openwebtext-1000.jsonl

{"text":"A magazine supplement with an image of Adolf Hitler and the title 'The Unreadable Book' is pictured in Berlin. No law bans \u201cMein Kampf\u201d in Germany, but the government of Bavaria, holds the copyright and guards it ferociously. (Thomas Peter\/REUTERS)\n\nThe city that was the center of Adolf Hitler\u2019s empire is littered with reminders of the Nazi past, from the bullet holes that pit the fronts of many buildings to the hulking Luftwaffe headquarters that now house the Finance Ministry.\n\nWhat it doesn\u2019t have, nor has it since 1945, are copies of Hitler\u2019s autobiography and political manifesto, \u201cMein Kampf,\u201d in its bookstores. The latest attempt to publish excerpts fizzled this week after the Bavarian government challenged it in court, although an expurgated copy appeared at newspaper kiosks around the country.\n\nBut in Germany \u2014 where keeping a tight lid on Hitler\u2019s writings has become a rich tradition in itself \u2014 attitudes toward his book are slowly changing, and fewer people are objecting to its becoming more widely available.\n\nNo law bans \u201cMein Kampf\u201d in Germany, but the government of Bavaria, where Hitler officially resided at the time of his 1945 suicide, holds the copyright and guards it ferociously. German-language copies that were printed before 1945 are legal, although they command a premium price, and the book is available in translation elsewhere in the world.\n\nBut the question of whether to publish it in the country where Hitler plotted his empire has lost some of its edge in the Google era, when a complete German-language copy of the book pops up as the second result on the local version of the search engine.\n\n\u201cTo say this is a very dangerous book, we must ban it, this is ridiculous,\u201d said Wolfgang Wippermann, a professor of modern history at the Free University of Berlin. \u201cMaybe it was necessary once, but now it\u2019s over, it makes no sense. You can find it so easily.\u201d\n\nThe publisher of the excerpts, London-based Albertus, has said it will appeal the Bavarian government\u2019s injunction. In 2009, the publisher beat charges of copyright violation and the illegal use of Nazi symbols after the Bavarian government seized reprinted copies of the Nazi Party\u2019s in-house newspaper.\n\nThe attempt to publish portions of \u201cMein Kampf\u201d on Thursday was scuttled at the last moment, although the publisher, ready to capitalize on the publicity, had printed two versions of the pamphlet. The version propped on top of a heap of celebrity magazines at a newsstand in Berlin\u2019s central Friedrichstrasse station was a slender, blue, 16-page leaflet that has historical commentary in one column and an image of blurred text stamped with \u201cUnreadable\u201d in the other, accompanied by two reproductions of Nazi-era newspapers.\n\n\u201cMein Kampf\u201d \u201cis an awful book, and the whole thinking is absolutely not ours, but we have another view on it regarding the idea of packing it away. This idea is just naive,\u201d said Alexander Luckow, a spokesman for the publisher. \u201cIn a free country, you need to discuss these very bad parts of German history.\u201d\n\nStill, he said, there are limits, and using Hitler\u2019s words as inspiration, not as historical artifact, is where it crosses the line.\n\n\u201cThe danger is allowing right-wing people to sell it in bookshops with their modern commentary,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is forbidden and it\u2019s good . . . not only in Germany, this should be equal in other countries in Europe. Anti-Semitism is not confined to Germany. You look and it\u2019s all around Europe, dating back to the Middle Ages.\u201d\n\nThe debate will soon be over, whether or not the latest excerpts make it to newsstands. German law extends copyright 70 years after the author\u2019s death; after 2015, \u201cMein Kampf\u201d will be fair game. Some in Bavaria\u2019s government worry that neo-Nazis will publish their own version of the book shortly thereafter, and to counter that, they are encouraging a scholarly edition. A group of historians is preparing it.\n\nGermany\u2019s Jewish organizations have approached the publication with mixed emotions, sensitive that their country still has problems with neo-Nazis and anti-Semitism. The German government released a study this week that found that one in five Germans has anti-Semitic attitudes. And a neo-Nazi ring that has been linked to at least nine killings before it was shut down in November shocked Germans who thought they had done a thorough job working through their past.\n\n\u201cI do very well without any publishing of \u2018Mein Kampf,\u2019 \u201d said Dieter Graumann, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. \u201cIn a few years, it will be free, and I have every trust in the democratic maturity of the German people. . . . But for the moment, I am glad it is not.\u201d"}
{"text":"For today\u2019s post, I\u2019d like to take a look at California\u2019s voter initiative to legalize pot. If the measure passes, and the sky doesn\u2019t fall, many other states will probably be looking at similar law changes in the near future. Our drug policy of the last century has simply not worked, and it\u2019s heartening to see a state attempting to legalize marijuana.\n\nThe statistics on marijuana arrests are really shocking. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, which is in favor of legalization, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession between four and twelve times more than whites in California, even though studies have consistently shown that whites smoke more pot than blacks. In the last ten years, around 500,000 people have been arrested for possession. That\u2019s absurd! Think about how expensive that is for the criminal justice system. California spends $216,000 for each juvenile inmate in its prison system, yet it spends only $8,000 per student in the Oakland school system. It seems to me that if you really want to limit drug use, it\u2019d make more sense to spend more money keeping kids in school, helping them achieve.\n\nThe economic benefits of legalizing marijuana are mind blowing. If marijuana was legalized and taxed at the same rate of tobacco, the money we would save on law enforcement and gain in tax revenue equals about $17 billion. As Nicholas Kristof notes, that is enough money to send every three and four year old in a poor neighborhood to pre-school. Or we could spend that money improving public school education. Or we could use the money to shore up border defense. Whatever we do, $17 billion is not exactly a trivial amount.\n\nFor me, the biggest reason to legalize marijuana is to hurt the cartels. Immigration has emerged as a hot button issue recently, with Arizona passing a draconian immigration law and many similar propositions being considered by other states. People are worried about violence, and understandably so. No one wants to have foreign drug dealers operating in their back yard. But no matter how many laws we pass, or how much money we spend, marijuana from Mexico and other Latin American countries will always find a way across the border. Drug importers are smart, and the demand is so high that increased patrols by border agents and harsher prison sentences will not act as an effective deterrent. America will always have a demand for marijuana, and that means as long as the drug stays illegal, violent drug cartels will operate in our borders.\n\nBut what if the drug that the cartels are pushing is suddenly legal? No one in their right mind would buy pot off the street if they could instead walk into a dispensary and buy high quality marijuana legally, and probably for less money than the cartels are charging. Very few people actually want to have to hide their drug use. If given a choice, marijuana smokers would absolutely buy legal drugs. This would severely weaken the cartels, and decrease deaths related to drug trafficking.\n\nI\u2019m not advocating drug use here. I know people who have ruined their lives from excess drug use. But it\u2019s not true that marijuana is the gateway drug that people have been demonizing for years. Just because someone smokes pot every once in a while doesn\u2019t mean that person will turn around and become a heroin addict. Yes, marijuana intoxicates you, but so do legal drugs like alcohol. As long as sensible restrictions are built into the law, such as making it illegal to drive under the influence, then there is no reason that marijuana should not be legalized."}
{"text":"Anarchists in solidarity with the purged immigrants of Agios Panteleimonas ventured once again to open the public playground which is kept locked by fascists in favor of segregation, leading to battle with riot police and five arrests.\n\nOn Tuesday 9\/06 anarchists in solidarity to immigrants who are being daily terrorised by fascist thugs of the Golden Dawn neonazi party and their local allies in the area of Agios Panteleimonas, moved to unblock the entrance of the local children playground which the fascists want to keep locked in an effort to impose segregation between greeks and immigrants, and \"to preserve the blood purity of the white race\"...While unblocking the playground the anarchists were attacked by fascists who were soon routed before the arrival of riot police forces who engaged the anarchists in battle with the aim of protecting the fascists. During the clashes one policeman was injured and five protesters were arrested on criminal charges. After the end of the clashes, a local greek father, Mr Tasoulas, defying the reign of terror in the area, took his son to play in the coveted playground. Soon they were surrounded by fascists who blocked the exit of the playground and threatened to linch the father calling him a traitor. After he managed to handle the child to a sympathetic neighbor, the fascists beat the father in full presence of the chief of the local police station. The strong police forces present at the scene then arrested the father and took him to the local police station, where his solicitor, a leading figure of the legal world and human rights activist, was piled with eggs by fascists who threatened her life.\n\nThe new tension in the area comes after the euroelection ascent of LAOS, the fascist Popular Orthodox Alarm Party, to the 4th position with 7% of the vote. This in combination with the governing party's landslide defeat, has led the government to endorse the core of the extreme-right wing policies of LAOS, and pledge a mass sweeping operation against illegal immigrants and their greek supporters within the summer. As the concentration camp planned to be built in the old NATO airbase of Aspropyrgos is now deemed impractical, the government has committed several old military camps of disgraceful humanitarian standards around the capital for the purpose of \"cleaning the city of foreigners\". The measures and discourse comes as little surprise as it comes from a political party famous for wanting to displace homosexuals in desert islands in the late 1970s. Furthermore the \"Law and Order\" operation of the coming summer is said to also include a mass attack against anarchist squats, and solidarity actions to immigrants by the movement as a whole. This the government hopes to achieve via a virtual military occupation of the center of Athens for the summer months modeled on Olympics 2004, as well as the introduction of a disputed legislation that would eventually render protest marches illegal. Due to the lack of a legislative majority by one MP, the government has resorted to yet another legal trick by increasing the total number of MPs by one, non-elected member of its own liking for the summer session of the Parliament.\n\nThe dictatorial rule of the right-wing and the ruthless employment of its parastate agents is increasing the tension across the country. Last week one police station in Athens was attacked and a central tax office was bombed by a Marxist guerrilla group, while a series of luxury brothels frequented by the ruling class were destroyed. At the same time, the movement is on its guard in expectation of next Saturday's Gay Pride parade which last year was attacked by parastate fascist thugs, as well as in expectation of an evacuation of the old courts in down-town Athens which are occupied by immigrants and are a constant target by the bourgeois media who waste no time in supporting the fascists in a most unambiguous manner."}
{"text":"The 45-year-old \u201chighway shooter\u201d who engaged in a 12-minute shootout with California Highway Patrol officers earlier this year now says Fox News host Glenn Beck has been an inspiration for his activity.\n\nIn a several thousand word expose for MediaMatters, Pacifica journalist John Hamilton interviewed the so-called highway shooter, Byron Williams, from prison.\n\nIn the interview, Williams details what he saw as an elaborate global conspiracy and tells the journalist \u2014 whom he sees as his \u201cmedia advocate\u201d \u2014 to look to specific broadcasts of Beck\u2019s show for information on the conspiracy he describes. (MediaMatters says Beck\u2019s show provided \u201cinformation on the conspiracy theory that drove him over the edge: an intricate plot involving Barack Obama, philanthropist George Soros, a Brazilian oil company, and the BP disaster.\u201d)\n\nThe release on Hamilton\u2019s story explains that \u201cWilliams also points to other media figures \u2014 right-wing propagandist David Horowitz, and Internet conspiracist and repeated Fox News guest Alex Jones \u2014 as key sources of information to inspire his \u2018revolution.'\u201d\n\nWilliams is quoted as saying that \u201cBeck would never say anything about a conspiracy, would never advocate violence. He\u2019ll never do anything \u2026 of this nature. But he\u2019ll give you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need.\u201d\n\n\u201cI collect information on corruption,\u201d Williams says, \u201cI\u2019ve been at it for some time.\u201d\n\nBeck, in particular, he says, is \u201clike a schoolteacher on TV.\u201d Williams reportedly told Hamilton, \u201cYou need to go back to June \u2014 June of this year, 2010 \u2014 and look at all his programs from June, and you\u2019ll see he\u2019s been breaking open some of the most hideous corruption.\u201d\n\nHamilton notes that extremism linked to anti-progressive propaganda is nothing new:\n\nConspiracy theory-fueled extremism has long been a reaction to progressive government in the United States. Half a century ago, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that right-wing thought had come to be dominated by the belief that Communist agents had infiltrated all levels of American government and society. The right, he explained, had identified a \u201csustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.\u201d In a 2009 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that the anti-government militia movement \u2014 which had risen to prominence during the Clinton administration and faded away during the Bush years \u2014 has returned. According to the SPLC, the anti-government resurgence has been buttressed by paranoid rhetoric from public officials like Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and media figures like Fox News\u2019 Glenn Beck. Just last month, Gregory Giusti pleaded guilty to repeatedly threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi \u2014 including threatening to destroy her California home \u2014 because he was \u201cupset with her passing the health care law.\u201d His mother told a local news station that he \u201cfrequently gets in with a group of people that have really radical ideas,\u201d adding, \u201cI\u2019d say Fox News or all of those that are really radical, and he \u2014 that\u2019s where he comes from.\u201d After the 2008 election, Fox News personalities filled the airwaves with increasingly violent rhetoric and apocalyptic language. On his Fox News show, Beck talked about \u201cput[ting] poison\u201d in Pelosi\u2019s wine.\n\nObservers of this most recent act were mystified by one of Byron Williams\u2019 reported targets: the Tides Foundation, a low-profile charitable organization known for funding environmentalists, community groups, and other organizations. Beck, it turned out, had attacked Tides 29 times on his Fox News show in the year-and-a-half leading up to the shooting.\n\nIn their writeup, The Huffington Post provided a video that detailed Williams\u2019 attack, as posted on YouTube. It follows."}
{"text":"New drunk-driving law cracks down on 3rd DUI LEGISLATURE\n\nDrivers who are repeatedly caught drunk behind the wheel could lose their license for up to a decade under legislation signed by the governor Monday.\n\nThe measure by Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, allows judges to revoke a person's driver's license for up to 10 years if they have three or more convictions for driving under the influence within the prior decade. Currently, courts may only take away a repeat offender's driver's license for three years.\n\nThe law will take effect on Jan. 1, 2012.\n\nHill estimated that the measure could help take more than 10,000 repeat DUI offenders off the road each year. Nearly 188,000 DUI convictions were handed down around the state in 2008, he noted, with 9,164 of those drivers on their third conviction and 3,200 with four or more DUI offenses, Hill said.\n\n\"I urge judges across the state to use this new authority and take repeat DUI offenders off the road,\" Hill said in a statement.\n\nAccording to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there are 1.5 million DUI arrests in California each year, and one-third of those arrested are repeat offenders. In total, more than 310,000 Californians have three or more DUI convictions, according to the agency.\n\n\"This legislation is an important step toward making California's roads safer,\" Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a statement. \"Those who have multiple DUI convictions should not be on the road threatening lives.\""}
{"text":"While it\u2019s good to see that number of obese and overweight children has (slightly) fallen for those starting school, one in 10 children is still entering reception obese or overweight, rising to one in five at the start of secondary school.\n\nMore startlingly, the figures from the Health & Social Care Information Centre show that 25% of children in poorer areas are obese, compared to about 11% in more affluent areas. Let\u2019s absorb that disturbing fact \u2013 right now, Britain\u2019s poor children are more than twice as likely to be obese or overweight.\n\nResponses to these statistics have included calls for a ban on junk food advertising before the 9pm watershed, but is this really the most productive way forward?\n\nWhat if it\u2019s not so much about \u201cjunk food\u201d, as we define it, but, rather, that all too often these days the junk is the food and the food is the junk \u2013 and that sometimes, for people on tight budgets, this is all that\u2019s reasonably achievable?\n\nOnce poverty enters the equation, it\u2019s simply not about junk food as we understand it anymore. Say junk food and an image springs to mind of people allowing their children to scarf down crisps, sweets, and the now notorious fizzy drinks, or burgers, pizzas and fried chicken from overflowing buckets. The implication is that the problem lies with the treats and extras, consumed on top of real meals and that children are being overindulged, to the detriment of their health.\n\nHowever, this image of feckless, uncaring, underprivileged Britons encouraging their fat children to over-snack simply doesn\u2019t ring true, especially considering that these are households where, by definition, money is tight.\n\nOn the contrary, it seems obvious that the actual meals are contributing hugely to the problem \u2013 and that this is where austerity is having a terrifying and sustained impact.\n\nWhile healthy food is often prohibitively expensive, less healthy options are relatively as cheap as, well, chips. When parents have to find the cheapest food available for their family, it\u2019s nearly always going to be less likely to be fresh; more likely to be highly calorific (therefore \u201cfilling\u201d), as well as packed with additives whose addictive and metabolism-skewing properties should not be discounted.\n\nYou also have to factor in how exhausting poverty is. Often the last thing that stressed, skint parents need at the end of the day is to start a meal from scratch.\n\nThis is why, however well meant, the \u201cwhy not buy some veg from the local market and make a lovely stew?\u201d rationale so often takes on the shrill ring of Marie Antoinette\u2019s fabled suggestion about the poor eating cake.\n\nThat\u2019s the cruel thing about cooking. It\u2019s not all about \u201clazy proles\u201d and their lost culinary skills. Something that\u2019s a hobby, a stress release, in an affluent household, too easily becomes an extra source of tension in an impoverished one. Moreover, \u201creal\u201d cooking can be expensive \u2013 from the ingredients, and the herbs and spices, to the equipment, even the gas or electricity. Hence the microwave, the ripping open of the packet, the easier solution. Who\u2019s to judge? Plenty of people do.\n\nPerhaps it could be acknowledged that the very concept of junk food has become absurdly dated and misleading. That shifts in fundamental food culture (the creep of junk into normal meals) appear to be a much more profound problem than merely overindulging in signposted treats. Kids eating rubbish has always been with us but it is only now that the staples, the dietary cornerstones, are also unhealthy, that their weight problems are escalating. Nor is the problem confined to junk food advertising \u2013 if only it were that simple. Like with most things that become uncontrollable in life, money lies at the core. Poverty isn\u2019t only exhausting and limiting, it\u2019s also highly fattening.\n\nCoe did the right thing. But why did it take so long?\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Better late than never. Sebastian Coe has walked away from his Nike contract. Photograph: Lionel Cironneau\/AP\n\nEven though Sebastian Coe has finally resigned from his \u00a3100,000-a-year role as Nike ambassador, he still insists that there was no conflict of interest with his position as president of the IAAF. Is he on another planet or am I?\n\nCoe\u2019s resignation doesn\u2019t prove that there was any wrongdoing, even with the email that surfaced relating to Eugene (birthplace of Nike) winning the right to stage the 2012 World Athletics Championships without others being allowed to bid. As things stand, Coe\u2019s conduct appears to have been above board. Nevertheless he has to stop this ludicrous sulking as if a big fuss is being made about nothing.\n\nThis is a prime example of a big fuss being made about\u2026 something. Obviously, it is not feasible for the president of IAAF simultaneously to be signed up as an ambassador to a major international sportswear company. Likewise, Coe\u2019s main argument concerning the longevity of his association with Nike (38 years) is resentful, entitled nonsense.\n\nIt\u2019s time for Coe to be philosophical. This was a blatant conflict of interest and the only mystery is how it wasn\u2019t dealt with when he became president earlier this year.\n\nLet Katie Hopkins damn herself\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Katie Hopkins: the face of unreason. Photograph: Dan Kennedy\/Discovery Communications\/Dan Ken\n\nIt seems as though every week now there is a terrible darkening of the skies as a giant candlesnuffer slams down over the flickering wick of free speech.\n\nThis time, it happened at Brunel University, where Katie Hopkins was spouting her usual informed, enlightened views on welfare. (Oh sorry, I went a bit funny there.)\n\nHopkins wasn\u2019t banned from speaking. Instead, just as she began to talk, a large bunch of students stood up, turned their backs on her and walked out of the hall. It was an action that was widely billed as a wonderful compromise protest, but it wasn\u2019t really.\n\nOf course it was better than banning \u2013 but only because anything is better than banning. It wasn\u2019t spontaneous, and therefore looked staged and just a little pompous. Nor, crucially, did it respect one of the foremost principles of free speech.\n\nFree speech is not just about someone being allowed to talk, it is also about them being properly heard and debated, and this holds true, even when that someone is as idiotic and offensive as Hopkins. Especially then.\n\nFor free speech to work, you have to let people speak first, and then challenge them via debate, which means no bans or, indeed, back-turnings and walk-outs.\n\nOtherwise, all that happens is that people such as Hopkins remain wedded to the delusion that they\u2019re fearless speakers of truth. Ideally, they should have their arguments brusquely shredded in a public forum.\n\nThe Brunel University walk-out was not a compromise protest, it was just a way of banning without actually banning. Everyone has to stop panicking and just allow people to be annoying bigots. Last time that I checked, the good people of Britain could cope."}
{"text":"The Reds announced that they signed free agent outfielder Ryan Ludwick to a two-year deal with a mutual option for 2015 (Twitter link). The BHSC client obtains a $15MM guarantee following his best offensive season since he was a member of the Cardinals.\n\nThe Reds made the free agent outfielder a two-year two-year offer earlier in the week, but John Fay of the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that at least one other club was being more aggressive on Ludwick. The 34-year-old posted a .275\/.346\/.531 batting line with 26 home runs in 472 plate appearances for the Reds this past season, a marked improvement from 2010-11 when he didn't hit more than 17 home runs or post an OPS above .750.\n\nLudwick ranked 26th on MLBTR's list of top 50 free agents with MLBTR's Tim Dierkes correctly predicting that he would re-sign with the Reds.\n\nJon Heyman of CBSSports.com first reported the agreement and the dollar amount. Fay first reported the option year and that the Reds were making progress toward a deal. Photo courtesy of US Presswire."}
{"text":"What if I want to build everything in ClojureScript\n\nJiyinYiyong Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 31, 2017\n\nMany things have changed since I wrote this post, check out updates on shadow-cljs. That\u2019s might be promising.\n\nJavaScript is becoming more and more mature. For front-end, React\/Anguar\/Vue are capable of building middle-size or even large apps, with help of all kinds of components and libraries. Deploying webapps is never easier, Webpack has almost all the features we need. For backend, Node.js ecosystem has been evolving since 2009, we have Express and Koa, with all kinds of middlewares. No mention how many developers are participating in \u201crewriting everything in JavaScript\u201d.\n\nJavaScript is a messy world. Mixed language paradigms, inconsistent languages features, lots of innovations toward different and sometimes opposite directions. It\u2019s hard to get well with such an inconsistent programming language. However, it turned out people like to use it thanks to its successful ecosystem.\n\nClojureScript is in a different situation. We have faith in functional programming but there\u2019s not a large community to support it. Here\u2019s the problem in me. I want to build websites with only ClojureScript. How can I achieve that?\n\nFor front-end, ClojureScript libraries and components are relatively rare(or at least hard to find many of them on Google). Yes we can use use JavaScript libraries and components. However it\u2019s not always true. Take an example from React and Vue, which are both in JavaScript, but it\u2019s impractical to share components from each other. I saw people using React components in Reagent or Rum many times. I was convinced it\u2019s possible. But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s easy since we may need so many components.\n\nFor backend it\u2019s worse. People are using Clojure to build web servers. Being a JavaScript developer there are lots of barriers if I want to pick up the whole Java ecosystem. Developing and debugging Clojure is a lot different from ClojureScript. And for web servers, the JavaScript community is throwing away expressing and going toward Koa with async\/await support, while in ClojureScript it\u2019s core.async , a lot different. We can still Google and find blogs and projects on using React components in ClojureScript, but it\u2019s fewer results for Node.js, besides, how about the framework and libraries? And I\u2019m not sure about the database part either.\n\nIt\u2019s not easy to believe in ClojureScript. To see JavaScript developers using create-react-app, using Koa, although slowly but most aspects of developing are covered by people who went ahead. In using ClojureScript, I have to take every step very carefully, sometimes in debugging without SourceMaps on variables, sometimes worried about where to find guides and docs, sometimes anxious about people misunderstanding my work.\n\nI will still pick ClojureScript as the primary language for my personal projects. Also I\u2019m fully aware that it adds limits to me so someday I still need to pick up some other languages to finish my work. It will be my big problem in the near future. I already see it and it made me feel sad that I can only write fast in ClojureScript. ClojureScript has some unique features that help me finished Stack Editor and Cumulo, but also trapped me here. I do hope that I learnt ClojureScript I can program all things I need, it\u2019s always not true for any language.\n\nNow I have to consider what to do next. In the past years I built many toy apps, none of them reached the complexity of real-world products. I have to learn such ability. Bet on ClojureScript or another?"}
{"text":"Ben White writing in the Independent:\n\nThis is Israel in 2012 according to a top UN body. Using unprecedented strong language, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) criticised Israeli policies in terms of \u201capartheid\u201d, as part of their published observations following a regular review.\n\nAffirming the kind of analysis that Israel\u2019s advocates try to dismiss as lies or rhetorical excess, the Committee slammed Israel for violating the right to equality in numerous policy areas. CERD described \u201csegregation between Jewish and non-Jewish communities\u201d, a lack of \u201cequal access to land and property\u201d, and \u201cthe ongoing policy of home demolitions and forced displacement of the indigenous Bedouin communities\u201d in the Negev.\n\nThe lack of a \u201cprohibition of racial discrimination\u201d in Israel\u2019s Basic Law was highlighted, and more recent developments, such as the restrictions on family unification affecting Palestinian citizens were also part of CERD\u2019s wide-ranging criticisms.\n\nThe Committee\u2019s observations also covered Israel\u2019s policies in the Occupied Territories, showing how the same discriminatory patterns are found on both sides of the Green Line. Israeli settlements in the West Bank form part of a regime of \u201cde facto segregation\u201d severe enough to cause the Committee to remind Israel of the \u201cprohibition\u201d of policies of \u201capartheid\u201d.\n\nAccording to Dr David Keane, senior lecturer in law at Middlesex University and author of \u2018Caste-based Discrimination in International Human Rights Law\u2019, this is \u201cthe most cutting CERD recognition and condemnation of a legal system of segregation since apartheid South Africa\u201d."}
{"text":"RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson says the OPP's much-anticipated report into the RCMP's response to the Parliament Hill shootings will be released this week or next.\n\nPaulson told the Senate's national security committee Monday his force are on the verge of releasing the report.\n\nThe report was commissioned by House Speaker Andrew Scheer after he asked for an independent police investigation following the Parliament Hill shootings.\n\nThe OPP led the investigation and submitted the report to the House of Commons in early April. When it was delivered, there were initial concerns whether the report would be made public or not.\n\nPaulson told senators the report examines the RCMP's response to the Oct. 22, 2014 shooting, both outside Parliament Hill and inside Centre Block. That's where shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was finally shot and killed.\n\nPaulson also told senators the Mounties will release the remaining 18 seconds of the Zehaf-Bibeau cellphone video in the coming weeks. Zehaf-Bibeau recorded the video immediately before the fatal shooting.\n\nThe RCMP already released 55 seconds of the video at a Commons public safety committee meeting in March.\n\n\"This is in retaliation for Afghanistan and because [Prime Minister Stephen Harper] wants to send his troops to Iraq,\" Zehaf-Bibeau, says in the video.\n\n\"Canada's officially become one of our enemies by fighting and bombing us and creating a lot of terror in our countries and killing us and killing our innocents. So, just aiming to hit some soldiers just to show that you're not even safe in your own land, and you gotta be careful.\u200b\"\n\nIn March, Paulson told reporters the remaining 18 seconds was edited for \"sound operational\" reasons. Thirteen seconds were cut from the beginning of the video and five seconds were edited from the end."}
{"text":"The way forward for autoworkers: An online interview with Jerry White\n\n15 October 2015\n\nThis Sunday, October 18, at 3:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time (conversions here), the World Socialist Web Site will host an online interview with WSWS Autoworker Newsletter editor Jerry White to review the political lessons of the contract fight. White will be joined by WSWS reporter Eric London, who will conduct the interview and field questions from autoworkers across the country. The interview will be broadcast at wsws.org\/autoworkers\/interview.\n\nThe battle by autoworkers in the United States has reached a critical juncture. After Fiat Chrysler workers overwhelmingly defeated the contract pushed by the United Auto Workers earlier this month, the UAW has brought back another deal crafted to meet the strategic aims of the auto corporations and Wall Street.\n\nNo matter what the spin the UAW\u2019s PR firm puts on it, the new deal, like the first, would accelerate the descent of autoworkers\u2014once among the highest-paid industrial workers in the world\u2014into the ranks of the working poor.\n\nThe challenges autoworkers face are immense, but the forces they can mobilize among workers and youth in the US and around the world are more powerful. To carry out a successful struggle, however, autoworkers who are leading this fight have to have a clear understanding of the economic and political forces that they confront.\n\nTo submit a question in advance of the interview, please register below. We urge our readers to make a donation to help the WSWS broaden the campaign amongst US autoworkers."}
{"text":"Don\u2019t raise your voice here.\n\nAngela Kabari Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 20, 2017\n\nMy name is Angela. I am the woman in the centre of the current Ushahidi sexual harassment scandal.\n\nThe past six months have been some of the most bizarre in my life and, on the balance, I think there is benefit in sharing my experience with the world so that lessons may be learned from it. It is my hope that, my story shall prompt a change in company policies, both in the Kenyan tech space and in other fields.\n\nI joined Ushahidi in September 2015 as a Capacity Development Officer for Making All Voices Count. My time there was mostly enjoyable: the work was challenging, the team was great, and the environment was liberal and progressive. All in all, a good place to be. Of course, everything was not perfect, but what organisation does not have issues and day-to-day frictions?\n\nThis changed on the morning of January 19th 2017, when Daudi Were, the Executive Director at Ushahidi asked me to have sex with a colleague, presumably for his own titillation. The events of that night left me troubled and confused. I knew that what had happened to me was not right, but I thought it was an isolated incident and decided to forget it and attempted to move on. (For details of this, see here my statement on the events of the night as well as a transcript of the audio. Some of the names in the transcript have been altered to protect the identities of my former colleagues. Aside from this, no other alterations have been made to it).\n\nI managed to do this for precisely one week after which I began to lose focus on my work. Over the next two weeks, I started to experience migraines whenever I went to the office. I did not want to leave my bed, yet I was sleeping poorly. I had experienced some periodic stomach upsets prior to and during the team retreat. However, after the retreat, these became worse and more frequent. At first, I thought that this was due to the upheaval that the Making All Voices Count programme was experiencing at the time due to international politics (it was negatively impacted by Brexit and changes in US presidency).\n\nI also thought that I might be physically ill so I sought professional advice from my doctor. I was diagnosed with a bacterial infection of the gut, but my doctor could not account for all my other symptoms. Upon his advice, I went to see a therapist who suggested some exercises to help me figure out what was wrong. I also took 3 weeks off from work from late February to mid-March as I thought I might be suffering from ordinary stress and burnout.\n\nIt was during this time off that I did the exercises prescribed by the therapist and I realised that my problem was psychosomatic. The distress from the incident in January had caught up with me, almost a month later. I had tried to pass off Daudi\u2019s remarks as drunkenness or joking but my body wasn\u2019t buying it. It was at this point that I decided to quietly resign; I still wasn\u2019t convinced that it was something I could or should raise with my employers.\n\nOnce I had made this decision in early March, I separately confided in two close friends that I was looking for a new job because I was uncomfortable with continuing to work at Ushahidi. When they asked why I was leaving, I shared with them some details of what had happened with Daudi. In the course of our conversations, I was stunned to learn that Daudi\u2019s comments were not the isolated incident I had assumed but rather that he had a years\u2019 long, widely-known reputation for sexually inappropriate conduct, socially and at work.\n\nAfter my leave was over, I began predominantly working from home, which thankfully was possible as Ushahidi allows remote working. I was going to the office only thrice a month on average and I timed my visits to the office to ensure that I would not have to run into Daudi. It was in early April, after a month of soul searching and conversations with three other women who had been on the receiving end of unwelcome attention from Daudi, that I came to the conclusion that something needed to be done. Unfortunately, I seemed to be the only person with both tangible evidence of his misconduct, as well as an employer-employee relationship. It is then that I sought legal advice and learned that, based on the provisions of Ushahidi\u2019s HR Manual, as well as Kenyan and Florida Law, Daudi\u2019s comments qualified as sexual harassment by creating a hostile environment. I was advised that I could file a court case but that it would be prudent to first give the company an opportunity to address the issue internally as the court should be a last resort.\n\nWith this in mind, I began to reach out to some of the women I had spoken to earlier. At this stage, I had been able to identify over five women who had also had inappropriate encounters with Daudi. Only one woman was willing to come forward if the Board could guarantee that she would remain anonymous. Some of the other women had no evidence of their allegations and thus did not expect to be believed. Others did not want to be associated with something so potentially scandalous or to rehash past traumatic events. It therefore took about three more weeks to get my ducks in a row and submit the complaint to the board; I did that on 4th May 2017.\n\nSee this timeline for what transpired since.\n\nSince then, I have heard terrible stories from a total of eleven women who have told me about having similar unpleasant encounters with Daudi, in addition to another ten or so stories that I\u2019ve been unable to verify. The behaviour told of in these stories varies from inappropriate and\/or suggestive text messages to sending of pictures of male genitalia and pornography. In one incident Daudi allegedly exposed his genitals to a woman in the middle of a conversation about her work.\n\nViewed against this grim picture, I feel as if I got off lightly. And, in the larger spectrum of harassment that encompasses physical assault and even sexual assault, it is easy to dismiss what happened to me as trivial. Except that it is not. I\u2019ve actually had people tell me \u201cIt was only words so it\u2019s not a big deal \u2014 at least he didn\u2019t rape you.\u201d However, in my view, verbal harassment is not inconsequential; in addition to being traumatic, it is often the gateway to more grievous offences and thus should not be treated lightly or ignored.\n\nThe reason I did not come forward with my story earlier is because, under Kenyan law, it is not permitted to comment on matters currently before a court. In this case, I was advised that as a show of good faith I should uphold this convention and extend its application to the internal Ushahidi process, even though the convention does not apply because the internal process was not judicial. But now that the Ushahidi Board has suspended Daudi after finding him guilty of gross misconduct, and will issue him with a notice to show cause why his employment should not be terminated, I am of the view that I am finally free to speak and comment on this entire debacle.\n\nI have two main bones of contention. The first is Daudi\u2019s behaviour. Based on the additional allegations made via tweets and offline discussions that have occurred since the news of my complaint came to light on 9th July, it would not be a stretch to call Daudi\u2019s alleged behaviour predatory. Such predation is enabled by a culture of silence and secrecy that encourages victims of harassment to \u201cnot make a fuss\u201d or \u201cpersevere\u201d or \u201cjust ignore him until he gets tired or bored and goes away.\u201d This culture leads many, many victims to not call out predatory behaviour and report it as the violence it actually is. This culture feeds into the victims\u2019 fears that there is no point in speaking out against the harassment they face and leads them to feel like they have no option but to suffer in silence. This must stop! We cannot expect victims of harassment to speak up if they are (rightly) afraid that public opprobrium will follow.\n\nMy second bone of contention is the Board\u2019s response. I have been deeply let down by the actions and inaction of David Kobia, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich and Jenny Stefanotti. Ever since I lodged my complaint on 4th May, I have been subjected to all the negative repercussions that make victims of harassment afraid to speak out:\n\nLack of support: Over the 74 days of this ordeal, not a single board member has reached out to inquire about my well being in any way, shape or form. Not a phone call, not an email, not through a third party. I shall repeat this again: nobody from Ushahidi leadership or the board has at any point bothered to ask if I\u2019m okay or sought to alleviate the adverse impact this has had on my work and health. The only person in management who displayed any concern is my supervisor who, even though he is my direct line manager, only found out about this when I informed him of my intention to leave Ushahidi on 19th June. The Board have claimed on several occasions that they refrained from enquiring about my well-being because they feared incurring legal liability. To the best of my knowledge, no laws prohibit a person from asking \u201chow are you?\u201d Anyone possessing some basic human decency should know \u2014 and do \u2014 better. Victim shaming: All through this process, I have been subtly censured by the Board for seeking and retaining legal counsel. The rationale is that I \u201cmade this legal and complicated\u201d by involving a lawyer which forced everyone else to lawyer up and thus led to the delays in handling the matter. This has been said to me personally by Erik Hersman and is a sentiment that has been repeated several times by other Board members, and their counsel in both private and public conversations. Slander: I have been reliably informed of more than one instance where Daudi has made comments to the effect that I am the one who pursued him for the purposes of establishing a sexual relationship and that I only filed a complaint when he rejected me. These comments were made to both colleagues and at project meetings with Ushahidi partners. I have tried to bring this up at least twice: once in the 24th May letter to the Board and subsequently at the internal hearing on 5th July. In the first instance, I received no response while in the second I was not even allowed to complete my question and was told that \u201cmy question is not relevant\u201d as these events occurred after my complaint was made and thus were not covered by the inquiry. Delays: It took 74 days to get a decision from the Board. Nothing except enthusiastic letter writing was done for the first 60 days. And even the letters from the Board\u2019s counsel seemed to be sent by literal snail mail \u2014 there was always a delay of 1 to 4 working days, and unlike the other lawyers they did not send advance copies of their letters via e-mail. The Board only seemed to act once the matter became public \u2014 first with Making All Voices Count followed then in various Kenyan WhatsApp groups, blogs and media. More happened in days 60\u201374 (15 days) than in the initial 60 days combined. An opaque process: Throughout the 74 days, and until now, I have had no clarity on how the board would handle this issue, save for the letter issued by the Board\u2019s advocates after the meeting of 20 June 2017 where the terms of engagement of the hearing were set out. At no point did the Board provide me with the timelines within which they intended to conclude this matter. They could have chosen to do this any way they wanted as the Ushahidi whistleblower policy is vague and only states \u201cThe Ushahidi\u2019s Compliance Officer will notify the person who submitted a complaint and acknowledge receipt of the reported violation or suspected violation. All reports will be promptly investigated and appropriate corrective action will be taken if warranted by the investigation.\u201d And even when a process was outlined, it was not as advertised. For instance, the inquiry that the board held was framed as a \u201cconversation to try and establish what happened and seek clarification\u201d but in my view, the \u201cconversation\u201d quickly degenerated to my being subjected to over 2.5 hours of brutal questioning designed not to get at the truth but to create an alternative narrative where the perpetrator became the victim. Even the 27-page Inquiry Report on this process ends with a Notice To Show Cause that once again has no timelines or clarity on when the process will end. Character attacks: During the inquiry, I had several harmless and not so harmless personality flaws used against me. Because I have a potty mouth and used the word \u201cfuck\u201d during the incident, it was suggested that I am the one who turned the conversation to sex and thus invited Daudi\u2019s sexual overtures. This was despite the fact that I did not use the word in a sexual context (see this video for various uses of the word \u201cfuck\u201d). It was also implied that I actively welcomed Daudi\u2019s sexual proposition because I did not vociferously voice my protest at his inappropriate remarks but instead tried to change the subject. The refusal to listen to, let alone address my concerns: Throughout this process, I have been provided with no opportunity to openly air my concerns to the board or receive a response to them. The issues I raised in my letters, such as Erik asking Ushahidi staff to report any sexual harassment to management, including Daudi, were not addressed. Even at the hearing, I was not permitted to ask any questions \u2014 I was not even allowed to explain why I resigned!\n\nThe blame for what is arguably the mismanagement of this entire issue lies squarely with the Board. David Kobia, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich and Jenny Stefanotti need to jointly and severally take responsibility for this. Their failure to properly manage my complaint is the sole reason I resigned from a job I was very fond of and was very good at. Their failure to set out crystal clear parameters for the hearing allowed Daudi\u2019s counsel to turn it from an inquiry to a \u2018courtroom\u2019 with him as the prosecutor and the judge. Their failure to speak up or intervene as I was harangued for over 2.5 hours \u2014 even when my counsel objected \u2014 indicates that they found this acceptable.\n\nThey also lacked the independence to properly investigate and take action in this matter. This is evidenced by the following:\n\nPrevious knowledge of similar allegations: Daudi has a long history of allegations of sexually harassing women from his days in the Kenya Blogger Webring (KBW), which was active in the mid to late 2000s. What is even more horrifying is that at least three of the Board members have known about Daudi\u2019s alleged penchant for harassing women for a significant period of time. Juliana was an administrator at Kenya Unlimited as this was going on, while David Kobia was a co-founder and forum administrator at Mashada. Erik was also active online during this period and presumably was aware of these accusations. Even if he might not have heard of these allegations in the aughts, Erik Hersman was explicitly informed about allegations of sexual harassment against Daudi in late 2015 when a prominent Kenyan tech entrepreneur told him about them in November 2015. The allegations this time included sending unsolicited \u201cdick pics\u201d to women via DM on Twitter and making unwanted sexual advances to women within the Bishop Magua building (where Ushahidi, BRCK, GearBox and iHub were then located) and in the wider tech ecosystem. At this time Daudi was the acting Executive Director of Ushahidi Kenya. Despite all this knowledge, the Ushahidi Board made Daudi\u2019s Executive Director position permanent in January 2016. Furthermore, even when presented with unequivocal proof of gross misconduct, as I did when I made my complaint on May 4th 2017, the board had to be subjected to intense public pressure before they did anything meaningful. For over nine weeks after I lodged this complaint, Daudi continued to act in his capacity as Executive Director: he participated in project meetings, strategy sessions and even international travel as the face of the organisation, including attending the 2017 Advancing Good Governance seminar and the 6th Annual Luxembourg Peace Prize Awards. He was only sent on compulsory leave on the same day that Quartz Africa ran a story (12th July). All through this \u2018investigation\u2019, the Board has bent over backwards to accommodate the requests of Daudi and his lawyer. Initially, they asked for the same level of procedure as a criminal court (e.g. witness lists and sworn statements) without having the authority to do so. Later, they turned around and insisted that it was an internal investigation and thus should exclude evidence from sources outside the company. The Board acceded to Daudi\u2019s lawyer\u2019s demands, apparently because they were afraid of a wrongful termination suit being filed by Daudi. This is at best disingenuous and at worst malicious. A company with the ethos Ushahidi purports to have should not shy away from doing what is right for fear of a lawsuit. Besides, had Daudi sued Ushahidi, he\u2019d have effectively turned a private matter public as he would have had to declare why he was terminated. Court documents in Kenya are public documents: having my complaint and particularly that audio recording in the public domain logically went directly against his own best interests. Daudi\u2019s explanation for the events of the evening was that he lost an earpiece of his hearing aid and Erik, as well as the Aberdare staff, were helping him look for it. I then allegedly joined them without invitation and refused to leave him so all his statements were made in an effort to get rid of me. However, at the time of our conversation, Erik had already retired to bed for the night. This can be attested to by any of the Ushahidi Team Members who were still at the bonfire. During the hearing, Erik did not correct Daudi on this point and in so doing, indirectly corroborated that untruth. Even if Erik had been awake, the fact that he was called upon as part of Daudi\u2019s \u201calibi\u201d should have clearly demonstrated his lack of independence. Erik should not have been a part of the panel that the Board constituted to investigate and make a decision. One cannot be a witness and judge in the same case! To date, Daudi still has his job: From the board\u2019s latest update, Daudi has only been suspended. It is entirely possible that he may be reinstated in the company. This is despite the Board possessing audio evidence of him sexually harassing his junior as well as allegations from a plurality of victims which relate to multiple occurrences. Even with this, it still took public pressure for the Board to first send him on leave then suspend him. This is unacceptable. How are victims supposed to come forward if this is how a company with the reputation of Ushahidi handles these incidences?\n\nI\u2019ve received several explanations for the delay: The Board claims that this was a complex matter because Ushahidi is domiciled in the US, yet the employees are Kenyan and the incident occurred in Kenya. It really wasn\u2019t that complicated. Florida and Kenyan law are in sync when it comes to sexual harassment laws: we checked this before we submitted my complaint and even attached excerpts from both countries\u2019 laws.\n\nThe Board has also claimed that they were not able to action my complaint as quickly as they would have liked because they were trying to avoid a wrongful termination suit. As explained above this is insincere. Based on the speed of events from the 3rd of July, this could have been handled in 2 weeks. So why did it take 74 days? It seems clear that the board was looking for reasons not to act despite their verbal and written assurances to the contrary. In such a case, the will to act is all that matters. Not assumed best intentions. And based on their findings, Daudi is guilty of misconduct on several fronts. None of that was news and was obvious even before the 5th July Inquiry was held. This should not have taken as long as it did.\n\nAs detailed extensively above, for some mysterious reason the Ushahidi board and leadership has been reluctant to take action even when presented with clear evidence about Daudi\u2019s misconduct. This completely boggles the mind because this scandal poses an existential risk to Ushahidi as an organisation. The Nairobi grapevine was already buzzing with rumours of this complaint after it was made on 4th May. The board just seems to have gone out of its way to avoid dealing with my complaint.\n\nThe board has also been less than forthright in the following ways:\n\nClay Shirky left the Board of Ushahidi in October 2015. This was not announced internally nor externally. Up until 15th July, Clay was still listed on the website as a Board Member. The summary of the proceedings at the inquiry is dubiously interpreted, contains some outright misrepresentations as well as the omission of relevant sections. This can be borne out by the recording of said proceedings which the Board possesses and I invite them to share this recording in its entirety with the public. Internally, Ushahidi has an open door policy. However, it seems that this openness exists in spite of, and not because of the Board. Erik has invited the staff to report any incident of harassment assuring them that the Board will handle it swiftly. This assurance is solidly contradicted by how the Board has thus far treated the two staff members who were sexually propositioned on 19th January 2017, one of whom had evidence (myself) and one who did not. The Chronology of Events provided by the Board on 17th July is economical with the truth. Specific examples that demonstrate this are:\n\nThe failure to mention that I was travelling for work when I was unavailable on 31st May. This is information the Board had easy access to and should have taken into consideration when they proposed a date for the hearing.\n\nThe inaccurate description of the process of the giving of the evidence (5th to 15th June). See the timeline for what actually transpired, with an explanation for the delays.\n\nThe inaccurate description of the process of agreeing upon the terms of engagement to be used at the inquiry (20th and 27th June)\n\n5th July: At the hearing, the Board stated they needed a week to make their decision. This has now been revised to \u201c7 working days to communicate its decision\u201d\n\n\u201c5th July: The Board communicates its decision to send the Respondent on leave until a decision is made.\u201d It is not clear who they communicated that with. It certainly was not to me in the course of the hearing nor to the staff as I had access to e-mails until 10th July and this had definitely not been communicated to the team by then. Daudi was first sent on leave on 12th July after significant community and public pressure.\n\nAll in all, this complaint has been completely and utterly mismanaged from Day 1. Both the tech community and Kenyan society at large need to reject the terrible precedent that the Board of Ushahidi has set. Their process has been deeply flawed and this should not be ignored just because they have ostensibly come to the correct conclusion. In cases such as these, the means matter just as much as the end.\n\nHaving been on the wrong end of a poorly managed process, I would suggest that all organisations revisit their sexual harassment procedures and evaluate them in light of best practices. Specifically, they need to ensure that the following issues have been addressed:\n\nA well-articulated process should be described that covers:\n\nTimelines: The time taken for the entire process should be as short as possible. A maximum of 14 calendar days seems to be an acceptable global standard. The process to be followed: In what form and way should employees submit complaints or raise concerns? Are there alternate persons to whom employees can submit such complaints when the complaints are against the very person they are normally supposed to submit them to? Is evidence of a claim required? If yes, what kind? What each stage of the process will do, when it will be done and why. What form communication during the process will take and what each party should expect to hear \/ receive at each stage. Notification of other staff: Be explicit on what staff will be notified, when and in what form. Channel to raise concerns: A means should be created to allow all parties to raise any issues they have as the process is ongoing. Appeal process: if the outcome is not satisfactory to the parties, what if any avenues for recourse do they have?\n\nSupport to the parties: what, if any, psychological support are the victim and perpetrator entitled to? When and where is this support available, and for how long?\n\nLeave of absence during the investigation: If and for how long the victim and perpetrator should be sent on compulsory (paid) leave as the investigation process is undertaken.\n\nCommunication with the rest of the company and the outside world: A policy should exist on what is revealed, when and how to other staff as well as to parties outside the organisation.\n\nIt should go without saying it seems that it must be said: Sexual harassment is not a harmless or victimless crime. Because of it, I\u2019ve had to resign from a job I liked and was very good at. This has been detrimental to both the Programme, and the organisation as a whole. I know of people who have been forced to resign due to harassment and are subsequently unable to find new jobs and new sources of income. This is because at its core sexual harassment is about an abuse of power. The person in a position of power leaves the victim in a position where they either remain silent or lose their livelihood. We cannot be speaking of building inclusive workplaces for women (who bear the brunt of the majority of sexual harassment cases) when we are still contending with such rudimentary issues as ensuring that offices are free of harassment.\n\nBased on how effectively my complaint was bungled, Ushahidi\u2019s reputation has taken a massive hit. This need never have happened and is completely unfair to the majority of the staff of the organisation who have played absolutely no part in this series of unfortunate events, and to this day remain mostly in the dark about exactly what transpired. It breaks my heart that the good people who work at Ushahidi have been damaged by the actions of David Kobia, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich and Jenny Stefanotti. The good work that Ushahidi has done over the past 10 years, and continues to do should not be tarnished by the actions and lack thereof of this Board.\n\nIn order to begin the healing process within the company, and for the world to begin to regain confidence in Ushahidi, the Board should resign in its entirety. Only new management can begin to repair the damage done. There is a Swahili saying: \u201cMwenzako akinyolewa, na wewe tia maji\u201d. Current employees who have witnessed first hand how poorly I have been treated have very real fears about how their issues and concerns will be handled in the future. Only a fresh and independent Board and Executive Director can provide the assurances that the staff, the Kenyan tech community and the world at large need, as we all move on from here. A good first step would be to set up a Kenya HarassMap deployment and put aside some resources to pay for any legal and counselling support services to other victims of Daudi and other sexual predators.\n\nUshahidi is a great company with a valuable product. I hope the Board can put their egos aside and do what\u2019s best for the company, which is stepping aside to give Ushahidi a chance to rebuild its reputation.\n\nUpdate: Timeline updated on 21 July to correct typos and add a missing link"}
{"text":"The decision Monday, the Roberts court\u2019s first direct look at public campaign financing, concerned only systems that use matching funds, as opposed to lump-sum grants. About a third of the states have some form of public financing, as does the federal government for presidential elections.\n\n\u201cWe do not today call into question the wisdom of public financing as a means of funding political candidacy,\u201d Chief Justice Roberts wrote. \u201cThat is not our business.\u201d\n\nSupporters of the law said the decision could have been worse. \u201cChief Justice Roberts at least recognized that public financing is a valid constitutional option,\u201d said Monica Youn, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, which represented one of the defendants in the case.\n\nAs a consequence of the decision, states and municipalities are now blocked from using a method of public financing that is simultaneously likely to attract candidates fearful that they will be vastly outspent and sensitive to avoiding needless government expense.\n\n\u201cThe government can still use taxpayer funds to subsidize political campaigns, but it can only do that in a manner that provides an alternative to private financing\u201d said William R. Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, which represented several challengers of the law. \u201cIt cannot create disincentives.\u201d\n\nChief Justice Roberts said that all escalating matching funds placed an unconstitutional burden on politicians who chose not to participate. But he added that Arizona\u2019s system also created problematic asymmetries and anomalies. Candidates with several opponents could generate multiple subsidies every time they spent money, and spending from unaffiliated supporters could do the same.\n\nJustice Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority opinion.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThree years ago, in Davis v. Federal Election Commission, another 5-to-4 decision with the same justices in the majority, the court struck down a superficially similar federal law known as the \u201cmillionaire\u2019s amendment.\u201d That law allowed candidates to raise amounts over the usual contribution limits when rich opponents spent more than a given amount of their own money.\n\nJustice Alito, writing for the majority, said the law imposed \u201can unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises\u201d free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.\n\nChief Justice Roberts said the logic of the Davis decision required the court to strike down the Arizona law. Indeed, he said, it is one thing for the government to allow candidates to seek additional contributions and another for the government to send a check.\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\n\u201cThe cash subsidy, conferred in response to political speech, penalizes speech to a greater extent and more directly than the millionaire\u2019s amendment in Davis,\u201d Chief Justice Roberts wrote.\n\nThe decision concerned two consolidated cases, Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett, No. 10-238, and McComish v. Bennett, No. 10-239. It was the fifth ruling from the Roberts court cutting back on the government\u2019s ability to regulate campaign finance.\n\nIn a dissent summarized from the bench, Justice Elena Kagan said the Arizona law advanced First Amendment values.\n\n\u201cWhat the law does \u2014 all the law does \u2014 is fund more speech,\u201d she wrote. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.\n\n\u201cArizona, remember, offers to support any person running for state office,\u201d Justice Kagan wrote. The candidates who challenged the law declined to accept that help, she said.\n\n\u201cSo they are making a novel argument: that Arizona violated their First Amendment rights by disbursing funds to other speakers even though they could have received (but chose to spurn) the same financial assistance,\u201d Justice Kagan wrote. \u201cSome people might call that chutzpah.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThe Davis decision, Justice Kagan wrote, involved a different issue, as it concerned a law that raised contribution limits disproportionately.\n\nThe majority and dissent disagreed about whether the Arizona law was supported by a permissible government rationale.\n\nChief Justice Roberts wrote that its main purpose was to level the playing field for political speech, which several earlier decisions have said is an improper goal.\n\n\u201cIt is not legitimate for the government to attempt to equalize electoral opportunities in this manner,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAnd such basic intrusion by the government into the debate over who should govern goes to the heart of First Amendment values.\u201d\n\n\u201c \u2018Leveling the playing field,\u2019 \u201d Chief Justice Roberts wrote, \u201ccan sound like a good thing. But in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game.\u201d\n\nJustice Kagan countered that the main purpose of the law was to root out corruption and the appearance of corruption by encouraging candidates to participate in public financing systems, a goal the Supreme Court has endorsed.\n\n\u201cLike citizens across this country, Arizonans deserve a government that represents and serves them all,\u201d she wrote. \u201cAnd no less, Arizonans deserve the chance to reform their electoral system so as to attain that most American of goals. Truly, democracy is not a game.\u201d"}
{"text":"FILE- In this Friday, May 18, 2012, file photo, a child looks at a laptop displaying Facebook logos in Hyderabad, India. Facebook said Monday, June 4, 2012, it is testing out ways to allow younger kids on its site without needing to lie. (AP Photo\/Mahesh Kumar A., File)\n\nFacebook has finally forgotten about that drunken night in college when you vomited on that one friend who never talked to you again. Any deleted photo from that episode, or any photo deleted by users for whatever reason, has finally been removed from the social network's servers, it appears.\n\n(Now if only your friend could permanently forget about the incidence too.)\n\nSince 2009, Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng has doggedly tracked how long it takes big photo-sharing sites to permanently delete photos after a user hits \"Delete.\" Her method was simple: save a photo's URL, delete the photo and wait to see how long it takes for the link to die. For Twitter and Flickr, it took seconds. For MySpace (remember that?), it took months. But for Facebook, Cheng found it could take years.\n\nIn some cases, photos deleted in 2009 were still on Facebook servers in 2012. In February, Facebook explained to Cheng \"[w]e have been working hard to move our photo storage to newer systems which do ensure photos are fully deleted.\" Now, Cheng is happy to report that she has \"tested this with two photos while saving their direct URLs, and both photos became inaccessible within two days of deletion.\" Her readers got similar results.\n\nFirst, let us say, Good job, Facebook. Like how we train a dog, we ought to reward good behavior as well as punish bad. The media, rolling up its newspaper, has knocked Facebook on the nose for many no-nos: swapping users' listed email addresses for Facebook addresses, accidentally showing people's private chats to the public, to name a few snafus. We're glad to finally give Facebook a treat.\n\nBut why did this take so long to implement?\n\n\"The systems we used for photo storage a few years ago did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site,\" Facebook told Ars Technica on Thursday. During its period of massive growth, Facebook apparently found it difficult to expand its servers and delete photos in a timely fashion. But now that new photo storage, installed in February, apparently deletes photos within 30 days, according to Facebook.\n\nPerhaps what this tells us several months later is that Facebook wanted to get serious about privacy -- including making sure that unwanted photos weren't being stored after users tried to delete them -- as it hurtled toward its initial public offering in May. As a publicly traded company, it's reasonable to expect Facebook to be more sensitive to privacy concerns."}
{"text":"Several states voted to legalize marijuana this past Election Day but the pot business still has a gripe\u2014regulations.\n\nThough decriminalized on some level in 19 states and the District of Columbia (it remains illegal under federal law), marijuana is still subject to regulations that strike some in the industry as micromanagement.\n\nOne company that tracks regulations is Cannabiz Media, which publishes the \u201cMarijuana Licensing Reference Guide.\u201d It recently posted a list of what it describes as the \u201c10 weirdest marijuana laws.\u201d For example, in Nevada and Oregon, signage for businesses that sell pot is regulated down to the font size and even font style. Connecticut bans the uses of illuminated signs while Washington, DC, makes it a point to outlaw the sale of pot at gasoline stations or auto repair shops.\n\nEd Keating, the person who compiled the list, sees such regulations as more than just a nuisance, particularly for medical marijuana dispensaries.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s really hard to comply with these regulations because they are so particular and, in some cases, they just don\u2019t seem to make a lot of sense,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you\u2019re a business trying to get medicine to your patients\u2026 some of these regulations are very expensive to comply with.\u201d\n\nHowever, Keating isn\u2019t entirely against regulations and argues that some control would be in the industry\u2019s best interests.\n\n\u201cIn a lot of states now, they\u2019re starting to put what an appropriate dosage or amount is to consume,\u201d he said, noting that Maureen Dowd\u2019s 2014 New York Times piece on her overdose of marijuana-infused chocolates showed the dangers of no labeling. \u201cThat makes a lot of sense for safety.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe other area that has seen a lot of regulatory scrutiny is testing because they want to make sure that if people are consuming this as medicine\u2014or even recreationally\u2014they\u2019re given a safe product,\u201d he continued. \u201cWhere it gets dangerous is when people concentrate that product into a liquid, an oil. You\u2019re raising the concentration of everything. So if there are bad chemicals in there, they get much more concentrated and it could be a danger to people. So I think we\u2019ll be seeing even more regulations there.\u201d"}
{"text":"The movement is not going away \u2014 most Republicans in the House have more to fear from primary challengers on their right than from Democratic challengers. An unpopular budget deal could reignite the Tea Party, as the antitax crusader Grover Norquist predicts.\n\nBut surveys of voters leaving the polls last month showed that support for the Tea Party had dropped precipitously from 2010, when a wave of recession-fueled anger over bailouts, federal spending and the health care overhaul won the Republicans a majority in the House.\n\nThe House members elected with Tea Party backing in 2010 forced onto the national agenda their goals of deep cuts to spending and changes to entitlement programs, embodied by the budget blueprints of Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who became Mitt Romney\u2019s running mate. And some of those lawmakers led the revolt last week that prompted Speaker John A. Boehner to cancel a House vote on a plan to avert a year-end fiscal crisis by raising tax rates on household income above $1 million.\n\n\u201cThe Tea Party put a lot of steel in the spine of the Republican Party,\u201d said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma.\n\nBut the Tea Party activists have not been front and center in the fiscal fight. And Mr. Cole added that Tea Party leaders now excoriating Mr. Boehner for offering higher taxes in a budget deal did not recognize political reality.\n\n\u201cThese guys want instant success,\u201d said Mr. Cole, a member of the House Republican leadership. \u201cIf they want to see a better result, they\u2019ve got to help us win the United States Senate. We\u2019ve thrown away some seats out of political immaturity.\u201d\n\nBut a number of Republican leaders said the Tea Party seemed headed toward becoming just another political faction, not a broad movement. It may rally purists, but it will continue to alienate realists and centrists, they said.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cI think the Tea Party movement is to the Republicans in 2013 what the McGovernites were to the Democrats in 1971 and 1972,\u201d said Don Gaetz, a Republican who is the president of the Florida Senate. \u201cThey will cost Republicans seats in Congress and in state legislatures. But they will also help Republicans win seats.\u201d\n\nPhoto\n\nBecause the Tea Party comprises thousands of local groups, it is impossible to determine whether its ranks shrank after the many electoral defeats last month, which activists said caused grief and deep frustration.\n\nGreg Cummings, the leader of the We the People Tea Party in rural Decatur County, Iowa, said his group had picked up 12 members since the election, for a total of about 50. \u201cIf you were in a fight and someone gave you a good left hook, it doesn\u2019t mean the fight is over,\u201d he said.\n\nBut Everett Wilkinson, the chairman of the Florida Tea Party in Palm Beach County, said the number of active Tea Party groups statewide \u201chas diminished significantly in the last year or so, certainly in the last couple of months,\u201d with only a third of what there once was.\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\n\u201cA lot of people gave their heart and soul to trying to get Obama out; they\u2019re frustrated,\u201d he added. \u201cThey don\u2019t know what to do. They got involved with the electoral process, and that didn\u2019t work out.\u201d\n\nFreedomWorks, a national group that has played a crucial role in organizing Tea Party activists and backing insurgent candidates, has been riven by turmoil, leading to the departure last month of its chairman, Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader in the House.\n\nMr. Armey said in news accounts that he questioned the ethical behavior of senior officials in the group, though others told of a power struggle. He was eased out with an $8 million consulting contract, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.\n\nFreedomWorks spent nearly $40 million on the 2012 elections but backed a string of losing Senate candidates, including Richard E. Mourdock of Indiana, Josh Mandel of Ohio and Connie Mack of Florida. Some Tea Party firebrands lost their House seats, including Allen B. West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois.\n\nOne notable success for the Tea Party was the Senate victory by Ted Cruz of Texas.\n\nMr. Cummings, who is the Midwest coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, a national group, said a major issue he would be focusing on now was Agenda 21, a United Nations resolution that encourages sustainable development. It has no force of law in the United States, but a passionate element of the Tea Party sees it as a plot against American property rights.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nBillie Tucker, an activist with the First Coast Tea Party in Florida, said she and others suspected that corruption on local election boards had led to Mr. Obama\u2019s victory in the state. Activists want to investigate.\n\n\u201cSome people say it\u2019s just a conspiracy theory, but there\u2019s rumbling all around,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s all kinds of data, and no one\u2019s talking about it, including, hello, the mainstream media.\u201d\n\nAnother issue boiling is the \u201cnullification\u201d of the Affordable Care Act. Angry that Mr. Obama\u2019s re-election means that the health care law will not be repealed, some activists claim that states can deny the authority of the federal government and refuse to carry it out.\n\nAt a Florida State Senate meeting this month, two dozen Tea Party activists called the law \u201ctyrannical\u201d and said the state had the right to nullify it.\n\nMr. Gaetz, the Senate president, a conservative Republican, said in an interview that he, too, disagreed with the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law. But he called nullification \u201ckooky.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re not a banana republic,\u201d he said. It is \u201cdangerous to the foundation of the republic when we pick and choose which laws we will obey.\u201d"}
{"text":"Former Bush administration official Stephen Hadley, a forceful advocate for a military strike against Syria, owns about $875,000 worth of stock in Raytheon, which manufactures Tomahawk cruise missiles . (Alex Brandon\/ASSOCIATED PRESS)\n\nMilitary analysts who made frequent media appearances during the recent debate over a possible U.S. strike on Syria have ties to defense contractors and other firms with stakes in the outcome, according to a new study, but those links were rarely disclosed.\n\nThe report by the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit watchdog, details appearances by 22 commentators who spoke out during this summer\u2019s Syria debate in large media outlets and currently have industry connections that the group says can pose conflicts of interest.\n\nIn some cases, the potential conflicts were clear-cut \u2014 such as board positions and shares in companies that make weapons that probably would have been used in any U.S. action. In other instances, including work for private investment and consulting firms whose clients are not disclosed, it was not possible to know whether those speaking had an interest in the debate.\n\nThe report also notes the prominent role of seven think tanks during the debate and their close links to defense companies.\n\n\u201cWe found lots of industry ties. Some of them are stronger than others. Some really rise to the level of clear conflicts of interest,\u201d said Kevin Connor, the group\u2019s director and a co-author of the report. \u201cThese networks and these commentators should err on the side of disclosure.\u201d\n\nIn several media appearances in September, Stephen Hadley, a former national security adviser to President George W. Bush, was a forceful advocate for strikes. He told Bloomberg TV that Republicans should back the president\u2019s use-of-force resolution and argued in a Washington Post op-ed that failure to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people would damage U.S. credibility if military action were threatened over Iran\u2019s nuclear program.\n\nWhile Hadley\u2019s role in the Bush administration was always noted, there was no mention of his ties to Raytheon, manufacturer of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which likely would have been fired from Navy destroyers stationed in the eastern Mediterranean in strikes against Syria. Hadley has been on the board of directors of Raytheon since 2009 and, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing from June included in the new report, owned 11,477 shares of Raytheon stock, now worth about $875,000. Hadley was also paid $128,500 in cash compensation by the company last year, according to a filing with the SEC.\n\nIn one appearance, CNN noted that Hadley is a principal at RiceHadleyGates, an international strategic consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and Washington.\n\nFred Hiatt, editorial page editor at The Post, said Hadley\u2019s opinions in the newspaper\u2019s op-ed commentary were not colored by his association with Raytheon.\n\n\u201cMore disclosure is generally better than less, but I\u2019m confident that Hadley\u2019s opinion piece, which was consistent with the worldview he has espoused for many years, was not influenced by any hypothetical, certainly marginal, impact to Raytheon\u2019s bottom line,\u201d Hiatt said in a statement.\n\nA spokesperson said Hadley was traveling in China and unavailable for comment.\n\nRetired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, a former commander of the U.S. Central Command, also made several media appearances to discuss the Syrian situation and cautioned that the kind of limited intervention that was being proposed has in the past been difficult to accomplish. But in the five appearances covered by the study, his ties to the defense industry were not disclosed.\n\nZinni has been on the board of directors of BAE Systems, a top defense contractor, since 2002 and was board chairman from 2009 to 2012. The company specializes in cybersecurity, intelligence analysis and several weapons systems. Zinni, in addition, sits on the board of advisers of DC Capital Partners, a private equity firm that focuses on investments in intelligence, homeland security and other sectors.\n\nReached by e-mail, Zinni said his board memberships are public. \u201cThe media who contact me for comment should post any relevant info re my background including my board positions if they desire,\u201d he wrote.\n\nRetired Gen. Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff, made frequent appearances as well, including as a Fox News military analyst, during which he supported U.S. action against Syria. His military career and his affiliation with the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank where he is board chairman, were regularly cited.\n\nBut there was no disclosure of Keane\u2019s ties to General Dynamics, where he has been on the board since 2004, and to SCP Partners, a venture capital firm focused in part on investments in defense and security, where he is a venture partner. General Dynamics\u2019 Bath Iron Works is the lead designer and builder of the destroyers from which the Tomahawk missiles would have been launched. Keane\u2019s office said he was not available to comment.\n\nAsked about the report\u2019s findings, Michael Clemente, executive vice president of news at Fox News, said in a statement, \u201cWe generally disclose contacts when our judgment is that it\u2019s journalistically germane to the story.\u201d\n\nTwo other networks where analysts covered by the report made frequent appearances, CNN and NBC, did not respond to requests for comment."}
{"text":"Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain was our game of the year in 2015, however the foundations for it were laid by standalone introductory chapter Ground Zeroes. Today, Konami has announced Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience which gathers both games and a bunch of DLC under one banner.\n\nDue to launch via Steam on October 13, players can expect \u201cadditional Mother Base currency\u201d, as well as a slew of items, including Rasp Short-Barrelled Shotguns, the Adam-ska Special handgun, a range of Personal Ballistic Shields, and a number of costumes for The Phantom Pain. Previously console-exclusive Ground Zeroes missions\u2014D\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu and Jamais Vu\u2014are also included, as are a number of DLC packs and weapons for Metal Gear Online.\n\n\u201cMetal Gear Solid V has received collectively over 60 industry accolades and awards thus far,\u201d says Konami president Tomotada Tashiro in a statement. \u201cThe Definitive Experience will give players an opportunity to play the complete MGSV experience, without interruption. Additionally, with Metal Gear Online, players also get access to a completely unique multi-player setting that is designed for a truly engrossing gaming experience as well.\u201d\n\nMetal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience is due October 13. Console versions will cost \u00a334.99\/$39.99, however Steam pricing is yet to be confirmed. Read Sam\u2019s review of The Phantom Pain over here."}
{"text":"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain\u2019s campaign said on Monday a McCain opinion article about Iraq offered to The New York Times as a rebuttal to Democrat Barack Obama had been rejected.\n\nRepublican presidential candidate Senator John McCain (R-AZ) speaks at a campaign picnic outside the Maine Military Museum in South Portland, Maine July 21, 2008. REUTERS\/Brian Snyder\n\nThe McCain camp had submitted the article to The Times as a response to a piece by Obama published by the newspaper last week.\n\n\u201cMy Plan for Iraq\u201d had detailed Obama\u2019s goal of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq in 16 months if he is elected on November 4.\n\nThe McCain article was largely a critique of Obama\u2019s position, arguing against establishing a set timetable for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq.\n\nMcCain is attempting to make sure his voice is heard while Obama picks up headlines with a visit this week to Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe.\n\n\u201cDuring the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be \u2018very dangerous,\u2019\u201d McCain wrote.\n\nAn e-mail sent to the McCain staff by a Times editor said it would be terrific to have an article from McCain but that the one sent in was not acceptable as currently written and that a new draft should articulate how McCain defines victory in Iraq.\n\nThe McCain campaign, which does not feel McCain gets equal treatment in the U.S. news media, expressed dismay at the Times\u2019 decision and suspected it was because the Times did not agree with McCain\u2019s policy.\n\n\u201cJohn McCain believes that victory in Iraq must be based on conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables. Unlike Barack Obama, that position will not change based on politics or the demands of The New York Times,\u201d said McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds.\n\nThe New York Times said it was standard procedure to have a \u201cback and forth with an author about his or her submission\u201d and looked forward to publishing McCain\u2019s views.\n\n\u201cWe have published at least seven Op-ed pieces by Senator McCain since 1996. The New York Times endorsed Senator McCain as the Republican candidate in the presidential primaries. We take his views very seriously,\u201d said the statement from Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis."}
{"text":"North Korea has detained another U.S. citizen, a Korean American professor, bringing to three the number of Americans being held in Pyongyang.\n\nThe Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang, which represents U.S. interests there because the United States does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea, confirmed to The Washington Post that a U.S. national had been detained. In Washington, the State Department said it was aware of the report.\n\nMedia in South Korea identified the man as Kim Sang-duk, a former professor at the Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST) in the northeastern Chinese city of Yanji, near the border with North Korea.\n\nKim was arrested at Pyongyang\u2019s international airport Friday as he was waiting to board a flight, South Korea\u2019s Yonhap News Agency reported.\n\nKim had been teaching a class in international finance and management at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a sister institution, for a month and was leaving the country with his wife when he was arrested, the specialist website NK News quoted the chancellor of PUST, Park Chan-mo, as saying.\n\n[What it\u2019s like to be an American held in North Korea]\n\nNorth Korea has taken a slew of Americans hostage in recent years and used them as bargaining chips in negotiations with the United States.\n\nIt is holding two other Americans.\n\nOtto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who went on a tour in North Korea while on his way to a study-abroad program in Hong Kong, was detained for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda sign from a Pyongyang hotel on New Year\u2019s Day last year.\n\nHe was convicted of subversion in March after a court found that he had committed a crime \u201cpursuant to the U.S. government\u2019s hostile policy\u201d toward North Korea and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.\n\n[North Korea sentences college student to 15 years of hard labor]\n\nHe has not been seen since March 2016, when he was convicted, and when Swedish diplomats were last allowed to meet with him.\n\nAnother American, former Virginia man Kim Dong-chul, was charged with spying last April and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Kim, who is in his early 60s, was born in South Korea but became a U.S. citizen in 1987, although he is thought to have been living in northeastern China in recent years.\n\nPrevious American detainees have been released after a few months following visits from high-profile Americans, including former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.\n\nBut so far, the North Korean regime has not used Warmbier and Kim as leverage.\n\nRead more:\n\nNorth Korea sentences former Va. man to 10 years of hard labor\n\nNorth Korea sentences U-Va. student to 15 years of hard labor in prison\n\nU-Va. student held in North Korea \u2018confesses\u2019 to \u2018severe\u2019 crime\n\nToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the world\n\nLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news"}
{"text":"Animals are dying in unnecessary agony because of a lack of understanding over how stunning stops them feeling pain when their throats are cut, research shows.\n\nIn conventional slaughterhouses, cows, sheep and chicken are stunned, usually with an electric shock, to ensure they are unconscious before their throats are cut.\n\nThis minimises suffering but in a number of Muslim abattoirs the animals are not stunned over fears it is not permissible, or 'halal'.\n\nIn a number of Muslim abattoirs animals are not stunned before slaughter over fears it is not permissible, or 'halal' but research suggests this is due to ignorance of the process (file image)\n\nA study by researchers at the University of Bristol suggests some Islamic scholars are ignorant about the humaneness of stunning, leading to animals dying in pain,The Times reported.\n\nWidespread research shows the welfare benefits of pre-slaughter stunning. The electric shocks lessen the pain felt by animals when their throats are cut.\n\nA number of industry bodies have spoken out against the slaughtering of animals without pre-stunning, with the British Veterinary Association saying there is an 'unacceptable time lapse between slaughter and the onset of permanent insensibility [loss of feeling] when animals are not stunned'.\n\nAnimals must also be stunned before slaughter under EU regulations.\n\nHowever Britain allows an exemption for those who oppose because of religious beliefs and the number of animals killed without stunning appears to be on the rise.\n\nRITUAL KILLING OF ANIMALS FOR RELIGIOUS REASONS HALAL Halal slaughtering involves cutting through the large arteries in the neck with one swipe of a blade, while a Muslim butcher recites a religious verse. All blood is then drained away since the consumption of blood is forbidden under Islamic law. Under Islamic law, an animal must be slaughtered by having its throat cut while it is conscious. KOSHER According to the laws, in order for a meat to kosher it must come from an animal that meets the kosher rules. These are the animal must be ruminant and have split hooves. Ruminant animals chew food once and swallow, before regurgitating it and chewing again. Animals that Jews can eat include cows, sheep, goats and deer. They cannot eat pigs despite the fact it has split hooves because it is not a ruminant animal. Before slaughtering, the animal must be healthy and uninjured and a sharp knife is used to slice through the main arteries and windpipe, causing a drop in blood pressure that causes the animal to lose consciousness. Jews believe this is a way of killing that shows 'respect and compassion' as set out in Jewish law.\n\nSome 2.4 million sheep and goats were put to death using the religious method in halal and kosher abattoirs in 2013 \u2013 a rise of 60 per cent on 2011.\n\nAccording to analysis by the Food Standards Agency, some 37 per cent of sheep and goats, 25 per cent of cattle and 16 per cent of poultry were killed in this way in halal premises.\n\nResearchers from the University of Bristol School of Veterinary Science questioned Islamic scholars and Halal consumers on the use of pre-slaughter stunning.\n\nThe study is published in the journal Meat Science.\n\nSome 69 per cent of scholars said they did not agree that stunning prior to slaughter had been showed to reduce the pain felt by animals, according to The Times.\n\nHowever more than 95 per cent of the scholars and 53 per cent of consumers agreed that if stunning did not result in death, cause physical injury or obstruct bleed-out, the meat would be considered Halal.\n\nThe study said: ' The lack of understanding of stunning among some scholars has resulted in the issuance of confusing fatwas on the suitability of stunned meat for consumption by Muslims.\n\n'There is an urgent need for these scholars to be given theoretical and practical education on stunning and other modern slaughter techniques such as mechanical slaughter.\n\n'This will help them make informed decisions about the suitability of these techniques for Halal production.'\n\nGudrun Ravetz, president of the British Veterinary Association said: 'Our view is that all animals should be stunned before slaughter, based on peer reviewed evidence that indicates an unacceptable time lapse between slaughter and the onset of permanent insensibility when animals are not stunned.\n\nBritain allows an exemption for those who oppose because of religious beliefs and the number of animals killed without stunning appears to be on the rise. File image\n\n'A number of notable bodies including the Farm Animal Welfare Committee and the EU Food Safety Authority all agree that there is a high probability that the cutting of sensitive tissues at the neck will trigger a significant pain response in a conscious animal.\n\n'Given the barrage of evidence about the humaneness of stunning before slaughter the veterinary profession is persuaded that animals must be stunned."}
{"text":"Photo\n\nFifteen years ago, bemoaning the high cost of higher education, the governors of 19 Western states decided to start a nonprofit online institution to help meet their need for a trained work force. The result, Western Governors University, offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in education, business, the health professions and information technology. Everything is online except for student teaching and some nursing requirements.\n\nMost of its 25,000 students are over 25, and have previously earned some college credits.\n\nInstead of being required to spend a certain number of hours to earn a certain sequence of credits, students at Western Governors must show \u201ccompetency\u201d through assignments and proctored exams.\n\nMarie Hermetz, who paid Western Governors about $9,000 to earn her master\u2019s degree in health care management, said she heard about the program on the news and switched from one that would have cost up to $40,000.\n\n\u201cDoing it one class at a time, I would have graduated maybe never,\u201d said Ms. Hermetz, 43, who had a bachelor\u2019s degree in math. \u201cThis way, it took just under 18 months. And whenever I ran into trouble, my professors would make arrangements, whether it was through a webinar or a phone call or an e-mail, to help me.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nActually, Western Governors does not have \u201cprofessors\u201d in the usual sense: the online curriculum is not developed by the university, but chosen by outside experts, and students have \u201ccourse mentors\u201d with graduate degrees."}
{"text":"The BBC has been ordered to disclose the names and details of 150 senior managers who received severance payouts after MPs invoked a rare parliamentary custom.\n\nThe Commons public accounts committee is to invoke the power of a standing order to force the broadcaster to release information about 150 redundancy payments to senior managers between 2010 and 2012.\n\nCiting data protection issues, the BBC has previously fought attempts to divulge the names, but has now written to the former managers alerting them that the nature of their severance arrangements may now be made public.\n\nThe development came on Friday amid further fallout in the BBC payoffs controversy, with a statement challenging former director general Mark Thompson's claim that the BBC Trust was fully informed about a \u00a31m severence settlement with a senior executive in 2010 issued by five trustees.\n\nOne ex-senior BBC manager, who received the letter warning that details of his severance arrangement may be published, told MediaGuardian: \"I am not prepared to have details of what was meant to be a confidential matter released into the public domain without any kind of assurance of how it will be presented.\n\n\"My redundancy was totally in order, but there is no guidance from the BBC as to how the information will be presented. The concern I would have is that a senior manager such as myself \u2013 whose redundancy settlement was perfectly in order \u2013 will be lumped together with the very small number of senior managers whose deals seem to have been rather more generous. I cannot see myself giving consent for my name and details to be released.\"\n\nIn the letter sent to all 150 former bosses to give them the opportunity to raise any concerns, the corporation said: \"PAC has recently confirmed in writing to the BBC that it is applying its Standing Order power to call for the 150 names and details of the 150 recipients of severance payments cited in the [National Audit Office] report, which includes you.\n\n\"PAC has informed us that on receipt of this information, it will then decide whether or not to make this information public taking into account the public interest in doing so. PAC further states that it will consider any representations concerning individual cases, that it takes the needs of confidentiality seriously and has chosen not to publish information regarding individuals on previous occasions.\"\n\nOn Friday the BBC Trust issued a statement from five trustees who were in post when the payoff for former deputy director general Mark Byford was being discussed in late 2010 \u2013 Richard Ayre, Diane Coyle, Anthony Fry, Alison Hastings and David Liddiment.\n\n\"We were not asked for approval of the financial package \u2013 formally or informally \u2013 nor did we give it. The Trust was assured that the package was within contractual terms and that the chairman of the BBC's executive remuneration committee had agreed to it being approved,\" they said.\n\nThompson, in his PAC evidence submission published on Friday, said he took \"all reasonable steps to ensure that the BBC Trust was properly informed in advance\" about the proposed redundancy settlements with Byford and Sharon Baylay, the former director of marketing who left with a \u00a3390,000 payoff.\n\n\"The timetable and the urgency of the email traffic between the Trust and various BBC managers supports the view that the Trust wanted to be able to express its view about the proposed settlements before the [executive remuneration committee] was asked to formally approve them,\" he added.\n\n\"The only non-automatic part of the proposed settlement with Mark Byford was the intention to delay the issuing of formal notice and to make a payment in lieu of notice: there is clear evidence that the trust was aware of both those points.\"\n\nEarlier on Friday, it emerged that Lucy Adams, the BBC's HR director, has written to MPs to correct her evidence to parliament about her involvement in agreeing the \u00a31m severance payment for a former senior executive.\n\nAdams admitted in fresh evidence released by the PAC on Friday that she was involved in drafting a key memo to the BBC Trust that detailed the controversial \u00a31m severance payment to Byford.\n\nThompson described Adams in evidence also published by the committee on Friday as \"one of the main authors\" of the memo \u2013 dubbed the 7 October note \u2013 which she claimed not to have seen when she appeared before MPs on the PAC on 10 July. In a letter made public on Friday, Adams said it was not clear which document the committee was referring to at the time.\n\nThe 7 October note, drafted in 2010, has become central to the BBC payoffs saga because it was drawn up to inform the BBC Trust of two controversial payoffs \u2013 to Byford and Baylay. The BBC Trust has since claimed not to have been fully briefed on these redundancy deals.\n\n\u2022 To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email media@theguardian.com or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly \"for publication\".\n\n\u2022 To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook"}
{"text":"SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email\n\nAustrians elected a Green Party-backed economics professor as their next president, spurning the appeal of an anti-immigration nationalist who campaigned to weaken ties to the European Union.\n\nWith all regular votes counted, Alexander Van der Bellen defeated Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party by 51.7 percent to 48.3 percent after Sunday\u2019s repeat run-off election to the mainly ceremonial presidency. While mail-in ballots will only be counted on Monday, Van der Bellen\u2019s margin of victory was too great to change the outcome, and Hofer conceded defeat.\n\nVan der Bellen, 72, said that he stood for the \u201cold values\u201d of freedom, equality and solidarity. He also signaled that he wanted to preside over a more active presidency, urging a focus on policies such as efforts to tackle unemployment.\n\nAustria sent a \u201cgood signal\u201d today \u201cto the capitals of the European Union,\u201d Van der Bellen, who ran as an independent, said in an interview with public broadcaster ORF. \u201cYou can actually win elections with a pro-European position.\u201d\n\nTogether with a referendum in Italy also being held on Sunday, the Austrian vote was seen as a bellwether for populist sentiment in Europe after the U.K.\u2019s Brexit vote and Donald Trump\u2019s election to the U.S. presidency. Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam Dutch politician, offered Hofer his commiserations on Twitter, as did French National Front leader Marine Le Pen. Nigel Farage, the former head of the U.K. Independence Party, had cited Hofer\u2019s EU-skeptic stance as further evidence of the pressures buffeting the EU \u201cconstruction.\u201d\n\nGerman Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, who heads the Social Democratic Party, hailed Van der Bellen\u2019s win as a \u201cvictory of reason against right-wing populism,\u201d according to an interview with Bild newspaper. EU President Donald Tusk extended his \u201cwholehearted congratulations\u201d to Van der Bellen in an e-mailed statement.\n\nYear of Acrimony\n\nThe result defied projections of a razor-tight finish and ends an acrimonious year of campaign politics that polarized Austria. Van der Bellen, who pledged to prevent anti-EU forces from forming a government, now has to heal the rifts exposed over immigration and economic inequality.\n\nIt\u2019s the first time in 70 years the country has elected a presidential candidate outside the Social Democratic or Austrian People\u2019s Party, after both the established parties were eliminated in earlier rounds of voting. It\u2019s also the first time that a Green Party leader has won a popular election in Europe to become head of state since the global environmental movement began.\n\nVan der Bellen narrowly squeezed out Hofer in the first presidential runoff on May 22, but the result was overturned by the Constitutional Court because of irregularities in counting mail-in ballots. Austria\u2019s Interior Ministry showed Van der Bellen won more rural support in Sunday\u2019s repeat vote, and also took key regions in the industrial heartland of Upper Austria as well as in the mountains of Tirol.\n\nOpening Doors\n\nThe result is a rebuff to some analysts who predicted Hofer would benefit from the same nationalist forces that propelled Trump to the presidency last month. Hofer campaigned on his ability to court favor inside a Trump White House as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m asking my voters to accept that in a democracy, the voter is always right,\u201d said Hofer. He added that he\u2019s looking forward to the next round of national elections where he\u2019ll stand by Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache, who accused Van der Bellen of orchestrating Sunday\u2019s victory with a \u201cmassive campaign of fear.\u201d\n\nAustrian Chancellor Christian Kern, a Social Democrat who warned last week that the EU must reform or slip into the abyss, struck a more conciliatory tone.\n\n\u201cAlexander Van der Bellen will be a good partner for an open-minded, future-oriented policy of chances and hopes,\u201d Kern said. \u201cTo the voters of Norbert Hofer, I say nobody should feel like a loser today. We\u2019re all Austria.\u201d\n\n\u2014 With assistance by Rainer Buergin, and Matthias Wabl"}
{"text":"The views may be pleasantly apocalyptic, and the second act may feature a motorbike duel with a robot B52, but it's the little things that really sell me on Gears of War 4 - the surprisingly delicate way it both harkens back to and departs from Epic's original cover-shooters. The fact that Swarm footsoldiers rush you when they're close to death, for example, where their Locust predecessors would often dig in till the bitter end. The presence of branching path sections that ask teams of two to support one another across a gulf, a classic Gears device enlivened by the addition of flying enemies and eccentric new flavours of sniper rifle.\n\nAnd then there's the Overkill shotgun, which perhaps encapsulates how well the Coalition understands the series it has inherited. On the surface it's a quad-barrelled monster worthy of Painkiller, but in practice the Overkill is a flexible instrument that, much like the famous Active Reload mechanic, challenges you to keep a cool head under pressure.\n\nSimply pull the trigger and you'll fire all four barrels at once to shattering effect. But if you hold the trigger, pause and release, you'll fire each pair of barrels separately for a tighter spread, allowing you to dent targets at range and really make the most of your ammo. Shotguns have always been Gears of War's principal skill weapons, the roaring Sphinxes that gate access to the upper echelons of competitive multiplayer. With the Overkill, the Coalition has crafted both an elegant tool for returning Gnasher pros and a bloodthirsty treat for the rest of us.\n\nEverywhere you look in Gears of War 4, you'll find a studio engaged in careful dialogue with the past. This is literally the case in the story, which takes place a few decades after the destruction of the Locust, and sees two generations of the Fenix clan fighting side by side. In a bid to shore up what remains of civilisation, the Coalition of Organised Governments has herded Sera's surviving humans into gigantic walled cities, defended by robots, but not everybody is content to trade their freedom for security. Amongst the rag-tag Outsiders who scrape a living in the wilderness is the one and only Marcus Fenix, he of the thousand yard scowl. As the game's second act begins, the COG is holding the Outsiders responsible for a spate of abductions, and new leading man JD Fenix has returned to his father's estate in hopes of guidance and a little covering fire, if not a hug.\n\nWhat follows is essentially a license handover reimagined as a family squabble, a clash between epochs in video game characterisation. JD is a blond and blue-eyed graduate of Nathan Drake High, accompanied by glib sidekick Delmont Walker and token ladybro Kait Diaz, whose parents are among the missing. Marcus remains a potty-mouthed crank, cut from the rock of the WW2 shooter and pickled to perfection by years of isolation. The script isn't exactly captivating so far - in opting for a more presentable college age cast, the Coalition has sacrificed a certain vivacity - but the reinvention of Marcus as a grouchy hermit, bellowing about his greenhouse in the midst of a COG bombing run, is worth a few laughs. I'm looking forward to finding out who else is back from Gears 3. With any luck, the Cole Train still operates somewhere deep in the wilds.\n\nThe art direction is also something of a generational mash-up. The Coalition has come up with its own spin on the original's \"destroyed beauty\" aesthetic - \"reclaimed beauty\", an admittedly clunky buzzword which pays into an unexpected riff on fossil fuel politics. By the time of Gears 4, Sera's reserves of underground immulsion are long gone, Mother Nature has taken back much of the surface, and the population now depends on a hodgepodge of renewable energy resources.\n\nThe game's plunging rural fastness is littered with the vestiges of the old world and ramshackle stabs at revival - windmills idling against a baleful sunset, enormous flywheels canted against cliff-faces, hydroelectric dams torn open by the \"windflares\" that now rake the planet's crust. In the course of the campaign's five acts (an estimated 10 hours) you'll take a ride in a deteriorating funicular and do battle inside a memorial to the Pendulum Wars, Sera's darkest hour prior to the emergence of the Locust. A hint: some of the antique weapons on display are functional.\n\nInspired by the landscape of north Italy, the game's palette is quietly enchanting - wiry underbrush and purple leafpile, mildew-spotted signage and ground-down masonry, flowing together in a way that makes the cover layouts less obvious to the eye, if no less tangible under the thumb. Gears of War's world has always been uniquely textured, and the Coalition has done a fine job of weaving its own vision into the tapestry, aided no end by some fancy bells and whistles - screen-space reflections on puddles, physically based shaders for a more tactile look, and a persistent dynamic weather system which, at its most severe, actually affects how you play.\n\nWhen the winds are raging, movement becomes a chore, certain terrain fixtures can be shot loose to create tumbling hazards, and slower projectiles such as the Boomshot's rounds may be blown off course, allowing you to sneak the odd shot around cover. If all this sounds transformative, however, the wind was seldom this much of a presence during my few hours with the campaign. For the most part, Gears of War 4's cover combat follows on from that of Gears 3, its AI behaviours, animations and even exploits painstakingly rebuilt to take advantage of Unreal Engine 4.\n\nThe basic rhythms are much as in any Gears game: you'll enter an area, slam your back against a pillar and work your way gradually around to flanking positions, overlooks and weapon drops, relying on AI comrades to revive you as and when you overreach yourself. The Coalition has added a few new tricks - you can reach across cover to haul a foe onto your combat knife, which adds an extra element of risk and reward to close-quarters gunplay - but any longtime Gears detractors hoping for a change of tune will come away disappointed.\n\nThere are, of course, new weapons to spice up the familiar double act of rifles versus shotguns. The Embar rifle handles like a mix of Torque Bow and Longshot - you must hold the trigger to charge up a slug, but if you hold it a second too long the weapon will vent, a blunder that's sure to rouse the scorn of Twitch chatboxes. The Buzzkill and Dropshot, meanwhile, are ways of cheating the game's cover logic. The former coughs up sawblades that ricochet around objects, while the latter spits out a flying drillhead that slams to earth explosively when you release the trigger.\n\nMore important than the new firearms, though, are the creatures you'll wield them against. Gears of War 4 introduces two new factions, the crusty Swarm and the COG's army of automatons or \"Dee Bees\". They share a number of familiar combat archetypes - units that pin you down, skirmishers that flush you out, and the odd towering bullet sponge equipped with a power weapon. But each faction boasts a few oddballs that may throw veteran players off-balance. The Dee Bees occasionally field Guardians, slippery UAVs that sport a chaingun or a rocket launcher (detachable, once you've shot the vehicle down) plus a recharging energy shield. Their rolling Tracker units are Kamikaze terrain denial weapons, exploding at your feet to create a brief but deadly puddle of static electricity.\n\nThe Swarm feel indistinguishable from the Locust at first, their rank and file emerging from sinkholes that can be sealed with a frag grenade, but just wait till you meet the Juvies - Swarm infants caught mid-gestation, fatty tissues dripping from their muscles as they hop and flail towards you. The original game's Wretches are the obvious comparison, but Juvies are much nimbler around objects and harder to hit - I was reminded a little of the Doom reboot's fidgety reinvention of the Imp, which is an encouraging parallel indeed. They also represent something of a terrain variable: you'll encounter Juvie egg sacks that can be used as cover, or shot down from the ceiling to squish anything beneath, but woe betide the player who rouses the occupant in the process.\n\nWeirder and deadlier still are the Swarm elites, especially the prancing Snatchers - they'll actually ingest you if they get the chance, carrying the hapless victim around in their bellies till blasted into submission. Carriers are the Swarm's artillery, their enormous torsos cracking open to release a cloud of toxic spores as they stomp slowly into melee range, and then there are the Pouncers, catlike, dart-tossing fiends with soft pink bellies that hop from surface to surface. As the name implies, Pouncers may try to pin you, but if you're alert to the warning signs you can usually catch the descending beast on the blade of a Lancer.\n\nBeyond the campaign, Gears 4 offers up a brace of familiar modes - Warzone, TDM, King of the Hill, and Guardian - plus the already discussed Dodgeball, a co-op bots mode and Arms Race, a team-based version of the Gun Game mod for Counter-Strike. In the latter, all team members get a different weapon after every third kill, which good news in that a struggling player won't be left behind, and less good news in that allies may accidentally sabotage each other. Finding that your Gnasher has become a Longshot after cornering an opponent is every bit as exhilarating as you'd imagine.\n\nThere's also Escalation, a three ring objective capture mode with a metagame element that is aimed squarely at the eSports community. The idea is to win seven rounds, the twist being that losing teams can activate a weapon spawn between rounds, whether to give themselves an edge or bait the other team into taking a risk. Backed up by LAN support and a robust suite of commentator options, it seems a good pitch for the tournament crowd.\n\nBut the star attraction in multiplayer is, of course, the new take on Horde, Gears of War's influential wave survival mode, which again follows on from Gears 3 but retains a few ideas from the underrated Gears of War: Judgment. The battle now revolves around a movable fabricator, where you'll construct fortifications such as turrets, fences and decoys using globs of power that must be manually collected from the bodies of the slain.\n\nThis creates more of a frantic, push-pull rhythm, as players scurry out to gather energy at the risk of being caught trousers-down when the next round begins. It accompanies a set of loose player classes - Heavy, Soldier, Engineer, Scout and Sniper - which determine your starting layout and are geared towards certain roles, but flexible enough that you can change tactics on the fly.\n\nEach class has a selection of abilities, largely passive, that can be levelled up - the Scout can equip a skill that awards bonus Power when harvesting under fire, for instance, while the Soldier might plump for the ability to plant up to five grenade mines at once. The class system doesn't quite feel essential yet, and there's the suspicion that it exists to justify the sale of ability cards, though all abilities can be earned and upgraded in-game. But having to factor in the fabricator's location and resource gathering on top of the usual Horde strategies is a fun complication, and you needn't give those cards a second thought once you've left the lobby screen behind.\n\nThe truly disarming thing about Gears of War's return is that it no longer has an obvious rival. The original's mechanics have been imitated by every blockbuster under the sun, from Killzone through Tomb Raider to the Tom Clancy franchise, but most of its disciples have either died off or evolved beyond recognition. If the Coalition's debut is a fairly conservative work at heart, one that is content to tinker ingeniously within sturdy parameters, it nonetheless feels strangely exotic. There is no game out there right now that plays like this one, that uses quite these variables in quite this way, and while the revisions aren't mind-blowing individually, they're gripping as a whole. Marcus Fenix may have aged disgracefully, but Gears of War 4 has the wind in its sails.\n\nThis article is based on a press trip to The Coalition's headquarters. Microsoft paid for travel and accommodation."}
{"text":"(1) Existing law generally prohibits the possession or transfer of assault weapons, except for the sale, purchase, importation, or possession of assault weapons by specified individuals, including law enforcement officers. Under existing law, \u201cassault weapon\u201d means, among other things, a semiautomatic centerfire rifle or a semiautomatic pistol that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and has any one of specified attributes, including, for rifles, a thumbhole stock, and for pistols, a second handgrip.\n\nThis bill would revise this definition of \u201cassault weapon\u201d to mean a semiautomatic centerfire rifle, or a semiautomatic pistol that does not have a fixed magazine but has any one of those specified attributes. The bill would also define \u201cfixed magazine\u201d to mean an ammunition feeding device contained in, or permanently attached to, a firearm in such a manner that the device cannot be removed without disassembly of the firearm action.\n\nBy expanding the definition of an existing crime, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program.\n\n(2) Existing law requires that any person who, within this state, possesses an assault weapon, except as otherwise provided, be punished as a felony or for a period not to exceed one year in a county jail.\n\nThis bill would exempt from punishment under that provision a person who possessed an assault weapon prior to January 1, 2017, if specified requirements are met.\n\n(3) Existing law requires that, with specified exceptions, any person who, prior to January 1, 2001, lawfully possessed an assault weapon prior to the date it was defined as an assault weapon, and which was not specified as an assault weapon at the time of lawful possession, register the firearm with the Department of Justice. Existing law permits the Department of Justice to charge a fee for registration of up to $20 per person but not to exceed the actual processing costs of the department. Existing law, after the department establishes fees sufficient to reimburse the department for processing costs, requires fees charged to increase at a rate not to exceed the legislatively approved annual cost-of-living adjustment for the department\u2019s budget or as otherwise increased through the Budget Act. Existing law requires those fees to be deposited into the Dealers\u2019 Record of Sale Special Account. Existing law, the Administrative Procedure Act, establishes the requirements for the adoption, publication, review, and implementation of regulations by state agencies.\n\nThis bill would require that any person who, from January 1, 2001, to December 31, 2016, inclusive, lawfully possessed an assault weapon that does not have a fixed magazine, as defined, and including those weapons with an ammunition feeding device that can be removed readily from the firearm with the use of a tool, register the firearm with the Department of Justice before January 1, 2018, but not before the effective date of specified regulations. The bill would permit the department to increase the $20 registration fee as long as it does not exceed the reasonable processing costs of the department. The bill would also require registrations to be submitted electronically via the Internet utilizing a public-facing application made available by the department. The bill would require the registration to contain specified information, including, but not limited to, a description of the firearm that identifies it uniquely and specified information about the registrant. The bill would permit the department to charge a fee of up to $15 per person for registration through the Internet, not to exceed the reasonable processing costs of the department to be paid and deposited, as specified, for purposes of the registration program. The bill would require the department to adopt regulations for the purpose of implementing those provisions and would exempt those regulations from the Administrative Procedure Act. The bill would also make technical and conforming changes.\n\n(4) The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement.\n\nThis bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this act for a specified reason."}
{"text":"The Marijuana Policy Project, a grassroots organization supportive of marijuana legalization, has named Colorado Senate President John Morse as the worst state legislator with a stance on marijuana issues in the country.\n\nMorse was included on the list primarily due to his role in attempting to repeal Amendment 64 in the last few days of the 2013 legislative session.\n\nAmendment 64 was authorized via a statewide people\u2019s ballot last year with a majority vote in all CO counties, and in May the Colorado legislature moved forward with a regulatory framework to support recreational sales.\n\nMorse has received considerable push-back from voters due to his stance on marijuana and other issues since the 2013 legislative session.\n\nCurrently, over 10,000 petition signatures have been collected to support the recall, nearly 50% more than the required amount to initiate a recall.\n\nNext Tuesday, September 10th, voters will be given the opportunity to decide whether or not Morse and fellow anti-legalization legislator Senator Angel Giron will be allowed to maintain their office.\n\nSen. Giron, of Pueblo County, was responsible for a separate anti-legalization bill, which would had criminalized marijuana if voters do not pass new taxes to support regulation."}
{"text":"Noah McCall (Albany Police Department Facebook page) Noah McCall (Albany Police Department Facebook page) Image 1 of \/ 3 Caption Close Partygoer accused of urinating on police officer 1 \/ 3 Back to Gallery\n\nAlbany\n\nCity police officers who went to the site of a loud party early Sunday said one of the partygoers urinated from a staircase onto an officer.\n\nAt 3:20 a.m., officers went to 470 Hudson Ave., where they say several people inside and out were drinking alcohol and causing a disturbance.\n\nNoah McCall, 19, urinated on an officer, police said. McCall was charged with reckless assault, police said.\n\nA resident was found with metal knuckles, police said. Luca Quinn, a 19-year-old State University at Albany student, was charged with criminal possession of a weapon.\n\nBoth men were arraigned in Albany City Court and released.\n\nPolice also requested a building and codes inspection of the house. The inspection found the building to be unsafe and uninhabitable.\n\nPolice were called to the home at least two other times in the last 15 months.\n\nAt about 12:15 a.m. on Aug. 30, police received a report of a loud party and found a group of people drinking alcohol. Police noted safety hazards on that visit and requested a building and codes inspection. The site was deemed uninhabitable.\n\nOn 1:15 a.m. Nov. 9, 2012, police found 14 people in the basement for what appeared to be an initiation for membership in a group or fraternity.\n\nOfficers said they saw several people face down on the basement floor with their faces submerged in water. They were being struck with wooden paddles and rubber hoses while being told to \"beg for mercy\" and having cold water from a garden hose sprayed on their heads.\n\nNine people were arrested on charges of hazing, criminal nuisance, unlawful assembly, obstruction of governmental administration and resisting arrest."}
{"text":"To many parents, it may be confirmation of something they have long suspected. A new study suggests that children pose a greater distraction to drivers than using a mobile telephone at the wheel.\n\nThe research involved an analysis of 12 families over a period of three weeks, in which all their car journeys were monitored by four cameras installed in their vehicle.\n\nThe families taking part had an average of two children, between 1-8 years of age. In total, 92 trips were analysed by the researchers, looking for any evidence of potentially distracting activity undertaken by the driver, such as looking away from the road for more than two seconds.\n\nIn 90 of the 92 trips studied, the team detected distracting activity on the part of the motorist, with the average parent taking their eyes off the road for three minutes and 22 seconds, during a 16 minute trip.\n\nThe video recordings showed that children travelling in the rear seats accounted for 12 per cent of all potentially distracting activity, compared to mobile phones, which were responsible for one per cent.\n\nFathers were more likely to engage in distracting activities with their children and were distracted for longer periods than their mothers.\n\nThe most frequent types of distractions included turning to look at the child in the rear seat or watching them in a rear-view mirror (76.4 per cent), engaging in conversation with the child (16 per cent), assisting the child in some way, such as handing them food or drinks, (seven per cent) or playing with the child (1 per cent).\n\nThe study found that the presence of a front seat passenger did not significantly affect the way in which drivers engaged in potentially distracting child-related activities.\n\nThe research was conducted by the Monash University Accident Research Centre, in Melbourne, Australia, where rules regarding the use of mobile phones while driving are similar to those in the UK, with hands free phones permitted.\n\nThe team say the results suggest that children are 12 times more distracting to motorists than talking on a mobile phone.\n\nDr Judith Charlton, an associate director of the centre, said: \u201cThe costs of distracted driving are undeniable. One major and previously unrecognised distraction is kids in the back seat.\u201d\n\nThe research comes just days after Brake, the road safety campaigners, supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers, called for tougher rules on mobile phones in cars, with a ban on hands-free devices, as well as hand-held ones. The charity also called for the penalty for calling or texting behind the wheel to be increased from \u00a3100 to somewhere between \u00a3500 and \u00a31,000.\n\nBut Dr Charlton suggested that while the risks of distraction during driving are becoming increasingly well known, motorists often overlooked children as a source of the problem. She added that her research indicated there was a need for more education on the issue. Her team have now launched a larger study, involving 50 families.\n\nThe research comes just months after Norland College, the British nanny school, was involved in the launch of Nanny Drive iQ, a specialist driving school to teach childcare professionals techniques about driving with children.\n\nSarah Rowley, from the driving school, said: \u201cParents expect those who care for their children to have relevant qualifications, but often let a carer or nanny drive off with their children without knowing how skilled and confident they are behind the wheel.\u201d"}
{"text":"Hannity: GOP's Failure 'Pushed Trump Into Arms of Chuck & Nancy'\n\nTucker: Trump Signing Dems' DACA Deal Would Be 'Massive Amnesty,' 'Collapse' of GOP\n\nPresident Donald Trump has been criticized by some on the right for striking a deal with Democrats on raising the debt ceiling and then meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to discuss a plan to preserve the DACA program while increasing border security.\n\nOn \"Fox & Friends,\" former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump made it clear during the campaign that he's a deal-maker and he's going to do what's in the best interests of the U.S.\n\n\"I think Washington needs to wake up and understand that this is a guy who is going to make the best deal for the country when he can,\" Spicer said. \"If that's with Republicans, it's going to be with Republicans. If that's with Democrats, it's going to be with Democrats. If that's with a bipartisan group of individuals, it'll be them.\"\n\nHe said that Trump has a big heart and wants to find a way to protect so-called \"Dreamers\" from deportation, but he also knows the importance of border security and is committed to building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.\n\n\"So like it or not, I don't see how you get a deal done that doesn't include the wall, because that's been a major priority of this president,\" Spicer said. \"When you see what the final product is, I guarantee it's going to be on Donald Trump's terms.\"\n\nWatch more above.\n\nCoulter: 'If We're Not Getting a Wall, I'd Prefer President Pence'\n\nTomi Lahren: 'ESPN Values Diversity, But Maybe Not Diversity of Opinion'\n\nGorka: Trump Won on 'Make America Great Again,' Not 'Make the GOP Great Again'"}
{"text":"Doug, Mr. Hennigan & Chaille discuss starting a Bisbee gossip column, Bingo's new book, Doug's dad on tour and a couple of travel tips. Hey, they all can't be gems.\n\nRecorded Oct 10th, 2017 at the FunHouse in Bisbee, AZ with Doug Stanhope (@DougStanhope), Brian Hennigan (@MrHennigan), & Ggreg Chaille (@gregchaille). Produced & Edited by Chaille.\n\nPre-Order a SIGNED copy of Doug's NEW book, \" This Is Not Fame: A \"From What I Re-Memoir\"\" at - http:\/\/bit.ly\/2z4dmBg\n\nThis episode is sponsored by BlueApron.com - Get $30 OFF YOUR FIRST MEAL - WITH FREE SHIPPING - by going to BlueApron.com\/STANHOPE\n\nDRAFT.com \u2013 New players get a FREE entry into a draft when you make your first deposit! Use promo code DOUG and play a real money game for FREE!\n\nALL THINGS COMEDY Comedy Festival (OCT 26-29) presents The Doug Stanhope Podcast LIVE with Doug Stanhope, Chad Shank, Greg Chaille and Special Guests @ The Orpheum Theater Thu - 10\/26 8:00pm in Phoenix, AZ. Tickets at https:\/\/phoenix.ticketforce.com\/eventperformances.asp?evt=371\n\nMore Stanhope 2017 Tour Dates at http:\/\/www.dougstanhope.com\/tour-dates\/. Get on the Mailing List.\n\nLINKS: Amy Dresner's book,\u201cMy Fair Junkie\u201d - http:\/\/amzn.to\/2gBVaZ9 Justin's Peanut Butter Packs - http:\/\/amzn.to\/2zk0fNr Chad Shank Voice Over info at AudioShank.com Support the Innocence Project - http:\/\/www.innocenceproject.org\/\n\nThe comedy clip is from Todd Barry's DVD \u201cFrom Heaven\u201d (2008 Comedy Central Records) and is available on Amazon.com - http:\/\/amzn.to\/2xBXb1Y"}
{"text":"Oh, space. You're so hard to explore. Sometimes you bombard spacecrafts with hurtling rocks and deadly cosmic rays, and other times you're so empty you don't give astronauts a darn thing to hold on to. But while scientists haven't quite figured out how to keep radiation at bay, the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory\u2014specifically, its Planetary Robotics Laboratory\u2014are building machines that can get a grip on the most difficult surfaces astronauts will find out there.\n\nAdhesion-wise, space presents a couple problems. First, robots typically struggle with uneven surfaces, let alone the kind of cliffs and crags you see on Mars. Second, space is kind of gravity challenged. \"Out in zero gravity, even pushing tape against surfaces is difficult,\" say Jaakko Karras, a robotics electrical engineer at JPL. Without gravity to anchor your feet to the ground, it's easy to run afoul of Newton's third law. (For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So you'll be pushed away from the wall with the same amount of force you applied to it. Physics!)\n\nAnd that's not just a problem in microgravity. Low gravity environments, like asteroids or comets, can be uncooperative too. (Just ask the European Space Agency's Philae lander.) \"If you got out there and wanted to do some sort of sampling and just started drilling, you\u2019re more likely to spin about the drill bit than the drill bit into the surface,\" Karras says.\n\nSo what's a robot to do? \"Nature solves the problems around us all the time,\" says Karras. \"A fairly common path for us is the biomimicry approach.\" When Karras and his team would test climbing robots out on vertical rock walls, lizards would blaze right past them. But rather than getting annoyed at the speedy little reptiles, Karras decided to take his cues from evolution instead. His team's adhesive makes use of van der Waals forces, which geckos use to climb smooth surfaces. For bumpy ones, his team built claw-inspired microspine grippers that can bend and flex. (You can see them in action in the video up top.)\n\nBoth gecko adhesive and microspine grippers are well on their way to scoring a ticket to deep space. Gecko adhesive is already being tested on the International Space Station. Right now, astronauts are using it to anchor things to interior panels, but NASA is considering using it as a replacement for Velcro, which kicks off a lot of dust and bristles\u2014particulates aren't all that welcome in the fragile environment of the ISS. And microspines are a crucial part of NASA's asteroid redirect mission: The little spikes will cover robotic arms used to snatch up an asteroid's boulder and deposit it in orbit around our moon.\n\nKarras also hopes that future missions will use microspines' vertical climbing skills to explore Mars' caves and lava tubes. \"They haven't been explored yet because they're difficult from a mobility standpoint,\" Karras says. \"But they may once have been collection points for liquid water, and they're sheltered, low-radiation areas. They're of interest for investigating the possibility of past and present life.\" So if we find any Martians in the next couple of decades, you have lizards to thank."}
{"text":"HANOI (Reuters) - Abuses by Vietnam\u2019s powerful police force are occurring at an alarming rate, a rights group said on Tuesday, and it urged the government to rein in offenders and create agencies to investigate complaints of beatings, torture and killings.\n\nTracking four years of alleged abuse of suspects in custody, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Vietnam\u2019s Communist government needed to recognize the scale of the problem and urgently initiate police reforms.\n\n\u201cWhat we have uncovered is a human rights crisis in the daily operations of the Vietnam police,\u201d Phil Robertson, HRW\u2019s deputy Asia director, told a news conference in Bangkok.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re convinced that what we\u2019re presenting today is the tip of a much larger iceberg,\u201d Robertson said, according to a transcript provided by HRW.\n\nThe group said many victims of police brutality were accused only of minor crimes like speeding or petty theft. It cited 14 deaths in custody - four unexplained, six alleged suicides and four from illness - and documented 31 cases of police beatings, among whose victims were eight children.\n\nRobertson said the report was far from a quantitative survey and \u201cmore a snapshot of a serious situation\u201d. The rights group did not interview witnesses or suspects itself for fear it could put them in danger.\n\nIt drew largely on what it described as patchy coverage of the issue in by Vietnam\u2019s state-controlled media and from bloggers keen to document cases of police brutality.\n\nReforming the police force could, however, be a tall order in Vietnam. The force is overseen by the Ministry of Public Security, which has a big stake in politics and numerous areas of society and administration.\n\nSeveral ministers, current and former, are politburo members and the remit of the ministry is far-reaching.\n\n\u201cSTRONG COMMITMENT\u201d\n\nThe rights group recommended that the government establish an independent police complaints commission, local-level internal affairs units, a tracking system to address allegations of abuse and ensure interrogations of suspects were videotaped.\n\nVietnam\u2019s government rejected what it said were \u201cfalse allegations\u201d in the report, citing its signing of the U.N. treaty against torture and inhumane acts as evidence of strong commitment to preventing abuses of suspects in police custody.\n\n\u201cEvery act of torture and corporal punishment during investigation and trial processes will be strictly handled in accordance with Vietnamese law,\u201d deputy Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Tran Thi Bich, said in a statement.\n\nMinister of Public Security Tran Dai Quang last week said during a hearing of the justice committee of Vietnam\u2019s parliament that action was being taken against policemen accused of abuses and cases had risen from 2011 to the end of last year.\n\nQuang said that of the 828 police accused of \u201cinfringing upon judicial activities\u201d, 23 were charged with using corporal punishment. Quang did not disclose if any had been jailed. Robertson described the hearing as remarkable but said far more needed to be done.\n\n\u201cFor now, it\u2019s clear that the Vietnam police are mostly getting away with these abuses,\u201d he said."}
{"text":"Germany coach Joachim Low will explore his options against Azerbaijan as he attempts to identify a pecking order behind injured goalkeeper Manuel Neuer.\n\nThe world champions secured their place at Russia 2018 with a 3-1 win away to Northern Ireland on Thursday, extending their 100 per cent record in qualifying to nine matches.\n\nBut their preparations suffered a setback with news that Neuer could be sidelined for a further six months due to a metatarsal injury.\n\nBarcelona shot-stopper Marc-Andre ter Stegen is the current replacement, but Bayer Leverkusen's Bernd Leno will be given another chance to impress on Sunday after an underwhelming display against Australia at the Confederations Cup.\n\n\"When Neuer is fit, he starts. We must see how [his injury] develops,\" Low said at his pre-match press conference.\n\n\"Marc-Andre has shown himself to be very capable. He has developed well with us.\n\n\"If you can speak of a goalkeeper behind Manuel Neuer, it is Marc-Andre ter Stegen. We also have confidence in him, just as in Bernd Leno and Kevin Trapp.\"\n\nLow also confirmed the in-form Leroy Sane will earn his eighth international cap at the Fritz-Walter Stadion and will be joined in the starting XI by Liverpool midfielder Emre Can.\n\nManchester City attacker Sane, a member of Germany's Euro 2016 squad, pulled out of the Confederations Cup to undergo nasal surgery."}
{"text":"Tricks of the trade: The world's best make-up artists reveal their secrets\n\nFrom primer to eyeshadow, these are the products we use every day - but do we know how to use them? We asked international make-up artists Laura Mercier, Jackie Tyson and Gucci Westman to give us their inside tips.\n\nLaura is known for her successful make-up range - her primer is a beauty icon. Gucci is a New York-based celebrity make-up artist who works with all the stars, including Demi Moore and Jennifer Garner. And Jackie is the make-up artist on The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent.\n\nHere, they select the products we really need and give their differing views on how to use them...\n\nDebating the truth: Make-up artists Laura Mercier (left), Gucci Westman (centre), and Jackie Tyson (right)\n\nShould you apply primer on top of freshly cleansed skin or on top of moisturiser?\n\nLAURA: Primer is a protective layer that seals in moisturiser and provides a smooth surface for foundation.\n\nIf you have an oily complexion, you may feel that the primer without moisturiser is enough.\n\nGUCCI: My routine is more about colour- correcting, treating and highlighting the skin. A product that gives you an immaculate canvas is a pore minimiser, which would be my equivalent to a primer.\n\nI use it only around the T-zone, where pores need to be made to look smooth and match the rest of the skin. Apply after moisturiser, and before you apply your foundation.\n\nJACKIE: A primer provides a base for your foundation, which will ensure it will stay put longer, but will also help give the illusion of flawless, radiant skin.\n\nTry Avon MagiX Face Perfector, \u00a37 (avonshop. co.uk) or Beauty Flash Balm by Clarins, \u00a326.50 (from Boots), which is a cult classic.\n\nThe X Factor: Jackie Tyson cannot live without her eyelash curlers and disposable mascara wands\n\nWhich make-up tools can\u2019t you live without?\n\nLAURA: My camouflage brush to apply concealer - it allows me to pinpoint areas where I need more coverage.\n\nGUCCI: My sponges - they are amazingly soft.\n\nJACKIE: My Shu Uemura Eyelash Curlers, \u00a319.50 (020 240 7635). I also get through lots of disposable mascara wands - \u00a36.25 for a set of nine (thepromakeupshop.com).\n\nProfessional tools: Invest in a set of brushes to get that flawless finish\n\nWhat\u2019s the best way to apply foundation to get a smooth, even coverage?\n\nLAURA: Fingers for a cream foundation, a sponge for liquids and a brush for mineral powder.\n\nGUCCI: Using a brush, start from under the eyes working out and up. Then apply highlighter to cheekbones, bridge of the nose and cupid's bow, pat it in with your fingers, and smooth out with a brush. Revlon brushes from \u00a36.99 (Superdrug).\n\nJACKIE: Use foundation only where you need it: around the eyes, nose and mouth. Blend well with a brush or fingers.\n\nHow can you get a lovely, healthy glow using bronzer without looking unnatural?\n\nLAURA: Never overload your brush, and match texture to texture. A cream or gel is perfect over liquid foundation, for example.\n\nIf you don't want a powdery look, use a blusher with a hint of pearl to lift the texture and add a glow.\n\nGUCCI: For mature skin, the more cream textures you can use, the better. Avoid powders as much as possible. It's easy to get a natural look with blusher - it's all in the blending.\n\nAfter applying cream or powder blush, simply dust over the area with a clean powder brush.\n\nJACKIE: Avoid powder bronzers for a more mature skin. POP Beauty has a fabulously easy-to-apply cheek stain called Apples Of The Cheeks, \u00a312 (popbeauty.co.uk), that looks great on any skin tone and can be applied with fingertips.\n\nBreak out of your eyeshadow rut: Bellapierre has a good range of shimmer powders\n\nHow can you break out of a colour rut with eye shadow?\n\nLAURA: Seek the advice of an in-store make-up artist - they'll give an objective opinion. When applying eye shadow, use a little at a time; it's easier to add more than take some off.\n\nGUCCI: Go for a eye make-up palette that combines a few of your safer, familiar tones with a range of new colours.\n\nJACKIE: Try to complement your outfit with make-up rather than match it. Bella Pierre has a good range of shimmer powders - individual pots cost \u00a312.99 or a stack of nine is \u00a359.99 (bellapierre.co.uk).\n\nCan you define your mouth and get long-lasting colour that doesn't look too fake?\n\nLAURA: Apply lipstick by dabbing with your finger to create the shape. The colour will look far more natural, and the pressing action will grind its pigment onto your lips.\n\nGUCCI: Apply lip colour using your fingers, pat it on and clean up the edges with a small concealer brush. Revlon's new Colorburst lipstick, \u00a37.99 (Superdrug and Boots) has a great lip balm feeling and provides a huge amount of colour.\n\nJACKIE: Colour is best applied sparingly over the top of a good lip primer to fill in fine lines around the lip line. Blend gently with the ring finger. When buying lipstick, get exactly the same colour lip liner.\n\nAfter applying a primer, such as Elizabeth Arden Advanced Lip-Fix Cream, \u00a318 (Boots and department stores; 020 7574 2714 for stockists), apply the liner all over the lips to provide a colour base and give the lipstick something to cling to. Blot with a tissue and repeat two to three times for extralasting power.\n\nBobbi Brown's Lip Liner pencils, \u00a314 (bobbibrown. co.uk), are long-lasting and the shades are all wearable. After applying, blend gently with the fingertips to remove any excess colour.\n\nNearly here: Yes To Tomatoes Totally Tranquil Facial Hydrating Lotion, \u00a311.99, victoriahealth.com COMING SOON\u2026 Tomatoes in your face cream The Yes To Tomatoes range is rich in vitamin C and lypocene.\n\nTotally Tranquil Facial Hydrating Lotion, \u00a311.99 (victoriahealth.com) combines 26 minerals from the Dead Sea with tomatoes, rosemary and red pepper.\n\nNivea's Protect & Bronze, \u00a312.55 (nivea.co.uk) is a dual-purpose suncream that protects the skin and enhances tanning.\n\nIt uses a plant extract called GA that helps increase the skin's melanin production.\n\nBenefit Confessions Of A Concealaholic, \u00a328.50 (benefitcosmetics. co.uk) has everything to hide blemishes in one handy kit, including eyelid brightener, primer and concealer brushes.\n\nWE LOVE... For anyone who's ever had a disastrous home hair colour, Colour B4, \u00a39.99, Boots, is a must.\n\nBritain's first home hair colour remover erases blunders with one application. Launched in association with hair, image and style expert Scott Cornwall, Colour B4 is available in regular (to reverse an undesirable hair colour) and extra strength (for hair with multiple colour applications).\n\nPedicure perfect: Comfys have been designed to stretch, flex and rejuvenate your feet\n\nHEAD TO THE BEECH!\n\nThese sandals may look scary, but are as comfy as slippers. There are four toe separators that flex and rejuvenate your feet.\n\nBeauty addicts have discovered that they're the perfect footwear for polished toes after pedicures. Available in leather or velour.\n\nBeech Sandals, \u00a329 (victoriahealth.com).\n\nWHERE CAN I FIND... ULTRAGLOW?\n\nCreated in the Seventies, Ultraglow was a must-have, along with shaggy perms and Sun-In hair lightener.\n\nBut the product was wise before its time because it contained minerals long before the rest of the cosmetics world had realised their benefits.\n\nWise before its time: Ultraglow Mineral Shimmer Powders, \u00a34.21 (ultraglowshop.co.uk)\n\nThe original formula hasn't changed, but it now comes with a Kabuki brush for application, and is available in loose or pressed textured.\n\nComplexsun is a matte version with a four-star UV rating.\n\nThe famous Ultraglow Magic Lips, \u00a320.42, are also still around (remember the lip stains that came in black, red and green and changed to your personal shade of pink when applied?) and sell like hot cakes on the internet.\n\nAnd there's also a great range of Ultraglow Mineral Shimmer Powders, \u00a34.21, and a Magic Mascara, \u00a39.95, which gives impressive coverage.\n\nUltraglow Original Pressed Bronzing Powder, \u00a315.99 (ultra glowshop.co.uk)."}
{"text":"Okay, are y\u2019all ready for the longest sex question I\u2019ve ever answered? Because this one\u2019s a doozy. Normally we edit the questions down to a nice size, but there\u2019s a lot going on here and I think all of it\u2019s valuable. So we\u2019re publishing most of this question, almost intact:\n\nI have been in a relationship with a bisexual girl for more than 10 months. We have a pretty okay relationship, we have our strong differences but there are things about her that I do adore. However, we are having some bedroom issues.\n\nIn February 2013, she went for an operation to remove a couple of cysts in her womb and she has been put on the mini-pill ever since. And since after that, our sex life has gone from hero to zero. We have had many chats (both peaceful and heated) about the lack thereof and she has said on many occasions that she will decide when we have sex. She said it\u2019s her body and she has a right to decide what someone else can do with it.\n\nI definitely have a higher libido than she does and here, I\u2019m not sure if it is because she has had sex with men or women (I\u2019m not her first girl) who have been demanding and have forced themselves on her. But all this is making me afraid to initiate sex in fear of rejection and yet I feel that it\u2019s unfair that sex should solely be on her terms. She sees penetration as an \u201cinvasion\u201d of her body and it is getting increasingly frustrating for me.\n\nI do not want to jeopardize the relationship\u2014I know sex isn\u2019t everything but I don\u2019t feel the intimacy with her. She says that I always want instant gratification that I get from sex and I always want it when I want it, which is not true. It seems that she only wants sex when she\u2019s drunk or when she feels like it. Please help. I don\u2019t know what else to do.\n\nAlrighty, dear reader. This is going to be a multipart opus, because you\u2019ve actually asked a lot of questions here, not just one.\n\nI want to start, though, by commending you for not calling this lesbian bed death. I feel like that term gets bandied about a lot and it implies that a difference in libido is somehow a lesbian-specific phenomenon. It\u2019s not. Any couple, no matter how they identify, can face this issue.\n\nSo now let\u2019s start by picking apart these questions, one by one, and see if we can\u2019t unwind this tangled ball of string into a more manageable spool.\n\nMedications Make A Difference\n\nYou\u2019ve acknowledged that there might be an external cause for the gap between your libidos. Medication, hormones, stress\u2014these are all things that can make a difference in one\u2019s desire to have sex. So it could be that this is a storm that you can weather\u2014is she on this medication temporarily? Or it could be that she\u2019s on the wrong medication for her. I don\u2019t know enough about her medical condition (or about medical conditions in general) to tell you if that\u2019s the case, but it\u2019s something about which she can certainly talk to her doctor. However, some medications are long-term and have unavoidable libido side-effects\u2014which might mean that this is the new normal. So what could that mean for you?\n\nHer Body Is, In Fact, Hers\n\nShe says that her body is hers and she can decide who does what with it when, and that\u2019s 100% correct. Even in your horniest state, it would be super ultra mega no-good to pressure her into having sex. Remember that consent counts only when it\u2019s enthusiastic. You have the right to pursue a sexually fulfilling relationship, but that doesn\u2019t mean that your girlfriend is personally obligated to sexually fulfill you even when she doesn\u2019t want to.\n\nBut there is another side to that equation\u2014your body is yours, and you are allowed to want things done to it. And you\u2019re allowed to seek out those things. It\u2019s normal and wonderful to want sex and to seek it out. So let\u2019s talk about the ways you can do that within the parameters you\u2019ve described.\n\nThe Price Of Admission\n\nBefore everyone gets on my case for using an idea that Dan Savage popularized, let me be clear. Dan Savage has said some VERY problematic things in his career, as many have. But he has helped normalize talking about sex and has contributed to the culture of being open and honest about our wants and needs. And this particular idea of his, despite so many problems with his other ideas, is a real winner.\n\nBasically, think of your partner as a ride (while still thinking of them as a person! I\u2019m not suggesting you objectify your partner!). There is a price you pay to ride the ride, and that price is often a compromise. I\u2019ll give you an example from my own life: my girlfriend is wicked smart. Like, the kind of smart you cannot even believe exists. But she does have this weakness. And that weakness is Say Yes To The Dress. Sure, most of the time we\u2019re watching thought-provoking documentaries or really excellent foreign films or any number of other things that are WAY MORE INTELLIGENT than Say Yes To The Dress. But the price of admission for my girlfriend is that sometimes we are gonna marathon this show and there\u2019s nothing I can do about it. If there is a Say Yes To The F*cking Dress marathon, that is what we are watching. Instead of fighting against it, I go with it and we have fun critiquing the wedding industrial complex together. I\u2019ve even come to grudgingly love it and find my inner Monte.\n\n(My girlfriend\u2019s note here: YOU DID NOT SPECIFY SAY YES TO THE DRESS ATLANTA! SAY ATLANTA! I HAVE MY STANDARDS.)\n\nYou can apply this idea to sex as well. I\u2019ll give you another example from my own life: I cannot keep my mouth shut during sex. I dunno, I just let forth a torrent of filthy talk every time I get naked. That\u2019s the price of admission for me\u2014I don\u2019t necessarily need someone to reciprocate it, I just need someone who\u2019s okay with me doing that. Because I like it and I really don\u2019t want to not do it.\n\nSometimes price of admission can change \u2014 it sounds like her boundaries about sex and penetration might be more recent, and may not have been there when you began this relationship, but that doesn\u2019t make them less valid.\n\nIn your case, it sounds like you both have different prices of admission when it comes to having sex at all. Your price of admission is frequent sex. Her price of admission is no penetration, or only when she\u2019s completely into it. Thus the apparent libido gap. Which brings me to my next point:\n\nSex Can Be More Than Penetration\u2026\n\nIn your question, you state \u201cshe sees penetration as an \u2018invasion\u2019 of her body.\u201d But if penetration is your criterion for sex, I\u2019d challenge you to broaden your definition. Sex is a huge category that covers a bunch of different acts. Here are a few suggestions for things that could be considered sex that are not you penetrating her.\n\nUsing a vibrator on her.\n\nHer using a vibrator on you.\n\nMutual masturbation!\n\nNon-mutual masturbation\/watching each other masturbate!\n\nHer penetrating you (fingers, dildo, back door or front door if ya catch my drift).\n\nOral sex!\n\nBDSM acts without penetration. (Yes, you can just flog someone and leave it there! Totally a thing!)\n\nAnd much much more!\n\nWhenever someone, a couple of someones, or multiple someones talk to me about a perceived libido gap, I always have to check and make sure they\u2019re on the same page when it comes to defining sex for themselves as an individual, couple or group. Everyone has certain things they\u2019re into, and when you\u2019re having sex with someone else, you\u2019re going to do the things that you\u2019re both into, the acts where your interests intersect. Think of it as a Venn diagram.\n\nIt could be you\u2019re both thinking you\u2019ve got a huge libido gap because you\u2019re both defining sex as acts totally on the opposite sides of your circles, but actually there are certain things you\u2019re both into doing together that fall smack in the middle and are totally still sex acts. The only way to find out about that is to talk about it. For a more complete list of sex acts to peruse, I recommend this list on Scarleteen (yes, yes, I know, I am always talking about it, but that\u2019s because the yes\/no\/maybe list is so good!) or this (admittedly a bit cheesy) interactive sex questionnaire. Your libido gap may not be as large as you think, you might just be looking in the wrong place on the diagram.\n\nOr you discover that no, in fact, your libido gap (the difference between your respective prices of sexytime admission) is exactly as large as you think it is and it is truly a difference in how often you want to be having the sex in the intersection. You still have other options.\n\n\u2026And Relationships Can Be More Than Monogamous\n\nAnother valid way of addressing a libido gap is to consider sleeping with other people. If you\u2019re both into it and you want to keep the non-sexual parts of your relationship going, you can always negotiate a less traditional relationship structure. You know, one that allows you to take your yayas outside the two of you and get your rocks off with someone else. Or many someone elses.\n\nNow there\u2019s a bit of a misconception I hear often\u2014a non-monogamous relationship doesn\u2019t mean you both have to be sleeping with other people to make it equal. It sounds like that wouldn\u2019t be really happening for her if you all decide to go this route. No, what makes this kind of relationship egalitarian is that both partners\u2019 needs are being met and both of you are happy. That means that, if you both agree on it, you could sleep with other people and she could sleep only with you, when she feels like it. Totally cool.\n\nOr perhaps she really likes her nonsexual relationship with you, but would like to also have a sexual relationship with someone else.\n\nOr! Maybe she finds that her libido increases when she gets her yayas yaya-ed by someone else and you are also bumping hoo-has with another human and then you come together for a sextravaganza. Some couples find that INCREDIBLY SEXY!\n\nOr! OR! She might want to watch you fuck someone else. Some couples find THAT incredibly sexy.\n\nThe point is that there are options for bridging a libido gap. And those options can safely and respectfully include non-monogamy. For more thoughts on this subject, I highly recommend The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy and Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino.\n\nRegardless of what you decide, you should still feel okay talking about sex with your partner and asking for sex from your partner (if you both agree that you still wanna be having sex). So\u2014\n\nThere Are Ways of Bringing Up Sex Without Pressure\n\nI\u2019ve actually written about this before, but let me do a reader\u2019s digest version.\n\nAlways talk about sex at a time and in a place where you\u2019re not having sex, or intending to immediately have sex after the conversation. Noisy coffee shops are my favorite. Driving in the car is my second favorite, though some have told me that location doesn\u2019t work for them because it distracts them from driving. Regardless, pick a place that your partner won\u2019t feel like you\u2019re pressuring her to have sex right this second.\n\nAsk permission to talk about sex and give that other person a chance to reschedule the conversation. If they say they don\u2019t want to talk about it right now, say something along the lines of \u201cthat\u2019s totally cool, no pressure. But this is a really important conversation to me. Can we work out another time to talk about it?\u201d\n\nAssume positive intent. Assume your girlfriend wants to make you happy. Assume that she is not mismatching y\u2019all\u2019s libidos on purpose. Because unless you\u2019re dating a mustache-twirling cartoon villain, she\u2019s not. If you are dating a mustache- twirling cartoon villain, pics please.\n\nBe prepared to compromise on one of those above solutions. Be prepared to make an actual change in the way you\u2019re doing things, and not expecting her to be the only one changing.\n\nAnd I\u2019m going to add another bullet point here, specific to you. Your partner seems to be not super into the way you\u2019ve asked for sex in the past. So make sure to include this question: \u201cHow would you prefer me to express my want for sex in the future?\u201d And again, really listen to what she says here, and be prepared to do what she asks.\n\nAlways Be Masturbating\n\nWell, not always. You\u2019ve got to eat, sleep and go to work. But yeah, masturbation is included in every You Need Help I answer because it\u2019s important. And in this case, it can be an important tool for filling the libido gap with some spectacular orgasms. It can also be a sex initiator\u2014many people get turned on when their partner starts touching themselves, and not wanting sex can turn into wanting sex totally organically.\n\nHowever.\n\nMay I speak frankly?\n\nI generally try not to give really specific advice because even though I answer the You Need Helps on Autostraddle sometimes, my relationship isn\u2019t your relationship and the way I have sex isn\u2019t the way you have sex. Things are different for everyone. But I want to point out a few things I read in your question:\n\n\u201cI have been in a relationship with a bisexual girl for more than 10 months. We have a pretty okay relationship, we have our strong differences but there are things about her that I do adore.\u201d\n\n\u201cI do not want to jeopardize the relationship\u2014I know sex isn\u2019t everything but I don\u2019t feel the intimacy with her.\u201d\n\nFirst off, you\u2019ve only been in a relationship with this woman ballpark ten months. That\u2019s not a very long time and already you\u2019re experiencing problems\u2014I want you to think about spending the next year this way. How about the next five? You also describe the relationship as only \u201cpretty okay\u201d and you don\u2019t say you adore her, but rather you say there are things about her that you do adore. That sounds like a pretty ambivalent way to talk about what should be a fairly new relationship. It sounds like you\u2019re compromising pretty hard here, and not just in the bedroom but outside it as well.\n\nYou also state that it\u2019s not really about the sex, it\u2019s about the intimacy that you\u2019re not feeling. Which brings up yet another reason for a libido gap: that there are deeper problems with the relationship. Problems like not truly having feelings for each other, or not trusting each other. Or perhaps more personal problems for one or both of you (think depression or anxiety). And it\u2019s these issues that are the problem\u2014the mismatched libido is merely a symptom, not the cause. It\u2019s up to you whether or not you want to work through those problems. But I need to be honest with you\u2014if I were in the relationship that you have described here, I would end the relationship. I would be breaking up with my partner.\n\nWhich brings me to my last point. Sometimes a libido gap isn\u2019t a libido gap. It\u2019s just a gap, plain and simple. An everything gap. And that gap can be too big to bridge. We need to reframe breaking up in our community\u2014everyone talks about it like the worst thing that could happen to a relationship. It can actually be the best thing. It means both of you get to be honest about what you\u2019re truly feeling, instead of keeping up a charade and wasting time y\u2019all could be out courting people who are fulfilling your needs. It could mean that you remain friends because you haven\u2019t ventured into the place where your relationship (not the romantic kind) is irreparable. It could mean that you never speak to each other again, and that\u2019s okay too! But whatever the case, we don\u2019t have to look at it as a thing that has to get ugly. Or a moment that has to be entirely sad. Endings are beginnings too, and I recommend you end this era and begin something new and different.\n\nGood luck, dear reader. I\u2019m rooting for both of you."}
{"text":"A number of the recent improvements made to Dropbox have focused around greater integration with Microsoft Office. The companies announced a partnership last fall, and you can now do things like open Office files in your Dropbox directly in Office Online, with changes being automatically synced back to the original file through Dropbox. Today, yet another new Office-related feature is being announced: the Dropbox app for iOS will soon let you create Office documents right inside it, without having to jump to another app.\n\nPresumably, the files are then saved to your Dropbox folder and can be accessed through Office Online or the traditional desktop apps. We haven't had a chance to try it out yet and see if it truly offers the same features you'd find creating files through Microsoft's apps, but it's certainly an intriguing way for Dropbox to take on the Google Drive \/ Docs combo. Dropbox says the feature will be available \"later this month.\"\n\nOffice document creation is the standout new feature here\n\nDropbox is also building on the commenting feature added last week. The feature lets users leave remarks on shared files that all other collaborators could see; you can now make and view those comments in the iOS app as well as through the web. Today's update also includes a slight navigation change. Rather than seeing simply an alphabetical list of your files and folders, the default Dropbox app view will instead show your most recently used files \u2014 that's anything you've uploaded, viewed, renamed, or edited on any device. While all these features are useful enough, the most intriguing feature here is definitely the upcoming Office document creation \u2014 we'll be keeping our eyes peeled to see exactly how that works.\n\nUpdate, May 5th 11:34 AM ET: This article has been updated to reflect that comments are now available on iOS as well as the web."}
{"text":"A Texas woman has filed a lawsuit against three police officers in Victoria, claiming that they brutally beat her and broke her ribs without a good reason.\n\nMary Frances Jones told the Victoria Advocate that the three police officers woke her up early in the morning on Dec. 22, 2013 over reports that a truck that she had purchased the day before had been seen driving in a local creek.\n\nJones said that she had been unaware at the time that her sons borrowed the truck while she was sleeping. After officers claimed that she was lying about owning the truck, Jones said she tried to go back inside her home, and that\u2019s when they forced her to the ground.\n\n\u201cOne of them had his foot on my arm, and the other kicked me and broke my ribs,\u201d she recalled. \u201cThey hurt me. They hurt me bad, and they know they did.\u201d\n\nAccording to Jones, she had to plead no contest to a charge of disorderly conduct-vulgar language so that she could go to the hospital. Her fiance, 50-year-old Mathew Milberger and two sons, William and Danny Wallace, were also arrested and charged with disorderly conduct-vulgar language.\n\nA police report filed by Officer D. Stone accused Jones and her family of yelling, \u201cF*ck the police, f*ck yall, and various other profanities.\u201d The report noted that Jones\u2019 son was shocked with a Taser, but it did not mention that she suffered broken ribs, black eyes and other injuries.\n\nJones said the broken ribs eventually resulted in pneumonia, which left her on a ventilator. In all, she had been in the hospital six times because of the beating, she said.\n\nAttorney Christopher J. Gale, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Jones, said that police had made her pay for showing \u201cdisrespect.\u201d\n\n\u201cI think the police, while they\u2019re trained in the concepts of law enforcement, they are not trained in regards to the application of them,\u201d Gale explained. \u201cWhen you express your opinion in any form or fashion with any kind of words and walk away from them, that\u2019s a sign of disrespect.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s completely and utterly constitutional to walk away from somebody,\u201d he added. \u201cThey\u2019re just going to make you pay the price. That\u2019s concerning. This is not a police state.\u201d\n\nThe lawsuit accuses the officers of false arrest and imprisonment. And it asserts that Jones\u2019 constitutional rights were violated because officers went beyond the \u201creasonableness\u201d standard set by the Fourth Amendment. Jones is seeking $1 million in damages.\n\nThe Texas Rangers recently launched an investigation after another officer with the Victoria Police Department used a Taser on a 76-year-old man while he was already on the ground."}
{"text":"LANSING, MI -- Enbridge directors say there are no areas where bare Line 5 metal is exposed to Great Lakes water but admitted during a Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board meeting the outer coating layer has failed in places and the company doesn't usually repair that kind of protection system. Kurt Baraniecki, Enbridge director of pipeline integrity, told the state board on Monday, March 13 that anticorrosion protections on the controversial pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac are \"working as designed,\" but there are 18 places where there is coating \"\n\n.\"\n\nBaraniecki said a federal work plan incorrectly identified the delamination spots along the pipeline as \"holidays,\" where the multi-layered coating has been completely lost and bare pipe metal is exposed. Baraniecki said \"the consultants had generalized this\" language in a\n\nto assess the impact of invasive quagga and zebra mussels on the twin underwater pipeline segment, a required part of a civil\n\nEnbridge reached with the U.S. Justice Department last year following the 2010 Kalamazoo River oil spill. \"These are locations we've identified that could potentially have coating holidays,\" he said. Divers \"are going to each of those locations to take samples of the biota and visually inspect the coating to see if it is still intact.\" He said Enbridge is \"confident it is still intact\" because of constant monitoring. Baraniecki's presentation was the main event at a rowdy pipeline board meeting on Monday that featured several busloads of protestors who packed the hearing room at the Michigan Public Service Commission building on W. Saginaw Highway. Security estimated there were about 260 attending, not including media, board members and state staff. Board co-chair Valerie Brader admonished the hostile audience several times during Baraniecki's presentation, reminding them that shouted questions, jeers and other interruptions only ate time away from the public comment period. At one point, a Petoskey man and his grandson sitting in the front row briefly left the meeting for the bathroom, where they undressed and coated themselves in chocolate cake batter to make a visual statement about the threat of a spill.\n\nMan and grandson cover themselves in cake batter at rowdy Line 5 meeting \"We wanted show you what the birds will look like... if the line breaks.\"\n\nThe packed meeting followed confusion related to Enbridge's biota investigation plan, which pipeline board member Jennifer McKay of the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council stumbled across on the company website in February. The plan\n\nwith the pipeline board because it referred to numerous holidays in the pipeline coating that had been identified during a June 2016 inspection of the pipeline. Enbridge called the holidays \"\n\n,\" but agreed to give a detailed presentation. In a March 8 letter, Attorney General Bill Schuette, Department of Natural Resources director Keith Creagh and Department of Environmental Quality director Heidi Grether called Enbridge's characterization of the holidays as merely hypothetical \"confusing in light of the terms of the plan itself,\" which clearly identified them in maps and diagrams. Using a series of slides, Baraniecki said the pipeline has a coal tar enamel coating layer under two layers of outer fiberglass wrap, and cathodic protection inspections show the enamel layer is \"still intact,\" although photographs show the outer wrap layer is missing, or \"delaminated,\" in spots. He said a consultant that created the biota work plan, Gulf Interstate Engineering (GIE), used data from Ballard Marine and identified places where they believed bare pipe was exposed to the water, but Enbridge concluded it was a \"mistake.\"\n\nEnbridge director of pipeline integrity Kurt Baraniecki explains why Line 5 has delaminated outer coating during the Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board meeting on March 13.\n\nHe said in-line inspection tools have not detected any holidays, but the delamination areas were discovered by visual inspection last year. \"We're not certain what is causing the delamination\" but they hope to figure that out. This year, Enbridge plans to hydrostatic test the original pipeline pressure used in 1953 when the line was installed to demonstrate the lines are as \"good as they were when they were brand new.\" The maximum pressure allowed on the line is 600 pounds-per-square-inch and Baraniecki said the company will test the line at double that level. As part of the biota survey, divers will look at delamination areas and \"if there are holidays, we will assess whether we need to do any repairs.\" Baraniecki said the purpose of the outer layers is to protect the pipe during construction and to prevent abrasion from soil or sediment during the line's lifespan, so it being compromised shouldn't diminish the coating system. \"The outer wrap is not something we'd typically repair.\" That statement got the attention of Michigan State Police Captain Chris Kelenske, the state's emergency management coordinator. \"If the outer wrap was necessary when it was put in, why would we not repair it, regardless of whatever the testing is?\" he asked. Brad Shamla, Enbridge vice president of U.S. operations, jumped in. \"We don't believe that going in and doing a repair is going to change the corrosion protections at all, but it's certainly something to look at,\" Shamla said, adding that the delamination spots amounted to \"less than 0.1 percent of the system.\" Kelenske replied that, \"from where I sit, any percent above zero is not good.\"\n\nEnbridge Line 5 may be 'one peak current event' from failure, says scientist Meanwhile, state officials seek info about 'hypothetical' defects in pipeline coating.\n\nAfter the meeting, McKay said the presentation left her with more questions. \"I think Enbridge needs to do a full analysis on the coating and look at the outer wrap, inner wrap, coal tar enamel and determine what is the extent of loss and what does it ultimately mean for the fitness of service for this pipeline,\" she said. Board member Mike Shriberg, regional director for the National Wildlife Federation, said he had a hard time squaring Baraniecki's assertion that the line was as good as new when there's delamination in the outer wrap. \"A pipeline that's in 'like new' condition isn't missing part of its coating,' he said. Shriberg, who represents an organization that is active in opposition to the pipeline in the public realm and in the court system, said Enbridge appears not to really know the depth of coating loss at certain points on its pipeline. \"They're assuming it's just the outer wrap -- which is bad in and of itself -- but it could be much deeper,\" he said. \"It left me with more questions than I started with.\" After the meeting, Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy said the company is satisfied that Baraniecki showed there's no exposed metal on the pipeline. As for the outer wrap delamination, Duffy said it \"doesn't play a role in preventing corrosion, necessarily. It's just the outer thin wrap on the line. Bottom line: There's no exposed metal anywhere along the line. There's no holidays.\""}
{"text":"An ancient Roman merchant vessel has been discovered off the Italian coastline, reportedly in such good condition that much of the food it was carrying might still be intact in its storage jars.\n\n'There are some broken jars around the wreck, but we believe that most of the amphorae inside the ship are still sealed and food-filled,\" Lt. Col. Francesco Schilardi of the police divers' group told the BBC of the containers.\n\nLocal fisherman first became aware of the wreck when pieces of pottery began turning up in their nets. They notified police divers who used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to locate the 2,000-year-old ship in the sea off the town of Varazze.\n\n\"We believe it dates to sometime between the 1st Century BC and the 1st Century AD,\" Schilardi said.\n\nTests on some of the roughly 200 pots, or amphorae, that the ship holds reveal that they contain pickled fish, grain, wine and oil, which were most likely en route to Spain to be traded for other goods when the ship sank.\n\nThe ship's remarkable state of preservation has been attributed to the layers of mud on the seabed, which covered the wreck and protected it from harm.\n\nThe vessel will remain on the ocean floor until Italian authorities decide whether to raise it.\n\n\"Right now, the area of the finding has been secured,\" Schilardi said, \"and no fishing or water traffic is allowed.\""}
{"text":"Political action committees with silly names are a dime a dozen \u2014 \"Americans for Real Good Coffee\" and \"Americans for Crushing It\" both actually exist \u2014 and most of them never end up with a dime to their name. But the Americans Against Insecure Billionaires With Tiny Hands PAC is standing out from the pack with a political ad demanding that Donald Trump release the exact measurements of his hands.\n\nIt's a spot-on parody of political ads, from the regular people expressing their dire fears about the future while engaged in everyday activities (setting the table, doing chin-ups, working at a construction site) to the swelling, ominous background music. There are some good hand puns: America, the ad declares, needs \"a president who can grasp the complexity of the world and hold off the decline of a great nation.\"\n\n\"If the White House phone rings at 3 am, will his little hands even pick up the receiver?\" one woman asks worriedly.\n\nThe video is tapping into a rich vein of criticism that Trump has historically found very difficult to tolerate: Call him a racist or a bully or a xenophobe if you must, but do not, under any circumstances, insult the length of his fingers.\n\nDuring the primaries, Sen. Marco Rubio was the first to pick up on it: \"I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5-foot-2,\" Rubio said during his brief insult comic phase: \"And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can't trust them.\" (That isn't actually what they say about men with small hands, but we'll get to that in a minute.)\n\nJokes about Trump's small hands \u2014 or, in the phrasing more commonly used before 2016, his short fingers \u2014 have a long, entertaining, very Trump-like backstory. His sensitivity to the insult dates back decades.\n\nWhy Trump really hates the insult \"short-fingered vulgarian\"\n\nAccusations of below-average finger size have dogged Trump for nearly 30 years. In 1988, Spy, a satirical magazine based in New York, coined an epithet for Trump that it would gleefully repeat for eight years: \"short-fingered vulgarian.\"\n\nSpy, which was published from 1986 to 1998, was busy skewering celebrities and public figures as Trump was building his national profile. Proudly avaricious and braggadocious, Trump embodied the spirit of the '80s. And Spy made him a frequent target of not just insults but also elaborate practical jokes.\n\n\"Donald Trump was our clickbait,\" Bruce Feirstein, a contributing editor for Spy, wrote for Vanity Fair in 2015:\n\nHe brought us word-of-mouth recognition, and more readers\u2014just the same way he is now bringing eyeballs to newscasts, and page views to Web sites\u2026 Over the course of our years at Spy, we fact-checked his books and his finances (with predictable results), trolled him by sending miniscule checks \u2014 as low as 13 cents \u2014to see if he\u2019d cash them (he did), and wrote up his all-but-forgotten business debacles. (Remember the \"Trump Castle World Power Boat Championship\"?)\n\n\"Two-month anniversary of the publication of short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal,\" Spy noted in January 1988, its first use of the phrase. \"Reader \u2026 is rushed to the hospital with hubris shock.\" (The same issue, presciently, floated the possibility of a Trump presidential bid, citing a survey that found 4 percent of Americans were sad he wasn't in the running.)\n\nSpy would call Trump a \"short-fingered vulgarian\" 12 times in the next eight years, including once reprinting a correction from the Stanford student newspaper, which had written the phrase as \"short-fingered Bulgarian\" and had to apologize for insulting Bulgarians.\n\nTrump, an expert troll, was getting trolled. He rose to the bait, responding in characteristic fashion: scribbling on the article in Sharpie marker and sending it to its writers. (\"Face of a dog!\" he once wrote over a photo of New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who had committed the other ultimate infraction: downplaying Trump's wealth by calling him a \"thousandaire.\")\n\nWhat upset Trump wasn't being called a \"vulgarian,\" a rich person with bad manners. It was the slur on his finger length.\n\n\"To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump,\" Graydon Carter, a founder of Spy and now the editor of Vanity Fair, wrote in 2015.\n\n\"There is always a photo of him \u2014 generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.\"\n\nRubio's \"small hands\" joke was probably a slur on Trump's penis size\n\nBefore we get any further into the saga of Trump's hands, here's one important note: It is not at all clear that Trump's fingers are, in fact, unusually short. But what matters is that Trump himself seems to believe short-fingeredness is a terrible accusation that must be refuted.\n\nThe Washington Post's Philip Bump conducted a thorough investigation that included, among other things, the photographic concept of foreshortening, a 1902 study of the finger lengths of imprisoned criminals, and a comparison of the size of Trump's hands with the size of a sheet of paper.\n\nBump's conclusion: \"Trump is not a 'short-fingered vulgarian,' for the sole reason that he is not short-fingered.\"\n\nStill, Trump seems to take a slur on his fingers as a terrible insult, for reasons that Spy was far too arch to make explicit.\n\nPalm readers, for one, have a host of stereotypes about short-fingered people: They're impulsive, stubborn, unconcerned with detail, prone to jumping to conclusions, and interested above all in doing big things. (\"They build enormous buildings,\" the Benham Book of Palmistry even notes.) But while that's a scarily accurate description of Trump, it's unlikely this is what Spy meant.\n\nFinger size also could be linked to testosterone, and has been cited as a predictor of everything from athletic prowess to ruthlessness on a trading floor. But that research \u2014 which, in any case, was conducted long after Spy first called Trump short-fingered \u2014 deals with the ratio of the length of a man's ring finger to the length of his index finger, not how long or short the fingers in question are.\n\nTrump was probably drawing a much less obscure conclusion: He thought Spy was implying he had a small penis. \"My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body,\" he told the New York Post's Page Six in 2006. \"From what I hear, the same cannot be said of editors of the failed Spy.\"\n\nTrump, as Trump does, was making the subtext text. While there are some superstitions linking hand size to strength of character, a far more common association is that small hands are an indication of, um, smallness elsewhere. (Urban Dictionary was on the case in 2008: \"If you say someone has small hands it means that they have a small penis.\")\n\nAnd Rubio's remark has put the old jokes about Trump's hand size back into circulation, from funny tweets in March to the PAC today.\n\nHastily-Arranged News Conference Just Excuse for Trump to Show Off New Hands pic.twitter.com\/CNJxNpLQV0 \u2014 Daniel Lin (@DLin71) March 2, 2016\n\nIt might set Trump's mind to rest if it were more widely known that the connection between hand size and penis size is spurious at best. The connection has been studied twice, once finding only a weak correlation and once finding no relationship at all.\n\nBut the feud over whether Trump is a \"short-fingered vulgarian\" has now lasted nearly 30 years. It would be a shame to stop it now."}
{"text":"This video is no longer available\n\nThis video was hosted on Vidme, which is no longer in operation. However, you might find this video at one of these links:\n\nVideo title:\n\nA Man Called Gaddafi: (His Life & Death) (Why Gaddafi had to die?)\n\nUpload date:\n\nApril 4 2017\n\nUploaded by:\n\namericanpatriot\n\nVideo description:\n\nMuammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (c. 1942 \u2013 20 October 2011), commonly known as Colonel Gaddafi, was a Libyan revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He governed Libya as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then as the \"Brotherly Leader\" of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011. Initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, he came to rule according to his own Third International Theory before embracing Pan-Africanism. The son of an impoverished Bedouin goat herder, Gaddafi became involved in politics while at school in Sabha, subsequently enrolling in the Royal Military Academy, Benghazi. Founding a revolutionary cell within the military, in 1969 they seized power from the absolute monarchy of King Idris in a bloodless coup. Becoming Chairman of the governing Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), Gaddafi abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the Republic. Ruling by decree, he implemented measures to remove what he viewed as foreign imperialist influence from Libya, and strengthened ties to Arab nationalist governments. Intent on pushing Libya towards \"Islamic socialism\", he introduced sharia as the basis for the legal system and nationalized the oil industry, using the increased revenues to bolster the military, implement social programs and fund revolutionary militants across the world. In 1973 he initiated a \"Popular Revolution\" with the formation of General People's Committees (GPCs), purported to be a system of direct democracy, but retained personal control over major decisions. He outlined his Third International Theory that year, publishing these ideas in The Green Book. In 1977, Gaddafi dissolved the Republic and created a new socialist state, the Jamahiriya (\"state of the masses\"). Officially adopting a symbolic role in governance, he retained power as military commander-in-chief and head of the Revolutionary Committees responsible for policing and suppressing opponents. Overseeing unsuccessful border conflicts with Egypt and Chad, Gaddafi's support for foreign militants and alleged responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing led to Libya's label of \"international pariah\". A particularly hostile relationship developed with the United States and United Kingdom, resulting in the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya and United Nations-imposed economic sanctions. Rejecting his earlier ideological commitments, from 1999 Gaddafi encouraged economic privatization and sought rapprochement with Western nations, also embracing Pan-Africanism and serving as Chairperson of the African Union from 2009\u201310. Amid the Arab Spring, in 2011 an anti-Gaddafist uprising led by the National Transitional Council (NTC) broke out, resulting in the Libyan Civil War. NATO intervened militarily on the side of the NTC, bringing about the government's downfall. Retreating to Sirte, Gaddafi was captured and killed by NTC militants. Gaddafi was a controversial and highly divisive world figure. Supporters lauded his anti-imperialist stance and his support for Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, and he was decorated with various awards. Conversely, he was internationally condemned as a dictator and autocrat whose authoritarian administration violated the human rights of Libyan citizens, and supported irredentist movements, tribal warfare and terrorism in many other nations.\n\nTotal views:\n\n408"}
{"text":"That is the same thinking that got Europe into such deep trouble\u2014the idea that one must welcome hordes of diversity in order to, what? still have enough people to buy cars or rent apartments, or require teachers\u2014to fuel the economy. And, they pretty much say it in this article at a small town newspaper in Maine, to wipe our old white butts in nursing homes!\n\nWatch, I\u2019ll be accused of being a white nationalist (oh wait! I already am labeled as such!) just for writing about this story.\n\nBut, it isn\u2019t me saying this, it is an immigration lawyer whose livelihood depends on more immigration just as a used car salesman looking for refugees to sell to (not disparaging used car salesmen!) does, or a nursing home owner who is trying to get workers at the cheapest hourly wage he can get!\n\nHere is the story from Maine. \u2018Lawyer, employer encourage hiring more refugees\u2018 which reports that refugees are now being spread out further from the normal resettlement sites in Maine (thanks to Catholic Charities).\n\n\u201cWhy are we so old?\u201d immigration attorney Jennifer Atkinson asked a small crowd gathered Nov. 16 for a talk about her work, hosted by the Camden Conference at Rockport Opera House.\n\n\u201cLook around\u2026\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re white. We\u2019re so old because we\u2019re so white.\u201d\n\nShe put the area\u2019s demographics bluntly, calling the Midcoast \u201ca bastion of whiteness\u201d within the oldest and whitest state in the country.\n\n[\u2026.]\n\nWhile some residents might be content with this, Atkinson said it doesn\u2019t bode well for Maine\u2019s economy or its future.\n\nWhen you read these next lines consider this: I\u2019m white and old enough to remember when the pressure on all of us college grads was to have ONLY two children or risk killing the planet. Guess who didn\u2019t listen to that\u2014the rest of the brown world didn\u2019t listen! Heck we have 9\/11 mastermind KSM telling interrogators that they are going to take us over by outbreeding us!\n\nStatistically speaking, there is a correlation between whiteness, oldness and slow population growth.\n\n[\u2026.]\n\nMaine\u2019s aging and decreasing population (the state had a net loss of 928 people last year) leads to cascading problems: low school enrollment, pressures on budgets, strains on services \u2014 especially health care \u2014 and declines in the working-age labor force. [928 doesn\u2019t sound like a lot to me!\u2014ed]\n\n[\u2026.]\n\n\u201cTo grow we have to be willing to become more racially diverse,\u201d Atkinson said, \u201cbecause that\u2019s where the growth is, in non-white communities.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s always the option to reach out to refugees and asylum-seekers,\u201d she added, fully disclosing that doing so would be good for her Friendship-based practice, but also would benefit employers and the community as a whole.\n\nWho is taking care of the old white people in nursing homes?\n\nI don\u2019t have time to discuss the next section, but you should read it, here. It is about a nursing home owner who has figured out that he can hire refugee labor probably much cheaper than a Mainer. When making arguments about why they hire refugees they NEVER admit it is about the hourly wage. They could probably find Americans for this work if they paid a decent wage! But, that would mess up their bottomlines!\n\n(Your tax dollars subsidize the family\u2019s needs when wages are too low.)\n\nLOL! Big business owners are always pretending they are doing God\u2019s work by hiring refugees!\n\nHaving had some experience with nursing homes in recent years, any one of you considering finding one for your elderly family member, especially one with some form of dementia, make sure that all those caring for your loved one (no matter their skin color) SPEAK ENGLISH WELL. It is hard enough for the mentally impaired as it is, and they need to be able to communicate well with a nursing aid. Something as benign seeming as a urinary tract infection can kill if not detected in time.\n\nQuestions I want answered:\n\nWhy is that Leftwingers are always pushing for more population growth (to fuel the economy) when they must know that growth of that sort will necessarily bring some degradation of the environment\u2014more cars, more roads, more houses, more school construction, less open space, etc? I don\u2019t get it! If there is some Open Borders Leftwinger who would like to explain it to me and our readers, I would very much welcome a guest column.\n\nAnd this too? Why all the yammering at whites to have only 2 kids, I don\u2019t see any of you nagging the Arabs or the Africans to do the same thing.\n\nSee our Maine archive by clicking here."}
{"text":"Michigan State coach Tom Izzo's Spartans are coming off their most spectacular and dominating win of the season, a 75-52 rout of rival Michigan, the best win Izzo said he's seen from his team in three years. (Photo11: Mike Carter, USA TODAY Sports) Story Highlights Izzo thinks people stopped talking about\/thinking about the Spartans after the UConn loss\n\nIzzo says going through the Big Ten's top teams might be tougher than the NCAA tournament\n\nIzzo says Draymond Green is one of those great players that rarely comes along\n\nEach Friday leading up to the NCAA tournament, USA TODAY Sports' Nicole Auerbach catches up with a premier college basketball coach:\n\nEAST LANSING, Mich. \u2013 This week, Michigan State coach Tom Izzo is happy \u2013 or as happy as he can be when he says he still can't tell how good his team is. (Here's my hint: Pretty good.) Izzo's Spartans are coming off their most spectacular and dominating win of the season, a 75-52 rout of rival Michigan, the best win Izzo said he's seen from his team in three years.\n\nOnce again, Michigan State is being touted as a Big Ten title contender (and is sitting atop the conference standings with Indiana at the moment) and a national championship contender, too. If there's one thing we've learned about college basketball this season, it's we should never count out a coach like Izzo and a balanced, talented team like the Spartans.\n\nSitting in his office Thursday morning, Izzo caught up with USA TODAY Sports about his team flying under the radar for much of the season, the brutal Big Ten schedule and what every great college basketball team needs \u2013 a fantastic leader.\n\nIzzo on why people haven't been talking much about the Spartans until recently:\n\nBUBBLE TRACKER: Who's in and who's out\n\nWe had some question marks coming in. You have to remember the (Branden) Dawson (torn ACL). He didn't start shooting the ball again until September, so that's seven months. Most people say you aren't any good until the year after. Adrian Peterson kind of screwed up that theory. That was a key thing. Our point guard \u2013 would he come into his own? He was a 2 guard playing the point. Would he grow? We had a couple of freshmen we knew we'd have to rely on, especially (Denzel) Valentine and (Gary) Harris. Those are unknowns.\n\nThat, along with you take Michigan \u2013 they had (Trey) Burke and (Tim) Hardaway coming back. They had some things to plug, too, but usually a team is going to have a chance to go far with its guards. It's like if you have a great quarterback, you're going to have a better chance to go somewhere.\n\nUsually, most years, we lose a couple of games early and we go from top five, top seven, top 12 to 20th and we're kind of off the radar. Most of the time, we play a schedule that's different than most people. This year, we lose to UConn and lose at Miami before Miami's anything.\n\nMAILBAG: Duke-UNC, Izzo and more\n\nIzzo on the challenge of Michigan State's upcoming Big Ten schedule:\n\n(In a 17-day stretch starting Feb. 19), ours is Indiana here, at Ohio State, at Michigan and Wisconsin here. That's concentrated. If you threw something in there, like Penn State, then you at least have some breathing room. You have to get up for every game. That's harder than the NCAA tournament. In the NCAA tournament, there's more space in between. We just came off three games in six days. When you're traveling and going to school, that's hard. When everybody tries to compare these conferences, there is no comparison. I've been in this 30 years. There's no comparison to what the top teams in our league are going through.\n\nIzzo on the importance of great leadership, like he had in recent years with Draymond Green:\n\nHe is rare. You know what happens with rare guys? You go to Final Fours. \u2026 That was another Jud (Heathcote) line when we won the national championship. He calls me four days later, and he always tells me I work too much. \u2026 He says, 'Take some time off. You better enjoy this.' I said, 'Yeah, I'll enjoy it.' He says, 'You really better enjoy it.' He says, 'You don't understand, this comes around every 20 years.' I say, 'Oh, I have to wait 20 more years to get to a Final Four, this or that?' Nope, he says, having that kind of leader. It was Magic (Johnson). It was Mateen (Cleaves). ... Thirteen years later, Draymond came around, and he's not far off.\n\nThat's what's missing at a lot of programs.\n\n(Izzo then mentioned Indiana's Victor Oladipo and Michigan's Trey Burke and Tim Hardaway Jr. as guys, like Draymond Green, who weren't really, really hyped or highly rated coming out of high school but have developed into their teams' leaders. He also discussed how programs like Duke, UNC and Kansas have talented upperclassmen who could have gone pro stay, and then they in turn teach underclassmen how to grow into leaders. Interesting stuff about what makes these teams successful.)"}
{"text":"Competition to feed humans has grown difficult enough that a Seattle couple, Dawn and Ben Ford, opened a food truck for humanity's best friend.\n\nVia Life with Dogs:\n\nThe popularity of food trucks in the United States has exploded recently, and in almost every major city there are a few that specialize in a particular style or flavor profile. This is great because it gives people options to eat foods that they may not have before. This is great for humans, but what about dogs? Is there a food truck for them somewhere? In Washington, the answer is YES!\n\nThe Seattle Barkery is a new mobile caf\u00e9 for dogs. Everything they make and serve is aimed towards giving dogs a similar freedom of choice like we as humans have. For their furry, four legged customers, they have everything from bacon cupcakes and peanut butter pumpkin pretzels, to chicken feet and duck necks."}
{"text":"Another day, another batch of mostly redundant and anonymously sourced stories about whether Vice President Joe Biden will run for president. Some of those stories, however, are getting ridiculous. So FiveThirtyEight\u2019s politics writers met in Slack to pick over the latest Biden coverage, our own assumptions and the state of the 2016 Democratic primary. This is an edited transcript of the conversation.\n\nmicah (Micah Cohen, senior editor): So, the will he\/won\u2019t he speculation about Joe Biden hasn\u2019t slowed down, but do either of you buy the argument that a Biden run could actually help Hillary Clinton?\n\nhjenten-heynawl (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I don\u2019t think it would be particularly helpful to Clinton. Forget about all the BS about whether Clinton runs better when she\u2019s in trouble. Personally, I never got that. If she were so good at running when she was in trouble, then why did she lose in 2008?\n\nRather, why would Biden run? Sure, he\u2019s in his 70s and this is his last shot, but he also has a family to take care of. He\u2019d likely only run if he concludes he has a better than nominal chance of winning. And that conclusion would be quite different from what the current metrics, such as endorsements, suggest. Biden may have an insight on the invisible primary that isn\u2019t visible to the rest of us.\n\nnatesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The irony is that the media has exaggerated all sorts of threats to Clinton, who remains in good shape for the nomination. But then you have the one thing that would be a tangibly bad sign for her campaign \u2014 the vice president of the United States running for the nomination against her! \u2014 and there are lots of \u201csmart takes\u201d about how it could help Clinton.\n\nhjenten-heynawl: What we\u2019ve argued this entire time is that Sen. Bernie Sanders has a weakness among the party actors (i.e., he doesn\u2019t have any endorsements), and that he has no longtime connections to the Democratic Party (remember, he\u2019s not a Democrat). Biden, on the other hand, has been in major federal office in Washington since 1973. He\u2019s someone who could conceivably reach out to all members of the party. He\u2019s already polling better among African-Americans than Sanders, for instance.\n\nmicah: Let\u2019s break this down a little: Both of you seem to think Biden entering the race is inherently bad for Clinton \u2014 he\u2019d be the most serious competition for the nomination she\u2019s faced. But would there be a couple side benefits, like that by giving the media a horse race to cover, there would be less focus on Clinton\u2019s scandals?\n\nnatesilver: Well, first of all, it\u2019s not just that Biden would be a more formidable competitor to Clinton than Sanders. I don\u2019t know that Biden would be all that great a candidate, in fact. But Biden running would signal that concern about Clinton among Democratic Party elites had gone from the bedwetting stage to something more serious.\n\nmicah: Is bedwetting not serious?\n\nhjenten-heynawl: I mean, it depends how old you are.\n\nnatesilver: But the other big problem (as we and others have pointed out before) is that Biden doesn\u2019t have much rationale to run other than if Clinton has \u201ctrust\u201d\/scandal problems. He might never come out and say it, but that would be the whole basis for his campaign. They don\u2019t really differ in any meaningful way on policy.\n\nmicah: But your logic seems circular: \u201cBiden will only enter the race if Clinton is in big trouble, and therefore if Biden enters the race it means Clinton is in trouble.\u201d What if all the party actors are telling Biden that he shouldn\u2019t run, that they\u2019re backing Clinton, and Biden just wants to run? It\u2019s his last chance. And he enters the race.\n\nnatesilver: What I\u2019m saying is that there\u2019s a lot of information we\u2019re not privy to, about what Democratic elites are thinking. Sure, there\u2019s some reporting on it, but a lot of that reporting needs to be looked at skeptically \u2014 like because it relies on anonymous sourcing, or cherry-picked information from a media that would like to make the race seem competitive. The one tangible sign we have about what Democratic elites are thinking \u2014 endorsements \u2014 looks really good for Clinton. But Biden running would be a tangible sign too.\n\nContra Maureen Dowd or whatever, this isn\u2019t necessarily a personal decision for Biden, or at least not entirely one. He\u2019s a party guy. He\u2019s the vice president. He\u2019s not likely to run unless he thinks it\u2019s in Democrats\u2019 best interest.\n\nhjenten-heynawl: Endorsements are merely a proxy for intra-party support. And proxies are wrong from time to time. They\u2019re imperfect. And I don\u2019t buy Biden is desperate to run. He reportedly indicated this week in a phone call with Democratic National Committee members that he and his family are grieving. The man lost his best friend and son. He wants to be there for his family. If I lost my father (my best friend), I don\u2019t take off running for president just because I feel like it. I run because I think I can help my party, and because I think I can win.\n\nnatesilver: Right. It\u2019s possible that Biden assesses the problem and miscalculates. But running for president would be a calculated decision on his behalf.\n\nAnd, by the way, if you read the reporting on Biden carefully, it suggests that the decision is very, very calculated. He\u2019s taking as long as possible to decide whether to enter \u2014 and at a time when it\u2019s already pretty darn late to begin a campaign \u2014 because he wants to collect more information on whether Clinton\u2019s in trouble or not.\n\nhjenten-heynawl: BINGO. He\u2019s meeting with a ton of people who represent different wings of the party, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Richard Trumka (head of the AFL-CIO). He\u2019s doing that, one would think, because he wants to understand what they are seeing. What are their people, their constituents, telling them.\n\nmicah: OK, so let\u2019s say Biden gets in. The night before he announces, he\u2019s sitting with his family and some advisers and they\u2019re talking about why they can beat Clinton (based on everything they hear during these weeks of meetings). What are they saying? Does it all come down to email\/scandal? Or would they be pointing to something else in the Clinton campaign or electorate? (I want data.)\n\nnatesilver: If you want data, and Biden\u2019s camp is looking at the same data, then they shouldn\u2019t be running in the first place. Unless they think the scandal will be Clinton\u2019s undoing.\n\nClinton remains extremely popular with Democrats, and that popularity is pretty broad-based. White liberals might not like her as much as white moderates, Hispanics, or African-Americans, but as we\u2019ve argued before, their support for Sanders is more an indication that they like him than that they dislike Clinton.\n\nSome of the reporting around what Biden\u2019s coalition would be doesn\u2019t make any sense. See, for example, from Politico:\n\nBiden\u2019s circle has identified what they see as their potential voting blocs: Reagan Democrats, Jews, an LGBT base that largely credits him with pushing President Barack Obama into supporting gay marriage, and Rust Belt voters. They believe he\u2019ll benefit from better stump skills than any of the other candidates running.\n\nThere\u2019s no evidence that any of these groups are weaknesses for Clinton. Nor are they all that large, nor do they have very much in common.\n\nmicah: What about the Quinnipiac poll out this week showing Biden running better than Clinton against Republicans in general election matchups? And that voters don\u2019t think Clinton is trustworthy or honest?\n\nnatesilver: I don\u2019t think you can compare a declared candidate in Clinton \u2014 who\u2019s been getting a ton of scrutiny from the press, some deserved and some not \u2014 against a hypothetical candidate who has a halo around him because the press would love to see a huge fight for the nomination.\n\nOver the long run, Clinton\u2019s favorability numbers have been no worse than Biden\u2019s. Often a little better.\n\nhjenten-heynawl: General election polls of candidates who aren\u2019t running in the primary are ridiculous. Once he enters, all of Biden\u2019s faults will be put on the table. And there are a lot to play with. If there weren\u2019t, he\u2019d have done better when he ran in past elections.\n\nmicah: From the WSJ writeup of the Quinnipiac poll:\n\nThe Quinnipiac poll found that 51% of voters have an unfavorable impression of her, her worst score ever on that measure. The poll also found that 61% of voters say she is not honest and trustworthy, another record low. On the honest and trustworthy question, that is up from 57% in a July Quinnipiac poll.\n\nnatesilver: Here\u2019s the problem, Micah. Lots of people, political reporters especially, believe in momentum. If something goes from 50 to 45 percent, they assume it will keep going down, until it hits 40, 35, etc.\n\nBut empirically, the opposite is closer to being true. At least when it comes to polling.\n\nIf something goes from 50 to 45, it\u2019s more likely to bounce back to 50 than to continue declining. Mean-reversion tends to be stronger than momentum. At least over the long term \u2014 the short term is sometimes a different story. But it\u2019s the long term we should be concerned with, given that it\u2019s still only August.\n\nThe Clinton who has a 42 percent favorability rating today isn\u2019t really all that different than the one who had, I dunno, a 52 percent favorability rating at the start of the campaign, or a 48 percent favorability rating when she was running in 2008, or whatever. She is different than Clinton as secretary of state or first lady, because those are closer to being nonpartisan positions. So she can\u2019t expect to see those numbers again, at least not while she\u2019s a presidential candidate. But the odds are that her favorability ratings would revert to the mean by Election Day next year, which in her case means about 50\/50.\n\nhjenten-heynawl: Remember when there was talk about whether Chris Christie would get into the 2012 race? Or whether Fred Thompson would get into the 2008 race? Or Wesley Clark into the 2004 race? Those guys were tied or leading in the primary polling at the time. Biden\u2019s best percentage so far has been 18 percent. He\u2019s down nearly 30 percentage points to Clinton. Clinton is still in a ridiculously strong position.\n\nnatesilver: Yeah, I saw some article that offhandedly asserted Biden was polling exceptionally well given that he wasn\u2019t in the race yet. Polling at 12 percent or 15 percent or 18 percent among members of his own party doesn\u2019t seem that great to me for a guy who is vice president of the United States.\n\nhjenten-heynawl: But we don\u2019t have all the information. We believe Clinton is strong based on polling, money and support from party actors. If Biden were to enter, though, it says to us that he has a piece of information that we aren\u2019t privy to. And this information is that Clinton is weak \u2014 for whatever reason. If he doesn\u2019t enter, it\u2019s a confirmation that she is strong within the party.\n\nnatesilver: Part of this is looking for verifiable evidence in an environment where the media has an interest in overrating how competitive the Democratic race is.\n\nBy most objective measures, Clinton is doing really well in the nomination hunt. About as well as any non-incumbent candidate has been doing up to this point in time. So, on the one hand, we look at that data and it makes us skeptical that Biden will convince himself to run. On the other hand, it means we have more reassessment to do if Biden in fact does run.\n\nmicah: OK, let\u2019s say Biden gets in. How does he win? Does he come in guns blazing on email and trustworthiness? Does he claim the Obama mantle?\n\nnatesilver: How does he run or how does he win? I\u2019d guess that his messaging would be rather cryptic at first. Because the way he wins is basically if Democrats decide that Clinton is too much of a liability because of her scandals. But Biden doesn\u2019t want to come right out and say that. Debating Clinton on policy is also awkward, though, given that they have few real differences. And that, to the extent they do, one of them is going to be criticizing the Obama administration\u2019s policy, which is an odd look for an incumbent party trying to win another term in office.\n\nhjenten-heynawl: Let\u2019s start with this: Clinton must perform disappointingly in the Iowa caucuses. If Clinton wins in Iowa by a convincing margin, this thing is going to take off. I don\u2019t know how Clinton loses in Iowa, necessarily, but that\u2019s where it needs to begin. Biden cannot wait until later states to take her on. Her money and momentum will be too great. So it\u2019s Iowa or bust. Now, it could be that Sanders comes close in Iowa \u2014 it doesn\u2019t have to be Biden, but he\u2019s gotta do reasonably well.\n\nnatesilver: Yeah, I agree. I mean, one way Biden wins is if there\u2019s some new scandal (or some new wrinkle to the email scandal) that\u2019s so bad Clinton drops out. That\u2019s sort of obvious, I suppose.\n\nShort of that, it might come down to the timing. Say there\u2019s some bad news for Clinton that drops a couple of weeks before Iowa. Iowa is taken as a referendum on her campaign, and she fails that referendum.\n\nmicah: And what happens to #feelthebern if Biden jumps in?\n\nhjenten-heynawl: I think he continues on the path it was on. He\u2019ll continue to get white liberals and that\u2019s about it. I guess you could argue one way or another whether this slightly boosts his odds, but I think it doesn\u2019t help him. If anything it could steal attention away from him as the anti-Clinton.\n\nnatesilver: Yeah, I don\u2019t think Sanders\u2019s support will be affected that much. At the margin, it might make it easier for him to win the plurality in a caucus state here or there. But Bernie will keep on Bernin\u2019.\n\nWhat I don\u2019t think we\u2019re likely to see is a case where the Clinton-Biden fight drags out for months and months, and then we\u2019re all doing a bunch of delegate math, involving Clinton and Biden and Sanders, in May. As Harry said earlier, a Biden candidacy would either gain traction or collapse pretty quickly based on how it did in Iowa and New Hampshire.\n\nhjenten-heynawl: Support for an anti-Clinton is either there or not.\n\nmicah: So on our initial question \u2014 \u201cCould a Biden run help Hillary Clinton?\u201d \u2014 we think the answer is: \u201cNo. And also, it probably wouldn\u2019t affect Sanders much either.\u201d\n\nIs that right?\n\nnatesilver: A Biden run would be the worst news Clinton has had so far in the campaign. She\u2019d still probably be the favorite, however.\n\nRead More: Joe Biden Made the Right Call"}
{"text":"REGINA \u2014 The Saskatchewan government has introduced a climate-change strategy that inches toward a price on carbon emissions, but leaves large parts of its economy untouched.\n\nAnd it doesn't include a carbon tax, which Environment Minister Dustin Duncan was happy to point out Monday.\n\n\"I believe it will achieve as much, if not more than, a carbon tax ever would,\" Duncan said after introducing the plan.\n\nIt calls for performance standards on facilities that emit more than 25,000 tonnes annually of carbon dioxide equivalent. Facilities that exceed their limit will have to pay.\n\nI believe it will achieve as much, if not more than, a carbon tax ever would. Dustin Duncan\n\nThey will be able to buy carbon offsets from farmers or foresters, a carbon credit from another company with emissions under its allotment or pay into a provincial fund.\n\nThe standards are to be developed next year, Duncan said.\n\n\"We want to see the economy continue to grow and, for some industries, that means that their emissions will grow. It's not a cap-and-trade program where we're capping absolutely the amount of emissions.\"\n\nDuncan said standards will recognize investments companies have already made to reduce their emissions, something the energy industry has been lobbying for.\n\nNo goals or targets\n\nThe document contains no goals or targets and doesn't include estimates of how much greenhouse gas emissions are expected to be reduced. There is an undated pledge to have SaskPower, a Crown-owned utility, generate half its electricity from renewables.\n\n\"They're going to great pains to say they're not doing carbon pricing and then implementing a policy which, everywhere else it's implemented, is called carbon pricing,\" said University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach.\n\nThe biggest hole in Saskatchewan's plan is its limited scope, said Leach.\n\n\"They're not touching their transportation, home heating, commercial and industrial energy use at all with this policy.\"\n\nAlberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec all have more inclusive plans, he said.\n\nLeach also noted the government hasn't specified how high the emissions standards will be. Too high, he said, and carbon becomes worthless and few emissions will be cut.\n\nChris Wattie\/Reuters Environment Minister Catherine McKenna takes part in a news conference in Ottawa on Dec. 9, 2016.\n\nFederal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said the plan is a good step toward carbon pricing.\n\n\"Saskatchewan's new plan proposes a performance standard for heavy industry that includes a carbon market. Momentum for carbon pricing is growing.\"\n\nBut she said it will have to be wider to satisfy Ottawa.\n\n\"Based on what's in today's plan, Saskatchewan's price likely wouldn't hit our standard, because it applies only to heavy industry instead of being economy-wide.\"\n\nBrad Herald of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers welcomed Saskatchewan's plan.\n\nBased on what's in today's plan, Saskatchewan's price likely wouldn't hit our standard. Catherine McKenna\n\n\"There's a great range of compliance options for us there.\"\n\nHe declined to say whether Saskatchewan's plan is more favourable to industry than Alberta's, which includes a carbon tax.\n\n\"Both are legitimate,\" he said.\n\nThe Agricultural Producers of Saskatchewan also praised the plan. It leaves agriculture, the source of about one-quarter of the province's emissions, largely exempt.\n\n\"We also strongly reject the imposition of a carbon tax on our sector,\" said association president Todd Lewis.\n\n'They are last to the party'\n\nErin Flanagan of the Pembina Institute, a clean energy think-tank, said Saskatchewan's plan is an improvement over previous positions.\n\n\"It's still not a credible approach to climate change,\" she said. \"They are last to the party, but it's good they are moving forward with some pieces of an approach.\"\n\nFlanagan said it's tough to know how much difference the plan will make.\n\n\"The fact they haven't said what these (carbon) prices will be makes it difficult to know what kind of impact this is going to have. Saskatchewan doesn't have an economy-wide (reduction) target.\n\nSaskatchewan has remained opposed to the federal government's insistence that all provinces must have a price on carbon in place by 2018.\n\nDuncan said Monday's plan doesn't change that.\n\n\"We're prepared to defend our position. If that means go to court, so be it.\"\n\nPreviously On HuffPost:"}
{"text":"I\u2019m still trying to find my place as a pray-er among the residents at the women\u2019s care facility. As an introvert and hermit, and with what little social skills I possess, the challenge is large.\n\nI had been given a list of names of the women who are Catholic and ambled to each room to introduce myself. Awkwardly I\u2019d pause to greet those in the corridors and sitting areas.\n\nIn the first room, the woman sat on the side of her bed, a wheeled oxygen tank between her knees and tubes under her nose. She was confused by my presence but not my purpose, and accepted my offer to pray with her. She\u2019d scurried to the administrator\u2019s office when I left her room. I learned later she had asked if I were real\u2014and convinced that I was\u2014asked if I would come again.\n\nMy next stop was with a very joyous developmentally-impaired woman. I\u2019m not a touchy-feely kind of person and found her advances to hug and touch off-putting. I struggled to hold my ground against the urge to back away. She could not understand that I was offering prayer, telling me instead of her upcoming birthday and of many other happy things.\n\nI knocked on two more doors, shamefully relieved that there were no responses, and headed upstairs. In the stairwell I stopped, overwhelmed. I was ill-prepared for the emotions that flooded my heart.\n\nI was upset because of the confusion I felt in the presence of these women, and questioned if I lacked genuine love in my actions. I wanted to feel that my presence gave validation to Jesus\u2019 love, and to feel pleasing to our Lord. I felt none of this. What I felt was the little love I had was barely enough to keep me moving to the next floor, let alone sufficient to be a presence to these ladies.\n\nLeaning against the banister I steadied my resolve to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit felt months ago. I prayed for those I had just encountered and for perseverance and the confidence to move on.\n\nLater at home in my oratory I thought about my shortcomings of truly being the hands of Christ. I felt that the spiritual food I had to offer was not enough for the enormity of the summons set before me.\n\nAs I sat in silence, the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000\u2014more than that counting women and children\u2014came to mind. When I read the Bible passages (Mt 14:13-16, Mk 6:30-37, Jn 6:1-13) something struck me. Consistent in all three, Jesus did not say to the apostles that he would feed them\u2014he said you feed them.\n\nThe apostles begged Jesus, for the good of all, to quickly send them away. There were too many in need for only a dozen hands to feed.\n\nJesus knew that with what little they possessed there was enough for him to work with. He didn\u2019t change the venue of the challenge; he multiplied the bits and pieces that they had to meet the need at hand.\n\nI only have a small amount to share\u2014of confidence, courage, and love. But in the hands of Jesus, what little I have is multiplied enough to feed those standing beside me, and he gives me enough for another day.\n\nThere\u2019s a miracle in here, somewhere. I\u2019m just too startled to see it."}
{"text":"Italian airport is letting travellers take as much as 500g of the sauce in their carry-on luggage, exempting them from the 100ml rule for liquids\n\nThe Italian port city of Genoa has taken pride in its famed pesto sauce to new heights by granting special airport waivers for those who can\u2019t get enough of the basil and pine nut pasta sauce.\n\nTrevi levy: Rome imposes fines for frolicking at famous fountains Read more\n\nGenoa\u2019s airport is letting travellers take as much as 500g of pesto in their carry-on luggage, exempting them from the 100ml rule for liquids in carry-on baggage.\n\nThe catch: passengers must make a donation of 50 cents or more to a charity that airlifts sick children to hospitals.\n\nThe airport said this week that \u20ac500 had been raised in the first 20 days of the initiative, which was inspired by the anguish of so many foodies having their pesto confiscated when trying to get through security."}
{"text":"The United Nations doesn\u2019t really give a shit that most of the rest of the world suppresses freedom and violates human rights. No, they are more concerned with what\u2019s going on in the most free and most civil country on the planet. In their newest most ridiculous demand, the UN is warning the United States that we must abolish the 1st Amendment right to free speech to combat white supremacy, or else. I think I speak for all Americans on all sides of every issue when I say the UN can go f*ck itself.\n\nThe UN threw The UN threw this shit out there in response to Charlottesville:\n\n\uf122 The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has called on the Government of the United States of America, as well as high-level politicians and public officials, to unequivocally and unconditionally reject and condemn racist hate speech and crimes in Charlottesville and throughout the country. In a decision issued under its \u2018early warning and urgent action\u2019 procedure, the Committee \u2014 which monitors implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination* \u2014 stated \u201cthere should be no place in the world for racist white supremacist ideas or any similar ideologies that reject the core human rights principles of human dignity and equality.\u201d\n\nEarly warning and urgent action procedure? This peculiar wording makes me think that if we don\u2019t comply, the UN is going to issue some kind of sanctions against the US. I double-dog dare them to do this. I\u2019m almost certain President Trump will react by pulling all funding to the UN and as I\u2019m sure they know, we pay most of their bills.\n\n\u201cWe are alarmed by the racist demonstrations, with overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacy and inciting racial discrimination and hatred\u201d, said UN nitwit Anastasia Crickley.\n\nGosh, what about the daily radical Islamic acts of terror around the globe? Don\u2019t those cowardly acts of violence that result in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people seem like a bigger concern? Apparently not. The death of one person in an isolated incident in the US is a way bigger deal.\n\n\u201cWe call on the US Government to investigate thoroughly the phenomenon of racial discrimination targeting, in particular, people of African descent, ethnic or ethno-religious minorities, and migrants,\u201d said Crinkly.\n\nIn case this isn\u2019t crazy enough for you, check this out:\n\n\uf122 Acting under its early warning procedure, CERD also called on the US to ensure that the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly are not exercised with the aim of destroying or denying the rights and freedoms of others. It also asked US to provide the necessary guarantees so that such rights are not misused to promote racist hate speech and racist crimes.\n\nThe UN wants America to get rid of the 1st Amendment rights of free speech and assembly to address white supremacy, which is only an issue with hysterical liberals. I guess they don\u2019t quite get how freedom works or that unpopular speech is exactly the kind of speech that the 1st Amendment protects.\n\nA better idea would be for the UN to condemn 99% of the rest of the world that has some kind of free speech restrictions. In half the countries having a opinion is a jailable offense and in the other half speaking one\u2019s mind is a death sentence.\n\nPutting up with a handful of racist knuckleheads is a small price to pay for liberty. America\u2019s freedom is the least pressing issue facing the globe."}
{"text":"Bedrock presented preliminary design and plans for the site of the former J.L. Hudson\u2019s Department Store Wednesday, February 22, 2017, at a meeting of the DDA (Photo: Bedrock Detroit)\n\nIn an era of a downtown Detroit renaissance, plans for the tallest building in the city were unveiled Wednesday.\n\nThe building is part of an estimated $775 million development proposed by an entity linked to billionaire Dan Gilbert. The project for the empty Woodward Avenue block where the J.L. Hudson department store once stood is one of the most expensive and ambitious plans introduced in a decade that has seen many blockbuster deals.\n\nThe shimmering, futuristic 734-foot tower aims to be a centerpiece for the city and state, officials for Gilbert\u2019s Bedrock Detroit said as they rolled out the proposed project to the board of the Downtown Development Authority. That\u2019s one of the city agencies that would need to approve the deal.\n\nThe tower would have 250 residential units and 700-plus underground parking spaces. A connected nine-story base structure would house retail, office, technology and arts and culture space. The development looks like nothing in Detroit now, with a glass and steel exterior that sweeps upward.\n\nBedrock officials showed images of Smithsonian exhibits and TED Talks as examples of the kind of events that could be held in conference and exhibit space. There were images of a market and hip retailers in the floor beneath street level. The mixed-use development would have 1.2 million square feet of space.\n\n\u201cWe believe this project is so unique that it can help put Detroit back on the national, and even global, map for world-class architecture, talent attraction, technology innovation and job creation,\u201d Gilbert said in a written statement Wednesday.\n\nThe DDA board quickly approved a new time frame for the yet-unnamed development. An entity linked to Gilbert has had development rights for the former Hudson\u2019s site since 2010; the DDA has granted extensions for the project several times. Early designs released in 2015 showed a swooping glass-and-metal structure.\n\nIf things go as intended \u2014 and it\u2019s too soon to tell \u2014 the new schedule would see construction start in December of this year and be finished by the end of 2020.\n\nA spokesman for Mayor Mike Duggan did not respond to an email asking for comment on Wednesday\u2019s announcement.\n\nPlans for the project could change because Gilbert is counting on tax breaks that don\u2019t yet exist to make the financing work on the project. Those potential tax incentives are currently in the state Legislature. On Wednesday, the package of bills was approved by the state Senate and the bills now go to the state House of Representatives. Last year, similar legislation died in the House.\n\nIf the tax incentives are not passed, \u201cIt certainly will impact what happens,\u201dsaid Joe Guziewicz, vice president of construction for Bedrock Detroit. \u201cWe would end up coming back to the DDA with revised renderings and a revised timeline,\u201d for the project, he said.\n\nBeyond the tax incentives, it\u2019s unknown whether other tax breaks may be sought for the development.\n\nEntities linked to Gilbert and Bedrock Detroit are major forces downtown, controlling more than 90 properties, which amounts to a $2 billion-plus investment.\n\nThe proposed tower would make the structure Detroit\u2019s tallest \u2014 by 7 feet. The 70-story center tower of the General Motors Renaissance Center stands 727 feet tall. The development plans were designed by SHoP Architects of New York in conjunction with Detroit-based Hamilton Anderson Associates.\n\nFor decades, the Hudson\u2019s store was the jewel of a bustling downtown filled with stores, offices and people. The store was demolished in 1998 and the site has been empty ever since, serving as a reminder of Detroit\u2019s decades-long decline.\n\nThe scope of the Hudson\u2019s development was praised by John Mogk, a Wayne State University law professor who follows downtown development. \u201cHudson\u2019s was a magical place that was really the catalyst for the downtown. This could be that, too. The Renaissance Center failed to do that.\u201d\n\nThe estimated $775 million price tag rivals the cost of Little Caesars Arena, the still-under-construction venue that will be the home ice to the Detroit Red Wings. The current estimate for the arena is $732.6 million, but that will increase if the arena also becomes home to the Detroit Pistons, which would result in millions of dollars in modifications to the venue.\n\nlaguilar@detroitnews.com\n\nTwitter: @LouisAguilar_DN\n\nHigher ground\n\nThese are the tallest buildings in Detroit. The planned building on the Hudson\u2019s site \u2014 at 734 feet and 52 floors\u2014 would eclipse them all.\n\n1. The Detroit Marriot at the Renaissance Center: 727 feet tall, 70 floors\n\n2. One Detroit Center: 619 feet tall, 43 floors\n\n3. Penobscot Building: 565 feet tall, 47 floors\n\n4. Renaissance Center Towers 100, 200, 300, 400 (Satellite Towers): 522 feet tall, 39 floors\n\n5. The Guardian Building: 496 feet tall, 40 floors\n\nSources: Emporis, historicdetroit.org\n\nRead or Share this story: http:\/\/detne.ws\/2lwdlQU"}
{"text":"FBI Handout Gunman who killed a security agent at LAX was carrying a note expressing 'disappointment in the government', reports claim.\n\nIn pictures: Shooting at Los Angeles Airport\n\nThe gunman who opened fire inside Los Angeles International Airport, killing a security agent and injuring several others, was carrying a note describing himself as a \"pissed off patriot\" who wanted to shoot \"pigs\", it has been reported.\n\nIn the hours after Friday's deadly attack, suggestions began to emerge that the shooter - identified as Paul Ciancia, 23 - was motivated by extremist anti-government views as well as emotional problems that had pushed him towards thoughts of suicide.\n\nAuthorities have declined to address his motivation publicly but a law enforcement official told the Los Angeles Times that a note was found on Ciancia expressing \"disappointment in the government\" and claiming he had no interest in harming \"innocent people\".\n\nInstead, he wanted to \"kill TSA\", the note reportedly stated, a reference to the Transport Security Administration created in the wake of the September 11 attacks to increase safety on US transportation. The written rant was said to detail Ciancia's belief that his constitutional rights were being violated by TSA searches and his anger at former Department of Homleand Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.\n\nAs he embarked on his shooting spree, dressed in fatigues and carrying a high-powered rifle, Ciancia asked several cowering members of the public if they were TSA, witnesses claimed. He found his target, shooting dead 39-year-old agent Gerardo Hernandez, the first TSA officer to be killed in the line of duty since the agency's creation.\n\nA number of other agents suffered gunshot wounds.\n\nThe deadly attack threw one of the world's busiest airports into chaos as terrified passengers fled Terminal 3, some gathering on the airside tarmac under the wings of waiting planes. Others locked themselves in bathrooms as security officers sought to fell the shooter, ultimately engaging him in gunfire which resulted in shots to his mouth and leg, and taking him into custody.\n\nCiancia, originally from New Jersey, reportedly began his assault at a check-in counter where he pulled an assault rifle out of a bag and opened fire. Witnesses heard several \"popping\" sounds before the gunman moved up an escalator, and through a security screening area to where passengers were waiting for their flights outside boarding gates.\n\nHe was then shot and wounded by police, reportedly near a Burger King stand. Up to a dozen shots were heard by passengers as they scrambled away.\n\nCiancia had at least five full 30-round magazines with him, police said. He was shot in the mouth and leg by two airport police officers.\n\nCiancia had earlier that day sent a text message to his brother saying that he intended to take his own life. This led his father to contact police in the family's home state of New Jersey expressing concern for his state of mind and asking for help in locating him. They in turn contacted police in Los Angeles who sent a patrol car to Ciancia's apartment in the city. There, his two roommates said they had seen him the previous day and that he appeared to be fine.\n\nA former classmate of Ciancia's told the LA Times that the suspected shooter was a loner and suffered bullying at their private school.\n\n\"In four years, I never heard a word out of his mouth,\" said David Hamilton, who graduated with Ciancia from Salesianum School in Wilmington, Delaware, in 2008. \"He kept to himself and ate lunch alone a lot. I really don't remember any one person who was close to him.\"\n\nWitnesses said Ciancia appeared calm and composed as he picked his way through the terminal seeking targets. But passengers, who included a number of TV and film celebrities, told of their terror during the ordeal.\n\nEmmy-nominated actor Tim Daly, who appeared in The Sopranos, was in the Virgin first class lounge on the other side of a wall from the shooting.\n\n\"Less than a minute after the shots the LAPD burst into the lounge with weapons drawn to make sure there were no bad guys in the lounge,\" he said. \"That was pretty frightening.\"\n\nDaly said when he was evacuated he saw a gun that looked like an AR-15 assault rifle with three clips on the floor outside Gates 35 and 36.\n\nHe said: \"It was right in the middle of where everyone waits to get on their planes. We were told not to step on any blood or bags because it was evidence.\"\n\nTV presenter Tory Belleci, from the show Mythbusters, tweeted:\n\nTwitter: Tory Belleci - Heard gun shots then everyone starting running for the door. Not sure if anyone was hurt. #LAX\n\nThe airport, known as LAX, serves about 64 million people a year, with more than 1,500 flights taking off and landing every day. Terminal 3 is home to Virgin America and other airlines. All flights were grounded and President Barack Obama was being kept informed.\n\nPassenger Sarah Richardson said: \"We heard a lot of loud gunshots. My colleague threw me to the ground and we were scrambling. Somebody told us to make a run for it. We got into a room and they pulled a coffee machine in front of the door. We could hear gunshots outside.\n\n\"The sound was so loud we thought a bomb had gone off. Some people hid in a bathroom. It was pure and utter mayhem, people tripping over each other crying and screaming, bags everywhere.\"\n\nEyewitness Brian Adamick, 43, told the Los Angeles Times he saw a wounded TSA agent with a bloody leg on the tarmac.\n\n\"It looked like it was straight out of the movies,\" he said. The agent told him \"I got shot, I'm fine,\" adding that he had been shot before.\n\nLos Angeles chef Vernon Cardenas, who was en route to Philadelphia to audition for the MasterChef TV programme, said the gunman looked at him but didn't shoot.\n\nHe described a white man in his 20s with \"dirty blonde hair\". Mr Cardenas said: \"He was dressed in navy blue clothes, he almost looked like an employee of the airport. He was walking around in sort of a daze.\"\n\nThe television channel AMC confirmed that scenes for its award-winning drama Mad Men were being filmed at the airport at the time of the shooting.\n\nProduction on Mad Men was taking place at nearby Terminal 4 and a member of the crew said on Twitter: \"We are filming at LAX. Gun fire. Locked down. Evacuating. Terminal 4. Forced back inside for safety.\"\n\nIt was not clear which members of the cast were present at the airport at the time.\n\nMythbusters presenter Tory Belleci told CNN: \"People were running towards me screaming 'There's a shooter, there's a shooter.' I heard the shots. Everybody was jumping over each other and trying to stay low. It was blowing my mind how he could get a weapon that far into the airport.\"\n\nFellow Mythbusters star Grant Imahara said: \"To be there was surreal and you went into survival mode. It was like the whole airport was holding its breath for an hour.\"\n\nPassenger Leon Saryan, who was walking from the security check carrying his shoes and belt, told ABC News: \"I was cowering in a corner. He (the gunman) looked at me and he said, 'TSA?' I shook my head no, and he kept on going. I just prayed to God. That's all I did. I just prayed.\""}
{"text":"Despite years of painful austerity, the UK\u2019s level of public spending is today no lower as a share of national income than it was after 11 years of a Labour government in 2008, according to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.\n\nThe major report from the UK\u2019s leading economic think tank shows that deep cuts have left the NHS, schools and prisons in a \u201cfragile state\u201d, and have merely returned public spending to pre-financial crisis levels.\n\nThe document presents a challenge to claims that Conservative-driven austerity saved the public finances following years of Labour overspending.\n\nWe\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s true. You can form your own view. From 15p \u20ac0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.\n\nThe think tank\u2019s report goes on to conclude that in the light of the data, Chancellor Philip Hammond\u2019s plan to abolish the UK\u2019s deficit by the mid-2020s is \u201cno longer sensible\u201d.\n\nWith his critical Budget approaching in November, it challenges him to admit the target looks \u201cincreasingly unlikely\u201d in the light of a worsening economic outlook, exacerbated by Britain\u2019s \u201cterrible\u201d productivity and uncertainty over Brexit.\n\nThe IFS analysis of public spending levels appears in its pre-Budget look at the Chancellor\u2019s options published on Monday.\n\nIt found public spending as a share of national income was at a similar level both now and shortly before the financial crash, an event David Cameron and George Osborne claimed Labour overspending left the country ill-prepared for.\n\nIn 2007-08, public spending as a share of GDP was 39 per cent, it peaked in 2009-10 at 45.1 per cent and is forecast to be 39.6 per cent this year, according to the IFS.\n\nThe main justification for austerity has been the need to reduce and eventually abolish the deficit, a target that the IFS refers to as \u201cever-receding\u201d.\n\nThe IFS argues Mr Hammond\u2019s critical budget speech next month, will be given against a backdrop of a worsening economic outlook that demands austerity goals are rethought.\n\nThe key to the \u201csignificantly worsened\u201d fiscal forecasts expected in November, leaving the Government less money to play with, is the UK\u2019s \u201clower productivity growth\u201d coming off the back of seven years of \u201cterrible\u201d growth.\n\nThe report argues Mr Hammond will also find it difficult to raise new money from taxes given the \u201cpolitical arithmetic\u201d that exists following an election which left the Tories without a solid Commons majority.\n\nThe Chancellor also faces huge pressure to ease the Treasury\u2019s purse strings, including demands to boost universal credit welfare payments, increase public sector pay and spend more on defence.\n\nThe IFS report said: \u201cIt looks like [Mr Hammond] will face a substantial deterioration in the projected state of the public finances.\n\n\u201cHe will know that seven years of \u2018austerity\u2019 have left many public services in a fragile state. And, in the known unknowns surrounding both the shape and impact of Brexit, he faces even greater than usual levels of economic uncertainty.\u201d\n\nIt goes on: \u201cGiven all the current pressures and uncertainties \u2013 and the policy action that these might require \u2013 it is perhaps time to admit that a firm commitment to running a budget surplus from the mid-2020s onwards is no longer sensible.\u201d\n\nThe body sets out areas where continuing austerity is having its greatest impact on services, citing \u201cclear signs of strain\u201d in the NHS.\n\nIt adds: \u201cBoth the four-hour A&E target and the 18-week waiting period target are being missed nationally.\n\n\u201cThe indicators paint a worrying picture for prisons, which, unlike the NHS, have seen large real-terms cuts (over 20 per cent) since 2009-10.\n\n\u201cStatistics compiled by the Institute for Government show that while the prison population is at roughly its 2009 level, staffing is down and violence (both against fellow prisoners and prison staff) and prisoner self-harm rates are on an alarmingly steep upwards trajectory.\u201d\n\nThe report goes on to note how the Chancellor has already abandoned the blanket public sector pay cap and may decide to give more people a pay rise.\n\nThe Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said: \u201cThe IFS have today confirmed seven years of Tory austerity policies have failed to drive up investment and productivity, with serious potential consequences for the public finances.\n\n\u201cTory economic failure means wages and salaries are lower today than when they came to power, and still falling, whilst their mishandling of Brexit is now also adding to the uncertainty around future borrowing plans.\u201d\n\nThe Independent contacted the Treasury for comment.\n\nWe\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s true. You can form your own view.\n\nAt The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That\u2019s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks \u2013 all with no ads.\n\nSubscribe now."}
{"text":"Michael Garb\/Gravity Glue (Facebook)\n\nMichael Grab, a Boulder artist who goes by the name Gravity Glue, said that police threatened to ticket or jail him for creating stacked river rock sculptures that the community has been enjoying for years.\n\nIn a Monday Facebook post, Grab explained that a Boulder police officer had informed him that there would be stiff penalties for continuing his art.\n\n\u201cFor the past 7 years i have been creating this art in and around Boulder, Colorado, USA. nearly every day!\u201d he wrote. \u201c[J]ust this weekend, one police officer has decided that balancing rocks in Boulder, Colorado is now illegal, obscurely referencing two city codes [5-4-8 and 5-4-2] about \u2018destruction of public property\u2019 in relation to rocks.\u201d\n\n\u201cSo now the police have belligerently taken it upon themselves to write tickets and\/or arrest ANYONE balancing rocks in Boulder, CO. and specifically threatened to ticket me and\/or arrest me if they catch me in the future,\u201d the artist lamented. \u201c[I] encourage as many people as possible (especially locals) to contact the city council here in Boulder and voice your support for this long standing tradition in Boulder. [I]t is something that an overwhelming portion of the community supports.\u201d\n\nGrab said that he would be forced to leave Boulder if the city council did not step in to clarify the city ordinances.\n\nRooster Magazine wondered why Boulder police felt the need to focus on \u201cDraconian rock art witch hunt\u201d instead of higher-than-average rates of rape and theft.\n\n\u201cWhy is any of this important? Because if we ban every bizzaro Boulder character that causes a stir (see: nude gardening woman), we\u2019re left with nothing more than a college town with a Target that\u2019s about to become Google\u2019s new headquarters,\u201d the magazine noted. \u201cAt a time like this, we need less kid gloves in the form of overzealous legislation, and more attention paid to retaining the city\u2019s core personality. And if you don\u2019t like that, f*cking move to Westminster.\u201d\n\n\u201cKeep Boulder weird, and keep Gravity Glue making weird ass rock art.\u201d\n\nIn the end, the call to action worked. Grab said that the city attorney personally called to let him know that rock stacking was not illegal in Boulder.\n\n\u201cUPDATE: holy shit! maybe the support was more than i anticipated!!\u201d he exclaimed. \u201c[J]ust got a call from the city attorney personally here in Boulder telling me that he has ordered the police to NOT cite rock balancing under the city codes [I] mentioned below!!!\u201d\n\n\u201cTHANK YOU everyone for the overwhelming support!!!! [T]hey must have gotten lots of calls!! haha :))\u201d\n\nWatch a video below of Gravity Glue doing his thing."}
{"text":"Kirsten Dunst earns millions for a film. But what about the actor who dubs her into Spanish? The world's top voice artists tell all - in their own words\n\nMexico's Kirsten Dunst: Claudia Motta\n\nI began dreaming of acting as a little girl, watching Japanese cartoons. I fell in love with the voices. Later I got into radio and then into dubbing - and I love it. After I spoke Kirsten Dunst's lines in Spider-Man, they asked me to do Mona Lisa Smile, Wimbledon, and others. She's a favourite in my stable of characters now, and I'm so pleased things are going well for her in Hollywood. I don't imitate the actor, I get into the personality of the role. I focus on the gestures and reflect that in my voice, even if there was no sound in the original. I add to the drama because to dub well you have to be as good an actor, or better. They paid me 10,000 pesos (\u00a3500) for Mary Jane in Spider-Man. The problem is that distributors don't put us in the credits. Suppose Kirsten Dunst thought, \"Gosh, how nice I sound in Spanish.\" She wouldn't have known who the voice belonged to.\n\nMuch of my work is for television. I'm best known for playing Bart Simpson for 10 years. When different actors were brought in because of a contract dispute, the public demanded we be brought back. Mexican dubbers mostly use a kind of neutral Spanish without accents or regional expressions so all Latin America can understand. We have the best dubbing industry, and the competition in Argentina and Venezuela just doesn't have our finesse or tradition. Top Cat in Spanish has a personality and feeling that is missing in English - and I take my hat off to the woman who voiced the witch in Snow White.\n\nFrance's Angelina Jolie: Fran\u00e7oise Cadol\n\nSometimes my home phone will ring and when I say \"hello\" there will be a sharp intake of breath at the other end. I know immediately it's a dubbing fan who has got hold of my number. Once a woman rang me and started gasping. Then after a silence, she said: \"Sorry, I'm just so emotional at hearing you, I can't speak, I'll have to call back.\"\n\nThere are people in Paris who keep scrapbooks on dubbing, who collect signed photos, who know what you've dubbed despite your name rarely appearing on the credits. I respect people's reasons for wanting to contact me, but I don't send out photos. People feel they know the voice and they want to know you. A voice is a very moving thing. Dubbing is taken seriously in France, and people get very upset if an actor who has dubbed a star for a long time suddenly changes. Audiences want continuity.\n\nI get invited on to TV shows to discuss dubbing - people are interested in the process. I have been Angelina Jolie since Tomb Raider because I was the voice of Lara Croft in the video games. I thought Jolie was very good in Mr and Mrs Smith - you could tell she and Brad Pitt were having a good time making that film. I don't seek out information on her in the celebrity mags, or follow her life at all, but I get on very well with the French actor who dubs Brad Pitt - a well-known actor in his own right. I'm also Gong Li, Sandra Bullock, Patricia Arquette and the voice of Mary Alice in Desperate Housewives.\n\nI dub films because I enjoy it, it's artistic - and it is a skill that teaches you a lot about acting. I'm currently writing my fourth play for my theatre company and dubbing allows me to keep on doing the work for theatre. I've acted in theatres all over Paris, I've been on the TV, but the greatest irony is that I've never actually appeared on the cinema screen.\n\nItaly's Ren\u00e9e Zellweger: Giuppy Izzo\n\nI was born into the business. My teacher was my father. He had four daughters and most evenings at dinner he would try to teach us something about intonation. He had a saying: \"Your voice is the soundtrack of your life.\" One of my sisters also entered the business and is now a dubbing director as well as a dubbing artist. It was a bit like growing up as a circus child, really.\n\nMy first job was as the 10-year-old daughter in The Goodbye Girl. I've no idea how many other films I've dubbed since then. I've voiced Ren\u00e9e Zellweger in both her Bridget Jones movies and several others. I've studied her diction, her movements and her breathing so much that I feel I know her. We've not met, though - the only actor I've both dubbed and met is Ellen Pompeo, the star of Grey's Anatomy. She came up and hugged me at a conference in Milan in the summer.\n\nThe key to this profession is obsession with detail. To get the same effects as in the original, I try, as far as I can, to imitate the actor's movements as I say her lines. Anyone who saw me working would think I was nuts. I lay down on the floor for the bedroom scenes in the Bridget Jones films. At the end of one of them, there's a scene in which Bridget is badly out of breath.\n\nI ran twice around the block before we recorded it.\n\nChina's Tom Cruise: Ren Wei\n\nTom Cruise was my latest voice acting role, but I have played hundreds of parts since I joined the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio in 1986. I was Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge, John Travolta in Broken Arrow, Joseph Fiennes in Enemy at the Gates, Hugh Jackman in Kate and Leopold and Vincent Perez in Fanfan la Tulipe.\n\nBut my real dream is to become a tenor. Luciano Pavarotti is my idol and I haven't given up trying to get a role in a musical. I have a good voice, dancing skills, and acting experience. I just need a chance.\n\nI guess I was chosen to voice the Tom Cruise role in Mission: Impossible III because my age and physique are similar to his. Some people say I even look like him from a certain angle. It was a tough job. While Atang [the Cantonese nickname for Tom Cruise] had months to make the film, I had to do the whole thing - from learning the script to dubbing all the lines - in four days. We always have to rush because of the piracy problem in China. If we don't get the translation and dubbing done quickly, an unauthorised version will be out on the streets before ours.\n\nEvery day I worked for at least 12 hours. I studied Atang's voice and tried to imitate his style of talking. It was an action movie, so there was lots of running about and shouting, which was hard to emulate in a studio. It was very intense and I had to cover a big range of emotions. In the fighting scenes, it was all \"Get down, get down! Go, go!\" Then there were romantic moments when his voice breaks up as he tells his wife how much he loves her. I had to watch the original English version time and time again to get the feeling right.\n\nWhen it was all over I was so hoarse that the director told me to go home and take a rest. The crew cracked jokes: \"Tom Cruise runs so fast he breaks his legs, Ren Wei shouts so loud he breaks his voice.\"\n\nI have never used the fact that I am Atang's voice actor to chat up women, but I have received letters from fans who say they really like my delivery. But that is not what is most important. My main aim is to satisfy the original actor as much as the audience.\n\nGermany's Julia Roberts: Daniella Hoffmann\n\nIt all started out with the casting for Pretty Woman back in 1990. Back then I didn't expect it to be a big deal - more like a B-movie. I was among the finalists and I think it was my laugh that clinched it. I can do a good, really filthy laugh just like Julia Roberts -I love it when she laughs. Since Pretty Woman I've played her in every film. My vocal range is very like hers, so it all comes pretty naturally. With Ally McBeal, whom I also dub, I put on a very different voice, much higher.\n\nI don't often get recognised as being the voice of Julia Roberts. I think women's voices are much harder to identify than men's. But being Julia has definitely brought work my way. Some adverts want the sound of \"Julia Roberts\" and I have also done Charlotte's Web because it was originally Julia who did the voiceover.\n\nWhen I come in to record I generally haven't seen the film I'm going to dub. It used to be different: we used to get the videos to take home beforehand. But these days they are amazingly strict about new releases. When I did a voice for Star Wars, I wasn't even told in advance what film we were doing - just to turn up.\n\nBut when I play Julia Roberts I don't need to prepare or anything. I follow her lead. I mean, the woman is a great actress, an Oscar-winning actress - why should I change anything about her work?\n\nIndia's Arnold : Schwarzenegger: Pawan Kalra\n\nI've done most of the big names: I was Arnold in The Terminator and True Lies; I voiced Owen Wilson in Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights; and Hugh Jackman in Van Helsing. A number of people say I look like Bruce Willis and I did Bruce as the cop in Sin City. I think Brad Pitt is one of the finest. I have just done him in Spy Games - a great film. Pitt is a very fine actor who can both overplay and underplay a role. You really have to watch how he speaks, it is fantastic.\n\nDubbing is an art requiring a voice of many textures and tones. Not everybody can do it just because they have a good voice. Voiceover artists are cast and we have writers who make the scripts fit the lip movements of the actors on screen so that it runs as smoothly as possible. There are sometimes arguments over how to translate a single phrase.\n\nIt is hardest with black actors like Eddie Murphy and Will Smith. They are not only very funny but they speak very, very fast. Trying to street talk quickly in Hindi is extremely tough. After two days your mouth gets really tired.\n\nMy brother was in the film business. I was running my father's transport company in Bihar, out there in the sticks. But I had done some performances, so my brother said: come out and try. So I did. And here I am, eight years later.\n\nA film for TV takes two days. I will make 20,000 rupees (\u00a3250). For theatre release it is more like 50,000 rupees (\u00a3625). It's really exploding. I do films, commercials and TV shows now. There are a lot more people saying \"I heard you on television\" these days. But it's a really competitive industry. When I started there were just a few people - now everybody thinks they can voice movies.\n\n\u00b7 Interviews by Jo Tuckman, Angelique Chrisafis, John Hooper, Jonathan Watts, Jess Smee and Randeep Ramesh"}
{"text":"ALLEN PARK -- There was some fear that Ndamukong Suh had opened himself to possible retaliation hits following his latest questionable football act. Seems he had to wait only one week for the first blow, after Arizona right guard Paul Fanaika dove at Suh's knees behind a play during Sunday's game. But there's been little media coverage of the hit, and no public backlash.\n\nNdamukong Suh was on the other side of a questionable block Sunday against Arizona, but isn't making a big deal about it.\n\nAnd the Detroit Lions defensive tackle isn't angry at the possible double-standard. \"(That kind of hit) happens all the time,\" Suh said during a news conference Wednesday \"It's not going to stop. Look forward to it -- look forward to keep making plays down the field. That's my job. \"To me, it's just gnats that are in the air that keep going after you. You swat at 'em, and sometimes you hit 'em, sometimes you don't. Sometimes they run away, sometimes they come back again. But ultimately, I'm just that bee going to find that honey hole. That's what I do.\" Suh was excoriated by various players, past and present, as well as coaches and some media for blocking Minnesota center John Sullivan in the knees in the opener. He drew a record $100,000 fine. Fanaika, conversely, wasn't whistled for a penalty -- in fact, the block was legal because Fanaika's an offensive lineman -- and the country hasn't rallied to Suh's defense. Suh said he \"doesn't care\" about being treated differently in the media. \"That's not my job,\" he said. Coach Jim Schwartz shrugged off the play as well, and wouldn't disclose whether Detroit has or plans to file a grievance with the league. \"That whole turning plays in and saying the league called and said this, I honestly think that's a little unbecoming,\" Schwartz said. \"We try to keep our conversations with the league just to that. If they tell us they blew a call ... I mean, how many times have I come up here and said that? \"Probably never, because we don't make excuses. We don't want to make excuses for stuff like that.\" Schwartz did seem to have some issue with the rule itself though, which allows for offensive lineman to block below the waist as long as it's from the front. \"Is it less of an injury risk (than if a defensive lineman does it)? No, but it's a legal play as opposed to a play that's penalized, so it is what it is,\" he said. Suh also denied a Fox Sports report that he's stomped on teammates in practice, deferring to previous statements from Schwartz and center Dominic Raiola that it never happened."}
{"text":"Humanoid robots are a vanity project: an attempt to create artificial life in our own image \u2013 essentially trying to play God. The problem is, we\u2019re not very good at it. Ask someone on the street to name a robot and you might hear \u201cTerminator\u201d, \u201cthe Cybermen\u201d or \u201cthat gold one from Star Wars\u201d. What you\u2019re not going to be given are names like Tesla Model X, Cassini or DJI Inspire 2. These are all robots, but they don\u2019t follow the sci-fi narrative of what robots should be like. The fact is, the robots of the near future won\u2019t be going about on two legs like the shuffling C3PO. And they\u2019ll be much more efficient than us bipeds.\n\nOur impression of what a robot is has been tainted by science fiction and popular culture. The term \u201crobot\u201d was first used in 1920 by Karel and Josef \u010capek in a play called R.U.R. to describe an artificial automaton. Since then, our narcissistic desires have seen the word become synonymous with humanoid robots, or androids.\n\nWe like to think that we\u2019re the dominant creatures on the planet, so mobile robots should look like us. But the fact is, they shouldn\u2019t. We can\u2019t fly, we\u2019re not very good swimmers, we can\u2019t live in a vacuum and if we want to travel more than a mile, most of us will get on some type of wheeled vehicles. Bipedal locomotion has served us well but it is limited and requires a huge amount of brain power and years of learning to perfect. The computer versions of our brain are nowhere near our level and are unlikely to be so for decades to come. After nearly 100 years of development, our most advanced humanoid robots can only just open a door without falling over (too often).\n\nIs a plane a robot?\n\nSo what is the future of robotics? Well, it comes down to what you define a robot as. Unfortunately there isn\u2019t a unified definition of what a robot is, but the general consensus is that it\u2019s a physical device which can sense its surroundings and interact with the environment with limited human intervention. This could either be automation, where tasks are pre-programmed, or autonomy, where the robot makes decisions on its own.\n\nLet\u2019s say that I build a little four-wheeled robot that can move from point A to point B without crashing into anything. I can give it a map and tell it where to go and it will do so without any further instructions. This sounds quite nifty, but what\u2019s the point of it? Well now let\u2019s scale it up so you can sit in it. Now suddenly it\u2019s not a robot, it\u2019s a driverless car. But all that\u2019s changed is the size.\n\nI now want to fly off on my holidays. I quite happily get on the plane and see the two pilots in the cockpit. When I land, they\u2019re still there and I think what a great job they did. More than likely though, the pilots didn\u2019t actually fly the plane. They will have inputted commands to the autopilot and the computer will have flown the plane. The plane, for all intents and purposes, is a robot with human supervisors to take over if anything goes drastically wrong, just like a driverless car.\n\nPlanes, trains automobiles \u2026 and robots\n\nThe future of nearly all transport is mobile robots. We\u2019re already there with robotic aircraft and within the next decade, we\u2019ll have robot cars. Robots already fly through space and scour the bottom of the ocean. It won\u2019t be too long before we have driverless trains and trams too. Drones will become a bigger part of society. All these things are robots, but they\u2019ve had to be called something else due to societal impression of what a robot is.\n\nWhat this highlights is that we adapt the technology to fit the environment. Rather than building robots that look like us so that they can be a direct replacement, you\u2019ll start to see things being built to suit a problem. Why do you need a robot with complex hands to pick up a pair of scissors or a hammer, when it can be built into their arms? Why build a robot to climb over debris in an earthquake on two legs, when four or six legs \u2013 or a wheeled track \u2013 would be much more stable?\n\nThere is no doubt that eventually androids will be walking around and talking with us. You\u2019ll pass them wandering down the street or hold a conversation with one as you do your shopping. But for now, the robots of the near future won\u2019t walk like us. Instead they\u2019ll drive, they\u2019ll fly, they\u2019ll swim or they\u2019ll walk on any number of legs \u2013 except two."}
{"text":"Russia today announced the beginning of a significant military drawdown in Syria, with the nation\u2019s lone aircraft carrier group being withdrawn from the Syrian coast, and a number of troops apparently set to follow as the ceasefire in the country continues to hold.\n\nExact details of the drawdown are unclear, but reports suggest a drawdown of some sort was actually always meant to be part of the deal which led to the ceasefire, which began a week ago and continues to mostly hold. There is considerable skepticism, however.\n\nThat\u2019s because Russia already announced a drawdown back in 2016, shortly after the February ceasefire began, only to eventually send a number of reinforcements when that collapsed. Until a peace deal is negotiated, these drawdowns are always going to be seen as temporary.\n\nPeace talks are coming though, with plans for negotiations in Kazakhstan some time later in January. Exact dates are not set, and the rebels have largely not committed to take part in the negotiations.\n\nLast 5 posts by Jason Ditz"}
{"text":"Emma M\u00e6rsk is the first container ship in the E-class of eight owned by the A. P. Moller-Maersk Group. When launched in 2006 she was the largest container ship ever built, and in 2010 she and her seven sister ships were among the longest container ships. Officially, she is able to carry around 11,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) or 14,770 TEU depending on definition. In May 2010, her sister ship Ebba M\u00e6rsk set a record of 15,011 TEU in Tanger-Med, Tangiers.[3]\n\nHistory [ edit ]\n\nEmma M\u00e6rsk was built at the Odense Steel Shipyard in Denmark. In June 2006, during construction, welding work caused a fire within the superstructure.[4] It spread rapidly through the accommodation section and bridge, which delayed her completion by six to seven weeks.\n\nShe was named in a ceremony on 12 August 2006, after M\u00e6rsk Mc-Kinney M\u00f8ller's late wife, Emma. She set sail on her maiden voyage on 8 September 2006 at 02:00 hours from Aarhus, calling at Gothenburg, Bremerhaven, Rotterdam, Algeciras, the Suez Canal, and arrived in Singapore on 1 October 2006 at 20:05 hours. She sailed the next day for Yantian in Shenzhen, then Kobe, Nagoya, arriving at Yokohama on 10 October 2006, and returning via Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Tanjung Pelepas, the Suez Canal, Felixstowe, Rotterdam, Bremerhaven, Gothenburg to Aarhus, arriving on 11 November 2006 at 16:00 hours.[5]\n\nShe appeared in headlines prior to Christmas 2006, when she was dubbed SS Santa because she was bound for the United Kingdom from China loaded with Christmas goods. The return journey to southern China was loaded with UK waste for recycling.[6]\n\nHer appearance in the news prompted the State Environmental Protection Administration in China to promise to \"closely watch the progress of investigation into the dumping of garbage in south China by Britain\". Ministry officials added that no official approval had been given to any company in the area to import waste.[7]\n\nIn 2008, the ship was featured on an episode of the television documentary series Mighty Ships, during a voyage between Malaysia and Spain.[8]\n\nIn 2011, the National Bank of Denmark issued a 20 DKK commemorative coin for her.[9]\n\nGoing eastwards on 1 February 2013, she suffered a damaged stern thruster and took on so much water in the Suez Canal that she became unmaneuvrable. Tugs, anchors and the wind[10] took her to Port Said to offload 13,500 containers, drain her and be investigated by divers. She had not been in danger of sinking.[11][12][13][14][15]\n\nOn 15 February 2013, Maersk Line confirmed that she was about to leave Port Said under tow to a yard for further assessment and repair.[16] On 25 February she reached the yard of Palermo, Sicily, where she was scheduled to stay for four months.[17] In August 2013, she was in service again[18] after a DKK 250 million (roughly US$44.5m) repair.[19]\n\nCapacity [ edit ]\n\nOriginally Maersk reported a capacity of 11,000 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) as the maximum capacity of fully loaded 14 ton containers, according to Maersk company's then method of calculating capacity,[20] which, at her introduction into service, was about 1,400 more containers than any other ship.[21] However, Maersk also acknowledges the standard method of defining capacity, stating 14,770 TEU.[22]\n\nBy normal calculations, she has a capacity significantly greater than reported\u2014between 13,500 and 15,200 TEU.[23][24] The difference between the official and estimated numbers is because Maersk calculates the capacity of a container ship by weight (in this case, 14 tons\/container), i.e. 11,000+ containers,[25] of which 1,000 can be refrigerated containers.[26]\n\nOther companies calculate capacity according to the maximum number of containers that can be carried irrespective of weight, always greater than the number calculated by the Maersk method.[citation needed] As of 2012, the E-class is still the largest by full-weight 14-tonne capacity. The Marco Polo can carry 10,000 14-t containers, 16,020 if not fully loaded.[27][28]\n\nOn 21 February 2011, Maersk ordered a family of ten even larger ships from Daewoo, the Maersk Triple E class, with a capacity of 18,000 containers. A further ten ships were ordered in June 2011. The first was delivered in 2013.[29][30]\n\nEngine and hull [ edit ]\n\nShe is powered by a W\u00e4rtsil\u00e4-Sulzer 14RTFLEX96-C engine, the world's largest single diesel unit, weighing 2,300 tonnes and capable of 81 MW (109,000 hp) when burning 14,000 litres (3,600 US gal)[31] of heavy fuel oil per hour. At economical speed, fuel consumption is 0.260 bs\/hp\u00b7hour (1,660 gal\/hour).[32] She has features to lower environmental damage, including exhaust heat recovery and cogeneration.[33] Some of the exhaust gases are returned to the engine to improve economy and lower emissions,[34] and some are passed through a steam generator which then powers a Peter Brotherhood steam turbine and electrical generators. This creates an electrical output of 8.5 MW,[35] equivalent to about 12% of the main engine power output. Some of this steam is used directly as shipboard heat.[36] Five diesel generators together produce 20.8 MW,[35] giving a total electric output of 29 MW.[26] Two 9 MW electric motors augment the power on the main propeller shaft.[35]\n\nTwo bow and two stern thrusters provide port manoeuvrability, and two pairs of stabilizer fins reduce rolling.[35] A special silicone-based paint, instead of biocides used by much of the industry, keeps barnacles off of the hull.[21] This increases her efficiency by reducing drag while also protecting the ocean from biocides that may leak. The paint is credited with lowering the water drag enough to save 1,200 tonnes of fuel per year.[37] The ship has a bulbous bow, a standard feature for cargo ships.\n\nThe turning diameter at 44 km\/h (24 knots) is 1.50 km (0.81 nmi). The engine is near midship to make best use of the rigidity of the hull and to maximize capacity. When banking 20 degrees, the bridge sways 35 metres.[38]\n\nSailing schedules [ edit ]\n\nHer regular round trip is between northern Europe and the far east via the English Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, calling at Ningbo, Xiamen, Hong Kong (westbound), Yantian (westbound), Algeciras (westbound), Rotterdam, Bremerhaven, Algeciras (eastbound), Yantian (eastbound), Hong Kong (eastbound), and Ningbo.[5][39][40]\n\nAs of April 2011 , the schedule included Gda\u0144sk, Aarhus, and Gothenburg.[41]\n\nCriticism [ edit ]\n\nShe and similar ships have been criticised for burning bunker fuel, which has a high sulphur content,[42] 2.5 to 4.5%, over 2,000 times more than allowed in automotive fuel.[42]\n\nIn Europe, new rules regarding the operation of marine shipping will require ships to burn cleaner fuel. MARPOL Regulation 14 will limit global sulphur content to 0.5% in 2020. However, a review of global fuel availability due to conclude in 2018 may delay the new regulations by five years, until 2025.[43]\n\nSee also [ edit ]"}
{"text":"Now in its 11th year, the annual Race to Wrigley will feature a new course this year, giving participants their first chance to experiencing running through the new bleacher concourse that opened last year.\n\nThe race, which starts at Addison and Racine, takes runners through the Wrigleyville and Lakeview areas, heading west to Ravenswood and east on Irving Park. This year, runners will continue on Irving Park all the way to Sheridan, which will eventually lead them to the center outfield of Wrigley Field for a final stretch through the field\u2019s concourse before ending at Clark and Addison.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s always been a race that reflects the fact that we are in a neighborhood and yet a major league ballpark,\u201d Mike Lufrano, executive vice president of community affairs and chief legal officer for the Chicago Cubs, says. \u201cIt\u2019s the third largest tourist attraction in Illinois. We started a race that would combine the two, [allowing runners] to see a bit of the neighborhood and community and reflect the fact that we are part of the community as well.\u201d\n\nThe 5K race, which will start at 8 a.m. on April 23, also serves as a crucial fundraiser for Cubs Charities. Runners can also choose to individually raise money for Advocate Children\u2019s Hospital, with the first 100 who raise $500 receiving an autographed baseball from a current Cubs player.\n\n\u201c[The money raised] all goes back into the community here,\u201d Lufrano says. \u201cIt supports youth sports, building baseball fields, health and fitness programs for kids, provides scholarships for kids to go to college. Last year, we donated about $3.4 million total and the race is part of that.\u201d\n\nRegistration for the race will remain open online through April 22. To sign up, visit either cubscharities.org or racetowrigley.com."}
{"text":"Mid Canterbury's mysterious big black cat is back.\n\nAnge Montgomery reckons she spotted it prowling down an Eiffelton hedge line 150 metres away from where she was sitting having a coffee early one frosty August morning.\n\nShe knows some people might think she is crazy, but she knows she's not. She knows what she saw, and that other people have seen it too.\n\nErin Tasker\/FairfaxNZ Angela Montgomery, with two-year-old daughter Isabel Purton, believes she saw Mid Canterbury's mysterious black panther walking along the hedge in the background.\n\nIt's been about three years since the last reported sighting of the cat, which some people believe is a black panther or puma.\n\nIts story dates to 2001 when it was first spotted near Alford Forest. In 2003, Ashburton truck driver Chad Stewart saw a large black animal sitting at the foot of a hill near stockyards on the Mayfield farm of Blair and Sarah Gallagher.\n\nREAD MORE:\n\n* High-country trap for mystery black panther\n\n* Editorial: Mystery of the panther\n\nErin Tasker\/FairfaxNZ Angela Montgomery, with two-year-old daughter Isabel Purton, believes she saw Mid Canterbury's mysterious black panther walking along the hedge in the background.\n\nExtensive searching from air and on land found no trace of the mysterious animal. In the years that followed numerous people reported seeing a similar creature lurking on Mid Canterbury farm land.\n\nMontgomery admits that before she saw it for herself she would have been skeptical.\n\nMontgomery \u2013 who moved from Christchurch to an Eiffelton dairy farm with her partner and two-year-old daughter Isabel only a couple of months ago \u2013 knows what she saw was a big cat. It walked along the hedge and then disappeared into it. It was the way it walked that convinced her it was a big cat. She has been keeping her eyes peeled since, but has not seen it again.\n\n\"It was exciting for me, I know what I saw and it wasn't anything explainable,\" she said.\n\n\"It wasn't a cow, or a dog, or anything like that.\"\n\nShe called out to her partner, but he was not quick enough to see it. When he told her it might have been a black panther, she thought he was kidding, until she remembered seeing something on the news a few years ago about a panther sighting in the area.\n\nNow, she is a believer, but she held off going public until she had researched the other sightings and the habits of big cats.\n\n\"I've told a few people about it and they kind of think I'm nuts and it was probably something else, but I know what I saw,\" Montgomery said.\n\nIt was bigger than a labrador dog and smaller than a cow, but was not a feral cat, she said.\n\n\"I know my animals and I know what they look like, and it wasn't that far away.\"\n\nThere have been rumours in the past that it is a black panther that escaped from a private zoo, or possibly from a boat, but no physical trace has been found.\n\nIn 2005, Timaru man Mark Brosnahan reported seeing a large black feline in the Mid Canterbury high country. He got two pictures of it from a distance.\n\nIf it was the same big black cat first seen in 2001, it was getting on in years now. Black panthers have an average life expectancy of 12 to 17 years.\n\n* Comments have been closed."}
{"text":"The warnings on Europe sound extra-apocalyptic this week. \u201cThe eurozone really only has days to avoid collapse,\u201d blares the headline on Wolfgang M\u00fcnchau\u2019s column. And, while European leaders are frantically thrashing out plans for further fiscal union to save the euro, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is still resisting sweeping reform measures. As my colleagues Michael Birnbaum and Anthony Faiola report, \u201cinvestors and world leaders alike hang on Merkel\u2019s every word, searching for a hint that her resistance is simply a bluff to scare countries into behaving more like hers.\u201d\n\nNot so easy, going it alone. (Michael Sohn\/AP)\n\nThese sorts of scenarios are no longer unthinkable. But a recent report suggests that either move would be far more painful than most people seem to realize. Indeed, a crack-up could prove far more costly to Germany than a bailout of its neighbors.\n\nIn September, economists at UBS Investment Research tried to tally up the costs of seceding from the euro. If a \u201cweak\u201d country like Greece tried to leave the euro, it would almost certainly have to default on its national debt, watch its domestic banking system collapse \u2014 every halfway-sentient depositor would rush to withdraw euros before they got converted to new, less-valuable drachmas \u2014 and the country would get rocked by big trade disruptions and unrest. UBS estimates that a \u201cweak\u201d country like Greece or Ireland leaving the euro would take a hit of up to 50 percent of its GDP in the first year alone, and then a 15 percent hit per year for the next few years. That\u2019s a crushing blow.\n\nNow, what would happen if a financially sound country like Germany decided to leave the euro, in order to maintain its own currency? Even that would hurt. A lot. Germany wouldn\u2019t default on its national debt \u2014 in fact, its new currency would likely be worth more than the old euro \u2014 but its banks would suddenly have assets in the old, devalued currency. Balance sheets would be thrown out of whack, and Germany would have to pour an enormous amount of money into bailing out its banks. What\u2019s more, the country\u2019s exports would likely collapse. All told, UBS estimates, the cost of secession to a country like Germany would likely reach 20 percent to 25 percent of GDP, and remain at about half that for a few years thereafter.\n\nOne thing UBS notes is that it would be much, much cheaper for Germany to simply bail out Greece, Ireland, and Portugal outright (that would cost about 1,000 euros for every German man, woman and child in one swoop) than it would be for Germany to exit the euro zone (which would cost the average German 8,000 euros the first year and 4,500 euros thereafter). Bailouts are deeply unpopular in Germany, and for good reason, but they look like the cheaper path. Even Bernard Connolly\u2019s estimate that it would cost Germany 7 percent of its GDP for several years to bail out all troubled euro zone countries, up to and including France, looks like a less-painful option at this point.\n\nIndeed, that\u2019s why the UBS report suggests that it would be insane for Germany to let the euro fracture, and argues that there\u2019s \u201can overwhelming probability\u201d that the euro zone moves toward some sort of fiscal integration \u2014 which partly means German taxpayers bailing out the Mediterranean neighbors it deems irresponsible. Of course, even if that\u2019s the more rational approach, that doesn\u2019t mean that will be the end result."}
{"text":"Arabic is the fastest-growing language in American households \u2014 and that\u2019s leading the US Census Bureau to explore the tricky task of adjusting its questionnaires to \u00adaccommodate the language\u2019s right-to-left script.\n\nThe bureau is using focus groups to explore possible changes to the 2020 census questionnaires for Arabic speakers who are not English-proficient, the Pew Research Center reported Friday.\n\nArabic is now the seventh-most commonly spoken non-English language in US households. An estimated 1.1 million people ages 5 and older speak Arabic at home, an increase of 29 percent between 2010 and 2014.\n\nThe number who speak Spanish at home has grown only 6 percent during the same period.\n\nOf those who speak Arabic at home, 38 percent are not proficient in English, according to census estimates.\n\nThat\u2019s just below the 42 percent English proficiency rate among the 39.3 million US residents who speak Spanish at home.\n\nThe growth in Arabic is linked to continued immigration from Middle Eastern and North African countries, according to the Pew Research Center.\n\nPossible changes to the census questionnaire include replacing the blocks for individual printed letters with a single open-field rectangle, so that answers can be written in connected Arabic script, the center said.\n\nOne major challenge facing census officials is whether to require a response in English and when to allow an Arabic response.\n\nA focus-group study recommended that the address fields require people to use English, because an American address might not be accurately translated into Arabic, according to the Pew Research Center.\n\nArabic names present another complication \u2014 as they can be transliterated into English in different ways because the letters of the Arabic \u00adalphabet don\u2019t necessarily have direct English equivalents.\n\nFor example, the Arabic name Hussein can be transliterated into English at least five additional ways: Hussain, Husein, Husain, Houssain and Houssein."}
{"text":"Img Project Descripton Backers Pledge \/ Goal \/ % +1 Button CoMo Booster Board for Rpi Module with: wifi, oled screen, digital audio, RTC, 6-36v power input. 55 $6,834 \/ $40,000 \/ %17\n\nZIR EL-200 \"ZIR EL-200 is connected to your computer, smartphone or tablet using Wi-Fi wireless network, and from there we set or directly assign instructions using the browser. However, one of its most interesting features is the ability to also be controlled by voice, using for that purpose applications on iOS and Android.\" 60 $5,012 \/ $90,000 \/ %5.6\n\n1080Pi 10\" 1080p Screen that mounts to the Rpi GPIO with 16 extra GPIO, 4 with 3A sinking current. 189 \u00a320,451 \/ \u00a3100,000 \/ 20%\n\nRFberryPi A 433Mhz Radio Shield used to communication with several peripherals such as relays & sensors. 14 \u00a3321 \/ \u00a34,850 \/ 6.6%\n\nSerialPi5 Board giving the Rpi the ability to have 5 RS-232 serial ports. 5 \u00a3261 \/ \u00a311,000 \/ 2%\n\nJilia Iot Dev Kit \"Add ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi to your Raspberry Pi with on-board sensors and an easy cloud API.\" 119 $6,256 \/ $50,000 \/ 12.5%\n\nRF Breakout Kit Breakout kit to build your own radio using the Rpi's built in clock generator. Frequencies up to 250Mhz 126 \u00a31,330 \/ \u00a31,800 \/ 72%\n\nBridge Shield Bridge an Arduino with:\n\nRTC, Motor drivers, Temp Sensor, IR Sensor, USB-UART converter, 5V 3A Reg, header for ESP8266, header for HC-05, level shifting between Rpi and Arduino, 8 Servo Motor Driver (I2C) 45 $2,696 \/ $4,100 \/ 65.8%\n\nPi UpTime \"GPIO connections, analog ports, UPS, RTC & battery power enabling Raspberry Pi to be mobile.\" 17 hours of uptime on full battery, 2 analog input, RTC, and 25 $4,020 \/ $15,000 \/ 26.8%\n\nHatlogico \"Open-source 16 PWMs, 8 ADCs and dual-voltage communications to sit on your Raspberry Pi to drive your quadcopter, robot, 3D printer etc\" 42 \u00a31,352 \/ \u00a34,800 \/ 48.3%\n\nBattPi \"BattPi is a Case for Raspberry Pi with integrated Battery and Real Time Clock. Built in UPS offering up to 8 hours of battery life.\" 34 \u00a31,973 \/ \u00a320,000 \/ 9.9%\n\nProtoPLC Industrial add-on board. 6 inputs, 6 outputs, 1 analog input, 1 analog output, programmable leds. 28 $3,653 \/ $20,000 \/ 18.3%\n\nRaspitab Hackable tablet built from the Rpi Module with 3400mah battery, 7\" screen, wifi usb, 5MP camera module. 87 \u00a39,981 \/ \u00a3125,000 \/ 8%\n\nPi-Home Add-on board with the ability to control: Zwave, Infra-red devices (TV\/DVD..), RF Device (315\/433 Mhz Plugs), and Zigbee devices. 80 $10,001 \/ $15,000 \/ 66.7%\n\nTX-1 GSM Cellular phone w\/GPS add-on module. 5 $641 \/ $14,000 \/ 4.6%\n\nHDMI Input Module \"Add an HDMI input interface to your Raspberry Pi and record or stream high quality video from your HD camcorder with clean HDMI output.\" 63 $6,907 \/ $15,000 \/ 34.5%\n\neasyPio GPIO breakout module for prototyping. 45 \u00a3329 \/ \u00a31,200 \/ 27%\n\nRasPoE Raspberry Pi PoE Shield. 28 \u20ac3,310 \/ \u20ac12,500 \/ 26.5%\n\nIf you're looking to crowdfund your Raspberry Pi project maybe you can learn what didn't go right for these projects. Here is a list of hardware projects that didn't get funded. This list was pulled from the two top crowdfunding sites Indiegogo and Kickstarter . This isn't all of the projects that I had found but some of the more interesting ones.*Note items in the list may have been re-listed later and funded. Some projects may have been ahead of their time as the Pi wasn't popular enough."}
{"text":"This article is about the motion picture of a fictional story of a character whose name is a homonym of a famous American automobile. For the article on the automobile, see Ford Fairlane (Americas)\n\nThe Adventures of Ford Fairlane is a 1990 American action comedy mystery film directed by Renny Harlin and written by David Arnott, James Cappe, and Daniel Waters based on a story by Arnott and Cappe. The film stars comedian Andrew Dice Clay as the title character, Ford Fairlane, a \"Rock n' Roll Detective\", whose beat is the music industry in Los Angeles. True to his name, Ford drives a 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 Skyliner in the film.\n\nThe film's main character was created by writer Rex Weiner in a series of stories that were published as weekly serials in 1979\u201380 by the New York Rocker and the LA Weekly. The stories were published as a book by Rare Bird Books in July 2018.[3]\n\nThe film was both a commercial and critical failure, grossing a little more than half its budget and being awarded the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture, tying with Bo Derek's Ghosts Can't Do It. However, it has since developed a cult following.\n\nPlot [ edit ]\n\nFord Fairlane (Andrew Dice Clay) is seen sitting on a beach smoking as the film opens. A flashback initiates, showing a roaring crowd at a concert given by fictional popular heavy metal band The Black Plague. Lead singer Bobby Black (Vince Neil) makes an eccentric entrance down a zip-line onto the stage and begins performing. Shortly into one of the band's songs, Bobby Black collapses on stage and dies.\n\nAfter the lead singer of The Black Plague is murdered onstage, shock-jock Johnny Crunch (Gilbert Gottfried), an old friend who came west with Fairlane, hires Ford to track down a mysterious teenage groupie named Zuzu Petals, who may have a connection to Black's death.\n\nSoon after hiring Fairlane, Crunch is electrocuted on the air. The world's hippest detective soon finds himself trading insults with ruthless record executive Julian Grendel (Wayne Newton), a clueless cop and former disco star, Lt. Amos (Ed O'Neill), a merciless hit man named Smiley (Robert Englund) and countless ex-girlfriends out for his blood. Aiding and abetting Fairlane is loyal assistant Jazz (Lauren Holly) and a hip record producer (Morris Day) at the head of a bizarre lineup of suspects, victims, beautiful women and a koala as he finds himself hip-deep in the case of his life.\n\nThe Macguffin of the film is three data CDs which, when read simultaneously, detail the illegal dealings of Julian Grendel, who was getting rich from bootlegging his record company's music and murdered Bobby Black when he found out Black had acquired the CDs with the incriminating evidence. Both of Fairlane's beloved possessions, his house and his car, are blown to bits, courtesy of Grendel.\n\nThe first disc was with Colleen Sutton, the second with Zuzu Petals, and the third disc was hidden under the star for Art Mooney on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.\n\nIt is later revealed that Grendel killed Bobby Black and Johnny Crunch, as he considered them both greedy and stupid because they wanted more money for their involvement in pirating CD's to sell to the highest bidder, making the music industry corrupt. However, Fairlane kills Grendel by setting him on fire with a flammable milk shake. Jazz leaves Fairlane, knowing how ungrateful he is for everything that has happened. Smiley shows up and plans to kill Ford, but not before revealing that he killed his young neighbor's [the Kid's] father. Ford distracts him and kills Smiley with a sleeve pistol. Jazz and Ford decide to reconcile, while the Kid decides to join their detective agency. Ford wins a million dollar lottery and buys a yacht, ending the film.\n\nCast [ edit ]\n\nSoundtrack [ edit ]\n\nMusic being central to the plot of a film about a private detective who specializes in cases arising from the music industry, the soundtrack featured a diverse group of artists. The official soundtrack release featured:\n\nThe film's soundtrack includes Idol's \"Cradle of Love\", the video for which was shown often on MTV in 1990. The song also appeared on Idol's 1990 album Charmed Life. In the video, a young woman, played by Betsy Lynn George, taunts an uptight neighbor with her advances as she dances to the music. The video also featured footage from the film playing on a television in the neighbor's home, although none of the footage features Clay (at least not his face). This may be due to the infamous ban of Clay from appearing on the music network. Alternate versions of the \"Cradle of Love\" video eliminates the film footage when the video is usually aired on MTV.\n\nRichie Sambora's contribution to the soundtrack was a cover of the Jimi Hendrix song. Yello's \"Unbelievable\" samples bits of dialogue from the film, with one notable dialog switch - where in the film, a phone number is said as \"1-800-Unbelivable\" and in the song, the phone number is said as \"1-800-Perfect\". A number of the musicians featured on the soundtrack also appeared in the film itself, including Morris Day, Sheila E., Tone Loc (as Slam the Rapper), former Ozzy Osbourne bassist Phil Soussan, and drummer Randy Castillo appear playing the Black Plague concert during the flashback at the beginning of the film and Vince Neil, the lead singer of M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce (who appeared as Bobby Black, the lead singer of the fictitious band, Black Plague). Black Plague's lead guitarist was played by Quiet Riot's axeman Carlos Cavazzo. Not appearing on the soundtrack is \"Booty Time\", the song that Ed O'Neill's character performs during the film.\n\nYello is also credited with the film's \"music score\", and an early cut of their album Baby is used as the film's incidental soundtrack. The film's score was composed and conducted by Cliff Eidelman.\n\nRelease [ edit ]\n\nBilly Idol's recording of \"Cradle of Love\" was named one of the \"Most Performed Songs from Motion Pictures\" by the ASCAP.[4]\n\nCritical response [ edit ]\n\nThe film received generally negative reviews upon release. Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 29% rating based on 28 reviews.[5] On Metacritic, the film has a 24 out of 100 rating based on 13 critics, indicating \"generally unfavorable reviews\".[6] Critic Roger Ebert gave the film 1 star out of a possible 4, and called the film \"loud, ugly and mean-spirited\" but he also suggested that Clay had the confidence and screen presence for a successful acting career if he could move beyond his shtick.[7]\n\nBox office [ edit ]\n\nThe film was not a financial success during its original theatrical release, making just over $21 million in the U.S.[2] Clay has claimed in interviews that the film had a successful first week before being pulled from theaters under pressure from the politically correct.[8] In fact, the film played on more screens during its second week than its first, but still suffered a 53.5% drop in box office gross.[9]\n\nAccolades [ edit ]\n\nThe film \"won\" numerous Razzies at the 1990 Golden Raspberry Awards including Worst Actor (Andrew Dice Clay), Worst Picture (Joel Silver & Steve Perry \u2014 tied with Ghosts Can't Do It), and Worst Screenplay (Daniel Waters, James Cappe and David Arnott). It was also nominated for Worst Director and twice for Worst Supporting Actor (for both Gilbert Gottfried and Wayne Newton).[10]\n\nInternational reception [ edit ]\n\nDespite negative reviews in the US, the film enjoyed tremendous success in post-communist Hungary, where copies of a pirated, dubbed version were widely circulated in the burgeoning VHS market. The film's popularity in Hungary has been attributed to a high-quality dub starring iconic eccentric musician and actor Fer\u00f3 Nagy, which contains gratuitous use of profanity not found in the original English version of the film. Several lines of dialogue from the film became ingrained in the slang of Hungarian urban youth culture throughout the 90s.\n\nIn Norway, after its 1992 VHS release, Ford Fairlane soon became a phenomenon. The catchphrases became hugely popular and the movie received cult status during the 90s. After huge demand from Norwegian audiences, the film was released on DVD in the early 2000s.\n\nIt also became quite popular in Spain, especially due to the dub by the popular singer, actor and comedian Pablo Carbonell.\n\nSee also [ edit ]"}
{"text":"Suspect Antwan James, 27, was last seen wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans and black boots. He is believed to be armed with a gun and is considered dangerous. (Photo11: Prince George's County Police Dept.) Story Highlights Police: Stepson of a D.C. police officer shot the officer during a dispute over yard work\n\nPrince George's County police are searching for 27-year-old Antwan James\n\nJames is considered armed and dangerous\n\nUPPER MARLBORO, Md. (AP) \u2014 Police say the stepson of a D.C. police officer shot and killed the officer during a dispute over yard work at their Maryland home.\n\nPrince George's County police said Tuesday that they are searching for 27-year-old Antwan James. He's been charged in a warrant with murder in the fatal shooting of his stepfather, 46-year-old Joseph Newell.\n\nPolice were called to Newell's Upper Marlboro home Monday night and found him shot to death. The officer was off duty at the time of the shooting. Police say Newell and James had been arguing over yard work before the shooting.\n\nNewell had been with the Metropolitan Police Department since 1989.\n\nPolice are searching for James with K-9 units and other specialized officers. He is considered armed and dangerous.\n\nCopyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.\n\nRead or Share this story: http:\/\/usat.ly\/ZLEjAh"}
{"text":"DO the Republicans owe their current congressional majority to gerrymandering? At first glance, it seems self-evident that they do. In the 2012 election, the Democrats won the popular votes for the presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives. But somehow in the House \u2014 for whose seats Republicans controlled the redistricting process in many crucial states \u2014 the Republicans managed to end up with a 16-seat majority despite losing the popular vote.\n\nThe presumption among many reformers is that the Democrats would control Congress today if the 2012 election had been contested in districts drawn by nonpartisan commissioners rather than politicians.\n\nBut is this true? Another possibility is that Democrats receive more votes than seats because so many of their voters reside in dense cities that Democratic candidates win with overwhelming majorities, while Republican voters are more evenly distributed across exurbs and the rural periphery. Perhaps even a nonpartisan redistricting process would still have delivered the House to the Republicans.\n\nTo examine this hypothesis, we adapted a computer algorithm that we recently introduced in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. It allows us to draw thousands of alternative, nonpartisan redistricting plans and assess the partisan advantage built into each plan. First we created a large number of districting plans (as many as 1,000) for each of 49 states. Then we predicted the probability that a Democrat or Republican would win each simulated district based on the results of the 2008 presidential election and tallied the expected Republican seats associated with each simulated plan."}
{"text":"Image copyright Reg Haslett Image caption Not a great day to be under canvas in Glenarm, County Antrim\n\nNorthern Ireland was the wettest region of the UK in July with 128mm of rain, according to Met Office figures.\n\nThat is 57% above average for the summer month, making it also the wettest July on record since 2010.\n\nThe UK as a whole saw 107mm of rain, or 37% more than normal, with all areas receiving more rain than average.\n\nAccording to the Republic of Ireland's weather service, Met \u00c9ireann, most areas across Ireland were also wetter than normal.\n\nImage copyright Mervyn Robb Image caption When the clouds parted there was some beautiful weather in Portrush, County Antrim\n\nShannon Airport had its wettest July since 1946 when more than double the average rain fell at the County Clare site.\n\nHowever, it was also the sunniest July in Northern Ireland since 2013 with 170.5 hours of sunshine, or 21% more than normal.\n\nImage copyright James Carlisle Image caption Another \"soft day\" for these hill-dwellers\n\nThis reflects the fact that we enjoyed some warm and sunny weather during the first 18 days of the month.\n\nImage copyright Mervyn Robb Image caption July in Cushendun - not a complete washout\n\nThe figure for the UK as a whole was 171 hours - which is normal for the time of year.\n\nTemperature-wise, July was fairly unremarkable with an average temperature of 14.4 celsius, just 0.2 celsius below normal."}
{"text":"A cop killed a dog and something else happened. Baltimore police officer Alec Taylor was off duty when, via the Baltimore Sun:\n\nTaylor's girlfriend told police she received a text from Taylor on February 26 telling her that he killed... [her] seven-month-old dog, named Rocko, after it defecated on the carpet. He then sent her a picture, according to a news release.\n\nShe told police Taylor said he was tired of cleaning up the dog's mess and that he had beaten it with a mop before throwing its body in a parking lot dumpster. Police said he later told investigators he used a mop to force Rocko from behind the dryer and then used his hands to choke the dog.\n\nWho the fuck is in charge of hiring at the Baltimore police department? The arrest was made by the Montgomery County police department, who charged Taylor with animal cruelty and abuse. The Baltimore police department insisted in a statement that it took animal cruelty seriously, although Taylor was merely suspended without pay and not fired right away for being the kind of sociopath who kills a girlfriend\u2019s pet and then sends her a picture (because his job is like a right!).\n\nh\/t CPA\n\nAs a sad sign of the times, the Sun\u2019s sidebar included this related story from just a month ago, where a cop in nearby Arundel shot a dog while canvassing a neighborhood and was put on \u201cadministrative duty\u201d while the department promised a \u201cthorough\u201d investigation. Our own related stories, below."}
{"text":"Derby County will renew acquaintances with Benfica this summer after final details to take part in the Algarve Football Cup this summer were completed.\n\nNigel Pearson\u2019s side will head to Portugal for a week-long training camp \u2013 between Wednesday 13 July and Wednesday 20 July \u2013 as part of their 2016\/17 preparations and during their stay in the southern part of the country the club will compete in two games.\n\nAs part of the Rams' week-long training camp, they will face Benfica and fellow Primeira Liga outfit Vitoria Setubal in the Algarve Football Cup.\n\nThe first fixture will see Derby take on Vitoria Setubal on Friday 15 July, kick-off: 8:30pm.\n\nThe following day will see Pearson\u2019s side take on Benfica, who reached the Quarter-Finals of the 2015\/16 UEFA Champions League competition and lifted the Primeira Liga title, on Saturday 16 July, kick-off also 8:30pm.\n\nBoth of Derby\u2019s fixtures will be played at the state-of-the-art Est\u00e1dio Algarve \u2013 a purpose built-stadium for the 2004 European Championship Finals.\n\nBoasting a capacity of around 30,000, the Est\u00e1dio Algarve hosted three Euro 2004 fixtures and has since been occupied by the Portugal and Gibraltar national teams.\n\nAbout Vitoria Setubal:\n\nManaged by Quim Machado, Vitoria Setubal finished 15th in this season\u2019s Primeira Liga \u2013 finishing just a point above the relegation zone.\n\nIn the history of the club, they have lifted the league title on one occasion as well as the Portuguese Cup three times.\n\nFounded in 1910, Vitoria Setubal play their games at the Est\u00e1dio do Bonfim, which has a capacity of 18,694.\n\nAbout Benfica:\n\nChampions of Portugal for a third consecutive year, Benfica are classed as one of the biggest club\u2019s in the European game.\n\nDuring the 2015\/16 season, they reached the Quarter-Finals of the Champions League, where they were beaten by Bayern Munich over two-legs.\n\nBenfica, however, have the second most participations in the European Cup\/ UEFA Champions League \u2013 second only to Real Madrid.\n\nHistorically, Derby defeated the \u00c1guias (Eagles) over two legs in the 1972 European Cup \u2013 winning the first leg at the Baseball Ground 3-0 courtesy of goals from John McGovern, Kevin Hector and Roy McFarland.\n\nJTA are offering an exclusive package for this summer's tour to Portugal. For more information, email JTA at: [email protected] to register for details which they will then contact once the details are confirmed.\n\nDerby County 2016\/17 pre-season so far\u2026\n\nWednesday 13 July \u2013 Portugal training camp\n\nFriday 15 July \u2013 Vitoria Setubal (Est\u00e1dio Algarve) 8:30pm KO\n\nSaturday 16 July \u2013 Benfica (Est\u00e1dio Algarve) 8:30pm KO\n\nSaturday 23 July \u2013 Walsall (Banks\u2019s Stadium) 3pm KO\n\nTuesday 26 July \u2013 Chesterfield (Proact Stadium) 7:30pm KO\n\nWednesday 27 July \u2013 Sheffield United (Bramall Lane) 7:45pm KO\n\nTweets by @ dcfcofficial"}
{"text":"* Dept of Homeland Security: Java vulnerable to hackers\n\n* Could be used to steal identity, form malicious networks\n\n* Applies to browsers on all major operating systems\n\nBy Jim Finkle\n\nJan 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security urged computer users to disable Oracle Corp\u2019s Java software, amplifying security experts\u2019 prior warnings to the hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses that use it to surf the Web.\n\nHackers have figured out a way to exploit Java to install malicious software enabling them to commit crimes ranging from identity theft to making an infected computer part of an ad-hoc network of computers that can be used to attack websites.\n\n\u201cWe are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem,\u201d the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s Computer Emergency Readiness Team said in a posting on its website late on Thursday.\n\n\u201cThis and previous Java vulnerabilities have been widely targeted by attackers, and new Java vulnerabilities are likely to be discovered,\u201d the agency said. \u201cTo defend against this and future Java vulnerabilities, disable Java in Web browsers.\u201d\n\nJava is a computer language that enables programmers to write software utilizing just one set of code that will run on virtually any type of computer, including ones that use Microsoft Corp\u2019s Windows, Apple Inc\u2019s OS X and Linux, an operating system widely employed by corporations.\n\nComputer users access Java programs through modules, or plug-ins, that run Java software on top of browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox.\n\nThe U.S. government\u2019s warning on Java came after security experts earlier on Thursday warned of the newly discovered flaw.\n\nIt is relatively rare for government agencies to advise computer users to completely disable software due to a security bug, particularly in the case of widely used programs such as Java. They typically recommend taking steps to mitigate the risk of attack while manufacturers prepare an update, or hold off on publicizing the problem until an update is prepared.\n\nIn September, the German government advised the public to temporarily stop using Microsoft\u2019s Internet Explorer browser to give it time to patch a security vulnerability that opened it to attacks.\n\nThe Department of Homeland Security said that attackers could trick targets into visiting malicious websites that would infect their PCs with software capable of exploiting the bug in Java.\n\nIt said that an attacker could also infect a legitimate website by uploading malicious software that would infect machines of computer users who trust that site because they have previously visited it without experiencing any problems.\n\nThey said developers of several popular tools known as exploit kits, which criminal hackers use to attack PCs, have added software that allows hackers to exploit the newly discovered bug in Java to attack computers.\n\nSecurity experts have been scrutinizing the safety of Java since a similar security scare in August, which prompted some of them to advise using the software only on an as-needed basis.\n\nAt the time they advised businesses to only allow their workers to use Java browser plug-ins when prompted for permission by trusted programs such as GoToMeeting, a Web-based collaboration tool from Citrix Systems Inc.\n\nAdam Gowdiak, a researcher with Polish security firm Security Explorations, subsequently said that he had found other security bugs in Java that continued to make computers vulnerable to attack.\n\nJava suffered another setback in October when Apple began removing old versions of the software from Internet browsers of Mac computers when its customers installed new versions of its OS X operating system. Apple did not provide a reason for the change and both companies declined comment at the time."}
{"text":"Japan might have only minutes to prepare for nuclear attacks, said officials in the island nation as they face down threats from demented North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.\n\nTokyo is asking for all its regional governments to sharpen alert plans should Pyongyang\u2019s tubby tyrant press the button and send nukes flying over the Sea of Japan.\n\nOfficials in Tokyo \u2014 Japan\u2019s largest city with 13.5 million citizens \u2014 said their residents might have as little as 10 minutes to act.\n\nAnd even more concerning, Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura said the 2.6 million residents of Japan\u2019s third-largest city might have as little as four minutes to run for their lives and take shelter.\n\n\u201cA missile may not be detected as soon as it leaves the launch pad \u2026 and that could take several minutes,\u201d Yoshimura told the Japan Times.\n\n\u201cThe warning and alarms might only sound four or five minutes before a missile arrives.\u201d\n\nAs North Korea continues to make nuclear threats, Japanese citizens are becoming increasingly fearful that they \u2014 and not Pyongyang\u2019s sworn enemies in Seoul and Washington, DC \u2014 could be Kim\u2019s first targets.\n\nJapan\u2019s civil defense website received 5.7 million visitors in the first 23 days of this month \u2014 a massive hike from its usual monthly traffic of less than 400,000 hits, the Washington Post reported.\n\nThe prime minister\u2019s office issued new \u201cactions to protect yourself\u201d guidelines this week \u2014 which pretty much amount to taking cover inside well-constructed buildings.\n\nUnder the site\u2019s FAQs, Japanese officials said citizens will have only minutes to act.\n\n\u201cWhen a missile is launched from North Korea, it will not take long to reach Japan,\u201d it answered. \u201cFor example, the ballistic missile launched from (North Korea) on February 7 last year took 10 minutes to fly over Okinawa.\u201d\n\nUS Vice President Mike Pence last week reaffirmed the Trump administration\u2019s alliance with Japan amid the recent provocations from the hermit kingdom."}
{"text":"The Lure of Radicalism Amongst Muslim Youth\n\n10\/18\/2010\n\nWhy is it that a few militant clerics are so popular among some American Muslims? I was asked by an academic at a recent luncheon.\n\nAfter all, besides being so extreme in their message, don\u2019t most of them lack the scholarly credentials of the many mainstream clerics who oppose their militancy?\n\nThe questioner was a highly educated person, someone who had a deep understanding of Islamic theology. He also understood quite well the existence of significant variations in the interpretation and understanding of religious texts. He was one of those who had no problem looking past the right-wing Islamophobic rhetoric of Fox News and Robert Spencer et al., yet was still confused as to why second-generation American and British Muslims would find a message of extremism and militancy so appealing.\n\nHe correctly pointed out that the clerics espousing militancy were not only in the minority, but were also not as well-trained in the classical sciences as were clerics belonging to the opposing camp. Why then, were their voices so influential?\n\nThis academic at the luncheon was not the only one struggling with the question. A recent congressional hearing also tackled this same issue. And of course, this was not the first time that I, myself, had to confront this very question. It was especially driven home after someone with whom I had only briefly interacted Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the now infamous \u201cunderwear bomber\u201d turned radical and tried to blow up innocent men, women and children.\n\nLike this? Get more of our great articles. Get more of our great articles.\n\nUmar\u2019s transformation provides an excellent case-study that can and should be studied further to shed light on the question of radicalism, and this short essay makes a first, humble attempt at doing just that.\n\nI remember Umar as a shy introvert who attended an intensive retreat, the IlmSummit sponsored by Al-Maghrib Institute in Houston, TX, in the summer of 2008. I was among ten instructors at that retreat.\n\nUmar was in fact so quiet and shy that I almost felt obliged to engage him in small talk, asking him mundane questions about where he lived and what he was studying. And that was about the extent of my interaction with him. Never once did he raise his hand in class to ask a question, or seek any advice, or share any concerns, or confront me on any subject.\n\nIt appears that the lack of communication or socializing was not limited to the two of us. Rather, it seems that other students at the retreat had the same experience; they didn\u2019t remember anything significant about him except his nonchalant, quiet presence.\n\nIn fact, my encounter with him had been so brief and dull, that when I saw his pictures being paraded on every website and news magazine cover in December of 2009, I didn\u2019t even recognize him until someone alerted me via email that this was the same Umar who had been at the AlMaghrib retreat. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that someone as shy and socially introverted as Umar would have attempted to blow up a plane by stuffing his underwear with explosives!\n\nSo, what happened?\n\nFrom news accounts and our own documentation, we know that the AlMaghrib retreat was his last AlMaghrib course or seminar. We also know that he left England for a Middle Eastern country (where he remained for a few months), and eventually made his way to Yemen, where he interacted with an American-born cleric whose vision of Islam was completely at odds with our own. It was this cleric who apparently inspired him to open a new chapter in his life, and who brainwashed this 19-year old introvert into believing that murdering two hundred innocent people, including many women and children (some of them even fellow Muslims), would somehow bring him closer to his Lord and earn him reward on Judgment Day.\n\nWhy did Umar AbdulMutallab, a college-educated young man with a bright future ahead of him, reject the authority and guidance of authentic orthodox Islam, and allow himself to be lured into performing such a destructive and na\u00efve act in the process destroying his own life and possibly that of many others? After all, hadn\u2019t he interacted with us (instructors and students of knowledge) and lived with us for two full weeks? Hadn\u2019t he observed our level of scholarship, our academic grasp of the religion, and our emphatic opposition to irrational and counterproductive militancy?\n\nUmar might have been a social introvert, but he was clearly not unintelligent. What was it in the message of this Yemeni-American that had caused him to ignore the message and methodology of the many teachers that he interacted with at the AlMaghrib retreat?\n\nSome of what you are about to read might not be ground-breaking, but other points that I mention will raise a few eyebrows and perhaps even anger some. That is to be expected, and I do not expect everyone to agree with everything that I write. The point of this article (as is typically my main intention when writing such pieces) is to jump-start the discussion, and to allow for frank dialogue among all parties.\n\nLet\u2019s get to the answer then. It is not rocket science, nor does it require expertise in human psychology. Rather, it is quite simple. There is an external factor, and an internal factor, and when these two factors are coupled together, the result is fertile breeding ground for extremist ideas.\n\nThe external factor is an almost total absence of voices from within mainstream Islam (of all varieties: Sufis, Salafis, Deobandis, etc.) that speak to and address the concerns and issues that resonate with the Muslims most prone to extremism. When the only voices that address issues of concern are the voices of radical militant jihadis, it is only natural that young and impressionable minds will gravitate to these voices. From the perspective of these disaffected youth, since the mainstream clerics aren\u2019t discussing relevant issues, or involved in the discourses that concern them, how then can they be turned to for guidance?\n\nThe internal factor is a very warped understanding of Islamic texts and doctrines, and a romanticized view of Islamic history. It is only with such a skewed and idealistic vision that a Muslim can allow radical voices to bypass simple common sense and a pure Islamic heart, filtering all the way to his inner psyche.\n\nLet us discuss both of these issues in more detail:\n\nThe External Factor\n\nThe issues and concerns that are fogging the minds of many Muslims (and all those who turn to radicalism) center around the present state of the Ummah, and in particular the political and social struggles that many Muslims around the world are facing. These struggles are significantly complicated (directly or indirectly) by policies put into place by our own American government (and, to a lesser extent, other Western countries). Before 9\/11, most of the grievances were solely linked to the Palestinian question, and it was for this reason that radicalization and militant tendencies during that time-frame amongst Western Muslims were almost non-existent (it is not a coincidence that all those who planned and aided in the 9\/11 attacks were foreigners).\n\nPost 9\/11, our government reacted in ways that has added infinitely more fuel to the fire of extremism (and hence, the rise in radicalism amongst our own Western youth). From the illegal invasion of Iraq to the foolish military endeavors in Afghanistan, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, from Aafia Siddiqui to Ali al-Timimi, from the \u2018War on Terror\u2018 to the \u2018Patriot Act\u2019, it became easier to convince an impressionable mind into accepting the West versus Islam paradigm (as if these two entities can be surgically and neatly delineated, separated and defined).\n\nAnd instead of such incidents abating with time, every few days a new headline in some newspaper conveys yet another story proving the false paradigm: an American drone missile strike kills a few dozen anonymous, faceless tribe-members in Pakistan, or ever-expanding Israeli settlements steal more land from Palestinians, or a new torture scandal involving Muslim prisoners is leaked, or another military scandal involving the killing of innocent Muslim civilians is exposed. These incidents are a direct or indirect result of either our own American military operations, or our tax-supported military aid, or our turning a blind eye to specific actions of our allies via the use of our veto power in the UN Security Council.\n\nAs if such misguided foreign action was not sufficient to enrage a proud young Muslim man, he must also face the constant media onslaught that seeks to portray him and his faith as inherently evil and dangerous. He hears of his friends and families or other Muslims being routinely harassed, humiliated and intimidated at airports and border-crossings, and \u201crandomly\u201d selected for additional screening and questioning. Of course, he too has his own first-hand discriminatory experiences.\n\nHis faith attacked on national airwaves, his religiosity treated with suspicion, his co-religionists around the world killed, and his activist brothers and sisters in Western lands jailed, it is no surprise that our young and impressionable Muslim teenager struggles to make sense of all of this.\n\nHe wants someone to defend his faith and speak up on behalf of the oppressed. He wishes to hear fiery and angry rhetoric, charging the \u201cfree and democratic\u201dnations with hypocrisy, double standards, and the flouting of human rights. It is obvious to him that his government is primarily concerned with acquisition of oil and the control of natural resources, even if that results in the loss of Muslim blood. He clearly sees our politicians pandering more to the interests of corporate sponsors and special-interest donors than to the interests of their own fellow citizens. So, naturally, as a lay-Muslim, he looks to the scholars of his religion, seeking to find solace in angry tirades and verbal lashings against our politicians, leaders, media pundits, and law enforcement agencies who are, in his view, the root cause of all of this anger and terror in the first place.\n\nInstead, all he hears at his local mosque, assuming he is fortunate enough to live in an area where the Imam speaks English, are khutbahs that have no political relevance whatsoever. Finding nothing of significance at a local level, he then looks to more influential scholars: famous national clerics and da`ees, staple invitees to any major Islamic conference. Alas, all he hears them do is to regularly criticize his side: the victims in his eyes. Those who stand up to defend the innocent and fight against the real terrorists \u201cfrom his perspective\u201d are described as \u201cMuslim terrorists.\u201d Instead of supporting the cause of the weak and oppressed, these clerics side with the oppressors, routinely dissociating themselves from their own, giving spectacle fatwas against violence even as they ignore state-sponsored terrorism and what he perceives as the \u201cgreater violence.\u201d\n\nOver time, as acts of violence and terror increase in Muslims lands, and as local scholars only increase in their denunciation of \u201cMuslim extremism,\u201d this young man becomes even more disillusioned with these clerics. In his eyes, these Western scholars, no matter how popular among the masses, are nothing more than sell-outs: government-appeasing servile acquiescing cowards who are more concerned about their own safety and popularity than the safety and comfort of their persecuted brothers and sisters around the world.\n\n\u201cEnough of criticizing us! Who speaks up to defend them?\u201d he demands. \u201cWhere is the condemnation of our own Western nations, our own policies and our own governments, when they engage in acts of violence, drone bombings, mass-killings, torture, secret renditions and sham trials? Why is such activity not described as terroris, is it not also targeting the innocent? Or is \u2018terrorism\u2019 only when a Muslim commits such acts?\u201d\n\nAlas, the token condemnation against foreign policy that does occasionally come from the mouths of these \u2018mainstream\u2019 clerics is too shallow for his liking, too weak to satiate his own anger, too lost in the convoluted language and footnotes of their larger message. He is always reminded of the words of Malcolm X and the distinction that Malcolm drew between the \u2018house Negro\u2019 and the \u2018field Negro\u2019 and he cannot help but feel that these mainstream scholars are far too entrenched with the powers-that-be to stand up against them.\n\nNot hearing anything from his local or national scholars in the physical world around him, he scours the virtual world instead, looking on the net for voices that will speak to his concerns and address his anger. And in this virtual world, he stumbles across chat-rooms and forums where, for the first time, he finds people who see the world his way. These people, aided by the anonymity of the internet and empowered by the false bravado that only a fake alias can give, finally make our young man feel home, and that he was right all along in his assessment.\n\nIt is on these forums that he finds people who list nothing but the political faults of the Western world. It is on these forums where little children pretend to be brave men who can take on the \u2018big bad wolf.\u2019 And it is on these forums that he is introduced to \u2018clerics who speak the truth\u2019 and \u2018fear none amongst men\u2019, of legendary giants that even America fears and will do anything to silence (even if that means sending squads of assassins to murder one of their own citizens without trial). Whereas previously he had trouble finding anyone who would voice his view of the world, here, all the voices on these forums seem to be echoing the same message, spoken from the mouths of militants and circulated online by their testosterone-filled teenage cheerleaders.\n\nAnd in this worldview espoused by these militants, our young man finds great comfort and solace. According to the militants, every fault in the whole world emanates not from within, but from without. The Muslims are never to blame for anything. It is always the \u2018West,\u2019 and in particular \u2018Amrika\u2019.\n\nLocal persecution of scholars in Muslim lands? \u2018Amrika,\u2019 because they were the ones who propped up the kings, presidents and emirs in the Muslim world in the first place. Bombings that kill innocent Muslims in the streets of Baghdad, or the mosques of Karachi, or the shrines of Najaf? \u2018Amrika,\u2019 through the use of false-flag operations conducted by American agents, or as a result of the wider chaos originally caused by once again, \u2018Amrik\u2019. The awful state of the economy in Muslim lands? You guessed it, \u2018Amrika\u2019, via the use of loans that the American-controlled IMF gave out and the economic policies that America put in place.\n\nIt is a comforting vision, especially for a young teenager: a simple and self-serving view that reclaims the honor of his faith while laying blame on the feet of others. \u201cIt\u2019s not our fault at all! We are always oppressed, always victimized, it\u2019s all America\u2019s fault,\u201d he says to himself over and over again. And on the forums that he frequents, the constant interactions with twenty other kids from around the world, some writing secretly from their parent\u2019s basement, some from their own \u2018Star-Wars\u2019 posters-lined bedrooms, this chatter begins to sound like the representative voice of the entire Muslim world.\n\nThis young \u2018victim\u2019 does not realize that the \u2018victim-mentality\u2019 is not a motif of the Quran, nor do we find it ever verbalized in the seerah of our beloved Prophet. It is not a dignified mentality, and even if there are elements of truth in some portions of it, such an attitude does not befit a believer who believes in an All-Mighty Being who Hears and Sees all. Our Prophet suffered more at the hands of his detractors than any Muslim in our time, yet he maintained a moral dignity and an internal courage that would put to shame the entire paradigm of victim-mentality that these radicals espouse.\n\nThe Internal Factors\n\nWith regards to the internal factors, it is not likely that a mind well-grounded in authentic texts and traditions will gravitate towards acts of terrorism. Thus, it is no coincidence that one will be hard-pressed to find senior clerics, of any theological persuasion, who justify flying planes into building or strapping bombs onto one\u2019s body in order to blow up innocent civilians.\n\nA radical\u2019s mind could only have been exposed to cherry-picked religious texts along with their misinterpretations; typically verses from Surah al-Anfal and Surah al-Tawba (both of which were revealed in specific historic situations very different from our own). Such a mind is only versed in Prophetic traditions of a military nature, sheered of their context and shown in isolation from many other traditions that would help paint a more nuanced view.\n\nHowever, these are not the only verses and ahadith (the Prophetic traditions) pertaining to the topic of jihad. Many other verses, especially those that seem to conflict with their warped understanding of Surah al-Anfal and Tawba, are simply dismissed as belonging to the \u2018Makkan\u2019 phase of revelation. Many Prophetic traditions which would show that military action is not the only way to fight for the truth are simply bypassed or ignored. For every evidence that they quote, there is an almost surreal attempt to isolate that one verse or hadith from the entire corpus of Islamic texts and law. For these militants, it is as if each verse they cherry-pick was actually revealed for their immediate benefit. For them, it is as if every hadith that they quote was stated by the Prophet directly to them and in support of their world-view. Only a mind completely bereft from the necessary hermeneutical tools of usul al-fiqh (the procedure of deriving laws) and maqasid al-Shariah (understanding the goals of Islamic Law) can be so shallow.\n\nWith regards to doctrines, a simplistic, black-and-white understanding of wala wa-l-bara is propagated by the extremists; one that the intellectually-challenged (of the ilk of George W. Bush) would have absolutely no difficulty understanding. \u201cYou\u2019re either with us or against us\u201d, both Bush and Awlaki pontificate.\n\nYet, the real world that we live in is not as black and white as these Manichean camps would like it to be. A clear and simple argument can be made that on each and every issue, we should stand with the truth, regardless of which side that truth is on. And it is not uncommon that this truth is not on one side, but somewhere in between.\n\nIn the context of the very verses that many militants use to justify their black-and-white understandings of wala wa-l-bara, one verse (8:72) specifically mentions that even if Muslims under attack ask for help, and reach out to you based on religious loyalties, you are not obliged to help them if that help will compromise your political alliances. Extrapolating from this, one can state that while American Muslims are with the Palestinians, Iraqis and Kashmiris in wanting freedom, safety and security for them, at the same time we cannot help them militarily if that help will compromise our own safety and the safety of our families and communities, or if such help would contradict our political alliances. We can still help our suffering brethren in many other ways, for example, by educating our fellow countrymen regarding the dismal plight of these people and how our own government has been, many times, complicit in perpetuating or even causing such predicaments.\n\nThe point that I am stressing here is that a more nuanced and pragmatic reading of the Quran can also just as easily be done \u201c but it takes more wisdom, foresight and moral courage than many of these testosterone-filled youth are willing to undertake (and for the record, I firmly believe that one of the best ways to de-radicalize these young men is to help them get married early and encourage them to have kids, and I mean this in all seriousness).\n\nMuslims need to understand that anyone who approaches the Quran and Sunnah with preconceived notions, wishing to find justification for certain theological or legal opinions, can almost always do so. If one wishes to speak to the texts rather than allow the texts to speak to him, then only his imagination will be a limit to the opinion that he seeks to derive.\n\nWith regards to our Islamic history and heritage, our overzealous youngster is told of a few romanticized legends of how a woman cried out for the Caliph Mutasim to come rescue her from the clutches of the enemy, or how Umar b. al-Khattab could not rest even if only one Muslim was in trouble, or how Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi almost single-handedly raised up an army to liberate Jerusalem from the clutches of the evil Crusaders.\n\nBut this youngster never actually reads a book of Muslim history himself. If he did, he would find a very different story, a very human one. Yes, there is no doubt that there were times in our past when noble men achieved gallant feats and ordinary people faced almost impossible challenges, yet came out as heroes in the end. But, as with any human history, these examples are more the exceptions than the rule.\n\nPolitically speaking, the Muslims suffered from as much intrigue, internal backstabbing, civil wars, bureaucratic inefficiencies, secret dealings, internecine warfare, bribery and corruption as just about any other culture and civilization. Were this youngster to read further, he would discover the almost constant insurrections that the Umayyads had to face from various Muslim insurgents, the political intrigues and the civil wars fought multiple times within the Abbasids, the alliances that the Taifa Rulers of Andalus regularly formed with Christian princes against fellow Muslims in order to retain power, the rivalries and fratricide of the Ottoman Sultans, and many, many, many more such sordid facts facts that are not taught in Islamic Sunday school.\n\nMost of the armies that were harnessed and prepared in our fourteen centuries of Islamic history were actually gathered to fight other Muslims for political or material gain, and not to fight the \u2018inglorious infidel\u2019. Muslim societies of classical and medieval times struggled with many of the same issues that their modern counterparts do (albeit to different levels), of societal corruption and moral decay and religious indifference. If there were even prostitutes in the holy city of Madinah during the Prophetic era (as our source books clearly mention), does one believe that later societies would somehow be better than our \u2018pious predecessors\u2019?\n\nWhat a thorough reading of our history shows us is that our societies and people were not angels, but simply humans. Yes, there was much good as well, and there is no denying that having a Caliphate that ruled according to Islamic law led to a society of greater Islamic accomplishments than what can be obtained in our times. But by the same token, because we live in an age devoid of a Caliphate, the good that does occur in our era is of a different type, and the endeavors and struggles of our times will inevitably form its own legends and heroes for future generations.\n\nIt is immature and dangerous to over-glorify our past. By painting an imaginary and overly-romanticized picture of an Islamic epoch, it is easier for misguided clerics to convince energetic but na\u00efve youngsters to reclaim and resuscitate such a fantasy, no matter what the cost might be.\n\nI have no doubt that Umar AbdulMutallab saw a level of academic excellence at AlMaghrib that he would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in the Western world. I also have no doubt that he was highly impressed with the scholastic content of our seminars. However, in the end, what was important to him was not what he saw, but what he didn\u2019t see. And what he didn\u2019t see was an exposition and condemnation of the role our own countries play in spreading terror around the world. What he didn\u2019t see were explicit solutions being offered in light of the current situation of the Ummah.\n\nIn other words, what he didn\u2019t hear was a discourse regarding the current political and social ills that he felt so passionately about, and a frank dialogue about the Islamic method for correcting such ills.\n\nAnd in that vacu\u00fcm, where neither AlMaghrib nor other mainstream voices had anything substantive to offer, the voices of radical extremism proved to be the only bait dangling in front of his eyes. For him, there never was a competition between Orthodox Islam and militancy; there never was an \u2018either-or\u2018 choice to be made because these two visions of Islam (from his perspective) were completely independent of one another. Each one discussed different topics and each was active in a different arena. So convinced was he by that message of radicalism that he was willing to give up his life for it, not realizing that living one\u2019s life for the sake of God is far more difficult than committing suicide for His sake (as if the latter can ever truly be for the sake of God!).\n\nBy allowing radicals to speak on behalf of the voiceless, we who remained silent simply lost the battle for the hearts and minds of people such as Umar.\n\nIf we truly wish to fight radical ideas amongst our youth; if we wish to persuade them away from rash measures drawn from raw emotions, and to persuade them to act upon wisdom and perform real acts of courage,then the first step that we will have to take is to become more vocal about the grievances that drive young men to acts of desperation. We will need to be frank about the role that our governments play in ruining the freedoms and happiness that specific societies around the world deserve. And after discussing these woes, we will need to educate our youth about the proper way forward in solving them: away from foolish and un-Islamic militancy, and towards education, political activism and other positive channels.\n\nThose who choose to take on this task will have much to worry about for themselves. They will have to brave the attention and subsequent fury of a fear-mongering media empire that loves to demonize any who dares disagree with its own romantic notion of a lost American utopia. These individuals will have to put their trust in Allah as they fight legal and political battles against their own governments and law enforcement agencies, as they themselves are wiretapped, monitored, harassed, baited and perhaps even jailed merely because they state the obvious: that it is our own country\u2019s domestic and foreign policies that are the greatest source of the anger and resentment fueling radicalism.\n\nIt is an awkward position to be in; for some, it appears to be a hopeless battle. How can one simultaneously fight against a powerful government, a pervasive and sensationalist-prone media, and a group of overzealous rash youth who are already predisposed to reject your message because they view you as being a part of the establishment (while, ironically, the \u2018establishment\u2019 never ceases to view you as part of the radicals)?\n\nBut there really is no other alternative. We need to protect our religion for our children after us, and we need to preserve what we can of the freedoms this country still offers us. And while I am skeptical that America will ever revert to its innocent pre-9\/11 state of affairs; still, despite all that has occurred to change this country, America remains far better than any European equivalent, and we need to appreciate and cherish this fact even as we struggle to balance our loyalties between the requirements of our faith and those that are increasingly being imposed upon us by our country.\n\nThe journey ahead of us is long and difficult, and the task is well beyond simply acknowledging the root cause of anger. Real and tangible solutions must be offered, and we must assess the pros and cons of any step that we undertake. This is but one step, and many more arduous miles lie ahead. But even the journey of a thousand miles must begin with one step.\n\nTo be continued.\n\nImage courtesy artcornwall.org"}
{"text":"Do Me a Favor, Prince [Monday Meeting Notes]\n\nMonday Meeting, News\n\nAnother fine piece of art from the Prince\u2019s Gambit card set by Mark Kelly. This time, of course, it\u2019s the Sabbat, which makes a lot of sense since part of the game is to figure out who among those playing is the Sabbat infiltrator or infiltrators. There\u2019s more info down below in the BLURBS! section about the Prince\u2019s Gambit Kickstarter, if you want to check it out.\n\nSpeaking of Kickstarters, somebody asked me what kinds of KSs I have backed and what compels me to back them. Which was a very different sort of question than I usually get asked, so thanks! So, for me, I\u2019ll back if the project is for a property I\u2019m interested in, or if the KS is for something that couldn\u2019t get made any other way. Sometimes those two coincide.\n\nSo, I just got in the giant, and I mean in dimensions, Judges\u2019 Guild book by Goodman Games that reprints a mess o\u2019 JG material at that \u201ctabloid\u201d size they published in back when I started out with D&D, and I just received my Unknown Armies books, from Atlas Games, that I backed because amazingly I never had a UA book in my game collection.\n\nOutside the industry, I absolutely had to back the MST3K revival KS, which might have fit into the next category, but honestly, I never thought it would fail.\n\nBut, in that second category, I backed MASHed, RPing in the Korean War by Mark Plemmons, which despite it having a perfect jewel of a triage system driving the operating room tension that was key to MASH, is the sort of ultra-focused game that might not have been made without KS.\n\nSimilarly, but outside RPGs, I backed Chris Moeller\u2019s KS that he ran several years ago to fund the creation of the third graphic novel in his Iron Empires series after the mainstream comic book publishers wouldn\u2019t touch it.\n\nAnd sometimes, if the KS is just so chock full of Stretch Goal stuff then I just have to pledge, even though I don\u2019t \u201cneed\u201d more stuff. The sculpts for the Rising Sun game were one of those things that were too cool, and in such quantity, that I couldn\u2019t say no.\n\nOur meetings today were mostly about process and getting things done. First Eddy and I went through a lot of the efforts he is going through setting up his schedule and his move to Ireland. Then we had our Onyx staff meeting, and that was also about all the projects we are working on, the differences between our properties and our licensed ones, and whether anyone expects us to respond to every comment Tweeted about us.\n\n(The answer is no, we have work to do).\n\nMirthful Mike Chaney asked me to remind everyone that we are still looking for artists, and frankly we always will be! If you are interested, you can email your interest and examples of your best work to him at: onyxpathart@gmail.com\n\nNow, here\u2019s the important part.\n\nWe want any of you who are considering sending some samples to Mirthful Mike to know that you have just as good a chance to get work with us, and to continue to work with us, as any other artist, regardless of gender, race, creed, or anything about the person you are. We\u2019re interested in awesome illustrations, and if you can do that, and deliver them on deadline, then that\u2019s what matters to us.\n\nAnd let me stress, because we want you to hear us, if you\u2019ve been unable to break into illustration because of any of those factors, we want you to know that we want you here working with us.\n\nSome people will ask why I felt the need to stress that.\n\nWell, because it\u2019s important for aspiring artists who\u2019ve had the door slammed in their faces because of who they are to know that the door we have opened isn\u2019t just open, but that we\u2019re waving them in because we want to see what kind of artwork they can do.\n\nThen it is up to the artwork to convince us to hire the artist.\n\nThere are other ways to phrase this, and other ways to try and get more diversity into this thing of ours. This is what we are doing right now, and how we are phrasing it.\n\nBLURBS!\n\nKICKSTARTER!\n\nThe Prince\u2019s Gambit casual vampire card game Kickstarter continues to roll with over 1100 backers! We\u2019re almost at the Stretch Goal for adding the Independent Clan Ravnos and then more new art, with more cool rewards yet to come. So please check it out: https:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/200664283\/princes-gambit-casual-vampire-card-game !\n\nDesigned by long-time Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop RPG developer Justin Achilli, Prince\u2019s Gambit is a fast-paced social deduction game set within the world of Vampire, but which requires no special knowledge to play. Players must cooperate to gain the favor of the Prince while deducing who among them are secretly the traitorous Sabbat infiltrators.\n\nNext, the Monarchies of Mau KS is scheduled come after Gambit.\n\nON SALE!\n\nLooking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Here\u2019s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: http:\/\/theonyxpath.com\/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution\/\n\nYou can now order wave 2 of our Deluxe and Prestige print overrun books, including Deluxe Mage 20th Anniversary, and Deluxe V20 Dark Ages!\n\nFrom the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: Beneath the Skin (Demon and Skinchangers 1486-1502 Aztec Empire). Ahuitzotl sits on the throne at the height of the Aztec Empire, overseeing his sorcerer-priests\u2019 sacrifices and the endless flower wars his jaguar and eagle warriors carry out in his name to keep the altars well-supplied with victims. The gears of the Aztec Empire turn smoothly and inexorably, but not everything is what it pretends to be. Skinchangers take the shapes of animals to run the wilds or bring down human prey, the Unchained cobble together identities from stolen lives, and stranger things still lurk in the deserts and jungles beyond the walls of Tenochtitlan.\n\nAvailable Wednesday in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG!\n\nFrom the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: Into the Cold (Demon: the Descent 1961 Berlin). East Germany erects a wall against its Western counterpart, turning West Berlin into an island within its own country. As the Cold War heats up, demons find themselves the targets of increasing human scrutiny, and begin to realize that the God-Machine\u2019s plans didn\u2019t end with the War.\n\nAvailable Wednesday in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG!\n\nThe splendor and horror of Rio is unwrapped! Cursed Necropolis: Rio for Mummy: the Curse is on sale in PDF and PoD versions: http:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/205257\/Cursed-Necropolis-Rio\n\nBeneath the splendor of Rio de Janeiro seethes a hotbed of occult activity. Over a score of mummies keep their tombs in Rio, their presence seeping into the soil and stones and souls of the city. Over all this reigns the infamous Teshra-Gemet, the pretender Pharaoh.\n\nThe city of Rio births marvels both bright and dark\u2026 and you never know which kind you have until it\u2019s too late.\n\nCursed Necropolis: Rio contains:\n\nThe secrets and schemes of Rio\u2019s Arisen.\n\nNew Utterances, from the perception usurping Horse and Rider to the cleansing fire of Baal\u2019s Due.\n\n\u201cThe Serpent\u2019s Tooth,\u201d an all-new adventure to introduce players to the conflicts and power plays of Rio de Janeiro.\n\nBeasts are added to Hunter: the Vigil with Hunter: Tooth and Nail, coming atcha in PDF and physical book Pod versions on DriveThruRPG.com! http:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/204066\/Hunter-Tooth-and-Nail\n\nTooth and Nail is a bonus chapter\/companion book to the previous released Hunter: Mortal Remains that explores antagonists inspired by the Beast: the Primordial RPG.\n\nHunter: Tooth and Nail includes:\n\nFiction and story hooks to bring these beasts of legend to your Hunter: The Vigil chronicle.\n\nchronicle. New bestial Dread Powers.\n\nNew Compacts and Conspiracies which hunt the monsters, but also sometimes hunt the zealous heroes that hunt as well.\n\nThe Secrets of the Covenants for Vampire: the Requiem 2nd REVEALED this Wednesday on DTRPG! Physical copy PoD version coming to DTRPG: http:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/199280\/Secrets-of-the-Covenants\n\nVampires gather under many banners. But five have endured the tumult of Western history better than any other. The Carthian Movement. The Circle of the Crone. The Invictus. The Lancea et Sanctum. The Ordo Dracul. Each has its fierce devotees, its jealous rivals, and its relentless enemies. Now,for the first time, the covenants speak for themselves. This book includes: A variety of stories from each of the covenants, all told in their own words.\n\nNever-before revealed secrets, like the fate of the Prince of New Orleans.\n\nNew blood sorcery, oaths, and other hidden powers of the covenants.\n\nFrom the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: Fallen Blossoms (Hunter 1640-1660 Japan). Japan is moving into the Edo Period. New laws and new ways of thinking wash over the land, and with a new order come new threats to humanity. Take a look at the Vigil in a time where samurai transition from warlords to bureaucrats, Japan massively and lethally rejects outside influence, and when Edo rapidly grows into a world power.\n\nContinuing our individual Dark Eras chapters, we offer you Dark Eras: Fallen Blossoms on in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG! http:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/205483\/Dark-Eras-Fallen-Blossoms-Hunter-the-Vigil\n\nFrom the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: Doubting Souls (Hunter 1690-1695 Salem). Immigrants and tribes struggled to co-exist on the Eastern Seaboard in the ever-expanding Colonies. Violent clashes, supernatural beliefs, and demonic influences spelled disaster for Salem Village and its surrounding towns, while others fought werewolves and vampires on the frontier. With so much at risk, only god-fearing men and women were deemed innocent \u2014 and those were few indeed.\n\nAvailable in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG: http:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/204372\/Dark-Eras-Doubting-Souls-Hunter-the-Vigil\n\nFrom the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: The Bowery Dogs (Werewolf 1969-1979 NYC). New York City in the 1970s. Crime. Drugs. Gang violence. Vast economic disparity. And werewolves. It\u2019s a lean, ugly time to be alive, and the lone wolf doesn\u2019t stand a chance out there. In the end, all you really have is family.\n\nAvailable in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG: http:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/203762\/Dark-Eras-The-Bowery-Dogs-Werewolf-the-Forsaken\n\nThe Locker is open; the Chronicles of Darkness: Hurt Locker, that is! PDF and physical copy PoDs are now available on DTRPG! http:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/199275\/Chronicles-of-Darkness-Hurt-Locker\n\nHurt Locker features:\n\nTreatment of violence in the Chronicles of Darkness . Lasting trauma, scene framing, and other tools for making your stories hurt.\n\n. Lasting trauma, scene framing, and other tools for making your stories hurt. Many new player options, including Merits, supernatural knacks, and even new character types like psychic vampires and sleeper cell soldiers.\n\nExpanded equipment and equipment rules.\n\nHurt Locker requires the Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook or any other standalone Chronicles of Darkness rulebook such as Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken, or Beast: The Primordial to use.\n\nFrom the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: Ruins of Empire (Mummy 1893-1924). Perhaps the quintessential era of the mummy in the minds of Westerners, this period saw the decline of the two greatest empires of the age: British and Ottoman. Walk with the Arisen as they bear witness to the death of the Victorian age, to pivotal mortal discoveries in Egypt, and to the horrors of the Great War.\n\nAvailable in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG. http:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/178801\/Dark-Eras-Ruins-of-Empire-Mummy-the-Curse\n\nFrom the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: The Sundered World (Werewolf and Mage 5500-5000 BCE). At the birth of civilization, in the shadow of the Fall, the Awakened stand as champions and protectors of the agricultural villages spread across the Balkans. In a world without a Gauntlet, where Shadow and flesh mingle, the steady taming of the world by humanity conflicts with the half-spirit children of Father Wolf.\n\nAvailable in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG. http:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/202272\/Dark-Eras-The-Sundered-World-Werewolf-the-Forsaken-Mage-the-Awakening\n\nNight Horrors: Conquering Heroes for Beast: the Primordial is available now as an Advance PDF: http:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/202615\/Night-Horrors-Conquering-Heroes\n\nThis book includes:\n\nAn in-depth look at how Heroes hunt and what makes a Hero, with eleven new Heroes to drop into any chronicle.\n\nA brief look at why Beasts may antagonize one another, with seven new Beasts to drop into any chronicle.\n\nRules for Insatiables, ancient creatures born of the Primordial Dream intent on hunting down Beasts to fill a hunger without end, featuring six examples ready to use in any chronicle.\n\nCONVENTIONS!\n\nDiscussing GenCon plans. August 17th \u2013 20th, Indianapolis. Every chance the booth will actually be 20? x 30? this year that we\u2019ll be sharing with friends. We\u2019re looking at new displays this year, like a back drop and magazine racks for the brochure(s).\n\nIn November, we\u2019ll be at Game Hole Con in Madison, WI. More news as we have it, and here\u2019s their website: https:\/\/www.gameholecon.com\/\n\nAnd now, the new project status updates!\n\nDEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM ROLLICKING ROSE (projects in bold have changed status since last week):\n\nFirst Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)\n\nExalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition)\n\nTrinity Continuum: Aeon Rulebook (The Trinity Continuum)\n\nM20 Gods and Monsters (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)\n\nM20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)\n\nEx Novel 2 (Aaron Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)\n\nC20 Novel (Jackie Cassada) (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)\n\nPugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)\n\nMonarchies of Mau Early Access (Pugmire)\n\nHunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)\n\nDtD Night Horrors: Enemy Action (Demon: the Descent)\n\nThe Realm (Exalted 3rd Edition)\n\nDragon-Blooded (Exalted 3rd Edition)\n\nArms of the Chosen (Exalted 3rd Edition)\n\nRedlines"}
{"text":"People need to understand exactly what was going on before forming conclusions.The layers of the securization process go very deep. In simple terms:\n\n1. Bank lends you the money\n\n2. They sell the loan into securization\n\n3. The loan is then bundled with many other similar loans\n\n4, Then the whole bundle is divided into dozens if not hundreds of pieces and sold to investors.\n\n5. The investors then hold, sell, trade, whatever is their fancy\n\n6. Pieces of your loan go from party to party.\n\n7. Folks also short the securization, which in effect creates double the amount of long holders on that piece of the loan, offset by those who are short your loan.\n\n8. This process repeats itself and you have 5 times your loan held by investors offset by four times your loan being short. In effect your loan is being paid to five different investment pool parties and four other investment pool parties are also profferring up payments on your loan along with yours to even it all out. (possibly exaggerated)\n\n9. All along, the legal requirements for transferring ownership of the loan are ignored. Thats because there is no true distinct owner of the loan. Since they didn't bother naming the true owner before hypothecating the loans, these loans are truly invalid under contact law.\n\nThe banks are just acting as agents of the trust when they foreclose. The trust is just a nominee and can't be an owner under the law. These means neither the bank nor the trust are able to truly prove ownership.\n\nI said long ago the only solution was for the fed to buy these loans and refinance them at current market values. Banks could have continued servicing them to earn their money. A $100,000 loan modfied down to $70,000 still means a $135,000 total repayment at 5% interest. This could have allowed most people to keep their homes and also would set the ground for newly valid mortgage contracts. And the government could have even made a profit on it and saved the economy in one quick swoop. Proves they are not friends of the people."}
{"text":"Story highlights Phyllis Schlafly, a prominent social conservative leader for decades, has passed away\n\nThe 1970's-era ERA foe died at 92\n\nWashington (CNN) Phyllis Schlafly, a prominent anti-feminist and early leader of the social conservative movement, died Monday at the age of 92 at her home in St. Louis.\n\nSchlafly, an outspoken voice against the liberalism of the 1960's and 1970's, was a towering figure in what emerged as the modern religious right. Her death was confirmed by the Eagle Forum, the Missouri-based advocacy organization she led.\n\n\"Her focus from her earliest days until her final ones was protecting the family, which she understood as the building block of life. She recognized America as the greatest political embodiment of those values,\" the statement read. \"From military superiority and defense to immigration and trade; from unborn life to the nuclear family and parenthood, Phyllis Schlafly was a courageous and articulate voice for common sense and traditional values.\"\n\nSchlafly was most well-known for her work fighting the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970's, emerging as one of the leading female critics of the feminist movement.\n\nPhotos: History of the ERA Photos: History of the ERA The feminist activists of the 1960s, '70s and early '80s weren't the first to push for an Equal Rights Amendment. Suffragist leader Alice Paul, second from right, fought hard to pass the 19th Amendment -- which earned women the right to vote in 1920. She drafted the first ERA and introduced it to Congress in 1923. Hide Caption 1 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA In 1972, the House and Senate passed the ERA by the necessary two-thirds votes before sending it to state legislatures for ratification. Three-quarters of the states needed to ratify it, but the ERA fell three states short by its 1982 deadline. Among those where it failed was Florida, where supporters voiced their disapproval after the state Senate voted 22-16 against the ERA in June 1982. Hide Caption 2 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Gloria Steinem, arguably the most recognized name and face in feminist activism, was among the key forces behind the ERA effort in the '70s and '80s. Although it wasn't ratified, most men and women were pro-ERA, Steinem says. She recently took a break from writing her latest book to join a gathering in support of the new ERA Coalition and celebrate the release of \"Equal Means Equal,\" written by coalition founder and director Jessica Neuwirth. Hide Caption 3 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Women's rights activist, poet and writer Robin Morgan -- seen here during a women's liberation conference in New York in 1970 -- was also among the crowd at the fundraiser and book launch at Manhattan's Yale Club. Morgan's 1970 anthology, \"Sisterhood Is Powerful,\" helped galvanize a movement. Hide Caption 4 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA President Richard Nixon endorsed the ERA after it was adopted by both houses of Congress in 1972. Thirty-five of the needed 38 states ratified the ERA by its 1982 deadline. The latest efforts to revive the ERA have included legislation that would lift the deadline or start the ratification process from scratch. Hide Caption 5 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA The face of ERA opposition during the last big go-round was Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist who founded the Eagle Forum. Now 90, she says the ERA is \"dumb and offensive\" and that the new push for it is \"a colossal waste of time.\" Schlafly, seen in this 1975 photo, once warned that the ERA would lead to same-sex marriage and women being drafted into combat. She also said it It would threaten families -- an argument she still makes. Hide Caption 6 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Schlafly led protests against the ERA, including this one at the White House in 1977. The group, about 200 strong, was protesting then-first lady Rosalyn Carter's campaign for the ERA. Amendment supporters like Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, say their real enemy was never Schlafly, but big business and insurance companies. Hide Caption 7 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy speaks at an ERA fundraising dinner in Washington in 1980. Kennedy spent more than three decades as a champion for the amendment in Congress. Hide Caption 8 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Eleanor Smeal, then-president of the National Organization for Women, left, and first lady Betty Ford attend an ERA rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1981. Hide Caption 9 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA From left, Rep. Gwen Moore, Sen. Bob Menendez and Rep. Carolyn Maloney hold a news conference in 2010 outside the U.S. Capitol to call for passage of the ERA. The amendment has been introduced in nearly every session of Congress since 1923. Hide Caption 10 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA ERA supporters like to quote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who told California Lawyer in a January 2011 issue: \"Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't.\" Hide Caption 11 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Last April, Scalia appeared at the National Press Club beside his judicial polar opposite -- and friend -- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The two were asked how they would amend the Constitution, if they could. Ginsburg, seen here at an annual Women's History Month event at the U.S. Capitol in March, didn't hesitate: \"If I could choose an amendment to add to this Constitution, it would be the Equal Rights Amendment,\" she said. Hide Caption 12 of 12\n\nSchlafly, until her death, remained in the political arena and recently made the case for electing Donald Trump president. On Monday night the Republican nominee eulogized Schlafly in a statement.\n\nRead More"}
{"text":"Dobson's history of perverse and shocking ideas about raising children is well-documented, but has escaped much media scrutiny.\n\nFrom Dobson's book \"The Strong Willed Child\":\n\n\"When I told Sigmund [the family dog] to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie's way of saying. \"Get lost!\" \"I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me 'reason' with Mr. Freud.\" . . . \"What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!\" ... \"But this is not a book about the discipline of dogs; there is an important moral to my story that is highly relevant to the world of children. JUST AS SURELY AS A DOG WILL OCCASIONALLY CHALLENGE THE AUTHORITY OF HIS LEADERS, SO WILL A LITTLE CHILD -- ONLY MORE SO.\" \"[I]t is possible to create a fussy, demanding baby by rushing to pick him up every time he utters a whimper or sigh. Infants are fully capable of learning to manipulate their parents through a process called reinforcement, whereby any behavior that produces a pleasant result will tend to recur. Thus, a healthy baby can keep his mother hopping around his nursery twelve hours a day (or night) by simply forcing air past his sandpaper larynx.\"\n\nKeep your children far away from Dobson - and anyone who follows his teachings.\n\nOn p.15 Dobson tells the story of a mother who spanks her 5 year old daughter and locks her in the garage for throwing some stones at cars. On p.18 he tells the story of a mother who slaps her 18 month old 9 separate times for reaching for a candy dish. On p.20 he tells the story of a mother who counts to three \"and if the kids had not minded by then, they would have to face the wooden spoon.\"\n\nOn p.61 Dobson says to spank a 6 year old for calling his parents \"hot dog\" or \"moose\" and on p.63 Dobson says to spank a 7 year old for lying. . . . On p. 135 Dobson is asked this question: \"Q: How long do you think a child should be allowed to cry after being punished or spanked? Is there a limit? A: Yes, I believe there should be a limit. As long as the tears represent a genuine release of emotion, they should be permitted to fall. But crying can quickly change from inner sobbing to an expression of protest aimed at punishing the enemy. Real crying usually lasts two minutes or less but may continue for five. After that point, the child is merely complaining, and the change can be recognized in the tone and intensity of his voice. I would require him to stop the protest crying, usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.\" On p.136 Dobson recommends using a switch or paddle to beat children. (link above) On p.137 Dobson says \"The spanking may be too gentle. If it doesn't hurt, it doesn't motivate a child to avoid the consequence next time. A slap with the hand on the bottom of a diapered two-year-old is not a deterrent to anything. Be sure the child gets the message.\"\n\nOne can only imagine with horror what goes in this man's household. Sick and crazy.\n\nMore here if you want to be even more throughly repelled.\n\nBut this will almost - almost- make you feel sorry for the man:\n\nA recent profile of Dobson sheds some light on these questions. As it turns out, Dobson\u2019s parents physically and mentally abused him as a child, and he once got beaten up in school by a kid even Dobson admits was widely acknowledged to be a \u201csissy.\u201d The article in a Denver magazine called \u201c5280\u2033 makes Dobson\u2019s mother, Myrtle, sound like a real piece of work. Notes writer Eileen Welsome: Myrtle [tag]Dobson[\/tag] was an amiable and social woman, but she didn\u2019t hesitate to whack her son with a shoe or belt when she felt it was required. Consequently, Dobson writes, he learned at an early age to stay out of striking distance when he back-talked to his mother. One day he made the mistake of mouthing off when she was only four feet away and heard a 16-pound girdle whistling through the air. \u201cThe intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps and buckles wrapping themselves around my midsection.\u201d The girdle incident did not dampen his defiance, however. One evening, after Dobson\u2019s mother forbid him from going to a dance, the recalcitrant teenager told her that he was going anyway; she picked up the telephone and called her husband. \u201cI need you,\u201d she said. The article continues: \u201c\u2018What happened in the next few days shocked me down to my toes,\u2019 writes Dobson.\u201d His father canceled the next four years\u2019 worth of speaking engagements, put the Oklahoma house up for sale, and took a pastor\u2019s job in San Benito, Texas, a small town near the Mexican border. Dobson had two years of high school left, and when he started classes he found himself the target of a couple of bullies. Rather than turn the other cheek, Dobson wheeled around and threw his schoolbooks in the face of one annoying youth. \u201cBy the time he could see me again I was on top of him,\u201d Dobson writes. Dobson also tried a little bullying himself, targeting a boy whom he sized up as a \u201csissy.\u201d But the boy gave him such a thrashing that Dobson concluded bullying wasn\u2019t for him. Elsewhere the story notes that in the Dobson household there were \u201ca million rules\u2026regulations and prohibitions for almost every imaginable situation.\u201d Dobson recalls being \u201cchewed out for using the expression \u2018Hot dog!\u2019 and forbidden from uttering \u2018darn,\u2019 \u2018geez,\u2019 or \u2018dad-gummit\u2019 because they were considered shorthand swear words.\u201d Even more alarming, Dobson admits in one of his books that as a child he arranged a fight between two mismatched dogs. The battle involved a tenacious bulldog and a \u201csweet, passive Scottie named Baby,\u201d and Dobson provoked it by throwing a tennis ball toward Baby. He writes what happened next: \u201cThe bulldog went straight for Baby\u2019s throat and hung on. It was an awful scene. Neighbors came running from everywhere as the Scottie screamed in terror. It took ten minutes and a garden hose for the adults to pry loose the bulldog\u2019s grip. By then Baby was almost dead. He spent two weeks in the animal hospital, and I spent two weeks in the doghouse. I was hated by the entire town.\u201d As any child psychologist will tell you, this type of cruelty toward animals is a sign of a serious psychological disturbance.\n\nJames Dobson is a sick, sick man. Instead of seeking help for the psychological damage he suffered as a child, he decided instead to inflict evil on others by manipulating them into beating their own children and telling them God wants them to. Talk about dragging Biblical understanding through the gutter.\n\nI will never on any day be listening to anything James Dobson has to say about the Bible or any other subject. Why the media gives his man any credence whatsoever is one of the great mysteries of life that will never be adequately explained."}
{"text":"It's not clear how or why two men attacked a man believed to be a British soldier in the London neighborhood of Woolwich, but U.K. officials are already investigating it as a possible act of terrorism.\n\nA video broadcast by the U.K. network ITV purports to show one of the two attackers explaining himself to a camera immediately after the attack. His hands are covered in blood, a knife and a machete in his right hand. The victim is clearly visible on the ground with a crowd gathering in the background. Here's what he said:\n\nWe swear by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reasons we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye a tooth for tooth. We apologise that women had to see this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don't care about you.\n\nThe Guardian cites eyewitnesses as describing the attack as a \"beheading.\" The BBC talked to an eyewitness who describes what he saw after arriving in the middle of the attack:\n\nI saw two people lying over him and I thought they were trying to resuscitate him. I went down to the garage and another bloke come along and told me they were actually stabbing him. Apparently they actually ran the car into him and knocked him down before they did anything. And the next minute a silver car came along and a man got out and shouted he was going to phone the police. The next thing that happened was he actually pulled a handgun out. It was a gun that looked as if it could take about 12, 15 rounds so I definitely know it was handgun because I actually seen it in his hand.\n\nThe same witness also said that some unarmed police were nearby but did not want to approach the men, who appeared to be armed, until armed \"Trojan\" police arrived.\n\nThe two attackers were shot by police and are currently receiving medical treatment.\n\nUpdate: The Washington Post's Anthony Faiola, reporting from London, listened to the ITV video very carefully and came away with a different quote than the one circulating in British media. The first part of the attacker's quote is difficult to hear because the ITV anchor is speaking over him. It's not clear to me where the above version, which is cited in The Guardian and elsewhere, first appeared. Here's the quote as heard by Faiola:"}
{"text":"If you take the long view with Chelsea \u2014 the view that starts on the day Roman Abramovich first wrote his name on the club in 2003 \u2014 the amazing thing isn\u2019t that they won the Champions League but that they won it the way they did \u2014 as underdogs, riding on luck and drama. Consider:\n\n1. Chelsea became the champions of Europe while finishing in sixth place in their own country, the worst domestic-league finish of any team since the European Champion Clubs\u2019 Cup became the Champions League in 1992. If they hadn\u2019t won the tournament, they wouldn\u2019t have qualified to play in it next year.\n\n2. In the quarterfinals, Chelsea overturned a 3-1 first-leg deficit against Napoli to win 5-4 after the home leg at Stamford Bridge. This happened after a late Lampard penalty forced extra time, allowing Branislav Ivanovic, who has scored eight goals in 107 appearances for Chelsea, to slot home a Drogba cross in the 105th minute.\n\n3. In the semis, they blew a 1-0 first-leg lead against the hugely favored Barcelona, went down 2-0 in the away leg, saw John Terry sent off in the first half, and somehow, with 10 men, came back to win 3-2 when Fernando Torres \u2014 he of the recent 1,541-minute goal drought \u2014 scored on a breakaway counter in the 91st minute.\n\n4. In the final, again playing against a favored team at that team\u2019s home stadium, and now missing four key players due to suspension, they again fell behind, needing late Drogba heroics, extra time, a colossal Petr Cech save against Arjen Robben, and a comeback during penalties (including more late Drogba heroics) to win. Bayern had a 43-9 shot advantage and a 20-1 advantage in corner kicks. Chelsea\u2019s one corner led to Drogba\u2019s match-tying goal.\n\nYou know those scenes in Friday Night Lights when Dillon comes back to win on a four-play, 240-yard drive that ends with a 90-yard Hail Mary with 0.001 seconds left? Chelsea did that in the Champions League against three straight opponents, two of whom (Barcelona and Bayern) finished 1-2 in both possession and pass-completion rate in Europe, one of whom (Barcelona) was an era-defining team that had won two of the last three Champions League titles. If it hadn\u2019t been Chelsea \u2014 a massively well-funded English club with global reach and an owner who owns multiple submarines \u2014 we would have talked about this as if it were the Cinderella run to end all Cinderella runs. No matter how dire their situation looked, Chelsea just kept surviving, trailing streams of exclamation points, and somehow repeatedly blowing up the clock a split second before the minute hand touched midnight.\n\nIt\u2019s hard to remember now what a disruptive force Chelsea was in world soccer during the first few years after Abramovich bought the club. Back in 2006 \u2014 the year the club won the second of its two straight Premier League titles under Jose Mourinho \u2014 the novelist John Lanchester joked that he was now supporting Chelsea \u201con Maoist grounds,\u201d and his friend responded, \u201cI think that\u2019s more Pol Pot\u2013ist.\u201d That was how Chelsea seemed back then: like a terrifying power that was either going to remake the game or burn it to the ground, if not both.\n\nYears before Manchester City batted an eyelash toward Abu Dhabi, it was Abramovich\u2019s takeover at Chelsea that established the archetype of the shady superbillionaire who buys a soccer team to use as his personal plaything. The old, established hierarchy of powerful clubs \u2014 the Manchester United\/Real Madrid cohort \u2014 certainly ran on money, but even the top clubs were shocked by the sums Abramovich could casually throw around \u2014 \u00a321 million for Shaun Wright-Phillips, \u00a324 million for Drogba, \u00a331 million for (gulp) Andriy Shevchenko. Not all these players worked out (see previous gulp), but what difference did that make when Chelsea could go back to the well for \u00a330 million whenever they felt like it? European soccer, which had no salary cap, no luxury tax, very little revenue sharing, no draft \u2014 almost no parity-fostering features at all \u2014 had no defense against this. Chelsea looked upon the dynamics of the sports economy and just luxuriantly did not give a shit. Any player in the world was potentially theirs for the taking.\n\nThis was also right around the moment when the Premier League stopped being an English sports league with international appeal and became an international sports league that happened to be based in England. Knowingly or not, Abramovich exacerbated all the tensions associated with the league\u2019s rush toward globalization. He was a trembly-lipped, bodyguard-flanked petro-oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. He was the long-distance governor of a remote Russian province. (Chukotka forever!) He collected yachts. He built the club both with global capital and in the model of global capital \u2014 ruthless, chaotic, indifferent to local tradition. Arsenal had filled squads with foreign players, but only in the service of Arsene Wenger\u2019s finer principles; they had to buy this Ivorian and this Estonian, because of the harmony and balance that would result from bringing them together. Abramovich, by contrast, bought foreign players the way other people might shop for shoes online. It wasn\u2019t about team chemistry or even tactics. It was about acquisition for its own sake, about taking whatever you wanted. Or anyway, that was how it seemed.\n\nPredictably, Chelsea was feared and hated. Abramovich compounded both emotions by hiring Jose Mourinho to manage the club in 2004. The new coach reveled in the panic Chelsea caused and did everything he could to provoke the English soccer establishment, from calling Arsene Wenger a \u201cvoyeur\u201d to signing the widely loathed Ashley Cole as the team\u2019s left back. Mourinho created the mother of all siege mentalities around the club, and it worked frighteningly well: In 2004-05, Chelsea demolished the field during the most annihilating championship run since the Football League was founded in 1888: 95 points, 29 wins, 15 goals (15!) conceded all season. They won again in 2005-06. For four and a half years \u2014 86 games, stretching from March 2004 to October 2008 \u2014 Chelsea didn\u2019t lose a single home game.\n\nIt was easy to hate them, but there was also something thrilling about the ease with which they turned English soccer upside-down. Top-level European soccer is essentially a racket that benefits the big clubs at everyone else\u2019s expense. The only thing capable of destabilizing the status quo is a massive amount of money. For around five years, from 2003 to 2008, Abramovich\u2019s billions were the most anarchic force in the sport. Chelsea wasn\u2019t staging a proletarian revolution; that\u2019s not how billionaires operate. But they were doing the next best thing \u2014 punching Manchester United in the mouth and swaggering off with both middle fingers up. Their audacity was its own kind of greatness, even if it was founded on an even more rigged game, global capitalism.\n\nNaturally, this couldn\u2019t last. Chelsea spent three seasons as the flashpoint of English soccer \u2014 the club with the most money, the deepest and most talented squad, the most flamboyant coach, and by far the most controversial headlines. At some point, though, the rest of soccer started to catch up. More billionaires bought into the game. Some of them, like Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City, were even richer than Abramovich. Other clubs got better at exploiting global finance, sponsorship, and the weird pathways of 21st-century commerce (cf. Real Madrid\u2019s plan to build a $1 billion resort island in the United Arab Emirates, which reads like something Jerry Jones dreamed up on a particularly sweaty peyote trip). UEFA passed Financial Fair Play, a set of rules that should\/might\/could possibly curtail runaway sugar-daddying in European soccer.\n\nAt the same time, Chelsea itself tore down some of the walls that kept it separate from other big teams. For years, Chelsea was at entertaining odds with the G-14, a supergroup of the biggest clubs in European soccer. After a lot of cloak-and-dagger maneuvering from then-Chelsea executive Peter Kenyon, the G-14 dissolved in January 2008 and was replaced by the European Club Association, a larger group that does include Chelsea. But the typical radicals-to-congressmen rules applied: Every time Chelsea made it a little further into the game\u2019s aristocracy, the club seemed a little less dangerous.\n\nMore urgently, Abramovich decided that winning the European Cup was his overriding top priority. After firing Mourinho\u2019s successor, the toadlike, thoroughly unqualified, and surprisingly successful Avram Grant \u2014 whose run included a 16-match unbeaten streak, a razor-thin loss on penalties in the 2008 Champions League final in Moscow, and a press conference in which he refused to answer any questions \u2014 Abramovich cycled through a sequence of far more conventional big-name managers like Phil Scolari, Carlo Ancelotti, and Guus Hiddink. He demanded \u201centertaining football\u201d in place of Mourinho\u2019s dull but punishingly effective 4-5-1. Where Chelsea had once seemed totally indifferent to the established ways of doing business, now they started to seem like another Juventus or Madrid \u2014 a big club answerable to the whims of the fans and the media. They even started sounding serious when they talked about turning a profit.\n\nPeople (including me) still complain about Chelsea and their money, but the truth is that they\u2019ve been pretty normal for a pretty long time. Manchester City has more or less taken over the \u201ccrazed and embattled vessel of the super-rich\u201d role at this point, with the difference being that their most provocative antics now feel kind of homespun and familiar, because Chelsea\u2019s already been there. Soccer has a way of assimilating whatever weird new challenges the clubs throw at it, and the aging squad of ex-controversialists at Stamford Bridge is proof that the game will still be there when Carlos Tevez finally calms down.\n\nThe terror that Chelsea represented in those early years was that with enough money, all the surprise could be taken out of the sport. When you spend a hundred million and then concede 15 goals across a 38-game season, you raise the legitimate fear that you will simply buy all the talent, win all the matches, and conquer European soccer with your unstoppable army of math. The irony, of course, is that by winning the Champions League with a frenzy of improbable, last-second comebacks, Chelsea finally conquered European soccer behind exactly the sort of unpredictability that they once threatened to eradicate. Somehow, winning the biggest tournament in the game was the least fearsome and most accessible thing they\u2019ve done in the Abramovich era. It took frantic adjustments, the way it does for everybody, and a different kind of good fortune. After nearly a decade under soccer\u2019s most iconoclastic rich dude, Chelsea now wins and loses on lucky breaks and heart, the way everyone loses and wins."}
{"text":"Yet the President is fast losing the few friends he did have in the capital, following a wild period in which he offered cover to white supremacists and ignited a war of words with North Korea, leaving GOP allies in the crossfire.\n\nThursday brought rebukes from two prominent Republican senators and a member of the highly influential Murdoch family, staunch supporters of the President.\n\nBob Corker, one of the most respected Senate Republicans, who has tried to keep open channels to the White House and coax Trump toward a more conventional foreign policy, unloaded on him in a spectacular manner.\n\nThe chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee is not prone to outspoken outbursts and thinks carefully before delivering his analysis. So his critique that the President has not shown sufficient stability, competence or understanding of the character of the country that he leads was devastating.\n\nSouth Carolina Sen. Tim Scott was another Trump ally who had been wrestling with a painful political and moral dilemma. But he also broke ranks Thursday, saying he could not defend the \"indefensible\" in the wake of Trump's comments about the alt-right rallies in Charlottesville.\n\nScott, the only black Republican senator, suggested that Trump had squandered the moral authority of his office -- a critical commodity vital in binding the nation together in a time of crisis or national tragedy that also helps to sustain the power of any presidency.\n\nAnother sign of Trump's growing isolation came Thursday night. James Murdoch, the 21st Century Fox CEO and son of Rupert Murdoch, who is one of Trump's close informal advisers, wrote a withering email denouncing the President's reaction to the White Supremacist rally and the violence it sparked.\n\n\"I can't even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis,\" Murdoch wrote. \"Or Klansmen, or terrorists. Democrats, Republicans, and others must all agree on this, and it compromises nothing for them to do so.\"\n\nTheir sharp words were a clear indication of the damage that Trump inflicted on himself with his unchained news conference Tuesday, in which he drew an equivalence between racists and counterprotestors in Charlottesville and offered a shocking glimpse of his inner beliefs and temperament.\n\nThe defections of the two senators followed a stampede away from Trump by CEOs who served on White House advisory councils, amid fears their company brands could be tarnished by association with the President.\n\nIt all left Trump increasingly alone and even more reliant on his ever-loyal core voters, who sustain him in times of self-inflicted controversy and public outrage, but who may not represent a sufficiently broad base on which to build a successful presidency.\n\nCorker and Scott have been slow to join the ranks of Trump's critics. Corker for instance, was on the President's short list to become vice president or secretary of state. And although he warned in May the White House was in a \"downward spiral,\" he has not been a fixture on the chorus of Trump critics that includes Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.\n\nCongressional tensions have a political price\n\nThe rebukes by Corker and Scott also pointed to a looming political problem that Trump has only exacerbated by his recent behavior.\n\nThe President was already lacking friends in the Senate, a reality that became clear in his narrowly failed push to repeal and replace Obamacare that left little doubt that few senators fear or revere him.\n\nIf he is to enact his ambitious political agenda that includes items such as tax reform and a massive infrastructure program -- or to influence Senate Republican legislation on these issues -- he will need to mend his toxic relations with top GOP members of the chamber, not least his feud with Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell.\n\nEvery lawmaker is acutely conscious of the political pressures that weigh on them in their districts and states. The fact that Corker and Scott felt able to speak out may hint at trouble for Trump's political fortunes.\n\nIt may also reflect an ebbing of enthusiasm for the President among grassroots GOP voters. While 83% of Republicans approved of the job that the President was doing in the latest CNN poll last week , there were indications that the number of GOP voters who strongly approve of him is beginning to wane.\n\nIn a way it's not surprising that Republicans feel free to criticize the President. His presidency has been in crisis from almost its first day. His approval ratings are the lowest of any modern president at an equivalent stage, and his campaign is facing a special counsel probe into allegations of collusion with a foreign espionage service. Only the resilient economy that continues to pump out good job numbers may be preventing a complete free-fall.\n\nThe implications of Corker's remarks Thursday are staggering.\n\nTaken to their logical conclusion, the remarks, from the lips of a friend, suggest that the President is simply not fit for office.\n\n\"The President has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful,\" Corker said, according to a video posted by local news website Nooga.com.\n\nThe Scott and Corker critiques fit into a trend that is seeing Trump's circle of influence and political relationships shrink as his White House slips further into self-imposed isolation and crisis.\n\nThe now-disbanded advisory councils on which the CEOs served might have been little more than public relations efforts, but their demise dealt a blow to Trump, who relished gathering corporate titans to talk business and to stage photo-ops in which he starred.\n\nIn many ways, after a largely unproductive first seven months in office, Trump is again becoming what he has always been \u2014 an outsider.\n\nHis White House inner circle is dwindling, after the ouster of former chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer, creatures of the Washington D.C. Republican establishment. There are rumors that another latecomer to Trump's campaign, his ideological alter ego Steve Bannon, may also be on the way out.\n\nThis week, Trump, having failed to lure a big hitter to the West Wing, named Hope Hicks, one of his most loyal aides, as interim communications director.\n\nIn another sign of his insularity, the President -- even when he leaves the White House -- rarely spends time outside his comfort zone in Trump-branded properties. He has spent extended time at his resort at Mar-a-Lago in Florida and Bedminster in New Jersey. If he goes out in Washington, it's usually to the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. If he's in the White House at weekends, he usually flees to his golf course on the banks of the Potomac in Virginia.\n\nTesting the limits of an unorthodox strategy\n\nTrump's narrowing political horizons are also reflected in his political strategy. In many ways, his unrestrained, unpredictable behavior of the last week recalls the persona that made him so popular with disaffected heartland voters.\n\nBy picking political fights on the status of Confederate monuments amid the fallout of his interventions on Charlottesville, he is raising issues that are important to a certain section of the conservative, Republican base.\n\nNext week, the President will return to the embrace of his adoring core voters, at what is expected to be a raucous rally in Arizona.\n\nHis pitch is sure to position him as the anti-establishment champion of voters who revile Washington. So while the defections by senators like Corker and Scott are damaging to his hopes of getting things done, they actually offer a measure of validation in a different political context.\n\nMany accounts of Trump's life and career stress that the President has never been the kind of person who cultivates vast networks of close political friendships. And he gives the impression that the only people who are not expendable to him are those in his family inner circle.\n\nRight from the start of his rise as a brash, young, real estate up-and-comer from Queens, Trump was spurned by New York elites and seen as a brazen self-publicist. He was never part of the corporate crowd he courted as President.\n\nBut his experience of being spurned helps explains the uncanny connection he forged with working-class, heartland voters who felt excluded from the economic boons unleashed by globalization and the economic recovery after the 2008 crisis.\n\nHis instinctive understanding of his fellow outsiders also helped shape his ferocious assault on the GOP establishment \u2014 which made him President.\n\nBut it left him with a string of political enemies that made the friends he did have in Washington all the more important. That's why the rebukes from Corker and Scott may end up being even more damaging than they first appear."}
{"text":"It's prom season at high schools across the country, a special time that until recently has been reserved for straight student couples. A sign of growing acceptance and change took place in West Virginia on Saturday night.\n\nThe Mussleman High School senior prom was held at The Heritage Hall in Inwood, West Virginia. Among the couples attending were Michael Martin, a Mussleman senior, and his boyfriend Logan Westrope, who attends Hedgesville High School.\n\nMichael was a four-year starter on his school's soccer team, making all-state as a goalie. He is also an all conference swimmer and tennis player. He told his coming out story on Outsports in December, in what was our most-viewed story of 2014. Michael will attend Wilson College in Pennsylvania this fall, major in Environmental Sustainability and play soccer. Logan plays tennis for Hedgesville High School. He will attend Penn State University and major in meteorology. The two have been dating for four months.\n\n\"We knew this would be a night to remember,\" Logan told Outsports. \"We walked in, checked in with our tickets, and were off to have fun! At first we were both a little hesitant to hold hands, not knowing how the rest of the student body would react. But after a short while, we were always next to each other and danced together the whole night.\n\n\"Some of the slow songs we danced to were 'Stay With Me' (Sam Smith), 'See You Again' (Wiz Khalifa), and 'All of Me' (John Legend). At the moment when the slow songs played, we would just stare into each other's eyes and would think of how lucky we are to have each other.\n\n\"We didn't hear any negative comments about Michael and I. A lot of people would come up to us (especially the girls) and say, 'You both are so cute!' or 'You guys look great!' Once we left the prom, I remember Michael saying to me in the car, 'Logan, this is our last prom and I'm so glad I got to spend it with you.' I couldn't have asked for a more perfect night.\"\n\nMichael asked Logan to the prom in March in the parking lot of Chik-fil-A, where Logan works. \"I asked Logan to the prom after his work. I gave him a bag with a chicken sandwich inside and asked, 'Are you a chicken or will you go to the prom with me?' \" Michael said. \"He easily and gladly said yes.\"\n\n\"Most everyone knows that I am gay and for the most part everyone that I work with there accepts me for who I am,\" Logan said. \"I was extremely nervous to tell my fellow employees but then realized I wasn't afraid to show the real me.\"\n\nHere are photos from their big prom night. All photos were taken by Logan's mom, Jodi Brotman Westrope:\n\nMichael and Logan get ready for the night\n\nWest Virginia cool\n\nLogan's dog, Piper, sees her master and his man off\n\nAn avid photographer (his Instagram page has 19,000 followers), Michael takes a shot of Logan at Poor House Farm Park in Martinsburg\n\nMichael adjusts Logan's corsage\n\nLogan returns the favor\n\nNo prom these days would be complete without a selfie\n\nThe happy couple at the end of the night\n\nMichael Martin can be reached via email (soccer4h96@gmail.com), Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Logan can be reached via email (logan.westropehhs@gmail.com), Facebook and Instagram."}
{"text":"In the city that never sleeps, most people could not be bothered to count the sheep that for three minutes every night this month have been filling more than 20 electronic billboards in Times Square.\n\nBales of hay, flocks of sheep and other pastoral scenes that were shot in Wyoming are being beamed onto screens ranging in size from 15,000 square feet down to 32 \u2014 small enough to fit on the side of a newsstand. A sheep\u2019s face peered over Broadway between 42nd and 43rd Streets as it appeared more than seven stories tall on the Nasdaq billboard.\n\nThe glimpses of rural life displayed in the heart of New York are part of \u201cMidnight Moment,\u201d a synchronized digital art exhibition curated by Times Square Arts that lasts from 11:57 p.m. to midnight each night. The footage, from a yet-to-be-released documentary called \u201cCounting Sheep,\u201d was first shown on Dec. 1 and will appear through Dec. 30."}
{"text":"The following is an analysis of a currently (at the time of this writing in early June) unnecessarily embargoed vulnerability in multiple OSes regarding the userland heap\/stack gap and how it affects grsecurity (or rather, doesn't affect it and hasn't affected it for many years). It's unnecessarily embargoed because the issue was already publicly discussed fully in Ga\u00ebl Delalleau's underappreciated 2005 CanSecWest presentation available here. A patch (available here) for this problem even existed prior to that presentation, created by Andrea Arcangeli in 2004 and included in at least SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 and 11 (as mentioned here).\n\nI am not a member of the private distros or linux-distros mailing lists, and though this particular issue is leaking through various channels like a sieve, I have no interest in digging out more details or ruining embargoes that I'm not party to. As a matter of principle, we choose not to participate in embargoes (even for issues reported to us) as they distort public perception of security: differences in response time, level of proactive measures, and quality of in-house security talent is obfuscated through the activity and delay happening behind closed doors. Effective security shouldn't depend on hoping the \"bad guys\" don't have early access to vulnerability information, which is what zero-days are all about. So this article is being written based off my impression of what the \"newly\" discovered vulnerability is, knowing nothing about whatever particular userland application prompted the sudden intense interest, and will be published immediately after expiration of the embargo.\n\nAndrea's patch mentioned above was never included in upstream Linux in 2004, and no improved version appeared in its place in the years following. That changed in 2010 when a highly-publicized instance of the kind of vulnerability Andrea's patch was designed to prevent was published against the X server by Rafal Wojtczuk. Rafal had worked with distributions on the now-shuttered private vendor-sec mailing list to ensure a fix for the issue was created at the kernel level. Seven weeks later, based purely off private discussions, Linus attempted to silently fix the issue via this commit, yet it had to be revised repeatedly later (at least as late as 2013 -- see this commit) as it broke userland applications and oopsed the kernel. But more importantly, Linus' patch didn't address the wider problem, but instead only the particular reported instance of the problem -- attacker-controlled recursion that could be prevented by a single guard page. We mentioned the problems with the patch publicly in comments on an LWN article on Linus' patch, but those comments, technical explanations, and C\/assembly examples of issues not covered by Linus' patch fell on deaf ears; the upstream Linux stack\/heap guard code saw no improvements in the following years. And now, as they say, the chickens have come home to roost.\n\nI imagine the issue is that someone again realized the behavior of GCC and LLVM on non-Windows OSes with regard to the default non-existence of stack probing and found some new instance of a vulnerable and widely-used application\/service to exploit. The following is a summary of the main issues which have all been heavily detailed and explained already in Ga\u00ebl's 2005 presentation from slide 24 onward (under the heading of \"Jumping the stack gap\"). Calls to alloca() over a page in size, large local variables, variable-length arrays (VLAs), etc can all easily skip over a single guard page and read from\/write to an attacker-controlled mmap-based heap allocation and cause further deeper stack frames to do the same, with all the implications on saved instruction pointers, etc. Not only does this problem affect the main process stack, but it's an issue for thread stacks as well. It was part of the motivation for the creation of GRKERNSEC_RAND_THREADSTACK over four years ago in response to this alloca()-based vulnerability\/exploit by Exodus Intelligence. Further easing exploitation is that Linux will honor mmap hints, conceivably permitting some rare vulnerable application to allow an attacker to suggest an allocation just below the stack guard page without needing to exhaust virtual address space to accomplish it (which would open up this vulnerability for more 64-bit apps).\n\nUnder PaX's ASLR, this is infeasible since mmap hints are ignored. MAP_FIXED requests are of course honored as required by the standard, but an attacker controlling those can just as easily blow away any existing allocation and replace it with their own content. Further, much like Andrea's original patch, our heap\/stack protection (implemented via an enforced gap instead of Linus' guard page) can be adjusted in size at runtime. Andrea's patch defaulted to a single page gap (for compatibility reasons that aren't a problem for the PaX implementation) whereas the PaX implementation enforces a 64KB gap at minimum by default. Without stack probing in place, any uncontrolled alloca() could be abused, so the chosen size of the enforced gap is a tradeoff between virtual address space wastage and security-based assumptions about reasonable stack allocation ranges an attacker might have control over without being fully unbounded. It should be clear that kernel-only attempts to solve this problem will necessarily always be incomplete, as the real issue lies in the lack of stack probing. Since the alternative real solution depends on rebuilding all userland, this is likely the only feasible solution for the foreseeable future. On grsecurity systems, the size of the heap\/stack gap can be adjusted via the \/proc\/sys\/vm\/heap_stack_gap sysctl entry. For instance, the following command will enforce a 1MB main stack gap for all new allocations:\n\necho 1048576 > \/proc\/sys\/vm\/heap_stack_gap\n\nAn interesting historical note: looking through the current upstream Linux kernel code, one will find a remnant perhaps of Andrea's never-merged original implementation, a single \"int heap_stack_gap = 0;\" line unreferenced by anything else in the kernel, but introduced by accident via an unrelated nommu commit by David Howells in 2005. This variable in Andrea's implementation held the number of pages of the variable-sized heap\/stack gap, something Linus' later implementation crucially lacked. Despite several public comments and LKML threads about this line, it continues to stand alone as a reminder about the dangers of NIH.\n\nOne might now be wondering: doesn't this same issue also apply to the kernel stack? Yes, it does. Here too upstream developers failed to note or care about this particular excerpt from our KSTACKOVERFLOW configuration help:\n\nThis introduces guard pages that in combination with the alloca checking of the STACKLEAK feature and removal of thread_info from the kernel stack prevents all forms of kernel process stack overflow abuse.\n\nThe PaX STACKLEAK plugin was added to grsecurity prior to my work on KSTACKOVERFLOW, so KSTACKOVERFLOW built upon it. The STACKLEAK plugin importantly instruments all implicit and explicit calls to alloca() by the kernel, ensuring the requests wouldn't step outside expected stack boundaries. One might recall the STACKLEAK plugin from when it was \"ported\" by a member of the KSPP, making no mention whatsoever in the commit description or Kconfig help of this functionality, and also having failed to even enable the plugin at all due to failing to adjust some copied and pasted lines from the Makefile to actually enable the plugin. This functionality also wasn't mentioned during a subsequent recent \"port\". This is but one of many examples that seriously raise the question of how security functionality will be properly implemented and maintained upstream if the maintainers don't understand what the code they've copy+pasted from grsecurity does in the first place.\n\nThe upstream CONFIG_VMAP_STACK has been claimed by many to be equivalent to what's present in grsecurity. Its Kconfig description includes the following:\n\nThis causes kernel stack overflows to be caught immediately rather than causing difficult-to-diagnose corruption.\n\nThis claim was repeated by various news outlets reporting on the upstream VMAP_STACK feature. One may recall VMAP_STACK for being responsible for over a dozen kernel CVEs, introducing potential memory corruption and denial of service through its design and resulting in several additional CVEs for memory handling errors in the fixes needed for those CVEs. Defending VMAP_STACK recently against claims by me that the implementation is objectively bad, Kees Cook of the KSPP said \"With this implementation in place, now those kernel stack exploit methods are dead.\" Remember that even though stack overflow vulnerabilities are quite rare in the first place, let alone exploitable ones, at least one of the published exploits for a Linux kernel stack overflow vulnerability (CVE-2010-3848) was exactly for this kind of vulnerability that VMAP_STACK would be unable to protect against. Unless there were at least 99 other exploitable stack overflow vulnerabilities in the kernel, characterizations by another KSPP and linux-hardened contributor that VMAP_STACK fixes 99% of the issue are also patently false.\n\nIn fact, VMAP_STACK lacking the equivalent functionality in grsecurity not only leaves it possible to exploit certain VLA-based overflows, it may ironically make it even easier to exploit these lingering forms of kernel stack overflows. Vmalloc allocations are less frequent to the point that one could more reliably target an adjacent victim kernel stack or other large allocation, not needing to know its absolute address.\n\nAs should now be clear, the kinds of kernel stack overflows grsecurity can prevent are not at all dead upstream, or for that matter in the recent linux-hardened project, which in its comparison matrix comparing upstream to grsecurity under the heading of \"Prevent kernel stack overflows\" suggests that upstream's reimplementation of grsecurity's protection for this class of vulnerabilities is \"complete\". In our comparison matrix we marked the associated KSPP feature with a orange minus symbol denoting \"watered-down features that differ significantly in their implementation and security benefits\". We'd been called misleading for this, while I held my tongue knowing the facts of the matter. By now it should be evident how much faith should be put into security claims and comparisons to grsecurity by developers that don't understand the basics of the code they're copying and pasting. It also demonstrates what we've said all along about the synergistic benefits of various grsecurity and PaX features that aren't realized by mindless piecemeal extraction.\n\nA careful reader may have noted the title of this article is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the LWN article linked above. This blog is being published as a teachable moment to demonstrate that articles written by non-security experts simply repeating the security claims of other non-security experts about their own code or others' code are to be taken with a large grain of salt. The \"ancient kernel hole\" LWN grandiosely proclaimed was closed, was in fact not closed at all for the past seven years. The facts destroying the myth have been available there for everyone to see all this time, but when a news site seems to care so little about accuracy in reporting that it doesn't (for instance) contact the subject of an article prior to publication, or correct glaring factual errors in its content that they've been made aware of, instead requiring readers to wade through pages of third-party comments, it's no wonder that the public is fooled by authoritative-sounding articles and don't bother investigating further. Some months ago I stopped publicly commenting on LWN due to its lack of concern for accuracy in reporting and commenters' lack of interest in learning. When the next issue is reported incorrectly, a reader can't assume an expert will chime in with a proper analysis as happened in this case seven years ago.\n\nTechnical debt always finds a way to be repaid, with interest."}
{"text":"Double Dragon is one of the most iconic games ever made, and while the series is best known as side-scrolling beat \u2019em up, there was actually a legit Double Dragon fighting game based in the 1994 movie.\n\nReleased for the Neo Geo CD, the movie-based fighting game was actually a well-developed and fun game that even The Angry Video Game Nerd (James) can\u2019t help but praise. It\u2019s apparently one of his favorite fighters of all time.\n\nNow, James is no fighting game aficionado, but he is a gaming enthusiast who knows a thing or two about good and bad video games. Watch him play and critique the obscure Double Dragon fighting game\u2026\n\nAre you old enough to remember Double Dragon? Do you have any fond memories of the series? Let us know in the comments below."}
{"text":"Nintendo will release special shiny packaged versions of its upcoming Nintendo 3DS ports of Pok\u00e9mon Gold and Silver, the company announced today \u2014 at least in Europe and Japan.\n\nThe company\u2019s European division tweeted out the photo below, confirming that the boxes would contain digital download codes for the games; these can also be purchased separately.\n\nOn 22\/09, shiny packaged versions of #Pokemon Gold and Pok\u00e9mon Silver containing a download code will be released in shops. pic.twitter.com\/PpfYtZFzp2 \u2014 Nintendo of Europe (@NintendoEurope) August 18, 2017\n\nThe Japanese version of the retail release includes additional goods: magnets shaped like the original Game Boy Color cartridges, stickers and a poster featuring the Gold and Silver generation\u2019s Pok\u00e9mon.\n\nPolygon has reached out to Nintendo to ask if the special edition boxes will also be available in North America and will update when we hear back. Maybe don\u2019t get your hopes up, however \u2014 similar retail releases for the 3DS Virtual Console ports of Pok\u00e9mon Red and Green last year didn\u2019t make it stateside.\n\nNintendo announced in June that Pok\u00e9mon Gold and Silver, originally released in 2000 for the Game Boy Color, would be available to download on the Nintendo 3DS eShop. Nintendo also confirmed that the updated versions of the games would be compatible for the first time with Pok\u00e9mon Bank, the 3DS service that allows players to deposit, store and manage their pocket monsters in private Boxes online.\n\nPok\u00e9mon Gold and Silver will be available to download on Sept. 22."}
{"text":"TODAY marks the 22nd anniversary of Xena: Warrior Princess, who first came into our lives in 1995 and has remained a major part of pop culture ever since.\n\nFor many, Xena was an icon of feminism, female empowerment and strength and became an icon for the LGBT community thanks to her challenging ideas of masculinity and femininity, and her relationship with sidekick Gabrielle.\n\nSo to celebrate all that Xena\u2019s given us over the years, here are a few facts you may not have known about the show, complete with tributes from around the Twittersphere from fans celebrating this auspicious day.\n\nLUCY LAWLESS WAS NOT THE FIRST CHOICE TO PLAY XENA\n\nXena is so ingrained in pop culture now that it\u2019s hard to imagine anyone else playing the part, but she wasn\u2019t actually the first choice for it.\n\nThe first choice was British actress Vanessa Angel, who starred in the TV adaptation of Weird Science. However Angel fell ill before she was supposed to fly to the set and Tapert eventually decided on giving Lawless the role.\n\nRENEE O\u2019CONNOR WASN\u2019T THE FIRST CHOICE FOR GABRIELLE, EITHER\n\nRenee O\u2019Connor has similarly become the only face fans could imagine playing Xena\u2019s trusty sidekick and love interest Gabrielle, but she also wasn\u2019t the first choice.\n\nSunny Doench was meant for the role but backed out, reportedly because she didn\u2019t want to leave her partner in the States. Lucky break for us, but not so much for her.\n\nXENA\u2019S LOOK WAS MODELLED OFF A TENNIS STAR\n\nXena was originally going to be blonde, but Lucy Lawless died her hair black.\n\nLawless decided that an Amazonian princess should look more like Gabriela Sabatini who was \u201cthe big noise in tennis\u201d at the time.\n\nIn an interview for the Emmys, Lawless said: \u201cI was like, \u2018What about being like her? She\u2019s big and bronze and dark-haired.\u2019 Fortunately they went that way, because my hair would have fallen out if we tried to keep it blonde.\u201d\n\nTHE CREDITS HAD A RUNNING IN-JOKE FOR FANS\n\nThe credits regularly had a fake disclaimer similar to the Humane Association messages saying \u201cno animals have been harmed\u201d.\n\nIt started as an occasional joke in season one, but by season two, every single episode had disclaimers like, \u201cDespite Gabrielle\u2019s incessant hurling, Ulysses\u2019 ship was not harmed during the making of this motion picture\u201d, \u201cNo harpies were harmed in the making of this episode\u201d, \u201cNo oversized Polynesian-style Bamboo Horses were harmed during the production of this motion picture. However many wicker lawn chairs gave their lives,\u201d and in an episode featuring Xena\u2019s death; \u201cXena was permanently harmed in the making of this motion picture, but kept her spirits up.\u201d\n\nFans caught on and started keeping track of each message via internet forums. Which brings us to the next point.\n\nXENA AND GABRIELLE WERE PRACTICALLY MARRIED\n\nSpeculation has always been rife over the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle and through many interviews over the years, the cast and crew have confirmed that gay subtext was done entirely on purpose.\n\nBut while the relationship was never made explicitly clear on the show, Lawless told Lesbian News in 2003 that Xena was \u201cGay. Gay, definitely.\u201d Not bisexual, not pansexual, not even just curious and experimenting \u2014 as far as she\u2019s concerned Xena and Gabrielle, \u201cThey\u2019re married, man.\u201d\n\nXENA WAS ONE OF THE FIRST SHOWS TO HAVE AN ONLINE FANDOM \u2014 AND IT\u2019S STILL GOING STRONG\n\nWhile nowadays, we use the internet for pretty much everything all the time, the 90s were a different time. Yet somehow, Xena managed to grow an online fandom.\n\nThe Xena fandom was one of the first to utilize the net to discuss their favourite show via the Xena Online Community board.\n\nThe Xena fandom was so strong that it only just had its final convention in 2015, a full 14 years after the show ended, and the online forums are still alive and thriving.\n\nXENA WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO DIE\n\nXena was originally only brought into Hercules because producer Rob Tapert wanted a dark figure to counterbalance the cheerful and heroic Hercules.\n\nShe was supposed to be there for three episodes and then die, but Tapert and the other producers liked Xena so much that they remodelled their previously planned Hercules spin-off just for her.\n\nPraise the TV Gods.\n\nThis story originally appeared in the New Zealand Herald."}
{"text":"Please enable Javascript to watch this video\n\nOccupy protestors performed a small bit of satirical play acting Wednesday as a form of demonstrating against the influence of corporate money in government.\n\nBoth Occupiers and supporters of LGBT rights had their say as the lawmakers and lobbyists observed from the balconies inside the Capitol Rotunda.\n\n\u201cToday's event is a piece of political theater and it\u2019s is intended to showcase how ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council has an influence and a direct impact on our legislative branch,\u201d said Occupy Salt Lake protestor Michael Wilson.\n\nALEC describes itself as a conservative legislative think-tank that creates model legislation lawmakers can take to their states and use. According to their website, they are the \"only\" organization to provide that service in the country. Their next annual meeting is in Salt Lake City.\n\n\u201cAttending the summit here this summer is $7000 if you're an attendee or $50 if you happen to be a legislator,\u201d said Wilson.\n\nFOX 13 tried contacting ALEC via phone and email, but had not received a response back as of Wednesday whether those costs disparities between a private person and a legislator are true.\n\nAn LGBT protest that also happened earlier Wednesday had protestors expressing a degree of anger in regards to a statewide antidiscrimination bill getting quickly tabled by lawmakers.\n\nFOX 13 will have more on this protest tonight during News at Nine."}
{"text":"MADRID \u2014 European basketball authorities say they will investigate an alleged assault of former Portland Trail Blazer player Rudy Fernandez while he was boarding the team bus in Lithuania.\n\nFernandez plays for Real Madrid, and the mayhem followed his team's 105-104 overtime win over Zalgiris Kaunas on Thursday.\n\nMadrid official Juan Sanchez says two fans hit Fernandez on the shoulder and neck and struck a security guard several times. The Euroleague says it has asked for reports from both teams and the local police.\n\nFernandez was back in his home country of Spain on Friday. He says he is fine and thankful \"things did not go further.\"\n\nHe stresses that \"people should not think that all Lithuanian fans are like that just because of these two people. Not at all.\"\n\n-- The Associated Press"}
{"text":"Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, compared Connecticut's homicide rates during the 10 years following the law's implementation to the rates that would have been expected had the law not been implemented. The large drop in homicides was found only in firearm-related killings, not in homicides by other means, as would be expected if the law drove the reduction.\n\nEarlier research from Webster found that Missouri\u2019s 2007 repeal of its handgun license law was associated with a 25 percent increase in its firearm homicide rates. For the Connecticut study, Webster and his colleagues used comparison states with homicide trends that most closely matched those in Connecticut before the law went into effect in order to predict what would have happened to homicide trends in Connecticut had the handgun licensing law not been implemented. \u201cTaken together, these studies provide compelling evidence that permit to purchase licensing systems is one of the most effective policies we have to reduce gun violence,\u201d Webster says.\n\nIn 1995 Connecticut added a law to the state's books requiring licenses (permits) and requiring background checks. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research decided to look into whether or not there were any results as a result. Comparing these results with results of the inverse happening in Missouri after they repealed their handgun law license has led to the shocking conclusion that gun laws help save lives. Cold dead hands and all that."}
{"text":"Story highlights Police: 14-year-old was armed with a pistol, held hostages in a 2nd-floor classroom\n\nHe released the hostages first, then put down his gun and surrendered to authorities\n\n(CNN) A 14-year-old boy held numerous students and a teacher hostage Tuesday inside his West Virginia high school -- a scary episode that ended peacefully with the teen dropping his gun and surrendering, police said.\n\nA 911 call placed at about 1:30 p.m. alerted Barbour County authorities that a person with a gun was inside Philip Barbour High School in Philippi, a city of 3,000 people about 40 miles south of Morgantown.\n\nAccording to a West Virginia State Police post on Facebook, responding officers arrived to find a 14-year-old armed with a pistol with other students and the teacher in a second-floor classroom.\n\nEveryone else was quickly shuttled to safety, first to the school's football field and then home via bus.\n\nNo injuries were reported.\n\nRead More"}
{"text":"Tony Abbott under fire from Cabinet colleagues over decision to grant knighthood to Prince Philip\n\nUpdated\n\nSome of Prime Minister Tony Abbott's most senior colleagues are bewildered, angered and dismayed by his decision to award an Australian knighthood to Prince Philip.\n\nPrince Philip and former Defence Force chief Angus Houston were named Australia's newest knights today, under an honours system reinstated by Mr Abbott last year.\n\nCabinet ministers have told the ABC the Prime Minister did not consult any of the leadership group before announcing the move.\n\nMr Abbott agreed it was a \"captain's call\", saying he consulted only with Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove and Order of Australia chairman Sir Angus.\n\nMinisters said they would have opposed the knighthood, if asked.\n\nOne described it as a \"stupid\" decision that would make the Government an object of ridicule.\n\nAnother said the Prime Minister's colleagues were willing him to succeed, but he had started the year badly and had made the job of trying to lift the Coalition's electoral credibility just that much harder.\n\n\"There is an old saying that when you are in a hole you should stop digging,\" one minister said.\n\n\"Well, we've just punched through the Earth's crust.\"\n\nAnother Coalition MP said the move reinforced the left-wing caricature of the Prime Minister: the appointment harked to Australia's past and the opportunity of making a positive statement about the future on the national day had been squandered.\n\nThe private anger of Coalition MPs and ministers was given public voice by the conservative chief minister of the northern territory, Adam Giles.\n\nHe said that when he read reports of the Prince's knighthood this morning he wondered if he had woken on April Fools' Day.\n\n\"It's Australia Day,\" he said. \"We're not a bunch of tossers, let's get it right.\"\n\nThe move to award an Australian knighthood to the Queen's husband has also been criticised by republicans, with former Western Australia premier Geoff Gallop calling it a \"sad reflection\" on Australia.\n\nAnd it drew fire on social media from commentators including Canberra press gallery veteran Laurie Oakes, who tweeted: \"Libs must wonder who can help a PM apparently determined to be seen as a joke. #jokeknighthood\".\n\nAnswering questions about the decision at an Australia Day event in Canberra today, Mr Abbott said he was \"really pleased\" the Queen had accepted his recommendations on the knighthoods and added that whilst the Duke had not called to say thank you for the honour, he did not \"expect gratitude\".\n\nAnd he said social media criticism of the move was akin to \"electronic graffiti\"\n\n\"I think that in the media, you make a big mistake to pay too much attention to social media. You wouldn't report what's sprayed up up on the walls of buildings and look, as I said, social media has its place, but it's anonymous,\" he told reporters.\n\n\"It's often very abusive and in a sense, it has about as much authority and credibility as graffiti that happens to be put forward by means of IT.\"\n\nMr Abbott said he stood by the decision to award the knighthood to 93-year-old Prince Philip because \"the monarchy has been an important part of Australia's life since 1788\".\n\n\"Prince Philip has been a great servant of Australia, he's been a great servant of all the countries of the Commonwealth.\n\n\"Here in this country he's the patron of hundreds of organisations. He's the inspiration and wellspring of the Duke of Edinburgh's Awards which have provided leadership training for tens if not hundreds of thousands of Australians over the years.\n\n\"I'm just really pleased that in his 90s, towards the end of a life of service and duty, we in this country are able to properly acknowledge what he's done for us.\"\n\nAsked how widely he had consulted before making the decision, Mr Abbott said: \"As you would expect, I consulted with the Chairman of the Order of Australia, and I consulted with the Governor-General. That's what you would expect.\"\n\nAsked if Prince Philip was a \"captain's pick\" for the award, Mr Abbott said \"I'm not going to dispute your characterisation\" before calling for questions on other topics.\n\nShorten says award for British royal 'a time warp'\n\nOpposition Leader Bill Shorten, who yesterday called for a renewed debate on Australia becoming a republic, said giving a knighthood to an English royal on Australia Day was outside the mainstream of Australian thinking.\n\n\"It's a time warp where we're giving knighthoods to English royalty,\" Mr Shorten told Fairfax Radio.\n\n\"On Australia Day, we're talking about Australia, Australian identity, the Government's managed to find a British royal to give a medal to, a knighthood to.\"\n\nHe said that if Labor won office it would not continue the tradition of knights or dames.\n\n\"When we look at Australia in the 21st century, it's about who we're going to be as a people and I just think giving out a top award to a British royal is anachronistic.\"\n\nPrince has 'long relationship with Australia'\n\nEarlier the head of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, Professor David Flint, said the knighthood was an appropriate recognition for Prince Philip's \"long relationship with Australia\".\n\n\"He was a sailor in the convoys that protected Australian troops being taken to the Middle East in the Second World War,\" Professor Flint said.\n\n\"He was also in the Pacific Fleet and he was actually in Tokyo Bay at the time the Japanese surrendered.\n\n\"He opened the '56 Olympics, he's got a very long relationship through the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme.\"\n\nBut Mr Gallop said Mr Abbott's decision to start awarding Australian knighthoods had \"heavily polluted\" the Australian honours system.\n\n\"As we try to reflect upon our nation ... one of Australia's highest honours goes to someone who's not part of our community,\" he said.\n\n\"In effect this is the eccentricity of Tony Abbott's views on our constitution coming through.\n\n\"It certainly doesn't reflect the view of the Australian people through a meritocratic process.\"\n\nFamed for his off-the-cuff quips and gaffes, Prince Philip, who married Queen Elizabeth in 1947, is the longest serving royal consort in British history.\n\nThe Queen once described him as \"my strength and stay all these years\".\n\nBut the duke, a constant presence by his wife's side throughout her six decades on the throne, has suffered a series of health scares in recent years.\n\nTopics: constitution, government-and-politics, royal-and-imperial-matters, human-interest, abbott-tony, australia, united-kingdom\n\nFirst posted"}
{"text":"WE STILL NEED YOUR HELP! HOURS LEFT TO PLEDGE!\n\nEven though we have met our goal, we'd love to raise another $3k to help cover the Kickstarter and Amazon fees (8-10%). We still have some great rewards available and even several producer credits left!\n\nRECENT PRESS\n\nHuffington Post - USA Today - Indiewire - \"Project of the Day\"\n\nSundance just featured us on their front page! Check it out here.\n\nABOUT THE FILM\n\nFIGHT CHURCH is a feature documentary about the confluence of Christianity and Mixed Martial Arts. The film follows several pastors and fighters in a quest to reconcile their faith with a sport that some consider violent and barbaric. Faith is tried and questions are raised. Can you really love your neighbor as yourself and then punch him in the face?\n\nWHY WE NEED YOUR HELP\n\nThe film is still a long ways from being done and we must raise 30k to complete our shooting and post production. Here's where your money will be going:\n\n1) $12,500- We need to return to New York and various other states to film with our main character and additional characters. Without this footage, we won't be able to tell the full story.\n\n2) $17,500- We have another 6-9 months of editing ahead of us. We need to hire an editor and an assistant editor at a bare bones salary to work with us to shape the story. We have about half the film edited, but can't finish without a budget.\n\nPlease help us tell the stories of these amazing individuals today! We want to finish our passion project and can't do it without your help!\n\n________________________________________________________\n\nTHE FILMMAKERS & THEIR FILMS\n\nWhile some of you may already be familiar with our work, others may not. Here are a few of the past projects we've completed.\n\nDaniel Junge, Director\n\nSaving Face - Oscar Winner for Best Documentary Short. The film follows several Pakistani women who are victims of acid violence.\n\nThe Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner - Oscar Nomination. The documentary follows the assisted suicide ballot initiative in Washington State.\n\nThey Killed Sister Dorothy - Jury and Audience Award Winner at SXSW, Emmy-nominated, Oscar Short-Listed. Documentary on the killing of 73-year-old Catholic nun and activist Sister Dorothy Stang.\n\nBryan Storkel, Director\n\nHoly Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians - Award-winning documentary tells the story of a team of card counting Christians who took millions from Vegas.\n\nEben Kostbar & Joseph McKelheer, Producers (Film Harvest)\n\nFree Samples - Narrative Feature starring Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Ritter, & Jess Weixler. Premiered at Tribeca 2012.\n\nThe Hammer - Award Winning Biopic on UFC fighter, Matt Hamill.\n\n__________________________________________________\n\nHOW CAN YOU HELP US FURTHER?\n\nPlease follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and please tell your friends and family about our Kickstarter campaign.\n\nFight Church on Facebook\n\nFight Church on Twitter\n\nBecause of how Kickstarter works, if we don't reach our goal of $30k, we won't get to keep any of the money. We can't do this without you! Here's how you can help us...\n\n1) Like us on Facebook, then share the Kickstarter Link with your FB friends, asking them to pledge.\n\n2) Make a small donation to help us finish the film!\n\nTHANK YOU VERY MUCH! :)"}
{"text":"The spotlight cast on the novelist by the Charlie Hebdo attacks should not mislead us \u2013 his target here is not Islamism but suggestible modern men News: Houellebecq stops promotion of novel after Charlie Hebdo attack\n\nAs the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders continues to unfold, French readers are turning to the magazine\u2019s latest cover star, with Michel Houellebecq\u2019s Soumission racing to the top of bestseller lists at Amazon.fr. But is France\u2019s most celebrated controversialist offering a splenetic vision of the Muslim threat to Europe or a spineless \u201csubmission\u201d to gradual Islamic takeover? Actually, neither. It\u2019s much more interesting than that.\n\nThose riffling impatiently through the opening for controversy will be disappointed, as we are introduced slowly to the narrator, Fran\u00e7ois, a middle-aged literary academic who teaches at the Sorbonne. He is an expert on Huysmans, the cultish 19th-century anatomist of decadence, and he sleeps hungrily with his students. But he is bored. The narration is enjoyably sardonic, a pungent mixture of deadpan jokes about sexual politics and close reading.\n\nThe novel, due to be published in English later this year, is set seven years hence, in the year 2022. Fran\u00e7ois settles in to enjoy the TV spectacle of the presidential elections, which he considers second only to the World Cup for entertainment value. After the first round of voting, the two candidates left are Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National, and the head of France\u2019s new Islamic party, Mohammed Ben Abbes. The Socialists do a deal with the \u201cMuslim Fraternity\u201d to defeat Le Pen, and Ben Abbes becomes president. Immediately all women go veiled in the street, state secondary schools adopt an Islamic curriculum, and Fran\u00e7ois is informed that he cannot return to his university work unless he converts to Islam.\n\nSome in France have already complained that the novel fans right-wing fears of the Muslim population, but that is to miss Houellebecq\u2019s deeply mischievous point. Islamists and anti-immigration demagogues, the novel gleefully points out, really ought to be on the same side, because they share a suspicion of pluralist liberalism and a desire to return to \u201ctraditional\u201d or pre-feminist values, where a woman submits to her husband \u2013 just as \u201cIslam\u201d means that a Muslim submits to God.\n\nBut Soumission is, arguably, not primarily about politics at all. The real target of Houellebecq\u2019s satire \u2013 as in his previous novels \u2013 is the predictably manipulable venality and lustfulness of the modern metropolitan man, intellectual or otherwise. Fran\u00e7ois himself happily submits to the new order, not for any grand philosophical or religious reasons, but because the new Saudi owners of the Sorbonne pay much better \u2013 and, more importantly, he can be polygamous. As he notes, in envious fantasy, of his charismatic new boss, who has adroitly converted already: \u201cOne 40-year-old wife for cooking, one 15-year-old wife for other things \u2026 no doubt he had one or two others of intermediate ages.\u201d\n\nMichel Houellebecq stops promotion of new novel after Charlie Hebdo attack Read more\n\nThe novel ends in an almost science-fictional conditional mood, with Fran\u00e7ois looking forward dreamily to his own conversion and a future of endless sensual gratification: \u201cI\u2019d have nothing to regret.\u201d But with his publisher under police protection, Houellebecq must surely regret the manner in which his darkly clever and funny book has become another succ\u00e8s de scandale."}
{"text":"Two worlds collide in Mario + Rabbids\u00ae Kingdom Battle!\n\nThis game is available for purchase exclusively on Nintendo eShop for Nintendo Switch.\n\nGold Edition includes game and season pass:\n\n8 new solo challenges + 5 co-op maps\n\n16 new weapons.\n\nAn exclusive world featuring a new hero, coming in early 2018.\n\nThe Mushroom Kingdom has been torn apart by a mysterious vortex, transporting the chaotic Rabbids into this once-peaceful land. To restore order, Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and Yoshi must team up with a whole new crew: four Rabbids heroes!\n\nTogether, they will battle with weapons through four worlds filled with combat, puzzles, and unpredictable enemies. Developed exclusively for the Nintendo Switch\u2122 system, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is the best of the Mario and Rabbids franchises, combining all that you love about Mario's iconic universe with the side-splitting antics of the Rabbids."}
{"text":"Image caption Harry Redknapp said two men fell on their knees and began pulling at his trouser legs\n\nTottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp has revealed he was mugged while attending a football match in Spain on Thursday.\n\nRedknapp, 63, was in Madrid to see the Spanish capital's two main teams, Real and Atletico, play in the Copa del Rey.\n\nHe said two men fell to their knees in front of him and tugged at his trouser legs to distract him while four others took money and items from his pockets.\n\nRedknapp said he did not report the incident to police.\n\nHe said he was at the match with his assistant manager Kevin Bond and had to borrow money from him to pay for a taxi back to his hotel and for dinner before returning to London.\n\n'Got some sweets'\n\nThe former Portsmouth and West Ham manager said: \"I'm walking round the outside of the stadium, it's a fantastic atmosphere, there's all little stalls there selling sweets.\n\nI just probably looked stupid or something Harry Redknapp\n\n\"I got some sweets, me and Kevin, and it was so packed. The next thing there's two guys on their knees in front of me and I felt someone pull my overcoat.\n\n\"I thought 'what are you doing?'. The next thing he's got my keys on the floor.\n\n\"I thought 'is he a blind man or someone having trouble walking properly?' What are they doing, these two blokes?\n\n\"I'm going 'let go of my trousers', pushing them away. While I'm doing that they're rifling my pockets, there were about six of them. And then they went.\n\nImage caption The Spurs manager was in Spain to watch Real Madrid beat Atletico Madrid\n\n\"I thought 'what are they doing?' I went to put my hand in my pockets and realised what they'd done.\n\n\"They took everything. All my money, credit cards, everything really.\"\n\nThe Spurs manager said he did not believe the muggers knew who he was.\n\n\"I just probably looked stupid or something, and they thought 'here's one here, he's not Spanish, obviously and we're looking for a foreigner'.\"\n\nReal Madrid won the match at Atletico's Vicente Calderon Stadium 1-0. Redknapp said the incident unsettled him and he left about 15 minutes before the end of the game, which he attended to watch potential transfer target Diego Forlan, the former Manchester United striker."}
{"text":"Image caption Mr Eastwood said if the 90,000 people who voted in the Brexit referendum turn out in March we wouldn't be 'hurtling towards direct rule'\n\nThe SDLP leader has urged the public to turn out for March's assembly elections in the same numbers as the EU referendum in June.\n\nColum Eastwood said if voter turnout was as high as it was for Brexit it could avoid the collapse of Stormont and a lengthy period of direct rule.\n\nThe referendum saw 63% of the electorate in Northern Ireland voting.\n\nThat was eight percentage points higher than the turnout for the Stormont election the previous month.\n\n'Alternative power-sharing government'\n\nMr Eastwood told the BBC he believed that a higher turnout on 2 March would increase the chances of a change to the status quo.\n\nSpeaking to the Inside Politics programme, he argued that his party and the Ulster Unionists had shown they could work together in a spirit of co-operation, but acknowledged they would need other parties to form an alternative power-sharing government together.\n\nMr Eastwood said that next month's election presented a \"major opportunity\" to change local politics.\n\nImage caption 62.7% of the electorate voted in the referendum, 8% higher than the turnout for the May's Stormont election\n\n\"If you take the 90,000 people who voted in the Brexit referendum but didn't vote in the May election,\" he argued, \"if those people came out, then you'd have a very different type of politics.\n\n\"We wouldn't be hurtling towards direct rule that we might not come back from. We'd be able to form a government on day one despite all the differences and all of the challenges.\"\n\n'Full transparency'\n\nThe SDLP leader said he wrote some weeks ago to the Secretary of State James Brokenshire asking him to name a date for the publication of party political donations.\n\nPreviously the SDLP had opposed full transparency over donations, but Mr Eastwood said that in the wake of the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal it is right that the current rules should change.\n\nThe SDLP leader said it is unfortunate that the DUP has not revealed the identity of an English organisation which helped fund its Brexit referendum campaign.\n\nQuestioned about the Irish government's opposition to the idea of special designated status for Northern Ireland within the EU, Mr Eastwood said he didn't care about the \"semantics\" of what any special measures are called, but supports protection for citizens, businesses and communities who will be disadvantaged as a result of Brexit.\n\nImage caption On reforming the petition of concern, Mrs Long argued that neither the DUP nor Sinn F\u00e9in have been genuine in their approach.\n\n'About policy, not people'\n\nMeanwhile, the Alliance leader Naomi Long has said she will not base her decision on joining a future Stormont executive on whether Arlene Foster is nominated again as first minister.\n\nBoth Sinn F\u00e9in and the SDLP have said they would not be prepared to participate in an executive led by Mrs Foster before she is cleared of responsibility by the public inquiry now examining the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal.\n\nHowever, if Alliance is approached to take a department it will not be taking a similar line as Mrs Long believes any decision \"should not be about people or personalities, but rather about policy and practice\".\n\nOn reforming the petition of concern, Mrs Long argued that neither the DUP nor Sinn F\u00e9in had been genuine in their approach.\n\nShe told Inside Politics the assembly must continue to have protection mechanisms for minorities and she believes Arlene Foster's suggestion that the petitions of concern could be abolished is in order to have \"no restraint on the DUP's ability, or unionists' collective ability to simply override nationalist opinion.\"\n\nOn the RHI scandal, the Alliance leader said the publication of the names of RHI recipients of the scheme would only be meaningful if it happened in conjunction with the release of the names of donors to political parties in Northern Ireland."}
{"text":"What do you want done with your body after you die?\n\nIt is an unnerving but important question, and for most Americans there have long been only two obvious choices: burial or cremation.\n\nBut a third option, a liquefaction process called by a variety of names \u2014 flameless cremation, green cremation or the \u201cFire to Water\u201d method \u2014 is starting to gain popularity throughout the United States.\n\nThis week, California became the 15th state to outline commercial regulations for the disposal of human remains through the method, chemically known as alkaline hydrolysis.\n\nIt may seem markedly different from the traditional means of digging graves or burning the dead. A machine uses a chemical bath to dissolve protein, blood and fat, leaving only a coffee-colored liquid, powdery bone and any metal implants, like dental fillings."}
{"text":"Mueller Turns Up The Heat With Unusual Search Warrant In Russia Probe\n\nEnlarge this image toggle caption Alex Wong\/Getty Images Alex Wong\/Getty Images\n\nFederal prosecutors have lots of ways to intensify pressure on the people they're investigating, from early morning FBI raids to leaning on relatives of those under government scrutiny.\n\nBut even by those measures, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in last year's presidential election is moving with unusual speed and assertiveness, according to half a dozen legal experts following the probe.\n\nConsider disclosures that FBI agents executed a search warrant last month for business and tax records at the suburban Virginia home of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. That step would have required them to prove to a judge that there's probable cause a crime has been committed.\n\nKenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel frequently criticized for alleged overreach by then-President Bill Clinton, never utilized search warrants, two members of the team told NPR. Neither did the special counsel investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity in the George W. Bush administration, said William Jeffress, a Washington attorney who represented White House aide Lewis \"Scooter\" Libby in that probe.\n\n\"A search warrant in a case like this is highly unusual,\" Jeffress said.\n\nLawyers said the special counsel may have been motivated to use a search warrant over concerns that evidence might be concealed or destroyed, which sometimes happens in terrorism and drug trafficking cases. Or, they said, Mueller may have been moving quickly amid a series of existential threats. In recent weeks, President Trump has blasted the Russia investigation as a \"witch hunt\" and flirted with the idea of firing Justice Department leaders as a roundabout way to get rid of Mueller himself.\n\nTalking with reporters Thursday, the president said he was \"very surprised\" by the FBI raid at Manafort's home and said it sent a \"strong signal.\" Trump also said that the White House is cooperating with the special counsel probe even though, he said, the subjects under investigation never happened.\n\nIn any case, the Justice Department frequently deploys tough tactics with a larger goal in mind: securing the cooperation of insiders who can guide authorities through a complex investigation and help deliver bigger targets.\n\n\"I call it 'climbing the ladder,' \" Jeffress said. \"It happens in every corporate investigation,\" where investigators question clerks and assistants, and then move up to vice presidents and higher-level executives.\n\nA spokesman for Manafort, Jason Maloni, said he is responding to government inquiries.\n\nWhether Manafort, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn or anyone else decides to strike a deal with the government is being closely watched by people in and outside the probe.\n\nAuthorities routinely enlist relatives to try to turn up the heat. Recent media reports suggested that investigators have reached out to Manafort's son-in-law, with whom he'd entered into some real estate dealings.\n\nIndeed, several members of Mueller's 16-lawyer special counsel team have a long history of approaching lower-level figures, including spouses and in-laws, to build bigger cases.\n\nTake Andrew Weissmann, a special counsel lawyer who once led the Justice Department's Enron Task Force. Prosecutors looking to uncover and punish fraud at that defunct energy company famously threatened to charge the wife of the company's chief financial officer with tax offenses if he did not agree to plead guilty and testify against his corporate superiors. The finance official, Andrew Fastow, refused. So, authorities indicted his wife, Lea. They both served prison time.\n\nA more recent addition to the special counsel team, Greg Andres, helped bring to justice the Bonanno crime family boss as a young mob prosecutor in Brooklyn, N.Y. Through the course of the trial, Andres helped unravel dozens of crimes over three decades, using federal agents and members of the crime family as narrators. One of his key witnesses was the brother-in-law of the defendant, Joseph Massino.\n\n\"The story principally was told from the vantage point of those involved in the crimes at issue and their credibility was a crucial issue,\" Andres told the publication Law360 last year.\n\nAndres so got under the skin of the mobsters that one later testified he had been targeted for a \"hit.\""}
{"text":"Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jose Manuel Barroso: \"Without the EU Britain will have less influence\"\n\nThe UK would have \"zero\" influence if it voted to leave the EU, the outgoing president of the European Commission has said.\n\nJose Manuel Barroso said Britain could not negotiate with the US and China \"on an equal footing\" on its own.\n\nHe also said free movement of people within the EU was an \"essential\" principle that could not be changed.\n\nConservative Party chairman Grant Shapps said Mr Barroso was \"out of touch\" and an \"unelected bureaucrat\".\n\nMr Barroso was asked about Prime Minister David Cameron's stated intention to negotiate a better deal for the UK in Europe, ahead of an in\/out referendum.\n\nThe prime minister has said he will \"not take no for an answer\" and \"get what Britain needs\" on the question of freedom of movement.\n\n'One last go'\n\nIf the Conservatives remain in power, a referendum would be held by 2017, Mr Cameron has said.\n\nSpeaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, Mr Barroso, whose term of office ends this month, said he believed Mr Cameron wanted Britain to remain in the EU.\n\n\"Britain is stronger in the European Union,\" Mr Barroso said, pointing to the Ebola crisis as an area where Britain would not have the same level of influence if it was outside the EU.\n\n\"David Cameron wrote to all of us about Ebola... What would be the influence of a prime minister of Britain if it was not part of the European Union?\n\n\"His influence would be zero.\"\n\nMr Cameron has said he wants to curb migration within the EU and last week pledged to have \"one last go\" at renegotiating the rules for Britain.\n\nThe Conservatives lost the recent Clacton by-election to the UK Independence Party, which wants the UK to leave the EU.\n\nImage caption Conservative chairman Grant Shapps said Britain had negotiated \"lots of impossible things\" from the EU\n\nMr Barroso would not comment on a report in the Sunday Times that the government could limit the number of national insurance numbers given to low-skilled immigrants.\n\nBut he said that while the EU was willing to discuss benefit fraud and sham marriages, an \"arbitrary cap\" on migration would \"not be in conformity with European rules\".\n\nHe said Mr Cameron had previously asked him to enforce the free movement principle between Spain and Gibraltar.\n\nMr Barroso said 1.4 million Britons lived elsewhere in the EU and it was a \"matter of fairness\" that other EU citizens had the same rights.\n\nHe also criticised comments by Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond last week that Britain was \"lighting a fire under the European Union\" with the proposed referendum.\n\n'Slap-down'\n\nMr Barroso said: \"I'm told the foreign secretary was the former minister of defence. I think this reference to fire and weapons is more appropriate for defence than foreign secretary.\n\n\"It is very important to have a positive tone regarding these issues between Britain and the EU.\"\n\nBBC political correspondent Matt Cole said this was a \"bit of a slap-down\" for Mr Hammond although Jean-Claude Juncker would shortly be taking over as commission president.\n\nAnalysis\n\nImage copyright Reuters\n\nBy BBC political correspondent Ben Wright\n\nThese comments are definitely unhelpful - and a window into Brussels thinking.\n\nBut Jose Manuel Barroso is on his way out - he's the outgoing president and a whole new commission will take over next month.\n\nAnd in several areas where David Cameron wants to renegotiate, he has allies in Europe.\n\nOn restricting benefits that EU migrants can claim, his concern is shared in several capitals - most importantly Berlin.\n\nI think there is some support for returning powers from Brussels to national governments.\n\nBut the big hurdle is this question of free movement of existing EU citizens which Mr Cameron is now talking about - even though we don't have a clear policy proposal from the government.\n\nA change of treaty would be impossible, I think.\n\nThere could be an attempt to change the directive that puts the freedom into practice but that would require agreement by EU leaders and the parliament.\n\nThe incoming commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has said he is prepared to make a \"fair deal\" with Britain. But it won't be at any price.\n\n'Total free movement'\n\nMr Shapps said Mr Barroso had \"dismissed\" the UK, adding: \"If he can dismiss us... then every other country in the EU ought to look out because apparently no country means anything to him.\"\n\nSpeaking on the BBC's Sunday Politics, Mr Shapps said \"a whole bunch of things\" needed to change in the EU, of which immigration control was \"one of the important ones\".\n\nImage copyright PA Image caption The government wants to get net migration below 100,000 a year\n\nHe said: \"[Mr] Barroso is only the latest person from Europe to tell us we will never get what we want.\"\n\nMr Shapps said \"there are lots of impossible things that we have negotiated\" including a cut to the EU budget.\n\nUKIP leader Nigel Farage said there was no way of limiting European migration while the UK remained an EU member.\n\n\"Do not take Mr Barroso's comments on their own,\" he said. \"Everyone in Brussels... says the same thing.\n\n\"We are committed by treaty - we have been since 1973 - to total free movement of peoples within the European Union.\"\n\nNon-negotiable\n\nThe level of net migration stands at more than twice the government's target of 100,000 a year.\n\nInternational Development Secretary Justine Greening told Sky's Murnaghan programme: \"Free movement of labour was never meant to be an unqualified principle, irrespective of how it might have worked on the ground.\n\n\"We do need to see action taken in relation to negotiation with the EU.\"\n\nShe said the government was \"taking a fundamental look at some of the rules that allow unrestricted immigration\".\n\nEurosceptic Conservative MP John Redwood said he understood work had been going on \"for some time\" to come up with ways to limit migration from the EU.\n\nBut the BBC's Mark Mardell said a senior Brussels source had told him Mr Cameron's plan was \"complete nonsense legally and economically\".\n\nMats Persson, director of Open Europe, a think tank that calls for EU reform, said free movement was \"the most basic principle perhaps of European Union membership, so you are effectively saying to the EU 'we want to renegotiate one of your founding principles'\"."}
{"text":"0\n\nSince we started our IMAX screening series, we\u2019ve mostly been focused on the newest movies about to be in theaters. While I love promoting new movies, when I first pitched the idea to IMAX for this series, the goal was to show both new and older films and balance the two. The fact is, while I love IMAX, the only negative about the format is that once a film is out of theaters, it\u2019s extremely rare to be able to see it again on their massive screens. Which is why showing older films in our screening series is just as important to me as showing the newest release.\n\nAnd this brings me to our next IMAX screening: TRON: Legacy.\n\nOn Tuesday, February 28 at 7pm, we\u2019re going to be showing TRON: Legacy for the first time in laser projection and in 3D! Back in 2010, when Legacy was first in theaters, laser projection was still in development.\n\nFollowing the screening, I\u2019ll be moderating an extended Q&A with director Joseph Kosinski where we will go in depth about the making of the film, the amazing Daft Punk soundtrack, and so much more.\n\nI\u2019m a huge fan of Tron and the world Steven Lisberger created in the early 80s. I\u2019ve probably watched the film more times than I care to admit and showing TRON: Legacy has been on my wish list for our IMAX screening series since it first started.\n\nSo if you\u2019d like to see TRON: Legacy in IMAX 3D and watch our Q&A with Joseph Kosinski you need to click this link to enter for tickets. We\u2019ll be accepting requests until February 23rd and soon after we\u2019ll contact the people that won with exact details about the screening.\n\nGood luck and hope to see you there!"}
{"text":"But it is not so simple. The final weeks in a war zone are often the most dangerous, as weary troops get sloppy or unfocused. Once they arrive home, alcohol abuse , traffic accidents and other measures of mayhem typically rise as they blow off steam.\n\nWeeks later, as the joy of return subsides, deep-seated emotional or psychological problems can begin to show. The sleeplessness , anxiety and irritability of post-traumatic stress disorder , for instance, often take months to emerge as combat veterans confront the tensions of home and the recurring memories of war.\n\nPhoto\n\nIn their new normal, troops must reconnect with children, adjust to more independent spouses and dial back the hypervigilance that served them well in combat \u2014 but that can alienate them from civilians.\n\n\u201cThe hardest part for me is, I guess, not being on edge,\u201d said Staff Sgt. Francisco Narewski, a father of three who just completed his second deployment. \u201cI feel like I need to do something, like I need to go on mission or I need to check my soldiers. And I\u2019m not.\u201d\n\nFor the First Battalion, 87th Infantry out of Fort Drum, N.Y., which recently finished a yearlong tour, leaving Afghanistan proved as deadly as fighting in Afghanistan. In the first 11 months of deployment, the battalion lost two soldiers, both to roadside bombs. During the next month, it lost two more, neither in combat.\n\nOn March 9, the day before he was scheduled to leave Kunduz, Specialist Andrew P. Wade, 22, was accidentally shot and killed by a friend who was practicing a drill with his 9-millimeter pistol inside their tent.\n\nThree weeks later, Specialist Jeremiah Pulaski, who had returned from Afghanistan in February, was shot and killed by a police officer after he shot and wounded a man outside a bar in Arizona . He was 24.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nBoth soldiers were considered among the best in the battalion. Specialist Wade, a whiz with a soccer ball, was a member of the elite scouts platoon and on a fast track to promotion. Specialist Pulaski could be quick to use his fists in an argument but was revered for his fearlessness on the battlefield.\n\nSpecialist Pulaski was awarded a Bronze Star with Valor for dashing across an open field during an ambush in December, drawing enemy fire away from his platoon. Later that same day, he killed several insurgents as they were trying to ambush his unit near a village called Haruti.\n\nPhoto\n\nCaptain Bonenberger, Specialist Pulaski\u2019s company commander, said the soldier saved his life twice that day \u2014 and it gnawed at him that he had been unable to return the favor.\n\n\u201cWhen he was in trouble, he was alone,\u201d Captain Bonenberger said. \u201cWhen we were in trouble, he was there for us. I know it\u2019s not rational or reasonable. There\u2019s nothing logical about it. But I feel responsible.\u201d\n\nFinal Weeks\n\nIn Kunduz and Baghlan Provinces, war defied the usual rhythms last winter. American forces typically hunker down in the cold months to await the spring fighting season. But from October to January, American, German and Afghan forces cleared several major insurgent strongholds.\n\nBy February, the Afghan police were conducting regular patrols alone into places they had refused to visit without American forces just weeks before: Gor Teppa, Chardara and Aliabad in Kunduz, and Dahana-i-Ghori and the Golden Triangle north of Pul-i-Khumri in Baghlan.\n\nEven a slice of Dasht-i-Archi, where the stoning of an adulterous couple last year became a worldwide symbol of the Taliban \u2019s resurgence, was cleared of mines and insurgent checkpoints.\n\nAmerican intelligence officers say scores of insurgent fighters were killed and as many as 300 laid down their arms or switched sides. Cellphone towers that had been shut down nightly by the Taliban started running 24 hours a day. A radio station that played rock music returned to the air. Commerce revived along roads once too dangerous to travel.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThrough the winter campaign, only a handful of American soldiers were wounded, and none died.\n\n\u201cThe police are more capable today than they were a year ago,\u201d said Lt. Col. Russell Lewis, the battalion commander. \u201cThey are going places they haven\u2019t been in years.\u201d\n\nPhoto\n\nStill, there was much debate among American soldiers over whether the stability would last. Had insurgent forces melted away simply to regroup for a spring offensive? Would the insurgents who switched sides remain allies? Many soldiers had doubts.\n\nThen came a series of attacks that made it clear the insurgents were not gone. In early February, the governor of Chardara District was killed by a suicide bomber just hours after a visit with Colonel Lewis. Two weeks later, a bomber detonated a powerful device in Imam Sahib, killing 30 people, most of them civilians. And in early March, another suicide bomber assassinated the police chief of Kunduz Province, Gen. Abdul Rahman Saidkhail, outside his heavily guarded office.\n\nGeneral Saidkhail had been aggressive in pursuing Taliban commanders and cajoling their fighters to switch sides. To American officers, his death was a blow to the government of President Hamid Karzai and an ominous indication of what lay ahead for Kunduz Province.\n\n\u201cWhatever chapter has been written is now finished,\u201d Captain Bonenberger recalled thinking when he heard about the general\u2019s death. \u201cThe book is lying on the table and that\u2019s it. What\u2019s done is done.\u201d\n\nJourney Home\n\nThe string of winter operations against the Taliban had given many soldiers a sense of accomplishment that was missing in the fall, when morale, like the temperature, was sinking. By the end of the tour, spirits were high and pranksters were afoot, hogtying officers in their beds and stealing clothing from showering soldiers.\n\nBut there was also a more solemn sense among soldiers that they would return home altered by their year away.\n\nSpecialist Alan Bakula, 22, had seen the exhilarating highs and shattering lows of combat. One of the battalion\u2019s steadiest fighters, he earned two Purple Hearts and an Army Commendation Medal with Valor in several major firefights.\n\nPhoto\n\nBut he had also been shot through the ankle and hit by shrapnel in the elbow and the face. He had also seen one good friend, Specialist Matthew Hayes, lose his leg to a mine and another, Specialist Wade, killed in an accident. By the end of the deployment, he had lost his taste for battle and was ready to trade the Army for college.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cGetting injured a few times definitely changes your perspective a little bit, makes you feel a little less bulletproof,\u201d he said in Kunduz.\n\nSpecialist Billy Moody, 26, wondered whether he could ever talk openly to friends about the close calls he had seen: rocket-propelled grenades that just missed, accurate mortar rounds that somehow failed to explode.\n\nHe detailed those experiences in a notebook that he planned to share with his wife and family, but no one else.\n\n\u201cSome stuff, people just don\u2019t \u2014 they wouldn\u2019t really believe or appreciate,\u201d he said. \u201cI hope people don\u2019t ask me that kind of stuff, and then after I tell it to them, they think I\u2019m exaggerating.\u201d\n\nJust getting the battalion\u2019s nearly 800 soldiers home was far from simple. It would take a month, along with dozens of helicopters, military cargo planes and commercial jets, to move them the 6,500 miles from Kunduz through Mazar-i-Sharif and Kyrgyzstan to Watertown, N.Y.\n\nOn his final flight home, Private Stevenson, 20, fantasized about the freedoms he would soon taste again: texting anyone anytime, wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, taking his little brother to the zoo. Being alone.\n\nPhoto\n\nHis deployment had been a mixed bag. After getting into an argument with a higher-ranking soldier, whom he half-heartedly threatened to kill, he lost a rank. But he had also performed well under pressure.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nWhile driving his platoon leader on a mission last fall, his truck hit a powerful mine that blew off its rear end and flipped it over. Private Stevenson was the first out and helped the three other passengers, including his lieutenant, escape. He earned a Purple Heart after sustaining a back injury and a possible concussion in the explosion.\n\nAs the plane approached New York, he was thinking about his next big challenge. His fianc\u00e9e was pregnant, and he was so excited by the prospect that he planned to buy baby furniture and diapers as soon as he got home. More than ever, he thought he should get out of the Army and try college.\n\nHe had never known his own father and had lived on the streets of Port Arthur, Tex., as a teenager after his mother died of AIDS . \u201cI know I\u2019m not ready\u201d to be a father, he mused. But he wanted badly to try.\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\n\u201cI want to be there for my kid\u2019s first steps; I want to be there for his first bicycle accident,\u201d he said. \u201cI kind of think the Army is not for me, family-wise.\u201d\n\nReunions\n\nA wet snow was falling as Sergeant Narewski\u2019s charter DC-10 touched down at Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield in March. It was just after midnight, and the air was colder than it had been in Afghanistan. But he bounded off the plane beaming like a boy heading into summer vacation.\n\n\u201cI love America,\u201d he shouted as he sprinted to the terminal.\n\nHis unit went through customs, turned in weapons and received safety briefings on base speed limits, malaria pills and mental health counseling. Then they waited. Finally, at 6 a.m., they boarded yellow school buses and headed to the Fort Drum gymnasium.\n\nPhoto\n\nIn the bleachers sat his wife, Christina, with their three children. She had risen at 1 a.m. to apply her makeup, shimmy into a tight dress bought just for this occasion and hustle the children into front-row seats.\n\nAs the soldiers marched into the gym, she craned anxiously in search of her husband, squirming with impatience as they croaked their division\u2019s song out of key. She kicked off her high heels, and as soon as a commander shouted \u201cDismissed!\u201d she sprinted across the hardwood floor.\n\n\u201cEverybody was laughing at me, but I ran,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s all I remember, is running.\u201d\n\nFor minutes, time enough for some couples to hug and leave, she buried herself in Sergeant Narewski\u2019s broad arms, whimpering. \u201cJust to have him hold you or be in his arms again is just the greatest,\u201d she said. \u201cYou think about that not happening while he\u2019s gone.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThis second deployment of his had been harder than she anticipated, and she had begun taking medication to calm her nerves. To her delight, Sergeant Narewski, 31, accepted a drill sergeant assignment at Fort Jackson, S.C., a two- to three-year tour with no deployments.\n\nBeing a drill sergeant would be good for his career, the sergeant said. But inside, he was still thinking about leading soldiers into combat. \u201cI love it,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m going to miss it. I miss it already.\u201d\n\nFor Sgt. Tamara Sullivan, 32, there was nothing about Afghanistan she would miss. For days after arriving in Kunduz a year ago, she cried at the thought of not seeing her children, ages 4 and 2. The experience taught her a lesson about emotions, one she learned to apply with iron discipline.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s something that you just have to learn how to turn off and on, like a light switch,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t feel like it made me less of a mother because I learned how to shut it off. I think it made me a better soldier.\u201d\n\nPhoto\n\nNow she was finally home, looking lost as she searched the crowd for her husband, Tim, who had come without the children from North Carolina , where the couple have a home. Suddenly he appeared, and they embraced awkwardly before rushing to find her bags.\n\nShe had been thinking for days about how this deployment might change their family dynamic. Tim had learned to be a single parent and was so comfortable in the job that she wondered whether he was prepared to give it up.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m ready to come back home and jump back in, you know, where I left it, do my mommy role,\u201d she said before leaving Afghanistan. \u201cJust shoo him out of the way. I\u2019m pretty sure he\u2019ll be a little, you know, like, \u2018Wait a minute, I used to do it this way.\u2019 \u201d\n\nBut she would have to wait to test those waters. She was scheduled to transfer to Fort Gordon, Ga., in October, but until then, Tim and the children would remain in North Carolina. Except for occasional weekends, they would be apart for another six months.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nStill in her uniform, she took Tim to the airport and then went shopping at Wal-Mart . On a 3-by-5 card, she had neatly listed items she needed for her new apartment near Fort Drum: linens, a frying pan, food for one. She filled two carts and headed home.\n\nIn her second-floor home, she began unpacking boxes of paperback books, unused uniforms and crayon drawings from her children. Without the children, it had been a subdued, almost joyless homecoming. But she seemed content in her solitude. The Army is her career, and a good one, she told herself. She just needed to be patient.\n\n\u201cAs long as my children are happy, as long as I know their education is set for, then I\u2019m good,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ll just keep doing this as long as I have to.\u201d\n\nPhoto\n\nSergeant Keith\u2019s homecoming was surprisingly boisterous, even without his wife and son. His parents, grandfather, brother, nieces and nephews greeted him at the gymnasium, then accompanied him to a new apartment they had found and furnished for him.\n\nBut when they left, he was by himself for the first time in practically a year. He took a shower, the longest and hottest in months, then crawled into a bed that felt as large as a swimming pool. \u201cI never felt more alone any time ever in my life,\u201d he recalled.\n\nThe deployment, his third in six years, had been great, and not because of the adrenaline rush of combat \u2014 he saw none of that. A fuel specialist, Sergeant Keith, 29, was responsible for making sure gas tanks were full and generators were running.\n\nSent from the battalion headquarters in Kunduz to an outpost in Baghlan, he had been left alone to do his job and loved the independence. For the first time in years, he felt proud to be a soldier, and ambitious to do more.\n\nThe deployment had clearly been hard on his wife and made him almost a stranger to his 18-month-old son. \u201cI got to work my way back into his life again,\u201d he said.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nAnd yet, almost to his surprise, he felt a sense of lightness and liberation now that his wife had left him. He went drinking at the American Legion with friends. Maybe he would start dating. And down the line, he felt almost certain he would deploy again.\n\nPerhaps it was the clarity of deployed life that he craved. The structured routines seemed so much simpler than the messy realities of home. He could not quite put his finger on it, but he knew that \u201cnormal life\u201d no longer meant what it once did.\n\nPhoto\n\n\u201cOnce you get stuck into that environment,\u201d he said of deployment, \u201cand you do it every day, it\u2019s very, very hard coming back to the states and living a normal life. I\u2019m just having a real hard time dealing with it.\u201d\n\nHealing\n\nIn the weeks after the battalion got home, Captain Bonenberger, 33, moved into an apartment with two fellow captains and considered his future. Should he accept a teaching position at West Point or get out of the Army?\n\nPrivate Stevenson married and learned that his child, due in August, was a boy. He bought an SAT prep book.\n\nSpecialist Hayes, undergoing rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center , visited his platoon mates at Fort Drum. To celebrate, they drank Guinness from his prosthetic leg.\n\nAnd Sgt. First Class Brian Eisch, 36, struggled to learn how to run again.\n\nA machine-gun burst had almost taken off his left leg during a battle in Kunduz last fall, and he had been flown to Walter Reed for treatment. Determined to return to a frontline unit, he would have to prove that he could run with a pack. Doctors told him to go slow, but it was not in his nature.\n\nSo after returning to Fort Drum in February, he went to the gym almost nightly, working the shreds of muscle still in his calf. When he continued to limp, his doctors suggested that he replace the leg with a prosthetic. No way, he said.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cI\u2019m trying to put on the happy face and the strong guy, but at the end of the day I\u2019m almost in tears in pain, \u201c he said. \u201cIt hurts.\u201d\n\nA single father, Sergeant Eisch was also trying to get his sons reacquainted with Fort Drum. They had spent the first half of his deployment in Wisconsin with their uncle. Now back home, Joey, 8, was dodging homework, and Isaac, 12, was having nightmares about bad things happening to his father.\n\n\u201cI explained to him, that\u2019s just your body,\u201d said Sergeant Eisch, who was having his own recurring nightmares. \u201cYour body is just trying to get rid of stress.\u201d\n\nThough he earned a Bronze Star with Valor for aiding a critically wounded Afghan police officer, Sergeant Eisch was also plagued by self-doubt. \u201cThere\u2019s a sense of me that says I failed for getting shot,\u201d he said.\n\nDoctors suggested he had post-traumatic stress disorder, but Sergeant Eisch questioned the diagnosis. He also bristled at his assignment to a Warrior Transition Unit, where he felt he was surrounded by unmotivated and overmedicated soldiers.\n\nUp and then down. He raged at the Army. Then he bought himself a new boat to go with his new truck. He bemoaned his bad leg. Then he hugged his boys and considered himself lucky.\n\nIt was like that in the Army. Hero one day, faceless grunt the next. Scout platoon sergeant in November, wounded warrior in March. He had rolled with it for almost 17 years; he hoped he could make it three more to retirement .\n\n\u201cHey, I\u2019m still kicking, and there\u2019s new motivation there,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m going to heal.\u201d"}
{"text":"Researchers at Johns Hopkins University will perform the US's first penis transplant in 2016, according to The New York Times. And when they do, they will be helping a soldier who was injured by a bomb blast in Afghanistan.\n\nJohns Hopkins has given its doctors permission to perform 60 of the experimental surgeries. It's unclear how high the demand is for this type of transplant, but a lot of people might end up benefitting from these operations if the researchers are successful. Between 2001 and 2013, more than 1,300 men in the US military have suffered injuries to their genitals, according to the Department of Defense Trauma Registry. Most were under the age of 35 at the time, and many lost all or a portion of their penises or testicles.\n\nThese injuries are \"as devastating as anything that our wounded warriors suffer.\"\n\n\"These genitourinary injuries are not things we hear about or read about very often,\" W. P. Andrew Lee, the chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins, told the Times. But these injuries are \"as devastating as anything that our wounded warriors suffer.\"\n\nThis won't be the world's first penis transplant. The first successful surgery was performed in December of last year; the recipient was a 21-year-old man in South Africa who lost the organ because of complications related to a traditional circumcision procedure. In June, his doctors announced another success: the recipient's partner is pregnant. There has been another high-profile attempt in 2006, but it ended in failure. Doctors in China spent 15 hours attaching a penis to a 44-year-old patient, only to reverse it two weeks later at the patient's request. At the time, the recipient and his wife said they were suffering from psychological problems.\n\nAs with any transplant, the risks of this operation are great. Bleeding, infections, rejections, and psychological effects could all arise; and some men may not regain complete function. But for many, the benefits may outweigh the risks. Lee told the Times that fathering children after the operation is a \"realistic goal.\"\n\nFor now, the transplant will be available only to veterans who were injured during a combat mission. The operation will take 12 hours and cost between $200,000 and $400,000; the university has offered to pay for the first surgery. For all 60 operations, the penis will come from a deceased donor. If the surgeries go well, Johns Hopkins University may decide to make the transplant a standard treatment."}
{"text":"White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney called the administration's budget proposal a \"Taxpayer First Budget,\" on May 23, and defended its cuts to federal anti-poverty programs. (Reuters)\n\nPresident Trump on Tuesday proposed a new process for closing numerous military bases, the elimination of government funding for public radio and television, and cuts of more than $1 billion to after-school programs.\n\nHe called to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), defund several programs that study climate change, cut research on infectious diseases and reduce the Strategic Petroleum Reserve by 50 percent.\n\nMuch of the focus on Trump's $4.094 trillion budget plan has been on the large reductions in safety net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but there are dozens of smaller budget cuts that, in aggregate, would amount to a major realignment of the government\u2019s role in society.\n\nAside from national defense and border security, Trump\u2019s plan would put the onus on states, companies, churches and charities to offer many educational, scientific and social services that have long been provided by the federal government. This was the overriding goal in revamping numerous anti-poverty programs, prodding states to do more to limit the number of people who seek and receive benefits.\n\nTop White House advisers said that the government spends too much and that a dramatic reduction is necessary to make the government \u2014 and its presence in society \u2014 smaller.\n\n\u201cWe're no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs, but by the number of people we help get off of those programs,\u201d White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Tuesday.\n\nThe budget would also cut retirement benefits for federal employees, reduce health-care benefits for low-income children and make it harder to qualify for disability benefits.\n\nThese changes, the White House said, are necessary to eliminate the deficit over 10 years, though many critics have questioned the budget math used to wipe out the gap between spending and revenue. Because the government spends more than it brings in through revenue, the government runs a deficit, which adds to the federal debt each year.\n\n\u201cIf I take money from you and I have no intention of ever giving it back, that is not debt, that is theft,\u201d Mulvaney said. \u201cAnd if we're going to borrow money from people, we have to have a plan for how we are going to pay it back.\u201d\n\nWhite House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney defended the projection of unemployment rates in the administration's 2018 budget proposal on May 23, amid criticism of their assumptions about future economic performance. (Reuters)\n\nUnder Trump\u2019s plan, a number of the government\u2019s biggest obligations would remain intact. It would continue to fully finance Medicare and Social Security retirement benefits, which combined will account for $1.5 trillion in federal spending next year.\n\nBut myriad other programs would be structurally changed. The White House proposes reducing the size of the federal workforce (though it doesn\u2019t specify by how much) and trimming regulation in a way that top aides argue will foster more economic growth. Workforce training programs run by the Labor Department would be scaled back.\n\nCritics have raised alarms that the changes would cut the government\u2019s investment in future growth, making companies less competitive.\n\n\u201cThe budget shrinks the core parts of government \u2014 the parts that do education, research, infrastructure \u2014 to unprecedentedly low levels for a modern economy,\u201d said Jason Furman, who was a top economic adviser during the Obama administration. \u201cIn doing so, I think it would make it harder \u2014 not easier \u2014 to reach the outlandishly high growth target that the administration has set for itself.\u201d\n\nThe budget would crack down on the CFPB, an agency created after the financial crisis that is designed to ensure that lenders don't rip off consumers. It proposes reducing the CFPB's funding by $6.8 billion between 2018 and 2027. The watchdog agency is an \u201cunaccountable bureaucracy controlled by an independent director with unchecked regulatory authority and punitive power,\u201d the White House said in its budget request. The agency needs to be restructured, it said, and limiting its budget in 2018 would \u201callow for an efficient transition period.\u201d\n\nSupporters of the CFPB, however, believe weakening it will make it easier for lenders to trap borrowers with predatory loans. Similarly, the Trump budget plan would strip some money from the Securities and Exchange Commission.\n\nThe Trump administration renewed a long-held call by the Pentagon for a new round of base realignments and closures, saying it could save $2 billion per year that could be spent on boosting military readiness.\n\nThe request asks Congress to authorize the Defense Department to begin studying base realignment, with an eye toward carrying out the plan in 2021. But there could be strong resistance on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have long been resistant to base closures in their districts.\n\nThe last round of base realignment was carried out in 2005 by the administration of President George W. Bush.\n\nThe White House is also proposing to shift the way it delivers some foreign aid programs, replacing grants with loans that must be repaid.\n\nNot all of the budget is red ink, though.\n\nIn its $27.7 billion budget request, the Justice Department asked for $26 million for 300 new prosecutors in U.S. attorney's offices nationwide to support Attorney General Jeff Sessions\u2019s emphasis on targeting violent criminals and prosecuting illegal immigrants. An additional $75 million was requested for 75 more immigration judges to adjudicate removal proceedings for people in the United States illegally. About $80 million was sought to fully open an underused federal prison in Thomson, Ill., which was once considered as a possible facility to hold Guant\u00e1namo prisoners and would provide the Bureau of Prisons with 1,500 to 2,000 more beds.\n\nAnd at least one of the cuts the White House had threatened has been pulled back.\n\nThe budget would retain the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which had been threatened with virtual extinction, with $368.5 million in funding, a small decrease from its 2017 funding.\n\nIn an email to full-time employees this month, Richard Baum, the acting director of the office, said the administration\u2019s proposal for the fiscal year that begins in October would reflect \u201ca nearly 95 percent\u201d cut in the agency\u2019s budget. That appears to have been largely reversed, and the office\u2019s two major programs \u2014 the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program and the Drug-Free Communities Support Program \u2014 have been retained."}
{"text":"This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.\n\nNatural products with medicinal value are gradually gaining importance in clinical research due to their well-known property of no side effects as compared to drugs. Tinospora cordifolia commonly named as \u201cGuduchi\u201d is known for its immense application in the treatment of various diseases in the traditional ayurvedic literature. Recently the discovery of active components from the plant and their biological function in disease control has led to active interest in the plant across the globe. Our present study in this review encompasses (i) the genetic diversity of the plant and (ii) active components isolated from the plant and their biological role in disease targeting. The future scope of the review remains in exploiting the biochemical and signaling pathways affected by the compounds isolated from Tinospora so as to enable new and effective formulation in disease eradication.\n\nTinospora cordifolia commonly named as \u201cGuduchi\u201d in Sanskrit belonging to family Menispermaceae is a genetically diverse, large, deciduous climbing shrub with greenish yellow typical flowers, found at higher altitude.[ 1 \u2013 3 ] In racemes or racemose panicles, the male flowers are clustered and female are solitary. The flowering season expands over summers and winters.[ 4 ] A variety of active components derived from the plant like alkaloids, steroids, diterpenoid lactones, aliphatics, and glycosides[ 4 ] have been isolated from the different parts of the plant body, including root, stem, and whole plant. Recently, the plant is of great interest to researchers across the globe because of its reported medicinal properties like anti-diabetic, anti-periodic, anti-spasmodic, anti-inflammatory, anti-arthritic, anti-oxidant, anti-allergic, anti-stress, anti-leprotic, anti-malarial, hepatoprotective, immunomodulatory and anti-neoplastic activities. In this review, we focus our attention to: (i) the reported genetic diversity in the Plant (ii) biological roles reported in humans and animals and active components from the plant. (iii) biological roles reported in humans and animals.\n\nAll the reports of experiments on different model types (in vitro, ex vivo, and in vivo) were taken varying from animal and human model systems. Reported data was analysed and represented in the form of figures and tables for the current review. ChemDraw Ultra 9.0 Software, Cambridge soft Life Science Enterprise Solutions was used for drawing the figures in the review. The figures of the compounds were obtained as reported in different journal sources.\n\nPublished literature on recent developments in research in Tinospora cordifolia, including original articles and papers in Pubmed and Pubmed Central Databases were taken into study for the report. Information extracted from a total of 175 published articles of which five review articles and cross references thereof were collected. The search criteria were restricted to the roles of the plant in the field of medical advancements and the effects that has been observed with different experiments.\n\nRESULTS\n\n(i) Tinospora cordifolia: A genetically diverse plant Reports on studies of morphological and physiological characters of the plant, including plant length, stem diameter, growth habit, floral morphology, flower color, stomatal density, trichomal density, lenticels density, petiole length, plant biomass, and other characteristics of the plant and diversity in the genetic components identified by markers have indicated the diversity in the medicinal plant which has profound importance for efficient and effective management of plant genetic resources. Reports using markers for random amplified polymorphic DNA,[5] and inter-simple sequence repeat primers[1,5] have pointed toward the genetic variation within the population. However, reports on conservation strategies and propagation of the germplasm are few.\n\n(ii) Tinospora cordifolia: Biological roles A myriad of biologically active compounds, including alkaloids, diterpenoid lactones, glycosides, steroids, sesquiterpenoid, phenolics, aliphatic compounds, and polysaccharides have been isolated from different parts of the plant body [ [4\u201339], ]. These compounds have been reported to have different biological roles in disease conditions thus enabling potential application in clinical research. Tinospora cordifolia extracts are extensively used in various herbal preparations for the treatment of different ailments for its anti-periodic, anti-spasmodic, anti-microbial, anti-osteoporotic, anti-inflammatory, anti-arthritic, anti-allergic, and anti-diabetic properties[6] [ ]. Table 1 Open in a separate window Open in a separate window The major biological property of Tinospora cordifolia includes:\n\nImmunomodulatory property The immuomodulatory property of Tinospora cordifolia is well documented.[40\u201342] Active compounds 11-hydroxymustakone, N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone, N-formylannonain, cordifolioside A, magnoflorine, tinocordiside and syringin[6] has been reported to have potential immunomodulatory and cytotoxic effects.[13,40\u201342] They have been reported to function by boosting the phagocytic activity of macrophages, production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in human neutrophil cells,[43] enhancement in nitric oxide (NO) production by stimulation of splenocytes and macrophages indicative of anti-tumor effects.[44] Aqueous Tinospora extracts has been also reported to influence the cytokine production, mitogenicity, stimulation and activation of immune effector cells.[44] In mice, Tinospora cordifolia extracts has been shown to result in up-regulation of IL-6 cytokine, resulting in acute reactions to injury, inflammation, activation of cytotoxic T cells, and B cell differentiation.[45] Active compounds in aqueous extracts like alkaloids, di-terpenoid lactones, glycosides, steroids, sesquiterpenoid, phenolics, aliphatic compounds or polysaccharides[19] in experimental rat model have been reported for their cytotoxic action. Dry stem crude extracts of Tinospora cordifolia with a polyclonal B cell mitogen, G1-4A on binding to macrophages have been reported to enhance immune response in mice by inducing secretion of IL-1, together with activation of macrophages. Reports on Tinospora cordifolia in prevention of oxidative damage also exist.[46] The (1,4)-alpha-d-glucan (alpha-d-glucan), derived Tinospora cordifolia have been shown to activate human lymphocytes with downstream synthesis of the pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines, in vitro.[47] Synergistic effects of compounds in the immunomodulatory activity of Tinospora cordifolia are reported.[6]\n\nAnti-diabetes property The stem of Tinospora cordifolia is widely used in the therapy of diabetes by regulating the blood glucose[48] in traditional folk medicine of India. It has been reported to mediate its anti-diabetic potential through mitigating oxidative stress (OS), promoting insulin secretion and also by inhibiting gluconeogenesis and glycogenolysis, thereby regulating blood glucose.[48] Alkaloids, tannins, cardiac glycosides, flavonoids, saponins, and steroids as the major phytoconstituents[49] of Tinospora cordifolia have been reported to play an anti-diabetic role. The isoquinoline alkaloid rich fraction from stem, including, palmatine, jatrorrhizine, and magnoflorine have been reported for insulin-mimicking and insulin-releasing effect both in vitro and in vivo.[10] Oral treatments of root extracts have been reported to regulate blood glucose levels, enhance insulin secretion and suppress OS markers. Initiation and restoration of cellular defence anti-oxidant markers including superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and glutathione (GSH), inhibition of glucose 6-phosphatase and fructose 1, 6-diphosphatase, restoration of glycogen content in liver was reported in in vitro studies.[10] The crude stem ethyl acetate, dichloromethane (DCM), chloroforms and hexane extracts of Tinospora cordifolia inhibited the enzyme's salivary and pancreatic amylase and glucosidase[50] thus increasing the post-prandial glucose level and finds potential application in treatment of diabetes mellitus. The root extract has been reported to decrease the levels of glycosylated hemoglobin, plasma thiobarbituric acid reactive substances, hydroperoxides, ceruloplasmin and vitamin E diabetic rats.[51] Oral administration of Tinospora cordifolia extract in \u201cIlogen-Excel\u201d formulation (Ayurvedic herbal formulation) composed of eight medicinal plants including Curcuma longa, Strychnos potatorum, Salacia oblonga, Tinospora cordifolia, Vetivelia zizanioides, Coscinium fenestratum, Andrographis paniculata, and Mimosa pudica is reported to reduce GSH and vitamin C[51] in blood and urine glucose and lipids in the serum and tissues in alloxan diabetic rats with a subsequent decrease in body weight.[52] Decreased concentration of GSH, GPx, and SOD, catalase activity is reported in heart and brain of diabetic rats.[53] T. cardifolia root extract (TCE) has been reported to cause an increase in body weight, total hemoglobin and hepatic hexokinase[54] and lowering hepatic glucose-6-phosphatase, serum acid phosphatase (ACP), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) in diabetic rats thus having hypoglycemic and hypolipidaemic effect.[54] The protective effects of TCE were reported in presence of higher levels of anti-oxidant molecules and enzymes.[55] TCE has been shown to significantly counterbalance the diabetes-associated OS in the maternal liver by lowering the levels of malondialdehyde and ROS and the increased levels of GSH and total thiols.[56]\n\nAnti-toxic effects Tinospora cordifolia extracts have been reported to scavenge free radicals generated during aflatoxicosis.[57] It exhibited protective effects by lowering thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) levels and enhancing the GSH, ascorbic acid, protein, and the activities of anti-oxidant enzymes viz., SOD, CAT, GPx, Glutathione S-transferase (GST) and glutathione reductase (GR) in kidney. Alkaloids such as a choline, tinosporin, isocolumbin, palmatine, tetrahydropalmatine, and magnoflorine from Tinospora cordifolia showed protection against aflatoxin-induced nephrotoxicity.[57] Tinospora cordifolia stem and leaves extract has shown hepatoprotective effect in Swiss albino male mice against lead nitrate induced toxicity.[58] Oral administration of plant extracts prevented the occurrence of lead nitrate induced liver damage.[59] Decreased level of SOD, CAT and increased level of aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), ALP, and ACP were observed in mice suffering from lead toxicity.[59] Synergistic administration of aqueous extract of stem and leaf along with the lead nitrate increased the activities of SOD and CAT and decreased the levels of AST, ALT, ALP, and ACP enzymes.[59] Protective role of aqueous extract of stem and leaves of Tinospora cordifolia overcoming the toxic effects of lead is shown as its effects on the hematological values.[58] Cyclophosphamide (CP) an anti-cancer drug has been reported to reduce the GSH content in both bladder and liver and lowered levels of cytokines Inerferon-\u03b3 and IL-2 an increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokine TNF-\u03b1. This effect could be reversed on Tinospora cordifolia treatment indicating the role of Tinospora cordifolia in overcoming CP induced toxicities in cancer treatment.[60]\n\nAnti-arthritic, anti-osteoporotic effects Single or synergistic formulations of Tinospora cordifolia with Zingiber officinale has been used in rheumatoid arthritis treatment in traditional medicine.[61] Tinospora cordifolia have been reported to affect the proliferation, differentiation and mineralization of bone like matrix on osteoblast model systems in vitro and hence finds potential application as an anti-osteoporotic agent. Alcoholic extract of Tinospora cordifolia have been shown to stimulate the growth of osteoblasts, increasing the differentiation of cells into osteoblastic lineage and also increasing the mineralization of bone like matrix.[62] Ecdysteroids isolated from the plant have been reported of protein anabolic and anti-osteoporotic effects in mammals. Beta-Ecdysone (Ecd) from Tinospora cordifolia extracts have been reported to induce a significant increase in the thickness of joint cartilage, induce the osteogenic differentiation in mouse mesenchymal stem cells[63] and to relieve osteoporosis in osteoporotic animal models.[63] Further 20-OH-\u03b2-Ecd isolated from Tinospora cordifolia has been reported of its anti-osteoporotic effects[62] thus highlighting the role of Tinospora cordifolia in the treatment of osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.[64]\n\nAnti-HIV effects TCE has been shown to demonstrate a decrease in the recurrent resistance of HIV virus thus improving the therapeutic outcome.[65] Anti-HIV effects of TCE was revealed by reduction in eosinophil count, stimulation of B lymphocytes, macrophages and polymorphonuclear leucocytes and hemoglobin percentage thus, revealing its promising role of application in management of the disease.[65,66]\n\nAnti-cancer effects The anti-cancer effects of Tinospora cordifolia are mostly studied in animal models. TCE have been shown to have a radioprotective role by significantly increase in body weight, tissue weight, testes-body weight ratio and tubular diameter and inhibit the harmful effects of sub-lethal gamma radiation on testes in male Swiss albino mice. In pre-irradiating mice, TCE significantly affected radiation induced rise in lipid peroxidation and resulted in the decline of GSH concentration in testes.[67] Pre-treatment of HeLa cells by TCE have been shown to decrease the cell viability, increase LDH and decrease in GSH S-transferase activity.[68] Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) in TCE has been reported to stimulate the growth and proliferation of Human LNCaP cells (which are androgen-sensitive human prostate adenocarcinoma cells). Androgenic compounds in TCE act via androgen receptor.[69] Newly isolated compounds like (5R, 10R)-4R, 8R-dihydroxy-2S, 3R: 15, 16-diepoxycleroda-13 (16), 17, 12S: 18,1S-dilactone (ECD), a diterpenoid from Tinospora cordifolia has been reported for its chemopreventive potential in diethylnitrosamine (DEN) induced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in rats by decreasing anti-oxidant activities via SOD, CAT and detoxification enzymes like GSH, GPx and subsequent increase in the activities of the hepatic markers ((Serum glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase)SGOT, (Serum Glutamic Pyruvate Transaminase) SGPT, LDH) and decreased serum transaminase level thus confirming its anti-tumor effects and promising application as a potent chemo preventive drug for HCC.[26] The radiosensitizing activity of DCM extract of Tinospora cordifolia has been reported in Ehrlich ascites carcinoma (EAC) mice enabling tumor-free survival via depletion of GSH and glutathione-S-transferase by elevated levels of lipid peroxidation and DNA damage to tumor cells.[9,57,70] TCE hexane fraction has been shown to block the G1 phase in EAC mice and cause apoptosis by the formation of apoptotic bodies, nuclear condensation, activation of caspase-3, decreased cell number and ascites volume, increased expression of pro-apoptotic gene, Bax, and decreased expression of anti-apoptotic gene, Bcl-2.[71] TCE could induce a reduction of papillomas, tumor yield, tumor burden, and tumor weight while increase phase II detoxifying enzymes[72] in skin carcinoma animal models. The effect of a hydroalcoholic (80% ethanol: 20% distilled water) extract of aerial roots of Tinospora cordifolia on Swiss albino mice[73] revealed a significant increase in acid-soluble sulfhydryl (-SH), cytochrome P (450) contents, and enzyme activities of cytochrome P (450) reductase, cytochrome b5 reductase, GST, DT-diaphorase (DTD), SOD, catalase, GPX, and GR activity in the liver highlighting the chemopreventive role of Tinospora cordifolia against carcinogenicity.[73] In vivo anti-angiogenic activity of TCE in B16-F10 melanoma was detected by increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, including IL-1 \u03b2, IL-6, TNF-\u03b1, granulocyte monocyte-colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) and the vascular endothelial cell growth factor (VEGF), increased production of anti-angiogenic agents IL-2 and tissue inhibitor of metalloprotease-1 (TIMP-1) in the B16-F10 extract-treated animals.[74] The polysaccharide fraction from Tinospora cordifolia was found to be very effective in reducing the metastatic potential of B16-F10 melanoma cells. Markers of neoplastic development were reduced significantly in the treated animals compared with the untreated control animals.[75] Most of the synthetic chemotherapeutic agents suffer from toxic side effects.[76] The effect of Guduchi extracts was comparable or better than doxorubicin treatment.[77]\n\nTinospora cordifolia: Anti-microbial activity The methanol extracts of Tinospora cordifolia have been reported to have potential against microbial infections.[78] The anti-bacterial activity of Tinospora cordifolia extracts has been assayed against Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Proteus vulgaris, Salmonella typhi, Shigella flexneri, Salmonella paratyphi, Salmonella typhimurium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Enterobacter aerogene, and Serratia marcesenses (Gram-positive bacteria).[78\u201380] In mice models, TCE has been reported to function in bacterial clearance and improved phagocytic and intracellular bactericidal capacities of neutrophils.[81] TCE has been reported of immunostimulant properties on macrophages.[82] Intra-mammary infusion of hydro-methanolic extracts of Tinospora cordifolia treatment showed enhanced phagocytic activity of polymorphonuclear cells in bovine subclinical mastitis.[39,83]\n\nTinospora cordifolia: Anti-oxidant activity The anti-oxidant capacity of Tinospora cordifolia stem methanol extracts administered orally increased the erythrocytes membrane lipid peroxide and catalase activity. It also decreased the activities of SOD, GPx in alloxan-induced diabetic rats.[52,84,85] Tinospora cordifolia Willd.(Menispermaceae) extracts possess possible inhibitors of aldose reductase and anti-oxidant agents[86] thereby reducing chemotoxicity induced by free radicals.[87] TCE has been reported of its strong free radical scavenging properties against superoxide anion (O 2 -), hydroxyl radicals (OH), NO radical, and peroxynitrite anion (ONOO-).[87] The extract was also found to reduce the toxic side effects of CP in mice by the free radical formation.[88,89] Tinospora cordifolia lowers the levels of malondialdehyde and ROS and the higher levels of GSH and total thiols. The protective effects of Tinospora cordifolia could be observed even in the fetal milieu, with higher levels of anti-oxidant molecules and enzymes.[56] Tinospora cordifolia has the ability to scavenge free radicals generated during aflatoxicosis. Tinospora cordifolia showed protection against aflatoxin-induced nephrotoxicity due to the presence of alkaloids such as a choline, tinosporin, isocolumbin, palmatine, tetrahydropalmatine, and magnoflorine.[8] A significant increase in the concentration of TBARS in brain along with a decrease in heart has been observed in diabetic rats.[53] It also enhanced formation of SOD, GPx, and GSH in liver. Treatment with Tinospora cordifolia also inhibited glucose 6-phosphatase and fructose 1, 6-diphosphatase; and restored glycogen content in liver. Tinospora cordifolia has been shown to regulate blood glucose.[90] (5R, 10R)-4R, 8R-dihydroxy-2S, 3R: 15, 16-diepoxycleroda-13 (16), 17, 12S: 18,1S-dilactone (ECD), a diterpenoid from Tinospora cordifolia has been shown to possess chemo-preventive potential in DEN induced HCC rats. Treatment of ECD in both preventive and curative DEN induced animals increased the level of anti-oxidants and detoxification enzymes.[26] An aqueous extract of Tinospora cordifolia has a radio-protective enhancing the survival of mice against a sub-lethal dose of gamma radiation.[64\u201365] Tinospora cordifolia was effective in elevating the GSH levels, expression of the gamma-glutamylcysteine ligase and Cu-Zn SOD genes.[91] Aqueous extract of Tinospora cordifolia inhibited radiation mediated 2-deoxyribose degradation by inhibiting the formation of (Fe2+)-bipiridyl complex formation to confer radio-protective effects.[92] The arabinogalactan polysaccharide (TSP) isolated from Tinospora cordifolia showed good protection against iron-mediated lipid peroxidation of rat brain homogenate as revealed by the TBARS and lipid hydroperoxide (LOOH) assays.[42] Tinospora cordifolia also has the components that decrease the recurrent resistance of HIV virus to antiretroviral therapy (ART) and improve the outcome of the therapy.[93] The effect of a hydroalcoholic (80% ethanol: 20% distilled water) extract of aerial roots of Tinospora cordifolia on carcinogen\/drug metabolizing phase-I and phase-II enzymes, anti-oxidant enzymes, GSH content, LDH and lipid peroxidation has been shown in liver of Swiss albino mice. The enhanced GSH level and enzyme activities involved in xenobiotic metabolism and maintaining anti-oxidant status of cells are suggestive of a chemo-preventive efficacy of Tinospora cordifolia.[73] Tinospora cordifolia has been reported to contain an alpha-glucosidase inhibitor, characterized as saponarin (apigenin-6-C-glucosyl-7-O-glucoside). The leaf extract had appreciable anti-oxidant and hydroxyl radical scavenging activities.[20] Pepticare, a herbomineral formulation of the Ayurveda medicine consisting of the herbal drugs: Glycyrrhiza glabra, Emblica officinalis and Tinospora cordifolia, has anti-ulcer and anti-oxidant activity in rats.[94] Hyponidd is another herbomineral formulation composed of the extracts of 10 medicinal plants (Momordica charantia, Melia azadirachta, Pterocarpus marsupium, Tinospora cordifolia, Gymnema sylvestre, Enicostemma littorale, Emblica officinalis, Eugenia jambolana, Cassia auriculata and Curcuma longa). Hyponidd administration also decreased levels of glycosylated hemoglobin, plasma thiobarbituric acid reactive substances, hydroperoxides, ceruloplasmin and alpha-tocopherol in diabetic rats.[95] Anti-oxidant activities of Dihar, a polyherbal formulation containing drugs from eight different herbs viz., Syzygium cumini, Momordica charantia, Emblica officinalis, Gymnema sylvestre, Enicostemma littorale, Azadirachta indica, Tinospora cordifolia and Curcuma longa in streptozotocin induced type 1 diabetic rats. Dihar produced a significant decrease in serum creatinine and urea levels in diabetic rats.[7]"}
{"text":"KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A missing Malaysian airliner appears to have been deliberately steered off course after someone on board shut down its communications, Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Saturday.\n\nA week after the disappearance of flight MH370, Najib said its last transmission of satellite data came nearly seven hours after it disappeared from radar screens.\n\nBut the new satellite data gave no precise location, and the plane\u2019s altered course could have taken it anywhere from central Asia to the southern Indian Ocean, he said.\n\nMinutes after the Malaysian leader outlined investigators\u2019 latest findings, police began searching the house of the aircraft\u2019s 53-year-old captain for any evidence that he could have been involved in foul play.\n\nThe Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the early hours of March 8 with 239 passengers and crew aboard.\n\nNajib, giving his first statement at a news conference since then, confirmed reports that investigators believe somebody cut off the plane\u2019s communications reporting system, switched off its transponder and steered it west, far from its scheduled route.\n\n\u201cIn view of this latest development the Malaysian authorities have refocused their investigation into the crew and passengers on board,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cDespite media reports the plane was hijacked, I wish to be very clear, we are still investigating all possibilities as to what caused MH370 to deviate.\u201d\n\nSearch operations by navies and aircraft from more than a dozen nations were immediately called off in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea to the east of Malaysia, where the plane dropped off civilian air traffic control screens at 1:22 a.m. last Saturday (1722 GMT on Friday).\n\nMalaysia said new data showed the last communication between the missing plane and satellites at 8:11 a.m. (0011 GMT), almost seven hours after it turned back and crossed the Malay peninsula.\n\nThe data did not show whether the plane was still flying or its location at that time, presenting searchers with a daunting array of possible last locations. Seven hours\u2019 more flying time would likely have taken it to the limit of its fuel load.\n\nTWO CORRIDORS\n\nNajib said the plane\u2019s final communication with satellites placed it somewhere in one of two corridors: a northern arc stretching from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, or a southern one stretching from Indonesia to the vast southern Indian Ocean.\n\n\u201cClearly, the search for MH370 has entered a new phase,\u201d said Najib, whose government has come under criticism for its slow release of information surrounding one of the most baffling mysteries in aviation history.\n\nRelated Coverage Malaysian plane saga highlights air defense gaps\n\nIndia stepped up its search in two areas at the request of Malaysia - one around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and another further west across the Bay of Bengal - but found no evidence that would indicate that the plane had come down in its waters, the Defence Ministry said.\n\nA senior military official in Port Blair, capital of the archipelago, said Indian aircraft had combed waters stretching up to 300 nautical miles offshore and overflown all 572 islands in the chain but \u201cwe don\u2019t have anything so far\u201d.\n\nIndia\u2019s Eastern Naval Command was investigating a separate rectangular \u2018box\u2019 15 km wide by 600 km long, some 900 km east of Port Blair, but had found nothing.\n\nAbout two-thirds of the passengers on board the flight were Chinese, and Beijing has been showing increasing impatience with the speed and coordination of the Malaysian search effort.\n\nOn Saturday, China said it had demanded that Malaysia keep providing more thorough and accurate information, and added that it was sending a technical team to Malaysia to help with the investigation.\n\nChina\u2019s Xinhua state news agency said in a commentary that Najib\u2019s disclosure of the new details was \u201cpainfully belated\u201d.\n\n\u201cAnd due to the absence - or at least lack - of timely authoritative information, massive efforts have been squandered, and numerous rumors have been spawned, repeatedly racking the nerves of the awaiting families,\u201d it said.\n\nThe fate of flight MH370 has been shrouded in mystery since it disappeared off Malaysia\u2019s east coast less than an hour into its scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8.\n\nBut investigators have increasingly discounted the possibility of an accident due to the deliberate way it was diverted and had its communications switched off.\n\nEXPERIENCED CAPTAIN\n\nInvestigative sources told Reuters on Friday they believed the plane was following a commonly used navigational route when it was last spotted early on Saturday, northwest of Malaysia.\n\nTheir suspicion has hardened that it was flown off-course by the pilot or co-pilot, or someone else with detailed knowledge of how to fly and navigate a large commercial aircraft.\n\nNo details have emerged of any passengers or crew with militant links or psychological problems that could explain a motive for sabotaging the flight.\n\nThe experienced captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was a flying enthusiast who spent his off days tinkering with a flight simulator of the plane that he had set up at home, current and former co-workers said. Malaysia Airlines officials did not believe he would have sabotaged the flight.\n\nJapan Coast Guard pilots look out from the cockpit of their Gulfstream V Jet aircraft, customized for search and rescue operations, as they search for the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane over the waters of the South China Sea March 15, 2014. REUTERS\/Edgar Su\n\nThe 27-year-old co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, was religious and serious about his career, family and friends said, countering news reports suggesting he was a cockpit Romeo who was reckless on the job.\n\nAs the search enters its second week, several governments are using imagery satellites - platforms that take high definition photos - while data from private sector communications satellites is also being examined. China alone says it has deployed 10 satellites.\n\n\u201cThe area is enormous. Finding anything rapidly is going to be very difficult,\u201d said Marc Pircher, director of the French space centre in Toulouse. \u201cThe area and scale of the task is such that 99 percent of what you are getting are false alarms.\u201d\n\nThe corridors given by Najib represent a satellite track, which appears as an arc on a map. The plane did not necessarily follow the corridor, but was at some point along its path at the moment the signal was sent.\n\nOfficials at Kazakhstan\u2019s state air navigation service were not available for comment while in Turkmenistan, state aviation officials referred queries to the Foreign Ministry.\n\nAfghanistan\u2019s ministry of aviation said its controllers were certain the plane had not crossed their airspace. A spokesman for Pakistan\u2019s civilian airspace authority said: \u201cWe have not received any requests from Malaysia authorities for help, nor have we any information on the plane\u2019s whereabouts.\u201d\n\nSATELLITES\n\nEarlier, a source familiar with official U.S. assessments of electronic signals sent to geostationary satellites operated by Britain\u2019s Inmarsat said it appeared most likely the plane had turned south over the Indian Ocean, where it would presumably have run out of fuel and crashed into the sea.\n\nIf so, just finding the plane - let alone recovering the \u201cblack box\u201d data and cockpit voice recorders that hold the key to the mystery - would be a huge challenge.\n\nThe Indian Ocean has an average depth of more than 12,000 feet, or two miles. This is deeper than the Atlantic, where it took two years to locate wreckage on the seabed from an Air France plane that vanished in 2009, even though floating debris quickly gave an indication of the area of the crash.\n\nAny debris would have been widely dispersed by Indian Ocean currents in the week since the plane disappeared.\n\n\u201cWe have many radar systems operating in the area, but nothing was picked up,\u201d Rear Admiral Sudhir Pillai, Chief of Staff of India\u2019s Andamans and Nicobar Command, told Reuters.\n\n\u201cIt is possible that the military radars were switched off as we operate on an as-required basis. So perhaps secondary radars were operating, which may not have the required range to detect a flight at an altitude of 35,000 feet.\u201d\n\nThe other interpretation was that the aircraft continued to fly to the northwest and headed over Indian territory.\n\nThe source said it was believed unlikely the plane had flown for any length of time over India because it has strong air defence and radar coverage that should have allowed authorities to see the plane and intercept it.\n\nSlideshow (16 Images)\n\nIt is extremely rare for a modern passenger aircraft to disappear once it has reached cruising altitude, as MH370 had. When that does happen, the debris from a crash is usually found relatively quickly, close to its last known position.\n\nIn this case, there has been no trace of the plane, nor any sign of wreckage.\n\nThe maximum range of the Boeing 777-200ER is 7,725 nautical miles or 14,305 km. It is not clear how much fuel the aircraft was carrying, though it would have been enough to reach its scheduled destination, Beijing, a flight of five hours and 50 minutes, plus some reserve."}
{"text":"The relentless attacking football implemented by Brendan Rodgers at Anfield has acted as a major inspiration for the Reds' U21s team this season, according to Alex Inglethorpe.\n\nOn Friday, the coach takes his Academy youngsters into a Barclays U21 Premier League semi-final clash with Manchester United on the back of a campaign which has featured 55 goals in just 21 outings.\n\nKick-off at Anfield is at 7.45pm BST; tickets for the Kop are available to purchase now, while the game will also be broadcast live on LFC TV and LFCTV GO from 7.15pm. Click here for details.\n\nAhead of the encounter, Inglethorpe reflected on how he and his players are inspired by Rodgers' approach and the footballing philosophy the Northern Irishman has installed at the club.\n\n\"I think it's a very clear philosophy that runs from the top,\" he explained to Liverpoolfc.com.\n\n\"We've got incredible mentors and fantastic people to look up to in the first team in the style which they have played all season, irrespective of systems, because the first team have played a few different systems.\n\n\"The style has been consistent, they want to have the ball, they want to attack, they want to press high on the pitch, they want to entertain and they certainly do that.\n\n\"They are a side which people will regularly tune in and want to watch a Liverpool match because you are guaranteed excitement and a return to the values that the club was associated with for so many years, and it's our job as an U21s team to do our best to imitate that.\n\n\"At times we've been able to do that, other times we've tried but not been successful, but that's the nature of youth football and development, but we certainly know what we are trying to do.\"\n\nWatch the video here \u00bb\n\nThe young Reds are now one step away from a final against Chelsea to determine who will be this year's national U21 champions, and Inglethorpe is relishing another date in front of the Kop.\n\nThis season at Anfield, the U21s have won four games out of five - firing 14 goals in the process - and the coach knows his young charges are keen to impress once more.\n\nHe added: \"We're looking forward to it as a group. We feel as though we've worked hard all season and it's always nice, when you get to the end of the season, to have something to play for.\n\n\"It's great because the lads have more opportunities to impress and improve and there's no greater chance than at Anfield on Friday.\n\n\"To get the chance to play at Anfield I think is everything, not just the players but for the staff as well. Anfield generates an incredible atmosphere and there's an incredible ambience about the place.\n\n\"It's a fantastic place to go and work and it does give the players that lift because it's ultimately where they want to go and play every week.\n\n\"They want to play at home, they want the ground to be full and they want to contribute to the club, so to have a little dress rehearsal before the future main event is inspirational for all of them.\""}
{"text":"Clarity is a short film project, estimated at under a half hour run time. It is currently in pre-production, and shoot dates will be in July, 2014 in the Phoenix, AZ area. Dustin Diamond and Lynn Lowry are acting in it! It was written by Jenny Brundage, and will be directed by Brian LaPan.\n\nCover Art\n\nNear Future: About one-third of North America's population has either died, or is fatally ill due to side-effects of a commonly-ingested substance. The early symptoms can be mild, and include memory loss, but eventually lead to dementia and a horrible, painful death.\n\nKrystal, a young woman, stops off for a bite to eat, on her way to the city, and is reunited with her childhood best friend's older sister, Hope, whom invites her to visit a resort for a few days to catch up. Days pass, and romantic feelings blossom between the women. The resort and its inhabitants seem more and more like home and family. Unfortunately, many of the people are fatally ill, and some of them are not as stable as they initially seem...\n\nEverybody is preparing for the punch toast at midnight... but with different drink options, and different reasons behind their choices.\n\nClick here for CAST and CREW UPDATES!\n\nCast:\n\nLynn Lowry as Mrs. Diamond\n\nLynn Lowry\n\nDustin Diamond as Dusty Diamond\n\nTo be clear, Dustin Diamond, best known for his portrayal of Samuel \"Screech\" Powers on Saved by the Bell, will be portraying a regular, nice, somewhat sarcastic guy. Ever want to see him in something serious, dark and eerie? Back this Kickstarter to get your chance!\n\nDustin Diamond, known mostly to starring in Saved By The Bell, is an actor who has hit most screens in the recent past. He played the role of Samuel Power for almost thirteen years since it began. He played the role so well that he continued the role in the college series where it went by the name, Saved By The Bell: The College Years. Other than appearing on this show, he also appeared in number of games and some reality shows. Some of the reality shows that he appeared in are The Weakest Link, Celebrity Boxing 2, Celebrity Fit Club, and Professional Wrestling. He has also appeared in films like Dickie Roberts: Former Child star in 2003. Dustin has performed stand-up comedy for several years. He has a stage humor which most comedians don\u2019t have. He also commentates on TruTV\u2019s, The Smoking Gun Presents: World\u2019s Dumbest\u2026 He has written Behind the Bell, the inside story of the young cast from Saved by the Bell. You can see him in the upcoming film Scavenger Killers (A New Kind of Crazy).\n\nE.E. King as Tia... and she's also doing the cover art!!!\n\nE.E. King\n\nE. E. King is a performer, writer, biologist and painter. Ray Bradbury called her stories \u201cmarvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.\u201d She is the recipient of various international biology and painting grants. She has murals in Los Angeles and Spain.\n\nYou might have even seen Meeting of Minds, Mural on Mercado La Paloma, Los Angeles, 2000 121\u2019 x 33\u2019. Also, E.E. King will be Artist in Residence in the Bermuda Museum of Master Artists in 2015. Did I mention she's doing the cover art for Clarity???\n\nDirector:\n\nBrian LaPan\n\nBrian LaPan--Background includes being writer\/producer on television shows, including Roseanne, Dinosaurs, Unhappily Ever After, The Sinbad Show, and Parker Lewis Can't Lose. Because of his television background, he is especially suited to skillfully handle our short shoot, work with both novices and seasoned Hollywood actors, and help Clarity become an utterly amazing film."}
{"text":"If you believed the internet, you'd think there's huge debate over whether eggs, coffee, or salt are good or bad for you. In reality, there's significant agreement on diet and health issues among experts, but the general public is conflicted. So why are we so confused when experts agree? Let's clear the air.\n\nIf you asked most people about foods that are \"good\" or \"bad\" for you, you'd get a dozen different answers. You'd find people who vehemently argue that eggs are both good or bad for you, that sodium does and doesn't contribute to hypertension, or that carbs do or don't make you sick. In general, you'll find a lot of laypeople with opinions that may or may not be based in real science. Researchers however, generally have some pretty solid opinions on these issues, and are quick to note where their own shortcomings are.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nSo where's the disconnect? In this post, we'll look at where the breakdown happens, who's to blame, and what you can do about it all. We sat down with a number of our own experts to get their input. It's going to be a bumpy ride, so let's get started.\n\nThe \"Health and Diet\" Industry Carries Much of the Blame\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAmericans spend billions on health and diet products every year. From books and meal plans to prepackaged foods and DVDs, we eat the stuff up (pun intended). It's natural to be attracted to any path that promises big results for little effort, but there's more to it. People who would otherwise consider themselves rational are often duped by marketing and half-truth statements made in the name of science.\n\nThis is where the diet industry flourishes. By taking advantage of the public's desire for practical health information, so-called \"experts\" sell us everything from juicers to supplements, convincing us the whole time we'll live forever thanks to their advice. It shouldn't work, but it does. Beth Skwarecki, a science writer and educator, explains why:\n\nWe respond strongly to warnings about danger, and promises of really awesome stuff (like health, or weight loss)\u2014but only if those warnings or promises are actionable. And with food, that really applies: We can act on a warning to avoid gluten or eat superfoods (or whatever) at our next meal or our next trip to the grocery store. It makes us feel good to have control over ourselves. I'm not a psychologist and this is just my personal opinion, but I'm sure there is research that backs this up.\n\nWhy this causes confusion: Truth and falsehoods are both presented this way. \u201cVitamins are magical substances that will make you more healthy if you are deficient!\u201d Well, yeah. That's actually true. \u201cVitamins are magical substances that will make you more healthy!\u201d Sounds similar, but it's not the same, and it's not true in most cases. Then you can substitute various other chemicals or superfoods for the word \"vitamins\" in that sentence. True claims and misleading ones sound very similar. People selling diets or exercise programs will latch on to true things that help them sell their product; they'll also latch onto false ones. Just look at Dr. Oz: plenty of what he's pushing is true, but lots of it isn't, or is misleading. Which is which? I don't know that he cares. He just needs a steady stream of things to endorse.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nWe don't mean to single out Dr. Oz here. There are a number of physicians and other medical professionals who are highly educated, but have made the decision to \"sell health.\" They may believe they're doing good, or just want to make a living. In all of those cases, the message is similar: \"Living healthy doesn't have to be hard, just do this thing\/eat this food\/buy my book.\"\n\nSelling health is only half of the job. The other half is undermining public trust in science-based medicine and traditional authorities (although they carry blame too\u2014we'll get to that in a moment) so they can swoop in to the rescue. Andy Bellatti, registered dietitian and frequent Lifehacker contributor, explains:\n\nThe food industry thrives on confusion, and it loves to propagate the notion that \"Gee whiz, one day you're told coffee is good for you, the next day you're told it's unhealthy!\" By making nutrition advice seem \"confusing,\" they attempt to gain the public's trust.\n\nIt also doesn't help that, increasingly, food companies are setting up \"institutes\" (i.e.: Coca-Cola's Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, General Mills' Bell Institute) that are essentially PR efforts that oh-so-coincidentally frame these companies' products as healthful (or, in the case of soda, in no way problematic from a health standpoint). To make matters more confusing, these institutes have doctors, cardiologists, and dietitians on their payroll\u2014as well as key media contacts\u2014resulting in a health professional talking to media about, say, how soda is \"unfairly vilified.\" Most times, the general public isn't aware that this isn't an objective health professional choosing to say that.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nWhen we debunked stubborn exercise myths, we ran headlong into one of these groups. The \"Gatorade Sports Science Institute\" has papers explaining why Gatorade is better than water for exercise\u2014papers we saw copied word-for-word on other sites. In reality, depending on the exercise you do there's either no difference between water or sports drinks, and for most people (and for moderate exercise) there's clear evidence that water is the better option unless you're doing for bouts of prolonged exercise.\n\nAll of these tactics may seem underhanded, but they're just part of the marketing game. By playing on the public's confusion and presenting their own products as quick fixes they convince us to buy their books, follow their diet plans, and perhaps most dangerously, ignore legitimate advice and real research.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nIt's not just companies that do this though. Individuals with a message to sell also do it. Skwarecki's article, Why It's So Easy to Believe Our Food is Toxic, is an exceptional case study in this. She explains how \"experts\" take good premises\u2014like the need to take your health in your own hands and be critical of the things you eat and buy\u2014and go off the rails when the sales pitch gets involved. She calls out nutrition gurus and health \"experts\" you've likely seen reposted on Facebook, like Vani Hari (aka The Food Babe,) and Joseph Mercola, among others, who thrive on obfuscating nutrition so much that the only clear thing they do suggest is that you should buy their books, sponsored foods, and DVDs.\n\nFood industry marketing firms and \"diet guru\" salesmen both use the same tactics, and both groups make money from your fear and lack of knowledge about health. You should treat both with the same skeptical eye, even if one's message is more attractive than the other.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nCorporate-Influenced Government Writes the Guidelines\n\nThe diet industry only shares part of the blame here. Much rests squarely on the shoulders of our government. We're not talking about a political party or person. This problem extends back for over 50 years, and it's not just an American problem. Our dietary guidelines and food industries have far-reaching global impact. People in countries around the world aim to adopt a more luxurious, first-world lifestyle, and that includes all of the food products available in countries like ours. Our industry reps are at the table when writing trade agreements. Nutrition scientists however, are not.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nDietary guidelines issued by government agencies responsible for food (largely the USDA) have changed over the years. They now focus less on foods and more on nutrients, which has three big problems:\n\nA \"balanced diet\" has transformed from a selection of foods and portion suggestions into a concoction of nutrients that people have to \"make sure they're getting enough of,\" (which they would anyway with a balanced diet.) It's led the public to panic over specific nutrients and ingredients in our foods. So-called \"nutritionism\" has led to the low-fat craze, the salt-is-evil scare, and the eggs-cause-heart-disease panic, all of which have been largely refuted (with special cases excepted.) The people responsible for dietary guidelines are directly at odds with (and often influenced by) food industry groups, agricultural companies, and other businesses with a massive stake in making sure you eat the food they pack and sell\u2014and they're willing to spend politically to make sure the government recommends their products.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nJust like money can buy influence in politics, it can buy influence in dietary guidelines. Kamal Patel, director at Examine.com, a site that aims to bring relevant studies to nutrition topics, explained the connection this way:\n\nThe USDA created the food pyramid to encourage a healthy diet, but the USDA also has a mission to encourage agricultural products grown in the US. There can be a LOT of conflict between those two goals. So the food pyramid (ahem, I mean \"MyPlate\") is not simply an objective summary of the available evidence. In fact, if the dietary guidelines had to go through peer review, I'm not sure it would be accepted for publication.\n\nSpeaking of the dietary guidelines...some people are of the mindset that they don't really matter. Nobody really reads the whole guidelines document, unless you're a researcher or just really into nutrition. But the guidelines are actually hugely important. Who's the biggest provider of food in the US? It's not McDonald's. It's the US government, by far. They provide food for the school lunch program and for over a million military members, in addition to subsidizing food for people with low incomes and a variety of other groups. And that's outside the indirect effect the guidelines have on physicians, who then inform their patients, who often aren't Lifehacker types who do their own research but rather just do exactly as their doctor directs. Or at least attempt to.\n\nEqually important is the huge size of supplement industry and the food lobby. Farmers have little to no power compared to Unilever, General Mills, etc. They made it so that packaged foods are the norm, food and supplement marketing has become insane, and whole foods have lost out big time. In the beginning days of the food pyramid, they were using the slogan \"Eat Right\". Kraft used that slogan, so they told the government to stop, and they did! Companies always win. A few more examples: Government policy favors packaged foods that can display health claims (e.g. Granola bars, Lunchables) rather than natural foods that come loose or in clear plastic (e.g. strawberries, chicken thighs). Grains were originally 2-3 servings per day until food companies complained and they more than doubled the recommendation. Fruit and veggie manufacturers make very little money compared to General Mills and Unilever, so it took the National Cancer Institute to step in and tell the first-draft writers for the food pyramid that they really need to bump up the fruit and veggie intake. Even the person in charge of the first pyramid, Louise Light, wrote a book about how screwed up the process was by industry and differing interests. She said that the grain-based pyramid would cause obesity and diabetes, and it did. The people in charge told her that fruits and veggies are kind of interchangeable with grains, plus grains are cheaper for food stamps. Although few if any researchers are out to lie to the public, note that for the 2000 Dietary guidelines committee, 6 out of 11 members had financial ties to food and agriculture manufacturers. Researchers have pet projects and advocate for them, and funding and careers are dependent on that.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nWhen Patel explained this, I asked how the government\u2014probably the closest thing to a trusted resource\u2014could re-shape its recommendations. He explained:\n\nA better way to form the guidelines may be to avoid focus on individual nutrients (since few nutrients are categorically good or bad, other than manmade trans-fats which are always bad) and rather encourage whole foods. But if that message was the basis of a more simple guideline, and processed packaged foods were discouraged, where would that leave General Mills, Monsanto, and Unilever? Not that they directly write the guidelines, but they have lobbies and fund studies. And the government allows them to label Fruity Pebbles as healthy, just because they add some sprinkling of vitamins into the sugary mix. One last reason why it's good to focus on foods rather than nutrients for recommendations: single vitamins often fail in trials. Researchers used to think that vitamins E and A may protect against disease if supplemented. Dozens of trials later, it turns out that both may slightly lower lifespan or cause a bit more disease. One reason is that nutrients work in concert \u2014 eating a healthy diet where the foods naturally have a variety of nutrients is probably a better idea than relying on supplements to save you from a crappy diet. Indeed, there are no \"superfoods\" or \"supernutrients\"...it's probably more important to eat a natural diet that has some of each nutrient in addition to some healthy plant and animal components that aren't classified as essential nutrients (these are good\/great for optimal health, but not technically necessary to live).\n\nAdvertisement\n\nUnfortunately, that won't happen as long as major food industry groups play a significant role in drafting nutritional guidelines. This isn't to say they're not at all useful, but they should be viewed with a skeptical eye. Alannah Dibona, frequent Lifehacker contributor, MS in Nutrition Studies and registered dietitian, sums it all up:\n\nWe humans are experts at changing our minds, issuing inaccurate self-reports, and, well, living. Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health explains this beautifully alongside other issues with nutrition research in his latest book \"Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating.\" Dr. Willett takes care to point out another major factor: in this country, nutrition research for governing bodies is frequently in direct conflict with agriculture and its stake in the economy. The research that contributes to the USDA food pyramid, for example, is largely funded by grants from the dairy and beef industries. Thus, dietary \"recommendations\" from different bodies should be examined with a critical, research-oriented eye. The consumer must ask, \"Who paid for this?\"\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThe Media and the Scientific Community Communicates Poorly\n\nSo we've established that money talks. But surely science-based medicine must offer useful data that we can all use, right? Not quite. When I asked Skwarecki about it, she explained it this way:\n\nThe other reason there is confusion? Because there really ARE old beliefs that were held as true that are being corrected. Saturated fat is a subject with genuine controversy. Experts have not come to a consensus, but decades of public-health messages are in the process of being potentially overturned. When you hold to something as a foundation (Of course fat is bad for you! Of course stretching prevents injury!) and that belief gets challenged, you're tempted to give up on everything. It's a very reasonable thing to do: My facts were wrong, I need to reevaluate all my facts.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThe truth is, while there's consensus on many things, there's a huge lack of it on others. Epidemiology, or the study of the patterns and causes of disease, is extremely difficult to do. Says Patel:\n\nNutritional epidemiology is a really, really tough thing to study. Harder than most other areas of health. Much harder than it sounds. Some people think \"Oh nutrition! I know about food and nutrition! That's much easier than some analyzing some obscure medication that I can't even pronounce.\" Wrong. Medication effects can be complex, but nutritional epidemiology makes that look like child's play. ... It's easy to see how the public can get mixed messages. Research results are notoriously unpredictable, since only some of the total number of studies get published. Studies have a higher chance of getting published if they show positive results, and food and supplement manufacturers can keep funding trials until one gets published. Nutrients interact with each other, so the effects of any one nutrient are hard to predict, let alone the effect of any one food in the midst of a diet comprised of dozens or hundreds of foods. So while I don't agree with everything Michael Pollen says, his message is generally on point: \"nutritionism\" is bound to fail. If you obsess about your diet and individual nutrients, you not only lose the benefit of the occasional cronut or thanksgiving dinner, but you lose the forest for the trees. Natural foods are what's healthy, nutrients and the controversies they cause are what keeps research dollars flowing and flip-flops popping up every couple weeks. It's important to get nutrients, but it's wise to get them mostly through food, and only after that supplement what you need in a very targeted manner.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nIn short, the science here is complex, difficult, and slow-moving. Patel explained that while there is consensus on some things, everyone's body is different. For every factor where there is agreement, there's another factor that influences everything:\n\nThere is a rough agreement that a balanced diet is probably a good idea. While there are some regular people who experiment with meat-only diets, macrobiotic diets, etc, most researchers are old dudes who eat normal diets and believe that veggies and fruits and whole grains are good, and red meat is bad, and some other things are in between. I'm just one person who has had the opportunity to make a career out of reading articles and grading their study quality \u2014 but I can honestly say that I don't know what is correct for sure. Gluten and wheat is bad for some people, low carb could help certain diabetics but so could a very nutritious diet, and low carb can also cause side effects in some people. Some people live long lives with \"healthy\" diets, some live long lives eating milk chocolate and fried chicken every day. For any specific nutrient, I can summarize the evidence. And for any type of diet, I can find the totality of observational evidence for it. But there haven't been many (any?) long term randomized trials of low carb, high carb, etc etc. It would be too expensive, deemed unethical, and just not logistically feasible for compliance \u2014 the primary researcher for long term observational trials (where they just follow people and collect data, not make them eat certain diets) often die in the middle of the trial, so it's quite an effort to keep a long randomized trial going that costs millions. Especially when food trials are funded at levels so much lower than pharmaceutical trials.\n\nThis is where the media comes in. Research that you hear about may be just one study designed to tackle a specific angle to a much larger problem. This is where the media (yes, ourselves at Lifehacker included) are at fault. Preliminary results published and popularized as cure-alls, rat cures touted as future human cures, it makes the public believe every miracle is a few trials away, and when it's not, people are frustrated and confused. This kind of poor communication and science reporting is a topic we've covered before in detail, and it plays a huge role in making the public's perception of science and medicine worse. As a result, it sends people running into the arms of diet hucksters and snake oil salesmen, eager to capitalize on that lack of trust.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nWe Are Predictable and Easily Influenced\n\nAdvertisement\n\nWe're part of the problem too. Our buying habits are predictable and easy to capitalize on. Our psychology is even predictable, and well studied by marketers. The power of the word \"natural\" to drive sales even though we all know it's meaningless is a good example, as is the fear around the word \"processed\" without context.\n\nThe scare over the \"yoga mat chemical\" (aka azodicarbonamide) is a good example too - we're poorly educated when it comes to science issues, don't read beyond headlines, succumb to confirmation bias, take up sides and arms in specific camps, and carry our message around to anyone who'll listen without listening ourselves.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nSimilarly, where we put our money influences who has power and amplifies their message, even if it's not backed by science. We put our money where those opinions are, and those opinions are influenced easily. The industries and companies we support grow, even as we look elsewhere in the world for examples of healthy living. Those companies in turn export our lifestyle into new markets. Unless there's strength in the food traditions in those markets, they become more like us and suffer the same illnesses we do. In the process, they lose the very things we could learn the most from.\n\nSo What Can We Do?\n\nAdvertisement\n\nBy now it may seem like we're pretty screwed. Where can you turn for legitimate advice? I asked our panel for their suggestions, and unfortunately they all agreed that we have to properly calibrate our bullshit detectors, and seek out multiple, trustworthy resources. Be ready for conflicting data\u2014if you find it, it just means the topic isn't settled. The image above, from this pocket guide to bullshit prevention over at io9, is a good starting point.\n\nYou could ask your doctor, or a nutritionist\u2014but Patel explained that's not always the best route. Most physicians get minimal nutrition training during medical school. A \"nutritionist\" could be anyone with a range of certifications, some of which can be earned in months without any real science study or knowledge. Even some registered dietitians (RDs) can unflinchingly toe the official government line just because it's easy and the closest thing we have to an evidence-backed recommendation, even though it's far from perfect.\n\nWhen I asked Patel, he suggested everyone take time to learn about nutrition science and empower themselves:\n\nIt's best to learn a bit of basic nutrition science (like from a free online course or book\u2014online courses from Udemy, Khan, MIT, etc), and then get to finding people who seem logical to discuss things with. These people can be at a local meetup, they could be a doctor or an alternative medicine practitioner or a dietician. Do not rely on Mayo Clinic, WebMD, etc. They are very conservative and go with whatever the government says for the most part. People who like food, who like cooking in particular, often eat healthy even if they don't know everything about nutrition. This is because eating plants and animals is probably the healthiest diet, rather than eating mostly packaged foods comprised of some type of flour, some type of vegetable oil, and a long list of other ingredients.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nBellatti suggests you be critical, but also don't boil it down to the old adage, \"everything in moderation.\" It oversimplifies things:\n\nThe basic principles of healthful eating\u2014eat a generous amount of fruits and vegetables, eat as little sugar as possible, prioritize whole foods (i.e.: avocados and chickpeas as opposed to Lucky Charms and Cheetos)\u2014have remained unchanged for decades. The issue of moderation is problematic because it sounds good in theory, but it has been so watered down and so co-opted by the food industry that it now means nothing. The food industry loves to use \"everything in moderation\" to state that all their offerings\u2014no matter how heinous\u2014\"fit in a healthy diet.\" Alas, a diet that includes frozen pizza, sugary cereal, soda, chips, and fast food all in \"moderation\" quickly becomes a diet where these foods, \"in moderation,\" take up the most real estate. I urge people to remain curious and open-minded, but also to remember common sense and, whenever possible, read the actual study or seek the opinion of a well-informed individual who is able to understand the studies. Sometimes, a study like \"X food lowers diabetes risk by 35%\" is based on a study where the servings needed to slash that risk are preposterous.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAt the end of the day, the reason why there's so much confusion is because there's too much to be gained by keeping us all confused and looking for guidance. Similarly, the fact that nutrition and health science is difficult and slow doesn't engender much faith from a quick-fix addicted public.\n\nThe big lessons here though are ones you probably knew already: Eat smart, cook your own food, and think critically when someone tries to sell you a diet or lifestyle. Think just as critically when someone is trying to sell you fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Do your own research, challenge your confirmation bias, and be willing to change your mind as new evidence arises (don't fall for the \"I've done this my whole life and I'm fine\" excuse.) Finally, and most importantly, remember that what works for you may not work for someone else. Nutrition is never a one-size-fits-all science.\n\nKamal Patel is the director of Examine.com. He's a nutrition researcher with an MPH and MBA from Johns Hopkins University, and is on hiatus from a PhD in nutrition in which he researched the link between diet and chronic pain. He has published peer-reviewed articles on vitamin D and calcium as well as a variety of clinical research topics. Kamal has also been involved in research on fructose and liver health, mindfulness meditation, and nutrition in low income areas. Examine.com and Kamal are both on facebook.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nBeth Skwarecki is a science writer and educator. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, PLOS Public Health Perspectives, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. You can find more of her work in her portfolio here, and you can follow her on Twitter at @BethSkw .\n\nAndy Bellatti, MS, RD is a Las Vegas-based dietitan and the author of the nutrition blog Small Bites. You can follow him on Twitter at @andybellatti.\n\nAlannah DiBona, MA, MS, is a Boston-based nutritionist and mental health counselor, and the woman behind mindbodysportconsulting.com.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAll four graciously volunteered their expertise for this story, and we thank them."}
{"text":"Tax and spend: Seattle outpaces other governments\n\nThe City of Seattle's operating budget has increased by 65 percent since 2000, a significantly faster clip than the jumps in spending at King County and the state.\n\nBut it still hasn't been enough.\n\nSeattle faces a $67 million deficit next year, a situation that has led Mayor Mike McGinn to propose broad cuts to next year's city budget -- including the elimination of nearly 300 jobs and reductions to the arts, neighborhoods and human services.\n\nMost governments are underwater due to a combination of rising expenses and tax revenues coming in at a slower than expected rate due to the Great Recession. However, Seattle has outpaced others when it comes to taxing and spending, according to a review by seattlepi.com.\n\nKing County's operating budget has gone up 32 percent during the decade, while its general fund revenues have increased 41 percent. The state's operating budget increased by about 53 percent in 10 years while its revenues rose by about 50 percent. The money the city gets from taxes, fees and other sources to pay for day-to-day services has gone up 67 percent over the past decade .\n\nIt's tricky to compare governments because they do different things and serve different populations. King County has fewer taxing resources and it's charged with providing services for unincorporated areas that are expensive to cover, for example. And the state's operations dwarf those of cities and counties, while Olympia lawmakers can rewrite tax and spending laws to help deal with downturns. And the state writes its budget on a two-year cycle. Seattle and King County operate on one-year budgets.\n\nSeattle, the state's largest city, has a famously tax-friendly electorate. It's rare for Jet City residents to reject a tax hike, so its political leaders are less wary than their counterparts elsewhere to reach for that option.\n\n\"The vast majority of the differences between growth at the county and the city are the revenue tools allowed by state law. The city has the ability to rely on property taxes, sales taxes, B&O (business) and utility taxes, while the county does not have the B&O or utility tax,\" said Hall Walker of Seattle's budget office.\n\nKing County relies on the property tax for the bulk of its funds. In 2001, voters passed Initiative 747, which limits property tax growth to 1 percent plus new construction. It had been 6 percent before that. \"King County's general fund revenues are more constrained than either the state's or a city's,\" said Frank Abe, spokesman for Executive Dow Constantine.\n\nWalker said there were other reasons for the discrepancy in government growth. The county removed park funding from its general fund and the Emergency Medical Services levy renewed at a much higher rate in 2007, $630 million over six years. The owner of a $400,000 home is paying $120 a year for the service. The county funnels the EMS monies into a separate account, while Seattle puts its EMS revenue in its general fund. And Seattle has raised its business and occupation tax rates and added more paid, on-street parking spaces to try to bring in more money.\n\nIn 2000, Seattle's adopted operating budget was $548 million. This year it was just over $905 million. Ten years ago the city took in $542 million from taxes and other sources to pay for its daily operations. This year that figure was about $900 million.\n\nIn his budget for next year, McGinn proposed no general tax increases. But he did suggest $23 million in higher fees and other revenue-generating proposals. The business community objected to plans to significantly raise the hourly parking rate.\n\nLast month McGinn and a coalition of city unions announced they'd tentatively agreed to forgo automatic 2 percent cost-of-living raises in future years. Previously, unions got at least a 2 percent annual bump, regardless of inflation.\n\nGoing forward through 2013, raises will track the Consumer Price Index. For next year that would mean a 0.6 cost-of-living increase and a $2.3 million savings for the general fund. Labor costs are the biggest chunk of the operating budget, and, since 2000, what the city has paid its workers in salary and benefits has gone up 58 percent -- from $733.8 million to $1.1 billion.\n\nOn Monday, McGinn, the City Council and labor leaders have scheduled a news conference to discuss potential labor savings."}
{"text":"random schedule, VI Felipe de Bourbon, became at midnight the new King of Spain, one hour after the removal of the national football team, the defending champion, the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. At 46, the young monarch was sworn in Madrid during a simple ceremony, during which he swore allegiance to the Constitution of 1978, the founding base of Spanish democracy.Modern and discreet.\n\nhe succeeded his father Juan Carlos, who on Wednesday signed his abdication. His wife, Princess Letizia, a former television news presenter, becomes Queen of Spain the same occasion.\n\nStudy Abroad, military training: \u201cHis goal, his only goal is to serve Spain. It was instilled in his heart, he must be the first servant, \u201csaid one day his mother, Queen Sofia. Its mission is to ensure the continuity of a parliamentary monarchy gradually introduced with the arrival on the throne in 1975, Juan Carlos, the hero of the democratic transition after the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Contested in the polls by a Spanish two in a country plagued by economic crisis and unemployment. Monarchy\n\n12:05. Royal Parade new king meets a great success The decorated in the colors of Spain, a convertible sedan, a king physique which has just passed his first inauguration speech \u2026 Felipe VI through no fault this morning streets handover. The people cheered.\n\n12 hours. Moment of communion with the Spaniards It declared a national holiday in Spain has allowed citizens to travel to attend the handover. Returning to the palace, the new king salutes the crowd during forty minutes to give a strong signal to his country.\n\n11h, 55. Letizia smiling and happy this crazy woman temperament, divorced once, and daughter taxi driver, who has often been described as \u201cambitious\u201d suggests his happiness to become Queen of Spain through its mine happy and relaxed.\n\n11h 50. Letizia and Felipe VI ride in the convertible Rolls to greet the crowd Felipe VI standing in convertible sedan embodies the crown in sunny Madrid. A beautiful image to create enthusiasm. Favorable to the monarchy polls back for fifteen days."}
{"text":"The story of the ExMoi occupation in Turin, a solution by radicals and refugees to the problems of homelessness amongst migrants in a city full of empty buildings, and the reaction of racist organisations to the project.\n\nThe story of ExMoi begins with two open wounds: the countless empty buildings in Turin, and the countless refugees living on Italian streets and in Italian train stations.\n\nBack in 2006, the Turin municipality and the national government spent over 140 million euros in building a new neighbourhood to host athletes for the Winter Olympic Games. This was in an area that once held the city\u2019s biggest wholesale market (MOI \u2013 Mercato Ortofrutticolo all\u2019Ingrosso). Designed by international architects and built according to the latest ecological and sustainable design criteria, the Olympic Village was finished in 20 months. It was used for around 16 days and left mostly empty after the Games ended.\n\nLittle by little, the regional government has sold off some of the buildings; some have been converted into student housing and a youth hostel. At the same time, serious structural problems have emerged, revealing the poor quality of the buildings: as a consequence, no-one wants to invest in them. The potential for regenerating the deprived Lingotto area has been squandered. Four buildings were sold off to a private holding (35% owned by the city, the rest by Pirelli and the Intesa San Paolo bank) and left empty for seven years.\n\nEven though no official investigation has been carried out, many claim that the Mafia was involved in the construction work (as has been proved the case in many other public tenders for public housing and private buildings). Many believe that quick and shoddy building for money laundering purposes is the reason for structural and other problems (the concrete is breaking up, the solar panels have never worked, countless minor pieces of heating insulation and pipework were never finished, and the paint is peeling off).\n\nIn the meantime, between 2011 and 2013, a steady stream of refugees continued to arrive in Italy. These asylum seekers were able to benefit from the ENA (North Africa Emergency Plan), an Italian government comprehensive integration project to tackle the humanitarian crisis following the turmoil in North Africa and the war in Libya. While actively supporting the Libyan war, the Italian government was unable to host the 30,000 ENA refugees properly. This programme reinforced the SPRAR project (Services for the Protection of Asylum Seekers and Refugees), providing funds to support the refugees\u2019 insertion into training placements and the labour market as well as providing access to public healthcare and to dignified shelter. These projects were lacking in many ways: they failed to teach Italian, many were set in distant locations, no social integration or any understanding of Italian bureaucracy was provided, and job training just did not take place. Some locations were simply hotels or other facilities where the refugees were forced to stay with nothing to do. The ENA ended abruptly and in March 2013 many refugees ended up on the street.\n\nSome refugees were in contact with local squatters and housing rights activists. Together, they decided to occupy the ExMoi buildings in the former Olympic Village and on 30 March 2013 about 300 refugees took part in the action. Currently around 800 people of over 26 different nationalities live at the ExMoi, in four different buildings. This is the largest, most stable and important occupation by and for refugees that has ever taken place in Italy. On 23 May 2014 UNHCR reported that \u201cthousands of refugees are forced to live in empty buildings in the main Italian cities like Rome, Milan and Turin, due to the lack and insufficiency of the projects.\u201d The ExMoi is a prime example of this.\n\nThe Refugees and Migrants Solidarity Committee is a group of volunteers which includes students, migrants, committed citizens and social activists. It is linked politically to two autonomist squats in the city, CSOAs Askatasuna and Gabrio, is also supported by various local associations and the local church, and is connected to the national grassroots housing movement. The Committee has been supporting the ExMoi occupation with the aim of providing refugees with housing after they were abandoned by the government. Since the occupation, the Committee has provided medical, language and legal care, created a school on the premises, and co-ordinated the distribution of food, furniture and other basic supplies. This is a significant development but not without precedent in Turin. Refugees were squatting in the city long before the ExMoi occupation. The movement started in 2007 with refugees from Darfur and there are currently at least eight occupied buildings for refugees (among 27 with other housing or political aims). Together, these buildings are home to more than 1,000 people.\n\nAn eight-month-long political battle, begun by refugees and the Committee, has included various demonstrations and temporary blockades of public offices in order to get legal permanent residency (Residenza) for the refugees. Permanent residency grants access to all social and health services, and (for children) to school. It is necessary to renew the Permesso di soggiorno (permission to stay) which all refugees require in order to stay in Italy. It allow refugees to have a driving licence and legal job contracts. At long last, the Turin municipality granted all refugees permanent residency which gives them access to public healthcare and allows them to sign up with the employment agency. It does not, though, grant access to social services (which is discriminatory, according to Italian legislation).\n\nIn early 2014 the Committee supported another occupation. A five-storey building was occupied, following the overcrowding of the ExMoi building complex. It currently hosts around 60 people. The internal yard has been converted into a vegetable garden run by the residents, and there is also a self-managed bike repair workshop. Formerly a nursing home managed by the local Catholic parish, today the building is managed by its residents, who take most decisions via a weekly assembly\/meeting. Ownership remains in the hands of the Church, however, which has decided to form a refugee project in order to legalise the building\u2019s status.\n\nMeanwhile the ExMoi occupation lives on. Many among the refugees are families (15% of the inhabitants are women and more than 30 children under 10 live there), some have found jobs and continue living there to support their friends. Many people have not been able to find a proper job but survive by selling metal or other materials found in rubbish bins. A community has somehow been created, with a mix of ethnic groups living peacefully together. Although there have been some minor personal clashes, life goes on, even if the structural problems make everyday living challenging: water pours from some ceilings, the electricity system cuts out, and only half of the apartments have hot water, not to mention the lack of any heating system. Despite all this, the refugees and the Committee have managed to keep ExMoi clean and working, repairing the worst problems in three out of four buildings.\n\nUnfortunately, a wave of racist reaction from the usual suspects (Lega Nord, Fratelli d\u2019Italia and Forza Italia) has managed to destabilise the situation. These parties have joined together to create a political campaign with the aim of forcing the municipality to evict the residents, who they call \u201ccriminals\u201d and \u201cillegal immigrants\u201d. Through contacts in the Turin municipality, they arranged an \u201cinstitutional visit to check the situation\u201d. Following negotiation with ExMoi, this was cancelled but a right-wing politician decided to come anyway, before being shown the door by the refugees. The far-right groups then held a racist demonstration in the area in December 2013, attended by around 50 people, mostly from Giovent\u00f9 Nazionale, the youth wing of Fratelli d\u2019Italia. They have now invited the head of Lega Nord, Matteo Salvini, well known for his racist statements and his hatred of social movements and immigrants. Thankfully, nothing has come of this. So far.\n\nFinally, in December 2014, a judge signed an authorisation order to evict the residents. It usually takes a long time for an order to lead to an actual eviction but the news made the papers immediately and right-wing parties are exerting pressure for an eviction to take place. It is highly unlikely that the municipality will use the police to evict the refugees, although this has happened in other places. In this case, both police and judges would like a peaceful solution, especially because of the large number of residents involved. It seems that the Mayor of Turin (Fassino, Democratic Party) will ask the national government for exceptional funding. The Mayor is also the president of ANCI, the association of Italian local councils, and has a direct channel to the prime minister, Matteo Renzi. This situation could have serious repercussions for Renzi and the PD.\n\nThe experience of the 2007 Darfur refugees indicates how the institutions are likely to act: ask for funding, offer a legal temporary solution to those who accept, force out those who do not comply. It is worth mentioning that the police are both the authority that has to perform the eviction and acquire all possible information to perform it, and also the authority in charge of renewing the visas the refugees need (most of those living at ExMoi have humanitarian one-year visas, which are very hard to renew).\n\nThe solution offered by the local government is quite clear: get millions of euros from national government, perform the eviction by any means, give the money to a well known association already handling refugee projects, give the association some breathing space with the funds, let the projects run for three to 12 months and then, once the money has run out and the story is no longer newsworthy, kick the refugees out again.\n\n(The associations which handle refugee projects tend to be linked to political parties or to the Catholic church. They include those recently implicated in the ongoing \u201cCapital Mafia\u201d scandal.)\n\nIn the end, money comes and goes, not into new solutions but into this well-established system, a system which is certainly not improving matters for refugees. The existence of ExMoi is testament to that.\n\nThe process will take some time to work through, due to the large size of ExMoi. Meanwhile, the right-wing parties will have an easy target for the next elections and will keep on pushing for the harshest punitive measures.\n\nThe refugees and the supporting Committee know this, and most are willing to stay and resist. In the months approaching the second anniversary of the occupation the refugees will have to weigh up the offer, if there is one, and make a very difficult decision.\n\nFor more information, see the original article here."}
{"text":"Thanks to a recent poll from ABC News and the Washington Post, we know that nearly two-thirds of American adults think global warming is \u201ca serious problem facing the country.\u201d\n\nAnd now, thanks to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change (full study available at this link), we know exactly how many people are out there taking money from dirty energy interests to try and confuse Americans about climate changeto derail overdue action and protect the fossil fuel industries' profits.\n\nJustin Farrell, a professor of sociology at Yale\u2019s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the author of the report, studied both the institutional and social network structure of the climate denier movement and found that there are some 4,556 individuals with ties to 164 organizations that are involved in pushing anti-climate science views on the public.\n\n\u201cThe individuals in this bipartite network include interlocking board members, as well as many more informal and overlapping social, political, economic and scientific ties,\u201d Farrell wrote in the report. \u201cThe organizations include a complex network of think tanks, foundations, public relations firms, trade associations, and ad hoc groups.\u201d\n\nFarrell notes that while funding from ExxonMobil and the Koch family foundations have notoriously played a part in building the climate denial movement, there was very little empirical evidence demonstrating exactly how much influence these corporate benefactors had on the actual output of climate deniers and, in turn, how much they affected what politicians and other decisionmakers were saying about climate change.\n\nSo Farrell studied all of the written and verbal texts relating to climate change produced between 1993 and 2013 by climate denial organizations (40,785 documents comprising nearly 40 million words), as well as any mention of global warming and climate science by three major news channels (14,943 documents), every US president (1,930 documents) and the US Congress (7,786 documents).\n\nHe focused on Exxon and the Koch Brothers\u2019 family foundations because, he writes, they are \u201creliable indicators of a much larger effort of corporate lobbying in the climate change counter-movement.\u201d\n\nWhat Farrell found was that organizations taking funds from \u201celite\u201d corporate funders of climate denial like Exxon and the Koch Brothers \u2014 groups like the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Heartland Institute \u2014 \u201chave greater influence over flows of resources, communication, and the production of contrarian information\u201d than other denial groups.\n\nAfter performing a sophisticated semantic analysis, Farrell was able to show that climate denial organizations with ties to those two major funders were more successful at getting their viewpoint echoed in national news media. Presidential speeches and debate on the floor of Congress showed less of an impact.\n\nAccording to Bloomberg, Robert Brulle, a sociology professor at Drexel University who has conducted similar research but was not involved in the Nature Climate Change study, said that Farrell\u2019s findings beg a very obvious question:\n\n\u201cWhy is the media picking up and promulgating the central themes of climate misinformation?\u201d\n\nThat is very similar to the questions posed by DeSmog's executive director Brendan DeMelle in his coverage of Justin Farrell's other recent study on this issue: Research Confirms ExxonMobil, Koch-funded Climate Denial Echo Chamber Polluted Mainstream Media. DeMelle listed three questions for media outlets to ponder:\n\nWill this study, published in a highly authoritative journal, finally compel the newsrooms and boardrooms of the traditional media to take responsibility to undo some of the damage done by their complicity in spreading fossil fuel industry-funded misinformation? Will false balance \u2014 quoting a distinguished climate scientist and then speed-dialing Pat Michaels at the Cato Institute for an opposing quote \u2014 finally stop? Will editors commit to serving as referees to ensure the same industry PR pollution isn\u2019t published any longer?\n\nImage credit: P.WOLMUTH\/REPORT DIGITAL-REA\/Redux"}
{"text":"By By Andrew Moran Jul 19, 2009 in Health In recent preliminary reports published on the internet, Baxter Healthcare Corporation applied for a patent for the vaccine that would immunize the H1N1 Swine Flu. After the application was leaked on the World Wide Web by a United Kingdom publication, justoneclickgroup, it showed that the company also applied for patents to other diseases: \u201cIn particular preferred embodiments the composition orvaccine comprises more than one antigen\u2026..such as influenza A and influenza B in particular selected from of one or more of the human H1N1, H2N2, H3N2, H5N1, H7N7, H1N2, H9N2, H7N2, H7N3, H10N7 subtypes, of the pig flu H1N1, H1N2, H3N1 and H3N2 subtypes, of the dog or horse flu H7N7, H3N8 subtypes or of the avian H5N1, H7N2, H1N7, H7N3, H13N6, H5N9, H11N6, H3N8, H9N2, H5N2, H4N8, H10N7, H2N2, H8N4, H14N5, H6N5, H12N5 subtypes.\u201d Head of Virology at Baxter\u2019s Austrian subsidiary Otfried Kistner was part of the Austrian-based team that applied for the patent for the H1N1 Swine Flu on August 28, 2007. Many countries are ordering vaccinations for the recently declared pandemic. Some countries are even making it In August 2007, Baxter Healthcare Corporation, the company developing the swine flu vaccination, applied for a patent on many vaccines including H1N1 Swine Flu After the application was leaked on the World Wide Web by a United Kingdom publication, justoneclickgroup, it showed that the company also applied for patents to other diseases:\u201cIn particular preferred embodiments the composition orvaccine comprises more than one antigen\u2026..such as influenza A and influenza B in particular selected from of one or more of the human H1N1, H2N2, H3N2, H5N1, H7N7, H1N2, H9N2, H7N2, H7N3, H10N7 subtypes, of the pig flu H1N1, H1N2, H3N1 and H3N2 subtypes, of the dog or horse flu H7N7, H3N8 subtypes or of the avian H5N1, H7N2, H1N7, H7N3, H13N6, H5N9, H11N6, H3N8, H9N2, H5N2, H4N8, H10N7, H2N2, H8N4, H14N5, H6N5, H12N5 subtypes.\u201dHead of Virology at Baxter\u2019s Austrian subsidiary Otfried Kistner was part of the Austrian-based team that applied for the patent for the H1N1 Swine Flu on August 28, 2007.Many countries are ordering vaccinations for the recently declared pandemic. Some countries are even making it mandatory now . However, since the fifty countries have ordered the vaccines , Baxter has declared that it cannot accept any more requests. Baxter Spokesman Chris Bona said, \"At this time we're not in a position to take additional orders.\" More about Swine flu, Vaccinations, Baxter healthcare group swine flu vaccinations baxter healthcare gr..."}
{"text":"At 2am on a cold winter\u2019s night in London last year I was loitering in the shadows on Furnival Street near Chancery Lane tube station with a veteran urban explorer called Lucy Sparrow. Across the street was a six-storey building with scaffolding haphazardly arranged on its facade, pinioned by a large blue wooden hoarding and an aluminium sign reading: \u201cCaution - deep manhole. Do not enter.\u201d\n\nOur fingers were going numb in the cold as we waited for a black cab parked at the end of the street to leave. It looked like he was taking a break, listening to a late-night radio show, but after what felt like hours he finally clicked on his lights and pulled away. We withdrew into the darkness as he drove past.\n\nWhen the street was empty, we sauntered across arm-in-arm \u2013 just another pair of late-night lovers out on the piss. Out of sight of a nearby CCTV camera I crouched down, interlaced my fingers and boosted Lucy over the wooden hoarding so she could quietly open an emergency fire door from the other side and let me in. The whole performance was over in a blink. Twenty minutes later, a late-night rambler might pass and have no clue that we were 60m under their feet, running through miles of empty tunnels in what was once Britain\u2019s deepest telephone exchange.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Kingsway Telephone Exchange was built as a second world war air-raid shelter\n\nI am a geographer interested in what is not on maps. Over the past six years I have spent much of my time sneaking into places closed to public access as a part of a long-term research project on urban exploration. Urban explorers \u2013 who now number in the thousands across the globe \u2013 access neglected, forgotten, closed and hidden areas in cities. Tagging along with some of the most dedicated and skilled urban explorers in the world, I have trespassed into countless abandoned buildings and subterranean tunnel systems and scaled prominent skyscrapers in dozens of cities without permission - including the Shard back in 2012, before the far more daring external summit by Greenpeace activists the following year.\n\nExplorations behind the scenes show us that a city is a beautifully threaded tapestry of wires, pipes and rails\n\nThere is attentiveness to time in everything urban explorers do: from a considered historic appreciation of derelict remains, to knowing the window of opportunity when one can scale a construction crane over the City \u2013 explorers recognise everything is temporary. Not long into my research, I was told by a French explorer that \u201cruins are just like construction sites because they reveal the city as it really is \u2013 a place of constant change\u201d. Though ruins and construction sites morph at a different rate, he argued, they both hint that the city we pass through every day requires careful and dedicated maintenance to preserve the urban stasis we all take for granted.\n\nThere is also attentiveness to space. Victorian Londoners used to tour urban infrastructure, including sewage pumping stations, curious to know how it all worked. Far fewer people today think about what happens where they flush the toilet, make a phone call, or throw something in the bin - what kind of process that triggers and what sort of physical spaces are required to make those things possible. As Alan Weisman made clear in his book The World Without Us, the time it would take for the city to begin to break down and deteriorate if we stopped maintaining it is incredibly short.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest The River Tyburn flows in underground culverts and sewers for its entire length from Hampstead to the Thames\n\nThe photography of hidden places that explorers undertake \u2013 a practice which is quickly developing its own particular aesthetic sensibility \u2013 is an attempt to create a visual mark of the present, with reference to what came before, what will come after, and how it is all connected through us. Explorations behind the scenes show us that a city is not a collection of isolated locations but a beautifully and delicately threaded tapestry of wires, pipes and rails.\n\nI\u2019ve experienced many incredible things tagging along on missions into the forbidden city, and as much as I might treasure memories of watching sunsets from the roofs of council blocks or waking up on top of bridges, it is undercity London that most piques my interest. The tangle of tunnels that keeps the city ticking are vast, diverse in function and undoubtedly the most difficult in the world to access, this being the city of paranoia and all.\n\nThe urban exploration crew I had worked with, the London Consolidation Crew or LCC, had long graduated from ruins and skyscrapers \u2013 it was the city in the city they were after, the secrets buried deep underground where the line between construction site and ruin is very thin indeed. The Kingsway Telephone Exchange was the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me, more coveted even than abandoned Tube stations or possibly even the forgotten Post Office railway we accessed in 2011.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Kingsway Telephone Exchange contained a bar for workers on their off-hours, 60m below the London streets\n\nWhen I walk the city now, I can\u2019t help but imagine it vertically as well as horizontally\n\nKingsway was originally built as a second world war air-raid shelter under Chancery Lane. These deep level shelters were, at one time, connected to the Tube and citizens would have undoubtedly taken refuge here during Luftwaffe bombing runs. In 1949 the tunnels were sold to the General Post Office where they became the termination for the first submarine transatlantic phone cable \u2013 the \u00a3120m TAT1 project. The system, meant to protect the vital connective tissue of the city in the event of terror-from-the-air (including nuclear attack), stretched for miles. It only had three surface entrances and contained a bar for workers on their off-hours, rumoured to be the deepest in the UK at 60m below the street. Although the government employed a host of people to maintain the tunnels, Kingsway was a spatial secret of state - part a trio of the most secure and sensitive telephone exchanges in Britain, along with the Anchor Exchange in Birmingham and the Guardian Exchange in Manchester.\n\nThe conversion of the air-raid shelter into the Kingsway Telephone Exchange was undertaken secretly by the government. In 1950 the tunnels suddenly vanished from the map, as did a big chunk of taxpayer money used to retrofit them. However, as the journalist Duncan Campbell wrote in his book War Plan UK, \u201cthe secrecy of the new government project did not last long - a report of the \u2018Secret Network of Tunnels\u2019 appeared on the front page of the Daily Express in September 1951.\u201d The Express later published a second article suggesting new networks were being dug under Whitehall \u2013 what would eventually become subterranean military citadels, connected by tunnels not on any map of underground London, even today. The Cabinet Office called a meeting with MI5, GPO employees and Ministry of Works officials to discuss their options for suppressing the Daily Express or leaking counter-information about the tunnels. Campbell writes:\n\nThe minutes of the secret committee, known only as MISC 379, observed: \u2018It would be embarrassing to the government if the public got the impression that deep shelters were being constructed. Either the public would think that the government were out to protect their own skins and those of their immediate servants; or the public would assume that the shelters were intended for public use in time of war and would be disappointed when they found they were not.\n\nWord of these tunnels systematically disappeared from the public eye. Then, incredibly, in 1980 the ever-tenacious Campbell \u2013 equipped with a bicycle and a camera - gained access to them and explored the entirety of the system. He published his explorations, including photos, in the New Statesman. The GPO suggested the explorations were fake and that the photos of the tunnels had been made in a studio - which obviously wasn\u2019t the case because Campbell relayed access details for the tunnels which, 30 years later, got us in.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest High-voltage electricity cables under central London\n\nAfter climbing 60m down a set of alternating ladders in a long, vertical metal cage, we emerged into a set of tunnels that smelled reassuringly neglected. Like a post-apocalyptic game show, we suddenly had to make a choice between three tunnel entrances to the left, right and straight ahead. It turned out it didn\u2019t really matter which we entered, they all linked back on each other in the end. Once we had circled back, we were sure we were alone and had the run of the tunnels all night. We found the bar, the switchboard, medical facilities, power control panels and more.\n\nTwo things really struck me while we were in there. First, the electricity was on wherever we went. I couldn\u2019t help but wonder whose job it was to change the bulbs in the (no-longer-so) secret subterranean telephone exchange. Second, the tunnels, in the middle of winter, were a cosy hoodie temperature. It made me think about how all this space was being wasted, space that was built with taxpayer money. I thought about Campbell\u2019s determination over 30 years ago to make clear what was being spent by the government and the lengths he was willing to go to to reveal what was still a state secret and the way he insisted that the government should be held accountable for the construction of this bizarre underworld.\n\nBattles over space are nothing new in London of course \u2013 urban space is a continually contested place\n\nToday, we\u2019ve been so inculcated with fear and distracted by obligations and consumer junk, we can\u2019t even be bothered to ask why numerous miles of warm, fluorescently lit tunnels under Chancery Lane are laying mothballed while people with no homes freeze to death on the streets above them \u2013 forced to sleep in hypothermic conditions by anti-homeless spikes installed on ledges outside shops, luxury flats and offices.\n\nMany of us have a sense that cities are being closed to us, but we find it difficult to articulate how or why; we simply feel we\u2019re losing control of things in some fundamental way. Battles over space are nothing new in London of course: from private Georgian squares in the 18th century to the South Bank Undercroft in the 21st, urban space is a continually contested place. But these days we seem less inclined to stand up to spatial inequality or obstructive behaviour over the release of information.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest A huge disused water reservoir under Finsbury Park in north London\n\nThere is, perhaps, a sense that the battle is lost; that it is not worth fighting any more in a climate where we are all being monitored. New surveillance technologies or increasing corporate control of space are not the most worrying developments of our time, however \u2013 the biggest concern is growing apathy. So before you dismiss urban exploration as a weird fad \u2013 or mark it as just another interesting tab in your flooded browser to look at later \u2013 be aware that these explorers risked death and imprisonment to bring you these photos and that they insist it was worth it, because if we don\u2019t even know these spaces exist we can hardly have a public conversation about what to do with them. Urban exploration carries on the important work of exploratory journalism; it spreads stories that help us perceive worlds other than the ones presented to us, and it gives us an alternative where one has not been offered. Urban exploration is an apathy killer.\n\nAs the geographer David Harvey wrote, the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is one of the most precious and neglected of our human rights. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m overstating the case when I say that it\u2019s vital to the maintenance of what few rights to place remain to continually make transparent and subvert the boundaries that are constantly being circumscribed around our bodies and imaginations. Rather than condemning the system, urban explorers will insist that we must simply carry on exploring and imagining, regardless of those constraints. If we want to live in cities replete with citizens rather than inhabitants, we must encourage exploration.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Aldwych Underground station (which opened as the Strand in 1907) closed in 1994\n\nBeing an urban explorer has been a wonderful lesson in geography. I\u2019ve learned about how people build relationships to places; how space is surveilled, controlled and regulated; how the city is built to not just influence our behaviour but to actually condition the way we think about what is ethical, right and even possible. Although it was chasing the story of urban exploration that got me involved in the first instance, it is the way urban exploration makes boundaries visible and keeps me sharp, paying attention to everything and continually calling me to action, which holds my interest as a researcher.\n\nWhen I walk the city now, I can\u2019t help but imagine it vertically as well as horizontally. Most of the tourists walking at street level \u2013 photographing Parliament and clippers cruising the Thames \u2013 haven\u2019t a clue that there is a snarl of tunnels underneath their feet, many of which aren\u2019t on any map.\n\nPerhaps it\u2019s right that local knowledge should reside with locals; this is our city after all. We, like Campbell, are engaged citizens acutely aware of what\u2019s going on around us and determined to partake in the conversation about what constitutes the city. Urban explorers want to know what is being built, by whom, with what funds and to what ends; they want to know what has been forgotten and left behind and how that space might be re-imagined with the public interest in mind. These expectations \u2013 like the expectation that people will explore whatever environment they happen to live in \u2013 are threaded with common sense throughout, unlike many of the policy decisions that have led to our cities increasingly become a sight to be seen rather than a place to participate in.\n\nThrough these photos of the London you never knew, I invite you to expand your vertical imagination of the city into subterranea: delve into the sewers, utility tunnels, abandoned Tube stations, secret bunkers and finally into the new depths being bored by tunnelling machines at this very moment. Although much of what is here is, I believe, an important piece of documentation, it is also more importantly an invitation for you to increase your understanding of what is happening under your feet right now, because the ongoing conversation about public space does not stop at the manhole cover.\n\nBradley Garrett is a geographer at the University of Southampton and author of Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City. His new book, Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital, was published in October 2014"}
{"text":"U.S. Announces Coalition To Fight Against The Islamic State\n\nThe United States says it has formed a coalition of 10 countries to help in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq.\n\nThe group consists of the United States plus Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark.\n\nThe New York Times reports that the coalition will act in two ways: It will support allies fighting against the Islamic State on the ground, and it will continue attacking the Sunni militants using air strikes.\n\nReuters reports that in a meeting on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Wales, Secretary of State John Kerry said the strategy for the coalition was to contain, not destroy, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.\n\n\"We need to attack them in ways that prevent them from taking over territory, to bolster the Iraqi security forces and others in the region who are prepared to take them on, without committing troops of our own,\" Kerry said, according to Reuters. \"Obviously I think that's a red line for everybody here: no boots on the ground.\"\n\nThe Times adds:\n\n\"American officials are hoping to expand the coalition against ISIS to include as many countries as possible, particularly in the region. Obama administration officials said privately that in addition to the countries that attended the meeting Friday morning, the United States was hoping to get quiet intelligence help about the Sunni militants from Jordan, whose leader, King Abdullah, was participating in the NATO summit. \"United States officials said they also expected Saudi Arabia to provide money and aid for moderate Syrian rebel groups. Yousef al-Otaiba, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States, said in a statement earlier this week that the United Arab Emirates stood ready to join the fight against ISIS. 'No one has more at stake than the U.A.E. and other moderate countries in the region that have rejected the regressive Islamist creed and embraced a different, forward-looking path,' the ambassador said. The Emiratis, he said, are 'ready to join the international community in an urgent, coordinated and sustained effort to confront a threat that will, if unchecked, have global ramifications for decades to come.' \"\n\nThe Islamic State, if you remember, caught the international community's attention when it began a brazen and lightning-fast attack on Iraq over the summer. Since then, the group has overtaken several Iraqi cities and has taken responsibility for the beheading of two American journalists.\n\nAs the Islamic State moved further into Iraq, the United States began an air campaign against the group."}
{"text":"Patrick Rothfuss Goodreads Author\n\nBorn\n\nWebsite\n\nTwitter\n\nGenre\n\nMember Since\n\nFebruary 2008\n\nIt all began when Pat Rothfuss was born to a marvelous set of parents. Throughout his formative years they encouraged him to do his best, gave him good advice, and were no doubt appropriately dismayed when he failed to live up to his full potential.\n\nIn high-school Pat was something of a class clown. His hobbies included reading a novel or two a day and giving relationship advice to all his friends despite the fact that he had never so much as kissed a girl. He also role-played and wrote terrible stories about elves. He was pretty much a geek.\n\nMost of Pat's adult life has been spent in the University Wisconsin Stevens Point. In 1991 he started college in order to pursue a career in chemical engineering, then he considered clinical psychology.\n\nIt all began when Pat Rothfuss was born to a marvelous set of parents. Throughout his formative years they encouraged him to do his best, gave him good advice, and were no doubt appropriately dismayed when he failed to live up to his full potential.\n\nIn high-school Pat was something of a class clown. His hobbies included reading a novel or two a day and giving relationship advice to all his friends despite the fact that he had never so much as kissed a girl. He also role-played and wrote terrible stories about elves. He was pretty much a geek.\n\nMost of Pat's adult life has been spent in the University Wisconsin Stevens Point. In 1991 he started college in order to pursue a career in chemical engineering, then he considered clinical psychology. In 1993 he quit pretending he knew what he wanted to do with his life, changed his major to \"undecided,\" and proceeded to study whatever amused him. He also began writing a book....\n\nFor the next seven years Pat studied anthropology, philosophy, eastern religions, history, alchemy, parapsychology, literature, and writing. He studied six different martial arts, practiced improv comedy, learned how to pick locks, and became a skilled lover of women. He also began writing a satirical advice column which he continues to this day: The College Survivial Guide. Through all of this he continued to work on his novel.\n\nIn 2000 Pat went to grad school for English literature. Grad school sucked and Pat hated it. However, Pat learned that he loved to teach. He left in 2002 with his masters degree, shaking the dust from his feet and vowing never to return. During this period of time his novel was rejected by roughly every agent in the known universe.\n\nNow Pat teaches half-time at his old school as an assistant-sub-lecturer. He is underpaid but generally left alone to do as he sees fit with his classes. He is advisor for the college feminists, the fencing club, and, oddly enough, a sorority. He still roll-plays occasionally, but now he does it in an extremely sophisticated, debonair way.\n\nThrough a series of lucky breaks, he has wound up with the best agent and editor imaginable, and the first book of his trilogy has been published under the title \"The Name of the Wind.\"\n\nThough it has only been out since April 2007, it has already been sold in 26 foreign countries and won several awards.\n\nPat has been described as \"a rough, earthy iconoclast with a pipeline to the divine in everyone's subconscious.\" But honestly, that person was pretty drunk at the time, so you might want to take it with a grain of salt."}
{"text":"Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Wednesday announced the Department of Education would pause two rules created by former President Barack Obama's administration that would protect student borrowers and imposed requirements on for-profit colleges. Photo by Erin Schaff\/UPI | License Photo\n\nJune 15 (UPI) -- The Department of Education has paused two rules created by former President Barack Obama's administration to protect student borrowers and impose requirements on for-profit colleges.\n\n\"The department intends to develop fair, effective and improved regulations to protect individual borrowers from fraud, ensure accountability across institutions of higher education and protect taxpayers,\" the Department of Education said in a statement on Wednesday.\n\nOne rule, the Gainful Employment regulation, required for-profit colleges and certificate programs at non-profit colleges -- under the threat of withholding federal aid -- to show that a student's education in those institutions would help those students receive \"gainful employment.\"\n\nThe second rule, the Borrower Defense to Repayment regulation, clarified how student borrowers who were defrauded or misled by their college could apply for loan forgiveness and also created a fast-track for students who apply for forgiveness in case their college closed.\n\nThe rules were to take effect July 1 but the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos said it would delay implementation upon further review. The Obama-era rules were first proposed amid the collapse of the Corinthian Colleges Inc. for-profit institution.\n\n\"My first priority is to protect students,\" DeVos said. \"Fraud, especially fraud committed by a school, is simply unacceptable. Unfortunately, last year's rulemaking effort missed an opportunity to get it right.\"\n\nDeVos said her department would uphold processing claims already filed by 16,000 student borrowers.\n\nSome Democratic members of Congress criticized the move by the department.\n\n\"Delaying this important pathway to debt relief would harm thousands of students, many with crushing levels of student loan debt and few meaningful job prospects,\" Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Patty Murray, Sherrod Brown and Dick Durbin wrote in a statement."}
{"text":"Barney Frank, long known as America\u2019s crankiest liberal, is actually not feeling too bad. Frank retired from Congress in 2012, after three decades of representing Massachusetts\u2019s Fourth District, then wrote a memoir, became a director of the Signature Bank, and took his curmudgeon act on the road as a lecturer. But the election of Donald Trump has not shattered his confidence about the nation\u2019s political future. \u201cThis was not a wipeout. People will tend to overinterpret it. Remember, we got more votes than they did,\u201d he said, in an interview this week. \u201cAnd there is one silver lining for us. They have succeeded in blaming us for everything that goes wrong in the world. From now on, anything bad that happens is on them. They control the whole government\u2014White House, Senate, House, Supreme Court. Some people think that maybe Trump can somehow evade that responsibility, but I think it will be hard to blame it on some Mexicans when something goes wrong.\u201d\n\nStill, Frank believes that politics did change in some fundamental ways with Trump\u2019s victory. \u201cTwo major rules of American politics disappeared this year,\u201d he said. \u201cThe first was that you had to argue that America has to be strong and assertive worldwide. Trump won while rejecting that view. And the second change was that you should only talk about growth for everyone and avoid talk of class warfare. The fundamental reason that Trump won is the anger in America and other developed countries at the unfairness of the distribution of wealth. It\u2019s been building and building, and all of a sudden it broke through.\u201d\n\nIn particular, Frank believes that Bernie Sanders\u2019s primary campaign helped Trump\u2019s portrayal of himself as a populist succeed in the fall. \u201cSanders wounded her badly,\u201d Frank said, referring to Hillary Clinton. \u201cHis differing with her on the issues was entirely reasonable, but he\u2019s the one who sold the argument that she was corrupt and bought by Wall Street. He had one ad which I called McCarthyite\u2014where he essentially said Goldman Sachs got off so easy because they paid Clinton for speeches. Sanders helped Trump become the guy who says we are tired of rich guys getting away with everything. Sanders helped persuade people that she is on the wrong side of that issue.\u201d Then, too, of course, there were the e-mails and the last-minute intervention of James Comey, the F.B.I. director. \u201cIf she hadn\u2019t been using that e-mail system, she would have won, and Comey exacerbated the problem,\u201d Frank said.\n\nFrank is fond of the adage, attributed to Harold Macmillan, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, that the future of politics is determined by \u201cevents, my dear boy, events.\u201d The success or failure of Trump\u2019s Presidency will be the critical factor in the future of the Democratic Party. \u201cIf he delivers somehow and increases employment among the white working class, and increases prosperity, then we\u201d\u2014the Party, that is\u2014\u201chave a political problem,\u201d Frank said. But since Frank believes that Trump\u2019s program will not yield these kinds of successes, he feels that Democrats will have room to criticize and propose alternatives.\n\nIn some respects, Frank believes that the Trump campaign may help the Democrats produce an updated and more appealing message. \u201cObama began to walk away from the idea that we have to be the leader of the free world,\u201d Frank said. \u201cNow it\u2019s clear that we don\u2019t have to be the leader of the free world and we don\u2019t have to pay to be the leader of the free world.\u201d That will open the door, Frank believes, to substantial reductions in military spending\u2014on the order of a hundred and fifty to two hundred billion a year. \u201cWe could then use that money to offset some of the inequality in the economy. Reduce the age of access to Medicare to fifty-five. Raise the minimum wage. Put a lot of people to work on infrastructure.\u201d\n\nHis second idea for Democrats may be more controversial within the Party. \u201cWe need to be less absolutist on environmental issues, especially wetlands and endangered species,\u201d he said. \u201cWe currently treat those issues as absolute bars to development, and they should not be absolute. They should be balances. I saw in my district how much anger these issues generate. Our current position is bad politics and bad public policy.\u201d Frank does not believe, however, that Democrats should retreat on climate change. \u201cToo much at stake on climate change to give way there,\u201d he said.\n\nOne part of Trump\u2019s ascendancy reflects the great political success of Frank\u2019s life. During Trump\u2019s campaign, and in a recent interview on \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d the President-elect said that he regarded same-sex marriage as a settled issue, which he would not seek to overturn. As a longtime leader in the gay-rights movement, and the husband of Jim Ready since 2012, Frank, who is now seventy-six, watched the cause of same-sex marriage move from the fringe to the realm of conventional wisdom. Indeed, the subject turns this often cantankerous man downright cheerful. \u201cSixty years ago, people didn\u2019t talk about being gay,\u201d Frank said. \u201cBut now that so many people are out, straight people know they have gay relatives, gay co-workers. Being gay is kind of positive. It\u2019s kind of fun.\u201d"}
{"text":"CNN has set a September 1 premiere date for Holy Hell, an inside look at Buddhafield, a secretive, spiritual cult formed in 1980s West Hollywood. The pic will air at 9 PM ET and repeat at 11.\n\nDirector Will Allen joined the group just after graduating from film school and eventually became its unofficial documentarian. As he got more deeply involved, he began filming his experiences as the group\u2019s unofficial videographer. It wasn\u2019t until after Allen left the cult that he understood the film he\u2019d been making for more than 20 years. The close-knit Buddhafield aspired to an artistic utopian communal life. Led by enigmatic and charismatic guru, Michel. Buddhafield members pursued his vision for fulfillment while living together, exploring nature, and performing together. Gradually, several came to grow disenchanted with Michel and alleged emotional manipulation and even physical abuse.\n\nHoly Hell had its world premiere at Sundance in January, followed by a May 27 theatrical self-release via Allen\u2019s WRA Productions. He produced the film along with Tracey Harnish and Alexandra Johnes. Michael C. Donaldson, Julian Goldstein, Jared Leto, and Cheryl Wheeler Sanders are the executive producers. Check out the newly released key art for the film:"}
{"text":"CTV.ca News Staff\n\nFor the first time there are more single Canadian adults than married Canadians, a new report says.\n\nCanadians are also working longer hours, and spending less time with their families -- and the families they have are less likely to be the traditional nuclear family.\n\nThose are just some of the findings in Families Count: Profiling Canada's Families IV, a new report released Monday by the Vanier Institute of the Family.\n\nUsing information from the 2006 census, the report said that only 47.9 per cent of adults were married.\n\nThe highest amount of married people by province was in Newfoundland and Labrador with 54.3 per cent and the lowest was in Quebec, with 37.5 per cent. Among the territories, only 31 per cent of adults were married in Nunavut.\n\nThe number of married couples without children also outnumbered married couples with children for the first time.\n\nMarried-with-children families now represent 39 per cent of families, compared to 55 per cent in 1981.\n\nCommon-law families are the fastest-growing family type in Canada, from 5.6 per of families in 1981 to 15.5 per cent in 2006.\n\nTwo decades ago, 81 per cent of children under the age of 15 lived with legally married parents, but in 2006, only 66 per cent of children under 15 did.\n\nKathy Buckworth, the author of several books on motherhood, said the rising proportion of common law relationships may be due to the fact that \"we're dealing with people who grew up in the divorce generation.\"\n\n\"If they grew up in that situation, perhaps they're thinking, \u2018If I can't get married, I can't get divorced,'\" she told CTV News Channel.\n\nBuckworth also said that financial factors may play a role, with many couples opting to keep their finances separate.\n\n\"Weddings can cost a lot of money, and with less pressure to have that traditional relationship, or marriage certificate, maybe that's being bypassed,\" she added.\n\nThe 2006 census was the first to record data on same-sex marriages. The data said 16.5 per cent of same-sex couples were married.\n\nEconomic impact on families\n\nClarence Lochhead, the executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, said modern economic realities have had a serious impact on the makeup of the Canadian family.\n\nMore adult children are living with their families, especially young men. Some 60 per cent of men between 20-24 were living at home, as were 26 per cent of men between the ages of 25 to 29.\n\n\"If you think about the education required to be successful in the labour markets . . . people are waiting much longer to leave home . . . it's a reflection of the economic reality of the labour market,\" Lochhead told CTV News Channel.\n\nAging parents are also an additional stress on families, as 4.7 million Canadians were providing care for a senior.\n\n\"It's one of the big challenges we have as a society,\" Lochhead said.\n\nFamilies are responding by working more. In 82 per cent of two-parent families, each parent is earning some income and in 32 per cent of two-parent families, each parent is working full time.\n\nMen are working longer hours, up to 8.8 a day in 2005 compared to 8.2 hours in 1986. That extra work is coming at the expense of the family, with men now spending 3.4 hours a day with family, compared to 4.2 hours in 1986.\n\nWomen are now more likely to be the breadwinner in a two-parent family, with 28 per cent being the primary earner in their family. That is up from 12 per cent in 1976."}
{"text":"Adapted from a recent online discussion.\n\nHi Carolyn:\n\nI live on a street with a large number of young children (under age 6). One family recently bought a new puppy, and we were surprised to learn that it is a pit bull. Now several of us are worried about letting our children play freely on the street, since pit bulls are known as an aggressive breed that can attack without provocation. Any advice on what we can do?\n\nNeighbors bought a pit bull\n\nYes: Inform yourselves about pit bulls. Heck, about dogs: Just about any dog can hurt a small child, badly.\n\nDogs don\u2019t \u201cattack without provocation\u201d unless they have temperament problems, and those problems are quite visible in other circumstances. Otherwise, dogs who bite give all kinds of signs that they\u2019re going to defend themselves or their people. Many people ignore\/are ignorant of those signs and so they continue the behavior that provokes the dog \u2014 or, the owners don\u2019t know anything about dogs and don\u2019t train or handle them safely. Again, this is all dogs, not just pit bulls.\n\nUnfortunately, pit bulls became a look-at-how-cool-I-am accessory and fell in disproportionate numbers into the hands of idiots, posers and thugs \u2014 people who have no business having pets, much less powerful dogs.\n\nThe pit bull is not the most dangerous breed out there. What is? Trick question: The most dangerous dog is one that has irresponsible owners and is big enough to kill.\n\nMeanwhile, \u201ccute\u201d little dogs, like dachshunds and Jack Russells, are much more likely to bite the neighborhood 6-and-unders. Pits historically have been bred to be responsive to their humans, and they\u2019re actually far less likely to bite if a kid, say, tugs an ear (it just makes the news if they do). Tugging not recommended, by the way, with any dog, which responsible parents teach their kids.\n\nEver see \u201cOur Gang\/Little Rascals\u201d? The dog, Petey, is a pit. Pit bulls\u2019 nickname in the past has been \u201cthe nanny\u201d because they were known as great family dogs. Still are, by a dedicated population of defenders.\n\nSo. Do not fear this dog unless you have cause to fear the neighbors. Is the dog spayed or neutered, trained, never chained, walked\/exercised regularly and otherwise supervised \u2014 all just as good for dogs as for neighbors? Are the neighborhood kids taught how to interact with dogs?\n\nHysteria is no way to protect children from anything. When you feel threatened by something, seek knowledge first, then seek a remedy, if you even need one after you have the facts.\n\nRe: Pit bull bullies:\n\nIt took a conscious effort on my part to learn about pit bulls when a roommate decided to get not one but two! These dogs ended up being the kindest, most well-behaved dogs I\u2019ve ever been around. My roommate also had a\n\n3-year-old daughter.\n\n\u201cNeighbors\u201d needs to teach her children about how to approach a dog and what a dog means by its body languages.\n\nAnonymous\n\nAbsolutely. Abundant resources are a browser away. Type \u201cdog stress signs.\u201d\n\nAnyone curious about pit bulls should also check out what became of the Michael Vick pit bulls. Educational and inspiring.\n\nWrite to Tell Me About It, Style, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, or tellme@washpost.com."}
{"text":"Image: wireless sensor microchip\/UCL\n\nThe IEEE Computer Society released a report this week detailing its predictions for the state of computing technology in 2022. No, the Singularity is not part of it: no downloaded personalities or post-human artificial intelligence. It nonetheless sounds a lot like \"the future\" should, with wearable, implantable nanotechnology and batteries that hold charges for months on end, just a more comprehensible future, one that doesn't involve sudden innovative inflationary periods or out-of-the-blue discoveries.\n\nTechnology follows a trajectory.\n\n\"Predicting the future in the computer industry is even harder and riskier due to dramatic changes in technology and limitless challenges to innovation,\" the IEEE CS report begins. \"Only a small fraction of innovations truly disrupt the state of the art.\"\n\n\"Some [innovations] not practical or cost-effective, some are ahead of their time, and some simply do not have a market,\" the report continues. \"There are numerous examples of superior technologies that were never adopted because others arrived on time or fared better n the market. Therefore this document is only an attempt to better understand where technologies are going.\"\n\nThe report is the product of nine technical leaders within the IEEE Computer Society surveying the current states and progressions of 23 different technologies, including,\n\n3D printing, big data and analytics, open intellectual property movement, massively online open courses, security cross-cutting issues, universal memory, 3D integrated circuits, photonics, cloud computing, computational biology and bioinformatics, device and nanotechnology, sustainability, high-performance computing, the Internet of Things, life sciences, machine learning and intelligent systems, natural user interfaces, networking and inter-connectivity, quantum computing, software-defined networks, multicore, and robotics for medical care.\n\nThis authors took the above listed technologies and examined them in light of different drivers and disruptors. The relative weights of technological drivers there were able to determine are indicated in the chart below.\n\nDisruptors:\n\nSo, what does it all add up to? A key projection of the IEEE report is the \"seamless intelligence scenario. Computing devices\u2014from the very small, such as wearable devices and chips embedded under the skin, to the computers inside our mobile devices, laptops, desktops, home servers, TV sets, and refrigerators, to the computing cloud that we reach via the Internet\u2014are interconnected via different communication and networking technologies,\" the report explains.\n\n\"Together, they form an intelligent mesh,\" the authors continue, \"a computing and communication ecosystem that augments reality with information and intelligence gathered from our fingertips, eyes, ears, and other senses, and even directly interfaced to our brain waves.\" It's the internet of things, where we ourselves become a thing.\n\nThe report is really a series of reports, each one examining each of the aforementioned 23 technologies in great detail. It's open-access and worth a deep dive.\n\nSome other highlights include a worrisome note about the looming limits of classical computer systems, as they shrink to their absolute minimum and effectively put the brakes on Moore's law. Computers as we know them will stop getting faster and smaller\u2014soon. The authors seem hopeful that quantum computing can save the day, but as to whether practical QC will be ready in time is unsettled.\n\nAdvances in computer memory will help stave off this Moore's wall, at least. I've written here before about the profound limits current memory systems are putting on computing power. Computers may get faster, but they're not gaining memory access speed nearly as fast. The hope is for a \"universal memory\" system to save the day, in which SRAM, DRAM, hard-drive, and flash memory are all integrated into one quickly accessible and extremely small system. In the future, hard-drive access could be as quick as it is for an actual logic unit to access its own registers (the slivers of memory within the unit itself).\n\n\"We expect at least one NVM [non-volitile universal memory] technology to reach maturity and volume manufacturing capabilities within the next three to five years,\" the IEEE team predicts. By 2022, it's reasonable to expect a \"collapsing\" of the memory hierarchy into a single (or near to it) uniform technology. There will still be organization, of course, but all within the same basic superfast device.\n\nFortunately, medicine seems less likely to hit a fundamental limit than computers. \"Imagine your life being saved by a custom-designed medical machine made from particles 50,000 times as small as a single strand of your hair,\" the report offers. You might be living with a fleet of diagnostic bots just cruising around inside your body, looking for trouble and fixing it. A proper auxiliary immune system.\n\nIn Wired, the IEEE's Dejan Milojicic, makes a valiant effort at summarizing the report's other key findings, which are extensive. \"With energy consumption increasing along with the world's population, electric cars, LEDs, smart grids, smart cities, dark silicon, new battery technology, and new ways of cooling data centers are some areas where advances in sustainability are expected,\" he writes.\n\n\"Silicon photonics will address bandwidth, latency, and energy challenges, and developments at all levels of the network stack will continue to drive research and the Internet economy,\" Milojicic continues. \"In the area of software-defined networks, OpenFlow and SDN will make networks more secure, transparent, flexible, and functional.\"\n\nFortunately, predicting the future isn't solely the realm of futurists, but of scientists too. In some ways that's just as hopeful."}
{"text":"Gun rally to end permits for concealed weapons Grassroots NC pressures Republican Senators to pass gun bill Share Shares Copy Link Copy\n\nHide Transcript Show Transcript\n\nWEBVTT THE STATE CAPITOL TODAY, INHOPES OF DOING AWAY WITH PERMITSFOR CONCEALED WEAPONS.BILL O'NEIL TAKES US THERE.BILL: GUN RIGHTS ADVOCATES CAMEUP SHORT THIS PAST SESSION.THEIR EFFORTS TO ELIMINATECONCEAL CARRY PERMITS PASSED THEHOUSE, BUT NEVER CAME TO A VOTEIN THE SENATE.>> WE ARE TELLING THEM TO DOWHAT THEY SENT YOU HERE FOR.THEY SEEM TO HAVE FORGOTTEN WHOBROUGHT THEM TO THE DANCE.BILL: TODAY'S RALLY TARGETSSENATE REPUBLICANS.THE GUN RIGHTS GROUP CALLEDGRASSROOTS NORTH CAROLINA SAYSIT WANTS TO SHAME THEM INTOACTION.THEY USED A MASCOT NAMED SQUISHYTHE MAGIC RINO TO CALL OUT WHATGUN SUPPORTERS SAY ARE RINOS,REPUBLICANS IN NAME ONLY.>> THE FACT IS VOTERS SENT THEMHERE, GUN VOTERS SENT THEM HERETO DO A JOB, AND WE WANT THEM TODO T JOB WE SENT THEM TO DO.BILL: GUN SUPPORTERS DELIVERTHEIR MESSAGE TO THE OFFICE OFTHE SENATE'S TOP REPUBLICAN,PHIL BERGER, WHO WASN'T IN.BUT A NUMBER OF REPUBLICANSOPPOSE ELIMINATING PERMITS FORCONCEALED WEAPONS, INCLUDINGGUILFORD COUNTY LAWMAKER JOHNFAIRCLOTH.>> LOOK AT HOW MANY KILLINGS WEHAVE HAD IN NORTH CAROLINA INTHE LAST SIX MONTHS.IT IS GETTING TO BE AN EPIDEMIC,ALMOST.BILL: GUN RIGHTS ADVOCATES SAYSSENATE REPUBLICANS CAN EXPECT TOSEE THEIR RINO MASCOT NOT ONLYAT THE LEGISLATURE, BUT AT GOPCAMPAIGN EVENTS AS WEL"}
{"text":"Image copyright Reuters Image caption Northern Ireland has effectively been without a devolved government for almost six months\n\nSinn F\u00e9in has called on the British and Irish governments to intervene to help break the deadlock in Stormont's power-sharing negotiations.\n\nJohn O'Dowd said they must inject \"leadership and energy\" into the talks.\n\nBut the DUP's Edwin Poots said that \"one party cannot deliver this process on its own\".\n\nTalks to restore Northern Ireland's devolved government are going down to the wire, with the parties having until 16:00 BST on Thursday to reach a deal.\n\nIf agreement is not reached by the deadline, which is set down in law, Northern Ireland faces the prospect of a return of direct rule from London.\n\n'Expect very late night'\n\nThe negotiations involve the five main Northern Ireland parties and the UK and Irish governments, although a deal is dependent on whether the two biggest parties, the DUP and Sinn F\u00e9in, can resolve their differences.\n\nThese include republican demands for a stand-alone Irish Language Act and rights for the LGBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) community.\n\nThe DUP has criticised the Irish government for supporting Sinn F\u00e9in's demand for an Irish Language Act.\n\nIn a statement, the party said: \"Only last week the Irish government lectured our United Kingdom government on the importance of observing neutrality when dealing with Northern Ireland parties.\n\n\"Yet by publicly declaring its support for Sinn F\u00e9in's position in negotiations, the Irish government has undermined its own credibility as being neutral.\"\n\nRound-table talks involving the five party leaders were due to take place on Wednesday but the BBC understands the DUP and Sinn F\u00e9in did not show up.\n\nIrish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney tweeted: \"Stormont talks continuing - efforts intensified to find agreement on outstanding issues before tomorrow's deadline. Expect very late night.\"\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption What are the options if no deal is reached?\n\nShortly after 17:00 BST on Wednesday, Sinn F\u00e9in's John O'Dowd said no compromise had been reached and he called on the governments to become more involved in the efforts to reach a deal.\n\n\"With less than 24 hours to go in these talks, the DUP have not moved to resolve the issues which brought down the institutions in January,\" Mr O'Dowd said.\n\nImage caption Sinn F\u00e9in's John O'Dowd called on the British and Irish governments to help break the deadlock\n\n\"Rights, equality and respect need to be resolved, they need to be implemented in legislation and we need to get to that position.\n\n\"There is now clearly an onus on the two governments to inject energy into these talks, to inject leadership into these talks and ensure that the outstanding issues are resolved in the timescale we have left to us.\"\n\nHowever, the DUP's Edwin Poots said the party wanted to show \"absolute respect for other people's language and culture\" in respect of Sinn F\u00e9in's demand of an Irish Language Act.\n\nMr Poots also said that talks had been a \"slow grind\".\n\n\"We're trying to get to people's bottom lines so decisions can be made as to how we can move forward. We would like to do that tomorrow but that's up to others.\n\n\"Ultimately, one party can't deliver on this process on its own, it's going to be an engagement.\"\n\nHe added that the DUP were ready to establish government before the deadline and \"if there's issues outstanding that we need to continue to work on, then we're happy to do that\".\n\nWith no breakthrough reached by Wednesday evening, it would be very difficult to meet Thursday's deadline, according to BBC NI political correspondent Enda McClafferty.\n\n\"It appears there has been little or no progress made on the key issue which is emerging - the Irish Language Act,\" he told the BBC's Evening Extra programme.\n\n'Real Madrid star'\n\nEarlier, Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire said that there would be serious implications if the Stormont parties could not agree a deal by Thursday's deadline.\n\nMr Brokenshire would not go into detail about any alternatives he might be considering if the talks fail.\n\nHe also denied the Tory-DUP confidence and supply deal would make it impossible for the government to maintain their impartiality in Northern Ireland.\n\nHe said he had not been part of those talks.\n\nSpeaking at Northern Ireland Questions in Westminster, Mr Brokenshire said he would not be on a liaison committee being set up by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the Conservatives.\n\nImage copyright Reuters Image caption DUP MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Tory Chief Whip Gavin Williamson signed the deal agreed this week\n\nUnder the \"confidence and supply\" arrangement, the DUP guarantees that its 10 MPs will vote with the government on the Queen's Speech, the Budget, and legislation relating to Brexit and national security - while Northern Ireland will receive an extra \u00a31bn over the next two years.\n\nWhile rival Stormont parties have largely welcomed the additional funding, concerns have been raised that the deal could undermine the peace process and devolution negotiations, with the UK government dependent on the support of the DUP.\n\nThe Scottish National Party said the DUP was holding a \"sword of Damocles\" over the government's head.\n\nSNP MP Alison Thewliss joked that the \u00a31bn deal meant each DUP MP was now worth more than the Real Madrid footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.\n\nThe new Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Smith said there was a danger that trust in the perception of the government's impartiality would be eroded.\n\nHe called on the government to publish the minutes of any meetings of the new liaison committee.\n\nImage caption If parties cannot agree a deal by Thursday, then direct rule could be implemented\n\nNorthern Ireland has effectively been without a devolved government for almost six months.\n\nIts institutions collapsed amid a bitter row between the DUP and Sinn F\u00e9in about a botched green energy scheme.\n\nThe late deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, stood down in protest over the DUP's handling of an investigation into the scandal, in a move that triggered a snap election in March."}
{"text":"David Cameron is \u201cliving in cloud cuckoo land\u201d when he suggests a new Tory government would ban messaging apps that use encryption, security experts have told the Guardian.\n\nThe prime minister has pledged anti-terror laws to give the security services the ability to read encrypted communications in extreme circumstances. But experts say such access would mean changing the way internet-based messaging services such as Apple\u2019s iMessage or Facebook\u2019s WhatsApp work.\n\nIndependent computer security expert Graham Cluley said: \u201cIt\u2019s crazy. Cameron is living in cloud cuckoo land if he thinks that this is a sensible idea, and no it wouldn\u2019t be possible to implement properly.\u201d\n\nOther security experts echo Cluley, describing the approach as \u201cidiocy\u201d and saying Cameron\u2019s plans are \u201cill-thought out and scary\u201d. The UK\u2019s data watchdog has also spoken out against \u201cknee-jerk reactions\u201d, saying moves could undermine consumer security.\n\nMeanwhile a start-up has warned on the possible effect on Britain\u2019s nascent technology sector of Cameron\u2019s plans. Eris Industries, which uses open-source cryptography, has said it is already making plans to leave the UK if the Conservative party is re-elected with this policy in its programme.\n\nOn Monday, Cameron made a speech in which he decried the ability of ordinary people to have conversations on which the security services were unable to eavesdrop.\n\n\u201cIn extremis, it has been possible to read someone\u2019s letter, to listen to someone\u2019s call, to mobile communications,\u201d Cameron said. \u201cThe question remains: are we going to allow a means of communications where it simply is not possible to do that? My answer to that question is: no, we must not.\u201d\n\nCluley said either tech companies would have to work with UK government and build backdoors into their software to allow the authorities to intercept messages, or the apps themselves will have to be banned.\n\n\u201cIf there are backdoors in the apps, or if weak encryption is used, then you are only opening up opportunities for hackers to break in and steal information too. That\u2019s not going to go down well with businesses or consumers,\u201d Cluley said.\n\nRoss Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge, said: \u201cThis is just what the agencies pushed in the late 1990s, after Al Gore persuaded Tony Blair to go back on his pre-election promise not to ban encryption.\n\n\u201cIndustry fought back, along with civil society, and the outcome was the Rip Act, which gives a chief constable the power to demand decryption.\u201d\n\nPeter Sommer, professor of cybersecurity and digital evidence at de Montfort and the Open Universities, said: \u201cThe National Crime Agency and the people there understand that relationships with people and the companies like Google are important, as they will help you, but passing laws and badmouthing in public is simply not going to work,\u201d\n\n\u201cBut at the top there\u2019s been the kind of idiocy exemplified by what happened in the basement of the Guardian, where there were obviously lots of copies of the Snowden material but they insisted on the destruction of a computer that might have been used for storing them.\u201d\n\n\u201cYes you can pass laws in Westminster until you\u2019re blue in the face but you can\u2019t enforce them,\u201d said Sommer.\n\nThe UK\u2019s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner Christopher Graham and data privacy campaigners were equally worried by Cameron\u2019s comments and the implications it could have on data security and privacy.\n\n\u201cWe must avoid knee jerk reactions,\u201d said Graham. \u201cIn particular, I am concerned about any compromising of effective encryption for consumers of online services.\u201d\n\n\u201cCitizens, businesses, and nation states need to protect themselves. Internet companies are understandably offering their customers online services that are better encrypted following recent security incidents,\u201d said Graham.\n\n\u201cCameron\u2019s plans appear dangerous, ill-thought out and scary,\u201d said Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group. \u201cHaving the power to undermine encryption will have consequences for everyone\u2019s personal security. It could affect not only our personal communications but also the security of sensitive information such as bank records, making us all more vulnerable to criminal attacks.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe only practicable way forward is a new international treaty on access to communications data and content, which must involve safeguards that will be acceptable to all,\u201d said Anderson.\n\nPreston Byrne, the chief operating officer of Eris Industries, warns that his company will be forced to leave the UK if Cameron\u2019s comments on the technology become policy, and move to \u201cmore liberal climes such as Germany, the U.S., the People\u2019s Republic of China, Zimbabwe, or Iraq.\u201d\n\nByrne, who is also a fellow at the London-based free-market think tank ASI, told the Guardian that \u201csecure open-source cryptography is at the core of our business\u2026 so we were able to make the decision more or less immediately.\u201d\n\nEris Industries uses technology loosely based on the bitcoin cryptocurrency to build a decentralised network, with potential applications in communications, social networking and community governance. But, Byrne warns, \u201cnone of these benefits can be realised without secure cryptography, including end-to-end encryption.\n\n\u201cDavid Cameron has said this measure is designed to \u2018modernise\u2019 the law. He fails to understand the full extent of how out of date the law is. The only way you can shut down cryptographic distributed networks today is to either arrest the vast majority of (or in the case of a blockchain database, all) persons running a node and ensure that every single data store containing a copy of that application database is destroyed; or shut down the Internet.\u201d\n\nAs a result, he tells the Guardian, \u201cI\u2019d be very surprised if the Conservatives stick to their guns on this.\u201d\n\nOne insider at a major US technology firm told the Guardian that \u201cpoliticians are fond of asking why it is that tech companies don\u2019t base themselves in the UK\u201d.\n\n\u201cI think if you\u2019re saying that encryption is the problem, at a time when consumers and businesses see encryption as a very necessary part of trust online, that\u2019s a very indicative point of view.\u201d"}
{"text":"PROVIDENCE, R.I. \u2014 Four men are in custody after a shooting Thursday morning just a block away from the Garrahy Judicial Complex in downtown Providence.\n\nA report of shots fired came in to Providence police at 10:48 a.m., after a possibly gang-related dispute broke out inside the courthouse and moved outside after deputy sheriffs ejected the participants, Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements Jr. said.\n\nDetectives converged on the downtown area and quickly took four young males into custody. The suspect who was believed to have fired the gun was picked up behind the Coro Center, Clements said.\n\nThere were no reported victims, but detectives will check with the hospitals, Clements said.\n\nDetectives recovered a handgun, according to Commander Thomas Verdi.\n\n\"Everyone is safe,\" Clements said. The suspect \"clearly had an intended target.\"\n\nLawyer Nick Obolensky was inside the fourth-floor court hallway when he saw several young men get into a fight and the deputy sheriffs eject them, he said.\n\nThe young men went outside, where the fight continued and gravitated on to Pine Street.\n\nGarrahy courthouse was placed on lockdown for about a half-hour, with no one allowed to go in or out, Amanda Lysikatos, who'd been in court on a matter, said as she watched detectives work the scene.\n\nBeverly Berard, of North Providence, said she saw about 10 young people fighting and cursing in the center of Pine Street.\n\n\"All of a sudden a gun went off,\" said Berard, who works at the Pierce Atwood law firm.\n\nFour to five people scattered in one direction on foot. Four to five others ran in the opposite direction, she said. One of the people involved had a ponytail and wore red shorts.\n\n\"You hear fighting at the courthouse, but never a gun shot,\" she said.\n\nA suspect was seen sprinting down Fountain Street moments later.\n\nThe scene drew the attention of criminal justice majors at Johnson and Wales University as police and prosecutors questioned witnesses. Several left the homeland security class after hearing gunfire and checking Providence police scanner activity.\n\n\"I wanted to go so bad,\" said Michael Clark, a senior who plans to go to law school.\n\nAlexis Pollack, also a senior and budding cop, documented the scene on Facebook Live.\n\nIt is the second shooting outside a courthouse in less than a year. A 22-year-old Pawtucket man was critically injured after a noontime drive-by shooting in January near the Licht Judicial Complex.\n\nDiscussions are afoot in the state judiciary about changing the policy that bars deputy sheriffs from carrying guns. Since 2015, some deputy sheriffs have carried Tasers in addition to batons, pepper spray and handcuffs.\n\nCraig Berke, spokesman for the judiciary, said the deputy sheriffs armed themselves during the incident and security was enhanced at the courthouse. Surveillance video taken in and outside the courthouse is being reviewed, he said.\n\nBerke released this statement late Thursday: \"Court security procedures are constantly under review and the Judiciary's administration is certainly looking at this event. We are always looking at measures that will further enhance the safety of litigants, the public, judges and staff within our courthouses. Our security protocols worked today. There was no breach within the courthouse or on the courthouse grounds, not even when one of the subjects involved sought refuge from the shooting by returning to the courthouse, where he was screened and detained for the police.\"\n\nThis story was updated multiple times, most recently at 11:46 a.m., 12:43 p.m. and 3:59 p.m."}
{"text":"You really can\u2019t make up how ludicrous things have gotten at campuses in the United States. Here\u2019s the latest via the University of Michigan:\n\nDelicate snowflakes. Univ. of Michigan cancels \u2018American Sniper\u2019 screening: \u2018Made students feel unsafe\u2019 http:\/\/t.co\/NJ8SH4cGPI \u2014 JWF (@JammieWF) April 8, 2015\n\nOh, COME ON!\n\nI'm disgusted by the Univ of Michigan, it cancelled the campus screening of American Sniper http:\/\/t.co\/sBixroYm0p #ChrisKyleAmericanHero \u2014 Dave Melin (@Schneider_F3) April 8, 2015\n\nGutless display by my alma mater. University cancels \u2018American Sniper\u2019 screening: \u2019Made students feel unsafe\u2019\u2026 http:\/\/t.co\/SwS3TfT4xF \u2014 Steve (@evetsgnaw) April 8, 2015\n\nAre U of Mich students delusional, thinking campus was in Iraq or just wussies? American Sniper canceled. http:\/\/t.co\/tu7h69ES3s \u2014 Michael R Shannon (@ReluctantUser2) April 8, 2015\n\nAnd instead of \u201cAmerican Sniper,\u201d the vicious, killer Wolverines of Michigan will see\u2026\n\nWin for the precious snowflakes. Univ of Michigan pulls \"American Sniper\" screening, replaces w\/ \"Paddington Bear\". http:\/\/t.co\/r6JPc3Pzbg \u2014 CamEdwards (@CamEdwards) April 8, 2015\n\n@Mashon45 Paddington will be shown instead. \u2014 Campus Involvement (@UMInvolvement) April 7, 2015\n\nHa!\n\nHere\u2019s the official statement from UM\u2019s Center for Campus Involvement on the cancellation:\n\nA statement from the Center for Campus Involvement regarding the screening of American Sniper at UMix this Friday. pic.twitter.com\/uClDigpd4w \u2014 Campus Involvement (@UMInvolvement) April 7, 2015\n\nUpdate: The university has decided to go ahead and screen the film, but with these safeguards.\n\n***\n\nRelated:\n\nTwitchy coverage of American Sniper"}
{"text":"Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, quit his position on Friday after telling President Donald Trump he disagreed with the hiring of Anthony Scaramucci as communications director.\n\nTrump offered Scaramucci, a New York financier, the job on Friday morning and reportedly requested that Spicer stay on. Scaramucci said at a White House briefing that \u201cSean decided that he thought it would be better to go.\u201d\n\nSarah Huckabee Sanders, who had been Spicer\u2019s deputy, will take over for Spicer as White House press secretary.\n\nSee live blog of White House press briefing.\n\nScaramucci founded the investment firm SkyBridge Capital, and the SALT hedge-fund conference. He regularly defended Trump on television during the campaign and was a campaign fundraiser.\n\nAFP\/Getty Images Anthony Scaramucci\n\nSpicer was communications director at the Republican National Committee before joining the Trump team. The 45-year-old was known for being combative with White House reporters and the subject of lampoons by comedian Melissa McCarthy on \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d\n\nSee: Sean Spicer on Melissa McCarthy\u2019s \u2018SNL\u2019 performance: Cute, funny but \u2018dial it back.\u2019\n\nSanders read a statement from Trump at the briefing, saying he was \u201cgrateful\u201d for Spicer\u2019s White House service and that he wished him well. \u201cJust look at his great television ratings,\u201d Trump said in the statement.\n\nScaramucci said he loved Spicer and that \u201cI hope he goes on to make a tremendous amount of money.\u201d\n\nSpicer\u2019s tenure got off to a controversial start when he said Trump\u2019s inauguration was \u201cthe most watched ever,\u201d a statement that was later debunked. In recent weeks, Spicer had briefed the press less regularly. Sanders has instead frequently taken the podium at the White House briefings, which have often been held off camera. Before Friday, there had not been an on-camera briefing since June 29.\n\nSpicer said in a tweet on Friday that it had been an \u201chonor\u201d to serve Trump and that he would work through August.\n\nIt's been an honor & a privilege to serve @POTUS @realDonaldTrump & this amazing country. I will continue my service through August \u2014 Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) July 21, 2017\n\nIn May, Trump blamed his press team, including Spicer, for failing to put out the public firestorm that erupted after Trump fired James Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As USA Today wrote, the strain in the Trump-Spicer relationship was on display when Trump did not invite the devout Catholic to a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican in late May.\n\nIn another memorable episode involving Spicer and the media, a Washington Post story in May said he was hiding in bushes at the White House. The Post later said he was \u201camong\u201d the bushes. The story prompted mocked-up pictures of Spicer in bushes, including one on Friday."}
{"text":"Two of the longer term concerns entering the 2013-14 season for the Toronto Maple Leafs were the contract statuses of their star players Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf. GM Dave Nonis made good on Kessel\u2019s desire to negotiate before the season, and now the Leafs leading scorer will be in the fold until 2022. Having taken care of the time sensitive work, now Nonis\u2019 sights will be set on re-signing the Leafs captain to a long term deal. But what\u2019s it going to cost? Let\u2019s take a look.\n\nFor his part, Phaneuf has said he\u2019s open to negotiating a new deal midseason, having done so in Calgary back in 2008. And why not? The Flames overpaid to lock up a young, budding star defender that had already reached the 20-goal and 60-point plateau by the age of 23. He\u2019s never managed to repeat either feat since, and was shipped to Toronto two years later as a high-priced disappointment. Since coming to Toronto, he\u2019s lost and re-found some measure of his scoring touch, while regularly lining up in the toughest defensive assignments. His role has changed, the cap has risen, the rules have changed, but his paycheque has remained static since then.\n\nTo look at what Phaneuf should get, I looked into the last four seasons of data on defensemen (2009-10 through 2012-13). Amusingly, these happen to be the four worst years of Phaneuf\u2019s career from a statistical standpoint, but probably better reflect his scoring output as the seasons roll on. Yes, in an eight-year career, two Phaneuf\u2019s worst individual seasons saw him feature 10th and 12th in league scoring among defenders. So please understand that I used the word \u2018worst\u2019 in a relative sense here.\n\nIn 277 games over the last four seasons, Phaneuf ranks 23rd in points scored with 134, good for .48 points per game. More impressively, he ranks 8th in goals (41), power play goals (18) and time on ice (6916 minutes). It is in that last category where there\u2019s some interesting salary correlations, as six of the seven players ahead of him in TOI over the last four seasons also have higher cap hits (Weber, Chara, Bouwmeester, Doughty, Suter and Boyle). Only Duncan Keith, signed to a phony 13-year, $72-million deal that pays just 5% of his total salary over his final two seasons, has a lower annual cap hit and has played more hockey than Phaneuf.\n\nNow, ice time is hardly a perfect measure of Phaneuf\u2019s worth, and I think most would agree that at least five of the seven players ahead of Phaneuf on that list are better defensemen than the Leafs captain. But what we can extrapolate is that is that defensemen who play as much as Phaneuf does tend to get paid as much as Phaneuf does. They also tend to have both a leadership role and a \u2018play in all situations\u2019 role with their club, much like Phaneuf does. So while I\u2019d be hesitant to say that Phaneuf is the league\u2019s 8th best defenseman, he\u2019s certainly in the top 20.\n\nBut one of the greatest difficulties in projecting Phaneuf\u2019s future cap hit is understanding the vast shift in his playing style since coming to Toronto. As alluded to above, he has been tasked with defensive zone starts and top lines every shift he\u2019s skated in Toronto. In his early days, Phaneuf saw over 5 minutes a night on the power play, and was given sheltered minutes at even strength. This season, Phaneuf finds himself in an elite pair of defenders (the other being Phoenix Coyotes defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson) who average at least 3:30 in ice time on both the penalty kill and power play per game while facing the league\u2019s best forwards.\n\nAt this point, I\u2019d like to remind Leafs fans of Phaneuf\u2019s idol and potential career model, Scott Stevens. While known for punishing hits and staunch defensive play for the New Jersey Devils, it\u2019s sometimes hard to remember that he was once a pure scorer. While never among the ranks of Larry Murphy or Paul Coffey offensively, Stevens still tallied 900 points in his career. His best season was 1993-94 when he finished with 78 points. Then came the first of Gary Bettman\u2019s lockouts and a new game format that encouraged stifling defensive play. In 10 more seasons, Stevens would only crack 30 points once more, yet he became the most notable defensive presence of the \u201cDead Puck Era.\u201d\n\nSimilarly for Phaneuf, the offensive dynamism that made him rich seems to have been replaced by defensive prowess. It\u2019s not that Phaneuf has lost that offensive side to his game, it\u2019s that his role and usage limit his overall number of offensive chances for in favour of limiting offensive chances against. Phaneuf could never score 40 points again, but he\u2019s significantly more reliable, responsible and positionally sound than he was in his halcyon days as a scorer. As both James Mirtle and I said on Monday, Phaneuf is without a doubt the most irreplaceable player in the line up.\n\nMany have argued that Phaneuf\u2019s current cap number looks out of place citing his capgeek comparables, and have been using Jay Bouwmeester when forecasting Phaneuf\u2019s next deal. The St. Louis Blues defender and former linemate of Phaneuf\u2019s is in the last year of a deal that pays him $6.68-million annually. He also recently signed a five-year extension with the Blues that will pay him a mere $5.4-million. And for seemingly little reason, that\u2019s what Phaneuf should get. Or so the thinking goes.\n\nBut there\u2019s several factors that make me believe there\u2019s no chance that Phaneuf can be re-signed for JayBo\u2019s modest number. Firstly, there\u2019s little similarity in their game, beyond the fact that both log a tonne of minutes. Over the past four seasons, Bouwmeester has 30 fewer points than Phaneuf; 22 fewer goals. While a top defenseman in his own right, Bouwmeester has to fight for third billing behind standouts Alex Pietrangelo and Kevin Shattenkirk. It\u2019s hard to ask for a raise when there are two other guys at your work who do your job better than you. Phaneuf does not have to suffer that workplace competition, and might never in a Leaf uniform. Also, George W. Bush was still president at the start of the last season where Bouwmeester recorded 40 points. Finally, Phaneuf is also a year younger than Bouwmeester, still closer to his prime and still able to crack 40 points.\n\nSo what does it all mean? What is Phaneuf worth? Most would agree that he\u2019s not worthy of Ryan Suter\u2019s $7.4-million paycheque, despite Phaneuf having 59 more points over 600-game careers. He\u2019s also worth more than Jay Bouwmeester\u2019s future cap hit of $5.4-million.\n\nIf I had to stake a guess, I\u2019d actually say that Phaneuf will see a slight raise ahead of next season. He\u2019s still only 28, and has been healthy most of his career. He\u2019s proven capable of playing 25-minutes a night and more likely than not to score 40 points a season. There\u2019s a dearth of options internally or externally that the Leafs could acquire to immediately replace and improve upon what Phaneuf does.\n\nThe only way I could see him re-signing at his current price tag or for less money is if the Leafs are willing to offer Phaneuf an eight-year deal. But if I had to give a more accurate range, I\u2019d say that the Leafs and Phaneuf will probably end up coming to terms on a deal in the 7-8 year, $47-56-million deal. That would put his annual cap hit at a reasonable, $6.7 to $7-million cap hit on a deal that would expire when Phaneuf was 36 or 37 years of age. Should the Leafs want shorter term, expect the AAV to go up accordingly.\n\nWhile it might sound unreasonable, nothing about NHL player\u2019s paydays are ever reasonable. And ask yourself, what would you rather have? Phaneuf at 6.9 million, or to spend the next few seasons trying to replace him?\n\nHighest Scoring NHL Defenseman\n\nFor combined seasons, from 2005-06 to 2013-14, playing defenseman, sorted by descending goals scored."}
{"text":"Buy Photo Domestic abuse victims who call the police often won\u2019t have to worry about being kicked out of their rental properties under a bill approved by the Legislature and sent to the governor Wednesday, April 27, 2016. (Photo: William Petroski\/The Register)Buy Photo\n\nIowa lawmakers voted Monday to advance Gov. Terry Branstad's controversial water quality proposal with assurances from his staff that they will offer amendments to address the concerns of various stakeholders.\n\nA three-person House subcommittee voted to 2-1 to advance the bill to a full committee. It was the first time lawmakers had a chance to publicly consider the bill.\n\n\"I\u2019ve seen two proposals for water quality in our state over the last year. One was a lawsuit,\" said Rep. Peter Cownie, R-West Des Moines, referencing a suit brought by the Des Moines Water Works against three northwest Iowa counties over water quality.\n\nHe credited that action with drawing state attention to the issue, but said \"I like this way of doing things better.\"\n\nThe governor's proposal, which he has said is his top priority for the session, would extend for another 20 years a one-cent sales tax currently earmarked for education infrastructure spending. That tax currently is set to expire in 2029.\n\nSchools would be guaranteed everything they currently receive through the tax plus an additional $10 million annually. The proposal would capture revenue growth beyond that cap and direct it to water quality projects.\n\nThe Department of Revenue projects the plan would create $4.7 billion to support water quality over 32 years and maintain $21 billion for schools.\n\nBut so far, the proposal has been met with skepticism, with some arguing that it pits water quality against education \u2014 two high-priority issues in the state.\n\nMany people who spoke at the subcommittee meeting said they appreciate that the governor has attempted to tackle the issue, but most said they are reserving judgment before choosing to support or oppose the legislation.\n\nTed Stopulos, a legislative liaison for the governor, said the bill was designed to be a starting \"framework\" for discussions. He said Branstad has been meeting with stakeholders in the weeks since announcing his plan and his administration plans to bring amendments to address a number of issues that have caused some concern.\n\nHe said there will be an amendment forthcoming that would allow school districts to use revenue generated by the tax to support not just infrastructure needs, but also transportation, per pupil spending and property tax relief. But it would prevent districts from using the money to build new sports stadiums.\n\nNEWSLETTERS Get the Breaking News Alert newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Alerts on breaking news delivered straight to your inbox. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-877-424-0225. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Breaking News Alert Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters\n\nStopulos said there also would be an amendment to require that any school infrastructure project worth than more than $1 million would require a vote to move forward.\n\nFinally, he said, they will support a provision promoting accountability, such as requiring some form of annual report to the Legislature.\n\nRep. Lee Hein, R-Monticello, who chaired the committee, said he believes this is the first step in what will likely be a long process. But he said he's glad to see the conversation continuing and believes the issue is worthy of being discussed at the committee level.\n\nRead or Share this story: http:\/\/dmreg.co\/1XtMtNw"}
{"text":"A former South Carolina police officer has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for fatally shooting an unarmed African-American motorist.\n\nMichael Slager committed second-degree murder when he shot Walter Scott, 50, in the back as he fled arrest after a traffic stop, a judge ruled.\n\n\"I forgive you,\" relatives of Scott told Slager, 36, in court, as they spoke about the death's impact on them.\n\nA bystander recorded mobile phone video of the April 2015 shooting.\n\nExperts say that without a video of the shooting, the former officer probably would not have been fired from the force nor have faced murder charges.\n\nVideo caption The dash cam footage shows Walter Scott's car being pulled over and Officer Michael Slager asking for his paperwork before Mr Scott runs away\n\nJudge David Norton told the court that Slager, who is white, had \"lived a spotless life\" before the shooting.\n\n\"Regardless, this is a tragedy that shouldn't have happened,\" he added.\n\nLawyers for Slager had argued in court that he opened fire on Scott because he thought he had taken his police-issued stun gun during their scuffle.\n\nThe case ended in a mistrial in 2016, and rather than face another jury, the former North Charleston officer pleaded guilty in May to a federal charge of violating the victim's civil rights.\n\nImage copyright Reuters Image caption The dead man's mother, Judy Scott, forgave Slager in court\n\nIn Thursday's sentencing, the judge ruled that Slager had acted with malice and \"willful intent to provide false testimony\".\n\nThe judge also had the option of sentencing him for a lesser crime of voluntary manslaughter, which would have carried a sentence of 12 to 15 years.\n\nThe dead man's mother, Judy Scott, told Slager in court on Thursday that she forgave him.\n\nShe said she hoped he would repent and allow Jesus into his heart.\n\nScott's brother, Anthony, said it had taken him a long time to overcome his depression and forgive Slager.\n\nImage copyright Reuters Image caption Michael Slager gestures as he testifies in his murder trial last year\n\n\"I'm not angry at you, Michael,\" he told Slager. \"I pray for you.\"\n\nMembers of the family thanked onlooker Feidin Santana for filming the encounter.\n\nThe City of North Charleston paid a $6.5m (\u00a34.8m) settlement to the Scotts.\n\nSlager told the court on Thursday: \"I wish this never would have happened.\n\n\"I wish I could go back and change events, but I can't and I am very sorry for that.\"\n\nSlager chased Scott after pulling him over for a broken brake light.\n\nScott, who was wanted for unpaid child support, fled the vehicle, police dashcam footage shows.\n\nVideo caption Racism in the US: Is there a single step that can bring equality?\n\nA bystander's video captured Scott breaking free from Slager's grasp and running directly away from him, with his back to the officer.\n\nSlager draws his pistol and fires from about 15ft (4.5m) away, hitting Scott five times.\n\nThe death took place amid US media scrutiny of police treatment of African Americans, and provoked protests by the Black Lives Matter movement.\n\nUS Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement: \"Officers who violate anyone's rights also violate their oaths of honour.\n\n\"And they tarnish the names of the vast majority of officers, who do incredible work.\""}
{"text":"House OKs small biz jobs bill\n\nNEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- One week after the Senate passed a $42 billion bill aimed at helping small businesses, the House voted Thursday to send the bill to President Obama's desk.\n\nThe measure, which passed the House in a 237 to 187 vote, is aimed at creating 500,000 jobs, according to a Senate summary of the bill. The Small Business Jobs Act also is intended to make credit more available for Main Street and enacts about $12 billion in tax breaks.\n\nThe president will sign the bill into law on Monday.\n\n\"The small business jobs bill passed today will help provide loans and cut taxes for millions of small business owners without adding a dime to our nation's deficit,\" said Obama in a statement.\n\nNot only is Obama under pressure to create jobs, but he started talking about getting cheap capital to small businesses nearly a year ago.\n\nThe House first passed a version of the legislation about 3 months ago, but the bill met stiff Republican opposition in the Senate. After months of debate and significant pressure from the White House, the Senate finally passed the bill in a 61 to 38 vote last week.\n\nThe president chided Congress for the politicking even as he celebrated the passage. \"After months of partisan obstruction and needless delay, I'm grateful that Democrats and a few Republicans came together to support this common-sense plan to put Americans back to work,\" he said.\n\nThe Financial Services Roundtable, a group of the nation's largest financial institutions, supports the bill. \"Small businesses are the linchpin of our nation's economic growth and well-being,\" said Steve Bartlett, president of the Roundtable.\n\nRepublicans have largely opposed the bill: The votes in both the House and the Senate have fallen nearly on party lines.\n\n\"Unfortunately, this bill does nothing to help end the uncertainty that is crippling job creation and hurting small businesses,\" said House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. \"Instead it puts taxpayers on the hook for even more bailouts.\"\n\nWhat is in the bill: The Small Business Jobs Act authorizes the creation of a $30 billion fund run by the Treasury Department that would deliver ultra-cheap capital to banks with less than $10 billion in assets.\n\nThe idea is that community banks do the lion's share of lending to small businesses, and pumping capital into them will get money in the hands of Main Street businesses.\n\nAnother provision aims to increase the flow of capital by providing $1.5 billion in grants to state lending programs that in turn support loans to small businesses. The state programs have proven themselves to be efficient, targeted and effective, but with many states struggling to balance their budgets, the programs are going broke.\n\nThe bill would also provide a slew of tax breaks that will cost $12 billion over a decade, according to a preliminary estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation. The breaks aim to encourage small businesses to purchase new equipment, to incentivize venture capital firms to invest in small businesses, and to motivate entrepreneurs to start their own business.\n\nAnother provision of the legislation increases the loan limits on government-backed loans. It also extends the popular loan sweeteners for Small Business Administration loans through the end of the year. The sweeteners, initiated with the 2009 Recovery Act, have been a ,stimulus success story, and small businesses have been in line waiting for more funding.\n\nThere are quite a few tax breaks, but here is a rundown of five that have the potential to be game changers for the small businesses that are affected:\n\n100% exclusion of capital gains: The bill would eliminate capital gains taxes on investments in qualifying small businesses.\n\nTo qualify for the tax break, a small business needs to be a C corporation - sorry, LLCs and S-corps - with assets of less than $50 million. The investor must buy the stock at \"original issue,\" meaning it's purchased directly from the company, and has to hold it for at least five years.\n\nCarry back provision extended to 5 years: When a business books a profit, it pays income tax on its earnings. But if the business then turns a loss in later years, tax rules allow the business to \"carry back\" its loss and deduct the money from earlier profits.\n\nBy filing an amended tax return for the earlier, profitable year, the business can claim an immediate refund on the taxes it paid. The bill allows certain small businesses to extend the carryback for 5 years.\n\nIncrease of Section 179: To motivate companies to go spend money on equipment, \"Section 179\" of the tax code allows businesses to write off capital expenditures immediately, putting cash in a company's pocket quickly.\n\nThanks to the Recovery Act, businesses can write off up to $250,000 worth of equipment through 2009. This bill extends the benefit through 2011 and the maximum increases to $500,000.\n\nBonus depreciation extension: Businesses can also opt to recover the cost of capital expenditures by writing off a bit of the cost of the purchase over a number of years, following a depreciation schedule.\n\nTemporarily, businesses can front-load that deduction by writing off 50% of capital expenditures made in 2008 and 2009. This bill extends that first-year depreciation for qualifying property that is put in service in 2010.\n\nHelp for start-ups: Currently, entrepreneurs can deduct up to $5,000 in start-up expenses. That amount is reduced by the amount that the start-up's expenses exceed $50,000. The bill would increase the deduction to $10,000 for 2010, and the deduction would be reduced by the amount that an entrepreneur exceeds $60,000."}
{"text":"Blue Bunny, one of the biggest ice cream makers, is testing a line of nondairy vegan ice cream in five cities, and Dallas and Houston are on the list.\n\nThe line includes four flavors \u2014 vanilla, chocolate, mint chocolate chip and mocha fudge \u2014 and can be found at all Kroger stores in Dallas and Houston. It's also being sold in Denver, Omaha and Des Moines.\n\nCompany spokeswoman Deanna Dugo says the new ice cream reflects a nationwide trend. \"In the current climate, nondairy alternatives are huge, whether it's a sensitivity or with more people becoming vegan,\" she says.\n\nThe ice creams are made with almond milk, and they are cholesterol- and lactose-free. \"Almond milk has become a big trend,\" Dugo says. \"This means you can eat ice cream even if you don't do dairy.\"\n\nThey run from 150 to 180 calories per serving \u2014 typical for supermarket-style ice cream \u2014 with 6 to 8 grams of fat, also typical. They provide 20 percent of the recommended daily allotment of calcium, which is higher than most regular ice cream.\n\nNondairy ice cream is common at natural-food stores like Sprouts and Whole Foods Markets, who devote half their freezer case to nondairy, but it says something when it's a mainstream company like Blue Bunny. Ben & Jerry's also recently announced that it will start selling vegan ice cream in 2016.\n\nWith Texas-based Blue Bell still downed following a recall of its products in April after an outbreak of listeria, the timing is good for Blue Bunny to add something new to the freezer case, especially in these parts, says Gary Huddleston, spokesman for Kroger.\n\n\"Dallas-Fort Worth is a huge ice cream market, and as of a couple of weeks ago, the Blue Bunny ice creams are at all of our stores,\" he says."}
{"text":"The myth of 'mum and dad' property investors\n\nUpdated\n\nProperty groups want us to believe that average income earners dominate property investment and negative gearing - a closer look at the statistics shows that's a furphy, writes Michael Janda.\n\nThere's no doubt that a lot of ordinary, average-income Australians own investment properties, many of which are negatively geared.\n\nIf you aren't a property investor yourself, then there's a good chance you know plenty of them, and run into them incessantly at weekend barbeques, weddings, on the golf course, or at a range of other social functions.\n\nThat's not surprising, because Tax Office statistics show there are almost 1.9 million individuals who declare rental income or, more typically, make rental losses.\n\nWhat is surprising is that, according to the Housing Industry Association, nearly three quarters of them earn a taxable income of $80,000 or less.\n\nThat's one of the key justifications trotted out for maintaining the current negative gearing regime - that it overwhelmingly benefits ordinary, average-income 'mum and dad' investors.\n\nWhen the HIA made that claim again this week upon releasing an economic report in defence of negative gearing, it set off my bull-dust detectors big time.\n\nSo I went to the source, the ATO's tax stats, to find out the truth.\n\nFor those who argue that negative gearing isn't overwhelmingly the domain of society's better-off, the truth hurts.\n\nWhen I crunched the raw numbers, I did find that 72 per cent of investors indeed earned $80,000 or less in the latest 2011-12 figures (the discrepancy with the HIA figures being that their report used the 2010-11 stats).\n\nBut this just didn't tally up with Melbourne University's widely respected Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey taken every four years that examines the nation's household finances in depth.\n\nFigures compiled by the Reserve Bank from that survey show that investment housing loans are, unsurprisingly, more than twice as common amongst the top fifth of highest-earning households than amongst any other income group.\n\nIn its latest Financial Stability Report, the RBA's analysis of HILDA also shows that a whopping 60 per cent of investment housing debt is held by the top fifth of income earners.\n\nThat got me thinking about the apparent discrepancy between the RBA data and the tax stats - such a large survey as HILDA surely couldn't have got it that wrong.\n\nAn obvious issue with the HIA's use of the ATO data was that it looked at taxable income - after people take out various deductions to lower their tax bills.\n\nWhen I crunched the numbers, over 60,000 people with investment properties whose taxable income was $80,000 or less had total incomes above that $80,000 threshold.\n\nThat takes the HIA's claimed 74 per cent, which is 72 per cent on the latest data, further down to 68 per cent.\n\nBut more than two thirds of landlords earning under $80,000 a year still seemed way too high in light of other evidence.\n\nThat's when I found the ATO's Excel tables that look at what taxable and total incomes people have declared who collect rent from investment properties.\n\nAlmost 74,000 people who declare rental income or losses have a total income of less than $0 - that's right, they either live on nothing or have other means of paying the bills that don't have to be declared to the ATO.\n\nSpeaking to tax experts, including Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand's Michael Croker and UNSW's Professor Peter Swan, there are a few unverifiable possibilities as to who these people might be.\n\nThey could be people who own a property, are losing money on it, but are living off their partners' incomes; they could be people living off savings whose rental losses outweigh any investment income they earn; they could be superannuants drawing on now non-taxed drawdowns and pension streams; maybe they have some sophisticated trust structures which mean they can pay the bills while apparently earning no money.\n\nOr they could be foreign investors.\n\nRental income or losses are the only earnings that non-resident foreign property investors are likely to have to declare to the Australian Tax Office, as their wages, profits or other investment earnings are likely to be sourced overseas.\n\nSeparate ATO data show 50,600 non-residents declared rental income in 2011-12, of which almost all (49,520) earned $80,000 or less in Australia.\n\nSo take them out of the HIA figures and you are now down to 65.7 per cent.\n\nThat's already a fair bit less than three-quarters, but still more than the HILDA figures would seem to suggest.\n\nHowever, on top of the 74,000 negative income earners, there are another quarter of a million people declaring rental income or losses who have total incomes below $20,000.\n\nAgain, it is highly unlikely that these people could survive if that was their genuine income level, let alone service the mortgages that the 116,000 of them who are negatively geared have.\n\nCompletely removing all double counting, if we exclude these people as well, that takes the proportion of landlords earning $80,000 or less down to around 60 per cent - certainly closer to the truth, but probably still overstating the true situation.\n\nThe very reason that many housing investors fall below the $80,000 threshold is because they have used negative gearing to slash their tax bill.\n\nThat's because the ATO's measure of \"total income\" includes net, not gross, rent - that is, rental earnings or losses after deductions such as interest payments have already been removed.\n\nThe very reason that many housing investors fall below the $80,000 threshold is because they have used negative gearing to slash their tax bill.\n\nThe net result of all these calculations could be boiled down to a 'fact check' of the HIA's statement, and the outcome would be 'massively overstated'.\n\nThe vagaries of what is counted as income for tax purposes, and of tax deductibility, mean that it is impossible to be sure exactly how many landlords really earn less than $80,000 per year.\n\nOne other interesting fact from the ATO's figures is that the average 'total income' of Australian taxpayers was $55,000.\n\nThat means that on the way the tax office calculates 'total income' - looking at net rent and net capital gains, and excluding non-taxable items - someone on $80,000 is already a relatively high income earner.\n\nIncome by itself is also an incomplete measure of whether these are 'average' Australians - wealth is just as important as income when considering the equality of tax measures.\n\nMany of the sub-$80,000 income earners are self-funded retirees who may own several investment properties, and possibly have a substantial share portfolio or bank balance as well.\n\nTheir incomes may be below $80,000 in any given year, but they have the option to liquidate those assets at will to fund their retirement lifestyle.\n\nGiven that superannuation drawdowns aren't counted either, it is certain that many of these superannuants are exactly the \"so-called wealthy investors\" that the HIA claims the tax figures show are so few in number.\n\nA lot of this group may no longer be utilising negative gearing, but it will have undoubtedly assisted them in building up the assets that will give them a comfortable retirement.\n\nFor all these reasons, the HILDA data - used extensively by the Reserve Bank - is a much more reliable measure than the Tax Office data on what type of household gets by far the biggest benefit from negative gearing, and it ain't the poor.\n\nMichael Janda is an online business reporter with the ABC. View his full profile here.\n\nTopics: housing, housing-industry, tax\n\nFirst posted"}
{"text":"The partition of Quebec refers to the secession of regions of the province of Quebec, rather than to partitions in a strict political sense. It is usually discussed as a possibility in the event of Quebec secession from Canada. It was not a key issue in either the 1980 Referendum on Quebec Sovereignty or the 1995 Referendum on Quebec Sovereignty, but dominated the politics of national unity for about two years in the aftermath of the second referendum. Since then, the issue has occasionally resurfaced (for example in the 2007 provincial election).\n\nPartition proposals [ edit ]\n\nWhat area would an independent Quebec occupy? That of the Province as it is today without any territorial waters? That of 1867 i.e., the territory without the 1898 and 1912 annexes? That of 1984 with the addition of Newfoundland's Labrador? A.-L. Sanguin, 1984[1]\n\nBroadly speaking, partition proposals have tended to fall into three categories:\n\n1. New borders based on a return to historical boundaries that predate the Confederation of 1867.\n\nProvinces of Canada at Confederation in 1867\n\nThe logic here is that the separation of Quebec would represent an end to a constitutional deal in which Quebec was granted stewardship over certain lands which would revert to their former sovereign owners if Quebec were to leave Canada. For example, in his 1991 book Who Gets Ungava?, David Varty notes that the northern two-thirds of Quebec\u2019s current territory had formerly been a part of the lands owned by the Hudson's Bay Company, and that it had been transferred to Quebec by means of two Acts of the Canadian Parliament, in 1898 and 1912 respectively. For this reason, if Quebec were to secede, the transfer would be legally void: Quebec was a province of Canada at the time that the Ungava territory was transferred to Quebec\u2019s jurisdiction... Had Quebec been moving to become an independent country, the transfer of jurisdiction would not have taken place. There was an implied condition that the Province of Quebec was going to remain part of Canada. Any attempt to move to independence would constitute a breach of that implied condition attached to the transfer.[2]\n\n2. New borders that would create a \u2018land bridge\u2019 between New Brunswick and Ontario This could be set up to prevent Canada\u2019s remaining nine provinces from being split into two non-contiguous chunks of territory separated by about 300 miles (480 km) of foreign (Quebec) soil. The term sometimes used for this eventuality is \"Pakistanisation\",[1] in reference to the way in which East Pakistan and West Pakistan were separated by hundreds of miles of foreign soil, following independence in 1947, with East Pakistan eventually separating and becoming its own country, Bangladesh, in 1971. The fear is that Canada would be unworkable if its four Atlantic provinces were to become an exclave. 3. New borders based on the preferences of local populations. The logic of this approach is that, if Quebecers as a whole have the right to determine by majority vote whether to separate from Canada, then by extension the residents of regions within Quebec ought to be accorded the same right to separate from Quebec and to remain within Canada. The areas of Quebec that have been mentioned as likely to choose to remain in Canada include predominantly English-speaking municipalities on the western part of the Island of Montreal, Northern Quebec, the Eastern Townships and the Pontiac region in the Outaouais.[ citation needed ] In his 1992 book Canada Remapped: How the Partition of Quebec Will Reshape the Nation, Scott Reid argues in favour of partition as determined by local populations and largely dismisses the first two lines of thought on partition listed above.\n\nHistory of the Partition debate [ edit ]\n\nThe partition movement dates from May 1976, when William Shaw, a candidate for the leadership of the Union Nationale, proposed the idea in a series of interviews with journalists. Writing several years later, Shaw recounted one of these interviews: \"I said to the journalist at that time, \u2018I want to introduce a new word into the lexicon of Canadian politics\u2014PARTITION. The threat of partition will prevent separation.\u2019\"[3]\n\nIn December 1976, an organization called the \"Preparatory Committee for an Eleventh Province\" was formed in Montreal. This group contained some individuals who believed, along with Shaw, that the threat of a partition in which some parts of Quebec would remain within Canada would weaken support for separation.\n\nOther members of the Preparatory Committee sought to create a new province out of the linguistically mixed parts of Quebec even if Quebec were to remain in Canada, in order to create a new, bilingual province.[4] This faction within the early partition movement bears some resemblance to the movements that have arisen from time to time in parts of some Canadian provinces to break away and form new provinces. For example, also in the 1970s, there was a movement, led by the Parti Acadien, to create a new Acadian province out of northern New Brunswick.\n\nShortly before the 1980 referendum on Quebec secession, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau remarked, \"Si le Canada est divisible, le Qu\u00e9bec doit \u00eatre aussi divisible.\"[5] (This translates as, \"If Canada is divisible, Quebec must also be divisible.\") Apparently taking their inspiration from this statement,[6] Shaw and co-author Lionel Albert had published a book on the subject by the end of the year. Partition: The Price of Quebec\u2019s Independence outlined a plan for the excision of three slices of territory from a newly independent Quebec republic:\n\nShaw and Albert calculated that the resulting independent Quebec republic would contain somewhat less than one-quarter of the province\u2019s total landmass, have a population of around 2.9 million, and would be about 97% French-speaking. The parts remaining in Canada would contain over three million residents, of whom about two-thirds would be French-speaking. But they also seem to have believed that their scenario would never play out. As they put it, \"Such a country will not be proclaimed\u2014ever. The French-Canadian people would not have it. They would rather have a large province than a small country. That is why separation will not happen.\"[10]\n\nThe Grand Council of the Crees and the Inuit of Nunavik in Northern Quebec have both expressed that they will keep their lands in Canada should Quebec secede, invoking international laws that guarantee their right to self-determination. In 1995, a Cree referendum voted 95% in favour of staying in Canada should Quebec secede.\n\nFollowing the narrow loss by the separatist side in the October 1995 referendum on secession, there was a widespread belief that another referendum would be held in the near future. For this reason, potential players began to take actions that would strengthen their positions in the coming unity crisis.[11] Forty-three municipal councils in Quebec, including many on the western part of the Island of Montreal, passed resolutions expressing their will to stay in Canada.[12]\n\nIn 1997, Denzil Spence, the mayor of Allumette Island, a small west Quebec municipality on the Ontario border, approached the county councils in several nearby Ontario counties with the following pro-partition resolution which had previously been endorsed by Quebec's Equality Party:\n\nResolved: Regardless of the outcome of any referendum on the independence of Quebec conducted by the government of the province of Quebec, the Government of Canada guarantee forthwith the rights of loyal citizens of Canada, where they form the majority in any provincial riding in Quebec, to remain citizens of Canada, territorially part of the Canadian nation and people, one and indivisible.[13]\n\nBetween March and August 1997, the resolution was endorsed by county councils in Renfrew County, Frontenac County, Lanark County, and Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry United Counties, but it was rejected by the council of Prescott-Russell County.[14]\n\nA similar resolution, circulated by a group called the Quebec Committee for Canada, was endorsed by New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna in early summer 1997, and shortly afterwards by New Brunswick's Union of Municipalities, representing about 40 predominantly anglophone municipal councils. However the parallel francophone organization, the Association of New Brunswick Municipalities, rejected the partition resolution.[15] Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard responded to Premier McKenna's letter of endorsement with a letter of his own, defending Quebec's right to secede with its territory intact. This in turn provoked an open letter from federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister St\u00e9phane Dion, arguing that partition was a legitimate option. Finally, on August 14, Quebec's deputy premier, Bernard Landry, responded with an open letter in Le Droit, accusing partitionists of being anti-democratic.\n\nShortly after these events, the sovereigntist provincial government of Premier Bouchard enacted a law forcing many of Quebec's municipalities to merge \u2014 and in particular, forcing all of the small non-francophone municipalities on the Island of Montreal to become part of a single francophone-majority municipality covering the entire island. Montreal Gazette columnist Henry Aubin observed shortly afterwards that \"many sovereigntists hoped that the merger would boost French and stymie partition.\", ignoring the fact that municipalities have no constitutional powers and belong to the province.[16]\n\nArguments against partition [ edit ]\n\nQuebec sovereigntists and federalist Quebec nationalists generally oppose partition. Partition is chiefly supported by the argument of the right of territorial integrity (int\u00e9grit\u00e9 t\u00e9rritoriale) of Quebec. A number of arguments have been advanced in defence of this position.\n\n1. International law guarantees the territorial integrity of Quebec. The most precise expression of the argument that international law would guarantee a sovereign Quebec\u2019s right to its current boundaries was given, in 1992, from the B\u00e9langer-Campeau Commission, by a panel of international law experts (Thomas Franck, Rosalyn Higgins, Alain Pellet, Malcolm Shaw, Christian Tomuschat) commissioned by the government of Quebec in the aftermath of the failed Meech Lake Accord. They responded to the following two questions on the territorial integrity and the potential partition of an independent Quebec, which were posed by a special commission of the Quebec National Assembly:\n\nQuestion No. 1: \u201cAssuming that Quebec were to attain sovereignty, would the boundaries of a sovereign Quebec remain the same as its present boundaries, including the territories attributed to Quebec under the federal legislation of 1898 and 1912, or would they be those of the Province of Quebec at the time of the creation of the Canadian Federation in 1867?\u201d\n\nQuestion No 2: \u201cAssuming that Quebec were to attain sovereignty, would international law enforce the principle of territorial integrity (or uti possidetis) over any claims aiming to dismember the territory of Quebec, and more particularly: \u201c(a) claims of the Natives of Quebec invoking the right to self-determination within the meaning of international law; \u201c(b) claims of the anglophone minority, particularly in respect of those regions of Quebec in which this minority is concentrated; \u201c(c) claims of the inhabitants of certain border regions of Quebec, regardless of ethnic origin?\"\n\nThe panelists answered with their opinions as follows:\n\nAnswer No. 1: \u201cIf Quebec were to attain independence, the borders of a sovereign Quebec would be its present boundaries and would include the territories attributed to Quebec by the federal legislation of 1898 and 1912, unless otherwise agreed to by the province before independence, or as between the two States thereafter.\u201d\n\nAnswer No. 2: \u201cIf Quebec were to attain independence, the principle of legal continuity (absence of a vacuum juris) would allow the territorial integrity of Quebec, guaranteed both by Canadian constitutional law and public international law, to be asserted over any claims aimed at dismembering the territory of Quebec, whether they stem from: \u201c- the Natives of Quebec, who enjoy all the rights belonging to minorities, in addition to those recognized in indigenous peoples by present-day international law, but without giving rise to the right to secede; \u201c- the anglophone minority for whom the protection provided by international law has no territorial effect; or \u201c- persons residing in certain border regions of Quebec, who, as such, enjoy no particular protection under international law.\"\n\n\u201cThese conclusions are reinforced by the applicability of the principle of the succession to the existing territorial limits at the time of independence.\u201d[17]\n\nThis line of argumentation is supported by \"Uti possidetis juris\" which states, as per customary international law, that newly formed sovereign states should have the same borders that their preceding dependent area had before their independence.[18]\n\n2. Quebec is a nation, and therefore it has the collective right to be an independent nation-state, and also a collective right not to be partitioned or divided. There may be corollaries to this argument. First, Canada including French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians would be considered not to be a nation, and hence its territorial integrity does not warrant the protection given under international law to the existing borders of nation-states. Second, the fact that English-speaking Canadians living in Quebec are linked by language to another nation (the rest of Canada) does not mean that they have the right to remain within Canada in their homes if the province secedes. This was the argument presented by Premier Lucien Bouchard when he stated, on January 27, 1996, that \"Canada is not a real country.\"\n\nThis argument is also based in international law, more specifically Section b. of Article XI of the Charter of the United Nations, stating:\n\n\"Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost, within the system of international peace and security established by the present Charter, the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories, and, to this end: [...]\n\nb. to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement; [...]\"[19]\n\nWorded otherwise, this means that Quebec, as a distinct nation, has the right to aspirations to form a sovereign state, as well as the right to be supported by the Federal government in this endeavor.\n\nG\u00e9rald Larose, the president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions, used this argument to explain why he referred to partition proposals as \"racist\":\n\n\"Asked why he calls the partition movement racist, Larose said, 'cutting up a territory, wherever it's done in the world, is a racist project. They cut according to the backyard and the sidewalks of people, according to their race. This is a racist project.' Asked why this does not apply to the sovereigntist project and Canada, he said, 'There is not one people in Canada. There are two peoples. Quebec is a people and Canada is another people and we have our territory. That is why Canada is divisible, Quebec un-divisible.'\"[20]\n\nThis argument has also been supported by francophones in provinces outside of Quebec. In the two-year period following the 1995 referendum, when many municipal councils in Ontario and New Brunswick were passing resolutions endorsing the right of individual municipalities within Quebec to leave the province and rejoin Canada, the \"partition resolution\" was rejected by almost all French-majority municipalities in the two provinces. In the mostly French-speaking Ottawa suburb of Vanier, the council approved the resolution, and later rescinded its approval. Mayor Guy Cousineau explained this reversal to a newspaper reporter by stating \"I had letters and calls from many francophones in Nepean, Gloucester, and on the Quebec side.\" He went on to explain, \"We must show solidarity for 'la francophonie' from one ocean to the other. Not just here in Ontario, not just in Quebec, but everywhere in Canada\u2026. Now, it's very clear and certain that we're not in favour of Quebec separation, but there are better ways to encourage Quebecers to remain in Canada.\"[21]\n\n3. Partition is based on the undemocratic assumption that Quebec is not divisible as long as it is voting \"No\" to secession, but that it is divisible as soon as it votes \"Yes.\" In 1997, future Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois leader Bernard Landry expressed this point of view when he wrote,\n\n\"The partitionists argue that 'No' voters should have more rights than 'Yes' voters. In 1980 and again in 1995, sovereigntist voters accepted with good grace the majority decision. According to the partitionists, some 'No' voters could ignore democracy, refuse the verdict and change the rules of the game. This would be an intolerable injustice\u2026. [Do] you think that the towns or the regions that voted 'Yes' in 1980 and in 1995 also have the right to break themselves away from Canada? Surely not.\"[22]\n\nAs an example of what ex-premier Bernard Landry explained, it can be established that after the Quebec Referendum of 1995 where the Yes vote lost by a margin of about 0.5% (49.42% Yes, 50.58% No), no attempts to partition were made by the \"Yes\" voter base, in respect of the referendum. It is an argument based less on legal grounds, and more on moral grounds.\n\n4. Partition is an impractical solution, or is being proposed insincerely even by its advocates. This argument has been advanced by Raymond Villeneuve, a founding member of the FLQ and leader of the Mouvement de lib\u00e9ration nationale du Qu\u00e9bec (MLNQ), who says,\n\n\"They're always threatening us, always, always. Whether it's Brent Tyler, Stephen Scott, William Johnson, William Shaw or whoever. And they're very subtle about it. They say that if we want to divide Canada, then they'll divide Quebec. And they make it sound as though people will accept it. Their real objective is to scare people, but they say, 'We don't want violence. We just won't pay our taxes. We'll use civil disobedience.' \"\n\nThere is merit in Villeneuve's characterization of partition as being primarily an argument designed to encourage Quebecers to vote against separation in any future referendum on separation. Trudeau's 1980 observation that if Canada is divisible, Quebec is also divisible, was made on the eve of a referendum in which he was attempting to encourage voters to cast their ballots against secession. The first book on the subject, and the one which gave its name to the movement, was 1980's Partition, the Price of Quebec's Independence, by Lionel Albert and William Shaw. The title of this book makes clear its intention to use the threat of territorial losses to dissuade Quebecers from voting in favour of secession. Stephen Scott was even more direct about his intention to use the threat of partition as a means of preventing separation altogether:\n\n\"Partition is to Quebec nationalists like rats for Winston Smith in George Orwell's novel 1984 \u2014 it is the ultimate fear. That is the only thing they have ever been afraid of: the disintegration of their territory.\"[23]\n\nBy the time of the second referendum on secession, in 1995, not all partition arguments were designed with the intention of causing Quebecers to vote against independence. The referendums by Quebec's Cree and Inuit populations in the days prior to the province's referendum seem to have been designed not to serve as a threat, but rather to provide a clear basis on which to actually carry out the separation of these territories from Quebec, in the event of a provincewide majority in favour of secession.\n\n5. Partition is illegal due to municipalities being entities created by the Quebec National Assembly and therefore, the municipalities cannot hold referendum on separations, because they don't have any constitutional powers.\n\nThe fact that municipalities don't have constitutional powers is recognised by the constitution act:\n\n\"The Constitution Act, 1867 established the parameters of current federal and provincial relationships with municipalities. Section 92 of the Act sets out the exclusive powers of provincial legislatures in 16 areas, with section 92(8) giving the legislature of each province exclusive responsibility for making laws relating to that province\u2019s municipal institutions. [...] Because local governments are legally subordinate to provincial governments, the only sources of authority and revenue available to municipalities are those that are specifically granted by provincial legislation.\"[24]\n\n6. Partition is not allowed without the consent of the affected provinces. Section 43 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms explicitly states that \u201cany alterations to boundaries between provinces [\u2026] only where so authorized by resolutions [\u2026] of the legislative assembly of each province to which the amendment applies\u201d[25]\n\nPopular support \/ opposition [ edit ]\n\nNo polling was done on the subject of partition prior to the 1995 referendum on secession, so it is difficult to guess at levels of support. However, during the years following the referendum, a number of polls were conducted, asking Canadians their views on the subject. Different questions sometimes elicited different responses, but certain patterns could nevertheless be distinguished:\n\nSupport for partition was relatively low when people were asked, simply, if they favoured \u201cpartition\u201d as a concept, but rose rapidly when the pollsters asked whether people or regions should be allowed to choose whether to remain in Canada. For example, one poll published in late September 1997 reported that when Quebecers were asked, \u201cAre you for or against partition?\u201d only 34.4% supported the idea. In another poll conducted at almost the same time, 60% of Quebecers answered \u201cyes\u201d when asked, \u201cDo you believe that any regions of Quebec which want to remain part of Canada have the right to do so?\u201d[26]\n\nWithin Quebec, opinion was about evenly divided as to whether parts of the province that wish to remain within Canada should be permitted to do so. However, outside Quebec, a decisive majority believed that parts of Quebec which wish to remain Canadian should be permitted to do so. In a poll conducted five months after the referendum, 48% of Quebecers responded \u201cyes\u201d, and 45% \u201cno\u201d to the question, \u201cIf Quebec becomes sovereign, do you think regions of Quebec should have the right to remain part of Canada?\u201d In the rest of Canada, 75% answered \u201cyes\u201d and only 23% answered \u201cno.\u201d[27] In a 1997 poll, 56% of Quebecers and 80% of non-Quebecers felt that \u201cregions\u201d of Quebec should \u201chave the right to stay in Canada\u201d if Quebec were to secede.[28]\n\nBoth inside and outside Quebec, there tended to be opposition to any option that hinted of the use of force to settle territorial issues. The strongest opposition to partition came in the answers to a 1996 poll in which respondents were asked whether it would be acceptable \u201cfor groups within Quebec to partition the territory and separate from Quebec.\u201d Only 66% of non-Quebecers said this option was acceptable (about 10 - 15% below support levels in other polls), and it was supported by only 25% of Quebecers. Significantly, survey respondents had first been asked whether they agreed with the statement, \u201cIf Quebec votes to leave Canada, the federal government should use force to make it stay,\u201d and it seems likely that many survey respondents associated partition with the use of force.[29]\n\nAmong both Quebecers and non-Quebecers, support was higher for giving the right to self-determination to Quebec\u2019s aboriginals, than it was for giving the same right to non-aboriginals who might want to remain within Canada. For example, in a 1997 poll, 75% of Quebecers and 92% of non-Quebecers agreed that the Cree and Inuit regions of northern Quebec \u201chave the right to stay in Canada.\u201d[30] A 1999 poll showed that 72% of Quebecers found it reasonable that \u201cnorthern regions with an aboriginal majority could stay in Canada\u201d, while only 49% were willing to accord the same right to regions where a majority had voted No to separation.[31]\n\nNo major political party in Quebec supports partition, including federalist parties.\n\nProvincial election of 2007 [ edit ]\n\nDuring the Quebec provincial election of 2007, Liberal Premier Jean Charest stated that while he personally was opposed to partition, it would emerge as an issue if Quebec voted to secede from Canada.[32] Political rivals Mario Dumont (Action d\u00e9mocratique du Qu\u00e9bec) and Andre Boisclair (Parti Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois) criticized this.\n\nPierre-Karl P\u00e9ladeau 2015 [ edit ]\n\nOn 26 November 2015, PQ leader Pierre-Karl P\u00e9ladeau created controversy when he implied First Nations and other groups could negotiate succession from an independent Quebec. This went against his party's longstanding position than an independent Quebec's borders would remain the same. He later retracted his statement, saying negotiations with First Nations would take place within the context of Quebec's current territory.[33]\n\nSee also [ edit ]\n\nReferences [ edit ]"}
{"text":"An Iqaluit man has taken advantage of Amazon's free shipping to the city to make food donations to local schools. Now he wants to expand his giving to other schools throughout Nunavut's Baffin Island region.\n\n\"The need's not going away,\" said Michael Murphy of the high local food prices that have driven him to ditch his shopping cart for his computer mouse.\n\n'At the post office ... there was a section that was called 'Michael's Section'' says Murphy. (CBC)\n\nSince November Murphy has shipped $7,000 worth of food to several schools in Iqaluit.\n\nHe started in November 2015 by asking for donations to help pay for breakfast and lunch programs and food hampers at the schools.\n\nHe bought all the food \u2014 peanut butter, cereal, soup, breakfast bars \u2014 on Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.\n\n\"That's where you get the best buying power,\" Murphy said.\n\nFree shipping key to program\n\nAmazon.ca charges substantial shipping fees to shoppers living outside of the Nunavut capital.\n\nWhat it costs on Amazon to ship 12 cans of Campbell's chicken noodle soup to Pond Inlet, Nunavut. The same order can be shipped for free to Iqaluit. (CBC)\n\nSomeone from Pond Inlet ordering a dozen 284-millilitre cans of Campbell's chicken noodle soup would have to pay $121 in shipping and handling fees \u2014 12 times the cost of the soup.\n\nBut someone placing the same order from Iqaluit has the option of choosing free shipping or slightly faster free shipping using a $79-a-year Amazon Prime account, which is what Murphy has.\n\n\"If Amazon ever changes the shipping to Iqaluit, we would be hurting up here,\" he said. \"Our dollar doesn't go very far.\"\n\nExpanding to other communities\n\nMurphy's next goal is to ship food to other Baffin Island communities \u2014 like Pond Inlet, which is a two-and-a-half hour plane ride from Iqaluit \u2014 where free Amazon shipping is not an option.\n\nBut he knows that, once the items arrive in Iqaluit, shipping them himself to the other communities will be pricey.\n\n\"I'm exploring other avenues for when I start up in the fall to see if I can get it on gratis on a plane to go up there,\" he said.\n\nSylvain Charlebois, professor of agriculture at Dalhousie University. (CBC)\n\nMurphy is also talking to schools in the Toronto District School Board about auctioning off art depicting life in the North made by Nunavut schoolchildren, as a way to raise money for shipping outside of Iqaluit.\n\n\"If anything the need has just gotten worse and it's not going to go away,\" he said of those communities.\n\nSylvain Charlebois, a professor at Dalhousie University's Faculty of Agriculture, says Amazon has the potential to fight food insecurity in the North thanks to the company's sheer size and its ability to keep food prices low and stable.\n\n\"Amazon could actually allow many people to have access to not only good food, but many people up North could actually have access to affordable food as well,\" he said."}
{"text":"FORMER Brisbane Lions captain Jed Adcock is determined to extend his career at another club, believing he has at least three years of football left in him.\n\nThe Lions informed the 29-year-old last month they would not renew his contract beyond this season after 12 years and more than 200 games with the club.\n\nBut a match-winning four-goal and 21-disposal effort in the Lions' surprise victory over the Western Bulldogs has left Adcock even more certain he can play on for several more years.\n\n\"I was pretty confident throughout the whole year that my future next year was going to be pretty good, so it came as a fair shock when I got told at the end of the year that I'd be moving on,\" Adcock told AFL.com.au.\n\n\"I felt like my form as a defender was really good, and I definitely felt that I'd done enough.\n\n\"I still feel like I've got three or four really good years of footy left in me. I'm only 29. I'm excited by the opportunity to move on and see what's next for me.\"\n\nAdcock was the longest serving Lion on the club's list in 2015, was co-captain with Jonathan Brown in 2013 and took on the reins solely in 2014 before the role was handed to teammate Tom Rockliff.\n\nAdcock said he spoke with coach Justin Leppitsch about two weeks before the end of the season and was delivered the news he would not be at the club in 2016.\n\n\"It was a weird meeting. It was just me and 'Leppa', and Leppa felt that my form had dropped a little bit,\" he said.\n\n\"But it was more that he was worried that my body had given way more than anything and that my pace was down and change of direction not as good. I found that a bit hard to believe.\"\n\nAdcock said the ensuing final rounds of the season were difficult knowing he would soon be packing up his locker and departing, describing it as \"a kick in the guts\".\n\n\"But it was really important for me to play well, because I've not got to go out and prove to other teams they should be picking me up and that I do have three good years left in me,\" he said. \"I'm hoping on the weekend some teams were able to see that.\"\n\nAdcock's credentials are strong. He has been durable \u2013 playing 20 or more games in the past five seasons \u2013 and will be able to start next pre-season on day one after not requiring off-season surgery.\n\nHe has had two top-three finishes in the club's best and fairest (in 2005 and 2007) and was an All Australian nominee in 2007.\n\nHe will also be eligible as a delisted free agent, allowing clubs to consider signing him without having to go through the trade process.\n\n\"They know me as a defender but having that flexibility and going both ends of the ground is only going to help me find a club next year,\" Adcock said.\n\n\"Hopefully it's not a hard sell but I imagine what will happen is there's probably bigger priorities they're trying to get at the moment and I'll fall through after that.\"\n\nAdcock and his young family are prepared to move anywhere for another AFL opportunity, having already considered it likely they would leave Queensland after his career at the Lions ended.\n\nHe has been developing his skills as part of the Next Coach Program run by respected football assistant coach David Wheadon, and hopes to get into a position as soon as his playing career ends.\n\n\"It's probably made me think about footy in a few different ways, but in a lot of ways my beliefs about coaching are the same as his,\" Adcock said.\n\n\"The more I've done it the more I've enjoyed it. There as aspects I've got to do a bit more work on but there are other aspects which I feel right across.\"\n\nWhile speculation had dogged the Lions in recent weeks about unrest with some players and their coach \u2013 including midfielder Jack Redden who wants to be traded out of the club \u2013 Adcock said he had a good relationship with Leppitsch.\n\n\"It was never going to be an easy conversation with a 12-year player who has captained the side. It was never going to be easy for him,\" he said.\n\n\"I respect that he was able to tell me face-to-face where he thought my footy was at. It's fine, that's footy and I understand it's a business and sometimes you have to make the tough calls.\n\n\"This opens another opportunity for me and we're really excited to find out what that will be and I can play some good footy at another club.\""}
{"text":"Arena South District redevelopment 8 Gallery: Arena South District redevelopment\n\nGRAND RAPIDS, MI \u2013 The parking lots south of the Van Andel Arena need more pedestrian connections, green spaces and buildings for people to work, live and shop in, according to a \u201cvisioning plan\u201d presented to the Downtown Development Authority Wednesday, April 10. The seven-week study yielded a series of drawings that propose replacing freeway exits and parking lots in the Arena South District with new buildings, some of which would wrap around parking structures.\n\nTom Nemitz, an architect who led the \u201cvisioning\u201d effort, said the suggestions gained from meeting with residents and stakeholders in the area, concluded the \u201cSouth Arena District\u201d should establish \u201cstreet grids\u201d that end the US-131 off ramp at Cherry Street rather than Oakes Street. One option called for a tree-lined boulevard leading to Oakes Street while another option called for the creation of a park-like plaza connected to Oakes Street. While the DDA did not act on any of the plans, it voted to approve the five priorities established by the study. Those goals included: \u2022 Growing business and economic opportunities \u2022 Greening streets, buildings and public spaces \u2022 Building compact urban blocks that are densely developed and designed for people \u2022 Connecting transit, shops, restaurants, hotels, schools and the Grand River \u2022 Living and engaging in a multi-season inclusive environment. Mayor George Heartwell urged the planners to consider the needs of low-income residents in the neighborhood. Heartwell also encouraged the planners to consider mass transit options as an alternative to replacing the parking spots that will be lost with redevelopment. em>E-mail Jim Harger:\n\nand follow him on Twitter at"}
{"text":"Live concert I recorded and released on tape years ago. Original pressing was limited to 25 and they were all given out at Brattfest. For sale now is a copy from my personal archives. Very rare cover songs and one unreleased song. Won't find these recordings anywhere else! Please note the sound quality isn't the greatest as it was recorded live straight to cassette.\n\nTrack listing:\n\n1. New Mexico song (part)\n\n2. Free as the rent we don't pay (part)\n\n3. Whiskey is my kind of lullaby\n\n4. DIY orgasms\n\n5. Where is my coffee\n\n6. Green St.\n\n7. Wagon wheel\n\n8. Harmony parking lot song\n\n9. Acid song\n\n10. Color in your cheeks\n\n11. Going to Georgia\n\n12. This year\n\n13. Tampa Bay song\n\n14. Fuck cops intro, into Skaggy\n\n15. No trespassing waltz\n\n16. Crackhouse song\n\n17. Sellout song"}
{"text":"Canberra's proposed lockout laws ditched by ACT Government\n\nUpdated\n\nThe ACT Government has scrapped its proposed bar and nightclub lockout laws in the face of opposition from the Greens, businesses and the community.\n\nThe Government was considering enforcing a 3:00am closing time or increasing fees for businesses selling alcohol after that time.\n\nThe proposal was aimed at reducing the amount of alcohol-fuelled violence in Canberra.\n\nBut similar changes introduced in Sydney have been widely condemned by business owners and patrons.\n\nOn Tuesday the Greens announced they would not support the changes, effectively blocking the proposal.\n\n\"The Greens didn't support restrictions on trading hours because we want Canberra to have a thriving night time economy,\" ACT Greens MLA Shane Rattenbury said.\n\n\"It would shut down opportunities for nightlife and entertainment in Canberra, when in fact we should be moving in the other direction.\n\n\"Dealing with alcohol-related harms is important, but we don't need to do it by curbing Canberra's nightlife.\n\n\"We can have safety and entertainment at the same time.\"\n\nEmphasise on smaller venues and transport: Rattenbury\n\nMr Rattenbury said he believed there were other ways to reduce street violence.\n\n\"We believe an emphasise on smaller bars, restaurants and live music is one of the key issues to addressing alcohol-fuelled violence,\" he said.\n\n\"So there are options for people to go out and be entertained without having to just drink alcohol.\n\n\"Certainly having good transport options for people to get home at the end of the night safely is another important part of maximising the ability for people to go out without getting involved in alcohol-related violence.\"\n\nChief Minister Andrew Barr denied he had been \"rolled\" by the Greens.\n\n\"Well without me it wasn't going to get up and I didn't support it and that was the most important factor in the decision,\" he told 666 ABC Canberra.\n\n\"I'm not going to go through in great detail the position of each individual Cabinet minister, but suffice to say the Attorney-General [Simon Corbell] put forward a discussion paper and it had the support of all of his colleagues.\"\n\nBut Mr Barr said community and Cabinet response to a possible 3:00am closing time was mixed.\n\n\"The issue here is to what extent does the poor behaviour of a very small number of people dictate a response that impacts very negatively on a much larger number of people,\" he said.\n\nAttorney-General Simon Corbell said the Government would continue to work with police and venues to reduce street violence.\n\n\"There is no place in our city for alcohol-fuelled violence and we will continue to work to keep our streets safe,\" he said.\n\nThe Government will continue to introduce legislation later this year that will include initiative to \"lower licence fees for lower risk venues and red tape reduction for cafes\".\n\nTopics: music, health, alcohol, community-and-society, states-and-territories, canberra-2600, act\n\nFirst posted"}
{"text":"Ribbon Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United States 5278 Posts Last Edited: 2011-07-19 08:06:12 #1\n\nAre you a nerd?\n\nAre you a slob?\n\nDo you have a girly screen name on Team Liquid?\n\nIf you answered any of these questions, there's only one thing can salvage your life\n\nBUFFCRAFT! HUAH!\n\nYou see, I know a lotta y'all wanna spread the word of e-sports, but how you gonna get taken seriously if you look like the sterotypical gaming nerd. Y'aint, t's how.\n\nIn order for our fandom to be taken seriously by today's materialist culture, we must be more than devoted, funny, and all around cool people. The Starcraft 2 fandom must be known o'er the land as the fandom with the\n\nROCK!\n\nHARD!\n\nABS!\n\nHuah!\n\nRules\n\nWhen you're a real man (or real woman, as they case may be. Muscles are not a patriarchy, they're a pec-riachry), you make your own rules. Here's what they are:\n\n1. You gotta ladder, bro. How you gonna be taken serious as a Starcraft 2 player if you don't ladder. That's common sense.\n\n2. When you win a game, reward yourself by doing a manly act of your choice. Flex! Punch something! Headbutt a tree! What matters is that you stay pumped\n\n3. But when you LOOOOOSE, that's when you need to earn back the right to play.\n\n3a. If you lose a macro game, you need to do 10 crunches OR 10 jumping jacks OR ten push-ups\n\n3b. If you lose to cheese, you need to do 25 crunches, jumping jacks, OR push-ups\n\n3c. If you yourself are the cheeser and still you lose, you must do 30 crunches, jumping jacks, or push-ups\n\n4. After payin' your dues, you can rest if you feel you feel you need to. Play when you're ready, don't actually hurt yourself. We don't judge you...out loud.\n\n5. If you wanna keep track of your weight-loss and share the results with the thread, fucking go for it, bro. If you want to keep it to yourself, that is also dude. The goal is self-improvement through self-indudement.\n\n6. Buffcraft is not a substitute for an actual exercise regime. I'm not a doctah. Go see one before starting this program if you feel the need, due a medical condition, pregnancy, or anything like that.\n\nRemember, the most important rule is to get a little healthier and manlier (or womanlier!) while having fun playing Starcraft 2. Anything in accordance with that rule is not only allowed, but encouraged. You think you can have more fun adding \"flex and then yell\" at 50 food in your build order. Fucking do it. You wanna ladder dressed as David Coverdale from the band Whitesnake? Huah!\n\nAnd if you get flex and crunch your way to Masters, then you're just goddamn winning at everything.\n\nEDITED:\n\nA lot of y'all in the thread thing that the Buffcraft regime is insufficiently masculine. I'm proud of you for recognizing that more can be done. You wanna participate, and you think you can handle MORE than the vanilla pansy-ass version of Buffcraft. Post your alternative regimen in the thread, and keep us updated as you step up further. But remember, lying causes your secondary sexual organs to shrink to the size of raisins. And nobody likes raisins.\n\nRibbon\n\nWin: Having crushed my enemy and seeing him driven before me, I imagine the lamentations of his women.\n\nLose a macro game: 25 crunches. 25 jumping jacks\n\nLose to cheese: 25 crunches, 25 jumping jacks, 10 push-ups\n\nFail at committing cheese: 25 crunches, 25 jumping jacks, 20 push-ups. However, Ribbon does not cheese, and thus never has to face this punishment. Are you a nerd?Are you a slob?Do you have a girly screen name on Team Liquid?If you answered any of these questions, there's only one thing can salvage your lifeYou see, I know a lotta y'all wanna spread the word of e-sports, but how you gonna get taken seriously if you look like the sterotypical gaming nerd. Y'aint, t's how.In order for our fandom to be taken seriously by today's materialist culture, we must be more than devoted, funny, and all around cool people. The Starcraft 2 fandom must be known o'er the land as the fandom with theHuah!When you're a(or, as they case may be. Muscles are not a patriarchy, they're a pec-riachry), you make your own rules. Here's what they are:1. You gotta ladder, bro. How you gonna be taken serious as a Starcraft 2 player if you don't ladder. That's common sense.2. When you win a game, reward yourself by doing a manly act of your choice. Flex! Punch something! Headbutt a tree! What matters is that you stay3. But when you, that's when you need toback the right to play.3a. If you lose a macro game, you need to do 10 crunches OR 10 jumping jacks OR ten push-ups3b. If you lose to cheese, you need to do 25 crunches, jumping jacks, OR push-ups3c. If you yourself are the cheeser and still you lose, you must do 30 crunches, jumping jacks, or push-ups4. After payin' your dues, you can rest if you feel you feel you need to. Play when you're ready, don't actually hurt yourself. We don't judge you...out loud.5. If you wanna keep track of your weight-loss and share the results with the thread, fucking go for it, bro. If you want to keep it to yourself, that is also dude. The goal is self-improvement through self-indudement.6. Buffcraft is not a substitute for an actual exercise regime. I'm not a doctah. Go see one before starting this program if you feel the need, due a medical condition, pregnancy, or anything like that.Remember, the most important rule is to get a little healthier and manlier (or womanlier!) while having fun playing Starcraft 2. Anything in accordance with that rule is not only allowed, but encouraged. You think you can have more fun adding \"flex and then yell\" at 50 food in your build order. Fucking do it. You wanna ladder dressed as David Coverdale from the band Whitesnake? Huah!And if you get flex and crunch your way to Masters, then you're just goddamn winning at everything.EDITED:A lot of y'all in the thread thing that the Buffcraft regime is insufficiently masculine. I'm proud of you for recognizing that more can be done. You wanna participate, and you think you can handle MORE than the vanilla pansy-ass version of Buffcraft. Post your alternative regimen in the thread, and keep us updated as you step up further. But remember, lying causes your secondary sexual organs to shrink to the size of raisins. And nobody likes raisins.: Having crushed my enemy and seeing him driven before me, I imagine the lamentations of his women.: 25 crunches. 25 jumping jacks: 25 crunches, 25 jumping jacks, 10 push-ups: 25 crunches, 25 jumping jacks, 20 push-ups. However, Ribbon does not cheese, and thus never has to face this punishment."}
{"text":"Washington (CNN) It was their last, best chance at a big, bipartisan deal: President Barack Obama and congressional Republican leaders all agreed on free trade.\n\nJust a little more than a year ago, that philosophical alignment looked like enough for Obama's signature trade deal and centerpiece of his Asian pivot policy -- the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership -- to clear Congress.\n\nThen the 2016 presidential campaign intervened. Now, as Obama participates in his last Southeast Asian summit to promote the pivot and its massive trade pact, the TPP looks like it's headed to the political graveyard.\n\nObama tried to sound optimistic Wednesday about the deal's future, while also conveying to leaders in Asia the reality of the obstacles.\n\n\"I believe that we'll get it done but it's always going to be hard,\" Obama said at a news conference in Laos, suggesting the deal's path might be easier after the US election. \"Nothing is easy in the US Congress right now. Maybe there was a time when it was but I haven't seen it.\"\n\nRepublican presidential nominee Donald Trump roused a populist base with his strident anti-trade message, declaring the Pacific Rim deal \"terrible\" and a \"rape\" of American workers. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, seeking to minimize the threat of primary opponent Bernie Sanders, announced that she, too, opposes the TPP. And, sensing the political risk of supporting a controversial deal both presidential nominees oppose, several lawmakers changed their positions.\n\nTrump is expected to call Wednesday for eliminating the sequester on defense spending and bolstering the US' defenses by proposing a \"major investment\" in US military spending.\n\nAs Obama tries to cajole last concessions from partner countries on his final trip to Asia, the same congressional leaders who'd nudged him along on the TPP now say it's unlikely to be ratified.\n\n\"The current agreement, the Trans-Pacific agreement, which has some serious flaws, will not be acted upon this year,\" Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell flatly declared at a Kentucky Farm Bureau event last week.\n\nRight now, with even pro-trade stalwarts like McConnell opposed to ratification during Obama's term, advocates of the TPP admit that they don't have the votes necessary to clear the House and the Senate.\n\nThe summer has featured a rush of Republicans -- particularly those in competitive races -- bolting from the trade deal.\n\nSen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican and long-time trade supporter, wrote in August in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed : \"We should dump the TPP and return to the negotiating table to get an agreement that would create jobs and economic growth here at home.\"\n\nMissouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt told reporters he's having second thoughts about the deal . Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, once a Trump challenger, hasn't taken an official position, but he stripped mention of trade -- and his support for earlier steps greasing the wheels for TPP -- from his website, RealClearPolitics recently reported\n\nAnd Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican who once negotiated pacts as the US trade representative under George W. Bush, opposes the TPP.\n\nConservative activists who waged a battle to deny Obama trade promotion authority in the first place, meanwhile, say they believe Trump awakened a party that had been ignoring its loyalists on trade.\n\n\"I think this will last. Every time an issue comes to the forefront, I've never seen the activists forget about it. Once that issue is in the quiver and activists are paying attention to it, it stays there and activists will fight it forever,\" said Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler. \"The stain is here to stay.\"\n\nThe deal's supporters -- including the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers -- aren't giving up. But they acknowledge the uphill battle on Capitol Hill.\n\nLinda Dempsey, the National Association of Manufacturers' vice president of international economic affairs, said that, \"additional leadership is needed in Washington to forge a viable path forward.\"\n\nThe US manufacturing sector \"continues to lose foreign sales and access to new customers in some of the fastest-growing markets in the world,\" Dempsey warned about the deal falling through.\n\nObama and TPP advocates have a problem with the president's typical allies on the left, too.\n\nOnly a small group of Democrats -- mostly members of the centrist New Democrat Coalition -- backed trade promotion authority in the first place, making for the unusual coalition of Obama and congressional Republicans.\n\nSince then, those Democrats have been under pressure from labor unions that argue the TPP, which they've dubbed \"NAFTA on steroids,\" would siphon more manufacturing jobs away from the United States.\n\nSanders stoked opposition to the TPP among unions and progressives during the primaries, making it a mainstay of his stump speech and his go-to answer about what differentiated him from Obama and Clinton.\n\nThat forced Clinton -- who'd declared the TPP a \"gold standard\" trade deal in 2012 while serving as Obama's secretary of state -- to the left. Her announcement in the fall of 2015 that she opposes the deal made Obama's task of getting Democrats on board even tougher.\n\nOpponents, meanwhile, are declaring victory -- at least for now.\n\n\"It won't come up because the votes aren't there,\" Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, a labor union that opposes TPP, said at a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast Thursday. \"The candidates running will have to declare where they stand on TPP and the chips will fall where they may.\"\n\nRepublican House Speaker Paul Ryan has maintained the deal would need substantial renegotiation -- a tough task since each of the other 11 participating nations have their own political sensitivities and Obama has less than five months remaining in office.\n\n\"They have to fix this agreement and renegotiate some pieces of it if they have any hope or chance of passing it,\" Ryan said in an early August interview with Wisconsin Public Radio. \"I don't see how they'll ever get the votes for it.\"\n\nBut McConnell made clear last week that the path to the TPP's passage isn't totally closed.\n\n\"It will still be around. It can be massaged, changed, worked on during the next administration,\" he said.\n\nEven if Congress ultimately does approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the next president will have ways of blocking its implementation -- such as procedural steps like refusing to officially notify other countries of the United States' implementation of the deal or not verifying that those countries have satisfied their TPP commitments.\n\nThe hope of trade supporters is that a President Clinton or Trump would drop their resistance to the trade deal once in office. If they did, they'd be following a path similar to Obama, who pledged as a presidential candidate to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement but governed as a trade supporter who entered new negotiations with the European Union and Asia-Pacific countries.\n\nBut trade was less of a driving issue in the 2008 race, and neither Clinton nor Trump has left much wiggle room for a post-election reversal.\n\n\"I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages -- including the Trans-Pacific Partnership,\" Clinton said in August in Warren, Michigan. \"I oppose it now, I'll oppose it after the election, and I'll oppose it as president.\"\n\nTrump -- whose strident rejection of the TPP and other trade deals is a staple of his campaign events -- denounced the pact again on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham's show Thursday.\n\n\"It's a terrible deal for the United States,\" he said. \"It's a terrible deal for our workers.\""}
{"text":"The wide scar that runs the length of Vivi Lozoya\u2019s abdomen is a daily reminder of the brutal attack that almost took her life.\n\nShe constantly replays the incident in her mind.\n\nIt was May 2011, and Lozoya, a transgender prostitute, had recently run away from the pimp she says had abused her and held her captive for two years.\n\nOne day while she was out with friends, Lozoya says a man working for her pimp and his associates came up to her on the street, tapped her on the shoulder, and stabbed her in the stomach - she can't remember if it was three or four times. She does remember what the man said before sticking the knife in: \"They sent me to wish you sweet dreams.\"\n\nThe recovery was grueling. To this day, Lozoya says, when she drinks water, it sometimes feels as if it\u2019s seeping out of her digestive tract.\n\n\"And I still dream about being chased,\" she recounts one recent afternoon, sitting in her apartment in a working-class Los Angeles neighborhood. She says she doesn\u2019t know if her attacker was ever caught.\n\nViolence is common\n\nLozoya\u2019s experience was extreme in its brutality. But advocates say violence against transgender women, specifically transgender immigrants like Lozoya who are in the U.S. illegally, is all too common.\n\nIn response, immigrant rights groups are beginning to expand the scope of their work to raise awareness about the discrimination and abuse that gay, and specifically transgender, immigrants often face.\n\nZizi Bandera, an organizer with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, says the impetus to address these issues was the realization that the broader LGBT movement - with its emphasis on marriage equality - has not embraced the cause of gay immigrants.\n\n\"It\u2019s led by gay white men and it hasn\u2019t centered the lives of immigrants that are also LGBT, and particularly transgender,\" Bandera maintains.\n\nA 2011 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that 26 percent of transgender people had experienced either physical or sexual abuse. But advocates believe the number is much higher among transgender immigrants, because of intolerant families or because those in the country illegally are much more likely to engage in prostitution to survive, or both. What drives those high rates of abuse, Bandera asserts, is the belief by some people that transgender lives are expendable.\n\nAbuse from an early age\n\nFor Lozoya, the abuse began early, even before she arrived in the U.S. at 19 and began the transition from man to woman. She says it began when Vivi Lozoya was Jose Lozoya, a 12-year-old gay boy living in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. Beatings from homophobic family members were common, Lozoya remembers.\n\nOnce in the U.S., Lozoya decided to become a woman physically, and paid for the surgeries with the money earned from prostitution. Always trusting and, she admits, a bit na\u00efve, Lozoya says she welcomed an offer by a man she met on the street to help her earn more money by placing ads for her services.\n\nBefore long, she says, the man was driving her from one hotel to another across northern California, beating her and forcing her to have sex with up to 30 men a day.\n\nWhen she finally ran away, she filed a restraining order against him, she recalls. She thought that would keep him away; she hadn\u2019t expected him to send someone to kill her.\n\nLozoya only recently started sharing her story. One afternoon in mid-April, she stands before a crowd of people near downtown L.A. and lifts her blouse to show the gruesome scar.\n\nThe first \"Day of Transgender Survivors\"\n\nThe event, called the First International Day of Transgender Survivors, is a resource fair organized by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. About 200 transgender people and their allies show up to tell stories of violence and survival.\n\nWhen Banderas began working with transgender immigrants about two years ago, she noticed that many of those who came to the Coalition for immigration help - especially the transgender women - had stories of being attacked.\n\n\"I can\u2019t think of one transgender woman here that I\u2019ve worked with that hasn\u2019t faced some kind of severe physical violence in her life,\" she says.\n\nAnd yet many of the women no longer seem fazed by the violence, as if they are used to it, she adds. Banderas says she\u2019s spending a lot of time trying to get transgender women to understand that such violence isn\u2019t normal - and that it should be reported to the police.\n\nThose in the country illegally resist going to the authorities \"out of fear of deportation,\" Bandera says. Others hesitate \"out of fear that their abuser or the person that attacked them will find them later on if the police [don't] follow up the way they should.\"\n\nThe Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights is beginning to work with police to sensitize them to the issues that transgender people face and to encourage them to investigate attacks against transgender people as hate crimes, Bandera says. Though she acknowledges that a hate motive isn\u2019t always apparent in such crimes, she's convinced that \"their transgender identity has everything to do with the violence they experience.\"\n\nA stark reminder\n\nThe resource fair culminates with a noisy march to nearby MacArthur Park, with transgender men and women and their supporters chanting and carrying signs declaring, \"Trans Lives Matter\" and \"Trans Lives Are Beautiful.\"\n\nAs she marches, Vivi Lozoya says being so visible and open about her story gives her a sense of empowerment unlike any she\u2019s felt before.\n\nBut that mood is quickly spoiled. As the rally\u2019s participants head back to their cars, three transgender women are assaulted in two separate attacks.\n\nOrganizer Zizi Bandera says the attacks are a reminder: While transgender people want to make themselves more visible to the world, doing so still isn\u2019t completely safe.\n\nShe says the coalition plans to increase security at next year\u2019s event."}
{"text":"I\u2019m conflicted. As a front-end web developer, I should be excited about the advancements in HTML5: the new HTML tags that correct all the hacks and self-replicating div s; the correctly cross-browser rendered styles which have finally caught up to modern web design; and the new Javascript API\u2019s that make the browser into a semi-legitimate \u2013 albeit Frankensteinian \u2013 app environment.\n\nThen I read this presentation on HTML5, and suddenly, I\u2019m a lot less excited. It\u2019s one thing to formalize the hacks developers have come up with over the years and standardize them into a cohesive spec, but with the renewal of the browser wars, it feels like an escalating feature war all over again.\n\nGoogle has taught us, over the years, that it\u2019s possible but difficult to build complex applications completely in the browser. Google+, Gmail, Google Docs are written with many millions lines of carefully hand-crafted front-end code[1]. Careful coding, because the development environment is markedly unfriendly: loose HTML parsing, undefined and silently-failing CSS styling, and ironically unforgiving Javascript interpretation.\n\nFor a while, this was the accepted state of the web development world: the pieces didn\u2019t really fit together, but with enough brute force you could make things work, even across browsers if you really put in that 50% extra effort. When that wasn\u2019t good enough, browser vendors raced to introduce new features, knowing the spec would take a decade or more to be ratified.\n\nThe new API\u2019s were great, but they necessitated defensive coding in languages not suited for it (e.g., enabling the styling of HTML5 tags in IE\u2019s not recognizing HTML5 with the appropriately-named html5shiv). It also brought about the idea of graceful degradation, where you not only have to worry about getting the functionality to work properly as it is coded, but also somewhat work when functions, features and entire languages are ripped away via browser incompatibilities and user preferences.\n\nNowadays it seems like we\u2019re just going full-steam-ahead, damn the compatibility issues. With the pace of browser releases picking up \u2013 Google\u2019s at the forefront with rapid Chrome releases, Firefox following suit \u2013 it\u2019s nice to have new API\u2019s to play with, but it reeks of the Microsoft-style, proprietary add-ons to an already-crowded and piecemeal coding \u201cecosystem\u201d.\n\nHaving to support 3-4 major browser was already a pain, but supporting 7-8 various browser versions is impossible. Even worse, only Chrome is really set up for rapid client releases; Firefox, for instance, is trying to release more often, but has already claimed its first casualties with a legacy plugin system[2] that wasn\u2019t designed for malleable software versioning. In other words, a lot of add-ons just stopped working with the upgrade, despite how similar FF5 was to FF4.\n\nAdding even more features that is basically implemented in the 3rd-place browser further bifurcates web development: either make full use of new technologies and create cool demos that target a small subset of platforms, or work across all modern platforms targeting a wide audience while sticking with more mundane design and coding techniques. I think most of us who have to work on the web fall into the latter camp by business necessity; it\u2019s only in our spare time that we can try out the new stuff, but with no real hope to transfer what we learn back work-related tasks.\n\nAlthough\u2026now that I think about it, there is a platform for the former group of adventurous web coders.\n\nChrome OS. It suddenly makes a little more sense."}
{"text":"Market expectations for an interest-rate hike before the end of 2015 have fallen sharply this autumn, following weaker-than-expected economic data and rising fears of a global growth slowdown.\n\nThe Fed-funds futures market is now pricing in a 5% probability of a rate increase in October and a 30% probability of a rate increase in December The first fully priced-in rate hike has now been pushed out to March 2016, according to the CME Group\u2019s Fed Watch Tool.\n\nBut if history serves as a guide, the market is probably still getting it wrong, according to Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank.\n\nSince 2009, the market has continuously overestimated the Fed\u2019s rate-hike intentions, getting caught in continuous cycles of anticipating a rate rise and readjusting as the Fed subsequently stayed put, Slok said, in a note late last week.\n\nAs the following chart shows, Fed-funds futures have been predicting a Fed liftoff for the past six years\u2014and have been proven wrong every time.\n\nThe dotted lines represent the projected Fed-funds rate, based on Fed-funds futures prices, while the red line shows the actual Fed-funds rate.\n\nDeutsche Bank The market\u2019s rate-hike expectations (dotted lines) have overestimated the Fed\u2019s actions (red line).\n\nForecasts by Wall Street economists about the benchmark 10-year rate have also been too optimistic for a very long time, the Deutsche Bank report showed.\n\nFor more than a decade, as the following chart shows, forecasts for the 10-year rate from the Fed\u2019s quarterly survey of professional forecasters came in consistently about 60 basis points higher than the actual 10-year yield.\n\nDeutsche Bank The projected 10-year rate (dotted lines) has constantly overestimated the actual 10-year yield (blue line) by about 60 basis points.\n\nCurrently, the Philly Fed survey projects a 2.5% yield by the end of 2015, according to the report. That\u2019s about 46 basis points above the current 10-year yield TMUBMUSD10Y, -0.98% which on Monday hovered around 2.037%, according to Tradeweb.\n\nMaking an accurate prediction about future interest rates might become even more difficult as Fed policy makers\u2014in the name of transparency\u2014express conflicting opinions on monetary policy.\n\nWhen Stanford University economist John Taylor, a well-known expert on monetary policy, told New York Fed President William Dudley on Thursday that the Fed is creating confusion in the market, he echoed the views of many interest-rate strategists.\n\n\u201cIt has recently become cloudier as Fed officials have been taking diverging views,\u201d said Ninh Chung, head of investment strategy at SVB Asset Management.\n\n\u201cThe data remain uneven and inconsistent, so you can see an argument to support both sides. Fed officials\u2019 conflicting views just cause more volatility,\u201d said Michael Arone, chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisors.\n\nProviding critical information for the U.S. trading day. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Need to Know newsletter. Sign up here."}
{"text":"Sometimes lost in the contentious discussion around fighters receiving a Therapeutic Use Exemption for Testosterone Replacement Therapy is that some fighters unequivocally need it for medical reasons. While many fans are cynical over Vitor Belfort's use of TRT, the case of Antonio \u201cBigfoot\u201d is another matter.\n\nSilva engaged in a battle for the ages with Mark Hunt at UFN 33, but tested positive for elevated levels of testosterone afterwards. Although he had been granted a TUE, he let his levels get too high, so the fight was declared a no contest, Silva was suspended for nine months, and he was denied his Fight of the Night bonus.\n\nSilva's manager Alex Davis appeared recently on The MMA Hour and explained that Silva's case is a medical necessity.\n\n\u201cThis is one of the guys that really have authentic technical reasons to be on TRT,\u201d said Davis as transcribed by MMA Fighting. \u201cHe has acromegaly. His pituitary gland overproduces GH (growth hormone) and that unbalances all his other hormones.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhen I started managing him, he was actually lactating. He has extreme low testosterone. He has extremely low testosterone, so he has a real reason to be on TRT.\u201d\n\n\u201cI didn\u2019t really take part on the TRT process. There was a miscommunication between him and his doctor. If I was in the middle of it maybe we would have avoided it. I didn\u2019t realize I needed to be involved.\u201d\n\n\u201cHe took the instructions wrong, but he did not try to cheat. What happened was, there was a miscommunication with the doctor and he ended up taking injections at the wrong time. He was taking a month then started taking a week. He took one a week before the fight and one at the week of the fight, which wasn\u2019t supposed to. It got mixed up.\u201d"}
{"text":"Patrick Stokes, Deakin University\n\nDear Mr Briggs,\n\nWe haven\u2019t met. But I\u2019ve been following your ministerial career with some interest, since just before the last election.\n\nAs you\u2019ll recall you were the then-opposition\u2019s spokesperson on \u201cgovernment waste,\u201d a role that involved attending a surprising amount of sport. And in that capacity, you launched a broadside against what you saw as: those ridiculous research grants that leave taxpayers scratching their heads wondering just what the Government was thinking.\n\nYou gave four examples of ARC funded \u201cprojects that do little, if anything, to advance Australians [sic] research needs.\u201d As I discussed on this site at the time, two of those four were projects in my field, philosophy.\n\nOf course, ARC funding is insanely competitive, so those projects were more or less by definition world class contributions to the discipline. Yet you chose to ridicule them \u2013 and, by extension, the life\u2019s work of people like me \u2013 all the same.\n\nCan you believe that was only two years ago? My, what a roller coaster it\u2019s been for you: winning the election, becoming Assistant Minister (not, as you insisted to Raphael Epstein that time, a \u2018junior minister\u2019 even though that\u2019s a common and well-understood term) for Infrastructure and Regional Development, busting a leg tackling the newly deposed PM, being made Minister for Cities and the Built Environment.\n\nAs your new boss might have said, surely there was never a more exciting time to be Jamie Briggs.\n\nAnd then, seemingly out of nowhere, you had to resign after inappropriate behaviour towards a public servant in a bar in Hong Kong.\n\nSo clearly you\u2019ve been busy, and I doubt you\u2019ve had much time to revisit the question of what does and doesn\u2019t count as a valid area of research.\n\nBut what I\u2019d urge you to do, now that you\u2019re back to constituency business and maybe have a little time on your hands, is to find out a bit more about what you knocked back then. Perhaps, in your enthusiasm to win the election, you were a bit too hasty. Perhaps philosophy was the answer all along.\n\nThere\u2019s certainly precedent for those in your profession. Plato, after all, insisted the rulers of the ideal state should be trained philosophers. The likes of Cicero, Seneca, and the philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius all managed to meld the life of the mind and the affairs of state, to the benefit of both. As a Liberal, you\u2019ll surely appreciate the Harm Principle - the cornerstone of modern liberalism - formulated by J.S. Mill, who served one term as an MP.\n\nBut as you can confirm, politics is also brutal and full of setbacks. Philosophy can help there, too.\n\nThe philosopher Boethius was a powerful official under the reign of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, until he was accused of treason. While awaiting execution, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy (523), one of the most influential books of the Middle Ages. As my Cogito colleague Laura D'Olimpio has described, Boethius imagines being visited by a personification of philosophy, who explains that love of wisdom is the only true balm for the sufferings of his soul.\n\nThe Stoics, too, might offer you some resources for overcoming your recent loss of rank. But perhaps that won\u2019t be won\u2019t be enough, and you\u2019ll find you can\u2019t shake it off that easily (as another noted philosopher urges). Politics is a game built for the ambitious, and there\u2019s little so painful as frustrated ambition. Perhaps you\u2019ll find yourself in the position William James describes:\n\nThe paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has \u2018pitted\u2019 himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn\u2019t do that nothing else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeed he is not.\n\nFifty years earlier, Kierkegaard too had diagnosed this particular form of despair:\n\nThus when the ambitious man, whose slogan was \u2018Either Caesar or nothing\u2019, does not become Caesar, he is in despair over it. But this signifies something else, namely, that precisely because he did not become Caesar he now cannot bear to be himself. Consequently he is not in despair over the fact that he did not become Caesar, but he is in despair over himself for the fact that he did not become Caesar.\n\nThat\u2019s a bad place to be. We\u2019ve already seen what how corrosive that form of despair can be with one ousted PM and it looks ominously like we might be seeing it with another.\n\nIf philosophy can help you avoid that fate, surely it\u2019s worth taking a second look?\n\nBest regards,\n\nPatrick\n\nPS: Do let me know if I can offer any reading suggestions. Always happy to help."}
{"text":"Sen. John Cornyn said Tuesday, he viewed \u201cfour large binders full of classified information that\u2019s been made available to the committee to conduct\u201d its wide-ranging investigation. | Getty CIA providing raw intelligence as Trump-Russia probes heat up Congress has entered a new phase in its investigation.\n\nLawmakers are trekking to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to review classified evidence on Russia\u2019s involvement in the presidential election. The House has scheduled its first public hearing on the issue. And the Senate is preparing to interview witnesses.\n\nThe congressional investigations into ties between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian officials are in full swing.\n\nStory Continued Below\n\nFor months, the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees said their investigations into Russia\u2019s meddling in the 2016 presidential election were in their \u201cinitial\u201d stages. On Tuesday, it became clear that the probes had moved into a new phase.\n\nThe CIA is now providing raw intelligence documents to committee members, according to multiple senators. Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) visited CIA headquarters on Monday to view the documents underlying the intelligence community\u2019s unclassified assessment that Russia sought to sway the election in favor of Trump.\n\nAt Langley, Cornyn said Tuesday, he viewed \u201cfour large binders full of classified information that\u2019s been made available to the committee to conduct\u201d its wide-ranging investigation.\n\nHouse Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said members of his panel had also made visits to CIA headquarters and that there will be \u201cmore trips out there.\u201d He said he was close to reaching an agreement with the intelligence community on whether evidence would be turned over to Congress or continue to be housed within the agencies.\n\nNunes also said Tuesday that his panel\u2019s first public hearing on the issue would be held March 20 and that former members of the Obama administration had been asked to testify \u2014 including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who was fired by Trump in January after refusing to defend his travel ban executive order in court.\n\nThe Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, is expected to begin questioning witnesses behind closed doors \u201cin the coming days and weeks,\u201d according to a congressional source who spoke on the condition of anonymity. These formal interviews are expected to take place on Capitol Hill, the source said, and will likely be with officials from the agencies that contributed to the assessment that concluded Moscow was trying to aid Trump in November \u2014 the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency.\n\nThe panel\u2019s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, said he planned to travel to Langley on Wednesday to view the raw intelligence documents. Warner emphasized that the documents were \u201cnot the extent of the information we'll need\u201d to conduct the Intelligence Committee\u2019s Russia investigation, which will include looking into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.\n\nThe Virginia senator said he and Burr were in discussions about which people should be interviewed as part of the probe. He declined to say whether the committee would seek testimony from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a top Trump backer, who did not disclose two meetings he had with Russia\u2019s ambassador last year during his January confirmation hearing.\n\nThe Associated Press reported Monday that the Intelligence Committee had reached out to former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page and that Page had responded to the panel that he would \"provide any information\" that might be needed.\n\nMorning Cybersecurity A daily briefing on politics and cybersecurity \u2014 weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.\n\nWarner also indicated Tuesday he was happy with the cooperation the Intelligence Committee has gotten so far from the FBI. The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, has accused the FBI of withholding information from his panel.\n\n\u201cI have regular conversations with [FBI] Director [James] Comey,\u201d Warner said Tuesday. \u201cI am confident that we're going to get all the information we need to get to the bottom of this in a way that we can let the American people know what happened or didn't happen.\u201d\n\nNunes also suggested Tuesday the intelligence community might not have shared information about potential counterintelligence investigations with top lawmakers \u2014 called the Gang of Eight \u2014 who are supposed to be briefed on such matters.\n\nThe congressman noted that multiple news reports have indicated that people associated with the Trump campaign were being investigated for potential ties to Russia, but that Congress was not made aware of any such investigations.\n\n\u201cIf Trump or any other political campaign, anybody associated with Trump, was under some kind of investigation, that clearly should have risen to the Gang of Eight level,\u201d Nunes said. \u201cClearly we have some questions about whether or not last year we were read into everything that we should have been read into.\u201d\n\nJosh Gerstein contributed to this report."}
{"text":"An Ocean\u2019s Eleven or Dirty Dozen-style caper series with time travel? That\u2019s DC\u2019s Legends of Tomorrow which started filming its series today on Vancouver\u2019s waterfront near Crab Tree Park with most of the cast on set except for the Big Bad \u2014 Vandal Savage.\n\nDoctor Who\u2019s Arthur Darvill is time-master Rip Hunter who assembles a squabbling group of DC super heroes and villains \u2014 Victor Garber as Dr. Martin Stein, Wentworth Miller as Leonard Snart\/Captain Cold, Caity Lotz as resurrected Sara Lance\/the White Canary, Brandon Routh as Ray Palmer\/ the A.T.O.M, Dominic Purcell as Mick Rory\/Heatwave, Ciara Renee as Kendra\/Hawkgirl, Falk Hentschel as Carter Hall\/Hawkman and Franz Drameh as Jax Jackson \u2014 to try to stop Vandal Savage (Casper Crump), who threatens the planet and time itself. It could be a suicide mission but they\u2019ll trade quips along the way. The two-part pilot is directed by Glen Winter. Legends of Tomorrow showrunner Phil Klemmer is on set too.\n\nDay one of #LegendsofTomorrow with our amazing director!! I think this show is going to be ________! pic.twitter.com\/KAbftRP0xw \u2014 Caity Lotz (@caitylotz) September 9, 2015\n\nCiara Renee, Caity Lotz and Falk Hentschel.\n\nArthur Darvill as Rip Hunter. And looking like David Tennant\u2019s Doctor Who with the big brown coat.\n\nWentworth Miller.\n\nPrison Break reunion: Dominic Purcell and Wentworth Miller.\n\nBrandon Routh and Caity Lotz soak up the sun waiting for the next take.\n\nVictor Garber as Dr. Martin Stein. And Franz Drameh as Jay Jackson in the passenger seat.\n\nDancing in the streets like a proper time master\u2026.tick tick tick Boom A photo posted by Caity Lotz (@caitylotz) on Sep 10, 2015 at 2:54pm PDT\n\nGot to meet the lovely Caity Lotz at DC\u2019s \u2018Legends of Tomorrow\u2019 filming in Downtown Vancouver today! @olv @yvrshoots pic.twitter.com\/9ZgT0KvXHd \u2014 Rachel Short (@RackkShort) September 9, 2015\n\nAfter production wrapped on the waterfront it moved into Gastown\u2019s Bourbon Bar.\n\nDC\u2019s Legends of Tomorrow debuts mid-season on The CW."}
{"text":"SA\u017dETAK: Istra\u017eivanja pokazuju da postoji pozitivna povezanost me\u0111u predrasudama prema razli\u010ditim dru\u0161tvenim skupinama, kao i odre\u0111ena vremenska stabilnost te stabilnost rang poretka u izra\u017eenosti predrasuda. Sukladno tome, opravdano je pretpostaviti da, osim nestalnih, kontekstualnih faktora, antecedente izra\u017eenosti predrasuda mogu predstavljati i neke trajnije dispozicije pojedinca. Cilj doktorskog rada je produbiti razumijevanje dispozicijskih osnova za sklonost predrasudama prema razli\u010ditim dru\u0161tvenim skupinama, odnosno pobli\u017ee istra\u017eiti odnos osobina li\u010dnosti i kognitivnih sposobnosti s generaliziranim predrasudama. Istra\u017eivanje na kojem se rad temelji provedeno je na reprezentativnom uzorku maturanata iz Grada Zagreba i Zagreba\u010dke \u017eupanije (N = 1034). Istra\u017eivanjem su prikupljeni kvantitativni podaci o kognitivnim sposobnostima, osobinama li\u010dnosti, desnoj autoritarnosti, orijentaciji na socijalnu dominaciju te predrasudama prema starijim osobama, pretilim osobama, psihi\u010dki oboljelim osobama, ateistima, gej mu\u0161karcima i imigrantima. Rezultati istra\u017eivanja pokazali su da je pozitivne interkorelacije izra\u017eenosti predrasuda prema pretilima, psihi\u010dki oboljelima, ateistima, gej mu\u0161karcima i imigrantima mogu\u0107e objasniti latentnim g faktorom predrasuda koji upu\u0107uje na sklonost generaliziranim predrasudama. Najva\u017eniji korelati generaliziranih predrasuda su orijentacija na socijalnu dominaciju, desna autoritarnost, otvorenost prema iskustvu i kognitivne sposobnosti. Zajedno s ostalim dimenzijama li\u010dnosti iz petofaktorskog modela, ove varijable obja\u0161njavaju tri \u010detvrtine varijance latentnog konstrukta generaliziranih predrasuda. Kognitivne sposobnosti i pored otvorenosti prema iskustvu imaju jedinstven doprinos predikciji kriterija. Analiza mehanizama djelovanja dispozicijskih varijabli na generalizirane predrasude pokazala je da: (1.) otvorenost prema iskustvu i kognitivne sposobnosti imaju na generalizirane predrasude izravne i neizravne negativne efekte posredovane desnom autoritarnosti i orijentacijom na socijalnu dominaciju; (2.) ugodnost ima neizravni pozitivni efekt posredovan desnom autoritarnosti i neizravni negativni efekt posredovan orijentacijom na socijalnu dominaciju; (3.) neuroticizam ima izravni i neizravni negativni efekt posredovan orijentacijom na socijalnu dominaciju; (4.) ekstraverzija i savjesnost imaju isklju\u010divo neizravne pozitivne efekte posredovane desnom autoritarnosti. Primarni doprinos istra\u017eivanja ogleda se u \u010dinjenici da pru\u017ea uvid u, ranije nedovoljno istra\u017een, me\u0111uodnos osobina li\u010dnosti i kognitivnih sposobnosti u kontekstu predikcije predrasuda. _____________________________________________________________________________________EXTENDED SUMMARY: Introduction. Prejudice most often denotes negative attitude towards a social group or its members. Previous studies revealed a positive correlation between prejudices towards different social groups, as well as certain time stability and rank-order stability of prejudice. This suggests that individual's dispositions, along with contextual factors, may play a significant role as antecedents of prejudice. This thesis focuses on personality and cognitive ability as possible precursors of prejudice. Three theories seem to be especially relevant when examining the relationship between dispositions and prejudice: McCrae and Costa\u2019s (2008) meta-theoretical framework of the Five-Factor Theory (FFT) of personality, Duckitt\u2019s (2001) Dual-process motivational model of ideology and prejudice (DPM) and Dhont and Hodson\u2019s (2014) Cognitive Ability and Style to Evaluation (CASE) model. According to the FFT, dispositions (as basic tendencies) should relate to the ideological attitudes (as characteristic adaptations), which should further relate to prejudice, ethnocentrism or discrimination (as objective biography). This is in line with the postulates of the other two relevant theoretical frameworks. As stated in the DPM, the exposure to threatening and competitive social surroundings results in the development of social conformity (i.e. low openness and high conscientiousness) and toughmindedness (i.e. low agreeableness). A person characterized by high social conformity reacts sensitively to signs of threat within society and is eager to protect the established norms at any cost. Individuals characterized by high toughmindedness perceive the world as a competitive jungle and tend to be unattached and interpersonally aversive. These characteristics bring forward the motivational goals for security and power (embodied in the right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation), which ultimately lead to prejudice. Finally, according to the CASE model, lower cognitive ability and higher need for structure, order and predictability enhance the perception of changing social environment as threatening. This leads to the activation of the prevention focus, aimed at keeping the status quo. Perceived threat and prevention focus can further lead to the right-wing, socially conservative attitudes that are related to the resistance to change, and consequently, stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. The causal order of these models\u2019 components was supported both experimentally and longitudinally. Although this thesis did not comprehensively test any of the above-mentioned theoretical models, it largely aligned with the FFT, the DPM and the CASE model predictions when building its hypotheses. The aim of the study. The aim of the study is to deepen the understanding of the dispositional basis of proneness to prejudice. Empirical study was conducted examining the relationship of personality traits and cognitive ability with generalized prejudice. It also explored the mechanisms underlying the effects of dispositions on generalized prejudice and analyzed the interdependence of dispositional predictors of generalized prejudice. Methodology and data analysis. The study was conducted on a representative sample of secondary school students from the City of Zagreb, Croatia and the Zagreb County. Participants were 17-20 years old and were attending their final year of secondary education (N = 1034). The measures encompassed dispositional variables - Big Five personality traits and cognitive ability, ideological variables - right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, as well as different measures of prejudice - prejudice towards elderly people, prejudice towards overweight people, prejudice towards individuals with mental illnesses, prejudice towards atheists, prejudice towards gay men and prejudice towards immigrants. The data was analyzed using exploratory factor analysis and series of regression analyses. In addition, structural equation modelling with latent variables was performed. Results and discussion. Results revealed that positive correlation between the measures of prejudice towards overweight people, individuals with mental illnesses, atheists, gay men and immigrants can be explained by the latent g factor of prejudice. Prejudice towards elderly people shared less variance with other measures of prejudice and appeared to be somewhat sub-optimal indicator of the g factor of prejudice. Therefore, this indicator was not included in the definition of the generalized prejudice construct. The lower correlation of this specific prejudice measure with the g factor was discussed with respect to the following: the peculiarity of this group as an untypical out-group; the prevailing norm of nurturance of traditional values in contemporary Croatian society; and the opposite direction of its relations to the ideological variables of right-wing authoritarianism [-] and social dominance orientation [+]. Generalized prejudice was strongly positively correlated to right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation and moderately negatively correlated to openness to experience and cognitive ability. There was a low negative correlation of generalized prejudice with neuroticism and low positive correlation of generalized prejudice with extraversion and conscientiousness. The correlation of generalized prejudice with agreeableness was low and statistically insignificant. The ideological variables, followed by openness to experience and cognitive ability, appeared to be the most pertinent correlates of generalized prejudice. The latter is in accordance with the theoretical background and previous empirical evidence about these relationships. In the thesis, only tentative interpretations of the relationships of extraversion, conscientiousness and neuroticism with generalized prejudice were given, since the correlations were low and the earlier findings were incongruent or inconsistent. The unexpected finding revealing the non-significant relationship of agreeableness and generalized prejudice was discussed in regard to the opposing direction of the correlations of agreeableness with right-wing authoritarianism [+] and social dominance orientation [-], as well as regarding the fact that the Big Five Inventory was used as a measure of personality traits. A set of dispositional and ideological variables explained about three quarters of the variance of the generalized prejudice latent variable. The dispositional predictors appeared to be as useful in explaining the variance of generalized prejudice as the ideological variables (with contribution shared with dispositional variables accounted for). The results indicated a statistically significant contribution to the prediction of generalized prejudice by all the individual predictors. The most important predictors were social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism and openness to experience. Importantly, cognitive ability and openness to experience had non-redundant contributions to the explanation of the variance of the generalized prejudice. The present study also investigated the mechanisms underlying the effects of dispositional variables on generalized prejudice. The analysis of direct and indirect effects resulted in several notable conclusions. Firstly, the effect of the openness to experience and cognitive ability on generalized prejudice was threefold: (1.) direct negative effects of these variables suggested that higher openness to experience and higher cognitive ability were associated with lower generalized prejudice; (2.) indirect negative effects via right-wing authoritarianism suggested that individuals with higher openness to experience and higher cognitive ability were more inclined to reject right-wing attitudes and thus had lower generalized prejudice; and (3.) indirect negative effects via social dominance orientation indicated that individuals who were more open to new experiences and had higher cognitive ability were less focused on establishing hierarchy in social relations and thus less inclined to generalized prejudice. Secondly, agreeableness had a dual contrasting effect on generalized prejudice via right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation: (1.) an indirect positive effect via right-wing authoritarianism suggested that more agreeable individuals were more inclined to adhere to right-wing ideology and thus more inclined to generalized prejudice, while (2.) an indirect negative effect via social dominance orientation suggested that the more agreeable individuals were less supportive of social domination and thus, indirectly, less prone to generalized prejudice. Thirdly, the effect of neuroticism on generalized prejudice was twofold: (1.) a direct negative effect suggested that higher neuroticism (trait more characteristic of female compared to male participants) was associated with lower generalized prejudice, while (2.) an indirect negative effect via social dominance orientation suggested that the individuals with higher neuroticism preferred egalitarian social relations and thus demonstrated lower generalized prejudice. Finally, extraversion and conscientiousness had positive effects on generalized prejudice, mediated by the right-wing authoritarianism - more extroverted and conscientious individuals were more inclined to favor right-wing authoritarian tendencies and thus, indirectly, were more inclined to generalized prejudice. Comparing the magnitude of indirect effects of dispositions for which both ideological variables served as mediators of the effect on generalized prejudice, right-wing authoritarianism was found to be more important mediator in the case of openness to experience, and social dominance orientation was found to be more important mediator in the case of agreeableness and cognitive ability. In sum, both right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation appeared to be of vital importance in ensuring the mechanism through which the dispositions exerted its effects to prejudice, since the former mediated the effects of five, and the latter mediated the effects of four (out of six examined) dispositional variables to generalized prejudice. In addition, none of the dispositional variables had exclusively direct effect on generalized prejudice. Rather, indirect effects always followed the identified direct effects. However, it should be borne in mind that the robustness of some (unforeseen) mechanisms might be brought into question by the upcoming research, since the significance of some of the effects may well be influenced by the fact that the analysis was performed on a large sample. Conclusion. The present research contributes to better understanding of the role of personality traits and cognitive ability as precursors of (generalized) prejudice, especially with respect to their interdependence. A deeper understanding of the dispositional basis of proneness to prejudice serves as one of the preconditions for the integration of these constructs into the models that include a wider spectrum of prejudice antecedents. Indirectly, the research fuels further advancement in the study of nature and determinants of prejudice and provides a basis for the development of more effective interventions for prejudice reduction."}
{"text":"FORT COLLINS, Colo. - Colorado State, in conjunction with the University of Arkansas, announced on Wednesday that the two teams will play each other on Sept. 8, 2018 in Fort Collins. It will mark the second time that an SEC school has ever visited Fort Collins, joining Mississippi State in 1981.\n\n\"This is exciting for our football program and for our fans,\" said head coach Mike Bobo . \"Being able to bring an SEC opponent to Fort Collins speaks to the growth of our program and also speaks to the impact our new on-campus stadium is already making. We want to challenge ourselves in our non-conference schedule and also bring those quality opponents to our home field and our fans.\"\n\nThe addition to the schedule completes the Rams' 2018 non-conference slate, which will feature three Power-5 opponents for the second year in a row. The season will begin Sept. 1 with the annual Rocky Mountain Showdown vs. Colorado in Denver. The following week, Sept. 8, the Razorbacks will visit Fort Collins, followed by a trip to another SEC school, Florida, on Sept. 15. The Rams will close the non-conference portion of their schedule on Sept. 22 vs. Illinois State before opening up Mountain West action. CSU will host Hawai`i, New Mexico, Utah State and Wyoming in conference play while travel to Air Force, Boise State, Nevada and San Jose State.\n\nTuesday's announcement with Arkansas is the second in the past year. In April, it was announced that the two schools will face each other in Fayetteville during the 2019 season. Additionally, the two schools signed a home-and-home deal to play in basketball over the next two seasons, which was also announced in April.\n\n\"Arkansas is a wonderful addition to our home schedule in 2018 and reinforces our trend of securing high-profile non-conference opponents,\" said athletics director Joe Parker . \"We are thrilled to have the Razorbacks in Fort Collins as we transition an originally agreed-upon guarantee game into a home-and-home series.\"\n\nThe Rams and Razorbacks have met three times in football. All three contests - in 1974, 1979 and 1990 - were played in Little Rock and won by Arkansas.\n\nBetween 2018-2028, CSU now has 18 non-conference dates scheduled, 15 of which are against Power-5 teams. The Rams will also play three Power-5 opponents in 2017, facing Colorado (Denver), hosting Oregon State and traveling to Alabama. From 2008-14, CSU did not host a Power-5 school once, but from 2015-2021, at least one will visit Fort Collins in six of the seven years, plus other dates already scheduled for 2025, 2026 and 2027.\n\nThe Rams are preparing for their highly anticipated 2017 season and opening of the new on-campus stadium. New season ticket commitments are now being accepted by contacting the Rams Sales Team at 800-491-RAMS (7267) or visiting www.CSURams.com\/tickets. Current season-ticketholders will have first priority to select their seats during appointed times set to begin March 22. In preparation for the inaugural season of the on-campus stadium, the Colorado State athletics department has launched a special football gameday website, which provides in-depth information on everything from tickets to parking, tailgating, gameday logistics and much more. The website can be found at www.CSURams.com\/footballgameday.\n\nFUTURE COLORADO STATE NON-CONFERENCE FOOTBALL SCHEDULES\n\n2017\n\nSept. 1 - vs. Colorado (in Denver)\n\nSept. 9 - ABILENE CHRISTIAN\n\nSept. 16 - at Alabama\n\nSept. 23 - OREGON STATE\n\n2018\n\nSept. 1 - vs. Colorado (in Denver)\n\nSept. 8 - ARKANSAS\n\nSept. 15 - at Florida\n\nSept. 22 - ILLINOIS STATE\n\n2019\n\nAug. 31 - vs. Colorado (in Denver)\n\nSept. 14 - at Arkansas\n\nSept. 21 - TOLEDO\n\n2020\n\nSept. 5 - COLORADO\n\nSept. 12 - at Oregon State\n\nSept. 26 - at Vanderbilt\n\n2021\n\nSept. 11 - VANDERBILT\n\nSept. 25 - at Toledo\n\n2025\n\nSept. 6 - TEXAS TECH\n\nSept. 27 - at Vanderbilt\n\n2026\n\nSept. 12 - at Texas Tech\n\nSept. 26 - VANDERBILT\n\n2027\n\nSept. 4 - ARIZONA\n\n2028\n\nSept. 2 - at Arizona"}
{"text":"Leyton Orient are understood to have offered the head coach role to Kevin Nugent.\n\nThe O's are looking for a replacement to Russell Slade following his resignation last week. Nugent stepped in as caretaker boss for Saturday's 3-2 home defeat to Rochdale and is expected to take charge again at home to Swindon this weekend.\n\nNugent is believed to have accepted the offer in principle although it has not yet been confirmed by the club.\n\nSpeaking at the weekend, Nugent said: \"I'm sure there will be people interested because it's a fantastic job for someone. I'm sure there will be interest in it but I don't know.\n\n\"I've obviously worked here a long time and I've done the youth team, scouting and all sorts. Changing the role to head coach is something that would certainly excite me but we'll have to wait and see.\""}
{"text":"We\u2019ve been hearing for years that the NFL is a quarterback-driven league. We\u2019ve assumed this means you need a star QB in order to compete for a title. But what if the other end is also true? What if competing for a title can turn a modest quarterback into a star?\n\nWith the rules and nature of the pro game favoring passing attacks, coaches can now tailor their systems to highlight a quarterback\u2019s strengths and\/or hide his weaknesses. The square-peg, round-hole thing has become borderline moot; the holes are now so large that anyone can fit in. So in this quarterback-driven league, wouldn\u2019t that mean more opportunities for all quarterbacks to succeed, including the mediocre ones?\n\nLook at the quarterbacks likely to be in this year\u2019s AFC playoff bracket: Ryan Fitzpatrick; Alex Smith; Brandon Weeden (or journeyman Brian Hoyer, depending on his health); AJ McCarron (assuming his wrist is healthy enough, he\u2019s in for an injured Andy Dalton, who had been the poster child of \u201cdecent but limited\u201d quarterbacking); Brock Osweiler; Tom Brady (the exception to this group, though as we\u2019ll see shortly, much less of an exception than you might guess).\n\nThe quarterbacks likely out of this AFC postseason: Philip Rivers, Ben Roethlisberger, Andrew Luck, Joe Flacco (the latter two were on the fringe even before injuries). Star passers did not carry the show this year.\n\nThere will always be a place for big-bodied, strong-armed passers who make full-field progression reads from the pocket. Each NFL game still presents multiple scenarios that demand this type of play. But the game has opened up and evolved to the point where this classic style of quarterbacking is no longer mandatory on every series.\n\nThere are numerous ways to tailor an offense for a quarterback. Let\u2019s go through the prime example from each of this year\u2019s likely AFC playoff teams.\n\n\u2022 THE FINE FIFTEEN: A new team sits atop Peter King\u2019s power rankings, plus what the Broncos\u2019 Monday night defeat of the Bengals means for the playoff picture\n\n* * *\n\nNew York Jets (No. 6 seed)\n\nWhen Chan Gailey coached Ryan Fitzpatrick in Buffalo, he quickly understood what the journeyman QB was and what he was not. Fitzpatrick had an OK arm that he at times treated like a great arm, rifling balls into too-tight windows. With erratic mechanics, Fitzpatrick\u2019s ball could also get away at times\u2014all the more problematic when you consider the defensive traffic surrounding those \u201ctoo-tight windows.\u201d Instead of trying to change his quarterback\u2019s makeup (which almost never works in the NFL), Gailey structured a system that would minimize Fitzpatrick\u2019s damages. The Bills spread out. This spread the defense as well, minimizing the traffic and better clarifying the passing lanes. Because of the spacing, your route combinations from a spread can be limited. But that was not a huge problem because Fitzpatrick didn\u2019t always play within the timing and structure of route combinations anyway.\n\nReunited with Gailey in New York, the 33-year-old Fitzpatrick has been tamed into less of a wild stallion, though not enough for Gailey to change his approach. The Jets are a bona fide spread offense. To capitalize on this (and also hide the fact that they have nothing at tight end), they instill as much receiving speed and athleticism into their spreads as possible. More than 30 percent of their snaps this season have come with four wide receivers on the field\u2014by far the highest margin in the NFL. Here\u2019s an illustration of their template.\n\nAnother benefit for Fitzpatrick in a four-receiver spread is that it leaves minimal bodies in pass protection. This compels the QB to get rid of the ball quickly. That\u2019s why the Jets, despite an average offensive line, have given up only 21 sacks this season, second fewest in the league.\n\n\u2022 MAKING TODD BOWLES: Bruce Arians, Joe Gibbs and Bill Parcells each had a hand in molding Todd Bowles, who is now remaking the Jets in his own image\n\n* * *\n\nKansas City Chiefs (No. 5 seed)\n\nNot everyone likes to hear this, but it\u2019s true: Alex Smith is the consummate game manager. He doesn\u2019t throw interceptions because he doesn\u2019t take chances. In the system Andy Reid has built for him, that\u2019s fine. The Chiefs manufacture a passing game through pre-snap motion and shifts, and intertwined route combinations that create defined reads for the quarterback, usually at the shorter intermediate levels. Here\u2019s a classic example:\n\n\u2022 Q&A WITH JAMAAL CHARLES: The Chiefs star on his rehab, his status for 2016 and what it\u2019s been like to watch his team\u2019s hot streak\n\n* * *\n\nHouston Texans (No. 4 seed)\n\nBrandon Weeden has been stellar if not spectacular in his six quarters as Houston\u2019s signal-caller. Bill O\u2019Brien, one of the trendier offensive innovators in football, has not asked Weeden to do too much. It helps that O\u2019Brien wasn\u2019t asking Weeden\u2019s predecessor, Brian Hoyer, to do too much either. (Hoyer will likely be healthy for the Wild-Card Round.) The Texans this season have not had to amend much of their system despite starting four different quarterbacks. Here\u2019s an illustration of that system.\n\n\u2022 Q&A WITH CECIL SHORTS: The Texans receiver (and sometimes quarterback) on how Houston turned things around\n\n* * *\n\nCincinnati Bengals (No. 3 seed)\n\nThe Andy Dalton injury was a critical blow to the Bengals. Dalton had become very adroit in Hue Jackson\u2019s scheme, which took advantage of the quarterback\u2019s high pre-snap awareness. That said, Dalton\u2019s injury was not a death blow. Jackson\u2019s scheme can also simplify things in the post-snap phase, as long as the QB reads the safeties properly. Two things the Bengals have done well with Dalton: attacking the seams in the red zone and stretching the field outside, often with A.J. Green. Two weeks ago at San Francisco, in AJ McCarron\u2019s first NFL start, Cincy still got huge plays from these concepts.\n\n\u2022 WATCHING FILM WITH\u2026 A.J. GREEN: The Bengals superstar wideout breaks down the nuances of his game\n\n* * *\n\nDenver Broncos (No. 2 seed)\n\nSince leading the Broncos to a snowy Sunday night upset over the Patriots, Brock Osweiler has been asked to mostly just manage games. Many of Osweiler\u2019s throws have been on simplified route concepts at the short-intermediate levels. The results have been good and bad. Ultimately, if Denver is to advance this postseason, Gary Kubiak will have to lengthen his 25-year-old quarterback\u2019s leash. Fortunately, Kubiak\u2019s system is already equipped to do that, thanks to its heavy emphasis on zone play action. This approach naturally slices the field in half, which helps any QB.\n\n* * *\n\nNew England Patriots (No. 1 seed)\n\nTom Brady is the obvious outlier among this year\u2019s AFC playoff quarterbacks. Fans marvel at the way he wins no matter how bland his supporting cast might be. What\u2019s not asked often enough is how does he win? Brady has full power to adjust plays at the line of scrimmage, and his pocket mobility, pinpoint accuracy and underrated arm strength make him a lethal full-field progression passer. But with a makeshift offensive line, average wide receivers and a mediocre ground game, Brady lacks the surrounding resources to play this way down in and down out. So he and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels have constructed a quick-strike passing attack that sustains drives through small chunks and yards-after-catch.\n\n* * *\n\nBig-time quarterbacking still carries the day in the NFL. This year\u2019s NFC playoff bracket shows as much. Carson Palmer has been the prototype. Cam Newton has evolved into an elite pocket passer (among other things). Aaron Rodgers has kept Green Bay\u2019s utterly ineffective aerial attack above water. And in Seattle, Russell Wilson has learned to play from the pocket without sacrificing his sandlot prowess. The other two playoff teams, however, Minnesota and Washington, both fit in the AFC mold. That means seven of this year\u2019s 12 finalists have quarterbacks who must be aided and camouflaged by their offensive system. With the nature of today\u2019s pro game, those seven teams all still have a shot."}
{"text":"This post is about making functional decomposition from perspective of Aspect Oriented Programming using C++11. If you are not familiar with ideas of AOP don\u2019t be afraid \u2013 it\u2019s rather simple concept, and by the end of this post you will understand the benefits of it.\n\nYou also can treat this post just as example how to use high-order functions in C++11.\n\nIn short \u2013 AOP tries to perform decomposition of every business function into orthogonal parts called aspects such as security, logging, error handling, etc. The separation of crosscutting concerns. It looks like:\n\nSince C++11 supports high-order functions now we can implement factorization without any additional tools and frameworks (like PostSharp for C#).\n\nYou can scroll down to \u2018what for\u2019 chapter to check out the result to get more motivated.\n\nPART 1 \u2013 TRIVIAL SAMPLE\n\nLet\u2019s start from something simple \u2013 one aspect and one function.\n\nHere is simple lambda with trivial computation inside:\n\nauto plus = [](int a, int b) { LOG << a + b << NL; }; 1 auto plus = [ ] ( int a , int b ) { LOG << a + b << NL ; } ;\n\nI want to add some logging before and after computation. Instead of just adding this boilerplate code into function body let\u2019s go other way. In C++11 we just can write high-order function which will take function as argument and return new function as result:\n\ntemplate <typename ...Args> std::function<void(Args...)> wrapLog(std::function<void(Args...)> f) { return [f](Args... args){ LOG << \"start\" << NL; f(args...); LOG << \"finish\" << NL; }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 template < typename . . . Args > std :: function < void ( Args . . . ) > wrapLog ( std :: function < void ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f ] ( Args . . . args ) { LOG << \"start\" << NL ; f ( args . . . ) ; LOG << \"finish\" << NL ; } ; }\n\nHere we used std::function, variadic templates and lambda as result. (LOG, NL \u2013 my own logging stream and you can just change it with std::cout , std::endl or your another logging lib).\n\nAs i hoped to achieve the most simple and compact solution, i expected to use it like this:\n\nauto loggedPlus = wrapLog(plus); 1 auto loggedPlus = wrapLog ( plus ) ;\n\nUnfortunately this will not compile. \u2018no matching function to call \u2026.\u2019 The reason is that lambda is not std::function and automatic type conversion can\u2019t be done. Of cause we can write something like this:\n\nauto loggedPlus = wrapLog(static_cast<std::function<void(int,int)>>(plus)); 1 auto loggedPlus = wrapLog ( static_cast < std :: function < void ( int , int ) >> ( plus ) ) ;\n\nThis line will compile, but this is ugly\u2026 I hope cpp committee will fix this casting issue. Meanwhile, the best solution i found so far is the following:\n\ntemplate <typename Function> struct function_traits : public function_traits<decltype(&Function::operator())> {}; template <typename ClassType, typename ReturnType, typename... Args> struct function_traits<ReturnType(ClassType::*)(Args...) const> { typedef ReturnType (*pointer)(Args...); typedef std::function<ReturnType(Args...)> function; }; template <typename Function> typename function_traits<Function>::function to_function (Function& lambda) { return typename function_traits<Function>::function(lambda); } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 template < typename Function > struct function_traits : public function_traits < decltype ( & Function :: operator ( ) ) > { } ; template < typename ClassType , typename ReturnType , typename . . . Args > struct function_traits < ReturnType ( ClassType :: * ) ( Args . . . ) const > { typedef ReturnType ( * pointer ) ( Args . . . ) ; typedef std :: function < ReturnType ( Args . . . ) > function ; } ; template < typename Function > typename function_traits < Function > :: function to_function ( Function & lambda ) { return typename function_traits < Function > :: function ( lambda ) ; }\n\nThis code is using type traits to convert anonymous lambda into std::function of same type. We can use it like this:\n\nauto loggedPlus = wrapLog(to_function(plus)); 1 auto loggedPlus = wrapLog ( to_function ( plus ) ) ;\n\nNot perfect but much better. Finally we can call functional composition and get the result.\n\nloggedPlus(2,3); \/\/ Result: \/\/ start \/\/ 5 \/\/ finish 1 2 3 4 5 6 loggedPlus ( 2 , 3 ) ; \/\/ Result: \/\/ start \/\/ 5 \/\/ finish\n\nNote: if we had declared aspect function without variadic template we could compose functions without to_function() conversion, but this would kill the benefit from writing universal aspects discussed further.\n\nPART 2 \u2013 REALISTIC EXAMPLE\n\nIntroduction is over, let\u2019s start some more real-life coding here. Let\u2019s assume we want to find some user inside database by id. And while doing that we also want log the process duration, check that requesting party is authorised to perform such request (security check), check for database request fail, and, finally, check in local cache for instant results.\n\nAnd one more thing \u2013 i don\u2019t want to rewrite such additional aspects for every function type. So let\u2019s write them using variadic templates and get as universal methods as possible.\n\nOk, let\u2019s start. I will create some dummy implementation for additional classes like User, etc. Such classes are only for example and actual production classes might be completely different, like user id should not be int, etc.\n\nSample User class as immutable data:\n\n\/\/ Simple immutable data class UserData { public: const int id; const string name; UserData(int id, string name) : id(id), name(name) {} }; \/\/ Shared pointer to immutable data using User = std::shared_ptr<UserData>; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 \/\/ Simple immutable data class UserData { public : const int id ; const string name ; UserData ( int id , string name ) : id ( id ) , name ( name ) { } } ; \/\/ Shared pointer to immutable data using User = std :: shared_ptr < UserData > ;\n\nLet\u2019s emulate database as simple vector of users and create one method to work with it (find user by id):\n\nvector<User> users {make<User>(1, \"John\"), make<User>(2, \"Bob\"), make<User>(3, \"Max\")}; auto findUser = [&users](int id) -> Maybe<User> { for (User user : users) { if (user->id == id) return user; } return nullptr; }; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 vector < User > users { make < User > ( 1 , \"John\" ) , make < User > ( 2 , \"Bob\" ) , make < User > ( 3 , \"Max\" ) } ; auto findUser = [ & users ] ( int id ) -> Maybe < User > { for ( User user : users ) { if ( user -> id == id ) return user ; } return nullptr ; } ;\n\nmake<> here is just shortcut for make_shared<>, nothing special.\n\nMaybe<> monad\n\nYou, probably, noticed that return type of request function contains something called Maybe<T>. This class is inspired by Haskell maybe monad, with one major addition. Instead of just saving Nothing state and Content state, it also might contain Error state.\n\nAt first, here is sample type for error description:\n\n\/\/\/ Error type - int code + description class Error { public: Error(int code, string message) : code(code), message(message) {} Error(const Error& e) : code(e.code), message(e.message) {} const int code; const string message; }; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 \/\/\/ Error type - int code + description class Error { public : Error ( int code , string message ) : code ( code ) , message ( message ) { } Error ( const Error & e ) : code ( e . code ) , message ( e . message ) { } const int code ; const string message ; } ;\n\nHere is minimalistic implementation of Maybe:\n\ntemplate < typename T > class Maybe { private: const T data; const shared_ptr<Error> error; public: Maybe(T data) : data(std::forward<T>(data)), error(nullptr) {} Maybe() : data(nullptr), error(nullptr) {} Maybe(decltype(nullptr) nothing) : data(nullptr), error(nullptr) {} Maybe(Error&& error) : data(nullptr), error(make_shared<Error>(error)) {} bool isEmpty() { return (data == nullptr); }; bool hasError() { return (error != nullptr); }; T operator()(){ return data; }; shared_ptr<Error> getError(){ return error; }; }; template <class T> Maybe<T> just(T t) { return Maybe<T>(t); } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 template < typename T > class Maybe { private : const T data ; const shared_ptr < Error > error ; public : Maybe ( T data ) : data ( std :: forward < T > ( data ) ) , error ( nullptr ) { } Maybe ( ) : data ( nullptr ) , error ( nullptr ) { } Maybe ( decltype ( nullptr ) nothing ) : data ( nullptr ) , error ( nullptr ) { } Maybe ( Error && error ) : data ( nullptr ) , error ( make_shared < Error > ( error ) ) { } bool isEmpty ( ) { return ( data == nullptr ) ; } ; bool hasError ( ) { return ( error != nullptr ) ; } ; T operator ( ) ( ) { return data ; } ; shared_ptr < Error > getError ( ) { return error ; } ; } ; template < class T > Maybe < T > just ( T t ) { return Maybe < T > ( t ) ; }\n\nNote, that you don\u2019t have to use Maybe<> and here it\u2019s used only for example.\n\nHere we also use the fact that nullptr in C++11 has it\u2019s own type. Maybe has defined constructor from that type producing nothing state. So when you return result from findUser function, there is no need for explicit conversion into Maybe<> \u2013 you can just return User or nullptr, and proper constructor will be called.\n\nOperator () returns possible value without any checks, and getError() returns possible error.\n\nFunction just() is used for explicit Maybe<T> construction (this is standard name).\n\nLogging aspect\n\nFirst, let\u2019s rewrite log aspect so it will calculate execution time using std::chrono. Also let\u2019s add new string parameter as name for called function which will be printed to log.\n\ntemplate <typename R, typename ...Args> std::function<R(Args...)> logged(string name, std::function<R(Args...)> f) { return [f,name](Args... args){ LOG << name << \" start\" << NL; auto start = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now(); R result = f(std::forward<Args>(args)...); auto end = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now(); auto total = std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::microseconds>(end - start).count(); LOG << \"Elapsed: \" << total << \"us\" << NL; return result; }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 template < typename R , typename . . . Args > std :: function < R ( Args . . . ) > logged ( string name , std :: function < R ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f , name ] ( Args . . . args ) { LOG << name << \" start\" << NL ; auto start = std :: chrono :: high_resolution_clock :: now ( ) ; R result = f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; auto end = std :: chrono :: high_resolution_clock :: now ( ) ; auto total = std :: chrono :: duration_cast < std :: chrono :: microseconds > ( end - start ) . count ( ) ; LOG << \"Elapsed: \" << total << \"us\" << NL ; return result ; } ; }\n\nNote std::forward here for passing arguments more clean way. We don\u2019t need to specify return type as Maybe<R> because we don\u2019t need to perform any specific action like error checking here.\n\n\u2018Try again\u2019 aspect\n\nWhat if we have failed to get data (for example, in case of disconnect). Let\u2019s create aspect which will in case of error perform same query one more time to be sure.\n\n\/\/ If there was error - try again template <typename R, typename ...Args> std::function<Maybe<R>(Args...)> triesTwice(std::function<Maybe<R>(Args...)> f) { return [f](Args... args){ Maybe<R> result = f(std::forward<Args>(args)...); if (result.hasError()) return f(std::forward<Args>(args)...); return result; }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 \/\/ If there was error - try again template < typename R , typename . . . Args > std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > triesTwice ( std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f ] ( Args . . . args ) { Maybe < R > result = f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; if ( result . hasError ( ) ) return f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; return result ; } ; }\n\nMaybe<> is used here to identify error state. This method can be extended \u2013 we could check error code and decide is there any sense to perform second request (was it network problem or database reported some format error).\n\nCache aspect\n\nNext thing \u2013 let\u2019s add client side cache and check inside it before performing actual server-side request (in functional world this is called memoization). To emulate cache here we can just use std::map:\n\nmap<int,User> userCache; \/\/ Use local cache (memoize) template <typename R, typename C, typename K, typename ...Args> std::function<Maybe<R>(K,Args...)> cached(C & cache, std::function<Maybe<R>(K,Args...)> f) { return [f,&cache](K key, Args... args){ \/\/ get key as first argument if (cache.count(key) > 0) return just(cache[key]); else { Maybe<R> result = f(std::forward<K>(key), std::forward<Args>(args)...); if (!result.hasError()) cache.insert(std::pair<int, R>(key, result())); \/\/add to cache return result; } }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 map < int , User > userCache ; \/\/ Use local cache (memoize) template < typename R , typename C , typename K , typename . . . Args > std :: function < Maybe < R > ( K , Args . . . ) > cached ( C & cache , std :: function < Maybe < R > ( K , Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f , & cache ] ( K key , Args . . . args ) { \/\/ get key as first argument if ( cache . count ( key ) > 0 ) return just ( cache [ key ] ) ; else { Maybe < R > result = f ( std :: forward < K > ( key ) , std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; if ( ! result . hasError ( ) ) cache . insert ( std :: pair < int , R > ( key , result ( ) ) ) ; \/\/add to cache return result ; } } ; }\n\nThis function will insert element into cache if it was not there. Here we used that knowledge that cache is std::map, but it can be changed to any key-value container hidden behind some interface.\n\nSecond important part, we used only first function argument here as key. If you have complex request where all parameters should act as composite key \u2013 what to do? It\u2019s still possible and there are a lot of ways to make it. First way is just to use std::tuple as key (see below). Second way is to create cache class which will allow several key parameters. Third way is to combine arguments into single string cache using variadic templates. Using tuple approach we can rewrite it like this:\n\nmap<tuple<int>,User> userCache; \/\/ Use local cache (memoize) template <typename R, typename C, typename ...Args> std::function<Maybe<R>(Args...)> cached(C & cache, std::function<Maybe<R>(Args...)> f) { return [f,&cache](Args... args){ \/\/ get key as tuple of arguments auto key = make_tuple(args...); if (cache.count(key) > 0) return just(cache[key]); else { Maybe<R> result = f(std::forward<Args>(args)...); if (!result.hasError()) cache.insert(std::pair<decltype(key), R>(key, result())); \/\/add to cache return result; } }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 map < tuple < int > , User > userCache ; \/\/ Use local cache (memoize) template < typename R , typename C , typename . . . Args > std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > cached ( C & cache , std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f , & cache ] ( Args . . . args ) { \/\/ get key as tuple of arguments auto key = make_tuple ( args . . . ) ; if ( cache . count ( key ) > 0 ) return just ( cache [ key ] ) ; else { Maybe < R > result = f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; if ( ! result . hasError ( ) ) cache . insert ( std :: pair < decltype ( key ) , R > ( key , result ( ) ) ) ; \/\/add to cache return result ; } } ; }\n\nNow it\u2019s much more universal.\n\nSecurity aspect\n\nNever forget about security. Let\u2019s emulate user session with some dummy class \u2013\n\nclass Session { public: bool isValid() { return true; } } session; 1 2 3 4 class Session { public : bool isValid ( ) { return true ; } } session ;\n\nSecurity checking high-order function will have additional parameter \u2013 session. Checking will only verify that isValid() field is true:\n\n\/\/ Security checking template <typename R, typename ...Args, typename S> std::function<Maybe<R>(Args...)> secured(S session, std::function<Maybe<R>(Args...)> f) { \/\/ if user is not valid - return nothing return [f, &session](Args... args) -> Maybe<R> { if (session.isValid()) return f(std::forward<Args>(args)...); else return Error(403, \"Forbidden\"); }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 \/\/ Security checking template < typename R , typename . . . Args , typename S > std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > secured ( S session , std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > f ) { \/\/ if user is not valid - return nothing return [ f , & session ] ( Args . . . args ) -> Maybe < R > { if ( session . isValid ( ) ) return f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; else return Error ( 403 , \"Forbidden\" ) ; } ; }\n\n\u2018Not empty\u2019 aspect\n\nLast thing in this example \u2013 let\u2019s treat not found user as error.\n\n\/\/ Treat empty state as error template <typename R, typename ...Args> std::function<Maybe<R>(Args...)> notEmpty(std::function<Maybe<R>(Args...)> f) { return [f](Args... args) -> Maybe<R> { Maybe<R> result = f(std::forward<Args>(args)...); if ((!result.hasError()) && (result.isEmpty())) return Error(404, \"Not Found\"); return result; }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 \/\/ Treat empty state as error template < typename R , typename . . . Args > std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > notEmpty ( std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f ] ( Args . . . args ) -> Maybe < R > { Maybe < R > result = f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; if ( ( ! result . hasError ( ) ) && ( result . isEmpty ( ) ) ) return Error ( 404 , \"Not Found\" ) ; return result ; } ; }\n\nIm not writing here about error handling aspect, but it\u2019s also can be implemented via same approach. Note that using error propagation inside Maybe<> monad you can avoid using exceptions and define your error processing logic different way.\n\nMultithread lock aspect\n\ntemplate <typename R, typename ...Args> std::function<R(Args...)> locked(std::mutex& m, std::function<R(Args...)> f) { return [f,&m](Args... args){ std::unique_lock<std::mutex> lock(m); return f(std::forward<Args>(args)...); }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 template < typename R , typename . . . Args > std :: function < R ( Args . . . ) > locked ( std :: mutex & m , std :: function < R ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f , & m ] ( Args . . . args ) { std :: unique_lock < std :: mutex > lock ( m ) ; return f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; } ; }\n\nNo comments.\n\nFINALLY\n\nFinally, what for was all this madness? FOR THIS LINE:\n\n\/\/ Aspect factorization auto findUserFinal = secured(session, notEmpty( cached(userCache, triesTwice( logged(\"findUser\", to_function(findUser)))))); 1 2 3 \/\/ Aspect factorization auto findUserFinal = secured ( session , notEmpty ( cached ( userCache , triesTwice ( logged ( \"findUser\" , to_function ( findUser ) ) ) ) ) ) ;\n\nChecking (let\u2019s find user with id 2):\n\nauto user = findUserFinal(2); LOG << (user.hasError() ? user.getError()->message : user()->name) << NL; \/\/ output: \/\/ 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] findUser start \/\/ 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] Elapsed: 0us \/\/ 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] Bob 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 auto user = findUserFinal ( 2 ) ; LOG << ( user . hasError ( ) ? user . getError ( ) -> message : user ( ) -> name ) << NL ; \/\/ output: \/\/ 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] findUser start \/\/ 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] Elapsed: 0us \/\/ 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] Bob\n\nOk, let\u2019s perform tests for several users ( here we will request same user twice and one non-existing user ):\n\nauto testUser = [&](int id) { auto user = findUserFinal(id); LOG << (user.hasError() ? \"ERROR: \" + user.getError()->message : \"NAME:\" + user()->name) << NL; }; for_each_argument(testUser, 2, 30, 2, 1); \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.283 [83858:10583917] findUser start \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:Bob \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] findUser start \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us \/\/ error: \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] ERROR: Not Found \/\/ from cache: \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:Bob \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] findUser start \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:John 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 auto testUser = [ & ] ( int id ) { auto user = findUserFinal ( id ) ; LOG << ( user . hasError ( ) ? \"ERROR: \" + user . getError ( ) -> message : \"NAME:\" + user ( ) -> name ) << NL ; } ; for_each_argument ( testUser , 2 , 30 , 2 , 1 ) ; \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.283 [83858:10583917] findUser start \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:Bob \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] findUser start \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us \/\/ error: \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] ERROR: Not Found \/\/ from cache: \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:Bob \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] findUser start \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us \/\/2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:John\n\nAs you can see it\u2019s working as intended. It\u2019s obvious that we got a lot of benefits from such decomposition. Factorisation leads to decoupling of functionality, more modular structure and so on. You gain more focus on actual business logic as result.\n\nWe can change order of aspects as we like. And as we made aspect functions rather universal we can reuse them avoiding a lot of code duplication.\n\nInstead of functions we can use more sophisticated functors (with inheritance), and instead of Maybe<> also could be more complex structure to hold some additional info. So whole scheme is extendable.\n\nNote also, that you can pass lambdas as additional aspect parameters.\n\nWorking sample to play with: github gist or ideone\n\nPs. BONUS:"}
{"text":"The actual Great Canyon features probably the most polarized climate extreme conditions associated with all over the world. The actual Northern edge rests in a hill height associated with 8, 000 ft, the actual Southern Edge from 7, 000 ft, and also the base from the Great Canyon and also the Co Water rests in a low-desert height associated with simply two, 000 in order to two, 500 ft. Due to these types of extreme conditions within height, the actual temps within the Canyon also provide high levels and incredibly reduced levels. Individuals possess each freezing in order to passing away as well as already been warmed in order to passing away, just about all within places which are just a couple of kilometers through one another.\n\nBecause it is breakthrough through Europeans within the middle 1500s (actually through The spanish language explorer Coronado as well as their men), the actual Great Canyon offers stated the actual life associated with countless individuals. Within the guide \u201cOver the actual Advantage: Passing away within the Great Canyon\u201d the actual writers discover all the numerous ways individuals give up on within the Canyon. Heating system in order to passing away, or even more precisely perishing associated with dehydration- as well as warmth stroke-induced heart police arrest, is actually the most typical method individuals end within the Canyon.\n\nThe actual wheels, becoming hill conditions, tend to be awesome within the summer time as well as lower correct chilly within the winter season. In the wheels, typical levels within the summer time remain eighty levels, along with levels within the 50s. Typical levels within the winter season in the wheels remain forty levels, levels close to eighteen levels.\n\nTherefore beginning in the Edge points feel at ease sufficient, however as soon as lower within the Canyon the actual landscape as well as climate alter significantly! Typical levels in the Co Water within the summer time float close to 110 levels, and that is within the tone, along with levels just within the reduced 80s. Within the winter season, the actual Co Water offers levels around sixty levels, along with levels close to forty levels.\n\nLots of people begin OKAY in the wheels, considering the actual Canyon isn\u2019t actually which large of the offer. These people begin without having sufficient drinking water as well as without having sufficient of the mind start heat from the day time. As soon as lower within the Great Canyon, they are devoted to possibly dealing with drinking water or even obtaining back again away. Once the warmth strikes, most of them have not managed to get in order to possibly.\n\nWithin the winter season, walkers tend to be departing the actual Co Water along with levels close to sixty as well as seventy levels \u2014 fairly comfy. However through the period they are in the wheels they may be the sub-zero level blizzard. You will find walkers who\u2019ve really succumbed towards the chilly close to the wheels as well as already been hidden within the snowfall, just found days later on once the snowfall dissolved away. Difficult to assume whenever the first is departing the heat from the canyon base.\n\nAn additional main element in Great Canyon climate may be the monsoon period, that endures through middle 06 in order to middle Sept, and may usher within damaging thunderstorms. Walkers as well as boaters have to be cautious associated with large container canyons whenever there is ANY KIND OF climate in the region. The thunderstorm in the Northern Edge can make the expensive ton within Phantom Creek sixteen kilometers aside, as well as you will find individuals that have passed away presently there along with other locations along with apparently absolutely no pre-warning. In the event that there is any kind of possibility of rainfall inside 50 kilometers in a path, prevent container canyons.\n\nThe actual Great Canyon is a good spot to go to, however be ready as well as understand what you are engaging in. It might simply save your valuable existence!"}
{"text":"Image caption Thomas Hadley said 11 lambs were still missing and 33 have been killed\n\nA young farmer has spoken of his shock after most of his flock of 56 lambs were killed by two dogs.\n\nThomas Hadley was telephoned on Friday to say two dogs were attacking his sheep in Risbury, Leominster.\n\nMr Hadley, 23, said when he arrived the field was \"scattered\" with dead and injured lambs and the dogs were still attacking other sheep.\n\nPolice sent armed officers and seized the dogs. A 64-year-old man has been arrested and bailed.\n\nThe man, from Leominster, has been bailed until October on suspicion of allowing a dog to be out of control and allowing a dog to kill or maim livestock. A police spokesman said the firearms officers were deployed as a \"matter of precaution\".\n\n'Can't trust any dog'\n\nMr Hadley said 33 of the lambs, who were born in April, died from their injuries or shock or had to be destroyed.\n\n\"I haven't slept at all,\" he said. \"We are still missing 11 lambs and these could be fatally injured lying somewhere and we have searched a two-mile radius of this place and haven't found them.\"\n\nMr Hadley, who also works as an sheep shearer and livestock agent, has been breeding sheep for three years and said the incident had cost at least \u00a310,000.\n\n\"I have lost the breed lines and will have to start from scratch,\" he said.\n\n\"People don't realise that their dogs can do this,\" he said. \"You can't trust any dog around livestock.\""}
{"text":"LONDON (Reuters) - Gold rose on Wednesday, recovering from its lowest in nearly two weeks, as prospects for further economic stimulus helped to bolster investor appetite whil the dollar remained flat.\n\nAccommodative monetary policies favour gold as well as equities because low interest rates encourage investors to opt for assets that do not rely on interest yields.\n\nSpot gold was up 0.7 percent at $1,340.90 an ounce by 1417 GMT, having earlier touched $1,327.30, its lowest since July 1. Bullion had fallen by 1.7 percent on Tuesday, its biggest one-day drop since May 24.\n\nU.S. gold rose 0.5 percent to $1,341.50.\n\n\u201cGold prices can continue to benefit from an uncertain economic picture for the UK and Europe after the Brexit vote and also from any quantitative easing, which also means low interest rates,\u201d Natixis analyst Bernard Dahdah said.\n\nGold has gained about $100 an ounce since Britain voted to leave the European Union, with worried investors piling their cash into safe-haven assets.\n\nGlobal shares came within reach of testing their 2016 peak on Wednesday, also bolstered by prospects of economic stimulus. [MKTS\/GLOB]\n\nThe dollar, in which gold is priced, fell 0.2 percent against a basket of six currencies.\n\nAfter five weeks of gains, gold had come under some pressure following strong U.S. non-farm payrolls data on Friday.\n\nDespite better than expected jobs data, the Federal Reserve should be in no rush to raise interest rates, two senior Fed officials said.\n\n\u201cGold thrives in an environment of negative rates, low government bond yields ...obviously the unknown is the probability of a Fed rate increase, which could however no happen this year, helping the metal\u2019s price ascent,\u201d Societe Generale analyst Robin Bhar said.\n\nHoldings of SPDR Gold Trust, the world\u2019s largest gold-backed exchange-traded fund, fell 1.63 percent to 965.22 tonnes on Tuesday, its biggest one-day decline since Dec. 2. [GOL\/]\n\nPalladium touched an eight-month high of $645 an ounce.\n\nPlatinum, which fell for the first time in two weeks in the previous session, rebounded 0.1 percent to $1,087.50.\n\nSilver, meanwhile, gained 0.7 percent to $20.27."}
{"text":"Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.\n\nJune 21, 2017, 2:48 PM GMT \/ Updated June 21, 2017, 3:21 PM GMT By Alex Seitz-Wald\n\nSANDY SPRINGS, Georgia \u2014 Democrats are tired of losing and the accusations are flying.\n\nAfter going all in and coming up short in Georgia's special election Tuesday, Democratic lawmakers and political operatives are venting their frustration at losing every competitive special congressional election so far this year.\n\nMany were upset that Democrat Jon Ossoff blunted what was arguably his greatest asset \u2014 antipathy toward President Donald Trump \u2014 by going relatively easy on the president and avoiding controversy at all cost. Others, however, countered that Ossoff was a fine candidate who was the victim of a party that is too cautious and has lost its ability to connect with voters.\n\nSen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), one of the party\u2019s rising stars, said Democrats have been distracted by the investigation in Trump\u2019s alleged ties to Russia and need to focus more on making a concrete impact on voters' lives.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been hyper-confused for the past five years,\" he said on MSNBC\u2019s \"Morning Joe.\" \"Some of the time we\u2019re talking about economic growth, some of the time we\u2019re talking about economic fairness.\u201d\n\n\"We need to be hyper-focused on this issue of wage growth and job growth \u2014 I think Democrats are scared of this message because it\u2019s what Republicans have been talking about,\" he added.\n\nRep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) said, \"Close is only good in horse shoes. A loss is a loss...We can't just dismiss it. We need to review it together.\"\n\nRELATED: Five Lessons From the Georgia Special Election\n\nDemocrats also have an \"authenticity\" problem, he said, noting, \u201cI think that there are a lot of people who look at the Democratic party and aren\u2019t sure that we aren\u2019t also captive by special interest \u2014 and that\u2019s not true.\"\n\nOn her path to victory, Republican Karen Handel returned to the GOP playbook of tying Democratic candidates in purple-to-red districts to the party's liberal wing, and especially to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Ossoff presented himself as squeaky clean alternative with uncontroversial plans like cutting government spending.\n\nRepublican candidate for Georgia's 6th District Congressional seat Karen Handel celebrates with her husband Steve as she declares victory Tuesday, June 20, 2017, in Atlanta. John Bazemore \/ AP\n\n\u201cOne important lesson is that when they go low, going high doesn't f**king work,\u201d tweeted Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, referring to Michelle Obama's maxim from the 2016 campaign.\n\nRep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), a former Marine with three degrees from Harvard and one of the party's up-and-comers, said the defeat should be a \u201cwake up call for Democrats.\u201d\n\nRep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a progressive who represents Silicon Valley, said Democrats have failed to appreciate how massive changes in the economy are impacting voters.\n\n\u201cWe have to figure out how we are going to speak to people\u2019s economic anxiety,\u201d he told NBC News. \u201cWe\u2019ve failed at doing that.\u201d\n\n\u201cOur politics are still conventional, incremental, are not very different, frankly, from our proposals from 10 years ago,\u201d he added.\n\nAnd when Democrats don\u2019t run on bold economic ideas, Khanna added, \u201cThese elections will end up being about what party people are from or more trivial issues like that.\"\n\nJeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders\u2019 former presidential campaign manager, said that while Ossoff ran a good campaign, Democrats should not have made that race their only cause. Instead, Weaver argued, the party should have offered more help to its candidates in the Montana and Kansas special elections earlier this year.\n\n\u201cIn the Montana race, the one I\u2019m most familiar with, with a fraction of the investment that was made in Georgia 6 we likely could have sworn in a Democratic congressperson,\u201d Weaver told NBC News.\n\n\u201cShould we as Democrats compete in economically conservative districts like Georgia 6? Absolutely. We should compete everywhere. But the more likely road to a Democratic U.S. House majority runs through places like Kansas, Montana and South Carolina,\u201d he added.\n\nDemocratic candidate for 6th congressional district Jon Ossoff, left, waves to the crowd while stepping offstage with his fiancee Alisha Kramer after conceding to Republican Karen Handel at his election night party on June 20, 2017 in Atlanta. David Goldman \/ AP\n\nThe Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee quickly sought to move past the Georgia debacle by distributing a memo to staff and Democratic lawmakers officially declaring \u2014 for the first time \u2014 that Chairman Rep. Ben Ray Luj\u00e1n (D-NM) believes \"the House is in play.\"\n\n\"I don\u2019t make this statement lightly \u2014 I\u2019ve never said it before,\" Luj\u00e1n said. \"This is about much more than one race: the national environment, unprecedented grassroots energy and impressive Democratic candidates stepping up to run deep into the battlefield leave no doubt that Democrats can take back the House next fall.\"\n\nAnd former Obama White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer warned Democrats to avoid yet another round of self-flagellating recriminations.\n\nBut Anna Galland, the executive director of MoveOn.org, said the Georgia race shows \u201cDemocrats will not win back power merely by serving as an alternative to Trump and Republicans.\u201d\n\n\u201cIn the closing weeks of the race, Ossoff and the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] missed an opportunity to make Republicans\u2019 attack on health care the key issue, and instead attempted to portray Ossoff as a centrist, focusing on cutting spending and coming out in opposition to Medicare for All,\u201d she said.\n\nSome of the toughest criticism came from the Sanders wing of the party.\n\nRoseAnn DeMoro\u200f, the president of National Nurses Union, suggested the Democratic party\u2019s current strategy was \"insanity.\"\n\nBut Stacey Abrams, the minority leader of the Georgia House and a 2018 gubernatorial candidate, said Democrats need to take a breath and focus on the long game.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m a red state Democrat in the South,\" she told NBC News. \"We understand that we have to make incremental progress, that we don\u2019t win in one fell swoop.\""}
{"text":"Ben Simmons Expects To Go First Overall, Prepares To Play For Sixers\n\nShare ! tweet\n\nLSU\u2019s Ben Simmons expects nothing less than being picked No. 1 overall in the coming 2016 NBA Draft and according to a report, his camp is already preparing the multi-faceted forward to suit up with the Philadelphia 76ers.\n\nThe story was supported with the fact that Simmons has already signed a shoe deal with Nike, cancelling out the rumor about the Australian forcing his way to Los Angeles in search of better endorsement opportunities.\n\nTom Moore of Burlington County Times wrote:\n\nAgent Rich Paul, who represents LeBron James, John Wall and others, \u201chas been preparing for his client to go to Philadelphia from the moment the Sixers got the\u201d top selection in the May 17 draft lottery, according to the source. Neither Simmons nor Paul has apparently made any public comments about draft preference and the Sixers since the lottery. Simmons has a connection to the area in that his trainer lives in Drexel Hill. He\u2019s also known Sixers coach Brett Brown, who coached Simmons\u2019 dad in Melbourne, Australia, since birth.\n\nAccording to most experts, the draft is a two-horse race between Simmons and Duke\u2019s Brandon Ingram but all indications point to the Sixers selecting the former by a landslide.\n\nIt seems the feeling is now mutual.\n\nMandatory Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports\n\nComments\n\ncomments"}
{"text":"Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect\u2019s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect\u2019s place on Marc Hulet\u2019s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect\u2019s rank on Hulet\u2019s overall top-100 list.\n\n***\n\nOrlando Castro, LHP, Pittsburgh Pirates (Profile)\n\nHigh-A: 22N\/AN\/A55.2 IP, 46 H, 18 R, 41\/7 K\/BB, 2.91 ERA, 2.77 FIP\n\nSummary\n\nWhile he\u2019s not remotely physically imposing, this little lefthander knows what he\u2019s doing.\n\nNotes\n\nLast year, Orlando Castro emerged on the fringes of the prospect scene with a stellar first half with Low-A West Virginia, putting up a 1.93 ERA and 63\/6 K\/BB ratio in 74.2 innings. He was basically a complete nobody before that, so his performance didn\u2019t get him noticed by many other than Pirates diehards and K\/BB leaderboard sorters, and a mediocre second half with High-A Bradenton did nothing to further his ascent up prospect lists.\n\nNow, though, Castro\u2019s doing it again, dominating High-A hitters by filling the zone and missing enough bats to stay interesting, and this second successful run commands a bit more attention. After all, Castro\u2019s just 22 and he throws with his left hand.\n\nCastro\u2019s listed at 5\u201911\u201d and 190 pounds, and size is certainly not a positive for him. As you might expect from a small lefty control artist, he\u2019s not an especially hard thrower, though he works consistently at 88-91 mph, which isn\u2019t particularly poor for a lefthanded starter. Castro throws both a four-seam and a two-seam fastball, the latter of which helps him get groundballs.\n\nThe Pirates tend to heavily emphasize changeup development over that of breaking pitches in the low minors, and so when I saw him in 2013, Castro used his 83-84 mph changeup far more than his big-breaking 73-76 mph curveball, but both pitches should end up average or better. The changeup is so advanced that he\u2019s limited righties to just a .214\/.245\/.328 line this year, while his fellow southpaws have hit .257\/.301\/.314.\n\nIt all comes out of an extremely simple, eminently repeatable motion that allows Castro to hit his spots consistently. He\u2019s not just a guy going out there and aiming for the plate\u2013he moves and mixes his pitches and locations adeptly.\n\nThere\u2019s certainly precedent out there for guys with this sort of approach succeeding in the bigs\u2013take Tommy Milone, Jason Vargas, Dallas Keuchel, Jon Niese, and Travis Wood as a few examples of sub-90 southpaws with good pitchability and offspeed pitches. How he adjusts to Double-A hitters will be a big indicator of whether Castro will ascend to that status or become merely another organizational control pitcher. He\u2019s probably about ready for that test, though, and I have a feeling he\u2019ll do better on it than many think.\n\n***\n\nJames Dykstra, RHP, Chicago White Sox (Profile)\n\nLow-A: 23N\/AN\/A51.2 IP, 59 H, 22 R, 44\/7 K\/BB, 3.83 ERA, 2.64 FIP\n\nSummary\n\nThis sixth-round find has a polished arsenal and good control.\n\nNotes\n\nThe brother of former first-rounder and current Triple-A slugger Allan Dykstra, James Dykstra became the highest-drafted player ever out of Cal State San Marcos last year, with his sixth-round selection trumping Johnny Omahen\u2019s 35th-round slot quite handily. While his brother has walked more than he\u2019s struck out this year, James has posted an eye-catching K\/BB ratio of his own in his first extended minor league action, tacking on a 61% groundball rate as well. Above-average strikeouts, minimal walks, and an extreme groundball rate comprise a great statistical platform to build from, but Dykstra is 23, so he\u2019ll need to move quickly to be taken seriously.\n\nHe has the stuff to make that jump, though, with a polished three-pitch mix that includes an 89-93 mph running fastball, a 72-76 mph big-breaking curveball, and an 80-84 mph sinking changeup. His fastball\/changeup combination is solid, and both are solid-average pitches; the curveball flashes higher than both of them and could be a plus offering, but he\u2019s not consistent with his usage of it. Sometimes he\u2019ll fall in love with the pitch and throw it 50% of the time for an inning, while others he\u2019ll abandon it altogether. Here\u2019s a look at the pitch flummoxing touted Red Sox prospect Manuel Margot:\n\nAnd here\u2019s a look at a strikeout on the changeup:\n\nWith good size and athleticism, an easy delivery, and an interesting set of pitches, Dykstra has the upside of a good innings-eater at the big-league level. He\u2019s not always consistent with his stuff and approach, which is both an obvious negative\u2013consistency is, well, good\u2013and a positive\u2013he\u2019s already pitching extremely well without consistency, so if he can tighten the screws further on his stuff, mechanics, and approach, he\u2019ll adjust to new levels very well. He will need to move quickly due to his age, but this isn\u2019t just a random college finesse pitcher beating up on inexperienced bats\u2013the all-around excellent numbers are backed up by across-the-board solid attributes.\n\n***\n\nAntonio Senzatela, RHP, Colorado Rockies (Profile)\n\nLevel: Low-A Age: 19 Top-15: N\/A Top-100: N\/A\n\nLine: 55.1 IP, 57 H, 28 R, 27\/13 K\/BB, 3.90 ERA, 5.40 FIP\n\nSummary\n\nA teenager with easy velocity, Senzatela doesn\u2019t have exciting numbers, but his upside is high if his offspeed pitches come around.\n\nNotes\n\nAntonio Senzatela has the highest walk rate of the three pitchers discussed in this piece, at (a still very good) 5.5%. He also has easily the lowest strikeout rate, a worrisome 11.5%. His FIP is an ugly 5.40, roughly double Dykstra\u2019s and Castro\u2019s. So why should we care about him? There are several reasons.\n\nFirst, Senzatela turned 19 in January, roughly two months after Dykstra\u2013who, mind you, is in the same league\u2013turned 23. Comparing their performances doesn\u2019t mean a whole lot\u2013one would hope that Dykstra\u2019s the more advanced guy, and he is. Senzatela has at least a couple of years before he needs to really get moving performance-wise; at this stage, the question is stuff.\n\nAnd he has stuff. Or, at least, he has a fastball.\n\nThree things about the above video:\n\n1.) He hit 95 mph.\n\n2.) He hit 95 easy.\n\n3.) He hit 95 easy in the sixth inning.\n\nWhen Senzatela first came out for warmups in the start I saw, I wasn\u2019t expecting much. He looks shorter than his listed 6\u20191\u2033 and heavier than his listed 180, maybe 5\u201911\u201d 205 or so, and he employs a low-effort motion that doesn\u2019t look like it should generate a whole lot of velocity, especially from a pitcher of that size. And yet, there it is. Senzatela works mostly at 90-94 mph and projects for above-average command due to the easy motion, which is a heck of a pair of building blocks for a teenager.\n\nEverything else is a work in progress, which is why Senzatela doesn\u2019t miss many bats. He throws a slider, curve, and changeup, all of which grade out as 30 or 35-grade pitches on the 20-80 scouting scale. The 71-75 mph curve is very soft and doesn\u2019t have the big break required to make a pitch that slow work, the slider lacks bite, and the changeup doesn\u2019t have good movement either, though it does have good velocity separation at 77-82 mph. Every now and then, Senzatela will flash up to fringe-average with his offspeed pitches, lending hope that he\u2019ll take some steps forward in that department as time goes on. The curve, in particular, has some potential if he can tighten it up some, an adjustment that is quite common for pitchers at this developmental stage. All he needs is one of his secondary pitches to come around to profile as a good relief pitcher, and if the whole set can come up to average, he\u2019ll be a good #4 starter. There\u2019s some risk involved here because of the inadequacy of his current offspeed arsenal, but Senzatela\u2019s easy velocity can\u2019t be taught, and he has time to figure everything else out."}
{"text":"Enter Shadar Logoth. There are some really nice descriptions of the architecture of this ruined city.\n\nHow do you picture the characters?\n\nThe boys slip out the back of the warded shelter without permission to explore the empty city. As night approaches, they encounter Mordeth. We get into the motivations of this dangerous character.\n\nMatt picks up the ruby hilted dagger during their flight, but tells no one.\n\nAfter they return Rand has a dream. Is the old man in it Ishmael?\n\nThe approach of Tollocs forces the party to flee.\n\nWoTSpoilers is a twice weekly book-club, you can join the conversation on Discord\n\nRemember, we're two nerds in a basement who would rather be creating content full time, than working our 9-5s. You can help us create the content you love, by donating on Patreon"}
{"text":"A weird \u2018metal butterfly\u2019 which buzzed a father and son as they left a restaurant in Ohio this week is among the clearest UFO pictures ever taken.\n\nBut some UFO fans say it\u2019s a fake - possibly created using CGI software.\n\nLocal men Tom and Christopher claim that the weird, butterfly-like craft buzzed them - then they saw two black, military helicopters following it.\n\nIt was shown off by paranormal-themed YouTube channel Secure Team - whose creator, Tyler Glockner, swears it is real.\n\nGlockner says, \u2018The reason I am calling this an alien craft rather than just a UFO\u2026is in the stunning detail, where we can see the true structural characteristics of this ship.\n\n\u2018And guys you take a look and tell me with a straight face this has anything to do with humans.\n\n\u2018The features on this thing don't make any sense.\u2019\n\nGlockner claims that the duo who filmed the clip were unable to photograph the military helicopters which tailed the craft, as they were \u2018going the other way\u2019.\n\nNigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, is more sceptical, saying, \u2018It looks like it was produced using a model and CGI. It is a very distinctive looking object, it reminds me of the Millennium Falcon spacecraft in the Star Wars films with a bite taken out of it.\n\n\u2018Alarm bells ring when the witnesses are only known as Tom and Christopher, and we might also wonder why other people in the area didn't see it."}
{"text":"Yesterday was brutal for NC State fans. First they learned that Trevor Lacey was going pro, then they find out Kyle Washington is transferring. So for all of you toeing the ledge right now, we have some recruiting news that will hopefully put you in a better mood.\n\nAccording to Adam Zagoria of ZagsBlog, Mark Gottfried is in Greece looking for a commitment from 7 foot center Georgios Papagiannis.\n\nN.C. State coach @Mark_Gottfried left for Greece today where he will see 7-footer Georgios Papagiannis. More here: http:\/\/t.co\/QvTZ5Ywtcr \u2014 Adam Zagoria (@AdamZagoria) April 17, 2015\n\nNow, I\u2019m not going to act like I\u2019ve seen anything more than a few videos, but this kid is legit. In fact, there are a few coaches that think he\u2019s a potential one and done type guy (From the videos I\u2019m not buying that). He\u2019s 7\u20191, has a good frame, is bouncy, coordinated, can handle it a bit and can shoot it. Gott is trying to lock him up and is likey the first coach to go over to visit him.\n\nHe is also looking at St. John\u2019s, Temple, Oregon, Kentucky and UConn. He is expected to make a decision by June but Gottfried is surely hoping to come home with one in a few days."}
{"text":"Dear President Obama:\n\nBefore you decide to attack Syria, yet another Arab or Islamic country that does not threaten U.S. security, there are certain constitutional \u201cniceties\u201d that you should observe. Chronically violating the Constitution overturns the rule of law and can produce costly blowbacks.\n\nOn August 28, you stated that bombing Syria \u201cis not about war, it\u2019s about accountability,\u201d obviously referring to the brutal gassing of neighborhoods outside of Damascus. What about your accountability to receive authorization from Congress which, under Article 1, Section 8, has the sole and exclusive power to declare war? Spare Americans the casuistry of your lawyers who \u201clegalized\u201d your war on Libya, with no declaration, authorization or appropriation of funds from Congress, and pushed the envelope of the \u201cunitary presidency\u201d beyond the unlawful and brazen extremes advocated by George W. Bush and his lawyers.\n\nNearly 200 members of both parties of Congress \u2013 now on its August recess \u2013 demanded there be no attack on Syria without Congressional authorization. These signers have so far included 72 Democrats. Merely secretly consulting with some lawmakers on the Intelligence Committees does not substitute for formal Congressional authorization. The framers of our Constitution \u2013 whatever their other differences \u2013 were unanimous in writing Article 1, Section 8, so that no president could go to war on his own. To do so, as you have already done in the past, would be a major impeachable offense.\n\nThe media have reported that your lawyers are searching for legal justification for Tomahawk Missiling Syria. They need look no more \u2013 the Constitution clearly rests the power to engage in war with Congress and Congress only. You cannot start another war! You cannot continue to be the prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner anywhere, and at any time.\n\nYou may think the foregoing cautious and mere formalities. But the framers held the war-making power in Congress for another reason than just thwarting a latter-day King George III tyranny. They wanted a deliberative open process to avoid reckless presidential decisions that were bad for our country and produced entanglements with warring foreign nations. Remember George Washington\u2019s farewell address on this point \u2013 truer today than in his day.\n\nRemember what the nearly 200 members of Congress said to you \u2013 \u201cengaging our military in Syria with no direct threat to the United States and without prior Congressional authorization would violate the separation of powers that is clearly delineated in the Constitution.\u201d Congressional deliberations would ask the following questions in the open:\n\nAssuming the veracity of the regime as the cause, how could a U.S. attack not make a horrible situation even more horrible, both inside Syria and in the volatile region?\n\nWhy are so many in the U.S. military privately opposed to such an action \u2013 though they defer to civilian authority? Could it be due to the lack of any strategic purpose and the violent plethora of uncontrollable consequences? See the oppositional stands, reported in the August 30th Washington Post, \u201cfrom captains to a four-star general.\u201d\n\nHow are you going to avoid the kind of awful continual civilian casualties that were produced in the first Iraq war in 1991? U.S. bombings broke chemical warfare containers and led to sickness (called the Gulf War Syndrome) for tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers \u2013 many continue to suffer to this day.\n\nHow are you going to deal with the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the Middle East and at least 70 percent of Americans here who are opposed to you bombing Syria? Do you think that lack of domestic public support and even deeper hatred abroad are inconsequential? Your empire mentality seems to say yes.\n\nOne would think that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), of all people, who just sent you a detailed letter of inquiry and caution, citing Congressional authority, should give you pause. Increasingly, you are coming across, even to your hardcore political supporters, as impulsively aggressive, too quick to order killing operations and too slow to contemplate waging of peace.\n\nThe Syrian civil war \u2013 riven by fighting rebel factions, sectarian revenge cycles, outside arms suppliers and provocations, and a spreading al-Qaeda force fighting the dictatorial Assad regime \u2013 can only get worse following a violent attack by your Administration.\n\nListen to Hans Blix, the former United Nations head of the weapons inspection team in Iraq during 2002-2003 that was aborted by George W. Bush\u2019s criminal invasion that led to the continuing loss of over a million Iraqis, many more injuries, five thousand U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of injured Americans.\n\nSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts\n\nMr. Blix, former Swedish minister for foreign affairs, urges an international peace conference under the UN Security Council\u2019s auspices attended by all governments supporting the various sides in Syria\u2019s civil war. Since all fighters in Syria are receiving their weapons from outside nations, these \u201csupplier countries have leverage,\u201d Blix writes, to support the demand \u201cthat their clients accept a ceasefire \u2013 or risk losing further support.\u201d\n\nAchieving this goal will require strong leadership. While it is difficult for you to move from waging war to waging peace, history documents that the latter brings better outcomes and forestalls worse slaughter and blowbacks that security experts fear could reach our country.\n\nWhen your own military believes you are moving into dangerous terrain and possible points of no return, you\u2019d better start to rethink. You\u2019d better reread the warnings in the measured memoranda given to you by Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, and the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey.\n\nMore publically, retired Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold, who directed operations for the Joint Chiefs during the run-up to the Iraq war, told the Washington Post: \u201cThere\u2019s a broad naivet\u00e9 in the political class about America\u2019s obligations in foreign policy issues, and scary simplicity about the effects that employing American military power can achieve.\u201d He said that many of his fellow officers share his views.\n\nGeneral Newbold\u2019s words seem like a rebuke not just to the Bush Neocons (pro-Vietnam war, draft dodgers) who pushed the Iraq invasion, but also to you and your immediate circle of hawkish civilian advisors.\n\nAll weapons of violence \u2013 chemical, biological, nuclear, drones, conventional munitions \u2013 are used to destroy lives and habitats. The fact that using some weapons constitutes international war crimes per se is hardly consoling to the victims of other mass weapons systems.\n\nAggressive arms controls should be the priority of the leading superpower in the world. Why haven\u2019t you made U.S. ratification of the small arms, the landmines, and the cluster munitions treaties, adhered to by most nations, a priority?\n\nBefore you violently embroil our country into yet another Mid-East country\u2019s tragic turmoil, visit the government supported U.S. Institute of Peace for intensive tutorials. Then read again Article 1, Section 8, and its originating history, which says that going to war is not your decision but the exclusive decision of the Congress. That may help you accept the imperative of your moral and legal accountability.\n\nSincerely,\n\nRalph Nader"}
{"text":"Government spending cuts could cause growth only if they increase the other components by more than spending was cut. There's a common argument that this could happen in the long term. Less federal spending allows the government to take in fewer tax dollars. If you believe that the private sector better promotes economic growth than the government, then it makes sense that smaller government paired with lower taxes will lead to higher growth.\n\nBut that's not the situation we're talking about here. We're trying to pay down the enormous government debt, so we can't lower taxes in proportion to the spending cuts. Doing so would leave the debt level unchanged. In order for spending cuts in a vacuum to stimulate the economy, they must have some intangible positive effect on one or more of the other components of GDP. Let's think through this.\n\nConsumption : Less government spending will not provide consumers with more money to spend. So to spend more, they would need to save less or incur more personal debt. These options seem somewhat unlikely, as less government spending probably means the impact of entitlements softens -- so Americans will need to save more, not less.*\n\n: Less government spending will not provide consumers with more money to spend. So to spend more, they would need to save less or incur more personal debt. These options seem somewhat unlikely, as less government spending probably means the impact of entitlements softens -- so Americans will need to save more, not less.* Investment : Less government spending will not provide firms with more money to invest. So they would either need to pay shareholders less or borrow to invest more of their revenue for growth. It's hard to see why cutting government spending would encourage either of these options. At best, you could see the private sector attempt to provide some of the services that government cut, but most of the government's functions tend not to be potential profit centers for firms. More importantly, this would just replace the services the government already provided, so growth would remain flat. Economic activity would remain unchanged: some would just shift from government to firms.\n\n: Less government spending will not provide firms with more money to invest. So they would either need to pay shareholders less or borrow to invest more of their revenue for growth. It's hard to see why cutting government spending would encourage either of these options. At best, you could see the private sector attempt to provide some of the services that government cut, but most of the government's functions tend not to be potential profit centers for firms. More importantly, this would just replace the services the government already provided, so growth would remain flat. Economic activity would remain unchanged: some would just shift from government to firms. Net Exports: Less government spending could actually reduce net exports. If the deficit declines, then the dollar should strengthen. While that might sound great, it means that our goods and services will appear more expensive to those overseas. That will make it more difficult to convince them to buy U.S. exports.\n\nYou can quibble that government spending shouldn't be a part of the definition of GDP. That position isn't crazy, but it also doesn't change anything. As just shown, those other components will not reflect new economic activity boosting growth if government spending is cut.\n\nRemember, cutting spending takes money out of the economy. That money isn't being replaced. Any further growth will have to occur by draining savings or by taking on more credit. Will less government produce stronger economic sentiment to induce such behavior? It could if the government borrowing was having an adverse negative effect on the economy in some way. Currently, that doesn't appear to be the case. U.S. debt is still being issued relatively cheaply."}
{"text":"This story is a further continuation of \u201cPlaying a Story in a Believable World\u201d and \u201cPlaying a Story in a Believable World 2\u201d. I highly recommend reading both of those articles before continuing.\n\nPlay on Assumptions\n\nAdventures can be inspired from anything. In the campaign I mentioned last article, one particularly nasty antagonist that the party set out to destroy was almost completely based on H.P. Lovecraft\u2019s \u201cPickman\u2019s Model\u201d. It\u2019s a story that hardly lends itself to high combat, but with a little modification I was able to pay it homage while making something unique and fun that Lovecraft fans could make a few guesses about along the way. Another adventure, to hunt a sewer dwelling urban legend called Croc-Man, led the party to call up thoughts and stories of Killer Croc from the Batman cartoon\/comics. The story hardly had anything to do with the DC character, but it allowed me to direct the investigation because I knew what assumptions the party had made.\n\nAs my campaign evolved, the story called for higher action and less intrigue. Though I never stated that a genre change was impending, I did allude to it repeatedly. A war was brewing in my plot, a battle to epitomize Good vs. Evil on a mass scale. The players could feel the danger growing larger session by session, NPCs spoke of an end to the battles they faced, and prophecy warned of the final confrontation. To prepare for the massive combat, I watched movies like 300, Gladiator, and other violent action flicks. I noted their soundtracks and during my battles, played those coupled with other powerful songs; music that I knew (knowing my group\u2019s tastes) would pump some adrenaline into the room. I can\u2019t say I recommend Metallica\u2019s Battery covered by acoustic metal group Van Canto for every game, but with my group is was the perfect choice. Battles truly felt like epic moments of intense rage directed at an irredeemable enemy, exactly what I hoped to convey.\n\nAfterword\n\nEvery group is different; I cannot tell you specifically how to lead every player to the assumptions you want from them. However, I do feel that being aware of the mood you are crafting will help you figure out how to guide your particular group. Here are a few starter ideas to help you establish a Continuity of Theme, Tone, and Mood.\n\nChoose and communicate a genre style. Every genre comes with its own set list of assumptions on the types of characters, adventures, and so much more. Use this to quickly explain the feelings your story is trying to create.\n\nWatch movies or read books that capture the chosen genre. Anything that well illustrates the given tone you want to recreate can serve as inspiration.\n\nDon\u2019t be afraid to make references to the genre directly or indirectly in your campaign. I don\u2019t recommend taking your plot straight from Mass Effect for your Sci-Fi RPG, but if your group is familiar with the game and it has elements that blend well, use them.\n\nSpend some time with Thesaurus.com (or a real thesaurus! Advice I could use myself). Look up descriptors for the mood you are establishing and find similar words, then use these in your descriptions for locations, artifacts, or characters.\n\nTry to stay consistent from the outset. This is probably the most difficult tip to master, if such a thing is possible. In the event you are forced to change your mind about your genre due to disinterest or dramatic plot change, be sure to review this list of tips, choose a new genre, and communicate it to the players.\n\nI think it is very important to mention here not place yourself in a box. Your chosen genre should serve only as a baseline, a point from which assumptions can be made. How you twist and direct those assumptions is entirely up to you as the writer and GM. Lastly, crafting a believable world to tell your story in doesn\u2019t end here, these are only steps along the path. Experiment, read on game theory, and decide what works for you. I\u2019m working on more articles regarding NPC Relationships, Time Use, and Equipment that all tie your series of adventures into a story world your players can really get into.\n\n[tag]Game Mastering, Pen and Paper RPG, role playing, Role Playing Games, roleplaying, rpg[\/tag]"}
{"text":"As the Los Angeles Clippers propose guard Jamal Crawford in possible trade scenarios, the NBA's Sixth Man of the Year has a message for the Clippers and potential future teams: Wherever Crawford's playing, he wants a contract extension next summer.\n\n\"Our intention is to get an extension with the Clippers or anywhere else that he may be traded based on the fact that he's undervalued for the production he's providing,\" his agent Andy Miller told Yahoo Sports on Wednesday night.\n\nCrawford has become a subject of sign-and-trade discussions with the Clippers, who have inquired about working deals for several potential free agents, including Cleveland's Luol Deng and Spencer Hawes, sources told Yahoo.\n\nScroll to continue with content Ad\n\nCrawford has two years, $11 million left on his deal, including a team option for the 2015-16 season. Crawford is eligible for an extension in the summer of 2015, and believes he's out-performed his deal. Crawford had a tremendously productive season for the Clippers, averaging 18.6 points in 30 minutes per game on his way to his second Sixth Man of the Year award in four seasons.\n\nCrawford averaged 15.5 points in 24 minutes per game in the 2014 Western Conference playoffs.\n\nIn 14 NBA seasons, Crawford has averaged 15.5 points. He's played with Chicago, New York, Golden State, Atlanta, Portland and the Clippers."}
{"text":"New Datamined Patch - Class Changes, Passive Effects, Rift Keystones, Item Set Names, Bounty Scrolls, New Banners, Warlords of Draenor Buff, Lots of Graphics\n\nWarning - all things below should NOT be considered as a confirmation or anything close to it. This is datamining and not everything is a representation of what would be in the game.\n\nUpdate 4: Added Set Item bonuses. There are quite some changes!\n\nUpdate 3: Added portraits. Faces are as follows: Enchanted Soul Fragment, Lord Wynton, Spirit Barbarian, Spirit Crusader, Spirit Crusader Male, Westmarch Boy, Adria Boss, Cow King, Zayl, Common Angel, BSmith Apprentice, Sophia. Looks like this might be it for the patch!\n\nUpdate 2: Added buff icons from items, Warlords of Draenor \"flag\" buff, new Bounty target Health Bar and Legendary Reagents. Fixed incorrect Pool of Reflection string.\n\nUpdate: Added a lot more pictures. Made Warlords of Draenor Buff more obvious in the notes below.\n\nNew Graphics - Icons, Items, Portraits, UI\n\nSet Item Bonuses\n\nDiabloFans Quote: Krelm's Buff Bulwark (New)\n\n2 pieces: [+500 Vitality] Chantodo's Resolve 2 pieces: [Your shields heal for 25% of their remaining amount when they expire.] (New) Legacy of Nightmares\n\n2 pieces: [This ring sometimes summons a Skeleton when you attack.] (Seems like it was missing from the tooltip the last few builds) Born's Command 2 pieces: [+15% Life] (Down from 20%)\n\n3 pieces: [Increases experience rewarded per kill by 20%] (Moved from 2 pieces)\n\n3 pieces: [Reduces cooldown of all skills by [{VALUE1}*100|1|]%.] (New) Cain's Destiny\n\n3 pieces: [50% Better Chance of Finding Magical Items] (Down from 100%) Captain Crimson's Trimmings\n\n2 pieces: [Reduces cooldown of all skills by [{VALUE1}*100|1|]%.] (New)\n\n2 pieces: [Regenerates 2000 Life per Second] (Up from 1945)\n\n3 pieces: [Reduces all resource costs by 10%.] (New)\n\n3 pieces: [+50 Resistance to all elements] (Down from 100) Aughild's Authority\n\n2 pieces: [Reduces damage from ranged attacks by 0.07%] (Moved from 3 pieces)\n\n3 pieces: [Reduces damage from Elites by 15%] [Increases damage versus Elites by 15%] (New) Asheara's Vestments 3 pieces: [Melee attackers take 3498 Holy Damage per hit] (Removed) Guardian's Jeopardy 2 pieces: [+250 Vitality] (Down from 975\n\n2 pieces: [Regenerates 2000 Life per Second] (Up from 1945)\n\n3 pieces: [+15% Movement Speed] (New) Demon's Hide\n\n2 pieces: [Melee attackers take 6000 Fire Damage per hit] (Up from 3498)\n\n3 pieces: [Chance to Deal 25% Splash Damage on Hit.] (Changed from 5.1% chance to Fear on Hit) Sage's Journey\n\n2 pieces: [+250 Intelligence] [+250 Strength] [+250 Dexterity] [+250 Vitality] (All values down from 975) Hallowed Protectors\n\n2 pieces: [Attack Speed increased by 10%] (Up from 8%) The Shadow's Mantle (Ninja Set) 2 pieces: [Automatically cast Smoke Screen when you fall below 25% Life. This effect may occur once every 30 seconds.] (Moved from 4 pieces. Replaces: Your Spike Traps lure enemies to them)\n\n4 pieces: [Reduce all cooldowns by 1 second every time you kill a demon.] (New) Helltooth Harness (Witch_Doctor_Set_x1) 4 pieces: [ Reduces cooldown of Wall of Zombies by 2 seconds. ] (Previously 500 Intelligence)\n\n6 pieces: [NYI] (Previously 500 Intelligence)\n\nItem Passive Effects\n\nDiabloFans Quote: New ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_739_x1 - Elemental skills have a chance to trigger a powerful attack that deals [{VALUE1}*100]% weapon damage:\n\n*Cold skills trigger Freezing Skull\n\n*Poison skills trigger Poison Nova\n\n*Lightning skills trigger Charged Bolt\n\nItemPassive_Unique_Bow_008_x1 - Ravens flock to your side.\n\nItemPassive_Unique_Ring_586_x1 - Wall of Zombies spews acid, dealing [{VALUE1}*100]% weapon damage every second for its entire duration. (Was NYI till now)\n\nItemPassive_Unique_Ring_587_x1 - All damage taken is split between wearers of this item. (Was NYI till now) Changed ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_533_x1 - Strafe gains the effect of the Drifting Shadow rune. (Previously removed Hatred cost)\n\nItemPassive_Unique_Ring_602_x1 - Your Spike Traps lure enemies to them. Enemies may be taunted once every {VALUE1} seconds. (Added taunt mechanic description)\n\nItemPassive_Unique_Ring_600_x1 - Summons shadow clones to your aid when you Stun an enemy. This effect may occur once every {VALUE1} seconds. (Added occurrence limitation)\n\nItemPassive_Unique_Ring_615_x1 - Healing wells replenish all resources and reduce all cooldowns by {VALUE1} seconds. (Now also reduces cooldowns)\n\nItemPassive_Unique_Ring_621_x1 - Fan of Knives gains the effect of the Fan of Daggers rune. (Changed from having a knock back effect)\n\nItemPassive_Unique_Ring_626_x1 - Grasp of the Dead gains the effect of the Rain of Corpses rune. (Changed from having no cooldown)\n\nItemPassive_Unique_Ring_643_x1 - Blocks have a chance of summoning a charging wolf that deals [{VALUE1}*100]% weapon damage to all enemies it passes through. (Added creature details, changed from hell hound)\n\nItemPassive_Unique_Mighty_1H_011_x1 - Chance on attack to Whirlwind furiously for 325% weapon damage as Physical every second for 6 seconds. (Finally added actual numbers!)\n\nWarlords of Draenor Buff\n\nNOTE that Blizzard uses QUAD DAMAGE as a placeholder for CE stuff.\n\nDiabloFans Quote: WoDFlagBuff_name - Collectors Edition Buff\n\nWoDFlagBuff_desc - QUAD DAMAGE\n\nRift Keystones, Item Set Names, Bounty Scrolls, New Banners\n\nDiabloFans Quote: Bnet_EscapeMenu.txt RaiseDifficulty - Raise Difficulty Errors.txt NephalemRiftWarning_PlayerNeedsKey - Five Rift Keystone Fragments are needed to conjure a Nephalem Rift.\n\nPowerUnusableInDifficulty - You can't do that in this difficulty level.\n\nDifficultyTooLow - You must be in a higher game difficulty for that.\n\nItemCannotBeEnchantedLegacy - The mystic cannot enchant legacy items.\n\nItemCannotBeEnchantedMysticLevelRequired - The mystic needs to be level {s1} to enchant this item type. General.txt LootRunClosesWarning - Nephalem Rift closes in:\n\nQuestUpdateNewBountyChatMessage - {s1}, {s2}\n\nStatAbbr - {s1}k HeroDetails.txt SplashDamage - Area Damage (Renamed from Splash Damage) ItemSets.txt Ninja_Set_x1 - The Shadow\u2019s Mantle\n\nThorns_Set_x1 - Thorns of the Invoker\n\nEarthquake_Set_x1 - Might of the Earth\n\nGolden_Oxen_Set_x1 - The Legacy of Raekor\n\nDot_Set_x1 - Raiment of the Jade Harvester\n\nMonkey_King_Set_x1 - Monkey King's Garb\n\nArcane_Wraps_Set_x1 - Vyr's Amazing Arcana\n\nWitch_Doctor_Set_x1 - Helltooth Harness\n\nWar_Harness_Set_x1 - Krelm\u2019s Buff Bulwark BuffTooltips.txt X1_Passive_BountyScroll_DemonDamage_0 - Bounty Scroll\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_DemonDamage_0_desc - 25% increased damage to Demons.\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_UndeadDamage_0 - Bounty Scroll\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_UndeadDamage_0_desc - 25% increased damage to Undead.\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_BeastDamage_0 - Bounty Scroll\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_BeastDamage_0_desc - 25% increased damage to Beasts.\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_TeddyBear_0 - Cuddle Bear!\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_TeddyBear_0_desc - You feel more cuddly.\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_RunSpeed_0 - Bounty Scroll\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_RunSpeed_0_desc - 30% increased movement speed. Powers.txt X1_Passive_BountyScroll_DemonDamage_name - Bounty Scroll\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_UndeadDamage_name - Bounty Scroll\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_BeastDamage_name - Bounty Scroll\n\nX1_Passive_BountyScroll_RunSpeed_name - Bounty Scroll Tutorials.txt X1_PoolsOfreflection_2 - You now have a pool of bonus experience which will persist between games. Dying will remove this bonus.\n\nX1_PoolsOfreflection_2_title - Pools of Reflection Bonus\n\nX1_RiftKeystone_title - Rift Keystone Fragments\n\nX1_RiftKeystoneInventory - Use 5 Rift Keystone Fragments to open a Nephalem Rift at the Nephalem Obelisk in town.\n\nX1_RiftKeystoneInventory_title - Rift Keystone Fragments\n\nX1_RiftKeystoneComplete - You now have 5 Rift Keystone Fragments. You can go back to the Nephalem Obelisk in town and open a Nephalem Rift.\n\nX1_RiftKeystoneComplete_title - Rift Keystone Fragments X1_LoadscreenTips.txt TIP056 - Primary or secondary properties proceeded by an orange bullet icon {icon:bullet2} are not factored into item comparisons.\n\nTIP057 - Shift-click on player names to link them.\n\nTIP058 - Holding down the SHIFT key while assigning paragon points will speed up the process by assigning them ten at a time. BannerAccents.txt banner_basic_sigilAccent_BatWings_01 - Wings\n\nbanner_basic_sigilAccent_Goblet_01 - Goblet\n\nbanner_basic_sigilAccent_MoonStar_01 - Moon & Sun\n\nbanner_basic_sigilAccent_Orb_01 - Orb\n\nbanner_basic_sigilAccent_Rose_01 - Roses\n\nbanner_basic_sigilAccent_Serpent_01 - Serpent\n\nbanner_basic_sigilAccent_Snakes_01 - Snakes\n\nbanner_basic_sigilAccent_Leaves_02 - Vines\n\nbanner_basic_sigilAccent_Rays_01 - Rays\n\nbanner_basic_sigilAccent_Sun_01 - Evenstar BannerPatterns.txt banner_basic_pattern_wave_04 - Wind\n\nbanner_basic_pattern_cross_05 - Cruces\n\nbanner_basic_pattern_cross_06 - Crucifix\n\nbanner_basic_pattern_drip_03 - Scalloped\n\nbanner_basic_pattern_fire_02 - Flares\n\nbanner_basic_pattern_fire_03 - Fire\n\nbanner_basic_pattern_starburst_01 - Infinity\n\nbanner_basic_pattern_starburst_02 - Starburst\n\nbanner_basic_pattern_starburst_03 - Sunburst BannerShapes.txt banner_basic_shape_chevron004 - Highborn\n\nbanner_basic_shape_chevron005 - Royal\n\nbanner_basic_shape_chevron006 - Imperial\n\nbanner_basic_shape_goth004 - Exultant\n\nbanner_basic_shape_point006 - Hallowed\n\nbanner_basic_shape_point007 - Glorious\n\nbanner_basic_shape_point008 - Westmarch\n\nbanner_basic_shape_rectangle002 - Reserved\n\nbanner_basic_shape_rectangle003 - August BannerSigils.txt banner_basic_sigilMain_Axe_01 - Axe\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Bird_01 - Ascendance\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Crus_01 - Crusader\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Hood_01 - Malthael's Hood\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Orb_01 - Crucible\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Rose_01 - Thorny Rose\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Scythe_02 - Scythes\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Shield_03 - Crusader Shield\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Sickle_01 - Sickles\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Soulstone_01 - Black Soulstone\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Malskull_01 - Reaper\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Axe_01_alt_01 - Axe\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Bird_01_alt_01 - Ascendance\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Crus_01_alt_01 - Crusader\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Flail_01 - Flails\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Flail_01_alt_01 - Flails\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Hood_01_alt_01 - Malthael's Hood\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Malskull_01_Alt_01 - Reaper\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Orb_01_alt_01 - Crucible\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Rose_01_alt_01 - Thorny Rose\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Scythe_02_alt_01 - Scythes\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Shield_03_alt_01 - Crusader Shield\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Sickle_01_alt_01 - Sickles\n\nbanner_basic_sigilMain_Soulstone_01_alt_01 - Black Soulstone\n\nClass Changes"}
{"text":"A white supremacist group will rally on the steps of the Pennsylvania State Capitol on Nov. 5, within days of the presidential election.\n\nThe National Socialist Movement's announcement of a rally in the \"heart of Democracy\" spurred local social service groups to organize their own event across town in the hope of averting a potentially violent protest.\n\n\"One of our goals is to show that equality and nonviolence will be spoken louder than hate that day in Harrisburg,\" said Ann Van Dyke, who's helping to organize a unity event as white supremacists converge on the Capitol. \"The other is to encourage young people to stay away from the rally -- to give them something better to do that day.\"\n\nAccording to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NSM is \"one of the largest and most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the United States.\" The center reported that the number of hate groups nationwide has increased 14 percent since 2014.\n\n\"They have 46 chapters in 40 different states,\" said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the SPLC. \"That makes them far larger than other groups in terms of chapters.\"\n\nPotok said their protests typically center around 10 or 20 members of the group but can draw dozens of police officers and as many as 500 demonstrators.\n\n\"There's always the threat of violence because anti-racists are so provoked and infuriated by the Nazis,\" he said. \"The police have a tough jog in these situations. They have to keep the neo-Nazis and their opponents apart.\"\n\nTroy Thompson, a spokesman for the state Department of General Services, confirmed that the NSM obtained a permit for its rally at the Capitol.\n\n\"Everyone has the right to free speech and freedom of expression,\" Thompson said. \"While we may not agree with the content of the message, as long as it's delivered in a peaceful manner, every individual has the right to express themselves.\"\n\nMessages left with the NSM rally's organizers were not returned Wednesday, but in a press release the group said it chose Harrisburg because of its status as \"one of the birthplaces of American democracy.\"\n\nOn its website, the NSM emphasized the timing of the rally within days of the presidential election although it does not explicitly endorse either candidate.\n\n\"We chose Harrisburg because of its living history,\" said Jeff Schoep, an NSM leader, in a written statement, \"a history so poignant in its remembrance during these turbulent social and political times.\"\n\nhttp:\/\/www.pennlive.com\/news\/2016\/02\/the_hateful_state_pennsylvania.html\n\nVan Dyke said the counter-demonstration, which will likely be held at a school far from the Capitol, will be apolitical.\n\nAmanda Arbour, racial justice coordinator for YWCA Greater Harrisburg, said the best response to a hate group is to shift focus away from their activities.\n\n\"Whenever there's a hate group having a rally, it's not as productive to have a counter-protest at the rally,\" she said. \"It draws more attention to their efforts.\"\n\nVan Dyke said the counter-event will include music, poetry and other activities designed to attract young people. Its organizers, she said, include Christian Churches United, the Community Responders Network, the Mayor's Interfaith Advisory Council, and the World Affairs Council.\n\nVan Dyke said it's important to keep protesters -- and particularly young people -- away from the white supremacist rally in order to protect them.\n\n\"Hate groups say such venomous things in their public rallies that sometimes protestors, particularly young people, lose control and end up breaking the law,\" she said. \"They're usually the ones that end up getting arrested.\"\n\nHate groups want protesters -- and the media coverage that follows -- at their events, she said, because it helps spread their message. Furthermore, any failure by local authorities to control the crowd could result in more favorable coverage or lawsuits against the city or state.\n\n\"Another goal, which is really important to keep in mind, is that they seek to inflame existing tensions in that town between the community and police,\" she said. \"For so, so many reasons, we need to have an alternative unity event.\"\n\nThe organizers are still finalizing the location of the alternate event, which will run concurrently with the rally at 2 p.m. on Nov. 5. Those interested in assisting the counter-event can call the YWCA at 717-234-7931.\n\nhttp:\/\/www.pennlive.com\/politics\/index.ssf\/2016\/06\/donald_trump_10_political_fire.html"}
{"text":"NewsFaith\n\nSANTA PAULA, California, December 1, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) \u2014 There will be a mass rosary service throughout the United States on December 12, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, inspired \u201c100 percent\u201d by the Rosary on the Borders in Poland.\n\nThe \u201cRosary on the Coasts and Borders\u201d is the initiative of a group of Church Militant fans who proposed \u2014 and then began planning \u2014 the event in its website comments box.\n\n\u201cI am in constant admiration of Poland,\u201d Patricia Lemmon, who is one of the organizers, told LifeSiteNews. \u201cOver and over again, (the Poles) show their allegiance to reality. Their pro-life laws and initiatives encouraging families to have children, supporting families when a Down syndrome child is expected, welcoming Christian refugees but barring (jihadist) incomers, these are a beacon of intelligence coupled with goodness in the midst of so much truly dark news out of dying secular western Europe.\u201d\n\nLemmon also praised the rosary events in Italy and Ireland.\n\nThe intention of the prayers will be \u201cto ask Our Lady to save the USA from Islamic jihad, from the denial of the Christian faith, and for an end of abortion.\u201d\n\nThe USA Rosary on the Coasts and Borders will not literally surround the nation\u2019s massive territory. Instead, Lemmon said, it will put up \u201ca prayer shield by representation.\u201d\n\n\u201cHere in the States we do things state by state, and we believe in representation,\u201d she told LifeSiteNews. \u201cSo (we need as representatives) one person or group from each of the 50 States, plus D.C., plus Puerto Rico, plus Guam or other territory. By December 12, that will be all 53 of us, representing the whole USA to Our Lady of Guadalupe.\u201d\n\nIn this way, the organizers hope to match a state or protectorate to each of the Hail Marys in a five-decade rosary.\n\nThe Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe was chosen for a few reasons. First, the only Marian apparition in the New World pronounced authentic by the Catholic Church was witnessed in Villa de Guadalupe in 1531. Next, Pius XII named Our Lady of Guadalupe the Patroness of the Americas in 1946. Finally, an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was taken by Don Juan of Austria\u2019s Christian army into the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. The Battle of Lepanto represented a major defeat to the Ottoman Empire.\n\n\u201cThe New World\u2019s Lady sailed to confront jihad in the Old World,\u201d Lemmon said. \u201cIs this not mind-blowing? That battle, against all odds, saved Europe from imminent invasion. \u2026 As Don Juan fought under that banner, the pope prayed the rosary.\u201d\n\nThe anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto on October 7 is also the Feast of the Holy Rosary and the date chosen by the organizers of the Polish Rosary to the Borders.\n\n\u201cSo the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, victor of Lepanto, seems the ordained date for America to link with Poland \u2026 \u201d said Lemmon. \u201cThus we will jointly block jihad and embrace faith and life.\u201d\n\nThe Rosary On the Coasts and Borders currently has representatives in 30 states and Puerto Rico. The organizers are still looking for representatives in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Guam, or some other protectorate.\n\nCanadians, too, are invited to join in. Lemmon addressed them through LifeSiteNews, saying, \u201cTurn to your south on December 12 and join us in throwing up to heaven a bubble of protection across these vast lands. \u2026 And when you do your own Canadian rosary, we will turn to our north \u2026 and join you in storming heaven for Canada!\u201d\n\nLemmon described the lay-led event as \u201ca Wild West Rosary.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe didn't wait for the U.S. bishops to do anything,\u201d she told LifeSiteNews. \u201cAs a group, they don't seem cut from the same cloth as the great Polish bishops who are so busy (being bishops), protecting and leading their flock among real dangers (although the U.S. does have a few sterling bishops). We here in the States can springboard off of the American do-it-yourself spirit.\u201d\n\nThose interested in joining can register on the Disqus link here."}
{"text":"Preface\n\nTerminology for 18650 batteries can be very confusing. In this blog post I will clear five common myths.\n\nMyth #1 - You have individual 18650 batteries\n\nMyth #2 - What is better, Li-Po or Li-ion?\n\nMyth #3 - When you charge a cell, its capacity increases\n\nMyth #4 - 18650 batteries can be either Primary or Secondary cells\n\nMyth #5 - Impedance and Resistance are interchangeable terms\n\nI decided to go into some detail for each point so that readers may fully appreciate what lies behind each myth. With detail also lies some complexity. Admittedly I'm worried. I want this post to clear up 18650 battery myths, not confuse even more.\n\nFor that reason I added as many metaphors for phenomenon as possible. When you come across these, really take a moment to think about what is going on. I find these metaphors are really the best way to quickly grasp complicated concepts.\n\nAnd lastly, if you come across any mistakes, have any questions, or disagree with something I've written, please let me know in the comments!\n\nMyth #1 - You have individual 18650 batteries\n\nAnswer: Technically, you have individual 18650 cells, not batteries\n\nThe terminology problem here arises because of the difference between consumers and engineers.\n\n1 - Cell\n\nTechnically speaking, an individual 18650 battery is actually a cell. A cell is the smallest packaged form a battery can take (and for 18650 batteries a cell is normally 4.2V).\n\n2 - Module\n\nThe next step up in the hierarchy is a module, which can consist of several 18650 cells connected in either parallel or series. Modules can range in size from several cells to several hundred cells depending on energy requirements.\n\nA BMW i3 lithium-ion battery pack, with viewable individual battery modules\n\n3 - Battery (or Battery Pack)\n\nA battery is a group of cells or modules connected together in either parallel or series, commonly referred to as a battery pack. Both engineers and consumers refer to the final package as a battery pack. However, only engineers typically refer to the pack with the single world \u201cbattery\u201d in the context of lithium-ion 18650 batteries. 18650 battery packs almost always contain a BMS (battery management system), which is circuitry that regulates the cells and modules.\n\nIf needed to distinguish between a pack and a battery, the \u201cpack\u201d is often smaller, while the \u201cbattery\u201d is larger\n\nDo I really have to start calling them cells and not batteries?\n\nWell it depends who you are and what you\u2019re doing.\n\nCalling an individual 18650 cell a battery, is completely acceptable for most people. We do it frequently on Battery Bro. This is because for most consumers, an 18650 is a battery just like an AA is a battery. It a little cylinder thing that gives us power - it\u2019s easy to communicate.\n\nBut nomenclature for engineers is different. Concerns for efficiency dictate an adherence to standards and depending on their work philosophy, some engineers can take this quite personally. I have come across such, and do not disagree with them.\n\nThat is because typically a battery is a self-contained system capable of powering a device safely. The key point is battery safety. An 18650 cell on the other hand, needs additional regulation circuitry to operate safely because lithium is so chemically reactive.\n\nThe addition of a BMS is also critical to maintaining a li-ions expected long cycle life. Individual cells do not have a BMS, that is the job of the pack.\n\nRemember the three tier system used in building battery packs - cells, modules, and battery. Each category has a different set of rules so they can\u2019t share their names. So in some cases the distinction between cell and battery is necessary.\n\nTo recap, an individual 18650 is a cell, and a group of 18650s is a battery.\n\nConsumers say: 18650 Battery\n\nEngineers say: 18650 Cell\n\nConsumers say: 18650 Battery Pack\n\nEngineers say: 18650 Battery (or 18650 Battery Pack)\n\nMyth #2 - What is better, Li-Po or Li-ion?\n\nAnswer: You can not actually compare the two.\n\nThere are two uses for the word LiPo (lithium polymer).\n\n(Uncommon) The original meaning, referring to a \u201cpolymer electrolyte\u201d (Common) The new meaning, a cell with a \u201cpouch format\u201d In this new meaning, cells do not have a different electrochemistry than li-ion (lithium ion)\n\nUsage #1 - (Uncommon) Polymer Electrolyte\n\nMany years ago, there was development of a chemistry dubbed LiPo. It never really was applied, and is not often menioned. In this type of cell actual polymer electrolytes are used - but it has not reached commercialization and is very much a prototype research cell.\n\nUsage #2 - (Common) Polymer Casing or Pouch Format\n\nToday, the word LiPo means Lithium Polymer. Polymer being a malleable, soft material that creates the external shell of the battery.\n\nThis is a bulging (decomposing) lipo cell (usually from age). Note an 18650 could never bulge like this.\n\nLithium Polymer (LiPo, LiPoly, etc.) is used for mobile phone and tablet batteries; think of their varying shapes and easy-to-puncture material. Contrast that with the steel-shelled 18650 cylindrical battery - which is standardized, hard, and cylindrical. 18650 (18mm by 65mm) batteries never share the characteristic of using a soft, malleable polymer pouch casing.\n\nIf we take a step back we can then see, that both the hard-shelled, and soft-shelled batteries use the same fundamental electrochemistry. They are both lithium-ion (li-ion, liion, etc.) batteries.\n\nThat is, they both give us usable energy by shunting lithium ions between the cathode and anode sheets. The ions move in one direction during charge, and in the other direction during discharge. This fundamental movement is present in both the hard 18650 and the soft LiPo type batteries. Both are lithium ion batteries.\n\nAwesome, aren't all these different polymer architectures nice?\n\nConfusion - All cells contain a little polymer, but it\u2019s not reactive\n\nSo what is polymer exactly? In ancient Greek, polus had the meaning \u201cmany, much\u201d and meros \u201cparts\u201d. A polymer is a large molecule composed of many repeating subunits. This broad definition means there are many types of polymers - notably synthetic plastics, and other natural biopolymers like DNA.\n\nThat means even an 18650 cell without a polymer separator, or any electrolyte may still contain \u201cpolymer\u201d. In fact lithium ion cells do have internal polymer but it accounts for less than 5% of the total weight and does not provide any electrochemical reactions.\n\nThis polymer is often a binding agent. It may be poly(vinylidene fluoride) or PVdF - which helps the mix of chemicals stick to the copper and aluminium foils inside the battery.\n\nThis binding agent shouldn\u2019t be confused with the true meaning of lipo. Lip means \u201cpouch format\u201d.\n\nMyth #3 - When you charge a cell, its capacity increases\n\nAnswer: When you charge a cell, its charge increases and not its capacity.\n\nThe distinction between charge and capacity is not intuitively clear so this myth arises.\n\nThe fuel gauge is a great way to think about battery charge\n\nThe \u201cFuel Gage\u201d\n\nThe easiest way to explain the charge is with an analogy to a fuel or gas gauge of a car. With this gauge you can easily compare the energy left in your car with the energy you had when it was full. The fuel gauge quickly lets you see how much energy you have left, until you need to recharge.\n\nFor batteries, this condition is called the State of Charge (SOC)(%), also known as the \u201cFuel Gauge\u201d function.\n\nNow think about holding your battery and asking \u201cHow charged is it?\u201d It\u2019s the same type of answer you expect if you ask \u201cHow much fuel is in my car?\u201d That means when you are talking about charge of a battery, what you really want to know is its SOC (state of charge) - not its capacity.\n\nTo recap: When you want to see something like a fuel-gauge for your battery, you are asking about its charge, and not its capacity.\n\nIn contrast with the fuel gauge, buckets are a great way to think about battery capacity\n\nCapacity\n\nThe best way to understand capacity is to think of it as a bucket. A bucket in the middle of a sandstorm. Every day you can see how much water is in the bucket, and how much can be refilled. However, every time you open the lid, sand gets in and builds up at the bottom of the bucket. Gradually your capacity decreases as sand increases.\n\nThe bucket is capacity, and the water is energy. The sand is battery degradation (due to cell oxidation) which is a naturally occurring and irreversible process.\n\nJump to France in the 1780\u2019s - a man named Charles-Augustin de Coulomb invented the SI unit of electric charge - which is now named after him. The coulomb unit is equal to the amount of electricity produced or consumed in exactly one second by one amp.\n\nWhen we are talking about battery capacity, we are talking about its coulometric capacity which is derived from discharging the battery.\n\nCoulometric capacity is calculated with the following formula:\n\n(Discharge Current in Amps) x (Discharge Time*)\n\n*Discharge time is the range between its fully charged SOC to the cut-off voltage.\n\nFor example:\n\n(2 A) x (2 Hours) = 4Ah or 4000mAh\n\n(20 A) x (6 Minutes) = 2Ah or 2000mAh\n\nThe resulting coulometric capacity is expressed in amp hours, or often translated to milliamp hours.\n\nThat is the equivalent of \u201cI know how much space is in my bucket, if I drink it with a 2mm straw and it takes me 2 hours, I can say I have 4 millimeter hours left in my bucket.\u201d\n\nIf you take this measurement when your bucket is brand new (no sand, no degradation) it is called rated capacity. If you take the measurement after some use, it is called current or actual capacity.\n\nEnvironmental conditions like temperature and variations in amperage during charge and discharge can significantly alter the useable capacity of a cell. Think of the bucket analogy - if the water is too hot you can\u2019t sip it at full speed. Likewise with brainfreeze on the other end of the spectrum. You can\u2019t measure the bucket well unless the water is at or near its optimal temperature.\n\nFurthermore,\n\nSOC depends on capacity\n\nThe SOC reference can be either the current capacity or the rated capacity. Remember current capacity is what the cell or battery can hold, while the rated capacity is what it can hold when it\u2019s brand new, in optimal conditions.\n\nUsing the rated capacity can be very misleading because of cell degradation over time.\n\nWithout accounting for the loss of performance from degradation, the fuel meter would always read 100% when charged, even if it could only hold half as much fuel as it could in the beginning of its life. Imagine if your fuel tank slowly shrunk over time, and car manufacturers did not tell you.\n\nDuring high amp continuous discharge or high amp pulses, the cell is used too fast and inefficiencies occur hence the loss of capacity. This is because chemical reactions take a finite time, and more energy can be put in than can be reacted to. The best analogy I have heard to explain this is with the pouring of beer. You have to pour it in slowly to fill it. Pouring it too fast leads to froth and annoyingly little beer.\n\nDischarging at high rates removes more power in an exponential way, and reversely, discharging at low rates increases the run-time significantly. This is dealt with by using Peukert\u2019s equation (I n T = C).\n\nOverview\n\nCharge is like a fuel gauge - it\u2019s easy to see how much you have left. Capacity is the total amount of fuel you can carry. You can measure the capacity for any given SOC (state of charge) but it is only an estimation.\n\nMyth #4 - 18650 batteries can be either Primary or Secondary cells\n\nAnswer: All 18650 batteries are secondary cells.\n\nA primary cell is one that is not rechargeable (or can not be easily recharged) after it is discharged. Primary cells are like disposable plates - used once and then discarded.\n\nA secondary cell is one that is rechargeable.\n\nNote: a rechargeable alkaline battery like a rechargeable AA is considered a rechargeable primary cell rather than a secondary cell, adding to confusion\n\nSecondary cells have become more and more popular and have replaced primary cells in many applications. However, in some use-cases like smoke detectors it still makes sense to use primary cells because their self-discharge rate is much lower.\n\nLithium-ion batteries are secondary cells, but they are used as primary cells were used in the past - for example when they direct power in laptops, mobile phones, and electric bikes. Even though li-ion is often used as primary cells have been in the past - liion is still considered a secondary cell.\n\nMyth #5 - Impedance and Resistance are interchangeable terms\n\nAnswer: There is little relationship between the two, and while they both function with the same purpose - the output (in Ohms) is always different.\n\nTo understand the difference between DC resistance and AC impedance you should understand that electrical loads have both resistive, and reactive phenomenon.\n\nSo keep these two things in mind:\n\nResistive phenomenon Reactive phenomenon\n\nKnow these interchangeable terms:\n\nDC Approach \/ load = Internal Resistance\n\nAC Approach \/ signal = Internal Impedance\n\nOhmic resistance (Ro)\n\nMeasuring internal resistance disregards the reactive elements.\n\nThis is the inside view of an internal heating element\n\nLooking at the internal resistance of a cell or battery from a purely resistive value (ohms) disregards reactive elements. The best analogy I have heard for this is that of a heating element that produces heat by the friction (resistance) of current passing through. The more internal resistance, the more heat is generated. In this scenario there are no reactive components, only one resistive one determining the output.\n\nWhen your voltage drops from use, this is because the battery current is flowing through its internal resistance.\n\nThe older DC approach\n\nThe DC approach is dubbed: Internal Resistance\n\nThe first and most common approach is to load-stress the battery. You apply a certain number of amps for a certain given time (eg. 20 amps for 5 seconds) and measure the resulting drop in voltage.\n\nThis is like adding friction to the heating element from the previous analogy, and measuring its resulting increase in heat.\n\nHow difficult would it be to hear someone from across this room?\n\nA note should be made regarding signal-to-noise ratio. Early DC tests required high-amperage for this reason. Imagine being at a cocktail party and trying to listen to a conversation across the room. It is only possible to do if the person is screaming.\n\nThe AC approach\n\nThe AC approach is dubbed: Internal Impedance\n\nA newer, improved approach to measuring resistance came after the DC approach. Using AC power, battery scientists were able to send an AC signal through the battery at a very specific frequency. The frequency here is the key point.\n\nIf we go back to the cocktail party. Now imagine we are a dog, and the person across the room has a dog-whistle. This is what using a specific AC frequency can do - it can allow us to very accurately discern the signal from the noise with a unique signature.\n\nThe problem is that this AC ripple will interact with other elements of the battery (inductive reactance from coil, and capacitance reactive from capacitor) which will degrade the signal quality. This is akin to the dog whistle bouncing off the walls and people.\n\nImpedance is used by manufacturers who frequently test 18650 cells at an AC of 1 kHz.\n\nThe newer DC approach\n\nThere are newer approaches where high amperage is no longer required, and tiny amounts of pulsed current can be applied to accurately discern the signal. This is akin to now being able to clearly hear a butterfly flap its wings across the room at the cocktail party.\n\nThe capacity and SOC (state of charge) of lithium-ion is not correlated with its internal resistance (measured by the DC approach)\n\nReactions\n\nAs we can see, the DC approach to measure internal resistance does not measure anything reactive. It is like a heater, you have more friction and you have more heat - there is nothing else. On the other hand,- the AC ripple reacts with coils and capacitors. One utilizes a DC load, the other an AC signal.\n\nWhen measuring an 18650 battery or cell, it\u2019s important to note which approach you are using because the resulting ohm values will be different.\n\nA new, fully charged 18650 cell tested with the AC approach (1kHz) may yield between 30 and 60 milliOhms.\n\nWhile with the equivalent DC approach it may yield 100 to 130 milliOhms.\n\nComparing resistance to impedance is not comparing apples to oranges - they are different non-interchangeable terms.\n\nFinish\n\nAnd that is the end of these five battery myths. Here is a recap of the myths and their answers:\n\nMyth #1 - You have individual 18650 batteries\n\nAnswer: Technically, you have individual 18650 cells, not batteries\n\nMyth #2 - What is better, Li-Po or Li-ion?\n\nAnswer: You can not compare the two.\n\nMyth #3 - When you charge a cell, its capacity increases\n\nAnswer: When you charge a cell, its charge increases and not its capacity.\n\nMyth #4 - 18650 batteries can be either Primary or Secondary cells\n\nAnswer: All 18650 batteries are secondary cells.\n\nMyth #5 - Impedance and Resistance are interchangeable terms\n\nAnswer: There is little relationship between the two, and while they both function with the same purpose - the output (in Ohms) is always different."}
{"text":"Jamie Vardy scored his first hat-trick since his three goals for Fleetwood against Ebbsfleet on 21 February 2012\n\nJamie Vardy scored a hat-trick as Leicester City pulled off a stunning victory over an out-of-sorts Manchester City.\n\nThe Foxes were 2-0 up in five minutes as Vardy ended his 10-game run without a Premier League goal by slotting home, and Andy King curled in moments later.\n\nIt was 3-0 within 20 minutes as Vardy added another after skipping past visiting keeper Claudio Bravo, and he completed his hat-trick by intercepting a misplaced John Stones pass and finishing from a narrow angle.\n\nAleksandar Kolarov, with a free-kick, and Nolito scored late consolation goals for the away side.\n\nThey have now lost back-to-back league games for the first time since Pep Guardiola took over in the summer, and are four points adrift of leaders Arsenal.\n\nFor defending champions Leicester, victory ended a five-game run without a league win and moved them up to 14th.\n\nMan City pay for chaotic defending\n\nGuardiola said this week he wanted a new rule to allow teams to use up to six substitutes - and after five minutes he may have hoped his wish was a reality.\n\nManchester City have kept just two Premier League clean sheets this season, and Guardiola reshuffled his formation to start with a back three of Pablo Zabaleta, John Stones and Bacary Sagna.\n\nThat strategy was swiftly scrapped, though, when his side fell 2-0 down after just 255 seconds - Kolarov was hauled out of midfield and into a hastily created back four.\n\nOnly Islam Slimani (19) averaged most of his playing time in the opposition half for Leicester - eight Manchester City outfield players spent most of the game in Leicester territory\n\nThe visitors, looking marginally better for the change, still managed to get caught on the break for Leicester's third and frequently put themselves under pressure by trying to play out from the back - Stones' misplaced backpass for Vardy's third the costliest example.\n\nTheir fragility could well be a result of their lack of a consistent starting XI, with Guardiola never having kept the same line-up for two consecutive games during his time at Etihad Stadium.\n\nSuspensions for Sergio Aguero, Fernandinho and Nicolas Otamendi had forced the Spaniard to make changes here, and his side were devoid of cohesion.\n\nFor all their possession, they did not have their first shot on target until Kolarov scored a well-placed free-kick in the 82nd minute, and only salvaged further respectability when Nolito tapped in the Serb's low cross late on.\n\nFoxes show championship charm again\n\nLeicester, who were a point above the relegation zone when they kicked off, were superb and, for perhaps the first time this season, showed all the hallmarks of last term's incredible title-winning campaign.\n\nThat most unlikely of championships was built on resolute defending, lightning-quick counter-attacking, Vardy's goals and Riyad Mahrez's magic - all of which were on show.\n\nMahrez pulled off a superb first touch to direct a high ball to Islam Slimani, who in turn slid in Vardy for the opener, and the Algerian repeated the feat when he redirected a long ball into the path of Vardy for Leicester's third.\n\nVardy, who scored 24 Premier League goals last season, had endured a 741-minute goal drought in the league, but took his tally for this term to five when he capitalised on Stones' error and somehow threaded a finish from the tightest of angles.\n\nMan of the match - Jamie Vardy\n\nA first hat-trick for Leicester in a performance reminiscent of his best displays last season - the confidence poured back into him after his first goal\n\n'Welcome back Jamie' - what they said\n\nMedia playback is not supported on this device Leicester City 4-2 Manchester City: Ranieri praises \"true\" Leicester\n\nLeicester boss Claudio Ranieri told BBC Sport: \"It was the true Leicester, maybe because we have played so badly in our last few matches, but today we were so strong.\n\n\"We played smart, slowed down the tempo.\n\n\"I am very pleased for Jamie. When he finished, I said 'welcome back'.\"\n\nFormer Leicester defender Matt Elliott on BBC Radio Leicester: \"There was a spark and zip about Leicester's play from the off. You could sense it, a freshness in the air.\n\n\"That's their best performance by some distance this season and that might just reignite their season, certainly in domestic terms.\"\n\nManchester City boss Pep Guardiola told BBC Sport: \"Leicester won the second balls and scored fantastic goals.\n\nMedia playback is not supported on this device Leicester 4-2 Manchester City: Guardiola will 'look inside' himself after defeat\n\n\"Football is a game with mistakes, especially today. I would never complain to my players and I will look inside myself and analyse the reason why we have problems with the second balls when they arrive.\n\n\"Our game is not bad, but in the box we have a lot of problems.\"\n\nMatch of the Day pundit Danny Murphy: \"That's as good as I've seen Leicester this season, it was like the Leicester of last season. But City didn't half help them.\n\n\"Kolarov was supposed to be playing as a third centre-half but he played so far forward, he left Stones isolated. Zabaleta was playing in a weird in-between position and it didn't look like he knew what he was doing.\n\n\"Kevin de Bruyne appeared to be at left-wing-back. The communication and lack of line was pretty bad. Kolarov was playing his own game going forward so often. They gave Leicester so many opportunities to attack them. It could have been more.\n\n\"Fifty changes, they've made this season. It's nice to build relationships and have some familiarity. You can't keep changing players.\"\n\nDefensive numbers make bad reading for Guardiola\n\nGuardiola has seen his side concede three or more goals in back-to-back league games for the first time as a manager.\n\nA Guardiola side conceded four goals in a league for only the third time (Atletico Madrid 4-3 Barcelona in 2009, Wolfsburg 4-1 Bayern Munich in 2015).\n\nOnly Crystal Palace, Hull and Sunderland (one) have kept fewer clean sheets than Manchester City in the Premier League this season.\n\nClaudio Ranieri has won eight of his nine Premier League matches as a manager against Manchester City, drawing the other.\n\nManchester City conceded twice in the opening five minutes of a Premier League game for the first time since October 2006 against Wigan.\n\nWhat's next?\n\nOn Monday, both sides find out who they will face in the last 16 of the Champions League.\n\nManchester City will be drawn against one of Atletico Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, Juventus, Monaco or Napoli.\n\nLeicester City will meet Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich, Benfica, Paris St-Germain, Real Madrid or Sevilla.\n\nOn Tuesday, Leicester travel to Bournemouth (19:45 GMT). Manchester City host Watford the following day (20:00)."}
{"text":"The English city of Norwich is an undeniably small place, even by European standards. With a population of just 210,000 (including its suburbs), it\u2019s not surprising that Norwich is largely unknown in global terms. But for lovers of beer and ale, there\u2019s no better place to experience England\u2019s rich drinking heritage.\n\n\u201cBrewing has taken place in Norwich since before 1249. The brewing of beer was a way to purify water, which was often unsafe to drink,\u201d says Philip Cutter, Landlord at The Murderers, a pub that has operated in the city since 1696. \u201cDuring the construction of the Norwich Anglican Cathedral, Franciscan monks brewed beer for the workmen at The Adam and Eve Pub, which still trades in the Cathedral grounds today.\u201d\n\nBoth The Murderers and The Adam and Eve are what\u2019s known as \u201creal ale\u201d pubs, meaning they stock high-quality, natural ales that have gone through secondary fermentation \u2013 a process that involves the ale being left to mature in the cask it\u2019s served from. The trend for this method of traditional production took off around 40 years ago, and has been growing ever since.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s the process of secondary fermentation which makes real ale unique and develops the wonderful tastes and aromas which processed beers can never provide,\u201d says Rob Whitmore, Norwich and Norfolk Branch Secretary of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and promoting traditional \u201creal\u201d ales.\n\nCAMRA began its work in the 1970s as a response to a rut in the UK beer market. Concerned that the availability of traditional, flavorful English ales was becoming a thing of the past, four ale lovers from the north-west of England came together to campaign against the domination of the industry by big companies producing large quantities of low quality ale. Today, CAMRA is known as one of the most successful consumer campaigns in European history. The organization itself now boasts 200 branches in the UK and more than 160,000 members from across the world.\n\nFur & Feather Inn is recognized in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide.\n\nIn Norwich, the city once said to have a pub for every day of the year, real ale has become a significant part of the urban architecture; a defining point in where and what you choose to drink. \u201cWe\u2019ve developed a strong bank of local brewers who have helped Norwich pubs not only survive, but become better and stronger,\u201d Whitmore explains. \u201cIf you did a tour of all the pubs in Norwich on any given day, it would not be uncommon to see over 250 different real ales for sale. This is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, ratio per head in the country.\u201d\n\nThe pubs themselves view real ale as a crucial part of their identity, and one that offers benefits to their business as much as it does to the city\u2019s reputation as a standout destination for beer. \u201cBeing recognized as a \u2018real ale\u2019 pub is enormously important to us, and certainly brings in many customers locally, and attracts out of town visitors,\u201d Cutter says. \u201cBeing part of a successful and vibrant real ale city makes us extremely fortunate \u2013 but being recognized as an award winning real ale pub put our establishment in the forefront, ahead of many others.\u201d\n\nDawn Leeder is chair of the City of Ale Festival, a 10-day celebration of Norwich\u2019s ale and pub scene every May, and she has seen enormous growth and renewed interest in the real ale scene over recent years. \u201cThe real ale renaissance of the 21st century has allowed many microbreweries to open in Norwich and Norfolk. Over 40 breweries took part in last year\u2019s festival and several more have opened since then,\u201d she says. \u201cNorfolk also produces some of the finest malting barley in the world \u2013 the maritime microclimate of our county\u2019s north coast gives rise to cooling harsh frosts which slow the ripening of the grain, intensifying the flavors to make very fine beer indeed.\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s this stellar combination of real ale production and availability that led Tim Hampson, Chairman of the British Guild of Beer Writers, to declare that Norwich\u2019s status as a city of ale is \u201cno longer a question, but a fact\u201d earlier this year. A lot may have changed since the monks started brewing here in the 13th century, but Norwich is definitely still the heartland of England\u2019s brewing culture."}
{"text":"Toys M.A.S.K. Toys\n\nM.A.S.K. toys accompanied the cartoon that was first released in 1985 and went on to spawn toys, video games and comics. There were four series of toys released between 1985 and 1988 in the USA, however, in Europe a fifth series was released in 1986 which contained smaller toys that came in blister packs.\n\nAs with most toy-lines in the 1980\u2019s the toys were split between the good guys M.A.S.K. (Mobile Armoured Strike Kommand) and the bad guys V.E.N.O.M. (Viscous Evil Network of Mayhem), however, far more M.A.S.K. toys were released over the four series.\n\nM.A.S.K. Toys\n\nSeries 1 (1985)\n\nThe first wave of toys was released in 1985 and featured all the major characters and vehicles from the first season of the TV show.\n\nM.A.S.K.\n\nBoulder Hill Condor Firecracker Gator Rhino T-Bob Thunderhawk\n\nBoulder Hill \u2013 Service Station play-set, home of M.A.S.K.\n\n\u2013 Service Station play-set, home of M.A.S.K. Brad Turner and Condor \u2013 A green motorcycle than can change into a helicopter.\n\n\u2013 A green motorcycle than can change into a helicopter. Hondo MacLean and Firecracker \u2013 An orange pickup which elevates into a mobile weapon platform.\n\n\u2013 An orange pickup which elevates into a mobile weapon platform. Dusty Hayes and Gator \u2013 An orange Jeep CJ7 with releasable boat.\n\n\u2013 An orange Jeep CJ7 with releasable boat. Matt Tracker, Bruce Sato and Rhino \u2013 A Kenworth semi tractor that converts into a mobile defence platform and command centre.\n\n\u2013 A Kenworth semi tractor that converts into a mobile defence platform and command centre. Matt Tracker and Thunderhawk \u2013 A Chevrolet Camaro which transforms into a jet airplane.\n\n\u2013 A Chevrolet Camaro which transforms into a jet airplane. Scott Tracker \u2013 Comes with his robot T-Bob\n\nV.E.N.O.M.\n\nJackhammer Piranha Switchblade\n\nCliff Dagger and Jackhammer \u2013 A Ford Bronco which turns into an assault vehicle.\n\n\u2013 A Ford Bronco which turns into an assault vehicle. Sly Rax and Piranha \u2013 Motorcycle with releasable submarine side-car.\n\n\u2013 Motorcycle with releasable submarine side-car. Miles Mayhem and Switchblade \u2013 A helicopter which can transform into a jet airplane.\n\nSeries 2 (1986)\n\nThe second series of toys tied in with the second season of the show apart from Hurricane, which appeared at the end of season one under the name \u201cNightstalker\u201d.\n\nM.A.S.K.\n\nFirefly Hurricane Raven Slingshot Volcano\n\nJulio Lopez and Firefly \u2013 An orange dune buggy that turns into a jet.\n\n\u2013 An orange dune buggy that turns into a jet. Hondo MacLean and Hurricane \u2013 A 1957 Chevy which turns into a six-wheeled tank.\n\n\u2013 A 1957 Chevy which turns into a six-wheeled tank. Calhoun Burns and Raven \u2013 A black Chevrolet Corvette which turns into a seaplane.\n\n\u2013 A black Chevrolet Corvette which turns into a seaplane. Ace Riker and Slingshot \u2013 A van which transforms into a jet and launch ramp.\n\n\u2013 A van which transforms into a jet and launch ramp. Matt Tracker, Jacques LaFleur and Volcano \u2013 A blue monster truck which converts into an attack station.\n\nV.E.N.O.M.\n\nOutlaw Stinger Vampire\n\nMiles Mayhem, Nash Gorey and Outlaw \u2013 A tanker truck which transforms into an assault station and mobile command centre.\n\n\u2013 A tanker truck which transforms into an assault station and mobile command centre. Bruno Sheppard and Stinger \u2013 An orange Pontiac GTO that turns into a tank.\n\n\u2013 An orange Pontiac GTO that turns into a tank. Floyd Malloy and Vampire \u2013 A red motorbike that turns into a jet.\n\nSeries 3 (1987) \u201cRacing Series\u201d\n\nThe third wave of toys was the largest release and were all centred around a racing theme, hence the name \u201cRacing Series\u201d.\n\nM.A.S.K.\n\nBillboard Blast Bulldog Bullet Goliath Meteor Razorback The Collector Wildcat\n\nDusty Hayes and Billboard Blast \u2013 A billboard which opens up to reveal a gun emplacement.\n\n\u2013 A billboard which opens up to reveal a gun emplacement. Boris Bushkin and Bulldog \u2013 A white semi tractor truck which turns into a half-track tank.\n\n\u2013 A white semi tractor truck which turns into a half-track tank. Ali Bombay and Bullet \u2013 A blue and white racing motorcycle which turns into a hovercraft.\n\n\u2013 A blue and white racing motorcycle which turns into a hovercraft. Matt Trakker, Nevada Rushmore and Goliath \u2013 A purple race car that becomes a jet.\n\n\u2013 A purple race car that becomes a jet. Ace Riker and Meteor \u2013 A white jet that splits into an aerial fighter and a missile launching tank.\n\n\u2013 A white jet that splits into an aerial fighter and a missile launching tank. Brad Turner and Razorback \u2013 A red and white Ford Thunderbird which turns into an elevated platform.\n\n\u2013 A red and white Ford Thunderbird which turns into an elevated platform. Alex Sector and The Collector \u2013 A toll booth that transforms into an attack installation.\n\n\u2013 A toll booth that transforms into an attack installation. Buddy Hawks and Wildcat \u2013 A red truck which turns into a tall tank.\n\nV.E.N.O.M\n\nBuzzard Iguana Manta Pit Stop Catapult\n\nMiles Mayehm, Maximum Mayhem and Buzzard \u2013 A Formula 1 race car which splits into a drone pilot-controlled jet and two smaller assault motorcycles.\n\n\u2013 A Formula 1 race car which splits into a drone pilot-controlled jet and two smaller assault motorcycles. Lester Sludge and Iguana \u2013 An off-road vehicle which turns into a mobile buzz-saw.\n\n\u2013 An off-road vehicle which turns into a mobile buzz-saw. Vanessa Warfield and Manta \u2013 A Nissan 300 ZX which turns into a plane.\n\n\u2013 A Nissan 300 ZX which turns into a plane. Sly Rax and Pitstop Catapult \u2013 An armoured gasoline stand.\n\nM.A.S.K. Laser Command (1987)\n\nHornet Ratfang\n\nHornet \u2013 A M.A.S.K. packing crate that opens to reveal an attack vehicle.\n\nRatfang \u2013 A V.E.N.O.M. truck with limited transforming capabilities, its doors, wheels and hood burst off when triggered by infra-red beams from Hornet.\n\nSeries 4 (1987-1988) \u201cSplit Seconds\u201d\n\nThe fourth and final series of M.A.S.K toys was called \u201cSplit Seconds\u201d as each vehicle could split into two separate parts, most of theses toys never appeared in the cartoon.\n\nM.A.S.K.\n\nThe Collector Wildcat Afterburner Detonator Dynamo Fireforce Skybolt Stiletto\n\nDusty Hayes and Afterburner \u2013 A dragster that splits into a small jet plane and an elevated turret.\n\n\u2013 A dragster that splits into a small jet plane and an elevated turret. Jacques LaFleur and Detonator \u2013 A VW Beetle that separates into an attack boat and an assault quad bike.\n\n\u2013 A VW Beetle that separates into an attack boat and an assault quad bike. Bruce Sato and Dynamo \u2013 A dune buggy that splits into a helicopter and assault car.\n\n\u2013 A dune buggy that splits into a helicopter and assault car. Julio Lopez and Fireforce \u2013 A Pontiac Fiero that splits into a jet plane and an assault quad bike.\n\n\u2013 A Pontiac Fiero that splits into a jet plane and an assault quad bike. Matt Tracker and Skybolt \u2013 A jet fighter plane that splits into an assault rocket car and an aerial attack craft.\n\n\u2013 A jet fighter plane that splits into an assault rocket car and an aerial attack craft. Gloria Baker and Stiletto \u2013 A Lamborghini Countach that split into a helicopter and assault plane.\n\nV.E.N.O.M\n\nBarracuda Vandal Wolfbeast\n\nBruno Sheppard and Barracuda \u2013 A motorbike that turns into a rocket glider and armed cycle.\n\n\u2013 A motorbike that turns into a rocket glider and armed cycle. Floyd Malloy and Vandal \u2013 A front-end loader which splits into an aircraft and tank.\n\n\u2013 A front-end loader which splits into an aircraft and tank. Miles Mayhem and Wolfbeast \u2013 A Corvette Stingray which splits into a tank and jet plane.\n\nCheck out this collection of M.A.S.K. commercials from the 1980\u2019s below!"}
{"text":"What you should know about a new law that will make it tougher for consumers to clear their debts.\n\nMore on bankruptcy \u0095 \u0095 \u0095 \u0095 QUICK VOTE Do you think people abuse the bankruptcy laws?\n\nYes\n\nNo\n\nView results Video More video President Bush talks about what the new bankruptcy law will require. Play video\n\nNEW YORK (CNN\/Money) \ufffd President Bush on Wednesday signed into law a bankruptcy reform bill that will make it harder for individuals to clear their debts through bankruptcy. So, experts say, if you were thinking about filing for bankruptcy, you might think twice -- or act twice as quickly, since major provisions of the law will go into effect six months from the day the law is signed. Individuals filing for bankruptcy usually do so either under Chapter 7 or under Chapter 13. In a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, your assets (minus those exempted by your state) are liquidated and given to creditors, and many of your remaining debts are cancelled, giving you what's known as a \"fresh start.\" In 2004, over 1.1 million people filed for Chapter 7, accounting for roughly 72 percent of non-business bankruptcies. Since many Chapter 7 filers don't have assets that qualify for liquidation, credit card companies and other creditors sometimes get nothing. In a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, you're put on a repayment plan of up to five years. Any debts not addressed by the repayment plan don't have to be paid. Last year, there were 445,574 Chapter 13 filings. Under the new law, fewer people will be allowed to file under Chapter 7; more will be forced to file under Chapter 13. Lawmakers who favor the legislation argue that it will prevent consumers from abusing the bankruptcy laws \ufffd using them to clear debts that they can afford to pay. But consumer advocates argue that the new law is a gift to creditors \ufffd particularly the credit card industry, which may receive $1 billion or more from repayment plans due to the expected increase in Chapter 13 filings, according to Robert McKinley, CEO of CardWeb.com. \"The bill simply doesn't balance responsibility between families in debt trouble and the creditors whose practices have contributed to the rise in bankruptcies,\" said Travis Plunkett of the Consumer Federation of America in a written statement. Key changes Here are some of the major changes for consumers under the new law: A qualifying test: Currently, it's up to the court to determine if your case qualifies for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Under the new law, your income will be subject to a two-part means test. First, it will be subject to a formula that exempts certain expenses (rent, food, etc.) to determine whether you can afford to pay 25 percent of your \"nonpriority unsecured debt\" such as your credit card bills. Second, your income would be compared to your state's median income. You won't be allowed to file for Chapter 7 if your income is above your state's median and you can afford to pay 25 percent of your unsecured debt, said California-based bankruptcy attorney Stephen Elias, who is coauthor of the book \"How to File for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy.\" But, he said, you may be allowed to file for Chapter 13. If your income is below the state's median but you can pay 25 percent of your unsecured debt, you may be able to file Chapter 7, but the court can still require you to file Chapter 13 instead if it believes that you would be abusing the system by filing for Chapter 7, Elias said. Under current law, the court has great latitude in deciding whether debtors may file for bankruptcy in consideration of their personal circumstances. Under the new law, there will be few if any exceptions made to the means test, no matter how sympathetic your case, said Leon Bayer, a bankruptcy attorney in Los Angeles. Determining what you can afford to pay: Currently, if you file for Chapter 13 today, the court determines what you can afford to pay based on what you and the court deem to be reasonable and necessary expenses. Under the new law, the court will apply living standards derived by the IRS to determine what is reasonable to pay for rent, food and other expenses to figure out how much you have available to pay your debts. The IRS regulations are more stringent, and to contest them means asking for a hearing from a judge, which can mean more time and expense, Elias said. Tougher homestead exemptions: Currently, if you declare bankruptcy, the state where you file may allow you to protect from creditors some or all of your home equity. In Florida, for instance, your home may be entirely exempt, even if you bought it soon before filing. In Nevada, you may exempt up to $200,000. The new law, however, places more stringent restrictions on the homestead exemption. For instance, if filers haven't lived in a state for at least two years, they may only take the state exemption of the state where they lived for the majority of the time for the 180 days before the two-year period. Filers may only exempt up to $125,000, regardless of a state's exemption allowance, if their home was acquired less than 40 months before filing or if the filer has violated securities laws or been found guilty of certain criminal conduct. Unlike most of the other provisions, the new homestead exemption rules go into effect immediately. Lawyer liability: Under the new law, if information about a client's case is found to be inaccurate, the bankruptcy attorney may be subject to various fees and fines. What that means for consumers is it will be harder to find a bankruptcy attorney willing to file because of the liability and the additional work required to verify a client's information, Elias said. Those who are willing are likely to charge more. Credit counseling and money management: Under provisions of the new law you must meet with a credit counselor in the six months prior to applying for bankruptcy. And before debts are discharged, you must attend money management classes at your expense. What should you do? For those people who have considered bankruptcy, the time to act may be now, consumer advocates say. Talk to a good bankruptcy lawyer, Plunkett said. If together you decide bankruptcy is the right call, you might consider speeding up your plans to file since most of the main provisions of the new law won't go into effect until six months from now. Typically, it can take a couple of weeks to file for bankruptcy, said Bayer. See Money magazine's 9-step program for tackling your debt problem. Money 101: Controlling debt Debt reduction planner"}
{"text":"The comments section might be set ablaze but, believe it or not, the Daily News Autos is here to tell you that the iconic BMW logo does not represent a stylized airplane propeller.\n\nThat\u2019s right BMW fans, everything you thought you knew about the blue and white logo on your beloved M3 or hybrid-powered i8 is wrong.\n\nFOLLOW DAILY NEWS AUTOS ON FACEBOOK. \u2018LIKE\u2019 US HERE.\n\nDon\u2019t feel bad, the idea that the famous BMW Roundel has roots in aviation stretches back almost to the very founding of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, which happened way back on March 7, 1916.\n\nCar logo origins: From the Ferrari horse to the Lamborghini bull\n\nAnd yes, the firm\u2019s first technical creations happened to be aircraft engines. So wait a minute, how the heck can we be so smug about the BMW logo not having something to do with airplanes?\n\nYou can blame the world of marketing and advertising for this Bavarian-themed level of miscommunication.\n\nThe blue and white logo is borrowed from the colors in the Bavarian flag, nothing more. Go ahead and Google search \u201cBavarian flag,\u201d we\u2019ll wait while you do.\n\nHere is the advertisement that ignited years of controversy surrounding the origins of BMW's iconic logo. (BMW AG)\n\nWhile it\u2019s true that BMW got its start in aircraft engines, the close of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles forbade the company from continuing down its original path. After the conclusion of WWI, BMW moved into motorcycle manufacturing. Eventually, the company was also allowed to restart the aviation side of its business.\n\nIt was an advertisement used in the late-1920s, in which the BMW logo cleverly represented the spinning propellers of an airplane, that we encounter the foundation of the famous Roundel\/propeller controversy. Yes, the logo represented plane propellers - but only in the ad, not the logo in general.\n\nThe advertisement must have been popular, because for decades since, most people assume design and colors of the BMW Roundel are firmly rooted in aviation.\n\nBMW Car Club of America E30 M3 showcase\n\nAround the same time this ad apperared, so did the first BMW motorcar. The thin-tired and dainty-looking BMW Dixi 3\/15 PS was powered by a small 4-cylinder engine that produced a grand total of 15-horsepower. Small, simple, and quite cheap; the little Dixi helped BMW survive the Great Depression, which arrived only months after the car first went on sale.\n\nSomewhat ironically, this first BMW automobile owed nearly all of its design to the Austin 7, a huge sales hit that was originally designed and engineered entirely...in Britain!\n\nLEARN MORE ABOUT BMW HERE.\n\nSign up for BREAKING NEWS Emails privacy policy Thanks for subscribing!\n\nDid you find this article helpful? If so, please share it using the \"Join the Conversation\" buttons below, and thank you for visiting Daily News Autos."}
{"text":"Turn to the nation's most objective and informative daily environmental news resource to learn how the United States and key players around the world are responding to the environmental...\n\nBy Rachel Leven\n\nSept. 10 \u2014 The Clean Power Plan presents a unique opportunity to shift how states and companies think about energy, but it won't be a \u201csilver bullet\u201d for all environmental justice issues related to power plants, an Environmental Protection Agency official said Sept. 10.\n\nThe EPA's landmark rule is intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, meaning that other pollutant emissions aren't required to be reduced under the rule, Kevin Culligan, an EPA associate division director, told justice advocates. But as states and companies think about how to comply with the rule, it provides them a \u201creal opportunity\u201d to look at their actions in \u201ca larger energy-planning kind of way,\u201d alongside other environmental mandates, he said during the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council's meeting in Arlington, Va.\n\n\u201cThere isn't a single silver bullet\u201d for resolving environmental justice concerns, Culligan said, urging justice advocates to harness all parts of the Clean Air Act and other laws to resolve these overburdened communities' other pollutant concerns.\n\n\u201cThe real opportunity here is not that the Clean Power Plan itself can solve all of the concerns about all of the power plants \u2026 but in many ways, [the opportunity is] that it changed the dialogue\u201d to think holistically, Culligan said.\n\nThe EPA released on Aug. 3 its final Clean Power Plan rule (RIN 2060-AR33), which sets state-specific power sector carbon dioxide emissions rates or alternatively mass-based targets. States must develop their own plans to meet these goals, which are phased in between 2022 and 2030. In order to receive an extension to develop and submit those plans, the states must demonstrate they have addressed overburdened communities as part of the planning process.\n\nBenefits for EJ Communities\n\nCulligan made his remarks following\u2014and in response to\u2014comments from several environmental justice advocates on the final rule, some of whom called for the EPA to do more to protect overburdened communities.\n\nWhile council member Vernice Miller-Travis praised both the agency and justice advocates for their involvement in developing a rule that culminated in a strong environmental justice focus, council member Nicky Sheats and others said that the rule didn't ensure that overburdened communities received the benefits.\n\nJustice advocates have expressed concern that actions such as carbon trading could result in increased activity at certain power plants, resulting in higher emissions for those communities, and the EPA moved to address those issues in its final rule.\n\n\u201cThe rule does a good job of saying \u2018we don\u2019t want disproportionate impacts in overburdened communities,' \u201d Sheats said. \u201cBut what we really want is [an emissions] reduction in [environmental justice] communities.\u201d\n\nSeveral members of the council called for the EPA to encourage states to ensure that these communities saw reduced emissions locally, to establish clear investment and outcome metrics for state plans and to ensure that communities have the knowledge to engage with industry and states effectively on state plans as they are developed.\n\nTo contact the reporter on this story: Rachel Leven in Washington at rleven@bna.com\n\nTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Pearl at lpearl@bna.com"}
{"text":"\u201cWhen Europeans entered North America,\" writes Arthur Remillard of the Saint Francis University, \u201cthere were approximately 500 independent Indian cultures, each with its own unique spiritual world view.\" By Indians, Remillard here means the native Americans. The games that the natives played \u201calso carried an air of sacredness\". But the Europeans saw the games or \u201cbodies in motion\" as \u201can affront to Christianity, and a barrier to conversion\". These bodies in motion were taken as evidence of \u201csuperstition\"\u2014an indication that Western Christianity\u2019s \u201ccivilizing\" role had yet to begin.\n\nThe complex relationship that sport and religion have had over the centuries continues to this day. Last week, the International Basketball Federation or Fiba, the world governing body for basketball, ratified a new rule allowing players to wear headgear. The decision has been welcomed by many Islamic and Sikh groups as the new rule will allow players to wear hijab and turbans during the game. The demand to change the rules in various sports to accommodate different cultures has been growing for some years now. An impetus to such demands was provided by Ibtihaj Muhammad, the US fencer who became the first American athlete in Olympic history to wear a hijab in the Rio games of 2016.\n\nThe media also splashed images of female beach volleyball players from Egypt\u2014some of them in hijab and all of them in full sleeves and long pants. This was in sharp contrast to their opponents, who were attired in the bikini-style apparel one would normally associate with beach volleyball. Following these developments, Nike, one of the top global sportswear brands, has announced that it will be coming out with a \u201cPro Hijab\" for Muslim athletes.\n\nSports should indeed embrace more diversity. If an innocuous change in a rule or two will enable competitors from culturally different parts of the world to exhibit their skills, then those changes should be made. But changing rules cannot solve all the problems. Take the case of Heena Sidhu, the Indian shooter, for instance. She decided to pull out of the Asian Airgun Shooting Championship in Iran last year because of the compulsory hijab rule for women participants. The matter, as it can be seen, boils down to choice. And if some choice has to be taken away, which of the two\u2014sport or religion\u2014will be the final arbiter?\n\nSports is the ultimate celebration of merit over identity. The story of Jesse Owens is the best example: The African-American athlete single-handedly dismantled Nazi propaganda of Aryan superiority in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. When two players or teams battle it out against each other, the rules create the level playing field required for a black individual to contest against a white, or the underprivileged to challenge the wealthy. In other words, sport, unlike politics, is a great equalizer. Sometimes in the quest for enforcing this equality, the sport can end up stifling diversity. Therefore, periodic review of rules is a good practice.\n\nBut religion can be far more stifling\u2014and the process of any change there can be far more cumbersome and protracted. While interpreting religious texts is a tricky business, more often than not the ambiguities of the text are exploited to cover for patriarchy and parochial politics. What else would explain the Taliban giving a go-ahead to men\u2019s cricket in Afghanistan but not to women\u2019s? Even the green-lighting of men\u2019s cricket had more to do with the sheer popularity of the sport in Afghanistan than the fact that the gentleman\u2019s game, unlike football, which the Taliban disapproves of, doesn\u2019t let the knees show because of full-length trousers, as the Taliban would argue.\n\nThe Taliban wanted to use cricket to boost their domestic popularity and increase the acceptability of their regime worldwide. The Taliban government which was recognized internationally by just three countries\u2014Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates\u2014thought an affiliate membership for the Afghanistan Cricket Federation (now Afghanistan Cricket Board) in the International Cricket Council would only serve to shore up its legitimacy.\n\nSport and religion, however, have not always been on a collision course. Christianity\u2019s initial problems with sports, as shown in Remillard\u2019s account, dissolved with time as sports became more popular and the idea of \u201cMuscular Christianity\" gained ground. While a patriarchal concept, Muscular Christianity\u2019s emphasis on physical activity and good health would slowly win over the evangelicals. And although the domain of sports was not immune to anti-Semitism and unfortunately isn\u2019t even today, Jewish minorities often found sports to be a good way of integrating with the mainstream. In Hinduism too, sports like wrestling have served as vehicles for social and caste mobility. Outside religion, sports would provide a platform of protest against racism\u2014the champion boxer Muhammad Ali being the most recognized exponent of this crusade.\n\nThe impact of sports on human history has overwhelmingly been for the better. The sport-governing bodies should, however, realize that a quest for equality on the field of play should not end up imposing uniformity to the extent of throttling diversity. Hijabs, turbans and kippahs are non-threatening additions and can be embraced. To be fair, sport has shown the ability to respond to democratic demands. The performance of religion on this count has been slightly less encouraging, to put it mildly.\n\nIs religion incompatible with sports? Tell us at views@livemint.com"}
{"text":"We owe a hat tip to Aleister at Progressives Today for this one because the debate over Second Amendment rights may have just hit a new low. You may recall that we previously covered the release of some Second Amendment friendly reboots of Grimm\u2019s Fairy Tales for the NRA, created by our friend Amelia Hamilton. That clearly didn\u2019t sit well with anti-gun groups, particularly the Brady Campaign. As the Washington Free Beacon reports, they responded with a frank, well researched argument about how these portrayals are unproductive and offered alternate suggestions for crafting a more nuanced, accurate argument.\n\nNaw\u2026 I\u2019m just kidding. They produced their own fairy tale which features Alice of Wonderland fame shooting herself in the face.\n\nA new ad from a prominent gun control group features the main character from Alice in Wonderland shooting herself in the face with a handgun. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence published the ad titled Alice PSA to its YouTube page Thursday. In it, Alice can be seen following the white rabbit through wonderland when she comes upon a room with a cabinet. In the cabinet she finds a gun, which she then shoots herself in the face with. \u201cOver one-third of all American households have a gun,\u201d a voiceover says as Alice pulls the trigger. \u201cAsk your neighbor: Is there a gun where they play? Asking saves kids.\u201d\n\nThat likely sounds so implausible as to border on science fiction so you should probably take a look for yourself. Don\u2019t worry\u2026 it\u2019s pretty short.\n\nAs you can imagine, Amelia wasn\u2019t thrilled with their take on it.\n\nMe: what if fairy tale characters were safe?\n\nBrady campaign: what if they shot themselves in the face? \u2014 Amelia (@AmeliaHammy) April 12, 2016\n\nWhat is it with these anti-gun groups? The original fairy tales \u2013 as I\u2019m sure most people would agree \u2013 are pretty horrific and filled with violence as it is. But the violence is generally directed at the heroes and heroines of the story or innocent bystanders and supporting characters. In Amelia\u2019s version, the characters have the chance to defend themselves and actually resolve some conflicts through intimidation rather than actually having to kill, skin or burn the evil-doer.\n\nThe Brady Campaign clearly chooses to go a different route. They\u2019re so desperate to have some violence, preferably at the hands of someone with a gun, that they portray a young child unloading a handgun into her face. As if the original fairy tales weren\u2019t scarring enough for kids who are trying to get some sleep!\n\nThis is just sick. There\u2019s really no other way to describe it."}
{"text":"Meet the lesbian Atlanta Police officers suing for the right to legally marry in Georgia\n\nMeet the lesbian Atlanta Police officers suing for the right to legally marry in Georgia\n\nOne Tuesday morning late last month, Rayshawn Chandler and her wife Avery Chandler pulled into the parking lot at the 730 Midtown building and began walking towards the entrance.\n\n\u201cBaby, you see the news trucks?\u201d Rayshawn asked Avery.\n\nAvery looked over, then back to Rayshawn. \u201cWhy would you say that?!\u201d she asked, laughing, since Rayshawn was well aware that Avery was nervous.\n\nThey continued on into the building and the reason for Avery\u2019s nerves\u2014they were heading for the Southern Regional office of Lambda Legal, and about to step out of the shadows and in front of a horde of local and national press to be introduced to the world alongside their five fellow plaintiffs in Inniss v. Aderhold, the federal class-action lawsuit attempting to strike down Georgia\u2019s 2004 same-sex marriage ban.\n\nAvery recalls talking \u201ca million miles a second\u201d on the way to the press conference. \u201cI was freaking out,\u201d she says.\n\nHowever, her wife balanced her out.\n\n\u201cI used that time to just think about the success of what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d Rayshawn says. \u201cI\u2019m really positive that things are going to come around for us.\u201d\n\n\u2018THE SKY JUST OPENED UP\u2019\n\nRayshawn, 29 and a Miami native, and Avery, 30 and an Atlanta native, are both officers with the Atlanta Police Department. Avery is also in the Army Reserves.\n\nThey met at the police academy in 2010 and occasionally worked out or went on runs together. It was strictly a colleague relationship until the following March, when they worked a few extra jobs together and began to talk and learn more about each other. And it was clear who was chasing whom.\n\n\u201cI thought I was going to have to go get a rope and tie her down,\u201d Rayshawn says laughing. \u201cOh my God, she was running.\u201d\n\nAvery thought Rayshawn was straight and told her she \u201cdidn\u2019t need another straight friend.\u201d\n\n\u201cMy gaydar was broken,\u201d Avery says.\n\nShe finally picked up on Rayshawn\u2019s intentions and ended up accepting an invitation to Rayshawn\u2019s June graduation from the police academy.\n\n\u201cShe surprised me and came and I just thought that it was the sweetest thing,\u201d Rayshawn says. \u201cShe went out to dinner with my family and I after graduation and it was wonderful.\u201d\n\nThey consider that graduation day, June 26, their anniversary and have been dating ever since. They moved in together the following October, then were married the following June in West Hartford, Connecticut, on their two-year anniversary.\n\nThe ceremony occurred in a rose garden in Elizabeth Park.\n\n\u201cIt seemed like it blossomed just for us because we were told that prior to our wedding day, it had rained the entire week,\u201d Rayshawn says. \u201cThe sky just opened up on our wedding day.\u201d\n\nFIGHTING FOR THEIR FAMILY\n\nLike many of the other plaintiffs involved in Inniss v. Aderhold, neither Rayshawn nor Avery, who call themselves \u201cTeam Chandler,\u201d have any background in LGBT activism. They live a quiet life together in Jonesboro, getting together with friends and family for the occasional barbecue or bowling night. So how did they get from there to walking through Lambda Legal\u2019s doors on April 22 and telling their story to the world?\n\nThe decision to join the suit didn\u2019t come without concerns, with Rayshawn mentioning having their \u201clife on a platter for everyone to look at and pick at and make their assumptions and put their opinions on,\u201d and Avery was worried about \u201cbeing vulnerable and exposed for everybody to look at.\u201d\n\nBut the Chandlers want kids, and they were more concerned about moving forward with that plan without the legal protections afforded to straight families throughout Georgia than they were concerned about the intrusion a lawsuit would bring on their private lives.\n\n\u201cWe want a family dynamic that\u2019s fair and that receives the same respect that others get,\u201d Rayshawn says. \u201cThat\u2019s a pet peeve of mine. We don\u2019t want to be tagged as \u2018that lesbian couple.\u2019 We\u2019re just a couple. We just want to be normal.\u201d\n\nThe perils of their jobs also factored into the decision, since their choice to protect the city of Atlanta (and in Avery\u2019s case, the nation) increases the risk to their personal safety. Avery says that they want to ensure that \u201cif anything were to happen to Ray or to me, we wouldn\u2019t have to worry about having to fight anyone for our child,\u201d she explains. \u201cOr fight for the right to see my wife in the hospital.\u201d\n\nThey\u2019re in the planning phase of becoming parents and hope to take that step in the next year or so.\n\n\u201cThis is a really important issue and it\u2019s near and dear to my heart,\u201d Avery continues. \u201cAnd if it\u2019s near and dear to your heart then you want to fight for it and make things right.\u201d\n\n\u2018SHOCK AND AWE\u2019\n\nThe press conference ended up being an emotional scene, with several plaintiffs and even an attorney or two wiping away tears as each of the plaintiffs\u2019 stories were told.\n\n\u201cTo finally know the background of everybody and that we\u2019re all fighting for the same mission, it meant so much,\u201d Rayshawn says. \u201cAll of us have our own individual reasons for why [we\u2019re joining the suit], so it was kind of like an \u2018ah-ha\u2019 moment. They all make sense. Look at that. They\u2019re all valid reasons why this thing should be recognized.\u201d\n\nFollowing the press conference, and especially after segments on the lawsuit ran on the 12 o\u2019clock news that day, came what Rayshawn called \u201cshock and awe\u201d\u2014a barrage of phone calls, text messages and Facebook messages and friend requests from people far and wide trying to make a connection with this suddenly public couple.\n\nAlthough well prepared for the attention the lawsuit would bring, the size of the initial onslaught still surprised them.\n\n\u201cThe support was amazing,\u201d Rayshawn says. \u201cWhen we went into it, we didn\u2019t look at how big it would be and how it would impact so many people. We were in a bubble. In our eyes we were just looking at our situation.\u201d\n\nThings have quieted down since then and gotten back to normal as Lambda Legal and the rest of the legal team await a response from the defendants in the lawsuit. The couple posts the occasional video to their YouTube channel, OurNormalLifeAtlanta, giving an update on their lives and fielding questions from viewers. They\u2019ve also bonded with the other plaintiffs, meeting up for the occasional bite to eat and they\u2019re planning a group outing soon.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s like a little family,\u201d Avery says.\n\nIf the lawsuit goes as they hope it to, Rayshawn, Avery and the rest of Georgia\u2019s LGBT community will be able to rest easier knowing each of their little families will have the same rights and protections, no matter whom they love.\n\n\u2022 Visit Rayshawn and Avery Chandler\u2019s YouTube channel OurNormalLifeAtlanta at www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCWKT-wBeguIu-qrGk2-c1GA\n\npsaunders@thegavoice.com | @patricksaunders"}
{"text":"Microsoft is bringing its classic Hover! game back to life, on the web. The game combines bumper cars and capture the flag, and originally shipped on Windows 95 CDs in a special folder called fun stuff. Microsoft has worked with Dan Church, an independent developer, to bring Hover! to the web. It took around eight weeks to get it ready in time for the launch today, and Hover! fans will be able to play the PC classic in retro and modern modes.\n\n\"Dan actually approached Microsoft when he read about IE11 and WebGL,\" says Microsoft's senior director of IE marketing, Roger Capriotti, in an interview with The Verge. The partnership led to a new Hover! version built using the latest WebGL technologies, and it looks very different than the original game. However, the gameplay, physics engine, and original levels are all still in place so while there's a modern twist on a PC classic, it will feel all too familiar. Microsoft has also built in a new multiplayer option and touch support for its Hover! web version, allowing Internet Explorer 11 users on Windows 8.1 to make use of a touchscreen to play the game.\n\nThe most impressive part, at least for fans of the classic Hover! version, is that Microsoft has also built in a \"secret\" retro mode to activate a web version of Windows 95 complete with the original. If you visit the site and type bambi at the main screen, the original codename for the Windows 95 game release and a nod to an old Easter egg, it will activate the retro mode. While it's not a full version of Windows 95, you can also double click on share_fb.exe and tweet.exe from the desktop and Windows 95-style setup wizards will appear allowing you to share the site to Facebook and Twitter. It's all very retro and executed perfectly for those who remember using Windows 18 years ago.\n\nFor Microsoft, the project is mainly about reviving a classic game to showcase WebGL and IE11. \"We build these experiences to showcase what the web can be,\" says Capriotti. While it's promoting Internet Explorer, the new Hover! web version will work with any browser that supports WebGL. Microsoft thinks the new site will highlight its work with WebGL, but also generate some nostalgia amongst fans. \"There's over 10 unofficial versions of it [Hover!] floating around the web,\" says Capriotti, noting that it has a cult following. Hundreds of Hover! fans took to Reddit recently in a nostalgic thread to highlight the game. \"There's a big fan base and we think folks are gonna share the game and talk about what the game was like in the '90s.\""}
{"text":"In addition to the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, the US government is pursuing court orders to force Apple to help bypass the security passcodes of \"about a dozen\" other iPhones, the Wall Street Journal reports. The other cases don't involve terror charges, the Journal's sources say, but prosecutors involved have also sought to use the same 220-year-old law \u2014 the All Writs Act of 1789 \u2014 to access the phones in question.\n\nThe FBI has argued that it only wants Apple to allow it to \"guess\" the passcode for the San Bernardino iPhone, but that innocuous-sounding process involves Apple performing a rewrite of the phone's iOS software, allowing the Bureau to use brute-force techniques to crack the passcode that might otherwise take years. The agency says it only wants this process performed on this one specific iPhone, but privacy advocates could see the additional cases as the US government already attempting to overreach this mandate.\n\nIt's not clear yet what the other cases involve\n\nAt this point, however, it's not clear what the dozen-or-so cases actually entail, nor what prosecutors are asking Apple to do exactly, or why Apple is pushing back. The FBI has complained that Apple is simply resisting its demand to unlock the phone so as not to \"tarnish the Apple brand,\" but the company says if it gives in and allows the FBI to access the phone with \"absent clear legal authority to do so,\" it would breach its consumers' trust.\n\nApple regularly assists law enforcement by helping authorities extract information from both on and off the device \u2014 from iCloud backups, for example \u2014 but it has pushed back in the San Bernardino case because the FBI is attempting to breach encryption methods introduced in newer versions of its iOS software. In cases involving phones running iOS 7 and earlier, Apple can pull out information without actively unlocking the phone for law enforcement, but iOS 8 introduced encryption linked to the passcode that made this impossible. We don't yet know which operating system the dozen other iPhones were running, but the WSJ says that many of them are using older software than iOS 9."}
{"text":"As I age, I get a feeling that I am becoming more and more nostalgic about the simple life, limited number of options and opportunities that were present, good food, clean environment, closer interactions with people and less of noise and emissions that electronic-mechanical machines cause. The recent trip to my hometown has already made me even more wistful, in fact. However, \u2018change\u2019 is must for the humanity to progress and\u2026 sigh\u2026 I have to live with the present.\n\nAs for my childhood to college life, I have so many things to share some of which was mentioned in a recent post on this blog. Today\u2019s post is about some of those great old brands and products that have been part of our lives during the 70s and 80s. Of course, some of them are still being produced and sold but have transformed for good while many of them have been discontinued. Here are the things that I am talking about:\n\n1. Parry\u2019s Green hard candy\n\nUnfortunately I do not have a picture of this but I am sure anybody in their 30s and 40s must have eaten whole lot of them during their childhood. These candies \u2013 known as \u2018Green Parry\u2019 (\u2018Paccha pyaari\u2019 in Malayalam) \u2013 was among the four or five wrapped candy options that we had at that time apart from those local made \u2018uncovered\u2019 ones. I remember, Parry\u2019s competitor Nutrine introducing an imitation of the same several years later.\n\nThe Parry\u2019s Confectionery ltd company was taken over by \u2018Lotte \u2019several years back and this particular product has been discontinued since then, I believe.\n\n2. Hero Pens\n\nAs far as I am concerned, this is the ONLY Made in China product that I have ever liked in my whole life and it was my first Chinese experience as well. Unlike today\u2019s children, we never got to use the ball point pen s until the age of 12 (or sixth grade) on account of \u2018bad hand writing\u2019 resulting from ball point pens. Most of us started our writing with cheaper \u2018Bismi\u2019 or \u2018Jubilee\u2019 fountain pens and then progressed to using the Hero Pens (fondly called \u2018Heero pena\u2019 In Malayalam. Many of us in fact get to use it only for exams \u2013 for some not until the SSLC examination \u2013 and it was indeed a super smooth experience to use them. Mostly people used to get these pens as gifts from those who worked in the Gulf countries but later on they were available in shops for Rs.25 or so in stationery shops.\n\nThe hero pens were cool due to their smooth quality of writing and the ability to fill ink via a cool press-suction operation. Old time pens had to be filled via direct pouring of the ink and we used to end up having the ink spilled on the floor as well as on our shirts.\n\nAs I moved to college, the Hero pen gave way to Pilots, Parkers and Sheaffers but the Hero fountain pen was always my hero!\n\n3. Happy T-shirts\n\nNow, this one is tricky and probably only Malayalis will understand what I am talking about. During those days mostly there would be at least one Keralite from every other household working in the Gulf countries (Generalized as \u2018Persia\u2019) and they make a visit once in every four or five years. At that time, everyone in the family \u2013 to the n\u2019th relationship level \u2013 neighborhood and the village need to be gifted something or other. Cigarettes, cheap perfume sprays and synthetic clothe material or saris that will last beyond five generations were some of the cheaper options to keep everyone happy. Among these gifts, the kids usually gets the so-called \u201cHappy T-shirt\u201d which is nothing but a round neck T-shirt made of cheap synthetic fabric and a big H A P P Y written on it in a semi circle. We kids were, indeed, very happy to get them as gifts and would proudly wear them till they wore out. Those who wear Happy Tees were identified as the Gulf fellow\u2019s son or relative.\n\n(Several years later somebody revealed to me that a dozen of them would cost only something like 5 Dirhams or so and that\u2019s how the poor Gulf Malayali could afford to buy them for everyone of our age group in that village. By the way, I do not know the actual the brand name of this T-shirt but it was always known as Happy shirt)\n\n4. Chelpark Ink\n\nOf course, the usage of fountain pen would mean daily refill of ink in the same. When we were in fourth or fifth grade, we used cheaper \u201cBrill\u201d or \u201cCamel\u201d brand of ink. At that time my father was using a Sheaffer\u2019s pen and he used to buy this blue-black ink by Chelpark. It was super quality ink for the Indian standards and I believe it\u2019s still being produced in India. However, the original wide-bottom glass bottle is missing now.\n\nI used the Chelpark ink for several years, I would say till I got my first job but had totally forgotten about it until my co-brother Manoj reminded me of that brand last week. In fact, that was the inspiration behind this post.\n\n5. Camel instrument box\n\nThe camel brand of math instrument box is no brainer. Camel is still a leading brand in India for stationery and art-craft supplies. However, during our school days it was something big and getting a Camel box was an ultimate achievement in one\u2019s otherwise limited wish list. Some of us get them during fifth or sixth grade and had to use the same till you pass out of 10th standard. Many times, the original paper sleeve wrapper around the box would be preserved intact for many years in order to protect the precious box from losing any of its print work on the surface.\n\nFor those who couldn\u2019t afford to spend two rupees more, there were brands like \u2018Nataraj\u2019 and the twin-brother of Camel was the \u2018Camlin\u2019 brand of instrument boxes.\n\n6. Premier rubber slippers\n\nLungis and Dhotis were the perfect clothing (and it still is for many) for Malayalis due to the sultry climate conditions and rains aplenty. The perfect footwear that goes with them was a pair of \u2018Premier\u2019 rubber slippers. I believe, I am recalling the name right because before brands like \u2018Paragon\u2019, \u2018Fisher\u2019 etc surfaced, it was all about Premier Hawai chappals. I am attaching a picture of the currently available Paragon slippers to give you an idea of how Premier looked like. But I guess, Premier brand is not available any more.\n\nTalking about these Hawai chappals, most Malayalis wore them to school, colleges or even to work. And like their ultra white dhotis (Mundu), these slippers used to be maintained ultra clean was well. The jobless and educated mallu\u2019s main hobby \u2013 apart from discussing international politics and Hartal or Bandh opportunities \u2013 those days was cleaning own slippers not just from the top but from sides and bottom as well.\n\nI have used this brand of slippers for many years and I still have a pair of Paragon at home.\n\n7. Murphy radios\n\nNow, this should ring the bell for all because many Indian families must have had one such Murphy or Philips vintage radio until recently. These were known as \u2018valve sets\u2019 which requires quite some skill to tune it to the right frequency and several precautions for proper maintenance. Many of the featured a green dancing light valve that can be seen outside and moves according to the tuning procedure. The frequency needle \u2013 mostly sitting at a centimeter or two away from the actual frequency numbers and usually dangling \u2013 had to be carefully positioned to get the right radio station and its position usually is not the same when you tune from left as compared to the right. Basically only the owner of the radio and most likely only the elder male member of the family could tune it to perfection.\n\nThese radios also had external antenna fittings and sometimes sporting a long mesh antenna \u2013 stretching from one end of the house to the other \u2013 was considered something royal. Due to issues in tuning or reception, most of the radio stations then used to sound like the distant Ceylon station. The cold starts used to be almost impossible and needed some heating via incandescent bulbs and occasional taps (out of frustration as well) on its wooden cabinet. Usually to listen to the 12:50 noon news (called Delhi news), one had to start preparing at around 12:30 itself.\n\nDespite all the above issues, it was fun to see and listen to such a Murphy radio. And I almost forgot to mention the Murphy logo which had a sweet baby\u2019s face.\n\nDoes anyone still have a vintage radio at your home?\n\n8. Dyanora TV sets\n\nNow, these are not really very old entities but it was the first Indian television brand that I got to watch (at my neighbour\u2019s place). I believe it was in 1980 or so? These Dyanora TVs (black and white) used to be thrice as big as its picture tube itself with two speakers on either side and sliding shutters that would close from both sides. It had pathetic design aesthetics but who cares when the transmission itself is available for only one or two hours per day \u2013 that too in black and white and with full of interruptions (Rukaavat ke liye khed hai!)\n\nThough I never ever liked Dyanora as a brand, I think it was one of the household names during those days and I remember it as the first TV I ever watched.\n\n9. Vijay Super Scooter\n\nWell, in a comment within my post about the Bajaj Chetak Scooter, I had mentioned about the Vijay super scooter. I learned riding on a Vijay super which is a discontinued model for years now. It was in fact something that looked like a Lamby and would run on a half-petrol half-kerosene mix. Though, this combination meant starting trouble and occasional \u2018fut-phut\u2019 sounds, I always remember it as the first geared two-wheeler I have ridden in my life not to forget the Luna moped which I had tried prior to that.\n\n10. Tinopal\n\nNow, how many of you can guess what it was? Tinopal (later it became Ranipal) was one of the clothe whitening agents (like Ujala) that I have seen my mother using during my childhood. It always amazed me because a drop of it was good enough for a bucketful of white clothes to make it surprisingly sparkling and smelling good. Its fragrance was similar to that of the modern fabric conditioners but I believe it was far superior. Sometimes, I just don\u2019t understand why such brands were discontinued.\n\nBy the way, I managed to Google out this newspaper ad announcing the brand name change \u2013 Tinopal to Ranipal\n\nOver to you\n\nI am sure all of you have plenty to talk about those retro brands. I still have many in my list but some of them that I haven\u2019t directly consumed or experienced.\n\nLet me know if you have any pleasant memories to share about those products or old brands that you have seen, used or experienced 20 or 30 years (or even before) back!"}
{"text":"Forms of address used in the United Kingdom are given below. For further information on Courtesy Titles see Courtesy titles in the United Kingdom.\n\nAbbreviations [ edit ]\n\nSeveral terms have been abbreviated in the table below. The forms used in the table are given first, followed by alternative acceptable abbreviations in parentheses.\n\nRoyalty [ edit ]\n\nA formal announcement in The London Gazette reads:\n\n\"The Queen has been pleased by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm dated 31 December 2012 to declare that all the children of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales should have and enjoy the style, title and attribute of Royal Highness with the titular dignity of Prince or Princess prefixed to their Christian names or with such other titles of honour.\"\n\nThis refers to any children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.\n\nNobility [ edit ]\n\nPeers, peeresses and non-peerage [ edit ]\n\nEldest sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of dukes, marquesses and earls [ edit ]\n\nEldest sons of dukes, marquesses and earls use their father's most senior subsidiary title as courtesy titles: note the absence of \"The\" before the title.[Note 8] If applicable, eldest sons of courtesy marquesses or courtesy earls also use a subsidiary title from their (great) grandfather, which is lower ranking than the one used by their father. Eldest daughters do not have courtesy titles; all courtesy peeresses are wives of courtesy peers.[Note 9]\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Courtesy marquess Marquess of London My Lord or\n\nDear Lord London My Lord or\n\nLord London Courtesy marquess's wife Marchioness of London Madam or\n\nDear Lady London My Lady or\n\nLady London Courtesy earl Earl of London My Lord or\n\nDear Lord London My Lord or\n\nLord London Courtesy earl's wife Countess of London Madam or\n\nDear Lady London My Lady or\n\nLady London Courtesy viscount Viscount London My Lord or\n\nDear Lord London My Lord or\n\nLord London Courtesy viscount's wife Viscountess London Madam or\n\nDear Lady London My Lady or\n\nLady London Courtesy baron\n\nCourtesy Lord of Parliament Lord London My Lord or\n\nDear Lord London My Lord or\n\nLord London Courtesy baron's wife\n\nWife of courtesy Lord of Parliament Lady London Madam or\n\nDear Lady London My Lady or\n\nLady London\n\nHeirs-apparent and heirs-presumptive of Scottish peers [ edit ]\n\n(Heirs-apparent and heirs-presumptive of Scottish peers use the titles \"Master\" and \"Mistress\"; these are substantive, not courtesy titles. If, however, the individual is the eldest son of a Duke, Marquess or Earl, then he uses the appropriate courtesy title, as noted above.)\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Scottish peer's heir-apparent\n\nor heir-presumptive The Master of Edinburgh Sir or\n\nDear Master of Edinburgh Sir or\n\nMaster Scottish peer's heiress-apparent\n\nor heiress-presumptive The Mistress of Edinburgh Madam or\n\nDear Mistress of Edinburgh Madam or\n\nMistress\n\nSons, grandsons and great-grandsons of peers [ edit ]\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Duke's younger son\n\n(Courtesy) Marquess's younger son The Lord John Smith My Lord or\n\nDear Lord John (Smith) My Lord or\n\nLord John Duke's younger son's wife\n\n(Courtesy) Marquess's younger son's wife The Lady John Smith Madam or\n\nDear Lady John My Lady or\n\nLady John (Courtesy) Earl's younger son\n\n(Courtesy) Viscount's son\n\n(Courtesy) Baron's son\n\n(Courtesy) Lord of Parliament's son The Hon John Smith Sir or\n\nDear Mr Smith Sir or\n\nMr Smith (Courtesy) Earl's younger son's wife\n\n(Courtesy) Viscount's son's wife\n\n(Courtesy) Baron's son's wife\n\n(Courtesy) Lord of Parliament's son's wife The Hon Mrs John Smith Madam or\n\nDear Mrs Smith Madam or\n\nMrs Smith\n\nDaughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters of peers [ edit ]\n\n(If a daughter of a peer or courtesy peer marries another peer or courtesy peer, she takes her husband's rank. If she marries anyone else, she keeps her rank and title, using her husband's surname instead of her maiden name.)\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Duke's daughter\n\n(Courtesy) Marquess's daughter\n\n(Courtesy) Earl's daughter\n\n(unmarried or married to a commoner) The Lady Mary Smith (if unmarried),\n\nThe Lady Mary Brown (husband's surname, if married) Madam or\n\nDear Lady Mary My Lady or\n\nLady Mary (Courtesy) Viscount's daughter\n\n(Courtesy) Baron's daughter\n\n(Courtesy) Lord of parliament's daughter\n\n(unmarried) The Hon Mary Smith Madam or\n\nDear Miss Smith Madam or\n\nMiss Smith (Courtesy) Viscount's daughter\n\n(Courtesy) Baron's daughter\n\n(Courtesy) Lord of Parliament's daughter\n\n(married to a commoner) The Hon Mrs Brown (husband's surname) Madam or\n\nDear Mrs Brown Madam or\n\nMrs Brown\n\n[10] Gentry and minor nobility [ edit ]\n\nBaronets [ edit ]\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Baronet Sir John Smith, Bt (or Bart)[Note 5] Sir or\n\nDear Sir John (Smith) Sir or\n\nSir John Baronetess in her own right Dame Mary Smith, Btss Madam or\n\nDear Dame Mary (Smith) Madam or\n\nDame Mary Baronet's wife Lady Smith Madam or\n\nDear Lady Smith My Lady or\n\nLady Smith Baronet's divorced wife Mary, Lady Smith Baronet's widow Mary, Lady Smith\n\nDowager Lady Smith, or\n\nLady Smith if the heir incumbent is unmarried\n\nKnights [ edit ]\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Knight (of any order) Sir John Smith[Note 5] Sir or\n\nDear Sir John (Smith) Sir or\n\nSir John Lady (of the Order of the Garter or the Thistle) Lady Mary Smith Madam or\n\nDear Lady Mary (Smith) My Lady or\n\nLady Mary Dame (of an order other than the Garter or the Thistle) Dame Mary Smith Madam or\n\nDear Dame Mary (Smith) Madam or\n\nDame Mary Knight's wife Lady Smith Madam or\n\nDear Lady Smith My Lady or\n\nLady Smith\n\nScottish barons (non-peerage nobility) [ edit ]\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Feudal baron The Much Hon John Smith of Edinburgh\n\nor The Much Hon John Smith,\n\nBaron of Edinburgh or\n\nThe Much Hon The Baron of Edinburgh[8] Sir or\n\nDear Edinburgh or\n\nDear Baron Edinburgh or\n\nBaron Female feudal baroness or\n\nFeudal baron's wife As feudal baron,\n\nsubstituting \"Madam\"\n\nfor first name and\n\nsubstituting \"Baroness\" for \"Baron\", or\n\nLady Edinburgh[9] Madam or\n\nDear Baroness or Dear Lady Edinburgh Madam or\n\nBaroness or\n\nLady Edinburgh\n\nChiefs, chieftains and lairds [ edit ]\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Chief, chieftain or laird\n\n(Only lairds recognised in a\n\nterritorial designation by\n\nthe Lord Lyon) John Smith of Smith or\n\nJohn Smith of Edinburgh\n\nor\n\nJohn Smith of that Ilk or\n\nThe Smith of Smith or\n\nThe Smith of Edinburgh or\n\nThe Smith[Note 10]\n\n(only the 2nd form of\n\naddress above applies\n\nto lairds) Sir or\n\nDear Edinburgh (if placename in title) or\n\nDear Smith (otherwise) Edinburgh (if placename in title) or\n\nSmith (otherwise) Female Chief, chieftain or laird or\n\nChief, chieftain or laird's wife Chief, chieftain or laird's wife, substituting\n\n\"Madam\" or \"Mrs\" for first\n\nname or \"The\"\n\nor Lady Edinburgh[11][12][13] Madam or\n\nas on envelope Madam or\n\nas on envelope Chief (etc.)'s heir-apparent John Smith of Edinburgh, yr or\n\nJohn Smith, yr of Edinburgh or\n\nJohn Smith of Edinburgh\n\n(last only if different first name to father) Sir or\n\nDear Younger of Edinburgh or\n\nDear Mr Smith of Edinburgh Sir or\n\nYoung Edinburgh or\n\nThe Younger of Edinburgh Chief (etc.)'s heir-apparent's wife Mrs Smith of Edinburgh, yr or\n\nMrs Smith, yr of Edinburgh Madam or\n\nDear Mrs Smith of Edinburgh the Younger Madam or\n\nMrs Smith of Edinburgh Chief (etc.)'s eldest daughter (if none senior) Miss Smith of Edinburgh or\n\nJane Smith, Maid of Edinburgh Madam or\n\nDear Miss Smith of Edinburgh or\n\nDear Maid of Edinburgh Madam or\n\nMiss Smith of Edinburgh or\n\nMaid of Edinburgh Chief (etc.)'s younger daughter Miss Mary Smith of Edinburgh Madam or\n\nDear Miss Smith of Edinburgh Madam or\n\nMiss Smith of Edinburgh\n\nClergy [ edit ]\n\nChurch of England [ edit ]\n\nSimilar styles are also applied to clergy of equivalent status in other religious organisations. The words clergy and cleric\/clerk are derived from the proper term for bishops, priests and deacons still used in legal documents: Clerk in Holy Orders (e.g. \"Vivienne Frances Faull, Clerk in Holy Orders\").\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Archbishop The Most Revd and Rt Hon The Lord Archbishop of Canterbury\/York Dear Archbishop Your Grace or\n\nArchbishop Archbishop that is not in Privy Council The Most Revd The Lord Archbishop of Wales Dear Archbishop Your Grace or\n\nArchbishop Diocesan bishop in Privy Council The Rt Revd and Rt Hon The Lord Bishop of London Dear Bishop My Lord or\n\nBishop Bishop, diocesan or suffragan The Rt Revd The Lord Bishop of Durham Dear Bishop My Lord or\n\nBishop Dean The Very Revd The Dean of York Dear Mr\/Madam Dean Dean or\n\nMr\/Madam Dean Archdeacon The Ven The Archdeacon of London Dear Archdeacon Archdeacon Prebendary The Revd Prebendary Smith Dear Prebendary Smith Prebend Canon The Revd Canon John Smith Dear Canon Canon Priest The Revd John Smith Dear Mr\/Mrs\/Ms Smith Mr\/Mrs\/Ms Smith or\n\nVicar\/Rector\/Prebendary\/Curate\/Chaplain etc. as applicable Deacon The Revd Deacon John Smith or\n\nThe Revd John Smith\n\nDear Mr\/Mrs\/Ms Smith or\n\nDear Deacon Smith Deacon Smith or Mr\/Mrs\/Ms Smith\n\nThe usage 'Lord' as applied to a bishop pre-dates the United Kingdom, and is a well-established convention. It is more usual to abbreviate Reverend (if at all) to Rev'd rather than Rev. Where a personal name is not used for a priest or deacon, the manner of address is Rev Mr etc., i.e. the Rev is used with the usual title. Without this title, the use of Rev with a surname should not be used in the United Kingdom for any ordained person, whether Anglican or not - it is a solecism. Catholic (and Anglo-Catholic) clergy favour Fr (Father) {or Mthr (Mother)}. For further details see Crockford's Guide to addressing the Clergy.\n\nClergy: 'introduce as Mr Pike or Father Pike according to his preference' (Debrett's Etiquette and Modern Manners 1981 pg230)\n\nChurch of Scotland [ edit ]\n\nIt should be noted that the Church of Scotland as a Presbyterian Church recognizes state-awarded titles only as courtesy. In court (Assembly, Presbytery and Session) one may only be addressed as Mr, Mrs, Miss, Dr, Prof, etc. depending on academic achievement. Thus ministers are correctly addressed as, for example Mr Smith or Mrs Smith unless they have a higher degree or academic appointment e.g. Dr Smith or Prof. Smith. It is 'infra dig' to use the title 'Rev' and even the use of 'the Rev Mr' requires sensitivity to official style.\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly His Grace The Lord High Commissioner Your Grace Your Grace or Sir\/Ma'am Clergy The Rev John Smith Dear Mr Smith Mr Smith\/Dr Smith etc. Current Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland The Right Rev John Smith Dear Mr Smith Mr Smith\/Dr Smith etc. Former Moderators of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland The Very Rev John Smith Dear Mr Smith Mr Smith\/Dr Smith etc.\n\nJudiciary [ edit ]\n\nUnited Kingdom [ edit ]\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address In court Male Justice of the Supreme Court The Lord Smith, PC Lord Smith Lord Smith My Lord[14] Female Justice of the Supreme Court The Lady Smith, PC Lady Smith Lady Smith My Lady[14]\n\nEngland and Wales [ edit ]\n\nScotland [ edit ]\n\nA judge's first name only forms part of their judicial style if, at the time of their appointment, there is a senior judge with the same or a similar surname. Thus, if there is a \"Mr Justice Smith\", subsequent judges will be \"Mr Justice John Smith\", \"Mrs Justice Mary Smith\", etc.\n\nA member of the Bar (but not a solicitor) addresses a circuit judge or higher, out of court, as \"Judge\".\n\nAcademics [ edit ]\n\nThe forms of address used for academics can, in most cases, be either formal or social.[18][19]\n\nPosition On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address In conversation Chancellor (formal) The Chancellor of [university name] Dear Chancellor Chancellor (if on a platform) or by name and title The Chancellor or by name Chancellor (social) [Name],[Note 13] Chancellor of [university name] By name By name or Chancellor The Chancellor or by name Vice-Chancellor (formal) The Vice-Chancellor of [university name][Note 14] Dear Sir\/Madam\/Vice-Chancellor Vice-Chancellor (if on a platform) or by name The Vice-Chancellor or by name Vice-Chancellor (social) [Name],[Note 13] Vice-Chancellor of [university name] By name or Dear Vice-Chancellor Vice-Chancellor (if on a platform) or by name The Vice-Chancellor or by name Professor (formal) Professor Jane Smith[Note 15] Dear Sir\/Madam Professor Smith Professor Smith Professor (social) Professor Jane Smith Dear Professor Smith Professor Smith Professor Smith Doctor (formal)[Note 16] Dr Jane Smith or The Revd John Smith DD or Susan Brown MD or Tom Brown PhD, etc.[Note 17] Dear Sir\/Madam Dr Smith Dr Smith Doctor (social)[Note 16] Dr Jane Smith Dear Dr Smith Dr Smith Dr Smith\n\nSee also [ edit ]\n\nNotes [ edit ]\n\n^ \"London\" represents any peerage title. ^ The forms given under \"Salutation in Letter\" are for use in social correspondence only. In formal letters, \"Sir\" or \"Madam\" would be used instead. ^ [3] and [4] The definite article \"the\" in the middle of two or more titles is sometimes capitalized, as in these tables. However this is controversial: traditional British guides use the lower-case \"the\". As a single example, Debrett's gives \"Major-General the Lord\u2026\u2026\",and Pears' Cyclopaedia in the section on Modes of Address gives several examples where the definite article interior to a list of honours is lower case. a b c d \"of\" may be omitted in the form of Marquessates and Earldoms and included in the form of Scottish Viscountcies. It is never present in peerage Baronies and Lordships of Parliament and always present in Dukedoms and Scottish feudal Baronies. a b c d e f g h i Some styles that could represent more than one class of person are clarified by the use of post-nominal letters. For instance: Knights and Baronets are distinguished by the use of \"Bt\" (or, archaically, \"Bart\") after the latter's names (and by the use of the appropriate post-nominal letters if the former are members of an Order of Chivalry). Knights bachelor have no post-nominal letters. Substantive peers below the rank of Marquess and courtesy peers who are Privy Counsellors (both of whose titles are preceded by \"The Rt Hon\") are distinguished by the use of \"PC\" after the former's names. ^ \"Smith\" represents any surname. ^ \"Edinburgh\" represents any Scottish place name. ^ Some sources do not recommend the use of the definite article before certain courtesy titles (particularly those who have prospects of promotion within the family's titles), but it is used by official Court publications such as the Court Circular ^ If the definite article is not used before courtesy peerages and The Hon Elizabeth Smith marries Sir William Brown, she becomes The Hon Lady Brown, but if she marries the higher-ranked Lord Brown, a courtesy Baron, she becomes only Lady Brown. If this Sir William Brown's father is created Earl of London and Baron Brown, as a result of this ennoblement his wife's style will actually change, from \"The Hon Lady Brown\" to \"Lady Brown\". It is important to note that while the style may appear diminished, the precedence taken increases from that of a wife of a knight to that of a wife of an earl's eldest son. ^ The exact form of a Scottish chief's style varies from family to family, and is generally based on tradition rather than formal rules. ^ Some circuit judges \u2013 for example, the Recorder of Liverpool or circuit judges sitting in the Central Criminal Court \u2013 are addressed in court as \"My Lord\" or \"My Lady\". a b \"Master\" is used as the form of address whether the High Court Master is male or female. a b This is the full name and title as it would be according to the rules elsewhere on this page, e.g. The Viscount London, Sir John Smith, KBE, Professor Jane Doe, Dr Tom Brown. ^ Check official title for the university concerned: The Reverend the Vice-Chancellor (Oxford) The Right Worshipful the Vice-Chancellor (Cambridge), The Vice-Chancellor and Warden (Durham), The President and Provost (UCL), etc. ^ If a professor holds an ecclesiastical rank this, strictly speaking, supersedes the academic rank. However, the academic style may still be used within academia and the two can be combined, e.g. as The Reverend Professor Jane Smith. If a professor holds a peerage or a knighthood, this title can be combined, e.g. Professor Lord Smith, Professor Sir John Smith, Professor Dame Jane Smith. a b The forms off address for a doctor applies to \"the recipient of a doctorate conferred by a university or other body, such as the Council for National Academic Awards\", not just those working in academia. The exception is surgeons, who are never addressed as Doctor even if they hold a doctorate. ^ Doctorates in divinity and medicine are always given as letters after the name, and this form may optionally be used for doctorates in other faculties. If \"Dr\" is used before the name, degrees are not given after it."}
{"text":"We\u2019re excited to announce VMware Workstation 11 and Player 7 Pro today with general availability in December 2014.\n\nVMware Workstation 11\n\nVMware Workstation\u2122 11 delivers leading-edge features and performance that technical professionals rely on every day when working with virtual machines. With support for the latest version of Windows and Linux, the latest processors and hardware, and the ability to connect to VMware vCloud Air, VMware Workstation is the perfect tool to increase productivity, save time and leverage the cloud.\n\nVMware Workstation 11 updates include:\n\nReady for Windows 10 Tech Preview \u2013 Run hundreds of operating systems including the latest Microsoft Windows 10 Tech Preview. Technical users can also run the latest Linux distributions including Ubuntu 14.10, RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Fedora 20, Debian 7.6 and many more.\n\n\u2013 Run hundreds of operating systems including the latest Microsoft Windows 10 Tech Preview. Technical users can also run the latest Linux distributions including Ubuntu 14.10, RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Fedora 20, Debian 7.6 and many more. State of the Art Performance \u2013 VMware Workstation supports the latest Intel 64-bit x86 processors, including the new Haswell microarchitecture for maximum performance. Taking advantage of key new Haswell extensions, the solution also delivers up to 45 percent improvement in CPU intensive operations like multimedia and encryption\/decryption compared to Workstation 10.\n\n\u2013 VMware Workstation supports the latest Intel 64-bit x86 processors, including the new Haswell microarchitecture for maximum performance. Taking advantage of key new Haswell extensions, the solution also delivers up to 45 percent improvement in CPU intensive operations like multimedia and encryption\/decryption compared to Workstation 10. Powerful Virtual Machines and Graphics \u2013 Create virtual machines with up to 16 vCPUs, 8 TB virtual disks, 64 GB memory, and now 2GB video memory. Graphics-intensive applications can now be given an additional boost by allocating up to 2 GB of video memory per virtual machine.\n\n\u2013 Create virtual machines with up to 16 vCPUs, 8 TB virtual disks, 64 GB memory, and now 2GB video memory. Graphics-intensive applications can now be given an additional boost by allocating up to 2 GB of video memory per virtual machine. Connection to VMware vCloud Air \u2013 Connect to VMware vCloud Air to extend and scale virtual machines on a public cloud. Developers can easily connect to VMware vCloud Air and upload, run, and view virtual machines right from the Workstation interface to easily collaborate with remote team members and scale through a public cloud.\n\nVMware Player 7 Pro\n\nVMware Player 7 Pro\u2122 is a streamlined desktop virtualization application that runs multiple operating systems on the same computer without rebooting. With its simple user interface, unmatched operating system support and portability, it\u2019s now easier than ever for IT professionals to get their users up and running with a corporate desktop. Player 7 Pro is licensed for commercial use and is enabled to run restricted virtual machines created by VMware Workstation 11 and Fusion\u00ae Pro 7.\n\nKey Features Include:\n\nEnhanced Operating System Compatibility \u2013 VMware Player 7 Pro will run on the latest release of Windows including Windows 8.1 and will support prevalent operating systems like Windows XP and Windows 7 in a virtual environment so users can continue to run legacy applications as long as they need.\n\n\u2013 VMware Player 7 Pro will run on the latest release of Windows including Windows 8.1 and will support prevalent operating systems like Windows XP and Windows 7 in a virtual environment so users can continue to run legacy applications as long as they need. Greater Hardware Compatibility \u2013 VMware Player 7 Pro will be optimized to run on today\u2019s modern hardware including the latest PC laptops and high-resolution tablets.\n\n\u2013 VMware Player 7 Pro will be optimized to run on today\u2019s modern hardware including the latest PC laptops and high-resolution tablets. Updated VMware Compatibility \u2013 VMware Player 7 Pro will be able to run restricted virtual machines created by VMware Workstation 11 or VMware Fusion 7 Pro. Restricted virtual machines secure corporate desktops with encryption, runtime password protection, USB access restriction, isolation between the host and guest OS, and time limitation.\n\nNew System Requirements\n\nWhile 32 bit operating systems are supported inside virtual machines, VMware Workstation 11 and Player 7 Pro will require 64 bit processor and 64 bit host operating systems for advanced computing and enhanced performance.\n\nAvailability and Pricing\n\nVMware Workstation 11 and VMware Player 7 Pro will be available for purchase in December for $249.99 and $149.99 respectively. Upgrades from VMware Workstation 9.x and 10.x to Workstation 11 will be priced at $149.99 and upgrades from VMware Player 6 Plus to VMware Player 7 Pro will be priced at $79.99, at the time of availability.\n\nCustomers who purchase VMware Workstation 10 and VMware Player 6 Plus between October 2014 and December 2014 will receive a free electronic upgrade to VMware Workstation 11 and VMware Player 7 Pro respectively. For more details, visit the upgrade page."}
{"text":"Back in the 1990s, Steve Rambam posed as a university researcher to get war criminals to tell him their stories.\n\nIn Hope, B.C., he interviewed Antanas Kenstavicius.\n\n\u201cHe was a police chief in Lithuania and his unit, under supervision of Germans, rounded up 5,000 Jews. They were locked up for a week, the women raped, their belongings looted. Then they lined them up naked in the ditch\u2026 it took them six days to kill them all by gunfire. This guy was telling me all this matter-of-factly. He told me: \u2018Then on Nov. 19, no more Jews.\u2019\u201d\n\nIt took them six days to kill them all by gunfire. This guy was telling me all this matter-of-factly\n\nProceedings to deport Mr. Kenstavicius began in 1997; the 90-year-old died the same day.\n\nThe case was not the first, or last, Canadian failure to bring suspected Nazi war criminals to justice.\n\nNazi hunter @StevenRambam to speak in Toronto, June 24. Fundraiser for United Chesed unitedchesed.com\/store\/c1\/Featu\u2026 http:\/\/t.co\/j7ePBd2mr0 \u2014\n\nDave Gordon (@davegordonwrite) May 13, 2014\n\nIt is estimated that between 2,000 and 5,000 war criminals fled to Canada after the Second World War, but not one Nazi has ever been successfully prosecuted in this country.\n\n\u201cIt is to the Canadian government\u2019s great and eternal shame that more was not done,\u201d said Mr. Rambam, the renowned \u201cNazi hunter\u201d who will be in Toronto on Tuesday for a charity event.\n\nActivists say it\u2019s not too late for Canada to act. A handful of cases are still actionable.\n\nLooking back, a key problem was that for decades Canada did not actively pursue suspected war criminals, and when it did decide to launch proceedings they were done badly and ineffectively, said David Matas, senior legal counsel of B\u2019nai Brith Canada.\n\n\u201cCanada started too late; there were just too many perpetrators; too much evidence had been destroyed or lost. The effort was more an attempt to construct a justice legacy for the victims of the Holocaust,\u201d said Mr. Matas.\n\nThe seeds of Canada\u2019s inaction were sown three years after the end of the war. The allied powers decided that prosecuting war criminals would end and the British Commonwealth Relations Office wrote to the dominions explaining the policy.\n\nThe punishment of war criminals is more a matter of discouraging future generations, than of meting out retribution\n\n\u201cIn our view, the punishment of war criminals is more a matter of discouraging future generations, than of meting out retribution to every guilty individual,\u201d wrote the department, as revealed by Franklin Bialystok in his book Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community.\n\nThe letter went on to say it was \u201cnow necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible.\u201d\n\nIn 1985, pressure from the Jewish community led Brian Mulroney to set up a Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by Jules Desch\u00eanes. The Desch\u00eanes Commission put forward the names of 883 suspects.\n\nFrom 1987 to 1992 just 26 cases were filed before the justice system; charges were laid under the Criminal Code in four cases.\n\nThe man in the dock in 1987 was Imre Finta, the first suspect to be accused under new laws on war crimes. Mr. Finta, who came to Canada in 1948 and died here in 2003, was accused of being a key official in the rounding up of Jews in Szeged, Hungary, in 1944 and sending them to Auschwitz and to Strasshof.\n\nHis acquittal in 1990 shut down any hope of winning criminal proceedings against Nazi war criminals.\n\n\u201cFinta presented no evidence to answer the charges against him,\u201d Mr. Matas said. \u201cWhen asked if he wanted to call evidence on his own behalf at his criminal trial he declined. Yet he was acquitted.\u201d\n\nWhy? The courts allowed a defence that said believing Jews to be the enemy was a legitimate reason for killing them.\n\nTwo appeal courts agreed.\n\nParliament later legislated to overturn the reasoning in the Finta case in 2005. But by then it was too late to recommence prosecutions, Mr. Matas said.\n\nAfter the failure of criminal prosecutions, the government in 1995 announced it would use such administrative measures as revoking citizenship and ordering deportation.\n\nUnder this new course of action, two men were extradited and five deported.\n\nBernie Farber, former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, calls a 90-year-old Kitchener, Ont., man, Helmut Oberlander, the \u201cfinal symbol\u201d of Canada\u2019s failure on this issue.\n\nIn fact, three cases could still be acted on: those of Mr. Oberlander, Vladimir Katriuk, and Wasyl Odynsky.\n\nMr. Oberlander was part of a Nazi killing squad, Einsatzkommando 10a, which operated in the eastern occupied territories during the Second World War. Mr. Oberlander admits to serving with the \u201cGerman armed forces\u201d but says he never subscribed to the Nazi ideology or participated in any killings.\n\nA judge ruled in 2000 that Mr. Oberlander worked, lived, and travelled as an interpreter for a Nazi mobile death squad and, although there was no evidence he participated in atrocities, he must have been aware of them.\n\nMr. Oberlander has been fighting attempts to strip him of his citizenship and deport him since 1995.\n\nThere is no justification for continuing to give him a haven\n\nIn 2008, he was stripped of his citizenship for a second time, but in 2009, the Federal Court of Appeal instructed the federal cabinet to reconsider because of Mr. Oberlander\u2019s assertion that he joined the squad as an interpreter under duress.\n\nIn 2012, Mr. Oberlander, a Ukrainian Canadian, was again stripped of his citizenship and immediately mounted a counter challenge. The Federal Court heard the appeal in February this year, but has not yet released a decision.\n\nMr. Oberlander could not be contacted for comment.\n\nVladimir Katriuk, ranked No. 4 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center\u2019s most-wanted list, came to Canada under a false name in 1951.\n\nIn 1999, the Federal Court ruled he had obtained his Canadian citizenship by misrepresentation, but found there was no evidence he had committed atrocities. The cabinet decided in 2007 not to revoke his citizenship\n\nNew evidence in the case came when declassified records released in 2008 documented that a man with the same name as Mr. Katriuk, currently in his 90s and living on a farm in Ormstown, outside of Montreal, was a commander of a platoon in a battalion that perpetrated a massacre in a Belarusian village in 1943, and that he personally opened fire with a machine gun.\n\nB\u2019nai Brith wrote to the government in 2011 urging that the government reverse the Katriuk decision.\n\n\u201cThe information we now know about Mr. Katriuk makes it unconscionable for the existing decision \u2026 to stand. There is no justification for continuing to give him a haven in Canada,\u201d it said.\n\nThe organization never got a response.\n\nMr. Katruik has consistently refused to talk publicly about his past. His wife told the National Post on Thursday that he would not be answering any questions.\n\nWasyl Odynsky came to Canada in 1949. Mr. Odynsky, 90, who had been living in Toronto but whose whereabouts are not known, was accused of serving as a guard at two forced labour camps and in an SS battalion. While a Federal Court ruled in 2001 that he had lied to gain entry to Canada, it also found that he was unlikely to have participated in a massacre of Jewish captives.\n\nIn 2007 the government decided not to take away his citizenship.\n\nB\u2019nai B\u2019rith is also challenging that decision.\n\nMr. Rambam, the U.S. private investigator who will speak at an event for impoverished Jews in Toronto on Tuesday, believes scores of war criminals are still living in Canada.\n\n\u201cEntire units came en masse into Canada through Halifax in the 1940s,\u201d he said. \u201cCanada knew at that time who they were.\n\n\u201cIf there are a few cases that can still be brought, just for the sake of doing the right thing, then that should happen.\u201d\n\n\u201cNone will live long enough to make it to trial, they will hire excellent lawyers. \u2026 They\u2019ll delay and throw legal roadblocks in the way until they have died safely in their beds, but it\u2019s the point of doing it.\u201d\n\nIt was the justice system itself that in the end let us down\n\nMr. Rambam interviewed 72 out of a list of 1,000 suspected Nazis living in Canada. His work was sent to the authorities, but he said little was done.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a stain on the history of Canada,\u201d he said.\n\nMr. Farber views things slightly differently.\n\n\u201cThe government did look at this matter with laser focus, so I think we have to give them credit \u2026 they tried. It was the justice system itself that in the end let us down.\u201d\n\nPaloma Aguilar, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said individuals who have been involved in war crimes or crimes against humanity would find no haven in Canada.\n\n\u201cThe Desch\u00eanes Commission put forward the names of 883 suspects. To this day, federal authorities have investigated upward of 2,000 files,\u201d she said.\n\n\u201cThe government continues to receive allegations, all of which are examined.\u201d\n\nNational Post"}
{"text":"Sausage Party has become the surprise hit of a summer sorely lacking in them, making almost $37 million on a $19 million budget. Well, now animators are speaking out about how the film kept costs down.\n\nStories about horrible working conditions first started coming out in the comments of a Cartoon Brew interview with directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. Anonymous commenters claiming to have worked on the film flooded the article with complaints about working for Nitrogen Studios. Here are a few examples:\n\nThe production cost were kept low because Greg would demand people work overtime for free. If you wouldn\u2019t work late for free your work would be assigned to someone who would stay late or come in on the weekend. Some artist were even threatened with termination for not staying late to hit a deadline.\n\nAlmost half the animation team was not credited. The team believed in this film and poured their hearts and souls into it. Despite this, more than half of it was not credited. You can see the full team on IMDB, which contains 83 people (and I am certain there are some missing). The film\u2019s credits, however, contains 47.\n\nAll of the comments are truth or maybe rather written too lightly. I personally know & witnessed many other incidents during the production; such as an \u201cOpen Letter\u201d to the clients, and how Greg threatened artists for it. I cannot put more details because I\u2019m scared of revealing my identity.. and *I really want to keep working in this industry* Sickening how one can brag about production cost, when he was the one who demanded artists to work for free, otherwise get fired.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nIt made sense that the commenters were anonymous: everyone was afraid of reprisals, especially since the stories included Tiernan threatening to ruin people\u2019s careers. But, of course, that also made it hard to verify.\n\nNow Variety has talked to the animators while keeping their names out of the story. And it all sounds true. The \u201cOpen Letter\u201d referenced above was a petition sent to Annapurna Pictures\u2014the production company behind the film\u2014by the animators telling them about the conditions. According an animator, one of the reasons they had to send a letter to the clients was because the person that received the complaints about Nitrogen was Nicole Stine, Tiernan\u2019s wife.\n\n\u201cThere was no one you could go to,\u201d the animator told Variety. \u201cIt was uncomfortable.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nNitrogen Studios is based in Vancouver, and conditions similar to these are apparently the norm in non-US-based animation studios. It\u2019s a combination of an overabundance worldwide of animators, making it hard to rock the boat when you know it\u2019s easy to be replaced, and Canada providing tax incentives for productions. In Los Angeles, animators are unionized and have protections workers in other countries just don\u2019t have.\n\nSony, which distributed the film, and Annapurna didn\u2019t comment on the Variety story, while Tiernan told Variety that the complaints were \u201cwithout merit\u201d and wouldn\u2019t explain why they existed, if they weren\u2019t true. \u201cWe take these things seriously and don\u2019t want to ignore these claims,\u201d he said.\n\nNow that complaints been made public, they can\u2019t.\n\n[Variety]"}
{"text":"This week's edition of Critical Reception examines online reaction to People Can Fly's first-person shooter, which reviews describe as \"an intelligent, nuanced design with fathoms of depth.\"currently earns a score of 86 out of 100 at Metacritic.com.David Houghton at Games Radar scoresat 10 out of 10 . \",\" he begins, \"is a very intelligent, highly intricate, and sumptuously nuanced design masquerading as a big dumb action game. In fact it's such an evolution of the FPS experience that it's very probably destined for that pantheon of rare games to be deemed worthy of the word 'important' in a couple of years time.\"is not just a shooter,\" Houghton explains. \"In fact, once you've taken the time to really explore its depths, you'll realise that being a shooter is just one small part of what it's about. It's just as much a 3D puzzle game, high-speed strategy game, and even, if you really get into it, a bit of a maths challenge too.\"'s combo system proves to be a compelling mechanic. \"You're constantly judged on the complexity and inventiveness of your kills, and scores decrease with repetition,\" Houghton says.\"The points you score for clever killing are the currency you use to buy new weapons, as well as functionality upgrades for your existing ones. Every gun and additional perk is meticulously designed to integrate with and balance against the others, opening up a pantheon of new options with each one that's added to the mix.\"These options make up's comprehensive list of Skill Shots, a line-up of circumstantial kills and stacked combos detailed in the pause menu, which comprise every possible violent interaction you'll concoct and plenty you won't. We're talking well over a hundred individual 'moves' here, with an accessible freedom of blendability that evokes the glory days of's combo system.\"This ultimately defines the experience, according to Houghton. \"None of this creative killing is any mere gimmick. It all serves serious purpose,\" Houghton says. \"The kind of interactions most games save for their most inventive Achievements or Trophies,builds its core game around. And when you really start plumbing its depths you'll discover a sense of personal involvement and purpose within its world that genuinely is groundbreaking.\"\"Forget your preconceptions ofas a foul-mouthed big dumb action game,\" Houghton writes. \"It's an intelligent, nuanced design with fathoms of depth, which marks a return to the importance of player creativity in shooters and simultaneously evolves the concept of interactivity in an FPS world. And with two cleverly complimentary secondary modes, it will have serious legs for a good long while to come.\"IGN's Arthur Gies ratesat 8 out of 10 . \"At face value I shouldn't like,\" he begins. \"It comes off as obnoxious and crass, full of toilet humor, emphasizing a sort of dickish boldness and attitude that's been driven into the ground by countless shooters over the last few years.\"\"So it's a surprise then thatis actually something kind of special,\" Gies says. \"Sure, it's still brash, and it's still full of toilet humor, but with context,is a violently charming popcorn shooter that plays well with some great design.\"Gies praises's Leash weapon, in particular. \"The Leash allows Grayson to snag enemies and fling them into the air in slow motion, and its AI has been designed to evaluate combat performance \ufffd it rewards balls-out combat bravado in the form of points that can be redeemed at Confederate resupply pods scattered around the planet,\" he explains. \"By combining shots to specific appendages and\/or bathing suit areas with standing and sliding kicks, the Leash, and various environmental hazards, you'll discover a variety of named kill combos that reward more points than standard shots.\"Gies continues: \"The Leash AI takes all of's unique and genre-defying mechanical elements and makes sense of them within its own particular reality. It's... smart. Who'd have thought, particularly given the throwback nature of's first person shooting? There's no cover, enemies aren't especially smart, and levels are a straight shot from A to B, butstill impresses. In tandem with shooting that feels responsive and meaty, with powerful, interesting weapons, the combo system makes's combat a success.\"disappoints with its omission of cooperative play, however. \"The time-and-score-attack Echo mode is a nice enough inclusion with its online-enabled leaderboards, but why isn't there leaderboard-enabled campaign scoring in the main game?\" Gies asks. \"Campaign co-op also seems like a missed opportunity; you have at least one AI partner at all times in, which makes the solo-only nature of the main game that much more jarring. Campaign leaderboards would help give replay value to a main game that I finished in less than six hours, and Echo just didn't hold my attention.\"demonstrates the value of 'why' for action games,\" Gies asserts. \"Taken out of the context of its fiction, People Can Fly would have something fun but forgettable on their hands, but the wayfits together results in something cool and memorable. Multiplayer failings notwithstanding,shines as a single-player shooter.\"Taylor Cocke at 1UP.com gives a B- grade . \"Billed as the 'antidote' to the modern shooter,is certainly on a much higher level of ridiculousness than, say, thefranchise or the recent reboot of,\" he notes. \"Even its sister series,, which is over-the-top in its own right, can't keep up with's old school, hyper masculine tendencies. And yet, it doesn't go quite far enough.\"Cocke finds that's limp narrative is one of its greatest shortcomings. \"Unfortunately,doesn't manage to escape the pitfalls of those it seemingly attempts to lampoon,\" he explains. \"The story revolves around Grayson's obsession with taking down his former commanding officer Serrano for a past deception that caused Grayson and his covert operations unit, Dead Echo, to assassinate various innocent citizens under the pretense that they were enemies of the state. Of course, upon discovering that fact, Grayson declares that he'll have his revenge. Sound too serious? It really is.\"Cocke continues: \"All the game needed to was a simple excuse to go on a rampage, not a deep motivation to appease some sort of indignant revenge desire. For a game ostensibly based around absurd violence and 'killing with skill', the seriousness of the plot feels like a misstep.\"This softens the impact of's over-the-top gameplay. \"There's a discrepancy between the Skillshot-heavy gameplay and the overtly serious plot that drags the campaign down,\" Cocke writes. \"While I attempted to have a good time with action and vulgar jokes, the plot intruded. All I wanted to do was kick fools into massive cactus spikes (for the Pricked Skillshot, of course), but I the generic, all too serious plot points simply took my maniacal murderous rage, previously aimed at the on-screen enemies, and redirected it right back at the unnecessarily humorless plot.\"is a game unsure of what it wants to achieve,\" Cocke concludes. \"When it lets itself, it's a fantastic adrenaline rush through well-constructed set-pieces and gloriously fun-to-watch violence. But it too often drags itself down with overly structured situations and restrictive, strategy-heavy gameplay.\"It feels like if chaos had been allowed to take the design process over, this could have had one of the most fun shooters of our generation, but as it stands,is a mechanically enjoyable game that's missing what it needed to be great.\""}
{"text":"Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were asked directly if Donald Trump is a racist at Wednesday\u2019s Democratic debate in Miami.\n\n\u201cSecretary Clinton, you have known Donald Trump a long time. You have seen what kind of campaign he\u2019s running,\u201d the Washington Post\u2019s Karen Tumulty said 20 minutes into the debate. \u201cSecretary Clinton, is Donald Trump a racist?\u201d\n\nClinton first said she prefers to keep the Democratic primary about Democrats, then reiterated her criticisms of Trump\u2019s xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric \u2014 and added a splash of spanish.\n\n\u201cI was the first one to call him out. I called him out when he was calling Mexicans rapists, when he was engaging in rhetoric that I found deeply offensive. I said basta,\u201d she said, drawing applause from the room. \u201cAnd I am pleased that others are also joining in making clear that his rhetoric, his demagoguery, his trafficking in prejudice and paranoia has no place in our political system. Especially from somebody running for president who couldn\u2019t decide whether or not to disavow the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nPressed by Tumulty, she again demurred from the journalist\u2019s label but said the Democratic nominee \u201ccan make the case against him, if he is the nominee, by pointing out what he has said, what he claims to believe in, the values he\u2019s promoting. I think that\u2019s a better way for the American people to draw their conclusions.\u201d\n\nTumulty put the question differently to Sanders, asking if it was fair to say Trump is racist. Sanders also declined to provide a direct yes-or-no. After saying that Americans will never elect someone who insults Mexicans, Muslims, women, and African-Americans, Sanders pointed out Trump\u2019s prominent role in a racist smear of Barack Obama.\n\n\u201cAnd let us not forget that several years ago Trump was in the middle of the so-called Birther movement trying to delegitimize the President of the United States of America,\u201d Sanders continued, to applause. \u201cMy dad was born in Poland and I know a little bit about the immigrant experience. Nobody has ever asked me for my birth certificate. Maybe it has something to do with the color of my skin.\u201d\n\nMeanwhile on the right, Trump\u2019s rise has helped reinvigorate avowed white supremacist groups. \u201cDemoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that,\u201d Stormfront founder Don Black recently told Politico.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThe Southern Poverty Law Center\u2019s recent report on white nationalist activity in 2015 found a 14 percent rise in the number of hate groups, and cites other research finding more people were killed by domestic terrorists in 2015 than in any year since 1995. According to the group, this moment is comparable in radical white racist activity to 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In a sense, then, the Grand Old Party is coming full circle on its long-running strategic deployment of coded racism that prominent Republican strategist Lee Atwater described at the dawn of the Reagan era."}
{"text":"Fireworks black market: Experts struggle to halt sale of illegal crackers\n\nPosted\n\nPyrotechnics experts are warning it will be difficult to stop Australia's dangerous underground market of illegal professional-grade fireworks.\n\nPolice are urging people to hand in their stashes of illegal fireworks before Australia Day, as they investigate two deaths from accidents with the devices.\n\nA 52-year-old man on the NSW Central Coast and a 46-year-old man in Victoria's Gippsland died after they attempted to set off illegal crackers on New Year's Eve.\n\nAustralia's fireworks industry is made up of between 250 to 300 companies.\n\nChristian Howard, the president of the Pyrotechnics Industry Association, said the black market fireworks were sourced from legal suppliers in Australia, rather than imported from overseas.\n\n\"I think the legal market of suppliers sell to the legal users, that they potentially on-sell them to the illegal market,\" he said.\n\n\"So there's a supply chain that's all legal and then at some point people start selling them to the public.\n\n\"I think there is a small amount of direct import but I think that's actually been slowed down in the last 10 years. It's very difficult to export them and import them into the country.\"\n\nMr Howard admits it will be difficult to stop the black market in illegal fireworks.\n\n\"There was a person selling fireworks out of a white van in Western Sydney and one of my colleagues who worked in the area just advised me that they were there.\n\n\"We alerted the authorities.\n\n\"They worked out he'd sold several hundred cartons of fireworks per year, just as a one person driving around in a van making a lot of cash on the side.\"\n\nThat person was linked back to a legal supply chain.\n\n\"In actual fact, he had a licence to use pyrotechnics but he would buy them and not use them, he would buy them and sell them, which is illegal because you need a licence to sell.\"\n\nFireworks are also freely for sale on the internet, including on Facebook.\n\n\"We take a lot of time and energy to make sure as an industry that we are safe with storage, handling, using, transporting and then the fact that then anyone can then buy them or sell them online and the general public is then using fireworks,\" Mr Howard said.\n\n\"And probably most of the time they are not low-level fireworks, they are probably the professional-grade, high-altitude aerial shells, which are very dangerous.\"\n\n'Hand them in', police warn\n\nThe sale of fireworks is banned in Australia, except on a single day in the Northern Territory, and under tight controls in Tasmania.\n\nThe deaths of two men on New Year's Eve are believed to be the first deaths from illegal crackers in four years.\n\nVictoria's Deputy Commissioner Andrew Crisp has urged people who may be holding onto illegal fireworks for Australia Day to hand them in.\n\n\"If you have illegal fireworks hand them in, report to Victoria police report to Worksafe, if you know of someone whose got illegal fireworks, similarly report it.\n\n\"How would you feel if you knew someone was about to let off illegal fireworks and it resulted in serious injury or the death of another person?\"\n\nTopics: accidents---other, accidents, disasters-and-accidents, law-crime-and-justice, crime, australia, nsw, vic"}
{"text":"Watergate veterans have seen this movie before about a president firing his attorney general to stop an investigation.\n\nIt didn\u2019t work back then, and the consensus among three Watergate insiders interviewed by The Daily Beast is that it won\u2019t work now. Just as the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973 marked the beginning of the end for President Nixon, who resigned in August 1974, President Trump would grease the skids for himself if he tries to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions with someone who would fire special counsel Robert Mueller.\n\n\u201cMueller is the kind of guy who would say, \u2018Fire me without cause, and I\u2019m going to Court.\u2019 And that could end up strengthening the Special Counsel,\u201d says John Dean, Nixon\u2019s White House counsel during much of Watergate.\n\n\u201cThey can\u2019t just cook up a PR campaign. It\u2019s like the Muslim ban. You just can\u2019t do it and pretend there\u2019s cause. The courts could come in and play havoc with Trump. It\u2019s amazing the institutions are working exactly the way they should. It\u2019s a pleasant surprise.\u201d\n\nConservative backing for the embattled Sessions appears to have scared Trump off Sessions, at least for now, as some Republicans are beginning to show some backbone. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley tweeted that there is no room on the committee\u2019s schedule to confirm a new AG\u2014and if Trump tried to slip one in while the Senate was in recess, it would almost certainly trigger a constitutional crisis.\n\nPublic outrage forced Nixon to name a second special prosecutor to replace the fired Archibald Cox. The White House thought Texas lawyer Leon Jaworski wouldn\u2019t be overly aggressive. After he heard the tape of Dean telling Nixon there is a \u201ccancer on the presidency,\u201d Jaworski told Dean he knew the president was \u201cguilty as sin.\u201d\n\nI asked Dean if he thought we could get that kind of clarity today. After all, as Trump likes to point out, the FBI has been investigating the Russia connection for a year, and no one has been charged with a crime. \u201cWe\u2019re in a different technical era,\u201d Dean replied. \u201cWho knows what\u2019s out there today. Who knows what the NSA is sitting on. None of us have seen this intelligence.\u201d\n\nAs news has poured in over the less than 200 days that Trump has served as president, people have forgotten how \u201cagonizingly slow Watergate was,\u201d says Dean.\n\nNixon\u2019s resignation on Aug. 8, 1974 came 782 days after the June 17, 1972, break-in. It was 920 days after the break-in that a jury found former Attorney General John Mitchell and aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman guilty of conspiracy to obstruct justice.\n\nElizabeth Holtzman was a member then of the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Democrat Peter Rodino in the Democratic controlled House, and in her telling, the Democrats took no action even as the taping system in the White House was disclosed, along with Dean\u2019s \u201ccancer on the presidency\u201d and reports of the Watergate burglars being paid off with hush money (PDF). There were serious abuses of power, if not criminality by the president. In July of 1973, Father Drinan, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, filed an article of impeachment based on Nixon\u2019s secret bombing of Cambodia.\n\n\u201cAnd nobody paid attention,\u201d she says, even as Nixon was trying to dismantle a signature Great Society program, the Office of Economic Opportunity. \u201cSo you had the president thumbing his nose at limitations of power, but none of that moved anybody in the leadership of the House. Peter Rodino had no interest in impeachment. It was really forced by the American people.\u201d\n\nThe trigger event was the Saturday Night Massacre. Members of the House were inundated with phone calls and telegrams. \u201cThe American people were outraged. It was an amazing shift in public opinion,\u201d says Holtzman. \u201cMy office was flooded with messages. That\u2019s what started the process [of impeachment]. It was not a partisan process.\n\n\u201cThe lesson for Trump is if the American people realize that he\u2019s threatening our democracy, and they don\u2019t want to be a banana republic, the president can\u2019t pick his prosecutor. They can force the Congress into action. Nixon had a huge landslide victory in 1972 and 11 months later, the Saturday Night Massacre was the beginning of the end. We expect our president to obey the law.\u201d\n\nWhen the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed Elliot Richardson as Richard Kleindienst\u2019s successor in May \u201973, they made him name a special prosecutor to their liking, Archibald Cox, and pledge that he would not fire Cox except for \u201cextraordinary improprieties,\u201d a Justice Department regulation that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has adopted in saying he would not fire special counsel Robert Mueller except for \u201ccause.\u201d\n\nRichard Ben-Veniste was one of the lead Watergate prosecutors, \u201cfollowing money to find a motive,\u201d he recalled to The Daily Beast, from the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) and then ultimately the White House.\n\nHe explains that here, investigators are probing Trump\u2019s financial dealings to determine whether they provide a motive for Trump asking Comey to go easy.\n\nBen-Veniste reminds those impatient with the pace of the Russia investigation that for a long period after the break-in, the White House was successful at deflecting investigative efforts to determine who sponsored it. Those efforts to deflect turned out to be obstruction of justice, so a separate crime was committed.\n\nAs today\u2019s investigation unfolds, he cautions that \u201cwe are drifting into what may be uncharted waters if Trump makes good on his threat to fire Mueller. That would create a constitutional crisis.\u201d\n\nAsked how that might play out, he says it\u2019s \u201cunclear whether Trump would find anyone\u201d to fire Mueller if Rosenstein refused. Asked how far down in the Justice Department Trump could go, Ben-Veniste said, \u201cI don\u2019t know if the elevator goes down that far.\u201d\n\nHe concluded our conversation saying that if Trump does what everybody is advising him not to do, and one way or another, gets rid of Mueller, it will come down to \u201cwhether Republicans in Congress can put country above party. Our system will be severely tested, and we will find out whether we are a government of laws, where the rule of law is respected, or whether an outrage like firing a person lawfully appointed is acceptable to one political party.\u201d\n\nIf Trump understood Watergate, he\u2019d be having second thoughts about trying to push out Sessions, says Dean.\n\nUnlike Sessions, who has significant support both in the Senate and in the conservative media, Kleindienst was easy to toss overboard. During marathon confirmation hearings over a record 22 days, he repeatedly perjured himself on his knowledge of an antitrust case that involved a $400,000 payoff to the 1972 Republican convention. The case had nothing to do with Watergate, but Kleindienst resigned under fire the same day (April 30, 1973) that Nixon announced the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and fired Dean.\n\nAt least Nixon didn\u2019t trash Kleindienst in public, I ventured in my conversation with Dean. \u201cNixon did that in private,\u201d he said, before there was Twitter. \u201cThere\u2019s no one who worked for Nixon he hadn\u2019t trashed on the tapes.\u201d\n\nDean calls the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg\u2019s psychiatrist\u2019s office in September of 1971 the reason the White House was so concerned about the Watergate break-in. Gordon Liddy, who headed the White House Plumbers unit (named for its initial mission of plugging leaks), had used two of the same guys, who were now in jail and could tie the break-ins to the White House. \u201cOtherwise we would have cut the Re-Elect loose,\u201d says Dean.\n\nLiddy\u2019s plan had gotten shot down twice before Mitchell signed off, saying, \u201cgive them $250,000 and see what they come up with.\u201d\n\nThe casual straying from dirty tricks to criminal behavior is striking. \u201cWe wrote the book on what not to do, and Trump doesn\u2019t seem to have any knowledge of what\u2019s in that book,\u201d says Dean.\n\n\u201cA lot of Watergate is just bungling\u2014it\u2019s pure bungling\u2014stupid things, like not hiring a lawyer. I tried to get Ehrlichman to agree to a criminal lawyer on my staff after Liddy confessed to me the same people were used in the Ellsberg break-in\u2014the first I heard of the Ellsberg break-in. Ehrlichman shot me down.\u201d\n\nAfter he left the White House, Dean learned of a handwritten memo signed by Ehrlichman authorizing the Ellsberg break-in \u201cas long as it is not traceable to the White House.\u201d It was an options memo on how to deal with Ellsberg, who had released the Pentagon Papers, and one of the options suggested by the Plumbers was to enter his psychiatrist\u2019s office, take his files and use them to discredit him.\n\nNixon launched into the cover-up very early, not because anybody told him about the Ellsberg situation, but because he was concerned about Mitchell, says Dean. \u201cBut for John Mitchell, he never would have become president. Mitchell is to Nixon what Trump\u2019s family is to him\u2014you can\u2019t get any closer.\u201d When Nixon came to New York from California, Mitchell set him up as a partner in a prestigious law firm, put money in his pocket, and when Nixon decided to run again in 1968, Mitchell ran the campaign.\n\nMitchell didn\u2019t want to be attorney general, according to Dean, but Nixon insisted, and the president was very worried on a personal level about Mitchell. \u201cAnd that comes through on the tapes,\u201d says Dean. \u201cFour days after the arrest of the Watergate burglars, there\u2019s a conversation where Nixon says, \u2018Let\u2019s just put all the facts out, put this thing behind us\u2014but if that\u2019s going to hurt Mitchell, we can\u2019t do it.\n\n\u201cThat was a bungle,\u201d says Dean. At every point where they could have cut their losses, they dug in deeper, and the crimes piled up under the heading conspiracy to obstruct justice. There was also the cover-up Nixon got away with, says Dean, by intentionally disrupting President Johnson\u2019s efforts to get peace in 1968.\n\nNixon biographer John Farrell found the evidence in Haldeman\u2019s notes, \u201cand if that isn\u2019t treason it sure does look, feel and smell like it,\u201d says Dean. \u201cIt was long suspected that Nixon wanted to break into the Brookings Institution when he heard they had \u2018bombing halt\u2019 papers. He might have been worried they had papers somehow showing what he had done with South Vietnam.\u201d\n\nThe Republic survived Watergate and people thought the safeguards put in place afterward ensured that a scandal of that magnitude could never happen again. Forty government officials were indicted or went to jail. One Senate investigator who did not want to give his name told The Daily Beast, \u201cIn retrospect, everyone in the administration who got anywhere near Watergate, even tangentially, lied or sat still while other people lied. It was a lesson in an administration going absolutely wild. My whole generation of lawyers and politicians feel this is history repeating itself\u2014the same personal characteristics, personal weaknesses, the same personal desire to acquire and embrace power.\u201d\n\nSome people saved their reputation then, notably Attorney General Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, who defied Nixon\u2019s order to fire the special prosecutor. We\u2019re waiting for today\u2019s profiles in courage. There should be ample opportunity."}
{"text":"China\u2019s Digging\n\nSince the industrialization of coal, the world has sourced much of its energy from fossil fuels. While the global energy landscape has started to change again over the past several years, with the introduction of more renewable and cleaner sources, fossil fuels are still the main source of much of today\u2019s energy. However, it looks like China has now found a way to access a previously elusive source of energy.\n\nReports from China\u2019s Ministry of Land and Resources claim that the country has successfully extracted methane hydrate \u2014 also known as \u201cflammable ice\u201d \u2014 from beneath the South China Sea, just 300 kilometers (186 miles) southeast of Hong Kong.\n\n\u201cWe brought the gas to the surface and have lit it up since May 10. By now, the drill has been running continually for eight days,\u201d project leader and deputy chief engineer at the China Geological Survey Ye Jianliang told the South China Morning Post. \u201cThe daily output [of gas] exceeds 10,000 cubic meters. The best day recorded 35,000 cubic meters.\u201d\n\nNot Clean Enough\n\nThough methane hydrate is not a new discovery, researchers have had difficulty putting it to practical use. The substance is called \u201cflammable ice\u201d because it looks like ice, but it\u2019s actually methane trapped inside water molecule lattices. Deposits of methane hydrate are usually found in areas with low temperatures and moderate pressure, such as the bottom of the ocean, making them difficult to access."}
{"text":"CNET\n\nYahoo.com visitors over the last few days may have been served with malware via the Yahoo ad network, according to Fox IT, a security firm in the Netherlands. Users visiting pages with the malicious ads were redirected to sites armed with code that exploits vulnerabilities in Java and installs a variety of different malware.\n\nCorrection:This story previously stated that the ads required a click to trigger the exploit. According to Maarten van Dantzig of Fox IT, the ad being displayed is enough to redirect users to the malware injection site. We are checking with Yahoo for further explanation.\n\nIn a blog post, Fox IT estimated that, based on sample traffic, the number of visits to the site carrying the malicious code was visited around 300,000 times per hour.\n\n\"Given a typical infection rate of 9% this would result in around 27,000 infections every hour. Based on the same sample, the countries most affected by the exploit kit are Romania, Britain, and France. At this time it's unclear why those countries are most affected, it is likely due to the configuration of the malicious advertisements on Yahoo,\" Fox IT said on its blog.\n\nThe security firm found evidence that the redirects go to domains hosted in the Netherlands, but was unable to identity the perpetrators. Traffic has slowed to the exploit, Fox IT noted, suggesting that Yahoo is addressing the vulnerability.\n\nYahoo confirmed the presence of malware on its servers and said it had taken steps to combat the issue.\n\n\"We recently identified an ad designed to spread malware to some of our users,\" Yahoo said Saturday in a statement. \"We immediately removed it and will continue to monitor and block any ads being used for this activity.\"\n\nIn a further statement issued Sunday, a Yahoo spokesperson said:\n\nOn Friday, January 3, on our European sites, we served some advertisements that did not meet our editorial guidelines, specifically, they were designed to spread malware. We promptly removed these advertisements. Users in North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America were not served these advertisements and were not affected. Additionally, users using Macs and mobile devices were not affected.\n\nYahoo subsequently modified its statement, adding that malicious ads were served between December 31 and January 3, not just Jan. 3. The spokesperson added that the company plans to post more information on the malware incident for its users.\n\nUpdated January 5, 2014, with additional information from Yahoo.\n\n[Via ZDNet and the Washington Post]"}
{"text":"David Zalubowski\/Associated Press\n\nNate Jackson was a tight end and wide receiver with the Denver Broncos from 2003-08. In April, he wrote about the draft from a player\u2019s perspective.\n\nYour body says No, but your brain says Yes.\n\nYes, you will get out of bed. Yes, you will try to eat breakfast. And Yes, you will put on your pads and run out on that field. Despite the pain, the doubt, and the fear, you will say Yes. You always say Yes.\n\nTraining camp is hell. Some players adapt to hell well, some burn up quickly. But there is no way around the psychological and physical warfare that players will endure this month.\n\nIn a strictly physical analysis, training camp brutalizes the body. The N.F.L. is home to the strongest, most explosive athletes on the planet. Being hit over and over again by these men is a painful ordeal, not so much as it\u2019s happening, but after the fact: after practice, late at night, early in the morning. Morning is the worst.\n\nAbout three or four days into training camp is when the soreness starts to peak, and it sticks around for about a week and a half until your body starts to desensitize itself to misery. During my six seasons with the Denver Broncos, there were days when getting out of bed was so difficult I was sure there was no way I could practice. Of course I was wrong. I found a way to get it done. Football players learn how to push down the pain and make a play. But it hurts later. It hurts a lot.\n\nCompounding the physical pain is the strange dichotomy between players and coaches. Coaches expect mathematic perfection from their players, so most often, whatever a player does is not quite right. There is always something to improve, even when you get the job done. As my friend Stefan Fatsis eloquently describes it in his book A Few Seconds of Panic, about the summer he spent on the field with me and my Denver teammates (as a kicker), different coaches communicate in different ways. But in the N.F.L., the militaristic approach usually dominates: veiny-foreheaded dopplegangers berating players daily.\n\nThe longer you\u2019re around, the more the cackle becomes background noise, which you learn to accept as an industry standard. But it\u2019s unproductive, because the aim begins to be, \u201cDon\u2019t make a mistake, don\u2019t get yelled at.\u201d That\u2019s an awful way to play football, especially when the dudes doing the yelling are or were inferior athletes to you.\n\nThe verbal haranguing isn\u2019t exclusive to the field. In meetings every day and night, it continues. The decibel level decreases, but it\u2019s no less biting. Every play of every practice is watched on film by the whole team that same day. Morning practice is watched in the afternoon before the afternoon practice, and the afternoon practice is watched at night before going home. Practices are watched on huge screens with high quality projectors. When a player makes a mistake, it is pointed out and discussed.\n\nNothing slips through the cracks. Depending on the severity of the mistake, and the frequency of mistakes being made by the player, the reaction from the coaches will vary, but the feeling for the player is always horrible. Being called out in meetings and having everyone in the room watching you fail in slow motion \u2014 often with a laser pointer on your two-dimensional body \u2014 is demoralizing, and only intensifies the pain. This scrutiny is well intentioned, but often falls flat from overkill, the message trampled by the messenger.\n\nTeams will go through their training-camp schedule for about eight days before a day off. Eight straight days is bad enough, but the length of each day makes it feel much longer. Each day feels like three days. Players arrive at the facility at roughly 7:30 a.m. The first practice is at 8:30 and lasts until around 11. After that comes lunch and a bit of down time, when players relax however they can: napping, video games, reading, crying. A special-teams meeting at around 1:30 p.m. is followed by offense\/defense meetings, then back on the field around 4 for a slightly shorter practice than in the morning. After practice is dinner, then meetings from 7 p.m. until 10 p.m.\n\nThe meetings drag on more than one would imagine. N.F.L. players spend typically twice as much time in meeting rooms as they do on the field. The attention to detail and robotic application of minute coaching points become an obsession, so there\u2019s always something to fix. This drains the brain. It\u2019s not uncommon to see a rookie make mistake after mistake as he mopes around the field on one day or another, simply because his brain is filled to the brim with detailed coaching points. The players who end up making the team and having a sustained career in the N.F.L. are the ones who can process these details and apply them quickly. It\u2019s one thing to understand what you\u2019re supposed to do, but to actually do it, at 100 miles an hour against the best in the world, is another thing entirely.\n\nAdding to the general feelings of blah and barf are cuts that must be made as August progresses. Realistically, of the 80 guys on each roster, 15 are already cut. Coaches have a pretty good idea of what the final roster will look like. There\u2019s a little bit of wiggle room in the middle of the depth chart. At every position, there are usually two guys competing for one spot. This is usually where I found myself, fighting for my professional life on a daily basis, battling with another good football player who was often my friend. I learned how to win that daily battle, but it never came easy, and someone was always left in its wake.\n\nBut this is in the middle of the depth chart, meaning that if a team is carrying 10 receivers in camp, receivers Nos. 5 and 6 are battling for a job. Nos. 7 through 10 are camp bodies, there to bolster the numbers, to take punishment, to give veterans an occasional rest, to serve as verbal punching bags for position coaches trying to make a point. This happens at every position, even quarterback. Players see this happening to them, and there is nothing they can do about it. At the bottom of the depth chart, guys get very few quality \u201creps\u201d \u2014 repetitions, turns to play in practice. Coaches often encourage these players, saying things like, \u201cDon\u2019t count your reps, make your reps count!\u201d But reality sets in. For many, this will be the last football they will ever play.\n\nYes, there is much to worry about this month for players on N.F.L. teams. For every superstar, there are 10 blue-collar players who fear their job security is in danger. This fear makes them anxious and paranoid. If you know someone in the N.F.L., leave him alone this month. If he survives, he will be better for the experience. Just wait until September to ask him about it."}
{"text":"Khao Yai National Park, Thailand\n\nThailand\u2019s not known for its wine; you\u2019re much more likely to think of beer when you think of this South-east Asian nation. But at Khao Yai National Park, around two hours by road from Bangkok, you\u2019ll find a cluster of wineries, producing an array of reds and whites.\n\nThe locally run Thailand Wine Tours (thailandwinetour.com) take visitors on a tour of the national park where they can spot the huge white Buddha statue on a hilltop, as well as visiting two wineries. Prices start from 7,850 baht (\u00a3169) for two people including transport from Bangkok, lunch, wine and English speaking guides.\n\nJoin Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just \u00a35.99 \u20ac6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just \u00a35.99 \u20ac6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads \u2013 for just \u00a35.99 \u20ac6.99 $9.99 a month\n\nLastminute.com has a week in Bangkok from \u00a3377pp including flights and two-star room-only accommodation.\n\nKefalonia, Greece\n\nThe Ionian island of Kefalonia, off the west coast of mainland Greece, has a beautiful landscapes and exceptional wines \u2013 some of which can\u2019t be exported, so a trip here is the only way you\u2019ll get to taste them.\n\nThe Robola Wine Cooperative, in the Omala valley, is around an hour from all of the main resorts, and half an hour from the capital, Argostoli.\n\nThomson (thomson.co.uk) offers packages to Kefalonia from \u00a3534pp in October including flights and self-catering accommodation in Skala, and for an additional \u20ac45pp you can book a day trip to Argostoli and the Robola vineyards, where you can try a selection of whites, reds, and a very strong dessert wine \u2013 which I would describe as half way between a port and a sherry. In addition to the wine, the views of the valley are worth the visit alone.\n\nJeruzalem, Slovenia\n\nLjubljana markets itself as a \"City of Vine and Wine\"; this despite there being no vineyards in or around the city. But if you\u2019re not satisfied with the Slovenian capital\u2019s numerous wineries, take a two-hour trip to the north-eastern village of Jeruzalem. It\u2019s renowned for its white wines and great views, which can be experienced in tandem on a walking wine tour.\n\nThe Ljubljana tourist board runs a Wine Routes of Jeruzalem tour (visitljubljana.com) in which you\u2019ll visit Prlekija, a Slovenian region known for its wine, food and thermal springs, before heading to the wine hills of Jeruzalem.\n\nThe tour costs \u20ac102 including wine tasting, lunch and transfers. The tour is available from the beginning of March \u2013 30 October.\n\nExpedia (expedia.co.uk) offers four nights in Ljubljana from \u00a3220pp including flights.\n\nOahu, Hawaii\n\nHawaii conjures imagery of fresh fruit, bright cocktails and exotic flavours, yet you\u2019ll also find wine produced here. Island Mana Wines (islandmanawines.com), in Honolulu\u2019s beachside Waikiki neighbourhood, on the isle of Oahu, is a wine tasting experience with a difference. The tipples here are not made with grapes, but instead include varieties produced from guava, mango, passion fruit and pineapple\u2013 all sourced from organic fruit native to the island. Reservations must be made in advance; entry is free, you just pay for the wine you drink.\n\nVirgin Holidays (virginholidays.co.uk) offers a week in Waikiki from \u00a31470pp in October, including flights and room-only accommodation.\n\nSkane, Sweden\n\nSkane, the region known for producing Absolut vodka, started to make a name for itself in the wine world during the 1990s. The main grapes of the region are solaris and rondo, which produce fruity whites and full-bodied reds. The Hallakra Vingard (hallakra.com), however, is renowned for its pinor noir. Groups of eight or more can book tours and tastings on request all year round (it\u2019s open to the general public over the summer); prices available on request.\n\nThe vineyard is half an hour from the city of Malmo, or around an hour from Copenhagen \u2013 across the bridge in Denmark. easyJet Holidays (easyjet.com\/holidays) has three nights in Copenhagen from \u00a3290pp including flights and hotel, room only."}
{"text":"British society needs modernisation but instead Brits will be busy rebuilding bridges they are about to tear down\n\nI love British humour. When something goes fundamentally wrong, the British laugh at it.\n\nBrexit? The EU now has 1GB of free space. If that gives you a wry smile, better jokes will be along soon \u2013 Brexit has a lot of potential to go wrong.\n\nTravelling for two months around Britain and Ireland, visiting Birmingham, Hull, Grimsby, York, Edinburgh, Belfast, Newry and Dundalk, I got an idea of why so many people voted for Brexit and how difficult it will be. For Britain, Europe and the rest of the world.\n\nGuardian readers gave me inspiration for where to go and who to meet, sending nearly 100 emails after I asked for tips in my first article. \u201cYou should visit my 76-year-old mum in Grimsby. In a Brexit heartland, she was the one swearing at our bridge club players, telling them not to betray their grandchildren,\u201d wrote Paul.\n\nIt was a pleasure to meet the resolute Mary Randall and her friends Margaret and Beat Haessig in Grimsby, and it helped me understand people\u2019s anxieties and challenges in an area that has suffered a long period of economic decline.\n\nWhen Margaret was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, Grimsby was thriving. By the time Mary moved to the town in 1983, the decline had already begun. \u201cBut when the fish industry went downhill there was no investment at all,\u201d she said. \u201cThe young people went away because there were no jobs for them.\u201d\n\nThey showed me around once-busy shopping areas, now run-down, and pointed out shops and businesses that had closed.\n\nTravelling to Hull the next day, practically a stone\u2019s throw away on the other side of the river Humber, took almost two hours because there is no proper train connection. Local entrepreneurs told me how fed up they were with the bad infrastructure and the lack of investment from Westminster. I heard \u201cyou in London\u201d a lot, even though I was only a temporary Londoner for two months.\n\nThe people I spoke to who had voted for Brexit and claimed to be fed up with Europe really had more specific concerns: sinking living standards, a lack of affordable housing, rising poverty and an inefficient NHS. All good reasons to be disgruntled, though Brussels is hardly to blame.\n\nThe morning I left Grimsby was the day the world learned that Donald Trump had won the US election. The outsider had beaten the establishment. Plenty of people, including me, felt that Brexit had happened again.\n\nFrank Stauss, a political consultant who has organised several election campaigns for the Social Democrats in Germany, said Trump\u2019s biggest asset was \u201cthat he didn\u2019t stand for going on with business as usual\u201d. Trump\u2019s voters in the US wanted a change, and so did leave voters in Britain. They were fed up with an establishment that promised wealth and prosperity in the EU when they were experiencing the opposite.\n\nWhen I came to Britain I had a picture in my mind of a divided society in which young, urban and well-educated people had voted for remain, while elderly and working-class people, and xenophobic ones, had voted to leave.\n\nBut it isn\u2019t that simple. I met a shipowner who employs only Polish people on his trawlers but voted to leave. (If the Poles left, he said, he would hire Russians instead.) I talked to a porter who was proud to have voted remain.\n\nBritish society as I experienced it has more and deeper faultlines than any other country I have lived in \u2013 namely Poland, Sweden, Germany and Italy.\n\nAccording to research by Poverty and Social Exclusion, 30 million people in the UK suffer from financial insecurity, 4 million people are not properly fed and 2.3m households cannot afford to heat the living areas of their homes. On the other hand, more billionaires live here than in many other countries, and the economy has grown over the last six years.\n\n\u201cPrivileged\u201d young Londoners with good jobs told me that starting a family was out of the question because they could not afford flats with enough space. \u201cOur parents live in houses we could never afford,\u201d say the millennials. The Northern Irish and Scottish complain that they are neglected by decision-makers in London.\n\nSome Britons claim Polish people are taking their jobs, but the Poles say they were welcomed at first as cheap labour, then treated with mistrust when they took on better jobs and homes. \u201cThe British liked us in these cheap jobs and became concerned when they improved,\u201d my friend Ania Faluta, with whom I studied in Poland, told me. She started her career in London 11 years ago as a cleaner and is now a project manager.\n\nIt struck me sometimes that the British are so occupied with competing \u2013 in their jobs, dancing, baking, with other nations \u2013 that they miss the bigger picture.\n\nAn education system that provides chances for everybody irrespective of social background? Well, has there ever been a Guardian editor from a comprehensive school?\n\nA modern childcare system that is affordable and adapted to the needs of families? Women told me how they jeopardised their careers by staying at home with their toddlers because it was cheaper than sending them to nursery.\n\nAn efficient healthcare system? I spent hours listening to my housemate\u2019s enraged reports about his experiences in waiting rooms.\n\nWith every week I spent in Britain, I grew fonder of the German federal system that allows states to set their own key issues, independent of the government in Berlin, and of a social system that allows me to have four children, a full-time job and to afford a two-month break abroad.\n\nBritish society could do with modernisation, in my view. It\u2019s so 1980s. But I doubt if Brexit will bring that about. Instead, the British will be occupied with rebuilding the bridges to the EU that they are just about to tear down.\n\nThat\u2019s what the negotiations are aimed at, aren\u2019t they? To leave Europe and the European single market, and at the same time guarantee access to the latter. Norway, which could serve as an example, is not a member of the EU but of the European Economic Area, and has 70% of EU directives and 17% of EU regulations in force.\n\nBrexit seems like a big waste of time and money, but nevertheless I\u2019d prefer the British to be as close as possible to the EU. When Theresa May sets off to embrace the autocrats in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the other Gulf countries, the democratic opposition in these countries will be even less heard.\n\nBut the EU is also far from perfect. Its harshest critics should not be easily dismissed. And we Germans could do with a good deal more of the politeness, consideration and respect that people in Britain show to their fellow humans.\n\nAnd, of course, with some British humour. How many Germans do you need to change a lightbulb? One! They are so efficient and have no sense of humour. You see?"}
{"text":"When Massachusetts voters legalized recreational marijuana in November, it sparked a war in the legislature, where some lawmakers are bent on limiting the sale, use and cultivation of the intoxicating plant. Pro-pot advocates have accused lawmakers of trampling on the will of the voters as bill after bill \u2014 37 to be exact \u2014 has been filed to scale back the legalization rollout. One bill, filed by Sen. William Brownsberger, D-Belmont, on behalf of a constituent, seeks wholesale repeal of the referendum that legalized pot. Recommended Slideshows 4 Pictures PHOTOS: Singapore's treasures star in NY Botanical Garden's 2019 Orchid Show 4 Pictures 36 Pictures Oscars 2019: Red carpet looks and full list of winners 36 Pictures 36 Pictures All of these celebrities have had their nudes leaked 36 Pictures More picture galleries 16 Pictures These photos of Trump and Ivanka will make you deeply uncomfortable 16 Pictures 4 Pictures Inside Brooklyn's Teknopolis is tech that makes us more human 4 Pictures 4 Pictures Inside The Strand's Fight Against Being Named a New York City Landmark 4 Pictures \u201cWhat we are worried about is bills that would really eviscerate what was passed in November,\u201d said Jim Borghesani, spokesman for the Yes on 4 campaign that lobbied for legalization. \u201cIt goes completely against the will of the people. You can\u2019t say you pledged to uphold the will of the people while at the same time filing bills that gut the very measure the people approved.\u201d The referendum to legalize retail pot sales and possession and growing the plant for adults over 21 passed by more than 53 percent of those who voted. Among other things, the bills would: Slash the amount of pot people over 21 can possess in their homes from 10 ounces to 2 ounces; Cut the number of plants people could grow from 12 down to six per household; Impose a two-year moratorium on the sale of marijuana-infused products at retail dispensaries; Give regulators the power to outright ban any product other than the leafy plant matter itself. In Colorado, where recreational pot was legalized in 2012, infusedproducts account for more than 50 percent of the market, state data shows . Related Articles Melting pot simmers Oakland legalizes pot growth Fruity One-Pot Lamb Fourteen of these bills were filed by Sen. Jason Lewis, D-Winchester, a leader in the failed crusade to stop legalization, who has said the specifics should be left to the legislature to \u201cresponsibly, thoughtfully and safely implement a legal marijuana market in Massachusetts.\u201d The legislature has already successfully pushed back the opening of retail dispensaries and the establishment of a Cannabis Control Commission by six months, something Borghesani also opposes. \u201cLewis is a prohibitionist and his bills are reflecting his position,\u201d Borghesani said. \u201cDuring the campaign, he opposed legalization just like he opposed med marijuana and just like he opposed the decriminalization of marijuana. Now he is doing his best to undo what voters approved overwhelmingly in November.\u201d"}
{"text":"Ciaran Clark scored in Newcastle's 6-0 win at QPR in September, but his own goal denied the Magpies victory at St James' Park\n\nCiaran Clark's last-minute headed own goal handed Queens Park Rangers a draw at St James' Park and denied Newcastle United top spot in the Championship.\n\nJonjo Shelvey's superb half-volley put the hosts ahead inside 37 seconds, but it was Rangers who created by far the better of the first-half chances and equalised through Conor Washington.\n\nNewcastle, beaten by Oxford in the FA Cup on Saturday, then edged back in front thanks to Matt Ritchie's header.\n\nBut Clark's error earned QPR a point.\n\nThe 27-year-old defender was stretching back in an attempt to clear Kazenga LuaLua's cross, but could only loop his header from the edge of the area over stranded goalkeeper Karl Darlow.\n\nIt means Rafael Benitez's side remain in second, one point behind leaders Brighton & Hove Albion and only four clear of Reading in third.\n\nOn the overall balance of play it was no more than QPR deserved, having carved out several opportunities in the first half before looking dangerous on the break in the second.\n\nThe visitors wasted numerous chances to equalise even before Washington eventually poked them level from close range, with Massimo Luongo twice failing to beat Darlow when well placed.\n\nNewcastle wrested their advantage back early in the second half through Ritchie's smart finish - his 11th goal of the season - and looked on course for a return to the summit of the Championship table.\n\nHowever, Clark's mistake in the final minute of normal time gave QPR a valuable point to move them up to 18th, nine points clear of the relegation zone.\n\nNewcastle manager Rafael Benitez:\n\n\"We had a lot of chances but we didn't take our chances and we conceded with an own goal which is the worst thing that can happen.\n\n\"We didn't take the chances that we had. We needed to score the third goal but we didn't do it.\n\n\"We're all disappointed that we couldn't get three points.\"\n\nQPR boss Ian Holloway:\n\n\"Would I have taken this after 45 seconds? Yeah.\n\n\"We took a punch on the chin, shook ourselves down and managed to go. We've got to learn to be a bit more clinical but I'm delighted for everybody.\n\n\"I've brought a whole load of new people in. That group has done us all proud.\""}
{"text":"The British Obsession with Parliamentary Sovereignty\n\nGerry Hassan\n\nThe Scotsman, January 15th 2011\n\nThe curse of the European issue has been slowly re-emerging for the Tory led government after a period of relative quiet and calm.\n\nRight-wing voices have stated that the European Union Bill with its Clause 18 defining parliamentary sovereignty is not clear and powerful enough to block the continued encroachment of Brussels into British public life.\n\nWhat then is this thing called parliamentary sovereignty, why are our political classes obsessed with it, and what does this tell us about the health of our democracy?\n\nBritain\u2019s parliamentary sovereignty is based on the Diceyian notion that no Parliament can legally bind its successor. It is of course a myth, fraud, and part of the folklore which makes up how the British constitution has evolved over time.\n\nThe actual reality is that Britain stopped being governed by parliamentary sovereignty in the pure sense a long time ago. The rise of party and cabinet government was one factor in the early 20th century bemoaned by Dicey. Another was the creation of dominion status for Canada and Australia in the Empire, limiting the powers of Parliament.\n\nA significant moment in all of this was the accession of the UK to the then Common Market in 1973. Related to this has been the emergence of a more politicised judiciary, the increased use of judicial review and the passing of the Human Rights Act.\n\nThen there is Scotland. Long before devolution we had MacCormick versus the Lord Advocate in 1953 \u2013 a complicated judgement which in many eyes qualified parliamentary sovereignty in Scotland.\n\nMore crucially do our elected politicians really believe the people out there hold on to the idea of parliamentary sovereignty? Have they learned nothing from the expenses scandal and the private welfare state they built to cocoon themselves from the harsh winds they inflicted on the rest of us? The public rage on this showed a sentiment that was shaped by popular, not parliamentary sovereignty.\n\nPolitical power now stems from the people, not Parliament. The confused Conservative Eurosceptic response to this is shown by the fact that their suggested ultimate defence of parliamentary sovereignty in the European Union Bill is the holding of a referendum whenever the European Union proposes a significant extension of its powers into UK domestic life.\n\nAs any constitutional student at even A Level would know \u2013 a referendum \u2013 a device once frowned upon by the defenders of the British constitution as being \u2018unBritish\u2019 and the sort of thing \u2018continental dictatorships\u2019 used such as Hitler and Stalin \u2013 undermines parliamentary sovereignty. The reason being it is an expression of popular sovereignty.\n\nSome of the Tory discontent in this is admittedly with the party\u2019s backbench frustration with the Cameroons and David Cameron himself. There is a feeling which strays far beyond the Tory right that David Cameron isn\u2019t exactly \u2018a Tory\u2019 and that this is not a Conservative enough administration.\n\nThe toxic distrust on the Tory right takes them into a surreal world of the land of make believe where a more full-blooded Conservative Party would be rapturously received by the voters; it is the kind of Walter Mitty fantasyland which the Labour left used to inhabit in the 1980s and which did such damage to the Labour Party.\n\nStrangely one of the paradoxes of this is that as parliamentary sovereignty has weakened in practice, our political classes have become more obsessed by it. One explanation for this is that it is one of the tales told of which makes Westminster and its politicians feel special and unique. Parliamentary sovereignty is one of the last stories of British exceptionalism; a kind of British version of the American dream but just for our political elites.\n\nThen there is the story of British democracy and liberty, which has by modern times been reduced to a Whig style caricature and set of clich\u00e9s whereby all the Westminster classes sign up to the special importance of Britishness.\n\nParliamentary sovereignty has a special place in this story, for it is the conventional account of how Britain became a democracy, its politicians stood up to despots, and overthrew arbitrary power. All of this was then given validation through British democracy surviving the Second World War when as the phrase goes \u2018we kept the lights on in Europe\u2019 and then built a welfare state and civilised society.\n\nOur democracy and Parliament was meant to be the envy of the world at the end of Second World War, but this fed into a British complacency and conceit. One British expert on politics responded to an American academic by stating that \u2018the British constitution\u2019 was \u2018as nearly perfect as any human institution could be\u2019. Now only two other democracies in the world have parliamentary sovereignty, New Zealand and Finland, while the First Past the Post electoral system is only rarely used in places such as the USA, Canada and India. British democracy is increasingly an anachronism in the world.\n\nThere is more to it than that. The old system of parliamentary sovereignty was shaped by a carefully constructed system of checks and balances which gave Britain relatively representative and responsible government. However, as Britain faced huge economic and social challenges and decline this system began to fall apart.\n\nFrom Thatcher on governments have chosen to interpret a literal version of parliamentary sovereignty to do what they like: be partisan, centralise powers, reward groups of supporters, and abolish tiers of government as they fancy, and much worse.\n\nThatcherism and New Labour drove through their revolutions on minority votes, aided by our truncated democracy and the ethos of parliamentary sovereignty. This allowed them to mount in Chris Mullin\u2019s words \u2018a very British coup\u2019, using the cloak of time old precedent to push through far-reaching change.\n\nStill to this day the dusty, rarefied, ancient corridors of Westminster are filled not only with the ghosts and tales of old, but with present day worship and deference to the voodoo myth that is parliamentary sovereignty.\n\nIt is a fiction, but the worst, most damaging kind of fiction, one which our political classes believe to be true, and act accordingly. It is a mantra which animates and holds prison our politics, political system and ourselves, the people.\n\nIt has long outserved its usefulness, and should be carted away to some special museum or made the subject of a David Starkey TV special on the mumbo-jumbo which people used to believe in the bad old days. It is time for Britain to enter the modern age, become a fully-fledged democracy, and dispense with the idea that parliamentary sovereignty protects us."}
{"text":"Tony Gentile, POOL, AFP | Pope Francis (pictured centre) with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his wife, Jeannette, at the Vatican on March 20, 2017\n\nPope Francis asked for forgiveness on Monday for the \u201csins and failings of the Church\u201d during Rwanda\u2019s 1994 genocide, saying he hoped his apology would help heal the African state\u2019s wounds.\n\nADVERTISING Read more\n\nBut Rwanda\u2019s government indicated it felt the apology did not go far enough, saying the local Church was still complicit in protecting the perpetrators of the genocide.\n\nAt a meeting with Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Pope Francis said that priests and Roman Catholic faithful had taken part in the slaughter of some 800,000 people from the ethnic Tutsi minority as well as moderates from the Hutu majority.\n\n\u201c(The pope) implored anew God\u2019s forgiveness for the sins and failings of the Church and its members, among whom priests, and religious men and women who succumbed to hatred and violence,\u201d the Vatican said in a statement.\n\nAn official Rwandan statement repeated the government\u2019s long-standing accusation of Catholic complicity in the massacres.\n\n\u201cToday, genocide denial and trivialisation continue to flourish in certain groups within the Church and genocide suspects have been shielded from justice within Catholic institutions,\u201d said a government statement.\n\nKagame, a Tutsi, led a rebel force to halt the slaughter in 1994 and accusations immediately surfaced that some priests and nuns had taken part in the killings.\n\nSome of the ugliest massacres were committed in churches, missions and parishes where Tutsis who took shelter were hunted down by extremist Hutu militias.\n\nA U.N. court in 2006 jailed a former Catholic priest for 15 years for ordering bulldozers to level a church, killing 2,000 people who were hiding inside.\n\nRwandan authorities have said other clergy implicated in the killings were allowed to start new lives in Europe and were protected by the Church.\n\nA Rwandan military court sentenced a missing priest in absentia to life in prison on charges of rape and delivering Tutsi refugees from his church to militias who killed them.\n\nLater arrested in France, where he was a popular priest in a rural parish, his case was eventually dropped and he was allowed to remain working at the parish. He has denied the charges.\n\nThe Catholic Church in Rwanda last year offered an apology, saying some of its members had fanned the ethnic hatred that led to the killings, but Kagame said at the time that he wanted the pope himself to say sorry.\n\n\u201cWhy doesn\u2019t he apologise like he does with other cases where more minor crimes were committed by comparison with here?,\u201d he said, referring to sexual abuse cases where the pope has regularly apologised to victims and their families.\n\nFrancis said on Monday he hoped his \u201chumble recognition of the failings of that period, which, unfortunately, disfigured the face of the Church, may contribute to a \u2018purification of memory\u2019 and may promote, in hope and renewed trust, a future of peace\u201d.\n\n(REUTERS)"}
{"text":"2\n\nPresident \ue000 rump has laid out \ue001our princi ples \ue001or tax re\ue001orm: First, make the tax code simple, \ue001air and easy to understand. Second, give American workers a pay raise by allowing them to keep more o\ue001 their hard-earned pay checks. Tird, make America the jobs magnet o \ue001 the world by levelin g the playing \ufb01eld \ue001or American businesses and workers. Finally , bring back trillions o\ue001 dollars that are currently kept o\ufb00shore to reinvest in the American economy. Te President\u2019 s \ue001our princip les are consisten t with the goals o\ue001 both congression al tax-writing committees, and are at the core o\ue001 this \ue001ramework \ue001or \ufb01xing America\u2019s broken tax code. \ue000oo many in our country are shut out o\ue001 the dynamism o\ue001 the U.S. economy, which has led to the justi\ufb01able \ue001eeling that the system is rigged against hardw orking American s. With signi\ufb01can t and meaning\ue001ul tax re\ue001orm and relie\ue001, we will create a \ue001airer system that levels the playing \ufb01eld and extends economic opportunities to American workers, small businesses, and middle-income \ue001amilies. Te \ue000rum p Administration and Congress will work together to produce tax re\ue001orm that w ill put America \ufb01rst.\n\nOVERVIEW"}
{"text":"Back in June, Toronto singer Daniel Caesar dropped two stunning new tracks, \"We Find Love\" and \"Blessed,\" as a kind of two-for-one single. Today he's gifting us with a grainy visual for the songs, which you can watch above. In the video, Caesar \u2014 who's low-key a total heartthrob \u2014 finds love, loses it, and finds it again.\n\nADVERTISEMENT\n\nToday, he's also announcing his debut album, Freudian, which will be out August 25 on Golden Child Recordings.\n\n\"I've never been as proud about anything I've created in my whole life,\" Caesar wrote in a note to The FADER, about the forthcoming full-length. \"This body of work is about examining my most complex feelings and thoughts more directly. I'm more exposed than ever on this album. It's like I'm in therapy, but it's on display. And I got to make this with my friends. It's just us, no label, so it makes it that much more special.\""}
{"text":"At this point, it should come as no surprise when Donald Trump manipulates the truth to his political advantage. However, presenting false racially biased statistics a day after an African-American protester was thrown out of one of his events doesn\u2019t send the best message.\n\nEarlier on Sunday afternoon, Trump did his weird version of a manual retweet of an image depicting a man (in this context, assumed to be black), with a bandana over his face pointing a gun sideways toward a list of wholly fabricated statistics.\n\nThe image alleges that 97 percent of African Americans were killed by African Americans, while only 1 percent of murdered African Americans were killed by police. These two statistics are demarcated from the rest in blue and red ink respectively. It also claims 81 percent of whites who are killed are killed by blacks, which is pure race-baiting at its most ignorant. The numbers in this erroneous image are attributed to the \u201cCrime Statistics Bureau - San Francisco,\u201d and reflect 2015 data.\n\nFor one thing, a \u201cCrime Statistics Bureau\u201d does not exist. The FBI is responsible for this data and they have yet to release a report on 2015, because, well, 2015 is not over yet.\n\nSecondly, whoever made that image did so with the intent of lying about the percentage of white Americans killed by black Americans. In 2014, that number was 14 percent, not 81 percent.\n\nAdditionally, in the graphic, only 16 percent of whites are killed by other whites. In the same FBI report, it clearly states that 82.3 percent of whites are in fact killed by other whites, which is very similar to the number of blacks killed by blacks (89.9 percent).\n\nFinally, when The Daily Beast reverse google image searched the picture, the only yielded results were attributed to YouTube videos in Arabic, which featured a duplicated image of the man in the picture Trump shared.\n\nThis explicit truth-bending is only compounded by the fact that a Black Lives Matter protester named Mercutio Southall Jr. was kicked out of a Trump rally in Alabama on Saturday.\n\n\u201cGet him the hell out of here, will you please?\u201d Trump requested at the rally. \u201cGet him out of here. Throw him out!\u201d\n\nSouthall at one point was on the ground being kicked and punched by several white men in attendance. When asked about the violent incident this morning on Fox & Friends, Trump said, \u201cMaybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing. I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a trouble-maker who was looking to make trouble.\u201d\n\nThe Daily Beast has reached out for comment to Southall Jr., who said he was repeatedly called a \u201cnigger\u201d and a \u201cmonkey\u201d at the event. Meanwhile in a Facebook message, his father asked me for some time before speaking about yesterday's events.\n\nThe Trump campaign has not responded to a question from The Daily Beast about whether Trump himself retweeted the image and where he got the information within it.\n\nThe FBI National Press Office told me they would have to wait until staffers were at work tomorrow to assess the validity of the data."}
{"text":"Williams \"couldn't afford\" to put together a mule car to run in Pirelli's 2017 tyre test program this year, according to Pat Symonds.\n\nPirelli asked teams to produce modified cars in order to simulate increased levels of downforce, allowing it to test the 2017 tyres before next year's cars hit the track. Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull will carry out a number of tests from August until November, with all three testing two days after the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi.\n\nWilliams was one of the teams to originally signal its intent to take part but Symonds - who is the team's chief technical officer - says the costs were too high.\n\n\"Not second class, but we don't have the money to do it,\" Symonds told the official Formula One website when asked if missing out makes it a second class team. \"We wanted to join, but then we worked out the costs and it showed that we couldn't afford to do it.\n\n\"Pirelli will disseminate the information as best as they can, but it will never be the same as running it on your car. And we certainly don't have a strategic relationship with any other team!\"\n\nAnd Symonds believes the change in tyre regulations next year will be the \"most crucial\" difference in 2017, but says tyre strategy will continue to play a part in races.\n\n\"Not eliminated - that would be a too strong word - but if Pirelli hit the target then I would expect that two-stop races turn into one-stop races and three-stop races turn into two-stop races. We will see wider windows to make the pit stop - so the strategic element will be less, but not eliminated.\n\n\"Of all the changes for 2017 the tyres will be the most crucial I believe. All teams aside from the three that do testing will have no knowledge of what the 2017 tyres will look like until they run them in February. Only Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull are testing - the rest, we need to see.\"\n\nClosing the gap? 2016 constructors points progression\n\nFEATURE: Red Bull Racing: Be My Guest\n\nFrom the cockpit: Felipe Nasr on the green grass of home\n\nKeep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter"}
{"text":"The manufacturer of the diet candy Ayds is seeking a new name for its product because publicity about the deadly disease AIDS is hurting sales, the chairman said today.\n\nThe diet suppressant has been on the market for 47 years and remains a profitable product for the the Dep Corporation, but sales have dropped by as much as 50 percent in recent years because of the name association, Robert Berglass, the chairman, said.\n\nSince January, Ayds has been marketed in Britain as Aydslim. If sales show signs of recovery, the appetite-suppressant candy may be sold in the United States under that name later this year, Mr. Berglass said.\n\nSo far, reaction from retailers has been positive, he said, but consumer reaction has not been determined. Consumer reaction could be available within a few months becuase most people go on diets in the spring, he said.\n\nFederal health officials believe about 40,000 Americans have been stricken with AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome."}
{"text":"EU Looks To Prevent Employers From Viewing An Applicant's Publicly Available Social Media Information\n\nfrom the well-that's-dumb dept\n\nEver since social media sites like Facebook and Twitter became household names here in America, we've occasionally had really stupid debates about just what type of access to those accounts employers should get from their employees. Some states have even passed laws that would allow employers to demand social media passwords from employees and applicants, presumably so that company reps can comb through private messages and posts shared only with the employee's or applicant's friends. If all of that seems stupid to you, that's because it totally is!\n\nBut it's not remotely as dumb as what the EU has decided to do in regulating corporations such that they are disallowed from viewing public social media information about an applicant unless it directly relates to the job for which they have applied. To be clear, this new regulation is non-binding at the moment, but it will be the basis of data protection laws set to come out in the future. Still, preventing a company from viewing publicly available information doesn't make much sense.\n\nEmployers who use Facebook, Twitter and other social media to check on potential job candidates could be breaking European law in future. An EU data protection working party has ruled that employers should require \"legal grounds\" before snooping. The recommendations are non-binding, but will influence forthcoming changes to data protection laws. The guidelines from the Article 29 working party will inform a radical shake-up of European data protection laws, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which are due to come into force in May 2018. Their recommendations also suggest that any data collected from an internet search of potential candidates must be necessary and relevant to the performance of the job.\n\nWhen it comes to privacy restrictions on matters of social media, it seems to me that there is an easy demarcation line that ought to suffice here: that which is public and that which is not. Most social media sites come with handy tools to keep some or all portions of an account private, or shareable only amongst connections within the platform. If an applicant wants something kept from the eyes of an employer, they need only hide it behind those privacy options. This regulation, however, would restrict a company from accessing public information, which should plainly be viewed as nonsensical.\n\nThe post notes that recruitment sites like CareerBuilder have seen rates of 70% or so employers that check public social media accounts of applicants they consider hiring. That's as surprising as the sun rising each morning. It's barely even considered creepy any longer to google the names of friends, never mind people you're looking to hire. Somehow I don't see any regulation curbing that across a continent.\n\nFiled Under: data protection, eu, interviews, jobs, privacy, public info, social media"}
{"text":"Americans believe that obesity is tied with cancer as the biggest health threat in the nation today. But though scientific research shows that diet and exercise are insufficient solutions, a large majority say fat people should be able to summon the willpower to lose weight on their own.\n\nThe findings are from a nationally representative survey of 1,509 adults released on Tuesday by NORC at the University of Chicago, an independent research institution. The study, funded by the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, found that concerns about obesity have risen. Just a few years ago, in a more limited survey, cancer was seen as the most serious health threat.\n\nThe lead researcher, Jennifer Benz of the survey group at the University of Chicago, said that to her knowledge no other survey has provided so comprehensive a view of Americans\u2019 beliefs about obesity, including how to treat it, whether people are personally responsible for it and whether it is a disease.\n\nResearchers say obesity, which affects one-third of Americans, is caused by interactions between the environment and genetics and has little to do with sloth or gluttony. There are hundreds of genes that can predispose to obesity in an environment where food is cheap and portions are abundant."}
{"text":"Glendale Water & Power is warning customers of a recent increase in telephone scams aimed at bilking them of thousands of dollars for phony past-due bills.\n\nCustomers are contacted by presumed customer service representatives and told their accounts are delinquent and they must pay immediately over the phone or face service shutoff. They are instructed to purchase a Green Pack Money Card \u2014 a specific prepaid debit card \u2014 from a 7-Eleven or Rite Aid and then call back to pay the bill using the card.\n\nIn the past week, three separate customers have paid the scammers between $1,000 and $2,000 each, according to GWP spokeswoman Atineh Haroutunian.\n\nThe scheme is run mostly from outside the United States, and organizers use software to make the calls appear on caller ID to be coming from GWP or from local numbers with an 818 area code, the utility said in a statement.\n\nGWP says its representatives will never ask for payment over the phone, and customers who receive these types of calls are encouraged to contact the utility at 818-548-3300 to check the true status of their account and report the attempted fraud.\n\nCustomers are also asked to call the Glendale Police Department at 818-548-4911 to report the calls."}
{"text":"ADVERTISEMENT\n\nWouldn't it be nice if we could just get all the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump garbage out in the open now, pour it in some toxic news dump and sift through it for a week, air out all the shiny pieces, then go back to talking for six months about which policies are better for America?\n\nIf your answer is no, that would be boring, you're in luck.\n\nThese past two weeks, essentially the first in the general election campaign, Trump has taken us back to the 1990s, the Bill Clinton presidency, especially Clinton's extramarital affairs, even an unsubstantiated rape allegation and the nutty idea that Bill and Hillary had their friend Vince Foster iced. Bill Clinton has sometimes been a distraction when stumping for his wife's presidential campaign, and he arguably does more harm than good.\n\nBut Donald Trump has his own Bill Clinton problems, and refighting the political wars from the 1990s won't fix them. To begin with, as Paul Waldman notes, these scandals were endlessly litigated in the 1990s, and Clinton essentially won.\n\nThat's in part because many voters saw impeachment as an overreach, even though Clinton had lied (or relied on an obscure definition of \"sexual relations\") under oath about an affair with an intern during a six-year, $50 million taxpayer-funded investigation into a 1980s failed Arkansas land deal. (Yes, that is the Whitewater affair that Trump's campaign accidentally disclosed it will be dredging up to attack Hillary Clinton.) It's also because his main Republican antagonists in the impeachment trial \u2014 House Speakers Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, and (we now know) Dennis Hastert, plus Sen. Henry Hyde \u2014 each had their own history of illicit sexual encounters; Gingrich was having an affair while pushing to impeach Clinton.\n\nAnd that brings us to Donald Trump's first Bill Clinton problem:\n\n1. Trump has no business attacking Clinton's affairs.\n\nIs that because Trump, too, has had extramarital affairs? Sure. Is it because he has called Bill a friend, \"a terrific guy,\" who did \"a terrific job\" as president? Kind of. But the big problem for Trump is that he has already exonerated Clinton for any peccadilloes in the 1990s.\n\nIn an August 1998 interview, for example \u2014 the one where Trump called Clinton accuser Paula Jones \"a loser\" \u2014 Chris Matthews asked Trump if he would ever run for president. Trump said no, \"can you imagine how controversial that'd be? You think about [Clinton] with the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine....\" Matthews made a cigar joke, and Trump reconsidered: \"Well, they might like my women better, too, you know.\" As late as 2008, Trump called the Lewinsky affair \"something that was totally unimportant,\" and argued in 2001 that Bill Clinton's big mistake is that he didn't take invoke his Fifth Amendment right to stay silent during the questioning about Lewinsky.\n\nChanging your opinion of a friend is very different than suddenly expressing horror at sexual activity you already called \"totally unimportant.\" At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf points out that there are really only two explanations for Trump's pivot:\n\nPerhaps Donald Trump truly believes that Bill Clinton is a rapist, or at best \"one of the worst abusers of women\" in U.S. history, as he said. And therefore, Trump invited a man he believes to be a rapist to his wedding, where Trump had his new wife pose beside the ostensible abuser, Trump smiling as the man he believed to be a sexual predator posed with his arm encircling his new bride's waist. Or maybe Trump doesn't actually believe that Bill Clinton is a rapist, or one of the worst abusers of women in history. Rather, he is cynically and falsely publicizing a rape accusation, knowing the accused may well be innocent, because spreading it will help Trump to win power. A frivolous or disingenuous rape accusation would typically make Trump supporters apoplectic.... They regard false rape accusations as serious if not unforgivable transgressions. [The Atlantic]\n\nNeither option looks very good for Trump. And yet he soldiers on, \"a walking contradiction,\" as Chuck Todd said on Wednesday's NBC Today. \"He has contradicted every single attack he's made on the Clintons. You can find sound to contradict it. It doesn't touch him.\"\n\nTrump's rationale, Todd said, is that he was a private citizen, not a politician, when he said nice things about the Clintons, and that being nice to powerful people is good for business. Which brings us to Trump's second Bill Clinton problem:\n\n2. Talking about Clinton makes Trump looking like a lying, misogynist jerk.\n\nWhen explaining why he is talking differently about Bill Clinton now, Trump is essentially saying that he used to be a private-sector liar, but now that he's a politician, he's a truth-teller. That's counterintuitive, but that's the campaign's story and they're sticking to it. When CNN's Chris Cuomo asked Trump's longtime attorney and political adviser, Michael Cohen, at what point Trump was lying about Bill Clinton, in the 1990s or now, Cohen replied: \"He was not lying. He was protecting a friend. There's a difference.\"\n\nWhat's that difference? Cuomo asked. Trump \"was being a true friend,\" Cohen said. He elaborated: \"He was a private citizen who was friendly with the Clintons, and he was trying to protect a friend, all right. Now, it's a different game. It's 2016.\" Cuomo pressed on, asking: \"Why would I trust you if you say all the things you said then were false?\" Trump \"was a private individual,\" Cohen said. When he was bad-mouthing the women accusing Clinton of sexual misconduct, Cohen suggested, Trump \"was standing up for a man who he considered to be a friend at the time.\"\n\nThat's essentially the \"bros-before-hos\" defense, and it's an interesting strategy for raising Trump's dismal favorability numbers with women.\n\n3. Trump wants spouses to be untouchable, except Hillary Clinton's.\n\nTwo of Trump's rockiest moments this campaign are when a Ted Cruz super PAC ran an ad showing a scantily clad Melania Trump, and when GQ published a long profile of Trump's wife. In the first instance, Donald Trump retweeted an unflattering photo of Heidi Cruz to his legions of Twitter followers. After the GQ article, Trump said to leave his wife out of this. George Stephanopoulos asked the obvious follow-up.\n\n\"There was an article in GQ about your wife Melania this week,\" he told Trump on ABC News earlier this month. \"And you said that spouses should be off the table, but you are willing to talk about Bill Clinton. Should he be off the table as well?\" Trump eventually got to no. \"It depends if he's involved in the campaign,\" he said. \"I think if he's involved in the campaign, he shouldn't be. And I \u2014 he probably will be involved. I think he gets involved when she plays the women's card.\"\n\nNow this is nonsense, on its face. First of all, Melania Trump is involved in Trump's campaign \u2014 she appears with him at campaign events, she has been interviewed about the campaign on TV, and she has stumped for her husband. If Bill Clinton's participation in his wife's campaign makes him a target, Trump's exemption of his wife makes no sense. Second of all, Hillary Clinton pointing out the offensive things Trump has really said about women doesn't have anything to do with Bill Clinton.\n\nTrump's response is that Hillary Clinton is an \"enabler.\" Or as he told Stephanopoulos: \"Hillary Clinton's husband abused women more than any man that we know of in the history of politics, right. She's married to a man who was the worst abuser of women in the history of politics. She's married to a man who hurt many women.\" But surely Trump would be outraged if anyone in the Clinton camp called Ivana Trump, his first wife and mother of his children, an \"enabler\" of Donald Trump's affair with the future second Mrs. Trump, Marla Maples, when he was still married.\n\nIf only some spouses are off-limits, then Trump has to come up with a better explanation why his wife is untouchable \u2014 not that anyone in the Clinton camp is attacking her \u2014 and Bill Clinton is not. Otherwise he's playing his own \"woman's card.\" Which brings us to Trump's final Bill Clinton problem:\n\n4. Trump is trying to get in the Clintons' heads, and its backfiring.\n\nBill Clinton's extramarital dalliances are \"fair game,\" as Slate's Jim Newell points out, but it's a time-tested electoral dud. Did Trump really think the Clintons didn't expect this? So far, when confronted with Trump's taunts, neither Clinton has taken the bait. In fact, bringing up Bill Clinton and women only highlights Donald Trump's Mad Men-era way of talking about women, and as Newell contends, plausibly, it reminds even many politically moderate women why they don't like Trump's party in the first place \u2014 restricting access to contraception, attacking Planned Parenthood, scrapping WIC benefits. Talking about the \"women's card,\" he says, \"only reinforces how clueless the party is about the ill will such policymaking priorities created, especially among unmarried women.\"\n\nDonald Trump fashions himself as a \"counter-puncher,\" by which he means he only hits people who attack him first, and often he tries to hit them harder. He appears to be serious about this, even proud of it; to him, it sounds chivalrous, just like treating your date nicely is a sign that you are pro-woman. It's actually pretty juvenile, the grown-up version of the 5-year-old's lament: \"But, she started it!\" (It also is a terrible trait for a presidential candidate \u2014 would you really want a thin-skinned, egocentric commander-in-chief going nuclear if he perceives a slight from a foreign leader?)\n\nTrump has the political bully's instinct to attack his opponent's perceived strengths \u2014 \"Trusted\" Ted Cruz became Lyin' Ted, smart and wonky Jeb Bush became Low-energy Jeb \u2014 and Bill Clinton will be one of Hillary's assets in the general election. Bill is \"the most gifted politician of the baby boomer generation,\" said none other than Kenneth Starr \u2014 yes, the one from the Whitewater\/Lewinsky prosecution \u2014 to The New York Times this week. \"His genuine empathy for human beings is absolutely clear.... The 'I feel your pain' is absolutely genuine.\"\n\nSo it's not foolhardy to try and \"muddy up the image of the fondly remembered former president, Hillary Clinton's most effective proxy,\" as Slate's Newell puts it. \"If you can turn Bill Clinton into a liability, you've greatly increased your chances of defeating Hillary Clinton.\"\n\nBut it also carries risks, especially for Trump. That old saying about throwing stones from glass houses? Donald Trump has a glass tower with his name in big gold letters, and Bill Clinton has good aim."}
{"text":"Regardless, what is made abundantly clear on Pixelapse's website is that drawing coherent illustrations was not a business need for their company. This must be true more broadly, because Dropbox themselves acquired Pixelapse even though they could not competently draw a box.\n\nAnother reason that many disparage visual design is that there is real incentive to distancing oneself from it. Many rightly realize that the quickest way to guarantee not getting respect is if their job title includes the word \"creative.\" Thus there is a compensatory advantage to marginalizing visual design and thus proving one's dedication to doing the 'real work.' Daniel Burka of Google Ventures found \"Even among designers of similar seniority, there is marked difference in compensation for UX Design, UI Design, and Visual Design,\" with salaries tending to descend in that order.\n\nPaul Rand once claimed \"A bad design is irrelevant, superficial\u2026basically like all the stuff you see out there today.\" In the years since, he has not been alone in promoting this sentiment. In the introduction to Humanist Interface, I note that designers at prominent companies like Apple, Amazon, and Facebook argue that design used to be a trivial coat of paint.\n\nSince that writing, Facebook's Director of Product Design, Maria Guidice chided designers who \"like to make things pretty, a term I like to refer to as 'aesthetic masturbation.'\" Today we are told we can rest assured that visual design is no longer so vacuous and superficial, due to the advent of flat design.\n\nI take a different stance. 'Pure veneer' is not an insult in my book. Quite the opposite, it is the very definition of visual design. Thinking visual design is anything but superficial not only requires a profound level of ignorance, but it indicates an incredibly limited view of what visual communication can accomplish.\n\nThese rationalizations by newly turned modern minimalists are incredibly telling. If prominent practitioners are being honest with us in claiming that visual design was plagued by harmful decoration only up until the advent of flat design, then they are admitting that for years, for the history of the GUI, and perhaps even the entire history of design itself, designers have been putting on a sham project in order to dupe corporations.\n\nWorse still, claims of visual design's insignificance tell us that design leaders never took their craft seriously. It truly undermines their credibility that it took the arrival of flat design for them to treat the entire spectrum of roles in product design with respect. Of course, as soon as that happened, they graduated from respecting traditional interface design principles.\n\nThis so-called 'maturation' in the vast majority of the design industry is in this way a major indictment of the professional history of these practitioners. If anyone should be condemned, it should not be those accused of the crime of visual design, but those practitioners who treat their job as frivolous.\n\nPerhaps the design world breeds a form of narcissism due to its nature as a winner-take-all economy. That would explain the logic of this race to the bottom in which designers feel compelled to attack their craft before others assume they are 'bullshitters' too. In the words of Dr. Sam Vaknin:\n\nBy pre-empting society\u2019s punitive measures and by self-flagellating, the narcissist is actually saying: 'If I am to suffer unjustly, it will be only by my own hand and no one else's.'\n\nIt is this masochistic status-striving that I find so ugly in this industry. That he who discredits his own craft is the most pious. That the most respected designer is the one who disowns beauty. This perpetual need to be the first to assign irrelevancy to one's own professional practice is the true impetus behind much of the puritanism of modern minimalist avant gardism."}
{"text":"Just days after the racism-fueled Charleston massacre, in which young white supremacist Dylann Roof took the lives of nine black churchgoers, a woman in Texarkana, Texas is being called out on social media for trying to incite racist attacks against the black community.\n\nTexarkana resident Ashley M. recently posted photos of herself on Facebook after reportedly being \u201cjumped by 3 African Americans ourside [sic] of the as [sic] Walmart.\u201d In the photos, she appears to be sporting two black eyes and a bloody nose and lip.\n\nThe problem? The wounds were obviously poorly-applied makeup. In fact, it pretty much looks like Ashley snuck a piece of charcoal into her purse at the last barbecue she attended and then just rubbed it all over her eyes.\n\nAshley M.\/Facebook\n\nYup, she went there.\n\nThe Daily Dot called the Texas-side Walmart (Texarkana shares a border with the Arkansas town of the same name) where the alleged attack took place. We spoke with a security worker who said no incidents had been reported there within the past week.\n\nWe also showed the photos to Texarkana Police Department public information officer Mike Jones, who responded with an emailed statement.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve talked to our detective Sergeant. He has reviewed all of the reports from the weekend and there is no report of this incident,\u201d wrote Jones. \u201cThere is also no report in our system from a person with the poster\u2019s name. We are confident is stating that this incident, if it did occur, has not been reported to this department.\u201d\n\nThe Texarkana Police Department also posted public statements regarding Ashley\u2019s claims on its Facebook page. The post stated that police officials \u201cbelieve the post to be fake\u201d and that \u201cthe injuries\u2026 are highly questionable.\u201d The post has since been taken down.\n\nAshley\u2019s Facebook post has also gone viral on Twitter, after Twitter user and ownyourblackness.com owner @missjia tweeted a screengrab. The responses were both damning and also kinda hilarious.\n\n@missjia she wasted so much makeup doing this. Smh \u2014 \u2026 (@__hbritt) June 22, 2015\n\n@missjia So she went with the raccoon eye contouring method\u2026.I \ud83d\udc40 ya see Miss. Deranged White Lady \u2014 TeamNoChill (@MsRita73) June 22, 2015\n\n@meoskop I did exactly this eye for a drunk clown skit in high school\u2026 \u2014 Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) June 22, 2015\n\nIn response to being mocked on Twitter, Ashley posted another photo of her \u201cbeaten\u201d face on her Instagram profile. She has since taken the photo down.\n\nIn the caption for the photo, Ashley continued to stick to her story:\n\n\u201cHere is your police report. Sorry I got jumped by three African American young men. I have 2 black eyes and nose still is bleeding, and somehow I am in the wrong. Enough for people to say it was makeup, how embarassing and very rude quite frankly. I don\u2019t want you pitty (sic) attention anything. I\u2019m just warning there are dangerous people in Texarkana be careful. They did this to me for no reason in front of my 3 year old. At Texas side Walmart.\u201d\n\nBy 11am Monday morning, both Ashley\u2019s Facebook and Instagram accounts have either been either removed or made private. Nonetheless, her story about being supposedly attacked by three black men has outraged the Internet.\n\nSadly, Ashley\u2019s attempt to frame black men as dangerous criminals hasn\u2019t been the only one in recent days, following the massacre at the Charleston church.\n\nAn image is currently circulating on Facebook of a young black man holding what appears to be two guns with the caption: \u201cYoung men get your guns and kill them white ass policemen. Do not think about it just do it. Call them bitchs (sic) out set them up with two in the head.\u201d\n\nPolice in Daytona Beach, Florida told WFTV that they had received more than 500 emails about the post by June 11. While officials were quoted as saying the photo \u201cmight be fake,\u201d they also said they were conducting an investigation along with the FBI and ATF, and that the man in the picture was holding \u201ctwo assault rifles.\u201d\n\nDaytona Beach might want to send those officers back to the police academy for more training. Because it\u2019s pretty clear from the gas station-like background and the coiled plastic cables attached to both guns that the guy\u2014who also looks young enough to be a teenager or possibly a college student\u2014is posing for a photo in a store, not trying to start a big, scary race war.\n\nUpdate 12:21pm CT, June 22: When asked why the Texarkana Police Department had taken down its statement on Ashley\u2019s Facebook post, a representative from the police department responded via email with the following statement:\n\nI was just informed by my social media manager that he was contacted by a friend of the original poster. We were informed that she is emotionally disturbed and that they are attempting to get her the assistance that she needs. We have removed the post to avoid contributing to her difficult struggle.\n\nUpdate 8:58am CT, June 23: An earlier version of this article speculated that the guns in the above viral Facebook photo were from a video game. But many gun enthusiasts on social media have pointed out that the trigger locks and security cable visible in the photo indicate that the photo depicts real guns, but was likely taken in a store.\n\nEditor\u2019s note: In light of the subject\u2019s potential mental instability, this story has been updated to remove her last name from the text and related images.\n\nH\/T @missjia\/Twitter | Photo via startupphotos\/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Fernando Alfonso III"}
{"text":"Sleep is present and tightly regulated in every vertebrate species in which it has been carefully investigated, but what sleep is for remains a mystery. Sleep is also present in invertebrates, and an extensive analysis in Drosophila melanogaster has shown that sleep in fruit flies shows most of the fundamental features that characterize sleep in mammals. In Drosophila, sleep consists of sustained periods of quiescence associated with an increased arousal threshold. Fly sleep is modulated by several of the same stimulants and hypnotics that affect mammalian sleep. Moreover, like in mammals, fly sleep shows remarkable interindividual variability. The expression of several genes involved in energy metabolism, synaptic plasticity, and the response to cellular stress varies in Drosophila between sleep and wakefulness, and the same occurs in rodents. Brain activity also changes in flies as a function of behavioral state. Furthermore, Drosophila sleep is tightly regulated in a circadian and homeostatic manner, and the homeostatic regulation is largely independent of the circadian regulation. After sleep deprivation, recovery sleep in flies is longer in duration and more consolidated, indicated by an increase in arousal threshold and fewer brief awakenings. Finally, sleep deprivation in flies impairs vigilance and performance. Because of the extensive similarities between flies and mammals, Drosophila is now being used as a promising model system for the genetic dissection of sleep. Over the last few years, mutagenesis screens have isolated several short sleeping mutants, a demonstration that single genes can have a powerful effect on a complex trait like sleep."}
{"text":"The former boarding house was due to hose 64 asylum seekers. Photo: Stian Strand \/ NTB scanpix\n\nEarly on Tuesday morning, a fire broke out a planned asylum centre in Hol Municipality in Hallingdal that left the building completely destroyed.\n\nPolice were notified of the fire at 4.52am on Tuesday.\n\n\u201cThe building has suffered great damage but it hasn\u2019t burned completely down. It\u2019s possible the fire brigade will monitor a controlled burn,\u201d police spokesman Ole Kristian Nerby told NTB.\n\nNerby said it was too early to say anything about the cause of the fire but confirmed that no one was in the building when the fire was discovered.\n\nThe building was approved for use as an asylum centre in January. The former boarding house was due to host 64 asylum seekers."}
{"text":"It\u2019s a common theme among many small apparel brands, and women\u2019s-specific brands in particular: a frustration with the current state of the market. Not happy with choosing from the limited selection of gear that\u2019s available, a passionate individual (or group of individuals) sets out to change the status quo. It was no different in the case of Femme Velo.\n\n\u201cWhen I started shopping for gear and clothing I was underwhelmed and increasingly disappointed by my lack of options,\u201d Nicole said. \u201cThe jerseys I found were an atrocious shade of pink or baby blue, which just wasn\u2019t for me.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m the kind of person that if I see something that can be better I don\u2019t wait around for someone else to fix it \u2014 I jump right in and fix it myself. Both my parents were entrepreneurs and so starting a business of my own never seemed far-fetched.\n\n\u201cWhen I had the dismal experience of trying to find kit I liked and that I could do long rides in without it literally being a pain in my ass, I decided, why not make it better?\u201d\n\nWhen she was still new to the sport, Nicole found out that while riding alone can be hugely rewarding, it\u2019s the social nature of the sport that binds us to our bikes. It provides the motivation to get out of bed when it\u2019s still cold and dark outside.\n\nFemme Velo initially began as a yearly women\u2019s cycling sportive in 2012, before launching its line of apparel earlier this year.\n\n\u201cI love where we came from in this sport,\u201d Nicole tells us. \u201cFemme Velo isn\u2019t about empowering women, because women don\u2019t need brands to empower them. Women need brands that complement them, that fit into their lifestyle, and most importantly women need choices.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s who we are and what we stand for and if we can get one more woman to walk past a bike shop and wonder at the possibility of what might come if she gets on bike and starts riding, then we\u2019ve done something great with our voice and our brand.\u201d"}
{"text":"The Freedom From Religion Foundation will be running a full-page ad in Sunday's Tulsa (Okla.) World and Wichita (Kan.) Eagle asking the question, \"What does the bible really say about abortion?\"\n\nThe answer is (as the ad puts it): \"There is no biblical justification for the assault on women's reproductive rights.\"\n\nThe advertisement features a compelling portrait of birth control crusader Margaret Sanger, and her quote: \"No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.\" It documents that the bible does not condemn abortion and, in fact, \"shows an utter disregard for human life.\" The ad reminds the reader: \"We live under a secular Constitution that wisely separates religion from government, and protects women's reproductive rights.\"\n\nThe ad is funded and was largely written by Brian Bolton, a retired professor and Life Member of FFRF, in memory of FFRF's principal founder Anne Nicol Gaylor (1926-2015), who was propelled into freethought activism by her experiences working to legalize abortion in the late 1960s and early '70s. Gaylor observed that the battle for women's rights \"would never end\" until the root cause of women's oppression, \"religion and its control of our government,\" is challenged.\n\nThe ad refers the reader for more information to Bolton's article, \"God is So Not Pro-Life\" and FFRF's nontract \"What Does the Bible Say About abortion?\"\n\nThe ad first debuted earlier this spring in the Austin American-Statesman and will appear later this month in the Houston Chronicle.\n\nFFRF warmly thanks Brian Bolton, who lives in Texas, for his generous support and commitment. Bolton additionally sponsors FFRF's annual graduate student essay contest.\n\nFor more information on bible sexism and its reach into civil law, also see Woe to the Women: The Bible Tells Me So, by Annie Laurie Gaylor, published by FFRF."}
{"text":"Moisturize, Moisturize, Moisturize By Worker Bee\n\nConventional wisdom (our dear, dear friend) tells us that without the constant application of skin creams and face lotions and mineral moisturizers, we\u2019ll become haggard parchment people with wrinkled mugs that\u2019d put an elderly Sharpei to shame. It seems to have worked, too. Most bathroom mirrors conceal impressive caches of creams, lotions, and oils, and many people instinctively and compulsively lather the stuff on any chance they get (similar to our infatuation with Purell, but that\u2019s another post altogether). But, as we\u2019ve often wondered, is confronting a totally natural occurrence \u2013 dry skin \u2013 with unnatural methods and products really such a good idea?\n\nAs you know, we here at Mark\u2019s Daily Apple tend to prefer the natural to the artificial \u2013 but that\u2019s only because we\u2019ve found that following nature\u2019s way and listening to biology and evolution often go hand in hand. It\u2019s not a dogmatic ideology of naturalism we espouse here; it is a pragmatic approach to life that tells us the natural way most often is the best way, but that also allows the use of artificial aids, if they are safe and effective. With that in mind, we weren\u2019t all that surprised to read about a recent scientific study that discovered using lotions and skin creams can actually weaken your skin\u2019s resistance to the elements and create a dependency on skin products.\n\nSwedish scientist Izabela Buraczewska found that creams can actually make the skin drier in the long run. Basically, once you start using a cream or lotion to combat dry skin, you have to keep using it or your skin will regress to a point even drier than it was before you started using the cream. She used several different kind of creams and oils to test her results, and she found that even different pH levels didn\u2019t change the effects on the skin. Both mineral and vegetable oil were tried, and both resulted in the skin having less resistance to drying elements. Strangely enough, however, using a complex cream had less of a drying effect. To Buraczewska, this meant that a blanket assignation of blame to all creams and lotions simply isn\u2019t realistic. The problem wasn\u2019t with the idea of artificial skin creams; the problem was that an effective skin cream simply hadn\u2019t been created that could deal with the drying effects.\n\nTissue samples taken from patients suggest that the application of skin creams affects the activity of certain genes that regulate the production of skin fats, which figure prominently in the skin\u2019s moisture levels. If we can isolate the compounds in the creams that do dry the skin, perhaps new moisturizers can be developed without the bad stuff.\n\nSo maybe smearing raw avocado and palm oil on your body isn\u2019t the best Primal moisturizer. Maybe using unnatural oils and creams will eventually be a better way to fight dry skin. There\u2019s a lot of things you can call us, but rigid isn\u2019t one of them. Better living through rigorously tested and nearly perfected chemistry? Sure, we\u2019ll take that every time.\n\nonly alice Flickr Photo (CC)\n\nFurther Reading:\n\nWe Like Drugs \u2013 Fair and Balanced\n\nHow to Get that Natural Glow\n\n10 Rules of Aging Well\n\nPost navigation\n\nIf you'd like to add an avatar to all of your comments click here!"}
{"text":"Image caption John Hemming MP said he would raise the matter in Parliament\n\nAn MP is to raise the case of a woman who he says had her baby forcibly removed by Caesarean section, and taken by social services in Essex.\n\nLiberal Democrat John Hemming said the Italian woman had had a panic attack linked to her bipolar disorder and was sectioned under the Mental Health Act.\n\nShe was sedated after authorities obtained a court order.\n\nEssex County Council, which allegedly took the baby into care, said it could not comment on \"ongoing\" cases.\n\nIt is understood the woman was pregnant when she came to the UK to work for Stansted Airport in 2012.\n\nUp for adoption\n\nMr Hemming, MP for Birmingham Yardley and chairman of the Justice for Families Campaign, said he planned to raise the case in Parliament.\n\nHe claims to have seen documents proving Essex social services obtained a court order for a Caesarean section, and for the child to be taken into care.\n\nHe said the girl, who is now 15 months old, was still in the care of Essex social services and was being put up for adoption.\n\nSolicitor Brendan Fleming issued a statement in which he said he had been instructed by the woman's lawyers but would not discuss the case.\n\n\"We remain committed to fighting for our clients and shall fight tooth and nail to help mother be reunited with her baby,\" it said.\n\nA council spokesperson said: \"Essex County Council does not comment on the circumstances of ongoing individual cases involving vulnerable people and children.\""}
{"text":"When Rand Paul dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016, the self-described \"libertarianish\" senator from Kentucky vowed: \"I will continue to fight for criminal justice reform, for privacy, and your Fourth Amendment rights. I will continue to champion due process over indefinite detention.\" On Thursday, amid the hullaballoo of former FBI director James Comey's dramatic testimony on Capitol Hill, Paul brought a handful of libertarian reporters inside his Senate office to discuss his recent work on these projects.\n\nFront and center is a new piece of legislation, introduced this week, to once and for all ban indefinite detention. With the working title of \"The Sixth Amendment Preservation Act,\" Paul's bill \"prevents any future military force authorization from being used to justify indefinite detention without trial,\" according to a summary prepared by his office. More from that:\n\nSection 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act unconstitutionally declares that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force allows our Armed Forces to indefinitely detain citizens, legal residents, and foreign nationals who are alleged to have engaged in hostilities against the United States. This means U.S. citizens apprehended within the boundaries of the U.S. could be held indefinitely without trial. The Sixth Amendment Preservation Act repeals section 1021 making it clear that no military force resolution can legalize indefinite detention without a trial and seeks to restore our constitutional commitment to individual liberty.\n\nEmphasis in original. \"You never know who could be in the White House,\" Paul explained Thursday. \"Could someone be there that would actually take away all of our rights and begin arresting us for who we are, what we are, what we think, what we read? And so I consider this to be one of the most important pieces of legislation that we'll put forward.\"\n\nAlso covered in the discussion: the senator's efforts to vote down the recent blockbuster arms sale to Saudi Arabia (\"winning a battle like this would send a huge message out there\"), the Trump administration's tough-on-crime posture (\"I think there's very little of this attorney general, this Department of Justice, doing anything favorable towards criminal justice or towards civil liberties\"), criticism of Paul's vote to confirm Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and his reaction to the Comey hearing, which we teased out yesterday.\n\nProduced and edited by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Krainin and Mark McDaniel.\n\nSubscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nLike us on Facebook.\n\nFollow us on Twitter.\n\nSubscribe to our podcast at iTunes."}
{"text":"The internet is a refuge for scorned groups, from furries to mommy bloggers, and atheists have found a home there as well. \u201cReddit Atheist\u201d has become shorthand for a subculture with its own memes, slang, rivalries, and parodies. While the internet has been a source of comfort for the irreligious, it has also intensified a stereotype about atheists\u2019 self-righteous arrogance.\n\nDespite the dominance of digital atheism, the community hasn\u2019t made the same impact on the mobile web. The online atheism community hasn\u2019t produced many apps of its own. Many of them are mainly collections of Richard Dawkins quotes in horrible fonts; others, like the Atheist Pocket Debater, are explicitly designed to needle Christians. While there are atheist apps, most of them are terrible, or promote arguing.\n\n\u201cI think the faithful have been propagating a narrative of the angry atheist for so long, and I think that there\u2019s some legitimacy to that,\u201d said Peter Boghossian, who teaches at Portland State University and has worked with inmates in Oregon, teaching critical thinking and moral reasoning. Boghossian, with the Richard Dawkins Foundation, created an app called Atheos to help us atheists change our reputation for being condescending doctrinaires. \u201cI wanted to give people a tool, so if they\u2019re approached by somebody, and instead of saying \u2018delusional maniac\u2019 and then swearing, they can explore the reasons for their beliefs,\u201d he said.\n\nIt\u2019s markedly different from other atheist apps in that it explicitly emphasizes not being rude to religious people. \u201cThe larger problem in society is an increasing incivility among different people holding different beliefs. I think it\u2019s really important to have civil, respectful dialogue with people, and we just haven\u2019t been doing that,\u201d he told me. \u201cSo that\u2019s a main thrust of the app.\u201d\n\n\u201cNone of us want this to be Iraq, right? Sunni and Shia divisions, people shooting each other because of different metaphysical beliefs about the world,\u201d he said.\n\nThough Boghossian used an inappropriately extreme example of religious conflict to compare, it is true that atheists are not well liked in America. A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans rated atheism far lower than all major belief systems except Islam. It\u2019s also simply not cool to be atheist. Justin Bieber worships in shredded Japanese denim alongside Kevin Durant at Hillsong. Kanye raps about God dreams. Who do atheists have? Penn Jillette, Arian Foster, and the late Christopher \u201cWomen Aren\u2019t Funny but the Iraq War Is for Sure Good\u201d Hitchens. It\u2019s grim. I\u2019m an atheist, and I am sorry to confirm that we are the pedantic neckbeards of American culture, skulking around the Sam Harris section at Barnes & Noble and telling anyone who\u2019ll listen that Thomas Jefferson was actually a deist.\n\nThis is not helped by reports that some atheists repurpose religious apps to fight about belief; in 2013, for example, The Washington Post reported that a regular free Bible app had gained an unusual following among nonbelievers. Another atheist has made money off of a Bible app he sells to Spanish believers. One diabolical-sounding atheist said he used a Bible app every night to \u201cengage believers in verse-on-verse debates via Twitter.\u201d\n\nAtheos is meant as a corrective to the apps that encourage dismissive behavior toward believers. It\u2019s a multilevel, multiple-choice quiz game; players select canned retorts to statements like, \u201cYou atheists are evil.\u201d There\u2019s a section on how to engage door-to-door Mormon missionaries, and another on disabusing Scientologists of Scientology. \u201cThe believer is going to think you\u2019re not taking them seriously if you compare their faith to gay-dar,\u201d one tip intones. Players are advised to refrain from asking Scientologists if they are taking any medications.\n\nIf you are looking for the world\u2019s most accurate simulator of an interminable, politely fractitious seminar debate between Epistemology 101 students, you are in tremendous luck. Playing Atheos feels like completing homework for an online course in Atheism Studies. The glossary, which provides short definitions for jargon like \u201cFragenblitzen,\u201d reinforces the scholarly vibe. The levels are divided into \u201ccaves.\u201d It\u2019s free, but after the first level is completed, the rest of the content is accessible only with a $5 purchase. I guess you could say it\u2019s like Westworld, in that it\u2019s a game about the nature of reality. I also guess you could say it\u2019s like Westworld, because it could inspire insufferable dorm-room conversations.\n\nWhile Atheos has overtures toward civility, its endgame is to make interlocutors doubtful about their most deeply held beliefs, and there\u2019s something inherently confrontational about that. I don\u2019t see how an app that encourages atheists to practice rebuttals and argument-hole-poking will help relationships between believers and nonbelievers. Atheos might be more useful for atheists engaging in conversation with believers if the screen simply flashed the words Maybe switch the topic to prestige TV??? anytime its sensors picked up voices using the terms \u201cGod,\u201d \u201creligion,\u201d or \u201cNeil deGrasse Tyson.\u201d Maybe the reason there are no good apps for atheists is you just can\u2019t make one. Atheos certainly tries, but at the crux of all these apps is either engaging in fruitless argument or strategically avoiding discussion of the very thing you downloaded an app for.\n\n\u201cAll this back-and-forth sniping serves to do is to make us feel a sense of superiority to the person making the claims and does nothing for them except leave them with a smugness about their assumption that \u2018atheists are all mean,\u2019\u201d former atheist blogger Martin Pribble wrote in 2013. \u201cFaith overrides knowledge and truth in any situation, so arguing with a theist is akin to banging your head against a brick wall: You will injure yourself and achieve little.\u201d"}
{"text":"I haven\u2019t posted on here in quite a long while. I feel like life took me by surprise and dragged me for months. But I\u2019m here now, and lately I\u2019ve felt the need to blog. To write in this blog and converse with others. I recently got laid off from my job due to lack of work. There are so many things wrong with the U.S. economy, but this isn\u2019t the blog for that kind of talk.\n\nI\u2019ve fallen into a hole and I seem to not be able to climb out of it. I used to be completely optimistic and cheery. Lately things have changed and I\u2019m quite the opposite. I stopped practicing yoga, meditating, working out, eating the way I should be and I\u2019ve started being lazy and doing things that do not make me happy for fulfilled. It was a downward spiral and I needed to tighten my grip on reality.\n\nI realize that no one is going to change anything for me. It\u2019s entirely up to myself to change the negative thoughts to positive and to go out and practice kindness and happiness everywhere I go. I can\u2019t lay down on my bed anymore and wait for something good to happen. Good things are happening all around and I haven\u2019t opened my eyes to see them. If you want to see good in the world, like really concentrate on the good in people, you will see it. The same goes for the bad in the world. The bad is easier to see because the world is becoming more cynical and selfish.\n\nI\u2019m really motivated about spreading kindness and happiness. I want to show others that there is a reason to be positive even when there are a thousand negative issues going on. That there are kind people out there even if they can\u2019t seem to find them. That just because you\u2019ve hit a major setback in your life, it doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s the end or even near the end. I want to spread good in the world."}
{"text":"Apparently, Color War isn\u2019t just for kids anymore.\n\nDuring a recent visiting day at her three children\u2019s sleepaway camp in Maine, \u201cOdd Mom Out\u201d creator and star Jill Kargman watched as parents brought out the big guns in an all-out-battle for public affection, Upper East Side-style.\n\n\u201cSomeone had a red wheelbarrow, pulling all the presents \u2026 There were people with Nobu sushi and I said to these moms, \u2018How is that fresh?\u2019 and they were like, \u2018Oh, we were only wheels up an hour ago and we have ice packs,\u2019\u201d Kargman says of the private-jet-loving parents. \u201cSomeone brought a whole thing of [Chinese food from] Mr. Chow because their kids \u2018missed ethnic.\u2019\u201d\n\n\u201cI know you\u2019re happy to see your kids and it\u2019s a big three weeks not seeing them, but it seems excessive,\u201d says Kargman, 42, who lives in Manhattan.\n\nSleepaway camp is a rite of passage for many city tots. And with camps ranging from $8,000 to $13,000 for a full seven-week term, it\u2019s an expensive one. But, for some parents, it\u2019s not enough to send their kids away to lavish rural retreats. They hire professional packers to ensure their children\u2019s trunks are perfectly assembled, send them off on private planes with platters of Zabar\u2019s smoked salmon and even bring the household staff to visiting day to dust bust the cabin while the parents and kids reconnect after a grueling 3 \u00bd weeks apart.\n\n\u201cVisiting day is a whole beast in itself,\u201d says Jodi Zgodny, co-founder of Love, Laura Gifts, which assembles extravagant baskets for the annual event. \u201cParents definitely want the gifts wrapped and ready to go.\u201d\n\nZgodny says parents will shell out $70 for candy-covered lacrosse sticks and more than $100 for cellophane-wrapped, candy-filled packages outfitted in camp-colored ribbons. Then, there are the all-important bunk gifts \u2014 small, often custom, presents for the entire group \u2014 which can cost upward of $25 per kid (most bunks have around 10 kids).\n\nSometimes, the bunk gifts get even pricier.\n\n\u201cThere might have been a rumor that somebody gave iPod shuffles to every girl in the bunk one year,\u201d a director of an all-girls camp in New York coyly told The Post.\n\nThe camp banished the tradition five years ago after gifts became too excessive.\n\n\u201cIt wasn\u2019t in line with our values,\u201d says the director, who asked to remain anonymous.\n\nLeslie Venokur, founder of Big City Moms, a parenting Web site, sends her 8-year-old daughter, Sami, to Camp Pontiac in the Berkshires. Venokur says the girls\u2019 beds are covered in gifts and food by the end of visiting day \u2014 no matter that all edible contraband is typically thrown out or donated after 24 hours.\n\n\u201cA lot of people go to their country clubs the day before and have them make their sushi platters and bring them up,\u201d says Venokur, who lives on the Upper East Side.\n\n\u201cMy daughter\u2019s favorite food is steak. She loves it and I know she doesn\u2019t have it at camp. My husband is crazy, and so he brought up a steak from Wolfgang\u2019s on visiting day.\u201d\n\nFor many parents, such as Upper West Sider Allysa Goldman, the excess is a way to show their love for their children.\n\n\u201cI was completely borderline certifiable,\u201d says Goldman of her first year sending her now 19-year-old and 16-year-old sons to Camp Starlight in Pennsylvania (the youngest one is going for his final year this summer).\n\n\u201cWe were notorious because we brought up so much stuff the first year and piled it up into the car and we realized we had no way of getting it all into camp,\u201d says Goldman. \u201cSo we had to drive into town and buy those huge, huge garbage cans with wheels to put everything in it and drag everything up.\u201d\n\nBut plain black bins didn\u2019t cut it for Goldman.\n\n\u201cI went and bought stickers to decorate the garbage cans and put their names on them,\u201d she says, with a laugh.\n\nSome parents even take their domestic staff to visiting day.\n\n\u201cEvery year, there are parents who bring their housekeepers to [clean],\u201d says Goldman. \u201cThey\u2019re there wiping the floors and spraying the Lysol.\u201d\n\nThe third-season premiere of Kargman\u2019s show, airing 10 p.m. July 12 on Bravo, centers around the absurdities of camp visiting day. She says nannies are more rare, but do make a cameo or two each summer. She recalls one set of parents who wouldn\u2019t let their nanny dress down for the occasion.\n\n\u201cThey made her wear the white Red Kap outfit,\u201d she says. \u201cI was like, \u2018Give her a break, can\u2019t she wear her dungarees? It\u2019s f\u2013king Maine. But she\u2019s in uniform?\u2019\u201d\n\nGoldman says some families will even pay to drive out all the \u201cbunk junk\u201d and food separately.\n\nFlying private to visiting day is the new norm for the elite.\n\n\u201cThe [hired help] will set everything up on the grass with a little tent and everything and leave,\u201d says Goldman.\n\nThis sort of over-the-top behavior starts well before visiting day.\n\nParents shell out thousands of dollars for customized camp gear ranging from $100 splatter-painted sleeping bags to $175 Uggs with their children\u2019s name spray-painted on.\n\nAnd, then, there are the professional packers.\n\nZgodny\u2019s company offers packing services at $100 an hour with a three-hour minimum.\n\n\u201c[My employees] bring Ziplocs and containers and Sharpies and label everything,\u201d says Zgodny.\n\n\u201cThey\u2019ll put dryer sheets between each layer of clothes, so when they come to camp, it smells good. And they\u2019ll put a nice gift on top, too,\u201d she says of the new trend of a \u201ctrunk gift.\u201d\n\nOf course, parents save some extravagances for themselves, too.\n\nFlying private to visiting day is the new norm for the elite who want to skirt a hellish 5-hour-plus drive to Maine and other out-of-the-way locales.\n\nFor those who don\u2019t have their own jets, there\u2019s Blade, which first launched private plane service to five camps last summer. This summer, they have expanded to 20 top camps in the Upper New York region, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Maine. One-way seats cost $425 to $525, according to Blade general manager Evan Licht, who says they\u2019ve already sold out of certain flights.\n\nKargman says two parents offered her and her husband a ride home on their jet after last year\u2019s visiting day.\n\n\u201cI was like, \u2018Well, we have our car so that doesn\u2019t work.\u2019 And she says, \u2018Send your people for it.\u2019\n\n\u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018I don\u2019t have people.\u2019\u201d"}
{"text":"ERBIL, Iraq \u2014 As Iraqi Kurdistan heads to a controversial independence referendum on Sept. 25, divisions are running deep in the Turkmen community, which, like the Kurds, has claims over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.\n\nTurkey's official policy terms Kirkuk \u201ca Turkmen city,\u201d and many Turks generally think that all Turkmens are on the same page. But the reality on the ground is different. To start with, the Turkmens in Erbil and Kirkuk differ in their stances on the prospect of Kurdish independence. Some Turkmens insist on the territorial integrity of Iraq, but others argue that cohabitation with the Kurds is easier. The Iraqi Turkmen Front (ITF), the largest party representing the Turkmens, is opposed to the referendum, while the Turkmen Development Party, founded by a group that split from the ITF, backs the referendum, arguing that Kurdistan is already a de facto state dealing directly with foreign countries.\n\nTurkey\u2019s and Iran\u2019s policies are another factor swaying Turkmen positions. For quite a while, Turkey has been advising the Turkmens to stay on good terms with the Kurds, which is contributing to the divergence of positions. Shiite Turkmens, meanwhile, have turned increasingly to Baghdad since the Islamic State\u2019s (IS) onslaught in 2014.\n\nBased on their reactions to the referendum, two major trends are discernible among the Turkmens. For those who live in Erbil, the Kurdistan project is not much of a problem. They argue they have been able to preserve their language and culture in Kurdistan, while Turkmens in the rest of Iraq have been obliterated. The Turkmens in Kirkuk, meanwhile, are worried that an independent Kurdistan would lead to the fragmentation of Turkmen areas, with the city of Kirkuk probably going to Kurdistan and towns such as Taza Khormato, Tal Afar, Tuz Khormato, Amerli, Qarah Tabbah and Jalawla staying with Iraq. This would mean an end to the dream of a Turkmen homeland, idealized in nationalist quarters.\n\nITF member Aydin Maruf, one of the five Turkmens in the Kurdistan parliament, paints a tough outlook for a community hit by geographical and sectarian divisions and relying on different powers for protection.\n\nMaruf told Al-Monitor that \u201cBaghdad\u2019s sectarian polices\u201d had pushed the Kurds to seek independence, arguing that the Iraqi Kurdistan Region had progressed both politically and democratically. \u201cHolding a referendum is a right. Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens alike can do that,\u201d he said.\n\nMaruf said the referendum was causing problems mostly in Kirkuk and Mosul. \u201cIn the disputed areas, neither Turkmens nor Arabs accept the referendum, and 70% of Turkmens live in the disputed areas,\u201d he said, stressing that the Kurds should have sought dialogue with other ethnic groups, including the Turkmens, before making the move.\n\nHe said that according to the Iraqi Constitution, Kirkuk, Tuz Khormato, Taza Khormato and Tal Afar do not belong to the Kurdistan region. \u201cTheir status must be resolved within a constitutional framework. That\u2019s why the Iraqi Turkmen Front does not accept holding the referendum in the disputed areas,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cWe have never opposed the rights of the Kurds,\u201d Maruf said. \u201cWe are living together. When the Baath regime [stormed the region] in 1991, the bombs rained on all of us. Our destiny is one. If there is a [Kurdish] state, we will be in that state, and if there is a war, we will be in that war as well. I\u2019m talking about Erbil here. The situation is different for those in Kirkuk and Mosul. If Iraq disintegrates, will it be only Kurdistan seceding? The Sunni Arabs might secede as well. Then, what will happen to the Turkmens in Mosul and Tal Afar?\u201d\n\nWhile some Turkmens charge that the Kurds have been trying to Kurdicize Kirkuk and cannot be trusted, the Kurds argue that Kurdistan is the best guarantee of Turkmen rights. According to prominent Kurdish commentator Massoud Abdulkhaliq, Kirkuk\u2019s Turkmens would be better off as part of Kurdistan. \u201cThe Turkmens used to have presence in all provinces and districts of Iraq. Now it is only in Kurdistan, which means they get along better with the Kurds than with the Arabs. No one is harassing them here,\u201d he told Al-Monitor in Erbil. \u201cThey insist that Kirkuk remain attached to Baghdad, but if it does, they will be finished in Kirkuk, too, as they were in other regions.\u201d\n\nThe ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) rejects accusations that the Turkmens have been subjected to ethnic cleansing and excluded from the administration.\n\nIn an interview with Al-Monitor, Mohammed Khurshid, the KDP head in Kirkuk, described a tradition of cultural diversity involving Kurds, Turkmens, Jews and Christians. That is why Kirkuk natives are called \u201cquadrilinguals,\u201d he said.\n\nKhurshid continued, \u201cAfter 1930, Bedouin Arabs were settled in Hawija to the south of Kirkuk. In 1963, the Arabs of Hawija attacked the Kurds, setting 300 villages ablaze. Hawija has always been a threat to Kirkuk. They attacked Turkmen villages as well. The Arabs of Hawija seized Turkmen lands. The [Arabization] project accelerated after 1974 under Saddam Hussein. In 1988, all Kurdish villages in Kirkuk were burned and destroyed. A total of 758 villages were either destroyed or resettled with Arabs. The people exiled from Kirkuk settled in Dahuk and Erbil.\u201d\n\nKhurshid denied any deliberate Kurdish policy to drive the Turkmens out of Kirkuk. \u201cI don\u2019t say there are no assassinations and explosions, but no Kurdish group has a policy of denial vis-a-vis the Turkmens,\u201d he said. \u201cBefore 2003, there was not even one Turkmen school in the city. Thanks to the Kurdish government, the Turkmens have opened several schools. They are even using the Latin alphabet. The Iraqi government does not accept that, but we do.\u201d Khurshid drew a comparison to Erbil, where, he said, Turkmens had a school before 2003. He argued that Kurds had been supportive of the idea that Turkmens hold senior administrative posts.\n\nThe status of Kurds who were driven out of rural Kirkuk is an issue. Khurshid said the Iraqi government failed to provide support to revive the old villages. \u201cAs a result, the people settled not in the villages but in the cities. The Turkmens are now complaining that the Kurds have settled in urban centers. \u2026 The Kurds moved to lands allocated by the government, not to other people\u2019s homes,\u201d he said, adding that Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who served as president of Iraq, built 1,000 homes in the town of Bashir, near Kirkuk, and gave them away to Turkmen returnees.\n\n\u201cIn our view, Kirkuk belongs to all of us. It\u2019s a city of all nationalities and religions,\u201d Khurshid said. He referred also to a proposal he had drawn up at the request of Kurdish leaders for a special status for Kirkuk within Kurdistan. The proposal, presented to representatives of other groups on July 30, outlines a power-sharing formula according to which the bloc that comes out first in the elections gets the governor\u2019s post, the second the post of provincial council speaker, the third the deputy governor\u2019s post and the fourth the deputy speaker\u2019s post. Given the demographic structure, the governor\u2019s post would likely go to the Kurds, the speaker\u2019s post to the Arabs, the deputy governor\u2019s post to the Turkmens and the deputy speaker\u2019s post to the Christians, Khurshid said. \u201cYet,\u201d he added, \u201cthe Turkmens demand that the third ticket gets both the deputy governor\u2019s and deputy speaker\u2019s posts. We reject that because the Christians would be cast out.\u201d\n\nBeyond those disagreements, another important factor has changed Turkmen perspectives. Because they see Turkey as a protector and guarantor, Turkmens used to say they did not need to arm themselves. Yet at least 12,000 Turkmens have joined the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) since the force was created in 2014 to fight IS, and now many believe that the PMU would fight for the Turkmens if need be.\n\nThe fear of an armed conflict with the PMU is rife among the Kurds. Recalling the 2015 flare-up between the Kurdish peshmerga forces and the PMU in Tuz Khormato, Abdulkhaliq said, \u201cIn Mosul, [the PMU] controls 12 of the 16 disputed areas, while the remaining four are in peshmerga hands. The danger of clashes is more serious in Tuz Khormato and to the south of Kirkuk.\u201d\n\nFormer KDP lawmaker Aso Karim drew attention to the PMU\u2019s Iranian connections. \u201c[The PMU] is growing and could step into action to retake the disputed areas. Iran is influential here,\u201d he said.\n\nIn an interview in Sulaimaniyah, Jalal Jawhar, a senior member of the Movement for Change (Gorran), also voiced concern that actors opposed to Kurdistan could start clashes in the disputed areas.\n\nThe referendum may be a natural right of the Kurds, but myriad uncertainties engulf the day after. The Kurds might still be able to avoid disaster scenarios if they follow more inclusive, flexible and prudent policies."}
{"text":"CLEVELAND (AP) -- Shaquille O'Neal's curious about one aspect of LeBron James' impending return to face angry Cavaliers fans -- the pregame ritual.\n\n\"I'm a silly fan,'' O'Neal said. \"I'm anxious to see if he's going to do that powder thing.''\n\nJames' homecoming on Thursday, his first game in Cleveland since deciding to join the Miami Heat this summer, may be the most anticipated matchup on the NBA schedule this season. Cavaliers fans are expected to mercilessly boo James, whose departure impacted the city's economy and psyche.\n\nDuring his seven seasons in Cleveland, James developed a routine -- before home and away games -- of filling his hands with a white powdered rosin and tossing it above his head just before tip-off, creating a dust cloud that has become as much his signature as any powerful dunk.\n\nOn Tuesday, James seemed unsure if he would do it in front of fans who may no longer appreciate the snow-like spectacle.\n\n\"The powder? I probably will,'' James said after practice in Miami on Tuesday. \"That's just a ritual for myself, a routine that I've always done, I've done on the road. I don't know. We'll see. I may change. I don't know.''\n\nO'Neal, who has felt the wrath of fans after leaving Orlando and Los Angeles, can't wait to find out.\n\n\"We have bets that he doesn't do it,'' said O'Neal, in town with the Boston Celtics to play the Cavaliers.\n\nDwyane Wade believes his Miami teammate will stick with his pregame powder ceremony.\n\n\"I wouldn't expect him to do anything different,'' Wade said. \"He's done it for every game he's played. So why change it just for one game? If he doesn't throw it up, I'll throw it up for him. That's what he does. You cannot stop doing what you do. Moreso than anything, that's his ritual. That's what gets him ready for the game.\n\n\"No one's going to know until tip-off. And we'll be excited to see.''"}
{"text":"Bray Wyatt has qualified to feature in the Money In The Bank WWE Title Ladder Match, besting Dean Ambrose in a qualifier match at the June 10th SmackDown tapings. We can also report that John Cena is scheduled to be added to the title match at some point, according to an update at F4wonline. That would make the line up to six big stars fighting for the title on June 29th, Cesaro vs Sheamus vs Orton vs Del Rio vs Cena vs Wyatt. Apparently WWE have already decided on who will be the new champion, and the company are also mulling over a second ladder match for the traditional MITB briefcase title shot. An argument could be made that Money In The Bank 2014 is in fact now stronger from Daniel Bryan's absence. His scheduled match against Kane was hardly a big sell to begin with. Instead we now have six of WWE's biggest stars fighting it out to be the new WWE Champion and a possible second ladder match on the show. Wyatt beat Ambrose in the SmackDown match after Seth Rollins ran in to distract the Shield member. It looks as if we will get Ambrose vs Rollins in a one on one undercard match at the pay per view, with Roman Reigns possibly doing nothing more than acting as enforcer at ringside. Overall the Money In The Bank pay per view is shaping up to be a great show, the addition of Wyatt into the title equation is exciting, we now await the final qualifier which will probably be Cena next week on Raw."}
{"text":"Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.\n\nJune 5, 2014, 3:16 PM GMT \/ Updated June 5, 2014, 3:58 PM GMT\n\nA senior politician from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party has been quoted saying that sometimes rape is \"right,\" sparking renewed outrage about rampant sexual assault in that country.\n\n\"This is a social crime which depends on men and women. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong,\" Babulal Gaur, home minister of Madhya Pradesh state, was quoted as saying in the Hindustan Times. \"Until there's a complaint, nothing can happen.\"\n\nGaur is from Prime Minister Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).\n\nModi has so far been silent about the May 26 gang rape and murder of two teenage girls in the north of the country. Three men later confessed to the attacks, which ended with the girls being hung from a mango tree.\n\nThe 14- and 15-year-old cousins were from a poor family without operating toilets in their home and disappeared after going into fields to relieve themselves."}
{"text":"One of the most important things determining the quality of a photo is the angle from which it was taken. Even if you have a really interesting subject and you follow the most important composition guidelines, you still need to find that unique and interesting angle to really make your photo shine.\n\nIn this article I\u2019m going to share my 9 best tips for finding the perfect angle so that your iPhone photos really stand out and look as great as they possibly can\u2026\n\n1. Move around to improve composition\n\nWhenever you\u2019re trying to pick the best angle for a photo, you should always think about balancing the composition, and the angle that you shoot from makes a huge difference for the horizontal and vertical balance of the photo. Let me show you what I mean with an example.\n\nIn this photo my subjects are the tree in the foreground and the mountain in the background. The photo is balanced horizontally as the two subjects are at the opposite sides of the frame. However, it\u2019s not balanced vertically as there is nothing of interest in the top half of the frame, and all visual weight is concentrated at the bottom half of the frame.\n\nNow let\u2019s look at the same scene from a different angle. The next photo was shot from the same location with the iPhone positioned higher and the lens directed more towards the ground.\n\nHere you can see pretty much the opposite \u2013 there\u2019s nothing of interest at the bottom half of the frame, and all visual weight is concentrated at the top. It\u2019s tempting to think that the best solution would be aligning both the tree and the mountain centrally, but then all visual weight would be in the middle, and the top and the bottom would then look empty.\n\nHowever, I was able to balance this image by walking closer to the tree so that the shadow is also included in the composition. Now the tree takes up the top and central parts of the image, the mountain is in the central part, and the shadow fills up the bottom third of the image. I hope this example shows you how easy it can be to adjust composition by just moving around a little.\n\n2. Shoot from the height of your subject\n\nWe look at the world from the height of our eyes, and thus it\u2019s only natural to also take photos from the same height. However, in many photography situations \u2013 such as taking photos of children, pets or plants \u2013 shooting from the height of your eyes will almost always result in bad photos.\n\nWhen photographing children and animals, you should take photos from their height and thus capture the world from their point of view. If you just shoot from the height of your own eyes, your subjects will literally look like they\u2019ve been tossed on the ground.\n\n3. Get close\u2026 and even closer\n\nA great way to make your photos more intimate is to get closer to your subjects \u2013 even closer than you would feel comfortable. That way your photos can convey the kind of intimacy that is normally only found in real life.\n\nDid you notice that this photo is shot from the height of the cat?\n\n4. Add perspective to your photos\n\nWhen possible, try to choose an angle that will show perspective in your photos. There are a few different ways you can do this. If your subject is far away, one simple way to show perspective is to juxtapose it with larger-looking objects in the foreground as seen below.\n\nIf the view extends into the distance, you can show perspective by shooting from a higher angle as seen in the next photo. I took this photo from a staircase so that my main subject \u2013 the silhouette of a women \u2013 is situated against the street extending far into the background.\n\nAnother great way to show perspective is to get really low with your iPhone. That creates an exaggerated perspective by making the objects in the foreground look massive, which can be used to emphasize details on the ground level and make the image more immersive.\n\n5. Include interesting reflections\n\nAn easy way to greatly improve your photos and make mundane scenes exciting is to include reflections in your photos. While you can find reflections on many different surfaces, water is perhaps the most obvious medium for interesting and unique reflections.\n\nIn general, I prefer to include both the actual subjects and their refections in the photo, and I like to make the reflections equally or more prominent than the other parts of the photo. Often the only way you can do this is by placing the lens of your iPhone just a little bit above the water. If the iPhone is even an inch higher, you probably won\u2019t be able to frame the photo as needed.\n\nAnother great reason to place the iPhone within an inch above the water is that even the tiniest waves \u2013 which you can also create yourself \u2013 will look massive and distort the reflection, which of course also adds perspective to the photo. This is something you can only do with a smartphone since in traditional cameras the lens is placed much higher from the bottom of the camera.\n\n6. Include shadows in the composition\n\nMany photos can be greatly enhanced by also including shadows in the composition. This works particularly well if you shoot within the so-called golden hour, which is the hour before sunset (or after sunrise) when the shadows are longer and much more pronounced.\n\nTo make sure that the shadows fit in with the rest of the composition, treat them like you would treat any other photography subject. Quite often it means that your photos with shadows should be shot from the top with the ground taking up a large part of the composition.\n\n7. Shoot from the hip\n\nShooting from hip height is one of the best ways to improve your street photos and other photos of people that are not portraits. By changing the angle like this you can make the photo more dynamic and interesting just because we normally don\u2019t look at other people from that angle.\n\nYou could either get down on your knees to maintain full control over the process, or you can just lower your iPhone and literally shoot from the hip to add some randomness to your photos.\n\n8. Tilt your photos for a more dynamic look\n\nWho said you should always keep your iPhone straight and take perfectly horizontal photos? For some reason that\u2019s exactly what we end up doing 99% of the time. However, there are situations when tilting the iPhone a little will result in a far more interesting and unique photos.\n\nThis is one of my favorite iPhone photos, and it\u2019s made much more interesting by the subtle but perceptible tilting of the frame. Of course, the subjects couldn\u2019t walk like this in real life, thus making this photo a bit surreal.\n\n9. Always keep experimenting\n\nYou should always keep experimenting and looking for a unique and interesting angle for your photos. Don\u2019t just take a photo the way you see the scene, try to change the angle and see how that changes the photo. Don\u2019t just settle for the first version of what could be a great photo.\n\nMaybe you want to get down on your knees, maybe you want to climb the nearby stairs and take the photo from there, or maybe you want to get closer to your subject. Always keep experimenting with unique shooting angles, and you won\u2019t be disappointed with the results.\n\nEmil Pakarklis is the founder of iPhone Photography School, a website that helps people take better photos with the iPhone.\n\nAll photos in this article were shot and edited with iPhone 4S."}
{"text":"Yeast. They already participate in producing some of the most popular pain-killing substances around: beer and wine. Now, scientists have engineered yeast that can also make one of the most powerful analgesics: morphine. Their work is in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. [Kate Thodey, Stephanie Galanie and Christina D. Smolke, A microbial biomanufacturing platform for natural and semisynthetic opioids]\n\nOpiates like morphine and codeine are essential for treating severe pain. But making these meds isn\u2019t easy. All are derived from opium poppies, and tens to hundreds of thousands of tons are needed to meet global needs. The crops can also be affected by climate, disease and even political turmoil in the countries where the plants are grown, which further limits commercial production.\n\nTo get around these potential challenges, researchers have turned to yeast, an organism that can be grown easily on industrial scales.\n\nThe scientists inserted into yeast cells a handful of genes isolated from the opium poppy. These genes encode the enzymes the plants use to produce opiates. After tweaking the system to adjust the relative amounts of the enzymes, the researchers could feed their yeast a precursor chemical called thebaine, and get pure morphine in return.\n\nThe yeast can\u2019t yet make opiates from scratch. But with a bit more effort and a few more enzymes, yeast may produce painkillers that are prescription strength.\n\n\u2014Karen Hopkin\n\n[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]\n\n[Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.]"}
{"text":"Since the Pac-12 expanded to 12 teams in 2011, the annual showdown between Oregon and Stanford hasn't been as much a North Division game as an annual coronation. Four of the last five times these teams met, the winner would go on to win the Pac-12 championship.\n\nAnd once they got to the league's title game, they typically dominated their South brethren. The first five Pac-12 championship games have been won by either Oregon or Stanford by an average of three touchdowns. It was a shared dynasty that was the envy of the league's 10 other programs.\n\nOregon has a 3-6 record and may miss playing in a bowl game for the first time in a dozen years. Chris Williams\/Icon Sportswire\n\nStanford travels to Oregon on Saturday, only this time the duo's monopoly on conference titles was broken up weeks ago. Regardless of the outcome, neither will win the conference. And neither will win the North. Both programs have yielded to the gentlemen from the great state of Washington \u2026 or the great Washington State. The Cougars and Huskies swept the Cardinal and Ducks in blowout victories, effectively marking the end of one epoch and trumpeting in the Pac-12's Age of Apples.\n\nThe Oregon-Stanford matchup has traditionally influenced playoff and BCS tides. But this year it wouldn't make a ripple in a kiddie pool. The once-ordained have been reduced to ordinary.\n\nYet while there are no national stakes at play for either team, there is still plenty worth investing in. The Cardinal (6-3, 4-3) -- despite their injuries and stilted offense -- still have a shot at a nine-win season and a mid-tier bowl game.\n\nOregon (3-6, 1-5) needs to win to keep its slim hopes of making the postseason alive. The Ducks have lost six of their last seven and are in danger of missing a bowl game for the first time since 2004.\n\nThis has traditionally been a game of competing philosophies: Oregon with its up-tempo, high-scoring brand of offense against Stanford's stalwart defense. And that still holds true. The Ducks are No. 4 in the league in scoring offense at 38.2 points per game. Stanford has the league's No. 3 scoring defense, yielding just 18.6 points per game.\n\nBut there's another contrast this year. Oregon's defense can't stop hemorrhaging points. Stanford's offense can't find any. The Ducks are 11th in the league in scoring defense. Stanford is last in offense.\n\nEDITOR'S PICKS Week 10 Pac-12 Power Rankings\n\nCollege GameDay travels to Seattle to see the two hottest teams in the Pac-12 face off in Washington and USC.\n\nIt's the stoppable force versus the movable object.\n\nLast year was the only time the winner of this game didn't win the league title. Oregon pulled out a tight 38-36 victory at Stanford, eliminating the Cardinal from playoff contention. But Stanford still went on to win the conference and roll through the Rose Bowl.\n\nThat's been a theme in this matchup -- one knocking the other out of something significant. In 2012, it was the Cardinal who topped the Ducks in Eugene in overtime, spoiling an undefeated season and paving the way for that barn-burning Notre Dame-Alabama BCS championship. A year later the Cardinal again topped an undefeated Oregon team. And then in 2015, it was the Ducks who bounced the Cardinal from playoff consideration.\n\nOregon has won the last two, but three of the last four meetings have come down to one possession.\n\nThis game also features two of the league's preseason Heisman favorites -- running backs Christian McCaffrey from Stanford and Royce Freeman from Oregon. Both were coming off outstanding, record-breaking seasons in 2015. But injuries have slowed them statistically and negatively impacted their teams.\n\nIt's a situation neither of these teams wanted to be in Week 11. This is the game that's always been circled as an exhibition of the Pac-12's best and brightest. Heismans have been won and lost in this game. Opinions have been molded. National landscapes have been altered.\n\nBut not this year. Every game is important and every game matters. You won't find a player in either locker room who doesn't care about the outcome. This is just the first time in a long time that the rest of the country won't be watching. Because this time around it's not a coronation. It's just another North Division game."}
{"text":"(Image: Oli Scarff\/Getty)\n\nIt may look like a sci-fi movie prop, but it could be a glimpse at the future of prosthetics.\n\n3D printing can render everyday artefacts in clear plastic, so we can see in unprecedented detail how they work \u2013 and this exquisite model of a prosthetic arm is a brilliant example. It is one of the highlights at the London Science Museum\u2019s 3D printing exhibition, which features more than 600 printed objects.\n\nDesigned by Richard Hague, director of the Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Research Group at the University of Nottingham, UK, and his students the arm shows how the printers can create strong structure, mobile joints and delicate sensors \u2013 like spiral-shaped metal touch-detectors \u2013 all in one process.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a mock-up but it shows circuits that sense temperature, feel objects and control the arm\u2019s movement,\u201d says Hague. \u201c3D printing gives us the freedom to make complex, optimised shapes, and our research aim is focused on printing-in electrical, optical or even biological functions.\u201d\n\nSuch techniques are also bringing prosthetics to people who previously could not afford them. For instance, the open-source \u201crobohand\u201d project, pioneered by South African carpenter Richard Van As, aims to print cheap, plastic customised prostheses for people who have lost fingers, or who were born with some digits missing or malformed. Some of his work \u2013 with the designs available online \u2013 is also on show at the Science Museum.\n\nSee more: \u201cWhat our 3D-printed future looks like\u201c"}
{"text":"How To Fight Like Saenchai\n\nWatch and Learn Saenchai\u2019s Best Muay Thai Techniques and Tricks\n\nObserving Saenchai\u2019s skills in person is mentally exhausting.\n\nHis raw talent is just mind-blowing and it\u2019s nearly impossible to figure out how he fights so perfectly. I was blessed to watch him teach a session at Phoenix MMA (Bournemouth, UK) and managed to film a lot of the techniques and drills he was demonstrating.\n\nSaenchai has been my idol since I started Muay Thai, so it\u2019s my absolute privilege to share his favourite techniques with you. Whilst they are mechanically quite simple, the timing and precision he performs them with is what makes them so effective:\n\n#1. Saenchai\u2019s Kicks\n\nHis unique flexibility allows him to bring his chamber up high with amazing speed and control. When he raises his thigh for a round kick, you have NO idea whether you\u2019re about to get booted in the leg or take a shin to the head:\n\nQuestion Mark Kick\n\nStart by swinging your kick at your opponent\u2019s leg, then at the last minute elevate your chamber and smash your foot into their confused face. The final blow may end up as more of a karate\/tkd-esque flick (which finishes at the target) than a traditional Muay Thai round kick (which goes through the target).\n\nKey points \u2013 Make sure you pop up hard onto the toes of your standing leg to help achieve a good snap in the kick and to help it reach the head. Saenchai makes it look so easy mainly because he has such loose hip flexors, better get stretching if you want to throw it as smoothly as he does.\n\nFlying Switch Teep\n\nOnce you understand the quick footwork required, this highly explosive teep combination will send your opponent flying across the ring whilst making you look like an absolute baller: Throw a front leg teep, then as it lands back on the floor, quickly drag your rear foot up to the front. Now throw your front knee up and jump up off your rear foot. As you\u2019re in mid-air, throw the rear teep. Having blasted your opponent with your rear foot, bring it back behind you so that you land in your normal stance.\n\nKey point \u2013 Throw the front knee as high as you can before executing the kick to make yourself look as G as possible.\n\nFake Round Kick Into Teep\n\nSaenchai uses this classic technique better than anyone: Deceitfully throw a rear round kick chamber out wide to draw a front leg check from your opponent. As they are balanced on one leg, lean back and extend your foot straight down the middle to send them collapsing into a puddle of gullible shame.\n\nKey point \u2013 Exaggerate and sell the initial round kick chamber to force a check.\n\n#2. How to Miss\/Avoid a Kick\n\nMissing A Kick By staying face on to your opponent after you throw and miss a kick, you\u2019re telling the judges that you have complete control of your movements. Also, if you\u2019re looking at your opponent after a miss, it\u2019s easier to detect any incoming counter attacks (sorry to state the painfully obvious). So, next time you miss a kick and swing around in a full circle whilst raising an anticipatory check in foolish panic as you present your back to your opponent, slap yourself. Saenchai would not be pleased.\n\nP.S. There\u2019s a reason Saenchai struts around like he\u2019s just fucked the entire Playboy Mansion: Muay Thai judges favor ring authority and aggression so his confrontational and arrogant swagger tells the judges he\u2019s commanding the situation.\n\nKey Point \u2013 Develop your own ring character (and definitely don\u2019t copy his, or any fighter\u2019s, because people will just laugh at your unoriginality)\n\nThe Lean Back\n\nNo one pulls this off more stylishly than Saenchai. You\u2019ll see videos of him bending backwards to the point he\u2019s basically entering the matrix, but you don\u2019t actually need to be that flexible to do this move efficiently. The evasiveness of the technique comes from stepping back with your rear foot and leaning back just enough to avoid the kick. Making a more minimal movement will also allow you to counter more efficiently.\n\nKey points \u2013 Stepping back enough with the rear foot and not bending back too much.\n\n#3. Elbows Notice how small his movements are when he throws his elbow strikes. When timed properly, elbows do enough damage without the need to dedicate your entire body weight and mortgage behind the shot. You unnecessarily risk losing balance if you over commit. Rear Cross Elbow Watch how he steps out at a 45 degree angle with his lead foot. This allows the elbow to travel in a wider arc and build more momentum which will create a more powerful blow. Most people make the mistake of stepping straight forward when throwing the elbow which limits the strike\u2019s power. Key point \u2013 Step out at 45 degrees. Countering Knee With Up-Elbow Watch how he waits for Pakorn to commit to the knee before stepping in with his own elbow counter. This strike is best thrown as a counter against your opponent\u2019s movement. Key point \u2013 He doesn\u2019t just blindly throw the strike hoping it will hit. Countering Hook With Up-Elbow Key point \u2013 Reach out and meet the punch to prevent your opponent locking on a collar tie. #4. The Clinch Fuck clinching with Saenchai. Ever. Duck under A powerful position to obtain. This essentially turns your opponent into your bitch. Notice how Saenchai blocks Pakorn\u2019s elbow after clearing the arm to avoid being struck by it? Ensure you also pull your opponent at a downward 45 degree angle to break their balance. Key point \u2013 block the elbow and take a big step with your rear knee to load up the strike. Cross face As your opponent reaches to collar tie you, duck under their arm and push their face in the opposite direction to lock out their arm and completely fuck with their body\u2019s mechanics. It\u2019s essential to pull this move off quickly to avoid being countered as you do it. Key point \u2013 do it fast. Body head knee combo This isn\u2019t related to clinch, but it\u2019s a wicked combination I wanted to share. Key point \u2013 Exaggerate the duck down as you throw the overhand to sell it like a body shot, this will help lower your opponent\u2019s guard and increase your chances of putting him to bed. (Thank you to Yokkao for putting this seminar together and allowing me to film. To all the Pakorn fans wondering why I left him out, it\u2019s because he didn\u2019t do any teaching. He\u2019s still a legend in his own right, he just didn\u2019t have any relevance to this article!) Bonus Saenchai Technique Breakdown Video\n\nPlease follow and like us:\n\nAuthor Profile Sam Razvi Sam is a travelling fighter\/journalist from England. He backpacked to Thailand to learn Muay Thai when he was 18 where he ended up having 4 professional fights. He then trained kickboxing in Holland where he learned how much it sucks to not take a leg kick properly. Having also performed stand-up comedy he likes to think he's funny, so please forgive him for any ridiculous jokes (and for the audacity of writing about himself in the 3rd person). Check his travelling fight blog here - http:\/\/www.pineapplesamurai.com. Latest entries Author Archives Culture Western Muay Thai vs Thailand Muay Thai\n\nWestern Muay Thai vs Thailand Muay Thai Technique How To Fight Like Saenchai\n\nLike this: Like Loading..."}
{"text":"With Brisbane Festival in full swing, we round up the best places cheap cafes and restaurants in the city \u2013 whether you fancy a big bowl of ramen, delicate French pastries or beer and burgers\n\nMrs Luu's Vietnamese Canteen\n\nThis is not your traditional-style Vietnamese restaurant. The family who own Mrs Luu's used to run one of the most popular Vietnamese restaurants in Brisbane, but for this latest venture, they have taken just a handful of favourites and given them a contemporary twist. The \"three little piggies'\" banh mi (Vietnamese baguette sandwich) is a combination of barbecued pork, Vietnamese-style ham and their own porchetta, piled high with crunchy, fragrant salad ($7). There are six varieties of goi cuon rice paper rolls (two for $6) and daily blackboard specials, such as green papaya salad with king prawns and pork belly, or Mrs Luu's own pho thai nam (rare beef brisket and noodle soup). Cash only, but there is an ATM on the premises.\n\n\u2022 25 Railway Terrace, Milton, +61 (0) 7 3369 5760\n\nLittle Greek Taverna\n\nLittle Greek Taverna, Brisbane\n\nIt's bustling, rowdy and a bit rough-and-ready, and that's all part of the appeal. This family-run restaurant is hard to beat when it comes to hearty, home-style Greek fare. Select from a list of mezedes, which includes homemade dips, classic zucchini fritters with tzatziki and Aunty Thea Ellie's tiropita (crisp, golden pastry filled with a mixture of warm feta and ricotta cheese, $6). Generous servings of souvlaki come with salad for $15, or $5 per skewer. In addition to traditional yiros (kebabs) at $10 a plate, there's a range of grilled seafood, including octopus, prawns, calamari and scallops (all under $20). You can bring your own wine (corkage $2) and they'll throw in the party atmosphere for free.\n\n\u2022 1 Browning St West End, +61 (0) 7 3255 2215, www.littlegreektaverna.com.au\n\nDouble Shot Espresso\n\nThe guys who run this pint-sized neighbourhood cafe have been in the hospitality game for many years and it shows. Chef Michael manages to turn out an array of perfect cakes, tarts, terrines, sandwiches and innovative breakfast fare from the minuscule kitchen, while Ross manages front-of-house with unflappable cheer, despite how hectic it can be on weekends. You can't beat their banoffee pie. The espresso here is well-made, and as strong as the cafe's name suggests. There simply isn't a dud option on the menu, with everything under $20. Be sure to take cash as there are no card facilities.\n\n\u2022 125 Oxlade Drive New Farm, +61 (0) 7 3358 6556.\n\nJan Powers Farmers Market, Brisbane City\n\nA salad from Nom Noms\n\nThis normally drab corner of the concrete jungle is transformed every Wednesday, bringing a little bit of the Queensland country to the Central Business District. Farmers and producers peddle their delicious wares to a bustling crowd of city workers, students and visitors. For around $10 (\u00a36), you can take your pick from hand-crafted dumplings, German Bratwurst and tasty vegetarian options from the Nom Noms stall. This is also the place for hunting and gathering locally made cheese, hot-smoked salmon, artisan sourdough, macaroons, brownies and ginger beer \u2013 all the makings of a perfect riverside picnic in the nearby botanical gardens.\n\n\u2022 Reddacliff Place (top of the Queen St Mall), George St, Brisbane, every Wednesday; janpowersfarmersmarkets.com.au.\n\nSwamp Dog\n\nSmoked sardines, toasted sourdough, feta and dried tomatoes from Swampdog\n\nAt this edgy little South Brisbane fish and chippery, it's all about sustainable seafood, with an emphasis on locally caught fish. Pull up a stool at the big communal table and help yourself to homemade lemonade, or order a takeaway and head down to nearby South Bank Parklands. Sample Moreton Bay mullet and chips ($10.90) or salt-and-pepper calamari with preserved lemon aioli and chips ($12.90). Our favourites are the mackerel cutlet with zingy pineapple and coriander salsa ($16.90) and the tempura whiting with ginger prawn mousse and fragrant, crunchy Viet-style salad ($14.90).\n\n\u2022 186 Vulture St South Brisbane, +61 (0) 7 3255 3715, swampdog.com.au.\n\nSourced Grocer\n\nIt's the city's hippest market cafe, offering a simple, produce-driven menu, served against an industrial-chic backdrop of gourmet goodies, cut flowers and some of the best fresh produce around. The simple menu is handwritten on the white subway-tiled wall and reads like a who's who of local artisan producers. Food is as wholesome as it is delicious \u2013 salads such as the Noosa smokehouse salmon, freekeh tabbouleh, pistachio, grapes and goat's cheese ($12) will keep the taste buds and the scales happy. The bircher muesli and smashed avocado on sourdough are some of the best you'll find.\n\n\u2022 11 Florence St Newstead, +61 (0) 7 3852 6734, sourcedgrocer.com.au\n\nThe Bun Mobile\n\nbun mobile\n\nBrisbane's first food truck set the bar high. This is fast food with class, offering simple, freshly steamed Chinese-style buns packed with flavoursome fillings. Buns are $8 each ($10 for the daily special), and there are always vegetarian and gluten-free options. Slow-cooked Wagyu beef with soy-pickled shitake mushrooms is a menu staple, as is the char-grilled teriyaki chicken with carrot and mint 'slaw and Japanese mayo. The twice-cooked pork version with hoisin and sakura-pickled cucumber is worth crossing town for \u2013 check the location calendar on their website as these buns get around.\n\n\u2022 +61 (0) 401 420 922, thebunmobile.com.au\n\nTaro's Ramen\n\nTaro's Ramen, Brisbane\n\nThe ground floor of an office tower in the Central Business District seems an unlikely spot for what is undoubtedly the city's best ramen, but it's worth battling the lunchtime crush for a bowl of their signature Red Tonkatsu Ramen ($15.90). Made from Bangalow pork bones, the rich stock has been bubbling away for two days by the time it's ladled into your bowl with tender, slow-roasted char siu pork, noodles, nori, seasoned egg and shallots. Naturally, noodles are made on the premises. For a tamer option, the shoyu ramen broth is a balanced blend of vegetable, chicken and seafood \u2013 or try \"golden triple soup\" with aged soy for a delectable umami hit ($13.90).\n\n\u2022 363 Adelaide St Brisbane, +61 (0) 7 3832 6358, taros.com.au.\n\nChouquette\n\nFirst-time visitors stare agape at the baskets of traditional baguettes, golden croissants and exquisitely delicate cakes on display in this little New Farm establishment. With a host of French-born and \u2013trained pastry chefs in the kitchen and cafe, all rattling off orders to one another in French, this is the most authentic boulangerie-patisserie experience this side of Paris. Best of all, despite the commitment to traditional slow-fermentation bread-baking methods and quality ingredients, you can eat like a French queen here for surprisingly little. Take your pick from any of the picture-perfect pastries \u2013 the chocolate torsade and almond croissant are standouts; add a well-made espresso and expect to hand over a meagre $10 for the pleasure.\n\n\u2022 19 Barker St New Farm, +61 (0) 7 3358 6336, chouquette.com.au\n\nTippler's Tap\n\nTippler's Tap, Brisbane\n\nThis is Brisbane's unofficial craft beer headquarters. A dark, hip little hideaway in Newstead with a staggering array of craft beers and fantastic, Chicago-style bar food. Whether your chosen tipple is a Bacchus Queensland Ale or My Wife's Bitter from Burleigh Brewing Company on the Gold Coast, the bar snacks are a drawcard in themselves. Order a hearty bowl of Grandma Kennedy's chilli with crusty organic sourdough, or share a 1kg serving of Buffalo wings with blue cheese sauce and celery sticks (both $10). Sliders are some of the best around. It's impossible to choose between the classic beef-cheese-onion-mustard combination and the pork belly, caramel star-anise, pickled cucumber and cilantro, so hedge your bets and go with the five for $20 deal.\n\n\u2022 22 Masters St Newstead, tipplerstap.com.au.\n\nMorag writes for extravirgin.net.au. She also hosts a food tour of Queensland on 612 ABC Evenings (Wednesdays 8.15pm)."}
{"text":"Pick virtually any issue facing America today, and you will find a generous collection of Republican lies on the subject. Some are actually well-crafted lies, difficult to disprove, but some are so totally over the edge that a fifth grader could expose them, like this one, so why do they do it?\n\nRep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., delivered one of her signature hard-hitting speeches at the Values Voter Summit, a conference for socially conservative activists on Sept. 17, 2010. At one point, Bachmann took a shot at the woman who leads her chamber, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Pelosi, Bachmann said, \"has been busy sticking the taxpayer with her $100,000 bar tab for alcohol on the military jets that she\u2019s flying.\" Bachmann was referring to the Air Force jets that Pelosi uses to fly internationally and back to her home in San Francisco. (Her Republican predecessor, Dennis Hastert of Illinois, used them as well, under a program approved under President George W. Bush.) Bachman\u2019s claim drew a rapid counterattack from the Speaker\u2019s office, as aides revived arguments they\u2019d used when the allegation first surfaced months earlier. Among other things, Pelosi\u2019s office noted that the Speaker \"does not drink alcohol\" and that there \"is no alcohol service on the domestic flights the Air Force operates for travel from Washington to San Francisco for the Speaker.\"\u2026 [emphasis added]\n\nInserted from <Politifact>\n\nOf course Batshit Bachmann was busted on her lie, as she has been dozens of times before. So why bother? Two paradigms come into play here.\n\nFirst, if Republicans told the truth, nobody would vote for them, except for the richest and most hate filled in our culture."}
{"text":"A medical worker has been suspended from duty after an allegation that she smacked a four-year-old child in front of his mother.\n\nA medical worker has been suspended from duty after an allegation that she smacked a four-year-old child in front of his mother.\n\nThe HSE has confirmed that an investigation is under way into the alleged incident and gardai may become involved.\n\nThe child's mother claimed the incident happened at Letterkenny General Hospital at the weekend. She has made a statement claiming her child was slapped on the bottom.\n\nIn a statement to the Irish Independent, a hospital spokeswoman confirmed the parent had made a formal complaint.\n\nThe medical worker has been suspended while the incident is investigated.\n\n\"Letterkenny General Hospital is investigating a 'trust in care' incident concerning a child who was attending the hospital, accompanied by its parent,\" said the spokeswoman.\n\nShe said the hospital was guided by two policies when dealing with such incidents.\n\nRESPONSIBILITY\n\n\"The 'Children First' policy states that the key principles informing best practice are that the welfare of children is of paramount importance and that all personnel and health professionals, irrespective of the position held within the organisation, have a responsibility towards child protection and welfare,\" she said.\n\n\"The 'Trust in Care' policy aims to ensure that any allegations or complaints against a member of staff are thoroughly investigated.\n\n\"This policy states that 'at an appropriate stage in the process, management should take whatever protective measures are necessary to ensure that no patient\/client or staff member is exposed to unacceptable risk.\n\n\"'These protective measures are not disciplinary measures and may include putting the staff member off duty with pay pending the outcome of the investigation'.\"\n\nIn the statement the hospital also said: \"In the interests of fairness and to ensure due process, the nature of any investigation is not discussed with third parties not associated with the alleged incident.\"\n\nThe spokeswoman added: \"When the results of the investigation are known, appropriate action is taken \u2013 up to and including disciplinary action and, where appropriate, the reporting of the incident to external authorities.\"\n\nIrish Independent"}
{"text":"Felicia Pearson (born May 18, 1980) is an American actress. She played a character of the same name, Felicia \"Snoop\" Pearson, on The Wire. She wrote a memoir titled Grace After Midnight detailing her troubled childhood and time spent in prison for second-degree murder.\n\nEarly life [ edit ]\n\nPearson was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of two incarcerated drug addicts, and was raised in an East Baltimore foster home. Born a premature crack baby and weighing only three pounds, she was not expected to live.[1] She was so small that she was fed with an eyedropper until she could be fed normally.[1] According to her memoir, Grace After Midnight, she met her biological parents very few times; her mother was a crack addict and her father was an armed robber. She thus decided to go by her foster family's surname. She was a tomboy from a young age.\n\nPearson worked as a drug dealer. At the age of 14, she was convicted of second degree murder after the shooting of a girl named Okia Toomer, and was sentenced to two eight-year terms, to be served consecutively, at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup, Maryland.[2] She was released after six and a half years.\n\nPearson said her life turned around at the age of 18 when Arnold Loney, a local drug dealer who looked out for her and sent her money in prison, was shot and killed.[1] He was the one who gave her the nickname Snoop because she reminded him of Charlie Brown's beagle Snoopy in the comic strip Peanuts.[1] While in prison, she earned her GED and was released in 2000.[1] She landed a local job fabricating car bumpers, but was fired after only two weeks when her employer learned she had a prison record.\n\nCareer [ edit ]\n\nActing & Reality Television [ edit ]\n\nPearson met Michael K. Williams, who played Omar Little on The Wire, in a Baltimore club. He invited her to come to the set one day. He introduced her to the writers and the producers, and after subsequent auditions, she was offered a role in the series.[1] She has appeared in videos of R&B singer Lil' Mo's \"Dem Boyz,\" rapper Rick Ross' \"The Boss,\" \"Here I Am,\" as well as \"Cash Flow\" by rapper Ace Hood and \"Shabba (feat ASAP Rocky)\" by A$AP Ferg.[citation needed].\n\nFor her performance in The Wire, Stephen King called her \"perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series.\"[3]\n\nIn February 2015, Pearson appeared in Da Sweet Blood of Jesus as Lucky Mays.[4]\n\nIn December 2015, Pearson appeared in Spike Lee's movie Chi-Raq as Dania.[5]\n\nIn 2016, she played the role of Roxy Barnes in \"Good Cop Bad Cop\", the 2nd episode of the 7th season of the CBS police procedural drama Blue Bloods.[6]\n\nIn 2016, Felicia also joined the cast of VH1's Love & Hip Hop: New York, a reality tv series which documents the personal lives, relationships and careers of individuals who have a history in the hip-hop world.\n\nMusic [ edit ]\n\nPearson was featured in the song \"It's A Stick Up\" with Tony Yayo and Mazaradi Fox. The music video for the song featured clips from The Wire. She has also discussed her plans for forthcoming musical projects in a number of interviews.[7][8] She has the only speaking part in Snoop Dogg\u2019s \"So Many Pros,\" and appears in three \"roles\" in the video (a live-action montage of fake movie posters).\n\nPhilanthropy [ edit ]\n\nPearson has also volunteered as a prison visitor and worked on anti-violence and literary campaigns for youths, and supported The Stay Strong Foundation.[9][10][11]\n\nPersonal life [ edit ]\n\nOn March 10, 2011, Pearson was arrested along with 60 others and charged with drug offenses. The arrest was made during a predawn raid at her home in Baltimore following a five-month DEA operation.[12] At the first hearing after her arrest, Judge John Addison Howard denied Pearson bail due to her acting ability: \"Well, you can change your appearance, I've seen the episodes of The Wire in which you appear. You look very different than you do here today, and I'm not talking about the jumpsuit, I'm talking about your general appearance.\"[13] After a month in jail, Pearson was offered bail of $50,000 on April 8, 2011.[14] In August 2011, she pleaded guilty to the charges a day before her trial was to begin.[15] She was sentenced to a suspended seven-year prison term, with credit for time served, and given three years of supervised probation.[16]\n\nReferences [ edit ]\n\nFurther reading [ edit ]"}
{"text":"Fitness is not always just about exercises; it is also about your diet and nutrition. It is only when exercises and nutrition go hand in hand can you hope to become healthy and have a good physique. Even though most trainers know about nutrition they do not know their legal rights and if they are allowed to share the information.\n\nWhile trainers can share knowledge about nutrition in general but what determines if it is legal is the certification of the trainer and if they are competent to give health advice to their clients. Trainers should not cross the line when suggesting nutritional changes for medical conditions; that is the prerogative of the registered dietician and general physicians.\n\nAs a trainer, you can inform your clients on the importance of adding phytonutrients into their diet and the importance of reducing dairy and relying more on healthy fats; eating more of lean protein.\n\nYou can also share recipes. Basically, you can give them the bricks to build the foundation of their diet. Where you tread tricky ground is when you suggest diet solutions to treat diseases. You cannot suggest any meal plans because that is beyond the scope of a trainer in most countries; in many countries, there are no clear-cut laws on this aspect of fitness. In the US, the law varies based on the state and its guidelines.\n\nFinal thoughts\n\nYour client looks towards you to give them some guidelines on what to eat and what to avoid and you are well within your rights to suggest the right foods and show them the food pyramid; remember only when their diet corresponds to the exercises can they hope to benefit. Those clients who are into bodybuilding will already be following a dietician\u2019s advice and might even be testosterone pills with a positive avis sur testogen aiding their cause.\n\n\u2026"}
{"text":"When six senior Italian detectives arrived in Cairo in early February, following the discovery of the brutally battered body of 28-year-old Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, they faced long odds of solving the mystery of his disappearance and death. Egyptian officials had told reporters that Regeni had probably been hit by a car, but clear signs of torture on his body had raised an alarm in Rome.\n\nThe Egyptian authorities guaranteed \u201cfull cooperation\u201d, but this was quickly revealed to be a hollow promise. The Italians were allowed to question witnesses \u2013 but only for a few minutes, after the Egyptian police had finished their own much longer interrogations, and with the Egyptian police still in the room. The Italians requested the video footage from the metro station where Regeni last used his mobile phone, but the Egyptians allowed several days to elapse, by which time the footage from the day of his disappearance had been taped over. They also refused to share the mobile phone records from the area around Regeni\u2019s home, where he disappeared on 25 January, and the site where his body was found nine days later.\n\nOne of the Egyptian chief investigators in charge of the Regeni case, Major General Khaled Shalaby, who told the press that there were no signs of foul play, is a controversial figure. Convicted of kidnapping and torture over a decade ago, he escaped with a suspended sentence.\n\nWho murdered Giulio Regeni? \u2013 podcast Read more\n\nThe Egyptians may well have hoped that the outside world, with no independent information, would have little choice but to accept their unsatisfying explanation for Regeni\u2019s death. But in the digital age, getting away with murder has become more difficult.\n\nAbout 10 days after the recovery of Regeni\u2019s body, Italian prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco and a couple of police officers travelled to Regeni\u2019s hometown of Fiumicello, in north-eastern Italy, to attend his funeral. It would be a rare opportunity to question many key witnesses in the case, gathered in one place.\n\nThe family had asked guests not to bring cameras, or to carry signs of protest, preferring a simple, sober ceremony. But more than 3,000 mourners attended the service, most of them spilling out of a school gymnasium into the street. The funeral turned the town of less than 5,000 people into a kind of miniature United Nations \u2013 a tribute to Regeni\u2019s short but global life.\n\nThere were friends from the US, where he had studied during high school; from Latin America, a region he knew well; from the UK, where he had done both university and graduate studies; from Germany and Austria, where he had worked; and from Egypt, where he had lived since November 2015, researching the trade union movement for his Cambridge doctorate. \u201cWe put people up in the houses of friends according to which languages they had in common,\u201d said Paola Regeni, Giulio\u2019s mother, who works as a teacher.\n\nMembership Event: The Long Read live at the Hospital Club\n\nNot only did the police have the chance to question witnesses, they received an unexpected bonus. In a gesture of astonishing openness, Giulio Regeni\u2019s grieving friends and relatives handed over their phones and laptops to the Italian police. As members of the Facebook generation, they were used to living transparently, ceding chunks of their privacy as the price for living in a connected world. If it could shed some light on the circumstances of Giulio\u2019s death, they were prepared to share their personal data.\n\nRegeni\u2019s parents also gave the police his computer, which they had taken from his Cairo apartment after he disappeared. This, together with the mass of emails and text messages collected from his friends, has allowed Italian prosecutors to work around the holes in the evidence provided by the Egyptian government, and to reconstruct Regeni\u2019s world.\n\nThe prosecutors also obtained another vital piece of evidence: Regeni\u2019s battered corpse, which, after an extremely thorough autopsy in Italy, has told them volumes about the final nine days of his life, from the time of his disappearance to the time his body was dumped in a concrete channel beside the road from Cairo to Alexandria.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Giulio Regeni. Photograph: Facebook\n\nWhile this evidence will almost certainly not be enough to help Italian investigators identify Regeni\u2019s killers by name, it has allowed them to refute a series of lies from the Egyptian government about Regini\u2019s murder \u2013 and keep up pressure on Egypt for hard information about his killing.\n\nItalian prosecutors recently made an important breakthrough: the Egyptian government agreed to hand over mobile phone records from both the area where Regeni was last seen, and the place where his body was found. Perhaps even more important, during a visit to Rome in early September, Egyptian prosecutors admitted for the first time that Regeni had been under police surveillance before his disappearance.\n\nThe Egyptian government continues to deny that it had any involvement in Regeni\u2019s death. Over the past eight months, Italian investigators have peeled away layers of false leads, attempted cover-ups, and phony evidence, to build a clearer picture of what happened to Giulio Regeni than at first seemed possible.\n\n\u201cI am going out,\u201d Regeni texted his girlfriend at 7.41pm on 25 January 2016. He was walking from his apartment to the nearby metro, bound for the centre of Cairo. This message is the last trace of him alive.\n\nThat Regeni disappeared on 25 January is not coincidental. It is, in fact, a crucial clue to understanding his murder\n\nThat Regeni should have disappeared on 25 January is not coincidental. It is, in fact, a crucial clue to understanding his disappearance and murder. It was the fifth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and the massive demonstrations in Tahrir Square that brought the Arab Spring to Egypt and led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak. The date has a totemic significance for the regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, for whom it represents a traumatic climbdown \u2013 a moment in which the military\u2019s apparently unassailable grip on power seemed to slip. As a result, the army had been forced to accept the trial of Mubarak and the election of Islamist leader Mohammed Morsi, posing a serious threat to its position in Egyptian life. Such a thing could never be allowed to occur again.\n\nWhen Sisi and the military took control of the government and arrested Morsi in July 2013, Morsi supporters occupied two public squares and staged sit-ins, hoping for a repeat of the peaceful revolution in Tahrir Square. But this time Sisi sent in tanks and soldiers and massacred at least 1,000 people.\n\nAlthough Sisi came to power himself in the wake of mass demonstrations against Morsi, he seems to live in terror of the crowd. One of his first official acts was to ban any unauthorised assembly of more than 10 people. And each anniversary of the Tahrir Square uprising has brought bloodshed. In 2014, Sisi\u2019s government killed more than 60 protesters around the country at the time of the anniversary. A year later, 25 people were killed, including a woman poet who tried to lay a wreath of flowers in the square.\n\nIn the days before his disappearance, computer records show that Regeni had laid low, mostly staying inside his apartment. He probably knew that the Egyptian authorities were working themselves up to a fever pitch in anticipation of the anniversary. Police had reportedly searched 5,000 apartments in Cairo, in an effort to intimidate anyone who might be planning a demonstration. The raids were mostly concentrated in downtown Cairo, and did not include Regeni\u2019s apartment in the Dokki neighbourhood of Giza, a separate city that includes the site of the ancient pyramids.\n\nAlthough Regeni\u2019s mother had asked him to remain at home, where it was safe, he decided to attend the birthday party of a friend on the evening of 25 January. Downtown Cairo appeared to have returned to normal by nightfall and he and another friend agreed to meet at their usual place, not far from Tahrir Square. And so, Regeni walked into the force field of police activity in central Cairo, at its point of greatest alert.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Tahrir Square is almost deserted and heavily policed on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the 25 January uprising. Photograph: Khaled Elfiqi\/EPA\n\nOn 21 April, Reuters reported that Regeni had been picked up on the night of his disappearance by Egyptian police in downtown Cairo, near the Nasser metro stop. The news agency claimed that he was taken to a local police station for half an hour, then transferred to a Homeland Security compound in the area. The Egyptian government categorically denied the story, insisting that Regeni had never been in police custody. Reuters has stuck by its story, citing six independent but anonymous sources \u2013 three in the police and three in the security services. After publishing the report, Reuters\u2019 Cairo bureau chief was threatened with criminal prosecution and left the country. Egyptian police recently detained an Egyptian Reuters reporter for unspecified reasons.\n\nIn May of this year, the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior accidentally leaked an internal memo proposing a ban on all press coverage of the Regeni case.\n\nIt is unclear whether Regeni\u2019s arrest was planned, or the result of a random sweep, but once they had him in custody, Egyptian authorities would have been quick to realise that they already had a file on him. \u201cThere is no question that he would have been monitored,\u201d said Marie Duboc, a French scholar who now teaches at the University of T\u00fcbingen, in Germany. Like Regeni, she has studied Egyptian labour unions. \u201cEven historical research that would seem harmless to any outsider, is still extremely sensitive in Egypt.\u201d\n\nDuboc lived under surveillance from 2008 to 2010, when she was in Cairo, working on her own PhD. \u201cI would get strange phone calls from the Ministry of Higher Education, asking about my research,\u201d she told me. Later, when she visited Egypt to do follow-up work, she was turned away at the airport and barred from entering the country. Clearly, her name had been placed on a blacklist. (She has subsequently been allowed to return, she said.)\n\nIndependent labour unions are a particularly sensitive topic in Egypt under the Sisi government, because unions were seen as a key galvanising force in the 2011 revolution. Traditionally, labour unions were government-run \u2013 more a means of controlling workers than representing their interests. The first independent trade union was formed in 2009, but the movement truly took flight after Tahrir Square. A thousand independent labour unions sprouted up after the fall of Mubarak and, within days of the 2011 revolution, the first federation of independent unions was formed. Many democracy advocates in and outside Egypt, including Giulio Regeni and his Cambridge supervisor, the Egyptian political scientist Maha Abdelrahman, regarded the independent trade union movement as a positive development, with the potential to strengthen civil society, democratic participation and workers\u2019 rights \u2013 all things that seem threatening to a military regime determined to repress autonomous sources of power.\n\nOn 11 December, six weeks before he disappeared, Regeni attended a public meeting of the independent unions. He was impressed by their combative energy and wrote an enthusiastic article about it, together with a friend, which they published (in Italian) under a pseudonym. But something disconcerting happened at the meeting: although Regeni sat to the side and was not on the roster of speakers, a woman in a headscarf came over and photographed him. Regeni was shaken and told several friends about it. It was the first sign that he might be being watched.\n\nRegeni\u2019s particular area of research was a nascent independent union of street vendors, a large group that was difficult to control and a cause of considerable concern to the government. Egypt has an estimated five million street vendors, who sell everything from snacks and drinks to cheap clothes and kitchen utensils. In a country of 80 to 90 million people, as many as a quarter of Egyptian families depend to some degree on the income of a street vendor.\n\nThe Sisi government regards these workers with clear suspicion. Street vendors moved rapidly into Tahrir Square during the massive demonstrations of 2011. Most were simply looking to make a little money, selling food and drink to protesters, but their very presence was viewed by the authorities as aiding and abetting the revolution. Since then, the government has sought unsuccessfully to remove street vendors from the centre of Cairo, using fines, prison sentences and violence.\n\n\u201cAfter repeated failures to clear Cairo\u2019s city centre of street vendors \u2026 the Cairo governorate issued a shrewd decree,\u201d wrote Abdelrahman, in an article she published last year. The decree required store owners to report any street vendors working near their shops, or risk losing their own trading licenses. This served a dual purpose of forcing shopkeepers to keep tabs on street vendors for the government and pushing the vendors into the hands of the police.\n\nIn order to remain on the street and avoid police harassment, street vendors were themselves expected to let police know of anything or anyone unusual or suspicious. \u201cOne of the things that has happened in Egypt in the past few years, which we didn\u2019t fully recognise, is that the street pedlars are frequently used as police informants,\u201d said one Cambridge scholar, who preferred not to be named. Scattered around the city, present on nearly every block and square, the street vendors form a natural surveillance network.\n\nFor his doctorate, Regeni was engaged in what is known as \u201cparticipatory research\u201d \u2013 a method that involves spending substantial amounts of time in the field with one\u2019s subjects. While this is standard practice, a young Arabic-speaking foreigner, hanging out for hours in street markets, and asking about unionisation, future organising plans and attitudes toward the government, is likely to have looked extremely suspicious to most Egyptians \u2013 who have been told over and over to be on the lookout for foreign agents.\n\nRegeni\u2019s good intentions may also have blinded him to how his actions could have been interpreted. During the autumn of 2015, he had learned of a grant of up to \u00a310,000 issued by a British foundation to fund a development project. He was interested in applying because he could use the money to support his own PhD research and help the people he was studying. He mentioned his idea to a leader of the independent street vendors\u2019 union, Mohamed Abdallah. Abdallah\u2019s level of interest \u2013 in the money, rather than the project \u2013 worried Regeni. As a result, Regeni dropped the idea. Still, news of a young well-funded foreigner, ready to finance an internal Egyptian movement, may have struck police as exactly the kind of foreign conspiracy they wanted to stamp out.\n\nThose most familiar with Regeni\u2019s work in Egypt dismiss the idea that he could have discovered anything valuable or threatening to the Egyptian government. \u201cGiulio had been out doing field work, talking to street pedlars, maybe six or seven times,\u201d says one of his close friends in Cairo. \u201cHe would have known only a fraction of what any of the Egyptian government\u2019s informants would have been able to tell them.\u201d Even the independent union meeting that he attended and wrote about was a well-publicised event, authorised and monitored by the authorities.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest A street vendor near Tahrir Square, in 2013. In recent years, the Egyptian police have recruited some of them as informants. Photograph: Khaled Desouki\/AFP\/Getty Images\n\nWhile the independent unions were certainly regarded by the Sisi regime with extreme suspicion, the government had already gone a long way to rendering them toothless. One of Sisi\u2019s first moves was to make the chief of the federation of independent unions his minister of labour, an appointment intended to co-opt the movement and bring it under government control. Just this summer, in a further threat to their independence, a new measure was introduced, forcing the independents to re-register or risk decertification.\n\nAnd yet, to a government on constant alert to security threats, there may have been much in the meeting that Regeni attended \u2013 and in the article he wrote about it \u2013 that the government would have found alarming. One of the proposals was for a \u201cseries of regional conferences that lead after a few months to a large national assembly and perhaps a unitary protest (\u201cTo Tahrir!\u201d said several of those present.)\n\nRegeni\u2019s article ends with a few sentences that look like fighting words. \u201cIn the repressive context of the Sisi government, the fact that there are popular and spontaneous initiatives that break the wall of fear is significant and represent in and of themselves an important push for change.\n\n\u201cTo challenge the state of emergency, the government\u2019s appeals to stability and social harmony in the name of the \u2018war on terrorism\u2019, means today, even indirectly, to challenge the very basis on which this regime bases its existence and its repression of civil society.\u201d\n\nOn 7 January, just a month after the union meeting, Mohamed Abdallah denounced Regeni to the authorities. After Regeni\u2019s death, he told the Arabic-language newspaper Aswat Masriya that he became suspicious of Regeni because his questions \u201cwere not about street vendors \u2026 and had other intentions \u2026 I am not an informant but I believe I am protecting my country.\u201d\n\nThe Egyptian government says that as a result of Abdallah\u2019s tip-off, it placed Regeni under investigation, but decided after a few days that his research was of \u201cno interest to national security\u201d.\n\nDuring the nine days after his disappearance, Regeni\u2019s case became an international cause celebre, inspiring the Twitter hashtag #whereisgiulio? It was also a source of serious concern at the Italian Embassy in Cairo, which was preparing for the visit of a major business delegation, led by the Italian minister of economic development, Federica Guidi. On 3 February, while Guidi was meeting with Sisi and other Egyptian officials, a mini-van driver got a puncture on the road from Cairo to Alexandria. While fixing his flat tyre, he discovered Giulio Regeni\u2019s body.\n\nThe Egyptian forensic expert who first examined the corpse initially said that the multiple signs of torture suggested Regeni had suffered a \u201cslow death\u201d. This claim, however, was quickly retracted. The deputy head of criminal investigations in Giza, the city where the body was found, told the Associated Press that initial investigations showed Regeni was killed in a road accident.\n\nMeanwhile, the Regeni case had become a huge story in Italy. In the following days, as pressure mounted, Egyptian officials began floating various theories in the local press: that Regeni was gay and the victim of a crime of passion, that he was involved in a drug deal gone bad, or that he was a foreign spy.\n\nUpon further investigation, these theories fell apart. The digital record in the possession of Italian investigators showed that Regeni had a girlfriend in Ukraine, and there were Skype logs, emails and texts to prove it. His computer, email and bank records showed no trace of contact with any intelligence services. \u201cWe had his bank accounts, which showed he had almost no money,\u201d said Alessandra Ballerini, the lawyer for the Regeni family. \u201cThis is a boy who wore his father\u2019s old bathing suit and used his mother\u2019s old backpack because he didn\u2019t want to be a financial burden to his family.\u201d\n\nMost important was the rigorous second autopsy carried out in Italy, using Cat scans and tissue analysis. The Egyptian pathologist\u2019s report had said that Regeni was killed by a blow to the head. More detailed analysis in Italy showed that he had been hit repeatedly on the head, but that these blows were not fatal. Blood had coagulated around the points where he had been hit, and other cuts, bruises and abrasions on his body showed different stages of healing. This indicated that Regeni had been tortured more than once \u2013 and that days had passed between his initial torture, later sessions, and the moment of his death. He was covered with cuts and burns, and his hands and feet had been broken. Even his teeth were broken. His torturers appear to have carved letters into his flesh, a well-documented practice of the Egyptian police.\n\nThe forensic doctors at the University of Rome used a highly accurate technique for determining time of death, which measures potassium levels in the vitreous fluid of the eyes. They established that Regeni died between 10pm on 1 February and 10pm on 2 February. \u201cThis is important because it means that he was alive for at least six or seven days and tortured repeatedly during that time,\u201d said one Italian investigator. The cause of death was a broken neck. Regeni\u2019s mother believes that this was the work of professional torturers.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Giulio Regeni\u2019s mother, Paola, believes he was murdered by professional torturers. Photograph: Remo Casilli\/Reuters\n\nThe strength of the autopsy evidence forced the Egyptian authorities to abandon the implausible theories of accidental death and begin a new public relations offensive. Sisi suddenly granted an interview to the editor-in-chief of the Rome newspaper La Repubblica, which was published on 16 March and dominated by the Regeni case. As the autopsy evidence implicated the Egyptian police, Sisi seemed to suggest that Regeni\u2019s death was part of an elaborate conspiracy.\n\n\u201cWhy was the body found right when the minister of economic development and the Italian delegation were here to strengthen our cooperation?\u201d he asked. Sisi also mentioned the shooting down of a Russian tourist airliner in October 2015. \u201cRussian tourism and Italian tourism [in Egypt] have collapsed to nothing \u2026 Fill in the dots of these different episodes and you have a clear picture of an attempt to strike the Egyptian economy and isolate Egypt.\u201d\n\nJust days later, in early March, a witness stepped forward with a new hypothesis. An Egyptian engineer claimed that he had seen Regeni, on the afternoon before his disappearance, having a furious argument with another foreigner near the Italian consulate. The engineer, Mohammed Fawzy, then appeared on a popular Egyptian TV programme to say that he thought that the Italian government knew who killed Regeni, but was hiding the evidence. Echoing Sisi, Fawzy speculated that whoever killed Regeni was trying to sabotage commercial relations between Egypt and Italy.\n\nRelatives of the alleged criminal gang have insisted that its members were killed in cold blood at close range\n\nThe engineer\u2019s story collapsed when the Italian prosecutors\u2019 digital archive showed that Regeni had been at home all afternoon on 24 January. He had been on Skype with his girlfriend, chatting as they streamed the same movie and watched it together, 3,500km apart. Mobile phone records also showed that the engineer was not in the neighbourhood of the Italian consulate in Cairo at the time of the alleged quarrel.\n\nAnd then, suddenly, on 24 March, the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior announced a definitive resolution to the case. The ministry announced on its Facebook page that the perpetrators were a gang of four men \u201cspecialised in impersonating policemen, kidnapping foreigners and stealing their money\u201d.\n\nAs proof, the government displayed a tray of objects that included Regeni\u2019s passport, Italian identity card, a credit card and his ID card from Cambridge University. Not only had the Egyptian police found the culprits, they had already killed them. \u201cIn an exchange of fire between police forces and the men,\u201d the ministry explained, \u201call the gang members were killed.\u201d\n\nHowever, phone records placed the leader of the gang more than 100km away from Cairo at the time of Regeni\u2019s disappearance. Relatives of the alleged criminal gang have insisted that its members were killed in cold blood at close range, rather than in a shootout. The government\u2019s scenario also made little sense: why would a band of thieves keep Regeni\u2019s identity cards, given that they would provide incriminating evidence that tied them to the crime? Why would they torture a robbery victim for a week without ever asking for ransom money or using his credit card? Egyptian officials have now accepted that it is unlikely the dead men had anything to do with Regeni\u2019s death. In fact, by producing Regeni\u2019s passport and identity cards, the Egyptian police have apparently incriminated themselves.\n\nThe string of improbable cover stories was becoming an embarrassment even in Egypt. In a rare public rebuke, Mohammed Abdel-Hadi Allam, the editor-in-chief of al-Ahram, a government-owned newspaper, wrote: \u201cThe naive stories about Regeni\u2019s death have hurt Egypt at home and abroad and offered some people grounds to judge what is going on in the country now to be no different from what went on before the 25 January revolution.\u201d He compared the Regeni case to that of Khaled Said, a young Egyptian who had been seized by police in an internet cafe in 2010, and beaten to death. Photographs of Said\u2019s body taken by his brother were posted on Facebook and became an important rallying cry for the protesters who helped bring down Hosni Mubarak.\n\nDespite clear indications of involvement by the nation\u2019s security forces, the Egyptian government is left with what might be called the stupidity defence. As the Egyptian ambassador to Rome put it: \u201cWe\u2019re not so naive as to kill a young Italian and throw away his body the day of Minister Guidi\u2019s visit to Cairo.\u201d\n\n\u201cThere are two theories,\u201d said Karim Abdelrady, an Egyptian human rights lawyer. \u201cOne is that there is a feud between the Egyptian secret services, and one branch dumped the body in order to embarrass the other.\u201d A long, detailed anonymous letter that was sent to the Italian embassy in Bern, Switzerland and published by La Repubblica described complicated machinations within different branches of the Egyptian secret services, and reported that Regeni\u2019s body had been wrapped in an Egyptian army blanket, as if to direct suspicion towards the military police. But Italian investigators say that they have no way to confirm or deny the information in this document.\n\n\u201cThe other theory,\u201d explained Abdelrady, \u201cis that the Egyptian police thought they could get away with it by blaming a band of criminals, and that people would not think the Egyptian police would be so stupid as to leave the body where it could be found.\u201d\n\n\u201cThis case cannot be understood without understanding the context of generalised paranoia in the country,\u201d said one foreign scholar who has lived in Cairo for many years. \u201cFor the last three years, many high-level government officials, including members of the military, have spoken publicly about foreign conspiracies to undermine Egypt. This is bound to seep down to all levels of the police and military.\u201d\n\nThe Egyptian government put Giulio Regeni\u2019s possessions on display in an attempt to prove they had found his killers. Photograph: Uncredited\/AP\n\nAlmost immediately after taking over during the summer of 2013, the Sisi regime seemed anxious to stress that the 2011 revolution was not the result of popular dissatisfaction, but collusion between outside powers and Egyptian subversives.\n\nSince then, the human rights situation in Egypt \u2013 which was never good under Mubarak \u2013 has continued to deteriorate. There are now an estimated 40,000 political prisoners. Between late January and November 2015, Egypt\u2019s Al Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence documented 281 extrajudicial killings, 119 murders of prisoners in detention, 440 cases of torture in police stations, and 335 forced disappearances. After documenting these cases, the Nadeem Center was forced to shut down, allegedly for violating its charter as a medical organisation.\n\nWhile in the past, Egypt had tried to avoid trouble with foreigners, it now seemed intent on making public examples of them. \u201cGiulio died like an Egyptian,\u201d says Ballerini, the Regeni family\u2019s lawyer.\n\nThe climate of xenophobia and police brutality in Egypt has raised questions for Italian prosecutors as to whether it was appropriate for Cambridge University to allow a young foreign student to go Cairo and undertake field research into such a delicate topic. Regeni\u2019s supervisor, Maha Abdelrahman, is very knowledgeable on this subject: she has been a vocal critic of Egypt\u2019s military governments and has written extensively about the country\u2019s unions and protest movements. In early 2015, she wrote about the tendency of turning ordinary citizens into police informants and the increasing criminalisation of previously harmless activities.\n\nRelations between the Italian investigators and Cambridge University got off to a bad start when Abdelrahman declined to hand over her emails and text messages after the funeral. She also kept the police waiting for three hours, turning up for her interview at the police station at 10pm. Abdelrahman\u2019s reluctance to hand over her personal data is understandable, given her background \u2013 she had grown up in Egypt under a military regime, when a person would never have given anything to the police if they could help it. Abdelrahman has chosen not to speak to the press since Regeni\u2019s death, but told colleagues at Cambridge that she cooperated with the Italian police the day of the funeral.\n\nThe Italian prosecutors have been keen to find out whose idea it was that Regeni should write his PhD dissertation on independent unions, and the street vendors\u2019 union especially. When detectives asked her whether she had pushed Regeni to pursue his research into that particular topic, or if she had been aware that he might have felt in danger, Abdelrahman felt that she was being treated like a suspect.\n\nThe lead prosecutor, Sergio Colaiocco, travelled to England in June, having sent a request to two Cambridge professors for an interview. The university says it received no notification from the Italian government, but learned of the request informally from Cambridge police. The two professors initially agreed to meet with the prosecutor, but then declined to be interviewed. This prompted a brief firestorm, with the Italian deputy foreign minister, Mario Giro, taking to Twitter to shame Cambridge for its lack of cooperation. An Italian professor who teaches at Oxford, Federico Varese, also criticised Cambridge in an interview with La Repubblica: \u201cThe university bears some measure of moral responsibility for not protecting [Regeni] and not grasping that the kind of \u2018participatory research\u2019 he was doing increased the risk. It seems that their priority is only to protect Cambridge from possible legal responsibility and a request for damages.\u201d\n\nIn June, Cambridge\u2019s vice-chancellor and a number of academics signed a letter stating that the university had not received any request for help from the Italian authorities, and that Regeni had no particular reason to be afraid for his safety, since \u201cno foreign student, researcher or academic\u201d had ever been murdered in Egypt. The university subsequently hired an Italian attorney to facilitate relations with the Italian government and has received, and fully complied with, a request for various documents in the Regeni case.\n\n\u201cI think this polemic with Cambridge has been overblown,\u201d said one close friend of Regeni\u2019s in Egypt. He pointed out that Abdelrahman had continued to do the same kind of field research that Regeni was pursuing. \u201cShe was not a professor who remained in the library and sent out her students to do field work. The truth about Giulio\u2019s murder is in Egypt, not Cambridge, in the increasing paranoia of the regime.\u201d\n\nIn December, 2015, he said, Egyptian police detained a young French scholar who was conducting research on a workers\u2019 movement, keeping her in jail overnight. \u201cThese kinds of things had been happening more often \u2013 but they go unreported because the scholars don\u2019t say anything, so that they can return to Egypt in the future.\u201d\n\nThe Egyptian government\u2019s softer and more cooperative approach in the last few months suggests, however, that it now accepts an urgent need for reputation management. The government and the Regeni family have agreed, in principle, to meet, which the family hopes will push the investigation another few steps closer to the truth.\n\nRegeni\u2019s death is a mystery hiding in plain sight: his seemingly inexplicable, brutal torture and killing reflects the demise of Egyptian democracy, the stripping away of already limited liberties and protections, the brutal crackdown on dissent, the increase in torture and forced disappearances, the tendency to blame the country\u2019s problems on outside conspiracies. In this closed world, Giulio Regeni, with his ability to speak five languages, his mobile phone full of foreign and Egyptian contacts, might look like a spy, and police, in a system with little or no accountability, might make reckless mistakes.\n\nThe Egyptian prosecutors seemed unable to understand why their Italian colleagues did not accept the evidence they were given. \u201cThe Egyptian authorities seemed shocked that our police kept asking questions after they came up with the \u2018gang\u2019 of killers and the tray with Regeni\u2019s documents,\u201d said one Italian investigator. \u201cTheir attitude seemed to be: \u2018hey, we found the criminals, we have even killed them. This should put an end to it.\u2019\u201d Surely, they thought, concerns of state \u2013 the close relations between two nations, billions of dollars of commercial ties \u2013 should count more than the life of one person, who had been killed by mistake. They seemed to find it impossible to understand that the Italian government would have to account to public opinion and could not, even if it had wanted to, accept a flimsy, implausible account of Regeni\u2019s death.\n\n\u201cThis didn\u2019t happen in a vacuum,\u201d Heba Morayef, an Egyptian human rights advocate, said. \u201cIt came after three years of almost constant rising xenophobic propaganda, fed by the security services, encouraging citizens\u2019 arrests of foreigners, and so on \u2026 There are so many people in the Egyptian security forces that talk about this foreign conspiracy, that more and more people start to believe it. This is how a deeply paranoid police state operates.\u201d\n\n\u2022 Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here."}
{"text":"In the threadbare upstairs room that passes for an owner's office at the Lakeshore Theater, original LPs from 1960s comedy giants Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl lean against a window.\n\nChris Ritter, the club's owner, had bought the records in order to have Gregory and Sahl sign them this week, when they were to play his art house comedy club in a converted movie theater on Chicago's North Side.\n\nInstead, along with the broken and plastic-bag-covered urinal in the men's room, they stand as a symbol of what went wrong at the Lakeshore, which hosted some of comedy's most cutting-edge acts and had Robin Williams show up on its stage more than once, but could never live any better than hand to mouth.\n\nAlready reeling from a big loss on a Sandra Bernhard show in February, and faced with more five-figure losses in the weeklong stand by Sahl and Gregory that wasn't selling well, Ritter pulled the plug on the Lakeshore on April Fools' Day.\n\n\"Stupid, three-legged dog,\" he says, comparing the 330-seat theater at Broadway and Belmont to \"a pet you have to put down that is deformed in some way, has some sort of terminal illness. But she just looks at you with those eyes.\"\n\nRitter, 42, was a theatrical producer who fell into comedy not out of some master plan, but because that, he says, is what worked in the room he has held together \"with paper clips and rubber bands\" for eight years, the last three as a comedy house.\n\nLetting it go, clearly, is difficult. We are talking in the theater, the afternoon before a raucous farewell show featuring many of the local comics the Lakeshore has nurtured. The seats, he points out, need replacing. The running lights along the aisle went out not long ago, a fire code violation.\n\n\"There's just so many mixed feelings,\" Ritter says, then blinks hard and looks away, down toward the stage where national stars including Jim Jefferies, Demetri Martin, Mike Birbiglia, Maria Bamford, Doug Benson and more found a Chicago home.\n\nUpstairs is the small apartment where Ritter, his wife, Jessica, and son, Joey, now 10, lived for six years. The family hasn't had health insurance for at least three years, and a few months ago, he says, Jessica was found to have breast cancer.\n\n\"It really gave me a personal jolt: OK, you've got an artistic mission and you're really dedicated to the place, but what are you really doing with your life?\"\n\nHe adds: \"I know in the core of my heart I'm doing the right thing, for myself and for my family. And I'm utterly convinced that in a month, six months, a year from now, I will have this incredible sense of relief in my life, where I'm not running around, panicked about how I'm gonna cover payroll next week, or whether the plumbing's about to explode.\n\n\"What I really want to do is work with artists and do shows. I know that that is going to be my endpoint, so there's a certain comfort in that. But the, uh\" \u2014 another long pause, another look into the emptiness of a theater in the afternoon \u2014 \"it's hard.\"\n\nHe repeats the phrase: \"Stupid, three-legged dog.\"\n\n\u2022\u2022\u2022\n\nThere were final shows Friday and Saturday from Jefferies, the budding Australian superstar whose career arc exemplified Lakeshore's strategy of building an audience for cutting-edge artists. His first show at the theater did $198 in box office in November 2007, and a lot of tickets were given away; his last ones sold out, four shows, some $6,000 per show.\n\nBut before Jefferies, on Thursday night, there is \"Closing Acts,\" a hybrid open-mic night\/Irish wake\/jazz funeral.\n\nFor 61\/2 hours, two dozen stand-ups take turns eulogizing the Lakeshore, roasting Ritter, taking potshots at the much more conventional Zanies comedy clubs, bemoaning Chicago's busy but undernourished comedy scene and, mostly, because there was a microphone and stage time, doing their own acts.\n\n\"Welcome to the end of any hope you ever had,\" says James Fritz, the night's first emcee, speaking to an audience of mostly comedy insiders.\n\n\"I'd be less upset if my parents got a divorce. Honestly, this place means more to me than my blood.\"\n\nFritz also suggests that Bert Haas, the executive vice president of Chicago's Zanies outposts, is \"dancing a jig\" over the closing, the first (and least derogatory) of several mentions of Haas by name.\n\n(Haas, reached by phone, gives it right back. \"It's just another venue,\" he says of the Lakeshore, one whose closing \"means there will be other places popping up\u2026 I've been with Zanies since 1980. In those 30 years I have seen at least 60 different establishments open, try stand-up comedy and close.\")\n\n\"Chris Ritter tried to be an artist on top of being a businessman,\" says Dan Telfer, who runs Chicago Underground Comedy, one of the alternative options that will pick up some Lakeshore slack with local acts. \"This place filled a void that the country was lacking, not just Chicago.\"\n\nAt some point the national anthem is sung. After most everyone remaining at 1:30 a.m. gets onstage to sing it again, Roseanne Barr is officially forgiven.\n\n\"I called Ritter a couple of weeks ago about opening up for Nick Thune,\" says the comic Prescott Tolk. \"He said, \u2018Yes. Do you know anyone who has $200,000?'\"\n\n\u2022\u2022\u2022\n\nThe numbers, actually, were moving in the right direction, Ritter says, bearing out, he believes, the validity of the idea that he and comic Paul Provenza, an adviser, hatched in early 2007: Showcase comedy as an art form (and stop the financial bleeding).\n\nIn 2007, the first year as a comedy-only venue, he and his partners lost $404,000, according to Ritter. In 2008, the venue lost $268,000. And last year, as attendance continued to grow and Ritter cut payroll by 55 percent, it actually made a profit, of about $65,000.\n\nBut his salary kept shrinking; he took home $30,000 last year, he says. And it seemed there would never be enough to pay down the $200,000 in debt remaining (after his partners covered the bulk of the losses) or give the building the more than $150,000 in repairs he says it needs.\n\nSince the closing announcement, Ritter has been gratified by the support and has come to believe people understood the club's mission in a way he wasn't sure they did while it was running."}
{"text":"OTTAWA \u2014 Canada\u2019s democracy would benefit best under an electoral system of proportional representation, a leading authority on voting systems told parliamentarians Monday.\n\nBut no matter what Parliament finally decides, it should avoid a referendum on the question and the danger of a vote based on voter confusion and misinformation, Arend Lijphart told a special committee on electoral reform.\n\n\u201cThe outcomes of referenda are often highly volatile and unpredictable, often involve a lot of emotionalism and outright lies,\u201d he warned. \u201cThe recent Brexit referendum shows how much damage a referendum can do. It\u2019s been a disaster for the whole world.\u201d\n\nLijphart, research professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, said proportional representation (PR) and the coalition governments the system typically produces, \u201cwork better because there is more negotiations, there is more compromise, therefore it builds stronger consensus.\u201d\n\nYears of extensive research, he said, show the most beneficial, statistically significant outcomes that correlates with PR is the quality of the democracies it produces.\n\n\u201cProportional representations (was) not only slightly better, but a whole lot better, there was simply no comparison between PR and FTTP (first-past-the-post),\u201d the system Canada has always used.\n\nPR systems and consensus democracies also have better records for effective policy-making, he said, though FTTP is often mistakenly considered the best system to represent democratic, majority rule.\n\nBut \u201cif you\u2019re a majority government, one-party government, it is based on just between 30 and 40 per cent of the voters. This (type of) government actually struggles constantly with the fact of being a kind of illegitimate majority government,\u201d he told the all-party committee of MPs.\n\nFTTP governments really only represent a large minority\n\n\u201cIt may seem ironic or paradoxical that, in fact, you have in PR better majority rule than with so-called majoritarian governments. FTTP governments really only represent a large minority.\u201d\n\nLijphart acknowledged a legitimate complaint about PR is that parties\u2019 election platforms and promises can be compromised or lost in the negotiations to form a coalition government . Still, in mature multi-party systems, such as in Germany\u2019s, it is often clear prior to an election which parties (and policies) are going to work together in government, he said.\n\nPR models have been adopted by many nations and, with a few exceptions, without holding referendums. Lijphart warned the MPs against doing so in Canada.\n\n\u201cIf one can avoid a referendum, please avoid a referendum,\u201d he urged. While changing the electoral system is an important decision, the problem with referenda is that other issues can come to fore, too, \u201cincluding people just expressing a general dissatisfaction with the government.\u201d\n\nThe Conservative party has argued that there may be no better way to test \u201cbroad-based support\u201d for a new system than some kind of referendum. Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef has expressed apprehensions.\n\nLijphart\u2019s criticism of referenda was countered by committee witness Benoit Pelletier, a University of Ottawa constitutional expert on electoral reform and former Liberal Quebec cabinet minister in the Jean Charest government.\n\n\u201cIf we want to do a reform of our voting system, it\u2019s normally for the population itself, so that the population has greater faith in its democratic institutions,\u201d he said. \u201cI would have a hard time seeing how we could do a significant electoral reform without calling on Canadians and asking them for their opinion.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhen you change the electoral system significantly, you change the political culture of a country. It is not just an issue of modalities, it is not a technical issue, it is also a cultural issue, an issue of values. The electoral system is choosing the values that we as a country want to emphasize.\u201d"}
{"text":"Would you be alright, he asked me, in a dream. Would you be able to hold it together, he said, a question in his eyes. I lifted my shoulders, maybe shrugging, maybe tucking my head and my neck in my sweater for warmth, as I feel the cold start to seep into my bones. It doesn\u2019t matter now, does it, is the only thing I could reply. It hardly ever matters now.\n\nEveryone Who Left Us\n\nSteven Cramer\n\nEveryone who left us we find everywhere.\n\nIt\u2019s easier now to look them in the eyes \u2014\n\nAt gravesites, in bed, when the phone rings.\n\nOf course, we wonder if they think of us.\n\nIt\u2019s easier, now, to look them in the eyes,\n\nImagine touching a hand, listening to them talk.\n\nOf course, we wonder if they think of us\n\nWhen nights, like tonight, turn salty, warm.\n\nImagine touching a hand, listening to them talk \u2014\n\nHard to believe they\u2019re capable of such coldness.\n\nWhen nights, like tonight, turn salty, warm,\n\nWe think of calling them, leaving messages.\n\nHard to believe they\u2019re capable of such coldness \u2014\n\nNo color, no pulse, not even a nerve reaction.\n\nWe think of calling them, leaving messages\n\nVivid with news we\u2019re sure they\u2019d want to know.\n\nNo color, no pulse, not even a nerve reaction:\n\nWe close our eyes in order not to see them.\n\nVivid with news, we\u2019re sure they\u2019d want to know\n\nWe don\u2019t blame them, really. They weren\u2019t cruel.\n\nWe close our eyes in order not to see them\n\nReading, making love, or falling asleep.\n\nWe don\u2019t blame them. Really, they weren\u2019t cruel,\n\nThough it hurts every time we think of them:\n\nReading, making love, or falling asleep,\n\nEnjoying the usual pleasures and boredoms.\n\nThough it hurts every time we think of them,\n\nLike a taste we can\u2019t swallow, their names stay.\n\nEnjoying the usual pleasures and boredoms,\n\nThen, they leave us the look of their faces\n\nLike a taste we can\u2019t swallow. Their names stay,\n\nDiminishing our own, getting in the way\n\nAt gravesites, in bed, when the phone rings.\n\nEveryone who left us we find everywhere,\n\nThen they leave us, the look of their faces\n\nDiminishing, our own getting in the way."}
{"text":"Columbus Crew SC, the New York Red Bulls, FC Dallas and the Portland Timbers have all reached the Conference Championship after an arduous 34-game season and at least two Audi 2015 MLS Cup Playoff games (three for Portland).\n\nThe ways in which they have been able to make it this far are varied. Each have relied on a particular style of play that has defined their season and ability to get this far.\n\nYou can see those styles of play in some statistics that these four teams have been able to produce throughout the course of the season. Here's one for each:\n\nColumbus Crew SC: Crosses from Open Play\n\nWhen you have Kei Kamara on your team, it is no surprise that Crew SC led the league in crosses attempted from open play.\n\nAs you can see from the table above, Columbus attempted 115 more crosses from open play than any other team in the league. The difference between Crew SC and the No. 2 ranked Portland Timbers is about the same as the difference between Portland and the No. 12 ranked Toronto FC.\n\nGregg Berhalter's team wasn't just attempting a ton of crosses but they were completing them at a high rate. Crew SC completed 27.26 percent of their open play crosses, the second highest rate in the league. The only team to complete a higher percentage is FC Dallas (27.46), who attempted almost 400 fewer crosses than Columbus.\n\nNew York Red Bulls: Opponent Passing Accuracy in Own Half\n\nWhen Jesse Marsch was hired as the new head coach of the New York Red Bulls, he built his team to do one thing.\n\nHigh press.\n\nAnd they have been successful in that endeavor as the Red Bulls won the Supporters' Shield this season and were able to do so largely because of their style of play.\n\nWith their high-press system, the Red Bulls haved allowed their opponents to complete just 84.14 percent passes in their own half. That may not sound all that impressive but consider that is the lowest percentage any team has held their opponents in that statistic since 2010. It was also easily the lowest this season.\n\nPortland Timbers: Shot Conversion Rate\n\nThis stat is a bit different as we are only taking a look at portions of the Timbers' season.\n\nPortland's late-season surge to the No. 3 West and ultimately the Conference Championship was at least in part sparked by the formation shift to put Darlington Nagbe in the center of midfield.\n\nThe main reason they were unable to collect maximum points before this time came down to their inefficient finishing. Despite taking the second-most shots per game in the league, they had the second-fewest goals.\n\nBut since the formation switch, all that has changed.\n\nDespite taking fewer shots, the Timbers have actually seen their goals scored per game skyrocket. Their shot conversion rate, which is goals divided by totals shots, has gone from a miserable 6.98 percent to a respectable 17.07 percent.\n\nTimbers Before\/After Formation Switch Period Shots\/Game Conversion Rate Before 14.32 6.98% After 13.67 17.07%\n\nFC Dallas: Dribbles\n\nEver since Fabian Castillo joined FC Dallas back in 2011, he has been the most prolific dribbler in MLS. That did not change this season.\n\nOpta defines a dribble as \"an attempt by a player to beat an opponent in possession of the ball.\" Basically it's when a player tries to take on another player in a 1v1 situation.\n\nLike Crew SC, not only did they exceed other teams in a specific area, they also were efficient.\n\nEven though they attempted the most dribbles of any team, they completed those dribbles at a rate of 43.08 percent, good for the fourth highest rate in MLS.\n\nCastillo led the way attempting 265 dribbles just by himself and completed them successfully 43 percent of the time.\n\nMichael Barrios (92), Mauro Diaz (79) and Ryan Hollingshead (62) also attempted more than 50 dribbles individually."}
{"text":"Plenty of industry experts, psychologists and body-positive activists have criticized the big, bad magazine industry for its undying love of Photoshop.\n\nBut hearing it from \"real women,\" aka not fashion models, on camera is powerful stuff on its own.\n\nA new video by advocacy T-shirt company FCKH8 showcases women of various ages, races and body types giving Photoshop the middle finger, after unashamedly stripping off the brand's \"This Is What a #Feminist Looks Like\" shirts and showcasing what real female bodies, untouched by airbrushing, can look like.\n\nOf course, even the models featured in magazines are \"real women.\" But the airbrush that tweaks and tones their bodies, touches up their stray hairs and smooths over their little imperfections contributes to making the bodies we see less real.\n\n\"The retouching is excessive. I do not look like that and more importantly I don't desire to look like that,\" is how Kate Winslet so perfectly put it about a decade ago, when her own body was airbrushed to the hilt.\n\nOver 10 years later, the airbrushing has gotten way more subtle and less offensive, but it's still happening all the time. \"Things are never, ever as they seem,\" model Chrissy Teigen told the Cut earlier this year, adding, \"Oh, the retouching.\"\n\nThanks to that retouching, we end up not seeing quite so many curves, nor many wrinkles.\n\nFCKH8's video calls out Photoshop for that deception and the shame it can cause women (and men) about their own bodies.\n\nOf course, as SheKnows points out, no video campaign is perfect. FCKH8.com is itself guilty of embracing a single body type on its website, showcasing slender white women; it's also a for-profit company, which some have said conflicts with its social justice mission to take on sexism, racism and other injustices.\n\nStill, seeing women flip the bird to beauty standards is pretty damn awesome \u2014 especially if it can get other women, those who aren't modeling T-shirts or making viral videos, feeling inspired to do the same.\n\nWatch the full video below.\n\nh\/t The Huffington Post"}
{"text":"A mural of Kevin Spacey will soon vanish from the side of a building in the northwest England city of Manchester.\n\nAnonymous street artist Akse revealed via Facebook on Friday that he will replace his 2015 piece \u201cas a result of the recent allegations\u201d of sexual misconduct against the Oscar-winning actor.\n\nThe decision to remove the mural, which shows Spacey as \u201cHouse of Cards\u201d character Frank Underwood, was made jointly with the wall\u2019s owners, Akse added.\n\nAkse painted the mural on the building, owned by Nurhbai and Co. Accountants, in May 2015.\n\n\u201cWe love it!\u201d the company said via Facebook on its completion:\n\nBut as sexual misconduct claims mounted against Spacey, owner Hussain Nurbhai was \u201cadamant\u201d it be replaced, the BBC reported.\n\nAkse has not revealed when or how he will paint over the piece, which formed part of his \u201cPsychopaths\u201d series. HuffPost has reached out for comment.\n\nBryan Cranston\u2019s \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d character of Walter White, and Christian Bale\u2019s character of Patrick Bateman from \u201cAmerican Psycho,\u201d also are featured in Akse\u2019s project in Manchester.\n\nA post shared by Akse P19 Crew (@akse_p19) on Aug 2, 2017 at 3:11am PDT"}
{"text":"This is the same Oklahoma team. The same Sooners that this time last year were on the verge of disaster.\n\nThat couldn\u2019t win a big game anymore under coach Bob Stoops. That no longer ruled the Big 12. That was set up for a spectacular fall after an embarrassing 34-point loss in a bowl game to a team playing a backup quarterback.\n\nSN AWARDS: Coach of the year: Dabo Swinney | All-America teams | Freshman All-Americans\n\nThen Baker Mayfield got eligible, Stoops hired a new offensive coordinator (Lincoln Riley) and OU is now the hottest team in the game heading into the College Football Playoff.\n\nThe reason is simple: the play of Mayfield, the Sporting News 2015 Player of the Year.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t think you can overstate how important Baker has been to this team,\u201d Stoops said.\n\nMaybe even the difference between playing for it all and playing out the string \u2013 both the season and a spectacular coaching career in Norman for Stoops. Fair or not, Stoops was feeling heat heading into this season, and had made changes to the staff in the offseason to address some glaring problems.\n\nMORE: Best bowl games | Most intriging matchups | Bowl gift guide\n\nAt the top of the list was the quarterback spot, where OU had struggled the previous two seasons and where the Sooners hadn\u2019t had a game-changer in the most important position on the field since Sam Bradford won the Heisman Trophy in 2008. Mayfield transferred from Texas Tech last season, and despite OU\u2019s significant efforts with the NCAA, he wasn\u2019t granted an appeal to play immediately.\n\nOn the outside looking in, OU\u2019s desperation to get Mayfield eligible seemed strange, especially considering the Sooners were coming off a big win over Alabama in the Sugar Bowl \u2013 a game where quarterback Trevor Knight played well and gave a hint of big things to come in 2014.\n\nNow we know why OU was so intent on getting Mayfield eligible in 2014: he\u2019s a game-changer. He\u2019s a program-defining player whose spirit, intensity and moxie rub off on others around him, forcing them to perform at his level.\n\nMORE: Follow Oklahoma's path to the playoffs\n\n\u201cI never had an idea of changing the way we do things around here,\u201d Mayfield said. \u201cI just wanted to fit in and do whatever I could to help.\u201d\n\nAll he did was make OU a national power again, and lead the Sooners to the College Football Playoff \u2013 something that seemed like a pipedream this time last season. Mayfield threw for 35 touchdowns, and rushed for seven more, had 3,383 yards passing and completed nearly 70 percent of his throws.\n\nLast season, with essentially the same two-deep depth chart, Oklahoma\u2019s quarterbacks threw for 17 TDS and 17 INTs and the Sooners lost five games. But the impact of Mayfield goes far beyond numbers.\n\nHis magnetic personality and carefree style helped loosen up a team that at times played much too tight over the last two seasons. OU played tight, made mistakes, lost games and lost its mojo.\n\nMayfield brought it all back, from the way he immediately connected with teammates when he first arrived last season, to how he handled his responsibility after winning the starting job in fall camp \u2013 to how he played week after week.\n\n\u201cFootball should be fun,\u201d Mayfield said. \u201cWe\u2019re playing a game. We can be serious and we can be focused on what we have to do every single play. But the bottom line is we\u2019re having fun playing a game.\u201d\n\nNo one played it better in 2015."}
{"text":"St. Lawrence Island (Central Siberian Yupik: Sivuqaq, Russian: \u041e\u0441\u0442\u0440\u043e\u0432 \u0421\u0432\u044f\u0442\u043e\u0433\u043e \u041b\u0430\u0432\u0440\u0435\u043d\u0442\u0438\u044f) is located west of mainland Alaska in the Bering Sea, just south of the Bering Strait. The village of Gambell, located on the northwest cape of the island, is 36 miles (58 kilometers) from the Chukchi Peninsula in the Russian Far East. The island is part of Alaska, but closer to Russia than to the Alaskan mainland. St. Lawrence Island is thought to be one of the last exposed portions of the land bridge that once joined Asia with North America during the Pleistocene period.[1] It is the sixth largest island in the United States and the 113th largest island in the world. It is considered part of the Bering Sea Volcanic Province.[2]\n\nGeography [ edit ]\n\nThe United States Census Bureau defines St. Lawrence Island as Block Group 6, Census Tract 1 of Nome Census Area, Alaska. As of the 2000 census there were 1,292 people living on a land area of 1,791.56 sq mi (4,640.1 km2).[3] The island is about 90 miles (140 km) long and 8\u201322 miles (13\u201336 km) wide. The island has no trees, and the only woody plants are Arctic willow, standing no more than a foot (30 cm) high.\n\nThe island's abundance of seabirds and marine mammals is due largely to the influence of the Anadyr Current, an ocean current which brings cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep waters of the Bering Sea shelf edge.\n\nTo the south of the island there was a persistent polynya in 1999, formed when the prevailing winds from the north and east blow the migrating ice away from the coast.[4]\n\nThe climate of Gambell is:\n\nJanuary April July October Daily max 12 \u00b0F (\u221211 \u00b0C) 20 \u00b0F (\u22127 \u00b0C) 50 \u00b0F (10 \u00b0C) 34 \u00b0F (1 \u00b0C) Daily min 3 \u00b0F (\u221216 \u00b0C) 10 \u00b0F (\u221212 \u00b0C) 41 \u00b0F (5 \u00b0C) 29 \u00b0F (\u22122 \u00b0C)\n\nVillages [ edit ]\n\nThe island contains two villages: Savoonga and Gambell. The two villages were given title to most of the land on St. Lawrence Island by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971. As a result of having title to the land, the Yupik are legally able to sell the fossilized ivory and other artifacts found on St. Lawrence Island.\n\nThe island is now inhabited mostly by Siberian Yupik engaged in hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding. The St. Lawrence Island Yupik people are also known for their skill in carving, mostly with materials from marine mammals (walrus ivory and whale bone). The Arctic yo-yo may have evolved on the island.\n\nPrehistory [ edit ]\n\nSt. Lawrence Island was first occupied around 2,000 to 2,500 years ago by coastal people characterized by artifacts decorated in the Okvik (oogfik) style. Archaeological sites on the Punuk Islands, off the eastern end of St. Lawrence Island, at Kukulik, near Savoonga and on the hill slopes above Gambell have evidence of the Okivik occupation. The Okvik decorative style is zoomorphic and elaborate, executed in a sometimes crude engraving technique, with greater variation than the Old Bering Sea and Punuk styles.\n\nThe Okivik occupation is influenced by and may have been coincident with the Old Bering Sea occupation of 2000 years ago to around 700 years ago,[5] characterized by the simpler and more homogeneous Punuk style. Stone artifacts changed from chipped stone to ground slate; carved ivory harpoon heads are smaller and simpler in design.\n\nPrehistoric and early historic occupations of St. Lawrence Island were never permanent, with periods of abandonment and reoccupation depending on resource availability and changes in weather patterns. Famine was common, as evidenced by Harris lines and enamel hypoplasia in human skeletons. Travel to and from the mainland was common during calm weather, so the island was used as a hunting base, and occupation sites were re-used periodically rather than permanently occupied.\n\nMajor archaeology sites at Gambell and Savoonga (Kukulik) were excavated by Otto Geist and Ivar Skarland of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Collections from these excavations are curated at the University of Alaska Museum on the UAF campus.\n\nHistory [ edit ]\n\nFalse color NASA Landsat image of St. Lawrence Island\n\nThe island was called Sivuqaq by the Yupik who lived there. It was visited by Russian\/Danish explorer Vitus Bering on St. Lawrence's Day, August 10, 1728, and named after the day of his visit. The island was the first place in Alaska known to have been visited by European explorers.\n\nThere were about 4,000 Central Alaskan Yupik and Siberian Yupik living in several villages on the island in the mid-19th century. They subsisted by hunting walrus and whale and by fishing. A famine in 1878\u20131880 caused many to starve and many others to leave, decimating the island's population. A revenue cutter visited the island in 1880 and estimated that out of 700 inhabitants, 500 were found dead of starvation. Reports of the day put the blame on traders' supplying the people with liquor causing the people to \u2033neglect laying up their usual supply of provisions\u2033.[6] Nearly all the residents remaining were Siberian Yupik.\n\nReindeer were introduced on the island in 1900 in an attempt to bolster the economy. The reindeer herd grew to about 10,000 animals by 1917, but has since declined. Reindeer are herded as a source of subsistence meat to this day. In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt established a reindeer reservation on the island.[7] This caused legal issues in the indigenous land claim process to acquire surface and subsurface rights to their land, under the section 19 of Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) as they had to prove that the reindeer reserve was set up to support the indigenous people rather than to protect the reindeer themselves.[8]\n\nWorld War II [ edit ]\n\nDuring World War II, islanders served in the Alaska Territorial Guard (ATG). Following disbandment of the ATG in 1947, and with the construction of Northeast Cape Air Force Station in 1952, many islanders joined the Alaska National Guard to provide for the defense of the island and station.\n\nCold War [ edit ]\n\nThe former Northeast Cape Air Force Station at St. Lawrence Island\n\nOn June 22, 1955, during the Cold War, a US Navy P2V Neptune with a crew of 11 was attacked by two Soviet Air Forces fighter aircraft along the International Date Line in international waters over the Bering Straits, between Siberia's Kamchatka Peninsula and Alaska. The P2V crashed on the island's northwest cape, near the village of Gambell. Villagers rescued the crew, 3 of whom were wounded by Soviet fire and 4 of whom were injured in the crash. The Soviet government, in response to a US diplomatic protest, was unusually conciliatory, stating that:\n\nThere was an exchange of shots after a Soviet fighter advised the US plane that it was over Soviet territory and should leave (the US denied that the US plane fired at all). The incident took place under heavy cloud cover and poor visibility, although the alleged violation of Soviet airspace could be the responsibility of US commanders not interested in preventing such violations.\n\nThe Soviet military was under strict orders to \"avoid any action beyond the limits of the Soviet state frontiers.\"\n\nThe Soviet government \"expressed regret in regard to the incident,\" and, \"taking into account... conditions which do not exclude the possibility of a mistake from one side or the other,\" was willing to compensate the US for 50% of damages sustained\u2014the first such offer ever made by the Soviets for any Cold War shoot-down incident.\n\nThe US government stated that it was satisfied with the Soviet expression of regret and the offer of partial compensation, although it said that the Soviet statement also fell short of what the available information indicated.[9]\n\nNortheast Cape Air Force Station, at the island's other end, was a United States Air Force facility consisting of an Aircraft Control and Warning[10] (AC&W) radar site, a United States Air Force Security Service listening post; and a White Alice Communications System (WACS) site that operated from about 1952 to about 1972. The area surrounding the Northeast Cape base site had been a traditional camp site for several Yupik families for centuries. After the base closed down in the 1970s, many of these people started to experience health problems. Even today, people who grew up at Northeast Cape have high rates of cancer and other diseases, possibly due to PCB exposure around the site.[11] According to the State of Alaska, those elevated cancer rates have been shown to be comparable to the rates of other Alaskan and non-Alaskan arctic natives who were not exposed to a similar Air Force facility.[12] In any event, the majority of the facility was removed in a $10.5 million cleanup program in 2003. Monitoring of the site will continue into the future.[13]\n\nTransportation [ edit ]\n\nThe airports are Gambell Airport and Savoonga Airport.\n\nBibliography [ edit ]\n\nNotes\n\nReferences"}
{"text":"Expectations for Netflix's third quarter couldn't have been higher, but the company still managed to wow Wall Street Monday -- and shares jumped 10% as a result.\n\nNetflix cynics have been waiting for the company's stock bubble to pop: Netflix shares are up a shocking 440% in the past 12 months, and analysts expected third-quarter earnings nearly to quadruple over the year.\n\nBut Netflix (NFLX) delivered. The company reported third-quarter earnings of 52 cents a share, well above the 49 cents that analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting.\n\nSales came in at $1.1 billion, in line with estimates.\n\nNetflix expects more happy news for the current quarter. The company predicted earnings of 47 cents to 73 cents per share. That's an extremely wide range -- common for Netflix -- but it's far above the 46 cents a share that Wall Street expected.\n\nShares of Netflix jumped 10% after-hours immediately after the news and continued their run in premarket trading on Tuesday.\n\nNetflix CEO Reed Hastings isn't comfortable with the huge stock run-up, however. On a post-earnings conference call with analysts, he said Netflix thinks \"momentum investors\" are \"driving the price more than we like normally\" -- but that it's out of the company's control.\n\nSubscriber growth and original content: Hastings was happier with Netflix's third-quarter subscriber growth, which also impressed. Netflix added nearly 1.3 million new American subscribers during the third quarter, near the top range of the 690,000-1.49 million range the company predicted in July.\n\nInternational subscriber growth was even more striking: 1.44 million new overseas streaming customers. That pushed Netflix above the 40 million subscriber mark for the first time. But Netflix warned of a surge in free-trial signups in Latin America that artificially boosted the international additions figure.\n\nIn order to continue that user-base growth, Netflix has spent years transforming itself into not only a purveyor of other studios' content, but a creator of original content as well.\n\nNetflix CEO Reed Hastings and other company executives have repeatedly said Netflix \"wants to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix.\" (HBO is owned by CNNMoney parent company Time Warner (TWX).)\n\nRelated story: RIP television, hello mobile gaming\n\nThat original-content strategy has included a new season of \"Arrested Development,\" a U.S. remake of \"House of Cards,\" and -- most notably -- the new series \"Orange is the New Black.\" Netflix called the comedy-drama \"one of the most critically well received TV shows of 2013\" and said it will end the year as Netflix's most watched original series to date.\n\nThree of those original series netted Netflix a total of 14 Emmy nominations and three wins (all for \"Cards\") this year, but some analysts are still concerned about Netflix's mounting costs. The company reportedly spent $100 million producing and shooting two seasons of \"House of Cards,\" the first of which was released in February.\n\nNetflix appears unfazed by that criticism. The company said it expects to double its spending on original content in 2014. Content chief Ted Sarandos said on the earnings call that the company is actively looking for documentaries to debut on Netflix and will keep an open mind about feature films -- but Netflix still isn't interested in airing sports.\n\nMeanwhile, the content licensing side of Netflix's business is also expensive. Studios have demanded more money for their content as rival services proliferate: Amazon (AMZN), Hulu and Redbox (OUTR) are only a handful of the competitors. Premium channels like HBO and CBS' (CBS) Showtime are also expanding their streaming offerings."}
{"text":"Baton-wielding and helmeted police have clashed with tens of thousands of protesters taking part in a demonstration against Monday's inauguration of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president-elect, arresting at least 400 in Moscow.\n\nThose arrested on Sunday included Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader, liberal leader Boris Nemtsov and ultra-left wing activist Sergei Udaltsov.\n\nThe three men are key leaders of the nascent protest movement against Putin, who served as president and prime minister before he was re-elected in March.\n\nPolice said they detained the protesters after they threw stones and water bottles at officers and blamed the violence on opposition leaders who attempted to stage a sit-in protest in the middle of the crowd.\n\nEarlier, reports said at least 20,000 opposition protesters took part in the demonstration, which had been billed as a \"March of Millions\".\n\nThe protesters marched shouting \"enough lies\" while helmeted police, using batons, beat back dozens of mostly young protesters at the event across the river from the Kremlin.\n\nThe turnout appeared smaller than most of the winter's unprecedented wave of protests, some of which attracted crowds estimated at 100,000 or more.\n\nNational parliamentary elections were marred by fraud, but Putin won the vote easily and another round in March, returning to the Kremlin seat he held in 2000-2008.\n\nSome of the demonstrators acknowledged that Putin's election win and his inauguration have been a blow to morale.\n\n\"It's true that some have been disappointed,\" said Yuri Baranov, a 46-year-old information technology specialist. But \"the most important thing is that people have awakened\".\n\nOthers admitted some doubts about whether the protests would spur any long-term change.\n\n\"I would like to think that our voice will be heard, but I am not totally sure of this,\" said Yelena Karpsova, 47, who came to the rally from Tula, about 200km south of Moscow.\n\nRival demonstrations\n\nSupporters of the ex-KGB spy meanwhile planned to hold a gathering with some 50,000 people.\n\nA senior city official said Putin's group did not need permission to bring out such large numbers onto a public square because \"what they will be having is not a rally or a march or a protest\".\n\n\"It will be a mass cultural event,\" Alexei Mayarov, a Moscow regional security department head, told Russian news agencies.\n\n\"What is important is there is still a constituency, and the most modernised constituency in Russia, that does not see Putin as a desired president\" - Maria Lipman, political analyst\n\nOrganisers said the demonstration along a main Moscow thoroughfare towards Bolotnaya Square opposite the river from the Kremlin was to conclude with a meeting that city authorities officially limited to 5,000 people.\n\n\"It's called the march of millions and I suspect they wish they had not named it that name because it's going to be interesting to see just how many people do turn up to this protest,\" Al Jazeera's Sue Turton reported from Bolotnaya Square.\n\n\"They have got permission for 5,000 people to congregate in Bolotnaya Square, but the march starts further across Moscow and then they will walk here and then congregate and later on ... move to another square next to the Kremlin and have some sort of sit in overnight until the inauguration.\n\n\"Now we don't even know how many people would contemplate doing that. There has definitely been a wane in the momentum of the protest movement,\" she said.\n\nMaria Lipman, a political analyst from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Al Jazeera from Moscow: \"The rally that has been authorised implies that 5,000 will take part. Maybe more can be expected, however not the many tens of thousands that we saw in Moscow streets and squares in December, February and March.\"\n\nProtests 'on decline'\n\n\"The mass protests are maybe losing momentum and may be on decline, however what is important is there is still a constituency, and the most modernised constituency in Russia, that does not see Putin as a desired president.\n\n\"I think that part of society will not reconcile to the fact that Putin holds power for the next six years, and we may see more eruptions of discontent in the following years over various kinds of developments,\" she said.\n\nPutin's return to the presidency will technically give him greater powers than he previously wielded as prime minister.\n\nHe has dismissed the allegations that widespread fraud helped him win the presidential election and secured victory for his United Russia party in a parliamentary poll in December.\n\nThe inauguration ceremony will include a booming 30-gun salute and a special blessing from Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill."}
{"text":"School crossing patrollers, public toilets, community centres and libraries are all under threat in a savage council savings plan that has caused a senior Tory councillor to quit the party.\n\nSpeyside Glenlivet member and planning committee chairman Walter Wilson dramatically walked away from the party yesterday following a row with colleagues.\n\nThe shock departure came as it emerged that council chiefs are looking at mothballing every community centre and public toilet in Moray, along with every library other than Elgin.\n\nIt is understood that the ruling group is also examining plans to axe every lollipop man and woman at schools.\n\nCouncillor Wilson branded his former allies \u201cright wing extremists\u201d as he accused them of sacrificing public safety in the penny-pinching drive.\n\nBut last night the Tories fired back, saying Mr Wilson had balked at making tough decisions and questioned whether he belonged in politics.\n\nMr Wilson said: \u201cI am no longer a Conservative, which was a tough decision to make.\n\n\u201cBut I couldn\u2019t just sit there and listen to extreme right-wing views, and it all came to a head when my colleagues were discussing what they wanted to cut.\n\n\u201cIt felt like Speyside Glenlivet was going to be badly affected, and it led to a big argument and some irreconcilable differences.\n\n\u201cI just said that was it, I couldn\u2019t vote for a budget like that.\n\n\u201cThere are a core of right-wing extremists who have made life difficult for some of the Conservatives in the group and the Independent members of the administration.\u201d\n\nMr Wilson was one of eight Conservatives elected in May\u2019s council elections, who later formed a coalition administration with six independent members.\n\nLocal authority leader George Alexander last night confirmed that a series of \u201cunpalatable\u201d cuts is expected to be made public next month.\n\nThe independent councillor said: \u201cNone of these cuts have been decided but we will make our proposals public in December and I don\u2019t think that will be a nice Christmas present for people.\n\n\u201cMr Wilson is the first councillor to balk at having to do this, but we were all aware of how unpleasant a task balancing the budget would be.\u201d\n\nMr Wilson said he was horrified when colleagues suggested ward constituents affected by a change in road gritting \u201ccould just move house\u201d.\n\nHe added: \u201cThose are the kind of views I was trying to go up against.\u201d\n\nConservative councillor for Fochabers Lhanbryde, Marc Macrae, said the remark in question was a \u201cflippant\u201d one which Mr Wilson had overreacted to.\n\nHe added: \u201cIt has started to get hot and Mr Wilson has left the kitchen, you need to have a thick skin in politics.\n\n\u201cThis will be a tough budget for Moray, but no ward will be disproportionately affected and we will consult on the proposed cuts.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m disappointed in Mr Wilson, I would question whether politics is for him.\u201d\n\nMr Wilson \u2013 who is still owed thousands after his former employer went bust \u2013 will suffer a \u00a310,000 pay cut as a result.\n\nHe said he hoped to continue as an independent but would \u201clisten to constituents if they feel that I should resign my position\u201d.\n\nMoray MSP Richard Lochhead said Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson should launch an inquiry into the group.\n\nThe SNP representative said: \u201cThe extraordinary resignation of a councillor due to the repugnant and extremist views of his colleagues lifts the lid on the ugly politics at the heart of Moray Conservative Party\n\n\u201cMany local people will be troubled that some of the elected representatives who run Moray Council are deemed to be extremists by a colleague who sat in meeting after meeting with them behind closed doors and has now decided he simply can\u2019t stomach their vile views any longer.\u201d"}
{"text":"Large lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada\n\nFor the lake in Alberta, Canada, see Lesser Slave Lake\n\nThe Great Slave Lake (French: Grand lac des Esclaves) is the second-largest lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada (after Great Bear Lake), the deepest lake in North America at 614 metres (336 fathoms; 2,014 ft),[1] and the tenth-largest lake in the world. It is 469 km (291 mi) long and 20 to 203 km (12 to 126 mi) wide.[2] It covers an area of 27,200 km2 (10,502 sq mi)[1] in the southern part of the territory. Its given volume ranges from 1,070 km3 (260 cu mi)[4] to 1,580 km3 (380 cu mi)[1] and up to 2,088 km3 (501 cu mi)[5] making it the 10th or 12th largest.\n\nThe lake shares its name with the First Nations peoples called Slavey of the Dene family by their enemies the Cree. Towns situated on the lake include Yellowknife, Hay River, Behchok\u01eb\u0300, Fort Resolution, \u0141utselk'e, Hay River Reserve, Dettah, and Ndil\u01eb. The only community in the East Arm is \u0141utselk'e, a hamlet of about 350 people, largely Chipewyan Indigenous peoples of the Dene Nation and the now abandoned winter camp\/Hudson's Bay Company post, Fort Reliance. Along the south shore, east of Hay River is the abandoned Pine Point Mine and the company town of Pine Point.\n\nHistory [ edit ]\n\nIndigenous peoples were the first settlers around the lake after the retreat of glacial ice. Archaeological evidence has revealed several different periods of cultural history, including: Northern Plano Paleoindian tradition (8,000 years before present), Shield Archaic (6,500 years), Arctic small tool tradition (3,500 years), and the Taltheilei Shale Tradition (2,500 years before present). Each culture has left a distinct mark in the archaeological record based on type or size of lithic tools.[6]\n\nGreat Slave Lake was put on European maps during the emergence of the fur trade towards the northwest from Hudson Bay in the mid 18th century. The name 'Great Slave' came from the Slavey Indians, one of the Athapaskan tribes living on its southern shores at that time. The name was influenced by Cree disdain for this rival tribe, with whom they shared a sordid history. As the French explorers dealt directly with the Cree traders, the large lake was referred to as \"Grand lac des Esclaves\" which was eventually translated into English as \"Great Slave Lake\".[7]\n\nBritish fur trader Samuel Hearne explored Great Slave Lake in 1771 and crossed the frozen lake, which he named Lake Athapuscow. In 1897-1898, the American frontiersman Charles \"Buffalo\" Jones traveled to the Arctic Circle, where his party wintered in a cabin that they had constructed near the Great Slave Lake. Jones's exploits of how he and his party shot and fended off a hungry wolf pack near Great Slave Lake was verified in 1907 by Ernest Thompson Seton and Edward Alexander Preble when they discovered the remains of the animals near the long abandoned cabin.[8]\n\nIn the 1930s, gold was discovered on the North Arm of Great Slave Lake, leading to the establishment of Yellowknife which would become the capital of the NWT. In 1960, an all-season highway was built around the west side of the lake, originally an extension of the Mackenzie Highway but now known as Yellowknife Highway or Highway 3. On January 24, 1978, a Soviet Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite, named Kosmos 954, built with an onboard nuclear reactor fell from orbit and disintegrated. Pieces of the nuclear core fell in the vicinity of Great Slave Lake. 90% of the nuclear debris was recovered by a joint Canadian Armed Forces and United States Armed Forces military operation called Operation Morning Light.[9]\n\nGeography and natural history [ edit ]\n\nMackenzie River drainage basin showing Great Slave Lake's position in the Western Canadian Arctic\n\nThe Hay, Slave, Lockhart, and Taltson Rivers are its chief tributaries. It is drained by the Mackenzie River. Though the western shore is forested, the east shore and northern arm are tundra-like. The southern and eastern shores reach the edge of the Canadian Shield. Along with other lakes such as the Great Bear and Athabasca, it is a remnant of the vast glacial Lake McConnell.\n\nThe lake has a very irregular shoreline. The East Arm of Great Slave Lake is filled with islands, and the area is within the proposed Thaydene Nene National Park Reserve. The Pethei Peninsula separates the East Arm into McLeod Bay in the north and Christie Bay in the south. The lake is at least partially frozen during an average of eight months of the year.\n\nThe main western portion of the lake forms a moderately deep bowl with a surface area of 18,500 km2 (7,100 sq mi) and a volume of 596 km3 (143 cu mi). This main portion has a maximum depth of 187.7 m (616 ft) and a mean depth of 32.2 m (106 ft).[10] To the east, McLeod Bay ( ) and Christie Bay ( ) are much deeper, with a maximum recorded depth in Christie Bay of 614 m (2,014 ft)[1]\n\nOn some of the plains surrounding Great Slave Lake, climax polygonal bogs have formed, the early successional stage to which often consists of pioneer black spruce.[11]\n\nSouth of Great Slave Lake, in a remote corner of Wood Buffalo National Park, is the Whooping Crane Summer Range, a nesting site of a remnant flock of whooping cranes, discovered in 1954.[12]\n\nBodies of water and tributaries [ edit ]\n\nRivers that flow into Great Slave Lake include (going clockwise from the community of Behchok\u01eb\u0300);[13][14]\n\nEmile River\n\nSnare River\n\nWecho River\n\nStagg River\n\nYellowknife River\n\nBeaulieu River\n\nWaldron River\n\nHoarfrost River\n\nLockhart River\n\nSnowdrift River\n\nLa Loche River\n\nThubun River\n\nTerhul River\n\nTaltson River\n\nSlave River\n\nLittle Buffalo River\n\nBuffalo River\n\nHay River\n\nMosquito Creek\n\nDuport River\n\nMarian Lake\n\nNorth Arm\n\nYellowknife Bay\n\nResolution Bay\n\nDeep Bay\n\nMcLeod Bay\n\nChristie Bay\n\nSulphur Cove\n\nPresqu'ile Cove\n\nRocher River\n\nFrank Channel\n\nIce road [ edit ]\n\nGreat Slave Lake has one ice road known as the Dettah ice road. It is a 6.5 km (4.0 mi) road that connects the Northwest Territories capital of Yellowknife to Dettah, a small First Nations fishing community also in the Northwest Territories. To reach the community in summer the drive is 27 km (17 mi) via the Ingraham Trail.\n\nApril 28, 2012 on Yellowknife Bay. The surface melt begins to make transportation more difficult to and from the houseboats near Jolliffe Island.\n\nIce Lake Rebels [ edit ]\n\nFrom 2014 to 2016, Animal Planet aired a documentary series called Ice Lake Rebels. It takes place on Great Slave Lake, and details the lives of houseboaters on the lake.[15]\n\nGallery [ edit ]\n\nDettah ice road on Great Slave Lake\n\nUtsingi Point (East Arm) on the eastern edge of the proposed Thaydene Nene National Park\n\nNorthern Bay, Great Slave Lake\n\nHay River, one of the tributaries of Great Slave Lake\n\nForest fires in northern Canada, southeast of Great Slave Lake\n\nSee also [ edit ]\n\nReferences [ edit ]\n\nFurther reading [ edit ]\n\nCanada. (1981). Sailing directions, Great Slave Lake and Mackenzie River . Ottawa: Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans. ISBN 0-660-11022-9\n\n. Ottawa: Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans. ISBN 0-660-11022-9 Gibson, J. J., Prowse, T. D., & Peters, D. L. (2006). \"Partitioning impacts of climate and regulation on water level variability in Great Slave Lake.\" Journal of Hydrology . 329 (1), 196.\n\n. 329 (1), 196. Hicks, F., Chen, X., & Andres, D. (1995). \"Effects of ice on the hydraulics of Mackenzie River at the outlet of Great Slave Lake, N.W.T.: A case study.\" Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering . Revue Canadienne De G\u0310\u01b0enie Civil. 22 (1), 43.\n\n. Revue Canadienne De G\u0310\u01b0enie Civil. 22 (1), 43. Kasten, H. (2004). The captain's course secrets of Great Slave Lake . Edmonton: H. Kasten. ISBN 0-9736641-0-X\n\n. Edmonton: H. Kasten. ISBN 0-9736641-0-X Jenness, R. (1963). Great Slave Lake fishing industry . Ottawa: Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre. Dept. of Northern Affairs and National Resources.\n\n. Ottawa: Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre. Dept. of Northern Affairs and National Resources. Keleher, J. J. (1972). Supplementary information regarding exploitation of Great Slave Lake salmonid community . Winnipeg: Fisheries Research Board, Freshwater Institute.\n\n. Winnipeg: Fisheries Research Board, Freshwater Institute. Mason, J. A. (1946). Notes on the Indians of the Great Slave Lake area . New Haven: Yale University Department of Anthropology, Yale University Press.\n\n. New Haven: Yale University Department of Anthropology, Yale University Press. Sirois, J., Fournier, M. A., & Kay, M. F. (1995). The colonial waterbirds of Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories an annotated atlas. Ottawa, Ont: Canadian Wildlife Service. ISBN 0-662-23884-2"}
{"text":"New Delhi: Noted jurist Ram Jethmalani, 94 on Saturday announced his retirement from over seven-decade-long career as advocate. He referred to the present status of governance as \"calamity and said he would continue to fight corrupt politicians.\n\n\"I am here just to tell you I am retiring from the profession but I am taking on a new role as long as I am alive. I wish to combat the corrupt politicians that have been brought into the position of power and I hope the condition of India will take good shape,\" Jethmalani said.\n\nJethmalani alleged that the present NDA government has \"let down\" the nation like the previous UPA dispensation.\n\nHe was speaking at a function organised by apex bar body, the Bar Council of India, to felicitate new Chief Justice of India Justice Dipak Misra.\n\n\"The country is not in a good shape. The previous and the current governments, both have let down the nation very badly. \"It is the duty of the members of the bar and all good citizens to rise to this great calamity,\" he said adding that they should do their best to see that those in positions of power are shown the exit door as soon as possible.\n\nFirstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com\/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button."}
{"text":"Saturday December 12, 2015\n\nEast Carolina: Duke offensive coordinator Scottie Montgomery will be the next head coach at ECU, per Bruce Feldman.\n\nEast Carolina: Brady Hoke and Everett Withers were widely reported to be interviewing again today and we mentioned that there were whispers of a third potential candidate. We hear that Duke offensive coordinator Scottie Montgomery is still be involved in the process.\n\nHanover College (D-III \u2013 IN): Franklin College offensive coordinator Matt Theobald has been named head coach at his alma mater.\n\nPenn State: Fordham head coach Joe Moorhead will be Penn State\u2019s offensive coordinator according to multiple reports.\n\nTexas: Texas has officially announced Sterlin Gilbert as offensive coordinator\/quarterbacks coach and Matt Mattox as offensive line coach\/run game coordinator. Gilbert will earn $850,000 per year over a three-year contract; Mattox will make $550,000 a year over his three-year contract. Shawn Watson and Joe Wickline will not have their contracts renewed.\n\nTulsa: Quality control assistant\/assistant offensive line coach Matt Bloesch has been promoted to offensive line coach. The Hurricane\u2019s other open position will be filled after the Dec. 26 Independence Bowl.\n\nVirginia: Bronco Mendenhall has added Ruffin McNeill as assistant head coach \/ inside linebackers. To recap, UVA retained Marques Hagans as receivers, added Ruffin and is bringing six assistants from BYU: Robert Anae (OC), Mark Atuaia (RBs), Jason Beck (QBs), Garret Tujague (OL), Nick Howell (DC) and Kelly Poppinga (STC).\n\nOklahoma State: We continue to hear that Gundy will fill Robby Discher\u2019s special teams role in the same capacity. The hire is expected to be a grad assistant, not one of the nine full-time positions.\n\nGeorgia: Sources confirmed to us Pitt offensive coordinator Jim Chaney will be the offensive coordinator at Georgia. Sources also now have confirmed Arkansas offensive line coach Sam Pittman will join him at Georgia.\n\nTexas: It took the President of the University, the AD, the head football coach and others to go to Tulsa last night; but UT wound up getting their guys. Sterlin Gilbert is coming as offensive coordinator and Matt Mattox will be the new offensive line coach at UT.\n\nJackson State (FCS \u2013 MS): If Mississippi State\u2019s Tony Hughes can\u2019t get a deal done, sources tell FootballScoop that North Carolina Central head coach Jerry Mack could have further discussions with JSU."}
{"text":"Rep. David Schweikert David SchweikertThe Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race House Dems release 2020 GOP 'retirements to watch' for Ethics committee expanding investigation into GOP rep over finance questions MORE (R-Ariz.) on Thursday suggested that a lack of rhetorical discipline may be responsible for any appearance that President Trump attempted to obstruct a federal investigation.\n\n\"I'm at the point where we also have to be real careful from the standpoint that we have a president that's not from the political class,\" Schweikert said on NPR's \"Morning Edition.\"\n\n\"The learning of the disciplined use of language and what certain words mean in our context \u2014 if you're not from this world, you may not have developed that discipline,\" he added.\n\nADVERTISEMENT\n\nSchweikert's comments came after The Washington Post reported Wednesday that special counsel Robert Mueller was investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, signaling a major change in the federal investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election and possible ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow.\n\nAt issue is Trump's reported requests to top intelligence officials to downplay or shut down investigations involving his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.\n\nIn a February meeting with then-FBI Director James Comey, the president reportedly told the law enforcement official, \"I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.\" Trump abruptly fired Comey early last month amid the Russia probe.\n\nTrump also reportedly pressed Dan Coats Daniel (Dan) Ray Coats58 ex-national security officials rebuke Trump over emergency declaration DNC unveils new security checklist to protect campaigns from cyberattacks Overnight Defense: Trump to leave 200 troops in Syria | Trump, Kim plan one-on-one meeting | Pentagon asks DHS to justify moving funds for border wall MORE, the director of national intelligence, and Michael Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, to publicly deny the existence of evidence suggesting collusion between his campaign and Russia."}
{"text":"Ed Davis was a popular player on some truly terrible Toronto Raptors teams from 2010 to 2013. An athletic big man that could rebound, block shots and finish around the rim, but wasn\u2019t changing the fact his team couldn\u2019t win. Traded away in a last ditch effort to save then President and General Manager Bryan Colangelo\u2019s job, Davis has bounced from Memphis to the Lakers and is expected to decline his NBA minimum salary player option for next season to become an unrestricted free agent for the second time. So, should the rebounding challenged Raptors attempt to bring him back?\n\nThere are a lot of free agent big men available this year and Toronto has to make decisions on Amir Johnson, Tyler Hansbrough, Chuck Hayes and Greg Stiemsma before looking at the numerous possibilities available.\n\nThe issue with Davis in Toronto and elsewhere hasn\u2019t been his production. His per 36 minute numbers have averaged right around 12.1 points, 10.6 rebounds, 1.7 blocks and 0.9 steals in each of his five NBA seasons with three different teams and his average minutes bouncing between 15 and 24. This past season in Los Angeles was his best season and the analytics looked good, but it really wasn\u2019t out of line with what he\u2019s done in the past and the old hard to shake \u2018soft\u2019 label continued to follow him.\n\nSB Nation, Silver Screen and Roll, Free Agent Forecast: Ed Davis raises some all too familiar observations:\n\nJameson Miller: Davis has had a great year in limited minutes on an awful team, so valuing him accurately comes with all sorts of potential pitfalls and caveats. Trevor Lane: He is a fantastic player but his shortcomings limit his usefulness. His slim frame kills his effectiveness as a center by making it tough for him to stand his ground defensively against bigger players, while his complete lack of a jump shot makes it difficult to play him at power forward.\n\nDavis has looked at his best on bad teams that were willing to give him minutes. What should concern his next team looking to invest more than the NBA minimum contract the Lakers handed to him is what happened in Memphis. The Grizzlies gave him a good look, but after January 2014 he only averaged 11 minutes per game interspersed with numerous DNPs. Then Memphis let him walk as a free agent at the end of the season.\n\nThe soon-to-be 26-year-old did average 8.3 points, 7.6 rebounds, 1.2 blocks and 23.3 minutes while shooting an impressive 60.1 percent from the field with the Lakers \u2013 although 96 percent of his shots were within 10 feet of the rim. Davis has done enough to be noticed in a crowded field of free agent big men this summer and could be a nice addition off the bench in the right situation.\n\nToronto might be that situation \u2013 maybe. Ideally Davis would be playing beside a stretch-four\/five with the physical presence needed to not get pushed around in the paint by bigger players, someone like the Raptors Patrick Patterson or Amir Johnson. It isn\u2019t an easy call and Toronto may be able to find better options, but if Davis can convince Head coach Dwane Casey that he could help the Raptors rebound better, then there could be a role for him on the roster.\n\nDavis should attract a little more attention in free agency this summer than he did in 2014 when he had little choice but to accept the Lakers minimal offer, but he really didn\u2019t show any more potential this past season than he did when he was in Toronto. Davis\u2019 agent still has a sales job to do in order to get his client a better deal. In the end it may come down to choosing between more money and a smaller role in a better\/winning situation.\n\nStephen Brotherston covers the Toronto Raptors and visiting NBA teams at the Air Canada Centre and is a member of the Professional Basketball Writers Association."}
{"text":"A Rohingya Muslim refugee woman holds her child as they wait to go to refugee camps near the Thankhali refugee camp in Bangladesh\u2019s Ukhia district after fleeing Burma. (Dibyangshu Sarkar\/AFP\/Getty Images)\n\nThe Weinstein Effect is rippling out across the globe. It\u2019s no longer just women in the United States who are speaking up about sexual harassment \u2014 their counterparts in many other countries are, too. And we\u2019re once again seeing confirmation of a truth that is often overlooked in discussions of sexual misconduct or assault: These stories are often more about power than they are about sex. Specifically, for men in positions of power, it\u2019s often about demonstrating the extent of their control over the vulnerable.\n\nThe same principle applies \u2014 albeit in more extreme form \u2014 when sexual violence is used as a weapon of war. The aggressor aims to impose the most extreme humiliation on his victims, to destroy their dignity, to devastate their souls. This isn\u2019t about pleasure. It\u2019s about the calculated and vicious exercise of power over a helpless target. This is the absolute negation of love \u2014 the exact opposite of what sex should be about.\n\nYou will be reminded of this if you can bring yourself to delve into the latest report on Burma from Human Rights Watch. It makes for a harrowing read. One of the group\u2019s researchers has carefully documented the use of rape as an instrument of terror during the Burmese military\u2019s recent ethnic cleansing campaign, which since August has driven more than 600,000 members of the Muslim Rohingya minority into neighboring Bangladesh.\n\n\u201cIn every case described to us, the perpetrators were uniformed members of the security forces, almost all military personnel,\u201d the report carefully notes. Most of the documented attacks involved gangs of soldiers attacking individual women. Nura Begum, 35, tried to prevent her four children from seeing what was happening to her. \u201cI kept screaming and saying not to rape me in front of the children. But they did what they wanted to my body.\u201d Akash Abdul described how she and her younger sister tried to flee after watching security forces kill the other members of their family. \u201cAs we got to the edge of the village two soldiers grabbed me,\u201d she said. \u201cThey threw me to the ground and then raped me.\u201d She was 14 years old.\n\nYou might think that such crimes are outliers. You would be wrong. The use of rape as a weapon of war is widespread. Thousands of women have fallen victim to it in South Sudan\u2019s civil war. The reign of ISIS in Syria and Iraq has resulted in the wholesale sexual abuse of young women from the ancient religious community of the Yezidis. Women were also raped during the recent ethnic unrest in Burundi.\n\nSri Lanka\u2019s civil war ended in 2009, but members of its Tamil minority say that they still often face torture, including rape, when targeted by security forces. Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have all experienced sexual violence in recent memory; all these countries have their communities of survivors.\n\nMen in conflict zones also fall victim to sexual violence. According to a recent story in the Guardian, post-revolutionary Libya has seen a spate of such attacks, usually involving militias from groups persecuted by the old regime taking revenge on their enemies.\n\nWomen are never exempt, though. the Guardian story also quoted one female survivor of sexual violence in Libya: \u201cThe worst thing they did to me,\u201d she whispered, \u201cis to rape me in front of my eldest son. Since then, he won\u2019t speak to me.\u201d\n\nIn the sick logic of war, rape is a highly effective weapon. Its crippling effects can last for years. By creating shame and humiliation it destroys ties within families and communities. It silences and paralyzes.\n\nWe know it\u2019s a crime. It\u2019s been defined as one in international law. But it\u2019s still happening. And it will continue to happen until we can make the perpetrators truly accountable.\n\nThe case of Burma would be a good place to start. Pramila Patten, the U.N. special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, has directly accused the Burmese military of responsibility for the campaign of rape. Last week the Burmese military issued a report denying all related allegations \u2014 in terms similar to those of a Burmese officer, Col. Phone Tint, who in early September was already dismissing reports of sexual violence: \u201cWhere is the proof?\u201d he asked. \u201cLook at those women who are making these claims \u2014 would anyone want to rape them?\u201d\n\nThe international community should act while these crimes are still fresh. We must demand that the Burmese government cease its ethnic cleansing campaign. Western governments should stop supplying the Burmese military with arms and aid. We must target the responsible generals with personal sanctions and move to ensure that they face justice. (The International Criminal Court is only one option.)\n\nBut let\u2019s not forget the other victims of similar atrocities around the world. And above all, let\u2019s make a concerted global effort to marshal money and resources for the medical and psychological care the survivors so urgently need. We should not compound past crimes by the sin of neglect."}
{"text":"For other people named David McKean, see David McKean (disambiguation)\n\nDavid McKean (born 29 December 1963)[1] is an English illustrator, photographer, comic book artist, graphic designer, filmmaker and musician. His work incorporates drawing, painting, photography, collage, found objects, digital art and sculpture. McKean's projects include illustrating books by amongst others Neil Gaiman, Heston Blumenthal, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, and directing three feature films.\n\nCareer [ edit ]\n\nComics [ edit ]\n\nAfter a trip to New York City in 1986 during which he first showed his work to editors at Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and Continuity Comics, McKean met writer Neil Gaiman, and the pair collaborated on a short graphic novel of disturbing childhood memories, Violent Cases, published in 1987.[2] This was followed in 1988 by a Black Orchid miniseries[3][4] and Hellblazer covers for DC Comics.[5][6]\n\nIn 1989, he illustrated the Batman graphic novel, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, with writer Grant Morrison.[7] Comics historian Les Daniels observed that \"Arkham Asylum was an unprecedented success, selling 182,166 copies in hardcover and another 85,047 in paperback...McKean produced 120 pages of paintings for Arkham Asylum, offering powerful visual reinterpretations of the classic characters.\"[8] From 1989\u20131997 McKean produced the covers for Gaiman's celebrated series The Sandman, all its collected editions, and many of its spin-offs.[9][10] In 1998, the cover images from The Sandman were released as one compiled volume titled Dustcovers: The Collected Sandman Covers.[11] Further collaborations with Gaiman produced the graphic novels Signal to Noise in 1992 previously serialised in The Face magazine, about a dying filmmaker and his hypothetical last film; and The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, which explored similar themes as Violent Cases through the imagery of the Punch and Judy show. In 1995 McKean wrote and illustrated a book for The Rolling Stones called Voodoo Lounge to tie-in with the release of their album of the same name.[6]\n\nBetween 1990 and 1996, McKean wrote and drew the ten issues of Cages, an ambitious graphic novel about artists and creativity, illustrated in a stripped-down pen-and-ink style influenced by Alberto Breccia, Jos\u00e9 Antonio Mu\u00f1oz and Lorenzo Mattotti.[12] Cages was published as single volume by Kitchen Sink Press in 1998, and in a new edition by NBM Publishing in 2002. In 2010, Cages was released by Dark Horse Comics in paperback. An anniversary edition was released in 2016 by the same publisher, featuring a new introduction by Terry Gilliam.[6]\n\nMcKean's collections of short comics Pictures That Tick, and Pictures That Tick 2: Exhibition[13] were published by Dark Horse Comics in 2009 and 2015. Pictures That Tick won the Victoria and Albert Museum Illustrated Book of the Year award.\n\nMcKean created a wordless erotic graphic novel called Celluloid[14] for Delcourt, which was published in the United States by Fantagraphics Books.\n\nBlack Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash, which was a commission by the 14-18 Now Foundation, The Imperial War Museum and The Lakes International Comic art Festival, was released as an artist's edition in June 2016, and was published in October 2016 by Dark Horse Comics as an oversized hardback and regular paperback. The project was also a live performance featuring cellist\/singer Matthew Sharp and violinist Clare Haythornthwaite, and was performed in Amiens, Kendal, London, Rye and Ashford.\n\nIllustration [ edit ]\n\nMcKean designed the posters for the Raindance Film Festival[15] for five consecutive years between 1996\u20132000. In 1997 he wrote, directed and edited a ninety-second trailer for the festival. In 2005, McKean designed the poster for the 32nd Telluride Film Festival. In 2006, he designed projections, sets and directed film clips for the Broadway musical Lestat, adapted from Anne Rice's novels, with music and lyrics by Elton John and Bernie Taupin.\n\nMcKean has created a few books documenting his travels using only illustrations. Examples include Postcards from Vienna, Postcards from Barcelona, Postcards from Paris (2008), Postcards from Brussels (2009), Postcards from Perugia (2011), Postcards from Bilbao (2012). He created another book of 200 pages called Squink (\u00e9ditions BdArtist(e)) that gathered a number of drawings in 15 chapters.\n\nC.D. and book covers [ edit ]\n\nMcKean created C.D. covers for many artists, amongst others for Alice Cooper, Altan, Tori Amos, Download, Frontline Assembly, Paradise Lost, Dream Theater, Skinny Puppy,[16] Toad the Wet Sprocket and Steve Walsh. He made book covers for Jonathan Carroll, Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore.\n\nBooks of photography [ edit ]\n\nHe has published four books of photography:\n\nA Small Book of Black and White Lies (1995)\n\n(1995) Option: Click (1998)\n\n(1998) The Particle Tarot: The Major Arcana\n\nThe Particle Tarot: The Minor Arcana\n\nWork with John Cale [ edit ]\n\nMcKean designed and illustrated John Cale's autobiography What's Welsh for Zen, a further biography called Sedition and Alchemy, a box set of C.D.s called Circus Live, and used John's Welsh-by-way-of-New York voice as the narrator for his short film N[eon].\n\nChildren's picture books [ edit ]\n\nMcKean has collaborated with Neil Gaiman on four children's picture books, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (1998), The Wolves in the Walls (2003), Crazy Hair (2009), and Mirrormask (2005), and illustrated Gaiman's children's novels Coraline (2002) and The Graveyard Book (2008), as well as S. F. Said's Varjak Paw (2003), Outlaw Varjak Paw (2006) and Phoenix (2013). The Wolves in the Walls: a Musical Pandemonium premiered as a play in Glasgow in 2006 with Improbable and the National Theatre of Scotland. The National Theatre of Scotland adapted The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish into a promenade performance for young people in 2013. He illustrated David Almond's The Savage published in April 2008, Slog's Dad published in September 2010, and Mouse Bird Snake Wolf (2013). In 2011, McKean collaborated with Richard Dawkins on The Magic of Reality, an introduction to critical thinking and science for children.[17] McKean also illustrated Ray Bradbury's The Homecoming (2006).\n\nThe Fat Duck Cookbook [ edit ]\n\nIn 2008, McKean collaborated with Heston Blumenthal on The Fat Duck Cookbook, an autobiography, compilation of key recipes and insight into Blumenthal's scientific method. The book was nominated in the James Beard Foundation Awards for Cooking from a Professional Point of View and won the Photography\/Illustration award. In 2014, McKean collaborated again with Blumenthal and writer Pascal Clariss on Historical Heston, a collection of historically inspired recipes. The book won two James Beard Foundation Awards. McKean is the Director of Story at The Fat Duck, and helped to relaunch the restaurant after its refurbishment in 2015. He has created package designs, maps, menu designs and murals for The Fat Duck, as well as Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London and Melbourne.\n\nStamps [ edit ]\n\nMcKean created six images for the Royal Mail's Mythical Creatures collection, which featured depictions of mythical creatures found in British folklore, including dragons, unicorns, giants, pixies, mermaids, and fairies. The collection was released in the UK on 16 June 2009. The Presentation Pack contains short descriptions of each subject by author Neil Gaiman.[18]\n\nFilms [ edit ]\n\nMirrorMask, McKean's first feature film as director, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2005. The screenplay was written by Neil Gaiman, from a story by Gaiman and McKean. A children's fantasy which combines live action and digital animation, MirrorMask was produced by Jim Henson Studios and stars a British cast Stephanie Leonidas, Jason Barry, Rob Brydon, and Gina McKee. Before MirrorMask, McKean directed a number of television intros and music videos as well as several short films, such as The Week Before (1998) and N[eon] (2002),[19] which are included in the compilation DVD of McKean's work Keanoshow from Allen Spiegel Fine Arts. McKean has directed The Gospel of Us, a film of the National Theatre Wales's Passion play in Port Talbot which stars Michael Sheen.[20] A new feature film, Luna,[21] written and directed by McKean and starring Stephanie Leonidas, Ben Daniels, Dervla Kirwan and Michael Maloney debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2014.\n\nMcKean was a concept artist on the TV mini-series Neverwhere (1996), which was created and co-written by Neil Gaiman, and the feature films Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005).\n\nTheatre and Live Performance [ edit ]\n\nMcKean wrote and performed a song cycle called Nine Lives[22] at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Graphic Festival. This was also performed at the British Library and at LICAF.\n\nMcKean wrote the text for Wildworks' Wolf's Child[23] site-specific theatre work as part of the Norwich Theatre Festival in 2015.\n\nAn Ape's Progress [24] was a commission by the Manchester Literature\/Jazz Festivals in 2015, and was created by poet Matthew Sweeney, composer\/saxophone player Iain Ballamy, cellist Matthew Sharp, singer Emilia Martensson, accordionist Stian Carstensen, and pianist Kit Downes, with McKean providing film projections and keyboards. A book of the work accompanied the show.\n\nBlack Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash [25] is a multi-media, music, song and performance work commissioned by 14-18 Now Foundation and LICAF. McKean performs as narrator and pianist, Matthew Sharp as performer, singer and cellist, and Clare Haythornthwaite as violinist\/performer. It was premiered in Amiens, and has been performed in Kendal. In 2016 it was performed in Rye, Ashford and at Tate Modern.\n\nJazz label [ edit ]\n\nMcKean founded the record label Feral Records[26] with saxophonist Iain Ballamy.\n\nAwards [ edit ]\n\nMcKean has won numerous awards and accolades. Over the years, he has been nominated five times for a World Fantasy Award in the category of \"Artist\", and he won the award in 1991.[27] His graphic novel Cages won the Alph-Art, Pantera, and Harvey Awards for best Graphic Novel.[28] He has been nominated six times and won three Spectrum Awards in the categories of \"Advertising\", \"Book\", and \"Comic\".[29] His collection of short comics, Pictures That Tick won the V&A Museum Illustrated Book Awards Overall First Prize.[28] In 2004, McKean won a BSFA Award in \"Short Fiction\" along with Neil Gaiman for their work, The Wolves in the Walls. His film MirrorMask was nominated for the William Shatner Golden Groundhog Award for Best Underground Movie, the other nominated films were Green Street Hooligans, Nine Lives, Up for Grabs and Opie Gets Laid.[30] Luna won Best British Feature at the Raindance Festival Awards,[31] and also the Raindance Award at the M\u00f6et British Independent Film Awards.[32] In 2017 Mckean was the inaugural recipient of the \"Sergio Aragones International Award for Excellence in Comic Art\", given as part of The Lakes International Comic Art Festival.[33]"}
{"text":"Scotland's leader Alex Salmond will on Saturday urge Scots to put aside party politics in the vote on independence, as he tries to win support from Labour rivals for his bid to leave the United Kingdom.\n\nIn an address to the Scottish National Party's (SNP) last conference before a September 18 referendum, Salmond will stress that a vote for independence is not a vote for him or his party but a way to put Scotland's future in its own hands.\n\nHis appeal comes after a narrowing in opinion polls that has for the first time made a vote for independence look a possibility, with both sides trying to persuade the up to 15 percent of voters who remain undecided.\n\nSalmond will promise to set up an all-party \"Team Scotland\" group after any \"Yes\" vote, to negotiate the terms of independence by March 24, 2016.\n\nHis promise is an appeal to Scottish Labour voters, many of whom bitterly oppose the SNP, which won the first majority government of Scotland's devolved parliament in a landslide victory in 2011.\n\n\"A Yes vote in September is not a vote for me, or for an SNP government in 2016 (at the next Scottish election),\" Salmond is expected to tell 1,200 party faithful gathered in Aberdeen, the oil capital of Scotland, for the two-day conference.\n\n\"It's a vote for a government in Scotland that the people of Scotland choose, pursuing policies the people of Scotland support.\"\n\nKeep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait\u2026 Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close\n\nRallying call against conservatives\n\nSalmond will stress that the reason to vote for independence and end the 307-year-old tie to England is so that oil-rich Scotland can decide its own policies and not have its fate determined by politicians in London.\n\nHe will say that any government of an independent Scotland would be in control of tax, the economy, social security, employment, immigration, oil and gas revenues, European policy and a range of other areas now under Westminster's control.\n\n\"That may be the SNP. It may be Labour. It may be a coalition,\" he will say.\n\n\"I tell you what it won't be. It won't be a government led by a party with just a single MP in Scotland,\" he will add, referring to the Conservative Party which is unpopular in Scotland but the major partner of Britain's ruling coalition.\n\nIn the Scottish Parliament the SNP holds 65 seats while Labour has 38 and the Conservatives 15. The rest are held by Liberal Democrats, Greens and independents.\n\nSalmond's appeal for cross-party support comes as opinion polls this week showed support for independence at about 40 percent, up from 30 percent a year ago, and compared to 45 percent opposition.\n\nThe pro-union Better Together campaign said the polls showed they were still ahead, citing a YouGov survey on Friday that found 57 percent of Scots supported Scotland staying in the UK but with increased powers for the Scottish Parliament.\n\nBusinesses have raised concerns about the risks of independence and the uncertainty regarding what currency would be used in an independent Scotland, financial regulations, taxation and European Union membership.\n\n\"As part of the UK we can have the best of both worlds - a strong Scottish Parliament, with the guarantee of more powers, backed up by the strength, security and stability of being part of the larger UK. Only separation would put that at risk,\" said the shadow Secretary of State for Scotland Margaret Curran."}
{"text":"When cognitive psychologists talk about testing, and when the rest of the population uses that word, they mean different things. For educators and parents, testing means standardized testing: a tool wielded by politicians and administrators to terrify children and teachers. When cognitive psychologists hear the word testing, they think immediately of \u201cthe testing effect\u201d \u2014 one of the best learning strategies. This may seem like semantics, but it\u2019s a problem.\n\nThe testing effect is the idea that trying to remember something leads to greater learning than just re-reading information. In one famous experiment, participants tried to learn information from a textbook either by repeatedly re-reading, or repeatedly writing out everything they could remember after reading the information only once. The strategy of writing from memory led to 60 percent correct recall of the material one week later, compared to only 40 percent in the repeated reading condition.\n\nBut despite its effectiveness as a learning strategy, the testing effect had to be rebranded to the less scary\/more fun-sounding \u201cquizzing\u201d and we have had to come up with more and more subtle ways to produce the effect without students realizing that they are being tested \u2014 somewhat akin to hiding broccoli in brownies.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAs champions of the testing effect, we find it awkward to hear bemoaning of standardized tests. So, let\u2019s tackle a few of the most common critiques:\n\nTests cause anxiety\n\nGet Today in Opinion in your inbox: Globe Opinion's must-reads, delivered to you every Sunday-Friday. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here\n\nThere\u2019s no doubt that challenging, high-stakes tests can provoke anxiety in some students. But, perhaps counterintuitively, the solution to this problem is not to get rid of testing; instead, it is to encourage more testing \u2013 particularly frequent, lower-stakes testing. With many tests spread out across the year, each individual test will be worth less and thus necessarily lower stakes; students will become more accustomed to testing, and thus, less afraid of it. What\u2019s more, every time they bring information to mind during a test, students are creating new memories from the cognitive effort involved. So more testing will lead to more learning and could decrease anxiety.\n\nTeachers and parents can also try to redirect some of that anxiety, a tactic that makes students feel more confident and actually perform better on high-stakes tests. Researchers have found one promising method in which students are told that the anxiety they feel before a test is actually helpful \u2013 not harmful \u2013 to their test performance.\n\nFinally \u2013 and this is something that ought to be examined empirically \u2013 the negative views of testing repeated by teachers and parents may be feeding into kids\u2019 anxiety and test-aversion. Just like public speaking, tests are an aspect of education that kids tend not to like even though it\u2019s good for them. Our job as parents is to realize that the benefits of testing outweigh the inconvenience of dealing with kids\u2019 complaints.\n\nTeaching to the test\n\nThe idea that teaching to a test isn\u2019t really teaching implies an almost astounding assumption that standardized tests are filled with meaningless, ill-thought-out questions on irrelevant or arbitrary information. This may be based on the myth that \u201cteachers in the trenches\u201d are being told what to teach by some \u201cexperts\u201d who\u2019ve probably never set foot in a \u201creal\u201d classroom. What these defiant teachers fail to realize \u2013 or simply choose to ignore \u2013 is that these experts are groups of carefully selected individuals that always include well-seasoned \u201creal classroom teachers\u201d, who guide the decision-making on what material should be assessed by the tests. For those wanting to find out more about how tests are made, here\u2019s an informative video by the Educational Testing Service which develops, administers or scores more than 50 million tests.\n\nStandardized tests are biased\n\nAdvertisement\n\nStandardized tests are not the great equalizer that will eliminate discrimination. But it is highly unlikely an individual teacher alone could create a more fair, unbiased test than many experts with access to a lot of resources, a huge amount of diverse data, and the ability to refine tests based on those data. As stated in the ETS video, once a new question is introduced, statisticians work to figure out whether it\u2019s performing equally well for different groups.\n\nUnfair, biased questions are certainly an important ongoing issue for the makers of standardized tests to address, but much work is going into the refinement and improvement of these questions, with the goal of avoiding and, hopefully, eventually eliminating such biases. All individuals have implicit biases that are almost impossible to override, so leaving assessment to individual instructors can only worsen the problem. The crux of the matter is trust \u2013 can we trust a board of experts that includes experienced teachers to act in our best interest as a nation of educators, parents, and children? And if the answer is no, then how can we trust individual teachers, and how would we hold them accountable?\n\nTests don\u2019t provide prompt feedback\n\nHere standardized tests have a lot of room for improvement. Feedback on standardized tests is tardy and often incredibly confusing, and doesn\u2019t include information on which specific questions the student answered incorrectly. By the time it comes, the feedback is just a meaningless score. Although students can learn from tests even without feedback, it is clear that feedback increases the benefits of testing. Tests can be expected to improve on this front as they transition from paper to online, where rapid feedback is more viable on a large scale.\n\nStandardized tests were created to track students\u2019 progress and evaluate schools and teachers. Griping abounds about how these tests are measuring the wrong thing and in the wrong way; but what\u2019s conspicuously absent is any suggestion for how to better measure the effect of education \u2014 i.e., learning \u2014 on a large scale. In the absence of direct measures of learning, we resort to measures of performance. And the great thing is: measuring this learning actually causes it to grow. So let\u2019s reclaim the word testing, so that the first word that comes to mind when we see it is \u201ceffect\u201d.\n\nYana Weinstein is an assistant professor in the Psychology department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Megan Smith is an assistant professor in the Psychology department at Rhode Island College. They are the co-founders of Learning Scientists (@AceThatTest on Twitter)."}
{"text":"It turns out that the millionaire GOP establishment donor who bankrolled the anti-Donald Trump skywriting at the Rose Bowl parade on New Year\u2019s Day isn\u2019t just any ordinary donor-class millionaire. He\u2019s backing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the man who is emerging as the anti-conservative establishment and donor-class candidate for president in 2016.\n\nAccording to the Center for Responsive Politics, Luther Stan Pate IV\u2014an Alabama real estate developer worth millions\u2014has donated thousands of dollars to Rubio\u2019s electoral efforts.\n\nOn Jan. 29, 2015, Pate donated $5,200 to Rubio\u2014who, at the time, hadn\u2019t yet officially launched a presidential campaign but was acting as if he were running for president.\n\nJust days earlier, ABC News\u2019 Jonathan Karl reported exclusively that Rubio had hired Anna Rogers, then the finance director for Karl Rove\u2019s American Crossroads, to lead \u201cthe effort to raise the $50 million or more he\u2019ll need to run in the Republican primaries.\u201d\n\n\u201cHe has told us to proceed as if he is running for president,\u201d a senior Rubio adviser told ABC News for the piece, which ran on Jan. 23, 2015\u2014six days before Pate\u2019s donation to Rubio.\n\nA couple months later, Pate gave another $2,500 to Rubio, according to the Center for Responsible Politics. Later in the year, after Rubio launched his presidential campaign, the Rubio campaign returned $5,000 of the $7,700 total that Pate had donated to him. That is standard operating procedure because the Federal Election Commission (FEC) only allows donors to make a total of $2,700 to an individual presidential candidate.\n\nPate is the man who set up, on Dec. 29, a new anti-Trump Political Action Committee. FEC filings show that Pate is listed as the Treasurer and Custodian of Records for the new group entitled the \u201cWeThePeople Foundation.\u201d\n\nThat organization wrote messages like \u201cAmerica is great. Trump is disgusting\u201d and \u201cAnybody but Trump\u201d and \u201cIowans dump Trump\u201d in the sky at the Rose Bowl with at least five skywriting planes on Friday. Skywriting is a fairly expensive endeavor, and doing so with five planes makes it even more expensive.\n\nThe skywriting also directed viewers to the Rubio campaign-donor Pate\u2019s new PAC website, http:\/\/anybodybuttrump.us\/, a crudely designed site that viscerally attacks the 2016 GOP frontrunner.\n\nThe website allows visitors to donate to the Rubio campaign-donor Pate\u2019s new PAC, to buy anti-Trump items from the organization\u2019s online store, and to display various videos and anti-Trump materials.\n\nPate is an eccentric establishment GOP figure who\u2019s been associated with behavior similar to this before.\n\nLagniappe, a weekly newspaper in Mobile, Alabama\u2014Pate is based in Tuscaloosa\u2014devoted an August 2007 cover story to Pate\u2019s sharp-elbowed political tactics.\n\n\u201cIn mid-2005, Pate sought $16 million in public funds for a real estate development, a shopping center to be named Midtown. The Tuscaloosa City Council declined [to grant] the aid with Council President Jerry Plott and Councilman Kip Tyner being the most vocal opponents,\u201d said the article, which was also picked up by various local bloggers.\n\nIt wasn\u2019t Pate\u2019s first difficulty with the councilmen and he was frustrated. \u201cHe [Pate] fought us tooth-and-nail to get that money,\u201d Plott said. \u201cBut I didn\u2019t think public dollars should be spent on a private business. He began a public crusade to try to destroy me.\u201d Pate apparently conceived a Web site aimed at fomenting discord against Plott. Amidst the many charges of corruption on www.theplottthickens.com, a dormant discussion board asks for feedback on the councilman and a line on the site declares, \u201cI am Stan Pate and I approve this message,\u201d then gives a Northport post office box address. Pate admits to having founded the site and claims good reason for such. \u201cI filed an ethics complaint that is a matter of public record against Mr. Plott,\u201d Pate said, \u201cand I made it very clear in multiple ads and in the newspaper and in Tuscaloosa and on various publications that I feel like Mr. Plott\u2019s dealings while he was on the city council were unethical and corrupt.\u201d\n\nAt this time, Rubio\u2019s team is not disavowing the efforts his donor Pate has taken against Trump. Alex Conant, Rubio\u2019s communications director, has not responded to a request for comment when presented with evidence that the Rubio campaign\u2019s donors are behind this attack on Trump.\n\nWhile Trump has battled with pretty much everyone in the entire GOP field in 2016, he\u2019s crushed a few candidates: former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) are among those still running. And outgoing Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), former New York Gov. George Pataki and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker are among those not running anymore.\n\nBut there are a few candidates that Trump is treating carefully.\n\nRubio is one of them. Trump has been very critical of Rubio\u2019s pro-amnesty positions on immigration, his work on trade, and Rubio\u2019s horrendous attendance record when it comes to votes and national security briefings in the U.S. Senate. But he hasn\u2019t gone as aggressively after Rubio as he has gone after, say, Bush.\n\nRubio is the last remaining establishment-backed candidate who\u2019s got a clear shot at the nomination.\n\nBush and Kasich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie all could bounce back, but each of them is struggling and Rubio is the only non-conservative in the top-tier of polling along with Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Dr. Ben Carson.\n\nThat means Rubio presents basically the only threat to conservatives\u2019 chances in 2016\u2014and now that Rubio\u2019s team is coming after Trump this aggressively, with the skywriting above the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Rubio may have just inadvertently wandered into the bear\u2019s den."}
{"text":"A MELBOURNE woman has been reunited with her dog 10 years after it went missing.\n\nLatte disappeared from Anne Quach\u2019s Reservoir home in 2004, sparking a fruitless search.\n\n\u201cI bought Latte and her brother Cappuccino in 2003, and a year later Latte went missing from our yard,\u2019\u2019 Ms Quach said.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re not sure if she was stolen or snuck out, but I was devastated and Cappuccino whined for weeks afterwards.\u201d\n\nAt the time, Ms Quach put up posters in the hope someone would recognise the much-loved pooch, but she eventually gave up hope of being reunited.\n\nUntil now, when she turned up at the City of Whittlesea Pound in Epping where a microchip scan revealed the identity of her owner.\n\nLatte was unkempt and slightly malnourished, but otherwise OK.\n\nMs Quach said Latte didn\u2019t recognise her or respond to her name, but she was settling in well.\n\n\u201cCappuccino is very happy and my son Vin, who was only a month old when she went missing, loves his new friend,\u2019\u2019 she said.\n\nWhittlesea Council animal management team leader Rod Thickins said Ms Quach\u2019s story was a timely reminder to microchip pets.\n\n\u201cMicrochipping our cats and dogs has led to many happy reunions at the pound. Latte\u2019s case is extraordinary \u2014 10 years is definitely our council record,\u2019\u2019 he said."}
{"text":"With NES Classic Edition Discontinued, Hyperkin's Retron HD Could Take Its Place\n\nWith NES Classic Edition Discontinued, Hyperkin's Retron HD Could Take Its Place\n\nShare. Doing what Nintendoesn't. Doing what Nintendoesn't.\n\nHyperkin wants to pick up where NES Classic Edition left off with the Retron HD, a new console that plays 8-bit classics from Nintendo's home system.\n\nThe Retron HD works with original NES cartridges \u2014 from both NTSC and PAL regions \u2014 displaying them at 720p on screen. The console comes with a controller with a 10-foot cord and HD cable, plus a micro USB charge cable.\n\nMeet the Retron HD 6 IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 06 Hyperkin's Retron HD plays NES cartridges at 720p. 01 OF 06 Hyperkin's Retron HD plays NES cartridges at 720p. Meet the Retron HD Download Image Captions ESC\n\nAnnounced earlier this month, the Retron HD looks like an attempt to build off the success of Nintendo's mini console. The Big N discontinued the NES Classic Edition in April, with a company representative at the time stating that the system \"wasn\u2019t intended to be an ongoing, long-term product.\"\n\nNow this isn't the first time Hyperkin has released an HD console that plays NES cartridges. The Retron 5 actually supported 10 different systems, such as SNES, Genesis and Game Boy Advance.\n\nThe Retron HD will release May 25 for $40\/\u00a350 in gray and black.\n\nExit Theatre Mode\n\nEvan Campbell is a freelance writer who scripts the Daily Fix, streams games on his Twitch channel, and chats about movies and TV series on Twitter."}
{"text":"NEW YORK (PAI) \u2013 With sights set on the November 2014 elections, Graphic Communications Conference and International Brotherhood of Teamsters leaders are pledging to work tirelessly for pro-labor candidates and assure there is no repeat of the disastrous midterm contests of 2010.\n\nWhat they aim for is to prevent a repeat of the mid-term results four years ago. That\u2019s when, analysts say, a Tea Party-fueled backlash against Democratic President Barack Obama and his signature Affordable Healthcare law ousted 63 Democrats from the U.S. House and six from the Senate.\n\nThe GOP momentum spread to states like Wisconsin, where right winger Scott Walker was elected governor and, with Republican state legislative colleagues, quickly enacted legislation that stripped basic bargaining rights from public employees.\n\nGCC\/IBT leaders vow not to be caught flatfooted this time around.\n\n\u201cWe let down our guard in 2010,\u201d said union President George Tedeschi. \u201cIt won\u2019t happen again.\u201d Other union leaders voiced similar sentiments.\n\n\u201cI would tell people that labor should reward its friends and punish its enemies,\u201d said Frank Golden, business representative and organizer for District Council 4 in the Chicago area, quoting American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers. \u201cI use that as a stepping stone and tell these people, because we got a little time to go, and just throw that straight at them as a reminder.\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s a general rule of politics that midterm election results are largely determined by a president\u2019s job approval rating. If the chief executive is well-regarded, voters are apt to favor his party. A president with low public opinion scores can be a detriment.\n\n\u201cUsing the president\u2019s approval rating, even in a midterm election, is useful because, for better or worse, a president is the face of his party,\u201d wrote Charlie Cook, editor of The Cook Political Report and one of the nation\u2019s leading political analysts. \u201cAlthough voters rarely reward a party for having a popular president, they are quick to register their displeasure with a chief executive by voting against the candidates of that party in a midterm election.\u201d That\u2019s especially true in a president\u2019s second mid-term.\n\nIn 2006, GOP President George W. Bush was struggling and Republicans lost 30 House seats, six Senate seats and majorities in both houses of Congress. Polls show history may repeat itself.\n\nThat\u2019s because Obama also has lost ground recently. By mid-June, an average of 49 percent of those surveyed, in dozens of polls compiled by Real Clear Politics, said they disapproved of the president\u2019s performance.\n\nObama\u2019s slide was tied to several embarrassing episodes \u2014 Internal Revenue Service agents allegedly hounding tea party-affiliated groups, secret collection of data from Associated Press reporters, and the National Security Agency\u2019s surveillance of phone calls and overseas Internet use.\n\nNext year, all 435 seats in the GOP-dominated U.S. House are up for election in the president\u2019s second mid-term. And 33 Senate seats, a majority of them Democratic-held, will be contested.\n\nOverall, Democrats hold 52 Senate seats, Republicans hold 45, and independents, two. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who died in June, held the other. GOP Gov. Chris Christie appointed a Republican to replace Lautenberg until a special October election, upping the GOP\u2019s Senate total, temporarily, to 46.\n\nThere will be 36 statehouse battles in November 2014, with most in GOP hands. Among the most closely watched will be the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, where Walker is running for re-election. The GOP governor beat back a recall election in 2012 despite efforts by organized labor to oust him after Walker pushed legislation virtually killing collective bargaining for most of the Badger State\u2019s 200,000 public workers.\n\nSimilar pieces of legislation also were proposed in Ohio and Michigan, now a right-to-work state.\n\nGolden said that Democrats must be held accountable, too. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of Democrats out there who made a lot of promises that they haven\u2019t really been stepping up on either,\u201d he said.\n\nThe fights over worker rights, in both the states and over the NLRB, show the stakes are high in 2014 even though midterm elections lack the fanfare \u2013 and turnout \u2013 of presidential contests.\n\n\u201cWe need to find and support the candidates that serve our members interests,\u201d said Ronnie Pineda, president of GCC Local 140-N in Los Angeles. \u201cIn the last 10 years we\u2019ve gotten people elected and they\u2019ve betrayed us. I for one am a big believer in education. We need to educate ourselves completely with every one of the candidates and any other new laws that may be on the ballot.\u201d\n\nJack Noone, president of Local 241-M in Scranton, Pa., said union leaders must help members \u2013 and their families \u2013 stay focused.\n\n\u201cRight off the bat we have to try to educate people so they understand what the really important issues are, and not be distracted by these scandals,\u201d he said, adding some of Obama\u2019s performance must be attributed to the Republicans\u2019 willful obstruction of his efforts.\n\n\u201cWe have to try and get them involved and help them understand the issues,\u201d Noone said. \u201cWe have to get people on board.\u201d\n\nZachary Dowdy writes for the Graphics Communicator.\n\nPhoto: Unions found it necessary to occupy the Capitol in Madison Wisconsin after Scott Walker, who was swept into office in the last mid-term tea party wave, attacked the collective bargaining rights of workers. Blake Deppe\/PW"}
{"text":"Duke University's decision to scrap plans to allow the Muslim call to prayer to emanate from its chapel bell tower raises controversy on campus. (Reuters)\n\nDuke University canceled plans Thursday to begin a weekly Muslim call to prayer from the campus chapel this week, an initiative that had set off debate on social media. A school spokesman and a Duke Muslim leader said that a serious and credible security threat played a role in the decision.\n\nThe university had announced that Muslim students would chant the \u2018adhan,\u2019 the call to a weekly prayer service, from the Duke University Chapel bell tower each Friday. The sound of the call to prayer in Muslim communities is a standard part of ritual life on Muslims\u2019 main prayer day. Theologically, it reminds Muslims \u201cto worship God and serves as a reminder to serve our brothers and sisters in humanity,\u201d Imam Adeel Zeb, Muslim chaplain at Duke, said in a news release.\n\nBut reaction to the story off campus was swift. Some celebrated the decision.\n\nI support the #DukeCalltoPrayer. Because religious inclusivity is more important than xenophobia. \u2014 Erin Howett (@EHowett) January 15, 2015\n\nBut many strongly opposed it.\n\nFranklin Graham, president of Samaritan\u2019s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, called on donors and alumni to withhold support from Duke until the policy was reversed. The hashtag #boycottduke spread quickly, and many of the reactions on Twitter referred to recent terrorist attacks, and interpreted it as an anti-Christian move.\n\nGraham posted strong words about it on his Facebook page: \u201cAs Christianity is being excluded from the public square and followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn\u2019t submit to their Sharia Islamic law, Duke is promoting this in the name of religious pluralism. I call on the donors and alumni to withhold their support from Duke until this policy is reversed.\u201d\n\nImmediate growing backlash momentum \u2013 people to #BoycottDuke \u2013 attend #AmericanFlashmob on Duke Campus starting 12:30 on Fri with #airhorns \u2014 Rolliby (@rolliby) January 15, 2015\n\nMuslim call to prayer to begin at Duke University. But Jesus isnt welcome @DukeU #boycottDuke \u2014 Shannon Catoe (@shannoncatoe) January 14, 2015\n\nFranklin later praised the reversal.\n\nI am glad to hear that @DukeU reversed its decision to allow Muslim call to prayer from its chapel bell tower. They made the right decision! \u2014 Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) January 15, 2015\n\nIn discussing the change Thursday, Duke officials said the response to the decision was not what the university had expected.\n\n\u201cDuke remains committed to fostering an inclusive, tolerant and welcoming campus for all of its students,\u201d said Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations, in a news release. \u201cHowever, it was clear that what was conceived as an effort to unify was not having the intended effect.\u201d\n\nSchoenfeld said Thursday night that a \u201cserious and credible\u201d security threat was one of the reasons for the decision. University officials declined to elaborate.\n\nOmid Safi, director of Duke\u2019s Islamic Studies Center, said Thursday evening that the call to prayer was scaled back because of \u201ca number of credible threats against Muslim students, faculty and staff.\u201d The school, he said \u201cis treating this as a criminal matter\u201d and that the threats are \u201cexternal.\u201d\n\nMuslim students, Safi said, have been advised not to speak and be identified, \u201cand are scared and disappointed.\u201d Asked if he personally had been threatened, he said he had been advised by officials to say \u201ca number of credible threats have been made.\u201d\n\nOn Friday, he said, there would still be a new addition to the weekly service: A call to prayer, but it would be from the steps of the chapel instead of amplified from the tower. The initial decision to have a call, he said, came last semester upon the urging of the Office of Religious Life \u2013 the overall chaplains\u2019 office with clergy from various faiths \u2013 and Muslim students, together. He said Duke is considered a leader in Islamic studies and hospitable for Muslims. More than 100 people show up each Friday for prayer, he said.\n\n\u201cWe had hoped for a symbolic action that would shine a light on how a leading international university in the American South can be a place where the symbol of the Christian heritage of the university is demonstrating hospitality to its Muslim community members. And instead we\u2019re having to talk about crazy people,\u201d Safi said.\n\nWhen the idea of holding the call from the tower was pitched, he said, no one thought it would be a problem. He blamed \u201cgeography\u201d and Duke\u2019s proximity to influential evangelical leader Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham.\n\n\u201cDuke has been committed to Islamic studies for decades,\u201d he said.\n\nThe university has held the weekly jummah prayers in the basement of Duke Chapel for many years, starting with the traditional chanted call to prayer. More than 700 of the 15,000 students at Duke identify as Muslim, according to school officials.\n\nDuke today is non-sectarian but has historic and symbolic ties with The United Methodist Church. Its bylaws were recast last year to say its purposes are grounded in the Christian tradition of intellectual inquiry and service to the world. Sapp described the chapel as \u201ca church.\u201d\n\nOn Wednesday, a Duke dean of religious life published an essay in the News & Observer touting the decision to hold the call, a common sound in Muslim communities around the world.\n\n\u201cThis opportunity represents a larger commitment to religious pluralism that is at the heart of Duke\u2019s mission and connects the university to national trends in religious accommodation,\u201d wrote Christy Lohr Sapp, associate dean for religious life at Duke University.\n\nIn her essay, Sapp noted that \u201cthere is much negative press\u201d today touching Muslims, \u201cfrom ISIS to Boko Haram to al-Qaida.\u201d The call, she wrote, would be the antithesis, and \u201cmight help students feel more at home in a world marred by weekly acts of violence and daily discriminations. Perhaps, too, this small token of welcome will provide a platform for a truer voice to resonate: a voice that challenges media stereotypes of Muslims, a voice of wisdom, a voice prayer and a voice of peace.\u201d\n\nNow Muslim students and others on campus wishing to take part in the prayer will meet on the quadrangle outside the Chapel before gathering in the Chapel for prayers.\n\n\u201cOur Muslim community enriches the university in countless ways,\u201d Schoenfeld said. \u201cWe welcome the active expression of their faith tradition, and all others, in ways that are meaningful and visible.\u201d\n\nPresident Obama said Friday that United States' \"one big advantage\" against terrorism was the feeling of belonging that American Muslims have to the country. He said some Muslims in European countries did not have these same national ties. (AP)\n\nThis story has been updated."}
{"text":"\u201cHi, it\u2019s me.\u201d For Australians living in isolation and doing it tough this Christmas, making that phone call may be the first step they take to reconnect with friends and loved ones.\n\nBut in a world of smart phones and the nbn\u2122, being connected is something a lot of us take for granted. It\u2019s easy to forget that there are many Australians who don\u2019t have the technology or financial means to access a phone line, or a way to connect with their loved ones at Christmas.\n\nFor some of these community members, not being able to come together with family, friends and loved ones at Christmas time only heightens feelings of loneliness, personal hardship and isolation.\n\nTo help those separated by distance or circumstance to get in touch with one another this festive season, we are again opening up our national payphone network and providing free local, national and standard mobile calls from Telstra payphones around Australia from December 24-26. We will also be offering free Telstra Air\u00ae Wi-Fi access from selected public hotspots.\n\nWe\u2019re really pleased to be working alongside our long term partner, The Salvation Army, to help spread the word about our offer. Their mission is to bring hope to those facing personal hardships, such as homelessness, all year, every year, and especially at Christmas.\n\n\u201cWith many vulnerable people suffering from feelings of social isolation, a free phone call removes financial barriers and gives everyone \u2013 regardless of their personal circumstance \u2013 the chance to make a positive emotional connection,\u201d said Major Brendan Nottle, The Salvation Army.\n\nAs a company with connection at its heart, we want to play a genuine role in connecting people at Christmas and all year round through the technology and experiences we provide. Our ability to open up our network gives all Australians the opportunity to pick up the phone and call their friends, families and loved ones at a time of year when social connection is really important.\n\nLast year, 170,000 calls were made from our payphone network across the same period, with our data revealing NSW residents and visitors to be the biggest payphone users overall.\n\nOver the three days, nearly 31,000 unique connections were made via our free Telstra Air Wi-Fi access, at sites across the country. Swanston Street and Bourke Street sites in Melbourne\u2019s CBD received the greatest number of users. Collective data usage across all Telstra Air Wi-Fi hotspots also reached 5.6 TB over the course of the campaign, with sites in Southport, Currumbin and Surfers Paradise in Queensland the top locations.\n\nNothing beats the sound of hearing a loved one\u2019s voice, especially at a time like Christmas when a focus on families coming together is really heightened. It\u2019s an important opportunity for those in the community who might be feeling isolated at this time, and we hope that even more Australians take up the opportunity to connect with their loved ones this year.\n\nAustralians will be able to call anyone in Australia across Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day free of charge from any of the 16,000 Telstra branded payphones around the country.\n\nThings you need to know:\n\nFree calls around Australia to local, national and standard mobiles from Telstra payphones from 24-26 December 2018. Free calls exclude international calls and premium services (19x), Mobile Satellite, and 1234, 12456 directory services. Excludes Telstra rented payphones. Free Wi-Fi data at select Telstra Air payphones and Telstra Stores, in Australia only. Telstra Air available for Wi-Fi enabled devices only."}
{"text":"<a href=\"https:\/\/www.documentcloud.org\/documents\/703318\/2013-05-20-joint-letter-to-sec-hagel-pii-redacted.pdf\">2013 05 20 Joint Letter to Sec Hagel (PII Redacted) (PDF)<\/a> <br \/> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.documentcloud.org\/documents\/703318\/2013-05-20-joint-letter-to-sec-hagel-pii-redacted.txt\">2013 05 20 Joint Letter to Sec Hagel (PII Redacted) (Text)<\/a>\n\nMilitary attorneys representing former CIA captives detained in a top secret camp at Guantanamo have called on Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to examine whether the head of the prison\u2019s guard force is fit for command.\n\nCol. John Bogdan, the commander of Guantanamo\u2019s Joint Detention Group, has been singled out by the defense lawyers for revamping dormant policies, such as inspections of Qurans and genital patdowns, that gave rise to a hunger strike, now entering its fourth month.\n\n\u201cAlthough we represent so-called \u2018high value detainees, many of our concerns relate to the treatment of all prisoners, to include men whose internment appears to be indefinite\u201d states a 13-page letter and signed by nineteen attorneys, including several who represent self-professed 9\/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the alleged architect behind the USS Cole bombing, sent to Hagel on Monday. \u201cThere has been a serious degradation in the quality of life for detainees in Guantanamo Bay over the past year. This change appears to have coincided with the arrival of the new Joint Detention Group Commander, Col. John V. Bogdan.\u201d\n\nArmy Captain Jason Wright, who is defending Mohammed before a military tribunal and also represents an Afghan prisoner named Obaidullah, one of the hunger strikers, told Al Jazeera the letter was prompted by \u201cyears of inaction by the US government.\u201d\n\n\u201cSadly, no none has been watching Guantanamo, much less responding to repeated concerns of uniformed service members about what is really happening down there,\u201d Wright says. \u201cIt is important to highlight that this is a peaceful, political protest by the majority of the men in Camps five and six who have been cleared for release and who are otherwise innocent until proven guilty by a competent court of law. It is shameful that [Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, which operates the prison] has responded to the hunger strike, not only by forcibly feeding [prisoners] in violation of international law, but by punishing them and placing them in conditions tantamount to solitary confinement. America is better than this.\u201d\n\nInspecting Qurans\n\nThe letter was sent to Hagel three days before President Obama is due to give a major speech about his counterterrorism policies, which will include a discussion about Guantanamo.\n\nBogdan became the warden of the prison last June. Three months after he settled in, a Yemeni prisoner named Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif was found unconscious in his cell and was pronounced dead at the detention hospital. An autopsy report concluded that Latif committed suicide by ingesting mass quantities of anti-psychotic medication. However, his death is still under investigation.\n\nFollowing Latif\u2019s death, according to the accounts several prisoners\u2019 communicated to their attorneys, Bogdan ordered a shakedown of their cells and guards confiscated personal items, which included pictures, legal papers, eyeglasses and isomats.\n\nIn January, an Afghan Taliban prisoner was shot in the throat in the recreation yard with a non-lethal round for allegedly trying to climb a fence. In early February, the prisoners\u2019 Qurans were inspected for contraband. The handling of the holy books immediately led to the hunger strike.\n\nPrisoners have told their attorneys since they launched their protest they have been physically abused by guards, subjected to sleep deprivation and forced cell extractions, denied potable water and have had the temperature in their prison cells turned down to freezing cold temperatures.\n\nIn mid-April, on Bogdan\u2019s orders, guards staged a pre-dawn raid at the communal camp and isolated all of the prisoners into single cells in what was seen by attorneys and human rights groups as an attempt to break the hunger strike. If that was the hope it had the opposite effect as the number of prisoners who joined the protest doubled.\n\n\"Death...is imminent\"\n\nThe military has vehemently denied the allegations. But the attorneys said in their letter if steps are not immediately taken to improve the quality of life for the prisoners, \u201cDeath - whether by suicide, starvation, organ failure, or associated complications - is imminent.\u201d\n\nAlong with their letter, the attorneys also sent Hagel an August 2011 report prepared for the United Nations General Assembly by the UN\u2019s special rapporteur for torture, which said solitary confinement rose to the level of inhumane and degrading treatment.\n\nUS Military attorneys say detainees are not being treated humanely [Jason Leopold\/Al Jazeera]\n\nReached for comment late Monday, Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman, told Al Jazeera, \"The Department does not discuss correspondence addressed to the Secretary, in the press.\u201d\n\nThe attorneys\u2019 letter said in addition to the inhumane living conditions hunger-striking prisoners residing in the two main prison camps - 5 and 6 - have been living under, 14 high-value detainees residing in Camp seven, a classified facility, are also not being treated humanely, an issue the attorneys raised with the Pentagon in a dozen previous letters that have gone unanswered. They have called for Hagel to immediately authorize an independent monitoring committee to investigate conditions of confinement at Guantanamo.\n\n\u201cYou could change the course and the consequences of the hunger strike right now Secretary Hagel by taking ownership of these issued during the political stalemate\u201d between President Obama and Congress over how to shutter the prison, the letter says. \u201cAt stake, as you know, is not just the inalienable right to human dignity - to be treated like a human being - but America\u2019s standing in the world.\u201d\n\nSeparately, the attorneys, citing a law school investigation, said Bogdan may have perjured himself when he testified before the military commissions earlier this year in Mohammed\u2019s case about secret listening devices designed to look like smoke detectors that were placed in the rooms where attorneys meet with prisoners, but were never turned on. The investigation by Seton Hall University\u2019s Center for Policy and Research concluded that Bogdan\u2019s testimony was inconsistent about what he knew and when he knew it. The Seton Hall report was co-written by former Guantanamo guard Joseph Hickman.\n\n\u201cWhile Seton Hall\u2019s finding are sufficient grounds to examine COL Bogdan\u2019s fitness to command the Joint Detention Group, his leadership should warrant further scrutiny based on the rapidly deteriorating conditions under his command and his heavy-handed response to the current hunger strike,\u201d the attorneys wrote.\n\nFollow Jason Leopold on Twitter: @JasonLeopold"}
{"text":"It\u2019s not hard to see how, in a Japanese-dominated society, pop art might have extended its global popularity with no Campbell\u2019s Soup cans in sight. Illustration: Chloe Cushman\n\nPop art without Andy Warhol? Iconic cartoon mice repping the underground comic scene? These are the possibilities in a world where Japan defeated the United States in 1945.\n\nHere\u2019s an alternate look at art history, reimagining movements, tropes and trends that could have evolved much differently had the Allies lost the second world war.\n\nJ-pop \u2026 art?\n\nOne of the most influential postwar creative movements, pop art elevated advertising and mechanical reproduction to the level of fine art. Combining splashy, intense colors with recognizable, everyday subjects, the style forced viewers to reconsider the sophisticated techniques underlying seemingly mundane comic books, magazine advertisements and other objects.\n\nGiven Japan\u2019s rich ad and comic culture, it\u2019s not surprising the country developed a pop art style of its own. Before 1945, the popularity of propaganda kimonos hinted at the movement. Since the end of the war, the style has flourished as artists like Yayoi Kusama, who inspired Andy Warhol, used advertising\u2019s bright colors, while others like Lady Aiko and Mr have adopted comic imagery. It\u2019s not hard to see how, in a Japanese-dominated society, pop art might have extended its global popularity with no Campbell\u2019s Soup cans in sight.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest In a Japan-dominated postwar world, American cartoonists probably would have been repressed and manga characters reaching US shores likely would have looked more realistically Japanese. Illustration: Chloe Cushman\n\nManga: underground no more\n\nContemporary manga is a hybrid of Japanese and American comic art, says Stephen Salel, the Honolulu Museum of Art\u2019s Robert F Lange Foundation curator of Japanese art. Many manga elements, like characters\u2019 large eyes and exaggerated expressions, owe their origin to US cartoon pioneers like Walt Disney.\n\nIn a Japan-dominated postwar world, American cartoonists probably would have been repressed, particularly those who contributed to wartime propaganda. Manga reaching US shores likely would have looked more realistically Japanese. And, Salel points out, as the preferred style of the victors, manga probably wouldn\u2019t have conveyed the underground chic that\u2019s made it so popular among US comic aficionados today. Imagine outlaw teens and proud geeks in a different world: would they have clustered around smuggled copies of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse?\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest R\u014dnin did find fertile ground in postwar American western films, but in an alternate timeline we might have seen an Old West r\u014dnin carrying a sword alongside his six-shooter, fighting a cattle-rustling gang headed by the yakuza. Illustration: Chloe Cushman\n\nR\u014dnin characters roam the big screen\n\nThe r\u014dnin, or \u201cwave man\u201d, the masterless samurai forever cut off from mainstream society, is a powerful Japanese icon. Freed of traditional hierarchies, he wanders from place to place, using his skills to survive \u2013 and, in some tales, to protect the innocent and punish the wicked. Sound familiar? R\u014dnin did find fertile ground in postwar American culture, particularly in westerns, with characters ranging from the squeaky-clean Lone Ranger to Clint Eastwood\u2019s grim \u201cman with no name\u201d.\n\nSometimes the r\u014dnin-gunslinger relationship is explicit: The Magnificent Seven was a western remake of Akira Kurosawa\u2019s The Seven Samurai, and the 1971 movie Red Sun united veterans of both movies in a unique \u201csamurai western\u201d. If Japanese aesthetics had dominated postwar Hollywood, we might have seen an Old West r\u014dnin carrying a sword alongside his six-shooter, fighting a cattle-rustling gang headed by the yakuza.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Can you imagine a postwar Ivy League alum cooling down after a tennis match wearing a yukata? Illustration: Chloe Cushman\n\nEast meets East Coast: the new preppy\n\nIn the late 1800s, Japan began adopting Western clothing; by the 1940s, it was the standard wardrobe for daily life. But if Japan had won the war, it seems likely that many of its traditional textiles and designs would have filtered into Americans\u2019 style. Can you see a postwar Ivy League alum cooling down after a tennis match wearing a Japanese robe called a yukata? Or a CEO\u2019s suit lined with flashy, kimono-inspired fabric?\n\nIt\u2019s not that hard to imagine, since similar looks have made it into American stores in the real world. Japanese retailer Uniqlo, renowned for its preppy clothes, also carries yukatas and Japanese-patterned shorts in its lineup. And Harajuku style, which merges American design and theatrical Japanese aesthetic, shows how the east Asian nation\u2019s culture has impacted western clothing today.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest California wines might have had fanciful names written in the most elegant kanji, hiragana and katakana. Translations: Mako Ishikawa. Illustration: Chloe Cushman\n\nTypography takes a turn\n\nIn the 1900s, increased industrialization and the rising cult of efficiency in the west signaled the end of flowery, Spencer-style penmanship. The efficient Palmer method streamlined handwriting, while the widespread adoption of the typewriter in the late 1800s and early 1900s accelerating the process. In Japan, on the other hand, pictographic kanji and the syllabic writing systems of hiragana and katakana had thousands of characters, which slowed the progress of one writing machine: the first Japanese typewriter had 2,400 keys.\n\nEmojis before the smiling poop: New York museum acquires world's first set Read more\n\nWhile it\u2019s hard to picture a postwar Japanese occupation forcing Americans to adopt Japanese \u201calphabets\u201d, it\u2019s probable that signs and other public messages would have been printed in Japanese in certain regions, especially California. And this would likely have bled out into mainstream American writing, with Asian-inspired fonts and advertisements gaining popularity. \u201cBrush-written calligraphy on elongated formats such as poetry cards [tanzaku] and hanging scrolls might have regained far more popularity than it currently enjoys,\u201d Salel says.\n\nAs for pictographic writing, it\u2019s not hard to see how it could have slowly worked its way into common usage \u2013 not unlike the emoji, which originated on Japanese cellphones in the 1990s and has since traversed the world.\n\nThis content is paid for by Amazon Prime Video"}
{"text":"previously on MeFi: 1 - 2 - 3\n\nalso previously: Bren\u00e9 Brown on shame & vulnerability (one, two)\n\nOne: No good role modelsTwo: Can you be \u2018bad\u2019 and yet still \u2013 overall \u2013 good?Three: It will hurt you too much to hear thisFour: No one can understand me Effectively communicating your feelings : \"I know that it can be hard to talk about your feelings. We\u2019re not taught to do it, and we\u2019re certainly not taught that it\u2019s an important thing to learn. But it\u2019s definitely a skill worth practicing. Because you\u2019re worth being heard. I promise.\" Effective Communication - Improving your Social Skills \"People aren\u2019t born with good communication skills; like any other skill, they are learned through trial and error and repeated practice.\"BakadesuyoSucceed Socially Some Common Conversation Mistakes and Core Listening Skills How Self-Awareness Leads to Effective Communication : \"Our previous experiences, believes, values, assumptions, judgments and bias influence the quality of our listening. Whenever we listen to something, we evaluate what we are hearing and this in turn triggers our emotional reactions and our judgment. If we hear something that contradicts our values or our interests, we tend to react, by becoming defensive; our ability to be effective listeners is hostage of our own filters.\" Are You a Poor Communicator? How to Improve : \"...communicating with others can be a difficult and frustrating experience. There are times when we mean well, but because of the way we say what we say, our message is misunderstood, with unintended and undesirable consequences.\"Raptitude"}
{"text":"An LGBT pride march in Scotland has banned \u201ccis\u201d drag queens from marching out of the fear that it could offend transgender people.\n\nFree Pride Glasgow is scheduled to take place in August, and bills itself as an alternative to the city\u2019s main Pride event, which has allegedly become too commercialized.\n\n\u201cIt was felt by the group within the Trans\/Non Binary Caucus that some drag performance, particularly cis drag, hinges on the social view of gender and making it into a joke, however transgender individuals do not feel as though their gender identity is a joke,\u201d organizers said in a statement.\n\nAccording to the statement announcing the policy, some transsexuals found drag performances offensive because it \u201chinges on the social view of gender and making it into a joke.\u201d\n\nInitially, the policy was also going to ban transsexual drag queens, on the grounds that it would be inappropriate to ask individual queens whether they identified as transgender or not. But then that policy offended the transgender drag queens, who complained, leading to a new policy where trans drag queens are welcome but wicked cis queens are banned (\u201cCisgender\u201d means a person who identifies with their actual, physical sex).\n\nFree Pride Glasgow justified its decision in a Monday Facebook post, saying they were deliberately choosing to desires of transgender women more than others.\n\n\u201cOur event aims to represent those underrepresented in our community, including but not limited to trans and non-binary people, women, People of colour, intersex people, asexual people and people with disabilities,\u201d the post said. \u201cAs such we have decided to prioritise the needs of trans women to feel safe and included in our event.\u201d\n\nThe decision earned a rebuke from the main Glasgow Pride event.\n\n\u201cPride Glasgow believes that any community group should be given their place to flourish but that success should not be built on the negativity and ignorance towards other events, groups and like minded people and we are saddened to see that this is the direction that Free Pride has chosen to take.\u201d\n\nOpposition to drag queens is surprisingly common, at least on the British left. Earlier this year, the National Union of Students officially condemned drag and cross-dressing as forms of \u201cfancy dress.\u201d\n\n\u201cTransphobic fancy dress should be met with the same disdain with which we meet other prejudiced or appropriative costumes,\u201d the group said at the time.\n\nFollow Blake on Twitter\n\nContent created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@ dailycallernewsfoundation.org.\n\nContent created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org."}
{"text":"Labor is a hot topic in Paris. (Loic Venance\/AFP via Getty Images)\n\nThe French government recently faced huge protests against unpopular changes to the country's labor law.\n\nMost of its critics would argue that French workers increasingly face burnout and exhaustion. But one employee has had far different problems: He sued his former company because his job was allegedly extremely boring.\n\nThe plaintiff, 44-year-old Parisian Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Desnard, is demanding more than $400,000 from his former employer, a perfume enterprise, as compensation for the boredom it allegedly caused. According to the Frenchman, the company should be held responsible for mental and other health damages as well as the financial consequences of him missing out on a promotion.\n\nDesnard claims that he was removed from his previous high-profile position in the company, which included managing certain contracts and travel expenses. For the next four years, he was asked to carry out much duller tasks.\n\nSpeaking to French newspaper Le Monde, Desnard said his company wanted to bore him \"to death\" in order to convince him to quit voluntarily and therefore limit severance payments. But amid a sluggish French economy, Desnard simply decided to stay and do nothing. In the following four years, he reportedly earned more than $90,000 per year -- but the money did not fulfill him, he said.\n\n\"I was ashamed to be paid to do nothing,\" Desnard was quoted as saying by AFP. In an interview, he described the time as \"hell\" and \"a nightmare,\" which caused multiple health issues, including \"epilepsy, ulcers, sleep problems and serious depression.\"\n\nThe Frenchman was fired two years ago after a car crash forced him to go on sick leave for more than half a year. After having paid him a salary of about $360,000 over four years, his employer stated that his prolonged absence was interrupting work processes and ended their relationship.\n\nA verdict is expected July 27.\n\nRead more:\n\nFrench shop run by Muslim convert refused to sell merchandise to women on weekdays\n\nThese students wore hijabs for a day to promote tolerance. It didn\u2019t go well."}
{"text":"In 2010, Rachel Bradshaw-Bean \u2014 17 at the time \u2014 was raped in the band room of her Texas high school, Henderson High. When she reported the assault to the assistant band director, he told her to \"work it out with the boy.\" Two days later, she and a friend tried to report the assault to the assistant vice principal. She then received medical exam that showed lacerations to the hymen and bleeding \"consistent with information given per the victim.\" A day later, she was told by the police that no criminal charges would be filed. The school did not launch its own investigation \u2014 although it was legally obligated to do so under Title IX \u2014 and instead sentenced her and her rapist to 45 days in a special disciplinary school. Their charge: \"public lewdness.\"\n\nTwo years after her rape, Bradshaw-Bean has decided to speak out to NBC because she doesn't want anyone else \"to have to go through what I did,\" she told reporter Abigail Pesta. She feels that her case was egregiously mishandled. Firstly, she believes that the fact that she didn't cry in her forensic interview caused the police to take her accusation less seriously. \"I'm sorry, am I supposed to cry? Am I supposed to feel the emotions you tell me to?... Am I supposed to feel these emotions right now and not go into shock and not [not] know what's happening?\" she asked in a taped segment with the channel. According to her account, the police were eager to push her case under the rug; she was told by the police that the sex was consensual and that there was no evidence to prove otherwise. The District Attorney of her county told NBC that she had used language that \"implied consensual sex instead of forcible rape\" when the police interviewed her, but he doesn't have any record of the context in which she made that statement in his notes. \"I was reporting a rape,\" Bradshaw-Bean insisted in response. \"It sounds like my words are getting twisted. If you have to twist someone's words to make your case, then something's not right.\"\n\nShe adds that she felt \"like a prisoner\" \u2014 at the disciplinary school she'd been exiled to, she saw her rapist in the hallways, when she was arriving in the morning and going to the bathroom. She tried to transfer to a different high school and was denied because the \"public lewdness\" charge was a stain on her record. Other students taunted her, threatening her and insinuating that she had \"asked for it.\" After graduation, she says, \"My personality changed. I didn't want to do anything. I blamed myself for the longest time.\" In June 2012, though, things started to look up. Bradshaw-Bean's mother, Colleen Chevallier, had filed a Title IX complaint against the school with the ACLU. And in June, a little over a year and a half after her rape, Bradshaw-Bean finally got word that the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights had ruled that Henderson High School was in violation of Title IX for failing to independently investigate the case and for its inability to provide \"a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason\" behind their decision to send Bradshaw-Bean to the disciplinary school.\n\nThe ED outlined and instituted a 13-point plan to bring Henderson High in line with its Title IX obligations. As part of that, the faculty was made to undergo extensive training \u2014 which was very necessary because, as Pesta points out, most high schools' Title IX coordinators don't have a real, firm grasp of what the law entails. The disciplinary actions taken against Bradshaw-Bean were also scrubbed from her record, and the school had to pay for her to undergo counseling.\n\n\"The counselor really helped,\" said Bradshaw-Bean. \"Finally, I thought, there are some smart people in the world\u2014rational people with levelheaded thoughts. It restored my faith in humanity.\" As of December 4, 2013, the school is in compliance with all 13 requirements mandated by the ED, and ED officials are still monitoring the school at the present moment. As for Bradshaw-Bean, she plans to go on to study criminal justice and criminal psychology. \"I can help others facing injustice of their own,\" she said.\n\nAdvertisement"}
{"text":"WASHINGTON \u2014 One by one, President Barack Obama ticked through the names on the Spurs\u2019 roster during Monday\u2019s ceremony in the East Room of the White House.\n\nHe mentioned Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, of course. Kawhi Leonard, Boris Diaw and Tiago Splitter. He named Patty Mills and Marco Belinelli, lamenting that the latter no longer played for the president\u2019s beloved Chicago Bulls.\n\nObama even brought up Matt Bonner, calling him \u201ca sandwich blogger named 'Red Mamba.\u2019\u201d\n\nCory Joseph\u2019s name never came up, and for good reason. In his first three mostly forgettable seasons with the Spurs, the backup point guard has been easy to miss.\n\n\u201cI felt coming into this year I had something to prove,\u201d he said. \u201cI still have something to prove.\u201d\n\nThirty-six games into a make-or-break season for him, Joseph has shown he can be a solid NBA point guard.\n\nWhether the free-agent-to-be still will be doing it in San Antonio at this time next season remains to be seen.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m always going to feel like I deserve a job in the NBA,\u201d said Joseph, averaging career highs in points (10.3) and assists (3.1) heading into Tuesday\u2019s game at Washington. \u201cI put in the work. I\u2019m always going to compete to the best of my abilities. Whatever happens on that end, I leave to my agent.\u201d\n\nWhen the Spurs declined to extend Joseph\u2019s rookie-scale contract in October, opening the door for him to become a restricted free agent this summer, it appeared he would not be back because the team had no need for him.\n\nNow it looks like he might not be back because the team won\u2019t be able to afford him.\n\nWith Parker and Mills missing chunks of the season with injuries, Joseph has been something of a savior for the Spurs\u2019 backcourt.\n\nThe last time the Spurs played Washington, on Jan. 3, Joseph held his own against All-Star John Wall, going for 17 of his 19 points in the first half of a 101-92 win.\n\nAnother moment: With the Spurs teetering late in a comeback win over Phoenix on Friday, Joseph put his head down and bulldozed for six consecutive points.\n\n\u201cHe always impressed me with the way he plays,\u201d coach Gregg Popovich said. \u201cHe is not blessed with the most talent in the world, but I don\u2019t think there is anybody on the planet who gets more out of what he\u2019s got.\u201d\n\nStill, until this season Joseph was a fringe NBA player. One reason Obama didn\u2019t mention him Monday: Joseph totaled only eight minutes against Miami in last season\u2019s Finals.\n\nSo when the Spurs declined to extend him in the fall, Joseph was hardly surprised.\n\n\u201cI knew I didn\u2019t play much in my first few seasons,\u201d said Joseph, a 23-year-old Texas-ex. \u201cI didn\u2019t even ask my agent about it (an extension). I just assumed they wouldn\u2019t.\u201d\n\nInstead, Joseph put on his hard hat and went to work, determined to grow himself into an NBA player.\n\nIt was the approach Joseph took from the beginning, when the Spurs selected him 29th in the 2011 draft, 14 spots behind the more heralded Kawhi Leonard.\n\nDevoid of playing time his first few seasons, Joseph occasionally requested to be demoted to the Spurs\u2019 Development League club in Austin to get minutes.\n\nFor Joseph, much of the work involved in becoming an established NBA player was accomplished in solitude.\n\n\u201cThere were times when I was in Austin, in the gym by myself, maybe with nobody to rebound for me,\u201d Joseph said. \u201cI would go to to the gym a lot \u2014 a lot \u2014 and just work out.\u201d\n\nThe work seems poised to pay off for Joseph in a literal sense. He just might have to leave San Antonio to get paid.\n\nThe Spurs have $44.4 million committed to Parker after this season and another $7.1 million to Mills.\n\nJoseph is probably due a raise from the $2.02 million he is earning this season, but it is hard to envision the Spurs paying a third point guard much beyond that.\n\nFor now, the Spurs will take whatever they can get from Joseph. With Parker and Mills easing back into the rotation, look for Popovich to seek creative ways to keep all three point guards in the mix.\n\nThe president might have forgotten Joseph, but the Spurs have not.\n\n\u201cHe\u2019s stepped up and really taken the opportunity and run with it,\u201d Duncan said. \u201cI\u2019m really proud of him. He\u2019s showed he can play in the league and really play well.\u201d\n\njmcdonald\n\n@express-news.net\n\nTwitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN"}
{"text":"A woman who slashed another woman\u2019s face in a \u201cmoment of madness or jealousy\u201d, leaving her permanently disfigured, has been given a six year sentence.\n\nKinsi Abdullah Dirir (33) was convicted of assault causing serious harm to mother-of-five Habiba Songolo (40) at a house on Foxborough Rise, Lucan, Co Dublin on May 17th, 2008.\n\nDirir had denied the charge at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, however she admitted causing criminal damage to a car outside the house on the same day.\n\nDirir, who was born in Somalia and came to Ireland aged six, has no previous convictions. A probation report put her at high risk of re-offending.\n\nThe court heard the attack happened after Dirir discovered that her former husband was in a relationship with the victim.\n\nDirir, a mother-of-three of Hollybrook Park, Clontarf, was acquitted by a jury of carrying a razor blade on the same occasion.\n\nJudge Desmond Hogan said the victim had suffered very serious injuries and continued to suffer traumatic effects, bordering on depression.\n\nHe suspended the final 18 months of the sentence for four years, after hearing Dirir\u2019s family had offered the sum of \u20ac2,000 as compensation to the victim.\n\nJudge Hogan took into account Dirir\u2019s long history of mental illness and ordered that she receive appropriate medication in custody."}
{"text":"window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'thumbnails-c', container: 'taboola-interstitial-gallery-thumbnails-3', placement: 'Interstitial Gallery Thumbnails 3', target_type: 'mix' });\n\nPhoto: Getty Images Image 1 of \/ 4 Caption Close Image 2 of 4 Chris Dominguez of the San Francisco Giants is congratulated after hitting a two-run home run during the seventh inning of a baseball game against the San Diego Padres at Petco Park September, 21, 2014 in San Diego. less Chris Dominguez of the San Francisco Giants is congratulated after hitting a two-run home run during the seventh inning of a baseball game against the San Diego Padres at Petco Park September, 21, 2014 in San ... more Photo: Getty Images Image 3 of 4 Chris Dominguezof the San Francisco Giants sits in the dugout after an 8-2 loss to the San Diego Padres at Petco Park September, 21, 2014 in San Diego. Chris Dominguezof the San Francisco Giants sits in the dugout after an 8-2 loss to the San Diego Padres at Petco Park September, 21, 2014 in San Diego. Photo: Getty Images Image 4 of 4 SF Giants rookie hits first home run, gets cute messages on ball 1 \/ 4 Back to Gallery\n\nChris Dominguez was beaming despite Sunday\u2019s 8-2 loss, and nobody could blame him. Making his first major-league start, the 27-year-old rookie homered against Ian Kennedy for his first big-league hit.\n\nThe ball went over the fence down the left-field line, hit off the Western Metal Supply Co. building and wound up in the hands of a little girl named Estella who was celebrating her birthday.\n\nThe Padres dispatched an employee to retrieve the ball, but before a swap could be completed, the little girl\u2019s sister got ahold of the ball and wrote on it, \u201cHappy birthday, love M.\u201d\n\nThe girl agreed to give the ball to Dominguez, but not before she added her own missive. She wrote, \u201cCongratulations, (heart) Estella.\u201d\n\n\u201cThat is awesome,\u201d Dominguez said when he saw the inscriptions. \u201cI think it\u2019s great for the memories.\u201d"}
{"text":"Israeli Occupation Forces Kill Two Palestinians, Kidnap 370 In May\n\nIn its monthly report on Israeli violations, the Ahrar Center for Detainees\u2019 Studies and Human Rights has reported that Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinians in May, and kidnapped 370.\n\nThe Center said that the army shot and killed Nadim Nuwwara, 17, and Mohammad Abu Thaher, 20, near the Ofer Israeli military roadblock, near the central West Bank city of Ramallah. The two were killed on May 15, during Nakba Day protests.\n\nIsraeli army sharpshooters killed the two following clashes with the army as the Palestinians marked the Nakba Day. Video footage showed the two walking away, with their backs to the army location, when they were killed.\n\nAs for arrests carried out by the Israeli occupation army, the Center said that 370 Palestinians were kidnapped in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.\n\nIn Jerusalem, soldiers kidnapped 118 Palestinians, the highest number of arrests in May, while 86 Palestinians were kidnapped in the Hebron district, 40 in Nablus, 30 in Bethlehem, 27 in Ramallah, 27 in Jenin, 16 in Qalqilia, 8 in Salfit, 4 in Tulkarem, and two in Tubas.\n\nIn addition, 12 Palestinians were kidnapped in the besieged Gaza Strip; three of them were kidnapped near the border fence, and nine were Palestinian fishers were kidnapped by the Israeli Navy in Palestinian territorial waters.\n\nAlso in May, the army kidnapped five Palestinian women in different parts of occupied Palestine, and released three of them, while two remained under interrogation.\n\nHead of the Ahrar Center, Fuad al-Khoffash, stated that Israel is escalating the arrests, especially amongst young Palestinians, and that Israeli interrogators continue to use cruel interrogation methods, and extreme torture, in direct violation of International Law and all related human rights treaties.\n\nHe added that the arrests are happening while Administrative Detainees, held by Israel under arbitrary orders without charges or trial, are ongoing with their hunger strike despite the fact that many detainees are facing life-threatening conditions, and serious complications."}
{"text":"The following table contains the main stats for all ADVENT units present in version 1.4 of Long War 2, including the units introduced by Shen's Last Gift and Alien Hunters DLCs.\n\nThe stat values can be influenced by the difficulty level (Rookie\/Veteran\/Commander\/Legendary) and those are also displayed accordingly.\n\nOther Stats\n\nIn addition to the stats listed above there are others that have very limited use. Here's a list of those stats and the specific situations where they are used\n\nFlank Aim - only used by the Sidewinders with a value of 5, 0 for all other units\n\nFlank Crit - default of 33\/33\/40\/40 for each difficulty level, Elite Sidewinders have the values at 40\/40\/50\/50\n\nStrength - propose\/use unknown, has a default value of 50, and higher values for units like Mutons and Stun Lancers\n\nItems - default value of 1 of nearly all units, with the exception of the ADVENT Engineer\/Grenadiers, which is set for 9\n\nSources"}
{"text":"You may recall that of all of the games I saw at E3, Eador: Masters of the Broken World was the one that caught my eye despite the lack of a huge booth and go-go dancers. Of course I have no idea how the game will come together in the end but if Snowbird Games hits its target \u2014 this is going to be something special.\n\nWhen you are developing a game and tossing about words such as Master of Magic, Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic you immediately draw the usual cries of, \u201cOh great another attempt at a MoM sequel\u201d but Eador has the foundation in place and looks like it just might pull it off.\n\nI had a chat with Vladimir Tortsov of Snowbird to talk about the game, its design, and a host of other goodies.\n\nThis one is long. Bring a snack.\n\nFirst off, can you clear something up for us? I read an article recently which describes Eador as a \u201creal- time strategy game\u201d and yet the demo I saw at E3 looked clearly like a turn-based game. Is Eador real-time or turn-based?\n\nYou saw it correctly, of course it\u2019s turn-based. It was some kind of misinterpretation in that other article.\n\nOK, now that we have that out of the way, can you tell us what Eador is all about? What exactly will you be doing in the game \u2013 how do you \u201cwin\u201d?\n\nFrom the very beginning of the game Eador poses a challenge: try to unify the shattered pieces of a planet under your rule, or lose. By invading the other shards (that\u2019s how we call these pieces of firmament floating in the astral void) and conquering them, your alter-ego, the Master, becomes more powerful and better able to shape the world as he wants.\n\nThus, Eador. Masters of the Broken World is all about achieving ultimate power and using it to do good or evil, depending on the player\u2019s choice. In this sense, it\u2019s pretty similar to the idea behind Sid Meier\u2019s Civilization, except that in our game there are concepts of evil and good and you have to make a choice all the time.\n\nTechnically speaking, the gameplay consists of three connected levels: astral, strategic and tactical. Having invaded a shard (the astral level), the players land on its surface (strategic level) and, after a series of battles (tactical level), they conquer the shard and literally attach it to their homeland. Add in diplomacy, army and hero management, internal affairs and moral dilemmas to the mix, and you get the game.\n\nI came away from the E3 demo excited to see more because it looks like Eador is borrowing from so many turn-based strategy staples, but this is such a large game \u2013 how challenging is it to combine so many different gameplay elements into one package? It looks like there are so many moving parts with the design.\n\nYeah, it\u2019s a clockwork with a huge number of details. I have to give the full credit for this amazing work to our lead game designer Alexey Bokulev, who is an extremely creative person and a huge fan of old-school strategy games.\n\nIn fact, Eador was born from Alexey\u2019s wish to play a perfect strategy game combining all the best features from his favorite games such as Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic, and Civilization. Designing that dream game was a very complicated task indeed, but he succeeded. You can check some screenshots from the 2D version of Eador (released in 2010 in CIS countries only) here: http:\/\/www.eador.com\/eador1\/gallery.html. With this 3D remake we\u2019re working on, we\u2019re trying to introduce this extraordinary strategy game to the worldwide audience.\n\nThe combat model based off the E3 demo reminded me a lot of Heroes of Might and Magic and King\u2019s Bounty. What makes Eador\u2019s combat mechanic special? When readers see the screenshots they think, \u201cOh a HoMM clone.\u201d Can you explain some of the differences between the two?\n\nYeah, it\u2019s true \u2013 the tactical screen is the most \u2018classic\u2019 of them all. Well, the difference lies in the details. Our battleground isn\u2019t just a field with a grid \u2013 it represents the real location with different types of terrain and obstacles. It matters a lot, because terrain affects the performance of your troops providing various bonuses and penalties. Unlike HoMM, our units don\u2019t stack, so you couldn\u2019t \u201ccheat\u201d by amassing a huge army of dragons on a single hex and eradicating all resistance. Finally, each unit has dynamically changing attributes like morale and stamina, which makes this combat system closer to the tabletop games with miniatures than to HoMM or King\u2019s Bounty.\n\nCan you talk a little about the various hero types that lead your armies? How do they differ fro one another and can you guide them down various paths by spending experience points?\n\nThere are four basic types of heroes in the game. They serve as generals for your armies and participate in battles alongside other units.\n\nA Warrior is a strong melee fighter, relying on his physical strength and equipment. He is a \u2018one man army\u2019, requiring only limited support from other units.\n\nA Scout is a skilled archer, also possessing a broad variety of non-combat utility skills such as a possibility to sabotage enemy army before the battle.\n\nA Commander is weak in melee, but he can lead a larger army than any other hero of comparable level, granting an assortment of bonuses to his troops as he leads them into battle.\n\nA Mage is, naturally, a very skilled spellcaster who can easily turn the tide of battle with a couple of powerful magic tricks.\n\nEvery unit in the game (including heroes, of course) gains experience points and progresses in levels. When a hero reaches level 10, he ascends to new class, either an advanced version of his initial specialization or a combination with any of the three remaining base classes. For example, our Warrior could keep his initial focus on melee and become a Berserker possessing some exciting new perks, or he can turn into a Dark Knight, able to cast deadly necromantic spells.\n\nWhen you attack a shard, what sort of things will you have to manage? This \u201coverland\u201d portion of the game looked meaty at E3 but I was hoping to get some more information about some of the tasks and gameplay mechanics that are involved with it. What do you have to do to run your economy, for example? Do you obtain gold, wood, etc?\n\nThe strategic level is the most complex one in the game, as there is lot of stuff to take care about \u2013 economics, politics, warfare, etc. First of all, the players should expand their capital, which is their main base of operations on the shard. By choosing which buildings he needs most and constructing them, the player shapes up his strategy. Military buildings allow him to hire stronger troops; financial buildings help to increase his income, while entertainment buildings assist him in keeping the population happy.\n\nConcerning resources, there are two basic ones: gold and magic gems. The gems are required for all our magical needs, while gold is needed for pretty much everything else. There are also nine rare resources in the game such as mithril or redwood lumber. Each rare resource has its specific purpose: for instance, mithril is used to create the most powerful artifacts with magical effects and lumber is required for the construction of some advanced buildings in the city.\n\nWhat are some of the role-playing mechanics at work in Eador? I seem to recall something about hero quests during the E3 demo? Can you give me some examples of how that works?\n\nYeah, as I\u2019ve said before \u2013 not just your heroes, but all units in the game level-up and get some new perks and abilities. For instance, your knights can acquire the passive ability to deal more damage to evil units starting from level 8, while your ogres may learn how to stun the enemy troops on level 3.\n\nSpeaking of quests, each hero can be assigned with an exploration task instead of a military one. It means our hero could spend his time in an allied province, wandering around and looking for places of interest. Each province has a number of dungeons, crypts, caves, magic shops etc., and our hero could visit all these beautiful places in order to gain some experience fighting the guardians and to plunder their treasures. Even if our hero was unable to find anything unusual during his search, exploration is a great way to increase tax income of that province (we can imagine that our hero is actually looking for more taxpayers to rip off, rather than for the monsters to slay?)\n\nYou mentioned unit stamina and morale? How do those affect gameplay?\n\nStamina represents the unit\u2019s ability to carry out our orders \u2013 i.e. move or attack. Each action costs a specific amount of stamina points, and when the unit is attacked by the enemy, his stamina suffers as well. The unit with zero stamina is considered utterly exhausted and becomes completely useless. Therefore, the player should review the state of his troops and give his tired units a break to catch their breath.\n\nMorale works a little bit different, but the effect is quite similar. The unit\u2019s morale depends on many factors, including the general\u2019s stats, magical effects, army composition and current battlefield situation. A demoralized unit cannot fight and will most probably try to flee the battle.\n\nHow does diplomacy work? What can be accomplished by talking to your opponents and not just stabbing them?\n\nThe diplomacy system is working on two levels \u2013 astral and strategic.\n\nOn the astral level, we can learn more about our competitors \u2013 the other Masters \u2013 by speaking to them. There is a strong chance that we\u2019d want to ally ourselves with a fellow Master who shares our views and beliefs. These \u2018astral\u2019 alliances lead to different story paths, eventually providing us with different endings.\n\nThere is also a strategic level diplomacy, which takes place during the war over some particular shard. It is possible that some other Masters also chose this shard as their target during their turn, and in this case, diplomacy becomes a powerful tool of survival. Instead of fighting the war on two or more fronts, we can negotiate with some of our adversaries and convince them to leave this shard for good. We can also sign a trade agreement with other Masters and sell or buy resources.\n\nWhat sort of creatures are you able to recruit in the game? Do you play a specific race such as the \u201cUndead\u201d or can you mix and match your unit types within an army or on various shards?\n\nIn Eador, you play as yourself \u2013 meaning that you don\u2019t represent elves, orcs or humans when you\u2019re hiring them. You\u2019re the Master, a demigod, and these puny mortals are nothing but pawns in your great game. Thus, you can mix & match units from different races as you want, but you have to pay attention to the chemistry. Goblins and elves don\u2019t really get along together, so you can expect a penalty to the troops\u2019 morale on a battlefield.\n\nThe player may ally with any of the races populating a particular shard, thus gaining access to its warriors (but you have to construct a specific building in your capital before that). Alternately, some particular units may join your ranks as a result of a completed quest.\n\nThe game looked enormous at the show \u2013 how \u201cbig\u201d of a game is Eador? Can you customize the options for a shorter game or is that set in stone?\n\nIf we\u2019re talking about hours of gameplay, I\u2019d say the first playthrough of Eador could take you about 60 hours to beat the game. Once you\u2019ve learned the tricks and understood the basics, you can finish the game in half that time. Thus, the duration of the story-driven campaign is more or less set in stone, but in the \u2018skirmish\u2019 mode (strategic + tactical levels) you can adjust all the settings as you wish.\n\nLet\u2019s talk a little about the random events that pop up from time to time. How involved are these events and are there enough in the game that you won\u2019t see the same ones too often?\n\nAccording to our latest inspection, there are 1,264 different \u2018event dialogues\u2019, so there shouldn\u2019t be a problem with their variety. Some of them are simple and last only for one round, while some others are more complex and may lead to unexpected outcomes a few turns later. Some of them are connected to your heroes, while others could happen anytime and anywhere.\n\nLastly, are you still on track for a 2012 release?\n\nSo far \u2013 yes, we\u2019re still aiming for this year. Wish us luck with that!\n\nI\u2019d like to thank Vladimir for talking with us and you can hopefully grab Eador sometime in 2012 on a PC near you."}
{"text":"As feathers settle at the end of yet another Edinburgh Fringe Festival, this year's event\u2014celebrating its 69th birthday\u2014showed that, despite its staunch old age, material at the fest is increasingly relevant to contemporary discourses on social media, research, science, and technology.\n\nThese topics underpinned many of the performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. One such example was The Sick of The Fringe conceived by artist, performer, and Wellcome Trust engagement fellow Brian Lobel.\n\nHe explained the rationale behind the show to Ars: \"As a performer in Edinburgh for the last eight summers, I found myself frustrated by the lack of nuanced conversation, particularly about issues of health, the body, trauma, illness, and disability.\" He added:\n\nI hope that The Sick of the Fringe is a safer platform for artists making work on their body, providing spaces for nuanced conversation, and opportunities for connections among artists making work on subjects which are difficult, and identities that are marginalised by differences in health and presumed capacity. I also hope that The Sick of the Fringe provides space for those working in health, medicine, and research\u2014both here in Edinburgh and abroad\u2014to engage with the ideas put forward by artists at the Fringe, which we hope will inspire new research, new policy, and a renewed sense of purpose.\n\nAs a member of the Sick of the Fringe team of writers in Edinburgh this year, I was asked to become part of the discourse among artists who are making work that deals directly with their own experiences relating to, say, sickness, racism, or discrimination.\n\nWe were asked to diagnose their performances by looking beyond the production quality or entertainment value of the piece, and to instead analyse the ideas presented in the work and its context within scientific and medical inquiry\u2014often pushing writers beyond their comfort zone. While undertaking my diagnosis, I was surprised by the preponderance of performances surrounding social media and sexuality, which suggested an emerging trend in how artists' experiences of new technological platforms are being reflected upon and filtered through to the diverse audiences that attend the Fringe.\n\nPerformers would often do their best to turn audience members into collaborators by asking them to tweet or blog questions or reaction.\n\nOne such performance was Blush\u2014created by Snuff Box theatre in association with Underbelly Untapped\u2014which presents the primal responses to those whose lives have been affected adversely by online porn.\n\nIt included stories that address revenge porn, porn addiction, and looked at how seeking validation and approval through sexual activity online can be harmful. Characters created by Charlotte Josephine were all defined by exposure to sexually explicit online content. A desk bell is used to simulate online notifications of venomously sexist comments. Every so often a blinding camera flash lit the stage to remind the audience that any intimate selfie can instantly become common digital property. And those targeted are left with little in the way of justice as revenge porn laws struggle to be enforced.\n\nBlush certainly brought together familiar narratives and cautionary tales for the technological age.\n\nContinuing that theme, Infinity Pool: A Modern Retelling of Madame Bovary by Bea Roberts explored technology and sexuality by updating Gustave Flaubert\u2019s enduring narrative on adultery for the sexting age. The performance had no actors but\u2014with the use of a TV, a soundboard, several projectors, an animated Powerpoint presentation, and a variety of physical props\u2014it managed to be an immersive performance. Roberts showed staggering flexibility and skill in exploring how tech can lead to loss of sexual intimacy while lubricating virtual betrayal. The evolution of online relationships is detailed here in a flurry of flirtatious e-mails and suggestive sexting.\n\nThe vast programme of the Fringe, ensures that\u2014for every serious reflection on the dark side of humanity and technology\u2014there\u2019s some light relief, often taking place in minuscule, dimly lit catacomb cellars with an alternative context for tackling scientific themes. Stand up performances strangely included reason and critical thinking in The Fringe of Reason\u2014Undiluted Brilliance, while Dan Simpson's Artificial Ineloquence warned audiences of the imminent world domination by deep learning AIs, and Dissecting the Joke saw scientists and sceptics take to the stage.\n\nGareth Morinan\u2019s performance, Graph Giraffe, used Venn diagrams and bell curves to call out \"heightism,\" privilege, and what he believes would be the benefits of living in a \"Dataocracy.\" Using some slightly suspicious statistics to educate the audience about lanky privilege, he suggested height wasn't a simple linear scale because it must be a function of gender, and in fact all privilege factors are also functions of something else. All of which led to some impressive privilege based equations.\n\nA government ruling through evidence based policy instead of being 99 percent ideologically based, he reckoned, would lead to more data that is recorded and openly available. I\u2019m sure Edward Snowden would approve.\n\nThe Wellcome Trust has said that it wants to spend \u00a35 billion on research projects over the next five years\u2014an important shot in the arm for projects such as The Sick of the Fringe, which will be back in Edinburgh in 2017. Meanwhile, a mid-February festival in London is planned.\n\nLobel told Ars that he has separately been working on There is a Light, a theatrical adaptation of the BRIGHTLIGHT study\u2014the largest research ever undertaken with young adults who suffer from cancer.\n\n***\n\nLucy Orr grew up close to CERN and Fermilab, while her father was busy searching for the Higgs boson (which he eventually found). While waiting for her mutant powers to manifest, Lucy kept herself occupied programming BASIC, reading comics, and playing MUDs. With an extensive career in digital art and animation, she still finds time to pet ferrets, listen to pop punk, and drink cider."}
{"text":". --- Georgia juniorhas become the first Bulldog to win the Butkus Award, given to the nation's best collegiate linebacker.Smith, a native of Montezuma, Ga., garnered 60 percent of the first-place votes and 40 percent of the overall weighted vote, which is a greater margin than any linebacker in the past decade. He was chosen from the other finalists of Michigan's Devin Bush, Virginia Tech's Tremaine Edmunds, Wisconsin's T.J. Edwards and Clemson's Dorian O'Daniel, according to an announcement from the Butkus Foundation.Smith is the first Georgia player to win the Butkus Award in its 33-year history since 1985. There have been three other Bulldog finalists four different years in recent history, including Leonard Floyd (2015), Jarvis Jones (2011, 2012) and Justin Houston (2010).proved to be the overwhelming favorite in this year's collegiate linebacking class,\" according to the award selection committee. \"He's always around the ball and is very tough, fast and instinctive, with exceptional football reflexes. He makes his presence felt all over the field and hits with the type of explosion that has come to define the Butkus Award. As terrific of a football player as he is, Roquan is highly regarded by teammates, coaches and support staff for his intelligence, intensity and leadership traits.\"Also a finalist for the Bronko Nagurski Trophy and the Chuck Bednarik Award, Smith has earned midseason All-American honors by leading the team for a second year in a row with 113 tackles (8.7 tackles\/game) during Georgia's 12-1 campaign, highlighted by its 13Southeastern Conference title and first since 2005 this past weekend.Smith has added 10.5 tackles for loss, a team-leading 5.5 sacks, two fumble recoveries and a forced fumble to lead the Bulldogs. With the help from Butkus Award semifinalist, Georgia ranks second nationally in Passing Yards Allowed (158.3 yards\/game), third in Scoring Defense (13.8 points\/game) and fourth in Total Defense (270.9 yards\/game).Georgia has held its last three opponents to a combined seven points in the second half, including the Bulldogs' 28-7 rout of second-ranked Auburn in the SEC Championship Game. In addition, Georgia blanked Tennessee 41-0 during the regular season, snapping the nation's fourth-longest active scoring streak and the sixth-longest streak in college football history.The third-ranked Bulldogs (12-1) travel to Pasadena, Calif., to face second-ranked Oklahoma (12-1) in the College Football Playoff's semifinal round in the Rose Bowl on Monday, January 1. Kickoff is at 5:10 p.m. ET.The Butkus Award selection committee is comprised of 51 football coaches, recruiters, talent scouts and journalists who study football talent yearlong. Selectors are asked to recognize qualities that defined Butkus' career; toughness, on-field leadership, competitiveness, football character, and linebacking skills. Selectors follow a 3-2-1 voting procedure for five named finalists or any linebacker they choose to write in.The 2017 high school winner is Solomon Tuliaupupu of Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, Calif. The 2017 pro winner will be announced after the NFL season, succeeding 2016 winner Khalil Mack of the Oakland Raiders.The Butkus Award is presented by the Butkus Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit organization which advances health and wellness through special initiatives including the I Play Clean\u00ae program. The Butkus Award is part of the National College Football Awards Association (NFCAA), which includes 23 awards honoring 800 individuals since 1935."}
{"text":"A new video shows lots of cops restraining a suspect. Is it police misconduct or necessary force? One thing is clear: You'll only see the video here.\n\nThis is something we don't normally get to see -- what happens when a drunk driving suspect refuses to give his blood to police.\n\nBut there's a video inside the Pasadena jail, last July. Nine cops will get in the action.\n\n\"It almost looks like each officer that runs through the door is wanting to get a piece of the action, more so than stopping to look and see if their assistance is even needed,\" defense attorney Jim Medley said.\n\n\"They were beating on this guy excessively, stomping his broke leg,\" Defense Attorney Sam Cammack said. \"He was basically begging for mercy.\"\n\nIt's video that's creating more tension.\n\n\"It looks like police held a whoop-a-black-man party that was held and sponsored by law enforcement officers,\" Community Activist Quanell X said.\n\nCurtis Nelson was questioned by Houston police after a traffic wreck that wasn't his fault. The Houston police officer doesn't do a full sobriety test. Instead, Nelson is taken to the Pasadena jail. With a search warrant, his blood will be drawn there whether he likes it or not.\n\nYou hear Nelson begging for another way.\n\n\"Can I do a sobriety test?\" he says in the video.\n\n''He's been afraid of needles since he was old enough to talk,\" said Nelson's attorney.\n\nBut the cops will try to put him in the restraint chair, and Curtis Nelson doesn't want to go.\n\n\"This is what happens to citizens, that people don't get to see all the time, if you say, 'I don't want you to draw blood,'\" Cammack said.\n\n\"We got a fighter,\" you hear an officer saying in the video.\n\nOne officer will grab him around the neck, and he'll be taken to the floor. Then a total of nine officers join in.\n\n\"You got nine officers on one man who's got a broke leg, who's already on the ground,\" Quanell X said. \"You can see one officer clearly kneeing the young man as he was lying down on the ground, kneeing him on his side; then you saw him punching him at the same time.\"\n\nOne officer appears to step on Nelson's broken leg. You hear at least one officer using profanity.\n\nThe officers tell him to stop resisting.\n\n\"'Stop resisting' was nothing more than stage rhetoric to justify what they were doing to him,\" Quanell X said.\n\nThe male nurse positions himself right between two chairs in the middle of the room, maybe just a coincidence that it blocked a full camera view of the incident; maybe not.\n\n\"I don't care if he was black, green, red, but it makes you pause to think that this would have happened to a 16-year-old white female,\" Cammack said.\n\nAfter he's restrained, Nelson is not put back in the chair to get the needle. The nurse sticks him right there on the ground.\n\n\"Why would you just take a needle and ram it in somebody's arm on a dirty, dusty floor inside of a jail, which is not one of the cleanest places anybody could be in,\" Quanell X said.\n\nA judge threw out the needle results this week after lawyers argued it was done with excessive force and in unsanitary conditions.\n\nBut they now want you to see what happened to Curtis Nelson.\n\nComing after the Tolan verdict and the suspension of eight Houston cops for an alleged beating, this video won't help calm tensions.\n\n\"This city is on the verge of erupting in a full scale riot against police officers,\" Quanell X said.\n\nWe reached out to Pasadena police tonight, and they couldn't comment until Friday.\n\nBut you can see the entire incident caught on camera -- from theto the\n\nThe DA's office tells us Nelson was intoxicated because blood alcohol content was 1.9."}
{"text":"Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Dragan Vasiljkov, centre, has been convicted of war crimes\n\nA former Serbian paramilitary commander with Australian dual citizenship has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for war crimes.\n\nDragan Vasiljkovic, also known as \"Captain Dragan\", was convicted of torturing prisoners and a deadly attack on a village during the Croatian war of independence in the early 1990s.\n\nHe had been living in Australia prior to his extradition to Croatia in 2015.\n\nVasiljkovic, 62, was convicted by a court in the town of Split on Tuesday.\n\nThe court heard that Vasiljkovic had directed his subordinates to torture captured Croat soldiers in a makeshift prison he had set up in the rebel Serb stronghold of Knin.\n\nHe was also found guilty of orchestrating an attack on the town of Glina which killed two civilians and forced others to flee their homes.\n\nVasiljkovic was acquitted of the 1993 torture and murder of two Croat soldiers in another village.\n\nLong process\n\nDuring the year-long trial, witnesses told the court of the abuse they had suffered at the hands of Vasiljkovic and his unit.\n\nThe former commander has maintained his innocence, calling the trial an \"oppressive fascist process\".\n\nVasiljkovic moved to Australia in 1969 and later spent four years in the nation's army reserves before being courted by Serbian intelligence chiefs, The Australian reported.\n\nHe was arrested in Australia in 2006, where he had been working as a golf instructor under the name Daniel Snedden.\n\nVasiljkovic fought for almost a decade to prevent his extradition from Australia, arguing he would not receive a fair trial in Croatia.\n\nHis lawyers have said they will appeal the sentence."}
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{"text":"Yumeroh Administrator\n\nJoin Date: Feb 2007 Posts: 317\n\nRyzom Blog, Facebook, Twitter, and at the Paris Game Festival and the German IRL\n\nIn this last year, we have rolled out four patches. Now we are in September and it's time to get things rolling on the Ryzom front again. One of the areas that we will be working on is something you've all been asking for: Communication!\n\nYes, that's right. We still think actions speak louder than words, but now we're going to give you more words as well. We're going to keep you better informed of our thoughts, plans and actions and to make this possible and as dynamic as possible we have set up accounts on some social networking sites:\n\nFacebook : Come join the Official Ryzom Group on Facebook.\n\n: Come join the Official Ryzom Group on Facebook. Blog : You can now read the Official Ryzom Blog. We will communicate there exclusively in English for reasons of simplicity and speed, but please feel free to translate what we say there and post it on Facebook.\n\n: You can now read the Official Ryzom Blog. We will communicate there exclusively in English for reasons of simplicity and speed, but please feel free to translate what we say there and post it on Facebook. Twitter: Join us on Twitter. We will \"tweet\" in English, usually, but you are free to re-tweet in your language if you want.\n\nIt's also possible to come meet and talk to members of the Ryzom Team:\n\nIn Paris, France, we will be attending the Paris Game Festival on September 19th and 20th. We won't have an exhibit there but Ryzom CTO Vianney Lecroart (vl), as well as other members of the dev and CSR teams will be roaming around the festival laden with goodies. You can find more information about this event on\n\nIn Bochum, Germany, on November 14th, one of Ryzom's biggest fans, Acridiel, will be organising an IRL. Leanon's Senior Game Master Boar will attend and bring some goodies with him. You can find more information about this IRL on\n\nWednesday, 16 September is the 5th anniversary of Ryzom. So that we can spend pleasant time together in celebration, we will be running small fun events during the (European) evening. Dear Players,In this last year, we have rolled out four patches. Now we are in September and it's time to get things rolling on the Ryzom front again. One of the areas that we will be working on is something you've all been asking for: Communication!Yes, that's right. We still think actions speak louder than words, but now we're going to give you more words as well. We're going to keep you better informed of our thoughts, plans and actions and to make this possible and as dynamic as possible we have set up accounts on some social networking sites:It's also possible to come meet and talk to members of the Ryzom Team:In, France, we will be attending the. We won't have an exhibit there but Ryzom CTO Vianney Lecroart (vl), as well as other members of the dev and CSR teams will be roaming around the festival laden with goodies. You can find more information about this event on the French forums In, Germany, on, one of Ryzom's biggest fans, Acridiel, will be organising an IRL. Leanon's Senior Game Master Boar will attend and bring some goodies with him. You can find more information about this IRL on the German forums Wednesday, 16 September is the 5th anniversary of Ryzom. So that we can spend pleasant time together in celebration, we will be running small fun events during the (European) evening."}
{"text":"A silly copyright notice is sweeping Facebook today, with users attaching pseudo-legalese to their status updates in a misguided effort to prevent Facebook from owning or commercially exploiting their content. Facebook has issued a formal \u201cfact check\u201d statement refuting the legalese.\n\nThe viral copyright notice last spread on Facebook in May and June. Now it\u2019s back and garnering lots of attention.\n\nThe notice incorrectly implies that Facebook has recently changed the copyright provisions of its user agreement. It then unnecessarily asserts a user\u2019s copyright over his Facebook posts (you retain such copyright without posting a notice) and cites the \u201cBerner Convention,\u201d an irrelevant international treaty properly spelled \u201cBerne Convention.\u201d The notice then instructs Facebook to get written permission to make commercial use of the user\u2019s content, which is pointless as Facebook users agree to let the social network make money off their posts when they sign up for the service. (The full text of the bogus copyright notice is below.)\n\nPopular hoax-debunking site Snopes addressed this copyright notice in the spring and updated their refutation today. Also, Facebook has taken the further step of putting out a statement of its own:\n\nThere is a rumor circulating that Facebook is making a change related to ownership of users' information or the content they post to the site. This is false. Anyone who uses Facebook owns and controls the content and information they post, as stated in our terms. They control how that content and information is shared. That is our policy, and it always has been.\n\nA blunter way of summarizing the situation is to explain that if you want to use Facebook, you must play by Facebook\u2019s rules, even when they change. If you don\u2019t want to play by Facebook's rules anymore, you must quit Facebook. The idea of remaining on Facebook but playing by your own rules via magic spells is a fantasy. Stay on Facebook or leave Facebook. There is no third option \ufffd not even during the holidays.\n\nFull hoax copyright notice:"}
{"text":"A coalition of lawmakers in the Senate have penned a letter to the Chairman of the Federal Communication Commission and the Attorney General, urging the Obama administration to scuttle a deal that would lead to high market concentration in the telecoms industry.\n\nAs representatives of Comcast and Time Warner Cable prepared to meet with the Department of Justice on Wednesday to discuss concerns related to the proposed merger between the two companies, liberal senators urged federal regulators to block the deal.\n\n\u201cWe believe that Comcast-TWC\u2019s unmatched power in the telecommunications industry would lead to higher prices, fewer choices, and poorer quality services for Americans,\u201d they wrote.\n\n\u201cWe urge you to defend American competition and innovation and\u2026take a stand for US consumers and businesses and reject Comcast\u2019s proposed acquisition of TWC,\u201d the lawmakers added.\n\nThe letter was signed by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).\n\nIt\u2019s ultimately up to the FCC and the DOJ to sign off on the $45 billion merger. If successful, it would result in a single company controlling 57% of the broadband market and 30% of the cable market.\n\nThe senators warned that the deal could have an adverse impact on upstart video streaming services, which are increasingly replacing pre-packaged cable offerings\u2014a transition known as \u201ccord cutting.\u201d\n\n\u201cWith Comcast\u2019s ownership of NBCUniversal and the numerous popular TV networks it controls, the combined company would have incentives and means by which to extract higher prices from other multichannel video programming distributors,\u201d they wrote.\n\nSome of their concerns related to paid prioritization were alleviated earlier this year by the FCC, when it approved of stronger \u201cNet Neutrality\u201d rules. However, the senators warned that the merger could lead Comcast to \u201cprioritize its own programming over that of competitors.\u201d\n\nBloomberg reported last week that staff attorneys with the Department of Justice\u2019s Antitrust Division are likely to recommend blocking the merger. Meanwhile, the FCC, according to the Wall Street Journal, could be planning on referring approval of the deal to an administrative judge\u2014a move that, people familiar with the process say, would amount to killing the acquisition.\n\nThe FCC\u2019s own market data proves right many of the concerns already issued by opponents of the merger. Last December, the commission released a report showing that consumers in competitive media markets paid less, had a smaller rate of increase in their bills, and received more channels in their cable TV packages versus consumers who lived in markets with only one provider."}
{"text":"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. 2017 July 25\n\nInt-Ball Drone Activated on the Space Station\n\nImage Credit: JAXA, ISS, NASA\n\nExplanation: What if you were followed around by a cute floating ball that kept taking your picture? Then you might be an astronaut on today's International Space Station (ISS). Designed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the JEM Internal Ball Camera -- informally \"Int-Ball\" -- is a bit larger than a softball, can float and maneuver by itself but also be controlled remotely, can take high resolution images and videos, and is not related to Hello Kitty. Int-Ball was delivered to the ISS in early June and is designed to allow ground-control to increase the monitoring of ISS equipment and activities while decreasing time demands on human astronauts. Int-Ball moves by turning on small internal fans and sees with a camera located between its two dark eyes."}
{"text":"A COLLEGE ESSAY ON POK\u00c9MON (649 words, complerted September quitetheoresama Nov 5th, 2014 792 Never 792Never\n\nNot a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up , it unlocks many cool features!\n\nrawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 3.92 KB Every time I look back on what makes me who I am, the roots of my personality always traced themselves to one video game franchise\u2014Pok\u00e9mon. The Pok\u00e9mon franchise, developed by Game Freak, is a series of role-playing games for portable Nintendo consoles, such as the Game Boy and Nintendo DS. Now, my love for this franchise contributed to my desire to major in game design in college. The portable nature of the games in the Pok\u00e9mon franchise encourages players to communicate with each other in real-life. Pok\u00e9mon fans learn how Pok\u00e9mon creatures develop from other like-minded Pok\u00e9mon trainers by trading and battling with each othe. As a result, players didn\u2019t just catch \u2018em all, but learned how to exchange their ideas through their Pok\u00e9mon creatures! In short, Pok\u00e9mon games encouraged people to communicate and express their ideas with each other. I fell in love with the aspect of expressing oneself through play. I was just two years old when that game made me who I am. At that age, I owned a Game Boy Color which I brought wherever I went while playing Pok\u00e9mon. I was using my Game Boy Color all the time, to the point where it would sometimes be confiscated by teachers or parents. If ever I wasn\u2019t eating my food or paying attention to what my parents were saying\u2014swipe!\u2014it would be taken away. But the Pok\u00e9mon games themselves captured my attention only because I was captivated by how Pok\u00e9mon worked. More importantly, it made me fall in love with video games, and I wanted to know how I could use that technology to express my ideas. I ended up taking Japanese language classes when I was six just so I could communicate with game developers and learn from them, especially those of Nintendo, whose headquarters were based in Kyoto. Nintendo was responsible for publishing Pok\u00e9mon, The Pok\u00e9mon Company making it known the world over. I couldn\u2019t help but feel the need but bring my ideas to their table! As a bonus, I learned how to read, write and converse fluently in Japanese. As I learned about how Pok\u00e9mon\u2019s art was inspired by Japanese manga comics, I ended up studying manga drawing techniques and how artists crafted their characters. I worked hard to analyze the styles of various artists so I could incorporate them into my own. Lo and behold, did my drawings improve! I then became the budding manga artist in my circle of friends, presenting my drawings to others and expressing my creativity and desire to improve. Manga in itself along with Japanese language classes gave me a high degree of exposure to Japanese culture. I learned about the subtle nuances in their crafts, their attention to detail and how orderly their societies worked. And even then, it gave me a thirst to learn about other cultures, and it encouraged me to understand how people express themselves. That thirst for learning made me absorb ideas like a sponge, making school much more enjoyable as I loved seeing what ideas people had to offer. Be it a discussion, presentation or even as simple as a conversation during lunch, I made sure to let others express themselves. That exchange and expression of ideas seemed like battles between Pok\u00e9mon trainers, and it only made communicating with each other all the more fun. However, you can\u2019t communicate if you can\u2019t express yourself! What ideas would there be to learn from? Being able to exchange and express your ideas like Pok\u00e9mon battles makes quite an impact on the world around us. After all, self-expression is what solves problems, what bridges faraway societies together and what enables human beings to break ground and evolve, much like Pok\u00e9mon. It\u2019s no wonder I\u2019m known for being so talkative\u2014I value self-expression. Pok\u00e9mon, art, video games, language and communication all share one underlying thread, and that common thread is\u2026 \u2026self-expression! By Ryen Raftery, for submission to NYU (this portion not included in the word count of 649)\n\nRAW Paste Data\n\nEvery time I look back on what makes me who I am, the roots of my personality always traced themselves to one video game franchise\u2014Pok\u00e9mon. The Pok\u00e9mon franchise, developed by Game Freak, is a series of role-playing games for portable Nintendo consoles, such as the Game Boy and Nintendo DS. Now, my love for this franchise contributed to my desire to major in game design in college. The portable nature of the games in the Pok\u00e9mon franchise encourages players to communicate with each other in real-life. Pok\u00e9mon fans learn how Pok\u00e9mon creatures develop from other like-minded Pok\u00e9mon trainers by trading and battling with each othe. As a result, players didn\u2019t just catch \u2018em all, but learned how to exchange their ideas through their Pok\u00e9mon creatures! In short, Pok\u00e9mon games encouraged people to communicate and express their ideas with each other. I fell in love with the aspect of expressing oneself through play. I was just two years old when that game made me who I am. At that age, I owned a Game Boy Color which I brought wherever I went while playing Pok\u00e9mon. I was using my Game Boy Color all the time, to the point where it would sometimes be confiscated by teachers or parents. If ever I wasn\u2019t eating my food or paying attention to what my parents were saying\u2014swipe!\u2014it would be taken away. But the Pok\u00e9mon games themselves captured my attention only because I was captivated by how Pok\u00e9mon worked. More importantly, it made me fall in love with video games, and I wanted to know how I could use that technology to express my ideas. I ended up taking Japanese language classes when I was six just so I could communicate with game developers and learn from them, especially those of Nintendo, whose headquarters were based in Kyoto. Nintendo was responsible for publishing Pok\u00e9mon, The Pok\u00e9mon Company making it known the world over. I couldn\u2019t help but feel the need but bring my ideas to their table! As a bonus, I learned how to read, write and converse fluently in Japanese. As I learned about how Pok\u00e9mon\u2019s art was inspired by Japanese manga comics, I ended up studying manga drawing techniques and how artists crafted their characters. I worked hard to analyze the styles of various artists so I could incorporate them into my own. Lo and behold, did my drawings improve! I then became the budding manga artist in my circle of friends, presenting my drawings to others and expressing my creativity and desire to improve. Manga in itself along with Japanese language classes gave me a high degree of exposure to Japanese culture. I learned about the subtle nuances in their crafts, their attention to detail and how orderly their societies worked. And even then, it gave me a thirst to learn about other cultures, and it encouraged me to understand how people express themselves. That thirst for learning made me absorb ideas like a sponge, making school much more enjoyable as I loved seeing what ideas people had to offer. Be it a discussion, presentation or even as simple as a conversation during lunch, I made sure to let others express themselves. That exchange and expression of ideas seemed like battles between Pok\u00e9mon trainers, and it only made communicating with each other all the more fun. However, you can\u2019t communicate if you can\u2019t express yourself! What ideas would there be to learn from? Being able to exchange and express your ideas like Pok\u00e9mon battles makes quite an impact on the world around us. After all, self-expression is what solves problems, what bridges faraway societies together and what enables human beings to break ground and evolve, much like Pok\u00e9mon. It\u2019s no wonder I\u2019m known for being so talkative\u2014I value self-expression. Pok\u00e9mon, art, video games, language and communication all share one underlying thread, and that common thread is\u2026 \u2026self-expression! By Ryen Raftery, for submission to NYU (this portion not included in the word count of 649)"}
{"text":"We don\u2019t see it in our Gmail settings (yet), but Webmonkey reports that Gmail Labs has added a very useful opt-in feature for sending text \/ SMS messages to mobile phones using the built-in Chat functionality.\n\nUpdate: the Labs team found a glitch and is pushing the release back a bit (\u2018probably within two weeks\u2019).\n\nUpdate 2: make sure you read the open letter the Webmail team at AOL writes to Google. It\u2019s supposed to be funny, I guess, but it\u2019s really not and quite unprofessional to boot.\n\nTurning the option on in your Gmail account settings apparently enables you to send an SMS as soon as you start typing a phone number into Chat\u2019s search box. When you enter new phone numbers, it will save the digits in your contact entries as well. This means that when contacts go offline, the chat window will give you the option to switch to SMS.\n\nOur invitation for a live demo was lost in the mail, but Webmonkey has been given a demonstration of the experimental feature by Gmail product manager Keith Coleman and adds:\n\nThe first time you send a text message, it will appear on the person\u2019s phone as coming from a number in the 406 area code. Google has made several thousands of these numbers available for Gmail users, and once a number is associated with your account, all of the text messages you send through Gmail will come from that number. The 406 number works both ways, so your friend can reply to you via text message. Also, your friend can save that number in their phone as belonging to you, and they can even use it to initiate new chats with you.\n\nWe haven\u2019t been able to try this out ourselves yet, but Google does list the text messaging feature on its \u2018What\u2019s new in Gmail Labs\u2018 page (only for US phones, for now).\n\nThis is probably one of the first results we\u2019re seeing from Google\u2019s acquisition of GrandCentral (dating back to June 2007 already).\n\nNo official word yet on the Gmail blog (the GrandCentral blog has been silent since last April), but we suspect an announcement and general roll-out to follow soon.\n\n(Image credit: monkey_bites)"}
{"text":"It is the most humble of vessels for New York City foodstuffs, ubiquitous at Chinese takeout joints and halal street carts. In pre-Starbucks days, coffee came packaged in its puffy embrace.\n\nBut the plastic-foam container may soon be going the way of trans fats, 32-ounce Pepsis, and cigarettes in Central Park.\n\nMayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose regulatory lance has slain fatty foods, supersize sodas, and smoking in parks, is now targeting plastic foam, the much-derided polymer that environmentalists have long tried to restrict.\n\nOn Thursday, Mr. Bloomberg, in his 12th and final State of the City address, will propose a citywide ban on plastic-foam food packaging, including takeout boxes, cups and trays. Public schools would be instructed to remove plastic-foam trays from their cafeterias. Many restaurants and bodegas would be forced to restock."}
{"text":"Early interviews mentioning The Blue Album and Pinkerton. Check. A lead single that promised we\u2019d be rocking out like it was '94. Check. It was clear what Weezer were trying to tell us: Honestly, we mean it, for real this time, this one\u2019s going to be the one you\u2019re waiting for. But put aside all of that and Everything Will Be Alright In the End is pretty much what you expect it to be: a record which, while sharing similarities with records from their earlier periods, is another predictably uneven entry in the Weezer discography.\n\nIt\u2019s not actually anywhere near as much of a return to the sound of the Nineties that they\u2019ve made it out to be. Within bars of the opener \u2018Ain\u2019t Got Nobody\u2019, it\u2019s clear that there\u2019s just as much overlap with the crunch and flex of Maladroit as with the chugging fuzz of Blue. It\u2019s a dense sound with glamorous guitar runs and, by blending the strengths of their career high points, they hit on some of the greatest moments of their recent output. The hooks of the opening track are genuinely reminiscent of Rivers\u2019 golden age of song writing: \u2018The British Are Coming\u2019 sees a lilting turn of Rivers Cuomo\u2019s falsetto morph into a solo which wanders from the main melody in the soulful, colourful way of Blue\u2019s instrumental breaks. But sadly these moments of inspiration are fleeting.\n\nOne of the oddest problems with Weezer\u2019s recent output is how blindly contradictory Cuomo can be on record nowadays in comparison to the robust character portraits he painted on his earliest records. Everything\u2026 is no different, and finds him sounding as oddly insincere as he has since on every record since 2005. After coming back on hands and knees to the audiences of the mid-nineties, he spends \u2018I\u2019ve Had It Up To Here\u2019 rallying against those who want him to compromise some odd notion of integrity (\u201cI\u2019M NOT A HAPPY MEAL\u201d, he proudly announces us in the album\u2019s best wincer of a Cuomoism). How he squares this circle is unclear, but it totally undermines the seriousness of something like \u2018Foolish Father\u2019. Does he even mean this? Is he talking about himself? Is it all made up?\n\nBut beyond the continuation of Cuomo\u2019s increasing incoherence, what\u2019s perhaps most damaging is the general sense of low ambition across the record, despite gimmickry like the album\u2019s title recurring through the lyrics, and suites of songs in trilogies. The chorus of \u2018Eulogy For A Rock Band\u2019 is lifted \u2013 almost completely intact \u2013 from Hurley\u2019s lead single \u2018Memories\u2019. The 2D hooks of \u2018Lonely Girl\u2019 and \u2018Go Away\u2019 circle for a while, wandering out of your head immediately. Sure, it escapes outright disgrace. But that\u2019s a pretty low benchmark for the band that wrote \u2018Say It Ain\u2019t So\u2019, on an album based on a publicity cycle promising a return to that era to boot. In spite of its moments of charm, it\u2019s a far cry from being either a fun retreat into 20 years ago, nor is it any indication that Weezer's reputation will be in better health 20 years from now.\n\n![97956](http:\/\/dis.resized.images.s3.amazonaws.com\/540x310\/97956.jpeg)"}
{"text":"August 10, 2000\n\nFor the New College B.M.O.C., 'M' Is for 'Machine'\n\nBy LISA GUERNSEY\n\nLeft, Jim West\/Impact Visuals for The New York Times; above, Barbara Martin for The New York Times WIRED - College students like, left, James L. Carey, and Shaun Encinias use computers for things like music, e-mail and homework.\n\nHow 20th century, college students today might say.\n\nThe computer, they declare, is the only item that could deserve to be first on any list of dorm necessities. In fact, the computer not only displaces other technology in importance but also replaces the need for some other appliances.\n\nIt serves as the stereo for students who listen to MP3 files and radio Webcasts. It makes answering machines less necessary because so much communication occurs via e-mail and instant messages. It can even substitute for televisions and alarm clocks.\n\nThe computer has also become the portal through which students do everything they need to do on campus. Using the Internet, they register for classes, turn in assignments, order books, browse the library catalog, listen to music, talk to friends, read the news, write papers, play games, pay bills, watch movies and carry on heated political discussions. Alumni returning to their alma maters will find that the quads and classrooms still exist, but the computer has become almost more central than the physical campus.\n\n\"It is an invisible change,\" said Matthew Pittinsky, co-chairman and founder of Blackboard, a software company that serves more than 3,300 colleges. \"But it is probably the most profound change that colleges have seen since the G.I. Bill.\"\n\nThe computer's immense impact on the social and academic lives of college students is just beginning to become apparent. Some students say they are carrying on fewer conversations with their dorm mates and more conversations with friends across the country. Many students say that while they still hit the bars and coffee shops, they rarely go to the library. One study shows that students spend less free time watching television, now that they can be entertained online.\n\nAs students pivot toward online information, \"something clearly has to give,\" said Eric Weil, managing partner in Student Monitor, a market research company that polls college students. In the latest Student Monitor survey, conducted in the spring, 56 percent of the 1,200 respondents at colleges across the country said that they had spent less time watching television in the previous six months.\n\nWhat were they doing instead? About 42 percent said they were spending more time surfing the Web and 49 percent said they were spending more time sending and receiving e-mail. Academics played a role too: 57 percent said they were spending more time doing homework. In many cases, Mr. Weil said, that homework was probably being done on a computer, often online.\n\nBut some students say that it is not television that they neglect. Instead, they are spending less time on the telephone or talking face-to-face with their peers on campus. It is not that they are being antisocial, the students say. They are simply communicating with people in a different way, using e-mail, online chats and streams of instant messages.\n\nEric Kelson, a junior at Syracuse University, said he frequently chatted online with his parents, his sister, his grandmother in Florida and his friends at other colleges. \"It helps because calling is expensive,\" Mr. Kelson said. \"And e-mail is good but it is not as personal.\"\n\nHe and his friends often watch television while they chat, he said. And more often than not, he said, he is chatting with people in his dormitory, even though they may be only a few paces away. Instead of picking up the telephone or knocking on his neighbors' doors to see what they are up to, he will send them instant messages.\n\nStudents who once said, `See you on the quad,' now say, `Meet you online.'\n\nMr. Kelson's case is not unusual, said Bennett Fisher, vice president for community at CollegeClub.com, a social site for students that has attracted nearly three million users. \"We used to sit in the hallway and talk to students in the dorm,\" Mr. Fisher said. \"Now they do that on the Web.\"\n\nEven conversations with professors, those moments of stimulating intellectual discussion that some baby boomers may recall with nostalgia, are often supplanted by online communication.\n\n\"Office hours are being replaced with e-mail discussions,\" said Gary Gigliotti, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rutgers University. Some regret the loss, but instead of waiting for those few hours a week when professors open their doors, students would rather talk online, Mr. Gigliotti said. \"It is more convenient for them,\" he said.\n\nThe seeds of this shift were planted in the early 1980's, when technologically adept students started taking computers to campus. But back then, the machines were by no means essential. They were primarily used for typing papers, and most students relied on the word-processing programs in computer laboratories instead of buying their own machines. Computer science and statistics students were often the only ones to use computers for more than writing papers.\n\nIn the mid-1990's, when the Internet caught on beyond the halls of engineering and computer science departments, that started to change. Large universities began to invest tens of millions of dollars in wiring dormitory rooms in the hope of providing high-speed Internet access to every student. It was the beginning of the race to provide what administrators call \"one port per pillow.\" On average, campuses have wired about 63 percent of their dormitories, according to the Campus Computing Project, an annual survey of more than 500 institutions across the country. Private research universities have gone the furthest: Of those surveyed, all said they offered high-speed access in every dorm.\n\nThe availability of Internet access has become a deciding factor for students who are trying to decide where to apply to college. Yahoo Internet Life magazineproduces an annual ranking, \"The 100 Most Wired Colleges.\" EduCause, a nonprofit organization that promotes technology in higher education, has created an online guide to help applicants determine which universities measure up to their needs ( www.educause.edu\/consumerguide).\n\nIn a sign of how important Internet access has become, students at Michigan State University, where most dormitories are wired, lined up seven hours in advance last spring to make sure that they were assigned to wired housing. To help those who missed out, the college installed voice mail. Everyone in those dorms uses the telephone lines for dial-up access, said James L. Carey, a sophomore, \"and students would be online so much they would never get phone calls.\"\n\nOne of the latest challenges facing administrators is whether to require all entering students to bring a computer to college, and if so, whether the computer should be a laptop or desktop. Reports on the Educause Web site show that about 100 universities have such a requirement, which in some cases is imposed only on students in certain programs.\n\nNext fall, the number will probably increase; about 11 percent of the institutions surveyed by the Campus Computing Project last fall said they would have a laptop computer requirement in place by 2001.\n\nOhio University is one of the universities that have decided to tackle the issue another way. Every Ohio University undergraduate dorm room is equipped with at least one new $1,000 Gateway computer and printer. The cost of the equipment is covered in an annual student fee.\n\nExactly how much time do students spend on these machines? An increasing amount, according to surveys. In the fall of 1998, according to Student Monitor, students spent an average of 5.6 hours a week online. That rose to 7.2 hours in the fall of 1999 and 8.1 hours this spring.\n\nBut many students say those numbers are even higher among students with computers in dorms that have high-speed access to the Internet. Shaun Encinias, a student at San Diego State University, said he spent hours online each day, checking e-mail before leaving his room in the morning, between classes, after classes and after dinner.\n\nE-mail, though, is not necessarily the most important reason for going online, according to the students polled by Student Monitor. More than 44 percent said that \"schoolwork-related research\" was their No. 1 priority.\n\nMost courses now have an Internet component, professors say, whether it is a Web-based syllabus, an e-mail-based discussion board, an online repository of required reading or an interactive quiz. Some instructors set up online chats with experts and colleagues at other universities across the country. And many students use the Internet and online library resources to do most, if not all, of their research for papers and projects. When they are done, many send their papers via e-mail or click through Web pages during presentations in class.\n\nThe presence of the computer can sway some students away from academics, however. Mr. Carey, the sophomore at Michigan State, said he had failed all his classes his first semester. \"I was shellshocked,\" he said. \"I stayed in my room all the time.\" He would log on to the Internet as soon as he woke up and hung out with friends he had made online instead of doing homework or talking with friends on campus. This year, he said, he is doing much better and uses his computer mainly for homework.\n\nhe warned, it can also lead to more isolation. If students choose to interact online with people who are just down the hall, for example, they are missing the chance to see other people's facial expressions, how they look when they are joking and what their body language says about their personalities.\n\nKaycee Swenson, a high school senior in Wichita, Kan., who took several courses at her local college last year, said she talked to people online every day, most of whom were not at her campus. But she said she also hung out with friends in the physical world, listening to music and playing basketball. \"You have to balance it,\" she said.\n\nThis fall, she will enroll full time at the University of California at San Diego, and she plans to take a new computer with her, even though she already has one equipped with a Pentium II processor. \"It's fast,\" she said, \"but not fast enough.\"\n\nIn fact, she said, when she talks to her mother about what she took to college decades ago, she cannot believe what students had to put up with. \"She thought it was great,\" Ms. Swenson said, \"that she was able to take a calculator to college or a cassette player to tape lectures.\" And when her mother said she had to stand in line to register for classes and to wait for professors to open their offices, she said she could hardly imagine it. \"I laugh at those things,\" Ms. Swenson said, \"but I'm sure it wasn't fun, you know?\"\n\nThese sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability."}
{"text":"Route of the M11 link road overlaid over an older map of the area, with key protest sites marked\n\nThe M11 link road protest was a major anti-road protest in Leytonstone, London, United Kingdom, in the early to mid-1990s opposing the construction of the \"A12 Hackney to M11 link road\", also known as the M11 Link Road, which was part of a significant local road scheme to connect traffic from the East Cross Route to the M11, avoiding urban streets.\n\nThe road had been proposed since the 1960s, as part of the London Ringways, and was an important link between central London and the Docklands to East Anglia. However, road protests elsewhere had become increasingly visible, and urban road building had fallen out of favour with the public. A local Member of Parliament Harry Cohen, representing Leyton, had been a vocal opponent of this scheme.\n\nThe protests reached a new level of visibility during 1993 as part of a grassroots campaign where protesters came from outside the area to support local opposition to the road. The initial focus was on the removal of a tree on George Green, east of Wanstead, that attracted the attention of local, then national media. The activity peaked in 1994 with several high-profile protesters setting up micronations on property scheduled for demolition, most notably on Claremont Road in Leyton. The final stage of the protest was a single building on Fillebrook Road in Leytonstone, which, due to a security blunder, became occupied by squatters.\n\nThe road was eventually built as planned, and opened to traffic in 1999, but the increased costs involved in management and policing of protesters raised the profile of such campaigns in the United Kingdom, and contributed to several road schemes being cancelled or reviewed later on in the decade. Those involved in the protest moved on to oppose other schemes in the country, while opinions of the road as built have since been mixed. By 2014, the road had become the ninth most congested in the entire country.\n\nBackground [ edit ]\n\nThe origin of the link road stems from what were two major arterial roads out of London (the A11 to Newmarket and Norwich, and the A12 to Colchester, Ipswich and Great Yarmouth) and subsequent improvements. The first of these was the Eastern Avenue improvement, that opened on 9 June 1924, which provided a bypass of the old road through Ilford and Romford.\n\nProposals for the route first arose in the 1960s as part of the London Ringways plan, which would have seen four concentric circular motorways built in the city, together with radial routes, with the M11 motorway ending on Ringway 1, the innermost Ringway, at Hackney Marsh.\n\nThe planned London Ringways.\n\nA section of Ringway 1 known as the East Cross Route was built to motorway standards in the late 1960s and early 1970s and designated as the A102(M). A section of the M11 connecting Ringway 2 (now part of the North Circular Road) and Eastern Avenue to Harlow was completed in the late 1970s,[4] opening to traffic in 1977.\n\nThe Ringways scheme met considerable opposition; there were protests when the Westway, an urban motorway elevated over the streets of Paddington, was opened in 1970, with local MP John Wheeler later describing the road's presence within 15 metres of properties as \"completely unacceptable environmentally,\" and the Archway Road public inquiry was repeatedly abandoned during the 1970s as a result of protests. By 1974, the Greater London Council announced it would not be completing Ringway 1. The first Link Road Action Group to resist the M11 link road was formed in 1976, and for the next fifteen years activists fought government plans through a series of public inquiries. Their alternative was to build a road tunnel, leaving the houses untouched, but this was rejected on grounds of cost. Drivers travelling in the areas where the new roads would have been built had to continue using long stretches of urban single-carriageway roads. In particular, the suburbs of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead suffered serious traffic congestion.\n\nThe Roads for Prosperity white paper published in 1989 detailed a major expansion of the road building programme and included plans for the M12 Motorway between London and Chelmsford, as well as many other road schemes. Although Harry Cohen, MP for Leyton suggested in May 1989 that the government should scrap the scheme, a public enquiry was held for the scheme in November.\n\nThe protest campaign in East London [ edit ]\n\nThe Humble Petition of The Stop the M11 Link Road Action Campaign sheweth: That the A12 Hackney Wick to M11 Link Road will be injurious to the health and well being of the Petitioners insofar as it will cause homelessness through their homes being demolished with in many instances no replacement being offered, it will cause ill health through noise and pollution and will be unfavourable to the community at large. Petition submitted to the House of Commons, June 1990\n\nBy the 1980s, planning blight had affected the area and many of the houses had become home to a community of artists and squatters. Eventually, contractors were appointed to carry out the work and a compulsory purchase of property along the proposed route was undertaken. In March 1993, in preparation for the construction of the road, the Earl of Caithness, then the Minister of State for Transport, estimated that there would be 263 properties scheduled for demolition, displacing 550 people, of which he estimated 172 were seeking rehousing. Several original residents, who had in some cases lived in their homes all their lives, refused to sell or move out of their properties.\n\nProtesters from the local area against the link road scheme were joined by large numbers of anti-road campaigners from around the UK and beyond, attracted by the availability of free housing along the route. These experienced protesters, who had participated in earlier events such as the Anti-Nazi League riots in Welling, gave impetus to the campaign. The new arrivals used the skills they had developed during prior protests to construct \"defences\", blocking the original entrances to the houses and creating new routes directly between them.\n\nSophisticated techniques were used to delay the construction of the road. Sit-ins and site invasions were combined with sabotage to stop construction work temporarily. This led to large numbers of police and constant security patrols being employed to protect the construction sites, at great expense. By December 1994, the total cost of construction had been estimated at \u00a36 million and rising by \u00a3500,000 every month.\n\nThe protesters were successful in publicising the campaign, with most UK newspapers and TV news programmes covering the protests on a regular basis. Desktop publishing, then in its infancy, was used to produce publicity materials for the campaign and send out faxes to the media. When the government began evicting residents along the route and demolishing the empty houses, the protesters set up so-called \"autonomous republics\" such as \"Wanstonia\" in some groups of the houses. Extreme methods were used to force the engineers to halt demolition, including underground tunnels with protesters secured within by concrete.\n\nThe chestnut tree on George Green [ edit ]\n\n[28] The chestnut tree on George Green, Wanstead became a focal point and a symbol for anti-M11 Link Road protesters.\n\nUntil late 1993, local opposition to the M11 extension had been relatively limited. While opposition had been going for nearly ten years, institutional avenues of protest had been exhausted, and local residents were largely resigned to the road being built. When outside protesters arrived in September 1993, few residents saw their mission as \"their campaign\".\n\nOne section of the M11 extension was due to tunnel under George Green in Wanstead. Residents had believed that this would save their green, and a 250-year-old sweet chestnut tree that grew upon it, but because this was a cut and cover tunnel, this required the tree to be cut down.\n\nSupport for the protests started to extend to the local community when Jean Gosling, a lollipop lady in Wanstead, upon learning of the tree's impending destruction, rallied the support of local children (and was later fired from her job for doing so while wearing her uniform), who in turn recruited their parents into the protests. It was then that the non-resident radicals realised that they had significant local support. When local residents gathered for a tree dressing ceremony on 6 November, they found their way barred by security fencing. With support from the protesters, they pulled it down.\n\nProtesters continued to delay the destruction of the tree. Solicitors for the campaign had even argued in court that receipt of a letter addressed to the tree itself gave it the status of a legal dwelling, causing a further delay. In the early morning of 7 December 1993, several hundred police arrived to evict the protesters,[a] which took ten hours to carry out.[b] Protesters made numerous complaints against the police;[36] police, in turn, denied these allegations, attributing any misbehaviour to the protesters.[c] Media attention started to increase regarding the protest, with several daily newspapers putting pictures of the tree on their front pages.\n\nHarry Cohen, MP for Leyton, started to become critical of the scheme and its progress. In March 1994, he said \"the Department of Transport's pig-headed approach to the M11 link road has been a shambles, and a costly one at that,\" and described the ongoing police presence as \"a miniature equivalent of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.\" According to him, local resident Hugh Jones had been threatened by demolition men wielding sledgehammers and pickaxes, adding \"the project has cost \u00a3500,000 in police time alone, to take over and demolish a 250-year-old chestnut tree and half a dozen houses\".\n\nClaremont Road [ edit ]\n\nThe view from the tower in Claremont Road, Leyton.\n\nBy 1994, properties scheduled for demolition had been compulsory purchased, and most were made uninhabitable by removing kitchens, bathrooms and staircases. The notable exception was in one small street, Claremont Road, which ran immediately next to the Central line and consequently required every property on it to be demolished. The street was almost completely occupied by protesters except for one original resident who had not taken up the Department for Transport's offer to move, 92-year-old Dolly Watson, who was born in number 32 and had lived there nearly all her life. She became friends with the anti-road protesters, saying \"they're not dirty hippy squatters, they're the grandchildren I never had.\" The protesters named a watchtower, built from scaffold poles, after her.\n\nA vibrant and harmonious community sprung up on the road, which even won the begrudging respect of the authorities. The houses were painted with extravagant designs, both internally and externally, and sculptures erected in the road; the road became an artistic spectacle that one said \"had to be seen to be believed\".\n\nIn November 1994, the eviction of Claremont Road took place, bringing an end to the M11 link road resistance as a major physical protest. Bailiffs, accompanied by the police in full riot gear, carried out the eviction over several days, and the Central line, running adjacent to the road, was suspended. As soon as eviction was completed, the remaining properties were demolished. In the end, the cost to the taxpayer was over a million pounds in police costs alone. Quoting David Maclean, \"I understand from the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis that the cost of policing the protest in order to allow bailiffs to take possession of the premises in Claremont road was \u00a31,014,060.\" Cohen complained in parliament about police brutality, stating \"were not many of my constituents bullied\u2014including vulnerable people, and others whose only crime was living on the line of route?\" The then Secretary of State for Transport, Brian Mawhinney, pointed out that there had already been three public enquiries at which protesters could have lodged their objections against the line of the route.\n\nTowards the end [ edit ]\n\nFollowing the Claremont Road eviction, non-resident protesters moved on to other sites such as Newbury. Meanwhile, Fillebrook Road near Leytonstone Underground station had already had several houses demolished on it due to problems with vandalism. By 1995, the only house left standing was number 135. The house was originally scheduled for demolition at the same time as the others, but had been left standing in order to give the tenant additional time to relocate. After they had done so, on 11 April 1995, the Department for Transport removed the water supply and part of the roof, and left two security guards on duty. When the guards decided to sleep overnight in their cars that evening, leaving the house unoccupied, the protesters moved in. The house was renamed Munstonia (after The Munsters, thanks to its spooky appearance). Like \"Wanstonia\", they proclaimed themselves a micro-nation and designed their own national anthem and flag, though author Joe Moran mentions their legitimacy was complicated by the protesters continuing to claim unemployment benefits from the \"mother country.\"\n\nThe eviction on Fillebrook Road, Leytonstone in June 1995\n\nA tower was built out of the remains of the roof, similar to one that had existed at Claremont Road, and a system of defences and blockades were built. A core of around 30 protesters ensured that there were always people staying there (a legal requirement for a squatted home, as well as a defence against eviction). They were finally evicted on 21 June 1995, whereupon, as at Claremont Road, the building was immediately demolished. The total cost of removing the protesters from Munstonia was given to be \u00a3239,349.52, not including additional costs of security guards.\n\nConstruction of the road, already underway by this stage, was then free to continue largely unhindered, although systematic sabotage of building sites by local people continued. It was completed in 1999 and given the designation A12; its continuation, the former A102(M), was also given this number as far as the Blackwall Tunnel.\n\nThe official opening of the road in October 1999 took place without fanfare, being opened by the Highways Agency Chief Executive rather than a politician, with only journalists with passes being admitted to the ceremony.[50]\n\nConsequences of the protest campaign [ edit ]\n\nThe M11 link road protest was ultimately unsuccessful in its aim to stop the building of the link road. The total cost of compensation for the project was estimated to be around \u00a315 million.\n\nProposals for the M12 motorway were cancelled in 1994 during the first review of the trunk road programme. The most significant response from the government occurred when Labour came into office following the 1997 general election, with the announcement of the New Deal for Trunk Roads in England. This proposal cancelled many previous road schemes, including the construction of the M65 over the Pennines, increased fuel prices, and ensured that road projects would only be undertaken when genuinely necessary, stating \"there will be no presumption in favour of new road building as an answer.\"\n\nSome protesters went on to join the direct action campaign Reclaim the Streets. A protester arrested and detained on the grounds of breach of the peace unsuccessfully challenged the UK Government's legislation at the European Court of Justice.\n\nIn 2002, in response to a major new road building programme and expansion of aviation, a delegation of road protest veterans visited the Department for Transport to warn of renewed direct action in response, delivering a D-lock as a symbol of the past protests. One such protestor, Rebecca Lush went on to found Road Block to support road protesters and challenge the government. In 2007, Road Block became a project within the Campaign for Better Transport. The M11 Link road protests inspired the launch of the video activism organisation Undercurrents. Training activists to film the protests, they released You've got to be choking in 1994, a 40-minute documentary about the M11 link road campaign.\n\nIn 2007, the BBC reported that the cost of the M11 link road had doubled due to the intervention of protesters. Residents in Leytonstone have complained that, following the completion of the road, their streets became rat runs for commuters trying to get ahead of queues.\n\nSee also [ edit ]\n\nNotes [ edit ]\n\n^ The BBC give the figure as two hundred; Wall gives the figure as four hundred. ^ According to the BBC; Wall gives a figure of nine hours. ^ The BBC quotes then-Chief Superintendent Stuart Giblin as saying \"My officers acted professionally despite some of the comments and behaviour of the protesters.\"\n\nReferences [ edit ]\n\nCitations [ edit ]\n\nBooks\n\nNews articles\n\nWebsites\n\nHansard\n\nFurther reading [ edit ]\n\nCoordinates:"}
{"text":"FRANKFURT, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Nokia NOK1V.HE needs to speedily boost its offering of mobile internet solutions, marketing head Anssi Vanjoki told a German magazine.\n\nNokia, the No. 1 global cellphone maker, needs to catch up with the rivals Apple (AAPL.O), Google (GOOG.O) and Blackberry-maker RIM RIM.TO in offering online solutions, Vanjoki was quoted as saying by weekly Wirtschaftswoche in an excerpt of an interview to be published on Monday.\n\nVanjoki did not rule out a sale of its core handset manufacturing business in the long term.\n\nNokia\u2019s mobile-device factories offered an important competitive advantage but one should \u201cnever say never\u201d should a sale at some point be warranted as part of Nokia\u2019s transformation, he was quoted as saying. (Reporting by Ludwig Burger, editing by Mike Peacock) ((ludwig.burger@thomsonreuters.com; +49 69 7565 1311; Reuters Messaging: ludwig.burger.reuters.com@reuters.net))"}
{"text":"Kevin Yakes spends so much time trying to keep his Golden Valley construction firm staffed, he sometimes feels like a full-time recruiter. During a recent family getaway in Florida, Yakes hopped in the car and drove more than an hour to have beers with a refrigeration technician he wanted to attract to Minnesota.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s like dating,\u201d Yakes said. \u201cI\u2019ve never, ever, had such a hard time trying to find people.\u201d\n\nNearly a decade after the U.S. economy collapsed and construction workers fled the industry, Twin Cities builders and contractors are in the midst of one of their busiest years. But a shortage of skilled workers means that new projects \u2014 from modest office renovations to soaring new apartment towers \u2014 are costing more and taking longer to complete. The situation has contributed to a housing shortage in the region.\n\nEven last year\u2019s completion of U.S. Bank Stadium, a project that kept thousands of workers busy for nearly three years, hasn\u2019t fully replenished the pool of construction help. \u201cWe have more work than we know what to do with,\u201d said Robert Heise, president of the Minnesota-North Dakota chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors.\n\nAs of May, there were more than 125,000 construction workers in Minnesota, the most for that month since 2006. And the latest tally of construction job openings was the highest in at least a decade. Electricians, carpenters and plumbers are among the most scarce.\n\nLabor leaders say the industry has struggled to attract young people to replenish the pool of workers drained by the 2008-2009 recession, even though construction jobs pay above-average wages and most require just a high school diploma.\n\nOne reason for that, says Tim Worke, chief executive of the Associated General Contractors of Minnesota, is that vocational training has been devalued. \u201cEveryone has been told that you have to have a four-year degree to be prosperous at life,\u201d Worke said.\n\nBut it\u2019s a fine line, he added, because the old notion that construction is a field only for those with a \u201cstrong back and a strong body\u201d isn\u2019t the case anymore. The work is more technical and workers need advanced training, Worke said.\n\nJames Mahler, a 35-year-old project manager for River City Tile & Underlayment in Chanhassen, joined the trades at age 19. \u201cCollege was never something that appealed to me,\u201d he said. \u201cI was eager to begin working and making my own career path.\u201d\n\nIn the recession, as others fled the industry, he stayed the course and is glad he did. He has never been without work and has been able to pick and choose jobs.\n\n\u201cWe make extremely good money, work reasonable hours, get to be active and build actual communities within the Twin Cities,\u201d he said. \u201cI want young people to realize that it is not a step down to go into construction.\u201d\n\nWith costs and job openings on the rise, the industry is getting more creative. This summer a consortium of industry groups will launch one of its most comprehensive efforts yet to help fill jobs: Project Build Minnesota, a marketing campaign aimed at \u201cmaking construction sexy again,\u201d said David Siegel, executive director of the Builders Association of the Twin Cities. The goal is to sweep as many trainees into both union and nonunion jobs. The consortium plans to raise $800,000.\n\nEarlier this year, a collective of labor unions launched its own PR campaign dubbed Elevate Minnesota to promote union construction jobs.\n\nA third group called the Twin Cities Construction Sector Initiative, which includes the Associated General Contractors, the Minnesota Building Trades Council, educational institutions and other stakeholders, is taking a higher-level look at workforce needs. That group hopes to roll out a multiyear plan by end of the summer.\n\nUntil those efforts gel, the effects of the tight labor market are rippling through Twin Cities property markets.\n\nCommercial construction costs are increasing two to five times the rate of inflation, local analysts say. Jim Durda, executive vice president of the local office of Zeller Realty Group, which manages the Fifth Street Towers and LaSalle Plaza in Minneapolis, said that 10 years ago it might have cost $25 per square foot to build out or remodel a commercial space. Today, it\u2019s $35 to $50 per square foot, partly because of labor costs.\n\nSuch increases can be even more detrimental for new buildings, which employ hundreds of workers from many trades. Last month, plans to build a Hy-Vee store in White Bear Lake were scuttled. High labor costs contributed to the decision not to build, according to both John Johannson, a manager in the local development company on the project, and Tara Deering-Hansen, a spokeswoman at Hy-Vee\u2019s Des Moines headquarters.\n\nHomebuilders are facing similar issues. Some builders have painted \u201chelp wanted\u201d and phone referral numbers on their trucks.\n\nTwo weeks before the start of a luxury house tour in the Twin Cities, Scott Busyn and several other custom homebuilders were scrambling to finish in time for it. Busyn paid overtime and offered other perks to discourage subcontractors from jumping ship to work with other companies.\n\nAt CPM Cos., one of the biggest apartment developers in the Twin Cities, the situation is making it difficult to finish buildings on time.\n\nConstruction manager Troy Wenck of Reuter Walton Commercial said that he\u2019s spending valuable time trying to recruit employees, and the company has had to turn away projects.\n\nMark Scherer, an owner of the one of the largest lumberyards and truss-building plants in the region, has managed to keep his staffing levels steady by regularly raising wages. At a plant in Albertville, he gave workers a nearly $1 an hour raise last fall. \u201cThat seemed to take care of the problem,\u201d he said.\n\nHe hasn\u2019t, however, been able to solve a more serious problem: Timing. He said it normally takes 90 days to build a house, but it\u2019s now taking 120 to 180 days in some cases.\n\nHouses are also more expensive. Scherer said an upscale house used to cost $175 per square foot, but increases in labor and other inputs means the price is now $250 to north of $300 per square foot.\n\nFor Yakes, the chief executive of Summit Commercial Facilities Group, a fix couldn\u2019t come soon enough.\n\nHe has a handful of openings to add to his current staff of 30 \u2014 and he wasn\u2019t able to persuade the Florida technician he met for drinks to join his company.\n\n\u201cIt is a whole lot of work,\u201d Yakes said. \u201cYou just always have to be ready to hire that next top talent.\u201d\n\nNicole Norfleet \u2022 612-673-4495 Twitter: @nicolenorfleet\n\nJim Buchta \u2022 612-673-7376 Twitter: @JustListedBlog"}
{"text":"The advantage of a hazelnut rod ... is the possibility to attach test-nodes (Testnosoden) at the tip. This allows to search more aimed at different oscillation patterns. \u2026 on my left pinky finger, there is a polarization ring made from ferrite material; this serves the determination of polarization, which means, whether the water vein spins right or left handed.\n\nThis is from a diploma dissertation presented to the faculty for landscaping architecture at the University Weihenstephan-Triesdorf in Bavaria. The German diploma is equivalent to the Master level. It was not forwarded to the campus health center\u2019s mental health division to ensure that the student receives help. Professor Doctor F. Luz evaluated with the highest possible grade! The student now uses his 'dowsing expertise' to earn a living. No, not relieving cat-ladies of their money, but with urban planning, paid for by tax payers.\n\nThis was two years ago. Everything sorted out now? You bet. The university has officially opened the course \u201cLandscape aesthetics&geomancy and Feng-Shui in Landscape Architecture\u201d. Diploma certified Engineer S. Broennle teaches whenever Luz is out in the field dowsing. According to all we know, grades are established with pendulum and Ouija board.\n\nThis updates Germany ranks first in Internationalism, the one where I told you the secret about that studying in Germany is still free. Now you don\u2019t even need to care about the science that traditionally was in the way of academic degrees. Pack your stuff, lazy students of the world. Germany Abolishes Itself.\n\n--------------------------------------------\n\nMore from Vongehr Topic for Topic"}
{"text":"JOE SCHMIDT HAS rejected the notion that the inclusion of Tommy Bowe in Ireland\u2019s matchday squad is a \u2018nostalgia\u2019 call.\n\nThe 33-year-old wing was used off the bench in Ireland\u2019s defeat to Scotland on the opening weekend of the Six Nations, after which Schmidt\u2019s selection was criticised.\n\nBowe is now back on Ireland\u2019s bench for tomorrow\u2019s clash with Wales, with more eyebrows being raised by the decision.\n\nBowe is back on the Ireland bench for tomorrow. Source: Inpho\/Billy Stickland\n\nFormer Ireland wing Shane Horgan, who played under Schmidt with Leinster, told the Second Captains podcast that Schmidt\u2019s decision to include Bowe against Scotland had been an error.\n\n\u201cThat looked like a nostalgia call, having him in the team,\u201d Horgan said. \u201cHe hasn\u2019t been playing well. I was very surprised that he was in the 23.\u201d\n\nBowe was subsequently left out of Ireland\u2019s matchday squad for the trip to Italy and missed out on the home win over France.\n\nThe Ulster wing was then ommitted from Schmidt\u2019s extended 36-man squad for the closing two rounds of the championship.\n\nHowever, a hand injury for Andrew Trimble saw Bowe called in as an injury replacement last weekend and he has jumped ahead of Tiernan O\u2019Halloran, Andrew Conway, Craig Gilroy and Jared Payne for the 23 shirt ahead of tomorrow\u2019s clash with Wales in Cardiff.\n\nWhen Horgan\u2019s suggestion that Bowe\u2019s inclusion during this Six Nations was a nostalgic decision was put to the Ireland head coach, Schmidt rejected it outright.\n\n\u201cLook, I think Shane hasn\u2019t spent any time in our environment, so he\u2019s never seen Tommy train, so I think it\u2019s a typically external opinion that is purely opinion based,\u201d said Schmidt.\n\n\u201cWe try to base our decision on how a player is performing. I\u2019ve coached Shane and there\u2019s probably been times when people have questioned my selecting him in the past. There\u2019s always going to be people questioning selection.\n\n33-year-old Bowe will win his 69th cap if used off the bench. Source: Ryan Byrne\/INPHO\n\n\u201cI feel that we\u2019re best placed. There\u2019s no way I\u2019d say we get it right every time, because again, there\u2019s a human factor in coaching, just as there is in playing, as I referred to with George North.\n\n\u201cI think he\u2019s a super player, and if somebody has a slightly off day, there\u2019s no guarantee that off days continue, in fact it\u2019s potentially going to be the reverse, they\u2019re going to revert to type and be outstanding in their next performance.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not sure whether, over the last three and a half, four years, how many nostalgic decisions I\u2019ve made. But I can\u2019t really remember many.\u201d\n\nHaving included Bowe as the 23rd man for a second time in this championship, Schmidt backed the 68-times capped Ulsterman to deliver for Ireland tomorrow night at the Principality Stadium.\n\nThe Ireland head coach also indicated that Bowe\u2019s aerial strength was one of the key reasons for picking him.\n\n\u201cI think if you look at his last two Ulster performances, you can see his ability to read the game, to run a good line, to be in the right place at the right time,\u201d said Schmidt.\n\n\u201cHis aerial game is a real strength for him, and for us. That\u2019s where they came after us last time with Dan Biggar and Liam Williams, George North is such a big man, Leigh Halfpenny got a couple of good aerial takes early in the game.\n\n\u201cTherefore, you cut your cloth, you account for how somebody\u2019s training, you calculate what they bring to the game, and then you make decisions.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s where I\u2019d challenge anyone to do as much work looking at how people are preparing themselves, and then make decisions. The caveat of all that is \u2013 I\u2019m not claiming that we\u2019ve got it right, we\u2019ve just worked hard to try to make the best decisions.\u201d\n\nSubscribe to The42 Rugby Show podcast here:"}
{"text":"Thoughts\n\nI\u2019ve made some pretty bad mistakes in my past, and I\u2019ll \u201cfess up\u201d to them at any point.. not because I\u2019m proud that I messed up at something but because acknowledging your faults, weaknesses and most importantly stupidity in the past has taught me to be a better human being. And you see, being a better human being, by bettering yourself from your own mistakes is a concept that most can\u2019t even dream of.\n\nSo, by doing this, as my \u201cnew year\u2019s resolution\u201d \u2013 Whatever kind of meaningless dribble people throw up on their facebook walls, as if to tell the world that this year they\u2019ll be different, this very year they\u2019ll increase their own self esteem by sorting after other peers appreciation of their own divisiveness to change. When in the very, very sad reality people don\u2019t change \u2013 You never really change, you can regret a decision and improve on that decision but your mistakes WILL \u201chaunt\u201d (as if to say your past and your previous decisions were a different beings choices, and not your own which you didn\u2019t, for even a slight second think of the repercussions) you for the rest of your life.\n\nAs a person, if you kill or hurt another person \u2013 You may face the repercussions and realize you can\u2019t do it again or you\u2019ll face the same music, but your head is still not screwed on right, and you know deep down in your head that every second of your life is a methodical plan to commit another\u2026 of whatever it is you\u2019re ashamed (or maybe just scared of showing society, or a loved one, or any number of people or entities) of.\n\nI used to be a \u201chacker\u201d but it was more than that, and it was because of a few stupid mistakes I made that I got caught and won\u2019t ever be doing anything stupid, like that again. That\u2019s not because I don\u2019t still think in my head (which is currently the only place of privacy we have) of what I could be doing, or that the women in front of me at the line of the grocery store just entered her pincode as 3782 or that my friend who works for the government just left her emails logged on in her computer. It\u2019s because of the fear that I don\u2019t want to \u201cface the music\u201d as some may say, and anyone who isn\u2019t scared of that then I\u2019ll look up to as a hero, hence my reference to Edward Snowden earlier.\n\n\u201cPeople aren\u2019t as evil as you may think, but temptation pushes most to the brink.\u201d\n\nYou might be asking yourself (or perhaps in your head, you\u2019re asking me) wtf the point of this article even is, and why I\u2019ve so far, refused to even give you a title (Not referring to the meta title here) well it\u2019s to do with the subtitle of my blog \u201cpolitically pissed off\u201d and it has even more to do with a YouTube video I found on the front page of Reddit today \u2013\n\nThis clip, and my entire rant here is about one specific thing and it\u2019s a phrase that I\u2019m sure has been used millions of times.\n\nThe World doesn\u2019t owe you anything, but you owe it the world \u2013 It\u2019s a slight alteration to \u201cthe world doesn\u2019t owe you anything\u201d which according to Google has been brought up over 55,000,000 times across the indexed web.\n\nMr Feenie proves this point even more. When most of you have a device in your pocket that could break most security precautions on the internet in minutes (with the right \u201cpush\u201d of course) yet you decide to use it to take photos of yourself to create a falsified image of yourself on some random social networking site. That shows how pathetic of a life you\u2019ve gotten yourself ravelled up in.\n\nThis extends to more than just the average joe as well. Justin Bieber has over 48,000,000 twitter followers (granted a lot will be fake\/bots) as of writing this. If he were to, for example: tweet a small pizza restaurants website\u2026 Within minutes it\u2019d more than likely crash. For a kid who put a song on YouTube this one time, he holds an unbelievably large amount of power \u2013 With the help of the internet of course.\n\nYet he decides to tweet selfies and him downloading his own tracks of iTunes.\n\nThen again, I\u2019m a paradox of my own stance on hypocrisy \u2013\n\nI\u2019m sitting on a i7 3.4 ghz CPU, 16gb ddr3 ram and a 4gb DDR5 Graphics card\u2026 Whilst using about a percent of the CPU\u2019s power and typing into an open source CMS, on a site that pretty much no one reads.\n\nMy moral of this story, and the question I bet you were asking yourself earlier is then?\n\nSpend your time wisely, and spend your time learning \u2013 Because for though it may seem like an eternity in hell, your life is almost irrelevant in the grand scheme of things."}
{"text":"Hillary Rodham Clinton\u2019s determination to reconnect with voters in localized, informative settings is commendable, but is in danger of being overshadowed by questions about the interplay of politics and wealthy foreign donors who support the Clinton Foundation.\n\nNothing illegal has been alleged about the foundation, the global philanthropic initiative founded by former President Bill Clinton. But no one knows better than Mrs. Clinton that this is the tooth-and-claw political season where accusations are going to fly for the next 19 months. And no one should know better than the former senator and first lady that they will fester if straightforward answers are not offered to the public.\n\nThe increasing scrutiny of the foundation has raised several points that need to be addressed by Mrs. Clinton and the former president. These relate most importantly to the flow of multimillions in donations from foreigners and others to the foundation, how Mrs. Clinton dealt with potential conflicts as secretary of state and how she intends to guard against such conflicts should she win the White House.\n\nThe only plausible answer is full and complete disclosure of all sources of money going to the foundation. And the foundation needs to reinstate the ban on donations from foreign governments for the rest of her campaign \u2014 the same prohibition that was in place when she was in the Obama administration."}
{"text":"Battle lines are being drawn for a fight over the future of rooftop solar energy in Maine, as the Public Utilities Commission prepares to hold a hearing Monday in Hallowell on proposed rules that would cut financial incentives for homeowners with solar panels.\n\nSimilar fights are taking place across the country, as utility regulators and politicians try to define the value and benefits of small solar-electric installations, as well as who should pay, and how much, to help expand their use.\n\nZach Good of ReVision Energy prepares a roof for solar panels at a home in Cape Elizabeth last year. The cost of solar technology has fallen dramatically. Shawn Patrick Ouellette\/Press Herald file SOLAR PANEL HEARING WHEN: Monday, 1 p.m. WHERE: Worster Room of Maine Public Utilities Commission building, 101 Second St., Hallowell\n\nThe outcome of these skirmishes matters because thousands of jobs are tied to these home-scale installations, and shifting policies about compensation have led many residents to put off investing in solar. Maine installers say that began happening last spring, after the Legislature failed by two votes to override Gov. Paul LePage\u2019s veto of a bill that would have restructured the financial incentives.\n\nWhat\u2019s happening this fall at the PUC is likely to be only a prelude to a rematch next year in the Legislature. Clean-energy advocates are talking about drafting another bill, all but assuring that the matter won\u2019t be settled in the near future.\n\nAt issue is a decades-old rule that requires utilities to credit the bills of small energy generators for the full retail price of all the electricity they send into the grid. Those credits chiefly help homeowners recover the investment in solar-electric panels, which can average $10,000 or so. They continued to be paid as long as the power\u2019s being generated.\n\nThis arrangement, called net-energy billing or net metering, was set up in the 1980s to help jump-start solar when the technology was new. But panel costs have fallen sharply in recent years, and utilities and some policymakers say it\u2019s time to trim the incentive. As solar\u2019s popularity grows, they say, the payments are shifting the cost of serving homes with solar panels onto other customers.\n\nLast month, the three PUC commissioners \u2013 all appointed by LePage \u2013 proposed a change that would grandfather net-metering credits for 15 years for residents who already have solar panels installed at their homes, and limit benefits for new solar owners to 10 years.\n\nDISPUTING VALUE OF HOME SOLAR\n\nThe PUC review was triggered by a requirement that net metering be revisited once peak solar power production hit 1 percent of Central Maine Power Co.\u2019s installed capacity. But reducing the net-metering incentives drew immediate fire from solar installers and clean-energy supporters. They countered that the value of this energy actually is greater than the cost of service. And they pointed to a study done for the PUC in 2015, and updated last summer, to prove it.\n\nThe updated study concluded that the value of distributed solar \u2013 power produced near its point of use \u2013 is worth roughly 27 cents per kilowatt hour over 25 years. In Maine, the average home electric rate today is less than 16 cents per kilowatt hour, so solar advocates see a clear benefit.\n\nBut teasing out the components that contribute to that 27-cents figure paints a more-complicated picture. The PUC\u2019s consultant found that just over 17 cents of the total value was from avoiding \u201cmarket costs,\u201d largely by not needing power from large generators. The other 9 cents or so were \u201csocietal benefits,\u201d linked to emitting less climate-changing carbon dioxide and pollutants into the air.\n\nIn testimony filed Wednesday, Portland-based ReVision Energy, the state\u2019s largest solar installer, reiterated its view that the cost-shifting claim isn\u2019t supported by the study. It also criticized the PUC for proposing changes to net metering before any investigation of the facts.\n\n\u201cThe failure to fairly, fully and rigorously evaluate the overall impact of net metering delegitimizes the proposed rule and this proceeding,\u201d ReVision said. \u201cThe commission has made critical findings of fact and proposes to fundamentally change the existing, legislatively approved rule based on these findings \u2013 yet there is no sworn testimony in the record.\u201d\n\nResponding to this criticism, PUC spokesman Harry Lanphear said the commission laid out its reasoning in a notice of rulemaking last month. In it, the commissioners acknowledged that net metering supports state energy policies to promote renewable, clean electricity supplies, and that there may be environmental values to ratepayers. But they added that \u201cprograms that involve the cross-subsidization of ratepayer funds among customer groups should be reviewed periodically,\u201d especially when the cost of the technology is falling sharply.\n\nCMP is expected to amplify that point Monday. John Carroll, a spokesman, said the cost of rooftop solar has fallen by roughly half over the past decade, yet it\u2019s still being subsidized at the same level as it was in the 1980s. He said CMP gets little benefit from rooftop solar because the values cited in the PUC study are largely tied to generation and energy supply, not to the cost of delivering power to homes. CMP contends that the cost of crediting solar homeowners shifted $1.3 million in expenses to other ratepayers in 2015, although solar advocates say CMP hasn\u2019t substantiated those figures.\n\nCMP has hired an expert witness to testify about the value of solar. Ashley Brown is a former Ohio PUC commissioner and executive director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group, which studies power issues. He is expected to make a case for why net metering should be discarded and replaced with market-based pricing.\n\nLePage, through his Governor\u2019s Energy Office, will make a similar plea. The office has filed comments that say the PUC\u2019s proposed rule should be scrapped. A system should instead be adopted that uses CMP\u2019s smart meters to compensate small generators for the value of their power in real time, because costs vary hour by hour.\n\nThe office wrote: \u201cDuring the duration of the proposed rule that extends through 2040, there are companies proposing the colonization of another planet \u2013 yet the proposal is stuck in 20th-century thinking and fails to utilize modern metering technology that has already been deployed across the state.\u201d\n\nSOLAR DEBATE IN OTHER STATES\n\nThese opposing views, in various forms, underpin the debate nationwide. The Solar Energy Industries Association website has posted links to cost-benefit studies from 17 states that are studying or have examined the value of solar. They include California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii. Various interest groups and think tanks also have weighed in with national studies.\n\nBut in Maine, as elsewhere, value studies are ammunition for larger political battles. In their filed testimonies, clean-energy advocates such as ReVision, the Natural Resources Council of Maine and SunRun, a national solar installer, urge the commission to hold off on any rule change and let the next Legislature set solar policy.\n\nIn a recent email message, ReVision also encourages its supporters to vote for candidates who will advance solar.\n\n\u201cWe are confident that Maine\u2019s Legislature can do the right thing for solar,\u201d ReVision says, \u201cand we will work to make the facts clear despite ongoing campaigns of misinformation and bullying on the side of anti-solar advocates.\u201d\n\nTux Turkel can be contacted at 791-6462 or\n\n[email protected]\n\n[email protected]\n\nShare\n\nfiled under:"}
{"text":"Secretary of State Jon Husted today defended use of the word \"monopoly\" in ballot language describing state Issue 3, which seeks to legalize marijuana in Ohio. \"We are trying to use simple, plain language that accurately describes the issue,\" Husted said during a Columbus Metropolitan Club luncheon, where, when asked, he also said he is interested in being governor someday.\n\nSecretary of State Jon Husted today defended use of the word monopoly in ballot language describing state Issue 3, which seeks to legalize marijuana in Ohio.\n\n\ufffdWhat we tried to use is simple, plain language that we believe the average voter will understand and that accurately describes the issues,\ufffd Husted said during a Columbus Metropolitan Club luncheon, where, when asked, he also said he is interested in being governor someday.\n\n>>Like Dispatch Politics on Facebook\n\nSupporters of Issue 3 strongly disagree with ballot summary and title that uses the word monopoly and seems to stress that aspect of the issue over the marijuana legalization.\n\n\ufffdThe ballot title and language Jon Husted has assigned to Issue 3 is deceptive and misleading,\ufffd said Ian James, executive director of ResponsibleOhio, the group of investors pushing to legalize marijuana in Ohio and set up 10 exclusive commercial growing sites.\n\n\ufffdIt's unthinkable that Ohio's chief elections officer is waging a campaign against Issue 3 from his elected office and using taxpayer dollars to confuse voters and rig the system.\ufffd\n\nResponsibleOhio wants the Ohio Supreme Court to overturn ballot language approved by Husted and the state Ballot Board.\n\nHusted said ResponsibleOhio wants to use poll-tested language to describe the issue in a way voters will support, but he doesn\ufffdt want to use \ufffdweasel words\ufffd that mask what the issue really does.\n\n\ufffdThe folks who wrote this, if they didn\ufffdt want it called a monopoly, then they shouldn\ufffdt have created a monopoly,\ufffd Husted said, as both he and moderator Mike Thompson broke out the dictionary.\n\nHusted also reiterated his position that if both Issue 3 and Issue 2, a legislative anti-monopoly proposal, pass in November, the marijuana issue would be invalidated, regardless of which issue gets more votes. The language of Issue 2, plus the fact that it would take effect immediately, makes it the dominant issue.\n\nHowever, if both issues pass, that interpretation is likely to be challenged in court.\n\nHusted also indicated his support for state Issue 1, altering the legislative redistricting process, which currently allows the majority party to gerrymander districts to its benefit. The new process would require minority-party votes in order to pass a 10-year map.\n\nOutside the Athletic Club, more than a dozen protesters held signs and chanted largely in opposition to Husted\ufffds decision in August to deny an effort to place fracking ban charter proposals on the ballot in Athens, Fulton and Medina counties. Three protesters later came into the luncheon, holding signs and chanting \ufffdlet the people vote\ufffd after the program concluded.\n\nTish O\ufffdDell, a community organizer with the Community Legal Defense Fund and a leader in organizing the protest, said the courts should be allowed to weigh in on the charter proposals, rather than Husted deciding they should be banned from the ballot.\n\n\ufffdResidents are upset that they do not have a vote,\ufffd O\ufffdDell said.\n\nHusted argued that the Supreme Court has already ruled that the state, not local communities, have the authority to regulate fracking, and the proposals violated that law.\n\n\ufffdThat doesn\ufffdt mean we took the democratic process away from them,\ufffd he said. \ufffdThey just need to use it in the proper venue.\ufffd\n\nHe suggested that supporters could go to the legislature, or use the initiated statute ballot process, to get the law changed.\n\nHusted also discussed his continuing push to get online voter registration enacted in Ohio.\n\n\ufffdI spoke to the speaker of the House (Cliff Rosenberger, R-Clarksville) the other day, and he indicated he thought it was something they\ufffdd be able to do this year,\ufffd Husted said.\n\njsiegel@dispatch.com\n\n@phrontpage"}
{"text":"Why would Sinn F\u00e9in go into an executive in which the DUP has a disproportionate degree of influence over the British government \u2013 an alleged, joint-guarantor with the Irish government of the Belfast Agreement\n\nSinn F\u00e9in won seven seats in the Westminster general election, running on an abstentionist ticket, which has been the party\u2019s policy for at least one hundred years.\n\nThe SDLP, which boasted about sitting in Westminster but had nothing to show for it, lost its three seats \u2013 seat held by three former party leaders and two of which have now been taken by Sinn F\u00e9in.\n\nAnd yet despite the wishes of the electorate which had been heavily exposed to all the arguments, Sinn F\u00e9in\u2019s critics, including the SDLP and southern political parties, and many in the media, few of whom wish Sinn F\u00e9in well, continued to criticise the party for keeping to its manifesto commitment.\n\nI was at the Belfast count on Thursday night\/Friday morning and was asked by a succession of journalists about whether in the circumstances of a hung parliament Sinn F\u00e9in would not drop its policy and help Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s Labour Party or, at least, make it more difficult for Theresa May to form a government with the help of the DUP.\n\nI said, No, it was not going to happen.\n\nMany arguments have been advanced in defence of abstentionism including that the oath or affirmation of allegiance to a foreign monarch and her heirs presents a difficulty and is inimical to one\u2019s republicanism; or that one\u2019s influence is miniscule and dwarfed by the major parties with few from the North able to demonstrate worthwhile achievements commensurate with their attendance.\n\nThese arguments, whilst valid, are not at the core of abstentionism. For example, the oath could be completely removed. Or, imagine Britain a republic. It might well be possible for some of the parties which take their seats to point to pieces of legislation that they have influenced or initiated. In the circumstances of a hung parliament it is undeniable that a tail might be able to wag the much bigger dog for a time.\n\nEven if the oath was removed and I was an MP I would still not take my seat.\n\nEven if Britain was a republic I would still not take my seat.\n\nEven if I held the balance of power and could get through bits and pieces of legislation (while flattering myself as to the magnitude of my importance) I would still not take my seat.\n\nFor me, it is quite simple.\n\nHow can I object to Britain interfering in Irish affairs if I go over and interfere in theirs?\n\nOnce I took my seat, with or without an oath, I have lost the moral high ground on that question of Irish sovereignty. I have already conceded Britain\u2019s right to govern on this shore \u2013 a claim that was demonstrably rejected in December 1918 by the majority of people in Ireland in a democratic election.\n\nEven though for reasons of pragmatism I support Agreements which were passed into law in the House of Commons, this does not mean that I recognise Britain\u2019s claim to rule over me as being legitimate.\n\nLeinster House and Stormont, for all their many flaws, are assemblies of the people of this island. Furthermore, the state in which I live is not the state in which I grew up. Much has changed; often beyond recognition. Much has clearly still to be changed. I am in the business of building a new society in Ireland out of the two states which currently exist. To do that I need to win over a significant body of support from the unionist community, as well as winning over people in the South who have lived for a century under successive partitionist governments which have never acted in truly national terms.\n\nThe establishment in the South distances itself from us by increasingly in its discourse conflating the Twenty-Six Counties with \u2018Ireland\u2019; although the threat of Brexit to the southern economy, and to the security of the peace process, has suddenly produced fresh \u2013 some might say, opportunistic \u2013 interest in reunification.\n\nOn Friday, the day after the general election, I tweeted: \u201cIn interfering in British affairs the DUP will gather many enemies.\u201d I hadn\u2019t appreciated how quickly that would happen nor the scale of the revulsion.\n\nThe British, especially the English, deeply resent anyone else telling them what to do.\n\nIn simplistic terms it explains their dislike of Europe and the way they voted on Brexit.\n\nAs an exercise, imagine that the Labour and Tory wins were reversed and that Sinn F\u00e9in\u2019s seven seats would be enough to support a Labour minority government, and that the party, out of the blue, took its Westminster seats.\n\nMake no mistake about it: the British public and the British media would be just as scathing of republicans as they are now of the DUP; although the DUP because of its homophobic, racist and sectarian proclivities present much more fertile ground for ridicule and attack.\n\nAnd that is because the British, especially the English, do not like outsiders interfering in their affairs.\n\nAlthough the SNP would also have faced criticism were it to prop up, say, a Corbyn minority government, the criticism and the type of condemnation would not be as visceral as the attacks on the Irish unionists because Scotland and Wales are unquestionably viewed differently from the Six Counties.\n\nIncidentally, those famous Irish politicians who did take their oath and seats in Westminster failed abysmally in their objectives.\n\nDaniel O\u2019Connell failed to achieve the Repeal of the Union. Charles Stewart Parnell and his Irish Parliamentary Party after decades in Westminster, and his successor, John Redmond, failed to achieve Home Rule, but did manage to sacrifice the lives of 50,000 Irish Volunteers in WWI who were fooled into believing they were fighting for the freedom of a small nation, Ireland.\n\nI\u2019m not including one major success at Westminster by the original Ulster Unionist Party because their exclusion of the Six Counties and the abandonment of the Home Rule Act has proved to be one unmitigated disaster for everyone.\n\nBy abstaining from Westminster Sinn F\u00e9in is making a powerful statement \u2013 that the people who vote for it reject British rule and British interference.\n\nAnd that is something that should give British people pause for thought: if you are livid at the prospects of a party from here, going over there to interfere and make your laws, how do you think we feel after all these centuries?\n\nThis sordid Tory\/DUP arrangement, if it comes off, may not last long, will ultimately damage both parties, but more immediately will jeopardise the prospects of a return to devolution.\n\nWhy would Sinn F\u00e9in go into an executive in which the DUP has a disproportionate degree of influence over the British government \u2013 an alleged, joint-guarantor with the Irish government of the Belfast Agreement?\n\nOne, perhaps unforeseen consequence of the DUP\u2019s willingness to go into coalition with a British government is that the DUP is effectively relinquishing any objection it might make in the future to Sinn F\u00e9in doing exactly the same in Dublin.\n\nFor the DUP I hope that the demonization they are facing (and which must appear as unjust and unfair to them) is a chastening experience and one which will make them or their supporters reflect on the antediluvian nature of their policies which encroach on the freedom of others.\n\nI also hope it makes them realise that in actual fact they belong here more than over there.\n\nIt is here, not over there, they should be entering into a true pact with their fellow Irish people."}
{"text":"Decided to wait until I had the other three done before uploading them all. Here we have Pinkie Pie as Hawkeye. Again, a difficult choice for me to make with who would fit with Pinkie Pie (considering Deadpool is not an Avengers). Still, I kind of consider Hawkeye sort of the comic relief of the group (though he wasn't much of a joker in the movie). Plus, I like the wordplay, Pinkeye. - Ew. Nothing really funny about Pink Eye. Heard that a nurse was using pinkie crust to make....Okay! Pinkie! No need for the details!Pinkie Pie own and (c) by HasbroHawkeye own and (c) by MarvelArtwork (c) Kenichi-ShinigamiMy Little Avengers -Shining Fury- [link] Captain Equestria- [link] Twilight Widow - [link] Ironmare - [link] Pinkeye - HereRainbow Thor - [link] Flutterhulk - [link]"}
{"text":"It\u2019s been a while since I last took part in the Peanut Butter Bash Group but its time to join in again! Because of my job I have had to sit the last few months out but this is fate because the month I could join in again was banana month\u2026\u2026. seriously anyone who has read this blog for a while will know just how obsessed with all things banana I am, so I could\u2019t wait to try these two together. And I came up with this Light and Fluffy Peanut Butter Banana Layer Cake.\n\nThis is everything a cake should be and oh so much more, let me explain \ud83d\ude00\n\nLayer Cake\u2019s & Banana\n\nI don\u2019t often make layer cakes, I find them too much to eat and can occasionally be just a little bit too dry for my liking. Hence why I tend to make traybake\u2019s, snack cakes and cupcakes. It\u2019s just a personal preference of mine. But I got it into my head that I wanted a layer cake. Banana cake is almost always a moist cake but it can make a sponge dense and heavy.\n\nTo make sure there were no dense heavy sponge issues with this cake I added buttermilk to the batter. Buttermilk is almost a wonder ingredient in cakes. It ensures a light and fluffy tender crumb. Ensuring the banana did not weigh the sponge down.\n\nPeanut Butter Overload\n\nBecause banana can be a strong flavour I wanted to make sure the peanut butter was an equal partner and not a side show. To do this I included a healthy amount into the cake batter, I also smothered the cake in a light and creamy peanut butter cream cheese frosting and to finish if off I added a handful of peanut butter chips.\n\nMaking sure that each bite had that peanut butter goodness in it \ud83d\ude00 The peanut butter chips are completely optional as I know they are not the easiest thing to come by, especially in the UK. I have to order mine online, so chocolate chips will work fine instead.\n\nOr leave them off all together. All in all this a light and fluffy cake that is equally flavoured with banana and peanut butter. It\u2019s simple to make and comes together in one bowl so there aren\u2019t too many dishes to wash up afterwards \ud83d\ude00\n\nHonestly you will love this Light and Fluffy Peanut Butter Banana Layer Cake as much as me. It really is a tea time treat for the whole family!\n\nLight and Fluffy Peanut Butter Banana Layer Cake A light and fluffy peanut butter and banana layer cake. Peanut butter and banana sponge filled and covered with a light and creamy peanut butter cream cheese frosting. 0 from 0 votes Print Pin Prep Time: 20 minutes Cook Time: 35 minutes Total Time: 55 minutes Servings: 8 -10 slices Author: Emma Ingredients For the cake\n\n125 grams unsalted butter (1 stick & 1 tablespoon)\n\n250 grams light brown sugar (1 & 1\/8 cup)\n\n125 grams smooth peanut butter (1\/2 cup)\n\n2 large eggs\n\n1 teaspoon vanilla extract\n\n2 medium sized ripe bananas - mashed\n\n120 millilitres buttermilk (1\/2 cup)\n\n1 teaspoon baking soda\n\n1 teaspoon baking powder\n\n1\/2 teaspoon salt\n\n290 grams plain \/ all purpose flour (2 & 1\/4 cups)\n\nFor the frosting\n\n212 grams unsalted butter (1 cup)\n\n65 grams smooth peanut butter (1\/4 cup)\n\n400 grams icing sugar (3 cups)\n\n155 grams full fat cream cheese (3\/4 cup)\n\n50 grams peanut butter or chocolate chips (1\/4 cup) Instructions Preheat your oven to 190C \/ 375F \/ Gas mark 5 and either line or lightly grease two 8inch round tins that are at least 2 inches deep and place to one side.\n\nCream the butter, sugar and peanut butter together until they are light and fluffy. About 2-3 minutes if you are using a stand or electric mixer.\n\nThen add the eggs one at a time beating in-between each addition then add in the vanilla extract and mashed bananas. Mix until everything is well combined about another minute.\n\nSieve in the baking soda, baking powder, salt and flour.\n\nThen gently fold in the dry ingredients into the batter.\n\nDivide the batter equally between the two tins and gently spread it out in the tin so it is level. Then pop the tins in the middle of your oven.\n\nAfter 25 minutes you need to reduce the temperature of your oven to 170C \/ 325F \/ Gas mark 3 and bake your cake for a further 10 minutes.\n\nAfter this 10 minutes check you cake for doneness, it should just be starting to pull away from the sides of your tins be a light golden colour and be firm to the touch. If you have a pick press it into the middle and it should come out clean. If it doesn't pass these tests give your cake a further few minutes and test again.\n\nTake the cakes out of the oven and let them rest in their tins for 5 minutes then transfer them to a wire rack to fully cool down.\n\nOnce the cakes are fully cooled down its time to make the frosting.\n\nUsing an electric mixer or stand mixer beat the butter until it is light and fluffy, this will be about 5-7 minutes.\n\nMix in the peanut butter and beat for another minute or two until it is well mixed into the butter.\n\nTurn your mixer off and pour in half of the icing sugar, on a low speed start to mix it in. When its fully combined repeat with the remaining icing sugar.\n\nAdd in the cream cheese and beat on a medium speed for a minute until it is well mixed in.\n\nYour cake is now ready to decorate.\n\nPut half of your frosting on top of one of your cakes and gently spread it out over the sponge but keep it a few centimetres from the edges and then sandwich it together with the other half.\n\nThen place the remaining frosting on the top of the cakes and gently work in over the top and down the side of the sponges until everything is fully covered.\n\nIf using sprinkle your peanut butter chips or chocolate chips over the top.\n\nSlice and serve.\n\nKept in an airtight tin in cool temperatures this cake will last 4 days. Tried this recipe? Mention @BakeThenEat or tag #BakeThenEat Share this recipe Mention @BakeThenEat or tag #BakeThenEat\n\nDo you want to join in on the peanut butter bash fun? If so, email Miranda and request to join the Peanut Butter Bash facebook group! The first Thursday of each month we post a dessert with peanut butter and a mystery ingredient. There is also a Facebook group if you want to join in the fun but don\u2019t run your own blog The Peanut Butter Recipe Box. Here are the other peanut butter and Banana creations!"}
{"text":"In Israel, open discourse and dissent appear to be among the casualties of the monthlong war in Gaza, according to stalwarts of what is known as the Zionist left \u2014 Israelis who want the country to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and help create a sovereign Palestinian state.\n\nIsraeli politics have been drifting rightward for years, and many see that trend sharpening and solidifying now. Several polls find that as many as nine out of 10 Israeli Jews back the prosecution of the war by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When that support slipped a bit last week, it seemed to be because more people wanted an even more aggressive assault on Hamas, the militant Islamist faction that dominates Gaza. Israelis who question the government or the military on Facebook, or who even share photographs of death and devastation in Gaza, find themselves defriended, often by people they thought were politically like-minded.\n\n\u201cOne of the victims of war is any nuance,\u201d said Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, who emigrated from New York in 1979. \u201cThe idea of having a nuanced position that recognizes the suffering on both sides and the complications is almost impossible to maintain.\u201d\n\nRabbi Weiman-Kelman is the founder of Kol Haneshama, one of Israel\u2019s largest and best-known Reform congregations, where every service ends with an adaptation of a traditional Hebrew prayer for peace that includes a line in Arabic borrowed from a traditional Muslim prayer. (Disclosure: I have occasionally attended those services.)\n\nWhen Rabbi Weiman-Kelman recently circulated a petition condemning racist comments by a right-wing rabbi, a member of the synagogue\u2019s board whose son was fighting in Gaza said the congregation should stay out of the matter and \u201cfocus on our boys,\u201d he recalled. And during services Friday night, another leader of the congregation with lengthy leftist credentials stood up and said he no longer felt comfortable with a different prayer, which included a wish for \u201cshalom\u201d \u2014 peace \u2014 for \u201call who dwell on earth.\u201d \u201cThe man said, \u2018There really are bad people out there who I don\u2019t wish shalom,\u2019 \u201d the rabbi recounted. \u201cIt was a devastating moment.\u201d"}
{"text":"WASHINGTON \u2014 As commercial spaceflight company Blue Origin prepares for another suborbital test fight, company founder Jeff Bezos said he thinks the next administration should assign NASA a mix of large-scale prizes and technology development programs.\n\nBezos, in an on-stage interview as part of the John H. Glenn Lecture in Space History at the National Air and Space Museum here, offered his views when asked what he would do if the next president called him and asked for space policy advice.\n\n\"I think big prizes would be an interesting thing to do,\" he said. NASA has run a prize program, called Centennial Challenges, for a decade, offering prizes of up to several million dollars for aviation and space technology achievements.\n\nBezos, though, believes NASA should go after something bigger, such as a prize for a Mars sample return mission. \"One thing that the government could do is just offer a very large prize to whoever first brings back some Mars samples,\" he said. \"It would be very interesting. That kind of horserace would create lots of attention. People would compete for it.\"\n\nBezos didn't offer an estimate of how large the prize should be for a Mars sample return competition. NASA is currently working on the first element of its own sample return effort, the Mars 2020 rover, to collect samples. That mission has an estimated cost of $1.5 billion. Later missions are proposed to launch the samples into Martian orbit and return them to Earth, but NASA has not disclosed a schedule or cost for them.\n\nIn conjunction with large prizes, Bezos suggested NASA also pursue ambitious technology development efforts. \"I would also advise that NASA needs to go after gigantic, hard technology goals,\" he said, that would be too difficult for private industry to do on its own. Examples he gave were in-space nuclear reactors and hypersonic passenger aviation.\n\n\"I think prizes and then really hard technology programs\" are what NASA should pursue, he concluded.\n\nBezos didn't weigh in on a particular destination for NASA human spaceflight efforts, but the other guest speaker at the lecture, Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, did. \"To me, the focus should be on Mars,\" he said.\n\nCollins said his views contrasted with those held by the late Neil Armstrong, who had advocated for a return the moon prior to going to Mars. \"I disagree with that. I think we ought to just go,\" he said. \"I used to joke that NASA should be renamed NAMA \u2014 the National Aeronautics and Mars Administration \u2014 and I would still to some extent like to see that.\"\n\nBezos didn't object to someone, be it NASA or a private venture, sending humans to Mars, although he thought it would be more for the achievement of doing so rather than any science crewed missions there might do. \"I don't think you can justify sending men to Mars for science reasons. I think we have reached a state where robots can do that task, probably better than people can,\" he said.\n\nInstead, he said people should go because it's \"cool.\" \"I hope somebody goes to Mars because I want to watch it. I think it would be glorious,\"he said.\n\nBezos' near-term space focus is on Blue Origin, the company he founded to develop reusable launch vehicles that promise to reduce the cost of space access. Bezos announced on Twitter June 13 that the company would perform another test flight of its New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle on June 17, which, for the first time, will be webcast live on the company's website.\n\nBezos said Blue Origin, which now has about 700 employees, is on track to begin commercial New Shepard flights, carrying people, in 2018. \"We'll fly our first test astronauts in late 2017, hopefully, if the test program continues to go well,\" he said.\n\nThe company has not yet started to sell tickets for those flights. \"We don't know yet what exactly we're going to charge,\" he said, but suggested Blue Origin would charge a price similar to Virgin Galactic, which is offering seats on its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle for between $250,000 and $300,000 a person. \"We're going to be in the same range, to start with, and then keep working over time to make it cheaper.\"\n\nBezos has previously indicated he has invested at least $500 million of his own money into Blue Origin. At the event, Bezos said Blue Origin remains in \"investment mode\" and will eventually be profitable, but \"it's going to take a long time.\"\n\n\"It's for-profit,\" Bezos said of Blue Origin when asked if it was a for-profit or not-for-profit company, but stressed it is not yet profitable. \"Well, it's not yet. That's an intention for the glorious future.\"\n\nOriginally published on Space News."}
{"text":"Excellent accuracy!\n\nI got it from the FFL dealer 12\/23\/14 and when I got it home, measured the chamber with a Hornady C.O.A.L gauge. I reloaded 50 cartridges with IMR 7828 SSC, 80 gr. and seated the bullets so the length was 3.779\" I mounted a Vortex Viper PST 6-24X50 with the MRAD reticle and 2 days later took it to the range. I started with 100 yards, and my 5th, 6th, and 7th shots were in a 1\" bullseye, 2 going through the same hole. I switched to a 3\" target at 100 yards and had a 3 shot group .5\" just high and to the left, made the adjustments to center in the small bullseye and noticed the scope rings had loosened even using locktite, so I stopped. I've ordered Vortex's Precision Matched 30mm rings and am waiting to receive them. Once I remount the scope using the new rings, I'm going to zero it for 200 yards and post another review, but initially I'm VERY pleased! Oh, this is my 4th Savage rifle. I have a model 114 in 7mm magnum and can hit golf balls all day long at 100 yards. Dropped a large doe at 70 yards and she never even kicked because I shot the top of her heart off."}
{"text":"Time to stock up on the antidote for rattlesnake bites and boost blood supplies.\n\nMore than 1 million visitors are expected to flood the state for the solar eclipse Aug. 21 and hospitals in its path are ramping up for the massive influx.\n\nFor hospital systems from central Oregon to the coast, it will be all-hands on deck in the run-up and aftermath of the eclipse.\n\nWithout a precedent, planners have turned for advice to their counterparts in Sturgis, a town in South Dakota that attracts about a half a million people for a yearly motorcycle rally in August.\n\n\"One of the key things that we learned was that the need for acute care services oftentimes just mimics the increase in the population,\" said Dr. Jeff Absalon, executive vice president of St. Charles Health System in Bend.\n\nThat means more patients with food poisoning, broken bones, strokes and heart attacks. It also means more emergency surgeries for traumatic injuries.\n\nHere's what's planned:\n\nCENTRAL OREGON\n\nSt. Charles Health System, with hospitals and clinics in Bend, Redmond, Prineville and Madras, has an emergency plan for Aug. 16 to 23. It expects the local population to increase by 280,000, more than doubling.\n\nTo meet the demand, the hospital system has canceled elective surgeries, such as hernia operations and joint replacements. It has limited time off and contracted to bring in nearly 60 traveling nurses. Administrators have also moved staff around, shifting doctors and nurses from nonclinical positions to the emergency room.\n\nThe hospital system has stocked up on supplies, buying everything from extra gauze and saline solution to pharmaceuticals. It also received extra blood from the Red Cross in Portland, nearly doubling its supply.\n\nThe Red Cross declined to provide any details about its contingency plans but said it would have the need for blood covered.\n\nSt. Charles Health System also purchased extra antidote for rattlesnake bites.\n\n\"It's a little tricky because it has a short shelf life, said Lisa Goodman, spokeswoman for the hospital system.\n\nClinics in Bend, Redmond, Prineville and Madras will welcome walk-ins, with hours extended from 6 to 10 p.m.\n\nMadras, home to about 6,700 people, is expected to be ground zero.\n\n\"It is largely considered to be the very best place in the country to watch the eclipse because of geography and weather patterns,\" Goodman said.\n\nHospital staff expect a sixfold increase in patients in the Madras ER around the eclipse.\n\nThe hospital will have five physicians, nurse practitioners or physician assistants on duty at the hospital instead of the usual three. But the hospital has only 25 beds.\n\nThat means patients will have to be transported to other hospitals in the area or out of the region and the roads are expected to be clogged.\n\nUsually, two air ambulances serve the area. Two more will be added during the eclipse period, Absalon said. The Oregon Army National Guard also will make a Black Hawk helicopter available to transport patients.\n\nAdministrators will open hospital parking lots to staff, allowing them to camp out in their recreational vehicles to be closer to work.\n\nProviders have urged pregnant women due around the eclipse to be prepared but the hospital isn't altering due dates by inducing labor or doing C-sections\n\n\"There will be some instances where people may need to make alternate living arrangements,\" Absalon said. \"We won't be delivering babies outside the standard time for delivery.\"\n\nSALEM AREA\n\nSalem Health administrators have been planning for a year for an expected 500,000 visitors to their vicinity.\n\n\"We're expecting everything to be up by 25 percent,\" said Wayne McFarlin, emergency preparedness administrator for Salem Health, with hospitals in Salem and Dallas and clinics in Marion and Polk counties.\n\nThe hospital system has increased supplies across-the-board, hired contract nurses, moved staff from nonclinical positions and shifted schedules to ensure that more physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses and technicians are available.\n\n\"We've increased our emergency department and hospital staff,\" McFarlin said. \"We've boosted nurses in every unit that has in-patients.\"\n\nIn concrete terms, that means an extra 10 professionals in the ER, compared with 65 to 70 usually, to treat perhaps an extra 100 extra patients a day at Salem Hospital.\n\nAdministrators will allow staff to sleep onsite if they choose. Salem Hospital has about 70 cots; half have been reserved so far.\n\nThe hospital also has available floor space, if needed, for doctors and nurses to sleep over.\n\nElective surgeries haven't been canceled but only about a third the usual number are booked because patients and providers have selected other dates, McFarlin said.\n\nOn the Wednesday before the eclipse, Salem Hospital will set up three air-conditioned tents outside the ER to handle the demand. They will be used as triage centers and sobering stations. Patients will also be treated in the tents, as appropriate, and discharged.\n\nA command center will be set up in the hospital to track patients and to work with 11 other hospitals in the region.\n\nCORVALLIS TO THE COAST\n\nSamaritan Health Services has five hospitals -- in Corvallis, Newport, Albany, Lebanon and Lincoln City \u2013 and expects more patients at each.\n\nThere could be 150,000 visitors on the coast and as many as 300,000 in the Willamette Valley. Administrators hope to shift demand to urgent care clinics when possible to save ERs for more complicated care.\n\nThe hospital system is closing dozens of specialty clinics to move staff to 18 urgent and family care clinics from Sweet Home to Albany to Depoe Bay. From Friday through Monday, some of those clinics will have extended hours. Of the 18, 15 will be converted to walk-in clinics. Details are posted online.\n\nThe hospital system has asked staff to work extra hours if possible. They'll be able to sleep overnight at the hospitals or camp in parking lots, provided there's space.\n\nAdministrators are also hiring contract nurses.\n\nBut with so many other hospitals in need of professionals, there's a limit to how many extra professionals they can hire on a temporary basis, said Joseph Hutchinson, director of emergency management, safety and security for Samaritan Health Services.\n\n\"Would we like more? Absolutely,\" Hutchinson said. \"Can we get more? No.\"\n\nSamaritan Health Services has canceled elective surgeries and bought more food, medications and other supplies.\n\nLike central Oregon, the area serving Samaritan Health facilities will have four air ambulances instead of the usual two and more medical transport vehicles on the ground.\n\nProviders have urged pregnant women to be prepared. But the hospital system has refused requests by women who want to deliver the day of the eclipse.\n\n\"If a person is ready to deliver \u2013 they will deliver a baby,\" Hutchinson said. \"We are not encouraging or accommodating anyone who wants to have a baby born on the eclipse.\"\n\nEmergency managers are stationing extra security guards at clinics and they're activating emergency communications, with satellite phones and a network of volunteer ham radio operators.\n\nPlanners have tried to think of everything as if they were preparing for a major earthquake or disaster.\n\n\"It's an invaluable exercise,\" Hutchinson said. \"You can't get better training for emergency preparedness.\"\n\n-- Lynne Terry"}
{"text":"Hugo Schwyzer explains why guys are so preoccupied with getting women\u2019s sex stats\u2014and why they should just let it go.\n\nJudging from what I read online and hear from my students, the question of the \u201cnumber\u201d is as compelling as ever. This month, Marie Claire ran an article, \u201cWhat\u2019s Your Number?\u201d in which five women (whose numbers ranged from zero to 100) told their stories. The March issue of Cosmopolitan Australia features the same discussion, noting that 59 percent of readers surveyed thought knowing a partner\u2019s exact number was important, and that 33 percent of those same readers had lied about their own pasts, claiming fewer sexual partners than they\u2019d actually had.\n\n(A quick note: most people use \u201cthe number\u201d to refer to the count of people with whom they\u2019ve had heterosexual intercourse. Any kind of sex that doesn\u2019t involve a penis inside a vagina usually \u201cdoesn\u2019t count.\u201d A lot of us are like Bill Clinton in that regard, not seeing oral sex as real sex. This is a very limited\u2014and limiting\u2014understanding of what sex really is. But that\u2019s a topic for another day.)\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\nIt\u2019s understandable to be curious about the sexual lives of our peers. It makes sense to want to know what the averages are. (According to the experts at the Kinsey Institute, the average number of lifetime sexual partners for men aged 30 to 44 is around seven, while for women in that same age group, it\u2019s four\u2014both lower than you might think).\n\nDon\u2019t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free\n\nBut the number has different meanings for men and women. The old double standard is still alive and well: a man with more sexual partners than his buddies may be teasingly called a \u201cman whore,\u201d but the epithet is a compliment, not an insult. Ask a woman who has dared reveal her number to someone who considers it too high, and she\u2019ll surely tell you a story of being \u201cslut-shamed.\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s quite common for a guy to worry about a girlfriend\u2019s sexual past. Too many men are still raised to see sex as crude competition, in which bedding a woman who has already had a lot of lovers counts less than scoring with a woman who is \u201chard to get.\u201d But I think the average guy\u2019s worry is simpler than that. The more men his girlfriend has slept with, the greater number of lovers to which she can compare his skills. It\u2019s easier to win a contest against two than against 20, he figures. And even easier to rank first when he\u2019s the only one to have ever played the game. No wonder so many men\u2014in this country and around the world\u2014are obsessed with finding a virgin.\n\nThis is the real reason why so many men get so filled with rage at sexually experienced women. And of course, it\u2019s the real reason so many women feel compelled to lie about their number.\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\nToo many women have told their boyfriends their real number, only to be nagged incessantly for explicit details. (One friend of mine recounted to me in horror how her current boyfriend stopped one day in the middle of giving her oral sex to ask how his technique compared.) Other women find that their boyfriends endlessly psychoanalyze the reasons for a number that they think is too high: \u201cDid you sleep with so many men because your father left you when you were a child?\u201d (If I had a dollar for every woman I know who\u2019s been asked that question, I could buy everyone reading this a Slurpee. Seriously.)\n\nAt this point, some men are probably protesting: \u201cBut I don\u2019t slut-shame or endlessly analyze. For me, it\u2019s not all about competing with other guys. Isn\u2019t the number an important thing to know about someone you might be serious about? Isn\u2019t it something I have a right to know?\u201d\n\nThat sounds reasonable. But again, why is it so important to know an exact number? What difference does it make? Knowing whether a potential girlfriend has ever been in love before is important; discovering (slowly and patiently) how her past experiences have impacted her view of men (for better or worse) is important. But really, what\u2019s the difference whether she\u2019s slept with four or 14 men? She isn\u2019t defined by her number\u2014and if there\u2019s a chance you might change how you see her when you discover the truth (should she tell you), why ask?\n\nThis has nothing to do, by the way, with asking about sexual health. It\u2019s a great idea to talk about sexually transmitted infections; it\u2019s a great idea for a new couple to get tested before having unprotected sex. We have a right to know if a potential partner has herpes. But the exact number itself is altogether different.\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\nI lost my virginity at 17 to my high-school girlfriend. She was a year younger but much more sexually experienced. She was my first for anything that went below the waist; I was the fifth guy she\u2019d had sex with. I\u2019d asked her number, of course, and then fought hard not to obsess about the four boys who had \u201cbeen there\u201d before me. But I saw the pain my questions caused her. And I came to realize that it didn\u2019t matter.\n\nI don\u2019t know my wife\u2019s number. I\u2019ve never asked her. She\u2019s never asked for mine. I know enough from the stories she\u2019s told to know that there was more than one guy before me; she knows enough about my past to figure out that she can\u2019t count my lovers on her fingers. Beyond that, we\u2014who have shared so much sexually and emotionally in our nine years as a couple, six years as spouses, and two years as parents together\u2014don\u2019t need to know more specifics.\n\nWhen we\u2019re in a monogamous relationship, what we have a right to insist on is that no names get added to the list after our own. It doesn\u2019t matter if I\u2019m number five or 55. I\u2019ll be crushed if my wife adds a number six or a 56 behind my back.\n\nDon\u2019t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free\n\nBut the right to ask to be last is not the same as the right to know how far we are from the first. And for me, part of being a good man is knowing what I don\u2019t need to know.\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\nOther Stories From the Good Men Project Magazine:\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\nDon\u2019t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free\n\n\u2666\u25ca\u2666\n\n\u2014Photo by eflon\/Flickr\n\nWhy Does It Matter How Many Partners She\u2019s Had?"}
{"text":"You drift towards a pastel island where everything sings as you pass.\n\nThe sky begins to darken and something in the distance catches your eye\u2026\n\nI\u2019m Ed Key, one of the developers of Proteus along with composer David Kanaga. Proteus came out for the PC and Mac in January 2013 and had a fantastic reception from Edge, Eurogamer, IGN and many more. For something that started out as a weird experimental project between me and David, this was pretty mind-blowing, and it\u2019s even crazier to now have the chance to bring it to PS3 and PS Vita with some brand new features that take advantage of Sony\u2019s hardware.\n\nProteus is something like a constantly-remixing ambient album in the form of an immersive island world. It\u2019s all about a particular feeling of wandering through nature alone, taking it in and getting pleasantly lost. Maybe it\u2019s a little bit about magic and mortality too. Don\u2019t expect tasks and scores and checklists \u2013 perhaps Proteus lurks somewhere on the shady fringes of what it means to be a game.\n\nWith the PS Vita and PS3 version we\u2019ve been adding new ways to engage with \u2013 and remix \u2013 the world. Previously, all Proteus islands were purely random, but on PS Vita, you can now choose to generate an island based on your current geographical location and on both platforms you can generate an island for the current date.\n\nBoth features have a chance of generating an especially \u201cwild\u201d island with various tweaks and twists. The island at my house, for example, has weird purple sea, green sky in the evening and some pleasant (but still very purple) inland lakes.\n\nWe\u2019ve also added a way for users to interact with the environment using the back touch screen, and we\u2019ll be talking more about this closer to release.\n\nCurve Studios is doing a fantastic job bringing the game to PlayStation, adding a lot of love and polish along the way. Playing it hand-held on the Vita\u2019s bright OLED screen is so nice, as is the experience of playing it a on big television through the PlayStation 3. We\u2019ve had a very positive response to the PlayStation version from people I\u2019ve shown it to, and I\u2019m happy to quote a friend here and say that it\u2019s the best version of Proteus there\u2019s ever been!"}
{"text":"5 TV Shows I Wish I Could Unsee\n\nLike everyone else, I\u2019ve seen my share of television shows I disliked.\n\nSome simply weren\u2019t my taste while others were objectively awful, and usually it\u2019s not a big deal. No harm, no foul; I just move on to something else.\n\nOnce in a while, though, a show hits me so wrong that it sticks with me, burrowing into my brain like an irritating bug until I want to scoop it out with a melon baller.\n\nHere are five such shows that I wish I could go back in time and unsee.\n\n[Warning: There are some spoilers in the following discussion]\n\nJOEY\n\nI loved Friends. I laughed (and occasionally cried) with them through ugly naked guy poking, the endless Ross-Rachel rollercoaster (I don\u2019t care that you were on a break, Ross!) and God knows how many cups of coffee at Central Perk. When it was announced that Matt LeBlanc was spinning off Joey, I thought it had a chance since it had worked for Frasier when Cheers ended. Wishful thinking on my part; obviously, but I wasn\u2019t quite ready to let go.\n\nA few episodes of Joey later, and I couldn\u2019t run away fast enough.\n\nThe show wasn\u2019t funny and Joey was no longer loveable-just dumber, more deluded, and much more grating. I wished I hadn\u2019t made the move to LA with him because it made me miss Friends even more.\n\nCOUPLING (USA)\n\nAs a fan of the original Coupling, I had to check out the American version despite, shall we say, less than stellar reviews. I ended up only watching two episodes, but that was more than enough (and it didn\u2019t last much longer than that, anyway).\n\nWhy were the jokes I had laughed at uproariously in the UK version suddenly so unfunny, and how is it possible that none of the actors had any chemistry?\n\nIn an especially cruel trick, BBC America showed the UK version of the Coupling episode immediately after NBC aired its version. The difference in quality between the two was embarrassing and made me suspicious of any future American remakes.\n\nHOARDERS\n\nThis one is my fault.\n\nI have clutter issues\u2013I know this, and yet one night while flipping through the channels, I landed on a Hoarders marathon and couldn\u2019t look away.\n\nThis show is both disturbing and riveting on so many levels. While I squirmed at the disgusting \u201cliving\u201d conditions with the piles upon piles of paper, trinkets, and garbage, the people destroyed me. This is a serious illness on display for everyone to gawk at as if it were a train wreck. I know I couldn\u2019t look away. At least not until an episode involving animals came on and the sheer horror of that broke the spell.\n\nI had nightmares for a week, and I\u2019ve never watched another episode, but I wish I could forget the ones I did see.\n\nVIVA LAUGHLIN\n\nI hadn\u2019t seen Viva Blackpool, the British miniseries upon which Viva Laughlin was based, but Hugh Jackman in a musical murder mystery show? Come on! I thought it would be delicious.\n\nInstead it was bland, clich\u00e9d, almost incomprehensible, and flat-out terrible with some of the worst dialogue ever uttered. And don\u2019t get me started on the not quite lip synching but not really singing, either.\n\nThis show made Cop Rock look Emmy-worthy .\n\nPERSONS UNKNOWN\n\nNot only do I wish I could unsee Persons Unknown, I wish I could forget it ever existed.\n\nI originally thought it was a fascinating idea for a show-seven strangers wake up in a strange hotel in a deserted town with no idea how they got there. So many possibilities, and while the pilot was just okay, there was a tremendous amount of promise, so I created a season pass.\n\nBig mistake. Huge.\n\nIt went steadily downhill after the pilot meandering down blind plot alleys and never quite settling on a tone with characters who became less interesting as the show wore on. I still stayed with it because I had to know how it would end, and NBC promised we would get answers.\n\nHa! Persons Unknown spun its rusty wheels, looping back and forth and creating giant plot holes in the process, until the finale when we got\u2013nothing. We still didn\u2019t know what the \u201cProgram\u201d was and the characters we had hoped would escape were once again stuck. Sure, some of them had made it to level two in the middle of the ocean, but I didn\u2019t spend thirteen hours to find out the whole show was just a video game.\n\nMost maddening finale I have ever seen.\n\nWorse, I had to listen to my husband complain about \u201cthat God awful show you made me watch\u201d for a month and he still brings it up if I suggest a new show. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to be like that terrible Persons Unknown, is it?\u201d Sigh.\n\nIf I had Hermione\u2019s time turner, those are the shows I would go back and unsee. What about you? Are there any shows that you wish you could erase from your memory? Let me know in the comments."}
{"text":"About\n\nScroll down to just below the last Stretch-Goals to PLAY The Selfie Board Game NOW!\n\nYou'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with\n\nsound 00:00 00:00\n\nPRESS RELEASE (scroll down for additional languages)\n\nPress Release (Version 1):\n\nAt 10am EST USA on 6th January 2016 (2am 7th January Australia), The Selfie Board Game will go live on Kickstarter (https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG) Launched by Aussie toy and game designer\/manufacturer Ken Howard, this is your chance to catch the vision of this exciting new game and genre. People will be able to pledge support for the game, in return for STARRING IN THE GAME plus ordering first copies. The object of The Selfie Board Game, is simply, to describe someone's appearance JUST from the sound of their voice BEFORE their selfie is revealed. This is a game for the whole world, for every language, every culture and every race, so that The Selfie Board Game builds these bridges internationally. The game headquarters will be based in Philadelphia, USA.\n\nKickstarter link: https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG\n\nOr go to Kickstarter and search for The Selfie Board Game to pledge \/ order your copy or to preview the game.\n\nOur Facebook page is: https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/SelfieBoardGame\n\nOur Web Page: www.TheSelfieBoardGame.com\n\nPress Release (Version 2):\n\nAustralian Ken Howard, in partnership with American Mark Mercer, launched Ken\u2019s Selfie Board Game on Kickstarter on the 6th January. The game aims to address issues of race and colour from an angle that has not been addressed before. Namely from our voices. Ken, who develops toys and games for clients all over the world, knows firsthand, the reaction to his Aussie accent in other countries. Having lived in Europe, Africa and the USA, he has come to appreciate his friends from all over the world. Ken says he sees \u2018features\u2019 not colour. In fact, Ken\u2019s mission is to do away with the \u2018colour\u2019 word altogether. He argues that if you went to a paint store after something BLUISH for your bedroom, you\u2019d go to the blue swatch which ranges from dark and royal blue down to pale, almost, white blue. He contends it is the same with human skin. We humans are in the brown range and therefore TONE should be used as a reference instead of colour. He jokes being Australian that he is in fact pink, getting burnt easily from the sunny weather down under. He addresses these issues in his new game, called The Selfie Board Game, where the object is to describe someone\u2019s appearance, just from the sound of their voice, before their selfie is revealed.\n\nUsing only your voice, which will be uploaded into an App, this VOICIE, as he calls it, tells a lot about you and who you are. From your gender to the language that you speak, to your accent, which can even lead you to guessing someone\u2019s eye colour. Howard makes some valid arguments in his thesis-like presentation where he has an Essay on Heritage as well as going into the linguistics of language. He certainly has done a lot of research and gone into great detail for the game. He says he is using Crowd Funding as a means to quickly \u2018get\u2019 the voicies and selfies he needs for the game. In short, it is a unique take on \u2018Guess Who\u2019 and with the inclusion of an App. He hopes this social media board game will evolve into its own product range including music, a toy hover car and even a TV game show. His experience in developing thousands of toys and games over the years, certainly puts this Aussie in the can-do bracket. We wish him all the best. Just search for The Selfie Board Game on Kickstarter.com is you wish to secure an EARLY copy of the game.\n\nPress Release (Version 3):\n\nDo you ever listen to the radio and wonder just what does that person look like? We all do it and make mental images of the person on the other end of the microphone. Australian Toy and Game Manufacturer Ken Howard, in partnership with Mark Mercer of Philadelphia USA, are launching Ken\u2019s new Selfie Board Game on Kickstarter, a game which addresses this exact issue. Ken says that in his travels all over the world, he was always fascinated meeting new clients he has only spoken to on the phone. He said that, in listening more, he honed in on what he thought the person would look like when he met them in person. He said being a designer, he has always noticed features and sounds first. and has taken this to a level not thought of before in his new game. Mary Couzin, owner of Discovery Games and the Chicago Toy and Game Fair commented: \u201cWow you wrote a thesis\u201d, referring to his Kickstarter page after being shown a preview. In fact, former Vice President of Hasbro, Mike Hirtle, even lent Ken his \u201cvoicie\u201d and \u201cselfie\u201d for the game which you can actually play within the Kickstarter web site. I am sure you will be surprised what you can learn about someone\u2019s voice. I certainly was, in reading Ken\u2019s Essay on the subject of linguistics on the site. It honestly looks like a hit with his new social media board game. Check it out on Kickstarter, search for The Selfie Board Game.\n\nPress Release\n\nUm 10 Uhr EST USA am 6. Januar 2016 wird die Selfie Brettspiel live auf Kickstarter (https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG) gehen Durch Aussie Spielzeug und Spieldesigner Ken Howard ins Leben gerufen , ist dies Ihre Chance, die Vision von diesem aufregenden neuen Spiel und Genre zu fangen. Die Menschen werden in der Lage, Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr das Spiel f\u00fcr immer erste und fr\u00fche Kopien verpflichten , im Gegenzug . Die Aufgabe der Selfie Brettspiel, ist einfach , um jemandes Aussehen gerade aus dem Klang ihrer Stimme zu beschreiben , BEVOR ihre selfie wird enth\u00fcllt. Dies ist ein Spiel f\u00fcr die ganze Welt , f\u00fcr jede Sprache , jeder Kultur und jeder Rasse , so dass die Selfie Brettspiel baut Br\u00fccken international . Die Spiel Hauptsitz in Philadelphia, USA basieren. Gehen Sie zu Kickstarter und die Suche nach der Selfie Brettspiel zu verpf\u00e4nden \/ bestellen Sie Ihre Kopie oder , um das Spiel\n\nComunicato Stampa\n\nAlle ore 10 EST USA il 6 gennaio 2016, il Selfie Gioco di societ\u00e0 andr\u00e0 in diretta su Kickstarter (https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG) Lanciato da giocattolo Aussie e game designer Ken Howard , questa \u00e8 la tua possibilit\u00e0 di prendere visione di questo nuovo ed entusiasmante gioco e il genere . Le persone saranno in grado di impegnarsi il supporto per il gioco , in cambio di ottenere prime e prime copie . L'oggetto del Selfie Gioco di societ\u00e0, \u00e8 semplicemente , per descrivere l'aspetto di qualcuno solo dal suono della loro voce prima che i loro selfie \u00e8 rivelato. Questo \u00e8 un gioco per tutto il mondo , per ogni lingua , ogni cultura e ogni razza , in modo che il Selfie Board Game costruisce ponti a livello internazionale . La sede di gioco sar\u00e0 basato a Filadelfia , Stati Uniti d'America . Vai a Kickstarter e cercare Il Selfie Board Game di pegno \/ ordinare la propria copia o per visualizzare in anteprima il\n\nCommuniqu\u00e9 de presse\n\n\u00c0 10h HNE USA le 6 Janvier 2016, Le Jeu de soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Selfie ira en direct sur Kickstarter (https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG) Lanc\u00e9 par jouet Aussie et game designer Ken Howard , ceci est votre chance d'attraper la vision de ce nouveau jeu passionnant et le genre. Les gens vont \u00eatre en mesure d' engager \u00e0 soutenir le jeu , en \u00e9change de l'obtention premi\u00e8res et au d\u00e9but des copies . L'objet de la planche de jeu Selfie , est tout simplement , pour d\u00e9crire l'apparence de quelqu'un seulement du son de leur voix avant leur selfie est r\u00e9v\u00e9l\u00e9. Ceci est un jeu pour le monde entier , pour chaque langue , chaque culture et chaque course , de sorte que le plateau de jeu Selfie construit des ponts \u00e0 l'\u00e9chelle internationale . Le si\u00e8ge social de jeu sera bas\u00e9 \u00e0 Philadelphie , USA . Aller \u00e0 Kickstarter et de recherche pour Le Jeu de soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Selfie \u00e0 gage \/ commander votre copie ou de pr\u00e9visualiser le jeu .\n\n\u05e9\u05e2\u05ea 10 \u05d1\u05d1\u05d5\u05e7\u05e8 EST \u05d0\u05e8\u05d4\"\u05d1 \u05d1 -6 \u05d1\u05d9\u05e0\u05d5\u05d0\u05e8 2016,\u05e2\u05dc \u05d4\u05d3\u05d9\u05d5\u05e7\u05e0\u05d9\u05dd \u05d4\u05e2\u05e6\u05de\u05d9\u05d9\u05dd \u05dc\u05d5\u05d7 \u05d4\u05de\u05e9\u05d7\u05e7 \u05d9\u05dc\u05da \u05d1\u05e9\u05d9\u05d3\u05d5\u05e8 \u05d7\u05d9 \u05d1 Kickstarter (https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG) \u05d4\u05d5\u05e9\u05e7\u05d4 \u05e2\u05dc \u05d9\u05d3\u05d9 \u05e6\u05e2\u05e6\u05d5\u05e2 \u05d0\u05d5\u05e1\u05d9\u05d5\u05de\u05e2\u05e6\u05d1 \u05de\u05e9\u05d7\u05e7 \u05e7\u05df \u05d4\u05d5\u05d5\u05d0\u05e8\u05d3 , \u05d6\u05d5 \u05d4\u05d4\u05d6\u05d3\u05de\u05e0\u05d5\u05ea \u05e9\u05dc\u05da \u05db\u05d3\u05d9 \u05dc\u05ea\u05e4\u05d5\u05e1 \u05d0\u05ea \u05d4\u05d7\u05d6\u05d5\u05df \u05e9\u05dc \u05d4\u05de\u05e9\u05d7\u05e7 \u05d4\u05d6\u05d4 \u05de\u05e8\u05d2\u05e9 \u05d4\u05d7\u05d3\u05e9\u05d5\u05d6'\u05d0\u05e0\u05e8 . \u05d0\u05e0\u05e9\u05d9\u05dd \u05d9\u05d5\u05db\u05dc\u05d5 \u05dc\u05e9\u05e2\u05d1\u05d3 \u05ea\u05de\u05d9\u05db\u05d4 \u05d1\u05de\u05e9\u05d7\u05e7 , \u05d1\u05ea\u05de\u05d5\u05e8\u05d4 \u05dc\u05e7\u05d1\u05dc\u05ea \u05e2\u05d5\u05ea\u05e7\u05d9\u05dd \u05d4\u05e8\u05d0\u05e9\u05d5\u05e0\u05d9\u05dd\u05d5\u05de\u05d5\u05e7\u05d3\u05de\u05d9\u05dd . \u05d4\u05d0\u05d5\u05d1\u05d9\u05d9\u05e7\u05d8 \u05e9\u05dc\u05d4\u05d3\u05d9\u05d5\u05e7\u05e0\u05d9\u05dd \u05d4\u05e2\u05e6\u05de\u05d9\u05d9\u05dd \u05dc\u05d5\u05d7 \u05d4\u05de\u05e9\u05d7\u05e7 , \u05d4\u05d5\u05d0 \u05e4\u05e9\u05d5\u05d8 , \u05db\u05d3\u05d9 \u05dc\u05ea\u05d0\u05e8 \u05d0\u05ea \u05d4\u05d4\u05d5\u05e4\u05e2\u05d4 \u05e9\u05dc \u05de\u05d9\u05e9\u05d4\u05d5 \u05e8\u05e7\u05de\u05d4\u05e7\u05d5\u05dc \u05e9\u05dc\u05d4\u05dd\u05dc\u05e4\u05e0\u05d9 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\u05d0\u05ea\u05d4\u05d3\u05d9\u05d5\u05e7\u05df \u05d4\u05e2\u05e6\u05de\u05d9 \u05dc\u05d5\u05d7 \u05d4\u05de\u05e9\u05d7\u05e7 \u05dc\u05e9\u05e2\u05d1\u05d3 \/ \u05dc\u05d4\u05d6\u05de\u05d9\u05df \u05d4\u05e2\u05d5\u05ea\u05e7 \u05e9\u05dc\u05da \u05d0\u05d5 \u05dc\u05e6\u05e4\u05d5\u05ea \u05d1\u05ea\u05e6\u05d5\u05d2\u05d4 \u05de\u05e7\u05d3\u05d9\u05de\u05d4 \u05e9\u05dc \u05d4\u05de\u05e9\u05d7\u05e7 .\n\n\u0641\u064a 10:00 EST \u0627\u0644\u0648\u0644\u0627\u064a\u0627\u062a \u0627\u0644\u0645\u062a\u062d\u062f\u0629 \u0627\u0644\u0623\u0645\u0631\u064a\u0643\u064a\u0629 \u0641\u064a \u064a\u0646\u0627\u064a\u0631 6th \u0639\u0627\u0645 2016\u060c \u0641\u0625\u0646 \u0644\u0639\u0628\u0629 Selfie \u0627\u0644\u0645\u062c\u0644\u0633 \u064a\u0630\u0647\u0628 \u0648\u064a\u0639\u064a\u0634 \u0639\u0644\u0649 Kickstarter (https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG) \u0627\u0644\u062a\u064a \u0623\u0637\u0644\u0642\u062a\u0647\u0627 \u0644\u0639\u0628\u0629 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\u0641\u064a\u0644\u0627\u062f\u0644\u0641\u064a\u0627 \u060c \u0627\u0644\u0648\u0644\u0627\u064a\u0627\u062a \u0627\u0644\u0645\u062a\u062d\u062f\u0629 \u0627\u0644\u0623\u0645\u0631\u064a\u0643\u064a\u0629 . \u0627\u0644\u0630\u0647\u0627\u0628 \u0625\u0644\u0649 \u0643\u064a\u0643 \u0633\u062a\u0627\u0631\u062a\u0631 \u0648\u0627\u0644\u0628\u062d\u062b \u0639\u0646 \u0644\u0639\u0628\u0629 Selfie \u0627\u0644\u0645\u062c\u0644\u0633 \u0646\u062a\u0639\u0647\u062f \/ \u0637\u0644\u0628 \u0646\u0633\u062e\u062a\u0643 \u0623\u0648 \u0644\u0645\u0639\u0627\u064a\u0646\u0629 \u0627\u0644\u0644\u0639\u0628\u0629.\n\nPress Release:\n\nSa 10:00 EST USA sa Enero 6, 2016 , Board Game Ang Selfie ay magiging live sa Kickstarter (https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG) Inilunsad sa pamamagitan ng Aussie laruan at laro designer Ken Howard, ito ay ang iyong pagkakataon upang mahuli ang paningin ng kapana-panabik na bagong laro at genre. Ang mga tao ay maaaring makapag upang nangako ng suporta para sa mga laro, sa bumalik para sa pagkuha ng una at unang bahagi ng kopya. Ang object ng Board Game Ang Selfie , ay lamang, upang ilarawan ang hitsura ng isang tao JUST mula sa tunog ng kanilang mga boses BAGO kanilang selfie ay mahayag. Ito ay isang laro para sa buong mundo , para sa bawat wika, ang bawat kultura at sa bawat lahi, kaya na ang gagawa ng Board Game Ang Selfie tulay internationally. Ang punong-himpilan ng laro ay batay sa Philadelphia, USA. Pumunta sa Kickstarter at paghahanap para sa Board Game Ang Selfie upang isangla \/ order ang iyong kopya o para\n\nTiskov\u00e1 zpr\u00e1va:\n\nV 10 hodin EST USA dne 6. ledna 2016 , bude Selfie Board Game j\u00edt \u017e\u00edt na Kickstarter (https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG) Zah\u00e1jena Aussie hra\u010dky a hern\u00ed design\u00e9r Ken Howard , to je va\u0161e \u0161ance chytit vizi t\u00e9to vzru\u0161uj\u00edc\u00ed nov\u00e9 hry a \u017e\u00e1nru. Lid\u00e9 se budou moci p\u0159isl\u00edbit podporu pro hru , na opl\u00e1tku pro z\u00edsk\u00e1n\u00ed prvn\u00ed a \u010dasn\u00e9 kopie. P\u0159edm\u011btem Selfie Board Game , je prost\u011b , popsat n\u011b\u010d\u00ed vzhled JUST od zvuku jejich hlasu p\u0159ed jejich selfie je odhaleno . To je hra pro cel\u00fd sv\u011bt , pro ka\u017ed\u00fd jazyk , ka\u017ed\u00e9 kultu\u0159e a ka\u017ed\u00e9m z\u00e1vod\u011b , tak, aby se Selfie Board Game stav\u00ed mosty v mezin\u00e1rodn\u00edm m\u011b\u0159\u00edtku. Hra \u00fast\u0159ed\u00ed budou zalo\u017eeny ve Philadelphii , USA. P\u0159ejd\u011bte na Kickstarter a hledat Selfie Board Game do z\u00e1stavy \/ objednejte si kopii , nebo zobrazit n\u00e1hled hru.\n\n\u041f\u0440\u0435\u0441\u0441-\u0440\u0435\u043b\u0438\u0437:\n\n\u0412 10 \u0443\u0442\u0440\u0430 EST \u0421\u0428\u0410 \u043d\u0430 6 \u044f\u043d\u0432\u0430\u0440\u044f 2016 \u0433. Selfie \u041d\u0430\u0441\u0442\u043e\u043b\u044c\u043d\u0430\u044f \u0438\u0433\u0440\u0430 \u043f\u043e\u0439\u0434\u0435\u0442 \u0432 \u043f\u0440\u044f\u043c\u043e\u043c \u044d\u0444\u0438\u0440\u0435 \u043d\u0430 Kickstarter (https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG) \u041d\u0430\u0447\u0430\u0442\u0430\u044f \u0430\u0432\u0441\u0442\u0440\u0430\u043b\u0438\u0439\u0441\u043a\u043e\u0433\u043e \u0438\u0433\u0440\u0443\u0448\u043a\u0438 \u0438 \u0438\u0433\u0440\u043e\u0432\u043e\u0439 \u0434\u0438\u0437\u0430\u0439\u043d\u0435\u0440 \u041a\u0435\u043d \u0425\u043e\u0432\u0430\u0440\u0434 , \u044d\u0442\u043e \u0432\u0430\u0448 \u0448\u0430\u043d\u0441 , \u0447\u0442\u043e\u0431\u044b \u043f\u043e\u0439\u043c\u0430\u0442\u044c \u0432\u0438\u0434\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435 \u044d\u0442\u043e\u0439 \u0437\u0430\u0445\u0432\u0430\u0442\u044b\u0432\u0430\u044e\u0449\u0435\u0439 \u043d\u043e\u0432\u043e\u0439 \u0438\u0433\u0440\u044b \u0438 \u0436\u0430\u043d\u0440\u0430. \u041b\u044e\u0434\u0438 \u0441\u043c\u043e\u0433\u0443\u0442 \u0437\u0430\u043a\u043b\u0430\u0434\u044b\u0432\u0430\u0442\u044c \u043f\u043e\u0434\u0434\u0435\u0440\u0436\u043a\u0443 \u0434\u043b\u044f \u0438\u0433\u0440\u044b , \u0432 \u043e\u0431\u043c\u0435\u043d \u043d\u0430 \u043f\u043e\u043b\u0443\u0447\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435 \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0432\u043e\u0433\u043e \u0438 \u0440\u0430\u043d\u043d\u0438\u0435 \u043a\u043e\u043f\u0438\u0438 . \u041e\u0431\u044a\u0435\u043a\u0442 Selfie \u041d\u0430\u0441\u0442\u043e\u043b\u044c\u043d\u0430\u044f \u0438\u0433\u0440\u0430 , \u044d\u0442\u043e \u043f\u0440\u043e\u0441\u0442\u043e , \u0447\u0442\u043e\u0431\u044b \u043e\u043f\u0438\u0441\u0430\u0442\u044c \u0447\u044c\u044e-\u0442\u043e \u0432\u043d\u0435\u0448\u043d\u043e\u0441\u0442\u044c \u0442\u043e\u043b\u044c\u043a\u043e \u043e\u0442 \u0437\u0432\u0443\u043a\u0430 \u0438\u0445 \u0433\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0441\u0430 \u0434\u043e \u0438\u0445 selfie \u0440\u0430\u0441\u043a\u0440\u044b\u0432\u0430\u0435\u0442\u0441\u044f . \u042d\u0442\u043e \u0438\u0433\u0440\u0430 \u0434\u043b\u044f \u0432\u0441\u0435\u0433\u043e \u043c\u0438\u0440\u0430 , \u0434\u043b\u044f \u043a\u0430\u0436\u0434\u043e\u0433\u043e \u044f\u0437\u044b\u043a\u0430 , \u043a\u0430\u0436\u0434\u043e\u0439 \u043a\u0443\u043b\u044c\u0442\u0443\u0440\u0435 \u0438 \u043a\u0430\u0436\u0434\u043e\u0439 \u0433\u043e\u043d\u043a\u0435 , \u0442\u0430\u043a \u0447\u0442\u043e Selfie \u041d\u0430\u0441\u0442\u043e\u043b\u044c\u043d\u0430\u044f \u0438\u0433\u0440\u0430 \u0441\u0442\u0440\u043e\u0438\u0442 \u043c\u043e\u0441\u0442\u044b \u043d\u0430 \u043c\u0435\u0436\u0434\u0443\u043d\u0430\u0440\u043e\u0434\u043d\u043e\u043c \u0443\u0440\u043e\u0432\u043d\u0435. \u0418\u0433\u0440\u0430 \u0448\u0442\u0430\u0431-\u043a\u0432\u0430\u0440\u0442\u0438\u0440\u0430 \u0431\u0443\u0434\u0435\u0442 \u043d\u0430\u0445\u043e\u0434\u0438\u0442\u044c\u0441\u044f \u0432 \u0424\u0438\u043b\u0430\u0434\u0435\u043b\u044c\u0444\u0438\u0438 , \u0421\u0428\u0410 . \u041f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u0439\u0442\u0438 \u043a Kickstarter \u0438 \u043f\u043e\u0438\u0441\u043a Selfie \u041d\u0430\u0441\u0442\u043e\u043b\u044c\u043d\u0430\u044f \u0438\u0433\u0440\u0430 \u0432 \u0437\u0430\u043b\u043e\u0433 \/ \u0437\u0430\u043a\u0430\u0437\u0430\u0442\u044c \u043a\u043e\u043f\u0438\u044e \u0438\u043b\u0438 \u043f\u0440\u0435\u0432\u044c\u044e \u043d\u0430 \u0438\u0433\u0440\u0443 .\n\nOp 10:00 EST VSA op 6 Januarie 2016 , sal die Selfie Board Game gaan woon op www.Kickstarter.com . Van stapel gestuur deur Aussie speelgoed en spel ontwerper Ken Howard , is dit jou kans om die visie van hierdie opwindende nuwe spel en genre te vang. Mense sal in staat wees om ondersteuning belowe vir die spel, in ruil vir die kry van die eerste en vroe\u00eb kopie\u00eb. Die doel van die Selfie Board Game , is eenvoudig , om iemand se voorkoms te beskryf net uit die klank van hul stem voor hul selfie geopenbaar word. Dit is 'n spel vir die hele w\u00eareld , vir elke taal, elke kultuur en elke ras, sodat die Selfie Board Game bou br\u00fbe internasionaal. Die spel hoofkwartier sal gebaseer word in Philadelphia , VSA. Gaan na Kickstarter en soek vir die Selfie Board Game pand \/ bestel jou kopie of om 'n voorbeeld van die spel.\n\nNa na 10am Est USA on 6 January 2016, The selfie Board Game ga-aga -ebi nd\u1ee5 na Kickstarter (https:\/\/goo.gl\/bMnwkG) Agbam onya site Aussie ji egwuri egwu na egwuregwu mmebe Ken Howard , nke a b\u1ee5 g\u1ecb ohere enwetagh\u1ecb \u1ecdh\u1ee5\u1ee5 nke a na-akpali akpali \u1ecdh\u1ee5r\u1ee5 egwuregwu na genre . Nd\u1ecb mmad\u1ee5 ga-enwe ike nkwa nkwado maka egwuregwu, na nloghachi n'ihi na mb\u1ee5 na n'oge mbip\u1ee5ta. Ihe The selfie Board Game, b\u1ee5 nan\u1ecb, na-ak\u1ecdwa onye eketie naan\u1ecb \u1ee5da nke olu-ha TUPU ha selfie na-ekpughe. Nke a b\u1ee5 egwuregwu maka nke \u1ee5wa dum , nke \u1ecd b\u1ee5la as\u1ee5s\u1ee5 , \u1ecd b\u1ee5la omenala na agb\u1ee5r\u1ee5 nile , nke mere na The selfie Board Game ewuli \u00e0kw\u00e0 mmiri mba. Egwuregwu n'isi \u1ee5l\u1ecd \u1ecdr\u1ee5 ga-dabere na Philadelphia, USA. Gaa Kickstarter ma ch\u1ecd\u1ecd The selfie Board Game ka nkwa \/ \u1ecbt\u1ee5 g\u1ecb Detuo ma \u1ecd b\u1ee5 ka \u1ecbh\u1ee5chal\u1ee5 egwuregwu."}
{"text":"A U.S. Navy sailor arrested on a charge of raping a Japanese woman in Okinawa has admitted to the crime, investigative sources said Wednesday. They said he reversed an earlier denial.\n\nJustin Castellanos, 24, who is based at the U.S. Marines\u2019 Camp Schwab in northern Okinawa, was arrested on March 13 on suspicion of raping the woman in her 40s at a hotel in Naha early that morning.\n\nPolice allege Castellanos took the woman, a tourist from Fukuoka Prefecture, into his room after finding her asleep in a hotel corridor and raped her.\n\nThe suspect and the woman were both staying at the hotel but were not acquainted, the police said.\n\nThe alleged incident resulted in protests by thousands of people in Okinawa, which hosts the bulk of U.S. military facilities in Japan."}
{"text":"The US is playing catch up to Australia when it comes to regulating trans fatty acid, but that doesn't mean our food is trans-fat free, some of the country's peak nutritional experts say.\n\nThe Obama Administration on Tuesday ordered ordered food companies to phase out artificial trans fats over the next three years, calling them a threat to public health.\n\nTrans fats are more likely to be found in processed foods including pastries, doughnuts and cakes at the cheaper end of the market. Credit:M. Spencer Green\n\nTrans fats are a particularly nasty fat that increases LDL, or 'bad' cholesterol levels and decreases 'good' HDL cholesterol levels, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes.\n\nTrans-fatty acids are created by treating vegetable oils with hydrogen, which causes the liquid oil to hold its solid form at room temperature, which helps food products like doughnuts, biscuits and cakes hold their shape and extends their shelf life."}
{"text":"Every student dreams of reading these words: \"Congratulations on your acceptance!\" But Elsik High School senior Amina Mabizari read them 15 times.\n\nShe applied to 16 universities, including eight Ivy League institutions.\n\n\"I didn't think I'd get accepted to any of them. By casting a wide net I thought someone would take the bait and take me,\" Mabizari said.\n\nBut when every letter had been opened this spring, seven of those Ivy League universities wanted her.\n\n\"I can't even put into words how big of a moment that was for me,\" Mabizari said.\n\nThe proud daughter of Algerian immigrants is about to graduate from Alief ISD. Mabizari's road to success wasn't an easy one. As a young student, she was last in her class in ready, even suffered with a speech impediment.\n\n\"To go from there to here being accepted to all these schools, it's incredible,\" Mabizari said.\n\nMabizari said she couldn't have done it without her parents.\n\n\"At that moment, I almost cried. It was just an unbelievable moment for me,\" said Mabizari's father, Bachir Mabizari.\n\nAnd if you thought applying to 16 schools was tough, deciding which one to go to was even harder. But this fall, Amina Mabizari's heading to Yale.\n\n\"I never imagined any of this would happen,\" she said.\n\nAmina Mabizari is as humble as they come. A proud, hard-working Muslim-American who now hopes her success story in Alief sends a loud message across the country.\n\n\"We represent a large community of people, the majority, the mass majority of which are positive and want to change the world,\" Amina Mabizari said.\n\nThis year, the Ivy League schools had an acceptance rate anywhere from 5 to 12 percent. Amina Mabizari plans to study political science and then go on to law school. She said she may also one day run for public office."}
{"text":"\"Anybody not reading [Tim Carney] regularly doesn't understand what's truly going on in DC or in the GOP,\" tweeted Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action. Since Heritage Action is driving quite a bit of what goes on in the Republican Party these days that's a strong endorsement.\n\nCarney, a columnist at the Washington Examiner and author of \"The Big Ripoff\" and \"Obamanomics,\" is the foremost chronicler of the idea that Republicans should become a populist party at war with favor-seeking business interests in Washington. And he's argued that that's part of what's going on in this shutdown fight. We spoke on Thursday, and a lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.\n\nWhat's that pig thinking? (Flickr\/CC)\n\nEzra Klein: You\u2019ve been developing this theme that what\u2019s happening in the Republican Party is a battle between the Tea Party and K Street, which is shorthand for business interests that work in Washington and often support the Republican Party. Expand on this a bit.\n\nTim Carney: I think, historically, K Street has been the most powerful pull in the Republican Party. It\u2019s also powerful in the Democratic Party. But Republicans don\u2019t have unions as a counterpull. K Street is really the only place for Republicans to go for funding. So if something came up where the free market position was different than the pro-business position Republicans would often side with business. This was the case with TARP and Medicare Part D and big spending in the Bush era.\n\nNow there\u2019s this ideological money coming into Heritage Action and the Senate Conservatives Fund and Club for Growth. They\u2019re donating because of what they believe. And so now there are these elected Republicans who don\u2019t care what K Street has to say about them. The business community says we need to end this government shutdown and stop flirting with the debt ceiling and a lot of Republicans can say they don\u2019t care.\n\nEK: But the money in the Tea Party isn\u2019t exclusively small-donor. The Koch brothers, to use the most high-profile example, are key Tea Party donors and also sit atop a vast empire of business interests that depend, in various ways, on government decisions. So, how do you know you\u2019re not just exchanging one set of business interests for another?\n\nTC: Anytime money is coming from a few sources, it\u2019s problematic. Ideally any movement in any party has a vast variety of sources and money because otherwise they\u2019re afraid of upsetting their funders. If Republicans ended up in a position where they were completely dependent on Koch money that would be very bad for Republicans. Heritage Action gets Koch money. But if you look at Freedom Works, for instance, they\u2019re definitely not getting Koch money. They were created as a splinter off the Koch world. Club for Growth gets a lot of rich conservative investors. They\u2019re not Obama\u2019s 20-year-old small donors, but they\u2019re a different source of money. And I\u2019ll say this: I think ideological money is better than money coming in to support the corporate bottom line.\n\nEK: This is an interesting question. The business money is transactional. It wants a change in law, a tax break, a regulation. But business also has a general interest in stability, in growth. The ideological money is also transactional. It wants something, too. But it often has an interest in conflict, in extreme tactics. The people who donate it are not representative of the average voter. They want something much different than the average voter. So, how do you decide which is better?\n\nTC: I don\u2019t agree. I think ideological money is more likely to be more representative than business money. Business money will have certain things in common. It\u2019s coming from businesses big enough to hire lobbyists, as opposed to just people interested enough to give money. Now, for individuals, it\u2019s so much easier to give money. The Senate Conservatives Fund was just a Web site when it started.\n\nEK: Let me rephrase that. Put aside who\u2019s more representative. What the ideological money wants is very different than what most voters want. Over the period of time that you kind of identify as seeing the rise of this money, Congress in general -- and Republicans in Congress, in particular -- have become less popular than at any time in history. So whatever that money is buying doesn\u2019t represent what most people want.\n\nTC: I do think it\u2019s possible that the rise of the Tea Party groups and similar groups on the left can lead to a lot of instability because the more ideological you are the less open you are to compromise. Democrats handled that by [Rep.] Nancy Pelosi saying she\u2019d work to end the Iraq War, and then she really didn\u2019t. The pragmatists won in the end there.\n\nI think that a lot of the way [Sen.] Ted Cruz and the Tea Party groups have handled the current shutdown fight has been bad politics; they\u2019ve at times mistaken tactics for principles. Cruz has burned bridges he didn\u2019t need to burn. There hasn\u2019t been enough experience among the people planning tactics. So the question I\u2019m curious about is: Can you use this inside-outside game where the Beltway groups sends messages to the grass-roots and the grass-roots applies pressure to lawmakers -- can you use that in a way that\u2019s less combative and more prudent than the groups have been using it in the last months?\n\nEK: You\u2019ve noted that this was a shutdown that began with Tea Party arguments over Obamacare but that the Republican Party\u2019s leaders are now trying to end with more traditional concessions, like repeal of the medical-device tax or budget negotiations. Expand on that a bit.\n\nTC: That\u2019s the standard Republican playbook. Something happens. Conservatives get excited. And K Street walks out with the victory. Now Heritage Action is onto that. They\u2019re saying [that] if all we get out of this is medical device tax repeal then how detached is the Republican Party from the base? I think the medical device tax is bad policy but just doing that would really sow dissatisfaction in the Republican base.\n\nEK: But isn\u2019t a lot of this that these Tea Party groups and politicians basically told the base something that was false? I mean, I\u2019ve been spending a lot of time in conservative Twitter and on Red State and it\u2019s just this weird, bizarro-world march of shutdown triumphs, where the shutdown is going great, Democrats are terrified, Republicans are ascendant. I don\u2019t know if they buy it or if it\u2019s cynical, but they\u2019re setting their people up for fights they can\u2019t win.\n\nTC: When I\u2019m in a hopeful mood, I see this as a pendulum swinging from one extreme to another and coming towards the middle. The old extreme was the Bush way of doing things. Republican leaders told the base they were doing something conservative, and then they\u2019d do something like prescription drugs and sell it to the base as a tactical move to get reelected. That was basically a lie the Republican leadership told the base.\n\nSo now, if you try to tell involved conservatives that this is just a difference in tactics, even if you\u2019re right, people are skeptical. [Sens.] Tom Coburn and Mike Lee don\u2019t have seriously different principles; they disagree on tactics. But the Republican base has been burned too may times to believe it even when it\u2019s true. I\u2019m hoping things can swing back to the middle and the methods of guys like Cruz and Mike Needham can move in more tactically intelligent ways then they\u2019re being used right now.\n\nEK: When I came to Washington in the mid-2000s the conventional wisdom was that Republicans had this follow-the-leader approach to politics and Democrats, in the old Will Rogers line, weren\u2019t even an organized party. Now it seems to have flipped. Democrats are comfortable following their leaders, and Republicans seem not just disorganized, but actively suspicious of anything their leaders come up with. It seems sometimes that the way the Tea Party shows it hasn\u2019t sold out is to almost reflexively oppose what [House Majority Leader John] Boehner comes up with.\n\nTC: I think a lot of the base, having gone through the Bush era, has come out with an innate distrust of the establishment. One of the symptoms of this was Christine O\u2019Donnell winning the Republican Party primary in Delaware in 2010. She wasn\u2019t particularly conservative. But she could rail against the establishment. When you saw Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann and these people rise up, it wasn\u2019t about ideology. It was about being anti-establishment.\n\nThe Republican Party needs to abandon some of these identity politics. So I hope guys like Cruz who can really talk to the base can build up a sense of both what the goals are ... and of here\u2019s what\u2019s possible, and move away from the knee-jerk, anti-establishment instincts in the base right now.\n\nEK: So, what do you think their endgame is here?\n\nTC: I think the goal has always been to try and win the shutdown in one way or another. That\u2019s not happening now. The question is can something change so Republicans start winning the shutdown? When you see Boehner talk about punting on the debt limit, remember, he previously wanted to fight on the debt limit. That reflects conservatives believing that maybe if the shutdown keeps going we can win. How that happens is not clear to me. But the necessary condition is that the shutdown somehow needs to be hurting Obama more than it\u2019s hurting Republicans. The reason I\u2019m skeptical of that is Republicans will never get the kind of fair or positive media treatment they\u2019d need for that to be the case.\n\nEK: So, Republicans are trying to split the debt ceiling and the shutdown, as you say. But what comes out of that, exactly? Democrats aren\u2019t going to defund Obamacare.\n\nTC: I think it\u2019s possible then that you see something like an actual strategy or potential path towards victory coming out of this. If it\u2019s not going to be Obamacare, I hope the Republican ask will be something like eliminating a corporate welfare subsidy Obama likes -- something like the sugar subsidy or the subsidies for Boeing. That would show a very new side of the Republican Party, it would weaken Democrats, and it would give something conservatives could bring home to their base."}
{"text":"TORONTO \u2014 Social media posts encouraging people to visit southern Ontario's wineries by bicycle has prompted a regional public transit service to apologize for the \"misunderstanding.\"\n\nIn May 10 Facebook and Twitter postings, GO Transit said \"Niagara's wineries are best enjoyed responsibly and on two wheels.\"\n\nThe posting encouraged people to take their bicycle on the GO for \"a cycling weekend adventure in Ontario's wine country\" in a promotion for its seasonal service to Niagara Region.\n\nThat prompted numerous replies on social media that suggested Go Transit was endorsing mixing cycling and drinking.\n\nOne poster said she \"wouldn't encourage biking while under the influence of alcohol. That's an accident waiting to happen.\"\n\nGO responded on Wednesday with a Facebook post saying it's sorry if the message suggested anything but responsible enjoyment, adding it does not \"encourage biking when intoxicated or impaired.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately some thought this post was intended to encourage biking and drinking. That was not our intention at all; quite the opposite,\" Anne Marie Aikins, a spokesperson for GO Transit parent organization Metrolinx, said in an email.\n\n\"We apologize if the post on Facebook caused any misunderstanding. We should have clarified it sooner,\" Aikins said.\n\nThere are many interesting things to see and do on winery bike tours, but Metrolinx's position is that customers who wish to drink should plan ahead and take one of the winery buses, she said."}
{"text":"Three days after Ambassador Chris Stevens was assassinated, Jay Carney told the White House press corps it had been the work of a flash mob inflamed by an insulting video about the Prophet Muhammad.\n\nAs the killers had arrived with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons, this story seemed noncredible on its face.\n\nYet two days later, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice doubled down.\n\nAppearing on five Sunday talk shows, she called the massacre the result of a \u201cspontaneous\u201d riot that was neither \u201cpreplanned\u201d nor \u201cpremeditated.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nCarney and Rice deceived us. But were they deceived?\n\nIt is impossible to believe that Carney would characterize the Benghazi, Libya, massacre as the result of a protest that careened out of control unless he had been told to do so by the national security adviser, the White House chief of staff or President Barack Obama himself.\n\nWho told Carney to say what he did? Who arranged for Rice to appear on five shows to push this line?\n\nThrowing a rope to Rice and Carney, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said last week that only recently had his team concluded that Benghazi was the work of terrorists.\n\nYet intelligence insiders were leaking to the press the day after Stevens was murdered that it was terrorism.\n\nNow that the cover story\u2013that the murder of Stevens and the other Americans was the result of a spontaneous outburst the Obama administration could not have foreseen or prevented\u2013has collapsed, the truth is tumbling out.\n\nAnd the truth is more alarming. For it calls into question the credibility and competence of Obama\u2019s security team and the judgment of the president himself.\n\nWhat do we now know?\n\nStevens believed he was on an al-Qaida hit list and so wrote in his diary. He was concerned about a rise in Islamic extremism in the city. \u201cDays before the ambassador arrived from the embassy in Tripoli,\u201d The Washington Post reported Sunday, \u201cWesterners had fled the city, and the British had closed their consulate.\u201d\n\nRice insisted that the act of barbarism arose out of a protest, but there may not even have been a protest, just a military assault with RPGs, machine guns and mortars that hit a safe house a mile from the consulate, killing two former Navy SEALs, while other U.S. agents fled to the airport.\n\nSo dangerous is Benghazi, The New York Times reported Friday, FBI agents investigating the ambassador\u2019s assassination have yet to venture into the city.\n\nWas U.S. intelligence oblivious to how dangerous Benghazi was when Stevens went in? Was not Benghazi\u2019s reputation as a haven for Islamic jihadi known to us all before we \u201cliberated\u201d Libya?\n\nThis is the city U.S. air power saved when Moammar Gadhafi\u2019s forces were closing in. It now appears to be an al-Qaidaville where U.S. diplomats and agents dare not tread.\n\nLate last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conceded that the Benghazi murders were acts of terror perpetrated by extremists associated with al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. She alluded to Mali, where an al-Qaida affiliate, the Ansar Dine, has taken over half the country.\n\nHow grave is that threat?\n\nOn Thursday, The Associated Press reported that Gen. Carter Ham, head of the U.S. Africa command, met with Mauretania\u2019s president to discuss \u201ca possible military intervention \u2026 in north Mali against al-Qaida-linked group members and their allies.\u201d\n\nYet Vice President Joe Biden still campaigns through the Rust Belt bellowing, \u201cGeneral Motors is alive, and Osama bin Laden is dead,\u201d and Obama still recites his mantra, \u201cal-Qaida is on the path to defeat.\u201d\n\nThe reality. Al-Qaida affiliates have taken over a region of Mali the size of France. Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb may have been in on the Benghazi massacre. Al-Qaida is in Syria fighting for a cause, the overthrow of Bashar Assad, Obama supports. Al-Qaida has helped reignite sectarian war in Iraq. Al-Qaida remains in Pakistan. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is in Yemen.\n\nWe failed to cut out or kill the cancer at Tora Bora in 2001, and it has since metastasized and spread across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.\n\nAs for the Arab Spring Obama embraced, that has given us the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo and jihadi in Sinai. Our departure from Iraq paved the way to a new sectarian war. The surge troops are out of Afghanistan, and the remaining U.S. troops no longer partner with the Afghan soldiers who are to take over the war.\n\nAny doubt about the outcome there when we\u2019re gone?\n\nWithin the past month, anti-American riots, flag burnings and the raising of Islamist banners atop U.S. embassy facilities have occurred in too many countries and capitals to recite.\n\nIf this is the fruit of a successful engagement with the Islamic world, what would a debacle look like? Rep. Paul Ryan said Sunday, \u201cThe Obama foreign policy is unraveling literally before our eyes on our TV screens.\u201d\n\nIs he wrong?\n\nPatrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of TAC and the author of \u201cSuicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?\u201d Copyright 2012 Creators.com."}
{"text":"Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world\n\nA US study suggests that LGBT people are more concerned about the environment than their straight counterparts.\n\nAccording to a poll by Harris, 55 per cent of LGBT adults say they \u201cpersonally care a great deal about the current state and future of the environment,\u201d compared with 33 per cent of heterosexuals,.\n\nFurthermore, the survey found that 40 per cent of LGBT adults say they \u201cencourage others to be more environmentally friendly\u201d, compared with 24 per cent of straight people.\n\nIn other results, it was found that LGBT people were more likely in 2010 to say they were \u201cenvironmentally conscious\u201d than the year before. The opposite was seen in straight respondents.\n\nForty-seven per cent of LGBT adults described themselves as \u201cenvironmentally conscious\u201d in the 2010 survey, up from 38 per cent in the 2009 one. Twenty-eight per cent of straight people described themselves as such in 2010, down from 30 per cent in 2009.\n\nThe poll surveyed 2,352 adults in December, 347 of whom described themselves as LGBT."}
{"text":"For the similarly-named personality trait distinct from the disorder, see Sensory processing sensitivity\n\nSensory processing disorder Synonyms Sensory integration dysfunction Specialty Psychiatry\n\nSensory processing disorder (SPD; also known as sensory integration dysfunction) is a condition where multisensory integration is not adequately processed in order to provide appropriate responses to the demands of the environment.\n\nSensory integration was defined by occupational therapist Anna Jean Ayres in 1972 as \"the neurological process that organizes sensation from one's own body and from the environment and makes it possible to use the body effectively within the environment\".[1][2] Sensory processing disorder has been characterized as the source of significant problems in organizing sensation coming from the body and the environment and is manifested by difficulties in the performance in one or more of the main areas of life: productivity, leisure and play[3] or activities of daily living.[4]\n\nSources debate whether SPD is an independent disorder or represents the observed symptoms of various other, more well-established, disorders.[5][6][7][8] SPD is not recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association[9][10], and the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that pediatricians not use SPD as a diagnosis.[9]\n\nSigns and symptoms [ edit ]\n\nSymptoms may vary according to the disorder's type and subtype present. SPD can affect one sense or multiple senses. While many people can present one or two symptoms, sensory processing disorder has to have a clear functional impact on the person's life:\n\nSigns of over-responsivity,[11] including, for example, dislike of textures such as those found in fabrics, foods, grooming products or other materials found in daily living, to which most people would not react, and serious discomfort, sickness or threat induced by normal sounds, lights, movements, smells, tastes, or even inner sensations such as heartbeat.\n\nSigns of under-responsivity, including sluggishness and lack of responsiveness; and Sensory cravings,[12] including, for example, fidgeting, impulsiveness, and\/or seeking or making loud, disturbing noises; Sensorimotor-based problems, including slow and uncoordinated movements or poor handwriting.\n\nSensory discrimination problems, that might manifest themselves in behaviors such as things constantly dropped.\n\nCritics have noted that what proponents claim are symptoms of SPD are both broad and, in some cases, represent very common, and not necessarily abnormal or atypical, childhood characteristics. The checklist of symptoms on the website of the SPD Foundation, for example, includes such warning signs as \"My infant\/toddler has problems eating,\" \"My child has difficulty being toilet trained,\" \"My child is in constant motion,\" and \"My child gets in everyone else's space and\/or touches everything around him.\" -- \"symptoms\" which read much like the day-to-day complaints of an average parent.[13]\n\nRelationship to other disorders [ edit ]\n\nSensory processing issues represent a feature of a number of disorders, including anxiety problems, ADHD,[14] food intolerances, behavioral disorders, and particularly, autism spectrum disorders.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21] This pattern of comorbidities poses a significant challenge to those who claim that SPD is a identifiably specific disorder, rather than simply a term given to a set of symptoms common to other disorders.[22] Dr. Catherine Lord, a leading autism expert and the director of the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, argues that sensory issues are an important concern, but not a diagnosis in themselves. \"I do think there's a value in attending to how a child is perceiving sensations, thinking about whether he could be uncomfortable. Where I get concerned is labeling that as a separate disorder.\"[23]\n\nTwo studies have provided preliminary evidence suggesting that there may be measurable neurological differences between children diagnosed with SPD and control children classified as neurotypical[24] or children diagnosed with autism.[25] Despite this evidence, the fact that SPD researchers have yet to agree on a proven, standardized diagnostic tool undermines researchers' ability to define the boundaries of the disease and makes correlational studies, like the ones about structural brain abnormalities, less convincing.[13]\n\nCauses [ edit ]\n\nThe exact cause of SPD is not known.[26] However, it is known that the mid-brain and brain stem regions of the central nervous system are early centers in the processing pathway for multisensory integration; these brain regions are involved in processes including coordination, attention, arousal, and autonomic function.[27] After sensory information passes through these centers, it is then routed to brain regions responsible for emotions, memory, and higher level cognitive functions. Damage in any part of the brain involved in multisensory processing can cause difficulties in adequately processing stimuli in a functional way. Sensory processing is viewed as a spectrum and how individuals process stimuli varies from person to person. Individuals with SPD tend to fall on the extreme ends of the sensory spectrum[28], either hyposensitive or hypersensitive.\n\nResearch [ edit ]\n\nCurrent research in sensory processing is focused on finding the genetic and neurological causes of SPD. EEG[29] and measuring event-related potential (ERP) are traditionally used to explore the causes behind the behaviors observed in SPD. Some of the proposed underlying causes by current research are: EEG recording\n\nDifferences in tactile and auditory over responsivity show moderate genetic influences, with tactile over responsivity demonstrating greater heritability. Bivariate genetic analysis suggested different genetic factors for individual differences in auditory and tactile SOR. [30]\n\nPeople with Sensory Processing Deficits have less sensory gating (electrophysiology) than typical subjects. [31] [32]\n\nPeople with sensory over-responsivity might have increased D2 receptor in the striatum, related to aversion to tactile stimuli and reduced habituation. In animal models, prenatal stress significantly increased tactile avoidance. [33]\n\nStudies using event-related potentials (ERPs) in children with the sensory over responsivity subtype found atypical neural integration of sensory input. Different neural generators could be activated at an earlier stage of sensory information processing in people with SOR than in typically developing individuals. The automatic association of causally related sensory inputs that occurs at this early sensory-perceptual stage may not function properly in children with SOR. One hypothesis is that multisensory stimulation may activate a higher-level system in frontal cortex that involves attention and cognitive processing, rather than the automatic integration of multisensory stimuli observed in typically developing adults in auditory cortex. [34]\n\nRecent research found an abnormal white matter microstructure in children with SPD, compared with typical children and those with other developmental disorders such as autism and ADHD.[35][36]\n\nDiagnosis [ edit ]\n\nAlthough sensory processing disorder is accepted in the Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood (DC:0-3R), it is not recognized as a mental disorder in medical manuals such as the ICD-10[37] or the DSM-5.[38]\n\nDiagnosis is primarily arrived at by the use of standardized tests, standardized questionnaires, expert observational scales, and free play observation at an occupational therapy gym. Observation of functional activities might be carried at school and home as well.\n\nDepending on the country, diagnosis is made by different professionals, such as occupational therapists, psychologists, learning specialists, physiotherapists and\/or speech and language therapists.[39] In some countries it is recommended to have a full psychological and neurological evaluation if symptoms are too severe.\n\nStandardized tests\n\nSensory Integration and Praxis Test (SIPT)\n\nDeGangi-Berk Test of Sensory Integration (TSI)\n\nTest of Sensory Functions in Infants (TSFI)[40]\n\nStandardized questionnaires\n\nSensory Profile, (SP) [41]\n\nInfant\/Toddler Sensory Profile [40]\n\nAdolescent\/Adult Sensory Profile\n\nSensory Profile School Companion\n\nIndicators of Developmental Risk Signals (INDIPCD-R) [42]\n\nSensory Processing Measure (SPM) [43]\n\nSensory Processing Measure Preeschool (SPM-P)[44]\n\nOther tests\n\nThe large number of different forms and tools of assessment listed here reflects what critics have argued is a fundamental problem with the diagnosis process: SPD researchers have yet to agree on a proven, standardized diagnostic tool, a problem that undermines the ability of researchers to define the boundaries of the disorder.[13][23]\n\nClassification [ edit ]\n\nSensory processing disorders have been classified by proponents into three categories: sensory modulation disorder, sensory-based motor disorders and sensory discrimination disorders [50] (as defined in the Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders in Infancy and Early Childhood).[51][52]\n\nSensory modulation disorder (SMD) Sensory modulation refers to a complex central nervous system process[50][53] by which neural messages that convey information about the intensity, frequency, duration, complexity, and novelty of sensory stimuli are adjusted.[54]\n\nSMD consists of three subtypes:\n\nSensory over-responsivity. Sensory under-responsivity Sensory craving\/seeking.\n\nSensory-based motor disorder (SBMD) According to proponents, sensory-based motor disorder shows motor output that is disorganized as a result of incorrect processing of sensory information affecting postural control challenges, resulting in postural disorder, or developmental coordination disorder.[50][55]\n\nThe SBMD subtypes are:\n\nDyspraxia Postural disorder\n\nSensory discrimination disorder (SDD)\n\nSensory discrimination disorder involves the incorrect processing of sensory information.[50] The SDD subtypes are:[56]\n\n1. Visual 2. Auditory 3. Tactile 4. Gustatory (taste) 5. Olfactory (smell) 6. Vestibular (balance) 7. Proprioceptive (feeling of where parts of the body are located in space)\n\nTreatment [ edit ]\n\nSensory integration therapy [ edit ]\n\nVestibular system is stimulated through hanging equipment such as tire swings\n\nThe main form of sensory integration therapy is a type of occupational therapy that places a child in a room specifically designed to stimulate and challenge all of the senses.[57]\n\nDuring the session, the therapist works closely with the child to provide a level of sensory stimulation that the child can cope with, and encourage movement within the room. Sensory integration therapy is driven by four main principles:\n\nJust right challenge (the child must be able to successfully meet the challenges that are presented through playful activities)\n\nAdaptive response (the child adapts his behavior with new and useful strategies in response to the challenges presented)\n\nActive engagement (the child will want to participate because the activities are fun)\n\nChild directed (the child's preferences are used to initiate therapeutic experiences within the session)\n\nSensory processing therapy [ edit ]\n\nThis therapy retains all of the above-mentioned four principles and adds:[58]\n\nIntensity (person attends therapy daily for a prolonged period of time)\n\nDevelopmental approach (therapist adapts to the developmental age of the person, against actual age)\n\nTest-retest systematic evaluation (all clients are evaluated before and after)\n\nProcess driven vs. activity driven (therapist focuses on the \"Just right\" emotional connection and the process that reinforces the relationship)\n\nParent education (parent education sessions are scheduled into the therapy process)\n\n\"joie de vivre\" (happiness of life is therapy's main goal, attained through social participation, self-regulation, and self-esteem)\n\nCombination of best practice interventions (is often accompanied by integrated listening system therapy, floor time, and electronic media such as Xbox Kinect, Nintendo Wii, Makoto II machine training and others)\n\nThe treatments themselves may involve a variety of activities and interventions (for example, prism lenses). Children with hypo-reactivity may be exposed to strong sensations such as stroking with a brush, vibrations or rubbing. Play may involve a range of materials to stimulate the senses such as play dough or finger painting. Children with hyper-reactivity, on the other hand, may be exposed to peaceful activities including quiet music and gentle rocking in a softly lit room. Treats and rewards may be used to encourage children to tolerate activities they would normally avoid. While occupational therapists using a sensory integration frame of reference work on increasing a child's ability to adequately process sensory input, other OTs may focus on environmental accommodations that parents and school staff can use to enhance the child's function at home, school, and in the community.[59][60] These may include selecting soft, tag-free clothing, avoiding fluorescent lighting, and providing ear plugs for \"emergency\" use (such as for fire drills).\n\nEvaluation of treatment effectiveness [ edit ]\n\nSome of these treatments (for example, sensorimotor handling) have a questionable rationale and no empirical evidence. Other treatments (for example, prism lenses, physical exercise, and auditory integration training) have had studies with small positive outcomes, but few conclusions can be made about them due to methodological problems with the studies.[61] [62] [63] In its overall review of the treatment effectiveness literature, AETNA concluded that \"The effectiveness of these therapies is unproven.\",[64] while the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that \"parents should be informed that the amount of research regarding the effectiveness of sensory integration therapy is limited and inconclusive.\"[65] A 2015 review concluded that SIT techniques exist \"outside the bounds of established evidence-based practice\" and that SIT is \"quite possibly a misuse of limited resources.\"[66]\n\nEpidemiology [ edit ]\n\nIt has been estimated by proponents that up to 16.5% of elementary school aged children present elevated SOR behaviors in the tactile or auditory modalities.[67] This figure is larger than what previous studies with smaller samples had shown: an estimate of 5\u201313% of elementary school aged children.[68] Critics have noted that such a high incidence for just one of the subtypes of SPD raises questions about the degree to which SPD is a specific and clearly identifiable disorder.[13]\n\nProponents have also claimed that adults may also show signs of sensory processing difficulties and would benefit for sensory processing therapies,[69] although this work has yet to distinguish between those with SPD symptoms alone vs adults whose processing abnormalities are associated with other disorders, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder.[70]\n\nControversy [ edit ]\n\nThere are concerns regarding the validity of the diagnosis. SPD is not included in the DSM-5 or ICD-10, the most widely used diagnostic sources in healthcare. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) states that there is no universally accepted framework for diagnosis and recommends caution against using any \"sensory\" type therapies unless as a part of a comprehensive treatment plan. In fact, in a 2012 statement, the AAP states that \"Because there is no universally accepted framework for diagnosis, sensory processing disorder generally should not be diagnosed.\" When an occupational therapist does recommend sensory integration therapy, the AAP instructs that the therapist is aware that, \"parents should be informed that the amount of research regarding the effectiveness of sensory integration therapy is limited and inconclusive.\" As such, most health insurance considers sensory integration therapy to be \"investigational\" and will not cover it. In the United States and UK, sensory processing disorder is not likely to qualify an individual for disability benefits, so the supporters of sensory processing disorder recommend having a child diagnosed for a related disorder that will qualify them for disability insurance. As was noted above, a 2015 review of research on Sensory Integration Therapy (SIT) concluded that SIT is \"ineffective and that its theoretical underpinnings and assessment practices are unvalidated\", that SIT techniques exist \"outside the bounds of established evidence-based practice\", and that SIT is \"quite possibly a misuse of limited resources\".[66]\n\nManuals [ edit ]\n\nSPD is in Stanley Greenspan's Diagnostic Manual for Infancy and Early Childhood and as Regulation Disorders of Sensory Processing part of The Zero to Three's Diagnostic Classification. but is not recognized in the manuals ICD-10 or in the recently updated DSM-5. However, unusual reactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects is included as a possible but not necessary criterion for the diagnosis of autism.\n\nMisdiagnosis [ edit ]\n\nSome state that sensory processing disorder is a distinct diagnosis, while others argue that differences in sensory responsiveness are features of other diagnoses and it is not a standalone diagnosis. The neuroscientist David Eagleman has proposed that SPD may be a form of synesthesia, a perceptual condition in which the senses are blended.Specifically, Eagleman suggests that instead of a sensory input \"connecting to [a person's] color area [in the brain], it's connecting to an area involving pain or aversion or nausea\".\n\nResearchers have described a treatable inherited sensory overstimulation disorder that meets diagnostic criteria for both attention deficit disorder and sensory integration dysfunction.\n\nSociety [ edit ]\n\nThe American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) supports the use of a variety of methods of sensory integration for those with sensory processing disorder. The organization has supported the need for further research to increase insurance coverage for related therapies. They have also made efforts to educate the public about sensory integration therapy. The AOTA's practice guidelines currently support the use of sensory integration therapy and interprofessional education and collaboration in order to optimize treatment for those with sensory processing disorder. The AOTA provides several resources pertaining to sensory integration therapy, some of which includes a fact sheet, new research, and continuing education opportunities.[71]\n\nHistory [ edit ]\n\nSensory processing disorder as a specific form of atypical functioning was first described by occupational therapist Anna Jean Ayres (1920\u20131989).[72]\n\nOriginal model\n\nAyres's theoretical framework for what she called Sensory Integration Dysfunction was developed after six factor analytic studies of populations of children with learning disabilities, perceptual motor disabilities and normal developing children.[73] Ayres created the following nosology based on the patterns that appeared on her factor analysis:\n\nDyspraxia: poor motor planning (more related to the vestibular system and proprioception)\n\nPoor bilateral integration: inadequate use of both sides of the body simultaneously\n\nTactile defensiveness: negative reaction to tactile stimuli\n\nVisual perceptual deficits: poor form and space perception and visual motor functions\n\nSomatodyspraxia: poor motor planning (related to poor information coming from the tactile and proprioceptive systems)\n\nAuditory-language problems\n\nBoth visual perceptual and auditory language deficits were thought to possess a strong cognitive component and a weak relationship to underlying sensory processing deficits, so they are not considered central deficits in many models of sensory processing.\n\nIn 1998, Mulligan found a similar pattern of deficits in a confirmatory factor analytic study.[74][75]\n\nQuadrant model\n\nDunn's nosology uses two criteria:[76] response type (passive vs active) and sensory threshold to the stimuli (low or high) creating 4 subtypes or quadrants:[77]\n\nHigh neurological thresholds\n\nLow registration: high threshold with passive response. Individuals who do not pick up on sensations and therefore partake in passive behavior.[78] Sensation seeking: high threshold and active response. Those who actively seek out a rich sensory filled environment.[78]\n\nLow neurological threshold\n\nSensitivity to stimuli: low threshold with passive response. Individuals who become distracted and uncomfortable when exposed to sensation but do not actively limit or avoid exposure to the sensation.[78] Sensation avoiding: low threshold and active response. Individuals actively limit their exposure to sensations and are therefore high self regulators.[78]\n\nSensory processing model\n\nIn Miller's nosology \"sensory integration dysfunction\" was renamed into \"Sensory processing disorder\" to facilitate coordinated research work with other fields such as neurology since \"the use of the term sensory integration often applies to a neurophysiologic cellular process rather than a behavioral response to sensory input as connoted by Ayres.\"[50]\n\nSee also [ edit ]\n\nReferences [ edit ]"}
{"text":"University, vocational training debts to skyrocket costing budget billions, documents show\n\nUpdated\n\nThe Federal Government is preparing to write off billions of dollars of higher education loans as the number of bad debts soar.\n\nKey points: Government forecasting losses of more than $13.5 billion on four years worth of loans\n\nEducation Minister this week recommitted to university funding cuts and fee deregulation\n\nUniversities Australia open to changes for loans, but only if HECS-HELP scheme remains fundamentally intact\n\nAn ABC Freedom of Information (FOI) investigation has revealed the Government is forecasting losses of more than $13.5 billion on just four years' worth of loans.\n\nThe figures come after the Government recommitted to university funding cuts and fee deregulation.\n\nThe Coalition is also considering changes to the scandal-plagued vocational education sector, which is helping fuel the bleak fiscal predictions.\n\n\"The costs to taxpayers of higher education have, over recent years, grown dramatically,\" Education Minister Simon Birmingham said.\n\nThe HELP loan system, including for university courses and vocational training, allows students to defer course payments and subsidises the interest rate on debt.\n\nThe amount never to be repaid on loans issued in 2018-19 is predicted to exceed $4.4 billion \u2014 a budget hit nearly four times higher than expected from loans issued last financial year.\n\n\"Funding of university students has essentially grown at twice the rate of the economy,\" Senator Birmingham said.\n\n\"I welcome all ideas from the sector, experts and students on how to make university funding sustainable as I continue to consult widely on higher education reform.\"\n\nRising student numbers drive 'doubtful debt'\n\nLosses include people not reaching the $54,000 a year income threshold and the Government subsidising the interest on the debt.\n\nThe amount owed on student loans rises in line with inflation \u2014 not the rate of interest paid by the Government.\n\nPredicted losses on debt issued each financial year: 2014-15: $1.29 billion\n\n2015-16: $2.59 billion\n\n2016-17: $2.99 billion\n\n2017-18: $3.78 billion\n\n2018-19: $4.44 billion\n\nTotal = $15.1 billion\n\nA recent Government budget update showed more than 20 per cent of debt issued in 2018-19 was not expected to be repaid, with the average amount of debt tipped to be $22,500.\n\n\"This is principally driven by what we call doubtful debt, that is student debt we don't expect to get back,\" Grattan Institute higher education director Andrew Norton said.\n\n\"Driven by expanding student numbers in the higher education system and the extension of HELP loans to students doing vocational education diplomas, which has been very much in the news for lots of malpractice in that industry.\"\n\nHigher education student numbers continue to rise, in part due to the removal of caps on university places in 2009 to create the current \"demand-driven\" system.\n\n\"But also there are trends in the labour market which mean that students are less likely to reach the $54,000, such as increased part-time work and simply because diploma graduates don't earn as much as bachelor degree graduates,\" Mr Norton said.\n\nStudent loan scheme a 'central feature' of higher education\n\nUniversities Australia chief executive Belinda Robinson is open to changes for university loans, but only if the HECS-HELP scheme remains fundamentally intact.\n\n\"To ensure that those with the ability to study at university are not impeded and not deterred from doing so,\" she said.\n\n\"It's really important to understand the value of the student loan scheme that we have in Australia.\n\n\"It has been an absolutely central feature of the success of higher education policy in Australia for many, many years.\"\n\nThe total cost to the Federal Government of higher education is tipped to be nearly $20 billion in two years time \u2014 nearly double the 2008 cost.\n\nStudents currently pay just over 40 per cent of university course fees \u2014 often through HECS-HELP loans \u2014 with the Government paying the rest.\n\nThe ABC obtained Senator Birmingham's incoming ministerial brief, with the probe also revealing:\n\nCommonwealth-supported university places will have jumped by 50 per cent over the 10 years to 2018 to 712,200\n\nThe uncapping of university places under the former Labor government has cost the Commonwealth at least $3.8 billion since being introduced\n\nThe demand-driven system is expected to cost more than $10 billion over a decade, compared to the previous regime\n\nFocus should be on cleaning up vocational training: Opposition\n\nSenator Birmingham earlier this week confirmed the Government was sticking with its plan to cut university funding.\n\nHe also confirmed the Government would implement its deregulation plan from next year, after delaying the controversial 2014 budget measure.\n\nThe Senate previously rejected the bid, which Labor claimed would see degrees cost $100,000 or more.\n\nThe Opposition's higher education spokesman Kim Carr said the focus should be on cleaning up vocational training.\n\n\"Personal trainers, and people that are undertaking diplomas of digital interactive gaming, those types of courses are being used running up big debts with no capacity to graduate and no real prospect of repaying,\" Senator Carr said.\n\n\"We can't allow these phoney training colleges to be able to inflict this sort of suffering on so many students.\"\n\nTopics: university-and-further-education, federal-government, money-and-monetary-policy, australia\n\nFirst posted"}
{"text":"April is Pet First Aid Awareness Month. How prepared are you for an emergency situation with your pet? What if you can\u2019t get your little buddy to the vet quick enough? Do you know what to do in some of the most common emergencies? Pet first aid is important for any pet owner to know, it can help save your pets life if you are unable to seek professional care. This time of year is starting to get warmer outside. That means longer walks, traveling to the beach, mountain climbing and more. Heat exhaustion can be dangerous, even fatal, for dogs. It is important to be able to act quickly and be able to recognize symptoms of heatstroke\/exhaustion. Dogs suffering from heat stroke will normally exhibit some or all of the following symptoms:\n\nRestlessness\n\n\u2022 Panting\n\n\u2022 Increased respiratory rate\n\n\u2022 Increased heart rate\n\n\u2022 Excess salivation\n\n\u2022 Vomiting\n\n\u2022 Diarrhea\n\nHeatstroke- Excessive panting and bright red gums or tongue are two major signs of overheating, as well as any temperature above 104 degrees. The normal body temperature for your pet should be between 99-102.5 degrees. As the symptoms progress and the dog\u2019s temperature rises, signs become more serious.\n\nWeakness\n\n\u2022 Staggering\n\n\u2022 Gasping\n\n\u2022 Gum color may become brick red, then purple or blue (cyanosis)\n\n\u2022 Seizures\n\n\u2022 Coma\n\n\u2022 Death\n\nThis can be devastating for uninformed or unsuspecting pet owners. Having the proper knowledge and skills to react to these situations will help alleviate much of the panic and stress pet owners often experience. Fortunately, there are some simple things that you can do to protect your dog from the dangers of heat exhaustion.\n\nThe very first thing you need to do, is remove your pet from the heat and place them in a cool area.\n\nCheck their temperature.\n\nUse a hose to spray your pet with cool water, or place your pet in a cool bath. While doing this, re-check their temperature to see if it\u2019s going down. You can also try placing water soaked towels on their head, neck, feet, and\/or abdomen area. Provide cool drinking water for your pet. Keep this up until your pets temperate is back to normal and seek immediate veterinary care afterwards.\n\nWarm weather is here and remember to never leave your pets in a parked car, and watch for signs of overexertion. Being well equipped for the heat when you have your pet with you is also important. The H-Duo travel cup made by Dexus makes that a breeze. This bottle is split in half, one side is for you, and one side is for your pet.\n\nAttached is a removable, and collapsible companion cup to ensure your pet stays hydrated on those warm days.\n\nAnother item that is important to keep handy this summer is the Chillz Cooling Wrapz. This washable, durable cloth will stay cool for hours once it\u2019s been wet with cool water. Make sure you\u2019re prepared for the heat we\u2019re sure to endure this summer. Be sure to stop by the store if you need any of these items. Or throw them in your shopping cart right now.\n\nLook for next weeks blog. We will give you tips on wound care."}
{"text":"Palestinian activist Issa Amro\n\nIssa Amro is committed to peaceful resistance to the Israeli occupation in his native West Bank city of Hebron, despite frequent arrests, attacks by settlers and other unrelenting efforts to sabotage his work.\n\n\u201cNonviolence is the best tool because it strengthens civil society and it gives a role to each person: the kids, the women, the elders and the youth. With nonviolent activities you get more international support and you neutralize the violence of the oppressor,\u201d he explained.\n\nIssa Amro speaks at a press conference marking the beginning of the annual Open Shuhada Street campaign in Hebron.\n\nIn Hebron, several hundred hostile settlers, many of them armed, live within close quarters of Palestinians under the guard of the Israeli army. Soldiers severely restrict Palestinians\u2019 movement and do little to prevent settler violence against Palestinians and their property.\n\nAmro, 36, founded the direct action group Youth Against Settlements.\n\n\u201cWe go to universities, we go to schools and we organize activities within our community to teach the youth how to resist the occupation using nonviolence,\u201d he said.\n\nIsraeli soldiers fire rubber-coated steel bullets and stun grenades at Palestinian boys throwing stones.\n\nEvery year, Youth Against Settlements organizes a week of activities as part of the Open Shuhada Street campaign, calling for the reopening of one of Hebron\u2019s former main commercial thoroughfares, which the Israeli army has shuttered and closed to Palestinians since 1994.\n\nAccess to the street for Palestinians was restricted after the massacre of 29 worshippers inside the Ibrahimi mosque by American Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein that same year.\n\nStudents paint a canvas outside the Shuhada Street checkpoint.\n\nThis year\u2019s Open Shuhada Street campaign included an art event in front of an Israeli checkpoint involving students from the nearby Palestine Polytechnic University.\n\n\u201cThrough art, we send a message to the occupiers and tell them that they cannot occupy our imagination and dreams of freedom and justice. Art can reach out to more people,\u201d Amro said.\n\nThe event was violently dispersed by Israeli soldiers who fired stun grenades at the students after a few boys threw stones towards the checkpoint.\n\nIssa Amro speaks with an Israeli soldier while Ofer Yohanna, a settler, records the exchange on his phone. Responding to an order from Yohanna, the soldier stopped Amro and a delegation from Breaking the Silence from passing through.\n\nAmro gives regular tours of Hebron to delegations from around the world, showing the reality of life under military occupation. The tours are often targeted by settlers seeking to intimidate both Amro and the visitors.\n\nJewish settler Ofer Ohana frequently interrupts tours conducted by Amro. He is an ambulance driver in Hebron and has been known to delay or even deny the provision of medical attention to Palestinians.\n\n\u201cThere is no law enforcement on the Israeli settlers or soldiers. As a Palestinian I am under Israeli military law and my Israeli settler neighbors are under Israeli civilian law. We are under different laws even though we are living in the same neighborhood,\u201d Amro explained.\n\nPalestinians in Hebron commemorate the anniversary of the Ibrahimi mosque massacre.\n\nAs part of this year\u2019s Open Shuhada Street campaign, Youth Against Settlements members and volunteers were invited to join residents of Hebron in an evening of commemoration for the victims of the 1994 Ibrahimi mosque massacre.\n\nIsraeli soldiers detain four Palestinians, including a child, on their way home after a vigil commemorating the Ibrahimi mosque massacre.\n\nAs people started to make their way home after the evening\u2019s commemorative activities, Israeli soldiers detained Amro together with three other Palestinians, including a 10-year-old girl.\n\nAnat Cohen, a settler living in Hebron, drives her car into a group of Palestinians.\n\nWhile Amro was detained, one of the settlers approached him. \u201cHe told me that each dog has his own day to be killed, meant to intimidate me and to describe me as a dog,\u201d Amro recalled.\n\nAs people gathered, waiting for Amro and the other Palestinians to be released, the infamously violent settler Anat Cohen drove her car directly into the crowd.\n\nA Palestinian man talks to an Israeli soldier who refused to intervene when a settler drove her car into a crowd.\n\nSeveral military units were called to the scene but none made any attempt to restrain Cohen. Yet in recent months soldiers have shot dead numerous Palestinians who Israel said used their cars as weapons against Israelis.\n\n\u201cAs Palestinians we are under the military law; we don\u2019t have any rights and they don\u2019t take our testimonies and our words into consideration. Soldiers are believed to always say the truth; they don\u2019t need to show evidence. We, on the other hand, need to show evidence that we are not guilty,\u201d Amro said.\n\nA Palestinian man collapses after a settler attacked a crowd that had gathered to commemorate the Ibrahimi mosque massacre.\n\nA Palestinian man collapsed during the incident. Many Israeli soldiers stood around, making no effort to provide assistance. An ambulance was called but its arrival was delayed.\n\nTwo days later, during a demonstration marking the end of the week\u2019s Open Shuhada Street campaign, Israeli soldiers broke up the crowd and arrested a human rights lawyer and a journalist. Approximately 50 people were injured when soldiers fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-coated bullets at the crowd.\n\nIssa Amro speaks to a group of young Israelis during a Breaking the Silence tour. At the end of his conversation with the group, Israeli soldiers appeared and arrested Amro.\n\nAmro was arrested a few days later at the end of a meeting with a delegation from Breaking the Silence, a group which publishes anonymous testimonies by former Israeli soldiers to expose the army\u2019s rights abuses.\n\nHe was charged with incitement, organizing an illegal demonstration and evading arrest \u2013 allegations which he rejects.\n\n\u201cIt is a kind of intimidation to stop the nonviolent activities and to stop any person from speaking out against the occupation and human rights violations,\u201d Amro, who was released one day later, said.\n\nThe constant harassment doesn\u2019t deter Amro.\n\n\u201cI will continue fighting them until they leave Hebron and they end their human rights violations,\u201d he added.\n\nClaire Thomas is a freelance photographer from the UK whose work focuses on social, political and humanitarian issues in the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook."}
{"text":"PARIS -- Pepe is set to become Paris Saint-Germain's first summer signing once his Real Madrid contract comes to an end, a source close to the French capital outfit told ESPN FC.\n\nThe Portugal international is still on Confederations Cup duty and will be until the third-placed playoff on Sunday, just two days before PSG coach Unai Emery and his non-international players report to Camp des Loges for preseason training, but the 34-year-old is close to signing a contract.\n\nAccording to the source, Pepe has been in talks with Les Parisiens for some time over a potential move to Parc des Princes -- before and after compatriot Antero Henrique's arrival as sporting director.\n\nHowever, it is mainly because of the former Porto man that this deal has been pushed to the brink of completion after the Portuguese transfer guru and Emery agreed the squad require greater experience and a stronger winning mentality.\n\nThe source said Pepe is set to sign a one-year contract with PSG, which includes an option for a second, and that the Ligue 1 giants' medical staff have already examined the Brazil-born Portugal star's troublesome knee.\n\nAlthough he will go on holiday post-Confederations Cup, the former Maritimo and Porto man -- who has won the Champions League three times as well as the 2016 European Championship among other titles -- is almost certain to be Henrique's first signing since he joined PSG at the start of June.\n\nPepe is expected to sign with PSG after he's finished with Portugal this summer.\n\nAnother boost for the sporting director and the recently deposed former French champions is the news that Thiago Motta is set to extend his stay by one more campaign.\n\nThe source claimed that although there are still a few details left to be taken care of in terms of how the 34-year-old transitions into a staff role at the end of his proposed new deal -- and which position he will occupy -- the Brazil-born Italy international will prolong his playing career by one more term.\n\nMotta's contract extension should be taken care of by the end of the week, and along with Pepe, he will be the main source of experience in the dressing room.\n\nOnce Pepe and Motta are sorted, PSG's next objective will be to lure Fabinho from French rivals and current champions Monaco to the capital.\n\nThe Brazil international is currently attracting interest from the likes of Manchester United but the source says the 23-year-old -- who was has been a revelation with Les Monegasques under Leonardo Jardim since switching from right back to defensive midfield -- has given his word to Henrique that he will hold out for a move to PSG.\n\nAssuming Fabinho gets his wish, he will take over the deep-lying midfield role Motta has made vital to the team's now trademark possession-based 4-3-3 formation, enabling Marco Verratti and Adrien Rabiot to occupy the more advanced berths with Blaise Matuidi likely to be moved on this summer.\n\nJonathan Johnson covers PSG and the French national team for ESPN FC. Twitter: @Jon_LeGossip."}
{"text":"2009 film based on Alice Sebold's 2002 novel\n\nThe Lovely Bones is a 2009 supernatural drama film directed by Peter Jackson, and starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Michael Imperioli, and Saoirse Ronan. The screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Jackson was based on Alice Sebold\u2019s award-winning and bestselling 2002 novel of the same name. It follows a girl who is murdered and watches over her family from the in-between, and is torn between seeking vengeance on her killer and allowing her family to heal. An international co-production between the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand,[2] the film was produced by Carolynne Cunningham, Walsh, Jackson, and Aimee Peyronnet, with Steven Spielberg, Tessa Ross, Ken Kamins, and James Wilson as executive producers. Principal photography began in October 2007 in New Zealand and Pennsylvania, United States. The film's score was composed by Brian Eno.\n\nThe Lovely Bones was first released on December 26, 2009, in New Zealand, and then internationally in January 2010. The film's North American release date was changed multiple times, with a limited release on December 11, 2009, and a wider release on January 15, 2010.[3] It was released to mainly mixed reviews from critics; the story and its message were generally criticized, with praise mainly aimed at the visual effects, Peter Jackson's direction, and the performances of Ronan and Tucci. In the film's opening weekend, in limited release, it grossed $116,616, despite only having been screened in three theaters, placing it at 30th place on the box office chart.[3] The Lovely Bones grossed over $44 million in North America.[4] The film also received numerous accolades, including Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, BAFTA, and Academy Award nominations.\n\nPlot [ edit ]\n\nIn 1973, 14-year-old high school freshman Susie Salmon dreams about becoming a photographer. One day, Ray, a boy she has a crush on, approaches her at school and asks her out. As Susie walks home through a cornfield, she runs into her neighbor, George Harvey, who coaxes her into his underground den. Inside, Susie becomes uncomfortable and attempts to leave; when he grabs her, the scene fades until she is seen rushing past classmate Ruth Connors, apparently fleeing Harvey's den.\n\nThe Salmons become worried when Susie fails to return home from school. Her father, Jack, searches for her, while her mother, Abigail, waits for the police. In town, Susie sees Jack, but he does not respond to her when she calls. Susie runs home to find Harvey soaking in a bathtub. After seeing her bracelet hanging on the sink faucet near a bloody shaving razor, Susie realizes she never escaped the den and was murdered by Harvey. Screaming, she is pulled into the \"In-Between\", that is neither Heaven nor Earth. From there, Susie watches over her loved ones, unable to let go despite the urging of her new afterlife friend, Holly.\n\nInvestigating Susie's disappearance with Detective Fenerman, Jack thinks Susie was murdered by someone she knew. He researches neighbors and comes to think Harvey is the killer. Fenerman is unable to find any evidence pinpointing Harvey as a suspect, as Harvey cleaned up. Susie's sister, Lindsey, agrees with Jack's suspicions, but their casework takes a toll on Abigail, and Jack invites Abigail's alcoholic mother, Lynn, to move in with them. Feeling alienated from her husband, Abigail leaves for California. Susie, in her afterlife, learns that Harvey, who has now targeted Lindsey as his next victim, has murdered six other girls, including Holly, and that he stuffed Susie's body into a safe in his basement.\n\nOne night, Jack, carrying a bat, trails Harvey into the cornfield. However, Jack accidentally stumbles across Susie's friend, Clarissa. Her boyfriend, who mistakenly thinks his girlfriend is being assaulted, nearly bludgeons Jack to death as Harvey watches from a hiding spot. As Jack recuperates, Lindsey breaks into Harvey's house looking for evidence that he killed Susie. Upstairs, she finds a notebook containing a sketch of the den, a lock of Susie's hair, and news articles about Susie's disappearance. Harvey returns home and almost catches Lindsey in his house, but she escapes and rushes home to discover that her mother has returned. Not wishing to spoil her parents' reunion, she gives the book to her grandmother, who contacts the police. Harvey has already fled, having seen Lindsey running from his home \u2013 he takes the safe containing Susie's remains with him.\n\nSusie's afterlife begins expanding into a larger heaven, and she is greeted by Harvey's other victims\u2014now showing nine, including Susie. She resists Holly's urging to enter Heaven along with the others, claiming she has one final thing to do. Meanwhile, Susie's classmates Ruth and Ray are present when Harvey drives up to dispose of the safe at a sinkhole dump site. Susie returns to Earth and enters Ruth's body, causing Ruth to faint. Ray rushes to Ruth's aid only to realize she has become Susie. They kiss, completing Susie's last wish, and she returns to Heaven. Meanwhile Harvey dumps the safe in a sinkhole, leaving it to disappear in the muddy water as he drives away.\n\nSometime later, Harvey meets a young woman outside a diner and offers her a ride, but she rejects him and leaves. A large icicle falls from an overhead branch, hitting Harvey on the shoulder. He loses his balance on the ice and falls backward over a cliff to his death. Time passes, and Susie sees that her family is healing, which Susie refers to as \"the lovely bones\" that grew around her absence. As the film concludes, Susie finally enters Heaven, telling the audience: \"My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was 14 years old when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. I was here for a moment and then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.\"\n\nCast [ edit ]\n\nProduction [ edit ]\n\nIn May 2000, Film4 Productions acquired feature film rights to Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones,[25] when it was a half-written manuscript. Producer Aimee Peyronnet had sought to attract studio interest to the manuscript, and an insider informed Film4's deputy head of production, Jim Wilson, of the project.[26] The company attached Luc Besson and Peyronnet's production company Seaside to the project, two years before the novel's release.[25] By February 2001, Lynne Ramsay was hired to direct and write the film adaptation of the novel.[27] In July 2002, Channel 4 shut down Film4, causing Hollywood studios and producers to pursue acquisition of feature film rights to The Lovely Bones, which had spent multiple weeks at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. The film adaptation, which had been estimated at a budget of $15 million, remained with Channel 4 under its newly developed inhouse film unit, with Ramsay still contracted to write and direct. By October 2002, Ramsay was writing the script with fellow screenwriter Liana Dognini, with filming planned for summer 2003.[26] Author Sebold was invited by the producers to provide input on the project.[28]\n\nRamsay, who had read the novel in manuscript prior to publication, said in 2012 that her adaptation departed from it significantly. The scenes with Susie in heaven would have been depicted purely as her father's imagination. He would have become friends with Mr. Harvey, never suspecting him of having killed his daughter. \"I really didn't like the My Little Pony, she's-in-heaven, everything's-O.K. aspect\", she told The New York Times in 2012.[29]\n\nIn July 2003, the studio DreamWorks negotiated a first look deal with producer Peyronnet,[30] after DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg expressed interest in the project.[31] DreamWorks did not acquire the rights to the novel, and Ramsay was eventually detached from the project as, she says, FilmFour wanted a version more faithful to the novel.[29] In April 2004, producers Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens entered negotiations to develop the project.[32] Jackson described the book as \"a wonderfully emotional and powerful story. Like all the best fantasy, it has a solid grounding in the real world.\"[33] By January 2005, Jackson and Walsh planned to independently purchase film rights and to seek studio financing after a script had been developed. The producers sought to begin adapting a spec script for The Lovely Bones in January 2006, with the goal of script completion and budget estimation by the following May.[34]\n\nJackson explained he enjoyed the novel because he found it \"curiously optimistic\" and uplifting because of the narrator's sense of humor, adding there was a difference between its tone and subject matter. He felt very few films dealt with the loss of a loved one.[35] Jackson foresaw the most challenging element in the novel to adapt was the portrayal of Susie, the protagonist, in her heaven, and making it \"ethereal and emotional but not hokey.\"[33] Saoirse Ronan explained Jackson chose to depict the afterlife as depending on Susie's emotions. \"Whenever Susie feels happy, Heaven is sunny and there's birds and everything. Whenever it\u2019s not so great, it's raining or she\u2019s in the middle of an ocean.\"[36] Jackson described the book's description of \"heaven\" as being an \"In-Between\" rather than a true heaven and said he was not trying to paint a definitive picture of Heaven itself.[35] \"[W]hen Jackson created Susie's heaven, in a 1973 world, he went through the Partridge Family television show archives as a reference.\"[37]\n\n\"[I] basically [added] more violence and suffering, [the audience] wanted far more violence [...] They just weren't satisfied [...] We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted to see [the character] in agony and suffer a lot more, we had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed.\" \u2014Jackson to Reuters on re-shooting Harvey's death scene, November 2009[38]\n\nA 120-page draft of the script was written by September 2006.[39] In April 2007, the script was completed by Jackson, Walsh and Boyens; Jackson intended to direct. The three producers began seeking a studio partner to finance the film adaptation. Besides the major studios, smaller companies including United Artists were also contacted. New Line Cinema was excluded from negotiations because of Jackson's legal dispute with the studio over royalties from his The Lord of the Rings trilogy.[40] Jackson sought a beginning $65 million budget for The Lovely Bones, also requesting from studios what kind of promotional commitments and suggestions they would make for the film adaptation.[41]\n\nBy May, four studios remained interested in the project: DreamWorks, Warner Bros., Sony, and Universal.[42] The Lovely Bones was sold to DreamWorks for $70 million.[43] Paramount Pictures received the rights to distribute the film worldwide. Production began in October 2007 in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and New Zealand.[5][44] Shooting in parts of Delaware, Chester and Montgomery counties, including Hatfield,[45] Ridley Township, Phoenixville, Royersford, Malvern and East Fallowfield,[46] lasted a few weeks, and most of the studio shooting was done in New Zealand.[39]\n\nIn December 2008, Brian Eno signed on to compose the film's score. Fran Walsh, a big fan of his work, suggested him to Jackson.[47] Jackson had called Eno to request use of two of his early tracks to evoke atmosphere for the 1970s scenes in the film. When Eno asked if he could compose the whole score, Jackson was surprised, since he had heard Eno did not like working on films. For the film's ending, Eno uncovered a demo he had done in 1973 and reunited with the vocalist to create a proper version for the film, commenting: \"That song from 1973 was finally finished in 2008!\"[48]\n\nIn November 2009, Jackson stated that he re-shot new footage of Harvey's death scene after test audiences said it was not violent enough and wanted to \"see more of Harvey in pain.\"[13][38] Jackson said it was important to him that the movie receive a PG-13 rating so that the film could appeal to the widest possible audience, despite the necessarily violent nature of some scenes.[13]\n\nRelease [ edit ]\n\nStrategy [ edit ]\n\nThe Lovely Bones and screened a clip from it. Jackson at 2009 Comic-Con film festival . At the festival Jackson discussedand screened a clip from it.\n\nThe Lovely Bones was originally scheduled for release on March 13, 2009, but it was delayed to December 11, 2009, as the studio became interested in releasing the film for \"awards season,\" which gave Jackson an opportunity to make some effects shots larger in scope.[49] The film then received a limited theater release on December 11, 2009, in the United States.[50] The film was originally set to have a wider United States theater release on December 25, 2009 (Christmas Day), as part of a campaign to build its momentum into January 2010.[52] In early December it was confirmed that the United States release date had been pushed back by three weeks to January 15, 2010.[53] Paramount and DreamWorks did not give a reason for the change of the release date. The film premiered in New Zealand on December 26, 2009, and was released in the United Kingdom on January 29 and in other countries in January 2010.\n\nAccording to the Los Angeles Times, Paramount invested $70 million in production and an additional $85 million in worldwide marketing and distribution.[53] In December 2009, the Los Angeles Times described the marketing and promotion of The Lovely Bones as having been a \"heavy advertising campaign.\"[52] In late July 2009, as part of the promotion, Jackson talked about the film and screened a 4\u200b1\u2044 2 minute clip at the San Diego Comic-Con International film festival.[37]\n\nAs part of marketing for the film, in August 2009, people were allowed to enter a contest to win a trip to Wellington, for the film's New Zealand premiere on December 14, 2009.[54] The offer included, if the winner lived outside of Wellington, one night\u2019s accommodation and a voucher for flight or petrol to Wellington.[54] A teaser trailer was released in August 2009, days before the film's official trailer.[55] The official trailer debuted on the television series Entertainment Tonight and was released online shortly afterwards.[37][56] In August 2009, Jackson offered a \"behind-the-scenes look\" at the film and discussed elements (mainly violence) in the film's plot line.[57]\n\nThe Los Angeles Times reported that Paramount had originally expected the film to appeal to a \"sophisticated, adult audience,\" but after poor revenue and average reviews, the studio decided to redirect the film to an audience in another age group.[52] Surveys showed that the film was favored more by females aged 13\u201320 than by any other demographic. Paramount began to screen the movie \"aggressively for high school- and college-age girls\" during its three-screen limited release.[52]\n\nBox office [ edit ]\n\nOn December 11, 2009, the film was released on three screens in Los Angeles and New York. As of January 4, 2010, the film had grossed over $389,000 in the US.[3] Claudia Eller and Ben Fritz of the Los Angeles Times felt that it did poorly at the box office in the first few weeks of its release because of average reviews and negative word-of-mouth.[52] During its opening-weekend release on three screens, it earned over $116,616, an average of estimated $38,872 per-theater revenue.[3] The film's revenue placed it at thirtieth place on the box office chart.[3] In the film's second and third weeks of release, the film saw a decrease; in the fourth week, it had a 54.3-percent increase.[58]\n\nWhen put into wide release on January 15, 2010,[18] it grossed $17,005,133 that weekend, ranking number three at the domestic box office. By the end of its run, The Lovely Bones had made $44,114,232 domestically, and $49,507,108 overseas, for a worldwide total of $93,621,340.\n\nHome media [ edit ]\n\nThe film was released in the US on DVD and two-disc Blu-ray April 20, 2010 and in the United Kingdom on June 11, 2010.[59]\n\nReception [ edit ]\n\nCritical reception [ edit ]\n\nAlthough Ronan and Tucci were praised for their performances, The Lovely Bones received mixed reviews from critics.[60] On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 32%, based on 238 reviews, with an average rating of 5\/10. The site's critical consensus reads, \"It's stuffed full of Peter Jackson's typically dazzling imagery, but The Lovely Bones suffers from abrupt shifts between horrific violence and cloying sentimentality.\"[61] Metacritic gave the film a score of 42 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating \"mixed or average reviews\".[62] It is Peter Jackson's lowest rated film to date.[citation needed]\n\nIan Freer of Empire gave the film 4\/5 stars.[63] Freer emphasized the \"bold, daring original filmmaking, with arguably more emotional and intellectual meat to chew on than either the Rings trilogy or Kong.\"[63] Freer noted that, like The Lord of the Rings, the film \"does a fantastic job with revered, complex source material\" and that, since it is \"as terrific on terra firma as it is audacious in its astral plane\", it is \"doubtful\" that there would be a \"more imaginative\" and \"courageous film\" in 2010.[63]\n\nRichard Corliss of Time wrote that \"through [Peter] Jackson's art\" and Ronan's \"magic\" the \"obscenity of child murder has been invested with immense gravity and grace\" and \"like the story of Susie's life after death, that's a miracle.\"[64] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone felt that the film was \"conveyed\" in a \"remarkable performance\" by Ronan and described Tucci as being \"magnificent as a man of uncontrollable impulses\" to \"help Jackson cut a path to a humanity that supersedes life and death.\"[65] Travers praised Jackson for building \"jolting suspense.\" Despite praising the film, however, Travers noted that while the book \"never flinched,\" the film does, and while the \"business is being transacted\" by Jackson with a \"Lord of the Rings fantasy\" the film \"attunes himself to a family tragedy.\"[65]\n\nClaudia Puig of USA Today gave the film 2\/4 stars, remarking that while \"[Peter] Jackson gets the thriller scenes right\", the \"conceit of Susie trapped in a DayGlo world between the one she left and her final resting place, imparting lessons on coping with death, feels preachy.\"[66] Puig also described the film as having \"clashing tones\" that veer from \"lightheartedness to heavy-handedness.\"[66] Puig also criticized the film's computer-generated imagery, describing it as being \"cheesy\" and felt that it broke \"no ground.\"[66] Kirt Honeycutt, of the Hollywood Reporter, described the film as telling \"a fundamentally different story\" which is \"one that is not without its tension, humor and compelling details\", but that \"it's also a simpler, more button-pushing tale that misses the joy and heartbreak of the original.\"[67] Honeycutt also described Jackson as having transformed Sebold's \"startling, unique novel about the aftermath of a terrible murder\" into a story that's more \"focused on crime and punishment.\"[67]\n\n\"[Alice] Sebold's book would've had a tough leap to the multiplex no matter who guided it. But [Peter] Jackson is too enamored with the idea of mixing heaven and the heebie-jeebies, so he's made the skeevy equivalent of a Mitch Albom book with some pulp fiction pressed between its covers.\" Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News[68]\n\nStephanie Zacharek, of Salon.com, viewed the film as being \"an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material\" because \"good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects.\"[69] Todd McCarthy, of Variety, felt that Jackson had undermined the \"solid work from a good cast\" with \"show-offy celestial evocations\" that \"severely disrupt the emotional connections with the characters.\"[70] McCarthy stated that he felt that the film, overall, was a \"significant artistic disappointment.\"[70] Joe Neumaier, of New York Daily News, described Jackson as having \"siphoned out all the soulfulness\" that made the author's \"combination thriller\/afterlife fantasy a best-seller\" and that the film was \"a gumball-colored potboiler that's more squalid than truly mournful.\"[68] Neumaier also wrote that the film and Jackson \"wasted\" a \"good cast.\"[68] Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 1.5 stars out of 4, calling it \"deplorable\", and criticizing the apparent message that Susie's murder eventually made her happier. He was also critical of the film's portrayal of Heaven, which he compared to \"a happy gathering of new Facebook friends\". However, he praised the acting, stating that \"this whole film is Jackson's fault\".[71]\n\nAccording to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the rating given to The Lovely Bones received 24 objections, more than any other movie in 2010. The BBFC report states, \"Many found the film to be a shocking and upsetting experience. The scene in which young Susie is entrapped by the killer, and the subsequent sequence in which the killer soaks in a bath after the murder, were compared by some complainants to scenes in \u201818\u2019 rated horror films.\" The BBFC rated the movie a 12A, and many complained that the movie was upsetting for a younger audience. Nevertheless, the BBFC defended its rating: \"The Lovely Bones lacked any explicit detail of the murder and any sexual elements were downplayed. The audience\u2019s sympathies remain entirely with the family and the film had many positive messages about life.\"[72][73][74][75][76]\n\nAccolades [ edit ]\n\nSee also [ edit ]"}
{"text":"There are still fences up all over the Splash Park and Issak Kendal Ker Plaza on Princes Island this weekend. These Fences make it impossible for me to do my job. On the busiest weekend of the year celebrating 150 years of Canadain History one tradition was forgotten and several Magicians, Jugglers, Acrobats and Clowns are unable to work.\n\nEver since the park was built there has been street performance in that plaza. In it\u2019s height there were dozens of entertainers emigrating to Calgary so they could perform on that beautiful amphitheater. For generations there has always been some kind of performance there every weekend. People who saw a one-man band there as a child, bring their kids back to watch the new generation of magicians and jugglers. Especially on Canada Day.\n\nNot this year. The fences wont allow the passing people to step off the path, out of traffic and enter the theatre to sit on the grass or the stones or the 3 tiers of steps for seating. When people walk past and see someone performing on the stage they don\u2019t have the option to stop and watch.\n\nOn Canada Day we moved our shows to Stephen Ave because there were all kinds of events and fun things bringing people to the core. The next day we went back to the amphitheater, THE FENCES ARE STILL UP!?! Our permits are very clear about where we are allowed perform. Because we gather crowds and perform full shows we are restricted to ONLY work in side that amphitheater. As soon as we gather a crowd anywhere else Bylaw or the Police shut us down.\n\nIs this just a negative result of bureaucracy? Or is Calgary Parks trying to get rid of us. Because right now they are acting like a partner who wants to break up me but would rather manipulate me into doing it for them."}
{"text":"Prabhat Kumar Jha\n\nRautahat, August 6\n\nPolice today arrested contractor Prahlad Sah of Durga Construction Service after four girls of a family drowned in a ditch that was dug by Sah\u2019s men to expand the Ring Road in Garuda Municipality, Rautahat.\n\nRam Ekwal Sah\u2019s daughters \u2014 Sangita Kumari, 12, and Sunita Kumari, 9, his brother Jogendra Sah\u2019s daughter Sunaina Kumari, 9, and his other brother Prem Sah\u2019s daughter Susmita Kumari, 9, of Ramjanaki Temple Tole of Garuda Municipality died in the tragic incident yesterday. Police arrested Prahlad after the victims\u2019 family demonstrated against the incident.\n\nThe locals protested with the bodies at Methur Chowk for four hours after relatives of the minors received the bodies from district hospital after the post-mortem today. They demanded stern action against the staffers at Road Division Office, Chandrapur, and the contractor.\n\nPolice assured the victims\u2019 kin that action would be taken against the guilty. SP Yagya Binod Pokhrel of Rautahat District Police Office said an immediate relief amount of\n\nRs 25,000 was offered to families of each girl for their final rites.\n\nRautahat Chief District Officer Uddab Bahadur Thapa has sought documents related to road construction from Road Division Office Chief Yogesh Suman.\n\nSuman said he was unaware of ditches being dug on the road. \u201cWe called a tender for road construction, giving all responsibilities to the contractor,\u201d he added. He said the contractor should be held responsible for the incident.\n\nThe road division office had called the tender for expanding the road. Sah signed the contract for Rs 1.4 million, which was one-third of the tender price. Locals accused the contractor of using soil dug out from sides of the road for construction of the road.\n\nA local, Manoj Chaudhary, said ditches were dug on both sides of the road using dozer. He said minors fell into a ditch filled with rainwater as they were oblivious of the ditches.\n\nRam Ekwal has sought action against staffers of the road construction company who had left the ditches unattended.\n\nA version of this article appears in print on August 07, 2017 of The Himalayan Times.\n\nFollow The Himalayan Times on Twitter and Facebook"}
{"text":"The Association of American Universities released the results of its 27-school \u201cclimate survey\u201d on campus sexual assault on Monday, and officials explained on a conference call with reporters why this one is the gold standard.\n\nUnlike earlier surveys, the AAU survey included both a large number of campuses and a large sample size at each participating school, said Bonnie Fisher, a consultant for survey design firm Westat and professor at the University of Cincinnati.\n\nPrior surveys were \u201cplagued\u201d by differences in definitions and methods, how they were administered and how they were designed, Fisher said. The AAU survey precisely measured how many students said they were sexually violated by clearly defined methods of contact (penetration and touching) and \u201ctactics\u201d (physical force, drugs and alcohol, coercion, absence of affirmative consent).\n\nYou would think with this careful design spread across more than two dozen large research universities, the AAU survey results would differ notably from previous surveys that suffered from vague definitions, small samples and \u201cselection bias,\u201d meaning an overrepresentation of people with strong views on the subject in the survey pool \u2013 all of which contributed to implausibly high levels of reported assault.\n\nNope. This survey found slightly more sexual violence than the well-known but questionable statistic that 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted in college:\n\nThe incidence of sexual assault and sexual misconduct due to physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation among female undergraduate student respondents was 23.1 percent, including 10.8 percent who experienced penetration.\n\nThis result made no sense to me, so I flipped to the section of the report that defines \u201cincapacitation\u201d (page viii of the executive summary), a concept that is so poorly explained on the average campus that it\u2019s practically meaningless:\n\n\u201c\u2026.unable to consent or stop what was happening because you were passed out, asleep or incapacitated due to drugs or alcohol\u201d\n\nYou\u2019ll notice that is not a definition of incapacitation \u2013 it\u2019s a tautology (incapacitation means being incapacitated) \u2013 and it\u2019s not meaningfully different from how other surveys have treated incapacitation, as something you just know when it\u2019s happening (to yourself or your partner).\n\nIndeed, students are now repeatedly warned at many campuses that they or their partners can\u2019t consent if they are \u201cincapacitated,\u201d \u201cintoxicated\u201d or just \u201cdrunk\u201d (we\u2019re looking at you, Coastal Carolina), and judging whether an accuser was in a state of mind to be able to consent to sex (and whether the accused should have known) is one of the central tasks of campus adjudications.\n\nRELATED: If you don\u2019t have the best sex of your life at Coastal Carolina University, it\u2019s rape\n\nSince everyone agrees that alcohol (at the least) is involved in a significant number of campus sexual experiences, if not most of them, you\u2019d think that telling students the precise conditions for incapacitation would be indispensable for getting accurate answers.\n\nWhen I asked officials on the call why the definition was so loose, and how it could lead students to think they were incapacitated when they were drunk but still cognizant of their actions, they basically shrugged.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s a fairly standard phrase that\u2019s used on a number of other surveys\u201d and it was taken from the White House\u2019s task force on sexual violence, Westat Vice President David Cantor said. \u201cWe actually modified that statement a bit to make it more strict,\u201d and \u201cit\u2019s not just talking about being drunk.\u201d\n\nEnd of story.\n\nNo one seemed to appreciate the irony that the AAU and Westat were bragging about designing a survey that avoided the pitfalls of all its predecessors, and yet it made the same giant honking mistake as every survey before it: treating incapacitation as something self-evident.\n\nThere\u2019s every reason to suspect that students who were already uneasy about prior sexual encounters \u2013 perhaps because they were drinking at the time \u2013 would identify in retrospect as \u201cincapacitated,\u201d if prompted, unless they were told in detail that it\u2019s more than just acting stupid when you\u2019re drunk.\n\nBrett Sokolow of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, which advises schools how to design sexual-misconduct policies and proceedings, gave a thorough definition of incapacitation 10 years ago that could have been useful to AAU and Westat:\n\nOne becomes under the influence of alcohol as soon as one has anything to drink. Impairment begins as soon as alcohol enters the bloodstream, and increases with consumption. Intoxication and inebriation are synonyms, as is drunkenness, and corresponds to a .08 blood alcohol concentration. Incapacitation is a state beyond drunkenness or intoxication. What is confusing about incapacity is that it has nothing to do with an amount of alcohol or a specific blood alcohol concentration. In fact, some drunk people will be incapacitated, and some will not. Incapacity can be defined with respect to how the alcohol consumed impacts on someone\u2019s decision-making capacity, awareness of consequences, and ability to make fully-informed judgments.\n\nThough his discussion goes on to give colleges far too much leeway to judge that what appeared consensual, to both parties, at the time of sex, was actually not consensual in retrospect, at least those conditions put some intelligible limits on the concept of incapacitation.\n\nI\u2019ll have more thoughts on this report, and a review of other skeptical reactions, in a future post.\n\nLike The College Fix on Facebook \/ Follow us on Twitter\n\nIMAGE: RogaMuffin\/Flickr"}
{"text":"Subtle changes are made all the time in college football, but it's the wholesale changes that really help separate the men from the boys. Sometimes you have to revolutionize your approach in order to improve your product.\n\nSee: recruiting, the expansion craze, offensive philosophies, offseason schedules, rejuvenation tactics away from the field and satellite camps.\n\nYou simply can't fight change. Doing so is foolish. That's one reason the SEC has been so successful during the past decade. Those eight national championships in 10 years didn't just materialize overnight. Careful planning and excellent business sense from league officials, universities and coaches have helped the SEC rise above the rest in college football.\n\nThanks to the skillful mind of former SEC commissioner Mike Slive, the SEC has stayed ahead of the curve for most of the 2000's. New commissioner Greg Sankey is in the infancy of his reign as league commissioner, but if he wants to give the SEC another leg up on the competition, he could take a radical step into future planning.\n\nPetition the NCAA to get rid of divisions in college football ... even though the SEC created them in 1992.\n\nHonestly, what's the point? They are outdated, and hurt the conference more than help it.\n\nBut, Edward, what about traditional division rivalries? Why do you hate the fact that Missouri is on the western side of the conference, but plays in the Eastern Division?\n\nFor starters, yes, it makes no sense to have Missouri in the East. Secondly, this is a great way to make sure that traditional rivalries are preserved and respected.\n\nI love traditional division rivalries so much that I think the league is bleeding real conference rivalries dry with its silly format. Nine conference games aside, the 6-1-1 conference scheduling model (one permanent and one rotating opponent in the opposite division) does no one any favors. It's bad for the players, bad for the fans and really leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to league play.\n\nObviously, people above my pay grade would have to dissect this more thoroughly, but if the SEC pushes the NCAA to get rid of divisions, conferences can keep their rivalries and even invest in older ones. Example: Florida and Auburn began play in 1912 and played for 58 consecutive years (1945-2002). The additions of Missouri and Texas A&M in 2012 further extinguished this rivalry by eliminating another cross-divisional opponent. Florida and Auburn aren't slated to play until 2019 in Gainesville, and at Auburn in 2024.\n\nWithout divisions, Florida could keep Georgia, Tennessee and LSU (the current permanent West opponent) on its schedule, and add Auburn. The Tigers could keep Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee, and add Florida.\n\nProtect all the key in-conference rivalries for schools and set four or five permanent opponents for each team. Rotate the others with a home-and-home series, mix and match, whatever. If you have four permanent opponents and four different rotators or five permanent opponents and three rotators, players would see each SEC team in three years. Doing home-and-homes would push that to five years in either format.\n\nOf course, time between rotators decreases with nine conference games.\n\nPlayers would see every school in four years and you're keeping the most important games each season. Two wins right there. And disproportionate permanent crossovers would be gone.\n\nYou're welcome, LSU.\n\nElimination of divisions would also ensure that the two best teams would play in Atlanta every year. The West has won seven straight conference titles, six by 14 points or more. Florida (2008) is the last East team to win the conference. Let's not act like there hasn't been an imbalance of power in the SEC, thanks to divisions. There is an obvious disparity, creating more worry for teams and their true playoff hopes.\n\nThe SEC title game has mostly gotten the pairings right by overall record, but there have been instances in the past where a ho-hum title game would have been replaced by a more deserving matchup, like Alabama and LSU in 2011 and Auburn-Arkansas in 2010.\n\nNothing wrong with getting the most competitive game possible in your most important game every year by guaranteeing No. 1 vs. No. 2, which -- wait for it -- increases playoff hopes even more!\n\nOn the outside, this looks simple. With the sport evolving more and more, you might as well make sure you can get the best product on the field more and more. This is a step in that direction, and it serves the league, its teams and its fans well."}
{"text":"In October, the US Intelligence Community, which includes 16 American intelligence agencies, announced that they were \u201cconfident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.\u201d Controversy broke out last week over the disputed conclusion that the Russians were attempting to push Donald Trump to victory, as opposed to attempting to undermine the electoral system generally \u2013 but there\u2019s been little controversy about whether Russia was behind the WikiLeaks hacks.\n\nExcept on the right.\n\nThere, many commentators have insisted that there\u2019s no evidence whatsoever that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government were behind the hacks. Sean Hannity, who used to believe that Julian Assange should go to jail, hosted Assange (whom, Hannity assured his audience, had \u201cdone us a favor\u201d by hacking the Democratic National Committee) and kvelled as Assange said that the Russians had nothing to do with the hacks. Trump mouthpiece Bill Mitchell dutifully tweeted Putin\u2019s challenge to the United States, and that tweet received nearly two thousand likes and well over a thousand retweets from sympathetic Trump fans.\n\nHere\u2019s the actual story, from CNN:\n\nThe United States must either stop accusing Russia of meddling in its elections or prove it, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was \"indecent\" of the United States to \"groundlessly\" accuse Russia of intervention in the US election campaign, Russian state news agency Tass reported. \"They should either stop talking about that or produce some proof at last. Otherwise it all begins to look unseemly,\" Peskov reportedly said about the latest accusations that Russia was responsible for hacker attacks.\n\nThe celebratory glee from Trump advocates \u2013 see, Putin\u2019s denying it, so it must all be a Democratic plot in coordination with the CIA! \u2013 is odd, considering that Putin has a long record of lying blatantly about his nefarious activities. In 2012, Russia denied that a spy ring allegedly working for Russia was working for Russia. In May 2015, for example, as Russian troops motored into Ukraine, the government denied that its troops were in Ukraine at all \u2013 even as the Russian government issued an order covering up all deaths of Russian troops in the country. In October 2015, the Russian government denied that it or pro-Russian separatists had anything to do with the shooting down of MH17 \u2013 and Trump naturally bought Putin\u2019s explanation, stating, \u201cPutin and Russia say they didn\u2019t do it, the other side said they did, no one really knows who did it, probably Putin knows who did it, possibly it was Russia but they are totally denying it.\u201d Last month, Russia denied reports of an air offensive in Aleppo \u2013 even though human rights groups reported the airstrikes.\n\nRussia, in other words, lies all the time. It\u2019s a dictatorship run by a former KGB operative.\n\nYet Republicans seem to parrot Putin\u2019s line as the truth, so long as that truth benefits Donald Trump. Kellyanne Conway\u2019s ridiculous line that questions about Russian hacking should end if President Obama loved \u201cthe country enough\u201d are a shoddy way of shutting down a discussion about the hacking itself.\n\nThat\u2019s pretty disgusting. But it makes sense from a utilitarian perspective, if not a moral one \u2013 many Trump supporters are happy to praise one of the planet\u2019s worst human beings so long as he helps their agenda, and top members of the Trump administration think of Russia as part of the anti-jihadist team, and have some admiration for Putin\u2019s nationalist ambitions (see Bannon, Steve).\n\nIt\u2019s sad to watch the party of Reagan mimic the Putin party line. But partisanship now trumps decency and truth, obviously."}
{"text":"Share\n\nYesterday, Twitter took the lid off its recent acquisition Vine. It\u2019s a social app that allows you to make six-second, looped, GIF-like videos. It has an interface very reminiscent of Instagram, primarily because for the time being it\u2019s mobile-only (although its deal with Twitter means its content is embeddable in Twitter cards, so Vines are showing up there plenty).\n\nVine is fun, creative, simple, social, and as it turns out, something news outlets are busy experimenting with. It isn\u2019t anything revolutionary, however. It\u2019s not a threat to all that many apps or platforms out there \u2013 but Facebook shut it off anyway.\n\nYes, within a day of Vine\u2019s launch, Facebook pulled the ability for Vine users to find Facebook friends who were also using the new app.\n\nWhen asked for comment, a Facebook rep pointed me to this just-posted blog entry:\n\n\u201cFor the vast majority of developers building social apps and games, keep doing what you\u2019re doing. Our goal is to provide a platform that gives people an easy way to login to your apps, create personalized and social experiences, and easily share what they\u2019re doing in your apps with people on Facebook. This is how our platform has been used by the most popular categories of apps, such as games, music, fitness, news and general lifestyle apps.\n\nFor a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we\u2019ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today (see I.10).\u201d\n\nVine isn\u2019t the only app to feel Facebook\u2019s cold shoulder: Mobile text and voice messaging app Voxer also lost Facebook access recently, because after its update to Messenger, Facebook now sees it as a competitor. Voxer says that while Facebook isn\u2019t where it\u2019s getting user growth from, it is a disappointing development. \u201cWe are sorry that a channel for engagement is being shut down by Facebook to the detriment of our community. But we aren\u2019t alone, and it is both a lesson and a warning for other companies to be careful about counting on third party services that can be easily taken away.\u201d Russian search giant Yandex\u2019s Wonder app \u2013 essentially a mobile, voice-activated version of Graph Search \u2013 is yet another product that found itself on the outs with Facebook.\n\nWhat is the deal?\n\nWhat\u2019s maybe most upsetting about this series of events is that it\u2019s not even surprising anymore. For the last year, social-networking platforms have been cutting off varying levels of access to one another. A quick recap of all the most unfriendly moments in social networking that have been going on:\n\nIt didn\u2019t use to be like this. I fully realize how \u201cI remember when a gallon of gas used to cost a nickel\u201d that sounds, but it\u2019s true. In their infancy, social-networking platforms had a share-and-share-alike attitude, where you could cross-post and import contacts and find friends and use apps that were pulling mass amounts of useful data from outside APIs. It was a beautiful, brief moment in time.\n\nOf course, these platforms weren\u2019t what they are now. They were more basic, features were limited, content wasn\u2019t embedded as richly, there was less to interact with. As they\u2019ve grown, so too have their databases of social information, and thus their worth. Twitter has a tight grip on the interest graph, Facebook on the social graph, Google on the information graph. They want bits and pieces of what the others have. But instead of trading, and sharing, the walls have gone up and silos have been erected. Power grabs are being made. And we lose. Every time, we lose.\n\nThese moves are perfectly within the rights of the companies making them, but that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s right, or that we have to like it. These outlets can\u2019t call themselves Open Platforms anymore; they can\u2019t just reinterpret that phrase to mean that they invite developers to work with them, under their rules, on their terms \u2013 and that if you\u2019re an app with a major competitor, it\u2019s game over.\n\nIt\u2019s also a bit confounding, because it\u2019s not as if Vine is going to challenge Facebook for social network dominance, or Instagram is going to be the new Twitter.\n\nThe slippery slope here is bigger than just losing contact-finding abilities. Cross-posting could get killed off; developers will become warier about working with a platform, and the goal will be to get acquired, a la Instagram and Vine, to assure compatibility. There\u2019s also fear that if you do happen upon something that really connects and inspires users, the dominant networks are simply going to clone it (although, that largely hasn\u2019t worked out well).\n\nWith great power comes great responsibility, and a handful of social networks are finding themselves in this position right now. But instead of doing what Spider-Man would do and creating an open, thriving, connected social Web, they are building walls and cutting off ways for us to create and share various types of content. Social networking won\u2019t work if platforms and apps exist as their own solitary islands of wonderful, unshareable, unfindable content.\n\nThere are hints of very monopolistic behavior. But what can we do? Right now, we\u2019re just watching the big platforms get bigger. We\u2019ll be left wondering what could have become of the small startups that never had a chance to grow.\n\nThe views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the beliefs of Digital Trends."}
{"text":"As a professor of literature, rhetoric, and writing at the University of California at Irvine, I\u2019ve discovered that one of the biggest lies about American culture (propagated even by college students) is that Americans don\u2019t read.\n\nThe truth is that most of us read continuously in a perpetual stream of incestuous words, but instead of reading novels, book reviews, or newspapers like we used to in the ancien r\u00e9gime, we now read text messages, social media, and bite-sized entries about our protean cultural history on Wikipedia.\n\nIn the great epistemic galaxy of words, we have become both reading junkies and also professional text skimmers. Reading has become a clumsy science, which is why we keep fudging the lab results. But in diagnosing our own textual attention deficit disorder (ADD), who can blame us for skimming? We\u2019re inundated by so much opinion posing as information, much of it the same material with permutating and exponential commentary. Skimming is practically a defense mechanism against the avalanche of info-opinion that has collectively hijacked narrative, reportage, and good analysis.\n\nWe now skim everything it seems to find evidence for our own belief system. We read to comment on reality (Read: to prove our own belief system). Reading has become a relentless exercise in self-validation, which is why we get impatient when writers don\u2019t come out and simply tell us what they\u2019re arguing. Which reminds me: What the hell am I arguing? With the advent of microblogging platforms, Twitter activism, self-publishing companies, professional trolling, everyone has a microphone now and yet no one actually listens to each other any more. And this is literally because we\u2019re too busy reading. And when we leave comments on an online article, it\u2019s usually an argument we already agree with or one we completely reject before we\u2019ve read the first paragraph. In the age of hyper-information, it\u2019s practically impossible not to be blinded by our own confirmation bias. It\u2019s hard not to be infatuated with Twitter shitstorms either, especially when we\u2019re not the target practice.\n\nE-novels, once the theater of the mind for experimental writers, are now mainstream things that look like long-winded websites. Their chapters bleed into the same cultural space on our screen as grocery lists, weather forecasts, calendar reminders, and email messages. What\u2019s the real difference between reading a blog post online by an eloquent blowhard and reading one chapter of a Jonathan Franzen novel? We can literally swipe from one text to another on our Kindle without realizing we changed platforms. What\u2019s the real difference between skimming an informed political critique on a political junkie Tumblr account and reading a focused tirade on the Washington Post\u2019s blog written by putative experts?\n\nWhat\u2019s the real difference between skimming an informed political critique on a political junkie Tumblr account and reading a focused tirade on the Washington Post\u2019s blog written by putative experts?\n\nThat same blog post will get reposted on other news sites and the same news article will get reposted on other blogs interchangeably. Content\u2014whether thought-provoking, regurgitated, or analytically superficial, impeccably researched, politically doctrinaire, or grammatically atrocious\u2014now occupies the same cultural space, the same screen space, and the same mental space in the public imagination. After awhile, we just stop keeping track of what\u2019s legitimately good because it takes too much energy to separate the cr\u00e8me from the foam.\n\nAs NPR digitizes itself in the 21st century, buries the \u201cR\u201d in its name, and translates its obsolete podcasts into online news features, every one of its articles now bleeds with its comment section, much of it written by posters who haven\u2019t even read the article in question\u2014essentially erasing the dividing lines between expert, echo chamber, and dilettante, journalist, hack, and self-promoter, reportage, character assassination, and mob frenzy.\n\nOne silver lining is that the technological democratization of social media has effectively deconstructed the one-sided power of the Big Bad Media in general and influential writing in particular, which in theory makes this era freer and more decentralized than ever. One downside to technological democratization is that it hasn\u2019t lead to a thriving marketplace of ideas, but a greater retreat into the Platonic cave of self-identification with the shadow world. We have never needed a safer and quieter place to collect our thoughts from the collective din of couch quarterbacking than we do now, which is why it\u2019s so easy to preemptively categorize the articles we read before we actually read them to save ourselves the heartache and the controversy.\n\nThe abundance of texts in this zeitgeist creates a tunnel effect of amnesia. We now have access to so much information that we actually forget the specific nuances of what we read, where we read them, and who wrote them. We forget what\u2019s available all the time because we live in an age of hyperabundant textuality. Now, when we\u2019re lost, we\u2019re just one click away from the answer. Even the line separating what we know and what we don\u2019t know is blurry.\n\nWe now have access to so much information that we actually forget the specific nuances of what we read, where we read them, and who wrote them.\n\nIt is precisely because we now consume writing from the moment we wake until the moment we crash\u2014most of it mundane, redundant, speculative, badly researched, partisan, and emojian\u2014that we no longer have the same appetite (or time) for literary fiction, serious think pieces, or top-shelf journalism anymore, even though they\u2019re all readily available. If an article on the Daily Dot shows up on page 3 of a Google search, it might as well not exist at all. The New York Times article we half-read on our iPhone while standing up in the Los Angeles Metro ends up blurring with the 500 modified retweets about that same article on Twitter. Authors aren\u2019t privileged anymore because everyone writes commentary somewhere and everyone\u2019s commentary shows up some place. Only the platform and the means of production have changed.\n\nSomeday, the Centers for Disease Control will create a whole new branch of research dedicated to studying the infectious disease of cultural memes. Our continuous consumption of text is intricately linked to our continuous forgetting, our continuous reinfection, and our continuous thumbs up\/thumbs down approach to reality, which is why we keep reading late into the night, looking for the next place to leave a comment someone has already made somewhere. Whether we like it or not, we\u2019re all victims and perpetrators of this commentary fractal. There seems to be no way out except deeper inside the sinkhole or to go cold turkey from the sound of our own voices.\n\nJackson Bliss is a hapa fiction writer and a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Irvine. He has a BA in comp lit from Oberlin College , a MFA in fiction from the University of Notre Dame, and a MA in English and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from USC. His short stories and essays have appeared in many publications.\n\nPhoto via Raysonho\/Wikimedia Commons"}
{"text":"Print Article\n\nFirst-year student Carson Huey-You wants to become a quantum physicist. He scored a 1770 on the SAT, and he was co-valedictorian of his senior class.\n\nThis semester he is taking 14 hours. His class load, which includes calculus and physics, has him moving between Beasley, Bass and Winton-Scott Halls.\n\nHis mother, Claretta Huey-You, is never far away.\n\nThat\u2019s because Carson is 11 years old. He was admitted to TCU when he was 10.\n\nDean of Admission Ray Brown said he cannot recall ever having an applicant so young.\n\nCarson couldn\u2019t even apply online because the software is not set to accept someone born in 2002, Brown said.\n\nDuring his admission interview, Carson\u2019s many talents were impressive. Brown said Carson spoke Mandarin Chinese, and played piano in the Admissions Center.\n\nPrior to Carson, Brown said the youngest student to enroll at the university during his tenure was Sam Hong, who graduated in 2011 at age 17.\n\nCarson\u2019s parents expect him to graduate in four to five years, when he is 15 or 16.\n\nBrown said he is pleased to have Carson at the university.\n\n\u201c[Carson] is at a place that will genuinely care about him as a person,\u201d Brown said.\n\n\u201cA strong ability to focus\u201d\n\nCarson\u2019s mother said the first sign that Carson might be gifted came when he was three months old.\n\nShe said she brought him with her to an eye appointment and the doctor was impressed with Carson\u2019s ability to focus.\n\nIn fact, Carson was reading chapter books at the age of two, before being potty-trained. He started a Kumon math and reading learning program before he was three.\n\nHis mother said he could add, subtract, multiply and divide by age three. He was working at an eighth grade level by the age of five.\n\nIt was at this time Carson\u2019s mother and father began searching for a school for Carson.\n\nHis young age and advanced intellect made finding a school for Carson challenging, she said. He was rejected several times before enrolling at Accommodated Learning Academy in Grapevine, Texas.\n\nALA principal and teacher Melissa McGowan said the school caters to all students no matter what learning style they prefer. The school has 16 teachers and 55 students, and 30 to 40 percent of the students end up graduating early, McGowan said.\n\nCarson graduated from ALA with a 4.0 GPA. He said his cumulative SAT score was 1770 (critical reading: 580, math: 620, writing: 570).\n\nWhen asked about Carson in the classroom, McGowan said, \u201c[Carson] was empathetic for others, and was the kind to help others in a humble way.\u201d\n\nMcGowan said the high school students adored him.\n\nA young Horned Frog\n\nCarson and his parents were keen on selecting a college that was a perfect fit for him.\n\nHe visited the university last fall and met with Dr. Magnus Rittby, the senior dean for the College of Science and Engineering. The purpose of the meeting was to see if he was prepared for college.\n\nBy the time Carson left, Rittby said he considered him to be \u201cextremely gifted\u201d and ready for college.\n\nCarson\u2019s parents said they are supportive of his decision to attend the university.\n\nWhen asked if they were concerned about their son attending the university at such a young age, there was little to be said.\n\nCarson\u2019s father, Andre Huey-You, a former pilot, said he is \u201cnot pushing [Carson], but trying to hold on to his son, so he doesn\u2019t get too far beyond him.\u201d\n\nHis mother Claretta is a stay-at-home mother but plans to return to school and enroll in a nursing program.\n\nCarson is not the family\u2019s only over-achiever, too.\n\nHis brother, Cannan, 7, is studying at the eighth grade level. His parents expect him to graduate from high school by age 13.\n\nCarson\u2019s mother and father describe their childrens\u2019 intelligence as a blessing.\n\nCarson doesn\u2019t want to limit his experiences at the university to the classroom. He is interested in science clubs or foreign language clubs since he is close to mastering Mandarin Chinese.\n\nHe said he taught himself to play the piano using online videos, books and any resources he could find. Now, he has a teacher to help him develop his musical skills. The teacher made a deal with Carson, saying that she would teach him to play the piano if he would teach her son Mandarin Chinese. He is learning \u201cF\u00fcr Elise\u201d by Beethoven.\n\nLife outside the classroom\n\nLike other children his age, Carson hangs out with friends, plays video games and enjoys being active.\n\nHe and Cannan enjoy playing MineCraft, an online video game. They are also Star Wars fans and have watched every movie. Carson said Star Wars Three, Five and Six are his favorite. His favorite Jedi is Master Windu, and his favorite Sith is Darth Maul.\n\nHe said his favorite television show is \u201cMyth Busters.\u201d He said he enjoys the physics aspect of the show and \u201cwhen they blow stuff up.\u201d\n\nCarson, who is still learning to swim, enjoys throwing the football, playing basketball and roughhousing with his brother.\n\nRittby said Carson joked that he wanted to join the TCU basketball team.\n\nCarson said he is \u201cstill trying to find his groove\u201d as he settles into college.\n\nHe said when he arrives home from classes, he grabs a snack and then begins his homework. When he is finished, he helps his brother with his homework. In every class, Carson managed to find a seat in the front.\n\nWhen asked how his first week went, Carson said, \u201cIt was overwhelming but exciting and fun.\u201d\n\nIf he graduates in four years, he will have a diploma in his hands before he even has a driver\u2019s license."}
{"text":"Kuno Wittmer will take part in the new Pirelli World Challenge SprintX Series, with the Canadian driver having been confirmed at Mills Racing.\n\nHe\u2019ll join team owner\/driver Michael Mills at the wheel of the team\u2019s BMW Z4 GT3 in the three-round championship, which kicks off at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park next month.\n\n\u201cI am really looking forward to the inaugural SprintX race at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park.\u201d Wittmer said.\n\n\u201cRacing in my home country is always as nice thing, especially in front of family, friends, and representing the BMW brand.\u201d\n\nWittmer, a BMW of North America factory driver, is a former IMSA GT Le Mans class champion, and will bring a wealth of experience to the upstart team, which made its debut at Circuit of The Americas last month.\n\nThe Texas-based team, with the support BMW of North America, has shifted its focus entirely to SprintX for the remainder of the year.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m honored to have the opportunity to participate with Kuno for this new series,\u201d Mills said.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a dream come true to be included in the BMW family, and we are excited to pursue a championship with Kuno and BMW behind us.\u201d\n\nBMW of North America Motorsports Manager Victor Leleu added: \u201cMichael had a very successful weekend at COTA in the GTA class, showing great pace and quick adaptation to the BMW Z4 GT3.\n\n\u201cThe car is fast and reliable, and Michael and Kuno will form a very strong and complementary pair.\u201d\n\nThe inaugural SprintX weekend takes place at CTMP on May 20-22, with the championship also including stops at Utah Motorsports Campus and Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca."}
{"text":"After sticking to their \u201cnever-say-die\u201d attitude on and off the field, the San Francisco Giants have broken the mold for the archetypal play-off team on the club\u2019s way to capturing the greatest victory a team can win for each other and its city, the World Series title.\n\nAnd it\u2019s not the first time in less than a decade we\u2019ve seen this club take it all. Just two seasons ago, the 2010 incarnation of the team shocked the world and showed everyone without a doubt, that pitching beats good hitting.\n\nBut even with the two extraordinary post-season runs the club has now pulled off twice in the last three years, should the Giants be welcomed into the fold of team\u2019s that many would consider a \u201cdynasty\u201d ?\n\nWell, you\u2019d be hard pressed to find anyone in the Bay Area who wouldn\u2019t say yes without hesitation, myself included. But when bringing the term dynasty to the plate, one must stop and consider what a dynasty actually is.\n\nIn baseball\u2019s colorful, storied history, many teams have come together and pulled off amazing feats to capture championship after championship.\n\nFrom the Oakland Athletics (who won the World Series from 1972-1974), to the St. Louis Cardinals and Stan Musial, who, in his twenty-two year career with the club, helped the team win three of St. Louis\u2019 eleven titles in 1942, \u201944, and \u201946.\n\nAnd then of course, there\u2019s the New York Yankees, who sit at the top of the title class with a ridiculous twenty-seven championships. In fact, during Mickey Mantle\u2019s seventeen seasons with New York, the team won seven titles. And if you count the year he was drafted (1949), they won nine titles while he was part of the team. They also hold the MLB record for most World Series championships won in a row, winning consecutively from 1949-1953 (they actually almost did it a first time when they were champions from 1936-1939). And it doesn\u2019t hurt that besides the 1980\u2019s, they are the only team in the MLB to win a title in every decade since the 1920\u2019s, where New York won it all for the first time in 1923.\n\nSo what determines a dynasty?\n\nA dynasty is commonly referred to when speaking of monarchs, handing down the torch of crown from heir to heir. Fathers and sons belonging to the same college fraternity, or even a political family that spans generations.\n\nWell, it\u2019s kind of the same thing in baseball, only the difference is that things are changing all the time. Players rarely stay with the same team for more than a few years, often making it impossible to classify many winning teams as dynasties due to the many moving pieces, and how different one championship team of the same franchise could look different from another even the next year.\n\nThis was half the case for the San Francisco Giants this time around.\n\nIn 2010, the team featured a lights-out pitching staff, bullpen included. The one through five rotation was as such:\n\nTim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Barry Zito, Jonathan Sanchez, and Madison Bumgarner.\n\nPosition players such as:\n\nAubrey Huff, Freddy Sanchez, Edgar Renteria, Juan Uribe, Cody Ross, Nate Schierholtz, and Andres Torres headed the team\u2019s offense, which didn\u2019t turn any heads. But as most are aware, the clutch and timely hitting of these players proved to be just enough to go all the way.\n\nAnd then 2011 came along, a season full of high expectations for San Francisco. Unfortunately, despite keeping most of the team in tact (bye bye Juan Uribe and Edgar Renteria), the offense took a turn for the worse during most of the season. Players like Aubrey Huff, Miguel Tejada, Eli Whiteside, Cody Ross, and Andres Torres just weren\u2019t getting it done.\n\nSo what did the team do? They brought up a couple of minor leaguers, Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford, a first base-man and short-stop, respectively.\n\nIn addition, they also gave a former organizational pitcher, Ryan Vogelsong, a second chance to pitch with the club, something he hadn\u2019t done since the 2001 season.\n\nThis helped the team stay afloat despite a lack of offense, and the Giants pitching was still as dominant as ever. But with Buster Posey out with season ending injuries, and the heroes of the previous year not stepping up, the teams playoff hopes quickly vanished and finished eight games behind the Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League West.\n\nFast forward to 2012. With Ryan Vogelsong joining the team for a second consecutive year and replacing Jonathan Sanchez, the revamped rotation looked poised to dominate yet again.\n\nDuring the off-season, the team cleaned house, getting rid of the likes of Aaron Rowand, Cody Ross, Andres Torres, Carlos Beltran, Miguel Tejada, Jeff Keppinger, and Orlando Cabrera. This enabled the club to bring back rookies Belt and Crawford, as well as bring in the highly-anticipated switch-hitting outfielder Melky Cabrera, and speedy center-fielder Angel Pagan.\n\nAlso joining the squad was outfielder Gregor Blanco and infielder Joaquin Arias, with Hector Sanchez re-joining the club to back-up a healed Buster Posey behind the plate.\n\nAnd it didn\u2019t stop there. Brian Sabean surprised the critics and fans alike when at the July trade deadline, he traded Nate Schierholtz to the Philadelphia Phillies for fellow outfielder Hunter Pence, finally tossing his aging-vet recruitment philosophy to the side.\n\nWhat did this teach us?\n\nIt shows that the team might be headed in a different, more promising direction, as bringing in talented, young, fast players with high ceilings is definitely a turn-around from what we\u2019ve seen of this clubs players during the last decade or so.\n\nNot everyone on the team is a youngster, and shouldn\u2019t be, as having veteran leadership on a club is always important. And the club absolutely had it this year. One of the best, possibly THE best, pickups of the season, saw second base-man Marco Scutaro join the ranks of the Giants, a move most thought nothing more than a typical acquisition for Sabean. How wrong they were.\n\nThey also brought in veteran Ryan Theriot, who had just won the World Series with St. Louis the previous season.\n\nIn 2012, the Giants looked very different when comparing them to their 2010 incarnation. Most of the pitching looked exactly the same, with some tweaks here and there, but it was their offense that had changed drastically, and for the better. Instead of holding on to aging vets, the team opted to go for youth and speed.\n\nThis didn\u2019t mean they got rid of everyone, of course. Returning at third base to prove himself once again, Pablo Sandoval manned the corner in-field position with stunning range, despite his size. Buster Posey put together one of the most impressive seasons a young player has ever had. And of course, you had pitchers Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, and Madison Bumgarner, all of whom (besides Sandoval in 2010) played key roles in the teams 2010 and 2012 post-season runs. These five players (but not limited too) are this teams cornerstones, and when you add in a budding super-star first-baseman (Brandon Belt) with the potential to be a perennial home-run king, along with the short-stop of the Giants future in Brandon Crawford, the word dynasty definitely starts sounding more and more realistic.\n\nSo maybe you don\u2019t have to have the same players on the team year in and year out to be considered a dynasty. What the Giants are doing \u2013 I think, supports the idea of what a \u201cdynasty\u201d should be in baseball.\n\nIt\u2019s not about buying the biggest, baddest, most expensive free agents, or having the biggest payroll in all the land.\n\nIt\u2019s about developing young players. Playing as a team. Doing your research, and not always going along with what everyone else is doing. It helps when your city is also one with a rich history in the game, and featured many of the greats like Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Barry Bonds, and Gaylord Perry.\n\nSan Francisco\u2019s style is anything but traditional, and has proven they can get things done. Two World Series championships in a span of three years is pretty good, and both under manager of the year finalist Bruce Bochy, who has been a integral part to this teams recent success. But when you add in the fact that the franchise had not seen a title since 1954, it makes things a little clearer when realizing just what this team is doing.\n\nBesides, they are tied for the fourth most World Series titles in major league history (7), and that sounds pretty good to me."}
{"text":"Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of state, will deliver a major speech on economic policy on Monday, laying out in more detail her diagnosis of went wrong with the economy and, in broad strokes, how she will approach fixing it, the campaign says.\n\nShe will make clear, according to a campaign official, that she doesn't believe wage stagnation and growing inequality are simply facts that we have to live with, caused by trends outside our control. Rather, she will say that the U.S. has the power to change these patterns if we make the right policy choices.\n\nHere are seven ways to understand why Clinton is making the case.\n\n(1) Clinton's top goal is raising median incomes\n\nAccording to a campaign official, Clinton will make clear she believes that raising incomes for average Americans is the top priority. To understand why that's become a big issue for politicians of all stripes, one doesn't need to look farther than this chart of real median income over the past 40 years. Wages have been going through a prolonged period of stagnation and decline.\n\nA related phenomenon to stagnating wages has been growing inequality. The two trends are not the same--in the 1990s, the gap between the rich and poor widened even as average workers saw pay rise.\n\n(2) She believes policy can help raise worker pay and reduce inequality\n\nThe two biggest reasons usually cited for wage stagnation and growing inequality are technology, which makes lower-skill work (like working on a factory floor or clerical duties) less valuable, and globalization, which can boost corporate bottom lines but provide less opportunity for many American workers. No doubt, these are powerful factors.\n\nBut another way to look at wage stagnation and inequality is through the prism of the financial return to work itself -- as opposed to the return on investments like stocks and bonds. And it has been declining. So shareholders and top executives, compensated in stock, may be more likely to enjoy the fruits of economic activity than average workers. Left-leaning economists like to point out, however, that this phenomenon largely reflects not just global patterns but also national choices, such as wage and labor standards and tax policies -- a view Clinton will endorse.\n\n(3) In particular, she is looking to boost women's pay\n\nClinton is going to talk about how we need to do better to help women and families in the economy. Many women take time away from the workplace to raise their children, or they stop working entirely. As a result, they lose opportunities to develop their skills and professional connections. That could be one reason that while younger men and women earn similar amounts, women in middle age and older earn substantially less.\n\n(4) And Clinton is looking to make sure more women are in the workforce\n\nClinton will call for paid leave policies to help women work while raising families. That might help raising the number of women in the labor force, which has flatlined after years of growth. How much such a policy will to close pay disparities between men and women isn't as clear. Countries with more generous parental leave polices tend to have even larger pay gaps.\n\n(5) Clinton believes the federal minimum wage should be lifted\n\nClinton will call for raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour. The chart below shows how the the minimum has changed over time, taking into account increases in prices. It's important to note that many states have already raised the minimum wage over the past few years, without federal action.\n\nA White House report showed the declining value of the minimum wage after adjusting for inflation.\n\n(6) And she believes tax policy changes that favor the wealthy are misguided\n\nClinton is expected to chide Republican presidential candidates for continuing to espouse a GOP philosophy of tax cuts that benefit the wealthy under the theory that that will trickle down to the middle class. Effective tax rates have fallen across all income groups since the 1990s, but especially for the wealthiest Americans. Tax hikes at the end of 2013 and as part of the Affordable Care Act pushed rates back up, though not nearly close to their historic highs.\n\n(7) She also wants to make corporations, particularly on Wall Street, more focused on long-term returns\n\nThe former New York senator is expected to say that our economy is too often driven by hope of a quick profit rather than more enduring and sustainable growth at benefits more people -- and she'll say this is especially a problem on Wall Street. She'll also underscore the need for more investment in things like infrastructure and research and development.\n\nAs this chart from Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein of Harvard Business School shows, Wall Street and other financial components of the economy have dramatically grown as a percentage of total economic output.\n\nThis partly reflects how the stock market has changed. It was once a place where companies regularly went when they wanted to take on some project in order to get new money from banks and investors. Now, it's become a place where firms distribute their earnings to their owners, instead of taking money in, as the economist J.W. Mason has shown."}
{"text":"For a video that was created to fail, \u201cWhat does the Fox say?\u201d has been incredibly successful, totaling more than 120 million views \u2026 but that wasn\u2019t Ylvis\u2019 intent. They swear.\n\nBrothers Vegard and B\u00e5rd Ylvis\u00e5ker are hosts of Tonight with Ylvis, a late-night talk show in Norway. And when it came time to prepare a promo for their new season, they called on a favor they had with some guys over at Stargate, a Norwegian production company that has produced hits such as Rihanna\u2019s \u201cDiamonds.\u201d After Ylvis helped one of the guys at Stargate prepare a birthday gift, the company had promised to produce something for the comedy duo in return, and now the guys were ready to cash in their I.O.U.\n\n\u201cAs comedians, it wouldn\u2019t be a good thing if we went to pursue a hit in the States because they could potentially make something that became big, so we thought it would be more fun from a comedian perspective to come home to the talk show and say, \u2018Listen we had the chance, we could\u2019ve made it big, but the only idea we got for the song was this old idea about what the fox says so we\u2019re sorry. We screwed up.\u2019 That was the plan,\u201d B\u00e5rd said. \u201cThat would\u2019ve been funny to say on the talk show.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe had started writing the scripts for the show and we even had the introduction to this video, we wrote that as this \u2018We\u2019re sorry, we screwed up, this was all we could do,'\u201d Vegard added. So what happened when the video took off and actually became the brothers\u2019 biggest hit? \u201cWe had to rewrite the whole thing.\u201d\n\nSo let\u2019s back up: When the brothers were brainstorming ideas for possible promos, what made them think about the sounds a fox makes? \u201cIt all comes out of a genuine wonder about what kind of sounds it makes,\u201d Vegard said. \u201cFor all other known or normal animal species, you have this defined word that they say that is their sound like woof or meow or squeak. The first verse is telling this to the world in a very pretentious way: \u2018The mouse goes squeak and the cow goes moo.'\u201d\n\n\u201cIt started with us making sounds \u2013 we had other mammals as well \u2013 but we ended up thinking \u2018it would be fun with a fox,'\u201d B\u00e5rd added.\n\nSo after two days in the vocal studio and a bit of a mishap with the costumes \u2014 the brothers joke about wearing a bear and a squirrel costume in the video \u2014 they had created the video that would eventually land them on U.S. talk shows and in The New York Times. If only the duo had gone with their original idea \u2026\n\n\u201cFirst we had an idea about why every weekend there\u2019s three billion guys in the entire world that dread the fact that they have to go to a club and they have to dance and no one can actually dance. There\u2019s not one move. There used to be like cha cha cha and now it\u2019s just chaos. That was their original idea and that felt [like it was] searching for a hit,\u201d B\u00e5rd said. \u201cBut [Stargate was] pitched this idea, so that\u2019s why they gave us the songs. And I called one of the guys. I said, \u2018The whole thing changed a bit and now we want to make a song about what sound the fox makes.\u2019 I explained that it will be funny for us if we go over and misuse your talent \u2013 that will be funny for our show.\u201d Luckily, Stargate was in.\n\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning that this wasn\u2019t Ylvis\u2019 first music video. In fact, musical comedy is something they consider to be very near to their hearts. The brothers, who grew up in Africa, found their love of music and comedy at a young age. \u201cWe grew up with the Life of Brian from Monty Python. We grew up in Africa and we didn\u2019t bring enough videos, so we only had that. We had two. We had that and a Norwegian variety guy. So we developed humor that was a mix between those two,\u201d Vegard said.\n\nAlthough they have no vocal training between them, singing is something they\u2019ve been doing for years. \u201cOur parents were always really fond of music and they encouraged us to do whatever we wanted to do. We went to choir and stuff when we were kids,\u201d B\u00e5rd said.\n\n\u201cWe sang continuously. We made small music things in our room. But it was always with a comic context. We always hide behind that. We\u2019re too much of cowards to actually mean something,\u201d Vegard said.\n\nOther things you might not know about the comedians: Vegard is a commercial pilot, or he could be if anyone hired him, and Bard enjoys having no education whatsoever and gardening. They\u2019re also big Tenacious D fans. But most importantly, the success of this video does not mean that fame is now their priority.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re not chasing the next hit. We\u2019re just making stuff that we think is funny. Some will get like 100,000 views and some obviously got 100 million, but it\u2019s the same recipe,\u201d B\u00e5rd said. \u201cIt\u2019s supposed to be three minutes for a Norwegian talk show and this one traveled. Maybe we\u2019ll make another song with them maybe not. It\u2019s just a month old, this song.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ll see when it reaches a billion,\u201d Vegard joked.\n\nWatch one of the guys\u2019 improvised bits, \u201cThe Intelevator,\u201d below:\n\nAnd here\u2019s another one of their music videos, about Stonehenge no less:\n\nWill you continue to follow Ylvis\u2019 comedy, PopWatchers?"}
{"text":"Hannah Bonser, who stabbed a 13-year-old to death in Doncaster, is reportedly living as a man named Adam at HMP Low Newton\n\nA female child killer is living as a man at a women's prison, where the murderer has been boasting about an upcoming sex-change operation on the NHS.\n\nHannah Bonser, who stabbed 13-year-old Casey Kearney to death, has changed her name to Adam while serving time at HMP Low Newton in County Durham.\n\nSources say the 31-year-old's gender switch has angered fellow inmates on the high-security F Wing.\n\nGuards now address the wing's prisoners as 'ladies and gentleman' instead of just 'ladies', according to a former inmate who said: 'It's put an end to the call of, \"Cells, ladies, please\".\n\n'Hannah now insists they use \"ladies and gentleman\".\n\n'Hannah's not physically a man yet, but is on her way. She has asked to be called Adam and changed her name with officials. She says she is going the whole hog.'\n\nThe move has led to accusations of preferential treatment at the prison, where serial killer Rose West and Baby P's mother, Tracey Connelly, are also serving time.\n\nCasey Kearney was stabbed to death when she was aged just 13 by Hannah Bonser, who is reportedly living as a man in prison\n\nBonser was locked up in 2012 after stabbing her teenage victim as she made her way to a sleepover on Valentine's Day.\n\nShe was jailed for life and will serve a minimum of 22 years after her victim died from a single stab wound after the attack in Elmfield Park, Doncaster. The teenager managed to call 999 before she died.\n\nBonser, who had a history of mental health problems, had repeatedly informed medics that she thought herself to be dangerous.\n\nBonser is serving a 22-year sentence after she murdered a 13-year-old child by stabbing her to death while she was walking to a sleepover\n\nJust one month before she murdered Casey, Bonser told professionals that she was worried she would kill and said her fear caused her to stay away from people on the street.\n\nBonser first became known to social services when she was just nine years old after the death of her morbidly obese Mormon mother. She was then referred to 16 psychiatrists and 20 mental health workers.\n\nThe future killer was hearing voices and speaking to rocks by the time she was 17, developing an obsession with druids and a belief birds were people coming to get her.\n\nA Prison Service spokesperson said: 'We do not comment on individuals.'"}
{"text":"Some of Donald Trump\u2019s most passionate GOP detractors \u2014 including Sens. Lindsey Graham, left, and Ben Sasse \u2014 are now taking a more optimistic tone. (Charles Ommanney\/The Washington Post; Bill Clark\/CQ Roll Call via AP)\n\nTen months ago, Doug Heye was one of the Beltway Republicans doing their best to warn the party against getting into bed with Donald Trump \u2014 a man, he wrote in an op-ed, who would \u201ccause greater instability throughout the world at a time when the world looks to America for leadership.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe emperor doesn\u2019t have any clothes,\u201d the veteran Capitol Hill spokesman later declared on MSNBC. \u201cThere\u2019s no part of a Trump candidacy that I don\u2019t see as being a disaster for Republicans.\u201d\n\nAnd now?\n\n\u201cWell, there actually have been a number of positive signs,\u201d Heye said in a phone interview just days after Trump\u2019s surprise victory. There was that gracious acceptance speech, Heye noted. Plus, that seemingly stable meeting with President Obama. And \u201cthe fact that they took down the Muslim ban from the website was heartening to me,\u201d he added.\n\nUh, Doug. You know, the Trump team put that proposal right back up on its site hours later.\n\n\u201cOh, I didn\u2019t realize that,\u201d Heye said. \u201cBut the fact that it even got deleted is heartening to me.\u201d\n\nIf establishment Republicans are going through the stages of grief, it appears they\u2019ve reached the bargaining stage. All over town, erstwhile critics \u2014 who once described Trump as a betrayer of conservative values and an agent of chaos \u2014 are now, at least publicly, grasping for signs that maybe he won\u2019t be so bad after all.\n\nPerhaps, they say, conservatives will finally get some quality judges on the Supreme Court? Maybe Trump will focus more on unraveling Obamacare than on deporting 11 million people living in this country illegally or registering Muslims into a database? Maybe now that he\u2019s president, they say, Trump will finally pivot to acting presidential?\n\nSo many tea leaves floating around this week. You can just pick and choose the ones you like.\n\n[Obama in state of denial as Democrats work through the stages of grief]\n\nThat seems to be the new approach of Sen. Lindsey Graham \u2014 one of Trump\u2019s fiercest Republican critics during the campaign. When Trump announced Sunday that Steve Bannon, the former chief executive of the website Breitbart \u2014 a favorite periodical of white supremacists, known for taking aim at blacks, women, Muslims and Jews \u2014 would serve as his chief White House strategist, the senator from South Carolina responded only to the other half of the day\u2019s news:\n\n\u201cCongrats to @realDonaldTrump for outstanding choice of @Reince [Priebus] to be Chief of Staff,\u201d tweeted Graham, about the appointment of the Republican National Committee chair. \u201cThis shows me he is serious about governing.\u201d\n\nWishful thinking has become our new national pastime, and because no one really knows what a Trump presidency will look like, it\u2019s possible for everyone to hold out hope.\n\nElected Democrats are looking to the possibility of an infrastructure bill as a silver lining, while liberal commentators such as Nicholas Kristof ask readers to \u201cgive President-elect Trump a chance.\u201d\n\nSen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), the capital\u2019s most enduring GOP Never Trumper, is crossing his fingers that the president might work at \u201cending cronyism.\u201d Super-lobbyist Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, has offered up his swamp-draining services.\n\n[As GOP\u2019s anti-Trump, Sasse picked a big fight. What would it mean to win?]\n\n\u201cThis past week has reinforced that a President-elect Trump has the capacity to rise above the campaign mudslinging,\u201d said Lott\u2019s former spokesman, Ron Bonjean, now a PR strategist who does not count himself as a \u201cskeptical\u201d Republican. \u201cI\u2019ve always believed that if he can bring in a team around him of solid people and get away from the late-night Twitter accounts, this could be okay.\u201d\n\nAs it happened, Bonjean uttered these optimistic thoughts to a reporter after Trump issued a tweet blaming post-election demonstrations on \u201cprofessional protesters\u201d supposedly incited by the media but before his most recent Twitter rant about how the New York Times is supposedly failing. (It\u2019s doing quite well, actually.)\n\nErick Erickson, a conservative pundit who served as an outspoken critic of Trump from the right, is pushing back against what he sees as a lot of \u201ccrying wolf\u201d about the president-elect. So he says he\u2019s giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. Even about controversial decisions such as hiring Bannon.\n\n\u201cIf Obama got [Valerie] Jarrett, Trump can have Bannon,\u201d he wrote for the Resurgent. \u201cAnd when the alt-right goes marching through Washington or people start trying to round up Jews because of it, then we can raise the issue and provide shelter to those in need. But there is no guarantee that will happen.\u201d\n\n(\u201cNo guarantee.\u201d Whew.)\n\nHeye maintained that he doesn\u2019t see his role or his stance changing all that much from before the election: If Trump does something good, he\u2019ll compliment him for it, he said. If Trump reverts to his campaign behavior, he\u2019ll call him out.\n\n\u201cI never really called myself a Never Trump person,\u201d he said. \u201cI just said I\u2019m not voting for the guy.\u201d\n\nSomehow, though, amid the rubble, a dwindling number of unwavering Trump skeptics on the right still live and breathe.\n\n\u201cWinning the election doesn\u2019t change my opinion about him,\u201d said Ben Howe, an editor at the conservative website RedState. \u201cI\u2019ve said from the beginning that he is a sociopath, that he is unstable and dangerous, that his views on nuclear proliferation are dangerous and that he will put people in positions to influence him that are dangerous. So far, he hasn\u2019t done anything to convince me otherwise.\u201d\n\nHowe said he\u2019s not surprised that so many people have traded in their skepticism for optimism. He realizes that some people believe it is their patriotic duty to show their support for the president and that others are just so tired of the chaos of the campaign that they are desperate to make things seem normal again.\n\nAnd he understands that some critics believe they owe the unpredictable businessman the benefit of the doubt. He just doesn\u2019t see it that way.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a lot of pretending like this is an innocent-until-proven-guilty type of situation,\u201d Howe said. \u201cThe problem is, the campaign was the trial. I\u2019ve seen the evidence, and I\u2019ve made a decision based on that.\u201d\n\nThere is, however, one possibility that Howe won\u2019t rule out.\n\n\u201cThe only thing I\u2019m open to now is that I could be wrong,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m fine being wrong. Being wrong would be great.\u201d"}
{"text":"BAFTA Awards to Feature Plant-Based Menu\n\nLike us on Facebook:\n\nThe current article you are reading does not reflect the views of the current editors and contributors of the new Ecorazzi\n\nVegan celebrities and filmmakers can rejoice; at least those attending this year\u2019s BAFTA awards in London.\n\nThe British Academy of Film and Television Arts has announced that their annual star-studded event will feature a plant-based menu for those opting out of meat and dairy. While dessert options have yet to be disclosed, entrees include \u201cquinoa salad with radishes, broad beans, asparagus, peas and a lemon and olive oil dressing,\u201d as well as a \u201croasted butternut squash and sun-blushed tomato lasagne with wilted spinach, roasted pepper and sage\u201d.\n\nPETA quickly lauded the decision. Director Mimi Bekhechi said in a statement, \u201cinterest in vegan eating is skyrocketing in the UK and beyond. With some of the world\u2019s best chefs, including Jamie Oliver and Wolfgang Puck, getting creative with cruelty-free cooking, we\u2019re sure that guests attending the BAFTAs are in for a treat.\u201d\n\nOf course, the lavish event is not exclusively plant-based. The dinner, which began preparations back in September with a team of 25 chefs, includes roughly one tonne of beef (it\u2019s a trio-of-beef main course)and variety of seafood. It also features some 2000 bottles of wine and 8,220 glasses of champagne for the nearly 2,000 guest.\n\nThere are also a pair of vegetarian course, though they contain dairy. The starter is\n\nsmoked cheese arancini, celeriac and Granny Smith apple salad, port wine glaze, walnut oil dressing; while the main features roast sweet potato, red onion and Taleggio tart, smoked garlic and chive butter sauce, gratin Dauphinoise, green beans and baby carrots.\n\nStill, serving plant-based options is a step in the right direction. Your move, Oscars.\n\nThe BAFTAs take place February 8 at Grovesnor House Hotel in London.\n\nVia The Daily Mail, Marie Claire UK"}
{"text":"...about a year ago I noticed what would be a lump in my teet, and I have been just thinking of course that it's nothing ... a week or two ago I went in [to the doctor] to get my first mammogram. I'm 41, I guess I should have started last year. So I went in and got the mammogram and the results were abnormal ... go in for a follow-up, and I was told the follow-up would take 30 or 45 minutes at most, and yesterday I spent the entire day in the hospital while they ran numerous tests ... the doctor came in and she was clearly a highly intelligent, kind but very concerned person ... and when I was going through the tests all day yesterday ... part of me thought ... there was a misunderstanding... based on already being hospitalized with a deadly illness and my mother dying, there was just no way they were going to come in and tell me anything but, \"Ok, everything looks great!\" ... And the doctor came in and her tone was very scary ... she said \"Ok, so, we have found something in both breasts,\" ... after all the explanation I said, \"Wait a minute, are you telling me that I possibly have cancer,\" and she said, \"Well, we have to get biopsies done but from what I can see with all the testing we've done today it is very probable that you do in both breasts, yes.\""}
{"text":"This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.\n\nAMY GOODMAN:\n\nIn one of his first acts as president last week, Barack Obama signed an executive order setting new rules on the role former lobbyists can play in his administration.\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As of today, lobbyists will be subject to stricter limits than under any other administration in history. If you are a lobbyist entering my administration, you will not be able to work on matters you lobbied on or in the agencies you lobbied during the previous two years. When you leave government, you will not be able to lobby my administration for as long as I am president.\n\nAMY GOODMAN:\n\nDespite President Obama\u2019s pledge, several former lobbyists are set to play key roles in the new administration. Obama has nominated Raytheon\u2019s former top lobbyist, William Lynn, to serve as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Lynn was a registered lobbyist for the defense contractor until July. Several watchdog groups, including Public Citizen and Project on Government and Oversight, have urged the Senate Committee on Armed Services to reject Lynn\u2019s nomination because of his ties to Raytheon.\n\nPresident Obama has granted a waiver to Lynn, as well as to William Corr, who has been nominated to be Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Until recently, Corr was a registered lobbyist for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.\n\nAt the Treasury Department, Secretary Timothy Geithner has hired former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson to be his chief of staff. Patterson was a registered lobbyist until April.\n\nThe National Journal is reporting fourteen of the 112 White House staffers that Obama has named had been registered as lobbyists at some point since 2005. The list includes Obama\u2019s senior adviser David Axelrod and Homeland Security adviser John Brennan.\n\nWe\u2019re joined now in Washington by Bara Vaida. She is a reporter covering the lobbying industry for National Journal. Her article, \u201cFormer Lobbyists Join Obama,\u201d appears in this week\u2019s issue.\n\nLay it out for us, Bara Vaida.\n\nBARA VAIDA:\n\nHi, Amy. Thanks for having me.\n\nAs Obama said, these are the most sweeping restrictions on lobbying behavior that\u2019s ever been implemented by a president, so it\u2019s important to remember that. I think what this shows is that there are \u2014 the lobbying industry is just a very big part of the culture of Washington and that there are a lot of people who have worked on policy that end up lobbying from time to time. And there\u2019s such a mix between lobbying and policy that it shows how difficult it is to draw a very bright line between lobbying and policy. Lobbyists, you have to remember, do have a lot of expertise. They have a lot of information. They do play an important role in how policy is developed. So that\u2019s, you know, an important sort of thing to remember when we talk about lobbying.\n\nObama did campaign on a pledge that he would limit the role of lobbyists in his White House. And as I noted, there are fourteen \u2014 or thirteen people, actually, who have had lobbying in their background who are now White House staff, and there\u2019s probably more at this point. But there\u2019s hundreds of positions already that he has named. So he is \u2014 he can say that he\u2019s limited so far the role of lobbyists. But it\u2019s important to pay attention to how many of these folks have had lobbying in their background and keep track of it to make sure he keeps with his pledge, you know, not to have lobbyists dominating his White House, as opposed to what we saw with the previous administration.\n\nAMY GOODMAN:\n\nWhat about Raytheon\u2019s former top lobbyist, William Lynn, serving as Deputy Secretary of Defense?\n\nBARA VAIDA:\n\nYes, I mean, that has certainly caused a lot of heartburn in the watchdog community. They\u2019re very concerned about that. They don\u2019t see how it\u2019s any way possible that Mr. Lynn can do his job without doing something that\u2019s going to have some kind of impact on the bottom line at Raytheon. And that\u2019s what they\u2019re greatly concerned about.\n\nAnd that was what happened in the Bush administration. You have to remember, a lot of these rules that Obama has implemented are a reaction to what happened during the Bush years. What we saw happen in the Interior Department, Steven Griles got embroiled in something with a former lobbyist named Jack Abramoff, who\u2019s now in jail, and that he had gotten people in the Interior Department to, you know, trade on favors for him, for his clients. And that\u2019s what this is aimed at.\n\nMr. Lynn has sent a letter, apparently, to the Hill this week, trying to lay out that whatever he does that may have some effect on Raytheon, he will run it by the general counsel\u2019s office before he does anything. And McCain and some \u2014 I think Senator Grassley, as well, have both said, \u201cYou know, that\u2019s just too vague. We want somebody more specific.\u201d\n\nAMY GOODMAN:\n\nWhite House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was questioned Wednesday about the role lobbyists will have in the new administration.\n\nREPORTER: Is the President bothered at all that Secretary Geithner has picked as his chief of staff a former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, who has obviously \u2014 that company has benefited from government bailouts. Doesn\u2019t that punch a hole in what the President signed just last week in terms of preventing lobbyists like that from serving in his administration?\n\nROBERT GIBBS: No, the President \u2014 well, again, let\u2019s step back and talk about the broader issue of ethics and transparency in this administration. As I said from this podium, and as you all read in papers throughout the country, that the ethics and transparency executive orders that the President signed the first day institute a policy that covers this administration, unlike any policy we\u2019ve seen in any previous administration in the history of our country.\n\nREPORTER: But if it\u2019s a strong \u2014 even if it\u2019s a strong policy, does it mean anything if people are getting waivers to go around it?\n\nROBERT GIBBS: Those very same people that labeled that policy the strongest of any administration in history also said they thought it made sense for a limited number of waivers to ensure that people can continue to serve the public.\n\nAMY GOODMAN:\n\nAnd that was Robert Gibbs, the new press secretary. Bara Vaida, what about Treasury Department Secretary Tim Geithner hiring former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson to be his chief of staff? Patterson, a registered lobbyist until April.\n\nBARA VAIDA:\n\nAgain, I mean, it\u2019s a good question. I mean, Patterson was lobbying up until about March of 2008, and there is definitely a question: how can he do his job without doing something that may have an impact on Goldman Sachs? It\u2019s almost impossible. So I think it\u2019s totally fair to raise these questions.\n\nAnd I think the administration is going to keep getting hit with these questions until they explain how they\u2019re deciding how they\u2019re implementing these waivers. They haven\u2019t explained that, what their standard is. I have asked them that. They don\u2019t want to answer it. You heard the response. That\u2019s the response we tend to get, which is, \u201cWe\u2019ve said we\u2019ll do a few waivers in the cases where we think there\u2019s unique experience of this person and that a waiver should be granted.\u201d I guess, you know, people will be watching this very carefully, and people will have to decide: are the exceptions OK or not? I think the administration really needs to explain what standard they\u2019re using, and that is not clear.\n\nAMY GOODMAN:\n\nBara Vaida, I want to thank you very much for being with us, reporter covering the lobbying industry for National Journal."}
{"text":"Vincent Kessler\/Reuters French apiarist Andre Frieh holds a sample of normal honey (right) besides a blue colored one (left) at his home in Ribeauville near Colmar, Eastern France, October 5, 2012.\n\nMars Incorporated has proclaimed that \u201cChocolate is better in color\u201d with its M&Ms. But French beekeepers may beg to differ on that.\n\nSince August, beekeepers near the town of Ribeauville, in the northeastern region of Alsace, have been reporting their bees are producing blue and green honey, according to Reuters. And they\u2019ve traced the cause back to a biogas plant that processes waste from an M&Ms factory.\n\n(PHOTOS: Bee Beard Contest in China)\n\nBees are apparently picking up vibrantly colored, sugary waste from the plant, operated by the company Agrivalor some 2.5 miles away from their apiaries. A statement from Agrivalor that appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde said the company would clean its containers and store waste in airtight containers to prevent bees from reaching it.\n\n\u201cWe quickly put in place a procedure to stop it,\u201d Philippe Meinrad, co-manager of Agrivalor, told Reuters.\n\nFrance generates 18,330 tons of honey per year, making it one of the largest honey producers in the European Union. In Alsace alone, about 2,400 beekeepers manage 35,000 colonies, which produce about 1,000 tons of the stuff per year. However, France hasn\u2019t been spared by the largely unexplained decrease in the world bee population in recent years, Reuters reported.\n\nGill Maclean, a spokesperson for the British Beekeepers\u2019 Association, told the BBC that the harsh winter of 2011-2012 may have affected bees\u2019 ability to forage. This could be a reason why the bees sought out the alternate sugar.\n\n\u201cBees are clever enough to know where the best sources of sugar are, if there are no others available,\u201d Maclean told the BBC.\n\nRest assured: Consumers won\u2019t see blue honey on store shelves anytime soon. Alain Frieh, president of the apiculturists\u2019 union, told Reuters the only similarity between regular honey and their bees\u2019 M&M-tainted byproducts might be taste.\n\n\u201cFor me, it\u2019s not honey,\u201d Frieh told Reuters. \u201cIt\u2019s not sellable.\u201d\n\nWATCH: Do City Bees Make Healthier Honey?\n\nSEE ALSO: The Big Surprise of Martin Luther King\u2019s Speech"}
{"text":"Scatec Solar ASA, an integrated independent solar power producer, has entered into financing agreements totalling USD 157 million for construction of a 104 MW(dc) Red Hills solar power plant in Utah. When complete, the Red Hills solar project will be Scatec Solar\u2019s largest developed and constructed project in North America.\n\nTotal investment for the plant is estimated at USD 188 million\u2014with Google providing tax equity, Prudential Capital Group providing debt financing, and Scatec Solar providing sponsor equity. The power plant will be wholly-owned by a partnership jointly owned by Google and Scatec Solar, which structured and executed the financing for the project. Scatec Solar will manage and operate the plant when it goes into operation.\n\nGoogle has signed agreements to fund over $1.5 billion in renewable energy investments across three continents with a total planned capacity of more than 2.5 GW (gigawatts).This agreement represents the 18th renewable energy investment project for Google and supports its continued push towards a clean, low carbon energy future.\n\nPrudential Capital Group, a Prudential Financial asset management business, provided term financing for the project.\n\nThe Utah Red Hills Renewable Energy Park, set to be built on a site with excellent solar irradiation, will generate around 210 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per year, which will be fed into the grid under a twenty-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with PacifiCorp\u2019s Rocky Mountain Power, according to the utility\u2019s obligation under the federal Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act. When operational by the end of 2015, the plant will be Utah\u2019s largest solar energy generation facility, generating enough energy to power approximately 18,500 homes annually. Based on US Environmental Protection Agency estimates, it will produce enough renewable power to prevent nearly 145 thousand tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually\u2014the equivalent to not burning 156 million pounds of coal each year.\n\nThe ground-mounted photovoltaic solar facility is being developed on approximately 650 acres of privately-owned land in Parowan, Utah, will deploy approximately 325,000 PV modules on a single-axis tracking system and will interconnect to an existing transmission line.\n\nScatec Solar is an integrated independent power producer, aiming to make solar a sustainable and affordable source of energy worldwide. Scatec Solar develops, builds, owns and operates solar power plants, and will in 2014 deliver power from 220 MW in the Czech Republic, South Africa and Rwanda. The company is in strong growth and has a solid pipeline of projects under development in Africa, US, Asia, Middle East and Europe. Scatec Solar is headquartered in Oslo, Norway and listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol \u2018SSO\u2019."}
{"text":"One year since the military coup in Egypt\n\n5 July 2014\n\nThis week marks the first anniversary of the US-backed military coup that brought the junta of now president and de facto dictator General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to power.\n\nIn launching the coup, the army sought to pre-empt a mass movement that had developed against Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi. The class struggle exploded in the first half of 2013, as workers mounted over 5,544 strikes and social protests against Mursi\u2019s government. When protests were called in late June, tens of millions of workers went onto the streets to express their anger at Mursi\u2019s free-market policies and his support for Israel\u2019s assault on Gaza and the US-led proxy war in Syria.\n\nWhile the protests showed the immense power of the working class, their outcome revealed the essential problem of the Egyptian revolution: the chasm between the elemental anger of the Egyptian population and the absence of political leadership.\n\nIn the absence of a revolutionary party fighting to rally the working class in a struggle to take power on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program, the forces that emerged in control of the movement, primarily the Tamarod (\u201cRebel\u201d) movement, worked to channel popular opposition behind the army.\n\nWhen al-Sisi launched a coup and deposed Mursi in close coordination with the American military and the Obama administration, liberal youth activists and pseudo-left political forces operating in and around Tamarod hailed it as a \u201csecond revolution.\u201d Sameh Naguib, a leader of the pseudo-left Revolutionary Socialists (RS), enthused: \u201cThis is not the end of democracy, nor a simple military coup ... People feel empowered and entitled by the events of the last few days.\u201d\n\nIn contrast, the day after the coup, the World Socialist Web Site warned the working class of the reactionary role the military would play. We wrote, \u201cThe army will seek to enforce the policies demanded by finance capital. In the final analysis, the conflict between the military on the one hand and the ousted Muslim Brotherhood on the other is a fight between conflicted factions of the ruling class. The main target of the repression that the military is preparing will be the working class. The stage has been set for the denunciation of further protest actions by the working class as harmful to the \u2018national interest\u2019 and illegitimate.\u201d\n\nThis warning has been dramatically confirmed over the past year. After taking power, the al-Sisi junta unleashed a reign of terror against its political opponents, seeking to restore the military-police state as it existed under Hosni Mubarak, before the Egyptian revolution began in 2011.\n\nThe military government violently dispersed protests and strikes, shooting thousands in cold blood in the streets of Egypt\u2019s cities. It banned Mursi\u2019s Muslim Brotherhood and sentenced over 2,000 of its members and supporters to death. According to recent figures from the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, 41,163 people were jailed between the coup and May 15 of this year.\n\nThe year following the coup was without question a major setback for the Egyptian revolution. Yet it is not over. From the beginning, the Egyptian revolution has been driven by deep objective processes: the impoverishment and exploitation of the working class internationally, and the escalating crisis of imperialism in the Middle East. A new stage of the revolution will begin, and the key task is to draw the necessary political lessons to prepare for it.\n\nThe al-Sisi coup was the culmination of three-and-a-half years of bitter revolutionary struggles that have confirmed Trotsky\u2019s Theory of Permanent Revolution. None of Egypt\u2019s bourgeois factions\u2014the army, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left groups that oscillated between them\u2014had any progressive perspective to solve the democratic and social demands of the masses.\n\nThe task of building a truly democratic society freed from poverty and imperialist oppression, the Theory of Permanent Revolution explains, falls to the working class in a struggle for world socialist revolution. It was on the basis of this perspective that the WSWS opposed the al-Sisi coup.\n\nThe WSWS consistently defended this position from the beginning of the Egyptian revolution, explaining on the day before the working class toppled Mubarak: \u201cThe revolutionary Marxists must counsel workers against all illusions that their democratic aspirations can be achieved under the aegis of bourgeois parties. They must expose ruthlessly the false promises of the political representatives of the capitalist class. They must encourage the creation of independent organs of workers\u2019 power which can become, as the class struggle intensifies, the basis for the transfer of power to the working class. They must explain that the realization of workers\u2019 essential democratic demands is inseparable from the implementation of socialist policies ...\n\n\u201cAbove all, revolutionary Marxists must raise the political horizons of Egyptian workers beyond the borders of their own country. They must explain that the struggles that are now unfolding in Egypt are inextricably linked to an emerging global process of world socialist revolution, and that the victory of the revolution in Egypt requires not a national, but an international perspective.\u201d\n\nIn Egypt, all the necessary prerequisites for a revolution were present save one: a revolutionary party fighting for this perspective. The central question posed in Egypt, and internationally, is the construction of such a party, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, fighting to rekindle the struggles of the revolution, bring down the al-Sisi government, and take up the fight for socialism.\n\nJohannes Stern\n\nPlease enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus."}
{"text":"Until now, we mostly talked about how to create simple components in Angular, like a zippy or a tabs component, and we also covered some isolated parts of the framework like the new dependency injection. In this article we are going to discuss another essential part when it comes to building components: Styling.\n\nA component in Angular is basically a controller class with a template. But as all of us know, a component also needs it\u2019s own styles, especially when it comes to sharing reusable components across applications, which is what we want to achieve in the modern web anyways, right?\n\nWe can always write our CSS code in a way, that it is modular and easily extensible at the same time. However, if we don\u2019t rely on technologies like Web Components, our styles all end up concatenated and minified in the head of our HTML document, without our components actually knowing that they exist. This is actually good when we think in separation of concerns, on the other hand, if we build a component and want to share it, it should come packaged with all the needed styles, scoped to that component.\n\nAngular components are designed with exactly that in mind. A component comes with HTML, JavaScript but also has it\u2019s own styles that belong to it. All we need to do is to define the styles in our component, or at least declare, where to get those from. In fact, there are three ways to associate CSS styles to a component in Angular: Component inline styles, style urls and template inline styles. Let\u2019s explore them one by one.\n\nComponent inline styles\n\nThe easiest way to add styles to a component is taking advantage of the @Component decorators that allow us to define component inline styles. All we need to do is to add a styles property to the decorator and define the styles. To see what that looks like, here\u2019s a snippet of our zippy component that we\u2019ve built a while ago.\n\n@ Component ({ moduleId : module . id , selector : 'my-zippy' , templateUrl : 'my-zippy.component.html' , styles : [ ` . zippy { background : green ; } ` ] }) class ZippyComponent { @ Input () title : string ; }\n\nThis is pretty straight forward. You might wonder though, why the value of that property is a list and not just a (multi-line) string. Well, I wonder too. That\u2019s why I asked the question right away.\n\nOkay, so defining styles on the component is pretty clear, but where did those end up in the DOM? If we run this code in our browser, we see that there\u2019s something very interesting happening. It turns out that Angular takes the defined styles, and writes them into the head of the HTML document. Here\u2019s what that looks like:\n\n<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <style> .zippy { background : green ; } <\/style> <\/head> <body> ... <\/body> <\/html>\n\nWhat\u2019s going on there? The reason why Angular takes our styles and puts them up there, is because of the View Encapsulation that we are using. Since Angular 2.x, it comes with three different view encapsulation types in order to support both, browsers that don\u2019t support Shadow DOM, and also the ones that do support it. The view encapsulations will be explored in another article are covered in this article, but we have to touch on this though in order to understand why this is happening.\n\nAngular currently uses the Emulated View Encapsulation by default. Which basically means, there\u2019s no usage of any Shadow DOM at all. One of the nice features of Shadow DOM is style encapsulation. It allows us to scope styles to a specific component without affecting the outer world.\n\nTo take advantage of style encapsulation, styles have to be put into the shadowRoot of a component. Due to the Shadow DOM strategy that is used, there is no shadowRoot to put our styles into. That\u2019s why Angular writes them into the head. But as mentioned, there\u2019s another article that explains all three view encapsulations.\n\nLet\u2019s take a look at another way of adding styles to our component.\n\nStyles urls\n\nIn an ideal world, we don\u2019t have to mix our styles with our application code. That\u2019s why we have the <link> tag, that allows us to fetch and embed a stylesheet from a server. Angular components allow us to define styleUrls , so that styles don\u2019t have to be written into the component. Pretty straight forward, here\u2019s an example:\n\n@ Component ({ moduleId : module . id , selector : 'my-zippy' , templateUrl : 'my-zippy.component.html' , styleUrls : [ 'my-zippy.component.css' ] }) class ZippyComponent { @ Input () title : string ; }\n\nWhere do those end up in the DOM? Well, for the same reason as explained earlier, they are written into the head of the document. But not only that, when Angular fetches the style resources, it takes the text response, inlines and appends them after all component inline styles. So if we would have a configuration like this:\n\n@ Component ({ moduleId : module . id , selector : 'my-zippy' , templateUrl : 'my-zippy.component.html' , styles : [ '.zippy { background: green; }' ], styleUrls : [ 'my-zippy.component.css' ] }) class ZippyComponent { @ Input () title : string ; }\n\nAnd the my-zippy.component.css content would look like this:\n\n. zippy { background : blue ; }\n\nWe will end up with a document head that looks something like this:\n\n<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <style> .zippy { background : green ; } <\/ style > < style > .zippy { background : blue ; } <\/style> <\/head> <body> ... <\/body> <\/html>\n\nThis also brings us to the next conclusion that styles defined in style urls will always be appended and therefore override styles defined in the component, unless the inline styles don\u2019t have a higher specificity.\n\nLast but not least, we have template inline styles.\n\nTemplate inline styles\n\nWe can for sure always write our styles directly into the DOM, nobody can prevent us from doing that. In fact, when thinking in Web Components it\u2019s quite common to put styles directly into the template of a component, since they will be encapsulated when Shadow DOM is used.\n\nTranslating the styles used above to template inline styles would look something like this (in case of our zippy component):\n\n<style> .zippy { background : red ; } <\/style> <div class= \"zippy\" > <div ( click )=\" toggle ()\" class= \"zippy__title\" > {{ visible ? ' \u25be ' : ' \u25b8 ' }} {{title}} <\/div> <div [ hidden ]=\"! visible \" class= \"zippy__content\" > <content><\/content> <\/div> <\/div>\n\nGuess what, also those will be appended in the head of our document, after the ones defined in the component or as style urls. Template inline styles always have the highest priority, which sounds pretty straight forward to me."}
{"text":"rbutr Puts Climate Information In Front of Those Who Need It Most\n\nPosted on 6 May 2012 by Shane Greenup\n\nGuest post by Shane Greenup.\n\nIt is an unfortunate fact that most people will tend to only see information which confirms their current beliefs. Thanks to choosing friends with similar beliefs, choosing news programs which report things in a way which we find agreeable, and now thanks to the filter bubble concept, even Google and Facebook are selectively giving us more of what we have previously indicated we liked and clicked on.\n\nThis is a real problem for those of us who are interested in genuinely finding the truth in this sea of opinions. How do we inform ourselves completely when everywhere we look (whether by design or by accident) we only see more self-confirming bias? Perhaps more importantly, how do we reach everyone else who is trapped in their own bubble of self-confirmation, and don\u2019t even realise it?\n\nIn an attempt to help with this problem we have recently launched an application which provides a surprisingly simple way out of this self-confirmation bubble for anyone who cares to look. It is called rbutr, and it simply allows people to connect one webpage which makes a claim, to another webpage which rebuts that claim. In doing so, any future visitors to the original claim webpage are then able to see that that page has been rebutted, and can easily click through to read the rebuttal.\n\nTake for example a recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal: No Need to Panic About Global Warming. Within our system we already have 8 rebuttals listed for this page. Following one of them to Phil Plait\u2019s Bad Astronomy blog we get a thorough debunking of the op ed, including use of Skeptical Science\u2019s Escalator animation. Interestingly, there is also a rebuttal posted to Phil Plait\u2019s rebuttal, taking you to an article which argues against the escalator graphic. Looking at that article though, you are then able to click through to another rebuttal on SkS itself, defending the graphic, which has also provided links to a few other articles which argue against W.M.Briggs\u2019 article criticising the escalator. Using rbutr you are able to immediately step outside the single perspective presented on any one of these websites, and see the greater internet-wide discussion which is taking place.\n\nOne point which is particularly worth noting about rbutr, which separates it from other apps designed to inform people about particular subjects, is that rbutr is neither subject specific, nor agenda driven. This is important, because the way that people are trapped within their own confirmation-bubble means that the people who most need to install an application like Skeptical Science\u2019s climate change myth debunking tool, won\u2019t even know it exists! However, if the tool is genuinely neutral and the subject matter presented by the tool is entirely up to the contributors, then hopefully it is just as likely to be used by creationists as it is to be used by evolutionists, by anti-vaccinationists as by vaccine supporters, and of course, by all people on all perspectives of the climate change debate. Because really, preaching to the converted is not much help to anyone\u2026\n\nWhat Do We Hope To Achieve?\n\nWe do hope to have a significant impact on the way information is accessed online. Since launching our beta just over a month ago, rbutr has had press coverage in The Australian, a great review by Tim Farley of SkepTools, and made it in to the final 52 of the 1078 applications for the Knight Media News Challenge - we're waiting to see if we've made it in to the top 15, and then one of the winners who will receive a large grant to fund ongoing development costs of our application.\n\nOur current goal is to build a large, vibrant and active community who are all interested in improving the quality of online discourse and information in general. Providing a way for people to readily inform themselves with quality information.\n\nWe are also looking at ways rbutr can be used to provide a platform on which an online crowdsourced debates can be conducted - allowing opposing sides to present their arguments and counter arguments to the best of their ability (as a global community), rather than relying on fallible individuals, or moderators to control the exchanges. The exact details are still being sorted out, but if you register with rbutr we will be sure to keep you informed, and if you are interested in participating or helping out, please feel free to contact us.\n\nIn the end, we just hope that for every new article which pops up repeating an already debunked myth, it will be fast and simple to add a rbutr link to an already existing rebuttal, immediately quashing any new-resurgence of the old myth for all rbutr users, who will then hopefully spread that rebuttal to other non-rbutr users, helping to keep the mole-whackers one step ahead of the nonsense-spreaders...\n\nHead over to http:\/\/rbutr.com, register, install the plugin (chrome only at the moment \u2013 we are still in beta testing), and let us know what you think! We\u2019re eager for as much feedback and thoughts as we can get during these early stages."}
{"text":"Dallas Stars General Manager Jim Nill announced today that the club has signed defenseman Julius Honka to a three-year entry-level contract. Per club policy, terms of the deal were not disclosed.\n\nHonka, 18, played his first season of North American hockey in 2013-14. In 62 regular-season games for Swift Current of the Western Hockey League, he posted 56 points (16-40=56), which paced all team defensemen. Honka was also tied for third on the team with two goals (2-0=2) in six postseason contests as well.\n\nA native of Jyvaskyla, Finland, he won a gold medal for his country at the 2014 World Jr. Championship, recording one assist (0-1=1) in seven games. Honka also won a bronze medal for Finland at the 2013 Under-18 World Junior Championship, earning four points (1-3=4) in seven games.\n\n\"We are happy to have signed Julius quickly so that the young defenseman can continue the process of developing his game,\" said Nill. \"He's highly skilled, moves the puck extremely well and is very competent at running a power play. We are really excited about his potential and think he has the tools to grow into an NHL defenseman in the near future.\"\n\nThe 5-foot-11, 180-pound defenseman was originally selected by Dallas with the 14th overall pick in the 2014 NHL Draft."}
{"text":"Drones set for commercial take-off\n\nUpdated\n\nHundreds of small commercially operated drones could soon take to Australian skies under a radical new set of rules proposed by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) in Melbourne this week.\n\nUnder a new weight class system, prospective drone entrepreneurs with craft weighing 2 kilograms or less could take off after completing nothing more than an online application form.\n\nCASA officials say they want to encourage use of this emerging technology, but the drone plan will be forced to dodge flak from opponents who have raised serious concerns over safety and privacy.\n\nWarne vs the FoxKopter\n\nIn the practise nets at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a taut Shane Warne confronted an expressionless drone. Robocop in cricket whites? Almost.\n\nThe legendary spin bowler was appearing in a Fox Sports promotion for the Twenty20 Big Bash League.\n\nBut the real star of the promo was FoxKopter, a small camera-drone deployed over several games this season. Flying 30 metres clear of the spectators, FoxKopter provided TV audiences with an up close and personal view of the match play. After a successful summer, the drone has already been deployed for the National Rugby League.\n\nFrom sport to news gathering to lifesaving patrols, there are dozens of potential civilian applications of drone technology. Currently there are just 33 CASA-approved commercial drones operators in Australia, mainly deployed on scientific research, surveying and aerial photography.\n\nThe approvals process can take months and costs thousands of dollars, with applicants required to complete about 90 per cent of a conventional private pilot's course.\n\nThat will abruptly change if CASA introduces the new rules on small 'Unmanned Aerial Systems' (UAS), more commonly called drones, operating commercially in Australian skies.\n\nBut CASA is also responding to the rapid, uncontrolled spread of high performance drone technology in Australia. Director of aviation safety John McCormick concedes he has no way of effectively enforcing regulations on those who don't want to fly by the rules.\n\nThis week in Melbourne he told a conference organised by industry lobby group The Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems Australia that there could already be up to 100 drones operating illegally.\n\n\"We think that for every one we know of there are two or three that we do not,\" he said.\n\nBetter, faster, cheaper\n\nThe problem for CASA is that small drone technology is now proliferating at an extraordinary rate, with capability and performance doubling every 18 months, while the price and size of the craft continues to plummet.\n\nCurrently $2,000 typically buys you a small, high performance multi-rotor the size of a wheelie bin lid, equipped with HD live stream video cameras, GPS, autopilot, top speed of 70 kilometres per hour, with a range of two to three kilometres and a 15-20 minute flight time.\n\nMost of these craft are legally flown by hobbyists who are required to stay below 400 feet, and operate only in daylight, well away from airports and areas of high population density. These recreational flyers are not required to undertake training or register their craft.\n\nThere are no accurate records on the numbers of small drones now in Australia, as they are often assembled locally from components ordered online from overseas. Hobbyists and retailers speculate that about 100 new multi-rotors and fixed wing drones are now taking to Australian skies each week.\n\nThe cat's out of the bag, long ago, long ago. Director of Aviation Safety John McCormick\n\nFor CASA's John McCormick, it's a regulatory nightmare.\n\n\"The cat\u2019s out of the bag, long ago, long ago,\" he says.\n\n\"The way you manage this is you manage it through Customs, you say you can't bring one in, just like they did with laser pointers, yes? You can't bring them in.\n\n\"But that's not my decision, I've got to work with what I've got.\n\n\"That's a decision for Government, that's a decision for other people to use or implement, be they Customs or Federal Police or somebody. But from our point of view, once it's out there, I can't pass a law I know I can't enforce.\"\n\nOne size doesn't fit all\n\nJohn McCormick's skies are being further darkened by growing swarms of smaller craft, marketed as toys.\n\nWeighing in at just 700 grams, the $350 Parrot AR Drone 2.0. boasts HD cameras and a more modest range of 50 metres.\n\nOptional extras now include a plug in GPS, and tests on new control systems have pushed the range out to one kilometre, batteries permitting.\n\nThe Parrot Company refuses to reveal sales figures, but leading industry website sUAS News claims 500,000 have been sold worldwide since it was first launched in 2010.\n\n\"The very lightweight thing you can buy in Harvey Norman or any toyshop somewhere, am I going to go out and tell that guy or woman to get an operators certificate? I can't write a regulation I know I can't enforce \u2013 I can. But it's bad law,\" John McComick says.\n\nSo CASA is writing some rules it can control. Pending consultation with industry, the Authority will re-categorise all commercial drones in four weight classes, to be flown under the same rules as hobbyists until they receive specific exemptions.\n\nOperators of the smallest Group A, weighing 2kg or less, will simply be able to fill out an online authorisation form, receive electronic approval, and start flying.\n\nSenior CASA officer Jim Coyne says the safety risk posed by this group is negligible, comparable to being hit by a cricket ball.\n\n\"A cricket ball weights about 160 grams, but at 100 kilometres per hour, [with a] kinetic energy of about 62 joules\u2026.there's been no recorded incident of anyone being killed by a cricket ball in the stand,\" he says.\n\n\"The potential for harm and the consequence is very low.\n\n\"We talk about a harmless UAS, causing minimal harm to a person. If it hits them on the head it will give them a headache. If it hits them in the back it will give them a bit of a bruise, but it is not going to kill you.\"\n\nThe bigger the drone, the more stringent the controls. The 2-7 kilogram class will require a risk assessment, and CASA will provide a half-dozen-page rule book.\n\n\"Potential for harm goes up, still it's not going to do a lot of damage ... that's seven kilograms, about the weight of a six-month-old baby, at 14 knots, or 26 kilometres per hour,\" Jim Coyne says.\n\nHe says operators proposing to launch the biggest drones in Group D will face greater scrutiny.\n\n\"For example, the Scan Eagle weighs about 20kg, it can fly at about 15,000 feet, it can be on station for 20-plus hours, and flies about 120kph. It can fly to New Zealand, it can fly internationally ... that person will be licensed, that person will have a full risk assessment, and it will be treated like a real aircraft.\"\n\nGlobally, civilian drones are set to become big business, eventually eclipsing the military market. US aviation analysts the Teal Group forecasts $US89 billion will be spent in the combined military\/civil sector over the next decade.\n\nDespite growing industry and community pressure, CASA's John McCormick insists there will be no compromises.\n\n\"Safety is the number one priority, that\u2019s the only reason CASA exists,\" he says.\n\n'Flying lawnmower'\n\nCASA can expect some heavy flak from sections of the piloted aviation community, which points out that drones carry no effective systems to avoid collisions.\n\nLast year a commercial helicopter pilot, who requested he not be named, told the ABC he had already had one near miss with an unidentified drone.\n\nWhat the FAA says about drones: Federal agencies are planning to increase their use of UASs. State and local governments envision using UASs to aid in law enforcement and firefighting. Potential commercial uses are also possible, for example, in real estate photography or pipeline inspection. UASs could perform some manned aircraft missions with less noise and fewer emissions. Federal Aviation Authority (US) Forecast Fiscal Years 2010-2030\n\nAnd in November 2011, a Royal Australian Navy target-towing jet encountered an unidentified drone while flying at 3,000 feet, 65 nautical miles east of Jervis Bay in NSW.\n\nThe mystery drone was not operated by the Australian or US military, nor any of the certified civilian operators.\n\nWhile most operators do fly responsibly, drones will crash, and the small-drone-disaster is becoming a popular YouTube genre.\n\nOne recent clip from Brazil no doubt sent shudders through the Fox TV\/Foxkopter camp: A phone camera recorded the worst-case sports scenario, as a small drone tracked across a football stadium before veering off course and into the crowded terraces.\n\nNo-one appeared to be injured, but 5kg of carbon fibre and alloy, propelled at 40kph by several spinning rotors, still generates a lot of what aviation engineers call \"kinetic energy\".\n\nIn lay terms this translates as being hit by a flying lawn mower.\n\nWho watches the watchers?\n\nBut perhaps the biggest challenge to CASA's drone future is privacy.\n\nIn 2012 the US Congress ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to integrate drones in domestic airspace by 2015.\n\nThe FAA estimated 15,000 civil and commercial drones could be flying by 2020, and as many as 30,000 by 2030.\n\nThe ACLU's view Rules must be put in place to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this new technology without bringing us closer to a \"surveillance society\" in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinised by the government. Drone manufacturers are also considering offering police the option of arming these remote-controlled aircraft with (nonlethal for now) weapons like rubber bullets, Tasers, and tear gas. The ACLU's Domestic Drones blog\n\nNow this ambitious timetable is stalling. The pro-drone lobby is locked in an epic struggle with growing numbers of US privacy advocates, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is concerned by the mass surveillance capabilities of this technology and its potential misuse by police.\n\nUS state and regional governments have also begun banning civilian drone operations in their locales before the concept has even taken off.\n\nAustralia has yet to have its drone debate. Given the implications of CASA's proposed reforms, Government sources tell the ABC it is unlikely any changes could be implemented before the federal election in September.\n\nLast year Federal Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim told the ABC he was concerned by the patchwork of federal and state laws that may or may not cover various civilian drone activities, and the ability of police to operate drones without a warrant.\n\nHe requested that Commonwealth, state and New Zealand attorneys general meet to formulate a coherent overall strategy for this emerging technology.\n\nThat hasn't happened yet.\n\nIn stark contrast to the United States, public opinion in Australia remains finely balanced by disinterest.\n\nIf a drone is used to assist in the rescue of the drowning swimmer, perhaps widespread acceptance will follow. But if a multi-rotor gets sucked into the engine of an Airbus on take-off from Mascot, we may well see drone control right up there alongside gun control.\n\nWhat to read next Drone journalism takes off : As the media starts to deploy small toy-like drones to cover stories, what ethical and safety issues are arising?\n\nAs the media starts to deploy small toy-like drones to cover stories, what ethical and safety issues are arising? The kill chain: Behind the scenes of Australia's drone war.\n\nBehind the scenes of Australia's drone war. Rise of the machines: How civilian drones are already being put to use in the US.\n\n- Mark Corcoran has been a reporter\/producer with Foreign Correspondent for 15 years. He is currently a Visiting Fellow and research student at the University of Technology, Sydney, examining potential news-gathering applications of drone technology.\n\nTopics: science-and-technology, australia\n\nFirst posted"}
{"text":"Assassin's Creed Unity's next major update (Patch 4) has begun rolling out on Xbox One and PS4, so forget about the delay we wrote about earlier.\n\nDetailing the new update, Ubisoft says the patch is \"mainly focused on alleviated performance issues and improving the overall experience.\" Part of that is an improved frame rate which Ubisoft says involved replacing and updating portions of the Paris city map. Of course, there's a number of other improvements as well \u2014 all of which are detailed in the patch notes below:\n\nStability, Performance and Save Game\n\nFixed numerous random crashes both on Campaign and Coop\n\nImplemented multiple optimizations and fixes to improve overall performance\n\nFixed save issue caused by the companion app on the main menu (loss of data)\n\nFixed save issue caused by contacts list (crash occurring). Users should now have access to save\n\nGameplay (navigation, fight, stealth)\n\nFixed various navigation issues\n\nFixed issues with lock picking chests\n\nFixed additional haystack issues\n\nCharacter, AI and Crowd\n\nFixed various character, crowd station and NPC issues\n\nOnline, Matchmaking, Connectivity and Replication\n\nFixed various matchmaking and connection issues both in matches and when starting a match.\n\nFixed various issues with voice chat\n\nFixed join-in-progress issues\n\nFixed various replication issues between host and clients\n\nFixed issues with player rank and COOP\/heist rewards\n\nFixed issues with Helix credits\n\nFixed issues with the My Club feature\n\nMenus and HUD\n\nFixed HUD icon issues and issues with map information\n\nFixed various Initiates issues\n\nFixed additional issues with notifications\n\nMission tweaks (campaign, coop and side content)\n\nFixed various low occurrence walkthrough breaks in both Campaign and COOP\n\nFixed various NPC issues\n\nFixed issue with the quest log disappearing for specific side missions\n\nWorld and 3D\n\nFixed various collision and mesh issues\n\nFixed additional issues where player would fall through the world\n\nFixed specific areas where textures were missing\n\nPC-Specific\n\nFixed crash on \"Quit to Windows\" in free roam mode\n\nFixed crash on accepting multiple \"Join the club\" requests\n\nFixed issues with TXAA\n\nFixed issues with PCSS\n\nFixed issues with textures on NPCs\n\nFixed black texture issues on MSAA-4x, MSAA-8x and TXAA\n\nRight Control now can be assigned as a hotkey\n\nMinor UI fixes\n\nBecause portions of the map had to be replaced, today's title update checks in at 6.7 GB; however, since a large portion of the patch replaces existing files the net increased to the game's overall size is actually less than 6.7 GB.\n\nPatch 4 is rolling out to Xbox One and PS4 players today and will be available on PC later in the week."}
{"text":"Today\u2019s post comes from Alan Walker, archivist at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.\n\nIn my reflective moments, I think about what has kept me here at the National Archives for all this time. It couldn\u2019t be the bone-wearying monotony of shuffling heavy cartons of records from here to there, or the tedium of changing out old information systems and learning the vagaries of new ones. No, there\u2019s something else that gets me in the door every morning. Fasteners.\n\nYou wouldn\u2019t think that something so trivial would hold my attention for any length of time. And yet, paper fasteners play such a vital role in our daily lives here. Consider: when researchers open boxes of records, they will see the telltale signs\u2014the double round holes centered at the tops of the documents, the pinprick perforations in the corners. And many fasteners are still doing their duty among the records now.\n\nIt is a canon of archival preservation that fasteners are the devil\u2019s work; capable of doing lasting and disfiguring damage to their host\u2019s integrity, they must be removed, and forthwith. And so they are. Textual processing staff at all National Archives facilities do this every day. Perhaps gazillions of the little buggers get the boot each year; here are some Acco fasteners awaiting their fate.\n\nMy fellow staff like to collect the unusual ones. Clips, pins, staples, nails (!), tabs, and types whose names I couldn\u2019t begin to fathom\u2014we have come across an astounding variety among the records. Customer Service Division chief Diane Dimkoff told me that she once found an inch-and-a-half-long thorn holding papers together! They were Army records from the field during World War II; you had to make do with what you had.\n\nJust among the humble paper clip, the range of artistry is astounding! Twisted into an amazing variety of shapes, angles, and patterns, there is a touching industrial beauty about them. And the range of raw materials from which these fasteners were produced\u2014steel, aluminum, copper, plastic, string, even compressed paper! \u2014offers a history lesson in itself; how industry introduced new materials and methods of production in the search for more efficiencies of cost, while ever mindful of how they could stylishly set themselves apart from the competition.\n\nThe fasteners themselves generate conversation. Archivist Pam Anderson at Lee\u2019s Summit tells of how court records from Puerto Rico were, for lack of folders, simply pierced through the center with extra-large staples. Not a bit of fun for the National Archives staff who have to remove them.\n\nFolks who work in processing the records will tell you that part of what they love about their work is the excitement of opening a box to see what\u2019s inside. And sometimes, while the records themselves may not seem interesting, what\u2019s attached to them can be fasten-ating.\n\nShare this: Twitter\n\nFacebook"}
{"text":"The Pacific Ocean is growing more acidic at a much faster rate than anticipated, scientists say, putting everything from corals to mussels in jeopardy.\n\nResearchers say carbon dioxide from the atmosphere forms carbonic acid in the ocean, changing the seawater enough that it can dissolve the shells of coral and shellfish.\n\nThe water off the west coast of Vancouver Island is changing at an unprecedented rate, meaning vulnerable life forms in the ocean's food chain must adapt or die.\n\nUBC PhD student Kathryn Anderson says sea urchins are one of the many species extremely sensitive to the changes now underway.\n\n\"It'll hit the larval stage, it'll hit the fertilization stage, it'll hit the adult stage,\" she said.\n\n\"Urchins are going to be hit from many different angles \u2026 this is stuff that we do know. Urchins will be highly negatively impacted.\"\n\nTidal pools along the coast are home to a complex web of life, with dozens of species dependent on each other.\n\n\"All the species we look at interact pretty tightly with each other,\" Anderson said.\n\n\"A single species may be affected less directly by ocean acidification, but because another species that it consumes or consumes it is highly affected by ocean acidification, that can cascade down the food web, through connections of competition and affect the entire community structure.\n\n\"People are only just starting to even consider these concepts.\"\n\n'A spectacular environment'\n\nAs ocean acidification continues, some species will die off and others will grow faster, creating an imbalance in the food chain.\n\nPisaster, or starfish, grow faster and eat more in response to ocean acidification, while its main food source, mussels, grow slower. (CBC)\n\n\"Our top predator, the pisaster [a starfish], is pretty interesting,\" she said.\n\n\"It has calcium carbonate in it but mostly in the form of spicules, and the research from our lab actually found that pisaster grow faster in response to ocean acidification and consume more.\n\n\"And this is an interesting problem because their main food source are mussels, which grow slower in response to ocean acidification. So they're becoming more voracious carnivores, while their food source is having a harder time calcifying and growing.\"\n\nNear the Bamfield Marine Research Station on Vancouver Island, 60 artificial tide pools that Anderson constructed each form their own little ecosystem. She's pumping in different levels of carbon dioxide in order to determine how different species will react.\n\n\"What I am trying to do is in one-third of my tide pools, trying to get a picture for what a tide pool is going to look like in 2100, and what tide pool our grandkids will look at,\" she said.\n\n\"It's a spectacular environment, and the truth is we don't know if it is going to look like that. We will lose a lot of stuff. I don't think the urchins will be there at all.\"\n\nLessons from a scallop farm\n\nFor some, that future has already arrived.\n\nAquaculture is big business in B.C., supplying a steadily increasing percentage of the food supply.\n\nAt Island Scallops near Qualicum Beach, scallops are raised from microscopic larvae. Two years ago, something all but wiped out a billion of them \u2014 nearly the entire year's crop.\n\n\"In 2010, we couldn't grow anything, everything died,\" said Island Scallops owner Rob Saunders.\n\n\"Every batch we put through the hatchery either died at day 10 or by the end of its larval life, which is about day 20, they were all dead. \"\n\nSimilar problems were popping up all along the Pacific Coast. Some blamed a mysterious disease, and those in the industry scrambled to test water temperature and salinity, but nobody considered pH.\n\n\"I was trained at UBC, and we were trained that the ocean never changes,\" Saunders said. \"It's the mother Earth, it's always stable and it hardly fluctuates, nobody was looking at pH.\"\n\nWith creditors calling and his multimillion-dollar business on the line, Saunders came across a study detailing the effects of pH levels on fish. He altered the pH of the water and put some larvae under the microscope.\n\n\"After we removed the CO2, I came in early in the morning, and I'm looking at the microscope ... and sure enough they were swimming around like mad, and then we knew we had it, and we haven't looked back since then.\"\n\nMass extinction feared\n\nIn Port Moody, UBC marine biologist Chris Harley and a student are conducting experiments to examine the effect of ocean pH on invasive species.\n\nUBC marine biologist Chris Harley says it is 'highly likely' we are in a period of mass extinction. (CBC)\n\n\"We're pretty that sure mussels are going to not do well, because they have to grow shells, which is hard to do when the water is acidic,\" Harley said.\n\n\"The barnacles, every study seems to show the barnacles are almost immune to this, so they might be all right.\"\n\nHarley has students working up and down the West Coast this summer, doing some basic research. He believes the changes he's seeing are directly related to climate change \u2014 the CO2 long accumulated in the oceans is now making its way toward shore.\n\n\"You have a power plant ... when it needs to be turned on, to generate extra electricity, it's burning natural gas, which is putting carbon dioxide into the air,\" Harley said.\n\n\"That carbon dioxide ends up in the ocean ... where it changes the pH of the water \u2014 and that's where it starts to create trouble for the plants and animals that live there.\"\n\nThere is debate about the role humans play in ocean acidification, but there's no doubt acidification is happening.\n\nAdjusting pH in the controlled setting of a scallop farm is relatively easy, but changing it for the entire Pacific Ocean is next to impossible.\n\nHarley says the science suggests we're in a period of mass extinction.\n\n\"It's highly likely we are in that scenario now. It's not just ocean acidification,\" he said.\n\n\"It's also overfishing combined with warming, combined with acidification, combined with lots of other things, and all of these changes happening so quickly and happening all at the same time is pushing these species past where they can rebound when their populations get knocked down.\n\n\"So over the next 50 years, we should probably see a lot of species go extinct in the sea.\"\n\nScientists are seeing changes in their own lifetime that in the past would have taken thousands of years.\n\nResearchers are struggling to catch up \u2014 monitoring changes, trying to determine just how bad it will get and finding out which species will be the first to go."}
{"text":"A pro-Police group has accused CNN of deceptively editing the Charlotte shooting video, where police shot Keith Scott. Hat tip to our friends at The Daily Wire.\n\nYes, as shocking as it sounds to accuse CNN of doing such a thing (see CAUGHT: CNN Forced to Apologize For Doctoring Violent Milwaukee Video), let\u2019s take a look. First, what CNN aired\u2026\n\nSecond, the unedited footage\u2026\n\nLooks like a deceptive edit to me. CNN removed the clips where the police constantly yelled for Scott to \u201cDROP THE GUN!\u201d\n\n\u201cThe editing was clearly intended to give viewers the impression that Scott wasn\u2019t armed. By intentionally excluding information to promote the false narrative that the officer-involved shooting of Keith Scott was unjustified, CNN directly contributed towards inciting violence and destruction in the Charlotte riots. Innocent citizens were hurt during the Charlotte riots, but editing like this also incites violence against police officers long after the riots are over.\u201d\n\nThis is what conservatives and anyone who cares about facts are up against (see RED-HANDED: Katie Couric Caught Editing Video to Push Anti-Gun Lies\u2026 and CENSORED: White House Edits Video of French President Saying \u2018Islamist Terrorism\u2019). The media will never let facts get in the way of their narrative unless they get called out.\n\nTo recap:\n\nTo the average person who works and raises a family and doesn\u2019t have the time to fact check the media (because they assume it\u2019s the media\u2019s job to fact check themselves), they just hear \u201ccops shoot black man holding book.\u201d\n\nLiberals know this. They run with it. They reap the consequences of their actions with ratings as cities like Charlotte burn. Media like CNN, with this editing trick, helped Black Lives Matter push the false narrative that cops are shooting unarmed black men. But no. Not so much, as this video shows.\n\nAnd this is why we fight back.\n\nNOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT! IT\u2019S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE."}
{"text":"(UPDATED) The former first lady is accused of creating private foundations in Switzerland from 1978 to 1984 when she was governor of Metro Manila\n\nPublished 1:05 PM, January 17, 2017\n\nMANILA, Philippines (UPDATED)\u2013 Ilocos Norte 2nd District Representative Imelda Marcos did not attend her last day of trial for a 25-year-old graft case before the Sandiganbayan, which has now been postponed to February 16.\n\nThe 5th Division on Tuesday, January 17, reset the trial because the defense failed to present their last evidence, which includes a testimony from deceased former judge Cesario del Rosario.\n\nThe 10 counts of graft filed in 1991 against Marcos stemmed from allegations that she created private foundations in Switzerland from 1978 to 1984 while she was governor of Metro Manila.\n\nThe former first lady also allegedly held financial interests in several private enterprises, a violation of Republic Act 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act.\n\nAssistant Special Prosecutor Rey Quilala told reporters that the evidence from the defense team consist of documents dating back to the 1990s. One is a copy of Del Rosario's testimony when the case was still with the Manila Regional Trial Court. Another is an internal memorandum between Del Rosario, then assistant solicitor general, and Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, then the chief presidential legal counsel of president Fidel Ramos.\n\nThe memo is said to be Del Rosario's briefer to Carpio, as the latter, after being appointed by Ramos in 1992, asked the former for an update on cases against the Marcoses.\n\nNeither the former first lady nor her lawyers attended the hearing.\n\nQuilala told reporters they will seek a formal order so the case could proceed for judgment. The prosecution had rested its case in 2015.\n\nThe private foundations that Marcos allegedly formed are considered among her and her family's hidden assets in Switzerland.\n\nThe government has since been able to identify $658 million worth of Marcos Swiss deposits. Documents which were used by the government to track down these deposits are used in related cases, such as this 1991 graft case.\n\nThe Sandiganbayan Special 1st Division is also handling another corruption claim against the former first lady, stemming from appeals from the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) and the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) to declare $24 million worth of art collections \"unlawfully acquired.\" (READ: Recovering Marcos' ill-gotten wealth: After 30 years, what?) \u2013 Rappler.com"}
{"text":"Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., has reopened after being on lockdown for nearly six hours due to an \u201conline threat made against the university,\u201d officials said.\n\nAll students and staff were asked to stay away from the campus as police investigated. Classes and meetings were also cancelled.\n\nThe lockdown was lifted at approximately 11:30 a.m.\n\nThreat contained \u201csimilar verbiage\u201d to posts about Oregon shooting\n\nThe nature of the threat is not immediately clear, but Waterloo police superintendent Pat Dietrich said it contained \u201csimilar verbiage\u201d to online threats on the same website ahead of the shooting at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon that killed 9 on earlier this month.\n\n\u201cIt was something we understand was previously used on a school-related\u2026incident in the State and that elevated concerns,\u201d Dietrich said. \u201cIt was the shooting in Oregon.\u201d\n\nThe threat \u201cwas picked up by a variety of police forces and passed on to the Waterloo Regional Police,\u201d Crowley said.\n\nThe university\u2019s Special Constable received a tip about the threat from Waterloo police at approximately 3 a.m. on Friday. The university was placed on lockdown at 6 a.m.\n\nCrowley said the threat was centred at the Science Building at University and Bricker Avenues. The building was empty when the university was placed on lockdown and no injuries have been reported, Crowley said.\n\nSuspect may not be a local\n\nDietrich also said the person who posted the threat online may not be in the Waterloo area, or even in the country.\n\nAs a result, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the RCMP are also involved in the investigation, Dietrich said.\n\n\u201cThese are very complicated investigations, locating IP addresses and the ways you can mask them is something that is very complex,\u201d Dietrich told reporters.\n\nThe suspect, he said, could face public mischief charges.\n\nThe university is in its reading week and campus is not as crowded as usual.\n\nAll students, faculty and staff were notified about the lockdown by email and on social media, Crowley said.\n\nRepresentatives from the university will provide updated information via legacy.wlu.ca as it becomes available.\n\nThe nearby University of Waterloo remained open during the lockdown, but officials said they were monitoring the situation at Wilfrid Laurier University closely.\n\nWith files from CTV Kitchener"}
{"text":"The Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) was a British civilian organisation set up during the Second World War and headquartered at White Waltham Airfield that ferried new, repaired and damaged military aircraft between factories, assembly plants, transatlantic delivery points, maintenance units (MUs), scrap yards, and active service squadrons and airfields, but not to naval aircraft carriers. It also flew service personnel on urgent duty from one place to another and performed some air ambulance work. Notably, some of its pilots were women, and from 1943 they received equal pay to their male co-workers, a first for the British government.\n\nMission [ edit ]\n\nThe initial plan was that the ATA would carry personnel, mail and medical supplies, but the pilots were immediately needed to work with the Royal Air Force (RAF) ferry pools transporting aircraft.[1] By 1 May 1940 the ATA had taken over transporting all military aircraft from factories to maintenance units to have guns and accessories installed. On 1 August 1941 the ATA took over all ferrying jobs.[2] This freed the much-needed combat pilots for combat duty. At one time there were fourteen ATA ferry pools as far apart as Hamble, between Southampton and Portsmouth, and Lossiemouth near Inverness in Scotland.\n\nA special ATA Air Pageant was held at White Waltham on 29 September 1945 to raise money for the ATA Benevolent Fund, supported by the aircraft companies that had been served by the ATA. It included comprehensive static displays of Allied and German aircraft, including a V1, aero engines, and even an AA gun and searchlight complete with crew. Pilots taking part included Alex Henshaw in a Supermarine Seafire.\n\nLord Beaverbrook, a World War II Minister of Aircraft Production, gave an appropriate tribute at the closing ceremony disbanding the ATA at White Waltham on 30 November 1945:[3]\n\n\u201c Without the ATA the days and nights of the Battle of Britain would have been conducted under conditions quite different from the actual events. They carried out the delivery of aircraft from the factories to the RAF, thus relieving countless numbers of RAF pilots for duty in the battle. Just as the Battle of Britain is the accomplishment and achievement of the RAF, likewise it can be declared that the ATA sustained and supported them in the battle. They were soldiers fighting in the struggle just as completely as if they had been engaged on the battlefront. \u201d\n\nAccomplishment [ edit ]\n\nDuring the war the ATA flew 415,000 hours and delivered more than 309,000[4] aircraft of 147 types, including Spitfires, Hawker Hurricanes, Mosquitoes, Mustangs, Lancasters, Halifaxes, Fairey Swordfish, Fairey Barracudas and Fortresses. The average aircraft strength of the ATA training schools was 78. A total of 133,247 hours were flown by school aircraft and 6,013 conversion courses were put through. The total flying hours of the Air Movement Flight were 17,059, of which 8,570 were on domestic flights and 8,489 on overseas flights. About 883 tons of freight were carried and 3,430 passengers were transported without any casualties; but a total of 174 pilots, women as well as men, were killed flying for the ATA in the wartime years.[5] Total taxi hours amounted to 179,325, excluding Air Movements.[6]\n\nInitially, to comply with the Geneva Convention, as many of the ferry pilots were nominally civilians and\/or women, aircraft were ferried with guns or other armament unloaded. However, after encounters with German aircraft in which the ferried aircraft were unable to fight back, RAF aircraft were ferried with guns fully armed.\n\nAdministration [ edit ]\n\nThe administration of the ATA fell to Gerard d'Erlanger, a director of British Airways Ltd, which was merged into the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) in 1940. He had suggested a similar organisation in a letter dated 24 May 1938.\n\nIn late August 1939 the ATA was placed under British Airways Ltd for initial administration and finance,[1] but on 10 October 1939 Air Member for Supply and Organisation (AMSO) took over. The first pilots were assigned to RAF Reserve Command and attached to RAF flights to ferry trainers, fighters and bombers from factory and storage to Royal Air Force stations.[7] The ATA's Central Ferry Control, which allocated the required flights to all Ferry Pools, was based at RAF Andover.\n\nLate in 1939 it was decided that a third and entirely civilian ferry pool should be set up at White Waltham, near Maidenhead in Berkshire. The operations of this pool began on 15 February 1940. On 16 May 1940 RAF Maintenance Command took control through its No. 41 Group. Then, on 22 July 1941, the ATA was placed under the control of Lord Beaverbrook's Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP). Although control shifted between organisations, administration was always carried out by staff led by Commander Gerard d\u2019Erlanger CBE, first at British Airways Ltd, then, after the merger in 1940, at BOAC.[2]\n\nPilots [ edit ]\n\nThe ATA recruited pilots who were considered to be unsuitable for either the Royal Air Force or the Fleet Air Arm by reason of age, fitness or gender. A unique feature of the ATA was that physical handicaps were ignored if the pilot could do the job, thus there were one-armed, one-legged, short-sighted and one-eyed pilots, humorously referred to as \"Ancient and Tattered Airmen\".\n\nThe ATA also took pilots from neutral countries. Representatives of 28 countries flew with the ATA.[8]\n\nMost notably, the ATA allowed women pilots to ferry aircraft. The female pilots (nicknamed \"Attagirls\")[9] had a high profile in the press. On 14 November 1939 Commander Pauline Gower MBE was given the task of organising the women's section of the ATA.[10] The first eight women pilots were accepted into service on 1 January 1940, initially only cleared to fly Tiger Moths from their base in Hatfield.[11] They were: Joan Hughes, Margaret Cunnison, Mona Friedlander, Rosemary Rees, Marion Wilberforce, Margaret Fairweather, Gabrielle Patterson, and Winifred Crossley Fair. Overall during World War II there were 166 women pilots, one in eight of all ATA pilots, and they volunteered from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States, the Netherlands and Poland. From Argentina and Chile came Maureen Dunlop and Margot Duhalde.[12] Fifteen of these women lost their lives in the air, including the British pioneer aviator Amy Johnson. Two of the women pilots received commendations; one was Helen Kerly.[13]\n\nA notable American member of the ATA was legendary aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran who returned to the United States and started a similar all female organization known as the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP).\n\nThese women pilots were initially restricted to non-combat types of aircraft (trainers and transports), but they were eventually permitted to fly virtually every type flown by the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm, including the four-engined heavy bombers, but excluding the largest flying boats. Hurricanes were first flown by women pilots on 19 July 1941, and Spitfires in August 1941.[11]\n\nOne of the many notable achievements of these women is that they received the same pay as men of equal rank in the ATA, starting in 1943. This was the first time that the British government gave its blessing to equal pay for equal work within an organisation under its control.[14] At the same time American women flying with the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) were receiving as little as 65 per cent of the pay given to their male colleagues.[15]\n\nTraining [ edit ]\n\nThe first ATA pilots were introduced to military aircraft at the RAF\u2019s Central Flying School (CFS), but the ATA soon developed its own training programme. Pilots progressed from light single-engined aircraft to more powerful and complicated aircraft in stages. They first qualified on one \u201cclass\u201d of aircraft, then gained experience on that class by doing ferrying work with any and all aircraft in that class, before returning to training to qualify on the next class of aircraft. As a result, pilots made progress on the basis of their own capabilities rather than according to a rigid timetable. This ensured not only that as many pilots as possible advanced, but that those who could not were still gainfully employed flying the aircraft types on which they had qualified.\n\nOnce cleared to fly one class of aircraft, pilots could be asked to ferry any plane in that class even if they had never seen that type of aircraft before. To do so they had Ferry Pilot Notes, a two-ring book of small cards with the critical statistics and notations necessary to ferry each aircraft. A pilot cleared on more than one class could be asked to fly an aircraft in any of the categories on which he or she was qualified. Thus, even a pilot cleared to fly four-engined bombers could be assigned to fly a single-engined trainer if scheduling made this the most efficient way to get the aircraft to its destination.\n\nThe ATA trained its pilots only to ferry planes, rather than to achieve perfection on every type. For example, aerobatics and blind flying were not taught, and pilots were explicitly forbidden to do either, even if they were capable of doing so. The objective of the ATA was to deliver aircraft safely and that meant taking no unnecessary risks.[16]\n\nRanks [ edit ]\n\nUnits [ edit ]\n\nThe following units were active in the ATA:\n\nNo. 1 Ferry Pool ATA White Waltham, Maidenhead\n\nPreviously: No. 1 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- 'A' Section of No. 3 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 2 Ferry Pool ATA Whitchurch, Bristol\n\nPreviously: No. 2 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- 'B' Section of No. 3 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 3 Ferry Pool ATA Harwarden, Chester\n\nPreviously: No. 3 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- 'C' Section of No. 3 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 4 Ferry Pool ATA Prestwick, Ayrshire\n\nPreviously: No. 4 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 5 Ferry Pool ATA Thame, Oxfordshire (Training Unit)\n\nPreviously: No. 5 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- 'D' Section of No. 3 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- Women's Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 6 Ferry Pool ATA Radcliffe, Leicester\n\nPreviously: No. 6 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 7 Ferry Pool ATA Sherburn-in-Elmet, Leeds\n\nPreviously: No. 7 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 8 Ferry Pool ATA Sydenham, Belfast\n\nPreviously: No. 8 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 9 Ferry Pool ATA Aston Down, Gloucestershire\n\nPreviously: No. 9 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 10 Ferry Pool ATA Lossiemouth, Moray\n\nPreviously: No. 10 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- No. 4 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 12 Ferry Pool ATA Cosford, Staffordshire\n\nPreviously: No. 12 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 15 Ferry Pool ATA Hamble, Southampton\n\nPreviously: No. 15 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 16 Ferry Pool ATA Kirkbride, Carlisle\n\nPreviously: No. 16 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- No. 4 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 14 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA Ringway, Manchester\n\nPreviously: No. 14 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA\n\nNo. 5 (T) Ferry Pool ATA\n\nPreviously: (Training) Ferry Pool ATA\n\nInitial Flying Training School ATA\n\nPreviously: Elementary Flying Training School ATA <- ATA School\n\nAir Movements Flight ATA (1942\u201345)\n\nAdvanced Flying Training School ATA (1942\u201345)\n\nPreviously: ATA School\n\nSee also [ edit ]\n\nReferences [ edit ]\n\nCitations [ edit ]\n\nBibliography [ edit ]\n\nLake, A (1999). Flying units of the RAF. Shrewsbury: Airlife. ISBN 1-84037-086-6.\n\nBooks [ edit ]\n\nAir Transport Auxiliary, Air Transport Auxiliary . (Handbook) White Waltham: Reminder Book, 1945.\n\n. (Handbook) White Waltham: Reminder Book, 1945. Barnato Walker, Diana. Spreading My Wings . Patrick Stephens, 1994 ISBN 1-85260-473-5\n\n. Patrick Stephens, 1994 ISBN 1-85260-473-5 Bergel, Hugh. Fly and Deliver: A Ferry Pilot's Log Book . Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing, 1982.\n\n. Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing, 1982. Cheesman, E. C. Brief Glory: The Story of A.T.A. . Leicester: Harborough Publishing, 1946.\n\n. Leicester: Harborough Publishing, 1946. Curtis, Lettice. Lettice Curtis: Her Autobiography . Walton on Thames: Red Kite, 2004.\n\n. Walton on Thames: Red Kite, 2004. Curtis, Lettice. The Forgotten Pilots: A Story of the Air Transport Auxiliary, 1939-45 . Olney, Bucks: Nelson & Saunders, 1985 ISBN 0-947750-02-9\n\n. Olney, Bucks: Nelson & Saunders, 1985 ISBN 0-947750-02-9 De Bunsen, Mary. Mount Up with Wings . London: Hutchinson, 1960.\n\n. London: Hutchinson, 1960. Du Cros, Rosemary. ATA Girl: Memoirs of a Wartime Ferry Pilot . London: Muller, 1983.\n\n. London: Muller, 1983. Ellis, Mary. A Spitfire Girl . Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2016.\n\n. Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2016. Fahie, Michael. A Harvest of Memories: The Life of Pauline Gower M.B.E. . Peterborough: GMS Enterprises, 1995.\n\n. Peterborough: GMS Enterprises, 1995. Genovese, J. Gen. We Flew Without Guns . Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1945.\n\n. Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1945. Great Britain, and Hugh Bergel. Flying Wartime Aircraft; ATA Ferry Pilots' *Handling Notes for Seven World War II Aircraft . Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972.\n\n. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972. Hathaway, Warren. Pursuit of a Dream: The Story of Pilot Vera (Strodl) Dowling . Edmonton, Canada: PageMaster Publishing, 2012.\n\n. Edmonton, Canada: PageMaster Publishing, 2012. Hawkins, Regina Trice. Hazel Jane Raines, Pioneer Lady of Flight . Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996.\n\n. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996. Hyams, Jacky. The Female Few: Spitfire Heroines of the Air Transport Auxiliary . Gloucester: History Press, 2012.\n\n. Gloucester: History Press, 2012. King, Alison. Golden Wings . London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd, 1956.\n\n. London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd, 1956. Lucas, Y. M. WAAF with Wings . Peterborough: GMS Enterprises, 1992.\n\n. Peterborough: GMS Enterprises, 1992. Miller Livingston Stratford, Nancy. Contact! Britain! . Createspace, 2011.\n\n. Createspace, 2011. Moggridge, Dolores Theresa. Woman Pilot . London: Michael Joseph, 1957. Republished as: Moggridge, Jackie. Spitfire Girl. My Life in the Sky . London: Head of Zeus, 2014.\n\n. London: Michael Joseph, 1957. Republished as: Moggridge, Jackie. . London: Head of Zeus, 2014. Narracott, Arthur Henson. Unsung Heroes of the Air . London: F. Muller, 1943.\n\n. London: F. Muller, 1943. Phelps, Anthony. \"I Couldn't Care Less.\" . Leicester: Harborough Pub. Co.; sole distributors to the trade: H. Marshall, 1945.\n\n. Leicester: Harborough Pub. Co.; sole distributors to the trade: H. Marshall, 1945. Schrader, Helena. Sisters in Arms . Barnsley: Pen & Sword Aviation, 2006.\n\n. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Aviation, 2006. Taylor, Leonard. Airwomen's Work . London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1943.\n\n. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1943. Thomas, Nick. Naomi the Aviatrix . Createspace, 2011.\n\n. Createspace, 2011. Volkersz, Veronica. The Sky and I . London: W.H. Allen, 1956.\n\n. London: W.H. Allen, 1956. Walters, Anthony Jack. Air Transport Auxiliary (The Lost Child) . Wallingford: Aries Publications, 2006.\n\n. Wallingford: Aries Publications, 2006. Welch, Ann Courtenay Edmonds. Happy to Fly: An Autobiography . London: John Murray, 1983.\n\n. London: John Murray, 1983. Wheeler, Jo. The Hurricane Girls: The Inspirational True Story of the Women who Dared to Fly . London: Penguin Books, 2018. ISBN 978-0-241-35463-6\n\n. London: Penguin Books, 2018. ISBN 978-0-241-35463-6 Whittell, Giles. Spitfire Women of World War II. London: Harper Press, 2007.\n\nFiction [ edit ]\n\nDewar, Isla. Izzy's War . Ebury Press, 2010.\n\n. Ebury Press, 2010. Gould, Carol. Spitfire Girls: A Tale of the Lives and Loves Achievements and Heroism of the Women ATA Pilots in World War II . Forfar: Black Ace Books, 1998.\n\n. Forfar: Black Ace Books, 1998. Lord Brown, Kate The Beauty Chorus . London: Corvus Atlantic, 2011\n\n. London: Corvus Atlantic, 2011 Matthews, Beryl. A Flight of Golden Wings . Sutton: Severn House, 2007.\n\n. Sutton: Severn House, 2007. Morrison, Margaret and Pamela Tulk-Hart, Paid to Be Safe . London: Hutchinson, 1948.\n\n. London: Hutchinson, 1948. Ryan, Garry, Blackbirds (2012) and Two Blackbirds (2014). Calgary, AB: NeWest Press.\n\n(2012) and (2014). Calgary, AB: NeWest Press. Schrader, Helena. The Lady in the Spitfire . Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, Inc, 2006.\n\n. Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, Inc, 2006. Singer, E. M. Mother Flies Hurricanes . Bend, OR: Avidia Cascade Press, 1999.\n\n. Bend, OR: Avidia Cascade Press, 1999. Terrell, George. I'll Never Leave You . San Jose: Writer's Showcase, 2001.\n\n. San Jose: Writer's Showcase, 2001. Wein, Elizabeth. Code Name Verity (Electric Monkey, 2012) and Rose Under Fire (2013)\n\nOther books that mention the ATA's women pilots [ edit ]\n\nBell, Elizabeth S. Sisters of the Wind: Voices of Early Women Aviators . Pasadena, CA: Trilogy Books, 1994.\n\n. Pasadena, CA: Trilogy Books, 1994. Jaros, Dean. Heroes Without Legacy: American Airwomen, 1912-1944 . Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1993.\n\n. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1993. Keil, Sally Van Wagenen. Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines: The Unknown Heroines of World War II . New York: Rawson, Wade Publishers, 1979.\n\n. New York: Rawson, Wade Publishers, 1979. Lomax, Judy. Women of the Air. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987."}
{"text":"About This Game Man O' War: Corsair.\n\nEngage in epic naval combat and explore the oceans of the Warhammer world.\n\nMan O' War: Corsair is a video game of high adventure, naval combat and exploration based on the Games Workshop classic Man O' War table top game.\n\nYour Quest\n\nSail the seas plundering enemy ships, visiting ports, and trading. Dominate everything in your path with a fleet of ships at your back and watch people flee at the mere sight of you, leaving legends of your deeds in the history books and steel through the hearts of your enemies.\n\nExplore and Fight\n\nCaptain a wide variety of unique sailing vessels, explore and trade whilst combating enemy ships in frantic naval action.\n\nBoarding Actions\n\nAs well as sea battles, engaging in boarding actions with enemy vessels sees you walking the deck, weapon in hand, attacking enemy crew. Loot the vessels or sink them, the choice is yours.\n\nEnemies and Allies\n\nBuy a variety of unique and deadly ships. Command allies from different races and fight many deadly enemies. Fierce storms, deadly fleets and terrible foes will block your path to ultimate glory.\n\nCustom Battles\n\nBuild your own fleet from any faction in game, and battle it against any foe you choose.\n\nThe Old World\n\nA captain in Man O' War: Corsair can sail the coast of a huge continent in the Warhammer world. Visiting over 50 ports from Erengrad to Sartosa, the sea is yours to explore.\n\nA heroic adventurer does not only have enemy ships to contend with. The deep and unexplored oceans hold terrifying creatures that few see and live to tell the tale.\n\nThese deadly creatures emerging from the deep sea will chill blood and drop jaws in equal measure. The wise would attempt to flee but those brave enough to tackle such creatures will be famed throughout the world.\n\nHere there be monsters...."}
{"text":"You're probably thinking: \"Big deal, so someone tied a big old balloon to a hot dog and a video camera and sent them into space. That's been done before except with sushi.\" The difference here? The guys from San Francisco's Zog's Dogs managed to retrieve their hot dog when it fell back down to earth and then they ate it. To celebrate the achievement of having sent \"the first hot dog into outer space,\" Zog's Dogs is, uh, launching a Space Dog Combo for $5. It is, of course, a Zog Dog with Astronaut Ice Cream for dessert. Are space dogs okay to eat? Anybody?\n\nVideo: The First Hot Dog in Outer Space\n\n\u00b7 The First Hot Dog in Outer Space [YouTube via HuffPo]\n\n\u00b7 All Hot Dog Coverage on Eater [-E-]\n\n\u00b7 All Space Food Coverage on Eater [-E-]"}
{"text":"Getty Images\n\nCount Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman as one NFL player who hasn\u2019t changed his opinion about the game he plays as he\u2019s learned more about the risks of concussions.\n\nSherman told GQ that he hasn\u2019t changed his approach and would love to see his son play football if he wants to.\n\n\u201cIt doesn\u2019t change the way I play,\u201d Sherman said. \u201cI\u2019ve always tried to tackle with the best form, and not try to always get people down on the ground without using my head. But it doesn\u2019t change the way I think about the game or how I feel about my kids playing the game. I feel like this game has given me a lot more than its taken. It obviously takes a toll on your body and you understand the risks going into it, but you also have to understand that it\u2019s taught me discipline, hard work, teamwork, being dependable, being available, how to be a leader, how to work past adversity. Just so many things that you use in your everyday life. And you can\u2019t take that for granted. So maybe my son doesn\u2019t end up being a professional athlete, maybe he never even plays a sport, but I wouldn\u2019t hold him back from something that\u2019s been so great to me.\u201d\n\nAt a time when some players are retiring early and citing concussions as the reason, Sherman\u2019s view still seems to be the majority opinion about NFL players: There are risks associated with playing football, but the risks are outweighed by the rewards."}
{"text":"Police arrest 2 Arabs, hunt 3rd, after they were documented committing horrific rape of mentally disabled girl while shouting racist slurs.\n\nTwo Arab residents of Judea and Samaria as well as an Arab citizen of Israel are suspected of raping a 20-year-old mentally disabled Jewish girl two weeks ago for \"nationalistic\" motives, as was revealed on Wednesday when a media gag order on the case was lifted.\n\nAll three were documented in footage they filmed two weeks ago raping the mentally handicapped girl in a motel in southern Tel Aviv, humiliating her and spitting on her while shouting racist slurs and threatening to harm her family.\n\nPolice hid the case from the public for ten days out of concerns it would spark clashes between Jews and Arabs.\n\n\"Nationalistic motives\" is a term used in describing terror attacks, as opposed to criminal motives.\n\nThe gag order came despite the fact that police arrested two of the perpetrators a full nine days ago, and are currently hunting down the third rapist whose identity is known to the police.\n\nOne of the three attackers is a minor from Jaffa (Yafo), and he was arrested.\n\nAnother arrested suspect, Amad Al-Din Daragmeh from the Judea-Samaria region, apparently filmed the vile gang-rape with the goal of spreading the video.\n\nHe was brought to the Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court on Wednesday morning for an extension of his arrest, where the judge emphasized the severity of the case and the condition of the victim.\n\nThe traumatic incident has left the victim in a difficult psychological state and she requires treatment."}
{"text":"A Class VI textbook of science taught in some of the schools under the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) has kicked up a controversy with one of its chapters using a Mosque-like image in pictorials to explain the sources of sound pollution.\n\nThe issue first came to the light after someone reportedly circulated a message on Whatsapp about the pictorial used in the textbook titled, Integrated Science. It later gained steam as people began sharing the controversial pictorial on various social networking sites.\n\nOne Masood Pasha, meanwhile, started a petition with a single signature at petition.org, demanding the removal of the pictorial. His petition had drawn more than 6000 supporters till Sunday.\n\nThe pictorial in the textbook has shown a man standing among various sources of sound pollution including an aeroplane, a fast moving train, couple of four wheelers and a Mosque-like building.\n\n\u201cThe text book of science of ICSE board sixth class has a picture of noise pollution and it is illustrating the Mosque\/Masjid is one of the reasons for sound pollution. It is totally wrong to point at one specific religion as a one of the reasons for the noise pollution. It will create unnecessary hatred among young minds of tender age kids. Pls (sic) remove the Mosque\/Masjid picture so that we can avoid polluting younger minds in our country,\u201d Pasha demanded in his petition.\n\nA news agency quoted the chief executive and secretary of the CISCE Gerry Arathoon as saying in his response to the row that the ICSE did not publish \u201cor prescribe these textbooks.\u201d\n\n\"If any book with objectionable content is being taught at certain schools, it is for schools and publisher to ensure such a thing does not happen,\" Arathoon told the news agency.\n\nSelina Publishers, which published the book, regretted over the controversy and promised that it will be removed from the textbook in next editions.\n\n\u201cThe diagram on page 202 of our publication integrated science for Class-VI has a structure resembling a portion of a fort and other noise producing objects in a noisy city. We apologise if it has hurt the sentiments of anyone. This is to inform all concerned that we will be changing the picture in our subsequent editions of the book,\u201d Hemant Gupta said on behalf of the Selina Publishers in a statement uploaded on the Twitter."}
{"text":"Kinchela Boys' Home survivors tell of removals, sexual abuse and redemption\n\nUpdated\n\nA vast old Moreton Bay fig tree stands on the grounds of what was once the notorious Kinchela Boys' Home \u2014 exerting a strange power over a group of Aboriginal men who once lived there.\n\nLike a monstrous character, it looms in their collective memory, of a deeply scarred childhood.\n\n\"That tree \u2014 it felt our pain,\" Richard Campbell says.\n\nRichard is a former inmate of the Kinchela Boys' Home, near Kempsey on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, where he was identified by the number 28.\n\nThe boys who passed through the iron gates of the home between 1924 and 1970 were not known by their names.\n\nIndeed, they were prevailed upon immediately to forget who they were.\n\nA Gumbaynggir and Dhungutti man from Bowraville, Richard remembers the first punishment he received, on the day he arrived at Kinchela.\n\nThe nine-year-old, charged just days before at Macksville with being a neglected child, was welcomed by the balled fists of a staff member.\n\n\"First thing, he just started belting into us,\" Richard says.\n\n\"He said 'you are not Richard Campbell' \u2014 bang. 'You are 28' \u2014 bang. 'You are not black, you are white' \u2014 bang. This was all in between hits around the head.\n\n\"Not with the hand, it was a fist. Imagine a grown man's fist. Welcome to Kinchela Boys' Home.\"\n\nA cruel separation at Central Station\n\nMichael \"Widdy\" Welsh was number 36 at Kinchela.\n\nIn 1960, the Wailwan man was taken from Coonamble in the far-north west of New South Wales when he was eight years old \u2014 one of seven children removed from his mother.\n\nHe still recalls life before Kinchela.\n\n\"I danced around the campfire, around my grandfather's hat, with my grannies and uncles,\" he says.\n\n\"I used to go cray fishing, used to go pig catching, saddle the horses up \u2014 before they took me.\"\n\nEscorted by welfare officers, the Welsh family was forced apart on a train platform at Sydney's bustling Central Station.\n\n\"They told us we were going on a train and our brothers and sisters were going to come on a train behind us,\" Michael says.\n\n\"What they were telling me, I knew that wasn't true. I didn't know what the word bullshit was, but that's what it was.\"\n\nThe 'crime' of being a neglected child\n\nRichard was taken from his mother with an older brother and three younger sisters in the 1960s.\n\nUnbelievably, Aboriginal child removals were a police matter.\n\nIt was standard procedure to charge children \u2014 babies included \u2014 with the offence of being a neglected child.\n\nIn the harsh eyes of the law, these innocent children were, to all intents and purposes, criminals.\n\n\"We went to the court in Macksville that's where they charged us,\" Richard says.\n\n\"From there we drove straight across over to Kinchela. Then they held us there and took off with the three younger sisters. We could hear them crying [and] screaming going down the street.\"\n\nRichard's three sisters were sent much further away \u2014 to the Bomaderry Children's Home, just outside Nowra on the south coast of New South Wales.\n\nIf the forced separation, being charged by police and then bundled into cars and trains under the supervision of complete strangers wasn't traumatic enough, much worse was yet to come.\n\nMichael says when he arrived at Kinchela, his eldest brother, 10-year-old Barry \u2014 who he calls his protector \u2014 tried to comfort him.\n\n\"We were walking through the gates, he cuddled me as we went through, and he said 'it'll be alright brother',\" Michael says.\n\n\"I knew this place was no good, it was evil.\"\n\nThat day, after being escorted to the manager's office, Michael recalls looking out an upstairs window and seeing a boy below digging what appeared to him to be a grave.\n\n\"He was on punishment. He was going to dig that all day ... so that added to the fear,\" he says.\n\n'A bonzer bunch of kids'\n\nIn 1965, a glowing report on the conditions at Kinchela was published in the widely-distributed Dawn, a monthly magazine produced by the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board to promote its activities.\n\n\"It's almost like a country club at Kinchela,\" the article begins.\n\n\"The boys were neglected before coming to Kinchela, but now they receive truly dedicated care and real affection from the home's mum and dad, who are manager and matron at Kinchela.\"\n\nThe writer concedes though that \"discipline at such an establishment must be reasonably strict\".\n\nThe manager, Henry Henricksen, told Dawn that he had \"the most bonzer bunch of kids in Australia\".\n\nIn an interesting postscript, a year after Dawn visited the home, the same man appeared before a parliamentary joint committee inquiring into Aboriginal welfare in New South Wales.\n\nAsked bluntly whether Kinchela was little more than a \"holding station\", until such a time as the boys were fit to work or be boarded out, Mr Henricksen replied: \"Yes, it is a pretty harsh description of it, but I say that that fits the bill\".\n\nCrying in another room\n\nRichard's account of his own childhood differs wildly from that of Dawn.\n\nHe doesn't hesitate when asked to recount the worst of his experiences at Kinchela.\n\n\"Getting raped \u2026 that was an ongoing thing,\" he says.\n\n\"When he was drunk you could smell him coming in. Not only myself, other boys used to get it too.\n\n\"He'd take someone else, and you'd be very thankful. You just don't want to think about it that way \u2014 but you could hear them crying and you knew what was going on.\"\n\nWhen Michael returned home to Coonamble just before he turned 18, he was reunited with his mother and they were able to confront their grief.\n\nWhile his cousins knew his face, they didn't recognise him.\n\n\"Soon as I started talking, you'd see something in their eyes. I'd think 'shit, what's wrong, what did I say?',\" Michael says.\n\n\"I realised later as time went by, I didn't speak like them \u2014 I'd changed, they'd reprogrammed our brains to be assimilated.\"\n\nFrom alcoholism to a healing alliance\n\nA personal war raged inside Michael for the next 45 years, in and out of the jail system, as he battled alcoholism.\n\nTwenty years ago, the national inquiry into the forced removal of Aboriginal children, presided over by former High Court judge Sir Ronald Wilson, handed its findings to the Commonwealth in the Bringing Them Home report, including 54 recommendations.\n\nAt the time, Richard was oblivious.\n\n\"I was still trying to kill myself with alcohol,\" he says.\n\n\"What came out of it? I don't know what came out of it because they're still taking the kids away.\"\n\nThe trauma the boys endured at Kinchela has had one positive effect \u2014 deepening the fellowship between them. They have established an incorporated Aboriginal organisation, the Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation.\n\n\"Now, I realise the importance of our stories,\" Michael says.\n\n\"We couldn't tell the story because we didn't think anybody would believe us. We thought everybody knew what was happening to us.\"\n\nA silent witness to suffering\n\nWhen the boys go back to Kinchela for commemorations, such as the 90th anniversary three years ago, both Richard and Michael zero in on that big old Moreton Bay fig tree in the grounds of the former home, which is now a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre.\n\nAs they talk, the story unfolds about why the tree is so significant to them.\n\nLike animals, the boys were chained to the trunk of the tree overnight, as punishment for wetting the bed and failing to pass inspection, for dirty fingernails.\n\nWorse still was done to them under the monstrous \u2014 or enfolding \u2014 limbs of the tree.\n\n\"That's where they used to chain the boys up in the night and do whatever they liked to them,\" Richard says.\n\nBut as they gather at the base of the tree on special occasions, redemption seems possible.\n\n\"Every time we go back, the tree has grown over the chain,\" Richard says.\n\nHe says almost like a sentient being, the magnificent old tree had borne silent witness to their suffering.\n\nMost of the iron links of the chain have rusted away, or been absorbed by the tree, and only the loop and a few links remain.\n\n\"It felt our pain, and it's grown over our pain \u2014 it's grown over the evil of that chain,\" Richard says.\n\nMichael says he hoped he lived to see the last link of the chain disappear, swallowed up by the tree.\n\n\"That tree is our power.\"\n\nTopics: indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, indigenous-policy, community-and-society, children, child-abuse, kempsey-2440, nsw\n\nFirst posted"}
{"text":"One of the worst terrorist attacks in recent history is currently taking place across Paris. According to media reports, at least seven separate sites are under siege in a coordinated operation that has claimed over 100 lives. One of the most notable venues attacked in this operation is the Bataclan concert hall, where during a concert terrorists reportedly used Kalashnikov rifles to gun down concert-goers while shouting \u201cAllahu Akbar\u201d (source: Breitbart).\n\nInformation continues to be sparse about the attacks, though France\u2019s President Hollande has already closed the borders and mobilized the military after declaring a state of emergency. As of Friday at 7pm ET, the death doll has reached above 140 in the Bataclan concert hall alone, with eyewitnesses describing the scene as one of utter destruction (source):\n\n\u201cIt was carnage,\u201d Marc Coupris, 57, told the Guardian, still shaking after being freed from being held hostage at the Bataclan, a popular concert venue. \u201cIt looked like a battlefield, there was blood everywhere, there were bodies everywhere. I was at the far side of the hall when shooting began. There seemed to be at least two gunmen. They shot from the balcony.\u201d \u201cEveryone scrabbled to the ground. I was on the ground with a man on top of me and another one beside me up against a wall. We just stayed still like that. At first we kept quiet. I don\u2019t know how long we stayed like that, it seemed like an eternity. \u201cI saw my final hour unfurl before me, I thought this was the end. I thought I\u2019m finished, I\u2019m finished. I was terrified. We must all have thought the same. Eventually, when a few gendarmes came in slowly we began to look up and there was blood absolutely everywhere. The police told us to run.\u201d\n\nLeftist media mouthpieces will be quick to caution sites like this one against drawing \u201chasty conclusions\u201d from a heinously tragic event, but our media masters can only pretend for so long that the emperor of multiculturalism is still wearing any clothes.\n\nImmigration has been a hot-button issue recently both domestically and abroad. Even larger than taking central stage in the US presidential election, the recent influx of Syrian immigrants across the European Union and the resulting cultural and economic upheaval has drawn massive criticism from grassroots media and native residents of the countries affected, but shockingly little mainstream media criticism. Why?\n\nOur own Michael Sebastian reported on this issue recently, with a shocking revelation from Mark Zuckerberg and German Chancellor Angela Merkel colluding to wipe negative comments about German immigration policy from Facebook:\n\nMerkel was complaining to Zuckerberg about posts by Facebook users who were critical to the hordes of Muslim migrants who are flooding Germany and other European countries. Zuckerberg responded that: \u201c[W]e need to do some work\u201d on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. \u201cAre you working on this?\u201d Merkel asked in English, to which Zuckerberg replied in the affirmative before the transmission was disrupted. What pretense will Facebook use to ban Germans from legitimately discussing the policy concerns of their country, which purports to be a democracy? Racism, of course: Loading... We are committed to working closely with the German government on this important issue,\u201d Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, said via e-mail. \u201cWe think the best solutions to dealing with people who make racist and xenophobic comments can be found when service providers, government and civil society all work together to address this common challenge. But can a true democracy exist when the public, who are supposed to be ultimate authority for the government, are not permitted to frankly debate policies?\n\nWhat they\u2019re not saying\n\nRoosh\u2019s recent video about how the multicultural narrative is collapsing before our very eyes appears even more prescient in light of the last couple weeks, with refugee-accepting Sweden now counting itself as the rape capital of the West and dealing with the harassment of its citizens by Muslim immigrants. Tonight\u2019s tragic events mark the next grim reminder that forced importation of a religious fundamentalist underclass is at odds with the self-preservation of any Western nation.\n\nBut why is it so controversial to say so? The media establishment clearly has a vested interest in keeping the average person ignorant of the dangers of mass cultural manipulation. Milo Yiannopoulos was one of the first to point out the media\u2019s soft-pedaling of the Muslim terrorism angle in its coverage of the Paris terrorist attacks:\n\nhttps:\/\/twitter.com\/Nero\/status\/665313187735162881\n\nhttps:\/\/twitter.com\/Nero\/status\/665328369022578688\n\nhttps:\/\/twitter.com\/Nero\/status\/665328237048758273\n\nIt\u2019s clear that the masters of our media, who themselves promote the destruction of distinct Western national identities through massive immigration initiatives, have instructed their megaphones to remain silent on this issue. A quick control-F of the top story on the New York Times, CNN, and ABC is shockingly absent of the words \u201cIslam\u201d or \u201cMuslim,\u201d despite strong circumstantial evidence and eyewitness accounts that almost inextricably link these actions to Muslim terrorism.\n\nThe only occurrence of the word came from the New York Times in this passing remark:\n\nThere was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Twitter erupted with celebratory messages by members and sympathizers of the Islamic State, the extremist group based in Syria and Iraq that is under assault by major powers including the United States, France and Russia.\n\nROK\u2019s coverage on this issue will continue for the foreseeable future, but in the meantime you must question every source you see reporting on this issue. Why is the story being reported in a certain way, one that encourages \u201ctolerance\u201d and not \u201cjumping to conclusions,\u201d when similarly deplorable domestic incidents are immediately ascribed to racism and gun control issues? Why are they lying to us, when the facts show a cultural disaster in the making that has already cost hundreds of innocent lives just in the last few hours?\n\nThe most chilling thing is that this may only be the beginning.\n\nRead More: Only White Countries Are Expected To Let In Hordes Of Illegal Migrants"}
{"text":"A Taxpayer-Funded Brooklyn Principal Is Under Investigation For Promoting Revolutionary Communism\n\nEric Owens\n\nEducation Editor\n\nThe New York City Department of Education is investigating a taxpayer-funded secondary school principal in Brooklyn for allegedly promoting communism and recruiting students for radical political causes.\n\nThe principal, Jill Bloomberg of Park Slope Collegiate, has responded by filing a federal lawsuit seeking to stop the investigation, reports New York public radio station WNYC.\n\nThe New York City education department initiated its investigation into Bloomberg\u2019s alleged communist and communist-recruitment activities based on a tip from someone who remains anonymous.\n\nThe tipster told officials that Bloomberg is affiliated with the Progressive Labor Party, a revolutionary communist political party based in Brooklyn.\n\nCourt documents filed by the education department say that the investigation is focused on allegations that Bloomberg has worked to promote the agenda of the Progressive Labor Party by recruiting students \u201cto participate in organizational activities, including marches for her political organization.\u201d\n\nAccording to the Progressive Labor Party\u2019s website, the group seeks to foment violent revolution. \u201cOnly the dictatorship of the working class \u2014 communism \u2014 can provide a lasting solution to the disaster that is today\u2019s world for billions of people. This cannot be done through electoral politics, but requires a revolutionary movement and a mass Red Army led by PLP.\u201d\n\nAlso: \u201cCommunism means the Party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers \u2014 eventually everyone \u2014 must become communist organizers. Join Us!\u201d (RELATED: These Mugshots Of Commie Trump Protesters Will Make Your Day)\n\nThe Progressive Labor Party \u201cfights to destroy capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class\u201d by organizing \u201cworkers, soldiers and youth into a revolutionary movement for communism.\u201d\n\nCourt documents filed by New York City\u2019s education department allege that students who disagree with Bloomberg and her comrades \u201care not allowed to express\u201d their political views.\n\nIn addition, the school district says, Bloomberg and her husband used footage of Park Slope Collegiate students and staff in documentary for a Progressive Labor Party-affiliated group \u201cwithout authorization\u201d from the students or staff members.\n\nThe policies of New York City\u2019s school district \u201cprohibit the use of school facilities, equipment and supplies on behalf of political organizations,\u201d according to the education department\u2019s court filing.\n\nBloomberg\u2019s lawsuit concerning the investigation \u2014 filed Friday \u2014 contends that the investigation into her alleged communist activities is retaliation because she opposes racism and has criticized the New York City Board of Education for, she says, practices that amount to segregation.\n\nEarlier this year, Bloomberg charged the education department with discrimination because, she said, a school with many white students received more sports equipment than Park Slope Collegiate did. The students at Park Slope Collegiate are primarily black and Latino.\n\nSupporters of Bloomberg packed a Lower Manhattan courtroom for a hearing related to Bloomberg\u2019s lawsuit. Many of them all wore the same t-shirts.\n\nAfter the hearing, Bloomberg and her supporters spoke.\n\n\u201cWhat speech is prohibited?\u201d Bloomberg asked, according to Chalkbeat, an education news outlet.\n\n\u201cThe speech I am most known for is anti-racism,\u201d the principal also said.\n\nBloomberg\u2019s supporters recited her message in remarkably similar fashion.\n\nA Park Slope Collegiate eighth grader named Maya showed up at the court proceedings to declare that Bloomberg only wants to fight against racism.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s just upsetting that she\u2019s being accused of stating her own political views when she\u2019s just stating the facts that racism is here,\u201d Maya informed Chalkbeat.\n\nA special education teacher, Sarah Vega, swore that Bloomberg never tries to indoctrinate students with revolutionary communist propaganda.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve worked for her for over a decade,\u201d Vega told Chalkbeat. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen her furthering any political agenda whatsoever. She fights against racism, but I don\u2019t really consider that partisan politics.\u201d\n\nBloomberg has indicated that she does not belong to the Progressive Labor Party.\n\nThis week, a federal judge is expected to decide whether to allow the investigation by school officials to proceed.\n\nRead more: http:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2017\/05\/03\/a-taxpayer-funded-brooklyn-principal-is-under-investigation-for-promoting-revolutionary-communism\/\n\nContent created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.\n\nShare this: Facebook\n\nTwitter\n\nLinkedIn\n\nReddit\n\nPinterest\n\nTumblr\n\nWhatsApp\n\nTelegram\n\nPocket\n\nLike this: Like Loading...\n\nRelated\n\nComments\n\ncomments"}
{"text":"diff options context: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 space: include ignore mode: unified ssdiff stat only\n\nauthor 2014-08-13 09:57:07 +1000 committer 2014-09-17 09:22:16 -0700 commit ba1f6592cb07d4d7025112e1ffcf279d904c7146 (patch) tree dc3845f5f3806921e3f0fe573b8aa17ff1789b2a parent 706d916414bf623b20c4626cc6096bb0839263dc (diff) download linux-ba1f6592cb07d4d7025112e1ffcf279d904c7146.tar.gz\n\nmd\/raid6: avoid data corruption during recovery of double-degraded RAID6\n\ncommit 9c4bdf697c39805078392d5ddbbba5ae5680e0dd upstream. During recovery of a double-degraded RAID6 it is possible for some blocks not to be recovered properly, leading to corruption. If a write happens to one block in a stripe that would be written to a missing device, and at the same time that stripe is recovering data to the other missing device, then that recovered data may not be written. This patch skips, in the double-degraded case, an optimisation that is only safe for single-degraded arrays. Bug was introduced in 2.6.32 and fix is suitable for any kernel since then. In an older kernel with separate handle_stripe5() and handle_stripe6() functions the patch must change handle_stripe6(). Fixes: 6c0069c0ae9659e3a91b68eaed06a5c6c37f45c8 Cc: Yuri Tikhonov <yur@emcraft.com> Cc: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> Reported-by: \"Manibalan P\" <pmanibalan@amiindia.co.in> Tested-by: \"Manibalan P\" <pmanibalan@amiindia.co.in> Resolves: https:\/\/bugzilla.redhat.com\/show_bug.cgi?id=1090423 Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de> Acked-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>\n\n1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions"}
{"text":"Some farms use subsurface tile drainage systems, which can discharge into streams and ditches. (Photo: Bruce Chambers\/The Drone Store LLC)\n\nCATAWBA ISLAND - Since the resurgence of Lake Erie\u2019s biggest monster over the last decade, harmful algal blooms, scientists have been working vigorously to pinpoint the root of the problem and what is causing it.\n\nOver time, a lot of progress has been made on that front.\n\nHaving dealt with it in the 1970s, scientists were able to determine back then that excess phosphorus runoff making its way to the lake was feeding the algae and leading to the harmful blooms.\n\nAs a result, significant conservation efforts were taken to reduce the amount of total phosphorus being drained and discharged along Lake Erie.\n\nIt was not until much more recently, as the algae kept blooming despite those efforts, that a specific culprit was eventually found: dissolved reactive phosphorus.\n\nAn entirely new model for the study of the lake\u2019s harmful algal blooms is based on the finding, according to Jeff Reutter, former director of the Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory on Gibraltar Island.\n\nAnd researchers have made another disturbing discovery: That much of the action taken over the past several years to address the algae problems is not having the desired impact.\n\nThe 2015 bloom was the worst ever recorded for Lake Erie, and perhaps most concerning, the problem is getting worse, not better.\n\nQuestions remain about the where the leading sources of this more specific nutrient, dissolved reactive phosphorus, are coming from. Research has shown heavy rains exacerbate the problem by causing sudden significant influxes of nutrients into the lake.\n\nMuch of the discussion has been about chemical fertilizers used by farmers in Lake Erie's Western Basin, many of whom have been already taking those conservation efforts to reduce their phosphorus runoff.\n\nAn area not yet widely discussed is the dissolved phosphorus and other nutrients caused by manure runoff.\n\nPam Taylor, an environmental activist from Lenawee County, Michigan, and member of the Sierra Club\u2019s \u201cLess=More\u201d coalition, spoke at a panel on harmful algal blooms hosted by the Lake Erie Improvement Association at the Catawba Island Club last week.\n\nTaylor worked extensively on the Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan (ECCSCM) study titled, \u201cFollow the Manure,\u201d which examined the impact manure discharged by factory farms had on the Lake Erie algal crisis.\n\n\u201cWe have less than 1 percent of the animals, but we send you about 18 percent of manure in the watershed,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cThat\u2019s because we have mostly dairy cows.\u201d\n\nShe noted one dairy cow excretes the equivalent waste of between 20 to 23 humans every day. \u201cSo we\u2019re sending you the equivalent waste of the City of Boston every day.\u201d\n\nThe study monitored 46 different sites where 13 factory farms produce and apply manure in 20 different townships in Michigan.\n\nWhen factory farms meet the threshold of total animals at a facility, they are classified as a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), the \u201clargest of the large\u201d farms, and have to be granted a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit for manure by the Environmental Protection Agency.\n\nAt the sites, edge-of-field water samples are taken and tested for E. coli, biological oxygen demand (BOD), dissolved oxygen, nitrates, phosphorus, ammonia and temperature.\n\nThrough October 2015, results of those tests from fields where manure was applied in Lenawee and eastern Hillsdale County areas of the Western Lake Erie Watershed showed 100 percent had phosphorus levels above 0.1 milligram per liter, a concern for aquatic life, and 89 percent met or exceeded 1.0 milligram per liter, Michigan\u2019s water quality point discharge standard for total phosphorus.\n\n\u201cThose levels are increasing, not decreasing,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cActually, every level increased this year. It was higher in everything.\u201d\n\nThomas Van Wagner, a retired USDA employee now under contract with the conservation district in Lenawee County, said the \u201cFollow the Manure\u201d report is faulty.\n\nHe believes they are leveraging Lake Erie\u2019s algae issues to point the finger at livestock, using a kernel of truth and twisting it around. He also said most of the very large operations referred to are already very highly regulated.\n\nA total of 146 farms are in the Western Lake Erie Watershed \u2014 57 in Ohio, 75 in Indiana and 14 in Michigan. In 2014, they held 11.6 million animals and produced 690.8 million gallons of manure.\n\nECCSM data includes permit violations since the year 2000, where the EPA or a state agency cited a farm for violating the Clean Water Act.\n\nVan Wagner said many of those violations have not had anything to do with water quality.\n\n\u201cThis could be something simple like a paperwork problem, didn\u2019t submit the right paperwork on time,\u201d Taylor acknowledged. \u201cBut it can also include something serious like a discharge where they were pumping manure basically right into the waterway, and we\u2019ve seen that.\u201d\n\nOf the 230 permit violations from CAFOs in the watershed, 112 were discharges of pollutants directly into the waters of the respective state.\n\n\u201cThose are the ones we want to minimize,\u201d Van Wagner said. \u201cWe can\u2019t always eliminate all discharges, but we can try to minimize the risk as best we can. Sometimes we have some rain storms that will cause some issues that are above and beyond people\u2019s control.\u201d\n\nWyandot, Hardin and Defiance counties in Ohio have the highest concentrations of animals housed.\n\nDespite the animal concentration numbers, Paulding County on the western border in Ohio and Lenawee County on the southern border of Michigan produce the most manure.\n\nFarms in Lenawee also have had by far the most permit violations and illegal discharges since 2008.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s important to note, the algae don\u2019t care where the phosphorus comes from,\u201d Reutter said. He said he does not draw a distinction between commercial chemical fertilizers and manure.\n\nIt isn't just the application of manure, but also whether the drainage systems are sufficient, Reutter said.\n\n\u201cManure isn\u2019t inherently bad, and sewage sludge isn\u2019t inherently bad, but if you put on too much, that\u2019s a big, big problem.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat happens,\" Taylor said, \"is they apply the manure and it doesn\u2019t even bother to run off, it just goes straight down and then out through the tiles.\u201d\n\nThat means it also bypasses any erosion-control measures, which research has shown to be the case.\n\n\u201cTheses conservation practices were developed to reduce erosion and to control nitrates, which have a much larger particle size than dissolved phosphorus,\u201d she said.\n\nTaylor pointed to 15 years of subsidized erosion-control measures, such as no till, conservation tillage, buffers, grass strips, constructed and two-stage ditches, tile plugs and cover crops, especially in the winter.\n\n\u201cIn spite of all these things, we\u2019ve seen our phosphorus levels continue to go up.\u201d\n\nApplication at the wrong time is a problem they\u2019ve observed as well. Manure and waste applied to snow or frozen ground simply runs off.\n\n\u201cIt just makes sense, right. It can\u2019t go anywhere,\u201d Taylor said.\n\nOne persistent message during the Lake Erie Improvement Association\u2019s hosted panel last week was whether to declare the Western Lake Erie Basin officially \u201cimpaired.\u201d It\u2019s a distinction outlined in the Clean Water Act that would immediately trigger an assessment by the EPA, which would formulate and implement a recovery plan.\n\nThe plan would include much more rigorous restrictions for the amount of pollutants that can be drained into the lake, called total maximum daily load (TMDL), enforcing a standard for the basin that would cross state lines.\n\nThis is the first recommendation the \u201cFollow the Manure\u201d report offers toward addressing the algae problem.\n\nState Rep. Steve Arndt (R, Port Clinton), who joined the panel, was asked if Ohio legislators will seek stricter sewage and septic requirements for factory farms, and while he said he believes it will be part of the discussions going forward, it is too premature to say for sure.\n\nAnother point discussed at length by the panel was an agreement by Ohio, Michigan, and Ontario, Canada, to reduce phosphorus runoff by 40 percent.\n\nTaylor said they found out a few weeks ago there is no baseline data available for Michigan\u2019s portion of the Maumee sub-watershed, questioning how a 40 percent reduction can be measured without that baseline.\n\nAnother recommendation, and one of the primary objectives of the \u201cLess=More\u201d coalition, is cutting subsidies to factory farms with violations and give the money to smaller farms that are genuine in their efforts to help solve this problem.\n\nThis effort, handing out less to the violators means more clean water, inspired its name.\n\n\u201cMaybe it\u2019s time to look at where that money is going and maybe shift it to people who are doing the right things, instead of feeding the bad actors,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cHelping the people who are sincerely interested in doing things right.\n\n\u201cEspecially the smaller farmers. They\u2019re the ones getting crunched. The small livestock farmers are getting just crushed by this. And we\u2019d like to see the money go to them so that they can buy the equipment, they can set up storage facilities they need.\u201d\n\nThe best solution, according to \u201cFollow the Manure,\u201d is stopping the problem at the source.\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t ever let it get into the water to begin with,\u201d Taylor said.\n\njstinchcom@gannett.com\n\n419-680-4897\n\nTwitter: @JonDBN\n\nRead or Share this story: http:\/\/ohne.ws\/1Yr0SsQ"}
{"text":"Source: iStock\n\nScientists have been mimicking nature for years, but few discoveries are this successful, or important. In an effort to develop clean, renewable energy sources, a team from the Australian National University has successfully duplicated one of the more crucial steps in photosynthesis, the process in which plants actively turn sunlight into energy.\n\nWhy\u2019s it a big deal? Because it could ultimately open the door to harnessing the process for energy cultivation.\n\nIf scientists are able to successfully take the photosynthesis process \u2014 which turns sunlight into chemical energy \u2014 and apply it to industrial biological systems, sunlight could be used to manufacture hydrogen, which could then be used as fuel. Hydrogen is already used as a fuel in many instances, and if applied on a large scale, it could serve as a replacement for petroleum \u2014 all the while contributing no new carbon to the atmosphere. Not only are the two main components required for photosynthesis available in wide abundance, but they are also cheap.\n\n\u201cWater is abundant and so is sunlight. It is an exciting prospect to use them to create hydrogen, and do it cheaply and safely,\u201d Dr. Kastoori Hingorani, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis in the ANU Research School of Biology told Science Daily. Not only are the ingredients abundant, but the process itself is sustainable for the long-term. Since there is no shortage of water or sunlight, if the photosynthesis process is completely harnessed, it could provide energy indefinitely.\n\n\u201cThat carbon-free cycle is essentially indefinitely sustainable. Sunlight is extraordinarily abundant, water is everywhere \u2014 the raw materials we need to make the fuel. And at the end of the usage cycle, it goes back to water,\u201d said co-researcher professor Ron Pace. \u201cIt\u2019s the beginning of a whole suite of possibilities, such as creating a highly efficient fuel, or to trapping atmospheric carbon.\u201d\n\nThe photosynthesis process \u2014 though often taught to schoolchildren, and simple enough on paper \u2014 is actually fairly complicated in practice, and often misunderstood. At the most basic level, the process simply converts light from the sun into usable energy in the form of chemicals. This is the basic way that plants produce energy, and release oxygen as a byproduct of the reactions happening within their structures. There are different types of photosynthesis that have been observed in varying types of life, including algae and even bacteria.\n\nEssentially, duplicating the act of splitting water into its more base elements is what scientists are trying to mimic. Australian researchers did it by creating a protein that creates an \u2018electrical heartbeat\u2019 when exposed to light. Development of the protein does not require expensive components or even batteries, meaning the technology could be used in developing areas and impoverished countries to produce fuel.\n\nHydrogen has been one of the few energy sources touted as the next big thing and is used in a variety of different ways. It is commonly used in rockets and spaceflight, and is starting to gain popularity in consumer vehicles that use hydrogen fuel cells instead of petroleum or all-battery power. For example, Toyota just announced its new fuel-cell vehicle, the Mirai, which will use hydrogen as its primary fuel source.\n\nAs consumers have become more and more aware of the effects that petroleum products can have on the environment, clean-burning alternative sources have grown in popularity. With the impending effects of climate change also concerning many people, switching to zero-carbon alternatives is quickly becoming a priority.\n\nFor years, scientists have been putting in an effort to successfully replicate photosynthesis, and this latest breakthrough signifies the overcoming of a major hurdle. If researchers are able to make the process as easy and cheap as they hope, it could mean seismic shifts in the energy business. After all, the major problem that has led to the mass adoption of hydrogen-powered technologies has been the fact that producing hydrogen is not only difficult, but expensive.\n\nThere have been efforts by private companies recently that have shown promise, such as the case of HyperSolar, which had come close to developing technology to successfully split water into its base elements. Although they didn\u2019t quite get there, the research from Australia is simply the next step in developing the technology. As ExtremeTech explains, the major interest in hydrogen stems from its versatility; unlike solar power, it presents an energy source that can be successfully stored and transported, all while providing no negative impact environmentally while it is produced.\n\nCurrently, the only methods of producing usable quantities of hydrogen have some serious setbacks. It can be produced from fossil fuels inexpensively, although the process of doing so has environmental drawbacks. The other method involves the electrolysis of water, which splits water molecules into its base elements. The problem with this process is that it requires a lot of energy \u2014 so much so that there is actually a net loss at the end.\n\nIt\u2019s easy to see why the prospect of a photosynthesis-inspired hydrogen production process is so exciting. The system would be cheap, easy, and ultimately very lucrative. Not only that, but the environmental advantages would be immense, especially considering the challenges that await in the coming years due to climate change. Even in areas affected by wars and natural disasters, energy production systems that run off of simple resources like water and sunlight could be deployed, and successfully run by almost anyone.\n\nWhile there is still some work to be done, there are plenty of reasons to get excited by this latest breakthrough in biomimicry. If the technology can be successfully developed and methods for distributing it are in place, hydrogen may finally be able to solve the world\u2019s energy issues in a cheap and easy way.\n\nMore From Business Cheat Sheet:"}
{"text":"When Dani Weingarten first joined UB\u2019s Alpha Phi sorority, the one thing she felt UB was missing was a Greek row \u2013 an area devoted to fraternity and sorority housing. She had visited her friends at other universities who lived in sorority houses located in a Greek row near the campus.\n\nWeingarten may get her wish next fall.\n\nStandard Ascension Tower Group Corp (SAT Corp), an investment corporation, is planning to create a \u201cGreek village\u201d near North Campus for UB\u2019s fraternities and sororities. The $60 million project will involve four phases and the first phase \u2013 which includes erecting 30 houses, a community house and entertainment complex \u2013 is set to be completed next fall.\n\nDepending on how many organizations move to the Greek row, the housing system will accommodate about 300 people.\n\nTaqua Daniels, chief marketing officer of SAT Corp, said the project is not affiliated with UB in any way and Pamela Stephens-Jackson, assistant director of fraternity and sorority life at UB, said neither she nor the university is involved and that this is a private project.\n\nAt the time of publication, the university did not have a comment regarding the project.\n\nDaniels said while SAT Corp would manage the houses, the company is willing to work with UB.\n\n\u201cThe university will have the ability to work with our group to help maintain university caveats,\u201d Daniels said in an email.\n\nMany universities have a Greek row \u2013 a collection of houses for different Greek organizations located in the same area on and near the campus. The Greek organizations and its alumni, or the university itself, usually owns the homes.\n\nMany UB Greek organizations \u2013 both legal and illegal \u2013 have homes located throughout the University Heights off South Campus. Student parties in the area, some of which are held by Greek organizations, have led to conflict between students and residents in the area. Daniels said SAT Corp hopes the project will remove Greek life from the Heights.\n\nWeingarten, a sophomore speech and hearing major, said while a project like this will benefit UB sororities and fraternities, those who live near the potential village may not appreciate their new neighbors. Weingarten said it would be a \u201cshock\u201d and could change the dynamic in the neighborhood where the Greek village is built.\n\nSome illegal fraternities are discussing becoming recognized with the university in order to partake in the Greek village.\n\nLarry Jordan, the chief executive officer of SAT Corp, said the company chose UB because it is familiar with the location and the environment of the campus and because most \u201cbig schools\u201d have a Greek row.\n\nJordan, the company itself and \u201cstate mutual funds\u201d will fund the project, according to Daniels. In order to be developed, the company first plans to send the project to be bid on by local development contractors and architects.\n\nAlthough there are two, 2.5-acre sites in Amherst where SAT Corp could develop the village, Jordan said the company wants to build it on the location closest to the North Campus. Daniels said it would be within walking distance of the campus.\n\nDaniels said the project is a set plan, but SAT Corp is currently seeing which organizations \u201cqualify\u201d to move into the location.\n\n\u201cQualified organizations will historically have a good standing with the UB campus, local community, academically and [national charter],\u201d Daniels said.\n\nThe Spectrum obtained SAT Corp\u2019s letter of intent to lease the homes. SAT Corp sent the nonbinding contract to UB Greek organizations in order to determine how many organizations would be interested in the project.\n\nJordan also presented the project to students in a classroom on campus last month. The Spectrum obtained photographs of the presentation, which included renderings of the potential village as well as prices.\n\nJoshua Grove, Greek liaison for UB\u2019s Inter-Greek Council, said the plan has only been in discussion for about a month and the \u201clocation, approval and zoning\u201d have yet to be put into effect.\n\nWeingarten said she thinks bringing a Greek row to UB\u2019s campus will be a good way to increase Greek membership, however more awareness about Greek life should happen before the village is built.\n\n\u201cI think right now Greek life needs to work on expanding and needs to be recognized more on campus before building houses for each organization,\u201d Weingarten said. \u201cI think if it was to happen a few years from now it would be great to have a part of where our students live dedicated to Greek life.\u201d\n\nOnce the first phase of the project is completed, roughly five organizations would be able to move into the village according, to Jordan.\n\nSAT Corp would then move on to the remaining three phases, which include town houses for smaller organizations, a solar panel park for sustainability and a chapter monument museum.\n\nDaniels said each organization has the option to design its own house and can choose between a modern or contemporary style. The Greek village will be in a gated community and each house will start at 25,000 square feet.\n\nThe houses \u2013 which will \u201cbe able to sleep up to 30 members\u201d \u2013 will have three floors that hold a library, grand dining hall and ballroom. The sorority houses will additionally have powder rooms and a large community closet.\n\nThe houses will have a rate comparable to rent for on-campus apartments and SAT Corp plans to accept student financial aid. Daniels said historically, larger and \u201cmore established\u201d organizations will have a purchase option from their national charter. Chapters who maintain a 3.5 GPA will be offered a rental and lease discounts.\n\nUltimately, Daniels said SAT Corp wants the Greek village to bring something new to UB by having a distinct area for the Greek life on campus.\n\n\u201cWe believe that this location will be pinnacle to the growth and respect of [the] university and a grand capstone to the New York academia community,\u201d Daniels said. \u201cIn general, Greek village adds another dimension to the university, enhancing its image as a major Division-I institution.\u201d\n\nMarlee Tuskes is a news desk editor and can be reached at marlee.tuskes@ubspectrum.com. Follow her on Twitter at @marleetuskes5."}
{"text":"The NBA schedule has just been released, and for Bulls fans across the world this day marks the first view of the upcoming season\u2019s schedule, one which will prominently feature a return of some guy who won the MVP one time and who most of the staff here at DRaT has a pretty homoerotic crush on.\n\nIn quickly glancing over the schedule, a couple of things stick out as noteworthy:\n\nThe Bulls open the season October 29 in Miami against the defending champs. Nothing like having to watch your most hated enemy hang up a banner to kick off the season. Imagine if Mitt Romney had to go to the presidential inauguration while being force fed coffee and other hot drinks. Fucking nightmare.\n\nThe Bulls home opener is on Halloween, against the spooky scary New York Knickerbockers. This game, like the one against Miami, will be played in front of a national audience on TNT. Look for Thibodeau to come dressed as an angry troll who lives under a bridge.\n\nThe annual circus trip will span from November 21-30. The Bulls will get a crack at Denver, Portland, the Clippers, Utah, Detroit and will wrap up against the Cavs. My early estimate is that the Bulls will go 5-1, but I\u2019m pretty irrationally excited and could be talked into a 75 win season.\n\nThe Bulls have one other long stretch of games away from the UC from January 29-February 6. that trip will be a bit tougher, with games against the Spurs, Pels, Kings, Suns, Warriors and Lakers. I\u2019m a little higher on New Orleans than some, but man I\u2019m excited to watch Rose tear it up. I\u2019m not making any sense. Basketball.\n\nWith the postseason just around the corner, the Bulls have a brutal stretch that runs through the middle of March. Although all games will be in Chicago, Miami-Memphis-SA-Houston is going to be a challenging stretch. Hopefully the team is healthy. No better way to announce that you are a true title contender than by ripping through that brutal stretch of games.\n\nThe Bulls have a rough schedule. The Central division is the strongest its been in years. The Bulls could be considered co-favorites with the Conference Finalist Pacers. The Cavs look like they will be formidable foes, with another year of Kyrie development plus whatever they squeeze out of Bynum and his degenerating knees. The Pistons made several big splashes this offseason and will look to break into the top eight in the East. And Milwaukee has warm bodies that can run up and down a court.\n\nLadies and gentleman, let the countdown to the 2013-14 season officially begin!!!\n\nAdvertisements"}
{"text":"Over the weekend, I went to visit my mom and aunt to celebrate their birthdays. They were born one day and two years apart! We hung out at the National Harbor yesterday and I was surprised at how many shops are there now compared to how many there were when it first opened. My aunt loves to shop, so we ended up exploring many of the clothing and accessory stores at the harbor. Although I saw lots of lovely things that would look good on me, I walked away from that place empty-handed, as usual. I have little desire to buy \u201cstuff\u201d anymore, unless it\u2019s something I actually need. I\u2019ve been living this way for about two years now.\n\nWhen I started working for myself full-time in 2010, I also began to adopt a minimalist mindset to my life. My main goal was to buy less, use what I had and save my money for experiences instead of stuff. As a result, I\u2019ve spent very little on \u201cthings\u201d over the past two years. Most of my income goes to housing, student loans, car payment, food and other monthly bills. The rest goes to activities that I gift to myself or other people: traveling, trying new restaurants, attending concerts and going to festivals.\n\nThe point of living with less, for me, is not about NOT buying things. It\u2019s about prioritizing the purchase of things that truly matter to you and add to your life. For me, that shift began with ending my habit of buying things I didn\u2019t need. Here are seven strategies I\u2019ve used in that journey that you may wish to consider for your own growth.\n\nStop watching TV. Constantly seeing celebrities on TV with their beautiful hair, designer clothes and fancy homes does a lot of damage to the psyche. Not only does it conjure up feelings of inadequacy in our own looks, but it can prompt us to buy the exact same stuff they have to make ourselves feel like we\u2019re living just a fraction of their fabulous lives. Please remember that everything on TV is FAKE. It is an escape from your day to day life, but when you start escaping with your credit card, you can end up with a bunch of expensive items that leave you feeling no better than you did before.\n\nStop watching commercials. Television advertising is insidious. In college, I learned about how car marketers are taught to \u201cmanufacture desire\u201d for new vehicles that no one needs. Used cars will do you just fine, but to have commercials tell it, you have to have the latest model BMV to have an exciting, glamorous life. Most commercials are full of lies and manipulation to get you to feel incomplete and lead you to buy things you don\u2019t need. But when you stop watching them, you lessen the power of corporate messaging on the decision-making part of your brain.\n\nDon\u2019t justify shopping because it\u2019s \u201con sale\u201d or you have a \u201ccoupon.\u201d Remember that you\u2019re only saving money if you would have needed to buy the item anyway. In other words, a sale on toilet paper is a score, but a sale on Jimmy Choos is not. My aunt cracks me up with all the DSW and Lane Bryant coupons she gets in the mail every month. She claims she\u2019s \u201csaving\u201d money on all the clothes she buys, forgetting that the best way to save money is not to spend it in the first place. Tell your favorite clothing stores to stop sending you discounts and reserve your couponing culture for buying food or other essential items.\n\nLimit your visits to the mall. I\u2019ve been living in Charlottesville for a month now and I haven\u2019t been to the mall once. I have no need to, unless I\u2019m replacing an item of clothing that\u2019s worn out or doesn\u2019t fit me right anymore. Idle shopping usually results in idle purchases. If you must go to the mall, go in with a purpose \u2013 to find a new pair of black dress pants or to replace your favorite pumps.\n\nStop buying magazines. When I was in college, I used to buy Lucky Mag religiously. I fancied myself a fashionista and I wanted to keep up with the trends. Thing is, each magazine cost $5 by itself, let alone what it would cost to purchase something highlighted in its pages. Women\u2019s magazines are blazoned with full-page ads that promise you instant beauty and weight loss and happiness if you just buy the latest product. And if it\u2019s a reputable publisher like Oprah or Essence, you\u2019re already pre-wired to trust the product recommendations, which can make you even more likely to buy something you see in those magazines. Just remember that you can get many of the same articles online these days, so there really is no need to read magazines anymore.\n\nStop reading fashion, makeup, natural hair and thrifting blogs. I feel so conflicted about this one, as I love the creativity and artistry with which my fellow bloggers put into their sites. But there are many that I just don\u2019t read, not because I have a problem with the bloggers themselves, but because I know that the whole purpose of their site is to recommend that I buy new clothes, buy old clothes, buy more makeup or buy every new natural hair product line that comes out. If you read blogs to get new information, inspiration or to support the writers, great! But when you find yourself feeling like you have to buy every new lip gloss that beauty bloggers review, it may be time to switch up the blogs you give your attention to.\n\nAvoid hanging out with shopaholics. When you see everyone else around you buying the latest fashions or electronics or accessories, it can be easy to fall prey to subtle peer pressure. Plus, shopaholics are usually the first ones to urge you to \u201cbuy that dress girl, it\u2019s so cuuuuute!\u201d with an urgency so fierce that it\u2019s hard not to get caught up in their excitement. So if a shopaholic friend asks you to go to the mall with her, opt to meet her afterwards for lunch or coffee instead. That way, you don\u2019t get tempted to mirror her out-of-control spending habits.\n\nWhat other strategies have you used to keep yourself from buying things that you don\u2019t need?\n\nSharing is caring!"}
{"text":"Northern Electronics have just announced another quality release. This one is super solid. Anthony Linell puts together 8 tracks for his new release titled \u201cEmeral Fluorescents\u201d on the no bullshit label. Going by the 2 tracks shared only a few minutes ago it seems like Linell is exploring a darker heavier side than what he releases under his Abdulla Rashim moniker. To quote the press release accompanying the album, \u201cScattered fractal stabs revolve around quietly furious low-end fit outs with enough sharp edges to let you know it\u2019s someone else\u2019s space.\u201d\n\nThe album (limited to 200 on wax) is available for pre-order on the Northern Electronics Bandcamp page.\n\nCheck out the two tracks here:\n\nAnthony Linell \u2013 Fractal Vision\n\nAnthony Linell \u2013 Emerald Fluorescents\n\nFor more updates, follow us on Instagram."}
{"text":"TOKYO: This year's Vivid festival attracted a record 2.33 million visitors, with national and international visitors to the Sydney light show up by 35 per cent.\n\nLaunching the dates for next year's Vivid to the Japanese tourism industry in Tokyo, Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the world's largest light show would be 10 years old in 2018.\n\nThis year, 5000 Japanese tourists travelled to Sydney to attend Vivid, but Ms Berejiklian said the NSW government wanted to boost Japanese tourism around the event, and would host a large delegation of 50 travel agents at Vivid in 2018.\n\nToru Ikuta, chief executive of major Japanese tour company, JTB World Vacations, said 20 years ago, 800,000 Japanese visited Australia annually. But the number of Japanese tourists plummeted by half in the following decades as tourism promotions stopped, and airlines reduced flights."}
{"text":"ESPN Warriors reporter Ethan Strauss discusses the recent comments from Warriors players regarding those critical of their championship season. (3:09)\n\nOAKLAND, Calif. -- Forward Draymond Green said Tuesday that teams questioning the Golden State Warriors' championship are bitter, pointing out that you don't hear such talk coming from teams such as the San Antonio Spurs.\n\nEditor's Picks Pelton: Were Warriors just 'lucky' to win title? Yes, there was luck involved in the Warriors' championship run. But is that the whole story?\n\nLeague MVP Stephen Curry, meanwhile, issued a mock apology for the Warriors' success.\n\nGreen and Curry made their comments Tuesday when they were asked about people discussing whether the Warriors \"deserve\" their title, possibly in reference to Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers saying to Zach Lowe of Grantland, \"You need luck in the West. Look at Golden State. They didn't have to play us or the Spurs.\"\n\n\"If they saying that, they aren't the champs. It's simple. Gregg Popovich didn't say that. That's one organization I really respect. And you haven't heard anybody in they camp say that. You ain't heard anybody from OKC say that, some of the organizations that I really respect,\" Green said.\n\n\"You see the ring fitting man over there? Jason of Beverly Hills, he over there fitting us for our ring? That's pretty cool. So if they saying that, it's some bitterness and some saltiness going around. They obviously not the champs. So who cares what they say. It is what it is.\"\n\nStephen Curry, left, and Draymond Green, right, have had enough of teams like the Clippers questioning their merits as champions. Ezra Shaw\/Getty Images\n\nCurry \"apologized\" to critics of the Warriors' title on Tuesday.\n\n\"I apologize for us being healthy, I apologize for us playing who was in front of us. I apologize for all the accolades we received as a team and individually. I'm very, truly sorry, and we'll rectify that situation this year,\" he said.\n\n\"Bitter\" is how Green's teammate Klay Thompson described Rivers' comments on Friday, when he also said of Rivers' team, \"I wanted to play the Clippers last year, but they couldn't handle their business.\"\n\nLast week, center Andrew Bogut also responded to the critics in an interview with KNBR radio.\n\n\"I've actually got my [championship] ring fitted for my middle finger, so they can kiss that one,\" Bogut said.\n\n\"It's just bad, man,\" Green said Tuesday, describing how he'd feel about questioning someone else's title. \"I would feel bad about myself doing that. That's just crazy to me, but that just lets you know how many people didn't want to see us win. Because they sick.\"\n\nAsked why he believes the Warriors are attracting this particular criticism, Green said, \"People hate change. People don't accept change well.\""}
{"text":"VIDEO: Revenge-seeking crows terrorize an Istanbul neighborhood\n\nISTANBUL\n\nA murder of crows has been attacking passersby for almost a week in an Istanbul neighborhood, creating scenes reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s 1963 masterpiece \u201dThe Birds.\u201dA nestling was killed under the wheels of a car last week, after it fell from its nest on top of a utility pole in Istanbul\u2019s Asian-side neighborhood of \u00dcmraniye. Since then, crows have been attacking people to avenge the death and protect the remaining nestlings.In addition to people who are regularly being hit on their heads, cats are being victimized by the rage of the crows as well. \u201cThey generally attack older people. We\u2019re also afraid, but they haven\u2019t attacked us,\u201d one of the children who have to use the road every day to go to a nearby school told Cihan News Agency."}
{"text":"Dolphin + Whale Project\n\nThe Problem\n\nWhales and dolphins continue to be killed around the world and need our help. Japan, Iceland, and Norway kill more than 1,000 minke, fin, and other great whale species every year, all for meager sales of whale meat. Thousands of dolphins are still killed every year in Japan for meat, and in Indonesia and Peru for shark bait. Whales and dolphins continue to be captured in Russia, Cuba, and Japan for export to captivity facilities. Despite a ban on captures and export, dolphins around the Solomon Islands still face threats of capture, slaughter and export, as is illustrated in the adjacent video, \"Pillaging the Solomons\".\n\nOur Action Campaign\n\nWe have a long history of working within the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to end commercial whaling. In 1982, we helped pass a moratorium on commercial whaling. We publish a daily newsletter, ECO, at IWC meetings, which is the voice for whales and the environmental community. We work with grassroots groups to educate local fishermen about the need to stop the killing of dolphins and sharks. And we support the growing efforts for watching wild dolphins and whales rather than killing them. We support community efforts to replace dolphin killing with dolphin tourism in places like the Solomon Islands, and fight to block the import and export to captivity of wild dolphins, belugas, and orca whales.\n\nCurrent Challenges\n\nCommercial whaling, undertaken under the guise of \u201cscientific\u201d whaling, must be stopped. Japan is planning more illegal whaling in Antarctica, in defiance of the legal ruling against the country in the International Court of Justice at the Hague. Iceland and Norway are also defiant. We work to protect cetacean habitat from oil and gas threats as well as the Trump administration's plans to reduce the size of marine protected areas. We successfully worked to block the import of wild belugas captured in Russia for U.S. captivity facilities, and to blow the whistle on live dolphin exports from the cruel \u201ccove\u201d drive hunts to places such as Dubai and China. We continue to monitor the situation in the Solomon Islands to ensure that the current ban on the capture and export of dolphins is upheld.\n\nIceland Kills 11 Pregnant Whales, Says It's A Good Thing Mark Palmer, October 2018 Iceland is one of the few countries that continues to kill whales for profit. Over this summer\u2019s hunting season, eleven pregnant whales were killed, their fetuses strewn across the flensing decks of the whaling ships. In an astonishing twist of logic, Kristj\u00e1n Loftsson, who runs Iceland\u2019s one and only whaling company, said that killing pregnant females is a good thing, showing that whale populations will continue to grow. Read More >\n\nThe Truth About Whaling Audrey Lee, October 2018 Whaling is the practice of hunting and killing whales by humans for multiple purposes and has been going on for more than a thousand years. Throughout the centuries, whaling became increasingly intense and widespread, especially with the development of the exploding harpoon and better boat engines to chase down the whales. In the 1960s, due to over-hunting, most large whale populations collapsed. Read More >\n\nCAMPAIGN HIGHLIGHTS Stop the Slaughter of Dolphins and Whales! Sign the Petition Demand that the IWC to include small cetaceans in their purview and advocate for increased cetacean protection. Sign Here > Faroe Island's Annual Pilot Whale Slaughter As Horrific As Taiji's Cove Pilot whales are killed each year in ways that are not humane. Watch the video and sign the petition! Read More > Watch Whales In Iceland, But Don't Eat Them! Tourism is among the biggest supporters of the Icelandic whaling. Learn what you can do to avoid supporting this inhumane practice. Read More >\n\nConnect with Us f t"}
{"text":"It\u2019s commonly accepted that the majority of Americans do not properly hydrate themselves throughout the day, despite the avalanche of physical problems this can cause. A new water bottle called the \u2018BluFit\u2019 is using smart technology to combat that issue.\n\nThe Bluefit water bottle works in synchronization with a smartphone will help consumers maintain optimum levels of hydration. Through the smart bottle and app, BluFit will determine how much water you need, how much you have consumed and will alert you when it\u2019s time to hydrate.\n\nAccording to the product manufacture \u201cStudies show that nearly half of Americans don\u2019t drink enough water. Staying hydrated not only helps with your alertness, controlling appetite, improving activity and performance, but it also keeps everyday symptoms like fatigues, headaches and dry skin at bay.\u201d When living a busy life, even simple tasks-like staying hydrated-can slip your mind. BluFit eliminates the guess work and does the job for you.\n\nOleoApps, maker of BluFit, designed a one-of-a kind device to help consumers maintain a healthy lifestyle by monitoring and analyzing their daily intake of fluids. The smart water bottle features a sensor that automatically records the time and amount of water consumed. While there are many determining factors that play into each individual\u2019s unique level of hydration, BluFit\u2019s integrated app will provide users with a program customized to fit their needs.\n\nThe BluFit app collects a variety of data including weight, age, temperature and humidity to determine exactly what your daily intake should be. Through the customizable app, you can view your current level of hydration, set and monitor personal goals and adjust your daily intake based on your activity level and health status.\n\nBluFit has customizable LED lights integrated into the bottle\u2019s sleeve to provide real-time alerts. In addition, the app will send phone notifications to help keep you on track. The smart bottle\u2019s interior setting includes a Bluetooth LE chip, compatible with iOS and Android devices, a built-in water flow sensor and a rechargeable battery that provides up to 6 days of continuous use.\n\nThe BluFit is available in Ocean Blue and Charcoal Black (exclusive Indiegogo colors). It will retail for $59 when it hits the market in March. You can also preorder the BluFit for reduced pledges on Indiegogo now.\n\nmore info: bluefit"}
{"text":"August 10, 2020\n\nIt was 5 AM. The platoon had seen heavy combat the day before after 3 giant nevermores ambushed the command post followed by 6 other assorted Grimm. To rebuild the damaged post, a contingent of 50 sailors from the Naval Construction Unit worked through the night, keeping the platoon from falling asleep.\n\nAlong the front, things had been tough. The constant bombing of the forests had caused out-of-control forest fires, and now, water bombers were being flown in to help control the fires. Up to now, at least 350 Grimm had been killed at the cost of 16 deaths. The death of Oobleck had made national news and had generally reduced the morale of the hunters and the troops.\n\nAt precisely 5:30, Jaune woke up the entire platoon. \"All rise and awake! Report to the briefing room now!\"\n\nRuby tiredly got up and yawned, saying, \"Another mission, sir?\"\n\n\"Precisely. Now let's go.\"\n\nAt 5:40, Jaune sat everyone down in the briefing tent. \"I have gathered my entire platoon here to inform them that we are to patrol the 3-mile-boundary until August 11. Squads Ruby and Cardin will patrol, and Squad Tan will standby and be flown in by helicopter if necessary.\"\n\nThe entire platoon grumbled. Yang said to Ruby, \"Not this.\"\n\n\"Now, now, we have to do it. After all, who else will? Squads Ruby and Cardin ship out at 0615 hours.\"\n\nRen thought to himself, \"Nothing better happen to Nora while I'm gone. She's gonna be handling radio communications for us, so as long as she keeps replying to us, she'll be safe.\"\n\nAs Squad Ruby patrolled the boundary zone, they kept watch for any active forest fires that may have been started by ordinance dropped from aircraft.\n\nWeiss said to Yang as they walked over a creek, \"Do you think we'll really clear out all the Grimm by November or December?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Yang replied. \"This entire operation seems a little rushed. I only hope we don't lose anyone else close to us. Oobleck was hard enough to lose.\"\n\nRen said to the two of them, \"Be careful, or you might jinx us.\"\n\nThen, Ruby held her hand out and said, \"Wait up! Shhh!\" The entire squad then paused as they all heard rustling from a nearby bush.\n\nBlake pulled out Gambol Shroud and Yang aimed her AR-7 at the bush. As Yang cocked her gun, the tension began building as to what was in or behind the bush.\n\nThen, a feral cat walked out of the bush, looking at the squad for a few seconds before scampering off. Blake said, \"Well that was disappointing.\"\n\n\"Uhhh,\" Yang said. \"I don't think that thing will be, though.\" She then pointed at a boarbatusk charging at the group.\n\nRuby activated her semblance and sliced the beast in half by flying past it with Crescent Rose, killing it easily. \"Piece of cake.\" She then spat on the ground beside her.\n\n\"That was still a disappointment,\" Blake replied.\n\n\"Well it was a figure of speech or whatever, alright?\" Yang was a little annoyed at Blake's response.\n\n\"That isn't exactly a figure of speech, first off. Second, your tone of voice is a bit off, too.\" Blake fired back at Yang.\n\n\"My tone of voice was perfectly fine, thank you very much.\"\n\nWeiss rolled her eyes and said to herself, \"Oh boy...\"\n\n\"No, it wasn't, Yang Xiao Long. It was VERY rude.\" It was clear by now that this would lead to an argument.\n\n\"Rude? Rude? Hahaha, Rude, right? That's all you can say?\" Yang's eyes then changed colour.\n\n\"You're only making this shit worse, Yang!\"\n\n\"Now that's rude, Blake. Maybe next time you should watch your definitions. I'm not in the fucking mood for this, considering I watched my old teacher die in front of me!\"\n\n\"God damn it, he was mine too! We all saw him die, Yang! It isn't all about you, asshole! We all were hurt by Oobleck's death!\"\n\nYang then flared in anger. \"That does it!\"\n\nRuby, extremely annoyed and angered by her best friend and sister arguing, then interrupted the argument by firing a round from Crescent Rose into the air before she screamed, \"JUST MOTHERFUCKING STOP YOUR POINTLESS FUCKING ARGUING! YOU CUNTS HAVE DONE NOTHING BUT GIVE EACH OTHER DIRTY LOOKS, BARELY INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER, AND HAVE THESE STUPID FUCKING FIGHTS SINCE YOU BROKE UP! YOU TWO ARE SUPPOSED TO PUT THAT ASIDE AS TEAMMATES AND HUNTERS, OR ELSE YOUR CONFLICT WILL GETS US ALL FUCKING KILLED!\" Ruby then took a deep breath. \"Do you assholes even like each other as friends anymore?! Do you two wants all of us to go back in boxes like Oobleck?! Do you want Dad to have to cry for us like she did for Mom, Yang?! Do you want to die without redeeming your name from the White Fang, Blake?!\"\n\nBlake and Yang looked at Ruby, astonished at her outburst. Weiss and Ren's jaws dropped to the ground.\n\n\"If not, THEN STOP IT! Either you two stop arguing, or I will have you BOTH court-martialed for obstructing us from carrying out our mission objectives!\" Ruby then broke down in tears, sobbing uncontrollably. \"I just want my big sister and my best friend to all get along like we used to... Is that too much to ask? What happened to us? What the fuck happened to us?\"\n\nWeiss walked up to Ruby and said, \"It's okay, it's okay.\"\n\nYang began to form tears in her eyes and said, \"Sis...\" She then walked up to her and hugged her as she also began to cry. \"I... I'm... I'm so sorry I let that get between us... All of us... It's all my fault...\"\n\nBlake walked up to her and replied, \"No, it isn't. It's both of us.\" Yang then separated from Ruby and hugged Blake. \"Listen, Yang, we need to move on from our relationship. It's pretty clear by now you've moved on, and that George boy treats you like the goddess you are. And, I think I'm beginning to fall in love all over again with someone else as well. Let's bury the hatchet, metaphorically of course, and work together again.\"\n\nYang said, \"Of course. I already knew I was a goddess beforehand, by the way.\" Yang and Blake then laughed. They then shook hands. \"Now, who is it?\"\n\n\"Who's what?\" Blake looked confused.\n\n\"Who's the lucky boy or lady who has stolen your heart?\"\n\nBlake blushed. \"Uhhhh... He's a faunus...\"\n\n\"It's Sun, isn't it? And let me guess, he doesn't know?\"\n\nBlake then sighed. \"Yes, and yes.\"\n\nAugust 16, 2020\n\nIt had been less than a day after the team returned home. In their time in the operation, Jaune's platoon scored a total of 84 kills. In total, all forces had scored over 1500 confirmed kills, as well as countless unconfirmed ones.\n\nToday would be the funeral of Doctor Oobleck. The platoon dressed themselves in their Ceremonial Uniforms and met in the centre of the academy grounds, where Team RWBY and Jaune had all first met just 5 years before.\n\n\"Before the service begins,\" Jaune started. \"We've all been invited to see what was left of him in his coffin alongside his family and closest friends. I would like it if all of us could go. Now, they've said that his parts were pretty badly burned, so if you're uncomfortable with it, I will understand if you don't want to see his remains. To move on, I want everyone to remember Oobleck as a master at hunting, as an amazing teacher, and as a good friend. He will be missed dearly by all of us.\"\n\nAs the platoon made their way through the impromptu preparation room, Ruby, joined by Delwyn IV, said to him, \"I wonder what they put in his coffin.\"\n\nAs Ruby and Delwyn went up, Ruby began to cry again. Oobleck, or what was left of him in various parts, was badly scarred and burned from the explosion Yang caused when she killed the nevermore that killed Oobleck. Alongside his remains was his thermos, badly charred but still in one piece, which as his weapon was to be buried alongside him as part of the Hunting Corps' custom for funerals and burial. Delwyn thought to himself, \"I hope I never have to send someone out to war again, not if it will lead to this.\"\n\nAs Yang and George went up, Yang said to Oobleck's remains, \"I'm sorry I couldn't save you in time, Doctor.\" She then gave him a salute and walked away, shaking her head in utter disbelief that he was actually dead. George held her hand as she walked.\n\nJaune saluted Oobleck's remains and said, \"It's been an honour serving with you, Major.\" He then left a bouquet of flowers alongside his coffin. Weiss did the same thing right after him.\n\nBlake and Sun went up together as well. Sun said, \"Everyone from Team SSSN's still in utter shock. I bet he's already started his own coffee company in the afterlife by now.\"\n\nBlake gave a short laugh and said, \"I could see him doing that. I'm not even kidding. Didn't he once say that that would've been his plan B if he lost his job?\"\n\n\"Oh yeah! I remember that! Good times, good times...\"\n\nThe Amphitheatre was crowded with students, ex-students, family, and friends of Oobleck, as well as journalists from various news agencies, since Oobleck's death had made worldwide news.\n\nOn the stage was Oobleck's coffin, wrapped in the flag of Vale, alongside a picture of Oobleck in his military uniform. It listed him as \"Maj. Bartholomew Joseph Oobleck, 1978-2020, Years of Service: 1995-2020.\" It also listed a quote from him, saying, \"I am a Huntsman because there is nothing else in this world I would rather be.\" (A\/N: The Hunting Corps adopted the gender-neutral term 'hunter' in 2017, though many older hunters will still use Huntsman and Huntress.)\n\nAfter the beginning ceremonies, Ozpin took to the stand and began a speech. \"My name is Brigadier General Michael James Ozpin. I am the Headmaster of Beacon Academy, and I have served my country as both a soldier in the army and as a huntsman in the Hunting Corps since I first went here as a student in 1985. I first met Ozpin when I was a teacher here. It was my first year teaching here at Beacon Academy. He was a very active student, and he often engaged in debates with other teachers and students involving various topics, such as faunus, campus policies, and foreign policy. He was one of several key participants in the fight to allow access to birth control on campus, and he also organised a petition with over 5,000 signatures to the Governing Council of Vale and the King of Vale at the time, Delwyn III, to pass anti-hate crime legislation for not only faunus, but also LGBT individuals, immigrants, and numerous ethnic and religious minorities. After he graduated from Beacon as a Valedictorian and served in active duty for several years, I contacted him and asked if he would consider becoming a teacher at Beacon. Of course, he took up the offer and became one of the most beloved teachers here.\"\n\nOzpin then looked at Jaune, confusing him.\n\n\"One example of how he impacted students would be a man who, when he first got here, was not a good fighter or leader at all. He had no control over his semblance or aura, and he reportedly faked his transcripts. Oobleck himself pointed out how he often did not pay attention in his class. Eventually, after improving his skills in his first year, Oobleck offered to give this man extra help outside of class. Multiple times, I let them fight Grimm by themselves in Emerald Forest. They ended up scoring many kills together. Today, this man is Lieutenant Jaune Arc, and he graduated at the number 22 spot in his class out of 678 students, an impressive feat considering he was at the very bottom when he first started.\" The audience then cheered and applauded.\n\nJaune smiled and said, \"Thank you...\"\n\n\"One of the last things Oobleck said to me was, pardon my language here, \"I'm getting too old for this shit.\" I could tell he was saying it in a joking manner, but I still said to him, \"Oobleck, you're 42 years old and have the energy of someone half your age. You won't be getting too old for this job anytime soon.\" He laughed and agreed with me. You know, I will always mourn his loss, but at the very least, I can take comfort in knowing that he died doing what he loved. Hunting Grimm was his life, and he was prepared to give up his life every time he went out onto the battlefield. And thus, the story of one of the greatest teachers in Beacon's history may be ending, but in all of you, a new story is just beginning. Thank you.\" The audience then applauded his speech and cheered.\n\nAfter 6 more long speeches by Oobleck's family and friends, the amphitheatre fell silent. As the audience fell silent soon afterwards, the honour guard took the flag wrapped around his coffin and held it above the sleek and wooden coffin.\n\n\"Present, ARMS!\" The cry of an honour guard captain pierced the air as all of the students, hunters, teachers, and other military personnel and royal family members gave a salute, while the civilians all placed a hand on their heart. Then, a lone bagpiper began playing \"Going Home\" to symbolise that Oobleck's soul was 'going home' in a sense.\n\nAfter the song ended, the sound of pagers ringing and the Beacon Fire Company's nearby siren echoed throughout the area.\n\n\"Vale City Fire Alarm, per the request of Beacon Academy and Signal Academy, is activating the tones of Beacon Fire, Signal Fire, and Patch First Aid in memory of Major Doctor Bartholomew Oobleck, who died serving the Kingdom of Vale on August 10, 2020, while fighting Grimm. May he rest in peace, and may his family and friends gain the strength to carry on. Time is 1006 hours, Alarm Operator 94.\"\n\nThen, the honour guard folded the flag and presented it to Oobleck's older sister and her husband. They walked back to the coffin and then lifted it, carrying it down from the stage and through the middle of the amphitheatre as the crowd watched and continued to salute. Finally, once the coffin left the building, the captain shouted, \"At ease!\"\n\nAugust 17, 2020\n\nToday, the team met after working at their day jobs. Weiss asked as they all sat down in Ruby and Yang's apartment, \"Did you guys remember to sign up for that makeup Basic Firefighter-CFR class tonight?\"\n\nYang said, \"We did after we came home yesterday. Me, Ruby, and Blake all went down to the station to sign up.\"\n\nWeiss replied, \"Good. You cannot miss a single class, or you'll fail the entire course. Say, how do you guys do during live burns?\"\n\nBlake said, \"I have to admit, Ruby is the best one out of all of us. When we first all did it, I was actually scared shitless, but Ruby calmed me down.\"\n\n\"Awww,\" Ruby replied. \"Thank you, Blake.\"\n\n\"I remember when I took it,\" Weiss said. \"I was just 14 and I had been in the fire company for 2 years by that point. Those were some fun times. I still have my gear from when I first started. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit anymore since puberty and boobs happened, but I still keep it around as a memento to those days.\"\n\nYang laughed and said, \"I'm sorry I'm laughing, it's just that part about puberty is both so weird coming out of your mouth, and I cannot imagine someone with a concave chest size.\"\n\nWeiss laughed and said, \"Oh shut up, Yang! Like any girl at 12 had a noticeable chest size. I have pride in my size or whatever I guess. I just don't give it much thought.\"\n\n\"Wanna see a picture of me at 12, Weiss?\" Yang then took out her phone. \"Here's me at Signal when I was 12. I had my hair in a ponytail back then because who the fuck cares. My chest size was B at the time. I was early, developing at 9 and getting a period just 2 months after I turned 11. I say my biological mom, Raven, was to blame, considering her chest size is F. Summer on the other hand was a C, explaining Ruby's growth or lack thereof compared to me.\"\n\n\"That... Is actually true...\" Ruby was stunned. \"I think you're right! I remember going through some of Mom's old clothes and finding some old bras while we were clearing out an attic at Dad's house.\"\n\nWeiss was stunned. \"Did you have any back pain?!\"\n\n\"Oh hell yeah. Since I was DD by the time I was 15, I had back pain until the rest of my body caught up. The back issues stopped around the time I was 18.\" Yang then stretched.\n\nBlake pointed at her chest and said, \"It's odd how we suddenly began talking about these lumps of fat like there's no tomorrow. I think it says something about us.\"\n\n\"That we're very talkative?\" Ruby asked Blake.\n\n\"No, that we're all a bunch of perverts.\" She then slowly held up Ninjas of Love 3. \"And we're not at all ashamed of it.\"\n\nYang burst into laughter and said, \"I love how Blake just confirmed that by holding up that book.\"\n\nRuby and Weiss also laughed hysterically. Weiss and Ruby then jokingly high-fived and said together, \"Flat chests unite!\"\n\nThey were then interrupted by their pagers all ringing, followed by several more tones.\n\n\"Vale City Fire Alarm on the air for Box 245 for 158 Exeter Street for a Box Alarm for Vigilant Fire 5, Goodwill Engine 6, Excellence Fire 7, and Enterprise Steamer 10. Caller reported that their family is trapped in a burning apartment on the 3rd floor. It's gonna be Apartment 3 Dash 7. Repeating, Vale City Fire Alarm on the air for Box 245 for 158 Exeter Street for a Box Alarm for Vigilant Fire 5, Goodwill Engine 6, Excellence Fire 7, and Enterprise Steamer 10. Time is 1756 hours, Alarm Operator 94.\"\n\nThe girls then all ran out of the apartment and down the stairs to the first floor. As they left the building, they saw the ambulance pull out from the Vigilant fire station. They ran like hell down the street to the station alongside several other volunteers as Car 5 sped past them. As the girls got their gear on, Ren ran into the station as well.\n\nWithin 3 minutes, Lieutenant Alfred Schnee hopped aboard the now-full Truck 201 and radioed, \"Truck 201 to Fire Alarm, we're responding with 10, 6 interior.\" At the same time, Car 5 and Ambulance 201 were reporting smoke showing from the 3rd floor as well as multiple witnesses from the building telling them of the fire, upgrading the fire to a Code 99.\n\nIomhair Rolfe, driving the truck said, \"We got a working one, fellas!\""}
{"text":"Last week, in response to Martin\u2019s questions about tunnel operations, Metro staff slipped in this quiet bombshell:\n\nMetro continues to take actions to expand ORCA use throughout the system and reduce cash payments. [This includes\u2026] working with our regional transit partners to implement a regional ORCA day-pass demonstration beginning in April.\n\nA multi-agency ORCA-based day-pass is probably the most requested fare product in the Puget Sound region, and for good reason. Today, interagency transfers are free with ORCA but (mostly) not with cash fare. An ORCA-based day-pass, if priced right, holds out the concurrent possibilities of improved comprehensibility for visitors, and good value for residents who plan to make several trips in a day. For people like me, who want buses to not suck, it\u2019s another weapon in the war against time-consuming on-board cash payment, and easily-abused paper transfers.\n\nThe devil, however, is in the details, which Metro staff supplied to us last week.\n\nAs you saw, the ORCA agency partners are planning a six-month pilot\/demo of a regional day pass later this year, hopefully beginning sometime this spring. The day pass demonstration will target visitors using hotels and convention centers. But, because the regional day pass will be available at all our current sales outlets, anyone could load the product on their card. At the conclusion of the demo, the ORCA partners will assess how well the card was received and determine the future of the program depending on what we learn. Q: What agencies will or could be included?\n\nA: All ORCA agencies except WSF Q: How much will it cost?\n\nA: $9 sales price, $4 per trip value. Riders would use E-purse to supplement higher fares based on how much they plan to travel. Q: What modes and fare zones will it cover?\n\nA: Good for any trip up to the $4 per trip value. Q: Is it a daily cap or a fare product you have to buy?\n\nA: It is a pass product loaded on the card. Once tapped it is valid for that service day. Service days is 3 a.m. \u2013 2:59 a.m. Q: Will it be issued on a disposable ORCA or just added to the existing $5 ORCA?\n\nA: Existing card. We do not have disposable card stock in the system\n\nDiscussion after the jump.\n\nSo, there are a couple of good things here, and I\u2019ll start with those:\n\nThe pass is mode-neutral and almost agency-neutral. Transit is about getting people places. The type of vehicle, and the agency logos on it, are important to passengers primarily as way-finding, not as a fundamental part of the service, as much as agencies might like to think otherwise. It\u2019s great to see that in this case, most Puget Sound agencies are putting the passenger experience first, providing simplicity and comprehensibility rather than more arcane rules.\n\nTransit is about getting people places. The type of vehicle, and the agency logos on it, are important to passengers primarily as way-finding, not as a fundamental part of the service, as much as agencies might like to think otherwise. It\u2019s great to see that in this case, most Puget Sound agencies are putting the passenger experience first, providing simplicity and comprehensibility rather than more arcane rules. Agencies have (or will have) hashed out revenue-sharing and technical issues. Getting severely-cash-constrained agencies to agree on revenue-sharing from a single fare is genuinely challenging negotiating problem, as carving up a passenger\u2019s regional fare is inherently a zero-sum game. Getting an agreement in this case could set a political and bureaucratic precedent for future day passes with different fare caps and prices. More generally, we\u2019ll have a public proof-of-concept, making it clear in the political discourse that this is technically doable.\n\nHere are the problems I see:\n\nThe day-fare cost is uncompetitive for most local riders, compared to using an existing ORCA card. Off-peak Metro fare is $2.25, peak is up to $3; the highest ST express fare is $3.50. Most other local bus services will be less than Metro. ORCA already provides a two-hour transfer window, and paper transfers are often cut much more generously. You have to ride a lot of transit trips, spaced out through the day, to add up to more than $9. Local riders will already be quite familiar with paying as they normally do, and if it doesn\u2019t make financial sense, they won\u2019t use day-passes, even if they were ubiquitously available. As they will require going out of the way, to a Metro sale partner, I suspect few locals will find them attractive.\n\nOff-peak Metro fare is $2.25, peak is up to $3; the highest ST express fare is $3.50. Most other local bus services will be less than Metro. ORCA already provides a two-hour transfer window, and paper transfers are often cut much more generously. You have to ride a lot of transit trips, spaced out through the day, to add up to more than $9. Local riders will already be quite familiar with paying as they normally do, and if it doesn\u2019t make financial sense, they won\u2019t use day-passes, even if they were ubiquitously available. As they will require going out of the way, to a Metro sale partner, I suspect few locals will find them attractive. The card+fare cost is uncompetitive for weekend or convention visitors. $14 in a day, or $23 in a weekend, is significantly more than anyone is likely to spend on transit in the Seattle area just paying as they go. Visitors are perhaps less price sensitive and more hassle sensitive, but I suspect they\u2019re also less likely to attempt all-day multi-hop trips around the city and region, which would be the only way to get close to $14. In groups, the numbers look even worse: for three people, $20 apiece would get you out and back to most outlying neighborhoods of interest to tourists in a cab, with far less hassle and time than Metro. People who intend to much spend time beyond the city, in the suburbs, are probably going to rent a car, because off-peak transit just isn\u2019t much good outside of Seattle.\n\n$14 in a day, or $23 in a weekend, is significantly more than anyone is likely to spend on transit in the Seattle area just paying as they go. Visitors are perhaps less price sensitive and more hassle sensitive, but I suspect they\u2019re also less likely to attempt all-day multi-hop trips around the city and region, which would be the only way to get close to $14. In groups, the numbers look even worse: for three people, $20 apiece would get you out and back to most outlying neighborhoods of interest to tourists in a cab, with far less hassle and time than Metro. People who intend to much spend time beyond the city, in the suburbs, are probably going to rent a car, because off-peak transit just isn\u2019t much good outside of Seattle. There\u2019s no disposable-ORCA option, which would be useful regardless of the price premium. If there were a $9, pre-loaded, disposable ORCA day-pass card available, plenty of people, myself included, would keep a stash of them around the house, for use by visitors and or in case I lost my own card. It would be worth the premium, above and beyond the pay-as-you-go price, to be able to give someone a card that worked on any land-based transit in the region, and whose loss did not mean the loss of a $5 permanent card. This would be a genuinely useful service I would pay for, which cannot be emulated today by other means.\n\nIf there were a $9, pre-loaded, disposable ORCA day-pass card available, plenty of people, myself included, would keep a stash of them around the house, for use by visitors and or in case I lost my own card. It would be worth the premium, above and beyond the pay-as-you-go price, to be able to give someone a card that worked on any land-based transit in the region, and whose loss did not mean the loss of a $5 permanent card. This would be a genuinely useful service I would pay for, which cannot be emulated today by other means. The $4 fare cap seems arbitrary. The most expensive regular bus service in the region is two-county ST Express at $3.50, while the Water Taxi is $3.50 (West Seattle) or $4.25 (Vashon) and Sounder runs on a scale up to $5.75 (Lakewood). If the purpose is to cover any possible fare in the region, $4 doesn\u2019t work. The only people who would lose out on a reduction of the fare cap from $4 to $3.50 would be a minute number of Sounder South day-pass riders; and if a reduction in the fare cap allowed the pass to drop in price, it would make the pass far more attractive.\n\nI hope this trial goes smoothly, and meets whatever bar for success the project leaders have in mind. I\u2019m not convinced, though, that the price and features of this day-pass have been thought out particularly well, and I fear it may underwhelm when presented to the public."}
{"text":"Liverpool FC training session at Rajamangala National Stadium before their first match of the 2015 Pre Season Tour in Bangkok against Thailand All Stars\n\nLiverpool FC training session at Rajamangala National Stadium before their first match of the 2015 Pre Season Tour in Bangkok against Thailand All Stars\n\nGet the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email\n\nThe Liverpool squad were put through their paces in the searing heat of Bangkok as they prepare for Tuesday\u2019s opening tour friendly against the Thai All Stars.\n\nBrendan Rodgers led the evening training session at the Rajamangala Stadium in front of around 1,000 supporters with the temperature around 32 degrees and 65% humidity.\n\nRodgers was assisted by backroom duo Sean O\u2019Driscoll and Pep Lijnders with new first team coach Gary McAllister not yet on the tour.\n\nMcAllister, whose appointment was only officially confirmed on Saturday, will link up with the squad in Brisbane on Wednesday or Thursday.\n\nWatch: James Pearce reports from Bangkok\n\nVideo Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now\n\nDespite the pitch cutting up badly, all the players came through unscathed. Rodgers is expected to use most of his squad in the opening friendly with no-one expected to play more than 45 minutes as the Reds build up fitness levels.\n\n\u201cWe had a great time in Thailand last time and it\u2019s been a good start to this trip,\u201d Rodgers said.\n\n\u201cTwo years ago our visit here provided us with a wonderful foundation for a good league campaign and we hope it will be similar this time. We\u2019re expecting a tough game.\u201d\n\nMidfielder Lucas Leiva added: \u201cIt\u2019s been a long trip but we\u2019re really looking forward to the game tomorrow.\n\n\u201cWe want to get some speed into our game and give the fans a good game.\n\n\u201cWith the weather it will be hard for us as it\u2019s difficult to play here but it will benefit us going forward.\u201d\n\nRodgers: There's been no rift with Raheem Sterling"}
{"text":"Blood flow restriction work makes you stronger than heavy training alone and is easy to recover from. Read up on the science of BFR and how to implement it.\n\nWhat you\u2019re getting yourself into\n\n3,900 words, 13-26 minute read time\n\nKey Points\n\nBlood flow restriction (BFR) training involves cutting off venous blood flow out of a limb, but still allowing arterial blood flow into a limb, resulting in the best pump of your life. Because of the massive pump you get from BFR training, people assume it\u2019s the bee\u2019s knees for hypertrophy. However, thus far, it doesn\u2019t seem to cause any more growth than conventional, heavy training. The biggest benefit of BFR training actually seems to be notable increases in strength when it\u2019s added to heavy training. It causes a high degree of muscle activation (rivaling heavy lifting) and causes virtually no muscle damage, making it essentially \u201cfree\u201d volume to help you get stronger without compromising recovery. There are a few more cool benefits, including enhancing recovery from training, and reducing atrophy when you\u2019re injured.\n\nBlood flow restriction (BFR) training, or occlusion training, is something that\u2019s met with mixed reactions. Some people are fully aboard the BFR bandwagon, and others think it\u2019s just a gimmick.\n\nTo this point, the available evidence suggests that BFR training is quite effective as an adjuvant to conventional, heavy training \u2026 just not for the reasons most people think.\n\nSo first off, what is BFR training?\n\nEssentially, you use a knee wrap or an elastic band to cut off venous blood flow in your arms or legs. The blood pressure in your veins (which remove blood from the limb) is substantially lower than the blood pressure in your arteries (which bring blood to the limb), so you apply the wrap tight enough to keep blood from leaving the limb, while still allowing blood to enter the limb.\n\nMost of the original studies used a special cuff to occlude venous blood flow, but using knee wraps or an elastic band works just as well. From a scale of 0 (meaning no pressure at all) to 10 (meaning the pressure you\u2019d expect form a tourniquet before getting a limb amputated), the pressure on your arms should feel like a 7, and the pressure on your legs should feel like an 8 or 9. Apply the wrap or band as close to the top of the limb as possible \u2013 very close to the groin if occluding venous blood flow from the legs, and very close to the arm pit if occluding venous blood flow from the arms.\n\nUse a light load. It should be a weight you can get for 30-40 reps when you\u2019re fresh (~20-30% of your 1rm is what\u2019s used most often in the research). Pump out as many reps as you can, rest for about 30 seconds, and pump out some more reps. 3-4 sets with short rest, totaling 60-100 reps is what\u2019s done most often in the literature. In some of the studies, the wraps are removed between sets, and in some, they\u2019re left on between sets (bro-tip: it\u2019s much more convenient to just leave them on between sets and admire all of your bulging blood vessels).\n\nWhile you\u2019re pumping out all of these reps, a ton of blood is driven into the limb, and very little of it can leave. The result: the best pump you\u2019ve ever experienced.\n\nWhen people try it for the first time, they assume that it must be god\u2019s gift to hypertrophy training. That\u2019s what most people use it for \u2013 to get jacked. However, it has other uses that go far beyond hypertrophy and, arguably, hypertrophy isn\u2019t even the biggest benefit you can get from BFR.\n\nBut, before we get into the effects of BFR training, let\u2019s backtrack a bit, and take a look at why and how it works.\n\nThe Mechanisms of BFR Training\n\nThere are six major mechanistic reasons why BFR training works for building muscle and strength.\n\nMetabolic Stress. Identified as one of the three primary mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy (along with muscular tension and muscle damage), metabolic stress signals muscles to grow. Constant BFR (leaving the wraps on between sets) works better that intermittent BFR (taking the wraps off between sets) for this purpose. Intermittent BFR leads to greater metabolic stress than regular low-load training, and constant BFR leads to similar levels of metabolic stress as training at 65% of your 1rm without BFR \u2013 equal metabolic stress with much lower loads. Motor Unit Recruitment (one, two, three). Regular low-load training potentially doesn\u2019t recruit as many motor units as heavier training, even when training to failure. I say \u201cpotentially\u201d because you assess motor unit recruitment via EMG, and it\u2019s very possible that as the first motor units recruited start to fatigue, they \u201cdrop out,\u201d so that the EMG readings at failure would be lower than they would have been when training with heavier loads (which wouldn\u2019t give motor units enough time to fatigue and \u201cdrop out\u201d), even if motor unit recruitment throughout the entirety of the set was identical (more on that here). Regardless, research shows that motor unit recruitment is substantially higher with low-load BFR training (specifically constant BFR) than with low-load training without BFR, and that motor unit recruitment is similar for low-load BFR training and heavier, conventional training without BFR. This, as we\u2019ll see later, is probably the biggest benefit of BFR training. Cellular Swelling. Similar to metabolic stress, cell swelling has been identified as a mechanism that can cause hypertrophy. Muscle thickness increases roughly 11.5-12% directly after a BFR workout, due to the increased fluid in the muscle, indicating (to use a scientific term) a buttload of cellular swelling. Modulating Hypertrophy Signalling Pathways and Gene Expression (one, two, three). Key signaling pathways (like the mTOR pathway) and genes (like the myostatin gene) are affected to a greater degree by low-load BFR training than low-load training without BFR. BFR training and heavier, conventional training affect them similarly, increasing protein synthesis and decreasing myostatin to similar degrees. There\u2019s also some data suggesting BFR increases the activity of heat shock proteins which may decrease catabolic signaling, but as far as I know, that\u2019s only been observed in one rodent study thus far. Satellite cell proliferation and myonuclear addition. If you remember from a previous article (I\u2019m overhauling this one in the future because there are some things about it I\u2019m not too pleased with as-is, but the mechanistic stuff about satellite cells and myonuclei is solid), addition of new myonuclei is an absolutely essential factor for long-term hypertrophy. Muscles can grow until the muscle fibers hit their myonuclear domain limit without adding more myonuclei, but to continue growing, the addition of new myonuclei from satellite cells is crucial. Low-load BFR training increases the satellite cell pool and causes myonuclear addition much more effectively than low-load training without BFR, and to a similar degree as heavier, conventional training. Growth Hormone Release. It\u2019s not clear whether acute elevations in ostensibly anabolic hormones affect muscle growth in any meaningful way, but the results of this study were eye-catching enough to at least give it a mention. Low-load BFR training to failure caused an increase in growth hormone 290x higher than resting levels, and approximately 4x higher than low-load training to failure without BFR.\n\nMechanisms are cool and all, but what are the effects on strength and hypertrophy?\n\nFor starters, overall, low-intensity BFR training seems to be about as good for hypertrophy and strength as heavier conventional training. Kreiger found an effect size of .35 for hypertrophy and an effect size of 0.8 for strength from multi-set conventional resistance training in his meta-analysis, and Loenneke found an effect size of .39 for hypertrophy and an effect size of .58 for strength from low-intensity BFR training in his. However, it\u2019s worth pointing out that the overall effect sizes for both hypertrophy and strength are depressed quite a bit in the low-intensity BFR training meta-analysis, since it included studies where the mode of exercise was incline treadmill walking with BFR. When only looking at resistance training studies, the effect size was 1.08 for both strength and hypertrophy (though, obviously, with a smaller sample size).\n\nWhen taking an aerial view, BFR training and conventional training have pretty similar effects. The fact that you get similar hypertrophy from low-load BFR training isn\u2019t overly surprising, in light of the fact that number of hard sets is the main determinant of hypertrophy, but the fact that the strength effects are similar is surprising, since generally training intensity (the percentage of your 1rm you\u2019re training with) is an important determinant of strength gains. More on that a bit later.\n\nIt\u2019s also worth pointing out that the BFR meta-analysis was just looking at studies that solely utilized BFR training, not BFR in addition to heavier, conventional training. I\u2019m going to assume that most people reading this article are also lifting heavy stuff, and aren\u2019t planning to use low-load BFR training for the entirety of their training plan, with perhaps the exception of when you\u2019re rehabbing an injury. More on that later as well.\n\nThere are five studies worth digging into that had well-trained subjects and combined BFR training with heavy resistance training.\n\nThe first is a glorious study, because the muscle being trained was the biceps. That also makes it the least relevant for people primarily concerned with getting strong, but I\u2019m sure that if you look deep down into your soul, you\u2019ll be able to admit to yourself that getting jacked arms is a worthy training goal, and that they are a great compliment to a huge squat or deadlift.\n\nThe researchers split the subjects \u2013 college-aged men, with at least one year of lifting experience \u2013 into two groups. One group did curls with BFR for 4 weeks (3 sets of 30 reps with 30% of their 1rm), followed by heavier curls for 4 weeks (3 sets of 15 with 60% of their 1rm). The other group did heavier curls for 4 weeks, followed by curls with BFR for 4 weeks.\n\nBoth groups gained the same amount of muscle over the 8 weeks of the study. They also gained the same amount of muscle during their BFR phase as their heavier training counterparts did; during the first four weeks, the people doing BFR curls gained as much muscle as the people doing conventional curls, and during the last 4 weeks when they changed training protocols, the people doing BFR curls (who did heavier curls for the first 4 weeks), again, gained the same amount of muscle as the people who did heavier curls (the people who did BFR curls for the first 4 weeks).\n\nThe next study is from Leubbers (2014).\n\nOver the course of 7 weeks of offseason training for Division IAA football, he split the players into four groups:\n\nOne group just followed the standard high-intensity off-season training program for football.\n\nOne group did the same high-intensity training program, with additional sets of squat and bench with 20% of their 1rm (1 set of 30 and 2 sets of 20) without BFR.\n\nOne group did the same high-intensity training program, with additional sets of squat and bench with 20% of their 1rm utilizing BFR.\n\nOne group basically just did accessory work, along with the light squats and benches with BFR.\n\nOver the course of the study, the athletes\u2019 arms and legs got bigger, and their chests didn\u2019t, but there were no significant differences in hypertrophy between the training protocols.\n\nWhen looking at strength, however, the group doing high-intensity training combined with low-intensity BFR had the largest increases in the squat. Their squats increased ~25kg over 7 weeks, vs. ~14kg for the group only doing high intensity training, and the group doing high intensity training plus low-load training without BFR. The group doing high-intensity training combined with low-intensity BFR also had the largest increases on bench, but the difference wasn\u2019t significant (~8.5kg vs. ~7kg for the other two groups doing high intensity training).\n\nAlso note that these were pretty strong dudes to begin with. The average squat at the start of the study was around 200kg.\n\nIt\u2019s also interesting to note that it seems like the stimulus from the BFR training is what drove the larger strength increase. My knee-jerk reaction was that the additional training volume was what made the difference, but the group doing the light squats without BFR, in spite of also having significantly higher training volume than the group only doing high-intensity training, gained the same amount of strength over the course of the study.\n\nThe next study by Yamanaka (2012) is very similar.\n\nThe researchers split the subjects (Division 1 football players) into two groups. Both groups continued their normal off-season strength training program. In addition to their normal high-intensity training, one group did one set of 30 reps, and 3 sets of 20 reps with 20% of their 1rm squat and bench with BFR, and the other group did the same sets and reps without BFR.\n\nThe group using BFR gained more strength in the squat and bench press than the group doing the same sets and reps with the same relative load without BFR. In addition, the BFR group\u2019s chest circumferences increased more (~3.1 cm vs. 1.5cm).\n\nThe next study is by Cook (2013).\n\nThis study was performed on semi-pro rugby players.\n\nThey were split into two groups. The first group trained for 3 weeks without BFR, then for 3 weeks with BFR, and the second group followed the opposite pattern.\n\nThey trained three times per week, doing 5 sets of 5 with 70% of their 1rm for squat, bench press, and pull-ups each day. The cuffs to restrict blood flow were only applied to the legs (even for pull-ups and bench press) and were removed between sets.\n\nDuring their time doing BFR training, the athletes added an average of 5.4kg to their bench, and 7.8kg to their squat. During their time without BFR, the athletes added an average of 3.3kg to their bench, and 4.3kg to their squat.\n\nThis study was interesting for a couple reasons. For starters, even though the cuffs were only applied to the legs, even during upper body exercises, the BFR group still had a larger increase in bench strength, suggesting that BFR may have systemic effects in addition to the local effects in the muscles with restricted blood flow. Additionally, they were using relatively high loads (70% of their max) \u2013 not the low loads typically used in BFR studies.\n\nLast but not least, we have one more study to look at. It\u2019s a Masters Thesis by O\u2019halloran (2014).\n\nHis study also combined high intensity training and low-load BFR training.\n\nOne group trained exclusively with loads in excess of 70% of their 1rm and no BFR.\n\nThe other group did 38% of their training with loads in excess of 70% of their 1rm with no BFR, and 62% of their training with 30% of their 1rm and BFR, for one set of 30, and three sets of 15.\n\nTraining volume (total weight lifted) was roughly equated.\n\nOver the course of the study, both groups\u2019 bench press, leg press, biceps cross sectional area, and thigh circumferences increased, with no significant differences between groups. These were already relatively strong guys on the outset as well \u2013 they were benching around 220-245lbs, and leg pressing around 800lbs.\n\nSo, on the whole, we can take a few things away from these five studies that combined conventional high-intensity training and low-load BFR training and pretty well-trained athletes.\n\nLow-load BFR training works about as well as heavier training for building muscle (Lowery\u2019s study), though the effects of combining the two may not be additive for hypertrophy. Leubbers\u2019 study showed that adding BFR training to high-intensity training didn\u2019t increase hypertrophy, but Yamanaka\u2019s did. It appears that BFR training doesn\u2019t just affect the muscles with venous blood flow occluded. Both Yamanaka\u2019s study (increased chest growth when the cuffs were applied to the arms) and Cook\u2019s study (larger increases in bench press, even though only leg blood flow was restricted) demonstrated increases in either strength or hypertrophy in muscles other than those below where the cuffs were applied. The most notable effect seems to be an increase in strength. Leubbers\u2019 study showed a larger increase in the squat, Yamanaka\u2019s study showed a larger increase in both squat and bench press, Cook\u2019s study showed a larger increase in both squat and bench press, and O\u2019halloran\u2019s Thesis showed that substituting a sizable chunk of high-intensity training for low-load BFR led to the same increases in strength.\n\nThe effects on strength are the most surprising. You\u2019d expect (or at least, I\u2019d expect) there to be a bigger difference in hypertrophy, but apparently the mega-pump lies to you.\n\nWhen you think through it, though, it makes sense. Plenty of things make muscle grow; tension, volume, metabolite accumulation, muscle damage, etc. With low-load BFR, tension is lower, metabolite accumulation is high, but not any higher than conventional training for 10+ reps, and there\u2019s very, very little muscle damage that takes place. It gives you a solid growth stimulus, but nothing that you can\u2019t also get from just picking up heavy stuff, and when you add it to a program that revolves around picking up heavy stuff, it doesn\u2019t seem to offer any additional hypertrophy benefits.\n\nHowever, strength is another beast entirely. Strength is partially dependent on structural factors (how much muscle you have), and partially dependent on neural factors (how well you can activate those muscles). Remember, low-load BFR causes roughly the same amount of muscle activation as much heavier, conventional training.\n\nBFR training has proven to be pretty disappointing for people with the sole goal of building muscle, since notable increases in muscle growth on top of heavier training haven\u2019t really manifested themselves (with the exception of additional chest growth in Yamanaka\u2019s study).\n\nHowever, low-load BFR training is basically the holy grail for strength athletes, at least as far as accessory work goes.\n\nWhen you add it to heavy training, it makes you stronger than heavy training alone. It\u2019s not just a matter of getting stronger from adding extra training volume because it beats out low-load training without BFR. It\u2019s incredibly easy to recover from since it causes essentially no muscle damage. (note: you may very well get sore the first couple of times you do it, simply due to novelty; this should go away pretty quickly, though) Because it also causes high muscle activation, it also aids in the neural side of strength development. Its effects are very similar to heavy training, and O\u2019halloran even showed that you can replace a hefty amount of heavy training with low-load BFRs and get the same increases in strength.\n\nYou can almost think of it as \u201cfree\u201d volume. You get all the upside of lifting heavy, but it\u2019s way easier to recover from. You can add low-load BFR to your current training program to get stronger, faster without compromising recovery. Or, if you\u2019re having issues with recovery, you can sub out some (not all) of your heavy training for low-load BFR and get the same strength increases without taxing your ability to recover to nearly the same degree.\n\nOther Stuff Worth Noting\n\nBFR without strength training speeds up recovery from training. One study showed that 2 sets of 3 minutes of BFR for the legs immediately after a training session significantly sped up recovery and enhanced subsequent performance for power-related tests.\n\nBFR can also decrease muscle atrophy when you\u2019re injured, and speed up the recovery of strength when you can get back to training. In one study, BFR (multiple sets of 5 minutes of occlusion, without exercise) significantly decreased muscle atrophy of the quads and hamstrings during the post-operative period following ACL reconstruction. In another, low-load BFR training helped people get muscle and strength back faster than training without BFR during the reconditioning phase following ACL reconstruction. Low-load BFR training can be a godsend to people dealing with or recovering from injuries. BFR without training can keep you from losing as much muscle if you\u2019re so jacked up you can\u2019t do anything (of course, consult with a physical therapist first), and low-load BFR training can help you maintain muscle and strength if you have aches and pains you need to train around. If you want to read more about how to progress from totally-jacked-up to picking-up-heavy-stuff-again, I\u2019d strongly recommend this review.\n\nKeep in mind, I\u2019m not recommending low-load BFR as the sole focus of your training plan. You should still be picking up heavy stuff (of course, since you\u2019re reading Strengtheory, I doubt I have to tell you that). One study showed that low-load BFR doesn\u2019t affect tendons to the same degree heavy training does.\n\nInterestingly, it seems that the additive increase in strength only applies to well-trained athletes. One study on untrained folks found that adding low-intensity BFR training to heavier training didn\u2019t increase strength gains. It could be that untrained people are already getting all the strength benefits they could possibly get just from picking up heavy stuff, but that more well-trained people have that capacity for greater increases in strength that don\u2019t manifest themselves because further increases in heavy training would compromise their ability to recover (since their training is already inherently more stressful). That seems plausible enough to me.\n\nPeople get leery of BFR because cutting off blood flow just seems like it would be dangerous. However, rates of adverse effects are exceptionally low, even in diseased and at-risk populations. You can completely cut off blood flow to a limb for over an hour without any long-term risks, and with BFR training, you\u2019re still allowing arterial blood flow, so you could likely occlude venous blood flow for even longer (though I wouldn\u2019t recommend it).\n\nThe thinner the device for cutting off venous blood flow, the better off you are. With thicker wraps, you run a greater risk of cutting off arterial blood flow. I generally use the resistance bands you can find in most gyms that some middle-aged women use for biceps curls. I get weird looks when I raid the BodyPump room in the middle of a class, but #yolo. Knee wraps can do the job as well, but bands are a better option if they\u2019re available to you.\n\nBro-tip: BFR work seems to work best, in my experience, when added in for a 4-8 week block, then replaced with more conventional accessory work for the next 4-8 week block.\n\nImplementation\n\nPick up heavy stuff as you generally would. You don\u2019t need to really change your program to add low-load BFR since it\u2019s exceptionally easy to recover from. After your heavy sets, do 3-4 sets of 15-40 reps with 20-30% of your max with BFR, resting about 30 seconds between sets. Whether you leave the wraps on between sets or take them off is up to you, but leaving them on seems to be better for muscle activation, and they\u2019re annoying to take off and put back on between sets anyways. This works really well for squat and bench (or you could do leg press and DB press after your squat and bench work, if you prefer). Whether it helps the deadlift or not hasn\u2019t been examined in the literature, and anecdotally, it doesn\u2019t seem to help out your hammies as much as your quads. Though not required, I\u2019d strongly recommend you also bust out a sweet superset or five for your arms. Who cares if science says it won\u2019t make your arms grow any faster than regular curls and triceps extensions? You get the same hypertrophy effect, but you get it by way of stupidly awesome pumps, which is a benefit in and of itself.\n\nAlternately, if you\u2019re having issues recovering from your training, you can sub out one or two heavy sets for 2-3 sets of low-load BFR. This is particularly useful for short stints when you know beforehand that recovery will be compromised (if you know you have a deadline coming up that\u2019ll stress you out and decrease how much you can sleep, or something of that sort).\n\nIf this is a subject that interests you, I\u2019d strongly recommend you check out these three reviews as well (one, two, three).\n\nThis was a snippet from the Second Edition of the Art and Science of Lifting that I\u2019m working along on right now. If you already have the First Edition, the Second Edition will be free for you when it comes out!\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nNext: The Complete Strength Training Guide \u2192\n\nThe New Approach to Training Volume \u2192\n\nSpread the love Facebook\n\nTwitter\n\nLinkedIn\n\nReddit\n\nTumblr\n\nEmail\n\nPocket\n\nMore\n\nPrint\n\nPinterest"}
{"text":"Touka Kirishima and the Rotting Womb\n\nThe two biggest pieces of evidence for what is next about to happen to Touka lies in the colored cover art for this chapter of Tokyo Ghoul, and a poem translated by michi here [x] attached to the Yomo, Touka and Ayato birthday art.\n\nStarting with the art, the most immediate eye catching area is Touka\u2019s bloodied stomach.\n\nStarting with the art, the most immediate eye catching area is Touka\u2019s bloodied stomach.\n\nBlood on the stomach is typically a feminine symbol, it does not have to necessarily mean being stabbed through the stomach. It could also mean menustruation and miscarriage, however, what comes to mind with deliberately invoking a symbol of miscarriage on Touka is what miscarriage means in a literal sense \u201cA new life being cut short.\u201d\n\nReturning to the top of the image, those are white sakura blossoms with the phrase \u201cBloom for me, a flower of my own.\u201d\n\nCherry or Sakura blossoms in japanese culture have a lot of meanings, but the most relevant to the situation is this one:\n\nCherry blossoms are a symbolic flower of the spring, a time of renewal, and the fleeting nature of life. Their life is very short. After their beauty peaks around two weeks, the blossoms start to fall. [x]\n\nThis meaning of a \u201cbeautiful life cut short\u201d could possibly apply to Touka if there were upcoming danger to her, or even to her and Kaneki\u2019s relationship if their sudden chance at growth was taken away by Mutsuki\u2019s interference. For example in the film 5 cm per second, cherry blossoms were used to symbolize a promising new relationship cut short.\n\nTouka\u2019s even referred to within this same chapter as beautiful, once again.\n\nOne thing I will note though is that the words:\n\n\u201cBloom for me, a flower of my own\u201d\n\nBecome foreboding if you realize that flowers in Tokyo Ghoul, and especially flowers blooming have always been a shorthand symbol for blood splatter and tragedy.\n\nThey were used here:\n\nand here:\n\nfinally here:\n\nFinally though, to the poem. The birthday poem written by Ishida is entitled:\n\n\u201c Her womb smelled like it was burnt.\u201d\n\nWhich goes along nicely with the miscarriage and feminine symbolism already being associated with Touka in this image. A lot of the allusions described in this poem also correspond to events that have been happening recently in canon.\n\nTo the point where I am now convinced that the narrator of the poem rather than Kaneki, is Touka herself.\n\nThe children who were meant to be born, died. The vision of the future convulses.\n\nSomeone declared that they\u2019ll crush only half of the broad bean.\n\nThe gene is in a severe bipolar state.\n\nThe nucleic acid sequence having no recollection of its own actions.\n\nThe children who were meant to be born could be referring to the ghouls from Aogiri. Touka herself is witness not only to ghouls and children being born into this world dying early, even herself being subjected to violence early as a child as CCG officers tried to kill her.\n\nSomeone declared they will only crush half the broad bean is Kaneki. It\u2019s two of his most famous lines combined together \u201cI\u2019ll only half kill you\u201d and \u201cI\u2019ll pluck the rotted beans.\u201d\n\nThe gene is in a severe bipolar state is also Kaneki, somebody who switches haphazardly between his ghoul and human sides even though he claims to be a person who can see both humans and ghouls. Bipolar is usually associated is Bipolar Manic Depression the mental illness, but the root of the word means \u201cTwo poles\u201d or two opposite ends.\n\nThe nucleic acid sequence having no recollection of its own actions, that\u2019s Haise. He had the same body as Kaneki, and the same mismatch of DNA, however he could not remember what it was he had done and Touka had to witness him in his memoryless state.\n\nAll of the fingers that were supposed to be connected from start to end, are scattered around; it\u2019s annoying. If you look closely at the knot, you can see that it can be surprisingly easy to untie.\n\nThis is referring to Touka\u2019s family itself, even the threadbare remaints of it, Yomo, Ayato and herself she has a difficult time trying to keep them all together. All Touka wants is for the people to love to stay around and love her in return, and she feels also that her family should have stuck around, it should have been simple but actually the ties of family aren\u2019t so binding and they easily unwind, both Ayato and Yomo left her at different points.\n\nI was always asked to keep the switch.\n\nGo forward.\n\nGo back.\n\nStop. I can hear my voice from the mouth.\n\nThat voice gave me a feeling of discomfort and it had become extremely disgusting but, no one noticed that and everyone was under the impression that it was indeed, my voice.\n\nThis is the three years of waiting Touka did. \u2018Asked to keep the switch\u2019 could refer to Touka having to host Re: and sit back and wait as the rendezvous point for both Ayato and Kaneki to eventually return to while they were allowed to move brashly ahead on their own. Even after they return though, Touka is still asked to hang back and monitor communications rather than allowing her to fight in the field.\n\nThe result is a Touka who acts much differently from the Touka we know today, and Kaneki even comments as such. The person who could act decisively and boldly for herself, the one who was always moving ahead of him scared him. It sounds a bit different to the Touka we know now in :Re who is acting as an advice dispenser and a passive source of guidance, standing in the place of Yoshimura.\n\nThe Touka that years of loneliness and abandonment has been conditioned into this current state.\n\nEverybody accepts this change in Touka, but does Touka herself accept it? She\u2019s at least still disatisfied with having to hang back, telling both Ayato and Kaneki when they tried to leave her out of critical moments to protect her that they didn\u2019t need to.\n\nSin is irresponsible. I\u2019m getting tired of being forgiven.\n\nMy shoulders have even forgotten about my legs. I open the door with the side of my arm. The path that I should\u2019ve advanced in is gone and darkness pulled onto the horizon that lay right beneath it.\n\nThis is another direct reference, when Touka was in the doorway with Yomo, Yomo explained to her that Koma and Irimi needed to die because their sins were unforgivable, but at the same time she countered why were her sins forgiven then?\n\n\u201cCome on, come on! Come on, come on!\u201d Go forward.\n\nGo back.\n\nStop. I can hear my voice from the bones. \u201cDid you know that our voice is the mixed voices from dad and mom? No wonder it\u2019s so disgusting.\u201d\n\nThe last part is Touka in reference to her father. Touka\u2019s always had complex feelings about Arata, but lately she has been turning away from him entirely because she sees his decisions as what led to her abandonment.\n\nTouka does not want to acknowledge the actions of a man who fought for a mother she barely remembers, a mother who died because of murders she did a long time ago. Despite not choosing to be, she was born a ghoul who carries the sins of those two previous ghouls as well. Touka\u2019s always dealt with self disgust for being born a ghoul, and also her own actions.\n\nI pinched my nose and jumped down without a pause. Just like how a child would when jumping into a pool. Even the never-stopping rain,\n\neven the never-breaking night,\n\neven the never-ending agony. It\u2019s surely there, it\u2019s just that it wasn\u2019t there until now. Falling down, falling down.\n\nIt\u2019s as if right has become left. And on the brink of collision, I recall Bj\u00f6rk\u2019s song,\n\nI think this is where we are at at the poem, Touka has dived in by basically lying it all bare in front of Kaneki. Approaching the point of collision could be Mutsuki, a final collision between those two plot lines.\n\nAs for a Bjork song, most assume that song is Hyperballad, the song played during the New Year\u2019s livestream. The lyrics are a bit abstract, but basically it is about a girl throwing away things off a mountain, pieces of herself so she can be happy with someone else. At some point in the song she also considers throwing herself off of the mountain too.\n\nI follow with my eyes \u2018til they crash\n\nImagine what my body would sound like\n\nSlamming against those rocks\n\nWhen it lands\n\nWill my eyes\n\nBe closed or open?\n\nI go through all this\n\nBefore you wake up\n\nSo I can feel happier\n\nTo be safe up here with you [x]\n\nI would say all of this foreshadowing at least points to Touka\u2019s dissatisfaction and possibly the confrontation causing her to lose consciousness. She might even throw herself in front of Kaneki to protect him, since the person in the poem and the song both willingly throw themselves.\n\nIn conclusion though, what does a rotting womb mean in association with Touka? It means that new life that could be born from her, has suddenly hit a stopping point and that stagnation is causing her to rot. What that could mean in literal terms though, we\u2019ll have to see as the events unfold."}
{"text":"The only reason I am still here, quite frankly, is all of you. I made this blog right as I began to get so much sicker, and was completely alone. The support I received through all of you gave me the courage to seek out further treatment that undoubtedly prolonged my life. Prior to this, nobody listened to me. Nobody heard me when I was sick, nobody believed that what I said was happening actually was. I had nearly given up on myself, since all of my doctors and families tried to convince me that I was lying about my failing health.\n\nIt was the absolute life changing experience of having an audience that gave me the strength to keep fighting. I actively thought about my followers, many of them by name, as I went to doctor after doctor and treatment after treatment. This is no exaggeration. My followers were the only people who wanted to be in my life and wanted to listen to what I had to say. That was everything to me.\n\nA lot of my early followers have become lifelong friends. I am sitting next to one of them right now, and have seen countless others these past few years, and anticipate meeting many more. Because of everyone, these have probably been the happiest years of my life.\n\nIf not for all of you, I would probably be dead already, no joke. My body was completely shutting down, and it took a lot more strength than I could ever have alone to pursue extremely painful and effective treatments. Even though there still is no cure, and my life will likely end sooner than the time since this blog began, it has been made so much longer and so much better because of all of you.\n\nEven if whoever is reading this is a new follower, even if you are an old one, if you ever doubt yourself, remember that your mere presence can be life changing to someone else. I still have a lot more fighting to do, but I never would have made it this far in the first place alone.\n\nThis birthday is because of all of you.\n\nThank you."}
{"text":"Prominent Toronto defence lawyer Randall Barrs has recovered after being shot Sep. 20 outside his law office, but he is critical of Halton police for allowing the shooting to happen and Toronto police for not determining why he was a target.\n\nBarrs spoke exclusively to CBC Toronto Tuesday. It was the first time in the more than two months since a gunman opened fire that he has spoken on camera.\n\nOn the sunny Tuesday afternoon when Barrs was shot in the driveway of his law office at 23 Bedford Rd. in the Annex, there were babies in strollers at a parkette just across the street.\n\nBarrs remembers them, but said he didn't see the man who is now accused of shooting him from behind until after he'd been shot twice in the left leg and had fallen to the ground.\n\n\"I heard the noises, the popping sound and the next thing I knew I realized I was on the ground and with the amount of blood I saw on my leg and on my shoe and on the driveway, when I looked back over my shoulder, I put together I'd been shot,\" Barrs said recalling the ordeal.\n\n\"I lost a lot of blood when I was hit, I was shot from behind by this coward.\"\n\nBarrs first started to hop on his injured leg down the driveway towards the assailant, but then fear set in.\n\n\"Then I realized after two or three hops that he has a gun and I don't have one, so I just did a U-turn and hopped towards my office and lay on the door there and that's when the mystery begins,\" Barrs said.\n\nJ. Randall Barrs gives his first television interview since he was shot outside his law office in September. (Martin Trainor\/CBC)\n\nWithin seconds a group of undercover officers from Halton Police had surrounded the gunman and were helping Barrs secure his belt around his leg to slow the bleeding.\n\nSources tell CBC Toronto the team had the alleged gunman under surveillance, but Halton police have never confirmed why.\n\nBarrs wants to know why police didn't step in earlier if they were hiding in the bushes.\n\n\"They were all wearing vests, they were protected \u2014 very dangerous situation. There were people all over the place,\" he said. \"It's just a miracle that no one else was hit beside me.\"\n\nOne of the officers shot the alleged gunman in the neck. The man survived, and the incident is being investigated by the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), the province's civilian police watchdog. The SIU steps in when police are involved in a confrontation that results in the injury of a civilian.\n\nJ. Randall Barrs is photographed outside his law office on Tues., Nov. 22, 2016. (Martin Trainor\/CBC)\n\nHalton police told CBC Toronto Tuesday they can't comment because their investigation is ongoing.\n\nThe SIU said its investigation is continuing and it could not provide an update.\n\nBarrs is perplexed the SIU investigation isn't finished because he said he was told the officer who pulled the trigger, along with the officers who witnessed it, were all interviewed within a week of the shooting.\n\nGrayson Delong, 51, is charged with 15 offences, including attempted murder. No longer wearing a gray neck-brace, on Nov. 21 Delong appeared in court, wearing an orange jumpsuit. Some pre-trial arrangements were made and he will appear next in court Dec. 5.\n\nAt the time of the shooting, Delong was out on bail after a series of break-and-enters in Halton region, and was under a weapons prohibition.\n\n\"He was out on bail for a bunch of [break and enters] in Peel but this doesn't look like [break and enter] surveillance. It doesn't make any sense,\" said Barrs.\n\nBarrs maintains Delong was not a past or present client of his, and the men did not know each other.\n\nToronto Police have downloaded video that allegedly captures the shooting from one of Barrs's associates and apprehended Delong's cellphone, according to Barrs.\n\nHalton police officers boxed in the alleged gunman, who is inside the silver car in this image, moments after lawyer J. Randall Barrs was shot. (Peter Schilling\/Submitted)\n\nYet nine weeks later there have been no updates from police.\n\nBarrs said whoever orchestrated the shooting hasn't been caught, which means whoever has an axe to grind against him is still out there.\n\n\"You would think that would cause [Toronto Police] to speed up their investigation. You would think time would be of the essence but that doesn't seem to be the way things work with the Toronto Police Service,\" said Barrs.\n\n\"I'm not happy, I haven't been on this side of the fence but now I understand why a lot of people who have been have expressed so much unhappiness.\"\n\nToronto Police did not respond to CBC Toronto for an update on their investigation.\n\nDespite everything, the veteran defence lawyer said he is not letting the open case stop him.\n\n\"I've been doing this for 40 years. I'm not afraid. I'm carrying on with my life,\" Barrs said.\n\nThe bullets went right through his left leg, missing bones and arteries. There is muscle and nerve damage, but he is recovering well, he said.\n\nHe says he was home from hospital the day after the shooting, and his first day in court was just over a week later on Sept. 29.\n\n\"I was in a lot of pain and discomfort for a long time, but it gradually got better day-by-day,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm doing pretty well. I'd say [I'm] at the 95 per cent level at this point.\""}
{"text":"Since the release of the Panama Papers, every day has brought on a new development. The sheer scale of the leaks is staggering \u2014 nearly 100 times more data than when Wikileaks released nearly 3 million US diplomatic cables.\n\nThe papers themselves include millions of leaked documents that reveal just how pervasive tax avoidance is among the world's most powerful and wealthy. They give a world tour of corruption, magnifying tactics used by the rich to keep their financial dealings secret. They have already forced out the prime minister of Iceland and raised uncomfortable questions for the prime minister of the United Kingdom.\n\nBut they also raised a lot of questions, from the complex to the simple: Who leaked the documents? How did we get into this situation in the first place? And what the hell is a shell company to begin with? While financial transparency remains a mainstay of many prominent world leaders' political platforms, the Panama Papers proved that international tax structures allow for widespread secrecy. Here's how:\n\n1) What are the Panama Papers?\n\nLet's start at the beginning. In short, the Panama Papers is the biggest leak of confidential data in history.\n\nSpecifically, the leak consisted of 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that specializes in helping people anonymously set up offshore shell companies in nations with lower taxes to protect their financial assets. The papers were initially released to German newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung. The newspaper then partnered with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. For more than a year, 300 journalists reviewed the 2.6 terabytes of data before releasing their findings, now called the Panama Papers.\n\nThe documents showed the internal dealings, emails, invoices, and documents shared between the world's elite and the lawyers paid to help them retain their wealth. If we have learned anything from the Panama Papers, it's that the revelations that came out of them are extraordinarily complicated (explained in more detail here), and their impact has depended not just on what the papers themselves showed, but on the political situation surrounding the principal players.\n\nThe papers named 140 politicians from more than 50 countries linked to offshore financial dealings in more than 20 tax havens. It named famous athletes and celebrities, friends of world leaders, and wealthy divorcees, ultimately giving insight into how the wealthy are able to keep their money and power without being subject to their own country's laws and tax codes:\n\nIceland's prime minister resigned after the Panama Papers showed he was personally connected to an offshore company , Wintris, registered in the British Virgin Islands, that stood to benefit from bailout negotiations in which he was involved with big banks, although it's not clear whether he personally benefited financially.\n\n, Wintris, registered in the British Virgin Islands, that stood to benefit from bailout negotiations in which he was involved with big banks, although it's not clear whether he personally benefited financially. UK Prime Minister David Cameron's father owned an offshore holdings company in Panama in which the prime minister also once had shares and sold before becoming prime minister in 2010.\n\nin Panama in which the prime minister also once had shares and sold before becoming prime minister in 2010. There is a multimillion-dollar network of offshore companies surrounding Vladimir Putin and his closest friends that, although not directly linked to Putin by name, connects the Russian president to secret and questionable loans and investments in Russian monopolies.\n\nand his closest friends that, although not directly linked to Putin by name, connects the Russian president to secret and questionable loans and investments in Russian monopolies. Mossack Fonseca was deeply tied to Brazil's current corruption scandal and President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment trial. The Panamanian law firm helped 57 people linked to the Petrobras scandal, a $5.3 billion bribery scheme implicating Brazil's most elite politicians and executives, and set up 107 offshore companies, including one allegedly tied to Eduardo Cunha, the lead opposition politician pushing for the president's impeachment.\n\n2) How do tax havens and shell companies actually work?\n\nTax havens \u2014 countries, states, or territories where taxes are very low or nonexistent \u2014 often also have financial regulations that require less transparency in the banking system. Panama, for example, does not have an international transaction income tax or sales tax. The government only requires that offshore companies pay a $300 annual franchise tax.\n\nPlaces like Panama \u2014 or the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, or the British Virgin Islands \u2014 are particularly attractive for wealthy individuals because this legal framework makes it easy to hide their financial assets from the tax authorities of the countries in which they actually live and work.\n\nBig multinational companies take advantage of tax havens to minimize their corporate income tax bill by internally shifting profit-making assets to subsidiaries located in low-tax countries. For example, Apple's global sales go through its subsidiary company in Ireland, which has lower corporate income tax.\n\nIndividuals can't really do this. Instead, they can go to law firms like Mossack Fonseca to set up inactive companies, called shell companies, the sole purpose of which is to hold financial assets.\n\nUsually the true owners of these companies remain anonymous \u2014 on paper, shell companies are often directed by the lawyers who control the company but don't have any real control of the company's activities. These shell companies can hold investments, they can buy houses and multimillion-dollar yachts, and ultimately they allow the real owners to shield assets from scrutiny or taxation.\n\nSetting up a shell company isn't illegal. Paying lower taxes in Panama or other tax havens isn't illegal either. These, like claiming deductions, are tax avoidance practices \u2014 legal ways to pay the least amount of taxes possible. But tax evasion \u2014 failing to accurately disclose your financial situation \u2014 is illegal. The precise line between legal avoidance and illegal evasion can be hard to detect, especially without access to full and complete financial records, so offshore shell companies can help blur the line.\n\n3) Are offshore tax havens bad?\n\nTax havens let people avoid or evade paying a lot of money to the governments under which they live \u2014 which is good for the avoiders, and, again, is not necessarily illegal, but is usually bad for their fellow citizens.\n\nGabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, estimates that nearly $8 trillion \u2014 8 percent of all the financial wealth in the world \u2014 is stashed in tax havens, and that illegal tax evasion costs governments around the world $200 billion per year in taxes. The problem is worst in Africa, where 30 percent of assets are in tax havens, and Russia, where the total wealth in tax havens is more than 50 percent.\n\nLegal tax avoidance schemes cost the US a lot of money, too: A recent study from Oxfam found the top 50 corporations in the US had stowed more than a trillion dollars in 1,600-plus offshore subsidiary companies while still receiving trillions in federal funds, whether in the form of a loan or a bailout. Their tax avoidance practices cost the US more than $110 billion every year, according to Oxfam's report.\n\nOrganizations like Oxfam say this leads to further inequality, ultimately forcing the government to cut federal programs that are meant to aid lower-income citizens. Outside of the US, this kind of practice can also reduce tax gains in the developing world. Because tax havens are the product of an unorganized international tax system, developing countries are also cut out of about $100 billion of taxes \u2014 money that could go toward necessary infrastructure like schools, roads, etc.\n\nTax havens are also counter to ideals of financial transparency. One chief purpose of shell companies is to maintain the anonymity of the real owner, which has the potential to lead to even shadier things than tax avoidance. Tax havens are often seen as breeding grounds for criminal activity. When countries do not require companies to report financial records, it makes it really easy to mask illegal activities. This is the scene in the movies when the rich guy in a silk robe gets arrested for laundering money through his private Cayman Island resort.\n\nAnd a lot of these law firms are set up to help people do just that.\n\nMossack Fonseca, the law firm at the center of the Panama Papers, has been investigated time and time again for aiding in money laundering schemes. In January, Brazilian prosecutors brought charges against their lawyers for hiding documents related to the Petrobras scandal. Before that, an American hedge fund that was invested in Argentina's defaulted debt investigated Mossack Fonseca's Las Vegas subsidiary for hiding records relating to offshore accounts that were stealing from Argentinian government contracts.\n\n\"When it comes to money laundering, we offer full service: rinse, wash, and dry,\" said Miguel Antonio Bernal, a Panamanian lawyer and political analyst told Vice. \"You can go to any law firm in the city, from the smallest to the biggest, and open up a shell company with no questions asked.\"\n\nIn the end, tax havens make inequality worse, Zucman told Vox's Libby Nelson: They make it easier for the rich to get richer by avoiding taxes. They make it harder to redistribute their wealth. And people who aren't sheltering their assets end up paying more in taxes to make up for the untaxed money that's being held offshore.\n\n4) If so many people think tax havens are bad, why are they still around? Isn't someone trying to do something about this?\n\nThe simplest way to approach this is that tax havens benefit the very wealthy and the very wealthy have a lot of political clout. Elites have largely allowed tax havens to exist because elites themselves benefit from their existence.\n\nThis doesn't mean fixes haven't been in the works. In both 2008 and 2014, the Senate investigated tax-evasion practices surrounding Switzerland's largest banks. During the second investigation, Credit Suisse agreed to a $196 million settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for illegal banking.\n\nIn 2015, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act. The bill, supported by many tax-justice oriented organizations, would tighten reporting requirements on offshore companies and treat certain offshore companies owned by Americans as taxable domestic corporations. It was referred to House committees the day it was introduced and has not moved since.\n\nThere are multiple reasons for this.\n\nFirst, tax havens' major beneficiaries are multinational corporations that have powerful lobbyists. According to the Oxfam study, a corporation is run by a \"multibillion dollar army of lobbyists to influence federal policy,\" which not only guarantees them millions in loans, loan guarantees, and bailouts, but also finds ways to eventually bring the money they have stored offshore back into the country without exorbitant taxes.\n\nBut also there are some persistent counterarguments to putting an end to tax havens. One, paying higher taxes prevents them from investing in resources that could ultimately benefit people. And second, there is the notion of double-taxing, which is the idea that without tax havens people could be taxed on the same income, assets, or financial transactions in two different jurisdictions.\n\nIn the current international tax structure, double taxing is prevented with tax deals between countries. For example, under President Barack Obama's administration the United States passed a deal with Panama that eliminated tariffs on trade and gave Panama access to US businesses and financial services.\n\n5) How did we get into this situation in the first place? Is a trade deal with Panama to blame?\n\nMany congressional critics of the free trade agreement between the US and Panama, which passed in 2012, warned the deal would worsen Panama's status as a tax haven. One of those critics, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, used the Panama Papers to vindicate his stance against the Panama free trade deal.\n\n\"The Panama Free Trade Agreement put a stamp of approval on Panama, a world leader when it comes to allowing the wealthy and the powerful to avoid taxes,\" Sanders said in a statement following the release of the Panama Papers.\n\n\"I predicted that the passage of this disastrous trade deal would make it easier, not harder, for the wealthy and large corporations to evade taxes by sheltering billions of dollars offshore. I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama\u2019s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared.\"\n\nBut this isn't necessarily the case. In fact, countries can use trade deals to put checks on tax havens. The papers themselves indicate that the agreement made it slightly \u200bharder\u200b for Americans to use Panama specifically as a venue, as the Washington Post's editorial board argues:\n\nData culled from the documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and presented in several charts on the group\u2019s website, show that the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, which specialized in setting up offshore accounts and shell companies for wealthy people, has been steadily reducing its activity in Panama for about a decade. As it happens, the decline began about the time the Bush administration and Panama began discussing a free-trade pact \u2014 and accelerated after the deal took effect during Mr. Obama\u2019s first term. [...] The Obama administration, backed by members of Congress, made it clear the free-trade deal \u2014 which Panama badly wanted, to match a deal between its Central American neighbors and the United States \u2014 hinged on a separate agreement granting U.S. tax authorities more access to Panama\u2019s financial system. The United States particularly insisted on plugging the \"bearer shares\" loophole. Panama agreed and changed its laws accordingly \u2014 before the free-trade agreement reached the Senate and Mr. Sanders nevertheless voted \"no,\" claiming, wrongly, that it would make the tax haven \"worse.\"\n\n6) Taxes are kind of confusing. Can we just watch cartoons instead?\n\nYes. But only if it's a fun educational cartoon about shell companies and tax havens. Here are the Panama Papers explained in an adorable comic about piggy banks:\n\n7) Hold up. Back to the Panama Papers. Who actually leaked these documents?\n\nWe don't actually know.\n\nIn an interview with Wired, Bastian Obermayer, the S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung reporter who first interacted with the anonymous whistleblower, said the German paper had months of encrypted conversations with the source, who over a few months continuously fed the reporters troves of confidential documents, emails, and invoices.\n\nObermayer said the source said his or her \"life is in danger.\" They never met in person and only communicated in encrypted messages. In the months that followed, S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung partnered with journalists around the world and created an encrypted database to work through the leaked documents. The paper has not released the raw data and has said it will not do so, in order to protect the source.\n\n\"You don't harm the privacy of people, who are not in the public eye. Blacking out private data is a task, that would require a lifetime of work \u2014 we have eleven million documents,\" the reporters wrote in a Reddit AMA.\n\nThe law firm in question, Mossack Fonseca, maintains that the leak did not come from one of its employees.\n\nSo, the source is still anonymous, but there are a lot of theories about who leaked the documents. It's fun to speculate, but the conspiracy theories also illustrate how different parts of the world are reacting to the leak:\n\nPutin's theory is that the US leaked the documents as part of a larger scheme to \"destabilize\" Russia, adding that the entire motive behind leaking the documents was to smear him as president.\n\n\"They are trying to destabilize us from within in order to make us more compliant,\" Putin said in response to the information revealed in the documents.\n\nThe Brookings Institute's Clifford G. Gaddy theory is that Russia leaked the documents, which turns Putin's theory on its head, claiming that this was some long-reaching Russian ploy to blackmail the US. How? Because while the Panama Papers mired Russian elites in headlines, they said little that was unknown. Rather, Gaddy says the papers are more interesting in what they don't reveal: the offshore habits of American elites. That information, he says, the Russians are keeping as blackmail:\n\nAny actual reputational damage to Putin or Russia caused by the Panama Papers is in fact pretty trivial. For that cheap price, the Russians would have 1) exposed corrupt politicians everywhere, including in \"model\" Western democracies, and 2) fomented genuine destabilization in some Western countries. What I wonder, then: Is it a set-up? The Russians threw out the bait, and the United States gobbled it down. The Panama Paper stories run off Putin like water off a duck\u2019s back. But they have a negative impact on Western stability. [...] Therefore, I suggest that the purpose of the Panama Papers operation may be this: It is a message directed at the Americans and other Western political leaders who could be mentioned but are not. The message is: \"We have information on your financial misdeeds, too. You know we do. We can keep them secret if you work with us.\" In other words, the individuals mentioned in the documents are not the targets. The ones who are not mentioned are the targets.\n\nThese two conspiracy theories have one thing in common: They suggest that the revelations in the Panama Papers were very important to Russia and Putin in particular. Even if neither is true \u2014 yes, Gaddy's theory is somewhat outlandish, but he's also one of the most prominent experts on Russia's economy \u2014 that's an important point of context to understand why they've made news.\n\n8) Why didn't Americans make the Panama Paper headlines?\n\nWe have three options here: One, we can go with Gaddy's theory that they actually did make an appearance in the papers and we just don't know about it yet; two, that Americans have used other tax-avoidance schemes; or three, that Americans are in the clear and don't use tax-avoidance schemes. The third is not the correct answer.\n\nAs the Oxfam study said, especially in corporate America, the use of tax havens is pervasive. Americans are not exceptional in this regard.\n\nAnd there are plenty of very wealthy Americans who are surely implementing tax-avoidance schemes. Mossack Fonseca is one law firm \u2013 and one that as a policy \"prefer(s) not to have American clients,\" founder Roman Fonseca recently told the Associated Press.\n\n\"My partner is German, and I lived in Europe, and our focus has always been the European and Latin American market,\" Fonseca told the AP.\n\nBut there is an additional point to be made here. The term \"offshore tax haven\" or offshore company, uses \"offshore\" very loosely. America has its own tax havens \u2014 a lot of them.\n\nAs James Henry, a senior adviser to the Tax Justice Network, wrote in a 2012 report, first reported by the Washington Post, offshore can also mean right at home for Americans looking to protect their assets:\n\n\"The term offshore refers not so much to the actual physical location of private assets or liabilities, but to nominal, hyper-portable, multi-jurisdictional, often quite temporary locations of networks of legal and quasi-legal entities and arrangements that manage and control private wealth,\" Henry wrote.\n\nNamely, Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, and New York are all tax-friendly for keeping financial assets, even when compared to the more iconically known tax havens like the Bahamas or Panama.\n\n9) Okay, so a lot of data was just released and important people were named. Is anything actually going to change now that we know this?\n\nIt's true this sort of tax-avoidance scheming has been going on forever; it has long been documented that people try to find every possible way to pay fewer taxes.\n\nBut as the stories continue to unfold some things have started to change. There were the immediate reactions: Iceland's prime minister resigned out of embarrassment, British Prime Minister David Cameron, who released his personal financial assets in an attempt at transparency \u2014 a promise he had made earlier on as prime minister and is now under enormous pressure to uphold \u2014 will also host an anti-corruption summit in the coming month, which will surely discuss the Panama Papers' findings.\n\nThe European Union's Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs Pierre Moscovici also threatened sanctions against Panama and other tax havens if they do not close their tax loopholes, according to the Associated Press.\n\nPanama, which has not cooperated with international tax issues in the past, has responded to the strong international outrage, forming an international committee of experts to recommend best transparency practices for Panama's offshore financial industry.\n\n\"The Panamanian government, via our foreign ministry, will create an independent commission of domestic and international experts ... to evaluate our current practices and propose the adoption of measures that we will share with other countries of the world to strengthen the transparency of the financial and legal systems,\" President Juan Carlos Varela said in a televised address after the papers were released.\n\nThere have been a lot of calls for action. Now it is a waiting game to see if changes will be implemented."}
{"text":"Hours before the rock band Coheed and Cambria was scheduled to perform at the Comcast Center in Mansfield yesterday, police arrested bass player Michael Todd and charged him with robbing a nearby pharmacy of painkillers.\n\nThe Attleboro Police Department said in a prepared statement that officers responded to a Walgreens Pharmacy about 1 p.m. Sunday after Todd, 30, of Anaheim, Calif., allegedly demanded Oxycontin and threatened pharmacists with a fake bomb.\n\nHe absconded with six bottles of pain pills, police said.\n\n\u201cThe male suspect fled behind the building,\u2019\u2019 the statement said.\n\n\u201cHe was seen by a passerby getting into a taxi cab.\u2019\u2019\n\nPolice said they contacted a local cab company, which reported picking up a fare near the Walgreens minutes after the robbery.\n\nThe cab service told police the taxi was headed to the Comcast Center, where Coheed and Cambria were slated to open for the 1990s rock band Soundgarden last evening.\n\nAttleborough police said they noticed the Mansfield Police Department, which sent officers to intercept the cab.\n\nTodd was arrested at the concert hall and he will face charges of armed robbery and possession of a controlled substance, the statement said.\n\nTodd was jailed in Attleboro on $10,000 cash bail while his bandmates performed without him.\n\nNew York-based Coheed and Cambria said in a statement on its website that it will not cancel any shows and plans to continue a tour of the Northeast and Canada with another bass player.\n\n\u201cTodd was arrested today on what we consider very serious charges and therefore he will not be finishing up the current tour,\u2019\u2019 the band wrote on its site.\n\n\u201cWe are surprised, to say the least, and will address the situation with Michael after the tour.\u2019\u2019\n\nAlexander C. Kaufman can be reached at akaufman@globe.com.\n\n\u00a9 Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company."}
{"text":"MEMBERS of the clergy would face jail for failing to report knowledge of sexual abuse gained during confession, with pressure growing to lift the confidentiality laws that protect them.\n\nExemptions exist for members of the clergy, medical workers and social workers among a small number of professions in NSW if they conceal knowledge of a crime from authorities if it was gained in their professional duties.\n\nYesterday Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott added their voices to calls that Catholic priests not be exempt from having to report child abuse to police if they hear it in the confessional.\n\nMPs said the forthcoming royal commission on sexual abuse should recommend that state criminal codes be harmonised to mandate priests to go to the police in child sexual abuse matters."}
{"text":"[Editor's note: Ohio State has asked us to remove the video of OSU's QBs at the scrimmage from publication. Our apologies.]\n\nHow did Ohio State's top-three quarterbacks -- J.T. Barrett, Joe Burrow and Dwayne Haskins -- look during Saturday's student appreciation day scrimmage?\n\nIn a word, they were sharp. Not perfect by any means or even close, but it was an encouraging day for the Buckeye QBs.\n\nBurrow is the clear backup to Barrett, but Haskins is also looking good. Barrett, Burrow and Haskins were all wearing black no-contact jerseys, while Tate Martell was live.\n\nFor much more on how the QBs performed during the scrimmage between the offense and defense, which ended in a 16-16 tie, check out our practice thread that was posted earlier on Saturday.\n\nWhat's next for the Buckeyes? Make sure you're in the loop -- take five seconds to sign up for our FREE Buckeyes newsletter now!\n\nWant the latest scoops and news on the Buckeyes? Try our 7-DAY FREE TRIAL AND BECOME A BUCKNUTS SUBSCRIBER!"}
{"text":"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with President Shimon Peres on Saturday evening and officially asked him for an extension in order to form the new government. Peres granted the request.\n\nIn a short press conference held in the President's Residence following the meeting, Netanyahu criticized what he called the \"boycott\" imposed by certain parties on others.\n\nRelated stories:\n\n\"The main reason I have not been able to finish forming the coalition until now is \u2013 and I'll say this as plainly as possible \u2013 the fact that certain parties are boycotting others.\n\n\"There's a boycott against a sector in Israel and this goes against my views,\" he said, in thinly veiled criticism of the political pact between Yesh Atid and Habayit Hayehudi, which states that they will not join a coalition that includes the haredi parties.\n\nNetanyahu and Peres (Photo: GPO)\n\n\"I am doing everything within my power to unite the people. I think that we, as Jews who have suffered from bans, we cry out in protest when Israel is shunned in international forums \u2013 as we should. We protest when settlers in Judea and Samaria have to deal with product boycotts \u2013 as we should. So the people who have to be the most sensitive to this issue are the settlers.\n\n\"Our history,\" he continued, \"Is riddled with tragedies caused by unfounded hatred and internal fighting. Today, when we look around and see the myriad of challenges around us \u2013 security challenges, the challenges posed by the need to hold a responsible peace process \u2013 I believe these challenges require that we stand united, not divided.\"\n\n'Democracy takes effort'\n\n\"After seeking legal advice and hearing how the negotiations are going and what you have done so far, I believe you are the man who should form the government,\" Peres told Netanyahu in the press conference.\n\n\"I was glad to learn that you believe that you have a good chance of forming a coalition within the next two weeks. I have no doubt that Israel needs a stable government that would be able to deal with the social and security challenges ahead.\n\n\"We are a democracy and democracy takes effort. I hereby grant you a two-week extension to form the coalition and bid you good luck,\" the president concluded.\n\nThe customary 28-day timeframe afforded to the prime minister after the Likud's election win, elapsed over the weekend.\n\nIsrael's Election Act, as well as Basic Law: The Government, state that the winning candidate is allowed to petition the president for an additional 14 days to complete the task, should the initial timeframe prove insufficient.\n\nAccording to the law, should Netanyahu fail to form a government at the end of his 14-day extension, Peres could task another candidate with the responsibility.\n\nIn the event that the president does ask another candidate to form the government and he or she fails as well, a new general elections would be called.\n\nNaftali Bennett was quick response to Netanyahu's criticism, via his Facebook page, saying it was the Likud-Beiteinu's negotiation team that is responsible for the disconnect.\n\n\"We expected to be the first, and most natural, partner to enter Netanyahu's government. We recommended that he be tasked with forming the government sans any preconditions. The Likud, however, sent us a clear message \u2013 'there is no way the religious-Zionism party will be part of the government.'\"\n\nDespite the mutual gabbing, Netanyahu and Bennett have agreed to meet on Sunday in another attempt to resolve the stalemate plaguing the coalition negotiations.\n\nFollow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter"}
{"text":"Graeme Watt enlightens us on the appeal of the trainer festival as Laces Out heads back to Camp & Furnace.\n\nThis Saturday sees Laces Out return to Camp and Furnace for its Biannual trainer festival, and having spent the best part of 3 years at the venue, they seem to have gotten the whole thing down to a fine art.\n\nNow trainer festivals probably seem a little far fetched to most, they have been going on up and down the country for the past 8 years or so with Crepe City dominating the footwear scene down south and Laces Out up north.\n\nThings may have slowed down with level of top quality releases in the shoe world, but that doesn\u2019t seem to stop the punters heading to Laces Out, as other than Carlos store out in South America, you\u2019ll be hard pressed to find unworn vintage Adidas anywhere but the Scouse trainer festival which seems to make it a favourite for those travelling.\n\nFor those oblivious to trainer culture, you can expect to find a wide variation of footwear, streetwear, local traders and exclusive previews from the likes of Adidas. Previous events have included sneak peeks of the Adidas Spezial range, early screenings of brand new sneaker channels before hitting social platforms, live music throughout the day with some guest appearances from guests such as Bobbito Garcia, Kish Kash, Neal Heard and Lecky Legs.\n\nThis weekends event also boasts an exclusive preview of Neal Heard\u2019s The Art of the Football Shirt exhibition showcasing classic football shirts from over the years.\n\nBoasting a wide selection of entertainment including No Fakin\u2019 DJ\u2019s, DJ Pooky and SUEDEBROWN along side stalls packed with footwear, Laces Out is pretty much the ideal place to spend your Football free Saturday with family & friends."}
{"text":"Occupy New Hampshire takes over White Park\n\nBy MATTHEW SPOLAR\n\nMonitor staff\n\nLast modified: 10\/10\/2011 12:00:00 AM\n\nWhite Park became ground zero of the Occupy New Hampshire movement yesterday, as residents from across the state descended on Concord to decide how to make their voices heard in a fashion similar to the ongoing Wall Street protests.\n\nUsing a consensus-building direct democracy format, about 100 people decided to begin an occupation of Veterans Park in Manchester at noon Saturday. The protesters, who intend to meet for a daily general assembly and occupy the park in shifts, will join a growing movement concerned about the influence of money and big business on government.\n\n\"I've been to protests before, but this is the most exciting movement I've seen so far,\" said Matthew Richards, a 20-year-old student at the University of New Hampshire in Manchester.\n\nOne of the most vocal organizers yesterday was Brett Chamberlin, a Durham native who is a junior at New York University. Chamberlin has been attending the Wall Street occupation since it began Sept. 17. With Chamberlin's direction, the group was organized into committees that will meet at the park to discuss topics like education, labor, art and religion.\n\n\"So far, the consensus at Occupy Wall Street has been that we're hesitating to make official demands because a movement doesn't have demands necessarily. We want it to be seen more as a movement,\" as opposed to a protest, he said. Occupy events have now sprung up in cities across the country.\n\nAlso, making demands at this point might turn people off from joining, he said.\n\n\"I think we're there more to respond to the problems and recognize that things are messed up before we necessarily try to channel that into demands,\" he said. \"It's complicated.\"\n\nKen Roos, first vice president of the State Employees' Association, was active in the discussion about how to go about the occupation. He said corporate profits go into off-shore tax shelters and private jets for CEOs instead of hiring more employees or improving employee benefits.\n\n\"The 1 percent controls everything that's going on in the country, and has had a negative impact not just on the 99 percent but the entire country,\" he said. \"As much as the government tries to follow the rules that the corporations are saying - as far as, 'provide us with tax breaks and things like that and we'll create jobs' - they're not creating them. At least not in the United States.\"\n\nLeah Wolczko, an unemployed teacher in Manchester, first became politically involved through the anti-tax Tea Party movement. Present yesterday were hardcore communists and hardcore anarchists, she said, and \"even those divergent positions can come to an agreement on what needs to change immediately.\"\n\nWolczko said the Tea Party movement, now associated with Republican politicians, and the Occupy movement, thought to be sparked by a more left-leaning sentiment, are \"the same thing to me.\"\n\n\"The Tea Party at its heart was against unfair advantage and big government that gives it and creates the inequalities,\" she said. \"This is a very diverse group politically, and not everybody agrees on how the inequality has come about. But we all agree that it's here.\"\n\nEd Cunningham, the 62-year-old chairman of the Kensington Democrats, said the people in both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement have similar concerns, but go about it in different ways.\n\n\"I think (the Tea Party was) co-opted by the Republican Party to win an election,\" he said. \"I don't think you can push these people anywhere they don't want to go.\"\n\nCunningham, toting a towering American flag, said the meeting reminded him of a \"constitutional congress.\"\n\n\"This is amazing,\" he said. \"This is what it was.\"\n\nSherry Gould, a 57-year-old social worker from Warner, said she loved watching people \"in live-free-or-die (New Hampshire), one of the most politicalized states in the world, rise to the challenge and be able to put their partisan differences aside, find common ground.\"\n\nGould said she came out because of \"my children and my grandchildren and this crappy, crappy world that we're handing them.\"\n\n\"It breaks my heart to see the lack of opportunity for young people,\" she said. \"All these people using their skills to build this movement are building a resume. Even if they can't get a job.\"\n\nLeah Woods, a 39-year old Portsmouth resident who teaches woodworking, said she is worried that in politics, \"increasingly allegiances seem to be more towards corporations and more towards organizations that have a lot of money.\" Figuring out where the problem starts is a difficult issue the Occupy movement can begin to address, she said.\n\n\"It's a really big, abstract issue that cannot be pinpointed to any one particular company or person,\" she said. \"I think there's so many factors that contribute to this place that the country is going, where people who have are on a path to have more and people who don't have are on a path to have less.\"\n\nMatt Lawrence, an unemployed 27-year-old from Manchester, said he is hoping the Occupy movement can make \"our elected officials actually represent us again,\" in Washington.\n\n\"The time and the place for calling your local politician seems to have come and gone, and it seems like it doesn't really do anything,\" he said.\n\nCurtis Russell, a 30-year-old Manchester resident who described himself as an individualist-anarchist, wasn't pleased with the hours spent yesterday trying to structure Occupy New Hampshire. Mimicking the Wall Street protests, where megaphones have been banned, the meeting used an active listening format where speakers paused every couple words as the crowd repeated what they said to make sure all had heard.\n\n\"It's a meeting to establish bureaucracy and I'm more interested in destroying bureaucracy,\" he said. \"I think it's a waste of time in that respect . . . these people are still hacking at the limbs of a tree and they're ignoring the roots.\"\n\nThe Occupy movement is too focused on reforming government without trying to get rid of it, he said.\n\n\"Arguably, global corporations are a huge detriment to mankind but they are unable to exist without their partner, the state,\" he said.\n\nAndrew Boyd, 42, of Concord said he came out to see what was going on, but wasn't ready to associate himself with the group.\n\n\"I'm not sure about who they are yet,\" he said.\n\nHowever, Boyd said it's always good for people to gather publicly, at any time.\n\n\"That's important - our right to gather is in need of exercise,\" he said.\n\n(Matthew Spolar can be reached at 369-3309 or mspolar@cmonitor.com.)"}
{"text":"Abortion may be a key issue for evangelical Christian voters, but Samantha Bee says that wasn't always the case.\n\nOn Monday night, the \"Full Frontal\" host went back in time to the late 1970s to explain how the issue was manufactured by power-hungry leaders of the religious right and then legitimized by the Republican Party.\n\n\"Last week, we took a look at the religious right, those coveted evangelical voters that conservatives spent decades pandering to only to be dumped just before November prom for a heretical billionaire bully who only says the word 'God' when he is ejaculating on a pile of money,\" said Bee.\n\n\"Many people think the new religious right arose as a response to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision,\" she added. \"But that's not true.\"\n\nBee played a clip showing Dartmouth religion professor Randall Balmer revealing how leaders of the religious right held a conference call in 1979 to discuss which issues they should politicize. One member suggested abortion.\n\n\"Wait, were they founding a movement or deciding what toppings to get on their pizza?\" asked Bee. \"Now they just needed to tell the rest of us that abortion was bad.\"\n\nBee then spoke to filmmaker Frank Schaeffer, the son of prominent Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer, who produced propaganda videos (such as the one below) to promote the pro-life movement.\n\nIt was to become \"the single greatest regret of my life,\" Schaeffer said.\n\n\"Most evangelical leaders didn't want anything to do with [the issue of abortion]. They wanted to just preach Jesus,\" said Schaeffer. \"They thought politics was dirty. They didn't want anything to do with it. We had to talk them into it.\"\n\nSchaeffer said the religious right's anti-abortion agenda was legitimized with the help of Jack Kemp, who went onto become President George H. W. Bush\u2019s housing secretary.\n\n\"(Kemp) brought in 50 senators and congressmen including Henry Hyde and Bob Dole and a bunch of other people and gave it respectability,\" Schaeffer said. And the rest, as they say, is history."}
{"text":"The 1996 Manchester bombing was an attack carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on Saturday 15 June 1996. The IRA detonated a 1,500-kilogram (3,300 lb) Lorry bomb on Corporation Street in the centre of Manchester, England. The biggest bomb detonated in Great Britain since World War II, it targeted the city's infrastructure and economy and caused devastating damage, estimated by insurers at \u00a3700 million (equivalent to \u00a31.3 billion in 2018) \u2013 only surpassed by the 2001 September 11 attacks and the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing in terms of financial cost.[3][4]\n\nThe IRA had sent telephoned warnings about 90 minutes before the bomb detonated. At least 75,000 people were evacuated from the area,[5] but the bomb squad were unable to defuse the bomb in time. More than 200 people were injured but there were no fatalities[6] despite the strength of the bomb, which has been largely credited to the fast response of emergency services in evacuating the city centre before the bomb could explode.[7][8] At the time, England was hosting the Euro '96 football championships and a Russia vs Germany match was to take place in Manchester the following day.\n\nAlthough Manchester had been targeted by the IRA before, it had not been subjected to an attack on this scale. In February 1996, the IRA had ended its seventeen-month ceasefire with a large truck bomb attack on London's Canary Wharf financial district, though the 3,300-pound bomb of Manchester was three times the size of the Canary Wharf bomb.[5] The Manchester bombing was condemned by the British and Irish governments and U.S. President Bill Clinton. Five days after the blast, the IRA issued a statement from Dublin in which it claimed responsibility, but regretted causing injury to civilians.[9]\n\nSeveral buildings near the explosion were damaged beyond repair and had to be demolished, while many more were closed for months for structural repairs. Most of the rebuilding work was completed by the end of 1999, at a cost of \u00a31.2 billion, although redevelopment continued until 2005. The perpetrators of the attack have not been caught, and Greater Manchester Police have conceded it is unlikely that anyone will be charged in connection with the bombing.[10] The bombing has however been credited for starting the city's mass regeneration and turning Manchester into a modern British \"powerhouse\" city with above national average economic growth in the 20 years following the bombing.[6][11][12]\n\nBackground [ edit ]\n\nFrom 1970 the Provisional Irish Republican Army was carrying out an armed campaign aimed ultimately at bringing about a united Ireland. As well as attacking military and political targets, it also bombed infrastructure and commercial targets in Northern Ireland and England. It believed that by damaging the economy and causing severe disruption, it could pressure the British government to negotiate a withdrawal from Northern Ireland.[13] Manchester had been the target of earlier IRA bombs. Firebombs damaged city centre businesses in 1973 and 1974, for which a man was later imprisoned. In April 1974, a bomb exploded at Manchester Magistrates' Court, injuring twelve. In 1975, IRA bomb factories were found in Greater Manchester and five men were imprisoned for planning attacks in North West England.[14] On 4 December 1992, the IRA detonated two small bombs in Manchester city centre, forcing police to evacuate thousands of shoppers. More than 60 were hurt by shattered glass and the blasts cost an estimated \u00a310 million in damage and business losses.[15]\n\nThe Downing Street Declaration of 1993 allowed Sinn F\u00e9in, a political party associated with the IRA,[16] to participate in all-party peace negotiations on condition that the IRA called a ceasefire. The IRA called a ceasefire on 31 August 1994. John Major's government, dependent on Ulster Unionist Party votes, then began insisting that the IRA must fully disarm before there could be any all-party negotiations. The IRA saw this as a demand for total surrender and believed the British were unwilling to hold negotiations.[18] It ended its ceasefire on 9 February 1996 when it detonated a powerful truck bomb in Canary Wharf, one of the two financial districts of London. The blast killed two people and caused an estimated \u00a3150 million worth of damage.[14] The IRA then planted five other devices in London within the space of 10 weeks.[19]\n\nThe IRA planned to carry out a similar bombing in Manchester. The city may have been chosen because it was one of the host cities of the Euro '96 football tournament, attended by visitors and media organisations from all over Europe, guaranteeing the IRA what Margaret Thatcher called the \"oxygen of publicity\". A Russia vs Germany match was to take place at Old Trafford in Manchester a day after the bombing. The year before, Manchester had also won its bid to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games,[21] at the time the biggest multi-sport event ever to be staged in Britain.\n\nOn 10 June 1996, multi-party negotiations began in Belfast. Sinn F\u00e9in had been elected to take part but were barred because the IRA had not resumed its ceasefire or agreed to disarm.[23]\n\nDetails of the bombing [ edit ]\n\nThe IRA's South Armagh Brigade was tasked with planning and carrying out the attack. It had also been responsible for the Canary Wharf bombing in February, and the Bishopsgate bombing in 1993. Its members mixed the explosives in Ireland and shipped them by freight from Dublin to England. In London, the bomb was assembled and loaded into the back of a red and white Ford Cargo van. On 14 June it was driven north towards Manchester, accompanied by a Ford Granada which served as a \"scout car\".[24]\n\nDiscovery [ edit ]\n\nStills taken from India 99 , a Greater Manchester Police helicopter, showing the Ford van moments before the blast, the explosion taking place, and the resulting mushroom cloud over the city, dwarfing the adjacent 23-storey high-rise, Arndale House.\n\nAt about 9:20 am on Saturday 15 June 1996, the Ford van was parked on Corporation Street, outside the Marks & Spencer store, near the Arndale Centre.[1] After setting the bomb's timer, two men \u2013 wearing hooded jackets, baseball caps and sunglasses \u2013 left the vehicle and walked to Cathedral Street, where a third man picked them up in the Ford Granada.[24] The truck had been parked on double yellow lines with its hazard lights flashing.[25] Within three minutes a traffic warden had issued the vehicle with a parking ticket and called for its removal. At about 9:40 am, Granada Studios on Quay Street received a telephone call claiming that there was a bomb at the corner of Corporation Street and Cannon Street and that it would explode in one hour. The caller had an Irish accent and gave an IRA codeword so that police would know the threat was genuine.[1][27] Four other telephoned warnings were sent to television\/radio stations, newspapers and a hospital.[28][29]\n\nThe first policeman to arrive on the scene noticed wires running from the van's dashboard through a hole into the back and reported that he had found the bomb. Forensic experts later estimated that the bomb weighed 1,500\u20131,600 kg (3,300\u20133,500 lb)[30] and was a mixture of semtex, a military-grade plastic explosive, and ammonium nitrate fertiliser, a cheap and easily obtainable explosive used extensively by the IRA.[32] Components of what may have been a tremble trigger were also found later, designed to detonate the bomb if it was tampered with.\n\nEvacuation [ edit ]\n\nAt 10:00 am, there were an estimated 75,000\u201380,000 people shopping and working in the vicinity. An evacuation of the area was undertaken by police officers from Bootle Street police station, supplemented by officers drafted into Manchester to control the football crowds. The police were helped by security guards from local shops.[1][34]\n\nOne group worked to move people away from the bomb while another, assisted by firefighters and security guards, established a continuously expanding cordon around the area to prevent entry.[1] By 11:10 am the cordon was at the greatest extent that available manpower would permit, about a quarter of a mile (400 m) from the truck and 1.5 miles (2.4 km) in circumference.\n\nExplosion [ edit ]\n\nThe bomb squad arrived from their Liverpool base at 10:46 am and attempted to defuse the bomb using a remote-controlled device, but they ran out of time. The bomb exploded at 11:17 am, causing an estimated \u00a3700 million (\u00a31.3 billion as of 2018)[37] of damage and affecting a third of the city centre's retail space. Marks & Spencer, the sky bridge connecting it with the Arndale Centre, and neighbouring buildings were destroyed.[1] It was the largest peacetime bomb ever detonated in Great Britain,[14] and the blast created a mushroom cloud which rose 300 metres (1,000 feet) from the ground.[38] The explosion could be heard up to 15 miles away and left a crater 15 metres wide.[25] Glass and masonry were thrown into the air, and behind the police cordon \u2013 up to 1\u2044 2 mi (800 m) away, people were showered by falling debris.[39] There were no fatalities, but 212 people were injured. A search of the area for casualties was confused by mannequins blasted from shop windows, which were sometimes mistaken for bodies. Hospitals across Greater Manchester were made ready to receive those injured in the blast.[1] The police commandeered a Metrolink tram to take 50 of the casualties to North Manchester General Hospital, which treated 79 in total; a further 80 were cared for at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, and many others were treated in the streets by ambulance crews assisted by doctors and nurses who happened to be in the city centre that morning.\n\nReaction [ edit ]\n\nThe bombing was condemned by British Prime Minister John Major and his government, by the opposition, and by individual members of parliament (MPs) as a \"sickening\", \"callous\" and \"barbaric\" terrorist attack.[41][42] Early on, Major stated that, \"This explosion looks like the work of the IRA. It is the work of a few fanatics and ... causes absolute revulsion in Ireland as it does here\".[43] Sinn F\u00e9in was criticised by Taoiseach John Bruton for being \"struck mute\" on the attack in the immediate aftermath. Bruton described the bombing as \"a slap in the face to people who've been trying, against perhaps their better instincts, to give Sinn F\u00e9in a chance to show that they could persuade the IRA to reinstate the ceasefire\".[43] The President of the United States, Bill Clinton, stated he was \"deeply outraged by the bomb explosion\" and joined Bruton and Major in \"utterly condemning this brutal and cowardly act of terrorism\".[44] Sinn F\u00e9in President, Gerry Adams, stated that he was \"shocked and saddened\" by the bombing. He insisted that his party was committed to achieving a peace settlement and argued \"it is sheer folly to return to the old agenda of excluding Sinn F\u00e9in and seeking to isolate republicans\".[45] On 20 June 1996, the IRA claimed responsibility for the bombing, and stated that it \"sincerely regretted\" causing injury to civilians.[16] The IRA statement continued:\n\nThe British Government has spent the last 22 months since August '94 trying to force the surrender of IRA weapons and the defeat of the republican struggle. We are still prepared to enhance the democratic peace process ... but if there is to be a lasting peace ... then the British Government must put the democratic rights of all of the people of Ireland before its own party political self interest.[46]\n\nThe bombing came five days after the beginning of the peace talks in Belfast, and represented the IRA's opposition to talks which excluded republicans.[47] The attack was part of a political strategy by the IRA to be included in negotiations on the IRA's own terms.[48] According to historian Richard English: \"What they were doing with their return to bombings like the Manchester bomb was saying, 'We can still return to war if we want to. We can still put off a huge bomb in your cities and devastate them and therefore you have to deal with us'\".[49]\n\nIn an effort to allay fears that Manchester's considerable Irish community might be subjected to reprisal attacks, Councillors Richard Leese and Martin Pagel \u2013 leader and deputy leader of Manchester City Council respectively \u2013 made a public visit to the Irish World Heritage Centre in Cheetham Hill. In the event there were only a few incidents, the most serious of which occurred on the evening of the bomb when a gang of ten men rampaged through an Irish-themed bar in the centre of Middleton shouting the Ulster loyalist slogan \"No surrender\" and smashing furniture and windows. Seven days after the bombing, Manchester Council held a 'family fun day' in front of the Town Hall in Albert Square to encourage shoppers and visitors back into the city centre, the first of a \"series of events and entertainments\". The Euro '96 football match between Russia and Germany at Old Trafford went ahead as planned the day following the bombing, after the stadium had been heavily guarded overnight and carefully searched; the game, which Germany won 3\u20130, was watched by a capacity crowd of 50,700.\n\nInvestigation [ edit ]\n\nIn an effort to trace the route of the Ford van, police examined CCTV footage from every major road and motorway taken in England within two days of the bombing. Footage revealed that the van was driven south along the M1 motorway into London on the Friday afternoon before the attack. It was seen again heading north along the motorway at 7:40 pm, accompanied by the Ford Granada. Detectives surmised that the van had been loaded with explosives in London and that the Granada was intended to be the getaway vehicle. The truck was last recorded travelling east along the M62 motorway towards Manchester at 8:31 am on the morning of the explosion.\n\nPolice in Manchester were aware that their Metropolitan Police colleagues in London were investigating a suspected IRA unit based in the capital, and wondered whether the London unit was responsible for the Manchester bombing. On 15 July, Metropolitan police arrested six men suspected of IRA membership: Donal Gannon, John Crawley, Gerard Hanratty, Robert Morrow, Patrick Martin, and Francis Rafferty. Each was tried and convicted of \"conspiracy to cause explosions at National Grid electricity stations\", and sentenced to 35 years in jail.[54] Police in Manchester meanwhile worked to establish if the men were also responsible for the Manchester bomb.\n\nTheir investigation was led by Detective Chief Inspector Gordon Mutch of the Greater Manchester Police (GMP), \"astonishingly ... the only person ever charged with a criminal offence in connection with the Manchester bomb\". The van's last registered owner told police that he had sold it to a dealer in Peterborough, who had in turn sold the van on to a man calling himself Tom Fox, two weeks before the bombing. After the purchase price was delivered in cash by a taxi driver, the dealer was instructed to take the van to a nearby lorry park, and leave it there with the keys and documents hidden inside.\n\nOn checking records of telephone calls made to the dealer, the police found that some had been made from a mobile phone registered in Ireland, and on further checking the records of that phone it appeared that the calls were made from locations consistent with the known whereabouts of the Ford truck. One call was to a known IRA member. The phone was last used at 9:23 am on the morning of the bombing, just three minutes after the bombers had parked their truck in Corporation Street. On 27 June, the phone's registered owner reported that it had been stolen 17 days earlier, but the police felt they had gathered enough evidence to bring a prosecution against the six IRA men held in London.\n\nAt a meeting attended by the commander of Special Branch in Manchester, a GMP assistant chief constable and a \"senior officer\" from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), it was decided, for reasons never made public, not to present the findings of the investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the body responsible for undertaking criminal prosecutions in England. The three may have felt that as the IRA suspects were already in police custody they were no longer a threat, or that to pursue the case against them may have jeopardised ongoing undercover operations. It was not until 1998 that the police finally sent their file to the CPS, who decided not to prosecute.\n\nLeak [ edit ]\n\nEarly in 1999, Steve Panter, chief crime reporter for the Manchester Evening News, leaked classified Special Branch documents naming those suspected of the bombing. The documents also revealed that the man suspected of organising the attack had visited Manchester shortly after the bombing and been under covert police surveillance as he toured the devastated city centre before returning to his home in South Armagh. Suspicion fell on Mutch as the source of the leaked documents after an analysis of mobile phone records placed both him and Panter at the same hotel in Skipton, North Yorkshire, about 40 miles (64 km) from Manchester on the same evening.\n\nOn 21 April 1999, the Manchester Evening News named a man it described as \"a prime suspect in the 1996 Manchester bomb plot\".[60] The newspaper reported that the file sent by Greater Manchester Police to the Crown Prosecution Service contained the sentence: \"It is the opinion of the investigating officers of GMP that there is sufficient evidence to charge [him] with being a party in a conspiracy to cause explosions in the United Kingdom.\"[61] The man denied any involvement.[62] The Attorney General wrote in a letter to a local MP that the advice given to the CPS by an independent lawyer was that \"there was not a case to answer on the evidence available ... a judge would stop the case\": the Attorney General further wrote that the decision not to prosecute was not influenced by the government. The newspaper also identified the six men arrested in London on 15 July as having planned the attack.[63][64] By July 2000 all six had been released under the terms of the 1998 Belfast Agreement.\n\nAs of 2018, Panter and Mutch are the only people to have been arrested in connection with the bombing. Mutch was tried for \"misconduct in a public office\" during an 11-day trial held in January 2002, but was acquitted. During the trial Panter was found in contempt of court for refusing to reveal his source, an offence punishable by a term of imprisonment without the right of appeal. Greater Manchester Police announced in 2006 that there was no realistic chance of convicting those responsible for the bombing.[68]\n\nReconstruction [ edit ]\n\nAbout twelve buildings in the immediate vicinity of the explosion were severely damaged. Overall, 530,000 square feet (49,000 m2) of retail space and 610,000 square feet (57,000 m2) of office space were put out of use.[69] Insurers paid out \u00a3411 million (\u00a3800 million as of 2018)[37] in damages for what was at the time one of the most expensive man-made disasters ever,[70] and there was considerable under-insurance.[69] Victims of the bombing received a total of \u00a31,145,971 in compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority; one individual received \u00a3146,524, the largest amount awarded as a result of this incident.[71]\n\nClose to the location of the blast, 2009\n\nAccording to Home Office statistics, an estimated 400 businesses within half a mile (0.8 km) of the blast were affected, 40% of which did not recover.[72] The heaviest damage was sustained by the three buildings nearest the bomb: Michael House, comprising a Marks & Spencer store and a six-storey office block; Longridge House, offices for Royal and Sun Alliance, an insurance company; and the Arndale Centre, a shopping mall.[73] Michael House was deemed beyond economic repair and demolished. Marks & Spencer took the opportunity to acquire and demolish the adjacent Longridge House, using the enlarged site for the world's biggest branch of the store.[69] The company's fortunes changed during construction, and Selfridges subsequently co-occupied the building; Marks & Spencer leased part of the Lewis's store in the interim.[73] The frontage of the Arndale was badly damaged and was removed in a remodelling of that part of the city centre.[69]\n\nComing to Manchester [after the bombing] was a journey I shall never forget. I sat on the train obviously deeply shocked and horrified. I knew that questions would be asked about what we were going to do; what is the right solution. Then I knew what the right solution was \u2013 to see this event, horrific as it was, as an opportunity and, no mucking about, we must do things on the grand scale and to the best quality we can. Michael Heseltine, then-Deputy Prime Minister\n\nThe glass domes of the Corn Exchange and the Royal Exchange were blown in. The landlord of the Corn Exchange invoked a force majeure condition in the lease to evict all tenants, and the building was converted into a shopping centre. The dome of the Royal Exchange shifted in the blast; its reconstruction took two and a half years and cost \u00a332 million, paid for by the National Lottery.[78]\n\nThe possibility of rebuilding parts of the city centre was raised within days of the bomb. On 26 June 1996, Michael Heseltine, the Deputy Prime Minister, announced an international competition for designs of the redevelopment of the bomb-affected area. Bids were received from 27 entrants, five of whom were invited to submit designs in a second round. It was announced on 5 November 1996 that the winning design was one by a consortium headed by EDAW.\n\nRedevelopment [ edit ]\n\nNew security safeguards were included in the redevelopment of the city centre including retractable bollards and pedestrianised streets.\n\nMuch of the 1960s redevelopment of Manchester's city centre was unpopular with residents. Market Street, near the explosion and at that time the second-busiest shopping street in the UK, was considered by some commentators a \"fearful\" place, to be \"avoided like the plague\". Until Margaret Thatcher's third consecutive election victory in 1987, the staunchly Labour-controlled Manchester Council believed that Manchester's regeneration should be funded solely by public money, despite the government's insistence on only funding schemes with a significant element of private investment. Graham Stringer, leader of Manchester City Council, later admitted that after the 1987 General Election result \"there was no get out of jail card. We had gambled on Labour winning the General Election and we lost.\" Thatcher's victory effectively put paid to Manchester's \"socialist experiment\", and Stringer shortly afterwards wrote a letter of capitulation to Nicholas Ridley, then Secretary of State for the Environment, saying, \"in a nutshell; OK, you win, we'd like to work together with you\".\n\nEfforts at improvement before the bombing had in some respects made matters worse, cutting off the area north of the Arndale Centre \u2013 the exterior of which was widely unloved \u2013 from the rest of the city centre. A large building nearby, now redeveloped as The Printworks and formerly occupied by the Daily Mirror newspaper, had been unoccupied since 1987. Many locals therefore considered that \"the bomb was the best thing that ever happened to Manchester\",[85] as it cleared the way for redevelopment of the dysfunctional city centre, a view also expressed in 2007 by Terry Rooney, MP for Bradford North. The leader of the Liberal Democrat opposition on Manchester City Council, Simon Ashley, responded that \"I take exception to his [Rooney's] comments about the IRA bomb. No one who was in the city on that day, who lost their jobs or was scared witless or injured by the blast, would say the bomb was the best thing to happen to Manchester\".[86] Sir Gerald Kaufman, MP for Manchester Gorton, stated that the bomb provided the opportunity for redeveloping Manchester city centre, although it was not fully exploited. \"The bomb was obviously bad but from a redevelopment point of view, it was a lost opportunity. While the area around St Ann's Square and Deansgate is not disagreeable, if you compare it with Birmingham and its exciting development, we've got nothing to touch that in Manchester\".[86] Howard Bernstein, chief executive of Manchester City Council, has been quoted as saying \"people say the bomb turned out to be a great thing for Manchester. That's rubbish.\" There was already substantial regeneration and redevelopment taking place in the city centre before the bombing, in support of the Manchester bid for the 2000 Summer Olympics, its second Olympic bid. Tom Bloxham, chairman of property development group Urban Splash and of the Arts Council England (North West), agreed with Bernstein that the bomb attack was not the trigger for the large-scale redevelopment that has taken place in Manchester since the early 1990s:\n\npillar box that withstood the bomb blast. A memorial brass plaque commemorates the 1996 bomb.\n\nFor me the turning point for Manchester came before the bomb ... it was the second Olympic Games bid [in 1992] when we lost but the city suddenly had a realisation. There was a huge party in Castlefield and people grasped the idea that Manchester should no longer consider itself in competition with the likes of Barnsley and Stockport. It was now up against Barcelona, Los Angeles and Sydney and its aspirations increased accordingly.\n\nMemorials [ edit ]\n\nA pillar box that survived the blast, despite being yards from the explosion, now carries a small brass plaque recording the bombing. It was removed during construction and redevelopment work, and returned to its original spot when Corporation Street reopened. The plaque reads:\n\nThis postbox remained standing almost undamaged on June 15th 1996 when this area was devastated by a bomb. The box was removed during the rebuilding of the city centre and was returned to its original site on\n\nNovember 22nd 1999\n\nA Thanksgiving service for the \"Miracle of Manchester\" was held at Manchester Cathedral on 24 July 2002, to coincide with the arrival of the Commonwealth Games baton, attended by Queen Elizabeth II and The Duke of Edinburgh. At 11:17 am on 15 June 2006, a candle was lit at a memorial held at Manchester Cathedral to mark the tenth anniversary of the bombing.[90]\n\nSee also [ edit ]\n\nReferences [ edit ]\n\nCitations [ edit ]\n\nBibliography [ edit ]\n\nFurther reading [ edit ]"}
{"text":"Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of \u201cThe Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform \u2013 Why We Need It and What It Will Take.\u201d\n\nMuch of the motivation for deficit reduction, a goal shared by policy makers across the political spectrum, is the belief that deficits consume the nation\u2019s seed corn. That is, deficits represent negative saving. Because saving is presumed to be the key determinant of long-term real economic growth, deficits deplete the supply of saving and thus reduce growth.\n\nToday's Economist Perspectives from expert contributors.\n\nThere are many problems with this analysis. One is that it assumes that all government spending is consumption. In fact, much of it consists of investment. According to the 2013 budget (see Section 21, Page 356), the federal government will invest $550 billion this year in physical capital (buildings, equipment), research and development and human capital (education). This includes grants to state and local governments for these purposes.\n\nIt is perfectly reasonable to finance long-lived capital projects with borrowing. Because the benefits will accrue over many years, it would be silly to treat things like highways as if they were consumed within a single year for budget purposes. Virtually all homeowners know this and borrow to buy homes. They understand that the flow of housing services they receive on an annual basis compensates for the interest that is paid.\n\nUnfortunately, the federal budget is silly in this respect. It treats investment spending the same way every other budgetary item is treated \u2013 as if it were consumption with no long-lasting benefits for the nation.\n\nAn unfortunate consequence of this budgetary convention is that reducing federal investment is viewed as beneficial if it reduces the deficit. Moreover, it is often easier to cut investment spending than consumption, just as homeowners suffering from an income loss may find that deferring maintenance or planned improvements is the easiest way to conserve cash.\n\nBut just as deferred maintenance on our homes, like putting off repairs to the roof, can be very costly in the long run, reducing the value and hence the net worth of our principal asset, the same is true of government investment. Maintenance that is deferred too long may require assets that would have lasted many more years to be replaced prematurely at much higher cost.\n\nAccording to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the nation is already in a net deficit position as far as building and maintaining its basic public infrastructure. The society estimates that the added costs to people and businesses from this underinvestment will reduce the aggregate gross domestic product by $3 trillion over the next decade. The group recommends an additional $1.1 trillion of public investment through 2020 to what is currently planned, $157 billion per year.\n\nOf course, the federal government is not going to spend that much more because it would make the goal of balancing the budget more difficult, based on the way deficits are calculated, making no allowance for capital outlays. Indeed, it will be difficult to prevent cuts in investment outlays that will reduce such spending below current projections.\n\nOne solution to this problem would be to have a capital budget that segregates government investment spending from consumption spending. Virtually all the states do this already. Conservatives who routinely defend a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, on the grounds that the states must balance their budgets annually, appear to be unaware that such requirements apply only to operating budgets, excluding capital outlays.\n\nIf households were required to balance their budgets the way balanced-budget amendment supporters want the federal government to operate, they would almost never be able to buy homes or cars. Such outlays almost always exceed their annual incomes over and above consumption and would thus constitute deficit spending.\n\nOf course, families could draw down savings to buy homes and cars. But that\u2019s an option not available to the government because it has no savings, only a large debt. Treating it and private individuals the same way, as balanced-budget supporters propose, would require the entire national debt to be paid off and a surplus accumulated before it would be permitted to make new investments in roads, bridges, buildings and other long-lived assets.\n\nOf course, no one actually believes that. But it follows logically from arguments one often hears about why the government should balance its cash income and outlays annually, because that is supposedly how families and the states are said to operate. In fact, they don\u2019t.\n\nThe distinction between capital spending and consumption spending also affects the way economists interpret the rate of saving. The standard measure, produced by the Commerce Department, calculates personal income and personal outlays. The difference between these two figures is assumed to be personal saving. Thus saving is not calculated directly, but is merely a residual between income and spending.\n\nAn alternative measure of saving that treats consumer durables, like autos, as investments would raise the measured rate of saving considerably. Alternatively, one could measure saving directly from financial institutions and other sources, as the Federal Reserve does (see Page 17). This yields a much higher measure of saving. In 2011, the last full year available, the Commerce Department estimated the personal saving rate at 4.2 percent, while the Fed put it at 10.3 percent.\n\nPeriodically, administrations have suggested creating a capital budget, both to give clearer picture of the economic effects of federal spending and to shield investments from budget cuts that should be limited to consumption outlays. The Reagan administration floated the idea in 1986, and the Clinton administration created a commission to study it.\n\nA common criticism has always been that the definition of \u201ccapital\u201d is too slippery and could too easily become a loophole through which consumption spending could escape. The obvious answer is to assign some entity, like the Government Accountability Office, to audit investment spending and ensure that it truly represents investment and not consumption.\n\nMany economists say they believe that the best thing the federal government can do to raise the long-term economic growth rate is increase infrastructure spending. It would have the double benefit of mobilizing idle resources, especially unemployed workers, while low interest rates permit capital projects to be financed very cheaply.\n\nOne main barrier to achieving this double benefit is the confusion between investment spending and consumption spending, which is distorted by the way the budget is presented and the way we calculate saving."}
{"text":"Related\n\nThe Nets have ruled forward Reggie Evans out for the next two games for \u201cpersonal reasons,\u201d the team announced today. That leaves Evans out for tonight\u2019s game against the Charlotte Bobcats, as well as Thursday\u2019s game in Chicago against the Bulls. It\u2019s the team\u2019s last two games before the All-Star Break, so Evans won\u2019t be with the team until they play against Utah on February 19th at the earliest.After starting 56 games last year, Evans\u2019s role on the Nets has been significantly reduced. He\u2019s played in just 30 of a possible 49 games, averaging 13.3 minutes per game. He has not suffered a publicly announced injury yet this season, meaning that those 19 games were merely DNP-CD (did not play-coach\u2019s decision).Evans is averaging 2.7 points and 5.0 rebounds per game, while shooting a career-worst 39 percent from the field. His most intriguing storyline this season is the, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding it.The team did not specify what Evans\u2019s personal reasons were for missing these two games."}
{"text":"Aviation Week & Space Technology\n\nA Northrop Grumman-led team is dashing its plan to propose a modified BAE Systems Hawk trainer for the U.S. Air Force\u2019s T-38 replacement program, opting instead for a clean-sheet design for the $1 billion program.\n\nThe shift is more bold than it is surprising. The team is paying for a brand-new prototype despite a slump in defense spending. But it has become increasingly evident that the Hawk is unsuited for the mission due to shortfalls in the fast-jet trainer\u2019s ability to sustain Gs, perform high angle-of-attack maneuvering and execute tight turn rate and radius.\n\nScaled Composites, wholly owned by Northrop Grumman since its purchase in 2007, formed a small team to build a suitable aircraft from the ground up.\n\nThis marks the third U.S. company to propose its own new-build aircraft for a competition that began with three foreign-built, modified off-the-shelf designs: the Hawk, Lockheed Martin\/Korea Aerospace Industries T-50 and General Dynamics\/Alenia Aermacchi M-346. Boeing planned since entering the competition to offer a new-build design; it is teamed with Saab. Textron Airland is looking at three variants of its company-developed Scorpion demonstrator for the T-X mission, says President Bill Anderson. Boeing declined to comment about progress on its prototype.\n\nThe Air Force has been openly pursuing a T-X plan since 2011, but the fiscal 2016 budget proposal sent to Congress Feb. 2 indicates that a request for proposals will finally be released in fiscal 2016. The plan calls for $575 million in fiscal 2016-19, with an estimated total program cost at $1.04 billion and a source selection by the end of fiscal 2017. The winner stands to dominate a global fast-jet trainer market, especially for countries planning to buy the F-35. Nine partners already are teamed to develop the stealthy fighter and another three are foreign military sales customers.\n\nThe so-called T-X will eventually be used to train future F-22 and F-35 pilots with advanced skills. Adding to the requirements is an Air Force decision in the fiscal 2016 budget plan to expand T-X to cover a requirement for a new \u201cred air\u201d aggressor \u201cstores aircraft interface\u201d kit to include adding a radar, datalink and hard points for weapons and a jamming pod. The T-X aggressors will replace F-16Cs used in that role now at the Air Warfare Center at Nellis AFB, Nevada. The Hawk would be unable to meet the demands of an aggressor aircraft.\n\nThe \u201cred air\u201d T-X is needed to tax the technology and skills of future F-22 and F-35 pilots, says Col. Adrian Spain, commandant of the Air Force Weapons School at Nellis. During live-fly training, the aggressors not only use enemy tactics but the aircraft must also emulate adversary platforms well enough to \u201cfool\u201d the Air Force\u2019s aircraft into \u201cthinking\u201d they are an actual enemy system.\n\n\u201cThe potential near-peer threat has improved pretty substantially over the last decade, [and] we want to be able to replicate that threat here so we can train against a threat that is realistic and relevant,\u201d Spain tells Aviation Week. \u201cWith an older, fourth-gen system, you can probably trick it into thinking [an aggressor] is something else. But in an F-35 and an F-22, the sensors are advanced enough that they\u2019ll know the difference. So we need to have capability on the range to fly against.\u201d\n\nBudget cuts forced the service to deactivate a squadron of F-15Cs last year, leaving only one F-16C aggressor squadron for advanced tactics and pilot training of U.S. and allied pilots at Nellis\u2019s Air Warfare Center.\n\nThe Air Force budget proposes to begin funding for the aggressor modification kit in fiscal 2018; a total of $220.5 million is included through fiscal 2020 for the work.\n\nThe challenge is for a T-X aircraft to emulate the fifth-generation aircraft qualities without accruing the high cost of replicating them. \u201cAs a team\u2014and I want to stress with you that everything was as a team\u2014we entered the fight with the Hawk and as time went on . . . we just kept an eye on the requirements,\u201d says Marc Lindsley, Northrop Grumman\u2019s T-X program director. \u201cAnd as we saw the requirements evolve and become more clear, we looked at options. It became more and more clear to us that the Hawk wasn\u2019t the optimum solution in terms of requirements and affordability. . . . So we started studying it.\u201d\n\nNorthrop turned to Scaled Composites, renowned for its innovative designs and rapid fabrication cycle time, to build the prototype. The team is preparing to assemble the aircraft at Scaled\u2019s facility in Mojave, California, with an eye toward first flight by year-end. Budget constraints are driving the Air Force and competitors to search for affordable options. Tom Vice, president of Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, says this is partly achievable with speed in designing and manufacturing aircraft coupled with innovative designs that take life-cycle cost into account upfront.\n\n\u201cWe have tremendous agility in the marketplace to bring innovation much, much faster,\u201d Vice told reporters during a tour last month to showcase the company\u2019s facilities in California. \u201cWe are setting a tone inside the organization and backing it up with investment that allows us to think about innovation for affordability.\u201d\n\nUntil now, Northrop has kept its plans for the new aircraft under wraps. The company teamed first as a subcontractor to BAE Systems in 2011; it quietly shifted roles to become the prime last June. The core team will remain intact, Lindsley says. L-3 Communications will continue to handle the ground-based training system. Northrop is \u201cin discussions with BAE Systems to include their training system in our aircraft solution,\u201d says Northrop spokesman Bryce McDevitt. The goal is to port the air vehicle training system from the Hawk to the new design. It would include a reconfigurable cockpit system to allow for various training scenarios as well as software to allow for insertion of various mission scenarios. BAE has declined to comment on its plans and has not explained how its air vehicle system will interface with L-3\u2019s ground-based equipment.\n\nNorthrop is taking lessons from Detroit-based Kuka Systems in designing its assembly line. Kuka started teaming with Northrop in 2012 and has experience in low-cost auto manufacturing techniques. A location for the work has not been announced, although if Northrop wins, the program will be based at its Melbourne, Florida, manned aircraft center of excellence.\n\nLindsley provides scant details of the actual prototype design, including a \u201cno comment\u201d on whether it would require one or two engines, because of the competitive landscape. The company has not offered a name for the prototype.\n\nThe Northrop team\u2019s decision to abandon the Hawk leaves a dim future for the program. BAE moved its Hawk work from Brough to Warton, England, in 2011 despite having few orders for the aircraft. Subsequently, however, it won a contract with the Royal Saudi Air Force for 22 aircraft and a deal with Oman for eight. The Hawk design evolved over time since its first flight in 1974. More than 1,000 Hawks have been built. BAE declined to comment about the future of the program.\n\nAir Force Secretary Deborah Lee James announced in January that T-X will be a pathfinder for her Bending the Cost Curve initiative, which is designed to allow for dialog with industry on requirements and cost trades with a goal of reducing weapon-system cycle time and cost. \u201cWhen it comes to T-X, we are about two years away from a request for proposals stage, and this new process should allow us to directly engage industry as we develop an understanding of how to best evaluate our objective and our threshold requirements,\u201d James said. Today\u2019s procurement process is linear, with requirements developed by one unit and handed over to another for a development and buy. James hopes that by opening a dialog with industry early in the process, the service can tailor the requirements not only for operational needs but with a realistic budget in mind.\n\nLindsley and Anderson welcome this approach. Lindsley cautions, however, that the Air Force must provide industry enough time to adjust its designs accordingly when allowing for such trades, especially when the Pentagon is relying more heavily on contractor research and development funding for prototypes and risk reduction. He says thus far there has been a \u201cvery healthy dialog\u201d on T-X with the Air Force; Northrop notified the service it was building its own prototype last year.\n\n\u201cThe big issue for us is we can debate the requirements, . . . but then we need the time . . . to meet those requirements,\u201d Lindsley says. \u201cHave the dialog, understand those trades, publish the requirements and lock them in, and then we need the time to design, develop and field that solution . . . at our investment.\u201d\n\nThis model is a departure for the Pentagon. With three contractors offering company-funded, clean-sheet options for T-X, industry is clearly keen on it. But the Defense Department\u2019s history in this area includes failures. Despite contractor-funded designs for an Army Armed Aerial Scout helicopter, the service ultimately ended a demonstration effort without selecting a design. Likewise, four bidders have heavily invested in risk reduction for a Navy Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike aircraft, and it has been continually delayed, prompting Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to halt or scale back their work substantially.\n\nThe Air Force intends to buy as many as 350 of the trainers as part of a larger T-X system, including advanced training aids such as a sophisticated ground-based training platform and aids."}
{"text":"BEIJING (Reuters) - The U.S. navy's latest collision at sea, the fourth in its Pacific fleet this year, shows it is becoming an increasing risk to shipping in Asia despite its claims of helping to protect freedom of navigation, an official Chinese newspaper said.\n\nThe USS John S. McCain and the tanker Alnic MC collided while the guided-missile vessel was nearing Singapore on Monday. The collision tore a hole in the warship's port side at the waterline, flooding compartments that included a crew sleeping area. Ten sailors are missing.\n\nThe collision - the fourth major accident in the U.S. Pacific fleet this year - prompted a fleet-wide investigation and plans for temporary halts in operations to focus on safety.\n\nADVERTISEMENT\n\nThe state-run China Daily said in an editorial on Tuesday that people will wonder why such a sophisticated navy keeps having these problems.\n\n\"The investigations into the latest collision will take time to reach their conclusions, but there is no denying the fact that the increased activities by U.S. warships in Asia-Pacific since Washington initiated its rebalancing to the region are making them a growing risk to commercial shipping,\" it said.\n\nChina has been upset at U.S. freedom of navigation operations near Chinese controlled islands in the disputed South China Sea, where China has been reclaiming land, building air bases and increasing its military presence.\n\n\"While the U.S. Navy is becoming a dangerous obstacle in Asian waters, China has been making joint efforts with the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to draw up a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea and it has boosted navigational safety by constructing five lighthouses on its islands,\" the China Daily said.\n\n\"Anyone should be able to tell who is to blame for militarizing the waters and posing a threat to navigation.\""}
{"text":"Some saw the lighter side of the situation:\n\nA viral message\n\nMany are asking what the circuit breaker is about. A securities professional replied: It's like bringing 5,000 yuan to a card game and losing all of it in half an hour. You call a truce for 15 minutes and withdraw 7,000 yuan from the ATM in that time. After losing all of that money too, the winner says to you: You are just too unlucky, let's call it a day.\n\nMing Liu\n\nWe are still having our morning meeting, but securities firm employees already can go home. This shows that men should find jobs as dealers with their high salaries and short working hours; women should marry dealers for not only are their husbands well-paid with lots of vacation time, they would also have time to go to the mall and movies with you!\n\nFernandeski-Bennett\n\nIn the past, I used to have afternoon tea after the market closed. Now, I have tea in the morning.\n\nLlaiyuu\n\nAfter the Chinese stock markets introduced circuit breakers, I'm even more determined to work for a securities firm after I graduate. After all, I only have to work half an hour every day!\n\n- Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook.\n\nPauline Chiou contributed to this report."}
{"text":"LAKELAND, Fla. \u2014 Justin Verlander has not pitched in a game yet, but the early reviews have all been positive.\n\nTigers catcher James McCann, who caught Verlander Thursday, is the latest.\n\n\"He looked really good,\" McCann said. \"Very live arm, ball was coming out really good, all four of his pitches.\"\n\nMcCann does have a frame of reference for comparison\u2019s sake.\n\nLast year he caught Verlander in Kansas City towards the end of the season.\n\n\"Completely different guy,\" McCann said. \"He pitched real well but that\u2019s a different guy right there. The ball comes out different, he\u2019s more confident. That\u2019s the kind of Ver we need.\"\n\nOAKLAND CLAIMS SMITH\n\nWhen the Tigers re-signed Joba Chamberlain to a one-year deal, it meant less opportunity for some pitchers.\n\nFor Chad Smith, it meant a completely new opportunity as the Tigers placed him on waivers to make room on the roster for Chamberlain.\n\nOn Thursday, Tigers president and general manager Dave Dombrowski said the Oakland Athletics claimed Smith and Smith\u2019s contract would be assigned to the A\u2019s organization.\n\n\"Really wish he would have made it through but you gotta take somebody off your roster at the time,\" Dombrowski said.\n\nSmith, 25, appeared a little dazed by the news after being in limbo for a couple of days.\n\n\"When they told me the news, I was in shock,\" Smith said. \"They took a chance on me back when I was in college, when I blew out my elbow. They were one of the few teams that still liked me so it\u2019s hard. I\u2019ve met so many great people and playing in Detroit was awesome. The fans were great. All-around, it was a first-class experience. Just kind of setting in now so it\u2019s tough.\"\n\nSmith made his major league debut June 22 of last season at Cleveland.\n\nHe made 10 appearances for the Tigers and had a 5.40 ERA, walking three and striking out nine.\n\nSmith said he and his agent hadn\u2019t been optimistic that another team would pick him up as most rosters are set and there haven\u2019t been any injuries.\n\nThe A\u2019s placed Taylor Thompson on the 60-day DL to make room for Smith.\n\n\"It\u2019s exciting that another team thought highly of me to pick me up,\" Smith said. \"The timing of it, I know a lot of rosters are full so they obviously had to make a move on their end. It\u2019s exciting. It\u2019s a big league team in Oakland, I\u2019m from California and spring training\u2019s in Arizona. Get to go home.\"\n\nSmith said he\u2019s been in contact with former Tiger Kevin Whelan, who is currently in A\u2019s camp as a non-roster invitee.\n\nSmith planned to go back up his apartment and pack up before heading to Arizona tomorrow.\n\nLIFE OF A UTILITY PLAYER\n\nDon Kelly may not have been the best player in history but you had to respect his versatility.\n\nEvery day Kelly would bring his multiple gloves to the field and take turns using each \u2014 ground balls in the infield, fly balls in the outfield.\n\nNow Andrew Romine and Hernan Perez, both battling for a utility role on the team, are trying to do the same.\n\n\"It\u2019s tough. It\u2019s just extra work, stuff on top of what we practice,\" Romine said. \"I\u2019ll practice with the infielders but then either before, 7:30-8 o\u2019clock in the morning or now, when we get done, I\u2019ll be out there doing outfield stuff.\"\n\nRomine said outfield coach Dave Clark is not making it easy on them.\n\n\"Clarkie\u2019s kicking our butts,\" Romine said. \"I think he secretly loves to kill us out there, which is good for us because we get a lot of good work in.\"\n\nRomine said everything is going well so far this spring.\n\n\"It\u2019s not like I never played outfield before,\" Romine said. \"Just getting live reads off the bat in BP and stuff. When we\u2019re taking live swings off our pitchers right now, just go out to the outfield and kind of read them. It feels good.\"\n\n***If multimedia does not appear right away, please click refresh***\n\nCOMPLETE TIGERS SPRING TRAINING 2015 COVERAGE"}
{"text":"New Glasgow police have issued a warrant for the arrest of a 34-year-old man after an incident where an officer was dragged several feet behind a car.\n\nAround 4:20 a.m. on Sunday New Glasgow police saw a man driving the wrong way along George Street in downtown New Glasgow. Two officers stopped the vehicle and approached it, suspecting the driver might be drunk.\n\nThe driver fled and one of the officers was dragged from the car for three to five feet.\n\nEHS checked the officer at the scene and treated him for minor injuries.\n\n\"Luckily the officer wasn't hurt further,\" said Const. Ken MacDonald of the New Glasgow Regional Police.\n\nPolice pursued the suspect's vehicle but it evaded them in the Thorburn area.\n\nPolice have issued an arrest warrant for Barrett Johnson Fraser, 34, and are asking for help from the public. Police say Fraser is facing charges of flight from police officers, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, two counts of assault on police, and two counts of assault with a weapon."}
{"text":"After it was reported on November 24 that Sulli had gone to the emergency room for a wrist injury, various rumors began to circulate about the nature of the injury and Sulli\u2019s relationship with Dynamic Duo\u2019s Choiza.\n\nAlthough SM Entertainment had already stated that the injury was due to carelessness while at home, there were rumors that it had been a suicide attempt and that her relationship with Choiza was on the rocks.\n\nThe Fact even claimed that Sulli had been drunk in the emergency room, citing an unnamed source from the Seoul University Hospital. The unnamed source also said that Sulli had denied any attempted suicide. However, the PR department of that hospital has already released an official statement stating that they cannot give out personal information on patients.\n\nSulli and Choiza were quick to dispel the wild rumors, with Choiza\u2019s agency Amoeba Culture stating, \u201cThere is a rumor going around that Choiza and Sulli\u2019s relationship is on the rocks, but we have not heard anything. This is a personal affair between the two of them so we as a company will not be interfering in it.\u201d\n\nIn addition to their earlier statement, SM Entertainment stated, \u201cThe two of them are still in a good relationship.\u201d\n\nSulli also posted a selfie on her personal Instagram and wrote, \u201cI got hurt by accident. I\u2019m sorry for making you worry!\u201d to reassure her fans.\n\nSource (1) (2) (3) (4)"}
{"text":"The announcement came as security was raised after vehicle attacks in Barcelona and elsewhere, and a widely-reported warning from the Islamic State group that Italy is next on its hit list.\n\nAdministrative expulsions, which are not subject to any appeal, are one of the main planks of Italy's strategy for preventing the kind of jihadist attacks suffered by other European countries.\n\nSicily decided Saturday to introduce barriers preventing vehicular access to six pedestrianised areas of the island's capital Palermo, reflecting fears of truck attacks.\n\nAdditional barriers are to be placed on potentially vulnerable locations in Milan, a meeting of regional security officials decided.\n\nThe prefecture for the Rome region approved an increase in the number of guards for its major tourist sports and said it would step up monitoring of trucks moving around the capital.\n\nThe latest individuals deported included a 38-year-old Moroccan said to have been radicalised while in prison for minor crimes.\n\nHis status was bumped from medium to high risk after he and other prisoners were seen enthusiastically celebrating the Stockholm truck attack in April which killed five people.\n\nThe Syrian, who also operated under a false Tunisian identity, was arrested in 2015 for involvement in illegal immigration and placed under house arrest at a centre for asylum seekers in southern Italy.\n\nThere, he was caught celebrating the attack in May that killed 22 people, many of them children, at a concert in the British city of Manchester.\n\nThe suspect, whose age was not released, had managed to avoid the fate of two previous expulsion orders issued in 2011.\n\nThe third man expelled was a 31-year-old Moroccan whose expressions of support for IS were thought to be linked to a psychiatric disorder for which he received compulsory treatment after being arrested for theft.\n\nThe interior ministry said all three had been flown back to their respective countries of origin.\n\nItaly is regularly threatened by IS propagandists. SITE, a private intelligence group which monitors extremist organisations, said Saturday it had picked up fresh online messages promising the country would be next to be targeted.\n\nItalian officials stress that they have yet to be alerted to an imminent, credible threat on its territory or against the Vatican.\n\nA government panel said in a report in January that Italy was less exposed than neighbouring countries to the risk of attacks carried out by homegrown radicals."}
{"text":"The NBA player who sits in the NBA\u2019s throne for greatest of all time is not the one who goes by King James. All the accolades that have been heaped on the shoulders of the polarizing superstar that is LeBron James are well earned, but the three-time MVP still has his work cut out for him if he seeks the crown that sets him apart from the other elite players in NBA history.\n\nMichael Jordan is rightfully hailed as basketball\u2019s GOAT. He embodies every characteristic that the greatest needs: elite technical skills, incredible athletic ability, and the potential to take over games as an individual. He transcended basketball and brought it to a level of popularity previously unseen by the game. No one can take that away from him, and LeBron will never be able to accomplish that same feat.\n\nBut in terms of on-court prowess, LeBron James has the ability to dethrone Michael Jordan as the greatest player that the NBA has ever seen. And with one ring in his pocket, LeBron can now strive to immortalize himself in basketball history. Through a comparison of what both have already accomplished and some thoughts of what is to come for LeBron, there very well may be a new king in the near future.\n\nFirst, a statistical comparison of Michael and LeBron:\n\nPer game statistics LeBron James Michael Jordan Points 27.6 30.1 Rebounds 7.2 6.2 Assists 6.9 5.3 Steals 1.7 2.3 FG percentage .484 .497 3PT percentage .332 .327 Minutes 39.9 38.3 PER 27.3 27.9 eFG percentage .516 .509\n\nThese regular season numbers show the remarkable equality between the two players. LeBron certainly needs to have the longevity of MJ, which is undoubtedly history yet to be written, but these guys are nearly equal in all categories. LeBron\u2019s PRA (points, rebounds, and assists combined) equate to 41.7. Jordan is virtually identical, at 41.6.\n\nJordan has an edge in scoring ability, but LeBron\u2019s overall offensive game is also based on a guard\u2019s ability to facilitate.\n\nThe number that should strike you as most shocking is three-point percentage. LeBron is often criticized for being a one-dimensional scorer whose sheer strength propels him to the basket, but he has a slightly higher 3PT percentage than Jordan. LeBron is often encapsulated in what people think he should be\u2014in part probably with a desire to defend Jordan\u2019s legacy. But looking at the numbers provides the foundation for the argument that one day the two can likely be prepared.\n\nStats are the ticket to come in the door to the palace. But there is more to be done to overthrow the king.\n\nDefensively, Jordan has a DPOY award to his name\u2014something LeBron has yet to add to his r\u00e9sum\u00e9. But nobody in their right mind would say Jordan is a far superior defensive player. At 6\u20198\u201d, the 250-pound monster can compete with big men like David West in the 2012 NBA playoffs. Not only that, but LeBron has proven he can defend the quickest players in the NBA. Remember the game when he shut down the 2011 NBA MVP, point guard Derrick Rose?\n\nAs LeBron said himself, defending power forwards and centers is taxing because of the physicality down low that is not necessary as a perimeter defender. Yet he still managed to put up staggering offensive numbers in 2012, when called upon to defend forwards\/centers.\n\nAnd at 6\u20196\u201d, Michael Jordan can never claim that diversity in ability to defend all five positions on the court. Even 6\u20199\u201d point guard Magic Johnson was able to play the center position at a high level on the NBA\u2019s biggest stage. (The two MJ\u2019s both roughly weighed 220 pounds.)\n\nThe edge defensively goes to LeBron\u2014he can defend every position on the floor. Enough said.\n\nThe true discrepancies between these two players come in with playoff pedigrees and awards. Jordan is still head and shoulders above LeBron when it comes to this comparison:\n\nLeBron James Michael Jordan 1x NBA champion 6x NBA champion 1x NBA Finals MVP 6x NBA Finals MVP 3x MVP 5x MVP 8x All-Star 14x All-Star NBA Rookie of the Year NBA Rookie of the Year 1x scoring champion 10x scoring champion 6x All-NBA First Team 10x All-NBA First Team 4x All-Defensive First Team 9x All-Defensive First Team\n\nhe has time. Jordan\u2019s 15-season career was shortened by his brief baseball stint, so if he stays healthy, LeBron very well could have a longer NBA career than Jordan did. LeBron has his work cut out for him to get on Michael\u2019s level here. But in the nine-plus seasons that LeBron has been in the NBA, he not only has room before he catches up to Jordan, but. Jordan\u2019s 15-season career was shortened by his brief baseball stint, so if he stays healthy, LeBron very well could have a longer NBA career than Jordan did.\n\nFor the sake of argument, let\u2019s give LeBron James nine more seasons\u2014which is (hopefully for NBA fans) an underestimation. If he wins titles in three of those seasons, that puts him at four. And whenever LeBron wins a ring, that gives him a Finals MVP, too. There is no way that LeBron wins a title as the second best player on his team. He\u2019s the best player in the game\n\nThree more MVPs is not an outrageous prediction for LeBron either, which puts him at six. The rest of the numbers will likely even out through the course of LeBron\u2019s career, perhaps even giving him the edge.\n\nThe only exception to this is the scoring titles. LeBron James will never come near Jordan\u2019s ten titles and that is in no way a pre-requisite for the discussion of these two players. LeBron has teamed up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh\u2014players whose career PPG averages are 25 and 20, respectively. And this plays directly into LeBron\u2019s sensational ability to create offense not only for himself but also for his teammates. Jordan only ever looked to one other player to create offense (Scottie Pippen). Toni Kukoc and John Paxson helped spread the floor for Jordan but really Jordan was option 1, 2, and 3\u2026and for good reason!\n\nThis leads to an argument that must be addressed: well, you might say, since LeBron is more of a facilitator and all-around player, he should be compared to Magic Johnson and Oscar Robertson, not Michael Jordan.\n\nall of the first four seasons of his career from 1961-64. The problem arises when looking at the era that Robertson played in. Statistics were staggering compared to today\u2019s game. Furthermore, Robertson was not even the best player in the 60s: Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain each took home four NBA MVPs during the 60s. Sure, the comparison could be made since the Big-O averaged a triple double one season and was less than half a rebound or assist away from averaging one inof the first four seasons of his career from 1961-64. The problem arises when looking at the era that Robertson played in. Statistics were staggering compared to today\u2019s game. Furthermore, Robertson was not even the best player in the 60s: Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlaintook home four NBA MVPs during the 60s.\n\nIn terms of playing style, compare these two all you want but the fact is this: LeBron is the best player in his generation. Oscar Robertson was no higher than the third best of his generation.\n\ncan be made, but really who cares? Michael was the best player of his generation and LeBron is the best player of his generation. And if we\u2019re going to compare the greatest player of all time, a pre-requisite is undoubtedly being the best player of your generation. As for Magic Johnson, the comparison againbe made, but really who cares? Michael was the best player of his generation and LeBron is the best player of his generation. And if we\u2019re going to compare the greatest player of all time, a pre-requisite is undoubtedly being the best player of your generation.\n\nSo, in this hypothetical situation that I have drawn up, LeBron has four Finals championships, four Finals MVPs, and six regular season MVP awards. He would probably surpass Jordan in All-NBA First Team and All-NBA First Defensive Team, too.\n\nThese numbers would put LeBron on equal footing with Jordan. Now, to consider who is better overall involves looking at some of their best playoff performances. Granted, in order for LeBron to be in the same discussion as Jordan, he will have a larger body of work to compare to but for now comparing LeBron\u2019s best two playoff performances to Jordan\u2019s will prove just how close these guys really are.\n\none more in six more seasons. Again, this is absolutely not to say that at this point LeBron is better but rather to just put it in perspective. Time is on LeBron\u2019s side. LeBron has two spots in the top 10 greatest NBA playoff performances of all time. Jordan has three\u2014or onlyinmore seasons. Again, this is absolutely not to say that at this point LeBron is better but rather to just put it in perspective. Time is on LeBron\u2019s side.\n\nNow to look at the two best playoff performances in each players\u2019 career:\n\nThe \u201cflu game\u201d is something that has immortalized Jordan. Commercials vie for this moment, coaches use it as motivation, and it lives on as the definition in the NBA of perseverance. In Game 5 of the NBA Finals in 1997 vs. the Utah Jazz, Jordan put up 38 points in 44 minutes, along with seven rebounds, five assists, three steals, and a block. The pictures of him helped off the court and sipping Gatorade with a towel over his head are engrained in every NBA fans memory. It was historic.\n\nLeBron\u2019s performance in Game 5 of the 2007 Eastern Conference finals was at least as memorable. 48 points, nine rebounds, seven assists, and two steals in 50 minutes played. He threw down dunk after dunk, a signature of LeBron (and a reason everybody wants to see him in the dunk contest on All-Star weekend).\n\nBut the most memorable part was that he scored 29 of the final 30 points of the game. Against the Pistons.\n\nESPN on this one, I\u2019d take LeBron\u2019s performance over Jordan\u2019s. 29 of the final 30 points in the game? I\u2019d love to see a basketball performance where someone was more unstoppable than this at the time when it matters most (fourth quarter and overtime). I disagree withon this one, I\u2019d take LeBron\u2019s performance over Jordan\u2019s. 29 of the final 30 points in the game? I\u2019d love to see a basketball performance where someone was more unstoppable than this at the time when it matters most (fourth quarter and overtime).\n\nJordan\u2019s Game 2 of the 1986 Eastern Conference first round was another defining moment in his career. Celtics Hall of Famer uttered seven of the most famous words in NBA history when asked about that game: \u201cthat was God disguised as Michael Jordan.\u201d Jordan could fill up the stat sheet, too: playoff scoring record of 63 points in 53 minutes with five rebounds, six assists, three steals, and two blocks. And coming off a season that was largely lost to injury\u2026it was remarkable.\n\nMaybe somewhere Derrick Rose is watching footage of this game, getting some ideas of his own\u2026\n\nin Boston. I say this with complete seriousness: LeBron had the pressure of his career heaped on him in one game. The Heat were one game away from elimination and the criticism would have landed squarely on LeBron\u2019s shoulders. LeBron haters were warming up their LeChoke chants. Skip Bayless was ready to rant. LeBron\u2019s most amazing playoff performance came this year, in the 2012 Eastern Conference finals against the Celtics. I say this with complete seriousness: LeBron had the pressure of his career heaped on him in one game. The Heat were one game away from elimination and the criticism would have landed squarely on LeBron\u2019s shoulders. LeBron haters were warming up their LeChoke chants. Skip Bayless was ready to rant.\n\n45 points, 15 rebounds, and five assists later, the Heat moved on to Game 7. LeBron shot a nearly impossible 19 of 26. And it wasn\u2019t just dunks and drives, as LeBron has proven he is best at. It was jumpers, banks, post-up shots, even three pointers. Another iconic performance.\n\nLet me use a baseball analogy to put this performance in perspective:\n\nThe 2004 Boston Red Sox were fighting 86 years of failed history when they were playing the Yankees in the ALCS. Similarly, LeBron was facing a career with zero championships in the 2012 ECF. The Red Sox had their back to the wall in Game 4 of the ALCS, and like the Heat, it was win or go home. Facing Alex Rodriguez, the best hitter in the game (he went yard in Game 4, too, even though he has come to be known as a playoff choker), and Orlando Hernandez, a former Cy Young Award winner, it was looking bleak. But the Red Sox pulled it off, winning four straight games against the Yankees.\n\nIt was unprecedented . Literally, such a feat had never been accomplished before. The takeaway from this that is relevant to the comparison to LeBron: the 2004 World Series champion Boston Red Sox were not defined by their sweep of the Cardinals in the World Series. The comeback in the ALCS vs. the Yankees was the propeller that flew the Red Sox to the Promised Land.\n\nIt\u2019s the path through adversity that defines the champion, not just the grand finale. Similarly, LeBron\u2019s Game 6 performance made the statement that he had championship talent and desire. The argument that this performance was diminished because it wasn\u2019t in the Finals does not hold up for the same reasons that the 2004 ALCS defined the eventual champion Red Sox.It\u2019s the path through adversity that defines the champion, not just the grand finale.\n\nFor those very reasons, I\u2019ll take LeBron\u2019s Game 6 performance over Jordan\u2019s Game 2 or flu game. As for \u201cclutch\u201d storybook endings, LeBron and Jordan both have theirs. Somehow this is a requirement to be considered the greatest of all time because you need a moment that even non-basketball fans can say \u2018wow, that guy is special.\u2019 Jordan\u2019s got the crossover of Bryon Russell when he sunk the free throw line jumper in the 1998 NBA Finals and LeBron\u2019s got the fade-away three-pointer at the end of regulation in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals.\n\nBoth were moments that you could capture in seconds and realize something about these guys just was not normal.\n\nAs for overall \u201cclutchness,\u201d you can argue until the next Jordan or LeBron comes (if they ever do), that Jordan was more clutch for such-and-such reason but again, the numbers show the pair are surprisingly close in this regard\u2014while Jordan still does have an edge.\n\nChasing 23 names all of LeBron\u2019s clutch shot makes (5) and attempts (12) through May 2012 which puts him at a 42 percent success rate. Jordan was names all of LeBron\u2019s clutch shot makes (5) and attempts (12) through May 2012 which puts him at a 42 percent success rate. Jordan was 9 of 18 in his career in such situations, or a 50 percent success rate. Again, let\u2019s give LeBron his full career but the dismissal of LeBron from the playing field of Jordan as GOAT is unwarranted and founded in 1) a desire to protect history or 2) simply a hatred of LeBron James.\n\nLeBron James has room to go before he can be in the consideration with Michael Jordan as the greatest player ever to hit the court. And even after both have retired, not even a judge could satisfy both sides unless LeBron goes on an absolutely historic tear to match his \u201cnot one, not two, not three, not four\u2026\u201d claim. While I personally think that was merely hyperbole, he did earn himself a lot of disrespect in that first public party in South Beach."}
{"text":"I promised monthly updates, so here I am to deliver!\n\nLet me start by introducing you to \u2018Ivan\u2019.\n\nWith the introduction of Bertha it was imperative that the rebels come up with a counter. Created from some destroyed Bertha\u2019s and a hollowed out cabin of an outdated MAV cockpit model, they were able to create \u2018Ivan\u2019. With performance stats similar to Bertha, the rebels stood a fighting chance!\n\nSeeing the arms race taking place, Wilson munitions seized the opportunity to increase their market share by deploying out a new line of heavy rockets as well!\n\nWith all this firepower flying around, there was bound to be collateral damage.\n\nAnd this is just the start!\n\nIn addition to the parts shown above, there are a few more I want you to discover on your own. There has been a large increase in the number of deployable parts, making the Engineer role a much more viable role to fill.\n\nAlong with these part changes, there has been an update to all the destructible buildings in the game. When buildings explode, they will do damage to anything around them. Small, concrete buildings will barley even be felt. Standing next to an exploding 100ft tall gas tank? That\u2019s going to hurt, a lot.\n\nIn addition to doing damage, some buildings will leave a burning residue on the ground as well. This fire will spread to your MAV if you stand in it and will continue to do damage the whole time you are in it. It\u2019s not a lot of damage, but it can turn the tide of the battle if you are not careful! Proper kill and damage credit is given if you destroy a building which then destroys another MAV. This counts for chain reactions as well!\n\nSpeaking of doing damage on when exploding, mines have been given an explosion effect when you shoot them. They will also do damage to the surrounding area, though not nearly as much as if they were triggered normally.\n\nGetting into the smaller tweaks, there have been a few balance changes:\n\n-Turning rates have been increased on all biped, reverse joint, hover, and wheel chassis. The final amount depends the the chassis variation.\n\n-The uplink deployable item has been increased in size by 2X and had its durability reduced from 350 to 120\n\n\u2013 Machine guns have been given a slight rate of fire reduction. HD versions have also been given a small boost to recoil and a larger rate of fire reduction from 370 shots per minute to 190 shots per minute. This makes the time to kill a full health base with 4 MINI-HD\u2019s go from ~1 minute to ~2 minutes.\n\n-Cannons have received a large increase in damage. They are now the highest damage weapon in the game. They have also received a 4X increase in the projectile size, with new FX to match. For balance, the fire rate has decreased significantly and the projectile speed was reduced slightly. They are a very high skill, high reward weapon.\n\n-The high angle weapons have had a complete rework of the projectile physics. Before, projectiles could land hundreds of meters off from the listed range. They will now land within ~10 meters, every time. This has significantly changed the \u2018feel\u2019 of howitzers and rockets.\n\n-All Wheel chassis have been given a significant boost to energy generation\n\n-Turret deploys have had energy requirements increased, along with a re-balance on weights. Deployment cool down timers have generally increased as well.\n\nAnd for the fun bug fixes!\n\nFixed multiplayer \u2018barrel clearing\u2019: This bug affected the shot velocity of the first shot of every weapon in multiplayer only. Now every shot will behave the same.\n\nFixed crash bug when taking fire damage: When taking fire damage [or other very rapid damage] the health UI could enter an infinite race condition resulting in a hard crash or lockup.\n\nFixed health UI not showing temporary damage bars when taking fire damage : Before when taking fire damage the health percentage would decrease, but the bar would stay static.\n\nLoading a MAV with locked parts will now result in an invalid build\n\nFailed build UI icon will now contain a tooltip showing all reasons for a MAV build to be failing.\n\nKnown issues:\n\nIn extreme cases, the flight path of rockets and howitzer rounds is\u2026 unexpected.\n\nEnjoy the new content!"}
{"text":"This man is holding an image of a sword that doesn't exist in real life. In fact, it doesn't even really exist on a virtual world\u2014he paid $16,000 for a game sword that he can't play yet.\n\nHe got the virtual sword at an auction to celebrate the launch of a highly anticipated game called Age of Wulin. Set in ancient China, the players would be able to ramble through a beautifully detailed world crouching the tiger and hiding the dragon. Other items sold include a sheath for Hook of Departure\u2014sold for $1,600\u2014and a Lordly Spear Sheath\u2014sold for $2,500.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nIt's going to be released in China soon, but it will not be available in English until Spring 2012, when all your base are belong to them. [Age of Wulin via Daily Mail]"}
{"text":"A Google news search returns 5,240 results for \u201cFerguslie Park\u201d over the last 24 hours. As compared to 0 mentions in the previous 24 hours.\n\nThe media have, with an incredible level of unanimity, seized upon a Tory being elected to represent Ferguslie Park, \u201cthe most deprived area of Scotland\u201d, as the leading evidence of a Tory resurgence into areas of Scotland \u201cthey could not previously venture into\u201d. I have heard this recounted on every available broadcast platform this evening.\n\nI have two bits of news for the unionist media. Firstly, Ferguslie Park is in Paisley. Most of you think it is in Glasgow. Secondly there is no ward called Ferguslie Park. There is a place called Ferguslie Park, and it is less than half of a ward called Paisley Northwest. Now here is the result of that stunning Tory super-victory amazing spectacular miraculous shocking earth-shattering mould-breaking Tory triumph in Paisley Northwest.\n\nMy, how the ground shook. In future years, everybody will recall just exactly where they were at the moment the Conservatives polled 13% in Paisley North West, when that vast uprising of 657 voters swept their candidate to victory on the 10th set of transfers into the fourth available slot in a multi-member constituency.\n\nNow, this will come as a shock to some people. Paisley North West is not a dreadful slum, and contains some distinctly prosperous areas. Much of the ward looks like this.\n\nHere are some statistics for the entire ward.\n\n65% of households in Paisley North West are owner occupied\n\n67% of the population of Paisley North West are employed, self employed or full time students\n\n5.1% of the population of Paisley North West are unemployed\n\n23% of the population of Paisley North West are pensioners\n\n4.9% are housewives\/husbands\/carers or not in the labour force\n\nIn a local election poll with a low turnout, there is a disproportionately high turnout from pensioners and from the wealthier districts. Very few indeed of those measly 657 Tory votes came from the Ferguslie Park estate.\n\nThe real story is that in a ward with 65% owner-occupiers and 67% economically active, the Tories could still only manage a measly 13% of the vote. That the large majority of \u00a3350,000 owner occupiers do not vote Tory. The real story is that the SNP took 44% to the Tories 13%. But no, the march of Ruth\u2019s 13%ers has apparently changed the course of history. As Tom Robinson once sang, \u201cIt\u2019s there in the papers, must be the truth\u201d.\n\nLiked this article? Please share using the links below. Then View Latest Posts"}
{"text":"Two suspicious packages that were found at Gower Park last week.\n\nAn item made of metal piping with protruding wires placed under the bowl of a public toilet is the latest in a string of suspicious items requiring bomb squad action in Hamilton.\n\nIn the last six months the Auckland-based bomb squad has been called in to deal with four suspicious items located in different public locations around the city.\n\nLast Thursday the central city shopping mall was evacuated for almost four hours after a suspicious package was delivered to the ANZ Bank at Centre Place.\n\nBruce Mercer Auckland's Defence Force team set up a robot at Gower Park, Hamilton, where a suspicious package was found this morning.\n\nThe latest incident on Monday involved an unusual piece of metal piping police say was purposely made to look like an explosive device and placed in the toilet block at the park in Hamilton Lake area.\n\nHamilton police Senior Sergeant Neil Faulkner said police received a call from Hamilton City Council staff who found a suspicious item in the women's toilet about 8.30am Monday.\n\n\"It was described as being a pipe with wires coming out of it, placed underneath one of the toilet bowls in the women's toilet.\"\n\nPolice set up a 200 metre cordon around the toilet block on the Sandleigh Rd side of the park, below Waikato Hospital, and halted motorists and pedestrians entering via Hibiscus Ave.\n\nResidents of about 10 houses in the cul-du-sac on Sandleigh Rd were told to stay inside their homes while the Auckland-based Defence Force team dealt with the item.\n\n\"It is the normal operating procedure when dealing with a suspicious package until the defence force have assessed it,\" said Faulkner.\n\n\"We make an assessment of the information that we have and decided to get the Defence Force to neutralise the item.\"\n\nThe bomb squad team arrived in a white van at the quiet park, lined with hospital workers' cars about 11am. About 20 minutes later a robot was deployed from the rear of the van into the building where the item was located in a small stall.\n\n\"They have tried to use the robot to go in there with cameras to take a look at the device and neutralise it if needed,\" said Faulkner.\n\n\"However, due to the close proximity of the walls and the cubicle they were unable to manoeuvre it sufficiently so they have done a manual approach.\"\n\nOne of the senior bomb squad members adorned in a specialist protective suit was sent into the cubicle to manually neutralise the item, said Faulkner.\n\n\"They are a specialist unit and luckily we had one of the main guys who was able to deal with it. They have a device that fires a water shot through it and blows it to pieces basically.\"\n\n\"We had a number of other contingencies here - fire and gas - in case something eventuated that was outside of our control.\"\n\nMaddie Cambort was visiting friends on Sandleigh Rd when she heard a loud bang about 12.15pm.\n\n\"It was really, really loud, sounded like a gunshot wound. The glass shook a little.\"\n\nFaulkner said the item, which was being investigated by Waikato CIB, had been purposely made to look suspicious.\n\n\"It was made to look like an IED - Improvised Explosive Device - but initial thoughts from the Defence Force are that it probably is not going to cause any danger to the public as it was.\"\n\nHamilton City Council Parks and Open Spaces Manager Sally Sheedy said the toilet blocks were open from 7.30am to 7.30pm daily. Outside of those hours only authorised council staff had access.\n\nThe item had likely been placed in the toilet sometime between Sunday morning and Monday, said Faulkner.\n\n\"It was there this morning, so it could have been anytime between when it was cleaned [Sunday] and when the doors were locked last night.\"\n\nThe bomb squad had recently used the robot to destroy a suspicious bag that had been found abandoned in the Hamilton IRD building on Bryce St. Police later tracked down the owner of the small blue bag left in the foyer who said she had forgotten she left it there.\n\nBack in December the bomb squad were again called in to deal with a suspicious item discovered outside Davies Medical Centre on Hukanui Rd.\n\nUniversity of Waikato political scientist Dr Colm McKeogh said there was a heightened sensitivity to security threats in today's climate.\n\n\"There's been two bomb scares in Hamilton, the IRD, which turned out to be innocuous and Centre Place and the one today is either a bomb scare or a threat. We don't know yet.\"\n\n\"Plus there's been the 1080 milk powder threat and the Lindt Caf\u00e9 in Sydney..[which] brought it much closer to home the possibility that it could happen here.\"\n\nThe response from the Defence Force and police was sometimes inconvenient for residents, but warranted in all cases due to what was happening with the Islamic State and the recent domestic threats made to milk powder, he said.\n\n\"The Defence Force is more aware of bomb scares in New Zealand and there's good grounds. At the moment they have to take them seriously because of what's happening nationally and internationally.\"\n\n\"It's a safe place (Hamilton) but it takes only one incident to shatter that belief.\"\n\nPolice said all three recent events are being treated as unrelated and all items were assessed as not being dangerous."}
{"text":"When we first caught wind of Sensic's head-tracking 3D Smart goggles a few days ago , we couldn't help but think of it as a Sony HMZ-T1 on Android-flavored steroids. We've just spent some time with the prototype here on the show floor playing a virtual demo that had us smashing buildings in a virtual world -- notably running entirely on the headset, thanks (in part) to its 1.2GHZ dual-core CPU. If you can't tell from the picture, the headset is absolutely massive. In-hand it's quiet hefty, but once it engulfed our noggin, we found that it was actually quiet well-balanced and comfortable, to the point that we almost forget that it was on our head -- almost. Notably, this proto is a \"one size fits all\" type deal rght now, so we did have to wrap a circle-scarf around our head to keep its 1280 x 1024 screens within our eyes view. Thankfully, our horn-rimmed glasses did fit inside with no issue.So, what's it like? An array of cameras on it's face scan the environment to react to your heads position and any movement you make. We were able to spin, tilt, walk around and even jump, with the virtual world on screen following suite -- all while looking like a confused and lost puppy to anyone passing by. We're told video refreshes at 60hz, but sadly, we were faced with stuttery visuals in our use. The unit is also capable of tracking hand movements, but we can't say we were able to make use of the privilege -- instead, a controller made up for the interim. Considering that Sensic's head-tracking 3D goggles do all of the above in a completely self-contained fashion, we can't help but think that there's lots of potential for the tech. The question remains, however, as to whether the experience and the hardware can be smoothed to bring the Minority Report -style of AR closer to a retail reality. Head on past the break for a video of us trying out Sensic's headset for ourselves-- trust us, you're in for a treat."}
{"text":"The electronic currency Bitcoin works because of encryption and a blockchain -- a widely accessible, distributed record of everyone who has created, accessed or altered a given file. Bitcoin's blockchain tracks who has had each Bitcoin, verifies its authenticity, and so on.\n\nThis technology, however, has much broader applications. As governments move to release more data and documents online, verifying the authenticity of those files will become increasingly important. In the future, governments could use blockchains to track and verify the ownership of property records, banking records, securities or anything else posted on an open data platform.\n\nBrian Forde, the director of the MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative, explores the concept in the video below.\n\nBy 2020, using blockchain technology might even become a best practice for the verification of public records online.\n\nMakes sense, @digiphile. You could be right. \u2014 Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) August 31, 2015\n\n\"Property records, particularly in the developing world, are notoriously subject to hacking,\" Oliver Goodenough, a professor at Vermont Law School, observed in an interview. \"Honduras got money to do an electronic record land registry, but when they were done, many key properties were held by relatives of people who set up the ledger. Now, a contract was awarded to a company in Texas to set up a blockchain-based property system.\"\n\nThat example and others are drawing attention in other contexts, from countries around the world. In the United States, the blockchain might be a way of validating voter records before and after elections, making entries perusable and insulating them from fraud. It might also be relevant to securities, adding a technological component that would make fraud by corrupt officials much harder.\n\nGiven how blockchain technology has matured in recent years, Goodenough says it's just going to require hard work to get it into use -- and he hopes that Vermont will be a leader in that area.\n\n\"This could give sunshine and make it very hard to screw the system,\" he told me. \"The blockchain will not cook us breakfast, but it might tell us who cooked breakfast.\"\n\nFor more, watch Goodenough's talk earlier this year at Stanford (embedded below) on the state of legal technology:\n\nGovernments haven't been the biggest fans of Bitcoin, given the use of the cryptocurrency on the shadier parts of the Internet, including drug deals on the Deep Web. But at least one recognizes the potential of blockchains.\n\nThis summer, Vermont took a couple of step toward smart contracts, agreements that contain technology that automatically tracks versions and authors. On June 3, Peter Shumlin, the state's governor, signed an economic development act into law that commissioned a report on the opportunities and risks of using blockchain technology to validate public records and \"electronic facts.\"\n\nAn amendment to the economic development bill submitted by state Sen. Becca Balint suggested that \"blockchain technology shall be a recognized practice for the verification of a fact or record, and those facts or records established through a valid blockchain technology process shall have a presumption of validity for matters to be determined subject to, or in accordance with, the laws of the State of Vermont.\"\n\n\"This study will provide reasonable recognition for the blockchain as a way to establish facts, providing a rebuttable presumption that the fact was true,\" Goodenough, who drafted the amendment, told The Huffington Post. \"We are just establishing legal recognition that this is a way of establishing evidence.\"\n\nGoodenough, who directs the Center for Legal Innovation at the Vermont School of Law, has been researching the potential of smart contracts and automated securities that can automatically record who has accessed, changed or traded them."}
{"text":"Everybody who likes pirates (and who doesn't like pirates?) has a pitch for the ideal game about them. We carry our imaginary game around with us, close to our rum-soaked hearts. It's got to be open world of course, because what's the point of the horizon if you can't have it brought to you? The romance of being a pirate is all about freedom.\n\nIt's also about stabbing people. There needs to be good stabbing, and pistol-shooting as well, and belting out a good \u201char har!\u201d while you do it. You want swinging onto someone else's deck and swashbuckling away to be joyous. Blasting enemies from a distance with cannon fire is Pirating 101. Duelling with swords and also with sails, some kind of system for using the wind against opponents and lining up broadsides, more tactical than the wild to-and-fro of close combat.\n\nOh, and we'll also need a robust economic simulation, please. What's the point of killing people and stealing their stuff if that stuff can't be sold at port? That leads to profit, so there need to be ways of upgrading ships and buying whole new ones with those profits, as well as managing the crew. Maybe something abstract for the bulk of yer maties, but if the officers could be BioWare-style companions with their own dark secrets to uncover and loyalty missions to undertake that'd be swell.\n\nSounds perfect. Why doesn't it exist already?\n\nHere's a game we can probably agree is a good one: Sid Meier's Pirates! It doesn't tick every box on that list but it's close. It encompasses a stretch of the Caribbean and Spanish Main so big you need turbo mode to cross it, there are ships full of Spanish gold to take (and Dutch gold, French gold, and English gold), and you can buy low and sell high profitably enough that you don't even need to turn to piracy if you're boring. On the other hand its dueling is pretty simplistic and depending which version you play there might be a divisive ballroom dancing minigame in there as well.\n\nAnd, more to the point, it's a game from 1987. It's been remade since then, in 1993 and again in 2004, but it still has very little competition. If you want to get your pirate on with something newer you have to play Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and slog through all of the assassin bits so you can unlock the half of the game you actually want: boarding ships and listening to sea shanties. But as great as it is to hit rough water and hear the crew of the Jackdaw launch into \u201cIt's stormy weather boys, stormy weather\/When the wind blows we're all together, boys,\u201d Black Flag isn't going to let you profit from manipulating trade conditions. It's just not that kind of game.\n\nThe MMO Pirates Of The Burning Sea is that kind of game. Its player-driven economy is detailed enough that you can have your own plots of land producing resources like iron ore which you manufacture into nails before selling them to another player who owns a shipyard. It's also got a fine ship-to-ship combat system for getting the wind in your sails and opening fire on someone who has a hold full of nails if you'd rather be a straight-up buccaneer than a manufacturer who also occasionally pirates it up.\n\nBeing an MMO means Pirates Of The Burning Sea can use other players for those interactions, whether trading or risking crew and cargo sailing through the dangerous waters of the PVP zones. But online games bring their own problems. Board a ship and you'll find yourself staring at a cooldown bar of attack options straight out of World Of Warcraft, a far less thrilling prospect than its ship-to-ship combat. And even its sailing can be seriously hampered by lag, with your ship suddenly stalling then teleporting to a different position nudged up against an outcropping of land.\n\nThere are plenty of other games about pirates and Steam is full of cutthroat simulators, many of them products of Early Access. But just like Black Flag or Pirates Of The Burning Sea there's always something missing, something holding them back from fulfilling our hopes and living up to that dream pitch of being a truly well-rounded pirate. They may start with positive feedback from the most involved community members, but once more players get involved their ratings drop\u2014Blood & Gold: Caribbean, Naval Action, Pixel Piracy, they're all trending down towards a 'mixed' rating in the harsh waters of Steam community reviews.\n\nWe're a judgmental bunch. I'd make a joke about pirate fans liking to make underwhelming games walk the plank, but then I'd get a bunch of judgmental comments about how walking the plank's unhistorical. We may like Monkey Island but we still want more than just a pirate costume draped on another genre. We see a ship and we get our hopes up, setting ourselves up for disappointment. Take a look at Sunless Sea, which isn't even about piracy though you can dabble in it. It's a game about story, as much a text adventure as a naval adventure, but there's still a cranky subset of its players upset by the fact its trade side is underdeveloped. Give us a ship and a set of ports and we want to start manipulating their economies for our benefit even in a game that's really about earning eerie stories rather than loot.\n\nWhy doesn't our ideal pirate game exist? Maybe it\u2019s simply because we're asking too much. First on our list is \u201copen world\u201d but open-world games are expensive and inevitably troubled by bugs, even when the biggest studios are behind them. The licensed Pirates Of The Caribbean game made by Akella and published by Bethesda, as well as its unofficial sequels in the Age Of Pirates series, are perfect examples, where you're as likely to crash to desktop as into a warship. The first thing on our list of demands is almost impossible on its own, let alone once we start fussing over the rest.\n\nRare\u2019s ambition for its upcoming online pirate game Sea of Thieves actually highlights why it\u2019s so difficult to make a truly satisfying one. \u201cEveryone\u2019s got an idea of what pirates do,\u201d design director Gregg Mayles told us at E3. \u201cEveryone knows they go after treasure. You don\u2019t need to be told how to sail a ship or climb to the crow\u2019s nest and use a telescope.\u201d\n\n\u201cAnything you expect to be able to do in a pirate game, we expect to make that dream come true for players,\u201d added executive producer Joe Neate.\n\nOther popular genres like sci-fi and fantasy settings certainly come with their own preconceptions, but they\u2019re less clear-cut. Pirate games aren\u2019t just about a place but about a specific kind of character and action. They\u2019re a more codified fiction than \u201cliving in space\u201d or \u201clike the past but with wizards\u201d and when we can\u2019t swashbuckle across the seven seas just right and raid and trade and all the rest, it just doesn\u2019t feel like real pirating.\n\nI wish Rare all the luck in the world with Sea of Thieves. But rather than getting our hopes up and setting ourselves up for another disappointment (we don't talk about Risen 2: Dark Waters), maybe we should lower those expectations like we're lowering our sails, losing some speed but gaining some maneuverability so that we don't smash right into a bitter reef of our own making just like this metaphor has.\n\nIn the meantime, who's for another rousing chorus of 'The Fish In The Sea?' \u201cIt's stormy weather boys, stormy weather...\u201d"}
{"text":"Image copyright AFP\n\nVisitors have stayed away from major tourist attractions in the wake of recent terror attacks, according to the London Eye and Madame Tussauds owner.\n\nMerlin Entertainments, which also runs the Legoland theme park, also warned that numbers could continue to fall.\n\nBosses said before the attacks foreign tourists had been flocking to the UK to take advantage of the weak pound.\n\nThe company's London Eye sits just next to Westminster Bridge - where the March attack took place.\n\nMerlin said in a statement: \"in the immediate aftermath of the Westminster attack on 22 March... the incident did result in a softer domestic, day-trip market.\n\n\"However, the subsequent attacks in Manchester and London over the past month have resulted in a further deterioration in domestic demand and, given the typical lag between holiday bookings and visitation, we are also cautious on trends in foreign visitation over the coming months\".\n\nImpact\n\nIn the aftermath of a terror attack, major attractions tend to not feel the impact for a few weeks or months because most foreign visitors tend to buy their tickets for Merlin sites such as Alton Towers or The London Dungeons, in advance.\n\nChief executive Nick Varney added: \"The impact of recent terror attacks on our London attractions is unclear at this stage.\n\n\"What is clear however is that London has bounced back before, and will do again.\n\n\"London is very much open for business, welcoming visitors from the UK and from around the world to this exciting and vibrant city.\"\n\nInvestors heeded Merlin's warning, sending shares falling 2.8% to 489p.\n\nNeil Wilson, senior market analyst at ETX Capital, said: \"Merlin had already warned in March when it released its 2016 full-year preliminary results that the threat of terror attacks had hit its UK business, citing events in Paris and Brussels as having an impact.\n\n\"This was before the Westminster attack on March 22nd, meaning the impact on the UK business is likely to be significantly greater in 2017 than it was last year.\"\n\nMerlin has seen visitors shun its attractions after major incidents before.\n\nIn 2015, the company saw a significant drop in visitors to its Alton Towers theme park after several thrill seekers were badly injured on one of the rides.\n\nBosses will face tough questions from shareholders on Tuesday at the company's annual general meeting at Legoland, where they will also be told about the opening of Legoland Japan and new sites across the US."}
{"text":"Bloodborne \u201cTotal Game Volume\u201d is Bigger Than Demon Souls, Claims Producer\n\n(Editor\u2019s note: the interviewee was originally listed as Director Hidetaka Miyazaki, as that was the name on the interview schedule, among other circumstantial communication oddities. That aside, here is the interview with Mr. Yamagiwa)\n\nDid you find From Software\u2019s previous games \u2014 Dark Souls and Demon Souls \u2014 long enough for the genre it\u2019s in? If so, you\u2019ll be glad to know Bloodborne will be even bigger in scope.\n\nContinuing our interview with Bloodborne Producer Masaaki Yamagiwa at TGS, we asked him how many hours of gameplay are they expecting from a typical Bloodborne playthrough, and here\u2019s the good news he relayed:\n\nJust like Demon\u2019s Souls, it really depends on the player\u2019s skill. It\u2019s hard to say. But we can say that the total game volume is bigger than Demon\u2019s Souls.\n\nWhile Miyazaki didn\u2019t give out any specific duration of time, the fact that the total game volume is bigger should be welcome news for fans, right?\n\nIn another part of the chat, Miyazaki commented on why Bloodborne is a PlayStation 4 exclusive.\n\nAre you concerned at all regarding Bloodborne\u2019s length or should it not matter provided the gameplay is solid?"}
{"text":"- Two ex-cons tried to use the Polk County Sheriff's office to scam a local business, but it didn't work.\n\nWhen Marco Sullivan was arrested in Lakeland on an outstanding warrant from Orange County, he didn't want his employer to know, so he asked his girlfriend, Martisha Wilson to try and cover it up for him.\n\nAt first, she told his boss that he had the flu and would be back in a few days. But after Sullivan went to court, he realized he was going to be behind bars longer than he thought. So he hatched a plan.\n\nHe told Wilson to download a Polk Sheriff's Office letterhead. Sullivan told her to write a letter saying that he was on a special mission with the ATF Division of the Polk Sheriff's Office.\n\nBut the letter had red flags from beginning to end.\n\n\"There is one thing for sure,\" said Polk Sheriff Grady Judd. \"We'll never use Martisha as a secretary at the sheriff's office.\"\n\nThe letter was written entirely in capital letters. Then there were the spelling mistakes.\n\n\"He'll be on the unit for 6 months or less,\" Judd read from the letter. \"Do (sic) to the severity of the case, I am not able to enclosed (sic), E-N-C-L-O-S-E-D, no farther (sic), F-A-R-T-H-E-R, information,\" Judd read, spelling out some of the misspelled words.\n\nJudd also pointed out the Polk Sheriff's Office doesn't have an ATF Division and the signature on the letter was Mike Singleton. There is no person employed at the sheriff's office by that name.\n\nWhen someone at Reddy read the letter, they knew something was wrong, called investigators.\n\nSullivan remains in custody. Detectives have yet to locate Wilson. There is a Polk County warrant for her arrest for criminal use of personal identification. She is believed to be in the Orlando area and is described as 5-foot-4 and 150 pounds. The Sheriff\u2019s Office asks anyone with information on her whereabouts to contact them at 863-298-6200."}
{"text":"Tweet\n\nProfessor Joan Goodman, the director of the Teach for America program at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the philosophy behind *no excuses* charter schools, and the price paid by students who attend them.\n\nEduShyster: You\u2019re the author of an article called Charter Management Organizations and the Regulated Environment: Is It Worth the Price? that\u2019s the single best overview of *no excuses* charter schools that I\u2019ve seen. Talk a little about the research you\u2019ve been doing.\n\nJoan Goodman: I began to focus on charter schools when the first Mastery Charter School was started in Philadelphia. These were supposed to be experimental schools which would have a variety of new approaches and they\u2019d get rid of bureaucracy and we\u2019d see all kinds of novel approaches to children. But particularly in terms of the charter management organizations they haven\u2019t provided much variety\u2014they\u2019re all strikingly similar to one another. These schools have a very clear philosophy about what they\u2019re trying to do, how they\u2019re trying to do it, what they think is necessary, who they read, who their leaders are. And they\u2019re explicit in describing it. The combination of the uniformity across these different schools and their explicitness about what they\u2019re doing and why they\u2019re doing it makes it easier to get hold of this movement than it is with say, public schools in a city or a school district where there\u2019s so much variety and there isn\u2019t a single philosophy.\n\nES: With the exception of KIPP, which has allowed Mathematica to study its admission policies and test results, these schools haven\u2019t been receptive to academic studies. How did you manage to study them?\n\nGoodman: I\u2019m the academic director of our Teach for America program at UPenn and our TFA students are teachers in these schools. So I can go in to look at what our students and their teachers are doing, and then students tell me a lot about what\u2019s going on. I have also done a good bit of visiting. The charters are hospitable to that. A lot of this is anecdotal, and much is based on what the schools have written, which is public. My work is investigative, I think, more than formal research. But you\u2019re right\u2014it takes a huge effort to try to get into these schools for any systematic research. They don\u2019t welcome outsiders to study them. And they have a point. What academics do when they go in is criticize, and you can see why they might not like that. I think they\u2019ll let just about anybody in for a visit. But to go in and have the schools really cooperate with an investigator, that\u2019s a whole lot harder. What are the day-to-day processes that are happening in the classroom? How do teachers feel about these processes? How much range of behavior is there? It would be great to be able to investigate these sorts of questions, but the schools wouldn\u2019t welcome that.\n\nES: Minority children in urban areas are increasingly being educated at schools run by the types of charter management organizations you study, yet I find that people know little if anything about the way these schools view the world.\n\nGoodman: These schools start with the belief that there\u2019s no reason for the large academic gaps that exist between poor minority students and more privileged children. They argue that if we just used better methods, demanded more, had higher expectations, enforced these higher expectations through very rigorous and uniform teaching methods and a very uniform and scripted curriculum geared to being successful on high-stakes tests, we can minimize or even eradicate these large gaps, high rates of drop outs and the academic failures of these children. To reach these objectives, these schools have developed very elaborate behavioral regimes that they insist all children follow, starting in kindergarten. Submission, obedience, and self-control are very large values. They want kids to submit. You can\u2019t really do this kind of instruction if you don\u2019t have very submissive children who are capable of high levels of inhibition and do whatever they\u2019re told.\n\nES: Time seems to be an essential component too\u2014the idea that not a second can be wasted. I\u2019m reminded of this video about *speedy transitions* for kindergarteners at a New Jersey charter school.\n\nGoodman: In order to maximize academic accomplishment, no time can be wasted and anything that\u2019s not academically targeted, that\u2019s not geared to what the students have to know, is time wasted. So there is almost no opportunity for play, for relaxation, very little time for extra-curricular activities. The day is jammed with academics, especially math and reading because that\u2019s what gets tested. The view of time and strict discipline are related, by the way; in order to get these kids to attend over very long hours\u2014they have extended days and extended weeks\u2014you have to be tough with the kids, really severe. They want these kids to understand that when authority speaks you have to follow because that\u2019s basic to learning. So they don\u2019t have the notion of learning that more progressive educators have, that learning is a very active enterprise and that children have to be very participatory and thinking and speaking and discussing and sharing and having initiative. That\u2019s not their view of learning. It\u2019s too variable across teachers, the objectives are too non-specific, and time is wasted.\n\nES: The *broken windows* theory is well known when it comes to policing, but as you write, these charter management organizations apply that theory to schools. Explain.\n\nGoodman: These schools believe that behaviors that you might not think are directly related to academic learning can have a domino effect if left unaddressed. Getting up from your chair to go to the bathroom without explicit permission, for example, or not having your hands folded on your desk, or not looking at the teacher every minute, or not having your feet firmly planted on each side of the center of the desk are problematic behaviors. Because if you don\u2019t conform to these rules then you are going to precipitate the next domino and the next domino. It\u2019s going to have a cascading effect on your behavior and pretty soon you\u2019re going to be very disruptive. If you get up to sharpen your pencil, maybe you\u2019re going to throw your pencil at someone. Or if you get up and get something out of your backpack that you forgot, maybe you\u2019re going to elbow another student on your way back to your seat, or make eye contact with them and divert them from looking at the teacher. Any one of these little behaviors they see as leading to the next behavior. Before you know it there will be bedlam.\n\nES: Does the emphasis on discipline diminish as kids get older?\n\nGoodman: Well yes\u2014as kids learn and adapt to this regime there\u2019s less time spent on discipline. It takes a while for the kids to adapt to this because it\u2019s so out of their experience. The older kids are still getting merits and demerits all the way through high school, though. In some schools they wear these lanyards that get marked, and when they accumulate a certain number of demerits things happen to them. By 12th grade, the kids are almost giving the demerits to themselves, they\u2019re so accustomed by this point. You might think that if this is still going on in 12th grade, then the kids can\u2019t have internalized all of this very well, but they do get used to it. They do adapt.\n\nES: One of the questions you ask is whether there are legitimate limits to the power exercised by schools over children.\n\nGoodman: That\u2019s a big question. What rights do children have that are similar to the rights of adults? Can you search them? Can you control what they say and don\u2019t say at all times? Do they have any freedom of speech rights? Do they have any freedom to bring something to school if they want to? More than that, do they have any rights at all against oppressive punishment? Students in these schools have to go to a certain chair and sit there for a certain length of time, all at the teacher\u2019s discretion, and sometimes they have to go repeatedly to this isolated chair with their back to the class. They may be deprived of recess if that\u2019s granted. They have to go to detention and stay after school. They have to write things 100 times. In some of the schools, there\u2019s a good bit of shaming: they have to wear different colored shirts, they can\u2019t talk, they have to sit on a lower bench than other children. And it\u2019s deliberate shaming of the kids. No one is allowed to talk to them. And what offense have they done to merit this kind of punishment? They haven\u2019t done their homework or they\u2019ve come in late, perhaps repeatedly. They haven\u2019t done anything violent. There has been no adjudication. The teachers or the school norms say that this is appropriate. So what are the limits of what a teacher can do to a child?\n\nES: You expected that students in these kinds of schools would consider the rules oppressive, but in your study The Quest for Compliance in Schools: Unforeseen Consequences, you found that the students had come to believe that they didn\u2019t deserve more freedom.\n\nGoodman: One thing about these atmospheres is that they\u2019re very uniform. Everybody is on board\u2014you don\u2019t have variability from teacher to teacher or class to class. The atmosphere is totalizing. And the children tend to model themselves after this authority. It has that effect on kids, that they identify with the rules of the regime and their identity becomes *a kid in this school who conforms to these rules.* Now some of the students, of course, don\u2019t conform to the rules, and I think that if you get the kids later in life it\u2019s much harder. But if you get them early, you develop their sense of self that accords with those of the authority. The adults know everything, they know nothing. Here\u2019s what\u2019s good, here\u2019s what\u2019s right. You\u2019ll be successful and happy if you take on these characteristics. Without these rules you\u2019ll be bad or impulsive and you\u2019ll destroy your future. You may not be having fun but you\u2019re doing what\u2019s important. We know best. And the kids come to believe that. As the social psychologists have shown, in totalizing environments, that\u2019s often the result. They call it \u201cidentification with the oppressor.\u201d Here oppressor should be changed to authority. There is very, very strong authority in these schools. The teachers are novice teachers, so they get molded too. I don\u2019t think you could take highly experienced teachers\u201420 years of running a classroom\u2014and put them into these schools and have the same kind of experience. It\u2019s a really interesting study to see how both the teachers and the kids get acculturated.\n\nES: I think it\u2019s important to point out that you also have some very positive things to say about these schools\u2014you\u2019re not just a straight-up hater.\n\nGoodman: Not at all. I\u2019m certainly not a hater. I think the basic idea of order, of developing habits\u2014you walk into class, you put your things away, you sit down, you take out your book, teacher says good morning, shakes hands, you look at her\u2014some of the habits they\u2019re cultivating will be helpful to kids. And certainly the prohibition on violence makes for a safe community. The problem is that the approach is unbalanced. I think a certain amount of routine, habit forming, strictness, limiting certain behavior is good\u2014but I would always be working towards reducing that. Once you\u2019ve established a safe environment, for example, why not loosen up on the behavior regulations? If I were running one of these schools I would feel that *OK\u2014I have to do this* but I would always be working towards turning over more authority to the kids. That would be my goal all of the time. Let the kids be responsible for their behavior. Have more group work, more student councils, more kids in charge of their own lives.\n\nJoan Goodman is a Professor in the Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania and a former school psychologist. Her article, Charter Management Organizations and the Regulated Environment: Is It Worth the Price?, appeared in the February 2013 issue of Educational Researcher.\n\nSend tips and comments to tips@haveyouheardblog.com."}
{"text":"According to a number of reports, much-maligned Philadelphia Eagles cornerbacks Roc Carmichael and Curtis Marsh have been released. Both Marsh and Carmichael struggled majorly in the team's preseason games. It's far from a surprise to see they were cut.\n\nMarsh is a former third round pick from the Eagles' dreadful 2011 NFL Draft class. Carmichael spent time on the Houston Texans practice squad last year before being signed away by the Eagles.\n\nWith Marsh and Carmichael gone, the Eagles cornerback position now comes into focus. The five remaining cornerbacks include: Cary Williams, Bradley Fletcher, Nolan Carroll II, Brandon Boykin, and Jaylen Watkins. Williams and Fletcher are the returning 2013 starters on the outside. Boykin is one of the best slot cornerbacks in the NFL on the inside. Carroll II projects to be the team's dime cornerback and also could push Fletcher for a starting job still. Watkins is a rookie fourth round pick with the versatility to also play safety. It appears Watkins will serve as Boykin's backup for the time being."}
{"text":"The Florida Gators were the last team to win back to back NCAA Tournaments in 2006 and 2007. There were three NBA lottery picks from that team, Al Horford, Joakim Noah and Corey Brewer. All three of those players were part of the 2004 signing class along with Taurean Green. They were all roommates during their three year stay in Gainesville and the best of friends. They became known around the state as the \u201c04\u2019s\u201d, perhaps a take-off of Michigan\u2019s \u201cFab Five\u201d of the early 1990s.\n\nAl three of the front court players from that team were chosen in the lottery, two of them Noah and Horford, are still with the teams that picked them. Brewer was picked by the Minnesota Timberwolves and has bounced around a bit with stops in New York and Dallas before finding a home with the Denver Nuggets. Noah was drafted by the Chicago Bulls and is still one of their best players. He played in this season\u2019s NBA All-Star Game, nearly recording a double double in just a few minutes in that game. Horford has also been to the All-Star game and is one of the best players for the Atlanta Hawks who drafted him.\n\nAll three of these players have panned out, which the odds were probably against. But the odds have never gotten the best of these three before. In 2004, the Kentucky Wildcats incoming class was rated over Florida\u2019s, and it wasn\u2019t even really close. In 205, these four players helped the Gators win their first ever SEC Tournament over Kentucky in the championship game, even though their roles were limited behind David Lee, Anthony Roberson and Matt Walsh.\n\nIn 2006, Florida began the season unranked. But with the emergence of Noah, Brewer and Horford along with Green and his back court mate, sharpshooter Lee Humphrey, the Gators got off to a 22-0 start. They went into the SEC Tournament as one of a handful of teams that had a shot to win it, but they won their second in a row, beating the South Carolina Gamecocks in the Final. They then went to the NCAA Tournament as a number three seed and went all the way to school\u2019s first national championship. Noah was a sure #1 pick as he was named the Most Outstanding Player of the tournament.\n\nCoach Billy Donovan got his \u201cBig Four\u201d together after the tournament and told them they had a chance to do something special in repeating as national champs. Noah\u2019s first reaction, understandably, was \u201cI\u2019m about to go get PAID!\u201d But Brewer talked his mates into returning to school to go for the repeat.\n\nThey made their announcement at the championship celebration, sending the Gator crowd into a frenzy, but putting a target on their backs. At times, the target was huge as teams gave them their best shots. But when the post season came around, these gators ripped through the competition for their third straight SEC Tournament championship and second straight national championship. Then it was on to the NBA.\n\nThis is their sixth season in the NBA and it is safe to say that all three have made their marks on the game. All three are participating in this year\u2019s playoffs and playing a major role for their teams.\n\nNoah averaged 12 points and 11 rebounds per game for the Bulls. He was the second leading rebounder and fourth leading scorer on the team.\n\nHorford averaged 14 points and six rebounds per game for the Hawks. He was their third leading scorer.\n\nBrewer averaged nearly 15 points per game for the Nuggets in what has been his first real shot to contribute in the NBA. The Nuggets up-tempo style fits his game perfectly.\n\nSo it is safe to say that the Gator Boys are Still Hot. Altogether there are at least eight former Gator players in the playoffs with the Spurs Matt Bonner, the Warriors David Lee (who is now out with an injured hip), the Rockets Chandler Parsons, and the Heat\u2019s Mike Miller and Udonis Haslem. There are probably not very many schools with that many contributing to playoff teams. The trio of Brewer, Horford and Noah will always be linked as the most revered of Gator greats."}
{"text":"Sans crazy arcade installation\n\nIt's been a real joy re-experiencing classic titles from Sega's past. With the recent releases of Outrun and Fantasy Zone II bringing back some serious nostalgia trips, the folks at Sega have still got plenty of 3D remasters in store. Though the spring phase of Sega's 3D Classics series is drawing to a close, there's still one more title in the wings, and that's the return of the underrated and super enjoyable Thunder Blade.\n\nMuch like Outrun, the 3D release of Thunder Blade has seen some time on the market overseas, but the Western crowd is now finally going to get a taste of the action on May 14. Just before its debut, I got to experience a special hands-on look with the title, along with a quick chat with producer Yosuke Okunari. And we got to learn what was like porting this unique arcade shooter to the handheld.\n\nOriginally released in 1987, Thunder Blade brings players to the helm of a heavily armed attack helicopter as they battle waves of foes in tanks, jets, and battleships across a variety of locations. Much like the other Sega offerings of its time, the story is kept light in favor of offering accessible and fast arcade-style gameplay. You're the good guy, everyone else is bad -- shoot them. Though unlike most other shoot-'em-up titles, Thunder Blade features a unique take on perspective, as the action will transition from an overhead angle to the over-the-shoulder look similar to Space Harrier during key sections of the stage. This dynamic switch of perspective made it a welcome fit for the 3D remaster.\n\n\"We felt that this point of view was extremely well suited for a stereoscopic 3D conversion,\" said producer Yosuke Okunari. \"When we went to actually build the game out in 3D, we found that it gained a very unique sense of actually being suspended in their air, and was even more impactful than the original game. This same thing happened with 3D Galaxy Force II, where by implementing stereoscopic 3D, the game's visual view point style transcended in to its final form, you could say.\"\n\nThunder Blade has made the transition quite well, and the new hardware has done wonders for the gameplay. The frame rate is rock solid, and the controls for the 3DS are super sharp and make controlling the attack chopper feel very accurate. The left stick controls movement and altitude, while both shoulder buttons control speed (increase and decrease). Though the 3DS is a far cry from the control scheme found on the original arcade release -- which featured a flight stick and a special chair that sought to emulate the cockpit of a helicopter -- I can safely say that 3D Thunder Blade is a fine port, and the action still kept me on my toes during the hectic battles.\n\nMuch like the other 3D Classic titles, Thunder Blade makes exquisite use out of the new 3D visuals and hardware. One of the most striking elements is its depth of view during altering perspectives, and the new 3D visuals do well to enhance the view and sense of movement during the action. Though the draw distances unfortunately haven't been improved, I was still quite impressed with how the visuals sharpened up. Interestingly enough, the transition to 3D meant having to design the new visuals around the new perspectives independently, and layering them on top of one another.\n\n\"For this version, we had to implement 3D separately for each of these three types of scenes,\" said the producer. \"The boss stages were particularly difficult. The original game actually had preset depths. Even more so than some of the Genesis games, there were a number of situations where we wouldn't really have to worry about if we left them in 2D, suddenly [having] paradoxical situations when we put them into 3D.\"\n\n\"Thunder Blade has three types of gameplay for every stage. The first are scenes that are from the top-down, which allow you to fully appreciate and enjoy changing your helicopter\u2019s altitude. The second are scenes that are 'over the shoulder,' which are reminiscent of After Burner II. The last are the boss battles, where you are not able to change your altitude but you are placed into a forced-scroll situation where you can control your speed and progression. There are no other games that allow you to experience these three types of gameplay all in a single game.\"\n\nThough they were keen on keeping the 3D remaster as it was with the original title, they did implement some new features -- both out of necessity and the desire to include new content with the original game. As some areas didn't take to the new 3D visuals too well, such as shadows glitching out and boss battles resulting in odd bugs, they had to be cut in order to preserve the experience. But in order to make up for this, they implemented a stage that's brand new to the original Thunder Blade. Okunari stated that the new level will be consistent with the rest of the game and really offer an exciting finish.\n\n\"The new stage feels natural and uses the graphical style of the era, all while taking advantage of the stereoscopic 3D to deliver a scene where you flying into the center of a base, reminiscent of the final Death Star scene in Return of the Jedi. The boss has a really awesome background to it as well, so I encourage everyone to check it out.\"\n\nNot only that, there's the new Arrange mode which is unlocked after completing the arcade mode. In Arrange Mode, players will control an alternate helicopter with different weapons and tackle stages that have some additions to them. While the the original arcade mode is exciting, the extra content goes above and beyond what I expected.\n\nI was pretty damn pleased with how 3D Thunder Blade turned out. It helped to scratch that shooter itch I had after playing Space Harrier and After Burner, and Thunder Blade definitely holds its own. While the style and approach is a bit different, I still found it to be a welcome addition to the Classics series. And it's a fine 3D remaster, too. This title is a good one to close out the spring phase of the Classics series, and it'll definitely hold you over till the summer titles come a knocking.\n\nYou are logged out. Login | Sign up\n\nClick to open photo gallery:"}
{"text":"NEW YORK \u2013 Calgary Flames center Jiri Hudler, Colorado Avalanche goaltender Semyon Varlamov and New York Rangers goaltender Cam Talbot have been named the NHL's \"Three Stars\" for the week ending March 8.\n\nFIRST STAR \u2013 JIRI HUDLER, C, CALGARY FLAMES\n\nHudler paced the NHL with eight points and shared the League lead with four goals to help the Flames (36-25-5, 77 points) earn seven out of a possible eight standings points. He opened the week with 1-1\u20142, including the winning goal at 1:23 of overtime, in a 3-2 triumph over the Philadelphia Flyers March 3. Hudler followed that performance with 1-1\u20142 in a 4-3 shootout win over the Boston Bruins March 5. He then recorded 2-0\u20142, including the game-winning goal, in a 5-2 victory over the Detroit Red Wings March 6. Hudler closed the week with a pair of assists in a 5-4 shootout loss to the Ottawa Senators March 8. The 31-year-old Olomouc, Czech Republic, native has posted multiple points in four consecutive games for the first time in his career. He leads the Flames with 23-33\u201456 in 63 outings this season, including four game-winning goals (tied for second on the team).\n\nSECOND STAR \u2013 SEMYON VARLAMOV, G, COLORADO AVALANCHE\n\nVarlamov went 3-0-0 with a 0.69 goals-against average, .981 save percentage and one shutout to lead the Avalanche (30-25-11, 71 points) to three straight wins. He made 28 saves in a 3-1 victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins March 4. Varlamov then stopped all 44 shots he faced in a 4-0 win over the Columbus Blue Jackets March 7 to record his 18th career shutout and fifth of the season, including three that have featured at least 40 saves (also Oct. 30 vs. NYI: 40 SV and Jan. 6 at CHI: 54 SV). He capped his performance with 29 saves in a 3-2 triumph over the Minnesota Wild March 8, extending his shutout streak to 124:19 \u2013 just 5:04 shy of his career high set March 1-6, 2012 (129:23). The 26-year-old Samara, Russia, native has appeared in 46 games this season (including 22 consecutive starts), compiling a 22-17-7 record with a 2.56 goals-against average and .921 save percentage.\n\nTHIRD STAR \u2013 CAM TALBOT, G, NEW YORK RANGERS\n\nTalbot posted a 2-0-1 record with a 0.99 goals-against average, .965 save percentage and one shutout to backstop the Rangers (40-17-7, 87 points) to five out of a possible six standings points. He denied 25 shots in a 4-1 triumph over the Nashville Predators March 2. Talbot then made 29 saves in a 2-1 overtime loss to the Detroit Red Wings March 4. He capped the week by stopping all 29 shots he faced in a 1-0 overtime victory against the Chicago Blackhawks March 8, becoming the first Rangers goaltender to post a shutout in Chicago since Dec. 25, 1966 (Ed Giacomin). The 27-year-old Caledonia, Ont., native has appeared in 26 games this season, going 14-6-4 with a 2.33 goals-against average, .921 save percentage and five shutouts. That includes points in 12 of his last 13 decisions (9-1-3) as well as a 5-1-1 mark in his last seven appearances (1.69 GAA, .943 SV%, 2 SO)."}
{"text":"49ers: Michael Crabtree Runs for First Time by Eric Melendez\n\n49ers: The Case Against Alex Smith by Eric Melendez\n\nPart 3 of my Get to Know series of this year\u2019s San Francisco 49ers draft picks, and we\u2019ll look at rookie tight end Bear Pascoe.\n\nGet to Know: Glen Coffee\n\nGet to Know: Michael Crabtree\n\nBear Pascoe, Tight End\n\nBorn: February 23, 1986\n\nHeight: 6-5\n\nWeight: 260 lbs.\n\nHigh School: Granite Hills High School (Porterville, CA)\n\nCollege: Fresno State University\n\nCollege Receiving Stats YEAR TEAM REC\n\nYDS\n\nAVG\n\nLNG\n\nTD\n\nFD\n\nFUM\n\nLOST\n\n2005 FRES 5\n\n34\n\n6.8\n\n12\n\n0\n\n0\n\n0\n\n0\n\n2006 FRES 22\n\n307\n\n14.0\n\n75\n\n2\n\n0\n\n0\n\n0\n\n2007 FRES 45\n\n553\n\n12.3\n\n44\n\n4\n\n0\n\n0\n\n0\n\n2008 FRES 40\n\n400\n\n10.0\n\n39\n\n4\n\n0\n\n0\n\n0\n\nTight end Bear Pascoe entered the NFL Draft after his senior year and was drafted in the sixth round with the 184th pick in 2009.\n\nBest game in college:\n\nSeptember 8, 2007 vs. Texas A&M: 7 receptions for 70 yards with 3 touchdowns.\n\nIn the clutch:\n\n2008 New Mexico Bowl vs. Colorado State: 3 receptions for 39 yards with 0 touchdowns.\n\n2007 Humanitarian Bowl vs. Georgia Tech: 6 receptions for 72 yards with 0 touchdowns.\n\n2006 Liberty Bowl vs. Tulsa: 2 receptions for 10 yards with 0 touchdowns.\n\nAwards:\n\n2003 East Yosemite League Offensive Player of the Year (High School) and 2003 All Area Team (Northern California).\n\nAll WAC Selection in 2007 and 2008.\n\nPascoe Facts:\n\nPlayed quarterback in high school. Passed for 1,851 yards and 16 touchdowns in his senior year. In the last two years of high school he had just under 3,500 total yards along with 33 touchdowns.\n\nWas recruited by Fresno State as a quarterback. Switched to tight end and redshirted his freshman year.\n\nFull name is McKenna Sean Pascoe. Earned the nickname Bear as a kid because of his size. He weighed 10 pounds as a baby.\n\nIs a champion team roper and cowboy down to the bone. He grew up on his family\u2019s ranch in Porterville, CA which they still own today.\n\nMajored in communication studies.\n\nAs a Niner:\n\nWill back-up starting tight end Vernon Davis. He will be used mostly as a blocker and on special teams. He blocked six field goals in college which is a record. He has great catching abilities and will challenge Davis for playing time this year.\n\nWill wear number 48.\n\nAs of June 10, 2009 he remains unsigned by the 49ers.\n\nHighlights:"}
{"text":"But a month before the news conference, court documents show, Mr. Levison had already received a subpoena for Mr. Snowden\u2019s encrypted e-mail account. The government was particularly interested in his e-mail metadata \u2014 with whom Mr. Snowden was communicating, when and from where. The order, from the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., required Mr. Levison to log Mr. Snowden\u2019s account information and provide the F.B.I. with \u201ctechnical assistance,\u201d which agents told him meant handing over the private encryption keys, technically called SSL certificates, that unlock communications for all users, he said.\n\n\u201cIt was the equivalent of asking Coca-Cola to hand over its secret formula,\u201d Mr. Levison said.\n\nBy July, he said, he had 410,000 registered users. Similar services like Hushmail, a Canadian encrypted e-mail service, had lost users in 2007 after court documents revealed that the company had handed 12 CDs\u2019 worth of decoded e-mails from three Hushmail accounts to American law enforcement officials through a mutual assistance treaty.\n\n\u201cThe whole concept of the Internet was built on the idea that companies can keep their own keys,\u201d Mr. Levison said. He told the agents that he would need their request for his encryption keys in writing.\n\nA redacted version of that request, which was among the 23 documents that were unsealed, shows that the court issued an order July 16 for Lavabit\u2019s encryption keys. Prosecutors said they had no intention of collecting any information on Lavabit\u2019s 400,000 other customers. \u201cThere\u2019s no agents looking through the 400,000 other bits of information, customers, whatever,\u201d Jim Trump, one of the prosecutors, said at a closed Aug. 1 hearing.\n\nBut Mr. Levison said he spent much of the following day thinking of a compromise. He would log the target\u2019s communications, unscramble them with the encryption keys and upload them to a government server once a day. The F.B.I. told him that was not enough. It needed his target\u2019s communications \u201cin real time,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cHow as a small business do you hire the lawyers to appeal this and change public opinion to get the laws changed when Congress doesn\u2019t even know what is going on?\u201d Mr. Levison said.\n\nWhen it was clear Mr. Levison had no choice but to comply, he devised a way to obey the order but make the government\u2019s intrusion more arduous. On Aug 2, he infuriated agents by printing the encryption keys \u2014 long strings of seemingly random numbers \u2014 on paper in a font he believed would be hard to scan and turn into a usable digital format. Indeed, prosecutors described the file as \u201clargely illegible.\u201d"}
{"text":"AT&T owned Cricket Wireless has added two new smartphones to its prepaid lineup, the Samsung Galaxy Amp Prime and the Samsung Galaxy Amp 2. Both Samsung phones are 4G LTE capable and come with the Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS. Cricket adds Samsung Galaxy Amp Prime for $149.99 online and in its stores while Amp 2 will be available for $99.99 from April 15, 2016, also online and in stores.\n\nFor quick info check the video.\n\nThe Samsung Galaxy Amp Prime is a larger handset of the two, featuring a 5-inch super AMOLED display. The phone comes with 5-megapixel camera with Quick Launch and HD videos and a front facing camera that can take selfies with simple hand gesture. The Amp Prime also features One-handed operation mode, Easy Mode for beginners with simpler interface and Ultra Power Savings Mode that extends phone\u2019s standby time for up to 24 hours with just a 10% charge.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThe smaller of the two, the Samsung Galaxy Amp 2, is an entry-level, low-cost smartphone with Super AMOLED display 4.5-inches in size. The display features outdoor mode that enables users to see better in sunlight by increasing the screen brightness for 15 minutes.\n\nBoth Samsung Galaxy Amp Prime and Amp 2 will work with Cricket\u2019s $40, $50 and $60 plans that include unlimited talk, text and data with first 2.5GB, 5GB and 10GB at 4G LTE speeds. The two pricier plans also come with unlimited international texting (SMS only) to 38 countries and unlimited calling, texting (text, picture and video messaging) and data roaming in Mexico and Canada. Customers who enroll in auto pay will receive a $5 monthly discount so they can get Cricket plans for $35, $45 and $55 per month.\n\nEven though Cricket said that the Samsung Galaxy Amp Prime is available online and in stores, the phone hasn\u2019t been listed on Cricket\u2019s smartphone page yet.\n\nSource: Cricket Wireless"}
{"text":"I plan to report only \"bright\" Supernova (above mag 17.5) on this page. Note that you are going to need a big telescope to find most of these things, for instance, a \"Mag 14\" SN probably won't be visible to the eye in anything less than a 10\" telescope. A CCD, however, can often detect a Mag 14 object with a much smaller objective. Those SN which are easily findable by amateurs (above mag 14.0) will be in red .\n\nThe format is as follows:\n\nName of SN, Discovery reference (link if possible), Date which the supernova first appeared (Year\/Month\/Date format), Name of discoverers separated by a \";\" (link to discovery site(s) if possible)\n\nName of galaxy (linked to a page describing this galaxy), RA and DEC of SN in J2000.0 coordinates (link to sky map of that area of the sky)\n\nDirections to the SN from core of host galaxy, galaxy name (linked to a Photometry Reference image of that galaxy)\n\nMagnitude of SN when LAST reported (link to the source of the last report) : date of report (\"maximum brightness:date of maximum\" or \"rising\" if that information is available), Type of SN if reported. [Spectrum if possible] (Any data which reference this SN (IAUCs; VSNET; past SNe))\n\nAny special pages dedicated to observing this SN, or a link to a sub page if enough data warrants it.\n\nIf possible I will create an icon for every bright supernova. This icon will be black on a white background and mirror imaged left to right so that North is up and East is left. The exception being a color image, which will have he same orientation. All icons will be less than 100x100 pixels in size so that they load quickly."}
{"text":"Since the last time Jon checked in on the increasingly sprawling Republican field for President, several more also-rans joined in: cherub Tennesse Williams character Lindsey Graham, frothy SEO disaster Rick Santorum, the forgotten George Pataki, and 19th century orientalist and cartoonishly evil corporate overlord Carly Fiorina. But one, in particular, Donald Trump, really gave the Daily Show host pause. After the Donald's smug, trolly face came on screen, Stewart paused, bit his fist and exclaimed, \"No, no I've made up my mind\u2026 God, maybe I'll get a twitter account.\"\n\nLet's hope so! In a GOP presidential race marked by increasingly goofy soundbites, The Daily Show would have no shortage of comedy gold in the coming months. Stewart even broke character for a brief moment as he looked genuinely shocked at neoconservative Lindsey Graham's casually racist assertion that Iranians are \"liars\". How can any comedian pass up week after week of rightwing softballs like these?\n\nWatch the video below:"}
{"text":"Map of aerial combat in Korean War.\n\n\"MiG Alley\" was the name given by United Nations (UN) pilots to the northwestern portion of North Korea, where the Yalu River empties into the Yellow Sea during the Korean War. It was the site of numerous dogfights between UN fighter pilots and their opponents from North Korea (including some unofficially crewed by Soviet airmen) and the People's Republic of China. Soviet-built Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 were the aircraft used during most of the conflict, and the area's nickname was derived from them. It was the site of the first large-scale jet-vs-jet air battles, with the North American F-86 Sabre.\n\nHistory [ edit ]\n\n1950 [ edit ]\n\nThe North Koreans began their war against South Korea on June 25, 1950 with small numbers of Soviet aircraft retained from the Second World War. These were flown by under-trained and inexperienced pilots. After the United States and its closest allies committed its air units to the UN, the North Korean People's Army Air Force (KPAAF) was rapidly depleted. For several months, propeller-engined bombers and fighters, like the B-29 and P-51 Mustang \u2013 and early jet fighters like the F-80 Shooting Star, F-84 Thunderjet and Grumman F9F Panther \u2013 flew the skies over Korea virtually unopposed.\n\nDuring October, the major Communist powers \u2013 China and the Soviet Union \u2013 commenced unofficial military support of North Korea. The Soviets also committed to supply North Korea and China with its latest MiG-15 fighters, and to train Korean and Chinese pilots to fly them.[citation needed] China officially entered the war in support of North Korea on October 25, 1950. While its strength in ground forces initially overwhelmed UN forces, the Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) was, at the time, small and no better equipped than the KPAAF.\n\nWhile the Soviet Union never officially entered the war, on 1 November 1950, the 64th Fighter Aviation Corps (64 IAK) of the Soviet Air Forces was attached to the PLAAF, under the 1st United Air Army. That same day, Soviet-piloted MiG-15s began operating over North Korea and the first clashes between MiG-15s and US aircraft occurred, when eight aircraft from the Soviet Air Forces intercepted about 15 United States Air Force P-51 Mustangs flying a ground support mission. First Lieutenant Fiodor Chizh shot down and killed Mustang pilot Aaron Abercrombie.[1] Later in the day, the first air combat between jets occurred, when three MiG-15s attacked about 10 USAF F-80s. While First Lieutenant Frank Van Sickle, in a F-80C, was killed, US records suggest that he was shot down by AA fire. First Lieutenant Semyon F. Khominich (referred to as Jominich in some sources) \u2013 was credited with a kill by the Soviet authorities.[2] On November 9, 1950, a MiG-15 was destroyed in combat for the first time, when Lieutenant Commander William T. Amen of the US Navy, in a F9F-2B Panther, shot down and killed Captain Mikhail F. Grachev.[1]\n\nIn response to the deployment of MiG-15s, the UN's P-51 squadrons began to convert to jet fighters. In the case of the USAF, this was the F-86 Sabre.\n\n49-1223. This aircraft served with the 335th F-I Squadron, 4th F-IW in Korea. It was shot down by MiGs near Wonsan on February 3, 1952; the pilot ejected. F-86A-5-NA Sabre. This aircraft served with the 335th F-I Squadron, 4th F-IW in Korea. It was shot down by MiGs near Wonsan on February 3, 1952; the pilot ejected.\n\nUN Command standing orders forbade pilots from crossing the Chinese border. On December 17, Lieutenant Colonel Bruce H. Hinton led a finger-four formation of Sabres from the 336th Fighter Squadron on a patrol, a 485-mile (780 km) round trip, along the Yalu River, in an attempt to draw the MiG pilots into combat. The Sabre pilots stayed below 475 mph (765 km\/h), to create the impression on radar screens that the Sabres were a slower aircraft. The slower speed and two 120-US-gallon (450 l; 100 imp gal) drop tanks on each F-86 also provided maximum air time. Forty minutes after take-off the Sabres were approaching the Yalu at 32,000 feet (9,800 m). Four MiGs were spotted 7,000 feet (2,100 m) below the Sabres and about to pass beneath them. The Americans jettisoned their drop tanks and as the MiGs passed below, the Sabres turned to the left and dived down at the Soviet fighters. When the MiG pilots realized that their adversaries were not older jets that they could be easily extend away from, they broke formation and headed for the border. Hinton caught up to the leader's wingman, Major Yakov Efromeenko, and fired 1,500 rounds of .50 caliber bullets. Smoke belched from its jet pipe and flames enveloped the tail section. After Efromeenko ejected, the MiG crashed about 10 miles (16 km) south of the Yalu.[3]\n\nOn the morning of December 22, a Sabre was destroyed by a MiG-15 pilot for the first time. Captain Lawrence V. Bach's F-86 was hit in the wing root by cannon fire from an unknown MiG pilot and Bach was captured after ejecting. That afternoon, eight Sabres from the USAF 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing (4th F-IW), operating out of a forward base at K-14 Kimpo (Gimpo), attacked an estimated 15 MiGs at 30,000 feet (9,100 m) and pursued some to the Yalu, claiming six without loss.\n\nOn January 1, 1951 a Communist offensive drove UN forces out of the Kimpo area; K-14 was overrun and the 4th F-IW was withdrawn to Japan.[4] In March 1951, the first two Sabre squadrons, from the 4th F-IW, returned to Korea, just in time to meet a new build-up of Communist air strength designed to secure air superiority over northwest Korea, in a prelude to a major ground offensive.[4]\n\nWhile the Australian government had attempted to order the F-86, to replace Mustangs operated in Korea by No. 77 Squadron RAAF, McDonnell-Douglas was required to prioritize re-equipping the USAF. The British Gloster Meteor F.8 was the only viable alternative. 77 Squadron on begin converting to Meteors in Japan during April 1951.\n\nUSAF pilots nicknamed April 12, 1951 \"Black Thursday\", after 30 MiG-15s attacked three squadrons of B-29 bombers (36 planes) escorted by approximately 100 F-80s and F-84s. The MiGs were fast enough to engage the B-29s and extend away from their escorts. Three B-29s were shot down and seven more were damaged, with no casualties on the communist side.[5] Following this, USAF bomber sorties over Korea were halted for approximately three months. Bomber commanders were forced to discontinue daylight raids, and changed to night missions by small formations.\n\nIn the first five months of 1951 the 4th F-IW flew 3,550 sorties and claimed 22 victories. No F-86 Sabres were shot down by MiGs, although a number were lost due to accidents.[6]\n\nOn July 10, 1951 truce talks between North Korean and UN representatives opened at Kaesong. The ground forces were virtually stalemated at the 38th parallel, but in the air the two squadrons of the 4th F-IW were flying the only Sabres in the theatre.[7] Some intelligence source estimated that 500 MiGs were being operated by the 1st United Air Army.[8]\n\nAlthough 77 Squadron RAAF had previously operated in Korea as a ground-attack unit, many of its pilots were veterans of World War II fighter units and it was expected that the Gloster Meteor would allow it to return to its previous role of interception. With 22 Meteors, 77 Squadron was attached to the USAF's 4th F-IW at Kimpo at the end of July.[9][10] For a few weeks, MiG-15 pilots scrutinized the performance of the Meteors and used their superior speed to avoid engaging the Meteors.[11][12] The first Meteor fatalities occurred on 22 August, when two aircraft collided in mid-air as they returned to Kimpo after a sweep.[11][13]\n\nMeteor and MiG-15s pilots engaged each other for the first time on 25 August, without either side scoring hits. Four days later, eight Meteors and 16 Sabres fought 12 MiGs; one Australian ejected after his aircraft was shot down, and a second Meteor was damaged. The following week, a Meteor suffered severe damage in a dogfight with MiGs.[14][15] As a result of these losses, senior RAAF commanders decided to focus on escort and air defense sorties.\n\n[16] No. 77 Squadron pilots and their Meteors at Kunsan, South Korea, June 1954.\n\nFlight Lieutenant R. L. \"Smoky\" Dawson registered No. 77 Squadron's first jet combat claim when he damaged a MiG during an escort mission near Anju, North Korea, on 26 September 1951.[13][17] On 27 October, Flying Officer Les Reading was credited with damaging another MiG while covering B-29s over Sinanju; it was subsequently confirmed as having been destroyed, making it the squadron's first MiG \"kill\".[18][19] The squadron was awarded the Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation for \"exceptionally meritorious service & heroism\" on 1 November.[20][21]\n\nOn 1 December 1951, over Sunchon, at least 20 Soviet-piloted MiGs from the 176th Guards Fighter Air Regiment (176 GvIAP) attacked a formation of 14 Meteors. Both sides apparently overestimated the scale of the battle and the damage inflicted to their opponents: while three Meteors were lost, Soviet pilots claimed nine Meteors destroyed; Australian pilots claimed one MiG shot down and another damaged, from a formation of at least forty MiGs, while Russian sources suggest that all of the MiGs returned to base and less than 25 MiGs were available to 176 GvIAP at the time.[22][23]\n\nThe F86-As and F86Es of the 4th F-IW were now getting decidedly battle-worn and it was decided that the 51st Fighter-Interceptor Wing (51st F-IW) was able to commence operations from Suwon on December 1 under Colonel Francis S. \"Gabby\" Gabreski.[24] Nonetheless, the 4th F-IW claimed 13 MiGs in air battles on December 13.[25]\n\nOn 26 December 1951, the RAAF reassigned 77 Squadron to ground attack sorties,[26][27] a role it would pursue until the end of the war. Its pilots continued to encounter MiGs and claimed two more victories over them, both in the Pyongyang area, on 4 and 8 May 1952.[28][29]\n\nBy August 1952, the tide of battle above \"MIG Alley\" had turned in favor of the United Nations. During that month 63 MiGs were shot down for the loss of only nine Sabres. An important reason for the increasing superiority of UN air power was the new F86-F, which had been issued to two squadrons of the 51st Wing in June and July and began reaching the 4th Wing in September. This Sabre development had a more powerful J47 engine developing 5,910 lbf (26,300 N) thrust, wing shackles for 200-US-gallon (760 l; 170 imp gal) drop tanks (raising the combat radius to 463 miles or 745 kilometres) and a simplified A4 radar gun sight that was more efficient than the MkXVIII gyro sight used on most of the F86-As and easier to maintain than the rather unreliable A1CM radar sight fitted to late F86-As and Es.[30]\n\nOne Meteor was shot down and another damaged by MiGs following a ground-attack mission on 2 October 1952.[31][32] No. 77 Squadron was credited with downing its last MiG southeast of Pyongyang on 27 March 1953.[33]\n\nA special fighter-bomber variant of the F86-F arrived in Korea during January 1953 \u2013 the F86-F-30 with dual stores mountings under each wing. This Sabre could carry either a 120-US-gallon (450 l; 100 imp gal) drop tank or a 1,000-pound (450 kg) bomb on the inner fittings, together with a 200-US-gallon (760 l; 170 imp gal) drop tank on each of the outboard points. The new fighter-bombers were issued to the 18th Fighter Bomber Wing, which included 2 Squadron, South African Air Force (previously a P-51 unit). In February the 8th Fighter Bomber Wing began to replace its F-80s with Sabre fighter-bombers.[30]\n\nOn July 27, 1953 the ceasefire came into effect. By that time there were 297 Sabres in Korea facing an estimated 950 Sino-Korean MiGs. During the conflict the F-86 pilots claimed to have destroyed 792 MiGs in air-to-air combat for a loss of 78 Sabres \u2014 a phenomenal 10 to 1 kills-to-losses ratio. On September the defection of a MiG-15 pilot (with his aircraft) enabled US pilots to assess their erstwhile opponent at first hand. The MiG that Lieutenant No Kum-sok flew into Kimpo on September 21 was one of the later MiG-15SDs.[34]\n\nSoviet role [ edit ]\n\nGun camera strip showing Soviet MiG-15 over Korea, April 1953.\n\nAccording to Budiansky, \"In late March 1951, the 1st RSM (1st Radio Squadron, Mobile), still operating in Japan, picked up Russian ground controllers in voice communication with Soviet MiG fighter aircraft operating over North Korea. This became an \"intelligence windfall\", because \"Soviet doctrine called for tight control of fighters by stations on the ground tracking the location of friendly and enemy aircraft on radar throughout the battle.\" These radio intercepts gave additional warning beyond the range of radar. This breakthrough in signals intelligence, centralized at a single USAFSS facility in Seoul, meant real-time listening of Russian controllers and fighters and the subsequent passing of information to U.S. pilots. \"An analysis of ground control traffic in June 1952 concluded that more than 90 percent of MiGs engaged in air operations over North Korea were being flown by Russians.\"[35]\n\nThe Soviet Union kept the participation of their aircrews in the Korean War secret for many years, though it was widely suspected by UN forces. Soviet aircraft were adorned with North Korean or Chinese markings and pilots wore either North Korean uniforms or civilian clothes, to disguise their origins. For radio communication, they were given cards with common Korean words for various flying terms spelled out phonetically in Cyrillic characters.[36] These subterfuges did not long survive the fury of air-to-air combat, however, and pilots were soon heard communicating in Russian.\n\nSoviet MiG-15 regiments were based on Chinese fields in Manchuria, where, according to existing UN rules of engagement, they could not be attacked. Many Soviet regiments underwent preliminary training at Soviet bases in the neighboring Soviet Maritime Military District. Soviet air defense troops also began to arrive along the Yalu, setting up radar installations, ground control centers, searchlights and large numbers of anti-aircraft guns to deter any attacks on the Chinese airfields.\n\nWhile UN pilots chafed at the restrictions imposed on attacking the MiG's Chinese airfields, it wasn't known until many years later that the MiG pilots themselves operated under tight restrictions. To preserve the impression that Soviet pilots were not fighting in Korea, they were prohibited from flying over non-Communist-controlled territory or within 30 to 50 miles (50\u201380 km) of the Allied front lines. One Soviet pilot who was shot down in UN-controlled territory shot himself with his pistol rather than be taken captive. Another pilot who bailed out into the Yellow Sea was strafed to prevent him from being captured. Soviet pilots were not allowed to pursue UN aircraft over the UN-controlled Yellow Sea.[37]\n\nIn spite of the restrictions, many US pilots took advantage of a \"hot pursuit\" exception to flying over China to pursue MiGs across the Yalu River. Later, \"hot pursuit\" became active MiG hunting over Manchuria, with US pilots maintaining a \"code of silence\" about the patrols. Flight leaders chose wingmen who would keep quiet, and many rolls of incriminating gun camera footage \"mysteriously\" disappeared.[37][better source needed]\n\nThe UN conducted Operation Moolah to entice Communist pilots, especially Soviet pilots, to defect to South Korea with a MiG-15.[citation needed] The operation was intended to gain an analysis of the MiG-15's flight performance, as well as serve a psychological purpose undermining the Soviet pilots.\n\nWith the end of the Cold War Soviet participation in the Korean war became widely recognized as pilots who participated in the conflict revealed their role.[36]\n\nAftermath [ edit ]\n\nMiG-15s curving in to attack USAF B-29s , 1951.\n\nThe MiG Alley battles produced many fighter aces. The top aces were Russian. Nikolay Sutyagin claimed 21 kills, including nine F-86s, one F-84 and one Gloster Meteor in less than seven months. His first kill was the F-86A of Robert H. Laier on 19 June 1951 (listed by the Americans as missing in action), and his last was on 11 January 1952, when he shot down and killed Thiel M. Reeves, who was flying an F-86E (Reeves is also listed as MIA). Other famous Soviet aces include Yevgeni G. Pepelyayev, who was credited with 19 kills, and Lev Kirilovich Shchukin, who was credited with 17 kills, despite being shot down twice himself.\n\nThe top UN ace of the war, Capt. Joseph C. McConnell, claimed 16 MiGs, including three on one day. His story featured in a film called The McConnell Story, starring Alan Ladd and June Allyson.[38] The second-highest-scoring UN ace, Maj. James Jabara, was the first UN jet-vs.-jet ace. Another ace, Frederick C. \"Boots\" Blesse, claimed nine MiG-15s in his F-86 Sabre[39] and later wrote No Guts, No Glory, a manual of air fighter combat that is still studied today.[37] James P. Hagerstrom claimed 8.5 kills. George Andrew Davis, Jr. became one of the first members of the new U.S. Air Force to receive the Medal of Honor after being killed while leading his section of two F-86s against 12 MiG-15s when he was trying to shoot them all down.\n\nThe newly established People's Liberation Army Air Force of China also emerged seven aces. Among them, Jiang Daoping has shot down the U.S. top ace Joseph C. McConnell. Hoyt Vandenberg, the Chief of Staff of the USAF, stated that the PLAAF had become a major air power.[40]\n\nOver thirty Sabre pilots were claimed to have been shot down behind enemy lines and their fate has never been definitively established. Surviving pilots, captured and later repatriated after the armistice, reported being interrogated by Koreans, Russians, and Chinese. For years after the Korean War ended in 1953, rumours persisted of pilots held captive by the Soviets.[41]\n\nA number of computer video games based on the combat in MiG Alley have been produced, amongst them MiG Alley Ace, released by MicroProse in 1985.[42][43]\n\nSee also [ edit ]\n\nList of Korean War flying aces\n\nMiG Alley (video game) \u2013 flight simulation computer game based on the air combat in MiG Alley\n\nReferences [ edit ]\n\nNotes [ edit ]\n\nBibliography [ edit ]"}
{"text":"In 2005, MIT professor Richard Schrock won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing catalysts for a reaction that is widely used to produce pharmaceuticals, fuels and other synthetic chemicals. That reaction, known as olefin metathesis, involves breaking and making double bonds between carbon atoms to produce new types of carbon-carbon double bonds.\n\nOne limitation to the metathesis reaction is that it had not been possible to control the configuration of the olefin products, which can occur in one of two configurations. However, Schrock and his collaborator Amir Hoveyda at Boston College have now developed a catalyst that yields almost exclusively the more desirable configuration, known as cis.\n\nIn a paper appearing in the Nov. 3 issue of Nature, the researchers report using their new catalyst to generate the cis form of two natural compounds that have been of great interest to scientists because of their potential as cancer drugs. They expect that the catalyst, which contains tungsten, could also be useful for controlling the configuration of hundreds of other natural products, as well as new variants of those natural compounds.\n\n\u201cSought by many investigators for almost two decades, this milestone achievement will be welcomed by the synthetic community as a major advance in organic synthesis,\u201d says K.C. Nicolaou, a professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute, who was not involved in this project.\n\nLead authors of the paper are Miao Yu, a graduate student in Hoveyda\u2019s lab, and Chenbo Wang, a postdoc at Boston College. Oxford University researchers Andrew Kyle, Pavol Jakubec and Darren Dixon are also authors of the paper.\n\nMaking rings\n\nIn the Nature paper, the researchers focused on synthesizing macrocycles \u2014 compounds that contain large rings of nine or more atoms. Compounds of this type often have potent biological activity, making them useful as drugs, says Hoveyda, a professor of chemistry and the principal author of the paper, in whose laboratory the organic chemistry was carried out.\n\nThe researchers were able to synthesize two naturally occurring macrocycles, epothilone and nakadomarin. Epothilone, originally found in a soil-dwelling bacterium, blocks cancer cells from dividing by interfering with the cell skeleton; several variants of the compound are now in clinical trials for the treatment of cancer. Nakadomarin, first discovered in a marine sponge, has both anticancer and antimicrobial activity.\n\nBoth compounds can be made in about 16 chemical steps, the last of which is a metathesis closing of the ring through formation of a double bond between two carbon atoms.\n\nMetathesis, whose mechanism was first proposed by Yves Chauvin in 1971, requires a catalyst \u2014 a special compound that consists of a metal atom attached to one or more organic structures known as ligands. In 1986, Schrock, now MIT\u2019s Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry developed the first catalyst that could perform this reaction. Chauvin and Schrock shared the 2005 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Robert Grubbs, who later developed different catalysts for metathesis that contain ruthenium.\n\nWhen each of the two carbon atoms in the double bond has another carbon atom attached to it, the attached carbons can point in the same direction (the cis configuration) or in opposite directions (the trans configuration).\n\nThe cis configuration is found in most naturally occurring compounds. Hoveyda speculates that the cis configuration might be better able to interact with biological structures such as cell receptors, or is better able to cross the cell membrane. Unfortunately, most metathesis reactions produce a mixture of cis and trans, with trans usually predominating (up to 80 percent). Mixtures of cis and trans products are very difficult to separate.\n\n\u2018An efficient solution\u2019\n\nThe team\u2019s new catalyst steers the reaction toward predominantly the cis form due to the size and shape of one of the ligands attached to the metal in the catalyst. This ligand is so large and bulky that it prevents any carbon atoms attached to the intermediate in the reaction from pointing toward it, forcing them into a cis configuration. Using this catalyst, the researchers were able to generate the cis configuration of epothilone and nakadomarin more than 95 percent of the time.\n\n\u201cIt turns out to be a surprisingly efficient solution, but nobody\u2019s ever done it before,\u201d Schrock says.\n\nAnother advantage of the tungsten catalyst is that tungsten is much more abundant than ruthenium, which is a precious metal used in other, more popular metathesis catalysts. Ruthenium\u2019s worldwide annual production is only about 12 tons, and one kilogram costs about $10,000. In contrast, about 60,000 tons of tungsten are produced worldwide per year, at a cost of about $50 per kilogram.\n\nSchrock and Hoveyda have started a company called XiMo to work with clients, particularly companies that synthesize drugs or other chemicals such as polymers, pesticides and fragrances, to develop new catalysts to make their production processes more efficient."}
{"text":"Following the trade deadline there was much speculation and criticism over the moves, or lack thereof, of Peter Chiarelli. And in hindsight it was well deserved, as Andrez Meszaros and Corey Potter proved to be not enough on the backend\u2014the duo rarely surpassed Matt Bartkowski on the depth chart, as Mezsaros appeared in four games, and Potter only one. Soon after the deadline, Bruins\u2019 President Cam Neely revealed on 98.5 The Sports Hub\u2019s Felger and Mazz radio show that a deal was in the works, but ultimately fell through at the last minute.\n\n\"We were in on something else that we felt would have been good for us if it could\u2019ve gotten accomplished, but it wasn\u2019t entirely in our control in that regard\u2026 I think it may potentially have laid some groundwork for the future. But again, you have to have a dance partner\u2026 We had a deal in principle that was predicated on another team getting something done.\"\n\nThe Boston Globe\u2019s Fluto Shinzawa wrote the following morning that the \"deal in principle\" was for the Canucks\u2019 Alexander Edler, reporting that the deal was contingent on Ryan Kesler being traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins. Had the trade gone through, the Bruins likely would\u2019ve had to give up at least two high prospects (Bartkowski\/Spooner\/Khokhlachev), and likely a draft pick. Chiarelli noted that the negotiations weren\u2019t a total loss, as he was able to \"lay some groundwork\", and that it would be revisited during the off-season. Flash-forward nearly three months to the day, and there\u2019s one major variable PC may not have seen coming: former Bruins\u2019 Assistant GM is now the general manager of the Vancouver Canucks, replacing Mike Gillis at the end of May. So what ripple effect does this have for the future of the Bruins blue line, you ask?\n\nFirst off, let\u2019s look at a couple major factors. We\u2019ll start with Edler\u2019s current contract.\n\nSEASON AHL SALARY NHL SALARY P. BONUSES S. BONUS AAV CAP HIT 2013-14 $3,250,000 $3,250,000 $0 $1,000,000 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2014-15 $4,250,000 $4,250,000 $0 $2,000,000 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2015-16 $6,000,000 $6,000,000 $0 $3,000,000 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2016-17 $6,000,000 $6,000,000 $0 $3,000,000 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2017-18 $6,000,000 $6,000,000 $0 $0 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2018-19 $4,500,000 $4,500,000 $0 $0 $5,000,000 $5,000,000\n\n2013-14 was the first season of a six year, $30M deal for Alex Edler. The $5 million annual cap hit would put him second on the Bruins, in front of Johnny Boychuk and Dennis Seidenberg. It would also give him the longest term of any defenseman on the team by two years, with Zdeno Chara and Seidy both up at the end of the 2017-18 season. Edler just turned 28, younger than Johnny Boychuk and only about six months older than both Adam McQuaid and Kevan Miller. He would just be turning 33 at the end of the contract, giving you the prime of his career at a reasonable price.\n\nNext, how about we take a look at his production in his seven full seasons in the NHL.\n\nSEASON TEAM GP G A P +\/- PIM PPG SHG GWG S S% 2007-08 CANUCKS 75 8 12 20 6 42 4 0 0 124 6.4 2008-09 CANUCKS 80 10 27 37 11 54 5 0 1 145 6.9 2009-10 CANUCKS 76 5 37 42 0 40 2 0 0 161 3.1 2010-11 CANUCKS 51 8 25 33 13 24 5 0 1 121 6.6 2011-12 CANUCKS 82 11 38 49 0 34 5 1 0 228 4.8 2012-13 CANUCKS 45 8 14 22 -5 37 5 0 0 113 7.1 2013-14 CANUCKS 63 7 15 22 -39 50 4 0 0 178 3.9 NHL TOTALS 494 58 170 228 -11 287 30 1 2 1,080 5.4\n\nWhile Edler is statistically a career minus player, last year was clearly the anomaly. Following the trade of Roberto Luongo at the deadline, Edler had a plus rating in just two of his final 19 games played, a -14 rating over that same span. Not that being -25 prior to the trade was much better, but in a year where Vancouver finished third-worst in the West, it can be chalked up to a down year.\n\nOffensively numbers were down as well, with his lowest PPG average since his rookie season. His primary points were down by shooting percentage was also at its lowest in four seasons. But his track record shows a different story. Among the four Canucks\u2019 defenseman with 5000+ minutes played since 2008\u2014the other three being Bieksa, Hamhuis, and Garrison\u2014Edler has the best Corsi and Fenwick ratings both 5-on-5 and on the penalty kill, and is 2nd on the team on the man advantage. In comparison with the Bruins, he is right in line with Johnny Boychuk and Zdeno Chara, the B\u2019s leading defenseman in the same categories over that time-span.\n\nEven Strength:\n\n# Player Name Team TOI G A FirstA Points Shots iFenwick60 iCorsi60 1 EDLER, ALEXANDER Vancouver 6457:21 19 69 29 88 568 7.879 11.856 2 BIEKSA, KEVIN Vancouver 6442:08 20 72 27 92 542 7.507 11.018\n\n# Player Name Team TOI G A FirstA Points Shots iFenwick60 iCorsi60 1 BOYCHUK, JOHNNY Boston 5266:40 18 44 24 62 548 8.841 12.680 2 CHARA, ZDENO Boston 8067:27 28 96 49 124 764 7.832 11.864\n\nPenalty Kill:\n\n# Player Name Team TOI G A FirstA Points Shots iFenwick60 iCorsi60 1 EDLER, ALEXANDER Vancouver 781:45 1 0 0 1 21 1.919 2.072 2 HAMHUIS, DAN Vancouver 1243:50 1 3 3 4 24 7.507 1.495\n\n# Player Name Team TOI G A FirstA Points Shots iFenwick60 iCorsi60 1 BOYCHUK, JOHNNY Boston 670:12 0 4 2 4 16 2.149 2.596 2 CHARA, ZDENO Boston 1233:56 1 7 4 8 40 2.431 2.577\n\n[source: stats.hockeyanalysis.com]\n\nAll these numbers and figures probably have you thinking, \"Yeah, we could use a young puck-moving defenseman with a good numbers.\" But here\u2019s the thing...\n\nYou don\u2019t want Alexander Edler on the Bruins.\n\nFirst of all, Edler\u2019s cap hit might be reasonable once the salary cap increases in a few years, but with Jarome Iginla\u2019s cap penalty on the books for next season, the B\u2019s are assumed to be docked around $4.5 million, bringing their projected 2014-15 salary cap down from $71M to $66.5M. Even with Savard\u2019s money on LTIR, Edler would put the Bruins against the cap, forcing them to make significant moves (trades or contract buyouts) before signing their own free agents. His $5M cap hit is comparable to Keith Yandle, who would give you much more bang for your buck.\n\nWhen seeking a puck-moving defenseman, don\u2019t forget the embarrassment of blue line riches the Bruins currently have under their belt. Not only does Boston have Dougie Hamilton under contract as he steadily grows in all facets of the game, but they have Torey Krug and Matt Bartkowski in their RFA years. Assuming they give Krug a multi-year deal and sign Bart to a qualifying offer, that\u2019ll give the big club eight defenseman. In the system, they have David Warsofsky, Zach Trotman, Joe Morrow, and the newly signed Linus Arnesson. While Arnesson is more of a lock-down defenseman, Morrow, Warsofsky and Trotman have an offensive skillset, as the three combined for 85 points in their collective 165 games played in the minors last season. Joe Morrow, who came over in the Tyler Seguin deal, is the most highly-touted prospect, while David Warsofsky\u2014also currently an RFA\u2014is the most NHL-ready, as he appeared in six games with the Boston during the regular season (1G, 1A, +1), and followed that up with a great showing in the Calder Cup Playoffs with 9 points in 12 games.\n\nRegardless of the defensive prospects possibly ready to make the jump, the trade for Edler was rumored to cost the Bruins\u2019 a couple highly valued forward prospects. Both Ryan Spooner and Alexander Khokhlachev were in the reported package headed to Vancouver. Koko led the P-Bruins in 2013-14 in points during the AHL regular season, and led the team with 9 goals in 12 games during the Calder Cup Playoffs. Spooner, who had 11 assists in 23 games with Boston, had the highest point-per-game percentage with Providence (.938) during the regular season, and led the team with 15 points in 12 playoff games. Either Khokhlachev or Spooner\u2014or both\u2014could be a welcome addition to the big club, giving a new look and added speed to the Bruins 3rd and 4th lines in 2014-15.\n\nThe main issue with the Edler trade isn\u2019t the player himself. It\u2019s the position and style. Between current D-men, both on the team and in the system, the Bruins have very good puck movers on their blue line; Zdeno Chara, Torey Krug, Dougie Hamilton and Johnny Boychuk all tallied more points than Edler. But aside from the strength of Kevan Miller, Dennis Seidenberg and Zdeno Chara, they have a slender defensive core. A skater heavy on the puck who has awareness in his own zone is a much bigger need. And Edler defensively isn\u2019t enough to put the Bruins over the top. So if not Edler, who? Hint: Stay in the Canucks\u2019 division.\n\nMark Giordano would be the ideal candidate, as he brings solid offensive touch while staying responsible in his zone. He led the Flames with a 12+ rating in 2013-14 despite the team goal differential being an abysmal -32. He\u2019s skated alongside Jarome Iginla for five seasons, and both would be vying for their elusive first Stanley Cup. His presence would be welcomed both on and off the ice, as he could complement Johnny Boychuk or Dennis Seidenberg for a lock-down 2nd defensive pairing. Giordano has two years remaining on his contract at $4.02 million per year, so he\u2019s cheaper than Edler, which could potentially lower the cost of the assets shipped out. In both zones, he\u2019s more consistent, and his production has had a bigger upside than Edler\u2019s over the last few seasons.\n\nA. Edler M. Giordano\n\nBut enough of the armchair GM talk. What about Jim Benning? In all likelihood, Benning being in Vancouver hurts the chances of an Edler trade.\n\nThere are two logical reasons for this. First, from what Behind The B showed us last season, Jim Benning was a key voice in the Bruins\u2019 front office in regards to the Tyler Seguin trade. Assuming this wasn\u2019t a one-time occurrence, it seems that Benning was and had been heavily involved in trade negotiations alongside Chiarelli. Odds are he was a facilitator leading up to the deadline, and there\u2019s a good chance that Benning wanted Edler on his team. Now that Jim has him, why give Edler up? Remember, the Canucks may have been sellers last season due to their record, but if they can get their goaltending situation figured out, there\u2019s plenty of firepower in their arsenal to make them a playoff threat in the West next season. Dumping Edler would hurt that cause.\n\nSecondly, a deal with his former team in his first season would require Benning to undoubtedly win the trade. Benning would be shipping out a Top 4 defenseman just one year after the Canucks signed him to a mutli-year contract, and therefore would have to make the return not only fair, but great. Otherwise he runs the risk of being accused of hooking up his old pals in Boston on the cheap. To make matters worse, Benning knows the prospects in the Bruins system, so he won\u2019t be fooled by any throw-ins Peter Chiarelli might try to claim are diamonds in the rough. He\u2019ll likely want the same package proposed in March, if not more.\n\nIf you are a Bruins fan that wanted Alexander Edler, then Jim Benning as the Canucks\u2019 GM is bad news. But if you\u2019re a Bruins fan that wants a better team next year, with many of their new, young talent intact, the \"trade that never was\" may just have been a blessing in disguise. Then again, you can\u2019t deny those dance moves."}
{"text":"by Brett Stevens on April 22, 2016\n\nWhen the patient has no hope, we enter palliative care. Sedatives and painkillers abound. Food and water are withdrawn, to allow the body to exit with grace. When that moves too slowly, ever-increasing doses of morphine are administered. At some point, the soul flies away and the gasping corpse returns to the earth.\n\nWe are at that point with America (and come to think of it, Europe, too).\n\nThese were groups of people, but they were replaced by governments \u2014 by their own hands, I might add. The politicians offered benefits like merchants offer discounts, and We The People leapt for the freebie. Then they found out that the cost was the creation of a USSR-style permanent bureaucracy that determined who would succeed and who would fail on the basis of ideology.\n\nAmerica was designed around the idea that democracy could be constrained by rules on paper. If we cannot have the best leading us, we can plan for an average equal robot-citizen to take the role, and put enough rules in there to keep him from doing damage. Or could we? The history of America shows that this approach has failed.\n\nIt is time to put the dying beast out of its misery. Its purpose long ago destroyed, it survives from lack of anything else to do. But having no direction, it merely lingers in boredom and complaint to the point that it does not even fear death. This is not life; it is living death. Release it!\n\nGovernment is not the nation. The nation is the nation: the people, their genetics, their culture and values. In saner times, we avoided government and had kings instead, people drawn from the nation who showed the best of its traits, and could lead it to excellence. But that hurt snowflake feelings: not everyone can be excellent.\n\nIt took them almost two centuries, but in 1968 the destroyers won. They did not want a nation. They wanted a jobs program with some kind of talking competition in which unexceptional people could become important just for destroying things and justifying it in creative ways.\n\nAt that point, America the organism died, and was replaced by Amerika the zombie-robot-ideology. Ever since that time, it has been miserable to live here. Jobs have replaced purpose, politics has replaced thinking, and a string of foreigners have replaced the people.\n\nMr. Trump, please do the right thing. Put this terminal patient to rest. Shoot it in the head. Declare a world war for transgender rights and ensure that the governments of USA and the EU perish in flames so that we do not have to watch the long slow decay to Brazil 2.0. Ruin government, so we can rebuild.\n\nThe remnant is out here. But they are paralyzed until the power falls. Burn it down, tear it down. Make America Go Away (MAGA). Send the EU to the fires of Hades. Smash all that is rotten and dead, and cover the earth in ash so something new can grow.\n\nAnything is better than this.\n\nTags: america, collapse, decay, decline, donald trump, european union\n\nPlease enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus."}
{"text":"Another Fork? Bitcoin Gold Project Plans to Fork Bitcoin Next Month\n\nAfter the hard fork on August 1 that produced Bitcoin Cash, many bitcoiners have been waiting for the possibility of a fork taking place this November with the Segwit2x plan. However, a lot of bitcoin proponents don\u2019t know about another fork called \u201cBitcoin Gold\u201d (BTG) that\u2019s scheduled to take place on October 25th.\n\nAlso read: Japan\u2019s Financial Authority to Begin Bitcoin Exchange Surveillance Next Month\n\nBitcoin Gold Plans to Fork Bitcoin and Change the Consensus Mechanism\n\nYes, you read that correctly bitcoin enthusiasts might see another hard fork this October that produces another token called Bitcoin Gold. The project first announced on Bitcointalk.org in July was created by Jack Liao, the founder of Lightning ASIC a mining firm based out of Hong Kong and an anonymous developer named \u201ch4x3.\u201d The forked protocol aims to change bitcoin\u2019s consensus algorithm allowing users to mine the currency with graphic processing units (GPU) among other changes. According to the development team, Bitcoin Gold will use the Equihash algorithm used by the altcoin Zcash rather than bitcoin\u2019s original SHA256.\n\n\u201cBitcoin Gold implements the UAHF (User Activated Hard Fork) proposal to accept GPU mining,\u201d explains the website archive. \u201cMiners can choose the size of the blocks they want to mine, with a default of 1 MB. It includes replay and wipeout protection.\u201d\n\nFor too long, Bitcoin has been held back by the centralized mining industry. GPU brings Bitcoin into the modern age with an exciting technological roadmap to enable massive on-chain scaling well into the future with decentralization.\n\nMost Bitcoin Proponents Unaware of this Project\n\nEven though it was announced back in July the news of the Bitcoin Gold fork is just starting to come around people\u2019s radar. Some believe the announcement and the project\u2019s website is a \u201ctroll attempt\u201d to create confusion and dilute the power of the Bitcoin Cash fork and Segwit2x. The Bitcoin Gold protocol has available code on Github for review and has multiple social media accounts for Twitter, Facebook, and a Slack channel. Currently, there are over 250 members in the Bitcoin Gold Slack channel, and many of the visitors seem excited about the new fork. Even though the user-activated hard fork will take place on October 25 the full network launch is scheduled for November 1.\n\nEvil ASIC Manufacturers\n\nThere is a lot of discussion happening on the team\u2019s Slack channel and it seems the team has a lot of work to do if BTG developers hope to fork on October 25. For instance, at the moment there is no testnet for miners to test the protocol, reveals the BTG lead developer. \u201cWe are working on core protocol and will launch the testnet ASAP,\u201d the BTG programmer reveals in a conversation on the team\u2019s general chat Slack channel. \u201c[Mining] profitability is determined by the price and mining difficulty, but the price is hard to predict,\u201d he adds.\n\nThe developer also throws out a few opinions throughout the general chat channel about mining centralization. \u201cASIC leads to centralization \u2014 Evil ASIC manufacturers want to take up Bitcoin,\u201d the BTG developer emphasizes. News.Bitcoin.com briefly spoke with Bitcoin Gold\u2019s lead developer who calls himself \u201cH4x3\u201d over the team\u2019s Slack channel about the project. \u201cI can confirm the PoW will be changed to Equihash and the fork date is October 25,\u201d explains the developer. We sent some questions to Jack Liao and H4x3 because the lead developer told us our questions were \u201ctoo sensitive\u201d to answer alone. The BTG team has not yet responded to our emailed questions.\n\nPossible Reasons for a Very Unorganized and Confusing Fork Proposal\n\nIt\u2019s likely that many bitcoin proponents are viewing the project as a joke or another method of \u201ccrypto-trolling.\u201d There\u2019s a lot of good reasons people believe its a prank because the project seems extremely unorganized for a hard fork slated for the end of October. Further, there is speculation from community members about the team\u2019s intentions to change the bitcoin algorithm to conform with GPU miners. Jack Liao manufactures GPU miners that can mine the Zcash algorithm Equihash and speculators believe this is the primary reason to clone bitcoin and make it GPU compatible.\n\nNews.Bitcoin.com will be following the development of this story closely and will update this article if the BTG team responds to our questions.\n\nWhat do you think about the proposed Bitcoin Gold hard fork allegedly scheduled for October 25? Do you think this project is trolling or a joke? Let us know what you think in the comments below.\n\nImages via Shutterstock, Twitter, and the Bitcoin Gold Slack channel.\n\nBitcoin News is growing fast. To reach our global audience, send us a news tip or submit a press release. Let\u2019s work together to help inform the citizens of Earth (and beyond) about this new, important and amazing information network that is Bitcoin."}
{"text":"InFocus today debuted the Kangaroo Notebook, a $299 laptop featuring a dock with an 11.6-inch HD screen and two interchangeable Kangaroo Mini PCs running Windows 10. The Kangaroo Notebook will be available for preorder on Newegg in mid-October.\n\nWhen the Kangaroo debuted in October 2015, and its less portable big brother arrived in April 2016, we explained that the oxymoron \u201cmobile desktop\u201d really is the best way to describe the Kangaroos. They\u2019re basically desktop PC towers shrunk down to the size of a phablet, sans screen.\n\nThe Kangaroo Notebook, however, doesn\u2019t deserve the Kangaroo name at all. It doesn\u2019t require connecting a mouse, a keyboard, or a monitor. It\u2019s a fully functional laptop with a keyboard, Synaptics ClickPad, battery, webcam, ports, a microphone, and speakers.\n\nInFocus envisions the Kangaroo Notebook being used by families that want to dedicate one module to financial and personal information while keeping another for apps, games, and movies. In other words, it\u2019s for paranoid people who really don\u2019t trust the idea of having separate accounts on the same PC.\n\n\u201cWith Kangaroo Notebook, we put the power to create private, individualized computing experiences directly into the hands of our customers,\u201d Ben Chu, head of Kangaroo sales, said in a statement. \u201cThe modular design of this new mobile computing bundle gives our customers a different level of flexibility and control over how they want to manage personal computing, particularly in the home.\u201d\n\nFor reference, here are the full specs for the Kangaroo Notebook:\n\nOS: Windows 10 64-bit Home edition\n\nCPU: 1.44 GHz Intel Atom x5-Z8350\n\nGraphics: Intel HD Graphics\n\nMemory: 2GB LPDDR3 RAM\n\nStorage: 32GB eMMC\n\nWireless: Wi-Fi 802.11AC + a\/b\/g\/n Intel\n\nExpansion: microSD TF slot (256GB max)\n\nBattery: 37Whr\/5,000mAh\n\nDimensions: 288.9 x 196 x 19.9mm\n\nWeight: 1.2kg\n\nPower: 36W(12V~3A) AC Adapter\n\nNotably missing is the fingerprint reader, which previous Kangaroos included. Instead, there is one slot for a Kangaroo Mini PC (though again, two ship in the box).\n\nAnd that\u2019s what really makes the Kangaroo Notebook unique: You can swap out the whole PC for another one. The pitch is around customization, privacy, and security. But frankly, we expect you\u2019ll stick to using just one.\n\nIf you don\u2019t have a monitor or TV to plug a Kangaroo into, the Kangaroo Notebook is for you. At $299, however, there are plenty of cheap Windows 10 laptops to choose from."}
{"text":"Ahead of legal, adult-use sales kicking off next year, San Francisco has created a new office to serve as a hub for all things cannabis.\n\nApproved at a meeting this week by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the Office of Cannabis will handle license applications and fees for the city and county, field questions and complaints, interact with state-level regulators, and act as an information repository for the public. It\u2019s set to open by the end of the year.\n\nAccording San Francisco Chronicle reporter Rachel Swan, the ordinance creating the office passed on the same day as the municipal budget, which earmarks funds to get the office off the ground:\n\nThe city budget included $700,000 to fund three Office of Cannabis positions \u2014 a manager, a principal analyst and a management assistant \u2014 along with overhead, website development and public outreach. Mayor Ed Lee also set aside $665,227 this year for five new Department of Public Health employees who would help oversee permitting for medical cannabis dispensaries. The city currently has 39 permitted dispensaries and 28 pending applications.\n\nDuring discussion of the ordinance, several of the supervisors raised concerns about race and gender equity in the cannabis industry, noting that the Bay Area has struggled to diversify its tech industry. In response, according to the meeting minutes, Supervisor Ahsha Safai moved to add language meant to promote inclusivity.\n\n\u201cThe Office shall ensure that the perspectives of communities that historically have been disproportionately impacted by federal drug enforcement policies are included and considered in all policy decisions,\u201d Safai\u2019s amendment says. It\u2019s not yet clear what that will look like from a practical standpoint.\n\nFollowing debate and amendments, supervisors passed the ordinance unanimously."}
{"text":"On Tuesday, January 27th I enjoyed a very candid conversation with Oakland Raiders Quarterback, Derek Carr. Below is a transcription of our 20 minute chat. I\u2019d like to note, speaking with Derek, it was very obvious that this young man is the same guy talking to the national media after an NFL game, his local media after a Raider practice, or a guy on the phone in Seattle who writes for a blog about the Raiders.\n\nFollowing is my interview with Carr about his rookie season, his offseason so far, and the future of the Raiders going forward.\n\nPatrick: How has your offseason been going? What has been your focus?\n\nDerek: Right now, its just letting my shoulder rest. I haven\u2019t thrown a ball since the season, I\u2019m trying to let that rest as much as possible. Coming off of my senior year of college, I had no rest. I went straight to training for the Senior Bowl, straight into the combine, straight into the workout, training camp and then the season.\n\nI haven\u2019t stopped throwing for way over a year now. I thought it was real important to rest that. I\u2019ve been working out real hard, trying to get stronger right now. Working to maintain the conditioning level.\n\nPatrick: Last season there were a couple close calls with some leg injuries, you were able to play through. Has your training been focused on preventative measures for that?\n\nDerek: Oh yeah, a lot of rehab type stuff. Like you said, preventative. I just praise God that it wasn\u2019t worse. It could have easily torn, or broke a bone you know. I just praise God that I wasn\u2019t hurt that bad. I was banged up, but at least I could fight through it a little bit and keep playing. All except the London game.\n\nDoing those kind of things in the offseason are important though, you want to make sure that your ligaments are strong, and all the parts of your body recover. Offseason is really important, especially when you have to go through a long season in the NFL.\n\nPF: When you fight through an injury like that, many people believe that earns you the respect from the older players in the locker room. Did you notice anything to that effect?\n\nDC: You know, I did. They all know you, but they don\u2019t KNOW you yet. They don\u2019t know what you really have deep down inside. When something goes wrong, or if you get banged up, how is he going to respond? All those things. You do your best to fight through those things. Sometimes there are things you can\u2019t fight through. Like when I got my concussion against Detroit in the preseason. That\u2019s something I couldn\u2019t help. I tried to fight through it, but I couldn\u2019t walk right. So I knew I was done for that game. (chuckles)\n\nPF: That\u2019ll close it down quickly.\n\nDC: Ha. Oh, real quick. Especially when your left side isn\u2019t working. But when its an ankle or a knee, if I think that I can play the next play, I\u2019m going to do my best to play the next play. At times, it may have hurt us on 3rd downs, but I\u2019m showing my teammates that I\u2019m their guy and no matter what I\u2019m going to be out there.\n\nPF: From watching your post game interviews, and mid-week interviews last season. Seeing how you grew from week to week and learning from every experience you had. Did you catch the NFC Championship Game, and what were you able to learn by watching that come back performance?\n\nDC: Oh absolutely! Not only do I play the game, but I\u2019m the biggest football fan around. I love football, I love watching it, I love learning from it. I absolutely watched that game. Especially, I was watching my buddy, Davante Adams, who was playing in it, so I wanted to watch him, root for him.\n\nWatching the game, you watch Russell play, and he does a lot of things in his life that I respect and that I like, and his kind of character, the way he handles thing; so I love rooting for him as well. You watch him, he goes off and throws 4 picks, the NFC Championship, it is in your home stadium, you feel like you are letting your everybody down, but he kept his head down, kept the faith and kept fighting, kept believing, kept leading his teammates.\n\nBecause games in the NFL are never over. That\u2019s one thing that I learned, that game is never over. You keep playing. As I watch, you don\u2019t have to do anything heroic you just have to do what you are taught. That\u2019s exactly what he did on both of those touchdowns. He did what the coaches taught him. He checked the one pass play for the TD in overtime, he\u2019s just doing what he was taught he wasn\u2019t trying to do too much, and that\u2019s something that I learned from it.\n\nPF: Speaking of the \u201cnot over till it\u2019s over\u201d I was at the game you played in Seattle. Toward the end of that game, I was thinking the exact same thing.\n\nDC: That\u2019s another example. Seattle got that onside kick against Green Bay, if we get our on side kick, we get the ball and we are trying to drive to win it. That\u2019s how close these games are.\n\n\u201cI hope I play here for the rest of my career.\u201d \u2013 Derek Carr\n\nPF: The wins everyone was hoping for last season, didn\u2019t come along. But the young players on the team did great, obviously Khalil is up for Defensive Rookie of the Year. You had one of the most productive rookie seasons from a QB in the history of the NFL; With all that, what do you think you need to do, and the team needs to do to improve?\n\nDC: For me, I want to go out and be more efficient. This past year I said I\u2019m going to go out and play as hard as I can, just do everything I possibly can to win a football game, throw it wherever I need to, try to fit it into windows to help us win. Record wise we weren\u2019t doing very well, so I tried putting it all on my shoulders. There as a spurt in the middle of the season where I was turning the ball over, and that was related to me trying to do too much. So, I said, \u201cya know what, I\u2019m going to finish the season off thinking about my team, and thinking about not turning the ball over.\u201d\n\nThat\u2019s how I\u2019ve played my whole life, but I was trying to prove something to people, and that\u2019s not who I am. When I had that mindset, the team mindset, we went out and we won our last three games at home, against some really good football teams. That\u2019s something I learned. No matter who you are in this league, you can\u2019t do it on your own. There\u2019s no doubt about it, I don\u2019t care who it is, you cannot win a game on your own. When you try to, you\u2019re going to screw it up for everyone else.\n\nAlso I learned, we\u2019re actually starting something really good here. The record might not show it, but people who pay attention to us and who know the Raiders, like yourself, you understand what we\u2019re doing and what we\u2019re building. Its going to take time, but our mindset is, we are trying to be playing at this time next year. We think that we can do that, obviously we have to add some pieces and keep working, and hopefully we are going to get there.\n\nPF: I remember at the beginning of the season, when they posted the schedule, a part of my heart sank, because I thought this was the hardest NFL schedule I\u2019d ever seen. How do you think that schedule helped your development?\n\nDC: You\u2019re exactly right, we played 8 of the top 10 defenses this year. The others we played were right up there anyway, there just wasn\u2019t room for them in the top 10. (chuckles) It was good. Coach Olson said, \u201cyou will probably never play a schedule like this again, and this could be the best experience you could ever have.\u201d He\u2019d never seen a schedule like this. Going through it as a rookie QB with a brand new team we are trying to build, I think those are things people over look with this team.\n\nPeople don\u2019t really necessarily pay attention to those things, and its sad. I know this league, and the only thing that matters is wins, so the fact that we can look back on it and say \u201chey, we did some pretty good things against some great defenses\u201d that\u2019s all good and well, but we know that all that matters is the wins. So we got to watch that film and try to push ourselves to be better next year knowing that in all honesty we played one of the best schedules you could ever play. We have a lot of confidence going forward, but that schedule was really good for us.\n\nPF: Have you had a chance to meet any of the new staff yet?\n\nDC: I did, I met them all. They are great. I think the Raider Nation is going to love them, honestly. I sat down, talked with them, I\u2019m going to continue to meet with them. Its been great so far, they\u2019ve been awesome.\n\nPF: The offseason is full of rumors, one has been (offensive coordinator) Musgrave wanting to install a no huddle offense. What would you think about running a no huddle offense?\n\nDC: I think it\u2019d be awesome. It\u2019s what I did in college. Getting up to the line of scrimmage, getting us in the right play, that\u2019s what I\u2019m used to. I have no problem doing that. It\u2019s what the best players in the league do at the QB position, that\u2019s what I want to do. The teams that are winning Super Bowls, those are the things those teams are doing. Getting to the line of scrimmage and putting it on the QB.\n\nPF: Woodson is back! How great is that, and how much inspiration did he have on the locker room last year.\n\nDC: He\u2019s awesome. Just to watch a guy at his age run around playing like he\u2019s 24 years old. No one questions him losing a step, no one questioned his ability to practice every day. The guy practiced every day. Played hard every single day, worked out every time. Never missed a meeting, never missed anything. He doesn\u2019t know everything, but its pretty darn close. He knows a lot about this game, and watching him wanting to learn and get better, its an inspiration for us young guys. Its something we need, and we need to see.\n\nHim (Woodson) coming back shows his confidence in this team, the guy doesn\u2019t have to play football. He has no financial problems. He doesn\u2019t need to win a SB, he has one. He has every reason to go home and enjoy his family, but the guy wants to play again and that says a lot about his confidence in this football team.\n\nPF: Did you watch Marcel in the Pro Bowl?\n\nDC: I caught some of it on TV. I heard he had a few good plays, I was actually taking care of my son. (chuckles) My wife was cooking dinner. I couldn\u2019t be more happy for him, he\u2019s the best fullback in the league.\n\nPF: Marcel said before he left for the Pro Bowl that he was going to do a little recruiting for Free Agency while he was there. Have you done any of that? Reaching out to players, or putting a name in Reggie\u2019s ear?\n\nDC: Absolutely. I already started talking to some guys, recruiting some guys. Obviously I can\u2019t say any names, but I have started. I\u2019m doing my best to help this team win, if I can help I\u2019m going to.\n\nPF: One name who has been coming up as a possibility for the Raiders is, Julius Thomas from Denver. He was quoted saying he\u2019d consider the Raiders a possibility because he grew up a Raider fan. He\u2019s just waiting to see if the Raiders reach out to him. How much of an impact could he have on the offense?\n\nDC: Having him would be amazing. Obviously, I\u2019d love to play with him. I\u2019d love to throw him the ball. His family are big time Raider fans. I know a lot about him, I think he\u2019s a heck of a player and I think he would fit in with the group we already have. If we could add him, it would be great. We\u2019ll see what happens, see what the front office wants to do. He\u2019d be a great addition for our team.\n\nPF: Julius said he\u2019s a Raider fan, I\u2019m starting to hear that more and more. Leonard Williams from USC is a Raider fan, Coach Del Rio grew up a Raider fan, even you grew up a Raider fan. Now that you\u2019ve been in the organization for a full season, what do you think it is that draws players and coaches to the Raiders?\n\nDC: I think it\u2019s that Silver and Black honestly. It\u2019s the emblem. The mystique of the Raiders. The fear people used to have when they\u2019d play us, and the fear we started creating again. Especially on the defensive side of the football in that last stretch in December.\n\nOnce you get to know these fans, once you get around them, I can tell you I never want to play anywhere else. I hope I play here for the rest of my career. I love these fans, I love playing for Mr. Davis. God has been good to me, to allow me to play here, so I\u2019m very thankful to be here. I think the fans are really what make it, the passion they have. No matter what we are doing, no matter how many wins or losses, to come running back on the field and hear the fans cheering for me. To come running out of tunnel and hear them go crazy even though we only have two (eventually three after the home finale) wins on the season. It\u2019s really amazing, and I love them to death."}
{"text":"Two people have been injured after an experimental flying car crashed into a tree Friday morning near a school in Vernon, B.C.\n\nThe aircraft clipped a fence behind Vernon's Ellison Elementary School, hit the tree and crashed a few metres from school property just before 9 a.m. PT.\n\nMade by a Florida company, the flying car is a combination of a plane engine, propeller and parasail attached to a dune buggy.\n\nRCMP spokesperson Gord Molendyk said there are indications the contraption had taken off from the airport in Vernon.\n\n\"It looked like it was on its approach,\" Molendyk said. \"There was motor sound and people looked up and it got into trouble and came through the fence and into the trees here.\"\n\nMolendyk said the pilot and his passenger had to be pulled from the tree. They suffered minor injuries and were taken to hospital. They have since been released.\n\nNo one was hurt on the ground, although children from the school were preparing on the nearby grounds for a track and field day.\n\nIt's believed Kelowna, B.C., resident Ray Siebring recently brought the fifth-ever flying car to Canada as a prototype and has been checking it out in a series of test flights across the Okanagan.\n\nA release from the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) confirmed the flying car was \"an American corporately registered I-Tech Maverick SP Powered Parachute\" that had crashed.\n\nThe vehicle, known as \"Maverick,\" uses a 100-metre runway to take off and flies under a parasail. But it also needs a 100-metre runway to make a safe landing.\n\nAccording to the manufacturer's website, the car can travel at speeds up to 160 kilometres per hour on land and up to 65 kilometres per hour in the air. It costs at least $94,000 to purchase, according to the site.\n\nThe TSB is now investigating."}
{"text":"YALTA, CRIMEA\u2014In what is being called the worst environmental disaster in the region\u2019s history, millions of policy proposals gushed into the Black Sea on Thursday after a Brookings Institution think tanker ran aground off the coast of Crimea. \u201cCleanup crews are working around the clock to contain this massive flood of position papers on economics and global development,\u201d said Brookings Institution president Strobe Talbott, adding that booms had been brought to the site to halt the spread of the nonpartisan research while skimmers had been deployed to collect the policy briefs from the ocean\u2019s surface in hopes of preventing currents from dispersing them over a far greater area. \u201cWe\u2019re doing our very best to limit the exposure of marine habitats to the analyses of sub-Saharan energy infrastructure, universal basic income, and automation in the labor market, but it could be months before we know the full extent of the damage.\u201d Talbott went on to say that the Brookings Institution had already pledged $200 million toward cleanup efforts thanks to generous donations from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Hutchins Family Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.\n\nAdvertisement"}
{"text":"Taking RPG to the Next Level #SRPG\n\nGreetings, Lords! This is Fantasy War Tactics Support Team.\n\nThe first to make a fine start of the relay weekend events will be\n\nWeekend Coocoo Dungeon Open Event!\n\nThis will make a great use out of Devil\u2019s Soul you lords will have received from Burning Week On-time Event J!\n\nIn fact, the Lost Island will be available on the next weekend and all three bosses from the island will make special appearances!\n\nDo not miss these events starting from this weekend to claim additional items, gold, and rewards!\n\nPlease refer below for further details\n\nOn the first weekend, all Coocoo dungeons will be open!\n\n\u25b6 Event Period: 2016. 01. 23(Sat.) 5:00am \u2013 01. 25(Mon.) 04:59am\n\n\u25b6 Event Information: All Nephthys dungeons (Flame Garden, Moonlight Garden, Underwater Garden) will all be open during the weekend.\n\n\u25b6 Event Note:\n\n- If you do not see those dungeons open during the event period, please re-login to check again.\n\nOn the second weekend, The Lost Island Festival Event!\n\n\u25b6 Event Period: 2016. 01. 30(Sat.) 5:00am \u2013 02. 01(Mon.) 04:59am\n\n\u25b6 Event Information: All the time travelers will make their appearance during the event period!\n\n[Featured Boss : Muang, Chenny, Nirvana]\n\n\u25b6 Event Note\n\n- Please re-login during the event period to play\n\nThank you, always."}
{"text":"Featured image: The South Texas Project nuclear power facility in Bay City, Texas could be under extreme threat from historic flood waters, groups warned on Tuesday. (Photo: STP)\n\nAs record-breaking rainfall and unprecedented flooding continue to batter the greater Houston area and along the Gulf coast on Tuesday, energy watchdogs groups are warning of \u201ca credible threat of a severe accident\u201d at two nuclear reactors still operating at full capacity in nearby Bay City, Texas.\n\nThree groups\u2014Beyond Nuclear, South Texas Association for Responsible Energy, and the SEED Coalition\u2014are calling for the immediate shutdown of the South Texas Project (STP) which sits behind an embankment they say could be overwhelmed by the raging flood waters and torrential rains caused by Hurricane Harvey.\n\n\u201cBoth the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the STP operator have previously recognized a credible threat of a severe accident initiated by a breach of the embankment wall that surrounds the 7,000-acre reactor cooling water reservoir,\u201d said Paul Gunter, director of the Beyond Nuclear\u2019s Reactor Oversight Project, in a statement by the coalition on Tuesday.\n\nThe groups warn that as Harvey\u2014which on Tuesday was declared the most intense rain event in U.S. history\u2014continues to dump water on the area, a breach of the embankment wall surrounding the twin reactors would create \u201can external flood potentially impacting the electrical supply from the switchyard to the reactor safety systems.\u201d In turn, the water has the potential to \u201ccause high-energy electrical fires and other cascading events initiating a severe accident leading to core damage.\u201d Even worse, they added, \u201cany significant loss of cooling water inventory in the Main Cooling Reservoir would reduce cooling capacity to the still operating reactors that could result in a meltdown.\u201d\n\nWith the nearby Colorado River already cresting at extremely high levels and flowing at 70 times the normal rate, Karen Hadden, director of SEED Coalition, warned that the continue rainfall might create flooding that could reach the reactors.\n\n\u201cThere is plenty of reserve capacity on our electric grid,\u201d she said, \u201cso we don\u2019t have to run the reactors in order to keep the lights on. With anticipated flooding of the Colorado River, the nuclear reactors should be shut down now to ensure safety.\u201d\n\nLast week, the STP operators said that safety for their workers and local residents was their top concern, but that they would keep the plant operating despite the approaching storm.\n\nSusan Dancer, president of the South Texas Association for Responsible Energy, said that as residents in Bay City\u2014herself included\u2014were being forced to leave their homes under mandatory evacuation orders, it makes no sense to keep the nuclear plant online.\n\n\u201cOur 911 system is down, no emergency services are available, and yet the nuclear reactors are still running. Where is the concern for employees and their families? Where is the concern for public safety? This is an outrageous and irresponsible decision,\u201d declared Dancer. \u201cThis storm and flood is absolutely without precedent even before adding the possibility of a nuclear accident that could further imperil millions of people who are already battling for their lives.\u201d\n\nAs Harvey hovers over the coastal region, heavy rains are expected to persist for days even as the storm system creeps toward to Louisiana in the east.\n\nBut no matter how remote the possibility, said Gunter,\n\n\u201cit\u2019s simply prudent that the operator put this reactor into its safest condition, cold shutdown.\u201d\n\nThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License"}
{"text":"The victims of the Bourke Street atrocity have received more than $2.2 million in compensation, new figures have revealed.\n\nIn January, a car ploughed into crowds at a Melbourne CBD shopping district, killing six people and wounding 37 more.\n\nWorkSafe and Transport Accident Commission figures show just over $2.2 million has been given to the impacted families, reports The Age.\n\nPeople pay tribute leaving flowers at a temporary memorial on Bourke Street Mall\n\nWorksafe received claims for a total of $1.69 million from 70 people including families who lost loved ones and victims who suffered physical or mental harm.\n\nOf the 70 victims, 14 did not need time off work and only needed to cover medical costs, 38 have returned to work, and 16 have been unable to go back to work.\n\nFive victims are still suffering physical injuries and 11 are fighting mental health issues.\n\nThe TAC want sent 106 claims amounting to $578,926 for three of the deaths, 14 physical injuries and 89 mental injuries.\n\nClaims were used to cover counselling, dependency benefits and reimbursement of travel and accommodation expenses stemming from hospital stays.\n\nMore than 1000 people called the Victorian Emergency Helpline in the aftermath of the attack, many for mental health issues.\n\nThe victims of the atrocity (pictured: one at the scene) have received more than $2.2 million in compensation\n\nA significant number of WorkSafe and the TAC victims were injured in the incident.\n\nFollowing the tragedy, the government set up a fund to provide financial support to assist the families most affected and to complement compensation.\n\nAn Independent Panel was established to guide decisions about the fund.\n\nWitnesses and those affected are encouraged to seek help from the Victim Support Line 1800 819 817"}
{"text":"For years, the antique had been on a rickety support on a sideboard of Wendy Jones's home without anyone suspecting it was of such high value.\n\nMrs Jones only took it to the show because her husband was taking some books.\n\nBut she was startled when the 22-inch oval-shaped plate turned out to be the most valuable to have appeared on the BBC programme in its 30-year history.\n\nThe plate was commissioned by the Prussian East India Company for King Frederick II, who set up the company in 1750.\n\nIt was made from hard paste porcelain and decorated with the alms of the Hohenzollern family, the order of the black eagle, and the Maltese Cross.\n\nThe plate was made between 1750 and 1755, and there are pieces of the service in museums across the world.\n\nMrs Jones said: \"The plate actually belongs to my son because he was left it by his grandmother.\n\n\"He didn't have room for it in his London home so I had it.\n\n\"One day it fell off the stand and crashed onto the sideboard but luckily it wasn't damaged.\u201d\n\nAs she left the house to go to the show in Aberglasney, Wales, she grabbed the plate and put it in a single Tesco's carrier bag. They can easily split,\u201d she said.\n\n\"When I heard how much it might be worth I was shocked.\n\n\"On the way to the show the plate was on the back seat of the car, but on the way home I kept hold of it all the way.\u201d\n\nShe added: \"We are not sure where the plate came from but my son's paternal grandmother did marry into a German family.\n\n\"And the plate was made for the King of Prussia, so that's possibly how it ended up in our family.\u201d\n\nJohn Axford, from Woolley and Wallis auction house in Salisbury, Wilts, who valued the plate, said: \"It is a fantastic piece of a very rare Royal service.\u201d"}
{"text":"Received on 24.12.17:\n\nWe are social activists and friends of Dmitry Polienko and we are starting a New Year campaign of solidarity with the Belarusian prisoner of conscience! Please send a postcard with some words of support to Dmitry!\n\nYou can also post a photo of your postcard on social media and use the hashtag: #Free_Polienko\n\nIt should be recalled that in October 2016, Dmitry Polienko was sentenced to 2 years suspended prison sentence for allegedly assaulting a police officer during a \u2018Critical Mass\u2019 cycling demonstration in Minsk. This Spring Dmitry was arrested again: the court overturned the suspended sentence and sent him to serve the sentence in Babrujsk prison colony.\n\nLet\u2019s not wait for miracles! Let\u2019s be a society that helps miracles come true!\n\nWrite to Dmitry:\n\nPaliyenka Dzmitry\n\nSikorskaha 1, PK-2, a.9\n\nBabrujsk, Belarus\n\n213800"}
{"text":"And, perhaps most importantly, he shows he thinks you\u2019re stupid in the many ways he protects President Donald Trump from accountability. On Monday night, during a CNN-moderated town hall event in Wisconsin, he offered the following justification for opposing a congressional resolution that would censure Trump for coddling white supremacists:\n\nI will not support that. I think that would be\u2014that would be so counterproductive. If we descend this issue into some partisan hack-fest, into some bickering against each other, and demean it down to some political food fight, what good does that do to unify this country?\n\nRyan, who was recently gearing up for years\u2019 worth of partisan investigations of President Hillary Clinton, says censuring Trump for coddling Nazis would be too partisan for his taste. What he hopes you\u2019ll overlook is his own power to determine what is partisan and what is not. If a censure resolution passed the House overwhelmingly\u2014reflecting a broad rejection of Trump\u2019s comments after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia\u2014it wouldn\u2019t be partisan. What makes censuring Trump \u201cpartisan\u201d is Ryan\u2019s view that Trump doesn\u2019t deserve it.\n\nBut Trump does deserve it. Not only does he deserve it on a basic and obvious moral level, but he deserves it because significant, symbolic rebukes to white supremacy are effective means of driving it back into the discredited silence where it belongs. Ryan is fortunate, in a way, that the events in Charlottesville, and Trump\u2019s response to them, occurred amid a lengthy congressional recess, with Republican elected officials scattered across the country rather than gathered in Washington, D.C. That is the one thing insulating Ryan and his party from answering for their apparent determination to see Trump clear of the political consequences of siding with neo-Nazis. But the winners who will benefit from Ryan\u2019s good fortune aren\u2019t Republicans in Congress or in the White House\u2014they are the racists who will take note when the censure resolution fails.\n\nThis isn\u2019t theoretical. White supremacists were pretty happy with Trump\u2019s initial response to Charlottesville, undeterred by his second, and absolutely thrilled with the unhinged defense of Nazi marchers he offered on the third go.\n\nBy contrast, after upwards of 10,000 peaceful counterprotesters dwarfed a dismal gathering of white supremacists in Boston over the weekend, the anti-Muslim group ACT canceled scores of \u201cAmerica First\u201d rallies scheduled for Saturday, September 9."}
{"text":"Category 5 cable, commonly referred to as Cat 5, is a twisted pair cable for computer networks. Since 2001, the variant commonly in use is the Category 5e specification (Cat 5e). The cable standard provides performance of up to 100 MHz and is suitable for most varieties of Ethernet over twisted pair up to 1000BASE-T (Gigabit Ethernet). Cat 5 is also used to carry other signals such as telephony and video.\n\nThis cable is commonly connected using punch-down blocks and modular connectors. Most Category 5 cables are unshielded, relying on the balanced line twisted pair design and differential signaling for noise rejection.\n\nCable standard [ edit ]\n\nThe specification for category 5 cable was defined in ANSI\/TIA\/EIA-568-A, with clarification in TSB-95.[1] These documents specify performance characteristics and test requirements for frequencies up to 100 MHz.\n\nThe cable is available in both stranded and solid conductor forms. The stranded form is more flexible and withstands more bending without breaking. Patch cables are stranded. Permanent wiring used in structured cabling is solid-core. The category and type of cable can be identified by the printing on the jacket.[2]\n\nTermination [ edit ]\n\nTIA\/EIA-568-B.1-2001 T568A Wiring Pin Pair Wire Color 1 3 1 white\/green 2 3 2 green 3 2 1 white\/orange 4 1 2 blue 5 1 1 white\/blue 6 2 2 orange 7 4 1 white\/brown 8 4 2 brown TIA\/EIA-568-B.1-2001 T568B Wiring[3] Pin Pair Wire Color 1 2 1 white\/orange 2 2 2 orange 3 3 1 white\/green 4 1 2 blue 5 1 1 white\/blue 6 3 2 green 7 4 1 white\/brown 8 4 2 brown A Cat 5e Wall outlet showing the two wiring schemes: A for T568A , B for T568B Category 5 patch cable in T568B wiring\n\nCable types, connector types and cabling topologies are defined by TIA\/EIA-568-B. Nearly always, 8P8C modular connectors (often referred to incorrectly as RJ45 connectors[5][6]) are used for connecting category 5 cable. The cable is terminated in either the T568A scheme or the T568B scheme. The two schemes work equally well and may be mixed in an installation so long as the same scheme is used on both ends of each cable.\n\nVariants [ edit ]\n\nThe category 5e specification improves upon the category 5 specification by revising and introducing new specifications to further mitigate the amount of crosstalk.[7] The bandwidth (100 MHz) and physical construction are the same between the two,[8] and most Cat 5 cables actually meet Cat 5e specifications, though they are not specifically certified as such.[9] The category 5 was deprecated in 2001 and superseded by the category 5e specification.[10]\n\nApplications [ edit ]\n\nCategory 5 cable is used in structured cabling for computer networks such as Ethernet over twisted pair. The cable standard provides performance of up to 100 MHz and is suitable for 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX (Fast Ethernet), and 1000BASE-T (Gigabit Ethernet). 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX Ethernet connections require two wire pairs. 1000BASE-T Ethernet connections require four wire pairs. Through the use of power over Ethernet (PoE), power can be carried over the cable in addition to Ethernet data.\n\nCat 5 is also used to carry other signals such as telephony and video.[11] In some cases, multiple signals can be carried on a single cable; Cat 5 can carry two conventional telephone lines as well as 100BASE-TX in a single cable.[12][13][14][15][16] The USOC\/RJ-61 wiring standard may be used in multi-line telephone connections. Various schemes exist for transporting both analog and digital video over the cable. HDBaseT (10.2 Gbit\/s) is one such scheme.[17]\n\nCharacteristics [ edit ]\n\nThe use of balanced lines helps preserve a high signal-to-noise ratio despite interference from both external sources and crosstalk from other pairs.\n\nInsulation [ edit ]\n\nOuter insulation is typically polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or low smoke zero halogen (LSOH).[citation needed]\n\nExample materials used as insulation in the cable[24] Acronym Material PE Polyethylene FP Foamed polyethylene FEP Fluorinated ethylene propylene FFEP Foamed fluorinated ethylene propylene AD\/PE Air dielectric\/polyethylene LSZH or LS0H Low smoke, zero halogen LSFZH or LSF0H Low smoke and fume, zero halogen\n\nBending radius [ edit ]\n\nMost Category 5 cables can be bent at any radius exceeding approximately four times the outside diameter of the cable.[25][26]\n\nMaximum cable segment length [ edit ]\n\nThe maximum length for a cable segment is 100 m per TIA\/EIA 568-5-A.[27] If longer runs are required, the use of active hardware such as a repeater or switch is necessary.[28][29] The specifications for 10BASE-T networking specify a 100-meter length between active devices.[30] This allows for 90 meters of solid-core permanent wiring, two connectors and two stranded patch cables of 5 meters, one at each end.[31]\n\nConductors [ edit ]\n\nSince 1995, solid-conductor UTP cables for backbone cabling is required to be no thicker than 22 American Wire Gauge (AWG) and no thinner than 24 AWG, or 26 AWG for shorter-distance cabling. This standard has been retained with the 2009 revision of ANSI TIA\/EIA 568.[32]\n\nAlthough cable assemblies containing 4 pairs are common, category 5 is not limited to 4 pairs. Backbone applications involve using up to 100 pairs.[33]\n\nIndividual twist lengths [ edit ]\n\nThe distance per twist is commonly referred to as pitch. Each of the four pairs in a Cat 5 cable has differing precise pitch to minimize crosstalk between the pairs. The pitch of the twisted pairs is not specified in the standard. Measurements on one sample of Cat 5 cable yielded the following results.[34]\n\nPair color [cm] per turn Turns per [m] Blue 1.38 72 Green 1.53 65 Orange 1.78 56 Brown 1.94 52\n\nSince the pitch of the various colors is not specified in the standard, pitch can vary according to manufacturer and should be measured for the batch being used if cable is being used in non-Ethernet situation where pitch might be critical.\n\nEnvironmental ratings [ edit ]\n\nUnited States and Canada fire certifications[35] Class Phrase Description Standards LSZH Communications low-smoke zero halogen NES\u2011711, NES\u2011713, MIL\u2011C\u201124643, UL 1685 CMP Communications plenum Insulated with fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) and polyethylene (PE) and jacketed with low-smoke polyvinyl chloride (PVC), due to better flame test ratings. CSA FT6[36] or NFPA 262 (UL 910) CMR Communications riser Insulated with high-density polyolefin and jacketed with low-smoke polyvinyl chloride (PVC). UL 1666 CMG Communications general purpose CSA FT4 CM Communications Insulated with high-density polyolefin, but not jacketed with PVC and therefore is the lowest of the three in flame resistance. UL 1685 (UL 1581, Sec. 1160) Vertical-Tray CMX Communications residential UL 1581, Sec. 1080 (VW-1) CMH CSA FT1\n\nSome cables are \"UV-rated\" or \"UV-stable\" meaning they can be exposed to outdoor UV radiation without significant destruction.[citation needed]\n\nPlenum-rated cables are slower to burn and produce less smoke than cables using a mantle of materials like PVC. Plenum-rated cables may be installed in plenum spaces where PVC is not allowed.[37]\n\nShielded cables (FTP or STP) are useful for environments where proximity to RF equipment may introduce electromagnetic interference, and can also be used where eavesdropping likelihood should be minimized.\n\nComparison with later standards [ edit ]\n\nThe Category 6 specification improves upon the Category 5e specification by extending frequency response and further reducing crosstalk. The improved performance of Cat 6 provides 250 MHz bandwidth and supports 10GBASE-T (10-Gigabit Ethernet) for distances up to 55 meters.[10] Category 6A cable provides 500 MHz bandwidth and supports 10GBASE-T for distances up to 100 meters. Both variants are backwards compatible with Category 5 and 5e cables.\n\nNotes [ edit ]\n\n^ Z 0 = R + j \u03c9 L G + j \u03c9 C {\\displaystyle Z_{0}={\\sqrt {\\frac {R+j\\omega L}{G+j\\omega C}}}} f R L = R 2 \u03c0 L {\\displaystyle f_{RL}={\\frac {R}{2\\pi L}}} f G C = G 2 \u03c0 C {\\displaystyle f_{GC}={\\frac {G}{2\\pi C}}} f R L > f G C {\\displaystyle f_{RL}>f_{GC}} corner frequency (or break frequency) is defined as f R L {\\displaystyle f_{RL}} f R L {\\displaystyle f_{RL}} Z 0 = L C {\\displaystyle Z_{0}={\\sqrt {\\frac {L}{C}}}} [20] The characteristic impedance of a transmission line is given by. There are two important transition frequencies related this equation:and. Typically we haveand the(or) is defined asbecause at frequencies greater thanthe familiar \"lossless\" relationfor characteristic impedance holds true to excellent approximation. Unfortunately neither of the terms corner frequency nor break frequency are consistently used in the literature. Most often these frequencies are not given any special name, and the topic itself is glossed over in most modern texts."}
{"text":"Columbus Crew SC today announced that it has loaned defender Kalen Ryden to the Austin Aztex of the USL. The rookie becomes the first Black & Gold player to be loaned to Austin, which was previously announced as Crew SC\u2019s new USL affiliate ahead of the 2015 campaign. Crew SC retains the option to recall Ryden at any point while on loan.\n\n\u201cOur partnership with the Aztex is a strong opportunity for players to gain valuable match experience while continuing to develop,\u201d said Crew SC Sporting Director and Head Coach Gregg Berhalter. \u201cWe are certain Kalen will be in good hands with the coaching staff in Austin, led by Paul Dalglish, as they get their season underway on Saturday.\u201d\n\nRyden appeared in five contests during Crew SC\u2019s preseason, helping the club keep clean sheets against Austin (February 15), London United (February 18) and the Costa Rica Under-23s (February 21).\n\nIn college, the defender made 28 appearances (27 starts) over two seasons at Midwestern State. The Mustangs recorded a shutout in 13 of his starts. Ryden led the school to consecutive NCAA Division II postseason appearances, earning NSCAA All-South Central Region First Team honors in 2014. Previously, he spent two seasons at Oral Roberts University.\n\nRyden was selected in the Fourth Round (69th overall) of the 2015 MLS SuperDraft on January 20. He signed with Crew SC on March 2.\n\nThe Aztex begin the 2015 USL season on March 28 against Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC. A complete Aztex schedule can be found at AustinAztex.com.\n\nTRANSACTION: Columbus Crew SC loans defender Kalen Ryden to the Austin Aztex (USL) on March 26, 2015. Crew SC retains the option to recall Ryden at any point while on loan."}
{"text":"Stefan Johansen remained coy on his Celtic future following the appointment of Brendan Rodgers.\n\nWith just 12-months remaining on his deal, the club could cash in on the midfielder signed in January 2014 from Stromsgodset by Neil Lennon to make way for new players.\n\nSeveral German teams are thought to be interested in the midfielder, who has underperformed for the Hoops this season.\n\nAs quoted by Norwegian outlet Nettavisen, he said:\n\nWe\u2019ve been negotiating for a while, but I haven\u2019t signed anything yet. We\u2019ll see if it happens or not. I completely trust that my agent does what is best for me. I have a year left on my contract with Celtic and I will focus on it.\n\nHis two assists against Malmo in a crucial playoff tie were quickly forgotten about as he put in under par performances time and time again.\n\nThis season he has made 37 appearances, scoring four goals and assisting on eight occasions \u2013 with his last league goal coming on Flag Day against Ross County.\n\nThe 25-year-old also spoke about the recent appointment of Rodgers, who replaced his fellow Norwegian Ronny Deila.\n\nHe has coached big clubs like Liverpool and Swansea. I think he will be a good match for Celtic , and the football he stands for is also suitable for the club.\n\nJohansen was given time off to recover after he admitted to suffering from a back injury, but he still hasn\u2019t quite reached the standards he set last year when he scored 10 goals and added 13 assists and received the SFA Player of the Year Award.\n\nIt remains to be seen who Rodgers will want to keep this summer and beyond, and with his contract up next summer, it will quickly become clear whether Johansen features in his future plans.\n\nShould Celtic sell Stefan Johansen this summer?"}
{"text":"What an amazing time to be a rich person in Miami-Dade. The market just keeps providing you guys with luxury things that us poorer people couldn't even imagine actually existed. Things like condos for your cars. No, not condos to actually live in and park your car nearby like the under-construction Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach. A condo that is literally just a nice place to store your collection of luxury automobiles.\n\nThe new project to do just that is called the Gables Auto Vault and it will be located at 3851 Bird Road. It's currently a vacant lot but is blocks away from a few high-end luxury car dealerships, including the Collection. It's a collaboration between CFH Group and developer Sheldon Lowe, and just received a $19.5 million loan for construction.\n\nGables Auto Vault: a car condo for your luxury car. $500K to $2 mill. via @trdmiami https:\/\/t.co\/DtgKU8pMzE pic.twitter.com\/GWaeeTuZap \u2014 SFDB (@sfdb) March 2, 2016"}
{"text":"A Peek At Other Computer Technicians Workbenches #4\n\nKeeping with what has almost become a Technibble tradition, its time again to take a peek at the Technibble forum members workbenches. Its a great way for technicians to get inspiration for your own setups, see how others are doing it and for the owners to show off a little.\n\nWe are now up to Workbenches #4 and if you missed them, you can check out our previous \u201cPeek at Technicians Workbenches\u201d posts here (1, 2, 3).\n\nHere is \u201cA Peek at Other Computer Technicians Workbenches #4\u201d:\n\nPBComputer\n\nHere are three pictures of our workshop. The images have not being stages or have I tried to tidy up for the pictures.\n\nA lot of the \u201cstock\u201d will be hopefully gone this week, once it\u2019s being put on eBay.\n\ngunslinger\n\nIts not much, but it gets the job done\n\nManiaman\n\nHere\u2019s an update now that my room is pretty well 95% finished. Fully functional now. Only thing left to do is put up a couple more shelves, and get electricity to the wall to the left in the first pic. Until then it\u2019s still a great space for things like laptop disassembly.\n\nComputers under the counter are waiting to be parted out\/pieced together into used computers.\n\nCenter island with two tech machines, a server, and a collection of usb drives with various tools on them. By far the messiest right now, I need to clean it up again.\n\nComputerPro\n\nWere moving into a new building across the street from our current location. LOT of work ahead! Were thinking of reversing our theme colors for this one (Walls green with black trim) and Blue used as accent color. Currently its the exact opposite. We\u2019ll be tripling our space (there\u2019s more offices, storage area in back not shown in pics).\n\nRight now its VERY bland being plain white. Compared to our loud colors anyway lol. Here are a few photos of the new building.\n\n\u2018putertutor\n\nThis is my own little dark and dank corner of the world. This is in my basement, and I had a fluorescent bulb go out on me this morning, so its not always so depressing looking in there. I am in the process of building a 20\u2033 long bench to the right of the wooden door in the pic. I\u2019ll probably convert the space my bench is in now to shelving, get all the machines of the floor.\n\nEventually, I\u2019ll stud out the walls, sheet rock them and make it a proper looking shop. Eventually\u2026\n\nPS: That red cup is a pen\/pencil holder, not a drink.\n\ngamesta400\n\nHere are the pics of my shop inside my home. My house was zoned business so I build this shop inside the front door and put a 5 foot sign in the front yard.\n\ngikstar\n\nThe skylights work great for us, no need to turn on the lights during the day time.\n\nI have added about 20 more computers sitting in the racks and under the work benches now. I seem to be constantly purchasing more and more stuff\u2026 just can\u2019t seem to pass up a good Craigslist deal. Just today I purchased 2 \u2013 Dell 22\u2033 monitors (P2210t\u2019s) for $60 each and a Dell 2007 Ultrasharp for $15 (which replaces the one we just sold today).\n\nWe have room to expand if we need to (have an empty bedroom). That one monster of a tech bench I had in storage for about 3 years since we didn\u2019t have a place big enough to put it up (a free item that I found on Craigslist along with a full size server rack).\n\nstidham\n\nHere is my work at home area.\n\nBillMoney\n\nMy \u201cworkshop\u201d down in the basement\n\nTechLady\n\nHere\u2019s my workshop in the garage. Those book shelves used to go all the way down to the floor and all the way across the wall\u2026wasn\u2019t easy letting go but we now have an awful lot of credit at the used bookstore down the street.\n\nThe left half is more for laptops, the right half more for desktops.\n\nSewed the curtains myself :)\n\n16k_zx81\n\nLeft pic \u2013 my spot, right pic \u2013 bob\u2019s spot, bottom pic \u2013 spare bench, shared, for work overflow.\n\nPR Tech\n\nHere is a Google virtual tour link of my shop. Fun things to see\u2026 3 Chronic Cellars posters (Dead Nuts, The Unteachables & Purple Paradise) in the tech bench area and the wall clock in the reception area. I had the tech benches custom made by a local cabinet maker. I use raceways to hide the cabling.\n\nSpecial thanks to everyone who shared pictures of their workbenches with us!\n\n0\n\nShares"}
{"text":"BlackBerry (NASDAQ:BBRY) and T-Mobile US (NYSE:TMUS) have kissed and made up. A little more than a year after BlackBerry cut sales ties with T-Mobile amid a dispute over T-Mobile promoting the iPhone over BlackBerry's phones, T-Mobile is now going to start selling the BlackBerry Classic smartphone.\n\nBlackBerry Classic\n\nNotably, the rapprochement between the carrier and the smartphone maker comes as T-Mobile is ramping up its efforts to gain market share in the enterprise market with new business plans. Getting T-Mobile back on board will also give BlackBerry a new possible revenue stream.\n\nThe Classic will be available beginning May 13 at T-Mobile.com and in participating T-Mobile stores beginning May 15 for $0 down, with equipment installment plan payments of $18.33 per month for 24 months. Customers can also purchase the Classic for $439.92 at full retail price.\n\nThe Classic is not BlackBerry's newest phone (that would be the touchscreen Leap) but it is one of BlackBerry's flagship products, and with its Qwerty keyboard it will likely appeal to business users. Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) and AT&T Mobility (NYSE: T) started selling the Classic in February.\n\nIn a statement, the companies said they \"showed they're two companies in the business of listening to their customers.\"\n\n\"People who love BlackBerry smartphones and want to use one on America's fastest nationwide 4G LTE network now have that choice,\" T-Mobile CEO John Legere said in a statement. \"Bringing BlackBerry into our device line-up now also stokes Un-carrier 9.0, which is all about bringing the Un-carrier revolution to business.\"\n\n\"BlackBerry is proud to partner with T-Mobile once again to offer the world's most secure and reliable mobile products and services that encourage productivity--whether they are individual users making the most of their day with the BlackBerry Classic, or an enterprise seeking to manage thousands of devices,\" BlackBerry CEO John Chen added. \"Together with T-Mobile, we hope to deliver highly differentiated solutions that appeal to our mutual users: the power professionals who depend on their smartphones to get things done and make things happen.\"\n\nThe burying of the hatchet comes less than two months after T-Mobile launched new plans aimed at business customers with a simplified rate structure in an effort to take away business from Verizon and AT&T. Although BlackBerry has seen its market share dwindle in recent years, many government workers and those in the legal, finance and medical professions still use BlackBerry phones. Selling the Classic could be a way for T-Mobile to step up its presence in the enterprise and small-and-medium-business markets.\n\nBlackBerry's decision last year to essentially cut sales ties with T-Mobile came after a public spat between the two companies over T-Mobile's decision to promote the iPhone as an alternative to its BlackBerry customers.\n\nFor more:\n\n- see this release\n\n- see this SlashGear article\n\nRelated Articles:\n\nAnalysts: T-Mobile's business plans could appeal to small businesses but not big enterprises\n\nT-Mobile aims to steal business customers from Verizon, AT&T with cheaper, simpler pricing\n\nT-Mobile offers $100 credit to BlackBerry customers after companies break up\n\nBlackBerry to cut sales ties with T-Mobile\n\nReport: 94% of T-Mobile BlackBerry customers who traded in phones switched to another platform\n\nT-Mobile to offer BlackBerry users $250 in credit to upgrade to new Z10, Q10\n\nBlackBerry CEO Chen slams T-Mobile for enticing BB users to switch to iPhone"}
{"text":"Confusion has surrounded the debate over Alberta's Bill 6, as the NDP government continues to push forward legislation aimed at making farm work safer and bringing the province's labour laws more in line with the rest of Canada.\n\nFarmers and ranchers see the proposed law as a threat to their businesses and ways of life, however, and they have not been shy about saying so.\n\nThe often emotional debate has been heightened by the recent deaths of a 10-year-old boy who was killed driving a forklift on a farm near Killam, Alta., and three sisters who suffocated in canola seed near Withrow, Alta.\n\nIn the face of a protest involving more than 1,000 people outside the Alberta Legislature, Labour Minster Lori Sigurdson admitted the government \"could have done a better job in communicating.\"\n\nShe and other ministers then pledged to personally attend town halls and public meetings around the province to offer more clarity about the bill.\n\nStill, many questions remain.\n\nHere, we do our best to answer five of the most common ones, and compare Alberta's proposed regulations to those in our neighbouring provinces:\n\n1. Will workers compensation be mandatory for all farm workers, including family members?\n\nAccording to the current wording of the bill, yes, but that could change.\n\n\"If you are operating a for-profit farming operation \u2026 you must cover any unpaid workers, including family members and children, performing work on your farm,\" the Workers Compensation Board (WCB) of Alberta states in its explanation of Bill 6.\n\nFarm operators would be asked to provide a \"value of service\" for the work unpaid labourers perform, the board explains.\n\nSigurdson, however, later suggested that would be amended in a new version of the bill, which would include an \"explicit\" exemption for families working on farms.\n\nThe province later clarified in a press release that \"WCB coverage would be required only for paid employees, with an option for farmers to extend coverage to unpaid workers like family members, neighbours and friends.\"\n\nIn Manitoba, workers compensation coverage was made mandatory for farm labourers in 2009, but family members were exempted from that change.\n\n2. How much will WCB coverage cost?\n\nWorkers compensation premiums, which must be paid by employers, range depending on the risk of injury associated with the type of work being performed.\n\nAlberta is proposing rates ranging from $1.70 per $100 of insurable earnings for things like greenhouse work up to $2.25 for grain farming and $2.97 for workplaces involving large animals, including beef producers, feed lots, livestock auctions and horse stables.\n\nIn British Columbia, by comparison, the rates are more expensive.\n\nAt the low end, orchard and vineyard work in B.C. comes with WCB rates of $1.73 per $100 of insurable earnings, but at the high end, the rate for grain farming stands at $4.87 and ranching at $5.65.\n\n3. How dangerous are farms?\n\nAlberta averages about 17 farm fatalities each year, including three deaths of children, based on data collected by the provincial government since 1985.\n\nMost of those deaths in recent years are due to machine runovers or rollovers, although not all were work-related.\n\nBy contrast, there are an average of 13 people killed on Saskatchewan farms each year, most involving machinery.\n\nAbout 14 per cent of serious farm-related injuries in Saskatchewan involve youth.\n\n4. What about occupational health and safety?\n\nUnlike other provinces, farm workers in Alberta are currently exempt from occupational health and safety laws and have no right to refuse unsafe work.\n\nThat also means data on work-related injuries and deaths are considered incomplete in Alberta, because currently all accidents don't need to be reported, and investigations aren't routinely launched.\n\nIn Saskatchewan, by contrast, employers are required to provide safe working environments and must ensure their workers know they have the right to refuse what they perceive to be unsafe work.\n\nAlberta's occupational health and safety exemption for farms and ranches would change under Bill 6, with standards applying \"when a farm employs one or more paid employees at any time of the year,\" according to a government press release.\n\n5. Will kids and neighbours still be able to help out on family farms?\n\nThat's been a particularly unclear point, according to Stephen Vandervalk, vice-president of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers in Alberta, who has been watching the legislation closely.\n\nIf Bill 6 is passed and indeed takes effect on Jan. 1, Vandervalk says farmers and ranchers aren't sure if neighbours could casually pitch in with cow branding or if children younger than 16 could help or even accompany their parents if they're working long hours.\n\nPremier Rachel Notley, however, later pledged that kids living on family farms \"will continue to be able to work on the farm as they always have.\"\n\n\"And they will continue to be educated on the farm through 4H programs as they always have,\" the premier said, speaking to reporters via conference call from Paris, where she was attending the COP21 climate change summit.\n\nIn Saskatchewan, there are exceptions to occupational health and safety rules that allow kids to help out on family farms, but children are prohibited from tasks like operating motorized farm equipment and handling dangerous chemicals.\n\nNo such prohibitions on kids operating motorized farm equipment currently exist in Alberta.\n\nThere have been cases in Saskatchewan of confusion, however, where parents have run afoul of labour laws for having their kids take on particular tasks on the family farm."}
{"text":"It is not just torture hearings on the training table this morning, there is a plateful of AIG\/Bankster\/Bailout fun on tap too. At 10:00 am EST, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a hearing on \u201cAIG: Where is the Taxpayer Money Going?\u201d.\n\nIn advance of the big hearing, David Cho and Brady Dennis in the Washington Post have a significant article out this morning confirming what any sane mind has thought all along, namely that the government and the Fed were way deeper in the muck of the AIG bonuses, and knew full well about the issue, long before they have admitted:\n\nDocuments show that senior officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York received details about the bonuses more than five months before the firestorm erupted and were deeply engaged with AIG as well as outside lawyers, auditors and public relations firms about the potential controversy. But the New York Fed did not raise the alarm with the Obama administration until the end of February. Timothy F. Geithner, who became Treasury secretary early this year, was the head of the New York Fed when it became aware of the bonus details. But his name is not among those of senior New York Fed officials mentioned in the summaries of phone calls, correspondence and other documents obtained by The Washington Post. Those documents also illuminate who in the government, beyond the New York Fed, knew what about the bonuses at AIG\u2019s most troubled unit, and when.\n\n\u2026\n\nBy Sept. 29, the bonus matter first appeared on the radar of the New York Fed, which was designated as the primary contact for AIG, documents show. Senior officials from the New York Fed met with AIG officials to discuss the compensation plans in place at Financial Products, whose risky derivative contracts had brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse. AIG e-mailed officials at the New York Fed copies of the company\u2019s compensation plans, which detailed bonuses and retention payments, including those at Financial Products, documents show. The issue arose in scores of meetings and conference calls over the ensuing months. AIG also disclosed its retention programs in public filings.\n\nWeeeeeeee! Another shocking instance of gambling going on at the casino. Or not. Actually, when we first learned of the Semtex laden AIG Retention Contracts there were immediate questions as to how it could be that the Fed and the rest of government had no idea of the explosive potential. Now that we know they knew, it sure is hilarious that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, in mid-March 2009, tried to devise a laughably bogus plan to fix the very same problem he apparently full bore ignored in October 2008 at the previous job where he was supposedly the smartest kid in the room.\n\nOf course, it wasn\u2019t just the New York Fed, and their purportedly detached head, that have completely misrepresented their depth of knowledge of the pending AIG Bonus Scandal. Congress did too (and they also attempted an inane hasty fix to the problem they had long known of):\n\nKey members of Congress began investigating the payments as long ago as October and, beginning in January, repeatedly warned the Treasury about the matter.\n\n\u2026\n\nThe spark that would grow into a political firestorm began in October when lawmakers began to request documents about the compensation at Financial Products. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) in particular latched on to the issue. By January, AIG was feeling heat from lawyers at the House Financial Services Committee, and from the offices of Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.) and Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), who one staff member noted in an e-mail to AIG was \"very upset about these payments.\" Kanjorski has said that around this time his staff began calling the Treasury about the issue and sending letters, but communication was hindered by the transition between administrations.\n\nNote that both the Fed and Congress folks were jabbering at the Administration, both that of Bush and Obama, on this long before either Administration has fessed up to. Another shocker. There are a lot more specific facts and discussion in the Washington Post article, and it is worth a full read. In fairness, it is certainly not like we didn\u2019t suspect such duplicitous complicity out of these officials, but the starkness of it sure brings the fury of the initial Bonus Babies Scandal revelation right back to the front burner. And just in time for today\u2019s hearing. Go figure.\n\nNow, back to the hearing, the official press announcement describes it as follows:\n\nAt 10:00 a.m., Chairman Towns and Ranking Member Issa will offer their respective opening statements and then Chairman Towns will swear in the C.E.O. of AIG, Mr. Edward M. Liddy, at approximately 10:15 a.m. Mr. Liddy will then offer his opening statement followed by questions from the Committee members. At the conclusion of Members\u2019 questions for Mr. Liddy, Chairman Towns will swear in the second panel of witnesses [comprised of AIG Trustees and a professor] and proceed with their opening statements, followed by Members\u2019 questions. The hearing will be broadcast in-house on channel 32 and available on the Committee webcast at 10:00 a.m.\n\nThe prepared testimony\/statement of AIG Chief Ed Liddy is here and the AIG Trustees here.\n\nIf you are interested in high finance, and torture is not your cup of tea, tune in and turn on. Of course, that is not to say that the slow rot coming out of Tim Geithner, Congress and the AIG saga isn\u2019t torture, it most certainly is."}
{"text":"The District of Columbia and D.C. United announced on Wednesday that the District has filed for eminent domain to acquire full control of the site of United\u2019s proposed stadium in the Buzzard Point neighborhood of Southwest Washington.\n\nThe club and the District jointly released the following statement to announce the measure, which \u2013 if completed \u2013 would clear United to begin construction on their long-awaited soccer-specific stadium.\n\n\u201cThe District of Columbia and D.C. United are moving forward on a soccer stadium that will transform a neighborhood on the banks of the Anacostia and generate hundreds of new jobs for District residents,\" the statement reads. \"We have created the best deal for the District, its residents, D.C. United and its fans.\"\n\nPer terms of a deal signed between the District and United in June, the D.C. government had a Wednesday deadline to acquire all of the land at the proposed stadium site. They had obtained all but two acres of land at the site prior to Wednesday, but couldn't agree to a price to buy the final piece of land from a local developer, forcing Mayor Muriel Bowser's government to file for eminent domain."}
{"text":"HELSINKI (Reuters) - Vesa Vihavainen is worried. Merivaara, his Finnish-based hospital bed-making business, is struggling - just like the economy that Finns once held up to debt-laden Greeks as a model of what national thrift can achieve.\n\nPeople stand near the gate of the Nokia factory in Salo, January 17, 2013. REUTERS\/Roni Lehti\/Lehtikuva\n\nWeak sales mean Merivaara has had to lay off staff as Finland fails to find an exit from a two-year recession. That spiral of lost jobs and income is also wrecking the country\u2019s cherished reputation for sound public finances.\n\nFinland\u2019s school-masterly advice, prominent in a chorus of northern European criticism when euro zone debtors asked for bailouts, may come back to haunt its policymakers as they struggle to agree on reforms from taxes to pensions.\n\nWhile southern Europe starts to win back investors after years of donor-imposed job losses and welfare cuts, Finnish welfare costs and taxes have risen as jobs are lost. Government levies as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) have jumped to a European Union high, piling costs onto the private sector.\n\nFinnish exports, investments and retail sales are all tumbling and firms are putting out profit warnings.\n\n\u201cThe Finnish economy has drifted into the same reference group with Italy and France,\u201d the EU\u2019s top economic official Olli Rehn said, referring to the two big euro zone economies whose finances linger outside the bloc\u2019s fiscal limits.\n\n\u201cWe have no time to lose,\u201d said Rehn, a Finn, last month.\n\nBut with parliamentary elections in a year\u2019s time and Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen due to step down next month, serious cost cutting looks unlikely for now.\n\n\u201cWe would need a brave government to implement the needed reforms,\u201d Danske Bank economist Pasi Kuoppamaki said.\n\nBut the chance of that happening decreased further on Friday, when social democrats replaced their leader, Finance Minister Jutta Urpilainen, with union boss Antti Rinne, who has advocated state take a bigger role in the economy.\n\nAnd with the opposition talking mainly about small cuts to welfare and incremental changes, elections are unlikely to produce anything beyond policy fine-tuning.\n\nFinland\u2019s GDP is still about 5 percent below its 2007 level, a bigger lag than the euro zone average and well below its main export competitors, Sweden and Germany.\n\nThe economy shrank 1.4 percent last year, and on Monday, the European Commission forecast it to grow 0.2 percent this year and 1.0 percent next - the second-weakest in the euro zone on both counts, beating only bailed-out Cyprus.\n\nNetherlands, another debt-crisis hardliner, also has seen economy contract, but its struggles are smaller than Finland\u2019s and has returned to export-led growth.\n\nIn the euro zone, only Malta and Estonia are less competitive than Finland on pricing. Companies such as Merivaara produce less, but labor costs have not fallen nearly as much.\n\nWhile Finnish leaders are worried, about half the deficit trimming has been achieved by raising taxes. Government revenue as a share of GDP rose to 56.3 percent this year, the highest in the EU and more than 10 percentage points above the EU average.\n\n\u201cThe question is: How can Finland finance a public sector of this size, and the answer is: \u2018It really can\u2019t, at least if it wants the economy to grow\u2019,\u201d Nordea analyst Jan von Gerich said.\n\nERODING COMPETITIVENESS\n\nMerivaara\u2019s sales of hospital beds and surgical tables show rising domestic costs coupled with the strong euro are increasingly hampering exports, which go mainly to Scandinavia and Russia, where the economy has stagnated.\n\n\u201cPrice competitiveness is getting tougher all the time,\u201d Merivaara\u2019s Vihavainen said. \u201cLabor here is expensive, and we are far from markets, which adds to transportation costs.\u201d\n\nBesides, health care spending across the globe is being squeezed by cuts in public budgets - a cause Finland championed.\n\n\u201cWhy would we listen to countries that are not taking care of their own public finances?\u201d said its EU minister Alexander Stubb in 2011.\n\nHe could become prime minister next month.\n\nEven after two years of recession, there are few empty storefronts. Unemployment has risen, but is still well below the EU average, which has made it easier to delay reforms.\n\nFinland has kept its top triple-A credit rating, earned by reforms undertaken after a deep recession in the early 1990s. But its pristine fiscal reputation \u201cis more the past than the present,\u201d Pimco portfolio manager Andrew Bosomworth said.\n\nForeigners hold 90 percent of its sovereign debt, and Finland may find its cost of borrowing drifting higher as debt investors look more closely at its current performance.\n\n\u201cWhen investors think next time whether they should buy more or reduce Finland\u2019s weight (in their portfolios), it may be that they\u2019ll act differently,\u201d Nordea\u2019s von Gerich said.\n\nLOST RECIPE FOR GROWTH\n\nFinland, with 5.5 million people, has lost about 100,000 industrial jobs in 10 years. Phonemaker Nokia\u2019s woes have grabbed global headlines, but traditional Finnish strongholds of machinery and paper sectors are shedding jobs too.\n\nIn a February report to government, economists Bengt Holmstrom, Sixten Korkman and Matti Pohjola called the current crisis \u201cto some extent even worse\u201d than that of the early 1990s, when unemployment rates were close to 20 percent.\n\n\u201cProductivity growth has stopped in a never-before-seen manner and there is a lack of ideas to speed it up. The recipe for growth has been lost,\u201d they said.\n\nFinns must shrink their welfare state and, put simply, work harder, they said. The OECD has just given a similar message.\n\nIn Finland, Sweden serves as a yardstick for almost anything, and Finland has fallen well behind. Sweden has rebounded from the financial crisis well and its economy is expected to grow about 3 percent this year and next.\n\nMobile games have often been touted as a Finnish success story, with global hits including Clash of Clans and Angry Birds. But the sector employs only about 2,000 people at home.\n\nSlideshow (3 Images)\n\nFinland also lags on reform: Sweden has cut taxes and brought the welfare state to an affordable level.\n\nWith many Finnish export-goods makers training their workers to perform highly specialized tasks, they have sought to keep the staff employed. Now lay-off notices are more frequent, and with capacity use at less than four-fifths, even an export upswing is unlikely to mean more hiring or investments.\n\n\u201cThere is no positive news for Finland in any scenario, at least not in the near future,\u201d Nordea\u2019s von Gerich said."}
{"text":"Brian Snyder \/ Reuters - Susan Walsh \/ AP\n\nYou\u2019re entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts; that political dictum was coined by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, because he was no fun. Well, good news, folks! Now you can have your own facts! Even better, when it comes to campaign polls you don\u2019t like, you can now have your own numbers!\n\nThe concept \/ conspiracy theory that election polling this year is \u201cskewed\u201d toward oversampling Democratic voters\u2013meaning they give falsely strong results for Obama\u2013has, through social media and the Drudge Report, reached full-on Internet meme status. (Go on Twitter after any major poll release, search for \u201cObama poll\u201d or \u201cRomney poll\u201d and watch your screen fill with disgruntled amateur statisticians muttering about \u201cD +9 sampling.\u201d) And now the polling conspiracists have their own website, UnSkewedPolls.com, which essentially takes existing polls and changes the numbers so that Mitt Romney is winning them.\n\nWell, there\u2019s more to it than that\u2014not a lot more, but more. The idea behind UnSkewedPolls.com is that there should be a far greater ratio of Republicans to Democrats in the electorate today than voters are telling pollsters that there is. The site takes data from major public polls, opens them up, and recalculates the percentages based on these much-more-GOP-friendly assumptions. In the RealClearPolitics average of national polls this morning, as I write this, Barack Obama leads by 3.7%. In the world of UnSkewedPolls.com, Romney is currently up by 7.8%. Click, tap\u2013hello, landslide!\n\nPeople more astute politically or accomplished at statistics than I can better detail the problems with this approach. (To take just one example, even if you accept this site\u2019s premise, it\u2019s applying the same recalculating method to polls with different methodologies\u2014peeling oranges like apples.) But the mere fact that this mindset has developed, has quickly spread and has become the current weapon of choice for mau-mauing election coverage on behalf of an aggrieved party says something about how hospitable political culture has become to conspiracies.\n\nCertainly polls can be wrong. They can be wrong en masse. (I won\u2019t, however, cite exit-polling foulups like those in 2000 and 2004; those are a different type of survey than pre-election polling.) They can even, conceivably, be wrong en masse in the same direction. And it\u2019s absolutely true that certain pollsters can have a \u201chouse effect\u201d that tends more Republican or Democrat\u2013which is exactly why sites like RealClearPolitics average out all the polls, and stat gurus like the brilliant Nate Silver account for the leans of various pollsters in their forecasts.\n\nBut consider what the \u201cpolls are biased\u201d meme asks us to believe. That dozens of national and local polls are deliberately skewing their results to find a greater proportion of Democratic voters than there are. (Not only that, but the private campaign polling that Republicans themselves say bodes poorly for Romney is also biased for Obama!) And\/or: voters themselves are\u2014from guilt? political correctness? peer pressure?\u2014reporting themselves as identifying Democratic more than they actually do. Evidently they didn\u2019t do this in 2008, at the apex of Obama-mania\u2013else the pre-election polling would have shown Obama with a 20% blowout lead\u2013but they\u2019re in the tank now, in concert\u2013all of them.\n\nIndependent polling firms. Educational institutions. Local media. National media. The Wall Street Journal and Fox News\u2014that\u2019s right, Rupert Murdoch\u2019s media properties are in there lifting away to give Obama a second term! What\u2019s more, they\u2019re all knowingly, erroneously reporting results that not only can be, but by definition will be, refuted by vote returns. Media outlets that rely on polls for credibility, pollsters that rely on accuracy for their very businesses\u2019 existence\u2013they\u2019re ready to blow it all in a few weeks just to give Obama four more years.\n\nExcept\u2014aha!\u2014there is of course a way around this argument. Suppose by some chance the results of these \u201cskewed\u201d polls prove right on election day. How do we know that the skewing didn\u2019t influence the result? That a drumbeat of positive polls for Obama didn\u2019t brainwash voters into jumping the bandwagon, dry up campaign donations, depress Republican turnout? You call it an accurate poll? I call it a self-fulfilling prophecy! The game is rigged, my friend!\n\nThat\u2019s why this sort of thinking is so popular, why it spreads so easily and why, apparently, no one in America will ever again believe that they fairly lost a hotly contested major election. This kind of bias charge is not just a willful single belief\u2014it\u2019s a totalizing mindset, in which any proof to the contrary can be jiu-jitsued into proof that the conspiracy is working.\n\nWhatever Moynihan once said, the way it works now, you don\u2019t need to have your own opinions or your own facts. As long as you have your own all-encompassing theory of mass brainwashing, the opinions and facts that you want will supply themselves.\n\n[Update] Here, my standard disclosure: I voted for Obama in \u201908 and plan to do so again in \u201912. To paraphrase Walter Mondale: most people who write about politics have voting preferences\u2014the difference is they won\u2019t tell you theirs and I just did. To read my fuller thoughts on political writing and disclosure, click here."}
{"text":"A GUNMAN has opened fire at a busy market in Trelleborg, Sweden.\n\nFour people have been taken to hospital as a result of the incident which happened Thursday night local time, around 8am AEDT.\n\nPolice say the attack is not being investigated as terrorism. However it appears to be the latest in a string of violent gang-related incidents that have beset the Swedish nation.\n\nTrelleborg is the southermost town in Sweden and has become known for gang violence. The shooting happened in the centre of the city.\n\nPolice said two of the injured were hurt during a shooting and that a total of four people were taken to the hospital late Thursday.\n\nThe Express quoted a Swedish policespokesman as saying: \u201cWe have received several reports of a shooting in Trelleborg.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhen we arrived at the scene, several people with gunshot injuries were found.\n\n\u201cWe are blocking certain areas and will conduct an investigation.\n\n\u201cI do not have any more information at this time. But we are at the scene and investigating.\u201d\n\nAccording to initial reports people were shot at multiple locations.\n\nOne witness told The Express: \u201cThere were many shots. We saw someone running outside. It\u2019s packed with police cars in the street.\u201d\n\nAnother said: \u201cI was at home at my computer when I heard a loud bang.\u201d\n\nPeople have been advised to avoid the area which has been cordoned off.\n\nPolice say a K-9 unit is searching for weapons and officers are interviewing witnesses. No suspects are in custody.\n\nTrelleborg is a Swedish port town located 33 km south of Malmo and 64km southeast of Copenhagen, Denmark."}
{"text":"Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation\u2019s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.\n\nThank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue\n\nSubscribe now for as little as $2 a month!\n\nSupport Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.\n\nFight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we\u2019ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation\u2019s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and we\u2019ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.\n\nThank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue\n\nTravel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.\n\nSign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?\n\nLast December the same conservative activists who persuaded the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act challenged the historic principle of \u201cone, person, one vote.\u201d They asked the Court to require states to draw districts based on eligible or registered voters, as opposed to total population, which had been the standard for more than 50 years. If that happened, millions of people, including children and non-citizens, would have been denied political representation. Districts would have become older, whiter, more conservative and more favorable to Republicans. Ad Policy\n\nToday the Supreme Court rejected that challenge, upholding \u201cone person, one vote\u201d in a unanimous 8-0 decision. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the decision, saying that all people are entitled to equal representation under the law. \u201cIt remains beyond doubt that the principle of representational equality figured prominently in the decision to count people, whether or not they qualify as voters,\u201d she wrote. (Justices Thomas and Alito concurred with the judgment but did not agree with its reasoning.)\n\nHere\u2019s the key part of her argument:\n\nAdopting voter-eligible apportionment as constitutional command would upset a well-functioning approach to districting that all 50 States and countless local jurisdictions have long followed. As the Framers of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment comprehended, representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible to vote. Nonvoters have an important stake in many policy debates and in receiving constituent services. By ensuring that each representative is subject to requests and suggestions from the same number of constituents, total-population apportionment promotes equitable and effective representation. LIKE THIS? GET MORE OF OUR BEST REPORTING AND ANALYSIS\n\nThis is a major victory for voting rights, and a huge crisis averted. If states had been required to use current voting-age population instead of total population as the metric for drawing districts, as I previously reported, a staggering 55 percent of Latinos\u2014those who are under 18 or non-citizens\u2014would not have been counted, as well as 45 percent of Asian Americans and 30 percent of African Americans.\n\nYet this is still in many ways a bittersweet victory, given that the 2016 election is the first in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. We\u2019re seeing the clear impact of that decision this year, with five-hour lines in Arizona, voters turned away from the polls by North Carolina\u2019s voter-ID law, and 300,000 registered voters who could be disenfranchised in Wisconsin tomorrow.\n\nImagine if protecting voting rights were the norm, rather than the exception, before the Supreme Court. That\u2019s why the future of the Court is the most important issue facing the country in 2016 and beyond.\n\nEditor\u2019s note: An earlier version of this article may have implied that the Court\u2019s decision barred voter-eligible apportionment. In fact, though Justice Ginsburg\u2019s opinion strongly endorsed total population apportionment as a \u201cwell-functioning approach\u201d that \u201cpromotes equitable and effective representation,\u201d the Court explicitly declined to \u201cresolve\u201d the question of whether states may use voter-eligible apportionment. While Justices Alito and Thomas concurred with the judgment, they disagreed with the opinion. The article has been updated to clarify these points."}
{"text":"Friday, July 7th I began my new series \u201cA Different Approach\u201d with the post about injecting resources into the experience editor. After I made my that post live, I continued my research and I became increasingly unhappy with my solution described. There is a better solution that solves my issue and that solution is somewhere in this post! \ud83d\ude2e\n\nClick here to skip the details of what led to this post.\n\nClick here to skip everything and go straight to my solution.\n\nClick here to watch the companion vlog to this post. It explains the code in more detail.\n\nFlashback to June 30th\n\nIssue:\n\nIt all began with another oddly themed post. In that post, I described a situation where a client wasn\u2019t 100% satisfied with their EE experience. They were concerned with the vagueness of how some of the fields and made a valid request. The client asked if we could add helpful descriptions to the fields prior to them initializing the field\u2019s chrome which obviously contains the Field Name and Help Text (if any).\n\nSolution:\n\nI decided to use my Editor Enhancement Toolkit module. First, I created a new rule action that ties a field to the helpful information. Next, I created a processor that\u2019s patched into the RenderField pipeline. The processor is simple. It processes the rules and if the rule\u2019s conditions pass, the new rule action populates a variable with the helpful information. The variable is then wrapped in HTML markup and prepended the default markup that renders the field\u2019s chrome.\n\nIssue That Arose from That Solution:\n\nSince both inline-styling and customizing existing Sitecore files i.e. the webedit.css are frowned upon, I needed to find a way to inject the stylesheet into the EE. I attempted to implement a solution using \u201cPageExtenders\u201d that I found on blogs by Pavel Veller, Mike Reynolds and Kamruz Jaman, but I failed.\n\nKamruz Jaman, the always helpful Sitecore superhero saved me from wasting a lot of time troubleshooting and told me: \u201cSince SC8.1 or so, the ribbon changed and was put into its own iframe. Previously it was part of the same page so using the page extenders meant it would affect both the content and the ribbon.\u201d\n\nUpdate July 13th: I figured out how to get the PageExtender working, I explain it in the \u201cMy Solution\u201d section. Kamruz also figured out a way to get it functional and informed me of this a little bit ago.\n\nLet\u2019s head back to the future\u2026 er\u2026 present, July 13th, 2017\n\nWhat I Hope to Achieve\n\nI want to figure out a way to implement my solution that is more flexible than hard coding the Stylesheet\u2019s file in code and it must not involve any customizations to Sitecore items and files. Normally I would give a lecture on how customizing Sitecore items or files creates upgrade headaches, but rumor has it Speak UI is becoming extinct. Which means this post will probably lose all relevance in about 2 months. Let\u2019s live for today and continue the quest to find a better solution to the issue. I am going to blog as I try to figure this out. Hopefully I figure this out quickly so the post doesn\u2019t become insanely long.\n\nPotential Solution : GetPageStylesheets Pipeline & Speak Items\n\nI was digging through the decompiled assemblies, I can across something interesting in the Sitecore.Speak.Client assembly. It was the processors that are used in the GetPageStylesheets pipeline. There are two important templates that are used by the code in processors. They are:\n\nPage-Stylesheet-File : This item allows you to select a single stylesheet from the file system to include in your app.\n\n: This item allows you to select a single stylesheet from the file system to include in your app. Page-Stylesheet-Folder: This item allows you to select a single folder from the file system. That folder should contain only stylesheets, but it doesn\u2019t matter. The code will render out all the stylesheets that are in the selected folder, ignoring any other file type.\n\nThe items based on either template need to be created under the PageSettings item for the everything to work correctly.\n\nGoing back to the code, the GetFileNames processor was the first to catch my eye. The code gets the PageSettings item and then it\u2019s passed to the StylesheetCollection for processing. The ProcessItem method in the StylesheetCollection loops the children of the PageSettings item and performs two checks:\n\nIf the child item\u2019s template is the Page-Stylesheet-File : The stylesheet\u2019s path that is defined on the item is added to args.FileNames collection.\n\n: The stylesheet\u2019s path that is defined on the item is added to args.FileNames collection. If the child item\u2019s template is the Page-Stylesheet-Folder: The StylesheetCollection gets the path to the folder defined on the item and loops through the folder\u2019s files. If the file is a stylesheet, the file path is added to the args.FileNames collection. If the file is a different type, it is ignored. It appears that it also processes any sub-directories as well.\n\nThe end to this madness is relatively straightforward. The extension method: PageStylesheets located in the static class: SitecoreHelperExtensions is where all the magic happens. In this method, the GetPageStylesheetsArgs are set and then the getPageStylesheet pipeline is fired. The processors do their thing, finally BuildStylesheets has its moment to shine. It processes the args.FileNames collection. Looping thru the collection, it constructs the link tag for each stylesheet and sets the final value to args.HtmlString. The PageStylesheets returns the HtmlString and called on the PageCode view and rendered.\n\nCool pipeline. I am glad I learned more about its functionality. I need to keep it in mind when I resume my custom Speak App.\n\nI was curious if anyone else blogged about this and of course someone did. August 25, 2015 Mark Servais posted: SPEAKing Aloud: Changing CSS. Great post. I wish I had searched for this a couple hours ago, it would have saved me some time.\n\nUnfortunately, this potential solution was a bust. The search continues.\n\nPotential Solution: A PageExtender, a Control and Pipeline Processors\n\nEvery rendering on the Ribbon item renders in the Ribbon\u2026 makes sense. I mentioned that so we can cross off all solutions that involve custom views being placed on the Ribbon item. This also means we should stop considering the PageCode in hopes of finding a solution.\n\nWe know that the page code controls everything on the Ribbon which lives in an iframe. If you go to a content page in the Experience Editor and inspect the page\u2019s source, you\u2019ll notice other code and markup. Interesting, I wonder what is controlling all that. Let\u2019s explore that more.\n\nAfter searching for some unique words found in the source such as \u201cscClientSettings\u201d, I was led the ScriptResources.cs and the GetClientSettings extension method. Next, I needed to find what was calling this method. After a quick search, I found two files, WebEditRibbon.cs and RibbonWebControl.cs.\n\nWebEditRibbon:\n\nThis is used in three of the PageExtenders: DebuggerExtender, PreviewExtender and WebEditPageExtender. However, there is a red flag\u2026 the WebEditRibbon is marked as Obsolete. I\u2019m going to slowing back away from the WebEditRibbon and pretend I didn\u2019t see it.\n\nRibbonPageExtender:\n\nThis is located in the Sitecore.ExperienceEditor.Speak.Ribbon assembly. It\u2019s related to the PageExtenders. When the RibbonPageExtender code runs, it fires the getExperienceEditorRibbon pipeline and the processor AddWebEditRibbon.\n\nAddWebEditRibbon:\n\nThat processor created a new RibbonWebControl, sets a property. That object is then assigned to the args.Control.\n\nRibbonWebControl:\n\nThere is a lot to this, but the part I\u2019m interested in is the DoRender method. That method is writing out some of the stylesheets and other items seen in the page\u2019s source. Cool.\n\nI think I have seen enough. I have an idea that just may solve my issue while achieving my goals of flexibility and Laissez-faire Sitecore items and files.\n\nMy Solution\n\nAfter researching the code in the previous section, I decided to mimic a few things from that approach. I was going to cover rendering out both the Stylesheets and JavaScript but time is short. I am sacrificing the JavaScript code and code refactoring.\n\nI created a new PageExtender called \u201cInjectAssetsPageExtender\u201d.\n\nWhen the Insert runs, it fires off a custom pipeline called \u201crenderPageArgs\u201d located on line 15, The first processor in this pipeline is GetStylesheets.\n\nGetStylesheets:\n\nI borrowed the \u201csources\u201d node section from a processor located around line 95 in the 001.Sitecore.Speak.Important.config. , I get the folder paths of the stylesheets from the config:\n\nI also borrowed some of the code from the GetFileNames processor located in the Sitecore.Speak.Client assembly, that is used in the GetPageScripts pipeline. After making a lot of quick edits, the code for GetStylesheets looks like:\n\nThe method AddSource gets the values from the config. Path = path of the Stylesheet, deep = process subfolders, add additional stylesheets to the collection and pattern, this allows what file type are permitted to be added to the FilePaths collection. Next, it loops through the folder(s) defined in the config above, and adds the stylesheet paths to the FilePaths collection. After the method finishes, we assign the FilePaths list to args.FilePaths. Next up, AssignPageAssetsToControl.\n\nAssignPageAssetsToControl:\n\nIf I had included the JavaScript functionality in this post, this file would have a larger role. Currently, it has one purpose and that is to instantiate a new RenderAssetsControl and assign the FilePaths list to the StylesheetList.\n\nRenderAssetsControl:\n\nNext we head back to the InjectAssetsPageExtender.\n\nInjectAssetsPageExtender:\n\nLine 16 calls AddControlToPage and passes in the args that now contains a valid, populated RenderAssetsControl control which is then added to the page using the \u201cwebedit\u201d placeholder.\n\nThe Configuration for this in its entirety looks like:\n\nIf everything is set up correctly, you should be able to locate your CSS files by viewing the page\u2019s source. This is what my source looks like:\n\nOther Files\n\nThe Processor:\n\nThe Args\n\nSince my first post covering this topic, Kamruz Jaman and I have discussed the PageExtenders and a few other things. Initially he informed me that PageExtenders no longer affect the Experience Editor since the Ribbon was moved into an iframe.\n\nI was excited that I was able to get a PageExtender to render outside the Ribbon and I needed to share. I opened Slack and messaged JammyKam my good news. If you know Kamruz, you can probably guess what he said. He figured out how to get the PageExtenders to work as well! \ud83c\udf89 It\u2019s like Christmas in July\ud83c\udf84. Kamruz showed me how he finally got it to work and it was different from my code.\n\nIf you\u2019re curious what Kamruz\u2019s solution is, you can read about it here. It\u2019s a great post.\n\nI am relieved I figured out a decent solution that met the requirements I set for myself. The code is more flexible than it had been and additional code can be added that would increase the flexibility. I had more planned, but I\u2019m not sure if I want to spend more time on something that may become obsolete when SItecore 9 is released.\n\nClick here to watch the companion vlog explaining the code in greater detail.\n\nI hope you found this post informative. Thanks for reading."}
{"text":"My intention is to unify the weapon damage and armor ratings across all installed mods. This way you can add any new item and it will be balanced.The increase in damage and armor ratings is in correlation with the weight of an item. Items made of iron weight about half as much as dragonbone items and all the other materials are somewhere in between.Everything is optional and adjustable to let the user create a custom experience of the game.- change the base damage values for bow, onehanded and twohanded skill weapons- critical damage will be half normal damage (vanilla style)- change the base armor values for light and heavy skill armor- optional change robes and hoods clothing to light armor- optional make robes and hoods craftable- change material weights and therefore the resulting damage\/armor rating- how much of each material is in an item can be adjusted, but has good default values- add a Boost to certain precious materials to make them more powerful- this is an optional setting to override the weights with random values (roleplaying purpose)- Weight = MatWeight*Parts- BoostValue = MatWeight*Boost- Armor = Min+Weight+BoostValue+-Randomnon-body armor will be 1\/3 of body armor rating- Damage = Min+((Weight+BoostValue)*Speed)+-Random- Crit Damage = Damage\/2- it runs for me without or with 200+ active mods- the min values should be greater than the random change, otherwise you might end up with a weapon of 0 damage or armor with 0 armor rating- click to install via Mod ManagerNMM:- run \"Data\"\\SkyProc Patches\\ArmoWeapUnizer\\ArmoWeapUnizer.jar\"MO:- activate the mod- open the \"Data\" tab and navigate to \"SkyProc Patches\/ArmoWeapUnizer\"- right click on \"ArmoWeapUnizer.jar\" and choose \"add as Executable\"- run the patcher from the dropdown menuBOTH:- once the patch is ready, activate ArmoWeapUnizer.esp in NMM or MO as usual- deactivate ArmoWeapUnizer.esp- it does not run in SUM, please run it as a standalone Skyproccer- some robes\/hoods appear as craftables in the list without values, they do not produce anything and are bogus or leftover armors from mods or the base game- very rarely either the armor or weapons thread may stop and the data is missing from the patch in the end, just rerun the patcher if this happens- Immersive Armors and Immersive Weapons introduces custom materials covered in this mod- Warmonger Armory works out of the box- Heavy Armory - New Weapons works out of the box- CCO introduces custom materials covered in this mod- WAFR introduces custom materials covered in this mod- you can add your own custom materials to the materials.ini file for compatibility- you can add your own keywords to the armor patch exclusion and\/or the robes\/hoods exclusion ini for compatibility*- get a materials.ini going that is close to vanilla values Wintermyst - Enchantments of Skyrim - comes with a lot of very fancy enchantments that can all be disenchanted and learned Xtended Loot - does enchant nearly every single item in the game, making crafting and disenchanting obsolete (disenchantment not possible)*every keyword in keywordsarmor.ini is inherited into keywordsrobes.ini. At the moment only IA-Keywords are additional in the robes ini, because the mod lets you change ingame the robes and hoods to light armor---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=MWUJvTyl-m4 :)"}
{"text":"A note about listicles: So we know a lot of people hate listicles and associate them with cheap, low-quality, traffic-driving, link-bait articles. But here\u2019s the thing\u2014a list is a great format for an article, and a format I was using on my old blog almost 10 years ago. In fact, my first listicle, 19 Things I Don\u2019t Understand, was published in August of 2005, a year before Buzzfeed was even founded. Then, over the last few years, I watched in horror as one of my favorite formats decided to prostitute itself all over the internet as the default format for lazy articles. Anyway the point is, A) I was doing listicles before they were cool, and B) A list headline doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t be a high-quality article, so C) Wait But Why will make a listicle when it\u2019s the best format for that post, and don\u2019t be mad at us cause it\u2019s not what it looks like.\n\n__________\n\nWhen you\u2019re a kid, or in high school, or in college, you don\u2019t really work too hard on your friend situation. Friends just kind of happen.\n\nFor a bunch of years, you\u2019re in a certain life your parents chose for you, and so are other people, and none of you have that much on your plates, so friendships inevitably form. Then in college, you\u2019re in the perfect friend-making environment, one that hits all three ingredients sociologists consider necessary for close friendships to develop: \u201cproximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.\u201d More friendships happen.\n\nMaybe they\u2019re the right friends, maybe they\u2019re not really, but you don\u2019t put that much thought into any of it\u2014you\u2019re more of a passive observer.\n\nOnce student life ends, the people in your life start to shake themselves into more distinct tiers. Something like this:\n\nAt the top of your life mountain, in the green zone, you have your Tier 1 friends\u2014those who feel like brothers and sisters. These are the people closest to you, those you call first when something important happens, those you love even when they suck, who make speeches at your wedding, whose best and worst sides you know through and through, and whose relationship with you is eternal\u2014even if you go months or years without hanging out, nothing has changed when you find yourself together again. Unfortunately, depending on how things went down in your youth, Tier 1 can also contain your worst enemies, the people who can ruin your day with one subtle jab that only they could word so brilliantly hurtfully, the people you feel a burning resentment for, or jealousy of, or competition with. Tier 1 is high stakes.\n\nBelow, in the yellow zone, are your Tier 2 friends\u2014your Pretty Good friends. Pretty Good friends are a much calmer situation than your brothers and sisters on Tier 1. You might be invited to their wedding, but you won\u2019t have any responsibilities once you\u2019re there. If you live in the same city, you might see them every month or two for dinner and have a great time when you do, but if one of you moves, you might not speak for the next year or two. And if something huge happens in their life, there\u2019s a good chance you\u2019ll hear it first from someone else.\n\nTowards the bottom of the mountain in the orange zone, you have your Tier 3 friends\u2014your Not Really friends. You might grab a one-on-one drink with one of them when you move to their city, but then it surprises neither of you when five years pass and drink #2 is still yet to happen. Your relationship tends to exist mostly as part of a bigger group or through the occasional Facebook like, and it doesn\u2019t even really stress you out when you hear that one of them made $5 million last year. You may also try to sleep with one of these people at any given time.\n\nThe lowest part of Tier 3 begins to blend indistinguishably into your large group of acquaintances (the pink zone)\u2014those people you\u2019d stop and talk to if you saw them on the street or would maybe email for professional purposes, but whom you\u2019d never hang out with one-on-one. When you hear that something bad happens to one of these people, you pretend to be sad but you don\u2019t actually care.\n\nFinally, acquaintances gradually blend into the endless world of strangers.\n\nAnd depending on who you are and how things shook out in those first 25 years, the way your particular mountain looks will vary.\n\nFor example, there\u2019s Walled-Off Wally:\n\nAnd Phony Phoebe, who tries to be everyone\u2019s best friend and ends up with a lot of people mad at her:\n\nEven Unabomber Ulysses has a mountain:\n\nWhatever your particular mountain looks like, eventually the blur of your youth is behind you, the dust has settled, and there you are living your life\u2014when one day, usually around your mid or late 20s, it hits you:\n\nIt\u2019s not that easy to make friends anymore.\n\nSure, you\u2019ll make new friends in the future\u2014at work, through your spouse, through your kids\u2014but you won\u2019t get to that Tier 1 brothers level, or even to Tier 2, with very many of them, because people who meet as adults don\u2019t tend to get through the 100+ long, lazy hangouts needed to reach a bond of that strength. As time goes on, you start to realize that the 20-year frenzy of not-especially-thought-through haphazard friend-making you just did was the critical process of you making most of your lifelong friends.\n\nAnd since you matched up with most of them A) by circumstance, and B) before you really knew yourself yet, the result is that your Tier 1 and Tier 2 friends\u2014those closest to you\u2014fall in a very scattered way on what I\u2019ll call the Does This Friendship Make Sense graph:\n\nSo who are all those close friends in the three non-ideal quadrants?\n\nAs time goes on, most of us tend to have fewer friends in Quadrants 2-4, because A) people mature, and B) people have more self-respect and higher standards for what they\u2019ll deal with as they get older. But the fact is, friendships made in the formative years often stick, whether they\u2019re ideal or not, leaving most of us with a portion of our Tier 1 and Tier 2 friendships that just don\u2019t make that much sense. We\u2019ll get to the great, Quadrant 1 friendships later in the post, but in order to treat those relationships properly, we need to take a thorough look at the odd ones first. Here are 10 common ones\u2014\n\n1) The Non-Question-Asking Friend\n\nYou\u2019ll be having a good day. You\u2019ll be having a bad day. You\u2019ll be happy at work. You\u2019ll quit your job. You\u2019ll fall in love. You\u2019ll catch your new love cheating on you and murder them both in an act of incredible passion. And it doesn\u2019t matter, because none of it will be discussed with The Non-Question-Asking Friend, who never, ever, ever asks you anything about your life. This friend can be explained in one of three ways:\n\n1) He\u2019s extremely self-absorbed and only wants to talk about himself\n\n2) He avoids getting close to people and doesn\u2019t want to talk about either you or himself or anything personal, just third-party topics\n\n3) He thinks you\u2019re insufferably self-absorbed and knows if he asks you about your life, you\u2019ll talk his ear off about it\n\nGiving you the benefit of the doubt here, we\u2019re left with two possibilities. Possibility #1 isn\u2019t fun at all and this person should not be allowed space on Tier 1. The green part of the mountain is sacred territory, and super self-absorbed people shouldn\u2019t be permitted to set foot up there. Put him on Tier 2 and just be happy you\u2019re not dating him.\n\nPossibility #2 is a pretty dark situation for your friend, but it can actually be fun for you. I have a friend who I\u2019ve hung out with one-on-one about four times in the last year, and he has no idea Wait But Why exists. I\u2019ve known him for 14 years and I\u2019m not sure he knows if I have siblings or not. But I actually enjoy the shit out of this friend\u2014sure, there\u2019s a limit on how close we\u2019ll ever be, but without ever spending time talking about our lives, we actually end up in a lot of fun, interesting conversations.\n\n2) The Friend in the Group You Can\u2019t Be Alone With Under Any Circumstances\n\nIn almost every group of friends, there\u2019s one pair who can\u2019t ever be alone together. It\u2019s not that they dislike each other\u2014they might get along great\u2014it\u2019s just that they have no individual friendship with each other whatsoever. This leaves both of them petrified of the lumbering elephant that appears in the room anytime they\u2019re alone together. They\u2019re way too on top of shit to ever end up in the car alone together if a group is going somewhere in multiple cars, but there are smaller dangers afoot\u2014like being the first two to arrive at a restaurant or being in a group of three when the third member goes to the bathroom.\n\nThe thing is, sometimes it\u2019s not even that these people couldn\u2019t have an individual friendship\u2014it\u2019s just that they don\u2019t, and neither one has the guts to try to make that leap when things have gone on for so long as is.\n\n3) The Non-Character-Breaking Friend You Have to be \u201cOn\u201d With\n\nThis is a friend who\u2019s terrified of having an earnest interaction, and as such, your friendship with him is always in some kind of skit\u2014you always have to be on when you\u2019re interacting.\n\nSometimes the skit is that you both burst out laughing at everything constantly. He can only exist with you in \u201cThis is so fucking hilarious it\u2019s too much!\u201d mode, so you have to be in some kind of joke-telling or sarcastic mode yourself at all times or he\u2019ll become socially horrified.\n\nAnother version of this is the \u201calways and only ironic\u201d friend, who you really bum out if you ever break that social shell and say something earnest. This type of person hates earnest people because someone being earnest dares him to come out from under his ironic safety blanket and let the sun touch his face, and no fucking thanks.\n\nA third example is the \u201cYou\u2019re great, I\u2019m great, ugh why is everyone else so terrible and not great like us\u201d friend. Of course, she doesn\u2019t really think you\u2019re perfectly great at all\u2014if she were with someone else, you\u2019d be one of the voodoo dolls on the table to be dissected and scoffed at. The key here is that the two of you must be on a team at all times while interacting. The only comfortable mode for this person is bonding with you by building a little pedestal for you both to stand on while you criticize everyone else. You can either play along and everything will go smoothly, even though you\u2019ll both despise yourselves and each other the whole time, or you can commit the ultimate sin and have the integrity to disagree with the friend or defend a non-present party the friend criticizes. Doing this will shatter the fragile team vibe and make the friend recoil and say something quietly like, \u201cHm\u2026yeah\u2026I guess.\u201d The friend now respects you for the first time and will also criticize you extra hard next time she\u2019s playing her pedestal game with a different friend.\n\nWhat these all have in common is the friend has tall walls up, at least toward you, and so she builds a little skit for you two to hang out in to make sure any authentic connection can be avoided. Sometimes that person only does this out of her own social anxiety and can become a great, authentic friend if you can just stomp through the ice. Other times, the person is just hopelessly scared and closed off and there\u2019s no hope and you have to get out.\n\nIn any case, I can\u2019t stand these interactions and am in a full panic the entire time they\u2019re happening.\n\n4) The Double-Obligated Friendship\n\nThink of a friend you get together with from time to time, which usually happens after a long and lackluster email or text exchange during which you just can\u2019t find a time that works for both of you\u2014and you\u2019re never really happy when these plans are being made and not really psyched when you wake up and it\u2019s finally on your schedule for that day.\n\nMaybe you\u2019re aware that you don\u2019t want to be friends with that person, or maybe you\u2019re delusional about it\u2014but what you\u2019re most likely not aware of is that they probably don\u2019t want to see you either.\n\nThere are lopsided situations where one person is far more interested in hanging out than the other (we\u2019ll get to those later), but in the case we\u2019re talking about here, both parties often think it\u2019s a lopsided situation without realizing that the other person actually feels the same way\u2014that\u2019s why it takes so long to schedule a time. When someone\u2019s excited about something, they figure out how to get it into their schedule\u2014when they\u2019re not, they figure out ways to push it farther into the future.\n\nSometimes you don\u2019t think hard enough about it to even realize you don\u2019t like being friends with the person, and other times you really like the idea or the aesthetic of being friends with that particular person\u2014being friends with them is part of your Story. But even in cases where you\u2019re perfectly lucid about your feelings\u2014since neither of you knows the other feels the same way and neither has the guts to just cut things off or move it down a tier, this friendship usually just continues along for eternity.\n\n5) The Half Marriage\n\nSomewhere in your life, you\u2019re probably part of a friendship that would be a marriage if only the other person weren\u2019t very, very, extremely not interested in that happening. 1 for 2 on yes votes\u2014just one vote away\u2014so close.\n\nYou might be on either side of this\u2014and either way it\u2019s one of the least healthy parts of your life. Fun!\n\nIf you\u2019re on the if only side of things, probably the right move is to get your fucking shit together? Ya know? This friendship is one long, continuous rejection of you as a human being, and you\u2019re just wallowing there in your yearning like a sobbing little seal. Plus, duh, if you gather your self-respect and move on with your life, it\u2019ll raise their perception of your value and they might actually become interested in you.\n\nIf you\u2019re on the oh yeah definitely not side of the situation, here\u2019s what\u2019s happening\u2014there\u2019s this suffering human in the world, and you know they\u2019re suffering, and you fucking love it, because it gives your little ego a succulent sponge bath every time you hang out with them. You enjoy it so much you probably even lead them on intentionally, don\u2019t you\u2014you make sure to keep just enough ambiguity in the situation that their bleeding heart continues to lather your ego from head to toe at your whim.\n\nBoth of you\u2014go do something else.\n\n6) The Historical Friend\n\nA Historical Friend is someone you became friends with in the first place because you met when you were little and stayed friends through the years, even though you\u2019re a very weird match. Most old friends fall somewhat into this category, but a true Historical Friend is someone you absolutely would not be friends with if you met them today.\n\nYou\u2019re not especially pleased with who they are, and they feel the same way about you. You\u2019re not each other\u2019s type one bit. Unfortunately, you\u2019re also extremely close friends from when you were four, and you\u2019re both just a part of each other\u2019s situation forever, sorry.\n\n7) The Non-Parallel Life Paths Friendship\n\nThroughout childhood and much of young adulthood, most people your age are in the same life stage as you are. But when it comes to advancing into full adulthood, people do so at widely varying paces, which leads to certain friends suddenly having totally different existences from one another.\n\nAnyone within three years of 30 has a bunch of these going on. It\u2019s just a weird time for everyone. Some people have become Future 52-year-olds, while others are super into being Previous 21-year-olds. At some point, things will start to meld together again, but being 30-ish is the friendship equivalent of a kid going through an awkward pubescent stage.\n\nThere are darker, more permanent Non-Parallel Life Path situations. Like when Person A starts to become a person who rejects material wealth, partially because she genuinely feels that pursuing an artistic path matters more and partially because she needs a defense mechanism against feeling envious of richer people, and Person B\u2019s path makes her scoff at people who pursue creative paths, partially because she genuinely thinks expressing yourself is an inherently narcissistic venture and partially because she needs a defense mechanism against feeling regretful that she never pursued her creative dreams\u2014these two will have problems. They may still like each other, but they can\u2019t be as close as they used to be\u2014each of their lives is a bit of a middle finger at the other\u2019s choices, and that\u2019s just awkward for everyone. It\u2019s not always that bad\u2014but to survive an Off-Line Life Situation, friends need to be really different people who don\u2019t at all want the same things out of life.\n\nThis friendship is a distant cousin of The Morally Off-Line Friendship\u2014\n\n8) The Frenemy\n\nThe Frenemy roots very hard against you. And I\u2019m not talking about the friends that will feel a little twinge of pleasure when they hear your big break didn\u2019t pan out after all or that your relationship is in bad shape. I\u2019m not even talking about someone who secretly roots against you when they\u2019re not doing so well at some area of life and it hurts them to see you do better. Those are bad emotions, but they can exist in people who are still good friends.\n\nI\u2019m talking about a real Frenemy\u2014someone who really wants bad things for you. Because you\u2019re you.\n\nYou and the Frenemy usually go way back, have a very deep friendship, and the trouble probably started a long time ago.\n\nThere\u2019s a lot of complex psychology going on in these situations that I don\u2019t fully understand, but my hunch is that a Frenemy\u2019s resentment is rooted in his own pain, or his own shortcomings, or his own regret\u2014and for some reason, your existence stings them in these places hard.\n\nA little less dark but no less harmful is a bully situation where a friend sees some weakness or vulnerability in you and she enjoys prodding you there either for sadistic reasons or to prop herself up.\n\nA Frenemy knows how to hurt you better than anyone because you\u2019re deeply similar in some way and she knows how you\u2019re wired, and she\u2019ll do whatever she can to bring you down any chance she gets, often in such a subtle way it\u2019s hard to see that it\u2019s happening.\n\nWhatever the reason, if you have a Frenemy in your life, kick her toxic ass off your mountain, or at least kick her down the mountain\u2014just get her off of Tier 1. A Frenemy has about a tenth of the power to hurt you from Tier 2 as she does from Tier 1.\n\n9) The Facebook Celebrity Friend\n\nThis person isn\u2019t a celebrity to anyone other than you, you creep. You know exactly who I\u2019m talking about\u2014there are a small handful of people whose Facebook page you\u2019re uncomfortably well-acquainted with, and those people have no idea that this is happening. On the plus side, there are people out there you haven\u2019t spoken to in seven years who know all about the new thing you\u2019re trying with your hair, since it goes both ways.\n\nThis is a rare Tier 3 friend, or even an acquaintance, who qualifies as an odd friendship, because you found a way to make it unhealthy even though you\u2019re not actually friends. Well done.\n\n10) The Lopsided Friendship\n\nThere are a lot of ways a friendship can be lopsided.\n\nSomeone can be higher on their friend\u2019s mountain than vice versa.\n\nSomeone can want to spend more time with a friend than vice versa.\n\nOne member can consistently do 90% of the listening and only 10% of the talking, and in situations where most of the talking is about life problems, what\u2019s happening is a one-sided therapy situation, with a badly off-balance give-and-take ratio, and that\u2019s not much of a friendship\u2014it\u2019s someone using someone else.\n\nAnd then there\u2019s the lopsided power friendship. Of course, this is a hideous quality in many not-great couples, but it\u2019s also a prominent feature of plenty of friendships.\n\nA near 50\/50 friendship is ideal, but anything out to 65\/35 is fine and can often be attributed to two different styles of personality. It\u2019s when the number gap gets even wider that something less healthy is going on\u2014something that doesn\u2019t reflect very well on either party.\n\nThere are some obvious ways to assess the nature of a friendship\u2019s power dynamic\u2014does one person cut in and interrupt the other person while they\u2019re talking far more than the other way around? Is one person\u2019s opinion or preference just kind of understood to carry more weight than the other\u2019s? Is one person allowed to be more of a dick to the other than vice versa?\n\nAnother interesting litmus test is what I call the \u201cmood determiner test.\u201d This comes into play when two friends get together but they\u2019re in very different moods\u2014the idea is, whose mood \u201cwins\u201d and determines the mood of the hangout. If Person A is in a bad mood, Person B is in a good mood, and Person B reacts by being timid and respectful of Person A\u2019s mood, leaving the vibe down there until Person A snaps out of it on her own\u2014but when the moods are reversed, Person B quickly disregards her own bad mood and acts more cheerful to match Person A\u2019s happy mood\u2014and this is how it always goes\u2014then Person A is in a serious power position.\n\nNot All Friendships Are Grim\u2026\n\nIn the Does This Friendship Make Sense graph above, the friendships we just discussed are all in Quandrants 2, 3, or 4\u2014i.e. they\u2019re all a bit unenjoyable, unhealthy, or both. That\u2019s why this has been depressing. On the bright side, there\u2019s also Quadrant 1\u2014all the friendships that do make sense.\n\nNo friendship is perfect, but those in Quadrant 1 are doing what friendships are supposed to do\u2014they\u2019re making the lives of both parties better. And when a friendship is both in Quadrant 1 of the graph and on Tier 1 of your mountain\u2014that friendship is a rock in your life.\n\nRock friendships don\u2019t just make us happy\u2014they\u2019re the thing (along with rock family and romantic relationships) that makes us happy. Investing serious time and energy into those is a no-brainer long term life strategy.\n\nBut in the case of most people over 25\u2014at least in New York\u2014I think A) not enough time is carved out as dedicated friend time, and B) the time that is carved out is spread too thin, and too evenly, among the Tier 1 and Tier 2 friendships in all four quadrants. I\u2019m definitely guilty of this myself.\n\nThere\u2019s something I call the Perpetual Catch-Up Trap. When you haven\u2019t seen a good friend in a long time, the first order of business is a big catch-up\u2014you want to know what\u2019s going on in their career, with their girlfriend, with their family, etc., and they want to catch up on your life. In theory, once this happens, you can go back to just hanging out, shooting the shit, and actually being in the friendship. The problem is, when you don\u2019t make enough time for good friends, seeing them only for a meal and not that often\u2014you end up spending each get-together catching up, and you never actually get to just enjoy the friendship or get far past the surface. That\u2019s the Perpetual Catch-Up Trap, and I find myself falling into it with way too many of the rocks in my life.\n\nSo I think there are two orders of business:\n\n1) Think about your friendships, figure out which ones aren\u2019t in Quadrant 1, and demote them down the mountain. I\u2019m not suggesting you stop being friends with those people\u2014you still love them and feel loyal to them, and old friends are critical to hold onto\u2014but if the friendships aren\u2019t that healthy or enjoyable, they don\u2019t really deserve to be in your Tier 1, and you probably shouldn\u2019t be in theirs. Most importantly, doing this clears up time to\u2026\n\n2) Dedicate even more time to the Quadrant 1, Tier 1 rocks in your life. If you\u2019re in your mid-20s or older, your current rocks are probably the only ones you\u2019ll ever have. Your rock friendships don\u2019t warrant 2x the time you give to your other friends\u2014they warrant 5 or 10x. And keep in mind that seeing one of them for an hour-long meal isn\u2019t really enough\u2014your rocks deserve serious, dedicated time so you can stay close. So go make plans with them.\n\n___________\n\nIf you\u2019re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we\u2019ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It\u2019s a very unannoying list, don\u2019t worry.\n\nIf you\u2019d like to support Wait But Why, here\u2019s our Patreon.\n\n___________\n\nIf you liked this, check out:\n\nHow to Pick Your Life Partner\n\n10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys\n\nWhy Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy\n\nThe Great Perils of Social Interaction"}
{"text":"Here are a few questions you won\u2019t hear asked of the parade of Israeli officials crossing US television screens during the current crisis in Gaza:\n\nWhat would you do if a foreign country was occupying your land?\n\nWhat does it mean that Israeli cabinet ministers deny Palestine\u2019s right to exist?\n\nWhat should we make of a prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who as opposition leader in the 1990s addressed a rally under a banner reading \u201cDeath to Arafat\u201d a year after the Palestinian leader signed a peace accord with Israel?\n\nThese are contentious questions, to be sure, and with complicated answers. But they are relevant to understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. They also parallel the issues routinely raised by American journalists with Palestinian officials, pressing to consider how the US would react if it were under rocket fire from Mexico, to explain why Hamas won\u2019t recognise Israel and to repudiate Palestinian anti-Semitism.\n\nBut it\u2019s a feature of much mainstream journalism in the US, not just an issue of coverage during the last three weeks of the Gaza crisis, that while one set of questions gets asked all the time, the other is heard hardly at all.\n\nIn years of reporting from and about Israel, I\u2019ve followed the frequently robust debate in its press about whether Netanyahu really wants a peace deal, about the growing power of right-wing members inside the Israeli cabinet opposed to a Palestinian state, about the creeping air of permanence to the occupation.\n\nSo it has been all the more striking to discover a far narrower discourse in Washington and the notoriously pro-Israel mainstream media in the US at a time when difficult questions are more important than ever. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and a crop of foreign leaders have ratcheted up warnings that the door for the two-state solution is closing, in no small part because of Israel\u2019s actions. But still the difficult questions go unasked.\n\nTake Netanyahu\u2019s appearance on CBS\u2019s Face the Nation on Sunday. The host, Bob Schieffer, permitted the Israeli leader to make a lengthy case for the his military\u2019s ground attack, guiding him along with one sympathetic question after another. Finally, after describing Netanyahu\u2019s position as \u201cvery understandable\u201d, Schieffer asked about dead Palestinian civilians \u2013 but only to wonder if they presented a public relations problem in \u201cthe battle for world opinion\u201d.\n\nAs if Schieffer\u2019s position wasn\u2019t already blindingly clear, he went on to quote former prime minister Golda Meir\u2019s line that Israelis can never forgive Arabs \u201cfor forcing us to kill their children\u201d.\n\nAs way of balance, CBS followed with a short clip of an interview by Charlie Rose with the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, who was pressed on his willingness to recognise Israel.\n\nThere has been fine reporting from on the ground in Gaza by courageous American journalists who have laid bare the price being paid by ordinary Palestinians. That, in turn, has prompted some stiff questioning in American TV studios of Israeli officials about the scale of civilian deaths and shelling of schools and hospitals. Some pro-Israel American pundits admit to have becoming \u201cless pro-Israel\u201d.\n\nBut the broader framework of how the conflict is presented in the US is more troubling.\n\n\u2018We have a media scandal that we need to expose,\u2019 says Rula Jebreal. Still via CNN\n\nFormer MSNBC contributor Rula Jebreal drew widespread attention to the media divide when she condemned NBC News on air, on MSNBC, for pulling its only Arab-American correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, out of Gaza, only to reinstate him because of the backlash. \u201cWe are disgustingly biased on this issue,\u201d she said.\n\nShe has a point.\n\nAn analysis by Punditfact of CNN coverage during the first two weeks of the latest Gaza crisis showed that appearances by Israeli officials outnumbered Palestinian officials by more than four-to-one. There were substantially more interviews with what Punditfact called Palestinian \u201claymen\u201d, but they included the relatives of a Palestinian-American beaten by Israeli soldiers that offered little insight into the bigger picture.\n\nAll appearances by Palestinian officials were outnumbered by interviews with a single man: Israel\u2019s former ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, whom CNN hired as a Middle East analyst earlier this year. The network presents Oren as a kind of neutral interpreter, when just a few months ago he was vigorously defending Israel on behalf of Netanyahu\u2019s government. His limited value as an analyst was swiftly exposed by his assertion that Hamas was trying to get Israel to kill as many Palestinian children as possible as part of a media strategy.\n\nThe number of guests booked or sources quoted has never been balanced on this issue in the mainstream American press, but more important is the nature of interviews and the broader coverage when Israel and Palestine are not thrust into the news by a fresh surge in violence.\n\nAt one extreme is Fox News, where last week Sean Hannity shouted down a Palestinian guest, Yousef Munayyer, because he would not condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation, then proceeded to terminate the interview.\n\nMunayyer, director of the Jerusalem Fund in Washington, has appeared repeatedly on CNN where he is treated more respectfully. But he told me he is frequently brought on to answer accusations from the Israeli side, rather than explain the Palestinian perspective in the way that Israeli officials and commentators are allowed to lay out their case.\n\n\u201cMost of the time I go on it is to be put on the defensive, in response to a conversation that\u2019s framed around Israel\u2019s security concerns first and foremost,\u201d Munayyer said.\n\nPalestinians should face difficult questions about recognition of Israel, about Hamas\u2019s policies and actions, about how peace would work in practice.\n\nBut on the other side, I\u2019ve rarely seen a major channel match that kind of routine close questioning of Israeli officials about the position of a government packed with ministers hostile to a Palestinian state, who advocate annexation of much of the occupied territories and who propose second-class citizenship for Arabs.\n\nIsrael\u2019s preferred representatives in the US media \u2013 Oren, plus the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, and Netanyahu\u2019s spokesman, Mark Regev \u2013 all project the country as a liberal democracy, an unwilling occupier that is thirsting for peace.\n\nBut that does not fit with the views of leading politicians back in Israel. Naftali Bennett, the economy minister and leader of the most powerful political party on the right, has said: \u201cI will do everything in my power to make sure [the Palestinians] never get a state.\u201d\n\nDanny Danon, the increasingly powerful chairman of the central committee of Netanyahu\u2019s Likud party, openly opposes a Palestinian state and has said the prime minister doesn\u2019t believe in it either. \u201cI want the majority of the land with the minimum amount of Palestinians,\u201d Danon, whom Netanyahu just fired as deputy defense minister for being critical of opposition to a ceasefire, told me last year.\n\nAnd Israel\u2019s ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, wants a good chunk of Israel\u2019s Arab population stripped of citizenship.\n\nPerhaps none of these men will get what they want. But they hold important levers of power, and good journalism would seem to demand that probing questions get asked about where Israel is headed under such leadership.\n\nThat kind of piercing American journalism can be found, mostly in foreign-policy journals and long magazine articles, such as David Remnick\u2019s insightful report in the New Yorker last year on the rising political power of Jewish settlers. But much of the press demonstrates a frightening lack of inquiry, and if the mainstream media won\u2019t do it, others are increasingly willing to do it for them.\n\nIt\u2019s no secret that younger Americans do not rely on the nightly news, cable networks or printed newspapers for information in the way many older people do. The internet has opened access to foreign news media, which often has a different take in Israel, and has opened up a stream of links to to first-hand accounts as well as writing by analysts and activists who offer insights and information wilfully ignored by the Bob Schieffers and Sean Hannitys of the world.\n\nThere is evidence of a shift in public opinion, mostly generational: a Pew poll this month showed falling support for Israel among younger Americans. Over 65s backed the Jewish state by 60% to just 9% support for the Palestinians. Among young adults, aged 18-29, just 44% were behind Israel with backing for the Palestinians rising to 22%.\n\nAs opinion shifts, it will be harder to go on presenting just one side of the story.\n\n\u2022 This article was amended on 1 August 2014. An earlier version said Netanyahu had addressed rallies in the 1990s under a banner reading \u201cDeath to Arabs\u201d. That has been corrected to say that Netanyahu addressed a rally under a banner reading \u201cDeath to Arafat\u201d a year after the Palestinian leader signed a peace accord with Israel.\n\n\u2022 Comments on this article are set to remain open for 24 hours from the time of publication but may be closed overnight (UK time)"}
{"text":"GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Gazan authorities on Wednesday issued notices to restaurants and hotels in the Strip banning establishments from throwing New Years Eve celebrations, a Gaza police spokesperson said.\n\nAyman al-Butneiji told Ma'an the notices were issued because New Years Eve celebrations, in the eyes of the Hamas-run Gazan government, \"contradict\" Islam, and \"are mainly an imitation of the west.\u201d\n\nHe also highlighted the \"pains and sacrifices\" that come with living in Gaza due to Israel's \"imposed siege\" on the Strip.\n\nPalestinian culture encourages communities to refrain from having celebrations during times of death or upheaval.\n\nIn Bethlehem, Christmas celebrations were toned-down significantly out of respect for the more than 120 Palestinian families who have lost loved ones since the start this year's upheaval in October.\n\nSince the start of October, municipalities across the occupied West Bank have also asked bars and restaurants to refrain from having large parties or celebrations out of respect for the seriousness of the current political situation."}
{"text":"Commencement May 18, 2003\n\nHonorary Degree: Religious Studies\n\nConferred on Bernard J. Cooke\n\nCandidate presented by: Philip Rossi, S.J., Professor and Chair of Theology\n\nBernard J. Cooke, internationally recognized theologian and educator, has been a pioneer in shaping Catholic theological education in colleges and universities for more than forty years. Joining the Marquette faculty in 1957, he soon instituted an undergraduate theology major and revised the curriculum for master of arts students.\n\nGenerations of Marquette students remember him for his indefatigable energy, his enlightening closed circuit television lectures for undergraduates, his \"Cooke Book\" of notes for graduates, his passion for justice and his dedication to the improvement of general education throughout the university. He received Marquette's Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence in 1964.\n\nHis most lasting accomplishment at Marquette was the inauguration of the Ph.D. program in Theology in 1963. Marquette was the first institution in the nation to offer doctoral level training to Catholic laypeople in preparation for careers of theological scholarship and teaching. Dr. Cooke's enduring legacy are the three hundred graduates of Marquette's doctoral program who have taught in college and university classrooms throughout North America, produced significant theological scholarship, and served as leaders in the academy and in the church.\n\nAs a theological scholar, Dr. Cooke has published major works on the sacraments and on ministry in the Catholic Church. After leaving the Marquette faculty in 1968, he lectured in many countries, worked extensively in programs for lay ministry formation, and has held faculty positions at the University of Windsor and the University of Calgary in Canada and at the College of the Holy Cross here in the United States, where he held the title of Loyola Professor of Theology. His books, articles, courses and lectures have been for many people throughout the world a rich source for theological reflection and inspiration.\n\nMarquette University is proud to welcome Dr. Cooke home to Marquette and to acknowledge his gifts as an educator and scholar. Because of his many contributions to Marquette and his pioneering work for Catholic theological education in colleges and universities, Reverend President, I hereby recommend Bernard J. Cooke for the Marquette Degree of Doctor of Religious Studies, honoris causa."}
{"text":"Kepler-80: Analysis of a Compact System\n\nIt\u2019s been a week for unusual planetary systems, and I\u2019ll cap it off with Kepler-80, a star about 1100 light years away that features five planets in extraordinarily tight orbits. Such systems are now being referred to as STIPs (Systems with Tightly-spaced Planets), a nod to our apparently imperishable drive to create acronyms. Whatever we call them, though, systems like these make us realize that our own Solar System\u2019s configuration is but one possibility in a sea of other outcomes. Yesterday\u2019s post on \u2018warm Jupiters\u2019 is yet another confirmation of the thought.\n\nWhat we have in new work from Mariah MacDonald, Darin Ragozzine (Florida Institute of Technology) and colleagues is an analysis of transit timing variations (TTVs) of the planets around this star, all of which orbit inside 1\/10 AU. Here the planets\u2019 years are 1.0, 3.1, 4.6, 7.1 and 9.5 days, respectively, close enough that gravitational perturbations can create slight changes in transit times. Although the innermost planet has a very weak TTV signal, the other four show signals strong enough for the researchers to work out the masses of each.\n\nGravitational interactions that disturb a perfectly periodic sequence of transits are a valuable way of making mass estimates for planets small enough that radial velocity detections are difficult. Usefully, Kepler has measured hundreds of TTV signals allowing for such estimates. They\u2019re particularly helpful in multiple-planet transiting systems because now we can use the combination of mass and planetary radius to produce density measurements.\n\nThe Kepler-80 planets are f, d, e, b, and c in order of period. The inferred masses for the four outer planets are roughly 6.75, 4.13, 6.93 and 6.74 Earth masses, but we learn that the two outermost planets are almost twice as large as the inner two. The researchers believe this is consistent with terrestrial compositions for d and e and extended, puffy atmospheres of hydrogen and helium for b and c. Here\u2019s how the paper describes these worlds:\n\nAlthough all four planets have very similar masses, planets d and e are terrestrial and planets b and c have \u223c2% (by mass) H\/He envelopes assuming Earth-like cores. Their orbits are similar and models suggest that photo-evaporation would have removed \u223c1% H\/He from all four planets. Though simulations suggest the system has been affected by planetary tides, we did not consider the effect of dissipation on the atmospheric history of the planets. It is unusual to have four well-measured densities in the same system and future comparative planetology may constrain the formation and evolution of their atmospheres.\n\nDue to orbital resonances, the four outer planets are synchronized, returning to the same configuration every 27 days. The paper notes that Kepler-80\u2019s planetary orbits are stable in the long-term as long as we assume orbital eccentricities below about 0.2 (the researchers point out that TTVs cannot reliably detect eccentricities for this system). Although the available Kepler data are not enough to reveal the evolution of the atmospheres on these planets, the researchers\u2019 simulations show that the outer two planets could have migrated inward from original positions in the disk where accretion of hydrogen and helium would be more likely to occur.\n\nImage: This animation shows the position of the five planets of Kepler-80 whenever the outer two planets (green and red) pass by one another, about every 27 days over the course of four years of observations by NASA\u2019s Kepler Space Telescope. Due to the rare synchronized nature of the system, the middle two planets (blue and purple) also return to almost exactly the same location. The innermost planet (yellow) is not synchronized and hence is found at a random location every 27 days. MacDonald et al. 2016 were able to show that this pattern indicates formation by \u201cmigration,\u201d where the orbits shrink very slightly over time. The orbits are to scale with each other, but the planets are shown 50 times larger. The outer four planets are all about 4-6 times the mass of the Earth. The inner three planets (blue, purple, and yellow) appear rocky and the outer two planets (green and red) are likely rocky with a very puffy Hydrogen\/Helium atmosphere. Credit: MacDonald\/Ragozzine\/FIT.\n\nImproved mass and eccentricity estimates will fall to future space-based observatories. With its complex resonances and intriguing dynamical history, Kepler-80 should be a useful laboratory for studying planet formation. The Kepler mission has given us a wealth of information about how planetary systems can be built, and it\u2019s clear that their formation and evolution will be the subject of study for decades. The systems we\u2019ve looked at this week hint at what is possible as exoplanetary architectures continue to surprise us.\n\nThe paper is MacDonald et al., \u201cA Dynamical Analysis of the Kepler-80 System of Five Transiting Planets,\u201d accepted at The Astronomical Journal. A Florida Institute of Technology news release is available."}
{"text":"Dropped on a frozen planet under suspicious circumstances, a group of marines struggles to discover the true objective of their mission. \u201cCold War\u201d is set in the same universe as Adam Christopher\u2019s novel The Burning Dark.\n\nThis novelette was acquired and edited for Tor.com by editor Paul Stevens.\n\n\u201cThis is bullshit.\u201d\n\nFirst Sergeant Furusawa\u2019s voice came back over the comms. \u201cI don\u2019t like your attitude, Marine.\u201d\n\n\u201cSorry,\u201d said Anderson. \u201cThis is bullshit, Sergeant.\u201d\n\nThe sergeant laughed. \u201cBetter.\u201d\n\nIt was there again: the pulse, the tick; something echoing across the comms, weaving around in the empty space behind the voices. It sounded like interference, the rhythmic tap of something electrical shorting, but that was impossible.\n\nThen the comms clicked off and Private Grec was left with nothing but the sound of the blood in her ears and the schtomp schtomp schtomp of seven pairs of boots wading through the snow.\n\nCorporal Anderson was right, Grec thought. It was bullshit. Icy, covered-in-six-feet-of-snow, a hundred light years from anywhere bullshit.\n\nWhat the Special Operations team had been doing here was a mystery\u2014at least, a mystery to those who really needed to know, which at the current moment included Sergeant Furusawa and her two three-person fireteams trudging onwards from the drop zone. The planet had a name, a real one, according to the brief\u2014Hrostar\u2014but to the Fleet it was just Warworld 3663. A lump of ice, big enough for Earth-type gravity, but slightly too far out of its sun\u2019s Goldilocks Zone to comfortably support much life worth writing home about. And since contact with the Spec Ops team had been lost five cycles ago, the Fleet war catalog had been updated, changing the planet\u2019s entry to Warworld 3663\u03a9\u2014Omega for \u201cdanger unspecified.\u201d The Spec Ops team had apparently met that danger, and now Furusawa\u2019s search and rescue ground team was here to find them.\n\nOf course, Grec and the others\u2014Anderson and Alonso in her team, Bowen, Palladio and Khouri in the Psi-team\u2014all knew what \u201cunspecified danger\u201d really meant.\n\nThe Spiders were here.\n\nRelentless, implacable, totally alien; the Spiders were a machine gestalt swarming across the galaxy, consuming\u2014literally\u2014whole planets, even stars. The eight-legged war machines ranged in size from just a few meters across to the giant Mother Spiders, as big as a moon, with legs long enough, powerful enough to crack the crust of a planet.\n\nBut if Warworld 3663\u03a9 really was a mostly lifeless lump of rock, then there was no reason for the Spiders to have paid it any heed. The machines seemed only to target inhabited planets, preferably those under the control of the Fleet. The Spiders were less an enemy, more a plague, a contagion. And after decades of conflict, the Fleet were becoming more and more desperate as the Spiders kept coming, and coming, and\u2014\n\nHey.\n\nGrec snapped out of her thoughts, and smiled. As the SAR team walked on through the snow, Grec spun on her heel, keeping pace but walking backwards through the tracks of the marine in front. Psi-Marine Maryam Khouri was on rear point, Grec in the center of the line. Grec gave a thumbs-up and Khouri did the same, signaling that all was well, then Grec turned back around without missing a step. Behind the opaque visor of her helmet, she smiled to herself and focused with her mind, pushing the feeling out, hoping that Khouri, three places behind, would be able to sense it. Grec had no psi-ability, and the Psi-Marines weren\u2019t supposed to communicate with the regular forces like that, officially. But it was common. Sometimes the quickest way to get a message across without anyone else knowing\u2014enemy included\u2014was to use your mind. On the long tour aboard the Union Starship Hit and Run, the two of them had worked at it, Maryam insisting that everyone, even Kat, had the power buried up there somewhere in their cerebrum. With a little effort, you could make yourself heard.\n\n\u201cBack to work, Marine.\u201d\n\nGrec glanced up. The Sergeant\u2019s voice was loud and clear in her helmet\u2014the private two-way channel\u2014unlike the message Khouri had planted in Grec\u2019s mind.\n\n\u201cAlways at work, Sergeant.\u201d\n\nGrec dragged her legs through the snow. The others remained silent, as quiet as the frozen wasteland across which they marched, a peace disturbed only by the soft sound of the team pulling themselves forward.\n\nHow much farther they had to go was mystery number two. According to the briefing back on the U-Star, now orbiting somewhere far above them, the search area itself was small: a patch of ground not five klicks square, at the northern edge of which was a range of low hills. The drop zone, for some reason, was ten klicks further south, which meant they had to walk the rest of the way. Anderson had questioned this, but before the ship\u2019s Commander had even opened his mouth to reply, Sergeant Furusawa had butted in, casting doubt on Anderson\u2019s masculinity. The two fireteams had laughed and were dismissed, but Grec knew she wasn\u2019t the only one who noticed the question had never gotten an answer.\n\nAnd another thing. SAR was usually done in little one-man hotseats, small and agile U-Stars that could skim through a planet\u2019s atmosphere, allowing a close ground scan with both the craft\u2019s instruments and the pilot\u2019s own senses. SAR on foot was a rare occurrence. And hell, if it was a Spec Ops team that had gone missing, why not send another damn Spec Ops team down after them? Sending a bunch of regular grunts and their Psi-Marine babysitters was surely the wrong decision and\u2014\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re here.\u201d\n\nThe line of marines stopped. \u201cHere\u201d was a featureless patch of snow, indistinguishable from the terrain they\u2019d spent the last two hours slogging through. The marines fell out of line, each looking around, as if expecting to find a giant X emblazoned on the white ground. Grec turned slowly, eyes to the horizon. The sky was just a shade darker than the ground, but the heads-up display of her visor enhanced the view, throwing up a reference grid and picking out the difference with ease. Without the HUD, Grec thought, they\u2019d be nearly blind.\n\nShe turned one-eighty and raised her hand, thumb skyward, signaling everything was A-OK and hunky-dory.\n\nThen she took a step forward, her raised hand falling back to the plasma rifle clipped across her front.\n\nMaryam?\n\n\u201cWhere\u2019s Khouri?\u201d she asked.\n\nThe other marines all turned to face back the way they\u2019d come. Sergeant Furusawa walked to the front, then turned, looking the group over, counting them up. Grec did the same.\n\nAnderson, Alonso and herself. Palladio, Bowen, and Sergeant Furusawa.\n\nSix marines.\n\nFurusawa turned away and Grec moved to her side. Looking out, she could see nothing but a nearly featureless white expanse, the ground broken only by the half-meter deep trench the marines had carved in the snow as they walked.\n\nThe Sergeant took a step forward. \u201cPsi-Corporal Khouri, what\u2019s your twenty?\u201d\n\nThere was no response. Khouri was gone.\n\nThey moved on after an hour. The two remaining Psi-Marines, Bowen and Palladio, had spent all of the intervening time trying to contact the missing third member of their fireteam, but without luck. Neither of them could reach out to her with their minds, unable to make contact or even sense her presence.\n\nAnd there was another problem.\n\n\u201cSee?\u201d said Anderson. \u201cBullshit. Bull. Shit.\u201d\n\nThe comms\u2014the regular communication channel between the marines, and between the marines and their starship in orbit\u2014wasn\u2019t working.\n\n\u201cShut up and keep trying, Marine,\u201d was all Furusawa said over the crackling emergency radio channel as she paced back and forth, scanning the surrounds, her HUD on maximum magnification and enhancement. Grec and the others watched the sergeant\u2019s view displayed on their own HUDs, each studying the image, just in case someone missed something. Anderson\u2014the communication specialist\u2014worked on the failed comms link. They\u2019d only discovered the fault when Furusawa had tried to contact the Hit and Run to report their situation and realized that nobody\u2014not even the marines standing next to her\u2014could hear her.\n\nThey\u2019d been planetside three hours and were one marine down with basic systems failure. The operation had been screwy from the very start, and now Grec knew they were in even worse trouble.\n\nShe swallowed, focusing on the situation, pushing the fear over her partner\u2019s fate out of her mind.\n\n\u201cWe have to go back, Sergeant,\u201d she said. She watched Furusawa continue her slow pace as she scanned the way they had come. Then the sergeant turned around, the opaque visor of her elliptical helmet reflecting Grec\u2019s own.\n\n\u201cOur primary objective is to locate the missing Spec Ops team, Marine. We have our orders.\u201d\n\nGrec paused, then said \u201cSergeant,\u201d her training kicking in even as every instinct screamed to her that something wasn\u2019t right.\n\nPalladio shouldered his rifle and came to attention in front of the sergeant. \u201cPermission to track back to the drop zone to locate Khouri.\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s a negative, Marine.\u201d\n\nPalladio nodded at Alonso, standing nearby. As Marine Gunner, his heavy-duty weapon was considerably larger than the rifles carried by the rest. \u201cAlonso and I can go,\u201d said Palladio. \u201cSweep the area, pick up Khouri and head back to the target zone.\u201d\n\n\u201cNegative, Marine,\u201d Furusawa repeated. \u201cI\u2019ve lost one Psi-Marine already, and I don\u2019t want to lose another.\u201d\n\n\u201cBut, Khouri\u2014\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d The emergency radio buzzed as Furusawa\u2019s voice punched across the channel. The back-up system was low quality and the interference was still there, even worse. A repeated pattern, almost electronic in nature. As the sergeant spoke even Anderson looked up from his position on the ground, where he was working on the computer interface built into the forearm of his combat armor, trying to get the regular comms back online.\n\nSergeant Furusawa looked over her remaining marines, then nodded. \u201cWe continue the SAR. If Khouri got lost in the snow we\u2019ll pick her up on the way back. Grec, start the geophys scan. We\u2019ll head north-north-east.\u201d\n\nGrec blinked as an orange icon appeared in her HUD: an open triangle, hard against the left of her vision. As she turned her head, the icon slid around until it was at the top. North-north-east, the direction marker shared from Furusawa\u2019s HUD over the psi-fi net that linked each of the marines\u2019 armor together.\n\n\u201cMove out,\u201d said Furusawa, taking point, not waiting for the rest of them to fall into line. As they walked off, Grec turned again, wanting to signal with a raised thumb to Khouri, but it was Palladio at the rear now.\n\nGrec dropped her arm, turned back to the front, and listened to the stiff crunch of snow underfoot.\n\nThey marched on.\n\nYou okay?\n\nGrec swept the wand of the geophys scanner over the snow in front of her as she walked. To operate the device she\u2019d shifted up to take point, but with the directional marker in her HUD, she knew where she was supposed to be leading the group. She squeezed the wand a little harder and increased the radius of her sweep. The readings from the scanner, relayed to the display on the inside of her visor, were a little weird, but she hadn\u2019t really had a chance to calibrate everything to zero. Not after Khouri had\u2014\n\nKat?\n\nGrec frowned, her eyes flicking over the geophys readout. It was an important job and the Sergeant would be asking for a report very soon. Having Palladio send her messages with his mind\u2014messages he knew she couldn\u2019t respond to\u2014was a distraction. She didn\u2019t really know him that well, either. Not like Maryam. But at least Palladio wasn\u2019t using the emergency radio. The back-up system didn\u2019t have private channels. What one marine said, all would hear.\n\nI was her friend, too.\n\nGrec screwed her eyes tight and filled her mind with just one single thought.\n\nSHUT UP!\n\nShe knew she couldn\u2019t \u201ctalk\u201d to the Psi-Marine, but maybe her annoyance would be enough for him to sense. At any rate, they marched on and Palladio\u2019s voice didn\u2019t enter her head again. Grec relaxed a little and returned her focus to the geophys scan, but after a while her mind wandered. Wandered to Maryam.\n\nThey\u2019d been close, back on the Hit and Run. Tight friendships between regular marines and their psychic counterparts were common. Often, what started as friendship became something much more. Relationships like that were against regulations, but sometimes in deep, deep space, in the middle of the war, blind eyes were turned. Morale was low enough as it was and the Fleet commanders were unlikely to actively discourage anything that improved it, no matter which statute they broke.\n\nThe radio clicked on in Grec\u2019s ear. The tapping sound of the interference was loud. As Grec watched, she saw the noise matched the pulse of the geophys readouts running along the bottom of her HUD.\n\n\u201cGeophys, Private.\u201d\n\nGrec cleared her throat and dragged her attention back to her task. As the team walked forward, Grec swept the wand back and forth again. The readings didn\u2019t change. Nor did they make much sense.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not sure,\u201d she said, trying to parse the data. She came to a stop. Furusawa appeared at her shoulder.\n\n\u201cI need a report, Private.\u201d\n\nGrec shook her head. \u201cI need to recalibrate, Sarge. The scanner\u2019s bugged.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the reading?\u201d\n\nGrec clenched her jaw and focused on sharing the HUD data with her team leader. The psi-fi indicator in her visor flickered briefly as her combat suit made contact with the sergeant\u2019s, and began streaming the data to its computer.\n\nSergeant Furusawa shifted her grip on her rifle as she waited. \u201cWhen you\u2019re ready, Private.\u201d\n\n\u201cData streaming, Sergeant.\u201d\n\nFurusawa\u2019s helmet tilted to one side. Grec waited.\n\n\u201cNegative,\u201d said the Sergeant. \u201cTry re-linking.\u201d\n\nGrec closed her eyes this time. Each of the combat suits could be paired together in a low-level, short-range psychic field\u2014psi-fi, a technology-based by-product of the research conducted by the Fleet\u2019s Psi-Marine Corps. The psi-fi net of each suit did everything, from linking the computer buried in the armor backplate to the helmet\u2019s HUD, connecting various tools like the geophys scanner to the suit\u2019s systems and HUD, to sharing data streams between suits. All Grec had to do was concentrate just a little with her own mind. The suit\u2019s computer did the rest, pairing its psi-fi router with the intended partner unit.\n\n\u201cNothing,\u201d said the sergeant. Grec opened her eyes and exhaled, and her whole HUD flickered. When it was stable again, the psi-fi indicator was flashing red.\n\n\u201cI have a computer issue,\u201d she said. \u201cPsi-fi just disconnected on me.\u201d\n\n\u201cMe too.\u201d Anderson came over the radio, his voice crushed by the interference.\n\nGrec turned to her sergeant, who nodded, then turned to face the other marines.\n\n\u201cEveryone check their psi-fi net and reboot if necessary. Check in when you\u2019re done.\u201d\n\nGrec let the geophys scanner drop on the tether connecting it to her belt, and flipped the long panel on her armor\u2019s right forearm open. Inside the access panel was a small keyboard and set of sliding switches below a row of LEDs. Grec selected the correct switch for the psi-fi router, flicked it up and down quickly, then waited as the indicator in her HUD went dark, then came back on orange, then a second later changed to green. The others, already rebooted, began checking in.\n\nAnderson. Alonso. Bowen. Palladio. Grec. Khouri. Furusawa.\n\nKhouri.\n\nGrec felt her heart thud in her chest. She spun around in the snow, as did the other five remaining members of the team. They were still one down.\n\n\u201cI heard her,\u201d said Bowen, his helmet swiveling as he looked from the sergeant to the empty white expanse around them and back.\n\n\u201cSo did I,\u201d said Alonso. He slid his heavy rifle from his shoulder.\n\nAnderson raised his rifle to the side of his helmet and tilted his head to look along the barrel, aiming back the way they had come. \u201cThe fuck is going on?\u201d he asked no one in particular.\n\nPalladio stepped up to Grec. She couldn\u2019t see his face behind his opaque visor, and she knew that her face was likewise hidden, but she recognized his concern, not just for Khouri but for her. She gave a tiny nod. Palladio seemed to pause, then returned the gesture and turned to the sergeant.\n\n\u201cSergeant, we need to go back,\u201d he said. \u201cMaryam got separated and lost, is all. Horizon blindness. Everything on this iceball is white on white. Won\u2019t take any time to pick her up. She\u2019ll have dug in, back along\u2014\u201d\n\nFurusawa ignored him, and pointed at Anderson. \u201cShoulder your weapon, Marine. We move to the target.\u201d\n\nPalladio turned to Grec, then back to the sergeant. When his voice returned to the emergency radio he sounded breathless. The popping background sound seemed to swell with his temper.\n\n\u201cWe have to go back for her\u2014\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s a negative.\u201d\n\n\u201cBut\u2014\u201d\n\nFurusawa turned to the Psi-Marine. \u201cIf she\u2019s lost she\u2019ll have dug in, like you said. We\u2019ll pick her up on the way back. March on, Marine. The primary objective takes priority.\u201d\n\nAnderson hissed over the radio and stomped through the snow, coming to a halt in front of Furusawa, his helmet just a few centimeters away from hers.\n\n\u201cWhat the hell\u2019s the damn hurry?\u201d\n\nFurusawa actually took a step forward, until her visor knocked against Anderson\u2019s.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve got our orders, Marine. March on.\u201d\n\nAs Grec watched, she could see Anderson adjust his grip on his rifle, his finger inching around the trigger. He held it diagonally across his body, pressed close between him and the sergeant.\n\n\u201cWhat the hell kind of orders are we following anyway?\u201d he asked. His voice was loud in Grec\u2019s ears, the poor quality of the emergency radio channel distorting it strangely.\n\nThe HUD flashed in Grec\u2019s visor. She raised the geophys wand and pointed it back the way they had come.\n\n\u201cYou\u2019re close to the line, Corporal,\u201d said the sergeant.\n\nAnderson huffed. \u201cThis is bullshit, Sergeant, and you know it\u2014\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d Out of the corner of her eye, Grec saw Furusawa turn around. Anderson laid a gauntlet on the sergeant\u2019s shoulder. Psi-Marine Bowen, standing closest to the pair, moved up to Anderson, his voice punching across the argument.\n\n\u201cHey! What\u2019s got into you, Darwyn?\u201d\n\nThe geophys readout in Grec\u2019s visor was going crazy. She raised the wand higher.\n\n\u201cSergeant!\u201d\n\nFurusawa moved over to her. Behind, Bowen was pressing a hand into Anderson\u2019s chest. Anderson shook it off, but the heat appeared to have left him, for now, as the marines gathered around Grec.\n\nFurusawa looked out across the snow plain. \u201cWhat is that?\u201d\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s something moving, something big.\u201d Grec glanced at the wand, then moved it around in a wide sweep. \u201cIt\u2019s underneath us.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhere?\u201d\n\n\u201cEverywhere.\u201d\n\nThe ground shook. Alonso, standing at the back of the group, swore and swung his heavy weapon around, looking for something to aim at.\n\nGrec tried to read the geophys data, but it was moving too fast. Then, as the group watched, the ground opened up a few hundred meters back along the trench they\u2019d carved. The thick snow cover began to cave inwards as the trench unzipped into a wider tear that accelerated towards the marines at an alarming pace.\n\n\u201cThe fuck?\u201d Anderson voiced what Grec was thinking.\n\nGrec lowered the wand. She felt the sting of adrenaline, like they\u2019d walked into an ambush. She raised her rifle, as did all the rest.\n\nExcept Furusawa.\n\n\u201cDo not engage!\u201d\n\nGrec aimed at the moving ground. She could see the barrel of Alonso\u2019s heavy gun light up in red as he prepared to fire. \u201cSergeant?\u201d he asked.\n\nThe marines stood ready, poised. Grec swore and lowered her rifle a little, backing away. Whatever was under the snow would be on them in seconds.\n\nWhen Furusawa gave the next order, the marines obeyed implicitly, Grec included.\n\n\u201cRun!\u201d\n\n\u201cAhead, ten o\u2019clock.\u201d\n\n\u201cAffirmative.\u201d\n\n\u201cMove it!\u201d\n\nThere was a burst of heavy rifle fire behind them. Grec didn\u2019t turn, just ran in the direction indicated. Ahead, the flat, featureless snow plain began to rise into low hills, striations of dark rock showing through the ice. And at ten o\u2019clock, a larger black shape: the entrance to a cave. They were sitting ducks in the open. Chances are they were sitting ducks under cover, as well, but the cave at least offered options. Grec took a chance and checked over her shoulder.\n\nAlonso paused and fired again into the snow, the superheated plasma bolts throwing up as much ice and snow as the thing burrowing its way after them. At a run, the marines were faster, but in stopping to fire twice, Alonso was very close to their pursuer, the collapsing ground lapping at his boots before he turned tail and fled.\n\n\u201cCease fire!\u201d Furusawa\u2019s order came over the emergency radio. She was in front and hadn\u2019t stopped running.\n\nThe cave was close now. The snow beneath Grec\u2019s boots became shallower, harder-packed. Their powered combat armor made the slog easier, but even so, they would be exhausted soon, pushing through at this pace. Grec only hoped the cave would keep them safe from whatever the hell it was under the snow.\n\nThe cave opening had a lip. Furusawa and Anderson jumped over it, then vanished into the blackness, their cries of surprise loud over the radio. Alonso, apparently happy to ignore the First Sergeant\u2019s orders, shouted something about keeping them all covered, but Grec didn\u2019t catch it all, the rhythmic buzzing on the channel so loud it cut out half of his words. She was close to the cave, the lip within reach. Psi-Marine Bowen jumped ahead of her, then she followed. Behind, Alonso had stopped again and rattled off another burst of heavy rifle fire.\n\nThe floor of the cave was half a meter lower than the entrance, an icy shelf that fell away at a smooth angle. As soon as she landed on the other side of the cave\u2019s lip, Grec\u2019s legs slipped out from under her. Her backplate cracked on the cave floor and she slid down the incline, into the tangle of marines piled at the back of the cave.\n\n\u201cJesus, shit.\u201d Anderson picked himself up, the First Sergeant helping him. Bowen and Palladio scrambled to their knees and crawled back to the cave entrance, quickly using the lip to rest their rifles as they took aim. Grec pushed herself onto her knees and turned on the ice, waiting for Alonso to come sliding in.\n\nNothing.\n\n\u201cAlonso, report,\u201d the sergeant said over the radio. Her voice was swamped with interference. \u201cReport please. Gunnery Sergeant, come in.\u201d\n\nSilence. The rumbling of the sundered ground had stopped, and Alonso\u2019s heavy rifle hadn\u2019t fired again. Bowen got to his feet while Palladio covered the entrance, and moved closer, his movements loud as his hard armor scraped against the walls of the cave. At the back, Grec reached out and touched the walls. While the floor seemed to be a solid block of ice, forming a more-or-less flat, sloping surface, the walls were different. They were dark and shiny, looking almost like graphite, but when she scraped the ceramic-metal plates of her gauntlet over the surface it left no mark.\n\n\u201cFreddy?\u201d Bowen stepped up onto the cave\u2019s lip, rifle in one hand, the butt hard against his armor as he balanced himself against the cave wall with his other hand. He called out again.\n\nGrec glanced at the sergeant, who went to join Bowen. Grec followed.\n\nOutside, the white snow plain of Warworld 3663\u03a9 was still, featureless except for a wide trench, snow and ice piled in two great mounds on either side, stretching back two hundred meters. Grec\u2019s HUD projected a grid over the landscape, mapped the disturbed ground and told her that the geographical feature stopped fifty meters from where she was standing.\n\nFirst Sergeant Furusawa stepped over the lip of the cave, out into the open.\n\n\u201cGunnery Sergeant Alonso, report please. Confirm your location.\u201d\n\nSilence.\n\n\u201cAlonso, do you copy? Come in, please.\u201d\n\nAnderson swore, then Grec\u2019s HUD flickered briefly, and went off, and the world was plunged into total darkness.\n\nBowen took first watch, which just meant standing and pointing his rifle at the cave entrance. The others were gathered at the back wall, two heatsticks from an emergency kit providing warmth and a sickly yellow light. The odd substance of the cave walls seemed to be an exceptionally good conductor of heat, so Furusawa had leaned the snapped, chemical-filled rods against the back wall, trying to keep them off the ice floor in case they melted through. She was sitting next to the sticks, the dead helmet of her combat suit next to her.\n\nAs soon as the psi-fi in each suit had shut off completely, they\u2019d had to remove their helmets. The ambient temperature inside the cave was warmer than out in the open\u2014a balmy minus eighteen centigrade\u2014and the heatsticks were beginning to take that up admirably, but in the meantime each marine had unplugged the padding lining of their helmets, the design allowing them to be worn as emergency headgear in just such conditions. Nearby, Anderson sat against the back wall, his helmet wedged between his knees as he worked on the electrical systems inside it with a pair of fine tools.Without a psi-fi network, the helmets couldn\u2019t pair with the combat suit computers, rendering them useless. The suits still had power, that was no problem, but with the psi-fi off for so long, the computers in each had gone to sleep. Over the last two hours they\u2019d tried reboots, switching suit power packs, everything. Nothing worked. Now Anderson was trying something else, seeing if he could boot his helmet separately into a developer mode that would allow him to investigate the glitch.\n\nAnderson didn\u2019t need silence to work, but Grec kept quiet, using the time to process their situation, figure out what the hell was going on and what the hell the First Sergeant was up to.\n\nThe others kept quiet too, no doubt feeling the same, thought Grec.\n\nThen her thoughts were interrupted.\n\nI\u2019m sorry about Khouri.\n\nPalladio again, inside Grec\u2019s head. She drew her knees up to her chest, and watched the reflected glow of the heatsticks dance on the smooth wall of the cave.\n\nI know you were close.\n\nShe closed her eyes, willed the Psi-Marine to shut up.\n\nBut look, she\u2019s out there.\n\nGrec held her breath.\n\nWe\u2019ll find her, trust me. And then\u2014\n\nGrec pushed herself up from the cave floor, stepped towards Palladio, and pushed his chest. He slipped backwards on the smooth floor and hit it with a crack.\n\n\u201cHey!\u201d\n\n\u201cShut the hell up!\u201d Spittle flew from Grec\u2019s mouth. \u201cAnd get the fuck out of my head.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat the fuck are you doing?\u201d asked Palladio from the floor.\n\nFurusawa stood. \u201cKat, what is it?\u201d\n\nGrec sighed and waved at Palladio. His eyes were wide, his mouth in a surprised O.\n\n\u201cNothing. Absolutely nothing,\u201d said Grec. She glanced around. The others were staring at her and the Psi-Marine on the ground. Grec shook her head, then went to join Bowen at the cave entrance. Bowen glanced sideways at her, nodded, then returned his attention to the darkening world outside.\n\nKhouri was dead. She knew it. That voice\u2014the one that had reported in after they\u2019d rebooted their psi-fi the first time\u2014it wasn\u2019t her, she knew it. They\u2019d all heard it, but she knew. It had been different. It was something else. Psi-Corporal Maryam Khouri wasn\u2019t out there, waiting for rescue. The other Psi-Marines, Bowen and Palladio, hadn\u2019t been able to find her with their minds, which meant one thing.\n\nShe was dead. And Alonso too. Eaten by the monster under the snow.\n\n\u201cKat?\u201d\n\nGrec jumped. The First Sergeant was standing next to her. Furusawa glanced at Bowen, then turned away, indicating for Grec to follow.\n\n\u201cAre you okay?\u201d asked Furusawa.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m fine, Sergeant. No problem.\u201d But Grec\u2019s voice was small and quiet, and even as she spoke she knew that she wasn\u2019t fine, not at all.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry about Psi-Corporal Khouri. I knew you were close.\u201d\n\nGrec felt the heat rise in her face. She had to hold it together. She was a Fleet Marine. She swallowed, and asked: \u201cYou think she\u2019s dead? Alonso too?\u201d\n\nFurusawa chewed her lip, but didn\u2019t speak. Grec leaned in closer.\n\n\u201cWhat the hell is going on, Sergeant?\u201d she whispered. \u201cWas Anderson right? Are you following a different set of orders?\u201d\n\nFurusawa raised an eyebrow. \u201cI\u2019m not sure I follow, Private,\u201d she said, her voice still low but her tone suddenly formal.\n\n\u201cBecause,\u201d said Grec, \u201cI\u2019m starting to believe him. This S-A-R is bullshit, Sergeant.\u201d\n\n\u201cPrivate Grec, I\u2014\u201d\n\n\u201cSo what the fuck are we doing here?\u201d\n\nGrec met Furusawa\u2019s eye. The sergeant seemed to be holding her breath.\n\nThen Anderson called out from the back of the cave.\n\n\u201cGot it!\u201d\n\nFurusawa turned and walked away. Grec swore under her breath and followed.\n\nAnderson held his tongue between his front teeth, grimacing as he made a delicate adjustment inside his helmet. He twisted one tool clockwise, and his face was lit from below by the familiar glow of the Fleet HUD. Grec knelt beside him and peered into the helmet, watching as the visor displayed scrolling pages of code as it went through a forced reboot.\n\nFurusawa nodded and folded her arms. \u201cGood work, Anderson. Fix the others, then we can get going.\u201d\n\nGrec\u2019s jaw dropped. \u201cWhere the hell to? We need to get back to the drop zone and wait for extraction.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe can\u2019t go back,\u201d said Bowen from his position at the cave entrance. He indicated the pitch black outside with his rifle. \u201cNot with that thing out there, whatever it is. Not at night.\u201d\n\nGrec waved him off. \u201cWith the suits back online the dark doesn\u2019t matter. We\u2019ll be able to see it before it sees us. We\u2019re goddamn Fleet Marines, remember.\u201d\n\nBowen shook his head. \u201cIt\u2019s taken Khouri and Alonso already, remember?\u201d\n\nGrec stormed to the cave entrance and yanked on Bowen\u2019s shoulder. \u201cYes, I do remember, you son of a\u2014\u201d\n\nThe cave was filled with a buzzing sound. It was sharp, loud, washed with static and echoed off the hard walls, floor, ceiling. Grec and the others look around in surprise, and saw Anderson squinting into his helmet, still on his knees. He twisted a tool, and the noise died as abruptly as it had started.\n\n\u201cFuck, fuck, fuck.\u201d Anderson dropped his helmet to the cave floor.\n\nBowen looked at the others \u201cWhat the hell was that?\u201d\n\n\u201cSome kind of interference,\u201d said Anderson. \u201cMaybe deliberate jamming, I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s swamped the psi-fi. We\u2019re still screwed.\u201d\n\nFurusawa crouched on the cave floor, and stared at the heatsticks.\n\n\u201cIt was on the emergency radio too,\u201d she said.\n\nGrec nodded. \u201cAnd the comms before that.\u201d\n\nBowen and Palladio exchanged a look, then Palladio tapped his temple. \u201cWe heard it too.\u201d\n\n\u201cShit,\u201d said Furusawa.\n\nGrec moved to her pile of gear at the back of the cave and pulled out the geophys wand. She turned it on and the row of lights blinked on at once, then went out. A moment later, they began to pulse. There was no sound, but as Grec held the scanner up, the other marines gathered around, staring at the wand. The lights flashed to the same rhythm as the buzz from Anderson\u2019s attempted repair. The comms specialist shook his head.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s a hell of a jammer.\u201d\n\nGrec gave a thin smile. \u201cWorks though, doesn\u2019t it? It\u2019s knocked us out, totally. Left us helpless in a cave.\u201d She looked up at the sergeant. \u201cDo your mystery orders cover this?\u201d\n\nThe two stared at each other for a moment. Out of the corner of her eye, Grec saw Bowen and Palladio exchange a worried look. Then, finally, Furusawa shook her head. She turned to Anderson.\n\n\u201cBreak out the lightspeed field transmitter. We\u2019ll contact the ship, get an evac. This isn\u2019t part of the mission at all.\u201d\n\n\u201cFuck, finally,\u201d said Anderson, before turning to his corner of the cave. He flipped his pack over and began pulling out the heavy-duty transmitter.\n\nGrec stood and folded her arms. She nodded at the sergeant. \u201cYou going to tell us jarheads what these secret orders are?\u201d\n\n\u201cNo,\u201d said Furusawa, then she raised her rifle and walked to the cave entrance, indicating to Bowen that she would take over the watch.\n\n\u201cWake up.\u201d\n\nOne side of Grec\u2019s face was warm. She shifted, the sensation of her skin sticking to something hard and smooth helping to rouse her.\n\n\u201cWake the fuck up.\u201d\n\nThat, and Anderson whispering in her ear, his breath hot. She opened an eye and pushed herself more upright against the curved wall of the cave.\n\n\u201cDarwyn? What is it?\u201d\n\nGrec looked around. Palladio and Furusawa were asleep on the other side of the cave. A fresh pair of heatsticks had been snapped at some point and rested against the back wall, which had grown very warm indeed. Near the heatsticks, it looked as though the ice floor of the cave had melted a little, the dark of the rock below showing through.\n\nAnderson stood back, and smiled. Grec watched him, then rubbed her face.\n\n\u201cThey\u2019re out there, see,\u201d said the comms operator. He pointed to the cave entrance. \u201cAlonso and Khouri. They\u2019re fine. They\u2019re just waiting for us to come out and join them. You coming or what?\u201d\n\nGrec blinked. It was still night outside. She felt groggy. The cave was stuffy, the heatsticks having done a fine job of keeping them from freezing to death.\n\nThen she noticed the problem.\n\n\u201cWhere\u2019s Bowen?\u201d\n\nShe pushed herself to her feet, and took a step towards the unguarded cave mouth. As she moved, Anderson stepped between her and the entrance.\n\nGrec indicated the cave entrance with a nod. \u201cWho\u2019s on watch?\u201d she asked. \u201cYou?\u201d\n\nAnderson closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. \u201cDon\u2019t you get it, Kat?\u201d he said. His smile vanished, replaced by an expression that was tight and angry, one that Grec didn\u2019t like. Anderson took a step forward and Grec instinctively took a step back.\n\nThen Anderson looked away and tilted his head, and the smile came back. He nodded. Grec felt ill. He was listening to something. But, surely, he wasn\u2019t listening to\u2014\n\n\u201cYes,\u201d said Anderson to the air, then he turned back to Grec. \u201cIt\u2019s bullshit. Bull. Shit.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat is?\u201d\n\nAnderson waved his arms, indicating the cave, the sleeping marines. \u201cThis. All this. Bullshit. Search and rescue? Search for what, huh? Rescue who? Rescue fuck, is who. But it\u2019s fine, it\u2019s okay. I\u2019m dealing with them.\u201d\n\nGrec shook her head, then went to wake the sergeant. Anderson had always been edgy, but he was cracking under the pressure. Grec wondered when his last Fleet evaluation had been. Surely he must have been due for a new one, one that would take him off active duty.\n\nAs she bent down, Grec noticed more of the floor had melted. More than that, it looked as though someone\u2014Anderson, presumably\u2014had been digging into the softening ice on the other side of the cave, revealing something black and long, part of the rock of the actual cave floor. There was something about it that made Grec curious. She moved closer to get a better look, but Anderson grabbed her arm and pulled her back around to face him.\n\n\u201cGet off,\u201d she cried out, pulling away. Anderson\u2019s grip was tight and as she struggled just got tighter.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re going now, bitch,\u201d Anderson said. He turned towards the cave entrance, pulling Grec after him.\n\n\u201cStop.\u201d\n\nAnderson turned his head. Furusawa was crouched on the cave floor, a pistol in hand, aimed at the marine. Nearby, Palladio was awake, his eyes open and fixed on the scene, although he hadn\u2019t moved from his position on the floor.\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t you fucking get it?\u201d Anderson let go of Grec, who scrambled back to the others. Anderson didn\u2019t seem to notice. Instead, he pointed again to the cave entrance. \u201cThey want us out there, now. Come on! We have to go, now, or we\u2019ll blow the whole mission.\u201d\n\nGrec glanced down at Palladio. The Psi-Marine slowly raised himself up. Anderson pointed at him.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s their fault, you know?\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re doing this. But I\u2019m dealing with it.\u201d\n\nFurusawa kept the pistol level. \u201cDealing with what, Marine?\u201d\n\nAnderson waved his hand. \u201cThem. Those fucking freaks.\u201d\n\nPalladio held his hands up. \u201cHey now, I don\u2019t know what you think is going on, but\u2014\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s okay, Kat.\n\nThe voice in Grec\u2019s head was new, but familiar. The relief she felt was instantly swamped by something else: fear. Cold, vertiginous fear.\n\n\u201cMaryam?\u201d\n\nCome outside.\n\nGrec looked at the others. They\u2019d stopped fighting. They must have heard it as well. Palladio shook his head.\n\n\u201cIt can\u2019t be her, can it?\u201d\n\nGrec opened and closed her mouth a few times, unable to find quite the right words. She wanted Khouri to be alive, to be out there somewhere on the snow plain, lost but dug in, knowing that all she had to do was stay put and conserve power and keep warm and the others would collect her later. The Fleet left no one behind, not now, not ever.\n\nBut . . .\n\nCome outside.\n\nA different voice. Furusawa flinched.\n\nGunnery Sergeant Alonso.\n\n\u201cPalladio,\u201d called Furusawa. \u201cTalk to them.\u201d At the other end of her steady pistol, Anderson stood and smiled, his eyes closed.\n\nPalladio crouched next to the sergeant.\n\n\u201cI can\u2019t.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhy not?\u201d asked Grec.\n\n\u201cBecause,\u201d said Palladio, looking up. \u201cKhouri is dead\u2014I can\u2019t sense her. And Alonso isn\u2019t a Psi-Marine. It can\u2019t be them.\u201d\n\nCome outside. Khouri\u2019s voice again, echoing inside Grec\u2019s head. Furusawa turned to her, her face pale.\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t you get it?\u201d said Anderson. He leapt forward, grabbing the pistol from the distracted Sergeant\u2019s hand. She made a grab towards him, then backed off as she found herself covered by the marine. Anderson waved them all together, until the trio were backed against the rear of the cave.\n\n\u201cAnderson, come on,\u201d said Furusawa.\n\nCome outside, said the voice in Grec\u2019s head that sounded like Alonso, but wasn\u2019t.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve got to finish the mission,\u201d said Anderson, rictus grin on his face, his free hand rubbing the side of his head.\n\n\u201cDarwyn, what are you doing?\u201d asked Palladio, one hand reaching out to his teammate.\n\nCome outside, Kat, said the voice in Grec\u2019s head that wasn\u2019t, couldn\u2019t have been Khouri. When the voice spoke, there was a buzzing in the background. The weird interference; the jamming signal. And beneath that, other voices\u2014two, three, four\u2014voices that Grec didn\u2019t recognize, all saying the same thing.\n\nCome outside.\n\nAnderson\u2019s aim wavered, then he pulled the gun up and rubbed the heel of his hand into the other side of his head, stretching the skin around his face. His eyes were closed in pain.\n\n\u201cMake them stop,\u201d he said. \u201cMake them fucking stop.\u201d\n\nFurusawa nudged Grec with her elbow. Grec glanced sideways, met the sergeant\u2019s eye, and nodded. She tensed herself, ready to rush forward with the sergeant to disarm and disable Anderson.\n\n\u201cNow,\u201d said Furusawa. She powered forward. Grec went to move, but stopped. Furusawa came to a halt, the pistol in Anderson\u2019s hand nearly touching her forehead.\n\n\u201cMake them stop,\u201d said Anderson. His face was red, tears streaked down it. \u201cPlease, make them stop.\u201d\n\nGrec held out her hands. \u201cDrop the gun, Darwyn. Come on.\u201d\n\nAnderson shook his head, then it drooped, his eyes closed, and he moaned in pain. Again the gun hand moved up as he rubbed his temple.\n\n\u201cYou don\u2019t get it, do you? Any of you?\u201d he laughed, and pointed to the corner of the floor that he had dug out during the night. \u201cWe\u2019re sleeping with the dead and you don\u2019t even get it.\u201d\n\nGrec looked over at the hole. There was something there, under the ice. Not the floor of the cave, but\u2026\n\n\u201cGive it up, Marine!\u201d Furusawa ordered.\n\nThen Anderson\u2019s head snapped up. He smiled, nodded, looked at each of the other marines in turn.\n\nThen he said \u201cYes, I give up,\u201d put the pistol to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.\n\nThey found Psi-Marine Bowen\u2019s body just outside the cave entrance, a single plasma bolt wound on the back of his head. Anderson must have set his sidearm to silent and shot the Psi-Marine while he was watching the darkness outside.\n\nNow Bowen\u2019s body lay next to Anderson\u2019s on one side of the cave. First Sergeant Furusawa, Psi-Corporal Palladio, and Private Grec stood around the hole in the ice floor near the opposite wall.\n\nGrec had been right. Anderson had found something under the ice, where the heatsticks had begun to melt the cave floor.\n\nA body. A Fleet Marine, although his armor was black rather than the standard blue and olive and had no visible insignia. The corpse was only exposed from the shoulders to head, the rest of him still locked beneath the ice. He was one of the Spec Ops team, had to be.\n\nHe wasn\u2019t wearing his helmet. Instead, his bare head was crowned with a nest of what looked like melted metal, tangled strands of varying thickness webbed over his scalp, trailing down over most of his face. At random points, the metal strands poked into the marine\u2019s skin, tiny spots of dark red leaking out around each entry point. It was hard to see under the ice, but it looked like there was more of the grey webbing wrapped around the rest of his body.\n\nIt was Grec who broke the silence. \u201cWhat the hell happened to him?\u201d\n\n\u201cThe Spider got him,\u201d said Furusawa.\n\nGrec raised an eyebrow. She gestured at the body. \u201cWhat, and stored the body on ice?\u201d\n\n\u201cWait . . .\u201d\n\nGrec and Furusawa turned to Palladio. The Psi-Marine had his eyes closed. Without opening them, he began pointing to the floor.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019re more. Four.\u201d He opened his eyes, then knelt down and scraped at the floor. Here the ice was still frozen, but it was a little soft. Palladio managed to slough a few centimeters of frost off the surface, enough to see something else dark further below.\n\nAnother body. The Spec Ops team was here, in the cave. Under their feet.\n\nFurusawa stood with her hands on her hips. \u201cCan we get them out?\u201d\n\nPalladio tapped his temple. \u201cWait, wait . . . they\u2019re dead. But . . . it\u2019s weird, I can sense their brain activity. There\u2019s not much there, but there\u2019s . . . something. I don\u2019t understand it.\u201d\n\nThe sergeant pointed back at the partially uncovered body. \u201cLooks like that webbing penetrates the skull. Could it be connected to the central nervous system?\u201d\n\nGrec shook her head. \u201cFor what?\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s the question,\u201d said Furusawa. She stood. \u201cCan you operate the lightspeed transmitter, Private?\u201d\n\n\u201cYes, Sergeant.\u201d\n\n\u201cGood. Set it up. It\u2019s time to get a ride home.\u201d\n\nIt was nearly dawn, the abyssal blackness beyond the cave mouth softening to a pale blue.\n\n\u201cTry it again,\u201d said Furusawa.\n\nGrec nodded with a sigh, and shifted her position on the ground next to the lightspeed transmitter. The device was a rectangular panel, fifteen centimeters thick, with a handle along one side. The front was studded with big, bulky switches and knobs, designed to be easily operable by the armored gauntlets worn by a marine out on the field. The transmitter was most commonly used as a beacon, bringing in an airstrike, or marking a target for an orbital attack. Or, in emergencies, calling for rescue. The transmitter was more powerful than the comms units built into their combat suits, which were dead anyway.\n\nGrec flicked a switch, opening the lightspeed link, and repeated the words she had spoken the first time around.\n\n\u201cBlizzard SAR alpha-three-six-six-three to U-Star Hit and Run. Respond please.\u201d\n\nShe glanced up at the two marines standing over her, then held her breath. She knew what was coming next. She twisted the controls.\n\nThe rhythmic buzzing filled the cave. The same sound as on the comms, as on the emergency radio. The same signal picked up by Grec\u2019s geophys scanner. The same sound heard by the Psi-Marines. The same sound heard in Grec\u2019s head when the voices of the dead had \u201cspoken.\u201d And here it was on the lightspeed link, stronger than ever.\n\nThey were cut off, well and truly.\n\nA thought occurred to Grec, something she had wondered about when they had first come into the cave. She looked up at the ceiling, then stood from the transmitter and walked over to the wall. She ran her gauntleted fingers across the surface\u2014as she had noticed before, it was hard, glassy, a dark silver-grey. Maybe there was something in the cave itself that was interfering with everything . . . although that was impossible, as there were only a handful of alloys that could block a lightspeed signal . . .\n\n\u201cOh God,\u201d Grec whispered, her hand falling away from the wall.\n\nFurusawa stiffened. \u201cWhat is it?\u201d\n\nGrec reached toward the wall of the cave again, then yanked her hand back, as though expecting a shock. She turned to her sergeant.\n\n\u201cThis isn\u2019t a cave.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d asked Palladio from behind them.\n\nFurusawa reached forward, running her own hand over the wall. Then she scratched at it with the metal tip of her gauntlet, and gasped.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s made of herculanium.\u201d\n\n\u201cHow can a cave be made of herculanium?\u201d asked Palladio, joining them at the wall.\n\n\u201cBecause it\u2019s not a cave,\u201d said Grec. \u201cIt\u2019s an eggshell. We\u2019re standing inside a Spider egg.\u201d\n\nGrec held the geophys wand in one hand, her other tightly wrapped around the grip of her rifle, as she stood in the cave\u2019s\u2014in the eggshell\u2019s\u2014entrance. Without the automatic adjustments provided by her helmet, the snow plain was a brilliant white expanse of nothing in the morning light, bright enough to hurt. And without the HUD indicators, they would have to follow the trench back to the drop zone or get lost in the snow.\n\nThe trench that was carved not just by their own march, but by whatever was out there, hiding somewhere under the surface.\n\nThe Spider.\n\nGrec wondered what it was doing here. Spiders hatched en mass in deep space; not planetside, not alone. Vast asteroid fields comprised entirely of hollow herculanium spheroids were carefully mapped by the Fleet, providing data on Spider population and spread. The hatcheries were also a boon for both the Fleet and private mining companies alike, enterprises which frequently clashed as they moved in to process the eggshells into more manageable herculanium ingots. The metal was something both sides of the war were in need of\u2014the Spiders were made of it, as were the U-Stars of the Fleet.\n\nGrec had seen Spider eggshells before\u2014two specimens, one intact, another smaller example split in half, were held by the Fleet Academy on Earth for training. Grec remembered the workshop, being lectured about the Spider lifecycle as the tutor led them around the interior of the divided specimen, a hemisphere ten meters across. The Spider lifecycle was as mysterious as the gestalt\u2019s very origins\u2014how the mechanical, robotic machine creatures were somehow constructed in miniature on a Spider factory planet, billions of baby creatures packaged into eggs which were then scattered into space when the planet was deliberately shattered. The eggs drifted, the Spiders inside growing, building themselves into larger machines of war until they were ready to hatch.\n\nAn entire division of the Fleet was dedicated to studying this process, hoping to find some flaw, some secret which would enable the Fleet to get the upper hand in a war that was going poorly.\n\nBut a Spider egg on a planet? It was embedded in the side of the hills, making it mistakable for a natural cavern. It must have crashed, split open, disgorging an undeveloped Spider which, perhaps following a natural instinct, had found protection by burrowing into the snow. It must have been an accidental arrival, because Warworld 3663 was light years from anywhere, and uninhabited\u2014of no interest to the Spiders, and, consequently, of no interest to the Fleet.\n\nExcept the Fleet had sent a Spec Ops team. A Spec Ops team that the Spider had caught, wrapped in web, and preserved under the ice floor of its old egg.\n\nGrec lowered the geophys scanner and turned back to the others in the cave.\n\n\u201cThey were here to get the Spider, weren\u2019t they Sergeant?\u201d she asked.\n\nFurusawa said nothing. Palladio nodded. \u201cAnd we are too, right? S-A-R wasn\u2019t the mission. The Fleet wants the Spider.\u201d\n\n\u201cAnd,\u201d said Grec, \u201cthey\u2019ll just keep sending teams in until they get it.\u201d\n\n\u201cOr until they run of out marines.\u201d\n\nGrec nodded. \u201cLike they ran out of Spec Ops. They\u2019re too valuable. Better to send in regular marines, with Spec Ops to lead them.\u201d She stepped down off the lip of the entrance and walked up to Furusawa. \u201cAm I getting warmer, Sergeant?\u201d She paused. \u201cAt the briefing, you spoke over Commander Weinberg. Is First Sergeant even your real rank?\u201d\n\nThe geophys scanner bleated. Grec swore and checked the reading, then ran back to the cave entrance. Palladio followed.\n\n\u201cWhat is it?\u201d he asked.\n\nGrec pointed the scanner out into the open. The lights still pulsed with the interference from the cave, but the genuine data was too strong to be swamped completely.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s moving again,\u201d said Grec. \u201cShit.\u201d She\u2019d have to leave the questions for later.\n\n\u201cWe go back to the drop zone, signal for evac.\u201d Furusawa shouldered her rifle and picked up the lightspeed transmitter. \u201cWe\u2019ll open a channel when we\u2019re clear of the interference.\u201d\n\nPalladio stepped back into the cave. \u201cWe go out there, we get eaten.\u201d\n\n\u201cOr we stay here and get added to the larder,\u201d said Furusawa. She stopped at the entrance and handed the lightspeed transmitter to Grec, who took it in one hand. \u201cUse the geophys,\u201d said the sergeant. \u201cWe can watch it with the scanner, stay out of its way until we can get a signal up. Palladio can scramble the Spider\u2019s sensors with his psi.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt takes more than one of us to jam a Spider,\u201d said Palladio. \u201cWe\u2019ll be dead before we reach the drop zone.\u201d\n\nFurusawa flicked the safety off her rifle and the end of the barrel flickered to red. She stepped up to the Psi-Marine. \u201cJust do your job, Psi-Marine, and I\u2019ll do mine.\u201d\n\nGrec pointed at the bodies of Bowen and Anderson at the back of the cave. \u201cWhat about them? And the bodies under the ice? The Fleet doesn\u2019t leave anyone behind, Sergeant.\u201d\n\nFurusawa smiled. Grec felt ill.\n\n\u201cYou\u2019re in the Spec Ops now, Marine. Different rules.\u201d The smile dropped. \u201cWe travel parallel to the trench, but stay clear of it. Let\u2019s go.\u201d\n\nThey ran out onto the snow plain. Out of the herculanium interior of the cave-like eggshell, warmed all through the night by heatsticks, the change in temperature was like a slap in the face. Grec heard Palladio swear behind her even as her own breath caught in her throat, the freezing air threatening to choke her.\n\nShe stumbled onwards, the First Sergeant\u2014or whatever her real rank was\u2014ahead, plowing a path through the snow that got steadily deeper and deeper the farther they got from the hillside, until just a few meters later it was up to their knees. The augmented strength of the combat suits\u2014the powered joints and motivators by design unaffected by the armor\u2019s offline computer\u2014lessened the effort required to run through the snow, but not by much. If they still had their helmets, Grec thought, and the psi-fi link between their minds and the suits, then the armor would have responded to the task. As it was, they made difficult and slow progress.\n\nThen the geophys scanner buzzed in Grec\u2019s hand. Movement, below them.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve got company,\u201d Grec shouted over the crunching schwoosh as they moved through the snow.\n\nFrom behind: \u201cIncoming!\u201d, and then three muffled thuds as Palladio opened fire with his plasma rifle. Grec turned to see the Psi-Marine shooting from the hip as a large area of the ground behind them began to bulge upwards, the snowy covering cracking and sliding apart in great slabs as the Spider stood up from its cover. Palladio swept his rifle up, spreading his shots up the shifting mound of snow. The pulse ammo sparked as it hit something, stripping away more of the ice and snow, revealing the machine rising up out of the ground.\n\nGrec fumbled with her own rifle to fire, but with the geophys scanner and the transmitter in hand, she was slow. Before she had brought her weapon to bear, the sergeant grabbed her shoulder and pulled her backwards.\n\n\u201cCome on!\u201d\n\nBehind, Palladio had ceased fire and was running away from the Spider, which seemed to pause, perhaps getting its bearings.\n\nIt was silver grey, the same matte color as the herculanium of its egg. The machine\u2019s body was spherical, perhaps ten meters across and formed from individual curved plates which slid and shifted as the thing moved. From between the plates, a red light shone\u2014the light, Grec knew, of the solar plasma that boiled in the creature\u2019s core, a power source held in check within a lattice of magnetic fields. Eight eyes\u2014four large, four small\u2014formed an optical array on the front of the body, surrounded by other stubby sensors and antennae of varying size and length, all made of something black and glassy.\n\nPalladio stopped and turned, firing on the enemy machine again. His pulse fire skittered across the machine\u2019s sensor array, but didn\u2019t seem to have any effect.\n\n\u201cScramble it!\u201d Furusawa called out.\n\n\u201cAffirmative!\u201d\n\nPalladio stopped shooting and lowered his weapon. He stood still, and then after a moment the air was filled with the buzzing, clicking sound. This time it wasn\u2019t just in Grec\u2019s head. It was a real sound, reverberating over the snow plain.\n\nPalladio collapsed onto his knees. \u201cI . . . can\u2019t do it. We\u2019re not the only ones needing evac\u2014it\u2019s sending out its own distress call. The signal is swamping everything else.\u201d\n\nThey were dead, Grec knew it. As if responding to her thoughts, the machine rose higher into the air, eight huge, curved, knife-like legs erupting from the snow, flexing, straightening as they lifted the Spider into the gray sky. Five meters. Ten meters. Twenty. Palladio toppled backwards.\n\nGrec dropped the transmitter and leapt forward, reaching for the Psi-Marine laid out in the snow. She got close, nearly close enough to grab one arm and pull, only Furusawa was on her shoulders again. The Sergeant yanked backwards and the pair fell into the snow.\n\n\u201cGet off!\u201d yelled Grec through a mouthful of snow. She jabbed an elbow backwards and was met with a cry from underneath her, then she pushed herself back to her knees. \u201cPalladio!\u201d\n\nThe Spider stood over the Psi-Marine, who lay, unmoving in the snow. The machine\u2019s spherical body rotated backwards a few degrees, until a pyramidal structure on its belly was pointed at the Psi-Marine.\n\n\u201cNo!\u201d But Grec was helpless. Behind, she heard Furusawa unearthing herself from the snow.\n\nThe Spider\u2019s mouth opened.\n\nThe heat was incredible, even from a distance, blasting out in a wide cone from the opening in the machine as its churning plasma core was exposed. Snow and ice vaporized in great clouds of steam around Palladio. He cried out and rolled over to escape the inferno, his face buried in his arms.\n\nThe Spider lowered its body down, the whole structure leaning forward on the four larger, scythe-like legs, as two of the smaller forward supports\u2014more like articulated arms than legs\u2014reached forward.\n\nGrec scrambled in the snow until she had her plasma rifle back in her hands. She raised the sight to her eye and took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm, to make the shot. Their weapons had been useless against the herculanium shell of the machine creature, but there was an opportunity here to hit something far more vulnerable.\n\nThe furnace-like mouth of the Spider was angled down towards the ground, towards Palladio. Grec\u2019s target was small, but relatively stationary. She opened fire, sending white tracer pulses towards it. The first couple impacted on the surface plates on the front of the Spider, but the next flew true, vanishing into the interior of the machine.\n\nAt the ends of the Spider\u2019s arms, pincer claws opened, shut, opened, shut.\n\nGrec\u2019s shot had no effect. The Spider was unstoppable, even in this immature state. She heard Furusawa order her to run, but the roaring of the Spider\u2019s distress call was deafening and Grec decided that she hadn\u2019t heard her properly. She raised her rifle to her eye again, pressed her cheek against the side of the weapon. Perhaps she could take out the legs, or the arms\u2014maybe the joints were fragile, more susceptible to plasma bolts\u2014before the thing got Palladio.\n\nShe took aim, trying to track the movement of the creature\u2019s arms, but she was too slow. The pincers grabbed Palladio by the legs, and he cried out as he was pulled backwards. Grec swore, fired, but too high\u2014if she tried for the arm joints now she\u2019d hit the Psi-Marine. Her shots tore up the front center of the machine, dragging a vertical line between the sensor array on the front, but as the impact flashes faded, she could see the shots hadn\u2019t even scratched it.\n\nThe Spider was oblivious, apparently content with its catch, as it began to sink back into the snow, dragging Palladio with it. The machine\u2019s legs folded in and then the body itself vanished below the ground. Palladio slid backwards, the pincers still around his legs, and then was gone. Soon there was nothing but a mountain of torn-up snow and ice, surrounded by a small lake of steaming melt water. Palladio and the Spider were gone.\n\nGrec dropped her rifle, screamed at the sky, then looked over her shoulder. Furusawa had resumed their journey back to the drop zone.\n\nGrec grabbed for the lightspeed transmitter, then pushed herself to her feet, using the rectangular box for leverage.\n\nThen she trudged after the sergeant, and she kept the safety on her rifle off.\n\nFurusawa had stopped, and was looking up at the gray sky like she expected the unbroken cloud layer to part and for salvation to descend from the heavens. Grec could see her body heaving with effort, her breath gathering in a cloud in front of her. Since the Spider had taken Palladio, their journey had been uninterrupted, the geophys scanner silent.\n\nFurusawa turned around and Grec raised her plasma rifle. She had it aimed right between the sergeant\u2019s eyes.\n\n\u201cYou need to tell me about your orders,\u201d said Grec. For her part, Furusawa didn\u2019t react, she just regarded the marine with a smug expression. Grec ground her teeth and kept the rifle level. Perhaps that was to be expected. Spec Ops were different from the rest of the regular recruits, and the two divisions rarely mixed well.\n\n\u201cS-A-R, plain and simple,\u201d said Furusawa. It was like she said it as a challenge, a dare for Grec to accept or reject.\n\nGrec\u2019s finger curled around the rifle\u2019s trigger. Like Furusawa, she was hot from the run, but the air temperature was perilously low and she knew that out here in the open, without the protection of their helmets, they would freeze to death soon enough. If they weren\u2019t evacuated.\n\nIf the Spider didn\u2019t get them first.\n\n\u201cFuck S-A-R.\u201d Grec sniffed the frozen air. \u201cIs the Fleet so desperate to capture a Spider in secret they\u2019ll send down a ground team with a false briefing?\u201d\n\nFurusawa laughed. \u201cThe briefing was accurate. You just weren\u2019t given the whole picture.\u201d\n\nGrec moved the rifle forward. \u201cTry me.\u201d\n\nThe sergeant rolled her lips, then pointed at the transmitter Grec had dumped in the snow.\n\n\u201cGet the transmitter set up so we can signal the Hit and Run.\u201d\n\n\u201cTell me what\u2019s going on or we\u2019ll wait here for the Spider to get us.\u201d\n\n\u201cPrivate\u2014\u201d\n\nGrec swung her rifle to one side and shot once into the snow, then returned her aim to Furusawa\u2019s forehead.\n\nThe ground shook.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t think you should have done that,\u201d said the Sergeant.\n\nGrec looked around as the air was filled with the buzzing, chirping sound of the Spider distress call. The ground shook again and the snow behind them exploded in shower of white snow and blue ice. The Spider rose up from the ground, its scissor legs unfolding as it stood.\n\nBeside Grec, Furusawa dropped to her knee and raised her rifle, taking aim. Grec knocked the barrel down.\n\n\u201cWait!\u201d she said, and pointed.\n\nThe Spider lowered one of its pincer arms to reveal Palladio, held upright in the machine\u2019s other claw, the two pincers having been cupped together like a protective shell around the marine. From under the machine\u2019s body, hot exhaust from its mouth blasted clouds of steam from the ground as it periodically opened and closed, opened and closed, like the thing was breathing.\n\nThe Spider stood, rocking slightly on its legs.\n\n\u201cPalladio?\u201d Grec called out. \u201cHe\u2019s alive!\u201d\n\nHe was bloody, battered, and had one arm wrapped firmly around his middle. His eyes were closed, like he was concentrating.\n\n\u201cI managed to hack its psi as it pulled me under and got it to resurface, but your shot attracted it.\u201d Palladio winced in obvious pain. \u201cQuick. I can\u2019t hold it for long.\u201d\n\n\u201cHe\u2019s jammed it.\u201d Furusawa lowered her weapon. \u201cGood work, Marine.\u201d She turned to Grec. \u201cSignal the Hit and Run. We\u2019re going to need a cargo hopper\u2014I\u2019ll give you the request code.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou\u2019ve got to be fucking kidding.\u201d\n\nFurusawa ignored her and turned back to the machine. \u201cYou wanted to know what my orders were. You might well get the chance to find out.\u201d\n\nThe Spider shuddered, and there was a change in the tone of its distress beacon. Atop the machine, Palladio shifted and gasped in pain.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a battery, Kat,\u201d he called, his eyes still closed. \u201cIt\u2019s using the lost team as a psychic battery to boost its distress beacon.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat?\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s why it took Khouri. It figured out what she was, then came after the rest of us.\u201d Palladio cried out in pain. \u201cIt\u2019s trying to use me too . . . I can keep it jammed, but its drawing on the others back at the cave. It\u2019ll break free before help arrives.\u201d\n\nThe Spider shuddered again and one leg crept forward.\n\nPalladio was right, Grec knew. It took whole fireteams of Psi-Marines to jam Spider networks. One Psi-Marine\u2014one injured Psi-Marine\u2014couldn\u2019t last long. Not even against an immature Spider\u2014one that was tapping into the extra psi-power provided by its victims stored under the ice.\n\nAs if on cue, Palladio gasped and the machine took another step forward.\n\nGrec dropped to the snow. Maybe they had a chance, a slim one. She only hoped the Hit and Run was ready and waiting.\n\n\u201cNo time,\u201d said Palladio, shaking his head. His arm dropped from his middle, revealing cracked combat armor stained scarlet with blood, which trickled down over the optics of the Spider. \u201cNo time.\u201d\n\nThe transmitter was ready. Grec looked up, saw the Sergeant raise her rifle.\n\nThe Sergeant fired, not at the Spider, but at Palladio. His body jerked as the plasma round hit him, then he slumped forward. Grec rushed toward Furusawa, taking the sergeant out in a tackle. They toppled sideways; as soon as Furusawa hit the ground, Grec pushed herself to her knees, wrenching the sergeant over on to her back, and pulled her gauntleted fist back for a punch.\n\nThe air was suddenly still, quiet. Grec looked up. The Spider\u2019s beacon had shut down, and the machine itself dimmed, the red light shining from between the moving body plates fading. The mouth on the underside closed, and the Spider fell, its legs collapsing. Grec cried out in surprise and dived to the side, grabbing for Furusawa as she did so, but the Sergeant was heavy in her combat armor and as the Spider\u2019s body collided with the ground, Grec was thrown into the air. She landed back in the snow, filling her mouth, nose, eyes. She coughed, gasped, tried to get herself upright. She slid again, and managed to roll over and look back.\n\nThe Spider had fallen clear of Furusawa, but the sergeant wasn\u2019t moving. Grec crawled back to her, then saw the snow underneath the sergeant was quickly turning red. Embedded in the sergeant\u2019s chest was a long, curved piece of metal, part of one of the Spider\u2019s pincer claws. Furusawa\u2019s eyes were open, and she stared at the sky, looking for the rescue that had never come.\n\nShe\u2019d found Palladio\u2019s body lying a few yards away, thrown clear from the falling Spider. She dragged him and the sergeant away from the wrecked Spider, which lay smoking in the slushy snow.\n\nThe sergeant had made the right decision. Grec knew this, even though she wasn\u2019t sure she would have been able to do it herself. Despite being dragged under the snow and injured, Palladio had reached out with his mind to jam the Spider\u2019s AI. The only way to prevent the Spider from burning out his mind and then killing Grec and the sergeant was to kill him. Suddenly breaking the psychic link\u2014a link amplified by the minds of the dead marines the Spider was using as a battery\u2014would send a shockwave back to the Spider, enough to fry its CPU. Furusawa had realized this and took the decision, one that would have saved her had Grec not intervened.\n\nHad Grec not intervened.\n\nShe\u2019d searched Furusawa\u2019s body, found nothing out of the ordinary. No sealed orders, no secret ID card that revealed her true rank and identity. As far as the official record would go, she was just a First Sergeant in the Fleet Marine Corps. Killed in action, Warworld 3663. The Omega classification could be removed, at least.\n\nGrec knelt in the snow and activated the transmitter. Now clear of interference from the Spider\u2019s beacon, the transmitter\u2019s signal light shone bright blue, and the device began to softly beep.\n\nFleet Marine Private Katarina Grec knelt in the snow. She thought of Alonso and Bowen and Palladio. She thought of Anderson, and of the secrets that had died with Furusawa.\n\nShe thought about the Fleet and how fucked up it was and how maybe she didn\u2019t want to be part of it, not anymore.\n\nShe thought of Maryam Khouri and she looked up into the sky, and she waited for rescue.\n\n\u201cCold War\u201d copyright \u00a9 2014 by Seven Wonders Limited\n\nArt copyright \u00a9 2014 by Victor Mosquera"}
{"text":"Nov 1, 2016; Brooklyn, NY, USA; New York Islanders left wing Andrew Ladd (16) is taken down as he plays the puck against the Tampa Bay Lightning during the second period at Barclays Center. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports\n\nThe New York Islanders don\u2019t reveal much information on player injuries. What little we do get is vague. For instance, GM Garth Snow casually dropped that Andrew Ladd was hurting for months, and that was the reason for his scratch. No mention of the specific ailment in his statement. No follow-up from the press.\n\nI was watching the Islanders -Kings game this past Saturday night. Not so unusual for a New York Islanders blogger. Since I live in Los Angeles I was watching the King\u2019s feed. And something amazing happened a few minutes into the game.\n\nJim Fox and Chris Cuthbert were doing the game. Cuthbert, filling in for Bob Miller, is fantastic. One of the best in my book. Though I admit to being partial to hearing a Canadian accent calling a game.\n\nAnyway, early in the first Fox is discussing the New York Islanders scratches for the night and says the most amazing thing. \u201cAndrew Ladd is out with a lower back injury. He first hurt his back during training camp and it hasn\u2019t been right all year\u201d\n\nUhh\u2026Come Again?\n\nWhat? Did you know that? Garth Snow finally mentioned a nagging injury last week but didn\u2019t specify it at all.\n\nWhy didn\u2019t the Islander\u2019s own color guy, Butch Goring, ever gives this piece of info? He is not an employee of the Islanders. He shouldn\u2019t fear the wrath of Garth\u2026 much.\n\nWhere was Arthur Staple on this? I think he does a great job, but if the info is out there for Jim Fox, how can Arthur not stumble upon it? When Staple gets unfairly dumped on for not being more critical he likes to answer that he is a reporter and not a columnist.\n\nWell, if he is a reporter, than he needs to report.\n\nI am sympathetic to the idea that a person\u2019s medical records are private, and should not be divulged without permission. But there is an implicit sacrifice of privacy when you become a professional athlete. Your physical condition, as it might affect performance, is fair game.\n\nI don\u2019t want to know who has a hangnail, or premature hair loss (and that\u2019s just the H\u2019s).\n\nWhat I want, and expect, is that the people who are empowered with the sacred (yeah, alright, that\u2019s hyperbole) duty to ask the question and chase the answers. Staple and Cygalis aren\u2019t expected to be Woodward and Bernstein.\n\nI don\u2019t expect them to meet a source in a dark underground parking garage. They don\u2019t need three sources before they go to print. But did anyone even ask the question about Ladd\u2019s injury?\n\nDid they put any effort into finding an answer?\n\nOr have years of a Kim Jung Snow style regime beaten them into intellectual submission on the injury disclosure issue?\n\nBut aye, here\u2019s the rub. If this medical information is so closely held, how the hell did Fox get it?\n\nI sent him an email to ask the question. No response yet."}
{"text":"Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Image from Texas Tech\n\nLUBBOCK, TX (NEWS RELEASE) - In 1984, Sankar Chatterjee \u2013 curator of paleontology for the Museum of Texas Tech University \u2013 and his student, Bryan Small, made an astounding discovery.\n\nWorking on Seymour Island in Antarctica, they uncovered the fossilized skull of an animal they\u2019d never seen before. While it was obviously a plesiosaur \u2013 a Cretaceous-period marine reptile scientists first discovered in the early 1600s \u2013 this plesiosaur was unlike any previously found. They named the new species Morturneria and brought its skeleton back to the Museum of Texas Tech.\n\nNow, 33 years later, Chatterjee and his team have made a new discovery about Morturneria, one that adds a whole new dimension to science\u2019s understanding of plesiosaurs \u2013 and larger than that, to the understanding of evolution itself.\n\nMore than 65 million years ago, the Earth\u2019s oceans were populated with many animals still found there today, like fish, krill and sharks. But one of the oceans\u2019 biggest predators, the plesiosaurs, went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs on land.\n\n\u201cOften, plesiosaurs are called sea monsters,\u201d said Chatterjee, a Horn Professor in the Department of Geosciences. \u201cThey were large \u2013 50 feet long, superb swimmers and occupied the top of the marine food chain. Although dinosaurs are very familiar to everyone, during their days, the sea was ruled by these monster-like plesiosaurs. Like dinosaurs on land, they dominated the sea from Arctic to Antarctic waters. \u201d\n\nPlesiosaurs had a broad, flat body and short tail, four long flippers they used to \u201cfly\u201d through the water, long necks and very sharp teeth.\n\n\u201cThe teeth of most plesiosaurs are conical, stout, sharp, robust and ideal for stabbing and killing large animals,\u201d Chatterjee said.\n\nBut as he wrote in his 1984 paper announcing Morturneria\u2019s discovery, \u201cthe long, slender and delicate teeth may have formed a \u2018trapping\u2019 device that enabled (the animals) to feed on small fish and crustaceans that abound in the same deposits.\u201d\n\nThis notation led an international team of Chilean, Argentinian and American paleontologists to take a closer look at Morturneria\u2019s teeth.\n\n\u201cIn our 1984 paper, we described the unusual teeth of Morturneria and their probable function,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever, our new international team, who had worked on plesiosaurs from many continents, found them fascinating and unique.\u201d\n\nChatterjee and the team reconstructed Morturneria with a large, round head, a huge mouth and tiny teeth that point the wrong way. The teeth did not meet tip to tip as in all other plesiosaurs, but lay together in a battery that strained food particles from the water.\n\n\u201cWhen the jaw was closed, teeth from the upper and lower jaws formed a nice trap,\u201d Chatterjee said. \u201cBasically, the animal would swallow a school of krill, close the jaws to let the water out, but keep the krill inside for chewing and swallowing. With these kind of interdigitating delicate teeth, the animal could not tackle the large fish or shelled animals (called ammonites) that were the favorite foods of most plesiosaurs.\u201d\n\nThe team\u2019s finding, published in the new issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, is that Morturneria used a filter-feeding method. This feeding style is unknown in other marine reptiles but is found in today\u2019s baleen whales. F. Robin O\u2019Keefe of Marshall University was the article\u2019s lead author.\n\nThe identification of Morturneria\u2019s whale-like filter feeding is a startling case of convergent evolution between reptiles and mammals. Plesiosaurs and whales shared many of the intervening steps in the evolution of this feeding style and their extreme morphologies are similar despite arising from different ancestors.\n\nChatterjee stresses convergent evolution does not imply Morturneria was in any way related to today\u2019s baleen whales; it just means they both evolved the same way.\n\n\u201cThey had adopted similar lifestyle and feeding,\u201d he said. \u201cFor example, birds and bats fly, but birds are now considered dinosaurs and bats are mammals. These superficial similarities of lifestyles and behavior are called \u2018convergent evolution.\u2019\u201d\n\n(News release from Texas Tech)"}
{"text":"Created Last update By\n\nThis (almost) daily post intends to follow up the activity changes of volcanoes all over the world.\n\nThis post is written by geologist Rodger Wilson who specializes in Volcano seismicity and Armand Vervaeck. Please feel free to tell us about new or changed activity if we haven't written about it. -\n\nApril 28, 2013 volcano activity\n\nWe start our daily overview with another great video from yesterday's Etna (Sicily, Italy) Paroxysm (short powerful eruption)\n\nKVERT reported no significant changes in eruptive\/seismic at the five active Kamchatkan volcanoes: Tolbachik, Sheveluch, Bezymianny, Kizimen, and Karymsky. Seismicity at Gorely volcano, which presently exhibits a high level of hydrothermal activity, remains at a moderate level.\n\nSmall shallow earthquakes continue in varying daily numbers at Iliamna volcano (Alaska Range) (station INE).\n\nSeveral small earthquakes occurred at\/near Mount Rainier (Cascade Range) (WA) (station RCS) and Mount Saint Helens (station VALT) today.\n\nSeismic data from Colima volcano (Mexico) continue to be unavailable. The Colima volcanocam showed no obvious surface activity when viewed a few hours ago. Exhalations occurred at an average rate of nearly two events per hour at Popocatepetl volcano overnight. An exceptionally large outburst took place at the volcano earlier today and launched an ash-laden plume to over a kilometer in height above the cone. The Popo seismogram continues to show mainly low-level volcanic tremor occurring within\/beneath the cone.\n\nVolcanic tremor is high at Pacaya volcano (Guatemala) (station PCG) at this time, but surface activity has been relatively low. Small strombolian explosions, incandescent rockfalls from the snout of the newly extruded lava flow, and nearly continuous \"locomotive sounds\" characterize activity at Fuego volcano (station FG3) today. Small vulcanian explosions have recently increased from the Caliente dome at the Santiaguito Dome Complex (Santa Maria volcano ) (station STG3), some are visible on today's Santiaguito seismogram.\n\nVolcanic tremor remains slightly elevated at San Cristobal volcano (Nicaragua) (station CRIN). Magnitudes of seismic events at Telica volcano (station TELN) have increased overnight, but their rate of occurrence has been only slightly above the \"normal\" high background level observed at the volcano. Volcanic tremor at Masaya volcano (station MASN) remains unstable, but has generally declined in amplitude over the past few days.\n\nHigher-than-normal magnitude volcanic earthquakes continue at San Miguel volcano (El Salvador) (station VSM).\n\nLocal earthquakes and hydrothermal \"noise\" continue at Poas volcano (Costa Rica) (station POA2) today.\n\nSeismicity remains unstable at Nevado Del Ruiz volcano (Colombia) (station OLLZ). Small earthquakes affect Sotara (station SOSO) and Cumbal (station MEVZ) volcanoes, and pulses of gas (and ash) emission tremor have recently appeared on seismograms at Galeras volcano (station CUVZ).\n\nEruptive activity has re-commenced at Tungurahua volcano (Ecuador) (station RETU) less than two days after we noted an increase in seismicity (see yesterday's report) at the volcano. Small earthquakes continue, though with reduced amplitudes today, at Cotopaxi volcano (station CO1V). Co-eruptive(?) seismicity has increased at Reventador volcano (station CONE) since yesterday.\n\nVolcanic tremor continues its slow decline at White Island volcano (New Zealand), but surface hydrothermal activity remains strong there.\n\nOMI satellite data have not been updated during the past few days (another victim of \"The Sequester\"?). Volcanic \"hotspots\" were identified in MODIS satellite images of Tolbachik, Fuego, Etna and Stromboli (Italy), and Batu Tara (eastern Java) volcanoes.\n\nzTime goes here"}
{"text":"President Trump has demanded that the House of Representatives vote on the Republican health care bill Friday, even though he doesn\u2019t have the votes lined up.\n\nIf the vote is taken and the bill goes down, it will be a tremendous political embarrassment to the new administration. But if this gambit works, it will be remembered as a bold legislative play that paid off \u2014 albeit in the service of a deeply flawed and extremely unpopular bill that may never get out of the Senate.\n\nWhatever happens, it\u2019s worth noting that this is a deeply unusual legislative strategy. The usual practice for big, controversial bills like this is for congressional leaders to ensure they have votes in hand \u2014 or at least really close to in hand \u2014 before actually taking the vote.\n\nThen when leaders are confident they have or are close to getting juuust enough votes to get the bill through, they actually hold the vote. Nancy Pelosi, for one, was a master of this strategy during her speakership, which resulted in several very narrow House victories on top Obama agenda items in his first two years.\n\nWhy most leaders get the votes before taking the vote\n\nThis practice is the norm in part because it\u2019s simply embarrassing for a leader and a president to bring up a bill and have it fail.\n\nMore broadly, though, it\u2019s done because party leaders generally want to protect their party members, and particularly their members in swing districts, from casting tough votes unless it\u2019s totally necessary.\n\nVoting for an intensely controversial bill like the American Health Care Act is politically painful, particularly for members of Congress in vulnerable districts. These votes can be used against them in attack ads and hurt their reelection campaigns.\n\nStill, if members of Congress take a tough vote and the bill becomes law, at least they\u2019ve achieved something. The worst outcome for a leader, though, is if you force your members to take a tough vote and then the bill fails anyway. Then you\u2019ve forced them to stick their necks out for no benefit, and made them more vulnerable to attacks in the next election.\n\nThis is exactly what happened in 1993 when House Democrats voted to pass Bill Clinton\u2019s \u201cBTU tax\u201d on energy, a bill that died in the Senate. And even Pelosi let it happen once in 2009, when a fair number of Democrats in vulnerable districts voted for a cap-and-trade bill that, again, died in the Senate.\n\nIn both cases, many of those Democrats then lost their seats \u2014 and their party lost the House \u2014 in the next midterm election. (\u201cGetting BTUed\u201d briefly became a fairly common phrase on the Hill.) And both of those bills at least got through the House; casting a vote for an unpopular proposal that ends up failing in the House seems like even more pointless.\n\nSavvy party leaders want to avoid that bad outcome, so they generally try to only hold a tough vote if they\u2019re confident they can get the bill across the finish line, at least in their chamber.\n\nHarvard professors David King and Richard Zeckhauser demonstrated this with a clever 2003 paper that shows that on controversial congressional votes, \u201csmall victories\u201d are a far more common result than \u201csmall defeats.\u201d That\u2019s in large part because if leaders figure out advance that they\u2019re headed to a narrow defeat on a vote, they preempt that outcome by not holding the vote at all (until they can line up more votes, at least).\n\nBut Trump isn\u2019t a typical party leader\n\nTrump, however, has demanded that the House vote on the AHCA even though he\u2019s not sure if it can pass. He\u2019s probably taking this approach for a few reasons.\n\nFirst, Trump sees himself as a savvy negotiator and dealmaker willing to employ bold stratagems. Here, he sees himself as calling holdout conservatives\u2019 bluff. (Maybe he\u2019s right!)\n\nThe Trump playbook pic.twitter.com\/FQBQJU9Mx0 \u2014 Brandon Wall (@Walldo) March 24, 2017\n\nSecond, as a businessman and Washington outsider, Trump has never actually governed before. As a result, he simply may not be all that familiar with legislative leaders\u2019 dynamics on close votes. (A piece by Axios\u2019s Jonathan Swan provided some evidence for this, claiming that congressional GOP leaders fear \u201cthe vote will collapse\u201d if they don\u2019t line up the votes in advance, while the White House is more optimistic.)\n\nThird, Trump may not care all that much about trying to protect Republican members of Congress. He himself came up as an outsider in the party, and hardly any members of Congress endorsed him. He may naturally have little loyalty to the party as a result. (Though he may live to regret it if Republicans lose the House.)\n\nFourth, the president doesn\u2019t seem to care all that much about health reform in particular. It wasn\u2019t his top priority during the campaign, and people close to him are already leaking to the New York Times\u2019s Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman that he regrets agreeing to put it ahead of tax reform on the agenda. If it fails, he may think, So what?\n\nFinally, Trump is vindictive and legendarily holds on to grudges. Rather than try to make GOP members of Congress more comfortable, he may want to force them to take a clear stand for or against him \u2014 so, perhaps, he can retaliate against those who remain defiant."}
{"text":"The first time Herb Hyman spoke with the rep from Starbucks, in 1991, the life of his small business flashed before his eyes. For three decades, Hyman\u2019s handful of Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf stores had been filling the caffeine needs of Los Angeles locals and the Hollywood elite: Johnny Carson had his own blend there; Jacques Cousteau arranged to have Hyman\u2019s coffee care packages meet his ship at ports around the world; and Dirty Dozen leading man Lee Marvin often worked behind the counter with Hyman for fun. But when the word came down that the rising Seattle coffee juggernaut was plotting its raid on Los Angeles, Hyman feared his life\u2019s work would be trampled underfoot. Starbucks even promised as much. \u201cThey just flat-out said, \u2018If you don\u2019t sell out to us, we\u2019re going to surround your stores,\u2019 \u201d Hyman recalled. \u201cAnd lo and behold, that\u2019s what happened\u2014and it was the best thing that ever happened to us.\u201d\n\nEver since Starbucks blanketed every functioning community in America with its cafes, the one effect of its expansion that has steamed people the most has been the widely assumed dying-off of mom and pop coffeehouses. Our cities once overflowed with charming independent coffee shops, the popular thinking goes, until the corporate steamroller known as Starbucks came through and crushed them all, perhaps tossing the victims a complimentary Alanis Morrisette CD to ease the psychic pain. In a world where Starbucks operates nearly 15,000 stores, with six new ones opening each day, isn\u2019t this a reasonable assumption? How could momma and poppa coffee hope to survive? But Hyman didn\u2019t misspeak\u2014and neither did the dozens of other coffeehouse owners I\u2019ve interviewed. Strange as it sounds, the best way to boost sales at your independently owned coffeehouse may just be to have Starbucks move in next-door.\n\nThat\u2019s certainly how it worked out for Hyman. Soon after declining Starbucks\u2019s buyout offer, Hyman received the expected news that the company was opening up next to one of his stores. But instead of panicking, he decided to call his friend Jim Stewart, founder of the Seattle\u2019s Best Coffee chain, to find out what really happens when a Starbucks opens nearby. \u201cYou\u2019re going to love it,\u201d Stewart reported. \u201cThey\u2019ll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar.\u201d The prediction came true: Each new Starbucks store created a local buzz, drawing new converts to the latte-drinking fold. When the lines at Starbucks grew beyond the point of reason, these converts started venturing out\u2014and, Look! There was another coffeehouse right next-door! Hyman\u2019s new neighbor boosted his sales so much that he decided to turn the tactic around and start targeting Starbucks. \u201cWe bought a Chinese restaurant right next to one of their stores and converted it, and by God, it was doing $1 million a year right away,\u201d he said.\n\nHyman isn\u2019t the only one who has experienced this Starbucks reverse jinx. Orange County, Calif., coffeehouse owner Martin Diedrich started hyperventilating when he first heard a Starbucks was opening \u201cwithin a stone\u2019s throw\u201d of his cafe, yet he reported similar results: \u201cI didn\u2019t suffer whatsoever. Ultimately I prospered, in no small part because of it.\u201d Ward Barbee, the recently passed founder of the coffee trade magazine Fresh Cup, saw this happen scores of times. \u201cAnyone who complains about having a Starbucks put in next to you is crazy,\u201d he told me. \u201cYou want to welcome the manager, give them flowers. It should be the best news that any local coffeehouse ever had.\u201d\n\nNow, lest we get carried away with the happy civic results of Starbucks\u2019 global expansion, I hasten to point out that the company isn\u2019t exactly thrilled to have this effect on its local competitors\u2019 sales. Starbucks is actually trying to be ruthless in its store placements; it wants those independents out of the way, and it frequently succeeds at displacing them through other means, such as buying a mom and pop\u2019s lease or intimidating them into selling out. Beyond the frothy drinks and the touchy-feely decor, Starbucks runs on considerable competitive fire. Consider Tracy Cornell, a former Starbucks real-estate dealmaker who found and locked up a staggering 900 North American retail sites for the company in her decade-plus career. \u201cIt was sort of piranha-like,\u201d Cornell told me of her work for Starbucks. \u201cIt was just talking to landlords, seeing who was behind on their rent. All I needed was an opening like that, where the landlord wanted out. I was looking for tenants who were weak.\u201d\n\nAs much as independent coffeehouse owners generally enjoy having a Starbucks close at hand, most of them seem to have a story or two of someone from the company trying to undercut them. And occasionally a new Starbucks will hurt a mom and pop\u2014even drive them out of business. For example, in 2006, cafe owner Penny Stafford filed a federal antitrust suit against the company, alleging a nearby Starbucks illegally sank her Bellevue, Wash., coffeehouse. Starbucks employees were passing out samples right outside her front door, Stafford claims, even though the company\u2019s nearest outlet was over 300 feet away.\n\nBut closures like this have been the exception, not the rule. In its predatory store placement strategy, Starbucks has been about as lethal a killer as a fluffy bunny rabbit. Business for independently owned coffee shops has been nothing less than exceptional as of late. Here\u2019s a statistic that might be surprising, given the omnipresence of the Starbucks empire: According to recent figures from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, 57 percent of the nation\u2019s coffeehouses are still mom and pops. Just over the five-year period from 2000 to 2005\u2014long after Starbucks supposedly obliterated indie cafes\u2014the number of mom and pops grew 40 percent, from 9,800 to nearly 14,000 coffeehouses. (Starbucks, I might add, tripled in size over that same time period. Good times all around.) So much for the sharp decline in locally owned coffee shops. And prepare yourself for some bona fide solid investment advice: The failure rate for new coffeehouses is a mere 10 percent, according to the market research firm Mintel, which means the vast majority of cafes stay afloat no matter where Starbucks drops its stores. Compare that to the restaurant business, where failure is the norm.\n\nSo now that we know Starbucks isn\u2019t slaughtering mom and pop, the thorny question remains: Why is Starbucks amplifying their business? It\u2019s actually pretty simple. In contrast to so-called \u201cdowntown killers\u201d like Home Depot or Wal-Mart, Starbucks doesn\u2019t enjoy the kinds of competitive advantages that cut down its local rivals\u2019 sales. Look at Wal-Mart. It offers lower prices and a wider array of goods than its small-town rivals, so it acts like a black hole on local consumers, sucking in virtually all of their business. Starbucks, on the other hand, is often more expensive than the local coffeehouse, and it offers a very limited menu; you\u2019ll never see discounts or punch cards at Starbucks, nor will you see unique, localized fare (or\u2014let\u2019s be honest\u2014fare that doesn\u2019t make your tongue feel like it\u2019s dying). In other words, a new Starbucks doesn\u2019t prevent customers from visiting independents in the same way Wal-Mart does\u2014especially since coffee addicts need a fix every day, yet they don\u2019t always need to hit the same place for it. When Starbucks opens a store next to a mom and pop, it creates a sort of coffee nexus where people can go whenever they think \u201ccoffee.\u201d Local consumers might have a formative experience with a Java Chip Frappuccino, but chances are they\u2019ll branch out to the cheaper, less crowded, and often higher-quality independent cafe later on. So when Starbucks blitzed Omaha with six new stores in 2002, for instance, business at all coffeehouses in town immediately went up as much as 25 percent.\n\nThe key for independent coffeehouse owners who want to thrive with a Starbucks next-door is that they don\u2019t try to imitate Starbucks. (As many failed coffee chains can attest, there\u2019s no way to beat Starbucks at being Starbucks.) The locally owned cafes that offer their own unique spin on the coffeehouse experience\u2014and, crucially, a quality brew\u2014are the ones that give the Seattle behemoth fits. Serve an appetizing enough cappuccino, and you can even follow Hyman\u2019s lead and take aim at almighty Starbucks, where automated espresso machines now pull consistently middling shots at the touch of a button\u2014no employee craftsmanship required.\n\nAfter all, if Starbucks can make a profit by putting its stores right across the street from each other, as it so often does, why couldn\u2019t a unique, well-run mom and pop do even better next-door? And given America\u2019s continuing thirst for exorbitantly priced gourmet coffee drinks, there\u2019s a lot of cash out there for the taking. As coffee consultant Dan Cox explained, \u201cYou can\u2019t do better than a cup of coffee for profit. It\u2019s insanity. A cup of coffee costs 16 cents. Once you add in labor and overhead, you\u2019re still charging a 400 percent markup\u2014not bad! Where else can you do that?\u201d Until Americans decide they need to pay four bucks a pop every morning for a custom-baked, designer-toast experience, probably nowhere."}
{"text":"Vibrate the music! Turn everyday objects into speakers\n\nPocket sized powerful music maker\n\nIf it works with headphones, it'll work with Vibroy\n\nEveryone knows that the best sounding music comes from high quality speakers. And whether you bought those speakers at a big box store or out of the back of a van, they're probably big. Too big to carry around when you want to make noise on the go. After all, you have to blast the Imperial March when the CEO walks into the board room, right? If you don't, you might find yourself on the receiving end of another Force Choke.\n\nThe Vibroy Portable Vibration Speaker turns everyday objects into speakers. Stick it to boxes, empty food containers, furniture, your coffee cup. Vibroy's mini module can turn just about anything into a speaker and it's so small that you can slip it into your pocket and take it everywhere you go. Does it work with your device? Yes, it probably does! If you can plug in your earbuds or headphones into it, chances are it will work with the Vibroy. Now wherever you go, you can vibrate the music!\n\nProduct Specifications"}
{"text":"The surfing section of this Jimmy Gopperth interview comes later. Considering the New Plymouth native is a professional rugby player, signed by Leinster to replace Jonathan Sexton (or is that to provide cover for Ian Madigan?) we felt it prudent to lead off with that area of expertise.\n\nThe Newcastle Falcons seems a peculiar club for a one-time All Black triallist to spend the last four years of his twenties playing the game he was born to run.\n\n\u201cI was just kind of sitting behind Dan Carter for ages,\u201d said Gopperth, stalling in the dead ball area of Cill Dara RFC last Friday morning after signing his name roughly a thousand times.\n\n\u201cI had a young family and I saw the opportunity. I had a few mates in Newcastle at the time and coming overseas, there was a good atmosphere and it was so much more low key outside of rugby so you could enjoy it, enjoy life.\n\n\u201cI had a great four years there. The rugby was not that flash at times, but I adapted really well and had some great experiences.\u201d\n\nAfter 52 outings and 354 points for the Wellington Hurricanes (2005-08) and a a season with the Auckland Blues, how close was every Kiwi boy\u2019s dream to becoming a reality?\n\n\u201cI got an All Black trial in 2005 and was always sniffing around. I played Junior All Blacks in 2006 and I was there or there abouts. When you have Dan Carter and Nick Evans floating around, for myself and Stephen Donald it was such a conveyor belt.\n\n\u201cI was playing good footy and enjoying myself but it is so hard to crack that black jersey, which is something all young New Zealanders wants to do. I was unfortunate, but I still played at a high level and have no regrets.\u201d\n\nGlint in his eye\n\nThen Newcastle. Now here. There\u2019s a glint in his eye as he delivers the next comment.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m ready for the opportunity to come back into that environment again; to play for a team that is going to be contending for the Heineken Cup is even better. There is a huge buzz around the city, you can see it here today, and that tunes you in a little more. You can test yourself against the best players and the best players in the squad.\u201d\n\nUp at the other 22, Ian Madigan is still scribbling away alongside Luke Fitzgerald and a barely visible Brian O\u2019Driscoll, the barrel of kids threatening to collapse in upon him.\n\nUntil, that is, his smiling face, reappears from underneath the wave of admirers.\n\nWe choose our next words carefully. Gopperth probably knows by now that he will be fielding the Madigan question from now until our next heat wave, circa 2016, when his contract runs dry.\n\n\u201cIt is healthy for both of us. You want to go into a team where you have two, three, four guys pushing for one position because it brings the best out of everybody.\n\n\u201cIf you just get it too easy and you know you\u2019re number one you can let your form slip. This way we can be on each other\u2019s heels and pushing each other. There are a couple of young guys who will be pushing us as well [by complete coincidence Cathal Marsh\u2019s developing frame strolls past].\n\n\u201cNobody wants to be a back-up, I\u2019m just going to try and fit in as best I can with the systems and the environment and use my authority in the game and my experience and we\u2019ll see how it goes. I\u2019m looking forward to the challenge.\u201d\n\nThey are similar enough players; squat and waspish with dazzling hand-eye co-ordination.\n\n\u201cWith myself and Mads, I don\u2019t think \u2013 to be fair to (Sexton) \u2013 we\u2019re losing too much. We\u2019re gaining enthusiasm with both of us. We will be biting at each other\u2019s heels and that enthusiasm we might just blossom amongst the group.\u201d\n\nThat\u2019s enough rugby talk for August. Go to YouTube and the usual action clips of Gopperth can be found but it\u2019s the eight minute, freeze-frame surfing montage, replete with slick tunes that\u2019s really worth a look.\n\nA friend has a place up in the Donegal seaside village of Rossnowlagh.\n\nWet suit\n\n\u201cAh, I\u2019ve just been trying to get my bearings,\u201d said the man who seems happiest in a wet suit. \u201cWhen my missus came over we went to the west coast and had a good weekend. It is just like New Zealand, literally, with all the winding roads and the water was nice and warm.\n\n\u201cGrowing up in New Zealand the beach was on my back doorstep so I grew up in the sea. Having a good coastline here, even the east coast, we went diving, I found a few lobsters . . .\u201d\n\nThe board and the flippers will be shelved as rugby takes over in the coming weeks and at 30 it\u2019s a career opportunity he almost believed had passed him by.\n\n\u201cOnce everything worked out that Jonny was leaving, Joe gave me a call to see my availability. I jumped straight away, as soon as Joe asked me, I just said yes.\n\n\u201cIt is the biggest opportunity I could get, to come to a club such as Leinster . . . I couldn\u2019t turn it down.\u201d"}
{"text":"A New Jersey congressman wrote directly to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta two months ago to seek details about the Dover Air Force Base mortuary\u2019s practice of dumping troops\u2019 cremated body parts in a landfill but says he never received a reply.\n\nThe congressman\u2019s letter raises questions about when Panetta learned that the mortuary disposed of cremated portions of remains at the King George County, Va., landfill. Panetta has said he was unaware of the dumping before this week.\n\nRep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), acting on behalf of a constituent whose husband was killed in Iraq and was prepared for burial by the Dover mortuary, said he sent a letter to Panetta on Sept. 16 \u201cseeking clear and definitive answers\u201d about the mortuary\u2019s landfill practices. Holt said he had raised the issue a few months earlier with the Pentagon\u2019s legislative affairs office but was \u201cfrustrated by a failure\u201d to get a full response.\n\nPentagon press secretary George Little said Friday that Panetta\u2019s office had received Holt\u2019s Sept. 16 correspondence and that staffers \u201chave been working to collect the information required to answer the questions in the congressman\u2019s letter. We will, of course, provide a thorough response as promptly as possible.\u201d\n\nLittle said Panetta was first briefed on the issue Wednesday.\n\nAt a news conference Thursday, Panetta said he had been kept informed about a broader federal investigation into problems at the Dover mortuary but had been unaware of the landfill arrangements until The Washington Post reported on them the day before.\n\n\u201cI did not know that, frankly,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cI think that it happened back in the past,\u201d added Panetta, who took office July 1. \u201cI know they\u2019ve changed that procedure now, but nevertheless it\u2019s something we should look at.\u201d\n\nThe Dover mortuary handles the remains of American troops killed overseas. The Air Force said that it ended the landfill dumping in 2008 and that the ashes are now buried at sea in ceremonies overseen by the Navy.\n\nAir Force officials have said they dumped only cremated fragments or portions of body parts that were unable to be identified at first or were later recovered from the battlefield. Family members had authorized the military to dispose of those portions.\n\nThe Air Force said the body parts were cremated, then incinerated, and taken to the landfill by a military contractor. The manner of disposal was not disclosed to relatives of the troops.\n\nIn his letter to Panetta, Holt asked why the ashes were trucked to the landfill and not interred at Arlington National Cemetery. He also asked whether the human remains had been mixed with incinerated medical waste, and he sought information on which military contractors were responsible.\n\nAs of Friday, Holt said, he still had not received answers from Panetta\u2019s office.\n\n\u201cI thought there would be some straightforward explanation that we could get fairly quickly,\u201d Holt said in a telephone interview. \u201cEvidently this has been harder for them to answer.\u201d\n\nHolt said he was acting on behalf of Gari-Lynn Smith, a constituent whose husband, Army Sgt. 1st Class Scott R. Smith, was killed by a buried bomb in Iraq in 2006.\n\nIn 2007, Gari-Lynn Smith received her husband\u2019s autopsy report and learned that some remains had not been found in time to include in his casket.\n\nOver the next four years, she tried to find out what happened to those body parts. A Dover mortuary official notified her in April that they had been cremated and taken to the landfill.\n\nHolt said the Pentagon\u2019s legislative affairs staff confirmed to him in June that the landfill dumping had taken place between 2003 and 2008. Though they did not give details, they wrote to Holt that the practice ended as part of \u201ca process improvement initiative and not the result of complaints or findings of non-compliance.\u201d\n\nIn a statement, Holt disputed that assertion.\n\n\u201cIt is now clear to me that real issues did and may still exist, complaints were made and non-compliance was an all too common occurrence at Dover,\u201d he said.\n\nIn addition, Holt criticized the Pentagon for not informing him \u2014 at the time of his inquiries this summer \u2014 that the Air Force was simultaneously conducting a separate investigation into the Dover mortuary.\n\nThe results of that 18-month investigation were made public Tuesday, when federal investigators said they had documented \u201cgross mismanagement\u201d after whistleblowers complained about lost body parts, shoddy inventory controls and lax supervision.\n\nPanetta has said he was fully briefed about the probe as soon as he took office in July. That investigation, however, did not examine the mortuary\u2019s landfill-dumping.\n\nThe defense secretary appointed an independent panel Tuesday to review overall operations at the mortuary. The panel\u2019s leader, former U.S. surgeon general Richard H. Carmona, quit Friday so he instead could run for the Senate. He is seeking an open seat from Arizona.\n\nThe Pentagon said Panetta would name a replacement to head the review panel."}
{"text":"Artist's concept of astronauts in an Orion capsule helping direct robotic teleoperations on the moon's farside.\n\nNASA is pressing forward on assessing the value of a \"human-tended waypoint\" near the far side of the moon \u2014 one that would embrace international partnerships as well as commercial and academic participation, SPACE.com has learned.\n\nAccording to a Feb. 3 memo from William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, a team is being formed to develop a cohesive plan for exploring a spot in space known as the Earth-moon libration point 2 (EML-2).\n\nLibration points, also known as Lagrangian points, are places in space where the combined gravitational pull of two large masses roughly balance each other out, allowing spacecraft to essentially \"park\" there.\n\nA pre-memo NASA appraisal of EML-2, which is near the lunar far side, has spotlighted this destination as the \"leading option\" for a near-term exploration capability. [Gallery: Visions of Deep-Space Station Missions]\n\nEML-2 could serve as a gateway for capability-driven exploration of multiple destinations, such as near-lunar space, asteroids, the moon, the moons of Mars and, ultimately, Mars itself, according to NASA officials.\n\nA capabilities-driven NASA architecture is one that should use the agency's planned heavy-lift rocket, known as the Space Launch System, and the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle \"as the foundational elements.\"\n\nThe Lagrange points for the Earth-moon system. NASA is evaluating an early mission with the Orion capsule placed at Earth-moon L2. Astronauts parked there could teleoperate robots on the lunar farside. (Image: \u00a9 David A. Kring, LPI-JSC Center for Lunar Science and Exploration)\n\nCadence of compelling missions\n\nThe memo spells out six strategic principles to help enable exploration beyond low-Earth orbit:\n\nIncorporating significant international participation that leverages current International Space Station partnerships.\n\nU.S. commercial business opportunities to further enhance the space station logistics market with a goal of reducing costs and allowing for private sector innovation.\n\nMultiuse or reusable in-space infrastructure that allows a capability to be developed and reused over time for a variety of exploration destinations.\n\nThe application of technologies for near-term applications while focusing research and development of new technologies to reduce costs, improve safety, and increase mission capture over the longer term.\n\nDemonstrated affordability across the project life cycle.\n\nNear-term mission opportunities with a well-defined cadence of compelling missions providing for an incremental buildup of capabilities to perform more complex missions over time.\n\nQuiet zone\n\nAccording to strategic space planners, an EML-2 waypoint could enable significant telerobotic science on the far side of the moon and could serve as a platform for solar and Earth scientific observation, radio astronomy and other science in the quiet zone behind the moon.\n\nFurthermore, the waypoint could enable assembly and servicing of satellites and large telescopes, among a host of other uses.\n\nIf NASA succeeds in establishing an astronaut-tended EML-2 waypoint, it would represent the farthest humans have traveled from Earth to date, the memo points out.\n\nExtended stays at EML-2 would provide advancements in life sciences and radiation-shielding for long-duration missions outside of the Van Allen radiation belts that protect Earth, scientists say.\n\nRobotic roll-out of an antenna \u2014 part of a low-frequency array of radio antennas to observe the first stars in the early universe. (Image: \u00a9 Joe Lazio\/JPL )\n\nNext step\n\nGerstenmaier noted that moving forward on international, commercial and academic partnerships will \"require significant detailed development and integration.\"\n\nMoreover, Gerstenmaier added, EML-2 \"is a complex region of cis-lunar space that has certain advantages as an initial staging point for exploration, but may also have some disadvantages that must be well understood.\"\n\nA NASA study team is assigned the task of developing near-term missions to EML-2 \"as we continue to refine our understanding and implications of using this waypoint as part of the broader exploration capability development,\" the memo explains.\n\nThe study is targeted for completion by March 30, 2012.\n\nA working group of International Space Station members \u2014 a meeting bringing together space agencies from around the world \u2014 is being held in Paris this week with NASA\u2019s EML-2 strategy likely to be discussed with international partners.\n\nProving ground\n\nBullish on the promise of telerobotics exploration of the moon from EML-2 is Jack Burns, director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR) Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. LUNAR is funded by the NASA Lunar Science Institute.\n\nBurns and his team have been collaborating with Lockheed Martin (builder of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle) for more than a year to plan an early Orion mission that would go into a halo orbit of EML-2 above the lunar far side.\n\n\"This is extremely exciting from both the exploration and science sides,\" Burns told SPACE.com. \"This mission concept seems to be really taking off now because it is unique and offers the prospects of doing something significant outside of low-Earth orbit within this decade.\"\n\nIn collaboration with Lockheed-Martin, the LUNAR Center is investigating human missions to EML-2 that could be a proving ground for future missions to deep space while also overseeing scientifically important investigations.\n\nAstronauts at an in-space habitat near the moon could achieve near-telepresence, allowing greatly increased functionality of robots on the lunar surface compared to control from Earth. (Image: \u00a9 Dan Lester, University of Texas)\n\nRoadways on the moon?\n\nIn a LUNAR Center white paper provided to SPACE.com, researchers note that an EML-2 mission would have astronauts traveling 15 percent farther from Earth than did the Apollo astronauts, and spending almost three times longer in deep space. [Lunar Legacy: Apollo Moon Mission Photos]\n\nSuch missions would validate the Orion spacecraft's life-support systems for shorter durations, could demonstrate the high-speed re-entry capability needed for return to Earth from deep space, and could help scientists gauge astronauts\u2019 radiation dose from cosmic rays and solar flares. Doing so would help verify that Orion provides sufficient radiation protection, as it is designed to do, researchers said.\n\nOn such missions, the white paper explains, Orion astronauts could teleoperate gear on the lunar far side. For instance, the moon-based robotic hardware could obtain samples from the geologically appealing far side \u2014 perhaps from the South Pole-Aitken basin, which is one of the largest, deepest and oldest craters in the solar system.\n\nAlso on a proposed lunar robotic agenda is deployment of a low-frequency array of radio antennas to observe the first stars in the early universe.\n\nAmong a number of research jobs, the LUNAR team has been investigating how modest equipment could be used to fuse lunar regolith into a concrete-like material, which could then be used for construction of large structures, without the expense of having to carry most of the material to the lunar surface.\n\nThe ability to fabricate hardened structures from lunar regolith could also foster on-the-spot creation of solar arrays, habitats, and radiation shielding and maybe, even roadways on the surface of the moon.\n\nLeonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of last year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999.\n\nFollow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook."}
{"text":"The federal government could save billions of dollars if it tackled the roots of poverty, according to a new report from a government advisory body.\n\nThe report from the National Council of Welfare urges the governing Tories to take a long-term \"investment\" approach to preventing poverty, rather than a short-term program spending approach.\n\nIt says the public cost of poverty is easily $25 billion a year, and climbing \u2014 all while the poverty rate does not improve.\n\nConservative Senator Hugh Segal says the new report uses hard numbers to link poverty to the cost of productivity, health care and the justice system. (Frank Gunn\/Canadian Press)\n\n\"The costs and consequences of poverty are much larger than direct spending on social programs. We see the total costs when indirect and societal costs are taken into account,\" the report says.\n\nThe council has been able to look at the cost of poverty in a way that federal departments can't, said Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, who has long been involved in poverty eradication.\n\nFederal departments analyze poverty programs with a simple cost-benefit analysis, while the council report is able to look at \"the cost of inertia, the cost of not doing anything,\" Segal said.\n\nBut the new report uses hard numbers to link poverty to the cost of productivity, health care and the justice system, he added.\n\n\"It's a very good way to encourage public debate and discussion.\"\n\nSavings to be found at hospitals, prisons\n\nThe long-term preventive approach would eventually save taxpayers significant amounts in emergency health care, prisons, shelters and other social services that are used in floundering attempts to keep poverty under wraps, the report says.\n\nThere's a catch. Overhauling social supports would require up-front funding.\n\nP.O.V. How should Canada deal with poverty? Have your say.\n\n\"An investment model is geared towards the longer term,\" says the report titled \"The Dollars and Sense of Solving Poverty.\" \"It may require larger initial resources and may take time, but there will be a far greater and more permanent pay-off.\"\n\nWhile many an anti-poverty advocate has argued that reducing poverty would also reduce health-care costs, the council's report documents case after case of communities saving money by changing their approach.\n\nA homeless person in Calgary, for example, can run up $42,000 a year in costs at emergency shelters. Putting that person in a prison or psychiatric hospital would cost about $120,000. But giving that person access to supportive housing and social services would cost between $13,000 and $18,000, the report says.\n\nSimilarly, about 20 per cent of health-care spending in Canada is attributed to socio-economic factors such as income, the report says, citing research from the Public Health Agency of Canada.\n\n\"Canadians are paying the most in the least productive areas, trying to fix costly problems linked to inequality, insecurity and poverty that are preventable,\" the report states.\n\nThe council recognizes there is a general public concern that spending money on the poor would come at a cost to other people and services.\n\nBut it argues that poverty reduction benefits society at large, and not just the poor.\n\nPressure on hospitals would be alleviated. The Canadian population would have higher levels of literacy and numeracy, benefiting the economy. And a healthier workforce would dramatically reduce companies' costs of absenteeism.\n\nThe council, tasked with advising the federal government on dealing with poverty, says Ottawa should start by setting out a long-term vision that identifies needed resources and sets up a way to measure success.\n\nThe recommendations are similar to those put forward by Canada Without Poverty. In its pre-budget submission, the national activists' group urges the federal government to set firm targets and timelines to reduce poverty, and work with all levels of government to that end.\n\nBoth groups warn that dealing with poverty is a far more efficient way to reduce crime than passing tough crime legislation that would hit the poor hard.\n\n\"People who face poverty combined with other factors such as addiction, mental illness and discrimination, and who are mixed with those inclined to inflict evil on these victims, equals crime,\" the pre-budget submission states.\n\nBut the federal government has repeatedly resisted calls for a national anti-poverty strategy, saying such issues are better dealt with by local and provincial levels of government.\n\nAnd, indeed, most provincial governments are seized with designing new, long-term anti-poverty strategies. But they also argue that they have neither the scope nor the money to do it alone.\n\n\"It is still a hard sell. Poverty is a hard sell. It shouldn't be, because it costs everybody,\" said Liberal Senator Art Eggleton, who led a massive study on poverty two years ago, only to see it dismissed by the federal Tories.\n\n\"Our future prosperity may well depend on how we address our current level of poverty. I quite simply don't believe we can afford poverty any more.\"\n\nHuman Resources Minister Diane Finley will be less likely to ignore this anti-poverty report than others, added Segal. That's because it comes from a group of advisers chosen by the government for their apolitical work in the field.\n\n\"It should have greater impact,\" Segal said."}
{"text":"The History of the English penny from 1485 to 1603 covers the period of the Tudor dynasty.\n\nThe Tudors (1485\u20131603) [ edit ]\n\nHenry VII [ edit ]\n\nSilver penny of Henry VII.\n\nHenry Tudor, who reigned as King Henry VII between 1485 and 1509, had a rather tenuous claim on the throne, being the Lancastrian claimant via an illegitimate descendant of Edward III when all the more senior candidates had been killed off in the Wars of the Roses. He brought the wars to a conclusion with his 1485 victory at The Battle of Bosworth and subsequently consolidated this power through a variety of means, including his marriage to Elizabeth of York (which united the two warring dynasties.) Henry VII's reign was plagued by pretenders to the throne, whose existence was a result of the King's initially insecure grasp of power. Nevertheless, he was able to subdue each of these attempted usurpers without particular difficulty. The whole style of Henry's coinage marked a break with what had gone before \u2014 the king's bust becomes much more lifelike, and the shields on the reverse become much more detailed. Henry's first coinage is very like that of Henry V and VI, minted at London, Canterbury, Durham and York the inscription is one of a variety of HENRIC DI GRA REX ANG \u2014 Henry by the grace of God King of England. Soon, however, Henry introduced what is known as the Sovereign coinage, so-called because the king is depicted seated on a throne, while the reverse shows the royal shield over a cross. This issue is regarded as marking the division between the coins of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance in England. The Sovereign coinage was minted at London, Durham, and York, and inscribed with one of a variety of HENRICUS DI GRA REX ANG .\n\nHenry VIII [ edit ]\n\nSilver penny of Henry VIII.\n\nHenry VIII (1509\u20131547) is one of England's more interesting monarchs, not just for having married six times, but numismatically too. Henry's first coinage, to 1526, resembled that of his father and still used his father's portrait. With higher bullion prices on the continent, the weight of the silver coins was reduced again. Pennies were minted at the London, Canterbury, and Durham mints. With the reformation starting in the 1530s, the principal effect as far as the coinage was concerned was the closure of the ecclesiastical mints of Canterbury, Durham and York \u2014 in future all mints would be Royal mints, under the control of the crown who would consequently get all the revenue. The second coinage, of 1526\u20131544 had a completely different inscription, H.D.G. ROSA SIE SPIA \u2014 Henry by the grace of God a rose without a thorn. At this time the pound standard for mintage was changed from the local Tower pound to the internationally known troy pound; therefore, the value of a pennyweight increased from 1.46 grams to 1.56 grams. The coins were minted at London, and the Canterbury, Durham and York ecclesiastical mints.\n\nThe Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s and the ratification of the First Act of Supremacy in 1534 resulted in a huge financial bonus for the king, but by 1544 Henry was running short of money, thanks partially to his own extravagant lifestyle and expenditure. Henry's solution was to drastically lower the fineness of the third coinage (1544\u201347) to only one-third silver and two-thirds copper. This was understandably not popular with the people, and it resulted in Henry acquiring the nickname \"Old Coppernose\" as the silver rubbed off the high-relief part of the coin design. By this time there were two mints in London, at the Tower and in Southwark, and both of them, together with mints in Bristol, Canterbury and York produced the debased coinage which bore the inscription H.D.G. ROSA SINE SPINA .\n\nEdward VI [ edit ]\n\nSilver penny of Edward VI.\n\nThe debased coinage caused rampant inflation, so when Henry died in 1547 he left behind a country with a sickly nine-year-old king, religious turmoil, and economic unrest. Moreover, the influx of silver and gold from Central and South America into Spain and thus to the rest of Europe was destabilising the price of bullion and making the situation worse.\n\nUntil 1551, what is known as the posthumous coinage was produced \u2014 these were coins which were exactly the same as Henry's last issue, but with a different portrait of him. Inflation over the last thirty years had made the penny much less important, and in fact for the next few reigns the most common coins would be shillings, sixpences, and groats. The reign of Edward VI though short (1547\u20131553) was numismatically important for seeing the introduction of new denominations \u2014 the silver crown, half crown, shilling, Sixpence, and Threepence \u2014 which were to survive until 1971, and which were a reflection of the increasing wealth of the country. The new coins were struck in good silver, with the aim of revitalising the economy. Edward VI's pennies however, were still struck in debased metal (except for one, possibly unique, coin) at the Tower, Southwark, Bristol and York, with the inscription E.D.G. ROSA SINE SPINA \u2014 Edward by the grace of God a rose without a thorn.\n\nMary I [ edit ]\n\nSilver penny of Mary and Philip.\n\nIn 1553 Edward died and was succeeded \u2014 after the nine-day rule of Lady Jane Grey \u2014 by his older sister, the strongly Catholic Queen Mary. Pennies of her first year, bearing her head alone with the inscription M.D.G. ROSA SINE SPINA \u2014 Mary by the grace of God a rose without a thorn \u2014 are quite rare. In 1554 she married Philip, the Prince of Spain, and put his portrait on the coinage as well as her own. Both fine silver and base metal pennies of this reign were issued from the Tower mint, with the legend P Z M D G ROSA SINE SPINA \u2014 Philip and Mary by the grace of God a rose without a thorn.\n\nElizabeth I [ edit ]\n\nSilver penny of Elizabeth I.\n\nWhen Elizabeth I ascended the throne in 1558, England was an impoverished country, in religious turmoil, and with a coinage which was in a poor state after Henry VIII's debasement, since when little had been done to improve either the quantity or quality of the coins in circulation. The coinage system as a whole urgently needed reform, and Elizabeth boldly set about doing this. Throughout her reign large quantities of gold and silver coins of many denominations were produced (the gold and silver often being obtained by raiding Spanish shipping); of the silver denominations produced the shilling and sixpence were most important, but small denomination coins \u2014 groats, threepences, half-groats, three-halfpence, pennies, three-farthings, and halfpennies \u2014 were also struck and were very popular with merchants and small traders.\n\nFor the first time in England milled, or machine-produced, coins were produced by Eloye Mestrelle, an ex-employee of the Paris mint, between 1560 and 1572, but while the milled issue was fairly successful there was animosity towards Mestrelle by other employees of the Tower mint who feared for their jobs, which ultimately led to his dismissal. No milled pennies were produced, as they would probably have been too small to be mechanically produced by the equipment of the time. Also for the first time some of Elizabeth's coins were dated.\n\nElizabethan pennies are very small, and are often found creased or bent. The obverse bears the legend E D G ROSA SINE SPINA \u2014 Elizabeth by the grace of God a rose without a thorn \u2014 around a left-facing bust of the queen, while the reverse bears the legend CIVITAS LONDON \u2014 City of London. All pennies were minted at the Tower mint, in London.\n\nReferences [ edit ]"}
{"text":"Now that Virtual Reality is becoming more mainstream you begin to see games that were previously meant for traditional 2D being resigned and ported over to VR systems. Personally I am EXTREMELY excited to see developers taking popular 2D games and bring them back to life in a fully 3D VR environment. Indie game \u2018Please, Don\u2019t Touch Anything\u2019 (PDTA) originally released on March 26th, 2015 and was a HUGE hit for those who tried it out, leaving it with over 1000 positive reviews on Steam. This hidden gem will SOON be available on Oculus Home (MAY 19th) for the Oculus Rift ($14.99) and Gear VR! ($8.99).\n\nThe game has been developed by Escalation Studios and Four Quarters based in Texas in partnership with Oculus. Published by Bulkypix based in France.\n\n***The remainder of the article may contain mild spoilers included in text, pictures, & video.\n\n\u201cover 1000 positive reviews\u201d\n\nWhen I first started the game I was immediately struggling to figure out my purpose as I had never previously played this game and I was not familiar with any of the objectives. I find it extremely satisfying when you have to slowly figure out things for yourself as opposed to being given too many hints and obvious paths to follow at the beginning of the game. Even so it wasn\u2019t long before I was getting into the groove and creating plenty of chaos!\n\nThe developers of this game have done an amazing job at creating a seamless atmosphere that looks and feels like a legitimate work space all the while concealing the fact that almost each and every object is a potential clue that must be looked at, studied, and deciphered for it\u2019s proper meaning within the puzzle. What I really love is the fact that you don\u2019t WIN the game as much as you PLAY the game. It\u2019s about doing things differently and making sure you troubleshoot properly. You could say this is a creative troubleshooting simulator set in a warped reality!\n\nVR SPECIAL FEATURES! (escalation.com)\n\n30+ mind-bending enigmas with Virtual Reality enhanced endings\n\nFully re-imagined 3D environment built specifically for Virtual Reality\n\nInnovative interaction systems for investigating objects in the room\n\nA newly-composed chiptune soundtrack with new tracks for VR\n\nDon\u2019t worry I didn\u2019t forget about the video! Just in case the article wasn\u2019t enough, I have a semi-playthrough \u2018Let\u2019s Play\u2019 video available for you to watch! I worked hard on it so please take a look! I played the game for just about an hour an managed to get through about 6 of the 30+ endings!\n\nThanks a lot for checking out this article! I hope you found it interesting and informative! Please let me know if you have any questions or comments either below or on one of my social outlets! I really appreciate it. Also, if you think that you have something article worthy let me know! I love collaborating with the community! Thanks again!\n\nIf you\u2019d like to see more in-game pictures click here! ***Mild Spoilers\n\nVRGAMERDUDE PLAYS IN HIS GEAR VR!\n\nUKRIFTER PLAYS WITH HIS CV1!"}
{"text":"I need some advice... I'm a 29 year old female, college graduate, and firmly situated in a great job. I've been dating my 29 year old boyfriend for a year and a half. I love him and I know he loves me. We have a great relationship, enjoy each other's company, and our families love us and emotionally support us. We both are adults with our own homes. We don't live together. We have friends and hobbies. We're both physically active and take care of our bodies. He gets me and loves me for who I am. He defends me and provides a listening ear when I need it. He also isn't afraid to call me out when I'm wrong. He's become one of my closest friends. I love him for all those things.\n\nHe started college later than most people and recently graduated. He has a decent job and is job hunting to find something better and more within his degree path. Like me, he has a solid family, great parents who've never been divorced and a sibling married with kids.\n\nHe talks about us in futuristic terms. \"Our kids, our someday house, our dreams...\" I believe he wants a future with me. However, whenever I bring up marriage he gets this \"deer in headlights\" look. He tells me the thought of marriage frightens and overwhelms him. Those conversation usually end with him frustrated and holding me while I cry. I wouldn't consider myself a clingy or overly emotional woman but when he says those things I get scared. I'm scared on some level of not being enough or unwanted, of being alone for the rest of my life, and of not spending the rest of my life with him. I've stopped bringing it up. I don't want to be a nag and I feel that I shouldn't have to be. Either he loves me and wants to spend his life with me or he doesn't.\n\nI want to be married. I'm ready. I want a family one day. I want a family with him.\n\nMy question is this. How long do I wait for him to be ready? Honestly, I feel like the two year mark is the deal maker or breaker. But is that reasonable? I feel like I've been waiting for him... to graduate, to get settled, to become ready... do I keep waiting? I realize, \"Love is patient.\" But how long does one remain patient?\n\nI don't want to have a \"you marry me or we're over\" discussion. I'm not into ultimatums. But at the same time, I'm nearing my 30s and I do want a family one day. Waiting for years for him to \"be ready\" doesn't seem healthy.\n\nYour thoughts?"}
{"text":"TORONTO \u2014 Bullets claimed two more lives early Sunday during a violent month in which the number of people killed by shootings in Toronto doubled compared to last January.\n\nTwo men are dead and three others suffered injuries in a Chinatown shooting at Spadina Avenue and Nassau Street around 3:15 a.m.\n\n\u201cSome sort of altercation occurred that prompted the shooting but we\u2019re still early in the investigation,\u201d said Toronto Police Det. Mike Carbone, who wouldn\u2019t rule out the possibility that the killings were the result of gang-related violence.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s difficult to say at this point, but that\u2019s something we will explore,\u201d he said.\n\nI was lying in bed and heard six to eight gunshots and soon I heard a lot of sirens\n\nIn the 37 shooting incidents in Toronto in January, eight people were killed. Four died in shootings in January 2014.\n\nIn Sunday\u2019s multiple shooting, one man was pronounced dead at the scene, while another died in hospital around 8:45 a.m. Their identities have not been released by police.\n\nThe stretch of Spadina between Dundas Street and College Street, home to many ethnic restaurants and small businesses, was closed most of the day for the investigation as police officers canvassed the area.\n\nOfficers did not release any information about suspects.\n\nMitchell Kingsley, who lives near the spot where the shooting took place, recalled hearing a series of shots.\n\n\u201cI was lying in bed and heard six to eight gunshots and soon I heard a lot of sirens,\u201d Kingsley said. \u201cIt\u2019s crazy. I don\u2019t know if an altercation went wrong, but I don\u2019t think I have to worry. I\u2019m not the type of person to provoke someone.\u201d\n\nToronto\u2019s eight gunfire victims in January: Jan 4: Joseph Petit, 17, is shot in front of his home in Danforth Village. He dies in hospital. No arrests. Jan. 19: Tevin James, 22, is shot in an Etobicoke apartment and dies three days later. Frederick Leon, 20, is charged with second-degree murder. Jan. 20: Alfredo Patriarca, 42, is found shot to death in a garage in Etobicoke. No arrests. Jan. 20: A gunman kills Alva Dixon, 70, and wounds a man in his 40s as they sit in a parked van in East Toronto. No arrests. Jan. 24: Adedotun Agunbiade, 28, is shot to death during a private party at a hair salon in a strip mall in Scarborough. No arrests. Jan. 29: Former Mafia boss Rocco Zito, 87, is gunned down in his home near Yorkdale Shopping Centre. His son-in-law, Domenico Scopelliti, 51, is charged with first-degree murder. Jan. 31: Two people are killed and three wounded outside a restaurant in Chinatown."}
{"text":"Had marijuana become a problem for me, it would have been reflected in my job performance, and I would have been cut. I took my job seriously and would not have allowed that to happen. The point is, marijuana and excellence on the playing field are not mutually exclusive.\n\nA good example is Josh Gordon, the Cleveland Browns wide receiver who led the league last year with 1,646 receiving yards, despite missing two games for testing positive for codeine (for a strep throat, he said). He was suspended again late last month for the entire season after testing positive for marijuana. (At least five others were also suspended last year and this year for marijuana, according to the magazine Mother Jones.)\n\nMost players are tested once a year under the N.F.L.\u2019s substance abuse policy, between April 20 and Aug. 9. But players who test positive for a banned drug are placed in the league\u2019s substance abuse program, where the testing is more frequent. It is in this probationary program that players tend to falter.\n\nGordon had marijuana in his system. He broke the rules. I understand that. But this is a rule that absurdly equates marijuana with opiates, opioids and PCP. The N.F.L.\u2019s threshold for disciplinary action for marijuana is 10 times higher than the one used by the International Olympic Committee.\n\nNearly 17,000 Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers in 2011, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These are the same pills I was handed in full bottles after an injury. The same pills that are ravaging our cities. The same ones that are creating a population of apathetic adults, pill-popping their way through the day and dead behind the eyes. The same ones that are leading high schoolers to heroin because the pills no longer get them high and are too expensive. Yeah, those."}
{"text":"Wireless charging is hardly a ubiquitous feature in smartphones and tablets at this point. It's often optional\u2014phones from certain carriers will have it, or you'll be able to add it to a phone using a special charging case. But if you pick a phone at random off the shelf, chances are good that it won't support wireless charging out of the box.\n\nGoogle's most recent Nexus devices, on the other hand, have all included built-in support for the feature\u2014the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, and 2013 Nexus 7 all support wireless charging. While any charging pad that supports the Qi (pronounced \"chee\") standard will work with them, as of last week Google will sell you its own Nexus-branded charger to match. This is actually the second Nexus charger that Google has made, after the now-discontinued (and somewhat problematic) Nexus 4 wireless charger. Google sent us one of the new chargers, and we put it through its paces to see if it's worth the $50.\n\nUnboxing\n\nRecent Nexus phones and tablets have come in well thought out, understated blue boxes, and the Nexus wireless charger follows the trend. Lift the lid off the box and the charger will be sitting right there, staring you in the face.\n\nThe charger itself is a surprisingly small square that's 2.36 inches on each side and half an inch thick, but it's pretty dense\u2014it weighs 3.7 ounces, not all that much less than the Nexus 5's 4.59 ounces. The glossy black top is unadorned save for a faint Nexus logo in the center, and the sides are a blank matte plastic except for the side with the micro USB port embedded in it.\n\nOn the underside, Google has applied some sticky but not-quite-adhesive material that plants the charger firmly to whatever surface you'd like, but it doesn't leave a residue when you pry it off. This material is not quite as sticky as tape, but it's grippy enough that it could hang out on the wall of my office for 15 or 20 seconds before falling on the floor (whoops). It should easily keep the charger from sliding around on your desk or bedside table, but if you move it around a lot you'll need to clean the dust and grit off it to keep it sticky.\n\nYou won't find a mention of the Qi standard anywhere on Google's product page, but that appears to be what the Nexus charger is using. It's listed as being compatible with the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, and the 2013 Nexus 7, but it should also work fine with other Qi-enabled phones (or phones with Qi-compatible charging cases).\n\nOnce you've stuck the charger where you want it, you just need to set your phone or tablet on top of it to start charging. Magnets will pull the device into place and keep it there, so the device isn't in any danger of slipping off the charger or moving too much if you need to poke at it while it's charging. Centering the tablet on the charger can be a little tricky, but all three Nexus devices make a distinctive notification sound when charging wirelessly to tell you when you've done it correctly.\n\nOn the whole, the design of the charger is better thought out than the old Nexus 4 wireless charger. That device had an angled face (which made it difficult to impossible to use with anything larger than a phone) and used the same not quite adhesive material to hold the slippery Nexus phone to the charger. As we've noted, this material picks up dust and other detritus easily, and the dirtier it is the worse it is at sticking to things. The Nexus 4 charger had the more distinctive design, but the new charger is definitely more functional.\n\nPower draw and charging speeds\n\nThis was my own first foray into wireless charging, so I was interested in seeing how much power the charger used compared to a standard wired charger plus how this affected charging speeds. Using an ever handy Kill-A-Watt meter, I measured power draw at the wall for both the wireless charger and a standard micro USB charger (these figures are for the adapter that shipped with the 2013 Nexus 7, but the figures for the one that comes with the Nexus 5 were about the same). These figures were each taken when the phone's battery was mostly empty and with the screens turned off (the numbers will generally go up when the screen is on and the device is in active use, and they'll fall as you near the end of a charge cycle).\n\nDevice Power draw (micro USB) Power draw (wireless charger) Nexus 5 6.6 Watts 6.0 Watts Nexus 7 (2013) 7.5 Watts 6.1 Watts\n\nThe Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 will both draw more power through a micro USB charger than the wireless charger, which is par for the course\u2014wireless charging usually isn't as fast as charging through a cable. These differences in power draw are reflected in charge times. The Nexus 7 takes about two hours and 56 minutes to charge using its power adapter, but six hours and six minutes to charge using the wireless charger. The wireless charger draws about 25 percent less power, but it takes 100 percent more time to charge the tablet. Keep in mind that the convenience of wireless charging also takes longer and is less efficient.\n\nWireless charging is still a nice feature\u2014it's a good box to check, but its exclusion wouldn't keep us away from an otherwise attractive phone or tablet. If your phone does support Qi, and you're in the market for a nice charger, you could do worse than Google's. Unlike its first try, the new Nexus Wireless Charger is unobtrusive, attractive, and functional. It's a little pricey at $50 (compared both to other charging pads and to the adapter that came with your phone), but it gets the job done."}
{"text":"Monero (XMR), the privacy-centric cryptocurrency that was first released in 2014, is now definitely on the FBI\u2019s radar. In late 2016, darknet markets AlphaBay and Oasis Markets began to accept Monero for payments. At a recent seminar session attended by a journalist from CoinDesk, Special Agent Joseph Battaglia of the FBI\u2019s Cyber Division in New York City, told 150 people at Fordham University that the FBI was monitoring Monero, and was concerned criminals would use Monero for nefarious purposes. Special Agent Battaglia gave a \u201chigh-level\u201d account of how the FBI\u2019s Cyber Division conducts cryptocurrency investigations, during the event. The event was hosted by Fordham University and co-hosted by IBM and was attended by law students at the university, as well as by New York City Police detectives and IRS agents.\n\n\u201cThere are obviously going to be issues if some of the more difficult to work with cryptocurrencies become popular. Monero is one that comes to mind, where its not very obvious what the transaction path is or what the actual value of the transaction is except to the end users,\u201d Special Agent Battaglia said at the seminar. During 2016, the price of Monero soared from around $0.50 (USD) to over $12 (USD). Monero provides more privacy than Bitcoin, using the CryptoNote protocol which is based on one-time ring signatures and stealth addresses. Monero transactions cannot be traced, and is designed to prevent the identity of the sender and receiver of the cryptocurrency.\n\nDuring a panel at the event, which featured IBM\u2019s Vice President of Blockchain Business Development, Special Agent Battaglia described the FBI as a \u201creactionary organization\u201d and said that the FBI\u2019s Cyber Division is taking a wait-and-see approach with Monero. \u201cWe\u2019re going to look at what catches on, and what becomes mainstream, and then we\u2019re going to keep an eye on that, because usually not long after that is when you start to see some of the fraud and some of the more nefarious uses of that technology,\u201d Battaglia said during the panel. Battaglia would not provide additional information about the FBI\u2019s investigative techniques surrounding Monero, when asked after the event.\n\nThe FBI\u2019s Cyber Division was founded in 2002, and according to Battaglia, the division splits it\u2019s work equally between criminal matters and matters of national security. The Cyber Division is made up of squads located throughout the United States. Special Agent Battaglia explained that partnerships are made between the FBI\u2019s Cyber Division and state police, the IRS, FinCEN, the Secret Service, and \u201cdetectives from all sorts of different law enforcement agencies.\u201d At a keynote address, Special Agent Bataglia also mentioned how Monero is increasingly being used by ransomeware.\n\nWhile Oasis has since gone offline, in an exit scam, AlphaBay continues to function and allow users to make deposits and withdrawals in both Bitcoin and Monero. AlphaBay began accepting Monero on September 1st, 2016. \u201cFollowing the demand from the community, and considering the security features of Monero, we decided to add it to our marketplace,\u201d a notice on AlphaBay said in August of 2016."}
{"text":"From RationalWiki\n\nComputing woo refers to a range of pseudoscientific practices and urban legends associated with computing, especially computer security.\n\nTechnical support [ edit ]\n\nThe world of technical support is a magical place. User[Who?] beliefs include:\n\nProgramming [ edit ]\n\nTechnicians and software developers many of whom consider themselves rational logical thinkers are not immune from all kinds of sloppy thinking and superstitions:\n\nHeisenbugs , issues that never seem the same when you attempt to study them\n\n, issues that never seem the same when you attempt to study them Cargo cult programming\n\nIt works on my machine: some programmers and IT have a tendency to assume that because code will run on one computer, that if it doesn't run on another one, that the other one is broken. It's usually the opposite. If you have code that runs on your personal computer but not on other machines, it is probably doing something dangerous that should cause segmentation faults or similar, but somehow is being allowed to do it. Alternatively, it may be set up in a way that is peculiar to the settings and file system on your machine.\n\nName, time, addresses, maps, gender misconceptions and more![4][please explain]\n\nAnd among most people there is little conception what's involved in programming, to the point that the moviegoing public can accept the idea that a sufficiently good programmer can write a virus for a completely alien operating system, in a completely alien language, and have it work right the first time.[note 1]\n\nBadBIOS [ edit ]\n\nBadBIOS is firmware malware that was created by Ruiu ... in his head. Individuals like Ruiu are extremely concerned about malicious firmware from hackers and the NSA to the point of literal paranoia.\n\nOrigin [ edit ]\n\nAccording to Ruiu (@dragosr on twitter), BadBIOS is a rootkit that can infect computers without bluetooth, ethernet, or Wi-Fi. Instead it can infect other computers by emitting \"ultrasonic sound [...] from the device's loudspeakers\". Computers nearby somehow pick up the sound via the speakers and thus get infected. Ruiu suspected his computers were infected with BadBIOS once his computers were acting strange.[5] Ruiu later provided data dumps of his BIOS only to have experts reveal it was normal data. Ruiu then countered stating that the malware probably erased itself whenever he tried to make a data dump.[6] While these claims are not outside the realm of science fiction, Ruiu has not provided a silver bullet, only speculation. Despite this, his reputation seems to be intact somehow.\n\nYears later, Ruiu came to the conclusion that BadBIOS can also contaminate USB , through some way of knowing...[7]\n\nThe subreddit [ edit ]\n\nYep, \/r\/badBIOS\/ is a subreddit for a malware that probably never existed! Unsurprisingly, it's inhabited by some users who think that one weird thing in a computer means infected malware. These people are generally paranoid, judging by the threads:\n\nUser thinks hackers infected his ... mp4 file because it got corrupted. [8] OP blatantly states they used a dirty electricity filter to evade hacking. Ironically, his means to evade being hacked is the reason why he thinks he got hacked \u2014 having poor connection to an external device can disconnect a device when it's not ready, resulting in corrupted file. [ citation needed ]\n\nOP blatantly states they used a dirty electricity filter to evade hacking. Ironically, his means to evade being hacked is the reason why he thinks he got hacked \u2014 having poor connection to an external device can disconnect a device when it's not ready, resulting in corrupted file. A user claims that they're picking up ultrasonic sound ... must be badBIOS! [9] Ultrasonic sound is just high-frequency sound above the human hearing range. There are other (plausible) sources of such frequencies such as bats.\n\nUltrasonic sound is just high-frequency sound above the human hearing range. There are other (plausible) sources of such frequencies such as bats. \"Neuroimaging tech will soon be able to decode our thoughts\"[10] An example of just how paranoid this subreddit is.\n\nTruth to it [ edit ]\n\nDespite Ruiu's paranoia, there is truth to the madness:\n\nThrough an \"internal NSA catalog\", the NSA performs firmware attacks through backdoors thus confirming proof that such attacks do exist. Unlike BadBIOS, these attacks are actually detectable and actually have documentation; however, certain tools in the catalog require tools priced as high as 250,000$USD, something not to be wasted on the average Joe. Despite this discovery, it doesn't confirm Ruiu's brain fart that has no evidence. [11] [12] [13] [6]\n\nIn the paper Journal of Communication, Michael Hanspach and Michael Goetz showed that BadBIOS is possible but only at 20 bps.[14]\n\nDeep web [ edit ]\n\nSee the main article on this topic: Deep web\n\nCargo cult paranoid computer security practices are often advocated by naive internet denizens and trolls towards even more naive newcomers. High profile attacks aimed at Tor hidden services Operation Onymous as well as large attacks on users such as the FBI's legally dubious network investigation malware[15] has created an association of insecurity and surveillance associated with what is in fact one of the most secure and surveillance-resistant networks ever created.\n\nProspective explorers often ask if they should put tape over their webcam or use Tails in order to 'safely' explore the dark web. They will fixate on how technological configurations can secure their machines, but are entirely clueless about vectors such as password reuse, identity segregation or how to verify safety of file downloads.\n\nSuch common misconceptions stem from limited public understanding of threat modelling , privacy and practical computer security. As such, there is a massive market for bloggers and YouTube charlatans such as Takedownman and SomeOrdinaryGamers to offer off-the-shelf tips which increase the user's feeling of security.\n\nEvery day, an intrepid dark web explorer will read that the US Navy founded the initial creation of the Tor network and fancy themselves the next Edward Snowden by disseminating this information.[16]\n\nHackers and viruses [ edit ]\n\n[17] Or maybe to keep their missiles from crashing into the Firmament. Russian Orthodox Leader Sprays Holy Water on Government Computers to Magically Stop WannaCry Attack.Or maybe to keep their missiles from crashing into the Firmament.\n\n[citation NOT needed] Criminal hackers don't wear balaclavas except when it's cold or they are being ironic.\n\nDue to the low understanding of what hackers do and how viruses and malware works, it has been a relatively accepted trope for someone to claim their account was hacked as a get-out-jail-free card in the event of certain drug-fuelled rants and dramas.[18]\n\nSome computer users will attribute changes to their computer to malevolent forces in a method comparable to astrology when it comes to rationalising changing and intermittent issues.\n\nOf course, in a video gaming context, anyone who is better than you is a hacker.\n\nThere is a small number of 'anti-updaters', an anti-vaccination movement-like contingent of people arguing against automatically updating applications due to the misplaced belief that significant numbers of people care to manually review and install all patches.[19][20] Patches and updates are generally good, except maybe if you're working with the CIA.[21] Yes, there are occasions where an update breaks something that was working before or causes other mischief, but by and large updates are something you want: they fix problems and improve the security of your system.\n\nCryptography [ edit ]\n\nSee the main article on this topic: Cryptography\n\nDepending on who you ask, encryption can be anything from the largest piece of social good modern mathematics has ever produced or a dangerous weapon utilised by terrorists[22] and child abusers[22] in order to evade justice which must be carefully controlled.\n\nIn the early days of strong cryptography, the US government attempted to issue export bans, classifying the technology as akin of munitions.[23] While such bans were overturned in 1992, it wasn't until the rise of ubiquitous personal computing that governments would once again characterize mathematics as a dangerous tool.\n\nThe 2010s saw an increased call from politicians[Who?] around the world to backdoor common encryption software.[24] From the encrypted-by-default iPhone[25] through to bans on WhatsApp [26] in Brazil[27] and proposed and later withdrawn in the UK,[28] governments around the world remain convinced they can create a secure back door into software to counter criminals; however, it's not like backdoors are only exclusive to government agencies.\n\nSaid statements could be considered rhetoric to coerce tech giants deeper into mass surveillance programs, and less charitably as mathematical denialism from senior elected officials.\n\nMonitoring your Internet usage [ edit ]\n\nHow much do your teachers, coworkers, employers, or other people really know about what you do online?\n\n\"The Internet\" is really an inter-network, or a network of networks.[note 2] Your home Internet, the free WiFi at a coffee shop, your campus or work networks, etc. are all networks that talk to other networks. When you view a website, check your email, or chat with your friends, your computer achieves that by sending traffic from your network to someone else's, and routing it through every network in between.\n\nAnyone with control of the network can try to figure out what kind of traffic you're sending, where it's going, and what's in it. The modern Internet is moving toward HTTPS by default, which is an attempt to make things more secure. If your browser reports that your connection is \"secure\" or \"insecure\", it's talking about HTTPS specifically. It doesn't mean that there's no chance that anyone can intercept what you're doing. By analogy, you're writing letters to a friend, and passing them through the hands of a series of strangers. By agreement, everyone has agreed not to tamper with the contents of the letter. HTTPS lets you seal the letter from (most) prying eyes, but does nothing to hide which friend you're mailing.\n\nIt's important to remember that there are good reasons for network administrators to monitor what goes into or out of their networks. If someone downloads and runs malware from an unsafe site, it puts the whole network at risk. If an employee does something illegal with their computers, their employer might be implicated. Few admins should have any kind of interest in spying on individual users, but every good admin has an interest in a safe and healthy network.\n\nEmail security [ edit ]\n\nWho can read your email? Whoever provides you with email services, for starters. Microsoft read a blogger's Hotmail inbox in 2012, suspecting a software leak.[29] Ironically, around this same time, Microsoft was running the Scroogled ad campaign, attacking Gmail for using inbox contents to serve up targeted ads. It also defended its own right to read your mail.[30]\n\nEmail alternatives such as Slack might also expose even direct messages to your boss.[31]\n\nSecure email and instant-messaging tools do exist, but no security system is absolute.\n\nWeb filtering [ edit ]\n\nWeb filtering is a magical solution to all the world's problems. Simply by stopping people (particularly children, but also library patrons) reaching the wrong website you can prevent sexual depravity bringing about the fall of modern civilisation, and prevent terrorism. Companies including Impero, Future Digital, and Securus sell \"anti-radicalisation software\" which prevents children reading about Islamist terrorism'.[32] According to online security company Akamai, British law requires schools and universities to consider the use of such software.[33] Whether Akamai is an unbiased source of legal advice is for you to judge.\n\nThe traditional use of such software is to block access to pornography online, but such filters are pathetically useless. A British newspaper report complained that one filter blocked searches for \"sex education\" but allowed explicit searches in Spanish; it concluded they provide false security and could be easily circumvented (as anybody who knows anything about children could tell you). More seriously, anti-porn filters may discourage children from talking to their parents and actually promote porn addiction: \"Filters can also encourage secrecy, deception and shame \u2013 key conditions for nurturing dependency or even potential addiction.\"[34] Because the naughtiness is half the reason why porn is appealing.\n\nWeb filters also rarely if ever consider the blocking of pornography or jihadism to be their first priority. The majority of their efforts go to the blocking of websites offering alternative proxies and websites offering translation software. The former because it allows people to easily and perhaps even unintentionally bypass these filters and the latter because they often allow for diverse translations of the thing that people want to be censored and thus increase exponentially the work required to censor everything. Even more worrying is that some have them by default, meaning that no matter what you do, you won't be able to access Babelfish.[35]\n\nYou'll be glad to know that the best in the business who have a firm place in the international market are currently selling their software to dictatorships that want to avoid their citizens reading about any information that might potentially harm the way the government is perceived by its citizens. [36] On the plus side, since these governments are spending their time with censoring internet traffic and they will never be able to fully do so anyway, this is often accompanied with a more uncensored traditional press and television. However, one might still question why democratic governments support something that is partially marketed to dictators.\n\nMisc [ edit ]\n\nThings that are not computing woo [ edit ]\n\nWhilst common computing misconceptions are numerous, often too many serious issues are written off[citation needed][Who?] as such including:\n\nSee Also [ edit ]\n\n\/r\/itsaunixsystem on Reddit - dedicated making fun of Hollywood hacking\n\nwillusingtheprefixcybermakemelooklikeanidiot.com - You should always be cautious with the about mainstream media reporting of cyber-anything. If in doubt, be sure to check\n\nNotes [ edit ]\n\n\u2191 As seen for instance in Independence Day \u2191 Hence the abbreviation of \"Inter-net(work)\"."}
{"text":"The National Institutes of Health is spending more than $400,000 sending text messages to Latino men to encourage them to exercise.\n\nThe University of California, San Diego is conducting the study, which is attempting to employ the \u201clow-cost\u201d strategy of using cell phones to reach Mexican-Americans.\n\n\u201cMexican-American men report high rates of inactivity and related health conditions. The proposed study seeks to promote physical activity among this at-risk, understudied population by developing interactive and tailored text-messages to enhance a print-based physical activity intervention for Spanish- speaking [Mexican American] MA men,\u201d a grant for the project said. \u201cThe proposed high-reach, low-cost strategy for increasing physical activity has great potential for adoption on a larger scale and thereby positively impacting public health and eliminating health disparities.\u201d\n\nLatino men \u201cmay have limited access to public health interventions promoting physical activity,\u201d according to the project, and there is a \u201cdearth of studies in this area.\u201d\n\n\u201cTo address these rising health disparities, effective interventions that leverage state-of-the-art technology, theory, and methods are needed for [Mexican-American] MA men,\u201d the grant said.\n\nThe project is based on a preliminary study using \u201cculturally and linguistically tailored\u201d print campaigns to encourage Latino men to exercise.\n\nClick for more from The Washington Free Beacon."}
{"text":"Ukrainian journalist and political analyst Yuri Romanenko says it's time for Ukraine's Armed Forces to start a deliberate campaign of murdering Russian journalists in Donbass, for the purpose of attracting global media attention.\n\n\u00a9 AP Photo \/ Sergei Grits Heard Through Grapevine: Putin Turned Down Poroshenko\u2019s Offer of Donbass\n\nRecalling a recent meeting at Harvard University on his Facebook page , Romanenko noted that he recommended to his colleagues that Ukrainian army snipers suppress Russian coverage of the war in Donbass by deliberately targeting Russian journalists operating in the region.\n\nThe political analyst noted that as the conversation turned to the powerful role played by information warfare in the present conflict, speakers began lamenting about how Ukraine has been falling out of the American media space recently. It was then that Romanenko decided to \"inject some new life into the debate.\"\n\n\"I know how to resolve the problem of waning attention and to bring media attention to a new level. The Ukrainian army must selectively and carefully eliminate Russian journalists covering the situation in Donbass. We need to direct Ukrainian army snipers to shoot people wearing PRESS helmets, making them priority targets,\" Romanenko wrote, recalling his comments before the Harvard audience.\n\n\"Since the media represent a destructive weapon and allow Russia to operate not only in the war zone, but across Ukraine, taking out several dozen journalists in the conflict zone will reduce the quality of the picture presented in the Russian media and, therefore, reduce the effectiveness of their propaganda.\"\n\n\u00a9 Photo : MoD of Ukraine Interpol-Wanted Extremist Appointed Advisor to Ukraine's Chief of Staff\n\nThe political analyst explained that such an action would quickly bring Ukraine back into the center of the American media's attention, noting that while on the one hand this would serve as \"bad PR\" for Ukraine, \"all the same, PR is PR, and we must do everything possible not to fall out of the US media's focus in the context of [its] presidential campaign.\"\n\nThe analyst noted that his Harvard hosts rejected his proposal outright, noting that the deliberate murder of journalists is a violation of international law, to which, in Romanenko's recollection, the Ukrainian delegation \"happily grinned.\"\n\n\u00a9 Sputnik \/ Anzhela Babenko Ukrainian Economy Suffers 15% Drop in GDP in First 100 Days of 2015\n\nThe analyst noted that when Russia repeatedly violated international law in relation to Ukraine, \"you didn't seem too worried\u2026so why should you be worried now? The intensification of the conflict, and bringing it to a new level, unable to be ignored by the US and Europe, serves as our magic wand.\"\n\nRomanenko stated that following the meeting, \"one man from the [Ukrainian] diaspora\" told him \"you are completely right; this is just the way to save Ukraine.\""}
{"text":"Well, Mrs. Perkins mostly stays put, except when she takes the girls away on vacation. More mercurial is Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), a married theatrical set designer who has adopted Tom as her prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and appointed herself his muse. This makes her Max\u2019s rival, and also the most interesting and unpredictable person in the movie, even though \u2014 or perhaps precisely because \u2014 it lacks the imagination to know quite what to do with her.\n\nInstead, \u201cGenius\u201d sighs with palpable nostalgia for a supposed golden age of masculine artistic potency and paints the struggle for self-expression in familiar sentimental colors. For Tom, writing is the unbridled expression of the life force, something Mr. Law indicates by hollering and gesticulating and allowing a stray lock of hair to fall just so across his brow. Mr. Firth\u2019s performance is equally broad, even though he\u2019s supposed to be the more uptight partner in this bromance. He grimaces and sighs like a vaudeville Puritan.\n\nBut the actors can perhaps be forgiven, since they are continually pushed into scenes that seem designed to halt subtlety in its tracks. The most egregious of these \u2014 in which Tom drags Max to a sweaty nightclub in Harlem, pontificating on the spontaneous energies of jazz and boogieing with the working girls at the bar \u2014 adds a dash of racial condescension to the cocktail.\n\nIt\u2019s dispiriting to see a movie about interesting real-life characters reduce them to clich\u00e9s, making them less vivid, less fascinating, less charismatic than they must have been. (It\u2019s also a bit disconcerting, though hardly surprising at this point, to see yet another movie with important figures in American history portrayed by British and Australian actors.) \u201cGenius\u201d is full of talk about art, life and greatness, but it\u2019s only talk.\n\n\u201cGenius\u201d is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Cigarettes and other examples of old-fashioned naughtiness. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes."}
{"text":"Editor's Note: This has been cross-posted from the EnergyBlog at Energy.gov\n\nAs many of us hit the road to celebrate America's independence this upcoming 4th of July weekend, we must once again confront the reality of our country's economy, environment and security dependence on foreign oil.\n\nOn Wednesday, June 29th, at 2:00 pm ET, please join Dr. Arun Majumdar at Energy.gov for a frank, two-way discussion about the investments the federal government is making in innovative research and technology today that will move us off of foreign oil and toward the clean energy infrastructure of the future.\n\nWatch the video invitation to the online chat with Dr. Arun Majumdar here.\n\nThe Energy Department is making critical investments to improve the technology and ramp-up the development and manufacturing of renewable energy sources, such as advanced biofuels, solar, wind and hydro power.\n\nAnd as the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), Dr. Majumdar oversees the Department of Energy's investments in high-risk, high-reward projects -- such as work to invent better batteries for electric vehicles, create smarter electric grid infrastructure, explore energy-efficient cooling of buildings, find new ways to create liquid fuels using microorganisms, and many more projects to accelerate the development and deployment of key energy technologies.\n\nYou can submit your questions about new energy innovations to Dr. Majumdar in advance of the event through email, Twitter or Facebook, by\n\nSending an email to newmedia@hq.doe.gov;\n\nTweeting your question to @energy with the hashtag #energymatters; or\n\nLeaving a question for Dr. Majumdar at http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/energygov.\n\nYou\u2019ll also be able to send him questions live during the event using the above methods, or by visiting energy.gov.\n\nAs Dr. Arun Majumdar says in his video, like past American generations have already done, this is our turn to change the world. We hope to see you online on Energy.gov on Wednesday the 29th at 2pm ET to discuss how."}
{"text":"David Cameron today vowed that Britain will take 'thousands' more refugees as he promised to 'fulfil our moral responsibilities'.\n\nThe Prime Minister ordered a review of the country's policy on accepting asylum seekers from north Africa, and an announcement on details is expected within days.\n\nThe UK is unlikely to sign up to a Brussels plan which emerged today for 160,000 people to be dispersed across the European Union.\n\nBut Downing Street has been stung by criticism that Mr Cameron was 'shaming the country' with his refusal to increase the UK's commitment.\n\nScroll down for video\n\nDavid Cameron today sought to quell public outrage over the refugee crisis with a promise to 'fulfil our moral responsibilities'\n\nPoll Should Britain agree to take more refugees? Yes No Should Britain agree to take more refugees? Yes 20099 votes\n\nNo 75705 votes Now share your opinion\n\nBritain has opted out of UN and EU schemes that could mean accepting tens of thousands more asylum seekers, with the focus on spending aid money in the war torn countries from which people are fleeing.\n\nMr Cameron argues that opening the door to more refugees is not the answer to the crisis triggered by tens of thousands of people massing in Greece, Italy and Hungary.\n\nBut he signalled that senior ministers are now looking at options to increase the number of refugees able to resettle in Britain.\n\nMr Cameron said: 'We are taking thousands of refugees and we have always done that as a country \u2013 running our asylum system properly and giving a proper welcome to people and helping them when they come here.\n\n'We keep it under review. We work with our partners. We are taking thousands of people and we will take thousands of people. What matters is when they come they get a proper welcome and we look after them.'\n\nPublic calls for the UK to offer more help has mounted after harrowing images emerged of five-year-old Galip Kurdi and his brother Aylan, 3, who drowned after their dinghy capsized while attempting to cross from Syria to the Greek island of Kos.\n\nMr Cameron said he was 'deeply moved' by the pictures but refused to spell out plans for an increased offer of more refugee places.\n\nThe Prime Minister told reporters: 'Anyone who saw those pictures overnight could not help but be moved and, as a father, I felt deeply moved by the sight of that young boy on a beach in Turkey.\n\n'Britain is a moral nation and we will fulfil our moral responsibilities.\n\n'I would say the people responsible for these terrible scenes we see the people most responsible are President Assad in Syria and the butchers of ISIL and the criminal gangs who are running this terrible trade in people.'\n\nMr Cameron's remarks were echoed by Chancellor George Osborne, who said Britain had already taken in 5,000 asylum seekers fleeing the war in Syria and would 'go on taking people'\n\nIt comes after Mr Cameron has come under pressure from within the Conservative party, as well as political opponents, church leaders and foreign leaders to do more.\n\nFormer Scottish first minister Alex Salmond said Mr Cameron was 'shaming the country' over the crisis. He told BBC Radio 4's World At One programme: 'When people, human beings, see other human beings in distress, when we see pictures of young toddlers lying dead on a beach, then the natural human instinct is to help.\n\n'David Cameron's natural instinct is to walk by on the other side and that's why he's shaming the country.'\n\nBritain is a moral nation and we will fulfil our moral responsibilities Prime Minister David Cameron\n\nThe Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby today said the migrant emergency is a 'wicked crisis'.\n\nHe added: 'My heart is broken by the images and stories of men, women and children who have risked their lives to escape conflict, violence and persecution.\n\n\u2018This is a hugely complex and wicked crisis that underlines our human frailty and the fragility of our political systems,\u2019 he added. \u2018We must respond with compassion.\u2019\n\nLabour's acting leader Harriet Harman said it was 'deplorable' that the government was 'putting its head in the sand and showing itself to be heartless and out of touch'.\n\n'We are all proud of Britain's historical role of offering a sanctuary to those fleeing conflict and persecution,' she wrote in a letter to the PM.\n\n'We are an outward-facing, generous-hearted nation, not one that turns inward and shirks its responsibilities. I know you will not want to be the Prime Minister of a Government that fails to offer sanctuary while our neighbours are stepping up to respond.\n\n'I strongly support the Government's continued aid for the refugee camps in the region and agree with you that we need much tougher action against people trafficking, but it is clear now that we also have a moral duty to act to take in more of these people and help them to rebuild their lives.'\n\nThe human cost: One thousand miles away, a policeman on a Turkish beach had to gently recover the bodies of two brothers drowned as their family tried to make their way to the Greek island of Kos yesterday\n\nDevastating: The two boys' mother also drowned in one of the most harrowing episodes of the migrant crisis\n\nHOW UK'S ASYLUM SYSTEM WORKS It would be easy to think from some of the attacks in recent days that Britain refuses to accept any refugees. In fact, since early 2011 the UK has granted asylum to almost 5,000 Syrians. To claim asylum in the UK, a person has to be in the country. Last year some 32,344 adults and their dependants from around the world applied in 2014, the highest annual number since 2004. In the first quarter of 2015, the figure was 7,435. Genuine refugees are expected to seek asylum in the first safe country to arrive in. However, it can be difficult for people from the most dangerous parts of the world to reach the UK. Under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation scheme, refugees can apply to be resettled in the UK by being transferred from Syria. A total of 216 people have been resettled under scheme so far.\n\nMr Cameron's remarks were echoed by Chancellor George Osborne, who said Britain had already taken in 5,000 asylum seekers fleeing the war in Syria and would 'go on taking people'. He added that Britain's closed-door refugee policy was 'under review'.\n\nHe said Britain would continue sending aid to the Middle East to help Syrian refugees trapped in camps.\n\nHe said: 'You have got to make sure the aid keeps coming \u2013 we put \u00a31billion of overseas aid in to help these desperate people.'\n\nBut he added: 'Of course Britain has always been a home to real asylum seekers, genuine refugees. We have taken 5,000 people from the Syrian conflict.\n\n'We will go on taking more and keep it under review. Britain has been playing a leading role and it will continue to do so.'\n\nIt came after Brussels drew up an emergency plan relocate 160,000 refugees across the EU. However, Britain has opted out of the scheme is not obliged to accept a single extra migrant.\n\nUnder the new scheme, migrants stranded in Italy, Greece and Hungary will be transferred to countries across the EU based on their population and economic wealth.\n\nIt will see Germany granting asylum to 35,000 refugees, France accepting 26,000 and Spain 16,000.\n\nEven poverty-stricken Bulgaria and Romania will be expected to take thousands of families.\n\nHowever, the UK \u2013 which refused to join the scheme when it was originally set up in May \u2013 will not have to take in any refugees despite being one of the largest and wealthiest countries in the EU.\n\nIf the UK were to take the same share as the rest of the EU it would be expected to grant asylum to around 17,000 refugees - or 11 per cent of the total number.\n\nAccording to today's leaked EU document there are 54,000 asylum seekers in Hungary 39,600 in Italy, 66,400 in Greece.\n\nMigrants board a train at Keleti Railway Station in Budapest today as plans emerged to relocate refugees across the EU\n\nAround 2,000 migrants from Syria have been forced to sleep near the Keleti railway station in Budapest\n\nPUBLIC PETITION FORCES DEBATE ON TAKING MORE REFUGEES More than 100,000 people have backed a petition calling for Britain to accept more refugees, triggering a debate in Parliament. At one point five people per second were backing the e-petition, urging the government to 'accept more asylum seekers and increase support for refugee migrants in the UK'. The petition adds: 'There is a global refugee crisis. The UK is not offering proportional asylum in comparison with European counterparts. 'We can't allow refugees who have risked their lives to escape horrendous conflict and violence to be left living in dire, unsafe and inhumane conditions in Europe. We must help.' By 10.30am it had passed the 100,000 threshold for it to be considered for a debate in Parliament. Labour leadership contender Andy Burnham called for MPs to debate whether the UK should take in more refugees when Parliament returns next week. 'David Cameron cannot continue to turn his back on the crisis. It is time for him to show leadership and restore Britain's reputation as a country that has always provided refuge to the vulnerable,' he said.\n\nDiplomatic pressure on Mr Cameron is grown in recent days, with Germany and Austria accusing the British PM of behaving like it is 'out of the club in this big task of sharing the burden'.\n\nSome Conservative MPs, peers and donors today publicly called on Mr Cameron to offer sanctuary to 'not hundreds but thousands' of refugees.\n\nTory MP Jeremy Lefroy told MailOnline: 'We are talking about refugees, people fleeing for their lives. We should be doing more.\n\n'We need to work with local communities up and down the country. The British people are very generous and which to provide help and support.'\n\nThe MP for Stafford said the UK government had already done more than any other European country to provide humanitarian help but it was 'not a question of either or', and refugees should be sent to parts of the country best able to support them.\n\nYVETTE'S SELFIE BRIGADE Yvette Cooper has written to all MPs urging them to take a selfie proclaiming that they would welcome more refugees in Britain. The Labour leadership candidate made her move after rival Andy Burnham appeared to claim credit for being the first of the contenders to call for the UK to grant more Syrians asylum. In her letter, the shadow home secretary told MPs the situation \u2018transcends\u2019 party politics and the Labour leadership race. She added: \u2018We are writing to you now to encourage you to ... take a selfie with a #refugeeswelcome banner and put it on Twitter and Facebook, encouraging others to do the same.\u2019\n\nDavid Burrowes, the Tory MP for Enfield, said Britain had taken a lead in providing a humanitarian and military response in north Africa but that had to be matched by a 'refuge response'.\n\n'We have got a voluntary resettlement programme but at the moment it is in the numbers of the hundreds compared to other countries where it's thousands,' he told MailOnline.\n\n'Part of the answer is we should not be taking hundreds as we are at the moment but thousands.\n\n'We are open to criticism that we are not taking our fair share but also from our own point of view, I think it makes compassionate sense just to do more.'\n\nTom Tugendhat, MP for Tonbridge and Malling, wrote on Twitter: 'I've spoken to many in West Kent who want us to do more and I agree with them. Our common humanity demands action at home and abroad.'\n\nNadhim Zahawi, MP for Stratford-on-Avon, added: 'We r nothing without compassion. Pic should make us all ashamed. We have failed in Syria. I am sorry little angel,RIP.'\n\nJohnny Mercer, the Tory MP for Plymouth Moor View, told The Times: 'We have always led the world in looking after people who can't look after themselves.'\n\nTory MP Nicola Blackwood posted on Twitter: 'Britain has a proud history of giving sanctuary to those fleeing conflict & protecting the persecuted.\n\n'We cannot be the generation that fails this test of humanity. We must do all we can.'\n\nFellow Conservative Chris Heaton Harris said the UK had 'always helped refugees fleeing war zones and we should now'.\n\nEU leaders have drawn up a plan to relocate 160,000 refugees around the Continent \u2013 but Britain will remain exempt from taking any\n\nTory MP David Burrowes (left) said Britain had taken a lead in providing a humanitarian and military response in north Africa but that had to be matched by a 'refuge response'. Nadhim Zahawi, MP for Stratford-on-Avon, said Britain was 'nothing without compassion'\n\n100 MIGRANT CHILDREN TAKEN INTO CARE IN KENT IN JUST A MONTH The number of migrant children entering Britain has continued to surge with 100 youngsters taken into care in Kent in just one month alone. Figures show that 720 unaccompanied children seeking asylum are being looked after by Kent County Council, up from 630 at the beginning of August. In comparison, the local authority was supporting around 220 unaccompanied asylum seeking children under the age of 18 in March last year, which rose to 369 in March of this year. The latest figures come after the council said last month it had no more foster beds available for children. The huge surge in the numbers of unaccompanied children seeking asylum comes amid this summer's turmoil in Calais, leaving Kent County Council with a multi-million pound funding gap in care costs.\n\nHowever, other Tory MPs backed the Prime Minister's stance. Gary Streeter said: 'The reality is that taking more refugees is not going to solve the problem.\n\n'What I am frustrated about is that collectively, whether it is the European Union or the UN or even the US, I don't think we are doing enough to tackle the root problem - we have got to stop people getting on the boats or the trains.'\n\nFormer Conservative International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell said that the UK was providing an 'immense amount of humanitarian support' to countries such as Syria.\n\n'Were Britain not providing that support, there would be yet more hundreds of thousands of people coming out of that part of the world'\n\nHe added that the UK had done 'more than the whole of the EU put together in terms of financial support'.\n\nBut Tory MP Andrew Percy said his constituents were not clamouring to accept more refugees, tweeting: \u2018It is incredible comparing the media coverage of the migrant crisis with the emails I am receiving from constituents.\u2019 Meanwhile, tension was also mounting across Europe as Brussels was accused of turning the Mediterranean into a \u2018cemetery\u2019 for refugees.\n\nTurkey\u2019s president Tayyip Erdogan accused EU states of being responsible for the death of every single victim of the crisis, saying: \u2018European countries, which turned the Mediterranean Sea \u2013 the cradle of ancient civilisations \u2013 into a migrant cemetery are party to the crime that takes place when each refugee loses their life.\u2019\n\nNils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe\u2019s Commissioner for Human Rights, attacked Britain specifically for doing \u2018much less\u2019 than other countries to ease the crisis.\n\nLast night, as the numbers crossing into Germany reached nearly 150 per hour, it asked Italy to impose identification checks at Brennero, on the border with Austria, to ease the flow.\n\nAn unprecedented surge of migrants has been trying to get to the country after Berlin last week began accepting asylum claims from Syrian refugees regardless of where they entered the EU.\n\nIt has caused chaos across eastern Europe as authorities have struggled to cope with the vast numbers who, as undocumented migrants, are theoretically barred from travelling across the EU. Figures released yesterday showed a record 104,460 asylum seekers arrived in Germany last month.\n\nItalian minister for European affairs Sandro Gozi suggested Mr Cameron risks losing support for his plans to curb benefits for migrants.\n\nMr Gozi told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'It is clear that in front of this mess, in front of this particularly serious crisis, we would welcome that every country take on more responsibility.\n\n'When it comes to the UK, the UK has a special status but if you have a special status you cannot seek to shape policy in which you don't want to participate.'\n\nLabour leadership contender Yvette Cooper has suggested that it should be possible to take some 10,000 people seeking asylum\n\nJUNCKER'S REFUGEE RELOCATION SCHEME EXPLAINED EU chief Jean-Claude Juncker wants 160,000 refugees relocated across the continent European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker is set to propose a big increase in the number of refugees EU countries are required to give refuge to. In July, Mr Juncker called on European leaders to agree to share 40,000 refugees who had successfully made it to Italy and Greece. EU leaders eventually agreed to relocate 32,000 asylum seekers across the continent \u2013 but only those from Syria, Iraq and Eritrea. The number of refugees per country was calculated based on population, economic wealth and unemployment rates. Mr Juncker now wants the asylum scheme to be expanded to help relocate 160,000 refugees from three countries - Greece, Italy and Hungary. The new proposals include a 'permanent relocation scheme' so arriving migrants are automatically shared out between EU states. However, the UK, Ireland and Denmark opted out of the scheme when it was first set up.\n\nPeter Sutherland, the UN special representative on international migration, said while some countries were 'massively bearing the burden' of the migrant crisis, the UK was among those that 'can do more'.\n\nConservative donor Sir Mick Davis said Britain must not 'shut itself off' from modern crises.\n\nTory former foreign office minister Baroness Warsi told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'We have to be prepared to share the burden.\n\n'This is not about having an open door policy, this is about having quite a specific responsive policy in the areas for example that we have expertise (in).\n\n'Unaccompanied minors, women fleeing from sexual violence, for example territories held by Isis.\n\n'These are areas upon which we have both expertise and an international reputation and I think Britain has always been a generous, open, welcoming country and we must not allow a political climate of today to step away from that proud tradition.'\n\nLabour leadership contender Yvette Cooper has suggested that it should be possible to take some 10,000 people seeking asylum.\n\nShe said: 'It is heartbreaking what is happening on our continent. We cannot keep turning our backs on this. We can - and must - do more. If every area in the UK took just ten families, we could offer sanctuary to 10,000 refugees. Let's not look back with shame at our inaction.'\n\nLiberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said the Government's refusal to take more than a few hundred refugees was 'morally wrong' and 'politically foolish' while Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: 'We must do more.'\n\nAmid signs that EU leaders were losing control of the crisis, Germany was yesterday forced to ask Italy to impose identification checks at Brennero, on the border with Austria, sparking claims that free movement is on the brink of collapse."}
{"text":"Huntington Beach Police breath testing patrons in local bars\n\nIs the Huntington Beach Police breath testing patrons in local bars ? The Orange County Register had a news story about the Huntington Beach Police breath testing patrons in local bars as part of the \u201cknow your limit\u201d program. Huntington Beach Police received a grant from the State of California Office of Traffic Safety in the amount of $435,226 for the program up to September, 2015, although Police in Huntington Beach said they will continue the program. Police Officers are paid to hang out in local bars, breath test patrons, and give out a silver sticker that reads \u201cI Know My Limit.\u201d\n\nOf 55 cities comparable in size, with 100,001 to 250,000 residents, Huntington Beach was ranked No. 1 in the state in 2011 for alcohol-involved accidents. That year Huntington Beach saw 164 victims killed or injured. Further investigation showed that the majority of those accidents were from the following five local bars:\n\nBaja Sharkeez: 16 accidents Hurricanes Bar and Grill: 5 accidents Marlin Bar and Grill: 5 accidents Huntington Beach Beer Company: 4 Black Bull Chop House: 4\n\nHuntington Beach Police breath testing patrons in local bars\n\nHuntington Beach might be the first to use this breath testing program, but they probably won\u2019t be the last. Officers from the Anaheim Police Department and police agencies in Los Angeles County have joined Huntington Beach officers in downtown bars to test out the program for their cities.\n\nThe OC Register Article did state one troubling fact, however. It suggests that people could be arrested for not participating:\n\nBar patrons who are clearly intoxicated and refuse to participate in Know Your Limit can be arrested for being intoxicated in public, but are mostly encouraged to find a ride home.\n\nDoes that mean that if you refuse a breath test in one of the local bars (which is not illegal, as long as you are not being asked to leave), and an officer thinks you are drunk, (without a test to confirm), that you could be arrested based upon not participating in the voluntary test?\n\nThe program may also not be particularly effective however. The first city to use the program was Scottsdale, Arizona, where they instituted it in 2010, and then had a record year of drunk driving accidents in 2011.\n\nAwareness to prevent DUIs is admirable, but it\u2019s the driving that is the problem. Drinking is not illegal. If you know how to drink and how to avoid a DUI, you can avoid the intrusion from police demanding a test from you in a bar.\n\nIf you do know someone arrested for a Huntington Beach DUI, the best thing you can do is talk to an experienced Huntington Beach DUI lawyer. Call 949-682-5316 to get your free consultation today."}
{"text":"For :iconsMachinesandMonsters:,here is the grand opening for the Dino Charge Megazord Para-Raptor formation..with copics. To be perfectly honest with ya guys,this show rocks!! Hehe. ^_^ Shelby is possibly my fave ranger in the team and is a perfect replacement for Amy from Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger which is still better than freakin' Ninninger!! Well,that is for another time but hey,the characters in Dino Charge are likeable and Koda is possibly the show-stealer. Chase (oh man,he's got the same name as Chaser from Masked Rider Drive..T_T) is literally smooth as ice and Riley is starting to be like Souji. Hehey. Ivan the Gold Ranger is miles better than Utsusemimaru in my opinion and his antics are quite the treasure. Tyler is also a good character and at least the show isn't about him like a certain Mission Impossible trilogy before Ghost Protocol came along.The Dino Charge Megazord is possibly one of the most detailed Megazords in toku history and I only say that is because there is soooo much detail and rivets on the Zords even though they were like from millions of years. XD Hope PLEX comes up with something in the 40th Sentai. XD So yeah,the villain Sledge is also a competent villain and yes,he looks like a Bionicle and I like that. Bite me!There's nothing to say about the Kyoryujin Western other than it is a sharp shoot. What's more to say,this is a great show to watch if you think Ninninger was terrible,give Dino Charge a go. The Graphite Ranger has now been unlocked."}
{"text":"Toward the end of 2006, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility \u2014 \"a national non-profit alliance of local, state and federal scientists, law enforcement officers, land managers and other professionals dedicated to upholding environmental laws and values\" \u2014 charged the National Park Service with stalling on a promised review of a creationist book sold at the bookstores at Grand Canyon National Park. Although the park's bookstores are operated by a separate non-profit organization, the Grand Canyon Association, the National Park Service is responsible for approving the items that are sold there. In August 2003, the NPS approved the sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View , edited by Tom Vail and published by Master Books, the publishing arm of the Institute for Creation Research. A Different View expounds a young-earth creationist view of the geology of the canyon, and proclaims, \"all contributions have been peer-reviewed to ensure a consistent and biblical perspective.\" In his review of the book ( RNCSE 2004 Jan\/Feb; 24 [1]: 33-6), the geologist Wilfred Elders described it as \"'Exhibit A' of a new, slick strategy by biblical literalists to proselytize using a beautifully illustrated, multi-authored book about a spectacular and world-famous geological feature,\" adding, \"Allowing the sale of this book within the National Park was unfortunate. In the minds of some buyers, this could imply NPS approval of young-earth creationists and their religious proselytizing.\"\n\nAfter the sale of A Different View was approved, the superintendent of the park appealed to the NPS headquarters for \"a review of the book in terms of its appropriateness,\" and the Chief of the Park Service's Geologic Resources Division recommended its removal, saying that it \"does not use accurate, professional and scholarly knowledge; is not based on science but a specific religious doctrine; does not further the public's understanding of the Grand Canyon's existence; [and] does not further the mission of the National Park Service.\" Meanwhile, the sale of the book became a matter of public controversy (see RNCSE 2004 Jan\/Feb; 24 [1]: 4-5). Elders's review appeared in Eos (the weekly newsletter of the American Geophysical Union); the presidents of the American Paleontological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the Association of American State Geologists, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, the American Geological Institute, and the Geological Society of America signed a joint letter to the NPS, urging that A Different View be removed \"from shelves where buyers are given the impression that the book is about earth science and its content endorsed by the National Park Service\" (see RNCSE 2004 Jan\/Feb; 24 [1]: 19); and stories about the controversy appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times . A spokesperson for the NPS repeatedly assured the press and Congress that the promised review would be forthcoming.\n\nIn its December 28, 2006, press release, however, PEER charged, \"Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park.\" Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, commented, \"As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan .\" In a December 28, 2006, letter, PEER urged the new director of NPS, Mary Bomar, to remove the book from sale at the park's bookstores and museums as well as to \"[p]rovide training to the interpretive staff at Grand Canyon NP regarding how to answer questions from the public concerning the geologic age of the Canyon and related matters; and ... [a]pprove an updated version of the long-stalled pamphlet 'National Park Service Geologic Interpretive Programs: Distinguishing Science from Religion' for distribution to agency interpretive staff.\" It ought to be noted that PEER was not accusing the NPS of forbidding its interpretive staff to present the scientific facts about the canyon's age and geology. Unfortunately, careless wording in its press release suggested otherwise, and PEER's credibility suffered as a result, obscuring PEER's important charge that the NPS is not providing its staff with the resources it needs to present the scientific facts about the canyon's age of geology effectively, especially when faced with park visitors who have questions about, or even embrace, views that reject those facts on religious grounds.\n\nPrompted by PEER's press release, the controversy over the sale of A Different View began to attract attention again in the media, with the Arizona Daily Sun (2007 Jan 4) offering a report in which a spokesperson for the NPS was quoted as saying, \"We do not use the creationist text in our teaching, nor do we endorse its content. However, it is not our place to censor alternate beliefs.\" The Sacramento Bee (2007 Jan 4) suggested, in a forceful and cogent editorial entitled \"Don't use parks to promote creationism,\" \"A new year and a new National Park Service director mark an opportunity for change. Here's an easy one. Settle the 3-year-old controversy about a creationist account of the Grand Canyon.\" The editorial argued that \"Mary Bomar, the new National Park Service director, should send a message that programs and materials in national parks present the best scientific evidence and don't endorse any particular religious beliefs,\" and concluded by urging Bomar to do so quickly:\n\nRemove the book from sale from within the park; its proper place is for sale in private bookstores outside the public park. Equally important, finish the long-delayed pamphlet ... and distribute it to park rangers. The nation's public parks are not the place to promote religious theories about the formation and development of Earth.\n\nA spokesperson for the NPS, David Barna, told The New York Times (2007 Jan 5) that there was no formal review of whether the bookstores ought to discontinue selling A Different View in part because of differences among the NPS's specialists. According to the Times , \"When officials got together to discuss the book, the geologists and natural resource specialists would say, 'Get this book out of here,' Mr. Barna said. 'But the education and interpretation people would say: 'Wait a minute. If your science is so sound, the fact that there are differences of opinion should not scare you away.'\" In a written statement, the Times reported, Barna \"notes that Park Service management policies require reliance on 'the best scientific evidence available' and, as a result, rangers tell visitors that \"the Colorado River basin has developed in the past 40 million years.\" But the Times also reported, \"the guidelines also say that material available from concessionaires in national parks should adhere to the standards used to evaluate Park Service materials.\" PEER's executive director Jeff Ruch was quoted as contending that selling the book promoted fundamentalist Christian views: \"This is government establishment of religion in a fairly fundamental way, if you pardon the pun.\"\n\nRonald Bailey, the science columnist for Reason , heard NCSE's executive director Eugenie C Scott speak about the controversy at the James Randi Educational Foundation's event The Amazing Meeting V, and promptly went to Grand Canyon National Park to see A Different View for himself. He reports, \"As I was buying it, I asked the clerk what she thought about it. 'We're not allowed to say anything about it,' she said covering her mouth with her hand in the 'Speak No Evil' monkey fashion. 'Oh come on,' I cajoled, but the clerk refused any further comment. Later I went in search of it at the other south rim Park Service bookstore at Desert View. In this much smaller bookstore, Vail's slender Flood geology volume was mixed in among the other photo books. Again, I asked this clerk what she thought, and she smiled and replied, 'All I will say is that it's got some really beautiful photographs'\" (2007 Jan 26; available on-line at http:\/\/reason.com\/news\/show\/118334.html). Acknowledging that the NPS-overseen bookstores carry books that present and discuss the creation myths of Native Americans, Bailey nevertheless drew the crucial distinction: \"unlike books on native creation myths, Vail insists that he is making scientific claims about how rock layers are laid down, fossils formed and the canyon carved.\"\n\nTitle: Renewed Concern About Creationism at Grand Canyon National Park Author(s): Glenn Branch NCSE Deputy Director Volume: 27 Issue: 3\u20134 Year: 2007 Date: May\u2013August Page(s): 15\u201316"}
{"text":"Besides projecting directions and e-mails in front of your face, Google Glass can also measure biological signs like heart and breathing rates, according to new research. The work suggests a new way for wearable devices to track a person\u2019s stress level and provide instant fitness feedback.\n\nResearchers from MIT\u2019s Media Lab and the Georgia Institute of Technology\u2019s School of Interactive Computing say that they can accurately ferret out this data by monitoring a Glass wearer\u2019s head movements with the gyroscope, accelerometer, and camera built into Google Glass. A paper on the research will be presented at the MobiHealth conference in Athens, Greece, in November.\n\nThe project, called BioGlass, could lead to biometric-tracking apps for Google Glass. Looking beyond the controversial head-worn computer, researchers hope their work leads to less obtrusive sensors for self-monitoring via wearable devices.\n\nBioGlass uses the Glass sensors and camera to track the wearer\u2019s ballistocardiogram, or BCG, which is a mechanical signal measuring the tiny body movements that result from the heart pumping blood. BCG tracking has been around since the 1870s, but was hardly used for many years because it was tricky to track without special equipment (such as a frictionless table). More recently, though, research has shown that sensitive motion sensors for electronic devices can easily detect the BCG signal, and at least one company, Quanttus, is building a product that can do so at the wrist (see \u201cThis Fitness Wristband Wants to Play Doctor\u201d).\n\nIn a study of 12 people, researchers were able to estimate heart and breathing rates nearly as accurately as they could with FDA-approved sensors for tracking the same signals. The results for heart-rate estimation were off by less than a beat per minute and respiration by less than a breath per minute, says Javier Hernandez, a graduate student in MIT\u2019s Media Lab who coauthored the paper.\n\nThe researchers built an Android app that captured data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and front-facing camera of the Google Glass device; in order to get a range of physiological parameters, study participants wore it as they stood, sat, and lay motionless, and then again after riding an exercise bike. Researchers then isolated and extracted heart- and respiration-rate data from the accelerometer and gyroscope readings, and tracked motion in the video by noting pixel displacement over time. They then used this data to extract heart and respiration information.\n\nThe researchers are now working on several apps that would use this kind of data for practical purposes; Yin Li, a paper coauthor and graduate student at Georgia Tech, says they\u2019re making an app that captures and analyzes the signals that were investigated in the study in real time (for the study, the signals were analyzed after the fact).\n\nThere are plenty of challenges ahead. The researchers still need to test their work with big motions, such as walking around, to see if they can get the same level of accuracy. And it may be difficult to convince people to wear Google Glass in the first place, let alone track their body\u2019s signals with the device. At $1,500, the device is about 15 times more expensive than most fitness trackers, and its in-your-face style is polarizing.\n\nBut Rosalind Picard, a paper coauthor and MIT professor who heads the Media Lab\u2019s affective computing research group, says that while the group\u2019s work uses Google Glass, the method would work with any pair of glasses embedded with a camera and the right sensors.\n\n\u201cI would love for my glasses to give me a little quiet indication about my breathing so I can adjust it,\u201d she says.\n\n\u200b"}
{"text":"Facebook has decided to turn over to congressional investigators copies of roughly 3,000 advertisements purchased by Russian-linked groups during the 2016 presidential campaign.\n\nThe company confirmed Thursday afternoon that it would release details associated with the advertisements, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlining other steps the company is taking to step up transparency for ads.\n\n\u201cWe believe it is vitally important that government authorities have the information they need to deliver to the public a full assessment of what happened in the 2016 election,\u201d Facebook\u2019s general counsel Colin Stretch said in a post.\n\n\u201cThat is an assessment that can be made only by investigators with access to classified intelligence and information from all relevant companies and industries \u2014 and we want to do our part.\u201d\n\nADVERTISEMENT\n\nSen. Mark Warner Mark Robert WarnerHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Addressing repair backlog at national parks can give Congress a big win MORE (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has been a leading critic of Facebook's handling of the probe into Russian activity on its platform, called the move a \"necessary first step.\"\n\n\u201cImportant & absolutely necessary first step. The American people deserve to know the truth about Russia\u2019s interference in the 2016 election,\u201d Warner tweeted.\n\nZuckerberg said the release was only one of the steps the company is taking to make the platform less vulnerable for those looking to use it as a tool for election interference.\n\n\u201cWe will continue our investigation into what happened on Facebook in this election. We may find more, and if we do, we will continue to work with the government,\u201d Zuckerberg said during a Facebook Live.\n\nZuckerberg noted that the company would be expanding its analysis of election interference into other former Soviet countries \u2014 something that Warner has been pressing it to do. He also said that Facebook will push to make its political ads more transparent.\n\n\u201cNot only will you have to disclose which page paid for an ad, but we will also make it so you can visit an advertiser's page and see the ads they're currently running to any audience on Facebook,\u201d he said.\n\nFacebook will also devote more resources to its security team and double the number of staff on its election integrity team, Zuckerberg said.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not what we stand for.\u201d\n\nFacebook said its decision to turn over copies of the ads to Congress came after \u201can extensive legal and policy review,\" noting that federal law \"places strict limitations on the disclosure of account information.\"\n\nThe company has previously cited federal privacy laws for its delay in releasing more information about the Russian-linked advertisements to congressional investigators.\n\nMeanwhile, Facebook had given more details to special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s team for its probe of Russia's interference in the 2016 election and any Russian ties to President Trump's campaign.\n\nFacebook did not mention releasing further details on the matter to the public, which some lawmakers have pushed for.\n\nThe social media company revealed earlier this month that Russian actors purchased $100,000 in political ads during the 2016 presidential campaign, but has remained tight-lipped about additional details.\n\nFacebook has been criticized by lawmakers for not revealing enough information about the extent of Russian activity on its platform to potentially influence the election.\n\n\u201cI question whether Facebook has put near the resources they need into getting us all the facts,\u201d Warner told reporters last week.\n\nWarner\u2019s counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff Adam Bennett SchiffTech takes heat as anti-vaxers go viral Demands grow for a public Mueller report Bharara: It would seem 'odd and unusual' if Mueller report isn't made public MORE (D-Calif.), had similarly called for more details on the ad buys.\n\nWarner and Sen. Richard Burr Richard Mauze BurrHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Five tantalizing questions about Mueller\u2019s investigation MORE (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence panel, say they plan to have Facebook, and potentially other companies, testify on the matter in the fall.\n\nTwitter has also received scrutiny. A company spokesperson told The Hill on Thursday that it will meet with Senate Intelligence Committee staff over its inquiry of Russian interference in the 2016 race.\n\nThe spokesperson declined to comment on if it has found evidence of Russian influence on its platform.\n\nUpdated: 4:45 p.m."}
{"text":"Gun-control advocates and their allies in the state legislature are gearing up for another battle in 2014 in hopes of making New Jersey gun restrictions, already among the toughest in the nation, even more stringent.\n\nLast year, during a tumultuous legislative session following the murder of 20 children in a Newtown, Conn. elementary school, the legislature passed 22 new pieces of gun legislation. About a dozen became law, while the balance were struck down by the governor's veto pen. Advocates for more limits on guns say important legislation was left on the table.\n\nTIMELINE: 2013 was a big year for gun legislation\n\nIt's those measures \u2014 in particular, a restriction on ammunition magazine size, a ban on .50-caliber rifles, stricter limits on children\u2019s access to firearms and mandatory safety training for gun owners \u2014 that will be their focus in the coming year. \"Our top priority is a 10-round limit on magazine size,\" said Bryan Miller, executive director of Heeding God's Call, a faith-based organization focused on preventing gun violence.\n\n\"Nobody needs a 15-round ammunition magazine unless they are a domestic terrorist or a gangster,\" Miller said. \"We expect the legislative leadership to get behind this and the governor to see some sense.\"\n\nIn last year's session, the magazine restriction never made it to the governor's desk. Instead, it was the Senate and president Steve Sweeney who stood in its way. The state currently restricts clips to 15 rounds, a limit Sweeney described last year as \"effective.\"\n\nBut Miller said he is confident the Senate president is on board with the 10-round limit this time around.\n\nFor the families of the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, the 10-round magazine has become a rallying cry.\n\n\"We do a lot of studying and research and we speak to gun owners and people all\n\nover the political spectrum,\" said Mark Barden, advocacy director for Sandy Hook Promise whose son Daniel was among the children murdered. \"We hear universally\n\nfor hunting, home protection and sport shooting that a 10 round magazine is\n\ncertainly plenty.\"\n\nBarden said to back up the claim that the limit would save lives, you need only look to the number of shootings that are halted when the shooter stops to reload.\n\nFor their part, Second Amendment advocates say the magazine restriction is arbitrary and does nothing to prevent gun violence. What it does, gun advocates say, is limit only the firepower of those who follow the law.\n\n\"For the most part this is the same feel-good, do-nothing legislation that the New Jersey legislature is so fond of sponsoring,\" said Frank Fiamingo, president of the New Jersey Second Amendment Society. \"As usual, the legislation targets the law-abiding gun owner who has purchased a gun legally and does not address the gangs and the career criminals who are committing the crimes.\"\n\nLikewise the ban on .50 caliber rifles, a weapon gun advocates say is irrelevant to the discussion because it's used only by wealthy hobbyists and has never been used to commit a crime in the state.\n\nLast year, Gov. Chris Christie himself advocated for its ban but later reversed course with a veto of the measure.\n\nThe governor hinted that the veto was punishment for Democratic overreach; however, gun-control advocates believe he also was pandering to a New Hampshire pro-guns group that urged its members to contact the Christie and warn him against signing various gun-control measures.\n\nMiller said he's hoping the governor makes good on the ban this year.\n\n\"Both houses of the legislature and the governor himself supported the ban prior to passage and then, just to teach Democratic leaders a lesson, he vetoed it,\" Miller said. \"Is this leadership? And who was he really talking to, the citizens of New Jersey or the right wing pro-gunners of New Hampshire.\"\n\nMandatory safety training was part of Sweeney's centerpiece bill, passed by both houses of the legislature last year but conditionally vetoed by the governor. The bill would have changed the way the state issues firearms licenses, made background checks instant and included private sales in the law. It also would have required proof of safety training prior to the issuance of a gun license. Training was among the elements altered by the governor's veto. After the conditional veto, Sweeney abandoned the measure.\n\n\"It's the most logical of the group,\" Miller said. \"You need safety training to drive a car. Everybody who owns a gun should know how to store it and use it safely.\"\n\nBut Fiamingo said the devil is in the details. If the legislation is aimed at providing free common-sense training on gun storage and other safety factors, his group could back it. The problem, he said, is the parameters are always left out of the bill.\n\nIf it's true training and it's provided free, he could back it, Fiamingo said. But if it's just a financial barrier erected to make it harder to obtain a gun permit, he said, it's a non-starter.\n\nSweeney already has reintroduced the bill in the current session. Asked about specifics of this year's agenda, however, Sweeney issued only a broad comment.\n\n\"The governor vetoed common-sense gun-safety reforms, including legislation I sponsored that would have made New Jersey a national model on background checks,\" he said. \"We will be examining these issues again during the new term.\"\n\nAs he was last year, Assemblyman Lou Greenwald is a strong advocate of gun-control measures, including the magazine restriction.\n\n\"I made a personal commitment to the families of Newtown that we would not stop fighting, no matter how long it takes until we get the magazine limit passed,\" Greenwald said. \"In talking with the families, they will tell you, the single most important piece of legislation to stop this kind of insanity in the future is that magazine limit.\"\n\nWhile gun-control supporters ask \"Why not?\" when it comes to the magazine-size limit, pro-gun advocates say that's the wrong question.\n\n\"The question is, what is the statistical evidence that shows that reducing the limit on a clip from 15 to 10 rounds will reduce gun crime?\" Fiamingo said. \"If this passes, are the Latin Kings or the Bloods or the Crips going to reduce their magazine capacity to 10 rounds?\"\n\nDespite objections from gun-rights groups, polls taken in the aftermath of Newtown showed nearly 60 percent of New Jersey residents favored stricter controls on guns, and a year later, public opinion remains on the side of gun control. And while the political climate in the state has changed significantly over the past year, it's too soon to tell if it will result in a sea change on gun control.\n\nChristie, though he's fresh off a landslide reelection victory, is politically wounded. Once the frontrunner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, the dual scandals surrounding lane closures at the George Washington Bridge and Hurricane Sandy recovery funding in Hoboken have cast a pall \u2014 at least for now \u2014 over his viability as a national candidate. Whether that will mean he'll focus on a more Jersey-centric agenda or move more to the right remains to be seen.\n\nSweeney also faces an altered landscape. His own reelection in the 3rd Legislative District, where gun owners and sportsmen are commonplace, will no doubt allow him more freedom to navigate the issue. He has his own sights set on the governor's office, so he will likely adopt a more statewide focus on a host of issues, gun control being among the most obvious.\n\nBarden and others plan to attend a press conference with the state's legislative leaders later this month in hopes of finishing what was started here last year.\n\nNJ.com reporter S.P. Sullivan contributed to this report."}
{"text":"Share. You're soaking in it! You're soaking in it!\n\nThe latest update for The Sims 4 adds pools and other pool-related activities to the game.\n\nThe Build mode used for home creation has been adapted to pools, which should help streamline the pool-building process.\n\nIn addition to being created in Build mode, pools can also be built diagonally and on rooftops. Windows can be added to pools to create infinity pools, wall height can be adjusted to make deeper or shallower pools, and a slew of new swimwear has been added to the game as well. The new line of swimwear can be perused in Create A Sim.\n\nHaving a pool means that Sims can just sit around the pool and enjoy all that owning a pool entails, from swimming, to relaxing pool side, to getting splashed by other Sims. It also means the return of death by drowning, which means Sims ghosts may express their displeasure for water, on account of it being the cause of their untimely simulated demise.\n\nIn addition to pools, there are a number of bug fixes including the tweaking of some performance issues and graphical oddities.\n\nThe Sims 4 launched at the beginning of September and help propel EA to huge earnings in the second quarter of its fiscal year.\n\nSeth Macy is a freelance writer who just wants to be your friend. Follow him on Twitter @sethmacy, and MyIGN at sethgmacy."}
{"text":"Syria is almost completely cut off from the global Internet.\n\nSeveral Internet monitoring companies reported Thursday that Syria suffered an almost complete Internet shutdown. This is the latest in a long series of Internet blackouts in the war-torn country.\n\nThe blackout started around 8:30 a.m. ET, according to Internet monitoring firm Renesys, which first spotted the outage. Renesys reported that 84 networks experienced an outage in Syria starting at 12:26 UTC, which is 95% of the routed networks in the country, the company wrote.\n\nInternet in Syria almost entirely down at 12:26 UTC. Only Aleppo link to Turkey remains connected. pic.twitter.com\/o6flIEbkVy \u2014 Renesys Corporation (@renesys) March 20, 2014\n\nThe disruption was then confirmed by other companies like Akamai, BGPmon, OpenDNS, and Google.\n\nNear complete Internet disruption in #Syria detected by @Akamai traffic monitoring, starting at ~12:30pm UTC pic.twitter.com\/MqGovceSHy \u2014 StateOfTheInternet (@akamai_soti) March 20, 2014\n\nCountry wide Internet outage in Syria starting at 12:25 UTC Only remaining network are the Aleppo, AS24814, prefixes pic.twitter.com\/s74fStmBEz \u2014 BGPmon.net (@bgpmon) March 20, 2014\n\nLooks like Syria is offline again. pic.twitter.com\/F1eovuPjnE \u2014 Think Umbrella (@ThinkUmbrella) March 20, 2014\n\nAt this point, the source of the outage is still unclear. In the past, the government has often blamed technical issues \u2014 claims that experts meet with skepticism, arguing that the outages seem to coincide with important military operations or offensives, instead indicating that the government might purposely shut down the Internet. This is possible thanks to Syria's stranglehold over the country's single point of failure, the state-controlled Syrian Telecommunications Establishment, which controls the flow of the Internet in and outside of the country.\n\nDoug Madory, a researcher at Renesys, said that only the link from Aleppo to Turkey remains working, something that \"is consistent with outages over the past few months.\"\n\n\"Aleppo's outages occur independently from the country-wide blackouts,\" he added.\n\nThe last Internet blackout in Syria was reported Feb. 20, 2014.\n\nUPDATE, 3.31 p.m. ET: The Internet has apparently been restored in Syria, after a blackout that lasted more than 7 hours, according to Renesys and Akamai.\n\nApparent restoration of #Syria Internet connectivity detected by @Akamai traffic monitoring at ~7:00pm UTC. pic.twitter.com\/eQnRJvE1Ho \u2014 StateOfTheInternet (@akamai_soti) March 20, 2014\n\nThe outage was caused by \"a breakdown in the optical fiber cable in Damascus Countryside,\" according to the Syrian government-owned news agency SANA.\n\nMadory, the Renesys researcher, told Mashable that from the outside world, it's impossible to know for sure what caused the outage, and whether the government's explanation is accurate. But its explanation is plausible.\n\n\"If they have a single fiber line that connects Tartous with [Syrian Telecommunications Establishment]'s central office in Damascus and that was what was cut, then this is possible,\" he said."}
{"text":"JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A man was arrested several months after he put six puppies in pillow cases, tied the pillow cases in a knot and dropped them into a culvert near a storm drain, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said.\n\nErnest Martin faces six counts of animal abandonment.\n\nMartin, 39, was arrested Saturday, but the incident took place last September, police said.\n\nAccording to the Sheriff's Office, a passerby noticed the pillow cases, and people then took out the puppies, which had been stolen from their owner.\n\nJSO booking photo of Ernest Martin on surveillance image\n\nEXTENDED VIDEO: Surveillance shows puppies stuffed into storm drains\n\nA resident checked their surveillance video, and Martin was seen in it, stuffing the puppies into the culvert at the corner of Clyde Street and Van Buren Avenue, police said.\n\n\"It just breaks my heart to see someone hurting animals like that,\" said the person who recorded the surveillance video. \"He throws them real high into the air and over the fence and they're hitting the ground. He came back outside with some pillow cases, grabbed the puppies up one by one, came out here to the drain and started shoving them into the drain.\"\n\nThe witness, who wished to not be identified, told News4Jax on Monday that when the man couldn't stuff all the puppies into one drain, he went to another one.\n\n\"When they started moving around, he was kicking them, trying to shove them back into the drain,\" the witness said.\n\nFortunately, all six puppies, which police said belonged to Martin's stepfather, survived the attack. News4Jax learned that one of the puppies now lives with the stepfather, and the others were given to family members.\n\nMartin's mother, who asked to remain anonymous, said her son's actions were the result of schizophrenia.\n\n\"When he saw the dogs, he though they were little demons,\" she said. \"He goes through little spasms, but he put them in there. He put them in the ditch.\"\n\nMartin was booked into the Duval County Jail and ordered held on $90,000 bond.\n\nViewer warning: The videos, shown in this story, contain graphic details and images that may be considered disturbing to some people.\n\nCopyright 2017 by WJXT News4Jax - All rights reserved."}
{"text":"Today I have a Do-It-Yourself guide on how to \"dropkick\" a Claymore Anti-Personnel mine for you guys. This is a technique I learned in Ranger Battalion and was able to use later on when I was in Special Forces. The term dropkick is of course just shorthand for a method of rigging the Claymore mine for a very fast employment when outnumbered and outgunned by the enemy. Also known as the \"red vapor mist machine\" in some circles, the Claymore mine is typically used to protect soldiers in static positions such as patrol bases, or used to initiate an ambush against enemy troops. The dropkick technique is different in that it is used by snipers, recce patrols, or other small SOF teams who are breaking contact with the enemy and attempting to escape and evade.\n\nSo here it is, the Claymore Mine that we all know and love. With a layer of plastic explosives lining the inside of the curve shaped mine, there are about 700 ball bearings laid into the explosives that fire forward at enemy troops as shrapnel. I'm out of the military now so this demonstration was done with an inert trainer rather than the real deal!\n\nStep 1: Take inventory and test equipment. You will need everything you see above and a knife for this project. Use the test set to test the Claymore out on the range for functionality. Go through the entire process, EIB standards and everything. If you actually have to use a dropkicked Claymore in combat, you need it to work, so don't cut any corners here. Check the mine, wire, and clacker for serviceability and scrounge up some rubber bands; you'll see why in a minute.\n\nStep 2: First we need to prepare the Claymore bag that the mine comes in. Directions on how to employ the mine are sewn into the cover of the bag. This is going to get in the way as we move forward, so do yourself a favor and cut or tear these out now.\n\nMake your Claymore bag look like this and we are ready to move on to the next step.\n\nStep 3: The Claymore bag is partitioned down the middle into two pouches, one for the Claymore mine and one for the wire with blasting cap, clacker, and test set. We need to cut down this partition so that we have one big pouch in the bag.\n\nOnce your Claymore bag looks like this you will be ready to go on to the next step.\n\nStep 4: Extend the legs of the Claymore mine and put it in the bag to see where the legs poke into the bottom.\n\nUse your knife to cut slits in the bottom of the bag and ensure that the legs of the mine can slide through.\n\nStep 5: Back to the lid of the bag. Cut slits up both sides of the lid, three on each side. Make sure that they are equally spaced apart and don't go past the buttons.\n\nStep 6: Take the rubber bands and loop them through the slits that you made in the cover, then loop the bands back on themselves, making a bite around the fabric of the lid. Do this for each of the six slits that you cut.\n\nStep 6: This is where it gets a little tricky. Figure out how much length of the Claymore wire covers and surpasses the length of the lid. In my case, I can wrap the cord around my elbow and over my palm to make a spool, and that fits nicely for our purposes. This might require some experimentation on your part to get it right. You will need to make three separate wraps that will be locked into place with the rubber bands, so plan ahead.\n\nStart stringing the Claymore wire back and forth. Once you get enough wraps, separating the wire equally into thirds, go ahead and lock the ends into the loops of the rubber bands. You may need to twist the rubber bands and loop them back around the wire a second time to make sure it's in there nice and snug.\n\nThis is what it should look like when you are done. During this process it is critical that you are careful with the blasting cap when doing this with a live mine. When I worked with live demo, I'd keep the cap inside the plastic spool that the wire comes on for safety purposes.\n\nStep 7: Put the Claymore mine back in the bag, push the metal legs through the slits you cut in the bottom, and fold them down and out of the way for transportation.\n\nStep 8: Arm the mine. Screw the blasting cap into the mine when appropriate. This depends on unit SOP, so if you Privates out there need to check with your Squad Leader before you Sua Sponte this! Army regs say that no charges or explosives can be primed with initiation systems until they are going to be used. Most SOF units these days are priming their charges on the FOB beforehand and rolling out to their targets. How your unit does is METT-T (situation) dependent.\n\nHere is the finished product, you've dropkicked a claymore mine. The mine can now be carried by the sling or kept on an external pouch on a rucksack. When a small recce patrol makes contact and can't wait for air support, it's time to use this bad boy. Extend the claymore legs, stick it in the ground (THIS SIDE FACES ENEMY), pull however much wire you need to get you behind cover and concealment, run to cover, pop the shipping plugs, and attach the clacker. Once a pursuing enemy closes in on your position, you know what to do!\n\nWriting up this DIY guide cost me some money; would you believe that a used Claymore trainer costs almost 200 dollars?! I think it was worth the trouble, but if you guys learned anything from this post, please help us out and make this DIY guide famous. Use the like button and share this with as many people as possible. Thanks guys.\n\nKit Up! contributor Jack Murphy is a former Ranger, Special Forces Soldier and is the author of the military thriller Reflexive Fire."}
{"text":"With most of our games, our initial prototypes are made with simple shapes to get the gameplay working as soon as possible. With Don't Grind, the concept was so simple that we decided to set the project up properly right away. So we created the spritesheets and started building the scene as we worked on the gameplay.\n\nCharacters - Injecting life into inanimate objects\n\nIt's important with a game like Don't Grind to feel connected with what is going on. We really wanted to bring the characters to life but avoid the whole \"grinding up cute cats and dogs\", so we chose to use inanimate objects. There have been thousands of games where you put animals in blenders and stuff since way back in the early days of flash, and we didn't want to make one of those."}
{"text":"Every new business wants to differentiate itself, to stand out from the crowd. It is a bit of a mystery, then, why so many websites for smaller cider companies proudly state that they are different because they don\u2019t make sweet cider, unlike the big bad Big Players (you know who they are). So many cideries make this claim that it no longer seems to be much of a distinction. More to the point it does an incredible disservice to sweeter ciders, seeming to say that if it\u2019s sweet it\u2019s therefore bad, and implying that if it\u2019s dry it is therefore good. As with most simplistic statements, this ain\u2019t necessarily so.\n\nFirst, when we talk about sweetness in cider, just what is it we\u2019re talking about.\n\nSugar is the obvious answer, and how much of it is either left in the cider from the original juice or added back at some point post-fermentation either in the form of un-fermented juice or plain old table sugar. The amount of sugar in a finished cider can be reported in any of a number of ways \u2013 in grams of sugar per liter (which can also be expressed as a percentage), specific gravity, or degrees brix (often used in the wine world). There are any number of calculators and tables available that can convert these measurements from one to the other, so for the purposes of this discussion we\u2019ll stick to grams per liter (g\/L).\n\nThe good folks at the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) have tried to bring some order to the world of cider evaluation by setting some general boundaries for various categories of cider-based on sugar content.\n\nDry Medium-Dry* Medium Medium-Sweet Sweet g\/L 0 \u2013 4 4 \u2013 9 9 \u2013 20 20 \u2013 40 >40 % 0 \u2013 0.4 0.4 \u2013 0.9 0.9 \u2013 2.0 2.0 \u2013 4.0 >4.0 SG 1.000 \u2013 1.002 1.002 \u2013 1.004 1.004 \u2013 1.009 1.009 \u2013 1.019 >1.019\n\n(*aka semi-dry or off-dry)\n\nTo put this in perspective, regular Coca Cola\u00ae has a sugar content of 108 g\/L, and freshly pressed apple juice will typically come in at 117 \u2013 260 g\/L.\n\nLeft to their own devices yeasts will most of the time keep eating up any sugar they find until there is nothing left, resulting in dry cider. But not always. The traditional production method for French ciders, for example, starves the yeasts of other essential nutrients so that they more or less give up before all the sugar has been consumed. The result is a naturally sweet often quite complex and wonderful cider. A similar process can be used in the making of ice cider, which starts with highly concentrated (by freezing and thawing) juice and results in a very sweet dessert cider (upwards of 165 g\/L) that more often than not avoids being cloying by wrapping all that sugar around a sturdy backbone of bright acid.\n\nSugar content isn\u2019t quite the last word on sweetness, though. Our brains can sometimes be fooled into thinking something is sweeter than the actual available sugars would suggest. The amount of acidity in a given cider will, for example, influence how sweet it tastes. A high acid cider that has a sugar content that would put it into the medium cider category may taste less sweet than a low acid cider having a sugar level in the medium-dry range, which is also why to many palates fresh apple juice will taste less sweet than a Coke\u00ae. Furthermore, because taste and smell are so closely intertwined a fruity aroma will also encourage us to taste a cider as sweeter than it is, while conversely an earthy aroma will make a cider be perceived as less sweet. (Genetics can play a role in sweetness perception, too.)\n\nSo why take issue with sweetness? For one thing, it\u2019s an easy target. The most common complaint of people that don\u2019t like cider is that it is too sweet. Generally this kind of statement suggests that the speaker hasn\u2019t had the opportunity to try many ciders, and certainly the ciders offered by the Big Players are on the sweet end of the spectrum. What\u2019s more, the Big Players muddy the waters by labeling some of their offerings as \u201cdry\u201d when on an objective basis they are anything but.\n\nTake a couple of examples produced by some of the nationally distributed large brands. One \u201cdry\u201d cider has, according to the label, 7 grams of sugar in a 355 ml serving, which works out to 19.7 g\/L of sugar, on the high side of medium. Another labeled as \u201cdry pear\u201d has a whopping 17 grams of sugar per 355 ml serving, coming in at an astonishing 48 g\/L, so far from dry that it can\u2019t even see it in it\u2019s rear view mirror.\n\nWhy, one might ask, don\u2019t the Big Players make actual dry ciders if, as one assumes from the marketing pitches of their smaller competitors, there is in fact a market for them? The easy answer is that while there are those that do prefer drier beverages, Americans as a whole seem to prefer their drinks sweet, particularly in an emerging category or market.\n\nMore to the point, it\u2019s actually more challenging to make a decent tasting dry cider than a sweet one. With a truly dry cider there is nowhere to hide. It requires more attention to apple varieties and blends, and to production dynamics, in order to create something that isn\u2019t just a complete thin and watery acid bomb. In addition, when you are starting with juice concentrates, which once a company is making cider at a certain scale is an absolute must, it is simply impossible to add back all of the subtle complexities inherent in fresh juice that get stripped out during the concentration process. Sugar can make this diminished character less obvious, although at some point all you can taste is the sugar itself rather than the harmonious flavor you\u2019d get from actual juice.\n\nDry shouldn\u2019t be the considered the ultimate goal. There are certainly as many uninteresting dry ciders on the market today as there are sweet ones, and more than a few that could be rescued by just a little more attention to balance. Complexity, proportion, nuance \u2013 those are the watchwords of a great cider regardless of where it sits on the sweetness scale.\n\nThere are a handful of cider companies (such as Seattle Cider Company and Redbyrd Orchard Cider) that have taken it upon themselves to add some sort of scale information on their label in an attempt to help consumers find their way through the fog. This sort of information along with the writings of thoughtful reviewers, those that work hard to describe a full range of a cider\u2019s characteristics not just whether or not they liked it, can help to bring some clarity to an otherwise murky area.\n\nMeanwhile, here\u2019s hoping that the next time a new cider company\u2019s marketing team sits down to describe what sets the company apart he\/she\/they work a little harder to find something a little more original to say."}
{"text":"Talk about insult to injury. Judith Reese, Rockies fan and birthday girl celebrating her 69th, was not only forced to watch the Rockies get crushed by the San Francisco Giants, but also gets nailed in the head by a foul ball and carted out of the game in the fifth inning.\n\n\"My friend Kim and I have gone to opening day for years,\" Reese told 9News. And this year she was celebrating her birthday with great seats -- third row, behind the rail and down the third base line.\n\nBut in the fifth inning, the birthday celebrations came to a screeching halt when Rockies outfielder Michael Cuddyer hit a foul ball right along the third base line that went flying right into Reese's temple and knocked her out.\n\nCuddyer, who was making his Rockies debut at home, described the hit from what he saw from the field, \"I saw the ball off my bat, saw the stands part ways and boom \u2013 saw it hit the head,\" CBS4 reported. \"I hope (she) is all right and everything is well. It\u2019s tough. That\u2019s the scary part of this.\"\n\nThe game was delayed briefly as medical personnel attended to Reese who was carted off and eventually taken to Denver Health Medical Center where she was treated for a concussion and bruised head, according to 7News. Reese never did hear her birthday song at Coors Field that her friends arranged for her, but she has already been released by the hospital, is recovering and going to be okay.\n\n\"I want to thank the fans, the paramedics and the community for their instant support,\" Reese said in a statement released by Denver Health."}
{"text":"Products used:\n\nCG Honey Dew\n\nNano Skin Auto Scrub\n\nPinnacle Souveran Liquid Wax\n\nPurple Power APC (diluted 5:1)\n\nMother\u2019s Wheel & Tire Cleaner\n\nMother\u2019s Tire Gloss\n\nLexol Leather Cleaner\n\nLexol Leather Conditioner\n\nThis vehicle was in a roll-over accident crushing all four doors, the roof and basically the whole car. The body shop did a excellent job bringing this car back to life. They still have some work to do but this is a long way from what it was.\n\nThis was the inside. Dust had been building up from sitting around a paint and body shop for months.\n\nThe exterior of the car was washed thoroughly, decontaminated and then sealed with Pinnacle Soveran.\n\nThe inside definitely needed the most attetion. There was dust in every crack and crevice. First all the top surface dirt had to be removed before we could start any real detail work. It took some time but the results were well worth it.\n\nLovely reflection."}
{"text":"New alcohol advice published today reiterates that the recommended maximum intake weekly for male adults should fall from 21 to 14 units - barely enough to fill a bowl with electric soup*.\n\n\u201cTo keep health risks from alcohol to a low level it is safest not to drink more than 14 units a week on a regular basis,\u201d the UK government guidelines state (PDF).\n\nThe guidelines attracted widespread criticism after they were published in January.\n\nThe opinion of the UK\u2019s Chief Health Jobsworth (official title: \u201cChief Medical Officer\u201d) Dame Sally Davies is that there is \u201cno safe level\u201d of drinking.\n\nProfessor Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at Cambridge University, pointed out that the \u201cno safe level\u201d message contradicted the working group\u2019s guiding principle that the public needed to be able to make an \u201cinformed choice\u201d, not get scared into obedience. Eating a bacon sandwich, or watching an hour of TV, posed more long-term health risks than moderate alcohol consumption, he wrote. Graham Stringer MP pointed out the zero-alcohol advice would have a \u201cperverse effect\u201d - most people would simply ignore it.\n\nFor a Puritan, however, the thrill comes from denying another\u2019s pleasure, and the Puritanism and the \u201cno safe level\u201d recommendation remains, albeit in different wording, and in specific relation to cancer:\n\nThe expert group was also clear that there are a number of serious diseases, including certain cancers, which can occur even when drinking within the weekly guideline. Whilst they judge the risks to be low, this means there is no level of regular drinking that can be considered as completely safe in relation to some cancers.\n\nHowever the following passage modulates a little:\n\nThis level of risk is comparable to those posed by other everyday activities that people understand are not completely safe, yet still undertake.\n\nAlcohol industry trade body the Portman Group responded to the new guidelines by saying \"it is regrettable that the guidelines still include a reference to the Guidelines Development Group's view that there is no safe level of drinking... Placed alongside low risk guidelines it will render the CMOs' advice confusing and contradictory for consumers.\"\n\nFollowing the EU referendum the media remarked, with some dismay, how people \u201cdon\u2019t trust experts\u201d. But perhaps it depends on how self-interested, or \"expert\", the experts are perceived to be. The Times in May reported that \u201cfour key figures behind [the new recommendations] were closely associated with the Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS), a lobby group financed by the temperance movement.\u201d\n\nThis wasn't news to Register readers - we wrote four years ago that the IAS is funded by something called the Alliance House Foundation. This was created in Manchester in 1852, and by 1853 rejoiced in the name \u201cThe United Kingdom Alliance to Procure the Total and Immediate Legislative Suppression of the Traffic in All Intoxicating Liquors\u201d. It subsequently spawned better-known temperance groups. In turn, the largest funder of the AHF is the European Union. In 2008 it raised just \u00a370 in donations from members of the public.\n\nPerhaps one unexpected \"Brexit Bonus\" might be a diminution in killjoy lifestyle regulation. Which would be ironic, really. For years we were promised \"continental drinking\", the boozy Europeans offering a more liberal drinking culture than the uptight British. \u00ae\n\n*Bootnote\n\nFor younger readers."}
{"text":"In addition to its new trio of GT factory drivers for 2017, Porsche has announced at its Night of Champions that it will send a factory squad to the 2017 FIA WEC to race in the GTE Pro class with its new 911 RSR.\n\n\u201cThis is a significant boost for our motorsport involvement and underlines that we have chosen the right platform with the WEC,\u201d said Michael Steiner, member of the executive board for research and development at Porsche AG.\n\nThe Porsche Motorsport GT team will campaign a pair of new 911 RSR in the top GTE class, after the brand was represented by just a sole Proton Competition-run 911 this season. The drivers confirmed so far are Michael Christensen, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Makowiecki and Richard Lietz.\n\nNext season the GTE Pro class has been granted FIA World Championship status for the first time, with factory efforts from Porsche, Aston Martin, Ferrari and Ford all confirmed.\n\nThe mid-engined 2017 Porsche 911 RSR was fully officially unveiled last month by the brand, and shown off to the WEC paddock at the Bahrain season finale."}
{"text":"WASHINGTON \u2014 President-elect Donald Trump is shrugging off contradictions with his own cabinet picks that have been on display during Senate hearings this week. \u201cAll my cabinet nominee are looking good and doing a great job. I want them to be themselves and express their own thoughts, not mine!\u201d Trump said over Twitter early Friday.\n\nThis Jan. 11 file photo shows U.S. President-elect Donald Trump during a press conference at Trump Tower in New York. Trump has shrugged off the strikingly divergent positions his cabinet picks have taken on a number of issues. ( TIMOTHY A. CLARY \/ AFP\/GETTY IMAGES File Photo )\n\nThe comment comes after members of Trump\u2019s future cabinet separated themselves from the president-elect on a series of issues, including Russia, torture and Muslim immigration. Partly as a result the nominees have gotten mostly gentle treatment from Senate Democrats who say they\u2019ve found the cabinet choices more palatable than the future president himself. \u201cAs I meet members of the cabinet I\u2019m puzzled because many of them sound reasonable,\u201d said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. \u201cFar more reasonable than their president.\u201d\n\nArticle Continued Below\n\nSen. Jeff Sessions, picked for attorney general, said he\u2019s against any outright ban on immigration by Muslims, in contrast to Trump\u2019s one-time call to suspend admittance of Muslims. Secretary of State candidate Rex Tillerson affirmed U.S. commitments to NATO and took a relatively hard line on Russia, both in contrast to Trump \u2014 though Tillerson irked GOP Sen. Marco Rubio by refusing to label Vladimir Putin a \u201cwar criminal.\u201d And CIA pick Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, affirmed his opposition to torture and said he would refuse any Trump order to torture, adding he could not imagine Trump would give such a directive. Trump, while campaigning, suggested bringing back waterboarding and more. Tillerson\u2019s nomination is in question in light of concerns from Rubio and others, but it looks like smooth sailing for Pompeo; retired Gen. James Mattis for Defence; and retired Gen. John Kelly for Homeland Security, among others. \u201cPompeo\u2019s very popular, Mattis, Kelly \u2014 these are popular selections,\u201d said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Sessions was denied confirmation once before by the Senate, but that was three decades ago for a federal judgeship. This time around the Alabaman is a sitting senator and was treated gently, for the most part, by his colleagues, even when Democrats brought up the racial issues that brought him down him last time around. There was potential for drama as Sen. Cory Booker, D-N. J., broke with Senate tradition to testify against his colleague, but it came on the second day of the hearing after Sessions had finished testifying, so he was not even in the room.\n\n\u201cThe purpose of confirmation hearings is to examine the record and views of potential nominees and I think that\u2019s what these hearings are doing,\u201d said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. \u201cI think it\u2019s likely that all of the cabinet nominees are going to be confirmed, I think the hearings have gone quite well this week.\u201d The outings also lack drama due to Democrats\u2019 decision while in the Senate majority to lower the vote threshold for cabinet nominees and others from 60 votes to 50, allowing Republicans to ensure approval as long as they can hold their 52-seat majority together.\n\nArticle Continued Below\n\nThere could be fireworks yet to come because several of the most potentially explosive hearings are still pending, including for former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin for Treasury secretary. Democrats have set up a website to solicit stories from the thousands of people whose homes were foreclosed on by OneWest Bank while Mnuchin headed a group of investors who owned the bank. They hope to use Mnuchin\u2019s nomination hearing to attack Trump\u2019s populist appeal with working-class voters and cast themselves as defenders of the middle class. Also pending are hearings for Rep. Tom Price for Health and Human Services; Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a vocal denier of climate change science, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency; and fast-food executive Andrew Puzder to head the Labor Department. MORE ON THESTAR.COM 10 times Donald Trump\u2019s cabinet picks directly disputed him\n\nRead more about:"}
{"text":"U.S. Air Force F-15 and Russian Bear Bomber. Air Force photo\n\nRussia Admits It Isn\u2019t Ready to Fight Space Aliens\n\nFortunately America\u2019s got a plan\n\nDavid Axe Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 2, 2013\n\nby DAVID AXE\n\nA Russian space official just admitted that Moscow has no strategy for combating an invasion by galactic marauders. Lucky for Planet Earth, the United States does have a plan. And it counts on Russia and America fighting together.\n\nSergei Berezhnoy, on the staff of the Titov Space Control Center near Moscow, said that Russian air-defense officers \u201chave not been tasked with preparing for the contingency of an alien attack,\u201d according to Rianovosti.\n\n\u201cThere are enough problems on Earth and in near-Earth space,\u201d Berezhnoy added.\n\nA team of scientists from America\u2019s NASA Planetary Science Division have disagreed. \u201cWhile humanity has not yet observed any extraterrestrial intelligence, contact with ETI remains possible,\u201d Seth Baum, Jacob Haqq-Misra and Shawn Domagal-Goldman wrote in a 2011 paper.\n\nThe scientists conceded that extraterrestrials could be friendly or ambivalent\u2014but we can\u2019t be sure. \u201cContact with uncooperative ETI seems likely be harmful to humanity,\u201d they warned.\n\nThe Pentagon isn\u2019t taking any chances, if one U.S. military instructor is to be believed. Prof. Paul Springer, a history teacher at the U.S. Air Command and Staff College in Alabama, told an Australian TV program last year that Washington has plans for even the least likely military threats\u2014including attackers from beyond the solar system. \u201cWe make all kinds of contingency and war plans,\u201d Springer said.\n\nBut America\u2019s interstellar war plan is surely pretty thin. After all, the Pentagon wouldn\u2019t know anything about the attackers until the first laser bolt or disrupter blast or photon torpedo was fired and Earth forces were already in retreat.\n\nIn the event of an alien invasion, \u201cthe first thing you would need to try to do is preserve your forces,\u201d Springer said. In other words, hide. After that, \u201clearn as much about the enemy as possible.\u201d Presumably with spy satellites, drones, electronic eavesdroppers and old-fashioned sneaking around.\n\nThe aliens, meanwhile, would probably target Earth\u2019s communications networks and its most potent weapons, nukes, Springer said.\n\nAs the world\u2019s leading military powers, America and Russia would be the biggest targets \u2026 and the leaders in the eventual counterattack. Combined, the two countries could field huge air, land, sea and space forces numbering thousands of warplanes, millions of soldiers, hundreds of ships and most of the world\u2019s spacecraft.\n\nAssuming Earth survives and wins, human society could be turned upside down. Springer said former rivals could become close allies, even unified. \u201cKeep in mind many of the greatest civilizations in human history formed to counter a common enemy,\u201d Springer pointed out.\n\nPlan or no, Russia is bound to join America on the front lines in the First Alien War.\n\nSubscribe to War is Boring here."}
{"text":"There is one thing about Mark Zuckerberg that has never changed since he launched Facebook and became one of the youngest billionaires in the world: the grey T-shirt he wears every day.\n\nThe Facebook CEO shared a picture of his wardrobe and the two types of t-shirts he wears every day this week as he returned to work following his paternity leave.\n\nHis bland outfits may seem dull, but Zuckerberg has a legitimate reason for donning the same T-shirt every day. He claims dressing in the same way allows him to focus his energy on more important decisions at work.\n\nWe\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s true. You can form your own view. From 15p \u20ac0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.\n\nFirst day back after paternity leave. What should I wear? Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, 25 January 2016\n\nThe 31-year-old explained this during his first public question and answer session in 2014 when an audience member asked why his outfits never changed. \u201cI really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,\u201d said Zuckerberg.\n\n\u201cI'm in this really lucky position, where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. And I feel like I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.\u201d\n\nConsidering Zuckerberg is worth an estimated $37.5 billion after launching Facebook from his room at Harvard University while still a teenager, it might be worth bearing his sartorial stance in mind.\n\nWe\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s true. You can form your own view.\n\nAt The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That\u2019s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks \u2013 all with no ads.\n\nSubscribe now"}
{"text":"In the same hotel where Alexander Graham Bell once demoed coast-to-coast telephone calls, Microsoft will announce plans for a new white space internet service on Tuesday. This ludicrous technology sends broadband internet wirelessly over the unused channels of the television spectrum. It\u2019s also ingenious.\n\nUnderstandably, you probably have some questions about this postmodern concept. If you were born before 1985, you might remember the days when TV signals floated through thin air, delivering episodes of Married With Children to homes across America without any wires. Those TV signals still exist, and in between the channels, there\u2019s unused spectrum called white space. Enterprising scientists have figured out how to turn that white space into a sort of super wi-fi and broadcast internet service to a many miles-wide radius. What\u2019s extra special is that, unlike wi-fi or cellular service, the stronger TV signal can penetrate buildings and other obstacles. This makes it ideal for rural areas, where conventional broadband service is either unavailable or prohibitively expensive.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAs Tuesday\u2019s announcement makes clear, Microsoft scientists have been on the bleeding edge of white space research. The increasingly hip company intends to drop $10 billion to launch a new white space service in 12 states, including New York and Virginia, connecting an estimated two million Americans to the internet, The New York Times reports. This plan ought to please FCC chairman Ajit Pai, who\u2019s made expanding high speed internet access a priority since he took the helm of the agency. Then again, many believe that Pai\u2019s mission amounts to an empty promise, one that stands to line the pockets of big telecom companies instead of actually helping rural America. But that\u2019s a whole \u2018nother can of beans.\n\nExciting as it may sound, Microsoft\u2019s new white space initiative does face some tricky challenges. Infrastructure is a big one. While white space internet service does utilize the very familiar TV spectrum, the ability to connect to the internet requires some special hardware. On the regional level, we\u2019ll need to build special base stations, equip them with white space antennas, and supply them with electricity. (Solar power is an option for base stations that are off the electric grid.) On the local level, white space customers will need to access to special receivers that can turn the white space signal into something their computer understands, like wi-fi. All of this will cost money.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nGood news is Microsoft has a lot of money. It\u2019s not yet clear how much the company will charge for the new service, but presumably, it will cover the expense of building the new base stations. Customers will have to buy the hardware for their homes at a sobering price of $1,000 or more, but Microsoft says these costs will come down to $200 per device by next year. That\u2019s not nothing for a lot of rural Americans, and then they\u2019ll have to pay for access \u2014 a fee that Microsoft says will be \u201cprice competitive\u201d with regular old cable internet (again: not cheap).\n\nBut hey, progress matters. While this white space internet technology has been in development for years, Microsoft is set to become the first major company to bring it to the masses, and that might just mean others will follow. Far-future solutions for rural broadband access like Facebook\u2019s laser-powered drones, Google\u2019s silly balloons, or Elon Musk\u2019s pie-in-the-sky satellites remain theoretical for the time being, while white space already works. And soon, it could be working in a middle-of-nowhere near you.\n\n[New York Times]"}
{"text":"Paul Beeston denies that the Toronto Blue Jays are being held back by financial restraints from ownership.\n\nDuring a guest appearance Friday on Brady & Walker on Sportsnet 590 The Fan, the Blue Jays president and CEO said Rogers Communications has been more than accommodating when they\u2019ve needed to add salary, adding that the club\u2019s payroll is going to increase for 2015.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ll set the record straight. We\u2019ve never gotten to Rogers and asked them for money for anything we haven\u2019t got,\u201d Beeston said. \u201cThey\u2019ve been very, very generous with us when we took our salaries up from $90-million to $125-million. I think we\u2019ll be up next year. There\u2019s no question about that. They\u2019ve been very supportive.\u201d\n\nBeeston also took issue with recent criticism directed at the Blue Jays\u2019 inactivity at the trade deadline. Many, including right fielder Jose Bautista, expressed their disappointment that the Blue Jays didn\u2019t add a player while the division rival New York Yankees added Brandon McCarthy, Chase Headley and Martin Prado.\n\nBut Beeston said the club\u2019s lack of movement had nothing to do with money.\n\n\u201cWhen I hear last week that we didn\u2019t make decisions because we didn\u2019t have the money or there was a hockey contract, it\u2019s just flat out wrong,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt\u2019s patently false. We\u2019ve got what we need to do. If there wasn\u2019t a trade that was made, it was because Alex (Anthopoulos) and the baseball people didn\u2019t think they wanted to part with the players for what they\u2019d get back.\u201d\n\nIt has been a tough week for the Blue Jays, who have lost five of their past six games and saw third base Brett Lawrie return to the disabled list after just three innings of play Tuesday with an oblique injury.\n\n\u201cWhen we lose, all of a sudden it\u2019s because of finances. It\u2019s because we don\u2019t have the money. That\u2019s really not fair to Rogers,\u201d said Beeston. \u201cThat\u2019s because of decisions we made or because of injuries or the way we play. It\u2019s nothing to do with the financial part of it.\u201d\n\nThe Blue Jays enter play Friday with a 61-55 record. They are 5.0 games behind the Baltimore Orioles in the AL East and 0.5 games behind the Kansas City Royals in the wild card standings."}
{"text":"At 3:00 p.m., [presiding] judge R. notified me that I had been appointed to assist with the execution. I feel repulsed, but I can't get out of it. I thought about it all afternoon. My role will consist of taking note of the prisoner's statements.\n\nThe execution scene from \"La vie, la mort, l'amour\" (Life, Love, Death), by Claude Lelouch (1969). \"Life, Love, Death\" was made before the abolition of capital punishment in France. The movie's central message is the inhumanity of the death penalty. (NB: The video's English subtitles are at times erroneous and misleading.)\n\nPlot: Fran\u00e7ois Toledo, a married businessman and father, falls head-over-heels in love with Janine, a work colleague. However, after three dates, he feels dishonored when he suffers from impotence. In frustration, he strangles three prostitutes before being arrested. He is tried and convicted, and sentenced to death...\n\nThe execution scene from \"\" (Life, Love, Death), by Claude Lelouch (1969). \"\" was made before the abolition of capital punishment in France. The movie's central message is the inhumanity of the death penalty. (NB:: Fran\u00e7ois Toledo, a married businessman and father, falls head-over-heels in love with Janine, a work colleague. However, after three dates, he feels dishonored when he suffers from impotence. In frustration, he strangles three prostitutes before being arrested. He is tried and convicted, and sentenced to death...\n\nAt 7:00 p.m., I went to the cinema with B. and B. B., then we had something to eat at her place and watched a late-night movie until 1:00 a.m. I went home, I did some chores, then laid down on my bed. Mr. B. L. telephoned me at 3:15 a.m., as I requested. I got ready. A police car came to pick me up at 4:15 a.m. During the journey, no one said a word.We arrived at Marseilles' Baumettes prison. Everyone was there. The District Attorney (DA) [avocat g\u00e9n\u00e9ral] arrived last. A large group formed. Twenty or thirty guards, the 'officials.' All along the path, brown blankets were spread on the ground to cover the sound of our footsteps. On the path, in three places, tables holding basins of water and towelsThe cell door was opened. I heard someone say that the prisoner was dozing, but not sleeping. He was made to 'get ready.' It took a long time, since he had an artificial leg and it had to be put on. We waited. No one spoke. I think this silence, and the apparent calmness of the prisoner, relieved those present. No one would have wanted to hear crying or protests. The group reformed itself, and we took the path back. The blankets on the ground had been pushed to the side slightly, and we were no longer trying to avoid making too much noise with our steps.The group stopped beside one of the tables. The prisoner was seated on a chair. His hands were locked behind his back with handcuffs. A guard gave him a filter cigarette. He started smoking without saying a word. He was young. Very dark hair, neatly styled. His face was rather handsome, with even features, but he was pallid and had dark circles under his eyes. He looked neither stupid nor brutish. Simply a handsome young man. He smoked, and complained immediately that his handcuffs were too tight. A guard approached and tried to loosen them. He complained again. At this moment, I noticed the executioner standing behind him, accompanied by two assistants. He was holding a cord.Originally, it was intended to replace the handcuffs with the cord, but in the end it was decided to just remove them, and the executioner said something horrible and tragic: 'See, you're free!' It sent a shiver down the spine... The prisoner continued to smoke his cigarette, which was nearly finished, and he was given another. His hands were free and he smoked slowly. I understood then that he was beginning to realize that it was all over - that he could not escape now - that his life would end here, and that the moments that he still had would last as long as that cigarette did.He requested his lawyers. Mr. P. and Mr. G. approached. He spoke to them as quietly as possible, because the executioner's two assistants were standing right by him, and it was as if they wanted to steal his last moments as a living man. He gave a piece of paper to Mr. P. who tore it at his request, and he gave an envelope to Mr. G. He spoke to them very little. There was one on either side of him and they did not speak to each other either. The wait continued. He requested the prison director and asked him a question about what would happen to his possessions.The second cigarette was finished. Quarter of an hour had already passed. A young and friendly guard approached with a bottle of rum and a glass. He asked the prisoner if he wanted a drink and poured him half a glass. The prisoner began to drink slowly. He understood then that his life would end when he had finished drinking. He spoke a little more with his lawyers. He called back the guard who gave him the rum and asked him to gather up the pieces of paper that Mr. P. had torn up and thrown to the ground. The guard bent down, picked up the pieces and gave them back to Mr. P., who put them in his pocket.It was at that moment that everything became confused. This man is going to die, he knows it; he knows that he can do nothing but delay the end by a few minutes. And he became almost like a child that will do anything to delay bedtime! A child who knows that he will be treated indulgently, and who makes use of it. The prisoner continued to drink his rum, slowly, in little sips. He called the Imam who came over and spoke to him in Arabic. He responded with a few words, also in Arabic.The glass was nearly empty and, in a last attempt, he requested another cigarette: aor a[unfiltered cigarettes made with strong, dark tobacco], because he didn't like the brand that he had been given. The request was made calmly, almost with dignity. But the executioner, who was becoming impatient, interrupted: \"We've already been nice with him - very humane - we have to get this over and done with.\" In turn, the DA intervened to deny the cigarette, despite the prisoner repeating the request and adding very opportunely: \"It will be the last.\" A sort of embarrassment came over the assistants. About twenty minutes had passed since the prisoner sat down on his chair. Twenty minutes, so long and yet so short.The request for this last cigarette brought back the reality, the 'identity' of the time which had just passed. We had been patient, we had stood waiting for twenty minutes while the prisoner, seated, expressed wishes which we immediately granted. We had allowed him to be the master of that time. It was his possession. Now, another reality was appearing. That time was being taken back from him. The last cigarette was denied, and to get it over and done with, he was hurried to finish his glass. He drank the last sip. Passed the glass to the guard. Immediately, one of the executioner's assistants took a pair of scissors from his shirt pocket and began to cut off the collar of the prisoner's blue shirt. The executioner signaled that the cut was not large enough. So, to simplify things, the assistant made two big cuts to the shoulders of the shirt and removed the entire shoulder section.Quickly (before the shirt collar was cut), his hands were tied behind his back with the cord. He was helped up. The guards opened a door in the corridor. The guillotine appeared, opposite the door. Almost without hesitating, I followed the guards who were pushing the prisoner and I entered the room (or, rather, a courtyard?) where the the 'machine' stood. Beside it was an open brown wicker basket. Everything went very quickly. His body was practically thrown down but, at that moment, I turned away. Not out of fear, but by a sort of instinctive and deep-rooted modesty (I can't find another word).I heard a dull sound. I turned round - blood, lots of blood, very red blood - the body had toppled into the basket. In a second, a life had been cut. The man who had spoken less than a minute earlier was nothing more than blue pyjamas in a basket. A guard took out a hose. The evidence of a crime needs to be erased quickly... I felt nauseous but I controlled myself. I had a feeling of cold indignation.We went into the office where the DA was childishly fussing around to prepare the official report. D. carefully verified every part. It's very important, the official report of an execution! At 5:10 a.m. I went home.I am writing these lines. It is 6:10 a.m.-- Monique Mabelly (Juge d'instruction)"}
{"text":"Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com\n\nSilence in our community is not striking a blow at our enemies. In fact it just makes them stronger and more confident in their actions. Pretending to be heroes in the face of evil never helps anyone. We Black women are not superwomen. We are as vulnerable and as susceptible to violence as our white female counterparts (and maybe even more so). Sexual assault does not happen \u201cout there\u201d\u2014outside the walls of our community. No, it occurs daily within our own borders right under our noses by those we trust the most.Partner rape is not a myth and causes as much emotional and psychological damage as stranger rape, domestic abuse, incest and molestation. For many people the idea that your trusted husband, boyfriend or girlfriend could be your rapist is as much of a fable as is the Loch Ness monster; but it does exist.According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest NationalNetwork (RAINN) , \u201csurvivors of partner rape are more likely to be raped multiple times when compared to stranger and acquaintance rape survivors. As such, partner rape survivors are more likely to suffer severe and long\u2013lasting physical and psychological injuries.\u201dAs Black women we have been taught since we were first knee-high that in order to protect our Black men first, our community second and ourselves last, that we needed to learn the value of a closed mouth. Shouldering responsibility in silence was always the best course of action lest it be known publicly\u2014giving our \u201cwhite enemies\u201d another chance to disparage our people. We were expected to suffer alone; to workout the problem as quietly as we could and to never, ever bring shame into our households. Unfortunately, this responsibility has also caused on our humanly demise.For me, it was (and still is) one of the most distasteful, disgusting and sinful burdens ever to be laid at the feet of Black women. We have been so effective in this community strategy that it has left many of us deathly afraid to speak up and out against those we have loved and claim to have loved us. Those human beings who promised to protect us and instead raped us.I have read the stories from women of color who were raped by their husbands, boyfriends, partners and girlfriends. Women who suffered unimaginable and unbearable agony in fear of what would happen to them should they say anything. They were left unaided by friends, family, and even church members because they did not want to break with tradition, or better yet be seen as a victim.We must stop living like this. We must break our silence and begin coming out in droves telling our stories and confronting those men within our communities, within our lives, who have brought upon us despicable acts of violence and torture. If we do not what will happen to those left behind us? To those growing up now? If in 2011, as reported by NewsOne, \u201csixtypercent of black girls [had] experienced sexual abuse at the hands of black menbefore reaching the age of 18 ,\u201d what are the chances that the number will double in say the next two or three or four years? How long are going to keep protecting others at the expense of our souls\u2014our bodies\u2014our dignity?I know that coming forward is not, by any means, easy for anyone regardless of the type of abuse but is necessary if we want to control this problem within our community. Black women you have the right to protect yourselves and to place your humanity as your number one priority. Partner rape happens every day to so many of beautiful sisters. Have the courage to stand up and place your perpetrator behind bars. You not only save your life but the life of someone else.For more resources check out:I would also urge you to check out No!: The Rape Documentary by Aishah Simmons who documents the stories of African American women breaking their silence.Alice J. Rollins is an aspiring freelance writer and blogger who holds an M.A. in Women\u2019s and Gender Studies from DePaul University. Her areas of interest include African American women\u2019s spirituality, feminist\/womanist pedagogy and politics of migration. She is currently based in Chicago, IL. Email her at: alice@forharriet.com"}
{"text":"(Reuters) - Online video rental company Netflix Inc said it won pay TV rights to Dreamworks Animation movies starting in 2013, the first time a major Hollywood studio has chosen an Internet streaming player over a traditional cable channel.\n\nThe headquarters of Netflix in Los Gatos, California, September 20, 2011. REUTERS\/Robert Galbraith\n\nNews of the deal drove Netflix\u2019s stock up nearly 7 percent to a high of $137.88 in early trade on Nasdaq on Monday.\n\nNetflix did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.\n\nHowever, Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told The New York Times that the deal, worth $30 million per picture to Dreamworks over a number of years, was \u201cgame-changing\u201d and represented a bet that viewers would soon no longer make distinctions between content streamed on the Internet or through cable.\n\nThe Netflix deal means Dreamworks \u2014 the studio behind family friendly fare from \u201cShrek\u201d to \u201cKung Fu Panda\u201d \u2014 is eschewing premium pay-TV operator HBO in favor of online streaming, the Times reported. HBO is a unit of Time Warner Inc.\n\n\u201cWe are really starting to see a long-term road map of where the industry is headed,\u201d Katzenberg was cited as saying to the newspaper in an interview.\n\nThe content agreement comes days after Netflix, which has seen its share price decline sharply after a series of missteps, sealed an agreement to broadcast TV shows from Discovery Communications Inc.\n\nNetflix needs to add more content to its streaming service to keep drawing in new customers and fend off competition from the likes of Amazon.com, Google Inc and Apple Inc.\n\nShares of the one-time Wall Street darling have fallen 50 percent in two months. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has apologized for failing to explain moves adequately, from a surprise price hike in July to a separation of its DVD-mail from streaming services, and the company is trying to win customers back.\n\nBut adding customers is suddenly proving difficult, with Netflix on the receiving end of heated complaints from customers still upset over the price hike announced in July.\n\nIt cut its subscriber forecast by 1 million, saying it now expected to have 24 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter. The last time Netflix reported a subscriber decline was the second quarter of 2007, when Blockbuster was aggressively pushing a DVD rental package called Total Access.\n\nAccording to the Times, Netflix was quick to pump up the Dreamworks deal.\n\n\u201cThis is one of the few family entertainment brands that matter,\u201d Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos was quoted as saying. \u201cIt\u2019s also a signal to people that we are in no way moving away from movies. Our programing is just reflecting more and more what people want.\u201d"}
{"text":"On the other hand, they found being satisfied can lead to good communication\n\nAthens, Ga. \u2013 One of the top reasons couples seek counseling is communication issues, so does better communication predict a more satisfying relationship?\n\nThe answer may not be that simple, according to a study by the University of Georgia\u2019s psychology department published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.\n\n\u201cAlthough communication and satisfaction were correlated, communication wasn\u2019t a good guide for determining partners\u2019 satisfaction with their relationships over time,\u201d said the study\u2019s lead author Justin Lavner, an assistant professor in UGA\u2019s clinical psychology program in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.\n\nAlthough communication practices could predict satisfaction to some extent for some couples, the lack of a definitive causal relationship calls for additional attention to other factors that influence marital satisfaction, such as environmental stressors, what activities and interactions a couple has, and the personality traits of the individual partners.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely right to say more satisfied couples do communicate more positively, as well as to say couples who communicate better on average are more satisfied,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it gives us a lot more pause to say that one caused the other one, which is really important. I think what this leaves us wondering is what are some of the other factors that matter for couples\u2019 relationships and how these factors predict how couples do over time.\u201d\n\nPrevious research and theories emphasized communication\u2014or the lack thereof\u2014as a predictor of marital satisfaction and even divorce. Lavner and his co-authors decided to look at whether communication was really a cause or if communication was a consequence of being satisfied, or was simply connected to it instead.\n\nMore than 400 low-income newlywed couples in Los Angeles participated in the three-year-long study, during which they were assessed four times. At each meeting, conducted in a couple\u2019s home, participants would first complete three different tasks to gauge communication and then fill out a report on their satisfaction with their marriage.\n\nThe communication tasks were meant to determine whether the couple used positive, negative or effective communication while completing tasks such as picking a problem in their marriage and discussing how to rectify it.\n\n\u201cIn general, the correlational findings were pretty strong, showing\u2014as we kind of expect\u2014the more satisfied you are, basically, the better you communicate with your spouse,\u201d Lavner said. \u201cWhat those results showed was that couples who were more satisfied also demonstrated higher levels of positivity, lower levels of negativity and more effectiveness.\u201d\n\nThe authors were surprised, however, to see that there wasn\u2019t a strong causal link showing that good communication caused satisfaction, Lavner said.\n\nThere was some evidence of communication being a predictor of satisfaction, but it wasn\u2019t \u201cas strong as it should have been given how central that assumption is in theory as well as practice. Overall, the pattern was one that it wasn\u2019t as robust as theory would lead us to believe,\u201d Lavner said.\n\nIndeed, in the majority of cases, communication did not predict satisfaction, nor did satisfaction predict communication, Lavner said.\n\n\u201cIt was more common for satisfaction to predict communication than the reverse,\u201d he said. \u201cI think the other thing that was surprising is that when one effect was stronger than the other, satisfaction was a stronger predictor of communication. These links have not been talked about as much in the literature; we have focused on communication predicting satisfaction instead.\u201d\n\nThe authors chose to look at couples with incomes at or below 160 percent of the 1999 federal poverty level for families of four because of the unique stressors present in low-income households. The first few years of marriage are usually a high-stress transition period for couples, with a high risk of divorce, Lavner said. Financial worries further compound the already stressful newlywed period.\n\nLavner is currently focusing on personality characteristics and how they affect relationships, satisfaction levels and divorce.\n\nThe study, \u201cDoes Couples\u2019 Communication Predict Marital Satisfaction, or Does Marital Satisfaction Predict Communication?\u201d is available online at http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/jomf.12301\/full.\n\nThe study was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under grant numbers HD053825 and HD061366."}
{"text":"Just 5 days from election day, and Hillary is hit with new major huge scandal \u2013 her involvement in Benghazi tragedy!\n\nAnd with new emails form WikiLeaks, now we know how sick and evil monster she is!\n\nAccording to The Political Insider about Wikileaks published email:\n\nHillary Clinton is having the worst week of any Presidential candidate in history.\n\nRead More: Trade DAX and Kilauea volcano video\n\nThe FBI is closing in on her criminal use of a private email server to transmit classified material. We now know \u2013 without a doubt \u2013 that foreign governments had easy access to the server.\n\nBut what\u2019s an even bigger deal is Hillary\u2019s actions which directly lead to the deaths of four Americans \u2013 Including a U.S. Ambassador \u2013 in Benghazi, Lybia.\n\nThe terrorist attack was easily avoided, but Hillary refused to provide the security they needed at the embassy.\n\nToday, in a new batch of emails, WikiLeaks reaffirmed exactly how Hillary caused the foreign policy disaster in Benghazi.\n\nWOW!\n\nHillary Clinton could have saved their lives, but chose note to. She was trying to keep the danger in Benghazi a secret, and left Americans to die. She is unfit for office.\n\nAmerica need better candidate for president than Hillary!\n\nIs Trump is going to be our greatest president ever or Hillary will be next president ?\n\nPlease VOTE HERE to see:\n\nIf you agree, please share and comment below.\n\nBy sharing this story, you are helping Donald J. Trump to become our new US president.\n\n2.1k ON SHARES Share Tweet"}
{"text":"This report is for media and the general public.\n\nThe SMM witnessed the impact of the conflict on the civilian population in the town of Yasynuvata, and met \u2013 in Chernivtsi \u2013 with Ukrainian activists delivering supplies to the area of fighting. The SMM deployed an advance team to Mariupol (113 km south of Donetsk) last night at 22:30hrs. They will be reinforced today. Reporting will also be initiated today.\n\nThe situation in Kharkiv was calm.\n\nThe SMM talked to the family of an 82-year-old woman, who was reportedly shot by a member of the Ukrainian voluntary \u2018Aidar\u2019 battalion in the village of Oleksandrivka, around 90 km north-west of Luhansk (see Daily Report of 28 August 2014). The chief surgeon in Severodonetsk (97 km north-west of Luhansk) hospital confirmed to the SMM that an 82-year-old woman with bullet wounds had been brought to the hospital on 23 August, and was in intensive care.\n\nThe SMM visited Yasynuvata (20 km north-east of Donetsk) and saw around 80 people in an underground bunker approximately 110 metres long, and 25 metres wide. Most of the sheltering civilians were elderly women. They said that they had been there since 12 August, and were worried about their situation, especially taking into consideration the onset of autumn and winter. In another shelter, located in the basement of a school, the SMM saw around 60 persons, including elderly people and infants, apparently housed there for two or three weeks. There was no electricity in the basement, which consisted of an unspecified number of small rooms \u2013 the sheltering civilians used small torches and candles. They seemed to have food and water.\n\nThe SMM observed in Yasynuvata several multi-storey apartment buildings with most of the flats apparently empty. One of the apartment buildings had two indications of projectile impact. The SMM saw remnants of Grad rockets next to the building. Several combatants from the so-called \u2018Donetsk People\u2019s Republic\u2019 (\u2018DPR\u2019) approached the SMM and reported that on 12 August one of the apartment blocks, used by them as an observation post, was partially damaged by Ukrainian artillery. The SMM also saw a large playground with two signs of artillery impact. Trees, branches and demolished tiles from rooftops littered the place.\n\nAn entrepreneur from Kramatorsk (97 km north of Donetsk) told the SMM that small and medium-sized enterprises were reviving their activities after several months of interruption. However, many of them had difficulties in delivering current orders because of insufficient capacity.\n\nThe situation in Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson and Odessa was calm.\n\nA doctor from Chernivtsi, and social activists providing supplies such as clothes, shoes, military uniforms, food, and medicines to soldiers fighting in Donbas, told the SMM that their convoys, and volunteering medical personnel, had become sniper targets of either the \u2018DPR\u2019 or the so-called \u2018Luhansk People\u2019s Republic\u2019.\n\nThe Ivano-Frankivsk metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church expressed dismay about the damage to two churches in Donetsk belonging to the Greek-Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate) Churches. He informed the SMM that chaplains from the Greek-Catholic Church were going to the east to support soldiers, for example, by providing medical care, or they were acting as military chaplains. The church collected funds for flak jackets and helmets for troops. The bishop also said that during the Maidan period, 70 Greek-Catholic priests from Ivano-Frankivsk worked on rotation in Kyiv.\n\nThe situation in Lviv was calm.\n\nNearly 1,000 participants of a peaceful demonstration held in in front of the Ministry of Defence in Kyiv called on the Government for more intensive support of Ukrainian forces, in particular for the Donbas battalion, which is reportedly encircled by \u2018DPR\u2019-affiliated fighters in the town of Ilovaisk (47 km south-east of Donetsk)."}
{"text":"Advertisement\n\nJust a few months ago, Grishin Robotics made its robotic first investment (that we know of) by writing a check for a cool quarter million to Double Robotics and its rolling iPad telepresence thingy. Today, Grishin has announced investment number two, with another $250,000 going to Elad Inbar's RobotAppStore.\n\nWhat is RobotAppStore? We'll break it down for you: it's a store, that sells apps, for robots. You can buy (or download for free) apps for a variety of consumer robots (Naos, Pleos, Roombas, Lego NXT kits, and more), each of which has been checked out by RobotAppStore itself to make sure it won't cause your hardware to explode. On the other end, developers can sell apps through the store, keeping 70 percent of whatever their apps bring in.\n\nHere's Dimtri Grishin on why he decided to go with RobotAppStore:\n\n\u201cRobotics is a combination of good hardware and software \u2013 thus, the important role of a project like the RobotAppStore in the market ecosystem is unquestionable. The concept of \u2018Cloud robotics\u2019, which implies ability of all robots to connect to the internet, share a common knowledge database and seamlessly upgrade their functions in real-time, is a soon-to-be future; one reminiscent of the of personal computer industry. We believe that the strong team behind RobotAppStore coupled with their ability to leverage the advantages of having strong community already built around the product, can make this future closer\u201d, said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics, Co-Founder & CEO of Mail.Ru Group.\n\nThat mention of cloud robotics isn't coincidental; Grishin is betting that there's a future in giving robots the same ability to benefit from cloud software and cloud hardware that smartphones have now. Like, let's take some sort of stupendously difficult problem that may or may not be solved (depending on who you ask), like grasping, and imagine how a cloud-based app store or service could improve it: your robot could be about as smart as a plastic spork with an arm and a Kinect on it, but as long as you've got the right app and a connection to the cloud, it doesn't matter. Your bot can simply send a 3D image of the object in question, some supercomputer somewhere can do some number crunching, and send back grasping instructions faster than you can say \"wow, that was fast.\" Obviously, the RobotAppStore isn't set up for this kind of thing yet, but that's why now's the time to invest, I suppose.\n\nAnyway, here's what Elad thinks about the whole thing:\n\n\u201cThe support provided by Grishin Robotics is a great vote of confidence in our plans for the company,\u201d said Elad Inbar, Founder & CEO of RobotAppStore. \u201cIt shows their belief in our vision and the importance of the marketplace for robotics applications. The robotics industry has reached its tipping-point with broad market acceptance, usability of robots, and the ability to extend the robots' capabilities. Being a part of Grishin Robotics\u2019 portfolio provides high synergy with other robotics companies and better resource utilization. We are excited to use this funding to secure our place as THE market-leader of the consumer and educational robot-apps\u2122 industry.\"\n\nAs much as I'd like to believe this, \"the robotics industry has reached its tipping-point\" is a sentiment that I've heard consistently ever since I started writing about robots back in 2007, and as far as I can tell, nothing has tipped yet. I think it's more likely that Grishin's investments, and RobotAppStore itself, will help the robotics industry reach some sort of tipping-point in the first place. An app-type ecosystem, where you can download new capabilities for your robot that someone else has come up with rather than taking the time to develop them yourself, is one of the things that has made ROS so successful in robotics, and has the potential to do something similar for consumer robots in general. The only question I have at this point is whether there are really enough robots out there for RobotAppStore to get a good foothold, but even if there aren't (yet), the existence of a place to share apps will perhaps motivate people to buy more robots knowing that new capabilities are already available.\n\n[ RobotAppStore ] via [ Grishin Robotics ]"}
{"text":"Replacing articles of clothing every time they get holes can become an expensive proposition. Instead, use the darning technique to repair small holes in socks, shirts and other apparel. With a darning needle and yarn, you'll form a network of stitches across the gap. It\u2019s easy to do and can be a big cost-saver.\n\nFind thread or yarn that matches the sock in color and texture; you can use embroidery floss to repair a crew sock, while wool yarn is appropriate for a wool sock. Choose a darning needle as well.\n\nPlace a lightbulb in the sock and position the hole over the lightbulb. Your needle will glide smoothly over the bulb's surface, making your stitching go faster.\n\nThread the darning needle with the yarn or thread and leave the end unknotted. The darning process should create a tight weave that makes knots unnecessary.\n\nStart your work on either side of the hole. Take several small vertical running stitches in the intact fabric of the sock, about 1\/2 inch to the left or right of the hole. Turn the sock upside down and make another row of stitches next to the first.\n\nIncrease the number of running stitches you make as you come closer to the hole. When you reach the point at which the hole begins, your stitching line should extend from 1\/2 inch above the hole to 1\/2 inch below it.\n\nContinue making vertical running stitches. When your stitching reaches the hole, take your thread or yarn over the hole and into the fabric on the other side, forming what resembles a vertical bridge over the hole. Stitching should extend 1\/2 inch beyond the hole at both the top and bottom edges.\n\nCut the thread end once you have covered the hole with vertical threads and extended the stitching 1\/2 inch past it so that both sides of the hole look identical.\n\nThread your darning needle and begin your work 1\/2 inch from either side of the hole at either the top or bottom. Take the threaded needle and weave it under and over the vertical threads that cover the hole as well as the vertical threads that lie within 1\/2 inch of the hole.\n\nTurn the sock upside down once you reach the opposite end of the hole, and weave another yarn strand next to the first. Continue stitching back and forth until you've completely filled the hole. Trim excess thread."}
{"text":"A new report uncovers the role of US psychologists in torture and criticizes the American Psychological Association for supporting interrogation in the name of national security\n\nThis week the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF) have published the most comprehensive study on the role of psychologists in the War on Terror. At 269 pages, the full report is as detailed as it is grim, concluding that American psychologists collaborated extensively with the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the CIA to develop a range of interrogation methods used in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guant\u00e1namo Bay.\n\nThe list of methods is horrifying: beatings, exposure to extreme cold, shackling, repeated slamming into walls, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, exposure to prolonged white noise and yelling, forced nakedness, exploitation of phobias, slaps to the face and abdomen, cramped confinement, prolonged stress positions (such as having hands and feet chained to the floor), forced feeding via gastrointestinal tubing, sexual and religious humiliation, forcible restraint of the head, deprivation of basic items such as sheets, blankets and mattresses (termed \"comfort items\"), threats to the detainee\u2019s family, asphyxiation, and waterboarding.\n\nThe report documents how psychologists consulted with the military under the Orwellian euphemism of \"safety officers\". Their official role was to work in Behavioral Science Consultation Teams to \"identify vulnerabilities of detainees and collaborate with interrogators in exploiting them\". Psychologists were selected for these positions based on professional training in clinical and forensic psychology. Yet while clearly valuing these qualifications, the military classified the psychologists as \"combatants\" rather than health practitioners, a move which enabled them to bypass normal ethical standards.\n\nThose ethical standards themselves are unclear. The American Psychological Association (APA) \u2013 the official professional body for psychologists in the US \u2013 officially rejects torture but it also supports the role of psychologists in interrogation: \"It is consistent with the APA Ethics Code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national-security related purposes\". The APA has yet to indicate which, if any, of the methods listed in the IMAP\/OSF report would be consistent with its ethical policy.\n\nThe position of the British Psychological Society is even less clear. On the one hand the Society condemns torture yet at the same time remains silent on whether psychologists can assist with interrogation or other military objectives. As with the APA's policy, the point at which interrogation becomes abuse is left unsaid, the boundaries of unethical conduct given room to move.\n\nThe report makes a number of concrete recommendations, calling for US president Barack Obama to apply more strict prohibitions on the use of \"sleep deprivation, isolation, exploitation of fear, and other interrogation methods that violate international standards\". It also urges the APA to clarify its ethical policy and \"repudiate the report of its Presidential Task Force\u2026that condones the participation of psychologists in interrogation\".\n\nThese are undoubtedly vital reforms, but the facts uncovered by this study raise even more fundamental questions. In the quest for national security, is there a genuine balance to be met between the ideologies of \"do no harm\" and \"prevent harm being done\"? At what point (if any) is it morally acceptable for psychologists to be deployed as weapons of war? As important as it is for the psychological profession to clarify its policies on these issues, it is also not for psychologists alone to provide the answers. That responsibility is shared by all citizens of a free society."}
{"text":"Shanghai, China \u2013 Since four-fifth of the Chinese students wear glasses. An Asian dad beat up his son for having perfect 6\/6 vision. He was convinced that wearing glasses would mean an increase in his sons grades.\n\nA boy named Wang Wei, a 15 year old student from Shanghai was badly beaten up by his dad Fang Wei. He then took him to a doctor and forced him to prescribe glasses for his son.\n\nWang was just an average student who would pass all his exams. This want enough as his father\u2019s expectations were very high of him. He attributed this on him having a perfect 6\/6 vision and proceeded to beat up his child.\n\nThe doctor tried convincing his father that corrective glasses are not required with no results. He said he wouldn\u2019t leave until the doctor gave his son glasses. Hence the doctor was left with no choice and prescribed him a Rayban aviator sunglasses.\n\nChina and many other East Asian countries do not prize time outdoors. Being outdoors and exposure to daylight helps the retina to release a chemical that slows down an increase in the eye\u2019s axial length.\n\nSchoolchildren in China are often made to take a nap after lunch rather than play outside; they then go home to do far more homework than anywhere outside East Asia. The older children in China have poor eyesights, as they stay indoors and not because of the country\u2019s notorious pollution.\n\nLike this: Like Loading..."}
{"text":"Retired marine was abruptly let go from position informing relevant White House officials about covert operations following clash with NSC official\n\nWhen the history of Donald Trump\u2019s war with the US intelligence community is written, the name of the conflict\u2019s first casualty is unlikely to be recorded, as the former marine officer is still a serving CIA official.\n\nThat marine officer was the CIA\u2019s liaison to the White House, whose duties included bringing relevant White House officials with appropriate security clearance into the loop about covert operations.\n\nBritish spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia Read more\n\nAccording to current and former White House and intelligence officials, he lost a bureaucratic struggle with his nominal boss, the National Security Council\u2019s controversial intelligence director.\n\nMultiple former colleagues described the former CIA liaison as a consummate professional with no history of infractions. But late one afternoon in mid-March, the retired marine was abruptly informed that his services were no longer needed and he ought not to come to work the next day. Co-workers were shocked at a display that seemed designed to humiliate him.\n\n\u201cIt was the most disrespectful thing they could have done,\u201d said a White House official familiar with the incident. \u201cHe\u2019s a good man. What happened to him was fucked up.\u201d\n\nOver a month later, the CIA has not sent a replacement liaison to the White House, though there are other agency officials on loan there. The ex-liaison has not been accused of any crime or abuse and has returned to the CIA.\n\nThe liaison\u2019s removal, first reported by the Washington Post, followed a clash with Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the 30-year-old intelligence director on the NSC staff, to whom he reported.\n\nCohen-Watnick was a junior case officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he caught the eye of Michael Flynn, the ex-DIA director and first national security adviser to Trump. When Flynn came to the White House, Cohen-Watnick was among the Flynn deputies whom career national security staff came to view as a clique \u2013 derisively known in intelligence circles as the \u201cFlynnstones\u201d. For their part, the so-called Flynnstones viewed the career staff as Obama loyalists, and excluded many of them from national security decision-making.\n\nWhen Flynn\u2019s downfall came, owing to the way he misled Vice-President Mike Pence over contacts with the Russian ambassador, his ultimate replacement the current national security adviser, HR McMaster, sought to oust Cohen-Watnick. The CIA, which Trump had for months disparaged, distrusted Flynn and was uncomfortable with Cohen-Watnick remaining as an intermediary between Langley and the White House.\n\nBut McMaster lost out to Cohen-Watnick, who persuaded strategist Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump\u2019s son-in-law, to protect him. A Newsweek profile reported that Cohen-Watnick\u2019s parents have ties to Kushner, an added asset for Flynn.\n\n\u201cThey hate him. They absolutely despise him,\u201d a former senior intelligence official said of the CIA\u2019s view of Cohen-Watnick.\n\nThe CIA declined comment for this story and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.\n\nCohen-Watnick\u2019s moment of prominence came in late March, when he was exposed as a channel for information used by the House intelligence committee chairman, Devin Nunes, another Flynn ally, to distract from an investigation into Russia\u2019s connections with Trump affiliates. A key figure in that investigation is Flynn, who received tens of thousands of dollars for a speech in Moscow from RT, a news channel the CIA considers an adjunct of official Russian propaganda.\n\nReportedly, Cohen-Watnick provided Nunes with documents purporting to show improper surveillance on Trump\u2019s allies, an allegation Nunes made while obscuring that the narrative, politically convenient for the White House, emerged from the White House itself. Nunes later reluctantly recused himself when the revelation of White House involvement sparked a political outcry. Subsequently, both Democrats and Republicans who viewed the documents considered them anodyne, a far cry from Nunes and Trump\u2019s portrayals.\n\nSome sources considered the removal of the CIA liaison to be an act of retaliation for the attempt to get Cohen-Watnick off the NSC. The episode occurred in mid-March, before Nunes made his allegations.\n\nOther sources pointed to attempts by the former CIA liaison to stop Cohen-Watnick from taking actions which a White House official declined to describe substantively but characterized as appearing to \u201coperationalize\u201d the NSC.\n\nIn US national security circles, that term evokes the idea of using the NSC to perform secret or sensitive operations as a backchannel around both Congress, which does not review the NSC, and agencies such as the CIA which would be likely to object. The issue arose during the Iran-contra scandal, when marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, an NSC official in Ronald Reagan\u2019s White House, sold Iran weapons to fund anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua against Congress\u2019s express orders.\n\nThe former senior intelligence official said Cohen-Watnick had committed \u201cserious protocol violations\u201d. Among them were appearing to take responsibilities for certain covert programs away from the CIA and communicating with lower-level intelligence officials outside of established channels that ensure intelligence chiefs and deputies are aware of White House requests and concerns.\n\nIntentionally or not, sources said, Cohen-Watnick created a perception of the White House bypassing intelligence chiefs \u2013 right as Trump was tweeting his disapproval of US intelligence, which he considered to be on a politicized witch-hunt to tie him to the Kremlin.\n\n\u201cOn a procedural level, it would be odd for a senior director to reach down into the bowels of intelligence agencies. There\u2019s a chain of command to go through,\u201d said a different former senior intelligence official.\n\nDonald Trump travel ban 'simplistic and wrongheaded', says former CIA chief Read more\n\nThe removal of the CIA liaison had immediate consequences, sources said. Among the liaison\u2019s tasks were providing visibility for NSC officials into classified programs. That process stalled in the first weeks after the liaison returned to the CIA, but has since been sorted out.\n\nIn recent weeks, as McMaster has accrued power at the expense of both the Flynn loyalists supporters and Bannon, the White House war with the intelligence agencies has waned. Last week Mike Pompeo made his first speech as CIA director, and insisted to his Washington thinktank audience that the agency and the president had turned a corner in their relationship.\n\nBut it may be an unsteady equilibrium, particularly as the inquiries into Russia progress. Cohen-Watnick remains in his job.\n\nTwo weeks after his forced dismissal, several colleagues threw a going-away party for the retired marine officer at the Army-Navy Club on Farragut Square, a few blocks from the White House. At least a dozen NSC staffers attended to fete the now-ex CIA liaison."}
{"text":"Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his two sons, Hassan and Hussain, failed to appear before the National Accountability Bureau\u2019s (NAB) Lahore office on Friday for a probe meeting pertaining to a Supreme Court-ordered investigation into the Sharif family's business concerns.\n\nSecurity had been tightened in and around the NAB office, DawnNews reported, with about 200 police personnel deployed in the surrounding area in anticipation of the ousted PM's visit, but Sharif and his sons did not appear today.\n\nSubsequently, the five-member NAB team comprising an additional director, a deputy director, and an assistant director, returned to Rawalpindi.\n\nNAB sources said a decision on whether or not to send another notice to the family would be made after consultation with the NAB chairman. It also remains to be seen whether Sharif and his sons will be summoned to the offices in Lahore or Islamabad.\n\nPML-N insiders earlier told Dawn that Sharif and his sons would \u2500 after discussion with close aides and their legal team \u2500 not join the NAB investigation until the apex court decided on his review petition against the July 28 Panamagate verdict which disqualified him from office.\n\nExplore: Sharif, sons to skip NAB probe meeting today\n\n\"Mian Nawaz Sharif and his children have decided not to appear before NAB till a verdict on his review petition in the SC is decided. Sharif has sought a stay of the NAB proceedings and till the apex court decides his petition there is no point in his joining the NAB investigation in cases against him,\" a close aide to Sharif, who is privy to the development, told Dawn on Thursday.\n\nSharif appealed to the SC to stay further implementation of the Panamagate judgement, which included orders for the opening of references against the family's Al-Azizia Steel Mills and Hill Metal Establishment, and one regarding 16 other companies.\n\nThe companies are Flagship Investments, Hartstone Properties, Que Holdings, Quint Eaton Place 2, Quint Saloane, Quaint, Flagship Securities, Quint Gloucester Place, Quint Paddington, Flagship Developments, Alanna Services (BVI), Lankin SA (BVI), Chadron, Ansbacher, Coomber and Capital FZE (Dubai).\n\nRead more: Panamagate: Decision to disqualify me had been taken before the judgement, Nawaz alleges\n\nPML-N's Senator Asif Kirmani, a close aide of the ex-PM, also said neither Sharif nor his sons would appear before NAB in Lahore, and had not received any summons from NAB.\n\nA joint team of NAB officials from Lahore and Rawalpindi have also formulated a questionnaire for the investigation.\n\nAccording to a copy of the questionnaire acquired by DawnNews, it is expected that Sharif and his sons will be questioned about financial matters pertaining to Al-Azizia Steel Mills and Hill Metal Establishment.\n\nThe inquiry may include questions about the purchase of land and machinery for Al-Azizia, and the formation of its internal structure. NAB is also expected to ask for proof of purchase of machinery for the mill from Dubai.\n\nThe probe team could possibly ask about where the capital for the creation of Hill Metal came from, who was part of the board of directors, and where the shareholder details of the company are.\n\nAdditionally, the three may be quizzed about the nature of monetary gifts made to Nawaz Sharif by his son Hussain Nawaz.\n\nIt is possible that Rehman Malik and Shahbaz Sharif may also be summoned by NAB to record their statements.\n\nAs Sharif and his sons failed to appear before NAB today, a second summons may be issued within the next week or so. A third summons may also be issued if they do not appear before the NAB after the second notice, Dawn reported, added that following this course of action may be a way for the Sharif family to buy some time if the review petition before the SC is not in their favour.\n\nWith additional reporting by Zulqernain Tahir."}
{"text":"Check out this cute school poster from Japan that teaches kids about lesbian, gay, bisexual and asexual people. The \"Who Will You Come To Like?\" poster is part of a health series of educational materials.\n\nAccording to ROYGBIV, the two blurbs at the top right say:\n\nWhen young people reach puberty they often like other people this is called sexual attraction. Depending on who a person likes, this is their sexual orientation. Most are heterosexual, but people who are homosexual and bisexual are not altogether a small group. Sexual orientation is innate and it cannot be changed by intervention, so there is no need to change your preferences.\n\nand\n\nHowever, adolescence is a time when one generally discovers their sexual orientation. When it comes to understanding one's sexual orientation, one should take as much time as is needed.\n\nThis version of the poster was put outside of the nurse's office at Saitama Prefecture's Sayama Keizai School of Economics."}
{"text":"With its costume competitions, treats, and atmosphere of mischief, Halloween is Canada\u2019s dominant masquerade festival\u2014but it\u2019s not our only one. The lesser-known Acadian festival of Mi-Car\u00eame looks, at a glance, like a peculiar cousin of Halloween. Participants may choose to decorate their driveways with scarecrow-like figures and hang red lights on their homes to prepare for visits from mi-car\u00eames\u2014masked wanders who roam the streets at night, knocking on doors and asking to be let inside. There, a guessing game begins\u2014who is this masked stranger, a neighbour, or a family member, or a friend? Once the mi-car\u00eames\u2019 true identities have been revealed, their hosts treat them to a snack\u2014toffee, fudge, and a bit of booze are traditional\u2014and instruments come out for a musical performance before it\u2019s on to the next house.\n\nOnce widespread throughout French Canada, there are only four spots in Canada where Mi-Car\u00eame is still celebrated today: Ch\u00e9ticamp, Nova Scotia, and in Quebec, Natashquan, Isle-aux-Grues, and Fatima. \u201cMi-Car\u00eame used to be celebrated in most small villages and small towns that had Roman Catholic roots, and it was to break the fasting that the church would ask them to do after Mardi Gras and before Easter, the 40 days of Lent,\u201d explains Monique Aucoin, who has celebrated the festival annually for 68 years and is the president of Ch\u00e9ticamp\u2019s Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Mi-Car\u00eame (which indeed translates to \u201cmid-Lent\u201d). Over time, various elements of modernity dulled Mi-Car\u00eame\u2019s appeal to all but the most remote Acadian villages, where communities are close-knit and trusting, nobody is too fussy about crowds stomping over their hardwood or carpet, and a giddy, carnivalesque event brightening the wintery gloom is very welcome. \u201cIn my first life I was a nurse and I always said the week of Mi-Car\u00eame was a great week to work because nobody was sick. It\u2019s like endorphins,\u201d says Aucoin.\n\nToday, the history of Mi-Car\u00eame is cherished (though the festival has lost much of its religious association) and the villages that uphold its tradition also work to expand it, through the creation of visitor information centers and the elongation of the festival itself, which can now feature opening and closing galas or community dances. Those who have moved away are known to return for the event, and newcomers are quickly incorporated into the tradition. \u201cI think it\u2019s the best celebration that our culture has,\u201d says Aucoin, \u201cit makes people happy.\u201d\n\n_________\n\nNever miss a story. Sign up for NUVO\u2019s weekly newsletter, here."}
{"text":"Thursday, March 18, 2010 | 12:37 PM\n\nSince we launched Google Buzz for mobile, we've been working on ways to make it quicker and easier to share your thoughts and experiences while you're out and about.\n\nToday, we're excited to release a Google Buzz widget for Android phones that lets you post text and photos with a single tap. Like other mobile access points for Google Buzz, the widget lets you choose to tag your post with the location or place from which it was posted. You can post buzz about a great meal you had and share photos of the new restaurant. To save time, your posts will upload in the background, letting you get back to your scrumptious dessert without a wait.\n\nThe widget is initially available in English for Android phones running v1.6 and later. Search for 'Google Buzz' in the Android Market to download it now. Once installed, you can add it to your home screen: tap \"Menu\" while on the home screen and select \"Add > Widgets > Google Buzz\".\n\nWe plan to add support for other languages soon. Visit our Help Center to learn more, ask questions in our Help Forum, or give us suggestions and vote on other people\u2019s on the Mobile Product Ideas page.\n\nUpdate\n\nPosted by Zak Cohen, Software Engineer, Google Mobile\n\non March 22nd @11:10 PM: You can also directly scan the QR code below to install the widget."}
{"text":"Ricegrowers predict dire outcomes if water cuts proceed\n\nPosted\n\nRiverina ricegrowers say propopsed water cuts in the Murrumbidgee system could spell the end of the rice industry as it is known.\n\nConsultants in Griffith are doing research on the socio-economic impact of the Murray Darling Basin Authority guide which recommends cuts of up to 45 per cent in local water availability.\n\nRicegrowers gave evidence yesterday on what they said will be the dire impact locally should the cuts proceed.\n\nOther industry groups are being consulted this week.\n\nThe chairman of the parliamentary inquiry into the Murray Darling Basin Guide said yesterday the Basin Authority has done a poor job selling its draft recommendations.\n\nA public hearing at Murray Bridge in South Australia was the first in a nine day national tour to hear community submissions on the draft plan.\n\nThe chairman Tony Windsor said the Authority neglected to explain alternatives to cutting water allocations, causing angst for irrigators in the river system.\n\n\"It was sold as cutbacks,\" said Mr Windsor.\n\n\"And that to the communities and to the political process meant decimation of towns, individuals, livelihoods on the back of the worst drought we've had in ten years. So, poorly marketed.\" he said.\n\nWater economist Mike Young said the Queensland floods show figures given by the Murray Darling Basin Authority in its guide for the Basin's future are inaccurate.\n\nProfessor Young also appeared before the parliamentary inquiry.\n\nProfessor Young who is the Executive Director of the Environment Institute at Adelaide University and a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists said many of the proposed water cuts are based on averages, rather than seasonal variations.\n\n\"You can't plan on averages,\" said Professor Young.\n\n\"Everyone can now see that we have droughts and we have flooding rains, and so we need an approach that doesn't just talk about average numbers, but actually talks about what will happen when it's dry.\"\n\nThe Murray Darling Association says State Government powers to restrict water used by irrigators should be over-ruled by the Basin Authority.\n\nThe Association's General Secretary - Ray Najar - address the inquiry.\n\n\"There shouldn't be any restrictions on water use for food production,\" he said.\n\n\"there's just no, absolutely no need for it, the small amount of water that we require for growers in South Australia to have full allocations, for example, is about two days flow out of the Murray Mouth.\"\n\n\"So it's ridiculous for the government to maintain a policy that was written for drought and use it in a flood situation,\" said Mr Najar.\n\nTopics: irrigation, regional, rivers, water, water-management, rural, griffith-2680, deniliquin-2710, hay-2711, leeton-2705"}
{"text":"A Webster man is in the Harris County Jail, accused of getting a 17-year-old woman drunk and then sexually assaulting her. But what makes this case unique is what finally led to his arrest.\n\nOn Thursday, Elric Shawn Millner had his picture taken at the Webster jail when he was arrested. He was smiling. On Friday, he was taken before a judge in probable cause court. The smile was gone.\n\n\"We request a $50,000 bond based on the facts of the offense,\" said a prosecutor in court Friday morning.\n\nMillner is 24 years old. He was 22 when documents allege he sexually assaulted a then-17-year-old woman with whom he was involved.\n\nIt allegedly happened at the Clear Lake apartment complex where he lived. The woman stated it happened after he gave her a lot of liquor to drink.\n\n\"She drank in excess to the point of passing out and having no memory of that night and showed her multiple videos of the suspect and another individual engaging in sexual intercourse with the complainant,\" said the prosecutor in court.\n\nIt went unreported for two years until the woman started dating a man who had been a Marine MP. Prosecutors say he made it his mission to take the case to police, pretending to befriend Millner and making up a story.\n\n\"Talked to the old boyfriend about the complainant, pretending he was upset with her,\" said prosecutor Adam Muldrow.\n\n\"And so the defendent did what at that point?\" we asked.\n\n\"The defendant confirmed the allegations,\" said Muldrow.\n\n\"And he showed him the video?\" we asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said.\n\nTwo weeks after the woman finally went to police, Millner is now in jail. The video he allegedly kept for two years will be evidence.\n\nMillner, 24, was charged Thursday with sexual assault. Bond has been set at $50,000."}
{"text":"If Planet Nine really exists, astronomers have a pretty decent chance of spotting it.\n\nOn Wednesday (Jan. 20), scientists announced that a planet about 10 times more massive than Earth likely lurks in the distant outer solar system, orbiting perhaps 600 times farther from the sun than Earth does on average.\n\nThe evidence for the existence of this \"Planet Nine\" is indirect at the moment; computer models suggest a big, undiscovered world has shaped the strange orbits of multiple objects in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune. But direct evidence could come relatively soon, in the form of a telescope observation, Planet Nine's proposers say. [Evidence Mounts for Existence of 'Planet X' (Video)]\n\n\"It's actually not obscenely faint,\" said Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Brown and lead author Konstantin Batygin, also of Caltech, wrote the new paper laying out the evidence for the putative planet's existence.\n\n\"In fact, it's bright enough over a lot of its orbit that we should have seen it already, if it's in the closest approaches to the sun,\" Brown told Space.com. Indeed, at closest approach, \"you could almost see it with some backyard telescopes,\" he added. (Planet Nine's orbit likely brings it as close as 200 to 300 astronomical units, or AU, to the sun, and takes it as far away as 600 to 1,200 AU, Brown said. One AU is the average distance from Earth to the sun\u2014about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)\n\nPlanet Nine is therefore probably not too close to the sun at the moment, said Brown, who has discovered or co-discovered a number of distant solar system objects, including the dwarf planets Eris and Sedna. But powerful ground-based telescopes can probably still detect the object, wherever it may be, he added. [The Case for \"Planet Nine\" in Pictures]\n\n\"Even at its most distant, and at the smallest guesses of how big it is, it's like 24th or 25th magnitude,\" Brown said, referring to the brightness scale astronomers use, in which higher numbers denote fainter objects. \"It's not crazy; this is the kind of stuff people are finding all the time. We just need to go out and cover a good swathe of the sky.\"\n\nJust how big a swathe? Astronomer Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., has come up with a rough estimate: between 2,000 and 4,000 square degrees. (For perspective, the full moon as seen from Earth covers about 0.5 degrees of sky.)\n\nThat corresponds to about 50 nights of observations using a powerful instrument such as the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, said Sheppard, who has a lot of experience finding far-flung objects in the solar system. For example, in 2014, he and Chadwick Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii discovered an object called 2012 VP113, whose orbital characteristics hint at the presence of a Planet Nine.\n\nThe 27-foot-wide (8.2 meters) Subaru Telescope is the go-to observatory for the search, because Planet Nine is predicted to be visible in the Northern Hemisphere sky, both Brown and Sheppard said. (Many other big, powerful scopes are in Chile, south of the equator.) [World's Largest Reflecting Telescopes Explained (Infographic)]\n\nSheppard stressed that it's tough to know just how detectable Planet Nine would be, considering the uncertainties surrounding the putative world's size, orbit and composition\u2014all characteristics that affect brightness.\n\nBut, Sheppard told Space.com, \"if it's not on the extreme ends of the orbit or the size, then Subaru should be able to find it.\"\n\nThe hunt is on\n\nSheppard and his colleagues have already covered some parts of Planet Nine's possible orbit using Subaru, as part of a larger, years-long survey for more objects such as 2012 VP113. (The broader survey also employs a telescope in Chile, which spotted 2012 VP113.)\n\nThe researchers will likely use Subaru to narrow in on more promising possible locations, now that Batygin and Brown have given them a better idea of where to look, Sheppard said. But the hunt for smaller bodies such as 2012 VP113 will continue as well.\n\n\"We're trying to find many more of these smaller objects, which could lead us to the bigger object,\" he said.\n\nThe hunt for Planet Nine will also probably send astronomers back to their archives; it's possible that the undiscovered world has already been photographed by powerful telescopes, but researchers didn't spot it, Brown said. (Confirming the planet's existence will require more than one image, because astronomers will need to see the object move to know it's not a background star or other extremely distant object.)\n\nSheppard said that he had pegged the odds of a big planet lying undiscovered beyond Neptune at 50-50, but the new study by Batygin and Brown boosts his confidence in the existence of Planet Nine to about 75 percent.\n\nBrown seems even more confident.\n\n\"I find this really compelling,\" Brown said. \"I think it's there. But, like everybody else, I want to see it.\"\n\nCopyright 2016 SPACE.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed."}
{"text":"Workers would win the \u201cright to own\u201d their employers under a Labour government. In a speech to Co-operative UK in Manchester today, John McDonnell promised legislation to give employees first rights on buying out a company that is being dissolved, sold or floated on the stock exchange.\n\nThe Shadow Chancellor argued that the Labour Party needs to draw upon its radical, co-operative tradition to find a way out of the current economic crisis. \u201cWith consortium co-operatives providing an effective means for new businesses to share and reduce costs, we\u2019d look to support these at a local level, working with local authorities, businesses and trade unions,\u201d he said.\n\nHe promised that the Labour Party would consider providing matching government funding for new co-operatives and look into the recommendations in Graeme Nuttall\u2019s report on employee ownership, including creating a statutory right to request employee ownership and have proposals considered by employers.\n\n\u201cWe should look to extend this approach, offering employees first rights on buying out a company that is being dissolved, sold, or floated on the stock exchange. The Tories have offered a \u201cRight to Buy.\u201d Labour would seek to better this. We\u2019d be creating a new \u201cRight to Own,\u201d he said.\n\nMcDonnell said the Labour Party must not only look for state-led solutions to the current crisis in capitalism, but also look back to its traditions of decentralisation and grassroots co-operation.\n\n\u201cThis radical tradition has deep roots in our collective history. From RH Tawney, GDH Cole and the guild socialists, back to the Rochdale Pioneers, the Society of Weavers in Fenwick, Ayrshire, and even further back to the radicals of the English Civil War.\u201d\n\nMcDonnell also argued that while technology can be disruptive \u2013 deskilling and creating greater inequality \u2013 it can also open up new possibilities of new forms of sharing and co-operation."}
{"text":"On Tuesday\u2019s All In, host Chris Hayes and his guests tackled a chilling and politically loaded subject: which beliefs should disqualify someone from holding public office. Among other things, the group decided that global warming \u201cdenialism,\u201d opposition to same-sex marriage, and opposition to a \u201crobust\u201d Voting Rights Act should put a politician outside the mainstream and ruin their chances of holding public office.\n\nHayes seemed excited that politicians might be branded with a figurative scarlet letter for holding beliefs that run counter to his own far-left vision. In fact, he claimed the act of disqualification based on certain beliefs is a \u201ctool of progress,\u201d not something that \u201cconstrains consensus.\u201d The host gloated:\n\nIt\u2019s a tool of progress when we say that certain things, like opposing marriage equality, are sort of, like, not the kinds of things that mainstream American politicians \u2013\n\nOne of Hayes\u2019 guests cut him off, but he didn\u2019t need to finish that sentence. The point is clear \u2013 Hayes has stumbled upon a new way to squelch debate in this country and pave the way for liberal domination of American political thought.\n\nThe host was particularly gleeful over the growing acceptance of the theory that human beings are driving climate change. After playing clips of Sen. Marco Rubio expressing skepticism of global warming and then trying to clarify when pressed on the issue, Hayes smirked:\n\n[T]he fascinating aspect of this to me is that it looked to me for the first time in a long time that denialism was looking like a thing that was a disqualifier or at least something to be defensive about in a way I haven't seen in a while.\n\nOne of Hayes\u2019 guests, former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, agreed:\n\nAnd I think nowadays it is. I mean, this is an issue that\u2019s \u2013 I mean, we\u2019re all threatened by this. I mean, the planet is in danger. Something needs to be done. And I think if you\u2019re just going to deny that this is even occurring, it means that you\u2019re going to be blocking the policies that we need, and it should be a disqualifier.\n\nHayes even went so far as to call global warming skeptics \"really cuckoo.\"\n\nRegarding gay marriage, the host was also ready to declare the debate closed. He exulted that he has \"never seen an issue go so quickly from a contentious, contested issue that\u2019s at the center of our political debates to one in which opposition to it is quickly becoming taboo.\u201d\n\nBut in many parts of the country, gay marriage still is a \u201ccontentious, contested issue.\u201d Hayes only wishes it were a settled topic.\n\nBy the way, the host placed global warming skepticism and opposition to gay marriage in the same basket as 9\/11 Trutherism. During his introduction to this discussion, Hayes mentioned that Van Jones, now a co-host of CNN\u2019s Crossfire, was pressured into resigning from his job in the Obama White House because, among other things, his name appeared on a petition that suggested the George W. Bush administration may have knowingly allowed the 9\/11 terrorist attacks to happen. The host failed to mention, of course, that MSNBC colleague Toure has a history of Truther-style statements.\n\nThat conspiracy theory is well outside of the mainstream, but it was what prompted Hayes to launch his discussion of other, more conservative beliefs that he wishes society would just laugh away.\n\nBelow is a transcript of the segment:\n\nCHRIS HAYES: Van Jones says he never actually signed the 9\/11 truther petition that prompted that spout of outrage, and he maintained from the start it did not reflect his actual views. But just that tiny little brush with trutherism was enough to get the guy drummed out of the White House. And all this got me thinking about what exactly should constitute a disqualifier when it comes to those who want to hold public office or even work in the government. Joining me now, Bob Herbert, distinguished senior fellow with Demos; Christina Bellantoni, editor-in-chief of Roll Call; and Richard Kim, executive editor of TheNation.com. I am really interested in the boundaries of taboo and consensus and what are the kinds of things that are the kinds of things that politicians can argue about, and the kinds of things that kind of place them off the table. And I thought it was interesting to see the Ernst campaign felt that that claim about WMD was an off-the-table kind of claim they had to then deny, which I found to be progress of a sort. Are there certain things you think, Bob, that should be in the kind of off-the-table category that aren't currently in the off-the-table category?\n\nBOB HERBERT: Sure. I would start with if you don't have support for a robust Voting Rights Act for example. So if you're running for national office and you don't feel that qualified Americans ought to be guaranteed the right to vote, that should disqualify you.\n\nHAYES: Just like Voting Rights Act as a matter of \u2013 Voting Rights Act or opposition to Voting Rights Act is off the table. But here\u2019s the thing that's tricky about that, right, is that no one comes out. You're right. That is actually rhetorically where we are in American politics insofar as no one will come out and be like, I don't like the Voting Rights Act, unless, you know, Supreme Court justices. But, right, I think \u2013 don't you agree that if someone \u2013 no one would actually come out and say that.\n\n[crosstalk]\n\nHERBERT: \u2013 should have to come out and say it. I'm saying you need to be forthright in your support of a robust Voting Rights Act because you need to be forthright in your support of Americans' right to vote.\n\nHAYES: And Rand Paul has come pretty close.\n\nRICHARD KIM: With the Civil Rights Act, which is not the Voting Rights Act, but that package of civil rights legislation.\n\nHAYES: And that infamous moment on Rachel\u2019s show with the long, torturous, just train wreck of an interview in which he basically said, I'm not that into the public accommodation part of the Civil Rights Act, that was him flirting with precisely the line of the disqualifying.\n\n***\n\nJONATHAN KARL: Let me get this straight. You do not think that human activity, the production of CO2, has caused warming to our planet?\n\nSEN. MARCO RUBIO: I don't believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.\n\nUNIDENTIFIED: What information, reports, studies or otherwise are you relying on to inform and reach your conclusion that human activity is not to blame for climate change?\n\nRUBIO: Well, again, I mean \u2013 headlines notwithstanding, I\u2019ve never disputed that the climate is changing, and I pointed out that climate, to some extent, is always changing. It\u2019s never static.\n\nHAYES: Nice try, Marco Rubio. I\u2019m back with Bob Herbert, Christina Bellantoni, and Richard Kim. And the reason I want to play that, so Rubio \u2013 again, he stepped in it on that Jon Karl interview. I think he didn\u2019t think it was going to become a headline. I mean, you can see his passive\/aggressive note about headlines notwithstanding. And then today he tried to walk it back in a totally incoherent way. But the fascinating aspect of this to me is that it looked to me for the first time in a long time that denialism was looking like a thing that was a disqualifier or at least something to be defensive about in a way I haven't seen in a while.\n\nHERBERT: And I think nowadays it is. I mean, this is an issue that\u2019s \u2013 I mean, we\u2019re all threatened by this. I mean, the planet is in danger. Something needs to be done. And I think if you\u2019re just going to deny that this is even occurring, it means that you\u2019re going to be blocking the policies that we need, and it should be a disqualifier.\n\nHAYES: And the key here to me is, the conspiratorial thinking it requires to think that thousands of scientists across the globe are engaged in this massive hoax, which is basically what James Inhofe, who\u2019s a sitting U.S. senator, believes, right? The conspiratorial thinking that it takes to believe that is really cuckoo. I mean, that is really out there.\n\nKIM: Okay, I can't believe I'm going to take the other side on this. So obviously, I don't believe, you know, these views, and I think they\u2019re sort of lunatic and really dangerous. On the other hand, large percentages of the American population believe that. And don't they have representation in that political process? And I also worry that if you have this circle of disqualified opinions, and you keep growing that circle, what that rewards is an incentive structure that depends on sort of an absolute certainty of emotion. Like a really kind of intense belief. And to keep feeding that, if the facts on the ground don't match, you invent a set of facts. And I think, actually, that is what has happened to the Republican Party. They\u2019ve sort of produced this outrage machine.\n\nHAYES: So you're just saying, like, against litmus tests as a broad \u2013\n\nKIM: I say let the democratic process play out, and people should vote these things down.\n\nCHRISTINA BELLANTONI: On climate, as a specific thing. The candidate that appeals to the business community tends to be the candidate that\u2019ll either win the nomination or win the general election. And so this is an area where you \u2013\n\nHAYES: In the Republican party, in particular.\n\nBELLANTONI: In general, though, you have to be palpable to them to sit in the White House. And so with the business community shifting on this issue or on minimum wage issues or on some other labor issues, that's where you start to see the shifts. That guides the politician.\n\nHAYES: But what you\u2019re identifying, though, is precisely the nefarious ideological undercurrent of discussions about what's disqualifying. Because, I mean, that goes hand-in-glove with what Richard is saying. You\u2019re saying the people that actually draw the lines around what\u2019s disqualifying is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And like, frankly, that\u2019s what\u2019s going to decide if you're, like, a whacko.\n\nBELLANTONI: And just watch with immigration reform. I mean, the conversation has completely changed since 2005-2006 when George Bush, people were angry at him in a certain segment of the population because he supported immigration reform. And now it is sort of a moderate Republican view.\n\nHAYES: Or on marriage equality. I mean, that is a place where you really do see \u2013 I have never seen an issue go so quickly from a contentious, contested issue that\u2019s at the center of our political debates to one in which opposition to it is quickly becoming taboo.\n\nHERBERT: Well, the truth is that you can only do this as a hypothetical exercise, and that\u2019s a good example of why. I mean, there was a time when no one could get elected if they were in favor of gay marriage. Now in many elections it\u2019s a disqualifier if you\u2019re opposed to gay marriage.\n\nHAYES: But that makes me hopeful about the power of this kind of \u2013 the force of this, as opposed to this being something that constrains consensus, it actually is this tool, right? It\u2019s a tool of progress when we say that certain things, like opposing marriage equality, are sort of, like, not the kinds of things that mainstream American politicians \u2013\n\nKIM: But it's also a double-edged sword. So things like supporting a 90 percent tax rate, which was once policy in the United States \u2013\n\nHAYES: Right, that's a very good point.\n\nKIM: \u2013 would be a completely disqualifying characteristic for many, many people in this country.\n\nHAYES: If you came forward and said I am for a 90 percent top marginal tax rate, which of course was what it was after World War II and the Eisenhower administration before the first round of tax cuts, you would be \u2013 that would be the equivalent.\n\nKIM: Exactly."}
{"text":"German company Speedlink releases their OMNIVI Core. Sporting an ergonomic, polarizing design, this right-handed gaming mouse is equipped with 10 programmable buttons, an ultra-precise 12000dpi optical sensor, an adjustable USB polling rate up to 1000Hz and a USB connector (w\/ 1.8m flexible USB charging cable with hard-wearing sheath).\n\nNot to mention, the OMNIVI Core also comes with adjustable LED lighting that glows in any one of 7 atmospheric colors, an on-board memory for storing DPI settings and lighting settings, and an aluminum base plate. The Speedlink OMNIVI Core will retail for $70 in the US.\n\nProfessional gaming mouse\n\nUltra-precise 12,000dpi optical sensor\n\n10 freely configurable buttons\n\nAdjustable LED lighting glows in any one of 7 atmospheric colours\n\nSolid finger rest and aluminium base plate\n\nProfile management with any number of game profiles\n\nPowerful Macro Editor\n\nDPI switch for rapid toggling between resolutions\n\n6 sensor precision levels from 800 to 12,000dpi\n\nIlluminated 2D scroll wheel indicated current dpi level\n\nIlluminated 2D scroll wheel indicated current dpi level\n\nAdjustable USB polling rate up to 1,000Hz\n\nIncredible ergonomic comfort with grippy scroll wheel and finger rest\n\nRubberised finish\n\nMaximum acceleration: 50g\n\nMaximum tracking speed: 250ips\n\nSensor frame rate: 12,000fps\n\nFlexible USB cable with hard-wearing sheath (1.8m)\n\nDimensions: 87 \u00d7 131 \u00d7 52mm (W \u00d7 D \u00d7 H)\n\nWeight: 145g\n\nThe OMNIVI Gaming Mouse combines feature-packed functionality, ease of use and incredible precision in one perfect package. It is setting new standards in the gaming scene with its exhaustive feature set, including colourful glow, solid aluminium base plate, four thumb buttons and the ultra-precise, optical 12,000dpi sensor. Use the ten programmable buttons to keep your opponents at bay by utilising the extensive programming function to customise the mouse so your personal gaming style matches the game. And witness how your macros are unleashed at the press of a single button to perform close-combat or distance attacks, switch weapons or cast spells."}
{"text":"Chinese Ships Retrieve Beacon in MH370 Search 2014-04-02 06:06:35 Xinhua Web Editor: Luo Dan Related: Chinese Escort Fleet Reaches Target Area Two Chinese ships in search of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean retrieved a beacon late Tuesday, said an embedded Xinhua reporter.\n\nThe crews aboard Jinggangshan and Donghaijiu 101 told Xinhua that the beacon might be cast by aircraft involved in the hunt for the ill-fated Boeing 777 jetliner but confirmation was needed.\n\nThe two ships are among the seven Chinese vessels currently scouring waters some 2,000 kilometers west of the western Australian port city of Perth. Two Chinese IL-76 planes are also assisting the undertaking.\n\nMeanwhile, a three-ship Chinese naval flotilla previously deployed in the Gulf of Aden for escort missions teamed up with Chinese patrol vessel Haixun 31 on Tuesday to search for the missing plane south of Australia's Christmas Island.\n\nDespite massive multinational efforts, no hard evidence has so far been acquired about the whereabouts of MH370, which disappeared early March 8 while carrying 239 people -- including 154 Chinese passengers -- from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.\n\nShare\n\nCRIENGLISH.com claims the copyright of all material and information produced originally by our staff. No person, organization and\/or company shall reproduce, disseminate or broadcast the content in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of CRIENGLISH.com.\n\nCRIENGLISH.com holds neither liability nor responsibility for materials attributed to any other source. Such information is provided as reportage and dissemination of information but does not necessarily reflect the opinion of or endorsement by CRI."}
{"text":"Batman writer Scott Snyder has wrapped up his \"Night of the Owls\" arc, and as soon as he's done with bringing back The Joker this Fall, he now looks set to reintroduce The Riddler to the DC Universe in \"The New 52\" continuity.\n\nI will use Riddler in 2013 RT @ AlabamaMike2814 : @ Ssnyder1835 are you agreeing Riddler is awesome or that you're writing a Riddler story?\n\nYes. RT @ BradWiegele : @ Ssnyder1835 Will you please give us a badass Riddler story? He's so cool in Arkham city but nowhere in the DCU.\n\n: ComicBookMovie.com is protected from liability under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and \"Safe Harbor\" provisions. This post was submitted by a volunteer contributor who has agreed to our Code of Conduct . CBM will disable users who knowingly commit plagiarism, piracy, trademark or copyright infringement. Please contact us for expeditious removal of copyrighted\/trademarked content. Learn more about our copyright and trademark policies HERE"}
{"text":"Internet users have called for a boycott of web hosting giant Go Daddy over its public support of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the US.\n\nWhile the company has publicly supported SOPA and similarly controversial proposed legislation for months, its position went largely unnoticed until a thread on Reddit gained legs yesterday.\n\nUser \"selfprodigy\" said he planned to move 51 domain names he has registered with Go Daddy to another registrar, adding: \"I'm suggesting Dec 29th as move your domain away from GoDaddy day because of their support of SOPA. Who's with me?\"\n\nThe posting attracted almost 4,000 comments, largely supportive of the boycott.\n\nBen Huh, CEO of the Cheezburger Network - the owner of sites such as FailBlog - said in a tweet that he would move his 1,000 domains away from Go Daddy unless it dropped its support for SOPA.\n\nThe campaign now also has a website at GoDaddyBoycott.org (registered via Canadian registrar Tucows using a privacy service to protect the owner's identity).\n\nGo Daddy's position, however, has been firm. Not only has it supported SOPA from the outset, but it has also dismissed criticisms of the bill, which many say amounts to censorship.\n\n\"The notion that the solutions that have been put forth will break the internet, or that certain legal businesses will go off-line because of new mandates, is utterly unconvincing,\" Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones wrote in November. \"SOPA goes a long way toward fixing the existing problems.\"\n\nA month later, responding to similar criticisms on her personal blog, Jones wrote: \"Most of what we are seeing is either 1) rhetoric, 2) regurgitated lobbying spin, 3) criticism of language we have already fixed, or 4) retweets by people who like to steal music and buy fake, but cheap, goods.\"\n\nHowever, most companies in the domain name industry that have expressed an opinion oppose SOPA, saying it will break end-to-end authentication using DNSSEC, the emerging domain security protocol. They also say that by forcing American ISPs to block piracy sites at the domain level, SOPA will compel American internet users to use workaround DNS services operated by criminals overseas, increasing the likelihood of phishing and fraud.\n\nGo Daddy's Jones has refuted this, writing last month: \"It\u2019s hard to imagine that the limited times per year that the Attorney General seeks this remedy for a site dedicated to infringement will result in a mass exodus away from DNS as we know it. I have to believe that the average person doesn\u2019t want to commit a crime.\"\n\nGo Daddy has faced calls the boycotts before, notably this March when then-CEO came under fire for posting a video online showing him shooting an elephant while on vacation in Zimbabwe. In that case, the calls for a boycott resulted in thousands of domain names being transferred to rival registrars, but the net effect of the publicity was positive for Go Daddy's sales.\n\nNevertheless, opportunistic competitors quickly seized upon the latest scandal yesterday, taking to Twitter to promote special discounts for consumers wishing to transfer their domains away.\n\nToday, a Go Daddy spokesperson said in a statement: \"Go Daddy has received some emails that appear to stem from the boycott prompt, but we have not seen any impact to our business. We understand there are many differing opinions on the SOPA regulations.\"\n\nGo Daddy says it registers, renews or transfers a domain name every second. It is responsible for well over a third of all .com domains registered today, not including its resellers' sales. \u00ae"}
{"text":"General arrangement of MWT apparatus\n\nMagnetic water treatment (also known as anti-scale magnetic treatment or AMT) is a method of supposedly reducing the effects of hard water by passing it through a magnetic field as a non-chemical alternative to water softening. Magnetic water treatment is regarded as unproven and unscientific.\n\nThere is a lack of peer-reviewed laboratory data, mechanistic explanations, and documented field studies to support its effectiveness. Erroneous conclusions about their efficacy are based on applications with uncontrolled variables. There are, however, some studies which have claimed significant effects and proposed possible mechanisms for the observed decrease in water scale.[1]\n\nEffectiveness [ edit ]\n\nVendors of magnetic water treatment devices frequently use pictures and testimonials to support their claims, but omit quantitative detail and well-controlled studies.[2] Advertisements and promotions generally omit system variables, such as corrosion or system mass balance analyticals, as well as measurements of post-treatment water such as concentration of hardness ions or the distribution, structure, and morphology of suspended particles.[2][3][4][5][6]\n\nHypothesized mechanisms [ edit ]\n\nDuration of exposure and field strength, gradient, rate of change, and orientation along or perpendicular to flow are variously cited as important to the results.[7] Magnetic water treatment proponent Klaus Kronenberg proposed that the shapes of solute lime molecules are modified by strong magnetic fields, leading them to precipitate as spherical or round crystals rather than deposit as sheets or platelets of hard crystals.[8] Simon Parsons of the School of Water Sciences at Cranfield University proposed that the magnetic field reduces the surface charge on small particles, increasing the tendency to coagulate as large particles that stay with the flow rather than depositing as scale. However, an internal study in 1996 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found no difference in preferred crystal structure of scale deposited in magnetic water treatment systems.[9]\n\nLiu et al.[10] and Coey and Cass published research in 2010 and 2000 reporting that magnetic treatment causes water containing minerals to favor formation of a more soluble form of calcium carbonate (aragonite rather than calcite).[11]\n\nPipe material [ edit ]\n\nThe effect of magnetic treatment depends on properties of the pipe. The magnititude of the effect depends on pipe conductivity and surface roughness.[12]\n\nRelated devices [ edit ]\n\nThere are related non-chemical devices based on a variety of physical phenomena which have been marketed for over 50 years with similar claims of scale inhibition.[13] Whilst some are effective, such as electrolytic devices,[14][15][16][17] most do not work.[2]\n\nElectrolysis: Electrolytic scale inhibitors - two metals such as copper and zinc are used [18]\n\n- two metals such as copper and zinc are used Electrostatic: [2] Electronic water conditioners\n\nElectromagnetic: [2] fluctuating electromagnetic fields are created\n\nfluctuating electromagnetic fields are created Catalytic [2]\n\nMechanical [2]\n\nOther devices combine these different methods\n\nOther uses of magnetic devices:\n\nSee also [ edit ]"}
{"text":"The Gang of Six isn\u2019t satisfied by screwing over Social Security and Medicare, and imposing sneaky tax hikes on workers with the Chained CPI. They want to give billions of dollars in tax savings to the richest corporations in the US, and encourage them to move jobs overseas. That is the logical result of changing to a system of taxing income only if it is \u201cearned\u201d in the US. This is called a \u201cterritorial taxation\u201d system. Currently we have a hybrid system. We tax income from whatever source, but we give a credit for foreign taxes on the income, and we don\u2019t tax any of the money until it is repatriated.\n\nThe territorial tax will delight these monster corporations that have accumulated billions of untaxed profits overseas. They can invest the money off shore to create any new business they might want to enter, in any country they might like, and with little effort completely avoid US taxation. This removes any reason for any corporation to manufacture in the US for export. As soon as possible, the company simply moves production off shore, and uses tricks to make the profits in some low tax country. Jobs leave, exports drop, and so do tax revenues.\n\nThe rich benefit from higher stock prices as the profits of their pet corporations rise,. When they sell off the stock, they only pay at the low capital gains tax rates.\n\nThe US Chamber of Commerce and many of the anti-American corporations it represents are begging congress to enact a one-time repatriation with at 5% tax rate. Their web site is the patriotic WinAmerica, with a lovely picture of working Americans, you know, the people expected to make shared sacrifices. That is a tough sell in light of the howling about the debt ceiling. Even our corrupt elected representatives are having trouble saying that this is a jobs measure, when we know from recent experience that it is just a devious way to give more money to the rich, and increase their leverage over US workers at the same time.\n\nThe best part is that in the uproar of trying to increase taxes on workers and screwing Social Security recipients, this little provision won\u2019t attract any attention. The New York Times and the Washington Post don\u2019t mention it in today\u2019s stories. Of course, the business press spotted it immediately. Here\u2019s Bloomberg:\n\nThe proposal also calls for the Finance Committee to switch to a territorial tax system, under which U.S. multinational companies wouldn\u2019t face taxes on income they earn outside the country. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have been urging Congress to make such a change. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has proposed his own bipartisan tax-code overhaul, said yesterday that driving rates down that far would require making big changes to breaks that many taxpayers enjoy. Those include the mortgage interest deduction and the deduction for charitable contributions. \u201cYou would have to cut back very dramatically on some of the middle-class tax incentives,\u201d he said.\n\nAnd, of course, Wyden is right. The bandits in the Gang of Six include this instruction to the Senate Finance Committee: \u201cReform, not eliminate, tax expenditures for health, charitable giving, homeownership, and retirement\u2026.\u201d\n\nReuters has a good summary of liberal dismay over this provision. The Hill notes The Business Roundtable\u2019s enthusiastic support, and quotes Rich Trumpka of the AFL-CIO making the point that this system encourages export of jobs, not goods and services.\n\n\u201cWe need to keep asking our leaders: \u2018Who got us into this mess?\u2019 It wasn\u2019t working people. The people who got us into this mess are getting off scot-free, and this Gang of Six proposal shows they have accomplices in both parties.\u201d\n\nThe Pretend Democrats couldn\u2019t care less who caused this mess. Working people have to pay, in higher taxes and fewer and worse jobs. Better they should suffer and die than that Dick Durbin should have to tax his precious contributors."}
{"text":"Other than your protagonist, your antagonist is going to be the most important active force in your story.\n\nby K.M. Weiland\n\nThe antagonist doesn\u2019t have to be a person. It could be weather, circumstances, or the protagonist\u2019s inner self. But, more often than not, the antagonist takes the form of a person. And crafting that person into a memorable and compelling character in his own right is vital to the success of your story.\n\nYour antagonist needs to summon up reader emotions that are just as strong as those felt for the protagonist. Hateable bad guys will deepen reader sympathy for your protagonist. But, beyond even that, bad guys with whom the reader can identify to at least some degree are bad guys who will make him squirm even more.\n\nLet\u2019s a take a look at several categories into which your antagonist may fall, so you can choose the best one for your story.\n\nYour antagonist needs to summon up reader emotions.\n\nThe Immoral Antagonist\n\nThis is easily the most popular form of antagonist. The bad guy is one readers will have no trouble hating. He is usually set in clear contrast against the good-guy hero. The lines are drawn in varying shades of black and white, and readers have no problem choosing whom to root for.\n\nHypocrite:\n\nThe hypocrite is an antagonist who feigns goodness. He may be guilty of all sorts of treachery and evil, but on the surface he\u2019s all honey and sunshine.\n\nHe puts a righteous face on his misdeeds (perhaps even accusing the protagonist of hypocrisy to disguise his own), but the reader knows the truth: this guy is not just bad, he\u2019s a fake. And we hate him all the more for it.\n\nA mainstay of horror stories, this guy is just evil all the way through. He has no excuses, no thread ofgoodness leading him back to redemption. He\u2019s just bad. And crazy on top of it.\n\nSerial killers, genocidal world leaders, and sadists fit the bill to a T. Not only do readers hate psycho bad guys\u2014they\u2019re scared to death of them.\n\nRegular Person Forced to Do Bad Things for an Illegitimate Reason:\n\nMost antagonists\u2014in life as well as fiction\u2014aren\u2019t mustache-twirling, maniacally laughing whackos.\n\nMost of them are just regular Joes who have let their weaknesses get the better of them. Lust, greed, and hatred can drive even ordinary people to do extraordinary evil.\n\nThe bad guy is one readers will have no trouble hating.\n\nThe Moral Antagonist\n\nIn the moral antagonist we find a more complicated\u2014and often more compelling\u2014character, since he presents more parallels than contrasts with the protagonist.\n\nThis is a person who is doing the right thing\u2014as he sees it\u2014and usually for the right reasons, but who has nonetheless been forced to do battle with your hero, thanks to the requirements of your story\u2019s overall conflict.\n\nGood Guy on the Opposing Side:\n\nNot all stories are going to offer an epic battle between good and evil. Sometimes the conflict will allow good people with opposing views to appear on both sides of the battle lines.\n\nLawyers fighting each other for causes in which they each believe passionately, football teams competing for a championship, two love interests trying to win the same girl\u2014none of them have to be inherently bad. Stories of this nature can provide all kinds of interesting possibilities for exploring the gray areas of life, relationships, and morality.\n\nThe crusader can be an insanely scary bad guy in his own right. This is someone who fiercely believes he is doing the right thing, and indeed he may well be fighting for a good cause.\n\nHe may be someone who believes he has to choose between the lesser of two evils in his decisions. Or he may be someone driven to fanaticism\u2014and thus dangerous decisions\u2014by his passion for his cause. In fact, he may be just plain out right, while the protagonist is the one who\u2019s wrong.\n\nRegular Person Forced to Do Bad Things for a Legitimate Reason:\n\nSometimes even essentially good people end up doing bad things because they feel they have no choice.\n\nA character who robs a bank to pay for his wife\u2019s operation or to save himself from the Mafia\u2019s threats may be a hero in his own right\u2014or he may be a compelling and relatable antagonist to the detective protagonist who has to go after him.\n\nThe possibilities for your antagonist are every bit as vast as they are for your protagonist. The more time you spend creating a character who can properly oppose your hero, the stronger and more compelling your story will be.\n\nAntagonists should be just as well-rounded and believable as your heroes. Don\u2019t settle for anything less than brilliant!\n\nHe may be just plain out right, while the protagonist is the one who\u2019s wrong.\n\n-K.M. Weiland\n\n[box] K.M. Weiland is the author of the historical western A Man Called Outlaw and the medieval epic Behold the Dawn.\n\nShe enjoys mentoring other authors through her writing tips, her book Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success, and her instructional CD Conquering Writer\u2019s Block and Summoning Inspiration.[\/box]\n\nPhoto Credits: Stock XChng, K.M. weiland"}
{"text":"Italian side Napoli have confirmed their interest in signing Gonzalo Higuain from Real Madrid.\n\nArsenal have been linked with the Argentine striker for most of the summer, with reports last week, now obviously premature, that a deal was imminent.\n\nHowever, with the Gunners sights now apparently trained on Liverpool\u2019s bitey racist, Luis Suarez, the Serie A outfit are looking to spend some of the near \u20ac70m they received from PSG for star striker Edinson Cavani.\n\nIn a Twitter Q&A, Napoli\u2019s President, Aurelio De Laurentiis, was asked if it were true that there were talks regarding Higuain. His reply, \u201cIt\u2019s true.\u201d\n\nQuite where this leaves Arsenal pursuit of the player remains to be seen. There\u2019s something of a tradition of Argentine strikers in Naples, and from looking the most likely of summer signings, Arsene Wenger could miss out on a player still favoured by many fans.\n\nThe only signing of the summer thus far has been Yaya Sanogo on a free from Auxerre, so hopefully Napoli\u2019s interest will force our hand a bit and we can get this deal done."}
{"text":"Plus: The greatest director of his generation on who he considers his one true peer, which Oscar he thinks should be named after him\u2014and whether he really will quit after his tenth movie\n\nQuentin Tarantino lives up in the Hollywood Hills, in the same house he\u2019s had since 1996, with a movie theater built into one wing of the house and a terrace with a swimming pool and an orange tree and a Planet of the Apes statue out back. That\u2019s where he\u2019s sitting one night in October, glass of red wine in hand, watching the sun go down. He\u2019s still got to \ufb01nish the sound mix and work on the colors, but his newest \ufb01lm, The Hateful Eight, is otherwise pretty much done. He shot it on 65-millimeter \ufb01lm, like Paul Thomas Anderson did with The Master, and then he had his studio buy up pretty much every existing 70-millimeter projector in the country so he could personally equip 100 theaters with them and show the movie the way he thinks it should be shown.\n\nHe describes The Hateful Eight as \u201ca claustrophobic snow Western\u201d\u2014a chamber piece, like Reservoir Dogs or The Iceman Cometh, but set in the wintry post\u2013Civil War 1800s. It\u2019s about a bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) escorting a prisoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to justice, only to be diverted into Tarantino-land\u2014a.k.a. a tavern of sorts called Minnie\u2019s Haberdashery, which doesn\u2019t sell hats\u2014where six other men are waiting out a snowstorm, and nobody\u2019s who they say they are. It also stars Sam Jackson and Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern; everyone wears giant furs. \u201cI think it could be my best movie,\u201d Tarantino says. \u201cIf not, at least in my top four.\u201d Which is a hilarious quali\ufb01er, since he\u2019s only made eight. People count Tarantino movies because he\u2019s maintained for a while now that he\u2019s only making ten. Maybe not even ten. \u201cIf \ufb01lm projection goes the way of the dodo bird, well, then, maybe I might not even get to ten,\u201d he says.\n\nHe sounds weirdly at peace saying that\u2014anticipating the end of the work he\u2019s given his life to. He seems, frankly, weirdly at peace in general, holed up with his costume-designer girlfriend, every memorabilia-crammed room here like some exhibit in a future Tarantino museum, with a Charro! poster on the bathroom wall and a couple of muscle cars out front and a glittery view of the Valley\u2019s fading light. He\u2019s still the antic, emphatic, maniacally gesticulating guy of \u201990s popular imagination, but he also turned 52 recently. \u201cI tend to always think of myself as perpetually 35 or so,\u201d Tarantino says. \u201cSo, you know, it\u2019s a bit of a drag, in certain regards. And in other regards, I\u2019ve really enjoyed it. I mean\u2026a lot of shit that used to really be on my mind is kind of gone now.\u201d\n\nHe sits up in his chair, tries to explain. \u201cI\u2019m over a whole lot of stuff,\u201d he says. He places his \ufb01nger at the precise center of the table we\u2019re sitting at. \u201cIf the universe was this table, I\u2019m right here where I wanted to be at this point in time, at this point in my life, at this point in my \ufb01lmography. I\u2019m right where I wanted to be.\u201d\n\nHow did you spend your time off between Django and The Hateful Eight?\n\nQuentin Tarantino: Usually, when I\u2019m done, I want to spend two months on my couch. I want to just pretty much nail the door shut, fuck the phone, and just go to sleep whenever. I have a completely erratic sleeping schedule. I fall asleep whenever I want. I get up whenever I want. Just two months of just watching movies and doing cinema writing and just vegging out that way. And I start emerging and just start, you know, getting back into the swing of things of life.\n\nThe people in your life must want to murder you during that sleep-whenever-you-want phase.\n\nOne of the privileges you have of living the life of an artist and creating your own world and everything is the fact that, in-between times, you can kind of spend them however you want. Because, you know, once you open up your candy store again, you\u2019re open for business. And you have to be responsible. You have to be available. But, you know, that in-between time, I get to really live the fun life of a graduate student.\n\nThe legend is that you wrote Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam with no phone. Are those the conditions you need to write?\n\nNo, I don\u2019t need to go anywhere to write. It can be fun. I have a cell phone, and the only person who has the number is my girlfriend. Because I don\u2019t need anyone to call me as I\u2019m walking down the street or driving from hill to dale. You know, my landline is my phone. And so I unplug it, or I don\u2019t listen to it for a while. I\u2019m good. I\u2019ll play some of the messages. I\u2019ll hear them when they come in. Okay, \ufb01ne.\n\nAnd that doesn\u2019t cause you anxiety?\n\nNo, no. My problem is the opposite. It causes me no anxiety whatsoever. A lot of people \ufb01gure that\u2019s my problem: I have no anxiety about shutting the world out at all.\n\nHow does something like The Hateful Eight emerge from that process?\n\nI liked the idea of creating a new pop-culture, folkloric hero character that I created with Django, that I think\u2019s gonna last for a long time. And I think as the generations go on and everything, you know, my hope is it can be a rite of passage for black fathers and their sons. Like, when are they old enough to watch Django Unchained? And when they get old enough\u201414 or 15 or something like that\u2014then maybe it\u2019s something that they do with their fathers, and it\u2019s a cool thing. And then Django becomes their cowboy hero. And so I like the idea of maybe like a series of paperbacks coming out, Further Adventures of Django, and so I was really kind of into that idea. And then I started writing it as a book, as prose. And that\u2019s what ended up turning into The Hateful Eight. The number one thing I had to do was get rid of Django. [laughs]\n\nDjango felt like a political turn for you.\n\nYou know, it was very political, as opposed to, say, Inglourious Basterds, which was not necessarily political. It\u2019s a little bit more wish ful\ufb01llment. All right? Django is still a bit of wish ful\ufb01llment, but I was trying to show America itself, you know? Django was de\ufb01nitely the beginning of my political side, and I think Hateful Eight is the\u2026logical extension and conclusion of that. I mean, when I say conclusion, I\u2019m not saying I\u2019ll never be political again, but, I mean, I think it\u2019s like, in a weird way, Django was the question and Hateful Eight is the answer.\n\nWhat do you mean by that?\n\nWell, I mean, in the way of, like, talking about America\u2019s culpability in their past is what _Django\u2019_s about. The white supremacy that has existed since and that is rearing its ugly head again, to such a degree that it\u2019s being dealt with by the Black Lives Matter movement and all that stuff, is where we are now. And that\u2019s what The Hateful Eight deals with. The thing that was really wild is, I wasn\u2019t trying to bend over backwards in any way, shape, or form to make it socially relevant. But once I \ufb01nished the script, that\u2019s when all the social relevancy started.\n\nYou\u2019re referencing the fact that Hateful Eight is in part about the tension between Sam Jackson\u2019s post\u2013Civil War bounty hunter and the various Confederates and Confederate sons he faces off against in Minnie\u2019s Haberdashery. Do you think you\u2019re just reading patterns subconsciously, or is it a coincidence?\n\nNo, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence. I think I was tapped into the Zeitgeist. That is the issue I was dealing with. All right? And now all of a sudden, it\u2019s such a real issue that it\u2019s now not under the surface anymore in American life, and people are having to deal with it.\n\nDjango came out at an interesting moment, when you also had Spielberg\u2019s Lincoln, and then, a year later, Steve McQueen\u2019s 12 Years a Slave, in theaters, dealing with the same material.\n\nThere literally was a moment where Lincoln was playing in one theater in the multiplex and Django was playing in another one. Which was actually kind of fucking groovy.\n\nI interviewed McQueen around the time his movie came out and asked him about Django, and he said, \u201cI\u2019m just happy to see black actors on-screen who actually get work.\u201d That sounded like a shot to me.\n\nYeah, I\u2019m sure it was.\n\nWhat did you think of his movie?\n\nI never saw it.\n\nIs that because it was too close to what you were working on?\n\nNo, I just spent a year and a half in the antebellum South. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was go back. I was so not the audience for that movie, after I literally created the worst possible decade of the last 200 years and lived in it every single solitary day. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was visit it in any way, shape, or form. There\u2019s no shade going toward his movie when it comes to that. I just didn\u2019t want to subject myself. I was in a depression a bit. Even though it was my biggest success, I was in a depression for about nine months after the \ufb01lm came out, because I couldn\u2019t really allow the pain and the misery that I was orchestrating to get into my inner fibers and those little pockets of your lungs, and it all got there when it was done.\n\nDjango made $425 million\u2014what do you chalk that success up to?\n\nPeople liked the movie. I mean, [laughs] I take a little bit of pride about the fact that Westerns aren\u2019t supposed to work, black-lead movies aren\u2019t supposed to work, and if they\u2019re not supposed to work, slavery movies are really, really, really not supposed to work, and I made almost a half a billion dollars around the world and was actually even more of a success and greeted with more open arms in other countries. But ultimately, I think it was the movie. People just responded to the movie.\n\nDo you have high expectations for the new one?\n\nNo. If anything, I have the opposite. It\u2019s like, I\u2019m hoping that my movie will do well, but it\u2019s not the third in line to Inglourious Basterds and Django. It\u2019s a different beast. And I love the fact that, like, people are so excited about it and they\u2019re talking about it and everything at the end of the year, and it seems a little crazy that, like, my movie Hateful Eight, this claustrophobic snow Western, all right, that owes more to Iceman Cometh than anything else, you know, is being talked about at the end of the year in the same sentences as Star Wars. [laughs]\n\nAnd presumably the Oscar conversation.\n\nWell, that is understandable. I think we are a contender. We\u2019ll see. But it is one of those weird things. Wow\u2014have I gotten so popular that I can do weird-ass shit like this, and it actually is a commercial entity? Well, that remains to be seen. But if that\u2019s the case, that would be fucking awesome.\n\nHow do you feel about going out and campaigning for Oscars?\n\nWell, you know, it depends on what you call campaigning. Sitting down with every chucklehead that has a podcast, because, well, why not? Can\u2019t hurt! No, I\u2019m not going to do that. You know, but I\u2019ll go to an event. I\u2019ll go to a party. I\u2019ll go to this screening. I\u2019m happy to do that.\n\nThe real turnoff for lots of people is when their film doesn\u2019t win.\n\nI\u2019ve felt that way a little bit on Inglourious Basterds. You know, it was like\u2026I didn\u2019t shamelessly promote Inglourious Basterds in any way, shape, or form. But I did what was asked of me. I did a genuine campaign, all right? And maybe I did a little too much. And yeah, we won Supporting Actor, but I was a little pissed off by the results. And I probably won\u2019t ever do that much again.\n\nAre you competitive as a director?\n\nI\u2019m not competitive as a director. But the thing about it is, if I win a third screenwriting Oscar, I will tie with Woody [Allen]. I can\u2019t beat Woody until I tie with him.\n\nBut you want to beat him?\n\nI want to have more original-screenplay Oscars than anybody who\u2019s ever lived! So much, I want to have so many that\u2014four is enough. And do it within ten \ufb01lms, all right, so that when I die, they rename the original-screenplay Oscar \u201cthe Quentin.\u201d And everybody\u2019s down with that.\n\nTarantino\u2019s girlfriend emerges from the house: \u201cYou are insane. I just heard that. That\u2019s the most ridiculous thing you\u2019ve ever said.\u201d\n\nI just find it hard to believe that you\u2019re down to see other people go up there and get Best Director.\n\nI\u2019m just telling you what I want. I want that third one. I want to tie Woody. All right? Look: When it\u2019s your time, it\u2019s your time. And actually, you can barely do anything to stop it from being your time. There\u2019s almost nothing Danny Boyle could have done to stop the success of Slumdog Millionaire. There\u2019s almost nothing that the Coen brothers could have done to stop the success of their Sherman\u2019s March through Hollywood for No Country for Old Men. So if I end up getting lucky and having one of those ones, then all things will be taken care of.\n\nYou\u2019re such a scholar of the medium. You know the history. No offense to Danny Boyle, but aren\u2019t you like, \u201cHow the fuck is Danny Boyle winning Oscars when I\u2019ve directed eight films?\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s whatever. You know, I don\u2019t make Oscar kind of movies. So the fact that I\u2019m invited to the party when I don\u2019t\u2014and I\u2019m not saying he\u2019s pandering, I mean, it was hardly pandering doing Slumdog Millionaire\u2014but, you know, there\u2019s no pandering to mine. I mean, actually, the idea of winning three screenplay Oscars, maybe four, all right, with only ten films, and never doing it for that purpose, only following my own muse\u2014that\u2019s about as great a testament to an artistic career as I can imagine. But I\u2019m also keeping it in perspective, because I actually think, you know, Preston Sturges is maybe a better writer than all the guys who have ever won before, and he didn\u2019t win shit. [Sturges did win once, for 1940\u2019s The Great McGinty*\u2014make of this slip what you will]*\n\nEDITOR\u2019S PICK\n\nIt surprised me that you reacted so angrily to the leak of the Hateful Eight script\u2014you know you\u2019re a good writer. So why sue Gawker over posting a link to it?\n\nWell, it was a mistake to sue Gawker, and the mistake was\u2014I was just pissed off at the time, and, like, \u201cThey can\u2019t do that! Okay, let me sue them!\u201d And it got kind of exciting for a second, because it looked like, you know, even though there was no precedent for it, it looked like it might be one of those things that could create a precedent. And that became very exciting. Well, it didn\u2019t happen. So I dropped it. But I regret it now, because it actually took the spotlight off where I thought it deserved to be, which was on Hollywood practices of passing out stuff by artists\u2019 representatives.\n\nDid you sue Gawker before or after they posted about the girl who went on a date with you?\n\nNo, that [post] was before. I had no idea. If Gawker was involved\u2014I don\u2019t think Gawker was involved with that. I think they hired her after the fact. So I don\u2019t think they were involved with her. But if they were, I wouldn\u2019t even have known about it.\n\nSo it wasn\u2019t about\u2014\n\nNo, no. They\u2019re putting my fucking script\u2014there\u2019s a copyright issue going on here, you know, and if the judge had saw it our way, maybe things would be different now. But they didn\u2019t.\n\nEnnio Morricone did the sound track for The Hateful Eight, but he also was in the news in 2013 for saying that you place music in your films \u201cwithout coherence.\u201d\n\nI think he was talking to a class, and he was just saying that he didn\u2019t care for my all-over-the-map approach in the case of Django and some of the other things that I\u2019ve done and whatever. But it wasn\u2019t necessarily a criticism of me, per se. It\u2019s just not his cup of tea. I think it\u2019s kind of a generational thing, and that I completely understand. He apologized. And he said nothing he needed to apologize about. He later clarified it, because it was blown out of proportion. Some asshole nimrod who wants some sort of power thing leaked it to whatever thingy so he can just have the fun of watching it in three hundred outlets. I felt [Morricone] was betrayed by that person. I knew that was where he was coming from! I knew that\u2019s how he felt about my shit! It was nothing new to me. And almost in a generational way, he was left out to dry. He is such a great artist, he can say any fucking thing he wants.\n\nTwenty years ago, would you have worked with that guy after he said something like that in public?\n\nWell, people made a bigger deal out of it than what, you know\u2026you know, there used to be a time where I could go to Austin and have my QT fest and sit there in front of the audience, in either a question-and-answer session about my own shit, or introducing some movie that I\u2019m a big fan of that I\u2019m talking about, and I could be honest and off the cuff and funny and profound and whatever, and complicated, and it was fine, because it was just for the people in that room. That world doesn\u2019t really exist anymore, and that\u2019s not Ennio\u2019s fault.\n\nDo you mourn that?\n\nI mourn it terribly. Yeah. But where I\u2019m coming from is they don\u2019t deserve it. If the only way they can experience it is by filming it so they can put it online, then they don\u2019t deserve my candor. They don\u2019t deserve a special moment that we might be having amongst us. They don\u2019t deserve it. And if that\u2019s what they ultimately want, well, then, okay. I\u2019ll clean up my act. [laughs]\n\nYou\u2019re on film number eight. How could you plan to make only two more after this?\n\nHopefully it\u2019s like I\u2019m getting down to the tip of the arrowhead. I\u2019m getting better and better. And that means I still have two more to go. All right? And two more to go is gonna be six years, at least. But we\u2019ll see what happens. And, you know, if that tenth \ufb01lm is a stinker, well, maybe the plan goes into the house fan. You know, in shreds. But so far so good. And I love the idea of taking my vitality to its furthest point, and then stopping, leaving you wanting a little bit more. Not staying too long at the party. Not working with dulled senses. Not working with dulled intentions. Not working with compromised intentions\u2014i.e., age, vitality, wealth, wife, kids, you know, all those kind of things that get in the way.\n\nThat seems like a bleak thing to say, that last part.\n\nMy \ufb01lmography comes \ufb01rst. My artistic journey comes \ufb01rst. I\u2019m not saying I can\u2019t have kids. But the last two movies, can\u2019t have kids, can\u2019t have a wife, you know. That\u2019s the deal. Now, now it\u2019s not so scary. You know, conceivably, I could have a kid tomorrow, and by the time I\u2019m done with a career, they\u2019re six. And I have the whole rest of their life to dedicate myself one hundred and twenty percent. Well, not the rest of their life. The rest of my life. And if I have a kid two years from now or three years from now, then they\u2019re age three or age four. Now I\u2019m, boom, that guy. And that\u2019s okay. But there is an excitement when you\u2019re hanging on the next \ufb01lm of a director as they\u2019re doing their climb to immortality. I felt that way about De Palma in the \u201970s and the \u201980s. I felt that way about Scorsese in the \u201970s and the \u201980s, and I felt that way about Spielberg in the \u201970s and \u201980s.\n\nWho do you think is currently working at your level?\n\nI think my real \ufb01lmmaking peer is probably David O. Russell right now\u2014i.e., his ability to write, the movies he does, and his relationship that he has with the actors that he likes to work with. And I think along with myself, I think he is the best actor\u2019s director out there. And I feel he\u2019s pushing it. I actually think, as terrific as Robert De Niro was in Silver Linings Playbook, I think his cameo in American Hustle is maybe the best work he\u2019s done in the last seven years. It\u2019s a small little thing, and he was a diamond bullet in it! He was perfect. And you would think, Oh, you never need to see De Niro ever play a mob guy again, but you never saw that guy. And that was a fucking cameo! But no one treated it like a cameo. And the fact that, like, they have that trust and that relationship is just such a lovely thing. I think [Russell] and Jennifer Lawrence are the closest thing we have to Bette Davis and William Wyler. I mean, it\u2019s fucking exciting.\n\nCan you still access the person that you were at the beginning of your career\u2014the guy who went to jail for parking tickets and who\u2019d never left Los Angeles?\n\nOh, very much so. I mean\u2026 [pause] I still touch base with that person all the time, and I still have their thoughts. I still have their perspectives. I mean, you know, the way the police are killing black males out there, unarmed black males, shooting them down, um\u2026you know, it\u2019s a different story for me now. All right? The police protect this house. And I need them to do that. And I want them to do that. If I have a problem here, if I think somebody jumped my fence and is fucking around on my property, I\u2019m gonna call the cops. But I\u2019m rich now. I\u2019m rich and white now. All right? When I was in my twenties, I wasn\u2019t rich. They looked at me, and they saw a criminal. They saw a scumbag. They saw someone to be fucked with. I went through a county-jail system four different times. I saw how the county sheriffs talk to you when you\u2019re down there. I saw what it\u2019s like when you have absolutely no power and you\u2019re on the wrong side of the social strata, and what they think of you, and the judgments they make of you. I see that, and I see that now. So when I watch this stuff, I say, \u201cGod, shit, that, you know, that could have been me in 1984. That could have been me in 1986.\u201d Now, I have white skin and they have black skin, and that\u2019s a huge difference.\n\nBack in the \u201990s, you used to approach the press cycle like an actor would, and you became famous in your own right. Did you later regret that decision?\n\nI joke I\u2019m not really that famous, I\u2019m just that recognizable. If you know what I look like, you\u2019re gonna know me when you see me. But no\u2014I wanted me to be enough when I\u2019m making a movie. I didn\u2019t want to have to go and get a star who respected my movies. I wanted to be enough to get it made, and if I get a star, well, that\u2019s all great. Okay, now we\u2019re talking Hitchcock and Cary Grant. Awesome! All right? But, you know, Hitchcock and Farley Granger is okay, too.\n\nSo many people in your industry have early success and then burn out. How did that not happen to you?\n\nI worked too long to be here. I mean, I had such incredible good luck and fortune to make Pulp Fiction and just, in this weird pocket of time, that it could be appreciated for what it was. If I\u2019m gonna fuck that up, I don\u2019t really deserve to have any of this. But I was never afraid of the burnout scenario that you described. I was more afraid of like\u2014I didn\u2019t want to open up a shingle and a shop and now I\u2019m a factory. You know, I do my movie that I do every two or three years, but then I produce a bunch of stuff, and my name\u2019s always out there, Quentin Tarantino Presents this movie, that movie, and I\u2019m rewriting this, because they\u2019re paying me a lot of money, I do a two-week dialogue polish on Transformers 3, this and that and the other, and I keep making money and money and money, and I\u2019m, like, you know, giving my special magic well water away to these people\u2014and now all of a sudden my name doesn\u2019t mean jack fucking shit.\n\nHave you seen The Wolfpack, the documentary about the kids who love and reenact your films?\n\nYes, I have. Those kids are fucking awesome, man. I think they\u2019re fantastic. And, like, you know, and literally, watching acting out the scenes, that was so entertaining and lovely and glorious. But watching them writing the script, i.e. just jotting it down, but the way they talk about it, it\u2019s as if they wrote it. \u201cI\u2019m working on the script. I\u2019m writing the script.\u201d And I know exactly what they mean! I got it. Watching the kid writing the dialogue down word for word on a yellow legal pad was fucking fantastic.\n\nThere\u2019s still a lot of random Tarantino floating around in the culture in 2015\u2014whether it be in film dialogue or nonlinear storytelling or the basic eternal persistence of the Reservoir Dogs suits. Where do you most encounter your work or your influence in the wild?\n\nIn the \u201990s, from like \u201997 through \u201999 or 2000 or something like that, it would be going in young people\u2019s apartments and seeing the Pulp Fiction poster up, or seeing the head shot from Pulp Fiction, which is Jules and Vincent pointing their guns. Or seeing their cinder-block used-video library\u2014you know, that they bought for $9.99 from the local video store\u2014and they have Godfather 1, they have Godfather 2, they have Scarface. And then they have Reservoir Dogs and they have Pulp Fiction."}
{"text":"A DIALOGUE WITH SARAH, AGED 3: IN WHICH IT IS SHOWN THAT IF YOUR DAD IS A CHEMISTRY PROFESSOR, ASKING \u201cWHY\u201d CAN BE DANGEROUS\n\nSARAH: Daddy, were you in the shower?\n\nDAD: Yes, I was in the shower.\n\nSARAH: Why?\n\nDAD: I was dirty. The shower gets me clean.\n\nSARAH: Why?\n\nDAD: Why does the shower get me clean?\n\nSARAH: Yes.\n\nDAD: Because the water washes the dirt away when I use soap.\n\nSARAH: Why?\n\nDAD: Why do I use soap?\n\nSARAH: Yes.\n\nDAD: Because the soap grabs the dirt and lets the water wash it off.\n\nSARAH: Why?\n\nDAD: Why does the soap grab the dirt?\n\nSARAH: Yes.\n\nDAD: Because soap is a surfactant.\n\nSARAH: Why?\n\nDAD: Why is soap a surfactant?\n\nSARAH: Yes.\n\nDAD: That is an EXCELLENT question. Soap is a surfactant because it forms water-soluble micelles that trap the otherwise insoluble dirt and oil particles.\n\nSARAH: Why?\n\nDAD: Why does soap form micelles?\n\nSARAH: Yes.\n\nDAD: Soap molecules are long chains with a polar, hydrophilic head and a non-polar, hydrophobic tail. Can you say \u2018hydrophilic\u2019?\n\nSARAH: Aidrofawwic\n\nDAD: And can you say \u2018hydrophobic\u2019?\n\nSARAH: Aidrofawwic\n\nDAD: Excellent! The word \u2018hydrophobic\u2019 means that it avoids water.\n\nSARAH: Why?\n\nDAD: Why does it mean that?\n\nSARAH: Yes.\n\nDAD: It\u2019s Greek! \u2018Hydro\u2019 means water and \u2018phobic\u2019 means \u2018fear of\u2019. \u2018Phobos\u2019 is fear. So \u2018hydrophobic\u2019 means \u2018afraid of water\u2019.\n\nSARAH: Like a monster?\n\nDAD: You mean, like being afraid of a monster?\n\nSARAH: Yes.\n\nDAD: A scary monster, sure. If you were afraid of a monster, a Greek person would say you were gorgophobic.\n\n(pause)\n\nSARAH: (rolls her eyes) I thought we were talking about soap.\n\nDAD: We are talking about soap.\n\n(longish pause)\n\nSARAH: Why?\n\nDAD: Why do the molecules have a hydrophilic head and a hydrophobic tail?\n\nSARAH: Yes.\n\nDAD: Because the C-O bonds in the head are highly polar, and the C-H bonds in the tail are effectively non-polar.\n\nSARAH: Why?\n\nDAD: Because while carbon and hydrogen have almost the same electronegativity, oxygen is far more electronegative, thereby polarizing the C-O bonds.\n\nSARAH: Why?\n\nDAD: Why is oxygen more electronegative than carbon and hydrogen?\n\nSARAH: Yes.\n\nDAD: That\u2019s complicated. There are different answers to that question, depending on whether you\u2019re talking about the Pauling or Mulliken electronegativity scales. The Pauling scale is based on homo- versus heteronuclear bond strength differences, while the Mulliken scale is based on the atomic properties of electron affinity and ionization energy. But it really all comes down to effective nuclear charge. The valence electrons in an oxygen atom have a lower energy than those of a carbon atom, and electrons shared between them are held more tightly to the oxygen, because electrons in an oxygen atom experience a greater nuclear charge and therefore a stronger attraction to the atomic nucleus! Cool, huh?\n\n(pause)\n\nSARAH: I don\u2019t get it.\n\nDAD: That\u2019s OK. Neither do most of my students.\n\n* * *\n\n(REPRINTED FROM ISSUE ONE, APRIL 11th, 2005)"}
{"text":"Beginning May 14, fuel outlets in eight states will be shut every Sunday following Prime Minister Modi's call to conserve oil, a fuel pump owners' body said in Chennai on Tuesday.\n\n\"We had planned to shut our outlets on Sundays a few years back. But marketing companies (OMCs) had then requested us to reconsider our decision. Now we have decided to shut the outlets on Sundays,\" said Suresh Kumar, an executive committee member of the consortium of Indian\n\nHe said the association's decision was made in view of the Prime Minister's call during his recent 'Mann ki baat' programme to to save the environment.\n\nKumar, also the vice-president of Association, said nearly 20,000 outlets in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and would be shut for 24 hours on Sundays, starting May 14.\n\n\"In Tamil Nadu, we expect a business loss of Rs 150 crore if we do not operate on a Sunday. But we have been seeing a decline in sales on Sundays by upto 40 per cent,\" he said.\n\nAsked if the association's decision was supported by the OMCs, he said, \"We will communicate our decision to them shortly.\"\n\nKumar said the fuel outlets which normally have about 15 staff each would have one staff member on the holidays to provide fuel if there was an emergency situation.\n\nOn the issue of hiking the margins to petroleum outlets, he said the association was discussing it and would soon make an announcement in this regard.\n\n\"That struggle is going on. We are meeting our association members shortly. We will announce our decision soon,\" he said."}
{"text":"Nintendo Switch Surprise Australian Launch Line-Up \u2013 9 Unannounced Games\n\nThe Nintendo Switch launch games in Australia aren\u2019t what the locals expected.\n\nThe Nintendo Switch launched at midnight in Australia, with lucky fans already well and truly deep into games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is the big system seller of the launch window, and what we\u2019ve played thus far has been truly incredible - a fantastic gaming experience and a must-own. You can read more about it in the Nintendo Switch Magazine. It is not alone at launch, of course. In all 12 games were set to launch alongside the Switch, the lowest in 21 years. However, when Australians opened up the eShop for the first time, they weren\u2019t greeted with the list of titles they expected.\n\nThe announced launch-line-up was:\n\n1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild\n\n2. Super Bomberman R\n\n3. 1-2 Switch\n\n4. Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment\/Treasure Trove\n\n5. Just Dance 2017\n\n6. FAST RMX\n\n7. Snipperclips \u2013 Cut It Out Together\n\n8. I am Setsuna\n\n9. World of Goo\n\n10. Little Inferno\n\n11. Human Resources Machine\n\n12. Skylanders: Imaginators\n\nThe actual line-up is:\n\n1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild\n\n2. Super Bomberman R\n\n3. 1-2 Switch\n\n4. The King of Fighters \u201989\n\n5. Waku Waku 7\n\n6. Shock Troopers\n\n7. World Heroes Perfect\n\n8. Metal Slug 3\n\n9. Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment\/Treasure Trove\n\n10. New Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers\n\n11. Othello\n\n12. Voez\n\n13. Vroom in the Night Sky\n\n14. Just Dance 2017\n\n15. FAST RMX\n\n16. Snipperclips \u2013 Cut It Out Together\n\n17. I am Setsuna\n\nSo we have an additional nine games we didn\u2019t know where coming to Australia, and four games that are missing. It\u2019s typical of the confusion surrounding the launch of this system, but more games is hardly a deal breaker. Especially given the big guns are still there.\n\nWhat is the Nintendo Switch magazine?\n\nIf you want to learn more about the launch of the Switch, with exclusive reviews of the console, accessories, online service and 24 games, get the Nintendo Switch Magazine. Go direct to Amazon or iTunes if you prefer.\n\nNew comment\n\nPlease enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.\n\nDisqus"}
{"text":"If you were just a casual observer of security theater you may think that TSA\u2019s adoption of technology \u2014 especially to expedite passenger movement through the airports \u2014 is a great thing, a step in the right direction after a decade-plus of building up a wall around Fortress America.\n\nBut if you go beyond the surface, a different picture emerges: that the TSA is creating a higher Berlin Wall just to help jump over the wall it previously built, instead of trying to whittle the original one down to a more manageable level.\n\nInstead of working on making simple things better \u2014 such as clear and readable signage, understandable and obvious lanes, better load balancing at multiple checkpoints \u2014 what travelers have to deal with are steps upon steps added to climb over the previous set of inefficiencies.\n\nAt all stages in its lifecycle, the TSA has chosen not to de-escalate or tear down any of the original web of procedures, but instead added additional layer of new procedures to help create side doors to the system, in effect building a parallel machinery.\n\nWhy does the TSA need to roll out a whole new parallel screening system with PreCheck and the qualification hoops passengers have to jump through to be part of it, when it could just as well lower the screening requirements built into the original system in the first place?\n\nImagine the costs involved in first coming up with PreCheck and then building, administering, marketing and maintaining it, when it could save a lot more by a rational de-escalation of the security requirement post 9-11 decade? And on top of that, PreCheck does not guarantee expedited screening, as its own rules say! The knots TSA has tied itself up in.\n\nWhy does the TSA need to order $6.8 million worth of liquid scanners for airports, when even the former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley says all that\u2019s needed on liquids is updating software on current baggage scanners?\n\nWhy spend $900 million and 2,800 workers on a big behavior detection program when it was objectively shown that it was being misused? And don\u2019t make matters worse by spending even more money to hire a consultant to try and find the system\u2019s faults.\n\nInstead of bringing in more tech to scan passports for some passengers \u2014 and spend millions to get these machines \u2014 why not ease up the questioning and requirements of entry into the country and speed up immigration lines and reduce hours and hours spent in lines at airports like JFK?\n\nBeyond the knee jerk reactions like Republican lawmakers talking about abolition of TSA altogether, few grasp the nuances of the maze that has been built by TSA as both a solution to its political challenges and a justification for its own existence. There is no end solution, just more means created to foster other means.\n\nSo even if saner minds would suggest a paring down of TSA\u2019s activities and streamlining, that would likely involve hiring another expensive consulting firm, and it will create additional systems to \u201csimplify\u201d the already existing systems.\n\nEven when TSA tries to bring down some of the original restrictions like allowing small knives, the non-sensical public brouhaha that follows doesn\u2019t give TSA any incentive to actually do anything smart about the bloat. It just becomes easier for it to build new moats around it, it seems.\n\nMaybe defunding isn\u2019t such a bad idea after all\u2026"}
{"text":"Video caption London Zoo 'devastated' by aardvark fire death\n\nStaff have been injured and an aardvark and possibly four meerkats killed in a fire at London Zoo.\n\nAbout 70 firefighters tackled the blaze at its height in the Animal Adventure section that spread to a shop.\n\nOne person was taken to hospital and eight were treated at the scene.\n\nThe zoo said an aardvark called Misha died in the fire and four meerkats were still unaccounted for, presumed dead. The zoo was shut on Saturday but said it would reopen on Sunday.\n\nThe cause of the fire is not yet known.\n\nImage copyright Brendan Cooney\/Reuters Image caption Photographs posted on social media showed orange flames rising from the building\n\nTen fire engines went to the zoo, which sits in the capital's Regent's Park, shortly after 06:00 GMT and the fire was brought under control about three hours later.\n\nSix people were given help at the scene for the effects of smoke inhalation and two for minor injuries, London Ambulance Service said.\n\nOne person was taken to a north-west London hospital, the service said.\n\nImage copyright London Fire Brigade\n\nImage copyright Charlie Bard\n\nDuty staff who live on site were on the scene \"immediately\" and started moving animals to safety, the zoo said.\n\nIn a statement the zoo said it was \"devastated\" about what had happened.\n\nIt said: \"Sadly our vets have confirmed the death of our nine-year-old aardvark, Misha. There are also four meerkats still unaccounted for, but we are now presuming these have also died.\n\n\"All other animals in the vicinity are being monitored closely by our vets, but early signs suggest they have not been affected. We will continue to monitor them over the coming days.\n\n\"We are all naturally devastated by this, but are immensely grateful to the fire brigade, who reacted quickly to the situation to bring the fire under control. \"\n\nYou might also be interested in:\n\nAdnan Abdul Husein said he saw the blaze from a nearby park when he was out walking his dog, and alerted zoo security.\n\n\"It didn't look like smoke just coming out of a chimney - it was quite heavy\", he said.\n\n\"As I got closer to the zoo I could see that it was actually inside the zoo so I went over to the security and told them, 'there's flames or there's smoke coming from inside there, do you know anything about it?'. And they obviously didn't have a clue.\"\n\nImage copyright Getty Images\n\nLondon Fire Brigade (LFB) station manager Clive Robinson, who was at the scene, said three-quarters of the cafe and shop had been affected by the fire and half of the roof.\n\nHe said: \"Firefighters worked hard to bring the fire under control as quickly as possible and to stop it from spreading to neighbouring animal enclosures.\"\n\nImage copyright @PaulWood1961\n\nImage copyright London Fire Brigade Image caption The cause of the fire is not yet known, London Fire Brigade said"}
{"text":"Project Euler is a collection of interesting computational problems intended to be solved with computer programs. Most of the problems challenge your skills in algorithm design rather than your knowledge of mathematics.\n\nThanks to short concrete problems and number-only solutions you don\u2019t have to thinker with IDEs, GUI designers, programming libraries and frameworks, so Project Euler is an excellent tool for learning a new programming language or improving your core programming skills.\n\nWhy use Scala\n\nAlthough all general-purpose programming languages are Turing-complete and thus suitable for Project Euler, each language has its own philosophy and set of tools. In spite of programming language \u201choly wars\u201d, the truth is that different tasks demand different tools.\n\nSince Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language, it allows programmers to efficiently express a wide range of common programming patterns. Most Project Euler problems imply advanced transformation of numeric or symbolic data and Scala\u2019s functional programming features are the perfect tool for that purpose (moreover, unlike pure functional languages, being a hybrid language, Scala provides object-oriented capabilities when modeling or simulation is required).\n\nSo, what does Scala have to offer for Project Euler? Here is the list of most valuable features:\n\nscripting,\n\ntype-inference,\n\nfirst-class functions,\n\ntail call optimization,\n\nlazy evaluation,\n\nexcellent collection library,\n\nsequence comprehensions.\n\nOn the top of everything else, Scala brings enjoyment to your coding. According to The Right Tool Scala is ranked high in the following categories:\n\nThus Scala is the right tool for those who want to mingle the useful with the pleasant.\n\nSample solutions\n\nThis section contains solutions to the first 33 problems. You may use them either to size up how well Scala plays in Project Euler, or to compare your own solutions with the samples.\n\nKeep in mind, that the purpose of these solutions is to demonstrate Scala in the first place, so the problems are just a \u201ccanvas\u201d to show the elegance and expressiveness of the language. Many times I intentionally preferred a direct and concise solution (if it performs reasonably fast) to a \u201cmath-savvy\u201d one.\n\nAll the code is available as a GitHub repository.\n\nSee also:\n\nProblem 1\n\nAdd all the natural numbers below one thousand that are multiples of 3 or 5.*\n\nval r = (1 until 1000).view.filter(n => n % 3 == 0 || n % 5 == 0).sum assert(r == 233168) \/\/ 7 ms\n\nProblem 2\n\nFind the sum of all the even-valued terms in the Fibonacci sequence which do not exceed four million.*\n\nlazy val fs: Stream[Int] = 0 #:: fs.scanLeft(1)(_ + _) val r = fs.view.takeWhile(_ <= 4000000).filter(_ % 2 == 0).sum assert(r == 4613732) \/\/ 1 ms\n\nProblem 3\n\nFind the largest prime factor of a composite number.*\n\ndef factors(n: Long): List[Long] = (2 to math.sqrt(n).toInt) .find(n % _ == 0).fold(List(n))(i => i.toLong :: factors(n \/ i)) val r = factors(600851475143L).last assert(r == 6857) \/\/ 1 ms\n\nProblem 4\n\nFind the largest palindrome made from the product of two 3-digit numbers.*\n\nval r = (100 to 999).view .flatMap(i => (i to 999).map(_ * i)) .filter(n => n.toString == n.toString.reverse) .max assert(r == 906609) \/\/ 102 ms\n\nProblem 5\n\nWhat is the smallest number divisible by each of the numbers 1 to 20?*\n\nval r = Range(20, Int.MaxValue) .find(n => Range(2, 21).forall(n % _ == 0)).get assert(r == 232792560) \/\/ 23 s\n\nProblem 6\n\nWhat is the difference between the sum of the squares and the square of the sums?*\n\nval numbers = 1 to 100 def square(n: Int) = n * n val r = square(numbers.sum) - numbers.map(square).sum assert(r == 25164150) \/\/ 1 ms\n\nProblem 7\n\nFind the 10001st prime.*\n\nlazy val ps: Stream[Int] = 2 #:: Stream.from(3).filter(i => ps.takeWhile(j => j * j <= i).forall(i % _ > 0)) val r = ps(10000) assert(r == 104743) \/\/ 24 ms\n\nProblem 8\n\nDiscover the largest product of five consecutive digits in the 1000-digit number.*\n\nval s = \"\"\"<raw input data>\"\"\" val r = s.filter(_.isDigit).map(_.asDigit) .sliding(5).map(_.product).max assert(r == 40824) \/\/ 33 ms\n\nProblem 9\n\nFind the only Pythagorean triplet, { a , b , c }, for which a + b + c = 1000.*\n\nval limit = (1 to 1000).find(n => n + math.sqrt(n) >= 1000).get val rs = for (b <- 2 until limit; a <- 1 until b; c = 1000 - a - b if a * a + b * b == c * c) yield a * b * c val r = rs.head assert(r == 31875000) \/\/ 32 ms\n\nProblem 10\n\nCalculate the sum of all the primes below two million.*\n\nlazy val ps: Stream[Int] = 2 #:: Stream.from(3).filter(i => ps.takeWhile(j => j * j <= i).forall(i % _ > 0)) val r = ps.view.takeWhile(_ < 2000000).foldLeft(0L)(_ + _) assert(r == 142913828922L) \/\/ 1 s\n\nProblem 11\n\nWhat is the greatest product of four numbers on the same straight line in the 20 by 20 grid?*\n\nval s = \"\"\"<raw input data>\"\"\" val ns = s.split(\"\\\\s+\").map(_.toInt) def m(i: Int, p: Int, c: Int): Int = if (c > 0) ns(i) * m(i + p, p, c - 1) else 1 def ms(xs: Seq[Int], ys: Seq[Int], p: Int) = ys.flatMap(y => xs.map(x => m(20 * y + x, p, 4))) val ps = ms(0 to 19, 0 to 15, 20) ++ ms(0 to 15, 0 to 19, 1) ++ ms(0 to 15, 0 to 15, 21) ++ ms(3 to 19, 0 to 15, 19) val r = ps.max assert(r == 70600674) \/\/ 4 ms\n\nProblem 12\n\nWhat is the value of the first triangle number to have over five hundred divisors?*\n\nlazy val ts: Stream[Int] = 0 #:: ts.zipWithIndex.map(p => p._1 + p._2 + 1) def p(t: Int) = Range(1, Int.MaxValue) .takeWhile(n => n * n <= t) .foldLeft(0)((s, n) => if (t % n == 0) s + 2 else s) val r = ts.find(p(_) > 500).get assert(r == 76576500) \/\/ 1 s\n\nProblem 13\n\nFind the first ten digits of the sum of one-hundred 50-digit numbers.*\n\nval s = \"\"\"<raw input data>\"\"\" val r = s.split(\"\\\\s+\").map(_.take(11).toLong).sum .toString.take(10).toLong assert(r == 5537376230L) \/\/ 2 ms\n\nProblem 14\n\nFind the longest sequence using a starting number under one million.*\n\ndef from(n: Long, c: Int = 0): Int = if (n == 1) c + 1 else from(if (n % 2 == 0) n \/ 2 else 3 * n + 1, c + 1) val r = (1 until 1000000).view.map(n => (n, from(n))) .reduceLeft((a, b) => if (a._2 > b._2) a else b)._1 assert(r == 837799) \/\/ 1 s\n\nProblem 15\n\nStarting in the top left corner in a 20 by 20 grid, how many routes are there to the bottom right corner?*\n\ndef f(row: Seq[Long], c: Int): Long = if (c == 0) row.last else f(row.scan(0L)(_ + _), c - 1) def r(n: Int) = f(Seq.fill(n + 1)(1L), n) assert(r(20) == 137846528820L) \/\/ 1 ms\n\nProblem 16\n\nWhat is the sum of the digits of the number 21000?*\n\nval r = BigInt(2).pow(1000).toString.view.map(_.asDigit).sum assert(r == 1366) \/\/ 1 ms\n\nProblem 17\n\nHow many letters would be needed to write all the numbers in words from 1 to 1000?*\n\nval units = Array(0, 3, 3, 5, 4, 4, 3, 5, 5, 4, 3, 6, 6, 8, 8, 7, 7, 9, 8, 8) val tens = Array(0, 0, 6, 6, 5, 5, 5, 7, 6, 6) lazy val name: Int => Int = { case n if n < 20 => units(n) case n if n < 100 => tens(n \/ 10) + (if (n % 10 > 0) units(n % 10) else 0) case n if n < 1000 => name(n \/ 100) + 7 + (if (n % 100 > 0) 3 + name(n % 100) else 0) case 1000 => 11 } val r = (1 to 1000).map(name).sum assert(r == 21124) \/\/ 1 ms\n\nProblem 18\n\nFind the maximum sum traveling from the top of the triangle to the base.*\n\nval s = \"\"\"<raw input data>\"\"\" val grid = s.trim.split(\"\n\n\").map(_.split(\"\\\\s+\").map(_.toInt)) def f(rows: Array[Array[Int]], bottom: Seq[Int]): Int = { val ms = bottom.zip(bottom.tail).map(p => p._1 max p._2) val ss = rows.last.zip(ms).map(p => p._1 + p._2) if (ss.length == 1) ss.head else f(rows.init, ss) } val r = f(grid.init, grid.last) assert(r == 1074) \/\/ 2 ms\n\nProblem 19\n\nHow many Sundays fell on the first of the month during the twentieth century?*\n\nval lengths = Array(31, 0, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31) val ls = for (y <- 1900 to 2000; m <- 1 to 12) yield if (m == 2) if (y % 4 == 0 && (y % 100 != 0 || y % 400 == 0)) 29 else 28 else lengths(m - 1) val fs = ls.scanLeft(1)((ws, l) => (ws + l) % 7) val r = fs.slice(12, 1212).count(_ == 0) assert(r == 171) \/\/ 2 ms\n\nProblem 20\n\nFind the sum of digits in 100!*\n\ndef f(n: BigInt): BigInt = if (n < 2) 1 else n * f(n - 1) val r = f(100).toString.view.map(_.asDigit).sum assert(r == 648) \/\/ 1 ms\n\nProblem 21\n\nEvaluate the sum of all amicable pairs under 10000.*\n\nval ds = (0 until 10000).view .map(n => (1 to (n \/ 2)).filter(n % _ == 0).sum) val as = ds.zipWithIndex.collect { case (n, i) if n < 10000 && ds(n) != n && ds(n) == i => i } val r = as.sum assert(r == 31626) \/\/ 658 ms\n\nProblem 22\n\nWhat is the total of all the name scores in the file of first names?*\n\nval r = io.Source.fromFile(\"names.txt\").mkString.split(\",\") .map(_.init.tail).sorted.map(_.map(_ - 64).sum) .zipWithIndex.map(p => p._1 * (p._2 + 1)).sum assert(r == 871198282) \/\/ 38 ms\n\nProblem 23\n\nFind the sum of all the positive integers which cannot be written as the sum of two abundant numbers.*\n\nval as = (0 to 28123).map(n => (1 to (n \/ 2)).filter(n % _ == 0).sum) .zipWithIndex.filter(p => p._1 > p._2).map(_._2) val exc = as.view.flatMap { a => as.takeWhile(_ <= (28123 - a)).map(_ + a) } val r = (1 to 28123 diff exc).sum assert(r == 4179871) \/\/ 5 s\n\nProblem 24\n\nWhat is the millionth lexicographic permutation of the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9?*\n\ndef ps(s: String): Iterator[String] = if (s.length == 1) Iterator(s) else s.toIterator.flatMap(c => ps(s.filterNot(_ == c)).map(_ + c)) val r = ps(\"0123456789\").drop(999999).next().toLong assert(r == 2783915460L) \/\/ 712 ms\n\nProblem 25\n\nWhat is the first term in the Fibonacci sequence to contain 1000 digits?*\n\nlazy val fs: Stream[BigInt] = 0 #:: fs.scanLeft(BigInt(1))(_ + _) val r = fs.view.takeWhile(_.toString.length < 1000).length assert(r == 4782) \/\/ 468 ms\n\nProblem 26\n\nFind the value of d < 1000 for which 1\/ d contains the longest recurring cycle.*\n\nval ps = (2 until 1000).map(i => (1 to 2000) .find(BigInt(10).modPow(_, i) == 1)) val r = 2 + ps.indexOf(Some(ps.flatten.max)) assert(r == 983) \/\/ 2 s\n\nProblem 27\n\nFind a quadratic formula that produces the maximum number of primes for consecutive values of n .*\n\nlazy val ps: Stream[Int] = 2 #:: Stream.from(3).filter(i => ps.takeWhile(j => j * j <= i).forall(i % _ > 0)) def isPrime(n: Int) = ps.view.takeWhile(_ <= n).contains(n) val ns = (-999 until 1000).flatMap { a => (-999 until 1000).map(b => (a, b, (0 to 1000).view .takeWhile(n => isPrime(n * n + a * n + b)).length)) } val t = ns.reduceLeft((a, b) => if (a._3 > b._3) a else b) val r = t._1 * t._2 assert(r == -59231) \/\/ 6 s\n\nProblem 28\n\nWhat is the sum of both diagonals in a 1001 by 1001 spiral?*\n\ndef cs(n: Int, p: Int): Stream[Int] = (n * 4 + p * 10) #:: cs(n + p * 4, p + 2) val r = 1 + cs(1, 2).take(500).sum assert(r == 669171001) \/\/ 1 ms\n\nProblem 29\n\nHow many distinct terms are in the sequence generated by a b for 2 \u2264 a \u2264 100 and\n\n2 \u2264 b \u2264 100?*\n\nval r = (2 to 100).flatMap(a => (2 to 100) .map(b => BigInt(a).pow(b))).distinct.length assert(r == 9183) \/\/ 17 ms\n\nProblem 30\n\nFind the sum of all the numbers that can be written as the sum of fifth powers of their digits.*\n\ndef max(d: Int) = math.pow(10, d).toInt - 1 def sum(n: Int) = n.toString.map(_.asDigit) .map(math.pow(_, 5).toInt).sum val limit = Stream.from(1).find(d => max(d) > sum(max(d))).get val r = (2 to max(limit)).view.filter(n => n == sum(n)).sum assert(r == 443839) \/\/ 2 s\n\nProblem 31\n\nInvestigating combinations of English currency denominations.*\n\ndef f(ms: List[Int], n: Int): Int = ms match { case h :: t => if (h > n) 0 else if (n == h) 1 else f(ms, n - h) + f(t, n) case _ => 0 } val r = f(List(1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200), 200) assert(r == 73682) \/\/ 15 ms\n\nProblem 32\n\nFind the sum of all numbers that can be written as pandigital products.*\n\nval ms = for { a <- 2 to 10000; b <- 2 to 10000 \/ a m = a * b; s = a.toString + b + m if s.length == 9 && (1 to 9).mkString.forall(s.contains(_)) } yield m val r = ms.distinct.sum assert(r == 45228) \/\/ 73 ms\n\nProblem 33\n\nDiscover all the fractions with an unorthodox cancelling method.*\n\nval rs = for (i <- 1 to 9; j <- (i + 1) to 9; k <- 1 to 9 if k * (9 * i + j) == 10 * i * j) yield (10 * i + j, 10 * j + k) val p = rs.reduceLeft((n, d) => (n._1 * d._1, n._2 * d._2)) def gcd(n: Int, d: Int): Int = if (d == 0) n else gcd(d, n % d) val r = p._2 \/ gcd(p._1, p._2) assert(r == 100) \/\/ 5 ms\n\nTags: problem, Programming, project euler, puzzle, scala, solution"}
{"text":"As tensions rise in the Old City of Jerusalem, hundreds of people gathered on Delmar Boulevard in University City Sunday evening to show their support \u2014 some for Palestinians and others for the Israeli government.\n\nThe Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) organized the march to protest new Israeli security measures at prayer sites in Jerusalem. Metal detectors and security cameras were installed after the mosque was temporarily closed on July 14, when three Palestinian civilians and two Israeli officers were killed in clashes nearby.\n\nAt the St. Louis area march, protesters demanded freedom for Muslims to worship without harassment and extra security measures when entering the Jerusalem compound that houses Al-Aqsa Mosque. The compound is an area also referred to by Jews as the Temple Mount.\n\nHowever, for many St. Louisans the gathering was about more than the installation of new metal detectors at the holy site in Jerusalem.\n\nCAIR intern and member of the Palestine Solidarity Committee Neveen Ayesh, a Muslim, is Palestinian-American and spoke to the St. Louis-area crowd about the ongoing conflict.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s what\u2019s going to come after the metal detectors and what\u2019s going to come with the metal detectors,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s just another way to put [Palestinians] on a leash and try to control them.\u201d\n\nMarchers carried signs and chanted \u201cfree free Al-Aqsa\u201d and \u201cend the siege on Aqsa now.\u201d In a show of international solidarity, people waved flags from the United States, Palestine, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Jordan.\n\nSunday\u2019s march was attended by many Muslims, members of the Palestinian-American community, and activists from local social justice organizations including the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, Jewish Voice for Peace and Progressive Youth Association.\n\nThere was also a counter demonstration in support of Israel\u2019s new security measures. Attendees held Israeli flags and signs advocating for Israel\u2019s right to defend itself.\n\nThe pro-Palestinian marchers and pro-Israeli demonstrators didn\u2019t cross paths, but Jewish-Israeli Boaz Steiner took it upon himself to walk amongst the pro-Palestinian protesters.\n\nSteiner is an advocate for Israel\u2019s new security measures and said he thinks it\u2019s more useful to speak directly to pro-Palestinians instead of standing at the pro-Israeli demonstration.\n\n\u201cI am a person who lived there and understand the situation on the ground truly,\u201d he said. \u201cOther religious sites around the world have security measures, why can\u2019t Israel?\u201d\n\nBut Jewish-American Michael Berg disagrees. As a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace and St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, he\u2019s participated in many demonstrations calling for equal rights for Palestinian citizens. He also gave a speech at the rally.\n\n\u201cThe rate of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian inhabitants of the Old City and east Jerusalem is accelerating,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ll continue to be out, fight and advocate until there\u2019s justice,\u201d he said.\n\nAfter the march, pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered for evening prayers in the parking lot behind Cicero\u2019s on Delmar Boulevard. The imam who lead the prayer recited specific prayers advocating for the end of Israel\u2019s occupation of east Jerusalem.\n\nMany participants also signed a petition organized by CAIR to bring awareness of the military occupation of Palestinian territories to St. Louis-area government officials.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re telling them to speak out and say no and to stop funding [Israel\u2019s military occupation],\u201d Neveen Ayesh said. \u201cWe are going to continue to raise awareness, near or far. This is something sacred to our hearts.\u201d"}
{"text":"IS seeks to isolate Turkish border crossing\n\nThe Islamic State [IS] attacked a YPG-controlled town in Al-Hasakah province on Tuesday, as it seeks to isolate the nearby border crossing with Turkey, a Kurdish citizen journalist told Syria Direct on Wednesday.\n\nIS \u201caims to control Tel Khanzir and close the door on YPG\u201d forces holed up in the border crossing of Ras al-Ain, said Roman Yusef, the Al-Hasakah-based activist.\n\nTel Khanzir is located on the highway between the joint YPG and rebel-controlled town of Tel Abyad and the YPG-controlled border crossing of Ras al-Ain.\n\nBy winning control Tel Khanzir, IS hopes to cut off the supply line between Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain, which IS has attacked for the past month.\n\nThe YPG staved off the assault on Tel Khanzir, killing and injuring an undisclosed number of IS members in the fighting, said Khalid Iskef, a Syria-based correspondent for the Lebanese pro-regime news channel Al-Mayadeen.\n\nYPG forces, aided by the regime, have been battling IS for control of key parts of Al-Hasakah province for the past month.\n\nYPG clashes with IS in four villages southeast of Kobani\n\nYPG forces are battling Islamic State (IS) fighters for control of four villages in the southeast Kobani countryside.\n\n\u201cClashes between YPG and IS remain ongoing as of now in the villages of Aqbash, Ahmadia, Mamad Khan and al-Jarn al-Aswad, 35 kilometers south of Kobani,\u201d Mustafa al-Abdi, senior correspondent with the Iraqi Kurdish Arta FM radio station based in Kobani told Syria Direct on Wednesday.\n\n\u201cThis comes after YPG forces clashed with IS in the southeast Kobani countryside on Tuesday, with the help of coalition air strikes that targeted IS positions on the front line,\u201d al-Abdi added. The YPG captured five villages from the Islamic State on Tuesday after fighting that reportedly led to the deaths of 43 IS fighters.\n\nThe offensive is part of a new YPG military campaign that began Monday under the rubric \u201cRevenge for the Martyrs of Hasakah,\u201d reported pro-Kurdish Adar Press. Last Friday, unknown assailants launched car bomb attacks on Kurdish Nowruz celebrations in Al-Hasakah city that killed at least 45 people.\n\nYPG forces captures 27 IS corpses and large stockpiles of weapons and ammunition in the aftermath of the fighting, reported the pro-Kurdish ANHA news outlet on Tuesday.\n\nYPG fighters seize weapons cache from IS on Tuesday. Photo courtesy @pyd_rojava.\n\nAs rebels close in, Idlib regime company defects to opposition\n\nA contingent of regime forces fearing a rebel assault on its position in the southeastern Idlib countryside defected to the opposition on Tuesday.\n\nThe regime contingent\u2013reportedly consisting of five officers and 45 soldiers\u2013defected as its distracted leadership was fortifying Ma\u2019amal al-Qarmeed, a brick factory turned regime military base 7.5km southeast of Idlib city, for an expected rebel attack, reported the pro-opposition news site All4Syria on Tuesday.\n\nThe defecting regime officers and soldiers joined the newly minted Operation Room for the Liberation of Idlib, also known as Jaish al-Fatah, a rebel coalition including the Islamist groups Jabhat a-Nusra and Ahrar a-Sham. Jaish al-Fatah announced its formation this Tuesday, reported the pro-opposition Orient News on Tuesday, the same day it launched a offensive to take regime-controlled Idlib city.\n\nThe campaign to capture Idlib is particularly significant to Nusra, which reportedly wants the city as part of its plan to eventually carve out an al-Qaeda emirate in northern Syria.\n\nNusra may have contributed up to 3,000 men to the fight, in addition to US-manufactured TOW anti-tank missiles, likely looted from the US-backed, now-dissolved Harakat Hazm last month.\n\nFor more from Syria Direct, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter."}
{"text":"Most of us like reading stories about ancient times and fantasize that our ancestors\u2019 lives were easy and romantic, but were they really? 24-year-old Russian man Pavel Sapozhnikov decided to see what his ancestors\u2019 lives were really like by spending 6 months living in 10th-century conditions.\u201cThe idea is to see if a modern man can survive alone in an early medieval environment, what impact this kind of lifestyle will have on his psychological state\u201d says Alexey Ovcharenko, who is the driving force behind the \u201cAlone in the Past\u201d project.For six months \u2013 until March 22 \u2013 Pavel will live in a medieval farm without electricity, running water, Internet access and other modern comforts. The autumn and winter seasons were chosen on purpose \u2013 scientists want to explore the everyday challenges faced by medieval people during the toughest time of the year.If given the chance, would you be brave enough to live alone in the past?"}
{"text":"2009 Paris-Roubaix runner up ready for Sunday after Sanremo and Flanders disappointment\n\nFilippo Pozzato (Lampre-Merida) is taking aim at the third and final big target of his spring campaign, as he hopes to go one better than his 2009 second place in Sunday\u2019s Paris-Roubaix. The 31-year-old Italian was active, but unsuccessful in Milano-Sanremo on March 17th, but less visible in last Sunday\u2019s Ronde van Vlaanderen but, as the blue-fuchsia team\u2019s Classics captain, he expects more in l\u2019Enfer du Nord.\n\n\u201cParis-Roubaix is a very demanding and selecting race, the group of the pretenders is even more limited than at the Ronde van Vlaanderen,\u201d Pozzato explained. \u201cI focused the early part of the season to three targets: Milano-Sanremo, the Ronde van Vlaanderen and Paris-Roubaix. I\u2019ve got one last chance to be a protagonist, after not having hit the targets in the first two appointments.\n\n\u201cOf course, I\u2019ll need to be more competitive than past Sunday, because Paris-Roubaix must be approached with energy and a clear mind.\u201d\n\nAfter such taking such a dominant victory in Sunday\u2019s Ronde, there will be one rider that Pozzato - and the rest of the peloton - will be watching across the fearsome cobbles of northern France.\n\n\u201c[Fabian] Cancellara will have all eyes on him,\u201d Pozzato confirmed. \u201cHe is the logical favourite.\u201d\n\nFriday will see Pozzato reconnoitre most of the cobbled sectors, starting from sector 19 [of 27 - ed] between Haveluy \u00e0 Wallers and riding all the way to section 4 at Le Carrefour de l'Arbre. The Italian team will be riding a new Rida frame from bike sponsor Merida, which has been specifically designed for tough, cobbled races like Paris-Roubaix.\n\nLampre-Merida team for Paris-Roubaix\n\nMassimo Graziato, Elia Favilli, Andrea Palini, Alessandro Petacchi, Filippo Pozzato, Maximiliano Richeze, Davide Vigan\u00f2 and Luca Wackermann"}
{"text":"Firearms of Japan were introduced in the 13th century by the Chinese, but saw little use. Portuguese firearms were introduced in 1543,[1] and intense development followed, with strong local manufacture during the period of conflicts of the late 16th century.\n\nTeppo [ edit ]\n\nDue to its proximity with China, Japan had long been familiar with gunpowder weaponry. Firearms seem to have first appeared in Japan around 1270, as primitive metal tubes invented in China and called tepp\u014d (\u9244\u7832 lit. \"iron cannon\") seem to have been introduced in Japan as well.[2]\n\nThese weapons were very basic, as they had no trigger or sights, and could not bear comparison with the more advanced European weapons which were introduced in Japan more than 250 years later.[2]\n\nTanegashima (matchlock) [ edit ]\n\nThe first documented introduction of the matchlock which became known as the tanegashima was through the Portuguese in 1543.[1] The tanegashima seems to have been based on snap matchlocks that were produced in the armory of Malacca in Portuguese Malacca, which was captured by the Portuguese in 1511.[3] The name tanegashima came from the island where a Chinese junk with Portuguese adventurers on board was driven to anchor by a storm. The lord of the Japanese island Tanegashima Tokitaka (1528\u20131579) purchased two matchlock muskets from the Portuguese and put a swordsmith to work in copying the matchlock barrel and firing mechanism. Within a few years the use of the tanegashima in battle forever changed the way war was fought in Japan.[4] From 1560, firearms were used in large battles in Japan.[5] In his memoirs published in 1614, the Portuguese adventurer turned author Fern\u00e3o Mendes Pinto placed himself in that first landing party, although this claim has been roundly discredited and in fact contradicts his claims to be simultaneously in Burma at the time. However, Pinto does appear to have visited Tanegashima soon thereafter.[6]\n\nHistory [ edit ]\n\nSengoku Period [ edit ]\n\nAshigaru (foot soldiers) using matchlocks (tanegashima) from behind shields (tate). (foot soldiers) using matchlocks () from behind shields ().\n\nJapan was at war during the Sengoku Period between 1467 and 1600, as feudal lords vied for supremacy.[7] Matchlock guns were used extensively and had a decisive role in warfare. In 1549, Oda Nobunaga ordered 500 matchlocks to be made for his armies. The benefits of firearms were still relatively questionable however compared to other weapons. At the time, guns were still rather primitive and cumbersome. According to one estimate in 16th century Japan, an archer could fire 15 arrows in the time a gunner would take to load, charge, and shoot a firearm.[8] Effective range also was only 80 to 100 meters, and at that distance, a bullet could easily bounce off armour. Furthermore, matchlocks were vulnerable to humid or rainy conditions as the powder would become damp.[8] However, firearms could be manned effectively by farmers or non-samurai low-ranking soldiers.[9]\n\nThe Japanese soon worked on various techniques to improve the effectiveness of their guns. They developed serial firing technique to create a continuous rain of bullets on the enemy.[10] They also developed bigger calibers to increase lethal power.[10] Protective boxes in lacquerware were invented to be able to fire matchlocks in the rain,[11] as well as systems to accurately fire weapons at night by keeping fixed angles thanks to measured strings.[12]\n\nAs a result, in the year 1567, Takeda Shingen announced that \"Hereafter, the guns will be the most important arms. Therefore, decrease the number of spears per unit, and have your most capable men carry guns\".[13] At the Battle of Nagashino in 1575, 3,000 arquebusiers helped win the battle, firing by volleys of 1,000 at a time, and concealed across a river and breastwork to effectively stop enemy infantry and cavalry charges while being protected.[14]\n\nIn the year 1584 Ikeda Sen led a troop of 200 women armed with firearms at the Battle of Komaki and Nagakute and in 1600 at the Battle of Sekigahara, rare example of Tepp\u014d unit, or musketeer unit consisting only of women.[15]\n\nJapan became so enthusiastic about the new weapons that it possibly overtook every European country in absolute numbers produced.[9] Japan also used the guns in the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592, in which about a quarter of the invasion force of 160,000 were gunners.[16] They were extremely successful at first and managed to capture Seoul just 18 days after their landing at Busan.[17]\n\nEdo Period [ edit ]\n\nThe internal war in Japan was won by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who established the Tokugawa shogunate, a powerful entity that would maintain peace and prosperity in Japan for the following 250 years. From the mid-17th century, Japan decided to close itself to interaction with the West through its policy of Sakoku. Guns were used less frequently because the Edo Period did not have many large-scale conflicts in which a gun would be of use. Oftentimes the sword was simply the more practical weapon in the average small-scale Edo Period conflicts, nevertheless there were gunsmiths in Japan producing guns through the Edo Period.\n\nIt should also be noted that isolation did not decrease the production of guns in Japan\u2014on the contrary, there is evidence of around 200 gunsmiths in Japan by the end of the Edo Period. But the social life of firearms had changed: as the historian David L. Howell has argued, for many in Japanese society, the gun had become less a weapon than a farm implement for scaring off animals.[18]\n\nLate Edo Period [ edit ]\n\nJapanese percussion pistol, 19th century, possibly converted from a matchlock.\n\nA few Japanese started to study and experiment with recent Western firearms from the beginning of the 19th century especially as a means to repel the visits of foreign ships, such as the incursion by British frigate HMS Phaeton in 1808.[19] Through the process of rangaku (the studying of Western science through the Dutch), airguns were developed by Kunitomo Ikkansai c. 1820\u20131830. From 1828, experiments were made with flintlock mechanisms.[19]\n\nThe Nagasaki samurai Takashima Sh\u016bhan (\u9ad8\u5cf6\u79cb\u5e06) started to import flintlock guns from the Netherlands known as \"Gewehr\" from the 1840s.[20] He made the first modern Western military demonstration for the Tokugawa shogunate, in Tokumarugahara (north of Edo) on 27 June 1841.\n\nWith the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854 and the inescapable opening of the country to trade, rapid efforts were made at reequipping Japan with modern fireams. Old matchlock weapons were recovered and converted to flintlock mechanisms.[21]\n\nBoshin War [ edit ]\n\nThe mounting civil war in Japan and the opposition of various feudal lords against the Bakufu during the Late Tokugawa shogunate led to serious rearming until the 1867 Boshin War. At the same time, technological progress was extremely fast in the West, with the introduction of the rifle, breech-loading and even repeating firearms, so that Japanese armies were equipped with composite technologies, with weapons imported from countries as varied as France, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States, and coexisting with traditional Tanegashima guns.[22]\n\nDuring the Boshin War, most shogunate vassal troops used Gewehr smoothbore guns. These guns were rather ancient and had limited capabilities, with an effective lethal range of about 50 meters, and a firing rate of about two rounds per minute. Much more effective Mini\u00e9 rifles were also used by the armies directly under the command of the sh\u014dgun, the Bakufu troops. The Daimy\u014d of Nagaoka, an ally of the sh\u014dgun, possessed two Gatling guns and several thousand modern rifles. The shogunate is known to have placed an order for 30,000 modern Dreyse needle guns in 1866.[citation needed] In 1867, orders were placed for 40,000 state-of-the-art French Chassepot rifles, a part of which reached Edo by year's end.[22] Antiquated Tanegashima matchlock guns are also known to have been used by the Bakufu however.[23]\n\nImperial troops mainly used Mini\u00e9 rifles, which were much more accurate, lethal, and had a much longer range than the smoothbore Gewehr guns, although, being also muzzle-loading, they were similarly limited to two shots per minute. Improved breech-loading mechanisms, such as the Snider, developing a rate of about ten shots a minute, are known to have been used by troops of the Tosa Domain against the shogunate's Sh\u014dgitai, at the Battle of Ueno in July 1868. In the second half of the conflict, in the northeast theater, Tosa Province troops are known to have used American-made Spencer repeating rifles.[23] American-made handguns were also popular, such as the 1863 Smith & Wesson Army No 2, which was imported to Japan by the Scottish trader Thomas Blake Glover and used by the Satsuma forces.[23]\n\nModern period [ edit ]\n\nThe Arisaka rifle family. List goes top to bottom: 1. Arisaka Type 30 2. Arisaka Type 38 3. Arisaka Type 38 carbine 4. Arisaka Type 44 carbine 5. Arisaka Type \"I\" model. The Type \"I\" was produced by Italy for Japan and was basically an Arisaka with a Carcano action 6. Arisaka Type 99 (Earlier Model) 7. Arisaka Type 99 (Later Model)\n\nFor some time after the Meiji Restoration, Japan continued to use imported weapons. The newly created Imperial Japanese Army used firearms intensively against more traditional samurai rebellious forces during the Satsuma rebellion in 1877, with an average of 320,000 rounds of ammunition fired daily during the conflict.[24] After the Satsuma rebellion, Japan relied extensively on the French Chassepot.[25]\n\nJapan finally developed its own model, the Murata rifle, derived from the French Fusil Gras mle 1874.[25] This was Japan's first locally made service rifle, and was used from 1880 to 1898. An industrial infrastructure, such as the Koishikawa arsenal had to be established to produce such new weapons.\n\nLater, Japan developed the very successful bolt action Arisaka series rifles, which was the Japanese service rifle until the end of World War II.[26] Japan produced relatively few submachine guns during World War II, the most numerous model was the Type 100 submachine gun of which 24,000\u201327,000 were produced, compared, for example, with the British Sten of which millions were produced. During the war, the Japanese worked on a copy of the American semi-automatic M1 Garand (the Type 5 rifle) but only a few hundred were made before the end of the war and it did not enter service.\n\nAfter the end of the war, the dissolution of the Imperial Japanese Army, and the establishment of the Japan Self-Defense Forces in 1947, Japan relied on M1 Garand rifles provided by the United States. In the mid-1950s however, Japan's Defense Agency started to develop battle rifles of its own, such as the Howa Type 64[27] and assault rifles like the Howa Type 89 which has been gradually replacing the former.[28]\n\nSee also [ edit ]\n\nReferences [ edit ]"}
{"text":"Recently, my colleagues and I published research in Mayo Clinic Proceedings that examined dietary data from almost 50 years of nutrition studies. What we found was astounding; these data were physiologically implausible and incompatible with survival. In other words, the diets from these studies could not support human life if consumed on a daily basis. The reason for this is simple; the memory-based data collection methods (M-BMs) used by nutrition researchers are unscientific because they rely on both the truthfulness of the study participant and the accuracy of his or her memory. Stated more simply, these methods collect nothing more than uncorroborated anecdotal estimates of food and beverage consumption.\n\nImportantly, vast amounts of taxpayer dollars are directed away from rigorous scientific investigations and squandered every year on the collection of uncorroborated anecdotes via M-BMs. Approximately 80% of the data in the USDA\u2019s National Evidence Library consists of uncorroborated anecdotes as well as 100% of the dietary data from every major epidemiologic study over the past 50 years (e.g., Nurses\u2019 Health Study, Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, REGARDS project, and EPIC study). In other words, most of what nutrition researchers call \u201cscientific evidence\u201d is in reality a vast collection of nearly baseless anecdotes. Nevertheless, despite a century of unequivocal evidence that human memory and recall are woefully inadequate for actual scientific data collection, the data from these methods are used to create public health policy.\n\nTo date, no researchers have published data that challenge or attempt to refute our findings and conclusions. The reason for this fact is simple: our science is strong and our findings irrefutable. Nevertheless, this has not stopped government-funded researchers and officials from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from demonstrating an unscientific intolerance to criticism by using rhetoric and fallacious ad hominems in defense of their pseudoscientific methods. While these attacks do nothing to advance the science of nutrition, the fact that taxpayer-funded NIH officials and researchers are attacking and attempting to bully and censor legitimate scientists serving the public suggests that publicly-funded science is in grave jeopardy.\n\nIn September of 2015, prior to the publication of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, I was invited by President Obama\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to present our research on implausible dietary data. The presentation was short and simple: the dietary data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, \u201cWhat We Eat In America\u201d study (NHANES \/WWEIA) are incompatible with the survival and therefore cannot be used to inform public policy. Nevertheless, the administration proved impervious to contrary evidence and presented the implausible NHANES\/WWEIA data as scientific evidence of the \u201cCurrent Eating Patterns in the United States\u201d in the recently published 2015 Guidelines. This official presentation is patently false and fraudulent. It should be obvious that dietary data that cannot support human life are not an accurate description of the \u201cCurrent Eating Patterns\u201d of Americans.\n\nIn response to the misrepresentation of the NHANES\/WWEIA data, we recently published evidence on the willful manipulation and doctoring of data by government-funded researchers to support current dietary dogma. Yet perhaps the most egregious example of scientific fraud and misconduct in the Guidelines is the use of these implausible dietary data to create fear and uncertainty in American citizens. In chapter 2, the section entitled, \"Underconsumed Nutrients and Nutrients of Public Health Concern,\" states that vitamins A, C, D, E, and iron are under-consumed. This statement is directly contradicted and refuted by the Government\u2019s own objective data (i.e., serum biomarkers). For example, at the time of the last CDC Biochemical analysis, less than 1% of Americans were at risk for deficiencies in vitamins A and E, and 80% of Americans were not at risk for deficiencies in any of the minerals and vitamins measured (including vitamins C, D, and iron). It should be obvious that Americans could not be under-consuming vitamins A, C, D, E, and iron while at the same time maintaining healthy serum levels of these same vitamins and minerals. As such, the Guidelines present alarmist, subjective, implausible dietary data as scientific fact while ignoring the objective, rigorous, and obvious data that Americans are exceptionally well fed.\n\nThe Executive Branch of our Federal government and the government-funded nutrition community have been aware of the empirical refutation and misrepresentation of dietary data for decades, yet this evidence is ignored. Stated more simply, government officials knew the dietary data used to create the Guidelines were patently false but published them as fact.\n\nThe Dietary Guidelines for Americans direct our attention and research resources towards unscientific and specious \u201cnutrients of concern\u201d and dietary dogma while distracting us away from the actual causes of obesity, diabetes and chronic non-communicable diseases. It is well-established that 80% of Americans are not at risk for any dietary deficiencies, yet more than 95% of Americans do not meet the minimum physical activity guidelines. Because of this simple fact, with each passing generation our children become better fed but less fit, less healthy, and fatter.\n\nUntil we replace the unscientific fiction of \u201cwe are what we eat\u201d and the uneducated government-funded rhetoric that \u2018food is our foe\u2019 with rigorous scientific facts, many American children will live shorter, less fit and less healthy lives than their parents. Given this reality, it is our hope that in the meantime, the fatal conceit and lack of epistemic humility of the researcher-politicians in our Federal Government are constrained by the dictum \u201cPrimum non nocere\u201d (First, do no harm). Retracting the fraudulent 2015 Guidelines will be a good start."}
{"text":"NEW DELHI: Highlighting benefits of the just- announced Crop Insurance Scheme, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said awareness about it should be spread across the country so that at least 50 per cent of the farmers join it within two years.In his monthly radio programme 'Mann Ki Baat', he also pitched for continued efforts to popularise Khadi and awarness to save girl child, mentioned about the recently launched 'Start-Up India' programme and talked about the upcoming International Fleet Review to be held in Visakhapatnam.Modi said he needs the \"maximum help\" from people about spreading awareness regarding the Pradhan Mantri Crop Insurance Scheme which was launched earlier this month.\"In our country, a lot is said in the name of farmers. I don't want to get involved in that debate. But farmers face a major crisis. In natural calamity, their entire effort goes waste. His one year goes waste. To give him security, only one thing comes to mind and that is crop insurance,\" he said in this year's first edition of the monthly radio programme.\"In (the New Year) 2016, the central government has given a big gift to the farmers -- Pradhan Mantri Crop Insurance Scheme. This scheme has been brought not for the purpose that it should be praised or the Prime Minister should be hailed,\" he said.The Prime Minister said that for so many years, there has been a talk regarding crop insurance but \"not more than 20-25 per cent\" of the country's farmers had been been able to benefit from such schemes.\"Can we take a pledge that we should connect at least 50 per cent of the farmers to this scheme in two years? I need this help from you. Because if a farmer joins the scheme, he will get huge help during a natural calamity,\" he said.Modi said this time, the scheme has got \"wide acceptability because it has been made quite extensive and easy and involves use of technology. Not only this. If something happens to the crop within 15 days after harvest, even then help is assured.\"Usage of technology will ensure speedy assessment and disbursement of compensation, he said.\"The biggest thing is that the rate of premium has been kept so low which nobody would have imagined. The rate of premium for Kharif crop has been kept 2 per cent while for Rabi crop it is one-and-a-half per cent.\"Now tell me, if any farmer is deprived of the benefits of this scheme, will he not suffer loss? I want the awareness about this scheme to spread,\" he said."}
{"text":"Update 3: code for the demo video is here.\n\nUpdate 2: In which I actually post working code.\n\nUpdate: Eep! This post was featured on the Raspberry Pi blog today. Thanks, Liz!\n\nAnd now for something completely different:\n\n\u2026 a clock that isn\u2019t human readable. You\u2019ll need a QR code reader to be able to tell the time.\n\nThis, however, is not the prime purpose of the exercise. I was looking for an excuse to try some direct hardware projects with the GPIO, and I remembered I had a couple of Nokia-style surplus LCDs lying about that could be pressed into service. These LCDs aren\u2019t great: 84\u00d748 pixels, 3V3 logic, driven by SPI via an 8-pin header which includes PWM-controllable LED backlighting. They are cheap, and available almost everywhere: DealExtreme ($5.36), SparkFun ($9.95), Adafruit ($10 \u2013 but includes a level shifter, which you really need if you\u2019re using a 5V logic Arduino), Solarbotics ($10) and Creatron (about $12; but you can walk right in and buy one). Despite being quite difficult to use, helpful people have written drivers to make these behave like tiny dot-addressable screens.\n\nI\u2019d been following the discussion on the Raspberry Pi forum about driving the Nokia LCD from a Raspberry Pi. Only when user bgreat posted some compact code that was supposed to run really fast did I dig out the LCD board and jumper wires. Building on bgreat\u2019s nokiaSPI.py class and a few other bits of code, here\u2019s what I built to make this singularly pointless clock:\n\n#!\/usr\/bin\/python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # qrclock - The Quite Rubbish Clock for Raspberry Pi - scruss, 2013-01-19 import time # need to use git:\/\/github.com\/mozillazg\/python-qrcode.git import qrcode from PIL import Image import ImageOps # uses bgreat's SPI code; see # raspberrypi.org\/phpBB3\/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=9814&p=262274&hilit=nokia#p261925 import nokiaSPI noki = nokiaSPI.NokiaSPI() # create display device qr = qrcode.QRCode(version=1, # V.1 QR Code: 21x21 px error_correction=qrcode.constants.ERROR_CORRECT_M, box_size=2, border=1) bg = Image.new('1', (84, 48)) # blank (black) image background while 1: qr.clear() newbg = bg.copy() # copy blank background s = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') qr.add_data(s) # make QR Code of YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS qr.make() qrim = qr.make_image() # convert qrcode object to PIL image qrim = qrim.convert('L') # make greyscale qrim = ImageOps.invert(qrim) # invert colours: B->W and W->B qrim = qrim.convert('1') # convert back to 1-bit newbg.paste(qrim, (18, 0)) # paste QR Code into blank background noki.show_image(newbg) # display code on LCD time.sleep(0.4) # pause before next display\n\n(Convenient archive of all the source: qrclock2.zip, really including bgreat\u2019s nokiaSPI class this time \u2026)\n\nTo get all this working on your Raspberry Pi, there\u2019s a fair amount of configuration. The best references are bgreat\u2019s own comments in the thread, but I\u2019ve tried to include everything here.\n\nEnabling the SPI kernel module\n\nAs root, edit the kernel module blacklist file:\n\nsudo vi \/etc\/modprobe.d\/raspi-blacklist.conf\n\nComment out the spi-bcm2708 line so it looks like this:\n\n#blacklist spi-bcm2708\n\nSave the file so that the module will load on future reboots. To enable the module now, enter:\n\nsudo modprobe spi-bcm2708\n\nNow, if you run the lsmod command, you should see something like:\n\nModule Size Used by spi_bcm2708 4421 0\n\nInstalling the WiringPi, SPI and other required packages\n\nWiringPi by Gordon is one of the neater Raspberry Pi-specific modules, as it allows relatively easy access to the Raspberry Pi\u2019s GPIO pins. For Raspbian, there are a few other imaging libraries and package management tools you\u2019ll need to install here:\n\nsudo apt-get install python-imaging python-imaging-tk python-pip python-dev git sudo pip install spidev sudo pip install wiringpi\n\nInstalling the Python QR code library\n\nFinding a library that provided all the right functions was the hardest part here. I ended up using mozillazg\u2018s fork of lincolnloop\u2018s python-qrcode module. mozillazg\u2019s fork lets you use most of the lovely PIL methods, while the original hides most of them. Since I had to do some image compositing and colour remapping to make the image appear correct on the Nokia screen, the new fork was very helpful.\n\nTo install it:\n\ngit clone git:\/\/github.com\/mozillazg\/python-qrcode.git cd python-qrcode\/ sudo python .\/setup.py install\n\nThe tiny 84\u00d748 resolution of the Nokia screen doesn\u2019t give you many options for sizing QR codes. For the time display of the clock, a 21\u00d721 module Version 1 code with two pixels per module and one module margin just fits into 48 pixels. Using a medium level of error correction, you can fit the 19-character message (such as \u201c2013-01-19 18:56:59\u201d) into this tiny screen with a very good chance of it being read by any QR code reader.\n\n(In the video, there\u2019s a much larger QR code that\u2019s a link to this blog post. That\u2019s a Version 7 code [45\u00d745 modules] at one pixel per module and no margin. This doesn\u2019t meet Denso Wave\u2019s readability guidelines, but the Nokia screen has large blank margins which seem to help. It won\u2019t read on every phone, but you\u2019re here at this link now, so you don\u2019t need it \u2026)\n\nWiring it all up\n\n(Do I really need to say that you\u2019ll be messing around with the inner delicate bits of your Raspberry Pi here, and if you do something wrong, you could end up with a dead Raspberry Pi? No? Okay. Just make sure you take some static precautions and you really should have the thing shut down and powered off.)\n\nYou\u2019ll need 8 female-female jumper wires, and also some kind of pin header soldered in (I used right-angled ones). Note that the thick border of the LCD is the top of the screen. These boards are made who-knows-where by who-knows-whom, and there\u2019s a huge variety of labels and layouts on the pins. My one appears to be yet another variant, and is labelled:\n\nVCC GND SCE RST D\/C DNK(MOSI) SCLK LED\n\nThis is how I wired it (from comments in bgreat\u2019s code and the GPIO reference):\n\nLCD Pin Function Pi GPIO Pin # Pi Pin Name ============= ============= =============== ============= 1 VCC Vcc 1 3.3 V 2 GND Ground 25 GND 3 SCE Chip Enable 24 GPIO08 SPI0_CE0_N 4 RST Reset 11 GPIO17 5 D\/C Data\/Command 15 GPIO22 6 DNK(MOSI) Data In 19 GPIO10 SPI0_MOSI 7 SCLK Serial Clock 23 GPIO11 SPI0_SCLK 8 LED Backlight 12 GPIO18 PWM0\n\nWire it up, and fire up the program:\n\nsudo .\/qrclock.py\n\nYes, code that accesses GPIO needs to be run as root. Pesky, but helps you avoid running code that accidentally scrams the nuclear power station you\u2019re controlling from your Raspberry Pi \u2026\n\nShare this: Facebook\n\nFlattr\n\nTwitter\n\nReddit\n\nPinterest\n\nUpdate 3: code for the demo video is here. Update 2: In which I actually post working code. Update: Eep! This post was featured on the Raspberry Pi blog today...."}
{"text":"A federal bankruptcy judge approved Thursday a Chapter 11 reorganization plan that will allow AT&T and DirecTV to purchase Comcast SportsNet Houston and relaunch it in November as Root Sports Houston.\n\nThere was no immediate indication, in the wake of Judge Marvin Isgur\u2019s ruling, when the new network will launch with expanded carriage on DirecTV and AT&T U-verse in addition to Comcast.\n\nHowever, CSN Houston has posted a broadcast schedule through Nov. 9, so the new network is not likely to launch until after that period.\n\nJudge Isgur\u2019s ruling does not mean that the case is concluded. Comcast, in fact, filed notice of appeal late Thursday night, alleging the judge erred on six grounds in his decision.\n\nThe appeal likely will be assigned to U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes.\n\nIn its appeal, Comcast says Judge Isgur erred in six areas:\n\n\u2014 In confirming the reorganization plan.\n\n\u2014 In not allowing Comcast\u2019s secured claim to be accepted for payment over time under section 1111(b) of the bankruptcy code.\n\n\u2014 In ruling that the plan met the requirements of section 1129(b) of the bankruptcy code in that it \u201cdoes not discriminate unfairly, and is fair and equitable, with respect to each class of claims or interests that is impaired under, and has not accepted, the plan.\u201d\n\n\u2014 In ruling that the plan had been approved by a valid class of creditors that will not receive full payment of claims.\n\n\u2014 In ruling that the plan did not discriminate against a class of creditors that included Comcast entities.\n\n\u2014 In holding that the plan legally exculpates or provides protection against liability for the Astros, Rockets, DirecTV, AT&T and members of the CSN Houston but not against Comcast.\n\nJudge Isgur, meanwhile, will preside over another hearing at 2 p.m. Friday as the parties continue to thrash through logistical issues involved in the transition from CSN Houston to Root Sports Houston.\n\n\u201cEverybody can lose a lot of money if you don\u2019t reach an agreement,\u201d the judge said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot at stake.\u201d\n\nOfficials with the Rockets and Astros, who supported the reorganization plan, said they were pleased with the judge\u2019s ruling.\n\n\u201cOn behalf of Leslie Alexander and our organization and, more than anything, our fans, we are very appreciative of Judge Isgur\u2019s ruling and look forward to getting our games on as quickly as possible,\u201d said Rockets CEO Tad Brown.\n\n\u201cWe want to stay focused to make sure that we get the network on the air to the entire market as quickly as possible. There are logistics involved. We\u2019ve got to get with the Root Sports folks, but there is a clear path. We appreciate the judge for that path and it\u2019s a great day for Rockets fans, Astros fans and sports fans in Houston.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a great day for the fans,\u201d said Astros general counsel Giles Kibbe. \u201cWe will have broad coverage on AT&T, DirecTV and Comcast, and this will put us in position where we can continue implementing our plans with the teams.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s been very costly to the teams, but we\u2019re looking forward. We have broad coverage and media rights fees that will enable us to compete. We\u2019re not looking back. We\u2019re looking forward. It\u2019s been long and hard, but it\u2019s a positive day.\u201d\n\nA spokesman for Comcast, which opposed the reorganization plan, said, \u201cWe are disappointed with the judge\u2019s decision and intend to file an appeal.\u201d DirecTV and AT&T, which will acquire the network for $5,000 and will invest $50 million, had no comment.\n\nCSN Houston launched in the fall of 2012 but was never available across most Houston-area TV households. Comcast put the network into bankruptcy in September 2013 when the Astros threatened to retake their broadcast rights because the network could not pay rights fees."}
{"text":"President Donald Trump makes his way to board Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C, on Feb. 24. Mandel Ngan\/AFP\/Getty Images\n\nPresident Donald Trump is getting ready to mark his 100 days in office as the least popular commander in chief of the modern era at this point in their presidency. But among his supporters, 96 percent of those who voted for Trump said they would do it all over again if the election were held today, and only 2 percent say they regret supporting him, according to the latest Washington Post\/ABC News poll. In contrast, 85 percent of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton said they\u2019d vote for her if the election were held today. That\u2019s not because Clinton voters would support Trump, but rather because they say they\u2019d be more willing to back a third-party candidate or not vote at all.\n\nThe poll makes clear what numerous surveys have already pointed out: Trump has not enjoyed the typical 100-day honeymoon period. Overall, only 42 percent of Americans approve of Trump\u2019s performance as president, and 53 percent disapprove. The number is worse in the latest NBC News\/Wall Street Journal poll that puts Trump\u2019s overall job-approval rating at 40 percent, 4 points lower than it was in February. That is in sharp contrast to the average 69 percent approval for past presidents at or near the 100-day mark. President Barack Obama, for example, had a 69-26 percent approval rating near his 100 days in office.\n\nMore than half of Americans don\u2019t think Trump has accomplished much in his first 100 days. Forty-five percent of Americans flat out say that Trump\u2019s presidency is off to a poor start while 19 percent say it\u2019s been \u201conly a fair start.\u201d That compares to the 35 percent who say the president\u2019s first 100 days have been \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cgreat,\u201d according to the NBC\/WSJ poll.\n\nThat doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s all doom and gloom for the president. The Post\/ABC poll also finds some surprisingly positive evaluations of the commander in chief\u2019s performance on certain issues. More than half of Americans\u201453 percent\u2014say Trump is a strong leader, including 25 percent of Democrats. Plus 73 percent of Americans approve of the way he has been pressuring companies to keep jobs in the country. A plurality\u201446 percent\u2014also approve of the way he has been handling North Korea. The president also gets high marks for his recent military actions in Syria, which 62 percent of Americans say they support, according to the NBC\/WSJ poll.\n\nStill, despite these few bright spots, the polls point to mostly bad news for the president, as 56 percent say he doesn\u2019t have the judgment to serve effectively as president, and 58 percent doubt his honesty and trustworthiness. The public also seems to have noticed Trump\u2019s penchant for changing his mind, with 55 percent saying he doesn\u2019t follow a consistent set of principles.\n\nDemocrats should be cautious about getting too gleeful about Trump\u2019s numbers though, as 67 percent say the Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of most Americans, according to the Post\/ABC survey. Both Trump and the Republican Party have better scores in that regard with 58 percent and 62 percent, respectively.\n\n*This post has been updated to include additional information from the Washington Post\/ABC News poll."}
{"text":"The Fraud Among Us, or Within Us?\n\nIt happens uncomfortably often. A successful person, who seemingly has achieved great things and earned respect and admiration, is exposed as a fraud. From Bernie Madoff to the imprisoned real estate developer who built the outsized, now foreclosed home in my neighborhood, I am reminded that people are not always what they seem.\n\nFraud disturbs me most when it happens close to my professional home. A decade ago, a social psychologist was forced to resign her position at the University of Texas and retract four articles. Now, it has happened again. Diederik Stapel, a productive and frequently honored social psychologist and self researcher, has resigned his position at Tilburg University after admitting to fabricating data in his research.\n\nThe most recent instance has been called \u201csad,\u201d \u201cshocking,\u201d and \u201cincomprehensible.\u201d Cases of outright fraud in science are distressing for a lot of reasons. They damage the careers of students and collaborators, and raise doubts about nonretracted papers by the same author. Most important, they damage public trust in science and in scientists. In this case, trust in social psychologists and the work we do is undermined. Appropriately, then, SPSP has accepted Stapel\u2019s resignation from the society, and asked him to step down from his various responsibilities.\n\nBeyond these very real consequences, I find the psychology of these cases deeply disturbing. I try to put myself in the shoes of someone exposed as a fraud, and think about what it must feel like to be them. What would it feel like to receive respect, admiration, job offers, and even honors and awards, knowing that they are based on falsehoods? Honest, authentic human connections would seem impossible, if I knew I was not the person that my peers, students, and colleagues thought I was. How isolating would that be, how lonely? How present would fear of exposure be in daily life? And how humiliating and downright frightening would it be to be exposed and lose everything\u2014job, career, status, respect? Just thinking about it, I feel ill. It\u2019s inexplicable to me that someone with obvious intelligence, ambition, and talent would risk everything by falsifying data.\n\nExplaining the Inexplicable\n\nPerhaps these cases seem inexplicable because we find out about them at the end, when the fraud has been exposed. By that time, bad choices leading to minor transgressions have escalated into outright career-killing fraud, likely in ways that were never intended. Bernie Madoff surely didn\u2019t begin his Ponzi scheme planning to steal $50 billion. Social psychologists probably don\u2019t begin down the path to scientific misconduct by inventing a study\u2019s worth of data from whole cloth, while foreseeing that this would eventually cause their entire program of research to be doubted. These cases surely began as small missteps, smoothing over uncooperative results of one form or another. Cases of fraud are more understandable when we think about how they begin and escalate, not how they end.\n\nStanley Milgram\u2019s studies of obedience to authority provide insight into why people do things that are so counter to our norms and understanding of human nature that they seem either inexplicable, or the result of some form of pathology (Milgram, 1963). Usually, people interpret Milgram\u2019s studies as revealing how obedient most of us are to authority or as evidence that the situation determines behavior. Another lesson of these experiments, however, may be more relevant to understanding cases of fraud: how easy it is to take the first small step on the slippery slope of violating our own norms and values, and how difficult it is to stop once the downward slide gains momentum (Modigliani & Rochat, 1995).\n\nIn Milgram\u2019s studies, the research subjects were placed in the role of \u201cteacher;\u201d they were to administer electric shock to another subject, the \u201clearner\u201d (actually a confederate of Milgram), each time the learner gave an incorrect answer, using a \u201cshock generator\u201d consisting of 30 switches, the first labeled \u201c15 volts, slight shock,\u201d and increasing by 15 volt increments to \u201c420 volts, danger: severe shock, and finally, \u201c450 volts, XXX.\u201d The teacher was to increase the shock by 15 volts each time the learner was wrong, or did not answer. When these roles were explained, the learner revealed that he had a heart condition.1\n\nThis experiment is famous because of where it ended; of the 40 subjects in the original version of the study, 26, or 65%, administered shock up to the final switch on the shock generator, well past the point at which the \u201clearner\u201d complained of heart pain and then stopped responding altogether. The lesson of the study seemed to be that people would violate their own moral codes and administer potentially deadly shock to an ill victim, merely on the say-so of an authority figure.\n\nBut this experiment may be more important for where it begins. All participants\u2014100%\u2013began by giving only a \u201cslight shock\u201d of 15 volts in response to the learner\u2019s first incorrect answer. With the experimenter\u2019s assurances that the shock might be painful but was not dangerous, what could be the harm of giving 15 volts?\n\nThe harm is that once people have given 15 volts of shock, they have no compelling reason to resist giving a tiny increase of another 15 volts. After all, they have implicitly conceded that 15 volts of shock is minor. And once they have given 30 volts of shock, why not 45? Each time participants administered shock\u2014at first just a \u201cslight\u201d amount, then stronger shocks\u2013that level of shock became the new \u201cnormal.\u201d Consciously or unconsciously, teachers justified their behavior to themselves each time they pulled the switch, and each justification made pulling the next switch easier. It is much harder to see that giving shock is wrong and that one has the power to simply stop after one has already given shocks that increased from 15 to 300 or more volts. Thus did participants slide down the slippery slope toward administering potentially fatal shock (Modigliani & Rochat, 1995).2\n\nImagine what would have happened if Milgram had asked the teachers to begin by administering 450 volts of shock, marked XXX, beyond \u201cdanger: severe shock,\u201d at the first wrong answer by the learner. To my knowledge, this variation of the Milgram studies has never been conducted. I suspect that \u201cobedience,\u201d in this scenario, would drop dramatically, perhaps even to 0.\n\nFor understanding fraud, the useful lesson of the Milgram studies is the significance of that first tiny step down the slippery slope, however \u201cslight\u201d a violation it may be. Each minor transgression, whether dropping an inconvenient data point or failing to give credit where it is due, creates a threat to self-image\u2014\u201cAm I that sort of person?\u201d To avoid the discomfort, people rationalize and justify until their behavior feels comfortable and right, making the next transgression seem not only easier, but perhaps even morally right.\n\nTo be fair, we are all flawed, nonperfect human beings. Although the well-being of our science and our society, require that fraud be punished severely, merely focusing on the perpetrator may divert our attention from the fraud within us all. Although we don\u2019t all fabricate data or run Ponzi schemes, if we look closely at our lives, surely all of us can find places where we took that first step, and perhaps several, down one slippery slope or another. Perhaps we transgressed in some minor way\u2013snapped at our children, or borrowed a few words from someone without attribution. Perhaps we refused a request for some service or another because we wanted to focus on advancing our own careers. Because people are human, if we look for things we\u2019ve done that violate, even just a tiny bit, our own moral values, surely we will find them.\n\nSurely there are ways we are not who our colleagues think we are\u2014we are less brilliant, witty, selfless, or helpful than we lead them to think. We already know what it feels like to be a fraud, be cause in little, nearly imperceptible ways, our desire to be well-regarded leads us to conceal our mistakes, weaknesses, and foibles from others. Perhaps, while enforcing the standards of our profession, we can still have compassion for those who transgress, knowing that it is in our nature as human beings to try to get others to see us in a positive light.\n\nThis analysis shifts the focus from \u201cthem\u201d to \u201cus,\u201d and shifts the question away from, \u201cHow could they do it?\u201d to \u201cWhy do we start in the first place?\u201d and \u201cHow can we stop?\u201d\n\nWhy do we start?\n\nAll of these transgressions, minor or major, may have started with a little fear of our egos. Milgram\u2019s studies do not address the issue of why his participants administered the first 15 volts of shock. 100% of participants in his first study took this first step, so the data offer no clues as to why people might draw the line and not even take the first step. Through the lens of my own research, I suspect that something in this situation triggers egoistic concerns for participants; some fear or little anxiety was triggered. It wasn\u2019t fear of losing their $4.50 payment for participating; Milgram assured subjects that the money was theirs to keep, no matter what. Instead, it was likely some fear of what noncompliance would mean about them (I wasted my time coming here; I\u2019m not helpful; I\u2019m the trouble-maker; I\u2019m the one who screwed up science), or fear of being judged negatively by the experimenter. In some small, perhaps imperceptible way, noncompliance represented a threat to subjects\u2019 self-image or public image.\n\nIn the same way, the first small step down the slippery slope of fraud probably starts out of some sort of egoistic fear or anxiety\u2014fear of losing someone else\u2019s admiration and respect, fear of letting others down, fear of being seen as a loser, fear of being a failure, or fear of not getting the job, the grant, or the award one covets.\n\nHow can we stop?\n\nThe difficult question then becomes, how can we stop the slide? Again, Milgram\u2019s study is instructive. A meta-analysis of data from eight of Milgram\u2019s obedience experiments showed that defiance of the experimenter was most likely at 150 volts, when the learner first requested to be released from the study (Packer, 2008). Although not conclusive, this finding suggests that, for defiant participants, at some point concern for the well-being of the learner took priority over concerns for self-image or public image that prevented defiance of the experimenter.\n\nAnd this might be the most important lesson. Cultivating concern for the rights and well-being of others, making it a daily practice, committing to act on it\u2014these things may help us stop our slide down that slippery slope. In the case of the 15 volt steps toward scientific misconduct, thinking about the consequences for our students, colleagues, loved ones, our institution, our discipline, or science itself might help us stop our own little slides, when they inevitably happen.\n\nIn this regard, we should all feel gratitude toward, and admiration for, those people who took the risk to stop something unacceptable when they saw it. Surely, they experienced egoistic fears\u2014Will they believe me? What will happen to me? Will my own reputation be tarnished? But they acted for the common good in spite of those fears, and I, for one, thank them.\n\nFootnote\n\n1. For more information about the Milgram study see: http:\/\/www.psychologicalscience.org\/index.php\/news\/releases\/50th-anniversary-of-stanley-milgrams-obedience-experiments.html)\n\n2. I thank Marc-Andre Olivier for pointing out to me this powerful aspect of Milgram\u2019s obedience paradigm.\n\nReference\n\nMilgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.\n\nModigliani, A., & Rochat, F. (1995). The role of interaction sequences and the timing of resistance in shaping obedience and defiance to authority. Journal of Social Issues, 51, 107-123.\n\nPacker, D. J. (2008). Identifying systematic disobedience in Milgram\u2019s obedience experiments: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 301-304.\n\nAdvertisements"}
{"text":"A video purportedly showing three British schoolgirls moments before they were smuggled by an alleged foreign spy from Turkey into Syria - where they joined the Islamic State (Isis) terror group - has emerged.\n\nThree girls, said to be runaway London teenagers Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, are seen in the shaky footage as they unload their baggage from a taxi and enter another vehicle in what appears to be Turkey's southern city of Gaziantep.\n\nThey are helped by two men, one of whom is filming the operations with a mobile device. The man asks the girls their names and then helps them into another vehicle, saying it will take them across the border within one hour.\n\nSpeaking in English, he tells the girls not to forget anything, including their passports. \"It's nice!\" he is heard saying in the clip obtained by broadcaster A Haber.\n\nHe then wishes them good luck, adding he will not personally accompany them to the border as he will return to Sanl\u0131urfa a Turkish about 50km north of the Syrian city of Kobani.\n\nThe smuggler was arrested earlier in March by Turkish authorities who claimed he was an intelligence officer working for an anti-IS coalition member state.\n\nIn a separate video also published by A Haber, the suspect is seen living a courthouse in Turkey flanked by plain clothed security agents.\n\n\"It turned out to be someone who worked in the intelligence services of a country in the coalition,\" Turkey Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said announcing the arrest.\n\nThe minister did not reveal the nationality of the agent but said they did not work for the US or any EU state. Turkish media claimed he was a Syrian national working for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), named as Mohammed al Rashid.\n\nCanadian government sources denied the man was employed by CSIS or any other federal agency.\n\nHowever, Reuters quoted a European security source familiar with the case as saying the suspect had ties to the CSIS.\n\nA spokesperson for Canada's Public Safety Minister, Steven Blaney, told The Toronto Star: \"We are aware of these reports. We do not comment on operational matters of national security.\"\n\nBegum, 15, Sultana, 16, and 15-year-old Abase flew from London's Gatwick Airport to Istanbul on 17 February. CCTV images appeared to show the teenagers boarding a bus to Gaziantep, a notorious port of entrance for foreign fighters travelling to Syria. They are now believed to be living in IS's de facto capital, Raqqa.\n\nThe Turkish government has been criticised by its Nato allies for allegedly not doing enough to prevent would-be-jihadists from crossing its long and porous border with Syria. In turn, Ankara claimed Western states have failed to provide it with enough intelligence on suspect travellers.\n\nThousands of Westerners have travelled to IS-held territories via Turkey, swelling the terror group ranks over the past two years."}
{"text":"Aston Martin says Adrian Newey's new road car will be quicker than a Formula One car around some of the world's fastest race circuits.\n\nThe new car, codenamed the AM-RB 001, is being built as part of a new collaboration between Red Bull and Aston Martin, with under 100 examples expected to reach production in late 2018. Newey has been given a clean slate to design the car and is incorporating ground-effects and a mid-engined layout to create unprecedented levels of performance in a road car.\n\nAston Martin CEO Andy Palmer said the target is to make a car capable of lapping Silverstone quicker than an F1 car.\n\n\"As we sit here today, the raison d'etre that we've given the team is to be faster than an F1 car around Silverstone - or indeed any other F1 track,\" Palmer said. \"I am sure there are other cars that can go in straight lines quicker than this, but we don't make drag cars, we make cars you can use. That is the raison d'etre we use.\"\n\nRed Bull team principal Christian Horner says the potential performance of the AM-RB 001 will underline how much quicker Formula One cars could be with different regulations.\n\n\"I think it showed with unrestricted aerodynamics what is possible,\" he said. \"I think that F1 has got scope to move the lap times considerably quicker. There is a step coming for 2017, we personally would like it to go further but we seem to be a lone voice in that. But F1 should be the ultimate.\n\n\"Taking unrestricted aerodynamics, this car will be seriously, seriously quick. And the initial indications we have had from it have generated more downforce than any car that we have ever produced.\"\n\nConcrete details of the car remain slim, with the engine, tyres and expected performance figures yet to be released.\n\n\"We're not going to talk about tyre suppliers or anyone at the moment, but we are well down the line with talking to all of our suppliers,\" Aston Martin designer Marek Reichman said. \"For anyone involved this is a very exciting programme to have your name as a supplier on this car. I don't know if you played Top Trumps when you were a kid, but this will be the Top Trump for everything.\""}
{"text":"Always Trying to Escape When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some humanities courses to get more \"culture.\" Besides the English classes required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I found astronomy--as a humanities course! So that year I escaped with astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest thing to science I could find.\n\nBefore I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of addressing myself to political liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty in social occasions--the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to the \"destruction of the moral fiber of society.\" An interesting question, but not the one we were supposed to discuss.\n\nAnother essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, \"On a Piece of Chalk,\" in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is the remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now used to conve ideas through writing on the blackboard.\n\nBut again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a parody called, \"On a Piece of Dust,\" about how dust makes the colors of the sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always trying to escape.\n\nBut when we had to write a theme on Goethe's Faust, it was hopeless! The work was too long to make a parody of it or to invent something else. I was storming back and forth in the fraternity saying, \"I can't do it. I'm just not gonna do it. I ain't gonna do it!\"\n\nOne of my fraternity brothers said, \"OK, Feynman, you're not gonna do it. But the professor will think you didn't do it because you don't want to do the work. You oughta write a theme on something--same number of words--and hand it in with a note saying that you just couldn't understand the Faust, you haven't got the heart for it, and that it's impossible for you to write a theme on it.\"\n\nSo I did that. I wrote a long theme, \"On the Limitations of Reason.\" I had thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how there are certain limitations: moral values cannot be decided by scientific methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on.\n\nThen another fraternity brother offered some more advice. \"Feynman,\" he said, \"it ain't gonna work, handing in a theme that's got nothing to do with Faust. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote into the Faust.\"\n\n\"Ridiculous!\" I said.\n\nBut the other fraternity guys think it's a good idea.\n\n\"All right, all right!\" I say, protesting. \"I'll try.\"\n\nSo I added half a page to what 1 had already written, and said that Mephistopheles represents reason, and Faust represents the spirit, and Goethe is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked it all in, and handed in my theme.\n\nThe professor had us each come in individually to discuss our theme. I went in expecting the worst.\n\nHe said, \"The introductory material is fine, but the Faust material is a bit too brief. Otherwise, it's very good-- B + .\" I escaped again!\n\nNow to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded professor named Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and he would mumble along, and I couldn't understand a thing. The other people in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didn't seem to pay any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch, and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers and drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.\n\nFinally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went \"wugga mugga mugga wugga wugga . . . and everybody got excited! They were all talking to each other and discussing, so I figured he'd said something interesting, thank God! I wondered what it was?\n\nI asked somebody, and they said, \"We have to write a theme, and hand it in in four weeks.\"\n\n\"A theme on what?\"\n\n\"On what he's been talking about all year.\"\n\nI was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term that I could remember was a moment when there came this upwelling, \"muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmugga wugga,\" and phoom!--it sank back into chaos.\n\nThis \"stream of consciousness\" reminded me of a problem my father had given to me many years before. He said, \"Suppose some Martians were to come down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually active. Suppose they didn't have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called sleep. So they ask you the question: 'How does it feel to go to sleep? What happens when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they move less aanndd lleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyy yyy? How does the mind actually turn off?\"\n\nI got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep?\n\nSo every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme, I would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep. And I'd watch what happened, when I went to sleep.\n\nThen at night, I'd go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when I could make observations--it was very good!\n\nAt first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually.\n\nThen, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two things at once. I discovered this when I was talking internally to myself about something, and while I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn't aware that I was imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on the other rope, and they wouldn't wind up smoothly. But I said, internally, \"Oh, the tension will take care of that,\" and this interrupted the first thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at once.\n\nI also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically interconnected. You don't notice that they're not logically connected until you ask yourself, \"What made me think of that?\" and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what the hell did make you think of that!\n\nSo you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they're completely disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.\n\nAfter four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these observations were made while I was watching myself fall asleep, and I don't really know what it's like to fall asleep when I'm not watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which pointed out this problem of introspection:\n\nI wonder why. I wonder why.\n\nI wonder why I wonder.\n\nI wonder why I wonder why\n\nI wonder why I wonder!\n\nWe hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor reads one of them: \"Mum bum wugga mum bum . . .\" I can't tell what the guy wrote.\n\nHe reads another theme: \"Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga. . .\" I don't know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:\n\nUh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh\n\nUh wugga wugga wugga.\n\nI wugga wuh uh wugga wuh\n\nUh wugga wugga wugga.\n\n\"Aha!\" I say. \"That's my theme!\" I honestly didn't recognize it until the end.\n\nAfter I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep itself!\n\nIn the first part of the dream I'm on top of a train and we're approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the tunnel--whoosh! I say to myself, \"So you can get the feeling of fear, and you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel.\"\n\nI also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.\n\nBy this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the train lurching about. I say to myself, \"So you can get kinesthetic feelings in a dream.\" I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are-not mannequins, but three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty good!\n\nI continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead as I go, when I say to myself, \"Hey! It would be interesting to get excited--sexually--so I think I'll go back into the other car.\" I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through the train--I could control the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window, and I see three old guys playing violins--but they turned back into girls! So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.\n\nWell, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually, saying things like, \"Wow! It's working!\" and I woke up.\n\nI made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking myself, \"Am I really dreaming in color?\" I wondered, \"How accurately do you see something?\"\n\nThe next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see each hair. You know how there's a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting--the diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you want: perfect vision!\n\nAnother time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the tack. So the \"seeing department\" and the \"feeling department\" of the brain seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they don't have to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there's no thumbtack. I run my finger down the doorframe, and I feel the tack!\n\nAnother time I'm dreaming and I hear \"knock-knock; knock-knock.\" Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not perfectly--it seemed sort of foreign. I thought: \"Absolutely guaranteed that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and I've invented this part of the dream to fit with it. I've got to wake up and find out what the hell it is.\"\n\nThe knocking is still going, I wake up, and . . . Dead silence. There was nothing. So it wasn't connected to the outside.\n\nOther people have told me that they have incorporated external noises into their dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully \"watching from below,\" and sure the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn't.\n\nDuring the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of waking up was a rather fearful one. As you're beginning to wake up there's a moment when you feel rigid and tied down, or underneath many layers of cotton batting. It's hard to explain, but there's a moment when you get the feeling you can't get out; you're not sure you can wake up. So I would have to tell myself--after I was awake--that that's ridiculous. There's no disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and can't wake up. You can always wake up. And after talking to myself many times like that, I became less and less afraid, and in fact I found the process of waking up rather thrilling--something like a roller coaster: After a while you're not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit.\n\nYou might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped (which it has for the most part; it's happened just a few times since). I'm dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in front of me a pennant. I answer for the twenty-fifth time, \"Yes, I'm dreaming in color,\" and then I realize that I've been sleeping with the back of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that the back of my head is soft. I think, \"Aha! That's why I've been able to make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and I can make these observations any time I want. So I think I'll stop making observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep.\"\n\nWhen I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn't do it any more.\n\nAs a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One of the reasons that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to how you can see an image, of a person, for example, when your eyes are closed, and nothing's coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve discharges, but you can't get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at something. Well then, how could I \"see\" in color, and in better detail, when I was asleep?\n\nI decided there must be an \"interpretation department.\" When you are actually looking at something--a man, a lamp, or a wall--you don't just see blotches of color. Something tells you what it is; it has to be interpreted. When you're dreaming, this interpretation department is still operating, but it's all slopped up. It's telling you that you're seeing a human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn't true. It's interpreting the random junk entering the brain as a clear image.\n\nOne other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife was from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically. I didn't believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: We're playing a game on a billiard table with three balls--a white ball, a green ball, and a gray ball--and the name of the game is \"titsies.\" There was something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and the green ball are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can't get to it.\n\nI wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the game gives it away, of course-them's girls! The white ball was easy to figure out, because I was going out, sneakily, with a married woman who worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a drive-in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one-what the hell was the gray one? I knew it had to be somebody; I felt it. It's like when you're trying to remember a name, and it's on the tip of your tongue, hut you can't get it.\n\nIt took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a girl I liked very much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months before. She was a very nice girl, and I had decided that when she came back I was going to see her again. I don't know if she wore a gray suit, but it was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one.\n\nI went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be right--there is something to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my interesting dream, he said, \"No, that one was too perfect--too cut and dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis.\""}
{"text":"The video will start in 8 Cancel\n\nGet the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email\n\nHundreds of tourists were evacuated from the Eiffel Tower tonight - as armed police and soldiers searched tourists in central Paris.\n\nThe whole area around the popular tourist attraction was cordoned off and the popular tourist hotspot placed on lockdown.\n\nAt 9pm tonight the situation was declared a \"false alarm\" and the vicinity began to return to normal.\n\nInitially there was confusion and the reason for the evacuation was not immediately clear - with unconfirmed reports of a \"suspicious package\" having been found.\n\nVideo Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now\n\nFrench outlet BFMTV reported that security services spotted an abandoned piece of luggage.\n\nEyewitnesses described a large police presence at the scene - with many cops spotted carrying assault rifles.\n\nVisitors were warned away from the site of France's most popular landmark - with Twitter users reporting the military had been deployed \"all over\" the place.\n\nPolice allowed people into the ground floor restaurant - but nobody else was allowed to venture any further - according to one report.\n\nPeople were reported to be acting calmly - with \"no state of panic\" - and responding well to the show of force.\n\nThe French nation is on a knife-edge after suffering a number of Islamic State terrorist attacks in the last 18 months - including the attacks in Paris last November, the attack in Nice last month and the murder of a French priest in Normandy last week.\n\nAccording to BMFTV the evacuation was undertaken as a precautionary measure in the wake of these attacks."}
{"text":"Sometimes it happens on rough days that a glimmer peaks through.\n\nI received a handwritten letter via snail mail (address on sidebar) from a young Jesuit\u2026 I know, I know\u2026.\n\nHere is some of it:\n\nThank you for your vocation, your bold witness to the truth and beauty of the Church\u2019s teaching, and your blog. I\u2019ve been in [JESUIT SCHOOL] for my theological studies for the past three years and found your blog encouraging and grounding to say the least. Please pray for me and the twelve other men being ordained with me. For the greater part we are a solid JPII\/Benedict group and I have a lot of hope for the good things we might do to do right by our Founder\u2019s great vision.\n\nThat\u2019s what I\u2019m talking about!\n\nThere are a lot of younger Jesuits who want the real deal. They need support.\n\nPapa Ganganelli! Pray for them!\n\nDear readers, pray for them."}
{"text":"The Mendenhall Order marked a decision to change the fundamental standards of length and mass of the United States from the customary standards based on those of England to metric standards (Mendenhall 1922). It was issued on April 5, 1893, by Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, with the approval of the United States Secretary of the Treasury, John Griffin Carlisle. The order was issued as the Survey's Bulletin No. 26 - Fundamental Standards of Length and Mass.\n\nStandards before the order [ edit ]\n\nIn October 1834, the United Kingdom Houses of Parliament were destroyed in a fire, and the British standards of length and mass were also destroyed. \"When the new imperial standards to replace them were completed in 1855, two copies of the yard and one copy of the avoirdupois pound were presented to the United States\" (Barbrow & Judson 1976, 9). These were superior to the yard then in use, so one of them was adopted as the United States national standard yard. These yards were taken to England and re-compared with the imperial yard in 1876 and 1888. The pound provided by the United Kingdom agreed with the United States mint pound, which remained the national standard according to Barbrow and Judson. Hockert (2015) claims the UK pound replaced the mint pound.\n\nThese were the fundamental standards for customary length and mass measurements in the United States, but the Office of Weights and Measures had other standards for metric measurements.\n\nOfficial recognition of the metric system [ edit ]\n\nThe Metric Act of 1866 was passed by Congress and allowed, but did not require, the use of the metric system. Included in the law was a table of conversion factors between the traditional and metric units. The U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Office of Weights and Measures had on hand a number of metric standards, and selected the iron \u201cCommittee Meter\u201d and the platinum \"Arago Kilogram\" to be the national standards for metric measurement; the standard yard and pound previously mentioned continued to be the standards for customary measurements. (Barbrow & Judson 1976, 10).\n\nA series of conferences in France between 1870 and 1875 led to the signing of the Metre Convention and to the permanent establishment of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, abbreviated BIPM after the French name. The BIPM made meter and kilogram standards for all the countries that signed the treaty; the two meters and two kilograms allocated to the United States arrived in 1890, and were adopted as national standards (Barbrow & Judson 1976, 16).\n\nReasons for the change [ edit ]\n\nThe imperial standard yard of 1855 was found to be unstable and shortening by measurable amounts (Barbrow & Judson 1976, 16). Also, the mint pound was found to be \u201clikewise unfit for use.\u201d For several years before the Mendenhall order was actually issued, the Office of Weights and Measures was \u201cpractically forced\u201d to use the metric standards because of their superior stability, and because they were better designed for carrying out precision comparisons. The Office found that the conversion tables in the 1866 law were satisfactory and used them to derive customary length and mass from the metric standards. The conversions were 1 yard = \u200b3600\u2044 3937 meter and 1 pound = 0.4535924277 kilogram. The Mendenhall order amounted to a formal announcement of a change that had already occurred (Mendenhall 1922).\n\nRefinement of the conversions [ edit ]\n\nThe definitions of 1893 remained unchanged for 66 years, but increasing precision in measurements gradually made the differences in the standards in use in English-speaking countries important. By the international yard and pound agreement of July 1, 1959, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States agreed that 1 yard = 0.9144 meter and that 1 avoirdupois pound = 0.45359237 kilogram (but see U.S. survey foot in the foot) (Barbrow & Judson 1976, 20).\n\nStandards versus systems [ edit ]\n\nMendenhall ordered that the standards used for the most accurate length and mass comparison change from certain yard and pound objects to certain meter and kilogram objects, but did not require anyone outside of the Office of Weights and Measures to change from the customary units to the metric system.\n\nSee also [ edit ]"}
{"text":"South Carolina General Assembly\n\n120th Session, 2013-2014\n\nDownload This Bill in Microsoft Word format\n\nIndicates Matter Stricken\n\nIndicates New Matter\n\nH. 4923\n\nSTATUS INFORMATION\n\nGeneral Bill\n\nSponsors: Rep. Nanney\n\nDocument Path: l:\\council\\bills\\dka\\3161cm14.docx\n\nIntroduced in the House on March 12, 2014\n\nCurrently residing in the House Committee on Education and Public Works\n\nSummary: Bicycles\n\nHISTORY OF LEGISLATIVE ACTIONS\n\nDate Body Action Description with journal page number ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3\/12\/2014 House Introduced and read first time (House Journal-page 13) 3\/12\/2014 House Referred to Committee on Education and Public Works (House Journal-page 13)\n\nView the latest legislative information at the website\n\nVERSIONS OF THIS BILL\n\n3\/12\/2014\n\n(Text matches printed bills. Document has been reformatted to meet World Wide Web specifications.)\n\nA BILL\n\nTO AMEND THE CODE OF LAWS OF SOUTH CAROLINA, 1976, BY ADDING SECTION 56-1-1715 SO AS TO REQUIRE THE OWNER OF A BICYCLE TO OBTAIN A PERMIT FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES AND LIABILITY INSURANCE AS IS REQUIRED OF MOTOR VEHICLES BEFORE OPERATING A BICYCLE ALONG A HIGHWAY WHOSE MAXIMUM SPEED LIMIT IS AT LEAST THIRTY-FIVE MILES AN HOUR; AND BY ADDING SECTION 56-3-115 SO AS TO PROVIDE THAT NOTWITHSTANDING ANY OTHER PROVISION OF LAW, FOR THE PURPOSES OF REGISTRATION AND THE REQUIRED LIMITS OF LIABILITY INSURANCE, A MOPED IS A MOTOR VEHICLE.\n\nBe it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina:\n\nSECTION 1. Article 9, Chapter 1, Title 56 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding:\n\n\"Section 56-1-1715. (A) Notwithstanding another provision of law, the owner of a bicycle who is at least fifteen years old shall obtain a bicycle permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles upon payment of a fee of five dollars and maintain liability insurance on the bicycle as is required of an owner of a motor vehicle as provided in Chapter 77, Title 38, before operating the bicycle along a highway whose maximum speed limit is at least thirty-five miles an hour.\n\n(B) Before the department issues a bicycle permit, the applicant must pass successfully all parts of a bicycle safety written examination that is developed by the department. The examination shall include a test of the applicant's eyesight, as pertains to the operation of a bicycle, a test of his ability to read and understand highway signs regulating, warning, and directing traffic and his knowledge of the traffic laws of this State. This permit must be in the applicant's immediate possession when the bicycle is operated along a highway whose maximum speed limit is at least thirty-five miles an hour. A person who is less than fifteen years old may not operate a bicycle along a highway whose maximum speed limit is at least thirty-five miles an hour.\"\n\nSECTION 2. Article 3, Chapter 3, Title 56 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding:\n\n\"Section 56-3-115. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, for the purposes of registration and the required limits of liability insurance, a moped is a motor vehicle.\"\n\nSECTION 3. This act takes effect upon approval by the Governor.\n\n----XX----\n\nThis web page was last updated on March 18, 2014 at 10:13 AM"}
{"text":"Numerous keys for Sniper Elite 3 have been invalidated and their owners left practically empty handed after Steam and developing studio Rebellion discovered they were stolen and then re-sold to other vendors.\n\nRebellion is offering the \"Target Hitler\" DLC extension as a make-good for those affected, but as far as the full game, they're being told to contact the reseller and demand a refund. Neither Rebellion nor Steam are offering that.\n\nRebellion, in a forum thread now stretching more than 700 comments, explicitly held the resellers blameless. \"One of our PC retail distributors informed us that some of their allotted Steam keys were stolen,\" Rebellion wrote. \"We believe these keys were then resold to multiple companies, with no payments going to either Valve or the retail distributor.\"\n\nRebellion informed Steam of this, and Steam revoked these keys.\n\n\"We have in no way targeted any specific vendors (who may have also thought these keys were legitimate),\" Rebellion added, \"just this one set of keys.\"\n\nRebellion is facing a storm of angry responses on the game's Steam page as well as the studio's Facebook page. The most it's offering is the DLC, on the understanding that some may have preordered these keys and, therefore, if they lose the game they would also lose \"Target Hitler,\" which for now is available only as a preorder incentive.\n\nBuyers of the revoked keys have until July 4 to claim that DLC.\n\n\"All we can suggest if you have been affected is to please contact your vendor and first ask for a replacement key, and then contact us for the free pre-order DLC if you are successful,\" Rebellion wrote.\n\nPolygon has contacted Rebellion for additional comment and will update this story if any is provided."}
{"text":"We offered a charity bet to all of the main party leaders, and the only one to take us up was Nigel Farage. He\u2019s had his \u00a3500 on Soll at 20\/1, with any proceeds going to the RNLI.\n\nFunnily enough, that was the horse I was planning to back. Not sure whether to be pleased or not that Nigel agrees with me. I ought to point out that I don\u2019t remember backing a Grand National winner since the 1980s.\n\nFor political science groupies, the selection has to be Bob Ford at 50\/1. I don\u2019t think the horse was named after Manchester University\u2019s Rob Ford, co-author of the excellent UKIP study Revolt on the Right, but I could be wrong.\n\nIf you fancy a bet, you can find the latest odds on the big race here."}
{"text":"After last month\u2019s insane\/awesome issue, Nailbiter returns with a story that reveals quite a bit about the series\u2019 mythology. Is it good?\n\nNailbiter #23 (Image Comics)\n\nObservations\n\nIf you\u2019re a deadbeat foster parent, then you kind of deserve having Finch and Crane bust into your house with their guns drawn.\n\nA trip down memory lane with Edward Warren: Come for the nightmare-inducing childhood drawings, stay for the revelations.\n\nWhen Edward Warren says things are about to get weird, you can count on it being an understatement.\n\nPoor Edward. I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m about to say this, but maybe he actually does deserve some sympathy\u2026\n\n\u2026and I immediately retract that statement.\n\nSpeaking of feeling bad for people (and changing my mind), it\u2019s nice to see this character again. Not sure the rest of the Nailbiter cast is going to feel the same way.\n\nIs It Good?\n\nIf executed incorrectly, a multiple thread cliffhanger is a recipe for narrative frustration\/disaster. Lucky for us, we are in the wonderfully capable hands of Josh Williamson, who crafts an ending to Nailbiter #23 that is both perfectly paced and exhilarating.\n\nMost of the issue is spent with Edward Warren slowly revealing things about himself to Alice. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have turned into a massive exposition dump. Instead, Williamson ties Warren\u2019s story perfectly into what has come before while simultaneously leading us on a bizarre trip into one of the darkest (and strangely well-lit) corners of Buckaroo.\n\nMeanwhile, this journey of discovery is juxtaposed with Finch and Crane\u2019s mad dash to find Alice. Adding to the desperation of the search is their attempt to make sense of the evening\u2019s brutal violence. Throw in a meeting between Finch and Marigold\u2013along with Crane alluding to an even more improbable upcoming alliance\u2013and you\u2019ve got a couple of riveting plot lines to follow.\n\nAnd as if all that weren\u2019t enough, the issue\u2019s coda brings a major character back into the fold in a very big way. Admittedly, I wanted to scream at Williamson when he cut away from the Warren\/Alice revelations, but the final page more than made up for it.\n\nAs usual, Mike Henderson\u2019s artwork is outstanding. He and colorist Adam Guzowski do a fantastic job rendering the issue\u2019s many location and mood changes. I also love the way Henderson draws the returning character so differently from how we got used to seeing him\/her before. As good as he is at drawing gore and scary guys in armor, Henderson\u2019s ability to portray a character\u2019s emotions and mental state might be his greatest strength.\n\nThere\u2019s not a whole lot of action for Henderson to draw this issue, but Williamson\u2019s great dialogue and carefully rationed revelations more than make up for it. \u2018Bound by Blood\u2019 is turning out to be a perfect example of why Nailbiter is one of the best comics being published right now."}
{"text":"Juancarlo Parkhurst, owner of Lina\u2019s Diner and Bar, with some of his crew members in the restaurant\u2019s kitchen. Photo by Mike Diegel.\n\nSilver Spring\u2019s newest restaurant, Lina\u2019s Diner and Bar, will officially open Tuesday, May 30.\n\n\u201cWe opened up last Thursday, so this entire run, Thursday through Saturday is what we consider our soft open,\u201d said Juancarlo Parkhurst. \u201cWe\u2019ll be closed for the Monday holiday and then we\u2019ll start Tuesday with lunch, dinner as well as happy hour.\u201d\n\nParkhurst started cooking in college about 20 years ago to pay the bills, he said. He also cooked during a brief stint in law school, which he said he hated. He switched to the front of the house, working in various restaurants in New York City and South Beach, then went back to cooking, eventually moving back to New York City. He\u2019s been living in the Silver Spring area for about 12 years.\n\n\u201cMy most recent stint was as a general manager opening up RPM Italian,\u201d he said, an upscale Italian restaurant in Mount Vernon.\n\nThe inspiration for Lina\u2019s comes from his childhood experience going to a diner in New York City in the Meatpacking District that he said, \u201cjust blew my mind, it was such a cool place. You were seated next to transvestites, prostitutes, business people. It was open 24 hours a day. It was really kind of what I guess New York was in the 80s and 90s.\u201d\n\nWhat always intrigued him about that restaurant, he said, was that it was a diner but with a strong French influence. By going to other places in the city over the years, the bistro idea just got ingrained in him, Parkhurst said\n\nHe\u2019d started looking at the location (8402 Georgia Ave.) and talking to the landlord eight years ago before actually jumping out on his own with Lina\u2019s. He spent about two and half months renovating the space to get ready for the opening.\n\nThe diner is named after his daughter, 10-year-old Carolina. The outdoor patio is named Sam\u2019s Garden after his son (which also explains why the section of the menu listing burgers and such is labeled \u201cSamwiches\u201d).\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a very small, kind of recognizable comfort food menu,\u201d he said about the offerings. \u201cObviously, we have strong classics.\u201d\n\nThose dishes include steak frites, a double cheeseburger, an omelette in the French style (\u201ca little loose on the inside\u201d), pork belly poutine, grilled bratwurst, and a Croque Monsieur or Madame among other items. The restaurant will also start offering daily specials, including a fish of the day.\n\nThe clientele during the soft open \u201chas been a really interesting mix,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve had young families, I\u2019ve had young professionals, I\u2019ve had kind of all walks of life over the last week and a half. It\u2019s kind of what I wanted to go for\u2014very much going back to that experience I had as a child.\n\n\u201cYou can\u2019t be everything to everyone,\u201d Parkhurst continued, \u201cbut I hope it\u2019s a comfortable space for a lot of people.\u201d\n\nLunch at Lina\u2019s will run from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and then reopen at 5 for dinner. Monday through Thursday, the kitchen will be open until 10 p.m. and the bar open until 11, and open one hour later for each on Friday and Saturday. The restaurant does not accept cash, only credit and debit cards.\n\n(Editor\u2019s note: Lina\u2019s Diner and Bar\u2019s website will go live next week.)\n\nOne of the pieces off artwork on the walls is a caricature by a local artist of Parkhurst\u2019s daughter Carolina, for whom the diner is named. Photo by Mike Diegel.\n\nFollow Source of the Spring on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Sign up for our free Weekly Newsletter here. Submit events to our Community Events Calendar here. Please send tips and questions through our News Tips form, or email [email protected]\n\nLearn how to support Source of the Spring here.\n\nSee something around town? Tag your photos on Twitter & Instagram with #SourceShots."}
{"text":"Don't be expecting Oculus Rift support for the PS4 or Xbox One any time soon.\n\nThe Oculus Rift is making waves in the world of PC gaming as of late, trying it's best to provide gamers with the VR device we have been dreaming of since Tron. Even in the prototype stage, support for the device is constantly growing among PC developers, but Sony and Microsoft have seemingly shown very little interest. Talking to Tech Radar, creator Palmer Luckey says that's fine, explaining that the next-gen consoles are still too limited for his vision anyway.\n\n\"Consoles are too limited for what we want to do. We're trying to make the best virtual reality device in the world and we want to continue to innovate and upgrade every year - continue making progress internally - and whenever we make big jumps we want to push that to the public.\"\n\nHe says that his main problem with consoles is that after they are released, they are locked into a certain spec for a very long time. \"Look at the PCs that existed eight years ago. There have been so many huge advances since then. Now look at the VR hardware of today. I think the jump we're going to see in the next four or five years is going to be massive, and already VR is a very intensive thing, it requires rendering at high resolutions at over 60 frames a second in 3D.\"\n\n\"We're seeing games that are already saying they're gonna run in 720p on next gen so they can barely hit 60 in 2D,\" he continues, no doubt referencing the \"resolutiongate\" controversy. \"It's hard to imagine them running a VR experience that's on par with PC.\"\n\nWhen asked if Luckey lumped Valve's upcoming \"Steam Machines,\" (AKA, the Steam Box) in with his \"consoles\" statement, he is a bit more optimistic. \"We're good friends with Valve,\" laughs Luckey, \"We're great friends with them.\"\n\nSource: Tech Radar"}
{"text":"In the history of TV\u2014all 75 years of it\u2014there has never been a time when so much content has been so readily available to watch.\n\nBut with the average cable package now topping $103, according to Leichtman Research Group, and a new wave of direct-to-consumer services, viewers have more choices than ever in how they watch, via over-the-top, or OTT, services.\n\n\u201cThe key advantage to launching a stand-alone service is growing their audience beyond the traditional pay-TV ecosystem,\u201d said Glenn Hower, a senior media analyst at the Dallas-based research firm Parks Associates.\n\nAbout 82 percent of TV households nationwide subscribe to some form of pay-TV service, according to Leichtman. That\u2019s down 5 percent from 2011. As consumer behavior changed, and the technology got better, TV programmers took notice and started going over the top.\n\nCBS All Access was one of the first to launch in October 2014. It now has almost 1.5 million subscribers paying $5.99 a month for CBS shows as well as exclusive programs like The Good Fight and the upcoming Star Trek. HBO Now was the first premium direct-to-consumer service. It launched in April 2015 and now has more than 2 million subscribers paying $14.99 per month.\n\nCBS\n\nAnd while those platforms serve a wide audience, the new trend is niche.\n\nThis month, Turner launched Boomerang, an ad-free streaming service that comes with access to thousands of hours of cartoons including the entire Hanna-Barbera, Looney Tunes and MGM libraries.\n\nAnother streaming player, WWE Network, is built for fans of professional wrestling.\n\n\u201cBack in 2012 and 2013, we started doing research among our fans, and we found out pretty quickly that WWE fans were consuming a lot of digital content online, about five times the national average,\u201d WWE chief revenue and marketing officer Michelle Wilson told Adweek. \u201cSo while we were originally going down the path of launching a linear TV network, when we saw this data the light bulb went off for us and we felt this was an opportunity for us to go direct to our consumers.\u201d\n\nWWE only ranks behind Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and MLB.TV in total paid subscribers, according to a 2016 report from Parks Associates. Showtime is No. 9 and CBS All Access is No. 10 in total subscribers, per that same report.\n\n\u201cWe like calculated risks and we were willing to take the risk for the revenue upside and for the opportunity to drive more engagement,\u201d said Wilson. \u201cWe felt streaming provided the greatest long-term transformative growth for WWE on a global basis.\u201d\n\nThe three-year-old WWE Network, which can be viewed with services like Roku and Apple TV, now has nearly 2 million paid and free trial subscribers across the globe. The service is $9.99 a month.\n\nWhile the standalone streaming model has been a hit for WWE, not every company sees the need to go over the top, whether on its own or with the new streaming bundles from the likes of AT&T\u2019s DirecTV Now, Dish\u2019s Sling and Google\u2019s YouTube, as well as offerings from Hulu and PlayStation Vue.\n\nBob Bakish, CEO of Viacom, which includes networks like Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV and the soon-to-launch Paramount Network, says signing on with a streaming service may increase viewers, but won\u2019t always make economic sense.\n\n\u201cIf you think about all these guys that have launched they\u2019re all essentially the same,\u201d said Bakish. \u201cWhat I mean by that is they\u2019re all about 40 bucks. They\u2019re all based on broadcast and sports. And if you talk to the CEOs of any of them, they\u2019ll tell you the same thing, which is we can\u2019t make any money, which is probably code for we\u2019re losing money on a variable basis.\u201d"}
{"text":"US Paving the Way for Massive First Strike on North Korea Nuclear and Missile Infrastructure\n\nThe emerging Chinese super powers North Korean Proxy continues to accelerate towards being able to punch a hole through the US Military Empires encirclement of China as every other day brings North Korea a step closer towards it's primary objective of hitting and destroying the US Military base on Guam, home to over 10,000 troops and 160,000 US citizens, and which as the following map illustrates is just 1 of 400 US military bases in Asia for the express purpose of encircling and containing China.\n\nThe latest news is that of a successful H-bomb test, though western scientists are reporting that the detonation registering on the richter scale was more on par with a 100k device rather an H-bomb that one would expect to have been several orders of magnitude more powerful. Still a 100k device would more than capable of destroying the US military base on Guam, in fact would be powerful enough to destroy most of the infrastructure of any of worlds major the cities.\n\nIn response to which US Defence Secretary James Mattis stated that the US is considering military options towards eliminating the North Korean nuclear threat. Including warning of a 'massive military response' if North Korea attacks any US interests, and that Trump was being briefed on each of the \"many military options\" for dealing with the North Korean nuclear threat.\n\n\"Our commitment among the allies are ironclad. Any threat to the United States or its territories, including Guam, or our allies will be met with a massive military response, a response both effective and overwhelming.\"\n\n\"We are not looking to the total annihilation of a country, namely North Korea, but as I said, we have many options to do so.\"\n\nEarlier President Trump had warned of halting trade with any nation that does business with North Korea, which is primarily aimed at the $500 billion of goods imported annually from China.\n\nUltimately the US objective is for North Korea to be taken over by South Korea, whilst for China it is the opposite objective.\n\nSo the trend towards war with China remains in motion as I warned of in my in-depth analysis in the Trump Reset series that concluded BEFORE Donald Trump took office of why the US was inevitably trending towards War with China and therefore to understand why events such as a bellicose North Korea are happening one needs to look through prism of the world\u2019s TWO global military and economic super powers. The United States as the defacto global super power, and the emerging Chinese super power that ultimately seeks to displace the United States with its own military and economic global empire.\n\nSo that there is no confusion, a war that will likely involve the use of nuclear weapons is INEVITABLE as I iterated in my latest video analysis that concerned the role that the North Korean proxy was playing as China attempts to punch a hole through the ring of US military bases encircling China and its inevitable nuclear war consequences.\n\nhttps:\/\/youtu.be\/a-bS0oWewgw (Note the video is unavailable on some devices such as mobile phones).\n\nIn respect of which the US looks set to use at least a dozen tactical nuclear weapons on North Korea to neutralise their missile and nuclear infrastructure.\n\nOther videos in the Trump Reset - War with China series:\n\nDelirium - Why Trump Won the Election\n\nMy first video in this series was in the immediate aftermath of the US election and explained why Trump won.\n\nThe Putin Doctrine\n\nMy second video concerned Trump following the \"Putin Doctrine\", one of there being no difference between that which is truth and that which is fiction.\n\nWill the CIA Assassinate President Trump?\n\nThe prospects of the risk of President Trump going against the interests of the US military industrial, intelligence and corporate complex, such as being friendly towards Russia and dismissive of NATO and US intelligence that risks the CIA moving once more to remove a 'rogue' president from office, the last being 1963.\n\nTrump vs the Deep State that Hides in Plain Sight\n\nThe \"Deep State\" best describes the invisible labyrinth of power which truly controls the United States no matter which party is in power against which a President Donald Trump will find himself doing battle against as his first press conference illustrates where Trump let rip into the mainstream press (CNN) as he reacted to the CIA's leaking of another MI6 dodgy dossier to the mainstream press, calling it all 'Fake News', fake intelligence by something that could have come out of Nazi Germany.\n\nAnd neither should it be forgotten that there are two other nuclear weapon proxies in the region, India for the US and Pakistan for China. Which as the North Korea theatre continues to escalate then soon could also be engineered towards threatening postures in the interest of each of the super powers interests i.e. India \/ China border skirmishes etc.\n\nEnsure you are subscribed to my always free newsletter and youtube channel Ensure for my forthcoming vides in the War with China series.\n\nBy Nadeem Walayat\n\nhttp:\/\/www.marketoracle.co.uk\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2005-2017 Marketoracle.co.uk (Market Oracle Ltd). All rights reserved.\n\nNadeem Walayat has over 30 years experience of trading derivatives, portfolio management and analysing the financial markets, including one of few who both anticipated and Beat the 1987 Crash. Nadeem's forward looking analysis focuses on UK inflation, economy, interest rates and housing market. He is the author of five ebook's in the The Inflation Mega-Trend and Stocks Stealth Bull Market series that can be downloaded for Free.\n\nNadeem is the Editor of The Market Oracle, a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication that presents in-depth analysis from over 1000 experienced analysts on a range of views of the probable direction of the financial markets, thus enabling our readers to arrive at an informed opinion on future market direction. http:\/\/www.marketoracle.co.uk\n\nDisclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any trading losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors before engaging in any trading activities.\n\nNadeem Walayat Archive\n\n\u00a9 2005-2019 http:\/\/www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication."}
{"text":"The past few days, it seems like every member of the media has been all over the attempt to conflate the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party. One person who\u2019s not getting in the act, though? Glenn Beck. It\u2019s unsurprising considering that Beck really, really likes the Tea Party and really, really doesn\u2019t like Occupy Wall Street.\n\nAnd so, today on his radio show, Beck had fairly negative things to say about one such person making those connections; Jon Stewart.\n\nAfter playing clips of Stewart asking how the protesters are not like the Tea Party, Beck claimed he couldn\u2019t fit all the reasons in even the two hour running length of his GBTV show.\n\nAfter accusing the OWS crowd of wanting to murder and cannibalize rich people, Beck went onto Stewart personally.\n\n\u201cYou know, Jon Stewart, I have absolutely no respect for you. You are not a thinking man at all.\u201d\n\nSo Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart don\u2019t see eye to eye on the issue. I will say this, that\u2019s one way the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are exactly, 100% identical.\n\nListen to the clip below:\n\n(h\/t)\n\nHave a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com"}
{"text":"I have been tattooed twice, say, the usual-machine-way and I\u2019m not sure when I started the decision to have a traditional tattoo at least once. It appealed to me so much because it was raw and real. Then some friends went up the mountains to have their tattoos done manually, known as pagbabatok, by famous Whang Od (if you don\u2019t know yet, it\u2019s pronounced as Fang-Od). So I researched more about the traditional art, Whang-Od, and how to get there, through blogs and friends. So if you\u2019ve read the title, I\u2019m not really getting into those details. You can find tons of info in any search engine so go ahead and do that.\n\nI told my family and friends about my plans to go and they were all like, am I sure, can I handle the pain, it\u2019s too risky and dangerous, blah blah.\n\nDays before our trip to Kalinga, we visited a friend who\u2019s had his \u201cbatok\u201d last year and has visited Buscalan many times already. Aside from the usual warnings of the dangerous road and rough trek, he mentioned, \u201cPero eto ang pinakamadumi na tato ah. Hanggang ngayon pag pinipisil ko yung tato ko, may lumalabas eh.\u201d (\u201cThis is the dirtiest tattoo. Even now, when I pinch it, something comes out.\u201d) I asked him if he ever had it checked by a doctor, he said no, simply because it will defeat the purpose of having it done traditionally. Also he was a friend of the group Tado was with on the way there, so he knew the people who died to take this journey, may they rest in peace, that\u2019s why he asked me if I still wanted to go. You can also discover in blogs that though Whang Od changes the pine needle to use per person, she does not change the cloth she uses to wipe over the skin of those getting their tattoos. Even if you give her a new one to use, she won\u2019t allow it. The ink to be used is the soot from her cooking-ware mixed with water.\n\nHonestly, knowing all these didn\u2019t even shake my desire to go there. I have decided before I knew.\n\nI was ready to go alone, but my friend Keisha wanted to go too, so we went together. We also happen to meet Kuya Paolo along the way who\u2019s heading to Buscalan. You can read about our trip here.\n\nSo, yes, you already (hopefully) know the process is cringe-worthy. They don\u2019t give you anesthesia. For me, it was 20 times more painful than machine tattoos, and I\u2019d like to believe I have a strong pain tolerance. I managed not to cry or scream though, concentrating on the plants around and savoring the feeling of what the elders in the tribes have felt. Kuya Francis Pa-in, our guide, also told us stories. The pain was too much to bear for some that there were cases when the person peed, fainted, and yes, even pooped. In these instances, Whang Od won\u2019t continue with the tattoo even if you insist, she can always tell if the person can or can\u2019t bear it. Also for women on their dreaded time of the month, it is not advisable since it can be more painful or for whatever reason I don\u2019t know. Ask your doctor. Don\u2019t worry too much though, Keisha was on hers when she got tattooed and she\u2019s fine. Her tattoo just bled profusely more than mine though I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s the position or her condition that time. I earnestly hope what I\u2019m saying doesn\u2019t discourage you if you happen to plan to go.\n\nAfter we\u2019ve been permanently branded a traditional Buscalan art, I was more than overwhelmed. I was exhilarated. I have never felt more alive and proud. The throbbing wasn\u2019t so unbearable after. They just put coconut oil on it and said we didn\u2019t have to put anything after. It looked like pointillism and it was swelling more than my previous tattoos after an hour. We were allowed to take a bath that afternoon, but getting it wet a day after wasn\u2019t advisable since it might affect the natural scattering of the ink. The following day, about four inches of my arm was swelling in length, and an inch more in terms of width.\n\nI could not lower my hand because the blood flows down and it throbs like hell so I held it up all the time. This wasn\u2019t the case for Keisha though, again, it might vary by the tattoo\u2019s position. That\u2019s when I understood what Kuya Francis said about tattoos on the legs and feet are so painful after because the blood flows down and you can\u2019t really put them up unless you\u2019re lying down. My wrist kept throbbing when my hand was down for at least a week.\n\nThe soot ink started to form solid lines. I also observed that it looked and peeled like a normal wound, except the dried skin was black. Well, it\u2019s really a wound after all. It was my personal choice not to put antibiotic or anything on it because I wanted it to be as genuine as the tradition.\n\nWhen my tattoo started to look out of hand though, I was slightly worried since nobody said that it would look so scathed after a week. People would stare at it with judging looks, like they were telling me I made a very unwise decision getting it. I didn\u2019t really care. And those who inquired were taken aback upon hearing the story behind it. Although I admit, it gets pretty tiring to explain yourself to everyone.\n\nThankfully, Keisha\u2019s tattoo looked the same. So we tried to find out more about the healing process of this kind of tattoo and nothing in the internet mentioned it. So we just resorted to letting it heal naturally.\n\nOn the third week I decided it was safe to put moisturizer on it since the wound was closed and was just repairing the skin, which was really, really itchy by the way. I applied RestoraDerm, since I use it when my skin gets too dry. It works wonders and it did work its wonder on my healing tattoo.\n\nThe skin didn\u2019t look too dry and it peeled faster, leaving a grey tint, like ash. It was still embossed though. I thought this was finally how the color was going to look like since the ink used was really soot. I consistently put the lotion every morning after bathing and before I go to sleep at night. Keisha told me she put on a regular lotion so I made her try RestoraDerm as well. She said it works better and the itching lessened, but a normal lotion will do.\n\nMy tattoo still peeled and it looked like it had blackheads on the fourth week. I admit I always picked on it. I completely don\u2019t recommend doing this though. When the excess skin came off, there were visible holes on my arm where the needle went through. It started to flatten as well but the skin was still unsmooth because of the irregularity the holes bring. Still, it looks healed now. My own eyes tell me that it\u2019s infection free.\n\nNow the lines are obviously not perfectly straight, but that\u2019s the beauty of it. It wasn\u2019t made by a machine. It is purely done by the hands of a 95-year old Kalinga tattoo artist, with pine needle and soot as her tools, and almost a century\u2019s worth of experience. I carry this art, traditionally only for the most brave and beautiful.\n\nAll details mentioned were my own experiences and choices. I decided to share them since I found no other blog saying what happens AFTER you get your batok.\n\nSo for those of you who are attempting to get your tattoos from Whang Od and are wondering about the risks and joys, you\u2019re welcome. Though I earnestly discourage you to go there if you just want to look cool. Revere the art, the artist and the culture.\n\nFeel free to share how you managed your batok or if you have any questions on the comments below. \ud83d\ude42\n\nAdvertisements"}
{"text":"Town hall erupts in jeers after GOP official lies about ACA \u2018death panels\u2019 Constituents weren\u2019t having it.\n\nTown hall erupts in jeers after GOP official lies about ACA \u2018death panels\u2019.\n\n(Credit: CNN screengrab)\n\nConfronted with talking to constituents about health care, these GOP lawmakers chose to hide Members of Congress are fleeing from concerned constituents. (thinkprogress.org)\n\nBy Zack Ford\n\nPolitifact\u2019s 2009 \u201cLie of the Year\u201d was brought back from the dead during a Saturday town hall hosted by Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL)\u2014and the mostly pro-ACA crowd wasn\u2019t having any of it.\n\nBill Akins\u2014chair of Pasco County, Florida\u2019s Republican Party\u2014told the roughly 250 people in attendance that his problem with the Affordable Care Act is that \u201cthere is a provision in there that anyone over the age of 74 has to go before what is effectively a death panel.\u201d\n\nAs soon as the words \u201cdeath panel\u201d left Akins\u2019 mouth, the crowd erupted in boos, jeers, and chants of \u201cliar, liar.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s in there folks. You\u2019re wrong!\u201d Akins replied, falsely, as Bilirakis tried to restore order. Akins then calls the angry crowd \u201cchildren.\u201d\n\nAs CNN\u2019s Eric Bradner reported from the event, Bilirakis heard from a man who said his daughter has a genetic disease is still alive because of the ACA and a doctor who reported seeing fewer self-paying patients since the ACA became law.\n\nBut Bilirakis\u2014 who describes himself as a \u201cstaunch opponent of Obamacare\u201d on his website\u2014persisted in making his case that people should have the \u201cchoice\u201d to be uninsured.\n\n\u201cYou gotta have choice, ladies and gentleman,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople should have the opportunity to pay for their own plan based on their own needs.\u201d\n\nBilirakis held a town hall on the Affordable Care Act last weekend, too. At that event, like the one on Saturday, he was confronted by a crowd mostly opposed to repealing the ACA.\n\nAs ThinkProgress wrote on the occasion of Bilirakis\u2019 previous town hall, his willingness to meet with his constituents \u201csets him apart from other Republican members of Congress, several of whom have recently fled constituent town halls in order to avoid dealing with crowds of pro-Obamacare demonstrators.\u201d\n\nAnother opponent of the ACA, Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA), recently said he doesn\u2019t want to hold town halls because \u201csince Obamacare and these issues have come up, the women are in my grill no matter where I go.\u201d\n\nRepublican members of Congress haven\u2019t yet decided how to deal with the ACA, if at all, but all of the options they\u2019ve considered for replacements would create more problems than they\u2019d solve.\n\nStudies indicate repealing the ACA could cost 32 million people their health insurance, reduce U.S. job growth by al-most 1.2 million in 2019, and result in between 27,000 and 36,000 preventable deaths each year.\n\nZack Ford Follow LGBT Editor at ThinkProgress.org. Gay, Atheist, Pianist, Un-apologetic \u201cSocial Justice Warrior"}
{"text":"Surveillance footage captured a man robbing the TCF Bank branch at 4930 N. Milwaukee Ave. View Full Caption Bandittracker.com\n\nCHICAGO \u2014 Police said they arrested a man suspected of robbing a bank in Jefferson Park Sunday morning.\n\nA man robbed the TCF Bank branch at 4930 N. Milwaukee Ave. about 11:20 a.m., according to the FBI. He told tellers he had a weapon but never showed one, according to the FBI.\n\nHe fled the building with an undisclosed amount of money, but cops caught up to a suspect matching his description about 10 minutes later, said Officer Janel Sedevic, a police department spokeswoman.\n\nThe 36-year-old man was arrested but had not been charged as of early Monday afternoon, authorities said.\n\nSedevic said no one was hurt in the robbery."}
{"text":"Eric (34) is the eldest brother with the highest education. He has his eye on increasing profits, improving customer service, and expanding the tow-truck fleet (currently at a whopping 3 trucks) in order to make a push into the huge Toronto market. Secretly, Eric\u2019s come home after botching a transportation company merger in Saskatchewan.\n\nJon (31) has been working at Bill & Sons Towing since he dropped out of high school in Grade 9. Jon sees himself as the rightful heir to running the family business, and believes Eric has swooped in with his \u2018fancy college degree\u2019 to take something that doesn\u2019t belong to him. Highly resistant to change, Jon sees no point in expanding the business or improving customer service.\n\nTony (30) is the undeniable screw-up of the family. Whether it\u2019s \u201ccleaning out\u201d towed vehicles, or running insurance scams, Tony will do anything to stuff his wallet. Yet for all the trouble he causes, he\u2019s a huge asset as an all-round utility man; he\u2019s a skilled tow driver, mechanic, and locksmith."}
{"text":"A Manhattan nail salon owner defended her customers and store from an armed robber on Wednesday night. Annie Sheng, who owns Peony Nails Spa at 542 LaGuardia Place, just down the street from Washington Square Park, says it started when a man wearing a cap and a plaid shirt in her store around 8:30 p.m.; WABC 7 reports that besides Sheng, there were 10 customers, two children and her staff in the store.\n\nSheng asked him if he needed any help and that's when he threatened her for the money. She told ABC 7, \"He came my way and said, don't talk I have a gun, give me your money.\"\n\nAs he approached her behind the cash register counter, Sheng said the robber reached for his gun, so she acted: \"I see him try to go get it and I push it [his arm] and just push him,\" shoving him in the body and then shoving the gun down his pants.\n\nThe robber walked out of the store, and Sheng followed him to the door and then called the police:\n\nSheng, who told reporters she wasn't scared, is 5'4\" and about 120 pounds. The attempted robber is about 5'11\" and 160 pounds. Police say the suspect \"fits the description\" of a man wanted for other armed robberies at nail salons, according to the Post.\n\nHer 10-year-old daughter said, \"She should have done it but at the same time, it was dangerous.\""}
{"text":"This election year has been absolutely unprecidented, even for people who have no real interest in politics. The television tells us that one of the two most untrusted, disliked candidates in living memory will become our next President- while simultaniously mocking and berating those who challenge the validity of this \"representative democracy\". Red-baiting, rampant corruption proven by email leaks, and mainstream denial- how the hell do we fix this?\n\nThe key to understanding the chances of real change lies in recognizing that the most important variable in that equation is us. Life isn't a tv channel or Facebook feed to get updates on; it must be interactive for any success to occur. Think of Bernie's groundbreaking campaign- did we all just wait to see the results? Or did we make it happen? Yes, we were driven by enthusiasm and hope back then, which is now (quite purposely) in short supply...\n\nIt's not all our fault- this purposely widespread and worsening poverty gives us no time or energy to do much more. Our \"education\" trains us to be disciplined robots, skilled mostly at consuming, following orders, and fighting with each other over petty personal differences without ever grasping the bigger picture. That self-destructive cognitive dissonance is also a primary cause for this country's (profitably medicated) rampant depression and mental illness.\n\nA lot of the issue is our successful creation of a \"viewer\" society, where the majority lives off the media's narrative for their reality checks instead of actually making anything happen. Reality is external, somewhere else, something that you get updates on from Twitter. In our Coke-or-Pepsi mentality, any healthy skepticism about the credibility or motive of 'news' is mitigated by the choice of different flavored networks- 'lesser evil' narratives become \"truth\".\n\nThen add to that all of the indoctrinated divisive thinking perpetuated by over-hyped labels, categories, and blatant scapegoating. Community spirit and true patriotism is disintegrating, being replaced by every-citizen-for-themselves desperation which breeds populace infighting instead of cooperative pride. The establishment's version of society is just another corporate product that we were lured into, then became a stranglehold monopoly at all our expense.\n\nWhat both Bernie and Trump had in common was the idea that we don't have to be willing victims to it. But while Bernie's approach was civil, gentlemanly revolution built around equality and integrity, Trump's was empowerment of belligerent non-conformity and disrespect as a blunt anti-status quo tool. Thus, we Berners largely considered the Trump crew to be ignorant and chaotic; the Trumpers called Bernie and his fans weak, establishment, and \"cucks\".\n\nAs is the reality in just about every polarized situation, neither are entirely correct... and neither entirely wrong.\n\nWhat Trump's crew has right is that we are the victims only because we allow ourselves to be, following the polite rules even when completely, irrefutably unacceptable. We've just been held hostage long enough in an undemocratic system that our own rights and freedoms are things we no longer personally defend, just wait and hope desperately that others will- yet our lives, laws, and opportunities are dictated to us, worsening, and we have proof it's rigged.\n\nIt's completely valid; however, when framed in a mob mentality with a fairly universally distasteful leader, it's easily condemnable, thus easily dismissable, thus susceptible to the current mainstream media tactic of \"Trump says that the elections are rigged, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? Because if you do, you must support TRUMP. How can anyone be so anti-American? PEACEFUL TRANSITION OF POWER, SAUSAGE BEING MADE, now here's more celebrities!\"\n\nIn a capitalist land of scheming dishonesty, where respectful integrity can be perceived as a fatal disadvantage in business, life, and politics, Trump fans picked their well-qualified challenger. Consistency and trustworthiness came second to the justified anger and hatred toward the smug, elitist establishment \"left\". Under that completely untrue false-progressive flag, dismissal of the Democratic party also easily included their 'socialist' alternative candidate.\n\nWhat Bernie's political revolutionaries had right is that populace unity is absolutely essential, and finding common ground is always more powerful and productive than finding differences to fight among ourselves over. His example was that respectful dialogue, even (or especially) with those with opposing views, could be done using merely facts, not incivility and cheap personal shots. He taught an entire generation what the words \"civil servant\" could mean.\n\nThe contrast left many Berners logically analyzing everything and everyone with their now validated \"unrealistic ideological purity\", including the ridiculously over-covered Trump campaign. They saw the violence, heard all the cavalier rhetoric, and summarily dismissed Trump and his fans as irrational, dangerous fools. While Hillary must indeed be stopped, exchanging one ego-driven con artist for another wasn't just irrational, but a moral antithesis.\n\nIn my view, both were doing the best they could under ugly circumstances to work for the common greater good- end of this neoliberal tyranny, recognition of the ugly reality for the majority, and swift accountability for those who orchestrated and profited off this corporate takeover and subversion of our democracy. Those are the overlapping goals I firmly believe we must build on to take our country back; surely it far outweighs what might divide us all?\n\nThe rich, duplicitous political actors have taken over both controlling political parties, replacing representation 'of the people, by the people, for the people' with representation 'of the sponsors, by the corporate media, for the elite agendas' - which by their greedy nature and forced perpetuation must continuously run contrary to our own rights, freedoms, and any hope of sustainable quality of life. This affects us all, regardless of our personal political views.\n\nWhat most people have lost sight of is that a political party is merely a tool, not an identity. Protecting our futures and say in governance cannot be effectively nor ethically handled through empty slogans, high-dollar lobbyists, or focusing on trivialities while atrocities get effectively normalized. Successfully clouding this fact has allowed most political opinion and direction to become just dictated and assimilated, instead of generated and represented.\n\nHow about instead of teams or details, we unite in basic ethics? I know we've been taught \"winning by any means\" justifies dishonesty and spin for the greater good, but this bad logic is the same one being utilized by those we must overcome. Lowering ourselves to their level only evens the playing field to where sheer power and money win. By outdating our integrity, we've unfortunately turned reality into just another opinion to be argued away or ignored.\n\nWe must face our reality; neither minority-yet-controlling party represents or protects us. Equal justice under the law is a bad joke. Native Americans are now being arrested trying to stop more oil dumping into our water. Families in places like Flint are being poisoned by their own crumbling infrastructure. Our bloated military, bigger than the next several largest combined, are now bombing seven different countries while most of us drown in poverty and debt.\n\nOne candidate still in this race is fundamentally opposed to every single one of these issues. Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party has spoken out but largely not been heard, buried under verifiably skewed polls and the childish, distractionary soap opera drama our mainstream media has chosen to focused on instead. We have a true \"none of the above\" third party solution available to 48 states- plenty to collectively say to the reigning duopoly, enough is enough.\n\nThere's a good chance that voting will still be rigged- bring it on. Bernie's run helped us prove that the DNC ran a completely fixed race, with every kind of manipulation and collusion possible being used. His mass appeal and turnout forced them to expose their own criminality in covering it up. Why not do it again? Make the whole damn country light up Green, see how well they can manipulate that with the whole world watching and reporting it closely.\n\nSo what are our \"chances\" of real change happening? That's up to us- all of us- and whether we can lay down our arms against fellow countrymen to finally effectively overcome the domestic terrorism of oligarchic oppression. I urge everyone to talk openly with your friends, families, strangers, anyone who will listen. Let's create informed voters. Let's beat these guys at their own game. Let's stop just complaining, and start actively organizing a truth offensive.\n\nAfter all, America historically finds greatest unity and patriotic pride when facing its biggest threats; surely this one qualifies?"}
{"text":"It\u2019s the weekend all 7s fans look forward to every year, the biggest party on the circuit. Here are ten stars to watch out for among the many on show.\n\nCECIL AFRIKA\n\nThe Blitzbokke came oh so close to taking the spoils in Tokyo, and one wonders if they might have had their star playmaker been fit to partake. One of the very best players South Africa have ever produced in the shortened version, Afrika is a fabulously gifted footballer with superb skills from both hand and foot, and his return is a big boost to the squad with the series title on a knife edge. Alongside Justin Geduld and Branco du Preez, coach Neil Powell has three dynamite sparks capable of weaving magic, but there\u2019s no question whose name will be first on the team sheet.\n\nANDREW AMONDE\n\nPaul Treu might not have Humphrey Kayange to call on, but he does have another talismanic figure up front to lean on for some much-needed inspiration. The Kenyan captain was one of the few to stand out of his countrymen in what has a mediocre effort in Tokyo. Tall and limber even though heavily armored with muscle, Amonde is a powerhouse runner with excellent offloading skills who is more than happy to lower the shoulder when his team needs some hard yards.\n\nDANNY BARRETT\n\nA recent graduate of the famed UCal Golden Bears program, the big back rower is more rugged than what one might expect from someone out of San Francisco. After some eye-catching displays in the ARC tournament he\u2019s been thrown in at the deep end in the IRB circuit, to which he has responded superbly. Somewhat ungainly but deceivingly quick, his trademarks are a piston-like fend (as Canadian Harry Jones can attest to) and thumping tackles that leave even the spectators wincing.\n\nBEN LAM\n\nGordon Tietjens has a habit of turning prospects into world beaters, and had this dynamo from Auckland not been injured for the entirety of the ITM Cup he might already be plying his trade in Super Rugby, but instead he is regaining his fitness on the circuit once more. The nephew of current Connacht coach and former Manu Samoa legend Pat Lam has a strong pedigree and stronger strides. Formerly a hulking winger, he is now found more often in the midfield, sucking in defenders and creating space for the likes Sherwin Stowers and George Tilsley out wide.\n\nEMOSI MULEVORO\n\nThere are at least a half dozen genuine stars one could pick out from the defending champions, names like Pio Tuwai and Samisoni Viriviri, but the man who stole the show in Tokyo was the Navy representative from Kadavu. With captain Osea Kolinisau occupying the flyhalf position, Mulevoro has had to fight off the quicksilver Waisea Nacuqu for the scrumhalf spot. Blessed with lightning acceleration and dancing feet that would make his illustrious predecessors proud, don\u2019t be surprised to see him shine again at So Kon Po.\n\nMARTIN RODRIGUEZ\n\nFollowers of Argentine rugby might recognize a familiar name among their contingent, one more often associated with the pink jersey of Stade Fran\u00e7ais than that of the Pumas 7s side. After featuring heavily in the World Cup he has struggled with injury for the past couple seasons and finding game time harder to come by, Rodriguez has returned to Rosario to revive his career, and is hoping to restore some confidence with a return to the faster code. Strongly built and with good footballing skills, he\u2019ll hope his experience rubs off on some of his younger teammates this weekend.\n\nJAMES RODWELL\n\nEngland\u2019s ginger giant plays his 50th tournament in Hong Kong, adding another stamp on his accomplished international career that began in Dubai in 2008 and also includes two 7s World Cups and a Commonwealth Games. The aerial specialist is approaching his 30th birthday but remains in peak physical condition and one of the premier support players on the circuit. Six years is a lengthy career in this competition, but his old teammate Simon Amor will be hoping he can get a couple more from one of his on-field lieutenants.\n\nCONOR TRAINOR\n\nThe dynamic midfielder looked set for stardom after scoring two tries against the All Blacks at the World Cup, but injuries and university obligations have slowed his progress. With both now behind him, the 24 year old has turned his focus to international rugby, starting with 7s, in the hopes of earning a professional contract. In this version he usually lines up at prop, but it\u2019s his running and distribution skills that have helped propel a surging Canadian side from also-rans to regular cup quarter finalists.\n\nVIRIMI VAKATAWA\n\nYou could be forgiven for thinking that the Racing M\u00e9tro flyer was playing for another country, he is after all a Fijian age-grade international, but he has instead opted to wear the tricolors of his adopted nation like that of another recent residency \u2018poach\u2019, Noa Nakaitaci. Whether or not one agrees with the policy, his talent and potential to step up to the senior side are not so debateable. A three-quarter in XVs, he lined up at prop for France in Tokyo and his strength and balanced running have the eyes of the selectors already.\n\nLEE WILLIAMS\n\nWales lost one of their playmakers in Rhys Jones to injury in Tokyo, but have thankfully regained the services of another. Williams is one of their few top-class 7s exponents, the last remaining member of the World Cup winners, and his speed of foot and thought will be a major boost to the side. On top of his talents he also assumes the captaincy, a role not foreign but a challenging one in light of his team\u2019s struggles this season."}
{"text":"An incorrect court order issued against the founder of Megaupload has been declared \u201cnull and void\u201d by a New Zealand judge. The legal bungle could lead to the return of the internet tycoon\u2019s multi-million dollar fortune.\n\nNew Zealand police reportedly made a procedural error and applied for the wrong kind of restraining order. As a consequence internet mogul Kim Dotcom, formally known as Kim Schmitz, was not afforded the opportunity to defend himself prior to the seizure of his assets eight weeks ago by the police.\n\nThe Judge presiding over the case, Justice Judith Potter said on Friday that the order carried no \u201clegal effect\u201d and the case would have to be re-evaluated, the NZ Herald reports.\n\nPotter said she would soon rule on whether the mistake meant the internet mogul should get his property back.\n\nKim Dotcom\u2019s legal defense team had previously challenged the restriction order, calling it unlawful and demanding that their client\u2019s assets be released.\n\nAccused on multiple accounts of internet piracy, Dotcom was arrested by the New Zealand authorities on January 19. During the subsequent police raid on his mansion, millions of dollars of assets were confiscated, among them bank accounts, properties, jet-skis and dozens of cars.\n\nIt also coincided with the shut-down of the file sharing website Megaupload on grounds of copyright violation.\n\nThe seizure left Dotcom without any funds to mount a legal defense.\n\nThe internet tycoon was released on bail on February 22 and is currently awaiting extradition to the US, where he will be put to trial for charges of copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering.\n\nMegaupload was one of the top 20 visited sites on the internet and constituted four percent of the overall internet traffic. The US department of justice believes that its owners earned over $175 million in illegal revenues by selling ads and subscriptions on the site.\n\nA provisional court date for Dotcom\u2019s extradition hearing has been set for August 20."}
{"text":"45User Rating: 4 out of 5\n\nReview title of Alex Not bad, it can be better though\n\nSo far its a pretty good emote app, however its missing a few things, one of the big ones are a better way of looking through them, worded categories, and a accent color option, other small ones are a custom option, and adding some missing emotes. Worded categories are pretty self explanatory, instead of icons have them sorted by words like Happy, Angry, Sad, Surprised, Smug, and Other, Favorites can stay a star icon though. The layout is kind of an eyesore to look through, and on some displays it can cause the \"dot illusion\" , It would be nice if the boxes were bigger and also have a list view instead of tiled. The last thing would be the accent color, currently its only blue, and uses a light theme, a dark theme and accent color would fix this. So its pretty good but like I said it can be better, its missing some other emotes like \u1555( \u141b )\u1557 , (\u0e07\u30c4)\u0e27, but those could probably be added later or fixed if there was a custom option."}
{"text":"Friday on Fox News Channel\u2019s \u201cFox & Friends,\u201d White House aide Kellyanne Conway pointed to the negative political discourse on social media playing a role in the shooting at a Republicans practice for a congressional charity baseball game earlier this week.\n\nThat shooting critically injured House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), who is recovering in a Washington, DC hospital.\n\nConway said, \u201cI really would ask people to think about the hateful rhetoric. This man, this shooter the other day, didn\u2019t hate baseball, He hated Republicans, and his social media feed was a complete anti-Trump, anti-Republican screed. For those particularly in the media who are so obsessed with the president\u2019s social media postings, why isn\u2019t everybody looking inside a little bit at what they\u2019re posting and what they\u2019re saying? Nobody is responsible for this shooting except the shooter. There is no question about that. But at the same time you can oppose policies, but with some such hateful charged rhetoric that active resistance becomes armed resistance in the case of this lone gunman.\u201d\n\nShe continued, \u201cLook at Twitter, If I were shot and killed tomorrow, half of Twitter would explode in applause and excitement. This is the world we live in right now. It\u2019s terrible. Again it is one thing for people to say I disagree with you on the health care repeal, on taxes or national security plans, but you can\u2019t attack people personally in a way and think that tragedies like this won\u2019t happen.\u201d\n\nShe added, \u201cThis is also the natural by-product you have after images of the president being shot in rapper\u2019s video, or being assassinated in a production there in New York City, or a picture of a severed head. All of that is a toxic stew. Again there is no one to blame but the shooter here, but the calls for tamping down, there should also be some introspection there.\u201d\n\nFollow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN"}
{"text":"Updated on May 5 at 8:29 a.m. ET\n\nTurkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has stepped down after a power struggle with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.\n\n\u201cI decided that for the unity of the (ruling party) a change of chairman would be more appropriate,\u201d Davutoglu said. \u201cI am not considering running at the May 22 congress.\u201d\n\nHe will remain in office until then. The move allows Erdogan to tighten his grip on power. The two men have clashed since Davutoglu became prime minister. As Bloomberg explains:\n\nErdogan ran Turkey for more than a decade as prime minister and has sought to maintain his tight grip on power even after moving up to the presidency, traditionally a largely ceremonial office, in 2014. His handpicked successor Davutoglu has struggled to assert his own authority.\n\nDavutoglu\u2019s authority had been weakened recently after party leadership stripped the prime minister of some powers. Before a meeting between the two leaders late Wednesday, Erdogan alluded to their tensions. He said, according to the Hurriyet Daily News, \u201cWhat matters is that you should not forget how you got to your post.\u201d"}
{"text":"Roughly ten days before worlds I built a strange deck that I nearly decided to run for worlds. Ultimately, I decided to go ahead and play the light side deck I had been playing for over a month (write up about that deck here). Since worlds though, I\u2019ve been playing the \u2018experimental\u2019 deck. I thought my only regret from worlds was not running a second Falcon objective set in the deck I took to worlds\u2026 but man, now I have two regrets!\n\nNot only do I have a whole lot more fun with this deck, it actually seems to be working much more consistently against the \u2018good decks\u2019 that I expected to see at worlds. I would think it was a fluke, but it\u2019s been doing well against players I consider to be top level players.\n\nThe more I play the Star Wars LCG though, the more I\u2019m learning to \u2018unlearn what I have learned\u2019 about card games. In particular, the way I value a card is drastically different in this game. If the structure of objective sets wasn\u2019t enough, add in the fact that you can draw four or five cards just about every turn and card value is drastically different.\n\nSo, what does all of this have to do with this strange deck I built before worlds? Everything, of course!\n\nThe deck I built isn\u2019t necessarily seeking a particular advantage, but has a lot of cards that play well with each other. I often have turns where I have to sit for a few minutes just to figure out what I want to do, primarily because there are so many ways to use the cards in my hand. This is very unlike my Jedi deck, where the right move is generally obvious. This makes using the deck a lot more fun and playing against it all the more maddening. When you do so much with so little, it can really catch your opponent off guard.\n\nThis deck is honestly the combination of several cards I\u2019ve been looking at for quite some time. It all started with everyones favorite stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder, in the guise of a rebel card: Han Solo.\n\nAren\u2019t You a Little Short for a Stormtrooper?\n\nSearching through your deck for a card is, arguably, the most powerful effect in any card game. Well, maybe outside of a free resource that generates three resources instantly\u2026\n\nSo, for the first time in the Star Wars LCG we get a search effect and it comes on a Rebel Han Solo with solid stats. Since you don\u2019t need to win an edge battle, you can often force your opponent into a situation where if they block and win the edge battle, you get to search your deck for a card and they had to focus down a defender. Or, you can also just win the edge battle and clean up most defenders.\n\nOf course, searching your deck is only as important as the cards you can go get, so when I first saw the Rebel Han Solo my brain immediately starting thinking of Rebel cards I could want to get on command. My list looked something like this:\n\n\u2013 Rebel Assault (Defense of Yavin 4 or Mobilize the Squadron)\n\n\u2013 Home One (The Rebel Fleet)\n\n\u2013 Princess Leia (Fleeing the Empire)\n\n\u2013 A New Hope (Decoy at Dantooine)\n\nThis list has two of my favorite cards that I rarely use: Princess Leia and A New Hope. This is when things began to really start working as far as the deck concept. I didn\u2019t like the idea of basing the deck around Han alone, as I might never even see him.\n\nHowever, if I also have Princess Leia. who becomes insanely better when you can control when she leaves play, now I have four characters I can draw into that all my leave play effects work well with. Add in Bright Hope that comes with the Rebel Han that removes a token of any type from itself when another friendly unit leaves play, and you have lots of reasons to have characters leaving play. This is not to mention Sith damage decks that find ways of removing lots of units just about every turn!\n\nWhere things really took off though, was the fact that these two objectives (Fleeing the Empire and Decoy at Dantooine) really solved my problem of consistently getting these characters to leave play through You\u2019re My Only Hope, A New Hope, and Fall Back. Han\u2019s objective, Evacuation Procedure, also packs a removal effect. So at this point, the core of the deck is:\n\n2 x Evacuation Procedure\n\n2 x Fleeing the Empire\n\n1 x Decoy at Dantooine\n\nNow, on to the junk.\n\nHunk of Junk\n\nThe rest of the deck really fell together after this. In any deck that has a decent number of characters in it, Asteroid Sanctuary has to be considered. The thought of attacking with the Falcon, triggering the ability to drop in Han, and then attacking with Han just seemed way too good to pass up. The Falcon also interacts fantastically with Bright Hope, forcing a leave play with the Falcon each turn can make Bright Hope do some serious work.\n\nI would be remiss if I didn\u2019t include at least a single Rebel Assault in a deck that let\u2019s me search for Rebel cards, so Defense of Yavin 4 is at minimum a one of. Considering I\u2019ve already got two Falcon and two Bright Hope in the deck, the objective itself has become a huge part of this deck. Playing the Millenium Falcon for 2 or 3 resources can just ruin your opponent. This also gives me two of each Y-Wing, Red 2, Rebel Assault, Hidden Outpost, and Astromech Droid Upgrade (wonderful with Bright Hope).\n\nSo now the deck is shaping up and looks like this:\n\nAffiliation: Smugglers and Spies\n\n2 x Asteroid Sanctuary\n\n2 x Defense of Yavin 4\n\n2 x Fleeing the Empire\n\n2 x Evacuation Procedure\n\n1 x Decoy at Dantooine\n\nWith one objective slot left to get to ten objective, the final slot could easily go to any Smuggler or Rebel Objective. To be honest, this final slot is anything but decided at this point. There are several options here. On my consideration list is:\n\nRenegade Squadron Mobilization \u2013 This objective seems too good for the deck to not include. For starters, the objective itself pairs with A New Hope amazingly. I\u2019ve had games where I draw 4-5 cards off of playing A New Hope. It also features Renegade Squadron, which is a great card. It\u2019s especially great with Princess Leia being captured so often in this deck and it likely that Defense of Yavin 4 is on the board. The other really amazing synergy here is Echo Caverns. A great card in it\u2019s own right, when Evacuation Procedure is out it becomes insane. Being able to use it on you and your opponents turn is just sick.\n\nRaise the Stakes \u2013 The objective and the Blockade Runner give the deck quite a bit of added punch. I could live without the Bothan Spy and the Smuggling Compartment, but an additional Cloud City Operative and Swindled are fantastic. The Swindled is a great option for getting Leia to leave play when you need her to and for triggering Bright Hope if necessary. Of course, bouncing a Royal Guard isn\u2019t ever awful either!\n\nTrust Me \u2013 I think any time I start Smugglers, this objective is on my list. The objective itself is great against Sith and Lando in a Falcon deck can bring the pain. It has a few cards you don\u2019t want however, so it\u2019s certainly not at the top of the list.\n\nAt the moment, I think there are just too many synergies not to use Renegade Squadron Mobilization in this deck. So, on to the deck list:\n\nAffiliation: Smugglers and Spies\n\n2 x Asteroid Sanctuary\n\n2 x Defense of Yavin 4\n\n2 x Fleeing the Empire\n\n2 x Evacuation Procedure\n\n1 x Decoy at Dantooine\n\n1 x Renegade Squadron\n\nThe deck might not look like much, but she\u2019s got it where it counts.\n\nCards Are Cards\n\nWhile the list may not look like much, I dare you to try the deck a few times. I can literally have nothing on the board and generate an unimaginable amount of damage. You have to know the various options of the deck to really see it\u2019s beauty, so I recommend trying it when you have time to take the game slow and consider your options. It\u2019s really quite insane just how many options the deck presents each turn.\n\nIn the end, what I continue to learn about Star Wars is that the value of each card is drastically lower than in most other games. This has a lot to do with the draw mechanic, but also because so much more of this game happens outside of the stats that what is on a card. How you attack, with which units, and in which order makes all the difference. The player skill involved in using the tools at your disposal appropriately is immense. Even if a card doesn\u2019t seem all that great at first, give it a try. It may not be tall enough to be a stormtrooper, but it might end up being quite a bit better than you think.\n\nI\u2019ve seen quite a bit of \u2018conventional\u2019 wisdom being developed in this game and I think Star Wars is way too young to be developing hard and fast rules for decks and what is viable. If you play this game, I implore you to not settle for conventional wisdom, to experiment with objectives people aren\u2019t using, and to push the limits of what is possible in this game. Don\u2019t believe the all powerful they. We\u2019ve got several months until Store Championships and regionals roll around, so this is a fantastic time to give objectives a try that don\u2019t look that great on paper.\n\nUntil next time, I\u2019ll be seeing if I can\u2019t find a way to make a viable Scum deck\u2026 As always, may the Force be with you.\n\nZach"}
{"text":"CLEVELAND, Ohio -- For the second day in a row, a handful of activists visited Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty's office to ask questions about the investigations into the police killings of Tanisha Anderson and Tamir Rice.\n\nAnd for the second straight day, they said, they were told to \"come back tomorrow.\"\n\nThe activists, which included Joshua Stephens, Don Bryant and two others, showed up at McGinty's office in the Cuyahoga County Justice Center about noon Wednesday, hoping to find out when a grand jury will hear evidence in the two November deaths involving Cleveland police.\n\n\"We just feel like (McGinty) is intentionally dragging his feet,\" Stephens said in a phone interview.\n\nThe quest began Tuesday, when four protesters sat in McGinty's office for close to an hour. McGinty's spokesman, Joe Frolik, told the group that if they came back Wednesday, McGinty might have time to meet with them, Stephens said.\n\nIn the people's office of Cuyahoga Cty, Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty waiting for two police officers to be arrested for the murder of Tamir Rice, 12-year-old gunned down in Cleveland, 6 mm onths ago. Join us, we got peanut butter n jelly sandwiches. Posted by Don Bryant on Tuesday, June 16, 2015\n\nA Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Deputy asked the four protesters who showed up at the office Wednesday to leave immediately, Stephens said. The deputy said the group could be arrested for trespassing, arguing the office was a place of official business and they had no business there.\n\nOnce the group explained they were asked to come to the office, the deputy agreed to let them stay for a few minutes, until they found out if they could meet with McGinty, Stephens said.\n\nA few more deputies showed up, and the process repeated.\n\nEventually there were five sheriff's deputies to the four protesters. Stephens said the protesters were not chanting, and were not combative with the deputies.\n\nStephens exchanged some texts with Frolik, who eventually asked the group to come back Thursday. The group decided to leave, and three deputies followed them into the elevator and out of the building.\n\n\"It was really overkill,\" Stephens said.\n\nFrolik offered a different account of what happened Tuesday. He said he asked the group to leave Tuesday because the office has a small waiting area reserved for victims, witnesses, attorneys and others who have appointments.\n\n\"I offered cards to the people who were here and told them how to email me to request an appointment,\" Frolik said. \"One person took the card. No one emailed.\"\n\nFrolik said he was not in the office when the group showed up again Wednesday, but said he asked the sheriff's deputies to ask the group to leave if they didn't have an appointment.\n\nSheriff's department spokesman John O'Brien did not return a message seeking comment.\n\nThe group's move comes days after McGinty's office released hundreds of pages of partially redacted investigative material collected by sheriff's deputies probing the death of Tamir. Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback shot Tamir in Cudell Recreation Center Nov. 22, after they responded to a report of a person with a gun.\n\nA Cleveland judge found probable cause that Loehmann and Garmback should be charged for their respective roles in the shooting.\n\nThe group is also concerned about the status of the investigation into the death of Anderson, who died Nov. 13 while in police custody. The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner ruled her death a homicide, and that the mentally ill woman who suffered from obesity and heart disease was restrained during her arrest.\n\nCleveland police handed their investigation of Anderson's death to McGinty's office in February, Frolik told Northeast Ohio Media Group at the time. McGinty has said his office will present both cases to a grand jury, but has declined to say when.\n\n\"We just want some kind of vague time frame,\" Stephens said.\n\nFrolik stuck to that no comment Wednesday, saying it would violate state rules of procedure to discuss grand jury proceedings, including when a grand jury may hear a specific case.\n\nHe said his office is still reviewing both the Tamir Rice investigation and the Tanisha Anderson investigation, and declined to comment further.\n\nStephens said the group is has not decided whether to show up Thursday, for fear of the same outcome.\n\n\"That seems to be the universal response from (McGinty's) office to questions about Tamir's case,\" he said. \"Come back tomorrow.\"\n\nUpdate: Frolik said he returned one text message to Stephens, telling him he was in a meeting. He denied telling the group to come back Thursday."}
{"text":"Laureate International Universities has donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. | Getty Bill Clinton\u2019s pay at for-profit education company topped $17.5 million\n\nBill Clinton was paid more than $1 million in 2015 by Laureate Education, a global operator of for-profit colleges, according to tax returns released today by Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign.\n\nThe new figure brings the former president\u2019s total compensation from Laureate to more than $17.5 million for his five-year role as an \u201chonorary chancellor.\u201d His role consisted of advising the company on educational matters and traveling to campuses across the world to speak to young people. Clinton ended his position at Laureate in April 2015 after Hillary Clinton launched her bid for the White House.\n\nStory Continued Below\n\nLaureate International Universities, the company\u2019s international arm for which Clinton worked, has donated $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, with a new contribution made as recently as the second quarter of this year, according to records posted on the foundation\u2019s website.\n\nRepublican presidential nominee Donald Trump has criticized Hillary Clinton\u2019s connection to Laureate. Trump has accused her of having \"laundered\" money through Laureate while she was secretary of state \u2014 a charge that has been discredited by fact-checkers. House Republicans have asked the feds to investigate the Clintons\u2019 ties to Laureate.\n\nLaureate says that its international operations represent the largest global network of degree-granting universities in the world, enrolling more than 1 million students across 28 countries. In the United States, the company owns Walden University, a Minneapolis-based online school that the Education Department has placed on a list of colleges that officials are more closely monitoring because of concerns over its \u201cfinancial responsibility.\u201d\n\nLaureate is in the process of going public. It filed for an initial public offering last fall."}
{"text":"UNICEF and the WHO stated that they halted a measles vaccination program in northern Syria after at least 15 children who received the vaccination have developed severe symptoms about an hour after they received the vaccination and died.\n\nThe United Nations Children\u2019s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a joint statement, announcing the immediate halt of the vaccination campaign, stating:\n\n\u201cUNICEF and WHO have been shocked and saddened to learn of the deaths of at least 15 young children in Idlib, Syria. \u2026 The death of the children occurred in areas where a measles immunization campaign had been underway\u201d.\n\nAbdullah Ajai, a physician who administered the vaccinations at a medical center in Jarjanaz, Idlib, said, according to AP, that the children demonstrated signs of \u201csevere allergic shock\u201d after being given the second round of the shots. The second round of vaccination was launched in Idlib and Deir Ez Zour on Monday.\n\nThe children were all well below two, reports Reuters, adding that some of the children suffocated to death due to severe swelling. Abdullah Ajai commented on the situation:\n\n\u201cThere was shouting and screaming, it was hard for the parents. You get your child vaccinated and then you find your child dying, it\u2019s very hard\u201d.\n\nAt least 15 children have died after receiving the measles shot, although the actual number may turn out to be higher than that. According to reports from rights groups and reports from areas controlled by armed insurgents, the number could be as high as 34 or 50; that is, some hundred percent more than has thus far been reported by the UN.\n\nThe WHO stated that it would be sending in a team of experts because it is vital to establish the precise cause of the children\u2019s deaths. Both the WHO and UNICEF state, however, that they are hopeful to resume the vaccination campaign as soon as possible.\n\nWhile the WHO and UN bodies like UNICEF continue pushing for vaccination programs worldwide, they have largely failed at addressing fundamental vaccine safety issues.\n\nIn 2013 the Islamabad City Hospital reported that it began receiving a large number of cases with measles. Over 50% of those who were brought to the hospital had previously been vaccinated.\n\nThe figures substantiated British reports about a 30-year-long cover-up of serious vaccine safety issues. In 2014 a fully vaccinated person in New York, USA, didn\u2019t only catch the measles after being vaccinated but infected others.\n\nVaccine safety issues, which the WHO according to many experts fails to address appropriately, include, among others; documented correlations between vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders including autism; pharmacological vaccine safety studies sponsored by big pharma and other conflict of interest; incestuous relationships between vaccine makers and e.g. the Centers for Disease Control in the USA; flouting ethics and violations with vaccine trials in India.\n\nMeasles belong to a cohort of childhood diseases against which one is immunized for live after coming down with them during childhood. A growing number of vaccine safety concerns prompt a steadily growing number of independent experts to question the benefit of vaccines against e.g. mumps, rubella or measles and calls for the need to give first priority to independent, ethical trials."}
{"text":"Do you consider yourself to be fairly familiar with the Debian Linux distribution? I thought I was familiar with it enough to know its origin and history, how its name was derived and that Richard Stallman, the Father of the Free Software movement, uses a Debian derivative (gNewSense) for his own personal computer. There's one significant piece of the Debian puzzle that I didn't know about: Its Constitution.\n\nIt has a Constitution and well-defined leadership roles. It also has well thought out rules of engagement, problem resolution and overall structure. I sincerely applaud the creators and successors who've pushed Debian into the mainstream for the past 17 years. Yes, 17 years--can you believe it?\n\nWhen I first heard about Debian, I was working in a small IT support group for about 400 developers and their support staff. I ran an early version of Red Hat Linux on a clandestinely obtained computer in my cubicle. About three dozen of the organization's hardcore developers had access to it. They did some of their development with it and requested, through their management, that I construct and deploy some real server hardware for them using Linux.\n\nRed Hat was OK with them but one java developer preferred something called Debian.\n\nI said, \"What is Debian?\" To which he responded, \"Well, if you think that Red Hat is the Porsche-driving rich kid, then Debian is sort of your poor cousin once removed.\"\n\nIt sounded absolutely intriguing to me. Maybe it was his description or maybe it was because Dan was one of the smartest people I've ever known. In any case, my love affair with Debian started that fateful day in the summer of 1996.\n\nI obtained another computer, through less than savory means, and did an over-the-network installation of Debian. Even in 1996, it had an impressive number of software packages available for it (about two GB, if I recall correctly). I installed everything, which, I believe, used to be an option.\n\nWe never managed to secure real server hardware for the developers but the two systems ran for more than a year. That was until my quiet little gig as developer support was snatched away and I was whisked back under the larger umbrella of corporate support. Such activities are known in the corporate world as \"reorganization\" and it's always in the best interest of the employees at the bottom of the food chain.\n\nDebian and its derivatives are always my favorite Linux distributions in any list I create. Its Constitution further drives home that high praise.\n\nA truly democratic Linux distribution.\n\nI like it. A lot.\n\nIt's too bad that large corporations don't take a lesson from Debian and its intelligent design. Not only does it, the collective Debian development community, create perhaps the best Linux distribution currently available but it does it in a democratic and thoughtful way.\n\nTo the Debian Team:\n\nIf you ever start your own country, I'm in.\n\nThanks to the Debian Team, Ian Murdock and all of you who support Debian by using it.\n\nWhat do you think of Debian and its Constitution? Do you think it's the correct way to setup and manage a worldwide group of developers?"}
{"text":"Kobe Bryant has been among the most culturally relevant players in the NBA for nearly all of his 17-season career. When not winning championships or scoring titles (and often when doing so), Bryant has been one of the more divisive stars in league history, earning criticism for perceived selfishness and nevertheless standing out as one of the most talented and committed players the league has ever seen. No matter what he does, people notice it.\n\nIt should not come as a great surprise, then, to learn that the younger generation of NBA players looks up to him. As revealed in the annual survey of rookies conducted by John Schuhmann of NBA.com, Bryant is the most common favorite player of this season's incoming class of NBA rookies (via PBT). Here's the voting breakdown from the 36 participants:\n\nScroll to continue with content Ad\n\n1: Kobe Bryant, L.A. Lakers -- 21.2 percent\n\n2: LeBron James, Miami -- 15.2 percent\n\nT-3rd: Kevin Durant, Oklahoma City & Dirk Nowitzki, Dallas -- 12.1 percent\n\nT-5th: Kevin Garnett, Brooklyn & Chris Paul, L.A. Clippers -- 9.1 percent\n\nOthers receiving votes: Carmelo Anthony, New York; Vince Carter, Dallas; Tim Duncan, San Antonio; James Harden, Houston; Kawhi Leonard, San Antonio; Steve Nash, L.A. Lakers; Dwyane Wade, Miami\n\nStory continues\n\nAs Schuhmann notes elsewhere, Kobe supplanted LeBron at the top of this list, although it's a little surprising that the Lakers icon doesn't win every year. While James is undoubtedly the best player in the NBA right now, the 19- and 20-year-olds entering the league have never really known an NBA without Bryant serving as a massively important representative of the league. It stands to reason that, even if many players were on the anti-Kobe side, enough would love him that he would win this award until he retires. When LeBron is 35, we would expect him to cast the same sort of shadow over a generation of players.\n\nThis vote is a testament to Kobe's impact, as well as a useful reminder of the sheer force of his accomplishments. Seventeen years after his arrival in the league, Kobe is still relevant enough to top a list of favorite players. No matter what, he keeps himself on people's minds.\n\nOh, and nabbing that No. 1 spot can't only be a matter of being in the league for a long time. If that were the case, Vince Carter wouldn't have been another receiving votes."}
{"text":"A male cheerleader almost cost his side victory in a recent game between Pittsburgh and Louisville after he rushed onto the court to celebrate a dramatic late slam dunk only to commit a technical foul.\n\nThe Louisville cheerleader rushes onto the court after Kyle Kuric\u2019s slam dunk (Pic: YouTube)\n\nApparently convinced Kyle Kuric\u2019s dunk had sealed victory for Louisville, the cheerleader rushed onto the court and hurled the ball in the air in celebration.\n\nThe referees were less than impressed with his actions though and with five tenths of a second remaining on the clock awarded Pittsburgh two free throws for a technical foul for delaying play.\n\nAshton Gibbs proceeded to sink the two throws but missed with a half-court shot that would have tied the contest and sent it into overtime. Instead, Louisville edged the game 62-59.\n\nCommenting on the almost catastrophic intervention by the cheerleader, Louisville coach Rick Pitino joked: \u2018The male cheerleader is coming to an end. It was good while it lasted. It was fun. Now we\u2019ll try another sport for him.\u2019\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAdvertisement\n\nHe added: \u2018No, I\u2019m sure it was unintentional, but you could actually lose a game that way. Hopefully he\u2019ll learn the rules of basketball next time.\u2019\n\nWatch the male cheerleader in action below:"}
{"text":"Kayla Harrison, the two-time Olympic gold medalist in judo, will begin a mixed-martial arts career in the World Series of Fighting.\n\nThe move is not a surprise. Harrison has been talking about becoming an MMA fighter since she became the first American woman to win a judo gold at the 2012 London Olympics. After she won her second gold this summer in Rio she said she was retiring from judo and hinted at transitioning into an MMA career.\n\nHarrison told the website MMAjunkie that she will fight in the World Series of Fighting and also become a commentator for the network starting on 31 December.\n\nUSA's Kayla Harrison wins second straight Olympic judo gold Read more\n\n\u201cI just want everyone to be excited and expect big things from me,\u201d she told MMAjunkie. \u201cThis is only the beginning. I\u2019m excited for this new chapter. I\u2019m excited to commentate. I\u2019m excited to be a brand ambassador and help the World Series of Fighting grow their organization as well as help me grow myself as a fighter and a brand myself.\u201d\n\nHarrison, 26, has a gregarious, outgoing personality that will help her as a broadcaster and the possibility of being more than just a fighter seems to have driven her decision to join the WSOF. She had long been rumored to be a prospect for the UFC, given her friendship with the organization\u2019s top female fighter, Ronda Rousey. Harrison and Rousey trained together as rising Olympians before the 2008 Games (an event Harrison missed out on) and the two have stayed in touch since. Back in March, Harrison said she considered Rousey a \u201cfrenemy.\u201d She said then that Rousey had encouraged her to pursue an MMA career but Harrison moved slowly toward her decision. She already understood many of the judo and jiu-jistu moves but had done little sparring and was unsure how she felt about taking punches.\n\nIn 2012 Harrison became an American Olympic star as she excitedly celebrated her first gold. She has become a strong voice against abuse after telling the story of how a judo coach sexually abused her. Her Rio celebration was more muted but still enthusiastic perhaps because she knew it was her last chance at another Olympic medal.\n\nShe will begin her WSOF career with commentary before eventually moving to an actual fight."}
{"text":"Get the biggest football stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email\n\nBillionaires Red Bull want to buy a football club in England \u2013 and \u2018give it wings\u2019 to make it big, writes Alan Nixon in the People.\n\nThe Austrian-based energy drinks firm are on the look-out for a suitable club, with Anglophile coach Ralf Rangnick, sporting director of Red Bull Salzburg, heading the search.\n\nAs well as current Austrian league leaders Salzburg, Red Bull already owns clubs in Germany, New York, Brazil and Ghana.\n\nThe company\u2019s sporting assets also include two Formula One teams: Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso.\n\nNow coach Rangnick, who almost got the Everton job in the summer, has been tasked to find a club in England for their latest move into ownership.\n\nAn insider in the deal said: \u201cRed Bull want a team to take into the Champions League. It is the only market they have not reached yet. Ideally this would be in the London area, but both Everton and Liverpool interest them too because it would not take much to get them to that level.\n\n\u201cThey have looked at the Championship, but you can spend fortunes there and not make any progress.\u201d\n\nRangnick, an English-educated German, has a good knowledge of the game and is looking at several options. He would also oversee the \u00adpurchase and running of the club.\n\nNews of Red Bull\u2019s interest is spreading rapidly and there should be no lack of willing sellers.\n\nThe company\u2019s Formula One success, with Sebastian Vettel taking them towards a fourth straight title, has put them on the map, but buying a club in the \u2018home\u2019 of football could be their biggest coup yet.\n\nAnd taking it into the Champions League is the ultimate aim for one of the biggest sports-backing firms in the business.\n\nTeams which could be lined up\n\nEVERTON Bill Kenwright has been looking for a respectable buyer for his club for years. The fact Ralf Rangnick nearly got the job and knows the club helps. Only snag \u2013 Red Bull Everton?!?\n\nLIVERPOOL The American owners have pumped in millions and will want a big return on their investment. Genuine worldwide appeal. Red Bull Liverpool does have a ring.\n\nCRYSTAL PALACE Red Bull would really give the Eagles wings. London, near airports, very appealing. Would not cost much, but needs a big spend. Red Bull Crystal Palace is a mouthful.\n\nWEST HAM Owners who are always open to approaches. New home at the Olympic Stadium makes them appealing too. Red Bull West Ham? Not so crazy.\n\nLEEDS The Yorkshire club has history, a huge fan base and owners who would sell at the drop of a hat. Red Bull Leeds United? Why not?"}
{"text":"Donald Trump fans in the Hudson Valley are being offered free tattoos to show their support for the Republican presidential candidate.\n\nIt's one thing to put a lawn sign on your yard or a bumper sticker on your car. But what about permanently inking your body with your favorite candidate's face? A Hudson Valley tattoo parlor is offering up their services to Trump supporters who want to show just how dedicated they truly are.\n\nDoyle and his business partner, John Newell, say that they believe in Trump's message and want to give other supporters a way to display their solidarity with the Republican candidate.\n\nSean Doyle is an eight-year veteran of the Marine Corps and part owner of Anarchy Tattoo. Doyle and his business partner, John Newell, say that they believe in Trump's message and want to give other supporters a way to display their solidarity with the Republican candidate.\n\nDoyle revealed to us that he was never much into politics before Trump came along. In fact, At 33 years old, this will be the first time Doyle casts a vote in a presidential election. The former Marine told us that politicians have always sounded like a broken record to him, saying the same things over and over without any real message.\n\nTrump's business experience, straightforward talk, support for the troops and ideas about foreign policy all appeal to Doyle. In fact, he was the very first person to receive Trump ink at Anarchy Tattoo. The photo above is of Sean's leg. Newell, on the other hand, is still deciding between a tattoo of Trump Tower, a Trump train or The Donald's face. Another challenge for Newell is finding room on his body for the ink, which is already pretty much full of tattoos.\n\nThe biggest hurdle for customers getting a Trump tattoo is the fear that their candidate might not actually win. According to Doyle, those who worry about \"tattoo remorse\" can take comfort in knowing that Newell is extremely talented at covering up unwanted tattoos. The business owner says his tattoo artistry could easily transform Trump into a \"zombie Trump or cover him up with a tiger or a rose.\" As for Doyle; win or lose he'll be keeping his Trump tattoo, honoring who he calls a \"man of the people.\"\n\nFor those of you interested in getting your free Trump tattoo, you can visit Anarchy Tattoo on Route 6 in Slate Hill. Operating hours, directions and contact information are all available on their website ."}
{"text":"The latest beta of Persevere features a new native object storage engine called JavaScriptDB that provides high-end scalability and performance. Persevere now outperforms the common PHP and MySQL combination for accessing data via HTTP by about 40% and outperforms CouchDB by 249%. The new storage engine is designed and optimized specifically for persisting JavaScript and JSON data with dynamic object structures. It is also built for extreme scalability, with support for up to 9,000 petabytes of JSON\/JS data in addition to any binary data.\n\nThese statistics are even more impressive when one considers all the additional functionality that Persevere provides while outperforming these other storage systems. MySQL utilizes traditional fixed structure schemas requiring homogenous records in a table, while JavaScriptDB (as well as CouchDB) support storage of heterogeneous objects of any structure in tables. Persevere\/JavaScriptDB goes further with the flexibility to evolve schemas and handle partial schemas. Persevere also provides integrated server side JavaScript (SSJS) with persistence, Comet-driven data change notifications, JSONQuery, standards based HTTP interface with content negotiation, JSON-RPC interface to SSJS, cross-domain handling, CSRF protection, and more. All of these things are additional features that one would have to add to the stack for other storage systems, making them even slower. Persevere includes this functionality out of the box, while still maintaining extremely fast performance.\n\nTest Scenario\n\nThese tests were performed on a Mac\/OS-X with a 2GHz dual-core Intel processor and 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 memory. The PHP\/Apache\/MySQL setup used MAMP 1.7.2 which includes PHP 5.2.6, MySQL 5.0.41, and Apache 2.0.59. The CouchDB tests were performed with CouchDBX version 0.8 (which uses CouchDB 0.8.1). Persevere\u2019s nightly builds from late March were used for JavaScriptDB tests.\n\nThree different operations were performed in the tests:\n\nInsert\/POST operation to create a new object\n\nUpdate\/PUT operation to update an object\n\nQuery\/GET to search for objects by an (indexed) field\/property\n\nOn the PHP\/MySQL tests, all operations were handled by a very simple PHP script that first did a quick security check query against a small table (actually empty for the tests) to emulate the security capabilities of Persevere and CouchDB (although CouchDB\u2019s security capabilities are limited, and probably often require additional logic), and then the main query was executed against MySQL, whether it be an INSERT, UPDATE, or SELECT. All the created objects\/records had four properties\/fields for all three systems. In MySQL, two properties were indexed, one being the primary key, the other being the property that was queried on in the query requests. In CouchDB, a simple view was created that indexed on a single property. This view was used for the requests that queried by index. Both Persevere and CouchDB tests used their standard HTTP interface for creating, updating, and querying.\n\nTests were carried out by a HTTP client running on 10 threads concurrently issuing a sequence of 200 of each type of request. The \u201cfull test\u201d performed create, update, and query requests. The \u201cwrite test\u201d performed create and update requests, and the \u201cread test\u201d only performed query requests. The files used to perform the benchmarks are available here.\n\nTest Conclusions\n\nTwo sets of tests were run\u2014one that used fast commits that do not wait for committed data to be actually physically written to the disk (allowing for normal OS write-back caching), and high-integrity commits which cause the committed data to be forced to the disk. JavaScriptDB has a setting for choosing which style of commits to use. In MySQL, the MyISAM storage engine was used for fast commits, and the InnoDB storage engine was used for high-integrity commits. CouchDB always uses high-integrity commits.\n\nWhile PHP is not the fastest language, the script that was used for these tests was very trivial, and it\u2019s unlikely that PHP code execution significantly detracted from the overall performance of the PHP\/MySQL combination. With this simple, streamlined PHP script, a very fast classic setup was used. Alternate languages would not be likely to improve the performance by very much. Yet, Persevere\u2019s JavaScriptDB still beat this setup by a significant margin. With more complex request handlers that might provide more of the functionality that Persevere already provides, the margin would be likely to increase even more. Quite simply, the classic application server + MySQL database setup is hard-pressed to compete with Persevere in terms of performance for most normal database interactions.\n\nSo how does Persevere achieve this level of performance with the JavaScriptDB storage? The dynamic object-oriented nature of the data that is stored in JavaScriptDB is much different than that of a traditional relational database, so a number of innovative approaches were employed.\n\nDirect Data-Bound Object Representation\n\nOne of the central concepts of Persevere is that all persisted data is mapped to JavaScript objects. This enables server side JavaScript functions and handlers to easily be able to interact with persisted data, and provides a convenient in-memory representation of data that allows for intuitive normal object-oriented data interaction. However, in Persevere this more than just a convenient API\u2014it also facilitates efficient memory utilization by providing a single in-memory representation that can be reused at multiple levels.\n\nIn a traditional application stack, a record must have separate in-memory representations for each different level in the stack. A database may have an in-memory representation before serializing result sets back to the application. The application may have result set level representation, which then might be mapped to an object representation. Every one of these levels consumes more memory. These extra layers increase latency and overhead as well. In addition, most database driven applications rely on TCP\/IP communication with the database, which consumes a large amount of resources as well. With the JavaScriptDB, the single in-memory object is efficiently reused at the database level for all result sets and data caching. This not only means less memory-consumption, but it also translates to more efficient CPU cache utilization for Persevere, and direct low-latency access to data.\n\nShared Cache of Objects with Copy-on-Write\n\nNot only are in-memory objects shared between the application level and the database level, but Persevere also utilizes a shared cache of objects between threads to ensure that any given record\/object only exists in memory at most one time. Traditional application frameworks process separate HTTP requests concurrently and each request will have its own result set and a copy of data. These can lead to significant duplication of data in memory. With Persevere, objects are always reused if they are still available in memory.\n\nWhile this technique is relatively simple for read-only data, Persevere still maintains virtual memory isolation between threads to protect against concurrent access between threads and ensuing race conditions. Persevere does this by performing copy-on-write style values in objects. When a property is modified, internally its value is modified to being a \u201ctransactional\u201d value that actually has multiple states depending on which thread is accessing the objects. Therefore an object can be modified by one thread, but another thread can access the same object without seeing the uncommitted change. Property changes are made visible when transactions are committed. This technique allows Persevere to maintain transactional isolation between concurrent request handlers, while minimizing the record\/objects that must be held in memory. Persevere\u2019s architecture combined with JavaScriptDB\u2019s integration minimizes memory consumption, allowing internal caches to be maximized for optimal performance.\n\nPersevere utilizes the sophisticated least recently used (LRU) caching capabilities of the Java Virtual Machines\u2019s (JVM) soft referencing mechanism. In-memory objects, as well as JavaScriptDB\u2019s indices, are cached via soft reference tables. This allows the JVM to utilize an integrated view of reachability and object access timestamps to determine which objects to collect and discard. This means that objects that are reachable by currently executing code will always stay in the cache (since they must stay in memory due to reachability) as long as they are reachable. Unreachable objects are then discarded according to LRU strategies. Since the JVM\u2019s garbage collection handles object collection at a global level, it is also able to optimally select objects for collection without being constrained by module level view. This means that if the indices are not being used frequently, more memory can be allocated to the object cache and vice versa. Caches are maintained according to usage and reachability with the JVM\u2019s global perspective for optimal discarding strategy.\n\nAppend-based Database Storage\n\nJavaScriptDB uses an append-based database format to store data. Many traditional database will synchronously commit data to a transaction log file before committing data to the main storage table, which requires multiple writes. On the other hand, JavaScriptDB appends transactional data directly to the main storage file such that writes can be committed with a single IO operation. This also enables JavaScriptDB to efficiently maintain a version history of the database and its records. The storage file is essentially a running log of transactions, and these transactions are exposed as the Transaction table. By storing data as a sequential set of transaction, JavaScriptDB not only can persist data quickly, it also provides efficient access to the transactions that have taken place and a version history of the database and objects within it.\n\nAdaptive On-Demand Concurrent Indexing\n\nJavaScriptDB features a dynamic approach to indexing that minimizes the configuration and management required to create and maintain tables, and maximizes performance. By default, JavaScriptDB indexes all properties of persisted objects, so typical queries can almost always be run in fast O(log n) time. However, the indexer does not block write operations to complete index updates when objects are added, deleted, or modified. Rather, the indexer execution takes place concurrently in a background asynchronous task executing threads. As objects are indexed, the index update operations are delegated to the appropriate index nodes, which are also executed as asynchronous tasks. When an index is needed for a query, any outstanding updates along the node tree path are completed so the query can execute.\n\nIt is worth noting that this on-demand indexing does not mean that the entire index must be updated to execute a query. Often (and usually in the case of large databases) an object may be updated that affects an index node that isn\u2019t used in a subsequent query. In this case, the query can still execute without waiting for the index node to be updated. JavaScriptDB properly orchestrates concurrent indexing such that nodes are updated through lower-priority background threads when possible, and immediately updated on-demand as necessary. This allows write operations to take place very quickly, while still allowing indexes to be ready for fast query operations as well. This also allows Persevere to utilize resources and CPU processing more evenly and smoothly. Background processes can take CPU time as needed when client requests are not demanding immediate data retrieval.\n\nFurthermore, JavaScriptDB uses adaptive techniques with indexing. If a particular index has been unused for some time while many objects have been added to a table with the corresponding property, JavaScriptDB will stop proactively updating the index to conserve resources. When an index is no longer proactively updated, the index will only be updated on-demand, when a query is performed that requires that index. Once the index is updated, it will resume proactive updates (at least until disuse causes it to go back to a non-proactive update state). This approach allows JavaScriptDB to automatically do appropriate and efficient indexing with minimal manual configuration. JavaScriptDB does also support manual configuration of indexes, for situations where you may want explicit control of indexing.\n\nBatched writes in integrity mode\n\nOne of the most expensive operations that a database can perform is a forced synchronous disk write operation. These operations are necessary for high-integrity commit mode where the commit does not return until the database is certain that the data has actually been written to the disk, fulfilling the durability component of ACID compliance. These operations can take around 10ms. In order to improve the performance of high-integrity commits, Persevere will detect when multiple writes are taking place concurrently and batch multiple writes together in a single synchronous disk write operation. When a number of concurrent write requests are being sent to Persevere, this can significantly reduce the number of synchronous writes that must take place and greatly improve performance.\n\nPluggable Storage\n\nPersevere uses a pluggable storage system. JavaScriptDB is one of several data source plugins (the default data source) that can be used with Persevere. Persevere supports heterogeneous storage configurations. This means you can leverage the performance and flexibility of JavaScriptDB in Persevere without abandoning existing relational databases, as well as other data sources. Even custom data sources can be created for unique storage systems.\n\nThe ServerJS working group is also considering a standard API for database interaction that might possibly allow JavaScriptDB to be used as a standalone database engine for use by other Rhino-based frameworks like Helma (of course Persevere + JavaScriptDB can already be used with existing JavaScript modules, and it can be used as a database for Java applications through it\u2019s Java API).\n\nFuture Improvements\n\nThis is the first release of JavaScriptDB, so there is still significant opportunities for continuing to improve and refine this storage engine. Currently, JavaScriptDB does not utilize indices for nested object queries (the equivalent of inner joins in relational DBs). Consequently queries of the form [?prop1=\u2019something\u2019] will execute in O(log n) time, but queries of the form [?prop1.prop2='something'] will only execute in O(n) . Future versions will provide fast O(log n) for a much broader range of queries. A later release will also provide true ACID compliance (the current version does not fulfill the atomicity constraint). Finally, replication\/clustering services will be added in the future as well, for distributing Persevere workload across multiple servers.\n\nReal Value\n\nAs Alex Payne pointed out, the economy may be ending the era of disregard for system performance and efficiency with the excuse of buying more servers. More servers costs more money, and architectures like Persevere that can efficiently handle large numbers of users and traffic with minimal hardware resources equates to real money saved.\n\nPersevere combines numerous advanced capabilities for web-accessible data including standards-based HTTP interface, JSONQuery, JSON-RPC, server side JavaScript, Comet-based data notifications, robust security, and more. Now these capabilities are available with speed and scalability that outperforms the most common web application systems, allowing you to build high-performance client\/server Ajax web applications with unprecedented ease, efficiency, and value.\n\nUpdate: Jan Lehnardt pointed out that CouchDB is now at version 0.9.0 and OS-X is not the optimal platform for CouchDB, so the latest version CouchDB can presumably improve upon the CouchDB performance shown in these tests. Hopefully we can progress towards better benchmarking tools for this new breed of databases."}
{"text":"GENEVA (Reuters) - Syria\u2019s political opposition hopes Hillary Clinton wins the U.S. presidential election next week because she has a better understanding of the conflict than Donald Trump, according to members of a delegation holding talks at the United Nations.\n\nPresident of the Syrian National Coalition Khaled Khoja delivers remarks regarding Russian air strikes on Syria at the United Nations in Manhattan, New York September 30, 2015. Russia launched air strikes in Syria today in the Kremlin's biggest Middle East intervention in decades. REUTERS\/Andrew Kelly - RTS2IBM\n\nKhaled Khoja and Hind Kabawat, in Geneva on Monday to press for U.N.-led negotiations on the release of Syrian detainees, said they trusted Clinton, a former U.S. Secretary of State, to deliver on the opposition\u2019s top priority - protecting civilians.\n\nClinton has called for the establishment of a no-fly zone and \u201csafe zones\u201d on the ground in Syria to protect non-combatants. Trump says this could \u201clead to World War Three\u201d due to the potential for conflict with Russia, which is providing military support to President Bashar al-Assad.\n\nKabawat said Trump, who has never held public office and has no foreign policy experience, saw Islamic State, also known as ISIS, as the only alternative to Assad in Syria.\n\n\u201cFor us a woman\u2019s leadership at this time would be a good thing. Also for many, like Trump and others, they think that the Syrian conflict is comparing Assad with ISIS and they have to take one side or the other, and of course for them Assad will look more prominent than ISIS,\u201d said Kabawat.\n\n\u201cShe (Clinton) knows that is wrong. She knows that there is this moderate opposition that believes in democracy and freedom. This is what we are aiming for, to have a president of the U.S. with good experience who knows the difference between the different oppositions.\u201d\n\nAssad, whose forces have regained much territory against their opponents with the help of Russian warplanes, has branded all those opposed to his rule as \u201cterrorists\u201d.\n\nISLAMIC STATE\n\nTrump has said defeating Islamic State should be a higher priority than trying to persuade Assad to step aside, a departure from a long-held U.S. policy objective.\n\nKhoja, leading the Syrian opposition delegation in Geneva, disagreed with this viewpoint.\n\n\u201cDealing with only the ISIS issue will not help with solving the crisis in Syria or the region because the root cause of the crisis is the (Assad) regime itself,\u201d he said.\n\nKabawat, an attorney and a member of the opposition High Negotiations Committee, added that the Syrian political opposition wanted to see women playing an equal role to men in the nation\u2019s politics.\n\nThe opposition delegation, which has links to the Free Syrian Army but not with Islamic State or al Qaeda-linked groups, is in Geneva this week to revive the issue of prisoner releases, sidelined during months of fruitless peace talks.\n\nKhoja said more than 100 armed groups had shown their willingness to cooperate but there had been no sign of cooperation from Assad\u2019s government or Russia, adding that the United Nations should form a committee on the matter.\n\n\u201cIf it\u2019s needed, if there is a response from the regime side to release the detainees and stop killings inside Syria, then we can have the representative of the military groups also in this committee, and if the regime wants to send someone to this committee, we can discuss it,\u201d Khoja said.\n\nThe Syrian Network of Human Rights has documented more than 90,000 detainees held by the Syrian government, 6,000 held by Islamic State and 2,400 held by the rest of the opposition, but estimates the real numbers are twice as high."}
{"text":"Over the long weekend, somebody directed my attention to an article on the Everyday Feminism site entitled \u2018Gay Men\u2019s Sexism and Women\u2019s Bodies\u2018. It\u2019s a pretty attention-grabbing headline, especially to a gay male feminist, so I clicked through, and ultimately came away massively conflicted about what I\u2019d just read. The writer, Yoko Akili, is a gay male writer, poet and educator, and it is definitely important to view the article within the context of his Queer American perspective.\n\nThere\u2019s plenty within the article to agree with. He relates the story of a female friend who had her breasts grabbed aggressively in a club by a gay man she had never met before. The man refused to apologise or admit he had done anything wrong, saying \u201cIt\u2019s no big deal, I\u2019m gay, I don\u2019t want her \u2013 I was just having fun.\u201d\n\nTo be frank, that\u2019s an utterly vile statement. I don\u2019t give two shits whether or not you find somebody sexually attractive \u2013 do not ever grab somebody\u2019s junk without their consent. Like, ever. That is assault. It is not okay.\n\nI\u2019ve seen plenty of online commentators make the comparison with hordes of straight women flooding into gay bars and clubs, making the occasional vodka-induced crotch-grab on a passing Muscle Mary, but I\u2019m not going down that route. Yes that\u2019s equally wrong and equally fucking annoying, but I do think Akili is spot on when he points out that this issue exists and highlights a male sense of ownership of women\u2019s bodies, regardless of sexuality.\n\nWhen a skinny, permatanned twink grabs a girl\u2019s tits on the dancefloor of a gay club, their motivation clearly isn\u2019t the same as when those teenage boys in Steubenville, Ohio raped a passed-out girl at a party, but they\u2019re both parts of the same damn problem \u2013 it\u2019s sexism and it\u2019s misogyny, pure and simple. It\u2019s the viewpoint that women\u2019s bodies are only there for the experiencing of pleasure, of \u201chaving fun\u201d. Whether it\u2019s of a sexual nature or not is entirely beside the point. This is what feminism exists for \u2013 to challenge behaviours such as this and to expose the pervasively misogynistic worldviews that motivate them.\n\nAkili says that he has \u201cexperienced this attitude as being very common amongst gay men\u201d, and opens his article with the admittedly less-than-scientific observation that a group of gay men in the audience of one of his presentations all admitted to touching a woman\u2019s body without her consent, and also to offering a woman unsolicited advice about how to \u201cimprove\u201d her body or fashion. He is clearly basing this article on his own anecdotal experience. To a certain extent I, and I\u2019m sure many readers, share those experiences \u2013 I\u2019m painfully aware that this behaviour does occur on a regular basis within parts of the LGBT community. That being said, however, I\u2019m pleased to report that the vast majority of my friends who identify as gay\/queer men would find the idea of feeling up a female stranger in a club completely awful.\n\nHere\u2019s a not so shocking fact for you \u2013 gay men are no more a monolithic entity than any other social group. We know it\u2019s not okay to begin sentences with hideously sweeping, absolutist statements like \u201call Muslims are\u2026\u201d or \u201call Chinese people are\u2026\u201d, because those statements are almost always demonstrably fallacious. Not all gay men grope women in clubs. Not all gay men go to clubs. Not all gay men would routinely walk up to a woman they barely know and start telling her what is wrong with the way she looks or the clothes she wears. Don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 it happens, and the rest of us should do whatever we can to smash that kind of bullshit wherever we experience it. Akili\u2019s problem is that he extrapolates out from his own personal experiences of a small subsection of a nationally-defined subculture and attempts to apply his findings to \u201call gay men\u201d \u2013 a mythically homogenous group if ever there was one.\n\nThe part of the article which baffles and confuses me most is the leap Akili then makes from discussing the grabbing of breasts and the inherent misogyny therein to classifying gay men\u2019s \u201cdiva worship\u201d and \u201ccelebrating women\u201d as \u201cobjectification, assault and dehumanisation\u201d. It\u2019s a frankly insulting and entirely unfounded assertion, and it really does come out of left field. If you grope a woman in a club or feel you have the Gucci-given right to tell her how she should look, then you\u2019re a douchebag and you\u2019re a dehumanising misogynist. But to go from that to asserting that when a gay man idolises or celebrates a woman, or group of women, he is objectifying them \u2013 there\u2019s no basis for such a claim and it\u2019s almost offensive. To leap from your own personal, limited experience and make sweeping and damning claims about an entire group of people\u2026well it definitely doesn\u2019t sit too comfortably with me.\n\nAkili\u2019s intentions are pure, I have no doubt. The patriarchy is an insidiously pervasive and damaging force \u2013 from the glass ceilings of our workplaces to the sticky dancefloors of our gay bars, it\u2019s everywhere and it must be challenged at every available opportunity. But not all gay men are misogynists, and thank God for that. We do receive a certain amount of the privilege that comes with being male in our Western society, and that\u2019s a huge part of why some gay guys are sexist ass-hats, but it\u2019s not all of us. Gay men aren\u2019t all the same, but if we could all recognise where the misogyny is occurring within our community and stomp it out, maybe we could be. And then that wouldn\u2019t be such a bad thing."}
{"text":"Before the start of the 2013-14 NBA season, a springtime Thursday night matchup between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Los Angeles Lakers seemed like a pretty attractive primetime affair, with visions of league-leading scorer Kevin Durant leading another title-contending Thunder squad into a contest with a Lakers team perhaps scrapping for a playoff spot behind a version of Kobe Bryant rounding into form after knocking off nearly eight months of Achilles-rehab rust. That, of course, wasn't to be.\n\nWhile Durant's turned in an MVP-caliber campaign to lead the Thunder to contention for the top seed in the Western Conference, injuries and setbacks (and, y'know, losing an All-Star center in free agency and \"replacing\" him with Chris Kaman) have derailed Bryant and the rest of the Lakers this season, leading to L.A. dragging a 22-42 record into Thursday's game, which the Lakers entered fresh off having ruled Bryant and point guard Steve Nash out for the remainder of the season. Four days after the Lakers pulled off a stunning upset of the Thunder, OKC returned the favor with a 131-102 smackdown behind 29 points apiece from Durant and Russell Westbrook. The game would've been more fun \u2014 although perhaps not necessarily all that much more competitive \u2014 with Bryant around.\n\nScroll to continue with content Ad\n\nAs it turns out, though, the Mamba was present in spirit, after a fashion. During a conversation with Durant that served as the basis for a piece leading up to Thursday's game, Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Daily News spoke with Durant about the way he works on his game, and how he's modeled that approach on his experiences with Bryant over the years:\n\nStory continues\n\n\u201cOf course. He\u2019s the greatest of all time. His skill is second to none. Him and [Michael Jordan] are neck and neck as far as skill. You can put in athleticism and be the best passer and strongest and quickest. But it\u2019s about skill. I think that\u2019s how his game is played. That\u2019s why Kobe is the top two best ever in just having skill, footwork, shooting the three, shooting the pull up, posting up, dunking on guys and ball handling. It\u2019s flat out skill. Him and Jordan are 1 and 1A. They\u2019re neck and neck as far as the skills are concerned.\u201d\n\n\u201cKobe plays his game no matter what with his intensity and focus and he will play to win. He also will do what he needs to do to get ready to play. If he sees a mismatch, he\u2019ll take it down low and demand the ball. He\u2019s one of those guys who will always bring the same intensity every time no matter who\u2019s on the court.\u201d\n\nThis will undoubtedly rub some readers the wrong way, as such statements always seem to. That's fine \u2014 rankings are, of course, a matter of personal preference, Durant's entitled to his opinion as to Kobe's all-time greatness, and the specific elements Durant's talking about (the breadth of Bryant and Jordan's skills, their commitment to technique, the variety of different things they could do offensively) might not dovetail perfectly with everyone else's definitions of \"greatest of all time.\" There's still plenty of room to state cases for any number of other \"1 or 1A\" players, from Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson, to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson, to Larry Bird and Bill Russell, and any number of others in between. Your mileage may vary. Please feel free to argue this on a barstool to your heart's content this weekend, so long as I am not on the barstool next to you.\n\nWhat's most interesting to me, though, is the way Durant's praise of Bryant's game and accomplishments came in the context of acknowledging not only that he's modeled his own approach to skill development and improvement on Kobe's, but also that he's actively sought advice from his 2012 Summer Olympics teammate on matters both specific and general. More from Medina:\n\nWhat\u2019s Kobe\u2019s personality like?\n\n\u201cHe\u2019s one of those guys that\u2019s to himself and real quiet. That\u2019s how it was being around the Olympics. He\u2019s a great guy to talk to and somebody that I remember two years ago, I called him at like 3 in the morning. We both had a game the next day. I was picking his brain a little bit. He\u2019s one of those guys who\u2019s a night owl.\u201d\n\nWhat were you asking him?\n\n\u201cI was picking his brain about different situations in the game and how I can handle my teammates better and how I can approach the game a little better. I don\u2019t think I told anybody that. But I texted him one night and said, 'Man, I need to talk to somebody before playing the next day.' It was three in the morning. He picked the phone up. That\u2019s something I\u2019ll always remember. When we play each other, it\u2019s better now that we have that relationship because it was almost bragging rights.\u201d\n\nDurant's language here is very similar to what Indiana Pacers forward Paul George used in a recent interview, where he said he'd like to develop a mentor\/mentee-type relationship with LeBron James, \"because I think he\u2019s a player that can help me get to the next level and continue to keep going to the next level.\" (George also said he wishes Bryant \"would mentor [him],\" noting that every time he runs into Kobe, \"he gives me a couple words.\") James, for his part, said he'd be open to mentoring George: \"You know me, I don't mind it at all. I don't mind giving guys [advice], whatever he wants to ask. Guys know I have an open door\/phone policy.\"\n\nWhen those stories broke, some cast sideways glances at George for saying he'd like to be mentored by the guy whose spot he's trying to take and at James for saying he'd be willing to mentor the guy trying to take his spot. I suspect Durant won't be seeing any such side-eye in this instance, if for no other reason than that \u2014 at age 35, after a year lost to major leg injuries, on a Lakers team that looks unlikely to compete for anything meaningful any time soon \u2014 Bryant and the Lakers no longer really represent the same sort of threat to Durant's primacy as the West's best scorer or the Thunder's chances of being the West's best team that George and the Pacers do to James and the Heat. Kobe doesn't think that way, obviously \u2014 he'll believe he could compete for a championship until he's six feet under, same as Jordan \u2014 but in the context of the NBA world as it actually exists, it makes more sense in the minds of many for a great player from the new school to seek counsel from a prior generation's top star rather than for contemporaries to compare notes.\n\nIt shouldn't, though. I like the idea that LeBron and KD have worked out together. I think it's cool that the best and brightest want to not only go after each other and tear one another apart, but also want to learn from one another and try to get better by figuring out stuff they don't know from people who might. Nobody's saying that everybody needs to be the best of friends all the time, but considering that one of the primary developments of the post-AAU-basketball-playing social structure is that these guys mostly are friends, why not make the most of those other awesome people you know as you attempt to become the best possible version of yourself?\n\nYou're never going to know everything, and you're never going to be the unquestioned best at everything if you don't ceaselessly attempt to get better. A lot of that work is physical, of course, coming through hour after hour of hard labor in the practice gym and weight room, but important additions can also come from simple conversations, whether during All-Star Weekend shootarounds or 3 a.m. check-ins. Do collaboration and competition have to be mutually exclusive? Or can players adopt an \"each one teach one\" mentality off the court, and still go all out to take one another to school on it? It sure seems to be working for guys like LeBron and Durant; if this \"mentoring\" thing catches on, the rising tide could lift quite a number of super-talented young boats in the years to come.\n\n- - - - - - -\n\nDan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!\n\nStay connected with Ball Don't Lie on Twitter @YahooBDL, \"Like\" BDL on Facebook and follow BDL's Tumblr for year-round NBA talk, jokes and more."}
{"text":"This is a signboard located on the Makran Coastal Highway. The signboard can easily be ignored by any passersby but ignoring it means ignoring a history of around 9000 years.\n\nThe signboard points a traveler to the historic Hinglaj Devi Temple located in Hinglaj of Balochistan region in Pakistan\u2019s southwest.\n\nIt is one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Pakistan for the country\u2019s minority Hindus. Because it is located near Karachi, the Islamic country\u2019s only cosmopolitan city, Hindus find Hinglaj easily accessible.\n\nWhy is the religious significance of Hinglaj?\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAny temple in the repressive, anti-minority Pakistani establishment is important for the Hindus, and Hinglaj has a history that even the native Balochistanis are proud of.\n\nAccording to the Hindus, the site is one of the 51 Shakti Peeths of Hinduism. A Shakti Peeth is a place associated with Sati \u2013 the wife of Lord Shiva. Hindus believe that the head of Sati fell at Hinglaj, thus making it the most important of all Shakti Peeths in the sub-continent.\n\nHinglaj is also the only Shakti Peeth in Pakistan.\n\nDespite its religious significance, Hinglaj does not even look like a Hindu temple.\n\nThe temple is like a shrine nestled in a small cave like opening at the foot of a mountain. There is only a mark of a Sun and a Moon on the shrine believed to have been made by Lord Ram.\n\nThe idol of the Goddess is inside a low-roof structure. Proper Hindu rituals are followed in the worship of the Goddess.\n\nPilgrims walk on foot over the rocky desert landscape to reach the temple as a form of penance.\n\nHow is Hinglaj still surviving despite increasing fundamentalism in Pakistan?\n\nThe temple would have been lost to the establishment condoned rising fundamentalism in Pakistan but for the locals of Balochistan.\n\nIt is the Balochistani people, Muslims by faith, who have helped protect the shrine for this long. They call it \u2018Nani ki Mandir\u2019.\n\nThe caretakers of the shrine and Baloch tribesmen live in a local village close by. The tribesmen revere the Hinglaj Devi temple and help the Hindu pilgrims in whichever way they can during the pilgrimage.\n\nIt is because of the Baloch tribesmen that the temple survives to this day in a land where everything related to minorities face persecution at the hands of fundamentalists and a government that has kept its eyes closed."}
{"text":"\"Drinks for all my friends!\" Mickey Rourke (right) and Frank Stallone in a scene from \"Barfly,\" the quintessential dive bar movie, from 1987. \"Trees Lounge\" is also an esteemed member of the genre. (The Cannon Group)\n\nRecently, I lamented the passing of John\u2019s Place, a dive bar in Fairfax City which closed Jan. 1. It seemed perhaps symbolic of the evolution of shiny new Northern Virginia, leaving grubby old Northern Virginia behind.\n\nBut readers jumped in with many suggestions of dive bars still thriving in NoVa. I will soon undertake a research mission to explore the places you\u2019ve pointed out. But I needed a template, a philosophical guide: What, in Northern Virginia in 2013, is a dive bar?\n\nI turned to Fritz Hahn, tavern expert for The Post\u2019s Going Out Guide and a man well-acquainted with the dives of NoVa, D.C. and elsewhere. I asked what rules should be used to define a dive bar. I started out with some suggestions: 1) No kids. 2) Decent jukebox. 3) Inedible food.\n\nHis response, below, is hilarious. Insightful, clearly spoken from experience, and a total roadmap. Read on, and then add your own defining characteristics of a dive bar in the comments:\n\nFritz: Good start. I don\u2019t think the food has to be inedible. I\u2019ll admit to liking the burger at Quarry House (Silver Spring) and the chili dog at Vienna Inn. But the menu should be full of things you\u2019d get at a fire station or a church picnic. Chili, Italian subs, fried mac and cheese, wings or tacos would be fine. Even fish and chips. Strip steak, anything topped with boursin cheese, any \u201cwrap,\u201d fancy fish \u2014 all out. At least half of the menu items should have come in contact with a deep fryer.\n\nWhat a dive bar looks like. From the Surf Club in Hyattsville, now gone. (Nikki Kahn\/The Washington Post)\n\nThe exception I\u2019ll make is for places that have found ethnic neighborhoods spring up around them. I\u2019ve been to some bars in Silver Spring and Annandale where the cooks were Latin American and talked the owners into putting quesadillas or empanadas on the menu, and they\u2019re better than the American dive food.\n\nAnyway, more suggestions:\n\nNo microbrews that you don\u2019t see advertised on TV, i.e. Sam Adams, though I\u2019m flexible with this: I know of some dives where the owner or a bartender prefers good beer, so they stock it, or the regulars asked for DC Brau or another local brew.\n\nNo drink over $10. Better yet, no beer-and-a-shot combo over $10.\n\nA dusty bottle of Galliano, Frangelico or Benedictine that probably hasn\u2019t been used since the \u201980s.\n\nHouse wine poured from large jugs behind the bar.\n\nNo framed reviews on the wall unless they\u2019re 10 years old, from an actual newspaper.\n\nI used to say no internet jukebox, and while I\u2019m easing off that, I still prefer a CD Jukebox. Or, as Galaxy Hut did when they caved, a jukebox that the owner can ban artists from. While the Hut has an internet juke, you can\u2019t punch up Britney or One Direction or something.\n\nA dive bar regular, in this case, Tom Orlowski at Mark\u2019s Place in Virginia Beach. \"They oughta hang 'em and get it over with,\" Orlowski said of sniper John Allen Muhammad and his trial then starting in Virginia Beach. (Stephanie K. Kuykendal\/FTWP)\n\nShould be dark or dimly lit. Bonus points for a light that\u2019s out or flickering.\n\nSomething about the place should be local without being hokey \u2014 maybe a high school team\u2019s hat or jersey on the wall, an old photo of the building, a sign advertising an event at the local VFW.\n\nAt least one patron should look like they got there before 10 a.m. Corollary: If the bar doesn\u2019t open before 5, it\u2019s not a dive.\n\nBonus points for a family photo of the owner, more for a family photo showing the bartender, even more for photos of regulars.\n\nPool table is a plus, especially if the felt is faded and you see obvious wear in front of the head spot. (And, like Hank Dietle\u2019s in Rockville, there\u2019s a sign telling you not to use the pool balls in a fight.)\n\n(Fritz\u2019s top Virginia dives: Jay\u2019s in Clarendon, JV\u2019s in Falls Church, McKeever\u2019s in McLean, Mark\u2019s Pub in Falls Church and the Forest Inn in Arlington. )\n\n(Here\u2019s a list of Fritz\u2019s top Virginia bars, of all varieties.)"}
{"text":"Ash Carter announces extra personnel and criticises allies in Middle East for not doing enough in fight against Isis\n\nThe US defence secretary has announced that 200 more military personnel will be sent to Syria to strengthen the fight against Islamic State in its stronghold of Raqqa.\n\nSpeaking at talks on Middle East security, Ash Carter said Barack Obama had approved deployment of the extra troops, who would include special forces trainers, advisers and bomb disposal experts.\n\nThree hundred US special forces are already in Syria working with a coalition of Kurdish and Arab fighters who are attempting to capture the city. The Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) has been gaining ground in areas north of Raqqa, the caliphate\u2019s Syrian capital. The US has mostly been supporting the effort through airstrikes.\n\nCarter also made one of his most direct attacks yet on other Middle Eastern countries for not lending more military muscle to the fight against Isis while complaining about American efforts.\n\nIn a speech on Saturday at a security conference in Bahrain, Carter said the additional troops would \u201ccontinue organising, training, equipping, and otherwise enabling capable, motivated local forces\u201d to take the fight to Isis.\n\nHe went on to criticise America\u2019s Middle East partners for failing to help in the broader campaign to defeat the group and counter-extremism. He suggested US politicians had been irritated by what he saw as disingenuous criticism from \u201cregional powers here in the Middle East\u201d.\n\nCarter said: \u201cI would ask you to imagine what US military and defence leaders think when they have to listen to complaints sometimes that we should do more, when it\u2019s plain to see that all too often, the ones complaining aren\u2019t doing enough themselves.\u201d\n\nHe said it was not unreasonable for Washington to expect regional powers who opposed extremism in the Middle East to do more to help fight it, \u201cparticularly in the political and economic aspects of the campaign\u201d.\n\nCarter noted how many Sunni-led Gulf countries had expressed concern about the spread of Iranian influence in the region.\n\n\u201cThe fact is, if countries in the region are worried about Iran\u2019s destabilising activities \u2013 a concern the United States shares \u2013 they need to get in the game. That means getting serious about starting to partner more with each other, and investing in the right capabilities for the threat.\u201d\n\nHe added that Russia, Syria\u2019s main ally, had \u201conly inflamed the civil war and prolonged suffering\u201d.\n\nCarter said Obama had approved the extra troop movements last week. It is thought they are needed in the urgent efforts to train Arab volunteers who are joining the Raqqa push.\n\n\u201cBy combining our capabilities with those of our local partners, we\u2019ve been squeezing Isis by applying simultaneous pressure from all sides and across domains, through a series of deliberate actions to continue to build momentum,\u201d he said.\n\nThe military push is complicated by the role played by local Kurdish fighters, the most effective US partner against Isis in Syria, but who are viewed by Turkey, a US ally, as a terrorist threat.\n\nMeanwhile, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, was in Paris on Saturday meeting European and Arab foreign ministers to discuss Syria, a conflict he described as the worst catastrophe since the second world war.\n\nHe was due to hold talks afterwards with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, a day after admitting to US embassy staff in Paris that he was \u201ctired\u201d of trying to negotiate with the Russians over the civil war in Syria.\n\n\u201cI know people are tired of these meetings. I\u2019m tired of these meetings,\u201d Kerry said. \u201cAnd people are sort of: \u2018Oh, another meeting. OK. This one will end the same way the other one did.\u2019 I get it, folks. I\u2019m not born yesterday. But what am I supposed to do? Go home and have a nice weekend in Massachusetts while people are dying? Sit there in Washington and do nothing? That\u2019s not the way you do business.\u201d\n\nKerry has struggled to make progress since Russia intervened militarily to prop up Bashar al-Assad\u2019s regime. On Friday in Aleppo, pro-regime forces were claiming to occupy 85% of the city, much of which has now been reduced to ruins.\n\nLavrov announced on Wednesday a temporary \u201chumanitarian pause\u201d to the bombardment of Aleppo to allow civilians to leave, and on Thursday 10,500 fled the city. The UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said on Saturday that an estimated 100,000 people remained, squeezed into an \u201cever-shrinking\u201d pocket of resistance to Assad\u2019s forces and without access to food, water or medicine.\n\nDe Mistura said the expected government victory in Aleppo would not end the war, as has been predicted. \u201cA serious discussion about the future political set-up of Syria\u201d was the only way to achieve peace, he told BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme."}
{"text":"As the large-scale FBI investigation into corruption in college basketball continues nationwide, Hurricanes coach Jim Larra\u00f1aga and his staff are cooperating with authorities looking into the Miami program, Larra\u00f1aga\u2019s attorney said late Tuesday night.\n\nStuart Z. Grossman, a Coral Gables attorney who is representing Larra\u00f1aga, told the Sun Sentinel the coach has turned over phone records and other documents to both school and government officials investigating the Hurricanes men\u2019s basketball team.\n\nTheir efforts, Grossman says, will help prove that neither Larra\u00f1aga nor any member of his coaching staff knew about an alleged payoff being potentially made to a prospect Miami was recruiting.\n\n\u201cWe are living up to our pledge to cooperate with the government and with the University of Miami from Coach Larra\u00f1aga\u2019s point of view by giving them anything and everything they ask for, whether it\u2019s emails, phone receipts, or any documented records that we have,\u201d Grossman said. \u201cAnd I think it\u2019s impressive because we don\u2019t play games. We\u2019re very straightforward, and we believe that anyone that objectively looks at this, and we\u2019re convinced they will, will conclude that the University of Miami, Coach Larra\u00f1aga and his assistants don\u2019t know a thing about this conversation that took place in which a coach was named as supporting some type of payoff to a high school player.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not denying that somebody may have mentioned a coach\u2019s name, but I\u2019m absolutely telling you that none of our coaches were involved in that, in the conversation or in attempted bribery or anything like that.\u201d\n\nFederal corruption and bribery charges were filed against 10 people tied to college basketball nationwide last week, including four assistant coaches, Adidas executive Jim Gatto and youth travel basketball coach Jonathan Brad Augustine.\n\nIn the Department of Justice complaint filed against Gatto, the DOJ alleges that a \u201cCoach-3\u201d from \u201cUniversity-7\u201d had knowledge of a plan to funnel approximately $150,000 to \u201cPlayer-12,\u201d an unnamed high school basketball recruit set to graduate in 2018 in order to secure that athlete\u2019s verbal commitment to the \u201cUniversity-7.\u201d\n\nNo Miami coaches were named in the complaint or were arrested, but school president Dr. Julio Frenk confirmed last Wednesday that the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office was investigating a potential tie between a recruit and a member of the coaching staff at UM, which fit the description of the unnamed \u201cUniversity-7\u201d mentioned in the complaint against Gatto.\n\nGrossman said that Larra\u00f1aga, like everyone else, learned about the allegations involving the Miami program last Tuesday. And he said the coach has been \u201cdevastated\u201d by what has unfolded since.\n\nGrossman said Larra\u00f1aga has spoken with his three assistant coaches \u2014 Chris Caputo, Adam Fisher and Jamal Brunt \u2014 and Grossman said the coach remains confident none of them are involved in the matter.\n\n\u201cFirst of all, he was devastated because each individual knows what he or she did or does in broad daylight or in the middle of the night,\u201d Grossman said. \u201cCoach L knew he had not participated in anything like this. So his No. 1 concern was his assistants, had any of the three of them betrayed him, because he loves these guys. And that, I think, hurt him the most. He didn\u2019t know anything other than what he read, and he\u2019s satisfied that none of the assistants did anything. They\u2019re like sons to him. And if you know him, that\u2019s the way he is. He is the father of Miami basketball. \u2026 Now, we just sit around and wait and cooperate.\u201d\n\nGrossman said he\u2019s uncertain how long the investigation into Miami\u2019s program will go on, but the longer it takes, the greater impact it will have on Miami\u2019s recruiting.\n\nThe Hurricanes, who had one of their best recruiting classes in program history a year ago and are projected to be a preseason Top 25 team this season, currently do not have any recruits committed in their 2018 class. And at least one top prospect has reportedly said he is no longer considering the program.\n\nAs the investigation continues, so, too does the preparation for the upcoming season. Miami, which was 21-12 last year and advanced to the first round of the NCAA Tournament, opened practice last Friday.\n\nIt\u2019s on the court, Grossman said, that Larra\u00f1aga and the Hurricanes have found a brief respite from their off-court issues.\n\n\u201cFrankly, that\u2019s their best moment of the day, when they can get on the floor and practice and they\u2019ll forget about \u2014 for that period of time \u2014 what\u2019s going on,\u201d Grossman said. \u201cIt weighs on everybody\u2019s minds. It weighs on the coaches\u2019 minds, I\u2019m sure on the players\u2019 minds, you have to reassure them that everything\u2019s going to be OK and whatnot. The saddest part is Coach works all of his life to build a program on his own reputation and you sell it to recruits and they, of course, do their due diligence \u2026 come for a campus visit, check out the coaches, this and that and up until this moment, it\u2019s been just flawless under his leadership. Now, you\u2019ve got this taking place and it\u2019s just highly disruptive to the recruiting process.\n\n\u201cI would just like the folks out there who believe in the truth and believe in the university to hang in there. We\u2019ll get through this. We\u2019re doing all we can to cooperate.\u201d\n\nCAPTION Manny Diaz is introduced as head coach of the Miami Hurricanes and outlines his vision for the program moving forward. Manny Diaz is introduced as head coach of the Miami Hurricanes and outlines his vision for the program moving forward. CAPTION Manny Diaz is introduced as head coach of the Miami Hurricanes and outlines his vision for the program moving forward. Manny Diaz is introduced as head coach of the Miami Hurricanes and outlines his vision for the program moving forward. CAPTION Hurricanes running back DeeJay Dallas discusses some of Miami\u2019s woes. Hurricanes running back DeeJay Dallas discusses some of Miami\u2019s woes. CAPTION Manny Diaz talks Hurricanes defense, Temple job Manny Diaz talks Hurricanes defense, Temple job CAPTION UM\u2019s Ephraim Banda on the changes around UM\u2019s defense. UM\u2019s Ephraim Banda on the changes around UM\u2019s defense. CAPTION Hurricanes coach Mark Richt discusses the end of UM's losing streak ahead of Saturday's regular-season finale against Pittsburgh. Hurricanes coach Mark Richt discusses the end of UM's losing streak ahead of Saturday's regular-season finale against Pittsburgh.\n\nccabrera@sun-sentinel.com; On Twitter @ChristyChirinos."}
{"text":"Ducati Motor Holding is reporting another record sales year, and that the Italian motorcycle manufacturer sold 45,100 bikes in 2014. This marks the fifth year in a row that Ducati has shown sales growth, and it\u2019s the third year in a row that the sales figures have been an all-time record for the Italian brand.\n\nSales for 2014 were up 2% over 2013, with the USA again leading as Ducati\u2019s most important market (8,804 units sold in the USA). Unsurprisingly, the Asian market is growing quickly for Ducati as well, up 11% in 2014.\n\nDucati attributes its sales growth in-part to its new water cooler Monster line, where the Ducati Monster 1200 and Ducati Monster 821 helped raise Monster sales by 31%, with 16,409 new bikes sold in 2014.\n\nThe Ducati 899 Panigale helped the Italian company\u2019s Superbike line reach a 12% growth overall, with 9,788 bikes sold in 2014 \u2014 5,806 of those superbikes were Ducati 899 Panigales, up 74% over 2013 (readers will remember that the 899 had a early-autumn launch).\n\nGeographically, Ducati saw sales increases in Mexico (8%) and Brazil (74%, 1,174 bikes). Sales in Europe however were down 3%, with only 19,743 bikes sold in 2014.\n\nThis sales drop was due mainly to specific markets, namely Italy, where sales were down 14% at 4,284 units. Sales in the UK however were up 16%, with 2,742 bikes sold.\n\nIn other markets, Ducati sold 5,787 bikes in Asia, with Thailand leading growth with its 22% gain (3,057 units). Sales in China doubled, but no unit figures were given for this market by Ducati. Australia was up 13% with 2,132 bikes sold, and Japan was up 1% with 2,558 bikes sold.\n\nSource: Ducati"}
{"text":"Secret Empire Tie-ins (ongoing series)\n\nIn this post:\n\nAmazing Spider-Man Vol 4 #29 \u2013 31\n\nOccupy Avengers #8 \u2013 9\n\nChampions Vol 2 #10 \u2013 11\n\nX-Men: Blue #7 \u2013 9\n\nPrevious Posts:\n\nTales from Inside Hydra\n\nAvengers #9 \u2013 10\n\nU.S. Avengers #6 \u2013 9\n\nDeadpool Vol 4 #31 \u2013 35\n\nUnder the Darkforce Dome\n\nUncanny Avengers Vol 3 #24 \u2013 25\n\nDoctor Strange Vol 4 #21 \u2013 24\n\nX-Men: Gold Vol 2 #7 \u2013 8\n\nBeyond the Defense Shield\n\nUltimates 2 Vol 2 #7\n\nMighty Captain Marvel #5 \u2013 8\n\nAll-New Guardians of the Galaxy Annual #1\n\nAmazing Spider-Man #29 \u2013 30\n\nBackground:\n\nTie-in Synopsis:\n\nIssue 29\n\nAs the issue opens, Peter Parker is London preparing to do an interview about the recent involvement of his companies involvement in the liberation of Symkaria. Peter\u2019s publicist, who knows he is Spider-Man, tells him that now is the time for Peter Parker, Spider-Man and no matter what he has to do this interview for the sake of the company.\n\nShortly after the interview begins, the news that the Alpha Flight Station is under attack by a wave of Chitauri and the Masters of Evil are attacking Manhattan. The newscaster tells Peter that interview is over so they can cover these two events as they unfold. Peter is understanding and returns to the Parker Industries office.\n\nWhen he arrives his Spider-sense tells him something is wrong so he suits up as Spider-Man, Peter Parker\u2019s bodyguard and goes inside.\n\nOnce inside he realizes that things are amiss and it turns out that they are all Hydra agents.\n\nBefore they can attack, a voice tells them to stand down and tells Spider-Man to come into Parker\u2019s office\u2026\n\nSitting at the desk is\n\nwho proceeds to ask Peter to peacefully transfer the control of Parker Industries to him, since as he says it basically his inventions that Peter is profiting from his inventions.\n\nSidenote time: Most people reading this probably know but just in case, Doc Ock at one point transferred his consciousness into Peter\u2019s body and Peter\u2019s into his comatose body. While Doc Ock was in Peter\u2019s body he went by the Superior Spider-Man. ..or something along those\n\nOf course, Peter refuses and Doc Ock shows him a news report about the Darkforce Bubble over Manhattan and Parker Industries is responsible. Of course, the two start fighting after Parker refuses to give into his demands. Spider-Man also receives Tony\u2019s message about Hydra\u2019s assault on Washington D.C. Peter jumps in his rocket and heads to D.C. to help as Doc Ock leaves also destroying the Parker Industries building in the process.\n\nIssues 30 \u2013 31\n\nThe book open with the scene of the heroes defeated and Hydra-Cap holding Thor\u2019s Hammer. Spider-Man orders the other heroes to retreat, taking Mockingbird with him. Once they are back at his plane, Mockingbird says that need to start a resistance but Spider-Man says he has to stop Doc Ock from taking over Parker Industries as Hydra sees it as either a threat or asset to their plans.\n\nDoc Ock is at the San Francisco Parker Industries building where he is greeted by some X-Men who are also laying claim to the building. The X-Men allow Ock in after he threatens future Hydra entanglements with the mutant nation that Hydra-Steve has allowed to exist.\n\nPeter decides to make his stand in Shanghai and sets plans in place in case things don\u2019t go in his favor. When Doc Ock shows up and Peter uses his Spider vehicles to try and take him down, Peter learns that Doc Ock has hacked all his vehicles and has complete control over them.\n\nAfter Peter realizes he can\u2019t beat Doc Ock, he uses the \u201cnuclear option\u201d and shuts down and destroy all the research the company was doing so it didn\u2019t fall into Hydra\u2019s and Doc Ock\u2019s control.\n\nIn the last page, Doc Ock is back at the Hydra base\n\nHow does it tie-in to the overall Secret Empire storyline and when does it take place?\n\nThe tie-in story takes place at the beginning of the Secret Empire event. Issue #29 takes place around Secret Empire #0 and Issue# 30 and 31 take place after the events of the Secret Empire FCBD comic and before the Secret Empire #1.\n\nIs it necessary to read to understand the read Amazing Spider-Man to understand what is happening in the larger story?\n\nAs things stand in the event at this moment, not really. At most, it explains why Peter has not been seen after the events in Washington D.C. and sets up Doc Ock up as a member of the Hydra-Avengers. It is also the way the new Superior Doc Ock is reintroduced back into continuity.\n\nIt would be nice to know why Hydra-Cap wanted Parker Industries taken off the board\u2026 was it important or was he just being a dick.\n\n\u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014\n\nOccupy Avengers #8 \u2013 9\n\nBackground:\n\nSuper heroes \u2013 they\u2019re a privileged class. Doing what they want, when they want and suffering no consequences. They have no regard for the ordinary people who are left behind to suffer in their wake. Who will stand up for the little guy? There is a man. If you can find him, and if he believes in your story, he and his friends will put things right. Some call them outlaws, rebels, Robin Hoods. To others, they are heroes. No powers to speak of \u2013 just skills, smarts and a burning drive to do the right thing. His name is Hawkeye. Occupy Avengers: It\u2019s time to \u201cTake Back Justice\u201d!\n\nTie-in Synopsis:\n\nAfter Hawkeye leaves to go lead the Resistance, the Occupy Avengers team is left to help the common folk who are being terrorized by the Hydra forces. Hydra has been forcing farmers to send their goods elsewhere and the people who depend on them are left to fend for themselves.\n\nHawkeye tasks the team with making sure that the people who need the food get it which means hijacking a food convoy and locating one of Nick Fury\u2019s secret bases for supplies that the resistance needs.\n\nThe team splits up and makes their stand against the Hydra forces after they retrieve the weapons that Hawkeye knows that Nick Fury has stashed away.\n\nHow does it tie-in to the overall Secret Empire storyline and when does it take place?\n\nThe story seems to fit best after the events of Secret Empire #0 and before Secret Empire #2. One of the clues is the fact that The Champions are still at The Mound and Natasha has yet to recruit them for her Red Room.\n\nIs it necessary to read to understand the read Occupy Avengers to understand what is happening in the larger story?\n\nNot really, now I will admit that these two issues are the only ones I have read of the series aside from Issue #1 when it first came out so I have no real knowledge of the characters involved but at the same time it wasn\u2019t hard to pick up, read, and understand the situation these heroes found themselves in once Hawkeye left to led the Resistance.\n\n\u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014\n\nThe Champions #10 \u2013 11\n\nBackground:\n\nFollowing the fallout of CIVIL WAR II, Avengers Ms. Marvel, Nova and Spider-Man strike out on their own \u2014 joined by Cyclops, Viv Vision and the Totally Awesome Hulk! Six young heroes determined to change the world \u2014 and they`re only the beginning!\n\nTie-in Synopsis:\n\nIssue #10\n\nThe issue begins inside one of the Hydra Camps for the Inhumans which looks like a normal neighborhood.\n\nThe scene shifts to Viv Vision, Amadeus Cho (Hulk), and Miles Miguel (Spider-Man) searching the Dark Web for information as to the where about of Ms. Marvel. They know that Cyclops is with his X-Men team, Nova is trapped in space outside the Defense Sheild, but fear Ms. Marvel is in a relocation camp.\n\nViv finds the location of one of the camps, which it turns out Amadeus helped design as a place where they could put Banner and keep him from changing into The Hulk.\n\nThe Champions break into the relocation center hoping to free the Inhumans but are surprised when none of them want to leave. Instead of freeing the Inhumans, Amadeus and Viv rewire the power grid using Viv\u2019d ability to turn invisible to hide the town so that the Hydra reinforcements can\u2019t find it.\n\nAs a way of saying \u2018Thank You,\u2019 one of the Inhumans promise that they will use their abilities to search for Ms. Marvel and will contact the Champions if they find anything.\n\nIssue #11\n\nThe issue begins with the Champions searching thru the rubble of Las Vegas following Hydra\u2019s attack. The Champions are joined by Falcon, Wasp, Ironheart and Rayshaun Lucas, the new Patriot.\n\nThe team has split up to search for survivors. Falcon and Hulk are searching the North part of the city. As they are searching, Hulk is trying to keep his hopes up by trying to calculate the probability that they are going to find survivors.\n\nThe rescue effort to the South is Ironheart, Spider-Man, and Patriot. The three find an airplane that has crashed, when they open it up, they find that the people inside were cooked alive from the blast of the attack.\n\nPatriot, who is on his first outing as a superhero, is having a difficult time dealing with the carnage and hopelessness.\n\nThe rest of the team is having just as much luck. After they regroup, they begin to question what they are really doing fighting against Hydra.\n\nSuddenly they hear a noise which turns out to be Patriot, who has found a baby that survived the attack. This raises the team\u2019s spirits as they head back to The Mound.\n\nHow does it tie-in to the overall Secret Empire storyline and when does it take place?\n\nIssue #10 takes place between the FCBD issue and Secret Empire #1. As covered in the last post on the Secret Empire event, Ms. Marvel\u2019s story that takes place over in Secret Warriors and Scott \u201cCyclops\u201d Summers.\n\nIssue #11 takes place during the first few pages of Secret Empire #2 before The Champions decide to follow Natasha\u2019s plan to kill Steve Rogers.\n\nIs it necessary to read to understand the read The Champions tie-ins to understand what is happening in the larger story?\n\nAgain these issues are probably not important in the overall story. While I enjoy The Champions I feel that the way the characters are written in the Secret Empire issues is almost opposite of the way series writer Mark Waid handles them in the event.\n\nIn their own series, there is a sense of proactiveness and helping those affected by the Hydra takeover, whereas in the Secret Empire series they are more than willing to at least go with the plan that involves killing (yes, they do try to temper Black Widow\u2019s responses and plan, but are still willing to be accomplices to her assassination plans).\n\nIssue #10 does give more insight into the plight of the Inhumans\u2019 situation under the Hydra rule, but has a more positive outcome then is displayed throughout the rest of the event for the Inhuman race. There is no mention as to if The Champions continue to look for Ms. Marvel or just assume that she is somewhere else (okay so maybe Las Vegas getting leveled puts a damper on finding Ms. Marvel) that but it would have been nice for the two issues tied together rather than being two one-and done\n\nAnother small nitpick would be that in Secret Empire #2 they find some survivors in Vegas, in The Champions they only find the baby, ending the story on an upbeat positive note rather than the doom and gloom of the main Secret Empire title. Then again who am I to tell Mark Waid how to write a comic book\n\nThen again who am I to tell Mark Waid how to write a comic book? I guess I am just looking for a consistent tone to go along with the main story.\n\n\u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014\n\nX-Men: Blue #7-9\n\nBackground:\n\nTie-in Synopsis:\n\nThe time-displaced young X-Men, who are being helped by Magneto, find themselves at odds with the leadership of the sovereign mutant nation of New Tian, where humans and mutants are supposed to be living in harmony. However, those that dissent against the new regime is being unfairly incarcerated and punished, which the young X-Men won\u2019t stand for.\n\nThe team has been operating in New Tian, freeing those unjustly imprisoned.\n\nEmma Frost, the true ruler of New Tian, sends a strike force of Mutants led by Havok to capture the young X-Men and stop their rebellion. Cyclops, Beast, Angel, and Iceman are captured and while Jean and Jimmy Hudson (alternate universe son of Wolverine) must rescue them.\n\nUpon learning that some of the young X-Men have been captured Magneto, says that he plans to honor his promise to Hydra-Cap not to get involved with the mutant nation, but he has ways he can help rescue the captured X-Men.\n\nSpeaking of the captured X-Men, Emma Frost is trying to turn the young Scott Summers into the recently killed Scott Summers by mentally torturing him and trying to rewrite his brain.\n\nJean and Jimmy are able to rescue their teammates with the help of Polaris (Magneto\u2019s daughter) and the mutant Danger (which turns out is also the Blackbird and Danger Room).\n\nEmma tries to use Scott against his teammates but Jean is able to prevent her from doing so even though Emma\u2019s powers are being boosted by the Cosmic Cube shard she possesses. Jean is also able to temporarily release Xorn from Emma\u2019s control.\n\nFollowing the events in New Tian, Captain America confronts Magneto:\n\nHow does it tie-in to the overall Secret Empire storyline and when does it take place?\n\nThe X-Men: Blue issues are the only other comics that focus on the events taking place in the mutant nation of New Tian besides those in Secret Empire: United and the main series.\n\nWhere this story takes place in the timeline is kind of tricky to place, but if I had to I would say that it happens sometime after the events of Captain America #25 but before Emma surrenders here Cosmic Cube shard.\n\nHere is why:\n\nSecret Empire: United\n\nXorn is established as the Ruler of New Tian at the beginning of the issue\n\nAt the end of the one-shot Hydra-Cap reveals that he knows Xorn is a puppet of Emma\n\nBeast gives no indication that he is aware of Emma\u2019s presence or manipulation of Xorn here or when he and Hydra-Cap meet in Washington DC and Cap tells Beast that if he wanted he could take Thor\u2019s hammer and crush New Tian.\n\nIn X-Men-Blue #7, the mutant Random is one of the mutants the team liberates from the prison. Random was also part of the group that attacked the Hydra border at the beginning of Secret Empire: United.\n\nIn Captain America #25 when the members of the Hydra High Council demand to speak to the ruler of New Tian, the other mutants assume they have come for Xorn. When Emma reveals herself, there is a lot of surprise from Beast.\n\nX-Men: Blue #7\n\nEmma seems to be the one in control here and through out the story arc and it is even mentioned that Jean is able to break Emma\u2019s control over Xorn temporarily.\n\nIs it necessary to read to understand the read X-Men: Blue to understand what is happening in the larger story?\n\nUnless you are already reading X-Men: Blue or just want to find out what is happening with the mutants in New Tian, then you really don\u2019t need to read these issues. Like I said above, it is hard to pinpoint where these issues would fit in the overall story as the X-Men are more of a side story in this event.\n\n\u2014\n\nNext post will probably cover Secret Empire #9 and the Secret Empire: Brave New World"}
{"text":"A new episode of David Tennant\u2019s podcast series David Tennant Does A Podcast With... is now live. This week David's guest is the American actor and producer Jon Hamm. Jon is perhaps best known for his role as Don Draper in the worldwide hit TV drama Mad Men for which he received critical acclaim and won multiple awards including a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award. Jon has also received 16 Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his performances in or production of Mad Men, 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. In the podcast Jon talks about the trial and tribulations of Hollywood and how the success of Mad Men changed his life.\n\nYou can see him next in Amazon Prime\u2019s Good Omens as Archangel Gabriel when\u2019s it drops on 31st May.\n\nProduced by Somethin\u2019 Else and No Mystery with Georgia Tennant, new episodes of David Tennant Does A Podcast With... will be released on Tuesdays. Expect revealing conversation, surprise stories and lots of laughs as David chats to the likes of Micha\u2026"}
{"text":"An 'immigrant hating' Frenchman who planned 15 mass attacks on the Euro 2016 football championship was today facing a range of terrorist charges after being arrested in Ukraine.\n\nPolice announced the arrest of the 25-year-old, identified as Gregoire Moutaux, on the day the England team flew into Paris ready for the tournament's kick off on Friday.\n\n'Gregoire was armed to the teeth and ready to strike,' said a source close to the investigation, who said details of targets emerged during questioning.\n\nScroll down for video\n\nAn 'immigrant hating' Frenchman who planned 15 mass attacks on the Euro 2016 football championship was today facing a range of terrorist charges after being arrested in Ukraine (pictured)\n\nUkraine police said he had massed a 'vast arsenal' including five Kalashnikov assault rifles, two anti-tank grenade launchers, 5000 rounds of ammunition and 125kg of TNT explosives\n\nA source close to the investigation said the 25-year-old suspect was 'armed to the teeth and ready to strike'\n\nPolice announced the arrest of the 25-year-old, identified as Gregoire Moutaux, on the day the England team flew into Paris ready for the tournament's kick off on Friday\n\nThe 'far-right nationalist', who originally comes from Bar-le-Duc, near Reims, in northeast France, was arrested on Ukraine's border with Poland on May 21st.\n\nUkraine police said he had massed a 'vast arsenal' including five Kalashnikov assault rifles, two anti-tank grenade launchers, 5000 rounds of ammunition and 125kg of TNT explosives.\n\n'He could have caused carnage,' said the source, who also described Moutaux as 'a farm worker from the Lorraine district of France, who objected to his country being taken over by immigrants.'\n\nMoutaux was a confirmed Islamophobe and anti-Semite, and specifically wanted to targets mosques, synagogues, and 'large crowds building up around Euro 2016.'\n\nVasyl Grytsak, of the SBU Ukrainian security service, said: 'We were able to prevent fifteen terrorist acts that were planned in France on the eve of and during the European Championship football.'\n\nThe suspect had allegedly bought a series of weapons including machine guns, explosives and grenade launchers\n\nUkraine police said he had massed a 'vast arsenal' including five Kalashnikov assault rifles, two anti-tank grenade launchers, 5000 rounds of ammunition and 125kg of TNT explosives\n\nThe Frenchman arrived in eastern Ukraine last year and was 'trying to establish ties with Ukrainian troops under the guise of volunteering,' the Ukrainian agency said\n\nHe confirmed Moutaux aimed 'to blow up a Muslim mosque, a Jewish synagogue, tax collection organisations, police patrol units and numerous other locations'.\n\nMr Grytsak added: 'He obtained five Kalashnikov rifles, more than 5,000 bullets, two anti-tank grenade launchers, 125 kilogrammes (275 pounds) of TNT, 100 detonators, 20 balaclavas and other things.'\n\nMoutaux was particularly opposed to France's policy of allowing in migrants, the spread of Islam and globalisation, said Mr Grytsak.\n\nSoon after Moutaux's arrest in Ukraine, a raid was carried out at his home in France.\n\nThere officers found Neo-Nazi t-shirts, as well as chemicals used to produce explosives and five balacalvas. He had no criminal record.\n\nHe is believed to have travelled to Ukraine, one of the most unstable states in the world at the moment, because it is so easy to pick up arms and explosives.\n\nUkrainian agents had been following the man since December, and allowed him to buy a series of weapons\n\nThe Paris prosecutor's office, which handles terrorism cases at a national level, said no investigation had been opened yet\n\nMoutaux was particularly opposed to France's policy of allowing in migrants, the spread of Islam and globalisation, said Ukraine authorities\n\nDespite this, locals in Nant-le-Petit, which has a population of just 80 people, described Moutaux as a 'polite and pleasant lad'..\n\nMayor Dominique Pensalfini-Demorise said: 'He was a kid who was pleasant to his neighbours, intelligent and kind.He was always ready to help people.'\n\nBritish football fans will risk an unprecedented security threat when they travel to France for Euro 2016 this week.\n\nIt follows warnings from a range of security agencies, ranging from the U.S.. State Department to French police that Islamic State terrorists are planning to strike.\n\nMarseille commander Laurent Nunez said the Three Lions 'opening match against Russia on Saturday in in the Mediterranean port city was 'a particularly high risk'.\n\nSuggestions that the city will be attacked emerged on a computer belonging to Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the ISIS death squad that hit Paris last November.\n\nThe 'far-right nationalist', who originally comes from Bar-le-Duc, near Reims, in northeast France, was arrested on Ukraine's border with Poland on May 21st\n\nUkraine authorities said Moutaux 'aimed to blow up a Muslim mosque, a Jewish synagogue, tax collection organisations, police patrol units and numerous other locations'\n\nFrench regional newspaper L'Est Republicain identified the man as Gregoire Moutaux and said investigators raided his home (pictured) in Nant-le-Petit near the eastern city of Nancy in late May.\n\nIt managed to murder 130 people, with suicide bombers exploding their devices around the Stade de France during a football friendly between France and Germany.\n\nAbdeslam is currently on remand in a high-security prison in Paris, and has confirmed that ISIS want to attack again, while the eyes of the world are on France during Euro 2016.\n\nFrance remains under a State of Emergency following last November's attack, with thousands of soldiers joining police on the streets.\n\nSOUTH AFRICA INSISTS 'NO IMMEDIATE DANGER' DESPITE TERROR WARNING South Africa has moved to allayed fears after Washington warned Americans of a possibly imminent terror attack by Islamic extremists in the country's major cities. 'We remain a strong and stable democratic country and there is no immediate danger,' State Security Minister David Mahlobo said in a statement. The United States on Saturday said it had received information that terrorist groups were planning to carry out attacks in South Africa during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The warning said attacks may target sites frequented by US citizens, including high-end shopping areas and malls in the economic hub of Johannesburg and Cape Town, which is popular with tourists. It came against the background of ISIS' 'public call for its adherents to carry out terrorist attacks globally during the upcoming month of Ramadan,' the US embassy in South Africa said. But the South African government played down the threat. State security ministry spokesman Brian Dube said authorities have not stepped up security following the alert. He said: 'Our information has not necessarily confirmed what has been raised by the Americans.' This is the second alert the US has issued for South Africa in under a year and was followed by British government travel advice, cautioning against a 'high threat from terrorism' in South Africa. 'Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places visited by foreigners such as shopping areas in Johannesburg and Cape Town,' said the online foreign travel advice. South Africa has so far escaped the jihadist attacks seen in several other African countries. But according to Robert Besseling, Executive Director at Ex Africa Business Risk Intelligence, a threat of Islamist terrorism in South Africa was real. 'A successful terrorist attack in South Africa is feasible, given police ineffectiveness, serious weaknesses within the intelligence apparatus, and the lack of a counter-terrorism strategy,' he said in a statement. However, a local analyst said South Africa's neutral foreign policy did not place it at risk. 'We don't have a history of terrorism here, we have got a foreign policy that's quite neutral, we don't engage in any counter-insurgency operations either on the continent or elsewhere that would place us in at risk of retaliatory attacks,' said Ryan Cummings, an analyst with Cape Town-based Signal Risk think tank.\n\nElite special forces will be on hand to deal with possible terrorist incidents, scrambling to danger zones in a matter of minutes.\n\nFrench authorities have extended a state of emergency until the end of the tournament, as well as the Tour de France cycling race, which will be held from July 2 to July 24.\n\nSome 2.5 million football fans are expected in stadiums, including 1.5 million foreign visitors.\n\nYesterday, French President Francois Hollande said that the threat of extremism won't stop the European Championships from being successful.\n\nElite special forces will be on hand to deal with possible terrorist incidents, scrambling to danger zones in a matter of minutes. Police are pictured outside the Stade de France in Paris in March\n\nA French citizen arrested on the Ukrainian-Polish border with 125kg of explosives was planning a string of attacks in France to coincide with Euro 2016, it has emerged. French forensic officers take part in a mock terror attack drill outside the Stade des Lumieres, near Lyon earlier this week\n\nHollande said in an interview on Sunday with France Inter radio that precautionary measures throughout the matches, including a 90,000-strong security force, will ensure the matches scattered in 10 French cities are safe.\n\nHollande said France decided to go ahead with Euro 2016 despite two waves of attacks last year, and make it a 'festival for people and for sports.'\n\nBut he said that spectators at the month-long tournament must accept security checks as they enter stadiums and fan zones."}
{"text":"- Big Lake High School has made an amendment to its policy over the display of guns in yearbook photos, and the Big Lake Trap Team photo will now be included.\n\nTrapshooting coach Rhonda Eckerdt said she learned Wednesday from the athletic director that the team picture wouldn\u2019t be included in the yearbook because it's against school policy to show firearms in photos.\n\nThe team, coaches, parents and community members said the guns are a piece of sporting equipment \u2013 do different from a baseball bat \u2013 and should be part of the photo. The issue was expected to be raised by parents during a school board meeting Thursday night, but Thursday morning the school made an exception for the trap team and will allow the photo.\n\nThis year\u2019s photo was particularly special because it was the first year the team has its photo in the current yearbook, and the first year ever that all team members were included in the photo.\n\nBig Lake Schools statement on policy change\n\nThe Big Lake Schools administration accepted a request this morning to change a handbook policy concerning the display of guns in yearbook photos.\n\nThe past policy said the administration may edit or exclude any photos or artwork that displayed firearms or weapons.\n\nOnce the procedure for modifying a handbook policy was followed, the district was able to amend the policy so that the school-sponsored Trap Shooting team photo can be included.\n\nIt is important to remember that a school district has rules and procedures that need to be followed. The intense conversation around this topic on social media and the phone calls and emails we received, only delayed the process.\n\nWe encouraged the public to follow the process when a request is being made to review a rule or policy. As always, we appreciate feedback and comments from the public.\n\nPolicy Amendment\n\nAll photos, written text, and artwork must conform to school policies and are subject to approval by the yearbook advisor and\/or administration. Photos and artwork that violate school policy, display firearms, weapons, drugs, alcohol, inappropriate gestures or poses, and revealing or obscene clothing may be edited or excluded without permission or notification. Exception given to our school-sponsored trap-shooting team which will be allowed to have team pictures in the yearbook, team poster displayed in the school, and any approved photos taken by yearbook staff. These photos would include their firearms."}
{"text":"When I see what some companies are doing these days with cloud and big data, I often wonder whether technology has ever been focused on business value in their organizations. I\u2019ve worked primarily in industries where technology had to deliver business value or it was a non-starter. These days it is no longer sufficient to be a technologist that is simply putting bits and bytes together. Today it\u2019s all about how those bits and bytes add value. Defining how a new technology approach will add value is the role of an IT executive, but that\u2019s where too many executives drop the ball.\n\nRemoving the Bias from Big Data\n\nWith cloud and big data in particular I think there\u2019s a real danger in buying into the hype without understanding the implications. If you do that, it\u2019s almost certain you will make bad decisions. With big data, the risk is that you find the answer you\u2019re looking for \u2013whatever it is. It\u2019s a psychological fact that if you have a preconceived notion, data will help drive to that point of view. If you say, \u201cWhat is impacting my sales growth\u2026and by the way I think it\u2019s poor product performance,\u201d you\u2019re magically going to get a lot of data coming in about poor product performance and it will validate that notion. This predictive bias often ends up being an organizational, structural, and mindset issue.\n\nBig data is really about measuring what matters versus measuring what\u2019s measurable. And to be honest there are not enough good data scientists out there. So it can still be more dangerous to do big data than not. It\u2019s accessible to anyone now, but sometimes you want to take the keys away from people so they don\u2019t hurt themselves. You may be better off taking a more cautious path than diving into the deep end, but at a minimum go in with eyes wide open.\n\nCloud Initiatives Beg for Clarity\n\nIn the same way, you can\u2019t decide to be a cloud-first organization without deciding what cloud first should mean for you. Does it mean Platform-as-a-Service or email? Does it mean development or delivery? If you don\u2019t get into the right level of detail, you\u2019re sending your teams into blood fights to battle for what they want, versus what the strategic direction is. Leaders need to take a more active role in getting into the details of what is meant by these strategic decisions. You don\u2019t want to micromanage things, but at a very minimum you should be sending teams off to come back with the critical decisions that need to be made and have those discussions and make those decisions at the right levels. If the bosses are not aligned the employees will be wasting precious time fighting losing battles. Sometimes it\u2019s easier not to have fights with your peers, but that just means you\u2019re leaving it for your employees and that is simply cowardice. Forcing uncomfortable discussions about what a cloud or big data strategy means and then getting into the detail is often the better course to take.\n\nExecutives have to drill in to get agreement at the deeper levels. They have to make the hard decisions. If you\u2019ve got three bosses that aren\u2019t aligned, it\u2019s patently unfair to expect their teams to get aligned. So if you have to have uncomfortable conversations, have them.\n\nEven Agile Can Slow You Down\n\nThere\u2019s a faddish IT dynamic out there across a lot of things. Look at agile. There isn\u2019t a developer or development organization out there today saying, \u201cI\u2019d really prefer to be doing waterfall.\u201d The problem is, most of the architectures they\u2019re working on don\u2019t lend themselves to agile. If you work in an agile model in a fragile architecture, things are likely to break. You don\u2019t want DevOps guys making minimum marketable changes in a legacy, tightly coupled architecture.\n\nBut nobody wants to do waterfall, so you get sprawl of organizations saying we do agile. What they often want is to do waterfall with limited documentation and agile practices, which is going to cause more problems than do good. There may be a fear you can\u2019t get the right talent. There\u2019s a real passion that says, \u201cI can\u2019t get the talent I want unless I\u2019m doing agile.\u201d Then organizations do agile but don\u2019t have real product managers and they aren\u2019t really managing stories. You\u2019re doing some things, but not in a way that\u2019s valuable.\n\nYes, you can dive into an IT fad without thinking about it, but I can promise you\u2019ll look back and be horrified someday. The only time you can fully adopt some of these new methods is when you are starting from scratch. Most of us don\u2019t have that luxury because we are working with legacy architectures and technical debt so you have to play hand you\u2019ve been dealt, communicate well, set clear and measurable outcomes, and use these fads to thoughtfully supplement the environment you are working in to benefit the ecosystem.\n\nRead this Harvard Business Review article, \"Beware the next big thing.\"\n\nSven Gerjets is Chief Technology Officer at Pearson, the world\u2019s leading learning company, with 40,000 employees in more than 80 countries. He brings 20 years of IT experience to his role, including application development, system integration, enterprise program management, and large organization leadership."}
{"text":"Sarkeesian criticizes gaming tropes\n\nBy Max Moran | Published 6 hours ago | Updated 6 hours ago\n\nOn Monday, the University welcomed media critic Anita Sarkeesian for a lecture on sexist and anti-feminist tropes in video games. The lecture had initially been planned for February, but it had to be rescheduled due to major snowfall that caused travel problems.\n\nSarkeesian is the host and co-writer of \u201cFeminist Frequency,\u201d an online video series deconstructing sexist tropes in media, particularly video games. Since her work discussing games began, she has been the subject of online harassment, including rape and death threats, hacking and identity theft. Sarkeesian was one of the major targets of the \u201cGamergate\u201d movement, which is a reaction against media trends toward diversifying gaming culture and criticizing the \u201cgamer\u201d identity. Previous Sarkeesian talks in other venues have received bombing and mass shooting threats, which may have been why audience members passed through a metal detector before entering the Wasserman Cinematheque to hear the lecture.\n\nChairman of the Computer Science department Prof. Jordan Pollack (COSI) introduced Sarkeesian, stating his pleasure at the lecture\u2019s co-sponsors, and pointing out that \u201cit\u2019s not often that computer science works together with the various women\u2019s studies groups on campus.\u201d Pollack said he was inspired to invite Sarkeesian to speak at the University after a colleague suggested that more women and people of color might be inspired to pursue computer science if the University\u2019s department taught game programming and design, and Sarkeesian\u2019s story stood out to Pollack. \u201cI believe a modern university must study and teach video games as a multidisciplinary media,\u201d Pollack said.\n\nSarkeesian then took the stage, beginning with what she said was a simple assertion: \u201cvideo games matter.\u201d She said that while it is not \u201ca simple one-to-one correlation,\u201d the media that people consume influences them, which is why criticism, especially feminist criticism, is important. Sarkeesian said she started Feminist Frequency because she was frustrated at the inaccessibility of feminist thought she discovered in college and wanted to use pop culture as a way to engage a wider audience with feminism. Her first series of Feminist Frequency videos dissected tropes in pop culture at large, and after they found moderate success, she decided to release a second series. Noticing that almost all of the tropes she was interested in were prevalent in video games, Sarkeesian decided that this series of videos would specifically discuss tropes in gaming.\n\nNext, Sarkeesian briefly discussed the online harassment she\u2019s received for her work, though she stressed that she didn\u2019t want to talk about harassment for the majority of the lecture. She characterized her harassers as a \u201ccyber mob,\u201d \u2014 a group which collectively shames and discredits its target with the underlying goal of reinforcing their own dominance within a given culture, in this case, gaming.\n\nSarkeesian asserted that Gamergate is an extension of this same mob mentality and that it works to maintain the status quo of games being made primarily for men. She then compared the exclusion of women in gaming to the common stigma within gaming that certain games are not played by \u201ctrue gamers.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe idea that you can love something and be critical of it at the same time is so important to what I do,\u201d Sarkeesian told the audience as she transitioned into the heart of the lecture with a slide reading \u201c8 Ways To Improve Games For Women.\u201d She listed eight tropes in gaming plots and presentation that portray women negatively and offered solutions and examples of games which have avoided the tropes.\n\nThe first trope was the \u201cSmurfette Principle,\u201d wherein a story has only one female character for a full ensemble of men. Sarkeesian specifically pointed out 2013\u2019s \u201cThe Wonderful 101,\u201d which features seven playable male characters who are color-coded, but only one female character, whose color is pink. Sarkeesian noted that the female character\u2019s abilities reinforce that \u201c\u2018girl\u2019 is her personality,\u201d pointing out that she fights with a dominatrix-esque whip and is introduced in a trailer for the game through a shots that needlessly include her underwear.\n\nSarkeesian introduced the second trope \u2014 \u201cLingerie Is Not Armor,\u201d \u2014 by showing a trailer for the 2000 game \u201cPerfect Dark,\u201d which depicted its female spy protagonist taking a shower, putting on makeup, and deciding on an outfit. Sarkeesian argued that game designers often think only about titillating a straight male audience when designing outfits for female characters, and jokingly suggested a solution to the problem by changing the slide to several pictures of sports bras. \u201cThey\u2019re designed to prevent jiggle physics,\u201d she added.\n\nHer third trope was called \u201cOne Size Does Not Fit All,\u201d which she introduced by pointing out that almost all female characters in the game \u201cLeague of Legends\u201d are young, large-breasted, slender women. Sarkeesian stated that since sexualized women are almost the only women depicted in the medium, it reinforces that these characters\u2019 worth is to excite the audience. She elaborated that those who point out sexualized men in games to counter her arguments are creating a false equivalency. Showing an image of the main characters from the upcoming game \u201cOverwatch,\u201d Sarkeesian pointed out that the male characters have a range of body types, while all but one of the female characters are sexualized.\n\nThe fourth trope, humorously titled \u201cStrategic Butt Coverings,\u201d began with a series of clips of female player characters walking in games, all of which featured camera angles that prominently display the characters\u2019 behinds. To contrast this, Sarkeesian showed clips of male player characters \u2014 when the player could focus the camera on a male characters\u2019 behind, heavy clothing or capes obscured the characters\u2019 cheeks, which contrasted sharply with the female characters. According to Sarkeesian, this emphasis on characters\u2019 rear ends tells players that the woman\u2019s sexual body parts are what they should focus on, rather than the character themselves, as for the men. She pointed to 2015\u2019s \u201cLife is Strange\u201d as a game which avoided this problem, simply by having its female protagonist wear jeans and a knapsack.\n\nFifth, Sarkeesian noted that women in games are overwhelmingly white, and that when women of color are depicted, it is usually through a lens of sexualized racism that caricatures these characters as \u201csavage\u201d or \u201cuntamable.\u201d She pointed to \u201cNever Alone,\u201d a game made by an Alaskan indigenous community about their own culture, as a notable exception to this trope.\n\nSarkeesian then pointed out the sexualization of female characters\u2019 walking animations, comparing a clip of Catwoman in \u201cBatman: Arkham City\u201d to a model on a runway. Her seventh trope was titled \u201cFighting and Fucking are Different,\u201d which she introduced by playing audio of a female character moaning sexually. When she revealed that this audio was of a \u201cLeague of Legends\u201d character in combat, the audience laughed. Sarkeesian extended the trope to point out that female fighting dialogue is often sexual as well and that this trope both conflates violence with sex and communicates that female sexuality is dangerous, rather than positive or fun. She indicated \u201cAssassin\u2019s Creed: Unity\u201d as a recent game that avoided this trope.\n\nFinally, Sarkeesian asked the audience: \u201cWhere Are All the Female Combatants?\u201d She pointed out that games rarely feature women as standard enemies and said that game designers she\u2019s interviewed often say that this is done to avoid depicting violence against women. Sarkeesian said that there are ways to show female enemies without it being problematic, saying that violence against women is an issue when the violence is committed specifically because the target is a woman.\n\nA brief question-and-answer segment followed the lecture, which was this year\u2019s Martin Weiner lecture in Computer Science, and was co-sponsored by the Computer Science department, the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Chief Information Officer, the English department, the Women\u2019s Gender and Sexuality Studies program, the Sociology and Social Justice Police Program and the Women\u2019s Studies Research Center."}
{"text":"A new, 2015 Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet has leaked ahead of the stylus-packing device\u2019s official unveiling.\n\nAlthough Samsung has yet to shed any formal light on the existence of such a device, the 2015 Note 10.1 has popped up on the company\u2019s official website.\n\nSpotted by the folks over at TechTastic, the Galaxy Note 10.1 (2015) has been prematurely referenced in a services and app descriptions page. It was listed as one of a number of devices compatible with a range of Samsung services.\n\nName teasing aside, the leak has offered up no further insight into the capabilities of the 2015 Galaxy Note 10.1.\n\nThe timing, however, could be particularly telling. With the 2014 Galaxy Note 10.1 having been unveiled last October, annual refresh patterns would suggest that the 2015 Galaxy Note 10.1 could be with us in the very near future.\n\nWith the tablet\u2019s name having leaked, new Galaxy Note 10.1 rumours have started to surface. One such report has suggested the device could be held off until November so as to hit retailers running Android 5.0 Lollipop direct from the box.\n\nLast year\u2019s Note 10.1 packed a 2560 x 1600 pixel display alongside a Snapdragon 800 processor and Samsung\u2019s S-Pen stylus.\n\nWith the Galaxy Note 4 smartphone having recently jumped to a QHD panel, Snapdragon 805 chipset and a stylus with twice the sensitivity of its predecessors, we would expect any new Note tablets to follow suit.\n\nNext, read everything you need to know about the Samsung Galaxy S6"}
{"text":"Senators rejected dueling Republican and Democratic plans to stop rates from doubling. Student loan bills stall in Senate\n\nThe Senate on Thursday voted twice to try to keep student loan interest rates low \u2013 but got nowhere.\n\nSenators rejected dueling Republican and Democratic plans to stop rates from doubling in July, because of partisan fighting \u2013 again \u2013 over how the $6-billion bill would be paid for.\n\nStory Continued Below\n\nRepublicans want to divert money from a prevention fund created under the new health care law, while Democrats insist on eliminating a tax loophole for Subchapter S Corporations.\n\nBoth plans were largely expected to fail to reach the 60-vote barrier to kill a filibuster. And on Thursday, neither side was budging.\n\nSenate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) went to the Senate floor in the morning to chastise Republicans for wanting to drain the preventive fund, which they deem an unnecessary slush fund.\n\n\u201cThe Republican proposal is paid for by stripping Americans of life-saving preventive health care,\u201d Reid said. \u201cThe Democratic proposal is paid for by closing a loophole that allows wealthy Americans to dodge their taxes.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s easy to see these two proposals were not created equal,\u201d he added.\n\nSenate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) quickly followed, accusing Democrats of trying to manufacture a scapegoat instead of reaching across the aisle to Republicans. Closing the tax loophole for so-called S Corporations amounts to a tax increase, he said.\n\nRepublicans also argue that closing the loophole, used by S Corporations to avoid paying a tax on Medicare, would redirect billions away from the health care program for the elderly.\n\n\u201cWe already know how this story ends,\u201d McConnell said. \u201cSo why are Democrats forcing us to vote on their failed proposal yet again? Because, as I\u2019ve said, they\u2019re more interested in drawing our opposition \u2014 of creating a bad guy \u2014 than in actually solving the problem.\u201d\n\nIn the House, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) blamed Democrats for the gridlock.\n\n\u201cThe House has passed a reasonable and responsible student loan bill and paid for it by eliminating a slush fund that the president and Democrats have already supported cutting,\u201d Boehner said. \u201cIf the president and Senate Democratic leaders prefer a different approach, then the onus is on them to offer a solution that can pass both chambers,\u201d\n\n\u201cThis issue can be resolved quickly if the Democrats come to the table and offer a responsible solution,\u201d he concluded, \u201cand we hope they will.\u201d\n\nDemocrats weren\u2019t having it, though.\n\n\u201cThese are lobbyists, these are lawyers who have craftily used Subchapter S Corporations to avoid paying payroll taxes,\u201d Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said. \u201cThis loophole has been criticized on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal \u2026 I can\u2019t think of a clearer choice.\u201d\n\nThe Democratic bill failed 51-43. The Republicans\u2019 bill, which mirrors legislation passed by the GOP-led House in April, failed 34-62. Sixty votes were needed to move the measures along.\n\nThe Obama administration has vowed to veto the Republican bill. White House press secretary Jay Carney issued a statement after the votes blaming the GOP for the gridlock.\n\n\u201dWith only 37 days left to stop student loan interest rates from doubling on July 1, Senate Republicans still have not proven that they\u2019re serious about resolving this problem,\u201d he said.\n\nTen Republicans voted against their party\u2019s bill, while one Democrat \u2014 Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia \u2014 rejected the Democratic version. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) voted present on both bills to avoid conflict-of-interest issues with her husband, John McKernan, the chairman of the board of directors of the Education Management Corporation.\n\nKeeping the federal student loan interest rate at the current 3.4 percent has been one of President Barack Obama\u2019s top priorities lately, but so far the legislation has bogged down. Without congressional action, the rate will rise to 6.8 percent in July.\n\nPreventing such an increase would save 7 million college students an average of $1,000 over the life of their loans, according to the White House.\n\nThis article tagged under: Student Loans\n\nPolitics"}
{"text":"CHICAGO, IL - APRIL 29: Taj Gibson #22 of the Chicago Bulls dunks against the Washington Wizards in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals in the 2014 NBA Playoffs on April 29, 2014 at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and\/or using this photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2014 NBAE (Photo by Gary Dineen\/NBAE via Getty Images) Bulls forward Taj Gibson. (Gary Dineen\/NBAE\/Getty Images)\n\nThe Bulls may not be as active on the trade market right now as originally thought.\n\nAfter a Sporting News report surfaced that Chicago sixth man Taj Gibson had been \u201cconnected to much of the league the past few months\u201d in trade talks, Yahoo Sports NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski told the Spiegel and Mannelly Show on Friday morning that he\u2019d heard nothing of that sort in his discussions.\n\n\u201cI have not heard anything involving Taj,\u201d Wojnarowski said.\n\n\u201cI haven\u2019t heard that in my conversations with team executives. I\u2019ve heard about a lot of names coming up in trade talks. His has not been one of them. Going forward for the Bulls, do they have a decision to make on Taj? Let\u2019s say Jimmy Butler is going to get a max offer sheet (next offseason) or they have to get in front of a max offer sheet and offer a deal close to the max.\n\n\u201cDo they have to look at the cap and make a decision on Taj? It\u2019s possible. But I don\u2019t know that they have to do that now. I haven\u2019t heard anything along those lines that they were looking to shake it up that way. That doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not true, but I haven\u2019t heard one team mention to me that they felt Taj was available.\u201d\n\nGibson was at the center of many trade rumors last summer when the Bulls pursued Carmelo Anthony in free agency and were weighing options on how to offer him the most money, so it\u2019s not surprising that Gibson\u2019s name has popped up again. Still, the report on him being connected to \u201cmuch of the league\u201d seemed to suggest Gibson had a huge \u201cfor sale\u201d sign hanging on him, which Wojnarowski hasn\u2019t found to be the case.\n\nIn signing the 34-year-old Pau Gasol last summer, the Bulls basically gave themselves a two-year title window with this group. So unless the return haul is something special, trading Gibson would seem contrary to Chicago\u2019s win-now mentality anyway.\n\nWhile he\u2019s been inconsistent at times, Gibson remains a key contributor who was a stalwart in Chicago\u2019s closing lineups last season and could serve as an answer in that role again as Tom Thibodeau looks for ways to spark his struggling team."}
{"text":"The University of Oregon is being sued by a longtime psychology professor who alleges the UO pays her substantially less than several less-experienced male colleagues, in violation of the federal Equal Pay Act.\n\nJennifer Freyd\ufffds suit, filed Tuesday morning in U.S. District Court in Eugene, also includes claims alleging disparate treatment and impact, sex-based discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause, and Title IX violations. Title IX bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive federal money.\n\n\ufffdFor years, I have tried to work within my department and the college to help the UO live up to its own policies of non-discrimination,\ufffd Freyd said in a statement issued by her attorneys. \ufffdWomen all over the country and in all kinds of jobs earn less than their male counterparts. It\ufffds past time for the UO to recognize and address this problem in its own salary practices.\ufffd\n\nThe suit asserts that professor salaries in the psychology department are supposed to be determined by seniority and merit, and alleges that UO officials are aware of pay differences between their male and female psychology professors.\n\nUniversity spokesman Tobin Klinger said UO officials know of Freyd\ufffds allegations and plan to \ufffdlook closely at the case in the coming days.\ufffd\n\n\ufffdAlthough professor Freyd\ufffds pay places her in the top 13 percent of all tenure track faculty at the UO, we are committed to paying our faculty commensurate with their achievements,\ufffd Klinger said.\n\nFreyd\ufffds current salary is $155,237 and her benefits package, which includes health insurance and a retirement plan, totals another $70,545, bringing her total compensation to $225,782, according to data provided by Klinger.\n\nFreyd is the psychology department\ufffds most senior faculty member. But, according to the suit, she is paid less than three of her male colleagues \ufffdwho are junior to her and similarly or less accomplished\ufffd and receives roughly the same salary as a fourth male professor who is \ufffdsubstantially junior.\ufffd The lawsuit did not name the colleagues or list their pay.\n\nFreyd has been a full professor in the university\ufffds psychology department since 1992. She is a nationally known expert in sexual assault trauma, and in 2014 filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging the university had violated a federal campus security law when it did not notify the campus community or include in a police log a sexual assault allegation against three UO basketball players. The university later expelled the players.\n\nFreyd is seeking unspecified monetary damages; a declaration that the UO has engaged in unlawful sex discrimination against her; a order that boosts her salary and benefits \ufffdto the levels they would be in the absence of discrimination\ufffd and also prohibits the UO from retaliating against her; back pay to compensate her for differences in her salary and benefits for the past six years; and an additional three years\ufffd back pay.\n\n\ufffdThe psychology department recognizes and acknowledges this gender-based disparity in her salary as well as the salaries of other female professors in the department,\ufffd the suit alleges. \ufffdDespite forceful advocacy on her behalf by the head of her department and others, the University of Oregon has not rectified its sex discrimination.\ufffd\n\nThe lawsuit asserts Freyd\ufffds salary has been \ufffdinfected by sex discrimination\ufffd since early in her career at the UO.\n\nIn May 2014 \ufffd the same month in which she filed the complaint over the UO\ufffds handling of the basketball players\ufffd case \ufffd Freyd provided psychology department heads with an analysis showing that female professors were being paid significantly less than their male counterparts, according to the suit.\n\nFreyd and two colleagues provided a second, similar pay analysis in April 2015. That same year, Freyd was awarded an 8-percent merit raise that still left her salary at $18,000 less than that of her closest male peer, who had seven years\ufffd less experience than she did at the time, the lawsuit says.\n\nMeanwhile, the psychology department completed its own study during the spring of 2016 that addressed a range of topics and found male professors are paid an average of about $25,000 more per year than their female counterparts, according to the suit. That study was provided to deans in the UO\ufffds College of Arts & Sciences.\n\nThe UO then appointed a committee to evaluate the psychology department. A report from the group noted gender pay disparities and recommended the department should continue \ufffdpressing for gender equity in terms of pay at the senior levels of the faculty,\ufffd the lawsuit says.\n\nUlrich Mayr, the psychology department\ufffds head, emailed the College of Arts & Sciences\ufffd deans in December requesting they address Freyd\ufffds salary, which he characterized as \ufffdour most glaring inequity case,\ufffd according to the suit. Mayr asserted Freyd\ufffds pay is as much as $50,000 below where it should be, the lawsuit says.\n\nThe College of Arts & Sciences announced raises in January. Freyd earned standard pay increases but no additional raise based on requests that she and Mayr had made, according to the suit. The lawsuit did not list the increases, but it appears that her pay was boosted approximately 3 percent. A campuswide salary report issued Nov. 1 by the UO\ufffds Office of Institutional Research lists Freyd\ufffds annual salary as being $150,862.\n\nAndrew Marcus, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, and Hal Sadofsky, the associate dean, met with Freyd on Jan. 18. They told her that they would not address sex discrimination in her pay, and \ufffdbelittled her comments\ufffd by saying that only three men in her department earned more than her, the lawsuit says.\n\nThe suit calls Freyd a pioneer in the field of the psychology of trauma, and says the UO has lauded her with its Research Innovation Award in 2009, its Excellence Award for Outstanding Mentorship in Graduate Studies in 2012, and its Faculty Research Award in 2014.\n\nScholarly journals focus on her research, which has twice led her to be invited to the White House, according to the lawsuit.\n\nFreyd is represented by Eugene law firm Johnson Johnson Lucas and Middleton.\n\nFollow Jack on Twitter @JackMoranRG . Email jack.moran@registerguard.com ."}
{"text":"Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Paul Wood in Homs says there is \"nowhere to hide\" for the city's people\n\nHeavy artillery fire has been rocking Homs, as Syrian troops step up an assault on the restive city.\n\nA BBC correspondent there describes almost constant blasts, in the fiercest attack in the 11-month uprising.\n\nUS President Barack Obama said it was important to resolve the conflict without outside military intervention.\n\nMeanwhile, Russia and China defended their veto of a UN draft resolution criticising Syria - a move that angered opponents of President Bashar al-Assad.\n\nLater the US State Department said it had closed its embassy in Damascus and pulled out all remaining staff because of security concerns.\n\nWashington had warned in January that it would close the embassy if the government did not step up security.\n\n'Not safe at all'\n\nHoms, one of the main centres of resistance to Mr Assad's rule, has been under attack from government forces for several days.\n\nShelling resumed shortly after daybreak on Monday, says BBC's Paul Wood who has managed to get into the city, and hundreds of shells and mortars have been fired throughout the day.\n\nAnalysis Syrian state television denied that there had been any bombardment. It said residents were setting fire to piles of rubbish on the roofs of their homes to trick the world into thinking that there was an attack. There is no doubt, however, from what we have seen and heard, that hundreds of shells and mortars have been fired at this place during the day. As I write this, the windows of the house we are in are still reverberating from the impact of a shell, probably in the next street. It is true that people have been setting fire to rubbish in the streets. They believe it will confuse the guidance systems of rockets apparently being fired at them. They are probably mistaken. People in this part of Homs say these attacks are the worst they have known since the beginning of the uprising, almost a year ago. The bombing has been going on for several days now. 'They are still picking up the bodies' Homs: 'Who will help us now?' Avoiding Syria's secret police\n\nEyewitness Danny Abdul Dayem told the BBC the army was using rockets for the first time, with more than 300 falling on his locality since dawn.\n\n\"It's not safe at all, a rocket could land in this house right now,\" he said\n\nSome rebels fighters have been firing automatic weapons in return, in what our correspondent calls a futile gesture.\n\nThe rebels claim that the shelling has hit a field hospital in the Baba Amr district, causing casualties. However, our correspondent says this is impossible to verify.\n\nThe facility is treating dozens of people wounded in previous assaults on Homs.\n\nMr Dayem said only one field hospital with four doctors was still operating in the city, and it was virtually impossible to get additional medication without being shot.\n\nAnother anti-government campaigner told the BBC the government was also using helicopters and tanks in the assault.\n\nActivists say at least 40 people were killed on Monday.\n\nSyrian state TV said \"terrorist gangs\" had blown up buildings in Homs.\n\nThe state-run Sana news agency reported that an oil pipeline near the city had been hit by an explosion on Monday. It also blamed \"terrorists\".\n\nBoth Syrian media and activists are also reporting clashes in the northern city of Idlib and the town of Zabadani, north-west of Damascus.\n\nThe government says it is fighting foreign-backed armed groups. Thousands of former army soldiers have defected to the rebel side, forming the Free Syrian Army.\n\nThe BBC's Jim Muir in neighbouring Lebanon says the conflict is beginning to look increasingly like a civil war with dangerous sectarian overtones.\n\nThe uprising is largely rooted in poorer sections of the Sunni community, our correspondent says, while the government draws its support mostly from Alawites, Christians and other minorities fearful of an Islamist takeover.\n\nThe Assad regime is feeling the noose tightening around them US President Barack Obama Russia keeps Syria options open\n\n'Inexcusable'\n\nThe Syrian opposition says Saturday's veto by China and Russia of a UN draft resolution condemning the crackdown will encourage the government to act without restraint.\n\nPresident Obama vowed to apply sanctions and put pressure on Mr Assad.\n\n\"I think it is very important for us to try to resolve this without recourse to outside military intervention. And I think that's possible,\" he said in an interview for the NBC network's Today programme broadcast on Monday.\n\nHe added that a negotiated solution was possible and said the US was \"relentless\" in demanding that Mr Assad leave power.\n\n\"The Assad regime is feeling the noose tightening around them,\" he said. \"We're going to just continue to put more and more pressure until hopefully we see a transition.\"\n\nUK Foreign Secretary William Hague described the Russian and Chinese vetoes as \"a grave error of judgement\".\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Danny Abdul Dayem in Homs: \"Pieces of bodies, children, women\"\n\nFrench President Nicolas Sarkozy said he would discuss the situation in Syria with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev later on Monday.\n\n\"France and Germany will not abandon the Syrian people,\" Mr Sarkozy said after a meeting in Paris with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. \"We will not accept that the international community remains blocked.\"\n\nHowever, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the resolution, drafted by Arab and European countries, would have meant taking sides in a civil war.\n\nSpeaking in Bahrain on Monday, he said encouraging \"armed extremist groups\" would only cause more casualties, and said Moscow supported peaceful dialogue in Syria.\n\nMr Lavrov is due to travel to Damascus on Tuesday for talks with President Assad.\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Homs resident: \"I watched a three-year-old girl dying\"\n\nThe Chinese government also defended its veto. It said the draft resolution would only have complicated matters, and said Beijing sought to \"avoid the scourge of armed conflict\".\n\nHuman rights groups and activists say more than 7,000 people have been killed by Syrian security forces since the uprising began last March.\n\nThe UN stopped estimating the death toll in Syria after it passed 5,400 in January, saying it was too difficult to confirm.\n\nPresident Assad's government says at least 2,000 members of the security forces have been killed fighting \"armed gangs and terrorists\"."}
{"text":"\"This monument reminds us all how important it is for us to respect every human being,\" remarks Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai at the unveiling\n\nPublished 10:53 PM, January 10, 2014\n\nTEL AVIV, Israel \u2013 Israel unveiled Friday, January 10, a memorial in Tel Aviv to remember the gay and lesbian victims of Nazi persecution, in a ceremony attended by Germany's ambassador.\n\nMembers of Tel Aviv's gay community turned out to see the stone monument, modelled on the pink triangle Nazis made homosexuals wear in concentration camps during World War II, and features inscriptions in German, Hebrew and English.\n\n\"In addition to the extermination of Europe's Jews, the Nazis committed many atrocities, in an attempt to destroy anyone who was considered different,\" Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai said at the unveiling.\n\n\"This monument reminds us all how important it is for us to respect every human being,\" he said.\n\nThe heart of Israel's cultural life and a bastion of secularism, Tel Aviv hosts an annual gay pride parade with relatively few objections from the country's religious community, unlike similar events in Jerusalem that have seen violence and even one stabbing.\n\nIsrael is widely seen as having liberal gay rights policies, despite the hostility shown towards homosexuals, particularly men, from the ultra-orthodox Jewish community.\n\nGerman Ambassador Andreas Michaelis said \"it is important that we put up monuments and name streets, in order to remember things that happened in the past. But they must be first and foremost reminders for the future.\"\n\nAdolf Hitler's Nazi Germany sent thousands of homosexuals to concentration camps in the 1930s and 1940s, and the Gestapo secret police arrested an estimated 100,000 men for being gay. \u2013 Rappler.com"}
{"text":"KABUL, Afghanistan \u2014 Coalition forces killed the top-ranking Taliban official in restive Kunduz Province during an overnight raid, according to the Afghan police and a local governor.\n\nThe officials said that Mullah Bahador, the Taliban\u2019s shadow governor in the province, was killed late Thursday night. Abdul Rahman Saidkhaili, the provincial police chief, said the target of the raid was a house in the Chardara district.\n\nIn a statement, coalition forces confirmed that they had killed an insurgent leader who \u201cmakes improvised explosive devices and suicide vests, leads a group of Taliban fighters and employs antiaircraft weapons against Afghan and coalition forces.\u201d\n\nCoalition officials could not be reached Friday to try to confirm the name of the man who was killed.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nSeveral suspected insurgents were arrested in the operation, the statement said.\n\nFormerly stable, Kunduz Province, which borders the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, has become increasingly violent in the past two years, as Taliban fighters have relocated there after coalition operations against them in southern Afghanistan. Kunduz City is now nearly cut off by violence, with all roads leading out controlled by the Taliban and other armed groups.\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\nThe governor of Kunduz was killed in October by a bomb as he prayed in a mosque, and four Taliban suicide bombers killed five policemen two weeks ago."}
{"text":"Last year Ann Leckie\u2019s novel Ancillary Justice won almost every major award in science fiction. It\u2019s the story of Breq, a hive mind consisting of a sentient starship and its crew of networked soldiers. When an act of betrayal destroys the ship and all but one member of its crew, Breq sets out in her last remaining body to seek revenge. Breq\u2019s story is told against the backdrop of the Radsch empire, a delightfully complex and colorful milieu. Leckie worked hard to create a plausible future free of any incongruous modern trappings, a common pitfall of far-future sci-fi.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s more easily noticeable in older science fiction,\u201d says Leckie in Episode 120 of the Geek\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. \u201cWe\u2019ve got this future society and the technology\u2019s all very different, but people are smoking cigarettes and using slide rules, and the social relationships are exactly like they would have been in the 50s. You know, the wife is bringing in coffee.\u201d\n\nWives bringing in coffee is the last thing you\u2019d find in the Radsch empire, where citizens are so indifferent to gender that men and women act and dress alike and are often hard to distinguish, especially for an AI like Breq. The Radsch language also makes no distinction between men and women, a fact that\u2019s reflected in the text by the decision to use the pronouns \u201cshe\u201d and \u201cher\u201d for every character regardless of gender. The fact that readers will never really know the genders of most of the major characters has created an interesting challenge for fan artists, who have to rely on personal impressions when it comes to depicting the characters.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s clear that each of these artists who\u2019ve done this have a very definite vision in their mind of what the characters look like,\u201d says Leckie. \u201cAnd they\u2019re all very different from each other, and they\u2019re all very different from my internal vision of the characters, and yet at the same time they all work.\u201d\n\nThis also makes the book a bit of a Rorschach test for readers, who sometimes form strong opinions about the gender of different characters and become convinced that their guesses have been confirmed by the text. Mostly they\u2019re wrong.\n\n\u201cThere was one review where someone was saying that \u2026 the characters are straight who are involved in sexual relationships,\u201d says Leckie. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018How do they know that?'\u201d\n\nListen to our complete interview with Ann Leckie in Episode 120 of Geek\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.\n\nAnn Leckie on the pitfalls of portraying music in fiction:\n\n\u201cI think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it. Sometimes when somebody will write a character who\u2019s musical there\u2019ll be touches of that, there\u2019ll be an almost Mary Sue-ish \u2018they play and sing beautifully and all the animals stop and listen.\u2019 I\u2019m exaggerating, but that kind of fetishization of music and musical talent and singing, I\u2019m not comfortable with myself. \u2026 I feel very strongly that art\u2014and music in particular\u2014is something that really everybody has some kind of ability to do, and that when you separate that out as something only special people can do, who are specially talented, you cut off that avenue of artistic expression for tons of people who would be able to enjoy it otherwise, but who think of it as something they can\u2019t do, and I feel kind of strongly about that.\u201d\n\nAnn Leckie on writing from the point of view of Breq:\n\n\u201cLike a lot of writers, I\u2019m a serious introvert, and talking to strangers, going out into a place\u2014the grocery store or whatever\u2014and talking to somebody I don\u2019t know is really very difficult. \u2026 In college I got a job as a waitress, and in a lot of ways it was not a fun job, but in a lot of ways it was really very beneficial, because I didn\u2019t know how those interactions were supposed to go with people I didn\u2019t know well. But working for several years as a waitress you learn really quickly a couple of default scripts, so you know exactly what the interaction is going to be when the person sits down at the table. And then after a few months I\u2019m like, \u2018Oh, I can switch it up a bit. I can say, \u2018Hey, it\u2019s pretty rainy outside,\u2019 and get a particular response to that. \u2026 And that\u2019s something I found really very useful. But what it means is that I\u2019m not the kind of person that those interactions come to naturally, and so when I\u2019m thinking about Breq, I\u2019m thinking about my own experience of, \u2018Here I am talking to a person, now I need to pick a script.'\u201d\n\nAnn Leckie on criticism of her use of pronouns:\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve been surprised at the number of people who were really angry that I tried to convey gender neutrality by using a gendered pronoun. Even if it was \u2018she,\u2019 which undercuts a masculine default, they feel as though it would have been much better if I had used an honest-to-goodness gender-neutral pronoun, and that would have conveyed it better. People have also been feeling angry that the male characters in the story are persistently mis-gendered, because they\u2019re continually referred to as \u2018she.\u2019 I understand where that\u2019s coming from, and it certainly wasn\u2019t my intention to make anybody feel like they were being maliciously mis-gendered, and in some ways I share the frustration of folks about the third person neutral pronouns. I wish they were used more. \u2026 I think at the time I was working very strongly from an assumption \u2026 that in fact gender is a binary, and the implications of that do turn up in the text, and I know some people have pointed it out, and they\u2019re right, it\u2019s there, and had I been writing it now I probably would have handled those moments a little bit differently, but I think I would still have gone with \u2018she,\u2019 because I think it has a much stronger, more visceral effect.\u201d\n\nAnn Leckie on ancient religion:\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a common part of the narrative of the history of Christianity that it was \u2018real\u2019 religion that involved real spirituality and real faith, and that\u2019s why it\u2019s completely superseded the more pagan polytheistic practices. I grew up Roman Catholic in a majority Roman Catholic city, and it wasn\u2019t until I was about college age that I discovered some of the attitudes people who aren\u2019t Catholic have toward Roman Catholicism\u2014that it\u2019s pagan superstition which has been superseded by true religiousness. \u2026 I\u2019m not Catholic anymore, I\u2019m an atheist, but I find that really offensive and hateful. If you look at anybody\u2019s religious beliefs and practices that aren\u2019t yours, they seem kind of shallow, and they don\u2019t make sense, and they don\u2019t have any resonance. \u2026 It\u2019s really easy to look back, particularly with the way we\u2019re taught in school about Greek and Roman paganism, that they\u2019re just these stories, and these stories \u2018explain\u2019 why there\u2019s lightning or why there\u2019s winter and why there\u2019s spring, because otherwise they didn\u2019t understand it, they were just so ignorant, right? I think a lot of ancient polytheistic religions worked very differently from the way that Christianity works, but I do not think they were any less important to the people who lived those religions.\u201d"}
{"text":"Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email\n\nThe Crown Prosecution Service has been fined \u00a3200,000 by data watchdogs after sensitive video interviews given to police by victims of sex abuse and violence were stolen from a private film studio in Manchester .\n\nThe filmed statements involved were given to police by 43 victims and witnesses concerned in 31 separate criminal investigations.\n\nThey included testimonies of alleged victims of disgraced radio DJ Jimmy Savile\u2019s ex-chauffeur and flatmate Ray Teret , who was subsequently jailed for 25 years in December last year for rapes and indecent assaults on young girls.\n\nThe videos, saved on laptops, were being edited by Manchester-based Swan Films for the CPS to use as evidence in court.\n\nAll the cases involved allegations of violence or sexual abuse.\n\nThe film company used a flat on Wilmslow Road, Rusholme , as a studio. Two laptops were stolen in a burglary there in September last year.\n\nThe Information Commissioner\u2019s Office (ICO) launched an urgent investigation into the CPS\u2019 contract with the company.\n\nThe probe found the videos were not being kept in a secure environment. They were left on a desk and were password-protected, but not encrypted. The ICO said the studio had no alarm and \u2018insufficient security\u2019.\n\nThe ICO\u2019s head of enforcement, Stephen Eckersley, said the probe ruled the CPS was \u2018negligent\u2019 and failed to take into account the \u2018substantial distress\u2019 that would be caused if the videos were lost.\n\nThe laptops were recovered by police eight days later. It\u2019s understood that they hadn\u2019t been accessed.\n\nMr Eckersley said: \u201cHandling videos of police interviews containing highly sensitive personal data is central to what the CPS does.\n\n\"The CPS was aware of the graphic and distressing nature of the personal data contained in the videos, but was complacent in protecting that information.\n\n\u201cThe consequences of failing to keep that data safe should have been obvious to them.\u201d\n\nThe ICO said the alleged victims were vulnerable and had already endured \u2018distressing interviews\u2019. They talked openly in their statements, and named names.\n\nMr Eckersley added: \u201cIf this information had been misused or disclosed to others, the consequences could have resulted in reprisals.\u201d\n\nIt was discovered during the probe that the CPS had been using the same film company since 2002.\n\nArrangements surrounding collection and delivery of un-encrypted DVDs were found by the ICO to constitute an ongoing contravention of the Data Protection Act.\n\nThe CPS said its contract with Swan Films was terminated immediately.\n\nSecurity arrangements have now been assessed and tightened.\n\nA spokesman said: \u201cIt is a matter of real regret that sensitive information was not held more securely by our external contractor, and that we, as an organisation, failed to ensure that it was.\n\n\"We are grateful that the material was recovered without being accessed by those who stole the computer equipment but accept that this was fortuitous.\n\n\"It is vital that victims of crime feel confident that breaches like this will not happen and, following a full review after this incident, we have strengthened the arrangements for the safe and secure handling of sensitive material.\u201d"}
{"text":"Getty Image\n\nDonald Trump wants to be hailed as the \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d president, but on Twitter, he\u2019s known as another four-word expression:\n\n\u201cA tweet for everything.\u201d\n\nNo matter what Trump does, there is an old tweet of his that applies (and is usually in direct opposition) to everything, especially when it comes to his predecessor, Barack Obama. There was the time the White House announced that visitor logs will not be made public (\u201cWhy does Obama believe he shouldn\u2019t comply with record releases that his predecessors did of their own volition? Hiding something?\u201d). Or when the Trump administration ordered an attack on Syria (\u201cAGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA \u2013 IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!\u201d). Or when the president went on a 17-day vacation to play golf (\u201cCan you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf?\u201d).\n\nTrump\u2019s latest \u201cshould regret, but doesn\u2019t regret\u201d tweet dates back to December 2014, when he wrote, \u201cObama has admitted that he spends his mornings watching @espn. Then he plays golf, fundraises & grants amnesty to illegals.\u201d We already know about his propensity for playing golf, but he\u2019s also an avid follower of ESPN. After SportsCenter host Jemele Hill called Trump a \u201cwhite supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w\/ other white supremacists\u201d and \u201cthe most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime,\u201d he tweet-demanded that ESPN \u201capologize for untruth.\u201d\n\nObama has admitted that he spends his mornings watching @ESPN. Then he plays golf, fundraises & grants amnesty to illegals. \u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 16, 2014\n\nESPN is paying a really big price for its politics (and bad programming). People are dumping it in RECORD numbers. Apologize for untruth! \u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017\n\nA president who spends his mornings watching TV? It\u2019s hard to believe."}
{"text":"HUMAN FAMILY TREE used to be a scraggly thing. With relatively few fossils to work from, scientists' best guess was that they could all be assigned to just two lineages, one of which went extinct and the other of which ultimately gave rise to us. Discoveries made over the past few decades have revealed a far more luxuriant tree, however\u2014one abounding with branches and twigs that eventually petered out. This newfound diversity paints a much more interesting picture of our origins but makes sorting our ancestors from the evolutionary dead ends all the more challenging, as paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood explains in the pages that follow.\n\nMore on this topic:\n\nThe Latest Fossil Finds Make the Puzzle of Human Evolution Harder Than Ever to Solve\n\nNew Evidence Shows How Human Evolution Was Shaped by Climate\n\nNew Twist Added to the Role of Culture in Human Evolution"}
{"text":"Please enable Javascript to watch this video\n\n#1 of 2: Donald Trump's indecent comments in 2005 (11 yrs ago) - were made when he was a Democrat. The hypocrisy of HilaryClinton to say.. \u2014 Susan Hutchison (@Susan_Hutch) October 8, 2016\n\nSEATTLE -- Taking a partisan view of Donald Trump's lewd comments about women, Washington State Republican Party Chairman Susan Hutchison said Friday night that the GOP presidential nominee's \"indecent comments in 2005 ... were made when he was a Democrat.\"\n\nShe added, \"The hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton to say Trump does not belong in the White House when her husband defined this behavior.\"\n\nHutchison tweeted her statements after she reportedly told a Seattle news outlet that 11 years ago, Trump was channeling Bill Clinton with his crude comments at the time.\n\n#1 of 2: Donald Trump's indecent comments in 2005 (11 yrs ago) - were made when he was a Democrat. The hypocrisy of HilaryClinton to say.. \u2014 Susan Hutchison (@Susan_Hutch) October 8, 2016\n\n#2 of 2: ...The hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton to say Trump does not belong in the White House when her husband defined this behavior. \u2014 Susan Hutchison (@Susan_Hutch) October 8, 2016\n\nMeanwhile, the highest-ranking Republican woman in Congress, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, has condemned Trump's crude comments.\n\nMultiple news outlets are reporting that in a Friday evening statement McMorris Rodgers said, \"It is never appropriate to condone unwanted sexual advances or violence against women.\" She also said, \"Mr. Trump must realize that it has no place in public or private conversations.\"\n\nShe did not say she would withdraw her support for the Republican presidential candidate, to whom she had given a lukewarm endorsement.\n\nIn a debate earlier this week, McMorris Rodgers said she would vote for Trump and praised his acumen as a businessman."}
{"text":"Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform,\n\n\u201cThe truth is like poetry, and most people fucking hate poetry.\u201d\n\nThe Big Short opens nationwide today. But it happened to have one showing last night at a theater near me. My youngest son and I hopped in the car and went to see it. I loved the book by Michael Lewis. The cast assembled for the movie was top notch, but having the director of Anchorman and Talledaga Nights handle a subject matter like high finance seemed odd.\n\nThe choice of Adam McKay as director turned out to be brilliant. The question was how do you make a movie about the housing market, mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, collateralized debt swaps, and synthetic CDOs interesting for the average person. He succeeded beyond all expectations.\n\nInterweaving pop culture icons, music, symbols of materialism, and unforgettable characters, McKay has created a masterpiece about the greed, stupidity, hubris, and arrogance of Wall Street bankers gone wild. He captures the idiocy and complete capture of the rating agencies (S&P, Moodys). He reveals the ineptitude and dysfunction of the SEC, where the goal of these regulators was to get a high paying job with banks they were supposed to regulate. He skewers the faux financial journalists at the Wall Street Journal who didn\u2019t want to rock the boat with the truth about the greatest fraud ever committed.\n\nWhat makes the movie great are the characters, their motivations, their frustrations, their anger at a warped demented system, and ultimately their hollow victory when the entire edifice of fraud came crashing down on the heads of honest hard working Americans. The movie does not glorify the men that ended up making billions from the demise of the housing bubble. But it clearly defines the real bad guys.\n\nSteve Carell plays Mark Baum (based on the real life character Steve Eisman). He\u2019s the kind of prick who would fit in perfectly on TBP. He is abrasively hysterical with his foul mouthed commentary and insults to authority. He is the heart and soul of the movie. You feel his pain throughout. Carrell should win an Academy Award for his performance.\n\nChristian Bale\u2019s quirky performance as one eyed Dr. Michael Burry, whose Asberger\u2019s Syndrome actually allowed him to focus on the minutia and discover the fraud before everyone else, is top notch. Ryan Goseling is hysterical in his role as the narrator of the story. Brad Pitt plays a supporting role, but does it with his usual class.\n\nUltimately, it is a highly entertaining movie with the right moral overtone, despite non-stop profanity that captures the true nature of Wall Street traders. This is a dangerous movie for Wall Street, the government, and the establishment in general. They count on the complexity of Wall Street to confuse the average person and make their eyes glaze over. That makes it easier for them to keep committing fraud and harvesting the nation\u2019s wealth.\n\nThis movie cuts through the crap and reveals those in power to be corrupt, greedy weasels who aren\u2019t really as smart as they want you to think they are. The finale of the movie is sobering and infuriating. After unequivocally proving that Wall Street bankers, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve, Congress, the SEC, and the mainstream media, destroyed the global financial system, put tens of millions out of work, got six million people tossed from their homes, and created the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the filmmakers are left to provide the depressing conclusion.\n\nNo bankers went to jail. The Too Big To Fail banks were not broken up \u2013 they were bailed out by the American taxpayers. They actually got bigger. Their profits have reached new heights, while the average family has seen their income fall. Wall Street is paying out record bonuses, while 46 million people are on food stamps. Wall Street and their lackeys at the Federal Reserve call the shots in this country. They don\u2019t give a fuck about you. And they\u2019re doing it again.\n\nEvery American should see this movie and get fucking pissed off. The theater was deathly silent at the end of the movie. The audience was stunned by the fact that the criminals on Wall Street got away with the crime of the century, and they\u2019re still on the loose. I had a great discussion with my 16 year old son on the way home. At least there is one millennial who understand how bad his generation is getting screwed.\n\nMerry Fucking Christmas America from a Wall Street banker"}
{"text":"Family members among 157 asylum seekers being detained on the high seas in separate rooms on a customs vessel are allowed out for meals and ''approximately three hours'' of daylight a day, according to a document lodged with the High Court on Tuesday.\n\nWhile it was previously stated 153 asylum seekers were on a boat that was intercepted off Christmas Island more than three weeks ago, the document says there are 157.\n\nScott Morrison arriving for talks with India's Minister for Home Affairs, Mr Rajnath Singh. Credit:Jason Koutsoukis\n\nA document filed by the government reveals the national security committee of cabinet decided on July 1, two days after the boat was intercepted, that those on board ''should be taken to a place other than Australia''.\n\nThe document says the asylum seekers are permitted ''approximately three hours' outside during the day in natural light for meals'', but says it would be unsafe to give them unrestricted movement."}
{"text":"If you\u2019re a fantasy reader (and, if you\u2019re reading this, I suspect you are), 2006 was a vintage year. One for the ages, like 2005 for Bordeaux, or 1994 for Magic: The Gathering. The Class of 2006 includes Joe Abercrombie\u2019s The Blade Itself, Naomi Novik\u2019s His Majesty\u2019s Dragon, Scott Lynch\u2019s The Lies of Locke Lamora and Brandon Sanderson\u2019s Mistborn: The Final Empire. All of which, remarkably, are debuts (except Mistborn, but Elantris was only the year before and Mistborn was the breakout hit, so we\u2019ll roll with it). And hey, if we stretch the strict definition of \u201c2006,\u201d we can even include Patrick Rothfuss\u2019 The Name of the Wind in the mix as well.\n\nThese are five authors that have dominated the contemporary fantasy scene, and to think that they all published more or less simultaneously is, well, kind of ridiculous.\n\nHowever, as tempting as it is to examine the lunar conjunctions of 2006 in the hopes of finding some sort of pattern, the fact that these books all published at the same time is total coincidence\u2014and, in many ways, irrelevant. Publishing ain\u2019t quick, and by 2006, these books had all been finished for some time. For some of these authors, their books had been out on submission for several years. If anything, we\u2019re actually better off prying into 2004, since the process between acquisition and publishing is generally around two years. What was in the air when five different editors all decided to lift these particular manuscripts from the stack?\n\nOr do we go back further? We know, of course, that these books were all written at completely different times. The Name of the Wind was the culmination of a decade\u2019s hard labor, beginning in the 1990s. Mistborn, given Sanderson\u2019s legendary speed, was probably written overnight. But what were the influences of the late 1990s and early 2000s that would\u2019ve led these five different people to all write such amazing, popular books? In the years leading up to 2006, there are some clear trends. These trends may have impacted the authors as they wrote these stunning debuts. They may have influenced the editors as they chose these particular books out of the pile.\n\nOr, of course, they may not have. But where\u2019s the fun in that? So let\u2019s take a look at some of major touchstones of the period:\n\nHarry Potter\n\nFrom 1997 onward, the world belonged to Harry Potter. And by 2004, five of the books were published and the end of the series was on the horizon. Publishers, as you might expect, were pretty keen to finding the next long-running YA\/adult crossover series with a fantasy inflection. Moreover, Potter proved that a big ol\u2019 epic fantasy had huge commercial potential, and could be a massive breakout hit. It also showed that the hoary old tropes\u2014say, coming of age at a wizard school, detailed magic systems, and a villainous Dark Lord\u2014still had plenty of appeal.\n\nThe British Invasion\n\nRowling\u2014deservedly\u2014gets the headlines, but the Brits were everywhere during this period. Susanna Clarke\u2019s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was one of the breakout hits of 2004, a fantasy that couldn\u2019t be more British if it were served with scones and a gently arched eyebrow. China Mi\u00e9ville collected every major genre award between 2000 and 2004. Looking at the Hugo finalists in from 2000, you can also see Stross, Richard Morgan, Ken MacLeod, Ian McDonald, Iain M. Banks\u2026 and that\u2019s just in the Novel category. Seeing so many British authors up for what\u2019s traditionally been a predominantly American award shows that the UK was, well, trending. That could only help inform\u2014or sell\u2014a UK author like Joe Abercrombie, or a British-set novel like Novik\u2019s His Majesty\u2019s Dragon.\n\nA Game of Thrones\n\nThis is a little weird to think about\u2014by 2006, every A Song of Ice and Fire book (save A Dance with Dragons) had already been published. The Potter arguments apply here as well\u2014ASoIaF was proof of concept: big fantasy series would sell, and publishers were on the prowl for the \u201cnext\u201d one. And, for authors, ASoIaF had dominated the scene since 1996: even before the HBO show, it was a massively popular series. Big Fantasy, again, could be successful\u2014and by subverting the tropes, Martin ushered in a new world of possibilities. Characters could die. Good guys could lose. Surprise was as interesting\u2014and as rewarding\u2014as simply doing the expected.\n\n* * *\n\nBut if we simply limit ourselves to books, we\u2019re missing out. A lot. The Class of 2006 was surrounded by storytelling in a host of formats, both personally and professionally. Abercrombie and Novik, for example, worked in the film and the gaming industries, respectively. So let\u2019s also consider the impact of the following:\n\nThe Lord of the Rings\n\nThe three most successful fantasy films of all time were released in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Everyone knew how to pronounce \u201cpo-tay-to\u201d and had an opinion on eagles. The films were ubiquitous, breath-taking and, most of all, lucrative. Jackson\u2019s trilogy meant that Hollywood wouldn\u2019t shy away from Big Fantasy, and, as with Harry Potter, everyone was on the prowl for \u201cwhat would be next\u201d\u2026\n\nGaming\n\nThe biggest and best fantasy worlds weren\u2019t in cinemas\u2014they were in your home, to be devoured in hundred-hour chunks. 1998 alone saw the release of, among others, Thief, Baldur\u2019s Gate, Half-Life, and The Ocarina of Time. By the early 2000s, games weren\u2019t just hack-and-slash; they were about stealth, storytelling, meandering side-quests and narrative choice\u2014with a rich visual language that stretched the boundaries of the imagination. From Baldur\u2019s Gate 2 (2000) to Final Fantasy (1999-2002), Grand Theft Auto (2002, 2004) to Fable (2004), huge worlds were in, as were immersive stories and moral ambiguity.\n\nGames were no longer about levelling up and acquiring the BFG9000; they involved complex protagonists with unique skills, difficult decisions, and complicated moral outlooks. Whether it\u2019s the immersive environments of Scott Lunch\u2019s Camorr, the unconventional morality of Abercrombie\u2019s Logen Ninefingers, the deliciously over-the-top Allomantic battles in Sanderson\u2019s Mistborn books, or the rich and sprawling world of Novik\u2019s Temeraire, it is easy to find parallels between game worlds and the class of 2006.\n\nThe Wire\n\nTelevision\u2019s best drama started airing on HBO in 2002. Critically acclaimed (and sadly under-viewed), it\u2019s had a huge impact on the nature of storytelling. Big arcs and fragmented narratives were suddenly \u201cin.\u201d Multiple perspectives, complicated plotlines: also in. Immediate payoffs: unnecessary. Moral ambiguity: brilliant. Pre-Netflix, it showed that audiences\u2014and critics\u2014would stick around for intricate long-form storytelling. The Wire\u2019s impact on fiction in all formats can\u2019t be underestimated.\n\nSpice World\n\nIn 1998, the Spice Girls had sold 45 million records worldwide. Their first five singles had each reached #1 in the UK. The previous year, they were the most played artist on American radio\u2014and won Favorite Pop Group at the American Music Awards. Yet, later that year, Geri Halliwell split from the group. Sales foundered. Lawsuits abounded. The Spice World had shattered. As an influence, we can see here the entire story of the Class of 2006. The second wave British invasion. The immersive, transmedia storytelling. The embrace of classic tropes (Scary, Sporty, Ginger)\u2014and their aggressive subversion (Posh, Baby). The moral ambiguity\u2014who do you think you are? The tragic, unexpected ending: what is Halliwell\u2019s departure besides the Red Wedding of pop? The void left by their absence\u2014a vacuum that only another massive, commercially-viable, magic-laced fantasy could fill.\n\n* * *\n\nOkay, fine. Probably not that last one.\n\nBut it still goes to show the fun\u2014and futility\u2014of trying to track influences. With a bit of creativity, we can draw a line between any two points, however obscure. If anything, the ubiquitous and obvious trends are the most important. We don\u2019t know everything that Rothfuss read or watched while crafting The Name of the Wind, but we can guarantee that he heard the Spice Girls. If a little bit of \u201c2 Become 1\u201d snuck in there\u2026 well, who would ever know?\n\nChasing an author\u2019s influences\u2014or an editor\u2019s\u2014is nearly impossible. There are certainly those inspirations and motivations that they\u2019ll admit to, but there are also many more they don\u2019t. And many, many more that the authors and editors themselves won\u2019t even be fully aware of. We are surrounded by media and influences, from The Wire to BritPop, Harry Potter to the menu at our favourite Italian restaurant. Trying to determine what sticks in our subconscious\u2014much less the subconscious of our favourite author\u2014is an impossible task.\n\nWhat we do know is that, for whatever reasons, many of which are completely coincidental, 2006 wound up being a remarkable year. Thanks, Spice Girls.\n\nWith huge thanks to r\/fantasy and \/u\/TeoKajLibroj for kicking off the conversation.\n\nJared Shurin is the editor of Pornokitsch and over a dozen anthologies, the latest of which is The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories."}
{"text":"It was one of many ads that John Geer, a Vanderbilt University political scientist, and I showed to panels of people throughout the campaign. We ran a weekly experiment called SpotCheck in which we randomly assigned a representative sample of 1,000 people to see one of two campaign ads. We evaluated the ads\u2019 persuasive effects and asked people to evaluate the ads on such criteria as whether the ad made them happy, hopeful, angry or worried.\n\nBy far, Mr. Sanders\u2019s \u201cAmerica\u201d was the ad from 2016 that made SpotCheck\u2019s raters the happiest and the most hopeful. Nearly 80 percent of viewers said the ad made them at least a little bit happy and hopeful in the week it debuted \u2014 including over half of the Republicans who saw it.\n\nWe paired the ad with a spot from Hillary Clinton called \u201cAll the Good,\u201d which also tested well. It featured the commanding voice of Morgan Freeman and a moving string soundtrack, yet only half the raters said this ad made them happy and hopeful."}
{"text":"Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email\n\nRadical plans to merge Manchester\u2019s three hospital trusts have moved a step closer after health chiefs backed the move.\n\nThe move could see North Manchester Hopsital, MRI and Wythenshawe Hospital - currently under three separate NHS trusts - all come under the same NHS management.\n\nAnd now the city\u2019s health and wellbeing board, chaired by council leader Sir Richard Leese alongside GP, patient, charity and hospital representatives, have given their green light to the plan this morning.\n\nThe trusts in charge of the hospitals - Central Manchester, University Hopsital of South Manchester and Pennine Acute - will now spend six weeks hammering out the finer detail of how that process should happen and what it could mean for patients.\n\nHowever patient group Healthwatch, while broadly supportive, has sounded out a warning over the speed of the move.\n\nIt says that Manchester patients and residents must be more actively involved in the process before the resulting plan becomes a \u2018done deal\u2019.\n\nRead:\n\nRead:\n\nLast week it emerged Sir Jonathan Michael, a King\u2019s Fund health expert commissioned by the council to look at the best model for running hospitals in Manchester, had concluded that one single trust was the best way forward, meaning North Manchester General could be removed from struggling Pennine Acute.\n\nThe plan would create a much clearer, more consistent level of healthcare in the city, the expert claimed, making health bosses more accountable and lining up services with GPs and social care.\n\nIt is estimated the move would save around \u00a320m a year, although the reorganisation itself is likely to be expensive.\n\nSo far it is unclear what the impact will be on services in the city, but it is likely to mean some services being closed or moved.\n\nNevertheless a restructure is absolutely not \u2018an end in itself\u2019, stressed Sir Jonathan, but simply a vehicle through which to make care better.\n\nThe plan had immediately prompted fears that taking North Manchester General Hospital out of Pennine would hit the trust\u2019s other hospitals in Rochdale, Oldham and Bury.\n\nBut Sir Richard said he had spoken to council leaders in the areas, who he said were \u2018supportive\u2019, while a separate review being led by consultant Mike Farrar is reviewing health care in general across the north east of Greater Manchester.\n\nHe also said parts of Pennine Acute, which is currently being overseen by Salford Royal, has effectively been \u2018in intensive care\u2019 of late.\n\nRead:\n\nRead:\n\nThe city\u2019s other two hospital trusts must now play their part in supporting North Manchester General hospital, he said.\n\nMeanwhile Mike Wild, representing the city\u2019s voluntary sector, said it was vital patients were put at the heart of the process - stressing trusts should not just \u2018broadcast\u2019 their plans at residents but have a proper discussion with them.\n\nAnd Vicky Szulist, chair of patient organisation Healthwatch, warned against the move being a \u2018done deal by the time it gets to patients\u2019.\n\nNevertheless all the GPs, commissioners, councillors and hosptial leaders - including board chairs - around the table said they were supportive of the move.\n\nCouncillor Paul Andrews, who is in charge of health and social care for the council, said he was delighted such an agreement between so many organisations had been reached.\n\nTwo years ago trying to get to such a point had felt like \u2018walking through custard\u2019, he added.\n\nCentral, UHSM and Pennine will now report back in August."}
{"text":"I am a colorful creature that values love and equality above all else. I have a loving home environment and am a strong advocate for women's rights and LGBTQ equality. I have a loving boyfriend and a terrorist disguised as an orange cat with an vendetta against paper towel rolls. I am very opinionated and very loud at times, but I always mean well. Cheers!\n\nAs people, we rely way too much on appearance and how people perceive us. There is a need to be accepted and liked ingrained within almost every mind. It is such that in today\u2019s society, it is difficult to find any single person, let alone any company that accepts all the colours in the crayon box.\n\nThis needs to be rectified. There are many topics of discussion that this article could be referring to with the above statements, but we\u2019re going to start with something as simple as hair colour. I have never understood dress code rules and regulations regarding hair colour. They make zero sense. Hair colour does nothing to deter or take away from work performance. The only excuse I have ever heard is that it\u2019s \u2018distracting\u2019. You know who it distracts? 3 year olds\u2026but even then they move on once you sate their curiosity.\n\nAdults should be well past the stage of believing that hair colour has any iota of sway in productivity, but time and time again, I see hair colour included in my friends\u2019 dress code rules for employers. If I want my hair to resemble unicorns fluffy and magical behind, well, that\u2019s my prerogative. Blue hair colour does not cause Jan in billing or Eric in tech to do their job any less fabulously. Hair colour can be a way to express ones\u2019 personality in a way that clothes may not always be able to.\n\nWhile I\u2019m on the topic, clothes should not determine ones\u2019 social status or ability to hold a job. I would be perfectly fine if Sebastian in collections came to work sporting goth attire with a few extra piercings, but the fact of the matter is that people simply do not accept others for who they are. Strange and unusual is a big ol\u2019 fat no no in the work place. You simply don\u2019t see the CEO of most companies with purple hair and skinny jeans, but I don\u2019t know why. I feel like there are so many standards in society that were established eons ago that simply do not hold a candle with today\u2019s society.\n\nPersonally, I would feel much more comfortable if Jan from billing decided to change up her hair from conservative blonde to coca-cola bottle red. If Eric in tech wants to wear fine tailored suits everyday and gauge his ear lobes to see through proportions, that\u2019s just fine with me. I feel like we need to be a little more accepting of change, because the world as we know it is changing\u2026and the strict stubborn rules of yesteryear are being left for the birds."}
{"text":"The first annual Ultimate Classic Rock Awards are here, and they are your chance to vote for the best rock music of 2011. Over the next week, we will be announcing nominees for the year's best classic rock albums, songs, tours, artists and more -- 10 categories in all -- and allowing our readers to pick the winners in each.\n\nWe'll begin with the Tour of the Year category: After all, if there's one place classic rockers undeniably dominate the music landscape, it is in the live performance setting. This year featured two big summer tour team-ups: Journey , Foreigner and Night Ranger combined to bring fans a hit-packed evening, and Motley Crue brought Poison and the New York Dolls along for their typically extravagant trek.\n\nOf course, some bands decided to go it alone, too. Rush continued their 'Time Machine' tour, which featured the band playing their 1981 'Moving Pictures' album in its entirety. Kiss proved the worth of their music by scaling down their stage show to play long-awaited concerts in smaller cities for much of the summer, and even as we speak, Guns N' Roses are making an emphatic case for the power of their new lineup and the 'Chinese Democracy' album with 3-hour marathon shows all across the land.\n\nLet's not forget Alice Cooper , who dazzled audiences around the world with a career-spanning show of surprising ferocity prior to the release of his 'Welcome 2 My Nightmare' album. That album, by the way, has already earned the No. 1 spot on our list of the Top 10 Albums of 2011, in addition to spawning what we've labeled the year's best new song, ' I'll Bite Your Face Off .'\n\nBut those were our staff's choices; this one is up to you. Select which one of the six aforementioned tours you thought was the best. You have until 11:59 PM on Jan. 1, 2012, and the winners will be announced Tuesday, Jan, 3."}
{"text":"The father of Daron Wint, the man suspected of killing a Northwest D.C. couple, their young son, and their housekeeper, had been so frightened by threats his son made to shoot his own family that he sought a protective order barring the man from contacting them for a year.\n\nMaryland court records show that over the last decade Mr. Wint has been the subject of numerous peace and protective orders.\n\nOne taken out by his own father in 2005 describes how the then 21-year-old Mr. Wint stood outside of his father\u2019s Lanham home and threatened to shoot his father and step-mother. Police were called to the scene, but Mr. Wint came back afterward.\n\n\u201cHe stood in the street in front of the house and continued to threaten me and my wife,\u201d wrote Mr. Wint\u2019s father in a handwritten application for a protective order filed in Prince George\u2019s County District Court. \u201cThreats were to be on the lookout for him, I should have made the officer pat him and they would have found what he had under his clothing for me.\u201d\n\nD.C. police have named Mr. Wint as a suspect in the gruesome killings of Savvas Savopoulos; his wife, Amy; their 10-year-old son, Philip; and their housekeeper, Veralicia Figueroa.\n\nFirst responders found their bodies May 14 inside the Savopouloses\u2019 multi-million-dollar Woodley Park home after responding to extinguish a fire there. The family is believed to have been held captive in the home the night before, and media reports indicate that $40,000 in cash was delivered to the home shortly before the fire broke out the afternoon of May 14.\n\nIn a press conference Thursday, Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said Mr. Wint at one point had worked for Mr. Savopoulos at his business, American Iron Works, which is based in Hyattsville.\n\nThe D.C. Medical Examiner has not ruled a cause of death in the four homicides, but there is speculation that the victims may have been beaten while held captive as at least three of the four victims suffered either blunt force trauma or wounds from sharp objects. Police said the fire at the home was set intentionally.\n\nThe protective order sought by Mr. Wint\u2019s father sought to ban him from the family\u2019s Lanham home, which was one of several locations in Prince George\u2019s County that police searched Wednesday night. The order also sought to keep Mr. Wint away from the elementary school and day care that his then 8-year-old sister attended.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission."}
{"text":"* Israel says major operation may last days\n\n* Does not rule out ground invasion of Gaza\n\n* Hamas, militant groups vow to fight\n\n* First target was Hamas commander\n\n* Southern Israel braced for Gaza rockets\n\nBy Nidal al-Mughrabi\n\nGAZA, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Israel launched a major offensive against Palestinian militants in Gaza on Wednesday, killing the military commander of Hamas in an air strike and threatening an invasion of the enclave that the Islamist group vowed would \"open the gates of hell\".\n\nThe onslaught shattered hopes that a truce mediated on Tuesday by Egypt could pull the two sides back from the brink of war after five days of escalating Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli strikes at militant targets.\n\nOperation \"Pillar of Defence\" began with a surgical strike on a car carrying the commander of the military wing of Hamas, the Islamist movement which controls Gaza and dominates a score of smaller armed groups.\n\nWithin minutes of the death of Ahmed Al-Jaabari, big explosions were rocking Gaza, as the Israeli air force struck at selected targets just before sundown, blasting plumes of smoke and debris high above the crowded city.\n\nPanicking civilians ran for cover and the death toll mounted quickly. Seven people including two girls under the age of five were killed, the health ministry said.\n\nA second Gaza war has loomed on the horizon for months as waves of Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli strikes grew increasingly more intense and frequent.\n\nIsrael's Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 began with a week of air attacks and shelling, followed by a land invasion of the blockaded coastal strip, sealed off at sea by the Israeli navy. Some 1,400 Palestinians were killed and 13 Israelis died.\n\nHamas said Jaabari, who ran the organisation's armed wing, Izz el-Deen Al-Qassam, died along with an unnamed associate when their car was blown apart by an Israeli missile.\n\nThe charred and mangled wreckage of a car could be seen belching flames, as emergency crews picked up what appeared to be body parts.\n\nGATES OF HELL\n\nIsrael confirmed it had carried out the attack and announced there was more to come. Reuters witnesses saw Hamas security compounds and police stations blasted apart.\n\n\"This is an operation against terror targets of different organisations in Gaza,\" Israeli army spokeswoman Colonel Avital Leibovitch told reporters.\n\nJaabari had \"a lot of blood on his hands\", she said. Other militant groups including Islamic Jihad were on the target list.\n\nImmediate calls for revenge were broadcast over Hamas radio.\n\n\"The occupation has opened the gates of hell,\" Hamas's armed wing said. Smaller groups also vowed to strike back.\n\n\"Israel has declared war on Gaza and they will bear the responsibility for the consequences,\" Islamic Jihad said.\n\nSouthern Israeli communities within rocket range of Gaza were on full alert, and schools were ordered closed for Thursday. About one million Israelis live in range of Gaza's relatively primitive but lethal rockets, supplemented in recent months by longer-range, more accurate systems.\n\n\"The days we face in the south will, in my estimation, prove protracted,\" Brigadier-General Yoav Mordechai, Israel's chief military spokesman, told Channel 2 TV.\n\n\"The home front must brace itself resiliently.\"\n\nMordechai said Israel was both responding to a surge in Palestinian rocket salvoes earlier this week and trying to prevent Hamas and other Palestinian factions from building up their arsenals further.\n\nAmong the targets of Wednesday's air strikes were underground caches of longer-range Hamas rockets, he said.\n\nAsked if Israel might send in ground forces, Mordechai said: \"There are preparations, and if we are required to, the option of an entry by ground is available.\"\n\nHAMAS EMBOLDENED\n\nIsrael's intelligence agency Shin Bet said Jaabari was responsible for Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, when the militant Islamist group ousted fighters of the Fatah movement of its great rival, the Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.\n\nIt said Jaabari instigated the attack that led to the capture of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit in a kidnap raid from Gaza in 2006. Jaabari was also the man who handed Shalit over to Israel in a prisoner exchange five years after his capture.\n\nIsrael holds a general election on Jan. 22 and conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to retaliate harshly against Hamas.\n\nHamas has been emboldened by the rise to power in neighbouring Egypt of its spiritual mentors in the Muslim Brotherhood, viewing them as a \"safety net\" that will not permit a second Israeli thrashing of Gaza, home to 1.7 million Palestinians.\n\nEgypt condemned Israel's strikes on Gaza and urged it to end the attacks at once.\n\nHamas has historically been supported by Iran, which Israel regards as a rising threat to its own existence due to its nuclear programme.\n\nIn the flare-up that was prelude to Wednesday's offensive, more than 115 missiles were fired into southern Israel from Gaza and Israeli planes launched numerous strikes.\n\nSeven Palestinians, three of them gunmen, were killed. Eight Israeli civilians were hurt by rocket fire and four soldiers wounded by an anti-tank missile.\n\nHelped by Iran and the flourishing contraband trade through tunnels from Egypt, Gaza militias have smuggled in better weapons since the war of 2008-09.\n\nBut Gaza's estimated 35,000 Palestinian fighters are still no match for Israel's F-16 fighter-bombers, Apache helicopter gunships, Merkava tanks and other modern weapons systems in the hands of a conscript force of 175,000, with 450,000 in reserve.\n\nIsrael's shekel fell nearly one percent to a two-month low against the dollar on Wednesday after news of the Israeli air strikes broke.\n\nEarlier, Israel killed the head of the Hamas military wing, Ahmed Jabari, in an airstrike. In all, Palestinian officials say six people have been killed in the Israeli attacks.\n\nIsrael says the airstrikes are the beginning of a broader operation, launched in response to days of heavy rocket fire from Gaza."}
{"text":"Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.\n\nAn NGO on Thursday accused the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), IDF, police and Prisons Service of a spike in alleged torture and abuse of detainees starting in June, during Operation Brothers\u2019 Keeper.\n\nThe Shin Bet gave an extensive rejection of these claims, as well as of torture that allegedly continued through the Gaza war and elevated tensions in the area through the end of 2014.\n\nAccording to statistics presented by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) based on hundreds of prison visits, there were 66 alleged acts of torture or abuse in the second half of 2014, up from 19 alleged acts in the first half of the year.PCATI did not distinguish between acts of torture and acts of abuse. It generally takes the position that it is simply fighting all deviant interrogation practices.What is considered illegal torture or abuse versus, sometimes permitted under Israeli law, \u201cmoderate physical pressure,\u201d is hotly debated both domestically and globally, with international law often giving few specifics.\u201cModerate physical pressure\u201d is a synonym for enhanced interrogation or pressure short of what the High Court of Justice would forbid as torture, and has been permitted for the sake of stopping a \u201cticking bomb\u201d terrorist attack since a 1999 court decision \u2013 which also prohibited anything more than moderate pressure.Of the 85 alleged acts for 2014, PCATI said that 48 complaints were submitted \u201cto various investigatory powers,\u201d including the Justice Ministry.The 48 complaints themselves involve fewer than 48 Palestinians as some of them submitted multiple complaints.Breaking down the 48 complaints: 23 were filed against the Shin Bet, 14 against the IDF, nine against the police or border police and two against the Prisons Service.Since June 2014, 18 complaints claimed their interrogators used the \u201cfrog\u201d or \u201cbanana\u201d (contorted) positions against them, 19 complained of sleep deprivation, 12 of beatings during interrogation, eight of sexual harassment or assault during the interrogation, seven of physical violence during arrest and two of being physically shaken against High Court dictates.PCATI said that the use of the \u201cfrog\u201d and \u201cbanana\u201d positions were most noteworthy since these methods had been used only 10 times in the prior four years.No specifics were provided regarding the individual cases that made up the basis of the statistics, though some information is protected under gag order.On March 3, 2014, the state attorney confirmed to the High Court that the Shin Bet does currently use moderate physical pressure in a small number of ticking bomb cases.On June 18, 2014 multiple media reports said that a senior military source had told them that the Shin Bet was using moderate physical pressure on certain Hamas agents to get operational information for finding the kidnappers of three murdered Jewish teens, whose kidnapping brought about Operation Brothers\u2019 Keeper.The military source also said that the Shin Bet had gotten special approval for using enhanced interrogation from Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein.A number of harsher and controversial tactics have been employed by the state in responding to increased security challenges since June 2014, such as house demolitions, though unlike torture, house demolitions were never forbidden by the High Court.The Justice Ministry at the time referred all question to the Shin Bet.The Jerusalem Post investigated the reports at the time, and each media source stood by the story, while security officials neither confirmed nor denied the statement, other than that the Shin Bet said that it neither asked for nor needs prior approval to undertake interrogations.If true, the new PCATI statistics would confirm the June reports.However, without assessing individual cases regarding each complaint\u2019s veracity and whether, if moderate physical pressure was used, the Shin Bet would have a necessity defense for having tried to prevent a \u201cticking bomb\u201d attack, it is impossible to know whether the complaints could legally carry criminal charges.PCATI director Ishai Menuchin said, \u201csome of the torture methods that were used are in full violation of High Court decisions... including giving advance approval for torture.\u201dHe said that at least three detainees had been told by their interrogators that their torture had been approved by the attorney- general or other officials \u2013 which he called illegal.Menuchin added that some detainees were allegedly tortured only after having been in administrative detention for some time, such that he questioned how they could provide updated and current information to help stop a ticking bomb attack.The IDF, police and Prisons Service said that they could not respond without information about the specific allegations.The Shin Bet did say, however, that it \u201cacts solely within the law and is open to both internal and external oversight and criticism, including the state comptroller, the state attorney, the attorney-general, the Knesset and the courts.\u201dIt continued, \u201cShin Bet detainees receive their full humanitarian rights that they are entitled to under the law, including: medical attention, meetings with lawyers and ICRC visits.\u201dFurther, the Shin Bet stated, \u201cevery detainee complaint is passed on directly and immediately to the Justice Ministry\u2019s head Shin Bet investigator, and handled by her.\u201dThe statement concluded, \u201call decisions regarding handling of the complaints and taking follow- up actions regarding them, on the basis of reviews, are decided by the Justice Ministry.\u201dOf around 1,000 similar complaints filed since 2001, not a single criminal investigation has been opened to date, leading the Justice Ministry to take over investigations of complaints of torture against the Shin Bet in June 2013.The new Justice Ministry division, which became fully operational in 2014, has sped up processing of complaints, but the jury is still out on whether it will be viewed as handling complaints better than the Shin Bet did.Yaakov Lappin and Ben Hartman contributed to this report.\n\nJoin Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>"}
{"text":"ACTA has received a knockout blow from the European Parliament as the majority of MEPs voted in favor of rejecting the controversial trade agreement, which critics say would protect copyright at the expense of freedom of speech on the Internet.\n\nMEPs voted overwhelmingly against ACTA, with 478 votes against and only 39 in favor of it. There were 146 abstentions.\n\n\u201cIn am proud to say that the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will not come into force in the European Union,\u201d the Treaty\u2019s rapporteur in the European Parliament, David Martin MEP, wrote on his blog after the session.\n\nMartin recommended that Parliament reject the treaty as it would not effectively tackle online piracy.\n\nThe anti-ACTA mood was strong among MEPs during the session, with some members holding banners reading \u201cHello democracy. Goodbye ACTA\u201d.\n\nThe ACTA-killing vote came despite an attempt by supporters of the treaty to postpone the crucial vote at the Parliamentary plenary session on Wednesday. However, as Martin writes, MEPs \u201cwere able to build a strong majority and defeated the call for a postponement.\u201d\n\n\u201cThis is a historic day in terms of European politics,\u201d he wrote. The European Parliament vote means that 22 European member states cannot ratify ACTA into their local sovereign law.\n\nEarlier all five parliament committees reviewing ACTA voted in favor of rejecting the international treaty.\n\nThe European Parliament was supported by 2.8 million European citizens around the globe who signed a petition calling for MEPs to reject the agreement. Thousands of EU citizens lobbied for blocking ACTA in street demonstrations, e-mails to MEPs and calls to their offices.\n\n\u201cOn July 4, Europe celebrates a day of independence from American special interests. Today, we stood up for our most basic rights against corporate giants, and won,\u201d Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party , wrote.\n\n\u201cThis is a huge victory for the citizenship, for democracy and for freedom online. We worked very hard for the last four years to achieve this,\u201d Jeremie Zimmermann, a co-founder and spokesperson for civil advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, told RT.\n\n\u00ad\n\nWhat's next for ACTA?\n\nIn theory, ACTA could still come into force outside the EU, between the United States and a number of smaller states like Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea, where the treaty is widely supported.\n\nACTA was developed with the participation of a number of countries, including all those listed above and others since 2007. When the ramifications of the agreement came to wider public knowledge this year, a wave of protests hit several countries. The EU suspended the ratification of ACTA in February to reconsider it.\n\nACTA could still be revived in the EU if the European Commission, the bloc's executive body, calls for the agreement's implementation and wins a court decision over it.\n\nHowever, non-EU countries will still be able to shape laws around the treaty's mandates, but ACTA will be significantly reduced without Europe's support.\n\nACTA \u201cwas wrong from the start\u201d says Martin, adding that they \u201cneed to start again from scratch.\u201d\n\nThe proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is aimed at protecting copyright over a wide range of industries.\n\nACTA would require signatory states to impose draconian restrictions on online privacy in the drive to eradicate content piracy and the sale of counterfeit branded goods through the internet.\n\nThe main focus of criticism was targeting the impact it would cause to internet freedom.\n\nAFP Photo\/Frederick Florin AFP Photo\/Frederick Florin\n\nImage from Twitter\/@judithineuropa Image from Twitter\/@judithineuropa"}
{"text":"\u00d7 Terms of Use\n\nTerms of Use of Shoney\u2019s Sites and End User License Agreement for Shoney\u2019s Apps\n\nPlease read these Terms of Use of www.shoneys.com, www.shoneysfranchise.com, www.shoneysinternational.com, www.shoneyscatering.com, www.shoneys5k.com and any other site (collectively, the \u201cSites\u201d) operated by Best American Hospitality Corp. on behalf of Shoney\u2019s North America, LLC (collectively, \u201cShoney\u2019s) carefully before using the Sites. These Terms of Use may be modified at any time and are effective immediately upon posting to the Sites. By using the Sites, you agree to the then-current terms of use. If you do not agree with any of the terms of use, do not use the Sites.\n\nThese Terms of Use also contain an End User License Agreement that covers your use of all software published by Shoney\u2019s, for use on mobile devices, tablets, personal computers and other devices, as well as all related elements including, but not limited to updates and upgrades, manuals, online materials, files and documentation of any kind (collectively, the \u201cApps\u201d). Be sure to read the following before using the Apps. By installing, accessing and using the Apps, you are hereby agreeing to be legally bound by these provisions. If you do not agree to the following, do not download or use the Apps and remove all copies from your devices."}
{"text":"Of all the billionaires that come and go on the Forbes China Rich List, Liu Yiqian is certainly the one with the biggest appetite for art. Liu, who ranked No. 220 with a net worth of $ 1 billion, yesterday bought a 600-year-old imperial embroidered Tibetan tapestry at a Christie\u2019s auction for $ 348 million Hong Kong dollars ($ 45 million), setting a record for any Chinese works of art sold by an international auction house.\n\nFor the art-savvy Liu, the magnificent piece is too important to miss. The silk tapestry, known as a thangka, is more than three meters tall and two meters wide. The work, created more than five centuries ago during the Ming dynasty on command of Emperor Yongle, is excellently preserved. The still brightly colored gold and silk threads depict the story of Raktayamari, 'The Red Conqueror of Death', embracing his consort, Vajravetali, according to Christie\u2019s. The thangka is the only one of its kind still in private hands - two other known examples are in the Jokhang Monastery in Tibet.\n\nLiu, who bought the piece for his private Long museum in Shanghai, said he is \u201cproud to bring back to China this significant and historic 15th century thangka, which will be preserved in the Long museum for years to come.\u201d In his WeChat message now widely circulated on Chinese media, Liu said the auction was a tough battle.\n\nThe 50-year-old collector has an eye for all sorts of artwork. In April, he spent $36.3 million on a tiny porcelain cup with a humble chicken painted on its surface- he also took a celebratory swig from it. Liu\u2019s collection also includes revolutionary pieces from the Mao period and modern Chinese artworks by celebrated artists such as Chen Yifei and Fang Lijun.\n\nLiu, who sometimes is dubbed the eccentric one, has a penchant for paying his purchases through American Express . He paid for the chicken cup by swiping his American Express card an individual 24 times and confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that he intended to settle payment for the thangka through American Express again.\n\nLiu is chairman of Shanghai-based investment company Sunline Group. Born in 1963 into a working-class family in the city, he left school at 14 to help with his mother\u2019s handbag business. After amassing a small amount of fortune by selling bags, he learned stock trading at 27 and was one of the earliest investors in the Shanghai stock market. He started collecting art about two decades ago with his wife Wang Wei."}
{"text":"As expected, Nokia has officially announced the Lumia 920. The leaks of this device have been spot on. The 920 has a Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor, a PureView camera on the back, and wireless charging. We\u2019ll have more details as they are revealed.\n\nThe PureView camera is very special. It reacts to the movements of your hand, and lets the shutter stay open longer. They haven\u2019t said exactly how many mega-pixel the camera is, but the leaks said 8 and they have been correct so far.\n\nThe display is called \u201cPureMotion HD Plus.\u201d It has a fast refresh rate to reduce blur when scrolling. The ClearBlack display is even better now, and the color tones adjust to glare from the sunlight. The display can \u201ceven bee seen in the dessert.\u201d\n\nThe battery on the Lumia 920 is 2,000mAh. Combined with the efficient processor, this makes for a long lasting display. The wireless charging comes with a Fatboy pillow, a plush charger that can be set comfortably on your bed. Nokia has also announced wireless charging partnerships with Virgin Atlantic and The Coffee Bean."}
{"text":"\u201cBuckle your seatbelt and get ready.\u201d That\u2019s Jon Stewart\u2018s message to us.\n\nThe former Daily Show host spoke with the TimesTalks\u2019 Chris Smith on his thoughts regarding the coming Donald Trump era.\n\n\u201cIt is odd to be in a position of knowing that the leader of the free world tweeted that you were a p*ssy at 1:30 in the morning,\u201d Stewart said regarding Trump according to The Huffington Post.\n\nAt a certain point in the interview, Stewart extended an olive branch of sorts to the folks responsible for putting Trump in the White House.\n\n\u201cNot everybody that voted for Trump is a racist,\u201d Stewart said during the interview. \u201cI don\u2019t give a f*ck what any of you say to me. You can yell it at me, you can tweet it at me. They\u2019re not all racists. Or they\u2019re not giving tacit support to a racist system \u2026 We all give tacit support to exploitative systems as long as they don\u2019t affect us that badly.\u201d\n\n\"I'm optimistic because I can't believe how much greater this country is than when it started.\" \u2013 Jon Stewart on #Election2016 pic.twitter.com\/UXvATQINTS \u2014 TimesTalks (@TimesTalks) December 1, 2016\n\nHe gave an example:\n\n\u201c\u2026guess how those are made, guess who makes them?\u201d Stewart said asking an audience member to pull out a phone. \u201c\u2019Oh yeah, but that\u2019s \u2026 \u2018 What, what is it? It\u2019s not different, we all do that. All of our shit stinks and getting beyond that takes incredible work.\u201d\n\nStewart talked about Trump\u2019s rhetoric versus his actions, recalling how he attacked Hillary Clinton as an \u201cunqualified Secretary of State because the way she handled classified material.\u201d\n\n\u201cHis selection for Secretary of State will be David Petraeus, who pled guilty to mishandling classified material,\u201d Stewart continued. \u201cHe said [Clinton] was unqualified because she gave a speech to Goldman Sachs. His Secretary of the Treasury is somebody from Goldman Sachs. We\u2019re in post-accountability.\u201d\n\n\u201cLet\u2019s look out for the losers. Having somebody you agree with have greater control over the levers of power might be a comfort, but it\u2019s not a solution. Unfortunately, I think our expectation now is, \u2018Oh, great, one of our team is in charge. I don\u2019t have to think about this anymore.\u2019 And I think it\u2019s never actually been the case.\u201d\n\nA transcription of the most notable moments from the interview can be found at HuffPo.\n\nFeatured image via YouTube"}
{"text":"When Hillary Clinton\u2019s former campaign chief received a bogus email that an elite Russian hacking unit allegedly sent, he clicked on its infected link, giving the hackers access to 58,000 or so emails.\n\nSuch a hack is known as \u201cspearphishing,\u201d and it turns out to be only the simplest tool in a sophisticated Russian hacking kit, according to a report issued Wednesday by FireEye, a Milpitas, California, cybersecurity company whose experts have been examining the group since 2007.\n\nOther tools include setting up \u201cwatering holes\u201d on websites likely to be visited by individuals of interest, infecting the users in the equivalent of a drive-by digital shooting, or finding \u201czero day\u201d flaws that allow hackers to control every aspect of targeted computers, servers or networks and the material they store.\n\nThe techniques are malicious and nearly impossible for nonprofessionals to block.\n\n\u201cThey are so capable,\u201d FireEye\u2019s Jonathan Wrolstad said of the Russian military unit. \u201cIn some ways, it may seem futile because they are so skilled. If you block them one way, they are going to look for the next way and the next way until they achieve their goal.\u201d\n\nSHARE COPY LINK Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday took turns questioning top intelligence officials, who say investigative agencies found compelling evidence of Russian cyber-hacking throughout the 2016 election cycle.\n\nThe Russian hackers are linked to the Russian military intelligence service, known as the GRU, and its targets span the globe and parallel the interests of the Russian state, FireEye said.\n\nIn late 2014, FireEye dubbed the Russian hacking unit APT28, a name derived from \u201cadvanced persistent threat.\u201d Other cybersecurity firms have given the unit names like Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Tsar Team and Pawn Storm. All the names refer to the same hacker team.\n\nEDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM\n\nThe FireEye report says APT28 hackers have targeted areas of strategic Russian interest including \u201cthe conflict in Syria, NATO-Ukraine relations, the European Union refugee and migrant crisis, the 2016 Olympics and Paralympics Russian athlete doping scandal, public accusations regarding Russian state-sponsored hacking and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.\u201d\n\nThe 13-page FireEye report is called: \u201cAPT28: At the Center of the Storm: Russia Strategically Evolves its Cyber Operations.\u201d\n\nEDITORS: END OPTIONAL TRIM\n\nTargets of APT28 hacks, compiled by FireEye, include government entities or political parties in Germany, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and the United States, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and French TV5Monde as well as active or retired political figures, including former Clinton campaign chief John Podesta and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.\n\nWhile it\u2019s not included in Wednesday\u2019s report, Wrolstad said APT28 had also targeted U.S. defense contractors, military attach\u00e9s in Europe and Asia, and the governments of Georgia and Chile.\n\n\u201cWe saw the Chilean government as a target of this activity back in 2014. And you wonder: How does that fit with Russia at all? So we started researching and we found that at that time there were discussions between the two militaries of Russia and Chile over some sort of arms sale or cooperation,\u201d Wrolstad said.\n\nAPT28 and other hackers alleged to be linked to the Russian state under President Vladimir Putin have used spearphishing thousands of times.\n\nEDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM\n\nThe Obama administration\u2019s declassified intelligence report on Russian hacking, released Dec. 29, said a parallel Russian hacking team known as APT29, thought to be operated by a domestic spying agency, the FSB, launched a massive spearphishing campaign in the summer of 2015, sending targeted emails \u201cto over 1,000 recipients, including multiple U.S. government victims.\u201d\n\nIt said that Russian team had routed the fake emails through domains belonging to universities and other respected institutions or groups, worming their way into the network of \u201ca U.S. political party,\u201d known to be the Democratic National Committee.\n\nEDITORS: END OPTIONAL TRIM\n\nAPT28 used a different technique to get into the DNC, luring one or more employees to click on a link to a fake webmail domain that mimicked Gmail or another service and tricked them into changing their passwords, thus sharing the new passwords with unseen Russian hackers observing from afar, the report said.\n\nThe FireEye report says, however, that the malicious toolbox owned by APT28 is large and growing. It listed six so-called \u201czero day\u201d vulnerabilities the unit is known to have utilized, allowing its hackers to use software flaws in products that U.S. vendors, such as Adobe, Java and Microsoft, hadn\u2019t known existed, although they were eventually patched.\n\nThe flaws bear the name \u201czero day\u201d because they allow hackers to take over systems the moment the flaws are known, leaving victims unaware that they have been compromised.\n\nAPT28 has shown over the past two years that they are able to procure these vulnerabilities called zero days at a rate much higher than any other group we\u2019ve observed. Jonathan Wrolstad, FireEye\n\n\u201cAPT28 has shown over the past two years that they are able to procure these vulnerabilities called zero days at a rate much higher than any other group we\u2019ve observed,\u201d Wrolstad said.\n\nWhen a zero-day flaw is known only to hackers, there\u2019s no defense until it is discovered and patched.\n\nEDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM\n\nThe Russian hacking toolkit includes other methods, such as creating a \u201cwatering hole.\u201d If hackers want to penetrate a network of an organization, they might first hack into the website of a nearby business that employees use, perhaps a restaurant.\n\n(The hackers) can just insert a line of code that tells the viewer\u2019s browser to go load another page. Patrick Neighorn, FireEye\n\n\u201cThe attackers, if they gain access to that restaurant\u2019s website, they can just insert a line of code that tells the viewer\u2019s browser to go load another page,\u201d said Patrick Neighorn, head of global media relations for FireEye. That activity would be invisible to the victim, beginning a process of deeper control of a targeted computer.\n\nThe FireEye report says this technique \u201cwas used to compromise and infect visitors to numerous Polish government websites in 2014.\u201d\n\nEDITORS: END OPTIONAL TRIM\n\nAPT28 hackers can even beat vaunted two-factor authentication, which requires users not only to type in passwords but also to type ever-changing security codes, the report says.\n\nThey also can spoof a Google App authorization request, such as when a user visits a retail or other site that allows visitors to log on using Gmail accounts, the report says.\n\n\u201cIn a matter of about 20 minutes . . . they would have the entire contents of both your Google Drive and your Gmail account,\u201d Wrolstad said."}
{"text":"Dealers get drugs and mobile phones thrown over prison walls\n\nThey are raking in tens of thousands of pounds from operations while inside jails. With a captive market, they can charge fellow inmates more for drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine than they can sell them for on the outside. In some cases, heroin is 10 times dearer inside prisons than out on the streets. Dealers are deliberately setting out to get caught for \u00adrelatively minor offences they know will result in a three-month jail term. Having already set up bank accounts, they smuggle mobile phones into the prison. Drug-using inmates then call friends and relatives with the account details so they can make cash deposits into the dealer\u2019s bank.\n\nThe dealer is able to use either phone or internet banking via the smuggled mobile to check the money has been deposited. Once it is in his account, a drug drop is arranged. A source released from Hull Prison last week told the Daily Express that dealers boast about making more than \u00a320,000 during three months in jail. The 37-year-old former burglar said: \u201cThe dealers are laughing at the prison officers because they say they can make more in just a couple of weeks than they earn in a whole year.\n\n\u201cMost use mobile phones but some are so brazen they even use the prison phones which are recorded. Getting the drugs into jail is no problem. They are thrown over the wall at designated times, again organised via the mobile phones. \u201cIf the phones get confiscated, a new one can be delivered in much the same way.\u201d The source said prison visitors also bring in large quantities of drugs, often hiding them in the clothing of young child\u00adren. A common ploy is to smuggle the drugs inside a baby\u2019s nappy, as these are not checked by the guards.\n\nBecause of the high profits to be made, there is also a strong temptation for prison officers to assist in smuggling in drugs. The Government said 64 prison officers were investigated for involvement in the trafficking of drugs last year. No figures were available for how many of these investigations subsequently led to prosecutions. The source has just completed four-year jail term for burglary and has spent much of the past two decades in prison. He has never developed a drug problem and is amazed at the scale of the illicit trade.\n\nHe said: \u201cI have been moved between 13 different prisons during this last stretch, all across Britain, and this scam was happening at every prison. It would be so easy to stop but most of the screws can\u2019t be bothered because it would only mean more grief and paperwork for them to do. \u201cA prisoner who is an addict is a lot easier to handle if he has got his fix than if he\u2019s being deprived it. \u201cI reckon about 80 per cent of the prisoners I have come into contact with are addicts. Even if they\u2019re not smack heads when they go inside, there is so much temptation and boredom once they are banged up that most give in.\n\n\u201cProper policing of jails could stop drugs quite quickly but nobody seems to care and that is allowing dealers to flourish \u00adwithin the system.\u201d Tory justice spokesman Nick Herbert reacted with astonishment at the revelations. He said: \u201cThese are extraordinary allegations which the Ministry of Justice should investigate without delay. \u201cThe idea that criminals might actually want to return to prison to conduct criminal activity offends against the fundamental tenet that jails should be secure."}
{"text":"Stabilizing the System of Mortgage Finance in the United States\n\nAuthor\/Editor:\n\nRichard Koss\n\nPublication Date:\n\nAugust 8, 2017\n\nElectronic Access:\n\nFree Full Text. Use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this PDF file\n\nDisclaimer: IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.\n\nSummary:\n\nIt has been over a decade since the peak of house prices in the US was attained, and while there has been a concerted regulatory response to the subsequent collapse, the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) remain in conservatorship. While this action served to forestall a deeper crisis at the time, over the past several years risks related to the system of mortgage finance can be seen building across several dimensions that need to be addressed. While reforms to the GSEs are an important part of dealing with these concerns, this paper argues that broader changes need to be made across the entire mortgage landscape to stabilize the system, even before the final state of the GSEs is fully determined."}
{"text":"In one of the more surreal chapters in the ongoing Trumpcare saga, the Independent Journal Review\u2019s Haley Byrd reports that some of Sen. Lisa Murkowski\u2019s (R-AK) Republican colleagues hope to entice her into supporting their latest effort to repeal Obamacare by letting Alaska keep much of Obamacare.\n\nUnder the reported deal \u2014 alternatively nicknamed the \u201cAlaska Bribe,\u201d the \u201cAlaska Purchase,\u201d the \u201cPolar Purchase,\u201d and the \u201cSnow Job\u201d \u2014 Alaska and Hawaii \u201cwill continue to receive Obamacare\u2019s premium tax credits while they are repealed for all other states.\u201d The proposal reportedly also includes favorable treatment for these two states under Medicaid.\n\nAfter Byrd\u2019s report became public, for what it\u2019s worth, one of the leading Senate sponsors of the new Trumpcare bill reportedly went into damage control mode.\n\nSen. Graham is telling other senators that reports about a special deal for Alaska are \"complete bullshit\" per a senior GOP aide \u2014 Leigh Ann Caldwell (@LACaldwellDC) September 21, 2017\n\nIf Murkowski ultimately is offered the deal described by Byrd, however, it would raise serious constitutional concerns. According to Georgetown law professor Brian Galle, the Alaska Purchase probably runs afoul of a provision of the Constitution requiring the U.S. tax code to have a degree of uniformity.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThough the Constitution gives Congress the power to tax, it also provides that \u201call Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.\u201d This clause has not played much of a role in American tax policy, but it creates a problem for the Alaska Bribe should Murkowski\u2019s state be offered tax credits that most states will not receive.\n\nAs Galle writes, \u201cthe leading recent authority on the uniformity clause is, coincidentally, also a case from Alaska, U.S. v. Ptasynski.\u201d There, the Supreme Court held that \u201cwhere Congress does choose to frame a tax in geographic terms, we will examine the classification closely to see if there is actual geographic discrimination.\u201d For such discrimination to be permitted, \u201cCongress has to show \u2018neutral factors\u2019 that justify its distinction. A purpose to \u2018grant\u2026an undue preference at the expense of other\u2026states'\u201d would flunk the test.\n\nSo a provision of Trumpcare whose purpose is to provide particular states with favorable tax treatment, in order to entice a wavering senator into supporting the bill, could be struck down under Ptasynski.\n\nWould it actually be struck down? That decision would ultimately rest with an increasingly partisan Supreme Court that may be reluctant to undo major legislation pushed by Republicans. And if it is struck down, it is far from clear that the Court would strike down more than just the one provision involving the tax code.\n\nAt the very least, however, if Murkowski were to agree to the enticement described in Byrd\u2019s report, she would likely see her name in unfavorable headlines for years as the legal challenge to the Alaska Purchase wound its way through the courts.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nRepublican officials were once quite bothered by the idea that one state might receive favorable treatment in order to buy an uncertain senator\u2019s support for a larger bill.\n\nIn 2009, thirteen state attorneys general wrote Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid threatening litigation against the so-called \u201cCornhusker Kickback,\u201d an enticement for Nebraksa Sen. Ben Nelson (D) that was ultimately removed from the Affordable Care Act. Their letter offered several theories, including allegations that the now-defunct special treatment for Nebraska was a \u201cdisplay of arbitrary power\u201d and that it could violate various constitutional provisions because it \u201cis a disadvantage to the citizens of 49 states.\u201d\n\nThese were weaker legal arguments than the case against the Alaska Purchase, largely because the Nebraska deal did not involve the tax code. But they are indicative of what Republican officials thought was an appropriate way to secure votes when Democrats controlled the Congress."}
{"text":"Mike English of the Blaze shoots during their round one NBL match against the New Zealand Breakers.\n\nCJ Bruton of the Breakers shoots during the round one NBL match against the Gold Coast Blaze.\n\nGary Wilkinson of the Breakers takes a shot on goal under pressure from Larry Davidson of the Hawks during their round one NBL match.\n\nMika Vukona of the Breakers clears the ball under pressure during their round one clash with the Wollongong Hawks.\n\nJoevan Catron of the Hawks drives to the basket under pressure from Gary Wilkinson of the Breakers during their round one NBL match.\n\nGuard CJ Bruton waves to the Vector Arena crowd as the Breakers leave the court after warm-ups.\n\nCoach Andrej Lemanis talks to his team during a first half timeout.\n\nBreaker Tom Abercrombie tries to drive by Kings guard Luke Cooper.\n\nBreakers guard Cedric Jackson tangles with Sydney's Luke Martin going for a loose ball.\n\nOut in the open, Alex Pledger drives to the hoop, being blocked by the rim on a one-handed dunk.\n\nIn a New Zealand basketball record crowd 6383 filled Vector Arena to watch the Breakers and Kings.\n\nBreakers forward Tom Abercrombie throws down as easy dunk during the first quarter against the Sydney Kings at Vector Arena.\n\nBreakers guard Cedric Jackson in action, defended by Nathan Crosswell during NZ Breakers v Adelaide 36ers basketball match at the North Shore Events Centre.\n\nBreakers guard CJ Bruton shoots a three pointer against the Wollongong Hawks at North Shore Events Centre.\n\nBreakers player Tom Abercrombie looks to get past Hawks forward Oscar Forman.\n\nBreakers guard Cedric Jackson tussles for the ball against Glen Saville (left) and Dave Gruber of the Hawks.\n\nBreakers Forward Gary Wilkinson fires up after colliding with Hawks player Glen Saville on the way to the hoop.\n\nBreakers forward BJ Anthony and Hawks forward Dave Gruber scramble for the ball.\n\nBreakers coach Andrej Lemanis appeals to the referees for a call.\n\nTom Abercrombie soars over Townsville's Michael Cedar to block his shot.\n\nBreakers coach Andrej Lemanis gets his message across against the Melbourne Tigers.\n\nBreakers guard Cedric Jackson looks for a way through the Tigers defence.\n\nBreakers guard Thomas Abercrombie completes an impressive slam dunk against the Melbourne Tigers.\n\nBoth teams erupt into an all out brawl.\n\nBlaze's Anthony Petrie is ejected from the match.\n\nBreakers Mika Vukona in action against the Gold Coast Blaze.\n\nTom Abercrombie of the Breakers under pressure from Chris Warren of the 36ers.\n\nCedric Jackson of the Breakers goes for the basket against the Adelaide 36ers.\n\nDiamon Simpson (L) and Daniel Johnson (R) of the 36ers competes with Dillon Boucher (C) and Tom Abercrombie of the Breakers.\n\nMika Vukona of the Breakers competes with Diamon Simpson of the 36ers.\n\nGary Wilkinson of the Breakers reaches for the basket against the Adelaide 36ers.\n\nCedric Jackson drives to the basket during the Breakers game against the Perth Wildcats.\n\nJesse Wagstaff of the the Wildcats and Breakers' Benny Anthony Jnr. compete for the ball.\n\nTom Abercrombie of the Breakers drives past Ayinde Ubaka of the Melbourne Tigers.\n\nCJ Bruton goes up for the lay-up.\n\nCam Tragardh of the Melbourne Tigers tries to get past the Breakers' Alex Pledger.\n\nBreakers forward Dillon Boucher puts up a shot against the Adelaide 36ers.\n\nBreakers forward Thomas Abercrombie hangs off the hoop against the Adelaide 36ers.\n\nBreakers forward Mika Vukona helps up guard Cedric Jackson against the Melbourne Tigers.\n\nBreakers forward Thomas Abercrombie flies at the basket against the Melbourne Tigers.\n\nThe North Shore Events Centre crowd gets behind the Breakers during their top-of-the-table defeat of the Perth Wildcats.\n\nBreakers centre Alex Pledger grasps possession during the 73-67 win over the Perth Wildcats in Auckland.\n\nLeon Henry shows his emotion after Breakers team-mate Cedric Jackson sunk a buzzer-beating shot against the Perth Wildcats.\n\nCJ Bruton fights for posession during the Breakers clash with Wollongong at the NSEC.\n\nA bemused Andrej Lemanis jokingly applauds the referee after a foul is called on Mika Vukona.\n\nTom Abercrombie rises above Glen Saville of the Wollongong Hawks.\n\nDillon Boucher tussles for position during the Breakers win over the Wollongong Hawks.\n\nGary Wilkinson of the Breakers wins the ball against the Adelaide 36ers.\n\nCJ Bruton of the Breakers surges forward against the Adelaide 36ers.\n\nDillon Boucher of the Breakers celebrates after the match against the Adelaide 36ers.\n\nCedric Jackson of the Breakers goes for the basket against the Adelaide 36ers.\n\nThe teams are seperated by the ref after an unsportsman foul against Gold Coast Blaze forward Stephen Hoare.\n\nBreakers coach Andrej Lemanis during the match against Gold Coast Blaze.\n\nGary Wilkinson of the Breakers beats Ben Allen of the Crocodiles to the rebound.\n\nPeter Crawford (centre) of the Crocodiles looks to get past Dillon Boucher (right) and Tom Abercrombie of the Breakers.\n\nAlex Pledger (right) of the Breakers contests for the ball with Elvin Mims of the Townsville Crocodiles.\n\nDillion Boucher of the Breakers in action against the Blaze.\n\nMorgan Natanahira of the Breakers shoots against of the Blaze at the Gold Coast Convention Centre.\n\nJason Cadee of the Blaze shoots during their match against the Breakers at the Gold Coast Convention Centre.\n\nBreakers point guard Cedric Jackson finished with 17 points and seven assists as the Breakers rolled by the 36ers 91-76 in Adelaide.\n\nJason Cadee of the Blaze passes against the New Zealand Breakers at the Gold Coast Convention Centre.\n\nLeon Henry of the Breakers in action against the Gold Coast Blaze.\n\nIf there was any doubt these New Zealand Breakers are something special it was removed tonight in a pulsating, dramatic overtime opening game of the Australian NBL's grand final series.\n\nThe Breakers somehow, some way were able to take the best shots of a very, very good Perth Wildcats side and - on the back of some overtime heroics from CJ Bruton and Mika Vukona - nail a pulsating 104-98 victory to begin this best-of-three series in the perfect fashion.\n\nThey did so without getting a single minute out of arguably their best, certainly their most explosive, player in Thomas Abercrombie who had to sit and watch the best game of the season from the comfort of the bench.\n\n1 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Tom Abercrombie holds the championship trophy aloft. 2 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Rio Bruton shows his dad is number one after CJ collected the grand finals MVP award. 3 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Alex Pledger shows off his championship ring. 4 of 57 Photosport Cedric Jackson delivers the ball to centre Gary Wilkinson as Perth's Shawn Redhage attempts a block. 5 of 57 Getty Images Dillon Boucher jumps for joy as the Breakers win their second straight Australian NBL title. 6 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ CJ Bruton of the Breakers ducks through the arms of Matt Knight and Brad Robbins of the Perth Wildcats. 7 of 57 Getty Images CJ Bruton gets the crowd going after hitting a three pointer in the grand finals decider. 8 of 57 PETER MEECHAM\/Fairfax NZ Dan Carter and Jerome Kaino show their support for the NZ Breakers. 9 of 57 Getty Images New Zealand Breakers' coach Andrej Lemanis with the ANBL championship trophy. 10 of 57 Photosport New Zealand Breakers' Dillon Boucher participates in the championship-winning tradition of cutting down the nets. 11 of 57 Photosport The New Zealand Breakers' celebrate their victory in the ANBL finals series. 12 of 57 Jason Oxenham\/Fairfax NZ Breakers' guard Cedric Jackson takes the ball to the hoop in game three of ANBL finals series against the Perth Wildcats. 13 of 57 Jason Oxenham\/Fairfax NZ Breakers' Alex Pledger climbs high for a dunk. 14 of 57 Photosport The New Zealand Breakers and the Perth Wildcats get involved in an altercation in game three of the ANBL finals series in Auckland. 15 of 57 Peter Meecham\/Fairfax NZ Breakers' forward Mika Vukona avoids the attention of Perth Wildcats' forward Shawn Redhage. 16 of 57 Peter Meecham\/Fairfax NZ Breakers' guard CJ Bruton goes past Perth Wildcats' point guard Brad Robbins. 17 of 57 Getty Images Breakers and Wildcats players get involved in an altercation. 18 of 57 Peter Meecham\/Fairfax NZ The crowd cheers as the Breakers take to the court during the third and deciding game of the ANBL finals series against the Perth Wildcats. 19 of 57 Getty Images Leon Henry and Dillon Boucher of the Breakers look on from the bench during game two. 20 of 57 Getty Images Shawn Redhage of the Wildcats celebrates with supporters at the end of the game during game two. 21 of 57 Getty Images Breakers playing discuss tactics during a break in play of game two of the ANBL finals series in Perth. 22 of 57 Getty Images Kevin Lisch of the Wildcats and Cedric Jackson of the Breakers contest for a loose ball during game two. 23 of 57 Getty Images Breakers and Wildcats players get involved in an altercation. 24 of 57 Getty Images Breakers big man during game two of the ANBL finals series in Perth. 25 of 57 Getty Images Leon Henry of the Breakers lays-up against Matt Knight of the Wildcats during game two. 26 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Cedric Jackson gets amongst the front-row fans after making a basket and being fouled. 27 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Mika Vukona looks to score down low under pressure from Luke Nevill. 28 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Small forward Leon Henry defends Perth's Cameron Tovey. 29 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Tom Abercrombie gingerly runs onto the court during player intros. 30 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Gary Wilkinson gets the Breakers fired-up pre-game. 31 of 57 Getty Images Dillon Boucher celebrates the Breakers win over Perth Wildcats in game one of the ANBL finals series. 32 of 57 Getty Images Leon Henry of the Breakers lays the ball up over Luke Nevill of the Perth Wildcats in game one of the ANBL finals series. 33 of 57 Getty Images Alex Pledger of the Breakers battles with two Perth Wildcats players for the ball in game one of the ANBL finals series. 34 of 57 Jason Oxenham\/Fairfax NZ Breakers guard CJ Bruton on the ball. 35 of 57 Jason Oxenham\/Fairfax NZ Breakers centre Gary Wilkinson drives into Perth Wildcats centre Luke Nevill in game one of the ANBL finals series. 36 of 57 Photosport Tom Abercrombie is treated on the floor while team-mates go after the referee. 37 of 57 Photosport Tom Abercrombie lies on the court in agony after severely straining ligaments in his left ankle. 38 of 57 Photosport The moment before Tom Abercrombie was taken out by Townsville's Peter Crawford on a breakaway dunk. 39 of 57 Photosport CJ Bruton raises his arms after a crucial fourth quarter three-pointer in the game three win. 40 of 57 Photosport Cedric Jackson hits the hardwood to grab possession for the Breakers. 41 of 57 Photosport MAKE OR BREAK: The Breakers are getting ready for a do-or-die match against Perth tonight. 42 of 57 Getty Images The Breakers celebrate after winning game two of the NBL Finals series against the Townsville Crocodiles. 43 of 57 Getty Images Eddie Gill of the Crocodiles passes the ball past Tom Abercrombie of the Breakers during game two. 44 of 57 Getty Images Russell Hinder of the Crocodiles looks dejected in game two of the NBL Finals series against the New Zealand Breakers. 45 of 57 Getty Images Dillon Boucher of the Breakers drives past Jacob Holmes of the Crocodiles during game two. 46 of 57 Getty Images Dillon Boucher of the Breakers makes a lay-up during game two. 47 of 57 Getty Images Michael Cedar of the Crocodiles attempts a jump shot over Cedric Jackson of the Breakers during game two. 48 of 57 Getty Images Mika Vukona of the Breakers drives past Todd Blanchfield of the Crocodiles during game two. 49 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Breakers forward Thomas Abercrombie keeps the ball in play. 50 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Breakers head coach Andrej Lemanis talks to his players. 51 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Breakers forward Dillon Boucher scoots around Townsville Crocs forward Jacob Holmes. 52 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ High-fives for the Breakers in the NZ Breakers. 53 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Breakers guard Cedric Jackson scoots around Townsville Crocs point guard Eddie Gill. 54 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Breakers forward Thomas Abercrombie charges into Townsville Crocs forward Todd Blanchfield. 55 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Breakers forward Dillon Boucher battles with Townsville Crocs forward Peter Crawford. 56 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Breakers forward Dillon Boucher on the fast break chased by Townsville Crocs guard Michael Cedar. 57 of 57 JASON OXENHAM\/Fairfax NZ Breakers guard Cedric Jackson passes under pressure from Townsville Crocs centre Luke Schenscher.\n\nWithout Abercrombie, the Breakers did extremely well to go toe-to-toe with this rugged Wildcats outfit and their outstanding MVP guard Kevin Lisch.\n\nThat they were able to come from six down late in regulation to nail a brilliant overtime win was the icing on the cake.\n\nThe Breakers now head to Perth for game two in eight days' time able to play with the freedom of a side one up knowing at worst they'll be coming home for the decider.\n\nGetty Images MAKING THE PLAY: Matthew Knight of the Perth Wildcats lays the ball up under pressure from Cedric Jackson of the New Zealand Breakers.\n\nA second straight championship is now just one tantalising win away for a club who simply do not know when to quit.\n\nWhat a game it was. And at the end, even though there was the usual Perth chippiness, both sides can hold their heads high.\n\nA record crowd of 9125 was treated to an instant classic between two clubs who do tend to produce the memorable when they meet.\n\nIn a game of runs, it had looked as though the Wildcats' steaming third quarter had put them in position to seal victory.\n\nThey got their noses in front in the final period and looked like they were on their way with an 85-79 lead with just under two and a-half minutes remaining.\n\nBut key buckets down the stretch to Cedric Jackson and Vukona and some outstanding defence helped the Breakers force overtime as the referees put their whistles in their pockets over a frantic finale.\n\nThen in the five minutes of overtime, first Vukona and then Bruton stepped up splendidly to make nerveless plays to enable the Breakers to take the final grip on proceedings.\n\nVukona was a monster early, grabbing rebounds, powering inside; then when his body finally wore down up stepped Bruton to nail a pair of triples that sealed the deal.\n\nJackson had a huge game for the victors, finishing with 25 points and eight assists as he slipped back into his best form.\n\nBut Bruton was not far behind him, going five-of-12 from deep, six-of-15 overall for 20 points to go with three assists and two boards.\n\nOf course no one loves the big moment like the veteran Aussie, and down the stretch it was clear to all that the Breakers had the game-winner in their midst.\n\nDaryl Corletto added 16 points (5\/10 FG, 4\/6 3PT) for the winners, Gary Wilkinson had 12 points and seven boards and Dillon Boucher nine points, seven rebounds and four assists as he continued to make big plays when it mattered.\n\nVukona came good late to finish with 14 points and five rebounds.\n\nAlex Pledger weighed in with a solid eight points and four boards and made two huge free-throws in overtime when Vukona had to retire with cramp.\n\nLisch led the Cats with a game-high 27 points and had quality backup from Matt Knight (17 points\/five rebounds) and Shawn Redhage (15 points\/five boards).\n\nBut they will be cursing letting this one slip through their grasp after a magnificent third-quarter fightback that put them in the box seat.\n\nThe signs hadn't looked good early when the Cats, perhaps buoyed by Abercrombie's absence, got off to an explosive 14-2 start inside the first four minutes.\n\nBut then the home team exploded on a 22-4 run of their own to roar into the lead, 28-24 at the end of the first.\n\nThe Breakers knocked down five triples in this period, a pair apiece to Bruton and Corletto as they showed they were here to play - even without their classy Tall Black Abercrombie.\n\nThat intensity continued in the second quarter when the Breakers held the Wildcats to just 11 points and, on the back of some inspirational play from Jackson, forged out to a 15-point lead.\n\nJackson, playing like the MVP he perhaps should have been, was magnificent in the first half, knocking down six of his eight shots for a game-high 14 points to go with four assists.\n\nCorletto weighed in with 11 points as he nailed three of his four looks from deep, while Bruton and Wilkinson added eight and seven points respectively.\n\nThe Breakers also did a great job of restricting MVP Kevin Lisch to just five first-half points, as the Cats offence cooled off after their fast start.\n\nBut the men from the wild west, chasing their sixth NBL title in their 26th consecutive playoff appearance, are nothing if not fighters.\n\nBack they came in the third quarter, a 17-2 run early in the third erasing the deficit and leaving us with a thriller on our hands.\n\nNZ Breakers 104 (Cedric Jackson 25, CJ Bruton 20, Daryl Corletto 16, Mika Vukona 14, Gary Wilkinson 12), Perth Wildcats 98 (Kevin Lisch 27, Matthew Knight 17, Shawn Redhage 15, Luke Nevill 13, Jesse Wagstaff 12). 1Q: 28-24; HT: 50-35; 3Q: 68-66; FT: 84-84."}
{"text":"Four Chicago suspects pled not guilty on Friday to several charges related to kidnapping and torturing a young schizophrenic man, which they allegedly broadcast on Facebook Live.\n\nAccording to the Chicago Sun-Times, public defenders for Brittany Covington, 18, Tesfaye Cooper, 18, Jordan Hill, 18, and Tanishia Covington, 24, entered not guilty pleas during their arraignment.\n\nAll four suspects are charged with hate crimes, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated unlawful restraint, and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. Three are also charged with residential burglary. One offender faces robbery charges, along with the possession of a stolen motor vehicle.\n\nThe video played on Facebook Live showed a bound and gagged white victim huddled in a corner while assailants are heard saying \u201cFuck white people\u201d and \u201cFuck Donald Trump\u201d as they beat him and cut his scalp with a knife. Another video clip shows assailants forcing the victim to drink toilet water.\n\nThe suspects are due back in court March 1.\n\nPrevious coverage of the case and the national reaction to it can be found here."}
{"text":"MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) \u2013 State commerce officials say a statewide sweep of gas stations last month found nine hidden credit card skimmers, which criminals use to steal credit and debit card information from unsuspecting customers.\n\nMike Rothman, the Minnesota Commerce Commissioner, announced on Thursday that the inspection was conducted over a three-week period, examining readers at more than 1,000 gas stations in the Twin Cities metro and Greater Minnesota.\n\n\u201cThe Commerce Department is cracking down on these skimmers to protect Minnesota consumers against identity theft and fraud,\u201d Rothman said in a statement. \u201cWe are working to make sure the state\u2019s gas pumps are secure and customers\u2019 credit and debit card information is safe.\u201d\n\nThe recent inspection checked 8,500 credit card readers. There are about 52,000 such readers in the state.\n\nMoving forward, the Commerce Department says its inspectors will be looking for skimmers or any sort of tampering with gas pumps as part of their routine.\n\nOfficials say they are also working with gas stations to train their operators on how to protect against skimmers.\n\nConsumers are advised to inspect card readers at gas stations before swiping a card. If one sees signs of forced entry or tampering, the gas station clerk should be alerted.\n\nTo avoid skimmers, it\u2019s advised that consumers pay inside the gas station or with cash. To protect against fraud, one should be sure to monitor bank and credit card accounts."}
{"text":"Interview\n\nFatah insisted that the idea of Pakistan ended in 1971 when the \"majority of its people said we do not want Pakistan and created Bangladesh\".\n\nMohd Asim Khan\n\nPakistan-born Canadian writer Tarek Fatah (he objects to being called a Pakistani) is offending and entertaining in equal measure.\n\nFrom Partition to the interpretation of Islam, he has views that verge on the extreme, and even when speaking on serious topics he glides from the sombre to the ludicrous, blurting out profanities now and breaking into a childlike giggle the next moment. At times, he contradicts himself.\n\nSuch is the charm of the man that you may disagree with him on all that he is saying, but you just can't dislike him. This is because whatever he says has that tinge of sincerity you can't ignore, even if it is outright controversial.\n\nFor example, he said communal riots in India would not happen if Indian Muslims forgo their personal law, and objects to names like Taimur (as Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan has named his son) and Aurangzeb.\n\nFatah is proud of his roots in India and his Hindu ancestry. He eulogises the great Indian civilisation and calls Pakistan an \"abstract idea\". But his snide remarks are not reserved only for Pakistanis or Muslims; he also takes India's Hindu right to task over love jihad and their perceived fondness for Hitler.\n\n\"India is a civilisation that has a past and a future. It's the only civilisation that has that. In spite of being assaulted and attacked and plundered over a thousand years, it has risen up again,\" Fatah, whose books include \"Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State\" (2008) and \"The Jew Is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism\" (2010), told IANS in an interview.\n\n\"On the other hand, Pakistan is not a nation, it's just a state of mind. There is no such people as 'Pak', like we have Afghans in Afghanistan, Kazakhs in Kazakhstan and Balochs in Balochistan. Where are the Pak people?\" he asked.\n\nFatah insisted that the idea of Pakistan ended in 1971 when the \"majority of its people said we do not want Pakistan and created Bangladesh\".\n\nAsked why he doesn't like to be called a Pakistani, Fatah said: \"India is a republic rooted in 5,000 years of Indus Valley civilisation, the other (Pakistan) is a concoction of hatred. Pakistan is merely a military enterprise for the jihadis.\"\n\nFatah went on to say that all the proponents of Pakistan were \"Hindu hate mongers\", including the celebrated Urdu poet Allama Iqbal.\n\n\"Iqbal's ancestors were Hindus but he was a Hindu hater. He went to the extent of plagiarising his own poetry to attack the Hindus. I would call people in India who are still celebrating Iqbal and singing his tarana (anthem) as idiots,\" Fatah said.\n\nHowever, despite calling Partition a tragedy, Fatah has little tolerance for the idea of Pakistan -- or any of its component territories -- merging with India.\n\n\"Why should Pakistan merge with India. Bhutan is an independent country; so why not Balochsitan or Sindh? What is this obsession with territories? It's a very feudal concept,\" he said.\n\nAlthough he believes that Balochistan and Sindh should be independent countries, he dismisses separatist movements within India such as that for Khalistan or Azad Kashmir or Bodoland as \"ideas drawn up in Pakistan's boardrooms\".\n\nOn Kashmir, he said that although the Kashmiris fit his definition of a nation, like the Balochs, they can't be given independence as \"Kashmiris themselves opted to join India in 1947\".\n\nFatah also has an objection to Indian Muslims naming their children after kings and Sultans such as Aurangzeb and Taimur.\n\n\"Indian Muslims have made people like Aurangzeb their heroes. That's why Saif Ali Khan has named his son Taimur. His wife says my husband is a historian. Is this what they got in history?\" Fatah asked.\n\nSo what should have been the baby's name, in his opinion?\n\nPat came the reply: \"Hitler rakh lete jee, toh Hinduon ko bhi thand par jaati. (They should have named him \"Hitler\" instead, so that even Hindus would have liked it). Because the (right wing) Hindus are so fond of Hitler. It's only in India that Hitler's books sell like hot cakes.\"\n\nThe Canada-based writer has no love lost for Indian Muslims who flaunt surnames which show their Arab lineage such as Hashmi, Naqvi and Bukhari.\n\n\"By flaunting surnames like Hashmi and Qureshi, they are saying 'we are not Indians, we are Arabs'. Only the Muslims who have converted from Hindus are Indians,\" he said.\n\n\"But this phenomenon plagues all Indians. Even Hindus who have made money take fancy names. So Namrita becomes Nikki Haley and Piyush becomes Bobby Jindal. They are all liars,\" Fatah said.\n\nWhile slamming the mullahs for stopping inter-religious marriages -- which he said happened quite frequently in undivided India -- Fatah does not spare the Hindus.\n\n\"The mindless Hindus are talking of love jihad. What nonsense is this? It is the fundamental human right of a man or woman who they choose to marry,\" he said.\n\nFatah said that Indian Muslims are to be blamed for communal riots in India. \"You end Muslim personal law, the communal riots would end. Muslims want communal riots and blame Hindus,\" he said.\n\n(Mohd Asim Khan can be contacted at mohd.a@ians.in)"}
{"text":"At 49-43, the Minnesota Twins are engaged in a three-team battle for the A.L. Central crown. The Twins are 1.5 games back of the resurgent Chicago White Sox following yesterday\u2019s victory over the Pale Hose (the Detroit Tigers also sit a game and a half back of the division lead). There is essentially no chance that the Wild Card comes out of anywhere but the AL East, so it\u2019s division title or bust for the Twins. The club\u2019s odds of playing postseason baseball \u2014 currently 36 percent according to Cool Standings \u2014 are heavily influenced by Justin Morneau\u2019s return to health. But the Twins could also use a return to 2008 form from Kevin Slowey.\n\nA second-round pick out of Winthrop in the 2005 draft, Slowey has always boasted off-the-charts control. He issued just 1.3 walks per nine innings in the minors, punching out 8.8 per nine, and surrendering 0.5 HR\/9 despite a low ground ball rate. According to Minor League Splits, Slowey induced grounders 41.1 percent of the time on the farm, but many of the fly balls hit against him were weak \u2014 his infield fly rate was 19.5 percent.\n\nSlowey made his big league debut in 2007, tossing 66.2 innings with 6.35 K\/9, 1.49 BB\/9, and a 4.78 xFIP. He owned one of the five lowest ground ball rates among pitchers with 60+ IP, at 28.9 percent. Converesely, the low number of grounders led to lots of round trippers \u2014 Slowey gave up 2.16 HR\/9. The prospect often compared to Brad Radke had a higher-than usual home run per fly ball rate (13.3 percent), but with so few grounders and ample fly balls hit, homers figured to be a big problem for Slowey if hitters continued to loft the ball so often.\n\nThe next year, Slowey\u2019s ground ball rate increased (relatively speaking), and he posted a 4.02 xFIP in 160.1 innings after coming back from an early-season biceps strain. Since then, Slowey\u2019s xFIP has gone in the wrong direction: in 2009, he had a 4.23 mark in 90.2 IP before right wrist surgery ended his season in July, and he currently holds a 4.68 xFIP in 100 innings this season. Slowey\u2019s control remains superb, though he\u2019s walking slightly more hitters (1.35 BB\/9 in \u201908, 1.49 BB\/9 in \u201909, and 1.71 BB\/9 this year). His K rate, 6.9 per nine in 2008 and 7.44 per nine in 2009, is also a little worse than usual at 6.3 K\/9. Another disconcerting sign for Slowey is his ground ball rate.\n\nI used Pitch F\/X data from Joe Lefkowitz\u2019s site to find Slowey\u2019s batted ball distribution over the 2008 to 2010 seasons. I also included the MLB averages for pitchers, provided by Harry Pavlidis at The Hardball Times. These numbers differ from the BIS data on Slowey\u2019s player page, but you\u2019ll note a clear change in his batted ball profile:\n\n(Note: Pitch F\/X is showing more of Slowey\u2019s fastballs as \u201csinkers\u201d this season. It seems like this could be a classification change by Pitch F\/X instead of a change on Slowey\u2019s part, so I decided to lump all his fastballs together. For the purposes of this article, the MLB averages for the fastball are for four-seamers.)\n\nSlowey\u2019s ground ball rate, already low, has declined sharply. Some of those grounders have been replaced by pop ups, particularly in 2009. But this season, Slowey\u2019s giving up lots of balls classified as flies and liners, which is not a happy development, given that fly balls typically have a slugging percentage between .550 and .600 (Slowey\u2019s career SLG% on fly balls is .639) and liners fall for hits about 72 to 73 percent of the time (about 75 percent for Slowey).\n\nIs Slowey doing anything different in terms of pitch selection this season? He is using his fastball less often, in favor of mid-80\u2019s sliders and mid-70\u2019s curveballs:\n\nUsing Lefkowitz\u2019s Pitch F\/X tool, I broke down Slowey\u2019s batted ball distribution by pitch type:\n\nIn 2010, Slowey\u2019s ground ball rate on his fastball is down, with more flies and liners hit. The rate on his slider has remained about the same, though that GB% is still well under the MLB norm. His GB rates on the curve and changeup are down, with more curves classified as flies and more changeups classified as liners.\n\nHow is Slowey faring when batters put these pitches in play? Here are his slugging percentage on contact numbers by pitch type, along with MLB averages from Pavlidis\u2019 article:\n\nSlowey\u2019s slugging percentage on contact with the fastball remains slightly below average, while the SLGCON on his slider has improved. But he\u2019s looking like Charlie Brown when he breaks out the curve or the change. Six of his sixteen homers given up have come on curveballs and changeups.\n\nWith opponents rarely chopping the ball into the grass, Slowey has coughed up 1.44 homers per nine innings this season. Also not helping his case is Minnesota\u2019s outfield D \u2014 typically featuring some combination of Delmon Young, Michael Cuddyer and Jason Kubel in the corners; Twins fly catchers have a collective -6.8 UZR\/150 this season (all have poor career marks, too). Even with outstanding control, it\u2019s going to be hard for Slowey to be more than a league-average starter if he keeps generating so few grounders."}
{"text":"The Illinois Department of Public Health has confirmed that eight refugees were diagnosed with active tuberculosis (TB) \u201cduring the initial health screening or within 90 days of the refugee arrival\u201d in the four years between 2012 and 2015.\n\nThis data was not included in the Reported Tuberculosis in the United States documents published annually by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) between 2012 and 2015. Those reports confirmed 1,565 cases of active TB diagnosed among refugees in the 46 states that reported immigration status upon first arrival among foreign-born residents of the United States diagnosed with active TB.\n\nIllinois is one of four states that do not share this data with the CDC. Arizona, Virginia, and Washington are the other three states.\n\n\u201cIllinois reports all data elements required by the CDC. It would be inaccurate to try to compare the Illinois data to the data in the CDC report due to different reporting methodologies,\u201d spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Health (IDPH) told Breitbart in an emailed statement.\n\n\u201cBackground information-the IDPH Refugee Health Program does track TB among refugees,\u201d the spokesperson added, noting:\n\nThe IDPH Communicable Disease Control Section does not report refugee TB data to the CDC in the same manner as some other states, but Illinois does report all data elements required by CDC. In some states, the refugee program is part of the communicable disease section. That is not the case in Illinois. The reporting methodology is different, therefore comparing Illinois data with the CDC report would be comparing apples to oranges. The Illinois Refugee Health Program captures active TB cases during the initial health screening or within 90 days of the refugee arrival. This is one reason why Illinois\u2019 data is not included in this CDC report. The data provided in the CDC report comes from our Communicable Disease Control Section. While the IDPH Communicable Disease Control Section tracks foreign-born cases of TB as this information is important for evaluation, testing, and treatment decisions, the Section is not required to collect and report refugee information to the CDC.\n\n\u201cHowever, it would be inappropriate to try to compare the Illinois data to the data in the CDC report due to different reporting methodologies. 2015 \u2013 4 TB cases (calendar year), 2014 \u2013 No TB Confirmed Cases Reported (Federal Fiscal Year), 2013 \u2013 2 TB cases (Federal Fiscal Year), 2012 \u2013 2 TB cases (Federal Fiscal Year),\u201d the spokesperson noted.\n\nTwenty-six thousand four hundred and six refugees were resettled in Illinois by the federal government between 2003 and 2015, according to the Department of State.\n\nSurprisingly, CDC does not require Illinois or any other state to provide data related to immigration status upon arrival for patients diagnosed with active TB for its annual Reported Tuberculosis in the United States.\n\n\u201cCDC encourages states\/jurisdictions to provide as complete information as possible, but there is no requirement that they provide immigration status as part of routine surveillance,\u201d a spokesperson told Breitbart News on Monday.\n\nLimiting reporting of cases of TB diagnosed upon arrival, however, fails to capture the majority of the refugee TB cases which develop and are diagnosed more than a year after their arrival.\n\nAs the annual Reported Tuberculosis in the United States, 2015 stated, only 17 percent of the 6,350 cases of active TB diagnosed among foreign-born residents of the United States that year, or 1,003 out of 6,350, were diagnosed less than one year after their arrival in the United States.\n\nTwenty eight percent of those cases, or 1,779 out of 6,350, were diagnosed more than one year after but less than ten years after their arrival, 19 percent, or 1,240 out of 6,350, were diagnosed more than ten years but less than twenty years after their arrival, and 26 percent, or 1,682 out of 6,350, were diagnosed more than twenty years after their arrival. (Nine percent of cases were classified as \u201cunknown\/missing.\u201d)\n\nIn Illinois, 18 percent of foreign-born TB cases diagnosed in 2015, or 43 out of 243, were diagnosed less than one year after their arrival in the United States. Nine percent those 43 foreign-born cases, or 4 out of 43, were refugees.\n\nEighty two percent of foreign-born TB cases diagnosed in 2015 in Illinois, or 200 out of 243, were diagnosed one year or more after their arrival in the United States. If nine percent of those 200 cases were refugees, that would mean there were 38 additional cases of refugee TB diagnosed in Illinois that year.\n\nDiscovering that information, however, seems problematic, since \u201cthe IDPH Communicable Disease Control Section tracks foreign-born cases of TB as this information is important for evaluation, testing, and treatment decisions, the Section is not required to collect and report refugee information to the CDC.\u201d\n\nThe eight cases of refugee TB reported to Breitbart News by Illinois, combined with the eleven cases in 2015 reported to Breitbart News by the state of Washington, brings the total known cases of active TB diagnosed among refugees in the United States between 2012 and 2015 to 1,584.\n\nThis latest estimate understates the true number of refugee TB cases in the United States during these four years because Arizona and Virginia do not collect refugee TB data or report it to the CDC, New York City and Washington, D.C. do not report this data to the CDC (and have not commented to Breitbart News whether they collect it), Illinois does not track cases of TB diagnosed in refugees after their initial medical screening in the first year after their arrival, and the state of Washington has not provided refugee TB data to Breitbart News for the years 2012, 2013, and 2014."}
{"text":"Advertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\nLet\u2019s start with the good news. Heinz Hollerweger, head of Audi\u2019s Quattro GmbH, says that expanding sales in the U.S. is vital for improving the division\u2019s performance. \u201cEurope is becoming a less important market, the U.S.A. and China are where we see growth happening,\u201d he told us at the press launch for the new Audi R8. So naturally we asked him about the replacement for the current RS4 (pictured)\u2014specifically its prospects for America. And those prospects look good.\n\nFirstly, as previously reported, Hollerweger confirmed that the new car will switch to six-cylinder power, with a turbocharged unit in place of the outgoing model\u2019s charismatic naturally aspirated V-8. \u201cI think that power has increased more than enough, and of course other performance is improved too,\u201d he said, adding that the upcoming car will have a higher output than the last one\u2019s 420 horsepower.\n\nAlthough he wouldn\u2019t discuss exact timing, he said the RS4 will be launched relatively early in the production cycle of the new A4. We\u2019re presuming that means shortly after the S4, which is due next year and which will stick with a modified version of the current car\u2019s supercharged V-6.\n\nThe more pressing question is whether the new RS4 will make it to the U.S. Hollerweger confirmed that it will launch as an Avant station wagon, saying, \u201cthat is what people expect from the RS4.\u201d Based on past experience, that means Audi America is likely to deny it to us. But there is a glimmer of hope. \u201cThe U.S. is changing, and there is more demand there [for wagons], so maybe that will change,\u201d Hollerweger said.\n\nSo will there be a sedan? Hollerweger suggested not: \u201cwe have to think of where we want to sell cars, and what is expected there. The potential in China and the U.S. for RS models is getting us thinking about body styles that may work there\u2014maybe a hatchback, like the RS7.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\nWith a Sportback four-door version of the current S5 having already been sold in certain markets, that sounds like a pretty broad hint that we\u2019re likely to get an RS5 Sportback rather than an RS4. RS4 Avant or RS5 Sportback, we\u2019ll take Audi\u2019s maximum A4 however we can get it."}
{"text":"Irish musical duo\n\nJohn and Edward Grimes (born 16 October 1991), collectively known as Jedward, are an Irish singing and television presenting duo. They are identical twins and first appeared as John & Edward in the sixth series of The X Factor in 2009, generating a phenomenon of ironic popularity described as \"the Jedward paradox\".[1] They finished sixth[2] and were managed by Louis Walsh, who was their mentor during The X Factor.[3][4]\n\nJedward have released three albums: Planet Jedward, Victory, and Young Love. The first two went double platinum in Ireland.[5][6] They have released nine singles, including \"Under Pressure (Ice Ice Baby)\", a mash-up of \"Under Pressure\" by Queen\/David Bowie and Vanilla Ice's \"Ice Ice Baby\"; \"Lipstick\", with which they represented Ireland at the Eurovision Song Contest 2011; and \"Waterline\", with which they represented Ireland at the Eurovision Song Contest 2012.\n\nJedward are also known for their television work, including presenting children's series Jedward's Big Adventure and OMG! Jedward's Dream Factory, and for participating in Celebrity Big Brother 8 [7] and Celebrity Big Brother 19 of which they were announced runners-up missing out on the winning spot to Coleen Nolan. John and Edward's combined net worth was estimated at \u20ac6m in September 2013, and they have been ranked as the fifth most financially successful former X Factor UK contestants.[8] They also appeared on the fourth series of Celebrity Coach Trip in 2019.\n\nEarly and personal life\n\nIdentical twin brothers John Paul Henry Daniel Richard Grimes and Edward Peter Anthony Kevin Patrick Grimes were born in Dublin. John and Edward's first school was Scoil Bhr\u00edde National School in Rathangan. They then attended King's Hospital School for four years before being moved to the Dublin Institute of Education.\n\nThe twins competed in school talent shows during their school years and were inspired by Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. They were also members of the Lucan Harriers Athletic Club and Dundrum South Dublin athletics club and have competed in several Irish athletic tournaments.[9]\n\nIn addition, they briefly worked as games testers for Xbox 360 format holder Microsoft and support football clubs Newcastle United and Celtic.[10]\n\nCareer\n\n2009\u20132012: The X Factor and Planet Jedward\n\nJedward performing live on the X Factor Tour, in 2010\n\nIn 2008 John and Edward formed a duo and the following year they auditioned in Glasgow as a group for the sixth series of The X Factor, under the name John & Edward.[11][12] Despite being described by judge Simon Cowell as \"not very good and incredibly annoying\", John & Edward were put through to bootcamp, then made it to judges' houses, where Louis Walsh selected them for the live shows.[13] The twins' inclusion in the final 12 was a controversial decision, due to their lack of experience,[14] but Walsh stood by them, saying \"I don't know how people can hate two nice young kids from Ireland. They've been edited really badly and come across as the people everyone loves to hate... but they're just raw, na\u00efve and innocent and they have the potential to be really good.\"[15] John & Edward became known for their unpolished but enthusiastic performances,[16] famously including a version of Britney Spears' \"Oops!... I Did It Again\", during which they reenacted the Titanic monologue.[17] After their departure from The X Factor, Jedward were signed to Modest! Management, however it was later announced that Louis Walsh had reached \"an amicable agreement\", which allowed him to take the twins on.[18]\n\nFrom February until April 2010, they performed on the X Factor Live tour, where they were credited with the boost in demand for tickets, that led to an extension in the tour run.[19] Their debut single \"Under Pressure (Ice Ice Baby)\" was a mashup of \"Under Pressure\" and \"Ice Ice Baby\", with Vanilla Ice contributing guest vocals. In March Jedward's Sony contract ended, but the following day Universal Music Ireland signed them on a three-album contract.[20] In April 2010, Jedward began their first solo tour, a 27-date tour of Ireland called the Planet Jedward Tour. Due to popular demand, it was extended with a second 43-date leg in the UK and Ireland. The Irish Independent rated the tour positively, saying that \"Jedwardmania is right up there with Beatlemania.\"[21] Jedward's second single, a cover of the Blink-182 song \"All the Small Things\", was released in July 2010 and peaked at number 21 on the Irish charts and number 6 on the UK Indie Chart. The same week, Jedward released their debut album Planet Jedward, consisting of cover versions. It which went straight to number one on the Irish Albums Chart and number 17 on the UK Albums Chart.[22][23] In August 2010, Jedward appeared in their own ITV2 documentary, entitled Jedward: Let Loose, a three-part series in which they moved out of their home for ten days.[24]\n\n2011\u20132012: Victory\n\nJedward performing live on the X Factor Tour, in 2010\n\nOn 12 February 2011, Jedward released their third single and Eurovision Song Contest entry \"Lipstick\", which peaked at number one in Ireland. Jedward successfully qualified from the second Eurovision Song Contest semi-final, eventually finishing in eighth place. After the Eurovision Song Contest, \"Lipstick\" was released digitally across Europe, where it charted in many countries such as Belgium, Sweden, Germany and most notably Austria where it peaked at number three. The song also peaked at number 8 in the South Korea's international artists' chart.[25] \"Lipstick\" had featured in a Hyundai advertising campaign in South East Asia.[26] Shortly after the Eurovision Song Contest, on 23 May, Jedward performed in front of an audience of 60,000 people at College Green in Dublin City ahead of a speech by visiting U.S. President Barack Obama.[27] In April 2011, Jedward began their second tour, the Bad Behaviour Tour, with a series of dates across Ireland.[28]\n\nJedward's next single \"Bad Behaviour\" was released in July and reached number one in the Irish charts.[29] This was followed two weeks later by their second album Victory, consisting entirely of original tracks. A new version of Planet Jedward was released by the German branch of Universal Music in July, featuring a mix of tracks from Planet Jedward and new songs from Victory.[30] On 31 July, the twins began the first leg of their third tour, The Carnival Tour, with 12 shows across Ireland and Northern Ireland.[31] In September Jedward played their first European tour, with dates in Sweden and Germany,[32] followed by a UK tour.[33] Three days after the first leg finished, Jedward entered the Celebrity Big Brother 8 house. They made it to the final, eventually finishing in third place. The third single from Victory, \"Wow Oh Wow\" was released in August 2011, with a music video featuring their Celebrity Big Brother housemate Tara Reid. In December, Jedward starred in the pantomime Jedward and the Beanstalk, a musical comedy version of the fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk.\n\n2012\u20132013: Young Love\n\nJedward performing at Eurovision Song Contest, in 2011\n\nIn 2012 saw Jedward again win the Irish national selection for the Eurovision Song Contest, this time with their song \"Waterline\". In May, Jedward performed \"Waterline\" at the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan. After qualifying from their semi-final, they eventually came in 19th place in the grand final.[34] \"Waterline\" was also the lead single on the twins' third album Young Love, released in June. The tracks \"Young Love\" and \"Luminous\" were also released as singles. Jedward released the charity single and \"unofficial\" Irish UEFA Euro 2012 song \"Put the Green Cape On\", a reworking of \"Lipstick\".[35] The duo embarked on the European leg of their Victory Tour in January, playing in Austria, Germany, Sweden, Finland and Estonia. This was followed by the Young Love Tour in Ireland in August.[36][37] They also visited Singapore, where the new album had enjoyed popular success.[38]\n\nIn June they ran as part of the 2012 Summer Olympics torch relay in Dublin on day 19 of the relay.[39][40] The twins starred in their own TV series Jedward's Weird Wild World on UK TV channel 5*, with John and Edward humorously presenting a selection of popular internet videos.[41] Over the Christmas and New Year period RT\u00c9 broadcast the second series of their show OMG! Jedward's Dream Factory,[42] and the second season of their BBC series Jedward's Big Adventure screened in early 2013.[43] Over the festive season, Jedward starred in their third annual pantomime, Jedward & the Magic Lamp.[44] In January 2013, the twins made a promotional visit to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, appearing twice on MuchMusic's New Music Live show[45] and also made an appearance on Canada AM.[46] While in Toronto, Jedward also filmed a promotional video for the Young Love album track \"Happens in the Dark\" and previewed a clip from the video on New Music Live.[47] Later in the month, it was announced that Jedward's three-album contract with Universal Music Ireland would not be renewed.[48]\n\nThe music video for \"Happens in the Dark\" was premiered on Much Music in March, with the video having been shot in Toronto earlier in the year.[49] In April the twins filmed a video for the song \"What's Your Number?\" in New York City.[50] Later in the month they made a promotional visit to Australia, including radio and television appearances.[51] In June, Jedward joined the line-up of A Night for Christy, a gala concert in aid of Aslan frontman Christy Dignam. The twins performed Aslan's song \"She's So Beautiful\" with the band.[52] In July the twins performed live shows in Cork and Limerick, with a UK live tour scheduled for September.[53][54] In November the twins toured Australia, with performances in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. While in Australia they also released the music video for Young Love album track \"Can't Forget You\".[55]\n\n2014\u2013present: Fourth studio album\n\nIn January 2014, the third series of their CBBC television programme Jedward's Big Adventure was broadcast. Due to its popularity, the series run was doubled to 10 episodes.[56] They also provided weekly style commentary of the contestants in Sweden's Melodifestivalen competition and made a guest performance at the Melodifestivalen Second Chance show in early March.[57] In April 2014, Jedward debuted their new single \"Free Spirit\" on Australian radio station KIIS 106.5. This was followed by news of the duo's fourth studio album to be released later in the year. The album will contain songs written and produced by Jedward.[58] The duo's follow-up single \"Ferocious\" was released in November 2014, charting at No.15 on the Irish singles chart.[59] In November 2014 it was announced that John and Edward would be joining the cast of ITV's new circus reality show Get Your Act Together in 2015.[60]\n\nBetween 2014 and 2016, they released several new self-penned singles and directed the accompanying music videos. The twins appeared on The Ray D'arcy Show in February 2017 and confirmed that they are working on their fourth studio album, which is due for release in the near future[when?].\n\nPhilanthropy\n\nJedward are involved with many charity projects, and were one of the highest rated charity ambassadors in Ireland for 2011.[61] Jedward are ambassadors for the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC) and have fronted an ISPCC poster campaign.[62] The proceeds of their Euro 2012 charity single \"Put The Green Cape On\" also went to the ISPCC. From 2010 to 2013 Jedward performed annually at the ChildLine Concert, which benefits the ISPCC's ChildLine service.[63][64] Also in Ireland, Jedward have been involved with the ISPCA's My Dog Ate It campaign,[65] and promote the Concern Worldwide Fast fundraiser.[66] Jedward have also been involved with Comic Relief,[67] Sport Relief[68] and Children in Need,[69] in the UK, as well as giving their time to visit children in hospitals.[70]\n\nOther ventures\n\nAdvertising\n\nJedward have been involved with many advertising campaigns in the UK and Ireland. In 2009, agreed to be the subject of a Tourism Ireland radio campaign, which made a tongue-in-cheek apology to the UK for Jedward's antics on The X Factor.[71] In 2010, Jedward fronted an advertising campaign for Irish fast food chain Abrakebabra.[72] Jedward have also fronted advertising campaigns for East Midlands Trains,[73] Rowntree's Randoms,[74] Disney Universe[75] and a Travel Supermarket commercial with comedian Omid Djalili. The latter was later banned after the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the advert was misleading.[76] In 2011, they fronted an advertising campaign for mobile network 3 Ireland, including their own Jedward-branded mobile phone.[77]\n\nStage\n\nSince 2010, Jedward have performed in an annual pantomime over the Christmas and New Year period. Based at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, the pantomimes also star Linda Martin. John and Edward play themselves and the shows feature Jedward songs. The twins' first show was Cinderella in 2010, where they played the fairy godbrothers.[78] They returned in 2011 with a sell-out season of Jedward and the Beanstalk,[79] and again in 2012 with Jedward and the Magic Lamp.[80] In 2013 their fourth pantomime was Jedward in Beauty and the Beast.[81]\n\nFashion career\n\nJedward have also been signed to Next Models and appeared in fashion magazines such as i-D, Esquire and Grazia.\n\nImpact\n\nTheir fans include Pixie Lott and Robbie Williams.[82] Taoiseach Brian Cowen also backed the singers,[83] while Leona Lewis said that she worried about them.[84][85] Two leading British political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, each released campaign posters parodying the twins.[86][87] Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown came under fire in November 2009 for describing Jedward as \"not very good\" and later apologised for doing so.[88][89] Following this, Walsh stated \"So Gordon Brown and Simon Cowell both have something in common: neither of them know what the public want.\" Former Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that he enjoyed watching The X Factor and that Jedward were his favourite act. Cameron also bought a T-shirt with their faces on it.[88][90][91][92] The Irish Independent called Jedward \"tone-deaf twins\", even though the pair were voted more popular than The Beatles in a teenage poll. Comedian Oliver Callan has parodied them on his RT\u00c9 2 show Nob Nation.[94] Their 2017 court case[95] was later the subject of a stage musical starring comedians Kevin McGahern and Tony Cantwell.[96]\n\nDiscography\n\nStudio albums\n\nFilmography\n\nAwards and nominations\n\nSee also"}
{"text":"SARASOTA, Fla. - The search for Cuban outfielder Henry Urrutia has come to an end.\n\nUrrutia obtained his work visa and made it out of Haiti. I\u2019m told that he\u2019s in Miami and will take his physical before reporting to the Orioles\u2019 minor league complex at Twin Lakes Park in Sarasota.\n\nExecutive vice president Dan Duquette confirmed tonight that Urrutia had arrived in Florida.\n\n\u201cHe needs to get in shape and we need to see how far along he is,\u201d Duquette said. \u201cHe needs to get the rust off. I\u2019m not sure how much he was able to train in Haiti.\n\nUrrutia, who received a $778,500 bonus from the Orioles over the summer, batted .397\/.461\/.597 with 12 homers, 32 walks and 23 strikeouts in 305 at-bats in his final season in Cuba. He played for Las Tunas in the Cuban League from 2006 to 2010 and batted .350 with 72 doubles, nine triples, 33 home runs, 219 RBIs and 209 runs. He also represented Cuba in the 2010 World Championships.\n\nThe 6-foot-5, 195-pound switch-hitter didn\u2019t play in 2011 due to a suspension after an unsuccessful attempt at defection.\n\nThe Orioles wanted to assign Urrutia to Double-A Bowie over the summer, but he was stuck in Haiti while attempting to obtain his visa.\n\nThe club will decide on an affiliate for Urrutia after he works out in Sarasota.\n\n\u201cLet\u2019s see where he is,\u201d Duquette said.\n\nAt least the Orioles know that he\u2019s in Miami and able to officially join the organization.\n\nHere\u2019s a scouting report on Urrutia from July.\n\nIn other news, Tsuyoshi Wada will throw his third bullpen session from a regular mound on Saturday, according to manager Buck Showalter. Wada threw 25 pitches today and said he continues to feel stronger."}
{"text":"The European election in Greece\n\nBy Christoph Dreier\n\n29 May 2014\n\nThe outcome of the European election in Greece reflects the population\u2019s resolute opposition to the Greek government and the European Union\u2019s austerity drive. Support for the ruling New Democracy (ND) and its social democratic coalition partner PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) fell to an all-time low. For the first time, the United Social Front (SYRIZA EKM) emerged as the strongest contender. Third place was taken by the fascist Golden Dawn.\n\nCompared to the Greek parliamentary election of two years ago, the two governing parties lost more than 10 percentage points. The ND garnered only 22.7 percent of the vote (compared to 29.7 percent two years ago). Although PASOK had affiliated with other parties in the Olive Tree coalition, the grouping received only 8.0 percent (as compared to 12.3 percent for PASOK in 2012). Compared to the last European election five years ago, the governing parties lost almost 40 percentage points, losing considerably more than half of their erstwhile voters.\n\nThe SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) breakaway organisation, the Democratic Left (DIMAR), which was part of the coalition government until a year ago, also collapsed. Two years ago, it won 6.3 percent of the vote. In this election, it obtained only 1.2 percent of the votes cast, well below the 3.0 percent parliamentary threshold requirement.\n\nSYRIZA is now the strongest party electorally. It was able to match its result in the previous national election with only slight losses (26.6 percent compared to 26.7 percent). However, its success in concurrent local elections was more limited. SYRIZA was the winner on the Ionian Islands and in the region of Attica, where more than a third of the Greek population lives. Contenders from the ruling parties were able to prevail in seven regions, but four other regions elected independent candidates.\n\nThe fascists of Golden Dawn were able to increase their share of the vote in the European election as compared to the Greek parliamentary election two years ago from 6.9 percent to 9.4 percent. They are now the third strongest party.\n\nGolden Dawn, which has carried out repeated attacks on political opponents, immigrants and homosexuals, has been promoted by the state apparatus and is closely connected with the ruling ND. Election analyses revealed that over 50 percent of the police voted for Golden Dawn.\n\nFor the first time, the new liberal Potami (the River) group gained 6.6 percent of the vote and will send two deputies to Brussels. The arch-Stalinist Communist Party (KKE) received 6.1 percent, slightly improving its result from the last parliamentary election (4.5 percent). The right-wing populists of the Independent Greeks (ANEL) dropped from 7.5 percent to 3.5 percent.\n\nThe election result places the coalition government under heavy pressure. Over the last two years, the coalition\u2019s once comfortable majority has declined by some 27 deputies. Currently, it is based on only 152 of the 300 deputies. If the European election results were repeated in a national parliamentary election, the ruling coalition parties would lose 94 seats.\n\nDespite the disastrous result for the ruling coalition, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras ruled out any prospect of early elections. \u201cThose who tried to turn the EU into a plebiscite election failed,\u201d Samaras said in a brief televised address. \u201cThey failed to create conditions of instability, uncertainty and political ungovernability.\u201d\n\nThe premier said he knew what he had to do. \u201cWe will proceed as quickly as possible,\u201d he said, without being more specific. According to press reports, Samaras is planning a radical reshuffle of his government. On Thursday, he will meet with President Karolos Papoulias to discuss the future course. This will be followed by planned coalition talks.\n\nAt noon on Monday, SYRIZA Chairman Alexis Tsipras met with the president, who has a purely symbolic role in Greece. Afterwards, Tsipras said: \u201cWe should move to national elections as soon as possible in an organised and calm manner to restore democratic normality.\u201d He added that Samaras had lost moral legitimacy to lead new negotiations with the European Union and impose new austerity measures.\n\nThe election result signifies a clear rejection of the policy of the Greek government, which has been imposing Brussels\u2019 austerity dictates on the population for the past two years. During this period, wages have fallen by up to 60 percent, general taxation has increased, and unemployment has risen to over 27 percent. The health and education systems are on the brink of collapse. Approximately 40 percent of workers are already excluded from health care because they are unable to afford treatment.\n\nWorkers are overwhelmingly opposed to this policy. Since 2010, some 6,300 demonstrations and protests have been held in Athens alone. That amounts to 14 per day. It includes as many as 36 general strikes, which have sometimes been attended by hundreds of thousands of workers. On Tuesday, May 20, teachers demonstrated outside the Ministry of Education against the government\u2019s plans to cut jobs and merge or close more schools.\n\nThis popular opposition is expressed in the election results for the ruling parties, which in recent weeks have once again been openly supported by the German government and EU officials. In light of the turnout of around 60 percent, only about a fifth of the electorate actually voted for one of the governing parties.\n\nSamaras\u2019s intention to continue the government\u2019s policy unchanged is a clear warning to the working class. In the last elections, only the undemocratic electoral system enabled the coalition to maintain its majority. Since then, the coalition has systematically curtailed workers\u2019 democratic rights. Striking workers have been placed under martial law, demonstrations have been outlawed and fascist gangs encouraged. The social attacks that have been launched in Greece cannot be imposed by democratic means.\n\nThe opposition of the workers, however, finds no expression in the program of the main opposition party, SYRIZA. Although the party uses its election campaigns to pose as an opponent of the austerity policy, it actively supports the EU and its brutal program of social reaction.\n\nOnly two weeks ago, Tsipras declared at a congress of the German Left Party that a SYRIZA government would in principle recognise Greece\u2019s debt and sit down with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to negotiate the terms of new loan agreements.\n\nLast year, Tsipras made several trips to the US and other European countries to meet with representatives of the EU, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and various governments. Each time, he assured his hosts they had nothing to fear from a SYRIZA government. On the contrary, Tsipras claimed, a government under his leadership would bring more stability to the country.\n\nA SYRIZA government would be a thoroughly right-wing regime. It would continue the course of the Samaras government and follow the dictates of Brussels. As is the case in France under the Socialist Party government of Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, the right-wing policies of an ostensibly left-wing government in Greece would strengthen the fascists. SYRIZA has already collaborated with the right-wing populists of ANEL on a number of occasions.\n\nPlease enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus."}
{"text":"Black Friday 2016 For Mobile World\n\nIf it is November, then it is Black Friday. Black Friday is the last Friday in November when you are thinking about those amazing gifts that will bring joy for your dear ones in December. If not, you certainly are in that category of people who makes long, long, long lists since last Black Friday with things you want to buy, waiting for this specific day when they are cheaper. Either way, there are two sure facts: everybody knows what Black Friday is and all customers buy in one day more than they could imagine (or they could use in their entire lifetime) just because of the huge sales. If years ago, people were making long queues early in the morning, in cold, outside the store and they were fighting for products inside, now this battle became online and since last year mobile devices have a bigger impact for this event. If we take a look at some stats published by Techcrunch we realize that 35% of Black Friday purchases in 2015 where made via mobile. Moreover, AppAnnie revealed a study after Black Friday 2015 where it shows a list of retail apps that won last year with this occasion. In 2016, the competition is fierce for mobile shoppers that need to make the best deal using their phones and tablets but for marketers, too because they have to stand out of the crowd to attract customers.\n\nBlack Friday For Mobile Shoppers\n\nIf you want to enjoy more these days and to eliminate the stress of getting the best price for the most incredible products in the shortest amount of time we have some tips to turn all this craziness in a pleasant adventure.\n\nMake your wishlist before the big day. Go to stores and analyze those products to be sure about their quality and their features. Check the store policies and be sure that you can return a product if you don\u2019t like it or it doesn\u2019t fit you. Then wait to attack the sales from the comfort of your home. Focus on mobile apps. A recent study published by Apptentive shows that 88% of consumers use retail mobile apps. This makes sense because apps are more customized and user friendly and they know what you are looking for before you press any button. Trust the evolution of technology and forget about the tiring mornings when you were waiting for stores to open their doors and after that you were struggling to reach other promotions. That\u2019s history. Show your fidelity for some brands. Many companies offer special promotions for loyal customers who use frequently their app. Opt for receiving push notifications and wait for those messages that will announce top sales for your favorite products. If you still like to go to some specific stores for Black Friday choose those apps that can help you find the best route to get there or other apps that allow you to compare very fast, prices and characteristics of products. Test them before to be sure that they do what you want. Be careful for the shipping fee. There are a lot of retailers that offer free shipping. These benefits make you save time and money, which is the main target of using your mobile devices for Black Friday.\n\nBlack Friday For Mobile Marketing\n\nIn order to avoid the chaos in that short period of time and to handle better the entire process, follow our best practices to reach as many customers as possible.\n\nUpdate your application. Prepare your app for this \u201choliday\u201d and offer your users an unforgettable experience. Let images and layouts to tell the story of this event and don\u2019t forget that your app should fit perfectly for all types of devices. Don\u2019t wait for the big day to arrive. Start now to change your app\u2019s interface as a promise of professionalism to your users and allow them to imagine what will happen for Black Friday. Keep in mind that mobile purchases are expected to hit 20 billion in the next period, as Apptentive NO errors. It is great to change colors and images for this period but, this effort means nothing if your app will crush in that specific day. The time is limited and it is unacceptable to let users struggle to make their purchases or to view your offers. Should I say more? Test your app 100 times if need it to be sure that everything will go as planned. Implement easy payment methods. All what users want in that day is to complete as fast as possible a transaction and to move on to the next one. If they need to remember their card number and all the personal information they will abandon the shopping cart in an instance. Allow people to use any fast payment services like Apple Pay or Android Pay and everything will go faster. Messaging is the key. Use in \u2013 app messages and push notifications to announce your users about the improvements you made to your app and about the promotions for this occasion. It\u2019s useless to make the best offers if nobody knows about them. Use deep linking. If you spread the word about the huge advantage of using your app during Black Friday, be sure that users won\u2019t get lost inside your app in that rush and allow them to land on the same page where they can find the promotion they are looking for. Take advantages of mobile moments. This is the perfect period of the year not only for increasing your revenue, but for user acquisition and especially for user retention. Focus on attracting your customers offering an amazing experience overall and they will come back to your app after the Black Friday, too.\n\nFinal Thoughts\n\nOver the last few years retailers began to start Black Friday earlier. So, it is almost Black Week than Black Friday. In case you are a shopper that dreams to buy whatever he wants with no restrictions be careful not to lose time with useless actions and prepare your techniques starting now. If you are a retailer this is the biggest reason to prepare your promotions and your app to achieve the success you are dreaming for. It is all about the strategy to turn this madness in an organized opportunity in terms of earnings."}
{"text":"Bakaki tskalshi kikinebs \u2013 ring any bells?\n\nWhen I think back to my first days in Georgia, as a foreigner and not having much of an idea about the culture, identity or indeed, language of the former soviet republic, it makes me smile. Not simply because they are fond memories, but because the identity of that person eludes me. I don\u2019t really recognise her anymore. This, if memory serves, was back in 2014. Personal ties took me, quite happily so, to the country. I remember it vividly. I instantly fell in love with Tbilisi, coming from London, I had never seen such contrast before. Yet, one prominent memory will always stay with me. Looking out of the window of a cab from Tbilisi airport to Didube, with a jaw-dropping type expression on my face, trying to avidly comprehend how people could actually understand the Georgian alphabet, and pronounce letters that, to my naive ears, sounded incomprehensible. I\u2019m not going to bore you with anything other than my quest to learn the language, for fear of rambling on. Suffice to say, my initial trip took me to three Georgian cities, all in stark contrast to the other. Tbilisi, Batumi and, rather significantly, Zugdidi. I had already brushed up on my Russian before arriving, as I knew that English, at least outside of the capital, was not widely spoken.\n\nSitting around the table in the Kakhati region of Zugdidi, at a Supra my hosts had put on in honor of my arrival, I vividly remember a dear, dear lady, whom will always stay in my heart, slowly going through the Georgian alphabet and asking me to repeat. Wait right there; let me paint you a little picture, this very evening was the first time I\u2019d ever \u2018tasted\u2019 Chacha. I was already two shots down. Megrelian Chacha is stronger than any other, and at this early stage and in my slightly intoxicated state, I pathetically thought I could repeat back what was being said to me. Wrong. My vain efforts were met with uncontrollable laughter. Three letters in particular. If you are not Georgian, and have had some time in this country, no doubt you\u2019ll know what these three letters are.\n\n\u10e7 \u2013 Well blow me down, this ain\u2019t a letter, it\u2019s a trick of the tongue, no?! No. It is a letter, and one I thought I would never be able to master\n\n\u10d9\u2013 Ok, so a hard \u2018K\u2019 right? So why am I being told that I\u2019m pronouncing it incorrectly? It\u2019s what I like to call \u2018the click\u2019 \u2013 The word Yes (in Georgian: \u10d9\u10d8) is a prime example of this, and where \u2018the click\u2019 is best displayed.\n\n\u10ec\u2013 A jumple of letters all rolled into one! \u2018Tz\u2019 was a real enemy of mine in the beginning.\n\nSo I suppose back then, looking back, I admitted defeat. I gave up trying and stuck to Russian. Then something weird happened..\n\nMy life then took me back to London for a while, but I would come back to Georgia every couple of months and drive by the same places. So, to my actual point, what was the triggering factor in my learning of the language? The word \u2018Lombardi\u2019. I kid you not. There in an area stretching from the church on Rustaveli, up until the beginning of Vake on Chavchavadze, that has Lombardi\u2019s (Bureau de change) a plenty. So those were my first letters, simply because they were blasted everywhere and I knew what it said. Having 8 letters under my belt, I thought I\u2019d test the waters and see if I could go any further. I went to Biblus books and bought a children\u2019s book on the Georgian alphabet. A\u2026.B\u2026..G\u2026.three more. Maybe this seemingly impossible language was possible after all, just maybe?\n\nMy linguistic skills improved slowly over the next year, with frequent visits to Georgia, me listening to Georgian radio and news in my office in London, and a year to the day that I first visited Georgia, I decided to move there. I got a job as a Medical Director and my daily sentence structure mostly consisted of an English base, with some Russian words thrown in and ending it with \u2018Aba ra\u2019 \u2013 I didn\u2019t really know what I was saying, but knew I could finish off a sentence this way without sounding too conspicuous. I recently had a conversation with my friend about the meaning of the word \u2018Aba\u2019, and how it can be translated into English. To this day, I cannot find one single word to define its numerous connotations in Georgian.\n\nI owe a lot to my job there, and to the people I had around me. I truly believe that if they had have spoken more English, my level of Georgian would not be where it\u2019s at today. As the days, weeks and months rolled by, I found myself conversing more and more in Georgian; sometimes without even realizing it. I am frequently asked by Georgians and foreigners alike, how I learnt the language and more specifically, how I learnt to pronounce the letters. The secret? I have no friggin\u2019 clue. All I can say is I immersed myself in Georgian life. Not an ex-pat one. I had one British friend in Tbilisi, that was it. The rest of my beloved friends were Georgian speakers only. So, the only methodology I can come up with to explain my attainment was that firstly, I had no choice, I chose to really listen and mostly importantly, I TRIED. Sure, I failed on many an occasion, but if I hadn\u2019t given it a go, I\u2019d be no nearer to success.\n\nAs I look back on my article here, I realize that, once again, I\u2019ve swayed from point to point. Let me conclude by saying this: I am now somewhere near fluent in Georgian. However, I\u2019m not exceptionally intelligent, don\u2019t have a ridiculously high IQ, nor am I a book worm who studied the language nonstop until perfection, at least in my eyes, was attained. No, I lived it. I breathed it. Most importantly still, I had a true passion for the language, and the country. I still do. I encourage those of you who may have some reservations about giving it a go, to really try. It\u2019s possible. I arrive at Tbilisi airport to the greeting of \u2018\u2019You\u2019re the English girl who speaks Georgian, right?\u2019\u2019 \u2013 enough of an incentive for me.\n\nBy Tamzin Whitewood\n\n30 May 2017 18:58"}
{"text":"Are you familiar with the internet? If so, you're probably familiar with The Oatmeal.\n\nThe Oatmeal is a ridiculously popular online comic that tackles topics from grammar to the mantis shrimp to Nikola Tesla to paradoxical dogs, with smart writing and illustrations that are equal parts sweet, grotesque, and laugh-out-loud funny. The man behind it all is Matthew Inman, a 30-year-old former website designer turned comic artist in Seattle, Washington.\n\nAs it turns out, Matthew is also a runner, which I only recently found out after seeing his six-part comic The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances. Think of it as a graphic, online version of Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, only with fewer words and more Blerch.\n\nShortly after reading that, and re-reading it, I got to thinking, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I could somehow persuade Matthew to do an interview with me for Remy's World? Shortly after that, I thought to myself, Maybe I should try contacting him to see. And shortly after that, I actually followed through.\n\nTo my surprise and delight, Matthew responded right away and agreed to answer some questions via email. Our exchange is below.\n\n(I should pause at this point to stress that -- unlike most of the crap I write -- the following interview is an actual, real thing that happened. Not just something I made up. FYI.)\n\nRemy's World: When did you start running?\n\nMatthew Inman: Ten years ago.\n\nWere you athletic at all before you took up running?\n\nNot at all. I hated any kind of exercise, especially running.\n\nDo you remember the first moment you felt \u201clike a runner\u201d?\n\nRunning used to feel like a chore. The day I truly became a runner was the day that I realized that being sedentary now felt like a chore. Running makes me feel relaxed, healthy, and great. Not running makes me feel like a bloated pile of uninspired, forgettable crap. Being a bloated pile of forgettable crap is more of a chore for me now than just putting my running shoes on and sweating for 20 minutes.\n\nWhat was the last race you did, and how'd it go?\n\nI ran the White River 50-mile ultra at the end of July, and then a week later ran the Grande Ridge 13.1. The ultra didn't go so well. I'd done it two years before and flew through the course, loving every minute of it. (Almost every minute, anyway. I'm not sure love adequately describes how I felt at mile 47). This year when I ran it I got really sick at mile 17: nausea, dry-heaving, and stomach spasms. I managed to lumber my way to mile 50, but I was an hour slower than my previous time. A week later I ran the Grande Ridge half marathon trail run. It had some respectable elevation gains, but the race went really well. After running WR50 I wanted to do a quick race that I could just sail through and enjoy, without all the relentless 11 hours of agony that comes with running an ultra.\n\nWhat's next, racewise?\n\nThe Seattle Marathon. I'm running it mostly because I want to see all my fellow Seattleites wearing \"I believe in The Blerch\" shirts.\n\nWhat, if anything, does your job have in common with running?\n\nBoth produce an endless supply of poop jokes.\n\nHas running affected your work in any unexpected ways?\n\nThe majority of my comics are written in my head while I run. I find when brainstorming ideas, if I focus really hard trying to come up with something I wind up empty-handed. If I focus on something else, however, such as running, showering, or even having a conversation, I find that those ideas will spring up. The tough part is getting them down on paper before they disappear back into the ether of my brain.\n\nA few surprisingly heavy themes pop up fairly often in your comics: life, death, loss, the nature of existence\u2026 Are these things you think of while you run? Or is running an escape from such thoughts?\n\nWe've all got loudspeakers in our heads that are constantly shouting fears, worries, and doubts at us. Running, at least for me, turns the volume on that loudspeaker way down. It's my way of saying \"Hey brain, shut the f**k up for a half-hour. I'm taking a little vacation from you.\" It makes terrible thoughts seem trivial, albeit temporarily. I don't know if it's just the endorphins doing the work on that one, but if so it's a drug-addiction I fully endorse.\n\nWhat are your lifetime running goals? (I refuse to use the phrase \u201cbucket list.\u201d)\n\nA [Boston qualifier], maybe, although probably not realistic -- I can't run very fast. I'm more of a slow and steady kind of guy, so I think running Western States would be a more realistic goal. Plus I really want one of those belt buckles.\n\nHow do you measure success as a runner?\n\nHave you ever tried to chase a deer? They are REALLY hard to catch. I've never seen a wild animal in the forest that I didn't chase. I think success as a runner means eventually overtaking a deer and tackling it. I would even settle for a caribou, or even something fatter and slower like a mountain goat, but ideally it would be a deer. Aristotle once said that the true measure of the human spirit is the ability to outrun and pile-drive a wild animal. I subscribe to that philosophy completely.\n\nYou seem to be a bit of a contrarian when it comes to things like nutrition. Yes?\n\nYeah, I run well and eat badly.\n\nExplain your philosophy on diet and nutrition, assuming you have one (and maybe you don\u2019t)?\n\nMy eating habits are that of a circus animal. Every time I do a trick, I get a reward. Ran 20 miles? Heck yes it's time for meatloaf and gummy bears. The best advice I can give other runners is to not eat like I do.\n\nAre you a \u201cfollow a training plan to a T\u201d sort of runner? Or a \u201cmake it up as you go along\u201d sort?\n\nI just make it up as I go along, mostly. I know the importance of having a training plan but I just tend to do my own thing.\n\nDo you run alone, mostly, or with a club or group?\n\nA few years ago I ran with a group, which I really enjoyed. We'd meet at various trails all over Washington state and I'd get paired up with various runners. Nowadays I run by myself most of the time. Running is kind of a private matter for me. I'm not one of those people that slathers their Facebook wall in posts every time they go outside and exercise.\n\nHow often do you get recognized while running or racing?\n\nI don't typically post photos of myself on my website so very few people know what I look like, but in Seattle it's becoming a bit more common for people to stop me and ask if I'm The Oatmeal. When people meet me in person they always say the same thing: \"I thought you'd be fatter! :(\" [ED: See above for a photo of Matthew racing.]\n\nIf you could guest-edit an issue of Runner\u2019s World, what would you add or change?\n\nI'd write a six-page piece on how to effectively chase, catch, and tackle a deer. Deer-tackling is the new 5K.\n\nWhat\u2019s the coolest place you\u2019ve ever run?\n\nThe Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. Imagine a forest with trees that are hundreds of feet tall laced with vines, rolling fog, and crazy amounts of jungle critters -- it looked like a scene from Avatar. Our hotel was near the park entrance so we snuck in at night and went for a short run. Overhead was an ocean of falling stars, and below us was a glittering sea of lightning bugs. Eventually the park rangers chased us out on motorcycles for being in there after-hours, so technically it was a night run lit by stars and lightning bugs, followed by a dramatic car chase.\n\nIf you could deliver one message to every runner reading this \u2013 and you can! \u2013 what would it be?\n\nWhen stopped at an intersection, don't jog in place. You look like an idiot. [ED: As readers of The Runner's Rule Book know, I agree.]\n\nHave you ever pooped yourself while running? Be honest.\n\nLike, in my pants? No. Although I did get the runs pretty bad while out on an 18-mile trail run by myself. I wound up crapping all over the place and using my 2009 Seattle Marathon shirt as toilet paper. It was one of my favorite running shirts so I had this idea in my head that I could just wash it in a stream and then properly wash it when I got home. I eventually defiled the shirt enough times that I wound up throwing it into the woods. As far as I know that shirt is still out there on a mountain somewhere, along with my dignity.\n\nLightning round! Beer or wine?\n\nWine.\n\nRunning with music: Yes or no?\n\nNo. Don't try to drown out the agony of running with music and other distractions.\n\nHills or heat?\n\nHills hills hills. I'm from the Pacific Northwest so heat is like my Kryptonite.\n\nEnergy gel or banana?\n\nBanana.\n\nRoad or trail?\n\nTrail.\n\nMeb or Ryan?\n\nI don't know what that question means, so I'll just reply and say that I really enjoyed all of Meg Ryan's films.\n\nShort-shorts or regular shorts?\n\nShort-shorts. They look horrible on 99.9% of people, but running isn't about looking good.\n\nNYC Marathon or Boston Marathon?\n\nI want to run both of them while wearing Heelys.\n\nFill in the blank: Barefoot running is _________.\n\n...a good way to DNF. If we were supposed to run barefoot we'd have evolved hooves by now.\n\nMy favorite thing on the internet (besides RunnersWorld.com) is _________.\n\nZombo.com\n\nIf you're one of the 18 people in the world who aren't familiar with Matthew's work, check it out at TheOatmeal.com."}
{"text":"American manufacturer of glass & ceramics\n\nNot to be confused with Owens Corning\n\nCorning Incorporated is an American multinational technology company that specializes in specialty glass, ceramics, and related materials and technologies including advanced optics, primarily for industrial and scientific applications. The company was named Corning Glass Works until 1989.[3] Corning divested its consumer product lines (including CorningWare and Visions Pyroceram-based cookware, Corelle Vitrelle tableware, and Pyrex glass bakeware) in 1998 by selling the Corning Consumer Products Company subsidiary (now known as Corelle Brands) to Borden, but still holds an interest of about 8 percent.\n\nAs of 2014 , Corning had five major business sectors: display technologies, environmental technologies, life sciences, optical communications, and specialty materials. Corning is involved in two joint ventures: Dow Corning and Pittsburgh Corning. Quest Diagnostics and Covance were spun off from Corning in 1996.[4] Corning is one of the main suppliers to Apple Inc. since working with Steve Jobs in 2007 to develop the iPhone;[5] Corning develops and manufactures Gorilla Glass, which is used by a large number of smartphone makers. It is one of the world\u2019s biggest glassmakers.[6] Corning won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation four times for its product and process innovations.[7][8][9][10]\n\nHistory [ edit ]\n\nCorning Glass Works was founded in 1851 by Amory Houghton, in Somerville, Massachusetts, originally as the Bay State Glass Co. It later moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, and operated as the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works. The company moved again to its ultimate home and namesake, the city of Corning, New York, in 1868 under leadership of the founder's son, Amory Houghton, Jr.\n\nOver 147 years later, Corning continues to maintain its world headquarters at Corning, N.Y. The firm also established one of the first industrial research labs there in 1908. It continues to expand the nearby research and development facility, as well as operations associated with catalytic converters and diesel engine filter product lines. Corning has a long history of community development and has assured community leaders that it intends to remain headquartered in its small upstate New York hometown.[11]\n\nThe California Institute of Technology's 200-inch (5.1 m) telescope mirror at Palomar Observatory was cast by Corning during 1934\u20131936 out of low expansion borosilicate glass.[12] In 1932, George Ellery Hale approached Corning with the challenge of fabricating the required optic for his Palomar project. A previous effort to fabricate the optic from fused quartz had failed. Corning's first attempt was a failure, the cast blank having voids. Using lessons learned, Corning was successful in the casting of the second blank. After a year of cooling, during which it was almost lost to a flood, in 1935 the blank was completed. The first blank now resides in Corning's Museum of Glass.\n\nIn 1935, Corning formed a partnership with bottle maker Owens-Illinois, which formed the company known today as Owens Corning. Owens Corning was spun off as a separate company in 1938.\n\n1917 advertisement for the Corning Conaphore headlamp lens shown above.\n\nThe company had a history of science-based innovations following World War II and the strategy by management was research and \"disruptive\" and \"on demand\" product innovation.[13]\n\nIn 1962 Corning developed Chemcor, a new toughened automobile windshield designed to be thinner and lighter than existing windshields, which reduced danger of personal injury by shattering into small granules when smashed.[14] This toughened glass had a chemically hardened outer layer, and its manufacture incorporated an ion exchange and a \"fusion process\" in special furnaces that Corning built in its Blacksburg, Virginia facility.[13][15] Corning developed it as an alternative to laminated windshields with the intention of becoming an automotive industry supplier.[13] After being installed as side glass in a limited run of 1968 Plymouth Barracudas and Dodge Darts, Chemcor windshields debuted on the 1970 model year Javelins and AMXs built by American Motors Corporation (AMC).[15] As there were no mandatory safety standards for motor vehicle windshields, the larger automakers had no financial incentive to change from the cheaper existing products.[13][15] Corning terminated its windshield project in 1971, after it turned out to be one of the company's \"biggest and most expensive failures.\"[15] However, like many Corning innovations, the unique process to manufacture this automotive glass was resurrected and is today the basis of their very profitable LCD glass business.\n\nIn the fall of 1970, the company announced that researchers Robert D. Maurer, Donald Keck, Peter C. Schultz, and Frank Zimar had demonstrated an optical fiber with a low optical attenuation of 17 dB per kilometer by doping silica glass with titanium.[16] A few years later they produced a fiber with only 4 dB\/km, using germanium oxide as the core dopant. Such low attenuations made fiber optics practical for telecommunications and networking. Corning became the world's leading manufacturer of optical fiber.\n\nIn 1977, considerable attention was given to Corning's Z Glass project. Z Glass was a product used in television picture tubes. Due to a number of factors, the exact nature of which are subject to dispute, this project was considered a steep loss in profit and productivity. The following year the project made a partial recovery. This incident has been cited as a case study by the Harvard School of Business.[17]\n\nCompany profits soared in the late 1990s during the dot-com boom, and Corning expanded its fiber operations significantly with several new plants. The company also entered the photonics market, investing heavily with the intent of becoming the leading provider of complete fiber-optic systems. Failure to succeed in photonics and the collapse in 2000 of the dot-com market had a major impact on the company, and Corning stock plummeted to $1 per share. However, as of 2007 the company had posted five straight years of improving financial performance.\n\nCurrent technologies [ edit ]\n\nThe turning point for Corning came when Apple approached it to develop a robust display screen for its upcoming iPhone. Later, other companies also adopted its Gorilla glass screen. In 2011 Corning announced the expansion of existing facilities and the construction of a Gen 10 facility co-located with the Sharp Corporation manufacturing complex in Sakai, Osaka, Japan.[18] The LCD glass substrate is produced without heavy metals. Corning is a leading manufacturer of the glass used in liquid crystal displays[citation needed].\n\nThe company continues to produce optical fiber and cable for the communications industry at its Wilmington and Concord plants in North Carolina. It is also a major manufacturer of ceramic emission control devices for catalytic converters in cars and light trucks that use gasoline engines. The company is also investing in the production of ceramic emission control products for diesel engines as a result of tighter emission standards for those engines both in the U.S. and abroad.\n\nIn 2007 Corning introduced an optic fiber, ClearCurve, which uses nanostructure technology to facilitate the small radius bending found in FTTX installations.\n\nGorilla Glass, an outgrowth of the 1960s Chemcor project, is a high-strength alkali-aluminosilicate thin sheet glass used as a protective cover glass offering scratch resistance and durability in many touchscreens.[19] According to the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Gorilla Glass was used in the first iPhone released in 2007.[20]\n\nOn October 25, 2011 Corning unveiled Lotus Glass, an environmentally friendly and high-performance glass developed for OLED and LCD displays.[21][22]\n\nCorning invests about 10% of revenue in research and development, and has allocated US$300 million towards further expansion of its Sullivan Park research facility near headquarters in Corning, New York.[23]\n\nCorning Incorporated manufactures a high-purity fused silica employed in microlithography systems, a low expansion glass utilized in the construction of reflective mirror blanks, windows for U.S. space shuttles, and Steuben art glass. The number of Corning facilities employing the traditional tanks of molten glass has declined over the years, but it maintains the capacity to supply bulk or finished glass of many types.\n\nCorning is engaged in research and development on green lasers, mercury abatement, microreactors, photovoltaics, and silicon on glass. Through its Life Sciences division, the company offers products to support life science research, including stem-cell culture products.[24]\n\nOther activities [ edit ]\n\nCorning employs roughly 34,000 people worldwide and had sales of $10.217 billion in 2014.[25] The company has been listed for many years among Fortune magazine's 500 largest companies, and was ranked #297 in 2015.\n\nAlthough the company has long been publicly owned, James R. Houghton, great-great-grandson of the founder, served as chairman of the board of directors from 2001 to 2007. Over the years Houghton family ownership has declined to about 2%. Wendell P. Weeks has been with the company since 1983 and as of March 2013 was chairman, chief executive officer, and president.[26]\n\nOver its 160-year history Corning invented a process for rapid and inexpensive production of light bulbs, including developing the glass for Thomas Edison's light bulb. Corning was the glass supplier for lightbulbs for General Electric after Edison General Electric merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company in 1892.[27] It was an early major manufacturer of glass panels and funnels for television tubes, invented and produced Vycor (high temperature glass with high thermal shock resistance). Corning invented and produced Pyrex, CorningWare Pyroceram glass-ceramic cookware, and Corelle durable glass dinnerware. Corning manufactured the windows for US manned space vehicles, and supplied the glass blank for the primary mirror in the Hubble Space Telescope.\n\nIn July 2008 Corning announced the sale of Steuben Glass Works to Steuben Glass LLC, an affiliate of the private equity firm Schottenstein Stores Corporation. Steuben Glass had been unprofitable for more than a decade, losing 30 million dollars over the previous five years.[28]\n\nIn February 2011, Corning acquired MobileAccess Networks, an Israeli company that develops Distributed antenna systems, which are often used by universities, stadiums and airports to ensure seamless wireless coverage throughout a facility. MobileAccess Networks became part of Corning\u2019s telecommunications business unit.[29] In July 2017, Corning acquired SpiderCloud Wireless.[30]\n\nBoard of directors [ edit ]\n\nAs of 2016 :[31]\n\nDonald W. Blair: retired executive vice president and chief financial officer, NIKE, Inc.\n\nStephanie A. Burns: retired chairman and chief executive officer, Dow Corning Corporation\n\nJohn A. Canning, Jr.: chairman, Madison Dearborn Partners, LLC\n\nRichard T. Clark: retired chairman, president and chief executive officer, Merck & Co., Inc.\n\nRobert F. Cummings, Jr.: retired vice chairman of investment banking, JPMorgan Chase & Co.\n\nDeborah A. Henretta: retired group president of global e-business, Procter & Gamble Company\n\nDaniel P. Huttenlocher: dean and vice provost, Cornell Tech\n\nKurt M. Landgraf: retired president and chief executive officer, Educational Testing Service\n\nKevin Martin: vice president, mobile and global access policy, Facebook, Inc.\n\nDeborah D. Rieman: executive chairman, MetaMarkets Group\n\nHansel E. Tookes II: retired chairman and chief executive officer, Raytheon Aircraft Company\n\nWendell P. Weeks: chairman, chief executive officer, and president, Corning Incorporated\n\nMark S. Wrighton: chancellor and professor of chemistry, Washington University in St. Louis\n\nSee also [ edit ]\n\nReferences [ edit ]\n\nFurther reading [ edit ]\n\nMedia related to Corning Inc. at Wikimedia Commons"}
{"text":"Why cook and clean when you can have a sexy maid come in and do it for you. While the concept isn't new, a Dallas company now offers a sexy, discreet and professional housekeeping service that can include nude and topless maids.\n\nI'm sure all the guys reading this are rejoicing internally.\n\nTexas Maidens is the name of the place that boasts employing the most desirable women in Texas as their sexy maids.\n\nBefore you go thinking you'll score with one of these 'sexy maidens', their website states these ladies are not escorts and do not provide illegal services. Regardless, I'm sure there are a lot of guys out there that wouldn't mind watching the game while a topless gal roams the house tidying things up. The prices aren't too bad either, ranging from $100-160 per hour.\n\nBetter yet, these gals also clean offices. So, next time the boss starts complaining that your current cleaning service isn't doing a good job, just offer up Texas Maidens as an alternative.\n\nWater cooler talk will never be the same, that's for damn sure.\n\nSpeaking of housekeeping, this is one of the greatest movie scenes ever."}
{"text":"With a headline like \u201cHillary Clinton uses obscenity on TV describing reaction to Trump\u2019s inaugural speech,\u201d you could be excused for thinking she went on an expletive laden rant. But Fox News\u2019 headline is exactly what\u2019s wrong with the right wing outrage machine.\n\nAppearing on the British late night talk show, The Graham Norton Show, Clinton and the out gay host, started chatting about the Trump inauguration and her attempt to get out of attending. (Because, seriously, would you want to go? You didn\u2019t even run against him and the ceremony probably turned your stomach.)\n\nClinton recounts that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, thought they might have found a way out, but it depended on what the other former presidents would do.\n\n\u201cWe thought, okay maybe others aren\u2019t going, so we called the Bushes, and the elder Bushes were in the hospital, which I think was legitimate,\u201d she said as the audience laughed. \u201cSo then we called the younger Bushes and they said \u2018yeah we\u2019re going\u2019.\u201d\n\nWhen the Carters told them they would also attend, the Clintons knew they were stuck. But when she talked about Trump\u2019s inauguration speech, she told a quick anecdote that has the right wing in an uproar.\n\n\u201cI was sitting next to George W. Bush and Bill was on my other side and we were listening to this really dark, divisive speech that I describe as a \u2018cry from the white nationalist gut. I was so disappointed. Really so, so sad that it wasn\u2019t an outreach; it was a narrowing and a hammering of what he had said before,\u201d she told Norton.\n\n\u201cIt was reported that George W. Bush, as it ends, said, \u2018That was some weird shit\u2019,\u201d she said as the audience roared.\n\nAnd it was,\u201d Norton replied.\n\nDespite the headline, the actual Fox News article devotes about half of one sentence and the quote from Bush to justify the hand wringing. The rest of the piece is about her thoughts on Trump\u2019s tweets and her attempt to avoid the inauguration.\n\nThis Story Filed Under"}
{"text":"Former Trooper Scott Kunstmann was accused of perjury and falsifying arrest reports.\n\nProsecutors have offered the former Florida Highway Patrol trooper accused of perjury and falsifying reports a no-jail plea deal.\n\nFormer trooper Scott Kunstmann was suspended, investigated and later fired and charged with falsifying documents and perjury \u2014 both felonies \u2014 after a Herald-Tribune investigation revealed that what transpired on his DUI stops did not match what he wrote in his official reports.\n\nProsecutors offered Kunstmann a plea deal consisting of two years of probation and two years of counseling, according to Dr. Robert G. Culbertson, a retired criminology and sociology professor from Fort Myers who Kunstmann arrested for DUI in November 2011, while the 72-year-old retiree was southbound on I-75.\n\nCulbertson is livid that the former trooper will likely not be going to jail.\n\n\"I think it's horrible a state trooper can go out and arrest someone, put them in jail, tell a pack of lies and then walk away,\" Culbertson said Friday. \"This guy should never have been on the road.\"\n\nNeither Kunstmann nor his attorney Nevin Weiner returned calls seeking comment for this story.\n\nCulbertson said he learned of the possible deal Thursday evening, after the prosecutor assigned to the case, Assistant State Attorney Shanna Hourihan, told him a deal had been offered.\n\nHourihan said the former trooper's lack of criminal history played a role in the decision.\n\n\"I cannot tell you the specifics of the actual plea offer, as this is a pending case, but we believe an appropriate plea was offered based on the defendant's lack of criminal history, the facts of the case and substantive mitigation by the defense,\" Hourihan said.\n\nKunstmann's conduct first drew scrutiny last year, when Culbertson noticed that what he read in the trooper's arrest report and heard when the trooper testified under oath in a deposition did not match his recollections of events.\n\nIt also did not match the events recorded on the trooper's own dash-mounted video camera.\n\nCulbertson retained Sarasota attorney Andrea Mogensen, who has said the trooper was not truthful in either his arrest report or during a deposition she conducted.\n\nThe State Attorney's Office threw out Culbertson's case last year, just as jury selection was set to begin.\n\nKunstmann, 47, had been a trooper since 2007."}
{"text":"EDMONTON - Love them or hate them, more traffic circles are coming to city streets.\n\nTraffic planners have concept designs finalized for a \u201cturbo roundabout,\u201d a new design first used in The Netherlands that forces drivers in the outside lane to exit at the first or second opportunity rather than endlessly circling, changing lanes and causing fender-benders.\n\n\u201cA lot of our traffic circles are set up so you could go around four or five times,\u201d said Rob Gibbard, director of transportation planning. The turbo roundabout still needs community consultation and funding, but traffic engineers are hoping to try it out at 118th Avenue and 101st Street.\n\nIn Europe, engineers use concrete curbs to keep traffic in the right lane and out the right exit, Edmonton hopes textured surfaces will accomplish the same thing without impeding snow removal.\n\nEdmonton was the traffic circle capital of Canada in the 1950s, then moved away from the design and even removed several near the University of Alberta.\n\nPeople complain other drivers don\u2019t understand the rules. But they prevent high-speed, T-bone collisions and are safer than a signalled intersection.\n\nAt the city\u2019s annual traffic safety conference next week, expect roundabouts to be a topic of conversation. The conference focuses on a new approach called Safe Systems, which aims to re-engineer the road system to prevent major injuries and fatalities.\n\n\u201cWe know a crash will happen despite all of our best efforts,\u201d said Australian Bruce Corben, a consultant making a presentation to the conference Wednesday. \u201cHumans do make intentional and unintentional mistakes. How do we design an intersection so that any crash has a very low chance of a severe outcome?\u201d\n\nIn 2012, Corben was hired to analyze eight poorly performing intersections in Edmonton, Sherwood Park and St. Albert. All have common safety flaws that created the possibility of a T-bone crash when a person turns left or runs a red, which is the most dangerous way for a vehicle to get hit.\n\n\u201cWe believe the use of roundabout is the single most effective tool. But it\u2019s a culture change, getting used to these new tools,\u201d he said.\n\nIn Victoria, Australia, he oversaw the change of more than 100 intersections to roundabouts and studied the effects, he said. \u201cWe find a 80- to 90-per-cent reduction in the most severe injury crashes.\u201d\n\nIn Edmonton, Gibbard\u2019s department approved concept plans for at least two traffic circles on 92nd Avenue between 215th Street and 231st Street. A two-lane roundabout is planned for 112th Street and 167th Avenue, and a single-lane roundabout for 112th Street and 176th Avenue. Other new areas will also be considered. Gibbard said the province now has a policy to consider a roundabout whenever they are thinking of installing signals at a rural intersection.\n\n\u201cAt the right traffic volumes, they work very well,\u201d he said. Edmonton is reconsidering where to place crosswalks around the circles, in some cases moving them further from the entrance\/exit to increase visibility.\n\nestolte@edmontonjournal.com\n\ntwitter.com\/estolte"}
{"text":"Editor's note: Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz are the sarcastic brains behind humor blog and book Stuff Hipsters Hate. When they're not trolling Brooklyn for new material, Ehrlich works as a news editor at Mashable.com and Bartz holds the same position at Psychology Today.\n\n(CNN) -- As anyone passing through a U.S. airport discovered last week, privacy is a precious thing.\n\nAnd while we can't expect it from grope-happy TSA officers, everyone should be able to demand a certain level from family and friends. So let's start with this week's most obvious shining bauble of a takeaway point: Don't snoop.\n\nA few decades ago, snooping had pretty clear-cut definitions: jimmying open the lock on Sally's diary and reading about her awkward fumblings with Billy, listening behind a closed door with a tumbler pressed against the wood, or slicing open a neighbor's mail. (We soon learned this last one is illegal, meaning that 10-year-olds still freeze in abject fear whenever they realize they've accidentally ripped open their sister's card and brace themselves for policemen to swing in through the windows, handcuffs at the ready.)\n\nNowadays, accidental espionage is the norm. You grab your girlfriend's phone to check the time -- and bam, there's a text from her ex-boyfriend. You crack open your daughter's laptop to show her a Flickr album -- kapow, there's her friends-only Blogspot in fully accessible glory. You surf to Gmail the day after your friend used your computer, and hello, friend's inbox.\n\nAnd if you do suspect bad behavior, e-investigation is almost too easy. Like it or not, from time to time your eye will fall on something that's not meant for you, and when that happens you're a big fat privacy invader.\n\nIn fact, a recent British survey found that 14 percent of wives spy on their hubbies' e-mails, 13 percent read his texts and 10 percent check his Web-surfing history. (The same survey found that about half as many men keep up the same spousal spying). An Australian survey found that 73 percent of those who check their partners' texts found out things they later wished they hadn't.\n\nSo hang on, snoopy. You can minimize the damage both to your own conscience and to your relationship by following our three rules of digital snooping. (They're completely made up, but this is a netiquette column so we get to do that -- deal with it.)\n\n1. Don't click on anything.\n\nThe second you make a move to read the rest of the text or scroll to see more of the illicit e-mail, you've gone from the snooping equivalent of manslaughter to murder. No matter how intensely your curiosity was piqued, no matter how tantalizing the first few words are -- it's a dark road and a slippery slope and all sorts of metaphorical directions you'd best avoid.\n\nMake like an uncomfortable traveler watching a fat man entering the full-body scan and avert your eyes.\n\n2. Figure out why you want to snoop.\n\nEveryone's favorite cat-killer (curiosity, that is) is a powerful force, but for most of us it's not potent enough to compromise our personal moral codes. So if you're just dying to check a certain relation's browsing history or e-mails or texts, there are likely some real-life red flags that are bugging you.\n\nIf, pre-snooping, you can't shake the feeling that your beau is still in contact with that ex in Phoenix despite his impassioned assertions that she's out of the picture, or your motherly spider sense is tingling with suspicion that little Suzie is addicted to her classmate's Adderall, your best bet isn't to grab a magnifying glass (or hit ctrl-F) and go all Encyclopedia Brown, it's to man up and ask him or her about it. (Without any mention of his or your digital habits, of course).\n\nHere's the cool part: If you're a trusting person (read: not maniacally exploring his or her smartphone in the dead of night), that doesn't mean you're gullible. In fact, a study from the University of Toronto suggests you'll actually be better at judging whether he's telling the truth when you ask him point blank what's up.\n\n3. Know when to call yourself out.\n\nWhat's making you feel all squirmy? Are you bothered by the fact that you saw something that wasn't meant for you, or by the content of what you saw? If it's the former, hats off to you for having a superhuman guilt reflex; there's no reason to tell your friend you saw that embarrassing follow-up e-mail from her gynecologist, so get over it, even if 'fessing up would make you feel better.\n\n(Exception: If she never, ever remembers to, say, log out of Facebook when she's done perusing at your place, the dingbat could probably benefit from a lesson in Protecting Your Personal Info 101.)\n\nBut what if your accidental indiscretion really is weighing on you? You truly didn't mean to glimpse a text from her ex, and now it's bugging you, or he doesn't know that you know that that flirtatious co-worker of his is sending him Facebook messages. So you walk around with narrowed eyes, thinking, \"Gah, you're keeping a secret from me. Why don't you just tell me?!\"\n\nWell, here's the missing piece, folks, the oft-overlooked sucker-punch from reality: You're keeping a secret now, too -- the fact that you read a private missive.\n\nSo take a deep breath, and reveal exactly what you were doing (grabbing her phone to find Tommy's number, as requested), exactly what you saw (Was that a MySpace shot of a dude with his shirt off?!), and exactly how it's making you feel (ashamed that you accidentally snooped; suspicious of this beefcake; inadequate about your own pecs; slightly turned on).\n\nThen you'll be back on the road to Trusting Relationship Town, population: you and your circle of not-hating-you friends.\n\nOr at least, you'll be on the road to passcodes and phone locks all around. Judging by those gloved, blue-shirted airport employees now pawing through your toiletries, it might be the last bastion of privacy you get."}
{"text":"Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Prime Ministerial candidate Beata Szydlo: ''We wouldn't have won, had it not been for the Polish people''\n\nPoland's opposition Law and Justice party - conservative and Eurosceptic - has won parliamentary elections.\n\nPreliminary results gave the party 37.6% of the vote, but it was not immediately clear if that would be enough for it to govern alone.\n\nIts leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski claimed victory, and the outgoing Prime Minister, Ewa Kopacz of the centrist Civic Platform, admitted defeat.\n\nLaw and Justice (PiS) has strong support in poorer, rural areas.\n\nCivic Platform, the pro-market party that governed for the last eight years, got 24.1% of the vote.\n\nThree other parties also won enough votes to get seats in parliament: a new right-wing party led by rock star Pawel Kukiz with 8.8%; a new pro-business party, Modern Poland, with 7.6%; and the agrarian Polish People's Party with 5.1%.\n\nThe election authority is expected to announce how many seats the parties get in parliament on Tuesday.\n\nExit polls suggested Law and Justice would have a small majority - making it the first time a single party has won enough seats to govern alone since democracy was restored in 1989.\n\nImage copyright EPA Image caption Some observers said Mr Kaczynski (left) could take the job of prime minister from Beata Szydlo (right) in months to come after the euphoria of victory has died down\n\n\"We will exert law but there will be no taking of revenge. There will be no squaring of personal accounts,\" said Mr Kaczynski.\n\n\"There will be no kicking of those who have fallen through their own fault and very rightly so.\"\n\nAnalysis: Adam Easton, BBC News, Warsaw\n\nIt was a historic election. It will be the first time since 1989 that there will be no left-wing party in parliament.\n\nLaw and Justice won big because they offered simple, concrete policies for the many in Poland that feel untouched by the country's impressive economic growth. It offered higher child care benefits and tax breaks for the less well-off.\n\nAfter eight years in office many Poles had grown weary of the governing centrist Civic Platform's unfulfilled promises, scandals and what was perceived by some to be an aloof attitude.\n\nLaw and Justice also stuck with its winning formula of presenting a more moderate face than its rather combative leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski.\n\nThat moderate face belongs to Beata Szydlo, a 52-year-old miner's daughter and avid reader, who will become the country's next prime minister.\n\nPoland returns to conservative roots\n\nPoland elections: Conservative swing grips media\n\nPolish miner's daughter set for top job\n\nBeata Szydlo said she was grateful for the support of the Polish people.\n\n\"We have won because we have been consistent in facing all the challenges ahead of us and we followed in the footsteps of the late President Lech Kaczynski,\" she said.\n\n\"We wouldn't have won had it not been for the Polish people who told us about their expectations and needs, and who in the end voted for us.\"\n\nEurope's refugee crisis also proved to be a key topic of debate before the election. While the government has agreed to take in 7,000 migrants, opposition parties have spoken out against the move.\n\nMr Kaczynski, 66, was not running as prime minister and instead nominated Ms Szydlo, a relative unknown, as the party's choice for the post.\n\nHowever, some observers said Mr Kaczynski - the twin brother of Poland's late president Lech - could take on the top job himself in the months to come.\n\nLast week, Mr Kaczynski was criticised for suggesting migrants could bring diseases and parasites to Poland.\n\nPiS is close to the country's powerful Roman Catholic Church and has promised increased benefits and tax breaks.\n\nIt supports a ban on abortions and in-vitro fertilisation and believes a strong Nato is necessary to offset the perceived threat from Russia.\n\nCivic Platform for its part sought closer ties with the EU.\n\nDespite overseeing eight years of impressive economic growth it was beaten into second place and will become the main opposition party."}
{"text":"The I.W.W. - Its History, Structure, and Method\n\nVincent ST. JOHN (1876 - 1929)\n\n\u201cWe must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, \u2018Abolition of the wage system\u2019\u201d\n\nThe Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), members of which are commonly termed \"Wobblies,\" is an international labor union that was founded in 1905. The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as \"revolutionary industrial unionism,\" with ties to both socialist and anarchist labor movements. The IWW promotes the concept of \"One Big Union,\" and contends that all workers should be united as a social class to supplant capitalism and wage labor with industrial democracy.\n\nVincent St. John (1876 \u2013 1929) was an American labor leader and prominent Wobbly, among the most influential radical labor leaders of the 20th century. - Summary by Wikipedia\n\nGenre(s): Essays & Short Works\n\nLanguage: English"}
{"text":"They say breast is best when it comes to nurturing a baby.\n\nThat message doesn\u2019t translate well when it comes to baked goods.\n\nAn unnamed mother has stirred up outrage on Facebook after she made brownies with breast milk for a school bake sale.\n\nA post on the Sanctimommy Facebook page revealed the mother\u2019s dilemma when she ran out of cow\u2019s milk as an ingredient for her baking and decided to use her own breast milk as a substitution.\n\n\u201cI didn\u2019t have time to run to the store and didn\u2019t think it was a big deal (some of those kids could use the nutrition let\u2019s be honest),\u201d the mother wrote. \u201cAnd it wasn\u2019t even that much.\u201d\n\nThe mysterious mommy stated another parent found out about the secret ingredient and was \u201cblowing it way out of proportion.\u201d The woman foolishly turned to the Internet for suggestions.\n\nLet\u2019s just say the reaction to the post \u2013 which has garnered 921 shares and more than 1,000 comments on Facebook \u2013 has been mixed and emotional.\n\n\u201cHonestly this is actually a damn near criminal offense,\u201d one outraged commenter stated. \u201cBreast milk, like blood or semen, can carry diseases, which is why legit donation services screen the milk before passing it along to moms and their babies.\u201d\n\n\u201cSecretly feeding children that aren\u2019t yours baked goods with your bodily fluids in them is gross, shady and borderline psychotic,\u201d another angry commenter wrote.\n\nWhile most of the comments were hateful, some people were confused over the situation.\n\n\u201cBut\u2026milk isn\u2019t even one of the ingredients for brownies\u2026human or cow,\u201d wrote a confused commenter.\n\nOthers found humour in the situation.\n\n\u201cBut was it homogenize?\u201d joked one person.\n\n\u201c\u2018Susan. These brownies are DELISH! What\u2019s in them? \u2026me,\u2019\u201d another humourously chimed.\n\nWhile breast milk is good for babies, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that HIV and other serious infectious diseases can be transmitted through the liquid."}
{"text":"THE definition of \u2018sexy news\u2019 has been taken to a whole new level after a Swedish TV station accidentally broadcast porn in the background of a news show.\n\nTHE definition of \u2018sexy news\u2019 has been taken to a whole new level after a Swedish TV station accidentally broadcast porn in the background of a news show.\n\nStation TV4 was broadcasting a discussion segment on Russia\u2019s involvement in the Syrian crisis when viewers noticed the erotic material on a screen behind the host.\n\nViewer Daniel Ek told Swedish paper The Local: \u201cAt first I realised I was looking at a naked woman and it quickly became clear she was having sex. It didn't take long before I realised it was a porn film.\n\n\"The image wasn't exactly in focus, but it wasn't hard to figure out what was going on\u201d, he continued.\n\nHe offered his own theories as to how the mix up happened: \u201cI had two theories. One is that someone was pissed off after getting fired and put the porno up as act of revenge. My other thought was that someone had simply screwed up.\u201d\n\nThe channel stated the incident was caused by a mix up in the feed \u2013 as the station\u2019s parent company also operate adult channels.\n\nNews editor Andreas Haglind said: \u201cIt's not like we were directly broadcasting porn. Put simply, it's crap that it happened. We're going to do everything we can so that it doesn't happen again.\u201d"}
{"text":"The English Channel in 6h 57min 20sec! Eric Defert and Pierre Yves Durand broke Yvan Bourgnon and Karine Baillet record. Eric Defert: \u201cWe had 25 knots of wind, reaching in 3 to 4 meters sea. We left at 8:26 am and arrived at 3:23pm! When we left for Plymouth wednesday, the forecast announced 15 knots, then in the next 48 hours, the prevision were for 20 + knots from the east. Since we were already in England, we decided to give a try. Our driver, in the ferry back to France, recorded wind up to 35 knots. It made for a strong sea. I think the record can be taken\u2026 Anybody?\u201d\n\nSunday morning Eric Defert was in Brest for the inauguration of the \u201cPort of Records\u201d. Eric was able to see in own plate made in bronze of his hands after his previous successful Atlantic Crossing on a Class 40, single handed. \u2013 Laurent Apollon."}
{"text":"The big 2-part Dark Matter season finale is coming up this Friday (I know \u2026 already) and to celebrate we had the opportunity to be a part of a conference call interview with several of the cast along with lead mystery wrangler, Joe Mallozzi. Joining Joe were Melissa O\u2019Neil (Two), Jodelle Ferland (Five), Alex Mallari, Jr. (Four) and Roger Cross (Six) who answered every question we threw at them. It was a lot of fun and laughter accompanied most of the conversation. Everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves and with the exception of a few phone line issues, it went off without a hitch.\n\nBefore you read any further, be warned that HERE THERE BE SPOILERS! There aren\u2019t any large, hairy, wookiee-sized spoilers inside, but there are a few, fuzzy tribble-sized ones tossed about. I know some people would rather avoid such teases and hints, so please avert your eyes and read no further if you are one of them. For the rest of you nerds, keep on readin\u2019 on, but before you do, remember that the Dark Matter finale is a two-parter beginning at 9\/8c this Friday. That\u2019s one hour earlier than usual. Don\u2019t miss it!\n\nHi, Space Cadets!\n\nCross: No hugs, Tom. No hugs, no hugs. (This is from me frequently teasing Roger about hugs on Twitter. The fact that I\u2019m still alive is proof he\u2019s a very tolerant man.)\n\nWith Five proving herself to be a very capable member of the crew, can you each talk about your character\u2019s changing opinions of her?\n\nCross: I still think Six kind of feels like he has to protect her, but he starts slowly realizing, \u201cWait a second, she\u2019s smart.\u201d There\u2019s a comment, and it\u2019s pretty subtle, too, that Joe wrote in there where they\u2019re coming off the ship and she goes, \u201cOh, I would\u2019ve just reprogrammed it.\u201d And all of a sudden the bells go off and he\u2019s like, \u201cI didn\u2019t know you knew how to program.\u201d She throw him things and all of a sudden you\u2019re like, well, maybe she\u2019s not as helpless as she appears.\n\nWho, other than Melissa, is the best singer? And who thinks they\u2019re the best singer that might not necessarily be?\n\nFerland: Melissa\u2019s the best singer.\n\nMallari: Roger\u2019s a nice second.\n\nCross: Alex, you\u2019re right there, brother! For some reason, from day one \u2026 I think it\u2019s a very odd group of us, but we all seem to know the same songs. And we might have some sing-alongs that kinda might drive our first ADs crazy going, \u201cThey\u2019re laughing and having too much fun! Like, stop!\u201d And we\u2019re like, \u201cWhat? We\u2019re just singing!\u201d\n\nO\u2019Neil: Alex, Roger and I all really love 90s soul and R&B. We should do a 90s music video!\n\nCross: That would be fun. We should do that.\n\nMallari: On the Raza.\n\nCross: We\u2019re still trying to get Jodelle to sing, but she keeps refusing. I don\u2019t know why.\n\nFerland: One day, I\u2019m just going to belt out into song and you will all be shocked.\n\nMelissa, here\u2019s a question for you. Dark Matter is your first television series experience. What was the most interesting or surprising thing you learned from this?\n\nO\u2019Neil: I didn\u2019t expect to come out with so many new friends. My entire summer has just kind of been filled with crew members and AD people and my stunt double. It\u2019s cool. I\u2019ve created this new posse in Toronto and besides learning a whole ton and learning a different way to tell a story, I\u2019ve made so many new friends. Like, life-long ones, you know?\n\nHow are each of you most like and most un-like your characters?\n\nMallari: I\u2019m not like Four at all. [laughs] Yeah, he\u2019s too serious for my liking.\n\nCross: You\u2019re not serious.\n\nMallari: That\u2019s what I\u2019m saying, I\u2019m not like Four at all. I mean, the only thing I have in common with Four is I can kick ass.\n\nFerland: I think I\u2019m most like Five because of her quirkiness and her weirdness. I just kind of consider myself a really weird person and I\u2019m proud of my awkwardness and strangeness. I think I\u2019m like Five in that way, she\u2019s pretty different and I relate to her because of that. I don\u2019t know how I feel about her sense of style. I tend to wear one or two colors at once instead of all of them, but I love dressing like that on set and it\u2019s a lot of fun because that\u2019s not normally how I\u2019d go outside. I love being able to play Five and be completely different than how I normally am, except for the quirkiness, as I said. So, yeah, other than the colors and all of the pink, we\u2019re pretty similar.\n\nO\u2019Neil: I don\u2019t know, I don\u2019t think I find as much comfort in my own skin as Two, but I don\u2019t know. I can be pretty forthcoming with my thoughts.\n\nYou\u2019re not a custom-built biosynthetic organism, are you?\n\nO\u2019Neil: I\u2019m not a biosynthetic organism. I don\u2019t think. But maybe there\u2019s going to be a dun, dun, dunnn(!) moment in my life, I have no idea. But no, not to my knowledge.\n\nWhat piece of technology from the show would you want to have in real life?\n\nMallari: Transfer Transit.\n\nO\u2019Neil: That would be so great!\n\nCross: That would be awesome.\n\nFerland: It freaks me out a little, I have to admit, but I would try it. It would be cool, yeah.\n\nMallari: Oh, and FTL!\n\nFerland: If we\u2019re just talking technology here, I just want the fish.\n\nDo you each have a favorite part of the ship\u2019s physical sets?\n\nO\u2019Neil: I like the corridors.\n\nCross: The corridors are cool\n\nO\u2019Neil: I love the hallways, they\u2019re so great. They just look so industrial and grimy. I feel like in those areas, that\u2019s where you can see that we\u2019ve got a \u201cbeater\u201d for a ship. It\u2019s not like we\u2019re flying around in some Cadillac. It\u2019s utilitarian and I feel like the corridors really show that off the best.\n\nFerland: I really love the bridge as well just because there\u2019s lots to look at. There\u2019s so many buttons and it\u2019s fun to hang out in.\n\nCross: We\u2019ve got a pretty cool screen in the commissary, too. It\u2019s the screens that never line up and drive Jodelle crazy.\n\nJodelle, we were surprised to see that you didn\u2019t say you liked the air ducts. With all that crawling, you need some knee pads for those.\n\nFerland: You know, I wasn\u2019t really sure what to expect. When I saw that I was going to be crawling through all those vents I thought, \u201cthat will be fun\u201d and then I actually got in there and I was like, \u201cI might\u2019ve been a little bit wrong.\u201d I can\u2019t say that if I had a little bit of free time that I wouldn\u2019t go find some vents to crawl through, but it\u2019s definitely worth it when I watch afterwards because I go, \u201cWow. That looked really cool, I\u2019m glad that I did it.\u201d But, yeah, it\u2019s never as much fun as you think it\u2019s going to be, but I still enjoyed doing it.\n\nJodelle, I know you\u2019re a big fan of Doctor Who. There\u2019s a great \u201ctechnobabble\u201d line uttered by the third Doctor when he says, \u201creverse the polarity of the neutron flow.\u201d It became a kind of catchphrase in its day. Back in episode 10 when you were wiring up the android to open the vault door you said, \u201cIf I don\u2019t adjust the inverter to minimize harmonic distortion we\u2019ll get pulsating torque and the whole thing will fry.\u201d Am I the only one who made this association? Because when I heard it I thought, \u201cShe\u2019s got her Doctor Who moment here!\u201d\n\nFerland: You know what? I didn\u2019t even think of that, but I\u2019m so glad you mentioned it because that makes me really happy. I love my Doctor Who references even if it was by accident!\n\nCross: And Joe will tell you it wasn\u2019t an accident.\n\nFerland: You never know with Joe. There are some things that seem like references to something and I\u2019m never sure if he did it on purpose.\n\nJoe, what gave you the idea to try Periscope after the Dark Matter broadcasts?\n\nMallozzi: Syfy UK asked if I would be interested and I was like \u201csure\u201d and we did it for one of the Syfy UK broadcasts and it was delightfully awkward, but fun. And then I decided I would follow through. I\u2019ve been live tweeting almost every week and hopefully I\u2019ll have time to do an east and west coast Periscope and possibly one for the UK viewers as well.\n\nDo any of you have any other upcoming projects that fans can look for while we wait for a second season of Dark Matter?\n\nCross: The final season of Continuum is coming out, as most of you probably know, September 11. I have a movie, Lockdown, that\u2019s going to be out soon. I\u2019m doing some episodes of Bones and I\u2019m doing a bunch of other stuff. You\u2019ll see me all over the place.\n\nO\u2019Neil: I\u2019ve just finished my last two days of shooting on a show called Rogue on DirecTV. I play this hacker girl. That\u2019ll be out, I think, over the holiday season. And a new CBC show called This Life, which stars Torri Higginson, our Commander Truffault. I just finished doing a video game, but I can\u2019t talk too much about that yet.\n\nJodelle: I\u2019ve had a pretty chill summer, actually, since Dark Matter finished. I have a couple of things I\u2019ll be working on with friends, but nothing I can give a lot of information on at the moment.\n\nAre you or any of the writing staff fans of Big Brother? The finale reminded me, in parts, of the general distress and alliances that show up so much in that show.\n\nMallozzi: Well, I\u2019m going to show my age, but I don\u2019t watch Big Brother. When I was a kid I read a lot of Agatha Christie and the finale is essentially Ten Little Indians where basically you\u2019ve got a group of people and they start dropping one by one. There\u2019s a dying realization that if there\u2019s no outside force here, then it\u2019s one of them, and as the mystery deepens distrust grows and you see alliances shift. Really, that\u2019s where my inspiration comes, but Big Brother is a good reference, too.\n\nCan you all talk about working with Wil Wheaton?\n\nCross: Poor Wil. Airplanes killed us that day. Remember that, Joe?\n\nMallozzi: We were actually shooting by an airport and the poor guy has to deliver this incredibly long monologue. He\u2019d get into it and then 30 seconds in a plane would buzz the area and we\u2019d have to cut and start over again. He ended up delivering an entire monologue in pieces, but he was super professional and super focused and just a very nice guy to work with.\n\nFerland: I knew we were going to have Wil Wheaton on the show, but I never got to meet him! I was so sad. What happened is that I \u2026 nobody told me. I was at the computer at home after work and I saw something on his Instagram of Facebook and it was a small piece of the Dark Matter logo and he was saying it was a hint of what he was working on. And I looked at it for a while and I thought that looks really familiar, then I was like, \u201cWait a minute!\u201d Then I texted Joe right away and I was like, \u201cWil Wheaton\u2019s on our show! Why didn\u2019t you tell me?\u201d I was very excited about it and hopefully I\u2019ll get to meet him some day.\n\nWhat was everybody\u2019s biggest surprise when you all read the finale script?\n\nFerland: Every episode had something that shocked the team. Every time we got a script we just wanted the next one.\n\nCross: These last few episodes, especially, we were just like, \u201cAhhh\u2026.\u201d\n\nFerland: Yeah, and we were bothering Joe non-stop asking, \u201cPlease, please give us the next episode. Tell us what happens. You can\u2019t do this to us!\u201d but we got nothing out of him.\n\nCross: Except for that grin. That Mallozzi grin.\n\nO\u2019Neil: I was watching the finale on my iPad and yelling at the screen. So we better find out, we really better get a second season. I want to know how it ends.\n\nFor the rest of our extensive coverage of Dark Matter, CLICK HERE.\n\nLike this article? Share it with your friends using our social share buttons found both on the left and at the top.\n\nSubscribe to Three If By Space to keep up with all the latest posts. It\u2019s super easy! All you have to do is click on the big, blue \u201cSubscribe\u201d button located in the right panel near the bottom of each post or just Click Here.\n\nStay connected: Follow @ThreeIfBySpace on Twitter for all the latest geekiness from all your favorite shows, movies, comics, conventions and more!\n\nFor all the latest Dark Matter news and reviews, follow me (@Thogar) on Twitter.\n\nThe Dark Matter 2-part finale airs Friday, August 28 at 9\/8 central on Syfy\n\nDark Matter official website\n\nLike Dark Matter on Facebook\n\nFollow Dark Matter on Twitter"}
{"text":"An exclusive Mitchell FOX 2 Detroit Poll of Michigan finds that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton hold large leads over their nearest GOP and Democratic opponents, respectively.\n\nIn a head to head matchup, Trump holds a 47 - 43 percent lead over Clinton with 10 percent undecided.\n\nThe latest Mitchell poll data has Trump holding a 3-1 lead over his two closest opponents in the Michigan Republican Presidential Primary.\n\nTrump has 51 percent compared to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz who is in second place at just 15 percent and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio who is in third with 12 percent. They are followed by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Michigan native Dr. Ben Carson, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie all at five percent.\n\nThree percent are voting for someone else and 5 percent are undecided.\n\nThe automated survey of 493 likely March 2016 Michigan Republican Presidential Primary voters was conducted by Mitchell Research & Communications January 25, 2016 and has a Margin of Error of + or - 4.41 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence.\n\nOn the Democratic side former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is at 61 percent with a big lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (34 percent) and Martin O'Malley (four percent) in a trial ballot test.\n\nThe data comes from the latest Mitchell-FOX 2 Detroit IVR (Interactive Voice Response) survey of 344 March 2016 Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary voters conducted by Mitchell Research and Communications January 25, 2016.\n\nThe poll has a margin of error of + or - 5.28 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence."}
{"text":"Got a cool 2.4 million dollars sitting around and a love for 80\u2019s movies? The home made famous by a crashing Ferarri and Cameron\u2019s refusal to give into his father any more is currently on the market.\n\nTHE BEN ROSE HOME-site of the famous movie \u201cFerris Bueller\u2019s Day Off\u201d, cantilevered over the ravine, these two steel and glass buildings, which can never be duplicated, have incredible vistas of the surrounding woods. This is a unique property designed by A. James Speyer and David Haid, both notable architects of the 20th Century. Estate Sale Sold \u201cAs Is\u201d No disclosures! This is an amazing architectural treasure.\n\nAs is? Does that include all of the movie memorabelia reportedly still in the home? It\u2019s a 4 bedroom, 4 bath home with roughly 5300 square feet of living space. If I can get 2,400 to each contribute $1000 . . . well, I\u2019ll be leaving the country. But wow, that would be a cool home to own.\n\n[tags]movies, beuller[\/tags]"}
{"text":"Bank of America and Citigroup incorrectly accounted for billions of dollars in debt over the past three years, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.\n\nThe report highlights a form of corporate borrowing increasingly under scrutiny since the financial crisis began. The loans, known as \"repos,\" or short-term repurchase agreements, allow banks to increase the amount of risk they can take in securities trading.\n\nBoth BofA and Citigroup disclosed in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that they have over the last three years accidentally classified some repos as sales when they should have been classified as borrowings, the newspaper reported. The amounts involved were small for the banks, though they totaled billions.\n\nIt is illegal under federal securities rules to intentionally conceal debt and mislead investors. Bank of America and Citigroup claim the accounting flaws were purely accidental and represent minute portions of their overall operations.\n\nBank of America, in addressing errors that reached up to $10.7 billion per quarter, noted that the flaws \u201drepresented substantially less than 1 percent of our total assets,\" the Wall Street Journal reports."}
{"text":"Image caption One of the freshwater arowanas that has been rehomed at a Cheshire aquarium\n\nFour large fish used in a drug smuggling operation have been re-homed at a Cheshire aquarium.\n\nThe freshwater arowanas were used in an attempt to smuggle 17kg of cocaine, with a street value of \u00a31.6m, from Colombia to the UK in 2011.\n\nThe drugs were hidden in sealed bags containing more than 16,000 tropical fish, most of which died in transit.\n\nThe fish, along with eight pacus and a large catfish, were transported to Blue Planet Aquarium, near Ellesmere Port.\n\nOf the 16,000 fish found, only 34 fish survived. Some were looked after at London Zoo and some were transferred to Bristol Zoo.\n\nAquarium curator David Wolfenden said: \"Clearly the smugglers did not care at all about the fishes' welfare and the fact that nearly all of them perished during the smuggling operation is extremely sad.\n\n\"It's something of a miracle that any managed to survive the ordeal and we're glad they can now live out their time here with us in a large, purpose-built display.\"\n\nThe largest of the pacus is a metre long and weighs almost 40kg.\n\nThe aquarium hopes to use the fish to promote the Big Fish Campaign - an initiative to try and raise awareness of the problems caused by the sale of fast-growing exotic fish species."}
{"text":"The Court cannot take judicial notice that a shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches long has today any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, and therefore cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapon.\n\n1. Not unconstitutional as an invasion of the reserved powers of the States. Citing Sonzinsky v. United States, 300 U.S. 506 , and Narcotic Act cases. P. 177.\n\nThe National Firearms Act, as applied to one indicted for transporting in interstate commerce a 12-gauge shotgun with a barrel less than 18 inches long without having registered it and without having in his possession a stamp-affixed written order for it, as required by the Act, held:\n\nOpinion\n\nMCREYNOLDS, J., Opinion of the Court\n\nMR. JUSTICE McREYNOLDS delivered the opinion of the Court.\n\nAn indictment in the District Court, Western District Arkansas, charged that Jack Miller and Frank Layton\n\ndid unlawfully, knowingly, willfully, and feloniously transport in interstate commerce from the town of Claremore in the State of Oklahoma to the town of Siloam Springs in the State of Arkansas a certain firearm, to-wit, a double barrel 12-gauge Stevens shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches in length, bearing identification number 76230, said defendants, at the time of so transporting said firearm in interstate commerce as aforesaid, not having registered said firearm as required by Section 1132d of Title 26, United States Code (Act of June 26, 1934, c. 737, Sec. 4 [\u00a7 5], 48 Stat. 1237), and not having in their possession a stamp-affixed written order for said firearm as provided by Section 1132c, Title 2, United States Code (June 26, 1934, c. 737, Sec. 4, 48 Stat. 1237) and the regulations issued under authority of the said Act of Congress known as the \"National Firearms Act,\" approved June 26, 1934, contrary to the form of the statute in such case made and provided, and against the peace and dignity of the United States. [n1] [p176]\n\nA duly interposed demurrer alleged: the National Firearms Act is not a revenue measure, but an attempt to usurp police power reserved to the States, and is therefore unconstitutional. Also, it offends the inhibition of the Second Amendment to the Constitution -- \"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.\" [p177]\n\nThe District Court held that section eleven of the Act violates the Second Amendment. It accordingly sustained the demurrer and quashed the indictment.\n\nThe cause is here by direct appeal.\n\nConsidering Sonzinsky v. United States (1937), 300 U.S. 506, 513, and what was ruled in sundry causes arising [p178] under the Harrison Narcotic Act [n2] -- United States v. Jin Fuey Moy (1916), 241 U.S. 394, United States v. Doremus (1919), 249 U.S. 86, 94; Linder v. United States (1925), 268 U.S. 5; Alston v. United States (1927), 274 U.S. 289; Nigro v. United States (1928), 276 U.S. 332 -- the objection that the Act usurps police power reserved to the States is plainly untenable.\n\nIn the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a \"shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length\" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State, 2 Humphreys (Tenn.) 154, 158.\n\nThe Constitution, as originally adopted, granted to the Congress power --\n\nTo provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.\n\nWith obvious purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of such forces, the declaration and guarantee of the Second Amendment were made. It must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.\n\nThe Militia which the States were expected to maintain and train is set in contrast with Troops which they [p179] were forbidden to keep without the consent of Congress. The sentiment of the time strongly disfavored standing armies; the common view was that adequate defense of country and laws could be secured through the Militia -- civilians primarily, soldiers on occasion.\n\nThe signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. \"A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline.\" And further, that ordinarily, when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.\n\nBlackstone's Commentaries, Vol. 2, Ch. 13, p. 409 points out \"that king Alfred first settled a national militia in this kingdom,\" and traces the subsequent development and use of such forces.\n\nAdam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Book V, Ch. 1, contains an extended account of the Militia. It is there said: \"Men of republican principles have been jealous of a standing army as dangerous to liberty.\"\n\nIn a militia, the character of the labourer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier: in a standing army, that of the soldier predominates over every other character, and in this distinction seems to consist the essential difference between those two different species of military force.\n\n\"The American Colonies In The 17th Century,\" Osgood, Vol. 1, ch. XIII, affirms in reference to the early system of defense in New England --\n\nIn all the colonies, as in England, the militia system was based on the principle of the assize of arms. This implied the general obligation of all adult male inhabitants to possess arms, and, with certain exceptions, to [p180] cooperate in the work of defence.\n\nThe possession of arms also implied the possession of ammunition, and the authorities paid quite as much attention to the latter as to the former.\n\nA year later [1632] it was ordered that any single man who had not furnished himself with arms might be put out to service, and this became a permanent part of the legislation of the colony [Massachusetts].\n\nAlso,\n\nClauses intended to insure the possession of arms and ammunition by all who were subject to military service appear in all the important enactments concerning military affairs. Fines were the penalty for delinquency, whether of towns or individuals. According to the usage of the times, the infantry of Massachusetts consisted of pikemen and musketeers. The law, as enacted in 1649 and thereafter, provided that each of the former should be armed with a pike, corselet, head-piece, sword, and knapsack. The musketeer should carry a \"good fixed musket,\" not under bastard musket bore, not less than three feet, nine inches, nor more than four feet three inches in length, a priming wire, scourer, and mould, a sword, rest, bandoleers, one pound of powder, twenty bullets, and two fathoms of match. The law also required that two-thirds of each company should be musketeers.\n\nThe General Court of Massachusetts, January Session 1784, provided for the organization and government of the Militia. It directed that the Train Band should \"contain all able bodied men, from sixteen to forty years of age, and the Alarm List, all other men under sixty years of age, . . .\" Also,\n\nThat every noncommissioned officer and private soldier of the said militia not under the controul of parents, masters or guardians, and being of sufficient ability therefor in the judgment of the Selectmen of the town in which he shall dwell, shall equip himself, and be constantly provided with a good fire arm,\n\netc.\n\nBy an Act passed April 4, 1786, the New York Legislature directed:\n\nThat every able-bodied Male Person, being [p181] a Citizen of this State, or of any of the United States, and residing in this State, (except such Persons as are hereinafter excepted) and who are of the Age of Sixteen, and under the Age of Forty-five Years, shall, by the Captain or commanding Officer of the Beat in which such Citizens shall reside, within four Months after the passing of this Act, be enrolled in the Company of such Beat. . . . That every Citizen so enrolled and notified shall, within three Months thereafter, provide himself, at his own Expense, with a good Musket or Firelock, a sufficient Bayonet and Belt, a Pouch with a Box therein to contain not less than Twenty-four Cartridges suited to the Bore of his Musket or Firelock, each Cartridge containing a proper Quantity of Powder and Ball, two spare Flints, a Blanket and Knapsack; . . .\n\nThe General Assembly of Virginia, October, 1785, (12 Hening's Statutes) declared,\n\nThe defense and safety of the commonwealth depend upon having its citizens properly armed and taught the knowledge of military duty.\n\nIt further provided for organization and control of the Militia, and directed that \"All free male persons between the ages of eighteen and fifty years,\" with certain exceptions, \"shall be inrolled or formed into companies.\" \"There shall be a private muster of every company once in two months.\"\n\nAlso that\n\nEvery officer and soldier shall appear at his respective muster-field on the day appointed, by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, armed, equipped, and accoutred, as follows: . . . every non-commissioned officer and private with a good, clean musket carrying an ounce ball, and three feet eight inches long in the barrel, with a good bayonet and iron ramrod well fitted thereto, a cartridge box properly made, to contain and secure twenty cartridges fitted to his musket, a good knapsack and canteen, and moreover, each non-commissioned officer and private shall have at every muster one pound of good [p182] powder, and four pounds of lead, including twenty blind cartridges, and each serjeant shall have a pair of moulds fit to cast balls for their respective companies, to be purchased by the commanding officer out of the monies arising on delinquencies. Provided, That the militia of the counties westward of the Blue Ridge, and the counties below adjoining thereto, shall not be obliged to be armed with muskets, but may have good rifles with proper accoutrements, in lieu thereof. And every of the said officers, non-commissioned officers, and privates, shall constantly keep the aforesaid arms, accoutrements, and ammunition ready to be produced whenever called for by his commanding officer. If any private shall make it appear to the satisfaction of the court hereafter to be appointed for trying delinquencies under this act that he is so poor that he cannot purchase the arms herein required, such court shall cause them to be purchased out of the money arising from delinquents.\n\nMost if not all of the States have adopted provisions touching the right to keep and bear arms. Differences in the language employed in these have naturally led to somewhat variant conclusions concerning the scope of the right guaranteed. But none of them seems to afford any material support for the challenged ruling of the court below.\n\nIn the margin, some of the more important opinions and comments by writers are cited. [n3]\n\nWe are unable to accept the conclusion of the court below, and the challenged judgment must be reversed. The cause will be remanded for further proceedings.\n\nMR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS took no part in the consideration or decision of this cause.\n\nThat for the purposes of this Act --\n\n(a) The term \"firearm\" means a shotgun or rifle having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length, or any other weapon, except a pistol or revolver, from which a shot is discharged by an explosive if such weapon is capable of being concealed on the person, or a machine gun, and includes a muffler or silencer for any firearm whether or not such firearm is included within the foregoing definition [The Act of April 10, 1936, c. 169, 49 Stat. 1192 added the words], but does not include any rifle which is within the foregoing provisions solely by reason of the length of its barrel if the caliber of such rifle is .22 or smaller and if its barrel is sixteen inches or more in length.\n\nSec. 3. (a) There shall be levied, collected, and paid upon firearms transferred in the continental United States a tax at the rate of $200 for each firearm, such tax to be paid by the transferor, and to be represented by appropriate stamps to be provided by the Commissioner, with the approval of the Secretary, and the stamps herein provided shall be affixed to the order for such firearm, hereinafter provided for. The tax imposed by this section shall be in addition to any import duty imposed on such firearm.\n\nSec. 4. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person to transfer a firearm except in pursuance of a written order from the person seeking to obtain such article, on an application form issued in blank in duplicate for that purpose by the Commissioner. Such order shall identify the applicant by such means of identification as may be prescribed by regulations under this Act: Provided, That, if the applicant is an individual, such identification shall include fingerprints and a photograph thereof.\n\n(c) Every person so transferring a firearm shall set forth in each copy of such order the manufacturer's number or other mark identifying such firearm, and shall forward a copy of such order to the Commissioner. The original thereof, with stamps affixed, shall be returned to the applicant.\n\n(d) No person shall transfer a firearm which has previously been transferred on or after the effective date of this Act, unless such person, in addition to complying with subsection (c), transfers therewith the stamp-affixed order provided for in this section for each such prior transfer, in compliance with such regulations as may be prescribed under this Act for proof of payment of all taxes on such firearms.\n\nSec. 5. (a) Within sixty days after the effective date of this Act every person possessing a firearm shall register, with the collector of the district in which he resides, the number or other mark identifying such firearm, together with his name, address, place where such firearm is usually kept, and place of business or employment, and, if such person is other than a natural person, the name and home address of an executive officer thereof: Provided, That no person shall be required to register under this section with respect to any firearm acquired after the effective date of, and in conformity with the provisions of, this Act.\n\nSec. 6. It shall be unlawful for any person to receive or possess any firearm which has at any time been transferred in violation of section 3 or 4 of this Act.\n\nSec. 11. It shall be unlawful for any person who is required to register as provided in section 5 hereof and who shall not have so registered, or any other person who has not in his possession a stamp-affixed order as provided in section 4 hereof, to ship, carry, or deliver any firearm in interstate commerce.\n\nSec. 12. The Commissioner, with the approval of the Secretary, shall prescribe such rules and regulations as may be necessary for carrying the provisions of this Act into effect.\n\nSec. 14. Any person who violates or fails to comply with any of the requirements of this Act shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $2,000 or be imprisoned for not more than five years, or both, in the discretion of the court.\n\nSec. 16. If any provision of this Act, or the application thereof to any person or circumstance, is held invalid, the remainder of the Act, and the application of such provision to other persons or circumstances, shall not be affected thereby.\n\nSec. 18. This Act may be cited as the \"National Firearms Act.\""}
{"text":"And for this sparsely populated land, the recent fighting seems a step beyond the army\u2019s desert skirmishes with the Tuaregs in the 1960s, the early 1990s and again in 2006. This time, the rebels are not being quickly stamped out or fleeing to the rocky mountains of this vast, inhospitable region. To the contrary, officials now say they are facing perhaps the most serious threat ever from the Tuaregs.\n\nEmboldened by their new weaponry, they have formed a made-to-order liberation movement, the M.N.L.A., or Mouvement National Pour la Lib\u00e9ration de l\u2019Azawad \u2014 Azawad being the name they give to northern Mali.\n\n\u201cOur goal is to liberate our lands from Malian occupation,\u201d said Moussa Ag Acharatoumane, one of the rebel spokesmen in exile in France.\n\nThe rebels \u2014 perhaps as many as 1,000, commanded by a former colonel in Libya\u2019s army \u2014 brought with them enough of an arsenal to create a kind of standoff with the Malian Army.\n\nPhoto\n\n\u201cHeavy weapons,\u201d said Mali\u2019s foreign minister, Soumeylou Boub\u00e8ye Ma\u00efga, referring to the new arms. \u201cAntitank weapons. Antiaircraft weapons.\u201d\n\nMalian military officials agree. \u201cRobust, powerful machine guns,\u201d said Lt. Col. Diarran Kone of the Defense Ministry. \u201cMortars,\u201d he added, describing the weaponry as \u201csignificant enough to allow them to achieve their objectives.\u201d\n\nAbout a half-dozen towns in the north have been attacked, including Niafounk\u00e9. Both government and rebel forces have suffered casualties, and nearly 10,000 civilians have fled the fighting, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThe situation appears to have worsened for the Mali government over the past few days. The rebels have retaken the town of M\u00e9naka, a military spokesman, Idrissa Traor\u00e9, acknowledged Friday, adding that a number of soldiers and civilians \u2014 he refused to say how many \u2014 had been killed by the rebels in the town of Aguelhok. In Bamako, the capital, families of soldiers have demonstrated against what they say is the government\u2019s poor handling of the rebel offensive, blocking roads and burning tires. The defense minister has been replaced, and reprisals have been reported against Tuareg citizens living in the south.\n\nOfficials in Bamako make no secret of their shock at what one Western diplomat called the \u201crobustness\u201d of the rebel incursion.\n\n\u201cAll of a sudden we found ourselves face to face with a thousand men, heavily armed,\u201d said Mr. Ma\u00efga, the foreign minister. \u201cThe stability of the entire region could be under threat.\u201d\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\nThe Malians, who viewed Colonel Qaddafi as a generous benefactor \u2014 he helped build an administrative complex here, among other things \u2014 now find themselves gnashing their teeth over this less beneficent aspect of his legacy. Still, officials here insist that the situation in the north is under control, while acknowledging that the threat is not over.\n\nAnalysts who study the region agree that the latest Tuareg resurgence is something new, and that Colonel Qaddafi is largely responsible, posthumously.\n\n\u201cThis is a fairly significant military force,\u201d said Pierre Boilley, a Tuareg expert at the University of Paris. \u201cThe game has changed. They can directly attack the Malian Army. I think the army will have trouble.\u201d\n\nThe new Tuareg campaign \u201cshows a pretty serious military and logistical capability,\u201d said Yvan Guichaoua, a Sahara expert at the University of East Anglia, in Britain. The Tuareg spokesmen are cagey about disclosing the precise dimensions of their arsenal, hinting only that they owe Colonel Qaddafi a good deal. \u201cThe Libyan crisis shook up the order of things,\u201d Mr. Acharatoumane said. \u201cA lot of our brothers have come back with weapons.\u201d\n\nPhoto\n\nIn some ways, the aggressive new Tuareg campaign represents the kind of support the rebels had long sought from Colonel Qaddafi, who for years alternately aided and betrayed the desert warriors, according to a recent study by Mr. Boilley. After the great regional droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, young Tuaregs migrated north to the colonel\u2019s military training camps, to later fight for him in places like Chad, while at the same time destabilizing the governments in Niger and Mali.\n\nLibya, with its World Revolutionary Center, where the warlords Charles Taylor of Liberia and Foday Sankoh of Sierra Leone were schooled in Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s doctrines, became the regional matrix of instability.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThe center\u2019s mission was to \u201ctrain volunteers in revolutionary warfare from all over the world,\u201d according to a 1999 book by Stephen Ellis of the African Studies Center, in Leiden, the Netherlands, in keeping with Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s belligerent anti-Western posture. The Libyan training camps under the center\u2019s auspices \u201cbecame the Harvard and Yale of a whole generation of African revolutionaries,\u201d Mr. Ellis wrote.\n\nMr. Taylor, who is awaiting a verdict after a trial on war crimes charges, recruited his first troops there, leading to years of chaos in Liberia, while Mr. Sankoh\u2019s murderous brigades also had a Libyan genesis, in part.\n\nColonel Qaddafi backed independence movements all over Africa, including a coup attempt in Sudan in 1976, and he supported pariah governments the West shied away from, like the military junta in Gambia in 1994.\n\nHis most significant African venture was in Chad during the 1980s, when he backed a rebel group against the government, with an eye toward capturing a mineral-rich border area. His surrogates were defeated by Chad\u2019s government in 1987, but Libyan troops did not leave the disputed border strip until 1994.\n\nAnd yet, Mr. Boilley writes, the Tuareg distrusted Colonel Qaddafi, whose rhetorical gestures on their behalf were rarely matched by material support.\n\nNow, unwittingly, the picture is different. Outside a villa in Bamako recently, a dozen or more pro-government Tuaregs glumly contemplated the new order of things back home.\n\n\u201cWhen they came into M\u00e9naka, they were yelling, \u2018Allahu akbar.\u2019 What does that mean? We don\u2019t do that sort of thing when we fight,\u201d said Bajan Ag Hamatou, a lawmaker from M\u00e9naka. His brother, Aroude\u00efny Ag Hamatou, the mayor of a small town outside M\u00e9naka, said, \u201cA lot of buildings were destroyed.\u201d\n\nBajan Ag Hamatou angrily blamed the West for having created a mess in his backyard.\n\n\u201cThe Westerners didn\u2019t want Qaddafi, and they got rid of him, and they created problems for all of us,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you chased Qaddafi out in that barbaric fashion, you created 10 more Qaddafis. The whole Saharo-Sahelian region has become unlivable.\u201d"}
{"text":"by Marilyn Price-Mitchell, PhD\n\nAbility to meet and overcome challenges in ways that maintain or promote well-being.\n\nOne of the first things you might associate with teenagers is their risk-taking behavior. And most of the time, those associations are negative. Right?\n\nThat\u2019s because we are deluged with stories of troubled youth whose risk-taking actions got out of hand \u2014sometimes with tragic results. But what if there was a flip-side to youth risk-taking? A side that would make us encourage teenagers to stretch their comfort zones?\n\nIn a recent article, What Happy People Do Differently, positive psychologists, Robert Biswas-Diener and Todd Kashdan, claim that truly happy people understand \u201chappiness is not just about doing things that you like. It also requires growth and adventuring beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone.\u201d\n\n\u201cCuriosity,\u201d they say, \u201cis largely about exploration\u2026the most direct route to becoming stronger and wiser.\u201d A study led by Kashdan and psychologist Michael Steger found that \u201ccurious people invest in activities that cause them discomfort as a springboard to higher psychological peaks.\u201d\n\nTeens Find Identity through Discomfort\n\nIn Tomorrow\u2019s Change Makers: Reclaiming the Power of Citizenship for a New Generation, young people, like adults, said they found happiness when they experienced risk-taking. At the peak of their discomfort, students made comments, including:\n\n\u201cI crossed barriers in my mind.\u201d\n\n\u201cI felt scared.\u201d\n\n\u201cI felt liberated.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat a powerful experience.\u201d\n\n\u201cI was way out of my comfort zone.\u201d\n\nWhat risk-taking experiences caused them to make these comments? Were they high on drugs or alcohol?\n\nQuite the opposite. These students were describing the positive experience of pushing their psychological boundaries as they participated in a variety of community service activities.\n\nSome had come face-to-face with people living in situations very different from their own. Others were doing physical labor that stretched them to new levels of endurance. Several feared failure as they set their sights on unimaginable goals to benefit others.\n\nThese students came from highly diverse backgrounds. But what they shared in common was a sense of accomplishment and self-esteem that came from learning to solve problems, working with others, and pushing their comfort zones.\n\nThe bottom line? The students in this study discovered their identities through the process of risk-taking. Simultaneously, they found a path to happiness.\n\nThe Teen Brain Craves Risk-Taking\n\nMuch of the research on happiness has been conducted with adults. But what we\u2019ve learned about the teen brain sheds light on their happiness too.\n\nBefore adolescence, children learn how to fit into society. With parents and teachers as guides, they absorb the norms and unspoken rules of how to behave at home and school. They are like little sponges, soaking up megabytes of information!\n\nAs children enter their teen years, they begin to merge what they know about society with their psychological selves. They search for their own identities, separate from their parents.\n\nChanges to the limbic system of the brain cause teens to seek risk, challenge, and emotional stimulation. While some parents fear this phase of a child\u2019s life, it\u2019s really quite natural. And it\u2019s a time to be embraced as a positive transition to adulthood.\n\nOf course, we mostly associate teen risk-taking with drinking, drugs, smoking, and sexual experimentation. But risk-taking is equally associated with positive activities, like mountain climbing, community service, politics, faith groups, and other experiences that can push young people out of their comfort zones and reward them handsomely.\n\nLike the teens that were part of my research study, risk-taking can seed happiness, life purpose, and well-being. When young people learn to overcome challenges and meet risk head on, they learn to be resilient. They learn that exploration beyond their comfort zones often leads to unexpected rewards and psychological peaks. They develop courage, curiosity, self-confidence, and persistence.\n\nCan we reshape the idea that teen risk-taking is always negative? What positive experiences have you or your teen enjoyed that pushed psychological comfort zones and increased happiness?\n\nPhoto Credit: Basketman23\n\nPublished: July 12, 2013\n\nShare Article:\n\nTags: character strengths"}
{"text":"Paul Manafort, back when he was still Trump\u2019s campaign chairman.\n\nDrew Angerer\/Getty Images\n\nThe resignation of Paul Manafort Friday morning, just six months after he signed on to Trump\u2019s campaign and two days after the ascension of Breitbart executive Steve Bannon, proves the very thing about Donald Trump we were loath to admit.\n\nAt a time when Trump is sinking in the polls and seems unable to right the ship, it\u2019s easier than ever, if you are not a Trump supporter, to indulge in a measure of relief. He\u2019s probably not going to be president. But at the same time, the lack of a Trump pivot, his astounding ability to continue to \u201cbe himself\u201d even at the cost of his base, means another, complementary truth must be acknowledged: Donald Trump is an incomparable figure, more untamable than even some of the worst people in the world.\n\nThese two realizations go hand in hand. Had Manafort, a dark mage of political image-making, been successful in reshaping the Trump campaign, we would have declared Trump a clown who got lucky in the primaries and smartly bent a knee to the party apparatus. But it seems the correct view now is that an unstoppably destructive force has, in the span of a year, laid waste not only to the brightest lights of the Republican Party, but to the party\u2019s own best attempt to give him the very thing he\u2019s ostensibly running for.\n\nIt\u2019s impressive!\n\nWhen Manafort first \u201cvolunteered\u201d for the campaign, it was seen as an act of salvation, a professional hand coming on to replace the ramshackle operation run by a dinghy-full of people, one of them being the promptly ousted and now gleefully gloating Corey Lewandowski. Franklin Foer was one of the earliest to sound the alarm bells about Manafort\u2019s evil genius here in Slate, with a frightening portrait of a man who had been a longtime GOP operative, who had crafted the 1984 \u201cMorning in America\u201d convention, and gone on to a lucrative career rehabilitating tyrants and taking money from Russian oligarchs.\n\nThis was the guy, it seemed, to really be afraid of. This was the guy who was going to take the wildly veering Trump canoe and rebuild it into a wave-chopping tanker of a presidency-winning machine. This, and the growing reports of connections between Manafort and pro-Russian interests, played into the illusion that Trump was a mindless Manchurian candidate of some kind, beholden if not directly to Putin, then to Manafort and his needs, or, opportunistically, to a white nationalist movement. In trying to imagine a convergence of networked interests, we underestimated Trump\u2019s singularity.\n\nHow wrong we were. Paul Manafort was able to stage-manage Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Mobutu, Angolan guerrilla fighters, Lebanese arms dealers, and Viktor Yanukovych. But he wasn\u2019t able to reform Donald J. Trump.\n\nThrough some alchemy of pathological striving, bitterness, narcissism, canniness, force of will, and starter funds, we have ended up with a presidential nominee who, we finally have to accept, is the furthest thing from a joke. Trump is a towering figure in American cultural\u2014and now political\u2014history. Paul Manafort is but a footnote.\n\nYou\u2019ve won, Donald. Even if you don\u2019t become president, you\u2019ve won. There is nobody like you. There never has been. And with any luck\u2014though luck rarely holds\u2014there never will be.\n\nRead more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign."}
{"text":"Journalists follow the presentation of Huawei's smartphone, the Mate S, ahead of the IFA Electronics show in Berlin, Germany, in this file picture taken September 2, 2015.\n\nJournalists follow the presentation of Huawei's smartphone, the Mate S, ahead of the IFA Electronics show in Berlin, Germany, in this file picture taken September 2, 2015. Reuters\/Hannibal Hanschke\n\nThe new Huawei P10 picks up where its predecessor left off the year before. It\u2019s an improvement over the Huawei P9 in nearly every facet, including camera, design and display protection. But when it comes to battery performance, how far off are the two P series siblings?\n\nHuawei P9 - Battery specs and features\n\nThe Huawei P9 is powered by a robust and non-removable 3,000 mAh battery. The P9 has rapid charging support and is able to provide about 40 percent of power in just 30 minutes of plug time using 9V\/2A charger. Unfortunately, the handset comes with a regular 5V\/2A charging unit, so those who want fast charging will have to purchase the 9V charger separately.\n\nDuring GSMArena\u2019s battery test, the Huawei P9 scored a pretty good rating. The phone battery can endure a few hours north of three days if the user does an hour each of phone calls, web browsing and video playback per day. The P9 has three power modes: Performance, Standard and Ultra Power Saving.\n\nThe Performance mode goes all out and does not enforce any kind of limit whatsoever on the hardware while the Standard mode supplements an additional couple of hours of use. The Ultra Power Saving keeps the handset going for a significant amount of time. There\u2019s also the ROG power saving option that takes down the native screen resolution to 720p to provide more battery life and extend playing time.\n\nHuawei P10 - Battery specs and features\n\nMeanwhile, the Huawei P10 houses a 3,200 mAh battery, sealed just like its predecessor. The bundled charger is strapping, tough enough to churn out 5V\/4.5A, 4.5V\/5A and 5V\/2A. P10 owners have to use the handset\u2019s charger and USB cable together in order to fully take advantage of the numbers, though, as the charging speeds considerably drop off when another cable is used.\n\nThe P10 is able to provide about 55 percent of battery life in just 30 minutes of plug time using the bundled charging accessories. Although the new P series smartphone has a slightly more powerful cell than its older brother, it provides roughly the same performance as the P9.\n\nHuawei P9 vs Huawei P10 \u2013 Battery performance test\n\nWhen TechRadar pitted the P9 and the P10 against each other in a series of rigorous battery performance tests that involved an hour and a half each of web browsing, gaming, YouTube playback and native video playback, the P10 came out on top. After 90 minutes of web browsing, the P9 had 57 percent remaining battery life while the P10 had 67 percent. Following the YouTube playback test, the older handset\u2019s battery level further stumbled to only 17 percent while the new phone hung on with 38 percent.\n\nBoth handsets didn\u2019t even get to complete the gaming portion. The Huawei P9 finished with a total performance time of three hours and 20 minutes while the Huawei P10 lasted four hours and 10 minutes.\n\nRELATED STORIES:\n\nLG G6 vs Apple iPhone 7 camera review and comparison [VIDEO]\n\nApple iPhone 8 \/ Edition to sport front and back glass, but may scrap Touch ID due to production difficulties"}
{"text":"Insect collection worth $100m providing answers to science, technology, agriculture\n\nPosted\n\nEntomologists at an insect collection in country New South Wales have a party trick they like to play.\n\nVisitors are given a pair of 3D glasses and asked to first close one eye and then the other while looking at a tray of small beetles, pinned to the cardboard of a specimen tray.\n\nAs if by magic, the beetles change from plain brown to vibrant, sparkling gold and green and then back again, as the viewer wearing the glasses closes each eye in turn.\n\nThe explanation, given by Dr Ainsley Seago, technical manager of the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries (DPI) insect collection, is that the beetles are using a tricky system called \"a circulatory polarised multi-layer reflector\".\n\n\"There are number of optical and photonic mechanisms that beetles have evolved that are years ahead of anything humans have created,\" Dr Seago explained excitedly.\n\nThe self-described \"bug nerd\" is part of the intriguing story of the collection, housed at the Orange Agricultural Institute in central west NSW.\n\nCollection dates to 1890s\n\nThe NSW DPI collection, which totals an estimated 650,000 specimens from all over the world, was recently valued at $100 million.\n\nSpecimens have been obtained through a range of means: from donations by private collectors to the confiscations of illegal insect importations at Australia's ports and airports.\n\nThere are whole drawers full of ticks taken from humans, dogs, cats, rabbits, rats and just about anything else unfortunate enough to have encountered one of the potentially paralysing parasites.\n\nThe collection's creepy crawlies are stored in 270 green metal cabinets, housed in a climate-controlled, fire-door-protected room with an overpowering smell of the preservative naphthalene.\n\nThe collection is large but also significant because it is one of the oldest in Australia, having been started by the-then Department of Agriculture in the 1890s.\n\nPeter Gillespie, collections curator at the NSW DPI, said then, as now, the key aim of the collection was to help farmers deal with pests and parasites in their crops and livestock.\n\n\"Agriculture was the backbone of the country ... but a lot of people didn't know what was here [and] we'd deliberately or inadvertently brought in a number of things that impacted on agricultural production,\" he said.\n\nEarliest specimens\n\nThe earliest specimens in the collection were gathered from all over the state by keen bug collectors on horseback or using Cobb and Co coaches.\n\nOne of the most prolific collectors was Walter Wilson Froggatt who travelled to some quite inaccessible places, such as west of Brewarrina in outback NSW.\n\nHis legacy lives on in the spidery handwriting on the labels attached to the specimens he collected while the state's chief entomologist for about 40 years from the 1890s.\n\nMr Gillespie said as well as setting the foundations for the collection, Froggatt was also an early ecological warrior and was one of the only dissenting voices against the introduction of cane toads into Queensland.\n\nBugs with history and hidden stories\n\nMr Gillespie said the insects in the collection act as a window to the past; for instance, some come from locations once vegetated but which are now all \"steel and concrete\".\n\n\"All collections are ultimately a biodiversity inventory; they point to a particular species being there at a place in time and collected by someone or other,\" Mr Gillespie said.\n\nDr Seago said what fascinated her were the stories behind individual specimens.\n\n\"I love pulling out a beetle specimen that was collected say, in North Africa in World War II, and I can kind of guess at the story behind that,\" Dr Seago said.\n\n\"I think who was this hapless soldier out fighting Nazis in the middle of the desert who saw a beetle and thought 'I've got to have that and take it home' and now it's in our collection.\"\n\nSignificance of collection today\n\nInsects may not always grab the public's attention, or the research dollar, until it comes to the more aesthetically pleasing specimens, such as the iridescent butterflies.\n\nBut that does not deter bug fanciers such as Mr Gillespie and Dr Seago who said even the more common-looking insects were making a big difference economically and scientifically for Australia.\n\nMr Gillespie said the collection was a biosecurity and agricultural aid because it could be used to identify an insect and determine whether it was found in a particular area.\n\n\"We facilitate trade decisions; [for instance if] Australia wants to sell a crop to somewhere in south-east Asia, they want to buy it so long as it's free of diseases X or Y or pest Z,\" Mr Gillespie said.\n\nDr Seago agreed that not everyone might be as fascinated by bugs as she was, but many saw the value in collecting and studying them.\n\n\"While people might not look at this little brown beetle and say 'wow, that's exciting', they will say 'what's this thing eating my truffles or my lucerne',\" she said.\n\n\"We have a whole group of growers and industry groups who are very interested in our findings.\"\n\nWork is currently underway at the NSW DPI to increase the amount of information available to the public via a digital database.\n\nTopics: invertebrates---insects-and-arachnids, agricultural-crops, community-and-society, regional, science-and-technology, animal-science, library-museum-and-gallery, pests, orange-2800"}
{"text":"Jung's split with Freud in 1913 was costly. He was on his own again, an experience that reminded him of his lonely childhood. He suffered a breakdown that lasted through the years of the first world war. It was a traumatic experience. But it was not simply a collapse. It turned out to be a highly inventive period, one of discovery. He would later say that all his future work originated with this \"creative illness\".\n\nHe experienced a succession of episodes during which he vividly encountered the rich and disturbing fantasies of his unconscious. He made a record of what he saw when he descended into this underworld, a record published in 2009 as The Red Book. It is like an illuminated manuscript, a cross between Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.\n\nIts publication sparked massive interest in Jungian circles, rather like what happens in Christian circles when a new first-century codex is discovered. It is of undoubted interest to scholars, in the same way that the notebooks of Leonardo are to art historians. And it is an astonishing work to browse, for its intricacy and imagination. But it is also highly personal, which is presumably why Jung decided against its publication in his own lifetime. So, to turn it into a sacred text, as some appear inclined to do, would be a folly of the kind Jung argued against in the work that followed his recovery from the breakdown.\n\nIn particular he wrote two pieces, known as the Two Essays, that provide a succinct introduction to his mature work. (He can otherwise be a rambling, elusive writer.) On the Psychology of the Unconscious completes his separation from Freud. He shows how tracing the origins of a personal crisis back to a childhood trauma, as Freud was inclined to do, might well miss the significance of the crisis for the adult patient now.\n\nIn The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, he describes a process whereby a person can pay attention to how their unconscious life manifests itself in their conscious life. It will be a highly personal and tortuous experience. \"There is no birth of consciousness without pain,\" he wrote. But with it, the individual can become more whole.\n\nBy way of illustration, Jung considers the example of a man whose public image is one of honour and service but who, in the privacy of his home, is prone to moods \u2013 so much so that he scares his wife and children. He is leading a double life as public benefactor and domestic tyrant. Jung argues that such a man has identified with his public image and neglected his unconscious life \u2013 though it won't be ignored and so comes out, with possibly explosive force, in his relations with his family. The way forward is to pay attention to this inner personality, literally by holding a conversation with himself. He should overcome any embarrassment in doing so and allow each part of himself to talk to the other so that both \"partners\" can be fully heard.\n\nA non-judgmental attitude is critical. If one side judges the other, then the other side actually gains power because it feels wronged, and so justified in its complaints. This is where therapy can help. \"The course of therapy is thus rather like a running conversation with the unconscious\", Jung writes. And when properly heard, the tensions between the inner and outer personality should subside. The result will be a more honest saint who is a lot easier to live with. Moreover, he will find that he has more energy for life because he will be less at war with himself and those around him.\n\nThe Red Book, then, can be interpreted as Jung's conversation with his unconscious. The devotee of Jung who reads it as if it were a conversation with their own unconscious diverges from the particular path towards individuation that they themselves must forge.\n\nNeedless to say, a discussion with the unconscious is not straightforward. If conscious life is not wholly rational, driven as much by emotions and intuitions, then the patterns and instincts of the unconscious are even more buried and obscure. Worse, Jung argues that the modern world has developed a positive fear of the unconscious because it escapes the precise determination, analysis and control promised by modern science. The natural language of the unconscious is not exact like mathematics; it is flexible like mythology.\n\nIt is at this point that the links between Jungian psychology and religion emerge particularly clearly, because if symbolism and mythology are the natural languages of the unconscious, they are the natural languages of spiritual traditions too.\n\nJung found continual inspiration for his psychology in spiritual writings. The Talmud says that \"The dream is its own interpretation.\" Jung agreed. Heraclitus, influenced by Eastern philosophies, wrote, \"Out of discord comes the fairest harmony\". Jung adopted this principle of enantiodromia as his own.\n\nFurther, Jung understood spiritual traditions to be a kind of psychotherapy avant la lettre. (Or to put it the other way round, he thought that psychotherapy emerged in the 19th century precisely because religious systems had begun to fail.) Human beings cannot stand meaninglessness in life, he argued. The decisive question we pursue is whether we are \"related to the infinite or not?\" Religious traditions provide frameworks within which this question can be approached, not primarily in an empirical or rational sense, but rather in an experiential and practical one.\n\nFor the Christian, the symbol of Christ represents complete humanity. The Buddha holds the same hope for the Buddhist. \"The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha,\" Jung averred.\n\nFurther still, he argued that Christ and the Buddha had both experienced their own confrontations with the unconscious, respectively in the stories of the temptations of Jesus and the Mara episode in the Buddha's legend. They are experiences that individuals shouldn't seek to imitate, but might expect and follow."}
{"text":"(Updates with background)\n\nBy Katharine Houreld\n\nKABUL, March 11 (Reuters) - A gunman shot dead a Swedish journalist outside a restaurant in a brazen attack in one Kabul\u2019s most heavily guarded districts on Tuesday, police and embassy sources said, underscoring growing insecurity threatening next month\u2019s elections.\n\nThe Swedish Embassy identified the victim as Nils Horner, 51, who worked for Swedish Radio and had dual British-Swedish nationality.\n\n\u201cNils was one of our absolute best and most experienced correspondents and what has happened to him today is terrible,\u201d said Swedish Radio\u2019s director-general, Cilla Benk\u00f6, who described this as one of the worst days in the corporation\u2019s history.\n\n\u201cWe are now trying to get as many details as we can.\u201d\n\nHorner had been waiting outside a Lebanese restaurant with his driver and translator when two men in Western clothes approached and one shot him at point-blank range in the back of the head, said Zubir, a guard at the restaurant who uses only one name.\n\nThe guard and a nearby shopkeeper said only one shot was fired.\n\nThe attack took place barely a minute\u2019s walk from the site of another Lebanese restaurant, where Afghan Taliban fighters killed eight Afghans and 13 foreigners in January.\n\nZabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, who are seeking to oust foreign forces and set up an Islamic state, said the group was unaware of the attack but would investigate.\n\nHashmatullah Stanekzai, chief spokesman for the Kabul police chief, said Horner\u2019s driver and translator were being questioned but there were no suspects in custody.\n\nThe neighborhood is home to several embassies, supermarkets and cafes frequented by foreigners. Police vehicles are permanently stationed at a roundabout a block away and the mansions that line the road have guards at each gate.\n\nA daytime attack on a civilian walking in that part of the capital is highly unusual.\n\nThe attack comes as Afghanistan prepares for the withdrawal of NATO forces and landmark presidential elections scheduled for April 5. The Taliban have threatened to attack anyone who takes part.\n\nAfghan troops with support from NATO are helping secure the elections.\n\nA small contingent of Americans may remain behind if the next government signs a deal to allow them to stay, something President Hamid Karzai has so far refused to do. (Additional reporting by Jessica Donati, Hamid Shalizi and Mirwais Harooni; Editing by Nick Macfie)"}
{"text":"Overnight Valve released the Dota 2 Workshop tools, and some people reckon in doing so the company soft-launched the long-awaited Source 2 game engine.\n\n\"Everything in this package is a new game,\" wrote RoyAwesome on the Dota 2 subReddit.\n\nA reference to Source 2 in the Dota 2 mod tools.\n\n\"It's all the Dota assets and code ported over to Source 2. That's why Hammer is different. That's why the console is different.\"\n\nHammer is Valve's map creation program for Source. A video of the new version being messed about with is below.\n\n\"The general consensus around the Source reverse engineering community is that this is really Source 2,\" RoyAwesome continued.\n\nValve, which operates on US West Coast time (eight hours behind UK time), is yet to make any announcement around Source 2, but it has been rumoured for some time.\n\nGamer Network's tech wizards tell me Valve may have simply released tools that relate to the Source 2 engine to be used to mod Dota 2, rather than launched the engine proper, but Valve's plan is unclear. We'll have more on Source 2 as the story develops."}
{"text":"Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump in seven key battleground states on Election Day 2016, though some races look to be close, according to early, live estimated results from the new election data service VoteCaster.\n\nVoteCastr cautions that none of its data constitute \u201cpredictions\u201d for who will win any specific state. For an explanation of how VoteCastr compiles voting data throughout election day, well before polls close, see the article by Slate.com senior writer Josh Voorhies at this link.\n\nAs of 7:15 p.m. Eastern Time, Clinton held leads in both Florida and Ohio \u2014 two key states that Trump must win to keep his path to the presidency alive \u2014 according to the VoteCastr data, which can be accessed via the online political magazine Slate.com at this link.\n\nVoteCastr sees very close races in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Ohio https:\/\/t.co\/YSk7PEglh6 pic.twitter.com\/GpiQ3J1HvJ \u2014 Josh Levin (@josh_levin) November 8, 2016\n\nWith polls just minutes from closings Ohio, VoteCastr sees the race there as neck-and-neck. Clinton has won an estimated 2,534,965 votes, while Trump claims 2,516,534, VoteCastr estimates \u2014 a difference of just over 18,000 votes statewide.\n\nUsing data from all 67 Florida counties, Clinton has turned out an estimated 4,712,021 votes so far, while Trump has collected 4,404,119.\n\nVoteCastr also began posting county-level breakdowns for each state in the afternoon. By 5:50 p.m. VoteCastr had taken into account about 94 percent of Florida\u2019s expected turnout, with Clinton holding a 48 percent to 45 percent lead over Trump. See the full interactive map at this link.\n\nClinton\u2019s total, if accurate, would give her more votes in Florida than President Barack Obama won there in 2012. Obama, who won the state, collected 4,161,850 votes to 4,050,540 for Republican Mitt Romney.\n\nSorting the VoteCastr data demographically shows that in \u201cpredominantly nonwhite counties\u201d in Florida, Clinton had 1,366,755 votes to 770,485 for Trump, a lead of more than 500,000 votes in the minority-dominated counties. But in mostly white counties, Trump led by roughly 300,000 votes, 3,008,657 to 2,703,849 in the VoteCastr estimates.\n\nIn Ohio, as of 5:50 p.m., VoteCastr had reported that Clinton had turned out 2,353,327 voters, while Trump trailed by under 22,000 votes in a nail-biting race, with 2,331,714.\n\nIn fact in the VoteTracker county breakdown, VoteCastr has Trump leading by one point, 46 to 45 in Ohio.\n\nMuch of Clinton\u2019s total in Ohio comes from the rust-belt state\u2019s heavily populated, urban counties. In Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is located, Clinton led 62.6 to 30.3 percent over Trump. In Cincinnati\u2019s Hamilton County, the Democrat held a 50 to 40.2 lead according to the VoteCastr estimate. And in Franklin County, home of the city of Columbus, Clinton led Trump 53.8 to 36.5 percent. VoteCastr had accounted for 88.4 percent of the expected turnout in Ohio.\n\nObama won Ohio narrowly in 2012, 50.1 percent to 48.2.\n\nIn New Hampshire, a state that had moved into the toss-up column thanks to a recent Trump surge in polling there, VoteCastr estimates put Clinton narrowly ahead with 279,140 votes as of 6 p.m. Eastern Time. Trump had collected 258,989 estimated votes.\n\nIn Colorado, Clinton has so far collected 767,953 votes. Trump\u2019s estimate stands at 722,891 according to VoteCastr data. That\u2019s Clinton with 46.3 percent of the vote to 43.6 for Trump, VoteCastr has calculated.\n\nNevada, a state where early voting results appeared to indicate a close but solid Clinton victory, saw Clinton clinging to an extremely precarious lead with an estimated 473,173 votes to Trump\u2019s 465,706 by VoteCastr by 6 p.m. Eastern Time.\n\nBut Nevada political expert Jon Ralston saw problems with the VoteCastr results.\n\nSo Stein on the ballot here (she's not), bizarre Clark numbers and wrong number (off by 150K) of reg voters there. Model probs, @votecastr? \u2014 Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 8, 2016\n\nVoteCastr acknowledged, and said it had fixed, the error.\n\nOur Nevada results showed Jill Stein with ~1.7. She was in our survey: we messed up and we are correcting the Nevada results accordingly. \u2014 VoteCastr (@votecastr) November 8, 2016\n\nHowever, VoteCastr showed Clinton leading in Clark County, where about 70 percent of Nevada residents reside \u2014 and home to Las Vegas \u2014 49.4 to 41.8 percent, a 7.6 point lead.\n\nIn Pennsylvania, however, the early VoteCastr count did not look nearly as good for Clinton. But by 6 p.m. Eastern she had pulled ahead in the crucial state, albeit about 130,000 votes. But her lead lagged behind Obama\u2019s 2012 performance in the state, mainly due to an unexpectedly soft turnout in Philadelphia County, home to the state\u2019s largest city \u2014 and the nation\u2019s fifth-largest.\n\nThe former Secretary of State had 2,310,013 votes by the VoteCastr estimate. Trump had collected 2,170,963. Clinton is nonetheless expected to win Pennsylvania, with the final Pollster.com polling average showing her leading 46.4 to 41.2, more than a five-point polling advantage.\n\nWhose voters are going to the polls? Follow our @VoteCastr Turnout Tracker for the latest estimates: https:\/\/t.co\/TEojnpFdaW pic.twitter.com\/19hsZMVjgQ \u2014 Slate (@Slate) November 8, 2016\n\nIf the very early VoteCastr count held, Pennsylvania would have gone down as a major polling failure. But with the updated vote count, the Democratic candidate appears to be on her way to a close but comfortable victory in the state.\n\nAfter a strong start for Trump in Iowa \u2014 where he was leading by nine points in the final Survey Monkey poll released on the morning of election day, Clinton had pulled ahead by 6 p.m. Eastern Time, according to VoteCastr estimates.\n\nClinton had 614,338 votes to Trump\u2019s 599,045, in VoteCastr estimates.\n\nBut Iowa was another state where VoteCastr sees a disparity between vote totals and the percentages in its county-level breakdowns, as seen in the map at this link. Trump was leading by a point in Iowa in the county-level iteration of VoteCastr numbers, 46-45, with about 76 percent of the vote account for.\n\nClinton took an estimated 614,338 votes in Iowa, with Trump at 599,045 by 6 p.m. Eastern according to the estimated vote totals.\n\nIn a state where polling showed Clinton on her way to an easy victory, Wisconsin, VoteCastr results appear to bear out the polling prediction. Clinton had built a lead of more than 163,000 votes at 1,242,938 to 1,079,266 for Trump as of 6 p.m.\n\nThe live election day VoteCastr results are available from Slate.com at this link. VoteCastr data will also be announced and analyzed as it comes in to the \u201cWar Room\u201d at Vice.com, in the live stream video at the top of this page.\n\nBy compiling and posting live estimated election day results before polls close, VoteCastr is breaking with a longstanding tradition in the media, in which news organizations stick to a kind of gentleman\u2019s agreement that they will not publish or broadcast results until after polls close across the United States.\n\n\u201cThe posture the media have collectively adopted on Election Day is paternalistic toward voters and puts journalists in the awkward and unfamiliar position of concealing information from their readers,\u201d wrote Slate.com Editor-in-Chief Julia Turner, explaining why Slate and VoteCastr are taking the controversial step of making information on voting results public throughout election day.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s also unsupported by social science. The news blackout that usually prevails is premised on the idea that publishing information about voter behavior may depress turnout. But such fears are unsupported by research. Academics examining the question have found no consistent effects on voter behavior. Which means that journalists are withholding information on a hunch,\u201d Turner wrote.\n\nThis post will be updated with more details, as well as further data as soon as it becomes available."}
{"text":"Simple and Easy Vegan Waffles\n\n|Serves 3-4|\n\nIngredients\n\n1 cup whole wheat flour\n\n1 Tbsp ground flaxseed\n\n2 tsp baking powder\n\n1 Tbsp sugar (turbinado, coconut sugar, or maple syrup)\n\npinch of salt\n\n1 Tbsp oil\n\n1 cup almond milk\n\nInstructions\n\nPreheat waffle iron to your desired setting (we like ours more crispy). In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients (flour, flaxseed, baking powder, sugar, salt). In a small bowl, whisk together wet ingredients (oil, almond milk). Pour wet ingredients in dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Do not over stir! Pour batter onto waffle iron (I use about 1\/4 - 1\/3 cup) and cook until golden brown. Enjoy!\n\nNotes\n\n*I always double this recipe and freeze any leftovers to use for quick breakfasts when I'm in a hurry.\n\n*This recipe is designed for traditional waffle irons, not Belgian waffle irons.\n\nxoxo,\n\nLauren"}
{"text":"Last Thursday, a reporter with La Presse caught Thierry Bordelais outside of his Chateauguay home and asked him what he made of his neighbours\u2019 concerns about his family taking up residence in the Montreal suburb.\n\n\u201cIf they are worried, all they have to do is move,\u201d Bordelais said, visibly irritated according to La Presse. \u201cWe\u2019re free, we\u2019re in a free country.\u201d\n\n\u201cHas anything happened over the past 10 years?\u201d he continued. \u201cSo why are they worried? I don\u2019t see why they are worried.\u201d\n\nOne would expect the same sort of exasperated defence by a husband of his wife if, say, she downed a bottle of schnapps at the last neighbourhood barbecue and started uncouthly hitting on someone\u2019s teenage son. But Bordelais\u2019 wife, Karla Homolka (or Leanne Teale as she is now known) did a little bit more than embarrass herself in front of the neighbours when she helped her former husband, Paul Bernardo, drug and rape her own teenage sister and participate in the rape and murder of at least two other girls. Indeed, I think Bordelais\u2019 neighbours can be forgiven if they\u2019re not entirely over that yet.\n\nWhat was striking in the exchange between Bordelais and La Presse was not merely its tone-deafness, however, but just how utterly normal it all seemed: Here was a guy, returning home to his wife and three kids, pissed off to find reporters waiting for him in his driveway. Eventually he would go inside, maybe get something to eat, talk to his kids about their days and go to sleep beside one of the most reviled serial killers in Canadian history. Just like he had done every day for the past seven years.\n\nIt\u2019s not unusual to hear of violent criminals attracting the attention of \u201cserial killer groupies,\u201d as they are colloquially called, or what is classified by psychology texts as those with \u201chybristophilia,\u201d a sexual attraction to people who have committed violent crimes. Hybristophilia tends to affect more women than men and, according to at least one school of thought, can be explained as a consequence of a woman\u2019s evolutionary drive to seek out a partner who can physically protect her offspring. Female admirers have reached out to notorious serial killers such as Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez and, so too, have some male admirers, including one who recently propositioned Rohinie Bisesar, the 40-year-old woman accused in the stabbing death in Toronto\u2019s underground PATH system last year.\n\nDespite this particular psychological explanation, some \u201cserial killer groupies\u201d claim that their attraction to certain criminals is bred not because of his or her violent past, but despite it. In a documentary TV series produced and directed by Errol Morris, true crime writer Sondra London adopts that position in attempting to explain her attraction to the \u201cGainesville Ripper\u201d Danny Rolling, with whom she had a relationship while he was behind bars. When pressed by the interviewer about why she\u2019s attracted to serial killers, London shoots back, saying, flatly: \u201cThat\u2019s a lame question.\u201d But when asked \u201cWhy the attraction to Danny Rolling?\u201d she responds: \u201cThat\u2019s different\u201d and goes on to describe Rolling\u2019s many endearing qualities, as if she was talking about any normal guy who didn\u2019t happen to tape his victims\u2019 mouths shut, stab them until they bled to death and mutilate their corpses.\n\n[np_storybar title=\u201dRead & Debate\u201d link=\u201d\u201d] Find Full Comment on Facebook\n\n[\/np_storybar]\n\nThere is no answer as to whether the greater aberrant mind is one that\u2019s attracted to a violent murderer or one that can separate a person from his or her murderous acts. And, indeed, in the case of Thierry Bordelais and Karla Homolka, it\u2019s impossible to say whether their relationship was borne from a hybristophilia-type of attraction or a phenomenal ability on the part of Bordelais to see the new \u201cLeanne Teale\u201d as a woman distinct from \u201cKarla Homolka\u201d \u2014 mostly because all the public really knows of the courtship is that the pair was connected through his sister Sylvie Bordelais, who was Homolka\u2019s lawyer.\n\nPlenty of observers have remarked that one of the great tragedies of the Homolka story will come when her children realize that their mother committed some of the most horrific acts humans can do to one another. But it\u2019s worse than that; since once that initial shock has worn off (if such a thing is possible) those kids will inevitably start thinking of their father, and wonder just what\u2019s wrong with him that he could fall in love, and marry, a monster. There\u2019s no comfort in mom or dad.\n\nNational Post\n\n\u2022 Email: rurback@nationalpost.com | Twitter: robynurback"}
{"text":"THEY spend hours wearing orange makeup and rigid smiles, trying to sell over-hyped items to viewers.\n\nBut would you buy from someone who doesn\u2019t know the Moon is a moon?\n\nAn unbelievable video has emerged showing two hosts from US shopping channel QVC discussing what the moon could be.\n\nShowing off a hideous patterned cardigan, Jane Treacy says: \u201cIt kind of looks like what the Earth looks like when you\u2019re a bazillion miles away from the planet Moon.\u201d\n\nHer co-host, designer Isaac Mizrahi, chimes in, thoughtfully. \u201cThe planet Moon...\u201d\n\nRealising her mistake, Ms Treacy tries again. \u201cIsn\u2019t the Moon a star?\u201d\n\n\u201cThe Moon is a planet, darling,\u201d Mr Mizrahi corrects her.\n\nBut she\u2019s sharper than that. \u201cIs the Moon really a planet?\u201d she demands. \u201cDon\u2019t look at me like that. The Sun is a star ... Is the Sun not a star?\u201d\n\nMr Mizrahi replies: \u201cI don\u2019t know what the Sun is.\u201d\n\nThey get into an argument, with Ms Treacy insisting the Moon is not a planet, and both pleading with viewers to Google the answer.\n\n\u201cSo what else is it?\u201d Mr Mizrahi asks, stumped.\n\n\u201cI believe it\u2019s a star ... or something,\u201d Ms Treacy answers.\n\nLooking a little sheepish, she adds: \u201cI feel like sometimes, though I am educated, I expose in this show that this blonde could be real.\u201d\n\nViewers of the clip on YouTube were incredulous.\n\n\u201cThis should serve as inspiration,\u201d wrote Troy. \u201cThe man who believes the Moon is a planet \u2018that things live on\u2019 is a millionaire who was a household name in the 90s for his eponymous fashion line. If he can do it, we all can.\u201d\n\nYouTube user paddles409 added: \u201cThe moon is a hollow, artificial satellite inhabited by giant, superior, hyperintelligent, ants. Hail Ants!\u201d\n\nMrJohn2010 was more despairing, calling it a \u201cshameful display of scientific illiteracy\u201d.\n\nFor all the QVC hosts still confused: the Moon is a moon, a natural satellite that orbits a planet \u2014 in this case, Earth.\n\nIts weak atmosphere and lack of water cannot support life as we know it.\n\nThe Moon has no moons."}
{"text":"Yesterday it was reported that a group of scientists had put forward a new theory that epigenetic marks may play a key role in determining why people are gay. According to press reports, these \u201cepi-marks\u201d determine how genes are expressed and are normally \u201cerased\u201d between generations, but in cases where they are not erased, they may be passed on from a mother or father in a way that can lead to a child becoming gay.\n\nWhich means, according to Bryan Fischer, that homosexuality might be a \u201cbirth defect\u201d which could lead prospective parents to choose abortion:\n\nAs I have said before, I suspect that not even homosexual activists today want the gay gene to be found, even if it exists, because of advances in prenatal genetic testing. It is now possible to routinely screen for 3500 genetic defects while a child is still in the womb.\n\nSo these activists rationally fear that preborn children who are detected with this gene will be aborted before they even have the chance to be born. After all, if 90% of babies in the womb who are diagnosed with Downs syndrome never draw their first breath, what are the chances that parents disposed to abortion will not exercise the same choice with regard to the gay gene?\n\nThe scientists in Koebler\u2019s article, in my view, are now resorting to genetic subterfuge and are coming dangerously close to saying that homosexuality is the result of a genetic defect, a genetic abnormality. In other words, read from one angle, these same scientists are saying that homosexuality is the result of a birth defect.\n\n\u2026\n\nSo in other words, when something goes wrong genetically, and these markers are not erased, the epi-markers which provide an evolutionary advantage to parents instead do evolutionary damage to their offspring.\n\nNow these researchers are quite at pains to avoid saying anything like this, but the logic to me seems inescapable: Homosexual children, on this theory, are born evolutionarily and genetically disadvantaged. They have been overexposed or underexposed to testosterone because something has gone wrong in the process of genetic transmission. In other words, they are the product of a genetic abnormality at best, a birth defect at worst.\n\n\u2026 I expect many abortion-minded parents will want to know exactly how strong this epi-marker is in their unborn children so they can decide whether or not to exercise reproductive choice.\n\nIn fact, I expect that if this theory gains some currency, it will not be long before we have legislation from the homoexual lobby prohibiting \u201csex-selection\u201d abortions on any child carrying this epi-marker."}
{"text":"A 2-year-old boy died this month after taking a drug-laced drink from his sippy cup, and a Jacksonville woman has been charged in his death.\n\nDana M. Anderson, 30, was arrested Monday, about a week after the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said an unresponsive child, Masia James Wright, was transported from a home in the 11000 block of Alta Drive.\n\nThe child was pronounced dead at Shands Jacksonville hospital, and an autopsy determined methadone toxicity was the cause. Methadone is a pain reliever and is used as part of drug addiction detoxification.\n\nAnderson and her boyfriend, Ernest Wright, the child's father, went in for questioning by police. She said she left a purple child's cup with some of the drug on a bedroom dresser, the arrest report said.\n\nAnderson was charged with aggravated manslaughter on a child younger than 18 years old by culpable negligence and was booked into the Duval County jail on $1 million bail.\n\nShe's been arrested in Jacksonville about a dozen times since 2006 on charges ranging from petty theft to possession of crack.\n\nMatt Coleman\n\n2 murder charges dropped by judge\n\nA Jacksonville man who had been charged as the triggerman in a 2007 drug shooting has been cleared of the charges.\n\nCedric Cutter, who was released from jail in time to celebrate his 30th birthday Tuesday, had been locked up since Sept. 19, 2008, on two counts of first-degree murder in the killings of David R. Holmes, 41, and Martin Surapol, 37, at a boarding house off Lone Star Road in Arlington in 2007.\n\nCutter was accused of shooting the men on orders from Anthony W. Vaughan, 25, who remains convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting. Although prosecutors argued for the death penalty, a jury recommended a life sentence for Vaughan in October.\n\nAccording to the Times-Union's news partner First Coast News, Circuit Judge David Gooding dismissed the case Monday after Cutter's defense team proved Cutter wasn't the accomplice. A description initially given of the murder suspect was 6 inches taller than Cutter and the lawyers also said Vaughan told people in jail that he didn't know Cutter.\n\nThe State Attorney's Office also said without the testimony from a key witness who since died, prosecutors saw no possibility of a conviction and made the decision to not pursue a trial in this case.\n\nDavid Hunt\n\n18-year-old arrested in September drive-by\n\nJacksonville police announced Tuesday the arrest of an 18-year-old in a drive-by slaying in September.\n\nShaheim Hasaan Lomax of the 200 block of East 48th Street is charged in the slaying of Spencer Eugene Winkfield, 20, who was shot Sept. 15 in the 5400 block of Liberty Street in North Jacksonville. Winkfield, of the 100 block of West 44th Street, was wounded in the foot and stomach. He died two days later.\n\nAn arrest report said Winkfield and at least two others were walking on the street when a car drove by and the driver began firing a handgun from the window. Police did not discuss a motive for the shooting.\n\nInvestigators collected several shell casings from the scene and they were matched to a gun found in a car driven by Lomax when police stopped the vehicle Monday. Police also recovered drugs in the vehicle.\n\nJim Schoettler\n\n2 seriously injured when car strikes power pole\n\nA man and a woman suffered life-threatening injuries after their car veered off the road and struck a power pole on Jacksonville's Westside early Tuesday.\n\nThe car was southbound on Rampart Road just south of Morse Avenue about 3 a.m. when the driver failed to negotiate a curve and hit a power pole at a JEA facility, said traffic homicide detective John Hurst of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office.\n\nA man and woman in the back seat were hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. The woman driving the car was ejected. She and a male passenger in the front seat had minor injuries.\n\nHurst said speed was a factor in the accident. It did not appear anyone was wearing a seat belt, he said.\n\nDana Treen\n\nBAKER COUNTY\n\nMacclenny man faces 22 counts of child porn possession\n\nA 43-year-old Baker County man was arrested Tuesday on 22 counts of possession of child pornography following an investigation into a computer at his Macclenny home, according to the Florida Attorney General's Office.\n\nRandall W. Lyons was booked into jail shortly after 9 a.m. on $3.4 million bail after investigators traced numerous images of child pornography to his computer, including some children as young as 1 year old.\n\nLyons and his wife have children, including one adopted from China, according to a website for Children's Hope International (www.childrenshopeint.org). So the Florida Department of Children and Families is involved in the case, said Jacksonville office spokesman John Harrell.\n\n\"The children are with family,\" Harrell said. \"We are working closely with law enforcement and the family to ensure the safety of the children.\"\n\nAttorney General's Office spokeswoman Sandi Copes said no specific victims have been identified.\n\nDan Scanlan\n\nAlachua man killed in collision with truck\n\nAn Alachua County man was killed and another driver seriously injured in a collision Monday in Baker County.\n\nRobert Harvis Gasche, 54, died at the scene of the 6:20 a.m. accident after his pickup truck veered in front of a northbound tractor-trailer rig on County Road 121 just north of the Union County line, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.\n\nGasche was southbound when his truck drifted onto the eastern shoulder of the road and then overcorrected onto the road into the path of the rig driven by Matthew Lee Ellis, 50, of Bradford.\n\nBoth drivers were wearing seat belts, according to the Highway Patrol. Ellis was taken to Shands at the University of Florida.\n\nDana Treen\n\nCLAY COUNTY\n\nJail inmate tests positive for TB; about 30 exposed\n\nA male inmate at the Clay County jail has tested positive for an active case of tuberculosis, the Sheriff's Office said Tuesday.\n\nThe agency is working to identify jail employees and inmates who might have had direct contact with the inmate, according to a Sheriff's Office news release. The current estimate is about 30 people.\n\nThe Sheriff's Office didn't identify the inmate, citing medical privacy laws, and declined to comment.\n\nThe inmate was arrested and booked into jail Nov. 3. The medical screening questionnaire responses were all negative with no indication of sickness or symptoms, the Sheriff's Office said. Tuberculosis was discovered later following a standard physical exam that included a TB skin test.\n\nMatt Coleman\n\nST. JOHNS COUNTY\n\nMotorist hits, kills bear crossing Interstate 95\n\nA bear crossing Interstate 95 about 5 miles south of International Golf Parkway was killed early Tuesday when it was hit by a southbound pickup truck.\n\nCamille Henderson Poirier III, 37, of Hastings was not hurt in the 12:45 a.m. collision with the bear that was crossing the highway from the west, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.\n\nThe bear continued across the road and about 400 feet into the woods where it died. Poirier's Chevrolet truck had to be towed from the scene, said Highway Patrol Lt. Bill Leeper.\n\nPoirier was wearing a seat belt.\n\nDana Treen"}
{"text":"Obama Offers Second Chance For Missouri Court Nominee\n\nEnlarge this image toggle caption Kelley McCall\/AP Kelley McCall\/AP\n\nPresident Obama has made it a priority to choose federal judges who are diverse in terms of race or gender. But for the most part, he's avoided controversy for those lifetime appointments.\n\nThat's why the nomination of a Missouri lawyer named Ronnie White has raised the eyebrows of experts who've been around Washington for a while. Old hands remember that White was rejected for a federal judgeship back in 1999 after a party line vote by Senate Republicans.\n\nNow, in what experts say could be an unprecedented step, he's getting another chance.\n\nWhite has already made history, in more ways than one. The Democratic lawyer served three terms in the Missouri House of Representatives. He became the first African-American to sit on the state Supreme Court, sworn in at a courthouse where slaves were once sold on the steps. And 14 years ago, White suffered a rare defeat on the U.S. Senate floor in his bid to become a federal judge.\n\n\"We rarely ever see floor votes rejecting a nomination,\" says Sarah Binder, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. \"That's what is so unusual and why I think almost everybody who's followed judicial nominations remembers the Ronnie White case.\"\n\nBinder and other experts who study nominations say they can't remember a time when a judge who's been voted down in the Senate has been renominated.\n\n\"There may be a case way back when in the early 19th century but for all intents and purposes this is unprecedented for a president to come back and renominate someone,\" Binder adds.\n\nWhite is unusual for another reason: He took the opportunity to defend himself and his record by testifying against his chief antagonist, former Missouri GOP Sen. John Ashcroft, during Ashcroft's own confirmation hearing to become attorney general in the George W. Bush years. White told the Senate back in early 2001 that he once thought he had a clear path to become a judge.\n\n\"And then I learned that Sen. Ashcroft was opposing me,\" White recalled. \"I was very surprised to hear that he had gone to the Senate floor and called me 'pro-criminal,' with a tremendous bent toward criminal activity. That he told his colleagues that I was against prosecutors and the culture in terms of maintaining order.\"\n\nWhite told lawmakers that Ashcroft had distorted his record: \"I deeply resent those baseless misreputations. In fact, and I want to say this as clearly as I can, my record belies those accusations.\"\n\nSen. Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, followed up with Ashcroft himself.\n\n\"Sen. Ashcroft, did you treat Ronnie White fairly?\" Durbin asked.\n\n\"I believe that I acted properly in carrying out my duties as a member of the committee and as a member of the Senate in relation to Judge Ronnie White,\" Ashcroft replied.\n\nAshcroft said he was bothered by White's record in death penalty cases and that the judge went out of his way to support defendants' rights, even in violent crimes. Anger from minority groups in Missouri ultimately helped cost Ashcroft his Senate seat, but it didn't stop his bid to become U.S. attorney general.\n\nAnd White \u2014 now 60 years old \u2014 may yet have a second act too.\n\nA spokesman for Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, told NPR the past criticism of the judge is \"completely unfounded\" and said she \"looks forward to supporting his nomination.\"\n\nSen. Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, told reporters he won't block White's bid for a Senate vote either.\n\nConservative groups who follow judicial candidates are digging through his record. Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network says given the recent change in Senate rules, she thinks White will get through this time.\n\n\"It's definitely clear that with the new 51-vote threshold it's going to be very difficult to stop his nomination,\" Severino says. \"So I think they're hoping to get through now some of these more extreme nominees that before would have required a bipartisan consensus to move on.\"\n\nThe White House didn't respond to questions about why it renominated White for a federal judgeship. But White may have offered an answer, in his Senate testimony a dozen years ago.\n\n\"There was a lot of outrage about my nomination being rejected and particularly in the African-American community,\" White said. \"And the reason for that outrage I believe, is when you have an African-American judge, African-Americans see that as one more step toward true equality.\"\n\nFor President Obama, who's made diversifying the bench a top priority, that may be reason enough to revisit the case of Ronnie White."}
{"text":"Matt Renshaw saw the shadow people. They hadn't been there for four days, but someone had opened a door and now there they were, right in his vision, running, walking, swaying from side to side. Once he saw them he couldn't concentrate. He had to pull away as the bowler ran in.\n\nThis enraged Ishant Sharma, who threw the ball down in anger and started a fight with Steven Smith before being moved away. Angry Ishant, too rarely seen, is by far the best Ishant.\n\nHe roars in next ball and follows right through to Renshaw to let him know how he's feeling. Soon he hits Renshaw on the hip. Another ball gets stuck in Renshaw's helmet after rattling around his face for a second. Then there is a bouncer that Renshaw barely avoids.\n\nWhen Ishant goes straight and gets one to skid a bit, Renshaw is trapped plumb in front. He shrugs his shoulders and leaves the ground, practising the shot he should have played as the shadow people dance and rejoice.\n\nA few minutes later, the shadow people dance again. Smith didn't make many bad decisions in his first innings of 127 overs, or even when he was in the field for 210 overs. But this one is bad, and Australia have spent all tour doing the right thing.\n\nAustralia have made a collection of decisions so far in this series. It started when S Sriram went from a development coach into the change room for this tour. He coached the batsmen on how to survive, and at times thrive, in India. But perhaps his greatest work was making Steve O'Keefe believe in himself. It was playing inside the line as Sriram had suggested and his constant mentoring of O'Keefe meant the weakest team to tour India, according to Harbhajan Singh, won a Test with a spinner who was fourth best , according to Shane Warne.\n\nThey were supposed to be embarrassed. Instead they had done the thing that teams had been trying to do all season in India.\n\nIn Bengaluru, Nathan Lyon got them off to a great start, and then it was the batmen's turn to step up. On a day when India were outstanding, Australia tried to just get far enough in front to win the game. As good as Shaun Marsh had been, it was his wicket at the close on day two that ultimately kept India in it. When Smith dropped Pujara, India battled to a lead big enough that Australia with a team of their very best players of spin would have struggled to get over the line. The chase and pitch was set up for an Australian collapse.\n\nAustralia have also been clever at little things. After O'Keefe's 12-wicket haul in Pune it would have been easy to think he would be a strike bowler in India, but Australia went straight back to using him as their stock bowler. It allowed Hazlewood more rest, it allowed Starc (Cummins) to be Starc (Cummins), and when Lyon's callous opened up, for O'Keefe to at least stop India getting away. They also got the ball to reverse while using their bowlers far better than Kohli used his. They played spin better over the first two Tests, they fielded and caught better, and they came up with intelligent plans and stuck to them well.\n\nIt's perhaps the most unAustralian they have been in India.\n\nShaun Marsh stood tall and blunted India Associated Press\n\nAn hour into this match, on a pitch so doctored that the Ranchi rolled mud was supposed to swallow the Australians whole, they looked completely at home. But then their first real problem on this pitch had nothing to do with this pitch: Warner failed again and they were leaving their fate in the hands of Glenn Maxwell.\n\nMaxwell was a bizarre choice, as Australia had barely used Mitchell Marsh's allrounded-ness, and perhaps the more sensible thing to do was bring in Usman Khawaja. Very rarely is Maxwell a sensible thing to do, and when Australia needed someone to play very long innings, him coming out to bat at 140 for 4 with Australia at least 300 behind where they would need to be, few would have been confident. But Maxwell played either the best innings of his life, or the one that sets up the rest of it. But as good as he was, and as just phenomenally good as Smith continued to be, 451 never quite felt enough.\n\nWhen they had India at 328 for 6, with Pat Cummins defying pretty much everything to storm through the crease, it did seem like it might be enough. Australia had tried all the tricks they had. Bowling dry with interesting fields designed to stop batsmen scoring efficiently, short quick spells of reverse from Hazlewood, and short quick cutters from Cummins.\n\nIndia crawled past them, but no matter how good Cheteshwar Pujara looked, or how well Wriddhiman Saha timed the ball, Smith refused to concede a single run. Pujara made a double-hundred that was essentially a three-day arm wrestle with Smith's fields. They let him stay in; they rarely let him score. They were tired, and never looked like getting a wicket, but they never rolled over, they never let India score. If India was going to score, it was going to be out of the footholes or with significant risk.\n\nForget the part-timers, forget taking chances. There were no easy runs for India, and that took time, which turned out to be very important.\n\nEven with the restriction of India's lead, and how long it took them to get there, there were problems for Australia. They had only faced more than 100 overs in the fourth innings of an Asian Test once, against Bangladesh, in 2006. The last time Australia batted an extended period to draw a game was six years ago in Sri Lanka. They hadn't won a series since then either. They had only batted 100 overs in their second innings in Asia 16 times.\n\nThis is a team that doesn't win series in Asia, doesn't bat out draws. Going into a final day with two wickets down, against the two best spinners in the world for these conditions, and a pit of despair outside the left-handers' off stump, this team was not equipped to draw this match. Not that Australia were the team that should have won in Pune, or stayed in the game in Bengaluru for as long as they did.\n\nWhat makes this series more remarkable is that this isn't a great time for Australian cricket. It's hard to praise the selectors too much, when part of their plan was replacing Peter Nevill with Matthew Wade as wicketkeeper. Wade has averaged less with the bat since coming back into the team than Nevill did when he was axed. And it was Wade's drop that ultimately cost them a chance of winning this Test.\n\nThen there is Mitchell Marsh, who even if he wasn't injured - even if he had never been injured - was an odd choice for a team with an underperforming No. 7. He became odder when he barely bowled a charity over in two Tests.\n\nThen there was the fact that about five minutes ago, Callum Ferguson was playing. Or that the selectors seemed to pick Renshaw on a whim, and then started to second guess themselves when they realised the India tour was coming up. And they also threw Nic Maddinson into Test matches while they publicly slated the man who has now replaced him.\n\nBut there was some method to their madness. Australian selections are still based on things like grit, youth, and aesthetic wonders that are apparently natural talent. However, when they turned their team around after the debacle in Hobart, they made three interesting calls with their batting. They went for a young kid who would become a star, the guy with the best recent first-class record, and the most naturally talented player they had.\n\nThat got them two players who have been important since, Renshaw and Handscomb, and to be fair, Maxwell was out of favour, and Chris Lynn was injured, so Maddinson was probably third choice anyway.\n\nThey continued to make big calls for this tour. At times it seemed like almost everyone did not rate Shaun Marsh outside of people who know his father, Western Australians, and Australian selectors. There is sometimes an overlap in those categories.\n\nMarsh is not a great batsman. If he was, with all the advantages he has had, he would have played a lot more than 22 Tests by the age of 33. He certainly would have averaged a hell of a lot more than 40 in first-class cricket and he would have averaged over 40 in more than one country. It just so happened that one country was Sri Lanka, and he also has a huge average in the IPL. So it made sense to see him as an Asian specialist.\n\nBut it was still a risk. Marsh might know his game, he might be better in Asia than most Australian players, and he might also be one of Australia's best players of spin - averaging 62, double his average against pace. While that might seem enough, in India you need big scores as well, and Marsh doesn't do that. He can score, but he doesn't score big daddy runs. His highest in first-class cricket is 182, and that is part of the reason he doesn't average more.\n\nMatthew Wade and Virat Kohli shook hands and called it a draw after Australia had batted out 100 overs Associated Press\n\nThat hasn't been a big problem on this tour as Marsh has never gone past 70, and yet both of his fifties have been very good knocks. His 66 in Bengaluru ended up being remembered for its limp end, but in the context of the game it was a terrific knock. The incredible part was how he found a way to survive on that pitch. And that is what he needed to do today.\n\nThe thing is, unlike in Bengaluru, Marsh had some help in Ranchi. Peter Handscomb has made three hundreds in each of the last three Sheffield Shield seasons. He played IPL and county cricket, and for someone still pretty young, he is a well-rounded and experienced. But he's also weird. That's okay if you're chosen as a kid on a whim because you have something special about you. When you're 25, and you've never played for Australia, and your batting technique looks like a drunk guy trying to imitate Steve Smith, getting into the Australian team is not a sure thing.\n\nHad there not been a crisis of faith after losing to South Africa, Handscomb might have had to wait a couple of years for a spot. Instead he was thrust in, and runs followed. Even in India, where he hasn't gone on with it, he has almost always looked better than most of the other batsmen. In Bengaluru, on a pitch where to survive you had to cobble together three or four ideas and hope for the best, he was the one player who looked like he could have chased down the total.\n\nIt was that cricket brain that shone again today. For 28 straight balls Marsh, who had fought hard against Jadeja in the rough, didn't have to face Jadeja in the rough. When India finally got Jadeja back at Marsh, it was halfway through the day, the ball was softer, Jadeja wasn't in rhythm, and the spit and fire were long gone.\n\nFor the rest of the day, the two played so incredibly smart. Marsh made sure to get outside the line, Handscomb took 13 runs off a poor over from Ashwin, so India would have to take him off and change their plans. They looked for runs, turned the strike over when it suited them, and played the kind of cricket Australians don't play in India that often.\n\nWhile India might have looked flat and out of ideas, and could blame the soft ball and the fact the pitch didn't fall apart as they wanted, they also had to credit this partnership because both players were in control of over 90% of the balls they faced. That would be incredible on day one, but for the fifth day, with one guy still proving himself at 33 and another in his first Tests outside home, it was a tremendous effort. When the new ball did start to play up again, and Marsh struggled before getting out, it was Handscomb who remained.\n\nHad those two got out, the Test could have ended poorly for Australia. Wade could have got a ball from the rough, and then the tail would have not only had to handle the spinners and the pitch, but also the crowd.\n\nInstead, the crowd was quiet. Handscomb had silenced them and they were a shadow of how it had been the evening before.\n\nIt even turned out that it wasn't the shadow people distracting Renshaw. It was M Vijay on the field. The only shadows Australia saw at the end of the day were those of disappointed Indian fielders, as they knew a win was slipping away.\n\nWhen Handscomb knocked a ball gently through the covers, the shadows went to collect it, but Handscomb stood still. He could have run, but if he did there was a chance that Wade would have to face Jadeja out of the rough, so he refused the runs. While it probably wouldn't have mattered much - the game was drawn shortly after - Hanscomb had made another sensible decision.\n\nAustralia have no Starc, a barely functioning David Warner, and with one Test to play the score is 1-1. They haven't been jumping at shadows like they usually do in India. They are determined to do the right thing. And more often than not, they have."}
{"text":"Miss Peru pageant contestants share violence against women statistics instead of body measurements\n\nUpdated\n\nWhen it came time for contestants at this year's Miss Peru pageant to give their waist, hip and bust sizes, more than 20 women instead recited facts about trafficking, femicide and harassment.\n\nLeading the protest was Camila Canicoba of Lima who said \"my measurements are: 2,202 cases of femicide reported in the last nine years in my country\".\n\nThe winner, 20-year-old Romina Lozano, said her measurements were \"3,114 women victims of trafficking up until 2014\", on the most watched show in Peru on Sunday (local time).\n\n\"My measurements are: the 65 per cent of university women who are assaulted by their partners,\" B\u00e9lgica Guerra, representing Chincha, said.\n\n\"My measurements are: more than 70 per cent of women in our country are victims of street harassment,\" contestant Juana Acevedo said.\n\nThe organisers also projected newspaper clippings of stories about violence against women as the contestants posed in bikinis at a theatre in the capital city, Lima.\n\nThe women are hoping to represent Peru in November's 66th Miss Universe competition in Las Vegas.\n\nMiss Peru 2018 organizer Jessica Newton told Buzzfeed: \"Everyone who does not denounce and everyone who does not do something to stop this is an accomplice\".\n\n\"Women can walk out naked if they want to. Naked. It's a personal decision,\" she added.\n\n\"If I walk out in a bathing suit I am just as decent as a woman who walks out in an evening dress.\"\n\nThe protest comes amid a slew of sexual harassment accusations towards film mogul Harvey Weinstein and now House of Cards actor Kevin Spacey.\n\nThe allegations towards Weinstein, originally sparked by a New York Times article detailing harassment towards Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd, prompted the #MeToo social media campaign.\n\nThousands of women began sharing their personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse using the #MeToo hashtag.\n\nSorry, this video has expired Video: Meet the woman behind the Me Too campaign (ABC News)\n\nIn the weeks that followed, countless numbers of women working in the film industry spoke out, accusing Weinstein of making unwanted advances towards them, and of sexual assault and rape.\n\nSpacey is the latest prominent man in Hollywood to be called out for his behaviour.\n\nActor Anthony Rapp, best known for starring in the musical Rent and Star Trek: Discovery, said he was invited to a party at Spacey's apartment in 1986 when he was just 14 and said Spacey, then 26, put him on his bed and climbed on top of him at the end of the night.\n\nA second actor has now made a sexual harassment allegation towards Spacey.\n\nMexican actor Robert Cavazos said he encountered Spacey at the bar of London's Old Vic Theatre where he tried to fondle him against his will.\n\nReuters\/ABC\n\nTopics: arts-and-entertainment, sexual-offences, women, peru\n\nFirst posted"}
{"text":"WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said the U.S. is \u201cgoing to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future\u201d after he abruptly canceled a scheduled vote on the contentious Republican health care bill Friday.\n\n\u201cObamacare is the law of the land, and it will remain the law of the land until it\u2019s replaced,\u201d Ryan said.\n\nRepublicans pull Obamacare replacement as bill fractures party\n\nThe vote on the American Health Care Act planned for Friday afternoon was scuttled minutes before it was to be held. House Republican leaders and the White House failed to win over a bloc of conservative members who thought the measure didn\u2019t go far enough in repealing the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.\n\n\u201cMoving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains,\u201d Ryan told reporters Friday afternoon. \u201cWe\u2019re feeling those growing pains today.\u201d\n\nThe failure to bring the bill to a vote is a major embarrassment for President Trump, Ryan and congressional Republicans, who had vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act since its passage in 2010.\n\n\u201cWe came really close today, but we came up short,\u201d Ryan said.\n\nU.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan arrives to talk to reporters on March 24, 2017, during a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Nicholas Kamm\/AFP\/Getty Images\n\nRepublican members of the conservative Freedom Caucus had balked at the bill\u2019s failure to repeal insurance regulations and presented a unified front that ultimately forced Ryan to pull the measure.\n\nA House Republican aide told CBS News that Mr. Trump spoke to Ryan at 3 p.m. Friday and asked him to cancel the vote.\n\nRyan said Mr. Trump has \u201creally been fantastic\u201d in advocating for the bill, saying he \u201cgave his all in this effort.\u201d\n\nRyan informed members of the Republican caucus of his decision to cancel the vote during a meeting shortly after the cancellation. Following the meeting, Rep. Bill Flores of Texas told CBS News\u2019 Walt Cronkite that Ryan told members the GOP would be pulling the bill and moving on to another subject. Flores said Ryan told the caucus they would focus on other reforms for now."}
{"text":"Argentina's foreign minister pales at the thought that anyone would compare the country's current scandal with Argentina's dark past known as the \"Dirty War.\" In his first in-depth U.S. television interview, Hector Timerman dismisses talk that the mysterious death of a prosecutor about to charge him and the country's president with serious crimes is anything like the \"terrible\" times three decades ago. Timerman speaks to Lesley Stahl about the death of Alberto Nisman and the charges he made before his untimely death in a 60 Minutes report to be broadcast Sunday, March 8 at 7 p.m. ET\/PT. An excerpt from Timerman's interview will be broadcast tonight on the CBS Evening News.\n\nNisman died from a bullet to the head just one day before he was to formerly present his case against Timerman and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner accusing them of conspiring to protect Iranian officials implicated in the 1994 bombing of AMIA -- the Buenos Aires Jewish community center -- that killed 85 people. All of Argentina is debating over whether it was suicide or murder. Some say it is reminiscent of the Dirty War.\n\n\"Nah, it's impossible,\"scoffs Timerman. \"We are talking about things that were terrible, terrible,\" he says, referring to the thousands who disappeared and died at the hands of the military junta or its proxies, including horrific executions when they were pushed out of aircraft over the sea or jungles.\n\nTimerman says he will not speculate whether Nisman was murdered or killed himself, but denies the charges of the 51-year-old prosecutor. Nisman lay out his case in a 289-page report. He accused Timerman and Kirchner of seeking a trade deal with Iran in return for protecting the officials, a deal Timerman had secretly made with the Iranians. \"Well, that's a lie. That's a total lie. I never said that. Nisman never showed any evidence that I said that,\" he tells Stahl. Furthermore, says Timerman, only a judge could rescind the standing order that Interpol detain the Iranian officials in question, which would have been part of any deal.\n\nStahl also speaks to the last known person to see Nisman alive. In a rare interview, Diego Lagomarsino was a tech worker in the prosecutor's office. He gave Nisman a gun - the one that was used in his death - because the prosecutor said he wanted additional protection; Lagomarsino says Nisman told him he did not trust his 10 bodyguards. Nisman was very upset, recounts Lagomarsino, \"He told me, 'Do you know how it feels that your daughters don't want to be with you because they are afraid that something will happen to them...', I had never seen Nisman so concerned,\" he says.\n\nThe latest twist in a tale that has transfixed Argentinians and captured the world's attention is what a forensics report commissioned by Nisman's ex-wife concluded: he was murdered and that his body was moved after his death."}
{"text":"To be skilled in critical thinking is to be able to take one\u2019s thinking apart systematically, to analyze each part, assess it for quality and then improve it. The first step in this process is understanding the parts of thinking, or elements of reasoning. These elements are: purpose, question, information, inference, assumption, point of view, concepts, and implications. They are present in the mind whenever we reason. To take command of our thinking, we need to formulate both our purpose and the question at issue clearly. We need to use information in our thinking that is both relevant to the question we are dealing with, and accurate. We need to make logical inferences based on sound assumptions. We need to understand our own point of view and fully consider other relevant viewpoints. We need to use concepts justifiably and follow out the implications of decisions we are considering. (For an elaboration of the Elements of Reasoning, see a Miniature Guide to the Foundations of Analytic Thinking.) In this article we focus on two of the elements of reasoning: inferences and assumptions. Learning to distinguish inferences from assumptions is an important intellectual skill. Many confuse the two elements. Let us begin with a review of the basic meanings: Inference: An inference is a step of the mind, an intellectual act by which one concludes that something is true in light of something else\u2019s being true, or seeming to be true. If you come at me with a knife in your hand, I probably would infer that you mean to do me harm. Inferences can be accurate or inaccurate, logical or illogical, justified or unjustified.\n\nAssumption: An assumption is something we take for granted or presuppose. Usually it is something we previously learned and do not question. It is part of our system of beliefs. We assume our beliefs to be true and use them to interpret the world about us. If we believe that it is dangerous to walk late at night in big cities and we are staying in Chicago, we will infer that it is dangerous to go for a walk late at night. We take for granted our belief that it is dangerous to walk late at night in big cities. If our belief is a sound one, our assumption is sound. If our belief is not sound, our assumption is not sound. Beliefs, and hence assumptions, can be unjustified or justified, depending upon whether we do or do not have good reasons for them. Consider this example: \u201cI heard a scratch at the door. I got up to let the cat in.\u201d My inference was based on the assumption (my prior belief) that only the cat makes that noise, and that he makes it only when he wants to be let in. We humans naturally and regularly use our beliefs as assumptions and make inferences based on those assumptions. We must do so to make sense of where we are, what we are about, and what is happening. Assumptions and inferences permeate our lives precisely because we cannot act without them. We make judgments, form interpretations, and come to conclusions based on the beliefs we have formed. If you put humans in any situation, they start to give it some meaning or other. People automatically make inferences to gain a basis for understanding and action. So quickly and automatically do we make inferences that we do not, without training, notice them as inferences. We see dark clouds and infer rain. We hear the door slam and infer that someone has arrived. We see a frowning face and infer that the person is upset. If our friend is late, we infer that she is being inconsiderate. We meet a tall guy and infer that he is good at basketball, an Asian and infer that she will be good at math. We read a book, and interpret what the various sentences and paragraphs \u2014 indeed what the whole book \u2014 is saying. We listen to what people say and make a series of inferences as to what they mean. As we write, we make inferences as to what readers will make of what we are writing. We make inferences as to the clarity of what we are saying, what requires further explanation, what has to be exemplified or illustrated, and what does not. Many of our inferences are justified and reasonable, but some are not. As always, an important part of critical thinking is the art of bringing what is subconscious in our thought to the level of conscious realization. This includes the recognition that our experiences are shaped by the inferences we make during those experiences. It enables us to separate our experiences into two categories: the raw data of our experience in contrast with our interpretations of those data, or the inferences we are making about them. Eventually we need to realize that the inferences we make are heavily influenced by our point of view and the assumptions we have made about people and situations. This puts us in the position of being able to broaden the scope of our outlook, to see situations from more than one point of view, and hence to become more open-minded. Often different people make different inferences because they bring to situations different viewpoints. They see the data differently. To put it another way, they make different assumptions about what they see. For example, if two people see a man lying in a gutter, one might infer, \u201cThere\u2019s a drunken bum.\u201d The other might infer, \u201cThere\u2019s a man in need of help.\u201d These inferences are based on different assumptions about the conditions under which people end up in gutters. Moreover, these assumptions are connected to each person\u2019s viewpoint about people. The first person assumes, \u201cOnly drunks are to be found in gutters.\u201d The second person assumes, \u201cPeople lying in the gutter are in need of help.\u201d The first person may have developed the point of view that people are fundamentally responsible for what happens to them and ought to be able to care for themselves. The second may have developed the point of view that the problems people have are often caused by forces and events beyond their control. The reasoning of these two people, in terms of their inferences and assumptions, could be characterized in the following way:\n\nPerson One\n\nPerson Two\n\nSituation: A man is lying in the gutter. Situation: A man is lying in the gutter. Inference: That man\u2019s a bum. Inference: That man is in need of help. Assumption: Only bums lie in gutters. Assumption: Anyone lying in the gutter is in need of help.\n\nCritical thinkers notice the inferences they are making, the assumptions upon which they are basing those inferences, and the point of view about the world they are developing. To develop these skills, students need practice in noticing their inferences and then figuring the assumptions that lead to them. As students become aware of the inferences they make and the assumptions that underlie those inferences, they begin to gain command over their thinking. Because all human thinking is inferential in nature, command of thinking depends on command of the inferences embedded in it and thus of the assumptions that underlie it. Consider the way in which we plan and think our way through everyday events. We think of ourselves as preparing for breakfast, eating our breakfast, getting ready for class, arriving on time, leading class discussions, grading student papers, making plans for lunch, paying bills, engaging in an intellectual discussion, and so on. We can do none of these things without interpreting our actions, giving them meanings, making inferences about what is happening. This is to say that we must choose among a variety of possible meanings. For example, am I \u201crelaxing\u201d or \u201cwasting time?\u201d Am I being \u201cdetermined\u201d or \u201cstubborn?\u201d Am I \u201cjoining\u201d a conversation or \u201cbutting in?\u201d Is someone \u201claughing with me\u201d or \u201claughing at me?\u201d Am I \u201chelping a friend\u201d or \u201cbeing taken advantage of?\u201d Every time we interpret our actions, every time we give them a meaning, we are making one or more inferences on the basis of one or more assumptions. As humans, we continually make assumptions about ourselves, our jobs, our mates, our students, our children, the world in general. We take some things for granted simply because we can\u2019t question everything. Sometimes we take the wrong things for granted. For example, I run off to the store (assuming that I have enough money with me) and arrive to find that I have left my money at home. I assume that I have enough gas in the car only to find that I have run out of gas. I assume that an item marked down in price is a good buy only to find that it was marked up before it was marked down. I assume that it will not, or that it will, rain. I assume that my car will start when I turn the key and press the gas pedal. I assume that I mean well in my dealings with others. Humans make hundreds of assumptions without knowing it---without thinking about it. Many assumptions are sound and justifiable. Many, however, are not. The question then becomes: \u201cHow can students begin to recognize the inferences they are making, the assumptions on which they are basing those inferences, and the point of view, the perspective on the world that they are forming?\u201d There are many ways to foster student awareness of inferences and assumptions. For one thing, all disciplined subject-matter thinking requires that students learn to make accurate assumptions about the content they are studying and become practiced in making justifiable inferences within that content. As examples: In doing math, students make mathematical inferences based on their mathematical assumptions. In doing science, they make scientific inferences based on their scientific assumptions. In constructing historical accounts, they make historical inferences based on their historical assumptions. In each case, the assumptions students make depend on their understanding of fundamental concepts and principles. As a matter of daily practice, then, we can help students begin to notice the inferences they are making within the content we teach. We can help them identify inferences made by authors of a textbook, or of an article we give them. Once they have identified these inferences, we can ask them to figure out the assumptions that led to those inferences. When we give them routine practice in identifying inferences and assumptions, they begin to see that inferences will be illogical when the assumptions that lead to them are not justifiable. They begin to see that whenever they make an inference, there are other (perhaps more logical) inferences they could have made. They begin to see high quality inferences as coming from good reasoning. We can also help students think about the inferences they make in daily situations, and the assumptions that lead to those inferences. As they become skilled in identifying their inferences and assumptions, they are in a better position to question the extent to which any of their assumptions is justified. They can begin to ask questions, for example, like: Am I justified in assuming that everyone eats lunch at 12:00 noon? Am I justified in assuming that it usually rains when there are black clouds in the sky? Am I justified in assuming that bumps on the head are only caused by blows? The point is that we all make many assumptions as we go about our daily life and we ought to be able to recognize and question them. As students develop these critical intuitions, they increasingly notice their inferences and those of others. They increasingly notice what they and others are taking for granted. They increasingly notice how their point of view shapes their experiences. This article was adapted from the book, Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life, by Richard Paul and Linda Elder. 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{"text":"Throughout history, doubles teams come and go. Some duos have great runs for a single tournament, or even a couple months, but few teams stick together and take their synergy to the next level.\n\nThese 10 teams, although varying in time spent playing together, have all made their mark on the Melee doubles scene, and will go down in history as the 10 best teams of all time.\n\n10. Husband and Wife\n\nAlthough Kevin \"Husband\" Dassing and Christopher \"Wife\" Fabisczak do not share the same level of victories or dominance as other doubles teams on this list, they should be mentioned for their prominence in the early years of competitive Melee.\n\nTheir combination of Marth and Peach, each in their white outfits, facing off against old school legends like Ken and Isai have earned them a spot in memorable doubles play.\n\n9. Shroomed and S2J\n\nDajuan \"Shroomed\" McDaniel is a highly skilled doubles player, and his recent run with Johnny \"S2J\" Kim have seen them rise through the ranks at a fast pace.\n\nIn a doubles environment full of deadly teams at their prime, taking third or second consistently at tournaments like Royal Flush and Smash'N'Splash 2 make their Sheik\/Falcon combination not one to disregard.\n\n8. Plup and Hungrybox\n\nJuan \"Hungrybox\" Debiedma, one of the Five Gods of Melee, teamed with top player, Justin \"Plup\" McGrath, and won several tournaments in a short period of time.\n\nThe height of their team was 2014, where they took first at EVO 2014 and Smash the Record using a combination of Jigglypuff and Sheik\/Samus.\n\n7. Leffen and Ice\n\nWilliam \"Leffen\" Hjelte and Mustafa \"Ice\" Akcakaya have teamed on-and-off since 2013, but they have established a strong presence in doubles tournaments in recent times.\n\nAlthough they tend to fall short of first place, their double Fox play has introduced an alternative to the usual doubles meta, and the two have taken out other powerful doubles teams in 2017.\n\n6. Lucky and Mang0\n\nThe team \"4 Leaf Mango\" cemented their legacy in doubles tournaments from 2007 to 2014, where they consistently placed first more often than not.\n\nIn 2007, they defeated Ken and Isai at Super Champ Combo, and despite losing the tournament, the victory signaled a time of transition. Their combination of Jigglypuff\/Fox and double spacies earned them big wins at Pound 4, the APEX series, and Kings of Cali.\n\n5. Hungrybox and Mew2King\n\nHungrybox and Jason \"Mew2King\" Zimmerman are monsters in their own right for Melee singles, and even bigger monsters in Melee doubles.\n\nWhen the two Gods team up, they rarely lose to anyone. Jigglypuff is a huge menace in doubles play because of its ability to wall out opponents, save teammates, and work as part of a team while still being a powerful single character.\n\nMew2King's support-heavy style matched up perfectly with Hungrybox and the two won every tournament they entered together until The Big House 5. They placed first in key tournaments like The Big House 3, EVO 2013, and APEX 2015.\n\n4. Armada and Android\n\nIn recent tournaments, Adam \"Armada\" Lindgren and Andreas \"Android\" Lindgren have used the power of the brother meta to dominate the international stage.\n\nAfter winning first place in numerous European doubles tournaments, Armada and Android have shown their ability in 2017, taking first in GENESIS 4, and Royal Flush just a short while ago. The Lindgrens use a combination of Sheik\/Peach or Sheik\/Fox. They are best known for creative combos and innovative teammate saves that showcase their high levels of synergy.\n\n3. PewPewU and SFAT\n\nKevin \"PewPewU\" Toy and Zachary \"SFAT\" Cordoni have rarely teamed with anyone other than each other, instead developing Melee's most synergistic doubles team over time.\n\n\"Pewfat\" is a major threat to any other doubles team. Their combination of Marth and Fox has granted them first place at EVO 2015, Smash Summit, and they were virtually unbeatable in 2016.\n\nPewPewU and SFAT know each other's movements and combos so well that it seems like they share one mind as they play. SFAT tends to close in and output damage, while PewPewU uses Marth's attack range to keep the momentum in their favor.\n\n2. Ken and Isai\n\nSome smashers argue that Ken and Isai dominated the doubles scene in the early years of competitive Melee because of a lack of competition at the time. From 2003 to 2007, no other doubles team could even touch the duo, regardless of whether they went Marth\/Sheik or Marth\/Falcon.\n\nWhen the best singles player in the world at the time (Ken) and the best doubles player in the world at the time (Isai) work together, the result is four straight years of domination with a handful of second place wins.\n\nThey definitely win first in terms of team name, as they called themselves \"El Chocolate Diablo.\"\n\n1. Armada and Mew2King\n\nArmada and Mew2King take the top spot for taking first place in Doubles nearly every time they have ever entered.\n\nStarting with a first place win in APEX 2012 and 2013, the two proceeded to win every doubles bracket they entered together until Paragon 2015. Mew2King is known for being the best doubles player in the world, but also stubborn in counter-picking and character choice.\n\nArmada commented that, while at SKTAR 3 against Mang0 and PPMD, he had to persuade Mew2King to stay Sheik, having already won the first two games with their Peach and Sheik combo -- a decision that Armada believed would win them the game.\n\nWhile they butted heads, they also balanced each other out in-game. Unfortunately, since Armada consistently teams with Android now, we'll never know of the potential legacy and dominance these two could have kept for years on end. Their winrate and domination whenever they decided to team won them the No. 1 spot as the best doubles team of all time."}
{"text":"published in Trail Walker Spring 2014, official publication of New York\/New Jersey Trail Conference, nynjtc.org\n\nBy Howard E. Friedman DPM\n\nHigh tech companies keep trying to push their products onto the trail either in your backpack or on your wrist. Mapping apps for smart phones and ipads. Solar powered recharging stations so you can recharge your ipad and smart phone. But many hikers, backpackers and trail runners continue to eschew the idea of letting technology get between them and the trail. But this spring the newest high tech product for hikers will actually come between you and the trail \u2013 as long as you are wearing socks. Really smart socks.\n\nThis spring a new high-tech sock will be available to runners and hikers that will record and project an image of exactly how your feet are striking the ground. Are you a heel striker, forefoot striker or mid-foot striker? Do you put all your pressure under your great toe but no pressure under your smallest toe? Understanding how the foot strikes the ground can be an important distinction especially for runners since many researchers suggest that mid-foot and forefoot strikers are less prone to injuries than heel strikers. (Walkers and hikers are normally heel strikers). The socks can also detect if the wearer\u2019s gait has changed during a hike or run.\n\nCalled Sensoria, these socks will also record distance traveled, cadence (number of foot strikes per minute), number of steps taken, calories burned, as well as other metrics. A number of existing products can also tell you similar information, such as the Nike+Sportswatch. But no other device on the market geared for the athletic consumer can generate data and images of the pressure generated under your feet.\n\nThe Sensoria sock made of a washable, synthetic wicking fabric will be available this spring from Heapsylon LLC, a Redmond, WA based technology company, Ceo Davide Vigiano said in a telephone interview. The company also manufactures a shirt and sports bra that use a sensor to record heart rate.\n\nThe sock incorporates three sensors, one each under the heel, near the big toe and near the small toe, which are less than 1 mm thick. To activate the sensors, the hiker or runner attaches an anklet to the sock via snaps. The battery powered anklet contains an accelerometer and other technology which allow it to capture data from the sensors in the sock. The user can then see the data as it is being collected on his or her smart phone or even Google glasses, with pressure reflected as either green, the lowest reading, or yellow or red, a high reading. Or the user could download the data from the anklet via Blue Tooth technology or using a USB connection, after the hike to see a video strip of their foot strike history and other data, like distance traveled. Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman Ph.D, who has authored many studies on barefoot running and is the author of The Story of the Human Body (2013 Pantheon) is collaborating on the mobile application, according to Mr. Vigiano. The sock sensors do not have a GPS but can be paired with existing GPS units, Vigiano said.\n\nThese smart socks are ideal for trail or road runners who not only want to know how far and fast they have traveled but also want to modify their gait, be notified if they have started suddenly pronating or supinating and want to try and minimize injury. Moreover, the sock could give a before and after look at exactly how an arch support or foot orthotic changes the pressure under the foot.\n\nHoward E. Friedman\n\nAdvertisements"}
{"text":"Washington (CNN) -- Frank Buckles, the last living U.S. World War I veteran, has died, a spokesman for his family said Sunday. He was 110.\n\nLawmakers Monday began to move ahead with proposed resolutions that would allow his casket to be displayed at the Capitol Rotunda, and plans were already in the works for his burial at Arlington National Cemetery.\n\nBuckles \"died peacefully in his home of natural causes\" early Sunday morning, the family said in a statement sent to CNN late Sunday by spokesman David DeJonge.\n\nBuckles marked his 110th birthday on February 1, but his family had earlier told CNN he had slowed considerably since last fall, according his daughter Susannah Buckles Flanagan, who lives at the family home near Charles Town, West Virginia.\n\nBuckles, who served as a U.S. Army ambulance driver in Europe during what was then known as the \"Great War,\" rose to the rank of corporal before the war ended.\n\nHis assignments included that of an escort for German prisoners of war. Little did he know he would someday become a prisoner of war during World War II.\n\nHe came to prominence in recent years, in part because of the work of DeJonge, a Michigan portrait photographer who had undertaken a project to document the last surviving veterans of that war.\n\nAs the years continued, all but Buckles had passed away, leaving him the \"last man standing\" among U.S. troops who were called \"The Doughboys.\" His death leaves only two verified surviving WWI veterans in the world, both of whom are British.\n\nPresident Obama issued a statement Monday on Buckles' passing, saying he and first lady Michelle Obama were \"inspired\" by Buckles' story.\n\nFrank Buckles lived the American Century,\" Obama's statement said. \"Like so many veterans, he returned home, continued his education, began a career, and along with his late wife Audrey, raised their daughter Susannah. ... We join Susannah and all those who knew and loved her father in celebrating a remarkable life that reminds us of the true meaning of patriotism and our obligations to each other as Americans.\"\n\nBuckles told CNN in 2007 he accepted the responsibility of honoring those who had gone before him, and to be their voice for permanent, national recognition after he was gone.\n\nDeJonge found himself the spokesman and advocate for Buckles in his mission to see to it that his comrades were honored with a monument on the National Mall, pushing for improvements to a neglected, obscure city memorial nearly in the shadow of the elaborate World War II memorial.\n\nBuckles wanted national status granted to the D.C. War Memorial, a marble gazebo built in the 1930s that, for now, honors only his comrades from the District of Columbia. His call was to elevate the designation of the site to join U.S. honors accorded to those who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.\n\n\"We have come to the end of a chapter in history,\" said Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, a House sponsor of legislation to upgrade the DC War Memorial. \"Frank was the last American Doughboy -- a national treasure,\" Poe said in a statement provided to CNN.\n\nThe \"Frank Buckles WWI Memorial Act\" passed the House but had not cleared the Senate before Congress adjourned. Poe on Monday restated his support for a House resolution that would allow a public display for Buckles in the Capitol Rotunda. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia is a co-sponsor of the Senate proposal.\n\nBuckles, at the age of 108, came to Capitol Hill from West Virginia in 2009 to testify before a Senate panel on behalf of the D.C. War Memorial bill. He sat alongside Rockefeller and fellow proponent Sens. John Thune, R-South Dakota, and Jim Webb, D-Virginia.\n\n\"I have to,\" he told CNN when he came to Washington, as part of what he considered his responsibility to honor the memory of fellow veterans.\n\nRockefeller praised Buckles in a statement Monday, calling him \"a unique American, a wonderfully plain-spoken man, and an icon for the World War I generation.\"\n\n\"His life was full and varied and an inspiration for his unbridled patriotism and enthusiam for life,\" the statement said.\n\nBuckles, after World War I ended, took up a career as a ship's officer on merchant vessels. He was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II and held prisoner of war for more than three years before he was freed by U.S. troops.\n\nNever saying much about his POW experience, Buckles instead wanted attention drawn to the plight of the D.C. War Memorial. During a visit to the run-down, neglected site a few years ago, he went past the nearby World War II memorial without stopping, even as younger veterans stopped and saluted the old soldier in his wheelchair as he went by.\n\nRenovations to the structure began last fall, but Buckles, with his health already failing, could not make a trip to Washington to review the improvements. The National Park Service is overseeing efforts that include replacing a neglected walkway and dressing up a deteriorated dome and marble columns.\n\nDetails for services and arrangements will be announced in the days ahead, the family statement said.\n\nFlanagan, his daughter, said preliminary plans began weeks ago, with the Military District of Washington expressing its support for an honors burial at Arlington, including an escort platoon, a horse-drawn casket arrival, a band and a firing party.\n\n\"It has long been my father's wish to be buried in Arlington, in the same cemetery that holds his beloved General (John) Pershing,\" Flanagan wrote as she began to prepare for the inevitable in a letter she sent to home-state U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia.\n\n\"I feel confident that the right thing will come to pass,\" she said.\n\nManchin issued a statement Monday that read, in part, \"He lived a long and rich life as a true American patriot, and I hope that his family's loss is lightened with the knowledge that he was loved and will be missed by so many.\"\n\nBuckles in 2008 attended Veterans Day ceremonies at the grave of Pershing, the commander of U.S. troops during World War I. He also met with then-President George W. Bush at the White House, and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the Pentagon.\n\n\"The First World War is not well understood or remembered in the United States,\" Gates said at the time. \"There is no big memorial on the National Mall. Hollywood has not turned its gaze in this direction for decades. Yet few events have so markedly shaped the world we live in.\"\n\nBuckles' family asks that donations be made to the National World War I Legacy Project to honor Frank Buckles and the 4,734,991 Americans with whom he served.\n\nMore than 116,000 Americans were killed, and more than 204,000 wounded, in the 19 months of U.S. involvement in the war, according to the Congressional Research Service. The overall death toll of the 1914-18 conflict was more than 16.5 million, including nearly 7 million civilians, and more than 20 million wounded.\n\nDetails can be found at: www.frankbuckles.org."}
{"text":"Now that Congress is back in session, it's time to do the people's business again. So let's get on with the nuisance hearings again, shall we?\n\nTopic A: Thanks to the McClatchy folks, let's look in on the scandal that is the administration's giving Iran its own fcking money back.\n\nGOP Rep. Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigation, said the evidence presented made it difficult to believe the payment wasn't a ransom. He asked the witnesses if they could guarantee that the money will not fund terrorism. \"I can't speak for every dollar that goes in and out of Iran, as you know,\" Backemeyer said.\n\nHold on a second. Common sense got caught in my throat there for a minute. The crime dog on this case is\u2026this guy? I mean, really, this guy? At least Trey Gowdy was a prosecutor once. This guy is a former reality show star who first got famous as a politician by whining about his congressional salary. This is that deep bench again.\n\nBut, since we are handed this lemon, let's make some lemonade, shall we? Let's go back to the golden days of early 1981, when the great sunshine of Amon-Ra Reagan had fallen upon the land, and some hostages came home\u2014after which $12 billion in Iranian assets that Jimmy Carter had frozen suddenly were thawed. Six years later, he let them have $454 million more of their assets. There was a great unfreezing under the Reagan Administration.\n\nIn between, of course, the administration sold them some lovely missiles at a decent price. Even if you don't believe that William Casey jacked around with the mullahs during the 1980 campaign\u2014And I do believe that he did\u2014there's no question that Ronald Reagan was in business with Iran almost from the moment he first sat down in the Oval Office, and a helluva lot more business than Barack Obama ever thought of doing. And it all proceeded from the release of the hostages in 1981.\n\nPlus, really now, this guy?\n\nMeanwhile, elsewhere in Our Nation's Capital, McClatchy reports that another predictable hooley has broken out in another committee room.\n\nRep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, opened the hearing by condemning Clinton for intentionally making a \"mess\" of the system for archiving and retrieving documents at the State Department that has frustrated legitimate requests for information from Congress, the media and the public\u2026For example, Chaffetz noted, The Associated Press had to go to court to obtain all the detailed planning schedules from Clinton's four-year tenure as the nation's top diplomat. Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management, told the committee the agency is improving its records management but continues to struggle with the heavy volume of open-records requests it receives. For more than two hours, Kennedy sparred with lawmakers over a range of questions related to Clinton's records. He said the department is currently sorting through thousands of records it received from the FBI following its investigation of Clinton.\n\nWelcome to the next four years.\n\nMaybe.\n\nClick here to respond to this post on the official Esquire Politics Facebook page."}
{"text":"Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice star Jesse Eisenberg is doing some damage control after comparing his experience at Comic-Con International: San Diego to \u201csome kind of genocide.\u201d\n\n\"Maybe on some cellular memory level, that's the only thing that seems like an equivalent social experience,\" Eisenberg told The Associated Press during another stop on The End of the Tour\u2019s press tour. \"Even if they're saying nice things, just being shouted at by thousands of people, it's horrifying.\"\n\nHe went on to state that he was honored to be at Comic-Con, and was only making use of hyperbole in his genocide remark. \"I of course was using hyperbole to describe the sensory overload I experienced. I sometimes do employ that,\" he said. \"I'm a normal person who has normal sensory experiences, so Comic-Con was very overwhelming for me. That said, it was really an honor to be on that end of such jubilation.\"\n\nEisenberg will play Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman, and explained that such hyperbolic statements are just what\u2019s expected of a villain. \"They expect me to use hyperbole!\" he said. \"If I didn't I'd be the hero who usually speaks pretty practically.\""}
{"text":"With less than one week to go until polling day, and irrespective of the fact that the polls are extremely close (they are), we should focus on whether the electoral system helps one or other of the two largest parties, argues Tom Lubbock. In recent years the system has had a skew to Labour resulting from its biases. Will it this time around?\n\nUnlike so many of the outstanding questions about this intriguing election it is possible to give an answer to the electoral skew question before in-person voting begins on May 7th. By taking a forecast of the election result and running it through some simple equations it is possible to give a rough and ready verdict on who is going to benefit from the electoral system. I\u2019ll present the results of this analysis and then move further into the weeds to explain what is going on and how it was carried out.\n\nGraph 1 illustrates the skew from previous elections since 1983, and the finding that on the basis of the best forecast of the 2015 election Labour and Conservatives are almost exactly equal beneficiaries of the electoral system in 2015. Labour benefit to the tune of 41 seats and the Conservatives benefit from a 40 seat skew. As you can see from Graph 1 the last time the system was in the habit of rewarding both large parties anything like this equitably was in 1997 and since then it has been one way traffic to Labour.\n\nWith the headline out of the way its time to unpack. The skew has four distinct causes:\n\nGeographic distribution of votes Presence of minor parties in constituencies Different abstention rates Different constituency sizes\n\nGraph 2 shows how the 4 different sources of skew have changed since 2005. It is important to note that these components of skew are independent and whilst one may be positive for a given party others may be negative for that party. It is clear from the graphs that the largest contributor to the overall skew in the system is vote distribution bias. Therefore I\u2019ll describe how this distribution bias comes about, spell out the method that produced these results, and give a few caveats.\n\nWe can\u2019t talk ex ante of skew and the biases that cause it and we can\u2019t do so separate from a specific election. Each component part depends on the behaviour of voters. In the case of distribution bias the advantage or disadvantage that the system gives a party is determined by how efficiently its vote is \u2018used\u2019 to win seats. If a party wastes millions (literally) of votes which are cast in seats where it finishes second or third then this counts against it.\n\nThe way to calculate how a party is affected by the way in which its vote is distributed is to add up the results of hypothetical elections where each party swaps its vote share with its competitors. We can then see whether, with a given vote share Labour does relatively better than, say, the Conservatives with the same vote share.\n\nBy taking the predicted percentage vote for each party in each seat (produced by the www.electionforecast.co.uk team) and using the electorate and turnout figures for each constituency from 2010 we can analyse the bias at a hypothetical 2015 election as forecast by electionforecast and it is these calculations that produce the above figures for 2015.\n\nFor the existence of this method we have to thank a Kiwi political scientist, R. H. Brookes. The even more extraordinary feat of adapting the method to the three party case has to be credited to Galina Borisyuk in papers written with her colleagues at Plymouth Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings.\n\nDespite the fact that it seems that the two largest parties are being rewarded evenly by the electoral system in this election smaller parties whose vote is not supremely regionally concentrated are harshly treated by the current system. Chris Hanretty has run the numbers and found that, on the same forecast being used here, this will be the most disporportional election ever (with a Gallagher index value of 20.4). And it is this skew against UKIP, the Lib Dems and in favour of the SNP that is driving calls for electoral reform (although oddly sometimes from the two largest parties who are still benefiting).\n\nSome caveats:\n\nThe method used to derive the biases and skew is designed for 3 rather than 5 party politics. Anyone who can come up with a method for the n-party case gets themselves a published paper.\n\nWe don\u2019t know turnout in each seat as the election hasn\u2019t been run. Therefore I have to just use the turnout from last time in each seat.\n\nThe results are based on a forecast of each party\u2019s vote share in each seat. It\u2019s just a forecast and the result may be different (although I have faith in the forecast).\n\nI am grateful to Matt Singh for encouraging use of the term skew.\n\nNote: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the General Election blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.\n\nAbout the Author"}
{"text":"Two Michigan state senators are pushing a bill to allow pharmacies to sell medical marijuana\u2014if the federal government approves\u2014the Detroit Free Press reported last week.\n\n\u201cThe voters decided that medical marijuana was a good thing for the state of Michigan, but unfortunately, very few parameters were put around that,\u201d Republican Senator Randy Richardville told the paper.\n\nMost interestingly, Prairie Plant Systems\u2014the company that held the sole contract to produce medical pot for the Canadian government until recent changes in that country\u2019s medical marijuana program\u2014is lobbying hard for the bill. The company hired Chuck Perricone, a former state house speaker, to move the medical marijuana bill forward. \u201cThe market for this is virtually untapped. The potential for the product is tremendous,\u201d Perricone told DFP.\n\nBut patient advocates are skeptical of the corporate pharmacy pot push. \u201cIf you\u2019re able to grow in your basement there\u2019s no reason to go to Walmart,\u201d Americans for Safe Access chapter spokesman Rick Thompson told the Associated Press. He suggested the goal of the bill is to eliminate patient home growing rights in Michigan, and said such a move is against the spirit of the medical cannabis law approved by voters in 2008."}
{"text":"Inquiry will hear from men abused as boys at Northern Ireland children\u2019s home and allegations that perpetrators were protected by working as spies\n\nAn inquiry into child abuse across a range of institutions in Northern Ireland will focus on Tuesday on the Kincora boys home scandal including allegations that MI5 blackmailed a paedophile ring which operated there in the 1970s.\n\nThe historical institutional abuse inquiry will hear evidence from men who were abused at Kincora when they were children and their allegations that the perpetrators were protected because they were state agents spying on fellow Ulster loyalists.\n\nA number of Kincora abuse victims have tried through the courts to force the scandal to be included in the national investigation into allegations of establishment paedophile rings operating in Westminster.\n\nGary Hoy tried and failed last month to force the home secretary to include Kincora in the Westminster inquiry. Hoy and others fear that the Kincora inquiry, which is based in Northern Ireland and taking hearings at the court in Banbridge, County Down, will not have access to sensitive MI5 intelligence files on the people who ran Kincora.\n\nAmnesty International has described the Kincora scandal as one of the most disturbing to emerge from the Ulster Troubles.\n\nPatrick Corrigan, Amnesty\u2019s director in Northern Ireland, said: \u201cNothing less than a full public inquiry \u2013 with all the powers of compulsion which that brings \u2013 can finally reveal what happened and the role that the security services may have played in the abuse of these vulnerable boys.\u201d\n\nAt least 29 boys were sexually abused by Kincora housemaster and prominent Orange Order member William McGrath and others at the east Belfast home. One boy is said to have committed suicide following years of abuse by jumping off a ferry into the Irish Sea in the late 1970s.\n\nAnother of the abuse victims at Kincora, Clint Massey, told the Guardian last year that he even tried to file a report at a local police station in east Belfast about what was happening to him and other boys at the home in the mid-1970s. However, Massey said he was forcibly marched out of the RUC station by police officers and that his complaint was not recorded.\n\nFormer army intelligence officer and whistleblower Colin Wallace has consistently claimed that MI5, RUC special branch and military intelligence knew about the abuse going on at Kincora and used it to blackmail the paedophile ring to spy on hardline loyalists.\n\nIn 1980, Wallace was arrested and convicted of manslaughter. He spent six years in jail despite suggestions he had been framed. His conviction for manslaughter was quashed in 1996 in the light of fresh forensic evidence and shortcomings at his trial. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher was forced to admit that her government had deceived parliament and the public about Wallace\u2019s role.\n\nAn independent investigation by David Calcutt QC found that members of MI5 had interfered with disciplinary proceedings against Wallace. As a result, Wallace was awarded \u00a330,000 in compensation.\n\nThree men were jailed for their part in abuse at Kincora in 1981, but attempts to establish the truth about British state involvement have been blocked. It has persistently been alleged that McGrath, who was a leader in an extreme evangelical Protestant group called Tara, was an informant for British intelligence. McGrath was jailed for sexual offences in 1981 and is now dead.\n\nTheresa May, the home secretary, has insisted that the chairman of the Banbridge-based inquiry, retired judge Sir Anthony Hart, will have full access to government and intelligence files relating to Kincora.\n\nThe historical institutional abuse inquiry is investigating 22 orphanages, care homes and other institutions where child sexual abuse took place. The inquiry team is expected to hear from around 450 witnesses, some of whom have travelled from as far as the United States and Australia to give evidence."}
{"text":"Everything's obvious in hindsight. That's a lesson that Fire Hose Games founder Eitan Glinert has learned at least twice in the past few years.\n\nThe first time happened at PAX Prime 2011, way up on the sixth floor where many of the indie developers had rented small booths two floors above the show floor. There was no good reason for everybody to keep doing this alone, Glinert thought. And out of that thought grew the Indie Megabooth, a collection of developers who band together and stake their claim on the main floor of PAXes east and west.\n\nMore recently, Glinert realized he had the power to organize something else for the tight-knit indie development community, many of whom he's seen fail \"for just some stupid, avoidable problem.\" And the realization, coupled with what he'd been able to accomplish with the Indie Megabooth, kind of pissed him off that nobody'd figured this out before \u2014 including him.\n\n\"That really set me off thinking that, if indies can do such a good job getting together for something like showing off at a conference, imagine what they could do if they kind of banded together a little bit more when it came to making their own games,\" Glinert told Polygon in a recent interview.\n\nThat idea's been bouncing around in his head for the last year or so. Now he's figured out what to do with it. Tonight at a monthly gathering of indie developers called the Boston Post Mortem, Glinert will outline his plans to help fellow indies by turning Fire Hose Games into an indie developer incubator.\n\n\"Imagine what they could do if they kind of banded together a little bit more.\"\n\n\"You know how you kind of have an epiphany on this sort of thing and and after you have it, it's like, 'Oh, my gosh! That was so obvious. How did I not realize that sooner? Well, that's exactly where we are, and frankly. I'm shocked that we don't see more people doing it.\"\n\nGlinert isn't interested in a classic incubator model, which he said were designed for businesspeople who want to create businesses. Instead, he wants to incubate games and the people who make them. He wants to create an environment where it's safe and sustainable to make games.\n\n\"It's no secret that all of indies talk to each other, right?\" he said. \"There's just been uncountable numbers of times when I've seen people failing with their project for just some stupid, avoidable problem. Maybe they just didn't have a little bit of money that they needed. Maybe they made a bad business decision. Maybe they didn't understand that it was time to iterate on their game. Maybe they didn't make the right connection, they didn't talk to the right person. Maybe they had some sort of healthcare issue.\n\n\"There's all these really solvable problems that come up, and it prevents a lot of indies form making a good game or from being successful. And we realized that that's the sort of thing that Fire Hose is set up to help people with. That's something that we can do to help people with.\"\n\nHe has \"spreadsheet after spreadsheet after spreadsheet\" which he thinks proves that the model can make money. And he's currently talking to investors to raise funds for the quasi-incubator that envisions.\n\nIn the gaming world, he said, the way it often works is that publishers look for good games to fund. But for Glinert, the goal will be different. The goal will be to find good developers, who will make good games. He believes it will work because he's seen it work in the studio he founded.\n\n\"We eat our own dog food. We are living it right now.\"\n\n\"Instead of us trying to pick the winner games, we're trying to pick the winner developers,\" he said. \"And that's a really big difference, right? I think it's actually a much easier problem to identify people that are really good at making games, and really good at making indie games. I say that because we've done that. We have great people at Fire Hose.\"\n\nThere's something else he's doing inside the studio that he hopes will teach him about how the incubation model he envisions will work: Fire Hose has been practicing the model for months.\n\n\"We eat our own dog food. We are living it right now. We are currently working on four fucking games. We have lost our goddamn minds,\" he said with a laugh. \"We're working on all these games in tandem. We're giving people huge amounts of creative control while they make the games. And we're pushing this forward as we speak.\"\n\nThat's Eitan Glinert's idea in a nut: Use the success of Fire Hose games to find and empower other developers to make great games. He doesn't have all the details yet \u2014 he's considering an interview process that doesn't even ask about games, at least for now \u2014 but he's working on it, and he's sure of a couple things. He wants the developers to stick around to make second, third and fourth games. But he also wants an escape lever built into the contract, so they can leave if and when they want to and their their intellectual property with them.\n\nAnd he wants Fire Hose Games to be at the forefront of this evolution in how he hopes indie games are made. As he sees it, it's a way to help others and help his business, too. It's a lot like what he did with the Indie Megabooth.\n\n\"That's how I feel about the games industry,\" he said. \"Why aren't people fixing this indie problem? Why the fuck do I have to go do it? Alright, I'll do it. Somebody's got to.\""}
{"text":"A serious security vulnerability in Windows code is currently being exploited, Google researchers said on Monday.\n\nGoogle discovered the flaw, which also affects Adobe's Flash media player, on Oct. 21. Adobe issued a fix a few days later, but Microsoft still has not issued its own, according to a Google blog post. Google said its policy is to publish actively exploited critical vulnerabilities seven days after it reports them to the software's creator.\n\nThe flaw, which exists in the Windows kernel, can be used as a \"security sandbox escape,\" according to Google. Most software contains sandboxes in order to stop malicious or malfunctioning programs from damaging or snooping on the rest of the computer.\n\nIt's unclear how extensively the Windows flaw has been exploited. Google said only that it is being \"actively exploited.\" In a statement, Microsoft acknowledged the security flaw and criticised Google for disclosing it before a fix was ready.\n\n\"We believe in coordinated vulnerability disclosure, and today's disclosure by Google puts customers at potential risk,\" a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat. \"Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible.\"\n\nThe company added that it recommends Windows owners use the Microsoft Edge browser, though it did not say whether Edge can prevent the vulnerability from being exploited. Google, meanwhile, said its Chrome browser prevents the exploit.\n\nCiting a source close to Microsoft, VentureBeat reported that the vulnerability requires Flash to be exploited. Since Adobe has already issued a fix for Flash, users with the latest Flash updates may be protected even without a Microsoft fix.\n\nThis article originally appeared on PCMag.com."}
{"text":"Current Treasurer Joe Hockey and former Liberal Treasurer Peter Costello both criticised Mrs Bishop's use of expenses on Sunday, with Mr Hockey pointedly noting that he hadn't \"heard of anyone who has taken a helicopter to a fundraising event\". Defiant: Bronwyn Bishop attends a memorial service at the Sydney War Memorial on Sunday to commemorate the Battle of Fromelles. Credit:Steven Siewert The Department of Finance is now conducting an audit of Mrs Bishop's expenses, despite Labor writing to the Australian Federal Police and requesting an investigation, as happened with former Speaker Peter Slipper. But in comments that ratchet up political pressure on the Prime Minister for the mistakes of the Speaker, Mr Shorten said on Sunday that Mr Abbott needed to act and remove his \"captain's pick\", Mrs Bishop, from the Speaker's chair. \"This has now become a test of Tony Abbott's leadership. Does Mr Abbott have the character to tell Bronwyn Bishop to stand aside? Because he knows - and the world knows - that this arrogant misuse of taxpayer funds needs to be held to account,\" he said.\n\n\"He can't dismiss this, as he apparently has, as village gossip ... Mr Abbott's Liberals are addicted to privilege. Expenses: Bronwyn Bishop at Saturday's press conference. Credit:James Brickwood \"<!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-AU JA X-NONE <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <![endif]--><!--StartFragment-->There is not a hint of apology in the ranks of the Liberal Party, there is no apology from Mrs Bishop, she just doesn't seem to understand what the fuss is about.\" Earlier on Sunday, Mrs Bishop was swamped by journalists after the unveiling of a new Anzac memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park. She faced further questions about the $5000 charter helicopter flight from Melbourne to Geelong \u2013 a journey that takes as little as an hour by car - and dismissed suggestions she should apologise.\n\n\"When we talked about the helicopter, that is now with the Department of Finance so I don't think it's appropriate to talk about it any further, except to say, if you look at other people's charter allowances, I think Mr [Tony] Burke spent in the same period $31,000. You have got to get things into proportion,\" she said. \"The best form of apology is to repay the money.\" A journalist countered: \"The best form of apology, Mrs Bishop, is to say 'I'm sorry.' \" But she swatted away that question and claims her case was comparable to that of Mr Slipper, who faced public wrath over his use of Cabcharge dockets, describing it as \"totally a different matter altogether\". And Mrs Bishop also attempted to justify the huge expenditure involved in a recent two-week trip to Europe.\n\n\"It wasn't $90,000, it was $88,000,\" she said of Fairfax's recent coverage of her fortnight-long trip to Europe, including time spent campaigning for an international job. And she repeated her claim that the money on the helicopter flight was spent within the rules, which requires expenditure to relate to the duties of office, even though she was attending a party political fundraiser. The event was, in fact, a form of community outreach, she said. Loading \"The [criticism about the] grandiosity [of arriving in a helicopter] is quite right,\" she said.\n\n\"That's why I've repaid the money.\""}
{"text":"The family of 13-year-old Jahi McMath and Children\u2019s Hospital Oakland have reached an agreement to allow a critical care team to transfer the brain-dead girl to another medical facility. Under the agreement reached Friday, her mother, Naliah Winkfield, will be \u201cwholly and exclusively responsible\u201d for Jahi during the transfer, including in the event that the teen\u2019s heart stops beating.\n\nFor weeks, the McMath family has been searching for a medical facility to accept Jahi while simultaneously fighting in court to keep her on life-support. She was declared brain dead on Dec. 12\u2013 three days after a tonsillectomy surgery aiming to alleviate her sleeping problems resulted in heavy bleeding and cardiac arrest.\n\nAlameda County Superior Judge Evelio Grillo refused the family\u2019s request for hospital doctors to insert feeding and tracheostomy tubes for the move, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Two hospital physicians and three outside doctors requested by the family have deemed Jahi brain-dead. Children\u2019s does not allow physicians to perform procedures on the deceased.\n\n\u201dRight now, arrangements are being made, and what we needed to know was that when all the balls were in line, that we could move quickly, and not to have impediments, so that we all understood what the protocol was,\u201d said Christopher Dolan, attorney for the family. \u201cSo this is a victory in terms of getting us one step closer.\u201d\n\nMeanwhile, the case continues to make headlines across the globe and foster discussions about the ethics of artificially prolonging life. Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, an organization launched shortly after the contentious death of Terri Schiavo in 2005, has been overseeing efforts by several groups to assist in Jahi\u2019s transfer.\n\n\u201cTogether with our team of experts, Terri\u2019s Network believes Jahi\u2019s case is representative of a very deep problem within the U.S. healthcare system\u2013 particularly those issues surrounding the deaths of patients within the confines of hospital corporations, which have a vested financial interest in discontinuing life,\u201d the organization said in a statement.\n\nRonda Hughes, an associate professor at Marquette University\u2019s College of Nursing specializing in health services research and patient safety, said Jahi will not benefit from more treatments. \u201cWhen someone is brain-dead that means that the brain cannot function to support life on its own,\u201d Hughes told Life Matters Media. \u201cIn this case, the hospital has said the patient is brain-dead. There is no technology, there is nothing to bring the patient back to life, no matter the hospital.\u201d\n\nDeath is difficult for many Americans to accept, partly because modern medical technologies have made it possible to prolong life longer than ever before. \u201cThis is an extremely difficult situation for anyone to go through, because it involves the death of what appeared to be an otherwise normal, healthy child. No parent expects anything to go wrong with their child,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cWe can keep her alive for years on life-support, but to what end? Are we doing what is best for the patient or what is best for the family?\u201d\n\nHughes said that Americans are much more accepting of deaths after a long illness, and even of those as a result of automobile accidents. \u201cAs a society, we have a lot of faith that our medical technology can do things that in reality it can\u2019t.\u201d\n\n[Jan. 6 Update: Brain-Dead Girl Released From Oakland Hospital]"}
{"text":"About 10 days ago, his backup point guard situation seemed destined to cause Stan Van Gundy indigestion or insomnia.\n\nNot so much anymore. Van Gundy saw enough from Steve Blake in his only preseason appearance \u2013 Friday\u2019s 28-point win over Atlanta in the finale \u2013 to feel comfortable going into Tuesday\u2019s season opener with Blake as his backup point guard.\n\nBut he also saw a different Spencer Dinwiddie over the second half of the preseason.\n\n\u201cHe\u2019s just got a lot of experience. I like the way he moves the ball, passes the ball,\u201d Van Gundy said of Blake after Sunday\u2019s practice. \u201cI thought Spencer, though, has played four pretty good games in a row. I\u2019ve been happy with him. He\u2019s played a lot better. I thought early in the preseason he was not real solid. He was very up and down. But over the last four games, I think he was good.\u201d\n\nThings are falling into place for the Pistons on the health front, it appears. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope threw a scare into Van Gundy when he limped off in the first quarter last Wednesday against Charlotte, but he\u2019s on course to play Tuesday. He missed Sunday\u2019s practice, but was scheduled to run on a treadmill with 100 percent body weight after taking it to 70 percent on Saturday.\n\nVan Gundy expects confirmation on Monday that backup center Aron Baynes will have the conditions under which he played in the preseason \u2013 a 15-minute limit per game and a ban on playing in back to backs \u2013 lifted by the doctor in charge of Baynes\u2019 rehab from off-season ankle surgery.\n\nBlake and Baynes will play key roles off the bench along with rookie Stanley Johnson, Jodie Meeks, Anthony Tolliver and Reggie Bullock. Blake, in fact, could be used in tandem with Reggie Jackson if Van Gundy sees a need to inject more ball movement. The Pistons spent part of Sunday\u2019s practice with that look, he said. Van Gundy says how deep he does into his bench from game to game will vary.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019ll be situational,\u201d he said. \u201cMy guess is we\u2019ll use at least 10, maybe 11. All depends.\u201d\n\nMarcus Morris and Ersan Ilyasova will be the starting forwards, Van Gundy confirmed. They started against Charlotte and Van Gundy said last week that unless something caused him to change his mind, that would be the starting combination for the season opener.\n\nTwo other bits of housekeeping to note:\n\nThe Pistons picked up fourth-year options on both Caldwell-Pope \u2013 there was never a doubt about that \u2013 and Bullock. That completes a remarkable month for Bullock, who entered training camp competing with Adonis Thomas and Cartier Martin for a roster spot and now has two more seasons of salary guaranteed \u2013 a measure of how good he was throughout the preseason."}
{"text":"Call it the curious case of gold and bonds.\n\nTypically, the yellow metal and U.S. Treasurys move in opposition as investors shift from one to the other in search of a safe haven amid changing economic conditions.\n\nHowever, Dennis Gartman, editor and publisher of The Gartman Letter, highlighted some very unusual activity that's been underway in recent months.\n\n\"Having been at this for 40 years, I always look for anomalies,\" explained Gartman on CNBC's \"Futures Now\" on Thursday. \"It's very strange to me that, since June, as went gold so went the bond market.\"\n\nTo this end, both gold and the U.S. 10-year Treasury note remained nearly unchanged in the last quarter. And, as Gartman pointed out, the absolute prices of both have rallied and fallen in tandem.\n\n\"It doesn't make any sense to me,\" said Gartman. \"If you go back over the course of the past many years, they move in contravention.\""}
{"text":"HYDERABAD: Renowned historian Dr Mubarak Ali has criticised the syllabus being taught at educational institutions of the country and called for rewriting it to make it more realistic.\n\n\u201cThe existing syllabus is meant for [producing] people of a particular mentality. If we teach such things to our young generation then what do we expect from them,\u201d he said while delivering a lecture on \u2018Role of youth in the country\u2019s development\u2019 organised by the Centre of Excellence in Art and Design of the Mehran University of Engineering and Tech\u00adn\u00adology at Jamshoro on Saturday.\n\nHe said that educational institutes should be free from law enforcement agencies personnel but the situation in Pakistan, particularly in Sindh, was different. Many countries had developed only through education and it still remained the only weapon to bring about a revolution in a society, he said.\n\nHe said that he was proud of being a student and teacher at the Sindh University but at the same time expressed disappointment over the fact that SU, Sindhi Adabi Board and other educational institutions were not delivering as was expected from them in the fields of culture, history and education with the result that today\u2019s students were unaware of their rights.\n\n\u201cIf we look at history, students have produced great leadership in the world. In Pakistan and Sindh students have played a vital and productive role in the past even during the rule of military dictator Ayub Khan,\u201d he said.\n\nHe said that students played a central role in the freedom struggles in Bangladesh, Germany and several other countries and they were playing a similar role to bring about change in Pakistani society when Gen Ayub imposed a ban on student unions. But they led from the front and forced him to take back his decision, he said.\n\nHe said the countries like Germany where education was free right from primary to university level were developing by leaps and bounds as they knew they needed skilled youth to maintain the progress but Pakistanis did not pay the attention to education it required.\n\nAbout pitfalls of writing fragmented history, he said, for instance people quoted examples of Quaid-i-Azam and Allama Iqbal without giving necessary details to enable youth to make their own opinions about them.\n\nMUET Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Mohammad Aslam Uqaili said that Dr Mubarak had contributed enormously to the history of Pakistan and Sindh and his books were guidelines for the youth.\n\nHe said that unfortunately people\u2019s attitudes had hardened and no one was ready to listen to the other\u2019s point of view and accept him as he is. \u201cSindh is a citadel of Sufi teachings but prolonged Afghan war has had a bad impact on its dwellers\u2019 behaviour, which needs to be changed to promote harmony,\u201d he said.\n\nCEAD director Prof Dr Bhai Khan Shar said that it was an honour for Sindh and Pakistan to have towering scholars like Dr Mubarak Ali.\n\nThe CEAD would continue to organise such informative and highly enlightening lectures to educate its students, he added.\n\nPublished in Dawn, March 29th, 2015\n\nOn a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play"}
{"text":"After years of declared victories, Cuyahoga County's public health advocates and leaders fear that once again they are losing the battle against smoking.\n\nThe county's smoking rates had fallen to less than 19 percent of residents in 2007. But that rate is back up to about 24 percent. And in in some Cleveland neighborhoods, more than 30 percent of adults smoke.\n\nFor Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman, the statistics are a call to action.\n\n\"Our goal is to change the culture of smoking in Cleveland and if people have a problem with that than that's good,\" Cimperman says. \"People should have a problem with people dying too soon from diseases like emphysema and lung cancer.\"\n\nThe city had already banned cigarette smoking in publicly-owned outdoor areas such as parks, community gardens, and within 150 feet of public places like City Hall and the convention center. Now, that law extends to e-cigarettes.\n\nNigel Aviles, who sells e-cigarettes at Record Revolution in Cleveland Heights, rolls his eyes when he hears the new rules.\n\n\"It helps people to stop smoking traditional cigarettes. They wean off of it through various dosages of nicotine,\" Aviles says.\n\nExecutives in the e-cigarette industry have said the product can help people quite tobacco. But Cuyahoga County's Health Commissioner Terry Allan says there's no definitive proof and disagrees.\n\nInstead, Allan says, e-cigarettes are another way to become addicted to nicotine.\n\n\"Public health people see e-cigarettes as a renormalization of tobacco use. It's a tobacco product,\" Allans says. \"And we consider it a tobacco product.\"\n\nOther cities that have banned smoking e-cigarettes include New York and Chicago. And, closer to home, Lakewood banned the sale of e-cigarettes to minors earlier this summer."}
{"text":"Instant public surveys on Barack Obama's address before Congress showed, by and large, that the public was incredibly receptive to his speech, regardless of political party. But that did not hold true for every single study.\n\nA CBS News poll of approximately 500 people saw approval of the president rise from 62 percent before the speech to 69 percent afterward.\n\nMeanwhile, a poll on CNN showed that 68 percent of respondents -- who skewed a bit Democratic -- viewed the speech positively, 24 somewhat positively, and only eight percent not positively. Eighty-two percent supported the president's economic plan as outlined in the speech, while 17 percent opposed it.\n\nThose results were buttressed by the findings of longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. In his own dial poll, which included 50 participants of mixed gender, education and politics, Greenberg found a large swath of bipartisan support for Obama's addres. That included a 14 percent jump, from 62 to 76 percent, in the favorability rating for the president.\n\nSaying at the onset that this was an \"immensely successful speech,\" he highlighted a few issues on which Obama won over the audience.\n\n* On taxes, \"there was a 26-point gain,\" from 38 to 64 percent, \"the biggest gains that he made.\"\n\n* On the deficit, \"there was an 18 point swing... from 42 percent to 60 percent.\"\n\n* On Iraq, \"there was a 18-point swing\" (no numbers were offered)\n\n\"I've never seen this,\" Greenberg added. For a large part of the speech, all three, the Republican, Democratic and independent line where virtually in the same place.\"\n\nWhat was striking, Greenberg concluded, was \"how un-polarized the reaction was to this speech. I have not quite seen that.\"\n\nHe should tell that to the generally conservative Luntz, Maslansky Strategic Research group. Mike Maslansky, the CEO of that firm, when speaking with the Huffington Post, said he found \"some of the biggest partisan divides that we ever see\" in the reaction to Obama's address.\n\nIn a survey of 29 registered Democrats and Republicans in suburban Virginia, who Maslansky said were ALL generally skittish about Obama's economic plans and housing proposals, Obama managed to win over a large chunk of the crowd. Eleven respondents, nine of whom were Democrats, thought that the speech exceeded expectations. Only three thought it failed to meet expectations, all of whom were Republicans. But the responses often broken down by political affiliation.\n\nTalk on the stimulus, Maslansky said, proved most divisive, as did talk of repairing the housing industry and, more generally, health care reform.\n\nOn energy, Obama won bipartisan plaudits, as he did when he emphasized personal responsibility both for parents dealing with their kids' education and politicians dealing with on pet interests."}
{"text":"How To Talk About A Significant Other's Weight\n\nDear Sugar Radio is a weekly podcast from member station WBUR. Hosts Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed offer \"radical empathy\" and advice on everything from relationships and parenthood to dealing with drug problems or anxiety.\n\ntoggle caption Courtesy of WBUR\n\nToday the Sugars take on a sensitive issue for millions of Americans: physical appearance \u2014 and specifically, how much someone weighs. A young man writes to the Sugars, wondering how to talk about his girlfriend's weight. It's an especially complicated issue, given how society has historically treated women related to their appearance.\n\nThey're joined by Lindy West, a writer, editor and performer whose work focuses on pop culture, social justice and body image. She's the author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman.\n\nDear Sugars,\n\nI am a 24-year-old college graduate in my first serious romantic relationship. My experience with girls before this was extremely limited. I've been dating my girlfriend for over six months now, and she is wonderful.\n\nHowever, her weight has always been a minor issue in the back of my mind: She is not fat but she has a few extra pounds and this can be seen more when she's wearing fewer clothes. I love her and would never ask or demand her to change just for me, but I've been thinking more and more about how her weight bothers me a little bit.\n\nI'm a very thin guy and have naturally gravitated physically toward thinner girls. Until now, I have avoided talking about the matter with my girlfriend except in general terms about others, or the few times she has brought up and engaged with me directly on the matter. When her doctor told her she needed to lose some weight to be healthier, she was upset, although she did not disagree.\n\nSo I spoke to my therapist and my roommate, and although they're both men, they both thought that if it was something on my mind and was making me a little uneasy that I should bring it up with her. I did, and she did not respond with as much understanding as I hoped.\n\nShe felt hurt and a little violated, like the one guy who's supposed to love and accept her and find her beautiful just the way she is was attacking a part of her identity. She was shocked, confused and taken aback. She tried to explain how some issues are so sensitive, touchy and personal for women that they should never really be brought up for the sake of the satisfaction in the relationship. In all fairness, I did bring it up a little suddenly and not in the most tactful or direct way, but I didn't know how else to start a hard, uncomfortable conversation I was not looking forward to.\n\nShe has genes that make it easier for her to gain weight and harder to lose. She has recently started going to the gym, and I was trying to support and encourage her to go more consistently.\n\nMy question for you is: Was I wrong for not being sensitive to how women think? Should I have let it go if I considered it a smaller issue in our relationship? Would it have made a difference if I spoke to another woman to ask her thoughts beforehand on if and how I should bring this up with my girlfriend? Did I need to?\n\nI love her and she is very big on being honest and open and comfortable in trusting each other. Our relationship never hinged on her weight, but I just want to come out stronger.\n\nSigned,\n\nThe Question of Weight\n\nCheryl Strayed: The Question of Weight, you sound like such a sweet and innocent and naive young man, and I think you made a big mistake. Indeed, you are supposed to love and accept her and find her beautiful just the way she is.\n\nI think you stepped into something that has a deeper and more complicated social and cultural history. Women are under scrutiny in enormously harmful ways when it comes to their bodies and their appearance and their weight in relation to their value to men, especially in romantic relationships.\n\nListen To The Podcast Subscribe to Dear Sugar Radio:\n\nRSS\n\niTunes\n\nStitcher Enlarge this image toggle caption Jennie Baker Photography\/Courtesy of WBUR Jennie Baker Photography\/Courtesy of WBUR\n\nAnd I think that, honestly, if you found her to be chubbier than you want her to be, you maybe should have not dated her to begin with, or you should have decided that it was worth ending this relationship with this person.\n\nSteve Almond: I have a slightly different take on this. I think he's coming to us in his first serious relationship with insecurities of his own about his body. There's something in him that feels a little bit unmanned by her being larger. It's not just about her body. His attitudes toward this woman, who isn't thin, somehow is triggering within him a kind of self-doubt about his own body image that he hasn't quite recognized.\n\nCheryl: The Question of Weight, I have strong feelings about what you did because I know how it feels to be that woman who is being told by a man, \"You don't meet this ideal that I've constructed and that society has helped me construct. And even though I love you and you're wonderful and I don't have any complaints about you, I've decided that I'm going to ask you to be physically perfect for me, too.\"\n\nI don't know what's going to happen in this relationship. I do think that this was hurtful to your lover, and she's probably going to carry this into your sex life, as well. I do think that honesty is really important. I think kindness is too, and generosity. I think that, Question of Weight, your relationship might be permanently damaged because of this. But whether it is or not, I encourage you to examine those messages that you've received about what women should look like, and how you might open your mind a bit.\n\nLindy West: What comes through in this letter is that their relationship isn't \"real\" until she can fix herself. That's how I felt about myself; I needed to fix this problem that made me not a real woman and not worthy of the respect that every other human being deserves. Everything was on hold until I could make myself thin. There was just this really low-grade despair all the time, because the narrative that you're fed is that as a woman, your job is to be pretty and small \u2014 small physically and small in your presence. And then you wait for someone to pick you. I was always very aware that I didn't look like the kind of girl who got picked, and so I was sort of resigned to the fact that I would be alone.\n\nBut what you learn when you grow up is, what you look like is irrelevant compared to what you are like. If you're confident and fun and engaged with people and you go out and are yourself, that's extremely attractive. And that proved true for me.\n\nYou can get more advice from the Sugars each week on Dear Sugar Radio from WBUR. Listen to the full episode to hear more discussion about how weight and physical appearance can affect relationships.\n\nHave a question for the Sugars? Email dearsugarradio@gmail.com and it may be answered on a future episode.\n\nYou can also listen to Dear Sugar Radio on iTunes, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app."}
{"text":"If the international spread of SlutWalk means anything, it means this: You should never underestimate the power of a simple idea. Nor should you expect that idea to remain simple for very long.\n\nSlutWalk has become massive; its website lists completed or planned events in several dozen American and Canadian cities, with still more marches occurring in Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK. But it\u2019s worth noting that its inspiration was relatively small and local. This January, at Osgoode Hall Law School, a Toronto policeman giving a lecture on campus safety told students that, although he\u2019d been \u201ctold not to say it,\u201d he thought women should stop dressing like \u201csluts\u201d so as to avoid being sexually assaulted.\n\nWhich, of course, is one of the oldest and worst lines in the book, when it comes to excusing rape. The fact is, anyone can be sexually assaulted; young or old, of any gender, of any race, conventionally attractive or not. The only common denominator in any rape or sexual assault is the presence of a sexual assailant. But the fact that a police officer, someone to whom a victim would be expected to turn to after an assault, could include victim-blaming in his \u201csafety tips\u201d: Well. It was a small incident. But it spoke volumes.\n\nHence, SlutWalk: Women and men taking to the streets to demand accountability from the Toronto police. Its goals were small and local focused; its message was equally simple and unequivocal. Its branding, however, stood out.\n\n\u201cWhether dished out as a serious indictment of one\u2019s character or merely as a flippant insult, the intent behind the word [\u2018slut\u2019] is always to wound,\u201d said the organizers, \u201cso we\u2019re taking it back. \u2018Slut\u2019 is being re-appropriated.\u201d\n\nAnd so they did. The SlutWalk movement said \u2014 indeed, implicitly demanded \u2014 that those who participated in the march should be willing to identify as \u201csluts or allies.\u201d It was an incredibly catchy, implicitly theatrical premise. Many of the protesters played that up, dressing in the sorts of revealing and provocative outfits that the Toronto policeman had condemned. The cameras tended to find those protesters first.\n\nFor some of those who joined, it was a simple way to identify. Some were sex workers, used to hearing that their impermissible sexuality was an excuse for police brutality, legal oppression, and violent assault or even murder. Others were women who enjoyed casual sex, or people who had sex in non-vanilla ways. For others, the label came less naturally; still, since any given woman can be labeled a \u201cslut,\u201d even the most monogamous or virginal among us, it made sense to march in solidarity. The simplicity of the message \u2014 no matter who you are, or how anyone else views your sexuality, you deserve safety \u2014 made it possible for the movement to gain ground anywhere that message rang true, until the outrage was not so much about anything that one man had done, but about the rage and pain that come with being sexual in a rape culture. And so, SlutWalk transcended Toronto, and the offending police officer, and became an international movement.\n\nAnd yet. Several women of color have written that the event is based in white culture, white problems, and white assumptions \u2014 for example, the idea that one can expect \u201csafety\u201d when dealing with law enforcement in the first place.\n\n\u201cThis event will not stop the criminalization of black women in New Orleans,\u201d wrote Aura Blogando, \u201cnor will it stop one woman from being potentially deported after she calls the police subsequent to being raped. SlutWalk completely ignores the way institutional violence is leveled against women of color. The event highlights its origins from a privileged position of relative power, replete with an entitlement of assumed safety that women of color would never even dream of.\u201d\n\nStill others have pointed out that the mere fact of wearing a \u201cslutty\u201d outfit does not always signify freedom, and feeling pressured to do so, or to reclaim the \u201cslut\u201d label, can in fact intensify and re-iterate their oppression: \u201cIn the post 9\/11 climate,\u201d wrote Harsha Walia, \u201cthe focus on a particular version of sex(y)-positive feminism runs the risk of further marginalizing Muslim women\u2019s movements who are hugely impacted by the racist \u2018reasonable accommodation\u2019 debate and state policies against the niqab.\u201d Simply telling women that they \u201ccan\u201d or \u201cshould\u201d be more sexually open or dress more scantily does not make sense, if those women are routinely persecuted for a seeming lack of sexual availability, or for wearing clothes that cover \u201ctoo much\u201d of their bodies. In a virgin-whore dichotomy, women are of course assaulted on both ends of the spectrum; anyone who plays the game will lose. That\u2019s how rigged games work.\n\nThis matters. Because these are the dangers of making an international movement out of a simple, local protest. \u201cSlutWalk\u201d made sense, as an immediate reaction to the events in Toronto: When the police officer blames rape on revealing outfits, you wear a revealing outfit. When the police officer uses the term \u201cslut\u201d in a derogatory way, you use it in a positive one. But once it was exported, its flaws became apparent. It did not, and could not, speak to the needs of every woman; nor could it adequately sum up and address every facet of rape culture. And so, removed from its original context, it stopped being simple, and became simplistic.\n\nSimple ideas are great for attracting crowds, especially when they come with camera-ready spectacle. But there is no way that SlutWalk can be made to bear the entire weight of anti-rape activism; relying solely on SlutWalk as our means of protesting anything \u2014 rape, sexism, even something as specific as slut-shaming \u2014 will invariably reveal that it does not measure up. No one protest or movement, not even one as widespread and as great at calling attention to itself as SlutWalk, can do that.\n\nFeminism cannot live on SlutWalks alone. The fact that the movement has been so widely embraced does not mean that we should turn to it exclusively. What it means is that other protests can and should be happening; in addition to making the SlutWalk movement itself more inclusive and responsive, it\u2019s essential that its organizers turn the mic over to other organizers, with ideas about protesting rape culture that extend beyond the \u201creclaiming slut\u201d banner. The best thing for SlutWalkers now is to listen to the people who feel left out, and help them. The Sluts can and should keep Walking. But they should also recognize when to follow someone else\u2019s lead."}
{"text":"TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami\/NSF) \u2014 Judges may have another way to help repeat DUI offenders sober up for good.\n\nInstead of blowing into a machine which keep their cars from starting, they may have to get their breath tested twice a day.\n\nThe proposal, approved by a House committee last week, would allow judges to place repeat DUI offenders into a new program, known elsewhere as \u201c24\/7 Sobriety,\u201d instead of having ignition interlock devices installed on their vehicles. State law currently requires interlock devices for drivers with more than one DUI. Judges would have the discretion to order the devices as well as the 24\/7 program.\n\nIn general, the program outlined in HB 7005, approved unanimously by the House Economic Affairs Committee, would require that drivers submit to twice-daily breath tests, random urinalysis or continuous monitoring devices, such as drug patches or ankle bracelets.\n\nSupporters say the 24\/7 abstinence-based programs have shown significant reductions in drunken driving and other alcohol- or drug-related offenses such as domestic violence, and have better compliance rates than the interlock devices.\n\nThe proposal is the latest salvo in a vendor-driven fight about possibly expanding the use of ignition interlock devices, used by more than 10,000 Floridians, to first-time DUI offenders. Vendors have pushed that idea over the objections of state highway safety officials.\n\nBut instead of adding to the vendors\u2019 market share, an amendment slipped onto HB 7005 last week would lead to the new 24\/7 program \u2014 possibly shrinking the use of interlock devices. The bill also includes a priority of House Speaker Will Weatherford dealing with driver\u2019s licenses.\n\nFlorida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles Executive Director Julie Jones, who recently lost a court fight to interlock-device vendors, is one of a growing number of driving safety experts who believe the abstinence-based programs are a better way to ensure that repeat offenders clean up their act. Jones has proposed shifting half of interlock-device users into a 24\/7 program and measuring the effectiveness of both programs for five years.\n\n\u201cThe current IID (ignition interlock device) program has been very helpful for the treatment of impaired driving offenders. But why limit ourselves to one method that is exclusive to drinking while driving while drugged-driving violations continue to increase?\u201d Jones said recently.\n\nJones said she was not responsible for the amendment that would give judges the option to impose the 24\/7 program instead of the interlock devices, but she did change it so that her department would have to authorize the program. And she has repeatedly objected to efforts by the vendors to expand the interlock-device program \u2014 a $10 million a year industry in Florida \u2014 to first-time offenders, something backed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving and favored by federal transportation officials. But Jones said research shows that the majority of first-time offenders don\u2019t need more intervention to stay out of trouble.\n\nThe amendment was proposed by a vendor for Intoximeter, a hand-held breath testing device used by 24\/7 programs elsewhere and already in use in other programs in Florida.\n\nLetting drivers with multiple DUI offenses get behind the wheel without interlock devices would be a major shift in policy, Douglas Mannheimer, a lobbyist for Alcohol Countermeasure Systems, told the House panel last week. ACS is one of three interlock vendors now doing business with the state.\n\n\u201cThe difference in policy now is that person that\u2019s in the program may \u2026 go to the convenience store, buy something, get in that car. Right now \u2026 the car would not start,\u201d Mannheimer said.\n\nBut under the proposed changes, \u201cwe could have second, third or even fourth offenders driving when I think the word is they proverbially fell off the wagon that afternoon,\u201d he said.\n\nMeanwhile, a pilot 24\/7 program in Jacksonville, the first in Florida, is slated to begin during the first week in May. The program was developed by the Jacksonville Sheriff\u2019s Office and the Northeast Florida Safety Council, the organization that provides court-ordered services, including DUI programs, in a nine-county region including Jacksonville.\n\nBill Mickelson helped create the country\u2019s first \u201c24\/7 Sobriety\u201d program in 2005 when, as a deputy state attorney general in South Dakota, he was intent on reducing the number of prisoners locked up for alcohol- or drug-related offenses, about two-thirds of those behind bars in the state at the time.\n\nMickelson, now a consultant, came to Florida to try to convince sheriffs and others to embrace the 24\/7 abstinence approach for habitual offenders. In the eight years since South Dakota implemented 24\/7, 37,000 individuals have participated in the program and provided a total of 7 million breath tests. A RAND Corp. study found a 12 percent reduction in repeat DUI arrests over a five-year period.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s the first time in their alcoholic careers that somebody\u2019s held them accountable for their sobriety,\u201d Mickelson, who also consults for Intoximeters, Inc., said. \u201cThere is a sure and measured and a swift consequence for a bad act, unlike other testing methodologies where there\u2019s a time delay.\u201d\n\nSouth Dakota\u2019s 24\/7 program has become a model for the country, and federal highway safety officials are encouraging states to adopt it. So far, only two other states \u2014 North Dakota and Montana \u2014 have implemented similar programs statewide.\n\nThe programs are premised on frequent testing paired with immediate consequences, usually jail time, for individuals who fail breath tests. In Jacksonville, those who fail breath tests for the first time will go to jail for 12 hours and face 24 hours for a second slip. The same consequences apply for individuals wearing patches or bracelets measuring alcohol or drugs. A third failure would result in an appearance before a judge and incarceration.\n\nThe interlock devices have been in use in Florida for a decade. Since then, nearly 6,000 of the 68,048 drivers ordered into the program received subsequent DUIs, and about 1,000 received DUIs while they were in the interlock program, according to data provided by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.\n\nThe Jacksonville pilot project will give judges the option of ordering the 24\/7 program as a requirement for pretrial release, probation or bond, and is not limited to driving offenses. Drivers ordered into the program may also have to participate in other programs, including rehab or counseling, required separately for some DUI offenders.\n\nNortheast Florida Safety Council Executive Director Sue Holley, who helped develop the Duval County pilot project, said interlock devices work well for some drivers. But the devices don\u2019t stop people from drinking and driving or from drinking altogether.\n\n\u201cThe substance abuse issue is so complicated and complex and it\u2019s very difficult to find the one thing that works for everybody,\u201d Holley, who has worked with DUI programs for three decades.\n\nLike DHSMV Director Jones, Holley views 24\/7 sobriety as a more modern, holistic approach toward treating repeat offenders before allowing them to have their licenses fully reinstated.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re looking at this program, the 24\/7 program, as probably being the next revelation for the DUI programs to be able to better serve the DUI offender, to provide better outcomes as far as their success with not re-offending, which is our goal,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to be able to go home and sleep at night. I don\u2019t want to have to rely on one single tool to be the magic torch.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe News Service of Florida\u2019s Dara Kam contributed to this report.\u201d"}
{"text":"SAN DIEGO (AP) \u2014 A U.S. Navy commander was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison for his role in a fraud and bribery scheme that cost the government about $35 million.\n\nCmdr. Bobby Pitts, 48, of Chesapeake, Virginia, was the latest person to be sentenced in connection with a decade-long scam linked to a Singapore defense contractor known as \u201cFat Leonard\u201d Francis.\n\nFrancis bribed Navy officials to help him overbill the Navy for fuel, food and other services his company provided to ships docked in Asian ports, according to prosecutors. The bribes allegedly ranged from cash and prostitutes to Cuban cigars and Spanish suckling pigs.\n\nPitts pleaded guilty in 2015 to charges that alleged he tried to obstruct a federal investigation while in charge of the Navy\u2019s Fleet Industrial Supply Command in Singapore.\n\nIn handing down the sentence against Pitts, U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino told him that he had \u201cbetrayed the Navy and betrayed the country,\u201d prosecutors said in a news release.\n\n\u201cPitts deliberately and methodically undermined government operations and in doing so, diverted his allegiance from his country and colleagues to a foreign defense contractor, and for that, he is paying a high price,\u201d said Adam Braverman, the U.S. Attorney in San Diego.\n\nIn addition to his prison sentence, Pitts was also ordered to pay $22,500 in fines and restitution."}
{"text":"Jan 20, 2013; Atlanta, GA, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Frank Gore (21) runs for a touchdown against the Atlanta Falcons during the third quarter of the NFC Championship game at the Georgia Dome. Mandatory Credit: Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports\n\nThe San Francisco 49ers are very angry about last year, so they want to take out their anger on Matt Ryan and the Atlanta Falcons. And Colin Kaepernick and company are more than capable.\n\nSan Francisco and Atlanta meet today at 12 PM PT at the Georgia Dome with a berth in Super Bowl 47 at stake. Colin Kaepernick accumulated 444 total yards last year, and he is trying to exploit a defense that has struggled against the read-option. Ryan and his star receivers are going to try and tear up San Francisco\u2019s secondary. But they won\u2019t be able to do that if Aldon and Justin Smith apply pressure.\n\nStay tuned here for updates and analysis of the 2013 NFC Championship."}
{"text":"PULLMAN, Wash. - Researchers at Washington State University have discovered a new type of cooperative photosynthesis that could be used in engineering microbial communities for waste treatment and bioenergy production.\n\nThey report today on the unique metabolic process seen for the first time in a pair of bacteria in Nature Communications.\n\nPhotosynthetic bacteria account for nearly half of the world's food production and carbon-based organic material. The research could also improve understanding of lake ecology.\n\nPhototroph + electron generator\n\nProsthecochloris aestaurii , a green-tinged, plant-like microbe, comes from the extreme environment of Hot Lake, a high salinity lake in northern Okanogan County near Oroville, Wash. Discovered and identified a few years ago by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Southern Illinois University, the bacterium is able to photosynthesize, using sunlight along with elemental sulfur or hydrogen sulfide to grow.\n\nThe researchers noticed that P. aestuarii tended to gather around a carbon electrode, an electricity conductor that they were operating in Hot Lake. The researchers isolated and grew P. aestuarii and determined that, similar to the way half of a battery works, the bacterium is able to grab electrons from a solid electrode and use them for photosynthesis. The pink-colored Geobacter sulfurreducens meanwhile, is known for its ability to convert waste organic matter to electricity in microbial fuel cells. The bacterium is also used in environmental cleanup.\n\nG. sulfurreducens, like animals and humans, can't photosynthesize. It consumes organic compounds, such as acetate, and \"breathes\" out carbon dioxide.\n\nThe bacterium is known for its ability to donate electrons to a solid electrode. As it consumes acetate, it generates electrons, which can be collected as electricity.\n\nMicrobes paired up in WSU lab\n\nLed by Haluk Beyenal, the Paul Hohenschuh Distinguished Professor in the WSU Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, and postdoctoral researcher Phuc Ha, the research team surmised that the bacteria might be able to help each other grow and put them together in the lab.\n\nThe researchers found that P. aestuarii could accept electrons generated from G. sulfurreducens and use them in a new type of anaerobic photosynthesis never before seen. Similar to how a battery or fuel cell works, the bacteria transfer electrons. They feed off each other to grow under conditions in which neither could grow independently.\n\nEcology-friendly implications\n\nFrom an ecological perspective, this new form of metabolism may play an important role in carbon cycling in oxygen free zones of poorly mixed freshwater lakes. It may also present new possibilities for engineering microbial communities for waste treatment and bioenergy production.\n\n\"We think this could be a common bio-electrochemical process in nature,\" said Beyenal, whose team is working to better understand the electron transfer mechanism.\n\n###\n\nThe work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Researchers from PNNL and China University of Geoscience also collaborated on the project.\n\nThe work is in keeping with WSU's Grand Challenges, a suite of research initiatives aimed at large societal issues. It is particularly relevant to the challenge of sustainable resources and its theme of meeting sustainable energy needs while protecting the environment."}
{"text":"Donald Trump\u2019s poll numbers in the Philly suburbs have gone from bad to worse.\n\nThe latest poll shows his trouble might be even bigger than anticipated, and because respondents in the crucial ring around the city have a big problem with the \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d tape.\n\nAccording to a poll released this morning from Bloomberg, Hillary Clinton now leads Trump in the Philly \u2018burbs by 28 points. Her overall lead in the state among likely voters is 48-39. This is the first major poll of Pennsylvania since an audio recording of Trump saying, among other comments, \u201cGrab \u2019em by the pussy. You can do anything.\u201d\n\nThe difference between the rest of Pennsylvania and Montgomery, Bucks, Delaware and Chester counties is stark. All of Pennsylvania, for instance, is pretty lukewarm on Trump. Forty percent of Bloomberg respondents said they had a favorable rating of him. But people in the Philly suburbs really can\u2019t stand him. Only 28 percent of respondents said they had a favorable rating of him.\n\nThe lack of love for Trump is obvious when compared to how the \u2018burbs voted in 2012. Then, Barack Obama still beat Mitt Romney handily, but his margin was 10 percent. This poll shows Clinton 18 points ahead of that. It also shows Clinton eight points ahead of a late September poll that showed her with a 20-point lead in the Philly suburbs.\n\nWhy such a huge margin for Clinton? The growth in Clinton\u2019s lead may have a little to do with the \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d tape. In the suburbs, 83 percent of respondents said they were bothered either a little or a lot by Trump\u2019s comments. But the rest of the state was angered, too, with 78 percent of Pennsylvania respondents overall saying they were bothered.\n\nLike many other pieces of this election, Clinton\u2019s huge advantage in the suburbs in some ways defies explanation. While she expectedly leads by huge margins among women and college graduates in the suburbs, she\u2019s also tied with Trump among whites and leading him by one point among men in the combined area of Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Chester counties, according to the Bloomberg poll. In the rest of the state, Trump is dominating these categories and catering to them with his message.\n\nBloomberg noted that in the rest of Pennsylvania Trump has an 11-point lead. The problem for Trump \u2014 and the positive for Clinton \u2014 is the rest of Pennsylvania doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re failing in the \u2018burbs, which accounted for 22 percent of the state\u2019s voters in 2012.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t know how you win if you lose the suburbs by a certain percentage,\u201d said Terry Madonna, a Franklin and Marshall pollster. \u201cYou can\u2019t lose by 20 points.\u201d"}
{"text":"While discussions continue on the future of the Prototype Challenge platform, the existing spec Oreca FLM09 cars could receive a series of updates for next year\u2019s IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season.\n\nThe possible updates, ranging from a 30-50 horsepower increase, to a new ECU that includes traction control and telemetry, and minor aero changes have been proposed by teams as a cost-effective, stop-gap measure for the aging French prototype until the introduction of an all-new platform for as early as 2017.\n\nIMSA met with PC team owners last weekend at Circuit of The Americas to discuss various options for the future.\n\n\u201cIMSA continues to evaluate the future of the Prototype Challenge class through 2016 and beyond,\u201d said Simon Hodgson, IMSA managing director, racing operations.\n\n\u201cAs part of this process, IMSA has ongoing dialog with current PC competitors, as well as ORECA and Katech, the current single-specification suppliers, in addition to considering other options.\n\n\u201cIMSA will ensure our loyal PC stakeholders \u2013 and any future stakeholders \u2013 are kept fully informed as we near a conclusion to this evaluation process.\u201d\n\nWhile PC team owners had previously been split on the category\u2019s future direction, the majority appear to be in agreement of rolling out updates to the existing car for 2016, prior to a complete new platform the following year.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been working pretty hard with IMSA since Laguna on this project, everything from the future of the class to trying to bring in the LMP3 car,\u201d Starworks Motorsport team owner Peter Baron told Sportscar365.\n\n\u201cI think the series has done a good job with trying to be financially reasonable and responsible for what the class needs and not go crazy with it. LMP3 didn\u2019t work out, so now the future is to upgrade the PC car.\u201d\n\nIMSA hosted an open test with a Ginetta-Nissan LMP3 car at Watkins Glen in June, which saw a number of drivers walk away less-than-impressed with the low power output and handling of the British-built entry level prototype.\n\nWhile further LMP3 examples have come online since, including the highly regarded Ligier JS P3, current PC teams have expressed interest in developing an all-new platform for 2017 that\u2019s largely based off of a new-spec P2 car.\n\nThe latest proposal differs from ORECA\u2019s proposed upgrade kit, which would have resulted in an entirely new set of bodywork.\n\n\u201cFrom my perspective, there\u2019s only really two viable paths,\u201d CORE autosport Chief Operating Officer Morgan Brady told Sportscar365. \u201cThe one that we\u2019re discussing are the smaller technical updates as a stop-gap measure.\n\n\u201cThe one I\u2019m interested in and excited about would be basically a P2-derived spec chassis as a replacement for the LMPC car. That would certainly be interesting for me.\n\n\u201cAs far as LMP3, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s really an option based on outright performance. And if the LMPC car has a short lifecycle left, it doesn\u2019t make sense to do a large, excessive update.\u201d\n\nWhile IMSA has yet to make a final decision on possible updates to the existing FLM09s, Brady feels the proposed changes, estimated to cost between $30,000-50,000 in total, would be a step forward for next year.\n\n\u201cWhen we started looking at options for the PC car, there\u2019s not a whole lot of things wrong with it but there are some key aspects missing,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cI think with a cost-effective update that brings some additional technology and drivability to the car, it would create a lot of interest and potentially increase the car count for next year.\u201d\n\nBaron, meanwhile, agrees that interest in the class could go up, particularly as operating costs are expected to rise in other categories.\n\n\u201cWith the costs of the GTD packages all going up, I think there\u2019s a lot more activity and interest for the PC class,\u201d he said.\n\nA final decision on what upgrades will be used in 2016 is expected to be made in the coming weeks, possibly during the Petit Le Mans weekend.\n\n\u201cTime is of the essence, and it\u2019s of paramount importance that any decision provides clear direction for stakeholders and reflects IMSA\u2019s continued goal of providing our competitors with a platform that is cost effective, stable and speaks to the Pro-Am nature of the class,\u201d Hodgson added."}
{"text":"Anders Lindsjo Coaching the Snatch w\/ Christmas Abbott \u2013 TechniqueWOD\n\nSubscribe to TechniqueWOD on YouTube\n\nA few weeks ago the Barbell Shrugged team had the pleasure of training with Anders Lindsjo, Head Strength Coach for Eleiko Sport in Halmstad, Sweden.\n\nAnders is kind, highly knowledgeable, and very well qualified. He was also a Swedish World and Olympic team member for about 10 years, so he\u2019s spent plenty of time underneath the barbell.\n\nUsually on TechniqueWOD we break down movements into their essential components and demonstrate how they should be done. But this week we thought we\u2019d offer you a different kind of experience, something you don\u2019t get to see that often.\n\nThis week Anders leads our friend Christmas Abbott through some intense technique work for the snatch. If you\u2019re an aspiring coach pay very close attention and get your notepad ready. There are about a million knowledge bombs here that you\u2019re going to want to write down.\n\nIf you want to become an expert coach, start by observing an expert coach.\n\nEnjoy,\n\nFor more\n\nWhat does it take to make the world\u2019s finest barbell? Learn all about Eleiko on Episode 155 of Barbell Shrugged .\n\n. Learn more about Eleiko\u2019s excellent coaching courses by visiting their website .\n\n. Want more TechniqueWOD? We\u2019ve got you covered."}
{"text":"With the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington is turning its sights elsewhere. Quietly, the Obama administration is building up a vast array of military resources in West Africa, and specifically in Portuguese-speaking Lusophone countries. Reportedly, the Pentagon wants to establish a monitoring station in the Cape Verde islands, while further south in the Gulf of Guinea U.S. ships and personnel are patrolling local waters. Concerned lest it draw too much attention to itself, the Pentagon has avoided constructing large military installations and focused instead on a so-called \u201clily pad\u201d strategy of smaller bases. In S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 and Pr\u00c3\u00adncipe, an island chain in the Gulf of Guinea and former Portuguese colony, the Pentagon may install one such \u201cunder the radar\u201d base, and U.S. Navy Seabees are already engaged in construction work at the local airport.\n\nJust why has the Obama administration invested so much time and effort in this corner of the globe? To be sure, controlling remote \u201clily pads\u201d may come in handy in the battle against Islamist militants operating farther inland in such countries as Mali and Niger. Washington also wants to counteract drug smuggling emanating from West Africa, a volatile and politically unstable region. Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, has in recent years turned into a cocaine hub, and the United Nations has called the country a \u201cnarco-state.\u201d Guinea-Bissau is geographically situated at Africa\u2019s most westerly point, and South American smugglers are thought to transport drug shipments from here on to Cape Verde and then to Europe.\n\nReportedly, Brazil has become South America\u2019s largest net exporter of drugs to Africa. However, in recent years African traffickers have begun to produce methamphetamines and have muscled in on their Latin counterparts, wresting an increasingly large portion over the drug smuggling business. The Africans ship cocaine by sea and have assumed international control over cocaine exports as far away as the Brazilian city of S\u00c3\u00a3o Paulo. Brazilian drug traffickers, meanwhile, are left with the domestic side of the business and are forced to sell coke to locals.\n\nOil Intrigue in the Gulf of Guinea\n\nTo be sure then, the U.S. is interested in patrolling West African waters in an effort to stem the tide of drug traffic. There may be other, less public reasons for the U.S. military buildup in the region, however. In an effort to ease its dependence on the volatile Middle East, the U.S. is looking elsewhere for its oil and is likely to receive a whopping 25 percent of its imported petroleum from Africa by 2015. Former American Vice Admiral and Deputy Commander of the U.S. Africa Command Robert Moeller has stated that protecting \u201cthe free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market\u201d is highly important, as well as forestalling oil disruption. What is more, the U.S. must now confront a rising China, a nation which is also interested in securing oil deposits in West Africa.\n\nIn its drive to acquire natural resources, China has been pursuing offshore oil exploration contracts in the politically unstable nation of S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 and Pr\u00c3\u00adncipe. In 2009, Chinese petroleum corporation Sinopec acquired Swiss company Addax which gave Beijing control over four oil blocs in the S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 and Pr\u00c3\u00adncipe-Nigeria joint development zone. The Sinopec purchase in the Gulf of Guinea made China the leading player in the S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 and Pr\u00c3\u00adncipe oil sector. Whether the islands will actually take off as a major oil producer is still unclear, though drilling is under way and commercial production is expected to begin within a few years.\n\nSPONSORED\n\nIf S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 and Pr\u00c3\u00adncipe take off as a major oil supplier, China will certainly be well positioned to reap maximum reward from the petroleum bonanza. However, Beijing will also have to reckon with a growing U.S. military profile on the islands. Recently, U.S. Navy Seabees have been renovating a boat ramp on S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9\u2019s coast guard base and building a guard house on the premises. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and State Department have installed a new surface surveillance system on the islands. S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 and Pr\u00c3\u00adncipe is the first African nation to install the program and to integrate such technology into its overall maritime safety program.\n\nA Growing Role for S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 and Pr\u00c3\u00adncipe\n\nMeanwhile, politicians on the island have broached the idea of deepening security ties, and Washington is reportedly receptive to the notion. U.S. officials see the island chain as a lily pad or forward operating base staffed by several hundred troops. S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 and Pr\u00c3\u00adncipe could be a promising site, the Americans believe, since the islands are heavily Catholic and have no history of Islamic militancy. Recently, American Coast Guard cutters have been patrolling local waters in an effort to assess threats to oil access. Coming ashore, the crewmen then fix door hinges no less in a blatant public relations maneuver.\n\nNeedless to say, not everyone is thrilled about the contingency plans. Speaking to the Associated Press, one local legislator was under no illusions about the growing American presence. \u201cUnfortunately,\u201d he remarked, \u201cAmericans are interested in S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 because of oil, but S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 existed before that.\u201d Former Prime Minister Guilherme Posser, meanwhile, says there should be greater transparency when it comes to military discussions. The notion of a base should be submitted to a national referendum, he argues.\n\nThe China-Macau Connection\n\nFaced with a growing U.S. profile in West Africa, the Chinese have busily sought to counteract such influence. According to a sensitive U.S. diplomatic cable, Chinese immigrants advance the Asian Tiger\u2019s business interests in the region by forming joint ventures with African firms. The influx of new Chinese entrepreneurs has been accompanied by \u201corganized crime elements, which are involved in trafficking, smuggling, and other illegal activities.\u201d Moreover, in a specific effort to counteract the U.S. in African Lusophone countries, Beijing has appealed to its own business community in Macau, a peninsula connected to the southern Chinese mainland. A former Portuguese colony, Macau reverted to Chinese rule in 1999.\n\nSpeaking with American diplomats, local contacts told the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong that Macau could be useful to China due to the former colony\u2019s ties to the Catholic Church. To be sure, \u201cmore than a few\u201d of Macau\u2019s ethnically Portuguese residents had relocated to Portugal after the colony\u2019s handover to Beijing, and only a very small percentage of local residents spoke Portuguese. Nevertheless, diplomats reported that \u201ca comparatively high 7.6 percent of civil servants in the Macau government claim that Portuguese is their primary language [and] this has helped maintain the Macau government's capacity to interface with Lusophone counterparts on behalf of Beijing.\u201d\n\nAccording to diplomatic cables, China hopes to take advantage of such cultural links and believes that Macau should \u201cexpand its economic and trade links with overseas Chinese communities\u201d while also providing \u201ca stable platform for China\u2019s trade ties and linkages\u201d with such Lusophone countries as S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 and Pr\u00c3\u00adncipe, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Beijing also hopes that Macau will extend ties to the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony located in the Gulf of Guinea and Africa\u2019s only Spanish-speaking nation. Though American diplomats report that overall volume of trade between China and the Lusophone countries remains low, Macau could prove quite useful for Beijing in the coming struggle for West African resources.\n\nEnter Brazil\n\nOverstretched and facing budgetary constraints, the Pentagon may have difficulties containing China in far-flung corners of the globe. In an effort to overcome such disadvantages, the Obama administration has been turning to Brazil, a nation which has common cultural and historical ties to former Portuguese colonies in West Africa [for a longer discussion about the politics surrounding Brazil\u2019s rising role see my earlier al-Jazeera column here]. Though Brazil has not been able to rival China\u2019s economic presence, the South American newcomer has been deploying its corporations to Africa in the hope of cashing in on Africa\u2019s oil boom and deepwater petroleum exploration.\n\nEstablishing cordial ties to Brasilia may be a shrewd move for Washington. Under former President Lula, Brazil did its utmost to establish links with S\u00c3\u00a3o Tom\u00c3\u00a9 and Pr\u00c3\u00adncipe and recently the South American powerhouse wrote off the impoverished island\u2019s debt. During his tenure, Lula traveled to Cape Verde to attend a summit meeting of the so-called Portuguese speaking countries, otherwise known as Comunidades dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa [or CPLP]. While in Cape Verde, Lula sought to highlight Brazil's long-standing social and economic ties and assistance programs with the island. In a further effort to extend its cultural influence, Brazil is backing Equatorial Guinea\u2019s desire to join the CPLP.\n\nWashington seems to hope that Brazil will act as an assistant policeman in West Africa so the Obama administration can avoid unnecessary political entanglements. There are some signs that Brazil, which seeks to guarantee its investments and the free flow of commerce, might just oblige. According to a recent article in the New York Times, Brazil has been training elite African forces at a remote military base in the Amazon. Meanwhile, the Brazilian Ministry of Defense, which wants to halt the spread of piracy, has pledged to donate aircraft to Cape Verde for maritime patrol duties.\n\nWashington\u2019s Wary Ally?\n\nIn West Africa, the Pentagon needs all the help it can get. The U.S. Coast Guard has been paying visits to Cape Verde and Equatorial Guinea, but oil facilities are considered vulnerable. In politically unstable Equatorial Guinea, some American oil platforms are protected not by the local government\u2019s insignificant Navy but by private unarmed guards. Interviewed by the Associated Press, one U.S. military officer described Equatorial Guinea\u2019s military authorities as \u201cdistant and standoffish,\u201d speculating that the estrangement had to do with increasing Chinese influence in the troubled West African nation.\n\nComing to the aid of an ally, Brazil has trained U.S. military personnel at its own jungle warfare center. Meanwhile, U.S. ships perform joint exercises with the Brazilian Navy and both countries patrol the waters stretching from Rio de Janeiro to the Gulf of Guinea. Presumably, Brazil carries out such collaboration because it is concerned with maritime security and drug trafficking, though perhaps this South American newcomer also shares Washington\u2019s concern over rising Chinese influence.\n\nWhatever the case, Brazil seems perfectly happy for the time being to act in concert with the Obama administration. The question, however, is whether Brazil will view such collaboration as desirable in the long-term. Already, there have been strains in the U.S.-Brazilian relationship, and there may come a time when this up and coming South American nation may wish to carve out its own sphere of influence in the Lusophone world without any interference from outside powers."}
{"text":"The best network TV show that no one\u2019s watching is ABC\u2019s \u201cAmerican Crime.\u201d\n\nHow this provocative drama from Oscar winner John Ridley got lost in the programming shuffle \u2014 and has yet to be renewed \u2014 is one of the more distressing mysteries of the TV season. Ideally, it should have premiered last fall, when audiences were primed for new offerings, instead of being tacked on the schedule in March \u2014 after the conclusion of the dopey (and unresolved) Viola Davis acting seminar \u201cHow To Get Away With Murder.\u201d\n\nThematically challenging and structurally ambitious, \u201cAmerican Crime\u201d offers something lacking in any other show on the ABC lineup: an actual adult story about an issue that affects us all \u2014 the nation\u2019s criminal defense system. While Ridley\u2019s point of view is very distinct, he skilfully dramatizes how one crime can ruin the lives of almost any family \u2014 and how the search for justice is, at the very least, frustrating and sometimes meaningless.\n\nWe meet the three families after the murder of Matt Skokie, a US military veteran who has become a petty drug dealer in Modesto, Calif. His divorced parents, recovering gambling addict father Russ (Timothy Hutton) and racist mother Barb (Felicity Huffman), are bitterly reunited. Matt\u2019s wife, Gwen (Kira Pozehl), survives the shooting but is left stricken with aphasia and cannot help the case; her parents (W. Earl Brown and Penelope Ann Miller) are more concerned with their daughter\u2019s recovery than with Barb\u2019s crusade for justice. A local family, the Gutierrezes, becomes swept up in the arrests when a teenage boy (Johnny Ortiz) is in the wrong place at the wrong time.\n\nThe series, whose eighth episode airs next Thursday, kicks into high gear when the prime suspect, African-American drug addict Carter Nix (Elvis Nolasco), is released in the face of circumstantial evidence. Barb goes ballistic, flat-out telling the cops they don\u2019t know how to do their jobs. She successfully campaigns to have the case reclassified as a hate crime and states her case on television. Not long after, a thrown brick shatters her car window. There is no witness to the crime and the cops can\u2019t do much without one. Barb buys a gun for her own protection, gets a license and starts practicing on a firing range.\n\nThe demoralization of Barb is only one of the consequences of the original crime, but each is rendered powerfully. Ridley is greatly aided by a first-rate cast. After wallowing way too long in the silliness of \u201cDesperate Housewives,\u201d Huffman rebounds to striking effect as the intolerant Barb, a woman who will not back down from her crusade. Hutton does his best work in years as the wayward father who will never make up for lost time. Had \u201cAmerican Crime\u201d premiered in September, the stars and supporting players, including Benito Martinez as Alonzo Gutierrez, would all be touted for Emmy consideration."}
{"text":"MURFREESBORO, Tenn. -- White supremacists and neo-Nazis planned two rallies in Tennessee on Saturday after law enforcement officials made lengthy preparations to prevent violence between marchers and counter-protesters.\n\nThe two \"White Lives Matter\" marches were scheduled in Shelbyville and Murfreesboro on Saturday. Despite high tensions and insults exchanged with counter-protesters, there was no violence reported at the first rally in Shelbyville, CBS affiliate WTVF reports.\n\nThe Shelbyville rally began Saturday morning and ran until 1 p.m. local time.\n\nOnly one person was arrested as of Saturday afternoon. A male was taken into police custody after jumping a barrier in an attempt to advance toward the white supremacist rally, WTVF reports.\n\nThe second event was canceled by \"White Lives Matter\" protesters shortly after the first march ended. \"Apparently it took so long to get through lines in Shelbyville,\" WTVF journalist Matthew Torres reports.\n\nThe heavy law enforcement presence at both locations included police helicopters, K-9 units and officers armed with sniper rifles. Several large trucks were used as roadblocks to prevent vehicles from driving into crowds.\n\nCounter-protesters were allowed to enter the public square through two designated streets. Safety checkpoints were set up to prevent protesters from bringing weapons and masks into the area.\n\nTwo lines for counter protesters in Murfreesboro to get through. One of two checkpoints. MANY items are prohibited. @NC5 pic.twitter.com\/8RJAqk8DXE \u2014 Matthew Torres (@NC5_MTorres) October 28, 2017\n\nThe city of Murfreesboro estimates between 400 and 500 protesters were in attendance at the \"White Lives Matter\" rally.\n\nFootage of the demonstrations on social media showed white nationalist protesters chanting \"closed borders, white nation, now we start the deportation.\"\n\nThe Nationalist Front marchs in Tennessee, chanting: \"Closed borders, white nation, now we start the deportation!\" pic.twitter.com\/i5NT5pttEJ \u2014 Jack Smith IV (@JackSmithIV) October 28, 2017\n\nThe rallies were held weeks after violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, at a white nationalist rally in August. One counter-protester was killed when a man drove his car into a group marching through the streets."}
{"text":"North America: Tuesday, February 3 @ 4:00 p.m. PST\n\nTuesday, February 3 @ 4:00 p.m. PST Europe: Wednesday, February 4 @ 4:00 p.m. CET\n\nWednesday, February 4 @ 4:00 p.m. CET Asia: Wednesday, February 4 @ 4:00 p.m. KST\n\nNorth America: Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. PST\n\nFriday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. PST Europe: Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. CET\n\nFriday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. CET Asia: Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. KST\n\nGreetings, nephalem!Season 1 is about to draw to a close, and we wanted to give players an opportunity to prepare for the start of the new season with some dates and times to plan around.Season 1 will be ending at the following dates and times for each region:Season 2 will be starting at the following dates and times for each region:For time zone assistance, click here We look forward to seeing you in Season 2!*Please note that Era 1 will end at the same time as Season 1. For more information, please click here"}
{"text":"Serbian Vladimir Vermezovic has been appointed coach of South African side Orlando Pirates, two years after he resigned from rivals Kaizer Chiefs.\n\nThe 50-year-old succeeds Roger de Sa, who quit last month because of exhaustion after 18 months at the helm.\n\nCheifs said Vermezovic will replace caretaker coach Eric Tinkler once a work permit has been granted.\n\nVermezovic left Chiefs in 2012 after a three-year spell in which he twice won the League Cup.\n\nHis last job was coach of Partizan Belgrade, who he left in April 2013 after less than a year in charge.\n\nUnder former South Africa goalkeeper De Sa, Pirates reached last year's African Champions League final, losing 3-1 over two legs to Egyptian giants Al Ahly.\n\nThey were also beaten in two domestic cup finals this season, and a fixture backlog means they trail league leaders Chiefs by 17 points halfway through the season."}
{"text":"During weekly protest near town of Modiin Illit, Arab protester sends small child towards IDF soldiers, tells them to shoot his son.\n\nFor nearly a decade, residents of the villages of Nilin and Bilin, located near the haredi town of Modiin Illit, have held fiery, often violent demonstrations against the construction of the security fence every Friday.\n\nThe demonstrations, which often include stone-throwings, draw anarchists and opponents of the Jewish state from around the world.\n\nWhile provocations against soldiers and Border Police are common, this Friday, one Arab participant attempted to use his son in the propaganda war against Israel, in a disturbing form of child exploitation.\n\nA recording of the incident shows the man carrying his young son towards several Border Police officers, setting him down, and shoving him off in the officers\u2019 direction while waving a PLO flag.\n\nThe man then seemingly yells at the soldiers to shoot his son, hoping to create a news item and fire up anti-Israel sentiment.\n\nThe officers, however, do not take the bait. They instead attempt to shake the boy\u2019s hand and speak with him, though the father, apparently intent on exploiting his son and turning him into the latest \u201cmartyr,\u201d seems to scream at him to attack the soldiers with stones.\n\nThe child eventually attempted to comply with his father\u2019s demands, but posed little threat as the soldiers watched him harmlessly toss stones aimlessly."}
{"text":"Gwinnett mom felt \u201cdevil like spirit\u201d before stabbing children, husband\n\nShare\n\nNine-year-old Diana Romero said she saw her mother stabbing her brothers, sister and father, but before the woman turned on Diana she told her that she was \u201cgoing to the sky to see Jesus,\u201d according to a state child welfare report obtained Wednesday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.\n\nThe young girl cried and told her mother that she didn\u2019t want to go to see Jesus, according to the report by the state Division of Family and Children Services.\n\nThe DFCS documents include a caseworker\u2019s notes on her interview with Diana, who describes in horrid detail watching her mother slay her siblings and father one by one in their Loganville home.\n\nThe child, for instance, says that her father tried to stop the mother but couldn\u2019t. Isabel Martinez, 33, is accused of stabbing and killing her husband, 33-year-old Martin Romero, and four of her children, 2-year-old Axel, 4-year-old Dillan and 7-year-old Dacota Romero and 10-year-old Isabela Martinez, early on July 6.\n\nIsabel Martinez gestures towards news cameras during her first court appearance Friday. (AP Photo\/John Bazemore) Photo: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution\n\nShe was charged with five counts of malice murder, five counts of murder and six charges of aggravated assault.\n\nThe DFCS report also includes a interview with the mother in the Gwinnett jail, who says she is innocent and that the killings were performed by a \u201cfamily friend,\u201d but she provides no name. Martinez tell the DFCS caseworker that she tried to stop the friend and he cut her on the wrist. Martinez also described a recent family trip to Savannah where, according to the report, she felt \u201ca devil-like spirit\u201d and where she felt the waves trying to take her and her children away.\n\nIN DEPTH: A peaceful neighborhood, a monstrous crime\n\nRELATED: Hundreds gather to mourn husband, 4 children slain in Gwinnett\n\nThe child welfare agency had one prior interaction with the family in September of 2015, when the agency received an accusation saying the father struck one of the daughters with a shoe and a phone charger at night when she wouldn\u2019t sleep. It\u2019s unclear in the report which daughter was being struck. The agency investigated and both parents admitted disciplining the children using a belt on their behinds.\n\nBut the agency found there were no safety threats and the case was closed soon after.\n\n\u201cIn Georgia corporal punishment crosses the line when there are welts or marks or bruises,\u201d said Ashley Fielding Cooper, DFCS chief operating officer. \u201cBased on the information we gathered in this case we determined that corporal punishment was used within the bounds of the law and that maltreatment did not occur.\u201d\n\nOn the deadly night of July 6, Diana Romero, a fourth-grader at Magill Elementary School, was stabbed by her mother, police say. She is the only survivor of the attacks. Family members have said she is steadily improving but has a long road to recovery both physically and mentally.\n\nIn a small mobile home community in Gwinnett, Isabel Martinez was charged with multiple counts of murder in the stabbing deaths of four of her children and their father. (Erica A. Hernandez\/AJC)\n\nThe caseworker spoke with Diana at 12:15 p.m. July 10. Before she opened up to the caseworker about the attacks, the child talked about having fun on the beach in Savannah. She said her mother and father did not fight while the family was away. She said her mother seemed normal when they all came home.\n\nDiana said the police had never come to her home before. As she began to speak about that night, Diana cried, the report said. She said everyone seemed to be asleep when the trouble started.\n\nShe said she saw her mother take the knife out of the kitchen and start cutting her brothers and sister.\n\nA public GoFundMe site set up by family member identified the surviving child as Diana. The site says Diana remains in the hospital and is expected to stay there for another two to three weeks to recover from her injuries. The site is seeking donations to cover the family\u0092s funeral and medical costs. Photo: GoFundMe Romero Family Funeral and Medical Fund. Photo: HANDOUT\n\nHer father rushed into the living room and tried to get help, but when he was walking to the door, she cut him too, according to the report.\n\nDiana told the caseworker that, watching all this before her, she could not move. She said her mother was not crying or screaming during the stabbings, the report said. She said her mother called the police after she cut herself. Five of the family members were dead when police arrived at the home in the pre-dawn hours.\n\nMartinez said that before police arrived she placed all the bodies in the same room so they could be together.\n\nIn a subsequent court appearance Martinez exhibited bizarre behavior, smiling and giving cameras the thumbs-up sign.\n\nOn Tuesday, the attorney for the woman said she will not undergo a psychological evaluation at this stage in her case, but could later on."}
{"text":"Advertising network Turn announced today that they will suspend their zombie tracking cookie program. Turn was recently caught using Verizon Wireless' invasive UIDH header to undelete tracking cookies that web visitors had previously deleted. This unacceptable practice means that users who delete cookies to avoid Turn's and others' tracking will continue to be tracked against their will, using information associated with their previous activity through a permanent identity.\n\nThis is a step toward victory for everyone who spoke out against Turn's zombie cookies, but it is not enough. Turn's cookies just underscore the huge privacy problems with Verizon's header injection. Turn's cookies were the first example found, but Verizon enables any company to use the identifier in similarly abusive ways, some of which may not be visible to users.\n\nVerizon needs to follow Turn's lead, and end their UIDH header injection program immediately.\n\nTurn plans to \"suspend\" the zombie cookie program \"pending re-evaluation.\" We again call on Turn to end their zombie cookie program permanently, and to commit not to use headers, browser fingerprinting, or any other method to circumvent individuals' decision to delete cookies. Additionally, Turn says, \"By early February, Turn will not 'respawn' cookie IDs associated with the Verizon UIDH.\" Turn should treat this as the urgent privacy problem that it is, and end the cookie respawning today, not three weeks from now.\n\nCompanies that engage in cookie syncing with Turn, as EFF described recently, should immediately disable the Turn cookie syncing program and delete existing cookie syncing data until Turn has confirmed that they have stopped respawning cookies and have purged any cookies that they may have respawned."}
{"text":"Gov. Scott activates 100 Florida National Guard members\n\nNAPLES \u2013 Today, Governor Rick Scott activated 100 members of the Florida Air and Army National Guard to support with planning, logistics and operations in preparation for potential impacts from Hurricane Irma. These 100 members will be stationed across the state, and will advise the Governor on available and needed resources to ensure communities are fully prepared for the storm. In addition, at the direction of Governor Scott, all 7,000 National Guard members will be reporting for duty Friday morning. Yesterday, Governor Scott issued Executive Order 17-235, which declared a state of emergency in all 67 counties within the State of Florida in response to Hurricane Irma and allowed for the immediate activation of National Guard members as preparedness actions continue.\n\nGovernor Scott said, \u201cToday I am activating 100 members of the Florida Air and Army National Guard to immediately begin assisting with ongoing Hurricane Irma preparation. Per my direction, they will be stationed throughout the state. I have also directed all 7,000 guard members to report for duty this Friday, however, if resources are needed before then, I stand ready to activate as many guard members needed to support our aggressive preparedness actions. With Hurricane Irma now a category 5 storm, we must do all we can to prepare our families and communities for any potential impact from this major weather event. We do not know the exact path of this storm, but weather can change in an instant and while we hope for the best, we must prepare for the worst.\u201d"}
{"text":"Researchers ID Ways to Exploit \u2018Cloud Browsers\u2019 for Large-Scale, Anonymous Computing\n\nResearchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon have found a way to exploit cloud-based Web browsers, using them to perform large-scale computing tasks anonymously. The finding has potential ramifications for the security of \u201ccloud browser\u201d services.\n\nAt issue are cloud browsers, which create a Web interface in the cloud so that computing is done there rather than on a user\u2019s machine. This is particularly useful for mobile devices, such as smartphones, which have limited computing power.The cloud-computing paradigm pools the computational power and storage of multiple computers, allowing shared resources for multiple users.\n\n\u201cThink of a cloud browser as being just like the browser on your desktop computer, but working entirely in the cloud and providing only the resulting image to your screen,\u201d says Dr. William Enck, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.\n\nBecause these cloud browsers are designed to perform complex functions, the researchers wanted to see if they could be used to perform a series of large-scale computations that had nothing to do with browsing. Specifically, the researchers wanted to determine if they could perform those functions using the \u201cMapReduce\u201d technique developed by Google, which facilitates coordinated computation involving parallel efforts by multiple machines.\n\nThe research team knew that coordinating any new series of computations would entail passing large packets of data between different nodes, or cloud browsers. To address this challenge, researchers stored data packets on bit.ly and other URL-shortening sites, and then passed the resulting \u201clinks\u201d between various nodes.\n\nUsing this technique, the researchers were able to perform standard computation functions using data packets that were 1, 10 and 100 megabytes in size. \u201cIt could have been much larger,\u201d Enck says, \u201cbut we did not want to be an undue burden on any of the free services we were using.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve shown that this can be done,\u201d Enck adds. \u201cAnd one of the broader ramifications of this is that it could be done anonymously. For instance, a third party could easily abuse these systems, taking the free computational power and using it to crack passwords.\u201d\n\nHowever, Enck says cloud browsers can protect themselves to some extent by requiring users to create accounts \u2013 and then putting limits on how those accounts are used. This would make it easier to detect potential problems.\n\nThe paper, \u201cAbusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit,\u201d will be presented Dec. 6 at the 2012 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference in Orlando, Fla. The paper was co-authored by Vasant Tendulkar and Ashwin Shashidharan, graduate students at NC State, and Joe Pletcher, Ryan Snyder and Dr. Kevin Butler, of the University of Oregon. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office.\n\n-shipman-\n\nNote to Editors: The study abstract follows.\n\n\u201cAbusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit\u201d\n\nAuthors: Vasant Tendulkar, Ashwin Shashidharan and William Enck, North Carolina State University; Joe Pletcher, Ryan Snyder and Kevin Butler, University of Oregon\n\nPresented: Dec. 6, 2012, at ACSAC in Orlando, Fla.\n\nAbstract: Cloud services have become a cheap and popular means of computing. They allow users to synchronize data between devices and relieve low-powered devices from heavy computations. In response to the surge of smartphones and mobile devices, several cloud-based Web browsers have become commercially available. These \u201ccloud browsers\u201d assemble and render Web pages within the cloud, executing JavaScript code for the mobile client. This paper explores how the computational abilities of cloud browsers may be exploited through a Browser MapReduce (BMR) architecture for executing large, parallel tasks. We explore the computation and memory limits of four cloud browsers, and demonstrate the viability of BMR by implementing a client based on a reverse engineering of the Puffin cloud browser. We implement and test three canonical MapReduce applications (word count, distributed grep, and distributed sort). While we perform experiments on relatively small amounts of data (100 MB) for ethical considerations, our results strongly suggest that current cloud browsers are a viable source of arbitrary free computing at large scale."}
{"text":"Last week, we took a stab at naming one All-Star squad that spanned both leagues, and judging by the actual rosters that were announced Sunday we guessed pretty well.\n\nBut what about, for lack of a better term, the Non-Stars? The players who've put up the most disappointing first halves in baseball, relative to expectations? What would that team look like?\n\nFAGAN: The best players not on an All-Star roster \u2014 yet\n\nLet's go position by position and find the players who fit the bill:\n\nC: Jonathan Lucroy, Rangers\n\nNumbers: .263\/.311\/.375, 4 HR, 20 RBI, 0.1 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: Lucroy's numbers are way down from his career averages across the board, and he's in danger of posting his lowest OPS since his rookie season in 2010. One of the better offensive catchers in baseball up until this year, Lucroy was supposed to be a key cog in a powerful Rangers lineup but has underachieved just like the entire team. There have been rumblings that the team is listening to offers for him, which shows just how far out of favor he's fallen.\n\n1B: Miguel Cabrera, Tigers\n\nNumbers: .264\/.358\/.456, 11 HR, 39 RBI, 0.5 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: First base was a tough position to fill, because there really isn't one guy who's having the kind of year that would land him on this list. So it's the future Hall of Famer Cabrera almost by default, as he's sporting what would be the lowest slugging percentage of his career and his lowest OPS since 2003. It's worth noting that Cabrera went crazy at the plate in the second half last year, so his stay on this list may be short-lived.\n\n2B: Rougned Odor, Rangers\n\nNumbers: .211\/.249\/.387, 14 HR, 35 RBI, -0.3 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: The league seems to have adjusted to Odor after his breakout 2016 season, and he's yet to adjust back. Like his teammate Lucroy, Odor has underachieved considerably with an OPS that right now is 162 points lower than his total from last year. He's never been an on-base demon, but this year he's striking out at an alarming rate and managed just one walk the entire month of June. He's dug himself quite a hole in the first half, and he's yet to find the answers to get himself out.\n\nSS: Trevor Story, Rockies\n\nNumbers: .224\/.305\/.409, 11 HR, 31 RBI, 0.6 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: Expectations were sky-high for Story after his impressive debut last year, when he looked to be neck-and-neck with Corey Seager in the NL ROY race before an injury ended his season early. He hasn't quite lived up to those expectations thus far, posting mostly pedestrian numbers while playing in one of the best hitter's parks in the game. He hasn't been bad, per se \u2014 he's dealt with injuries this year, too \u2014 but considering what he showed last year, it's hard not to be disappointed with the numbers he's put up in the first half.\n\nThe Rockies' Trevor Story has struggled to match the performance he showed early in his rookie season. (Getty Images)\n\n3B: Manny Machado, Orioles\n\nNumbers: .217\/.289\/.420, 15 HR, 38 RBI, 1.0 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: The past two seasons made it look like Machado would be a perennial MVP candidate, which is why his start to the year has been so puzzling. He was bothered by a wrist injury early in June, and it's possible that it's still affecting him, but that doesn't explain away his struggles in April and May. Whatever the reason, Machado's first half might be the most disappointing in either league.\n\nHOME RUN DERBY: Participants, date, time, how to watch\n\nOF: Carlos Gonzales, Rockies\n\nNumbers: .221\/.300\/.348, 6 HR, 20 RBI, -0.9 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: CarGo went through a horrendous slump in June, which at one point saw him go hitless in 27 straight at-bats. His numbers never recovered and he's on track to post his worst career numbers over a full season just before hitting free agency this winter. Talk about awful timing.\n\nOF: Gregory Polanco, Pirates\n\nNumbers: .246\/.310\/.379, 6 HR, 22 RBI, -0.1 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: He was expected to be a key cog in the Pirates' lineup after posting career-best numbers last year; however, the struggles that plagued him in the second half of '16 have carried over into this year. Polanco's numbers are rather pedestrian, and while he's had flashes this year (a .900 OPS in May, for instance) he hasn't been able to keep it up (a .520 OPS in June).\n\nOF: Kyle Schwarber, Cubs\n\nNumbers: .171\/.295\/.378, 12 HR, 28 RBI, -0.7 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: No one will forget his incredible comeback from a devastating injury last season to play in the World Series and help push the Cubs over the finish line. But Schwarber hasn't been able to carry over that momentum into this season, to the point where his struggles became so pronounced that the Cubs had no choice but to send him to the minors to get straightened out. This definitely wasn't the season anyone had in mind for Schwarber after watching him hit .412 in the World Series last fall.\n\nDH: Albert Pujols, Angels\n\nNumbers: .234\/.278\/.372, 11 HR, 52 RBI, -1.2 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: Father Time is undefeated, as the old saying goes, and he seems to finally be catching up to Pujols. While he's still a smart, dangerous hitter at times, Pujols has seen his overall numbers plummet this year to career lows virtually across the board. And he still has four years left on his contract. Yeesh.\n\nAlbert Pujols reacts after striking out. (Getty Images)\n\nSP: Rick Porcello, Red Sox\n\nNumbers: 5.06 ERA, 1.51 WHIP, .312 BAA, -0.3 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: Like Dallas Keuchel in 2016, Porcello has been a huge disappointment the year after winning the AL Cy Young Award. Even if he wasn't expected to match last year's achievements, few could have seen such a major drop in production for Porcello, who hasn't been able to fool anyone this season. His teammate David Price could've taken this spot, too.\n\nRP: Mark Melancon, Giants\n\nNumbers: 4.35 ERA, 1.35 WHIP, .298 BAA, 4 blown saves, 0.1 WAR\n\nWhy he's here: The Giants gave him a monster contract last winter to fix their bullpen woes. It hasn't quite worked out that way, as Melancon has as many blown saves this season as he did in all of 2016 and has found his way to the DL twice. It's not much better than what the Giants got from their bullpen last year, only it's costing them a lot more money this time. In a year when almost nothing has gone right for the Giants, Melancon's performance still manages to stand out."}
{"text":"May 26, 2015 \/ Brooklyn news \/ Williamsburg \/ Music \/ Brooklyn Is Awesome Juan Morel Campos students play hallway rock shows Appetite for instruction! Williamsburg school teaches Rock 101 The Brooklyn Paper\n\nShare on Twitter Tweet Share on Facebook Share\n\nThe halls are alive with the sound of music at Williamsburg\u2019s Juan Morel Campos Secondary School, where rock \u2019n\u2019 roll high schoolers play concerts in the corridor every Friday afternoon.\n\nThe bands set up right by the school\u2019s main door and play rock and pop tunes as kids and teachers are heading home for the day \u2014 and now students actually want to stay behind after class, says the teacher-turned-band-booker behind the gigs.\n\n\u201cEvery week, everyone will crowd around the musicians,\u201d said Stacey Wong, who teaches music to kids from sixth to 12th grade at the school on Heyward Street, between Marcy and Harrison avenues. \u201cThey love it.\u201d\n\nThe acts cut their teeth in Wong\u2019s music classes, where she forms the mini Hendrixes and junior Joan Jetts into rock supergroups \u2014 each including several guitarists, bass players, keyboardists, and vocalists \u2014 and schools them in songs such as \u201cRolling in the Deep\u201d by Adele, \u201cTake Me To Church\u201d by Hozier, and \u201cThinking Out Loud\u201d by Ed Sheeran. Kids learn music more quickly by playing Bruno Mars than Beethoven, she said.\n\n\u201cI want them to be able to enjoy playing music and then they can throw themselves into the theory,\u201d said Wong. \u201cIf they are playing music they do not like, they will not stick with it. I get them playing Adele right away and they love it.\u201d\n\nWong uses a curriculum called Amp Up NYC, which helps educators to get their students hooked on music class by teaching them the modern songs they already listen to. Little Kids Rock \u2014 an organization that offers free instruments and teacher training to low-income schools with shoddy or no music classes \u2014 created the program in partnership with Massachuse\u00adtts\u2019s Berklee College of Music and the New York City Department of Education, and they collectively intend to roll the scheme out to 600 schools city-wide by 2017.\n\nAt Juan Morel Campos, the school of rock has been such a success that some of the students have split off into their own bands and solo projects outside of the class. And the kids say they intend to keep on rocking long after school\u2019s out forever.\n\n\u201cDoing this makes it seem easier for me to branch out when I leave here and continue with music,\u201d said 10th grader Shanice Rodriguez, who has formed a duo with 11th-grade guitarist Elvin Jaquez. \u201cI really want to keep doing this.\u201d\n\nJaquez said he learned jazz drumming in middle school, but didn\u2019t realize he was really born to shred until he was exposed to the axe in class.\n\n\u201cMy family never had that kind of musical direction, but now that I am doing this, it is something that really interests me,\u201d he said.\n\nAmp Up NYC provides the schools with some equipment, but Wong says she has kept up with student demand by asking for donations to purchase extra guitars, amps, strings, picks, and tuners on fundraising websites.\n\nSadly for music scenesters, the Friday shows are the only gig in Williamsburg you can\u2019t get on the door-list for \u2014 they are open to Juan Morel Campos students, parents, and staff only.\n\nUpdated 10:17 pm, July 9, 2018\n\n\u00a92015"}
{"text":"Microsoft is again involved in talks over United States\u2019 PRISM spying program, this time in Australia where the local security boss claims that government computers could be monitored using a Windows backdoor.\n\nThis isn\u2019t the first time when Microsoft is accused of implemented a backdoor in its operating system to provide unrestricted access to US intelligence agencies, even though Redmond has strongly denied such a scenario, claiming that it only provides user data based on federal request.\n\nEija Seittenranta, head of the network security department in the Australian government, said in a statement that the country hasn\u2019t tried anything in particular to secure the computers and block any surveillance system that might be employed by the United States under the PRISM program.\n\n\u201cIt probably should be noted that our network is not a protected network, it is unclassified,\u201d Seittenranta stated according to The Guardian.\n\nWhile she hasn\u2019t said it very clear whether a Windows backdoor would provide access to secret data, Seittenranta mentioned that \u201cwe don\u2019t have the technical skills to create patches,\u201d so in case such a backdoor exists, it\u2019s still unblocked at this point.\n\nOn the other hand, Seittenranta stated that while leaked documents confirm that the PRISM program was indeed launched by the United States, some of the information that reached the web was only speculation, suggesting that Australian\u2019s parliamentary IT systems might not be at risk.\n\n\u201cWe are aware there are rumoured to be things like that around,\u201d she said.\n\nSome leaked documents belonging to the German government that got leaked during the summer indicated that local authorities have been advised to avoid using Windows 8 due to a potential backdoor hidden in the operating system.\n\nMicrosoft, on the other hand, has quickly denied all accusations, saying that Windows 8 is an important step forward in terms of security and all privacy concerns regarding the operating system are \u201caddressable.\u201d\n\n\u201cSince most users accept defaults, requiring the user to enable the TPM will lead to IT users being less secure by default and increase the risk that their privacy will be violated. We believe that government policies promoting this result are ill-advised,\u201d the company stated."}
{"text":"CORAL GABLES, Fla. \u2013 The University of Miami men's basketball team will play nine nationally-televised games and host six conference foes that played in last season's NCAA Tournament, the Atlantic Coast Conference announced with its 2017-18 league schedule release Thursday.\n\nThe Hurricanes will make two appearances on ESPN's \"Big Monday,\" hosting Duke and traveling to Notre Dame, and will make six other appearances on ESPN or ESPN2, including a road tilt at defending national champion North Carolina. The Hurricanes will also be showcased nationally on CBS when they host Syracuse.\n\n\"Year in and year out, the ACC is the best basketball conference in the country from top to bottom and this year will be no exception,\" Hurricanes head coach Jim Larra\u00f1aga said. \"This schedule will provide a tough test every night, and we will need to play our best because nearly every game we will be squaring off against nationally-ranked opponents.\"\n\nThe ACC sent a league-record nine teams to the NCAA Tournament last season, including Miami, which has made the tournament in three of the last five years. Miami posted a 7-2 home record in conference games last season.\n\n\"Our fans created an electric atmosphere at Watsco Center last year and we are looking forward to having that same type of home court advantage this year,\" Larra\u00f1aga said.\n\nMiami will host the Blue Devils on Monday, Jan. 15, at 7 p.m. The Hurricanes defeated Duke at Watsco Center on Senior Day last season, 55-50, behind 25 points from then-freshman guard Bruce Brown. The Hurricanes will venture to South Bend for their second \"Big Monday\" appearance on Feb. 19.\n\nMiami hosts four conference games \u2013 Louisville, Wake Forest, Virginia and Virginia Tech \u2013 on either ESPN or ESPN2. The Hurricanes travel to Chapel Hill to face the Tar Heels on Tuesday, Feb. 27 on ESPN. Miami defeated North Carolina, 77-62, last season, UNC's largest margin of defeat in 2016-17.\n\nThe Hurricanes will also host Syracuse on Feb. 17, in a nationally televised CBS encounter. The Orange defeated Miami, 70-55, at the Carrier Dome last season before the Hurricanes exacted revenge in the quarterfinals of the ACC Tournament with a 62-57 victory.\n\nThe Hurricanes open their conference slate with two games on the road \u2013 at Pittsburgh (Dec. 30) and Georgia Tech (Jan. 3) -- before returning home to Watsco Center to host rival Florida State on Sunday night, Jan. 7, 2018, on ESPNU at 6 p.m. Miami then travels to Clemson on January 13, for another ESPNU telecast.\n\nAfter hosting Duke, the Hurricanes travel to Raleigh, N.C., for a second consecutive season to face NC State for a regional telecast on Jan. 21. Miami swept the Wolfpack last season, opening ACC play with an 81-63 win in Coral Gables and then rallying for 84-79 victory at PNC Arena.\n\nThe Hurricanes return home to battle Louisville on Jan. 24, at 7:30 p.m. on ESPN2. Miami then faces the Seminoles a second time for a regional telecast in Tallahassee, Fla., on Jan. 27.\n\nPittsburgh visits Watsco Center on the final day of January before the Hurricanes head to Blacksburg, Va., on Feb. 3, to face the Hokies. That 2 p.m. tipoff will be televised on either ESPN or ESPN2.\n\nThe Hurricanes welcome Wake Forest to Coral Gables for an ESPN2 telecast on Feb. 7, followed by a road trip to Boston College on Feb. 10. The Hurricanes then return home to face Virginia on Feb. 13 for a 9 p.m. tip on ESPN2 before hosting the Orange four days later.\n\nMiami has a quick turnaround for its \"Big Monday\" encounter in South Bend on Feb. 19. The Hurricanes host Boston College on Feb. 24, for a regional telecast prior to their trip to Chapel Hill for a 9 p.m. tip on Feb. 27. Miami wraps up ACC play at Watsco Center on Mar. 3, against Virginia Tech at noon. That game will be telecast on either ESPN or ESPN2.\n\nThe ACC Tournament will be held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., for the second consecutive year. The 2018 tournament starts on Tuesday, Mar. 6, culminating with the championship game on Saturday, Mar. 10.\n\nIn addition to their nine ACC games, the Hurricanes host five non-conference games at Watsco Center, starting with Gardner-Webb on Friday, Nov. 10. After back-to-back season ticket sellouts in 2015-16 and 2016-17, the demand for Hurricanes basketball season tickets is at an all-time high.\n\n\"We have sold out our season tickets for the last two season and we anticipate that this will be the third year in a row that you will not be able to buy a ticket once our season begins in November,\" Larra\u00f1aga said. \"We encourage all of our season ticket holders to be sure they sign up now -- don't wait, because there won't be any available soon.\"\n\nA limited amount of season tickets are still available to purchase beginning at only $150. Call 1-800-GO-CANES.\n\n2017-18 Miami Hurricanes Basketball Schedule\n\nFriday, Nov. 10, 2017 Gardner-Webb TBA\n\nSunday, Nov. 12, 2017 Navy TBA\n\nThursday, Nov. 16, 2017 Florida A&M TBA\n\nWednesday, Nov. 22, 2017 LaSalle* TBA\n\nSaturday, Nov. 25, 2017 North Florida TBA\n\nWednesday, Nov. 29, 2017 @ Minnesota^ 9 p.m. ESPN2\n\nSaturday, Dec. 2, 2017 Princeton$ 8 p.m. ESPNU\n\nTuesday, Dec. 5, 2017 Boston University TBA\n\nSaturday, Dec. 16, 2017 @ George Washington TBA\n\nSaturday, Dec. 23, 2017 @ Hawai'i! 1 a.m. ESPNU\n\nSaturday, Dec. 23, 2017 Diamond Head Classic TBA\n\nMonday, Dec. 25, 2017 Diamond Head Classic TBA\n\nSaturday, Dec. 30, 2017 @ Pittsburgh 4 p.m. ACCN\n\nWednesday, Jan. 3, 2018 @ Georgia Tech 9 p.m. RSN\n\nSunday, Jan. 7, 2018 Florida State 6 p.m. ESPNU\n\nSaturday, Jan. 13, 2018 @ Clemson 3 p.m. ESPNU\n\nMonday, Jan. 15, 2018 Duke 7 p.m. ESPN\n\nSunday, Jan. 21, 2018 @ NC State 2 p.m. ACCN\n\nWednesday, Jan. 24, 2018 Louisville 7:30 p.m. ESPN2\n\nSaturday, Jan. 27, 2018 @ Florida State 4 p.m. ACCN\n\nWednesday, Jan. 31, 2018 Pittsburgh 7 p.m. RSN\n\nSaturday, Feb. 3, 2018 @ Virginia Tech 2 p.m. ESPN\/ESPN2\n\nWednesday, Feb. 7, 2018 Wake Forest 7 p.m. ESPN2\n\nSaturday, Feb. 10, 2018 @ Boston College 2 p.m. RSN\n\nTuesday, Feb. 13, 2018 Virginia 9 p.m. ESPN2\n\nSaturday, Feb. 17, 2018 Syracuse 12 p.m. CBS\n\nMonday, Feb. 19, 2018 @ Notre Dame 7 p.m. ESPN\n\nSaturday, Feb. 24, 2018 Boston College 2 p.m. RSN\n\nTuesday, Feb. 27, 2018 @ North Carolina 9 p.m. ESPN\n\nSaturday, Mar. 3, 2018 Virginia Tech 12 p.m. ESPN\/ESPN2\n\n65th Annual ACC Tournament (Barclays Center, Brooklyn, N.Y.)\n\nTuesday, March 6 (First Round)\n\nGame #1 ESPN2\/ACCN 12 p.m.\n\nGame #2 ESPN2\/ACCN 2 p.m.\n\nGame #3 ESPNU\/ACCN 7 p.m.\n\nWednesday, March 7 (Second Round)\n\nGame #4 ESPN\/ACCN 12 p.m.\n\nGame #5 ESPN\/ACCN 2 p.m.\n\nGame #6 ESPN2\/ACCN 7 p.m.\n\nGame #7 ESPN2\/ACCN 9 p.m.\n\nThursday, March 8 (Quarterfinals)\n\nGame #8 ESPN\/ACCN 12 p.m.\n\nGame #9 ESPN\/ACCN 2 p.m.\n\nGame #10 ESPN\/ACCN 7 p.m.\n\nGame #11 ESPN\/ACCN 9 p.m.\n\nFriday, March 9 (Semifinals)\n\nGame #12 ESPN or ESPN2\/ACCN 7 p.m.\n\nGame #13 ESPN or ESPN2\/ACCN 9 p.m.\n\nSaturday, March 10 (Finals)\n\nGame #14 ESPN\/ACCN 8:30 p.m.\n\n*Reading, PA\n\n^ACC-Big Ten Challenge\n\n$Hoophall Miami Invitational (American Airlines Arena)\n\n!Diamond Head Classic (Honolulu, HI)\n\nACC Regional Sports Networks Lineup\n\nFOX Sports South\n\nFOX Sports Southeast\n\nFOX Sports Florida\n\nFOX Sports Sun\n\nFOX Sports Midwest\n\nFOX Sports Indiana\n\nNESN\n\nYES Network\n\nCSN Mid Atlantic\n\nAT&T Sportsnet Pittsburgh"}
{"text":"Lin-Manuel Miranda with cast during his final performance curtain call of \u2018Hamilton\u2019 on Broadway at Richard Rodgers Theatre on July 9, 2016, in New York City.\n\nA Meowth on 46th and 6th almost made me miss a historic night on Broadway, the last performance of Hamilton for star\/creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as Tony winner Leslie Odom Jr. (Aaron Burr), Phillipa Soo (Eliza Hamilton), and ensemble member Ariana DeBose. I was blocks away from the Richard Rogers Theatre, with my head down, looking at my Pok\u00e9mon Go screen, and out of nowhere, one of my favorite Pok\u00e9mon shows up. I needed to get to the theater, because I knew the scene outside would be a biblical shit-show, but this was Meowth. So I turned and walked the opposite direction from the theater, in an attempt to catch it.\n\nIt took seven Pok\u00e9balls, one slight stumble off the curb, and dirty looks from a family that thought I was creepily taking pictures of them when in reality they were just standing right behind this beautiful Pok\u00e9mon, but I got it.\n\nCelebrating with no one but myself, I remembered that Hamilton was happening in 20 minutes. And upon arriving on the block of the show, I realized that my seven-minute detour might have been a mistake. Because it was packed.\n\nPhoto: Rembert Browne\n\nThe scene outside felt like a red-carpet premiere. \u201cLook who I\u2019m with,\u201d one man said looking into his phone, as a famous woman walked by, briefly crossing his screen. After she left, he stopped shooting video and asked his friend who she was. The friend didn\u2019t know.\n\nIt was Mariska Hargitay, which made me want to take his phone and stomp it out for not knowing the Queen.\n\nBefore I went in, I saw Jane Fonda, Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee, Rosie O\u2019Donnell, and many people who looked like Adam Levine but weren\u2019t. By the time I made it to my seat, I\u2019d already heard four people say versions of \u201cWe\u2019re actually in the room where it\u2019s happening,\u201d a reference to the song \u201cThe Room Where It Happens,\u201d in which Aaron Burr describes the envy of not being part of the power circle, in the room where the big decisions are made. Under any other conditions, moments like this would bring out a slight bit of eye-roll, but not tonight. The excitement was understood and it was clear no one was attempting to play it cool, which was oddly refreshing for New York City.\n\nSome people were pajama rich, dressed down like they were going to the movies, others glammed out as though they\u2019d just come from the Met Gala. The spectacle was real, and the lights were still on, with six or seven minutes until the show was set to begin. Apparently Jennifer Lopez was there, which certainly gave her the belt for \u201cmost famous person here.\u201d But it made sense \u2014 she and Lin-Manuel recently made a song together, \u201cLove Makes the World Go Around,\u201d a tribute to those affected by Orlando\u2019s Pulse Nightclub shooting.\n\nWhat a weird thing Hamilton became, that it made sense for J.Lo to be in attendance. Unreal.\n\nSitting there, thinking about J.Lo in the building, and then J.Lo in The Wedding Planner, and then J.Lo and Jane Fonda in Monster-in-Law, and then wondering what Michael Vartan has been up to, I must have missed a crew of men in suits with earpieces enter my area. Snapping out of my analog Wikipedia dive, I cased the room and saw four of these men, two by a doorway, two walking up a staircase. Moments later, Secretary of State John Kerry.\n\nOne person started clapping, and then more people started clapping, and then a few people stood up, and then the entire room was giving John Kerry a standing ovation. Sorry, Ms. Lopez, but it looks like there\u2019s a new belt-holder in town. And I don\u2019t know why, but I felt great for Kerry in this moment. He\u2019s not really hurting in any way, but it was nice to see him get some public respect. It\u2019s easy to forget about Yung Swift Boat, so this was great.\n\nI wondered if he\u2019d seen the show before. I wondered if there were parts of this that might get a bit real for him. I mean, he always kind of wanted to be in the room where \u2014\n\nOkay, I now understood how painfully easy it was to make that annoying joke. It was embarrassing, but who cares.\n\nA few minutes later, after being thrilled for Secretary of State Kerry, I felt terrible for him, as things turned into a meet-and-greet, clogging up a staircase. People were talking to him and asking for pictures, and if you weren\u2019t in the actual line, you were standing in front of him, getting that massive head and granite hair of his in your rudely unauthorized selfie.\n\nBut then I felt good again, because he bent over to talk to a little kid in a backwards Hamilton hat. This was all so weird, and again, the show hadn\u2019t even begun.\n\nAnd then things got really good. The Kerry meet-and-greet picked up steam again, with the long-armed Kerry now taking the selfies himself, again crowding the staircase.\n\nWhich made it comically difficult for Aaron Paul to get where he needed to go.\n\nPhoto: Rembert Browne\n\nWhen this happens, you have to break your \u201cno photos of celebrities\u201d rule. Is Aaron trying to talk to Secretary of State John Kerry? Did he sign up for this meet-and-greet? Is John Kerry a Breaking Bad fan, and if so, will he say something to Aaron? Is Aaron just trying to test his July 2016 swag by walking by Kerry, catching his eye, and seeing what happens?\n\nUnfortunately, we\u2019ll never know, because someone thought this was the moment to dim the lights and start the musical. Moments later, \u201cHow does a bastard, orphan \u2026\u201d\n\n***\n\nIntermission was wild, mainly because I walked around and finally spotted Jennifer Lopez. It wasn\u2019t hard to figure out where she was, there were throngs of people standing around, near her as well as up on the balcony, just staring at her. The room was buzzing, after being extremely fired up through the whole first act. Miranda received a standing ovation for the first number, \u201cAlexander Hamilton,\u201d and the cheers sounded more like what you\u2019d hear at a sporting event than a Broadway show. It was exciting, and almost everyone behaved perfectly, except for that one lady.\n\nThat lady.\n\nThe thing about Hamilton is that it\u2019s a triumph, easily one of the great musicals, an extremely transformative experience. The other thing about Hamilton is that some people like it too much, and these people are terrifying and must be destroyed, because they might challenge you to a duel and shoot you between the ribs if you interrupt them while they\u2019re singing \u201cWait for It.\u201d\n\nI had one of these people in my section, and not only did she sing along, she repeatedly raised her arms and screamed, and would drum on things that weren\u2019t drums, and any time there was a progressive line about immigrants, slavery, or equal rights, she would either clap, or stand up and then clap.\n\nDuring \u201cThe Schuyler Sisters\u201d \u2014 the fifth number \u2014 her presence had already been felt. And throughout that song, in her honor, I mentally changed the word \u201cwork\u201d to \u201cwoke\u201d in the lyrics.\n\nBecause she was so woke. The woke god. But it made sense, there were groups in this country that helped build it, groups that were treated unfairly and not properly credited. And she wanted you to know that she knew that. God bless her.\n\nAnyway, after about 20 minutes, the lights dimmed again.\n\n***\n\nHamilton will go on in a powerful, important way \u2014 both in New York and on tour \u2014 but this was certainly the end of an era.\n\nWhile the crowd was in a frenzy, what happened on stage was like any other night. There was one moment when Rory O\u2019Malley (King George) blew Odom (Burr) a kiss, making Odom laugh, which delighted the crowd. And both Odom and Christopher Jackson (George Washington) received standing ovations for \u201cThe Room Where It Happens\u201d and \u201cOne Last Time,\u201d respectively. But when it wrapped up, there wasn\u2019t a ten-minute Lin-Manuel speech, no one rolled out a cake, Barack and Hillary didn\u2019t show up \u2014 there was no self-initiated hoopla.\n\nPhoto: Rembert Browne\n\nAfter bows from the full cast, the four actors who were leaving stepped forward, and then Jackson pushed Miranda to the front of the stage for more solo applause from the crowd, which was very much deserved.\n\nBut right when it seemed to be over, suddenly the orchestra started playing the theme song from The West Wing, a show Miranda has cited as an inspiration. I expected many things on this night, but getting slightly choked up at watching Lin-Manuel Miranda laugh at the surprise, while thinking about my heroes Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn, wasn\u2019t one of them. But this wasn\u2019t a normal show, and this wasn\u2019t a normal night, so it was a fitting way for it to end, triumphantly abnormal. What a run."}
{"text":"Settlement in ignition defect doesn't include criminal charges against individuals.\n\nGM recall survivors protest on Capitol Hill in 2014. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite, AP)\n\nThe $900 million General Motors agreed on Thursday to pay the government for concealing a deadly ignition switch from regulators is a lot of money \u2014 nearly one-third of GM's earnings last year \u2014 though hardly an existential threat to the company. Indeed, GM stock was up 11 cents to $31.31 a share on the news.\n\nBut the truly disturbing part of the announcement was that not a single individual has been criminally charged for concealing the defect: a faulty ignition switch that allowed cars to suddenly stall or prevented air bags from deploying. Defective vehicles remained on the road even as cars crashed, lawyers secretly settled complaints with victims' families, and more than 120 people were killed.\n\nReal people, not some faceless \u201ccompany,\u201d made the fateful decisions not to fix a switch that failed to perform properly even before it went into production in 2002; not to do more once complaints of stalls and shutoffs came in; not to inform regulators of the defect when occupants began dying in crashes; and not to stop selling cars and misleading the public about their safety.\n\nNo one \u2014 engineers, lawyers or executives \u2014 has been personally called to account before the law.\n\nLaura Christian, whose 16-year-old daughter was one of GM's earliest victims, in 2005, described why the system needs to change. \u201cWe buried our loved ones because GM buried a deadly defect. And yet today, all GM has to do is write another check to escape.\u201d\n\nThursday's disappointing conclusion after months of federal investigation is simply par for the course. In the past decade, corporations have gotten away with all manner of fraud, self-dealing, negligent manufacturing and market manipulation. The subprime mortgage industry nearly brought down the U.S. economy and ruined untold number of lives. But to the extent there was punishment at all after these acts, it usually involved a company writing a check, as if these firms ran on automatic pilot.\n\nIndividuals are deterred from wrongdoing by the prospect of going to jail, much more so than by the prospect of seeing the corporate treasurer pay money to the government.\n\nIn GM's case, federal prosecutors in New York can point to two criminal charges against General Motors, the company, for concealing a deadly defect and for wire fraud. But even here, GM got off easy. The charges are deferred and will be dismissed in three years if GM fixes its recall process under an appointed federal monitor. Prosecutors also left the door open to charging individuals in the future, but nobody should hold their breath. It's hard to see what more investigating could turn up at this stage.\n\nIf criminal laws are inadequate to handle the types of fraud or negligence committed by people running companies, it\u2019s time to carefully re-examine those laws.\n\nFor auto safety, there\u2019s an easy fix. Under laws that cover many consumer products, individuals at companies can be charged criminally when they willfully fail to report unsafe products to regulators. Auto safety laws make it far more difficult to prosecute company executives for similar acts. Three Democratic senators \u2014 Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Bill Nelson of Florida \u2014 have been pushing a measure that would plug this hole, making it easier to hold auto executives responsible when safety laws are willfully flouted. Despite the uproar over hidden defects in Toyota vehicles a few years ago and the recent GM fiasco, the measure has failed to gain traction in Congress. The Senate, which will consider an auto safety measure this fall, should embrace it.\n\nThe logic is pretty simple.\n\nIf an individual who kills someone, even unintentionally, through negligent acts with a car can be charged with manslaughter, individuals at a company that kills scores of people with a car they know is unsafe ought to face criminal prosecution, too.\n\nUSA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view \u2014 a unique USA TODAY feature.\n\nTo read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter.\n\nRead or Share this story: http:\/\/usat.ly\/1F5lFPj"}
{"text":"A Fundamentalist Born and Raised\n\nI was born and raised a fundamentalist. Or, as some of my friends used to passionately say, a \u201cKing-James-Bible-Preaching-Devil-Hating-White-Shirt-Wearing-Biscuit-Eating-Capital-B-BAPTIST.\u201d Please, don\u2019t turn off your computer and run away scared. My story doesn\u2019t end that way.\n\n[Tweet \u201cI was a King James Bible Preaching Devil Hating White Shirt Wearing Biscuit Eating Capital B-BAPTIST.\u201d]\n\nI graduated with honors and a four-year diploma from a fundamental baptist Bible college. I almost completed several years of graduate work from the same school. I attended \u201cKing James Only\u201d or \u201cTR only\u201d churches for almost all of that time. I preached in some of them on a regular basis.\n\nIf you had asked me in those days, I would have help up my nose in pride and explained that I was King James in much the same way as one might say, \u201cI am reformed.\u201d I look back and wonder at the oddity of such a statement. My name is Tim, not James! And while I\u2019m a king in God\u2019s eyes, I\u2019ve never worn a crown. Nevertheless, that\u2019s what we said. What was meant by this sentiment? I was convinced that the KJV was the only preserved Word of God in English, and that every other translation was inferior at best, and perhaps even evil or demonically influenced.\n\nThen, something amazing happened\u2014something that rocked my world and made me a different person. It brought me closer to God than I\u2019d ever been before and gave me a stronger faith than I\u2019d ever had;\n\nI learned things.\n\nThe KJV Is Not the Only Option for a Bible Translation\n\nI took Dan Wallace\u2019s Credo Course on Textual Criticism. I took Gary Habermas\u2019 Credo Course on the Resurrection. I went through the entire \u201cTheology Program.\u201d I learned things\u2014things I had somehow never known, and things, I suspect, I had been carefully \u201csheltered\u201d from. I realized how utterly and unforgivably ignorant I was. I\u2019ll mention only a few of the things I learned.\n\nThe resurrection of Jesus was the true center of my faith.\n\nHe and he alone deserved the place at the center of my life that, sadly, so many other things had occupied.\n\nI could let go of everything but Jesus, and still have all that I needed, because I had Him.\n\nGod was most honored, not by a blind adherence to dogma that cannot be challenged, but by a breathless pursuit of truth that was willing to go wherever the evidence took me.\n\nAfter reading Aland, Metzger, and Tov as well as Scrivener, I realized it simply wasn\u2019t possible to claim that the KJV was verbally perfect or that the Greek Textus Receptus and Hebrew Masoretic Texts were perfect unless one was willing to say that the KJV translators were supernaturally inspired by God to correct every Hebrew and Greek manuscript in existence. And even if you grant this, you\u2019d still have to decide which KJV was perfect \u2013 the 1611 in its original form or the slightly different edition of 1769 which is what most today use? I didn\u2019t know much, but I knew enough to know I couldn\u2019t and didn\u2019t want to say that. It wasn\u2019t honoring to God, his Word, or to truth.\n\nThis left me with something of a dilemma\u2014one which, due to my upbringing, I had never faced before. If the KJV is not perfect and is not the only Word of God in English, how do I choose what translation to use? If the KJV is not the only Word of God in English, there are options, and with all options comes the responsibility of choice.\n\nSo how do you choose? To answer questions like this, you must know a little bit about the history of English translations of the Bible, and the different textual and translation theories behind modern versions.\n\nA Brief History of English Bible Versions\n\nThe Original Tongues\n\nWhile some may not be aware of this, the Bible wasn\u2019t originally written in English. When the human authors of the Old Testament (OT) put quill to papyri, they wrote in Hebrew, and a few small portions of Daniel and Ezra were written in Aramaic. When the New Testament (NT) authors penned their works, they wrote in Greek. However, most of us simple folk do not know Greek well enough to pick it up and read it. Even fewer of us chat with our friends on Facebook in Hebrew and Aramaic. This means that if we are to read the Word of God, we must do it through an English translation of the original languages.\n\nJohn Wycliffe\n\nWhile one may rightly point to figures like Alfred the Great, the Venerable Bede, and others as early examples of translating the Bible into English, it is in the work of John Wycliffe and his followers that almost all today would find as the first complete Bible in English. The official Bible of Wycliffe\u2019s day was the Latin Vulgate, which was translated by Jerome almost a millennium earlier. But the common man spoke English.\n\nConvinced that every man was responsible to obey what God had said, Wycliffe and his \u201cLollard\u201d followers desired every man to be able to read the Scriptures in their own tongue. The story of their brave persistence and sacrifice in completing this translation, at risk of life and limb, would rival the level of action in your favorite comic book series.\n\nHowever, their work was to translate from the common Latin into English. While this gave us a Bible in English, it was an extra step removed from the original languages. With the fires of the Reformation burning bright, fueled by the invention of reusable metal type and fanned by the revival of learning which it sparked, a second-hand translation from the Vulgate would not suffice. As the cry of Ad Fontes rang loud, a direct translation of the original languages was the desired response. And one William Tyndale arose to bravely answer this call.\n\nWilliam Tyndale\n\nTyndale had the advantage of an Oxford and Cambridge education, as well as the benefit of the Greek NT of Erasmus (though he at times still leaned on the Latin Vulgate). With the bravery of a lion, he faced opposition and persecution as he translated first the NT and eventually the OT into English.\n\nThe Constitutions of Oxford had made translating the Bible into English illegal, and both translations and their translators were being burned. Even so, Tyndale and his helpers pressed on in their goal, even to the point of Tyndale\u2019s own death by burning at the stake. A Bible in English, from the original Hebrew and Greek, was the blood-wrought result. There would be others along the way (Coverdale, Matthew, Geneva, Great, Bishops, etc.), but none would so stand out or endure as his. In fact, in some ways, each of the runner-ups could be considered as mere revisions of Tyndale\u2019s work. Truly, the splash made by Tyndale\u2019s life and work rippled into almost every English translation to come after him.\n\nThe King James Version\n\nIn 1604 at the Hampton conference, a new translation was called for.\n\nThen in 1611 six panels consisting of forty-seven of the best scholars of the day finished what became the most enduring English translation to date. While they sought to create a work \u201cnewly translated out of the original tongues,\u201d they noted the diligent comparing and revising of the former translations as essential to their work. In fact, in the prefatory \u201cThe Translator to the Reader,\u201d they noted the following:\n\n\u201cTruly (good Christian Reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one [\u2026] but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principle good one\u2026\u201d\n\nTheir admitted indebtedness to Tyndale is revealed on almost every page. It has been said that more than 70% of the language of the KJV is actually the language of Tyndale repeated. They did produce a new translation; and in the process, created one of the greatest and most enduring literary works ever produced in English. But in another very real sense, they were simply retweeting Tyndale.\n\n[Tweet \u201cThey did produce a new translation but in a sense, they were simply retweeting Tyndale.\u201d]\n\nThe Arrival of a Modern Text \u2013 What Do We Translate?\n\nErasmus to Lachmann\n\nMuch work was done after 1611 in the ever-blossoming field of NT studies. When Erasmus had produced the first critical edition of the Greek NT in 1516\u2014which is essentially the text the KJV translators had used\u2014he had included around 1000 annotations to the text which dealt with differences between the different manuscripts of the NT that were known to him. These differences are known as \u201ctextual variants.\u201d With his text, the science of NT textual criticism was born.\n\nTextual criticism is the science of comparing the minor differences in the different manuscripts to discover exactly what the text read when it left the original author\u2019s control.\n\nAs with most births, a growth period would soon follow the birth of textual criticism. As more and more Greek NT manuscripts were discovered, new editions of the Greek NT continued to incorporate these finds (mostly in marginal notes) without making any significant changes to the text itself.\n\nWith Karl Lachmann in 1831, that all began to change. His printed Greek text was the first to break with Erasmus\u2019 text and allow textual variants to change not only the shape of the marginal notes, but also the shape of the text itself. He believed the most reliable way to reproduce the original form of the NT text was to lean most heavily on the manuscripts which were most ancient rather than relying exclusively on Erasmus\u2019 much later texts. His ideas were continued in critical editions of the Greek NT published by men such as Griesbach, Tischendorf, and Tregelles.\n\nBut none of them would have the impact of the two scholars who broke onto the scene in the latter half of the 1800s. If Erasmus started the journey, and if Lachmann and others broadened the small trail, we must give credit to two men who turned that trail into a blazing highway. These two men were B.F. Westcott, and F.J.A. Hort.\n\nHort and Westcott\n\nAfter roughly 30 years of intense work on the Greek NT, these two scholars had taken the spark of Lachmann and fanned it into a burning flame. They were working on a new edition of the Greek NT, following text critical principles that have come to underlie almost all modern editions of the NT today.\n\nHort and Westcott were committee members of the newly commissioned revision to the KJV (known as the Revised Version) that had been called for in 1870. As the revision took place, they shared the results of their own textual critical work with those on the translation committee.\n\nLike Lachmann before them, they were convinced that the form of the NT text that most closely resembled the original autographs would be found in the most ancient copies. Several uncial manuscripts had been discovered which were almost a full millennium older than those upon which Erasmus had primarily based his work. Whatever the merits of the translation of the RV, its great gift to the world was that it was essentially based upon these older manuscripts. The era of modern translations was born.\n\nOlder Is Better, and Newer Is Older\n\nWhen we speak of \u201cnew manuscript discoveries\u201d, we\u2019re typically talking about the discovery of older manuscripts. The only way in which they\u2019re new is that they were recently discovered. In this sense, newer isn\u2019t better because it\u2019s newer; it\u2019s better precisely because it\u2019s older.\n\nHort and Westcott did their revising work with basically five uncial manuscripts that predated those which had formed the Textus Receptus by, in some cases around 1,000 years. Today, we have discovered so much more.\n\nWe\u2019ve discovered 323 uncial manuscripts.\n\nEven more significant, we have unearthed 131 papyri manuscripts which mostly date even earlier than the uncial manuscripts. A few date to as early as the second century A.D. Historically speaking, that is astonishingly close to the writing of the original autographs.\n\nRumor has it that a fragment of the Gospel of Mark has even been recently discovered which dates somewhere in the 80s A.D.\n\nWe also continue to discover manuscripts from the later periods. This increases our confidence in the general stability of the text of the NT.\n\nIn addition to the Greek NT manuscripts, we also have over 10,000 manuscripts of ancient Latin translations of the NT.\n\nWe have anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 manuscripts of translations into other ancient languages.\n\nAs if that weren\u2019t enough to garner confidence, we also have over a million quotations of Scripture from the early church fathers which bear witness to the text of Scripture.\n\n[Tweet \u201cQuite simply, we have an astounding amount of data that bear witness to the NT text.\u201d]\n\nWhen the KJV translators produced their work, it was based on essentially a dozen or so Greek NT manuscripts. Today, we have access to 5,839 of them. As the work of textual criticism continues today, we gain (with every new discovery) an ever-increasing confidence in the general reliability of the NT text, and we tweak the minor details to bring us closer and closer to exactly what was originally written by those who penned our NT under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We can rest quite confident that the NT text we have today is, in all essentials, exactly what was written by the original authors.\n\nModern translations differ from the KJV in that they are based on representations of the original text that are much more fully informed by the evidence. Today, that text is found in the NA28 and the UBS5 Greek texts.\n\nPut simply, we have much more data today than they did then.\n\nToday, there are only two English translations which are based on the older Textus Receptus (Remember, older here actually means later.): the King James Version, (last updated in 1769) and the New King James Version. All other modern versions are based on the newer (which means older) texts.\n\nTranslation Philosophies \u2013 How Do We Translate It?\n\nWhen choosing a translation today, not only do you have to make a choice between an older or newer original language text, you must also choose between different philosophies of translation. Where did these theories come from, and how to they work? To answer that, we must first consider two men who have had a major influence on how translations are done today.\n\nAdolf Deissmann and the Discovery of the Papyri\n\nIn 1895 Adolf Deissmann changed the landscape of biblical studies significantly when he published his work Bible Studies . In some ways, what made his work so revolutionary were the presuppositions which had come before it. It had been common to think of the language of the NT as a unique language, above that of the mundane life. Some even spoke of \u201cHoly Ghost Greek\u201d in reference to the NT.\n\nDeissmann demonstrated that a comparison of the many ancient papyri scraps from the Roman period with the Greek of the NT revealed that the language of the NT was rather the language of the common man. It was written in the conversational style of the average Joe.\n\nWhile the effect of Deissmann\u2019s work was initially felt in the revamping of lexicons, it would eventually also be felt in the revamping of translation theory. If the original language of the NT was a conversational style intended to communicate to the common man, then shouldn\u2019t translations into other languages seek to communicate in the same way?\n\nEugene Nida and the Proposal of Dynamic Equivalence\n\nIn the mid 1950s a man named Eugene Nida would take similar ideas and help us think carefully through our understanding of translation and the task it should accomplish. Born right here in OKC, OK, Nida was a Baptist minister who gained his Ph.D. in linguistics and began to propose refinements to translation theory. He published Toward a Science of Translating (Brill, 1964) in the mid 1900s and was a founding member of Wycliffe Bible Translators.\n\nHis suggestions were very widely received. While it had been common to think of translation in terms of either strictly literal or simply paraphrase, Nida showed at length that, in fact, these tight categories were overly simplistic. There is never perfect correspondence between any two languages, and perfect translation between them is impossible. He understood well that all translation already involves interpretation and that a goal of being less interpretive in translation is to miss the target by shooting for the moon.\n\nNo translation, however literal, can claim not to involve the interpretations of the translators.\n\nHe proposed that instead of thinking of two strictly different ways of translating, we should recognize that these traditional options are actually more like two opposing poles on a continuum; and it might be a more accurate representation of the function of an original text if a translation sought a kind of \u201cmiddle ground\u201d between them. This middle ground he termed \u201cdynamic equivalence.\u201d And so was born the modern approach to translation theory.\n\nIt has been suggested that today there are basically three philosophies of translation in use: formal equivalence, functional equivalence, and what is known as free translation.\n\nFormal Equivalence (Emphasis on Individual Words)\n\nFormal equivalence is the philosophy that seeks to keep as close as possible to the form of the original language, retaining (as much as possible) the words of the original and even, where possible, the form of those words. It has as its goal the representation of the words of the original language in equivalent words in the translation, even if this causes awkward and unnatural English.\n\nFunctional Equivalence (Emphasis on Sentences)\n\nFunctional equivalence recognizes that all translation is already interpretation and that for the modern reader to feel the impact the original readers felt when they read the original, the translators must find the meaning of the text and convey that meaning through the translation. Its goal is to represent the meaning of the original text in modern equivalents. In one sense, one might fairly say that the sentence becomes the translational unit in such a philosophy. The words and their order may be changed slightly into more modern equivalents so that they are smooth English. In another sense, that wouldn\u2019t be true, since the goal is still to translate the words. However, if the language and grammar must be sacrificed to make the meaning clearer in natural English, the degree to which a translation is willing to make this sacrifice is the degree to which the translation has chosen functional over formal equivalence.\n\nFree Translation (Emphasis on Thoughts)\n\nFree translation is what is often referred to as paraphrase. There is no attempt to maintain the words or the form of the original. The goal is to remove as much as possible the distance between the modern reader and the ancient text. The goal then is to translate ideas rather than words or even sentences. In many ways, such paraphrase is not truly translation. By definition, such an approach will contain more of the interpretation of the translator. Most who have produced such free translations would readily acknowledge this and wouldn\u2019t want anyone to use their work as their sole Bible.\n\nThat being said, understand that all translations are to greater or lesser degrees a mixture of these approaches. It is impossible to be woodenly literal in translation at all points. It is also impossible to be fully \u201cfree\u201d and avoid formal translation at all points. It might be best to think of a spectrum with a woodenly literal interlinear at one end and a free paraphrase at the other. Every translation can be placed on this spectrum. If we were to chart the most readily available translations today, we might see where they would land on such a continuum by suggesting the following chart;\n\nChart of Translations\n\nA Brief Examination of Some Major Translations\n\nInterlinears\n\nYLT\/Mounce\n\nIf someone chooses (for whatever reasons) to go with a translation from the older TR instead of the modern texts, they could turn to Young\u2019s Literal Translation (YLT) for the most literal translation of that text.\n\nRobert Young felt that belief in the verbal inspiration of Scripture demanded the most literal translation of the text as was possible, even if slavishly following the word order and form of the original text produced horrible English. He thus produced in 1862 the YLT. While not truly an interlinear (because it doesn\u2019t present the Greek and Hebrew texts), it follows the same basic woodenly literal style of translation followed by an interlinear version. For example, note how his rendering of John 3:16 reads:\n\n\u201cFor God did so love the world, that His Son\u2014the only begotten\u2014 He gave, that every one who is believing in him may not perish, but may have life age-during.\u201d (Footnote)\n\nToday, William Mounce has worked with Zondervan to produce several interlinear translations which are much more valuable than previous formats and take advantage of modern textual advances; . In these new editions, the original language is presented in its original order. This can easily be seen, but instead of awkward and impossible English, Mounce has used a system of italicized words to still produce good English. In addition, he has included the full text of common English translations in columns on the side. If you are looking for a way to see a glimpse of the structure of the original language but don\u2019t want to learn the languages, such interlinear are a valuable option.\n\nHowever, there is no substitute for an understanding of the lexical, syntactical, grammatical structures, and nuances of the original languages. All you will truly get from an interlinear is the original word order and perhaps some good lexical definition. One could easily mistake such a brief passing acquaintance for a close relationship with the original text, but that would be to fool oneself. If your acquaintance with the original languages is based on an interlinear, your relationship with them is on the level of \u201cjust met.\u201d So please don\u2019t go around telling people that you\u2019re married.\n\nFormal Equivalence Translations\n\nKJV\/NKJV\n\nIf you want a translation that has the TR as its basis but don\u2019t want the slavishly literal translation of Young\u2019s, you\u2019re left with two basic options: the KJV or NKJV.\n\nThe KJV is nothing short of a monument to the English language. Its beauty and elegance are unsurpassed. When it was first printed, it became an instant literary classic. In terms of English style, probably no English version will ever approach it.\n\nIf you\u2019ve come from a long tradition of using the KJV, it may be hard for you to even read the Bible in anything other than \u201cKing James English.\u201d Many have formed a deep emotional attachment to this translation . I would never try to get anyone to stop using it. In fact, I think every Christian should own and read a copy of the KJV. We just shouldn\u2019t claim it\u2019s perfect or that it\u2019s the only translation God approves of. Using the KJV will leave you with the impression that you\u2019ve been in the presence of royalty, and its rhythmic prose and enduring turns of phrase will leave a lasting impression upon your heart and will likely spring easily to mind for many years to come. It is and always will be a great translation with an impressive pedigree. It will always hold a dear place in the hearts of English speaking peoples.\n\nThe NKJV has retained the same original language texts that stood behind the KJV, but the translation has been updated to reflect modern English (and in some cases to produce a more literal translation and more natural translation).\n\nHowever, some have suggested that the choice to retain the text of the KJV but revise its language was in fact to choose to keep the element of the KJV which was inferior (its text), and remove the element which made the KJV so superior (the beauty and elegance of its language) . It might even be said that it was like snipping the rose off its stem; you lose the enticing aroma and the intrinsic beauty, but you keep the thorny stem.\n\nThe only reason to use the NKJV is if you desire for theological reasons to retain the use of the TR as the original language text but desire a good translation of that text into modern and more easily understandable English. But anyone reading either the KJV or the NKJV should know that several of the passages in it were almost certainly not written by the Biblical authors (such as I John 5:7, or Acts 9:5\u20136).\n\nNASB\/HCSB\n\nProduced by the Lockman Foundation in 1971 and significantly revised in 1995, the New American Standard Bible (NASB) sought to be the most formally equivalent translation of modern texts as possible without being a slavishly literal translation like that of an interlinear. The Lockman foundation makes the claim for their work that,\n\n\u201cAt no point did the translators attempt to interpret Scripture through translation. Instead, the NASB translation team adhered to the principles of literal translation. This is the most exacting and demanding method of translation, requiring a word-for-word translation that is both accurate and readable[\u2026] Instead of telling the reader what to think, the updated NASB provides the most precise translation with which to conduct a personal journey through the Word of God.\u201d\n\nAs we have seen when we mentioned Nida\u2019s work above, such claims are at best overstated. All translation is interpretation. Nonetheless, if one is seeking for the most literal translation short of an interlinear, the NASB is a good choice. It was the favorite among Southern Baptists for many years, but that pride of place has now gone to the HCSB.\n\nThe Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) is a much more recent translation. Produced by the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the HCSB intended to serve as an alternative to the NIV for Southern Baptist curriculum and ministry. The translation promoted what they termed \u201coptimal equivalence\u201d as a middle ground between formal and functional equivalence. In some ways it picks up the very literal style of the NASB before it. It seeks to follow in that literal translation vein except when that would sacrifice good English. At that point, it maintains good English and presents the more literal translation as a footnote with the \u201cLit.\u201d abbreviation.\n\nI think this is a very helpful approach, especially for those seeking a more literal translation. It\u2019s generally more theologically conservative in its translation and suits well the SBC which created it. It generally leans towards more traditional use of gender language.\n\nMy understanding is that it was originally intended to be a translation of the \u201cMajority Text\u201d of Hodges and Farstad. This would have made it a very unique translation and would have thrown a \u201c3rd text\u201d of the Greek NT on the English market, but this plan was ultimately abandoned. However, as perhaps something of a vestigial remnant of that purpose, it does still occasionally retain TR readings (in brackets) that have been relegated to the footnotes in most modern versions (e.g. the doxology at the end of Matt. 6:13, or the text of Acts 8:37).\n\nRSV\/NRSV\/ESV\n\nThe British Revised Version was the first major revision of the KJV, appearing in 1881. It had incorporated the new textual discoveries in its NT that have been noted above. In America, it was edited slightly, and then published as the American Standard Version (ASV) in 1901. While finding a better reception in America, it didn\u2019t quite gain the wide acceptance that had been hoped for. Really, its great gift to the world was its Greek text.\n\nIn 1952, it underwent a major revision, both of text and translation, known as the Revised Standard Version (RSV). In some ways, this was truly the first modern translation which wasn\u2019t simply a revision of the KJV.\n\nThe RSV garnered quite a bit of rather controversial attention. It had translated the Hebrew text of Is. 7:14 as \u201cyoung woman\u201d instead of the more traditional \u201cvirgin.\u201d While their translation was quite justified, there was an uproar in some hyper-conservative circles claiming that the RSV was seeking to impinge upon the deity of Jesus through this change. As if that wasn\u2019t preposterous enough, several of its translators were (with no warrant whatsoever) accused of being \u201ccommunist\u201d and \u201ccommunist sympathizers.\u201d Add to this, the rather emotionally based knee-jerk reaction to some of the many updates in the Greek text which it had incorporated, (e.g. not printing the phrase \u201cthrough his blood\u201d in Col. 1:14, etc.). One can grasp the controversy that unfortunately resulted. One pastor in the Rocky Mountains even burned the new translation. The revision, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), introduced gender inclusive language to a much greater degree than translations had done previously (though not in relation to Deity) as well as updating the Greek and Hebrew texts with modern textual advances, and continues to be used by those who might prefer a more literal translation of the Greek text.\n\nESV\n\nIn 2001 the English Standard Version (ESV) entered the scene. It was an entirely new translation from the original languages into contemporary English, but one which consciously stood in the lineage of the KJV-NRSV tradition.\n\nLeland Ryken had a huge influence on the translation work, and due to his input, the ESV has retained a kind of understated elegance that is quite exceptional. The emphasis on literary excellence is one of the more remarkable features of the translation. Understanding that theological language has a way of being \u201cstabilized\u201d from generation to generation, Ryken sought to retain the language that began with William Tyndale as a fountainhead (where such stabilization was accurate). He departed from that language only where accuracy and smooth modern English required it. Thus, there is a \u201cdignity of expression\u201d to the ESV often lacking in modern translations.\n\nTheir goal was to produce an \u201cessentially literal\u201d translation into modern English, taking formal equivalence as the starting point and departing from it only where good English demanded such a departure.\n\nWhile most recent translations (HCSB and a few other excepted) have employed ever-increasing gender inclusive language, the ESV deliberately sought to resist that trend.\n\nThe names of the men who worked on the translation reads like a \u201cWho\u2019s Who\u201d list of modern evangelical scholarship, and the results of their work have become one of the favorite translations of many an English Bible reader.\n\nFunctional Equivalence Translations\n\nThe NET Bible is something of an innovation in modern English translation. The acronym \u201cNET\u201d is a bit of a play on words. First, referring to the name of the work \u201cNew English Translation\u201d and second, the unique nature of the work which was primarily planned as an Internet translation. It was released online in 2005 and, while available in print, sought to accommodate the modern age by being an online accessible Bible. It is available online, in its entirety, free for all, for all time.\n\nThis is an inherently ministry-focused model which created a format that immediately solved common problems for those who sought to produce ministry materials which quoted large sections of biblical text. Prior to the publication of the NET Bible, they either had to use older public domain works or obtain difficult permissions from publishers of modern versions which often delayed and sometimes prohibited publication of ministry resources intended to be offered for free online and elsewhere. The NET Bible sought to resolves those difficulties by producing a translation downloadable free online in its entirety.\n\nThe combined work of over twenty-five prominent biblical scholars, the translation has provided a unique solution to the tensions inherent in translation work. Every translation must balance the competing aims of readability, elegance, and accuracy. The closer a translation moves towards one of these goals, the further they get from the other two. For example, if you glance at the chart of translations above, you see (obviously) that the further one moves to the right, the further he also moves from the left. Deep stuff, I know. This is the inescapable nature of translation work, and every translation inherently faces these tensions.\n\nTypically, a translation must land somewhere imperfectly between these competing goals. The NET Bible sought a unique solution. They provide in the actual text a more functionally equivalent translation which is more readable while still seeking an elegance balanced with readability. But then in the footnotes (at important points) they provide an explanation of the interpretive, textual, and translational difficulties of the passage and give a more literal rendering of the text as well as occasionally dealing with general Bible study issues. This allows them to maintain the goal of accuracy. There are over 60,000 such notes. That\u2019s more than any other translation ever produced; and because of the Internet format, they can continue to be updated and added to. Since these notes are provided by the translators themselves, they provide a unique way to \u201clook over the shoulders\u201d of the translators as they did their work, which is not available in any other English translation.\n\nOverall, the NET Bible is a unique translation, which has met the competing goals of translation in a hitherto impossible way, and has a clear focus on ministry values. It will no doubt continue to be a favorite among many Bible students.\n\nNIV\/NIV 2011\n\nIn 1894 the complete New International Version (NIV) was published. The release immediately stressed the international character of the work. Employing over 100 translators from America, Canada, Great Briton, Australia, and New Zealand, the translators aimed to produce an entirely new translation that would represent a widely interdenominational and truly international perspective.\n\nTaking the \u201cI\u201d in the name very seriously, they sought to make the translation simple enough that it would be easily usable even by a student for whom English was a second language. Thus, they avoided technical theological words (and any words with too many syllables), and sought to employ a more colloquial style. The translators all professed their \u201ccommitment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God\u2019s Word in written form\u201d which struck a chord with some conservative readers who had been suspicious of translations since the RSV.\n\nSuch a commitment sought accuracy to the original but also a clear, smooth English style. Thus, three separate committees reviewed both the translation and the style of the English. Further, while using the standard NA 26 Greek NT as its base, the committees occasionally disagreed with the textual choices of the NA, and so, actually translated an eclectic text which differed from the standard text at many points.\n\nNeedless to say, such an intricate process involving so many scholars was time-consuming, and expensive. It has been estimated that the total editorial cost was around eight million dollars. The NIV almost instantly rose to be the most widely used translation (perhaps excepting the KJV) and continues to top the charts of the best selling translations.\n\nWhile the NIV has faced a few minor revisions (NIVR, and TNIV), they didn\u2019t take on as widely. In 2011 the NIV received a full makeover that is definitely here to stay in the mainstream. Continuing to update the translation to be current with contemporary English usage, the committee also incorporated a greater degree of gender inclusive language. The NIV 2011 will likely continue to be one of the most widely sold and used English translations.\n\nNAB\/NJB\n\nThe New American Bible (NAB) was a production in 1970 of the Roman Catholic Church, but unlike several previous such productions, was much more ecumenical in its approach. One third of its translation committee was Protestants, and the translation shows the influence of the cooperation between both traditions. The revisions in 1986 and 1991 also introduced slightly more gender inclusive language.\n\nGNB\/REB\n\nIn 1976 the Good News Bible (GNB) arrived as the culmination of its Today\u2019s English Version TEV) predecessor. It sought to directly apply the principles of dynamic equivalence stated by Eugene Nida, and was one of the first translations to do so in such an intentional way.\n\nThe Revised English Bible (REB) was published as the revision of the NEB in 1989. It moved the translation away from much of its colloquial language and more towards the middle of our chart. The REB also used slightly more gender inclusivity in its language and was much more consistent in its translation of theological language.\n\nJB\/NLT\n\nJ. B Phillips originally published his translation as separate entities, but they were eventually published as the single volume The New Testament in Modern English in 1958. His purpose was to convey the sense of the original in a way that would have the same effect on the modern readers that the original writings had on theirs. He sought to set aside the traditional language that had been associated with English Bibles since Tyndale and to translate the text as one would translate any document from a foreign language, using the same freedom of style that would normally be employed in such an endeavor. The result garnered great praise from those who could see the meaning of the text being made plain. The eminent scholar F. F. Bruce stated that, in his time, the translation of the epistles was probably the best available for the average reader.\n\nThe New Living Translation (NLT), originally a revision of the Living Bible, actually became an entirely new translation in 1996. Based on the original languages, it primarily used a dynamic equivalence method. It thus departed significantly from the LB and became an altogether different translation.\n\nRecognizing that the original documents of Scripture were intended primarily to make an impact when read aloud, the NLT has employed a unique focus on recovering that impact in the public reading of the translation. Like the ESV and other modern translations, the translation team enlisted scholars to translate the books of the Bible who were specialist in exegesis and theology of each particular book. They employed such notable translators as Daniel Block, Tremper Longman III, Craig Blomberg, Darrell Bock, D. A. Carson, Douglas Moo, and Tom Schreiner. Its 2007 revision is truly remarkable as a functionally equivalent translation.\n\nNEB\n\nWith a wide variety of denominational input from a variety of British traditions, the New English Bible (NEB) sought in 1970 to leave behind traditional language and create a truly new English translation that did not simply recreate the traditional biblical English. It was in many ways simply a more functionally equivalent version of the RSV. With the notable C.H. Dodd overseeing the work and as notable a figure as C.S. Lewis contributing to its English style, the NEB was instantly popular and remains a favorite for many.\n\nFree Translation\n\nLiving Bible\n\nKenneth Taylor didn\u2019t originally intend to produce a new translation. As a father who wanted to render the great stories of the Bible in a way that his young children would understand, he began to take the ASV and more freely paraphrase its meaning into simple language that would help the ideas be easily grasped by even young children.\n\nEventually, his renderings became wildly popular, and he completed an entire Bible and published it as The Living Bible in 1971. The huge success of his work prompted him to start Tyndale House Publishers, and the free paraphrase nature of his work remained immensely popular in the \u201860s and \u201870s. It was especially popular among young people and many who were less acquainted with traditional biblical language. While still used, one of the major weaknesses of his paraphrase was that it was a paraphrase of an English translation, rather than a paraphrase of the original languages themselves.\n\nWhile Taylor\u2019s work was immensely popular for its ability to bring the concepts of the Bible into idiomatic English, the fact that it was in fact a paraphrase rather than a translation from the original languages severely limited its value.\n\nThe Message\n\nIn 2002 Eugene Peterson produced a new free translation which was of much greater scholarly aptitude. Much like Taylor before him, Peterson didn\u2019t originally intend to produce a new translation. He simply began to write out a more idiomatic translation of the books he was preaching in the church he pastored.\n\nHe had the academic background (from Regent College) to work directly from the original languages, and he submitted his work to the review of a group of other scholars. The result was a free translation much more accurate to the original languages. Rather than translating the words or even the exact ideas of the original languages, The Message sought to reproduce the effect of the original. It used idioms that were current, fresh, and part of the normal speech of everyday life. The language is thus much like that in which you would chat with friends and doesn\u2019t have an \u201cairy\u201d feel at all. As we saw above, Deissmann had shown already that this common language was in fact the conversational speech in which the NT was originally written.\n\nWhile a work like The Message has immense value in helping the reader \u201cfeel\u201d the force of the original in fresh language that most translations would prohibit, the reader also must keep in mind that a more free translation has inherently exercised a greater degree of interpretation before he even reads it.\n\nSome Concluding Principles\n\nChoose the Translation You Will Read\n\nAt the end of the day, almost any translation of the Bible can be a good one. They each have their strengths; they each have their weaknesses. When it comes to the common question, \u201cWhich translation is the best one?\u201d the answer, in some ways, is simply, \u201cWhichever one you will read.\u201d If a Bible never leaves your shelf, its merits and pitfalls don\u2019t really make much difference. I would recommend something near the center of the chart for a regular reading Bible. But really, whatever Bible you will use regularly is the one that is best for you.\n\nStudy from Multiple Translations\n\nRecognize that all translation is interpretation. While almost all translations are good and accurate, when reading the Bible in English, you are already removed somewhat from the Bible as it was originally written. What you are reading inherently contains the interpretive choices of the translators. This is not a bad thing, but it needs to be recognized.\n\nWhile I recommend having one \u201cprimary reading Bible,\u201d I would suggest that one of the best habits you can form is to never study from only one translation. When you are really digging into Galatians for that Bible study, read the passage from a few different translations. Take note of where they differ. The differences you see between them will give you a good indication of where there may be a textual difficulty in the originals or where there may be several possible ways to render the original language into English. You\u2019ll get the best understanding of the passage if you compare translations from opposite ends of the spectrum. Compare a more functionally equivalent translation with something on the more formal end of the spectrum. Most of these translations are now available free in online formats (e.g. the YouVersion Bible app).\n\nUse a Good Study Bible\n\nFinally, I would recommend that you make use of a good study Bible. The additional information you will glean from the study notes will enrich your study in ways that you can\u2019t imagine. The NIV study Bible is excellent. The ESV study Bible is one of the most helpful such tools I\u2019ve ever seen. The NET Bible notes are unsurpassed in text-critical questions. If you desire a \u201cTR\u201d translation, the \u201cKing James Study Bible\u201d from Thomas Nelson would be right up your alley. Whatever you choose to use, a good study Bible can give you a wealth of background information that you won\u2019t get by reading only the Bible.\n\nConclusion\n\nSo, what did I end up choosing? How did a former KJV only preacher choose a translation? After looking though quite a few, I have opted to use the ESV Study Bible as my primary reading Bible. I also regularly compare the KJV, the NET, and the NIV 2011, and I occasionally consult the NLT and the Message.\n\nBut my choices shouldn\u2019t necessarily be yours. You should make your own decision, and whatever you choose to use, read it.\n\nI am reminded of when I read through the story of Augustine\u2019s conversion in The Confessions. It was one of the more powerful moments I\u2019ve experienced in my own Christian walk. As he wrestled with his own depravity, having for so long been afflicted by his own wretchedness, he found himself sitting alone in a garden with his bitter tears pouring out under a fig tree. As he wept, he heard the voice of a child nearby (perhaps playing games as children do), repeating the phrase, \u201ctake up and read; take up and read.\u201d Interpreting the words as a \u201ccommand from heaven to open the book,\u201d he picked up a copy of the book of Romans, began to read, and found in the Scriptures the light of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. And none of us has ever been the same since. As he heard so long ago, I encourage you with advice that will change the life of all who will heed it;\n\nTolle Lege, (Take up and read)\n\nTolle Lege (Take up and read)"}
{"text":"Colorado State Senator Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, holds up a black ten-round rifle ammunition magazine with a green capacity extender, as he argues against one of several gun control bills before the Colorado Legislature, at the State Capitol, in Denver, Monday March 11, 2013. Colorado Democrats are advancing gun-control proposals in a state balancing a history of heartbreaking shootings with a Western heritage where gun ownership is treasured by many. (AP Photo\/Brennan Linsley)\n\nDENVER (AP) -- Fiercely debated ammunition limits have cleared Colorado's Democratic Legislature and are on their way to the governor, who has said he'll sign the measure into law.\n\nThe 15-round magazine limit would make Colorado the first state outside the East Coast to ratchet back gun rights after last year's deadly shooting sprees. Colorado's gun-control debates have been closely watched because of the state's gun-loving frontier heritage and painful history of mass shootings.\n\nColorado lawmakers decided to keep negotiating on a bill to expand background-check requirements to most private and online gun sales.\n\nThe measures are part of a Democratic gun control package that has been the focus of much debate, drawing thousands to the state Capitol over the past week. The GOP has decried the whole package as a bad reaction to last year's horrific shootings in Newtown, Conn., and at a suburban Denver movie theater.\n\n___\n\nKristen Wyatt can be reached at http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/APkristenwyatt"}
{"text":"Pope Tawadros II has arrived in Jerusalem in a historic visit that marks the first time that a head of the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church has visited the city since Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967.\n\nThe website of the Coptic Church in Jerusalem said the pope's only reason for the visit on Thursday was to attend the funeral prayer of the Bishop of Jerusalem Anba Abraham, the head of the Coptic Church in the Holy Land, who died on Wednesday.\n\nThe late Egyptian Pope Shenouda III had issued a ban in 1979, in the aftermath of the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, preventing Egyptian Coptics from pilgrimage to Jerusalem while under Israeli occupation.\n\nFather Boules Halim, the spokesman for the Coptic Church in Cairo, said that the visit was arranged for an \"exceptional situation\".\n\nHalim told the AFP news agency that the visit will not change the stance of the Egyptian Church towards the occupation which it historically opposes.\n\n\"The stance of the Coptic Orthodox Church concerning travelling to the Holy Lands will always remain the same. The Pope's visit came as an exception,\" said Halim.\n\n\"The position of the church remains unchanged, which is not going to Jerusalem without all our Egyptian [Muslim] brothers.\"\n\nThe Egyptian government does not ban Egyptian citizens from visiting Israel and encourages normal relations between the two countries.\n\nShenouda III, who was head of the Egyptian Coptic Church for more than 40 years, until his death in 2012, was against normalising relations with Israel despite the peace treaty between the two countries."}
{"text":"The pie list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished; the sausage, with his drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a pleasant thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple.\n\n1) In Gopher Prairie there is Thanatopsis Club ( thanatopsis = Greek \"vision of death\"; a name that was probably suggested by the poem which William Cullen Bryant, aged sixteen, wrote after reading Robert Blair's The Grave and William Cowper's The Task): this is the main cultural force of the city, led by the most eminent ladies, who attend conferences on the English poets.\n\nWILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, Thanatopsis , in THE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 21, 21 (D.\n\n9) John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: the Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000); Valene Smith, \"War and Tourism: an American Ethnography,\" Annals of Tourism Research 25 (1998): 202-227; Anthony Seaton, \"From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism: Guided by the Dark,\" Journal of International Heritage Studies 2 (1996): 234-244.\n\nThe term derives from the ancient Greek, thanatopsis , which means 'contemplation of death'.\n\nThe capsule held more than 50 items, including a piece of wood from Independence Hall, a copy of Thanatopsis , an 1818 poem by William Cullen Bryant said to be the first to contain the word Oregon, and a souvenir badge welcoming the President to Portland.\n\nIshmael experiences other tropes or turnings from his thanatopsis mood, as when in the Spouter Inn he is terrified by the prospect of a cannibalistic, harpoon-toting savage for his bedmate, only to find a bosom friend who indirectly saves his life; as when in the chapel, staring at signs of his seemingly foreordained death in the black-bordered tablets commemorating sailors lost at sea, he finds unaccountably that his \"Faith, like a jackal, [that] feeds among the tombs, [.\n\nAnd finally, it means to give oneself back to the place, as the speaker affirms in the opening lines; elsewhere Berry expresses this ecological thanatopsis as \"slowly falling \/ into the fund of things ."}
{"text":"Many businesses are planning out their CRM data quality strategies for 2015, yet some will fail to win the battle because their approach is simply wrong.\n\nAccording to Experian\u2019s Data Advantage Report from last year, more than 99 percent of organizations had a plan, but 94 percent still had data errors. That figure was an increase on the previous year\u2019s total too.\n\nThe takeaway from the report is simple: Data quality is a battle that requires stamina and commitment.\n\nFighting the battle means constantly working towards better quality data to improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, reporting and growth. Winning the battle means approaching the issue effectively, using the right techniques.\n\nThe Losing Battle\n\nData quality initiatives require investment and an ongoing focus on improvement. Many businesses see data quality as a cash drain, not a cash gain.\n\nTo cut costs, some businesses try to cut back on spending by using members of staff to carry out complex correction and error detection. The report found that 27 per cent of businesses are using manual database editing to tackle data quality. (While 40 per cent of businesses said that they would be using dedicated software for cleaning databases, this was a drop compared to previous years\u2019 figures.)\n\nHere\u2019s the fact: Cutting corners is not a good battle tactic. Manual correction is not fast enough, or accurate enough, to stem the flow of bad data that is being manually entered into other areas of the system. Bad data is also introduced through bad merges, incorrect character sets and the connection of different systems that have different standards and norms. It is also impossible for human reviewers to find fuzzy matches, phonetic matches and duplicate records when scouring a database line by line.\n\nData quality software does the opposite. It automatically catches new data problems at the input stage before they are committed to a database or customer relationship management system (CRM). It can detect and remove the duplicates that already exist. And as businesses work towards a situation where all data is held in one location, they also cut down on the manual import and export operations that are so problematic.\n\nPersistence\n\nData quality benefits are well understood in business:\n\n63 percent of respondents wanted to increase efficiency\n\n53 percent aimed to improve customer service\n\n51 percent wanted to make better decisions based on their data\n\n43 percent said they needed to profile customers more effectively\n\n37 percent were working towards a single customer view\n\nWinning the battle has almost become a utopian goal, but it is not an unachievable one.\n\nGoing into battle is daunting, and maintaining the fight on an ongoing basis can be a challenge for everyone, particularly when every single typo generates work and cost. But struggling through with manual editing is a false economy. We are handling more data than ever, and we are responsible for handling it well.\n\nBetter data means a better return on investment: better response rates, better customer retention, better productivity. Once you\u2019ve won the battle and have a grip on your data, you\u2019ll realise that cost-cutting is actually the worst battle tactic you could use.\n\nAbout the Author\n\nArmed with qualifications in mechanical engineering, business and finance, and experience of running engineering and CRM businesses, Martin founded a successful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software house in 1992, supplying systems to large, medium and small sized companies. Developing a deep understanding of the value of data, he became concerned that many organisations were making decisions based on poor quality data. To fill this gap in the market, he sold the CRM Company and started DQ Global in 2002 to provide data quality solutions, with a mission to detect, correct and prevent data defects which undermine business decisions. Since then, DQ Global has become a global market leader, delivering enterprise-wide data solutions utilising leading edge technology. Martin has gained a wealth of knowledge and experience and has established himself as a Data Quality Improvement Evangelist and an industry expert."}
{"text":"Google's Chrome is on the brink of replacing Firefox as the second-most-popular browser, according to one Web statistics firm.\n\nData provided by StatCounter, an Irish company that tracks browser usage using the free analytics tools it offers websites, shows that Chrome will pass Firefox to take the No. 2 spot behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) no later than December.\n\nAs of Wednesday, Chrome's global average user share for September was 23.6%, while Firefox's stood at 26.8%. IE, meanwhile, was at 41.7%.\n\nThe climb of Chrome during 2011 has been astonishing: It has gained eight percentage point since January 2011, representing a 50% increase.\n\nDuring that same period, Firefox has dropped almost four percentage points, a decline of about 13%, while IE has also fallen four points, a 9% dip.\n\nThat means Chrome is essentially reaping all the defections from Firefox and IE.\n\nIf the trends established thus far this year continue, Chrome will come close to matching Firefox's usage share in November, then pass its rival in December, when Chrome will account for approximately 26.6% of all browsers and Firefox will have a 25.3% share.\n\nStatCounter is not the only Web metrics company that publicly posts browser share statistics, however. Data provided by U.S.-based Net Applications, for example, shows a much bigger gap between Firefox and Chrome: In its numbers for August, Net Application had Firefox with a 22.6% share of desktop browser usage, and Chrome at 15.5%.\n\nUsing Net Applications numbers, Chrome could have a 17.8% share by the end of 2011, short of Firefox's projected 22.3%. But if the pace of change lasts, Chrome should pass Firefox on Net Applications' chart by mid-2012.\n\nBecause Net Applications weights its numbers to more better estimate usage share in countries from which relatively few users navigate to sites it monitors, the company's data theoretically paints a more accurate picture because it factors in the huge Chinese market.\n\nSome browser makers -- Microsoft in particular -- cite that as a reason why they regularly defer to Net Applications' numbers. Not coincidentally, Net Applications pegs IE with a much higher share -- 55.3% -- than do other metrics firms such as StatCounter.\n\nBoth Net Applications and StatCounter, however, have traced the same trends: usage declines of IE and Firefox, and a corresponding climb in Chrome.\n\nChrome may pass Firefox as the world's second-most-popular browser by the end of the year. (Data: StatCounter.)\n\nGregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.\n\nSee more articles by Gregg Keizer."}
{"text":"Prep Time: 10-15 minutes\n\nCook Time: 40 minutes\n\nPretty patties resting on a bed of oven roasted carrots. Doesn\u2019t that sound delicious?\n\nI guess I\u2019m having a \u2018vegetable patties\u2019 period. These are wonderfully soft and crispy at the same time, with a ton of options to spice them up. Since potatoes and cauliflower have a very mild taste, you can play around with herbs and spices.\n\nFor about a dozen patties you will need:\n\n4 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped\n\n\u00bd medium cauliflower or whole if it is small, cut into florets\n\n2 tablespoons coconut oil\n\n\u00bd teaspoon salt\n\n\u00bc teaspoon turmeric\n\n\u00bc teaspoon ground red paprika\n\n\u00bd teaspoon dried basil (or a few leaves if you have the option of fresh basil, finely chopped)\n\n\u00bc teaspoon dried oregano (again, use fresh herbs if you have the option, a few leaves will do the trick)\n\n1 cup vegan bread crumbs (You can make your own if you bake bread at home \u2013 leave it to dry and process it in your blender\/food processor.)\n\nOther options for flavor: garlic, saut\u00e9ed onions, soy sauce, curry, thyme\u2026\n\nTo make:\n\nCook the potatoes and cauliflower, potatoes need about 15 minutes, cauliflower 10 minutes \u2013 I just add the cauliflower 5 minutes later and cook until soft. Strain and mash well, try to break as many lumps as possible. Season with salt and other spices or herbs to your liking and start adding the bread crumbs a few tablespoons at a time. The mixture will be soft but keep its form. Taste and adjust if necessary. Use an ice cream scooper as a measuring tool to make the patties uniform in size and shape. Flatten them into discs and roll in bread crumbs. If you are not using them all just freeze them on a tray lined with baking paper and later when frozen transfer them into a bag to save on space in the freezer. You can fry these in a pan with a bit of coconut oil for 3-4 minutes on each side, but be careful: they soak up a lot of it. You could also bake them in the oven (375 F 15-20 minutes). The bed of carrots on which these heavenly patties rest are just organic carrots washed and sliced, tossed together with some olive oil, salt and thyme. Set on a baking tray lined with baking paper, 15-20 minutes at 375 F.\n\nBon appetit!"}
{"text":"NO, it\u2019s not Honda\u2019s long-promised RCV road bike but in the meantime the newly-revealed Ronax 500 is the closest thing to a GP bike you\u2019re ever likely to be able to buy.\n\nAs you can probably tell from the \u2018500\u2019 name, it\u2019s not taking its inspiration from the latest generation of four-stroke monsters but from an earlier era of more delicate, knife-edge 500cc two-strokes. Yes, it does look a lot like an NSR500, doesn\u2019t it? And yes, they\u2019re making 46 of them, which is a number that\u2019s reminiscent of someone who perhaps took the NSR500 to its last world title. But you\u2019ll find no official mention of that chap\u2019s name on the Ronax website.\n\nIn terms of spec, the bike isn\u2019t far from an NSR either, even if it is all actually the work of the guys at German firm Ronax. The 499cc motor is an 80-degree V4 with twin contra-rotating crankshafts, fuel injection and a six-speed cassette gearbox. At 160bhp, it\u2019s a tad down on the 180-200bhp that the last of the 500cc strokers were making, but it\u2019s supposed to be road legal and will hopefully last more than a race distance, too, so we\u2019ll let them off for that.\n\nWhat\u2019s perhaps harder to swallow is the price. It\u2019s \u20ac100,000. Plus VAT. Plus shipping. Let\u2019s face it, you\u2019ll get no change from \u00a3100,000 once you\u2019ve landed one in the UK. Call it two-and-a-half Desmosedici RRs. Or an NR750 and enough change to get a brand new S1000RR for daily use. Or, possibly, one of Honda\u2019s RCV road bikes as and when they get around to actually making them.\n\nBut then again, maybe if you\u2019ve got that sort of change sitting around, you\u2019ll be in a position to simply get one of each.\n\nFor more details, see Ronax."}
{"text":"TOULOUSE, France \u2013 Satellite builder Thales Alenia Space and six partners are investing their own money, plus grants from the French government, into the Stratobus high-altitude platform station (HAPS) on the assumption that the development yields a contract in 2017, the program manager said.\n\nThe Stratobus backers are focusing only on Earth observations in the tropical regions for the moment, but expect to add telecommunications payloads once international regulators have authorized HAPS systems to operate in Ka-band.\n\nCurrent International Telecommunication Union (ITU) rules limit HAPS systems to the Q- and V-bands for fixed services communications, between 47 and 48 GHz. These higher frequencies are not well suited to rainy conditions.\n\nThe U.S. government is leading the effort at the ITU to broaden the frequency regime for command and control of high-altitude drones to Ka- and Ku-band, already in mainstream use by satellite fleet operators. It is unclear whether HAPS could be covered under this.\n\nThe U.S. position met with substantial resistance \u2013 for reasons that were never made clear \u2014 at the last quadrennial meeting of global regulators, WRC-15, which agreed only to create a study group to examine the issue in view to a decision at WRC-19. WRC-15 agreed to study future use of Ka-band for HAPS.\n\nUntil additional frequencies are made available, Thales Alenia Space\u2019s Stratobus will limit itself to optical and radar Earth observation, said Jean-Philippe Chessel, head of the Stratobus project.\n\n\u201cIf [the ITU decision at WRC-19] is positive, it will clearly open the telecommunications market for HAPS and for Stratobus,\u201d Chessel said June 30 at the Toulouse Space Show.\n\nThe French-Italian Thales Alenia Space announced Stratobus in April following the receipt of 17 million euros ($19.2 million) in financing from France\u2019s PIA Investing in the Future public bond fund, plus 3 million euros from four regional governments in France that are home to the Stratobus industrial team.\n\nChessel said the industrial partners are financing 60 percent of the development over the next two years, with French government support totaling 40 percent.\n\nThe commercial version of Stratobus will measure 100 meters in length, as long as an Airbus A380, and 33 meters in diameter at its widest point. Its four electric-powered engines are designed to keep the platform steady at 20 kilometers in altitude in headwinds of up to 90 kilometers per hour. Air density at that altitude is less than half what it is on the ground.\n\nIt will carry a payload, typically a radar or optical Earth observation sensor, weighing up to 250 kilograms, that will image an areas of between 250 and 300 kilometers for radar applications, and 40-60 kilometers for optical.\n\nThe top half of Stratobus is transparent material. Attached to the underside of its roof is a solar panel drawing power both from the Sun above, and below from a row of solar power concentrator mirrors lining the floor.\n\nThe space industry last viewed solar concentrators on the first models of Boeing\u2019s large 702 telecommunications satellite platform. A design flaw caused the concentrators to damage the solar panels and resulted in reduced power, causing large insurance claims for the first batch of satellites. Boeing subsequently dropped the concentrator design, although in the years since then the damage to the satellites in terms of reduced operational life turned out to be less than originally feared.\n\nChessel said the concentrators will triple the amount of solar illumination onto the solar array and provide the 150 kilowatts power day of total power demand for Stratobus, of which 5 kilowatts will be reserved for the payload.\n\nStratobus\u2019s volume is 50,000 cubic meters. Chessel said the pressurized gas will be either helium or hydrogen, with hydrogen preferred because it is less costly to produce and is lighter, saving 300 kilograms over helium. But hydrogen has the downside of requiring special safety procedures.\n\nOperating in the tropics with sufficient sunlight year-round, Stratobus could remain on station for up to five years, Chessel said. At more-northern latitudes, the platform would be limited to the spring and summer months and could operate for eight months.\n\nChessel said the current budget is enough to carry the project\u2019s development for two years. A critical design review is planned for 2018, after which a full-size test model could be flown in 2020. Thales Alenia Space has begun the process of Stratobus flight certification with the European Aviation Safety Agency. A new certification category is needed because HAPS platforms like Stratobus fall somewhere in between the existing regulations for balloons and drones.\n\n\u201cWe expect to have our first contract in 2017 to develop the first proto-flight model,\u201d Chessel said. \u201cIt will be paid by the first customer and lead to the production of future flight models. Stratobus is a low-cost product, an order of magnitude less costly than a satellite, plus the fact that we don\u2019t have a launcher. We can take off and land by gas management and we don\u2019t need space-qualified components. Of course, this is a regional product only. It doesn\u2019t provide global coverage like a satellite. The prospects we have today suggest we are going in the right direction in terms of product.\u201d"}
{"text":"Apple's iOS 9.3 beta introduces major new features like Night Shift , but there are also dozens of little tweaks to be discovered in the operating system update. It appears that one of those minor changes applies to Wi-Fi Assist, adding a much-needed feature that allows users to see just how much data it's using.Wi-Fi Assist data usage can be checked within the Settings app by choosing the Cellular section and scrolling down to the Wi-Fi Assist option. Next to the toggle that turns the feature on and off, there's now a data usage number that displays how much data has been consumed when it is in use.Wi-Fi Assist was first introduced with iOS 9. It's a feature that allows an iPhone to seamlessly switch over to a cellular connection whenever a local Wi-Fi connection is weak. Enabled automatically when updating to iOS 9, Wi-Fi Assist proved to be unpopular with users who claimed it was eating up a lot of data . One recent news story even accused Wi-Fi Assist of causing a teenager to receive a cell phone bill for upwards of $2,000.Concerns about Wi-Fi Assist led Apple to publish a support document on the feature, explaining how it works and assuring users that data usage should only be a \"small percentage higher\" than previous usage. Wi-Fi Assist only turns on in a limited number of circumstances and won't activate when data roaming, when apps are downloading background content, or when using third-party apps that stream audio or video.Despite Apple's reassurances about Wi-Fi Assist, unhappy customers filed a $5 million class action lawsuit over the feature, with the plaintiffs claiming they were subjected to overage charges on their iPhones after updating to iOS 9. The lawsuit also claims Apple did not do an adequate job explaining the feature when iOS 9 was released.Wi-Fi Assist is available on any iOS device running iOS 9 or later, with the exception of the iPhone 4s, the iPad 2, the third-generation iPad, and the original iPad mini. Wi-Fi Assist can be turned off using the Settings app for those who don't want to risk using extra data."}
{"text":"NComputing has officially launched the RX300 which is Raspberry Pi 3 based thin client that can run Windows and Linux. It can utilize the cloud, is dual-screen capable and has Wi-Fi.\n\nThe RX300 will retail for $99 and that price will include a one-year subscription to NComputing\u2019s VSpace 10 platform. For those who are unaware, NComputing specializes in creating virtual desktops to multiple machines. Using this technology, a person will make it easier to manage multiple computers from a single host server. Obviously, larger companies may find it easier to do this manually, but the low price tag makes this an attractive option for mid-range companies that have multiple computers to manage.\n\nAccording to NComputing\u2019s press release, the RX300 will offer full-motion HD video playback, four high-speed USB ports, wi-fi and bluetooth, access to both vSpace and the Linux OS, 8GB of internal memory and 1 GB of RAM, a one-year subscription to VSpace 10, and be compatible with Vcast streaming. In terms of power consumption, NComputing has stated that the RX300 will use less than 5 watts of energy and will feature a sleep mode to save power.\n\nAdditional options and features will be available for an extra charge and once the yearly subscription has expired, users will be required to purchase a new one to access VSpace 10."}
{"text":"ES Football Newsletter Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account\n\nArsenal have agreed a new partnership with Universal Pictures that could see the club\u2019s players appear in promotional videos for the latest blockbuster films.\n\nThe deal will see Arsenal promote a number of the film company\u2019s upcoming releases, including Despicable Me 3. Replicas of the stars of that movie \u2013 Minions \u2013 have already been involved in promotional activity at the Emirates, where they were paraded on the pitch ahead of the final game of the season.\n\n\u201cThis partnership with Illumination and Universal Pictures is the first of its kind for the club and one we are extremely excited about,\u201d said Vinai Venkatesham, Arsenal\u2019s chief commercial officer.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a fantastic opportunity for both the club and the studio to be introduced to new audiences and we are already working closely with them to engage with our supporters in the UK and Ireland around their upcoming film releases.\u201d\n\nStar names such as Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil could \u2013 if they are still at Arsenal \u2013 even be asked to take part in unique content or promotional videos for movies.\n\nArsenal are not the first team to agree such a partnership, with Manchester United having had a deal with 20th Century Fox that has seen Wayne Rooney appear in a trailer for X:Men Apocalypse and mascots painted blue for promotional activity, neither of which were well-received by the general public.\n\nUniversal have also been working on a documentary film about Arsenal\u2019s famous 1989 league title win at Anfield."}
{"text":"The inhabitants of the Crimean peninsula have found a way out of the intricate situation in economics they have had to deal with for 6 months \u2013 the Bitcoin payments.\n\nAs a result of the referendum on the status of Crimea held on March 16, 2014, when the majority of the Crimean population voted for integration of the region into the Russian Federation, the local residents are reported to have started experiencing difficulties accessing essential services, including banking. Michael Chobanian, head of the Ukrainian bitcoin agency KUNA, sees the de-facto separation of Crimea from Ukraine the main reason why the Crimeans started to actively use BTC to purchase goods and items on the Internet.\n\nAccording to Chobanian, Crimea remains completely outside of the international banking system, which means there is no chance at all to conduct any foreign economic activity on the peninsula. The only solution for shopping, payments and financial transactions is the Internet. If you go the usual way, you\u2019ll end up in a bank, standing in a queue to open an account and make a ruble deposit. Then you would have to wait hours in another queue in order to get to the mainland. Once in Krasnodar Krai, you would need to go to another bank, open an account there, and then transfer your funds from a Crimean account to the one you opened in a Krasnodar bank; only then will you eventually be able to effect your payment.\n\n\u201cSeems unrealistic for busy people. That is why my colleagues from Sevastopol and Simferopol switched to Bitcoin payments; they purchase BTC with rubles and then pay for whatever they need with Bitcoin\u201d \u2013 Chobanian sums up."}
{"text":"After dropping hints for months, Amazon is finally releasing the Amazon Fire TV Stick in Germany, Austria, and the UK. Pre-orders are now live for all three countries, and the device will be released on April 15th. The Fire TV Stick will sell for \u00a335 in the UK and 39 EUR in Germany and Austria. Just like the Stick\u2019s US launch, Prime members can pre-order the device now at a discounted price. Existing Prime members in the UK will pay just \u00a319 and German Prime members will pay just 19 EUR if they place their order in the next 2 days. What\u2019s different from the US release is the availability of an even better price for new Prime members. If you sign up for a new Prime membership, you can pre-order the Fire TV Stick for just \u00a37 in the UK and 7 EUR in in Germany and Austria. Amazon will be enforcing that new Prime members pay their membership fee before receiving the initial discount. New Prime members will not receive the additional discount if they cancel their membership after the free 30 day trial ends.\n\nThe Fire TV Stick was the fastest selling product ever when it was released in the US. The device was back ordered for months after it was launched. Get your orders in early, because with these great pre-order discounts it won\u2019t be a surprise if history repeats itself for the Fire TV Stick\u2019s international release.\n\nFollow AFTVnews on Twitter \/ Facebook and subscribe via email to be the first to learn when new articles go live. Follow me, Elias Saba, on Twitter and Instagram to see what I'm working on before it's posted here.\n\nShareTweetShare+1"}
{"text":"Photos and Video of Derek Fisher DUI Crash Released\u2026He\u2019s Lucky to Be Alive (Pics + Video)\n\nVideo Playback Not Supported\n\nJudging from the newly released photos of his wrecked SUV, Derek Fisher and girlfriend Gloria Govan are lucky to be alive.\n\nFisher was behind the wheel of his 2015 Cadillac Escalade when he crashed into a guard rail on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles around 3 a.m. on Sunday morning. The vehicle flipped, but thankfully both he and Govan were buckled in and the airbags deployed, likely saving their lives. Both walked away without injury.\n\nTMZ obtained photos of the SUV, which suffered major damage on both the driver and passenger sides. Take a look:\n\nTMZ also obtained video footage of the crash site shot by someone driving by early Sunday morning:\n\nI\u2019d say Matt Barnes must be loving this, except he probably isn\u2019t. More likely his anger at Fisher is at an all-time high. Now, not only did Fisher \u201csteal\u201d his girl, the mother of his children, he almost killed her by driving drunk.\n\nOf course, Fisher now has much bigger problems than Matt Barnes. He\u2019s facing a serious DUI charge that could derail whatever chance he had of getting another NBA coaching gig.\n\nHat Tip \u2013 [TMZ]\n\nTags:\n\nShare This"}
{"text":"Perhaps the main reason why Ryanair chief executive Michael O\u2019Leary spoke to a Fine Gael \u201cbusiness breakfast\u201d last week \u2013 a private fundraising event for the party \u2013 was because he wants backing for Ryanair to provide a third terminal at Dublin Airport and no involvement of the State-owned Dublin Airport Authority. But he said a lot more at that breakfast, organised by a south Dublin branch of Fine Gael in the Shelbourne Hotel.\n\nO\u2019Leary revelled in a coarse, hectoring and hate-filled discourse that would make Donald Trump proud, and his primary targets were public servants; those, who according to Minister for Finance Michael Noonan in December 2013 as Ireland prepared to exit the bailout, are among \u201cthe real heroes and heroines\u201d of Ireland\u2019s austerity programme and who endured, in his words, \u201cserious pay cuts\u201d.\n\nWhy do Noonan and his colleagues then provide a platform for O\u2019Leary to eviscerate those same public servants, and not only that, but positively encourage it? Why is Fine Gael so keen to fawn over O\u2019Leary? Noonan is reported as having introduced O\u2019Leary as \u201cIreland\u2019s leading altogether decent man\u201d. Minister for Foreign Affairs Charles Flanagan publicly, via his Twitter account, expressed his delight at soaking up O\u2019Leary\u2019s rants: \u201cgreat start today listening to Michael O\u2019Leary sound off in flying form\u201d.\n\nTroubling\n\nO\u2019Leary enjoys calling himself an \u201cobnoxious little bollocks\u201d, but the main Government party encouraging him is a more troubling issue. Fine Gael, according to itself, is a \u201cparty of the progressive centre\u201d. Speaking at the unveiling of the budget on Tuesday, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe solemnly announced: \u201cThose of us in the middle ground of politics have a duty to show that co-operation and consensus can work; to show that our tone can be moderate.\u201d\n\nIn relation to its fundraising, the party asserts: \u201cAll monies fundraised will be used for electoral purposes and referenda campaigns as no statutory funds are permitted to be used for these purposes.\u201d So the money raised by O\u2019Leary\u2019s attacks on public servants and his aggressive privatisation agenda is to assist the electoral fortunes of Fine Gael. Why is Fine Gael so comfortable with this? Is it because, in reality, it sees O\u2019Leary as an ideological soulmate; a perfect fit for a party that talks centre but thinks right?\n\nBy all accounts, the several Ministers present at the braggarts\u2019 breakfast did not shift uncomfortably at RT\u00c9 being described as a \u201crat-infested North Korean union shop\u201d and the singling out of an individual RT\u00c9 journalist for abuse; or with the demand that garda\u00ed campaigning for pay restoration be sacked, or with the insistence that the health and transport services should be entirely privatised, or with the contention that Dublin city centre has been destroyed through \u201cnonsensical pandering to bloody cyclists\u201d.\n\nAll very juvenile and best to be shrugged off, it could be argued, as O\u2019Leary likes being an Irish Trump and savours the attendant publicity, but why should Fine Gael go unchallenged in contributing to and endorsing a destructive pitching of public against private sector which has been a hallmark of reaction to the Irish economic crisis of recent years?\n\nPolitical backing\n\nO\u2019Leary knows nothing about public service. Born to the silver spoon, he was a Clongowes Wood College boy and a student at Trinity College Dublin where he lived in a family-owned apartment before he began his private business enterprises. O\u2019Leary was a poor financial adviser to Ryanair founder Tony Ryan, advising him to close the airline, or else sell it to Aer Lingus.\n\nBut where would O\u2019Leary be without State support and public money? Ryan sought political backing to withstand Aer Lingus\u2019s predatory pricing and Charles Haughey obliged, with Ryanair getting a free run at Stansted Airport through a demarcation of the routes between the two airlines. Ryan also secured State subsidies in return for serving provincial airports and in 1992, rent breaks for Ryanair\u2019s headquarters at Dublin Airport.\n\nAnother part of the Ryanair history not dwelt on by its champions is how the State-owned Aer Rianta contributed to the saving of the airline in its early days by writing off more than \u00a31 million (\u20ac0.9 milliom) in landing charges and other fees and the renegotiating of deals at Cork and Shannon. These layers to the Ryanair story are now banished in favour of the macho O\u2019Leary soundbites, such as \u201cthere is no principle that can\u2019t be overturned for competitive reasons\u201d. Likewise, it appears there are no depths to which the unprincipled O\u2019Leary will not reach to excoriate public servants.\n\nLong ago he coined his own expletive \u2013 \u201cbolloxology\u201d \u2013 which, he explained, \u201cshould be liberally used in one-to-one print media interviews when referring to any procedure that other airlines claim is complex\u201d. In juvenile, privileged and elite O\u2019Leary-land there are no complexities; it is all a simple matter of money, market dominance and pathetic public servants that Fine Gael seems happy to laugh at too."}
{"text":"Qualification: There will be 4 separate BO1 Single Elimination Qualification Events:\n\nQualifier 1: Sunday, 26th of January 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET)\n\nQualifier 2: Sunday, 2nd of February 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET)\n\nQualifier 3: Sunday, 9th of February 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET)\n\nQualifier 4: Sunday, 16th of February 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET)\n\nPoints: The point distribution changes dependent on the amount of teams that have signed up for a qualification event.\n\n33-64 Teams:\n\n17-32 Teams:\n\n9-16 Teams:\n\n5-8 Teams:\n\n: The qualifier is cancelled if 4 or less Teams sign up. Each signed up team receives 1 point.Team captains, (and nobody else) must join the ingame channel SwissLegends at 12:45 o clock on the day of the qualifier. We reserve the right to disqualify teams that are not on time.The tournament bracket will be published at 12:45 CET on the day of the qualifier.Teams in the upper position on the tournament tree have first pick.The team with first pick opens a Custom Game in tournament draft mode with a random password and invites the captain of the enemy team, who will communicate the names of the other members of his team.The pause function can be used in case of disconnects only if no fights are happening! If a pause is used this is to be communicated to the tournament administration after the match.In case of abuse to achieve an advantage the offending team willbe disqualified.The winning team has to submit a screenshot of the aftergame lobby to the ingame channel SwissLegends. (Snipping Tool and imgur.com are recommended)If a team wishes to have a break between matches, this has to be discussed with their next opponent and the tournament administration. Team captains that are absent without informing the administration risk disqualification of their team.: Each Team signing up for a qualifier will be able to specify 6 players. During the respective qualifier, the team can freely swap out between these 6 players, but not with any players not specified during signup. At every following qualifier or at the Finals, the teams will once again be able to specifiy 6 players. HOWEVER, 5 out of these 6 players must have been specified at the original signup to qualify as the same team that earned points in any previous events.All Teams need to consist of 100% players that are living in switzerland. All players in any team that break this rule knowingly will be exempt from any further events. This rule includes all 6 players.The first qualifier will be seeded randomly. Every following qualifier will be seeded according to points the teams have already scored.The 8 Teams with the highest amount of points out of all 4 Qualification events will be participating in the finals on. Should any team not be able to participate, the next team in the ranking will be qualified. In case of a tie, a Best of 1 will be played between the tied teams.The detailed schedule will be published shortly after the final qualifier.THERE ARE NO PRIZES FOR THE QUALIFIER EVENTS!All prizes refer to the finals that will be played on Sunday, the 23rd of February 2014 at 13:00 CET.1. Place - 3200 Riot Points + Ryze Skin for all 5 players of the team + 1x150 Swiss francs2. Place - 2400 Riot Points for all 5 players of the team + 1x50 Swiss francs.3. Place - 1600 Riot Points for all 5 players of the team4. Place - 800 Riot Points for all 5 players of the teamRiot points and skins will be distributed by Riot Games. The cash prize will be transferred to the team captain. Further distribution is the concern of the team captains.Should this format be a success, Qualifiers for Swiss Legends #4 will begin on March 2nd, 2014. The best 4 teams from the Finals will automatically be qualified for the next finals and do not need to participate in qualifiers.Copy and paste the form below the line and complete it with the according information about your team. Teams can only sign up for the current qualifier., even if this leaves their score below 0. Teams can withdraw from a signup until the signup closes. However, all withdrawals are final.Submit the filled out sign up sheet in this thread or mail it to us:"}
{"text":"TULSA -- Police are investigating after two separate shootings in Tulsa Thursday evening.\n\nPolice say a man has died after possibly accidentally shooting himself in north Tulsa. The shooting happened on the 1000 block of North Delaware Place.\n\nPolice say the second shooting happened on the 1600 block of East Virgin Street. According to police, a woman was shot during a possible domestic disturbance.\n\nThe woman was taken to the hospital by EMSA medics in emergent condition and is currently undergoing surgery.\n\nStay in touch with us anytime, anywhere.\n\nDownload our free app for Apple and Android and Kindle devices.\n\nSign up for newsletters emailed to your inbox. Select from these options: Breaking News, Severe Weather, School Closings, Daily Headlines and Daily Forecasts.\n\nFollow us on Twitter :\n\nLike us on Facebook :"}
{"text":"WASHINGTON -- A Tennessee state legislator has introduced a bill to make the Bible the official state book, after two other Southern states considered similar moves in recent months.\n\nState Rep. Jerry Sexton (R) put forward his legislation Tuesday. He did not return a request for additional comment.\n\nLast month, legislators in Mississippi introduced two bills to designate the Bible as the state book.\n\n\"The Bible provides a good role model on how to treat people,\" said Mississippi state Rep. Tom Miles (D), one of the cosponsors of that state's legislation. \"They could read in there about love and compassion.\"\n\nA similar measure in Louisiana last year sparked a significant amount of controversy, with critics arguing that it would violate the separation of church and state. Other said it would trivialize the religious text. The sponsor of that bill eventually pulled it before it could go to the full floor for a vote.\n\nAlthough Tennessee doesn't have a state book, it does have a state fruit (the tomato), mineral (agate) and wild animal (raccoon).\n\nWant more updates from Amanda? Sign up for her newsletter, Piping Hot Truth."}
{"text":"The Obama administration on Thursday blocked development of a copper and nickel mine near a popular wilderness area in northern Minnesota, saying the project could poison the vast web of lakes, streams and wetlands that crosshatch the region.\n\nActing with just five weeks left in the administration, federal agencies refused to renew leases held by a mining company just outside \u2014 and upstream from \u2014 the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, along the Canadian border. Officials also took steps that could lead to a much larger area being put off limits to mining.\n\nThe company, Twin Metals Minnesota, sued the government in federal court in September, anticipating a possible rejection and arguing that it had an absolute right to the lease renewals. Twin Metals, a subsidiary of Antofagasta of Chile, one of the world\u2019s largest mining firms, has said it had planned to invest more than $5 billion in building the mine.\n\nIt was not clear whether the incoming Trump administration, which has vowed to eliminate regulations that hinder economic development, would try to reverse the decision."}
{"text":"Oh boy was this damn hard to crack.\n\nOk, I believe before it was established before that Aperture Science headquarters are in Cleveland, OH.\n\nSource: HL2EP2\n\nThough, this has been found.\n\nSource: Portal 2\n\nIt can be assumed that the Enrichment Center is there, as there is an underground mine in the game.\n\nNow here's the catch: Not only are there no salt mines in the Upper Peninsula, the surface as seen at the end of Portal 2 is flat with wheat growing. The UP is very mountainous, so it is impossible that it is flat for miles and miles. Also, no wheat is going to naturally grow there, it is too damn cold. Also, Michigan only has ever had one salt mine. (Source: Michigan State University, Lansing MI) We can either call paradox or assume the newspaper fudged up and meant to say Lower Michigan. Taking that into consideration, Aperture Science bought said mine from the Detroit Salt Company in January 1944. (Source: That Newspaper article from the game. The number 1944 is very hard to read.)\n\nSo, see this map from Detroit Free Press.\n\nThat is the location of the Salt Mine. Unless Valve wants to call a sensible location, I am the first person to pinpoint the exact location of where Portal takes place.\n\nSo, is the field of wheat at the end of the game possible? Yes. Although this is Downtown Detroit, enough time has taken place for all the standing buildings to be gone.\n\nFirst of all, Half-Life takes place in 2003. (Proof below)\n\nSource: Half-Life\n\nA December like that only happened in 03 and 08. Also, in the book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, a note by the series's writer mentions the date March 31, 2003.\n\nHL2 takes place 20 years later, making that 2023. Portal happens around the same time as HL2. The minimum amount of time that Chell could have been in hibernation is 2.4 years, so Portal 2 takes place during 2025 or later. (The wake up call tries to specify the amount of days in hibernation, but just repeats 9, so 900 days is reasonable. No facility will decay in 90 days) 29401 AD is also plausible. (9999999\/365.25+2029) For many possibilities, it is long enough for the buildings to just plain fall apart. Even for 2025, The Combine may have turned Detroit into scrap metal.\n\nThough, Valve really needs to do the research to make this make more sense."}
{"text":"A resolution introduced in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday aims to roll back privacy rules for broadband service providers that were approved by the Federal Communications Commission in October.\n\nThe rules include the requirement that internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon should obtain \u201copt-in\u201d consent from consumers to use and share sensitive personal information such as geolocation and web browsing history, and also give customers the option to opt out from the sharing of non-sensitive information such as email addresses or service tier information.\n\nThe rules have been opposed by internet service providers who argue that they are being treated differently from other Internet entities like search engines and social networking companies.\n\nThe providers secured a win last week when the now Republican-dominated FCC decided that the operation of the data security provisions would be temporarily halted in view of a stay petition by providers. The data protection rules were to come into force last Thursday.\n\nThe new resolution introduced by Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, is backed by over 20 Republican co-sponsors.\n\nIt aims to provide for congressional disapproval of the FCC rule relating to \u2018\u2018Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services\u2019\u2019 under the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law that empowers Congress to repeal federal regulations, according to a statement issued by Flake, who is also chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. The resolution under the CRA would also prevent the FCC from issuing \u201csimilarly harmful regulations\u201d in the future, it added.\n\nFCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who on Tuesday was nominated for a second term five-year term at the agency by President Donald Trump, favors uniform rules on privacy for Internet companies, with the Federal Trade Commission rather than the FCC setting those rules. His renomination requires Senate confirmation.\n\n\u201cThe federal government shouldn\u2019t favor one set of companies over another\u2014and certainly not when it comes to a marketplace as dynamic as the internet,\u201d Pai said in a joint statement last week with FTC Acting Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen.\n\nIn an op-ed this month, Flake wrote that by reclassifying in 2015 internet service providers as common carriers, subject to Title II of the Communications Act, the FCC had stripped the FTC of its jurisdiction over the privacy practices of ISPs. The reclassification of broadband as a public regulated utility was part of a move by the previous administration of President Barack Obama to preserve net neutrality in the country.\n\nThe FTC has no real regulatory power to protect the privacy of Americans once they turn 13 and are no longer covered by a 1998 children\u2019s privacy law, said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, in an emailed statement.\n\nThe Flake resolution has been opposed by civil rights groups as well as Democrats in Congress. Electronic Frontier Foundation has called on people to call up their senators and their representatives to tell them to oppose the use of the CRA to roll back the FCC\u2019s new rules about ISP privacy practices.\n\nThe use of the CRA would allow Congress to overturn the privacy rules with just a majority vote in both chambers, without the opportunity for members to filibuster, said the American Civil Liberties Union. It would also ban the FCC from issuing rules that are \u201csubstantially the same,\u201d raising \u201cserious questions about the FCC\u2019s ability to protect consumer\u2019s online privacy in the future,\u201d wrote Nathaniel Turner, lobbyist assistant at ACLU\u2019s Washington Legislative Office.\n\n\u201cThe Republican leadership\u2014working on behalf of the nation\u2019s largest cable and phone companies\u2014wants to strip Americans of important protections on how their most sensitive information can be used,\u201d Chester said. He warned that the leading broadband ISPs have developed \u201cBig Data collection practices\u201d that gather and analyze personal information when people are on PC\u2019s, mobile devices and increasingly even while viewing TV."}
{"text":"Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his primary election night event at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., on March 15. (Gerald Herbert\/AP)\n\nA group of rabbis is planning to boycott Donald Trump\u2019s speech next week before a leading pro-Israel advocacy group, a sign of growing unease among many Jewish leaders about the populist campaign being waged by the Republican presidential front-runner.\n\nAbout 40 rabbis have said that they plan to participate in the protest of Trump\u2019s appearance Monday at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to an organizer. The planned demonstration comes as members of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group of major GOP donors, is expected to debate how to deal with Trump during its annual meeting next month in Las Vegas.\n\nThe concerns being expressed by many Jewish leaders go beyond Trump\u2019s controversial pledge to be \u201cneutral\u201d during peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians \u2014 and extend to fears of Trump\u2019s style and approach to power.\n\nSome say they hear echoes of a painful past under fascism in Trump\u2019s recent comments appearing to praise authoritarian figures such as Russian President Vladi\u00admir Putin and in the way that Trump stokes economic anger among his supporters. And they point to Trump\u2019s call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and his harsh rhetoric on illegal Mexican migrants as reminiscent of the anti-immigrant sentiment that greeted European Jews in generations past.\n\n\u201cThese are the darkest days for Republican Jews like myself,\u201d former George W. Bush speechwriter Noam Neusner wrote in a column this month in the Forward, a Jewish newspaper. He wrote that Trump \u201chas built within our party the nearest thing America has ever seen to a European nativist working-class political movement. Such movements, to put it mildly, have never been good for the Jews or allies of free thought and the free market.\u201d\n\nSpeaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition candidate forum on Dec. 3, Donald Trump drew the ire of a few audience members when he wouldn't clarify whether he recognized Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. (Reuters)\n\nTrump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in a statement that Trump \u201chas a long history of being a strong supporter of Israel\u201d and has \u201cmade significant contributions to a variety of Jewish related causes over the years.\u201d\n\nOrganizers of the push to boycott Trump\u2019s AIPAC speech said they are worried that Trump could gain legitimacy through the event and want to deny him a chance to present the invitation as a tacit sign of approval.\n\nThe organizers said they don\u2019t know how many rabbis will ultimately participate. Those who have signed on so far primarily represent the Reform and Conservative movements of Judaism, whose followers tend to lean left politically.\n\nJeffrey Salkin, a Hollywood, Fla., rabbi helping to organize the boycott, said he and other rabbis were alarmed about Trump\u2019s behavior and rhetoric on the campaign trail. \u201cJewish history teaches that when hatred is unleashed, it takes on a life of its own,\u201d Salkin said.\n\nSalkin said the effort was an attempt to head off \u201cmore radical\u201d protest suggestions, including walkouts and jeers, and provide an outlet for those \u201cboth nauseated and terrified\u201d by Trump.\n\nAn AIPAC spokesman declined to comment on the reaction to Trump\u2019s appearance. Leaders of the organization have said they have a policy of inviting all active presidential candidates to speak to the group to ensure that \u201cour community develops a constructive relationship with whomever wins their respective party nomination and thus could be elected president.\u201d\n\nTrump\u2019s GOP rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has blasted Trump\u2019s statements on Israel, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are also scheduled to appear at the AIPAC conference. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and Vice President Biden will speak there as well.\n\n[Why Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz think Israel is a winning issue against Donald Trump]\n\nTrump\u2019s appearance presents an opportunity for the billionaire candidate as he seeks to be seen as the legitimate leader of the Republican Party.\n\nTrump holds a wide lead in the nomination battle but faces hostility and opposition from many GOP leaders and the country\u2019s foreign policy establishment, which has voiced concerns over Trump\u2019s views on Israel, his support for torture, and an apparent lack of a team of knowledgeable advisers.\n\nIn addressing the annual Washington policy conference hosted by AIPAC, which has strong ties to both parties, Trump has a rare chance to show that he can deliver a substantive speech away from the raucous rallies that have become a signature of his campaign and contributed to the anxieties of his critics.\n\nNathan Diament, executive director of public policy for the Orthodox Union, called the AIPAC speech a \u201ccritical moment\u201d for Trump.\n\n\u201cHe won\u2019t just be improvising an answer to a question on a debate stage. This is a planned speech. People are going to be looking to this as his definitive statement on his attitude toward Israel,\u201d Diament said. \u201cThe audience in the room and the audience tuning in will be a sophisticated audience. They\u2019re going to be looking for Trump to be specific. Trump just saying, \u2018believe me,\u2019 is not going to be sufficient.\u201d\n\nTrump\u2019s rise has caused particular consternation among Republican Jewish leaders, who had hoped that lingering discomfort with President Obama\u2019s policies on Israel and the Iran nuclear deal embraced by Clinton might lead to GOP gains in November among the traditionally pro-Democratic Jewish electorate. Even a slight shift could be pivotal in battleground states with heavy Jewish populations, such as Florida and Ohio.\n\nSome said they have cringed as Trump has repeatedly likened the Israel-Palestinian negotiations to the real estate deals that he has brokered over his career.\n\nIn a December interview with the Associated Press, he questioned Israel\u2019s commitment to peace and refused to back an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a red line for many GOP Israel supporters.\n\n\u201cI have a real question as to whether or not both sides want to make it,\u201d Trump said. \u201cA lot will have to do with Israel and whether or not Israel wants to make the deal \u2014 whether or not Israel\u2019s willing to sacrifice certain things.\u201d\n\nTrump failed to allay concerns during an awkward December appearance before the Republican Jewish Coalition. As many in the audience sat stunned, Trump suggested that he might not win the support of many in the room because he did not want their money. He also said he was best positioned to get a Middle East peace deal because he\u2019s a negotiator, \u201clike you folks.\u201d\n\n\u201cI\u2019d like to go with a clean slate and just say just, let\u2019s go, everybody\u2019s even, we love everybody and let\u2019s see if we can do something,\u201d he told the crowd, adding, \u201cJust relax, okay? You\u2019ll like me very much, believe me.\u201d\n\n[Donald Trump struggles with Israel question at Republican Jewish summit]\n\nHe has reiterated his neutrality comments through speeches and debates, arguing that appearing to strongly favor one side over the other would hamper his ability to broker an agreement.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m a negotiator,\u201d he said during a debate in Miami last week. \u201cIf I go in, I\u2019ll say I\u2019m pro-Israel and I\u2019ve told that to everybody and anybody that would listen. But I would like to at least have the other side think I\u2019m somewhat neutral as to them, so that we can maybe get a deal done.\u201d\n\nStill, Trump has sought to assure Jews and other Israel supporters, including evangelical Christians who make up a core segment of his GOP base. He describes himself as \u201ctotally pro-Israel\u201d and has said that he has donated large amounts of money to support the Jewish state. He has cited his role as the grand marshal of a pro-Israel parade in New York City in 2004 and his receipt of the Tree of Life award from the Jewish National Fund, which supports building infrastructure and planting trees in Israel.\n\nA spokesman for the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which now organizes the parade, did not respond to requests for comment. A longtime JNF official, Howard Ingram, said the group\u2019s New York real estate committee gave Trump its Tree of Life award in the early 1980s in part to acknowledge his ability to raise money.\n\nDuring the Miami debate, he mentioned his personal connections to the faith, referring to his daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner, who is a member of a prominent Orthodox family.\n\n\u201cI happen to have a son-in-law and a daughter that are Jewish, okay? And two grandchildren that are Jewish,\u201d he said.\n\nHicks, his campaign spokeswoman, added that \u201cmany of [Trump\u2019s] top executives and closest friends are Jewish\u201d and \u201cthere will be no one stronger on Israeli American relations than him, and his consistent support and advocacy for Israel over many years is proof of this.\u201d\n\nAri Fleischer, a former Bush administration official who also sits on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said Trump\u2019s seemingly confused messages have given \u201cnormally reliably Republican Jewish voters reasons to doubt him and question him.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe term \u2018neutrality\u2019 is a terrible buzzword,\u201d Fleischer said. \u201cIt\u2019s fraught with the language of the left, that is anti-Israel. So it\u2019s hard to accept this proposition that he\u2019s pro-Israel when he uses such a misguided word.\u201d\n\nFleischer said Trump\u2019s references to the New York parade and his JNF award are not sufficient to soothe concerns.\n\n\u201cThat has a lot more to do with his wallet than his heart,\u201d Fleischer said.\n\nThe Israel issue is a particularly important one to a group of deep-pocketed Republican donors, many of them affiliated with the Republican Jewish Coalition, who had rallied around Trump\u2019s opponents, particularly Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. With Rubio out of the presidential race, it remains unclear whether they will acclimate themselves to Trump.\n\nFleischer said there is an active conversation within the RJC about the proper response to Trump, one that will likely dominate the group\u2019s annual meeting in Las Vegas next month.\n\nMuch of the focus will be on GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul and RJC backer who is aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson has not endorsed in the race, and his spokesman declined to comment. However, Adelson met with Trump in December and declared in an interview with Reuters that he found Trump to be \u201cvery charming.\u201d\n\nAn Israeli blogger, Tal Schneider, reported this week that she had obtained video of Adelson at a fundraiser honoring former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani in Las Vegas on Feb. 27, in which Adelson said: \u201cTrump is a businessman. I am a businessman. He employs a lot of people. I employed 50,000 people. Why not?\u201d\n\nAn Israeli newspaper owned by Adelson also this week published an interview with Trump conducted after his Tuesday night primary victories, in which Trump declared that his success was \u201ctremendous news for Israel.\u201d\n\n\u201cYour friend is leading in the primaries,\u201d Trump told the newspaper\u2019s reporter, who covered his post-election celebration in Palm Beach. \u201cI\u2019ve always been your friend, even at the toughest moments. And that\u2019s not going to change. I love you.\u201d\n\nFor others, Trump\u2019s broader ideology and leadership style could be a non-starter.\n\n\u201cWhat I hear from the Jewish community is that he\u2019s odious and he\u2019s a bully, and in so far as he expresses a point of view about anything, it\u2019s usually something they disagree with,\u201d said Neusner, the former Bush speechwriter who also served as White House liaison to the Jewish community.\n\nNeusner called Trump\u2019s proposed religious test for immigration \u201ca black line\u201d in a community only a generation or two removed from the immigrant experience.\n\n\u201cIt strikes people as amoral,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not something that matters only to Republican Jews or Democratic Jews or independent Jews. It\u2019s deeply ingrained.\u201d\n\nCorrection: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was scheduled to address AIPAC. An earlier version also incorrectly referred to Israeli blogger Tal Schneider as he instead of she."}
{"text":"If it can happen in show business, it's happened to Jon Cryer. Now he's opening up for the first time and sharing his behind-the-scenes stories in a warmly endearing, sharply observed, and frankly funny look at life in Hollywood.\n\nIn 1986 Jon Cryer won over America as Molly Ringwald's loyal and lovable best friend, Duckie, in the cult classic Pretty in Pink, in a role that set the tone for his three-decade-long career in Hollywood. He went on to establish himself as one of the most talented comedic actors in the business, ultimately culminating in his current turn as Alan Harper on the massively popular sitcom Two and a Half Men.\n\nWith the instincts of a natural storyteller, Cryer charts his extraordinary journey in show business, illuminating his many triumphs and some missteps along the way. Filled with exclusive behind-the-scenes anecdotes, Cryer offers his own endearing perspective on Hollywood, the business at large, and the art of acting.\n\nCryer has worked with some of the biggest and most provocative names in the business, and here, for the first time, he details his experiences with Charlie Sheen, John Hughes, Robert Altman, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, and Christopher Reeve, among many others. He shares the intimate details of his friendships and relationships, pays tribute to his mentors, and explores the peculiar combination of heart, talent, and wisdom it takes to survive not just the bad times in a notoriously fickle industry but even the good times.\n\nIn this revealing, humorous, and introspective memoir, Cryer offers listeners a front-row seat as he reminisces about his life and experiences in showbiz over the past 30 years."}
{"text":"The mountain of broken down televisions and computer screens caught fire at around 11 o'clock in the morning, sending a thick plume of grey smoke over the tiny Utah town of Parowan. Soon, about ten fire trucks from neighboring towns Paragonah and Brian joined local firefighters on the scene, and authorities shut down an entire mile of Interstate 15.\n\nThe firefighters extinguished the blaze within a few hours, but the larger danger remains. The March 2 fire was just one symptom of enormous problem that's spreading across the country. As we move to flat screen TVs and computer displays, we're discarding our big, bulky old school televisions and CRT monitors, and they're piling up in warehouses like the one that caught fire in Parowan, with nowhere to go. These discarded screens aren't just a fire hazard. They're filled with lead and other toxic materials.\n\nIn California alone, more than 100 million pounds of leaded CRT monitors glass is recovered each year, according to CalRecycle, the state's recycling agency. In some states, recycling programs have provided cash incentives for companies to haul away junky old monitors and TVs, but there's almost no secondary market for the biggest parts of these monitors. So they just sit there, in massive piles. Over the past year, at least a half dozen warehouses filled with CRT debris have been abandoned in places like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Denver, and Yuma, Arizona. The stockpile in Parowan, Utah had not been abandoned, but just months earlier, state environmental officials had ordered its owner, Stone Castle Recycling, to move the waste out of the facility because of environmental code violations.\n\nEnvironmentalists say there's no obvious solution to the problem, but that means it's time for the government to step in. At the very least, we need a place where this growing pile of glass and lead can be cleaned and stored until we know what to do with it. We need a Yucca Mountain for all our CRTs.\n\nBillions of Pounds of Leaded Glass \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014-\n\nIf you've ever hauled one of the bulky monitors that were universal before the advent of flat panel displays, you'll know that they are remarkably heavy. That's because, behind the screen, there's a big funnel of heavy leaded glass designed to be sturdy and to protect consumers from radiation leakage. The glass is recyclable, and for awhile, U.S. recyclers were able to ship it off for reuse in other countries.\n\nBut today, there are only a handful of places that will accept this leaded glass. There's a lead smelter in Mississippi, and two more in Canada. And an Indian company, Videocon, is buying it too. But the pipeline of abandoned CRTs is spewing out far more leaded glass than the market can bear. \"Nowadays, everything is flat panels. There's just no use for the glass,\" says Earl Campbell, owner of E-Waste Harvesters in Phoenix. \"What you're left with is this glass that you literally have to pay to get rid of.\"\n\n>Over the past year, at least a half dozen warehouses filled with CRT debris have been abandoned in places like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Denver, and Yuma, Arizona.\n\nTen years ago, Videocon was paying recyclers between $100 and $200 a ton for their leaded glass, says Jeff Hunts, a manager with CalRecycle. Today, recyclers have to pay Videocon $100 to $200 per ton just to take the glass away.\n\nCalifornia pays recycling companies about $10 per monitor to haul away these old school TVs. Typically, they're moved to processing facilities where they can bet stripped of copper, plastic, and circuit boards. The recycling companies can sell all of this waste, but that still leaves the leaded glass in the CRTs. And getting rid of that costs money. So, instead, companies simply store the old monitors or glass in warehouses \u2013 warehouses that are increasingly being abandoned.\n\nOne company \u2013 Dow Management \u2013 was paid by about ten California recycling companies to haul away about 10 million tons of old monitors and TVs over a three-year period. According to Hunts and Arizona state officials, Dow stuffed them into a warehouses Los Angeles and Arizona, and simply walked away from the toxic glass, leaving the California recyclers and local officials to clean up the mess. Dow's website is still active, but the company didn't respond to an emailed request for comment and a number listed on the website has been disconnected. Stat officials believe that its operators have fled the country.\n\nA National Junk Monitor Graveyard? \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014-\n\nThe recycling trade publication Resource Recycling has recorded a mini-boom in abandoned warehouses stuffed with old CRT monitors, each one a miniature ecological disaster for local officials, says Jerry Powell, executive editor with Resource Recycling. The numbers add up: 1,500 tons in Cincinnati; 8,000 tons in Denver; 10,000 tons in Halsted Pennsylvania and Vestal New York; 3,000 giant \"gaylord\" boxes in Baltimore Maryland. \"It's a nationwide problem,\" says Powell.\n\nResource Recycling expects Videocon will stop accepting leaded glass altogether within five years, but people are still throwing out their monitors. Because many of these facilities include mountains of broken leaded glass, they're all mini environmental disasters in the making. Lead can leech into the water system and can cause organ damage when ingested by humans.\n\nSo what to do? Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, the environmental watchdog group that has most carefully watched this situation, says we should clean the glass and then basically bank it for the future. That is to say, storing it in \"carefully prepared landfill cells,\" where it cannot leech out and damage the local environment. To do that, though, will most likely take federal action by an agency such as the Environmental Protection Agency. An EPA spokeswoman didn't have any immediate comment for this story.\n\nPuckett's idea is not a long-term solution, but it's better than the toxic surprises that are popping up over the country right now. \"I think we need to sequester it,\" he says. \"It is glass and it is lead and some day someone might be able to find a use for that stuff.\"\n\n\"Of course the ultimate solution is to design products with end-of-life in mind,\" he says."}
{"text":"The Smell Report\n\nEmotion\n\nThe perception of smell consists not only of the sensation of the odours themselves but of the experiences and emotions associated with these sensations. Smells can evoke strong emotional reactions. In surveys on reactions to odours, responses show that many of our olfactory likes and dislikes are based purely on emotional associations.\n\nThe association of fragrance and emotion is not an invention of poets or perfume-makers. Our olfactory receptors are directly connected to the limbic system, the most ancient and primitive part of the brain, which is thought to be the seat of emotion. Smell sensations are relayed to the cortex, where \u2018cognitive\u2019 recognition occurs, only after the deepest parts of our brains have been stimulated. Thus, by the time we correctly name a particular scent as, for example, \u2018vanilla\u2019 , the scent has already activated the limbic system, triggering more deep-seated emotional responses.\n\nMood-effects\n\nAlthough there is convincing evidence that pleasant fragrances can improve our mood and sense of well-being, some of these findings should be viewed with caution. Recent studies have shown that our expectations about an odour, rather than any direct effects of exposure to it, may sometimes be responsible for the mood and health benefits reported. In one experiment, researchers found that just telling subjects that a pleasant or unpleasant odour was being administered, which they might not be able to smell, altered their self-reports of mood and well-being. The mere mention of a positive odour reduced reports of symptoms related to poor health and increased reports of positive mood!\n\nMore reliable results have been obtained, however, from experiments using placebos (odourless sprays). These studies have demonstrated that although subjects do respond to some extent to odourless placebos which they think are fragrances, the effect of the real thing is significantly greater. The thought of pleasant fragrances may be enough to make us a bit more cheerful, but the actual smell can have dramatic effects in improving our mood and sense of well-being.\n\nAlthough olfactory sensitivity generally declines with age, pleasant fragrances have been found to have positive effects on mood in all age groups.\n\nIn experiments involving stimulation of the left and right nostrils with pleasant and unpleasant fragrances, researchers have found differences in olfactory cortical neurone activity in the left and right hemispheres of the brain which correlate with the \u2018pleasantness ratings\u2019 of the odorants. These studies are claimed to indicate that positive emotions are predominantly processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, while negative emotions are more often processed by the right hemisphere. (The \u2018pleasant\u2019 odorant used in these experiments, as in many others, was vanillin.)\n\nPerception effects\n\nThe positive emotional effects of pleasant fragrances also affect our perceptions of other people. In experiments, subjects exposed to pleasant fragrances tend to give higher \u2018attractiveness ratings\u2019 to people in photographs, although some recent studies have shown that these effects are only significant where there is some ambiguity in the pictures. If a person is clearly outstandingly beautiful, or extremely ugly, fragrance does not affect our judgement. But if the person is just \u2018average\u2019, a pleasant fragrance will tip the balance of our evaluation in his or her favour. So, the beautiful models used to advertise perfume probably have no need of it, but the rest of us ordinary mortals might well benefit from a spray or two of something pleasant. Beauty is in the nose of the beholder.\n\nUnpleasant smells can also affect our perceptions and evaluations. In one study, the presence of an unpleasant odour led subjects not only to give lower ratings to photographed individuals, but also to judge paintings as less professional.\n\nThe mood-improving effects of pleasant smells may not always work to our advantage: by enhancing our positive perceptions and emotions, pleasant scents can cloud our judgement. In an experiment in a Las Vegas casino, the amount of money gambled in a slot machine increased by over 45% when the site was odorised with a pleasant aroma!\n\nIn another study \u2013 a consumer test of shampoos \u2013 a shampoo which participants ranked last on general performance in an initial test, was ranked first in a second test after its fragrance had been altered. In the second test, participants said that the shampoo was easier to rinse out, foamed better and left the hair more glossy. Only the fragrance had been changed.\n\nScent-preferences\n\nScent-preferences are often a highly personal matter, to do with specific memories and associations. In one survey, for example, responses to the question \u2018What are your favourite smells?\u2019 included many odours generally regarded as unpleasant (such as gasoline and body perspiration), while some scents usually perceived as pleasant (such as flowers) were violently disliked by certain respondents. These preferences were explained by good and bad experiences associated with particular scents. Despite these individual peculiarities, we can make some significant generalisations about smell-preference. For example, experiments have shown that we tend to \u2018like what we know\u2019: people give higher pleasantness ratings to smells which they are able to identify correctly. There are also some fragrances which appear to be universally perceived as \u2018pleasant\u2019 \u2013 such as vanilla, an increasingly popular ingredient in perfumes which has long been a standard \u2018pleasant odour\u2019 in psychological experiments (see Vanilla).\n\nA note for perfume-marketers: one of the studies showing our tendency to prefer scents that we can identify correctly also showed that the use of an appropriate colour can help us to make the correct identification, thus increasing our liking for the fragrance. The scent of cherries, for example, was accurately identified more often when presented along with the colour red \u2013 and subjects\u2019 ability to identify the scent significantly enhanced their rating of its pleasantness."}
{"text":"Philadelphia Phillies second baseman Scott Kingery makes a diving grab on a ground ball in the sixth inning March 3 against the Minnesota Twins during spring training at Spectrum Field. (Photo: Butch Dill-USA TODAY Sports)\n\nCLEARWATER, Fla. \u2013 Every spring there tends to be a player who emerges in camp, delivering a performance that enthralls the team and fans.\n\nFor the Phillies this year, second baseman Scott Kingery, has been that guy. He has made stellar defensive plays, hit for power and shown speed on the bases.\n\nAlthough he's yet to play above Double-A Reading, he has been treated like any other young player in the Phillies' clubhouse.\n\nFirst baseman Tommy Joseph is trying to create a fun handshake for the two to use, centered on Kingery's nickname \"Scotty Jetpax.\"\n\n\"Nothing that's camera worthy yet,\" Joseph joked. \"Still in the trial stages.\"\n\nKingery picked up the nickname at the University of Arizona. He stole home in a game after which a teammate proclaimed he was so fast it appeared he was wearing jetpacks. The nickname stuck. He even uses it for his Twitter handle (@ScottyJetpax25). That's where Joseph first learned of it and he's taken to calling Kingery \"Jetpax\" ever since.\n\nKingery, 22, is exactly the kind of player any Phillies fan should want to embrace.\n\nSTORY: Budding instructor Roy Halladay returns to Phillies camp\n\nBetween the unique nickname and his style of play, it's fun to imagine how he'd fit in the Phillies' infield. The reality, though, is that even with his strong performance \u2013 6 for 16 (.375), two home runs, three RBIs, five runs scored and a stolen base in seven games \u2013 Kingery is still likely a year away from having a real shot at making the team.\n\nIn the meantime, Kingery's performance has the potential to create unreasonable expectations, both in his readiness for Major League Baseball and how good he can be if he makes it to the big leagues. That's one of the pitfalls of exhibition games, where players aren't always going up against major-league caliber opponents.\n\n\"That's the hardest part when you have success in spring training like this, you almost start to believe that you're able to do this every day so you have to find a way to stay humble through it,\" Joseph said. \"He's going to get sent down at some point, right? So everybody's going to wonder, 'Why isn't he going to make the team?' Come on, he's got to get more experience. But I think it can do nothing but help his confidence.\"\n\nWhen manager Pete Mackanin has trotted out prospect-laden lineups this spring, he makes sure to sit back and enjoy watching what the young guys can do. It often presents one of Mackanin's, and fans', only opportunities to watch the prospects at this stage in their careers.\n\nMackanin has liked what Kingery's shown through the first 10 Grapefruit League games and believes he's capable of being a good MLB player. However, he cautioned reading too much into a player's numbers.\n\n\"The only issue I have is when a young guy starts doing extremely well in the spring then all of you media people start asking me if he's going to make the team,\" Mackanin said, laughing.\n\n\"The old saying is: Don't judge a guy on his spring training performance or September call-up performance. ... Everybody's looking for that future star player.\"\n\nThis isn't meant to diminish anyone's excitement at seeing prospects like Kingery or Nick Williams play well this spring. Embrace it. Enjoy it. Envision them being part of the Phillies' next World Series championship team.\n\nJust don't let two weeks of good play create unrealistic expectations. Keep it in perspective.\n\nContact Meghan Montemurro at mmontemurro@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter at @M_Montemurro."}
{"text":"If every Internet subscriber pays $5 monthly; then all music downloads should be free and legal. The Music Association of Canada cannot suck and blow at the same time.\n\nDavid Boyle, Toronto\n\nAlready they over charge huge amount to buy their CDs, if only they could be practical in pricing their product, they would not be in this situation.\n\nSteve Moore, Toronto\n\nIf that comes to pass, how and what would corporate and business subscribers pay ? Now I wonder if Toronto Star would also ask for a $5 fee since I came across this on the online edition ?\n\nMukesh Vashi, Brampton\n\nRidiculous. I have never downloaded music, never will, I'm lucky to have finally accomplished a level of computer savy to do basic tasks. I still have a collection of tapes for heaven's sake...I don't want to be bothered replacing them all with CD,s. So why should people like me, and there are plenty of us, pay for a service we will never use?\n\nJan Pinney, Elora\n\nI object to paying for a service I would never use. If I want music I use a CD or listen to the radio. Why should I pay for some strangers' habit of pirating music from the internet\n\nAileen Carter, Toronto\n\nSince we already pay a levy on blank media such as CDs and DVDs, and there is also a proposal to add a similar levy to hard drives and MP3 players, I don't see why we should have to pay yet another fee to supposedly compensate for downloaded music. Downloading music is already legal in Canada because of these levies, so why should we be slapped with another fee for doing something that is actually legal?\n\nIris Gray, Victoria\n\nThe idea is ridiculous. Should all mortgage payers be surcharged to help those who live beyond their means and default on their payments? Should all credit card users have to pay extra to bail out those who abuse credit? Should all car drivers have to pay an extra tax to subsidise those who evade payment? The truth of the matter is that the music business has brought its ills upon itself by its head-in-the-sand attitude.\n\nClive Warner, Monterrey, Mexico\n\nWhat happens to this money that is collected? How can the possibly know how much a musician or song writer should receive?\n\nRandy Drefs, Medicine Hat\n\nNothing wrong with paying $5 a month provided you WANT it. But I just dont get the thought process behind this ludicrous proposition of making everyone pay even if you never download music. Are we heading towards a communist\/socialist internet usage, having to pay up for someone elses losses. I, for one, will not fork it.\n\nVikas Thusoo, Richmond Hill\n\n$5 a month for music is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of, even if you are a music downloader. The only music I've actually ever downloaded was Radiohead's newest album, In Rainbows. Radiohead chose to release the music independently and actaully let you set your own price for the online download - a truly novel idea that the music industry should take note of. I have no doubts they've still made plenty of money.\n\nShawn Vickar, Calgary\n\nHow arrogant can these people be? First there was a tax on blank CDs, with the working assumption that anyone who burns a CD is ripping off an artist. How do these funds get disubursed? Why should Anne Murray get paid everytime I back up a database on a CD?\n\nDave Kingston, Toronto\n\nMost people have said that this fee is unreasonable, rightly so indeed. However I see some disturbing trends in those responses - first of all it's difficult to believe that almost any broadband internet user has never downloaded any music, but even if that's true how can you justify your \"throw the downloaders under the bus\" attitude - this is nothing more than attack on our freedoms and right to privacy by aggressive corporate lobbies in this insane post-9\/11 world. Fight for your rights or lose them forever!!\n\nRon Dyck, Edmonton\n\nConsidering the lousy music that record companies have been foisting on us for the past decade or two, I would suggest they work on actually cultivating talent and investing in developing artists rather than promoting interchangeable one hit wonders. People don't want to buy music that's disposable; they want something they'll still like in five years. Until there's better music available these companies don't deserve a penny from anyone.\n\nIlana McVeigh, Toronto\n\nAs a senior who only uses internet for e-mails and Pogo games I resent having to pay $5 for music. I have never downloaded any music nor will I ever. Should this charge appear on my bill I will cancel the internet outright.\n\nClaude Leduc, Ottawa\n\nHaving been connected to the internet for more than 13 years and have yet to download 1 song I would be horrified to learn I would be contributing to celine dions hundreds of millions of dollar bank account. Make money the old fashion way and earn it.\n\nAndy Vanklompenburg, Nanaimo\n\nI do not down load or by music CD's. I should not have to subsidise the music industry. The Music industry does not subsidise my income tax.\n\nJoe O'Byrne, Amherst, New Brunswick\n\nOf course! Music stores are practically extinct due to WWW. When was the last time you saw line ups in the HMV store?! Downloading from the web is equivalent to buying from a regular store - thus, pay up!\n\nYana Doubrovine, Toronto\n\nThis is just the tip of the iceberg. Now that the core internet has become a household necessity, every Tom Dick and Musician wants a surcharge put on for their particular organization. If people are illegally downloading, then criminally charge and convict them.. Don't download the costs on to the normal user of the internet, like myself, who does not download..\n\nChris McRae, Ottawa\n\nThis is an absolutely moronic idea. People who have no interest in downloading music will be paying for nothing and also subsidizing the cost for those who do wish to download.\n\nTom Tadman, Scarborough\n\nI am retired and on fixed income. I use the internet to keep in contact with friends but have never downloaded any music and have no intention of doing so. Fees for such would cause me to reevaluate my need for the internet at all. I simply cannot afford any more expenses eating away at my monthly pension.\n\nJudy Court, Toronto\n\nI stopped purchasing music long ago, not because I'm downloading it but because it is priced beyond what I perceive its value to be. I DO NOT download music, and cannot see any valid reason why I should be forced to pay a fee to do so.\n\nTony Heayn, Brampton\n\nThe internet can be used to pirate music, true. Cars can be used in bank robberies. Shall we apply a surcharge to car sales too? If this $5 fee comes into effect I will never pay for music again.\n\nScott Wiebe, Toronto\n\nSo people who don't download music will still be paying an extra $5\/mo? That sounds like a terrible idea. The fees should be the responsibility of those who download the music - not a tax on everyone.\n\nJeni Ator, Toronto\n\nWhat a great idea! Maybe we can save the auto industry with a $5 per month Internet Access Fee. And Toronto's budget problems - solved with an additional $5 fee! And climate change? Let's add another $5 on. Now isn't that easier than actually confronting the real issues at hand?\n\nPaul Tenk, Toronto\n\nI have always bought CDs: not once have I downloaded or shared music on the internet. If I am arbitrarily charged $5 a month on my internet, what incentive would I have to buy CD copies of music I have \"already paid for\"?\n\nGabriela Byron, Toronto\n\nI use the internet but have never downloaded a piece of music -so why should I pay. It's appropriate for music downloaders - for them it's still a savings over purchasing CD's.\n\nBea Klug, Toronto\n\nWhy should my mom, who has never downloaded anything in her life except email pay $5 a month to the recording industry?\n\nCraig Hall, Toronto\n\nThe idea is not bad but music comes from around the world. What if I only listen to music from an Australian band? Paying $5 to the Songwriters Association of CANADA won't make any sense!\n\nGavin Mill, Markham\n\nNow now, everyone calm down. Im sure Rogers will collect the fees fairly and make sure everything is alright, just like it does everything else.\n\nDan Carter, Hamilton\n\nI don't want to pay it either, but then, isn't this the same thing as having to pay school taxes when you don't have kids?\n\nRobert Guimont, Toronto\n\nInstead of imposing a new tax, stop and think about why piracy exists... These entities charge absurd prices then wonder why people don't want to pay. If they lowered their prices, people would buy legally. The same goes for software and games.\n\nBianca Devins, Toronto"}
{"text":"With the release of the Defense Build Update, players have been creating labyrinths and going up against some very well designed ones. Since the release on April 29 through to the end of the day on May 2, there were 600 raids. The boss won 50.2% of the time and lost 49.8% if the time. Pretty much 50\/50!\n\nAdditionally, there have been no reported crashes, and only 1 reported hang due to cards getting stuck in a state we didn't anticipate. If you have seen problems, please report them.\n\nDuelist\n\nDevelopment\n\nOver the past week our team has been busy preparing what will be in the next update release. We are considering doing a small update soon to patch some card bugs. But the next major update with progression will probably be a month or so away.\n\nOur Engineering Team worked on card logic; iOS Performance; tuned cards.\n\nOur Design Team worked on Wind up hit animations; Pyroclasm revamp.\n\nOur Art Team worked on Card 11 finished; Card Back 12 design.\n\nOur Audio Team worked on UI Sound design.\n\nBola Shot\n\nLabyrinth Gameplay Statistics\n\nSince the release on April 29 through to the end of of the day on May 2, there were 600 raids. The boss won 50.2% of the time and the boss lost 49.8% if the time."}
{"text":"Qualcomm\u2019s executive pay practices came under the spotlight this spring.\n\nFinancial columnists from The San Diego Union-Tribune and New York Times weighed in on Qualcomm\u2019s equity awards to executives and employees \u2014 saying these grants block the benefit to shareholders of billions in stock buybacks.\n\nActivist investor Jana Partners called for changes in Qualcomm\u2019s performance targets for executives. Instead of revenue and adjusted operating income, which can create \u201cthe incentive to grow at any cost,\u201d Jana wants shareholder-friendly metrics, such as earnings per share or return on invested capital.\n\nThese targets \u201cprovide an important check on stock-based compensation,\u201d the activist said in a letter to Qualcomm this spring.\n\nThe wireless chip maker\u2019s executive compensation plan is complex. It became more elaborate last year as the company took steps to keep its management team together after Microsoft reportedly tried to hire Chief Executive Steve Mollenkopf. The moves included providing millions in front-loaded restricted stock grants to Mollenkopf, Executive Chairman Paul Jacobs and other top officials.\n\nOne key issue for Qualcomm\u2019s critics is shareholder dilution. Over the past five fiscal years, the company has spent $13.6 billion repurchasing 239 million of its own shares. These buybacks should have reduced the number of shares in the market, boosting shareholder value. But despite the buybacks, Qualcomm\u2019s total share count at the end of fiscal 2014 was flat compared with five years before.\n\n\u201cThe company has spent a lot of money on repurchases, yet the share count has not declined,\u201d said Steven Re of Quality Growth Management, a Rancho Santa Fe investment firm that owns Qualcomm shares. \u201cIt\u2019s like a cloud over the company that it has so richly rewarded a management that has done so poorly for shareholders.\u201d\n\nQualcomm says its stock compensation program is designed to retain not only executives but also lower level employees. On average, Qualcomm\u2019s top five officers received 6 percent of compensation shares awarded over the past five years. The remainder went to employees outside of the executive suite.\n\nA glut of stock options from their heyday in the early 2000s was the main reason why buybacks failed to cut share count. Qualcomm no longer relies on options to pay executives. It has shifted to restricted stock, which is less dilutive.\n\nThis current fiscal year, the company increased buybacks. It pledged to repurchase $10 billion in shares by March 2016 \u2014 a move that is expected to shrink share count.\n\nThe bulk of Jacobs\u2019 pay last year came from stock options. He exercised 1.8 million shares at strike prices ranging from roughly $37 to $45 per share. He immediately sold the shares for about $73 to $79 each, pocketing the difference.\n\nAbout one-third of Jacobs\u2019 options were 10 years old and set to expire. Others were granted several years ago. He last received stock options in 2009.\n\nLast year wasn\u2019t typical for Qualcomm. After reports that Microsoft had approached Mollenkopf, Jacobs stepped down as CEO. \u201cA key element of retaining Mr. Mollenkopf was Dr. Jacobs agreeing to relinquish the CEO title and adopt a different role,\u201d the company said in its proxy."}
{"text":"Toronto city council has overwhelmingly voted no to a massive new downtown casino, shutting the door on a year-long debate that featured a parade of ambitious plans and a citizen-led campaign against them.\n\nIn an unexpected move, council also rejected plans to expand the gambling floor at Woodbine Racetrack, a narrow result that left the site's operator concerned for its future. However, council went on to vote in favour of pursuing discussions with the provincial and federal governments to expand the amount of convention space in the city, news that will be welcomed by those who say Toronto is lagging behind other North American destinations.\n\nNick Eaves, chief executive of Woodbine Entertainment Group, which operates the north Etobicoke site, watched the vote along with about 200 of his workers, who bussed in to city hall.\n\nStory continues below advertisement\n\nIn addition to the support from workers, Woodbine had a petition with 10,000 signatures, he said. \"For all of that to be unnoticed and to be turned down today is a real shock,\" he said.\n\nCouncillor Mike Layton, who led the charge to have the special meeting even after Mayor Rob Ford declared the casino plan effectively dead last week, put forward the motion to oppose the downtown site. It passed 40 to 4. Mr. Layton also asked council to oppose expansion in the area that includes Woodbine, which passed in a 24-20 vote. Earlier in the meeting Mr. Ford attempted to get support for a compromise that would see expanded gambling at Woodbine. That motion failed 13 to 31.\n\nMr. Eaves said the prospect of a new casino now going to neighbouring Vaughan or Markham would \"severely compromise\" Woodbine's ability to compete. He said he hopes to work out a deal with the province to keep Woodbine operating.\n\nOxford Properties Group, which in 2011 acquired the land under the Metro Toronto Convention Centre's north building, has been advocating for a casino on Front Street to help fund the convention centre's expansion.\n\nMichael Kitt, Oxford's executive vice-president, said in an interview that the company supports the city's decision. He said Oxford was encouraged by the discussion that arose at Tuesday's meeting. Council unanimously voted in favour of pursuing discussions with Queen's Park and Ottawa to invest in additional convention space.\n\n\"We think that's an important topic to continue the momentum over the coming months,\" he said.\n\nTuesday's highly anticipated casino vote, held at a special meeting called by a majority of councillors over Mr. Ford's objections, was overshadowed by recent allegations the mayor was caught on video smoking crack cocaine.\n\nStory continues below advertisement\n\nStory continues below advertisement\n\nDuring the council debate, Mr. Ford \u2013 who for months was one of the casino's most vocal supporters because of the jobs and revenue he said it would bring \u2013 spoke out against a downtown casino and laid the blame at Premier Kathleen Wynne's feet.\n\n\"No deal is good enough for this Premier,\" Mr. Ford told a packed council chamber. \"She doesn't want a casino in Toronto. No one knows which direction she's going on the gaming file.\"\n\nThe City of Toronto had originally counted on collecting $100-million annually for hosting a casino, but that came crashing down after The Globe and Mail reported that would mean a special deal for Toronto. Ms. Wynne told the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. to give all municipalities the same deal, and the new funding formula would see Toronto get a little more than $53-million a year for the downtown site.\n\nLas Vegas-based MGM Resorts was among those to express interest in Toronto and, according to city lobbyist records, was the most aggressive of the potential casino operators.\n\nAlan Feldman, MGM vice-president of public affairs, in a written statement thanked council for carefully considering the opportunity.\n\n\"As we have always said, we only want to operate in a city where we can partner with the local community,\" he wrote. \"For this reason, we are excited to continue the process and remain committed to sharing our vision with a willing host in the greater Toronto area.\"\n\nStory continues below advertisement\n\nMr. Feldman did not respond to an e-mail asking why the casino pitch didn't work in Toronto.\n\nJan Jones, of Caesars Entertainment, which had also expressed interest, wrote in a statement that she was \"disappointed\" by the vote, but respected council's decision.\n\nPeggy Calvert, one of the founding members of citizens' group No Casino Toronto, said she was \"delighted\" by the result.\n\n\"We couldn't be more ecstatic. \u2026 We could only hope way back when that this would be the outcome,\" she said."}
{"text":"Richard Stallman\u2019s GNU (gnunet.org) and French computing institute Inria have released the initial code for an \u201celectronic payment system,\u201d which is \u201cunlike BitCoin or cash.\u201d\n\nGNU\u2019s \u2018Not for the Black Market\u2019 Taler\n\nThe project, dubbed The project, dubbed Taler (for Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserve), is designed \u201cfor the mainstream economy, and not the black market,\u201d its website explains.\n\nTaler, according to the current available literature, is aimed at providing as much a solution to mainstream organizations\u2019 use of parallel payment systems as for customers. While sounding similar to cryptocurrency, the ethos behind the project suggests an attempt to distance itself from Bitcoin.\n\nThe website states:\n\nUnlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can learn their citizen\u2019s total income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes.\u201d\n\nNonetheless, the system ensures anonymity for users, who will ultimately use coins as a stand-in for national currencies and be free from exposure to any volatility inherent in a new cryptocurrency.\n\n\u201cWhen you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed to the merchant. The bank, government and exchange will also never learn how you spent your electronic money,\u201d it is written. \u201cHowever, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary.\u201d\n\nAs such, in terms of stability, Taler is reported to \u201c[use] an electronic exchange holding financial reserves in existing currencies.\u201d\n\nExperimental\n\nAs is standard for a GNU-related project, the Taler is free and the code readily accessible. Stallman, who coined the term \u201cfree software\u201d in the 1980s, has nonetheless been quiet on the progress or ultimate potential of Taler in the mainstream economy. As is standard for a GNU-related project, the Taler is free and the code readily accessible. Stallman, who coined the term \u201cfree software\u201d in the 1980s, has nonetheless been quiet on the progress or ultimate potential of Taler in the mainstream economy.\n\nCurrently, the project is very much in its infancy, with disclaimers noting pitfalls, which have yet to be addressed. No \u201creal\u201d currencies are currently available for experimentation, with an initial release slated for some time this year.\n\n\u201cThere is no auditor, and hence components do not properly support auditors either. As a result, a dishonest exchange could embezzle funds,\u201d an \u201cThere is no auditor, and hence components do not properly support auditors either. As a result, a dishonest exchange could embezzle funds,\u201d an email from systems maintainer and software architect Christian Grothoff states.\n\n\u201cThis is a first alpha release of the four key components providing logic for running a bank, exchange, merchant and wallet.\u201d\n\nThe development team meanwhile hails from various outlets including Inria, which is in turn placed under the supervision of French government industries of research and development.\n\nIn terms of deployment, as The Register In terms of deployment, as The Register points out , criticism of Taler may well come from Bitcoin circles, with critics in turn pointing to weaknesses in the Bitcoin ecosystem to validate the need for a Taler-like platform for the mainstream.\n\nWhat do you think about the potential of the Taler project? Let us know in the comments sections below."}
{"text":"Why did they do this? Diplomats from many countries have been asking this for days about Canada's sudden move to cut off diplomatic ties with Iran. Whether it was a good move or bad, there can be no doubt that in the execution Ottawa bobbled the ball.\n\nIf Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird wanted to deliver a clear message to the world about Iran, they didn't. Instead, they confused the world.\n\nFor many countries, Ottawa's basic message, \"Iran is bad\" was crossed with another signal: \"Canada is weird.\"\n\nStory continues below advertisement\n\nThe Harper government was clearly fed up with Iran on many fronts and chose to dispense with stagnant diplomatic ties that it decided were just getting in the way of tougher criticism. But it made Canadian foreign policy look erratic by muddling the message.\n\nFor most foreign governments, the message is interpreted through their diplomats, and diplomatic language. To diplomats, breaking off relations \u2013 suspending them, technically \u2013 is a serious step, a notch below declaring war. Countries maintain diplomatic ties through cold wars and even hot skirmishes. For days, foreign diplomats have been seeking explanations from fellow diplomats, Canadian officials, even journalists. To them, it's shocking.\n\nThat doesn't mean Canada should only do things that won't shock foreign diplomats. But if Ottawa wants to send a message, it has to explain, not confuse. This time, the explanation has been vague and shifting.\n\nFor starters, there was the suddenness. On Friday, Mr. Baird went before a microphone in Vladivostok to announce the closing of Canada's embassy in Iran and the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from Canada. Okay, that's because the Canadian government wanted to get all its diplomats safely out of Tehran before it said anything and then Mr. Baird, at a summit in Russia, rushed to the microphone just after 1 a.m. local time.\n\nBut the scene led to a sense of urgency. The obvious question was, why now? Mr. Baird didn't offer a convincing answer. His first explanation was a long list of complaints about Iran's behaviour on human rights, its nuclear program and support for Syria \u2013 all legitimate but none new \u2013 and also that, given Iran's poor record for protecting diplomats, \"it's simply no longer safe\" to have Canadian representatives in Iran.\n\nThe lack of a strong explanation fuelled speculation. Some suggested Israel had tipped Ottawa off to an imminent military strike, so Mr. Baird has since made a point of repeatedly denying that. The CBC speculated Iranian diplomats here might have been organizing sleeper cells.\n\nThe real safety reasons, it turned out, were more pedestrian but poorly explained \u2013 a sense that Canadians in Tehran were exposed. There's no U.S. embassy there and the British left last November, when their gated embassy was stormed by protesters. Ottawa worried Canadians could be next in line as the enemy foreigners. If Israel launches strikes, Canadian diplomats believed they would be taken hostage. Ottawa, after all, has become Israel's staunchest defender.\n\nStory continues below advertisement\n\nStory continues below advertisement\n\nThe Harper government also had a September deadline to list Iran as a \"state sponsor of terrorism\" under a new law, and worried about retaliation. It will probably also soon impose sanctions on Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards. There was one other thing Ottawa didn't adequately explain: its diplomatic relations had become less than zero because Iranian officials wouldn't meet Canadians.\n\nBut that's still not the whole reason for the Harper government's actions. It didn't have to expel all Iranian diplomats to deal with safety concerns in Tehran. On Monday, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney offered a new reason: Iranian diplomats were intimidating Iranian-Canadians.\n\nBut the key reason, certainly, was that the government wanted to make it part of a statement about Iran as a rogue nation. That's why Ottawa listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism on the same day as it made its surprise announcement.\n\nIt's a statement that confused, because Mr. Baird didn't offer a systematic explanation that cutting off diplomatic ties was not decided suddenly. The Harper government failed to grasp that the world would expect a clearer rationale for a big step.\n\nAfter all, if you're trying to send the world a strong message about Iran, it's best not to leave them puzzled about Canada."}
{"text":"A mother passing by her daughter's bedroom was astonished to see the bed was nicely made and everything was picked up. Then she saw an envelope propped up prominently on the center of the bed. It was addressed, \"Mom.\" With the worst premonition, she opened the envelope and read the letter with trembling hands:\n\nDear Mom: It is with great regret and sorrow that I'm writing you. I had to elope with my new boyfriend because I wanted to avoid a scene with Dad and you. I've been finding real passion with Ahmed and he is so nice-even with all his piercings, tattoos, beard, and his motorcycle clothes. But it's not only the passion Mom, I'm pregnant and Ahmed said that we will be very happy. He already owns a trailer in the woods and has a stack of firewood for the whole winter. He wants to have many more children with me and that's now one of my dreams too. Ahmed taught me that marijuana doesn't really hurt anyone and we'll be growing it for us and trading it with his friends for all the cocaine and ecstasy we want. In the meantime, we'll pray that science will find a cure for AIDS so Ahmed can get better; he sure deserves it!! Don't worry Mom, I'm 15 years old now and I know how to take care of myself. Someday I'm sure we'll be back to visit so you can get to know your grand children.\n\nYour daughter, Judith\n\nPS: Mom, none of the above is true. I'm over at the neighbor's house. I just wanted to remind you that there are worse things in life than my report card that's in my desk center drawer. I love you! Call when it is safe for me to come home.\n\n- An e-mail"}
{"text":"While writing a post yesterday I noticed there were some gaps in my vim setup for when I'm authoring a markdown file so here are a few tips for polishing up your markdown experience in vim, specifically for jekyll blogs.\n\nFront Matter\n\nStarting at the top, literally, with the front matter. It was looking a bit weird out of the box:\n\nIt's rather inconsequential data compared to the meat of the document, the actual content. I found a helpful blog post with some details that worked for me. The heart of which is to parse between the --- s and consider this content a comment.\n\nau BufNewFile , BufRead , BufWrite *.md syntax match Comment \/\\%^---\\_.\\{-}---$\/\n\nAfter, it looks a little less odd.\n\nTextwidth\n\nI prefer a little more space when I'm writing so I change the width before text wraps to something slightly more than my default 80 character width - like 100 characters. In my autocommand group I place something like:\n\nau FileType markdown setlocal textwidth = 100\n\nFenced-in Languages\n\nIf you have many, or maybe super-specific, languages and syntaxes you commonly use in your markdown you can specify them in your vimrc to be interpreted as such.\n\nlet g :markdown_fenced_languages = [ 'javascript' , 'ruby' , 'sh' , 'yaml' , 'javascript' , 'html' , 'vim' , 'coffee' , 'json' , 'diff' ]\n\nSnippets\n\nI use snipmate but I guess the same can be applied with something like UltiSnips? Probably. In any case, snippets are a lifesaver for the occasional piece of code or markup you can either never remember the exact syntax for, or are slightly awkward to type. For me it's more often the former.\n\n~\/.vim\/snippets\/markdown.snippets\n\nsnippet a [${1:text}](${2:http:\/\/}) snippet img ![${1:alt}](${2:http:\/\/}) snippet front --- title: ${1:Title} author: Joel layout: post permalink: `strftime(\"\/%Y\/%m\/%d\")`\/${2:slug}.html ---\n\nThe first two are for links and image tags, respectively. I consistently confuse the two so why leave it to guessing? The front snippet is handy in that date for the permalink is automatically populated when the snippet is expanded.\n\nPreview Your Markdown\n\nA tweet from Ches asking about previewing documents piqued my curiosity so I decided to look into it a little further. His suggestion to try the QuickLook plugin was met with failure, as he mentioned, as there's some weirdness when you try to launch from terminal. From finder it seems to work just fine but that defeats the purpose of being vim-driven, right? The next best thing would be to leverage a native mac app to get a look at what our rendered markdown files look like. The app I prefer is called MacDown and has plenty of good features if you ever feel like dropping into a gui app instead of vim.\n\nMacDown comes with a cli command you can use to open documents from the terminal but I've found that it doesn't retain your preferences and switches to the defaults once you use it. Using OS X's open command, however, does retain your preferences. So, about getting vim to play nice with this? Not so hard:\n\nmap < leader > pre : w < cr > : silent ! ! open - a MacDown % > \/dev\/ null & < cr > : redraw !< cr >\n\nSo <leader>pre will now open up MacDown with the current document so I can get a good look. Not bad!\n\nThe changes to MacDown's preferences I've found useful:\n\nGeneral > Put editor on the right. I don't care much about the editor, so it gets shoved right.\n\nRendering > Detect Jekyll front-matter. For those of us jekyll users.\n\nHelpful Plugins"}
{"text":"Periodic limb movements during sleep (PLMS), with or without symptoms of a restless legs syndrome (RLS), may cause sleep disturbances. The pharmacologic treatments of choice are dopaminergic drugs. Their use, however, may be limited due to tolerance development or rebound phenomena. Anecdotal observations have shown that oral magnesium therapy may ameliorate symptoms in patients with moderate RLS. We report on an open clinical and polysomnographic study in 10 patients (mean age 57 +\/- 9 years; 6 men, 4 women) suffering from insomnia related to PLMS (n = 4) or mild-to-moderate RLS (n = 6). Magnesium was administered orally at a dose of 12.4 mmol in the evening over a period of 4-6 weeks. Following magnesium treatment, PLMS associated with arousals (PLMS-A) decreased significantly (17 +\/- 7 vs 7 +\/- 7 events per hour of total sleep time, p < 0.05). PLMS without arousal were also moderately reduced (PLMS per hour of total sleep time 33 +\/- 16 vs 21 +\/- 23, p = 0.07). Sleep efficiency improved from 75 +\/- 12% to 85 +\/- 8% (p < 0.01). In the group of patients estimating their sleep and\/or symptoms of RLS as improved after therapy (n = 7), the effects of magnesium on PLMS and PLMS-A were even more pronounced. Our study indicates that magnesium treatment may be a useful alternative therapy in patients with mild or moderate RLS-or PLMS-related insomnia. Further investigations regarding the role of magnesium in the pathophysiology of RLS and placebo-controlled studies need to be performed."}
{"text":"PDF generation with Clojure, thanks to Dmitri Sotnikov\n\nJose Ayudarte Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 19, 2017\n\nUnlike consumer software, Reporting is something that enterprise software always needs, so a month ago our team did a benchmark analysis to choose the best PDF generator library or third-party tool. As Clojure runs on the JVM and has smooth Java interop we considered tools like JasperReports to create reports with drag-and-drop functionality but we weren\u2019t convinced: the design tool is user-friendly in the sense of having the option to create PDF sections visually, but then we realized that we had complex requirements, making it more difficult to achieve the results using JasperReports without losing ability to have dynamic data structures.\n\nSo we took our exploration further afield.\n\nEventually, we decided on clj-pdf, a library created by Dmitri Sotnikov, which shares similarities with Hiccup library at the time of generating elements. Now that we have developed and released our PDF report tool to production I will try to summarize the benefits and share some tips on how to use clj-pdf:\n\nI think it\u2019s important to highlight that the most useful document element for structuring advance content is the pdf-table. It\u2019s the only way to properly customize space and alignment between elements. Table could be also used but it has bugs and the display is broken on some advanced use-cases.\n\nAs for creating a header for the PDF, you might want to add a logo and some title aligned horizontally. In our case, as you can see in the code, we have created a pdf-table element that is 100% width and it\u2019s right-aligned, with no borders. We have also positioned the header statically within \u201cx\u201d and \u201cy\u201d axes in the page. Then we have used a watermark element to set and scale the logo just in the right place. This method has the caveat of having to customize header position for each different case. So if you have several documents with different text-lengths in the header, you have to adjust the position by hand for each of one.\n\nSo a better method to create a header it might be not setting its \u201cx\u201d and \u201cy\u201d axes at all, but just creating a 2-column pdf-table with pdf-cell inside that has paragraphs aligned to the desired place (right or left). Thus you could use any length for the header text but with the limitations that you should use some negative paddings for pdf-cells (needed to align the items horizontally) as well as getting more vertical top-margin in the page.\n\nAnother interesting thing is to create simple tables with few lines of data:\n\nFor instance, we have used a pdf-table element with a chunk element inside, separating data lines with \u201c\n\n\u201d end of line character, creating a background for the whole table.\n\nAlso, as a way to control jump or vertical gaps between elements, spacer element is good combined with size property that gives us more fined control, as the size specifies the font-size of the space inserted.\n\nFinally, another interesting trick is the use of negative padding values to have a better control over vertical gaps. As pointed before, left, right, top and bottom padding properties are available to use within pdf-tables\u2019s pdf-cell elements. By way of illustration, to move a pdf-cell\u2019s content up you would set a property padding-top to -3 value or something like that. Numbers are pixel units but it\u2019s better just to give it a go and experiment a bit.\n\nImportant issues:\n\nWe have had huge gaps with very long pdf-table columns. So we have created faux rows to split the content to avoid that. That shouldn\u2019t be a problem and we have to report an issue in the author\u2019s repository. In fact there is a property to control behavior of pdf-table\u2019s content across different pages.\n\nPdf-table column number is strict and immutable. We have to use colspan attribute to merge columns for a given row but we cannot pass less or more columns than expected to the pdf-table\u2019s body and that includes Clojure\u2019s nil values as well (they are counted as a column even if there is no content inside). We remove nil values or we skip structure creation completely in case we find the risk of breaking that rule. Also we create rows with nil columns if required when there is no content.\n\nAs my colleague Asier mentioned in an earlier post, our goal is to contribute more to Open Source projects and this awesome library can be a good candidate to start doing so."}
{"text":"The Hofstra University student killed during a home-invasion robbery was the victim of friendly fire from a veteran cop, Nassau County police revealed last night.\n\nThe officer unleashed a barrage of bullets when intruder Dalton Smith pointed a gun at him while using Andrea Rebello as a human shield, police said.\n\n\u201cHe kept saying, \u2018I\u2019m going to kill her,\u2019 then pointed the gun at the police officer,\u201d Det. Lt. John Azzata said.\n\nThe cop fired eight times, with one bullet accidentally hitting Rebello, 21, in the head, he said.\n\nThe other seven rounds struck and killed Smith, a career criminal, ex-con and parole absconder, Azzata said.\n\nSmith \u2014 clad in dark clothes and a ski mask \u2014 was wielding a 9mm pistol with one bullet in the chamber and another in the magazine, Azzata said. But he never got off a shot during the deadly encounter early Friday inside the off-campus house in Uniondale where Rebello lived with her twin sister, Jessica, Azzata said.\n\nThe cop who fired the shots was described only as a 12-plus-year veteran of the Nassau County Police Department who earlier served more than seven years with the NYPD.\n\nA source told The Post his decorations include the medal of honor.\n\nHe was treated for trauma after the incident, said James Carver, head of the Nassau County Patrolmen\u2019s Benevolent Association.\n\nNassau County Police Commissioner Thomas Dale said the cop was \u201cOK,\u201d adding: \u201cI believe he\u2019s out sick.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re going to make sure he receives counseling and appropriate medical attention if he needs it,\u201d Dale said.\n\nDale also said his department would conduct a \u201ccomplete investigation.\u201d"}
{"text":"February 28, 2015, at UFC 184. That was the last time Cat Zingano competed in the UFC.\n\nWhile she pleaded to get right back in there after her 14-second armbar loss to Ronda Rousey, the former title contender instead sat in the sidelines for a year and a half. During that time off, Zingano's weight ballooned up to 175 lbs, and she has slowly dropped the weight in preparation for her return at UFC 200.\n\nZingano took to Instagram to post a series of photos showing a timeline from January up to the present.\n\nHer post came with the following caption: \"Fighters be like.... I was 175 in January & 145 today. Reality vs expectation. There is a much bigger fight than what you see go on in that cage. And If I can do it, anyone of y'all can. #teamalphacat #ufc200 #bulkingJ\/K #strongAF #regretnothing #alphacatzingano #sorrynotsorry #notashamed #thatbasstho #cake\"\n\nZingano, 33, will face Julianna Pena as part of the UFC 200 preliminary card. She has a 2013 TKO victory over the current UFC champion, Miesha Tate."}
{"text":"Best Operas Ever is a new podcast from Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on CBC Radio 2. In each instalment, host Ben Heppner talks to one of the major opera figures of our time about a particular opera recording that they especially love. You'll find each episode here on cbcmusic.ca, and you can tune in to CBC Radio 2 at 1 p.m. any Saturday from now until the end of November to hear these classic recordings in their entirety \u2014 along with extended conversations with our esteemed guests.\n\nBest Operas Ever No. 5 - Barbara Hannigan Ben Heppner talks to the contemporary music maverick about a 20th-century opera she adores. Audio\n\nContemporary music has an estimable champion in Barbara Hannigan. There aren't a lot of musicians in the world who have cemented international singing careers, defined themselves with new repertoire, and still felt like that wasn't quite enough. And yet, Hannigan has taken to the conductor's podium with as much relish as the operatic stage. And the opera recording she chose as her favourite ever is as ambitious, smart and iconoclastic as Hannigan herself.\n\nOlivier Messiaen's Saint Fran\u00e7ois d'Assise is nearly five hours long in its entirety, requires as many as 300 musicians, and has virtually no story. It's a work of intense religious devotion, expressed through bursts of musical colour and texture, with nary a Verdian melody in sight. But for Hannigan, seeing it performed at the Salzburg Festival as a young singer was a life-altering experience. The singers in that production wore modern dress, as per the wishes of director Peter Sellars. Baritone Jos\u00e9 van Dam sang the title role, and soprano Dawn Upshaw was the angel who appears to him periodically. Kent Nagano conducted the vast ensemble.\n\n\"Peter Sellars opened up the rehearsals in Salzburg to anyone who wanted to come, as long as we were quiet and didn't disrupt,\" Hannigan told Ben Heppner. \"In a way, it was kind of like going to church, because the rehearsal space that Sellars created with Nagano was.... it was sacred.\" Hannigan was singing in another production at the festival, but she spent nearly every spare minute at Sellars' rehearsals for Saint Fran\u00e7ois \u2014 hours on end, watching the immense production come together.\n\nThe recording that Hannigan has chosen to feature on Best Operas Ever is from that very production at the Salzburg Festival, with those same singers. Hit the play button above to hear Heppner talk to Hannigan about why that Salzburg Saint Fran\u00e7ois was so formative to her. You can tune in to Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on Oct. 8 to hear more from this conversation, plus Kent Nagano's recording of Saint Fran\u00e7ois d'Assise in its (near) entirety.\n\nSubscribe to Best Operas Ever on iTunes!\n\nExplore more:\n\nBest opera ever? Jonathan Darlington chooses Weber's Der Freisch\u00fctz\n\nBest opera ever? Sondra Radvanovsky chooses Puccini's Tosca"}
{"text":"EXCLUSIVE: In what may be the first group of features to be financed by cryptocurrency and distributed via the blockchain, a consortium of companies plans to release New Frontiers, a sci-fi anthology of five segments that will combine into one feature.\n\nGround Control Entertainment, XYZ Films, and producer Kyle Franke are partnering with SingularDTV co-founder and president of entertainment Kim Jackson on the project, which will consist of a five-part anthology of films created and directed by Ruairi Robinson (The Last Days on Mars), Stephan Zlotescu (True Skin), Zac&Mac (Law Zero), and Tyson Johnston (Lunar).\n\nProducer Scott Glassgold, Ruairi Robinson and Ground Control Entertainment developed the universe for New Frontiers with screenwriter Philip Gelatt. Production will start in the first quarter of 2018. Futurism Studios will serve as an executive producer on the project.\n\nNo details on the anthology plots have been released. The combined films sport a budget of $5 million, or approximately 9000 in ether, the digital currency derived from the ethereum blockchain and one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world.\n\nThe deal was negotiated by SingularDTV\u2019s Jackson, with Chris Spicer and Nick Scott from Akin Gump for XYZ and Allison Binder for Ground Control. Jackson\u2019s credits include Tub (Sundance 2010), Children of God (Newfest, Outfest 2010, HBO), Gun Hill Road (Sundance 2011 competition, 2011 theatrical release), and Blue Caprice (Sundance 2013, MoMA New Films\/New Directors, IFC\/Sundance Selects). It was nominated for a Spirit Award.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m very proud that SingularDTV is creating a new frontier of its own, with a peer-to-peer funding and distribution platform, connecting fans with the films and filmmakers that they love,\u201d said Jackson. \u201cOur platform allows for audiences and creators to mutually benefit from the success of any project. As long as they keep supporting projects, there is no end to the possibility of sequels or TV series continuing to reach eager audiences. With SingularDTV there are no disappointing cancellations of beloved pilots or series. It\u2019s a self-sustaining franchise.\u201d\n\nSingularDTV\u2019s Ethervision distribution platform streaming channel plans to offer films, music and other content later in 2018. The company has been ramping up its activities and just announced the appointments of executives Shreesh Tiwari (chief strategic officer), Archna Desai (chief operating officer), and Oliver Mahrdt (SVP of marketing)."}
{"text":"It is easily the most depraved little episode of presidential campaign crime in decades, worthy of Nixon\u2019s CREEP or Boris Yeltsin\u2019s goons, and it\u2019s been almost totally ignored by the media\u2014mainstream and otherwise.\n\nRon and Rand Paul\u2019s top campaign aides, led by the husband of Ron Paul\u2019s granddaughter, bribing and extorting a crooked Tea Party Iowa politician to endorse the \u201cRon Paul rEVOLution\u201d\u2014which turns out to have been little more than a mirage built on fraud, oligarch cash, and the credulous fantasies of a few thousand pimply college-aged waffendweebs.\n\nAnd then there\u2019s the specter of the world\u2019s largest private surveillance apparatus, Google, looming over this story\u2014playing a central role in the criminal investigation that is both deeply conflicted, and oddly conflicting.\n\nFor over a year now, Google has refused to comply with federal warrants to hand over Gmail accounts of the three indicted Paul campaign managers and operators: Jesse Benton, John Tate, and Dimitrios Kesari, who all have held senior posts in Rand Paul\u2019s various campaigns and PACs. (Many of the legal filings mentioned in this article are embedded below.)\n\nBut it goes further: Ron Paul himself is named in a federal subpoena made public last year. Prosecutors want access to the libertarian hero\u2019s emails, as he appears to be a person of interest in the criminal investigation, an investigation that Google has been hindering with legal roadblocks and distractions.\n\nThe crimes are bad enough, and I\u2019ll explain them in a minute\u2014but when you have the most powerful Internet company in the world, and one of the largest corporate lobbyists in Washington DC, protecting indicted criminals who run presidential campaigns for politicians\u2014Ron and Rand Paul\u2014which Google has given thousands of dollars to in recent years, and whose libertarian ideology Google has supported in a number of ways and venues. . . . then we\u2019re talking about potentially nightmare-scenario levels of conflicts-of-interest.\n\nPotentially\u2014that\u2019s the key here, because the real story of Google\u2019s role in this sordid crime is a bit more complicated than that, and not entirely evil, much as that might frustrate me and many of our readers. Google\u2019s problem in this case rests in its overwhelming monopoly power\u2014it\u2019s as if the Nixon Tapes were on Google\u2019s servers, along with all of our own personal recordings, and Google had a policy of generally being a pain in the ass about handing over tape recordings so as to keep consumers lured into spending all their babbling moments babbling into their tape recording product...only in this case, Google is also a major campaign donor to Nixon and his political agenda. It\u2019s very problematic, and I\u2019ll save a deeper discussion of Google\u2019s conflicts in fighting government warrants for Ron and Rand Paul\u2019s indicted felons for another article...\n\nBut first, the crime. Let\u2019s start with Kent Sorenson, a mean, dumb, thumb-headed prairie bumpkin who so far stands as the only person convicted of a series of felonies involving the Ron Paul 2012 campaign, after Sorenson pled guilty last year to crimes\u2014including filing falsified federal election reports, and obstruction of justice, crimes that could carry a maximum sentence of 25 years behind bars.\n\nSorenson was, until recently, Iowa state Senator Sorenson, Iowa\u2019s leading firebreathing Tea Party radical who vowed to \u201cburn down\u201d Des Moines when he won his seat in the state\u2019s upper chamber in 2010. Sorenson talked the God-talk, bashed gays, the poor, drug users, and immigrants, which made him a darling among Tea Party libertarians like Ron Paul, who personally endorsed Sorsenson\u2019s run for state senate in 2010.\n\nAmong the bills Sorenson pushed\u2014a state Constitutional amendment banning same-sex civil marriages; a \u201cbirther\u201d law aimed at Obama, requiring presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates; a law forcing indigent welfare recipients to submit to random drug tests\u2014and denial of benefits if they failed the tests.\n\nNaturally, it was later discovered\u2014after he was elected\u2014 that Sorenson had been busted in 1992 delivering a baggie of weed and taking $30 cash from a drug informant, for which the Tea Party firebrand was convicted of an aggravated misdemeanor and sentenced to six months in county jail. He was 20 years old; he served five days. When the story came out in 2011, he blamed another guy and claimed to have mended his ways. But it was also discovered that he\u2019d welched on his child support payments, had his wages garnished, was penalized again for failing again, was charged but cleared of domestic violence, and had declared bankruptcy on his mortgage and student loans debts, which he blamed on usurious interest rates. In other words, a typical mean dumb white lowlife.\n\nLast year, after Sorenson was first convicted of taking bribe money from Ron Paul and lying about it, he was subjected to mandatory drug tests of the sort he voted to impose on Iowa\u2019s poorest residents\u2014and yes, Sorenson failed his own drug tests \u2014 not once, but three times.\n\nAnd just last month, police arrested Sorenson again for allegedly beating his wife.\n\nBut in our official narrative, as far as all the media harrumphers and pundits were concerned, Sorenson was a serious Tea Party evangelical, driven by conservative principles, no matter how much those principles might ruffle mainstream two-party Establishment feathers, by gum!\u2014just like Ron Paul. In early 2011, Sorenson\u2019s endorsement was something taken seriously, as a matter of weighty Tea Party principle\u2014and he threw in early for Michele Bachmann. As it turns out, he endorsed her, and became her Iowa campaign co-chairman, on a more familiar principle: Payment in kind. In secret and in violation of Iowa Senate ethics (and federal laws, once those bribes became falsified reports), the Bachmann campaign paid Sen. Sorenson nearly $8,000 per month in a clunky scheme in which Bachmann funds went through a couple of dummy companies and into Sorenson\u2019s pocket.\n\nThis is how politics works, folks; it\u2019s not what they teach you in middle school civics classes, but journalists should\u2019ve gotten over that little shocker by now.\n\nIn public, Sorenson said his endorsement of Michele Bachmann was all on account of shared deep Christian libertarian principles. Meanwhile, towards the end of 2011, as the Iowa caucuses were drawing near, Ron Paul\u2019s grandson-by-marriage, Jesse Benton, and his fellow staffers, having learned Sorenson was for sale (apparently everyone but the media knew it), opened negotiations to buy Sen. Sorenson\u2019s support by outbidding Bachmann. It helped that Ron Paul was raising money hand over fist compared to Bachmann, thanks to all the Silicon Valley and extraction industry billionaires who love Paul\u2019s vision of government without taxation or regulation or welfare or help of any kind for anyone or anything, but their private property, which is always in need of armed protection...\n\nAccording to a recently unsealed indictment, in late October 2011, Benton \u2014 who also led his uncle Rand Paul\u2019s SuperPAC until just recently, in case I haven\u2019t made this family point clear enough \u2014 sent an email to Sorenson and Sorenson\u2019s top aide offering to take over paying Sorenson\u2019s $8,000\/month bribes in return for Sorenson switching his allegiance from Bachmann to Dr. Paul. Both Sorenson and Dr. Paul\u2019s people agreed to delay Sorenson\u2019s switch until after a meeting of Iowa Republicans, where he\u2019d strengthen his own position within the party, on the eve of the big caucasus, as a principled Tea Party Christian libertarian.\n\nThen from mid-November 2011 until late December, a Ron Paul operative, Dimitrios Kesari, made numerous calls to Sorenson to negotiate and lobby for the bribe-and-switch deal. A few days before the switch, around Christmas 2011, Sorenson agreed with Ron Paul\u2019s campaign heads to write up a press release in-advance explaining how his Tea Party principles moved him to abandon Bachmann for Ron Paul. Sen. Sorenson then sent his draft statement to the Ron Paul 2012 campaign chiefs for editing\u2014his granddaughter's husband Jesse Benton, his family operative Kesari, and John Tate, the head of a Ron\/Rand Paul libertarian organization called Campaign For Liberty, who also served as an officer in Rand Paul\u2019s SuperPAC. And in case Sorenson double-crossed Ron Paul over his planned double-cross of Michelle Bachmann, Dr. Paul\u2019s campaign chiefs had readied a plan to smear Sorenson and ruin his life by leaking select emails of their payoff negotiations.\n\nSorenson agreed to switch to Ron Paul in exchange for being put on an $8,000 a month under-the-table salary, plus a $100,000 payoff to Sorenson\u2019s personal PAC. Being a thumb-head, Sorenson demanded a $25,000 check, and Dr. Paul\u2019s operative, Kesari, agreed, handing him a check in the name of Kesari\u2019s wife\u2019s jewelry company at an Iowa diner. But as soon as Sorenson got that big fat $25,000 check, he wasn\u2019t sure what he should do with it. So he just held onto it, figuring it would be useful later (and it was useful\u2014to federal prosecutors). Two days after getting the $25,000 check, on December 28, 2011, Sorenson appeared at an early afternoon rally for Bachmann at Pizza Ranch, still playing the role of her campaign\u2019s co-chairman\u2014but he kept silent throughout the Bachmann rally, claiming he couldn\u2019t speak because he\u2019d just had dental work done and his mouth was so numb \u201che was afraid he would drool on himself,\u201d according to the Des Moines Register.\n\nAfter the Pizza Ranch rally for Bachmann, Sen. Sorenson skulked away in his car, and showed up to a Ron Paul 2012 rally (\u201cSorenson said he drove to Paul\u2019s event, called a Paul staffer and asked: \u2018Do you guys want me on board?\u2019\u201d\u2014reported the Des Moines Register) and jumped on the stage in a fake-spontaneous Tea Party moment of libertarian passion, announcing that his conscience had compelled him, at the spur of the moment, to switch allegiance to the Ron Paul rEVOLution!\n\nSen. Sorenson sent the 500 Ron Paul dupes into a placard-waving frenzy, telling them,\n\n\u201cWe have a choice where we can elect more of the same \u2026 or we can elect someone who\u2019s going to transform this country to get it back to what our founding fathers wanted, and I believe that\u2019s Ron Paul.\u201d\n\nBenton gave statements to the press full of high-minded civics class gravitas:\n\nCongressman Paul is delighted to accept the endorsement of Senator Kent Sorenson, whose blessing and assistance carry a great deal weight in Iowa. The fact that he doesn\u2019t take this decision lightly tells a great deal about the senator and Ron Paul.\n\nIndeed. And if that wasn\u2019t sick farce enough, the Paul campaign released a giant \u201cspontaneous\u201d statement from Sen. Sorenson\u2014heavily edited by Ron Paul\u2019s campaign chiefs and relatives\u2014full of high-minded anti-establishment libertarian blather, air-quotes and all. Here are a few choice quotes::\n\nSince my election, I\u2019ve learned that doing the right thing isn\u2019t always easy. It\u2019s easy to see why so many legislators \u201csell out\u201d once elected. The pressure to do so is immense. But what America needs now is a President who will not just \u201cgo along to get along.\u201d Instead, we must send someone who puts doing what is right above all else to the White House. That candidate is Ron Paul. If you are as frustrated as I am with what's been done by the ruling class, I urge you to join me in supporting Dr. Paul. We can send the national big government political establishment a message they will never forget by voting for Ron Paul for President in the January 3 Iowa Caucuses.\n\nSorenson\u2019s betrayal was meant to land as a punch to the gut, to shock and awe Bachmann into total submission, losing her co-chair like that. What the Ron Paul hicks didn\u2019t expect was that Bachmann \u2014 a prairie hick of a different subspecies of mean-and-dumb, the kind of prairie hick that self-destructs unless under constant 24\/7 watch from a slick political minder \u2014 would expose the whole scam. Bachmann went straight to the press and spilled the beans, that Sorenson had been bribed by Ron Paul\u2019s campaign, and that Sorenson had even told her that they were going to bribe him. Which was true\u2014Sorenson had been bargaining with her, trying to leverage the Paul campaign\u2019s offer to squeeze a better counter-offer bribe out of Bachmann.\n\nImmediately after Bachmann\u2019s suicidal statement, her top aides ran to the media and said no-no-no-, you know how crazy Michele is, cuckoo! cuckoo!... nothing of the sort was going on, we\u2019re all honorable people here, Ron Paul\u2019s family member included. Because, obviously, there was the fear that if anyone decided to look into the allegations, they\u2019d find that Bachmann\u2019s campaign was guilty of the same crime.\n\nAnd according to last year\u2019s subpoena, the FBI wants access not only to Ron Paul\u2019s and his campaign staffers\u2019 emails, but to Bachmann\u2019s and her staffers too.\n\n* * * *\n\nBachmann\u2019s statement about Paul\u2019s bribes caused a brief controversy among the media, which didn\u2019t want to believe such a thing could happen in America, and especially not from the campaign of that real-life 21st C Jimmy Stewart\u2014albeit a hick-fascist Confederate Jimmy Stewart, but earnest and \u201cauthentic\u201d all the same, according to the rubes in the media, pushing Paul as the perennial anti-establishment hero. Among the conspirators, however, it caused a real panic, and a brief change of plans.\n\nThe next day, December 29, Benton & team had Sen. Sorenson issue a defiant statement that basically said, \u201cYou think I get paid for my principles? Wait till you see the FEC filings, then you\u2019ll see that Bachmann is a liar and no one\u2019s paying me anything, by gum!\u201d And then Sorenson and the Paul capos proceeded to forge their FEC filings to funnel their payments to Sorenson through a pair of dummy front companies. Not exactly the sharpest conmen, but brains aren\u2019t much of a requirement for success as a con artist. An empty conscience, some cunning, and the stupid sense that you and your testicles are smarter than everyone else\u2014those are much more important qualities.\n\nAnd then in January 2012, the payments started rolling: Sen. Sorenson filed an invoice for $33,000 from his dummy company, Grassroots Strategy, to a Ron Paul company called ICT Inc; then the Ron Paul people behind ICT filed an invoice for $38,125 from ICT Inc to the Ron Paul 2012 committee, and that way passed through their first payment. That was in January 2012, while the rubes in the libertarian movement and their fanboys in the progressive media were having high-minded debates about Ron Paul\u2019s principles. More followed throughout that year, ending in June, totaling nearly $80,000. The last payment, for $8,850, elicited an annoyed response from John Tate\u2014who until his recent indictment was president of Rand Paul\u2019s main SuperPAC, America\u2019s Liberty.\n\nWhen Sen. Sorenson\u2019s last invoice came, Tate emailed Ron Paul operative Kesari:\n\nWhat is this? What is it for, who is it? Why do we keep paying them? The last payment was supposedly the last.\n\nKesari responded with two short emails:\n\nThis is the last payment for kent Sorenson [sic]. The deal jesse [Benton] agreed to with kent. Is [sic] was for 6 months\n\nBy this point, Ron Paul\u2019s people got even lazier and just expensed the last payoffs as \u201cAUDIO\/VISUAL EXPENSES\u201d in their FEC filings.\n\nAnd all this time, for some inexplicable reason, Sorenson clung to that uncashed $25,000 check the way that zombie in Romero\u2019s Dawn of the Dead clung to that pistol as he shuffled around the shopping mall, dimly aware in some twitchy reptilian-zombie way, that the check could be useful.\n\nCUT TO: September, 2013. One of Sorenson\u2019s true-believer Christian aides couldn\u2019t stomach the sleaze, spilled the beans and incriminating emails, and landed Sorenson in an ethics committee investigation that he couldn\u2019t crawl out of. At this point, former Ron-now-Rand Paul operative Kesari jetted to neighboring flat state Nebraska so as to not look suspicious, and gunned it straight to Iowa to get that motherfucking $25,000 check from Sorenson that the lughead never cashed.\n\nAccording to a federal indictment,\n\nKesari [the Paul operative] flew to Omaha, Nebraska, backtracked to Senator Sorenson\u2019s home in Iowa, required that he and Senator Sorenson show each other that neither was wearing a recording device, and then asked that Senator Sorenson either return to Kesari or alter the $25,000 check that Kesari previously gave to Senator Sorenson...which Senator Sorenson refused to do.\n\nOne thing Sen. Sorenson had some experience with was ratting out others. He ratted out the pot dealer he got busted with and got his sentence reduced to five days and probation, and later, in office, voted to turn up the heat in the War On Drugs (funny how this didn\u2019t bother Ron Paul\u2019s principled people); and last year, after FBI agents raided Sorenson\u2019s home and took his and his family\u2019s computers, Sorenson copped a plea. Now the feds have the very top people in both Ron and Rand Paul\u2019s campaigns for president going back to 2007, campaigns heavily underwritten by Silicon Valley billionaires and true believers...\n\nThis past week has been an active one in the government\u2019s case against Jesse Benton, John Tate and Dimitrios Kesari\u2014the Southern Iowa District Court ruled that they were such a risk for leaking confidential documents that they could only view government evidence on CDs stored in their lawyers\u2019 offices.\n\nOn Thursday of this week, Jesse Benton and John Tate appeared before the court and pled not guilty on a number counts that mirror the Watergate charges 40 years ago: conspiracy to \u201cknowingly defraud the United States\u201d; \u201cknowingly and willfully falsify, conceal and cover up by a trick, scheme and device a material fact in a matter within the jurisdiction of the executive branch\u201d; \u201cknowingly cause the concealing, covering up, falsification...with the intent to impede obstruct, and influence the investigation...\u201d and so on.\n\nMeanwhile, the Court just sided with Google that it still wasn\u2019t required to comply with the FBI warrant just yet and allow access to all the Gmail accounts that the feds demanded last year. As Google was careful to point out in its filings, the company has made sure to preserve and protect all email communications from those listed on the warrant \u2014 including presumably Ron Paul\u2019s emails \u2014 to prevent anyone from trying to scrub or alter them. So Google is essentially complying, and they\u2019re going to eventually hand them over, in all likelihood, and it will be some very incriminating material that could drive a barbed stake in the heart of libertarianism\u2019s First Family...\n\nThe funny thing is that real libertarians don\u2019t even necessarily believe that bribery and fraud are legitimate crimes, if carried out in self-interest. For the most part, even mainstream libertarians from the CATO Institute argue that bribery should be legal.\n\nAnd yet\u2014because libertarians have paradoxically transformed in recent years into the most sanctimonious loud-mouthed whiners in the political arena, this is one of those ugly, sleazy, low-rent corruption scandals, going all the way into the Paul family gene pool, that won\u2019t sit well with the young, credulous males who give the libertarian cult its energy.\n\nMost of all, however, this story finally answers the question that all the hundreds of quasi-grizzled, quasi-cynical campaign trail journalists failed to answer: What happened to Rand Paul\u2019s presidential campaign, the most hyped-up, promoted candidacy of anyone\u2019s over the past two years? The liberal media has been drooling over Rand Paul like he\u2019s the second coming, the Confederate with the heart of gold that all middle-class liberals dream of. I heard a lot of suckers claim that the Koch brothers had suddenly decided, after all these years of supporting their pet Pauls, that Rand was not to their liking, too much of a lightweight, or something like that. Because you know the Kochs only go with Very Serious Gravitas-y Heavyweights\u2014the Herman Cains, Michele Bachmanns, Scott Walkers\u2026\n\nI\u2019ve learned since coming back here that American political journalists mistake their sneering for cynicism. Cynicism is what you learn in a place like Russia, which isn\u2019t as far from the US as one would think (or hope). It never crosses a smug sneery journalist\u2019s mind that the politics they\u2019re reporting on is as corrupt as a tinpot dictator\u2019s, that all the cant about principles is capital to be cashed, and cash it they do. Because politics is about dividing up trillions of dollars in wealth and power and privilege, not about high-minded debates in three-pointed hats.\n\nThose campaign donations that all the boring, unreadable nonprofit watchdog sites report on\u2014that\u2019s the dull accounting stuff for public consumption. The real game is the payoff\u2014the check cashed, the dummy company that gets the wire transfer. First you have to be willing to see that it\u2019s there."}
{"text":"Futsal: it might look like a simple game, but playing it well is far from easy. It takes a level of technical and tactical understanding that can take years to develop.\n\nLuckily, there are those out there who already have this knowledge and are generous enough to share it. The following 25 tips for futsal have been put together by elite level futsal players and coaches (credits below), with decades of combined experience in the game.\n\nThey\u2019ve distilled down the complexity of the game into simple technical and tactical rules: 25 maxims that you can bank on making you a better player, and improving your team. Learn them, live them, love them.\n\nAttacking Futsal Tactics\n\nOpen the court, wingers should play hugging the sidelines to provide maximum width\n\nThe 3 second rule: players must be on the move all the time when they don\u2019t have the ball. When your team is attacking you should never stay in the same place without the ball for more than 3 seconds. In a game of 40 minutes you play for 4 minutes with the ball and 36 without it. To find space, occupy the space left free by a teammate. The player with the ball moves closer to the defender (to be able to go past him and force him to turn around), the players without the ball move away from their defenders (to create space and passing options). Help the player who has the ball. Sometimes this means getting closer; other times you need to move away. The aim, every time, is to create a clear passing line between you and your teammates. Never lose sight of the ball nor the eyes of the teammate who has it \u2013 sometimes it doesn\u2019t matter if you move if your teammate has not even seen you. Pass and run \u2013 like the old motto: \u2018pass and move\u2019, but with an emphasis on the urgency of your movement. Be generous with your passing. The game is won by the TEAM who scores more goals; not the player who scores more goals. Separate where you look from where you pass. Do not make obvious passes. Use the element of disguise. Futsal is a sport for \u201cliars\u201d. Good players make it more difficult for the opposition to read them by performing feints when they\u2019re passing, and checking away from their markers before moving in the other direction and losing their marker. (See an example of Sean Garnier do it in his tips for futsal \u2013 see tip 2 on his list). Passes must be strong but not carelessly violent. A firm pass doesn\u2019t give defenders any unnecessary time to intercept it, or to close the space on the player receiving it. Be careful with passes from one wing to another when playing close to your own goal, near the \u201cD\u201d. If they\u2019re intercepted they\u2019ll lead to an easy chance for the opposition.\n\nThe rule of 5 passes. Patience is often needed in futsal. Where the opponents are set-up behind the ball in a defensive position, expect to pass the ball at least 5 times before shooting to disorganise them. The goalkeeper must know how to deal with the tempo of the game. When their team is losing, goalkeepers should play as quick as possible, but in a winning position they should take their time with the restarts and their throws. The backman or \u201cfix\u201d (or any player for that matter) never dribbles if he is the last man, because if he loses the ball it will be a 1 v 1 against the goalkeeper. Finish the play with a strong shot to avoid a counterattack. A weakly struck shot ends up in the goalkeepers arms and can quickly put the opponents on the front foot.\n\nDefending Futsal Tactics\n\nAggressiveness: a ball is never given up; fight for every single one. Defending is more about attitude than technique. Players have to want to steal the ball with everything they\u2019ve got and try to be the best defender in the team. Strength in the tackle. Tackle the ball like you mean it but not violently. Do not allow the player with the ball to think. Continuously annoy \/ disrupt the opponent but without trying to steal the ball, unless they lose control of it. Never lose sight of the ball or the eyes of the player who has it. Exactly the same tip as no.6, but equally crucial in defense. The wing (sideline) is one more defender. Direct the opposition player with the ball towards it. There is no rest when defending and no player should adopt an upright position \/ stance, as the opposition will exploit the tiniest mistake to score.\n\nAll players must defend behind the ball. When you haven\u2019t got the ball all players get back to defend, and all of them should be behind the ball, making it difficult for the opposition to break you down. Never cross over in defence. Talk to each other and change the players being marked. There should be constant communication between defenders\n\nThe above list has been reproduced (with small amendments) from \u201cFUTSAL: Technical & Tactical Concepts\u201d by Dr. Daniel Berdejo-del-Fresno, Jonathan Steel and David Jennings. This has been done with the permission of Dr. Daniel Berdejo-del-Fresno, who, among a host of achievements, is Sports Scientist \/ Strength & Conditioning Coach for the England National Futsal Team and has plenty of experience with elite level futsal players. Daniel has generously made his book available free for download on his blog: http:\/\/danielberdejodelfresno.blogspot.co.uk\/2015\/06\/book-released-futsal-technical-tactical.html It contains lots of futsal tips, techniques and tactics \u2013 definitely worth downloading a copy.\n\nMore tips and tactics for futsal\n\nIf you\u2019re just starting out on your futsal journey, and you\u2019re craving more tips. Check out our top 10 tips for futsal beginners. Full of very practical tips, it is a useful crib sheet for anyone new to the game.\n\nShare this: Tweet\n\nEmail"}
{"text":"Android OS version: 8.1.0_r7\n\n8.1.0_r7 For devices: Kenzo\n\nKenzo Authors build: xyyx\n\nxyyx Source code: https:\/\/github.com\/nitrogen-project | https:\/\/github.com\/nitrogen-os-devices\n\nhttps:\/\/github.com\/nitrogen-project | https:\/\/github.com\/nitrogen-os-devices Developers: xyyx\n\nxyyx Thanks: billchen1977 for brilliant work on Kenzo, ezio84, beanstown106, maxwen and etc.\n\nbillchen1977 for brilliant work on Kenzo, ezio84, beanstown106, maxwen and etc. Google Apps: opengapps.org\n\nopengapps.org Recovery: TWRP\n\nAttention:\n\nI don't force you to use my ROM. I fix bugs that doesn't require many commits from CAF.\n\nIf you don't like something, please, use another ROM and don't write in this thread. Please.\n\nSELinux in permissive mode. It is ready for enforcing. But I like no denies.\n\nGo to your recovery\n\nWipe Data\n\nInstall ROM and Gapps zip.\n\nReboot - 1st boot takes around 5-10 minutes.\n\nCode: Status Bar: - Network traffic; - Bluetooth device battery level in status bar; - Adjust brightness by sliding across the status bar; - Input method selector notification. Quick Settings: - Number of rows and columns; - Quick pulldown; - No QS on secured lockscreen; - Brightness slider; - Smart pulldown; - Show\/hide adaptive brightness icon in QS; - LTE enable\/disable tile. - Hiding tile's caption Buttons: For devices with hardware buttons - Enable\/disable buttons; - Adjust brightness; - Keys brightness timeout; - Reassignment hardware buttons action; - Volume rocker wake; - Playback control by volume keys; - Allow volume keys to enable\/disable \u201cDo Not Disturb\u201d mode. Navigation Bar: - 3 type navigation bar mode: Smartbar (as usual in android) and Fling (navbar from \u201cDirty Unicorns\u201d rom), AOSP Navbar; - Pulse settings in Fling navbar; - Navbar height control in portrait and landscape orientations; - Context buttons layout position; - Context buttons transparency; - Button touch animation; - Cursor arrows in navbar while typing; - Force show\/hide navbar on the bottom side when device is rotated; Gestures: - Open camera by double tap the power button; - Double tap on lockscreen to put the device to sleep; - Double tap status bar to put the device to sleep; Lock Screen: - Lock screen shortcuts; - Show\/hide weather on lock screen; - Longpress power button with lock screen turn on torch; Power Menu: - Customizing power menu; - Enable\/disable power menu on secure lock screen. Recents apps: - Exclude apps from the recents panel; - Select recents view. - Clear all button positions Miscellaneous: - Screenshot type \u2013 fullscreen screenshots or selected area as a screenshots; - Enable MTP instead charging after connect to PC; - Wakelock blocker; - Alarm blocker - App ops; - Wake up device if charger is plugged\/unplugged; - Allow signature spoofing (microG). Other: - Quick unlock - Enable\/disable dashboard suggestions, conditions;\n\nPal\n\nKnown Bugs:\n\nXDA:DevDB Information\n\nNitrogen OS, ROM for the Xiaomi Note 3 Pro Standart\/Prime\n\nXDA:DevDB Information\n\n[ROM] \u25ba [8.1.0] \u25ba [OTA] \u25ba Nitrogen OS Beta, ROM for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3\n\nContributors\n\nVersion Information\n\nBased on AOSP xyyx (Max) - main developerCopy the ROM and Gapps in SD card.EnjoyStable builds HERE Testing versions HERE Mirror for SF - HERE If you like my ROM, you can support me.xyyx:- sim detection after boot (random)- VOLTE video call- hidden wifi (need to turn off and on display after adding)8.x OreoLinux 3.10.xAOSP, CM, Pure, DU, OmniROMTesting2017-01-112018-03-04"}
{"text":"Labour\u2019s Shadow Home Secretary has rejected suggestions that UK-Israeli relations would suffer if party leader Ed Miliband becomes prime minister in May. She dismissed such claims a bid to \u201cplay party politics\u201d with foreign affairs.\n\nYvette Cooper\u2019s comments were issued in an exclusive interview with the Jewish Chronicle in response to remarks made by Conservative Northern Irish Secretary Theresa Villiers.\n\nVilliers had claimed in January a newly-elected Labour government would have a \u201cchilling\u201d effect on Britain\u2019s relationship with Israel.\n\nCooper said the suggestion that Britain\u2019s role as a key ally of Israel would be diminished if Labour wins May\u2019s general election is \u201cutter nonsense.\u201d\n\n\"It's nonsense to say Labour is anti-Israel\", says @YvetteCooperMP. Relationship w\/Jewish community \u201cstrong as ever\u201d http:\/\/t.co\/rPe19KKNAy \u2014 Marcus Dysch (@MarcusDysch) February 12, 2015\n\nShe said Villiers\u2019 bid to play political football with foreign policy issues was \u201cdisappointing.\u201d\n\nCooper acknowledged, however, Miliband\u2019s condemnation of PM David Cameron\u2019s response to the 2014 Gaza conflict was scathing. At the height of the conflict, Miliband had described Israel's military offensive in Gaza as\u201cunacceptable and unjustifiable.\u201d\n\nThe Labour chief had also criticized Cameron\u2019s stance on Israel\u2019s actions, accusing the Tory leader of being too ambivalent on the military campaign.\n\nBoycott Divestment & Sanctions: \u2018Tactic not principle\u2019\n\nWhile some backbench Labour MPs have signaled support for Britain\u2019s boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel, the campaign has not been endorsed by Miliband or Cooper.\n\nThe British arm of the movement is backed by academics, pro-Palestinian campaigners, and politicians across the UK.\n\nREAD MORE:UK MP says Bradford doesn\u2019t want Israeli goods, services or visitors\n\nThe BDS campaign, which is supported worldwide, says it seeks to \u201cstrengthen and spread the culture of boycott as a central form of civil resistance to Israeli occupation, colonialism and apartheid.\u201d\n\nLaunched in the Occupied Territories in 2005, it is supported by over 170 Palestinian organizations representing exiled Palestinian refugees, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and Palestinian\u2019s who suffer discrimination in Israel.\n\nSpeaking to the Jewish Chronicle, Cooper said Miliband has made his position on boycotts against Israel clear.\n\n\u201cEd does defend Israel, but that\u2019s not to say he will support every decision the Israeli government takes. No one could expect that,\u201d she added.\n\nWhile addressing the UN in October 2014, world renowned linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky was somewhat critical about the BDS campaign. He argued it is characterized by a set of tactics rather than principles.\n\n\u201cTactics are not principles. They\u2019re not actions that you undertake no matter what because you think they\u2019re right,\u201d he said.\n\nDecline in neighborhood policing\n\nAs part of her role in government, Cooper has worked closely with Jewish groups in an effort to tackle racism and hate crimes in the UK.\n\nAmid a rising climate of anti-Semitism in Britain, the Shadow Home Secretary said government cuts had led to drop in \u201ccommunity-led policing.\u201d Cooper said the decline of a neighborhood police presence in Britain is problematic.\n\n\u201cYou need that community-led policing work because people have a right to feel safe on their streets and in their homes,\u201d she added.\n\nA poll conducted in late January indicates Israeli foreign policy has not impacted on the majority of Britons\u2019 resolve that Israel has a right to exist.\n\nGreat that PM says antisemitism goes against what UK stands for. Wish politicians would say that for all racism http:\/\/t.co\/S7WSr1VlpF \u2014 rachel shabi (@rachshabi) February 9, 2015\n\nThe survey, commissioned by the UK\u2019s All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism, revealed 89 percent of Britons polled said the Middle Eastern state has a right to exist.\n\nThe survey suggested Britain\u2019s current rate of anti-Semitism mirrors that of 2005, hitting 4.6 on a scale of one to 10. According to the scale, one indicates anti-Semitism is \u201cnot a problem\u201d in the UK, while 10 indicates it is \u201ca serious problem.\u201d\n\nIn the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, members of the Jewish community in North London\u2019s Stoke Newington told the Shadow Home Secretary they were concerned.\n\nCooper said high-profile terror attacks and anti-Semitic abuse on the street and on social media platforms can seriously impact people\u2019s day-to-day lives.\n\n\u201cWe should never ignore that. We have to take it seriously and provide that reassurance for people,\u201d she said.\n\nThe Shadow Home Secretary insisted a newly-elected Labour government would implement measures to counter extremism and the rise of radicalization in Britain. She added a reformed strategy for tackling hate crime in Britain is paramount.\n\nCooper condemned social media firms for failing to intercept online anti-Semitic abuse, stressing how Labour's Lucia Berger MP was exposed to offensive vitriol from an online troll in 2014."}
{"text":"Dubai startup BitOasis announces its first round of funding\n\nDubai based bitcoin startup BitOasis has secured a new investment of seed funding for an undisclosed amount led by Wamda Capital.\n\nBitOasis provides bitcoin exchange, wallet, and cross-border payment services in and around the UAE.\n\nAccording to Wamda Capital, the seed funding round included Barry Silbert\u2019s Digital Currency Group (DCG), Samih Toukan, the serial tech entrepreneur chairman of Jabbar Group, as well as Payfort and other tech angel investors based in New York and Dubai.\n\n\u201cOur aim since launch is to build the largest digital currency exchange and payments infrastructure platform in the Middle East and North Africa,\u201d said Ola Doudin, CEO and cofounder of BitOasis.\n\nWithin the next year using the new venture capital, the bitcoin startup plans to grow its team further and expand to other Arab countries around the region to strengthen its presence outside the UAE.\n\nOne of the main advantages that BitOasis has over other startups in the space is at this time it\u2019s the only bitcoin business focused on the Middle East."}
{"text":"Get answers from your peers along with millions of IT pros who visit Spiceworks.\n\nHere are some stories we\u2019ve found across the internet from tech support folks we\u2019d love to share.\n\nEach of them is full of fun and drama.\n\n1. Making users liars since 1975\n\nOnce, I had a user come in\u2026\n\nUser: My MacBook air is really slow.\n\nMe (while opening up terminal and running uptime): Hmm, when was the last time you rebooted?\n\nUser: Oh, a few days ago.\n\nMe: According to your compute, it\u2019s been up for 41 days.\n\nUser: It\u2019s lying.\n\nShe also had 5 Chrome Windows with at least 20 tabs apiece, Spotify, Photoshop, Word, AND Excel.\n\n2. Now you see me, now you don\u2019t.\n\nCustomer: Do I have to watch my computer screen to use your app?\n\nMe: It\u2019s considered a best practice. Otherwise you can\u2019t see what people are saying.\n\nCustomer: I see\u2026\n\n3. Cat and mouse\n\nMe: Good afternoon, this is Ari. How can I help you?\n\nLady: My son\u2019s computer is just pissing me off. He is traveling with his new wife. Can you help me?\n\nMe: Sure. Have you started the computer?\n\nLady: Oh yeah.\n\nMe: I will need to see the configuration. Can you do a left click on the Start button bottom left of your screen with the mouse?\n\nLady: That arrow thing is acting like a son of a bitch, not moving. The right clicks seems to show me some shit.\n\nMe: Could you please lift the mouse and check that the ball is moving freely and there is no dirt?\n\nLady: Ah\u2026 uh\u2026 Now I know where that bloody ball came from. My cat\u2019s been playing with it since yesterday\u2026\n\n4. P as in Peter\n\nMe: Sir, do you see a login screen asking for username and password?\n\nUser: Yes.\n\nMe: Type admin as username.\n\nUser: Badmi?\n\nMe: No, sir, its admin. A as in alfa, D as in delta, M as in Mike, I as in India, N as in November\u2026\n\nUser: Admin, right.\n\n(35 minutes passed. Finally, the user did it.)\n\nMe: Can you type the word password in the password field and click login?\n\nUser: Bassword. \u201cInvalid bassword.\u201d\n\nMe: Try again. Type P as in Paul.\n\nUser: B as ball?\n\nMe: No sir. It\u2019s P as in Peter or P as in parrot.\n\nUser: B as Beter?\n\nMe (trying again): P as papa.\n\nUser: B as bapa,\n\n(This next part is my favorite.)\n\nMe (losing my temper): Sir, it\u2019s not AB\u2026 it\u2019s abcdefghijklmnop. P. P!\n\nUser: Oh so it\u2019s P! Huh!! I\u2019ll try now.\n\n5. My computer is not yours\n\nMe: XYZ technical support, how may I assist you?\n\nUser: I have some difficulty in locating some files on my computer, it seems I am not able to open any files\n\nMe: Sir, could you please check whether you are able to get the Desktop screen.\n\nUser: Yes, now what?\n\nMe: Can you open My Computer?\n\nUser: How can I open your computer?\n\n6. Fix it!\n\nCustomer: Fix it!\n\nMe: Fix what, ma\u2019am?\n\nCustomer: My Internet connection. Can\u2019t you tell why I\u2019m calling?\n\nMe: No, ma\u2019am, the technology doesn\u2019t work that way.\n\n(I apologize for any inconvenience, and then check her connection. Everything is fine. I even test with ping and packet testing; again, very strong signal to the Internet.)\n\nMe: Ma\u2019am, are you using a router?\n\nCustomer: I don\u2019t know. You guys installed it all.\n\nMe: Ma\u2019am, we don\u2019t install routers. Do you know the name of the router you\u2019re using?\n\nCustomer: No.\n\nMe: We can test the modem to make sure it\u2019s working. Can you take your laptop into the room with the modem and unplug the modem from the rou\u2014\n\n(Had I finished, I would have asked her to connect the laptop to the modem directly.)\n\nCustomer: No. I couldn\u2019t possibly do that! You just need to fix it.\n\nMe: Ma\u2019am, are you suffering from an illness or injury preventing me from helping you today?\n\nCustomer: No, and I couldn\u2019t possibly be bothered with that. The modem and the laptop are on different floors. I called you to fix it. Why can\u2019t you just fix it?\n\n7. Push When Ringing\n\nMe: Thank you for calling [Cell Phone Provider]. This is [My Name]. How may I assist you today?\n\nCustomer: Yes. Every time my phone rings and I try to answer it, my phone shuts off. It happens every time.\n\nMe: Well, that is pretty odd. Let me see if I can figure out what the issue with your handset is.\n\n(After spending almost an hour trying to look up account info and diagnose what could possibly be wrong with this woman\u2019s phone with no luck, I am about to give up and replace the phone.)\n\nMe: So that I can write up in your account what exactly is happening so we can replace your phone, what button are you pushing when trying to answer the phone?\n\nCustomer: The \u201cPush When Ringing\u201d button.\n\nMe: I\u2019m sorry, which button?\n\nCustomer: \u201cPush When Ringing.\u201d You know? P-W-R.\n\nMe: I think I know the problem\u2026\n\nWhat are the funniest tech support stories you\u2019ve ever heard? Share with us."}
{"text":"Recently I was reminded of something I learned ten years ago, while studying in Beijing. It was a month ago, and I was walking into a restaurant in Chengdu, around closing time, with a group of my wife\u2019s friends. It was nearly 9pm and most of the staff were eating their shift meal or clearing tables, waiting for the last diners to finish. I asked a waiter if we could get some food and he responded apologetically that they were closing. Knowing that our dinner options were dwindling, I pleaded our case, asking that they seat us. To deflect my request the waiter said, \u2018sorry, we are out of gas\u2019. I knew it was a lie, but I did not take it personally.\n\nIt brought to mind the director of my study abroad program in Beijing, who had introduced me to what she dubbed \u201cthe social institution of the polite lie.\u201d The polite lie is a lie that a stranger tells a stranger to avoid the discomfort of being direct. She told a story of trying to catch a ride from a cab driver that was playing a game of cards on the street. \u201cI would take you,\u201d he said, but my car is out of gas. She could see that he was playing cards and did not want to leave his game. She could also see the dashboard of his car, and she pointed out that he did in fact have gas in his car. \u201cThat gauge is broken,\u201d the driver retorted without looking up from his game.\n\nThis phenomenon seemed to pop up frequently after it had been pointed out to me. On one occasion I ran into a group of friends eating at a restaurant. I sat down at a table beside them, not intending to eat. As we chatted, a waiter approached and asked what I wanted to order. \u201cI\u2019ve already eaten, but I would like some tea,\u201d I said. \u201cSorry, we are out of tea\u201d, the waiter said casually and walked away. I was stunned by the slap of the lie; I felt a mixture of confusion and insult. I see now the waiter was just too busy to serve me. I was announcing that I was not going to be a paying customer, and he was announcing that he was not going to be giving me complimentary tea.\n\nThough it seemed interesting from an anthropological perspective, the polite lie always bugged me. I love China, and this niggling social convention felt like the most disingenuous part of it.\n\nOne frustrating encounter happened last year near my apartment. A new toy store had opened at the corner, and I wandered in to peruse their wares, idly chatting with the cashier as I fondled a magnetic floating globe. \u201cSo you guys just opened,\u201d I asked. \u201cWe\u2019re open every day from morning till night,\u201d she responded. \u201cNo, I mean this location,\u201d I clarified, \u201cyou just opened this store.\u201d \u201cNo, we\u2019ve been here for a few years, you probably just didn\u2019t notice,\u201d she replied matter-of-factly. I was infuriated by her suggestion that the opening of a new toy store near my house could have gone unnoticed by me for so long. I was instantly fuming, and then instantly amused at myself for taking offense at the remark. But I still couldn\u2019t understand why this woman would want to dupe me over something so inconsequential. There had to be a functional purpose for this evasive rhetorical device.\n\nThen it suddenly dawned on me. She wasn\u2019t trying to trick me, she was trying to cover up her own unfamiliarity with the business. I knew the store had just opened \u2013 I had seen it under construction \u2013 she must have just been hired. Maybe she didn\u2019t even know the store\u2019s history. \u201cHow long have you been working here,\u201d I asked. Her face reddened, and she acknowledged that it was her first day.\n\nI brought up the polite lie with an expat friend of mine, another long-time Chengdu resident, and he mentioned that he had often encountered the polite lie with his Chinese friends, though not as its recipient. He told me:\n\nMy Chinese friends would invite me to go do something, and I would tell them, \u2018sorry, I can\u2019t, I have to watch my kids.\u2019 And that was the truth. And my Chinese friends would say \u2018Okay, okay, okay, its okay, I understand. No problem.\u2019 And I could hear in their voice that they thought I was just making up an excuse.\n\nThe Chinese friends assumed they were being told a polite lie, happy to accept it. Social pleasantries utilize coded language, and if you are attuned to detect it, the polite lie is not so much an affront, as a form of indirect communication.\n\nThere is no question that face plays a role in the perpetuation of the polite lie as a social convention. Rejecting someone outright can cause them to lose face, and a polite lie allows you to avoid that by fabricating an excuse. It is in some ways a gesture of respect, demonstrating a desire to avoid contradicting the other person. A polite lie can be a lifeline, allowing you to deflect the wrath of a social superior. In that way, I can imagine how these micro-doses of mistruth function as a kind of social lubricant, diffusing status conflicts, maintaining norms, and preventing the loss of face.\n\nSo when I was recently hit with the explanation that the restaurant was out of gas, I was neither insulted nor dissuaded. Most restaurants in China close pretty early by Western standards, and I had been welcomed and denied by wait staff in similar situations in the past. So while I knew we might not be served, I also knew that the possibility was negotiable.\n\nIf you want to overturn a polite lie, directly confronting it is not advisable, since the lie was concocted with the courteous intention to avoid confrontation. The way to diplomatically counter such a lie is to build upon the provided scenario, to give the other person an option to reverse their stance without losing face. You give them a step down (\u4e00\u4e2a\u53f0\u9636\u4e0b ) as they say in Chinese, a way to yield without embarrassment.\n\nA Chinese friend repeated the staff\u2019s message for me, \u201cThey said they are out of gas. We should go.\u201d I ignored her. \u201cMaybe you have enough gas for just few more dishes?\u201d I said to the waiter. \u201cWe have aaaaaall these people \u2013 I gestured to our group \u2013 I don\u2019t want them to be hungry.\u201d Perhaps sensing oncoming hassle, the staff relented and ushered us upstairs.\n\nAvoidance of hassle can be a key motive for the polite lie. A Dutch friend, newly arrived in Chengdu, asked me to help him find a tailor who could execute some fashions designs that he had. His ideas were pretty straightforward, and he was frustrated that every tailor he visited had told him, \u201cWe can\u2019t do that\u201d \u2013 it should have been a snap\n\nfor any experienced tailor, he reasoned. I explained to him that the reason he was being given was probably not the whole story. When the tailors told him \u201cwe can\u2019t do that,\u201d they were really saying, \u201cyou look like a big hassle, and I don\u2019t want to deal with you.\u201d They were excusing themselves from the interaction before it even began.\n\nOne of the most confounding things about the polite lie is that it is deployed when it seems unnecessary. The lies of the tailors did not even register as lies to my friend \u2013 after all, why would anyone even bother lying about something like that? Why do I even care how long a toy store has been open? I can cope with the harsh truth if you just don\u2019t feel like keeping the restaurant open for me. There is part of me that refuses to accept that casually lying to a stranger can be anything other than socially harmful. But then I catch a whiff of my own ethno-centrism.\n\nI remember a Chinese friend who refused to accept my (heartfelt) assertion that an American friend and I graphically joking about each other\u2019s mothers was anything other than disgracefully insulting. The more I joked about my American friend\u2019s mother, the angrier the Chinese friend became, and the funnier it became to me, exacerbating the situation. To me, the suggestion that my American friend could possibly be offended by such remarks was absurd. After all, I would not dare to insult the mother of anyone but my dearest friends. To me, the mother jokes were an expression of fraternity.\n\nIf I can embrace the idea of an insult as a form of endearment, I should be able to accept the possibility of a lie as a form of courtesy. Whether it boils down to the interpretation of an insult, or the interpretation of truth, context is the ultimate arbiter of meaning.\n\nI brushed up against the soul of the matter again this past weekend. I had called my water store to order three new jugs of drinking water, and typical of their recent service, an hour and a half had passed without the water being delivered. I called the water dispatch center, irate about the delay. \u201cThis happens all of the time,\u201d I said. \u201cALL-THE-TIME. Every time.\u201d I was verging on belligerent. \u201cThe delivery guy was eating lunch,\u201d the voice on the other end of the line shot back reflexively. Was he really at lunch, I wondered. It was around lunchtime. It was impossible to know. Either way, the real reason for the delay was more complicated.\n\nOne factor, I learned later, was that the dispatch center number I had been calling was no longer technically correct. The branch was still operational, but it had been supplanted by a newer, closer branch, which was now responsible for delivering to my section of the complex. The old branch was still obliged to field my call, because I had pre-purchased water coupons from them, but now I was out of their delivery zone. The slow delivery time was the result of my order being relayed from one dispatch center to the next, getting de-prioritized along the way.\n\nThe water delivery guy explained this all to me, when he finally arrived with my jugs. I could understand why the woman from the old branch would have elided over these details on the phone. It probably seemed a lot simpler to tell me that the delivery guy was eating lunch, than to explain the politics of delivery zone redistricting to an angry foreigner. The efficiency the polite lie must have been alluring \u2013 how quickly it could staunch my stream of complaints, how cleanly it could end the phone call.\n\nI am averse to social conventions that perpetuate euphemistic language, so at the end of the day, even after giving consideration to its practical function and cultural context, it is still hard for me to see the polite lie as anything other than a kind of linguistic pathogen. It dilutes communication, and it normalizes a social dynamic in which two people are not always comfortable being completely honest with one another.\n\nBut there is an important lesson that I take away from the experience. If I dislike an element of local culture, I should make sure that I dislike it for what it really is, and not what I imagine it to be. In practice, local meaning trumps the pseudo-objective perspective of outsider like myself.\n\nAmong denizens of any locale there is a shared familiarity with the contours of social discourse. Language is a map of our collective cognitive landscape, and the polite lie is just one thoroughfare of communication that we navigate to reach one another\u2019s intended meaning. I doubt that the polite lie is unique to China, but it was certainly alien to my upbringing. That makes it anathema to me, but for many others, the idea of a \u201cfriendly\u201d insult to someone\u2019s mother is no doubt equally unfathomable. If the people who traffic in the polite lie do not feel deceived, that should factor into how I view the phenomenon.\n\nThe polite lie is not evidence of moral failure, or a predisposition for deception, or a culture of untrustworthiness\u2026 it is just an anachronistic piece of social etiquette that rubs me the wrong way. A lie is a lie, except when it doesn\u2019t feel like one. A punch in the face is assault, except when it happens in a boxing ring."}
{"text":"U.S. President Barack Obama told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday that Russia's actions in Ukraine were not conducive to a diplomatic solution of the crisis in that country, and the White House warned that Moscow would suffer further costs for its behavior.\n\nObama spoke to Putin at the Russians' request, a senior administration official said, describing the call as \"frank and direct,\" a diplomatic construction that usually means tense.\n\n\"The president made clear that the diplomatic path was open and our preferred way ahead, but that Russia's actions are neither consistent with or conducive to that,\" the official said.\n\nObama told Putin that Kiev had made \"real offers\" to address concerns about the decentralization of powers to local governments in the country.\n\n\"That is a matter for Ukrainians to decide,\" the official said. \"We have always and will continue to support an inclusive process.\"\n\nEarlier, U.S. officials stopped short of announcing a new set of sanctions against Russia but said they were in consultations with European partners about the prospect.\n\nThe European Union agreed on Monday to step up sanctions against Moscow by expanding a list of people subjected to asset freezes and visa bans.\n\nKeep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait\u2026 Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close\n\n\"Russia continues to engage in provocative actions in eastern Ukraine. The mere presence of the troops, in addition to what else they've done inside Ukraine, creates a threat of destabilization within Ukraine,\" White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.\n\n\"I can assure you that Russia's provocations - further transgressions and provocations will come with a cost. And I'm not here to specify what cost will come from which specific action, but there have already been costs imposed on Russia; there will be further costs imposed on Russia.\"\n\nThe next round of U.S. sanctions, which would be the fourth imposed since the Ukraine crisis began, is likely to target Russians close to Putin as well as Russian entities, three sources familiar with the discussions said on Sunday.\n\nU.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki noted that the United States was prepared to impose sanctions on individuals and entities in the financial services, energy, metals, mining, engineering and defense sectors.\n\nThe sanctions have been the most visible sign of U.S. anger at Russia's annexation of the Crimea region in southern Ukraine last month, reflecting the deepest plunge in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War.\n\nObama spoke to French President Francois Hollande about the crisis on Monday and praised Ukraine's government for showing \"great restraint\" and working to unify the country, the White House said.\n\nCarney also confirmed that the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, had been in Kiev over the weekend and decried what he called \"false claims\" leveled at the CIA by Russian authorities.\n\n\"Senior level visits of intelligence officials are a standard means of fostering mutually beneficial security cooperation including U.S.-Russian intelligence collaboration going back to the beginnings of the post-Cold War era,\" Carney said.\n\n\"U.S. and Russian intelligence officials have met over the years. To imply that U.S. officials meeting with their counterparts (in Kiev) is anything other than in the same spirit is absurd,\" he said.\n\nAccording to media reports, Russia has urged Washington to explain what Brennan was doing in Ukraine."}
{"text":"Reading Steiner:\n\nREFERENCE-OGRAPHY\n\nPUNOGRAPHY:\n\nSo, when you go back in time in \"Life is Strange\", you technically bring anyone who died a few seconds ago back from the dead, right? What if those people'sdon't come back with them? What if they just came back as empty husks with a few base instincts, like cannibalism (the basest of all human instincts, of course)? And if souls aren't affected by time-travel, then logically, fungus isn't either, because souls and fungus are in the same biological kingdom (duh), which means that whenever you go back in time in \"Life is Strange\", fungus is able to evolve more and more until something that used to only be able to infect insects jumps to infecting mammals -- even humans. The evolution would seem so sudden to anyone without the Reading Steiner* as the fungus makes its way into food delivered to the masses and infects the human species on a global scale.So, when you go back in time in \"Life is Strange\"... what are youdoing?1. An awareness of temporal re-experience2. The ability to recognize that you have undergone a nonstandard passing of time3. Knowing that you have gone back in time, but also retaining your memory from the original timelineThe red-headed girl, Ellie, is from \"The Last of Us\" which spawned my first parody series, \"THE LEAST OF US\" (look out for spoilers).The two with the gun, Lee and Clem, are from \"The Walking Dead Game\", which I've also made cartoons for called \"THE WALK-IN DEAD\" (also spoilers).The title is a pun on the term \"temporal anomaly\", which is a disruption in the space-time continuum usually resulting from time-travel or something like that."}
{"text":"In addition to Nintendo 2DS announcement, Nintendo of America announced a $50 dollar price drop for the struggling Wii U console. We've just gotten word from Nintendo Australia will not be following suit. As of this point there are no current plans for a Wii U price drop in Australia or New Zealand.\n\nThis also follows news that Nintendo will not be bringing the Wind Waker HD Limited Edition to our shores, or the Wii U Wind Waker HD bundle.\n\nThe limited edition for Wind Waker HD was rather snazzy, featuring a Ganondorf figurine, so I find this news rather disappointing.\n\nAs for the price drop, the statement coming from Nintendo Australia didn't necessarily rule out any future price drops. I suspect we'll definitely see one, but probably not before Christmas."}
{"text":"Primus :: 6.24.14 :: The Capitol Theatre :: Port Chester, NY\n\nRead Chad\u2019s review after the photo gallery.\n\nPrimus is an acquired taste, existing in \u2013 or more like occupying \u2013 the space where art-rock, metal, funk and jamband meet to forget themselves and rage together for a few hours. That the trio is sometimes inaccessible and occasionally stunty is part of the deal: set the scene, let the casual onlookers hang out nervously around the perimeter and engage front-and-center the fans for whom this odd collection of sounds and grooves holds singular appeal.\n\nIt isn\u2019t that the setlists or jams see enormous variation or surprise, or that the expected theatrics \u2013 gnarly stage setup, titillating visuals, Les Claypool\u2019s twisted-wiseacre monologues \u2013 are all that fresh each and every time. No, what brings you back to Primus \u2013 what sells out a show like this typically galvanizing night at the Capitol Theater \u2013 is the depth of the experience.\n\nAll Les Claypool bands have layers. You start with the carnival atmosphere, commingling with those who have also come for the \u201cshow\u201d aspect. This is a place where of course there will be trippy lights, and of course there will be two 15-foot astronaut statues flanking the stage and of course vintage Popeye cartoons will be shown on the projection screen during set break, because why not?\n\nA layer below that is the aural assault: Les\u2019 filthy thump, slaps and grooves, Tim Alexander\u2019s pummeling, yet nimble drumwork, Larry LaLonde\u2019s abrasive guitar runs, stabs and snatches of melodic counterpoint. And a layer below that is the actual songcraft \u2013 a catalog of character sketches and incisive, even scathing commentary that asks nothing of the listener but to hang on a little longer before it\u2019s default-described as \u201cwacky,\u201d so often the crutch phrase used to describe Primus\u2019 eccentric approach.\n\nThe two sets at the Capitol drew from across the Primus discography, and what was most encouraging was how the best songs from 2011\u2019s Green Naughahyde \u2013 particularly the frank, let\u2019s-funk-our-way-through-the-pain \u201cJilly\u2019s On Smack\u201d and the mutant bounce of \u201cLee Van Cleef\u201d \u2013 have integrated with the expected Primus highs of tunes like \u201cJerry Was a Race Car Driver.\u201d I don\u2019t share the opinion that \u201cNaughahyde\u201d is any great leap forward for the band, but a solid collection to keep pace \u2013 if not quite on par \u2013with the Frizzle Fry era of Primus output and convince us that with all the other things occupying Claypool\u2019s creative space, returning to Primus isn\u2019t just a nostalgia trip.\n\nMaybe that\u2019s the way to think about Primus in 2014. Les turned 50 last year and proved he could leave it behind before, so that it\u2019s back and once again thriving \u2013 having not altered its fundamentals \u2013 is the reason to keep coming. There\u2019s heart behind Primus; it\u2019s not a mechanical \u201cwacky\u201d for wacky\u2019s sake. Underneath the scary-funky menagerie populating this trio\u2019s world is a band aging with grace.\n\nPrimus, 6\/24\/2014 Setlist:\n\nSet One: Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers, The Last Salmon Man, Southbound Pachyderm, Over the Falls, Lee Van Cleef, The Heckler, Wynona\u2019s Big Brown Beaver, Frizzle Fry, Groundhog\u2019s Day\n\nSet Two: Spaghetti Western, Duchess and the Proverbial Mind Spread, Moron TV, American Life, Jilly\u2019s On Smack, Mr. Krinkle, My Name Is Mud, Mrs. Blaileen, Jerry Was a Race Car Driver, Harold of the Rocks\n\nEncore: Too Many Puppies > Hello Skinny > Too Many Puppies\n\nJamBase | Primus Sucks\n\nGo See Live Music!"}
{"text":"\u201cThey love to engage in revisionist history,\u201d Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said on the floor of the U.S. Congress, Nov. 19. She was referring to Democrats as she had risen to speak in opposition to an environmental protection measure intended to safeguard a 21-mile segment of Molalla River in Oregon. As she spoke, Foxx set about some blatant revisionism of her own.\n\nFoxx\u2019s began her objection with the bizarre suggestion that the GOP had been the champion of \u201cgood\u201d environmental protection laws. Had she stopped there, her floor speech would have justifiably been dismissed as a bit of irony. Instead, Foxx went on to perpetuate the misconception that Republicans were also the champions of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, amid fervent obstruction from Democrats.\n\nUpon the completion of Foxx\u2019s remarks, she was passionately rebuked by Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-CA). \u201cI can\u2019t believe my ears,\u201d Cardoza said, and went on to assign credit for the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) to the efforts to the Democratic administration of Lyndon B. Johnson.\n\nHere is video of the exchange on the House floor from the ThinkProgress.org Nov. 19 post on the subject. (continued below the clip)\n\nWhile Cardoza\u2019s assessment was factually correct and his tone appropriate, his rebuke of Foxx would have been strengthened by informing her that the Republican Party of which she spoke no longer exists. Indeed, the Republicans whose votes were vital to passing civil rights legislation in the 1960s would be derided as RINOs \u2013 Republicans in Name Only \u2013 by Foxx and like minded, right-wing ideologues of today\u2019s GOP.\n\nThat conservatives have sought to maintain this myth is nothing new. Paul von Hipple addressed it in a 2005 Alternet.org post responding to a taxpayer funded \u201cRepublican Freedom Calendar\u201d which presented a one-sided representation of their Party\u2019s historic role as advocates of civil rights. The evidence employed to prop up this argument relies upon the higher proportion of GOP votes for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.\n\nIt\u2019s a far too narrow interpretation of history, as von Hipple indicated in his 2005 post:\n\nIn fact, Congressional votes on the Civil Rights Act did not break along party lines \u2013 they split along regional lines. In the North, both parties supported the Civil Rights Act; in the South, both parties opposed it. The difference was that the Republican Party had very little presence in the South, which had been dominated since the 1870s by the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party.\n\nThis period marks a historical turning point for both political parties. President Johnson and liberal Northern Democrats were ill prepared for the Southern white backlash that followed the passage of civil rights legislation. Of course, the legislation wasn\u2019t the only factor, but it was during this time that the Democratic Party set on a path to shedding its racist elements. In doing so, Democrats lost the political grip on the South it had held since the Great Depression.\n\nThe path chosen by the Republicans was altogether different. Interestingly, the GOP underwent a schism, not unlike the one presently in progress.\n\nRepublican conservatives, sympathetic to the racist backlash among Southern whites, made their first political inroads in the South around this time. The most significant evidence for this trend was the GOP\u2019s 1964 presidential nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.\n\nBefore Goldwater\u2019s nomination, the GOP\u2019s regional strength was based in the American North-East. Their party leaders were inclined to support government investment in infrastructure. Having been decimated during their initial struggle against Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal (which they decried as \u201csocialist,\u201d sound familiar?) a moderate GOP persisted as a minority party, seeking to improve FDR\u2019s legislation rather than rail against it.\n\nGoldwater lost to LBJ in 1964, but having won his home state and four other Southern states in the contest, the GOP\u2019s course was set. They abandoned their moderate positions \u2014 the mantle of which Foxx is presently attempting to claim \u2014 in pursuit of the racially divisive \u201cSouthern Strategy.\u201d\n\nThis political strategy was neatly summarized by Sidney Blumenthal in a 2003 Salon.com post:\n\nWith the coming of the civil rights revolution, Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson deployed the federal government to support social equality. In reaction, Republicans \u2014 from Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan \u2014 developed a Southern strategy to win over white voters in the region who felt betrayed. That strategy involved using widely understood code words going back to the Civil War like \u201cstates\u2019 rights,\u201d an updating of the well-worn strategy of Southern reactionaries to demagogue on race in order to keep poor and working-class whites divided from blacks on issues of common interest. Thus the party of Lincoln became the party of Reagan.\n\nIndeed, Reagan\u2019s ascendency is instructive. His rise was facilitated by the GOP\u2019s rejection of its moderate voices. Just as Foxx mistakenly claimed the civil rights mantle on Nov. 19, Reagan did also. Yet his true feelings were betrayed by his policies and rhetoric.\n\nFrom the above mentioned von Hibble Alternet post:\n\n\u2026Ronald Reagan, in his 1966 campaign to become governor of California, endorsed repeal of California\u2019s Fair Housing Act, saying, \u201cIf an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.\u201d\n\nSimilarly, Foxx\u2019s own statements over the past year illustrate her departure from the moderate positions of the kinder, gentler GOP of yore. She has more than made herself clear regarding the present-day civil rights issues, most notably in debates over the rights of homosexuals and health care reform.\n\nMy Care2 colleague Tracy Viselli understandably called for Foxx\u2019s apology or resignation following her slanderous comments about Matthew Sheppard on the House floor while debating the hate crime legislation that bares his name. More recently, Viselli , rightly, took issue with Foxx\u2019s declaration that the present health care reform proposals pose a bigger threat to America than \u201cany terrorist from any country.\u201d Add to this Foxx\u2019s 2006 vote, along with 33 other Republicans, opposing the extension of the Voters Rights Act, and it becomes clear that any claim of civil rights advocacy exists only in her mind.\n\nFurther, these outrageous examples of Foxx\u2019s true beliefs plainly illustrate that the North Carolina congresswoman has absolutely nothing in common with the Republicans who helped advance the cause of civil rights in the 1960s. Rather, Foxx is just another product of the cynical GOP which prospered by exploiting the societal divisions left after their passing.\n\nRelated on Care2:\n\n~ Judy Shepard: Grace in the Face of Foxx\n\nPhoto used under the Creative Commons Attribution Act; Rep. Virginia Foxx"}
{"text":"If Telstra wins the company will get between $100 million and $200 million more than what NBN Co expects to pay over a 10-year period.\n\nIt is understood the problem was caused by the lack of a specific year in the contract despite legal teams working on the deal for over two years.\n\nArguments heard by judge\n\nThe problem was discovered after the deal was signed and both sides attempted to plan the timing of the payments. Both sides have already had arguments heard by former Federal Court judge Kevin Lindgren in 2012.\n\nMr Lindgren found in favour of NBN Co in December 2012 and provided an 11-page explanation as part of the judgement. \u201cI have come to the conclusion that NBN Co is correct,\" he said. \u201cTelstra\u2019s arguments are akin to the tail wagging the dog.\"\n\nTelstra has chosen not to accept Mr Lindgren\u2019s judgement and will contest the issue in the NSW Supreme Court. A preliminary hearing is due to begin on November 8 in Sydney.\n\nTelstra spokeswoman Nicole \u00adMcKechnie said the legal proceedings and their impact would be significant but not material from a investor \u00adperspective. \u201cWe have commenced legal proceedings with NBN Co over when CPI adjustments should start to apply under the NBN Definitive Agreements,\" she said. \u201cWe have one take on the contract and NBN Co has another.\" The case has the potential to cause problems for both companies as they enter fresh negotiations over the $11.2 billion contract.\n\nTiming of lawsuit\n\nWhere Labor\u2019s $37.4 billion NBN would have replaced Telstra\u2019s \u00adcopper network, the new Coalition \u00adgovernment prefers a fibre-to-the-node approach that will use the copper connections. The Coalition government will now have to buy and use Telstra\u2019s copper network, once valued at up to $17 billion, to build its fibre-to-the-node system which is expected to be cheaper and slower than Labor\u2019s version.\n\nMs McKechnie said that resolving the issue before negotiations began would \u201chelp provide greater certainty and as such may assist future policy \u00addiscussions.\" She also insisted the re\u00adnegotiations of the contract had nothing to do with the timing of the lawsuit.\n\nTelstra\u2019s lead NBN negotiator Tony Warren last week told investors in \u00adSydney that any negotiation would need to add value to the telco\u2019s existing deal. But he also said that positive statements by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull had helped assure the company a renegotiation could be successful for both sides."}
{"text":"ANALYSIS\/OPINION:\n\nThe Senate has turned full-force toward repeal, replace, reform, what have you of Obamacare.\n\nAnd while admitting the way is tough-going, Republicans by and large say: The premiums, and their potential to shred the family finances of households across America, are core to concerns.\n\nWell, that is a core concern. But what\u2019s an even bigger concern is the fact that all these discussions signify one thing, and one overlooked thing only: The free market, on America\u2019s health care, has gone the way of the dodo bird.\n\n\u201cThe biggest most notable damage is these skyrocketing premiums,\u201d said Sen. Ron Johnson, CNN reported.\n\nNotice what he didn\u2019t say \u2014 that the biggest most notable damage from Obamacare is the fact that it set the government securely in place in America\u2019s health care system.\n\nBut even on that \u2014 the skyrocketing premiums front \u2014 the Senate seems a bit flummoxed about what to do,\n\nLook at these quotes, the first, from Johnson, as CNN noted: \u201cI\u2019m still on the kind of 30,000 foot-level in terms of what are the primary goals of our efforts here.\u201d\n\nAnd this, from Sen. John Cornyn: \u201cWe haven\u2019t made any decisions. We\u2019re just batting around ideas.\u201d\n\nAnd this, from Sen. Ted Cruz: \u201cThis is not going to be easy.\u201d\n\nThese are not comforting statements \u2014 hardly the sort of rhetoric Americans who voted based on a hatred of Obamacare would like to hear.\n\nIn early May, Cornyn told reporters that the Senate was going to be \u201cgoing through the issues methodically,\u201d scrutinizing funding for Medicaid and trying to cut costs while lowering premiums. But part and parcel of all the discussion is this underlying truth: the reform-repeal-replace campaign still allows for government-run healthcare.\n\nAnd that right there is the elephant in the room. So long as the government takes the lead on deciding Americans\u2019 health insurance plans, it\u2019s Americans who are out of luck. It\u2019s the Constitution that\u2019ll stand corrupted, the free market that\u2019ll feel the pinch \u2014 the individual who\u2019ll lose the freedom.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission."}
{"text":"Could a Dutch Volunteer Be Charged with Murder for Killing Islamic State Militants?\n\nWhen a Dutch man decided to join Kurdish forces in Syria to help them beat back the Islamic State, he probably thought he would return to the Netherlands to a hero\u2019s welcome.\n\nTurns out he returned to murder charges instead.\n\nDutch prosecutors believe the 47-year-old, whose name has not been released due to the country\u2019s strict privacy laws, killed Islamic State militants in Syria. Although he is a former Dutch soldier, he reportedly traveled there without any instruction from the military. If he did in fact kill Islamic State militants, that could earn him prison time in the Netherlands.\n\nHe appeared before an investigating judge in the city of Rotterdam on Friday, but was released after agreeing to turn over his passport, which the judge said would ensure he did not travel back to Syria.\n\nStill, the possibility of a full-fledged criminal trial is very real. Prosecutors said Friday there is \u201can important difference between Dutch nationals who travel to Syria on their own to fight against IS and Dutch soldiers who train Iraqi and Kurdish forces.\u201d\n\nThe Netherlands has backed a campaign against the Islamic State, and even sends Dutch soldiers to train Kurdish forces. But the country does not encourage Dutch nationals to join the Kurds on their own. Still, some 100 Westerners are thought to have joined them in Iraq and Syria in the past two years. In 2015, at least one Canadian and one Briton were killed in battle.\n\nBut whoever this 47-year-old is, he\u2019s not the only Dutch committed to backing up the Kurds. In October 2014, members of No Surrender, a Dutch biker gang, announced gang members had traveled to Mosul to fight the Islamic State.\n\nAt the time, Dutch public prosecutor spokesman Wim de Bruin defended the bikers.\n\n\u201cJoining a foreign armed force was previously punishable; now it\u2019s no longer forbidden,\u201d he told AFP. \u201cYou just can\u2019t join a fight against the Netherlands.\u201d\n\nPhoto Credit: Spencer Platt\/Getty Images"}
{"text":"Notorious \u200bM\u200bafia hit man-\u200bturned-canary Salvatore \u201cSammy the Bull\u201d Gravano has been released from an Arizona prison five years early, according to inmate records.\n\n\u200b\u200b\n\nThe \u200binfamous \u200b72-year-old mob rat, who \u200bsquealed to \u200bhelp authorities bring down \u201cDapper Don\u201d John Gotti in exchange for a 1991 plea deal, was let out Sept\u200b. 18, Arizona\u2019s Department of Corrections records show.\n\nHe\u2019ll\u200b\u200b remain on federal parole for the rest of his life, as ordered by Brooklyn federal \u200bJudge Allyne Ross in 2002 when she locked him up.\n\n\u201cI spoke to him,\u201d the aged wiseguy\u2019s daughter, Karen Gravano, ecstatically told The Post. \u201cHe is happy to be out after spending the last 17\u00bd years in prison. He\u2019s in good health, great spirits and he\u2019s anxious to move forward with the next phase of his life.\u201d\n\n\u201cThere is no doubt I\u2019m extremely happy,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve been fighting for this day the whole 17\u00bd years that he\u2019s been in prison, so I\u2019m ecstatic it\u2019s finally here.\u201d\n\nDefense attorney Thomas Farinella echoed Gravano\u2019s comments almost exactly, saying his client was \u201cin good health and great spirits\u201d and \u201cextremely happy to be out.\u201d\n\nHe declined to comment on whether the elder Gravano would settle again in Arizona, or if he would continue sketching \u2014 a hobby he picked up while incarcerated.\n\nThe former Gambino underboss pleaded guilty to running a nearly 50-person, $500,000-a-week ecstasy ring in 2001, and was sentenced to 20 years behind bars.\n\nThat conviction followed a sweetheart deal in which Gravano was sentenced to just five years in prison for an admitted 19 murders \u2014 in exchange for helping the feds fell 39 mobsters, including his former boss and pal the Teflon Don.\n\nThe turncoat consigliere took the stand and spilled the Five Families\u2019 secrets for five days during Gotti\u2019s trial \u2014 and then testified in nine more, putting 39 wiseguys and associates in prison.\n\nAt the time, he was the highest-ranking member of La Cosa Nostra to turn fed.\n\nAfter a short stint in the big house followed by an even shorter one in witness protection, he moved to Tempe, Arizona, and lived under the assumed name Jimmy Moran.\n\nWhile Gravano was living in Arizona, peddling ecstasy and installing pools, he barely escaped his own killing, when the late godfather\u2019s enraged brother, Peter Gotti, sent a team of hitmen to go find him in the Copper State.\n\nThe then-Gambino crime boss ordered the hit in retaliation for his brother\u2019s death from cancer at age 61 behind bars.\n\nHis latest bid for early release was in 2015, when Ross declined to shave years off his sentence, citing his \u201clongstanding reputation for extreme violence.\u201d"}
{"text":"A report from OpenSQLCamp\n\nDid you know...? LWN.net is a subscriber-supported publication; we rely on subscribers to keep the entire operation going. Please help out by buying a subscription and keeping LWN on the net.\n\nWhat do you get when you put together 80 to 100 hard-core database geeks from ten different open source databases for a weekend? OpenSQLCamp , which was held most recently at MIT. Begun three years ago, OpenSQLCamp is a semi-annual unconference for open source database hackers to meet and collaborate on ideas and theories in the industry. It's held at various locations alternately in Europe and the United States, and organized and run by volunteers. This year's conference was organized by Sheeri Cabral, a MySQL community leader who works for PalominoDB\n\nThis year's event included database hackers who work on MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, VoltDB, Tokutek, and Drizzle. In contrast to the popular perception that the various database systems are in a no-holds barred competition for industry supremacy, most people who develop these systems are more interested in collaborating with their peers than arguing with them. And although it's OpenSQLCamp, programmers from \"NoSQL\" databases were welcome and present, including MongoDB, Membase, Cassandra, and BerkeleyDB.\n\nWhile the conference was mainly database engine developers, several high-end users were present, including staff from Rackspace, GoDaddy, VMWare, and WidgetBox. The conference's location meant the participation of a few MIT faculty, including conference co-chair Bradley Kuzsmaul. While few of the students who registered actually turned up, attendees were able to learn informally about the software technologies which are now hot in universities (lots of work on multi-processor scaling, apparently).\n\nFriday\n\nThe conference started with a reception at the WorkBar, a shared office space in downtown Boston. After a little drinking and socializing, participants slid immediately into discussing database and database industry topics, including speculation on what Oracle is going to do with all of its open source databases (answer: nobody knows, including the people who work there), recent releases of PostgreSQL and MySQL, and how VoltDB works. Whiteboard markers came out and several people shifted to technical discussions and continued the discussion until 11pm.\n\nJignesh Shah of VMWare brought up some interesting SSD testing results. In high-transaction environments, it seems that batching database writes actually reduces throughput and increases response times, completely contrary to performance on spinning disks. For example, Jignesh had experimented with asynchronous commit with large buffers, which means that the database returns a success message to the client and fsyncs the data in batches afterward. This reduced database write throughput, whereas on a standard spinning disk RAID it would have increased it up to 30%. There was a great deal of speculation as to why that was.\n\nA second topic of discussion, which shifted to a whiteboard for comprehensibility, was how to put the \"consistency\" in \"eventual consistency\" without increasing response time. This became a session on Sunday. This problem, which is basic to distributed databases, is the question of how you can ensure that any write conflict is resolved in exactly the same way on all database nodes for a transactional database which is replicated or partitioned across multiple servers. Historical solutions have included attempting to synchronize timestamps (which is impossible), using centralized transaction counter servers (which become bottlenecks), and using vector clocks (which are insufficiently determinative on a large number of nodes). VoltDB addresses this by a two-phase commit approach in which the node accepting the writes checks modification timestamps on all nodes which could conflict. As with many approaches, this solution maintains consistency and throughput at a substantial sacrifice in response times.\n\nSaturday\n\nThe conference days were held at MIT, rather ironically in the William H. Gates building. For those who haven't seen Frank Gehry's sculptural architecture feat, it's as confusing on the inside as it is on the outside outside, so the first day started late. As usual with unconferences, the first task was to organize a schedule; participants proposed sessions and spent a long time rearranging them in an effort to avoid double-scheduling, which led to some \"concurrency issues\" with different versions of the schedule. Eventually we had four tracks for the four rooms, nicknamed \"SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE\".\n\nAs much as I wanted to attend everything, it wasn't possible, so I'll just write up a few of the talks here. Some of the talks and discussions will also be available as videos from the conference web site later. I attended and ran mostly discussion sessions, which I find to be the most useful events of an unconference.\n\nMonty Taylor of Drizzle talked about their current efforts to add multi-tenancy support, and discussed implementations and tradeoffs with other database developers. Multi-tenancy is another hot topic now that several companies are going into \"database as a service\" (DaaS); it is the concept that multiple businesses can share the same physical database while having complete logical separation of data and being unaware of each other. The primary implementation difficulty is that there is a harsh tradeoff between security and performance, since the more isolated users are from each other, the less physical resources they share. As a result, no single multi-tenancy implementation can be perfect.\n\nSince it was first described in the early 80's, many databases have implemented Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC). MVCC is a set of methods which allow multiple users to read and modify the same data concurrently while minimizing conflicts and locks, supporting the \"Atomicity\", \"Consistency\", and \"Isolation\" in ACID transactions. While the concept is conventional wisdom at this point, implementations are fairly variable. So, on request, I moderated a panel on MVCC in PostgreSQL, InnoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB and BerkeleyDB. The discussion covered the basic differences in approach as well as the issues with data garbage collection.\n\nJignesh Shah of VMWare and Tim Callagan of VoltDB presented on current issues in database performance in virtualized environments. The first, mostly solved issue was figuring out degrees of overcommit for virtualized databases sharing the same physical machine. Jignesh had tested with PostgreSQL and found the optimal level in benchmark tests to be around 20% overcommit, meaning five virtual machines (VMs) each entitled to 25% of the server's CPU and RAM.\n\nOne work in progress is I\/O scheduling. While VMWare engineers have optimized sharing CPU and RAM among multiple VMs running databases on the same machine, sharing I\/O without conflicts or severe overallocation still needs work.\n\nThe other major unsolved issue is multi-socket scaling. As it turns out, attempting to scale a single VM across multiple sockets is extremely inefficient with current software, resulting in tremendous drops in throughput as soon as the first thread migrates to a second socket. The current workaround is to give the VMs socket affinity and to run one VM per socket, but nobody is satisfied with this.\n\nAfter lunch, Bradley ran a Q&A panel on indexing with developers from VoltDB, Tokutek, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, and Percona. Panelists answered questions about types of indexes, databases without indexes, performance optimizations, and whether server hardware advances would cause major changes in indexing technology in the near future. The short answer to that one is \"no\".\n\nAs is often the case with \"camp\" events, the day ended with a hacking session. However, only the Drizzle team really took advantage of it; for most attendees, it was a networking session.\n\nSunday\n\nElena Zannoni joined the conference in order to talk about the state of tracing on Linux. Several database geeks were surprised to find out that SystemTap was not going to be included in the Linux kernel, and that there was no expected schedule for release of utrace\/uprobes. Many database engineers have been waiting for Linux to provide an alternative to Dtrace, and it seems that we still have longer to wait.\n\nThe VoltDB folks, who are local to Boston, showed up in force and did a thorough presentation on their architecture, use case, and goals. VoltDB is a transactional, SQL-compliant distributed database with strong consistency. It's aimed at large companies building new in-house applications for which they need extremely high transaction processing rates and very high availability. VoltDB does this by requiring users to write their applications to address the database, including putting all transactions into stored procedures which are then precompiled and executed in batches on each node. It's an approach which sacrifices response times and general application portability in return for tremendous throughput, into the 100,000's of transactions per second.\n\nSome of the SQL geeks at the conference discussed how to make developers more comfortable with SQL. Currently many application developers not only don't understand SQL, but actively hate and fear it. The round-table discussed why this is and some ideas for improvement, including: teaching university classes, contributing to object-relational mappers (ORMs), explaining SQL in relation to functional languages, doing fun \"SQL tricks\" demos, and working on improving DBA attitudes towards developers.\n\nIn the last track of the day, I mediated a freewheeling discussion on \"The Future of Databases\", in which participants tried to answer \"What databases will we be using and developing in 2020?\" While nobody there had a crystal ball, embedded databases with offline synchronization, analytical databases which support real-time calculations, and database-as-a-service featured heavily in the discussion.\n\nWrap-up\n\nWhile small, OpenSQLCamp was fascinating due to the caliber of attendee; I learned more about several new databases over lunch than I had in the previous year of blog reading. If you work on open-source database technology, are a high-end user, or are just very interested in databases, you should consider attending next year. Watch the OpenSQLCamp web site for videos to be posted, and for the date and location of next year's conferences in the US and Europe."}
{"text":"New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was called a 'liar' today by thousands of police officers and firefighters at a rally in Trenton today. New Jersey reporter Brian Thompson tells us about the battle between public employee unions and politicians over budget cuts and pension changes. (Published Thursday, March 3, 2011)\n\nThree union workers who called out sick to attend a labor rally at the New Jersey Statehouse last week have been suspended.\n\nThe move comes a day after Gov. Christie told NBC New York in an interview that \"people who call in sick better be sick.\" Christie issued his warning ahead of another labor rally that drew thousands on Thursday.\n\nMonmouth County officials said the three employees suspended without pay Thursday work for the county's Senior Citizen Area Transportation service and are members of CWA Local 1038.\n\nThe county said the workers were among 14 in the department who called out sick; officials alleged that 174 developmentally disabled adults who depend on the county's services ended up \"waiting for buses that never came.\"\n\n\"These employees are being suspended without pay based on the fact that we have evidence to prove that they were not home sick as they had claimed,\" said Lillian Burry, a county official.\n\nThe union representing the workers, the Communications Workers of America(CWA) put out a statement through its District One calling this a \"politically-motivated attack on public workers who perform vital services.\"\n\nTop New York News Photos of 2011\n\nThe CWA statement added \"When all the facts come out, it will be clear that whatever errors in judgement were made, no one served by the county missed a medical appointment and no one should be fired.\"\n\nState Sen. Joe Kyrillos (R-Monmouth), who first complained of a \"sick-out,\" applauded officials for the suspension, noting some workers were \"caught on camera\" at last week's rally.\n\nHe wants officials to keep reviewing video to see \"if others were absent without proper excuse.\"\n\nWeird News Photos: Holiday Edition\n\nMeanwhile, thousands more rallied again at the Statehouse -- this time a gathering of police and firefighters protesting job cuts and changes to first responder benefits and pensions.\n\nLabor unions have been riding a wave of national attention on labor contracts and collective bargaining, sparked in part by disputes between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and public employees there.\n\nBruce Chester, a Woodbridge police office attending the rally, held up a campaign letter from Christie promising not to touch police officer pensions. When that same letter was shown on a big screen TV, officers and firefighters broke out in the chants of \u201cliar.\u201d\n\n\u201cEnough is enough,\u201d said Tony Weiners, president of the NJ State Policemen\u2019s Benevolent Association.\n\nIrvington Police Officer Jerry Ramos and Irvington firefighter Kevin Franz said they voted for Christie and were experiencing \u201dbuyers remorse.\u201d\n\nAt a separate news conference Thursday, Christie called the latest demonstration a \"me-first rally\" but admitted he made campaign promises he could not keep.\n\n\u201cThe situation has gotten significantly worse since I took office,\u201d Christie said \u201cThe system could be bankrupt by 2020\u2026.I\u2019m not going to let that happen.\u201d\n\nChristie said he tried to meet with the state PBA president and that \u201cthe numbers are the numbers.\u201d\n\nFollow Brian Thompson on Twitter @brian4NY and us @NBCNewYork,and on Facebook\/NBCNewYork, and sign up for breaking news SMS alerts on your phone by texting \u201cNYBREAKING\u201d to 639710."}
{"text":"As the robot tests alternative movements, it continuously updates it database of options\u2014having used a computer simulation of itself to create a sort of how-to-walk map ahead of time. Researchers call this testing phase a \u201csimulated childhood,\u201d and it\u2019s a little bit like what a baby does when she\u2019s learning how to crawl. Only the robot takes minutes\u2014not weeks or months\u2014to test and determine the movements that will work best.\n\nThis is much faster, the authors say, than previous attempts. And that\u2019s in part because although the robot is sifting through about 13,000 possible movements, they are all options that the robot has already deemed potentially useful. \u201cThe space of all possible behaviors that is searched to find these 13,000 high-performing behaviors is unimaginably vast,\u201d they wrote. \u201cIn fact, it contains 10^47 possible behaviors, which is about how many atoms make up the planet Earth!\u201d\n\nResearchers experimented with both a hexapod robot and a robotic arm, and they believe their algorithm could be used to enable any kind of robot to adapt to damage and complete a mission. Over the course of hundreds of tests, the six-legged robot was able to adapt to at least six different types of damage\u2014including completely losing two legs\u2014and the robot arm was able to adapt to at least 14 kinds of damage, including having two of its motors broken.\n\nPerhaps all this evokes images of Westworld, or of The Terminator, or at least of an assembly line that never breaks down. A robot that can break and keep going anyway is, after all, a robot that doesn\u2019t need people. Or needs them less than its robot predecessors did, anyway. The potential uses for such machines are incredible to imagine. These things could skitter across Mars, or explore an ocean trench, or crawl over rubble to help search for victims after an earthquake.\n\nScientists and engineers have been working on perfecting such algorithms for more than a decade. And in 2006, when researchers at Cornell built a robot that could teach itself how to limp, one scientist said the behavior was a form of consciousness. \"Whether humans or animals are conscious in a similar way\u2014do we also think in terms of a self-image, and rehearse actions in our head before trying them out\u2014is still an open question,\" researcher Josh Bongard told the university\u2019s news service at the time. Elsewhere, researchers have designed robots with squishy, self-healing muscles, robotic cubes that can apparently clone themselves, tiny robots that can assemble themselves in the first place, and giant robots that can hurl cinder blocks. The fields of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are making gains so rapidly it can be hard to keep track.\n\nThe work that culminated in Wednesday\u2019s Nature paper began in 2011. The intelligent algorithm at the center of the research turned out to be astonishing even to the people who designed it."}
{"text":"The trip to Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Chile by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in May this year sought to follow up on the planned cooperation between China and CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) announced in January of the same year. This plan\u2019s main goals are to increase bilateral trade to $500 billion and the inflow of Chinese direct investments to the region to $250 billion until 2025.\n\nThe two objectives are linked, since China expects that the bilateral trade will grow if it invests in Latin American infrastructure. This strategy has also been used to bolster China\u2019s economic relations with countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Railways, roadways, ports, and airports have been built or revamped to enable Beijing to buy raw materials and sell its manufactures around the world more cheaply and easily.\n\nThe investments promised by Li Keqing during his trip to South America are largely in line with this strategy. The flagship project is a $10 billion railroad between Brazil and Peru that will connect the Atlantic and Pacific ports. The railroad will make it easier and cheaper to export of soybeans, beef, and ore from the Brazilian hinterlands. Currently, these exports must first reach Brazilian ports in Par\u00e1 or Maranh\u00e3o, and then traverse the Panama Canal to reach the Pacific and China.\n\nIn Colombia, China promised to modernize the port of Buenaventura, the country\u2019s second most important harbor, and pledged to build a 600 km highway linking central Colombia with the Venezuela border. The road is supposed to cross the region of Orinoqu\u00eda \u2013 rich in agriculture, cattle, oil, and minerals. China and Colombia also pledged to negotiate a bilateral free trade agreement.\n\nThese announcements join a long list of projects in South American logistics proposed by China in recent years. Examples include the construction of a port in Suriname, which will also get a railway and a road connecting Paramaribo with Manaus to facilitate the export of Brazilian minerals; the expansion of Venezuela\u2019s Pal\u00faa port, in the Orinoco delta, as a vital complement to the investments announced in Colombia; the overhaul of the Chilean port of Desierto to export iron ore from the Atacama mines; and the expansion of the San Antonio West port in Argentina, to enable the export of agricultural goods cultivated in lands administered by the Chinese themselves.\n\nDuring his visit to Chile, Li Keqiang signed a series of financial agreements that will also be important for China\u2019s strategy of binding Latin American commerce with its own economy. A currency swap arrangement worth 22 billion yuan (approximately $3.5 billion) was announced, together with the establishment of a yuan clearing bank in Chile, which would be the first in South America. Both initiatives seek to reduce the use of the U.S. dollar in bilateral trade, restricting U.S. influence over their commercial dynamic. China and Chile also agreed to expand their bilateral free trade agreement, which was signed in 2005.\n\nOf course, some of these proposals probably will not materialize, but the strategy behind them reveal China\u2019s intentions. Beijing seeks to deepen its ties with South America and its investments are essentially oriented towards transporting commodities to coastal areas, connecting ports to mines and farmlands from the region\u2019s hinterlands. This is what has historically always been done in South America. China may be trying to update the model of cooperation, but it is up to the South American countries themselves to effectively use the export revenues and the Chinese investments to avoid the deindustrialization that has occurred in the past.\n\nMeanwhile, a significant shift in regional dynamics looks likely. There is a clear will on China\u2019s part to redirect South American production to the Pacific. That will economically benefit the countries located in coastal areas. Keqiang visited three countries that have that characteristic (Peru, Chile, Colombia) and which are articulated in the Pacific Alliance. This trade bloc seeks to facilitate trade and external financial flows, making it easier for China to develop its presence in the region, and contrasts with the more protectionist Mercosur, which is led by Brazil and Argentina. For South American countries facing the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea (most of them members of Mercosur), China seeks to create transoceanic links to reach the Pacific, such as the Brazil\u2013Peru railway or even the Nicaragua Canal.\n\nThis scenario suggests an especially important challenge for Brazil (but also for the other countries of the region) concerning South American regional integration and its domestic economy. It will be necessary to devise a national and regional project that mitigates the negative effects of investments from China (or indeed any other country), considering that \u201c(\u2026) the promotion of infrastructure focused on economic and commercial development does not guarantee that it will be useful for geopolitical and strategic objectives of a State of region, since it may be conditioned by private or external interests\u201d (Jaeger, 2014, p. 87, authors\u2019 translation). Doubtless, these investments will increase inter-regional trade between South America and China (or East Asia) as a whole, but that by itself does not assure intra-regional development and integration.\n\nThere will certainly be social, environmental, and deindustrializing impacts. However, South American countries need to develop strategies and establish rules to enable more effective use of the resources coming from Beijing in the defense of their interests. Infrastructure investments will not modernize local economies or guarantee regional integration on their own, but they could be very helpful if long-term development policies are in place and if the investments are used as leverage in bargaining with the U.S., the EU, or China itself. In fact, ECLAC affirms that the logistics infrastructure that China provides could well stimulate intra-regional trade and the formation of regional value chains. It is up to South America states to use Chinese investments for their own development goals and deepening regional integration.\n\nBruno Gomes Guimar\u00e3es is a researcher at the South American Institute for Policy and Strategy (ISAPE). Diogo Ives is an MA candidate in Political Science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)."}
{"text":"The City of Boca Raton gave Jozy Altidore the hero\u2019s welcome he deserved on Friday, July 18th at the Waterstone Resort & Marina.\n\n\u201cHe is our hometown hero,\u201d Mayor Susan Haynie said. \u201cHe has achieved so much in his sport and that certainly deserves acclaim from the community. We are all very thrilled and honored of him carrying the name of Boca Raton as his hometown.\u201d\n\nAltidore, the 2013 Futbol de Primera Player of the Year and the 2013 U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year, was honored by Haynie and the City of Boca with his own day, Jozy Altidore Day.\n\n\u201cThe first I heard of this it was incredible,\u201d Altidore said. \u201cIt\u2019s such a prestigious city in Boca Raton. I\u2019m so happy to be here and represent the soccer team.\u201d\n\nAt a young age it was evident that Altidore had a natural talent as he would toy with children at the local parks. Josef Schulz, a longtime youth coach in Boca Raton, took note of Altidore when he was 8 years old while Altidore was playing a pickup game at Boca\u2019s South County Regional Park and Schultz was amazed.\n\n\u201cSchulz played a very pivotal role for me in my career in a time where soccer wasn\u2019t so big here in the States,\u201d says a grateful Altidore of what Schulz did for him.\n\nAs a middle school student at Loggers\u2019 Run Middle School, Altidore harnessed his craft and after only one year he moved to Boca Raton Prep on a soccer scholarship.\n\nAltidore, who currently holds the record for most goals by an American overseas with 39, is set to rejoin his club Sunderland AFC late next week to begin preparing for the start of the 2014 English Premier League season.\n\nClick the link to be redirected to the gallery: http:\/\/goo.gl\/uhNAWg"}
{"text":"The sight of Hakeem Nicks gently running routes with his teammates early in Thursday\u2019s practice allowed the Giants to move closer to becoming whole on offense. Nicks is a huge piece of the puzzle and his return from a broken foot is on schedule.\n\nHe won\u2019t play tonight, though, leaving the Giants with Victor Cruz as the only proven receiver to take the field against his favorite team to dominate, the Jets. Once Nicks is back for good, he and Cruz command the two starting spots and the search continues for the third receiver needed to really get Eli Manning\u2019s passing attack cranked up.\n\n\u201cWell, I think there are a number of guys,\u2019\u2019 Manning said. \u201cI don\u2019t know if there\u2019s just one guy right now.\u2019\u2019 A number of guys and not one guy right now are euphemisms for \u201cNo one has seized the opportunity yet.\u2019\u2019\n\nThough Mario Manningham struggled for much of last season, he always presented a threat to opposing defenses and if some slouch was lined up against him, Manningham could make him pay in a big way. Manningham is now with the 49ers and to this point none of the candidates looking to fill his role have shown enough to claim the job.\n\nDomenik Hixon, coming back from two knee surgeries, is the most consistent of the bunch, but he was held out of the preseason opener with a slight hamstring issue. Jerrel Jernigan, a second-round pick last year, was impressive early in camp, but didn\u2019t catch a pass last week in Jacksonville. Rookie Rueben Randle already has gained the trust of Manning and the coaching staff as a sure-handed, natural pass-catcher, but he\u2019s still learning the nuances of route-running. Ramses Barden, as usual, had his moments in camp, and managed one catch last week for 14 yards. But he hasn\u2019t been able to maintain any positive momentum.\n\nIf one of these receivers is going to emerge from the pack, he hasn\u2019t done so yet.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s been a little bit of everyone,\u2019\u2019 Cruz said. \u201cRamses had a great training camp, Jerrel Jernigan had a great training camp, Rueben Randle did some good things. It\u2019s going to be tough for these coaches. I\u2019m glad I\u2019m not a coach or anybody working up top because it\u2019s going to be tough to pick one of those guys or even two of those guys to be our third or fourth receiver. They\u2019re all talented and all good players.\u2019\u2019\n\nThose are the supportive words of a teammate, but Manning is more discerning. He demands a great deal from his targets, and if they deviate from the script or fail to make the proper read, it doesn\u2019t sit well with the franchise quarterback.\n\n\u201cThese preseason games are big, when you see them against live action, against good corners, see their releases, and see if they\u2019re doing a good job getting open,\u2019\u2019 Manning said. \u201cSo, it\u2019s always a good problem to have as a quarterback, have a number of receivers who can come in and play well for you.\u2019\u2019\n\nOf course, it\u2019s not known whether Manning truly does have a number of receivers who can play well or just a bunch of receivers who can play, but perhaps not very well.\n\n\u201cWell, I think some guys do some things better than others,\u2019\u2019 Manning said. \u201cSo, I think that\u2019s why you usually carry six receivers, so you can put guys in certain spots, have them do what they do best.\u2019\u2019\n\nHixon must be considered the favorite to occupy the No. 3 spot at the start of the season, at least until Randle is ready.\n\n\u201c[Hixon\u2019s] played very well, and done a great job,\u2019\u2019 Manning said. \u201cSo, I\u2019m excited about having him back, because he\u2019s played in games and he\u2019s played well for us in the past.\u2019\u2019"}
{"text":"Oceans are the cradle of life on Earth. Giving life a birth date, though, is complicated as we\u2019re still discovering traces of bacteria older than all those we found so far. For now, we think that the oldest one lived at least 3.5 billion years ago, so around one billion years after Earth\u2019s formation. This theory is based on prints that bacteria left on soft mud that turned into rock with time. It is nearly impossible to preserve a bacterium as a \u201cfossil\u201d since they are extremely fragile.\n\nImage: Anomalocaris painting. Reconstruction of what this early predator must have looked like. Image by UNE photos (Creative Commons).\n\nBacteria are unicellular organisms (their bodies are constituted of only one cell, while the human body is formed by thousands of billions of cells\u2026) and for long, we didn\u2019t find anything between the old bacteria prints and the oldest fossils with shells and skeletons that lived 540 million years ago.\n\nA fossil is the remains of a long dead organism that was buried in mud which transformed into rock (or sediment) over time. Soon, by physical destruction by the mud and the water flow or by decomposition by bacteria, only the skeleton or the shell of the original animal remains. That\u2019s what you can see at the museum, once they\u2019ve been discovered and extracted from the rock.\n\nWe know from these fossils that a large amount of species have lived on Earth in the last 600 million years, in the ocean and later (since around 400 million years ago) on the continents, and that their sizes and shapes were very different to one another. In the last few decades, we even discovered a new type of fossils\u2026\n\nIn some rare environments, the mud that buries dead organisms can be so fine and the water flow so weak that they don\u2019t harm the remains, and the shape of the skin of the organism can print on the mud and be preserved that way. This is how we could find the Ediacaran fauna in Australia.\n\nIn this sort of environment we made an extraordinary discovery: fossils of animals (not bacteria) so old (around 560 million years ago) that they didn\u2019t have any hard parts in their bodies. No shells, no teeth, not a single bone. But these were not the most disturbing characteristic of their anatomy. Their perfect state of preservation allowed palaeontologists to notice another component of modern animals missing: the mouth. Not a single specimen of this strange zoo had any orifice, and we suppose they were able to absorb nutrients from the seawater directly through their skin.\n\nPalaeontologists discovered organisms with the strangest shapes, frozen in time and preserved in this extremely smooth mud turned into rock. Dozens of new fossil species were described and a new extreme limit of the appearance of multicellular organisms (in opposition to unicellular organisms like bacteria) was defined.\n\nBut it was just the start of a new series of astonishing discoveries. At Burgess (Canada), new and slightly younger species were found that lived around 540 million years ago, during the Cambrian era. Unlike Ediacara, all species from this fauna had shells (or \u201cexoskeletons\u201d; skeletons outside the organism, unlike humans or other vertebrates but just like molluscs and arthropods). Amongst them, an impressive specimen of the species Anomalocaris presented another major difference with older organisms: it had teeth, and those of a predator. Overall, the Burgess fauna presented a huge amount of different species compared to Ediacara, and we call this rapid increase in the biodiversity the \u201cCambrian Explosion\u201c. 20 or 30 million years may seem a lot of time, but when dealing with evolution, it\u2019s really not a lot. But for some reason, at this time, life on Earth had rapidly evolved.\n\nEdiacara was important because it was the first time we found multicellular organisms ageing before skeletogenesis (creation of skeleton and other hard parts). Burgess was also important because it was the oldest fauna we found with hard parts. But these two faunas combined made another major discovery: the start of predation. During the Ediacaran era, no organisms had teeth or even mouth, so they were clearly not carnivorous. Anomalocaris was an obvious proof of predation during the time the Burgess rocks were deposited. Because of this, we talk about the \u201cEdiacaran paradise\u201c, when Nature was at peace, without fight for survival.\n\nWhen we look at other species of Burgess fauna, several produced spines on their back, probably as a defence mechanism against predators like Anomalocaris. This led to the conclusion that hard parts were initially synthesized in order to protect the organism against aggressive species.\n\nAnother possible explanation of skeletogenesis is also proposed and focuses on chemistry mechanisms. As the seawater chemistry changed, maintaining an appropriate level of acidity in the organisms became more problematic. Synthesizing shells would have allowed the organism to store acidic molecules from their soft tissues to reach the proper equilibrium. But this doesn\u2019t explain by itself the presence of spines and teeth\u2026\n\nThe truth is probably somewhere between the two theories. But anyway, something major happened to living species between 560 and 540 million years ago. Something that changed the shape and the behaviour of all life on Earth, forever.\n\nVincent Mouchi\n\nPh.D. student, Department of Geology, Trinity College Dublin\n\nIf you want to know more about this topic and have more details on these extraordinary organisms, I would suggest you to read the book \u201cWonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History\u201d by the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould.\n\n0.000000 0.000000\n\nAdvertisements"}
{"text":"RIGBY -- A reserve officer for Rigby Police has died, months after he was badly burned in a crash in Utah, the department confirmed.\n\nBill Gray, who also worked as a truck driver, was driving an 18-wheeler when he was struck head-on by a suspect fleeing from Utah State Patrol July 26.\n\nThe other driver was killed in the collision. Gray was rushed to the University of Utah Burn Center in critical condition, with burns over 46 percent of his body.\n\nHe died from his injuries Monday after nearly two months in the hospital, Rigby Police said.\n\nMORE: Rigby reserve officer critical after Utah crash\n\nIn a Facebook post, the department wrote that Gray would be remembered as \"a man of selfless service,\" always ready to help others in his community.\n\n\"Bill was truly the best of mankind. Always willing to help, always willing to go the extra mile,\" Rigby Police posted. \"Bill was a big man, with a bigger heart. Everything about him was generous and kind.\"\n\nThe department recounted a time when he used his personal ATV to plow a path for local children to get to school during the heavy winter, saving them from having to walk into the street to get around the built-up snow.\n\n\"Bill always had a funny story to bring about a laugh. He always did the good thing,\" the department posted. \"This world would be better off with more Bill Grays, and this world is truly darker without his light.\"\n\nRELATED: Viral video highlights patient privacy laws\n\nGray's accident sparked a nationwide debate after a nurse caring for him at the University of Utah Burn Center was arrested after she refused to allow a a Salt Lake City Police detective to draw his blood without a warrant.\n\nNurse Alex Wubbels explained to the officer that Gray could not consent to the blood draw because he was unconscious. Detective Jeff Payne's body camera captured footage of him roughly grabbing Wubbels and physically pulling her out of the hospital as she wept and screamed for help.\n\nThe video drew widespread outrage, culminating in the hospital changing its rules to not allow police to speak with nurses and staff.\n\nRigby Police Chief Sam Tower thanked the nurse \"for standing firm, and protecting Officer Gray's rights as a patient and victim.\u201d\n\nA GoFundMe account has set up to pay for Gray's hospital bills is still nearly $7,000 short of its goal.\n\nCopyright 2017 KTVB"}
{"text":"Welcome to the BUFFY PHENOMENON Identifying the best Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes\n\nBuffy the Vampire Slayer fans love to argue about which episodes are their best. Some believe that \"Becoming, Parts 1 and 2\" are the greatest episodes. Others believe that \"Once More, with Feeling,\" \"Hush,\" and \"The Body\" are the greatest. There are even fans who love \"Doublemeat Palace.\"\n\nLike its sister site, The Phi-Phenomenon, the Buffy Phenomenon studies lists that people make. Instead of studying lists of the greatest films of all time to create the definitive best film list, the Buffy Phenomenon studies lists of the greatest episodes to create the definitive best (and worst) episode list. The episodes are listed by rank, alphabetically, by writer, by director, and by season. This site also lists the episodes that polarize fans and episodes that fans have largely forgotten as well as streaks of great and weak episodes.\n\nThis site also tries to figure out what makes an episode great or weak. It looks at the extent to which the quality of an episode may be affected by the when the episode aired, the episode's writer and director, and the relative prominance or absence of major characters in that episode.\n\nFinally, this site has found that Buffy fans do not agree on everything. There are at least two different tastes in Buffy episodes. Users can now see how fans differ in how they rank episodes. Users can also see how fans differ in how when the episode aired, major characters, writers, and directors may affect the quality of an episode.\n\nWARNING!! \u2014This site contains spoilers. Most pages give episode titles for all 144 episodes, indicate how good each of these episodes are, and indicate who wrote and directed each episode. The Characters Ranked page also mentions characters who do not appear until season 7 and discusses the presence or absence of major characters in seventh season episodes, and the Seasons Ranked page describes all seven seasons.\n\nIf you have any questions or comments, you can write this site at .\n\nBuffy the Vampire Slayer and all characters are the property of 20th Century Fox, Mutant Enemy, Joss Whedon, UPN, WB, and a whole bunch of other entities that are not affiliated with this site. All opinions on this site are either that of the Webmaster or from a compilation of the opinions of various people, most of whom are not affiliated with the aforementioned entities.\n\nAll contents on this site that are not owned by the above entities \u00a9 2003-2016.\n\nThis page was last modified on February 5, 2016\n\nSince January 2005,\n\nPowered by please enable browser's Javascript to use the Hit Counter tool.Powered by\n\npeople visited this page."}
{"text":"Vulcan survivor's guilt: Why J.J. Abrams should make Mr. Spock the hero of the new \"Star Trek\" franchise May 23, 2013 | May Contain Spoilers\n\nIn J.J. Abrams\u2019 reboot of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d universe, Spock is a burdened soul. As in Gene Roddenberry\u2019s original series, he is the only child of a human mother and Vulcan father \u2014 by birth, a man of two worlds and an outcast. But Abrams and his co-writers give him a fascinating additional burden: Midway through the first movie, Spock\u2019s home planet of Vulcan is destroyed by a Romulan villain, Nero. The enormous implosion claims the lives of the planet\u2019s indigenous population as well as Spock\u2019s mother. Cosmic and personal tragedies converge: not only does Spock lose his mom \u2014 his heretofore beacon of humanity \u2014 he and his Vulcan kinsmen become stateless nomads. Even at his most vulnerable, though, Spock controls his emotions, and lets logic dictate his actions, declaring his race to be an endangered species.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThe destruction of Vulcan, one of the most crucial planets in the \"Star Trek\" legendarium, should be at the core of J.J. Abrams\u2019 films. It is the single development that most distinguishes the original TV and movie series from Abrams\u2019 reboot, an event so boldly imagined that it marks the filmmakers\u2019 new, blank canvas with a hideous dark stain. And yet for the most part, the new films draw around the stain, not treating it quite as an afterthought, but not engaging with it as fully as they ought to.\n\nI believe they should engage with it \u2014 that in fact they should put it at the heart of the new franchise. It has an imaginative power comparable to the destruction of Alderaan in \"Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope,\" which gave 1970s children apocalyptic nightmares, though not intentionally: \"Star Wars\" creator George Lucas treated the Death Star's annihilation of a world as the cause of space-nausea and never mentioned it again, much less weighed down the adopted Alderaanian Leia Organa with the psychological freight of its absence.\n\nIn contrast, Abrams and his collaborators have woven mentions of Vulcan\u2019s death into the plot of the second film, \"Star Trek Into Darkness,\" in ways that, however tossed-off and limited, reinforce the superiority of \"Star Trek\" to \"Star Wars\" as popular art; they could, and should, build these references out and embellish them, because they're solid enough to give the entire franchise an a narrative anchor that it thus far has lacked.\n\n\"As if millions of voices cried out in terror...\"\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThat present-tense experience of grief is palpable even though the new \"Star Trek\" series hasn\u2019t placed it at the heart of its stories. Why not formalize the focus, and see what results? I believe the new \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise would be a greater, more powerful, more moving accomplishment if it stopped obsessing over the maturation of the impetuous James T. Kirk \u2014 an amusing but too-familiar arc, one that many adventure series have already portrayed \u2014 and redirected its energy toward exploring the psychology of the post-Vulcan Mr. Spock, the rightful lead in this rebooted franchise. That Abrams seems already to be headed in that direction, however fitfully, suggests that on some level he has already accepted this truth, although he hasn\u2019t yet embraced it as enthusiastically as I believe he should.\n\nAt the end of \u201cThe Wrath of Khan,\u201d the second film in the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, Captain Kirk eulogizes Spock by declaring, \u201cOf all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.\u201d\n\nThis anthropocentrism has always been evident in \u201cStar Trek,\u201d and, even though it betrays a superficially Earth-bound and reactionary nature, the statement echoes the deeper, secular, Bertrand Russell-style humanism of \"Star Trek.\" As such, the \u201chuman soul\u201d of Spock that Kirk laments is that of a universal adherent of the Golden Rule. This maxim has always governed Spock, whose strict dedication to Aristotelian logic was, for all intents and purposes, a gimmick. Given the choice, the character always opted for doing the Right Thing, even if it led to self-sacrifice.\n\nIn the reboot universe, J.J. Abrams could have amplified these central tenets of the character. With their planet gone, Spock and the remaining Vulcans are left without a home. \u201cStar Trek\u201d has built up this race as wise and philosophical, a people whose existence is based around knowledge, around reading and thinking and remembering. The total obliteration of the Vulcans\u2019 home planet is the razing of the Great Library of Alexandria, the Fall of Babylon, the Sack of Rome and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all rolled into one.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nHow would a catastrophe this immense affect the Federation? Are there tenets of the Vulcan culture that are irredeemably lost in time? What sort of effect does this have in the Federation\u2019s balance of power?\n\nThere is a more immediate analogue, too, namely the destruction of Vulcan as the \u201cStar Trek\u201d equivalent of the Holocaust. The event turns the Vulcan race into an intergalactic Jewish diaspora consisting entirely of survivors.\n\nThis is powerful stuff, and potentially fruitful. Abrams\u2019 \u201cTrek\u201d films have been criticized for shifting the original series\u2019 focus away from exploration and onto political and military intrigue, but this needn\u2019t necessarily represent a betrayal of what the original stood for. The destruction of Vulcan could let Abrams formalize an interest that\u2019s already evident to anyone who\u2019s seen \u201cStar Trek\u201d and \u201cStar Trek Into Darkness,\u201d and let the new series look at many of the classic \"Star Trek\" philosophical and moral issues through a fresh prism.\n\nAmong the questions such a refocused series could explore: Who preserves the memory of Vulcan? Would a new, post-Vulcan society of Vulcan survivors have fascist overtones, defending the racially \u201cpure\u201d against the unwanted attentions of the mixed-blood portion of society? Perhaps the surviving Vulcans have split into political factions akin to those seen within so many majority-minority societies. They may also be squabbling about how best to relate to the \"majority\" society they've been forced to become a part of; their arguments could echo the ones that happened within Native American and African-American society in the 1960s and '70s, which were torn between trying to change the United States' majority culture to make it more hospitable, versus standing apart from it or actively attacking it. The aftershocks of Vulcan's end also raise the question of whether a civilization can be a proper civilization without a homeland, or a home world. That there's a fleeting reference in \"Star Trek Into Darkness\" to New Vulcan -- presumably this universe's Vulcan version of Israel? -- suggests that Abrams and his cowriters have already been thinking about it.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nIt's all quite fraught -- a powderkeg of identity politics that people would avoid at cocktail parties for fear of ruining the evening. Where would Spock, a racially \u201cimpure\u201d Vulcan, find himself in all of this? He would probably be an assimilationist, committed to integrating Vulcan identity into the patchwork of galactic civilization, otherwise why would he have committed himself to Starfleet, or the Federation itself? This commitment would already be present given what we know about Spock's \"half-breed\" psychology, but the destruction of Vulcan would magnify those feelings and give his actions even greater urgency.\n\nBut not every Vulcan would agree with Spock. There would probably be separatist elements, perhaps with a militant mentality. Some would have dedicated themselves to wiping out the Romulans as revenge for Vulcan\u2019s death, notwithstanding counter-arguments that Nero, the man responsible for Vulcan's destruction, was just a \"bad apple,\" not representative of the Romulans as a race. And of course the Vulcans that wanted revenge against the Romulans wouldn\u2019t call it \u201crevenge.\u201d They\u2019d come up with some \u201clogical\u201d euphemism. But that would be their true motivation, and it\u2019s something Spock would have to contend with in his role as a half-Vulcan Starfleet officer, a man who\u2019s under constant pressure to be A Credit to his Race.\n\nMr. Spock, your destiny is calling\n\nAdvertisement\n\nIsn\u2019t it plausible that by giving his younger self information that he would otherwise not be privy to, old Spock actually changes the future? We know that the universe of \"Star Trek\" has a relativist approach to time, not determinist. By implying a future friendship, could the old Spock be actually affecting \u2014 perhaps even dooming \u2014 that bond? Heisenberg\u2019s uncertainty principal would suggest so. How would Spock, now the true hero of \"Star Trek,\" deal with such a dilemma?\n\nThis line of argument also suggests a more fundamental difference between classic \"Trek\" and the reboot. In the original version, destiny does not play a part. The ship is called Enterprise, and is the vessel to uncover hitherto unknown possibilities. The reboot errs strictly on the side of destiny. The crew of the Enterprise is destined to be together; Kirk and Spock are destined to be best friends; the Enterprise is destined to encounter Khan. But if all these conceits, previously established in the original Trek universe, are destined to happen, how, then, would they be affected by the destruction of Vulcan? And how would Spock, as the real hero of this incarnation of \"Star Trek,\" surmount these personal, philosophical, and physical challenges?\n\nThese are logical questions with potentially fascinating answers.\n\nNext Article: Book Excerpt: Guillermo Del Toro talks about the Best FIlm You've Never Seen Previous Article: Roger Ebert was an inspiration for disabled people\n\nPlease enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.\n\nDisqus"}
{"text":"\u201cNo, that kind of stock I don\u2019t buy. They are usually very, very expensive. A lot of people like to buy expensive stocks like that, but I do not,\u201d said Rogers, a widely followed investor who has published several books on investing, co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros, and more recently is the creator of the Rogers Global Resources Equity Index.\n\nReports suggest Facebook could file its papers for an initial public offering on Wednesday, one that could be the largest Internet offering ever, with the social media giant hoping to raise upwards of $10 billion. Such an IPO would value the company at more than $100 billion.\n\nRogers told CNBC that the timing of an IPO this week would be a smart move by Facebook.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s been demonstrated many, many times before that sellers are usually smarter than the buyers, and they usually know when the best time to sell is, and Facebook is doing it,\u201d he said.\n\nHowever, he said he would be interested in broader technology stocks, but is currently short the sector.\n\n\u201cI am interested in technology in some shape or form, but I can\u2019t imagine buying any of them. They are a bit hot these days and they have been for two or three months, so that\u2019s why I am short. I don\u2019t buy high-priced stocks,\u201d Rogers said.\n\nUS Public \u2018Saps\u2019\n\nTurning to the broader US economy, Rogers said the United States looks and feels better because the government is throwing money at it."}
{"text":"Contin\u00adued use of drones a barrie\u00adr to global peace, says Ramsey Clark.\n\nKARACHI: Former Attorney General of United States of America Ramsey Clark on Monday urged the Pakistani media to be more forthright in preaching \u201cthe criminality of US drones\u201d.\n\nSpeaking as chief guest at an award ceremony of the Pakistan American Democratic Forum, Clark stated that the US should cease using this \u2018vicious\u2019 technology, adding that the use of drones is primarily a US innovation in warfare and their use is a violation of all international laws.\n\nThe former US attorney general went on to say that there will be no peace on earth with the looming threat of drone attacks from one country to another.\n\n\u2018Free Afia Siddiqui\u2019\n\nEarlier, Ramsey Clark said that he came to Pakistan after 20 years with a singular purpose of raising his voice over the injustice meted to Dr Afia Siddiqui.\n\n\u201cShe was kidnapped from your country. It should not have happened, should not be allowed to happen, she lost her youngest child in the kidnapping bid, and was tried and convicted for no fault\u201d he said.\n\nRamsey Clark categorized Afia Siddiqui\u2019s case as \u201ctragic\u201d and \u201coutrageous\u201d, and stressed the importance of her release and return to Pakistan.\n\nThe former US Attorney General cut short a meeting with the Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Choudhry at the Karachi Registry of the Supreme Court of Pakistan to attend this award ceremony at Karachi Press Club.\n\nDr Fouzia Siddiqui of the Dr Afia Movement in her brief address thanked Karachi-based journalists for their support in the movement for the release of Dr Afia Siddiqui. She attributed the release of Dr Afia\u2019s daughter and son from US captivity to the efforts made by the journalists of Karachi who, she said, duly highlighted the plight of Dr Afia\u2019s family.\n\nPublished in The Express Tribune, August 28th, 2012.\n\nRead full story"}
{"text":"Less than a week after CBS let the cat out of the bag on its own iPad HTML5 tests, more media companies appear to boarding the HTML5 video train. Video services company Brightcove announced Monday morning that it will support HTML5 for its customers, offering \"high quality, interactive, and advertising-supported Web video experiences for HTML5-compatible devices.\" Two major Brightcove clients, the New York Times and Time Inc., are participating launch partners, meaning that these two sources will have the option of ditching Flash in some cases in order to be more iPad compatible.\n\nBrightcove's announcement comes just days before the iPad launch, and the company makes no attempt to hide the fact that this is a major reason for the HTML5 support. More than 1,000 Brightcove customers will be able to \"easily expand the reach of their online video initiatives to popular consumer devices including the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod touch,\" wrote the company. Brightcove currently provides support for device detection, playlist rendering, and playback of H.264 content, but plans to add support for customization, advertising, analytics, social sharing, and other features over the next year.\n\nWith such major names as the New York Times and Time on board, it's pretty clear that media companies aren't holding out hope that Apple and Adobe will kiss and make up. Like CBS, it's likely that they'll keep using Flash on their normal websites while allowing iPhone OS devices to access the HTML5 versions of the videos\u2014at least for a while. The remaining questions are when can we expect Hulu to hop on the HTML5 train, and will Netflix reconsider its stance on bringing its own streaming videos (via Silverlight) to the iPad?"}
{"text":"'Twitter is a playground and the website is the office,\" says Reverend Stuart Campbell, when asked whether he is a wind-up merchant.\n\nCampbell is the founder of Wings Over Scotland, a controversial pro-independence site that gets an astonishing 4.5 million page views a month.\n\nBorn in Stirling, he moved to Bath in 1991 for a job at a computer magazine and became a notorious reviewer of video games. He has lived in Somerset ever since.\n\nThe 46-year-old is also a long-term supporter of Scottish independence, but the issue only became pressing for him when the SNP's landslide Holyrood victory in 2011 made a referendum a certainty.\n\nWings, known for its abrasive take on Scottish politics - one Tory MSP was described as \"fat troughing scum\" - was started six months after Alex Salmond's historic victory.\n\n\"I was looking around for Scottish politics websites to follow ... and they weren't doing the job,\" he explains, sitting in a friend's house in Keynsham, outside Bath. \"It became fairly rapidly obvious that nobody was doing the thing that I thought needed to be done.\"\n\nOther than giving readers what he describes as the \"facts\" about independence, Wings also attempts to shine a light on newspapers' alleged bias.\n\nIn a podcast interview last year, Campbell said he wanted to \"shame\" the mainstream press and ensure newspapers did their job in a \"more even-handed way\".\n\nDoes he think newspapers have a duty to be even-handed? \"No is the short answer. They don't have a duty to. I think they should be.\"\n\nNewspaper stories, I say, are required to be accurate, not even-handed. Surely you are asking something of newspapers that they were never set up to deliver?\n\n\"They are perfectly at liberty to do that [not being even-handed] but if they're going to do that then they should expect that we will highlight that.\" Would he be sad if the Daily Mail closed? \"No.\" How about The Scotsman? \"No.\"\n\nLike Guido Fawkes and the US-based Drudge report, Wings is an internet phenomenon: on top of 4.5 million page views, 250,000 unique users visit the site every month. Campbell works around 14 hours a day on the site and is the poster boy for a certain type of online independence campaigner.\n\nAnd yet, Yes Scotland - the official campaign group for independence -won't touch Wings with a barge pole. Yes recently ordered a local group to stop distributing leaflets that endorsed the website.\n\nA senior Yes figure told the Sunday Herald that the reason for this distance can be summed up in one word: Hillsborough.\n\nIn September 2012, an independent panel confirmed that policing failures, not Liverpool fans, were to blame for a crush that led to the deaths of 96 people.\n\nBut on the day after the panel issued its findings, Campbell wrote a piece that pointed the finger squarely at Liverpool fans: \"The police's mendacious attempts to blame the fans for being drunk, late or ticketless were red herrings. The reality is much simpler, and required no lying - the fans were to blame because they, alone, were the ones who pushed and thereby caused the crush.\"\n\nCampbell now says of the article: \"Some people are upset at some of my personal views. I struggle to see what conceivable relevance they [his views] are. I stand absolutely by the stuff that I've written about Hillsborough.\"\n\nBut the panel said a lack of police control was to blame, not Liverpool fans.\n\n\"The inquiry has a very specific definition of blame. Listen, this isn't something that I particularly want to get into here. As I say, it's nothing to do with Scottish politics.\"\n\nIt's the reason people in Yes won't deal with him: \"The bottom line is I don't particularly care if people don't want to be associated with us.\"\n\nDoes he regret publishing it? \"No. As far as I am concerned, it is true.\" However, it would be wrong to say that Yes Scotland has had absolutely no contact with Campbell.\n\nAsked whether he had ever spoken to Yes chief executive Blair Jenkins, Campbell said: \"I have spoken to Blair on a number of occasions.\"\n\nWhen was the last time? \"I'm not particularly sure I want to reveal that.\"\n\nWings has also attracted money, with fundraisers reeling in nearly \u00a3150,000 from supporters.\n\nAs a result, Wings registered as a referendum campaigner, which means the source of donations over \u00a37500 has to be declared.\n\nThe website received a \u00a310,000 donation from a supporter, but this has not shown up on the register. He says the \u00a310,000 will be spent after the referendum, which falls outwith the rules.\n\nSo who is the donor?\n\n\"It was somebody who did appear on the Electoral Commission's list of donors that was published the other week,\" he says. Campbell declines to name the donor, but he rules out tycoon Brian Souter and lottery winners Colin and Chris Weir.\n\nLooking ahead to September 18, the Wings founder says he has \"no idea\" what the result will be.\n\nHowever, he worries about the effect of a No vote: \"The psychological damage to Scotland as a whole will be enormous.\"\n\nOne remaining mystery is Campbell's use of the word \"Rev\" before his name.\n\nHe does not have a university qualification, but he says he became a reverend in the 1990s.\n\nDoes he do weddings? \"I have not done weddings.\"\n\nFunerals? \"No.\"\n\nDoes he believe in God? \"Things evolve.\"\n\nHe says he uses Rev because a stalker used to edit his Wikipedia page in a way that directed people to a different Stuart Campbell who was a murderer.\n\nCampbell is an IT-literate troublemaker who has a long history of winding people up. A combination of the referendum, the internet and an edgy electorate has given him the perfect canvas."}
{"text":"The Football Association has announced that Alan Wiley will replace Merseyside official Mike Dean as referee for the FA Cup final between Liverpool and West Ham next month.\n\nThe 45-year-old Wiley took charge of this season's Carling Cup final between Manchester United and Wigan and replaces Dean due to the FA's policy of not using officials who come from the same area as one of the teams in question. \"The decision was taken following Liverpool's semi-final victory on Saturday,\" read an FA statement, contradicting an FA spokesman's earlier claim that, \"he's [Dean] been appointed, and that's not going to change.\"\n\nThe statement continuted: \"We have complete faith in Mike Dean's refereeing ability, integrity and impartiality. However, given the huge interest in all aspects of the FA Cup final, the fact that he is from the Wirral might lead to comment and debate which would place him under undue additional pressure.\n\n\"The decision has been taken with the best interests of Mike Dean and the competition in mind. At the age of 37, Mike Dean is still young enough to referee a future FA Cup final.\" The final will be held at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff on May 13."}
{"text":"Pony is a new programming language described on their site as \"an open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high performance programming language.\"\n\nIt has some interesting features and is different enough to existing popular programming languages to make it a nice diversion to experiment with. Some features include:\n\nlightweight actor based concurrency with M:N threading, mapping multiple language level threads to operating system threads.\n\nstrong static typing with generics\n\ndata-race free. The type system ensures at compile time that a concurrent program can never have data races.\n\ndeadlock free. There are no locking mechanisms exposed to the user so there are no deadlocks.\n\ncapabilities exposed to the type system to allow compile time enforcing of such things as objects that have no other references to it, immutable values, reference values, etc.\n\nlightweight C FFI\n\nThis post is an outline of my initial experiments with the languages including pitfalls to be aware of.\n\nInstalling\n\nPony can be installed from git and run from the build directory:\n\n$ git clone https:\/\/github.com\/CausalityLtd\/ponyc $ cd ponyc $ make config=release $ export PATH=`pwd`\/build\/release:$PATH $ ponyc --help\n\nRun tests with:\n\n$ make config=release test\n\nSome of the Pony standard packages dynamically load shared libraries. If they're not installed this will be reflected in build failures during the tests. The required libraries on a Linux based machine are openssl and pcre2-8 . To build Pony itself llvm version 3.6 needs to be installed. There is an llvm37 branch on github that works on Linux but is awaiting some llvm37 fixes before it is merged into master .\n\nPony can be installed in a default location, or using prefix to install it somewhere else:\n\n$ make config=release prefix=\/home\/user\/pony install\n\nOne catch is that running ponyc requires it to find the Pony runtime library libponyrt.a for linking purposes. This might not be found if installed somewhere that it doesn't expect. This can be resolved by setting the environment variable LIBRARY_PATH to the directory where libponyrt.a resides. I had to do this for the Nix Pony package.\n\nCompiling Pony programs\n\nA basic \"Hello World\" application looks like:\n\nactor Main new create(env: Env) => env.out.print(\"hello world\")\n\nPlace this in a main.pony file in a directory and compile:\n\n$ mkdir hello $ cat >hello\/main.pony actor Main new create(env: Env) => env.out.print(\"hello world\") $ ponyc hello $ .\/hello1 hello world\n\nponyc requires a directory as an argument and it compiles the *.pony files in that directory. It generates an executable based on the directory name, with a number appended if needed to prevent a name clash with the directory. The program starts executing by creating a Main actor and passing it an Env object allowing access to command line arguments, standard input\/output, etc. The Main actor can then create other actors or do whatever required for program execution.\n\nActors\n\nActors are the method of concurrency in Pony. An actor is like a normal object in that it can have state and methods. It can also have behaviours . A behaviour is a method that when called is executed asynchronously. It returns immediately and is queued to be run on an actor local queue. When the actor has nothing to do (not running an existing method or behaviour) it will pop the oldest queued behaviour and run that. An actor can only run one behaviour at a time - this means there needs to be no locking within the behaviour since access to actor local state is serialized. For this reason it's useful to think of an actor as a unit of sequential execution. Parallelism is achieved by utilising multiple actors.\n\nTo compare the difference between a standard object and an actor I'll use the following program:\n\nclass Logger let _env: Env let _prefix: String new create(env: Env, prefix: String) => _env = env _prefix = prefix fun log(msg: String, delay: U32) => @sleep[I32](delay) _env.out.print(_prefix + \": \" + msg) actor Main new create(env: Env) => let l1 = Logger.create(env, \"logger 1\") let l2 = Logger.create(env, \"logger 2\") l1.log(\"one\", 3) l2.log(\"two\", 1) l1.log(\"three\", 3) l2.log(\"four\", 1)\n\nThis creates a class called Logger that on construction takes an Env to use to output log messages and a string prefix to prepend to a message. It has a log method that will log a message to standard output after sleeping for a number of seconds given by delay . The unusual syntax for the sleep call is the syntax for calling the sleep C function using the Pony FFI. I'll cover this later.\n\nThe Main actor creates two loggers and logs twice to each one with a different delay. As a standard object using class is not asynchronous running this will result in a delay of three seconds, outputting the first log line, a delay of one second, outputting the second line, a delay of three seconds, outputting the third line and finally a delay of one second, outputting the final line. Everything happens on the single Pony thread that runs the Main actor's create constructor. Pony runs this on a single operating system thread. Total elapsed time is the sum of the delays.\n\nCompile and build with:\n\n$ mkdir clogger $ cat >clogger\/main.pony ..contents of program above... $ ponyc clogger $ time .\/clogger1 logger 1: one logger 2: two logger 1: three logger 2: four real 0m8.093s user 0m0.116s sys 0m0.132s\n\nChanging the Logger class to an actor and making the log method a behaviour will result in the logging happen asynchronously. The changes are:\n\nactor Logger let _env: Env let _prefix: String new create(env: Env, prefix: String) => _env = env _prefix = prefix be log(msg: String, delay: U32) => @sleep[I32](delay) _env.out.print(_prefix + \": \" + msg)\n\nNothing else in the program changes. I've just changed class to actor and fun to be . Now when the Main actor calls log it will add the behaviour call to the actor's queue and immediately return. Each Logger instance is running in its own Pony thread and will be mapped to an operating system thread if possible. On a multiple core machine this should mean each actor's behaviour is running on a different core.\n\nCompiling and running gives:\n\n$ mkdir alogger $ cat >alogger\/main.pony ..contents of program above... $ ponyc alogger $ time .\/alogger1 logger 2: two logger 2: four logger 1: one logger 1: three real 0m6.113s user 0m0.164s sys 0m0.084s\n\nNotice that the total elapsed time is now six seconds. This is the sum of the delays in the calls to log in the first Logger instance. The second instance is running on another OS thread so executes in parallel. Each log call immediately returns and is queued to run. The delays on the second Logger instance are shorter so they appear first. They two log calls on the second Logger run sequentially as behaviours on a single actor instance are executed in order. The log calls for the first Logger instance run after their delay, again sequentially for the calls within that actor.\n\nCapabilities\n\nPony uses reference capabilities to allow safe concurrent access to objects. In practice this means annotating types with a tag to indicate how 'sharable' an object is. For data to be passed to another actor it must be safe for that actor to use without data races. Reference capabilities allow enforcing this at compile time. There are defaults for most types so you don't need to annotate everything. Notice that none of the examples I've done so far use any capability annotations. I'll go through a few examples here but won't be exhaustive. The Pony tutorial has coverage of the combinations and defaults.\n\nval and ref\n\nA val capability is for value types. They are immutable and therefore anyone can read from them at any time. val objects can be passed to actors and used concurrently. Primitives like U32 are val by default. This is why none of the primitive arguments to behaviours in the previous examples needed annotation.\n\nA ref capability is for references to mutable data structures. They can be read from and written to and have multiple aliases to it. You can't share these with other actors as that would potentially cause data races. Classes are ref by default.\n\nThis is an example of passing a val to another actor:\n\nactor Doer be do1(n: U32) => None actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let n: U32 = 5 a.do1(n)\n\nAs U32 is a primitive it defaults to a val reference capability. It is immutable and can be read by anyone at any time so this compiles without problem. This example fails to compile however:\n\nclass Foo let n: U32 = 5 actor Doer be do1(n: Foo) => None actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b = Foo.create() a.do1(b)\n\nThe error is:\n\nmain.pony:5:13: this parameter must be sendable (iso, val or tag) be do1(n: Foo) => ^\n\nclass defaults to the ref capability which can be read, written and aliased. It can't be used to send to another actor as there's no guarantee that it won't be modifed by any other object holding a reference to it. The iso and tag capabilities mentioned in the error message are other capability types.\n\niso is for single references to data structures that can be read and written too. The type system guarantees that only one reference exists to the object. It is short for 'isolated'.\n\ntag is for identification only. Objects of capability tag cannot be read from or written too. They can only be used for object identity or, if they are an Actor, calling behaviours on them. Actors default to tag capabilities. Calling behaviours is safe as behaviour running is serialized for the actor instance and they don't return data.\n\nTo get the previous example to work we can force the Foo object to be of type val if it can be immutable:\n\nclass Foo let n: U32 = 5 actor Doer be do1(n: Foo val) => None actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b: Foo val = Foo.create() a.do1(b)\n\nref and iso\n\nLet's modify the example so we can change the value of the Foo object to demonstrate moving a mutable reference from one actor to another:\n\nclass Foo var n: U32 = 5 fun ref set(m: U32) => n = m fun print(env: Env) => env.out.print(n.string()) actor Doer be do1(env:Env, n: Foo iso) => n.print(env) actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b = Foo.create() a.do1(env, b)\n\nIn this example the do1 behaviour now requires an iso reference capability. As mentioned previously, iso means only one reference to the object exists therefore it is safe to read and write. But where we create the instance of Foo we have a reference to it in the variable b . Passing it as an argument to do1 effectively aliases it. The compile time error is:\n\nmain.pony:18:16: argument not a subtype of parameter a.do1(env, b) ^ main.pony:11:19: parameter type: Foo iso be do1(env:Env, n: Foo iso) => main.pony:18:16: argument type: Foo iso! a.do1(env, b) ^\n\nThis error states that do1 requires a Foo iso parameter whereas it is being passed a Foo iso! . The ! at the end means that it is an alias to another variable. Even though class objects are ref by default, Pony has inferred the capability for b as iso as we didn't declare a type for b and we are passing it to a function that wants an iso . However as it has an alias it can't be used as an iso therefore it's an error.\n\nOne way of avoiding the aliasing is to pass the result of the create call directly:\n\nactor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() a.do1(env, Foo.create())\n\nThere is no alias here so it compiles fine.\n\nIf we do want to have an initial reference to it, say to set a value first, we can tell the type system that we are consuming the existing reference and will no longer use it. This is what the consume keyword is for:\n\nactor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b = Foo.create() b.set(42) a.do1(env, consume b) \/\/ b.set(0)\n\nThis now compiles. Uncommenting out the use of b after the do1 call will be a compile error as we've consumed b and it no longer exists. In this case the error owuld be:\n\nmain.pony:20:5: can't use a consumed local in an expression b.set(0) ^ main.pony:20:6: invalid left hand side b.set(0)\n\nconsume is more often used for passing iso objects around. To pass it to another object you need to consume the existing reference to it. This becomes problematic if you are consuming a field of an object. Modifying the example so that the Foo is stored as a field of Main shows the problem:\n\nactor Main var b: Foo iso = Foo.create() new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() b.set(42) a.do1(env, consume b)\n\nThe error is:\n\nmain.pony:20:16: consume must take 'this', a local, or a parameter a.do1(env, consume b) ^\n\nb can't be consumed as it's a field of Main . It can't be left consumed - it must have a valid Foo iso object stored in it. In Pony assignment returns the old value of the variable being assigned too. This allows assigning a new value to the field and returning the old value in one operation and avoiding leaving the field in an invalid state:\n\nnew create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() b.set(42) a.do1(env, b = Foo.create())\n\nb gets a new value of a new instance of Foo and do1 gets passed the old value.\n\nThere's a lot more to capabilities and the capabilities section of the tutorial covers a lot. Although there are sane defaults it feels like that 'capability tutorials' will be the Pony equivalent of 'Monad tutorials' in other languages for a while. When I first was learning ATS I spent a lot of time floundering with function annotations to get things to compile, trying random changes, until I learnt how it worked. I'm probably at that stage with capabilities at the moment and I hope it becomes clearer as I write more Pony programs.\n\nPattern Matching\n\nPony has many of the concepts of most modern functional programming languages. Matching on values is allowed:\n\nlet x: U32 = 2 match x | 1 => \"one\" | 2 => \"two\" else \"3\" end\n\nUnion types with capturing:\n\ntype Data is (U32 | String | None) .... match x | None => \"None\" | 1 => \"one\" | let u: U32 => \"A number that is not one: \" + u.string() | let s: String => \"A string: \" + s end\n\nEnumerations are a bit verbose in that you have to use primitive to define each variant of the enumeration first:\n\nprimitive Red primitive Blue primitive Green type Colour is (Red | Blue | Green) ... let x: Colour = Red match x | Red => \"Red\" | Blue => \"Blue\" | Green => \"Green\" end\n\nC FFI\n\nPony has an easy to use C FFI. I showed an example of this previously:\n\n@sleep[I32](delay)\n\nThe @ signifies that this is a C FFI function call. The type in the backets is the return type of the C function call. The types of the arguments must match what the actual C function expects. Errors here will crash the program. Pony allows specifying the type of an FFI function in advance so argument types are checked. For sleep it would be:\n\nuse @sleep[I32](n: U32) ... @sleep(10)\n\nNote that it's no longer necessary to specify the return type at the call point as it's already been defined in the declaration.\n\nIf the C function is part of a library already linked into the Pony executable then there is no need use a statement to define the library file to link against. sleep is part of libc so it isn't needed. In the cases where you need to link against a specific library then the use statement is used in this manner:\n\nuse \"lib:foo\"\n\nThe addressof keyword is used to pass pointers to C code. It can be used for passing out parameters of primitives types:\n\nvar n: U32 = 0 @dosomething[None](addressof n) env.out.print(\"Result: \" + n.string())\n\nCallbacks\n\nThe FFI allows passing Pony functions to C for the C code to later call back. The syntax for this looks like:\n\nlet foo = Foo.create() @callmeback[None](addressof foo.method, foo)\n\nCalling C code example\n\nA working example for the following C function in a cbffi.c file:\n\nvoid do_callback(void (*func)(void* this, char* s), void* this) { func(this, \"hello world\"); }\n\nThe Pony code to use this is:\n\nuse \"lib:cbffi\" class Foo let prefix: String let env: Env new create(e: Env, p: String) => prefix = p env = e fun display(msg: Pointer[U8]) => env.out.print(prefix + \":\" + String.copy_cstring(msg)) actor Main new create(env: Env) => let foo = Foo.create(env, \"From Pony\") @do_callback[None](addressof foo.display, foo)\n\nNote that the display function takes a Pointer[U8] as an argument. Pointer[U8] is a generic type with U8 being the parameter. In this case it is the C string that the C function passes. Pony String types are an object with fields so C doesn't pass it directly. The String type has a couple of constructor functions that take Pointer[U8] as input and return a Pony String - the one used here, copy_cstring , makes a copy of the C string passed in.\n\nCompile with:\n\n$ mkdir cb $ cat >cb\/main.pony ...Pony code... $ cat >cb\/cbffi.c ...C code... $ gcc -fPIC -shared -o libcbffi.so cb\/cbffi.c $ LIBRARY_PATH=. ponyc cb $ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. .\/cb1 From Pony:hello world\n\nHere LIBRARY_PATH is set to find the shared library during compiling and linking. To run the generated executable LD_LIBRARY_PATH is used to find the shared library at runtime.\n\nIt's also possible to link against static C libraries:\n\n$ rm libcbffi.so $ gcc -c -o libcbffi.o cb\/cbffi.c $ ar -q libcbffi.a libcbffi.o $ LIBRARY_PATH=. ponyc cb $ .\/cb1 From Pony:hello world\n\nThings to look out for\n\nWhile writing Pony code I came across a couple of things to be aware of. Each actor has their own garbage collector but it runs only between behaviour calls. If a behaviour runs for a long time, never calling another actor behaviour, then it can be a while before garbage is collected. An example of where this can happen is a simple Main actor where everything is done in the default constructor and never calls another actor. Benchmarks can be an example here. No GC will occur and you can get an OOM (Out of Memory) situation.\n\nAnother is that there is no backpressure handling for behaviour calls on an actor. The message queues are unbounded so if a producer sends messages to an actor at a faster rate than it processes them then it will eventually OOM. This can occur if you have the message sender tied to an external process. For example a TCP listener that uses sockets and translates the data to a message to an actor. If the external users of the TCP interface (a webserver for example) are sending data faster than the actor handling the messages then OOM will occur. Slides from the Pony developers indicates that backpressure is on their radar to look at.\n\nAs usual with a new programming language there is a lack of libraries and library documentation. Expect to look through the Pony source code to find examples of how to do things. The tutorial is great though - even though parts are incomplete - and is on github.\n\nThere is a --docs command line argument that can be used to parse docstrings in Pony libraries and produce documentation in markdown format. For example:\n\n$ cd packages $ ponyc --docs collections $ ls collections-docs\/\n\nConclusion\n\nThis has only been a quick overview of some features of Pony. There's more too it. Some places to get more Pony information:"}
{"text":"An overtaxed bullpen forced the Rockies into a slew of moves Wednesday, as they optioned first-baseman Wilin Rosario to Triple-A Albuquerque to make room for relief pitcher John Axford.\n\nRight-hander Scott Oberg was also recalled to the Rockies, while LaTroy Hawkins was placed on the disabled list with a biceps injury.\n\nRosario will play every day for the Isotopes at first base. The Rockies sent him down to make room for Axford. Several short outings from their starting pitching staff in recent games put pressure on the Rockies\u2019 bullpen, and they need relief reinforcement.\n\nRosario was not happy about the move.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t feel good,\u201d Rosario said. \u201cI\u2019d be lying to you if I said that. I need to be here. I\u2019m playing at a big-league level.\u201d\n\nRosario, who was converted from starting catcher into a back-up first baseman in the offseason, is hitting .357 with three doubles in 14 at-bats this season.\n\n\u201cI feel really good swinging,\u201d Rosario said. \u201cIt\u2019s something I can do, is hit. Whether they play me here or not play me every day, when I get an opportunity, the time that I do get, I play well. I give the team a chance to win.\u201d\n\nThe Rockies on Monday got just two innings from starting pitcher Jorge De La Rosa, then five more from Tyler Matzek on Tuesday \u2014 both losses to the Padres at Coors Field. Their relief corps took on too much work in too short a span.\n\nSo the Rockies will move forward with an eight-man bullpen.\n\n\u201cOur hands were tied on this one,\u201d manager Walt Weiss said. \u201cIt was really the only possible move we could make\u2026 The bullpen is what needs protecting at the moment.\u201d\n\nAxford returns from the restricted list after missing 10 days while caring for his 2-year-old son, who is recovering from a rattlesnake bite. His son, Jameson, returned home Wednesday exactly one month after he was rushed to a Phoenix-area hospital. He\u2019s since been moved to Denver and is using a wheelchair while his foot recovers from the bite.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve kept myself prepared and game-ready this entire time,\u201d Axford said.\n\nOberg will return after he was optioned to Triple-A on Monday. He allowed three home runs against the Dodgers in inning Sunday in a 7-0 loss.\n\nHawkins, the team\u2019s former closer, pitched one scoreless inning Tuesday. But a lingering bicep injury forced him to the 15-day DL.\n\n\u201cThis gives him some time to recover,\u201d Weiss said.\n\nLooking ahead\n\nPadres\u2019 Tyson Ross (1-0, 4.08 ERA) at Rockies\u2019 Jordan Lyles (1-1, 3.50), 1:10 p.m. Thursday, no TV; 850 AM\n\nThrough three turns of the rotation, Lyles has been the Rockies\u2019 best pitcher in the early going. His ERA doesn\u2019t match Eddie Butler or Tyler Matzek. But he stays in games, throwing six innings each game so far. In his best outing \u2014 in a 6-5 loss to the Cubs in Denver \u2014 Lyles allowed just one run and struck out three. He\u2019s 5-1 all time at Coors Field with a 4.70 ERA. But he\u2019s just 1-3 with a 6.30 ERA against the Padres.\n\nFriday: Giants\u2019 Chris Heston (2-1, 0.87 ERA) at Rockies\u2019 Eddie Butler (1-1, 2.25), 6:40 p.m., ROOT\n\nSaturday: Giants\u2019 Tim Hudson (0-2, 3.93) at Rockies\u2019 Jorge De La Rosa (0-1, 31.50), 6:10 p.m., ROOT\n\nSunday: Giants\u2019 Tim Lincecum (1-1, 2.00) at Rockies\u2019 Tyler Matzek (1-0, 2.40), 2:10 p.m., ROOT\n\nNick Groke, The Denver Post"}
{"text":"Harry and Leia and the BBC Proms (Picture: Getty Images)\n\nHarry Potter, Princess Leia, E.T. and Indiana Jones will be joining the BBC Proms for the first time in 2017 as part of a celebration of John Williams\u2019 85th birthday.\n\nNetflix has changed The Notebook\u2019s ending and people are really, really angry\n\nThe BBC Concert Orchestra will pay tribute to the award-winning and iconic film composer John Williams with a selection of his most famous film scores, including Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Jaws.\n\n\u2018Will people come dressed as Star Wars characters? I\u2019d be really disappointed if they don\u2019t,\u2019 said Proms director David Pickard after the news was revealed.\n\nLuke, Leia, and Han (Picture: Disney)\n\nPerformances during the annual classical music festival will also for the first time take place outside of London, with three performances planned in Hull, the 2017 City Of Culture.\n\n\u2018I thought it was important, most specifically this year, to mark Hull as a City of Culture,\u2019 said David.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\u2018I was also looking to expand the initiative we took last year of taking some Proms out of the Albert Hall.\u2019\n\nThe BBC Proms (Picture: BBC\/: Mark Allan)\n\nElsewhere the festival will 100 years since the births of Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie with a concert starring vocalist Dianne Reeves and trumpeter James Morrison.\n\nElla Fitzgerland (Picture: BBC)\n\nThe music of jazz giant Charles Mingus will be celebrated by conductor Jules Buckley, while BBC Radio 2 presenter Clare Teal returns with bandleaders Guy Barker and Winston Rollins for a concert celebrating big band legends including Duke Ellington, and Jools Holland and His Rhythm and Blues Orchestra pay tribute to the legendary Stax\/Volt Revue, credited for its championing of Southern and Memphis soul music.\n\nMORE: BBC Proms presenter Katie Derham is Strictly Come Dancing\u2019s fifth contestant\n\nMORE: Expect thunderous applause for Joseph Calleja at the BBC Proms"}
{"text":"The Monday Morning Quarterback | A quick analysis of important economic data released over the past week\n\nU.S. Snapshot\n\nThe government shutdown weighed heavily on the minds of consumers as the confidence index dropped from 80.2 in September to 71.2 in October. The index now stands below levels reached a year ago.\n\nNational retail sales for September declined 0.1% from last month, but, are 3.2% above a year ago. This is a sign of weakness going into the Christmas season.\n\nSales of light vehicles and trucks fell a sharp 5.2% in September following a 1.9% rise in August. The drop was led by domestic trucks, down 7.5%. Domestic cars were down 5.1%. Import autos were down only 1.8%.\n\nConsumer prices were up 0.2% in September vs. August and now stand a modest 1.2% over a year ago. This is good news and bad news. The bad news is that the modest increases are below the Fed target of 2.0% and reflect very weak domestic demand.\n\nGrowth in industrial production topped expectations in September. But, it was all about atypically cool weather. Manufacturing was still flat. Overall, industrial production was up 0.6% following a rise of 0.4% in August. The gain was primarily due to a surge in utilities as cool weather boosted utility demand.\n\nCapacity utilization rose to 78.3% from 77.9% in September. While this is an improvement, it is still below the 80% that has historically been associated with increases in plant spending.\n\nAccording to the Institute for Supply Management, manufacturing expanded in October for the fifth consecutive month and the overall economy grew for the 53rd consecutive month.\n\nPending home sales declined for the fourth consecutive month in September as higher mortgage interest rates and higher home prices curbed buying power. The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward looking indicator based on contract signings, fell 5.6% to 101.6 in September from a downwardly revised 107.6 in August. The index is at the lowest level since December 2012.\n\nAccording to the S&P\/Case-Shiller home price index, home prices continued to climb nationally. Both the 10 and 20-city indices were up 12.8% over a year ago and 1.3% in August vs. July.\n\nArizona Snapshot\n\nAccording to data compiled by Fletcher Wilcox and the Cromford Report, it appears the major disruptions in the Greater Phoenix home market is near an end. September foreclosure starts were below 2006 levels. Auctioned properties were the lowest since 2006. Short sales were the lowest since 2007. Virtually every indicator of disruption was down significantly.\n\nAccording to CBRE, the Greater Phoenix office market continues to improve. For all three quarters of 2013 reported, absorptions significantly exceeded change in inventory. Thus, vacancy rates are down 1.7 percentage points over the last year. While vacancies are still very high by historic standards, they are moving in the right direction. The same is true in retail markets where vacancies are down 0.8 percentage points over the past year and are approaching 10%. Industrial markets are more mixed as change in inventory for the first three quarters of the year exceeded absorption by over 1 million square feet."}
{"text":"When will my order be dispatched?\n\nAll orders through the Royal Mail delivery service will be dispatched up until 5.20pm (Monday \u2013Friday), with DPD deliveries up until 5.00pm (Monday \u2013Friday). During busy periods such as Christmas we can dispatch on Saturday as well though.\n\nIf your order is placed outside of these hours it will be dispatched the next working day (Monday \u2013Friday).\n\nIf an item is on pre order and not in stock, this will be dispatched as soon as further stock arrives into our warehouse.\n\nHow will my order be shipped?\n\nAt checkout you will have a selection of delivery options. This will determine the service your order is shipped out on.\n\nWhat would the delivery time of my order be?\n\nUK Royal Mail First Class\n\nOn dispatch to you can expect to receive your order within 1-3 working days. Royal Mail First Class (Signed For)\n\nOn dispatch with you can expect to receive your order within 1-3 working days. DPD \u2018Next Business Day\u2019 (UK Mainland)\n\nOn dispatch you can expect to receive your order the next business day (Monday \u2013Friday). Please note this will exclude some areas of Scotland which can take up to two working days for delivery. DPD have improved their service by introducing facility to track where the driver is 15 minutes before delivery. Click for more details... International International Royal Mail First Class & International Royal Mail First Class (Tracked)\n\nTimes will vary depending on your countries import regulations and postal service. Please check with your local Post Office for an estimate on how long it takes to ship items from the UK to your country."}
{"text":"Something notable took place on the streets of London after the attack on Westminster Bridge which was carried out by Khalid Masood.\n\nThe usual picture has been that after a major terrorist attack, there is a corresponding significant peak and rise in anti-Muslim hatred. After Westminster, we did not see what was expected and there was no major peak in anti-Muslim hatred picked up across the country. If there was, our work within Tell MAMA would have immediately been alerted to this.\n\nThis raises some interesting questions. What was there about this terrible incident that did not create major ramifications for cohesion and policing within our country? What was done on this occassion to reduce possible impacts on communities and which also impacted on the frequency of anti-Muslim hate crime incidents across the country \u2013 with no major peak after what was a major terrorist incident? This is the first major terrorist incident in the last 3 years where there has not been a significant rise and peak in anti-Muslim hatred.\n\nWe understand that some groups put out messages asking people to significantly change behaviour patterns on the assumption of a major anti-Muslim backlash. We believe that such advice, (given no large scale backlash after the Westminster terrorist murders), was counter-productive and was not borne out with evidence on this occassion. Such advice may also impact heavily on the confidence of the more vulnerable in communities and we ask that agencies reflect on the messaging that they put out.\n\nWhat we can say though is that the capital still remains resilient against major community divisions and that the lives of Londoners as whole were not significanty impacted upon because of the terrorist attack. There are times when we can feel a sense of hope and the last week provides us with a real window of hope. London truly is a great city."}
{"text":"Somalia had every reason to succeed: an advantageous geographical situation, oil, ores and only one religion and one language for the whole territory; a rare phenomenon in Africa. Somalia could have been a great power in the region. But the reality is completely different: famine, wars, lootings, piracy, bomb attacks. How did this country sink? Why has there been no Somali government for approximately twenty years? Which scandals stand behind those pirates who hijack our ships? In this new chapter of our series \u201cUnderstanding the Muslim World\u201d, Mohamed Hassan explains for us why and how imperialist forces have applied in Somalia a chaos theory.\n\nHow did piracy develop in Somalia? Who are those pirates?\n\nSince 1990, there has been no government in Somalia. The country is in the hands of warlords. European and Asiatic ships took advantage of this chaotic situation and fished along the Somali coast without a license or respect for elementary rules. They did not observe the quotas in force in their own country to protect the species and they used fishing techniques \u2013even bombs!- that created huge damages to the wealth of the Somali seas.\n\nThat\u2019s not all! Taking also advantage of this lack of any political authority, European companies, with the help of the mafia, dumped nuclear wastes offshore Somali coasts. Europe knew of this but turned a blind eye as that solution presented a practical and economical advantage for the nuclear waste management. Yet, the 2005 Tsunami brought a big part of these wastes into the Somali lands. Unfamiliar diseases appeared for the first time among the population. This is the context in which the piracy mainly developed. Somali fishermen, who had primitive fishing techniques, were no more able to work. So they decided to protect themselves and their seas. This is exactly what the United States did during the civilian war against the British (1756-1763): with no naval forces, President George Washington made a deal with pirates to protect the wealth of the American seas.\n\nNo Somali state for almost twenty years! How is that possible?\n\nThis is the result of an American strategy. In 1990, the country was bruised by conflicts, famine and lootings; the state collapsed. Facing this situation, the United States, who discovered oil in Somalia a few years ago, launched Operation Restore Hope in 1992. For the first time, US marines intervened in Africa to take control of a country. It was also the first time that a military invasion was launched in the name of humanitarian interference.\n\nThe famous rice bag exhibited on a Somali beach by Bernard Kouchner?\n\nYes, everybody remembers those pictures carefully showcased. But the real reasons were strategic. An US State Department report recommended indeed that the United States must stay the lonely global superpower after the Soviet Bloc collapse. To reach that goal, the report advocated to occupy a hegemonic position in Africa, which enjoys a vast amount of raw materials.\n\nHowever, Restore Hope will be a failure. There was even that Hollywood movie \u201cBlack Hawk Down\u201d, with those poor G.I.\u2019s \u201cattacked by the bad Somali rebels\u201d\u2026\n\nUS soldiers were indeed defeated by a Somali nationalist resistance. Since then, American policy was to keep Somalia without any real government, even to balkanize it. This is the old British strategy, already applied in many places: setting weak and divided states in order to better rule them. That is why there has been no Somali state for almost twenty years. The United States has implemented a chaos theory in order to stop any Somali reconciliation and keep the country divided.\n\nIn Sudan, due to the civilian war, Exxon has had to leave the country after having discovered oil. So isn\u2019t letting Somalia plunge into chaos contrary to American interests, which cannot exploit the discovered oil?\n\nOil exploitation is not their priority. The United States know that the reserves are there but doesn\u2019t need it immediately. Two elements are much more important in its strategy. First, prevent the competitors from negotiating with a rich and powerful Somali state. If you consider Sudan, the comparison is interesting. The oil that the American companies discovered there thirty years ago, Sudan is selling it today to China. The same thing could happen in Somalia. When he was president of the transition government, Abdullah Yusuf went to China although he was supported by the United States. US mass media had strongly criticized that visit. The fact is that United States have no guarantee on that point: if a Somali government is established tomorrow, whatever is its political color, it could probably adopt a strategy independent of United States and trade with China. Western imperialists do not want a strong and unified Somali state. The second goal pursued by this chaos theory is linked to the geographical location of Somalia, which is strategic for both European and American imperialists.\n\nWhy is it strategic?\n\nThe issue is the control of the Indian Ocean. Look at the map. As mentioned, western powers have an important share of the responsibility in the Somali piracy development. But instead of telling the truth and paying compensation for what they did, those powers criminalize the phenomena in order to justify their position in the region. Under the pretext of fighting the piracy, NATO is positioning its navy in the Indian Ocean.\n\nSource: Wikipeda\n\nWhat is the real goal?\n\nTo control the economic development of the emerging powers, mainly India and China. Half of the world\u2019s container traffic and 70% of the total traffic of petroleum products passes through the Indian Ocean. From that strategic point of view, Somalia is a very important place: the country has the longest coast of Africa (3.300 km) and faces the Arabian Gulf and the Straight of Hormuz, two key points of the region economy. Moreover, if a pacific response is brought to the Somali problem, relations between African in one hand, and India and China on the other hand, could develop through the Indian Ocean. Those American competitors could then have influence in that African area. Mozambique, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania, Zanzibar, South Africa etc. All those countries connected to the Indian Ocean could gain easy access to the Asian market and develop fruitful economic relationship. Nelson Mandela, when he was president of South Africa, had mentioned the need of an Indian Ocean revolution, with new economic relationships. The United States and Europe do not want this project. That is why they prefer to keep Somalia unstable..\n\nYou say that the United States does not want Somali reconciliation. But what are the roots of the Somali divisions?\n\nIn order to understand this chaotic situation, we must delve into Somali history. This country had been divided by colonial powers. In 1959, Somalia gained independence through the fusion of the Italian colony in the South, and the British colony in the North. But Somalis were also living in some parts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. The new Somali state adopted a star on its flag, each branch representing one part of the historical Somalia. The message behind that symbol: \u201cTwo Somalias have been united, but three are still colonized\u201d.\n\nFacing the legitimacy of those claims, the British \u2013 who controlled Kenya-, organized a referendum in the Kenyan area claimed by Somalia. 87% of the population, composed mainly of Somali ethnics, voted for the Somali unity. When the results were published, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kenyan nationalist leader, threatened the British to throw the colonists out if they gave a part of the territory up to Somalia. So Great Britain decided not to take the referendum into account, and today an important Somali community is still living in Kenya. You must understand that those colonial borders were a real disaster in the Somali case. The border issue was besides the object of an important debate among the African continent.\n\nWhat was the issue of that debate?\n\nIn the sixties, as many African countries became independent, there was a debate between what we called the Monrovia and the Casablanca groups. This later, including among others Morocco and Somalia, resolved that the borders inherited from colonialism be discussed. For them, those boundaries had no legitimacy. But most of the African countries and their borders are colonialism products. Finally, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the ancestor of the current African Union, closed the debate by decreeing that the borders were indisputable: going back over those boundaries would provoke civilian wars everywhere on the continent. Later, one of the OAU architects, the Tanzanian Julius Nyerere, confessed that this decision was the best but that he regretted the Somali outcome.\n\nWhat will be the impact of the colonial divisions on Somalia?\n\nThey will create strains with neighboring countries. During those years when Somalia advocated for revising the borders, Ethiopia became a US imperialism bastion. The United States had also military bases in Kenya and Eritrea. At this moment, Somalia, a young pastoral democracy, wished to build its own army. The goal was to not appear weak in front of the armed neighbors, to support Somali movements in Ethiopia and even to regain by force, if necessary, some territories. But the western forces were opposed to the creation of a Somali army.\n\nSo Somalia had tense relations with its neighbors. Was it not reasonable to be opposed to this Somali army project? It would have provoked wars, wouldn\u2019t it?\n\nThe West did not care about conflicts between Africans but its own interests. The United States and Great Britain were providing and training militaries in Ethiopia, Kenya and Eritrea. Those countries were still under the yoke of very repressive feudal systems. But they were also neocolonial regimes devoted to Western interests. On the other hand, the power in place in Somalia was more democratic and independent. So the West had no interest in providing for a country that could escape its control.\n\nAs a consequence, Somalia decided to turn to the Soviet Union. This frightened the Western forces that feared Soviet influence stretching in to Africa. Those fears became more important with the 1969 putsch.\n\nWhat do you mean?\n\nSocialist ideas were spread in the country. An important Somali community was indeed living in Aden in South Yemen. However, this is where Britain used to exile persons it considered dangerous in India: communists, nationalists and so on. They used to be arrested and sent to Aden where nationalist and revolutionary ideas quickly developed and affected later both Yemenites and Somalis. Under the influence of civilians with Marxist ideas, a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat was led by officers in 1969 and Siad Barre took power in Somalia.\n\nWhat were the reasons of that coup d\u2019\u00e9tat?\n\nThe Somali government was corrupted. He had however the cards in hand to erect the country to the great regional power rank: a strategic position, only one language, one religion and many common cultural elements. This is fairly rare in Africa. But, by missing the economical development of the country, this government has created a context favorable to divisions among clans. Under the pretext of doing politics, Somali elites become divided. Everyone created his own political party, without any real program, and recruited voters among the existing clans. This increased the divisions and turned out to be totally useless. A democracy in a liberal type was in fact unsuitable for Somalia: there were at once 63 political parties for a three million population country! And the government was even not able to adopt an official script, which was creating serious troubles in the administration. Education was weak. Bureaucracy, police and army were, however, established. This later will play a key role in the progressive coup d\u2019\u00e9tat.\n\n\u201cProgressive\u201d! With the army?\n\nThe army was the only organized institution in Somalia. As a repressive apparatus, it was supposed to protect the so-called civilian government and the elite. But for many Somalis coming from different families and areas, the army was also an exchange place where there were no borders, no tribalism, no clan divisions. This is how Marxist ideas from Aden circulated among the army. So the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat was led by officers who were most of all nationalist. They did not have a good knowledge of socialism but they had sympathy for those ideas. Moreover, they knew what was happening in Vietnam, and that fed anti-imperialist feelings. The civilians, who knew Marx and Lenin\u2019s teachings lacked a mass political party, supported the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat and become the advisers of the officers who took power.\n\nWhat changes did the Somali coup d\u2019\u00e9tat bring about?\n\nOne important positive aspect: the new government quickly adopted an official script. Likewise, the Soviet Union and China were helping Somalia. The students and the population mobilized themselves. Education and social conditions were enhanced. The years that followed the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat were in fact the best ones that Somalia never knew. That is, until 1977.\n\nWhat happened?\n\nSomalia, which has been divided by colonial forces, attacked Ethiopia to get the territory of Ogaden back. Ogaden was mainly populated by Somalis. At this time however, Ethiopia was itself a socialist state supported by the Soviets. This country had been led for a long time by Emperor Selassie. But in the seventies, there was an important mobilization to overthrow him. The students\u2019 movement, in which I personally participated, made four major demands. First, to nonviolently and democratically resolve tensions with Eritrea. Secondly, to establish a land reform that would distribute the lands to the peasants. Thirdly, to establish the principle of equality among the nationalities; Ethiopia was a multinational country led by elite who did not represent the diversity. Fourthly, to abolish the feudal system and to establish a democratic state. As in Somalia, the army was the only organized institution in Ethiopia and the civilians joined the officers to overthrow Selassie in 1974.\n\nHow did two socialist states, each supported by the Soviet Union, enter conflict?\n\nAfter the Ethiopian revolution, a delegation including Soviet Union, Cuba and South Yemen organized a round table with Ethiopia and Somalia in order to resolve their contradiction. Castro went to Addis Abeba and Mogadishu. To him, Somali claims were justified. Finally, the Ethiopian delegation agreed to seriously seriously its Somali neighbor\u2019s demands. The two countries made an agreement stipulating that no provocation should happen as long as no decision has been taken. Things seemed to start well but Somalia did not honor the agreement\u2026\n\nTwo days after the Ethiopian delegation returned to its country, Henry Kissinger, a former Nixon Secretary of State, turned up to Mogadishu. Kissinger was representing an unofficial organization: the Safari Club that was among others including Shah\u2019s Iran, Mobutu\u2019s Congo, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and French and Pakistani intelligence services. The objective of that organization was to fight against the Soviet infiltration in the Gulf and in Africa. Under the Safari Club pressures and help promises, Siad Barre committed a disastrous strategic mistake of attacking Ethiopia.\n\nWhat were the consequences of that war?\n\nSoviets left the region. Somalia, still led by Siad Barre, integrated the neocolonial network of the imperialist forces. The country had been seriously damaged by the conflict and the World Bank and the IFM were in charge of \u201crebuilding\u201d it. This has aggravated infighting among Somali bourgeoisie. Each regional elite wanted to have its own market. They made the divisions among the clans\u2019 worst and contributed to the progressive dislocation of their country up to Siad Barre\u2019s fall in 1990. Since that, any head of state succeeded to him.\n\nBut, thirty years after the Ogaden war, the opposite scenario happened: Ethiopia was supported by the United States to attack Somalia\u2026\n\nYes, as I said, since the Restore Hope failure, United States has preferred to keep Somalia in chaos. However, in 2006, a spontaneous movement developed under the Islamic courts to fight against the local warlords and bring unity to the country. It was a kind of Intifada. In order to stop this movement from rebuilding Somalia, United States decided suddenly to support the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) after having refused to recognize it before. In fact, they realized that their project of a Somalia without effective state was no more possible: a movement \u2013 furthermore Islamic!- was about to lead to a national reconciliation. In order to sabotage the Somali unity, United States decided to support the TFG. But this later was lacking any social basis and an army. So the Ethiopian troops, commanded by Washington, attacked Mogadishu to overthrow the Islamic courts.\n\nDid it work?\n\nNo, the Ethiopian army was defeated and had to leave Somalia. On their side, the Islamic courts were dispersed in several movements that still control a big part of the country today. As for Abdulla Yusuf\u2019s transitional government, he collapsed and United States replaced it by Sheik Sharif, the former Islamic Court spokesman.\n\nSo Sheik Sharif has passed to \u201cthe other camp\u201d?\n\nHe used to be the Islamic courts spokesman because he is a good orator. But he has no political knowledge. He has no idea what imperialism or nationalism are. That is why western powers took him back. He was the Islamic court\u2019s weak link. Today he chairs a fake government, created in Djibouti. This government has no social base or authority in Somalia. It only exists on the international level because the imperialist forces support it.\n\nIn Afghanistan, the United States said they were ready to negotiate with Taliban. Why don\u2019t they look for discussing with the Islamic groups in Somalia?\n\nBecause those groups want to take the foreign occupier over and to allow a national reconciliation for the Somali people. As a result, the United States wants to break those groups: a reconciliation, through the Islamic movement or through the TFG, is not in the interests of the imperialist forces. They just want chaos. The problem is that today, this chaos reached Ethiopia too, which is very weak since the 2007 aggression. A nationalist resistance movement came to the light over there to fight against the pro-imperialist government of Addis Ababa. With their chaos theory, United States had in fact created troubles in the whole region. And now, they took it out on Eritrea.\n\nWhy?\n\nThis little country leads an independent national policy. Eritrea also has a vision for the whole region: the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia) do not need foreign powers\u2019 interference; its wealth should allow it to establish new economical relationship on the basis of mutual respect. According to Eritrea, the region must get it together and its members must be able to discuss about their problems. Of course, this policy frightens United States that fears that other countries follow that example. So they accuse Eritrea of sending weapons to Somalia and instigating troubles in Ethiopia.\n\nIsn\u2019t Eritrea sending weapons in Somalia?\n\nNot even a bullet! This is a pure propaganda as they did against Syria about the Iraqi resistance. Eritrea\u2019s vision catches up with the project of Indian Ocean revolution that we spoke about before. The western powers do not want of that and wish to bring Eritrea back to the circle of the neocolonial states under control, such as Kenya, Ethiopia or Uganda.\n\nAre there no terrorist in Somalia?\n\nImperialist powers have always labeled as terrorists the people who fight for their right. Irishmen were terrorists until they signed an agreement. Abbas was a terrorist. Now, he is a friend.\n\nBut we heard about Al Qaeda in Somalia?\n\nAl Qaeda is everywhere, from Belgium to Australia! That invisible Al Qaeda is a logo designed to justify to the public opinion military operations. If United States say to their citizens and soldiers: \u201cWe are going to send our troops into the Indian Ocean in order to probably fight against China\u201d, people would be afraid of course. But if you tell them that it is just about fighting piracy and Al Qaeda, it won\u2019t be a problem. The real goal is however different. It consists in setting forces in the Indian Ocean region that will be the theater of major conflicts in the coming years. This is what we will analyze in the next chapter\u2026\n\nMohamed Hassan is a geopolitics and Arab world specialist. Born in Addis Abeba (Ethiopia), he participated in student movements on the occasion of the socialist revolution of 1974 in his country. He studied political science in Egypt before specializing in public administration in Brussels. As a diplomat for his country of origin, he worked in Washington, Beijing and Brussels. Co-writer of L\u2019Irak sous occupation (EPO, 2003), he has also contributed to books about Arab nationalism, Islamic movements and Flemish nationalism. He is one of the best contemporary experts on the Arab and Muslim world.\n\nUnderstanding the Muslim World with Mohamed Hassan \u2013 Previous chapters:\n\nYemen: USA are fighting against democracy, not against Al-Qaeda\n\nWhat should Ahmadinejad do to get the Nobel Price?\n\nAfghanistan \u2013 Pakistan: the black hole of the empire\n\nThe Darfur crisis: blood, hunger and oil\n\n\u201cGaza is a normal place with normal people\u201d\n\nHow can we explain the success of Hamas ?\n\nTo examine the subject in depth, Mohamed Hassan recommends the following publications:\n\nMohamed Omar, The Road to Zero: Somalia\u2019s Self-Destruction, Haan Publishing,1993\n\nBabu, Abdul, Rahman Mohamed. African Socialism or Socialist Africa? Londres, Zed Press, 1981, 190 p.\n\nHersi, Ali Abdirahman, The Arab factor in Somali history : the origins and the development of Arab enterprise and cultural influences in the Somali Peninsula, Thesis\u2013University of California, Los Angeles, 1977\n\nMichel Cara\u00ebl, La ruine du pansomalisme, in Le Monde diplomatique, octobre 1982\n\nMahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror,\n\nJohn K. Cooley, Unholy wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, Pluto Press, 2000\n\nJohn Drysdale, Whatever Happened to Somalia?, Haan Publishing, 1994\n\nTranslation review: Fausto Giudice"}
{"text":"Susan Collins dismisses Palin presidential bid\n\nBy Rachel Weiner\n\nOn Tuesday, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) made headlines for saying Sarah Palin cost Republicans the Senate. (Some analysis of that claim here.) Now Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is throwing cold water on the idea of a Palin 2012 run. She told the Kennebec Journal:\n\n\"I think she likes being a celebrity commentator for Fox and a speaker and being able to provide for her family,\" Collins said. \"I think that life appeals to her. It's a lot easier to charge people up than to actually govern.\"\n\nCollins also argues that moderates like herself will still have power in the new Congress. She says that as soon as he won, Senator-elect Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) called her up to say, \"I can't wait to join your Mod Squad.\""}
{"text":"Skip Holtz has scored his second big win against his alma mater in less than a calendar year.\n\nThe South Florida coach will add former Notre Dame defensive end Aaron Lynch to the Bulls' roster in 2012, the school announced Monday.\n\n\"With Aaron originally being from Florida, we're very familiar with the kind of player he is,\" Holtz said in a news release. \"Aaron had a great freshman season at Notre Dame and we're excited to welcome him into the Bulls family.\"\n\nThe Irish announced April 13 that Lynch would transfer at the end of the spring semester. Lynch, a Cape Coral, Fla., native, earned freshman All-American honors in 2011, recording team bests of 5.5 sacks and 14 quarterback hurries, in addition to 33 tackles, seven tackles for loss and a forced fumble. He played in 12 games and started six.\n\nBarring a waiver from the NCAA to play immediately, Lynch will have to sit out the 2012 season.\n\nLynch's first college game was the Sept. 3 opener against USF, which upset the Irish, 23-20, in South Bend, Ind.\n\nWith former Notre Dame and current New York Giants defensive end Justin Tuck in town over the weekend to serve as an honorary captain for the Irish's spring game, Lynch's mother, Alice, posted a message to Tuck on Twitter asking him to talk Lynch into staying at Notre Dame. It proved to be too little, too late, as the 6-foot-6, 270-pound Lynch is heading home to Florida.\n\nHoltz, the Bulls' coach, is the son of ESPN analyst and former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz."}
{"text":"I have received many a question about details of the game and this video will help shed a bit more light. We will communicate all of the remaining points of our vision shortly after we start production next week and after we have spent more time on the forums. We want to get fan feedback on a few more items before we solidify our final vision document.\n\nI did want to give some detail on what the definition of a party based game was since there seems to be some confusion. In specific terms you will be creating and customizing four Rangers at the start of the game and typically you would give each of them different skills to create experts in certain fields. Skills in Wasteland range from lock-picking to bomb disarming to even toaster repair. This creates the dynamic of having players taking very different approaches to exploring the world. In addition there will be three slots for non-player characters to join the party. They will be similar in most respects to a player created member except you will not have 100% control over them. They will have quirks that could range from momentary indecision with them not firing their weapons at an opportune time, to being trigger happy and wasting ammo or even stealing from your characters. This opens up a wide range of possibilities on which NPCs you decide to have join your ranks.\n\nAnd while we have brought Obsidian into the mix, I think it is important to note that this is my baby, and I will be producing it and managing the programming here at inXile. There seemed to be some confusion on whether it will be a joint production, but the main facets of our involvement are with the use of their tools for asset integration and the design talents of Chris Avellone. Part of the charm and variety of Wasteland 1 came from the way different designers would approach their areas, and I wanted the same dynamic again. Only this time we have added the brains of Chris into the mix, and I am betting he will add ideas to Wasteland 2 that would have never been in the game otherwise.\n\nDue to popular demand, we have added a backer only T-shirt to the rewards. Here is a preview of what a few of the shirts will look like.\n\nI hope you find the video useful. We are now in the final stretch...."}
{"text":"ST. GEORGE \u2014 Saturday night, police officers were notified that at dusk a 17-year-old boy had run from a youth wilderness program\u2019s campsite in a rugged, uninhabited area of desert backcountry close to an area known as Jackson Springs near the Gunlock Reservoir. On the way to search for the boy, a member of the Washington County Sheriff\u2019s Search and Rescue team lost control of his Jeep on the unpaved Motaqua Road, causing the vehicle to roll. The SAR member was hospitalized and later found to have a concussion, while the search resumed for the boy.\n\nIn the dark, rescue teams, some in all-terrain vehicles others on-foot, dispersed throughout the backcountry near Jackson Springs and Pachoon Flats. The boy was said to not have a flashlight or food, and only a small amount of water.\n\nAbout 15 of the 70 SAR members in Washington County helped search for the boy, Washington County Sheriff\u2019s Deputy Darell Cashin, who manages the SAR team, said. All of the SAR members on Cashin\u2019s team are nonpaid volunteers, and the majority of them use their own equipment, vehicles, and in this case, tracking dogs during rescues.\n\nIn this instance, the Jeep that rolled was a personal vehicle of the SAR member who was driving it toward the lost boy. The visibility on the dirt road was poor because of dust from the convoy of SAR vehicles, Cashin said. Cashin was following two cars behind the Jeep on a dirt road and saw the Jeep roll.\n\n\u201cHe came around this corner and just washboarded and turned his Jeep,\u201d Cashin said, \u201cflipped onto his side and knocked him out.\u201d\n\nHe had no broken bones and there was no bleeding, but the SAR member sustained a concussion and was transported by ambulance to the Dixie Regional Medical Center, Cashin said. He was checked out at the hospital and later cleared to leave.\n\nWhile their team member was hospitalized, the rest of the SAR team arrived at the campsite from where the boy ran and began the search. Most of the team spread out in Jeeps or ATVs, looking for the boy.\n\nOne team that was on foot caught the boy\u2019s scent with help from a tracking dog. With help from the K-9, they followed the boy\u2019s scent and found his footsteps for a time but lost both his steps and his scent once they came upon a road. For the next five-six hours the SAR teams continued looking for the boy as the night turned to early morning.\n\nAt approximately 2 a.m. the teams were notified that the boy had been located. \u201cHe ran out of what little water he had and was wandering around in the desert,\u201d Cashin said.\n\nThe boy had walked into a nearby camp, cold, hungry and thirsty and the person who was camping there drove to an area with cell phone service and let the police know that he had the boy. The camper then turned the boy over to a Washington County Sheriff\u2019s Deputy who turned him back over to the wilderness program. The boy was checked out by medical personnel and, although cold and thirsty, he had no other reported medical problems. The boy\u2019s mother, who lives in Maryland, was also notified, Cashin said.\n\nAs far as the SAR member with the concussion, he shouldn\u2019t have to pay for any medical bills, Cashin said. Although the rescuers are unpaid, they are covered by the Worker\u2019s Compensation Fund.\n\n\u201cThese guys risk themselves every time we go out,\u201d Cashin said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to place blame \u2026 it was just a bad situation last night.\u201d\n\nThis late night search capped a significantly busy three days for Washington County\u2019s Search and Rescue teams. It\u2019s fairly typical for SAR to have only one rescue every week or two, Cashin said. But the last three days, SAR has had four searches.\n\nThursday afternoon, SAR assisted in rescuing a mountain biker who ended up Life Flighted to the hospital; Friday, for about five hours, 25 SAR members searched the Arizona Strip for a suicidal man, and Saturday, not only did they search for the runaway teen, SAR also assisted 10 mountain bikers who were lost in the dark in the Red Cliffs Reserve.\n\nOut of all these incidents, everybody returned safely and no one else got hurt, Cashin said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s all that matters \u2026 things can be fixed but people can\u2019t.\n\n\u201cI cannot say enough about these (Search and Rescue) guys.\u201d\n\nThe SAR members work for free and many of them take time off from work to go search, Cashin said. They pay for their own training, and they use mostly their own equipment that they pay for themselves.\n\n\u201cWith as many people as we have using all these beautiful recreational areas \u2026 they save the citizens of the county so much,\u201d Cashin said. \u201cFor these guys to take time off of work and come out there, I\u2019m just so thankful for them.\u201d\n\nThat being said, Cashin does everything he can to help the team with the resources he has. Although SAR does get an operational budget each year from Washington County, SAR relies mostly on donations and charity from the community. The operational budget pays for things like fuel, food, water, and sometimes repairs on equipment.\n\nAnyone interested in donating funds or support can do so at the Washington County Sheriff\u2019s office. A donation fund is available and money can be designated to the Search and Rescue.\n\nRelated Posts:\n\nEmail: dallred@stgnews.com\n\nTwitter: @STGnews\n\nCopyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2014, all rights reserved."}
{"text":"As a \u201cvertically integrated digital media company,\u201d the investment fund known as the New Republic still produces dead-tree editions to keep up appearances. Once the flagship magazine of American liberals \u2014 the white ones, anyway \u2014 it also must keep up appearances in an ideological sense despite the billionaire CEO Chris Hughes, the spouse of a failed Democratic congressional candidate, taking the company in a more capitalistic direction. For example, the cover story in this month\u2019s issue is a tissue of misrepresentations by a self-styled Christian socialist about conservative and traditional Catholics.\n\nIn a long and highly personal essay, staff writer Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig chastises critics of Pope Francis for raising doubts about some of his policy prescriptions and his alleged desire to \u201cbring the Church into the modern age.\u201d She writes:\n\nPope Francis approaches the past with dialogue, not mere deference, in mind. He knows that the only useful approach to the past is to recognize it as a work in progress. This has the effect of imbuing accumulated tradition with no special authority over current conclusions. \u2026 From that alone conservatively disposed Catholics might flinch.\n\nThe piece has come under criticism from some Catholic writers who see her as misunderstanding the papacy, which, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI put it, \u201cis bound to the Tradition of faith \u2026 it is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition,\u201d rather than a kind of absolute monarchy. The people Bruenig aims her polemic at are the ones who think, when approaching the past with \u201cdialogue, not mere deference, in mind,\u201d one should still keep in mind that it\u2019s louder than we are.\n\nThe piece doesn\u2019t get much deeper than quoting a few policy-based objections to statements of Francis\u2019s and implying the ones who said them are vaguely disloyal and full of \u201cfear.\u201d This in itself is a bit misleading; the right-leaning journal Crisis ran a piece just recently counseling conservatives to calm down, so the idea that they\u2019re all of a mind with Sean Hannity on this is arrant nonsense.\n\n\u201cIn [Bruenig\u2019s] mind, it\u2019s not possible for conservative and traditional Catholics to have mindful reservations about Francis; they are acting out of emotionally driven animus,\u201d wrote Gabriel Sanchez at the blog Opus Publicum.\n\n\u201cIn the worldview of Bruenig, the pope can do anything,\u201d said Dr. Adam DeVille in the Catholic World Report this week, adding that her sense of \u201cpapal maximalism \u2026 and this cult of personality surrounding the papal office are un-traditional, un-historical, un-theological, un-ecumenical, and unhealthy.\u201d\n\nBoth writers take Bruenig to task for describing the pope as \u201cthe world\u2019s most renowned Christian theological guide.\u201d It\u2019s a point of view that causes Church history to collapse into absurdity; one could say Saint Paul should have kept his mouth shut about the \u201cworkable synthesis\u201d of Mosaic law and the Gospel instead of confronting Saint Peter at Antioch.\n\nDamon Linker argued earlier this week at The Week that \u201cthe pope isn\u2019t a radical at all; that if I\u2019m wrong and he actually is a radical, then conservatives are perfectly capable of and justified in criticizing him.\u201d\n\nIndeed, none of this is necessarily to the point if Francis isn\u2019t a \u201cradical pope.\u201d On that, Bruenig tries to have it both ways, noting (truthfully) that he has presided over no substantial changes so far. Yet to argue that nothing has changed, but also say Francis seems to have a taste for it and anyway change is good, is a bit too clever, suggesting something about the priorities of the author.\n\nHow does she know the Church is ready for a radical pope? Or that Francis is one? Or that such a pope would be a good thing to have? Graduate school, obviously. Much of the cover story \u2014 three separate sections \u2014 is devoted to Stoker Bruenig\u2019s intellectual development at Cambridge under the tutelage of Fr. John Hughes, a proponent of a school of thought known as \u201cradical orthodoxy,\u201d a program of using Christian principles to critique modernity in ways that are often hostile to capitalism (a school which, for the record, I happen to have a lot of sympathy for). Fr. Hughes passed away in a tragic car accident last year.\n\nHe is referred to as a priest twice, and as Father John twice, which, in a piece about the pope, would give you the impression that he was a Catholic priest, wouldn\u2019t it?\n\nWell, he wasn\u2019t, he was an Anglican priest, and that isn\u2019t mentioned anywhere in their cover story. This should not have gotten past their fact checkers, if Chris Hughes has bothered to keep any on. I was not the only one who read the piece and got the impression Fr. Hughes was Catholic, which shows a note of clarification is needed.\n\n(He sounds like a wonderful teacher, and I\u2019m sure his thoughts on Catholic theology were insightful; I don\u2019t mean to gainsay that at all. But facts are important.)\n\nI pointed this out on Twitter last Monday night, and a week later it still hasn\u2019t been fixed, so obviously Stoker Bruenig and the New Republic\u2019s editorial staff don\u2019t agree. When I first pointed it out, Bruenig began to dissemble, tossing out an ad hominem about being criticized by an \u201censemble of white males.\u201d Apparently it is to \u201cbe a jerk about a well beloved deceased priest\u201d if you suggest it\u2019s relevant what kind of priest he was. She also said she \u201cpresumed people would know Cambridge = CofE.\u201d\n\nFor an advocate of the poor, this sure assumes a lot of knowledge about how Cambridge works.\n\nAt this point it\u2019s safe to assume that the New Republic doesn\u2019t view the distinction between Anglicanism and Catholicism as significant enough to be worth noting in a cover story about the pope. They both have bishops and stuff, what\u2019s the difference?\n\nThe bigger question is whether this elision is related to bigger issues in the piece, some of which have been pointed out by others. I submit that it is. Like the way Bruenig describes tradition, which is far more akin to the \u201cthreefold cord\u201d of Anglicanism:\n\nThe present and the past must speak as equals, as both are works of human effort. \u2026 Francis\u2019s handling of tradition and modernity privileges neither, but rather produces a workable synthesis of their contributions.\n\nIf this is true, then, pace Linker, there is indeed cause for concern, because it isn\u2019t really the pope\u2019s job to produce \u201ca workable synthesis\u201d of modernity and tradition. The pope isn\u2019t a glorified Archbishop of Canterbury. **The analogy is even more apt because in Bruenig\u2019s understanding of this modern synthesis, in lieu of deferring to the past or sacred tradition, the Church defers to the secular state. More on that later.\n\nWhether or not Francis is interested in changing the Church\u2019s teaching on things like homosexuality and communion for divorcees is, again, debatable, but there are reasons to believe other clergy are, because they\u2019ve said so. Stoker Bruenig doesn\u2019t even bother to mention them, a fact New York Times columnist Ross Douthat pointed out on Twitter:\n\n@yeselson @ebruenig It's a lovely essay that only lacks for a rebuttal to the theological arguments in question \ud83d\ude42 \u2014 Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) March 9, 2015\n\n@yeselson @ebruenig And if Elizabeth thinks reforms being proposed by Walter Kasper are theologically sound, I want to read *that* case. \u2014 Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) March 9, 2015\n\nDouthat alludes to a number of German ecclesiastics who are prepared to tweak the Church\u2019s teaching in various ways, even threatening to go their own way if they don\u2019t get what they want. The head of the German bishops conference even suggested young people who want \u201cto be clear in their positions\u201d have embarked on \u201cthe beginning of terrorism,\u201d using rhetoric that is, frankly, similar to Stoker Bruenig\u2019s.\n\nShe even quotes Cardinal Kasper for support of Francis\u2019s alleged radicalism; he says the pontiff \u201cdoes not represent a liberal position, but a radical position, understood in the original sense of the word as going back to the roots, the radix.\u201d\n\nWhat Kasper proposes amounts to a break with tradition; if we are leaves or twigs, to cut off our branches to return to the roots entails dismemberment and decomposition. But we\u2019ll get to that later. Suffice it to say that this concept is very enamoring for those looking for a precedent for their radicalism. The popularizer of the #fullcommunism meme likes it too:\n\nThe joke\u2019s on them, since white nationalists have already staked a claim on that bit of nomenclatural topography. Radix Journal exists, and they wouldn\u2019t like it.\n\nThis is an excellent place to bring up how the liberalizers\u2019 commitment to diversity quickly turns to condescension the moment minorities don\u2019t play the roles that have been appointed for them. Last year Cardinal Kasper caused a minor scandal when he said the views of African prelates on homosexuality were informed by a cultural \u201ctaboo,\u201d and that \u201cthey should not tell us too much what we have to do.\u201d\n\nYou see this attitude in a secular context in the progressive attitude toward blacks who voted overwhelmingly for traditional marriage in Alabama; their votes don\u2019t matter because a wealthy, largely white alternative-sexualities lobby has decided to use federal courts to overrule them. They shouldn\u2019t tell us too much what to do, after all. And they definitely shouldn\u2019t get to decide for themselves.\n\nActing racist toward more tradition-minded clerics from the Third World is a recurring motif among liberalizers, especially in the Anglican Communion. Archbishop of York John Sentamu has been the recipient of a fair amount, and he\u2019s not even all that much of a traditionalist, he just thinks they should be accommodated. In 1998, Bishop John Spong of Newark, who worked to build an \u201catheistic\u201d Christianity, famously said that, \u201cScientific advances have given us a new way of understanding homosexual people. At the Lambeth Conference and in dealing with the Third World this knowledge hasn\u2019t percolated down.\u201d\n\nMost of the people Bruenig criticizes are white. But there\u2019s a certain similarity between these criticisms of African clergy and the suggestion that American conservatives and traditionalists are nothing but fearful and superstitious.\n\nHer comments on liturgical traditionalists are even worse. There is a much-acclaimed shift among the Millennial generation back to more high-church forms of worship, including historic liturgies, and away from the amorphous ones of both our mainline Boomer parents and rock band evangelicals. It seems pretty uncharitable to look at one of these people, casting about for a style of worship that reflects the grandeur of God, and then tell them that that want to recover old forms is to \u201crelate to the past in a wholly modern way\u201d and then compare them to \u201cthose who ignored climate change.\u201d\n\nEven if there\u2019s some merit to this line of argument, it applies more to progressive Episcopalians than Latin Mass Catholics. For example, Jonathan Merritt recently wrote about Rachel Held Evans, a young writer whose \u201cthinking has become increasingly progressive \u2014 especially on hot button theological issues such as gender and sexuality. This shift culminated in her leaving evangelicalism for Episcopalianism.\u201d\n\nGenerally speaking, I think the trend toward high-church worship is a wonderful thing, but it\u2019s important that it express a commitment to catholicity rather than a kind of cultural elitism. It would be a real shame for all this energy to be directed into a body that has badly neglected its responsibilities to the Body of Christ. The Episcopal Church\u2019s heterodoxy on gay issues has put the entire Anglican Communion in a state of flux \u2014 maybe Bruenig would call it \u201cdialogue\u201d \u2014 with the Lambeth Conference indefinitely postponed. For any but the most devout practitioner of the progressive religion that price is much too high. Evans goes on to offer a self-righteous gloss on the decline of mainline churches everywhere; that the church needs to die to be reborn; \u201cLately I\u2019ve been wondering if a little death and resurrection is exactly what the American church needs. What if all this talk of waning numbers and shrinking influence means our empire-building days are over and it\u2019s a good thing?\u201d\n\nThat seems like wishful thinking wrapped up in a misguided analogy to me; supposing the Church regularly reincarnates itself is incompatible with the idea of an apostolic faith and Christ\u2019s promise to be with us until the end of the age. But almost more striking is the fatalistic kind of progressive amor fati; progressive unto death.\n\nAs a former Anglican, it baffles me that this is a road smart people like Cardinal Kasper seem to want to go down. It leads to confusion, isolation, and as some of the more honest progressives admit, death.\n\nThe Church is not an empire either, and God-willing, that temptation will be resisted. The Anglican tradition has a long and sordid history of pseudo-Erastianism, which continues today in the Episcopal Church\u2019s advocacy for Obamacare, and Gene Robinson and an Episcopal health ministry official getting cushy fellowships at the Center for American Progress. The WASPs may be gone, but the Episcopal Church\u2019s empire-building days ain\u2019t over. Indeed, you could say the corollary to thinking the Church is an empire is a deference to the state as an agent of liberation, which brings us back to Bruenig, who has written:\n\n\u201cA stateless response to poverty has not been part of Christian tradition for some time, and to address poverty without implicating politics at this point in history would be nearly impossible.\u201d\n\nAnd this:\n\n\u201cIf the state is here to recognize and protect property rights, then the state must recognize that the excess of the wealthy quite literally is the property of the poor, and act accordingly. Just as the state would work to retrieve a stolen article, it must retrieve the hoarded wealth being stolen from the poor, and deliver it to them.\u201d\n\nThese are interesting statements. The remarkable thing about Stoker Bruenig\u2019s point of view, in comparison to her mentor\u2019s, is its lack of radicalism or orthodoxy, more akin to a social gospeler than Moses Coady. There\u2019s practically nothing about it that wouldn\u2019t be at home in the Democratic National Committee. There is no sense of scale or subsidiarity in Bruenig\u2019s political thinking, as if the government that can supposedly end poverty isn\u2019t the same one that aspired to make the world safe for democracy or established an unlimited right to abortion. This also gives short shrift to the Church itself as a force of social transformation.\n\nThis program has a kulak to go with it; the conservatives and traditionalists she gestures at in the piece while quoting Sean Hannity. In the Episcopal Church, this scapegoating has taken the form of a program of state-sponsored confiscation by lawsuit \u2014 right up Stoker Bruenig\u2019s alley \u2014 of parish buildings belonging to conservative congregations that voted, sometimes overwhelmingly, to depart from the ever-more-battily-progressive Episcopal Church.\n\nThere\u2019s a lesson here, that the left doesn\u2019t extend the same latitude it asks for when out of power. The legal standard privileging congregational self-determination with respect to church buildings was established in the famous King\u2019s Chapel case in 1787, when the first American Anglican bishop Samuel Seabury \u2014 consecrated by non-juring Scottish bishops \u2014 refused to ordain the new rector of a Boston church, a Harvard man (of course) because of his turn to Unitarian theology. So they went their own way. Today, the Episcopal Church still fights for nearly every church building, but the dissenters are on the right, not the left.\n\nThis is an Episcopalian dispute \u2014 not that it matters to the New Republic \u2014 but the Catholic parallel is a kind of liberal clericalism that has arguably been emboldened under Francis\u2019s papacy, of which Bruenig\u2019s piece is a good representative. Just recently, the CEO of the Toronto-based Salt and Light Media Foundation and Television Network, Rev. Thomas Rosica, threatened to sue a traditionalist Catholic blogger. After becoming something of a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre in the blogosphere Rosica called it off, evidently unable to \u201cdialogue\u201d his way out of St. Paul\u2019s admonition about suing other Christians in secular courts.\n\nOne could say the Church of England was built on an alliance between liberal theology and a secular state, and that\u2019s worked out relatively well for them, to be honest. But it was maintained with substantial violence, and today it is not much healthier than its trans-priest-inclusive American offshoot. That\u2019s why I\u2019m not as enthusiastic as Stoker Bruenig about this:\n\nConsider \u2026 [Pope Francis\u2019s] remarks on financial inequality, in which he called for a \u201clegitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state, as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society.\u201d Pundits like Fox News host Sean Hannity erupted into paroxysms of anxiety, speculating that the Pope had some newfangled socialist schema in mind. Meanwhile, conservative leaders such as Catholic League President Bill Donohue offered only a lukewarm defense of their pontiff, deflecting outrage by arguing that Francis\u2019s remarks were not really as radical as they seemed.\n\nPope Francis made the comments in question to the United Nations last May, and the phrase \u201ccalled for\u201d does a little too much work here; he just said it had a role to play in \u201cequitable development.\u201d But it wasn\u2019t just Hannity and Bill Donohue who were concerned by them. Legendary blogger Fr. John Zuhlsdorf wondered, \u201cWhen has any \u2018State\u2019 done this effectively? And what does \u2018legitimate\u2019 mean? According to laws that are passed? And if the laws are bad laws? And who will administrate it?\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s a sure bet that someone who doesn\u2019t take these questions seriously is concerned with power, not justice. Pope Francis\u2019s use of the word \u201clegitimate\u201d certainly suggests questions about where authority lies and how it is exercised can\u2019t be passed over. Unless you happen to know a godly king languishing in crownless obscurity whom we ought to restore, these are exigencies we just have to deal with in our nominally republican system, but Stoker Bruenig acts like it\u2019s just a matter of bigger budgets for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.\n\nFor the record, I\u2019d be more comfortable knowing my money was well spent on a tax for the relief of the poor levied by a Catholic monarch than one passed by Congress in a secular nation-state and enforced by the IRS. Is that so insane? That a king\u2019s sense of social justice might in some instances be better than the choices expressed by a hundred million meaningless votes, mediated through a duopoly, a zillion special interests, and what\u2019s left of a constitutional process? This arrangement makes villains out of Republicans too, with even Reagan and especially Bush the Younger busting budgets and leaving it for the Democrats to clean up, a strategy Irving Kristol endorsed.\n\nIt\u2019s not like the conservatives who stick in Bruenig\u2019s craw don\u2019t have a leg to stand on. The social teaching of the Catholic Church presents significant obstacles for a Christian socialist, chiefly its condemnations of socialism. Reconciling those issues seems like it ought to be an important task for someone who describes herself that way, but so far Stoker Bruenig seems more interested in reminding the world that Ayn Rand is in hell than tackling these more interesting things. Indeed, bashing nasty conservatives and harmless libertarians is all she seems interested in doing. Whether you\u2019re Michael Novak or a Tridentine Mass goer, you\u2019re all not only wicked reactionaries, but worst of all, modern ones, just symptoms of a benighted country \u201cfull of crypto-fascists,\u201d clearly more loyal to Goldman Sachs and the GOP than the pope.\n\nWhen the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, if the socialists behave toward their enemies the way self-styled Christian socialists behave toward theirs now that they\u2019ve got a pope they think agrees with them, the rest of us will be in for a rough time."}
{"text":"A U.S. defence and foreign affairs think tank released a comprehensive report today suggesting the oft-maligned F-35 might not meet the performance standards of current fighters, including Canada's CF-18s.\n\nThe National Security Network, a non-profit foreign policy group based in Washington, D.C., is the latest organization to raise questions about the stealth fighter program, which is over budget and behind schedule in the U.S.\n\nThe report compares F-35's operational capabilities with the jets it is intended to replace, including the F-16, F-18 and A-10, and in each case it comes up short.\n\nStory continues below advertisement\n\nThe group urges the Obama administration to do a \"serious\" reassessment of the program and determine whether there are alternatives out there.\n\nResearchers noted that matching the F-16's manoeuvrability was a minimum design requirement, yet they conclude the older jet is capable of going faster and enjoys better wing-loading performance, another aspect that's critical for speed.\n\nThe F-16 is not considered as manoeuvrable as the F-18.\n\nThe Harper government put its purchase of 65 F-35s on hold after being accused by the auditor general of fudging the price tag and not doing sufficient research, and plans to extend the life of the CF-18s to 2025."}
{"text":"One of the big paradoxes of living in a democracy is that our leaders seem to need protection from the very people who elected them to office.\n\nEven as women, the poor and the disadvantaged run from pillar to post for basic things like physical safety \u2013 whether it is rape and molestation or violence - our politicians have scores of gun-toting commandoes being wasted on them. Even in the security-conscious West, we do not see so many politicians receiving so much protection.\n\nFrom X to Y to Z and Z-plus, many of our top-level politicians, both in or out of power, have unnecessary protection being given to them at the cost of the taxpayer. (To get a list of those receiving protection, read here)\n\nFor example, people with Z-plus security have as many as 36 police persons assigned to them followed by 22 for those in the Z category, 11 for those in Y and two for those with a mere X to their names.\n\nThis is not only an enormous waste of taxpayer resources, but is actually becoming counterproductive with our netas seeing security as some kind of status symbol. The more we give politicians free security, the more they will start believing they are masters and the rest of us their servants.\n\nThis is particularly vulgar when the ordinary people get very little protection from crime or criminals.\n\nAs citizens, it is now time to demand a curtailment of our netas\u2019 security expenses by making one simple demand: that official protection should be available only to political chief executives at centre or states. This means the Prime Minister and the Chief Ministers of various states. The rest should receive only normal institutional protection \u2013 just as any citizen is provided police cover if there is an immediate threat to him.\n\nApplying this principle would mean no state protection for politicians such as Sonia Gandhi and her children, no cover for LK Advani, Mulayam Singh, Mayawati, etc, etc.\n\nSecurity experts may be aghast that our leaders will become more vulnerable due to this demand, but lack of state spending on their protection does not mean no protection at all. What it means is that the individual will have to pay for it himself. Or herself.\n\nThis is how it should work.\n\nTop politicians in the major national and regional parties should create their own security apparatus for their leaders. Donations to political parties are anyway exempt from income-tax, and so paying for private security guards should be well within their means.\n\nRich politicians should automatically be given no protection at state expense at all. For example, what is the logic in providing Mulayam Singh, or Mayawati, who is a Rajya Sabha MP, or LK Advani or Kalyan Singh or Rajnath Singh security at our expense when they can afford it themselves? Or their party can provide for it?\n\nMayawati\u2019s last-known net worth was a hefty Rs 112 crore. The BSP leader, who claims most of her wealth came from small contributions, should use these contributions to provide for her own security. Mulayam Singh\u2019s assets also exceed Rs 100 crore. Ditto for Advani, or Kalyan Singh, both of whom are close to retirement.\n\nThey should be protected by their parties, which benefited from their activities in the 1990s, and not the exchequer.\n\nThere are good reasons why security expenses should be brought down for politicians.\n\nFirst, it is not morally right for politicians to seek protection at the expense of the people. Especially when they are out of power. They should share the risks their people face.\n\nSecond, it's the sheer futility of it. Having a bunch of security guards around you is no security at all when it comes to committed terrorists. Did high security save Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi? Minimal, discreet security is often good enough.\n\nThird, there is no reason why out-of-work politicians should not live like the rest of us and be responsible for their own security. They should take simple precautions, and pay for that little extra that private security can provide with personal or party funds. If the police are freed from the responsibility of guarding netas, they can act more professional and protect the people better. Trying to protect too many netas means denying the same to us.\n\nFourth, providing too much security is counter-productive in a democracy. Not only does it separate politicians from their people, it also builds in them a vested interest to create no alternative leaders. The real strength of a democracy is in the depth of leadership it can create, so that it is not worthwhile even for terrorists to bump off the odd top politician or two.\n\nIt is time we abolished running a taxpayer-funded protection racket for politicians.\n\nFirstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com\/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button."}
{"text":"Editor\u2019s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore\u2019s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.\n\nAn open letter to the campus community:\n\nSwarthmore, I\u2019m a big slutty slut. I have a lot of sex with a lot of different men because, frankly, I love men and a few ladies, because, frankly, college. And here\u2019s why: I love sex. I love everything about sex and every personally-defined variation of sex: I love to kiss and to come and to cuddle and to explore new sexual frontiers. I love sweet sex and rough sex and nights with no sex. I love all the accoutrements of sex: I love underwear and birth control and sex toys and porn. If I were to honestly list my skill sets in rank order by an algorithm accounting for both enjoyment and aptitude, sex in all its iterated glory would top that list by leaps and bounds (and you should know I bake a mean pie, write an even meaner thesis, and gain a great deal of satisfaction from both of them).\n\nLet me clarify: I\u2019m not a slut because I\u2019m out of control of my own sexuality. I\u2019m not a slut because I\u2019m hoping to rope a guy into wanting to be with me. I\u2019m not a slut because I\u2019m looking for some kind of validation or self-esteem boost. I\u2019m a slut because I make the active, intentional, self-aware and enjoyable choice to be. I\u2019m a slut because I choose to call myself \u201cslut.\u201d\n\nMy choice of the word slut is ultimately motivated by society\u2019s warped and uneven attitudes regarding some notion of essential, inherent female sexuality vis a vis that of men. Ours is a society where women \u201dput out\u201d their goods to please men, where it is nearly impossible to imagine a girl who goes out and beds a new guy every weekend who isn\u2019t in some way damaged, or immature, or looking for some form of validation. This is a society where, rigidly, men just want to get some and get out and women are responsible for keeping men\u2019s natural desires at civilized bay.\n\nMake no mistake: this society of Brobible.com, of Tucker Max, of pick-up games, of most RomComs, of things as seemingly mundane as the scorn inherent in the term \u201cwalk of shame,\u201d is a society which seeks to control women\u2019s bodies, sexuality and choices to conform to a specific notion of a way to be a \u201cgood\u201d girl, a \u201cgood\u201d woman. This is a society of rape culture, plain and simple, and these types of policing of specifically gendered bodies and choices are prototypical slut-shaming.\n\nThis unfortunate aspect of capital-S \u201cSociety\u201d is by no means a not-in-my-collegiate-bubble kind of issue either. Slut shaming is alive and well on Swarthmore\u2019s campus. We hear it in the scornful tones with which we remember certain alumnae, see it in the raised eyebrows of friends of friends as they recount an acquaintance\u2019s Saturday night hookup, read it in the comment sections of our sex columnists and gossip blogs. It\u2019s tempting to think that as a community of progressive, forward-thinking, and generally socially aware individuals, we wouldn\u2019t be bolstering these kinds of harmful understandings of sexual constructs, that these views exist only on the fringes.\n\nBut the lived reality of sluthood at Swarthmore is a surprisingly difficult one, even when not interacting with the obviously slut-shaming margins. We are greeted with a community aura of sex-negativity or at best sexual cluelessness. Institutionally speaking, the administration has a record of responding to issues involving sexuality with either a sort of manic, nip-it-in-the bud attitude, or an ill-advised stance of ignore-the-problem-and-it\u2019ll-go-away. They have a well-known past of extraordinary blundering bordering on victim-blaming regarding instances of sexual assault (albeit one that is happily and actively changing in recent months). They responded to past instances of sexual assault at Genderfuck by proposing to cancel the party, as though preventing drinking and dressing skimpily would prevent the underlying factors of sexual assault (read: assaulters). The Dash for Cash, the singular intentionally body-positive and administratively-endorsed campus tradition \u2013 which was well publicized and opt-in \u2013 was canceled at earliest possible opportunity. And in an egregious, though since-resolved, issue a few years ago, a campus wellness campaign could find the funds to provide free yoga mats for students, but not free condoms. Overall, Swarthmore does a very good job of making the sex-positive, sexually adventurous, and promiscuous among us feel like we\u2019d have a pretty precarious safety net availible if something happened to make us feel uncomfortable.\n\nIn this context, it is an intensely loaded and personally meaningful move to re-appropriate the traditionally venomous epithet of \u201cslut\u201d to fill the void in sex positive vocabulary to describe myself, my actions, my choices as a sexually active, aggressive, and generous woman. Is the choice of this moniker a comfortable one for all us sex-positive sex fiends? Absolutely not. But the entire point of making this term available to be self-selected is to reinforce, reiterate, and celebrate the agency with which a person might approach their sexual experiences, partners, and identity.\n\nFor me, being slutty is about more than just getting it in on Saturday night. It\u2019s about rejecting the social imperative to ignore my own desires and keep my legs shut in order to be desirable, to be acceptable, to be the \u201cright kind\u201d of girl\/woman\/person. It\u2019s about identifying and going after what I want. It\u2019s about claiming and owning and enjoying my own body and sexuality and about the euphoria of exploring the miraculous, bizarre, and thrilling intricacies of another person\u2019s. It\u2019s about holding yourself accountable for your own sexual choices and health and holding society accountable for its own sexual bullshit.\n\nSluttiness is not about the number of dates or make outs or hookups it takes for you to feel comfortable rounding all or one or any bases with another person. In fact it\u2019s not about numbers at all. The emphasis we place on our own sexual numbers is just another example of rigid, moral socio-sexual policing. How many women\u2019s magazine articles have you read which essentially roil in what they\u2019d have you believe is the eternal question: to disclose numbers or not to disclose numbers? You know what? Fuck that. Share or don\u2019t, that\u2019s your call, but don\u2019t imbue this number with some sort of synthetic and sacrosanct meaning. Sexual numbers are meaningless. They tell you nothing about a person. They don\u2019t tell you whether or not to get tested, as you as a sexually active or potentially sexually active adult should be getting tested with regularity anyway. They tell you nothing about the content of a person\u2019s character or their childhood or their relationship with their father or their mother or their feelings about their own body.\n\nSo yeah, let\u2019s talk numbers in the seven years since I\u2019ve become sexually active.\n\n98: the number of people I\u2019ve made out with.\n\n24: the number of people I\u2019ve gone down on.\n\n14: The number of people I\u2019ve had penetrative sex with.\n\n8: The number of people with whom I\u2019ve gone out on dates.\n\nYou know what that tells you about me other than I might have busyish Saturday nights? Absolutely nothing. Some numbers that might be more meaningful in telling you who I am as a person:\n\n325: the number of hours I spent teaching peer-run classes on sexual health, body image, and healthy relationships in urban schools my senior year of high school.\n\n1: the number of times I\u2019ve had my heart broken.\n\n4: the number of scars I still have from the abrupt end to a fun day spent bike riding with my dad when I was seven.\n\n0: The number of people I\u2019ve slept with without being immediately upfront about the date of my most recent STI test, whether or not I\u2019m sleeping with other people, whether I am available for anything above and beyond casual fun and without first ascertaining all of this information from them.\n\nSo here\u2019s the deal, Swarthmore. We\u2019ve tried to have this conversation before. Last semester, columnist Hester Prynne opened her installments with a discussion of reclamation and hers was an excellent primer extolling the virtues of sluthood. This past week a Swassip post turned into a comment-war fueled indictment of the morality of those externally impugned as sluts. In both instances, there has been frustratingly little safe room in the ensuing conversation for those living a life navigating the murky waters of Swarthmore with multiple partners. It\u2019s time for real talk: an introduction to a conversation on the lived realities of identifying and acting sluttily on a campus slightly deluded as to its own sex-positivity. So here it is, an above-ground forum for a conversation not only about sluthood or about sluts, but with and from those of us who have made this choice for ourselves. I am slutty; hear me roar.\n\nSee you next week, Sex Fiends, Slutfriends, fellow sluts, and \u2013 largely \u2013 Swatties,\n\nthe Tart"}
{"text":"Olivia Wilde\n\n29\n\nActress-social entrepreneur\n\nfacebook Share on Facebook\n\ntwitter Share on Twitter\n\nShare on LinkedIn linkedin\n\nlinkedin permalink Share Link\n\nFundraising is the bane of every philanthropy's existence. Do-gooders go back to the same rich donors over and over trying to convince them to keep giving. Actress Olivia Wilde thinks there's a better way. That's why she's co-founded Conscious Commerce. The company pairs brands with causes to help corporations become better global citizens. So profits from a best-selling dress at Anthropolgie go to a girls' school in India. A limited edition bag at Alternative Apparel helps fund a school in Haiti. \"I've always been a huge proponent of voting with your dollars,\" says Wilde. \"I'm inspired by the movement of entrepreneurs from my generation who are encouraging people to think about where their dollars are going.\" This year Conscious Commerce raised $100,000 for New Light, a community-development project serving the women and children of a red-light district in Kolkata, India. Conscious Commerce now shares time with Wilde's acting, but she's getting raves for her recent performance in the movie \"Drinking Buddies.\""}
{"text":"As some of you are aware just yesterday we announced Team ZZX's in development Zelda clone game that was coming to the ZX Spectrum at some point during 2018, well that game isn't the only one that's in development as we've just been told by the creator David Clarke, that he is also making a Legend of Zelda game, and that one is being developed using Arcade Game Designer. In light of this news there's even more footage to show, and even though it doesn't have sound, it looks pretty decent!According to David he is coding this for the ZX Spectrum as a learning exercise with more possibilities for the future, and although there is no sound, it will be added later. Furthermore he has also mentioned he is having a go at multiple enemies using the parama variable for the first time, although he has warned this may well be another unfinished project!: 1) Source"}
{"text":"KPS Teacher \"walk-in\"\n\nKalamazoo Public Schools teachers stood outside school buildings and in their entrances on Wednesday, Feb. 17, to support changes that make standardized testing less cumbersome and more effective. - Courtesy Photos\n\nKALAMAZOO, MI -- Teachers at many of the Kalamazoo Public Schools will participate in a demonstration before class on Thursday.\n\nMembers of the Kalamazoo Education Association will participate in a \"walk in\" at 7 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 6. Teachers, administrators and staff will gather outside school buildings 30 minutes before the academic day begins, demonstrating with signs to promote the need for more funding and less focus on standardized tests.\n\nAmanda Miller, president of the KEA, said the union's 800 members will all participate in some way in the awareness-raising campaign, coordinated by the group Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and part of a national effort.\n\nMiller said tests like M-STEP, which are administered in the spring and have results returned in the fall, don't give teachers any way to help students during the school year.\n\n\"Teachers love tests if we can get immediate feedback and use it for instruction,\" Miller said. \"If we don't get the results (until the next school year) and we're spending all this time on it, it's (not worth it). Kids need to be doing things that are beneficial instead.\"\n\nOnce the scores do come back, Miller said are being used to punish schools.\n\n\"Tests don't take into account of all the other aspects of (a student's) life like poverty,\" she said.\n\nThe online exams are also a drain on resources, requiring technology purchases and staff to deal with technical issues on test day.\n\nThe organization supports giving students access to an engaging and rigorous curriculum that does not base their success on high-stakes testing.\n\nLast year about 80 cities participated in the effort. This year, Miller said 200 cities are expected to join the walk-ins, which were moved to October to bring education issues to the forefront during the election cycle.\n\nParents, students and members of the community are also invited to attend and wear red to show solidarity with the cause. Miller said the walk in concept is a more positive way to demonstrate as opposed to a strike or walk out.\n\n\"We appreciate the leadership of our association regarding the important themes of school funding and time for learning and appreciate the opportunity to join others across the country in this consciousness-raising activity,\" said KPS Superintendent Michael Rice in a statement.\n\nA similar demonstration was coordinated in February. Many teachers carried signs that read: \"All our children deserve more time for learning, less time for testing.\"\n\nFor more information, visit reclaimourschools.org."}
{"text":"The AAP\u2019s latest attack on Reliance Industries does more than simply divert attention from their failure to govern; unfortunately for them, it also underscores the two main elements of their core ideology. On display is not only their dogged commitment to destructive populism over basic economic rationality, but also, and far more dangerous, their scornful contempt for constitutional democracy. By pressuring the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) to lodge an FIR against Mukesh Ambani and others in the absence of either jurisdictional authority or an iota of evidence, Kejriwal has sent shockwaves across the international business community, which would rather steer clear of India\u2019s shores than risk engagement with a berserk anarchist. A bare perusal of the hyped complaint against RIL reveals fanciful conjectures and childish conclusions that are grounded in neither law nor reason, but advance a bizarre counter-narrative that believes in profit being evil. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and the real picture emerges.\n\nThe crux of Kejriwal\u2019s charge against RIL is based on the infantile assumption that capital expenditure costs were unreasonably inflated to generate higher profits for the operator and less for the government. To substantiate this charge, he cites the Comptroller Auditor General\u2019s flawed performance audit report on KG-D6 to allege that procurement contracts were arbitrarily awarded without due competition. He forgets that the mind-boggling scale of the Krishna Godavari basin (over 7, 000 sq km) necessitates an equally gigantic survey and exploration effort which is both expensive and technically complex, meaning in turn that very few international players operate in this niche segment. Unlike a standard building contract where it is possible to have a blend of different contractors, deep-sea extraction is one of the most complex engineering feats known to man and it would be impossible to execute a project on this scale with a mish-mash of contractors. For the CAG, without any technical expertise or knowhow about the complexities of subsea exploration, to simply declare that one contractor ought not to have been picked over others, is not only irresponsible but laughable. Besides, even the global consulting firm, Ernst & Young, confirmed that any increase in capital expenditure would in fact hurt the contractor\u2019s profitability.\n\nHowever the CAG\u2019s insistence to audit private contractors raises fundamental questions of propriety that must not be ignored. The mandate of the CAG is circumscribed by the Duties & Powers Act of 1971, which outlines the scope of their powers to audit the accounts of public corporations. This law supplements Article 149 of the Constitution, and the two being in pari materia, must be read together. The CAG\u2019s scope of audit is restricted to accounts of the Union and cannot extend to private entities. The hon\u2019ble Delhi High Court, in its order on the 6th of January 2014, was absolutely correct when it reined in an overzealous CAG by ordering it to restrict itself to only the revenue-sharing arrangements that private telecom companies had entered into with the GOI. The court was very specific when it said that the CAG could only audit receipts and not inquire aspects like wisdom and economy in expenditure. An example of this overbearing sense of \u2018duty\u2019 is found on page 33 of the KG-D6 report, where the CAG adopts an irritatingly patronising tone in awarding unnecessary accolades to \u201cthe efforts of the operator in executing this world class\u2026within record time.\u201d Constitutionally speaking, the CAG has no business to be making such silly comments \u2013 they ought to stick to their mandate.\n\nThe CAG report also ignores the legislative intent behind the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP), which was to provide an incentive to private contractors, to tap domestic energy sources that PSUs like ONGC and OIL could not. The driving force behind this policy shift was not merely liberalisation of the economy, but a concerted effort to make India energy independent, and to reduce the nation\u2019s staggering fuel-import bill. In making the simplistic argument that RIL\u2019s higher gas prices lead to a subsidy burden on the economy, Kejriwal has wilfully ignored both, the saved fuel import-costs and the substantial GDP contribution made by domestic contractors. GOI currently pays up to $15 per million British thermal units (mmBtu). By Kejriwal\u2019s logic, India ought to pay billions of our precious and scarce foreign exchange to international gas providers but deny an Indian corporation from making a legitimate profit for the massive investment it has incurred, simply because the government subsidises the fuel. Even keeping aside the billions of dollars India saves by encouraging a domestic entity, why doesn\u2019t Kejriwal talk about the billions that the Indian government receives as its share of profit from KG-D6? Would he rather than India be at the mercy of foreign gas-producers than achieve energy security? Even keeping energy independence aside, the creation of jobs and enhanced shareholder value aid in spurring growth and confidence in the economy that benefits everyone.\n\nIt may certainly be argued that RIL and its partner NIKO got the initial gas estimates for KG-D6 wrong, but to suggest that billions were spent by them to execute some elaborate heist is ludicrous. Subsea gas reserve estimates spread over thousands of square kilometres are often off the mark. At times production is way more than the original estimate and at other times it is less. However the production sharing contract contemplates such eventualities, which is why the safeguard of variable profits depending upon production is built into the agreement. To cry foul simply because production levels did not match the original estimates is akin to the losing side in a game of cricket asking for the rules to be changed midway. Kejriwal is understandably irate because he can\u2019t write his own personal version of the PSC.\n\nLastly, the stunning allegation that RIL\u2019s KG-D6 partner NIKO supplies gas at half the price to Bangladesh is another spin on the truth. The fact is that NIKO\u2019s gas deal with Bangladesh has absolutely nothing to do with KG-D6. On the contrary, NIKO provides gas from an on-land gas field near Dhaka. The implication of this on cost is obviously immense \u2013 with dramatically cheaper production and transportation bills, thus resulting in a lower price.\n\nWith none of his political opponents too keen to entertain his shenanigans, Kejriwal was ultimately left with the ignominious route of pulling the plug on himself. Only time will tell if his gamble pays off electorally. But for anyone to assume that the people of India will ignore his dismal record, would be akin to gassing the truth."}
{"text":"China makes headlines every other week for its censorship of the Internet, but few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls, or how to get around them.\n\nForeigners who visit the country should expect some headaches. Be prepared to live without Google, Twitter and your favorite daily newspapers, and to have a hard time connecting with friends back home, or even firing off an email. That's how bad it can get.\n\n+ Also on Network World: Best\/Worst iPhone 6 Design Concepts (i.e., iPhoneys) +\n\n\"Connection Timed Out\" is the dreaded error message when you try to visit a blocked site. It makes you think the site itself is down, but it's actually the \"Great Firewall\" at work, a vast censorship system that blocks access to many of the world's most popular services.\n\nI've lived in China for close to six years and censorship has been a near constant, lurking in the background ready to \"harmonize\" the Web and throw a wrench in my online viewing.\n\nIt's been especially evident this month. Google's services, which don't follow the strict censorship rules, are currently blocked. How long that will last is unknown, but it coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests earlier this month -- an event the Chinese government wants no one to remember.\n\nLosing access to the world's biggest search engine is enough of a nuisance, but the censorship also affects Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Play, the Chrome browser, and even the news and weather widget that loads on my Android phone. Some of those services are running erratically or not at all. Most annoying is that friends can send me messages on Google Hangouts but for some reason I can't reply.\n\nThe censorship is a culture shock for foreigners visiting China for the first time. They expect to chat with friends on Facebook or Twitter only to find those services unavailable. Major publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are blocked. You need to find alternatives for all these things. I often end up using Microsoft Bing, which complies with China's censorship rules.\n\nPlenty of other foreign websites are accessible, including Reddit, Buzzfeed, Yahoo, and politically non-sensitive Wikipedia pages. Most foreigners here end up subscribing to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which let you mask your location and bypass the censorship. I've been using a VPN for four years and the US$7 a month is money well spent for access to the entire Internet.\n\nChina's censorship wasn't always this strict. When I arrived to teach English here in late 2008, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all were available and I could use Google's Blogger.com to record day-to-day experiences. All that ended in 2009 when China began blocking sites more actively. In March that year, supporters of the Dalai Lama -- an unwelcome figure here -- released a YouTube video that appears to show Chinese police beating Tibetans. A few months later, ethnic riots broke out in Western China, and the authorities cut access to Twitter and Facebook.\n\nBlogger.com had already fallen victim in May, and to keep my blog alive I emailed posts to my dad in the U.S. so he could update it for me. Eventually I bought a domain name and blogged through GoDaddy, which wasn't blocked.\n\nAll this censorship happens without official explanation. The Chinese government rarely mentions the topic or says why particular sites are blocked, but it's clear the authorities do everything they can to control what China's 618 million online users can access.\n\nAll local Chinese sites abide by the censorship rules or risk being shut down. That means China's largest search engine, Baidu, filters out sensitive content, like any mention of the Tiananmen Square protests. And social networks like Sina Weibo delete posts about contentious topics, or ban users who have gone too far. In rare cases, Chinese police have even sought out and arrested Internet users for starting online rumors.\n\nBut China's Internet is far from bland. While you can't access YouTube, Twitter or Google, there are Chinese equivalents, albeit with regulated content. Video sites show U.S. TV shows like \"The Walking Dead\" and \"Homeland,\" and online users can discuss some controversial matters, like celebrity scandals and even corruption by low-level officials. But it all happens under the watchful eye of censors, who keep the discussions from crossing a line.\n\nIt's partly why many Chinese don't notice the censorship; there's enough leeway that the Internet is still a useful medium. Most don't miss Facebook or Twitter because they can connect via WeChat, a local messaging app used by hundreds of millions. China effectively has its own Internet, with its own providers and its own rules. So far, none of the big U.S. Internet firms has managed to make significant headway here, and the ones who try must play by the rules. LinkedIn, for instance, which entered the market this year, is drawing flak for blocking posts about political matters in China.\n\nThere's little sign that the country's stance on censorship will change anytime soon. The clampdowns on foreign services tend to come and go, but this latest block on Google could remain indefinitely. Last November, citing threats to stability, the government laid out plans to control access even more.\n\nI recommend anyone visiting China buys a subscription to a VPN service. I've used one provided by Astrill.com and it's a must-have for me. Hopefully China won't block it."}
{"text":"Ten years ago, Jules Urbach had an insight.\n\nBack then, film companies would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on rendering, which turns 2-D or 3-D models into photorealistic scenes and is used in CGI (computer-generated imagery) animation, for just a few thousand frames. At 24 frames a second, that adds up just to a few minutes of an entire movie.\n\nHe realized that the way they were doing it \u2014 using a type of processor called a CPU that is commonly used in computers \u2014 it was never going to get faster or cheaper.\n\nInstead, he realized it could be done 40 times faster on a type of processor known as a GPU, which is a graphics cards designed for gaming devices such as Playstations and Xboxes.\n\nThat is now the most common method of rendering video games. And to accommodate demand, his company, OTOY, founded in 2009, and its main software, OctaneRender, have been using GPUs in the cloud with services such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure.\n\nEven back then, he could see that the appetite for such work might grow to the point it would be difficult for his company to keep up. So he dreamed up \u2014 and patented \u2014 the idea of a peer-to-peer network where anyone with some GPUs could contribute work to render scenes and pay out each of these contributors. Back then, the Bitcoin network had just started running and no more than a few academics and tech hobbyists knew about it. But now, as the cryptocurrency market has exploded and options like Ethereum are available to build new blockchain-based networks, Urbach\u2019s vision is now possible \u2014 and OTOY is launching a token for it: Render.\n\n\u201cThe demand for this work is so high that we have no other choice but to have another solution,\u201d he says. \u201cA lot of people are familiar with rendering in terms of computer graphics in films but it\u2019s seeping into all parts of our lives. People don\u2019t realize it\u2019s in advertising, in billboards, in your Zillow real estate Matterport capture.\u201d\n\n[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]\n\nOTOY is just one of a number of existing non-blockchain-focused companies that are issuing tokens to launch decentralized networks in their industry. The first to announce such an initiative was Kik messenger app, which recently raised $98 million but fell short of its goal of $125 million. Despite having 15 million monthly active users a month, only 10,000 people purchased tokens for its proposed token-based network for digital communication. While OTOY has an impressive roster of advisors, including Eric Schmidt, the chairman and former CEO of Google, and Brendan Eich, the cofounder and former CEO of Mozilla and CEO of Brave software, which launched the Basic Attention Token, plus big-name clients such as Facebook and Unity, it remains to be proven that an established company can successfully create a token-based network that also attracts its competitors and users outside its base and is therefore truly decentralized.\n\nOTOY\u2019s Render token could be well-positioned to do so. This year, it secured a deal to provide the entire rendering pipeline for Facebook \u2014 the social network\u2019s virtual reality camera data uses OTOY. \u201cOTOY has long been on the cutting edge of rendering technology. Their products were a natural fit for our efforts in pushing media to a new level of immersion,\u201d said Eric Cheng, Facebook\u2019s head of immersive media, by email. OTOY has also partnered with Unity, software akin to a Photoshop, but for mobile games such as Pokemon Go. Unity claims its software is used to make a third of top games. And the VR\/augmented reality industry could be on the cusp of taking off. A July 2016 Goldman Sachs report projected that VR\/AR will see $95 billion in revenue by 2025 \u2014 comparable to the $111 billion hardware market for laptops and $63 billion for desktops. Goldman and Deutsche Bank anticipate VR\/AR will become a bigger part of a variety of sectors including gaming, live events, virtual shopping experiences or \u201cv-commerce,\u201d healthcare and fitness, communication such as Skype or FaceTime, trainings and education, tourism, and social experience apps such as watching movies with others through VR.\n\nOTOY estimates that what is called the OctaneRender Cloud Network could bring on seven million users (mostly game developers on Unity). Advisor Eich also sees potential for Ethereum miners to switch to Render. \u201cAs Ethereum evolves toward proof of stake or other future technologies that don\u2019t require GPU power, that become more power efficient, the GPUs that were for mining Ethereum could be used on Render,\u201d he says. Urbach even imagines iPhones and iPads doing rendering as they recharge overnight, though he calls that an \u201cambitious\u201d goal.\n\nHowever, according to a Markets and Markets report, rendering is now only a $1 billion industry and is expected to grow only to $2.9 billion by 2022, so that may limit the potential market cap for the Render token, especially since the network wouldn\u2019t constitute the entire industry. OTOY, using other projections, projects that revenue in 2021 would be $10-$20 billion even if RNDR took just 2% of the industry.\n\nWhile some crypto players like Eich are excited about the Render token, others are more skeptical. Brian Kelly of digital asset hedge fund Brian Kelly Capital Management says, \u201cThere\u2019s nothing terribly unique about it. It\u2019s a model that could be replicated fairly easily. There\u2019s not a big moat around it from what I can tell.\u201d\n\nHowever, Urbach countered in an email, \u201cThe centralized iteration of our rendering model hasn\u2019t been replicated anywhere near our scale, and it\u2019s a good indicator of how hard it is to scale to millions of GPUs in a decentralized way as we plan to do now with RNDR.\u201d\n\nLucas Ryan of cypto hedge fund Metastable Capital wasn\u2019t convinced the token was necessary and felt such rendering work could be paid for in, say, Ether. Also, Golem network, a decentralized computing platform, might work just as well. Urbach says payment in other tokens doesn\u2019t scale and notes that with Render (unlike Golem Network Tokens), a hash of the assets used behind the render source enables the tokens to be easily distributed to the contributors, putting IP rights on the blockchain.\n\nRender is aiming to raise $134 million from its token sale, which starts October 5. As with the other existing companies launching tokens, it will be interesting to see how well OTOY can redirect its success so far with its company toward a decentralized network.\n\nBe sure to get Forbes' twice-weekly all things blockchain email newsletter, Crypto Confidential! Sign up here."}
{"text":"Image copyright Oxford University Image caption These images produced by the researchers were 0.07mm across - smaller than the width of human hair\n\nScientists have patented a new way to make ultra high-res displays that can bend and are thousandths of a mm thick.\n\nThey used a miniscule layer of a phase-change material, that flips between two chemical states when hit with current.\n\nBy sandwiching it between transparent electrodes, they made pixels just 300 nanometres across and produced images smaller than the width of human hair.\n\nThe design, published in Nature, could be useful in wearable technology, smart contact lenses or foldable screens.\n\nAccording to Prof Harish Bhaskaran, who led the research at Oxford University, it will be \"at least five years\" before any applications appear.\n\nBut as far as Prof Bhaskaran is aware, the resolution of the images his team produced is among the highest ever achieved. \"I haven't seen any other technology that approaches 100 or 200 nanometre resolution,\" he told the BBC.\n\nYou could roll out your screen from inside a pen Prof Harish Bhaskaran, Oxford University\n\nPhase-change materials are commonly used in heat management, because they absorb or release heat in switching between an orderly, crystalline state and a more chaotic \"amorphous\" state. Because their optical properties change with these states as well, they have also proved useful in data storage, such as rewritable DVDs.\n\nThe key to the new design is a very thin layer of one of these materials: an alloy containing germanium, antimony and tellurium (Ge2Sb2Te5, or \"GST\" for short).\n\nInstead of using GST to encode ones and zeros within the rings of a DVD, Prof Bhaskaran's team sandwiched it in between two layers of a transparent material that conducts electricity, producing a three-layered film no thicker than 0.0002mm. Then they painted a picture into the GST, pixel-by-pixel, by delivering current to different points across the film.\n\nElectrical current causes the GST to switch states - and change colour. In this way, the researchers produced a number of microscopic images.\n\nImage copyright Oxford University Image caption The team produced films that were flexible and semi-transparent\n\nThey also demonstrated that the technique could produce different colour changes, by using different thicknesses for the outer layers of the sandwich.\n\nNone of the pictures move - yet - but the team has filed a patent because of the potential to develop a new generation of flexible, thin, high-resolution displays.\n\n\"The cool part about this is that the functional part is very thin,\" explained Prof Baskaran. \"Because of that you could actually have displays that are non-intrusive, because you can keep the electronics far away.\"\n\nThis contrasts with current LCD displays, which require transistors immediately behind the screen to switch the colour of the pixels.\n\n\"Think of having a pen - and you can roll out your screen from inside the pen, but the electronics are contained within the pen,\" Prof Baskaran said.\n\nOther mooted applications include smart glasses or contact lenses, and even synthetic retinas, if the technology could be rejigged to convert pixels of light into electrical impulses.\n\nThe design could also offer big energy savings, because the pixels would simply stay put until they need to be changed.\n\nImage copyright Oxford University Image caption A microscopic image of a well-known Oxford landmark, made up of 150x150 300-nanometre pixels\n\n\"Unlike most conventional LCD screens, there would be no need to constantly refresh all pixels, you would only have to refresh those pixels that actually change,\" said Dr Peiman Hosseini, the study's first author.\n\n\"This means that any display based on this technology would have extremely low energy consumption.\"\n\nDr Stephen Kitson runs the Bristol display technology company Folium Optics, developing other strategies for flexible, high-resolution displays, and is also a visiting professor at the University of Western England. He said the findings were promising.\n\n\"It's a really challenging area, to get something that's bright,\" he told BBC News. \"There's a way to go, to see if they can get the dynamic range that you'd need - in other words, can you switch from really bright to really dark.\n\n\"They've got some interesting colour switches there, which is a brilliant first step.\"\n\nProf Bhaskaran agrees this is only the first stage. \"We're showing that we can combine thin-film effects with a super-thin layer of phase change material, and get colour out of it,\" he said."}
{"text":"Soon Spoon To Help Diners Score Impossible Reservations\n\nThought you couldn't get that last-minute table at Menton? Well, now you can.\n\nDevoted foodies and restaurant newbies love The Feed. Sign-up now for our twice weekly newsletter.\n\nHave you ever wanted to eat at that cool new restaurant that only seats 30 guests? Reservations are undoubtedly at a premium and you\u2019re often forced to make a reservation two weeks out. And that\u2019s if you\u2019re searching for a two-top. What about those times when friends or family are in town and your party is bigger than four people? Forget it.\n\nThat conundrum of quality, spontaneous dining is at the heart of Soon Spoon, a new restaurant reservation service that launches on March 19. Cofounders Travis Lowry and Conor Clary are working in conjunction with some of Boston\u2019s hippest, most compact restaurants to provide last-minute dining options at places such as Clio, Uni, Farmstead Table, and Puritan & Co.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve ever tried calling these types of places on a 4:30 on a Friday, but it can be very difficult,\u201d says Lowry. \u201cSome places are good about it. Menton always picks up the phone, but for most small restaurants it\u2019s just very hard because they might only have one or two people answering phones. So what ends up happening is you end up going to the place where \u2026 you can walk in\u2014that\u2019s not of the same quality\u2014but hey, you know, [you] can get a table.\u201d\n\nSoon Spoon currently has 17 restaurants that they\u2019re working with, but they hope to build that number up to 50 ideal spots by the end of the year. Lowry describes their approach with potential restaurant partners as \u201cprice agnostic,\u201d instead focusing on \u201cspecial, unique kind of places.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe don\u2019t approach restaurants because they\u2019re the most expensive,\u201d says Lowry. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of restaurants that are very expensive that we\u2019re not a good fit for. We work best in a place like East By Northeast that seats 29 or Bogie\u2019s Place that seats 15 in the back of jm Curley. We want to create this club of diners that love these restaurants and are open to eating at the last minute.\u201d\n\nUnlike OpenTable, Groupon, and Beeline\u2014which stop updating reservation availability after service begins\u2014Soon Spoon will provide to-the-minute data via text messages, email, and the website. Soon Spoon\u2019s reward system might not have typical perks such as coupons or appetizer discounts, but they will have a point system to provide personal touches like artisanal chocolates, pastries, and a seat at monthly pop-up dinners in private residences around Boston.\n\nSoon Spoon\u2019s point system works the other way as well, detracting points for cancellations and no-shows. An impetus for creating the concept was Lowry\u2019s own last-minute cancellation at Strip T\u2019s in Watertown. \u201cI saw an opportunity to help both restaurants and diners,\u201d says Lowry. \u201cI felt terrible about canceling a reservation for six at Strip T\u2019s. But those things happen all the time at restaurants. It\u2019s not impossible to dine spontaneously. We help facilitate that fun, serendipitous experience.\u201d"}
{"text":"In mid-July 2014, Microsoft announced the first truly abysmal Lumia handset, the Lumia 530, setting a new low bar for the quality of entry-level smart phone handsets. So it was with some reservation that I took possession of the Lumia 535, a 5-inch sibling to the 530 that also targets the low-end of the market. I shouldn\u2019t have worried: This is a great entry-level device and the model for Microsoft to follow for future Lumia handsets.\n\nIndeed, that has apparently already happened: Just this past week, Microsoft introduced two other low-end handsets aimed at emerging markets, the Lumia 435 and 532, and both will cost under $100 at launch. These devices clearly take more cues from the Lumia 535 than they do from the Lumia 530, and that\u2019s a good thing.\n\nBut today, let\u2019s focus on the Lumia 535, which is now fairly broadly available, see and how it differs from the 530.\n\nMicrosoft launched the Lumia 535 in November 2014 and its immediate claim to fame was that it was the first Lumia handset to carry the Microsoft branding. (Previous Lumias all bore the Nokia name.) I don\u2019t find that to be particularly interesting personally, but it was the headline at the time.\n\nThe Lumia 535 is powered by a 1.2 GHz quad core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor, 1 GB of RAM, and 8 GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD). Most of those core specs represent important upgrades from the lackluster Lumia 530, which features the same processor but is hobbled by only 512 MB of RAM and an unacceptable 4 GB of internal storage.\n\nThe biggest improvement over the 530, however, is the screen. Where the Lumia 530 features an embarrassingly bad 4-inch LCD display running at 800 x 480\u2014easily the worst screen I\u2019ve ever seen on a modern smart phone\u2014the 535 features a decent 5-inch qHD (960 x 540) IPS display with Gorilla Glass 3. And while it can\u2019t claim to be HD resolution, everything in the Windows Phone OS scales nicely, though small text isn\u2019t as razor-sharp as I\u2019d like. You also need to be looking at the screen dead-on for the best quality\u2014viewing angles aren\u2019t great, as you can see below\u2014but it\u2019s a smart phone. That\u2019s how you use it.\n\n(Like many other low-end Lumias, the 535 lacks hardware Back, Start and Search buttons and instead employs a software-based navigation bar that includes these buttons. I like this navigation bar for a few reasons\u2014it\u2019s much harder to hit the Search button by mistake, a common issue with Windows Phone handsets, for example\u2014but it also means that the UI is taking up some onscreen real estate at times. You can configure the navigation bar to auto-hide, or you can manually do so at any time, which is really nice.)\n\nThere\u2019s another important difference between the 530 and the 535, and here again we see Microsoft taking a good idea to heart for newer devices like the Lumia 435 and 532. Where the Lumia 530 includes only an accelerometer sensor, the Lumia 535 is equipped with a more reasonable array of sensors, including ambient light, accelerometer, and proximity. And these little doohickeys go a long ways toward making for a better experience: Unlike the 530, the Lumia 535 supports display auto-brightness, and the screen will dim when you raise it to your face to make a phone call.\n\nThe rear camera on the Lumia 535 is pedestrian as they come, it\u2019s a 5.0 megapixel unit with LED flash. But it also has a front-facer 5.0 megapixel wide angle unit that appears to be very similar to the \u201cselfie\u201d camera on the Lumia 735. By comparison, the Lumia 530 doesn\u2019t even have a front-facing camera, and the rear unit\u2014also 5.0 MPX, but with a fixed focus\u2014lacks an LED flash. The Lumia 535 doesn\u2019t have a camera button, a missing feature now common across all of Microsoft\u2019s low-end Lumias. (You have to step up to a mid-range Lumia 830\u2014which costs an unforgiveable $500 unlocked\u2014to get a dedicated camera button.)\n\nA few other points about the specs. Like the recently-announced Lumia 435 and 532, the 535 is aimed at emerging markets, so it does support dual SIMs\u2014still a curiosity here in the States\u2014but only 3G\/HSPA cellular networking. So there\u2019s no LTE support at all, limiting the 535\u2019s appeal in established markets. That said, it is running Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1 with Lumia Denim, and is at this moment the only phone I have capable of running the Lumia Camera app, though of course the camera isn\u2019t powerful enough to use any of that app\u2019s advanced new features. (And the pictures it takes are nothing special.)\n\nI outfitted the review unit with a microSD card so I could load it up with media\u2014and offload as much apps and data from internal memory as possible\u2014and use the Lumia 535 the way I think it will be most often used in places like the United States (though you cannot at the moment even buy this device here from a wireless carrier): As a media player. And in this capacity, the Lumia 535 absolutely shines, and it has replaced my previous Lumia media player, the 635, which has a smaller 4.5-inch screen.\n\nBefore I could get that microSD card into the 535, however, I had to figure out how to get the back cover off. Many Lumia devices feature a removable back cover, allowing you to access hidden SIM card and microSD slots, and a removable battery, or replace the cover with a differently-colored cover or flip case. And as you might expect, I\u2019m quite familiar with how these covers work. Yet, I\u2019ve had a heck of a time getting the 535\u2019s back cover off.\n\nI\u2019m not entirely sure why. The cover itself is much thinner than other Lumia covers, which contributes to this device\u2019s delightfully thin form factor. But this thinness is responsible for a certain creakiness I\u2019ve never experienced in other Lumias\u2014including the otherwise terrible Lumia 530, which has a thicker and more solid case\u2014and also, I think, to my issues removing it. In fact, I\u2019ve bent the cover around the USB hole because I\u2019ve struggled with it so much.\n\nFortunately, Microsoft sells replacement covers. Not here, in the United States, of course, but I was able to order a delightfully retro Lumia cyan-colored case from Alibaba to replace it. (It hasn\u2019t arrived yet, and I\u2019m not ready to recommend this option to potential US-based buyers.)\n\nLooking at Microsoft\u2019s international sites, I see this device is available for about 95 pounds in the UK ($144 USD), and Expansys is selling the device to US customers for $129. When you consider that a no-contract version of the Lumia 635 is currently selling for about $129 in the US as well (sometimes a bit less on sale) this seems like a great price, and given the option I would opt for the Lumia 535 personally.\n\nOf course, most 535 buyers are coming at this device from a different worldview. It\u2019s either their first smart phone, or they\u2019re moving to the 535 from a previous device that wasn\u2019t as full-featured. And aside from all the hardware niceties available here, it\u2019s worth remembering that it features all of the latest Windows Phone features\u2014Cortana, Skype, Office, OneDrive, and Lumia exclusive apps\u2014plus some neat camera functionality, especially with the front-facing selfie camera, and is both expandable and customizable. And Microsoft sells a number of colorful accessories that can complement this purchase. There really is a lot of value here.\n\nThe Lumia 535 is a fine low-end smart phone and a great example of what\u2019s possible in this market segment. Cheap doesn\u2019t have to mean low-quality. And the Lumia 535 is just the latest in a growing family of inexpensive Windows devices that delivers great value for those without a Platinum American Express card. As such, the Lumia 535 is highly recommended.\n\nTagged with Lumia"}
{"text":"Beeswax is produced by honeybee \u201cworker\u201d bees. They secrete it from glands on the underside of their abdomens then chew it up and mold it into the cells of the combs. That\u2019s why they call them worker bees. It\u2019s a big job for the beekeepers, too, who collect it from the hives and melt it down into cakes. (At least they don\u2019t have to chew it.) The reason beeswax is a bit pricey is because for every 100 pounds of honey harvested, a beekeeper will get only one to two pounds of beeswax. It\u2019s not easily come by, but maybe that\u2019s also why beeswax is so very, very wonderful.\n\nIn candles, beeswax smells delicious, requiring no added scent, and it burns longer and cleaner than other waxes. It also has beautiful, natural color.\n\nMy latest batch of beeswax candles.\n\nBeeswax has a melting point of 143-148 degrees. I prefer it for container candles. For tapers, you need a wax with a higher melting point. The best way to make beeswax tapers is to buy pressed beeswax sheets and roll each sheet tightly around a wick. (Dipped beeswax can make messy tapers that puddle. I prefer to use taper wax\u2013see Hand-Dipping Tapers.)\n\nYou can also use beeswax to make lip balms, skin creams, and herbal salves. When I was researching beeswax, I found the same recipes in multiple places, so I\u2019m not sure of the original sources. (Probably our great-grandmas.) The recipes I\u2019m posting are ones I\u2019ve experimented with and found useful. The first one is for a beeswax cream that is really nice for the hands in the winter.\n\nYou can print this post: Printer-Friendly\n\nFYI, these measurements are by volume, except for the beeswax, which is by weight (weighed before melting).\n\nBeeswax Moisturizing Cream:\n\n4 ounces sweet almond oil\n\n1 ounce beeswax\n\n2 ounces water\n\n8-10 drops essential oil (optional)\n\n8-10 drops Vitamin E\n\nMelt the almond oil and beeswax. Remove from heat and stir in the water. Stir in remaining ingredients. Stir as it cools\u2013before it becomes too cool to pour, transfer to a container (or divide between smaller containers).\n\nYou can also make a super easy \u201cVaseline\u201d-type moisturizer by combining 1\/2 cup baby oil per ounce beeswax. After you melt the beeswax, remove from heat and stir in the baby oil. (You can add a few drops of essential oil, too, if you want more scent. I really like beeswax just how it smells naturally.)\n\nThere are beeswax lip balm recipes all over the place, but this is one I like that is a Burt\u2019s Bees knock-off.\n\nBeeswax Lip Balm:\n\n1 teaspoons grated beeswax\n\n2 teaspoons coconut oil\n\n1\/2 teaspoon lanolin\n\nliquid from one Vitamin E capsule\n\n2 drops lemon or orange essential oil (optional)\n\n1 teaspoon honey\n\nMelt everything together with the beeswax in a microwave-safe bowl (except for the essential oil and honey). If you don\u2019t want to use the microwave, you can also place the ingredients in a little custard cup inside a pot of water on the stove; heat gently to melt. Remove from heat and stir in the essential oil and honey. Transfer to a small container. (This even tastes good.)\n\nYou can make a healing salve with different essential oils, depending on what you need, such as tea tree oil (good for cuts and burns).\n\nBeeswax Salve:\n\n2 ounces beeswax\n\n1 ounce jojoba oil\n\n3 ounces sweet almond oil\n\n1\/2 ounce vegetable oil\n\nessential oil*\n\n*Research the specific essential oils you are interested in before determining the safe quantity to use for your purposes.\n\nMelt beeswax together with jojoba oil, sweet almond oil, and vegetable oil. Remove from heat. Stir in essential oil, if using. Transfer to a container. You could also mix in various crushed herbs instead of using essential oils.\n\nBeeswax is also the ultimate furniture polish.\n\nBeeswax Furniture Polish:\n\n2 ounces beeswax\n\n1\/2 pint turpentine\n\n1\/4 ounce lemon or orange essential oil (optional)\n\nMelt the beeswax. Remove from heat and immediately stir in the turpentine. Add the essential oil, if using, and keep stirring as it cools. Transfer to a container. This makes a creamy polish that is great to lovingly rub into wood.\n\nAside from polishing, beeswax is a great protectant and waterproofing agent for wood. I love this recipe for \u201cSpoon Oil\u201d that was posted on the CITR forum by Buckeye Girl here.\n\nSpoon Oil:\n\n16 ounces mineral oil\n\n4 ounces beeswax, cut in chunks\n\nWarm the mineral oil by placing the container in a pot of warm water. Place beeswax in a wide-mouth jar and melt in a double boiler. Remove from heat and slowly pour the mineral oil into the melted beeswax. Stir as it cools. Use to rub into wooden spoons. Also great for reviving cutting boards.\n\nBees always scare me a little bit, but I love their stuff!\n\n*Make things with beeswax safely\u2013see my guidelines and precautions for melting wax here. You can find beeswax online at craft and candle suppliers, etc. Lanolin, coconut oil, jojoba oil, and sweet almond oil can be found online at health and beauty suppliers, and a lot of the same places where you buy soapmaking and other craft supplies including essential oils. (These are not expensive supplies other than the essential oils, if using.)\n\nMore posts you might enjoy:\n\nEmail Address:\n\nPosted by Suzanne McMinn on February 7, 2011"}
{"text":"On Media Blog Archives Select Date\u2026 December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015\n\nposter=\"http:\/\/v.politico.com\/images\/1155968404\/201310\/1902\/1155968404_2780947835001_vs-526fca73e4b03283b83fd6df-1592194023001.jpg?pubId=1155968404\" true The Republican National Committee's new ad blasts Obamacare and plays off the famous \"Get a Mac\" ad campaign run by Apple from 2006 to 2009. RNC to run Obamacare ad during Daily Show\n\nThe Republican National Committee will be running an anti-Obamacare commercial during Tuesday's \"The Daily Show with Jon Stewart\" in the Washington, D.C. market, the RNC announced Tuesday morning.\n\nThe ad that will run Tuesday is part of a series of four videos created by the RNC playing on the famous \"Get a Mac\" ad campaign run by Apple from 2006 to 2009. In the videos, a younger man plays the private sector, while an older, overweight and fumbling man plays the new healthcare law and the HealthCare.gov website.\n\n\"These videos help to convey the absurdity of ObamaCare and the administration\u2019s careless behavior,\" RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement.\n\n(WATCH: The best of last night's late-night TV)\n\nIt's clear who the RNC is trying to target with the ad during the Daily Show - the exact population the new health care law is relying on to buy health insurance in order for the whole system to function. But, the ad is only running on \"The Daily Show\" in the Washington, D.C. market, one full of federal government workers and contractors, many of whom have health insurance through their jobs."}
{"text":"I started going to counseling when I was 25. My counselor was a pastor and respected man in his 50s. At the time I was in a deep depression and was suicidal. I had never been in counseling before so I didn\u2019t know what the counselor\/client relationship was supposed to be like. At the time, I wanted to die, and going to this counselor was the only hope that I could hold on to. I depended on him. I gave him my trust, and I told him my deepest thoughts, feelings, and fears. This brought me a sense of closeness to him. He emphasized that closeness.\n\nI had often wondered if our friendship that came from the many counseling sessions was too close of a relationship. It is hard to differentiate what should and shouldn\u2019t have happened between us. We became really close and I did feel loved by him, but should I have? Was my counselor being inappropriate? How do you know when to tell someone to stop loving you when you feel so alone and horrible about yourself as I did at the time? It seems like I should have been able to figure it out, but in the midst of things, all I knew was that I needed him so that I could stay alive.\n\nWas I responsible to stop something that I didn\u2019t even know was happening? If so, when should I have known to stop it? Was my counselor being inappropriate? Here are some examples of the things that my counselor did that took us down this path.\n\nHe:\n\nSat next to me on the couch in his office when I was severely depressed\n\nHeld me while I cried\n\nGot me a free membership at a gym\n\nFound a place for me to volunteer where his wife worked\n\nTalked with me on the phone at any time when I was sad or wanted to die\n\nLet me stay at his house for safety on a night when I was going to kill myself\n\nConfided in me about his struggles\n\nAsked me if I would still trust him if it was found out that he had done something wrong\n\nTook me on a fast ride in his son\u2019s sports car just because\n\nMet with me at a coffee shop one day instead of his office to tell me he was fired as a counselor because he had an affair with another client\n\nTold me he had been seduced by the woman client he had the affair with\n\nContinued to see me one on one after being fired as a counselor\n\nMet me at my work and took me out to lunch regularly\n\nCalled and talked to me for hours when his wife was out of town\n\nHung up on me when we were talking on the phone if his wife came into the room with him\n\nCaused me to get suicidal because he was suicidal\n\nTold me that I understood him in a way others did not\n\nDidn\u2019t tell his best friend about me because his best friends wouldn\u2019t understand our special relationship\n\nHeld my hand while walking around the city\n\nKissed me on the top of the head when we would say goodbye\n\nTold me that he loved me on a regular basis\n\nWas my counselor being inappropriate? Were any of these things ok? These things made me feel special at a time in my life when I thought I was a horrible person. Not being a counselor myself, I didn\u2019t know about boundaries in counseling. I didn\u2019t know about relationship definitions between counselor and client and the possible negative impact these could have on my mental health. I didn\u2019t know that a counselor should just be a counselor or that I should be learning to have strength on my own and not get all my strength from my counselor.\n\nHow is a person in the midst of the biggest struggle of her life supposed to have the strength to stop something that she don\u2019t even know could be wrong or damaging? When someone loves you in what you thought was a pure love, how do you say no?\n\nAfter years of these things, I ended up being the one to start questioning him. I asked him if his wife knew about us meeting together. I asked him if any of his friends knew about our friendship, especially his best friend. I started questioning whether a married man should be telling his deep struggles to another woman. I started wondering if I was the other woman\u2026\n\n\u2026and then one day, when I called him, he said, \u201cOh, I didn\u2019t know it was you.\u201d Then he hung up on me. He never spoke to me again. I guess I got my answer.\n\nSharing this makes me feel very exposed and even ashamed that I didn\u2019t recognize what was happening sooner. So, why do I tell all this? I want you to know that these things are not ok. I want you to be able to recognize some signs that your counselor may be going down the wrong road with you. Maybe you can avoid the confusion and pain that I went through. If your counselor is trying to become more than a counselor, it is not ok. The counselor is not helping you at that point, they are helping themselves. You need help from a counselor, not confusion. You deserve not to be deceived or used for someone else\u2019s gain. Please know that you are worth having a safe counselor to go to. A counselor that will respect you and the counseling relationship."}
{"text":"Caracas, September 24th 2012 (Venezuelanalysis.com) \u2013 North American film director, Oliver Stone, has spoken out on the Venezuelan elections from the San Sebastian film festival in Spain, where he stated that current Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would \u201cwin the elections again\u201d in October and that his opponent, Capriles Radonski, was \u201cnot a good guy\u201d.\n\n\u201cIf he (Capriles) won, he would hand the country back to the upper classes,\u201d stated the veteran director, who was invited to the 60th anniversary of the film festival to receive a lifetime achievement award alongside Hollywood actor, John Travolta.\n\nStone, who directed the documentary \u201cSouth of the Border\u201d which tells the story of Latin America's new wave of elected left-wing presidents, went on to confirm that the Chavez is \u201cin good health,\u201d despite the fact that the Venezuelan leader is currently recovering from an undisclosed form of cancer.\n\nThe openly left-wing film-maker also used the festival as a chance to make a series of political commentaries, including his desire to see former Spanish president, Jos\u00e9 Maria Aznar, tried at the Hague due to his collaboration with George W. Bush and Tony Blair in the Iraq war.\n\nHe furthermore made a series of statements relating to current US politics, and denounced Washington for pursuing Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.\n\nDespite his criticisms of the current US administration, Stone said he would vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming US presidential elections, even though he considers the Democrat leader to be \u201cnot a very important leader, and even less so if he cannot change this direction to the right that we are taking\u201d.\n\nStone is currently promoting his new film \u201cSavages,\u201d which focuses on the issue of the narcotics industry in Mexico. During the presentation of the film in San Sebastian, the film-maker strongly criticised the \u201cstupidity\u201d of the Washington sponsored \u201cwar on drugs\u201d.\n\n\u201cForty-two years ago we (the US) started the war against drugs... and now there are more drugs, which are cheaper and better than ever... the US doesn't use the war on drugs to fight against drugs and the violence generated by them, but to spy on other countries and to enter other countries, such as Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan or Pakistan, to put their people there and.. militarise them,\u201d he stated."}
{"text":"The Iran Visa on Arrival information contained here is based on my experience in February 2017. If you have any questions about this process contact me on Facebook or in the comments below.\n\nI applied for a visa on arrival at Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport. A friend of mine applied at the international airport in Shiraz instead, the process was identical. Once you disembark from your plane, you should immediately look for signs pointing you towards the visa area. The airport is small so it is not hard to find this area, just look for the signs. The visa process is as follows:\n\nVisa on Arrival Application Process\n\n1. Purchase or Verify Your Travel Insurance\n\nThe first step in the visa process is to sort out your travel insurance. To do this, you will need to head to the travel insurance cashier\/desk. Please note that even if you already have travel insurance that is valid for Iran, you still need to have this verified at the insurance desk. If you already have insurance valid in Iran, make sure you have printed your policy certificate and show this at the insurance desk. Make sure to point out where on your certificate that it says \u2018Iran\u2019. I travel with World Nomads insurance and specifically made sure that Iran was included. The insurance certificate issued to me by World Nomads explicitly stated that it was valid for Iran. If you have travel insurance but your printed policy does not clearly state that it is valid for Iran, you may be forced to buy a separate policy.\n\nIf you are forced to buy insurance at this counter, you will need to pay about 14\u20ac for 30 days of coverage. Coverage for other lengths of time are also available with the cost going up and down proportionally.\n\n2. Fill in Visa Application Form\n\nAfter purchasing or validating your travel insurance, head over to the visa desk itself and get a small (A5) white visa application form. This small form is quick and easy to fill out and requires your passport details, home address, father\u2019s name, job and a few other details. The form also asks for the location and contact details of the place you will be staying at while in Iran. In this section I included the name, address and phone number for my hostel in Tehran. I did not include the details of all my accommodation in Iran, just the place I was staying at first.\n\nThere were no questions on the form about previous travel to Israel. I should note that I had previously been to Israel, however my passport contained no evidence of this. I was relieved to find the form did not ask me if I had been to Israel because really I don\u2019t like lying on visa applications.\n\n3. Pay For Your Visa\n\nAfter filling out the A5 sized visa application form, return to the visa desk and give the attendant the completed form, your passport as well as your proof of travel insurance. He will respond by scribbling a figure in Euro on a small white piece of paper and will instruct you to pay this at the cashier\u2019s counter located next to the visa desk. For me this figure read 145\u20ac. A cost schedule by country for the visa on arrival can be found here. It appears to be an accurate list, but I have not verified it 100% and the list is not complete. New Zealand is not on this list, however after speaking to a few Kiwis while in Iran, I can confirm that the cost is 150\u20ac for NZ passport holders.\n\nOnce you have paid the correct price at the cashier you will be handed a receipt. Do not lose the receipt, you will need it!\n\n4. Wait For Your Application to be Processed\n\nThe final step is to simply wait. You do not need to go back and speak to the visa desk attendant yet, you just need to wait. Once your application has been processed the attendant will call out your name (or maybe just your country\u2019s name). You will then need to hand over the receipt you received from the cashier and in return you will be handed your passport complete with Iranian visa inside it.\n\nIf you made any mistakes on the white A5 visa application form, it will be pointed out to you at this stage. I saw one person in particular fail to include a phone number for his accommodation and so they called out his name and made him correct it. He then he had to wait further. Make sure you completed the form described in step 2 above to avoid any delays at this step.\n\n5. Clear Immigration and Collect Luggage\n\nWith your passport in your hand, complete with a brand spanking new visa, you can now head to passport control. This step is very quick and you should not be asked any additional questions. Once you have cleared passport control you can collect your bags. If your application process took a while (as mine did) your luggage will probably not be on the luggage carousel but sitting on the ground somewhere nearby.\n\nDo You Need Proof of Onward Travel?\n\nI did have an onward flight booked and I had a printout of the booking details. However at no stage was I required to show this. From my experience, an onward flight is not required to gain entry to Iran. However, as is often the case, you may be required to show proof of onward travel during the check-in for your flight to Iran.\n\nIf You Have Valid Travel Insurance. Bring Proof!\n\nAn insurance policy certificate clearly stating that it is valid for Iran. If you do not have this you will need to buy insurance at the airport for about 14\u20ac\/30 days.\n\nBring Email Confirmation For Your First Accomodation\n\nAn email printout with your first accommodation booking details might be needed. You may not need to actually show this to anyone, but you will need the information on it to fill out your forms. At the very least make sure you have an email containing your accommodation booking details, an address and contact information. Contact details for a hostel are accepted, there is no need to book an expensive hotel.\n\nOnly accommodation details for your first stop in Iran appears to be required. I do not believe that the authorities called my accommodation to check if I was actually staying their, however have heard that in other cases they will check.\n\nDo I Need to Bring Passport Photos?\n\nThe Visa process as it stands does not require you to bring any passport photos. They will take a copy of your photo contained in your regular passport instead.\n\nWhich Countries are Eligible for a Visa On Arrival?\n\nA detailed list of countries eligible for a Visa on Arrival is available the following links.\n\nHow much does the Visa on Arrival cost?\n\nThe cost of a visa on arrival varies depending on your country of origin. However the most common price is 75\u20ac which is the price for most European countries. Australians and New Zealanders on the other hand pay 145\u20ac and 150\u20ac respectively. A complete list for VoA costs can be found at the link below.\n\n(Header image taken by Ellen from https:\/\/travellingtheworldsolo.com\/)"}
{"text":"1. The legislation will allow contractors to be secretly \"blacklisted,\" and excluded from DoD contracting programs.\n\n2. The blacklisting allowed under Section 815 could result in \"de facto\" debarments of federal contractors across the federal government without due process.\n\n3. Section 815 does not require DoD to notify or justify its decision to blacklist companies.\n\n4. DoD's determinations regarding its secret \"blacklist\" would be protected from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), protest at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), or action brought in the federal court system.\n\n5. The legislation represents a reduction in competitiveness in federal contracting programs, and as a result could lead to increased costs of goods and services.\n\n6. The legislation consolidates DoD acquisition authority on over $300 billion a year in defense contracts into the hands of a small group of high-level Pentagon officials.\n\n7. The legislation will lead to a reduction in transparency, accountability and oversight in federal contracting programs and opens the door to unparalleled and perhaps unconstitutional abuse.\n\n8. Could allow large contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman with significant clout at the Pentagon to eliminate their competitors with more efficient and cost effective products."}
{"text":"Saint John's overall office vacancy rate has crept up again, reaching 21.5 per cent.\n\n\"That's about the highest it's been during my [20 year] tenure here,\" said real estate analyst Andr\u00e9 Pouliot, with Turner Drake, the brokerage firm that compiled the numbers.\n\nIn comparison, office vacancy rates are 9.5 percent in Fredericton, 13.7 percent in Moncton, 15.3 percent in Halifax and 12.7 percent in St. John's.\n\nBecause of the excess of vacant offices in the Port City, some landlords told CBC they've felt pressured to drop their rents and pay up front for improvements or consider other incentives to attract tenants in a highly competitive market.\n\nJohn Lawson is seeking tenants for the entire fifth floor of Harbour Centre building in Saint John. (Rachel Cave\/CBC)\n\nIn Saint John's uptown business district, the least prestigious space with the fewest amenities, also known as Class C space, is renting for as low as $7 per square foot.\n\nPouliot says landlords must be feeling the pressure to move their capital elsewhere or repurpose their buildings.\n\n\"When we say the rates are unsustainably high, we're trying to get into the heads of property owners,\" he said.\n\n\"Property owners are capitalists. They expect to earn a certain return on their real estate.\"\n\nPouliot said when vacancy rates are topping 20 per cent, owners still have to make their mortgage payments.\n\n\"Eventually what they do is they look at the situation and say, 'Hey, can I put my property to better use?'\"\n\nSeeking tenants\n\nOver at the Harbour Centre building on Prince William Street, John Lawson is looking for tenants to fill 6,000 square feet, or the entire fifth floor.\n\nJohn Lawson is seeking tenants for 6,000 square feet of office space at Harbour Centre building. (Rachel Cave\/CBC)\n\nAs he walks through the empty rooms with their views of the harbour, he says the search for a new tenant began almost a year ago, when the previous renters gave notice they would be leaving by November.\n\n\"Right now, it's not great,\" he said. \"We haven't had a lot of inquiries.\"\n\nPouliot says employers today are looking for less space per worker and in Saint John he says that trend has not been offset by economic growth.\n\nSome blame the tax rate for stifling that growth.\n\n\"We have the highest commercial and property tax rates and it's hurting us,\" said corporate and commercial lawyer Andrew Costin, who also serves as vice-president for Uptown Saint John, the city's business improvement association.\n\nAccording to the Real Property Association of Canada, the annual tax on commercial property per $100,000 assessment is $5,043 in Saint John, $4,840 in Moncton, $2,640 in Toronto and $1,386 in Vancouver.\n\nCostin says it's a \"serious problem\" and he doesn't see any leadership from the province or the city to fix it.\n\nOffice stock supply stagnant\n\nPouliot says Saint John's supply of office stock hasn't changed a lot.\n\nThe city had about 2.29 million square feet in 2011 with a vacancy rate of 10.7 percent. Today, there's about 2.53 million square feet.\n\nBut that will change when Irving Oil completes its new headquarters.\n\nThat building will create more empty office space in the city when some 100 workers leave their current scattered locations and move in."}
{"text":"Around the world there has been a huge increase in the number of children being referred to gender clinics - boys saying they want to be girls and vice versa. Increasingly, parents are encouraged to adopt a 'gender affirmative' approach - fully supporting their children's change of identity. But is this approach right?\n\nIn this challenging documentary, BBC Two's award-winning This World strand travels to Canada, where one of the world's leading experts in childhood gender dysphoria (the condition where children are unhappy with their biological sex) lost his job for challenging the new orthodoxy that children know best. Speaking on TV for the first time since his clinic was closed, Dr Kenneth Zucker believes he is a victim of the politicisation of transgender issues. The film presents evidence that most children with gender dysphoria eventually overcome the feelings without transitioning and questions the science behind the idea that a boy could somehow be born with a 'female brain' or vice versa. It also features 'Lou' - who was born female and had a double mastectomy as part of transitioning to a man. She now says it is a decision that 'haunts' her and feels that her gender dysphoria should have been treated as a mental health issue.\n\nThis documentary examines Zucker's methods, but it also includes significant contributions from his critics and supporters of gender affirmation, including transgender activists in Canada and leading medical experts as well as parents with differing experiences of gender dysphoria and gender reassignment."}
{"text":"August 28, 2013\n\nNCAA Denies Rakeem Buckles to Minnesota\n\nThe NCAA has reportedly denied a waiver request that would enable Rakeem Buckles to compete during the 2013-14 season for the Minnesota Golden Gophers. Buckles would be a promising addition to a Minnesota roster that could use help rebounding and blocking shots.\n\nThe school can appeal the decision and the ultimate resolution could favor Buckles and the U. However, with Minnesota\u2019s fall semester beginning next week and classes having already started at Florida International, timing is an issue.\n\nThe traditional media will display \u201coutrage\u201d at the perceived inconsistency of the NCAA and point to \u201csimilar cases\u201d, but there are several issues that could be unique to Buckles.\n\nWho Plays if Buckles Doesn\u2019t?\n\nBefore getting into Rakeem Buckles and his situation, let\u2019s quickly consider who else is on the roster.\n\nThe Gophers have two redshirt junior centers in Elliott Eliason and Maurice Walker. Neither have logged many minutes during their years at Minnesota, but if they both stay healthy and produce then the situation at center seems relatively set.\n\nExperienced guards Andre Hollins, Austin Hollins and Malik Smith all figure to see a ton of floor time. However, none of these players rebound well.\n\nThe need for a power forward to rebound and defend inside is significant. Redshirt junior Oto Osenieks, redshirt freshman Charles Buggs and \u2013 if he receives a waiver to play immediately \u2013 sophomore Joey King, all are possibilities to help Minnesota rebound the ball this season from the \u201c4\u201d position.\n\nGopher sophomore Wally Ellenson, a 6\u20194\u2033 wing, may be a better offensive rebounder than any of the power forward candidates. With great leaping ability and fearlessness, Ellenson can make an impact crashing the offensive glass if given the green light.\n\nBack to Buckles\n\nThe arguments and reasoning by the various parties involved in such eligibility matters are rarely made public. Non-disclosure does cause some of the angst and complaining displayed by the public when there is a perception that the NCAA \u201cgot it wrong\u201d, but when you\u2019re potentially dealing with issues of academics, health, etc., non-disclosure is appropriate.\n\nWe are not opining here as to whether Buckles should be eligible to play for Minnesota this season. Rather, we are taking a non-comprehensive look at what some of the issues could be.\n\nThere isn\u2019t a checklist, unbiased computer program, or inflexible rules to look at. Ultimately most decisions include a degree of subjectivity.\n\n1) Multiple 4-4 transfers.\n\nIn early April we talked about immediate eligibility for graduate student transfers as it relates to Rakeem Buckles. Although our understanding is that Buckles has not been accepted into a graduate program at the University of Minnesota, the discussion in this article from nearly 5 months ago remains potentially relevant.\n\nPut simply, the NCAA could take issue with the belief that Buckles is following a coach around.\n\nIn April we discussed why approval of a waiver could be problematic for Buckles.\n\nGraduate students are generally afforded a one-time exception (i.e., no waiver is required). However, if a student has previously transferred from one 4-year school to another (i.e., Louisville to FIU), the exception is not available and a waiver must be requested.\n\n\u201cA coach leaving is not generally seen by the NCAA as a valid justification for a transfer and in fact Pitino\u2019s move from FIU to Minnesota might hurt the argument of Buckles being eligible up north. Most likely the argument would be that Minnesota has a grad program Rakeem has been accepted into, but the same program is not offered at FIU.\n\nWould the committee reviewing the waiver challenge the reasoning behind the request because of what may appear to be (and might factually be) a player following his coach as opposed to a student-athlete excited by a particular program at the University of Minnesota? With his history of injuries you\u2019d hope he gets a chance to do what he\u2019d like next season, but it\u2019s difficult to tell.\u201d\n\n2) FIU\u2019s Postseason Ban\n\nContrary to popular belief, if your school is banned from postseason play and you\u2019re going to be senior, you do not automatically receive immediately eligibility at a new school.\n\nThe NCAA Bylaws allow one of its groups to award a waiver based on the recommendations of another group in such circumstances.\n\nRemember, this waiver is generally granted when a postseason ban \u201cwould preclude the institution\u2019s team in that sport from participating in postseason competition during all of the remaining seasons of the student-athlete\u2019s eligibility\u201d.\n\nMinnesota\u2019s Malik Smith did transfer to Minnesota and was granted a waiver to play immediately, however his history is different from Rakeem\u2019s.\n\nWhen Buckles and Smith decided to attend FIU before the 2012-13 academic year (and when Richard Pitino decided to coach there), the expectation was that the school would be banned from postseason play in 2013-14.\n\nMalik transferred in from a junior college. He was eligible to compete in 2012-13 and had a chance to participate in the postseason, even though the prospects for being eligible for postseason in 2013-14 looked dim.\n\nBuckles transferred in from Louisville and was not eligible to compete in 2012-13.\n\nTherefore, it could be argued that Buckles essentially knew what his situation would be at FIU. In his one year of remaining eligibility to compete, he\u2019d be at a school that was ineligible for postseason play.\n\nDoes this mean it makes sense for Smith and Buckles to be treated differently? In some minds it might.\n\n3) Academic progress\n\nWhen transferring, student-athletes can run into situations where classes at one school do not help their progress toward degree at another school. A player might not declare a major early on and take some more \u201cgeneral\u201d type classes or certain classes (physical education, for example) that may help toward progress of only specific degrees offered by their school.\n\nSome classes taken previously may not transfer over. Some classes may transfer over only if a specific degree at the new school is being pursued.\n\nIn addition, when players are injured (especially early in a semester) they may be able to reduce their course work and still maintain eligibility under NCAA rules. Buckles tore an ACL about a week into the spring 2012 semester and could have withdrawn from some classes after this major injury.\n\nDelaying a decision on your major isn\u2019t unusual and there\u2019s nothing wrong with scaling back your course work if you need to have a major surgery performed during the semester (not to mention the need to dedicate a tremendous amount of time to rehab).\n\nHowever, such circumstances and decisions can result in cutting it close with regard to your progress toward degree.\n\n@LateNightHoops is on Twitter.\n\nSharing Options:"}
{"text":"Ethan Indigo Smith, Contributor\n\nWaking Times\n\nTerrorism [noun]: The unlawful use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.\n\nWar is politically motivated violence. War is, therefore, terrorism, enshrined in the law of one warring party.\n\nBy its definition, war threatens and enacts violence on behalf of the State, for its own benefit, at the expense of the lives and livelihoods of countless others. And yet we have come to accept their invasion, their suppression, and even their deaths as necessary to our lives \u2014 to our sense of peace. So we occupy lands, we kill leaders, we overturn cities in the hunt for weapons that don\u2019t exist \u2014 and all because the lawmakers who decide which violent acts are \u201cwar\u201d and which are \u201cterrorism\u201d tell us such violence is necessary to achieve peace.\n\nSo, remind me again\u2026 Who are the terrorists? Who are the war heroes, and who are the war criminals? How do we discern military from militia? Do we really believe peace can be achieved by declaring war on war itself?\n\nThe greatest hypocrisy of our time.\n\nThe world\u2019s political institutions \u2014 from the U.S. to Russia, from Israel to ISIS \u2014 seek to gain and maintain power through the use of violence, terror, and military coercion. In fact we live in a world where legally-sanctioned acts of terrorism are carried out more often than illegal terrorism \u2014 but, as they are conducted within someone else\u2019s borders, in someone else\u2019s homeland, we separate ourselves from this reality, in a dissonant attempt to protect ourselves from it.\n\n\u201cNever forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.\u201d\u009d ~ Martin Luther King Jr.\n\nWhether we are conscious of it or not, we are each deeply and profoundly disturbed by the war world we live in; we are disturbed that hate is the language of our leaders. We are disturbed that we send our sons and daughters away to participate in it. and we are disturbed that we allow it. And we are disturbed by feeling we are unable to do anything about it. For most of us, war has been an ever-present part of our lives, and we accept the state of war as the state of \u201cnormal\u201d \u2014 simply because it has always been.\n\nThe United States has been at war for 224 years out of the last 241 years. Not one U.S. president qualifies as a solely peacetime president, and the only time the United States lasted 5 years without going to war was between 1935 and 1940 \u2014 during the period of the Great Depression. Sadly, but true to form, America centered its post-Depression economic recovery around its military industry. Subsequently, every U.S. President since the end of World War II \u2014 from Truman to Kennedy, Eisenhower to Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, \u2018Dubya\u2019, and Obama \u2014 enacted a Presidential Doctrine directly pertaining to war, either by inviting U.S. involvement in conflict or inciting it directly. Today, with President Trump having just assumed office, the military industry is critical to the survival of the U.S. economy \u2014 and indeed, of the United States of America \u2014 employing over 3.5 million Americans [source] and generating over $300 billion in revenue each year for private military companies. [source]\n\nCall it what you will, such institutionalization of war is terrorism. It does not matter how crazy or legitimate their goals are perceived to be; violence in order to express a point is terrorism. But with a warring mentality firmly embedded in both the psyche and economy of the United States, Americans have not learned the lessons of history and failed Presidential policy, and allow these systems of war to continue on their behalf under the Orwellian guises of \u201cliberty\u201d, \u201cpeacekeeping\u201d and \u201cfreedom\u201d. However the reality shows us that the result of those systems is anything but free, peaceful liberty.\n\nInstitutional Thinking: The Mind of The State\n\n\u201cDeception is a state of mind and the mind of the state.\u201d\u009d ~ James Jesus Angleton\n\nNo matter how confusing the War on Terror becomes, no matter the geopolitics involved, no matter who is wearing which uniforms, or what book they hold, or flag they fly, people who kill and die in the name of institutional abstracts are terrorists \u2014 whether they are lawmakers, rebels, military soldiers, suicide bombers or Heads of State. Those who willingly kill and terrify on behalf of a geopolitical agenda are terrorists. Period.\n\nThose who do so are conned, convinced through varying levels of propaganda. The most obvious (yet diabolical) form is friendly old Uncle Sam beckoning young unemployed teens to \u201csee the world\u201d by his side. But it isn\u2019t just our troops who have been conned. We Americans are proud to see our children put boots to the ground (primarily 18-21 year olds) and engage (kill) the enemy. We celebrate their \u201csuccesses\u201d (killing) and mourn their \u201closses\u201d (being killed). We have learned to euphemistically minimize deaths as \u2018casualties\u2019, when there is nothing casual about it. We falsely believe the killing and maiming of innocent civilians to be the exception and not the rule of war, rationalize killing and dying in the name of perverted, monolithic geopolitical ideologies.\n\nWhatever way you look at it, using violence to coerce is terrorism. Not only is it commonplace, it the design of our society\u2019s institutions \u2014 from the more obvious government and military institutions to the less obvious nuclear energy industry, which feeds materials to nuclear weapons programs, and the media, which portrays the acts of war in perfect alignment with government rhetoric. Yes, the machinery of war is so commonplace in the United States that we can\u2019t even see the problem let alone then begin to define it!\n\nMake no mistake, the cause of violence and terror today is our so-called leaders. They control the military might to destroy entire countries, yet claim not to have the resources to simply defend our borders against attack, preferring instead to enact \u201cpreemptive strikes\u201d on foreign soil \u2014 to attack first rather than defend. Invariably, such policy requires increasingly authoritative, punitive and even fascist policies on home soil, to keep the confused (and disturbed) public in line.\n\nSo, to put an end to the U.S. doctrine of perpetual war, we need to stop asking why individuals resort to acts of terrorism and ask why we allow our institutions to do so as example to world\u2019s individuals. Why is terrorism increasing? Why would a terrorist sacrifice their own life to inflict harm on individuals? What are they responding to? Look no further than the reality of the behavior exhibited by the world\u2019s leaders: If another nation\u2019s policy or politician is disliked, debate. If you don\u2019t get your way, drop bombs on entire populations and take over their nation by force \u2014 even if it requires complete fabrication and propaganda (WMD\u2019s anyone?) to gain public support.\n\nIn simple terms, extreme militarism can only lead to the rise of extremist terrorism; the response of violent resistance to acts of violent imperialism. One cannot exist without the other. They are two sides of the same devastating and irreconcilable coin.\n\nIn more complex terms, however, violence is the result of conflicting ideologies. Our warring institutions don\u2019t just drop bombs to destroy \u201cenemy\u201d cities and bases, they are attempting to eradicate alternative (\u201cenemy\u201d) ways of thinking and being. This is evidenced by the way the \u201cWar On Terror\u201d has become a war on Islam, a war on American privacy, a war on our freedoms of speech and even our right to peaceful assembly. Government transparency is at an all-time low, while public surveillance and corporate-media manipulation are at an all-time high. This is a war for your thinking and being; a war on what you think and what you do. And in the process, our warring institutions are not just imposing authoritarianism on the population they claim to represent, they are seeking to impose \u201cAmerican-Style Freedom\u201d on other diverse nations by force, perpetuating a culture at home that accepts and even supports perpetual conflict while conducting their wars abroad so that only \u201cothers\u201d suffer for their misdeeds. In this way, we are never forced to confront the stark reality of our nation\u2019s wars beyond the (carefully selected) images we see on our TV screens.\n\nSo once again: Who are the terrorist? Who are the war heroes? And really, how the hell do we tell the difference? What is the difference between an IED (homemade bomb) and an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade)? The reality is, both are used to kill and influence, for political ends, to influence thinking and being. Both are extremely effective at ending lives, thereby engendering more violence. No matter what \u2018side\u2019 a terrorist is on, they all use the same methods of violence, and they all create the same outcome \u2014 more violence. The only difference is in the way we think.\n\nThe war mentality both encourages and is encouraged by separation, not oneness. One of the best ways to gain and maintain power is to keep the people in constant fear \u2014 in fear of wars, of outsiders, and \u201cterrorism\u201d. Built on a narrative of \u201cus\u201d versus \u201cthem\u201d, a culture of war-minded fear ensures the public consent to the constant funding of the military-industrial-complex, under the guise of security and protection. In war, institutions and collective thinking become the focus: the \u201cus\u201d becomes \u201cour country\u201d, \u201cour flag\u201d, \u201cour boys overseas\u201d. Or more accurately, \u201cour institutional war identity\u201d.\n\nIndeed, the only entities to ever benefit from war are the individuals who hide behind warring institutions and the legal formalities that enshrine them. Those who control the military industrial complex and the private companies that support it have arranged things so that, by design, no matter how the national fervor plays out, no matter what happens or which side \u2018wins\u2019, they still prosper one way or the other, and have the protection of their own domestic laws. But, as President Jimmy Carter so rightly pointed out, America cannot be both the world\u2019s champion of peace and the world\u2019s major supplier of weapons. So, with war institutionalized and sold to the public as a legal instrument of peace, it was inevitable we would find ourselves in the perpetual \u2014 and hypocritical \u2014 cycle of war and conflict we see today.\n\nAnd where are the peacemakers? Where are the protagonists of peace?\n\nToday it is not just the United States that is built on a foundation of war; nations around the world pour their resources into preparing for war, building billion dollar war machines, reinforcing polarizing \u201cus and them\u201d thinking at home, espousing the virtues of imperialism and endless \u201cgrowth\u201d, and promoting violent \u201cintervention\u201d as the only way to achieve it. But the United States is becoming the worst type of nation imaginable. It enacts increasingly anti-individual\/pro-institutional domestic laws, and is home to the biggest prison population (and private prison industry) in the world. It employs the biggest military budget in the world (while scrimping on domestic social and infrastructure development), \u201cpreempts\u201d wars with other nations and aggressively establishes military bases on their borders, all while maintaining its position as the world\u2019s leading manufacturer of military weaponry.\n\nIn the process, the United States has transformed from a state that is at peace, promotes peace and yet is prepared for defense, into a state that is at war, promotes war and prepares for war, but uses the Orwellian language of peace.\n\nNo wonder the American people are so confused. So let\u2019s boil this all down to simple terms\u2026\n\nImagine this. There are four bordering states in a contentious region of the world. One state is of peace, is constantly at peace and prepares for peace. Another state is of war, is constantly at war and prepares for war. Another state is at war, prepares for war and yet is ready for peace. And the last state is at peace, prepares for peace and yet is ready for defense.\n\nThere are many ways each states may act and react to this situation, but inevitably, the warring state will eventually arrive at the border of the purely peaceful state, and the peaceful state will likely concede. The warring state will arrive at the border of the other nations of war, and will either fight just enough to maintain a status quo of conflict (that is their cultural nature, after all) or fight until one side loses all (while the other loses a lot).\n\nNow imagine the winning war state arriving at the border of the peaceful state that is ready for self-defense. Inevitably, the war state will decide it is not worth the confrontation\u2026\n\nThat is, not without first infiltrating and subverting the nation\u2019s institutions, instilling chaos and discontent, and steering its culture toward war-mindedness. Sound paranoid? The reality of this tactic was clearly evidenced by last year\u2019s George Soros email hack, which revealed the U.S. government collaborator (and therefore war criminal) Soros funds color revolutions (fake grassroots uprisings) through a range of off-shore NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) which specialize in propaganda and the overthrow of democratically elected foreign governments. This cunning strategy amounts to the covert terrorism of a society\u2019s consciousness, no less.\n\nNonetheless, peaceful preparedness has proven to be a nation\u2019s best protection against the imperialism of war-minded nations, including one\u2019s own government. It forces warring institutions to abandon plans for outright conflict and invest in programs of social infiltration. Indeed, cultural subversion is the only way a peacefully-prepared nation can be drawn into conflict, regardless of the pretext.\n\nAnd that, readers, is where you and I come into the picture\u2026\n\nDo You Want War on Terror? Or Peace on Terra?\n\nTerra [noun]: land or territory; Terra [origin] Latin, meaning \u2018earth\u2019.\n\nThe truth is that we live in a world of States that prepare for war, and are at war. We invest trillions in building mechanisms that can destroy our planet, but neglect to build systems that can benefit our planet and benefit us all. We do not design systems that facilitate peace, but which hinder each other in war. We know and accept war, and lies, but we do not know how to help each other. We have to change our mind state. If we are to survive, our systems of war and destruction must be morphed into systems of support and creation, and our culture must morph right along with it. We have to uplift each other.\n\nI am a terra-ist. I stand for the Earth and its inhabitants. I strive to be at peace, to act in peace, and to promote peace. I am always be ready to defend myself, to defend others around me, to defend the Earth we call home, and to defend peace itself. And I know I am not alone.\n\n\u201cI am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.\u201d ~ Gandhi\n\nTerraists embody the exact opposite values of terrorists. They do not prize the abstract notions of power and ideology, but value the real, the natural and the living. Terraists act to protect and provide for all individuals\u2019 needs, with compassionate understanding. Terraists are the people who realize that the more terrorists fight, the further from peace we descend. Terraists build, protect and help others for no reason, other than what it is right, and terraists are prepared to defend against those terrorists (both in and out of uniform) who destroy and kill for reasons they believe justifies their violence.\n\nSo, to all terraists out there \u2014 to those peaceful individuals without uniform, doctrine or dogma \u2014 it\u2019s time to stand up and be counted! Be a terraist for peace, rather than a terrorist for a piece. Be a terraist of insight, rather than a terrorist who incites. Build, create, defend and help, for no other reason than it is right \u2014 and in today\u2019s war world, it is our only option.\n\nThe way to global peace isn\u2019t paved with war. History has shown us that dedicating our resources toward creating war doesn\u2019t just lead to more war; it makes war an economic necessity, imperiling us all. The only way to ensure peace in our world is to adopt a doctrine of peace; to give peace a budget, give peace a mandate, and give peace all our energy, both politically and personally \u2014 and remove from government, through the power of our will and the weight of our numbers, any individual who fails to act on it.\n\nDo not be tricked into thinking that violence by the State is not terrorism. Do not be duped into becoming a terrorist fighting terrorists, mistakenly believing there will later come an opportunity to become a peaceful terraist, once \u201cthe war is over.\u201d The reality is, the war will never be over, unless terraists around the world unite and take action on behalf of humanity, terra, and all her inhabitants.\n\nAbout the Author\n\nActivist, author and Tai Chi teacher Ethan Indigo Smith was born on a farm in Maine and lived in Manhattan for a number of years before migrating west to Mendocino, California. Guided by a keen sense of integrity and humanity, Ethan\u2019s work is both deeply connected and extremely insightful, blending philosophy, politics, activism, spirituality, meditation and a unique sense of humour.\n\nEthan\u2019s publications include:\n\nFor more information, visit Ethan on Facebook.\n\nThis article (The Oxymoron War on Terror \u2013 The Greatest Hypocrisy of Our Time) was originally created and published by Ethan Indigo Smith and is re-posted here with permission.\n\n~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family\u2026"}
{"text":"this little piggy went to market This sausage prank exposes our weird food issues\n\nI keep watching this video from a hidden-camera prank show (apparently in Brazil). Prank shows, at their best, are basically elaborate psychological experiments that reveal our cognitive biases and allow us to laugh at our own hypocrisy.\n\nYou should just watch it \u2014 but here are the highlights: You\u2019ve got an avuncular fellow offering sausage samples in a supermarket. People ask to buy some fresh sausage, at which point the man produces an adorable piglet and stuffs it into his \u201csausage machine.\u201d\n\nI see this as a version of the famous trolley problem, which goes like this: If a trolley was heading toward five people stuck to the tracks, and you could pull a switch to send it instead to kill just one person, would you? Most people say yes. OK. So if trolley was heading toward five people stuck to the tracks, and there was no switch, but you could push a really fat man in front of the oncoming train (which would surely stop it) would you? And to this, most people emphatically say, \u201cNo!\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s all very well to kill the man by turning a switch, but when you actually have to push him, those foundational moral prohibitions against murder kick in.\n\nThe trolley problem demonstrates that when people have a certain distance from an unpleasant choice, they tend to be coldly rational, e.g. yes, please kill an animal so I can enjoy its delicious meat. But when we are directly involved, we feel a strong emotional response, e.g. \u201cSave Wilbur!\u201d\n\nNotice that it\u2019s the sausage maker who becomes the villain, when of course it\u2019s us, the eaters, who are demanding fresh sausage. And this happens all the time with our food system. We search for cheaper food, but we are shocked when farmers respond by getting bigger and mechanized (so as to sell enough cheaper food to make a decent income).\n\nI\u2019m a strong believer in honoring the emotional response. People demand meat and also condemn meat producers for killing. This isn\u2019t stupid; it\u2019s human. We all have these kinds of responses. The best we can do is own them: Let\u2019s stop blaming the butchers out there; they\u2019re just working for us."}
{"text":"\u2018One thing leads to another.\u2019 (Picture: Youtube\/CARE Norway)\n\nRape culture starts in the smallest actions.\n\nA \u2018joke\u2019 made to your friends. Staring at a woman until she uncomfortably tugs down her skirt. Letting it slide when someone at work says something sexist.\n\nIt\u2019s also in inaction. Not calling people out. Ignoring the problem. Failing to support a victim when she comes forward.\n\nAs a new video from CARE Norway shows, each tiny thing can contribute to a society where rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence happen on a daily basis.\n\nTo hammer that idea home, the #DearDaddy video shows the consequences of those tiny actions and inactions, all happening to one man\u2019s daughter.\n\nYes, it\u2019s a little annoying that we still have to frame rape in terms of happening to someone\u2019s daughter or mother \u2013 rather than just \u2018rape is a horrible thing, even when it happens to someone you don\u2019t know\u2019 \u2013 but the five minute video is pretty powerful.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAdvertisement\n\nBecause if you\u2019re a dad, you can do all you can to protect your daughter.\n\nYou can make sure her mum stays safe (and doesn\u2019t eat sushi).\n\nBut by the time she\u2019s 14, she\u2019ll already have been called a bitch or a whore.\n\nShe may feel pressured into sex, and do something she doesn\u2019t want to.\n\nShe may be raped.\n\nAnd given that 1 in 3 women worldwide will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, usually from a male partner, she may find herself in an abusive relationship.\n\nIt\u2019s not about fear-mongering, suggesting that all men are bad, or the idea that if you make one mistake, your daughter will be hurt.\n\nTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video\n\nBut what the video shows is that \u2013 while it\u2019s impossible for one man to completely protect his daughter from violence \u2013 you can take steps towards making the world a safer place for women overall.\n\nMORE: 13 things women in their 20s are tired of hearing\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAdvertisement\n\nMORE: This woman is receiving rape threats for refusing to smile on command\n\nMORE: Artist creates an anti-rape cloak to protest victim blaming\n\nAdvertisement Advertisement"}
{"text":"The city of Santa Fe, N.M., added a Walmart Supercenter to the Entrada Contenta subdivision, a mixed-used development that consists of residential and commercial land uses. SMC Consulting Engineers P.C. was retained by Walmart to engineer approximately 17 acres of the watershed planned for the Supercenter, including the building, parking areas, driveways and landscaping.\n\nInitially, the site was undeveloped and covered with native grass and trees. The development increased the impervious area of the site, requiring the engineers to design a storm water management system to mitigate the impact of the increased runoff volume and the higher rate of flow. The limited area available for the Walmart development did not allow for an above-ground storm water management system; the engineers needed an underground solution.\n\nAside from the space constraints, Santa Fe County also experiences severe drought conditions, which make water resources scarce. With conservation in mind, the decision was made to collect the storm water runoff from the store\u2019s roof catchment area for irrigation purposes. Using the harvested storm water for irrigation would reduce the use of potable water, especially at times when outdoor irrigation is limited due to water rationing restrictions imposed by the city. Native desert plants were selected for site landscaping to further reduce irrigation demands.\n\nSeveral factors were considered in the selection process for the underground storm water storage systems. Durability, long-term performance and ease of access for inspection and maintenance were important. Additional consideration was given to the speed and ease of installation, as well as a system\u2019s accommodation of the existing subgrade conditions. Last, the overall footprint and a cost-benefit analysis were considered for each of the underground systems.\n\nStormTrap provided one DoubleTrap system for storm water detention and a second system for rainwater harvesting. Together, they protect the downstream drainage system from increased flow rate and higher volume of storm water runoff from the Walmart site, and also provide a viable option for water reuse or irrigation.\n\nA construction crew excavated a 12-ft-deep area below the planned parking lot and set the 10-ft detention system on a compacted aggregate base. To ensure that the system was watertight, an impermeable liner and geotextile fabric were wrapped around it. The detention system is designed to store more than 50,000 cu ft of storm water runoff. The runoff from the parking areas flows through the onsite storm sewer conveyance system and is treated by storm water quality devices prior to entering the detention system.\n\nThe stage-storage sizing of the underground detention system was designed for the SCS Type II, 24-hour storm interval for various storm events. Unit hydrographs and computed flood hydrographs for the existing and proposed conditions were developed using the Natural Resources Conservation Service hydrograph method. The outlet structure of the detention system was sized to regulate the release to the downstream storm water conveyance system at levels lower than historical flow rates.\n\nSMC Consulting Engineers performed testing on the rainwater harvesting system prior to commissioning it. A sequence of operations was developed to simulate various phases of the harvesting system and evaluate its response mechanism to different scenarios. Similar testing was done for the storm water detention system. Both systems functioned per intended design and were commissioned once they met the set operational benchmarks.\n\nThe rainwater harvesting system is composed of 50 10-ft DoubleTrap pieces and holds more than 15,000 cu ft of storm water runoff collected from the roof catchment area. The stored water is utilized to irrigate the site\u2018s landscaping.\n\nThe storm water management systems allowed the project engineers to maximize the storage volume and minimize the project footprint to allow room for additional parking and reduce the overall cost. SMC Consulting Engineers found that both systems were easy to install, and their clear open configuration allows walk-through access for future inspection and maintenance."}
{"text":"1. All matches are 20 overs per side, with the teams divided into three groups - North (Derbyshire, Durham, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire), Midlands\/West\/Wales (Glamorgan, Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Warwickshire, Worcestershire), and South (Essex, Hampshire, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey, Sussex).\n\n2. Matches start at 5.30pm (although there might be some changes to fit in with television schedules), with a 15-minute interval before the start of the second innings at 7.00pm.\n\n3. Each innings should last no longer than 75 minutes.\n\n4. Teams will incur a six-run penalty if they fail to bowl the full 20 overs within the 75 minutes.\n\n5. New batsmen must be in position within 90 seconds of a wicket falling.\n\n6. Only two fielders are allowed outside an inner circle during the first six overs of a team's innings.\n\n7. Bowlers are permitted a maximum of a fifth of the total overs in a completed innings (ie four overs if there is no delay or interruption caused by rain).\n\n8. Umpires can impose a five-run penalty for time-wasting by batsmen. They are expected to be ready as soon as the bowler is ready.\n\n9. No-balls will be penalised by a free-hit next ball with standard rules on no-ball dismissals applying.\n\n10. Each side must face a minimum of five overs for a match to be valid. The Duckworth-Lewis method will be used to calculate run targets in rain-affected games.\n\n11. The three group winners and best second-placed team will progress to the semi-finals\/final day on July 19.\n\n12. The overall winners will receive \u00a342,000, the runners-up \u00a321,000 and the losing semi-finalists \u00a310,000 each.\n\n\u00a9 ESPN Sports Media Ltd."}
{"text":"A sunny and warm Good Friday in the Greater Toronto Area had crowds of cyclists reaching for their bikes to take advantage of the first really nice riding day of the spring. While many took the opportunity to put in their first relatively big ride of the year, two students from the University of Toronto decided to take that to the next level and tackle a distance they\u2019d never ridden before. Not many would decide to do an almost 300 km ride around the Niagara peninsula passing through Port Colborne, Fort Erie, Niagara Falls, Niagara on the Lake and Hamilton in mid-April.\n\nOn Thursday afternoon, Kamil Krawczyk made the decision to do a big ride and turned to the University of Toronto Road Racing team Facebook page to look for someone to join him. \u201cI was feeling a bit down and overwhelmed with work and the progress of my PhD,\u201d Krawczyk explained on Saturday afternoon after a morning of rest and recovery. \u201cIt\u2019s been preventing me from enjoying cycling in the same capacity that I had enjoyed it for in the past. I felt that going on a long ride with nothing but the experience itself to think about would clear things up for me.\u201d\n\nIt was not Krawczyk first big ride but it would be the biggest. In November 2014, Krawczyk rode a brevet with the BC Randonneurs and a friend from the University of British Columbia Cycling Team. That day put 257 km into his legs but that was almost three years ago.\n\nRELATED: Garmin Edge 820 review\n\n\u201cI couldn\u2019t quite grasp what a 300 km ride would feel like or if I was even physically fit enough to do one,\u201d Krawczyk who is from B.C. explained about the challenge of the ride. \u201cI had taken a two-year hiatus from cycling after moving to Ontario due to an injury, and only started training seriously again as of January. This was the biggest mental factor \u2013 the worry of not being up to snuff by this point just yet. I was training primarily for racing, and not for long distance endurance stuff. I tried to throw in the occasional century but nothing longer than a 100 km since the beginning of the year.\u201d\n\nWith phenomenal weather with a high of 16 degrees on the day Krawczyk boarded the GO train from downtown Toronto to their starting point in Burlington. At around 9 a.m. the two riders started pedaling heading first through Dundas and then towards Port Colborne on Lake Erie. Across the Southern portion of the route along the northern shore of Lake Erie, the pair had a steady headwind meaning the going was a little slower than expected. On arrival to Niagara Falls, it was time to refuel and focus on the last portion of the ride.\n\nRELATED: 7 strategies to avoid burning matches at the front of the group ride\n\n\u201cNever try to get a meal at Niagara Falls when the weather is nice. It took half an hour to get two pizza slices and a drink, which on a normal day wouldn\u2019t be such a big deal,\u201d he said noting that the time constraint did make the long break problematic. \u201cBecause it was Good Friday, many places were closed especially in rural parts of the province. It was hard to find somewhere to fill up my bidons or grab a more protein-heavy snack.\u201d\n\nRELATED: Exploring new roads and new fuelling methods\n\nWith only five hours to make it back to Burlington, 100 km from Niagara Falls, the two riders buried themselves covering 62 km in less than two hours before needing to take another break to refuel.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s what definitely made the last stretch so hard \u2013 we should have been a little smarter and conserved our energy for the last haul. I think what got me through those two hours was the worry of being stranded or having to ride back from Burlington to Toronto and the fact that I really, really wanted a cold Slurpee,\u201d he recalled about the toughest part of the ride. \u201cThe last 40 km were the worst since I had nearly run out water and was starting to feel dehydrated. It was a relief to get back to the train station and fill my water bottle up a good four times.\u201d\n\nAfter the big spring ride, Krawczyk had some advice for others looking to tackle such a big ride. \u201cTake some time to build up to it. If you haven\u2019t done a 200 km trip, don\u2019t try a 300 km trip just yet. Try to get accustomed to riding these distances and to supporting yourself. Make sure you\u2019ve had a lot of sleep and a hearty meal the night before,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cBring more than what you expect you\u2019ll need \u2013 that goes for food, hydration and bike consumables, especially tubes and maybe a spare tire. Start early and don\u2019t overexert yourself at the get-go,\u201d he added. \u201cYou\u2019ll need that energy more than you need at the end. And most importantly, don\u2019t do it by yourself. Bring a friend for some moral support, conversation, and troubleshooting talks if need be down the road.\u201d\n\nThe ride from the train station in Burlington took the pair 11 hours 35 minutes and covered 296.2 km. They also rode the distance between the train station to their apartments in Toronto making it a well over 300 km day. Upon arriving home, Krawczyk shared a screenshot of the Strava ride on Reddit and received 3347 upvotes and over 200 comments. It was a response he did not expect.\n\nRELATED: How to recover from your first long ride of the season\n\n\u201cIt definitely worked,\u201d Krawczyk said about the experience bringing the joy of cycling back. \u201cI couldn\u2019t take my mind off of the beauty of southern Ontario. I was constantly telling my riding partner about how excited I was to go on these country roads, how the air was so fresh compared to the city and how this reminded me of home. I bet I got a little annoying. Most importantly, I was able to get back in tune with what I loved about this sport and clear my head.\u201d"}
{"text":"Team Liquid will not execute on its plan to split time in its mid-lane position between Greyson \"Goldenglue\" Gilmer and Austin \"Link\" Shin, and Link will move out of the team house this week, the team confirmed to ESPN on Wednesday.\n\nLiquid is currently also pursuing former Team Dignitas coach David \"Cop\" Roberson and former Big Gods support Kevin \"KonKwon\" Kwon as player substitutes who will not actively rotate or live in the team house, according to sources close to all parties. Team Liquid declined to comment on Cop and KonKwon.\n\nEditor's Picks League of Legends global power rankings through Feb. 7 FlyQuest soars while Dignitas plummets in the NA LCS. And bbq Olivers? It looks as good as ever, but the squad will be tested with tough matchups coming against SKT and Longzhu.\n\nThe team attempted to split practice time between Goldenglue and Link over the past few weeks but found the results were not adequate for Link to transition to the League Championship Series stage.\n\nAs a result, Link will return to his family home in the San Francisco area but remain as a listed and paid substitute on Team Liquid, in accordance with Riot Games' policy on substitutes. Liquid told ESPN it's willing to facilitate transfers for the player if another team has interest.\n\n\"We split scrims and also provided some focused solo queue practice, but the results were not there to support making a change in the mid-lane starting position at this time,\" Team Liquid co-CEO Steve Arhancet told ESPN. \"We will continue to strive for excellence for the team to compete at the highest level and have to make decisions with the information for results in the timeframes we want them. Austin has an impeccable work ethic, extremely intelligent player and glad we will be maintaining the substitute position with him in just a different capacity.\"\n\nLink, the mid-laner known for his time on Counter Logic Gaming, first joined Liquid on Jan. 5. The team intended to rotate him with Goldenglue in the mid-lane position, it announced at the time.\n\nBefore playing for Gravity Gaming and coaching Team Dignitas, Cop was the AD carry for Curse, the League of Legends team that merged with Team Liquid in December 2014. If the agreement with Liquid is completed, he will once again work with Arhancet, who at the time was the sole owner of Team Curse."}
{"text":"A former Amherst College student's account of being raped on campus \u2014 and the administration's contemptible response \u2014 is going viral on college campuses around the nation, so much so that the Amherst Student newspaper's website shut down for hours thanks to pageviews late last night. Some students at the elite liberal arts college say it's about time the public realizes Amherst is more concerned with keeping up appearances than clamping down on rape culture.\n\n\"Some nights I can still hear the sounds of his roommates on the other side of the door, unknowingly talking and joking as I was held down,\" wrote Angie Epifano, a former member of the Amherst class of 2014, in the Amherst Student article that's being circulated via social media and college listservs across the country. \"I had always fancied myself a strong, no-nonsense woman...May 25th [2011] temporarily shattered that self-image and left me feeling like the broken victim that I had never wanted to be.\"\n\nEpifano didn't report the rape \u2014 which she alleges was by an acquaintance, in a dormitory \u2014 until after the following February, when she had to work with her rapist on a fundraising project and couldn't deal with his smirks, winks, and pats on the back. She tried to seek help from Amherst's sexual assault counselor, which didn't go so well:\n\nIn short I was told: No you can't change dorms, there are too many students right now. Pressing charges would be useless, he's about to graduate, there's not much we can do. Are you SURE it was rape? It might have just been a bad hookup\u2026You should forgive and forget. How are you supposed to forget the worst night of your life? I didn't know what to do any more. For four months I continued wondering around campus, distancing from my friends, and going to counseling center. I was continuously told that I had to forgive him, that I was crazy for being scared on campus, and that there was nothing that could be done. They told me: We can report your rape as a statistic, you know for records, but I don't recommend that you go through a disciplinary hearing. It would be you, a faculty advisor of your choice, him, and a faculty advisor of his choice in a room where you would be trying to prove that he raped you. You have no physical evidence, it wouldn't get you very far to do this.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nEpifano's 5,000 word piece details her consequent breakdown: she claims the school abruptly decided to admit her into a psychiatric ward after she made suicidal comments spurred by the despair she felt when her allegations were repeatedly ignored. Once inside, Epifano resolved to stop feeling ashamed by her rape. She returned to Amherst, experienced the same unsympathetic treatment from the administration, and ultimately decided to transfer. Her rapist graduated, with honors.\n\n\"The fact that such a prestigious institution could have such a noxious interior fills me with intense remorse mixed with sour distaste,\" she wrote. \"I am sickened by the Administration's attempts to cover up survivors' stories, cook their books to discount rapes, pretend that withdrawals never occur, quell attempts at change, and sweep sexual assaults under a rug...Why can't we know what is really happening on campus? Why should we be quiet about sexual assault?\"\n\nEpifano's story is harrowing on its own, but it's not the only one coming out of the woodwork thanks to recent controversy over an offensive fraternity t-shirt and a subsequent campus-wide meeting regarding the administration's sexual misconduct policy and issues of \"sexual respect\" on campus.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThe clothing in question is care of \"underground\" fraternity Theta Delta Chi (TD), which holds an annual pig-on-a-spit \"Bavaria\"-themed party. Last year, the creative brothers came up with this design: a woman in her bra and thong, with bruises on her side and an apple jammed in her mouth, tied up on a spit over a fire, while a pig, cigar in hand, watches the woman roast.\n\n\"This is what sexism and misogyny look like at a so-called progressive, elite, liberal arts institution in 2012,\" wrote Amherst senior Dana Bolger \u2014 an on-campus rape survivor herself \u2014 on AC Voice, a student-run blog. Bolger decried the administration for holding \"an unadvertised, effectively closed-door discussion with a handful of students and frat members\" to remedy the situation, during which \"boys-will-be-boys\" comments (\"We were just a bunch of drunk guys sitting around on a Friday night designing the shirt\") and a blanket apology were deemed satisfactory. \"The administration's inadequate response to the t-shirt incident was not an anomaly and seems part of a larger pattern of forgiving instances of violence against women on campus,\" Bolger wrote, continuing:\n\nAccording to a Title IX committee meeting I attended last spring, Amherst has expelled only one student for rape in its entire history\u2014and only after a criminal court sentenced him to time in jail. Meanwhile, our disciplinary committee has found other students guilty of sexual misconduct but ultimately permitted them to continue their Amherst educations. Faced with the non-choice of staying on campus with his\/her rapist or leaving, many sexual assault survivors I know take time off, transfer, or drop out altogether.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nBolger's blog post incited so much controversy that Amherst's president, Carolyn \"Biddy\" Martin, invited all 1,791 undergraduates to an open campus-wide discussion, which took place last Sunday, October 14th. According to the Amherst Student, a mixture of administrators, faculty, coaches, fraternity members and survivors of sexual assault attended to talk about the school's fraternities, lax punishments for misconduct, and ways in which students could more actively help reshape Amherst's sexual assault policy. The administration hasn't released any sexual assault statistics*, but the Amherst Student reported that \"few cases have gone the full distance in the disciplinary process at the College.\" Of course, we have national statistics: 95% of campus attacks go unreported, according to the American Association of University Women. Two thirds of assaults are committed by someone known to the victim, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.\n\n\"I also want to encourage you to think about other aspects of life at Amherst, both the positive and the less than positive, and to imagine what it would take to strengthen our sense of community, enhance your education outside of the classroom, and have more fun,\" Martin wrote in last Sunday's meeting announcement. \"Fun?\" Catherine Bryars ('12) asked us. \"See how they're putting this in the fast route to get away from anything negative?\"\n\nBryars, who is currently devoting her first post-grad year to pressuring Amherst's administration to revamp their sexual assault policies \u2014 as a graduate, it's easier for her to speak on behalf of her former peers who still have to spend every day on the small, rural campus \u2014 said that last year was an \"explosive\" one, thanks to the number of female students who opened up about how their on-campus sexual assaults had been mishandled. \"Girls kept coming forward and saying that staff members had told them to consider sympathizing with their rapists, or go home for a period of time,\" Bryars said. \"I think that the campus culture overall is to stay silent, to deny, to not come forth with dissent.\"\n\nAdvertisement\n\nSunday's meeting was the administration's first attempt to challenge that assumption. Amherst's fraternities, which are technically banned on campus, were a big talking point; they're not allowed to hold on-campus parties or attend on-campus meetings, but many of them live together in suites on campus, and the Bavaria party at which the t-shirt was sold was held on campus. For this reason, the TD members who attended Sunday's meeting couldn't publicly acknowledge their fraternity membership. \"Fraternities exist in a regulatory grey area where we all sort of pretend they don't exist,\" Emma Saltzberg ('13) told the paper. \"It creates a culture where the administration agrees to look the other way. When you know that you exist in a grey area and that the administration is wiling to ignore your existence, that gradually turns into a culture of brazenness and in this instance, you see that people exploited that.\"\n\nTherein lies one obvious (and bizarre) problem in need of a solution. The school's aforementioned lenient repercussions for sexual misconduct also came up often during the meeting: according to the Amherst Student, the record of sanctions released by the College last spring show that students found responsible for sexual assault were usually suspended for two to four semesters, while punishment for theft of a laptop resulted in five semesters' suspension. Another issue, raised by Bolger, is how students on the disciplinary committee are chosen from a very narrow pool that includes few women and is, therefore, hardly representative of the student body.\n\nBut it seems that the larger, underlying problem is Amherst's obsession with keeping up appearances. If the college continues to prioritize its reputation over the well-being of its female students, little will change. Bryars said she feels confident that Martin, who has only been president for a year, will eventually realize that Amherst is doing its students a major disservice by refusing to take sexual assault seriously. But will Martin and her administration risk tarnishing Amherst's storied reputation as the second best liberal arts school in the nation by doing so? Now \u2014 thanks to Epifano's widely-circulated essay and the efforts of students like Bryars and Bolger \u2014 it seems they won't have a choice.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nUpdate: President Martin has issued a response to Epifano's essay. An excerpt: \"Clearly, the administration's responses to reports have left survivors feeling that they were badly served. That must change, and change immediately.\"\n\n*Edit: According to the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act Report, Amherst reported 15 on-campus forcible sex offenses in 2011."}
{"text":"Violence against men (VAM), consists of violent acts that are disproportionately or exclusively committed against men. Men are overrepresented as both victims[1][2] and perpetrators of violence.[3][4] Sexual violence against men is treated differently in any given society from that committed against women, and may be unrecognized by international law.[5][6][7][8]\n\nPerceptions [ edit ]\n\nStudies of social attitudes show violence is perceived as more or less serious depending on the gender of victim and perpetrator.[9][10][11] According to a study in the publication Aggressive Behavior, violence against women was about a third more likely to be reported by third parties to the police regardless of the gender of the attacker,[12] although the most likely to be reported gender combination was a male perpetrator and female victim.[12] The use of stereotypes by law enforcement is a recognised issue,[13] and international law scholar Solange Mouthaan argues that, in conflict scenarios, sexual violence against men has been ignored in favor of a focus on sexual violence against women and children.[14] One explanation for this difference in focus is the physical power that men hold over women making people more likely to condemn violence with this gender configuration.[15] The concept of male survivors of violence go against social perceptions of the male gender role, leading to low recognition and few legal provisions.[16] Often there is no legal framework for a woman to be prosecuted when committing violent offenses against a man.[17]\n\nRichard Felson challenges the assumption that violence against women is different from violence against men. The same motives play a role in almost all violence, regardless of gender: to gain control or retribution and to promote or defend self-image.[18]\n\nWriting for TIME, Cathy Young criticised the feminist movement for not doing enough to challenge double standards in the treatment of male victims of physical abuse and sexual assault.[19]\n\nDomestic violence [ edit ]\n\nIn 2013 editor-in-chief of the journal Partner Abuse, John Hamel,[20] set up the Domestic Violence Research Group to create the \"Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK)\".[21] PASK found parity in rates of both perpetration and victimisation for men and women.[22]\n\nMen who are victims of domestic violence are at times reluctant to report it or to seek help. According to some commentators there is also a paradigm that only males perpetrate domestic violence and are never victims.[23] Shamita Das Dasgupta and Erin Pizzey are amongst those who argue that, as with other forms of violence against men, intimate partner violence is generally less recognized in society when the victims are men.[24][25] Violence of women against men in relationships is often 'trivialized'[3][26][27] due to the supposed weaker physique of women; in such cases the use of dangerous objects and weapons is omitted.[3] Research since the 1990s has identified issues of perceived and actual bias when police are involved, with the male victim being negated even whilst injured.[28]\n\nFemale violence against men [ edit ]\n\nAccording to the journalist Martin Daubney \"...there remains a theory that men under report their experiences [of violence by women against men] due to a culture of masculine expectations.[29] The official figure in the United Kingdom, for example, is about 50% of the number of acts of violence by men against women, but there are indications that only about 10% of male victims of female violence report the incidents to the authorities, mainly due to taboos and fears of misunderstanding created by a culture of masculine expectations.[30] By comparison 1.9 million people aged 16\u201359 told the Crime Survey for England and Wales (year ending March 2017), that they were victims of domestic violence and 79% did not report their partner or ex-partner. Of the 1.9 million, approximately 1.2 million were female and 713,000 were male.[31] A Canadian report found that men were 22% more likely to report being victims of spousal violence in their current relationship than women.[30][32] Researchers Stemple and Meyer report that sexual violence by women against men is often understudied or unrecognized.[33]\n\nForced circumcision [ edit ]\n\n[34] patented device designed to prevent masturbation by inflicting electric shocks upon the perpetrator, by ringing an alarm bell, and through spikes at the inner edge of the tube into which the penis is inserted. Circumcision was recommended to prevent masturbation.\n\nNon-therapeutic male circumcision is considered, by several groups, to be a form of violence against young men and boys.[35][36] The International Criminal Court considers forced circumcision to be an \"inhumane act\".[35] Some court decisions have found it to be a violation of a child's rights.[37] In certain countries, such as Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and the United States, newborn baby males are routinely circumcised without the child's consent.[38][39] As well, the Jewish and Muslim faiths circumcise boys at a young age.[40] It is also practiced in Coptic Christianity and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.[39][41]\n\nAny cutting whatsoever of a female's genitals, also known as female genital mutilation, has been banned in most Western countries, starting in Sweden in 1982 and the United States in 1997.[42] When Sweden outlawed it in 1982, it became the first Western country to do so.[43]:611 Several former colonial powers, including Belgium, Britain, France and the Netherlands, followed suit, either with new laws or by making clear that it was covered by existing legislation.[44][45][46]\n\nAlthough a 2012 court ruling in Germany put the practice of male cutting under question, calling circumcision \"grievous bodily harm,\" the German parliament passed a law to keep circumcision of boys legal.[47] As of 2016, cutting of boys' foreskins is still legal worldwide.[38]\n\nMass killings [ edit ]\n\nSerbian victims during insurgency in the Kosovo War\n\nIn situations of structural violence that include war and genocide, men and boys are frequently singled out and killed.[48] The murder of targets by sex during the Kosovo War, estimates of civilian male victims of mass killings suggest that they made up more than 90% of all civilian casualties.[48]\n\nNon-combatant men and boys have been and continue to be the most frequent targets of mass killing and genocidal slaughter, as well as a host of lesser atrocities and abuses.[49] Gendercide Watch, an independent human rights group, documents multiple gendercides aimed at males (adult and children): The Anfal Campaign,[50] (Iraqi Kurdistan), 1988 \u2013 Armenian Genocide[51] (1915\u201317) \u2013 Rwanda, 1994.[52] Forced conscription can also be considered gender-based violence against men.[53]\n\nSexual violence [ edit ]\n\nIn armed conflict, sexual violence is committed by men against men as psychological warfare in order to demoralize the enemy.[54] The practice is ancient, and was recorded as taking place during the Crusades.[55] Castration is used as a means of physical torture with strong psychological effects, namely the loss of the ability to procreate and the loss of the status of a full man.[55] International criminal law does not consider gender based sexual violence against men a separate type of offense and treats it as war crimes or torture.[56] The culture of silence around this issue often leaves men with no support.[57]\n\nIn 2012, a UNHCR report stated that \"SGBV (sexual and gender based violence) against men and boys has generally been mentioned as a footnote in reports\".[58] In one study, less than 3% of organizations that address rape as a weapon of war, mention men or provide services to male victims.[6][8][59] It was noted in 1990 that the English language is \"bereft of terms and phrases which accurately describe male rape\".[60]\n\nHomicide [ edit ]\n\nHomicide statistics according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics[61] Male offender\/Male victim 65.3% Male offender\/Female victim 22.7% Female offender\/Male victim 9.6% Female offender\/Female victim 2.4%\n\nIn the U.S., crime statistics from the 1976 onwards show that men make up the majority of the homicide perpetrators regardless if the victim is female or male. Men are also over-represented as victims in homicide involving both male and female offenders.[61] According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, women who kill men are most likely to kill acquaintances, spouses or boyfriends while men are more likely to kill strangers.[62] In many cases, women kill men due to being victims of intimate partner violence,[63] however it should be noted that this research was conducted on women on death row, a sample size of approximately 97 during the last 100 years.[64]\n\nSee also [ edit ]"}
{"text":"Nothing gets out of a black hole\u2014not even light. Once a star, a planet, a piece of dust, or even a single photon crosses the limit known as the event horizon, it\u2019s not coming out again. Pulled into the crushing gravity of the singularity at the black hole\u2019s heart, it vanishes from the universe.\n\nThat\u2019s a big problem if what you really want from a black hole is a photograph. By definition, it\u2019s impossible. All light getting sucked in means no light reflects back\u2014so a black hole is invisible, across the spectrum. And, duh, invisible objects don\u2019t show up in photographs.\n\nBut thanks to a new telescope, Tim Johannsen, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, may be able to get a black hole pic after all. A loophole in physics means he might be able to see not the black hole itself, but its shadow. And, no big deal, but that photo just might overturn Albert Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity.\n\nSo...wait. Black holes have shadows? Sort of. As gas and dust and other cosmic material approaches a black hole, \u201cthat stuff heats up, like millions and millions of degrees,\u201d Johannsen says. That superheated matter swirls around the black hole in what\u2019s called an accretion disk; because it\u2019s so hot, the accretion disk emits a lot of light. Some of those photons zoom out towards Earthbound telescopes, while others cross the event horizon and fall into the void. So when astronomers look at a black hole, what they expect to see is a ring of bright light\u2014the accretion disk\u2014surrounding a circle of nothingness. That circle of nothingness is the shadow. (The black hole itself is just a single point within.) You can see a model of that here:\n\nAt least, that\u2019s the idea. No one has ever actually seen a black hole\u2019s shadow. \u201cDespite their enormous mass, black holes are also exceedingly small,\u201d says Avery Broderick, Johannsen\u2019s colleague at the Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo. Seen from Earth, the shadow of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way (also known as Sgr A*, which astrophysicists pronounce \u201cSaj-A-star\u201d) is just 1\/35,000,000th the width of the Moon, or 50 microarcseconds wide.\n\nHere\u2019s where that new telescope comes in. Maybe. Johannsen, Broderick, and their colleagues hope the Event Horizon Telescope will be able to resolve Sgr A*\u2019s shadow. The EHT is actually nine telescopes (and counting), all working together and each located in a different spot on Earth. Coordinating those telescopes\u2019 observations allows them to work as one big telescope that is, in essence, as big as the planet. The bigger your telescope, the higher your resolution. \u201cThe Event Horizon Telescope has the capability to produce the highest-resolution images in the history of astronomy\u201d, Broderick says. \u201cThat means, for the first time, we can see what happens right down in the immediate vicinity of black hole event horizons.\u201d\n\nScientists working on the EHT hope to see images in the spring of 2017. But they already have some ideas of what they\u2019ll get. General relativity describes gravity not as a force drawing two objects together, but rather as the warped spacetime that governs each of those objects movements. Concentrate a big enough mass in a small enough region of spacetime, and its gravity will be inescapably huge\u2014voila, you\u2019ve got a black hole. If that sounds weird to you, well, it took 50 years for astronomers to discover that black holes were real objects, not just a quirk of general relativity\u2019s math.\n\nThe problem is, general relativity is really good at describing giant things like stars, but breaks down utterly when it comes to really teeny tiny things like photons and quarks. To talk about those, you need a different theory: quantum mechanics. The central problem in physics today is that the theories are fundamentally incompatible. To figure that out, physicists are keen to find places where the theories overlap or break down\u2014like, for example, the event horizon of a black hole.\n\nGeneral relativity doesn\u2019t just predict the existence of black holes. It also precisely describes the size and shape of their shadows. Sgr A*\u2019s shadow is supposed to be perfectly circular and 50 microarcseconds wide. \u201cWhat would it look like if general relativity were wrong?\u201d wonders Broderick (and just about every other astrophysicist on the planet). There are two possibilities. \u201cThe shadow could be more egg shaped,\u201d says Johannsen. \u201cThat would be a smoking gun for a GR violation.\u201d It might also be slightly smaller or bigger than general relativity predicts. All he needs to figure it out is the picture from the EHT. (Johannsen and Broderick just published a paper outlining their strategy in Physical Review Letters.)\n\nAnd what if Sgr A*\u2019s shadow doesn\u2019t look the way general relativity says it should? Well, that would be great. If the results held up, physicists could start looking for alternative theories of gravity that did predict the shadow's size and shape. Success wouldn\u2019t mean the new theory would automatically be the successor to general relativity, of course. But it\u2019s a good way to figure out which theories might be on the right track, so you can give their other predictions a closer look.\n\nJohannsen\u2019s favorite possibility involves extra dimensions. A shortcoming of general relativity is that it doesn\u2019t explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces. \u201cLet\u2019s assume there is another space dimension. Gravity would immediately penetrate that and become kind of diluted,\u201d Johannsen says. In other words, gravity isn\u2019t weak, it\u2019s just working across more dimensions than the other forces. Amazingly, theories that predict those extra dimensions also predict a different size for Sgr A*\u2019s shadow. In a couple years, finally proving\u2014or falsifying\u2014this weird new physics could \u201cliterally be as \u2018easy\u2019 as putting a ruler across the image,\u201d Johannsen says.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re getting this amazing opportunity to finally put Einstein to the test around the most enigmatic and striking predictions of this theory,\u201d Broderick says. If Einstein is wrong, general relativity won\u2019t go away\u2014it\u2019s too good at what it does. It just won\u2019t be the whole story anymore. Isaac Newton was plenty right about how gravity worked here on Earth; Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the universe. But the universe is big enough to have room for someone to come along and do it again."}
{"text":"NEW HARTFORD, N.Y. -- A man is accused of reaching for a gun just before getting in a fight with a Wal-Mart loss prevention officer in a parking lot in New Hartford.\n\nPolice said were called around 8 p.m. Tuesday to the Wal-Mart at 4765 Commercial Dr. after two men were confronted by employees for stealing.\n\nTevin V. Joyner, 20, was being detained by loss prevention officers while 26-year-old Willie Alexander fled across the parking lot and toward the store's garden center, police say.\n\nWitnesses told police that Alexander was trying to get rid of the gun when a loss prevention officer approached him.\n\nThe two fought after Alexander allegedly reached for the gun on the ground while the employee was trying to detain him.\n\nNew Hartford Police Officer Ann Marie Brelinsky took Alexander into custody when she arrived at the parking lot.\n\nJoyner and Alexander are charged with misdemeanor petit larceny, while Alexander also faces a felony second-degree criminal possession of a weapon charge.\n\nBoth men were sent to the the Oneida County jail. Alexander is in custody without bail and Joyner was released Wednesday by a court order, records show.\n\nContact Jolene Almendarez anytime: 315-418-8746 | Email | Twitter | Facebook"}
{"text":"The Wall Street Journal editorial board published a furious tirade Tuesday in response to President Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d immigration proposals, arguing that the proposals do not do enough to make open-borders Democrats happy and would lead to a \u201chumanitarian calamity\u201d if illegal immigrants are sent home.\n\n\u201cDoes President Trump want a bipartisan deal on immigration, or is his talk merely for cable-TV show?\u201d the outlet, which caters to a big business readership, wrote.\n\nTrump\u2019s proposal, believed to have been drafted by nationalist adviser Stephen Miller, would shield illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in return for a host of measures demanded by conservatives. Those include funding for the wall on the southern border, mandated use of E-Verify by employers, an increase in immigration agents, greater restrictions on which family members immigrants can bring, and a stripping of funds from so-called \u201csanctuary cities.\u201d\n\nTrump had cozied up to the Democrats shortly after announcing the repeal of the Obama-era DACA program in September \u2014 setting a six-month time limit for its expiration and urging Congress to make a deal. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) indicated that Trump had suggested funding for the wall had been jettisoned by Trump as a firm term, replaced instead by a vague \u201cborder security.\u201d But the proposals announced late Sunday indicate a return to Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d campaign stance that helped him win the election in 2016.\n\nHowever, the Journal described the demands as \u201ceverything that the restrictionist right has ever sought\u201d and making an agreement \u201cwell-nigh impossible.\u201d\n\nThe article pivots to its concern for cheap labor for big business, claiming that \u201ctight visa caps\u201d are sending high-tech jobs abroad and agricultural production to Mexico. Oddly, it claims that limiting chain migration for family members would encourage more illegal immigration \u2014 the argument apparently being that America should just let in potential illegal immigrants before they break the law.\n\nAs Breitbart News reported, this argument from the center-right outfit is in line with that being pushed by a number of left-wing media and advocacy groups claiming that such demands are \u201cpoison pills\u201d because they will upset Democrats.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s hard to know if Mr. Trump intends all this as a serious negotiating offer, or merely as poison pills,\u201d the editorial board writes. The case for the latter is that he is demanding money for the wall, which he knows is a nonstarter with Democrats.\u201d\n\nThe board essentially is arguing that Trump should give up on a central campaign promise because Democrats do not like it. However, it later says that he would be much better off going for the old talking point of a \u201cvirtual wall\u201d:\n\nIf Mr. Trump feels he needs a symbolic wall victory, he\u2019d be smarter to settle for a virtual wall with drones, aerostat blimps and towers with infrared sensors to fill gaps in fencing where the border patrol has difficulty accessing. Newer technology has facial recognition features that can capture biometric data. A virtual wall could be installed within months, not years, and it can be continually improved.\n\nIf such a wall is a real possibility and would actually work better than a real wall, it is unclear why the Journal thinks Democrats would fund this, either.\n\nBut after claiming for much of the article that Democrats would scupper the deal, the board admits that such demands would \u201chave no chance of passing no matter which party controls Congress\u201d \u2014 essentially conceding that the problem is not just the Democrats.\n\nIt finishes with the warning that if illegal immigrants are not granted amnesty via a DACA replacement, Democrats will \u201cblame\u201d Republicans for their deportation \u2014 despite this being a campaign promise from the president.\n\n\u201cThis would be a humanitarian calamity, and a monumental lost political opportunity. Mr. Trump needs legislative victories to show he can govern, but his immigration bait and switch may guarantee another failure.\u201d\n\nThe WSJ article is the latest in a broad attack from pro-big business interests. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg\u2019s lobbying group has reportedly been lobbying top Republicans to prevent President Trump from including pro-American reforms as part of the amnesty for DACA recipients.\n\nAdam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY."}
{"text":"In a new systematic review in JAMA Neurology, Michigan Medicine researchers found reason to further explore the surprising effects of zolpidem that have been observed outside the scope of its primary Food and Drug Administration approval.\n\n\"We saw a dramatic effect in a small amount of patients with a variety of conditions,\" says Martin \"Nick\" Bomalaski, M.D., an outgoing resident physician in the Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. For one of the first systematic reviews of this unique effect, he spent two years combing through all the case studies and small trials that have been published.\n\nMost of the patients who responded to zolpidem for noninsomnia neurological disorders had either a disorder of consciousness or a movement disorder, Bomalaski reports. That includes those in comas and vegetative states, and others with Parkinson's disease and dystonia. In addition, some other patients who had experienced a stroke or traumatic brain injury, or patients with dementia, were prescribed for a range of symptoms, including aphasia, apathy and motor coordination. In all, more than 20 neurological disorders were part of the review.\n\nSignificant but transient effects\n\nFor most patients who saw improvement after taking zolpidem, the effects tended to last one to four hours but were repeatable. Depending on the condition, progress was reported for coma recovery, dystonia, Parkinson's disease and other scales that measure motor, auditory and verbal abilities. Some patients improved to a minimally conscious state while others even tried to speak to their loved ones, for perhaps the first time in years. Some patients' functional neuroimaging results improved as well.\n\n\"This is one of those strange paradoxes where the effects of an insomnia drug seem to have the opposite effect for patients who have paralysis or neurologic conditions,\" says co-author Mark Peterson, Ph.D., M.S., FACSM, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation and a member of U-M's Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation and Neuroscience Graduate Program. Some families will request zolpidem after finding a case study or news article online because they feel there are no other real options for their loved ones.\n\nBut zolpidem didn't work for everyone. The response rate in the reviewed articles was between 5 and 7 percent for patients with disorders of consciousness, and up to 24 percent or even higher for patients with movement disorders. For the subjects in this review, the most common adverse effect was that zolpidem did, in fact, sedate the patients as one would see in regular use of the drug. That happened in 13 of the 551 patients in the systematic review.\n\nThe first systematic review\n\nBomalaski has treated many patients affected with these disorders of consciousness and found the existing case reports quite interesting.\n\n\"I saw how these conditions affected their function and quality of life,\" he says. \"To see that something as simple as an average dose of a sleeping medicine had, in 15 minutes, woken someone up from a vegetative state seemed extraordinary, and I wanted to pursue it further.\"\n\nThe initial search turned up more than 2,300 unique articles. After assessing the abstracts, Bomalaski's team reduced the articles to 89. Another screening included a full read of the 89 articles, leading to a systematic review of 67 of them. Most are considered low-level evidence, including case reports and small interventional trials.\n\nBomalaski reviewed the 67 articles for type of disorder, dosage of zolpidem, frequency, effect and any adverse effects. Only 11 of the studies had more than 10 participants, but all together, there were 551 participants.\n\nGuidance for future research\n\n\"This kind of report brings up more questions than answers, although something like this is really foundational to guide a larger clinical trial,\" Peterson says. The next step is to study safety and efficacy, the authors say.\n\nAnother topic for more research is to assess whether the effects of zolpidem depend on the part of the brain that's injured. The researchers report zolpidem's unique effects may be present in patients whose basal ganglia, which help process information to perform an action, are no longer functioning correctly.\n\n\"The restorative effects on the basal ganglia may surpass the hypnotic effects on the frontal cortex,\" says Bomalaski, who is headed to the University of Washington for a brain injury fellowship.\n\n\"We still need to learn much more in order to answer the question about whether we should be using this in our clinical practice.\"\n\nArticle: Zolpidem for the Treatment of Neurologic Disorders: A Systematic Review, Martin N. Bomalaski, MD et al., JAMA Neurology, doi: 10.1001\/jamaneurol.2017.1133, published online 26 June 2017."}
{"text":"If you're thinking that sounds a lot like CRISPR gene editing, the new rule seems to be targeting just that. As it stands, WADA already bars genetically modified cells and other types of gene therapy that can enhance performance, but the existing rules don't cover CRISPR-type methods.\n\nThe agency said that certain types of medical gene therapy might be allowed, as long as they don't significantly enhance athletic prowess. \"Generally, performance enhancement implies enhancement beyond a return to normal, although you may appreciate that this is not always easy to prove definitively,\" WADA spokesperson Maggie Durand told New Scientist.\n\nWADA seems to be well ahead of any actual cheating. Only one CRISPR trial with humans has been completed, a form of lung cancer treatment done at Sichuan University in China (dozens more are planned in the nation). Unlike regular drug doping, CRISPR requires sophisticated, expensive equipment and techniques, so it's not like shady MDs can do it their garages -- for now.\n\nIt's a good thing that WADA doesn't have anyone to catch yet, because it doesn't really seem to have any detection methods, either. When quizzed by New Scientist (Engadget has reached, out too) about how it plans to catch gene-editing cheaters, the agency had no response. It's been working on techniques to detect such doping for over ten years, but only came up with a single test least year. For now, the best method might be the \"biological passport\" that can detect significant changes in an athlete's body."}
{"text":"Results of a recent Gallup Poll reveal that the American public's trust in banks has hit a record low. Just 21 percent of Americans have faith in the nation's banks, the lowest recorded number since the poll was first taken in 1973. It is lower now than it was in 2009, in the teeth of the financial crisis.\n\nOne can speculate that, like distrust in Congress, this lack of faith appears across the political spectrum. From the left, banks are criticized for engaging in risky conduct that helped to bring about the Great Recession. Similarly, many on the populist right vilify government intervention designed to prop up poorly managed financial institutions as threatening capitalism itself. In many ways, this lack of faith is not surprising. Media reports routinely provide the general public with reminders of bank misconduct, whether in the illegal origination of loans, the shoddy packaging of mortgage-backed securities, excessive and ill-advised risk taking or the faulty prosecution of foreclosures. These revelations have had a profound impact on the general public's faith in financial institutions. Making matters worse, law enforcement's most recent attempt at uncovering and prosecuting bank misconduct in the lead up to and fallout from the financial crisis has gotten moving in only fits and starts. These forces -- public disenchantment with the banks, coupled with weak law enforcement -- are a toxic mix. They will fail to prevent future misconduct; what's worse, they may, in fact, encourage it.\n\nThroughout the year, as more information comes out about bank misconduct before and after the financial crisis, public perception of the financial sector remains poor. Whether it's the $25 billion settlement of so-called \"Robo-Signing\" practices; revelations of the failure of Bank of America to disclose losses at Merrill Lynch when it asked its shareholders to approve purchase of the investment bank; the billions in trading losses at JP Morgan Chase; or the recent settlements of mortgage discrimination suits against Wells Fargo, Countrywide Financial Corporation and SunTrust Mortgage, the public receives constant reminders that our financial institutions have engaged in, and apparently continue to engage in, some very risky, and, at times, illegal, behavior.\n\nAt the same time, the law enforcement effort that was initiated as part of the Robo-Sign settlement, which is charged with reviewing bank practices both before and after the crisis, seems to have stalled. It is both underfunded and understaffed. While the S&L Crisis inquiry had a staff of over 1,000 lawyers and investigators, the current team is roughly one tenth the size, and does not seem capable of obtaining information about, let alone reviewing, the countless transactions and documents at the heart of the financial crisis.\n\nWhat all of this means is that bankers and the general public are left with the distinct impression not only that fraud in the financial industry was widespread, but also that those guilty of it are not likely to face any punishment. Simply put, this is a very dangerous combination of forces, one that will only lead to precisely the type of behavior that led to the most recent financial crisis in the first place.\n\nPerceptions of widespread misconduct, coupled with a belief that punishment of that misconduct is rare, leads to -- no surprise -- more misconduct. The field of behavioral economics teaches us that the extent to which we perceive others as complying with the law will likely influence our willingness to obey or break it ourselves. If we think others are complying, we are likely to behave similarly. If we believe others are breaking it, we will not wish to be seen as the suckers, the ones following rules that everyone else ignores. A now-famous study of the behavior of individuals who frequented a national park reveals how these forces work. In instances where park goers were confronted with signs that led them to think many people engaged in improper conduct in the park, fewer people were willing to forego such conduct for fear they would be missing out on something. By contrast, efforts that communicated the importance of pro-social behavior in the park resulted in more conduct that conformed to the rules. Similarly, and not unexpectedly, whenever the public believes that many people cheat on their taxes, and enforcement of such tax cheats is weak, there is more likely to be more tax evasion, not less.\n\nAll signs indicate that the current situation finds just these types of forces at work. First, there is a widespread mistrust of banks, one that is fueled by a perception that in the lead up to the crisis banks were routinely engaged in improper and even illegal conduct (whether such perceptions are justified or not). Second, law enforcement officials seem somewhat limited in their ability to hold financial institutions accountable for the illegal conduct, despite having made some headway recently in the area of punishing mortgage discrimination. Since at the heart of the financial crisis lies a range of bank misconduct, an atmosphere filled with the widespread perception of misconduct, coupled with little fear that lawbreakers will be held accountable, could send us back to a second financial crisis.\n\nIn order to rein in unnecessary risk and fraudulent behavior, what is needed now is a robust, serious and sustained effort to root out, expose and prosecute those illegal acts that led to the financial crisis. Once that is done, faith in the financial sector can be restored; the public will know that the misconduct has been addressed, and those responsible brought to justice. Moving forward, bankers will want to uphold their improved reputations, and will fear punishment should they fail to do so."}
{"text":"The Syracuse Crunch is on the very edge of the Calder Cup playoffs. As of this morning, their magic number for clinching a playoff berth was 4. That number could be lowered to zero if things play out right tonight. According to the AHL's most recent Playoff Primer, the Crunch could clinch a berth tonight if one of the following two scenarios play out:\n\n(a) a regulation or overtime win vs. Binghamton AND an Albany loss (reg\/OT\/SO) vs. Manchester\n\nOR\n\n(b) a shootout win vs. Binghamton AND an Albany regulation loss vs. Manchester.\n\nOnce Syracuse clinches, their next order of business will be to remain atop of the AHL's Northeast Division, something the Crunch has managed to do for the last several weeks. The Crunch is currently 7 points ahead of second-place Hartford, a team Syracuse will play on Friday. As long as that gap stays open, Syracuse will be sitting pretty in one of the top three spots in their Eastern Conference, and will have home ice for the first round of the playoffs.\n\nAs the first round is a best-of-three, home ice is pretty important, especially to a Syracuse team that has made a living out of winning in the Onondaga County War Memorial this season. Two seasons ago, the Crunch had home ice for the first round the playoffs, and swept the Portland Pirates to move onto the second round. That season, Syracuse wasn't nearly as proficient and comfortable in the War Memorial as they have been this season. Syracuse could definitely get a leg up in the playoffs with home ice advantage for at least the first round.\n\nThankfully for the offensively-strapped Crunch, help is on the way. Last week, the Lightning brought Bradyen Point to the Crunch after signing him to an entry-level contract. This week, they've signed another forward who has the potential to jump into the mix immediately and assist Syracuse: Matthew Peca.\n\nPeca was signed by the Lightning to a two-year, two-way contract. He was also signed to an amateur try-out contract (ATO) with the Syracuse Crunch, where he will remain for the remainder of the Crunch's season. It's been reported that Peca will wear number 22 in Syracuse. It is not yet clear whether he will be available for tonight's contest against Binghamton.\n\nPeca has spent the past four years playing for the Quinnipiac University Bobcats, and was recently touted by the New Haven Register as \"the best player to ever come through the Hamden campus.\" Although currently on the small side-Peca is 5-foot-8, 155-pounds-he reportedly doesn't let his size get in the way of playing big. He played in 157 career NCAA games with Quinnipiac, registering 42 goals and 143 points.\n\nHis point totals, however, only tell half the story. According to the Register, Peca brings with him a lot of good hockey sense, energy, and an innate desire to sacrifice his body in order to get the win:\n\nBut his knack for doing the little things endeared Peca to teammates. Just a shade over 160 pounds, he never shied away from contact in the corners. He was outstanding on face-offs; took countless double-shifts on the penalty kill; devoured minutes in tight games. And his enthusiasm for throwing himself in front of opposing slap shots seemed borderline maniacal.\n\nPeca's signing gives Crunch fans a reason to be optimistic about their forward depth, even without the likes of Vadislav Namestnikov. This is especially helpful since the Crunch's defense is still looking thin while Slater Koekkoek, Luke Witkowski and Nikita Nesterov remain with Tampa. With the AHL playoffs right around the corner for Syracuse, Peca definitely has the chance to jump in and make a difference right away."}
{"text":"The Tudeh Party of Iran, Iran\u2019s communist party, has issued an appeal for \u201csolidarity action with the working people of Iran campaigning for peace and progress\u201d and with the broad Iranian progressive and democratic movement.\n\nSince early January, the party\u2019s Feb. 21 message says, the Ahmadinejad regime \u201chas embarked upon a new wave of repressive measures designed to suffocate the opposition forces demanding a return to the ideals of the 1979 revolution in Iran: democracy, human rights and social justice.\u201d\n\nThousands of people have been arrested, nearly 100 protesters have been killed either by government security forces during protest demonstrations or under torture in detention centers, and 11 detainees have been condemned to execution, the Tudeh appeal says.\n\nAmong those arrested are activists and leaders of Iran\u2019s student movement, trade union movement, women\u2019s movement and well known academics and progressive writers and journalists.\n\n\u201cInternational solidarity with these victims of suppression in Iran is of vital importance,\u201d the Tudeh Party says. \u201cInternational pressure on the Iranian regime, to oblige it to abide by the internationally accepted norms and conventions governing treatment of peaceful political protest, needs to be maintained.\u201d\n\nThe appeal urges messages to the Iranian government supporting the following demands of communist, left, progressive and democratic organization around the world:\n\n* The Iranian government to abide by the UN Charter and the Universal Convention on Human Rights.\n\n* All death sentences to be commuted to terms of imprisonment decided in a court of law convened in accordance with the laws of natural justice and in which the accused have full access to defense lawyers and are able to defend themselves.\n\n* All those detained to be protected from torture or other ill treatment, to be allowed access to their families, lawyers and any necessary medical treatment, and for them to be brought before a judge without delay so that they may challenge the lawfulness of their detention.\n\n* Anyone held solely for their participation in protest demonstrations or for expressing their views to be released immediately and unconditionally.\n\n* The authorities in Iran to ensure that their policing of any further demonstrations meets international policing standards, including a ban on the use of firearms and other lethal weapons\n\n* An impartial investigation be conducted into the deaths of all those killed.\n\n\u201cThe situation is very desperate and the need for international solidarity is great,\u201d the appeal concludes.\n\nThe Tudeh Party (Party of the Masses) has a decades-long history of struggle against the shah\u2019s dictatorship and the current theocratic Islamic regime, and has had a mass following with wide support among Iranian trade unionists, intellectuals and artists and others. During that time it has faced vicious persecution, with many of its leaders and members executed under both regimes, and has been forced to work underground and in exile.\n\nPhoto: A blood-stained protestor in Iran, June 17, 2009. http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/arasmus\/ \/ CC BY 2.0"}
{"text":"Vue2 Redux\n\nVue bindings for for Redux in only 1.06 kB. \u23ed\n\nInstallation\n\nnpm install vue2-redux --save\n\nSetup in project\n\nimport Vue from \" vue \" ; import { VueRedux } from \" vue2-redux \" ; import App from \" .\/components\/App.vue \" ; import Store from \" .\/store \" ; Vue . use ( VueRedux ( Store ) ) ; new Vue ( { el : \" #app \" , render : h => h ( App ) } ) ;\n\nUsing in a component\n\n< template > < div id = \" app \" > < div v-if = \" !username \" > Please enter your username <\/ div > < div v-else > Your username is: {{ username }} <\/ div > < input @ keyup = \" handleUsernameChange \" type = \" text \" \/> <\/ div > <\/ template > < script > import { connect } from ' vue2-redux ' import { updateUsername } from ' ..\/actions\/User ' const component = { name : \" app-container \" , methods : { handleUsernameChange ( { target : { value } } ) { this . updateUsername ( value ) } } } const mapState = state => ( { username : state . User . username } ) const mapDispatch = dispatch => ( { updateUsername : nextUsername => dispatch ( updateUsername ( nextUsername ) ) } ) export default connect ( mapState , mapDispatch ) ( component ) <\/ script >\n\nSpecial note\n\nThis WILL NOT work if your .babelrc has:\n\n{ \" presets \" : [ [ \" env \" ] , { \" modules \" : false } ] }\n\nThis MUST BE changed to:"}
{"text":"Dear Audi,\n\nWe\u2019re very much looking forward to welcoming you to the Formula E paddock as a full works team, although the world of racing will indeed be a poorer place without your marvellous prototype machines.\n\nSince 1999, you have pushed the boundaries of what we believed to be possible when it came to motor racing. You bucked the trend by switching to diesel power at Le Mans in 2006 \u2013 and won. You did it again by becoming the first manufacturer to win Le Mans with a hybrid in 2012. Since the dawn of the new millennium, you\u2019ve won Le Mans 13 times out a possible 17; you\u2019ve won the WEC title twice since its formation (in 2012 and 2013).\n\nYou haven\u2019t just thought outside the box. You\u2019ve deconstructred it, redesigned it, and repackaged our expectactions and our emotions in a way not seen since a Swedish company decided to get into shelves and wardrobes.\n\nI\u2019m 21 years old: to me, Audi hasn\u2019t just raced at Le Mans: Audi has been Le Mans. To me, Le Mans without Audi is like F1 without Bernie (it\u2019ll happen one day but not today, never today).\n\nOne of my most memorable experiences in racing came in 2013, when I first ventured to the Circuit de la Sarthe. My friends and I climbed up the bank so we were overlooking the straight following the Porsche Curves. We watched the cars stream past. The one that really stood out to me was the Audi R18 e-tron quattro. \u201cIt sounds like a spaceship,\u201d I said, breathtaken. It looked like one, too. And it travelled just as fast. In fact, take that vehicle to some of the less-trod places of this world (or Chatham) and people really would think it\u2019s from another planet.\n\nIt is sensory experiences such as these that stick with motorsport fans; it isn\u2019t just me whose adulthood and career will be shaped by the experience of witnessing that clever creation for the first time. The WEC landscape without you will be like Egypt short of the pyramids, China without its great wall and London without its most famous clocktower chiming throughout the day.\n\nThrough all of your success, you have acted with dignity, courage and grace. Everything about your racing involvement at Le Mans and in WEC has exuded class and excellence. To have bowed out of the top tier of sportscar racing with a one-two finish in Bahrain, executed crisply and commandingly, was no less than you deserved.\n\nWith the weight of recent history in mind, we\u2019re proud that you will be moving forwards in Formula E. The all-electric series has been the epitome of alternative thinking when it comes to motorsport and automotive development through its infancy, so we think you might quite like it here. It is our hope that your legions of WEC fans may do too. Sure, you\u2019ve dipped your toes in the water with your connections with the ABT Schaeffler team, but the new commitment you\u2019re making is a game changer. You\u2019ve already thrived in the sphere of competition against other mighty manufacturers; taking on the likes of Renault, Jaguar, BMW and maybe even Mercedes in Formula E is a challenge we know you will relish.\n\nIn the early days of Formula E, a recurring question at press conferences was: \u201cDo you think Formula E will overtake F1 or WEC?\u201d (or similar). But that question betrays a significant degree of ignorance about people in general and about racing fans in particular. Variety is good, as a rule of thumb. When it comes to motor racing fans, it\u2019s simple: if you love racing, you love racing, in whatever form it may take. A fan may follow one category more than another but, essentially, we want all motorsport to flourish so that we have as diverse a palette of racing as the diverse nature of the audiences eagerly watching. Your move from WEC to Formula E is not a sign of times shifting. Instead, it\u2019s proof of your raison d\u2019\u00eatre: to innovate. If all you wanted to do was win, you\u2019d remain in your comfort zone in the WEC but that\u2019s not the Audi way.\n\nA team may be referred to as a single entity but it is not, of course. It is a collection of people, and those people have invested years of time, emotion and effort into your WEC adventure. Some of them we know through our Formula E work, gents such as Lucas di Grassi, Loic Duval and Allan McNish. We know they\u2019ll miss the furnace of endurace racing with you; we\u2019re confident that, as Formula E matures and moves forward, its own special brand of spectacle, technical innovation and down-to-the-wire racing will create many more storylines for you and those who, together, form the broader Audi identity.\n\nThank you for so many wonderful years of thinking differently. We sincerely hope that Le Mans has not lost the magnificence of four rings whistling around its hallowed paths forever. In the meantime, we stand ready and waiting to welcome you to a new racing chapter, and we look forward to travelling the world with you as part of Formula E.\n\nLuke Smith"}
{"text":"It looks like Kevin Durant will have his wingman back at full strength when the Oklahoma City Thunder's 2013-14 campaign kicks off. That's right: KD expects Russell Westbrook to hit the ground running after offseason surgery to repair a torn meniscus, per HoopsHype:\n\nDurant spoke to the media at a promotional event in Barcelona, and you can tell by his apparel that he understands the importance of getting off to a fast start.\n\nYep, the T-shirt says \"the time is now,\" which is an appropriate slogan for the Thunder as they look to seize the moment by making another run to the NBA Finals.\n\nDurant knows how tough such a sprint would be without Westbrook; he struggled mightily after his running mate went down during the postseason. The Houston Rockets doubled up their defensive attention on Durant, and Thunder head coach Scott Brooks didn't have any answers (or any semblance of an offensive game plan).\n\nOKC needs Westbrook to be at his best in order to compete against the NBA's elite teams. When he's relentlessly attacking the rim and pushing the pace, the Thunder are too athletic for most opponents to handle.\n\nBut the league saw how toothless the Thunder were without him.\n\nAccording to Royce Young of CBS, Westbrook opted to have his meniscus completely repaired, rather than risk returning too soon after a less severe \"clean-up\" procedure. The typical time frame for surgeries like the one he underwent April 27 is about three months, so it's hardly a surprise that Westbrook will be ready to roll by Oct. 30.\n\nPlus, the Vine he posted June 15 should have clued everyone in to the fact that he was getting healthy in a hurry.\n\nFortunately, Westbrook never got too bummed out about his injury. Maybe his upbeat attitude helped hasten the healing.\n\nIn fact, the OKC guard got himself into shape so quickly that he had plenty of time to squeeze in other activities during his summer break.\n\nSo, by the time the regular season rolls around, it appears that Westbrook will be fully healthy. Of course, it also looks like he's going to have a few more outside-the-box fashion ideas.\n\nBased on what we've seen from him to this point, I guess that qualifies as a mixed blessing."}
{"text":"Economics Minister and Habayit Hayehudi Minister Naftali Bennett slammed the U.S. State Department response to the Jewish nation-state bill, saying the U.S. shouldn't intervene in Israel's internal issues, as politicians from Israel's right also came out in criticism.\n\n\"I say to the Americans that the affairs of the State of Israel - we will manage [ourselves],\" Bennett told Army Radio, according to Israel National News.\n\n\"At the end it is our problem,\" he said. \"This is an internal issue and I think that no one has the right to intervene with it.\"\n\nThe U.S. State Department said Monday evening that it expected Israel to \"stick to its democratic principles,\" in its first response to the Jewish nation-state bill approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet a day earlier.\n\n\"Israel is a Jewish and democratic state and all its citizens should enjoy equal rights. We expect Israel to stick to its democratic principles,\" the State Department said.\n\nThough Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the U.S. statement by assuring that Israel is a \"model democracy,\" and that's how it will remain, other politicians on the Israeli right responded vehemently.\n\n\"We can keep the foundations of democracy even without the help of the partner over the ocean,\" Coalition whip and Likud MK Zeev Elkin said following the U.S. response, according to Yisrael Hayom.\n\nKeep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait\u2026 Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close\n\nElkin, who initiated the most extreme version of the bill, said that he would expect the U.S. to encourage Israel to adopt the American customs of swearing allegiance to the flag and singing the national anthem at schools.\n\n\"When this democratic American tradition is adopted in East Jerusalem, in Taibeh and in Wadi Ara, then we'll have a real foundation for a joint discussion of the necessity of the Jewish nation-state bill,\" he said.\n\nMK Moshe Feiglin, also from the Likud, told Army Radio on Monday that \"the intervention of the State Department in crucial questions of the State of Israel is a grave and unbelievable thing.\"\n\nAside for giving preference to Israel's Jewish identity rather than its democratic character, Elkin's bill would abolish Arabic\u2019s status as one of Israel\u2019s official languages and mandate construction of new Jewish communities without requiring similar construction for Arabs.\n\nThe controversial bill was approved by the cabinet on Sunday, and was supposed to come for a Knesset vote on Tuesday, the next legislative step. However, the head of Israel's government coalition decided on Monday to postpone the Knesset vote. Nevertheless, Netanyahu said on Monday that he was \"determined\" to have it passed, with or without his political partners' agreement."}
{"text":"London is a more \u201cIslamic\u201d city than many in Muslim countries, a leading Islamic scholar has claimed.\n\nMaulana Syed Ali Raza Rizvi, a Shia cleric, said he feels \u201cmore Islamic\u201d in Britain due to the country\u2019s multicultural policies and his freedom to practice his faith.\n\nSpeaking at the annual Benedict XVI lecture alongside Cardinal Vincent Nichols \u2014 the most senior Catholic bishop in England and Wales \u2014 and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the cleric claimed Islam was about \u201clove and justice\u201d but Muslim leaders were failing to show this.\n\nThe Telegraph quotes him as saying: \u201cI feel that London has more Islamic values than many of the Muslim countries put together.\n\n\u201cThere are many different communities living together in peace and harmony, giving respect to the others and loving others and that is what Islam is all about \u2013 and unfortunately [much] of the Muslim political leadership has failed to provide that.\n\n\u201cI feel more Islamic living here because I can easily practise my faith and give respect to all other members of the community belonging to different faiths and not even belonging to a faith, to anything.\n\n\u201cBecause that is what Islam is all about, respecting and giving to others. If in one line I could say what Islam is all about, it is all about love and justice.\u201d\n\nHowever, Chief Rabbi Mirvis also said at the lecture that minorities should be required to pass the so-called \u201cTebbit Test\u201d \u2013 the idea floated by former Conservative Cabinet Minister Norman Tebbit that the true loyalties of ethnic minorities can be determined by which national cricket team they support.\n\n\u201cMinorities are responsible to maintain their own traditions, to be proud of their background, loyal to their faiths, and at the same time to be proud members of their countries,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cIn a nutshell, minorities need to pass the Norman Tebbit test. This is something which, thankfully, Jewish communities across the globe have almost always done, and we\u2019re proud of the fact that we can pass that test within British society today.\u201d\n\nEarlier this year, figures showed that London\u2019s population had reached a record high, despite large numbers of people moving away from the city.\n\nThe UK capital\u2019s population is growing by around 100,000 a year, mainly due to immigration, with the city\u2019s demographics changing rapidly as white Britons move out.\n\nAccording to the 2011 Census, 620,000 white Britons moved out of London over the previous decade, including a third of all white residents in the borough of Barking and Dagenham."}
{"text":"NV Energy fights to keep rooftop solar from cutting into its profit\n\nThe future of solar energy in Nevada is at stake in a furious battle that likely won\u2019t be resolved as the 2015 state legislative session nears an end next month.\n\nSolar advocates, Nevada businesses and solar industry reps are pushing for more rooftop solar, saying it\u2019s unfair to force consumers to remain chained to the grid and warning that the state could lose thousands of jobs if it doesn\u2019t adapt. State utility NV Energy claims more household solar means increased prices for traditional customers who can\u2019t or won\u2019t install solar panels on their houses or businesses.\n\nIt comes down to money for both sides It\u2019s all about dollars for both the solar industry and NV Energy. The utility says ratepayers will be charged an additional $8 million for every percentage point the net metering cap increases. Rooftop solar customers receive a credit worth about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour for powering their homes and the grid with solar electricity. That credit is an incentive to go solar, but it\u2019s also a means for consuming less power from NV Energy, biting into the company\u2019s profit. The solar industry says a tariff and locked-in cap rate will kill the majority of the 6,000 jobs the industry brought to Nevada over the past five years and will limit consumer choice. Early in the legislative session, NV Energy unloaded a team of lobbyists to squelch any attempt to raise the cap. Solar followed with its own lobbying effort, congregating with a consortium of gaming and tech interests. The battle heated up after a bill draft to raise the cap to 10 percent died without a single public hearing or vote. Solar advocates met with lawmakers and the governor \u2014 whose outside advisers lobby for NV Energy \u2014 but had little success. Now, as time winds down in the session, only one solution is on the table \u2014 a punt. Republican Sen. Patricia Farley\u2019s amendment to a building codes bill would allow the Public Utilities Commission to raise the solar cap and to impose up to three tariffs on net metering customers. The eleventh-hour measure was the only way to save the solar industry this session, Farley said. \u201cIt gave the solar industry a vehicle to start a discussion,\u201d Farley said. The amendment cleared the Senate and is moving through the Assembly. The compromise is not ideal for companies such as SolarCity and Sunrun, which lease solar panels to customers who participate in net metering. Industry officials say proposed fees could hurt business by discouraging people from participating in a net metering program. Rooftop customers \u2014 who pay bills to both the utility and solar companies \u2014 pay about 20 percent less for solar than conventional energy, and the fees, industry leaders say, could bite into their cost savings. Adding fees and restricting the cap would be a big win for Berkshire Hathaway Energy and one of its few net metering successes nationally. Berkshire failed to impose caps in Utah and Washington. Arizona instituted a $5 to $7 net metering charge for homeowners. A fee is pending in Wisconsin. Colorado has no cap and no fees. In other words, utility companies in more than 40 states have unsuccessfully fought to eliminate net metering or impose fees.\n\nMuch of the fight revolves around Nevada\u2019s cap on net metering, an arrangement by which people with rooftop solar can sell extra power they generate back to the grid. Nevada is likely to hit its limit as early as this summer, solar advocates say, which will make it less advantageous for homeowners to tap the enormous solar energy potential of Southern Nevada.\n\nThe Legislature seems to have sided with NV Energy. On May 17, it passed a solar bill that failed to raise the cap but gave Nevada\u2019s regulatory Public Utilities Commission the ability to levy new fees on net metering customers who come online after the cap is hit. The new fees seem intended to protect NV Energy\u2019s income from what the company has characterized as an unfair subsidy at the expense of nonsolar ratepayers.\n\nWhile NV Energy, owned by Warren Buffett\u2019s Berkshire Hathaway, battles to keep the cap in place, it\u2019s also fighting on another front. A consortium of casinos and businesses is looking to leave NV Energy\u2019s grid and start generating their own power, saying they\u2019re being placed at a competitive disadvantage because they\u2019re paying more for energy than their business rivals in nearby states. The state Public Utilities Commission has said it would charge hefty fees \u2014 $27 million in the case of Las Vegas data center Switch \u2014 to let industrial ratepayers leave the system.\n\nMeanwhile, the utility is facing another threat in the form of technological advances. Tesla\u2019s Powerwall unit, a relatively cheap storage battery that can charge up on solar power, can help business operators and homeowners reduce their reliance on the grid \u2014 or, for the very wealthy, leave it altogether.\n\nHow the regulated monopoly came to be\n\nIn exchange for building power plants, power lines, distribution networks and maintaining electrical systems, Nevada, like many states, gives public utilities an authorized rate of return. Here, that rate is about 8 percent, authorized by the Nevada Public Utilities Commission. NV Energy\u2019s net income in 2014 was about $354 million, according to Berkshire Hathaway Energy\u2019s SEC filings.\n\nNV Energy did not respond to a request for comment on this story.\n\nGiving a utility a regulated monopoly over generating and providing power is a compromise. The utility gets a guaranteed profit and in return gives access to everyone who needs it and ensures capacity for all users. It\u2019s the commission that holds the utilities to the bargain, said Stephen Brown, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at UNLV.\n\n\u201cThe utility doesn\u2019t have an incentive to operate in the community interest,\u201d Brown said. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean they don\u2019t, but that\u2019s not their economic incentive. We\u2019re relying on the utility commission to make sure that the utility operates in the public interest.\u201d\n\nMore rooftop solar production means more competition for NV Energy.\n\nThe way competition disrupts the energy industry parallels the shift in the telecommunications industry, said Steven Weissman, director of the energy program at UC Berkeley\u2019s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.\n\n\u201cIt started with one monopoly utility and a black rotary dial phone in everybody\u2019s home,\u201d said Weissman, referring to AT&T and its monopoly on the U.S. telephone system until its breakup in 1984.\n\nBy 1996, Weissman said, Congress forced companies to provide competitors access to infrastructure. And the emergence of mobile phone technology made the fight over access to landline infrastructure obsolete.\n\n\u201cNow you have a whole generation of people who decide not to get a landline,\u201d Weissman said. \u201cIf the phone companies were able to gain anything by resisting opening their networks to competitive providers, it was something of only limited duration. They didn\u2019t create something that preserved their business model long-term.\u201d\n\nThe way AT&T and its descendents adapted to the loss of their monopoly was to spread into the broadband and mobile sectors, but big electric utilities have been comparatively slow to adapt to competition from new ways of producing power.\n\n\u201cWhat utilities are doing is instinctively looking for ways to take this pesky new technology and bat it away,\u201d Weissman said.\n\nSome companies want to produce their own power, but quitting the grid comes at a cost\n\nA group of Nevada companies wants to break from NV Energy and stop paying the utility for energy. Instead, the companies want to start generating and purchasing their own power and quit the grid.\n\nThe group calls itself the Nevada Coalition to Protect Ratepayers and includes Las Vegas Sands and Wynn Resorts, solar companies SolarCity and Sunrun, and Switch.\n\nThe utilities commission ruled this month that Switch would have to pay $27 million to leave the grid. Switch has asserted it should pay about $18 million.\n\nBorenstein said exit fees weren\u2019t unjustified.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m sympathetic to the Public Utilities Commission\u2019s view,\u201d Borenstein said. \u201cI would be suspicious of numbers utilities put out, but I don\u2019t think it should be free for customers to just walk away \u2026 (They) built the grid to support customers, and there\u2019s all these sunk costs. There may be stranded assets for which costs have to be recovered. When you leave, you have to bear some of those costs.\u201d\n\nYet the combination of limits on net metering programs and high exit fees seems to leave companies squeezed in the middle. Switch has said its energy costs in Nevada are 30 percent higher than competitors\u2019 in nearby states.\n\nSome energy companies elsewhere are adapting to new technology and demands for clean energy and more distributed generation. In California, public utility Southern California Edison is testing how to integrate Tesla Powerwall users, both residential and commercial, with its grid. The utility is performing test runs with a small number of Powerwall users to see if the batteries can, in aggregate, be helpful to Edison\u2019s grid needs.\n\n\u201cThe idea would be: How could a residential storage unit be used to help the grid?\u201d said Kevin Payne, the utility\u2019s senior vice president for customer service. \u201cWe could take power (from battery units) when necessary or inject power when it would be helpful to do that.\u201d\n\nPayne said the ability to control a customer\u2019s energy requirements or regulate the way customers pump power back into the grid could be a significant resource for the utility if battery storage users increase.\n\nIn contrast to NV Energy\u2019s resistance to distributed generation, Payne said Southern California Edison is adapting its vision for its power grid to incorporate new technological advances its customers might use.\n\n\u201cThe grid of the future is going to need to be upgraded and modernized,\u201d Payne said. \u201cToday \u2026 power flows from the top to the bottom. Going forward, the grid is going to have different characteristics: generation, solar or other, batteries, demand response. It\u2019s going to require upgrades to the grid to see what\u2019s happening and manage the two-way flow of power.\u201d\n\nArguments for and against legislative changes to solar\n\nSome say an increase in rooftop solar production would cause the traditional grid to collapse, others say solar would help meet power needs and help the state reach alternative energy mandates.\n\nSenate Bill 374, passed May 17, states that once the net metering cap is hit, new net metering customers will have to pay an additional tariff, to be determined by the Nevada Public Utilities Commission. That means anyone who installs a solar system on a roof after the cap is hit will pay higher rates to use and sell solar energy than net metering customers do now, though how much higher remains unclear.\n\nA bill proposed this year to raise the cap from 3 percent to 10 percent never passed. State Sen. Patricia Farley discussed an amendment to SB374 that would pass authority over the cap to the utilities commission, but the amendment wasn\u2019t included in the final version of the bill.\n\nSolar industry representatives say the cap must be raised to allow for consumer choice and more industry jobs.\n\n\u201c(People\u2019s) consumer choices are driving the growth of a home-grown industry,\u201d said Will Craven, a spokesperson for SolarCity, a solar power system provider and installer. \u201cRooftop solar jobs by definition must happen in-state.\u201d\n\nSeveral solar advocates point to a study commissioned by the Nevada Public Utilities Commission as proving net metering benefits all customers \u2014 those who generate energy and traditional customers.\n\nWhat the state\u2019s study, released last year, actually said was that it\u2019s probably a wash. Net metering probably won\u2019t ultimately cost non-participants more. Distributed generation may be more expensive than building large utility-scale solar plants, but Nevada is required to source 25 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025, and power from net metering customers may offset the cost of buying renewable power or building more renewable energy plants.\n\nMany experts question whether distributed generation is the most cost-effective route for the state to invest in clean energy. Severin Borenstein, a University of California, Berkeley economist who specializes in energy regulation and energy markets, said neither solar industry advocates nor the public utility are being honest about real costs.\n\nWith distributed generation, Borenstein said, \u201cYou lose the economies of scale. And the economies of scale are really large. The economics overall pretty clearly favor grid-scale generation, both wind and solar.\u201d\n\nBorenstein said the way net metering is structured is indeed a subsidy.\n\n\u201cYou\u2019re basically giving them (net metering customers) retail price credit for putting power into the grid,\u201d Borenstein said. \u201cIf (the credit for power) were at wholesale rates, it wouldn\u2019t be a subsidy.\u201d\n\nProper rate design \u2014 crafting fees to reflect the true costs and benefits of individual solar power generation \u2014 is key to fairness, Borenstein said.\n\n\u201cUtilities say if you keep installing solar, the grid\u2019s going to collapse and we\u2019re going to go out of business,\u201d Borenstein said. \u201cThere really isn\u2019t much chance of that, and we should be a having a discussion about that, whether that\u2019s the best way to put in renewables. Instead, you get politicians who are either boosting utilities or playing to the residential photovoltaic advocates with all this free consumer choice stuff. It\u2019s not true consumer choice if you can just fall back on the grid and the rates don\u2019t reflect the cost.\u201d\n\nBut in the fight between the utility and solar industry advocates, experts say, a real public discussion of the costs of distributed generation versus utility-scale clean power from solar and wind plants is being lost.\n\nWhat is net metering?\n\nThe solar energy policy fight in Nevada revolves around a net metering cap, a limit on the amount of solar power that can be bought back from people or institutions with renewable energy systems.\n\nIf a home or business generates more power from the sun than it uses in a month, NV Energy will buy the extra at retail power rates and give the customer a credit, the net of their power usage and power production. That means a homeowner with solar panels may be able to run his or her house largely on solar energy during the day and resell what he or she doesn\u2019t use to the grid, seeing real reductions in energy costs.\n\nBut there\u2019s a limit on the amount of net metering the state allows, and solar advocates and solar industry companies say Nevada will hit the existing cap this year, perhaps as early as late summer. The cap is set at 3 percent of the utility\u2019s peak capacity, or 225 megawatts."}
{"text":"Whether they know it or not, major advertisers are subsidizing online movie piracy, accelerating a trend in which illicit video streaming is eclipsing illegal P2P file sharing and downloading of copyrighted material.\n\nThat's according to an upcoming study commissioned by Digital Citizens Alliance, a nonprofit organization with the stated goal of making the Internet a safer place. The study is a follow-up to a February 2014 report that pegged the collective annual revenue of the nearly 600 illegal movie sharing sites it sampled at $227 million.\n\nAccording to Variety, the report reveals that video streaming was the only piracy category to post annual revenue growth, even though the number of large streaming sites dropped by half from the previous year.\n\nThe bigger culprits are the legitimate online ad networks.\n\nSpeaking at last week\u2019s Digital Entertainment World conference, DCA Executive Director Tom Galvin cited the high CPM rates (cost per 1000 impressions) associated with video ads as the primary reason for this spike in revenue. Most of that income came from major brands placing video advertising on those infringing streaming sites.\n\nWhy this matters: Consumers are all too often blamed for movie piracy, but one of the key takeaways from this report is that consumers aren\u2019t the primary revenue source for these illegal streaming sites. The bigger culprits are the legitimate online ad networks that place video ads on those sites, and the companies whose ads wind up there.\n\nPampers, Tide, and Esurance were among the brands we saw advertised on the pirate site pictured above, and brands don't get more mainstream than that. While it could be argued that major companies such as these are relying on middlemen to place their ads, ignorance of whose pockets their advertising dollars are ending in up is no excuse.\n\nLast year, the DCA estimated that even some of the smaller pirate sites it looked at were collecting as much as $100 thousand a year from advertisements. Because those sites are paying zero dollars for the movies they\u2019re streaming, the vast majority of that revenue goes directly to their bottom lines. Hollywood should also look to the bankers and payment processors between the ad networks and the pirate sites, who are taking their own slices of this illegitimate pie.\n\nFinally, Hollywood should take their customer's preferences into account. If people want to watch movies at home, why force them to find illicit ways of doing it? Make it easy, make it legal, and make some money!\n\nThis story, \"This pirated movie brought to you by Pampers\" was originally published by TechHive ."}
{"text":"10 ESSENTIAL RULES FOR BEING A GENTLEMAN IN 2015 Connor Doyle and Alice Gregg\n\nMan was not intended to live like a bear or a hermit; being a gentleman is about etiquette and decorum. What hasn\u2019t changed in over a century is that a gentleman knows how to behave toward other people.\n\nWe, the people of gentlemanliness, have collaborated to bring you the ultimate guide for being a modern gentleman in the year 2015. We\u2019ve analyzed past works, such as A Gentleman\u2019s Guide to Etiquette by Cecil B. Hartley, studied the cultures of our modern society, and taken into account the views and opinions of both women and men. This is the result.\n\n1. IT\u2019S NOT RUDE TO PAY FOR FOOD\n\nAs part of modern etiquette when dining with a lady, you are both expected to do the \u201ccheck dance\u201d (regardless of who invited who), even if she doesn\u2019t want to dance. But only accept her offer to pay for half if you sense she\u2019d be genuinely uncomfortable otherwise. A gentleman respects women\u2019s equality, but wishes to pay for the meal as a sign of appreciation.\n\n2. PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE\n\nTrue, pretty much our entire lives are on our phones - but when you\u2019re with someone else, devote your time and energy to being present and engaged with them, instead of with your device. All of your feeds can wait to hear about how your friend was chased down the street by someone dressed as a horse.\n\n3. SAVE YOUR INNER LAWYER FOR THE COURTROOM\n\nA gentleman understands the freedom of expression and thought, allowing others the entitlement of their own ideas. Even if convinced that your opponent is utterly wrong, graciously decline further engagement or dexterously turn the conversation - do not obstinately defend your own opinion until you become angry. You don\u2019t see The Hulk invited to soirees.\n\n4. DRESS LIKE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU\u2019RE DOING\n\nDressing well is a form of good manners. Don\u2019t settle for shirts with baggy waists, too short sleeves, or too tight collars. From a hiking trip to a keynote speech, a true gent always knows how to look good. Unless you actually find a store with clothes that actually fit off the rack, go custom. People will notice. Life\u2019s too short for bad shirts: awesome shirts here and special offer here.\n\n5. SO YOU THINK YOU CAN\u2019T DANCE?\n\nA true gent doesn\u2019t stand idle, observing from a corner: you can probably already see the problem with this\u2026 creepy. Take a class and embrace your inner Fred Astaire. Dancing, much like life, is about courage and hopefully having fun - and remember, elaborate flamboyant arm movements disguise a lack of footwork.\n\n6. LEARN HOW TO CONVERSE\n\nTwo year olds can have one word conversations. A gentleman should be engaged, thoughtful, and captivating. But do not steal the spotlight from others. Many people enjoy talking about themselves, so stay engaged, yet do more of the listening - and when they tell you some grandiose anecdote, let them have their moment. Don\u2019t be a one-upper.\n\n7. TO COFFEE OR NOT TO COFFEE\n\nIf the date has gone well, she might invite you up for coffee - or down; dating women who live in basement apartments is perfectly acceptable. The rule is if you\u2019re not planning on calling her again or think that you might view her differently for having coffee on the first date, then do politely turn down the invitation. Do the right thing.\n\n8. WATCH YOUR (DAMN) MOUTH\n\nEndeavour to find words that express your ideas eloquently. A gentleman does not require offensive language to speak; for those who use words such as \u201cgay\u201d, \u201cretarded\u201d, or \u201cghetto\u201d to describe something in a negative light not only adhere to stereotypes, but also show a lack of vocabulary and intellect. Cut back on that Hatorade. It\u2019s a resentful beverage that too many fools drink.\n\n9. KEEP THE CLASSICS\n\nChivalry is dead. Common courtesy is not. Some rules to being a gentleman will never change and should always be followed. The two biggest of which are opening\/holding the door for other people and giving up your seat when there are no more seats, both in this order: an older lady, an older man, a lady.\n\n10. BE A GOOD PERSON\n\nThis is everything else and it should be self explanatory, but we\u2019ll go ahead and help you a bit more anyway. Be compassionate and show respect towards everyone. Don\u2019t belittle or take advantage of others, ignore stereotypes, and understand that people from all walks of life are equal. It\u2019s what we do that defines us. That, and really nice shirts."}
{"text":"Garry Monk took over Middlesbrough after parting ways with Leeds United\n\nNew Middlesbrough manager Garry Monk has announced a new five-man backroom team.\n\nEx-England striker James Beattie and former Swansea City coach David Adams have been hired as first-team coaches while Darryl Flahavan has been named goalkeeping coach, having worked alongside Monk at Leeds United last season.\n\nIn addition, Sean Rush joins the club as head of physical performance, while Ryan Needs comes in as head of performance analysis.\n\nAll five new members of the coaching staff have previously worked with Monk at Swansea City and Leeds United.\n\n\"It's important as a manager that you build staff around you to work with you to deliver what is needed to be delivered,\" said Monk.\n\n\"We have great experience together as a group - we've worked together for a good period - and they have a good understanding of what I expect and how we work together.\n\n\"As you go through your career, you're consistently looking to refine and improve things and we're all on that journey together.\n\n\"The guys have the skill sets that we need to be able to cover all bases and there's also the importance of being able to rely on them with the responsibilities they will have.\""}
{"text":"We caught up with Luka \"perkZ\" Perkovi\u0107, Gamer2's midlaner, to learn something about him now that he qualified for LCS. Although he's still in high school, perkZ showed us you always have a chance to do what you love and is an inspiration to lots of us.\n\nImage courtesy of gamepedia.com\n\nHi Luka, thank you for participating in this interview. Tell us something little about yourself.\n\nperkZ: Hello, my name is Luka Perkovi\u0107 and I'm playing League of Legends for 3 and a half years. I qualified for LCS two months ago but I'm still attending high school in Zagreb.\n\nRegardless your age, could you say that you are living your dream? Where do you see yourself in the future?\n\nperkZ: I wouldn't say that this is my dream, but it's definitely something I enjoy doing. In near future, I can see myself playing professionally, yet later on I wish to go to college.\n\nHow do you manage to harmonize school, League of Legends and social life?\n\nperkZ: I organize my time well, but I spend most of it playing League of Legends.\n\nSince you live far away from your teammates, is it hard to maintain a friendly relationship with them?\n\nperkZ: From my point of view, if you're having fun with people over the internet, you will be having fun with them in real life too. I never had any troubles with my teammates and I don't think I will in the future.\n\nYou are currently living in Zagreb, Croatia, where you were born. What do you think of competitive scene in Croatia? Do Croatians accept eSports with the same enthusiasm like most of the world?\n\nperkZ: Esports scene is not yet developed in Croatia and I think there aren't enough professional players here for the country to develop soon.\n\nDo you plan to move somewhere because of League of Legends anytime soon?\n\nperkZ: I will be moving to Berlin this January.\n\nDo you have your parents support about moving out so young to professionally play a game?\n\nperkZ: Yes, I have my parent\u2019s full support.\n\nImage courtesy of Luka Perkovi\u0107 (twitter.com)\n\nIn your opinion, which champions are best for mid lane in current meta?\n\nperkZ: Kassadin, Ryze, Azir and Lulu.\n\nDo you think that the upcoming season changes will drastically affect the gameplay?\n\nperkZ: I'm not yet sure if they will, but I do hope so.\n\nAgainst which midlaner do you think you have a great chance to win, and against which one to lose?\n\nperkZ: I wouldn't like to talk about my chances against some midlaners and about their skills, but I'm mostly looking forward to play against Nukeduck and Febiven.\n\nAnd for the last question, tell us, who was your greatest support through your journey to eSports scene? Would you like to thank someone?\n\nperkZ: My greatest support through my whole journey was Joe \"InnerFlame\" Elouassi, current manager of Team Dignitas.\n\nThank you, Luka. We wish you all the best in your upcoming matches."}
{"text":"To President Donald Trump, backing out of the Paris deal was a message to the rest of the world that the United States would not be held to terms he doesn't like in international deals. | AP Photo Trump supporters revel in Paris exit Bannon's fingerprints on decision to leave climate agreement, a decision supporters say is broadly supported outside Washington.\n\nPresident Donald Trump's decision to leave the Paris climate agreement received a similar reaction to his travel ban: international scorn, widespread protests and condemnations from groups and business executives who often stay quiet.\n\nTo Matt Ames, though, it was a reason to celebrate \u2014 and he is helping plan a rally near the White House to celebrate Trump on Saturday.\n\nStory Continued Below\n\n\"The thinking is there is very strong sentiment within the party in favor of the president's decision yesterday on Paris Accord,\" said Ames, the chairman of the Fairfax County Republican Party in Virginia. \"We want to go make some noise and tell him how much we appreciate it. There seemed to be a tug-of-war, and it didn't appear it was going to happen.\"\n\nWithdrawal from the accord, like the travel ban, was spearheaded internally by Steve Bannon, the president's chief strategist. But White House officials, advisers and others close to the president say Bannon's job of convincing Trump is easier because the president has a natural tendency to take the same path as he \u2014 and that while Bannon irked the president with his behavior in the West Wing, Trump has never left him ideologically.\n\nWhile the president often crows about Gary Cohn's success at Goldman Sachs, and may talk to his daughter, Ivanka Trump, more than anyone, Trump often gravitates toward the Bannon modus. Bannon supporters note enthusiastically that the so-called moderates in the West Wing don't have much luck getting their way.\n\nIt is less about his friendship with Bannon \u2014 who didn't respond to a request for comment \u2014 or his personal opinion of him on any given day, advisers and aides say. The combative chief strategist has repeatedly told Trump his base is solid, that liberals will never love him, the large crowds voted for him for a reason \u2014 and that he will be rewarded for keeping campaign promises. He reminds him of his populist credo and the large crowds at rallies.\n\nMorning Energy newsletter The source for energy and environment news \u2014 weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.\n\nBannon has reminded other White House aides that the travel ban is far more popular \"than the media will ever say,\" according to one person who has spoken to him. He has teamed up with Trump in criticizing the news media.\n\nIn interviews with Trump supporters and Republicans across the country, the Paris climate agreement news looked far different than it did in Washington, a fact that Bannon reminded the president of, according to a senior White House aide.\n\nJenny Beth Martin, the head of the Tea Party Patriots, enthusiastically supported the move. She said her group viewed leaving the Paris agreement as a \u201cpart of a larger \u2018make America Great Again\u2019 platform that necessitates putting America first.\u201d\n\nAnd Trump supporters said backing for the move was widespread outside of Washington.\n\n\"I was in the Midwest yesterday, in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan,\" said Ken Blackwell, who headed domestic policy on Trump's transition. \"It played very well. It was exceptionally Trumpian. It was a very good day for him.\"\n\nAmong Democrats and some Republicans, the move was seen as short-sighted and horrific. Nicaragua and Syria are the only other nations not in the climate accord. The United States' allies could see a damaging signal on how serious climate change is. It gives other countries \u2014 like China \u2014 the ability to lead over the United States. And some see Bannon as he is portrayed on \"Saturday Night Live\": the \"Grim Reaper\" ruining the United States.\n\n\"It's sending the planet spiraling in an awful direction,\" said Bill Burton, a former Obama aide. \"You're killing off innovation and you're saying in a time of crisis, we need to lean on other countries.\"\n\nTo Trump, it was a message to send to the rest of the world that the United States would not be held to terms he doesn't like in international deals. And it was a good way to heap scorn on climate change \u2014 which is proven by science but a flash-point among Republicans -- while talking about creating new jobs for blue-collar workers.\n\n\"Pittsburgh, not Paris -- he couldn't have said it better,\" Ames, the Virginia Republican, said. \"That line really really resonated with a lot of people.\"\n\nBurton, the Democratic strategist, said Trump's move works for him \"from a brand perspective\" because it's about sticking it to the establishment. He also said Democrats may struggle to tie the move to everyday Americans \u2014 and he believed it would ultimately could prove less consequential than other decisions.\n\n\"But at some point, you have to find ways to put points on the board that appeal past your core base. He has shown himself completely inept at doing that so far,\" he said. \"If you keep doing things that are broadly unpopular, it weighs on you.\"\n\nAfter the travel ban, Bannon told others he relished seeing the protests on TV. Bannon has told friends he \"doesn't give a shit about\" the Grim Reaper portrayal on \"Saturday Night Live,\" in the words of one person who has spoken to him.\n\nMore protests are likely to come tomorrow when Trump's supporters line up outside the White House for a campaign-style rally.\n\nThe president, however, did not enjoy the protests last time. And he may be watching TV, too."}
{"text":"North Dakota was the great ex\u00adcep\u00adtion to the Great Re\u00adces\u00adsion.\n\nThe only area in the coun\u00adtry that saw both a wide\u00adspread sig\u00adni\u00adfic\u00adant in\u00adcrease in house\u00adhold in\u00adcomes and a sig\u00adni\u00adfic\u00adant de\u00adcrease in poverty rates over the past five years was North Dakota, spe\u00adcific\u00adally West\u00adern North Dakota, ac\u00adcord\u00ading to 2012 data the U.S. Census Bur\u00adeau re\u00adleased and mapped out on Thursday.\n\nMe\u00addi\u00adan house\u00adhold in\u00adcomes in more than half the counties in the state, in\u00adclud\u00ading most on the west\u00adern side, where oil pro\u00adduc\u00adtion is boom\u00ading, are high\u00ader today than be\u00adfore the re\u00adces\u00adsion began in 2007, and they\u2019re also high\u00ader in ob\u00adject\u00adive mon\u00adet\u00adary terms than most of the rest of the coun\u00adtry. House\u00adhold in\u00adcomes are also up in South Dakota. West\u00adern North Dakota\u2019s oil patch is one of the few places that not only weathered the Great Re\u00adces\u00adsion, but thrived. See the full ver\u00adsion of this map.\n\nOver the past five years, since 2007, 62 per\u00adcent of all counties in North Dakota saw in\u00adcreases in their me\u00addi\u00adan house\u00adhold in\u00adcomes, and 33 per\u00adcent in South Dakota saw in\u00adcreases.\n\n\u201cOne could say that these two states rep\u00adres\u00aden\u00adted nearly 50 per\u00adcent of all counties which showed a stat\u00adist\u00adic\u00adally sig\u00adni\u00adfic\u00adant in\u00adcrease in me\u00addi\u00adan house\u00adhold in\u00adcome,\u201d the bur\u00adeau finds.\n\nBy con\u00adtrast, of the oth\u00ader 3,000-plus counties na\u00adtion\u00adwide, just 56 had a sim\u00adil\u00adar \u201cstat\u00adist\u00adic\u00adally sig\u00adni\u00adfic\u00adant in\u00adcrease\u201d in house\u00adhold in\u00adcomes. Of all the counties that had a sig\u00adni\u00adfic\u00adant change in in\u00adcome levels, 89 per\u00adcent saw de\u00adclines.\n\nWest\u00adern North Dakota is one of the few areas out\u00adside of the North\u00adeast and Mid-At\u00adlantic re\u00adgions that has counties with house\u00adhold in\u00adcomes above the na\u00adtion\u00adal av\u00ader\u00adage, which was $51,371 in 2012. West\u00adern North Dakota was also one of the few areas where the poverty rate de\u00adcreased over the past five years, to be well be\u00adlow the na\u00adtion\u00adal av\u00ader\u00adage of 15.9 per\u00adcent.\n\nThe Census Bur\u00adeau doesn\u2019t say what is caus\u00ading North Dakota to stand out as it clearly does in its maps. But the oil boom that\u2019s taken over the west\u00adern part of the state \u2014 and is hav\u00ading ripple ef\u00adfects throughout the re\u00adgion and the rest of the U.S. \u2014 is in\u00addis\u00adput\u00adably a huge eco\u00adnom\u00adic driver."}
{"text":"Nothing riles up fans more than other fans shaming them for not being good, loyal fans. Or for people to claim that they have some special monopoly on being good fans. But given that riling people up is part of our #Brand here at HBT, we usually pass on the results of that annual survey which purports to measure such things.\n\nBrand Keys, a consulting firm or marketing firm or something, puts the list together by somehow measuring the \u201cfour emotional drivers\u201d of fan loyalty, which are (1) Pure Entertainment; (2) Authenticity; (3) Fan Bonding; and (4) History and tradition. These are mixed in a pot with things like overall league and team rankings, viewership and merchandise sales and then this comes out like so. So basically, there\u2019s no way to dispute their findings. We can just argue about them.\n\nTop 5 Teams for the most loyal fans this year, with last year\u2019s rankings in parentheses:\n\n1. St. Louis Cardinals (#1)\n\n2. Los Angeles Dodgers (#3)\n\n3. San Francisco Giants (#2)\n\n4 Detroit Tigers (#4)\n\n5. Washington Nationals (#5)\n\nThe bottom five with last year\u2019s rankings in parenthesis:\n\n30. Seattle Mariners (#25)\n\n29. Arizona Diamondbacks (#29)\n\n28. Colorado Rockies (#28)\n\n27. San Diego Padres (#24)\n\n26. Houston Astros (#30)\n\nWorth noting that the Phillies led the list for \u201cmost loyal\u201d on Opening Day 2011, which I think was probably the height of Philly fan enthusiasm. I don\u2019t think enthusiasm and loyalty is the same thing, though. Most Philly fans I know are still loyal to their team. They\u2019re just realistic that they suck. Same in reverse for the Mets, who used to \u2014 heck, maybe still do \u2014 have a singularly neurotic and pessimistic fan base but no one can doubt their loyalty. Indeed, if you\u2019re not loyal you don\u2019t allow yourself to be emotionally connected to the bad stuff enough to let it bother you. That makes the \u201cfan bonding\u201d and \u201centertainment\u201d parts of this thing suspect. You can be a loyal fan even if your team has been hostile to you and is more misery inducing than entertaining.\n\nAnd of course, all of this assumes that \u201cloyalty\u201d is an unequivocally great thing anyway. You don\u2019t get a reserved spot in heaven, get your karma reduced or get holes punched in some sort of cosmic rewards card just for being loyal to your team. I know the whole Sports is Everything Industrial Complex has convinced people that loyalty is everything, but it\u2019s actually pretty silly.\n\nIf you\u2019re the sort of fan who watches the sports team you like up to the point they entertain you and make it worth your time and then tune out when the balance is off you\u2019re not a better or worse person. If you put yourself through the ringer for them, no matter the situation, you\u2019re neither of those things either. Let sports be your thing in your own way and don\u2019t listen to people who would tell you different.\n\nFollow @craigcalcaterra"}
{"text":"Each week Bob and Ivey take a trip Beyond the Wall to discuss HBO's 'Game of Thrones' from the perspective of fans of the books. If you've not read the books, tread lightly, as there are spoilers everywhere, sweet summer child. This week, we make several bold predictions about what will happen in season two.\n\nWell, sports fans, it all comes down to this. Sunday marks the highly anticipated premiere for the second season Game of Thrones. For the past several weeks, Bob and I have been previewing the upcoming season, which will follow George R. R. Martin\u2019s A Clash of Kings. We\u2019ve looked back at the first season, talked about the casting of the new roles, previewed our most anticipated moments and discussed areas where we expected the series to deviate from the source material.\n\nThis week, we have several bold predictions for what we believe the second season might bring. As usual, a spoiler alert is in effect, as we will obviously be discussing events in Clash, and might look ahead to events beyond the second book.\n\nIvey:\n\nLet me kick things off; in the first season, Peter Dinklage had a breakout performance as Tyrion Lannister. Fans of the book have almost universally been fans of the Imp of Casterly Rock, but I believe Dinklage\u2019s performance endeared him to television viewers even more (to the tune of an Emmy win for Supporting Actor). This season, I expect Davos Seaworth will be the breakout character. The first time I read through A Song of Ice and Fire, I never really connected with the Onion Knight. I expect things to be different on screen.\n\nBob:\n\nHmm. You could be right. I always liked Davos. There\u2019s something about a rough around the edges ex-pirate, but I\u2019m not sure he\u2019s going to be the story. My money is on Brienne. She\u2019s the ultimate underdog up against so much hardship and yet she always struggles on. Add to that the fact that she is a bit of a badass and I think she\u2019s going to be the one folks are talking about around the water cooler.\n\nIvey:\n\nPerhaps; I\u2019m just not sure Brienne will have enough story this season for that to happen. If we\u2019re talking about seasons three and four, then I think she (and her companion on that journey) will have to be the favorites.\n\nBob:\n\nWe\u2019ll have to see.\n\nI think one thing that is going to disappoint fans is Dany\u2019s story this year. If the show follows the book, there just isn\u2019t a lot for Dany to do. She had a lot of story in season one. Yes, there\u2019s going to be a fantastic scene in the House of the Undying, but her story doesn\u2019t really pick up again until book three. Perhaps the writers will prove me wrong, but Dany kicking around Qarth with her little baby dragons is going to be a little dull, methinks.\n\nIvey:\n\nI couldn\u2019t agree with you more \u2014 though I\u2019d extend that prediction beyond just this season, but that is a conversation for another column. Though, as we\u2019ve discussed, I am really looking forward to the House of the Undying.\n\nWhile Dany\u2019s story might be lacking in the novel, Melisandre\u2019s is decidedly not. I know you\u2019re really looking forward to her boat trip with Davos, however I have a feeling that Melisandre will be far less interesting in the series than she is on the written page. Sometimes the mystery is lost when you pull a certain scene or character out of one\u2019s imagination and puts it on the screen. Such will be the case with the red priestess.\n\nBob:\n\nIt\u2019s entirely possible. From the look of the character, it appears that she is going to be a little toned down. I\u2019m expecting a character that is more mysterious and less intimidating and sinister. In the book, with the struggle between Davos and Melisandre, she came across as wicked and powerful. My guess is that for most of the season (until she starts summoning up some shadows), she will be more of a quiet mystery. Whether that means she\u2019s less interesting or not \u2026 I\u2019m not sure.\n\nI think one character that is going to get more interesting this season is Robb. He wasn\u2019t even a POV character in A Clash of Kings so most of his story was told through the yes of others. I think that with the story of his and Jeyne\u2019s romance at the forefront, along with his leadership as King of the North, he\u2019s going to come out of this season with more fans than he had in the book.\n\nIvey:\n\nI think so, too. I\u2019m not sure Robb was ever as well loved by ASOIF fans as his father was, but I think that is something that has changed on-screen. The decisions Robb makes this season, specifically regarding Jeyne, obviously have major effects down the road. I\u2019m glad we\u2019ll get a chance to see that play out, instead of only hearing about it after the fact.\n\nAnother character I think fans will appreciate less this year is Bran. Let\u2019s face it, brave-faced as he might have been last season, he was still a bit of a whiney brat (though less so than the lion\u2019s share of his siblings). If it hadn\u2019t been for the tragedy he experienced in the series premiere, I\u2019m not sure fans would have tolerated him at all. Considering the changes he experiences this season \u2013 or at least become more obvious \u2013 aren\u2019t something I think fans will be expecting, I\u2019m not sure how much they\u2019ll like it. At least, that was my reaction as a reader. What do you think?\n\nBob:\n\nI\u2019m not really sure. I could see it going either way. I think that because of the situation, he\u2019s going to be forced to grow up a little and be less of a whiner. Bran\u2019s story has always struck me as one of the very long arcs in the books and it\u2019s going to be interesting to see that translate to the screen. I think that we probably won\u2019t see a whole lot of the young Stark this year and when we do it will be concentrated on the three-eyed crow plot, which I have always found interesting. People like giant wolves, dude.\n\nIvey:\n\nWell, I\u2019ve seen some of the second season, and I have to admit I didn\u2019t hate how they conceptualized Bran\u2019s \u2026 dreams.\n\nWe did get a little more negative than I\u2019d expected; any last minute words of positivity?\n\nBob:\n\nIt\u2019s still one of the best shows on TV. This is all nitpicking, my friend. I can\u2019t wait for the new season to start!\n\nIvey:\n\nIndeed \u2026 nitpicking is often about as useful as nipples on a breastplate, but it can be fun.\n\nWe\u2019ll see you back here next week as we discuss episode one, \u201cThe North Remembers.\u201d\n\nPhoto Credit: Helen Sloan\/HBO"}
{"text":"It's well-known that the more adorable and charismatic of the endangered animals get most of the funding. That doesn't mean the cute animals, like the iconic panda, aren't worth saving, but it leaves a lot of the less photogenic but just as important animals out in the cold. Who's interested in saving the Brazilian bald-faced tamarin, which looks like a cross between a rabid monkey and a bat? Or the Komodo dragon, a 10-foot-long murderous lizard that's the embodiment of just about every childhood nightmare you ever had?\n\nThat's where the Ugly Animal Preservation Society comes in. It's an awareness campaign that uses comedy to bring attention to animals like the pig-nosed frog, pictured above, which may otherwise have trouble getting funding. The UAPS holds live events, where a combination of London comics and scientists discuss one ugly endangered animal of their choice. At the end of the show, the audience votes to decide which of those animals will become the mascot for each individual chapter of the UAPS. They don't seem to be directly donating money; instead, the aim is to raise awareness, with the hopes that it will eventually lead to donations elsewhere."}
{"text":"Samsung Releases Galaxy Tab S to Compete with iPad Air?\n\nSamsung has always been focused on building the ultimate experience for smartphone and tablet users. On the day of\n\n2014 World Cup opening ceremony, Samsung also officially released its first flagship tablet - Samsung Galaxy Tab S.\n\nThe core technology inside is the Super AMOLED (Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) instead of traditional LCD(Liquid Crystal Display) that used by most of tablets including iPad Air. With super-high 2560 x 1600 resolution,\n\nTab S provides straight-up gorgeous display to let HD video look great. Make no mistake: The key selling point of\n\nSamsung Galaxy Tab S is the highest resolution up till now to compete with iPad Air.\n\nBesides its Super AMOLED, what else breakthroughs does Galaxy Tab S produce compared with iPad Air?\n\nRead on, DVDSmith will bring you a full range of comparative analysis.\n\nNo matter which one is your preference, Samsung Galaxy Tab S or Apple iPad Air would be a good choice for you to enjoy great entertainment experience. But it makes sense that Galaxy Tab S pays more attention on display (size, resolution, type) and battery life from the above comparison, which provide you with more marvelous visual treat.\n\nExcept for downloading videos directly from websites, the vast majority of movie fans usually watch their DVDs which make them feel much better for some reason. Are you interesting in watching your favorite movie DVDs on Samsung Galaxy Tab S? Any DVD Cloner Platinum can help you to do it.\n\n>>Windows Users: Any DVD Cloner Platinum<<\n\n>>Mac Users: Any DVD Cloner Platinum for Mac<<\n\nIMAGE-TEXT Tutorial about Watching DVDs on Samsung Galaxy Tab S with Any DVD Cloner Platinum\n\nAny DVD Cloner Platinum is a powerful combination of DVD cloner and DVD ripper. As a DVD cloner, it provides 4 flexible copying modes to copy, clone or compress DVD to DVD, DVD folder or ISO image with all protections decrypted\n\nand removed. As a DVD ripper, it can rip any DVD to MP4, M4V, AVI, M2TS, HTML5 embedded video, easy to convert encrypted DVDs to videos supported by popular devices likeiPhone 5S\/5C iPad, Samsung Smartphone,Android tablet, etc. Only above 2 steps, movie DVD converter can convert all of your favorite DVDs to videos for enjoying on Galaxy Tab S.\n\nExtra Tips:\n\nYou might wonder how to transfer DVD movies to your iPhone\/ipad\/ipod, don't worry, Syncios Free manager has your back. Syncios Free Manager is a powerful iTunes alternative and iOS manager, trusted by millions Apple users. It can help you transfer, backup and restore data between your PC and iPad\/iPhone\/iPod without using iTunes. Learn More>>\n\nTry the free trial version of Syncios Manager Now!\n\nRelated Articles\n\n* How to enjoy movie DVDs on Sony Xperia Z2?\n\n* Sony PlayStation 4 is not only a game cosole, but also a home meida center\n\n* Watching classic movie DVDs on Samsung Galalxy S5 with Any DVD Cloner Platinum"}
{"text":"OTTAWA\u2014Chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand says Canada\u2019s outdated voting process has reached a tipping point and must be modernized to meet the needs and expectations of voters. Mayrand says the Canada Elections Act is based on the way elections were conducted in the 19th century, when communication with the regions was limited, oversight was minimal and election administration was local.\n\nMarc Mayrand wants to take Canada's \" rigid and slow\" voting system into the 21st century. ( Sean Kilpatrick \/ THE CANADIAN PRESS )\n\nAs a result, he says the process is entirely manual, rigid and slow. In last fall\u2019s election, he says the cumbersome procedures resulted in long lineups at advance polls. Mayrand is recommending a number of reforms to bring the process into the 21st century.\n\nArticle Continued Below\n\nFor instance, he says voter information cards should include bar codes that can be electronically checked as soon as voters show up at polling stations, rather than forcing voters to wait in line for a poll worker at a specific table to strike their name off a paper list."}
{"text":"Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) made a startling misstatement on the Senate floor Friday, amid a heated debate on funding women\u2019s health services \u2014 a key sticking point for Republicans and Democrats struggling to pass a budget that would keep the federal government from shutting down.\n\n\u201cYou don\u2019t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your blood pressure or your cholesterol checked,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that\u2019s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.\u201d\n\nShocking as that might sound, it\u2019s patently false. In fact, the opposite is true: More than 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does has nothing to do with abortion.\n\nThe Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is one of the nation\u2019s top non-profit organizations. In 2009, according to PPFA\u2019s figures, 96 percent of its activities were dedicated to one of the following: cancer screenings; STD or STI testing; counseling and education; or pregnancy testing and prevention.\n\nThanks to all of this, one in five American women have a much better shot at preventing unwanted pregnancies or catching a life-threatening disease before it becomes critical.\n\nIn fact, the vast majority of PPFA\u2019s reproductive health efforts are dedicated toward preventing unwanted pregnancies.\n\nTo this effect, independent research shows that each year PPFA plays a role in preventing over 2 million unwanted pregnancies and stopping over 800,000 women from getting abortions, saving public agencies billions of dollars in the process. The group says that only three percent of their patients request abortion services.\n\nFigures show the PPFA is ten times more likely to help prevent an abortion than carry one out.\n\nAdditionally, PPFA volunteers reportedly distributed educational materials on reproductive health to over 1.9 million people in 2009. They were also a key bulwark in the fight against sexually transmitted diseases, carrying out nearly 4 million tests that year.\n\nDespite this, misinformation as to what PPFA actually does remains rife among many Republicans.\n\nConfronted by questions from Raw Story, one legislator in South Dakota \u2014 Republican state Sen. Al Novstrup, the key sponsor of that state\u2019s recently passed abortion restrictions \u2014 appeared to be under the impression that PPFA was a profit-making venture with a \u201cfinancial incentive\u201d to carry out as many abortions as possible.\n\nSen. Kyl, it would seem, is about on that same page.\n\nFunding for PPFA was a key sticking point for Republicans and Democrats on Friday as they struggled to pass a budget that would keep the federal government running.\n\nRepublicans in the House, who recently passed a budget that cut virtually all domestic programs and left defense spending untouched, insist on ending support for PPFA. Democrats have conceded to a wide cross-section of their proposed cuts, but insist that womens\u2019 health services are not negotiable.\n\nMost services provided by PPFA are significantly more expensive when purchased from the private sector.\n\nCritics have suggested that the refusal to fund PPFA is actually a back-door scheme to funnel additional money into private health providers, which would be the last resort for most PPFA patients who lack health insurance. Republicans insist, however, that they are morally opposed to public funds going toward abortions. Public funding of abortions, however, has been repeatedly banned at the federal level. Public funds for abortion are only provided through Medicaid, and only in cases of rape or incest.\n\nIf the two parties cannot agree on a budget by midnight tonight, over 800,000 public workers will be temporarily displaced and many active duty combat troops will not receive their paychecks.\n\nThis video is from C-SPAN, broadcast Friday, April 8, 2011, as snipped by ThinkProgress."}
{"text":"Diabetes treatment may reduce breast cancer risk in women by lowering mammographic density, according to research. Mammographic density is a strong risk factor for breast cancer, and any form of diabetes treatment has been found to lower it. Previous research has found a link between diabetes and mammographic density, but this is the first time when diabetes treatment like insulin has been studied in this context.\n\nThe study looked at 5,644 women who received mammographic screening between 1993 and 2001. Associate professor Dr. Zorana Jovanovic Andersen reported, \u201cWomen with diabetes were less likely to have mixed or dense breasts, as opposed to fatty ones, both before and after adjustment for other factors such as being overweight.\u201d\n\nSimilar associations were seen among 44 women who had controlled diabetes solely by diet and 62 diabetics who took oral medications. Women who used insulin injections were found to have increased odds of mixed or dense breasts.\n\nDr. Andersen added, \u201cDiabetes is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, but the exact mechanisms which bring this about are still unclear. One of the characteristics of cancer cells is their ability to grow rapidly and uncontrollably, and to resist the programmed death that occurs in non-cancer cells. Therefore, growth factors are critical to cancer development and progression. We know that insulin is an important growth factor for all body tissues, and even if we do not know exactly how it affects the development of cancer cells, it is also highly plausible that it increases breast density.\u201d\n\n\u201cOur study looked solely at the effect of insulin on breast density. Now we would like to extend our research by following up these women for breast cancer and observing the effect of different diabetes treatments on breast cancer risk. If we find a relationship, we need to examine whether a high [mammographic density] is responsible, or whether other factors are involved,\u201d said Dr. Andersen.\n\nThe researchers intend to conduct a larger scale study on mammographic density data and link it to specific insulin treatments from the Danish Prescription Registry.\n\nDr. Andersen concluded, \u201cDenmark is fortunate to have such a large MD data set, which, through the DCH study group, can be linked to many different issues that may influence health outcomes. The possibility of analyzing such detailed information in a coherent group means that we have the ability to undertake additional studies in order to further investigate the relationships between breast density and other risk factors for breast cancer. In the meantime, we would urge all women, both with diabetes and without, to take measures to reduce their risk of developing breast cancer through simple lifestyle changes, such as avoiding obesity, reducing alcohol consumption, and exercising.\u201d\n\nConnection between diabetes and breast cancer\n\nControlling glucose levels in diabetes is important as uncontrolled glucose levels can cause damage to the blood vessels and the circulatory system, resulting in kidney failure, lower limb amputations, and even vision loss. Although this may not seem as if it is associated with breast cancer, in fact, it has been reported that there are higher rates of breast cancer among diabetics than those without diabetes.\n\nFifty years ago, it was first reported that breast cancer was most common in type 1 diabetes, but recent research has shown a more specific link between type 2 diabetes and breast cancer.\n\nPostmenopausal women over the age of 50 with type 2 diabetes have been found to have a 20 to 27 percent higher risk of breast cancer. Although the link between the two isn\u2019t as clear, it is speculated that the damage caused by uncontrolled glucose levels and inflammation can contribute to breast cancer. Additionally, type 2 diabetes and breast cancer share many common risk factors, including being overweight or obese, and lacking exercise and physical activity, to name a few.\n\nFurthermore, it has been observed that women with type 2 diabetes and breast cancer have a 50 percent higher risk of death. It is then even more important to manage your diabetes to not only reduce your risk of breast cancer, but to avoid worsened complications of the condition.\n\nRelated Reading:\n\nType 2 diabetes in women increases heart attack and stroke risk, intense activity may lower risk\n\nType 2 diabetes in women increases heart attack and stroke risk, but intense activity may help lower the risk. Women, compared to men, have double the risk of having a heart attack or stroke if they have type 2 diabetes. The findings suggest that additional intense activity could help lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. Continue reading\u2026\n\nGestational diabetes can develop into type 2 diabetes after pregnancy\n\nGestational diabetes is a type of diabetes that only occurs during a woman\u2019s pregnancy, although data shows that it can turn into type 2 diabetes after a person gives birth. Your body needs glucose for energy, but too much glucose in the blood is not good for the baby. If you have blood sugar that is too high then you have diabetes. Gestational diabetes is typically diagnosed during the late stages of pregnancy. Continue reading\u2026\n\nSources:\n\nhttps:\/\/www.ecco-org.eu\/Global\/News\/EBCC\/EBCC10-PR\/2016\/03\/Diabetes-treatment-can-reduce-mammographic-density-an-important-risk-factor-for-breast-cancer\n\nhttp:\/\/ww5.komen.org\/KomenPerspectives\/Diabetes-and-Breast-Cancer.html"}
{"text":"Kaboom! Controlled explosions in the legs of this silicone 'soft robot' make it leap higher than 30 times its own height.\n\nResearchers led by George Whitesides, a chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have engineered a three-legged silicone device that is powered by combustion \u2014 previously used only in hard systems such as diesel engines.\n\nThe soft robot has in each of its legs a channel with a soft valve at the end. Methane and oxygen gases are fed into this channel in a ratio of one part methane to two parts oxygen. The computer that controls how much gas is let in also controls a high-voltage cable connected to electrodes in each leg.\n\nWhen the computer sparks the electrodes, the methane and oxygen explode, turning into carbon dioxide and water \u2014 and releasing a lot of energy. The downward force from the explosion makes the robot jump \u2014 higher than 30 centimetres so far, although the researchers say the range has been limited by the height of the testing chamber. The soft valve is crucial, says Robert Shepherd, a study co-author and engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It closes in response to high pressure, thus making the pressure even higher, and then it opens after the explosion to let the exhaust gases out.\n\nSoft robots are lighter and simpler than hard systems, and they are relatively inexpensive to produce \u2014 but they have previously been limited to compressed-air power, owing to the high heat generated in combustion reactions. \u201cThe key discovery is that this material can work at these high temperatures,\u201d says Shepherd. The robot has withstood more than 30 consecutive explosive jumps so far. The results were published this week in Angewandte Chemie1.\n\nThe researchers hope that a developed version of their device could be used for search-and-rescue operations, leaping and cartwheeling its way over any obstacles that might block its path."}
{"text":"After months of controversy, Spike Lee\u2019s new film Chi-Raq finally hits theaters today. It\u2019s a dud. A squandered opportunity. There\u2019s a reckoning to be had in Chicago, and a serious examination to be done about the pervasiveness of gun violence here, but this movie is not it. Billed as a satire and based on the Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes, Chi-Raq is a brazenly opportunistic film, glomming onto current events with sickening desperation, simultaneously overwrought and underwhelming.\n\nThe plot summary in brief: After a series of escalating violent acts between two rival gangs\u2014the Spartans and the Trojans\u2014result in the shooting of a little girl, a young woman named Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), girlfriend of Spartan gang leader Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), initiates a sex strike in the hopes that it will curb the city\u2019s violence. In the film, Lysistrata\u2019s strike is marked with a motto: \u201cI will deny all rights of access or entrance,\"which she repeats to her legion of women. The film\u2019s posters, however, put it more succinctly: \u201cNo Peace, No Piece.\u201d\n\nChi-Raq is both a satire and late period Spike Lee and, ultimately, a mess. There are glimpses of that signature Lee stamp\u2014direct camera addresses, gorgeous cinematography (Wicker Park has never looked so good), and moving performances from Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson, and (surprisingly!) John Cusack. But there is so much more that doesn\u2019t work, from the haphazardly enforced rhyming verse throughout to the jarring nods at every hot button black subject du jour (mass incarceration! Sandra Bland! The Prison-Industrial Complex!). It\u2019s a well-known fact\u2014one trumpeted by Lee himself\u2014that the film was shot in six weeks and Lee scrambled to release it in time for Oscar consideration. The rushing shows.\n\nIt\u2019s hard not to come away from the movie feeling as though it\u2019s a gross oversimplification of Chicago\u2019s ails. Both Lee and his co-writer, Kevin Willmott, who originally came up with the concept of a modern revamping of Lysistrata, freely admit that the film was not originally supposed to be set in Chicago. That changed because of social media (read more about that here).\n\nIn Chicago\u2019s Q&A with Lee, he claims to have done his research. And sure, he frontloads the movie with grim stats about the violence in the city. The 500 murders in 2012, the contested claim that there have been more murders in Chicago than in Iraq. But from then on, the depictions of gang culture appear to stem directly from bad, outdated movies and TV shows about gang life. They resemble nothing of the overwhelmingly young, decentralized nature of the gangs that proliferate in Chicago today. The fact that the film\u2019s two central gang leaders (itself a dated concept in Chicago, when there are hundreds of splintered gangs who rule over one block or one street) are played by Nick Cannon, age 35, and Wesley Snipes, age 53, is just wildly inaccurate. (Let\u2019s ignore, forever, the utter absurdity of Snipes\u2019s Cyclops, from his bizarre, staccato laugh, to his bejeweled eye patch, to any character context whatsoever.) As Chicago has reported, the average age of both victims and perpetrators in Chicago is really young\u2014a shocking number are under the age of 30.\n\nWhat\u2019s been so surprising\u2014if not infuriating\u2014 about early critical reactions to the film is just how laudatory so many reviews have been. The cream of that strange crop: New York Times film critic Mahnola Dargis\u2019s critic\u2019s pick review. She not only calls Chi-Raq the best work Lee has done in years, but writes this travesty promptly circulated around local Internet circles and rightly mocked: \u201cSet in contemporary Chicago, where sidewalks are washed with blood, and human hearts beat to the rhythm of gunfire\u2026\u201d Why is there such reticence on the part of critics to really address the film\u2019s awfulness? As if taking on Chicago gun violence means Lee should be offered a carte blanche. The tropes the film traffics in means it could have been set anywhere. That Lee chose Chicago seems like a desperate attempt on his part to cash in on the city\u2019s unflattering national spotlight.\n\nLee says he wants this movie to save lives. But if it has no basis in the reality of the city, how can it?\n\nShare"}
{"text":"One of the most common sights following any major storm is a large number of houses with blue tarps pinned to their roofs. That was certainly true in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, and in Florida after Irma rolled through. But images from Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria are almost blue-roof-free. That\u2019s not because the hurricane didn\u2019t leave plenty of damaged homes \u2014 with winds speeds over 150 mph when it made landfall, Maria was a monster storm that ripped shingles from homes that met even the most stringent hurricane standards.\n\nSo why are images from Puerto Rico so lacking in that post-disaster blue?\n\nAfter Hurricane Maria damaged tens of thousands of homes in Puerto Rico, a newly created Florida company with an unproven record won more than $30 million in contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide emergency tarps and plastic sheeting for repairs.\n\nJust as the contract to rebuild Puerto Rico\u2019s electrical grid was awarded to a two-man firm in Montana that didn\u2019t even have an office, FEMA awarded the contract for supplying tarps and similar post-disaster materials to the Florida firm Bronze Star.\n\nOnly neither of the brothers behind the company had the supplies they were selling, or experience in acquiring them, or knowledge of delivering them. And if the name has you wondering, neither of them actually has a Bronze Star.\n\n\u201cMy brother and I, we are both veterans, so we just came up with a name to do business,\u201d Kayon Jones said. \u201cWe\u2019re not saying we have a Bronze Star or anything.\u201d\n\nSomehow the proposal from Bronze Star beat out eight other bids for tarps and plastic sheeting. But not a single item was delivered before FEMA finally cancelled the contracts on November 6. Which means that since September 20, homes on Puerto Rico have been picking up even more rain damage as they waited for these supplies."}
{"text":"Massachusetts Lawmaker Who Tipped Illegals Off to ICE Raids Says She\u2019s Not Sorry\n\nAs reported earlier \u2014 Massachusetts State Representative, Michelle Dubois took to Facebook to warn illegal aliens that ICE would be doing raids in the community of Brockton on Wednesday, March 29th.\n\nMs. DuBois even gave specific instructions to illegal aliens to stay inside \u2018don\u2019t go out on the street\u2019 and if there was a knock on the door, not to answer the door.\n\nMichelle DuBois told CBS Local she is not sorry for her illegal stunt:\n\n\u201cPassing information along that is already all over the community not only lets the people I represent know what is happening. It lets ICE know that everyone in Brockton is aware of their intended raid if there was one,\u201d DuBois said, reading a statement aloud. Asked whether she thought the post could be construed as obstructing justice, she replied, \u201cNo, I don\u2019t.\u201d DuBois also said she did not see a problem with disseminating a rumor and admitted, she did not contact ICE before doing so.\n\nThey need to start locking up a few of these criminals.\n\nThis lawmaker is out of control."}
{"text":"This is going to be a series of posts that talk about what I learned from the Django Dash. I think it\u2019s a really fun competetion that is also a great learning experience. I hope that this series catch on, and other people write about some of the things that they learned in the Django Dash.\n\nWhat I learned\u00b6\n\nThe thing that I learned about during my dash project was the awesomeness that is Gunicorn. It is an awesome HTTP server that I think has really solved the \u201chow do I deploy Django\u201d problem.\n\nHere are the steps involved in deploying a site using the gunicorn:\n\npip install gunicorn\n\nAdd \u2018gunicorn\u2019 to your installed apps\n\n.\/manage.py run_gunicorn -b 127.0.0.1:1337 \u2013daemon\n\nIt really is that simple. Gunicorn is the fastest way to having a production ready web server serving your site that I\u2019ve found in the Django realm. However, Gunicorn by itself isn\u2019t production ready. It is recommended to deploy something in front of it. We used Nginx, which is another super simple web server.\n\nHere is basically the simplest possible configuration of nginx that will work for your gunicorn backend server.\n\nserver { listen 80 ; server_name example . com ; access_log \/ var \/ log \/ nginx \/ example . log ; location \/ { proxy_pass http : \/\/ 127.0 . 0.1 : 1337 ; } }\n\nAfter you restart Nginx, you should be able to hit your server at port 80 and have it be serving your Django web app. This allowed us to get our application into production during the dash in about 10 minutes, which was a great time saver.\n\nI\u2019d be curious if people have had any trouble with Gunicorn in deployment, because as far as I\u2019ve seen its production ready. As a \u201cfirst Django deployment\u201d set up I think it\u2019s hard to beat. I\u2019ve also noticed that is uses significantly less RAM than an Apache\/mod_wsgi set up (I know this can be configured away, but by default it\u2019s much better). This is great for the memory constrained deployment platforms a lot of us are running on."}
{"text":"The best story about J\u00fcrgen Klopp\u2019s reputation in Germany dates back to 2008 when, as Mainz manager, he was under consideration to take over at Hamburg, subject to an intensive, secret period of scrutiny by the club, who had him observed at training, on match-day and in his life outside football.\n\nOf the many details that were reported back to Hamburg, the fact Klopp often wore ripped jeans struck the club\u2019s board as posing a serious question about his suitability. In the end, they gave the job to Martin Jol. For Klopp, who joined Borussia Dortmund months later, the story served as a useful reminder in driving the perception that he was a figure who belonged outside the establishment.\n\nJoin Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just \u00a35.99 \u20ac6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just \u00a35.99 \u20ac6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads \u2013 for just \u00a35.99 \u20ac6.99 $9.99 a month\n\nThe owners of Liverpool, Fenway Sports Group, will have no such concerns when they move to close a deal with their new manager over the next few days. Klopp, at 48, has a pedigree as good as any manager to come into the Premier League since Louis van Gaal and he has nurtured the reputation of a maverick and an outsider at Dortmund, where he often defeated the mighty Bayern Munich.\n\nIn the past, he has publicly compared Munich to the villain in a James Bond movie, while casting Dortmund as the force for good. He also compared Bayern\u2019s approach to China\u2019s theft of Germany\u2019s manufacturing industry\u2019s best ideas. \u201cBayern go about football in the same way that the Chinese go about industry,\u201d he said in 2013. \u201cThey look at what others do and then they copy it, with more resources and more money.\u201d\n\nPut it this way, if Jose Mourinho, for example, goes for the putative new Liverpool manager in one Friday lunchtime press conference, then he can certainly expect a robust response. Klopp has a confidence and an ego to match the biggest that currently call the Premier League home. The question is, what effect he can have on Liverpool?\n\nHe inherited a Dortmund team that finished 13th in the Bundesliga in 2008 and took them to two league titles in 2011 and 2012, as well as the cup double the second year. They reached the Champions League final in 2013 but then, after another second-place Bundesliga finish in 2014, they dropped like a stone. Bottom in February, they finished seventh last season, the same as Liverpool, albeit with a much inferior points-to-games average than the English club \u2013 1.35 against 1.63.\n\nAlong the way, Klopp fought against a dominant club in Bayern, with the resources to sign his best players. The underdog status will be no different with Liverpool, except that instead of one club with more financial clout than Dortmund, there are four who can outgun Klopp\u2019s new club. How he approaches that challenge will be intriguing.\n\nSpeaking to those who know Klopp well, it is his capacity to motivate players that stands out as his greatest strength. He is big on the pre-match speech, on making good players give great performances. He likes the emotion of the occasion and he uses that to his own players\u2019 benefit. He is not against taking on journalists in press conferences.\n\nTactically, the best Dortmund teams were about hard-running, high-pressing and an energy that overwhelmed their opponents. Even in Klopp\u2019s last season, when it was falling apart in the Bundesliga, they still succeeded in giving Arsenal a comprehensive Champions League chasing in September. He is a manager with one key philosophy and while Dortmund\u2019s style was so formidable for so long, it was also perceived as a weakness.\n\nWhile there was not one key reason why Dortmund fell apart last season, the problems associated with maintaining that style of football was cited. Another was that the players had simply heard Klopp\u2019s speeches too many times. His power to inspire them had waned and, without that, there was not much left.\n\nHis Bosnian assistant, Zeljko Buvac, a team-mate from his playing days at Mainz, is a certainty to follow Klopp to Anfield. He regards Buvac as his \u201cbrains\u201d and the co-architect of Dortmund\u2019s style of play. That said, Klopp was regarded as the best pundit on German television when it came to tactical analysis during his stint for broadcaster ZDF during the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany. He was only manager of Mainz then, yet his ability to explain strategy simply made him a first choice above more famous names.\n\nDortmund\u2019s player recruitment was a collegiate effort, led by the technical director Michael Zorc, regarded as one of the best in the business. Once players were acquired, it was Klopp\u2019s confidence that helped develop some of them into the stars they became. He encouraged the potential of Lukasz Piszczek at full-back, when he had previously been a mediocre striker for most of his time at Hertha Berlin. He also took a chance on Robert Lewandowski.\n\nSince his departure from Dortmund, the new manager, Thomas Tuchel, has tried to introduce more than one way of playing as an alternative to the high-octane style that Klopp preached. That style was cited in some quarters as unsustainable, with a tendency for them to tire late on in games, as they did in losing the 2013 Champions League final. Their start to the current season has been remarkable, unbeaten until they ran into Bayern Munich this weekend and lost 5-1.\n\nEither way, Liverpool are not recruiting a manager who has a track record of making quiet progress. Klopp is an impact coach, a man with a big personality who will seek to establish himself quickly in the minds of his players and in those of the English football public. At least, that is what he did at Dortmund \u2013 and the effect, culminating in one three-year period between 2010 and 2013, was impressive.\n\nHis mentor was the late Wolfgang Frank, a former player and manager of relative obscurity who was Klopp\u2019s manager at Mainz in the 1990s. Frank was known for his original, unconventional approach, which made an impression on the young Klopp. At a club that has spent more than 25 years trying to return to the top of English football, there is a platform to do things differently.\n\nLiverpool cannot afford to be unreceptive to new ideas as they try to break the top four. Klopp proved himself the master of that innovation at Dortmund and the question he will have to ask himself at Liverpool is whether that will work once more or if a new approach is required to solve a very old problem.\n\nChelsea\u2019s statement of intent couldn\u2019t be clearer, Jose\n\n\u201cHe has the squad with which to do it.\u201d Just nine words, but a sting in the tail to the statement of support that Chelsea offered Jose Mourinho. Roman Abramovich has given his manager the public support he asked for, but made it clear he has the resources at his disposal to, as the statement puts it, \u201cturn this season around\u201d. These statements are not issued lightly and their composition is very carefully considered. Mourinho knows what is required of him and the next club statement reflecting on his performance \u2013 if there is another \u2013 is not so likely to be good news.\n\nKeep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writers"}
{"text":"A few weeks ago, TSN\u2019s Pierre LeBrun reported that the Tampa Bay Lightning is looking for a defenceman (preferably a right shot) in a theoretical Jonathan Drouin trade.\n\nSince then, we have heard buzz about a number of potential Drouin deals, perhaps the most prominent concerning Tampa Bay\u2019s targeting of Cody Ceci and\/or Thomas Chabot from the Ottawa Senators.\n\nIn essentially every potential trade scenario, the proposed deal has Tampa Bay acquiring some type of defender in exchange for their former third-overall pick. To me, that\u2019s just as interesting as the reality that a player with such great potential is on the trade block, his future with the Lightning organization as dead as a doornail.\n\nTampa Bay is in a tough spot here. Trading a blue-chip prospect at such a young point in his career presents the danger of a pennies-on-the-dollar kind of return. It\u2019s an even bigger risk since the Lightning is an organization that should realistically be competing for a Stanley Cup right now. Only Washington has emerged as a serious threat in the Eastern Conference, so that window is wide open.\n\nThe way they are so actively targeting defenders in potential trades indicates that the front office has identified the team\u2019s biggest operational need \u2013 a defenceman to play behind their vaunted top pairing of Victor Hedman and Anton Stralman.\n\nIt\u2019s an interesting development, and one that seems to be data-driven. You can apportion at least some of Tampa Bay\u2019s relatively slow start to the season to their second and third pairings not performing up to par. What\u2019s more troublesome \u2013 at least if you are general manager Steve Yzerman or head coach Jon Cooper \u2013 is that the bottom four\u2019s bad performance has been somewhat pervasive, regardless of who is on the ice with them.\n\nWhere Hedman and Stralman elevate the performance of Tampa Bay\u2019s impressive forward group, the rest of the blueline seems to artificially suppress performance. Playing with the second and\/or third pairing often means spending more time in the defensive zone, and, consequently, fewer chances to have an impact in the offensive zone.\n\nIt doesn\u2019t matter if the first line or the fourth line is out with Tampa Bay\u2019s top pairing \u2014 they\u2019re going to spend a significant portion of shifts in the offensive zone. This pairing has become something of an analytics darling, so there\u2019s no need to re-hash what\u2019s already been said time and time again. Simply put: they have an incredible impact on their team\u2019s play regardless of whom else in on the ice with them. That\u2019s indicative of very real, very measurable talent.\n\nOn the other hand, Tampa Bay defenders three through six have really struggled from a possession standpoint. It\u2019s amazing to me that none of these defenders can do little more than break-even (at best) when playing with a generational talent like Steven Stamkos, or the vaunted Triplets Line that has chewed up competition since being assembled a couple of seasons ago.\n\nI do wonder if Tampa Bay thinks this is a two-pronged issue \u2013 the first being that talent on the second and third pairings hasn\u2019t played up to expectations, the second being that \u2018handedness\u2019 is contributing to some of the defence\u2019s struggles.\n\nThree of the four regulars (four of five if you count Nikita Nesterov) are left-handed shots, meaning at least one pairing is lefty with lefty. That means the other pairing features the lone right-handed shot in Andrej Sustr, a player who hasn\u2019t developed as quickly as Tampa Bay anticipated. Acquiring a talented right-shot defender would hypothetically solve both of these issues.\n\nIt\u2019s a theory, but one worth considering in light of the trade buzz.\n\nThe Takeaway\n\nIf Tampa Bay was just a team looking to inch into the playoff race and hope for a May miracle, we likely wouldn\u2019t be so concerned with how their blueline depth has performed. But Yzerman and company have pegged this team as a Stanley Cup hopeful. Knowing that the future of Stamkos is up in the air, I\u2019d hazard to guess that the pressure is on to win now. To that end, it\u2019s also understandable why the front office wants a defensive upgrade. After Hedman and Stralman, they just haven\u2019t been good enough."}
{"text":"Health Minister Leo Varadkar has admitted that parents of babies who died at the Midlands hospital in Portlaoise had been lied to over the circumstances of their children's deaths.\n\nSpeaking on RT\u00c9's This Week programme, the minister said he found it \"extremely worrying\" and \"appalling\" that parents who lost children at the hospital \"were not dealt with honestly\".\n\nThis included some cases where parents were told that their child's death was the only one of its kind.\n\nHe said it was important to create an environment where hospital clinicians at all levels were honest about mistakes made, but that there had been a culture of defensiveness within the health service.\n\nThe minister also said that the HSE continued to dispute some of the findings of a damning investigation carried out by HIQA, the health standards watchdog.\n\nHowever, he said both the HSE and his department had accepted all of HIQA's recommendations.\n\nAmong these, he said that he hoped to see the proposed Patient Advocacy Service in place sooner than the May 2016 target.\n\nHe also wanted to see the planned national maternity strategy published by the end of this year.\n\nMinister Varadkar also said he expected that terms of reference would be drawn up either this week or the week after for an external review into how certain red flags at Portlaoise hospital did not pass up through HSE management.\n\nHe said he expected a final report in a number of months."}
{"text":"How can you keep an eye on that slow SQL query? Is it taking up too much time nowadays? How about that call to the 3rd party API? Is it actually slow during the weekends? Being able to answer such questions quickly, to track these numbers in real-time, is a bit like driving at night with headlights on!\n\nImagine adding a new feature that you\u2019ve tested well enough, but want to roll it out slowly in production, while keeping an eye on the time taken for a few crucial operations. Having a system where it is easy to add in these few metrics quickly, have it graphed and alerted on in real-time, provides the scaffolding for smooth, solid ops. And less weekend on-call duties.\n\nSo how do you get yourself such a system? Read on!\n\nMeasuring\n\nThis is the easiest part. Measuring the time taken to execute a piece of code typically goes like:\n\nfunc ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () \/\/ ... do stuff ... elapsed := time . Since ( t ) \/\/ report elapsed } \/\/ or, a little more cleanly, like this: func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () defer func () { elapsed := time . Since ( t ) \/\/ report elapsed }() \/\/ ... do stuff ... }\n\nIf you want to count the number of times an event occurred, you\u2019d use something like this:\n\nvar parseFailures uint64 func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo . Parse (); err != nil { \/\/ count the number of times this happens atomic . AddUint64 ( & parseFailures , 1 ) \/\/ ... } \/\/ ... }\n\nThere are better ways to count and to report that count, though. Read on.\n\nReporting Metrics (push) vs. Collecting Metrics (pull)\n\nHow do you get the measurements out of your app and into something which can graph them? There are two approaches:\n\nPush : After gathering the measurement, your app reports, or \u201cpushes\u201d the measurements into a low-latency service, and continues with it\u2019s work.\n\n: After gathering the measurement, your app reports, or \u201cpushes\u201d the measurements into a low-latency service, and continues with it\u2019s work. Pull: Your app exposes these metrics in a standard format at a predefined endpoint. A collection service \u201cpulls\u201d these metrics.\n\nThere are enough examples of these in the wild. The proc filesystem mounted at \/proc and an SNMP agent that can be queried are examples of the pull model. Google Analytics is an example of the push model.\n\nSo which one should you pick for your app? There\u2019s no correct answer. In both cases, apart from your app, you need a service that can accept metrics or pull metrics. You should choose an approach that suits your app, scale and team.\n\nThe expvar package\n\nWithin Google, the pull approach is used, which perhaps explains why the expvar package exists in the Go standard library.\n\nThis library provides a way to expose your app metrics so that a service can collect them. Rewriting the above using the expvar package makes it look like this:\n\nimport \"expvar\" var elapsed = expvar . NewFloat ( \"parseTotalTime\" ) \/\/ nanoseconds func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () defer func () { elapsed . Add ( time . Since ( t )) }() \/\/ ... do stuff ... } var parseFailures = expvar . NewInt ( \"parseFailures\" ) func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo . Parse (); err != nil { \/\/ count the number of times this happens parseFailures . Add ( 1 ) \/\/ ... } \/\/ ... }\n\nImporting the package sets up an HTTP handler for the default HTTP server to handle the URL path \/debug\/vars , and serves up your metrics as a JSON object. You\u2019ll need to start the default HTTP server explicitly.\n\nAlthough it is convenient that this package exists in the standard library, there is not much of an (open source) ecosystem around it. Neither are there schema or conventions around the JSON format that is exposed.\n\nIf the pull approach suits you best, you might also want to take a look at Prometheus.\n\nStatsD and Graphite\n\nFor the push model though, StatsD and Graphite are the de facto standards. There are client libraries for many languages that let you push metrics into StatsD and graphite.\n\nYou can send your measurements as plain metrics into a graphite server. A single report is simply a name, a timestamp and a value.\n\nStatsD was designed to sit between your app and graphite, and do some aggregation of the metrics before passing it on to graphite. What\u2019s that, you ask? Basically, StatsD hangs on to the metrics you send it, and at periodic intervals (called the \u201cflush interval\u201d, typically 1 minute), calculates additional information and then pushes it into graphite. Here are some things that it can calculate:\n\nEach time an event happens, you can send a \u201c+1\u201d to StatsD. It can count them, and report totalled counts.\n\nEach time you send a timing measurement, StatsD remembers it. At flush time, it computes percentiles, min, max and more for each timing measurement metric and forwards it to graphite.\n\nYou can track a varying quantity (like system temperature or fan speed) as a gauge. The last value at flush time gets reported.\n\nSee this page for all the cool stuff that StatsD can compute.\n\nSending Data to StatsD\n\nThe StatsD on-wire text protocol is so simple it hardly needs any vendored library. Essentially, you can send text strings in this format to an UDP port. Here\u2019s the complete source of a fully functional StatsD client:\n\npackage util import ( \"fmt\" \"io\" \"net\" \"time\" ) var queue = make ( chan string , 100 ) func init () { go statsdSender () } func StatCount ( metric string , value int ) { queue <- fmt . Sprintf ( \"%s:%d|c\" , metric , value ) } func StatTime ( metric string , took time . Duration ) { queue <- fmt . Sprintf ( \"%s:%d|ms\" , metric , took \/ 1e6 ) } func StatGauge ( metric string , value int ) { queue <- fmt . Sprintf ( \"%s:%d|g\" , metric , value ) } func statsdSender () { for s := range queue { if conn , err := net . Dial ( \"udp\" , \"127.0.0.1:8125\" ); err == nil { io . WriteString ( conn , s ) conn . Close () } } }\n\nAs you can see, the code is quite simple. The metrics are pushed into a channel to allow the caller to continue ASAP. The statsdSender then writes each measurement into a StatsD-compatible agent on localhost.\n\nThe util.Stat* functions are meant to be used from application code, like so:\n\nfunc ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () defer func () { util . StatTime ( \"parse.timetaken\" , time . Since ( t )) }() \/\/ ... do stuff ... } func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo . Parse (); err != nil { util . StatCount ( \"parse.failures\" , 1 ) \/\/ ... } \/\/ ... }\n\nIf you anticipate that too many metrics might get pushed into the channel, have a look at the client-side sampling rate feature of the StatsD protocol.\n\nStatsD and the OpsDash Smart Agent\n\nIn the code above, the metrics are pushed into a StatsD running on localhost.\n\nFor OpsDash, we actually use nearly the same code above in production, and we don\u2019t have a StatsD on each node! The OpsDash Smart Agent includes built-in StatsD and graphite daemons. Naturally, we use OpsDash itself to monitor the SaaS version of OpsDash!\n\nHere\u2019s a snippet of the agent configuration file \/etc\/opsdash\/agent.cfg :\n\nstatsd { # You can enable the statsd interface by setting this to 1. enabled = 1 # For timing metrics, percentiles are computed as per this list. Values # must be comma-separated integers in ascending order. Default value is # \"90,95,99\". #percentiles = \"90,95,99\" # When enabled, OpsDash will listen on *:8125\/tcp and *:8125\/udp for # statsd connections. Uncomment to change the IP or port it listens on. #bind.udp = \"0.0.0.0:8125\" #bind.tcp = \"0.0.0.0:8125\" }\n\nThe OpsDash Smart Agent runs on each node and accepts the StatsD metrics from the application code. It then forwards it to the OpsDash SaaS server, where it can be graphed and alerted upon. Here\u2019s how the above metrics will look on an OpsDash custom dashboard:\n\nFurther Reading"}
{"text":"Analysis For IBM, storage value is moving to software, with object storage and flash growing while legacy disk and tape products see revenue falls.\n\nIn Big Blue\u2019s fourth 2016 quarter overall revenues dropped nine per cent but storage hardware revenues fared worse, dropping 11.1 per cent, with no end in sight.\n\nThis continues a trend seen for the past four years. The only bright spots seem to be flash arrays (FlashSystem) and server-based storage but we don\u2019t know how bright. IBM\u2019s financial reporting singles out storage hardware but not flash hardware within it.\n\nIBM doesn\u2019t report server-based storage separately nor identify storage software revenues as a single reporting category; all of which hampers our ability to know what\u2019s going on.\n\nWe can see what\u2019s been happening with the storage hardware category generally and it ain\u2019t pretty. Here's four charts showing what\u2019s what.\n\nChart number one is a look at IBM\u2019s quarterly revenues from 2010 to the end of 2015, with storage hardware revenues separately tracked.\n\nClick chart for larger view\n\nChart two is a look at storage hardware revenues on their own to make things clearer.\n\nA trendline has been added to show the downward trend\n\nOur third chart summarises this in an annual view.\n\nFour straight years of decline\n\nChart four abstracts out each quarter and shows its value year by year.\n\nWe see a consistent decline in storage revenues here.\n\nThe message here is that IBM storage hardware revenues have seen four straight years of decline and there is no end in sight. IBM management does not identify storage hardware as an area needing attention, despite annual revenues having dropped 35 per cent over four years, from $3.7bn in 2011 to $2.4bn in 2015.\n\nMartin Schroeter, IBM\u2019s CFO, said in prepared remarks: \u201cA couple of years ago we laid out our strategic imperatives around big data and analytics, around cloud, and around mobile and security.\u201d In 2015\u2019s final quarter \u201cOur strategic imperatives continued strong performance, up 26 per cent for the year. This now represents 35 per cent of IBM\u2019s revenue.\u201d\n\nWithin that: \u201cWith 57 per cent revenue growth over the last year, cloud is now a $10 billion business for us. This made us the largest cloud provider in 2015.\u201d\n\nCloud is the big thing, in Schroeter's view. \u201cTo address opportunities we see in this space, in 2015 we made seven cloud acquisitions including Cleversafe for object storage, Gravitant for cloud brokerage services, and Clearleap for cloud video services. We also invested nearly a billion dollars in capital expanding our global cloud data centre footprint to 46.\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s not that hardware, per se, is bad, though. In Schroeter's words: \u201cOur Systems Hardware revenue was up, driven by z Systems and Power. \u2026 This was the fourth consecutive quarter of growth in both z Systems and Power. \u2026 about half of our systems segment revenue in 2015 was to address analytics workloads, or hybrid and private clouds. \u2026 Even though the Unix market is declining, by delivering innovation and repositioning the platform, our Power systems have grown four quarters in a row.\u201c\n\nBut that apparent determination to grow the non-x86 server business was not paralleled in the storage hardware business; \u201cThe growth in our servers was mitigated by a seven per cent [constant currency] decline in storage hardware, which continues to be impacted by weakness in traditional disk and tape.\u201d\n\nAnalysis\n\nIBM could exit the commodity x86 server hardware business and focus on its proprietary z Systems and Power Servers. No such exit strategy appears possible in general disk and tape storage, where commoditisation of disk is affecting IBM.\n\n\u201cValue in the storage market continues to shift to software and offering requirements that are driving demand for flash and object-based storage,\u201d said Schroeter. \u201cWe are well-positioned in these new areas, with growth in flash, and our recent acquisition of Cleversafe.\u201d\n\nThis implies that IBM is not at all well-positioned in the general SAN and filer hardware area, and products here have been left on their own. We can infer that development budgets for these product areas will not be growing.\n\nWill IBM be looking to build hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) using its Power servers as a base? We think not, as commodity x86 server-based HCIAs could undercut them on price.\n\nOur thinking is that IBM could be doing well in server-based storage, but may be thinking that capacity-focussed SAN and filer storage is heading towards a commoditised on-premises game, which it doesn\u2019t want anything to do with, or to public cloud provision where its storage software, like Cleversafe, has a role.\n\nTherefore, IBM\u2019s storage hardware business could dip to a $2bn annual revenue run rate by the end of 2016 and fall below $2bn in 2017.\n\nIn the fourth 2015 quarter, storage hardware accounted for 32 per cent of IBM\u2019s hardware business. We expect that to fall below 30 per cent this year, and head towards a 25 per cent contribution.\n\nThis is, it seems to us, a managed decline, with IBM wanting a smaller, but presumably more profitable, storage hardware business to eventually emerge. \u00ae"}
{"text":"Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE\u2019s presidential campaign raised $11.3 million online over the last three days, the campaign announced Tuesday.\n\nADVERTISEMENT\n\nThe \u201crecord-breaking\u201d figure is the most Clinton has raised over a 72-hour period since she became the nominee at the Democratic National Convention in July, according to the campaign. The sum only includes online fundraising.\n\nThe surge in contributions came after FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress on Friday informing them that his agency discovered the existence of emails that appear to be \u201cpertinent\u201d to its investigation into the private email server Clinton used while secretary of State.\n\nIt was later revealed that the emails were found on a computer belonging to former Rep. (D-N.Y.) Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin who is under investigation for allegedly exchanging sexually explicit messages with a minor.\n\nComey\u2019s letter was widely criticized by Democrats for being vague, and Clinton's surrogates have assailed Comey for not being more forthcoming.\n\nRepublican nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE has seized on the FBI's move as he seeks to make up ground in the polls ahead of Election Day."}
{"text":"As jihadists expel Christians from Mosul, the international community responds.\n\nThere is a mass exodus of Christians from the Iraqi city of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. The Muslim fanatics who have taken over the city, calling themselves the Islamic State, issued an ultimatum to the city\u2019s Christians earlier this month, saying that if they did not leave by Saturday, July 19, they \u201cmust convert to Islam, pay a fine, or face \u2018death by the sword.\u2019\u201d As of Tuesday, most of the city\u2019s estimated 3,000 Christians had fled.\n\nFurther, the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, had marked homes and businesses owned by Christians with a red, painted \u0646 (pronounced \u201cnoon\u201d), the 14th letter of the Arabic alphabet and the equivalent to the Roman letter N. The \u0646 stands for Nasara or Nazarenes, a pejorative Arabic word for Christians.\n\nThe \u0646 is now being shared on social media as a symbol of solidarity with the Iraqi Christians forced to flee their homes. The Catholic blog Rorate Caeli has wrote, the Islamists \u201cmean it as a mark of shame, we must then wear it as a mark of hope. . . . You may kill our brethren and expel them but we Christians will never go away.\u201d\n\nThe hashtag #WeAreN is also trending, along with pictures of people of all religions drawing the \u0646 in red ink on their bodies.\n\nWhen asked why he changed his profile picture to the \u0646, political consultant Ryan Girdusky said, \u201cI changed it because of the lack of response by our media and our president . . . We feel like the Christian community is being persecuted at the same time the Palestinians are being given constant attention. There is a Christian genocide and no one is paying attention.\u201d\n\nThe mass exodus has incited international criticism, even from Muslim scholars. Al Jazeera quoted Iyad Ameen Madani, the secretary general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) as saying, \u201cThis forced displacement is a crime that cannot be tolerated.\u201d Yesterday, the United Nations\u2019 secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, said that the treatment of Iraqi Christians \u201cmay constitute a crime against humanity.\u201d He also \u201ccondemned\u201d ISIS\u2019s actions \u201cin the strongest terms.\u201d\n\nMosul has played a role in Christian history since the first and second centuries, when the Assyrians in the city converted to Christianity. It is the home to many churches, as well as mosques and synagogues. Al Jazeera described, via an Assyrian Christian who chose to stay behind, how a statue of the Virgin Mary outside of one of Mosul\u2019s churches was destroyed and replaced with a black flag. This Christian is one of the last left in Mosul, as most others have fled, many leaving with only the clothes on their backs.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\u2014 Christine Sisto is an editorial associate at National Review Online."}
{"text":"Examples For Using io.Pipe in Go\n\nMuch has been written and said about the work of art that are the io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces. Simple, yet powerful - just as Go itself.\n\nIn this post I want to showcase another part of the Go standard library that I find to be both simple and powerful - io.Pipe.\n\npr , pw := io . Pipe ( )\n\nAccording to the docs, io.Pipe creates a synchronous in-memory pipe, which can be used to connect code expecting io.Reader with code expecting io.Writer .\n\nUpon invocation, io.Pipe() returns a PipeReader and a PipeWriter . They are connected (hence the pipe), so that everything written to the PipeWriter can be read from the PipeReader .\n\nThe following three examples show use-cases of io.Pipe , its versatility and the way of thinking and composing I\/O it enables us to do.\n\nLet\u2019s get started!\n\nExample 1: JSON to HTTP Request\n\nThis is the go-to example one usually sees when it comes to io.Pipe . We encode some data as JSON and want to send it to a web endpoint via http.Post . Unfortunately (or rather fortunately), the JSON encoder takes an io.Writer and the http request methods expect an io.Reader as input, so we can\u2019t just plug them together.\n\nOf course we could always create intermediate []byte representations, but that is neither memory efficient nor particularly elegant. This is where io.Pipe comes in:\n\npr , pw := io . Pipe ( ) go func ( ) { \/\/ close the writer, so the reader knows there's no more data defer pw . Close ( ) \/\/ write json data to the PipeReader through the PipeWriter if err := json . NewEncoder ( pw ) . Encode ( & PayLoad { Content : \"Hello Pipe!\" } ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) \/\/ JSON from the PipeWriter lands in the PipeReader \/\/ ...and we send it off... if _ , err := http . Post ( \"http:\/\/example.com\" , \"application\/json\" , pr ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) }\n\nFirst, we encode some struct PayLoad to JSON and write the data to the PipeWriter created by invoking io.Pipe . Afterwards, we create a http POST request, which gets its data from the PipeReader . That PipeReader gets filled with the data written to the PipeWriter .\n\nImportant to note here is that we have to encode asynchronously to prevent a deadlock, because we would write without a reader if we didn\u2019t.\n\nThis practical example showcases the versatility of io.Pipe very well. It really incentivizes gophers to build components using io.Reader and io.Writer , without having to worry about them being used together.\n\nExample 2: Split up Data with TeeReader\n\nI found another very cool way of using io.Pipe together with TeeReader (read: T-Reader) in @rodaine\u2019s great blog post about asynchronously splitting an io.Reader .\n\nIn Solution #4, he describes the use-case of using a video-file and simultaneously transcode it to another format and uploading that, while also uploading the original file. All with minimal overhead and completely in parallel.\n\nBased on this solution, I tried to capture the gist of it with the following example:\n\npr , pw := io . Pipe ( ) \/\/ we need to wait for everything to be done wg := sync . WaitGroup { } wg . Add ( 2 ) \/\/ we get some file as input f , err := os . Open ( \".\/fruit.txt\" ) if err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } \/\/ TeeReader gets the data from the file and also writes it to the PipeWriter tr := io . TeeReader ( f , pw ) go func ( ) { defer wg . Done ( ) defer pw . Close ( ) \/\/ get data from the TeeReader, which feeds the PipeReader through the PipeWriter _ , err := http . Post ( \"https:\/\/example.com\" , \"text\/html\" , tr ) if err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) go func ( ) { defer wg . Done ( ) \/\/ read from the PipeReader to stdout if _ , err := io . Copy ( os . Stdout , pr ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) wg . Wait ( )\n\nMy example is of course simplified in that it doesn\u2019t use channels for propagating errors and results, but the underlying concept is quite similar - we have some kind of input io.Reader , a file in this case and create a TeeReader , which returns a Reader that writes to the Writer you provide it everything it reads from the Reader you provide it.\n\nNow we start two goroutines, one which just prints the data to stdout and another one which sends it to an HTTP endpoint. The TeeReader uses the io.Pipe to split up the given input. When the TeeReader is consumed, those same bytes are also received by the PipeReader .\n\nPretty cool, ha?\n\nExample 3: Piping the output of Shell commands\n\nI stumbled over this gist recently, which combines io.Pipe with os.Exec in a nice way. Basically, it does what most task runners in CI services like Jenkins or Travis CI do, which is execute some shell command and show its output on some website.\n\nI tried to encapsulate the general pattern behind it in this short snippet here:\n\npr , pw := io . Pipe ( ) defer pw . Close ( ) \/\/ tell the command to write to our pipe cmd := exec . Command ( \"cat\" , \"fruit.txt\" ) cmd . Stdout = pw go func ( ) { defer pr . Close ( ) \/\/ copy the data written to the PipeReader via the cmd to stdout if _ , err := io . Copy ( os . Stdout , pr ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) \/\/ run the command, which writes all output to the PipeWriter \/\/ which then ends up in the PipeReader if err := cmd . Run ( ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) }\n\nFirst, we define our command - in this case, we just cat a file called fruit.txt , which will just spit out the contents of the file on stdout . Then, and this is important, we set the command\u2019s stdout to our PipeWriter .\n\nSo we redirect the output of the Command to our pipe, which, as before, will make it possible to read it through our PipeReader at another point. In this rather contrived case, that point is just a goroutine where we dump the results of cat to stdout (which it would have done anyways), but I think it\u2019s easy to imagine doing something nifty here like exporting the results of the command somewhere or flushing it to a webpage as seen in this gist, where we\u2019d need an io.Writer as input.\n\nConclusion\n\nI hope these examples helped to convince you of the many opportunities opened by using io.Pipe together with nice abstractions which expect either io.Reader or io.Writer . Not only does io.Pipe enable seamless composition of components based on best practices, it\u2019s also quite flexible with the use of TeeReader , which points the vast possibilities of using io.Pipe in custom-made I\/O handling pipelines in both a readable and scalable way.\n\nOf course this post only scratched the surface on this topic, as it didn\u2019t handle the inherent gotchas with this approach nor error handling, but I plan to remedy this by a post or two on these and some more advanced topics in the future.\n\nHave fun pipin\u2019! :)\n\nResources"}
{"text":"For years, the works of Russia\u2019s towering men of letters\u2014Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Goncharov, Turgenev\u2014lay beyond the reach of English-speaking readers. That is, until a pale, sickly, unassuming British mother decided to translate them.\n\nTo the extent that 19th century Russian fiction deals with universal themes of human existence \u2014 nature, religion, love, death, and, of course, war and peace \u2014 these beloved tomes can feel timeless to readers. But the fact is, the English-speaking reading public didn\u2019t get their hands on them until some years after their publication, when Constance Garnett picked up a dictionary and set out to bring the Russian masters to life in her native tongue.\n\nThe Brighton-born Garnett (n\u00e9e Black) was a coroner\u2019s daughter, and worked as a governess before becoming a librarian in London\u2019s East End. Her sister Clementina, a writer and labor organizer, introduced Constance to Edward Garnett, the man who would become her husband in 1889. Edward was a publisher\u2019s reader, and was from an aristocratic literary family. His father was the Keeper of Printed Materials at the British Museum.\n\nThere weren\u2019t many Russian speakers in turn-of-the-century Britain, but because of growing political unrest in the major cities of the Russian Empire, there were increasing numbers of exiled Russian revolutionaries. And the suggestion that Garnett translate Russian literature came from one of them \u2014 despite the fact she spoke no Russian. Constance may have had something of a crush on Feliks Volkhovsky, a bearded bad boy who had escaped imprisonment in Siberia and settled in London. So when he broached the idea, she was amenable.\n\nVolkhovsky was part of a community of political thinkers and writers, and an editor at the Free Russian Press, an emigr\u00e9 journal and publishing house started by Alexander Herzen, the \u201cfather of Russian socialism.\u201d Edward Garnett regularly invited members of the Free Russian Press scene to spend weekends at his home. On one weekend visit, Volkhovsky, according to Constance, \u201csuggested my learning Russian and gave me a grammar and a dictionary.\u201d\n\nLeo Tolstoy relaxing at Yasnaya Polyana in 1908. (Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky\/Library of Congress)\n\nOnce laid up with pregnancy complications, Garnett undertook the mammoth task of learning the notoriously complex Slavic language. One of her first translations was \u201cThe Kingdom of God is Within You,\u201d a religious and philosophical tract by Leo Tolstoy. She went on to translate over 70 volumes of Russian literature, including almost everything Tolstoy ever wrote, Chekhov, all of Dostoevsky, and her favorite, Turgenev, among others. In 1894, Garnett took a three-month trip to Russia, and even visited Tolstoy at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana.\n\nClara Bell, a British linguist, had published a translation of War and Peace in 1886, but hers was a copy of copy, translated from a French translation, not the original Russian, and it wasn\u2019t well received. The first ever English translation of Anna Karenina was done by an American, Nathan Haskell Dole, the same year. But because of the readability of Garnett\u2019s versions, and her close ties to the publishing industry, her editions were printed cheaply and sold more widely than any that had come before. The Russian classics began to find their way into English homes and classrooms. A 1905 article in the Saturday Review, a British literary magazine, began, \u201cTwenty years ago Tolstoy was hardly known outside Russia [\u2026] Who has not heard of Tolstoy now?\u201d\n\nGarnett maintained, in the words of New Yorker editor David Remnick, \u201can ascetic lifelong routine of housekeeping, child-rearing, and translating.\u201d She worked ceaselessly. D.H. Lawrence, who was a friend of Garnett\u2019s, recalls seeing her sitting in her garden \u201cturning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high \u2014 really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.\u201d In 1921, writer Katherine Mansfield sent a letter to Garnett: \u201cAs I laid down my copy of War & Peace tonight I felt I could no longer refrain from thanking you for the whole other world that you have revealed to us through these marvelous translations from the Russian,\u201d she wrote. Of Garnett\u2019s body of work, she said, \u201cThe books have changed our lives, no less.\u201d\n\nGarnett\u2019s output was extraordinary by any measure, but is particularly impressive considering that she had a child to mind and spent the majority of her life in very ill health. She was frail, beset by migraines, and suffered from sciatica. Most surprisingly, she had terrible vision, which was dramatically worsened by her vocation, and was nearly blind toward the end of her translating career. But she remained indefatigable, eventually hiring an assistant to read aloud from the original Russian as she scribbled a translated draft.\n\nThe work of the translator, when not overlooked entirely, is often subject to extreme scrutiny, and Garnett has certainly not been spared. She reportedly translated with such haste that she occasionally skipped words or phrases that were too difficult to translate well \u2014 a fact that has pained purists and native Russian speakers, who think Garnett robs the reader of the richness of the original Russian.\n\nMost vociferous among her critics were Russian writers themselves, most notably Nabokov, whose lectures on literature are peppered with grumpy, anti-Garnett marginalia. He called her work \u201cdry and flat, and always unbearably demure,\u201d and her translation of Anna Karenina \u201ca complete disaster.\u201d Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, another Russian writer in exile, lamented that \u201cthe reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren\u2019t reading the prose of either one. They\u2019re reading Constance Garnett.\u201d"}
{"text":"EDIT: Would be nice to see some of you post your finished models. or even release them to the scripts \/ addon section!\n\nclass CfgPatches\n\n{\n\nclass clan_sign_tutorial\n\n{\n\nunits[] = {\"\"};\n\nweapons[] = {};\n\nrequiredVersion = 0.1;\n\nrequiredAddons[] = {\"CAData\",\"CAMisc3\"};\n\n};\n\n};\n\nclass CfgAddons\n\n{\n\nclass clan_sign_tutorial\n\n{\n\nlist[]=\n\n{\n\n\"Clan_Sign\",\n\n};\n\n};\n\n};\n\nclass CfgVehicleClasses\n\n{\n\nclass clan_sign_tutorial\n\n{\n\n\/\/ name in the editor\n\ndisplayName=\"3D Model Tutorial\";\n\n};\n\n};\n\nclass CfgVehicles\n\n{\n\nclass Thing; \/\/ External class reference\n\nclass Clan_Sign: Thing\n\n{\n\nscope = 2;\n\nmodel = \"\\tutorial\\sing.p3d\";\n\nicon = \"\\Ca\\misc\\data\\icons\\i_danger_CA.paa\";\n\ndisplayName = \"Clan Sign\";\n\nmapSize = 0.7;\n\naccuracy = 0.2;\n\nvehicleClass = \"clan_sign_tutorial\";\n\ndestrType = \"DestructNo\";\n\n};\n\n}; Click to expand...\n\nOk, everything in a video for this one.This will bring us to the point that we can have a working model in game. After this I will follow up with an rvmat that we can applyDownload link for the Blender conversion script:And a thanks of course to Alwarren who developed the script.Next tutorial will cover rvmatsHere is the complete config:"}
{"text":"Welcome to\n\nWe are on kickstarter to raise awareness of our cause and our brand. We will use everything we raise on the business and on establishing our brand to make our vision a reality.\n\nClothing is a basic essential that so far our society has mainly used for style or the eyes of others. To tell others who we are or who we want to be. We wear our clothes all day and that message radiates outward the whole time. Until you look in a mirror.\n\nSending a Message Inside\n\nWe believe that clothing is the perfect medium and opportunity for sending a message inside to ourselves. We will keep fashion designs with plenty of style but simply add a reverse image of a message. A message that touches you in a meaningful way every time you look in the mirror or take a selfie. Whether that message is Positive Reinforcement, A Personal Reminder, Internal Fire, etc. Whatever the case may be, you decide what kind of message works best for the betterment of yourself.\n\nOur main goal is to put a bigger importance on who we are on the inside as opposed to how we are perceived on the outside. We want to build this brand for children and teenagers because their minds are still developing. Especially when starting young, we can use clothing as another method of teaching good traits and qualities, even when we can't always be there. Our brand can also help young adults and above. To whom we serve positive reminders, or simple qualities that we may not always remember."}
{"text":"Drug charges against three men have been thrown out after a judge ruled that a Toronto police officer had been \u201cdeliberately misleading\u201d in his testimony and notes in an attempt to \u201cstrengthen the case\u201d against one of the accused. Const. Bradley Trenouth \u201cfalsely attributed\u201d a large piece of crack to Toronto man Jason Jaggernauth, Judge Katherine Corrick wrote in her Aug. 8 decision, staying the charges against Jaggernauth.\n\nIn her decsion, a judge wrote that public confidence in the rule of law is threatened \"when police officers present false evidence against accused persons.\u201d ( Andrew Lahodynskyj \/ Toronto Star file photo )\n\nBecause of Trenouth\u2019s actions, Corrick excluded evidence gathered by him and other officers from the trial of Jaggernauth\u2019s co-accused, leading the judge to find them not guilty in the same decision. \u201cThe false attribution of evidence to an accused\u2019s possession, and false testimony by a police officer constitute precisely the type of state misconduct that undermines the integrity of the judicial process,\u201d Corrick wrote. Jaggernauth, Jordan Davis and Jimal Nembrand-Walker were charged with possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking and possession of the proceeds of crime in 2014, after police found them in a Scarborough apartment that contained multiple types of drugs and drug paraphernalia.\n\nArticle Continued Below\n\nPolice officers found several grams of crack on Davis and crack, powdered cocaine and other drugs in Nembrand-Walker\u2019s pockets at the time of the arrest, Corrick wrote in her decision. Police did not find any drugs on Jaggernauth, Corrick said. Trenouth testified in a pretrial hearing that he saw a large piece of crack fall from Jaggernauth when officers got Jaggernauth to stand up from his chair \u2014 testimony that was backed up by the notes Trenouth said he took at the time of Jaggernauth\u2019s arrest, according to the judge\u2019s decision. But at the trial several months later, Trenouth told the court that he did not see the crack fall from Jaggernauth, Corrick wrote. Instead, Trenouth testified that he found the piece of crack on the floor near Jaggernauth and assumed it had fallen from him. Corrick noted other discrepancies between Trenouth\u2019s pretrial and trial testimonies in her decision.\n\nAt the preliminary hearing, Trenouth said he picked the large ball of crack off the floor after forensic officers had taken photos of the scene. But the photos taken do not include images of that specific piece of crack, Corrick wrote. Trenouth told the court that might be because the piece of crack had been moved or stepped on before the photos were taken.\n\nArticle Continued Below\n\nThe large piece of crack was also missing from evidence photos taken by police about three hours later, in Trenouth\u2019s presence, the judge said. Trenouth\u2019s story changed at trial, where he said there were no photos of the piece of crack because he had already picked it up and put it in his pocket before the photos were taken, Corrick wrote. Corrick ruled on Aug. 8 that Trenouth did not find the crack near Jaggernauth, as the police officer had claimed. \u201cI have concluded that Officer Trenouth was deliberately misleading when he prepared his notes and testified at the preliminary hearing, in an effort to strengthen the case,\u201d Corrick wrote. It is unlikely that Trenouth, who has eight years of police experience, would pick up unwrapped drugs and put them in his pocket at a crime scene, Corrick said. And if Trenouth had merely been mistaken in his pretrial testimony, he should have informed the Crown before the case went to trial, the judge added. An investigation should be immediately opened into Trenouth\u2019s conduct in the case, Jaggernauth\u2019s lawyer Chris O\u2019Connor said in an interview. \u201cThe bottom line is . . . an officer falsely attributed an exhibit to my client that never was on my client,\u201d O\u2019Connor said. Toronto police spokesperson Meaghan Gray said she \u201ccan\u2019t say whether (Trenouth) will face any discipline.\u201d All disciplinary matters are confidential until the officer in question has appeared before a police services tribunal, Gray added. \u201cGenerally speaking an investigation into allegations of an officer providing false evidence in court could lead to criminal charges (such as) perjury or (internal) discipline under the Police Services Act,\u201d Gray said. Corrick was scathing in her decision about the effects of Trenouth\u2019s false testimony. \u201cIt is difficult to imagine how public confidence can be maintained in the rule of law when police officers present false evidence against accused persons,\u201d Corrick wrote. \u201cOur justice system cannot function unless courts can rely on the willingness of witnesses to . . . tell the truth.\u201d"}
{"text":"If you think that a computer which is not connected to a network, doesn't have any USB sticks attached to it and doesn\u2019t accept any kind of electronic connection requests are reasonably safe against hackers and from all the malware, then you are Wrong.\n\nInaudible Audio signals. Here we have something shocking update that Some German Scientists have developed a proof of concept Malware prototype, could allow a hacker to infect your computers and other digital devices just using\n\nThe ability to bridge an air gap could be a potent infection vector. Just imagine, a cyber attack using high-frequency sound waves to infect machines, where stolen data also can be transferred back to attacker without a network connection, Sounds very terrifying ?\n\nDragos Ruiu claimed malware dubbed badBIOS allowed infected machines to communicate using sound waves alone, means that the devices are physically disconnected from any networks, including the internet, people said he was crazy. When a few weeks ago, a security researcherclaimed malware dubbedallowed infected machines to communicate using sound waves alone, means that the devices are physically disconnected from any networks, including the internet, people said he was crazy.\n\nBut Now German Researchers have published a paper on how malware can be designed to cross the air gap by transmitting information through speakers and recording it via microphone.\n\nRather than relying on TCP-IP, they used a network stack originally developed for underwater communication and the signal was propagated through the use of a software-defined modem based on the GNU Radio project.\n\nIn a scenario based hacking, \u201cThe infected victim sends all recorded keystrokes to the covert acoustical mesh network. Infected drones forward the keystroke information inside the covert network till the attacker is reached, who is now able to read the current keyboard input of the infected victim from a distant place.\u201d paper explained.\n\nIn another scenario, the researchers used sound waves to send keystroke information to a network-connected computer, which then sent the information to the attacker via email.\n\nDragos dedication about badBIOS research because this extraordinary concept was first introduced by him only. While the research doesn\u2019t prove Dragos Ruiu\u2019s badBIOS claims, but it does show that even if the system is disconnected from any network, could still be vulnerable to attackers. However, I would like to appreciatededication about badBIOS research because this extraordinary concept was first introduced by him only.\n\nResearchers POC Malware is able to transfer data at 20 bits per second only, which is very low, but that's still capable of transferring your password or credit card number to the hacker in a few seconds.\n\nSome basic countermeasures one can adopt to protect against such malware are:\n\nSwitching off the audio input and output devices from the system.\n\nEmploy audio filtering that blocks high-frequency ranges.\n\nUsing an Audio Intrusion Detection Guard.\n\nLets see how Antivirus companies will handle such threats to protect home users."}
{"text":"While it is hard enough to describe something effectively in fiction1\u2014how a thing smells, moves, looks\u2014sometimes it is useful to further describe how exactly a thing seems or appears to be, above and beyond any discernible physical characteristics. The ineffable sense of how things are often makes up the best and most memorable aspect of a piece of writing, but it can be among the hardest things to get right. It is useful for writers to remember that often this aspect of seeming and appearing will be conveyed through metaphor; and often the seeming and appearing will touch in some way on the meaning of what is being observed\u2014or will include a mention of a character\u2019s feelings about, or engagement with, the thing observed.\n\nNote that the description of the ineffable sense of a thing will almost always be preceded by a more basic, sometimes quite extended, physical description. The writer in this case takes on the role of Dr. Frankenstein. With Igor\u2019s help, the writer assembles legs, arms, torso, neck, head, and brain. The writer arranges all this stuff on the table, sews it together. But it is still dead (if vivid) matter. Then the writer applies the electricity\u2014describes the mysterious, often quasi-metaphorical sense of a thing\u2014and the thing opens its eyes and comes to life.\n\nFor example, in Alice Munro\u2019s 1979 story \u201cThe Beggar Maid\u201d, we find Rose, a scholarship student, just entering college. She is compelled to attend a meeting with other scholarship students, and, arriving with an unprepossessing companion at the room where the meeting is held, Rose hesitates outside the door.\n\nThere was a little window in the door. They could look through at the other scholarship winners already assembled and waiting. It seemed to Rose that she saw four or five girls of the same stooped and matronly type as the girl who was beside her, and several bright-eyed, self-satisfied babyish-looking boys. It seemed to be the rule that girl scholarship winners looked about forty and boys about twelve. It was not possible, of course, that they all looked like this. It was not possible that in one glance through the windows of the door Rose could detect traces of eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes. That was only what she thought. But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.\n\nNotice how Rose\u2019s observation of this long exact list of gross-out sufferings\u2014\u201deczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes\u201d\u2014is implicitly disowned twice (we are told that this is only how \u201cit seemed\u201d) and very explicitly disowned three times: \u201cIt was not possible, of course\u2026.It was not possible\u2026.That was only what she thought.\u201d (And notice further that Rose\u2019s disowning of the list in no way erases the impression the list has made on us.)\n\nBut no, Munro is onto something with these disavowals\u2014because it\u2019s true, these physical complaints are not what Rose has seen, not exactly. What she has seen is something else, something further, an impression of something, that she cannot really point to. She has seen \u201ca pall\u201d\u2014literally, \u201csomething that covers, shrouds, or overspreads, esp. with darkness or gloom.\u201d But where is the pall? Where is it in the room? Is it hovering \u201cover them\u201d, up near the light fixtures?\n\nWe understand from Munro\u2019s unusual insistence that we are not meant to take this as just a metaphor: \u201cBut there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.\u201d But what is this, really? What is being described here? Nothing less than the sense of how things are, a sudden, almost mystical understanding of the truth about these people. And with this description, zap, the world of the room takes on meaning, and life. The Frankenstein Effect, at its finest.\n\nMunro is a past master at this (and a million other things). In her story \u201cDance of the Happy Shades\u201d (1961), a group of mentally disabled children arrive at a much anticipated piano recital. The narrator senses something going on:\n\nIt is while I am at the piano, playing the minuet from Berenice, that the final arrival, unlooked-for by anybody but Miss Marsalles, takes place. It must seem at first that there has been some mistake. Out of the corner of my eye I see a whole procession of children, eight or ten in all, with a red-haired woman in something like a uniform, mounting the front step. They look like a group of children from a private school on an excursion of some kind (there is that drabness and sameness about their clothes) but their progress is too scrambling and disorderly for that. Or this is the impression I have; I cannot really look. Is it the wrong house, are they really on their way to the doctor for shots, or to Vacation Bible Classes? No, Miss Marsalles has got up with a happy whisper of apology; she has gone to meet them. Behind my back there is a sound of people squeezing together, of folding chairs being opened, there is an inappropriate, curiously unplaceable giggle. And above or behind all this cautious flurry of arrival there is a peculiarly concentrated silence. Something has happened, something unforeseen, perhaps something disastrous; you can feel such things behind your back.\n\nYou can\u2019t, of course\u2014not really\u2014but then again, yes you can. The many tiny details have added up to something impalpable and profound, something that goes beyond description\u2014something that has, almost literally, entered the air of the room.\n\nAlmost literally is the point here. On the verge of literalness.\n\nNote that not every description calls for a metaphysical component. Usually this sort of technique is most useful when a character is observing a complicated scenario\u2014an airport concourse, a crammed bookshelf, a busy restaurant\u2014in which a number of objects or people are involved, and where it is useful to convey both a sense of particularity and an overall impression of things. But always when you see a writer deploying the terms\n\nan air of\n\nan atmosphere of\n\na sense of\n\nan impression of\n\nand other similar shortcuts, you ought to feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, because Dr. Frankenstein is warming up his generator. And things are about to get metaphysical.\n\nThe P:V Ratio\n\nIf a metaphysical understanding is to be in some fashion arrived at through the medium of the world, then we may note that different authors derive this metaphysical understanding differently. Some writers prefer to assemble more world on the table before applying the electricity that represents a greater understanding.\n\nWe may therefore find it suitable to change our underlying metaphor, leaving behind all these dripping body parts our assistant has so obligingly harvested, and propose instead a more congenial potatoes-to-vodka ratio, where some writers prefer to assemble more potatoes (or \u201cworld\u201d) and others fewer, to arrive at a given amount of distilled spirit (or \u201cunderstanding\u201d).\n\nIn this new potatoes-to-vodka model, the potatoes, of course, are the physical matter of a story\u2014shoes, ceilings, arguments, sentences, eyebrows, wind, cat hair, Coca-Cola, and jump ropes3, while vodka is the metaphysical understanding derived from these physical things. We may call this a writer\u2019s p:v ratio, representing the efficiency with which a writer typically makes use of the world.\n\nIn the following selections, potatoes are set in bold and spirit, in italics.\n\nAlice Munro will, as always, provide a useful\u2014and in this case usefully typical\u2014example. In \u201cHateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage\u201d, a middle-aged, unattractive woman shops for a fancy dress, thinking (at this point falsely) that she is going to be married in it. She enters the shop:\n\nAlong one wall was a rack of evening dresses, all fit for belles of the ball with their net and taffeta, their dreamy colors. And beyond them, in a glass case so no profane fingers could get at them, half a dozen wedding gowns, pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace, embroidered in silver beads or seed pearls. Tiny bodies, scalloped necklines, lavish skirts. Even when she was younger she could never have contemplated such extravagance, not just in the matter of money but in expectations, in the preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss.\n\nHere the metaphysical understanding has plainly been reached by means of the physical observation. The potatoes of the shop provide a sort of ballast to the abstracted thought, but also provide the means by which to arrive at it. A reasonable amount of world (the rack, the net and taffeta, et cetera) produces in a character a reasonable amount of mind-stuff.\n\nMunro is unique in her ability but not in her technique; most writers\u2019 habits in this regard at least superficially resemble Munro\u2019s, deploying a moderate amount of stuff to arrive at a moderate amount of spirit. And perhaps it is this moderation that allows us to qualify a writer as \u201crealistic\u201d\u2014most of us seem to experience the world at something like this measured pace, after all, as we move through our days both beset by sensory input and at the same time subject to the addled and improvisatory workings of our own brains.4 In a similar vein, John Updike observes before he transcends, in \u201cThe Afterlife\u201d:\n\nA broad-faced strawberry blonde, she had always worn sweaters and plaid pleated skirts and low-heeled shoes for her birding walks, and here this same outfitseemed a shade more chic and less aggressively \u201csensible\u201d than it had at home. Her pleasant plain looks, rather lost in the old crowd of heavily groomed suburban wives, had bloomed in this climate; her manner, as she showed them the house and their room upstairs, seemed to Carter somehow blushing, bridal.5\n\nIf this balance between world and mind allows us to locate Munro and Updike in the solid realistic mainstream of contemporary fiction, what of some others? What happens if you prefer fewer potatoes? What if you prefer more? What if you\u2019re not interested in describing spirit at all? Or what if you\u2019re more interested in meaning than in matter, like some spats-wearing evangelist, waving your hands in the air in hopes of producing something from nothing? Clearly this requires an inadequate, seat-of-the-pants survey.\n\nTweaking the P:V Ratio\n\nSome writers, of course, prefer to avoid the explicit statement of spirit entirely. Hemingway and his ilk have a very high ratio of potatoes-to-vodka, with Hemingway\u2019s followers arranged around him in a haphazard spatter array. To take a familiar example, Raymond Carver\u2019s \u201cWhy Don\u2019t You Dance\u201d lives almost entirely in the present, physical moment; a man, now without his wife (we gather she has left because of his drinking, among other reasons), puts his household belongings out in his yard and driveway, arranging them for sale just as they have been arranged in the house. A young couple comes along; the girl dances with the man, and is evidently affected by his plight. The story is told in simple, factual terms, with little or no reference to thoughts, feelings, or epiphanic realizations. The story\u2019s final section, in its entirety, goes:\n\nWeeks later, she said: \u201cThe guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don\u2019t laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?\u201d She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.\n\nPotatoes? Vodka? It is debatable. The girl is feeling something, of course, as the story suggests, but she can\u2019t express it, possibly because she hasn\u2019t got the equipment to do so. And because she can\u2019t express it, we don\u2019t get an explicit statement of it either. It\u2019s possible to read the whole story as a pile of potatoes, with that last 26-word paragraph serving as the equivalent of the story\u2019s spirit. The story\u2019s last paragraph is in fact the mental result, finally, of a worldly encounter. At any rate, the ratio of potatoes to vodka here is very high, if indeed there is any vodka to divide by.\n\nBy contrast, a writer may be particularly interested in spirit\u2014literally so in the case of, for example, James Baldwin, whose stories and novels tend to avoid physical description while dwelling more on abstract concerns. In his story \u201cThe Outing\u201d, three boys are on the make in various ways during a church retreat. Then they enter the meeting room:\n\nDuring his testimony Johnny and Roy and David had stood quietly beside the door, not daring to enter while he spoke. The moment he sat down they moved quickly, together, to the front of the high hall and knelt down beside their seats to pray. The aspect of each of them underwent always, in this company, a striking, even an exciting change; as though their youth, barely begun, were already put away; and the animal, so vividly restless and undiscovered, so tense with power, ready to spring had already stalked and trapped and offered, a perpetual blood-sacrifice, on the altar of the Lord.\n\nWe sense here that, as is often the case for Baldwin, conflict is played out in an almost literal sense on the field of the personality, where such matters as identity and the fate of one\u2019s soul are best and most frankly considered. The rendering of the Baldwin\u2019s physical world is often minimal, as though such surface concerns are too trivial to consider.6\n\nWith these opposing practices in mind, we must now consider a minor and possibly self-evident corollary aspect of this idea, that of scale.\n\nScale\n\nThe scale under consideration here is the differing P:V ratio we find in stories versus novels. We know that novels tend to be richer in their effects than stories; specifically, we find that novelists tend to describe much more matter than a story writer will, but will derive from this matter roughly the same amount of spirit (or sometimes slightly more).7 In other words, novelists pile up more potatoes as a matter of course, but don\u2019t derive giant gushing fountains of vodka. Longer descriptions leading to bigger heaps of stuff, but not a concomitant increase in the amount of understanding derived. You can only understand so much at once, after all.\n\nIn Couples, John Updike describes Harold little-Smith\u2019s house; Harold has just learned that his wife may be having an affair. This has the effect of rendering his house \u201cmore transparent\u201d, and the description that follows is limpid to the extreme, if sometimes verging on the purple. The house is:\n\n\u2026a flat-roofed redwood modern oriented along a little sheltered ridge overlooking the marsh to the south. The foyer was floored in flagstones; on the right an open stairway went down to a basement level where the three children (Jonathan, Julia, Henrietta) slept and the laundry was done and the cars were parked. Above this, on the main level, were the kitchen, the dining room, the master bedroom, a polished hall where hung reproductions of etchings by Rembrandt, Durer, Piranesi, and Picasso. To the left of the foyer a dramatically long living room opened up, with a shaggy cerulean rug and two facing white sofas and symmetrical hi-fi speakers and a Baldwin grand and at the far end an elevated fireplace with a great copper hood. The house bespoke money in the service of taste. In the summer evenings he would drive back from the station through the livelong light hovering above the tawny marshes, flooded or dry according to the tides, and find his little wife, her black hair freshly combed and parted, waiting on the longer of the sofas, which was not precisely white but rather a rough Iranian wool bleached to the pallor of sand mixed with ash. A record, Glenn Gould or Dinu Lupatti playing Bach or Schumann, would be sending forth clear vines of sound from the invisible root within the hi-fi closet. A pitcher of martinis would have been mixed and held chilled within the refrigerator toward this precious moment of his daily homecoming\u2026.\n\nThe description in the original goes on at about this length again, and includes such additional stuff as a chewed sponge ball, Jonathan in bathing trunks, the liquid branches of the lawn sprinkler, and so on. The overwhelming feeling is of an assembling stillness and a slant-lit suburban glamour\u2014a hushed, beautiful hesitation\u2014until at last:\n\nMarcia would pour two verdant martinis into glasses that would suddenly sweat\u2026and his entire household, even the stray milk butterfly perched on the copper fireplace hood, felt about to spring into bliss, like a tightly wound music box.\n\nHere possibly we may see that a writer\u2019s natural habits align better with one form than with another; in his best work Updike the novelist seems to be much more confident that his gist will come across than does Updike the short-story writer. There is far less\u2014relatively speaking\u2014summarizing and explaining, as though Updike feels confident that surely, given all the matter he has presented to us, we will be able to see what he means.\n\nTurn the ratio down somewhat to discover Ian McEwan at work in Atonement, gathering his many finely described potatoes in order to derive, on behalf of Briony, a rather considerable draft of spirit:\n\n\u2026in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool\u2019s gold, a rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel\u2019s skull as light as a leaf. But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel\u2019s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.\n\nAnd observe Henry James, masterfully interweaving matter with spirit through the mind of the young and impressionable Isabel Archer, suggesting that to the greatest and most knowing practitioners, mind and matter are really inseparable aspects of a fundamental unity. Notice how difficult it sometimes is, in the following example, to decide which side of things a sentence or a phrase is addressing, and how, for James, matters of custom and perception can be seen to blend:\n\nThe foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother\u2019s house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste\u2014she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece\u2014she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side\u2014a place which became to the child\u2019s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror.\n\nAs a further and final aside, and related to the example of James, it is worth noting that as the efficiency of narrative distillation increases, and as the ratio of world-to-mind approaches the perfect balance of 1:1, peculiar things can begin to happen. John Cheever\u2019s novels and stories live fruitfully at this stylistic event-horizon, the authorial eye shuttling so swiftly between world and mind that the boundary between the two begins to fade away. In \u201cThe Ocean\u201d, one of Cheever\u2019s prototypically imperiled householders fears he is being poisoned by his wife:\n\nI mixed a Martini and went into the living room. I was not in any danger from which I could not readily escape. I could go to the country club for supper. Why I hesitated to do this seems, in retrospect, to have been because of the blue walls of the room in which I stood. It was a handsome room, its long windows looking out onto a lawn, some trees, and the sky. The orderliness of the room seemed to impose some orderliness on my own conduct\u2014as if by absenting myself from the table I would in some way offend the order of things. If I went to the club for supper I would be yielding to my suspicions and damaging my hopefulness, and I was determined to remain hopeful.\n\nCheever\u2019s rough 1:1 p:v ratio seems to go some way toward producing his trademark sound\u2014a sort of tremulous, searching flight, as a claustrophobic eye shuttles ceaselessly between world and mind in search of an elusive certainty. The feeling becomes one of weird immersion and a kind of synesthesia; the character experiences the world, has an immediate mental reaction, and is then at once experiencing the world again. Fitting perhaps that we find the fraught and frenzied Cheever here, seeing and feeling, seeing and feeling, helpless to prevent his marvelously fruitful mind from making something of everything.8\n\nThe Visual Aid\n\nFinally, with all these dubious propositions behind us, we can suggest that every writer might be plotted on a p:v graph, giving rise to the highly dubious Figure 1:\n\nSurely we have gone too far with this, and certainly it is entirely wrong to put novelists and short-story writers together, rather as though we have tried somehow to pen up tigers with barracuda, but it is interesting to note the opposing and intersecting groupings, one of which we may very generally see is composed of Worriers\u2014writers less at home in the world, and who have taken the self, or some version of the self, as the subject\u2014while the other is composed of Composed Describers, writers who have taken the world as their subject and, generally speaking, written about society. That this is a byproduct of the individual personalities in question seems plain. We should also note that the very greatest tend to find themselves at rather the far points on the graph, outliers here as elsewhere, and that certain stylistically versatile folks can be imagined to be plotted in more than one place (Welty\u2019s various moods, Updike\u2019s, Faulkner\u2019s come to mind), rather as though they have both a city house and a country one.\n\nBut what are we to do with this, then, as writers of prose? Probably we ought to note the relative scarcity of successful examples on the left side of the chart, whose few denizens have managed, like those extremophile bacteria who manage to flourish on ocean-bottom vents or in sulfuric acid pools in the depths of limestone caves, to survive in difficult environments, deriving great hogsheads of spirit from mere armfuls of potatoes. We ought to observe the cluster of sturdy realists trading remarks around the 10:2 mark, with the anomalous Coetzee somehow standing there too, all cool and gray and saying absolutely nothing whatsoever to anybody, and we may further admiringly note the high, plush posts of the great novelists, who manage to furnish their work with not only a great amplitude of matter but also of insight. We will leave it to the poets and especially to those lucky vessels who feel themselves recipients of divine inspiration to aspire to the ratio of 100:100, wherein the great unimaginable gigantitude of the world is, leaf-by-leaf, quantum-by-quantum, infused with the fullness of a supernaturally omnipresent understanding. We here are only prose writers, and we have deadlines to meet, so something like \u201cjust enough, not too much\u201d will have to do. A little vodka is good for you, let us be satisfied to say, and too much ain\u2019t.\n\nNotes\n\n1. Person, place, object, situation, idea\u2014they\u2019re all hard.\n\n2. I see pall people.\n\n3. Nouns are especially weighty. Descriptions are usually made of nouns and adjectives. But actions and lines of dialog must also be recognized as potato-esque in their effects, too, and a very good description will usually contain some element of action. Notice where your attention tends to catch and where it tends to slide in this description of Gabriel, from \u201cThe Dead\u201d:\n\nHe was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat. When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.\n\nObserve Joyce\u2019s well-intentioned attempts to \u2018actionize\u2019 the description: \u201cpushed upwards,\u201d \u201cscattered itself,\u201d \u201cscintillated restlessly,\u201d \u201cscreened.\u201d But these are tricks, and not very successful. The mind\u2019s eye is most engaged when Gabriel is actually doing something\u2014\u201dhe pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body.\u201d And it is least engaged where he is simply being something\u2014\u201dHe was a stout tallish young man.\u201d We see what is done more easily than we see what simply is. In this our eye is amphibian, registering change, becoming blind to stasis.\n\n4. This is, it may be argued, the fundamental work of narrative art: the description of the metronomic interaction between the private mind and the constantly impinging world.\n\n5. Updike\u2019s reliance on seemed here and throughout his mighty oeuvre suggests his general preoccupation with the truth that lurks behind appearances, with making sure that everything be understood; and if it is this impulse that gives rise to his occasional overweening anxiety that we get the point of something, it strikes me as a fitting impulse. Very tall, he was terribly gawky as a child, with a gigantic nose, debilitating eczema, a comical stutter, and to top it all off a world-class mind. No one looking at him could have guessed what he really was. No wonder that the Rabbit books feature a man who, on the surface, is mostly unremarkable\u2014a former high school basketball star, a printing press operator, a car salesman, a middling husband and father\u2014and yet who has perhaps the most florid, nuanced internal life of any character ever composed. Related to this, surely, is Updike\u2019s chronic affection for adverbs, those gravitational devices that control the flight of a verb even after it has been set loose. What other author would give us a character who \u201csteered sullenly\u201d? A life that is \u201cmajestically rooted\u201d? Why else would he describe a hoard of treasure as \u201csurreptitiously hidden\u201d? Because of a mostly generous desire to make sure we get what he\u2019s saying. That we get him, really, the kid with the big nose and the hideous skin, who also happens to be, as he might say, transcendently alight.\n\n6. This is complicated by the fact that Baldwin\u2019s characters also often struggle against their own bodies in various ways.\n\n7. This is true even when the novelist and the short story writer are one and the same person; Doctorow the novelist has a much higher P:V ratio than Doctorow the short-story writer.\n\n8. That Cheever was subject to the workings of his peculiar brain seems obvious; it has always struck me that the hysterical, sensory-enhanced well-being expressed in so much of Cheever\u2019s work resembles the feeling that accompanies an epileptic\u2019s \u2018aura\u2019, wherein the universe seems infused with mysterious meaning. Late in his life, with his brain ruined by booze, Cheever in fact had two epileptic seizures; it is my unsupportable crackpot belief that he had been experiencing mild seizures all his life, and that his habitual drinking may have been, in some small part, a means by which he attempted to reproduce the lovely feelings that unpredictably descended upon him, and which must have seemed, undiagnosed as they would have been, messages from a greater, senselessly benign power. Poor, mean, helpless, brilliant Cheever."}
{"text":"Charleston church shooting: the larger covert op\n\nby Jon Rappoport\n\nJune 18, 2015\n\nNoMoreFakeNews.com\n\n\u201cLong-term covert ops sometimes disguise themselves by claiming that the hidden cause of a problem is the cure. So it is with psychiatric drugs, like SSRI antidepressants, which push people into committing murder. In the aftermath of these killings, leaders call for expanded psychiatric screening\u2014which will result in further prescription of those very same drugs.\u201d (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)\n\nPolice report the suspect in the Charleston church shooting, Dylann Roof, has been captured.\n\nThis is the latest in a string of crimes in which black-white conflict has been highlighted, pressed, argued, and used, for the purposes of: fanning flames of racial discord, exercising further gun control, and fatuously claiming that universal psychiatric screening and drugging is an answer.\n\nIn this brief article, I focus on black-white conflict.\n\nIn the 1960s, in America, the burgeoning drug culture and the Vietnam War became the occasion for protests and riots that shook the nation. In that case, the main target was the federal government.\n\nEven though the \u201crevolution\u201d was pro-left, the 1968 Chicago riots were staged at the Democratic nominating convention. That gives you some idea of the degree of overall and virulent anti-government sentiment.\n\nFrom the point of view of elite planners, the 1960s should not be repeated; at least not in the same way.\n\nThis time, the government should be seen as the hero, the rescuer, the mediator.\n\nFor that to happen, Americans would turn on and target each other.\n\nThere is no better way to accomplish that than to strike at the issue of race.\n\nEmphasize it, push it, make it stand out, tie it into political correctness, create absurdist \u201cdialogue\u201d that could have no other outcome than outrage. The \u201cdiscussion about race\u201d has turned into transparent provocation.\n\nDivide and conquer is as old as the hills. The conqueror is the ruler. And, of course, as he wins, he enacts more downward pressure on freedom, in multiple ways, while pretending to be the healer.\n\nThis is the op.\n\nThis is the simplicity of it.\n\nYou can throw other logs on the fire: agents provocateur in the media; the release of violent immigrant criminals from US prisons; the seeding of the population with massive amounts of psychiatric drugs (SSRI antidepressants) that scramble brains and push people over the edge into committing violent acts, including murder.\n\nAnd oh yes, you can also include the intentional expansion of poverty (and attendant resentment) through the departure of millions of jobs overseas: aka Globalism. That is provocation of the highest order.\n\nThe objective is shifting the target from government to the people themselves, along the familiar lines of race.\n\nAnd the payoff message will echo the sentiments of 1995, after the Oklahoma City Bombing: \u201cCome home to the government, we will protect you. Only we can protect you.\u201d\n\nIf you believed mainstream media, you would think the entire race issue in America consists of a three-way conversation between Al Sharpton, a KKK high priest, and some demented college student who insists that every word in the English language contains a hidden racial element.\n\nUpdate: CBS News is reporting that Dylann Roof was arrested on February 28 in a mall, while he was asking a store clerk \u201cout of the ordinary questions.\u201d At that time, he was found in possession of a medicine called Suboxone.\n\nIt is an addicting drug used to treat opiate addiction. Some adverse effects: agitation, hostility, hallucinations, attempted suicide, depersonalization.\n\nRapid withdrawal from Suboxone can be more dangerous than taking it.\n\nGetting the picture?\n\nOf course, the distinct possibility that the drug pushed Dylann Roof over the edge into committing murder isn\u2019t part of the \u201ccorrect\u201d narrative aimed at accelerating racial hatreds.\n\nThe truth? Irrelevant.\n\nJon Rappoport\n\nThe author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine."}
{"text":"The vast majority of foreigners charged with crimes meriting the death penalty are relatively impoverished menial labourers, predominantly from third world countries. Members of this group cannot afford the \"diya\" or blood money payments to a victim's relative that can win clemency from the Shariah system of Islamic justice.\n\nAlthough foreigners make up just one quarter of the oil rich state's population, Amnesty reported they made up the majority of all those sent to death row. Its report revealed that at least 1,695 executions were carried out between 1985 and May 2008, with the number of non-nationals totalling 830, compared with 809 local citizens. It was impossible to ascertain the nationality of the remaining 56.\n\nBut it is in the number of reprieves that the greatest disparity lies. Amnesty claimed that a pardon is granted in one in every four capital cases involving a Saudi citizen but only one in 30 of each foreign case.\n\nSaudi Arabia executed 78 people in the first eight months of this year, a figure in line with the 2007 total of 158."}
{"text":"030317-N-5319A-014\n\nCentral Command Area of Responsibility (Mar. 17, 2003) -- Spetz a Bottle Nose Dolphin belonging to Commander Task Unit (CTU-55.4.3) is beached up on a transfer mat before going out on a training mission from the well deck of the USS Gunston Hall (LSD 44) operating in the Arabian Gulf. CTU-55.4.3 is a multinational team consisting of Naval Special Clearance Team-One, Fleet Diving Unit Three from the United Kingdom, Clearance Dive Team from Australia, and Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Units Six and Eight (EODMU-6 and EODMU-8). These units are conducting deep\/shallow water mine counter measure operations to clear shipping lanes for humanitarian relief. CTU-55.4.3 and USS Gunston Hall are currently forward deployed conducting missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the multinational coalition effort to liberate the Iraqi people, eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and end the regime of Saddam Hussein. U.S. Navy photo by Photographers Mate 1st Class Brien Aho. (RELEASED)\n\nDownload High Resolution\n\nGo Back"}
{"text":"Now that we\u2019re gardening in a frost-free area we have to get acquainted with a new bunch of sub tropical-ish weeds. This week, it\u2019s been all about the Madeira Vine. In our new garden, the stuff is everywhere.\n\nLook up Madeira vine and you will find gazillions of references to its invasive and terrible habits. But did you know that it\u2019s edible?\n\nLast weekend we got stuck into our new rental home\u2019s garden. Well, a corner of it, anyway. Small steps, obtain a yield, and all that.\n\nPrettymuch every surface in the corner we started in was choked in the bright green, fleshy leaves of Madeira vine, a garden escapee which hails from South America.\n\nMadeira vine (Anredera cordifolia) is a hardy perennial which climbs up trees and then proceeds to produce long tails of flowers followed by clusters of airborne bubils, which fall off, and make more Madeira vines.\n\nIt\u2019s considered a real problem all across subtropical Australia \u2013 choking the edge of rainforests and other native vegetation \u2013 like many resilient pioneer species, it\u2019s an aggressive little bugger.\n\nAnd our new garden was choked with the stuff.\n\nWith the enthusiasm that only establishing a new garden can bring, I took on the madeira vine with gusto.\n\nThe tuberous roots were everywhere, and it trailed up the fence and the lemon tree, as well as thickly across the ground. I ripped and I ripped and I ripped it out.\n\nDuring a pause in my ripping frenzy, I had a thought. And so I panted to Nick: \u201chey could you look up Madeira Vine and check what it\u2019s good for?\u201d\n\nIt turns out that Madeira vine is highly edible. Medicinal, even.\n\nMadeira vine leaves can be cooked like spinach and are highly nutritious\n\nMadeira vine roots (rizomes) can be baked like potato\n\nMadeira vine bubils (the aerial seed-ish things) are used extensively in Chinese medicine as an anti inflammatory, anti ulcer and liver protectant.\n\nSo here I am, ripping out a perfectly adapted, naturalised and nutritious food crop that can be used like spinach so that I can, er, plant some spinach.\n\nOh the irony.\n\nOur personal compromise? To meet the Madeira vine half way. We removed it from our intensive planting bed, But we left it be under the lemon tree, where it seemed happiest.\n\nOur future strategy? Management and reduction, via eating it.\n\nSo we won\u2019t plant any more spinach. Until we run out of madeira vine, that is.\n\nAs I looked through the very many online articles and references to Madeira vine as a noxious pest, I was struck by the fact that only one article in twenty mentioned the vine\u2019s eminent edibility.\n\nDon\u2019t you think that\u2019s crazy?\n\nI mean, don\u2019t get me wrong. Native vegetation is essential to preserve, as are our remaining pockets of functional rainforest. And weed removal is a part of that.\n\nBut conversely, in an age of food scarcity, of ridiculously wasteful and polluting industrial agriculture being promoted as the only way to feed Australia (because we couldn\u2019t possibly feed ourselves with localised small farm based food systems, apparently)\u2026\n\nIn the middle of all this, we have yet another rampant food bearing plant that is everywhere, and which is being entirely ignored for the nutrient dense value to our communities that it represents.\n\nIn fact, we have a local food source dripping, literally, from the trees around us. And yet our only plan for it, no matter where it grows, is to eradicate it.\n\nDoes this mean we should let plants like Madeira vine strangle our local nature reserve? Hell no.\n\nBut this does mean that, yet again, we have an adapted, perennial, zero footprint and highly nutritious food plant right on our doorsteps, which we\u2019re trying our best to wipe out.\n\nBecause it doesn\u2019t fit our idea of food, our idea of nature.\n\nBut unlike many other edible weeds that are there for the foraging but which could be easily discounted from cultivation due to various factors, it\u2019s interesting to note that Madeira Vine ticks many of the boxes desired for a food crop\u2026\n\nIt grows without much assistance, is hardy and produces prolifically.\n\nIt requires minimal cultivation.\n\nIt dominates an area where it is planted (meaning far less weed control is needed)\n\nIt is spread only by humans and by water flows distributing the bubils \u2013 an easy factor to contain with good design\n\nAnd if that\u2019s not enough, Madeira vine is already successfully cultivated + eaten extensively in Japan, where it is called okawakame (land seaweed)\n\nAt any rate, I feel fortunate that we looked it up, and now know of another local food that can be used to nurture our family and friends.\n\nSeeking sustenance by whatever means available, and necessary.\n\nMadeira Vine resources\n\nIt\u2019s a pickle, isn\u2019t it \u2013 what do you make of this issue?\n\nActually, speaking of pickles, i rekon Madeira vine would make a good pickle or kraut addition\u2026\n\n**Update in response to the various folks who are determined to see the above post as a promotion of cultivating noxious weeds \u2013 people, read the post again. It\u2019s not.\n\nWhat I am saying is that using the resources around you (even as you attempt to eradicate them) is a good idea, and an ethical approach to energy + food consumption.\n\nWhether it\u2019s madeira vine, feral rabbits, whatever \u2013 eating it is an appropriate use of energy, and should be considered over the alternative of exclusively approaching the problem with glyphosate or pindone.\n\nAnd if you really want to talk weeds and the destruction of the Australian landscape, let\u2019s start with the big ones \u2013 rice, wheat, canola, sugarcane and so on\u2026 it\u2019s a long list, if you look at it in terms of adverse and invasive impact on our ecosystems\u2026"}
{"text":"Selena Gomez says she wants more people to talk about therapy \u2014 and she\u2019s leading the charge.\n\nGomez said in April\u2019s Vogue magazine that DBT, or Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is helping her recover from anxiety and depression. \u201c[It\u2019s] completely changed my life,\u201d she told the mag, adding that she now sees her therapist five times a week.\n\nIS ONLINE THERAPY LEGIT?\n\nDBT is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy developed in the late \u201980s to treat borderline personality disorder. \u201cNow, almost three decades later, it\u2019s been \u2026 shown to be helpful for people with depression, anxiety, and people with mood swings,\u201d clinical psychologist Amanda Spray, Ph.D., assistant director of the Steven A. Cohen military clinic at NYU Langone, tells The Post.\n\n\u201cThere are four basic components,\u201d Spray explains: Mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness (learning how to have your needs met by others), emotion regulation (learning how to process and handle your emotions), and distress tolerance (taking a step back and not acting impulsively under distress). Spray says that many therapists have adapted DBT to fit their own practice, but traditional DBT entails weekly therapy appointments, weekly group meetings, and at-home exercises to help patients apply what they\u2019ve learned.\n\nFOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS\n\nClick for more from the New York Post."}
{"text":"Following news last month that Anthony Bourdain\u2019s planned international food market at Pier 57 had pushed its opening back by two years, an investigation by Eater NY is now questioning whether Bourdain Market will open at the pier at all. Eater found out that Bourdain and his partners haven\u2019t actually signed up for a lease at the SuperPier, but have only obtained a letter of intent, which is not a legally binding contract.\n\nInstead, Eater NY is investigating rumors that the Bourdain Market partners might actually be considering a back up option, which is signing on to 155,000 square feet of space at Gansevoort Market. The head of Bourdain Market, Stephen Werther confirmed to Eater that they hadn\u2019t signed a lease at Pier 57, and that they had previously considered Gansevoort as a backup option. He denied rumors that those talks had restarted again however.\n\nThe developers of the Pier, Youngwoo & Associates and RXR Realty declined to comment on the matter, but a rep for Youngwoo said that the development firm had never confirmed Bourdain Market as a tenant, and that only Google had been confirmed so far as having signed a lease at the space.\n\nWerther admitted to Eater that he expected the project to have moved forward sooner, but that signing the lease was \"imminent,\" and that there were bound to be complications for a project of this scope.\n\nArchitecture that comes to life in Game of Thrones"}
{"text":"Oracle suffered with serious vulnerability in the authentication protocol used by some Oracle databases. This Flaw enable a remote attacker to brute-force a token provided by the server prior to authentication and determine a user's password.\n\nA researcher - Esteban Martinez Fayo, a researcher with AppSec tomorrow will demonstrate a proof-of-concept attack.\n\nMartinez Fayo and his team first reported the bugs to Oracle in May 2010. Oracle fixed it in mid-2011 via the 11.2.0.3 patch set, issuing a new version of the protocol. \"But they never fixed the current version, so the current 11.1 and 11.2 versions are still vulnerable,\" Martinez Fayo says, and Oracle has no plans to fix the flaws for version 11.1.\n\nThe first step in the authentication process when a client contacts the database server is for the server to send a session key back to the client, along with a salt. The vulnerability enables an attacker to link a specific session key with a specific password hash.\n\nThere are no overt signs when an outsider has targeted the weakness, and attackers aren't required to have \"man-in-the-middle\" control of a network to exploit it. \"Once the attacker has a Session Key and a Salt (which is also sent by the server along with the session key), the attacker can perform a brute force attack on the session key by trying millions of passwords per second until the correct one is found. This is very similar to a SHA-1 password hash cracking. Rainbow tables can\u2019 t be used because there is a Salt used for password hash generation, but advanced hardware can be used, like GPUs combined with advanced techniques like Dictionary hybrid attacks, which can make the cracking process much more efficient.\"\n\n\"I developed a proof-of-concept tool that shows that it is possible to crack an 8 characters long lower case alphabetic password in approximately 5 hours using standard CPUs.\"\n\nBecause the vulnerability is in a widely deployed product and is easy to exploit, Fayo said he considers it to be quite dangerous."}
{"text":"After a season rife with rumors of trades and fistfights, is this\u2014finally\u2014Dion Waiters\u2019 coming out party?\n\nDion Waiters stood outside of his locker, squinted his eyes and shook his head as a half-smile-half-grimace formed on his face. It was early January, just days after the calendar turned to 2014. The Cleveland Cavaliers had just lost a heartbreaker to the Indiana Pacers, contenders for the NBA title, and he came pretty damn close to pulling off a miracle that would have propelled his name even further up the ranks in the minds of Cavalier fans. The Cavs were playing in their third game without All-Star point guard Kyrie Irving who had fallen victim to a bruised knee. In Irving\u2019s absence, Cavs head coach Mike Brown opted to go with Matthew Dellavedova at point guard, an undrafted rookie out of St. Mary\u2019s who had grown a bit of a cult following due to his never-ending hustle, rather than Waiters, who was drafted fourth-overall just a year earlier. Down 16 points in the fourth quarter, however, Cavaliers head coach Mike Brown reached to his bench, placing Waiters in the rotation as the primary ball handler. Waiters, who had mysteriously been given very little in the way of playing time to this point, took immediate advantage, rattling off 12 straight points\u2014a barrage of jumpshots between 17 and 26 feet, all different locations on the floor, all finding the bottom of the net. Once the Pacers defense started to converged, the second-year guard from Syracuse turned into a distributor, a facilitator, finding Varejao for two roof-raising assists.\n\nDays earlier, needing overtime to pull out a win against the Orlando Magic, it was Waiters who drove to his left with the clock running down, sinking a lay-up that would eventually send the Cavaliers into extra frames. Down two points with 20 seconds to go against the Pacers, Waiters once again took an inbound pass at the top of the key. The 6-foot-3-inch guard was being guarded by a 6-foot-9-inch small forward in Paul George, one of the best defenders in the league. Waiters made quick work of George, blowing by him on a drive to his right side. The catch: The Pacers center, a 7-foot tall Roy Hibbert, was playing weak-side defense and turned into a brick wall, forcing Waiters to take a tough shot that would ultimately not fall .\n\n\u201cPaul George is a good defender, but I knew I could get by him,\u201d Waiters would say. \u201cIt was that next guy you had to worry about. If I could do it differently, I would, but I was just trying to be aggressive at that moment and put the pressure on the refs to make a call.\u201d\n\nThis is the same Paul George who, in a feature for ESPN The Magazine, was recently dubbed one of the game\u2019s top players even in the event that he would never score a single, solitary point; the same George who has transcended himself to being the 1A among small forwards, behind only the reigning MVP in LeBron James. When asked by WFNY about going to his left, a voice came shooting over the horde of media members who were swirling about. It was fellow swingman CJ Miles who prodded his teammate\u2014\u201dEveryone knows you wanted to go left,\u201d he said, drawing a laugh from anyone within earshot. All it takes is a quick Google Image search of \u201cDion Waiters driving\u201d to find dozens of images of Waiters, full steam ahead, with the basketball in his left hand. The left wasn\u2019t there.\n\nBrown, hardly one to hand out compliments in what had been a season of disappointment, was willing to budge a little on this very night, categorizing any one-on-one matchup between his shooting guard as favorable. \u201cHe\u2019s a talented guy offensively,\u201d said Brown. \u201cHe knows it. Everybody knows it.\u201d\n\nSee what he did there?\n\n*****\n\nOffense has never been an issue for Dion Waiters. Drafted fourth overall in 2012, he arrived on the NBA scene with a chip on his shoulder and a try-and-stop-me attitude that would allow him to get to the rim with ease. Just 24 hours after Waiters\u2019 arrival to Cleveland, then head coach Byron Scott was lacing him with praise, saying that he felt the sixth man out of Syracuse was the second-best player in the draft . Scott salivated while daydreaming of a young and spry backcourt duo with the on-ball skills of Irving and Waiters pick-and-rolling teams into oblivion. As Waiters will attest, however, getting to the rack at the NBA level would merely serve to be half of the battle\u2014finishing upon arrival is the tougher of the tasks, one which would produce historically terrible numbers. Not given much in the way of a superstar treatment, Waiters often finds himself frustrated with the lack of whistles blown in his favor. This, at times, has led to poor defense and even worse body language, reportedly drawing the ire of a few teammates who were tired of watching teams score while their shooting guard is back on the other side of the floor seeking an explanation from an official. It was Dion Waiters whose face was plastered on the poster of shame following the Cavs\u2019 embarrassing loss to the Sacramento Kings earlier in the year\u2014his pouting was hitting a crescendo; his team was careening toward chaos.\n\nAmidst a roller coaster of a season, fewer players wearing wine and gold on a nightly basis have experienced the twists and turns that have been associated to Dion Waiters. Less than one month into the season and it was Waiters\u2019 name penned into the heart of stories rooted in team dysfunction\u2014some going as far as speculation surrounding a fist fight, aided by Irving showing up with a black eye Trade rumors swirled, looming large like black clouds over the ebbs and flows of each passing day, but were consistently shot down like clay pigeons with both the team and the player toting verbal shotguns\u2014\u201dIt\u2019s nonsense,\u201d said Waiters of a rumored meeting between he and then GM Chris Grant. \u201cMan, I ain\u2019t sitting in no office for three hours.\u201d As the season wore on, when posed a question specifically regarding Waiters, Brown has gone as far as he has to to admit pleasure in his player\u2019s offensive skill set, but consistently stops short of delivering full-blown praise\u2014enough to keep other teams interested in the event that they had yearned to acquire the shooting guard via trade, but not enough to make the player feel as if he was meeting all expectations during what was just his sophomore season.\n\n*****\n\nThere is something inherently compelling about Dion Waiters. From the day he stepped foot into Cleveland, he has been the player who is adored by most fans while being simultaneously shunned by those not looking through a lakefront prism. He arrived here having not been interviewed or taken part in a pre-draft workout. He showed up overweight and was shut down mid-way through his first run at an NBA Summer League. He was, after all, a sixth man.\n\nWaiters\u2019 decision-making has long been criticized, often predicated upon shot selection, shot form, and a lack of anything that could be classified as \u201chustle.\u201d At the same time, over the course of the last two years, when selecting a topic for the annual CavsZine, this very author has made Waiters his subject of choice . Maybe it\u2019s the mystery. Maybe it\u2019s the way he\u2019s the first person to rush over and defend a pesky teammate or an irate coach. Maybe it\u2019s the unfair (and oftentimes inaccurate) notions cast upon the man who lives inside of said mystery. To be fair, it is easy to be the subject of criticism when you tell the world that you believe you can be the best shooting guard in the entire world and subsequently put up a win-share total that is lower than your team\u2019s reserve center.\n\n\u201cThis year, I\u2019m going to show a lot of people who doubted me and still doubt me,\u201d Waiters said back in September. \u201cI\u2019m going to show them. I don\u2019t need praise and all of that. I just want to be respected. I\u2019m coming. That\u2019s all I have to say. I\u2019ve taken my work ethic to another level and I feel as though I still have something to prove. So, watch out.\u201d\n\nThen again, it could be that same (somewhat inflated) sense of self that makes Dion Waiters. Despite all of the struggles that the 2013-14 season has thrown his way, he\u2019s still that same kid out of inner-city Philly who stepped into Cleveland Clinic Courts and stared wide-eyed like it was the Land of Oz; he\u2019s the kid with \u201cBLESSED\u201d scrawled across his shoulders; he\u2019s still as confident as ever. When recently asked about his mindset between being a member of the starting five or providing relief off of the bench, Waiters didn\u2019t skip a beat. \u201cIt\u2019s all the same: Go in there and kill somebody.\u201d\n\n*****\n\nThe Cavaliers are heading toward the finish line once again. For all of the hope and expectations that came with last year\u2019s draft, some free agency additions and internal growth, a lottery pick awaits. Kyrie Irving just celebrated his 22nd birthday while wearing street clothes. Dion Waiters has had his own celebration, scoring nearly 24 points per game in the All-Star point guard\u2019s absence.\n\nLong having provided off-the-ball relief, leading the NBA in scoring off of the bench, Waiters has taken on a different persona as of late, doing so against the best the NBA has to offer. Against the Miami Heat earlier this month, Waiters\u2019 ball skills were on display as he recorded his first double-double. He would thank his teammates for hitting their shots after he found them, whether it was for an easy two or a clutch three. Two nights later, he tied a career high with 30 points against the Oklahoma City Thunder, being a part of a 21-2 run that rivaled the comeback attemp made against the Pacers back in early January. His driving lay-up pulled his team within five; as things began to slip away, he would drain a three-pointer to give the Cavs one final chance. Against the Houston Rockets, Waiters once again paced the Cavaliers with 26 points, adding eight more assists for good measure. One night later, on the second night of a back-to-back, he provided 22 more points as the wine and gold ended the New York Knicks\u2019 eight-game winning streak. It would be Jarrett Jack in the spotlight, leading the team in scoring and assists (31 and 10, respectively), but it would be Waiters who not only kept double-teams away from his backcourt mate, but hit a clutch three-pointer to put his team up by four late in the fourth quarter, having entered it down by nine.\n\nBy now, you\u2019ve heard the story. Following the loss to the Thunder, a game that not only left many feeling good, but showed that his team was still fighting despite the point in the season and the opponent, it was Dion Waiters, having just scored 30 points, who was sitting in Mike Brown\u2019s office, in a towel having not yet gotten dressed, waiting for his coach to finish his post-game address of the media. You see, despite the 30 points that he had just scored, Waiters felt that he did not do all that he could have done\u2014in the rebounding and hustle department, specifically\u2014and wanted to apologize. Why? Because \u201cthat\u2019s what men do,\u201d he would later say.\n\n\u201cAt the end of the day you have to look in the mirror at yourself,\u201d said Waiters. \u201cIf you feel as though you didn\u2019t rebound and you were part of the problem, why not admit it? It\u2019s easy to point the finger, but you have to look in the mirror and see what you can do better. Where I come from, we just tell it how it is. We don\u2019t point the finger at someone else.\u201d\n\nBrown said that Waiters is trying to take some \u201cinitiative in the process.\u201d His teammates, the same ones who were fed up with his antics during the winter-month drubbings, are also taking notice. Small forward Luol Deng said Waiters is \u201cplaying great right now.\u201d Jack, the man who inhabits the locker next to Waiters when the two find themselves within the confines of The Q, has also seen marked improvement, but not just in the young guard\u2019s play. Jack assured Waiters that the only reason people are hard on him is because of his ability and the expectations that come with being one of the best athletes in the world. He\u2019s challenged Waiters to not only bring it on the court, but off of it as well.\n\n\u201cI think he\u2019s done a hell of a job these last few games with Ky being out, stepping up making plays,\u201d said Jack. \u201cHe\u2019s still a work in progress, but I think he\u2019s doing a hell of a job. Leaps and bounds from where we were at the beginning of the season\u2014decision making, being more assertive, talkative, being more receptive to criticism but him also being able to lead others as well.\u201d\n\nRight now. A work in progress. Sure, all signs for Waiters are currently pointing up, but just like their head coach, his veteran teammates know that with life comes with qualifiers, with praise comes the notion that things are far from over. No matter where you are, no matter how far you\u2019ve come, the rug can be pulled out from under your feet at any time\u2014it comes down to how quick you can adapt to the altered landscape. For Waiters, to this point, his NBA career has been stocked full of almosts and what-could-have-beens. Fortunately for him, he\u2019s just 22 years old and has shown that he finally knows what everyone else has for the last two years\u2014 just because you want to go to your left doesn\u2019t mean the defense is going to give it to you.\n\n\u2014\n\n(Image: Michael Ivins-US PRESSWIRE)"}
{"text":"Learning C and Objective-C\n\nIf you have no programming experience and you want to write extensions\/tweaks, you'll need to learn a lot about Objective-C and developing ordinary apps for iOS. (If you'd like to first try modifying code in simple ways to explore some possibilities, you can try the paid package Flex, on the BigBoss repository in Cydia.)\n\nTo give you a taste, Code School has an iOS programming course for beginners, with a free interactive guide to getting started with Objective-C. You can also try the free courses offered by Codecademy - they're not about Objective-C or iOS, but they can give you a general sense of what programming is like.\n\nFor further study:\n\nIt's good to learn some C too; it'll give you a better foundation for learning Objective-C. You'll want to know about pointer arithmetic, the Objective-C runtime, buffer overflows, bitwise operations, the model-view-controller pattern, etc.\n\nIdeally you'll get to a point where you're comfortable writing and running code for iOS. If you're already there, definitely keep reading!\n\nSetting up Theos\n\nFollow Theos\/Setup to set up your Theos environment by installing Theos and creating your first project. These links may also be helpful: guide on Stack Overflow, this Theos documentation by theiostream, and Theos Install Script.\n\nYou'll probably also want to read more about Cydia Substrate - see saurik's Substrate documentation.\n\nFinding example projects\n\nHere is a list of just a few of the many open source projects that can be used as examples: Open Source Projects.\n\nFor some simple example projects you can build with Theos, see codyd51's Theos Examples.\n\nNot finding what you are looking for? Try searching through GitHub for iOS Tweaks with a simple trick, \"extension:xm\".\n\nExample:\n\nextension:xm SBAwayController\n\nUsing the above code will search GitHub for all files with the extension .xm (because Theos by default creates a Tweak.xm file when creating a new tweak). The example above will result in finding tweaks that reference SBAwayController. Not all developers use the .xm file extension, but a large number do, and this will help you in finding those examples.\n\nLooking at frameworks, classes, and processes\n\nTo figure out what code to modify, you'll want to explore around iOS and apps.\n\nYou can extract Objective-C class interfaces with class-dump, class_dump_z, or classdump-dyld. Remember that the resulting files are not the original headers, so use them with caution.\n\nYou can also find other developers have done this process for many frameworks and compiled their work into github repositories (e.g. iOS-Runtime-Headers).\n\nFor further help, take a look at Finding classes\/methods and using them by Sassoty.\n\nSee Reverse Engineering Tools for detailed information about these tools and many others, including Logify.\n\nSee Notifications for information about observing and posting notifications informing observers of events within a process and for IPC purposes, for example.\n\nPrototyping a tweak\n\nYou can use Cycript to explore running processes. Check out the official manual, especially the section about process injection. For a demo, see Adam Bell's JailbreakCon talk (example code and slides).\n\nBuilding your tweak\n\nAfter prototyping you will want to make your tweak into a project to build it and debug it. To achieve this you will most likely use Theos. It is available for different platforms including iOS and Mac OS, and, to a certain extent, Linux. On Mac OS you can use Xcode's command line tools, but for the other platforms you should use a toolchain. On iOS there are two available toolchains (On-device toolchains), and there is a project for Windows.\n\nTo learn about setting up your package's control file, see saurik's article on building packages. If you need to list dependencies or conflicting packages, Debian's packaging manual may be useful (because Cydia packaging is based on Debian packaging): Syntax of relationship fields, Dependencies, Conflicts -- or if you're submitting this package to a default repository, you can just ask your repository maintainer for help with this.\n\nDebugging\n\nSee Debugging on iOS 7 for how to run gdb and\/or lldb.\n\nThe System Log article on TheiPhoneWiki has useful tips about accessing the device's syslog.\n\nThe Crash Reporter package in Cydia is a convenient way to grab crash reports, and it's helpful to run symbolicate (also available in Cydia) on crash reports to get more detail.\n\nDebugging memory issues in Substrate tweaks\n\nA few problems you may run into while getting started\n\nProblem: Whenever I run programs I compile with your toolchain, they are immediately \"Killed\". I hate Apple :(.\n\nSolution: iOS only wants to run signed code. Jailbreaks patch the signature verification out of the kernel, but you still need to at least add a valid CodeDirectory to the binary that contains SHA1 hashes of the executable. See Code Signing for a few ways to do this.\n\nProblem: I tried copying a graphical program to the iPhone, and ran it from the command line. I am nearly 100% certain my program is correct, and I did your codesign instructions, but it doesn't work.\n\nSolution: You can't run things from the command line, you have to run them from SpringBoard.\n\nProblem: OK, but when I copied the file to \/Applications it didn't even show up in SpringBoard.\n\nSolution: iOS caches the Info.plist files of all installed applications in a centralized place. The fastest\/best way to handle this cache is to install UIKit Tools and then run its uicache as mobile:\n\nsu mobile -c uicache\n\nProblem: When I add setuid bits to my program, it no longer starts up and syslog doesn't seem to provide any useful information, either (True?).\n\nSolution: I am not quite certain what is preventing this. However, it is easy to defeat: replace your program with a two line shell script that, in turn, runs your program. Example, maybe MyProgram (setuid) gets renamed to MyProgram_, and MyProgram (not setuid) becomes the script:\n\n#!\/bin\/bash dir = $( dirname \" $0 \" ) exec \" ${ dir } \" \/MyProgram_ \" $@ \"\n\nPublishing your package in a default repository\n\nWhen you've completed a project, you may want to submit it to one of Cydia's default repositories (sources) for distribution.\n\n[Context about Cydia: Unlike the App Store, which is a centralized system, Cydia itself does not host\/distribute packages - instead, Cydia is a way to browse and install packages from repositories. By default, Cydia comes with a list of good repositories (independently-owned but work closely with the makers of Cydia) - so if you want to distribute a package to the general audience of Cydia users, submitting it to a default repository is a good plan. If you use a default repository and want to sell your package, you can choose to use the Cydia Store system so that people have a simple way to purchase it. You can also choose to run your own repository (see Repository Management) and ask interested users to type your repository address into Cydia to get your package.]\n\nThese are your options for default repositories, with links to information about submitting:\n\nBigBoss (managed by Optimo)\n\nModMyi (managed by Tyler)\n\nMacCiti (managed by MacCiti)\n\nIf you aren't sure which to pick, look up what your favorite developers use, or ask other developers for suggestions (if you don't already know any other developers, IRC may be helpful). If you have questions, email is usually the best way to get in contact with repository managers.\n\nFor questions about the Cydia Store system for paid packages, you can ask your repository manager; they've helped many developers figure this out. See also: Cydia Store Integration.\n\nSome guides on other sites\n\nAlso check out the list of development blogs for more writing by tweak developers.\n\nTheos challenges\n\nThis section is a set of tweaks\/apps that can be created with Theos for new or experienced developers to practice with.\n\nTitle Description Example Need Help? LaunchNotifier Show a UIAlertView on the screen after any app has been launched. The title of the UIAlertView is the name of the app being opened. Example Guide AskLaunch Show a UIAlertView after tapping an app, asking the user whether they want to launch it or not. Example TransparentSBEditor Make the SpringBoard icons transparent while editing, instead of jittering. Example\n\nIf you're interested in ideas for something else to build, the \"Request\" tag on \/r\/jailbreak has lots of tweak ideas from real people."}
{"text":"FROM: Project Lead\n\nTO: Arma 3 Users\n\nINFO: Helicopters DLC released, 1.34 update released, MP mode \"Support\"\n\nPRECEDENCE: Flash\n\nSITUATION\n\nLate yesterday afternoon we rolled the Helicopters DLC out of its hangar for lift off. Of course the 1.34 update contained not just the premium additions, but also the free platform update for everyone. We are very happy to be able to continue supporting the game in this way. By buying the game and DLC you provide us with the opportunity to strengthen, expand and enrich the platform and game. For an in-depth look at what changes arrived with Arma 3 Helicopters and version 1.34, read through the SPOTREP. Modders can do the same for the latest update of sister product Arma 3 Tools in the TECHREP.\n\nWhat's next for the team? Development focus will be on the second DLC: Marksmen. It is to follow a similar approach by delivering a set of premium assets, bundled with relevant new platform updates for all. We're right in the middle of producing the first new personal firearms and developing concepts for the rest of them. Meanwhile the designers and programmers are prototyping new gameplay features for weapon handling. In parallel, we do also have pre-production and early production of the Expansion terrain in progress. Finally, we obviously will be doing post-release support of Arma 3 Helicopters and we'll continue the maintenance cycle. Do check out this splendidly splendid write-up by Creative Director Jay Crowe on all of these topics.\n\nINTELLIGENCE\n\nFriendly reminder: if you have bought a Supporter Edition or own the DLC Bundle, you already own Arma 3 Helicopters DLC. This is not true for the (Digital) Deluxe Edition. If you've forgotten what version you own, one way to find out could be to check Steam. In the client, open Arma 3's properties. Visit the DLC tab and there it should list your DLC plus Digital Deluxe Edition content packages.\n\nLast Friday the voting stage for the Make Arma Now War Singleplayer category closed. This voting process selected the 20 finalists for that category (to be revealed in detail over the coming weeks). The other categories are in process of having their finalists selected by a Bohemia Interactive Task Force. After that, a soon-to-be-announced jury will carefully select the winners. Good luck to all contestants!\n\nOPERATIONS\n\nOne cool part of the 1.34 platform update is the \"Support\" multiplayer mode. This mode was designed to focus on aerial logistics, rather than combat (although the sessions are not exactly peaceful!). You and your friends are helicopter pilots whose main responsibility is to capture sectors by transporting infantry NPCs to them. Extra support options are Sling Loading supplies and performing casevacs. The mode does a great job of showing the many improvements that Helicopters DLC allowed us to make. We decided however, not to lock this mode to owners of the DLC. Everyone can play it and non-premium helicopters are available besides the Huron and Taru. The design Task Force consisting of Jir\u00ed Wainar, Nelson Duarte and V\u00e1clav Oliva is looking forward to your feedback in this forums thread. A good way of trying the mode is to connect to one of our official servers. We're also hoping to livestream the mode this Friday!\n\nWe are tracking one server crash that is particularly elusive. Our working theory is that it may be caused by a recent Steam client update, because the same crash affects our other games (e.g. DayZ) without those receiving updates. We are in direct contact with Valve's network engineers to get to the bottom of this. The investigation will hopefully result in either a fix of their client, or a way for us to solve the issue ourselves.\n\nLOGISTICS\n\nCheck out this nifty little web app to search and filter scripting commands. Kudos to Craig Vander Galien for creating it!\n\nThe 1.34 update added a bunch of nice decorative objects for scenario designers. You'll find objects to bring your airports and heliports alive, as well as objects for Forward Operating Bases (from fuel bladders to desktop PCs and canteen supplies to sports equipment). The SPOTREP lists all of them, but you may have to explore the editor for a while to find the right categories. Shout out to our colleagues in Black Element Thailand, who did a good job of creating many of these!\n\n#splendid"}
{"text":"Luis Antonio Caballero is an Argentine dog groomer who loves his job. A lot. His wife and business partner Gabriela Caballero caught him enjoying his job quite a bit on August 22, dancing to a song on the radio; even gently dancing with the dog he was bathing!\n\n\"I stepped away to make some tea and returned to find Luis dancing,\" Gabriela told The Dodo . \"He didn't realize I was there.\" So, Gabriela did what every good wife would do in this modern era -- she whipped out her phone, took some video, and promptly posted it on Facebook.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\"I diiiiiiied, haha, this is how you bathe your pets,\" she wrote. \"A happy puppy, hahaha, go Lu.\"\n\nThe video cuts off just as Gabriela is found out, but it's been viewed more than 5.6 million times since it was posted. People are touched by Luis' obvious happiness: it's clear that he loves dogs, loves good music and loves dancing!\n\n\"He loves them, and they love him,\" Gabriela said. Luis' life is all about dogs -- when he's not grooming them, he is working to get strays off the streets of Buenos Aires and into good homes.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\"We are a family dedicated to the dogs,\" Gabriela said."}
{"text":"College students love socialism, just look at how Bernie Sanders captivated the youth vote during the Democrat Primaries. However, if you were to ask them to define it, you might not be able to get a straight answer.\n\nCampus Reform visited Washington D.C to ask college students \u201cDo you like socialism?\u201d and then asked \u201cWhat is socialism?\u201d Many students expressed favor for socialism, though when they were asked what it was, had trouble articulating an answer. If these kids can\u2019t even define socialism, you can hardly expect them to recall the tens of millions who have been slaughtered under socialist and Marxist regimes throughout the 20th century. Hopefully they get a chance to take Econ 101 next semester.\n\nVia Campus Reform:\n\nLast year, a poll was released showing 53 percent of Americans under age 35 are dissatisfied with our nation\u2019s current economic system and think socialism would be good for the country.\n\n\u201cI guess just, you know, getting rid of that wealth gap in the United States?\u201d\n\nThe same poll found that 45 percent of young Americans would be willing to support an openly socialist Presidential candidate.\n\nThe findings of this poll coincide with the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders, an avowed \u201cDemocratic Socialist\u201d from Vermont who received millions of votes in the 2016 Democratic Primary, many of them from millennials.\n\nWhile it\u2019s clear that young people increasingly view socialism in a positive light, it\u2019s also clear that many of them are uneducated about what it entails, or the impact it\u2019s had throughout history.\n\nThe same poll found many millennials are unfamiliar with historical figures often associated with socialism, such as Che Guevara, Joseph Stalin, and Karl Marx."}
{"text":"Children make up over 25 percent of the civilians killed by Russian airstrikes, according to a report by a Syrian human rights organization.\n\nThe Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) released a report Friday that claimed Russian airstrikes in Syria killed approximately 2,704 civilians, 746 of which are children. In just over 11 months, Russia killed more Syrian civilians than the Islamic State killed in three years.\n\nThe report documents several examples of Russian transgressions against civilians, many of which appear to be intentional, and have little or no military purpose. Many of the examples provided in the report show a Russian penchant for targeting schools.\n\n\u201cRussian warplanes bombed a building that we were [using] to educate children in the neighborhood,\u201d Abu al-Fatih, a resident of Aleppo\u2019s al-Hollok neighborhood, told the SNHR. \u201cThe bombing was at a time when students were leaving their classrooms, which led to a number of deaths among children and the teaching staff.\u201d\n\nFatih noted that there were no legitimate military targets in the surrounding area when the attack occurred Dec. 7, 2015. He noted that several ethnic Turkmen-Syrians live in the neighborhood.\n\n\u201cI think the Russian bombing deliberately targeted the neighborhood as a retaliation for the Russian warplane that was shot down by Turkey,\u201d explained Fatih.\n\nWATCH:\n\nOne month later, a Russian attack on three schools in the Einjara district of Aleppo left 17 people dead, 15 of whom were students. Russian jets targeted an elementary school and two high schools. Mohammad al-Khatib, a media activist who witnessed the aftermath of the attack, described the scene in vivid detail.\n\n\u201cA teacher told me that a massacre happened at the western school after it was targeted with a missile by a Russian warplane, I went there. The missile fell in a classroom that was destroyed completely,\u201d said Khatib. \u201cResidents told me they pulled only four dead bodies and lost about 15 others who were reduced to shreds including the female teacher of the targeted classroom.\u201d\n\nRussian bombing strikes are ongoing, despite failed diplomatic attempts to secure a cessation. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been complicit in Russian air strikes more recently, allowing fighters and bombers to stage attacks from an airbase in the Hamadan region.\n\nFollow Russ Read on Twitter\n\nSend tips to russ@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.\n\nContent created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org."}
{"text":"State Democrats\u2019 three-day convention had a raucous start Friday, as liberal activists booed and heckled Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez after marching from the state Capitol to promote a universal heath care program.\n\nThe leader of the nurses\u2019 union that opposed Perez\u2019s recent election had just warned California Democrats that they would put up primary election challengers against lawmakers if they don\u2019t support a bill to create public-funded, universal healthcare.\n\n\u201cThey cannot be in denial anymore that this is a movement that can primary them,\u201d RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, told hundreds of nurses and health care advocates gathered for a rally at the Capitol.\n\n\u201cVote them out,\u201d the crowd chanted back, referring to Democrats in the Legislature wavering on whether to support their cause.\n\nSign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Sacramento Bee\n\nAs California Democrats kicked off their weekend convention here with a cocktail reception featuring trays of scallion pancakes with Hoisin sauce and red grapes rolled in blue cheese and coated in pistachios, the throng advocating for a statewide publicly funded, universal health care system snaked down a staircase behind Perez, shouting down his calls for unity.\n\n\u201cThis gathering kind of reminds me of Thanksgiving dinner at my house with my extended family,\u201d Perez said, trying to lighten the mood.\n\nAs Perez launched into a riff about shared party values, California Democratic Party John Burton told activists he backed universal healthcare before many of them were born, in 1998. He jabbed at a protester: \u201cPut your (expletive) sign down...We\u2019re all for it.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe make sure that healthcare is a right for everyone,\u201d Perez said. \u201cAnd not a privilege for a few.\u201d\n\nThe showdown over health care exposed deep rifts within the party that may have scabbed over, but have not healed, since last year\u2019s primary fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, a favorite of the nurses union, which also backed Perez\u2019s opponent in the chair\u2019s race, Rep. Keith Ellison.\n\nSanders has called for a national single-payer system, and earlier this month called on Californians to adopt the model at a speech in Los Angeles.\n\nDeMoro argued the Republican health care bill that passed the House has generated anger and fear among people from across the political spectrum, and many have turned their attention to the issue of health care because they fear losing coverage. Lawmakers have expressed skepticism over its projected steep cost.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s been a seismic shift because of Donald Trump,\u201d she said in an interview.\n\nPerez, in his brief remarks to delegates, sought common ground over their shared anger toward Trump.\n\n\u201cWe have a president .... I don\u2019t know who it is, Putin, or Trump,\u201d Perez said. \u2018They\u2019re in a bromance. This is really weird.\u201d"}
{"text":"CHICAGO -- Patrick Kane was nearly done talking with reporters after a practice on Saturday afternoon when he was asked about Duncan Keith, the Chicago Blackhawks' top defenseman.\n\nDuncan Keith Defense - CHI GOALS: 1 | ASST: 4 | PTS: 5\n\nSOG: 12 | +\/-: 5\n\nThe question was about how Keith continues to go somewhat overlooked when the conversation turns to the NHL's best at the position. Names like Shea Weber Ryan Suter and Erik Karlsson roll right off the tongue, while Keith only seems to make national headlines while he's embroiled in some sort of controversy.\n\n\"He's one of those guys you kind of take for granted because he's back there every night and does pretty much the same thing,\" Kane said. \"Whether it's shutting down the other team, or creating offensive chances, or jumping in the rush, or how fast he skates, or how good he is defensively with his stick \u2026 he does so many things that you can name and really is huge for our team.\"\n\nIt's true that Keith's numbers have dipped since winning the Norris Trophy in 2010, the same season Chicago ended a 49-year Stanley Cup drought, but he's still in the prime of his career at 29 and is still the Blackhawks' top blueliner. He also remains one of the best in the League, even if he does fly under the radar a bit.\n\nAs he listed all of Keith's responsibilities and tools on the ice, even Kane started to sound a little surprised at just how much Keith does for the Blackhawks, who racked up 77 points in 48 games to win the Presidents' Trophy. Chicago used a noticeably improved defensive effort this season to stay so consistent, and Keith's three goals, 24 assists and plus-16 rating led the way.\n\nKane even compared him to Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews -- who doesn't necessarily rack up a ton of stats, but consistently does many things at an elite level.\n\n\"It's kind of like Johnny,\" Kane said \"You kind of take for granted, maybe, some of the things he does because he does the same thing every night.\"\n\nOne thing that has changed for Keith from the previous three seasons is his ice time. It's gone down.\n\nDuring the regular season, Keith averaged 24:06 and nearly 29 shifts per game this season as compared to 26:53 and 31 shifts a game a year ago. His time during the Stanley Cup Playoffs also dropped during the Blackhawks' Western Conference Quarterfinal series victory against the\n\nMinnesota Wild.\n\nHe averaged 23:21 and 31 shifts in five games against the Wild, which was down quite a bit from the 30:15 and 33 shifts he logged per game in a first-round loss to the Phoenix Coyotes last year.\n\nThe decreased ice time is by design.\n\nBlackhawks coach Joel Quenneville tried to keep his team's legs as fresh as possible during the shortened season, which was packed with back-to-back games and sets of three games in four nights. He knew how important a refreshed Keith would be, so he stuck to a plan that cut back his top defenseman's minutes and shifts by roughly three a game.\n\nKeith had become known for his desire to absorb minutes, but the new plan hasn't bothered him. In fact, he said he's barely noticed being on the ice less. While Suter and rookie Jonas Brodin logged some eye-popping amounts of ice time for the Wild, Keith was content with the amount he got.\n\n\"I don't really notice it, to be honest with you,\" Keith said. \"When you think about it, it's only one or two shifts less in the course of a game. Sometimes maybe it's two or three minutes, but it's really only one or two shifts or one shift less a period. It's not that much. Every year's kind of different. This year we have (more defensemen) that can play and there's no need to play those minutes that maybe Suter was playing. I think it's good for the team, too.\"\n\n\"He's been so good, for so long, that I think after a while you just take it for granted what you see from him.\"\n\n-- Blackhawks goalie Corey Crawford\n\nKeith's stamina in that opening series did get tested, though. His wife, Kelly-Rae, gave birth to their first child, son Colton, last Wednesday morning prior to the fourth game of the series. Keith had already flown back to Chicago for the birth on Tuesday and flew back to the Twin Cities, without sleeping, for the game. After playing a team-high 23:57, Keith realized he'd been awake for about 48 hours -- and didn't really care.\n\n\"I definitely feel more responsible to look after a little guy,\" Keith told NHL.com on Saturday. \"My wife's doing most of the work right now, though. I don't want her thinking that I said I'm doing all the work. Her mom's in town and she's helping out a lot, so we're thankful she's been able to help out and be here.\"\n\nThe other thing on Keith's mind, of course, is the playoffs.\n\nAs of Saturday afternoon, the Blackhawks still didn't know if they'd be facing the Detroit Red Wings or San Jose Sharks in the Western Conference Semifinal round. For Keith and defense partner Niklas Hjalmarsson, that question also meant wondering what star's line they'd draw as an assignment -- Pavel Datsyuk or Joe Thornton.\n\nKeith and Hjalmarsson, who were paired together midway through this season, led the way in shutting down the Wild's Mikko Koivu and Zach Parise in the first round. They did it, according to Keith, with a simple formula -- hard work plus teamwork.\n\n\"It was just trying to play good defense, having a good gap in the neutral zone, eliminating the second and third chances and [goalie Corey Crawford] doing a good job, too,\" Keith said. \"It's not two guys who do it. It's not three. It's not one line of forwards. It's a team game.\"\n\nNobody on the Blackhawks understands that more than Mr. Under-The-Radar himself.\n\n\"He's been so good, for so long, that I think after a while you just take it for granted what you see from him,\" said Crawford, who often has a front-row seat. \"He's definitely a special player. The plays he makes sometimes \u2026 it looks easy, but when you're on the ice you appreciate the talent he has and what he can do for us.\"\n\nCrawford then laughed before adding: \"I think that's enough for pumping his tires. I don't want his head getting too big, but I think he knows how good he is. He's an awesome player.\""}
{"text":"What Portland bike thieves took away, our community is giving back.\n\nAs we shared last week, South Korean bike tourer Kim Minhyeong was pedaling through Portland on his dream trip when his bike was stolen from outside the Southeast Hawthorne Fred Meyer. It was fully loaded with all his gear, including his laptop, camera, and more. As word spread, Bryan Hance from Bike Index decided to help. Hance swung into action and held a fundraiser for Kim last Thursday.\n\nAccording to Hance, about 40 people showed up to Apex Bar \u2014 many of them with gear and donations in-hand. They showed Minhyeong what Portland is really all about as they shared free food donated to the event by Grind Musubi. \u201cDefinitely made me proud to be a Portlander! It was overwhelming, I won\u2019t lie.\u201d Hance wrote on in an email to supporters.\n\nThanks for reading BikePortland. Please consider a $10\/month subscription or a one-time payment\n\nto help maintain and expand this vital community resource.\n\nPortland-based apparel company Showers Pass donated store credit that Minhyeong has used to get a new jacket (the cool Atlas model no less). Right now Hance is helping Minhyeong organize a list of gear he still needs to replace with hopes of getting back on the road in 2-3 weeks. He also said friends of Minhyeong\u2019s took him shopping for a new bike today. The outpouring of support has certainly made an impression.\n\n\u201cWhen I started this journey, I was alone,\u201d Minhyeong wrote on his Facebook page yesterday. \u201cBut now, because of everyone\u2019s support, I no longer feel alone.\u201d\n\nA GoFundMe campaign site has also been set up in case you would like to support this cause and help Minhyeong turn his bad experience into a good memory.\n\nAnd in case you\u2019re wondering, Minhyeong finally got a u-lock.\n\n\u2014 Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org\n\nBikePortland is supported by the community (that means you!). Please become a subscriber or make a donation today.\n\nBike Theft, Front Page\n\nbike index, bryan hance"}
{"text":"Adventurer and Filmmaker Leon McCarron has completed a 1500km walk around the heart of the Middle East, concluding his journey on the summit of Mt Sinai, Egypt.\n\nMcCarron, 29, from Northern Ireland, began his journey on foot in Jerusalem in early December 2015.\n\nFollowing three weeks of trekking north through the West Bank and Jordan Valley, the expedition was briefly put on hold after McCarron\u2019s walking partner, writer Dave Cornthwaite, suffered two stress fractures in his left foot.\n\nDiscovery TV endurance athlete Sean Conway later joined the journey in Wadi Rum, after McCarron had walked the length of Jordan, dodging flash floods, spending days unsupported through rugged desert and experiencing the true face of the Middle East.\n\nFollowing several new and innovative local walking trails on 'Walk the Masar' (masar means \u2018path\u2019 in Arabic), including the Masar Ibrahim (in Palestine), the Jordan Trail and the Sinai Trail, McCarron\u2019s intention was to look beyond the natural struggles and tensions of the region; to fill a current void in the global media by focusing on the other side - the people, the stories, the communities, and compassion that comes with travelling on foot. For four months he immersed himself in the lives of the people of the regions he passed through, gathering their thoughts and opinions.\n\nHe says, \u201cI feel extremely privileged to have seen this part of the world in such a deep way. I came here with a working theory that most people are good. This trip has reinforced that no end. This is one of the most maligned parts of our world, yet in reality I've found it to be perhaps the friendliest, kindest and most peaceful place to spend time.\u201d\n\nMcCarron is now working on a series of short films and a book to tell the full story of his findings.\n\nFind out more on www.walkthemasar.com and www.facebook.com\/leonmccarron"}
{"text":"By Matthew Bridge\n\nHip Hop Vibe Staff Writer\n\nWhere Kanye West and Jay Z are concerned, there are a lot of rumors surrounding them. Much like he said on his 2005 hit, \u201cDiamonds From Sierra Leone,\u201d it seems like they are \u201cpraying for the death of their dynasty, like amen.\u201d They have pinned their hopes on TIDAL.\n\nWhen it comes to business, Jay Z has experienced all types of success over the past two decades. These decades have seen Jay Z launch various music-related businesses. His latest venture is TIDAL, a partnership with the likes of Kanye, Beyonce, J. Cole, Nicki Minaj, Usher, and many others.\n\nSince then, Kanye West has faced rumors of trying to distance himself from TIDAL, due to it being perceived as a failure. There were even rumors of Kanye West leaving Roc Nation, but it turned out he fired his manager within the company. Now, there are rumors of Kanye West premiering his new album on Apple Music, as opposed to TIDAL.\n\nSource: Hits Daily Double\n\nFollow Matthew Bridge on Twitter @dgfxla."}
{"text":"WikiLeaks cables and the Iraq War Yet another accomplishment for the leaker of the cables: preventing an agreement to keep troops in Iraq\n\nFrom a CNN report on why the Iraqi Government rejected the Obama administration's conditions for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline:\n\nU.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top brass have repeatedly said any deal to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the withdrawal deadline would require a guarantee of legal protection for American soldiers. But the Iraqis refused to agree to that, opening up the prospect of Americans being tried in Iraqi courts and subjected to Iraqi punishment. The negotiations were strained following WikiLeaks' release of a diplomatic cable that alleged Iraqi civilians, including children, were killed in a 2006 raid by American troops rather than in an airstrike as the U.S. military initially reported.\n\nThat description from CNN of the cable's contents is, unsurprisingly, diluted to the point of obfuscation. That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, \"provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.\" The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike. Although this incident had been previously documented by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the high-profile release of the cable by WikiLeaks generated substantial attention (and disgust) in Iraq, which made it politically unpalatable for the Iraqi government to grant the legal immunity the Obama adminstration was seeking. Indeed, it was widely reported at the time the cable was released that it made it much more difficult for Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain beyond the deadline under any conditions.\n\nAdvertisement:\n\nIn other words, whoever leaked that cable cast light on a heinous American war crime and, by doing so, likely played some significant role in thwarting an agreement between the Obama and Maliki governments to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and thus helped end this stage of the Iraq war (h\/t Trevor Timm). Moreover, whoever leaked these cables -- as even virulent WikiLeaks critic Bill Keller repeatedly acknowledged -- likely played some significant in helping spark the Arab Spring protests by documenting just how deeply corrupt those U.S.-supported kleptocrats were. And in general, whoever leaked those cables has done more to publicize the corrupt, illegal and deceitful acts of the world's most powerful factions -- and to educate the world about how they behave -- than all \"watchdog\" media outlets combined (indeed, the amount of news reports on a wide array of topics featuring WikiLeaks cables as the primary source is staggering). In sum, whoever leaked those cables is responsible for one of the most consequential, beneficial and noble acts of this generation.\n\nAnd yet (or more accurately: therefore) the person accused of accomplishing all of this, Bradley Manning, has been imprisoned for more than a year without trial, and, if convicted, is almost certain to remain in prison for many more years (with the possibility, albeit unlikely, of death, and as the Obama administration continues to block an unmonitored visit by the U.N. official investigating what had been the inhumane conditions of his detention). If one believes the authenticity of the chat logs produced by Wired, Manning's goal in leaking those cables -- \"hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms . . . i want people to see the truth\u2026 regardless of who they are\u2026 because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public\" -- have been fulfilled beyond what must have been his wildest dreams. Assuming the truth of those chat logs, he was motivated precisely by seeing cables of the sort that detailed this civilian slaughter and subsequent cover-up in Iraq, and the extreme levels of theft and oppression by Arab dictators, and the desire to have the world know about it. Meanwhile, those responsible for the Iraq War, and who suppressed freedom and democracy in the Middle East by propping up those tyrants, and who committed a slew of other illegal and deeply corrupt acts, continue to prosper and wield substantial power.\n\nHistory is filled with examples of those who most bravely challenged and subverted corrupted power and who sought reforms being rewarded with prison or worse, at the hands of those whose bad actions they exposed. If Bradley Manning did leak these cables, his imprisonment is a prime example of that inverted justice."}
{"text":"Thomas Friedman Whines About His Lost TPP\n\nThomas Friedman, who is legendary for his boldly stated wrong assertions, got into the game again making absurd claims about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the great loss the U.S. suffers from it going down. Friedman tells readers:\n\n\"It was not only the largest free-trade agreement in history, it was the best ever for U.S. workers, closing loopholes Nafta had left open. TPP included restrictions on foreign state-owned enterprises that dumped subsidized products into our markets, intellectual property protections for rising U.S. technologies \u2014 like free access for all cloud computing services \u2014 but also anti-human-trafficking provisions that prohibited turning guest workers into slave labor, a ban on trafficking in endangered wildlife parts, a requirement that signatories permit their workers to form independent trade unions to collectively bargain and the elimination of all child labor practices \u2014 all to level the playing field with American workers.\"\n\nThis is of course wrong. First, and most importantly, all the provisions on items like human trafficking, child labor, and trading in endangered wildlife depended on action by the administration. In other words, if the TPP had been approved by Congress last year we would be dependent on the Trump administration to enforce these parts of the agreement. Even the most egregious violations could go completely unsanctioned, if the Trump administration opted not to press them. Given the past history with both Democratic and Republican administrations, this would be a very safe bet.\n\nIn contrast, the provisions on items like violations of the patent and copyright provisions or the investment rules can be directly enforced by the companies affected. The TPP created a special extra-judicial process, the investor-state dispute settlement system, which would determine if an investor's rights under the agreement had been violated.\n\nFriedman also bizarrely seems to be claiming that increased intellectual property restrictions will benefit U.S. workers. These forms of protectionism (yes folks, patent and copyright protection are protectionism \u2014 even if you like them) are directly antithetical to the interest of most U.S. workers. It means that foreign countries will pay more money to Microsoft for its software and Pfizer for its drugs. This means that they will have less money to buy U.S. manufactured goods. This is pretty straight and simple economics; in other words, way over the head of Thomas Friedman. (He wrongly uses the term \"free-trade\" in reference to the TPP four times. This is a propaganda term used to sell the deal. It is not accurate since the increased protections in the pact likely more than offset the tariff reductions in the deal.)\n\nIn this respect, it is worth noting that the projected gain to GDP of $130 billion by 2030 by the strongly pro-TPP Peterson Institute for International Economics (the non-partisan United States International Trade Commission projected a more modest gain of 0.21 percent of GDP by 2032) does not take into account any negative impact from the increased copyright and patent related protections in the TPP. It is quite plausible that a model that actually took account of the negative effects of these protectionist provisions would show a loss to the U.S. from the TPP and especially to the bulk of the workforce who are not situated to benefit from these protections.\n\nThis raises the issue of currency rules, which are notably absent from the TPP. The deliberate decisions by China and other countries to prop up the dollar against their currencies has led to the enormous U.S. trade deficits of the last two decades. This both cost millions of manufacturing jobs and led to the huge imbalances that provided the basis for the housing bubble and the subsequent crash.\n\nFor this reason, it would have been reasonable to include enforceable provisions on currency management in the deal. Remarkably, the TPP includes nothing on the topic of currency. (There is a separate letter of understanding that has exactly zero legal status.)\n\nIn short, there are very good reasons why anyone who cared about workers, the environment, and access to medicine, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, would strongly object to the TPP. It is unfortunate that Friedman seem completely unfamiliar with these issues.\n\nIn this respect it is ironic that Friedman twice criticized Trump for rejecting the TPP without having read the deal. Thomas Friedman himself famously declared that there is no need to read these deals:"}
{"text":"Out of all of the content I\u2019ve dropped on this blog, this is one you should definitely bookmark, because you can use it the rest of your life.\n\nThis article will help steer your interactions with women in the right direction and keep you from losing your sanity.\n\nThere\u2019s a few axioms that I live by which I have put together over the years of dealing with hundreds of women and these commandments have stood the test of time over and over again.\n\nIf you adhere to these, then you will be years ahead of your peers and it will save you a ton of bullshit experiences with women, that could have been avoided.\n\nHere\u2019s a few of them\u2026\n\n#41. Who you marry will be the most important decision you ever make in life. Better make sure she\u2019s up for the job.\n\n#40. Never get married or get tied down with a woman who you\u2019re settling for. You will be miserable. She will be miserable. And life is too damn short to spend it with a woman low in caliber, personality and desire to suck your cock dry every motherfucking day.\n\n#39. Believe a woman the first time she SHOWS you who she is. Don\u2019t allow your emotions to blind you to her flaws and shortcomings.\n\n#38. Women are not the enemy. They are merely following their inherent nature. Learn how to handle them and you will be rewarded with their positive attributes. Flail about blindly and be cursed with their negative attributes.\n\n#37. Women are led by their emotions. Therefore, learn to use their emotions to your favor. Become the puppet master.\n\n#36. Your greatest defense against the manipulations of women, is to learn Game. There is no substitute.\n\n#35. Always lead a woman in the relationship. If you don\u2019t know how, then learn how.\n\n#34. You are not to be the bitch in the relationship. If you have to pause and think about it, then you are.\n\n#33. Women are just as sexual, if not more than men. They crave depravity. Do not be fooled.\n\n#32. ALL girls think they are unique. 99.9% of girls are not unique. Do not be fooled.\n\n#31. The moment you feel you cannot live without a certain girl, is the moment you have officially put her pussy on a pedestal.\n\n#30. Less is more when dealing with women.\n\n#29. Be ready to walk away from the relationship at any time for any reason. If she acts up, be ready to walk. If you stay you will lose a small piece of self-respect, until eventually you won\u2019t even know who you are anymore.\n\n#28. Never take advice on sleeping with women FROM women.\n\n#27. If you can\u2019t see who\u2019s the sucker in the relationship, then you\u2019re the sucker my friend.\n\n#26. What is unsaid when communicating with a woman, is oftentimes more powerful than what is said. Learn to use your eyes when flirting with women and conveying sexual tension.\n\n#25. If you get caught cheating, always, always, always deny. Deny until death and she will eventually get over it.\n\n#24. Always treat a woman\u2019s tantrums like you would treat a child\u2019s. Firm and unpersuaded.\n\n#23. Buying gifts, groveling, begging and changing for a girl will never keep her around. You\u2019ll only intensify her disdain for you and speed up her hunt for an alpha cock.\n\n#22. If you think she\u2019s cheating, she already has. Learn to trust your instinct. It\u2019s \u2018talking\u2019 to you for a reason.\n\n#21. Never fully trust a woman. It\u2019s not in their nature to be trustworthy. Self-preserve by only allowing for 60% of your trust given after a full and long courtship of at least 2 years.\n\n#20. Never get married before 30yo and always marry a younger woman. No exceptions.\n\n#19. You\u2019re not really ready for a relationship, until you know what\u2019s out there. Go fuck 20 women. When you get done, go fuck another 20. Then you might have an idea of what you want.\n\n#18. The moment you make a woman \u201cyour life\u201d, is the moment she\u2019s preparing to walk out of yours.\n\n#17. The only thing that matters to women between the ages of 18-26yo is: \u201cDoes he make my vagina wet?\u201d\n\n#16. Women would rather be with a psychopath broke bad boy, then a stable, sane beta bitch boy.\n\n#15. Never regret cheating.\n\n#14. Don\u2019t put pussy ON the pedestal, put it UNDER the pedestal.\n\n#13. Always fuck her like it\u2019s your last time before you go to prison.\n\n#12. Frame IS Game. If you don\u2019t learn to have a strong Frame, your \u2018Game\u2019 will always be weak and you will always struggle with women.\n\n#11. Always let her say \u201cI love you\u201d first. She\u2019ll love you more for your self-control.\n\n#10. Watch what a girl DOES, not what she SAYS.\n\n#9. If a girl dumps you, never take her back. She will never respect you the same and the relationship is doomed to fail.\n\n#8. If you notice 1 red flag take note. If you notice 2 red flags prepare to eject. When you notice three red flags you had better be out the door.\n\n#7. Women lie. Get used to it. Learn to play the game better than them.\n\n#6. The more money you get, the more you will attract women who are attracted to resources. Learn to put on a \u2018Humble Front\u2019 at first in order to screen the golddiggers out.\n\n#5. Women are hypergamous. Get used to it. Learn to develop yourself into a High Value Man.\n\n#4. The moment you invest more into the relationship than she does, then you\u2019re already fucked and you\u2019re starting to \u2018lose\u2019 her.\n\n#3. Never put aside your personal goals and dreams in order to please a woman. You won\u2019t please her and you will be miserable.\n\n#2. You will never lose a woman by having other admirers, but you will lose women by concentrating all of your efforts on one. You won\u2019t just lose the one you\u2019re focused on, you\u2019ll lose all of them.\n\n#1. If you don\u2019t choose to learn Game, then don\u2019t be surprised when the wool gets pulled over your eyes by a woman. Game is the great equalizer.\n\nSick and tired of getting fucked over with women? Learn my secrets to success with women in my system here.\n\nRead More: How To Approach Girls"}
{"text":"A second car has become stuck on Gold Coast tram tracks, just hours after an unmarked police car on the way to a pedestrian fatality became wedged when it attempted a shortcut.\n\nThe driver of a white Toyota Corolla became stuck on the Sundale Bridge in Southport just before 2pm, halting light rail services between the Main Beach and Surfer's Paradise stops in both directions.\n\nA second car has become stuck in Gold Coast tram tracks, just two hours after an unmarked police car. Photo: Matthew Howard \/ Ten Eyewitness News \/ Twitter Credit:Matthew Howard\/Ten Eyewitness News\n\nA Translink spokeswoman said buses were replacing trams between the two stops and commuters could expect delays of up to 40 minutes.\n\nA Queensland Police spokesperson said the male driver was assisting police with their inquiries."}
{"text":"One journalist hacked phones of 100 celebrities every day for 18 months, says barrister acting for victims including Sadie Frost and Paul Gascoigne\n\nThe \u201cindustrial scale\u201d of phone hacking at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the People made the News of the World look like a \u201csmall cottage industry\u201d in comparison, the high court in London has heard.\n\nScores of celebrities, including the actor Sadie Frost and ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne, were targeted thousands of times by journalists using the illegal practice from mid-1999 until 2009, it was claimed.\n\nIn the first hint of the true extent of phone hacking at the three titles, the court heard that the former Sunday Mirror journalist Dan Evans hacked about 100 celebrities every day from 2003 to mid-2004.\n\nSuch was the reliance on phone hacking for stories that one senior journalist was desperate for Evans to create \u201can enigma-type machine that would automatically crack pin codes\u201d, the court was told.\n\nDavid Sherborne, the barrister for eight victims, said hacking at the titles was \u201cutterly unprecedented\u201d and that knowledge of the activity went to the highest levels of the newspaper group.\n\n\u201cThis was not just the work of junior reporters \u2026 quite the opposite,\u201d he said. \u201cThe evidence demonstrates that voicemail interception, as well as the unlawful obtaining of personal information by blagging or use of private investigators, was in widespread and habitual use by a large number of journalists across all three MGN titles.\u201d\n\nBetween June 2002 and mid-2006, Sherborne said MGN journalists made nearly 10,000 calls to Orange\u2019s voicemail platform, which allows people to access their messages by calling a general number and entering their personal details. He said senior MGN journalists gave \u201cdeliberately crafted and disingenuous statements\u201d to the Leveson inquiry into press ethics, and accused MGN of withholding key evidence that meant that only the \u201cvery tip of the proverbial iceberg\u201d could be revealed.\n\nTwo senior journalists, who cannot be named for legal reasons, allegedly introduced Evans to phone hacking in April 2003 and ordered him to build a \u201cphone-hacking database\u201d using pay-as-you-go phones and a list of celebrity mobile numbers. Evans, who later pleaded guilty to phone hacking, covered up his illegal activities by throwing his mobile phones \u2013 dubbed \u201cburners\u201d \u2013 into the river Thames every two months, the court heard.\n\nThe evidence came on the opening day of a civil trial brought by eight claimants \u2013 including Frost, Gascoigne and BBC creative director Alan Yentob \u2013 against MGN for invasion of privacy.\n\nThe judge, Mr Justice Mann, is being asked to assess the extent of phone hacking across the three titles and rule on the level of damages for each of the claimants. The other claimants involved in the case are TV soap stars Lucy Taggart, Shane Richie and Shobna Gulati, flight attendant Lauren Alcorn and TV producer Robert Ashworth.\n\nFrost is alleged to have been hacked on a daily basis, morning and evening, in part because she was married to fellow actor Jude Law and was good friends with the model Kate Moss.\n\nShe described having her voicemails intercepted as like being \u201cmonitored and hunted down by a sort of secret police, who were digging into our lives as much as they could in order to discover every possible detail about our private lives, as well as our professional ones, to use against us\u201d.\n\nSherborne said the \u201cmost deeply private\u201d information was intercepted and published by journalists, including Frost\u2019s attendance at AA meetings, Richie\u2019s financial problems, Ashworth\u2019s divorce, and Taggart\u2019s relationship with actor Steve McFadden.\n\nOf the stories that Mirror Group has admitted were the result of phone hacking, 49 were printed in the Sunday Mirror, 40 in the Daily Mirror and 23 in the People between June 2000 and October 2006.\n\n\u201cStrangers were deliberately picking through this, sifting for things they could get away with publishing,\u201d Sherborne said. \u201cNo one imagined that all this private information, this treasure trove about just the sort of people who filled these newspapers in their millions, could be accessed and listened to in this way, let alone plundered as a source for stories.\u201d\n\nFrost, for example, was hacked at least twice daily by Evans because, like Yentob, she was deemed a particularly fruitful source of stories and was on his so-called \u201cback pocket list\u201d of targets. In Frost\u2019s case, this hacking resulted in 27 articles that Mirror Group has admitted were gleaned unlawfully from her private messages.\n\nBy comparison, Sienna Miller received \u00a3100,000 in damages from the News of the World publisher in 2011 over 11 articles based on hacking by that newspaper.\n\nMGN has admitted that 99 articles relating to the eight celebrities would not have been published without phones being hacked, the court heard.\n\nLandline call records show that Yentob had his voicemails intercepted 330 times from July 2002 to March 2005, although the court heard that the true extent was likely to be much greater when hacking from pay-as-you-go phones was included.\n\nJames Hipwell, a former Daily Mirror journalist, said Yentob was a principal target of showbusiness journalists and that his voicemails would be used in hacking tutorials. Journalists would sing an amended version of a Spike Milligan song while eavesdropping on his messages, Hipwell claimed. In a witness statement, the BBC executive said he felt \u201cviolated on a truly massive scale\u201d by the hacking.\n\nSherborne said: \u201cIt is abundantly clear that the documentary evidence before the court is only likely to reveal a tiny proportion of the total wrongdoing committed by MGN as against each of the claimants \u2013 merely the very tip of the proverbial iceberg.\u201d\n\nLawyers for the victims pieced together a picture of hacking at Mirror Group using evidence including landline call data, expenses receipts for pay-as-you-go telephones, internal emails from the Sunday Mirror and the People and witness statements from former exployees including Evans and ex-reporters James Hipwell and David Brown.\n\nEvans, who will give evidence as a witness in the trial, was allegedly instructed not to refer to telephones or voicemails explicitly in emails. Instead, he used the euphemism \u201cgetting the muppets\u201d to stand up a story.\n\nIn one email read to court, a Sunday Mirror journalist told his bosses that an unnamed celebrity \u201csounds so cute on the voicemail\u201d. In another email, a senior editorial staff member warned colleagues not to telephone a TV producer because \u201che\u2019s answering\u201d \u2013 meaning the journalists would not be able to access his voicemails and may be rumbled.\n\nThe court also heard that senior journalists made in-jokes about a hacked voicemail alleged to have been the source of a scoop revealing Sven-G\u00f6ran Eriksson\u2019s affair with Ulrika Jonsson.\n\nIn Mirror Group\u2019s written defence statement, Matthew Nicklin QC said the group had published a public apology and had written privately to the eight victims before the start of this trial. However, he said the discovery of hacking could not be said to have caused the victims serious long-term, life-changing suffering like that in personal injury cases. Nor could their hurt be equated with the kind of traumatic lengthy bullying suffered in harassment or discrimination cases.\n\nThe publicly listed publisher had strenuously denied any wrongdoing until September last year, when it made limited admissions in court. The newspaper group has since set up a \u00a312m compensation fund for hacking victims and last month printed an apology in its three papers for \u201can unwarranted and unacceptable intrusion into people\u2019s private lives\u201d."}
{"text":"Causes and symptoms of fish TB. Mycobacterium marinum. Possible treatment. There is some danger to humans when servicing\n\nTuberculosis was once a dreaded disease in Europe as well as North America and virtually everyone knew someone who had succumbed to \u2018consumption\u2019, the commonly used name for the disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is still widespread in most third world countries and after the fall of the Soviet Union, the numbers of tuberculosis patients have sky rocketed in Russia as well as in many other post-soviet states.\n\nWhat few of us know, however, is that a bacterium closely related to Mycobacterium tuberculosis called Mycobacterium marinum can be present in wild caught as well as captive bred fish and stay lurking in our aquariums without us ever realizing it. After all, when one of our fishes goes belly up, few of us drag out the Petri dish and starts growing bacterial cultures to find out exactly what caused its demise.\n\nSince Mycobacterium marinum is so closely related to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the disease it causes is commonly referred to as fish tuberculosis of fish TB. Learning more about fish tuberculosis is recommended for all aquarists since it can be lethal to our beloved fish. What\u2019s even worse, Mycobacterium marinum can spread to the aquarist and cause serious health problems. It can also spread to other animals and is capable of surviving in both soil and water without any host for prolonged periods of time. Don\u2019t be fooled by the word \u201cmarinum\u201d \u2013 this nasty little organism will survive just as well in freshwater conditions.\n\nSusceptibility\n\nCertain types of fish seem to be more at risk of carrying, or at least succumbing to, fish tuberculosis. This group includes the labyrinth fishes, among which you will find many popular aquarium fishes such as Bettas and Gouramis.\n\nSymptoms in fish\n\nThe main symptoms of fish tuberculosis are loss of scales, loss of color, lesions on the body, wasting, and skeletal deformities such as curved spines.\n\nDiagnosing\n\nLooking a slides of infected tissue under a microscope is sometimes enough to recognize Mycobacterium marinum, but in most cases a bacterial culture will be necessary. Both Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium marinum are acid fast, which means that they stain bright pink against a blue background.\n\nTreatment\n\nTreating fish tuberculosis is really difficult and euthanizing the fish a probably less painful for the fish than forcing it to go through endless treatments that may not have any effect on the disease. Euthanizing all the fish in the infected aquarium is also the best way of preventing the disease from spreading.\n\nIf you decide to try and treat your fish, keep in mind that Mycobacterium marinum can infect you as well. The risk of being infected can however be decreased dramatically by following a few simple safety guidelines. You can read more about this further down in this article.\n\nFish can be treated with the same drugs as humans get when they become infected by Mycobacterium marinum, e.g. Kanamycin. Since this is a very resilient microbe, normal treatment involves administering at least two different medications over the course of at least three months.\n\nA lot of aquarium problems can be fixed by performing frequent water changes, increasing the water temperature and adding some salt to the water, but fish tuberculosis is not one of them. Raising the water temperature may even worsen the problem since Mycobacterium marinum prefers warm water (their ideal temperature is 30\u00b0C).\n\nPrevention\n\nSince curing fish is virtually impossible once the disease begins to manifest, preventative measures are highly important.\n\nKeeping your fish healthy, happy and well-fed will boost their immune system and make it possible for them to handle limited exposure to Mycobacterium marinum.\n\nWounded or otherwise weakened fish should be moved to quarantine tanks where they can be treated and given time to recuperate, since weak fish that is left in the main aquarium can serve as a breeding ground for all sorts of malicious microorganisms that may eventually grow numerous enough to attack even the healthy fishes.\n\nNew fish should ideally be quarantined before you allow it into you main aquarium. Plants, substrate, equipment etcetera should be sterilized to kill of potentially harmful bacteria before being introduced to the aquarium. See the plant section for more info about how to sterilize plants without causing injury to them.\n\nAn aquarium that has had an outbreak of fish tuberculosis should be meticulously cleaned out with bleach and left to dry before you restock it.\n\nFish tuberculosis and the aquarist\n\nPrevention\n\nWhen aquarists become infected by Mycobacterium marinum, it is usually because the carry out maintenance work when they have cuts or other skin problems on their hands or arms. Our skin is remarkably good at keeping malevolent microorganisms out, but as soon as the skin gets injured, an important part of the body\u2019s defense system has been breached. It doesn\u2019t have to bee a large wound; a simple paper cut or eczema can be enough for Mycobacterium marinum to slip through. When handling an aquarium where you suspect that Mycobacterium marinum may be present, it is consequently important to use protective gloves. You may have a tiny sore that you haven\u2019t even noticed, such as a torn cuticle. Some aquarists prefer to use gloves all the time, or at least when they have damaged skin, since it is impossible to know if Mycobacterium marinum exists in an aquarium before the fish start to show symptoms of fish tuberculosis. You can also catch fish tuberculosis by using your mouth to start a siphon. Washing your hands and lower arms with soap after handling fish and aquariums is naturally always recommended.\n\nSymptoms and treatment\n\nWhen aquarists become infected with fish tuberculosis, it normally starts as a skin problem. Mycobacterium marinum is a slow growing mycobacterium and it can therefore take several weeks before you notice any symptoms. The first sign is normally small purple lesions or \u201cbumps\u201d. The lesions will grow and spread and Mycobacterium marinum can proceed to destroy the soft tissue under the skin, including tendons and joints. In severe cases, fish tuberculosis can spread to the bones and cause symptoms similar to arthritis.\n\nMost doctors never come in contact with fish tuberculosis and if you show up with some strange lesions on your hands, they might not realize what is causing it and put you on a general oral antibiotic that will not kill Mycobacterium marinum. It is therefore very important to inform your doctor that you are an aquarist and that you may have caught fish tuberculosis or some other disease from your aquarium. Mycobacterium marinum can be successfully treated but only if the right combination of drugs are used. Just as with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the treatment will normally need to be carried out over the course of several months. In serious cases, intravenous administration of antibiotics may be required.\n\nDidn't find the info you were looking for? Register for free and ask your question in our Aquarium forum !\n\nOur knowledgeable staff usually responds to any question within 24 hours\n\nRelated Articles\n\n- Summary of the fish disease argulus- Information on diagnosing and treating anchor worms.- An article about how to avoid diseases by buying healthy fish- An introduction to the more common fish diseases your fish might get.- Information on diagnosing and treating Chilodonella.- Information on diagnosing and treating constipation in fish.- Information on diagnosing and treating costia.- How to recognise the the existence of ill health in a fish.- Information on diagnosing and treating the dreaded dropsy.- Information on diagnosing and treating ergasilus- Information on diagnosing and treating eye problems in fish.- How to examine dead fish for evidence of external parasites or internal problems.- Information on flukes and how to trat flukes.- Information on diagnosing and treating fungis in fish.- Information on diagnosing and treating anchor worms.Natural methods to cure ich- Information on diagnosing and curing glugea and henneguya.- Information on diagnosing and treating hexamita.- Information on diagnosing and treating hole in the head disease.- Information on diagnosing and treating Ichthyosporidium.- Information on how to care for injured fish- How to prevent and control leeches in your aquarium.- Information on diagnosing and treating lymphocystis.- Information on diagnosing and treating the saltwater disease \"marine velvet\".- Information on diagnosing and treating nematodes.- Information on diagnosing and treating neon tetra disease.- Various fish parasites, some normally free-swimming organisms, and various species of algae can become a problem.- An article about how you can prevent diseases among your fish.- An introduction to Quarantine Aquariums.- Information on diagnosing and treating red pest.- Information on diagnosing scale protrusion and how to treat it.- Information on the different causes of swim bladder problems and how the problem can be treated.- Information on diagnosing and treating tail an fin rot.- Summary of treating fish disease argulus- Symptoms of Ich, its life cycle, and treatments using either malachite green or aquarium salt.- An introduction to the art of treating fish that suffers from a disease.- Information on tumors in fish- Information on diagnosing and treating Uronema marinum.- Information on diagnosing and treating velvet"}
{"text":"He sees the global West, led by the US, Britain, and Nato, as guilty of unprovoked aggression against Russia. He supports the separatist movement in east Ukraine, but repeats the Kremlin\u2019s (long debunked) line that there is \u201cno proof\u201d of Russian involvement in the war there.\n\nAnd he harbours a near-religious veneration for the Second World War as the foundation of a sense of Russian exceptionalism \u2013 the nearest thing contemporary Russia has to an official state ideology.\n\nA sign of just how far the convergence of hawkish public ideology with football terrace nationalism came after the now infamous assault on England fans in Marseille Old Port and Velodrome stadium in June.\n\nThe discipline, brutality, and obvious preparation of those attacks provoked outrage in Britain, but barely disguised glee amongst some Russian officials in Moscow.\n\nMr Khuslyutdinov says this was pure political opportunism, rather than evidence of collusion between hooligans and the state.\n\n\u201cThey were just saying what the broad electorate wanted to hear. With the exception of Vladimir Putin\u2019s personal rating, these officials have basically no popularity. So allegedly supporting us is a way of showing they are in tune with the public mood,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cBesides, the day before that Russian and English fans were on the same side fighting some of the French, and no one mentions that.\u201d\n\nAnd he vigorously rejects the suggestion that the Marseilles hooligans included soldiers sent by the Kremlin in an act of \"hybrid warfare.\"\n\nIn fact, he claims, they were not even Russia's best hooligans.\n\n\u201cYou have to make a distinction. There\u2019s the kids and there\u2019s real fighters, the osnova,\u201d he says, using a word that roughly translates as \u201cthe base\u201d or \u201cfoundation.\u201d\n\nThis praetorian guard of Russian hooliganism is made up of older, more experienced men who train hard, seldom drink, and follow health and fitness regimes that make them the diametric opposite of \u201cgetting drunk and having a go.\u201d\n\n\u201cThese are the best fighters, the first line. They\u2019re people who never run from a fight. But they stayed away because we expected a much more serious policing operation from the French, especially given the recent terror attacks there.\u201d\n\nTo prove the point, he sketched a map of Marseilles' Old Port and described in detail how the Russian attackers missed an opportunity to outflank French riot police and failed to set a second ambush.\n\n\u201cI could see those mistakes immediately just by watching on TV, and no experienced fighters would have made them,\u201d he said. \u201cIn Marseilles it was kids, youngsters.\u201d\n\n\u201cIf we\u2019d known the policing would be so limp-wristed a lot of other guys would have gone, and it would have been a very different story.\u201d\n\nTo illustrate the point, he pointed out a well-built but far from muscle-bound man strolling past the training ground. \u201cHe\u2019s in the osnova. He once killed a man with one punch and did five years inside for it. Now, you can imagine what it would have been like if they were there.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe authorities don\u2019t really know what attitude to have to us. We have a lot of people who just don\u2019t like the system, they don\u2019t recognise the state, its authority, or anything like that. And people like that cannot be ruled,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cOn the one hand we\u2019re useful to the government, because they can point at us and say \u2018you see how terrible and violent and scary these people are? that\u2019s why we need so many police!\u2019\u201d\n\n\u201cBut at the same time, some people in power are very fearful that this \u2018army\u2019 could be turned against them.\u201d\n\nAs a result, Russian police have pursued a no-nonsense crackdown on domestic hooliganism in recent years that has seen mass brawls mostly banished from stadiums and many hooligans jailed.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s why there will be no trouble at the 2018 World Cup. We will be strongly repressed in advance,\u201d said Mr Khuslyutdinov. \u201cThere will be no repeat of what we\u2019ve seen in France. It\u2019s impossible.\u201d"}
{"text":"Obamacare! The War on Drugs! A War on Poverty! Prohibition! The idea that government will bring social progress isn't new.\n\nEurope's monarchs believed in big government long before there was a Soviet Union or a welfare state. Eighteenth-century philosopher Voltaire praised \"enlightened\" monarchs like Prussia's Frederick the Great. Since the nineteenth century, so-called \"progressives\" have wanted government to get ever larger. They got their wish. The results were not so good for people.\n\nToday pundits and protesters moan about fiscal \"austerity\" in nations like Greece. But if austerity means cuts in government, there hasn't been much of it.\n\nSure, Greece cut spending, but only by 3 percent. One in four Greek workers still works for government (vs. one in seven in the U.S.). Greek politicians run government \"businesses\" that employ politicians' cronies. In other words, Greece has barely begun what I would call austerity.\n\nPaul Krugman deceitfully trashes real cuts and writes that he wants to see \"some example, somewhere, of austerity policies that succeeded.\"\n\nBut there are plenty. The Cato Institute's Chris Edwards and Dan Mitchell discussed some at FreedomFest, a giant gathering of people who care about free markets held last week in Las Vegas. Mitchell points out that Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands cut government spending and were quicker to recover from economic problems.\n\nIn the mid-90s, Canada was going broke, so the government cut its budget by about 10 percent. The growth that followed allowed Canada to cut its debt dramatically -- from about 68 percent of GDP to 28 percent. During that same decade, unemployment shrank. Canada's economy grew faster than that of every other G7 nation. Good things happened not because government spent more, but because it spent less.\n\nThe U.S. contains its own version of the Greek debt crisis in the form of Puerto Rico.\n\nA recent island governor tried to cut Puerto Rico's bloated government. Luiz Fortuno fired thousands of workers and made it easier to open a business. The economy improved. But firing workers isn't popular. Fortuno lost the next election and his successor increased spending and raised taxes. Of course that didn't work. Now Puerto Rico can't pay its $70 billion debt.\n\n\"Are there any success stories based on tax hikes or bigger government? The answer is no,\" warns Mitchell.\n\nProgressives pretend they have a technical fix for problems. On a national level, their fixes always involve giving more power to Washington, D.C. That soothes the left, since they love the idea of centralizing decision-making.\n\nFor a while, around the start of the twentieth century, technology advanced while government grew. Intellectuals thought the two things must go hand in hand. Government electrified rural areas! It can do anything!\n\nWell, government can do some things, mostly expensive, obvious things, like building interstate highways, guarding borders and going to war -- though government doesn't do those things efficiently. Almost all its projects end up way over budget and behind schedule.\n\n\"Centralization of government spending in Washington over the past century has severely undermined good governance,\" argues Edwards on the site he edits, DownsizingGovernment.org. \"Citizens get worse outcomes when funding and decision-making for education, infrastructure and other things are made by the central government rather than state and local governments and the private sector.\"\n\nPoliticians rarely notice the millions of tiny opportunities for people to make progress via new inventions and smarter ways of doing things -- the new app, the robotics start-up, the do-it-yourself metalworking printer.\n\nInstead, politicians' limited imaginations lean toward big government-run projects like building bigger airports (needed or not), more welfare and micromanaging every private workplace.\n\n\"Politicians and lobby groups constantly complain that America does not spend enough,\" writes Edwards. \"But they rarely discuss how to ensure efficiency in (government) spending, or cite any advantages of federal spending over state, local and private spending.\"\n\nGovernment shovels more money into its big, dumb projects and pretends to build the future. But our future is more likely to be built by thousands of entrepreneurs who make the countless contributions that quietly improve our lives."}
{"text":"Having met the author on his battlefield tours - Gary Weight has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Normandy campaign and the units involved - I eagerly awaited this book and it did not disappoint from the view of a wargamer and modeller with an interest in the NW European campaign.\n\nThe number of photos of personnel and the detail on personnel, training, locations in the UK and overseas, and movements will appeal in particular to relatives of veterans wishing to follow the paths of their families.\n\nIt is long (498 pages), well indexed, and concentrates absolutely on the 2nd Battalion the Lincolnshire Regiment, including only where necessary the minimum of background on the wider operations the unit took part in. Given the very large number of more or less general books, especially on the Normandy Campaign, this focus is welcome, as is the use only of photographs that are specific to the unit.\n\nThere are two 'prelude' sections on the history of the Lincolnshire Regiment (1685-1857 and 1857-1939), then 14 chapters on the 2nd Lincs part in:\n\nEntering France with the BEF;\n\nthe Blitzkrieg in Flanders;\n\nthe Dunkirk evacuation;\n\nTwo on rebuilding, training and preparation in the UK;\n\nNormandy 1 June-6 July (covering the landings and operations inland from Sword beach);\n\nNormandy 6 July- 11 July (covering Operation Charnwood)s\n\nNormandy 12 July - 31 July (Covering operation Goodwood);\n\nthe battle of Pont-de-Vaudrey;\n\ncrossing the Escaut Canal;\n\nThe Battle of Overloon and Venray;\n\nfighting in the Maas Salient;\n\nInto Germany and Operation Heather; and\n\nCrossing he Rhine until the German surrender.\n\nAn Epilogue contains a selection of photos of personnel taken immediately after the war, the Roll of Honour, and seven appendices cover Awards and Citations, a note on assault river crossings, background on two particular individuals, the War Establishment (organisation) of a British Infantry Battalion at various stages throughout the War, and the order of Battle (names where known of key personnel and their roles in the battalion command structure).\n\nOverall the book strikes the right balance between business-like but sympathetic coverage of the Battalion and their actions, and helps redress the balance of the majority of books on the big operations and armoured warfare. It really brings home the unrelenting grind of day-to-day infantry work, punctuated by short but bloody battalion level attacks.\n\nAppropriate weight is given to the various sections, with the emphasis on the key battalion level engagements. It is not padded out with an overview of the campaigns and is mercifully free of generalisations about the strategic arguments around the Normandy fighting and the capabilities of various German weapons.\n\nThe (30!) maps deserve special mention and are an object lesson in how to present maps in books of this genre. There are wide overviews of movements, the theatre and annotated contemporary maps but the jewels are, firstly, the annotated and faintly colourised contemporary air recon photos of the areas of detailed actions and, secondly, and presumably where suitable photos were not available, original maps by the author that bring out every detail referred to in the text."}
{"text":"It\u2019s no trick: Anoka\u2019s famed Halloween parades will be free of Tootsie Rolls, Starburst and other sugary treats this year, with event organizers citing safety concerns as the reason behind a new candy ban.\n\nStormy debate and criticism have swirled on social media over the recently announced rule change. The new ban means no more candy handouts at the Grand Day Parade. It\u2019s a marquee event in a city that Congress has proclaimed the \u201cHalloween Capital of the World,\u201d with Anoka\u2019s spooky celebrations tracing back nearly a century.\n\nEvent organizers say worries over children mobbing parade vehicles for sweets, as well as a dip in volunteers able to patrol for this behavior, resulted in the decision to forgo candy giveaways. The annual festival \u2014 which includes two other parades where handouts were already prohibited \u2014 is put on by Anoka Halloween Inc., a nonprofit made up of volunteers.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t know what else to do,\u201d said Liz McFarland, the festival\u2019s parade chair. \u201cSomething is going to happen with a child because people aren\u2019t watching their children.\u201d\n\nWhile there have been no injuries reported, previous parades have resulted in \u201cclose calls,\u201d McFarland said.\n\nThe Halloween hullabaloo over the ban has prompted calls to City Hall and some barbed posts on social media, which range from \u201cCandy IS Halloween!\u201d to \u201cHow about parents actually parent their children?\u201d\n\nCostumed children walked down Main Street during Anoka\u2019s Halloween festivities in 2015.\n\n\u201cIt was a very swift uprising of people in response to that announcement,\u201d said Colleen Halligan, secretary of this year\u2019s Anoka Halloween board of directors.\n\nA Facebook post made Friday about the rule change on the Anoka Halloween page had attracted about 250 comments as of Tuesday.\n\n\u201cWe had hoped that the floats and bands were why people were coming to our parade,\u201d the post read, \u201cbut we are learning that candy is very important.\u201d\n\nBefore this latest rule change, parade organizers say they had already barred tossing treats from floats, limiting candy to handouts by groups walking along the route. They had also tried restricting candy to certain sections of the parade and imposing minimum age requirements for those handing it out.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m out of ideas,\u201d McFarland said. \u201cWe had to regroup this year.\u201d\n\nSome found out about the new ban after parade applications became available online earlier this month.\n\nJeremy Anderson, who owns a local construction and retail business, said he has decided not to participate in this year\u2019s parade, despite it being a favorite tradition among his employees\u2019 families.\n\nHe said his business, Countryside Services of MN, typically buys a pallet of candy from Costco and spends thousands of dollars on goodies for parade revelers.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s just a bummer,\u201d Anderson said. \u201cIt\u2019s like every year they keep taking the fun out of it.\u201d\n\nThe outcry has festival organizers pondering ways to safely bring back the treats. They say they\u2019re now working to recruit more volunteers and fielding ideas.\n\n\u201cI hope to bring candy back,\u201d McFarland said. \u201cIt\u2019s Halloween. But safety is our No. 1 concern, and I don\u2019t want to be part of an accident.\u201d"}
{"text":"By Tom Bell\n\nArya Esfandmaz has declared he intends on showing the world what both he and the UK is capable of on the competition mats when he flies out to Abu Dhabi next month to compete in the World Pro Jiu Jitsu Championship.\n\nEsfandmaz won an all expenses paid trip to compete in the prestigious event after taking gold at the British National Pro Jiu Jitsu Championships in Birmingham, securing the $8000 package in the male +95kg division, which was a mix of black and brown belts. Arya also took bronze in the brown\/black absolute.\n\nThe Lucio \u2018Lagarto\u2019 Rodrigues brown belt coaches and trains out of Gracie Barra Knightsbridge and is known for his acrobatic, entertaining style, with many trademark flying submissions on his competitive resume.\n\nWith a background in Judo, training at the famed Budokwai from a young age, Esfandmaz has declared he wants to fly the British flag and show what the UK has to offer on a world stage.\n\nSpeaking to Jiu Jitsu Style, he said:\n\n\u201cThe tournament was really nice for me, I got to achieve one of my dreams in fighting black belts, as I always wanted to test myself at that level. I did well, I got lucky, and I ended up taking gold so it shows great improvement in myself.\n\n\u201cI also want to give a shout out to British BJJ because man, we had some good guys there like Bradley Hill and Viking Wong \u2013 they were very unlucky. They both drew Alan \u2018Finfou\u2019 Nascimento, so yeah, the UK smashed pretty much the whole thing and it showed that BJJ is improving a lot in the UK and it\u2019s really nice to see. I couldn\u2019t be more happy man. I just want to fly out there, do my best and bring home some medals.\u201d\n\nSpeaking passionately after training, the brown belt nostalgically spoke of early Jiu Jitsu in the UK and believes the country has an immense talent pool that we should be proud of compared to larger nations. He intends to show what the UK is capable of.\n\n\u201cI want to fly the flag, of course I do,\u201d says Arya. \u201cI want to show that we aren\u2019t some random small island that only likes to drink tea, we\u2019re quite handy on the mats too.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s funny, I remember back in my Judo days, I walked past Roger Gracie\u2019s first gym and it was like a garage man, it was really run down and that was only like ten, fifteen years ago and you look at his academy now.\n\n\u201cIt shows how much we\u2019ve improved and it shows how respected we are and I think we\u2019re top in Europe man, yeah, you have some Scandinavian countries coming through but I think we can smash it and to help fly that flag is something I want.\u201d\n\nThose familiar with the competitive circuit will know of the influx of Scandinavian talent Esfandmaz talks of, with the likes of Sebastian Brosche, winner of the Toukon Challenge Brown Belt Grand Prix and Eiren Cathrine Nygren who took double gold at brown belt at this year\u2019s Europeans.\n\n\u201cCalifornia alone is bigger than the UK,\u201d explains Arya. \u201cIf you look at some Californian academies, they have nice facilities, loads of training space and lots of training partners.\u201d\n\nThe entire UK holds a population of around 64 million people over a total area of 243, 610km2, however the Jiu Jitsu hotbed of California alone is home to 38 million over an area of 423, 970km2. You can fit the UK into the US around 38 times and there are just short of five Americans to every Brit.\n\n\u201cMan, in London, if you try and find some space to open an academy it\u2019s like, super hard,\u201d says Arya. \u201cPeople want space, people want apartments, they don\u2019t want to sell you space to put some mats down. It\u2019s hard to find the perfect training space here, so we need to appreciate our talent, look at the things that are actually against us and see how we\u2019ve done \u2013 it\u2019s really cool.\u201d\n\nEsfandmaz now looks forward to hard training with his master, Lagarto, and his partners at Gracie Barra Knightsbridge ahead of making his trip to the United Arab Emirates and is excited about the opportunity ahead of him.\n\n\u201cI always watched Abu Dhabi\u2019s championships, like, it is super professional,\u201d states Arya. \u201cThe fighters get a proper walkout, you even get a body guard to escort you. It\u2019s televised too, so that\u2019s an opportunity that\u2019s awesome to have, you know.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a really big opportunity and I\u2019m lucky enough to go into it training under Lagarto and Paul Hartley, as well as everyone else at Gracie Barra Knightsbridge. Man, I\u2019ve been waiting and I\u2019ve been training my ass off and now I\u2019m getting that confidence to go out there and be the best I can. Although Lagarto has called me out about doing cool moves, he wants me to win above everything else.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m like \u2018Lagarto! I\u2019m gonna do this, I\u2019m gonna flying armbar this guy\u2019, but he\u2019s like \u2018Arya! Go for the win first!\u2019 so I\u2019m going to do everything I can to take this opportunity for myself and for the UK.\u201d\n\nCheck out our latest issue HERE with cover star, Garry Tonon!"}
{"text":"10 years ago\n\nLimbaugh took aim at Powell's comments about the GOP.\n\nWASHINGTON (CNN) \u2013 Rush Limbaugh fired back at Colin Powell for his critical comments earlier this week, saying Wednesday that the former secretary of state should join the Democratic Party.\n\n\"What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat instead of claiming to be a Republican interested in reforming the Republican Party,\" Limbaugh said on his radio show Wednesday.\n\nLimbaugh also took aim at Powell's decision to endorse President Obama over John McCain during the presidential election, repeating his earlier sentiment that Powell's move was \"solely based on race.\"\n\n\"He's just mad at me because I'm the one person in the country who had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama,\" Limbaugh said. \"It was purely and solely based on race.\"\n\nDuring a speech on Monday, Powell said the \"the Republican Party is in deep trouble\" and said the GOP would be better off without Limbaugh, according to a report by the National Journal.\n\n\"I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without,\" Powell said.\n\nEarlier: Powell: GOP 'polarization' backfired in election"}
{"text":"Kim Richards is staying out of jail ... for now.\n\nThe ex-Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star, 51, was on the hot seat Wednesday linked to a probation violation after she was convicted of shoplifting more than $600 worth of merchandise at a Van Nuys Target store in August of 2015.\n\nWhile officials said she had not made good on the 30 days of community service and 52 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings the court ordered her to fulfill, on deadline, as part of her sentence, TMZ reported that her legal team was able to prove that she had completed both tasks late.\n\nBack on the red carpet: Kim Richards, 51, was allowed to remain a free woman Wednesday amid accusations the ex-RHOBH star had violated her probation in her 2015 shoplifting conviction\n\nThe presiding judge continued the matter until November, at which time the Southern California socialite - who remains on probation for the humiliating incident - must prove she's up-to-date on all of her court-ordered responsibilities.\n\nThe mother-of-four's shoplifting arrest came nearly a year ago, on August 2, 2015, when the former child actress was busted outside the retailer by a security guard with a swiped haul that consisted of children's-related items such as stickers, crayons and coloring books.\n\nKim, whose sister Kyle Richards remains a key cast member on Bravo's hit show set in the 90210, kept a low profile on Twitter Wednesday, with her last post having come Tuesday, in which she wished her youngest daughter, Kimberly Jackson, a happy 21st birthday.\n\nRock bottom: Kim's humiliating arrest came in August of 2015, when she was nabbed outside of a Van Nuys Target store with more than $600 in stolen merchandise\n\nReality bites: Kim's substance abuse issues were often the focal point of her storylines on RHOBH\n\nHard times: It's been a rough two years for the Los Angeles socialite, who was arrested twice in embarrassing circumstances, then lost her ex-husband and confidante Monty Brinson this past January to cancer\n\nAs reality TV viewers might remember, Jackson has been one of Kim's biggest supporters, as the dynamics of their nurturing - and sometimes-tragic - parent-child relationship were laid bare on Lifetime's The Mother\/Daughter Experiment: Celebrity Edition.\n\nViewers of the program saw Jackson admit that she's often forced into a 'caretaker' role over her mother, who was also arrested in April of 2015 in connection with public intoxication and more after a drunken, belligerent run-in with a police officer after she was kicked out of the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel.\n\nSisterhood: Kim posed in 2014 with sister Kyle, 47, who remains one of the key players on RHOBH\n\nOn the Lifetime program, Jackson said she was overwhelmed at times dealing with her mother, who she called 'fragile, physically and emotionally.'\n\nA teary-eyed Richards, after seeing her daughter's frustration, admitted, 'I need to remember how my decisions do affect Kimberly.'\n\nOn the show, Kim, who's also related to Kathy and Paris Hilton, seemed to believe that her time on Bravo's RHOBH 'really hurt me because I was struggling with certain things.'"}
{"text":"Julia Flynn Siler | The House of Mondavi | 2007 | 14 minutes (3,328 words)\n\nFor our latest Longreads Member Pick, we\u2019re excited to feature an excerpt from The House of Mondavi, Julia Flynn Siler\u2019s book about a family that turned a Napa Valley winery into a billion-dollar fortune. Thanks to Siler and Gotham Books for sharing it with the Longreads community.\n\nDownload .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)\n\n* * *\n\nCrush: 1966\u20131972\n\nThe first few months at the Robert Mondavi Winery were chaotic. Carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, and the winemaker, Warren Winiarski, were all working on top of one another. By late summer, there were walls, but still no roof, catwalks, or ladders to reach the tops of the new stainless steel fermenters. Parts were missing and there was no place to do any lab work\u2014let alone a lab technician to do it. Since there were no desks or offices or tables, Winiarski worked from a clipboard. Robert, who had a small office in a trailer, was seldom in one place for long. Winiarski would see him early in the morning and late in the day; the rest of the time, he was a whirlwind of energy, conferring with the builders, making deals for grapes, consulting, and purchasing equipment.\n\nRobert\u2019s energy was infectious and his aspirations heady. But he was strongly motivated to start making wine. Fired from Krug without any significant severance pay, Robert was under severe financial pressure. With construction costs mounting, he sought to produce cash flow as quickly as possible. So he set an ambitious timeline. He was determined to bring in the harvest that first year and crush grapes to make the Robert Mondavi Winery\u2019s first vintage. From groundbreaking to crush, he had two, or perhaps three, months at most. Although Robert had probably not fully formed his intentions for the new winery in 1966, even by then the people who were helping him to make it happen recognized that his dreams were lofty.\n\n\u201cIt was not meant to be a small winery and it was not meant to be a family winery.\u201d\n\n\u201cFrom the beginning, the Robert Mondavi Winery was meant to reach out,\u201d says Winiarski.\n\nOnce again, the friendships that Robert had built after twenty years in the valley came to his rescue. William Bonetti, by then the production chief at Charles Krug, helped Winiarski with some lab work, allowing him to come over and use the Krug lab to run simple analytical tests of the fermenting juice, as well as to borrow equipment and chemicals. Winiarski had assumed that Bonetti had gotten Peter\u2019s implicit, if not explicit, permission to help out his brother, but it wasn\u2019t exactly clear, since neither brother had spoken openly to Winiarski of the simmering feud.\n\nKrug also crushed grapes for the Robert Mondavi winery\u2019s first year, sold it yeast, bottles, and a labeling machine, and loaned the new winery a bottling machine free of charge. As a safety net, Peter and Rosa agreed to pay Robert a $9,000-a-year consulting fee after he was fired, although he never performed any consulting services for Krug. While they didn\u2019t welcome Robert as a competitor, they also didn\u2019t want him to fail. As Peter later explained, \u201cWe felt that he needed some support from the family inasmuch as he ventured, and we wanted to see him make a success of what he was doing.\u201d Louis Martini and the winemakers at Beaulieu also pitched in to help out their old friend.\n\nAnd when the time came to design the winery\u2019s first label, Robert again turned to people he had worked with at Krug: a well-known local printer named James E. Beard and a graphic designer named Mallette Dean. Dean had done beautiful work over the years for Krug, including a delicate woodcut of a farmer tending grapevines that had graced the masthead of the Krug newsletter \u201cBottles & Bins.\u201d\n\nThe label the pair created for the new Robert Mondavi Winery captured its spirit centered around Dean\u2019s wood engraving of the Cliff May building, with its elegant arch and wings. But Dean struggled with a lack of vertical balance in the frame, which he eventually corrected by adding a flank of poplar trees to the scene. In the real setting, a series of trees planted on the walkway had failed to flourish in the 1970s, so eventually, to match the reality to the image on the label, the winery ended up planting poplar trees where Dean had imagined them.\n\nDean\u2019s label for the Robert Mondavi Winery quickly became one of the iconic images of Napa Valley.\n\nPhoto: aphasiafilms, flickr\n\nThe cool weather that year also came to Robert\u2019s aid, pushing harvest back by several weeks. Fieldworkers picked the last Cabernet grapes on Veterans Day, November 11, in a season marked by tule fog and cool evenings that often cloaked the valley until ten or eleven in the morning.\n\nTo the astonishment of some of the friends and rivals who\u2019d called him crazy, Robert managed to make wine that first year. In 1966, the new Robert Mondavi Winery crushed about 490 tons of grapes\u2014even though there was nothing even close to resembling a building on the site yet. By the time the crush rolled around, there were only concrete slabs on the ground, foundations for the fermenting tanks. In the open air, Robert pumped the juice from the fermenting tanks into other tanks. As summer became autumn, workers were plastering the walls of the newly erected building, even as Warren Winiarski made the wine.\n\nReturning to the rituals and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church, Robert marked his winery\u2019s first crush of the grapes surrounded by his immediate family and his most supportive friends on a sunny morning in mid-September. Robert halted the whirl of painting, plastering, and sanding for a few hours. On a concrete platform surrounded by dirt, a group of a few dozen people gathered on the north side of what would become the winery. Father Levinus of the nearby Carmelite monastery, wearing a long black robe that fell to his ankles and a white cassock over that, faced the gondola that held the grapes. Marcia Mondavi, with her short-cropped dark hair and a ladylike knee-length skirt and sleeveless blouse, bowed her head and clasped her hands together. The priest began his benediction in English sprinkled with Latin words.\n\nPhoto courtesy of Robert Mondavi Winery\n\nIn the background, Winiarski operated the lift that raised the gondola filled with grapes and tipped them into the hopper. From there, the fruit moved along a conveyer belt to the crusher. The mechanics of the moment only hinted at the deeper transformations that would take place as the grapes moved toward their transfiguration into wine. The atmosphere was solemn: There was no round of applause or cheering as Robert\u2019s partners Fred Holmes, Bill Hart, and Ivan Shoch stood watching, their families beside them. Also present was Charles Daniels and two of his sons. Daniels had been distributing Krug\u2019s wines since the 1940s and was close friends with Robert. He wanted to support him in his new venture and offered to distribute his wines when they were released in the spring of 1967, even though he knew that support would infuriate Peter.\n\nFor growers such as Holmes and Hart, crush is a moment of death as well as birth. The life that they have nurtured from bud break through harvest is coming to an end; another is about to begin. \u201cThere is a death taking place here,\u201d reflects Warren Winiarski, who later became one of the valley\u2019s most famous winemakers. \u201cIt\u2019s the death of the grape. I never saw a grower sad, but solemn. They\u2019re glad that it\u2019s happening but it\u2019s a mixed feeling. They\u2019ve worked all that season to make these grapes what they are and now they are being crushed, being destroyed in order to be reborn into a different substance. They\u2019re glad but also a little bit mindful of destruction.\u201d\n\nBut that moment of solemnity passed. Robert said a few words about a new beginning. The group included workmen clad in overalls and hats to shield them from the sun. Marjorie began pouring the white wine that had waited for the group beneath a folding card table in a plastic tub filled with ice. Looking cool and elegant, with her blond hair pinned into a chignon, Marjorie, like her daughter, had dressed for the heat, in a conservative A-line skirt that stopped just below the knee and white flats, even though miniskirts and go-go boots were shocking the nation elsewhere.\n\nAfter the ceremony, the Holmeses, Shochs, and Mondavis gathered for a group photo in front of the grape-filled gondola. The adults held long-stemmed wineglasses. Robert smiled at Marjorie. Timothy, fair-haired and with the gangly look of a teenager, wore black-and-white-laced Converse sneakers. Then just fifteen years old, he, too, held a wineglass in his hand. Marcia, looking contemplative, sat below the row of standing adults. Perhaps in a foreshadowing of the family drama to come, Robert\u2019s elder son was absent on that momentous day.\n\n* * *\n\nThe new Mondavi winery was the most significant to be built in the valley since Prohibition, and with barely three dozen bonded wineries operating in the valley at the time, the groundbreaking marked a key turning point. \u201cThe construction of the Robert Mondavi Winery marks the effective beginning of American wine\u2019s rise in both quality and prestige,\u201d wrote the wine historian Paul Lukacs.\n\n\u201cWhat happened there helped ignite the revolution in American tastes.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt also helped change broad public attitudes toward wine in general and American wine in particular.\u201d\n\nThat fall, however, the significance of Robert\u2019s bold new winery\u2014a venture that some dismissed as \u201cRobert\u2019s Folly\u201d and others as an example of his hubris\u2014seemed to offer concrete proof of the fissure between the proud and talented Mondavi brothers. Fellow vintners watched the rising feud between Robert and Peter with a mixture of sympathy and dismay. After all, Robert was building his winery just five miles south of Krug on Highway 29. The brothers were barely on speaking terms. Other vintners in the valley didn\u2019t talk about it much; mostly, they looked the other way.\n\nBut what also caught everyone\u2019s attention and provoked some amused comments was that almost as soon as he started his own winery, Robert began pronouncing his surname differently than Peter, Rosa, and the rest of the family.\n\nHe restored it to \u201cMon-dah-vee,\u201d which was how the name was pronounced before Cesare had Americanized it after immigrating to the U.S.\n\nMeanwhile, Peter and the rest of the family continued to pronounce their last name as they always had done: \u201cMon-day-vee.\u201d\n\nHowever slight the change, the new pronunciation had the intended effect of distinguishing Robert from his younger brother. When his longtime friend Charles Daniels asked Robert why he\u2019d changed it, Robert explained with a straight face: \u201cThat\u2019s the proper Italian pronunciation.\u201d Daniels also recalled that around that time, some people in the valley began asking, \u201cWhat is it with this Mondavi business?\u201d referring to the rift between the brothers and Robert\u2019s startling decision to Europeanize his last name. Robert never formally announced the change in pronunciation; it just spread through usage. In later years, his sister Helen would even jokingly introduce herself as \u201cHelen Mon-dah-vee Mon-day-vee.\u201d\n\nAnd soon enough many people\u2014and especially newcomers to the valley\u2014started referring to the entire family as \u201cMon-dah-vees\u201d\u2014a galling, frequent reminder to Peter of Robert\u2019s linguistic coup over the rest of the family.\n\nThe Robert Mondavi Winery\u2019s growing reputation was built on fine wines, meaning expensive wines made almost exclusively from Napa Valley grapes. It was also built on Robert\u2019s gift for hiring talented winemakers. Keeping those winemakers was another matter, though. For Robert faced an ongoing problem: With one son in the business and another likely to join, the family would always get the credit for the elegant wines that were produced at Oakville, even though it was often the staffers doing much of the work. And although Robert would pay employees 10 to 15 percent above other wineries\u2019 wages and offered such perks as weekly wine tastings, there was a ceiling to any career ambitions that a staffer without the last name Mondavi might entertain at the winery. The family openly acknowledged this.\n\nMichael, upon his return, worked hard and earned just $650 a week. To try to drum up business, he would sometimes drive slowly down Highway 29 from Rutherford to Oakville, waiting for cars to stack up behind him. Driving a pickup truck borrowed from his father-in-law, he\u2019d then slowly make the right-hand turn into the winery. When a car or two followed him, as they often did, he\u2019d jump out of his truck and stick out his hand, saying, \u201cHi there, I\u2019m Michael Mondavi. Would you like a tour?\u201d Yet, Michael also clearly enjoyed an advantage because of his last name, even joking about it at times. On meeting Michael for the first time for a job interview, one applicant asked if he minded that the applicant\u2019s wife also worked at the winery.\n\nRobert\u2019s elder son leaned back in his chair and grinned: \u201cNepotism can be a good thing.\u201d\n\nBut this practice carried a sizable cost for the company: Ambitious employees often ended up quitting for better opportunities elsewhere. The first to go was Warren Winiarski, the academic refugee from the University of Chicago. Winiarski worked through the first two crushes at the Robert Mondavi Winery, amid the chaos of construction, and left shortly before the third in 1968.\n\nThis first year, Winiarski did much of the lab work himself as well as supervising crush, fermentation, and aging of the reds. Michael was doing his National Guard duty for much of the first year as the Vietnam War raged, so Winiarski took his guidance from Robert. In terms of the day-to-day production, Winiarski was in charge, without any sort of directions in terms of style from either Robert or Michael to produce, for example, Bordeaux-style wines. Because so much else was going at the winery\u2014completing construction, negotiating grape contracts, and selling their first year\u2019s wine\u2014Winiarski was left mostly to his own devices. Yet by 1967, Michael had returned from the National Guard and become, in title at least, the winemaker at Mondavi.\n\nThat proved frustrating for Winiarski, who, despite his differences with Lee Stewart, had embraced his old boss\u2019s style of paying close attention to even the seemingly most minor details of winemaking. Michael, in turn, had no formal training in enology or chemistry and while he had absorbed a general understanding of winemaking from his days as a cellar rat at Krug, he was not by nature highly detail-oriented. So when incidents occurred in Winiarski\u2019s second and third years at Mondavi, such as Michael taking the valves off the tanks and not replacing them, thus inadvertently exposing the wine to air, Winiarski started to wish he had more control. \u201cThere were things he didn\u2019t see because he didn\u2019t care,\u201d says Winiarski. \u201cHe liked wine but it wasn\u2019t his passion.\u201d\n\nWiniarski had borrowed money in 1965 to buy fifteen acres of his own up on Howell Mountain, where he hoped to plant a vineyard. His first season in 1967 was a disappointment but he didn\u2019t give up. The following year, his plans to start a vineyard of his own started to come together. So, hoping he could support his family as a freelance winemaker and consultant, he announced he was quitting the Robert Mondavi Winery, shortly before the crucial time of harvest. As Winiarski tells it, Michael was not happy about the timing of his departure. But \u201cI didn\u2019t come to California to be the number-two man in a two-man winery,\u201d recalled Winiarski, referring to his relatively short stay at Souverain Cellars. \u201cThe same thing was true at Mondavi.\u201d While Winiarski learned an extraordinary amount at both places, he bridled at working under someone else.\u201cEveryone who is devoted to making something wants to have control of the material\u2014finally and completely\u2014and that couldn\u2019t happen there because of Mike and Robert. It was their material,\u201d meaning it was ultimately their grapes, yeast, barrels, and wine.\n\nIt didn\u2019t take long for Robert to recruit Winiarski\u2019s replacement: a talented Croatian immigrant named Miljenko \u201cMike\u201d Grgich, who was then working at Beaulieu Vineyard for Andr\u00e9 Tchelistcheff, the quality-driven winemaker who demanded high standards of cleanliness and precision from his staff. Tchelistcheff was about to retire, but ironically his own son had applied for his job, which seemed to suggest that Grgich was unlikely to become the next winemaker at Beaulieu, the most revered producer of fine wines in the valley. Robert knew of Grgich\u2019s situation and thought he might be looking for a new position. So the men arranged a chat in the fall of 1968, just a few weeks after Winiarski had left.\n\nGrgich made the short, two-mile drive down Highway 29 and met with Robert on a wooden bench, near the Robert Mondavi Winery\u2019s mission-style arch. It was a sunny fall day and Robert\u2019s enthusiasm was infectious, as he explained to Grgich his dream of making French-style wines with the newest and most technologically advanced equipment available. Robert also explained that his son recently had returned from duty in the National Guard and was the vice president of winemaking. \u201cI need someone to help my son Michael, who is very young,\u201d Robert told Grgich. While his job title would be head of quality control, in fact he would run the winemaking operation for the family and be the actual winemaker, in a deus-ex-machina fashion. In return, Robert offered Grgich the opportunity to build his reputation as one of the finest winemakers of his generation.\n\n\u201cMike, if you join my company, I\u2019ll make out of you a little Andr\u00e9 Tchelistcheff!\u201d he promised him.\n\nIt was an irresistible offer, made more so because of Robert\u2019s evident passion to make the Robert Mondavi Winery America\u2019s finest. Grgich accepted and got to work, introducing\u2014among other methods he had learned at Beaulieu\u2014malolactic fermentation, a technique that lends a soft, buttery quality to wines by converting hard malic acids into soft lactic acids. Every Monday, led by Robert, the staff would have their own blind tastings of Mondavi wines against the best from France. It entered into company legend that the winery was California\u2019s largest importer of French grand crus because of these competitive tastings. Robert showed up at the winery nearly as early as Grgich, at six or seven each morning during crush, to taste the progress of the fermenting juice from the barrels or discuss a technical issue with his winemaker.\n\nThe very first Cabernet Grgich made for the winery, the 1969, was entered in a blind tasting\u2014which meant that the wine labels would be hidden from the judges\u2014against several other Cabernet Sauvignons from California. Organized by the Los Angeles Times\u2019s wine writer, Robert Lawrence Balzer, the judges, who included Tchelistcheff and Robert, had made most of the wines being tasted that day. When the judges voted the 1969 Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet as the very best, that decision led to a rush of favorable publicity for the young winery, catapulting it overnight into the ranks of such revered wines as those made at Beaulieu.\n\nThough Grgich had made the wine, Robert took credit for it.\n\nThe Balzer tasting, as it came to be known, was the first big publicity breakthrough for the winery, sending its sales soaring. It helped attract the attention of the European wine trade, which, a few years later, in 1976, would organize a blind tasting that would have an even more significant impact on Napa Valley.\n\n* * *\n\nFrom The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty by Julia Flynn Siler (juliaflynnsiler.com). Published by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), LLC. Copyright \u00a9 2007 by Julia Flynn Siler.\n\nPhoto: flydolce, flickr"}
{"text":"A roundup of every time Jason Louv has appeared with Duncan Trussell on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour to talk about magick!\n\nHey there! Over the last couple years I\u2019ve been very honored and grateful to team up with psychedelic avenger Duncan Trussell and become a regular guest on his show. About once a year I show up to do a \u201cMagick Class With Jason Louv\u201d spot, and Duncan and I travel across the multiverse to discuss the heavens and hells of psychedelic and magical consciousness.\n\nHere\u2019s the shows, in chronological order:\n\nDuncan Trussell Family Hour #114\n\nIn my first appearance on Duncan\u2019s show, we talk about the occult nature of the media; if there actually is a massive conspiracy to constrain human consciousness or if people are just that way all on their own; the nature of the Qliphothic Hell Realms and lots, lots more. This one starts off dark and just gets darker, but worry not, there\u2019s LVX at the end of the tunnel!\n\nDuncan says: Magician, author, and mystic Jason Louv (Monsanto Vs. The World, Queen Valentine, Generation Hex, The Psychick Bible) discusses the dangers and potential benefits that come from walking the magickal path!\n\nDuncan Trussell Family Hour #160\n\nI follow up my previous appearance with a good general talk on the nature of Magick and the critical importance of laser-pointed consciousness in our fragmented, mentally scattered world. How to jump across multiple dimensions by shifting your focus is also discussed, so there\u2019s that, too.\n\nDuncan says: Jason Louv, Ultraculture, magick.me, returns to the DTFH to teach Duncan about the secret arts!!\n\nDuncan Trussell Family Hour #230\n\nIn my latest appearance, we talk about the great Renaissance magician Dr. John Dee, the deeper history of the Western occult tradition and the nature of the universe itself as the embodied mind of God. These are all fun subjects you can discuss with your family around the dinner table after listening intently!\n\nDuncan says: A deluxe episode with an exclusive new song from award winning mega-band Win Streak Bonus Star along with a deep conversation with author and occultist Jason Louv. We explore John Dee, the Enochian angels and the magical arts.\n\n(Check it out at Duncan\u2019s site here, it\u2019s not on YouTube currently.)\n\nIf you\u2019re inspired to learn more about magick after listening to these shows, you check out my free course on chaos magick here!"}
{"text":"All Montgomery County and City of Rockville facilities will be closed and no programs will operate on Dec. 25 and Jan. 1.\n\nHoliday hours for city facilities are as follows:\n\nRockville City Hall will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.\n\nRockville Senior Center will close at 5 p.m. on Monday and on Dec. 31 and will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.\n\nLincoln Park Community Center, Thomas Farm Community Center and Twinbrook Community Recreation Center will be open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Monday, on Wednesday, on Dec. 31 and on Jan. 2. The centers will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.\n\nCroydon Creek Nature Center will be closed on Monday and on Dec. 31. The center will be open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dec. 26. The center will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.\n\nGlenview Mansion will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.\n\nF. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre be closed Christmas through New Year's Day.\n\nRockville Swim and Fitness Center will be open 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Dec. 24 and 31 and closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.\n\nRecycling and refuse collection for Monday and for Dec. 31 will not be affected. Collection for the remainder of each week will shift forward one day, with Friday collection made on Saturday.\n\nThe city also is recycling cut and artificial Christmas trees. Click here for details.\n\nParking will be free at city-owned meters and garages on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. For payment information on Rockville Town Square parking garages, go to rockvilletownsquare.com\/parking.\n\nFor more information about city facilities or programs call 240-314-5000 or visitwww.rockvillemd.gov.\n\nThe following county and state facilities will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year's Day:\n\nMontgomery County government offices. Offices also will be closed Monday.\n\nState offices and courts.\n\nMontgomery County Public School administrative offices will be closed Dec. 22-25 and Jan. 1.\n\nCounty libraries. Branches also will be closed on Monday. Branches will close at 6 p.m. on Dec. 31. Olney Express Service will be closed Dec. 23 through Jan. 1. Gaithersburg Interim Library will be closed Dec. 24-25, Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.\n\nAll recreation facilities will be closed on Monday, on Christmas Day and on New Year's Day. All county community and neighborhood recreation centers will be closed Monday through Jan. 1. County senior centers will be closed Sunday through Jan. 1.\n\nCounty liquor stores. Stores will be open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday and on Dec. 31.\n\nShady Grove Processing Facility and Transfer Station. The station will close at 5 p.m. on Monday.\n\nRecycling and refuse collection for Monday and for Dec. 31 will not be affected. Collection for the remainder of each week will shift forward one day, with Friday collection made on Saturday.\n\nParking will be free at county public garages, lots and curbside meters on Monday, on Christmas Day and on New Year's Day.\n\nTransportation services are running on modified schedules on Christmas Day and New Year's Day:\n\nRide On: Sunday schedule. Service ends early Monday, Christmas Eve, with last buses departing terminals around 10 p.m.\n\nMetrobus: Sunday schedule.\n\nMetrorail: Sunday schedule.\n\nTRiPS Commuter Stores near Silver Spring and Friendship Heights Metro stations will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day."}
{"text":"In this guest blog, Caroline Nielsen explores how war changed the lives of women on the home front not just in terms of their daily work, but in the clothes they wore to do it.\n\nOne day in early 1915 in the pit village of Horden, County Durham, 22 year-old Elizabeth \u201cLizzie\u201d Holmes set off to post a letter for her father-in-law. She was on her way home from work, and the Post Office was on the way. This seemingly innocuous errand ended with her being mobbed by children.\n\nWhy did Lizzie inadvertently become the centre of attention that day? Lizzie was wearing men\u2019s work clothes. Her heavy shirt, leather trousers and boots was the standard gear of all above-ground pit workers. Along with a number of her friends and neighbours, Lizzie had taken a labouring job at the local pit operating the coke ovens. For the first time, the children were confronted with a woman wearing an outfit that they had previously only associated with their fathers, grandfathers and older brothers. For one brief moment, Lizzie reminded all who saw her that the war had changed fundamentally changed British industry as they knew it. Women were taking men\u2019s jobs in all industries, including in the male-dominated coal industry.\n\nThat the simple act of wearing men\u2019s work clothes was evidently so shocking seems odd to modern audiences. But in 1915, trousers were an exclusively male garment. That doesn\u2019t mean that women did not periodically wear trousers albeit in very limited contexts. Women\u2019s fashion had toyed with the idea of trousers for at least three decades before Lizzie set off on her errand. A small number of Victorian and Edwardian ladies adopted baggy trousers and \u201cbifurcated skirts\u201d (long culottes) as part of their campaign against the restrictive fashions of the time. In spite of their efforts, trouser-wearing was not widely adopted until the late 1920s and 1930s when masculine tailoring became a staple of haute couture. Even the sportiest Edwardian lady pilots and racing-car drivers preferred to tie their long skirts modestly around their ankles.\n\nMale impersonators were also a regular feature on British music hall circuits where performers like Vesta Tilley drew large audiences. These women performed risqu\u00e9 songs while dressed as young men. Part of the thrill was that audience could see their legs! Lower-class women had, of course, been wearing work trousers for centuries. During the Victorian era, leather trousers were associated with the \u201cpit brow lasses\u201d of Lancashire. Women who chose to wear \u201cmen\u2019s clothes\u201d outside of these contexts risked a more negative response from their communities. Cross-dressing was a moral issue. By the early twentieth century, dressing in masculine clothes was gradually being associated with lesbianism. Trousers were associated with clear contexts: politicised fashion and distinct regional trades. They were not associated with respectable miner\u2019s wives, at least not in the Durham area. The fact that it was Lizzie, a woman who may have already attracted negative comments from her community, probably added to the children\u2019s response. She was an extrovert and in her own words, \u201ca bit rough and ready\u201d. She had tattoos, liked a drink, and on at least one occasion ended up in a fight, an event which she enjoyed describing when she was interviewed in her mid-80s.\n\nLizzie revelled in the notoriety of being proclaimed \u201cthe first woman in Horden to wear trousers!\u201d. We will never know if this title was truly deserved. However, her story demonstrates how the First World War expanded the employment opportunities available to women. Lizzie was offered the opportunity to work in a trade that had previously been barred to her as a married woman in a County Durham village. The Northern Coalfield was almost exclusively male. The 1911 census shows how shocking the arrival of female coke oven workers would have been in Horden: officially there were only 13 female coke workers recorded in the entire Durham area. While this figure was definitely an under-estimate, it explains why the children were so surprised!\n\nLizzie\u2019s time in the coal industry was short-lived. Like most women who joined heavy industry during the First World War, Lizzie saw her wartime job as a temporary expedient. She expected to leave the job once her miner husband came home from the front. The majority of married women never entered the labour market during the war, believing that their place was at home with their families. The Government, trade unions and employers similarly saw women\u2019s employment only as temporary. The end of the war saw the mass withdrawal of women from the labour market. Some went voluntarily like Lizzie. Many others were summarily dismissed. Some trade unions began lobbying for a ban on the employment of married women, concerned that the war had all too readily demonstrated that women were able to compete with their male counterparts. Women were encouraged to return to more \u201cgender appropriate\u201d trades like domestic service. Lizzie spent the rest of her working life as a charwoman, raising her family and caring for her wounded husband Jimmy.\n\nClick here to view an image of Lizzie (front row, far right).\n\nLizzie was interviewed in 1976 as part of the Peterlee Development Project, a collaboration between the artist Stuart Brisley, Peterlee Council and the Artists Placement Group. Some of the materials from this are now available on through Durham County Records Office and their People Past and Present Archive."}
{"text":"In his book, \"The Clintons' War on Women,\" high-profile Donald Trump campaign strategist and noted conspiracy theorist Roger Stone claims Chelsea Clinton \u2014 daughter of Democratic nominee Hillary and former-President Bill \u2014 had four plastic surgeries in order to look less like her biological father, Webb Hubbell.\n\nPromoting the book in what looks like a hotel banquet hall over the weekend, Stone reasons, \"Hillary admits in her own book that a large football player-sized man taught her the proper way to hold a baby. Who could that be?\"\n\nAdvertisement:\n\nHubbell \u2014 who was associate attorney general during Clinton's presidency \u2014 played offensive tackle for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks and was drafted by the Chicago Bears before a knee injury ended his career.\n\n\"And if you look at her, she doesn\u2019t look anything like Bill,\" Stone continued. \"She looks just like her daddy, despite four plastic surgeries, the youngest one when she\u2019s only 18. What 18-year-old gets plastic surgery unless you\u2019re trying to, I don\u2019t know, thin out the lips and make you look less like your daddy?\"\n\nWatch below, via MediaMatters:"}
{"text":"+1 Share 2K Shares\n\nChildren\u2019s Healthcare of Atlanta, one of the premier pediatric hospital systems in the southeastern U.S., announced Tuesday that they would be able to support a plan by State Representative Allen Peake (R-Macon) to introduce a medical marijuana bill. While not a rousing endorsement of medical marijuana, Children\u2019s says they are in support of the bill because of the research opportunities that will come along with it.\n\nIn a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Children\u2019s said \u201cthere has not been enough evidence-based research around the use of (cannabis oil) studying its safety and tolerability in children with seizure disorders and thus should not be used generally.\u201d However, they said they were \u201cin support of legislation that would allow clinical research by academic institutions to further investigate this compound for the treatment of intractable seizures in children.\u201d\n\nRep. Peake was expected to introduce his bill today but that got postponed when snow started falling and the House of Representatives adjourned until 1:00 PM Wednesday. It is expected that Rep. Peake\u2019s bill will place a heavy emphasis on medical marijuana in the form of CBD drops and tinctures."}
{"text":"RIM CEO Thorsten Heins is sort of like the captain of the Titanic, except the Titanic was popular and people were sad when it sank. But unlike Captain Edward Smith, Heins is either crazy or a liar. Or both.\n\nThis week, while most of America was either preparing for or in the midst of a beer-and-meat-induced catatonic state, RIM's current and final chief executive took a frosty page from the old Iraqi Information Minister, telling the world that the sky was not falling, but if it were, it was a chocolate sky. Lift up your mouth and let the delicious death spiral sprinkles fall into your mouth! Everything is lovely, nothing harmed, the children of tomorrow smile, palms upward, waiting for a new BB10 device. They tie ribbons in their hair and wait.\n\nHe also spit out a salvo of statements diametrically opposed to the fabric of reality. Here's all the proof you need to decide that RIM isn't just fucked, but not even due for an enjoyable fucking. The man in charge is full of shit. To wit, from an op-ed in the Globe and Mail that will make you weep:\n\n1. \"Don't count BlackBerry out.\"\n\nSorry, everyone has. It's over. And a weak cliche of ra-ra-ism isn't going to change that.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n2. \"We believe RIM is a company at the beginning of a transition that we expect will once again change the way people communicate.\"\n\nThere is nothing we've seen of BB10 that suggests it would've been anything more than a catchup grab at iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. There is zero about BB10 that's of the future.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n3. \"As we prepare to launch our new mobile platform, BlackBerry 10, in the first quarter of next year, we expect to empower people as never before. BlackBerry 10 will connect users not just to each other, but to the embedded systems that run constantly in the background of everyday life - from parking meters and car computers to credit card machines and ticket counters.\"\n\nThis would be a grandiose statement even from Google or Apple.\n\n4. \"We are working diligently on BlackBerry 10 in order to provide a compelling experience for our loyal enterprise customers and consumers. While we are in a very competitive and constantly changing market, customers benefit from this competition and continued innovation.\"\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\"Customers\" do, but not RIM customers. Nobody who wants a BlackBerry will benefit by waiting for an operating system that will almost certainly not see the light of day.\n\n5. \"As has been reported, RIM has hired outside advisers to help me and the other members of the executive team think about the business in new ways and to explore a range of alternatives that leverage our core strengths and build on the BlackBerry brand.\"\n\nTranslation: we have brought in consultants to figure out how we can die gracefully. Okay, actually that's the sanest thing he's said in months. Minus the \"build on the BlackBerry brand\" part.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n6. \"In response to our tough quarterly results last week, our employees received thousands of e-mails from around the world from retail customers, carrier partners, developers, family, friends and neighbours expressing their support and loyalty to BlackBerry. They are - like many of us - BlackBerry people by choice.\"\n\nHow many BlackBerry users have any brand loyalty beyond their job requirements? And how many of those \"thousands\" of cheery messages, if they are real, were matched by thousands of messages from the thousands of RIM employees you laid off because your company is dying?\n\nAdvertisement\n\nBut it might be a recent interview that shows just how detached Thorsten Heins is from anything you could call the real world:\n\n7. \"There's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now,\" Heins said on CBC's Metro Morning radio show. 8. \"I'm not talking about the company as I, kind of, took it over six months ago. I'm talking about the company (in the) state it's in right now.\"\n\nAdvertisement\n\nBut Thorsten, you yourself speak of \"tough quarterly results,\" how yours is a \"challenging job,\" and how the company needs to \"start to surface.\" From one side of your mouth you downplay RIM's necrosis, and from the other side, deny it altogether. At least Nero had the decency to fiddle while Rome burned\u2014Heins just plays the bullshit saxophone. We get that RIM needs to puff itself up if it wants to attract buyers for an inevitable corporate butchering\u2014like a diseased peacock that still needs a mate\u2014but this is just unseemly.\n\nIf, for whatever reason, you need more evidence that the man is unfit to see RIM droop and splinter in its last gloomy days, consider the fact that, at one point, Thorsten Heins said\u2014without a shred of irony:\n\nAdvertisement\n\n9. \"Let's rock and roll this!\"\n\nThat is all."}
{"text":"Welcome To The Pittman Center Community Volunteer Fire Department\n\nServing and Protecting since 1983\n\nBURN PERMITS ARE REQUIRED\n\nOCTOBER 15TH THRU MAY 15TH.\n\nVisit: burnsafetn.org to obtain a permit online or to see\n\nregulations for outdoor burning.\n\nPlease call 865-429-7020 to obtain a permit by phone.\n\nORDER YOURS TODAY!\n\nNow accepting donations on line.\n\nClick on the \"Donate\" button.\n\nFree Smoke Detector\n\nIf you need a Smoke Detector click on \"Smoke Detector Request \", fill out the form and click submit. We will come to your home and install the Smoke Detectors FREE OF CHARGE. If you do not live in our response area, we will pass on your information to your responding fire department.\n\nStation 2 is available for parties and meetings.\n\nClick on \"Station Rental\" for details"}
{"text":"We hear a lot about what could be done with the Blockchain, this decentralized ledger which record permanently and almost instantly information from all around the world. This is the first time in our history that we created such a ledger, it's not about chatting with someone else, it's about agreeing on facts with everyone else every couple of minutes.\n\nHowever we don't hear much about the actual projects the big corporations are working on. Let's see the 7 most important:\n\n1. IBM and Samsung - IoT\n\nWould you like to see your fridge, your phone and your car transact with other things? IBM and Samsung are working on a project unveiled at CES 2015 called ADEPT which will serve as a ledger of existence for billions of devices that will autonomously broadcast transactions between each other\u2019s.\n\n2. NASDAQ, NYSE \u2013 Stock Exchange\n\nOr how to bypass Automated Clearing House which take days to record wall street transactions. \"As Blockchain technology continues to redefine not only how the exchange sector operates, but the global financial economy as a whole, Nasdaq aims to be at the center of this watershed development.\" said Bob Greifeld, CEO, Nasdaq\n\n3. Deloitte - Audit & Consulting\n\nReal time auditing, land registry and reconsolidation between trading partners, this is just the top of the iceberg Deloitte is building with its new platform called Rubix.\n\nDeloitte is also working internally on a stealth solution to automate some of its auditing processing\n\n4. BNP, Barclays, City, UBS, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale, Goldman Sachs, Santander - Banks\n\nDo you know that your banks depends heavily on some protocol to transfer money? Using the Blockchain will allow them to get rid of VISA, Mastercard and SWIFT.\n\n5. Minecraft - Games and Virtual reality\n\nEvery game has it's own currency system and some become so important that you can find a stable exchange rate with fiat currencies. This is the case with World of Warcraft gold or Second Life Linden dollars. Blockchain bring to these world a currency that they can use inside the game and trade on Amazon at the same time. Some servers of Minecraft already implemented such systems.\n\n6. Western Union - Money transfer solutions\n\nThe famous dinosaur of money transfer is facing a big threat with the new Fintech startup and want to face it with the same weapon. They already set up a lab with Ripple to study the Blockchain technology and improve their cross border payment. Will they adapt?\n\n7. Honduras, Isles of man - Governments\n\nWe would expect the Blockchain to be used for a voting system, but it seems the first aspect interesting for government is registries. Registry of lands in one case, registry of companies in the other one, notaries might not be such an important job in the future.\n\nIf you want to know more and discuss details, let me some comments or send me a private message. I would also be pleased to hear some more examples !"}
{"text":"Passengers were stuck in the train without lights for about five minutes, and were guided to the station as much as 40 minutes from the time the train broke down, an eyewitness says.\n\nSINGAPORE: Some passengers found themselves walking on the Light Rail Transit (LRT) tracks in near-darkness in Sengkang on Tuesday evening (Mar 29), due to a train fault.\n\nLRT passengers forced to walk on track after train fault in Se... Sengkang LRT breakdown: Up to 30 people had to walk on the LRT tracks in near-darkness after a train fault.Full story: http:\/\/bit.ly\/1Rp0gEg(Video: Mohann) Posted by Channel NewsAsia on Tuesday, 29 March 2016\n\nAdvertisement\n\nOff-duty cameraman Rajamohann Alrum Murugaiah said he was on the train travelling from Sengkang station to Renjong station at about 7pm when it stopped suddenly about 150m to 200m from Renjong station. He said the lights and ventilation fans went out for about five minutes, before coming on again.\n\nFacebook video: What it was like to walk on tracks in near-darkness\n\nSBS Transit first announced the disruption on Twitter at 7.57pm, saying there was no service on the East Loop of the LRT, and that free bridging bus services were available. It later stated at 8.22pm that services on the West (outer loop) of the LRT were also unavailable.\n\nAt 8.31pm, SBS Transit said full LRT service resumed.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAdvertisement\n\nMr Rajamohann said while there were announcements on the train about the disruption, SBS staff only arrived about 20 minutes after the breakdown. They tried but failed to restart the LRT train, before two or three staff finally asked passengers to alight from the carriage and guided them towards Renjong station at around 7.30pm to 7.40pm.\n\nThere were about 30 people inside the train, but Mr Rajamohann said he did not observe any panic among his fellow passengers.\n\n\"It was after work ... I think they were just tired and frustrated,\" he said."}
{"text":"It\u2019s Friday, making it much easier to get distracted by something more interesting than work on the Internet. If you\u2019re looking for something great to watch today, then Google has put up a video of Garry Kasparov talking at Google this week.\n\nKasparov was the highest-rated chess champion for more than 22 years. In the chat that lasts just over an hour he discusses how he still feels IBM cheated in his match with Deep Blue. He also says the dismantling of Big Blue right after the match was equivalent to IBM removing the only partial witness to his claims. He hasn\u2019t even got logs of the game from IBM to look at.\n\nIt\u2019s a great watch with Kasparov giving some amusing responses to some of the questions asked. For example, when asked how to get better at chess without dedicating your life to it (18 minutes in), he responds by simply saying:\n\nIf you don\u2019t have time to devote your life for chess, why do you want to improve at the game?\n\nvia YouTube"}
{"text":"MSNBC HOST: The New York Times is reporting yesterday that Goldman Sachs has paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches in recent years. She was paid millions more by other Wall Street firms. Along with her husband, they've been paid more than $125 million for paid speeches since 2001.\n\nThat is, of course, not the kind of money that most Americans can relate to. Were the speeches a mistake, senator?\n\nSEN. JEANNE SHAHEEN, D-NH: Listen, voters are angry, and I don't blame them, because they've been watching a Washington that has been divisive, that hasn't worked together. And I believe we need a candidate who's not going to further divide this country but who's going to unite it.\n\nBut that's not my question, senator.\n\nThat's one of the reasons I'm supporting Hillary. Well, your first question was, are voters angry, and I would say yes.\n\nMSNBC HOST: No, I never asked that question. I think that's well established. The question was, are the speeches, were the speeches a mistake? Did it make sense to accept close to --\n\nSHAHEEN: Look, it doesn't matter whether you support that or not. The fact is, that's in the past, just as Bernie's socialism, he claims, is in the past.\n\nSo, the question is, what do voters want to see now from the candidates, and who can deliver? And that's what I believe the difference is between the candidates in this race. On both, on the Democratic side and on the Republican side."}
{"text":"While staying quite about the game for a while I was busy preparing things for bringing the game to E3, showing the game to journalists and the world in the Devolver parking lot. I'm happy to report it all went really, really well, and I'm so grateful for having gotten this opportunity, and I'm so so grateful people really seem to enjoy the game! If you haven't already, check a look at the trailer above!\n\nAnd as if just the adventure of going to E3 wasn't enough, the game got nominated for \"Best of E3\" by PC Gamer and CGM! It also got nominated for \"Best Action Game\" by IGN! And it won \"Best Indie Game\" by Resetmx! Incredible. And don't forget all of these nominations happened next to big AAA titles. Feels really surreal.\n\nOh yeah, and there was actual Pedro swag! (As you might spot in the lower left corner of the above image)\n\nIGN posted a gameplay video and it's already got over a million views. Check it out here:\n\nThere are also a bunch of video interviews floating around, some of which you can find here:\n\nThank you all for being part of the journey up to this point, and here's hoping you'll stick with the game until the actual release!\n\nOh, and if you haven't already, feel free to wishlist the game on Steam: Store.steampowered.com\n\nCheerio!\n\nVictor"}
{"text":"On Monday Mr Hollande said he had not yet decided whether to host Mr Putin, saying that pro-government forces in Syria troops had committed a \"war crime\" in the city of Aleppo with Russian support.\n\n\"I asked myself the question... Is it useful? Is it necessary? Can it be a way of exerting pressure? Can we get him to stop what he is doing with the Syrian regime?\" Mr Hollande said in a television interview.\n\nJean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, said on Monday that France would ask prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in the Hague to consider an investigation into suspected Syrian and Russian war crimes.\n\nMr Ayrault visited Moscow last week for talks with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, in an attempt to win support at the UN for a French draft resolution for a ceasefire in Aleppo."}
{"text":"A team of hackers that target governments, the military and journalists has turned its attention to the iPhone, according to Trend Micro.\n\nThe computer security company says it has discovered new spyware that infects iPhones, gathers large amounts of personal information and sends it to a remote server.\n\nThe spyware, called XAgent, is delivered via a phishing attack using a technique called island hopping. In that, the phones of friends and associates of the true target are first infected and then used to pass on the spyware link. It\u2019s based on the assumption that the target is more likely to click on links from people they know than from strangers.\n\nOnce installed, XAgent will collect text messages, contact lists, pictures, geo-location data, a list of installed apps, a list of any software processes that are running and the WiFi status of the device. That information is packaged and sent to a server operated by the hackers. XAgent is also capable of switching on the phone\u2019s microphone and recording everything it hears.\n\nXAgent runs on both iOS 7 and iOS 8 phones, whether they\u2019ve been jailbroken or not. It is most dangerous on iOS 7 since it hides its icon to evade detection.\n\nOn iOS 8 it isn\u2019t hidden and needs to be manually launched each time the phone is rebooted\u2014a process that would require the user to purposely reinfect their phone each time. For that reason, Trend Micro believes the spyware was written before iOS 8 was launched last year.\n\nSerenity Caldwell The iPhone 6 running iOS 8.\n\nWhile close to three quarters of Apple mobile devices are using iOS 8, a quarter are still running iOS7, according to data published by Apple this week.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been monitoring the actors behind this for quite some time,\u201d said Jon Clay, senior manager of Global Threat communication at Trend Micro, in a phone interview. \u201cThe criminals have introduced [the iOS app] as part of their campaign to move further into the [targeted] organization, using this rather than PC malware.\u201d\n\nWhile the identity of the hackers isn\u2019t known, Trend Micro says it believes those behind what it calls \u201cOperation Pawn Storm\u201d to be a pro-Russian group. Past targets have included military organizations, defense contractors, embassies and media groups.\n\nClay says the group might have targeted iOS because it discovered or assumed that a lot of its targets use Apple devices, either as work phones or secondary personal devices.\n\nSecurity software such as that offered by Trend Micro will detect XAgent, he said. Users can also look through phone logs, but manual detection of the spyware is quite difficult.\n\nHis best advice is the same that\u2019s been offered for years: don\u2019t click on links that appear to be suspicious, especially when they involve downloading software or entering passwords.\n\n\u201cThe good thing for users is that this isn\u2019t something that can be automatically done,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are steps you have to do as a user to install this.\u201d"}
{"text":"GOALTENDER ZANE McINTYRE NAMED CCM\/AHL AWARD WINNER FOR DECEMBER\n\nProvidence, RI - The American Hockey League announced today that Providence Bruins goaltender Zane McIntyre has been selected as the CCM\/AHL Goaltender of the Month for the month of December. McIntyre was a perfect 9-0-0 in nine appearances during December, sporting a 1.65 goals-against average and a .947 save percentage while stopping 269 of 284 shots.\n\nMcIntyre allowed two goals or fewer in eight of his nine starts last month, despite facing at least 30 shots seven times. After returning to Providence on Dec. 1 from an extended stay in Boston, McIntyre opened the month with a 31-save performance in a 6-2 win vs. Binghamton on Dec. 2, and he matched a career high with 38 saves in a 2-1 overtime victory over Springfield on Dec. 4. McIntyre stopped 31 of 32 shots and all three shootout attempts to earn a 2-1 victory over Hartford on Dec. 11, and he made 35 saves as Providence defeated Utica, 3-1, on Dec. 21. McIntyre closed out the month with 29 saves as the Bruins went to Wilkes-Barre\/Scranton and beat the league-leading Penguins, 5-2, on Dec. 30.\n\nA 24-year-old native of Thief River Falls, Minn., McIntyre is 10-0-0 in 12 appearances for Providence this season and leads the AHL with a 1.41 goals-against average and a .951 save percentage. McIntyre, a sixth-round pick by Boston in the 2010 NHL Entry Draft, also made his NHL debut earlier this season and appeared in three games with the parent Bruins. The University of North Dakota product has played 43 AHL games over his first two pro seasons, going 24-8-7 with a 2.32 GAA and a .914 save percentage.\n\nAlso selected as AHL award winners for December are Chicago Wolves forward Kenny Agostino as the CCM\/AHL Player of the Month and Wilkes-Barre\/Scranton Penguins forward Jake Guentzel as the CCM\/AHL Rookie of the Month. Each monthly award winner will be presented with an etched crystal award prior to an upcoming home game in recognition of his achievement."}
{"text":"EXPLAIN IT WITH MOLECULES-- SOAP MOLECULE What is Soap?\n\nSoaps are mixtures of sodium or potassium salts of fatty acids which can be derived from oils or fats by reacting them with an alkali (such as sodium or potassium hydroxide) at 80\u00b0\u2013100 \u00b0C in a process known as saponification. fat + NaOH ---> glycerol + sodium salt of fatty acid CH 2 -OOC-R - CH-OOC-R - CH 2 -OOC-R (fat) + 3 NaOH ( or KOH) both heated ---> CH 2 -OH -CH-OH - CH 2 -OH (glycerol) + 3 R-CO 2 -Na (soap) R=(CH 2 ) 14 CH 3 Note about 3D molecules -- Our files on this page now use Jsmol instead of Jmol . These files make use of Javascript which permits viewing of molecules on tablets, phones and easier use on Macs. - Jsmol is best viewed with the Chrome browser. Try this!! Click the right mouse button with the cursor over the image--> Labels --> Element Symbols Click on the left mouse button and rotate the soap structure. Notice that one end of the molecules is made up of a hydrocarbon chain -- the other end is a very polar structure containing oxygen and sodium. Soap molecules have both properties of non-polar and polar at opposite ends of the molecule. How does Soap Work? Nearly all compounds fall into one of two categories: hydrophilic ('water-loving') and hydrophobic ('water-hating'). Water and anything that will mix with water are hydrophilic. Oil and anything that will mix with oil are hydrophobic. When water and oil are mixed they separate. Hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds just don't mix. The cleansing action of soap is determined by its polar and non-polar structures in conjunction with an application of solubility principles. The long hydrocarbon chain is non-polar and hydrophobic (repelled by water). The \"salt\" end of the soap molecule is ionic and hydrophilic (water soluble). When grease or oil (non-polar hydrocarbons) are mixed with a soap- water solution, the soap molecules work as a bridge between polar water molecules and non-polar oil molecules. Since soap molecules have both properties of non-polar and polar molecules the soap can act as an emulsifier. An emulsifier is capable of dispersing one liquid into another immiscible liquid. This means that while oil (which attracts dirt) doesn't naturally mix with water, soap can suspend oil\/dirt in such a way that it can be removed. The soap will form micelles (see below) and trap the fats within the micelle. Since the micelle is soluble in water, it can easily be washed away. [Micelle shown using the Jsmol\n\nMolecular dynamics simulations of dodecylphosphocholine\n\nD. P. Tieleman, D. van der Spoel, H.J.C. Berendsen] --File shown without water molecules When you mix soap into the water the soap molecules arrange themselves into tiny clusters (called 'micelles'). The water-loving (hydrophilic) part of the soap molecules points outwards, forming the outer surface of the micelle. The oil-loving (hydrophobic) parts group together on the inside, where they don't come into contact with the water at all. Micelles can trap fats in the center. Try this ---> click right mouse button over image --> spin --> on Micelle (above) shown with water molecules. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Water is considered a polar molecule because\n\na) the molecule has a net positive charge\n\nb) the molecule has a net negative charge\n\nc) the molecule has a net zero charge\n\nd) the ends of the molecule have partial negative and positive charges 2. Soap is formed from:\n\na) two hydrophobic compounds\n\nb) a physical change when fats are heated\n\nc) two hydrophilic compounds\n\nd) oils or fats by reacting them with an alkali 3. Which statement is correct about hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds\n\na) hydrophilic are water-hating and hydrophobic water-loving\n\nb) hydrophilic are water-loving and hydrophobic water-hating\n\nc) both hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds are polar molecules\n\nd) both hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds are non-polar molecules 4. Soap acts by\n\na) digesting the fat molecules\n\nb) forming micelles and trapping the fat within the micelles\n\nc) releasing sodium and potassium into water\n\nd) a chemical change 5. Which of the following statements is not correct\n\na) the soap molecules work as a bridge between polar water molecules and non-polar oil molecules\n\nb) soap forms micelles\n\nc) soap is an emulsifier\n\nd) soap is made of just carbon and hydrogen atoms"}
{"text":"When asked if a conflict similar to the events inciting World War I could happen today, Indy Neidell responded, \u201cThere are an awful lot of similarities in the world today with the world of 1914.\u201d\n\n\u201cOf course that kind of question is really impossible to answer,\u201d he acknowledges, \u201cbut I wouldn\u2019t at all rule it out.\u201d\n\nIn an AMA (Ask Me Anything) discussion on Reddit, the historian host of The Great War YouTube series invited users to challenge his knowledge of the first World War, inquire about what he hasn\u2019t covered in the show\u2019s first 234 videos, and get his historical perspective on the United States\u2019 current political climate.\n\nWhile Neidell began his YouTube series in July 2014 on topics you\u2019d expect to find in a standard WWI curriculum\u2014the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, early trench warfare, propaganda, the Red Baron\u2014the show has since branched out to give a much more comprehensive look at the \u201cGreat War,\u201d detailing everything from soldiers\u2019 diets and salaries to what\u2019s wrong with EA\u2019s Battlefield 1 trailer:\n\nAs the series nears its $10,000 Patreon goal to enable its crew to \u201cstart planing trips to the European theatres of World War 1 and tell their stories in a completely new way,\u201d Neidell teased what history buffs can expect to see in upcoming episodes.\n\nAnd for fans unable to help the crowdfunding effort, Neidell\u2019s social media manager Flo joined him in his AMA to share this open invitation: \u201cYou can always help with research if you want.\u201d\n\nLesser-Known WWI History\n\nTeaching WWI\n\nHistorical Twist on a Classic Question\n\nIf He Could Watch Any Moment\u2026\n\nWhat\u2019s Next?\n\nTo read all of Neidell\u2019s answers to redditors questions, check out the original AMA discussion. And to catch up on your \u201cGreat War\u201d history in time just in time for Trivia Night, head over to The Great War YouTube channel."}
{"text":"Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.\n\nAug. 22, 2016, 8:10 PM GMT \/ Updated Aug. 22, 2016, 8:10 PM GMT By Maggie Fox\n\nResearchers have developed a way to make a mouse transparent \u2014 by removing the liquids and fats from its tissue.\n\nThey hope their method can be used to make a complete, unsliced model of a human brain, with all the delicate nerve connections untouched. And they say their see-through mouse might reduce the need for lab scientists around the world to kill living mice just to study their organs.\n\nResearchers in Germany have made mice see-through with a special method of dissolving skin that makes \"see through\" mice for lab research. Ali Ert?rk Ludwig \/ Maximilians University of Munich\n\n\u201cNow, for the first time, we have a powerful tool that can make the human brain transparent and reduce it size to fit an imaging microscope for mapping,\u201d Ali Ertu\u0308rk, a brain researcher at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany, said in written comments.\n\n\"I believe that now, using uDISCO, scientists can start to build whole body atlases for various biological systems such nerves, vasculature and immune cells.\"\n\nThe method, described in the journal Nature Methods, is called ultimate DISCO (short for 3-D imaging of solvent-cleared organs). It not only makes it possible to see entire structures in place, but shrinks the body so that it fits under a microscope.\n\n\u201cWe expect that this method is easily applicable to small monkeys, even to a whole human brain in the near future,\u201d Erturk wrote.\n\n\u201cWe all know the big fuss (rightfully) around mapping the human brain. But so far there is not any approach that even comes close to mapping any part of human brain at individual neuron level.\u201d\n\nA mouse with its skin removed during various stages of examination, taken with a bright field camera. Cell, Yang et al \/ AP\n\nThe technique might also save the lives of at least some lab animals, Erturk said.\n\n\u201cIn research, we usually sacrifice the animals to collect a small piece of their tissue,\u201d he wrote.\n\n\u201cThe rest of the animal actually is wasted. I believe that now, using uDISCO, scientists can start to build whole body atlases for various biological systems such nerves, vasculature and immune cells innervating whole body. This will at least provide the basic knowledge about how a healthy organ is organized in terms of these mapped systems (nerves, vessels etc.). This information will be available to everyone.\u201d\n\nThe team first anesthetized living mice, and used various agents to make it possible to image the desired systems using fluorescent light or other processes \u2014 akin to getting, for instance, an infusion of a contrast agent before getting an MRI or heart catheter scan.\n\nOnce the contrast dye or agent was pumped though the tissue, the mice were killed and their tissues cleared of water and fat.\n\nWater and lipids scatter light, making tissue opaque.\n\nScientists have come up with good images of organs and event whole bodies by slicing tissue very thinly, imaging it, and then recreating a 3-D version using a computer.\n\nBut even the thinnest slices can disrupt delicate neurons and their connections, Erturk noted.\n\n\u201cThat means, while their cell body resides in one side of the brain, it can make connections to the other side of the brain (several centimeters away) or even to the spinal cord, which might be more than a meter long,\" he wrote. \"Therefore, when we want to study brain diseases such as Alzheimers\u2019s disease or schizophrenia, making thin sections of biological specimen would degrade important information on neuronal connectivity.\""}
{"text":"TREASURE ISLAND \u2014 A Florida man was charged with aggravated battery after whacking a visiting tourist with a shovel in a dispute over digging at the beach.\n\nWTSP-TV reported Sunday that 53-year-old Christopher Carosella from Tampa argued with 18-year old Christian Geis over a large hole he had dug.\n\nCarosella on Friday evening allegedly got upset when the Lexington, Ky., teenager refused to comply with his order to stop digging.\n\nDrew Geis, Christian's father, told the station that 45 minutes later, Carosella took the shovel his son had left on the beach and then attacked him when he was walking back to his hotel room.\n\nThe station reported the Treasure Island Police Department said Carosella struck Christian Geis twice, causing bruising and abrasions.\n\nThe station said that Carosella was later released from the Pinellas County Jail on a $2,500 bond. Court records do not list an attorney."}
{"text":"1 people found this review helpful\n\nCustomer Review Rated Bad 8 - 8 out of 10\n\nFor a well-worn song title \u2018Paparazzi\u2019 is certainly a perfect vehicle for the Gee Gee girls; flashing cameras, intrusive attentions and story spins are inevitable when world domination is at stake, and a locale\u2019s paparazzi must be spazzing out to high heaven when the GG girls are in town. Anyway, this new Japanese single for SNSD is an okay dance song, and the video stage setting is elaborately befitting (with some \u2018Singing in the Rain\u2019 on the MV version). But this \u2018Paparazzi\u2019 (Mi Youn Kan and Lady Gaga did one, too) is really only a moderate dance song with more of that allurement factor going on. Wink wink. The same repetitive 'seduction' merry go round, getting \u2018bad publicity\u2019, staging the double dark dance of camera and \u2018star\u2019 into a swirl of premeditated social and pop culture media. Yes, the paparazzi are in town, and it\u2019s all vexingly watching the famous girls \u2018luring\u2019 the boys into their \u2018come up and see me sometime\u2019 world again (via TV camera) for the paparazzi to \u2018scandalize\u2019. Why are the girls so bad, the boys so bad? Its only theatre, smoke and mirrors, right? The Modern Tribal Cynical Sophistication Disco Dance, giving the masses their social tonic.\n\nOkay, okay, this is the theatre I\u2019m on about, not exactly SNSD themselves, more their personas and what\u2019s in the lyrics. But \u2018Paparazzi\u2019 is another similar slant in modern pop perspectives to take sides on. The \u2018bad\u2019 paparazzi who scandal (run devil run? It\u2019s a job isn\u2019t it?), the good girls who might see their mirror image tarnished. But it could be the other way around, the \u2018bad girl\u2019 alluring the camera boy or the dance club DJ? That sort of thing; seducing and dividing. Template soft anger pop. But instead of the Jets and the Sharks that are verses, it\u2019s the press and the famous, the VIP and the excluded, good\/bad (or whatever). The concept\u2019s okay, what the heck, it\u2019s supposed to be fun. But a new song meaning to the words Girls\u2019 Generation would be welcoming. For SNSD I really would love them to do\u2026something spiritually unifying. \u201cThe Boys\u201d album has strong songs and it\u2019s a nice album, but SNSD should do something really different in their pop music now. This limited edition is a landscape packaging with CD\/DVD but there\u2019s no inner booklet with mucho photo here. I preferred this cover version, too, to the main edition; the girls look all pensive and moody, a bit 'edgy' maybe, and its alright. I like SNSD I really do, as I like Kara, T-ara and many others. No divisions."}
{"text":"Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.\n\nA Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israeli parents in a shooting attack on their vehicle in Samaria, between Elon Moreh and Itamar on Thursday night; Four of their young children survived the attack without injury and were rescued by emergency responders from the bullet-ridden vehicle.\n\nMagen David Adom paramedics and IDF units pulled the children out of the car near the Palestinian village of Beit Furik, and paramedics declared the parents dead on the scene after failing to detect vital signs.\n\nA 4-month-old baby, a 4-year-old boy, a seven-year-old boy and a nine-year old boy survived the attack without physical injury, after witnessing their parents being shot dead before their eyes.Boaz Malka, a MADA paramedic who arrive on the scene, said, \"It was a very difficult scene. We saw a car in the middle of the road, and next to it, a man in his 30s lay on the ground with upper body gunshot wounds. Inside the car a woman sat, with severe upper body wounds. They had no vital signs and to our sorrow we had to declare them dead on the scene.\"The IDF was sweeping the area for suspects.Reacting to the shooting, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said \"this murderous terror attack this evening is a clear continuation of the incitement against the State of Israel and its civilians, and repeated attempts to carry out terror attacks.\"\"The war against terrorism requires determination from us, a steel hand, and patience. We are fighting against a blood-thirsty relentless enemy, and with great sorrow we sometimes absorb losses on the way. At this time, the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) are pursuing the murderers. We will pursue them and we will not be silent until we place our hands on the murderers, and those who sent them.\"In light of the shooting, right-wing politicians accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas 's incitement for the attack, which came a day after he threatened to stop abiding by all agreements with Israel in a fiery speech to the United Nations General Assembly.Likud Minister Miri Regev said, \"24 hours after the violent speech of the arch-murderer Abu Mazen [Abbas], a husband and wife were killed in Israel.\"She called on Israel to take harsher steps against Palestinian terror.Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Bayit Yehudi) said that Abbas's \"call to arms was taken up tonight in Israel, and it is red with blood.\"Bennett added that \"A people whose leaders encourage murder will never have a state, and this must be made clear. Now the time of talking is done and the time for action has come.\"Meanwhile, Hamas praised the \"heroic terror attack\" and called for more \"quality attacks.\"The group said that \"Zionists will pay the price for [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's criminal policies everywhere.\"\n\nJoin Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>"}
{"text":"Description\n\nTILLER Trap Soul \u2013 Midi & Loop Pack\n\n\u2018TILLER TrapSoul Midi & Loop Pack\u201d is influenced by Bryson Tiller, the hometown hero & RnB singer that has turned Trapsoul into a genre. This midi pack includes 150 Midi & 20 Premium wav loops that will blow you away if you love Trapsoul.\n\nWith this new product series, \u2018TILLER TrapSoul\u2019 brings life to the R&B genre again. With smooth leads, jaw dropping 808s, captivating melodies, lush pads, and stunning percussion, \u2018TILLER TrapSoul\u2019 is the new school product to begin 2017 for Diamond Loopz.\n\nAll of these original high-quality sounds are Royalty-Free, simply meaning that you can use them in personal or commercial compositions at no extra cost.Protect your beats with the FREE \u201cBeat Tag\u201d included.\n\nTrapsoul is RnB & Hip Hop Music on steriods with a little Trap and Soul mixed together. This is a new sound and a new trend that has emerged and started to be recognized by people who love RnB.\n\nProduct Includes: 120 MB of Content\n\n\u2022 150 Midi Loops\n\n\u2022 20 Premium Wav Loops\n\n\u2022 Beat Tag Included\n\n\u2022 (Bonus) TrapSoul Drum Kit\n\n\u2022 100% Royalty-Free\n\n\u2022 24-Bit Quality\n\nSave\n\nSave\n\nSave\n\nSave"}
{"text":"Rep. Nancy Pelosi was emphatic. Mitt Romney\u2019s refusal to release more than two years of his personal tax returns, she said, makes him unfit to win confirmation as a member of the president\u2019s Cabinet, let alone to hold the high office himself.\n\nSen. Harry Reid went farther: Romney\u2019s refusal to make public more of his tax records makes him unfit to be a dogcatcher.\n\nThey do not, however, think that standard of transparency should apply to them. The two Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives are among hundreds of senators and representatives from both parties who refused to release their tax records. Just 17 out of the 535 members of Congress released their most recent tax forms or provided some similar documentation of their tax liabilities in response to requests from McClatchy over the last three months. Another 19 replied that they wouldn\u2019t release the information, and the remainder never responded to the query.\n\nThe widespread secrecy in one branch of the government suggests a self-imposed double standard. Yet while American politics has come to expect candidates for the presidency to release their tax returns, the president isn\u2019t alone in having a say over the nation\u2019s tax laws. Congress also stands to gain or lose by the very tax policies it enacts, and tax records \u2013 more than any broad financial disclosure rules now in place \u2013 offer the chance to see whether the leaders of the government stand to benefit from their own actions.\n\n\u201cSenior public officials, especially members of Congress and presidential candidates, should be required to disclose their tax returns so that the public can monitor potential conflicts of interest,\u201d said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a nonpartisan watchdog group.\n\nThe question of taxes is particularly pressing this year, as Congress debates whether to extend all or some of the Bush-era tax cuts that are set to expire Dec. 31. At the same time, tax returns reveal assets and investments.\n\nAbsent tax information, members of Congress aren\u2019t fully transparent, said Daniel Auble, who heads the personal finance project for the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks financial disclosures by members of Congress and appointees confirmed by Congress.\n\n\u201cHaving a clearer picture of lawmakers\u2019 interests . . . is definitely important in making available to the public what possible influence there could be,\u201d he said. \u201cIn terms of transparency, it would be helpful to have more information.\u201d\n\nAmong those who did disclose their tax returns: Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and a co-author of the Dodd-Frank law tightening regulations on Wall Street.\n\nTo Pelosi and some other top Democrats, the focus is on Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, who\u2019s released his 2010 return and 2011 estimates and plans to release his 2011 return when it\u2019s completed, but refuses to release any more. They say the very refusal to release more suggests that he\u2019s hiding something.\n\n\"He could not even become a Cabinet member for that lack of disclosure, and now with that lack of disclosure he wants to be president of the United States,\u201d said Pelosi, the House minority leader, who\u2019s from California.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019d like to know what\u2019s in those tax returns that he refuses to show to the American public. Did he pay any taxes?\u201d Reid asked in an impassioned speech to the Senate on July 11. Days later, Reid, who\u2019s from Nevada, suggested that Romney\u2019s refusal to release more than two years of tax returns would make him ineligible to serve even as dogcatcher.\n\nRep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, also has harangued Romney for refusing to release more tax returns, calling it a \u201cpenchant for secrecy.\u201d\n\nAll three refused repeated requests from McClatchy to release their own returns, requests that started before the flap over Romney\u2019s records.\n\nPelosi aides refused, saying she\u2019s disclosed all that Congress requires.\n\n\u201cThe leader has filed a complete financial disclosure report as required by law that includes financial holdings, transactions and other personal information,\u201d Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said. \u201cThere has been no question about where Leader Pelosi and Democrats stand on tax policy: We must extend the middle-class tax cuts and end tax breaks for millionaires and use the revenues to pay down the deficit.\u201d\n\nChallenged at a recent news conference to release hers, Wasserman Schultz said she wouldn\u2019t because she wasn\u2019t running for president. \u201cI file full financial disclosure required under the law,\u201d she said.\n\nWhat\u2019s required by law is written by Congress itself, a broad financial-disclosure statement that offers no direct information on tax liabilities and no requirement for reporting spousal income other than the source \u2013 but not the amount \u2013 of any income above $1,000. There\u2019s little way of knowing whether that spousal income is $1,001 or $1 million.\n\nSeveral members of Congress married into money or have wealthy spouses. Topping that list are Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, whose wife, Linda, is an heiress to the Clear Channel Communications fortune, and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., whose wife, Teresa, is the heiress to the Heinz ketchup fortune. Pelosi\u2019s husband, Paul, heads Financial Leasing Services Inc., a San Francisco-based venture capital and real estate firm.\n\nWhen it comes to the valuation of investments or reporting of income on the annual disclosure forms, what\u2019s required are broad numbers such as between $250,000 and $500,000 or $1 million and $5 million. That makes it hard to determine how much benefit a lawmaker might get from competing tax plans.\n\n\u201cThey just don\u2019t provide the same level of detail as a tax return,\u201d said Darrell West, a specialist on governing and a vice president of the Brookings Institution, a center-left research center in Washington.\n\nMost members won\u2019t release that kind of detail.\n\nOnly 17 members shared their detailed tax information with McClatchy. Another 19 refused, but the majority of them stressed that they comply with congressional disclosure requirements.\n\nOf the lawmakers who shared their tax returns, most got large deductions for interest on personal and investment real estate. That\u2019s useful information for taxpayers, since a revamp of the tax code is expected in the next few years.\n\nMcClatchy isn\u2019t releasing the tax returns under the terms of the agreement with the lawmakers. Reporters requested the returns to examine in detail how members would be personally affected by changes in tax laws being debated in Congress including income tax rates, as well as taxes on capital gains and dividends and deductions for such expenses as home mortgage interest. In exchange for sharing their returns, members were told their actual returns would not be made public.\n\nMost lawmakers, however, chose to keep their tax liabilities a secret.\n\n\u201cFirst your publishers and editors and execs should publish their tax returns. They have great influence over public policy,\u201d Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., said in an emailed response. Ackerman, who was dogged in 2010 by allegations of a sweetheart stock purchase, isn\u2019t seeking re-election, so his term ends in January.\n\n\u201cAre you guys asking the president to turn over his college records? Or asking him to turn anything over of any kind?\u201d responded Allen Klump, the communications director for Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C.\n\n\u201cThanks, but we will not give you Sen. Rockefeller\u2019s tax return. Good luck on the project,\u201d said Vincent Morris, a spokesman for Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., whose family surname is synonymous with wealth.\n\nSeveral lawmakers said they\u2019d disclose what\u2019s required and no more.\n\nRep. Renee Ellmers \u201cfiles a financial disclosure form each year in accordance with House ethics rules and this is publicly available,\u201d said Tom Doheny, a spokesman for the North Carolina Republican.\n\nRep. Joe Wilson \u201chas submitted a financial disclosure form, which is required by law and available to constituents as a matter of public record,\u201d said Caroline Delleney, a spokeswoman for the South Carolina Republican.\n\nConstituents generally know where their particular lawmakers stand on the issue of the expiring tax cuts because the two major political parties have well-defined views. But there\u2019s more at stake than just tax brackets, and voters often have little feel for whether their members of Congress would benefit or be harmed by changes that are under consideration.\n\nFrom the financial disclosure forms, constituents can, with some work, surmise how lawmakers\u2019 investment income might be taxed under competing plans. Given their salaries, lawmakers would fall into the higher tax bracket for dividends, but it\u2019s unclear where they\u2019d fall individually on the income scale.\n\n\u201cThere are clearly some people above (the $250,000 threshold). There\u2019s a bunch of people who might or might not be affected, and you can\u2019t tell,\u201d said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, which is run by the Brookings Institution and the centrist Urban Institute.\n\nTax data isn\u2019t always a panacea, however.\n\nMissouri Democrat McCaskill was one of the few senators who provided McClatchy with a tax return. Her 1040 form lists her as married filing separately, showing an adjusted gross income of $193,384.\n\nBut her husband, Joe Shepard, is a wealthy businessman whose investments sometimes have put her in an unpleasant spotlight. His investment in a reinsurance company in Bermuda \u2013 the same country in which a Romney investment has been criticized by Democrats \u2013 brought allegations from Republicans in 2009 of tax dodging. Shepard no longer hold the investment.\n\nMcCaskill does report dozens of her husband's investments in her annual financial disclosure statement, with more detail than required. But each still is listed only under ranges of values, not precise amounts.\n\nThat\u2019s another reason advocacy groups think that financial-disclosure reporting should be expanded to capture spousal income more fully, and argue that tax data would be a useful, albeit imperfect, tool.\n\n\u201cAs public officials, potential conflicts of interest caused by their wealth and assets are a public concern,\u201d said Holman, the Public Citizen lobbyist.\n\nKaz Komolafe and Farah Mohamed contributed to this article."}
{"text":"Pirelli has overhauled its tyre concept to reduce degradation for 2017, as requested by the new rules, allowing drivers to push harder in a philosophy that is a departure from the policy it has followed since it became F1's tyre supplier in 2011.\n\nPirelli motorsport chief Hembery has previously said F1 could end up with processional racing this year because the rules shake-up, which includes significant tweaks to aerodynamics, will spread the field out.\n\nSpeaking at an event in Turin to mark Pirelli's 110th motorsport anniversary, Hembery told Motorsport.com that if the new tyre concept does not deliver a good show, the blame should not lie with the Italian company.\n\n\"You can't please everyone and you can only go in one of two directions,\" Hembery said. \"We did something from the outset which was desired, then there was a decision to go in another direction.\n\n\"We're just following what the sport asks us. All we ask is that they tell us what they want. There's no point in complaining that we deliver what we have been asked to deliver.\n\n\"As a sport we're moving in a different direction, and if it works as people say then we should get good racing.\"\n\nWhile the modified 2015 mule cars Pirelli used for testing failed to deliver the required amount of downforce expected in 2017, the tyre supplier was able to fall back on simulation data.\n\n\"The biggest challenge is if you don't have downforce, you might not be able to get the tyres working as intended, because we worked to a level of downforce given by the simulation,\" he said.\n\n\"It's true the mule cars were some way off in terms of performance levels, but we do have the simulation data.\n\n\"That's the question, how close will the cars be to that data \u2013 maybe they will have more and go much quicker.\"\n\nHembery feels while there may be fewer pitstops, the change in the rules should create a situation where overtaking possibilities are increased.\n\n\"We'll see fewer stops,\" he said. \"That comes with less degradation. You come into the pits either because of performance loss [due to degradation] or wear, and in this case we are reducing both.\n\n\"We'll see a lot more one-stop races but if we deliver with the aerodynamic package cars that are closer together, and the tyre's not overheating on the surface, drivers will be able to push and lead to a scenario where overtaking is improved.\""}
{"text":"In March 1987 Daniel Morgan, a private detective, was murdered in Sydenham in south east London, just as he was reportedly close to revealing police corruption with links to the News of the World.\n\nYou might ask why we would want to look at a murder that took place 25 years ago, but it\u2019s important to understand that the collusion between the police and press that\u2019s being uncovered now isn\u2019t just about events that took place in the past few years, but a pattern of corruption that goes back many decades, and that many of the people involved with past corruption are still involved with the Hackgate scandal even now.\n\nAfter repeated failed police inquiries into the murder which themselves have been mired in corruption the family of Daniel Morgan are still seeking justice, and have spent the past two decades running the Justice 4 Daniel campaign.\n\nSouthern Investigations\n\nIn 1984 Daniel Morgan and Jonathan Rees Jonathan Rees set up the detective agency Southern Investigations Jonathan Rees is alleged to have had a \u201cnetwork of corrupt police who were involved in widespread criminality and used Southern Investigations as a conduit for drugs and money\u201d, and that Rees \u201ccounted many officers as friends. One of his specialities was to use his \"friends\" in the force to provide information which he sold to tabloid newspapers.\u201d\n\nOn the other hand Daniel Morgan\u2019s role \u201cinvolved him acting as a bailiff or utilising his particular talent for remembering car registration plates and telephone numbers\u201d.\n\nIt is believed that at the time of his murder Daniel Morgan was planning to expose police corruption, described by his brother as \u201cpolice involvement with criminals, involvement with drugs and weapons importation.\"\n\nMore recently, Tom Watson MP alleged in a Commons adjournment debate that Daniel Morgan has approached Alex Muranchak of the News of the World with a story making allegations about police corruption a week before he died, and was offered \u00a340,000 for the story. He described the relationship between Jonathan Rees and Alex Marunchak as \"a close association between Rees and Marunchak ... a relationship that was so close they both had companies registered at the same address\". Watson also stated that \"thanks to a Guardian investigation we also know that Southern Investigations paid the debts of Marunchak \".\n\nAlex Marunchak would go on to deny those allegations , as well as other allegations made by Tom Watson.\n\nThe death of Daniel Morgan\n\nAt 9.30pm on Tuesday March 10th 1987 Daniel Morgan\u2019s body was discovered next to his BMW in the parking lot of the Golden Lion pub. An axe, wrapped in Elastoplasts to obscure fingerprints, was protruding at a right angle from his face, his pockets torn open, with notes he had been seen writing missing, but with his wallet and watch still on his body, and he was still holding the two packets of crisps purchased inside the pub.\n\nHe had let the Golden Lion pub at 8:55pm after meeting with Jonathan Rees to discuss an issue that was putting pressure on their already fraught relationship. Rees had claimed he had been robbed while transporting \u00a318,000 for a client of Southern Investigations, Belmont Car Auctions, with at least one moonlighting police officer. Both Morgan and Belmont Car Auctions believed this was a lie, and Rees and his associates had taken the money for themselves.\n\nAt the 1988 inquest into the murder the Southern Investigations accountant Kevin Lennon said that Jonathan Rees had told him \u201cI've got the perfect solution for Daniel's murder. My mates at Catford nick are going to arrange it\u201d and went on to say \"He went on to explain to me that if they didn't do it themselves the police would arrange for some person over whom they had some criminal charge pending to carry out Daniel's murder.\"\n\nThe initial police investigation into the murder\n\nDetective Sergeant Sid Fillery at Catford police station was assigned to the case, failing to reveal to his superiors that he had been working for Southern Investigations\n\nAt the 1988 inquest Kevin Lennon said Rees wanted Morgan dead after a row: \"John Rees explained that, when or after Daniel Morgan had been killed, he would be replaced by a friend of his who was a serving policeman, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery\", and eventually would end up in business with Jonathan Rees at Southern Investigations, recruiting corrupt police officers, and was later convicted for the possession of child pornography.\n\nSid Fillery and Jonathan Rees would later be arrested in 1987 on suspicion of murder , along with the brothers Glenn and Garry Vian and two Metropolitan police officers, but eventually all of them were released without charge.\n\nInquiries into the murder\n\nOver the next 20 years five investigations would look into the murder of Daniel Morgan . The initial investigation into the murder by the Metropolitan Police focused on Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees, both who denied involvement in the murder. This was followed by an inquiry by Hampshire Police in 1988 focusing on Jonathan Rees and another man, but the charges were dropped because of a lack of evidence, with the Hampshire inquiry's 1989 report to the Police Complaints Authority stated that \"no evidence whatsoever\" had been found of police involvement in the murder. During this period Sid Fillery left the police to join Southern Investigations as Jonathan Rees\u2019 business partner.\n\nIn 1999 Operation Nigeria began to investigate Southern Investigations, with bugs being placed inside the Southern Investigations offices by the police. The operation ceased when Jonathan Rees was recorded conspiring with a corrupt police officer to plant cocaine on an innocent woman in order to discredit her during a custody battle, and in December 2000 he was jailed for seven years.\n\nIn 2002-2003 a fourth inquiry began, involving the bugging of a suspect\u2019s car and the home of Glenn Vian. The investigation obtained evidence that linked a number of individuals to the murder, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence to proceed with a prosecution.\n\nThe fifth inquiry took place in 2006, headed by Detective Superintendent David Cook was set up in secret after Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair declared that the first investigation had been compromised by the involvement of Sid Fillery.\n\nConcerns over connections between Masonic Lodge members and the murder required the 36 police officers involved with the case to state they had never been Freemasons, with Cook describing the murder as being one of the worst kept secrets in south-east London, claiming \u201ca whole cabal of people\u201d knew the identity of at least some of those involved. He also claimed attempts had been made to smear Daniel Morgan\u2019s character and there had been attempts to link him with Colombian drug dealers. He identified the main suspects as \"white Anglo-Saxons\".\n\nYet again bugs were placed, Jonathan Rees, Sid Fillery, and Glenn and Gary Vian were arrested, along with a builder, James Cook, all on suspicion of murder, plus other related charges. This time however, the suspects made it to court.\n\nThe 2011 Old Bailey trial\n\nThe trial was badly handled by the prosecution , with 3 supergrass informers being dismissed as key witnesses, resulting in a stay of prosecution for Sid Fillery and James Cook being discharged.\n\nIn March 2011 the Director of Public Prosecutions abandoned the case and all remaining charges were dropped. The case had yet to reach the stage where it would look at the murder as it was still dealing with preliminary issues when the prosecution collapsed. The judge noted the case\u2019s vastness and complexity, and considered that the prosecution had been principled and right to drop the case, but the police had \u201cample grounds to justify the arrest and prosecution of the defendants\u201d.\n\nA massive amount of evidence had been gathered, over 750,000 documents, with four more crates of evidence being discovered after the trial collapsed.\n\nLinks to the News of the World\n\nAfter the trial collapsed it was revealed that Jonathan Rees had been working for the News of the World, earning \u00a3150,000 supplying illegally obtained information about figures in the public eye. After serving the prison sentence for perverting the course of justice after the Operation Nigeria inquiry Andy Coulson , then editor of the News of the World, hired Jonathan Rees, and worked regularly with the Sunday and Daily Mirror as well. Andy Coulson was later hired by David Cameron as director of communications despite warnings about Andy Coulson\u2019s hiring of the convicted criminal Jonathan Rees.\n\nUsing a network of corrupt police officers he illegally obtained information on a variety of public figures, including the Royal family, and was also alleged to have commissioned burglaries on behalf of journalists. However, despite detailed evidence the Metropolitan Police failed to pursue any action against Rees, even to the point of taking the News of the World at their word that Clive Goodman had worked alone when he was convicted for intercepting phone calls from Clarence House.\n\n[Forward to The Leveson Inquiry]\n\n[Index]"}
{"text":"The government\u2019s move to link one billion of these numbers to bank accounts and mobiles is fraught with security risks. Studies say that digital security must be beefed up before this happens\n\nAlarm bells have been ringing in the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY). This was ever since Union finance minister Arun Jaitley announced on August 28 that the linking of one billion Aadhaar IDs with bank accounts and mobiles is very much on the cards. The minister, speaking at a function to mark the completion of three years of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna, said that the linkage would ensure \u201cfinancial inclusion\u201d which will be \u201cnothing short of a social revolution\u201d.\n\nOfficials in MeitY, are a worried lot. The ministry has been entrusted with the onerous task of ensuring cyberspace security in the country and managing the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) which deals with hacking and related crimes. More importantly, it is also directly responsible for the functioning of the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) which operates the Aadhaar database. It will have an important role to play once the linkage referred to by Jaitley covers all Aadhaar cards\u2014virtually the entire adult population in the country.\n\nSTOLEN DATA\n\nA MeitY official told India Legal: \u201cThe finance minister has talked about a social revolution but we will need a cyber security revolution if the grand plan has to take off without floundering and losing its way. As things stand now, there are too many holes in the security set up which are being exploited by hackers. We have to prepare ourselves for a flood of cyber-related crime once the linkage happens. To make matters worse, no one is clear about the volume of Aadhaar data that has already been stolen or accessed by the wrong people.\u201d\n\nAccording to him, there are several reports with the ministry which point to the urgent need for a complete overhaul of the cyber security apparatus in the country. This will be a time-consuming process, but he feels it nevertheless needs to be done before any major three-way linkage is even attempted. \u201cA new financial division of CERT-In has been promised. It has to be set up and tested. No system is fool-proof. The basic problem with Aadhaar is that the safety of data was not thought through when it was launched. Much of what is being done is a post facto response,\u201d he added.\n\nMeitY sources also point out that according to official data, 164 government websites were hacked during 2015. There have also been instances where government departments have placed Aadhaar numbers in the public domain. The problem, they say, has several dimensions. And laws alone cannot deter the criminals. Prevention and detection are key aspects in any fight because the cyber-criminal floats in cyberspace and may operate from a foreign land outside India\u2019s jurisdiction."}
{"text":"Some time ago, I posted the cover art for the ebook editions of The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. For the sake of comparison, here is the art for the US hardback editions. All of these covers were done by Darrell K. Sweet except for the last book, A Memory of Light, which was done by Michael Whelan.\n\nClick each image to see a larger version.\n\nPrequel \u2014 New Spring cover art\n\n1. The Eye of the World \u2014 outside cover art\n\nThe Eye of the World \u2014 inside front cover art\n\n2. The Great Hunt cover art\n\n3. The Dragon Reborn cover art\n\n4. The Shadow Rising cover art\n\n5. The Fires of Heaven cover art\n\n6. Lord of Chaos cover art\n\n7. A Crown of Swords cover art\n\n8. Path of Daggers cover art\n\n9. Winter\u2019s Heart cover art\n\n10. Crossroads of Twilight cover art\n\n11. Knife of Dreams cover art\n\n12. The Gathering Storm cover art\n\n13. The Towers of Midnight cover art\n\n14. A Memory of Light \u2014 Darrell K. Sweet unfinished concept art\n\nMr. Sweet passed away before finishing the cover.\n\nA Memory of Light cover art \u2014 Michael Whelan\n\nWheel of Time Cover Art for the US Hardback Editions"}
{"text":"Seller Notes:\n\n\u201c Museum Condition-meaning VGC for something that was USED (though minimally) in real life-NOT showroom or MINT condition! Driven over 1300 miles since November 1, 2018-mainly to test\/sort all the issues out. Was stored for about 10 years prior to that. Shake down driving worked! Issues replaced! New: Distributor, Coil, Ignition Control Module, Fuel Pump, Tune-Up, Oil Filter, Air Filter, In-Line Fuel Filters, Valve Cover Gaskets and probably a few other things in that time. Tires have only about 1500 miles on 5 meaty bias plies. Originally from KY, and though not \"southwest pristine\" has very minimal rust. All known interior auxiliary electrical works, but interior electrical outlets unknown-all wiring intact, but not sure how system works, and not an electrician, so don't want to push my luck. Minor paint chips or pin-stripe imperfections. 4x4 works as of 12\/2018. About as good as something 37 years old that WAS driven 32,000 mile can be! Great for Van Life Expedition Van build out \u201d"}
{"text":"Hawaii may have been the fiftieth state to join the U.S., but when the calendar flips over to 2016 after midnight tonight, it will become the first state to raise the legal smoking age to 21.\n\nBack in April, Consumerist reported that Hawaii was poised to become the first state to raise the minimum age for smoking to 21 after a bill changing the age requirements passed the Hawaii Legislature. Governor David Ige then signed the bill, which bars people under the age of 21 from smoking, buying, or possessing both traditional and electronic cigarettes.\n\nAnyone caught in violation of the law would be fined $10 for the first offense, with subsequent incidents prompting a $50 fine or mandatory community service.\n\nBusinesses that are caught selling tobacco products to people under the age of 21 will be fined $500 for their first violation and up to $2,000 for subsequent offenses, Buzzfeed News reports.\n\nWhile Hawaii is the first state to raise the legal smoking age to 21, a number of municipalities, including Hawaii County and New York City, have done so on a local level. Washington state, Utah, and Colorado have also considered boosting the legal minimum age.\n\nProponents of such laws say raising the legal age to buy cigarettes to 21 would result in fewer smokers. In Hawaii, the state\u2019s Department of Health says 5,600 kids try smoking every year, with 90% of daily smokers starting the habit before they turn 19.\n\n[via BuzzFeed News]"}
{"text":"Dutch and Canadian technology could be key to managing UK pigs more effectively, including the use of sound to sense the early signs of disease.\n\nTechnology that detects how pigs are feeling will be used on farms within years to help producers find ways to manage them more effectively, according to a leading scientist.\n\nPrecision farming tools will measure the mental state of individual animals, allowing farmers to make decisions about rearing pigs, from the way they are housed to the feed they are given.\n\nDaniel Berkmanns, professor in bioengineering at KU Leuven in Belgium, says real-time monitoring of pigs\u2019 actions, movements and interactions could help improve the health, welfare and performance of herds.\n\nSee also: Farmer Focus: Pig performance improves just in time for hog roasts\n\n\u201cI am convinced we will see the mental state of animals being monitored on a commercial basis in the next few years,\u201d he says.\n\n\u201cPigs are intelligent animals and we should use their intelligence. If you put animals in a pen they will behave like stupid animals, but if we recognise that they are individuals with different needs and responses, we can react accordingly.\n\n\u201cIt will enable us to make things more interesting for them and us, and potentially result in better outcomes.\u201d\n\nProf Berkmanns says the technology is almost ready to be introduced into broiler units, and it is only a matter of time before it could be used on pig farms.\n\n\u201cThe technology is just at the beginning,\u201d he adds. \u201cContinuous, real-time monitoring through image analysis, sound analysis and sensors could have a huge array of uses such as monitoring health and welfare.\u201d\n\nProf Berkmanns says researchers at the University of Ghent have devised a system to analyse the sounds pigs make to detect illness.\n\n\u201cMost disease in pigs is respiratory. With some diseases you can detect signs just three hours after infection,\u201d he says.\n\n\u201cThe system detects a sick cough and sends an SMS message to the farmer, who can go out and decide if they need to call a vet. This kind of system reduces the use of antibiotics on farm.\u201d\n\nAnother system being tested involves monitoring pigs\u2019 drinking behaviour.\n\n\u201cWe can create models to estimate water use to within 92% or 200ml over 13 days,\u201d Prof Berkmanns says. If water use drops, farmers are alerted and inspect what is happening on the unit.\n\n\u201cThis technology doesn\u2019t mean that farmers will be replaced by the technology,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt has to be part of the management system.\n\n\u201cThe idea with monitoring is that daily checks are taken over by the technology and the farmer enters to solve the problem, not find it.\n\n\u201cIt doesn\u2019t have a value if it is just interesting technology, it has to be able to help the farmer make improvements.\u201d\n\nTailored diets could cut feed costs\n\nFeeding pigs diets tailored to their individual daily needs can slash feed costs and ensure the sustainability of the UK pig industry, say scientists.\n\nUsing precision farming technology to ensure pigs are only provided with the nutrients they need can result in feed costs being cut by as much as 10%, research at the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food in Canada found.\n\nWhile traditional three-phase feeding aims to maximise growth by ensuring the top-performing animals have the nutrients they require, it does not take into account that every pig\u2019s nutritional needs are different on different days, says the department\u2019s Candido Pomar.\n\nOften pigs are overfed nutrients, which are excreted in faeces and urine, creating a waste of feed and a negative effect on the environment, he says.\n\nInstead, investing in technology that will allow pigs to receive formulations based on their real-time needs will vastly improve efficiency.\n\n\u201cPrecision technologies help get the right amount of feed to the right pig at the right time,\u201d says Dr Pomar. \u201cIt is a total shift in pig nutrition. Instead of basing their nutritional requirements on estimations collected from data, feeding with technology depends on an individual animal\u2019s health, genetics and nutritional status, as well as external factors such as stress and management systems.\u201d\n\nIn experiments run by Dr Pomar and his team, 60 pigs were fed diets with varying amounts of lysine from automatic feeders.\n\nEach pig was tagged and identified by the feeder and given a serving of 15-25g of feed. The pigs could return to the feeder as many times as they liked.\n\nDuring the experiment, the pigs visited the feeder up to 110 times a day, but the overall amount of feed they consumed was 8-10% lower than traditional three-phase feeding.\n\nFurther trials discovered that typical lysine use could be reduced by as much as 27% without having any effect on growth performance, resulting in a 50% reduction in nitrogen excretion, Dr Pomar says.\n\n\u201cPrecision farming is an effective approach to improving efficiency, reducing nutrient excretion and reducing costs,\u201d he adds.\n\nSound sensors could detect some diseases within three hours of infection and alert farmers by text.\n\nMore from from the Bpex Pig Innovation Conference 2014"}
{"text":"Croatia's independent presidential candidate Bandic talks to his supporters after release of first unofficial results at his campaign headquarters in Zagreb Thomson Reuters ZAGREB (Reuters) - Croatian anti-graft police arrested the mayor of Zagreb, Milan Bandic, and several of his associates on Sunday on suspicion of corruption and abuse of office, Croatian media reported.\n\nThe police and the state prosecutor said only that several people from the Zagreb administration had been arrested but did not name them, in line with usual practice.\n\nBut all local media and the national televisions named Bandic as one of those arrested. Reports have linked Bandic to a number of corruption probes in the past decade but he has never been interrogated or detained until now.\n\n\"After several months of a complex criminal investigation, several persons have been arrested on suspicion of illegal activities in the city of Zagreb and the Zagrebacki Holding (the city's company in charge of communal services),\" the state prosecutor's office DORH said in a statement on its website.\n\nIt gave no details of possible charges, saying only that \"a number of corruption crimes are being investigated\".\n\nBandic, a former Social Democrat who left the party in 2009 to run as an independent candidate in the presidential election that year, has been at the helm of the Croatian capital since 2000.\n\nZagreb has almost a quarter of the country's 4.4 million people and is the financial and economic capital of the former Yugoslav republic, which joined the EU in July last year.\n\nCroatia launched an extensive anti-corruption drive in 2010 to boost its faltering EU membership bid. It has since tried and convicted several top state officials, including the former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader.\n\n(Reporting by Zoran Radosavljevic; editing by Andrew Roche)"}
{"text":"Sabrina Bicknell (1757 \u2013 8 September 1843), better known as Sabrina Sidney, was a British foundling girl taken in when she was 12 by author Thomas Day, who wanted to mould her into his perfect wife. Day had been struggling to find a wife who would share his ideology and had been rejected by several women. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book Emile, or On Education, he decided to educate two girls without any frivolities, using his own concepts.\n\nIn 1769, Day and his barrister friend, John Bicknell, chose Sidney and another girl, Lucretia, from orphanages, and falsely declared they would be indentured to Day's friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Day took the girls to France to begin Rousseau's methods of education in isolation. After a short time, he returned to Lichfield with only Sidney, having deemed Lucretia inappropriate for his experiment. He used unusual, eccentric, and sometimes cruel, techniques to try to increase her fortitude, such as firing blanks at her skirts, dripping hot wax on her arms, and having her wade into a lake fully dressed to test her resilience to cold water.\n\nWhen Sidney reached her teenage years, Day was persuaded by Edgeworth that his ideal wife experiment had failed and he should send her away, as it was inappropriate for Day to live with her unchaperoned. He then arranged for Sidney to undergo experimental vocational and residential changes\u2014first attending a boarding school, then becoming an apprentice to a dressmaker family, and eventually being employed as Day's housekeeper. Having seen changes in Sidney, Day proposed marriage, though he soon called this off when she did not follow his strict instructions; he again sent her away, this time to a boarding house, where she later found work as a lady's companion.\n\nIn 1783, Bicknell sought out Sidney and proposed marriage, telling her the truth about Day's experiment. Horrified, she confronted Day in a series of letters; he admitted the truth but refused to apologise. Sidney married Bicknell, and the couple had two children before his death in 1787. Sidney went on to work with schoolmaster Charles Burney, managing his schools.\n\nIn 1804, Anna Seward published a book about Sidney's upbringing. Edgeworth followed up with his memoirs, in which he claimed Sidney loved Day. Sidney herself, on the other hand, said she was miserable with Day and that he treated her as a slave.\n\nEarly life [ edit ]\n\nThe now-demolished Foundling Hospital, where Sidney was abandoned\n\nSidney was born in 1757 in Clerkenwell, London, and was left at the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children (more commonly known as the Foundling Hospital) in London on 24 May 1757 by an anonymous individual. This person left a note explaining that the baby's baptismal name was Manima Butler and that she had been baptised in St James's Church, Clerkenwell. Her name was likely a misspelling of Monimia but there were no baptismal records for any spelling of the name at the parish.\n\nOne of the requirements of the Foundling Hospital was that babies were to be less than six months old at the time of admittance, but the hospital did not keep more accurate records of age. Another requirement was that foundlings were given a new name and a reference number, so Sidney became Girl Ann Kingston no. 4759. She was taken in by a wet nurse, Mary Penfold, who brought her to Wotton, Surrey, where she remained until 1759, when she was two years old. Although it was usual for foundlings to remain with their wet nurse until the age of five or six, the Foundling Hospital had received an influx of new babies and moved many children who no longer required nursing, including Sidney, to the Shrewsbury branch of the Foundling Hospital. The Shrewsbury building was not completed until 1765, so in the meantime Sidney and another foundling were cared for by a nurse, Ann Casewell, at her home.\n\nDay's experiment [ edit ]\n\nBackground [ edit ]\n\nThomas Day in 1770\n\nThomas Day was a bachelor who had inherited his fortune from his father when he was an infant. Described as having a face pockmarked from smallpox, a brooding personality, and a short temper, Day attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to study philosophy. It was there that he decided to dedicate his life to becoming a virtuous man, shunning luxury and focusing on altruism. Around the same time he developed a list of requirements for his future wife, that she should be subservient and pure but also able to discuss philosophy and live without frivolities. These high standards, combined with his generally unlikeable personality, meant that his advances were rejected by several women while he was at university.\n\nDay was introduced to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by his friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth; the pair shared a particular affinity for Rousseau's work on education in the book Emile, or On Education. On leaving Oxford, Edgeworth and Day attempted to teach Edgeworth's first son, Dick, in the style of Emile, a learning-by-doing approach. Accompanying Edgeworth to Ireland as Dick's tutor, Day fell in love and was spurned first by Edgeworth's sister, and then by at least three other women in quick succession.\n\nDay came to the conclusion that he would not be able to find a wife who would meet his high standards and largely blamed women's education for this. Inspired by the character of Sophie in Rousseau's Emile, he resolved to \"create\" his ideal wife by raising her from adolescence, using the techniques laid out in the book. Day was approaching financial independence, when he would have full access to the money left to him, and conspired with his barrister friend, John Bicknell, to find two girls who could be taken into his care to be groomed as a perfect wife.\n\nChoosing the girls [ edit ]\n\nShrewsbury Orphan Hospital, which now forms part of Shrewsbury School\n\nJust after Day's 21st birthday in June 1769, he and John Bicknell travelled to the Shrewsbury Orphan Hospital to choose the first girl for his experiment. Sidney was 12 years old at the time, described as \"a clear auburn brunette, with darker eyes more glowing bloom and chestnut tresses\". She was slender, and had long eyelashes and a pleasant voice. Day was struggling to choose a girl for the experiment, and Bicknell quickly picked her out. The pair did not tell the orphanage secretary, Samuel Magee, about the planned experiment. Instead they told him that she was to be indentured as a servant at Edgeworth's country house in Berkshire, waiving the \u00a34 (equivalent to \u00a3545 in 2018) fee they would have received for the apprenticeship. In line with the orphanage's requirements that responsibility be held by a married man, Edgeworth would be legally accountable for Sidney, despite him not being present nor even aware of the arrangement.\n\nThe apprenticeship was approved by the governors of the orphanage on 30 June 1769; Day and Bicknell collected Sidney on 17 August. She was brought to lodgings in London, where she met Edgeworth for the first time. Day changed her name to Sabrina Sidney: Sabrina, the Latin name for the River Severn, which her orphanage overlooked; and Sidney after Algernon Sidney, one of Day's heroes. Day became a benefactor, and subsequently governor, of the Foundling Hospital, and on 20 September 1769 he chose another girl for his experiment, renaming her Lucretia after the Roman matron.\n\nDay had Bicknell draw up a contract to define the terms of the girls' indenture. Within one year, he would choose which girl he intended to marry, and the other would be given as an apprentice to a woman in a trade, along with a fee of \u00a3100 (equivalent to \u00a313,630 in 2018). He would give a further \u00a3400 (equivalent to \u00a354,519 in 2018) upon the girl's marriage or if she were to start her own business. He would marry his intended bride or, if he decided not to, would gift her the sum of \u00a3500 (equivalent to \u00a368,149 in 2018). Bicknell acted as guarantor for the contract.\n\nEducation in France [ edit ]\n\nDay wished for the girls to be isolated from external influences while he educated them so, at the beginning of November 1769, he decided to move them to France. It is also possible that he did this to protect himself from the legal ramifications of his experiment, as well as societal gossip. The trio travelled over 600 miles to Avignon, renting a house in le quartier des fusteries. The girls could speak no French and Day employed no English-speaking servants, to be sure that he would be the only person to influence them.\n\nDay focussed on the girls' education, in the style of Emile. He expanded on the teaching they had received from the Foundling Hospital in reading and basic arithmetic, and also taught them how to write. He believed that the girls should be able to manage the house, so they were charged with cooking and cleaning as well as other housework. Finally, he wanted to be able to debate complex concepts with them, so he taught them rudimentary theories in physics and geography, tasking them with observing the changing of the seasons, and recording details of sunrises and sunsets. He also imparted to them Rousseau's philosophical contempt for luxury.\n\nDuring his stay in France, Day regularly corresponded with Edgeworth. He said that both girls were passionate about their studies, Sidney more so. Day also related anecdotes, one concerning a trip on the Rhone where the boat overturned and he rescued both girls single-handedly as neither could swim. He described an incident in which he challenged a French Army officer to a duel, even producing a set of dueling pistols, simply as a manner of engaging or encouraging conversation with his young students; the officer apologised and explained he did not mean any offence, calming the situation.\n\nAccounts by 19th-century historians suggest that Day grew impatient with the girls when they became bored with their lessons and began to squabble, and that he also spent significant time nursing them through a bout of smallpox. These accounts may have been exaggerated as both girls had been inoculated against smallpox, and their strict upbringing meant they would not have rebelled excessively.\n\nReturn to England [ edit ]\n\nWhile in France, Day struggled over which girl to choose to take forward with the experiment. Both were beautiful; Lucretia was more cheerful, Sidney more reserved and studious. The trio returned to England in spring 1770, by which time Day had finally decided that he would carry on with Sidney's training. Edgeworth explained that each of Day's projects with Sabrina had been successful, but he had come to the conclusion that Lucretia was \"invincibly stupid\". Day apprenticed Lucretia to a milliner in Ludgate Hill, and took Sidney to Stowe House in Lichfield, where her training could continue. The household would have had no more than a couple of servants, leaving Sidney to maintain the four floors of the house. Her tutoring continued at the same time, with one-on-one lessons from Day on a variety of subjects.\n\nStowe House, Day's Lichfield residence, viewed across Stowe Pool, the lake into which Sidney waded\n\nDay extended his tutoring to fortify Sidney against hardship, again based upon his interpretation of Rousseau's Emile. The book explains the concept of \"negative education\", protecting a person from vices rather than teaching them virtues. Day interpreted this to mean that submitting Sidney to tests of endurance would help to create a woman with hardened nerves. One example given by Rousseau was helping Emile become accustomed to explosions such as fireworks by firing pistols with small amounts of powder near him, gradually increasing the amount of powder. Day, on the other hand, fired a pistol loaded with powder directly at Sidney's petticoat, not telling her that there was no shot in it.\n\nIn an attempt to increase her resistance to pain he would drop hot sealing wax on her back and arms or stick pins in her, commanding her not to cry out. He would test her ability to keep secrets by telling her that his life was in danger and she should tell no one. To increase her resistance to the cold, Day instructed Sidney to wade into Stowe Pool until the water reached her neck, then lie in the nearby meadow until her clothes and hair had dried in the sun. Finally, to test her resistance to luxury, he gave her a big box of handmade silk clothes and had her throw them on a fire. Day had limited success with these techniques. Sidney became able to endure hot wax dripped on her arm without flinching, but she did tell others of his secret techniques, and could not help screaming whenever he fired his gun at her.\n\nDuring their time at Stowe House, Day introduced Sidney to members of the local intellectual circle, including the priest at Lichfield Cathedral, Thomas Seward. Seward and his wife hoped that Day might be a suitor for their daughter, Anna, and Anna's writings of the time show her interest in Day. Anna was also enchanted by Sidney, who became the link between Day and the Seward family. Anna took a keen interest in Sidney's story, as her father had taken in Honora Sneyd when Sneyd's mother had died.\n\nMoving away from Day [ edit ]\n\nAnna Seward, acquaintance of Day who questioned the propriety of his relationship with Sidney\n\nBy 1770, Sidney began to question Day's techniques and to complain about the chores she had to perform. In December, the propriety of Day's arrangement with Sidney was questioned by the local community, especially Anna Seward. Edgeworth joined Day for Christmas at Stowe, and convinced him that his experiment had been unsuccessful. He also persuaded Day that Sidney was too old to live with him without a chaperone. Day appeared to accept Edgeworth's point of view, as he paid for Sidney to attend Sutton Coldfield boarding school in Warwickshire early in 1771. She remained at the boarding school for three years, including weekends and holidays, with infrequent visits from Day. The school normally focused on preparing high society daughters for marriage, with subjects such as needlework and the arts. Day stipulated that she was to be taught academic subjects but should not dance or learn music.\n\nIn 1774, Day visited Sidney to inform her that she would be apprenticed to the Parkinsons, a family of dressmakers, as Day believed the profession would not expose her to temptation. She was delivered to the family with the stipulation that she should work hard at chores and be denied luxuries. The Parkinsons, however, treated Sidney well, to the extent that Day later chastised them for not instilling \"industry and frugality\" in her. Less than a year later the Parkinsons' business went bankrupt, leaving Sidney without an apprenticeship and nowhere to live. Day arranged for her to stay with his friends, the Keir family, and implied that she could take on the role of housekeeper at his own home. Day again considered Sidney, who was now 18, a potential wife, but did not let her know of his intentions, nor that her upbringing was part of his experiment.\n\nBroken engagement [ edit ]\n\nOver the next few months, Day returned to moulding Sidney to meet his requirements for the ideal woman, choosing what she would wear, and pushing his ideas of frugality upon her. Sidney took on all the ideas willingly and Day believed he had finally created a woman who would meet all his requirements. He was so confident that he talked openly of marrying Sidney, though she was unaware of his intentions. Eventually one of Day's friends let her know that he hoped to marry her. Sidney confronted Day about the rumours and he admitted they were true, neglecting to mention that he had hoped to marry her since the day he met her.\n\nSidney did not refuse the proposal, so Day planned the wedding while she considered it further and eventually agreed. During the preparations, Day left Sidney with friends for a few days, giving her strict instructions on what she should wear. When he returned to find her in an outfit that did not meet his requirements, he flew into a rage and Sidney fled for a few hours, so Day called off the engagement. Sidney was sent to a boarding house in Birmingham and given a stipend of \u00a350 per annum (equivalent to \u00a36,180 in 2018). Day resolved never to see her again.\n\nMarriage [ edit ]\n\n\"I never thought I had a right to sacrifice another being to my own good or pleasure; but whatever else ensued you would be placed in circumstances infinitely more favourable to happiness than before\" Day's explanation of his behaviour to Sidney\n\nAfter her engagement to Day ended, Sidney spent eight years at boarding houses around Birmingham. Day met and went on to marry an heiress, Esther Milnes, in 1778. Sidney met an apothecary, Jarvis Wardley, who proposed marriage in an acrostic poem. She contacted Day for advice, and he told her in absolute terms not to marry Wardley, even writing an acrostic poem for her to use in turning him down. In 1783, she had become a lady's companion in Newport, Shropshire. It was there that she was approached by Day's friend, the man who helped choose her at the foundling hospital, John Bicknell. Bicknell was single and had spent the majority of his earnings from his law career in gambling dens. He had not paid much attention to Sidney since selecting her with Day, but proposed marriage immediately.\n\nSidney again consulted Day on the prospective engagement. Day did not approve, claiming the age difference was too great, although Bicknell was only two years older than Day. Bicknell decided to tell Sidney the truth about the experiment, that she was hand-picked to be Day's wife from childhood, and that all of Day's actions were designed to further his goal of turning her into the ideal bride. Horrified, Sidney wrote to Day to confront him over Bicknell's statements. Day admitted the truth but refused to apologise. After a series of letters, Day gave his consent to the marriage, telling her that the letter would be his final communication with her.\n\nFinal residence of Sabrina Bicknell, at 29 Gloucester Circus, Greenwich\n\nBicknell and Sidney married on 16 April 1784 at St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham. The same day, Day paid the \u00a3500 wedding dowry he had stipulated in the contract he had set up with Bicknell, ending his \u00a350 (equivalent to \u00a36,009 in 2018) per year stipend. The couple bought a house in Shenfield and had two children, John Laurens Bicknell and Henry Edgeworth Bicknell. Bicknell carried on with his gambling habits, squandering the remaining money over the following three years. On 27 March 1787, after three years of marriage, John Bicknell died of a paralytic stroke.\n\nSidney and her two children were now left without an income. Day sent her a new stipend of \u00a330 per year, (equivalent to \u00a33,708 in 2018) which was matched by Edgeworth. Her husband's barrister friends raised \u00a3800 (equivalent to \u00a398,873 in 2018) for the widow and her children. Sidney found a role as housekeeper for Charles Burney, as well as general manager of his schools in Chiswick, Hammersmith, and Greenwich. It was at his Greenwich school that her own children were educated.\n\nDay's widow, Esther, continued paying Sidney's allowance after his death in 1789, and Sidney carried on her work with Burney until she was 68. By this time she was living in a four-storey house in Gloucester Circus, Greenwich, with her own servants. On 8 September 1843, Sidney died at her home of a severe asthma attack. She was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery.\n\nLegacy [ edit ]\n\nSidney asked her friends not to discuss her past as she believed her humble beginnings, and Day's mistreatment of her, would tarnish her reputation. Anna Seward nevertheless wrote about Sidney's upbringing in her 1804 work Memoirs on the Life of Dr. Darwin. As Seward publicly identified Sidney in the book, it was criticised by the press, and Sidney's son John was very angry to learn of his mother's past. In his 1820 memoirs, Edgeworth stated his belief that Sidney and Day made a good match and that she loved him. Sidney disagreed with these accounts, saying that Day had made her miserable, and that she had effectively been a slave.\n\nSidney's education has been compared to George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, which may have been inspired by her story. Strong parallels have also been drawn between Sidney's upbringing and two novels of 1871: Henry James's Watch and Ward, and Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm. The story of her life has been told in Wendy Moore's 2013 book How to Create the Perfect Wife and dramatised in the 2015 BBC Radio 4 play The Imperfect Education of Sabrina Sidney.\n\nReferences [ edit ]"}
{"text":"The Alabama-Coushatta tribe plans to hold a job fair soon for their new Class II casino, Naskila Entertainment near Livingston, Texas. On Tuesday April 19 Tribal members are invited for either of two sessions to be held at the Tribal Multi-Purpose Center (Gym). Tribal Members and the general community are welcome to attend on Wednesday, April 20th.\n\nThe Multi-Purpose Center is located at 333 State Park Rd 56. Tuesday\u2019s job fair will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 pm and 4:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. with Wednesday\u2019s running from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 pm and 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.\n\nThe Job Fair will be facilitated by Naskila Management along with Tribal departmental staff. The open meetings will allow interested people to get face to face time and learn more about career opportunities. A variety of positions are available from managerial and technical to service and support. A flyer, also posted on the Entertainment Center\u2019s Facebook page offers a phone number for those with questions.\n\nOur phone calls Friday and Saturday went directly to voice mail and a Friday email has not been returned yet. We are monitoring social media and local news outlets for updated information in regard to an opening date, but expect the venue to open on or before May 1st.\n\nThe tribe has not offered Class II slot machines since 2002, since being forced by court decisions to close a lucrative operation that generated about $1 million per month for the tribe and ran less than a year. The only other tribal casino to operate in the state is the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino in Eagle Pass, which has been open since 1996. Texans, not in the \u201cDeep East\u201d also have a casino cruise ship available out of Aransas Pass \u2013 otherwise the state\u2019s denizens are forced to travel out of state to \u201cget their spin on\u201d across the border at other tribal casinos like the Chickasaw Nation\u2019s WinStar World Casino and Resort in Oklahoma.\n\nIn October 2015 the National Indian Gaming Commission ruled that the tribe, along with the Tigua Tribes (aka Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo) in Texas, had been restored to federal recognition a year before the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed; affirming both tribes\u2019 jurisdiction over their sovereign lands. On November 3, 2015 the tribe announced that they had received federal approval to resume electronic gaming.\n\nThe casino is located at 540 State Park Road 56, in Livingston, Texas and will offer 15,000 square feet of entertainment space with about 10,000 of that devoted to gaming on over 350 machines. A restaurant is also planned for the refurbished center.\n\nThe state\u2019s Charitable Bingo operators have been losing money for the last several years with some being shut down by the state for not generating positive income. They are staunchly opposed to the state\u2019s tribes self-determination on sovereign land on which the state has no jurisdiction to enforce its draconian gambling laws. The Charitable bingo operators were also heavily influential in getting the Texas Racing Commission to kill regulations allowing so-called Historical Racing machines. Statewide, the only legal gambling outlets are a state lottery, parimutuel wagering, and charity bingo."}
{"text":"Four minutes from the end of Manchester City's remarkably comfortable win over QPR on Sunday, the entire Etihad stadium rose to its feet to applaud an oncoming player. Yun Suk-Young was replaced by former City star Shaun Wright-Phillips and there was a show of respect for the winger, as there had been earlier in the game for Richard Dunne, to mark just how much the fans remember his efforts while playing at Eastlands.\n\nThat team also included Joey Barton, although he's since become something of a pantomime villain. That's likely to do with the number of indiscretions to his name at City, including his acrimonious departure after an incident with Ousmane Dabo, and then his attempts to \"take some of them with [him]\" as he went berserk in that game in 2012.\n\nThe thing is, those City fans that applauded Wright-Phillips onto the turf on Sunday were pleased to see him back. He epitomised everything supporters love to see, back when he was one of the club's only shining lights. Throughout the end of the Kevin Keegan era and the start of the Stuart Pearce reign, there wasn't a lot for those in the stands to cheer.\n\nFA Cup exits, relegation battles, European near-misses; all of these came and went and the pitch was filled with mediocrity. Except on the right flank, where an academy product could beat three or four players and smash an effort into the top corner from range. In one moment, he could inject some energy into a dour performance and give the dwindling atmosphere a buzz. He was going to be an England regular, too.\n\nAs was the way for City back then, they were a selling club, although they have since benefited from the flip side of that coin. If there was a player performing well who was \"too good\" for them, then a decent bid from a top side would no doubt result in a transfer.\n\nThat's exactly what happened. Pearce's side was desperate for investment, but the club had no money whatsoever and was actually close to going under. So when Chelsea bid \u00a321 million for the England prospect in 2005, the manager's hands were tied and the offer was accepted. Even now, the money the club received for the winger is their highest, although it will soon be surpassed when the sale of Alvaro Negredo to Valencia is triggered at the end of the season.\n\nThe fans were devastated to see Wright-Phillips leave, and it only later emerged in an interview with the Blue Moon Podcast that he was just as upset to be on his way.\n\n\"I didn't actually have a choice,\" he said. \"Everybody seemed to think it was something that I wanted to do, but I was happy playing for City. I didn't want to leave, but [staying] wasn't an option I had. City were in a bad situation and the money they were offered was hard for them to refuse.\n\n\"In the car on the way down I was crying because I didn't want to go.\"\n\nShaun Wright-Phillips applauds the Manchester City crowd as he receives an ovation while warming up at the Etihad.\n\nThat puts Wright-Phillips' remarks that re-signing for Mark Hughes' Manchester City was like \"coming home\" into more context, even if throughout his second spell it always felt for the fans like things were never quite the same. The time away had left him unable to be the influence he once was.\n\nThat's not to say he was poor when he came back, just that he never hit his previous heights. It was almost as if his move back to the north was what he needed to inject some life back into his career, much the same way he used to do to City's performances in 2003. He scored four times in three seasons at Chelsea, a tally he'd equalled in his sixth game after his return.\n\nAs much as Wright-Phillips was a crowd hero, he never really got to experience the good times he probably deserved with City. He played a bit part in the 2011 FA Cup-winning side, but had moved on by the time the title came to the Etihad the next season. By a bizarre quirk of fate, though, he was on the pitch when Roberto Mancini's side snatched the championship, playing for QPR that afternoon.\n\nThe applause reserved for those players who were loyal to the club and did their best to brighten up another gloomy day in Manchester will always remain strong. Although for Wright-Phillips, you can't help wondering whether things might have been different if he'd never been shown the door a decade ago.\n\nDavid Mooney is ESPN FC's Manchester City blogger. Twitter: @DavidMooney"}
{"text":"Turner Broadcasting System Inc. will cut its workforce by about 10 percent, or 1,475 workers, in the coming weeks through layoffs, buyouts and other measures, the company announced Monday.\n\nAtlanta-based Turner, which is owned by Time Warner, said 975 of the job reductions will be in metro Atlanta, which is taking the brunt of the cuts. In addition to TNT, Turner\u2019s holdings include CNN, TBS, Cartoon Network, truTV, HLN and other networks and online sites.\n\nThe company said fewer than 300 of the job cuts will be at CNN Worldwide.\n\nThe company said the cuts are being made to reduce redundancies, focus resources and prioritize investment in programming, monetization and innovation.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s our responsibility as business leaders to focus Turner\u2019s talent pool where individuals and groups will deliver the greatest return for the company, for Time Warner and for our shareholders,\u201d Chief Executive Officer John Martin said in an internal memo to employees, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.\n\nAtlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said he expected Turner to preserve as many jobs locally as possible.\n\n\u201cFor more than 30 years, Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) has served as the leading news, entertainment, and animation company in our city, state and region,\u201d Reed said in a statement. \u201cDespite Turner\u2019s decision to reduce staff globally, including operations in Atlanta, we are confident that its leadership team will work to preserve as many of the 5,500 full-time positions located in the city where TBS was founded.\u201d\n\nTurner said the cuts from among 14,000 full-time positions worldwide will come at all levels from across the company\u2019s news, entertainment, kids, young adult and sports networks and businesses, as well as corporate functions, in 18 Turner locations around the world.\n\nThe cuts are being made through a combination of voluntary buyouts, layoffs and other measures. Employees whose positions are directly impacted will be advised over the next two weeks and will be offered severance pay for transition, the company said."}
{"text":"What is Twitter marketing? It\u2019s what you want it to be. Want to learn more about your customers? Make your brand a little more human? Build buzz about your new product? Make an influencer\u2019s day? Provide lightning-fast customer support? Start mopping up after a PR disaster? Publicly humiliate trolls? Twitter\u2019s got you covered.\n\nWhatever your goals, there\u2019s no question Twitter can be a powerful tool to help you achieve them.\n\nIf you\u2019re just starting out with Twitter, this guide will show you how to craft a winning strategy. If you\u2019re already using the platform to grow your business, jump to our section on smart Twitter tips for business.\n\nBonus: Download the free strategy guide that reveals how Hootsuite grew our Twitter following to over 8 million users and learn how you can put the tactics to work for your business.\n\nHow to create a Twitter marketing strategy\n\nA well-crafted strategy is the foundation for success\u2014and it\u2019s what separates the most effective brands on Twitter from the also-rans. Without a clear plan, you will waste time and money tweeting without a clear understanding of how your activities are helping your organization meet its goals. And when it comes time to review your performance, you\u2019ll struggle to prove what you\u2019ve achieved. And that will make it hard to make the case for increasing your team size or budget.\n\nEvery hour you spend on research and strategy will pay off tenfold. We promise. Here\u2019s what you need to do:\n\nDefine success and set goals\n\nOkay, so you\u2019ve got a good answer ready when your boss asks, \u201cWhy are we on Twitter?\u201d Then come the two follow-up punches: \u201cAre we on track to meet our goals? And\u2026 what are they again?\u201d\n\nAnswering these questions isn\u2019t hard if you do your homework. Start with a list of your organization\u2019s current high-level business objectives, such as:\n\nGenerate leads and sales\n\nIncrease customer loyalty\n\nBuild brand and product awareness\n\nDecrease customer support costs\n\nFrom these objectives, craft specific and measurable goals. This will make it easy for you to evaluate progress and prove success. For example, if your objective is to provide your sales team with high-quality leads through social, your goal might be \u201cuse Twitter to drive 30 email sign-ups per month.\u201d\n\nWith objectives and goals in place, remember to take time to benchmark the current state of your team\u2019s performance. This will help you measure your progress toward your goals, proving that your strategy is producing real, measurable results for your business.\n\nDefining and measuring success on social media can be challenging, so taking the time to do this right will really set you apart. Our guide to the ROI of social media breaks down the process for you.\n\nResearch the competition\n\nGathering information about your competitors\u2019 strengths and weaknesses on social is critical. Not sure where to start? Read our quick guide, and then use this competitive analysis template to design a social marketing strategy that will leave your competitors in the dust.\n\nIdentify your target audience\n\nYour brand can\u2019t be all things to all people on Twitter\u2014nor should you want it to be. Know who you\u2019re targeting and craft a strategy that focuses on delivering real value to them. This will encourage them to engage with your brand and eventually become customers and advocates. While you\u2019re at it, check out our guide on how to attract and engage more Twitter followers.\n\nAudit and take charge of your Twitter accounts\n\nDepending on the size of your company and your goals, you may want to use a single Twitter account or multiple accounts for different departments or functions. If multiple people in your organization are already using Twitter, auditing and consolidating existing accounts is key.\n\nHow important is this? When the Vancouver Canucks hockey team deleted rogue accounts and launched official social media channels as part of their social strategy, they were able to strategically grow their Twitter fan base by 800 percent.\n\nIntegrate Twitter with overall social strategy\n\nTeams working in large (or growing) organizations can find themselves working in silos. If you find this happening to your social marketing team, make sure you keep tearing down those silos and stay connected to other teams. Their work can be a rich source of information and assets to share with your followers. And they may be gathering insights that can open up new opportunities for your Twitter strategy.\n\nKeep your Twitter presence unique\n\nWhile it\u2019s possible\u2014and easy\u2014to post the same content to multiple social networks, cross-posting isn\u2019t an approach we recommend. Each network has its own unique characteristics and user base, so while applying the same strategy to multiple networks might seem like a shortcut, it might cost you more in engagement and authenticity than it saves you in time and effort. Nail your strategy on one network at a time, keeping it unique and fresh.\n\nFor a head start charting your strategy, download our social media templates that cover everything from social media strategy and audits to content calendars and bulk message uploading for Hootsuite.\n\n10 useful Twitter marketing tips for business\n\n1. Use Twitter tools to get more done\n\nTwitter\u2019s website and apps are great for sending the occasional tweet or direct message\u2014but to manage your Twitter marketing at scale, you need the right tools for the job.\n\nOur list of 33 Twitter tools you can use in your marketing strategy is broken down by function to help you find the tools you need to market your business more efficiently on Twitter. Here are just a few of the things these tools will help you do faster and better:\n\nGenerate leads by learning more about the people engaging with your brand, why they\u2019re sharing your content, and who they\u2019re sharing it with.\n\nby learning more about the people engaging with your brand, why they\u2019re sharing your content, and who they\u2019re sharing it with. Find industry influencers to connect with.\n\nto connect with. Analyze your competition to find detailed information on their tweets, mentions, hashtags, followers, and more.\n\nto find detailed information on their tweets, mentions, hashtags, followers, and more. Find trending topics by content, hashtags, search terms, sources, and more.\n\nby content, hashtags, search terms, sources, and more. Edit and add images to your tweets.\n\nto your tweets. Manage who you follow (and unfollow) to add valuable new information to your Twitter feed\u2014and remove inactive and spammy followers.\n\n(and unfollow) to add valuable new information to your Twitter feed\u2014and remove inactive and spammy followers. Time your posts for maximum impact with tools that analyze both your tweets and your followers\u2019 tweets.\n\nWith your Twitter toolbox stocked and ready, it\u2019s time to turn your attention to crafting a world-class profile.\n\n2. Build a great Twitter profile\n\nA complete, strategically crafted Twitter profile does far more than put a pretty face on your organization\u2019s Twitter account\u2014it can build trust with your audience, improve how your business appears in search results, and give your customers a direct, real-time channel to reach out to you with questions and kudos for your company. Here\u2019s how to do it right:\n\nWrite a great bio\n\nTwitter lets you use a few less characters in your bio than in your tweets (160, compared to 280), but you\u2019ll still want to get maximum impact from every word (and hashtag). Whether you\u2019re writing writing a new bio from scratch or looking to freshen up an existing one, we\u2019ve got a list of world-class Twitter bio ideas to increase your follower count.\n\nImage via Hootsuite on Twitter.\n\nComplete and optimize your profile\n\nA strategically optimized Twitter profile can do far more than just share your name, handle, and description. With a few quick tweaks, you can boost the visual impact of your profile; target a precise physical location or general area; help customers find other Twitter profiles your company manages; and make it easier for people to interact with your brand and start conversations about your products. For all the details, see our video on optimizing your profile settings on Twitter.\n\nGet verified\n\nWhen people see that you are verified by Twitter, they know that they can trust your content\u2014and your brand. Learn how to get verified on Twitter and earn that small but highly valuable blue \u201cverified\u201d checkmark next to your account name.\n\nShow it off\n\nOf course, after investing all this work in crafting a great profile, you\u2019ll want to make sure people actually find it. Add your Twitter handle to your website, email signatures, the side of your delivery truck, and wherever else it makes sense to show it off.\n\n3. Listen and learn\n\nIf your strategy is focused on using Twitter to broadcast content to your followers, you\u2019re not taking advantage of Twitter\u2019s massive potential as a platform for social listening.\n\nAs our CEO Ryan Holmes explains, \u201cFor businesses that pursue social listening seriously, the benefits can be significant: real-time intelligence on competitors; instant feedback on how your own brand is being perceived; and actionable data for designing or tweaking marketing campaigns.\u201d\n\nYou need to know what your Twitter community is talking about, whether people are directly mentioning your brand or not. What topics are they interested in? What kinds of content do they respond to? Who do they engage with? These are all important factors to consider when participating in social media listening.\n\nThings to listen for include:\n\nYour brand\u2019s name (including misspellings)\n\nYour brand\u2019s product names (including misspellings)\n\nYour competitors (again, including misspellings)\n\nIndustry buzzwords\n\nBrand slogans\n\nYour CEO or public representative\u2019s names (and misspellings)\n\nCampaign names or keywords\n\nAnother key reason to listen on social is to find influencers and experts in your field. Nearly 40 percent of Twitter users say they\u2019ve made a purchase as a direct result of a tweet from an influencer, and 49 percent say they rely on influencers when looking for product recommendations.\n\nFor more information on how to find influencers on Twitter and build valuable relationships with them, take a look at our complete guide to influencer marketing on social media.\n\nOur guide to social media listening lists tools you can use:\n\nTwitter Advanced Search lets you narrow down your searches, search by negative or positive sentiment, explore relevant hashtags, and much more. For more information, see our guide on how to use Twitter\u2019s Advanced Search for lead generation.\n\nHootsuite makes it easy to set up streams that allow you to not only monitor conversations and keywords, but respond or assign the response to someone else on your team. And with Hootsuite Insights, you can monitor social media networks, news sources, and blogs to stay on top of trends, understand the conversations happening around your brand, and discover which content is resonating with your audience.\n\nSocial Mention monitors over 100 sources and \u201callows you to easily track and mention what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web\u2019s social media landscape in real-time.\u201d\n\nTweetReach offers basic listening tools, and helps you monitor tweets about your brand, and industry conversations.\n\nCision Social Edition (formerly ViralHeat) allows you to listen to conversations around your brand across social networks and then \u201cidentify trends to drive insights around your social media performance.\u201d\n\n4. Create great content\n\nWhile it\u2019s true that you\u2019ve only got 280 characters to worry about at a time, you should still strive to write tweets that are on brand, easy to read, and likely to resonate with your audience. If you\u2019re looking for help or inspiration, check out our great list of 8 writing resources for non-writers.\n\nHere are the basics for writing a great tweet:\n\nHelp your audience\n\nTo create content your audience will actually read and use, it helps to never stop learning about their interests, needs, and fears. In addition to reading their tweets and engaging directly with them, you can also use apps like Trendspottr to find and share trending content.\n\nWe're responding to storms & tornadoes that blew across the Midwest. For shelter info, visit https:\/\/t.co\/IwTsENcx2z or call 1-800-768-8048. \u2014 American Red Cross (@RedCross) April 30, 2017\n\nKeep it short\n\nYes, the limit is 280 characters\u2014but you don\u2019t have to use all those characters every time to create a great tweet. Mix up the length of tweets, and remember to use a URL shortener (like Ow.ly, available in the Hootsuite dashboard) to prevent links from taking up more space than necessary (and make it easier to include UTM parameters without creating clutter).\n\nIncorporate content curation\n\nYou curate content when you sort through the massive amount of content online and share the best of it with your followers in an organized, meaningful way. At Hootsuite, we share the best content we find with our followers using the hashtag #ChoiceContent.\n\nFor tips on incorporating content curation into your overall strategy, see our guide to using curated content on Twitter.\n\nUse hashtags\n\nHashtags ensure that your content is being seen by as many followers as possible. Hashtags enable you to classify content so that your tweets are grouped with other relevant Twitter content. This helps other Twitter users find your content easily, just as it can help you find influencers and others in your industry.\n\nThe art and science of using hashtags has evolved substantially in the past few years, and if you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re doing, you can wind up using hashtags incorrectly and sounding tone-deaf or worse. Get up to speed with our comprehensive guide on the do\u2019s and don\u2019ts of how to use hashtags.\n\n5. Use multimedia to drive more engagement\n\nThe popularity\u2014and effectiveness\u2014of multimedia continues its meteoric rise on social media. A survey of Twitter users found that the majority (82 percent) watch video content on Twitter, and that users want to see more videos from celebrities, other users, and brands. Why not offer your followers more of what they\u2019re asking for?\n\nVideo\n\nAccording to Wyzowl\u2019s State of Video Marketing 2017 report, 79 percent of consumers would rather watch a video to learn about a product than read text on a page\u2014and 84 percent of consumers have been convinced to make a purchase after watching a brand\u2019s video. You might tweet out videos your organization has created, retweet relevant video content your audience would find valuable, or explore ways to share real-time video on Twitter.\n\nImages\n\nAmong all the options for sharing images and photos online, don\u2019t forget to share them on Twitter too. Include relevant images to catch the eye of your community and encourage engagement. If you\u2019re sharing photos of people, you can also tag up to 10 people per image, as described in our post on Twitter best practices.\n\nGIFs\n\nAh, GIFs. With users sharing over 100 million GIFS on Twitter in 2016, they can be a great option for adding some relevant fun to your tweets. If some cheeky animated joy is on-brand for your organization, try out Twitter\u2019s integrated GIF search. And for a wealth of ideas, you can check out our GIF guide for social media marketers.\n\n6. Post at the right time\n\nTweets don\u2019t last. According to Wiselytics, a tweet has a half-life of just 24 minutes and reaches 75 percent of its potential engagement in less than three hours. That means you need to tweet at the right time to reach the most potential followers and maximize engagement.\n\nTweet regularly\n\nWe recommend tweeting at least once a day to attract and engage Twitter followers. Experiment with posting more than that, and then pay attention to how your followers react to find the frequency that works best for you.\n\nStart with industry best practices\n\nResearch has shown that the best posting times are generally 12 p.m., 5 p.m., and 6 p.m. Consider posting at these times in your initial strategy, then flesh out your schedule as you learn more about what times get the best results with your followers.\n\nUse analytics to fine-tune your approach\n\nUse engagement data from Twitter Analytics to adjust your timing once you\u2019ve gathered some data about how followers are engaging with your tweets.\n\nSchedule your tweets\n\nOnce you know the best times to tweet for optimal engagement, you can use Hootsuite to schedule your tweets, which will save you time and ensure you\u2019re getting the best bang for your buck with each tweet.\n\nWith Hootsuite, you can schedule your Twitter messages manually or in bulk, and you can even set up Hootsuite to automatically post at optimal times. For more information on exactly how to do this, see our post on scheduling posts through Hootsuite. And if you\u2019re looking for templates for bulk uploads, we\u2019ve got those too.\n\n7. Engage with your audience\n\nIt\u2019s easy for marketers to get obsessed with the number of followers we collect on Twitter. But without engagement, your follower number is just that\u2014a number. From the start, Twitter has been designed to help people connect and engage on a personal level. Use that strength to your advantage and engage daily with your audience.\n\nFollow your network\u2014 Your followers\u2019 tweets can provide a wealth of information about their interests, needs, preferences, and so on. Follow and learn from them.\n\nYour followers\u2019 tweets can provide a wealth of information about their interests, needs, preferences, and so on. Follow and learn from them. Respond quickly\u2014 According to one social media research study, 42 percent of consumers expect a 60-minute response time on social media. Respond quickly and naturally to customers, as you would in person or over the phone.\n\nAccording to one social media research study, 42 percent of consumers expect a 60-minute response time on social media. Respond quickly and naturally to customers, as you would in person or over the phone. Retweet, like, and follow\u2014 It feels good when people take a moment to retweet and like your tweets or follow you on Twitter. Return the favor and keep your followers happy.\n\nIt feels good when people take a moment to retweet and like your tweets or follow you on Twitter. Return the favor and keep your followers happy. Use @mentions and tag people\u2014 When you mention followers, influencers, or other brands in a tweet, including an @mention is a nice way to drive a little traffic their way. You can also tag people in photos when it\u2019s appropriate to do so, as covered in our post on Twitter best practices.\n\nWhen you mention followers, influencers, or other brands in a tweet, including an @mention is a nice way to drive a little traffic their way. You can also tag people in photos when it\u2019s appropriate to do so, as covered in our post on Twitter best practices. Ask for a little help\u2014 It\u2019s okay to occasionally ask followers to retweet, mention, or like your tweets.\n\nIt\u2019s okay to occasionally ask followers to retweet, mention, or like your tweets. Get interactive\u2014Tweet a question and see how your followers respond, or run a Twitter Poll for customer service feedback, quick product or service opinions, and direct social listening opportunities.\n\nWe're at #CES2016 & letting you choose what we cover. Vote now and watch our Periscope tomorrow! \u2014 Amazon.com (@amazon) January 7, 2016\n\nKeep listening for opportunities and pain points. If you\u2019re looking for a little inspiration on how to kick-start engagement with your Twitter followers, try our 5-day plan for increasing your Twitter engagement.\n\n8. Monitor your business and brand\n\nYou\u2019ve seen the news about companies mishandling PR disasters on social\u2014but whether you\u2019re monitoring social networks to mitigate major risk or just to keep an eye on overall sentiment about your brand, it\u2019s vital to know what people are saying and sharing on Twitter.\n\nFollow your competitors\u2014 This one\u2019s easy. Find your competitors on Twitter and follow them to know what they\u2019re sharing\u2014and what people are saying about them.\n\nThis one\u2019s easy. Find your competitors on Twitter and follow them to know what they\u2019re sharing\u2014and what people are saying about them. Get organized to listen more effectively\u2014 Twitter lists can be a great way to organize the people you follow on Twitter. If you use Hootsuite, you can easily set up streams to listen to your competitors right from your dashboard.\n\nTwitter lists can be a great way to organize the people you follow on Twitter. If you use Hootsuite, you can easily set up streams to listen to your competitors right from your dashboard. Monitor your brand\/company keywords\u2014 Twitter Analytics and other tools make it easy to do this. For a more comprehensive approach, you can Hootsuite Insights to monitor social media networks, news sources, and blogs to make sure you stay on top of trending content that matters to you.\n\nTwitter Analytics and other tools make it easy to do this. For a more comprehensive approach, you can Hootsuite Insights to monitor social media networks, news sources, and blogs to make sure you stay on top of trending content that matters to you. Have a crisis communications plan\u2014As our CEO Ryan Holmes pointed out in a LinkedIn post on \u201ctone-deaf\u201d brands, companies that haven\u2019t embraced the concept of social listening risk opening themselves up to full-blown PR disasters on social. Learn from their cautionary tales and put a plan in place for crisis communications\u2014and then hope you never need to use it.\n\n9. Measure results\n\nMeasuring your Twitter marketing results allows you to evaluate your success, see what kind of content your community engages with, and shows you opportunities for areas to further refine your Twitter strategy. Here are a few ways to get the data you need:\n\nUse Twitter Analytics\n\nTwitter Analytics gives you an overview of how your tweets are performing, who is engaging and when, influencers in your network, and metrics for individual tweets. You can track your followers\u2019 activity over time, their interests, demographics, and (if you\u2019re running a Twitter Ads campaign) ad performance.\n\nImage via Twitter.\n\nUse analytics tools from Hootsuite\n\nHootsuite\u2019s analytics tools feature real-time dashboards to help you monitor performance, spot trends, and track engagement across channels. You can tag tweets connected to campaigns or events, then track, analyze, and report on their performance.\n\nBonus: Download the free strategy guide that reveals how Hootsuite grew our Twitter following to over 8 million users and learn how you can put the tactics to work for your business.\n\n10. Elevate your strategy with advanced tactics\n\nNow that you\u2019ve mastered the basics, why not try a few more advanced tactics?\n\nAdvertise on Twitter\n\nAs great as your social media strategy may be, there are times when it makes sense to supplement your organic efforts with paid advertising to achieve your objectives on Twitter. Depending on the specific goal you\u2019re working toward, you can promote your individual tweets, your account, or even a trend you\u2019d like to amplify and associate with your business. When you\u2019re ready to get started, check out our complete guide to Twitter Ads.\n\nHost a Twitter chat\n\nHosting a Twitter chat is a great way to show thought leadership in your field while building advocacy, loyalty, and community. Using a shared hashtag, users meet online to catch up on industry news, discuss issues, and share ideas. To learn more, see our step-by-step guide on how to run a Twitter chat.\n\nHere at Hootsuite, we engage with our community through #HootChat, our weekly Twitter chat. We collaborate with influencers in the industry and encourage questions and discussion with our Twitter community.\n\nQ3. What are some tips to writing engaging captions? #HootChat pic.twitter.com\/lA7BfrC1G4 \u2014 Hootsuite (@hootsuite) May 18, 2017\n\nBroadcast live video\n\nBrands have been sharing live video on Twitter for some time now, and companies like AirBNB are even experimenting with 360\u00b0 livestreaming channels. Given the exploding popularity of video on social media, adding live video to your Twitter strategy is definitely a promising area to explore.\n\nExperiment with Twitter Moments\n\nTwitter launched Moments in 2015 as a curated list of the day\u2019s big tweets. In 2016, they opened the tool to everyone on mobile, and marketers have been using it to round up recipes, collaborate with influencers, and even create fan recaps for TV series. From serious to silly, Twitter Moments offer new ways to put Twitter to work for your business.\n\nOffer social customer service\n\nWith 67 percent of customers in the U.S. turning to social media for customer service, there\u2019s a very good chance your customers expect to be able to do the same. Whether you use your primary Twitter account or a devoted one for support will depend on the size of your organization and the type of support you offer. You could do worse than to follow the example of our favorite brands leading the way in social customer support.\n\nSo sorry, Lia. Mind sending us a DM with your contact info and the ingredients you need? Thank you! \u2014 Whole Foods Market (@WholeFoods) May 17, 2017\n\nWith rich opportunities for researching your market, engaging with followers, and building your brand, Twitter has come a long way since its 2006 debut as a simple platform for answering the question \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d in 140 characters. It\u2019s a powerful platform for building meaningful relationships that will drive the success of your organization\u2014one follower at a time.\n\nUse Hootsuite to execute your Twitter marketing plan alongside all your other social media activity. From a single dashboard you can monitor conversations, grow your followers, schedule tweets, and much more. Try it free today.\n\nGet Started"}
{"text":"VIRGINIA BEACH \u2014 Like most political discourse in recent months, Rep. Scott Taylor and his constituents have embraced the digital sphere to foster conversation. Those who don\u2019t live within a short distance of his two offices can use his Facebook page to stay informed.\n\nOn Jan. 30, Taylor held his first Facebook Live town hall from Washington D.C., giving his nearly 55,000 Facebook followers a chance to listen and ask questions in real time.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a very effective way of communicating with a lot of people at one time, for no cost, essentially,\u201d Taylor said.\n\nBut some constituents say they have been blocked from communicating with Taylor via Facebook.\n\nLulani Mae, of Virginia Beach, said she voted for Taylor in the Nov. 8 election because she thought his military background would lend to his ability to successfully represent Virginia\u2019s 2nd district. At the Feb. 20 Kempsville town hall, Mae, who is affiliated with the local Together We Will group, told Taylor she\u2019s been blocked from posting or participating in conversations on his Facebook page.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m no longer allowed to post on your Facebook page,\u201d Mae told Taylor at the town hall, \u201cand it\u2019s very disappointing.\u201d\n\nAfter Taylor suggested that Mae had been blocked by staff members for inappropriate behavior, she said her only recent comment was when she expressed disappointment with his representation of the district.\n\n\u201cHe told me he was sorry and that he would unblock me, but that hasn\u2019t happened yet,\u201d Mae said in an interview with Southside Daily.\n\nMae isn\u2019t the only constituent to make such a claim. Three more congressional district 2 residents allege the same treatment by Taylor and his staff.\n\nMary Meade Holtz, a Hampton resident and president of the Virginia Peninsula National Organization for Women, said that she was also blocked from posting or commenting on Taylor\u2019s Facebook page.\n\nAfter Taylor posted a photo on his Facebook profile in which he was posing with President Donald Trump, she commented and asked him what he planned to do about attacks on sanctuary cities within his district.\n\nThe next time Holtz went back to the social media page, she found herself in the same situation Mae had. She could no longer speak to her congressman via Facebook.\n\n\u201cI called his office in D.C. and asked about it,\u201d Holtz said. \u201cThey took my email and name and said they would get back to me but I haven\u2019t heard anything yet.\u201d\n\nHoltz said she tried to make a post from her own page to ask about why she had prevented from speaking on his page. She tagged the congressman in her post, trying to determine if there was an alternative form of communication with him about it.\n\nHer post went unanswered.\n\nWilliamsburg resident Sheila Ann Glennon told Taylor at a Yorktown town hall that she is frustrated she cannot participate in legislature-related surveys or queries posted by his staff, especially in light of Taylor\u2019s stance that it\u2019s important for constituents to use social media to share their policy opinions.\n\nLike other constituents, Glennon is unable to comment or post.\n\nGlennon said she was blocked from the page after posting a comment that called the travel ban \u201creligious discrimination.\u201d She said that while she doesn\u2019t believe her first amendment rights have been violated, she thinks that being barred from participating is contradictory behavior.\n\n\u201cHe himself said at that town hall that he uses Facebook to gauge his constituents\u2019 reactions to policies,\u201d Glennon said. \u201cIf comments are being deleted and people are being prevented from commenting, how is he serving all of his constituents?\u201d\n\nGlennon said, as a backup plan, she bought a stack of postcards. Every time she wants her voice to be heard on an issue, she slips another card in the mail to Taylor\u2019s office.\n\n\u201cI know that at least those will get through,\u201d Glennon said. \u201cI pay my taxes. I do have a right to be represented.\u201d\n\nAnne Tucker founded the political action group Indivisible 757. She lives in Virginia Beach and recently visited Taylor\u2019s local office with a friend who uses a wheelchair.\n\nTucker said that when the pair arrived at the office, there wasn\u2019t a push button on the door to assist handicapped visitors. Concerned, she asked Taylor\u2019s staff if they would consider adding the feature or asking the building\u2019s owner to do so.\n\n\u201cI wasn\u2019t sure they understood what I was asking so I tried to send Taylor a message on Facebook,\u201d Tucker said, adding that she wasn\u2019t able to because she\u2019d been blocked.\n\nLike Glennon, Tucker said she is frustrated because she also heard Taylor tell town hall attendees that he uses social media to monitor his constituents\u2019 comments.\n\n\u201cIf you are censoring the public voice of the people who you are representing, then you\u2019re not able to truly have an informed view,\u201d Tucker said.\n\nBut Taylor says he\u2019s not censoring his constituents on Facebook.\n\nTaylor said that members of his staff have the authority to block users from his Facebook page if their behavior is \u201cout of line.\u201d He added that the groups Tucker and Holtz belong to are organized to \u201cdisrupt things.\u201d\n\n\u201cThere are some people who get on there and all they\u2019re doing is just attacking and all that stuff,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cWhether you do or don\u2019t agree with it, they\u2019re not censored.\u201d\n\nEach of the women said they never used profanity or attacked other commenters. Each said they used the Facebook page to make their stances known to Taylor.\n\n\u201cI never said anything nasty or name-called or anything of that nature,\u201d Holtz said. \u201cI don\u2019t know if a carefully crafted response is just more threatening than name-calling.\u201d\n\nLast month, the Maryland branch of the American Civil Liberties Union responded to similar accusations against Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.\n\nSeeing the action against Hogan, Tucker said she decided to follow suit.\n\n\u201cI contacted the Virginia ACLU and let them know what was going on,\u201d Tucker said. \u201cIf you can\u2019t take it when someone disagrees with you, then you should stop using Facebook in an official capacity.\u201d\n\nPoulter can be reached at amy@localvoicemedia.com"}
{"text":"Vasko Kohlmayer is at it again. It was not too long ago that he wrote an article in the Washington Post claiming that there is no such thing as an Atheist. Well here we go again, another silly Washington Post article from Mr Kohlmayer.\n\nApparently he has now decided, in stark contrast to his previous article, that Atheists do actually exist, and are simply illogical. So how does he establish this? Well, he starts out like this \u2026\n\n\u2026let us turn to the Secular Web (formerly Internet Infidels) which is the most widely frequented atheist website on the internet.\n\nHe then proceeds to pick one \u2026 count them \u2026 one single argument from a long list and proceeds to demolish it. Incidentally, it took me some time to actually find what he was attacking, I\u2019ll not bore you with the details, but if truly curious, it comes from Number 7 on this page.\n\nThere are two of immediate key points.\n\n1) I personally don\u2019t gave a toss about proofs that God does not exist, and many others hold a similar view. It is not our problem to worry about disproving nonsense. Instead the burden of proof rests with the believers to present some credible objective evidence \u2026 so far that has been exactly zero.\n\n2) Mr Kohlmayer is guilty of quote mining. He has plucked the argument away from the surrounding text and then proceeds to demolish it in isolation and so implies the author was being incoherent. What he fails to tell you is that the author expresses some concern regarding this specific argument, but nevertheless includes it for completeness. For example the author writes \u2026 \u201cnot all nontheists would accept\u2026\u201d \u2026 and also explains \u2026 \u201cAll such arguments, though, would lead into the same sort of difficult and controversial issues as does the Nonphysical-vs.-Personal Argument, and so should not be regarded to be among the most forceful of the various atheological arguments available\u201d\n\nThe fact that Mr Kohlmayer is prepared to quote-mine and so craft a strawman is no surprise, it\u2019s the sort of dishonesty and lack of integrity we have come to expect from believers, nope no surprise there at all. But he does not stop with that, he then goes on to claim that this is part of an atheist worldview because it comes from a popular web-site, and of course every breathing atheist considers every word on this website to be the absolute truth, especially when quote-mined and taken out of context \u2026 yea right.\n\nOK, lets pause for a moment, what the heck is an atheist worldview? He keeps using that term, but I honestly have no idea what that actually means. Atheism is not a worldview, instead it is a conclusion ..no evidence has been presented to verify the claim that there is a god, so we simply reject the assertions regarding god. In other words, it\u2019s the null hypothesis, that\u2019s it, nothing more. It\u2019s not a belief, it\u2019s not a religion, it says nothing about how you should live, it says nothing about what is right and wrong \u2026 it is just the rejection of silly claims about supernatural gods due to zero evidence (So how many times need I repeat it before they get it? \u2026 many more I suspect).\n\nIn the end what am I to conclude? Well Mr Kohlmayer is well qualified, he has earned degrees in philosophy and literature, and has written for a number of newspapers, so what we learn is that being smart does not in any way prevent you from being either irrational or a complete kook, instead you simply think up really smart ways to justify nonsense.\n\nLinks\n\nShare this: Facebook\n\nTwitter\n\nReddit\n\nTumblr\n\nPinterest\n\nLinkedIn\n\nPocket\n\nSkype\n\nWhatsApp\n\nEmail\n\nPrint\n\nLike this: Like Loading..."}
{"text":"Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!\n\nFor unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:\n\nWe hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27\u00a2 per article.\n\n*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99\/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99\/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99\/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99\/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99\/month begins after first year.\n\n*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99\/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99\/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99\/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99\/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99\/month begins after first year.\n\n*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99\/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99\/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99\/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99\/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99\/month begins after first year.\n\n*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99\/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99\/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99\/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99\/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99\/month begins after first year.\n\nThank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!\n\nFor unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:\n\nWe hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27\u00a2 per article.\n\nThank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!\n\nFor unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:\n\nWe hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27\u00a2 per article.\n\n\u201cUltimately our goal is to raise between 25 and 30 million dollars in additional capital, through a mix of debt and equity, over the next number of months,\u201d John Arbuthnot said on Monday.\n\nDelta 9 will issue eight million new shares at $0.65 per share to raise as much as $5.2 million, and is seeking more capital to finance future expansion plans.\n\nTwenty-seven-year-old Arbuthnot, who co-founded Delta 9 Bio-Tech with his father Bill Arbuthnot, will become CEO of the publicly-traded company, which will be renamed Delta 9 Cannabis. Bill Arbuthnot will be president and chairman of the board.\n\nDelta 9 Bio-Tech, one of only two Manitoba firms licensed by the federal government to produce cannabis for medical users, could make its debut on the TSX Venture Exchange as soon as today. The listing has received conditional approval from the exchange, said Delta 9 co-founder John Arbuthnot, who is confident his firm will be listed by the end of the week.\n\nHey there, time traveller! This article was published 30\/10\/2017 (483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.\n\nHey there, time traveller!\n\nThis article was published 30\/10\/2017 (483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.\n\nDelta 9 Bio-Tech, one of only two Manitoba firms licensed by the federal government to produce cannabis for medical users, could make its debut on the TSX Venture Exchange as soon as today. The listing has received conditional approval from the exchange, said Delta 9 co-founder John Arbuthnot, who is confident his firm will be listed by the end of the week.\n\nTwenty-seven-year-old Arbuthnot, who co-founded Delta 9 Bio-Tech with his father Bill Arbuthnot, will become CEO of the publicly-traded company, which will be renamed Delta 9 Cannabis. Bill Arbuthnot will be president and chairman of the board.\n\nDelta 9 will issue eight million new shares at $0.65 per share to raise as much as $5.2 million, and is seeking more capital to finance future expansion plans.\n\n\"Ultimately our goal is to raise between 25 and 30 million dollars in additional capital, through a mix of debt and equity, over the next number of months,\" John Arbuthnot said on Monday.\n\n\"And all of that will be deployed over the next few years in our Winnipeg-based production, distribution, and hopefully ultimately retail operation.\"\n\nArbuthnot said he and his father will be the controlling shareholders of the publicly-traded firm, holding between 55 and 60 per cent of the shares. The deal is being underwritten by investment bank Canaccord Genuity.\n\nCurrently, 68 companies are licensed by Health Canada to produce cannabis for medical users. Delta 9 was among the first crop of companies to receive a production licence from Health Canada, in 2014.\n\nThe company employs about 55 people, primarily at its production facility in Winnipeg.\n\nMore than 2,000 clients are registered to purchase mail-order cannabis from Delta 9, Arbuthnot said.\n\nAs of June 30, there were 201,398 medical cannabis clients registered with Health Canada, including 3,598 in Manitoba. Some clients are registered to purchase from more than one licensed producer, and registered clients may sign up with any licensed producer in any province.\n\nRegistering with Health Canada and signing up to purchase cannabis from licensed producers requires a recipient to get a medical document from a physician.\n\nIn cities across Canada, a number of specialized medical clinics have sprouted up to connect potential medical cannabis users with physicians who may be willing to recommend cannabis. Delta 9 has launched its own such clinic in Winnipeg, the Delta 9 Lifestyle Cannabis Clinic at 478 River Ave.\n\nDelta 9\u2019s production licence from Health Canada allows it to devote up to 80,000 square feet of space to growing cannabis, said Arbuthnot. Right now, the company is using roughly 14,000 square feet, leaving plenty of room to grow before additional licensing is required.\n\nDelta 9 cultivates its pungent crop in 28 specially-modified shipping containers inside its Winnipeg facility. The expected influx of capital from the public offering will allow Delta 9 to add between 40 and 60 new shipping container grow rooms, Arbuthnot said.\n\n\"What comes with that expansion is more jobs being created in the community here in Manitoba, increased production capacity allowing us to continue to bring on more and more registered patients both here in Manitoba and outside, and hopefully also the first steps in really positioning ourselves towards taking a hard look at the recreational market for next year.\"\n\nFederal legalization of cannabis for recreational use is expected by July 1, 2018. Under the federal government\u2019s proposed Cannabis Act, which is not yet law, only licensed producers such as Delta 9 will be able to supply cannabis to the legal market.\n\nWant to get a head start on your day? Get the day\u2019s breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every morning.\n\nBy 2020, Arbuthnot said, Delta 9 plans to use its new capital to increase production drastically \u2014 from about 1,000 kilograms a year to 17,000 kilos a year.\n\nLike other players in Canada\u2019s legal cannabis industry, Delta 9 is not yet profitable.\n\n\"I think most investors who are looking in the space right now are looking past the short-term financial performance towards some other metrics that are very important for the space,\" Arbuthnot said, citing his company\u2019s as-yet-unused licensed production capacity as a potential selling point.\n\n\"We would encourage investors to look forward at things like capacity, as well as to look at some of the other points of our operations, including that we are one of Health Canada\u2019s oldest licensed producers,\" he said. \"And with that comes several years, now, of actual cultivation, processing, distribution, and sale experience.\"\n\nAfter being listed on the TSX Venture Exchange, Delta 9 Cannabis will trade under the stock symbol \"NINE\".\n\nsolomon.israel@freepress.mb.ca @sol_israel"}
{"text":"Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption David Sillito explores how Lowry was influenced by his surroundings\n\nThe works of LS Lowry will continue to divide opinion within the art establishment, predicts the co-curator of a major new Tate exhibition.\n\n\"He became a football in a certain kind of culture wars - and I think that will go on being the case,\" said Professor Tim Clark.\n\nLowry and the Painting of Modern Life opens at Tate Britain on Wednesday.\n\nThe show is the first to be held by a public institution in London since Lowry's death in 1976.\n\nBorn in 1887, Lowry is best known for his paintings of the industrial landscapes of the north of England.\n\nMany works depict the factories and terraced houses - and their working class inhabitants - around Salford and Pendlebury where Lowry lived and worked.\n\n\"He is not an artist who fits into the Home Counties, Eton and Oxbridge view of England and Englishness,\" said Professor Clark, speaking at a preview of the Tate show on Monday.\n\nImage caption Two of Lowry's Industrial Landscape paintings from the 1950s on display at Tate Britain\n\n\"He is not a subscriber to the cult of the countryside, country manors or the ambiguity or fatality of Empire. His subject is industry and the form of life that it made.\n\n\"It puts him outside things - it makes him very hard for the actual cultural elite of England to take seriously.\"\n\nThe exhibition, co-curated by art historians Clark and Anne Wagner of the University of California, features more than 90 works - including loans from public and private lenders.\n\nHighlights include Ancoats Hospital Outpatients Hall (1952), painted in the early years of the NHS, and The Cripples (1949), which shows people disabled by war and illness.\n\nThe paintings include the Tate's own Coming Out of School (1927), The Pond (1950), Industrial Landscape (1955) and Hillside in Wales (1962).\n\nLS Lowry 1887-1976 LS Lowry is known for his paintings of the industrial landscapes of the north of England.\n\nLowry was born in Stretford, Manchester on 1 November, 1887 to middle class parents.\n\nOn leaving school in 1904, he began work in Manchester as a clerk with a firm of chartered accountants, studying painting and drawing in the evenings.\n\nIn 1910 he became a rent collector and clerk with the Pall Mall Property Company in Manchester; he remained a full-time employee and eventually chief cashier until his retirement in 1952.\n\nHe drew inspiration from his surroundings, particularly Pendlebury, near Manchester, where he lived from 1909 to 1948.\n\nFrom 1948 until his death he lived in the same small, unmodernised house in Cheshire.\n\nLowry died on 23 February 1976, aged 88, at Woods Hospital, Glossop, following an attack of pneumonia.\n\nIn September 1976, the largest exhibition of Lowry's work to date took place at the Royal Academy. Your Paintings - LS Lowry\n\nThe Lowry exhibition comes after critics from the art world called on Tate to show its collection of paintings or put them up for sale.\n\nSome had questioned whether the gallery on London's Millbank had purposely not shown the Manchester artist's work because he was \"too northern\".\n\nSpeaking on Monday, Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis said the Lowry exhibition was for \"believers and also for cynics\".\n\n\"What we'd like to think is this show will delight people who love Lowry, but also open the eyes to those who thought that Lowry was not part of mainstream painting,\" she said.\n\nThe exhibition also explores Lowry's connections with French art and shows his work alongside French-themed paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Camille Pissarro.\n\nThe French impressionist, Adolphe Valette, taught Lowry in Manchester for many years.\n\nLowry's works online Watch a slideshow of L.S. Lowry's works, and discover more about this intriguing artist at BBC Your Paintings\n\n\"The myth says Lowry's an isolated weirdo completely off on his own,\" said Professor Clark. \"Actually he very early on decided he was more likely to get sympathetic attention in Paris than in London.\"\n\nHe added: \"Lowry's a very English artist indeed, but in order to have the confidence to take on the industrial scene he built on his understanding of the French painting of modern life.\"\n\nHidden painting\n\nThe Tate revealed on Monday that a little-known painting on the back of another work at the exhibition shed new light on the way Lowry would revisit and refine his favourite scenes over the years.\n\nThe unnamed painting on the wooden panel behind The Mission Room (1937) is an earlier version of two works featured in the exhibition: Our Town (1941) and A Town Square (1928).\n\n\"What this tells us is that Lowry was perfecting and developing his compositions with great care,\" Professor Wagner told the BBC.\n\n\"He is possessed with certain compositions throughout the years - he can't get them out of his mind. It's not that he had a paucity of invention, but that these are the works he wants to depict.\"\n\nImage caption The Pond (left) is one of Lowry's large urban panoramas on display\n\nThe final room of the exhibition brings together, for the first time, seven large-scale panoramas of northern industrial landscapes and the Welsh mining valleys.\n\n\"They represent a step up in style and a move forward to a deliberate effort to lay hold of this stage industrial society as it was passing away,\" said Professor Clark.\n\n\"The paintings do have a valedictory, memorialising tone, though I don't think they are relentlessly glum and gloomy,\" he added.\n\nLowry and the Painting of Modern Life is at Tate Britain from 26 June - 20 October."}
{"text":"Published: Monday 1 October 2012\n\nTags:\n\nBoroughs agree to fund Freedom Pass for over 60s\n\nFREE travel on London's buses, Tubes and Overground services is to be brought back for the over 60s, despite the government trying to push up the age at which the Freedom Pass kicks in.\n\nThe new 60 starting age for the 24-hour pass begins on 1 November and is expected to benefit an extra 10,000 people a month. It costs \u00a310 to join the scheme.\n\nFor the last two years, the starting age for the Freedom Pass has been 61, a side-effect of the official plan to raise the retirement age to 68 instead of the 60 for women and 65 for men it is at the moment.\n\nBut London's boroughs have now clubbed together and agreed to stump up the \u00a3320 million it takes to bring the qualification age down to 60 once again.\n\n\"From November, hundreds of thousands of people will be armed with their 60+ London Oyster card, enjoying all our great city can offer,\" said London Mayor Boris Johnson"}
{"text":"Senior citizens may stand to pay a substantial cost in lost services if Gov. Tom Corbett\u2019s effort to privatize the Pennsylvania Lottery\u2019s management goes nowhere.\n\nAlready, the costs of the consultants hired to assist the Corbett administration in that endeavor exceed $2.85 million, said Elizabeth Brassell, a spokeswoman for the Department of Revenue, which oversees the lottery.\n\nUnless another funding source is found, that money will come out of the lottery profits that are used to pay for senior programs, she said.\n\nTo understand the impact that would have if it came out of the lottery fund, information available from the state indicates that $2.85 million is enough to:\n\nAssist seniors in paying for 137,681 prescriptions through the PACE and PACENET programs,\n\nPay for 1.1 million free transit rides for seniors,\n\nProvide 6,055 rebates through the state\u2019s property tax and rent rebate programs, or\n\nCover 576 months of nursing home care, the equivalent of paying the tab for 48 people to stay in a nursing home for a year.\n\nBrassell said the consultants\u2019 tabs could grow even higher as the administration continues to explore ways to salvage the contract with United Kingdom-based Camelot Global Services PA, LLC, that Attorney General Kathleen Kane rejected in February.\n\nKane said the contract was unconstitutional and ran counter to state laws. But that didn\u2019t deter Corbett.\n\nInstead, he ordered his team to negotiate an extension on Camelot\u2019s bid through June 30 and try to revise the contract to address Kane\u2019s concerns without having to rebid the project.\n\nThe administration has touted the lottery management privatization as a way to generate $3 billion more for lottery-funded programs for a growing senior population over the next 20 years than the current public management would raise. By 2030, one in 4 people will be over the age of 65, according to Department of Aging.\n\nIf a contract with Camelot were executed, the private lottery manager would pick up the consultants\u2019 fees. Brassell said that possibility should not be ruled out just yet.\n\nBut as it stands now, the commonwealth would be stuck paying the tab.\n\nSenate Democratic Leader Jay Costa, D-Allegheny, is concerned about the rising costs that will grow the longer the Corbett administration spends trying to address the attorney general\u2019s concerns.\n\n\u201cThis is throwing good money after bad at the expense of our seniors,\u201d Costa said. \u201cWe\u2019d be better served as a commonwealth by pulling the plug on this and driving those resources back into programs for seniors.\u201d\n\nBut Brassell said even if a contract is not executed with Camelot, \u201cthe payments to consultants would be justified by the insight the commonwealth gained through the process.\u201d\n\nShe said all three of the firms that had expressed interest in the management contract proposed Keno as an opportunity to boost lottery sales and maximize profits.\n\n\u201cThat industry unanimity and expertise is what ultimately led the administration to decide to pursue Keno,\u201d Brassell said. \u201cOnce it's determined how best to approach Keno, that aspect alone stands to contribute about $200 million to lottery profits annually, once fully implemented.\u201d\n\nShe said a number of other lessons have been learned from marketing and product mix to expanding the player base from the money spent on this pursuit that will benefit the lottery whether it moves forward under public or private management.\n\nHouse Republican spokesman Steve Miskin said the administration\u2019s ultimate goal was to grow lottery profits to support services for an increasing senior population.\n\n\u201cIf you keep the status quo as Democrats are advocating, money is going to run out very soon,\u201d Miskin said.\n\nTo date, neither legal consultant DLA Piper of Baltimore, Md., nor financial consultant Greenhill & Co. of Chicago have been paid, Brassell said.\n\nBut their meters are running.\n\nFor work performed through mid-March, she said DLA Piper\u2019s costs are in the neighborhood of $2 million. And the firm continues to advise the commonwealth through the contract revision, Brassell said.\n\n\u201cWe won\u2019t know exactly what will be paid to them until their work on the project is complete,\u201d she said. \u201cWe can\u2019t say at this point exactly how much they are owed or will be paid.\u201d\n\nAs for Greenhill, its contract was built around payments tied to the project achieving certain milestones. At this point, Brassell said it is owed $850,000.\n\nBut if a contract were to be executed with Camelot, Greenhill \u2013 a firm where former Gov. Ed Rendell serves as a senior adviser \u2013 stands to receive a success fee that will be in the millions.\n\nAdministration officials have said all consulting fees would be no more than $30 million if a privatization contract is executed.\n\nNot included in the $2.85 million tab are the additional legal fees being paid to the Philadelphia law firm Blank Rome. That is the firm the administration hired to defend it in a pending lawsuit filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 13, some Democratic lawmakers and senior citizens over the lottery privatization.\n\nThat firm\u2019s contract is for $200,000 and to date, it has been paid $116,504 out of the lottery fund, Brassell said.\n\nThat amount is enough to cover 5,628 prescriptions through the PACE\/PACENET program, 46,415 free transit rides for seniors, 247 property tax and rent rebates, or nearly a full year of nursing home care for two individuals.\n\nThe Pennsylvania Area Agencies on Aging was among the senior citizen organizations that supported the privatization pursuit as a way to boost lottery profits.\n\nBut Crystal Lowe, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of the Area Agencies on Aging, said the $3 million spent on consultants would go a long way to whittling down the 6,200 to 6,400 seniors on a waiting list for Area Agency on Aging services.\n\nStill, Lowe doesn\u2019t fault the administration for hiring outside experts to help it work through the complicated privatization effort.\n\n\u201cI understand the need to get financial and legal expertise in order to do this,\u201d she said. \u201cThe lottery is far too precious for it to be at risk. So many people depend on it and we don\u2019t want to do anything that in the long-term compromises that.\u201d"}
{"text":"The proposal by 50 Conservative MPs follows plans to turn Britain\u2019s passports blue after Brexit\n\nFifty Conservative MPs are pushing ministers in Theresa May\u2019s cabinet to create a new lottery to raise funds for a \u00a3120 million royal yacht to promote post-Brexit Britain.\n\nIt follows plans to replace the country\u2019s passports, which are currently burgundy and bear EU markings, with a blue British one after Brexit.\n\nA new yacht would \u201cshowcase post-Brexit Britain and bring trade to our shores\u201d, the MPs said.\n\nIn a letter sent to the Government, the MPs said that a new national lottery game would allow ordinary Britons to feel \u201cthe pride of having a stake\u201d in the boat, which would also \u201cproject our humanitarian role across the globe\u201d after Brexit.\n\nBut the proposal met with an immediate backlash on Twitter, as the MPs faced accusations of being \u201cout of touch\u201d with the public.\n\nAngry social media users pointed to the number of homeless people on the streets and the cash-strapped National Health Service, as they questioned the Conservatives\u2019 priorities in spending \u00a3120 million on a new yacht.\n\nNumber of people sleeping rough has DOUBLED since the Tories took over in 2010 and these MPs are focusing on buying a new royal yacht? If you vote Tory you have a hand in this. \u2014 Ian M (@Ian_McKinley) December 28, 2017\n\nProminent Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, and Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, were among the recipients of the letter. Defence secretary Gavin Williamson and culture minister Tracey Crouch also received the letter.\n\nRoyal Yacht Britannia was decommissioned in 1997 by the then-Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on account of its high costs.\n\nUntil then, it had been regularly used by the Queen and members of the Royal family on their overseas trips. Over the course of 40 years, it took part in almost 1000 official tours and travelled over a million miles at sea.\n\nThe MPs called on ministers to \u201cright the wrong\u201d of Labour\u2019s decision on the vessel, saying: \u201cAs we leave the European Union, there has never been a better time to consider how Britain projects herself on the world stage.\n\n\u201cWe believe that now is the time to commission a new Royal Yacht Britannia as a new symbol of global Britain, designed and built domestically to showcase the best of UK shipbuilding and industry, and as a platform for promoting trade.\u201d\n\n_______________\n\nRead more:\n\nBrexit to turn British passports blue\n\nBritish firms fear fate worse than Brexit\n\nYear in Review: Populism was on the march in 2017\n\n_______________\n\nIt added: \u201cOur country needs and deserves a floating Royal Palace that can be used to host meetings and exhibitions to showcase the best of British business and project our humanitarian role across the globe.\u201d\n\nThe letter insisted that the replacement vessel would not add a burden to departmental budgets, thanks to the proposal to establish a new national lottery to help pay for it. \u201cIt would be the people of the UK through the unique funding method who would have the pride of having a stake in her,\u201d it said.\n\nThe note was signed by four former ministers, including Andrew Murrison, a former defence minister, and Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a Parliamentary private secretary in the defence department. It was written by Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay, who was previously a member of the UK Independence Party.\n\nThe campaign was supported by Anthony Morrow, the last captain of HMY Britannia, who said: \u201cA new initiative for a Royal Yacht to replace Britannia is to be warmly welcomed and it would be wonderful to see this come about.\u201d"}
{"text":"University of Illinois point guard Jaylon Tate was arrested in Champaign, Ill. early Saturday morning on domestic battery charges, public records show.\n\nChampaign police Sgt. Bruce Ramseyer said on News-Gazette.com that the 19-year-old victim, also a University of Illinois athlete, confirmed to police she had been hit once in the face by Tate.\n\nMORE: NCAA basketball live scoreboard | UConn clock controversy\n\nRamseyer said the responding officers could see she was spitting blood and had a swollen face. She went to a local hospital's emergency room to be evaluated. Police arrested Tate without incident and he was booked in Champaign County Jail at 6:15 a.m.\n\nTate, 21, will remain in the county jail until at least Sunday morning, when he is expected to make a bond court appearance. He has denied any physical contact with his girlfriend, Ramseyer said.\n\nTate has been indefinitely suspended by Illinois. Athletics Director Josh Whitman and head coach John Groce released the following statement.\n\nTate has started at times during his career at Illinois. He averaged 1.8 points and 2.5 assists per game as a junior. He's the third Illini basketball player to be arrested since August."}
{"text":"Research suggests the majority of women arrested in domestic violence incidents are themselves victims of ongoing abuse from their male partner.\n\nThe research, by the anti domestic violence group Shine, analysed the arrests of 60 women in Auckland City between April and September last year.\n\nThe report's author, Deborah MacKenzie, says of 35 women who assaulted their male partners, 19 used violence in response to ongoing abuse.\n\nDual arrests, where both parties are taken into custody, featured in nine out of the 35 cases.\n\nMs MacKenzie says this indicates the police sometimes have difficulty in identifying who the dangerous person is in the relationship.\n\nShe says officers should be trained to identify which party is most at risk.\n\nMs MacKenzie says in some cases men want to be the first person to call police, knowing they will be treated as the victim rather than the offender."}
{"text":"When you\u2019re depressed, it\u2019s easy to lie in bed and consider staying there forever \u2013 here are some suggestions for owning the world you might be scared of\n\nText Beth McColl\n\nI wasted most of my time when I was depressed. I stared at walls instead of doing my essays. I got in from work and lay face-down on the floor instead of getting started on dinner, putting my clothes in the wash, or calling someone who loved me. I watched two seasons of Nashville before I realise how much I hated Nashville. Then I watched the third season of Nashville. It was so fucked up. Point is \u2013 in the midst of soul-crushing depression, wasting time is easy. It\u2019s understandable. When you\u2019re in the deepest dark of depression your only job is to survive. It\u2019s enough to begin and end each day alive. Getting out of bed is almost impossible, getting a glass of water takes 45 minutes. You weigh up the pros and cons of leaving your room to pee. \u2018Could I pee in that cup?\u2019 you think. \u2018Is that a thing I could do?\u2019 But what about after? What about when the depression lifts \u2013 and it will lift, it will, it will. What about then, when you\u2019re standing almost healed among the wreckage, wondering how to begin building it into a life worth living? This was me last year. I\u2019d gotten over the worst of the breakup that felt like it would kill me. I was taking my Prozac on time, every day. I was putting an end to those harmful behaviours that had kept me locked in a depressive state for two years. I was eating. I was taking walks. Basically, I was only a little bit depressed, instead of full blown suicidal. Progress, sure, but six months after this turning point, I was still sort of in the same place. My self-destructive behaviours had morphed into inertia. I was so afraid of ever going back to The Worst Place that I didn\u2019t dare to take any risks on myself, didn\u2019t dare to take a step forward in case I stumbled and brought the world crashing back down. I didn\u2019t write, I didn\u2019t date. In short, I didn\u2019t Do. But here\u2019s the thing. The best of life is in the Doing. It\u2019s in the Deciding To Apply For That Job. It\u2019s in the Finally Learning How To Knit. It\u2019s in the Healing. It\u2019s in the Getting Up Everyday To Do Yoga. We could do these things, right? We survived the worst of the worst, these things should be easy. So why aren\u2019t we doing them right now? Why are we keeping them undone? Maybe it\u2019s because we\u2019re avoidant idiots with hearts of gold. Maybe it\u2019s because we\u2019re just not ready (which is fine). But maybe it\u2019s simply because, undone, they can\u2019t be proven undoable. It\u2019s like the promise of a feast at the end of a long day. It both starves and sustains us. And the real terror is that you can stay hungry forever. It\u2019s a possibility. It happens. What\u2019s to stop it happening to you?\n\nIT\u2019S YOU THAT DECIDES IT CAN\u2019T HAPPEN You can calmly accept that, if you want to have something, you will need to reach out and take it. You will have to fill your own belly with food. It is as terrifying and as easy as that. Your best life will not be handed to you by the universe. But that\u2019s OK. Because the universe doesn\u2019t know what you want. The universe is like that great aunt you have who smells like medicine and knits you a jumper for Christmas that\u2019s two sizes too big and has three sleeves and says \u2018From Your Aunt Morgaret\u2019 on the front even though that\u2019s not her name. That\u2019s nobody\u2019s name. MAKE LISTS Take it as lightly as you can. Be nice to yourself. Hold your own hand. Understand that these are things that need to happen. They\u2019re things that can happen. You can make the phone calls you need to make, you can fill out the forms that need filling in, you can learn what needs to be learned. You can push through the panic and do what you need to move forward. You can do these things, not because the world will fall apart if you don\u2019t, but because you are as important as any other person on this planet, and your life will be better and more enjoyable if you try your best to get to where you want to be. Also because it\u2019s what Aunt Morgaret would have wanted."}
{"text":"Israel\u2019s foreign minister on Wednesday said it's not the business of the United States whether his country decides to attack Iran.\n\nForeign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that warnings from the United States and Russia about an attack would not affect Israel\u2019s decision-making.\n\nADVERTISEMENT\n\n\u201c[It] is not their business,\u201d Lieberman said in an interview with an Israeli TV station Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.\n\n\u201cThe security of the citizens of Israel, the future of the state of Israel, this is the Israeli government\u2019s responsibility,\u201d he said.\n\nLieberman\u2019s comments come after Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said Sunday that an Israeli attack would be \u201cdestabilizing\u201d for the region.\n\nPresident Obama has said that the United States will not allow the Iranians to obtain a nuclear weapon, but Israeli officials say their country\u2019s existence is threatened by a nuclear Iran. The Israelis have suggested they might attack Iran to stop its nuclear program with or without U.S. assistance.\n\nIran says that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, but Israel, the United States and their allies believe Iran is striving to create a nuclear weapon.\n\nU.S. officials have pushed Israel to wait for sanctions against Iran to have an impact on the country that could convince the Iranians to abandon their nuclear pursuits.\n\nU.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon just returned from a visit to Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials.\n\nNetanyahu and Obama have a meeting scheduled March 5 at the White House while Netanyahu is in the country for the AIPAC convention."}
{"text":"Singaporean retail service provider (RSP) MyRepublic has called \"bull****\" on claims by Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) CEO Bill Morrow that consumers don't need and wouldn't use 1Gbps broadband, and has announced that it is launching a \"gigatown\" to prove customers' desire for higher speeds.\n\n\"It's absolute bull****,\" MyRepublic Australia managing director Nicholas Demos said in an interview with ZDNet.\n\n\"Australians want faster internet ... it is just a ludicrous statement to say there is not a requirement for it.\"\n\nDemos argued that 82 percent of NBN's users are on speeds of 25Mbps or less only because the incumbent RSPs have simply moved customers from their existing plans and price points onto the same plans and pricing on NBN services.\n\nIn the 12 weeks since launching as an NBN RSP, Demos said MyRepublic has signed up 10,000 customers to its high-speed plans, which proves that customers do want faster services -- as does the fact that 40 percent of its New Zealand customers are already on 1Gbps plans.\n\nArguing in November that the NBN had not yet properly launched, because RSPs are simply offering the same services, speeds, and pricing as before, MyRepublic offers just one package at one price on the highest possible speed tier available for each customer.\n\nDemos blamed the lack of 1Gbps NBN products on the network company's connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) charge, which reserves a consumer's bandwidth from the point of interconnect and is priced depending on usage of data.\n\n\"The CVC pricing that the NBN are charging, it's not economical,\" he told ZDNet.\n\n\"Yes, they do offer retailers such as us a product with CVC pricing -- a one-gig product -- but it's just priced out of the market and no consumer will buy it at that price in Australia.\"\n\nMyRepublic has announced that it plans to convince NBN of the desirability of 1Gbps broadband by bearing the cost of connecting consumers in one Australian town with 1Gbps services and gauging uptake of the service.\n\n\"We're launching a one-gigabit town in Australia ... just to show there is demand for it, it does work, people want it, but it's the [NBN] product that is wrong, which is why you can't offer it to the mass market at the moment,\" Demos told ZDNet.\n\nThe RSP will on Friday put out the call for consumers to express their interest in receiving a 1Gbps broadband connection, which will inform MyRepublic's decision on which town to connect -- although it would have to be in an area with full fibre-to-the-premises connectivity, Demos conceded.\n\nThe 1Gbps pricing will remain the same as MyRepublic's other packages, at AU$60 per month, with the gigatown to be launched in the next few months.\n\nMyRepublic's statements follow Morrow's claim during NBN's financial results presentation on Thursday that RSPs are not offering 1Gbps packages to consumers due to a lack of demand.\n\n\"We have roughly a million and a half homes that can have a technology to get a gigabit-per-second service capability today. We have a product that we can offer the retailers, should they want to sell it,\" Morrow said.\n\n\"The reality is that a couple of the retailers have signed up for a trial ... but they have chosen not to offer that to the consumers.\n\n\"I will presume it's because there isn't that big of a demand out there for them to actually develop a product to sell to those end users.\"\n\nOn its fixed-line network, NBN again reported the majority of its users as being on the 25\/5Mbps speed tier as of December 31, with 51 percent of users choosing these speeds, while 31 percent were on the 12\/1Mbps speed tier; 13 percent were on 100\/40Mbps; 4 percent were on 50\/20Mbps; and 1 percent were on 25\/10Mbps.\n\nCalling 1Gbps \"a lot of bandwidth\", Morrow claimed NBN has \"scoured\" the globe to speak with RSPs and carriers that have 1Gbps products that have seen limited uptake due to consumers not needing those speeds, or not wanting to pay for them.\n\n\"We asked the question, 'Has anybody actually used that amount of bandwidth?' And the answer was unanimously 'no',\" Morrow said.\n\n\"There are not that many applications that warrant much above the products that are being sold on NBN today, so I suspect that's the main reason. 'If I have to pay for it to move from 100[Mbps] up to a gigabit per second, I don't really have the application or the need for it, so why would I pay more to do that?' I believe that's the market dynamic that is occurring today.\"\n\nMorrow acknowledged that there will be applications in future that will need more bandwidth, such as alternate reality, artificial intelligence, and 8K video, but said the demand is not there now.\n\n\"All of these other things could certainly drive up more of that consumer need, but we haven't seen that as of yet,\" NBN's chief executive said.\n\n\"Even if we offered it for free, we see the evidence around the world that they wouldn't use it anyway.\"\n\nNBN has since claimed that Morrow's statements were taken out of context.\n\n\"NBN is disappointed to see media coverage today has taken comments on internet speeds by our CEO out of context,\" an NBN spokesperson told ZDNet.\n\n\"While the NBN network does offer 1Gbps wholesale services to retailers, to date no retailer has elected to sell these services. That is a commercial decision for the retailers.\"\n\nMorrow's statements came despite the City of Adelaide last month putting out a call for providers for its 10Gbps fibre broadband network; Telstra launching a 1Gbps 4G mobile network; and the majority of RSPs in New Zealand offering a 1Gbps service as of the end of last year across the New Zealand government's NBN equivalent.\n\nIn Singapore, 10Gbps broadband services have been offered by both Singtel and M1 for a year."}
{"text":"To celebrate International Women\u2019s Day 2017 we take a look at some inspirational and bold Welsh women from our history.\n\n5. KATE ROBERTS\n\nKate Roberts was our \u201cQueen of Letters\u201d and one of \u2018the most important Welsh woman of the 20th century\u2019 according to her biographer Alan Llwyd.\n\nShe was a prominent author, a prolific journalist and a major benefactor. Kate Roberts was one of the earliest members of the National Party and was the owner of Y Faner. She served Wales on various committees and in eisteddfods, and was prominent in several national and local campaigns, including the one to establish Ysgol Twm o\u2019r Nant school in Denbigh. She lived a varied and industrious life, but also a life that was filled with tragedy and sadness.\n\n4. MARGARET JONES\n\nMargaret Jones (1842-1902), was a woman from Rhosllannerchrugog, north Wales, who became famous in the nineteenth century as \u201cThe Welsh Lady from Canaan\u201d. She travelled extensively and spent time living in Paris, Jerusalem, Morocco, the United States and Australia. She published two books of her observations, \u201cLlythyrau Cymraes o Wlad Canaan [The Letters of a Welsh Lady from Canaan] (1869) and \u201cMorocco, a\u2019r hyn a welais yno\u201d [Morocco, and what I saw there] (1883).\n\n3. ZONIA BOWEN\n\nZonia Bowen is an Englishwoman who embraced the Welsh language and became a key figure in the period leading up to the establishment of Merched y Wawr. She came to Wales at age 17, married a Welsh man and learnt Welsh \u2013 well before the days of Welsh lessons for adults.\n\n2. ESME KIRBY\n\nEsm\u00e9 Kirby was the conservationist who formed the Snowdonia National Park Society. Her career began as an actress, and at 23 she married Thomas Firbank, whose bestselling book, I Bought a Mountain (1940) tells of their married life at Dyffryn, a 3,000-acre farm near Capel Curig. Their marriage ended as the Second World War began but Esm\u00e9 continued to farm on her own in the rugged Snowdonia landscape and made a success of it. She remarried and became a volunteer conservationist and formed the Snowdonia National Park Society, to ensure the mountains were protected from future development. The local farming community saw her strength and determination, and helped her to succeed\u2026 She made a success of Dyffryn against all the odds, leaving a lasting legacy.\n\n1. KATE BOSSE GRIFFITHS\n\nKate Bosse-Griffiths, of German-Jewish descent, succeeded in fleeing from Germany to the Britain in 1937. She fell in love, married, began writing in Wales and established Cylch Cadwgan whilst the Nazis made life in Germany and Europe hell on Earth. Her family was persecuted. A few tried to become a part of the system, others struggled in spite of the system, and some self-sacrifed in opposition of the system.\n\nIn Oxford she met fellow Classics scholar and Egyptologist J. Gwyn Griffiths and they soon settled as a married couple in Rhondda where Kate established the Cadwgan Literary Circle. She fled the brutal regime of the Nazis and became one of Wales\u2019 leading academic and literary figures.\n\nThe story would have been lost forever if it wasn\u2019t for the thousand and more pages that have been kept by the family; letters, diaries and documents. They give an account of the attacks during Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass), life under the insane regime, details of prison camps, fleeing to Shanghai, suicide, imprisonment and killing. Hers is a story of love and hatred, protection and persecution, yearning and terror during the most destructive period in European history.\n\nRead more at\n\nylolfa.com\n\nAdvertisements"}
{"text":"EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. \u2014 When Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Zimmer canceled the last session of minicamp as a reward for the team\u2019s offseason work, most players were surprised and delighted by the early start on summer vacation.\n\nMoritz B\u00f6hringer wasn\u2019t so sure.\n\nMore Vikings coverage\n\n\"I wanted to practice,\" B\u00f6hringer said, smiling wryly, \"because it\u2019s always good to get some more reps.\"\n\nNobody on the 90-man roster needs more training than B\u00f6hringer, the rookie wide receiver from Germany who became the first draft pick in the history of the NFL to come directly from a country outside the United States.\n\nHis deficiencies haven\u2019t been for a lack of dedication, though. This is simply the situation he\u2019s in, having discovered the sport about five years ago through YouTube videos of Vikings running back Adrian Peterson. He has played competitively for merely three seasons at a level nowhere near as sophisticated or intense as the league is entering.\n\n\"He\u2019s starting from way, way, way behind,\" offensive coordinator Norv Turner said.\n\nFor the Schwabisch Hall Unicorns in 2015, B\u00f6hringer had 16 touchdown receptions and an average of 20.9 yards per catch in 21 games on his way to the German Football League\u2019s rookie of the year award. The Unicorns only ran 70 or 80 plays out of five or six formations, paling in comparison to the complexity of Turner\u2019s playbook with the Vikings.\n\nNaturally, B\u00f6hringer\u2019s helmet has been spinning this spring in his attempt to grasp the route concepts, blocking responsibilities and advanced footwork technique required to excel at his highly skilled position.\n\nHe threw up on the field during his first practice in Minnesota, last month at rookie minicamp. Throughout the workouts with the full team over the past three-plus weeks, B\u00f6hringer has dropped plenty of passes.\n\n\"Most of the time it\u2019s a mental thing, because I\u2019m not 100 percent comfortable with the playbook,\" B\u00f6hringer said Thursday after the Vikings wrapped up their offseason program and adjourned for six weeks until training camp. \"But I think it\u2019ll come after time.\"\n\nThe Vikings have raved about the 22-year-old\u2019s acuity, despite his inexperience. General manager Rick Spielman declared B\u00f6hringer \"off-the-charts smart,\" fully confident he can grasp the intricacies of American football with time.\n\n\"You want to start at the grassroots and work your way up, and we\u2019ve been doing that with him. He\u2019s extremely intelligent, so he catches onto things pretty well,\" wide receivers coach George Stewart said. \"He understands exactly what I\u2019m trying to communicate to him. He has a great understanding of the language.\"\n\nFOLLOW US\n\nFS North on Facebook\n\nFS North on Twitter\n\nFS North on YouTube\n\nFS North on Instagram\n\nCulture hasn\u2019t been an issue, either, beyond a couple of predictable hiccups. His golf debut didn\u2019t go so well \u2014 \"I don\u2019t think it\u2019s my sport, but I tried,\" he said with a laugh \u2014 and he was unaware of the American custom of tipping restaurant servers that is uncommon in Europe.\n\n\"We go out to eat almost every night, so that\u2019s something that was kind of eye-opening for him and he\u2019s still kind of getting used to,\" said quarterback Joel Stave, his roommate this spring. \"Every once in a while, he\u2019ll leave a dollar and we\u2019ve got to cover it for him.\"\n\nB\u00f6hringer and Stave have formed a playbook study group with another rookie, tight end David Morgan.\n\n\"He\u2019s getting more comfortable with the offense, he\u2019s getting more comfortable with just football here, and he\u2019s getting more comfortable with the guys,\" Stave said. \"He seems more confident, and it seems like he\u2019s having more fun. It\u2019s been a lot of fun getting to know him and a lot of fun getting to talk to him and see what it\u2019s like coming from a different background like that.\"\n\nTargeted as a prospect through the NFL\u2019s expanding international outreach program, B\u00f6hringer blew away the scouts at Florida Atlantic University\u2019s pro day workout with a 4.43-second 40-yard dash. His 6-foot-4, 227-pound frame stoked the buzz around the league.\n\nSpielman called Stewart into his office one day during the pre-draft evaluation process at team headquarters to watch a YouTube highlight video of B\u00f6hringer\u2019s GFL games . They were sold. Rather than risking a wait to sign him after the draft, the Vikings took him in the sixth round.\n\n\"There are not a lot of receivers who are as big as me and have athletic ability. I think this combination is pretty unique,\" B\u00f6hringer said.\n\nHe\u2019s equally aware of the marketing implications accompanying his arrival.\n\n\"I think that\u2019s the best way to spread the game, having players from other countries be as role models,\" B\u00f6hringer said.\n\nSoon he\u2019ll report to training camp and put the pads on, bringing a new bunch of challenges.\n\n\"I still have to get used to that it\u2019s my job now,\" B\u00f6hringer said, \"and not just a hobby.\""}
{"text":"An unfakeable test for cocaine use that only requires a single fingerprint has been developed by scientists.\n\nIt is the first of its kind to test for ingestion of the drug, and is sufficiently developed that its creators expect it to be miniaturised into a portable device and in the hands of law enforcement agencies within ten years.\n\nBy using mass spectrometry, the test is able to detect the presence of chemicals excreted as cocaine metabolises in the body, providing immediate confirmation of a suspect\u2019s cocaine use.\n\nSuch a device would be a revolution for law enforcement, as it would enable police, prison officers and other agents to establish if a person had taken the drug at the scene, without the need for invasive blood or urine tests.\n\nIt would also remove the need for specialists and safe storage and disposal of bodily fluids, reducing costs and rapidly speeding up the process.\n\nIt is likely become a commonly used device, akin to the breathalyser, that police use during standard stop-and-searches and raids.\n\nThe test, which was developed by scientists from the University of Surrey with support from researchers from the Netherlands Forensic Institute, the UK\u2019s National Physical Laboratory, King\u2019s College London and Sheffield Hallam University, is notable for ability to test for ingestion of cocaine, rather than just skin contact.\n\n\u201cWhen someone has taken cocaine, they excrete traces of benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine as they metabolise the drug, and these chemical indicators are present in fingerprint residue,\u201d explained study lead author Dr Melanie Bailey, from the University of Surrey.\n\n\u201cFor our part of the investigations, we sprayed a beam of solvent onto the fingerprint slide (a technique known as Desorption Electrospray Ionisation, or DESI) to determine if these substances were present. DESI has been used for a number of forensic applications, but no other studies have shown it to demonstrate drug use.\u201d\n\nThe scientists verified the test\u2019s efficacy by comparing its results to standard saliva tests, thus demonstrating that it would be reliable enough to use in real-world situations.\n\nAs it tests using a fingerprint, the device could also simultaneously verify the subject\u2019s identify, meaning it would be \u2013 at least in theory \u2013 impossible to fake.\n\n\u201cThe beauty of this method is that, not only is it non-invasive and more hygienic than testing blood or saliva, it can\u2019t be faked,\u201d said Bailey.\n\n\u201cBy the very nature of the test, the identity of the subject is captured within the fingerprint ridge detail itself.\u201d\n\nDetailed in research published today in the journal Analyst, the test only requires miniaturisation before it can be used by law enforcement. And due to advances in this area, the researchers are confident this will be a quick process.\n\n\u201cWe are only bound by the size of the current technology. Companies are already working on miniaturised mass spectrometers, and in the future portable fingerprint drugs tests could be deployed,\u201d added Bailey.\n\n\u201cThis will help to protect the public and indeed provide a much safer test for drug users.\u201d\n\nHowever, the public reaction to the device remains to be seen.\n\nIn a world where increasing police powers and control are a genuine concern, a fingerprint scanning device of this type could be met with considerable suspicion and resistance."}
{"text":"The problem with Xbox Kinect - aside from a decent range of top-drawer titles - is the inability to play without a large living room and yards of space.\n\nGaming accessories manufacturer Nyko seeks to change all that, though, with this badboy accessory.\n\nThe Nyko Zoom for Kinect reduces the space required to play Kinect by up to 40 per cent. By my calculations, that means the recommended distance required to stand away from the sensor can be lowered from 8ft to under five.\n\nThe Zoom clips on top of the sensor without any modification and effectively makes Kinect look the wrong way through a pair of binoculars.\n\nIt also comes bundled with iBoutique Zoom Lens Cleaner, a brush-like device of which the name is fairly self explanatory.\n\nThe Nyko Zoom will see its UK release on 31 August. Amazon is now taking pre-orders for \u00a336. \u00ae"}
{"text":"The use of the word \u201ctoon\u201d to describe MMORPG characters is a contentious one, with fans divided over its annoyance or acceptance. But when it came to one MMORPG, it was nothing but proper terminology to call all characters just this.\n\nToontown Online was one of those \u201ckiddie MMOs\u201d that you probably ignored unless you happen to fall within its demographical clutches back in the day. While it lasted for about a decade, the game\u2019s operation would be notable for its repeated transformation and uncertain status.\n\nWith a silly, cartoon-like look and theme, this MMO attempted to bring a levity to a genre that was often marinating in deep fantasy lore and statistical theorycrafting. But when you wanted to eschew dragon fighting for slapstick pie throwing, there was no better game out there. Let\u2019s take a look!\n\nM.I.C.K.E.Y. MMO.U.S.E.\n\nThe year 2003 witnessed an explosion of MMORPGs that had been in development after the first generation of graphical MMOs rose to such prominence in the late 1990s. Tucked among Star Wars Galaxies, EVE Online, Shadowbane, Lineage II, and PlanetSide was an odd little title from the Mouse House itself.\n\nDisney had been looking to take its brand online since 1996 (with the proposed yet never-developed HercWorld). Around that time, one Imagineer named Jesse Schell created a virtual game of tag between Mickey and friends as a proof-of-concept that gained traction among the company. Disney\u2019s Internet Zone at its Epcot theme park incorporated the Toontag game for a decade and led to the idea of a family-friendly online game that would be safe and fun for all ages.\n\nThe pitch that the internal team gave to its higher-ups was that of a \u201cMassively Multiplayer Online Theme Park,\u201d which obviously appealed to Disney\u2019s sensibilities. But the \u201c20 MMOs in one\u201d concept was too expensive \u2014 to the tune of $100 million \u2014 and so the team started working on an Atlantis: The Lost Empire MMO as an alternative. This project didn\u2019t make it to launch (fortunately, considering that the movie floundered at the box office), and the team moved on to creating a town full of cartoon characters in the vein of the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? With about six million dollars budgeted, Toontown began production in 2000.\n\nHaving run its beta (or \u201csneak peek\u201d) since late 2002, Toontown Online was ready to go prime time with its launch on June 2nd, 2003. Disney Online marketed the game as a \u201cnon-violent\u201d alternative to other MMOs that incorporated the experience from Disney\u2019s famous theme park Imagineers.\n\n\u201cWe made Toontown a place for everyone, much like our theme parks, so it would appeal to a mass audience. In addition, and in the tradition of the Disney theme parks, this online attraction will grow over time, continuously offering our guests an ever-changing adventure,\u201d said Managing Director Ken Goldstein.\n\nA cartoony community\n\nIn the game, players would take on the role of colorful Toons who were attempting to defend their town against soulless \u201cCogs\u201d \u2014 robots who wanted to turn everything into dull grey structures. The only way to fight back was to employ slapstick gags as weapons, such as spritzers, megaphones, or good ol\u2019 fashioned pies in a turn-based showdown. Either the Toons would prevail with their hilarity or the Cogs would overwhelm them with sadness.\n\nHousing, parties, and minigames were also par for the course when a player Toon didn\u2019t want to go out to tackle the Cogs. Interestingly enough, while the game was an official Disney product and featured several licensed characters, the player Toons themselves looked like they came straight from the Looney Toons library.\n\nToontown Online was specifically designed to encourage players to be social and varied in their activities. They had to farm jellybeans from minigames to purchase gags for combat, and to play those minigames and progress in fights, they needed friends.\n\n\u201cIt was almost a religious thing with us: If this is going to be an online game, everything about it should be about playing with other people,\u201d said Schell.\n\nToonFest and SpeedChat\n\nWhile no massive hit, Toontown Online nevertheless became a modest success both critically (it was awarded \u201cMMORPG of the Year\u201d in 2003 by Computer Gaming World) and among its growing crowd of fans.\n\nA subscription fee of $9.95 a month kept the title somewhat affordable for families and kids, and a \u201csafe\u201d communication system called SpeedChat. In design, SpeedChat would select pre-made sentences to keep kids from getting harassed, and grouping could only happen if kids exchanged special codes in-person with their friends. Not surprisingly, players found a way to pass out these codes in game even so, arranging housing decorations to form the letters and numbers.\n\nSony Online Entertainment, a major player in the MMORPG market in the 2000s, got in on the action in 2005. A subsidiary of SOE called Platform Publishing helped to get Toontown Online to retail shelves in an attempt to grow the game\u2019s market. By 2006, 15 million characters had been created for the game.\n\nTo its credit, Disney threw a lot of support behind Toontown Online, including hosting a couple of player conventions that it called ToonFest. The first ToonFest was staged in 2006 and got a major publicity bump by the Disney Channel, with a second festival to follow in 2007. Another cool event was an in-game charity event in 2004 in which players recovered Cog-captured buildings to raise money for the Starlight Starbright Children\u2019s Foundation.\n\nThe end (or is it?)\n\nThe long-running MMO stumbled to a halt on September 19th, 2013, almost 10 years after it first released. No specific reason save that of \u201cshifting development\u201d from Disney was given for the closure, although the company encouraged players to check out its other titles (such as Club Penguin).\n\nCNN put the blame for the shutdown on Toontown Online\u2019s declining population but reported that thousands of players had signed a petition to get Disney to change its mind. The news outlet noted that the game had a special significance to certain gamers: \u201cBecause Toontown was a family game open to anyone seven and older, many of its more dedicated users started as children and grew into young adults while playing the game, making it an integral part of their childhood.\u201d\n\nIt wasn\u2019t as though Disney was trying to ditch and forget about Toontown Online entirely, however. Rumor was that the title wasn\u2019t making enough money in its current format, and whispers of a mobile port surfaced soon after the shutdown. As of today, any further plans with the game have yet to be unveiled.\n\nToontown Rewritten\n\nNot willing to let a good thing die, the Toontown fan community gathered the perishing title into its arms and breathed a single word in its ear: \u201cEmulator.\u201d This, mere months after Toontown Online was canceled, Toontown Rewritten started alpha testing.\n\n\u201cWe know that it has been a long time since we originally promised the Toontown Rewritten alpha, however we do have good reason for the delays,\u201d the project team posted in October 2013. \u201cThe more we worked on Toontown Rewritten, the more we saw that this game is severely outdated and needs a big rework. These past three months we have been setting groundwork to make sure that this game is not only revived, but revived so that it will last.\u201d\n\nThis hard work paid off, as Toontown Rewritten progressed through alpha, beta, and finally launch. The fan emulator, which publicly distances itself from the Disney moniker, has been running and delivering new content for four years now.\n\nIt really goes to show that you never know how certain MMOs can make a lasting imprint in the minds and hearts of fans and how these games can become virtual homes that players never want to leave."}
{"text":"Having broken into the England Test side the player\u2019s decision to walk away from the game aged 25 caused quite a stir but he explains that, for him, there is a lot more to life than cricket\n\nProfessional sport is scarred by stories of ageing athletes clinging to faded glory, or by bleak tales of their struggles in retirement, and so Zafar Ansari stands out in shimmering contrast. Ansari played three Tests late last year, his debut in Bangladesh and two in India, picking up five wickets and grinding out a highest score of 32. It was a start in the hardest arena of cricket and so Ansari\u2019s retirement in April, at the age of 25, seemed unusual.\n\nOf course those who knew him felt no shock. Alec Stewart, the director of cricket at Surrey, for whom Ansari had played since the age of eight, was supportive. \u201cIt\u2019s a brave and considered decision,\u201d Stewart said. \u201cHe was always open and honest.\u201d\n\nCounty cricket: Yorkshire v Surrey and more as day-night matches begin \u2013 live! Read more\n\nStewart alluded to Ansari\u2019s academic background, for the left-arm spinner had obtained a double first in social and political science from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, as well as a subsequent MA in history. \u201cWhen Zafar was reading a novel, the rest of our boys would be doing a colouring-in book,\u201d Stewart said in his homespun way. Kevin Pietersen, who played with Ansari at Surrey, tweeted amusingly: \u201cWay too clever to be a cricketer!\u201d\n\nOver the last six weeks I have got to know Ansari a little better. It is striking to receive some beautifully written emails from a sportsman, whether young or retired, about subjects stretching from I Am Not Your Negro, the recent James Baldwin documentary, to Ansari\u2019s encouraged and flowing analysis of Labour\u2019s unexpected election results. Books and writing have been at the heart of our exchanges, from Hisham Matar\u2019s The Return to Norman Mailer\u2019s The Fight.\n\nIt seems fitting that Ansari suggests we meet at the National Theatre, rather than The Oval, so he can talk for the first time in detail about his reasons for leaving cricket. After we have chatted for an hour he relives the quietly dramatic moment when he told his Surrey team-mates he was retiring a month into a new season: \u201cThere definitely were a few tears. I was choking up, and eventually crying. Other guys were also in tears. Alec Stewart choked up and Kumar Sangakkara said some lovely things. A physio I\u2019ve known a long time was crying his eyes out. It was tough.\u201d\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Ansari appeals unsuccessfully during the County Championship Division One match between Surrey and Lancashire at The Oval in April. It was to be his last game as a professional cricketer. Photograph: Jordan Mansfield\/Getty Images\n\nAnsari smiles at his bittersweet memory. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult when you don\u2019t have a Twitter account, and are reserved in your public output, because these are very hard decisions you spend hours talking about with your family. But once you stop playing it\u2019s natural there are lots of things you\u2019ll miss. So it was reassuring it felt difficult.\n\n\u201cIt would actually be inhuman to think that you\u2019d just forget. You can\u2019t move away from something you did for so long without an ache. But I\u2019m fortunate this is my choice \u2013 rather than a decision forced on me by injury or age. It happened over a long period as my competitive instinct was diminishing \u2013 and there was a fundamental sense I needed to be not only obsessive about cricket but obsessive about constantly improving my game. I started to tire of the complete immersion demanded by cricket.\u201d\n\nAnsari\u2019s involvement with England\u2019s Test team underlined that consuming focus \u2013 while making him regret the way in which international sport isolated him from real life. \u201cI don\u2019t want to make it sound negative but being an England cricketer requires a single-mindedness about cricket I lack. At Surrey, having lots of disparate things in my life helped my cricket. But this approach was not appropriate with England. The standard of cricket and the intensity of being abroad for 12 weeks, with the press around you, meant I could not be myself. I was missing out on things that are authentic to me.\u201d\n\nHe was proud to have become a Test cricketer and Ansari knew he should be thinking more about bowling to Cheteshwar Pujara and Virat Kohli than worrying about Donald Trump. But such a restricted worldview did not make sense. \u201cIt was a very politically significant time. Trump was elected on the first day of our opening Test in India. I was batting at 10 and we weren\u2019t allowed our phones in the dressing room. I was getting snippets of information from security but I felt so disconnected from something I would have been hyper-connected to here. The combination of playing very difficult cricket, while missing things that mattered so much, made me think more clearly about my future.\n\nPink balls at night may not be every County Championship batsman\u2019s delight | Vic Marks Read more\n\n\u201cI heard the news about Trump at the end of that day\u2019s play. We got our phones and it was a shocking moment. I expected [Hillary] Clinton to edge it and found it difficult to accept. I\u2019ve since focused most on the policy \u2013 like changes to healthcare provision, the attempted Muslim ban, as well as the ramping up of immigration and deportations \u2013 rather than just thinking of Trump as the clown he often appears. It\u2019s important to be less hysterical about the person but more hysterical about the political implications.\u201d\n\nCould he talk about such concerns to his England team-mates?\n\n\u201cYeah, and I think they enjoyed the fact we had conversations around the breakfast table that we wouldn\u2019t normally have as cricketers. They are by no means apolitical but their focus is inward a lot of the time. So we had some interesting discussions and there was a range of opinions.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t know if there were any people who were pro-Trump. But some were definitely sympathetic to things he was saying. I took it as a positive that there was space for these conversations. But when you have a degree there\u2019s this expectation you can provide answers to questions you have no idea about. I\u2019m just not that well-read so sometimes it was quite funny.\u201d\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Zafar Ansari bowls during his Test debut for England against Bangladesh at the Shere Bangla National Stadium in Dhaka in October 2016. Photograph: Philip Brown\/Popperfoto\/Getty Images\n\nJust as people expect Ansari to be the proverbial boffin, it was assumed by some that he would leave cricket for a career in the City. \u201cPeople were really supportive of my decision to retire. Mike Atherton wrote a really nice piece \u2013 as did Ali Martin in the Guardian. But there can be the assumption that because you\u2019ve been to Cambridge you\u2019d only give up cricket to earn a lot of money. My girlfriend and friends found that quite funny \u2013 because they know how far it is from the truth. Cricketers don\u2019t get paid like footballers but I was earning more than my parents \u2013 and they have been academics for 40 years. So if money was a motivation I would have stayed longer in cricket.\u201d\n\nAnsari smiles when he outlines his plans for the next year.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m going to work for a charity, starting in September, which supports young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. It\u2019s called Just For Kids Law and they\u2019re in north London. They work with young people involved in the criminal justice system. These are kids from disadvantaged backgrounds with educational difficulties, exclusions and immigration cases. I\u2019m doing a year there as a trainee youth advocate while taking an evening law conversion course. It\u2019s a great opportunity to develop new skills and, hopefully, help a few people.\u201d\n\nCompassion for others, and curiosity about their lives, beats just as strongly inside Ansari as his intelligence. \u201cThere are many people in cricket who are cleverer than me,\u201d he suggests. \u201cI think what perhaps differentiated me from other players wasn\u2019t necessarily my \u2018intelligence\u2019 but rather my wider interests. I love going to the cinema, I love listening to podcasts and hearing people talking about politics and broader social issues.\u201d\n\nDid he sometimes feel unhappy as a cricketer? \u201cIt sometimes felt claustrophobic with a sense of me wanting to be doing other things. It was a restlessness rather than an unhappiness. I was tussling with it for two years and I worried about letting people down who had invested a lot in me. Alec Stewart had always been very good to me so I was concerned that, because of his own passionate commitment to cricket, he would struggle with me walking away at 25 \u2013 and saying that there is more to my life than wanting to be an international cricketer. But it was absolutely the opposite. Alec and everyone at Surrey understood \u2013 which really helped.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Ansari receives a Surrey youth cricket award from the former Surrey and England captain Adam Hollioake in 2003. Photograph: Adam Davy\/Surrey County Cricket Club\/Press Association Images\n\n\u201cSince retiring it\u2019s become obvious that the temporality of cricket is so distinctive when you\u2019re a player. You spend five days a week from 9am to 7pm at the ground watching cricket, surrounded by cricketers. But since I\u2019ve stopped playing I\u2019ve started to follow the game more at home. I\u2019ve followed England the last few weeks \u2013 and I\u2019m engaging with it most days. I look at the scores online and I might watch 20 minutes of highlights. So that\u2019s 40 minutes a day where I\u2019ve followed cricket for pleasure. I didn\u2019t do that as a player.\u201d\n\nHave there been days when he regretted his decision? \u201cNo. I\u2019ve been back to The Oval a few times, as I\u2019m still involved with Surrey\u2019s charitable arm, and I\u2019ve been up to the dressing room during games. It\u2019s felt very comfortable.\u201d\n\nAnsari can now savour his three Test appearances. \u201cAbsolutely. The crowds weren\u2019t that large in India [in Rajkot and Visakhapatnam] or Bangladesh \u2013 but they were intense and exuberant. The atmosphere made it special and I am more and more proud of those five wickets and the 49 runs I scored. My first Test wicket in Bangladesh was quite magical and it meant a lot when I was handed my cap. Mark Ramprakash [England\u2019s batting coach] and I had played a little cricket together and he spoke incredibly kindly about me. That sense of entering an exclusive group is something to be proud of.\u201d\n\nEoin Morgan says dropping himself from series decider was a \u2018tough call\u2019 Read more\n\nDid his more expansive interests outside cricket help him cope with failure better \u2013 when he dropped a catch or bowled poorly? \u201cI probably felt those failures as much as anyone. In the moment of failure, or even the day of the failure, it hurt. But I could rationalise the situation a little more easily. I could genuinely say to myself that there are things that are more important in my life.\u201d\n\nAnsari flummoxed many whenever he was asked to pick his dream slip cordon. In 2015 he listed Malcolm X, Rosa Luxemburg, Chimamanda Adichie and Angela Davis. He laughs. \u201cWe get asked to do them every year and it\u2019s funny how people pick up on that particular selection. Malcolm X is definitely someone I\u2019m fascinated by but the last one I did included Rihanna and James Baldwin. It\u2019s just fun.\u201d\n\nThere is a seriousness, however, to Ansari\u2019s interest in race and politics. His Masters\u2019 thesis explored the legacy of the Deacons for Defense \u2013 an obscure 1960s black civil rights group in Mississippi and Louisiana.\n\n\u201cThey were more conservative than the Black Panthers. But they were based in the deep south and reflected their geography. The Black Panthers had a more coherent leftist ideology but the expressive politics of the Deacons for Defense were very powerful. Considering America today, with Black Lives Matter, I looked back and tried to assess all the Deacons of Defense had done.\u201d\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest \u2018I started to tire of the complete immersion demanded by cricket,\u2019 says Ansari, who will start working for a charity and studying at a law conversion course in September. Photograph: Sarah Lee\/for the Guardian\n\nThe world today is even more fractured and dangerous. With a white mother and having been born in Ascot and gone to Cambridge, Ansari stresses that: \u201cI obviously had a privileged upbringing. But I think I look at the urgent questions we face today through my father\u2019s eyes, to some extent, an Asian man and a Muslim. He arrived in the UK from Pakistan in the early 1960s, aged 14, and I always try to consider things from his perspective.\n\n\u201cSociety is in a concerning place whatever your background. There are troubling questions about inequality and the atomisation of people \u2013 the way in which societies are splitting up socially and economically. There are 3.1 million Muslims in this country and it\u2019s often very difficult to have conversations about divisions in British society after devastating attacks on all communities. But it\u2019s important we keep having those conversations.\u201d\n\nCricket is a wonderful diversion \u2013 and, as Ansari makes clear, it can also play a part in uniting communities. \u201cIt was a special moment this winter when we had four very different England players with a Muslim background in Moeen Ali, Adil Rashid, Haseeb Hameed and me on tour. They will continue to be great representatives for England.\u201d\n\nAnsari will make his own lasting contribution in very different fields. At 25 it\u2019s impossible to know yet where his best work will unfold \u2013 but it is easy to believe that, beyond cricket, so many more people will benefit from his intelligence and concern for the world around him. Zafar Ansari\u2019s real life, after all, has only just begun."}
{"text":"Image caption The Titan Arum is endangered in its natural habitat of Sumatra's tropical forests\n\nThe National Botanic Garden of Belgium is staying open late to give visitors a chance to see one of the world's largest and smelliest flowers.\n\nThe Titan Arum rarely blooms, though the Brussels specimen is said to have done so three times since 2008.\n\nThe flower rises 2.44m (8ft) off the ground and is expected to wane on Wednesday after only three days.\n\nThe Titan Arum is also known as the \"corpse flower\" because of the strong stench of rotting meat it gives off.\n\nWhen the plant is ready to attract pollinators, the spike heats up and gives off the smell which, while revolting to humans, is very alluring to insects. It then develops a fruit which attracts birds before ending its life.\n\nIt is endangered in its natural habitat of the tropical forests of Sumatra.\n\nA spokesman for the Jardin de Meise said it was \"exceptional\" that its specimen had flowered so frequently."}
{"text":"Last week, Minneapolis-based utility Xcel Energy proposed its fourth wind farm in the Upper Midwest since mid-July. If approved, the 150-megawatt Border Winds Project would be developed in North Dakota near the U.S.-Canadian border and produce enough electricity to save customers an estimated $45 million over its lifetime while reducing annual carbon dioxide emissions by about 320,000 tons.\n\nIn July, Xcel Energy \u2014 the nation\u2019s top utility for wind-based power \u2014 proposed to add 600 megawatts of wind energy through three wind farms in North Dakota and Minnesota. With the addition of the Border Winds Project, Xcel could save customers more than $220 million and add a total of 750 megawatts of wind power to its existing Midwest portfolio, which would bring its wind capacity total in the region to 2,550 megawatts \u2014 or enough power to serve over 750,000 homes.\n\n\u201cThese projects will lower our customers\u2019 bills, offer protection from rising fuel costs, and provide significant environmental benefits,\u201d Dave Sparby, CEO of Xcel subsidiary Northern States Power Co., said in a statement last month. \u201cWind prices are extremely competitive right now, offering lower costs than other possible resources, like natural gas plants.\u201d\n\nXcel has submitted the four projects to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and the North Dakota Public Service Commission for consideration and expects to hear the regulators\u2019 decisions by late fall. If approved, construction will begin immediately in order for the projects to qualify for the federal renewable energy Production Tax Credit (PTC).\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThe PTC, which was set to expire at the end of 2012, was extended in January to projects that begin construction by the end of 2013. The tax credit provides 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity produced over the first ten years of operation.\n\nThe Upper Midwest is not the only region that\u2019s benefiting from Xcel\u2019s aggressive push to add more wind power before the PTC expires. In Colorado, Xcel has asked regulators to approve a 200-megawatt wind farm that would save customers more than $142 million in fuel costs over the 20-year contract term.\n\nXcel also proposed three projects totaling nearly 700 megawatts that would be built in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, citing a lower price per megawatt-hour for wind energy generation than their own natural gas-fueled generation. These projects are expected to save customers $590.4 million in fuel costs over 20 years.\n\nAltogether, Xcel is awaiting approval on about 1,650 megawatts of wind power that could come online before the end of the 2016, which would increase its overall wind capacity by 30 percent.\n\n\u201cWe are committed to meeting our customers\u2019 needs in clean and affordable ways,\u201d said Ben Fowke, Xcel Energy\u2019s chairman and CEO. \u201cWind power is simply the cheapest resource available right now, and we are taking the opportunity afforded by the PTC extension to further shape our systems for the future.\u201d"}
{"text":"It\u2019s happening.\n\nIn just a few hours, Conor McGregor will be stepping in a boxing ring to take on Floyd Mayweather for the belt of the moneyweight division. This monumental moment in sports, that has captured the attention and drawn the interest of millions, is finally here and it will go down on Saturday night in Las Vegas, Nev.\n\nTo breakdown all the chapters and layers of this cultural phenomenon, MMA Fighting caught up with arguably the best welterweight boxer on the planet and one of the most analytical minds of the sweet science. Current undefeated unified 147-pound champion Keith \u201cOne Time\u201d Thurman weighed in on all of the ins and outs and the build up of Mayweather vs. McGregor.\n\nThe impact of Mayweather vs. McGregor on combat sports\n\nDanny Segura: First thing, first. Are you surprised these two are actually fighting?\n\nKeith Thurman: No, I\u2019m not surprised that it got made. I mean it\u2019s the year 2017 and hey, money talks.\n\nThis is not your typical boxing event, and it\u2019s almost not your typical sporting event although it\u2019s being placed as a typical boxing event in a typical boxing ring. What you\u2019re witnessing is a crossover extravaganza. How much of a build up has there been in the past seven years or whatever, just throwing a number out there, of what is better, boxing or MMA? You\u2019ve had some guys like Kimbo slice, rest in peace, that crossed over got defeated, won some matches, but nothing major came from it. But what you have here, and why this really manifested, and why Floyd even allowed it to happen is because his name is Floyd \u201cMoney\u201d Mayweather, so whatever makes money makes sense to him.\n\nSegura: Do you think this is the biggest fight in combat sports history?\n\nThurman: I don\u2019t know, man. I mean, Muhammad Ali back in the day in Africa that was big. It was also broadcasted to everyone for free. But of our generation, my lifetime? Shoot, is this bigger than any fight Mike Tyson ever had? I would say so. I\u2019m my lifetime, from 1988 to 2017, I would say this is the biggest event.\n\nSegura: Do you think we\u2019ll now see more MMA fighters crossover to boxing?\n\nThurman: It\u2019s interesting. I do see the possibility for a few more crossovers in the future, but I don\u2019t think they will ever be of this kind of stature. I don\u2019t think it will ever be like this because, I mean, it\u2019s Floyd Mayweather. He\u2019s been at the top of the game for over a decade, you know, he\u2019s dominated since he was an Olympian. So people really understand Mayweather and have watched his whole career manifest.\n\nMayweather is a truly rare athlete, he\u2019s a rare specimen, and to have him go up against the most rumbustious, most entertaining, biggest loudmouth Irishman on the planet, you know. So I don\u2019t think no matter what kind of crossover they do, I don\u2019t think it could ever compare to this crossover. So I think it\u2019s cool that this is the first time and the best you\u2019ll ever get to witness. But then again, if they do some heavyweight crossover, that could be interesting. People love heavyweights and whenever those guys fight is just lightning and thunder. So that could be interesting, but just as overhype and everything, I don\u2019t think anything can get bigger than this.\n\nNAC approves the switch to eight-ounce gloves\n\nSegura: Are you surprised the fight is happening in 8-ounce gloves?\n\nAnother handy 12 rounds today. We are prepared to destroy Floyd. Pick whatever size gloves you want as well little man. I fight with 4oz. I don't give a fuck about the size of the glove. I am coming sprinting at you with bricks. Know that. Brittle hands. A post shared by Conor McGregor Official (@thenotoriousmma) on Aug 2, 2017 at 4:27am PDT\n\nThurman: I told everybody that they would fight in whatever Floyd Mayweather wanted to fight in.\n\nSegura: Have you ever seen a case where the commission overrides the rules regarding glove size?\n\nThurman: The funny thing is that I competed in Florida early in my career, and when I competed at a catch weight of 152 pounds, the commission gave my opponent the option of eight or 10-ounce gloves. So I will say that there are times where it becomes negotiable to say the least. I knew with Floyd and McGregor that a lot of people were intrigued whether it was going to be with eight-ounce or 10-ounce gloves.\n\nSegura: Well, so is there a difference between 8 and 10-ounce gloves?\n\nThurman: It does make a difference. If it didn\u2019t make a difference, heavyweights would wear 8-ounce gloves. The more ounces McGregor has to wear the more it will negate from his power. The more ounces Floyd has to wear, the more it can assist in his defense. Real fighters know that the smaller the glove, the easier it is to slip one in. You might have your guard up, but the punch might still come through and you might think you\u2019re covering everything, but there is still that other inch unprotected.\n\nMcGregor\u2019s beef with Paulie Malignaggi\n\nSegura: So, the drama with Paulie Malignaggi. What did you make of that situation?\n\nA post shared by Paul Malignaggi (@paulmalignaggi) on Aug 3, 2017 at 8:07pm PDT\n\nThurman: You know how like sometimes people have beef but then you go and fight face to face and then you kind of squash your beef. Well, this is one of those situations where they had beef, they met each other, and now I think they got even more beef than they did before. That\u2019s their own story. I think it\u2019s kinda funny, and I wonder how personal it\u2019s going to get for Paulie when he ends up commentating on the fight.\n\nDS: What do you think actually happened in the sparring session?\n\nThurman: There are a lot of rumors about what really happened in that sparring session with Paulie. Paulie ultimately said that McGregor has some growth in his boxing technique but there isn\u2019t really enough time to allow him to grow enough for the Mayweather fight. That sounds like a true statement regardless of whether the guy got beat up or not.\n\nPaulie Malignaggi was a retired fighter that went into your training camp out of shape. And whenever you call somebody into your training camp, you have to understand that you will be in better shape than they are. And another thing is that I\u2019ve never sparred a single sparring partner for 12 rounds. So you don\u2019t make the guy that just got off a plane and who\u2019s not ripped and shredded like you are, you don\u2019t make that dude spar 12 rounds with you.\n\nFor example, back in the day when me and Shaun Porter were sparring partners before we were battling for these titles \u2014 and it looks like he might end up being my next opponent as a rematch \u2014 I was preparing for Marcos Maidana, that\u2019s why we were sparring because of Porter\u2019s aggressive style. That was before Maidana pulled out. Me and Porter never even sparred 10 rounds, we would only spar a maximum of five rounds at a single time. We would always spar four rounds and then my other sparring partner would come in next. So being able to get the best of a sparring partner in a training session, I mean, and you\u2019re talking about a retired fighter. When I look at the photos of Paul Malignaggi in that training camp, he was overweight, but still went 12 rounds with the guy. So it is what it is, he\u2019s not fighting Paulie, he\u2019s fighting Mayweather.\n\nSegura: Did McGregor\u2019s side break any code or etiquette by releasing the photos and sparring footage?\n\nThurman: A little bit, yeah. But at the end of the day, this motherf*cker is trying to create hype to make this fight worth watching. So you see Paulie Malignaggi on the ground and you\u2019re like, \u2018oh he\u2019s messing up this world class fighter; I can\u2019t wait and see what happens when he fights Floyd.\u2019 So with that going on, I\u2019m not really going to, I mean, it\u2019s not my thing. But man, if you don\u2019t want them to be releasing shi*, don\u2019t give them anything good to release.\n\nThe breakdown\n\nSegura: Is there an actual chance here for McGregor to pull off the upset?\n\nThurman: Well, it\u2019s a fight, and when you\u2019re in a fight, there is always a chance. Especially because, you don\u2019t have to call McGregor a boxer, but you have to admit he\u2019s used to hand-to-hand combat and his preference is hand-to-hand combat, not submissions or anything like that. We can say that McGregor has hit enough people in the face that it\u2019s a skillset.\n\nFor me, he became a boxer when he defeated Nate Diaz. The reason I say that is because whenever he struck Nate Diaz with a straight-left hand that knocked him down to the ground, he (McGregor) didn\u2019t take advantage of the MMA rules, which allow him to keep attacking Nate Diaz while he\u2019s still on the ground. He simply stood up and kept telling Diaz, \u2018stand back up, stand back up.\u2019 I\u2019m wondering why the referee ain\u2019t just giving them a 10 count, and if he doesn\u2019t stand up in 10 then the fight is over, so that looked like a boxing match to me.\n\nSo what I\u2019m intrigued in seeing is, what happens when McGregor lands that straight left? Can he land the straight left? Muhammed Ali said, \u2018yeah, Frazier is strong. But he ain\u2019t going to hit me, so it doesn\u2019t matter if he can\u2019t hit me.\u2019\n\nSegura: Do you think there could be a case where Mayweather is the one that scores a stoppage?\n\nThurman: Mayweather hasn\u2019t knocked anybody out since what, Ricky Hatton? Victor Ortiz was a freebie, hands down. So I\u2019ve made this statement a lot the many years I was rising through the ranks and I wanted to have an opportunity to put my skills against Floyd Mayweather, the best boxer of our generation. I always said, \u2018you don\u2019t have to be scared of Floyd knocking you out.\u2019 I mean, you can look forward to a 12-round fight with Floyd. I mean, I\u2019d put my grandma in the ring and not think she\u2019ll get knocked out, so that\u2019s not the question. The question is, can you beat the man?\n\nSegura: So this could be a long night for McGregor. Do you expect his conditioning to be ready for a 12-round bout?\n\nThurman: A lot of boxing guys believe that McGregor doesn\u2019t have a 12 rounds in him. If Floyd targets the body in the early rounds, some believe McGregor will gas out in the later rounds because he gassed out in Nate Diaz fight. In my opinion, he gassed out in both fights, but he handled it better in the second fight, although he was still gassing out towards the end of that fight. So I hope his team really upped their strength and conditioning, especially the conditioning part, in preparation for this fight.\n\nPrediction\n\nSegura: So who wins this fight and how do you think it goes down?\n\nThurman: I never really care about fights that I\u2019m not involved in so the outcome can be anything for my concern. I\u2019d like to stay open minded, but I think a defensive 12-round victory for Floyd. I don\u2019t see McGregor winning a 12-round victory. I don\u2019t see McGregor walking away with seven out of 12 rounds.\n\nAs long as you get seven of the 12 rounds in the books on the judges scorecards, you have a unanimous decision. So I don\u2019t see McGregor achieving that. Floyd Mayweather boxing\u2019s style is one that makes sure no fighter achieves that because that\u2019s his goal and he knows you\u2019re not allowed to win seven rounds. You can win five rounds and look good, but he doesn\u2019t allow you to win six or win seven. So yeah, McGregor needs a knockout to really shock the world."}
{"text":"It's Time to Slay the Revenant Keynes Share This:\n\nNaturally, many prominent economists are viewing this development with horror. \"People are saving! The economy will collapse! We've got to get them spending! Paradox of thrift!\"\n\nThe\n\nI think I have finally learned where such silly notions arise. I recently read an article by an Austrian economist (alas, I've forgotten who, so I can't give proper credit) that explained it thus: in the Keynesian view, an economy is driven by consumption, whereas in the Austrian view, an economy is driven by production (and savings).\n\nSo to a Keynesian, an economy is healthy as long as people spend, spend, spend...even if they have to borrow, borrow, borrow to do it. And if they stop spending, they must be made to spend more. And if they refuse, then the government has to do the borrowing and spending for them. (Somehow freedom of conscience never seems to be honored in the economic sphere. Can't I be a conscientious objector to Keynesian stimulus?)\n\nThis, despite the fact that to the best of my knowledge, the theories of Keynes have never been scientifically proven or even substantiated. No Keynesian intervention has ever been shown to work. So why are they always the first resort? Because whether or not they work, Keynesian prescriptions are convenient for those in power. They give the state a plausible cover, that the citizens will accept, to enlarge its power.\n\nSo, it's time to slay the revenant Keynes. Like Karl Marx, his half-baked theories reach from beyond the grave to strangle societies and ruin people's lives. It's Ptolemaic crackpottery which is long overdue for refutation. It enjoys what I call \"academic celebrity\" -- not \"famous because it is famous\", but rather \"accepted because it's accepted.\"\n\nAlas, I don't think Keynesianism will be discredited unless the economy suffers a total collapse. And from the rubble, I'm sure we'll hear the whine of the last Keynesian: \"It's because we didn't stimulate enough!\" Back to category overview Back to news overview Older News Newer News\n\nPrinter Friendly Brad - Thursday 05 March 2009 - 13:56:26 - Permalink I saw a few days ago that the U.S. savings rate has increased to 5%. To my mind, this is Good News: people are starting to get responsible about their finances, starting to pay down their debt, and starting to put some cash away for hard times. I figure this is exactly what's needed to get out of the credit swamp and back to a sustainable economy.Naturally, many prominent economists are viewing this development with horror. \"People are saving! The economy will collapse! We've got to get them spending! Paradox of thrift!\"The \"paradox of thrift\" holds that what is good for every individual (thrift and saving) is bad for the economy at large....rather as if the economy were one gigantic Prisoner's Dilemma . Mainstream economists love citing this, perhaps because it sprang from the mind of the exalted J. M. Keynes.I think I have finally learned where such silly notions arise. I recently read an article by an Austrian economist (alas, I've forgotten who, so I can't give proper credit) that explained it thus: in the Keynesian view, an economy is driven by consumption, whereas in the Austrian view, an economy is driven by production (and savings).So to a Keynesian, an economy is healthy as long as people spend, spend, spend...even if they have to borrow, borrow, borrow to do it. And if they stop spending, they must be made to spend more. And if they refuse, then the government has to do the borrowing and spending for them. (Somehow freedom of conscience never seems to be honored in the economic sphere. Can't I be a conscientious objector to Keynesian stimulus?)This, despite the fact that to the best of my knowledge, the theories of Keynes have never been scientifically proven or even substantiated. No Keynesian intervention has ever been shown to work. So why are they always the first resort? Because whether or not they work, Keynesian prescriptions are convenient for those in power. They give the state a plausible cover, that the citizens will accept, to enlarge its power.So, it's time to slay the revenant Keynes. Like Karl Marx, his half-baked theories reach from beyond the grave to strangle societies and ruin people's lives. It's Ptolemaic crackpottery which is long overdue for refutation. It enjoys what I call \"academic celebrity\" -- not \"famous because it is famous\", but rather \"accepted because it's accepted.\"Alas, I don't think Keynesianism will be discredited unless the economy suffers a total collapse. And from the rubble, I'm sure we'll hear the whine of the last Keynesian: \"It's because we didn't stimulate enough!\""}
{"text":"David Villa isn\u2019t going anywhere.\n\nThere was speculation that Villa would retire after his three-year contract expired at the end of this season, but New York City FC silenced those rumors Wednesday by signing the reigning MLS MVP to a one-year extension that will keep him in The Bronx.\n\n\u201cI am so happy to play [at NYCFC],\u201d Villa told The Post. \u201cI am fit, the club spoke about joining for one more year and it was one of the easiest things I\u2019ve done in my life.\u201d\n\nVilla\u2019s contract extension was formally announced at P.S. 49 in The Bronx, where the former World Cup winner from Spain fielded tough questions from youngsters, like what\u2019s his favorite pregame meal (pasta or rice) to whether he enjoys playing soccer (obviously). After all, the 35-year-old could have easily called it a career after this season, but he\u2019s not ready to hang up his boots just yet.\n\n\u201cI think I\u2019ve improved [at NYCFC],\u201d said Villa, who\u2019s missed just seven matches since NYCFC\u2019s inaugural season in 2015. \u201cWith experience, games, with minutes on the pitch and outside the pitch, I keep learning. I\u2019m a better player [now].\u201d\n\nVilla signed a three-year Designated Player contract in 2014 and, since then, he\u2019s been everything NYCFC could have asked for. Arguably one of the best Designated Player signings in MLS history, Villa never took his foot off the gas, especially last season, when he scored 23 goals to win MLS MVP honors and led NYCFC to their first ever playoff appearance.\n\n\u201cWhen I look back to those first days in 2014, it\u2019s really amazing to see how far we\u2019ve come in such a short space of time,\u201d said Villa, who is NYCFC\u2019s all-time leading scorer with 46 goals. \u201cAnd to know that there is so much potential for us to continue growing, on and off the field.\u201d\n\nThe World Cup winner has shown no signs of tired legs this season, leading NYCFC (13 points) with five goals in seven appearances.\n\nFor Villa, coming to NYCFC hasn\u2019t been a mistake.\n\n\u201cThere were no sacrifices,\u201d Villa said. \u201cI always dreamed of being a soccer player. I can say I sacrificed nothing playing soccer.\u201d"}
{"text":"Advertisement CBO: GOP health care bill would reduce number of people with comprehensive health insurance 'by millions' Share Shares Copy Link Copy\n\nThe Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary analysis of the Graham-Cassidy bill on Monday saying that millions of people with comprehensive health insurance would lose coverage under the new bill. \u201cThat number could vary widely depending on how states implemented the legislation, although the direction of the effect is clear,\u201d said the analysis. The non-partisan scoring agency estimates that between 2017 and 2026, \"the legislation would reduce the on-budget deficit by at least $133 billion and result in millions fewer people with comprehensive health insurance that covers high-cost medical events.\"The report is not as detailed as previous CBO scores, however.It does not give a more specific number of how many Americans would lose health care coverage under the health care law sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana nor does it include information on how Graham-Cassidy would affect the cost of premiums throughout the country.According to CBO, the reduction in the number of insured people relative to the number under current law would result from three main causes. 1. Enrollment in Medicaid would be substantially lower because of large reductions in federal funding for that program.2. Enrollment in nongroup coverage would be lower because of reductions in subsidies for it.3. Enrollment in all types of health insurance would be lower because penalties for not having insurance would be repealed.Senator Susan Collins from Maine, who reportedly said she was waiting for the report to come out before making her decision, said shortly after the analysis was posted that she was a no.Collins tweeted a full response as well saying, \"This is simply not the way that we should be approaching an important and complex issue that must be handled thoughtfully and fairly for all Americans.\"The agency announced weeks ago that it would not have adequate time to release coverage numbers and instead would only be able to release a \"preliminary\" report.\"CBO will not be able to provide point estimates of the effects on the deficit, health insurance coverage, or premiums for at least several weeks,\" the agency said in a statement about the bill.The CBO score's main purpose is to ensure that the legislation meets its saving targets required under reconciliation, the process that allows Senate Republicans to pass the health care bill with 51 votes.The non-partisan agency's score is also of the first version of the bill. Changes were made to the legislation over the weekend and released Sunday night. Those tweaks include a recalculation of how much money rural states would receive under Graham Cassidy as well as a further roll back on protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The CBO's latest score does not include the changes.CNN has contributed to this report"}
{"text":"A new survey on Jewish Americans released just now by the Pew Research Center shows what we\u2019ve come to expect from these reports: They are becoming less religious overall, with Millennial Jews even less religious than their older counterparts:\n\nA Pew Research reanalysis of the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey suggests that at that time, 93% of Jews in that study were Jews by religion and 7% were Jews of no religion (after some adjustments to make the NJPS and Pew Research categories as similar as possible). In the new Pew Research survey, 78% of Jews are Jews by religion, and fully 22% are Jews of no religion (including 6% who are atheist, 4% who are agnostic and 12% whose religion is \u201cnothing in particular\u201d). Though the two studies employed different question wording and methodologies and are thus not directly comparable, the magnitude of these differences suggests that Jews of no religion have grown as a share of the Jewish population and the overall U.S. public. The new Pew Research survey finds that approximately 0.5% of U.S. adults \u2014 about 1.2 million people \u2014 are Jews of no religion.\n\nLaurie Goodstein of the New York Times highlights this change in her report and brings up another relevant point: Non-religious Jews aren\u2019t passing down their religious traditions to their children, meaning the trend is likely to continue:\n\n\u2026 the percentage of \u201cJews of no religion\u201d has grown with each successive generation, peaking with the millennials (those born after 1980), of whom 32 percent say they have no religion. \u201cIt\u2019s very stark,\u201d Alan Cooperman, deputy director of the Pew religion project, said in an interview. \u201cOlder Jews are Jews by religion. Younger Jews are Jews of no religion.\u201d \u2026 But Jews without religion tend not to raise their children Jewish, so this secular trend has serious consequences for what Jewish leaders call \u201cJewish continuity.\u201d Of the \u201cJews of no religion\u201d who have children at home, two-thirds are not raising their children Jewish in any way. This is in contrast to the \u201cJews with religion,\u201d of whom 93 percent said they are raising their children to have a Jewish identity.\n\nWhat we\u2019re seeing more than anything else is a rise in secular Judaism as opposed to religious Judaism. It\u2019s the non-religious traditions that are being passed down to the next generation, if that.\n\nThe report also shows a rise in Jews who marry non-Jews, another sign that religious faith is taking a backseat to other qualities.\n\nThe strangest finding, though, may be just how many Jewish people believe that you can be a Jew while believing that Jesus was the Messiah\u2026\n\nI would jokingly say 34% of Jews didn\u2019t go to Hebrew school\u2026 but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a joke."}
{"text":"'Pray at the Pump' activist: 'We shall overcome' high gas prices Nick Langewis\n\nPublished: Sunday August 17, 2008\n\nPrint This Email This Divine intervention, not the market, is bringing gas prices down, one campaigner says. 59-year-old Rocky Twyman of Rockville, Maryland has garnered worldwide attention after holding prayer meetings at gas stations across the United States since April as part of his \"Pray at the Pump\" drive. Recently, to celebrate a drop in the average price of gasoline to $3.80 a gallon, Twyman led a group meeting at their inaugural Washington service station, singing a version of \"We Shall Overcome\" whose words were changed to \"We'll have to lower gas prices.\" \"We believe not just in prayer,\" Twyman said, \"because we believe that faith without works is dead. So we've encouraged people to car-pool more and organise their days more, because it's a combination of faith with these other factors.\" \"God is the only one we can turn to at this point,\" Twyman said during an April stop in San Francisco. \"Take it to the real CEO,\" Alabama DJ Todd Baker said during a recent prayer session at a Huntsville Texaco station on the heels of ExxonMobil's posting of a second-quarter profit of about $11.7 billion. Twyman also recently prayed for Tonight Show host Jay Leno, who mentioned him in a July 29 monologue: \"Hey, have you heard about this group called Prayer at the Pump? They're a prayer group that sprang up, and they go to gas stations and they hold hands and they pray for lower gas prices. Otherwise known as the Bush energy plan.\" Twyman's involvement in the community also includes the recruitment of about 14,000 minority individuals into the national bone marrow registry since 1992, for which he received honors from Montgomery County, Maryland in April. He also led a petition drive in 2005 to nominate Oprah Winfrey for the Nobel Peace Prize. \"We're just really impressed,\" Twyman told People Magazine, \"with what she has done to raise the level of consciousness about hunger, poverty, homeless, women's issues and, of course, the issue of AIDS.\""}
{"text":"That's bad policy for Americans as well as Cubans, and it's based on a disingenuous argument. The putative reason for the change is that Cuba still violates the human rights of its own people, including jailing dissidents and independent journalists. But hasn't the Trump administration been moving the U.S. away from its focus on human rights around the world? Pressing foreign governments to end oppression has been a mainstay of U.S. foreign policy for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations \u2014 but Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told State Department employees last month that the U.S. would no longer put such a premium on human rights issues because such considerations could interfere with our national interests. Trump has vowed to put \"America first\" and has been loathe to criticize foreign leaders publicly for their violations of human rights."}
{"text":"INDIA will send a strong squad to Zimbabwe for its five-match One-Day International (ODI) series against the hosts to give the series the zest coach Andrew Waller\u2019s men have been yearning for.\n\nStaff Writer\n\nThere were fears India would dampen the series by sending a second-string side as it did in 2010, but the tourists have since forwarded a squad list that, barring any injuries, should tour Zimbabwe this month.\n\nAll the big names that toured England for the International Cricket Council Champions Trophy and are currently engaged in a triangular series in the West Indies with Sri Lanka, are in the squad expected to arrive in Zimbabwe on July 21.\n\nSkipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni captains a 15-men squad that has been submitted to Zimbabwe Cricket.\n\nChampions Trophy player of the tournament Shikhar Dhawan, who had a dream tournament by scoring 363 runs, will be travelling to Zimbabwe.\n\nThe spin duo of Ravindra Jadeja and Ashwin Ravichandran, one of India\u2019s success stories, is also part of the squad.\n\nZimbabwe has been in camp for a month preparing for this tour, which comes ahead of Pakistan\u2019s visit, and also includes a two Test series.\n\nZimbabwe and India play the first three ODIs in Harare on July 24, 26, and 28 before travelling to Bulawayo for the final two matches on July 31 and August 3.\n\nIndia Squad for Zimbabwe:\n\nMahendra Singh Dhoni; Shikhar Dhawan; Dinesh Karthik; Murali Vijay; Virat Kohli; Amit Mishra; Suresh Raina; Rohit Sharma; Ashwin Ravichandran; Ravindrasinh Jadeja; Bhuvaneshwar Kumar; Ishant Sharma; Umeshkumar Yadav; Vinay Ranganatha and Irfankhan Pathan"}
{"text":"Republican lawmakers are threatening to put the nation\u2019s financial health at risk over a ritual vote to raise the debt ceiling, but they don\u2019t actually object to throwing away money. Case in point: they seem to relish spending taxpayer dollars on the plainly unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act.\n\nThe 1996 law prohibits federal recognition of marriages between people of the same sex. It was signed \u2013 to his shame \u2013 by President Bill Clinton, and for years the government defended DOMA in court against lawsuits. But in 2011 President Obama instructed the Justice Department to relent \u2013 after Justice concluded that the law was not constitutional.\n\nCue the budget-conscious Republicans on Capitol Hill, who authorized the spending of up to $2.75 million in public funds to hire lawyers to defend DOMA on their behalf. Apparently, that was not a big enough check, so on Jan. 4, the House Republicans raised the fee ceiling to $3 million.\n\nOn Tuesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner protesting the spending, which the G.O.P. leadership somehow forgot to mention at any of the dozens of press conferences they\u2019ve held to preach the gospel of fiscal responsibility.\n\n\u201cThis clandestine commitment of taxpayer funds is highly irregular and objectionable, and it must end now,\u201d they wrote, pointing out that defending DOMA is futile since it violates Constitutional guarantees of equal protection.\n\nThe Defense of Marriage Act is perhaps the last example of officially sanctioned discrimination in the United States. Until Congress repeals it or the Supreme Court strikes it down, a select group of Americans will be denied the benefits and recognition provided to all other married Americans, and state laws that allow gay unions will have only limited effect."}
{"text":"The layout principles\u2013columns and rows, angles and lines\u2013that we use to build websites today are largely influenced by their print heritage. And although grid implementation on the web is getting better and more polished, web layout in general is still awkward compared to print media, especially when it comes to content flow.\n\nMagazines and newspapers have always enjoyed elegant ways for arranging content layout, such as wrapping text around, or inside, non-rectangular shapes.\n\nMultipurpose Magazine by GreenSocks\n\nLet\u2019s explore how the CSS Shapes Module will allow us this same freedom on the web.\n\nQuick Intro to CSS Shapes\n\nCSS Shapes enable web designers to create more abstract, geometric layouts, beyond simple rectangles and squares. The specification provides us with new CSS properties which include shape-outside and shape-margin . Browser support is reasonable, though these properties are currently only available in Chrome, Opera, and Safari, with the -webkit- prefix, hence -webkit-shape-outside .\n\nThe shape-outside property will cause inline content to wrap around (outside) following the element curve, rather than the box model. Initially there was also shape-inside to wrap the content inside an element; text within a circular element would be moulded into a circle shape as well. However, the implementation has been postponed for CSS Shapes Level 2.\n\nFrom top to bottom: shape-outside and shape-inside in action.\n\nThe shape-margin property sets the margin around whichever shape is using the shape-outside .\n\nLet\u2019s take a look at some examples.\n\nCreating a Shape\n\nThe easiest way to find out how CSS Shapes works is probably through creating a circle. So, here\u2019s a div (our circle), with several paragraphs alongside.\n\nHere\u2019s some basic styling, including the width and the height of our circle, the border-radius to shape the element, and a float so the paragraph wraps around the element.\n\nAs the we would except, the paragraphs is now wrapped around the element. However, since the border-radius property does not define the actual element shape, the paragraph wrap does not form the circle curve.\n\nIf we inspect the element through our browser DevTools, we will find the element is, in fact, still a box. So, even though our div has the appearance of a circle, the border-radius has done nothing to the actual shape of the element.\n\nNotice the rectangular highlight around the element.\n\nIn order for our paragraph to adhere to the circular shape, we need to change the actual element shape through the shape-outside property; in this case, we\u2019ll add one with the circle() function passed as the value.\n\nOur paragraphs now wrap neatly around the circle\u2019s circumference.\n\nAdditionally, if we now inspect the element through DevTools, we\u2019ll see that the element is properly rendered into a circle.\n\nNotice the darker highlight.\n\nWith some margins, look how it might enhance a simple layout:\n\nCustomizing the Circle\n\nThe circle() function takes a couple of values for defining the radius and the center coordinate respectively: circle(r at x y) . By default, the radius value is derived from the element size; if the element is 300px wide, for instance, the radius will be 150px (the radius being half of the circle\u2019s diameter).\n\nSimilarly, the x and y coordinates are measured relative to the element\u2019s size, and they are by default set at 50% 50% ; right at the centre of the element.\n\nThe circle is positioned at the center of the element.\n\nThese two values will come in useful when you want to resize the shape, while keeping the actual element size, or move the shape while retaining the element position. In the following example, we\u2019ll reduce the circle radius down to 60px and set the center coordinate to 30% 70% , which should move the circle to the bottom left of the element box.\n\nThe paragraphs now pass through the element box following the circle size. View the demo.\n\nIt is worth noting that when modifying the circle both the center coordinate and the radius have to be explicitly defined; adding only one of the them is invalid.\n\nShape Box Model\n\nCSS Shapes inherit the same box model principle as the element, but applied outside the scope of the element itself. This allows us to separately set the element, say, to border-box while setting the shape to padding-box . To change the shape box model, add one of the box model keywords, content-box , margin-box , border-box , or padding-box after the function.\n\nThe default box-model of the shape is set to margin-box . And in the following example, we\u2019ve changed it to padding-box to tell the browser to exclude the element margin when determining the shape size or span. Now we should find the paragraph pass through the border, and immediately touching the padding of the element.\n\nThe orange square is the margin, the yellow square is the border, and the green square is the padding,\n\nI highly recommend checking out our free course on the Basics of CSS Box Model for more about how the box-model works in detail.\n\nCreating More Shapes\n\nThe CSS Shapes specification comes with a few more shape functions:\n\nellipse() : As the name implies, this function will create an ellipse shape. We can configure the ellipse radius and move the shape center coordinate as well. But unlike the circle() function, the ellipse() function applies two radius measurements, horizontal and vertical, hence ellipse( 100px 180px at 10% 20% ) .\n\n: As the name implies, this function will create an ellipse shape. We can configure the ellipse radius and move the shape center coordinate as well. But unlike the function, the function applies two radius measurements, horizontal and vertical, hence . polygon() : This function enables us to create more complex shapes like triangles, hexagons, as well as non-geometrical shapes. Using polygon is not as easy as creating a circle, but the Path to Polygon Converter tool makes it a bit more intuitive.\n\nWrapping Up\n\nIn this tutorial, we looked into the basic application of CSS Shapes; we created a shape, customized the size, the position, and the box model. At the time of the writing, several aspects of CSS Shapes are still very rough around the edges, which is probably why we don\u2019t see it used widely just yet.\n\nAs mentioned earlier in this tutorial, the CSS Shapes shape-inside property, which allows us to wrap and shape content inside an element, has been put on ice.\n\nproperty, which allows us to wrap and shape content inside an element, has been put on ice. The CSS Shapes specification provides a separate property named shape-box to define the shape box-model, though it currently seems inapplicable to any browsers.\n\nto define the shape box-model, though it currently seems inapplicable to any browsers. Safari requires the -webkit- prefix, highlighting that this feature is experimental.\n\nNonetheless, despite slow progress and disparity across browsers at the moment, I\u2019m looking forward to CSS Shapes! Once the major browsers pick it up I can\u2019t wait to see some really creative layouts on the web!"}
{"text":"The venerable British medical journalhasretracted a 1998 study suggesting a link between autism and childhoodvaccination with the measles -mumps-rubella MMR vaccine .\n\nThe Lancet tells WebMD that it has retracted \"10 or 15\" studies in\n\nits 186-year history. The retraction follows the finding of the U.K.\n\nGeneral Medical Council (GMC) that says study leader Andrew Wakefield, MD, and\n\ntwo colleagues acted \"dishonestly\" and \"irresponsibly\" in conducting their\n\nresearch.\n\nThe Lancet specifically refers to claims made in the paper that the\n\n12 children in the study were consecutive patients that appeared for treatment,\n\nwhen the GMC found that several had been selected especially for the\n\nstudy. The paper also claimed that the study was approved by the\n\nappropriate ethics committee, when the GMC found it had not been.\n\n\"We fully retract this paper from the published record,\" The Lancet\n\neditors say in a news release.\n\nThe retraction means the study will no longer be considered an official part\n\nof the scientific literature.\n\nBMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, has\n\ncompeted with The Lancet since 1840. BMJ editor Fiona Godlee says\n\nshe welcomes the Lancet retraction.\n\n\"This will help to restore faith in this globally important vaccine and in\n\nthe integrity of the scientific literature,\" Godlee says in a news release.\n\nIn 2004, 10 of Wakefield's 13 co-authors disavowed the findings of the 1998\n\nstudy. Although the study never claimed to have definitively proven a\n\nlink between the MMR vaccine and autism, sensational media reports ignited a\n\npublic panic . MMR vaccinations fell\n\ndramatically.\n\nMore rigorous studies have found\n\nno link between autism and the MMR vaccine . Last year, the U.S.\n\n\"vaccine court\" rejected U.S. lawsuits claiming that there was a plausible\n\nlink between the vaccine and autism.\n\nWakefield continues to proclaim his innocence and defends his earlier work.\n\nHe now resides in Texas, where he is executive director of an alternative\n\nmedicine center for autism treatment and\n\nresearch.\n\nBy Daniel DeNoon\n\nReviewed by Louise Chang\n\n\u00a92005-2008 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved"}
{"text":"There are world championships and then, well, there are world championships. The magic of the race for the rainbow jersey is its uncanny unpredictability. Because riders compete on their national teams rather than their trade teams, and because the race route changes from year to year, the event can sometimes smile on lesser-known riders.\n\nWords and Images by James Startt\n\nBut while upsets are frequent, the epic world championship races are the ones captured by great champions over grueling race routes. Greg LeMond\u2019s second world title in Chamb\u00e9ry, France, only weeks after winning the 1989 Tour de France, certainly goes down as one of the best. Another was the impressive victory taken in 1980 by French champion Bernard Hinault, who almost single-handedly demolished an elite field in his native France.\n\nAnd in what can only be heralded as a \u201cBabe Ruth\u201d move, Hinault promised national team director Richard Marillier that he would win the race three years earlier\u2014when he discovered that the worlds would be held in France. The anecdote, although rarely cited, calls to mind \u201cThe Babe\u201d pointing to the bleachers moments before blasting a home run to the very spot.\n\nHinault came to the start in Sallanches, a small town in the French Alps, prepared to deliver. On that day, the riders tackled the rugged C\u00f4te de Domancy\u2014the main climb on the final time trial to Meg\u00e8ve in this year\u2019s Tour de France\u2014no less than 20 times. Lap after lap Hinault assumed his role as pre-race favorite, forcing the pace and splintering the pack. Italian Gianbattista Baronchelli, the final rider capable of following Hinault\u2019s tempo, was having the race of his life. But he was no match for the ferocious champion that was Hinault, often known as \u201cThe Badger,\u201d who dropped the Italian on the final climb. Hinault won solo, a minute ahead of the Italian and almost five minutes before the seven-man \u201cpeloton.\u201d Only 15 riders finished the 268-kilometer race.\n\nIt is a day etched in Hinault\u2019s own memory, and one the ever-candid Frenchman shares with Peloton only a week before this year\u2019s title race.\n\n_____________________________________________________________________________________________\n\nPeloton: Bernard, you won one of the most memorable world championships in history. Why do you think your victory in Sallanches is so etched in cycling history?\n\nBernard Hinault: Well, firstly, because the course was just so hard!\n\nPeloton: It was a race that we rarely have seen since. You were one of the big favorites, the leader of the French national team, yet you attacked already on the first lap and basically won the race from the front. We just don\u2019t see that in modern-day racing?\n\nHinault: Again, the course was so hard. It was a race for the strongest. You had to be one of the strongest just to be able to follow the pace. When you are the strongest on a course like that, well, you can just drop everybody, \u00e0 la p\u00e9dale! I was super well-trained and I was at the summit of my career. If the world championship circuit had been that difficult for the next four years I would have been world champion for the next four years!\n\nOn race day, I just told my teammates to keep me at the front for the first 10 laps and then I would take care of the rest. And that is what I did. The C\u00f4te de Domancy was just so hard. It was ideal for me. I didn\u2019t need a lot of strategy. The final five or six laps up the hill I just rode a steady tempo like I did in the mountains until, finally, nobody could follow. I didn\u2019t have any help. I just went to the front each time we hit the climb. Each lap, more and more riders dropped\u2014bing, bing! And finally the last rider, Baronchelli, blew about 500 meters from the summit of the final ascension and I rode in to victory.\n\nPeloton: Yeah, but you withdrew from the Tour de France that year due to tendinitis. You weren\u2019t worried that you would lose the needed condition?\n\nHinault: No, I just sat out for eight days, the time for the swelling to subside and then I started riding again. Don\u2019t forget, I had won Li\u00e8ge-Bastogne-Li\u00e8ge that year as well as the Tour of Italy, and I withdrew from the Tour de France with the yellow jersey. So I was really in great shape. As long as I didn\u2019t take too long to recover, I knew that I would be okay, and that was the case! After I got back on my bike, the condition returned quickly. I used the Tour of Germany to prepare that year and felt really good there. So I was confident going into the race.\n\nPeloton: You were so confident that, according to legend, you promised the national team coach three years earlier that you would win the world championships that year. Is that really true?\n\nHinault: Absolutely. I didn\u2019t know where exactly the race would be. I didn\u2019t know it would be on such a hard circuit. But I knew it would be in France and I was going to do everything to win it there.\n\nPeloton: Bernard, you\u2019ve won so many great races, all of the grand tours, monuments like Li\u00e8ge-Bastogne-Li\u00e8ge and Paris-Roubaix. How does your world title resonate today?\n\nHinault: Like all of the others. We ride to win the great races. And each time we do, it\u2019s a great satisfaction. And winning the worlds remains one of my great victories. You just always want to give your best in this race. It brings out the best in riders!\n\nPeloton: What is it like wearing the rainbow jersey all year long? You instantly become a marked rider. Is it harder to get results?\n\nHinault: Ah, no. It\u2019s a great honor. Not everybody gets a chance to wear it. And because I had the rainbow jersey, I made sure I was in shape earlier the following season. As a result, I won races earlier in the season. That was the year that I won Paris-Roubaix. Usually I wasn\u2019t competitive so early in the season.\n\nPeloton: True, it was a race you truly disliked. And yet you won it with the world champion\u2019s jersey! You once called Paris-Roubaix a\u2026what kind of race?\n\nHinault: A shit race! Paris-Roubaix was just too dangerous for me. When you know that you can win a race like the Tour de France, you don\u2019t think about Paris-Roubaix. If you crash there, your season can be finished!\n\nPeloton: This year\u2019s world championship is going to be very different.\n\nHinault: Well, it won\u2019t be hard like in Sallanches. That is something that is not going to be the case in Doha this year. It\u2019s completely flat.\n\nPeloton: That\u2019s for sure, although many people are saying that the wind could really blow things apart!\n\nHinault: Sure, but all good sprinters at the professional level know how to ride in the wind, or at least they should! In addition, the race finishes on a circuit in the city, so there is plenty of opportunity for the race to come together again. And now they are talking about reducing the length of the race to only 107 kilometers if it is too hot\u2014well, then, the world championships will be reduced to a virtual criterium! No, I think regardless of the conditions, all the big sprinters will be there at the finish and it is going to be a big mass sprint.\n\nIf indeed they cut the race distance from nearly 260 kilometers down to 107, it won\u2019t have the same value. You just won\u2019t be able to compare the race to other world championships. There are going to be a lot more riders capable of winning a race that is so short. That said, you still have to win it!"}
{"text":"THIS WEEK\n\n6\n\n| NewScientist | 20 July 2013\n\nBONES. That is all the passing millennia have left us of the Neanderthals and the more elusive Denisovans. Until recently, the main insights gleaned from these bones have been physical: what our cousins might have looked like, for instance, and how they moved. But cutting-edge genetic science is changing that. We can now see, for the first time, which genes are switched on in humans but were not in Neanderthals and Denisovans, and vice versa. The findings point to subtle differences between our brain structure and function, and theirs. The research, presented last week at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in Chicago, reveals that after our ancestors split from Neanderthals and Denisovans, they evolved differences in genes connected with cognitive abilities. Many of those genes are associated with mental disorders in modern humans. Working out which genes are switched on or not involves looking at the epigenome, or the chemical \u201cmethyl\u201d tags attached to genes. Genomes, in contrast, show only the basic sequence of genes. Liran Carmel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Svante P\u00e4\u00e4bo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues analysed the epigenomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans and compared them with those of modern humans (s ee \u201cWhat\u2019s good about decay\u201d, top right). Altered methylation patterns are frequently associated with disease, particularly cancer and mental disorders. So Carmel\u2019s approach has the potential to give us unprecedented insight into the\n\n\u2013 Dem bones got something to say \u2013\n\nThe first look at which genes were switched on and off in our extinct cousins is allowing us to peer into their minds\n\nInside the brain of a Neanderthal\n\nSara Reardon, Chicago\n\n\u201cThe approach could offer unprecedented insight into the mental abilities of extinct hominin species\u201d"}
{"text":"The sounds a modern car makes are deliberate, designed, and a deception: the clicking of the turn signal isn't a mechanical tick-tock; it's an MP3 of a mechanical tick-tock, played back through hidden speakers. The engine's rumble is tuned with active noise-cancelling that mutes the tones that jangle the ears.\n\nBut as you reduce the speed that the drive shaft is rotating, you lower the frequency of the sound it\u2019s making. There comes a lower limit where the engine is making what Gordon calls \u201cgroan-y and moan-y\u201d noises which people find unpleasant. The car sounds broken. So cars had to keep the engine\u2019s RPM above a certain level, hurting their fuel efficiency, or risk alienating customers.\n\nGM\u2019s solution was to implement active noise cancellation, the same technique used in some headphones to quiet ambient noise. Microphones in the body listen to the ambient sounds the car and engine are making, and the car plays the opposite of that over the vehicle\u2019s speakers. The sound waves from the engine are cancelled out by the sound from the entertainment system, netting a quieter ride that can be more fuel efficient without being so bothersome.\n\nSome sounds in the car are completely artificial. The telltale clicking of a turn signal was once an artifact of the mechanical process that turned the light on and off. But that mechanism has long since been replaced by an electronic circuit that operates silently. Still, audible feedback is valuable so the car plays an MP3 file of a turn signal over the speakers."}
{"text":"Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Homes, businesses and vehicles were damaged in the clashes\n\nRiot police and army troops have been deployed in southern Sri Lanka following an outbreak of violence between Buddhists and Muslims, and a curfew has been imposed for the second night running.\n\nNineteen people were arrested when clashes erupted in Galle province, after a traffic accident.\n\nHomes and businesses were attacked and several properties damaged.\n\nAuthorities say the sectarian violence has now been brought under control.\n\n\"Additional police battalions, the police Special Task Force, the anti-riot squad and the military were called in last night to bring the situation under control,\" Law and Order Minister Sagala Ratnayaka said in a statement.\n\nHe also warned people not to stir up sectarian hatred on social media.\n\nMP Manusha Nanyakkara told the BBC that 10 vehicles were destroyed, the majority of which were owned by Muslims, and 62 homes and businesses were attacked.\n\nHe said the 6pm-6am curfew was imposed as a security measure to prevent further violence.\n\nImage caption A damaged motorbike is discarded in the street following the violence\n\nImage caption Several properties in Galle province were vandalised\n\nThe outbreak of street violence between majority Sinhalese Buddhists and minority Muslims started after an incident involving a Muslim woman and a motorbike driven by a Buddhist man.\n\nA police spokesman said people were arrested after \"spreading false messages and rumours on social media\" that contributed to the escalation in violence.\n\nSimilar clashes in a nearby area three years ago forced thousands of Muslims to flee their homes."}
{"text":"Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity published The Reincarnation of a Bulletproof Hoster, which examined evidence suggesting that a Web hosting company called HostSailor was created out of the ashes of another, now-defunct hosting firm notorious for harboring spammers, scammers and other online ne\u2019er-do-wells. Today, HostSailor\u2019s lawyers threatened to sue this author unless the story is removed from the Web.\n\nObviously, I stand by my reporting and have no intention of unpublishing stories. But I\u2019m writing about HostSailor again here because I promised to post an update if they ever responded to my requests for comment.\n\nThe letter, signed by Abdullah Alzarooni Advocates in Dubai \u2014 where HostSailor says it is based \u2014 carries the subject line, \u201cWarning from Acts of Extortion and Abuse of the Privacy of Third Parties.\u201d It lists a number of links to content the company apparently finds objectionable.\n\nCould this same kind of legal pressure be why security industry giant Trend Micro removed all reference to HostSailor from the report that started all this? Trend hasn\u2019t responded to direct questions about that.\n\nAstute readers will notice in the letter (pasted below) a link to a Twitter message from this author among the many things HostSailor\u2019s lawyers will like me to disappear from the Internet. That tweet to HostSailor\u2019s Twitter account read:\n\n\u201cPotential downside of reporting ISIS sites: The hosting firm (ahem @HostSailor) may share your info\/name\/report with ISIS. Opsec, people!\u201d\n\nI sent that tweet after hearing from a source with whom I\u2019ve been working to report sites affiliated with the jihadist militant group ISIS. The source had reported to HostSailor several of its Internet addresses that were being used by a propaganda site promoting videos of beheadings and other atrocities by ISIS, and he shared emails indicating that HostSailor had simply forwarded his abuse email on to its customer \u2014 complete with my source\u2019s name and contact information. Thankfully, he was using a pseudonym and throwaway email address.\n\nHostSailor\u2019s twitter account responded by saying that the company doesn\u2019t share information about its customers. But of course my tweet was regarding information shared about someone who is not a HostSailor customer.\n\nThis isn\u2019t the first time KrebsOnSecurity has been threatened with lawsuits over stories published here. The last time I got one of these letters was in Sept. 2015, from a lawyer representing AshleyMadison\u2019s former chief technology officer. The year before, it was Sony Pictures Entertainment, whose lawyers lashed out a large number of publications for too closely covering its epic and unprecedented data breach in 2014.\n\nPrior to that, I received some letters from the lawyers for Igor Gusev, one of the main characters in my book, Spam Nation. Mr. Gusev\u2019s attorneys insisted that I was publishing stolen information \u2014 pictures of him, financial records from his spam empire \u201cSpamIt\u201d \u2014 and demanded that I remove all offending items and publish an apology.\n\nMy attorney in that instance laughed out loud when I shared the letter from Gusev\u2019s lawyers, calling it a \u201cblivit.\u201d When I apparently took more than a moment to get the joke, he explained that a \u201cblivit\u201d is a term coined by the late great author Kurt Vonnegut, who defined it as \u201ctwo pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.\u201d\n\nOnly time will tell if this letter is a blivit as well. I\u2019ve taken the liberty of sanitizing the PDF document it came in, and converting that into two image files \u2013 in case anyone wants to take a look.\n\nTags: Abdullah Alzarooni Advocates, blivit, HostSailor, Kurt Vonnegut, trend micro"}
{"text":"The National Security Agency's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. (NSA)\n\nChris Finan is a former Obama administration official who has come to have serious doubts about the National Security Agency's role in domestic surveillance and cybersecurity efforts. In the past, policymakers looked to the NSA for its unparalleled expertise in cryptography and computer security. But Finan argues that rapid improvement in private-sector cybersecurity expertise has made dependence on the NSA unnecessary and, especially in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations, potentially dangerous. He argues that domestic counterterrorism efforts should depend more on civilian agencies and the private sector, not military agencies such as the NSA.\n\nFinan draws on a wealth of experience developed over several years of high-level government service. Finan served in the military during the Iraq war. After spending two years at a startup, he joined the Obama administration in 2009. He worked on cybersecurity policy, first at the Pentagon and then at the White House. He left government service in 2012 and now works for a Silicon Valley startup that helps companies protect their customers' accounts from being hijacked.\n\nWe spoke Thursday. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.\n\nYou're skeptical about the NSA's large role in domestic cybersecurity and surveillance activities. Why is that?\n\nOne of the themes of the 2012 cybersecurity debate was thinking about how to leverage the technical crown jewels that are NSA and bring that incredible technical capability to bear on this domestic security problem. Inherent in that assumption is that only NSA has the technical capability to aid our law enforcement and homeland security community. But technology paradigms have changed.\n\nThere's an enormous amount of data the federal government collects. They're parsing through that data to generate leads, looking for correlations to potential terrorists overseas, other leads the law enforcement community is looking for, etc. It used to be you needed enormous supercomputer infrastructure to do that well.\n\nNow, due to faster computers and parallelization, anyone can do it. Thanks to Amazon Web Services or Rackspace, if you have access to the Internet, you have access to a supercomputer. [The private sector] can do a lot of the big data capabilities that used to be an inherently government function in the past.\n\nThese big data analytics are driving the American economy right now. So to think that a government agency is going to do this better than our tech innovators in this country I think is fallacious. I think it was an old paradigm, it was an old assumption that needs to be challenged.\n\nStill, the NSA has a lot of technical expertise and powerful hardware, right? Why not use that to address domestic security problems?\n\nI don't believe that Americans are comfortable with the military intelligence community having such a central domestic role. We should come up with a strategy to divest the military and intelligence community and instead look for ways to leverage this [private sector] advantage. I think there's a way to leverage our competitive advantage in big data in a way that also is consistent with the Fourth Amendment.\n\nWe also have an over-classification problem. I don't condone what Ed Snowden did. He made a commitment to protect classified information. Breaking that commitment was wrong. However, he did bring to light this classification problem, which needs to be debated as a society. The problem with over-classification is you create an inherently closed system. Closed systems are prone to failure. In fact it's not just technology. Think of the political system. Closed totalitarian systems are inherently weaker than open egalitarian systems.\n\nThere's a principle called Kerckhoffs's principle, which states that if a code system is open and the only thing that's protected is the key, that's the most secure system. I wish our cryptology guys would think about [that principle in the cybersecurity sector]. It doesn't make sense that we'd have a closed system rather than open it up. Taking a centralized approach to this problem and having a single agency serve as the central aggregation point doesn't scale. That to me is the assumption that I go back to in thinking about ways to open up.\n\nThis gets to a larger point. People like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claim that more transparency will give the terrorists our playbook. I think you can acknowledge the existence of programs without giving away sensitive sources and methods and giving away our counterterrorism playbook.\n\nDirector of National Intelligence James Clapper, right. (Susan Walsh\/AP)\n\nSo is your proposal that a civilian agency at the Department of Homeland Security would do the kind of dragnet surveillance the NSA is doing today?\n\nNo, I'm not in favor of or proposing the continuation of dragnet surveillance. I don't believe that's necessary. I think we've taken an axe approach when scalpels would be more consistent with the Fourth Amendment. I think the FISA Amendments Act and the Patriot Act are overly broad. I favor a more targeted approach, using warrants to collect the data when we absolutely need it.\n\n[Instead, civilian agencies should focus on] providing [information to the private sector.] If the government gets information because of its foreign government intelligence apparatus, it should be able to quickly send that out to the private sector. Primarily as a one-way communicator. Here are threats we're seeing overseas. There's been some of this in the past, but they haven't scaled it up. [The government has] more of an interest in making it a quid pro quo, government receiving information and then giving information back. The private sector is going to be able to operationalize it much better than the U.S. government.\n\nSome of the career officials are hesitant to scale [public-to-private sharing] up because they want to use it as a chit to get access to more data. I think that's the wrong approach. Government should give this threat information to the private sector. We shouldn't adopt the mentality that the government knows better how to do this.\n\nSome in Congress have said we need to promote information sharing. I think that's code for many career national security officials to weaken privacy laws so they can get access to more domestic data. I'm all for pushing information out. I'm all for making it easier for companies to share information between each other, which may require more explicit legal language. I think if we can do that without weakening consumer protections, you can do that.\n\nI want to ensure that kind of sharing is restricted to threat information. I'm all for looking at how to do that, and as long as you keep the liability protections fairly narrow, that would work.\n\nWhat else can be done to shore up Internet security?\n\nCongress should look at aligning market incentives. For example, publicly traded corporations should report cyber risk as a material risk. I'd like Congress to make sure this is being done at scale across the private sector. That would go a long way toward improving cyber-security, because it would make shareholders more aware.\n\nA third thing is securing critical infrastructure. I was a proponent of some kind of standard for critical infrastructure. There was no appetite for that on Capitol Hill. I think there's certainly more that we can do. The problem though is that many on the Hill immediately look to [the NSA] as the solution. That's just myopic because it doesn't leverage our private sector innovators. There's no way that can scale.\n\nDefenders of the NSA say getting the NSA completely out of domestic surveillance is unrealistic because terrorists increasingly use American services like Gmail. Isn't that an argument for continuing the NSA's role?\n\n[Spying on terrorists' Gmail accounts] should be done by civilian law enforcement agencies with a warrant. It shouldn't be a military agency without a warrant. That's completely inconsistent with the values of this country. I don't care if it's a treasure trove of terrorists. It doesn't matter. There's something fundamentally wrong if that's our strategy. There's got to be a better approach. There's no way we have to rely on the military to be able to do that.\n\nI feel like we've allowed post-9\/11 inertia to drive us to the point where we are now. Let's reverse that. Let's think about that deliberately. Let's design a system that can scale to meet that threat. Focus our military and intelligence agencies outward."}
{"text":"David Donald sees rainy days as an opportunity and every hill as a workout.\n\nFoodora's head of cycling operations has been cycling for 38 years and now offers road-tested advice to the professional cyclists, students and second-income earners who have taken jobs with the food delivery service.\n\nSydney's city streets are not particularly bike friendly however Deliveroo and Foodora riders are becoming more common. Credit:James Brickwood\n\n\"Rainy days are when you have to suck it up and get out there,\" he said. \"Shiver a bit and you might get a bigger tip.\"\n\nThe likes of Foodora and Deliveroo have burst onto Sydney's streets from nowhere, an army of fuschia and aqua on wheels. Panting uphill, through downpours, hot spells and often on low-quality bikes, the bicycle delivery people are, against the odds, fast becoming a part of inner-city Sydney life."}
{"text":"A 4-year-old girl is recovering in the hospital after falling out of the back of a moving bus Saturday, and the horrifying incident was caught on video.\n\nLicensed EMT and volunteer firefighter Ryan Ciampoli was driving on a busy highway in Harrison, Arkansas, when he saw the young girl swing the back door of the bus open, hanging on for a brief moment before toppling onto the pavement. His dash camera happened to be running as he witnessed the accident and immediately sprang into action.\n\nCiampoli told KLRT-TV that the girl was initially unconscious but began waking up as he approached her.\n\n\"Obviously, you want to leave her laying there if she's not in danger, but we're in the middle of a state highway so I couldn't leave her just laying there,\" he said.\n\nHe carefully picked her up and laid her in a nearby truck bed where he assessed her condition and kept her conscious before the paramedics could arrive.\n\n\"Once the adrenaline and the shock kicked in in her little body, she started kicking and screaming, and 'Where's my mommy,' things like that. Stuff like that is really heartbreaking,\" Ciampoli said.\n\nThe young girl suffered a broken jaw and will need surgery, according to her mother, but she is expected to be released from the hospital Monday.\n\nIt is unclear how the little girl managed to open the back door or why the bus driver did not stop when she fell."}
{"text":"A student will serve 120 hours community service after admitting to frying his flatmate's hamster while drunk to \"the point of madness.\"\n\nJames White, 21, admitted causing unnecessary suffering to the female hamster in February last year after a court could not establish if the animal was alive or not upon entering the pan.\n\nDistrict Judge Roy Anderson said he was sentencing White- a politics and international relations student at York University- on the basis the rodent died minutes before, while he was handling it.\n\nWe\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s true. You can form your own view. From 15p \u20ac0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.\n\nTwo veterinary pathologists gave their expert opinion on how the female Syrian hamster, which has not been named, met its death.\n\nSelby Magistrates' Court heard White had drunk so much in his flat in York he was \"on the point of madness\" and could not remember the incident.\n\nDistrict Judge Anderson said it was clear the hamster did not die of natural causes and that \"what happened on that night is still shrouded in mystery.\"\n\nHe told White: \"By virtue of your treatment of this small, unfortunate rodent you've destroyed your good character and acquired a criminal conviction.\n\n\"It's accepted now that there was rough handling of that animal but that it couldn't be established that it was putting it in the frying pan and applying heat that caused its death.\n\n\"Had that sadistic conduct been established I would be dealing with you in a far more serious way than I am.\"\n\nWhite is also banned from keeping animals for eight years and will pay \u00a31,000 towards the \u00a33,356 costs of the case.\n\nWe\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s true. You can form your own view.\n\nAt The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That\u2019s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks \u2013 all with no ads.\n\nSubscribe now"}
{"text":"You\u2019re reading Back of the Envelope, an experiment that aims to bring shorter, quicker content to FiveThirtyEight.\n\nHalloween may be over, but there\u2019s still a zombie among us: the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is the trade deal many thought was already killed off, but it just won\u2019t go away. During the primaries, it served as a policy pinata \u2014 with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, in particular, taking turns excoriating it as a raw deal for American workers. Hillary Clinton, once a supporter, came out against it, too. (She now says the final version of the treaty doesn\u2019t meet her standards.)\n\nBut the Obama administration, which negotiated the treaty, isn\u2019t giving up on it. The White House is pressuring Congress to approve the 12-nation trade deal during the lame-duck session after the election. And on Thursday, Obama\u2019s Council of Economic Advisers published a report warning that if the TPP isn\u2019t passed, a China-backed trade agreement will take its place. That could put U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage when they try to sell to customers in Japan and other Asian nations. The report argues that if China\u2019s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership goes into effect, at least 35 U.S. industries as diverse as plastics, fishing and footwear will be at risk of increased competition from China in the Japanese market.\n\nNext week\u2019s election will affect the chances of Obama\u2019s TPP Hail Mary. If Trump wins, all bets are off: Republicans, usually more keen to support trade deals than Democrats, aren\u2019t likely to back a deal strongly opposed by the president their party just elected. But if Clinton wins, Obama might be able to put together a coalition of Republicans and trade-friendly Democrats to support the treaty. In other words, the TPP isn\u2019t dead yet."}
{"text":"Follow us 101.6k\n\nThis salad is one of my \"grab & go\" favourites. It's great for anyone with a busy lifestyle looking for a sating and nutritious low-carb meal they can take to work. I always have hard-boiled eggs and keto-friendly mayo in my fridge. This way I save time and money and avoid temptations. If you want to succeed with your healthy low-carb eating, you should plan your cooking at least a few days in advance.\n\n0 hours, 0 minutes\n\nHands-on 5 minutes Overall 5 minutes\n\nNutritional values (per serving)\n\n3.9 grams 1.5 grams 41.4 grams 49.7 grams 8.8 grams 626 calories\n\nTotal Carbs 5.4 grams Fiber 1.5 grams Net Carbs 3.9 grams Protein 41.4 grams Fat 49.7 grams of which Saturated 8.8 grams Calories 626 kcal Magnesium 63 mg (16% RDA) Potassium 655 mg (33% EMR)\n\nMacronutrient ratio: Calories from carbs (3%), protein (26%), fat (71%)\n\nIngredients (1 serving, large salad bowl)\n\n1 small head lettuce, Romaine or Little Gem (100 g\/ 3.5 oz)\n\n140 g tinned tuna, drained (5 oz)\n\n2 eggs, hard-boiled, free-range or organic\n\n2 tbsp mayonnaise, try my home-made mayo (30 g\/ 1.1 oz)\n\n1 medium spring onion or bunch chives (15 g\/ 0.5 oz)\n\n1 tbsp fresh lemon juice\n\n1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil\n\nsalt to taste (I used pink Himalayan)\n\nNote: Use less tuna if you this recipe is too high in protein for you. Find out what's your ideal protein intake using our keto calculator.\n\nA fun way to learn about healthy low-carb eating! Take the Keto Diet Quiz\n\nPrint Recipe Download Recipe\n\nInstructions\n\nTear the leaves of the lettuce, wash and drain in a salad spinner or with a paper towel. Spread the leaves over the bottom of the serving bowl. Add drained and shredded tuna.\n\nTo avoid unhealthy vegetable oils that may often be used in tuna products, get tuna in extra virgin olive oil or in brine. I avoid buying canned foods and get tuna in glass jars instead. This will minimise your exposure to toxic BPAs that may often be present in canned foods. Top with hard-boiled eggs (see instructions in this recipe to see how to hard-boil eggs), mayo mixed with lemon juice and freshly chopped spring onion. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and enjoy!\n\nDo you like this recipe? Share it with your friends! Pinterest Reddit\n\nMartina Slajerova Creator of KetoDietApp.com I changed the way I ate in 2011, when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto\u2019s, an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid. I had no energy, and I found it more and more difficult to maintain a healthy weight. That\u2019s when I decided to quit sugar, grains, and processed foods, and to start following a whole-foods-based ketogenic approach to food. More posts by Martina Slajerova"}
{"text":"The first day of the First International Conference on Men\u2019s Issues ended on Friday with a short speech by Paul Elam, who was introduced (twice, thanks to a troublesome microphone) by Warren Farrell. Farrell testified to Elam\u2019s warmth and kindness, his love for his wife, and his passion for the so-called men\u2019s rights movement.\n\nThe bromance continued on Saturday, as Elam rose to introduce Farrell. The Financial Times named Farrell one of the 100 Greatest Thinkers of the 20th century, Elam said, but he would count him as one of the greatest of the 21st century too. It was Farrell\u2019s book The Myth of Male Power that crystalized his thinking about the troubles between the genders\u2014and that inspired him to create the movement he leads. Two years ago, Elam was posting pictures of women who had committed \u201coffenses against men\u201d on his Register-Her.com website and vowing to \u201cfuck their shit up.\u201d Today, he high-mindedly declared that his goal is to \u201cbuild bridges between men and women instead of walls.\u201d\n\nFarrell, who once served on the board of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women, has come in for his share of controversy and misunderstanding over the years. Renewed interest in the forty-year-old interview he gave to Penthouse about his research on the positive side of incest (cousin-cousin, uncle-niece, aunt-nephew, brother-sister, and same-sex sibling incest are beneficial, he said, in 95 percent of the cases he looked at; mother-son incest is 70 percent positive) hasn\u2019t helped matters; the angry protesters he attracted when he spoke at the University of Toronto in November, 2012 must have stung him too (though men\u2019s rights activists, aka MRAs, made good use of the publicity).\n\nWarren\u2019s embrace of Elam and the corner of the Manosphere that A Voice for Men occupies seems like something of a come-down for a man who has hobnobbed with high-wattage celebrities, appeared on network talk shows, taught at major universities, written bestsellers, and taken calls from the White House. But he clearly hopes that he can help to elevate the movement\u2019s tone\u2014to shift its focus away from reactive hatred of feminism and empowered women, and towards a positive agenda. In his speech, he focused on issues that he believed could attract female allies to the movement, among them the crisis of boys, children\u2019s need for both parents, the need for better communication, the development of a birth control pill for men, and the importance of veterans care.\n\nProvocatively, he suggested that the name \u201cmen\u2019s rights activist\u201d be retired. \u201cYou know and I know that men do need rights. We need the right to equal parenting. We need the right to not be the only gender registering for the draft. We need the right to have Men\u2019s Studies,\u201d he said. \u201cBut men\u2019s rights is a tougher than necessary fight in a world that believes that men made the rules and have all the rights to begin with. It\u2019s like asking for king\u2019s rights.\u201d\n\nKaren Straughan, an LGBT divorced mother of three, identified herself as a lifelong anti-feminist. Going all the way back to Seneca Falls, feminism was always wrong, forever blaming men for problems that women never had. \u201cIt is huge, huge power we have as women,\u201d she declared, to the loudest and most sustained applause of the day. \u201cAnd it\u2019s really time that some of us stepped up and started to use it responsibly.\u201d She was talking about women, of course, but her words echoed Warren Farrell\u2019s admonitions to MRAs as well.\n\nCarnell Smith, a crusader against paternity fraud, told some hair-raising stories about men who had been entrapped into paying the upkeep for other men\u2019s children; he made the point that both the men and the women who lied to them were being used by the \u201cevil empire\u201d of Child Support Enforcement, which collects money without regard to whether the putative father is the biological father\u2014or whether he even has a relationship with the children. Robert Franklin, an attorney and father\u2019s activist, eviscerated the family court system; Terrence Popp, a war hero who lost custody of his children and became homeless upon his return from Iraq, testified to his sense of betrayal by his wife and by the courts.\n\nThe last speaker was the libertarian Stephan Molyneux, who reframed circumcision as male genital mutilation and turned the tables on the feminist notion that men are uniquely violent. 90 percent of a child\u2019s brain and character are formed in the first five years, he said, when boys spend most of their time with their mothers or the mostly female caregivers in day care settings. It is women\u2019s violence against boys\u2014corporal punishment, yelling, shaming\u2014that creates violent male adults, he said, referring to a study of Texas mothers, who reportedly hit their children more than 900 times a year. Mothers like those are as stressed as they are, he added, because of the bad choices they made\u2014they picked the wrong men to have children with; they put their careers ahead of their responsibility to their children. In the good old days before the welfare state, he concluded, illegitimate children were given up for adoption to two-parent homes, where they invariably thrived. Thanks to subsidized daycare and a host of other public services, single mothers now have the wherewithal to ruin their children\u2019s lives. Molyneux\u2019s enthusiasm for compelled adoptions clashed a little with the sentiments of many of the other speakers, who deplored how little efforts courts made to involve unmarried fathers in their children\u2019s lives, but there was no push-back from the attendees in the Q&A that followed.\n\nThe event closed with a panel discussion on activism, which all agreed was the movement\u2019s next phase and defining challenge. Farrell declared that he used to tell people that the men\u2019s rights movement was embryonic, but he would say that no longer.\n\nAll and all, the weekend wasn\u2019t an unalloyed hate fest, though there was plenty of rancor, contempt, defensiveness, and anti-feminism on display. Some of the female speakers were the least restrained in that respect, especially on the contentious issues of domestic violence and sexual coercion and modern women\u2019s infuriating desire to determine their own destinies. Many of the speakers signaled that they were chafing a little under Paul Elam\u2019s no trash-talking rule.\n\nIt will be interesting to see how much bridge-building A Voice for Men engages in from here on out\u2014starting, perhaps, with the comments about this very post."}
{"text":"\"Carlin at Carnegie\" is George Carlin 's third special to be seen on HBO, recorded at Carnegie Hall , New York City in 1982 , released in 1983 . Most of the material comes from his \" A Place for My Stuff \", the album released earlier that same year. Unlike the first two, this special was edited down to an hour and routines from the same show like \"A Place for My Stuff\" and \"Baseball and Football\" do not appear in this special in contradiction to many internet descriptions. The final performance of \" Seven Dirty Words ,\" his last recorded performance of the routine, features Carlin's updated list (read from an oversized scroll):\n\n\"Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits, Fart, Turd, Twat, Crap, Balls, Prick, Asshole, Jackoff, Jerkoff, Scumbag, Douchebag, Hardon, Rod-on, Boner, Stiff, Pisshard, Blueballs, Nookie, Koose, Gash, Slash, Hole, Slit, Snatch, Box, Beaver, Pussy, Bearded Clam, Jism, Cum, Cream, Juice, Pecker, Peckerhead, Peckertracks, Dick, Dork, Dong, Donacker, Wang, Shlong, Schwantz, Pork, Crabs, Ass, Butt, Hiney, Tuchas, Bum, Buns, Cheeks, Screw, Lay, Diddle, Plow, Hump, Bang, Poke, Batter, Wham, Knock-up, Bugger, Brown, Juggs, Bazooms, Knockers, Knobs, Lungs, Balloons, Dildo, Joystick, Hairpie, Muff, Cornhole, Rimjob, Blowjob, Sugarbowl-pie, Suck-off, Give-head, Sit-on-my-face, Buttfuck, Fingerfuck, Clap, Kleek, 69, 71 which is 69 with 2 fingers up your ass, daisy chain, circle jerk, cockteaser, wet-dream, cunt-struck, pussywhipped, short-arm, tuna-taco, group-grope, milking-the-chicken, bulldagger, gangbang, ballbreaker, ballbuster, merkin, bananas and cream, up the old dirt road, around the world, beat-your-meat, whack-off, flogging your dong, pounding your pud, beating the bishop, poontang, dingleberry, sit on it, fudgepacker, milking the lizard, fart face, old fart, farting around, fart sniffer, ream, snake, raincoat, quickie, queer, queen, putz, put-out, push, beef-injection, dog-style, pop your cookies, bust-your-nuts, one-eyed-monster, knob, pocket pool, tail, piddle, paddle the pickle, one-man-band, snapper, notch, rod, shaft, stick, piece of ass, god damn it, pimp, fucker, punk, faggot, dyke, lezzie, box-lunch, sea-food, hand-job, hammer, hatch, head-job, hot-nuts, hum-job, prong, jellyroll, jerk-the-gerkin, lob, meat whistle, cheese, scat fan, middle-leg, wanking, booty, love-muscle, snapping pussy, ghost, bitch, bastard, clam, bite the brown, going up mustard road, bone-on, bush, button, cunt-lapper, cherry, tool, dingus, quiff, quim, get off, joint, piece, stem, root, crack, cooch, crud, eat me, fuck you, up your ass, get laid, fuck-off, piss-off, piss on you, stick it, stuff it, ram it, jam it, cram it, horny, peter, the one eyed wonder worm, piece-of-ass, little brown eyeball, golden showers, pound cake, boy in the boat, brown eye, brown nose, sloppy seconds, Mongolian cluster fuck, rod of love, copping a feel, copping a cherry, copping a joint, on the rag, flying the flag, riding the cotton pony, dipping your wick, going down on, dry hump, fist fuck, skin-flute, French job, furburger, nuts, get your rocks off, get in, get it up, hung, ginch, gobble, dieseldock, rubber, shoot, diesel dyke that was, siff, wad, cocksman, tit-fuck, tongue, rough-trade, trick, weenie, and yodeling in the gully.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\n# Program opening\n\n# Abortion\n\n# Professional Comedian\n\n# Heart Attack\n\n# Rice Krispies\n\n# Have a Nice Day\n\n# Ice Box Man\n\n# Fussy Eater 1 & 2\n\n# New News\n\n# The Musical Portion of the Show\n\n# Dogs & Cats\n\n# Filthy Words\n\nee also"}
{"text":"Home secretary defends proposals in Thursday's flagship bill following claims that they will be unfair and unworkable\n\nThe home secretary, Theresa May, has defended plans to create a \"hostile environment\" for illegal migrants to Britain, as immigration lawyers warned her that a system of identity checks for all, including British citizens, would have to be introduced to enforce the government's moves to curb access to privately rented housing and to tackle alleged health tourists.\n\nThe warnings come as she publishes her flagship immigration bill on Thursday, which will require immigration checks to be carried out before anyone can open a new bank account, be issued with a driving licence or access routine health treatment.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, May said: \"Most people will say it can't be fair for people who have no right to be here in the UK to continue to exist as everybody else does with bank accounts, with driving licences and with access to rented accommodation. We are going to be changing that because we don't think that is fair.\"\n\nThe Home Office bill will include measures spanning six other Whitehall departments including justice, transport, business, health, local government, and work and pensions, and is designed, in May's words, to \"create a really hostile environment for illegal migrants\". \"What we don't want is a situation where people think that they can come here and overstay because they're able to access everything they need,\" May has said.\n\nThe Home Office confirmed the bill would:\n\n\u2022 Require private landlords to check the immigration status of their tenants.\n\n\u2022 Require temporary migrants, such as overseas students, who have only a \"time-limited\" immigration status, to make a contribution to the NHS. A \u00a3200 levy has been mentioned as an option.\n\n\u2022 Require banks to check against a database of known immigration offenders before opening a bank account.\n\n\u2022 Create new powers to check the immigration status of driving licence applicants and to revoke the licences of overstayers.\n\n\u2022 Introduce a \"deport first, appeal later\" policy for thousands facing removal who face no \"risk of serious irreversible harm\" from being sent back, and reduce the grounds for appeal from 17 to four.\n\nOn Today, May declined to give any estimate of the scale of \"health tourism\" in Britain but confirmed the bill included a health levy on overseas students and other categories of short-term migrants. She gave no figure for the levy and said the Department of Health would publish detailed proposals in the next few weeks. She denied it would cost more to collect the levy than the amount it raises.\n\n\"We will be asking for a surcharge; there will be a sort of levy on people who are going to be coming here, to be staying for a while, to contribute so people can feel it is fair,\" she told the BBC. \"One of the things the NHS has always been quite bad at is charging people who they should be charging, people who don't have the right to free access to the NHS and recovering those costs from them.\"\n\nMay did not spell out how the identity checks to establish the immigration status of those applying for health treatment, housing, bank accounts or driving licences would be carried out. But she did say that private landlords would have access to a helpline similar to that currently used by employers to help them carry out the checks.\n\nThe bill will also restrict the ability of immigration detainees to apply repeatedly for bail if they have already been refused it and create stronger guidance for the courts on the use of human rights laws to prevent deportation, particularly the right to family life.\n\nThere are also plans to make it easier for the Home Office to recover unpaid fines from companies who employ illegal migrants, and local authorities may face fines for letting social housing to tenants without a direct connection to a local area.\n\nHowever, leading lawyers, landlords, immigration welfare charities and housing organisations have warned that the bill will lead to a real risk of increased homelessness, including of families, and widespread discrimination.\n\nThe Immigration Law Practitioners' Association (Ilpa) has told May her plan for millions of private landlords to face \"proportionate\" fines of up to \u00a33,000 if they fail to conduct checks on the immigration status of new tenants and other adults living in their properties is unworkable.\n\nThe lawyers say the combination of the new housing and health checks with existing checks carried out by employers and educational colleges amounts to a system of identity checks for foreign nationals in Britain.\n\n\"What this means in practice is a system of identity checks for all, since it is necessary for British citizens or people with permanent residence to prove that they are lawfully present in the UK if and when checked,\" says the immigration lawyers' official response to the Home Office consultation.\n\n\"British citizens, European economic area nationals and third country nationals alike would be required to produce identity documents at many turns in a scheme that would be intrusive, bullying, ineffective and expensive and likely racist and unlawful to boot,\" says the Ilpa response.\n\nThe lawyers say the scheme is discriminatory because landlords are likely simply to say they aren't satisfied with a tenant's identity documents and refuse them accommodation. They also point out that somebody's immigration status is not necessarily straightforward, with the proposals taking no account of those who do not yet have leave to remain in Britain but have an outstanding application that clearly meets the immigration rules.\n\nThe Residential Landlords Association has told the home secretary that there are potentially 404 types of European identity documents that landlords may need to know about to operate the scheme. They also warn that some landlords will simply refuse to house migrants for fear of falling foul of the new rules.\n\nHabib Rahman, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, predicted that \"these measures will divide society, creating a two-tier Britain, a return to the days of 'no dogs, no blacks, no Irish' and of ill people with no access to healthcare walking the streets of Britain. This bill is a travesty and must be stopped.\"\n\nBut the immigration minister, Mark Harper, defended the bill, saying it would \"stop migrants using public services to which they are not entitled, reduce the pull factors which encourage people to come to the UK and make it easier to remove people who should not be here\"."}
{"text":"DAN \u015eOVA, a spokesman for Romania's opposition Social Democratic Party (PSD), is paying the price for his poor grasp of history. On March 5th, discussing the Holocaust live on television, he said: \"On the territory of Romania, no Jew suffered\". He added that \"24 Jews died\" as a result of the notorious government-backed Iasi pogrom of 1941. Most historians put the figure at 12,000 or more.\n\nGet our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.\n\nIt didn't take long for Mr \u015eova to feel the consequences. The PSD distanced itself from his comments, removed him from his post and dispatched him to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Yet Mr \u015eova's views are hardly unique in Romania. Any newspaper kiosk is full of books and other publications that echo his pronouncements.\n\nEducation is partly to blame. The Holocaust wasn't part of Romania's school curriculum until 1998, and until 2004 many textbooks followed the communist line that the killings were something that happened somewhere else. In 2004 the state-backed Wiesel Commission issued a report on the Holocaust, leading to an official acknowledgement that killings and deportations took place on Romanian territory. Since 2005 secondary-school students have been able to take a special Holocaust course.\n\nYet no history faculty at Romanian universities offers a course on the Holocaust, notes Felicia Waldman, a professor at the University of Bucharest's Goldstein-Goren Hebrew Studies Centre. And so many history teachers graduate ill-equipped to teach the subject.\n\nMore worryingly, history is often taught with the nationalist assumptions that held sway before the overthrow of communism. Romanian children are, for example, still taught that they are the direct descendants of the Romans and Dacians, an approach some historians see as simplistic.\n\n\u201cThe history that is taught is of the Romanian people, not of Romania itself,\u201d says Ms Waldman. \"Students are still taught about how hospitable the Romanian people have always been, and how they've been the victims of history, never acting as aggressors.\" Young and old people alike believe that Ion Antonescu, the pro-Nazi wartime dictator, was a \"friend of the Jews\".\n\nThe Centre for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism in Romania (MCA) estimates that 270,000 Romanian Jews and 36,000 Romanies (Gypsies) were exterminated under Antonescu. There are believed to be fewer than 9,000 Jews in Romania today.\n\nMr \u015eova issued a statement in which he said he regretted that his words had been misunderstood. But he failed to apologise for the content of his declarations. Now the MCA and Romani CRISS, a pro-Roma NGO, have filed a criminal complaint against him. Since 2002 Holocaust denial has been a criminal offence in Romania, punishable by up to five years in prison.\n\nBut the chances of prosecution are slim. The law has been repeatedly flouted. Earlier governments have set poor examples. In 2003, the public information ministry stated: \"We firmly claim that within the borders of Romania between 1940 and 1945 there was no Holocaust.\" (It retracted the claim a week later.)\n\nMr \u015eova's dismissal may indicate that the situation has improved since then\u2014although some think he will get his old job back after his pilgrimage to Washington. Romania has some way to go in facing up to its wartime past, and a change to the way history is taught might be a good place to start."}
{"text":"Donald Trump doesn't drink alcohol, but that didn't stop the owner of Yuengling beer from endorsing him.\n\nRichard \"Dick\" Yuengling Jr. threw his support to Trump this week. He even gave Eric Trump a tour of the popular brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Yuengling Jr. is a billionaire and head of the 187-year-old beer company, which his great-great grandfather founded.\n\n\"Our guys are behind your father. We need him in there,\" Yuengling Jr. told Eric Trump on Monday, according to The Reading Eagle.\n\nThe company did not respond to CNNMoney's request for comment.\n\nReaction on social media has been swift. Eric Trump's tweet from the brewery has over 1,100 retweets, but there's also been backlash. Some Yuengling beer fans have vowed never to take another sip.\n\nWay to go @Yuengling_Beer ! You just alienated me and tons of people who drank you. I will never drink you again. Peace\ud83d\udd95\ud83c\udffb \u2014 Christopher Fafalios (@chrisfafalios) October 27, 2016\n\n\"Way to go @Yuengling_Beer! You just alienated me and tons of people who drank you. I will never drink you again. Peace,\" one fan tweeted.\n\nSo far, Yuengling Jr.'s support is verbal only. He isn't listed as a Trump donor. He has mostly given money to the campaigns of Pennsylvania congressmen -- both Republican and Democratic -- over the years, according to OpenSecrets.org. His last presidential donation was to George W. Bush in 2000.\n\nRelated: Donald Trump is still ahead on this...\n\nPennsylvania is a must-win state for Trump. The Republican candidate and his family have visited numerous times in hopes of winning blue-collar workers upset with the disappearance of a third of the state's manufacturing jobs since 2000.\n\nThank you to Dick Yuengling for an amazing tour of the oldest brewery in the U.S! @Yuengling_Beer #PottsvillePA #MAGA pic.twitter.com\/XrGVbbOiI3 \u2014 Eric Trump (@EricTrump) October 24, 2016\n\nBut Pennsylvania has been called fool's gold for GOP presidential hopefuls. It hasn't voted Republican in a presidential election since 1988. Democrat Hillary Clinton has a solid lead in the polls.\n\nYuengling Jr.'s life story is somewhat similar to Trump's. He bought the struggling brewery from his father in 1985 and built it up into a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year business, making the lager cheap but fashionable. He's listed as No. 361 on Forbes' list of the 400 richest people in America."}
{"text":"Available August 25, 2015\n\nPREORDER TODAY!\n\nhttp:\/\/bit.ly\/RikkasRivalSF\n\nABOUT LOVE, CHUNIBYO & OTHER DELUSIONS! -HEART THROB-\n\nYuta Togashi thought he had problems dealing with one delusional girlfriend in the person of Rikka Takanashi, but now things are about to go totally insane as his FORMER \"one true soul mate\" from when he was a chuuni himself returns with a vengeance! So how bad is Satone Shichimiya's re-entry into Togashi's chuni-verse likely to be? Let's just say that she's so epically off the deep end of the chuni-scale that she prefers to use the name Sophia Ring SP Saturn VII and that she'll joyfully tear Togashi's real world to pieces in order to get him back in her imaginary one! Some girls just want to have fun and some want to break down the walls between their boyfriends and themselves. But when a girl's idea of fun is breaking down the wall between their presumed boyfriend and reality, retreating into a fantasy world might just be Togashi's best option. Especially since Satone knows where ALL the skeletons from his past are buried. Toss Rikka's equally delusional friend Sanae into the mix and girl-crazy takes on a whole new meaning in LOVE, CHUNIBYO & OTHER DELUSIONS - HEART THROB!\n\nDIRECTOR\n\nKyle Jones\n\nENGLISH VOCAL CAST"}
{"text":"Here\u2019s an understatement: Mike Will Made It had himself quite a 2013. The 24-year-old Atlanta producer has been steady climbing for a couple years now, attaching his eponymous, otherworldly drop \u2014 see here, far right, middle row \u2014 to an impeccable string of heaters, from Meek Mill\u2019s \u201cTupac Back\u201d to Future\u2019s \u201cTurn on the Lights\u201d to Juicy J\u2019s \u201cBandz a Make Her Dance.\u201d With even Kanye West tapping a sword on the young man\u2019s shoulder when he brought him in to coproduce \u201cMercy,\u201d there was no doubting his ascendance would continue apace. And then \u201cWe Can\u2019t Stop\u201d came along, and the timeline got blown to smithereens. Herewith, Mike Will in his own words breaks down his start, his rise, and how the Year of Miley allowed him to go ahead and toss \u201csuper\u201d in front of \u201cproducer\u201d on the ol\u2019 business card.\n\nI used to grind. I be telling people, you don\u2019t grind, you don\u2019t sell. I was like 15, 16 getting dropped off in the city by myself, with my own beat CDs. I had met Gucci [Mane] at this studio, Patchwerk. 2005 or some shit. I ain\u2019t even know he was gonna be there. And I had gave him some beats to let him hear, and he just went in the lounge and started freestyling on all my beats and shit. Next thing you know, he saw me again: \u201cYo, you buddy with the beats, right? Let me buy that beat from you, man.\u201d I got a band. [Editor\u2019s note: A \u201cband\u201d as in the thing that makes her dance.]\n\n\u201cTupac Back\u201d was the first single I had, but prior to that I already had 20-something songs in the street. I already had mixtapes with Gucci. But \u201cTupac Back\u201d showed people, He don\u2019t just do mixtapes, he can actually do a single. \u2019Cause this shit is a fucking banger. It really came in and shook the game up. It had everybody freestyling on it \u2014 to freestyle on the \u201cTupac Back\u201d beat was the thing to do. I was just very consistent after that.\n\nAt the end of 2011, Jeezy told me, \u201cMan, you got the beats, you got the talent, but all I\u2019mma tell you is spread that sound out. Don\u2019t put yourself in a box. They been a couple young producers that came in the game and they didn\u2019t do that.\u201d When Jeezy told me that, he said, \u201cPeople like Kanye, people like Lil Wayne, people like Jay Z gonna wanna work with you, too.\u201d\n\nSo I kept doing my thing and around March [2012], two days after my birthday, I was in Louisiana with Ludacris, and I got a call [from Kanye West\u2019s people] wanting to fly me to New York. Kanye is one of my favorite producers and artists. I thought he wouldn\u2019t know who I was, but I got up there, and man, he tells me, \u201cThere\u2019s times where there\u2019s a game-changing beat or a game-changing song, someone comes through with the crazy kicks, with the crazy sounds, changing the game to where everybody wants to be like that producer. And right now you that guy. You have what it takes to really take over the game.\u201d It was crazy. He let me hear \u201cMercy\u201d with no drums. He said, \u201cI wanna go straight to the source. I just felt like, if you come through, you put yo fuckin\u2019 drums on there.\u201d I just did it like that, and in no time \u201cMercy\u201d came out and took over.\n\n\u201cWe Can\u2019t Stop\u201d was [originally] for Rihanna, but she never heard it. I wasn\u2019t in the studio with Rihanna but I had run into Chris Brown and I was letting him hear the stuff I was working on for Rihanna. He heard \u201cPour It Up\u201d and went crazy. He said to her, \u201cMike Will got this crazy joint over here for you!\u201d \u201cWe Can\u2019t Stop\u201d was really the first song I wanted Rihanna to hear, but it wasn\u2019t all the way laid down yet, and \u201cPour It Up\u201d was. She heard \u201cPour It Up,\u201d she got locked on it, and she knocked it out.\n\nThe \u201cWe Can\u2019t Stop\u201d beat was so pop, I always said, \u201cMan, this shit remind me of a mature version of \u2018Party in the USA.\u2019\u201d And then somebody had asked me, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you give it to Miley then?\u201d I said, \u201cMan, that\u2019s a good fuckin\u2019 question.\u201d I ain\u2019t run into Miley yet but she hadn\u2019t put out music in a minute. I wondered, What she doing right now? She probably won\u2019t even fuck wit\u2019 me; she probably got too much politics to get to her. At the time, I ain\u2019t know where each artist was signed. I was just doing music.\n\nSo I had a meeting with RCA and [CEO] Peter Edge, letting him hear a whole bunch of different songs. And he heard \u201cWe Can\u2019t Stop,\u201d and he was just like, \u201cThat record might work for Miley Cyrus.\u201d Her A&R liked it too. He took it to [Miley] and let her hear it, and she said she instantly connected with it because it reminded her of parties that she had been to.\n\nReally, that song, it\u2019s written from the perspective of someone that\u2019s in a wild party \u2014 it\u2019s never her saying she was in the bathroom doing lines. And really it was from the [N.E.R.D. song \u201cEveryone Nose\u201d] \u2014 \u201cAll the girls standing in line for the bathroom!\u201d\n\nIt just worked for her. So when she heard it, we went in the studio, she laid it down, and that same day, we did [Mike Will\u2019s debut single] \u201c23.\u201d She had never rapped before. I was fucking with her lyrics, keeping her in the pocket, and that ended up dope. She listens to a lot of rap music, and she takes good direction. If I\u2019m like, \u201cYou should re-say it like this\u201d or \u201cUse this tone of voice,\u201d she\u2019ll try it a couple of times and knock it out. I ain\u2019t know what kind of chick she was, but she was down to try new things. But it was too early. I ain\u2019t want that to be the first [new] thing from Miley.\n\nThe vocals [on the original reference track] were by Rock City, a songwriting group that I work with. The beat was slow, it was real piano-ish. I told them, \u201cIf you can make a party record out of this, we out of here.\u201d And then when [Miley] had did it, we had worked on it a couple times. The first version doesn\u2019t sound like the version that actually came out: Rock City, they from the [Virgin] Islands, so the first version had more of an island melody. Miley\u2019s version, we told her to keep her country twang tone instead of trying to sound like the reference, and it came out dope.\n\nOn the second session we had, I saw her coming up the street, and a whole line of cars, just people swerving and shit. I was like, \u201cWho the fuck are these people?\u201d And then next thing you know, she turns into the garage, and these dudes, these grown-ass men, is tripping over each other. That was the first time for me seeing the paparazzi like that.\n\nWe were recording at this one studio once and she ended up leaving late and they took a picture of her leaving late and they made up a whole story and it was like, \u201cOhhh so this is how your life goes.\u201d\n\nHer album was pretty much done when we first got into the studio, but we just kept working, making dope records. I told the label, \u201cYou should let us keep going till we hit a dud. We need to keep going until we hit a brick wall.\u201d And we never hit a brick wall. Me and her now, we still talk on the phone every day, we still constantly working on music and giving each other different ideas.\n\nI look at her like a friend. She my homey, I love her for life. So I look at it like she was already a huge celebrity, and she already had an idea of what she wanted to do, as far as dancing and twerking and shit like that. But at the same time, I told her, man, look, you already a huge celebrity, grown-ass men chasin\u2019 you trying to take a picture \u2026 but if you come out with music that\u2019s dope as shit then can\u2019t nobody tell you nothing. I always had those talks with her. I always told her, \u201cYou gotta be just the illest.\u201d\n\nEverything that we planned on, how we wanted to roll up big, everything that we foresaw in January and February ended up being just like that. Being on the cover of Rolling Stone \u2014 damn, she a rock star! She really is one of those people that doesn\u2019t give a fuck, but at the same time she\u2019s real smart. Smart as a motherfucker.\n\nWe never had any conversation about racism, because I already knew she wasn\u2019t racist. I feel like, \u201cShe fuck wit\u2019 me, right?\u201d We didn\u2019t even keep up with a lot of that shit, but one time I was at her house, and we was watching something on TV, and they was talking about me. They was talking about we was dating or whatnot, they was talking about that\u2019s why she twerking. But it was like, man, no, she was already twerking before that. I don\u2019t know how to twerk! How the fuck can I teach somebody how to twerk?\n\nYou see a girl that\u2019s coming from Nashville, Tennessee, that\u2019s a big pop artist and she can strictly carry it all the way with the white people. But she\u2019s embracing the hip-hop community, and she\u2019s embracing the urban culture with open arms, and what they wanna do is call that racism. She isn\u2019t crip walkin\u2019. She not making fun of \u2019em \u2014 she embracing it. All kind of girls dance and twerk. Matter of fact, go to the strip club, you see Spanish girls, white girls \u2026 She went to New Orleans, they do bounce music down there, they do a lot of twerking, and that\u2019s when she started twerking.\n\nA lot of the time, people who write that stuff are racist themselves. They don\u2019t wanna see white doing black. \u201cThat just doesn\u2019t look right, she\u2019s fuckin\u2019 with this urban producer but really he came through with different sounds on her album, she\u2019s on his first single, they hang out all the time, and then she dancing like this and quoting different hip-hop lyrics on her Twitter \u2026 \u201d They don\u2019t wanna see that shit. I don\u2019t even generally understand how you can say someone that\u2019s embracing the urban culture is racist. I never got that.\n\nBut you either out there \u2014 a \u201cnot giving a fuck\u201d\u2013type person \u2014 or you a person that\u2019s going with the guidelines. And it\u2019s not really a black or white thing. If Miley was doing all the way pop shit, they would have found something else about her [to get mad about].\n\nI told every label that I had a sound that was gonna change the game. Put me in the studio with any artist that they want and we can take over the game. I\u2019m just trying to stay consistent. I\u2019m working on my own album. \u201c23\u201d is about to go platinum, and it got over 100 million views on VEVO. I been working on different designs for clothes and shit. People already loving the \u201c23\u201d hoodies. Jordan Brand even reached out to me to say they liked the shit. Michael Jordan reached out to me to say he liked the \u201c23\u201d song.\n\nI even scored the LeBron commercial. I came with the whole song and everything and got John Legend to sing on it.\n\nI don\u2019t sleep. I\u2019m drinking fruit juice, keeping all my nutrients, taking vitamins and shit. Making sure I got my energy up. Just exercising, juicing and shit, and just trying to keep my energy up because I know I can\u2019t sleep. I\u2019m trying to balance so much. I just had a show in Atlanta, I brought out Jeezy, T.I., 2 Chainz. I ain\u2019t even promote they was gonna come and it ended up being sold out. I\u2019m just trying to get my following right, get it all the way together. Yesterday, I slept the whole day. I got that one day where you sleep the whole entire day. Then you get back on the grind.\n\nThis interview has been condensed and edited."}
{"text":"PARFUM! My name is Ichiya Senpai, but you can call me Officer Yuri's Second Bazonga. I'm currently working under my boss \"Officer Yuri desu\" who is on the quest to have everyone as his harem. Yuri Lowell is the best husbando in Tales of Link\/Persona5\/RuneFactory\/Vesperia. My occupation is a 100% legit writer who is dedicated to write stories of Yuri's harem in the ToL community since I'm interested in you MEENNNN! My team (KissCAAM Studio) who are working on this project includes Teal, Chorong, RedHeadKitten, and myself. I will be gladly to post this cancelled fanfiction between Ray x Caam, however\u2026 Caam and Arcelle are lovers :O FRESH! After Officer Yuri saw this fanfiction, he immediately recruited me to the Yuri Lowell Corporation to have every one of you to his harem. If you're interested in Officer Yuri, contact him at (987) 456 \u2013 9355 or (YUR) ILO \u2013 WELL. In any other case, I welcome you \"THE BROKEN LINK\", my honeys!\n\nThe Broken Link\n\nSynopsis: Ray Kadoodles is \"supposedly\" a college student who is constantly being bullied due to the fact he was a loner. It could be due to the fact that his age remains unidentified, but that's not important right now . However, his life changed upon one fateful, rainy day where he met Caam, the most popular person in Bazongas University! Will he be able to connect with Caam and develop further relationship with him that is even more than romance? :O FIND OUT ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF DRAGON BALL... oops. That's not supposed to be there, no copyright infringement please :P\n\nThe Broken Link: One RAYny Day\n\nStarting today is the first day of college\u2026 meanwhile Ray Kadoodles is crawled up in his blanket, contemplating on when his life was going to change.\n\n\"I aaammmmm sooooooooo tiillltteed,\" he muttered to himself.\n\nIn his high-school life, he was constantly bullied for being a loner, as well as having N\/A under the category of \"age\" for any registration. Ray stood up to get dressed and went downstairs to have breakfast without brushing his teeth first.\n\n\"Damn, out of cereal again. I guess I'll just have those dank donut that's-\" Ray said until he was briefly interrupted by his younger sister Kaenai, who was only 8 years old.\n\n\"Onii-chan! Thank you for those delicious donuts! You even left those donuts for my 3 dogs and 4 cats too! You're the best!\" she exclaimed as she hugged him tightly. \"Onii-chan! My bus is here! I'll see you later!\"\n\nAll Ray could think about was all those donuts that he bought, but haven't eaten any of it. \"Could my day get any worse?\" he cried while kneeling his head down.\n\nAs he walked outside of his house, he forgot that today was the first day of college.\n\n\"Oh shit! I better run over there fast!\" he said.\n\nTen minutes after he ran, the weather changed almost instantaneously from sunshine bright to heavy thunderstorm.\n\n\"ARE YOU FU#*!NG KIDDING?! THIS IS TOTAL CANCER!\" he shouted as he ran towards shelter.\n\nBut as he turned around the corner for shelter, he accidentally bumped into a man holding an umbrella.\n\n\"Oooph!\" he muttered with his face flat on his chest.\n\nThe two stood there for a moment, gazing upon each other's face. It was at this moment that Ray knew his life was about to change.\n\n\"I'm so sorry, are you okay? I hope I didn't ruin your clothes!\" he said as he got back up on his feet.\n\n\"It's fine. I'm just glad that you're not hurt from that fall\" the man replied.\n\nRay's heart skipped a beat and wondered what this feeling inside of him meant. But during that time, he notices the man wearing a Teepo shirt and decided to strike a conversation.\n\n\"Nice Bazongas you have there!\" he blurted.\n\nThe man stared at him strangely as though he had lost his sanity from a minor fall.\n\n\"Thanks? Are you really okay? I can take you to the infirmary that's in my university if you'd like\" he responded.\n\n\"OH SORRY! I meant to say Teepo, but Bazongas was the first thing that came to mind. Ray said shyly. \"Oh, where are my manners. My name is Ray Kadoodles. I also go to Bazongas University if that was the university you mentioned. What's your name?\"\n\nThe man was relieved that it was just a person who was in the same university as him, since he couldn't identify Ray's age.\n\n\"The name's Caam. Nice to meet you Ray! Are we in the same Biology Lab class judging by the time you're leaving now?\" Caam said smiling.\n\n\"I guess we are! It looks like our professor's name is OFFICER YURI LOWELL. He must be like a badass character with that name, if you ever played Tales of Vesperia.\" Ray replied\n\n\"Dude! I love that game. And yeah, we should probably be lab partners too if we ever get the chance! We have some great things in common\" Caam winked.\n\nThe weather changed almost instantaneous yet again from heavy thunderstorm to a sunny day. At the same time, Ray's face was full of happiness that he finally connected with someone of similar interest!\n\n\"Okay!\" Ray shouted with glee."}
{"text":"Muslim pilgrims circumambulate around the holy Kaaba during the ritual pilgrimages of Haj and Umrah at the Grand Mosque. REUTERS\/Muhammad Hamed\n\nThe largest bank in Saudi Arabia has decided to turn itself into a fully Islamic bank in the next five years after coming in for criticism from the country's Islamic scholars. The state-run bank's decision came amid a $6 billion initial public offer -- the largest ever equity sale in the Arab financial world.\n\nNational Commercial Bank, or NCB, which has assets worth $116 billion, according to Reuters, works along Sharia-compliant Islamic banking guidelines but also follows certain Western banking conventions. NCB's decision to transform itself into a fully Islamic financial institution comes after some members of the Council of Senior Scholars, the country's highest religious body, said that it will not be possible to invest in the bank's share offer because too much of its business was non-Islamic.\n\n\"Religion comes above everything,\" Sheikh Abdullah al-Mutlaq, one of the council members, told state television, according to Reuters.\n\nWhile securities analysts said that such criticism of the bank's policies will not hamper the bank's public listing, NCB held a meeting on Thursday to discuss with the components of its board, such as the bank's chief executive, chairman and other officials, on how to make it Sharia-compliant.\n\nBy June, two-thirds of the bank's assets were Islamic in nature while the remaining was conventional, according to Reuters. The Sharia board has certified that 78 percent of NCB's financing deals, 92 percent of its liabilities and 73 percent of its income, were Sharia-compliant."}
{"text":"As Rick told Ilsa, they\u2019ll always have Paris. But the global warming hysterics won\u2019t, thanks to the wonderfully devastating action taken by President Donald Trump last week.\n\nAs promised in his campaign, Trump announced America would call it quits with Obama\u2019s 2016 signing of the Paris agreement on \u201cclimate change.\u201d\n\nCondemnations of the president came thick and fast, as hard-core liberals around the world kicked off an Orwellian \u201cTwo Minutes of Hate\u201d aimed at Trump that has, so far, lasted for four days. German newspaper headlines were of the \u201cEarth to Trump: F*** You\u201d variety, and a gaggle of pols and pundits proclaimed Trump\u2019s action to be the end of American leadership in the world.\n\nBut Trump\u2019s cancellation of the deal was precisely the opposite. It was a major act of leadership that told the rest of the world that global warming \u2014 if it even exists \u2014 is a far lower priority to America than the other problems that beset the civilized world.\n\nFormer President Obama told us that \u201cclimate change\u201d was the greatest threat to our national security. Obama preached that message to the EUnuch choir and was roundly praised for it. Mr. Trump is being condemned for reminding the world that there are real existential problems that we have to solve instead of wasting time on such globaloney. The EUnuchs would rather hide from their responsibilities and worry about \u201cclimate change\u201d than face the facts of Islamic terrorism, Russian aggression, North Korean and Iranian nukes and the rest.\n\nThink about the context of Trump\u2019s action. Man-made \u201cclimate change,\u201d first of all, is a myth. Earth\u2019s temperatures shift naturally \u2014 dependent on many things such as the sun\u2019s activity \u2014 and the warming trend that existed briefly and ended somewhere between 1986 and 1990. (Remember, please, that the term \u201cclimate change\u201d was created instantly to replace \u201cglobal warming\u201d when it became undeniable that \u201cglobal warming\u201d wasn\u2019t happening.) All the predictions of an environmental apocalypse are based on computer models of the weather that are neither scientifically proven nor scientifically provable.\n\nThe Paris agreement set a long-term goal of liming Earth\u2019s temperatures to below 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial (1850s) levels. The signing nations agreed to do that by establishing their own carbon emission rates aimed at cooling the Earth to reach those levels. But there was no enforcement mechanism. Any nation could set a goal and then change it at will.\n\nAbiding by the agreement would have prevented the development of American oil and gas resources, raised the costs of generating electricity enormously, cost thousands of jobs and strangled our economic growth.\n\nTrump\u2019s cancellation of the agreement will, like the agreement itself, have no effect on \u201cclimate change.\u201d On Friday, the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said in the worst case scenario, America\u2019s exit from the Paris agreement might cause the world\u2019s temperatures to rise by 0.3 degrees Centigrade by the year 2100. That tiny drift in temperature is apparently enough to melt all the eco-whacko snowflakes.\n\nFor decades, eco-pimps such as Al Gore have blamed all the world\u2019s ills on \u201cclimate change.\u201d It is supposedly responsible for floods, hurricanes, famine and disease. And so it went, on and on. When the weather was too hot, it was the result of \u201cclimate change.\u201d So were unexpectedly heavy snowfalls, plunging temperatures, riots, famine and whatever other plagues occurred. Good weather was irrelevant, but any severe weather \u2014 whatever it might be \u2014 was \u201cproof\u201d of climate change. It\u2019s fun what you can do with computer models when they\u2019re programmed to produce the result you want.\n\nJohn Kerry told us that refrigerators and air conditioners were more dangerous than ISIS. Last year, crazy ol\u2019 Bernie Sanders said\u201cclimate change\u201d causes terrorism. He wasn\u2019t alone in doing so, but Bernie took it one step further. He blamed \u201cclimate change\u201d for the Brits passing the Brexit referendum.\n\nMan-made \u201cclimate change\u201d has done no significant damage to anyone or anything, but the eager pursuit of controlling it has wasted tons of money and created extraordinarily stupid policies.\n\nRemember Solyndra? The company, a favorite of Obama (because its owners raised tons of campaign money for him), tried to market solar panels that produce electricity, its efforts funded by taxpayer-guaranteed loans. It went bust, like so many of those companies did, because there\u2019s no market for high-priced, weather-dependent electricity. Solyndra left us stuck with about $535 million in bad loans.\n\nRay Mabus, Obama\u2019s last (and the worst-ever) secretary of the Navy, decided to buy \u201cbiofuels\u201d at about $250 per gallon instead of diesel, which cost about $5 per gallon. In 2014, Obama\u2019s idiot Secretary of Defense Chuckie Hagel issued a \u201cClimate Change Roadmap\u201d which, among other things, required every operational plan to make accommodation to \u201cclimate change.\u201d\n\nThat directive \u2014 N.B. Secretary Mattis \u2014 may still be in effect. It would have a lot of absurd effects that could cost lives. For example, if the Marines \u2014 America\u2019s \u201ckick the door in\u201d force \u2014 need to storm a beach, they\u2019d first have to get permission from the beach erosion experts. If you doubt that, as Casey Stengel would have said, you could look it up.\n\nBy canceling America\u2019s signature to the Paris agreement, Trump took all that away. He told the world \u2014 allies and enemies both \u2014 that we were going to deal with the real problems with real solutions instead of sitting in a corner with the EUnuchs, sucking our thumbs and whining that \u201cclimate change\u201d \u2014 not terrorism, North Korea, Iran, China or Russia \u2014 was the greatest threat we face.\n\nCutting carbon emissions won\u2019t end terrorism: Unlimited war against the terrorists and the ideology that propels them will. \u201cClimate change\u201d solutions won\u2019t cure cancer; medical research will. That was Trump\u2019s implicit message. He should make it explicit right away in a major speech.\n\nPresident Trump could take the action he did, because the Paris agreement was nothing more than a paper agreed to by Barack Obama. It wasn\u2019t \u2014 like so many other agreements Obama signed \u2014 submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent. The Constitution requires a supermajority of the Senate \u2014 two thirds of the members, at least 66 votes \u2014 for a treaty to become U.S. law. If a presidential agreement is approved in that manner, it becomes a part of the \u201csupreme law of the land,\u201d as the case law says, equal in stature to a congressionally enacted law, and subordinate only to the Constitution itself.\n\nBecause the Paris agreement on climate change wasn\u2019t submitted for Senate approval, it remains subject to actions like the one the president took. The EUnuchs have refused to renegotiate it, so the president\u2019s announced exit from it is final.\n\nThe president needs to do the same for Obama\u2019s Iranian nuclear weapons deal. Like the Paris \u201cclimate change\u201d agreement, the Iranian deal was never approved by the Senate and is, likewise, not a part of American law and is revocable at any time. The Iranians have already refused to negotiate it. Having warmed up on the global warming deal, Trump should tell the Iranians that the deal is off."}
{"text":"Man who stabbed ex-partner's Tinder date to death in Sydney jailed for 30 years\n\nUpdated\n\nA man who stabbed to death his ex-partner's Tinder date in a Sydney restaurant has been sentenced to at least 30 years in jail.\n\nJovi Pilapil was on a first date with Keith Collins at a restaurant in the Hornsby shopping centre last year when they were attacked.\n\nAlexander Villaluna killed Mr Collins after stabbing the 53-year-old 10 times in the stomach and neck with a hunting knife he had bought a few weeks earlier.\n\nVillaluna stabbed his former partner in the chest and arm before she managed to escape.\n\nHe surrendered at the scene and later pleaded guilty to murder and wounding with intent to commit grievous bodily harm.\n\nFor murder, the 46-year-old was sentenced to a maximum 34 years in prison. For wounding, he was sentenced to a maximum 12 years.\n\nPart of the sentences will be served concurrently.\n\nThe sentences carry a combined non-parole period of 30 years.\n\n'Cowardly and vicious'\n\nIn sentencing, Justice Robert Beech-Jones described the crimes as \"cowardly and vicious\".\n\n\"The offender is an almost text book example of a perpetrator of extreme domestic violence,\" he said.\n\nJustice Beech-Jones described CCTV footage of the crime.\n\nIt showed Villaluna attacking Mr Collins first, then stabbing Ms Pilapil before returning to Mr Collins who was trying to get up off the floor.\n\n\"Of all the cowardly and pitiless acts the offender committed on this day, his actions in returning to finish off a dying man on the ground were the most heinous,\" Justice Beech-Jones said.\n\n\"The offender interrupted his vicious attack on his ex-partner to stab a defenceless dying man that the offender had never met and only because he dared to have dinner with a woman who did not wish to be with the offender anymore.\"\n\nThe court heard Ms Pilapil met Mr Collins through the dating app Tinder.\n\n\"The offender regarded Mr Collins as simply some intruder on his domain who he had the right to eliminate,\" Justice Beech-Jones said.\n\nVillaluna and Ms Pilapil separated six months before the attack after a physically abusive relationship.\n\nJustice Beech-Jones said Villaluna had shown no remorse.\n\nTopics: law-crime-and-justice, crime, murder-and-manslaughter, police, community-and-society, domestic-violence, courts-and-trials, hornsby-2077\n\nFirst posted"}