Datasets:

Elriggs
/

openwebtext-100k

Dataset card Data Studio Files Files and versions Community

Split (1)

train · 100k rows

text stringlengths 465 100k
BOULDER, Colo. — ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after. This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth. The conventional wisdom was reflected in a recent National Public Radio series on the cost of college. “So it’s not that colleges are spending more money to educate students,” Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute told NPR. “It’s that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.” In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher. In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000. Some of this increased spending in education has been driven by a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who go to college. While the college-age population has not increased since the tail end of the baby boom, the percentage of the population enrolled in college has risen significantly, especially in the last 20 years. Enrollment in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs has increased by almost 50 percent since 1995. As a consequence, while state legislative appropriations for higher education have risen much faster than inflation, total state appropriations per student are somewhat lower than they were at their peak in 1990. (Appropriations per student are much higher now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, when tuition was a small fraction of what it is today.) As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story For example, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1980, my parents were paying more than double the resident tuition that undergraduates had been charged in 1960, again in inflation-adjusted terms. And of course tuition has kept rising far faster than inflation in the years since: Resident tuition at Michigan this year is, in today’s dollars, nearly four times higher than it was in 1980. State appropriations reached a record inflation-adjusted high of $86.6 billion in 2009. They declined as a consequence of the Great Recession, but have since risen to $81 billion. And these totals do not include the enormous expansion of the federal Pell Grant program, which has grown, in today’s dollars, to $34.3 billion per year from $10.3 billion in 2000. It is disingenuous to call a large increase in public spending a “cut,” as some university administrators do, because a huge programmatic expansion features somewhat lower per capita subsidies. Suppose that since 1990 the government had doubled the number of military bases, while spending slightly less per base. A claim that funding for military bases was down, even though in fact such funding had nearly doubled, would properly be met with derision. Continue reading the main story Recent Comments B. Rothman 5 April 2015 Hey, middle America! This is what "smaller government," and lower taxes from the super rich and from corporate America look like. It also... RedPill 5 April 2015 Government funding trends of public colleges is a red herring.The real reason is that education as a whole became a serious for-profit... Karen 5 April 2015 The real problem is that all colleges are competing with the Ivy League (schools that are funded COMPLETELY differently from most colleges... See All Comments Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970. By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. Continue reading the main story Write A Comment Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase. The rapid increase in college enrollment can be defended by intellectually respectable arguments. Even the explosion in administrative personnel is, at least in theory, defensible. On the other hand, there are no valid arguments to support the recent trend toward seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university administrators, unless one considers evidence-free assertions about “the market” to be intellectually rigorous. What cannot be defended, however, is the claim that tuition has risen because public funding for higher education has been cut. Despite its ubiquity, this claim flies directly in the face of the facts.
Sample color A and paint a swatch of it in the middle. Sample color B and paint it lightly over top of the middle swatch. To paint with this middle mixture, sample it with the alt button! This process is known as ‘on-screen mixing’ and is quintessential for digital painting. It’s not similar to painting with oils, but will quickly feel intuitive. When using this on-screen mixing technique, you’ll experience two major bonuses to your workflow: Save tons of time. Every time you avoid opening the color picker window time is saved. To maximize this effect, use the eyedropper (alt) tool as much as you can. Create a unified color scheme. If you are primarily mixing on the canvas, your colors will naturally harmonize with one another through blending. Using a ‘Mini-palette’ Traditional painters are required to pre-mix paints on their palettes before starting to work. In this way they are able to plan out a pleasing color scheme ahead of time. Digital artists aren’t forced to do this step because there’s no physical paint involved. Even though not strictly necessary, I would ague that pre-mixing digital colors is a worthwhile endeavor. When starting a color painting, my first step is to create these pre-mixed colors on what I refer to as a ‘mini-palette’. It’s simply a blank layer that I title “palette” and paint small swatches on. Because it’s on a separate layer I’m able to move it around my canvas when it gets in the way, or to hide it completely with the visibility button. The specifics of the mini-palette format are up to you. I like to keep mine small and unobtrusive. Some artists like to paint swatches of their main colors – but I like to include mixed gradations as well. Doing so gives me a pleasing color palette because middle mixtures have a nice neutralizing quality. Mixing Productively One of my main goals when approaching photoshop for concept art is efficiency. I’ve found the most success through a combination of on-screen mixing and sampling from a mini-palette. When both of these techniques are used, one can almost completely avoid the color picker window – and save a ton of time. Homework: Swatches If you only take one thing away from this lesson it should be the power of the Alt key. What takes a traditional painter time and effort to mix is only a click away for photoshop users, so take full advantage. The following worksheet might be a familiar sight to art school students. It’s not glamorous, but it’ll get you mixing accurately in no time. The goal is to use the principles of on-screen mixing to mimic the examples provided. 1) Sample from squares A and B to create middle mixture C 2) Find the middle mixture between A and C 3) Use the same technique to mix B and C 4) optional bonus: use the soft round brush to create smooth transitions between each color swatch So save a copy of this sheet, and start mixing!
On this, the longest day of the year, it seems fitting to read about and perhaps put a few words down on the topic of gender. What? Yes … The longest day of the year means the year with the most Sun, the most 阳气, the most Yang essence, the most masculine of days if you believe the Chinese. In some parts of the world, most notably Europe, this day (the Summer Solstice) is celebrated with massive bonfires. A reveling in the energy of the sun and its tiny cousin fire, both a symbol of potency and bright obvious power. In China, this day is celebrated often with a bit of water … swimming perhaps … to balance out the Yang energy with a bit of Yin. Yin being the female – soft dark wet – susceptible to the moon and the tides, the hidden power, the power you never see coming. I spent the day eating lamb, another source of Yang in China (lamb is not only 羊 yang in Chinese, but is also believed, like beef and dog meat and many other foods, to have strong Yang energy). Normally lamb is only eaten in winter, again, to balance out the cold winds and snows of the ultimate Yin season, sunless and dormant and secretly fecund. But I figured I’d revel in the Yang myself, and if a bonfire isn’t feasible, then a little lamb and some beer in the hot Sichuan sun should do the trick. Before I went out to eat, I read three essays (one, two, three) on gender in the martial arts by (who else?) Ben Judkins and I found myself thinking of the Kungfu Women I have met over the years. Several of them fit Judkins’ descriptions of past Kungfu Women: magical, sexual, “honorary men,” yet still so feminine, no matter how many times she hit the bag or stared down a male rival … The Master’s Wife Master Dai Kang, whom I have written about a few times over the years, lived for most of his life on a rise overlooking a tributary of the Dadu River in western Sichuan. The mountains here hide villages unchanged, forgotten mines, old bones. Kungfu legends and tales of Yi Bandits. Today the mountains are as they always were, the towns are swollen with consumables and concrete, and the rise Master Dai Kang (Shiye) lived on is underwater, the result of upriver damming. I first went to his home and school back in 2003 in the middle of the night, led by Daniel Ratheiser, an incredibly resourceful German and an old friend. He found the school in the twisting, turning lanes that zig zagged up the hillside to some temple, and it was one of the most impressive things I have seen anyone do. It was pitch black. Only the fringes of small lightbulb glow could be seen over the walls, topped with glass shards, and dogs barked at us at every turn from dark shadows or from behind steel doors. We arrived, Shiye grunted at us, and we sat for a few minutes in his courtyard, exchanging a few pleasantries and looking at the large red characters on his walls. The sandbags like sullen ogres in the corner. One lightbulb reached out over the door to his inner chambers, and sketched out a perfect circle of light at our feet. Shiye was amiable, joking and smiling, teasing us about the dogs. But then his wife came out, Shitai, and he came to an almost imperceptible attention. Every little part of him shifted a fraction, his laughing eyes and smile, his big solid belly. Awareness. Of what? Of a woman of great power. For me the observer, it was slightly comical to see Shitai’s face, screwed up in (mock?) suspicion as she looked us up and down. Where we here to make a fool of her Kungfu Man? Where we here to pitter patter about and cry at the slightest bit of pain? Could we eat the food and take shits in the outhouse, wake up at 4am and run and train and hit bags and become better men? Or were we little pretenders, wasting everyone’s time? All that in a short glance, a shift of Shiye’s feet, and a gruff “Hungry?” In the days and weeks that followed, she fed us huge bowls of noodles drenched in pig fat and chili pepper. When she went to the market, she’d spare a sniff for us, and bark something at Shiye, who responded the way a man in love with a tough ass woman responds: quickly and with respect, but never obsequious. One night, a few students went out and met some gangsters from town and ate rabbit hot pot (the sign said, “more tender than frog). We drank a ton of Chinese moonshine. I drank a lot more than most, because I was next to the gangsters’ ringer, while the other students had positioned themselves on the other side of the table. I was completely fucked up and remember little. I was walked home, pissed all over the place, and woke up the next morning covered in my own urine and puke. First thing I said was, “What the hell happened to me?” and my friends didn’t have much to say. While I was pissing all over town and myself, I missed Shitai’s demonstration of her true power. Her mystical connection to past lives, future ones, omens and signs. The two brothers who remained standing at the end of that night had their fortunes told, they saw Shitai’s eyes roll back and heard her chant and gibber. Shiye watched, and didn’t make a move, didn’t say a word. His Kungfu Woman was doing her Kungfu Thing. Her power went beyond fists and feet, and to disrespect or disregard Shitai would unman you. Ben Judkins wrote of Tang Saier, and I thought of Shitai. Leading a rebellion is utterly within her skill set. The Honorary Man I’ve met a few Kungfu Women who were honorary men, and they were all, to a girl, street wise and unruly. Sexual in a nonchalant, slightly aggressive way, like 16 year olds who lost their virginity when they were 14. The first one that comes to mind is Wang Mei. My first thought when I met her was that her parents didn’t care much for her, because her name was so simple. Like it had been tossed out to the secretary putting together the birth certificate between puffs on a cigarette. She was beautiful, in a careless way. She came with Shifu to my house in Flower Town one day, and stayed for a week training with us. She wore pants and slippers. She could touch the sky with the tip of her foot and forms came easily to her. She was one of the many kids sent to kungfu masters to get disciplined, to get off the street and out of the KTVs. She seemed resigned to her fate, and fearless of what that might hold for her. The last time I saw her, she was drunk and in a mini skirt. We had just finished a BBQ at my house and she had been there. She was heading out into the darkness, into the countryside around my home, a place I knew held nothing for her save fields, darkness, and rough men. I told her to stay here with us, go to bed. But she wanted the darkness, she wanted the rough men perhaps. She wanted to be in a mini skirt, slightly drunk, and alone. She was afraid of nothing really, and her last words to me before she disappeared down the lane were, “I’m going out. Home. Forgetaboutit.” The other Kungfu Woman who fits this bill is Zou Fan, who also has some space on this blog, and in an essay I wrote for Roads and Kingdoms. I won’t say too much more about her here, except that she swaggers and spits like a man, punches and takes kicks like a man, and has the respect of every man I met who knows her. She’s divorced, her husband couldn’t handle her kungfu. And she sobbed when she told me that her son refuses to see her, because he also disapproves, of the kungfu and her wild ideas about Kungfu Eyries. Ng Moy anyone? The Princess Again, the girl who reminds me most of Yim Wing Chun, or at least my personal idea of what this beautiful, almost accidental Kungfu Woman was like, is Chen Jia. The Chen Taiji disciple with a school in Shanghai. Chen Jia is a disciplined girl. Loyal to her master and her style. She trains every day, and her expression rarely strays from the composed openness of the martial artist with an ethos. She is also very sexy, which somehow comes with the territory. An unattractive Kungfu Woman? Haven’t met one. But her sexuality is buried beneath her white robes, her tea ceremonies, her martial art. Boys come second, but she has let me see a glimpse or two of her desire. Not for me, sigh, but for love. She is a woman, and a martial artist. She also teaches her art, runs a school, and manages several other taiji masters, some of which are men. I have learned that the men “underneath” her are grumpy. One of them in particular, a very confident boy that I met in Henan, may have already left her school, even though to do so would make a few people lose no little face. It doesn’t matter how impressive her kungfu, how solid her dedication, or how accommodating her managerial style – fiery men will always have problems with subtle, powerful women like Chen Jia. She has to maintain her composure. Give when she can, take little, evade the egos, and move like water around the misogynistic tendencies of the martial arts. But she has chosen Taiji – perhaps because of all the arts, this one sees no difference between Yang and Yin – so not only does she excel, but her so does her school.
Futurist Thomas Frey has predicted more than two billion jobs will disappear by 2030 as a result of automation. Statements such as these strike fear into an already turbulent job market, but there are many who believe we should take solace in history. In their book, Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee explain how the recent panic brought on by ‘technological unemployment’ – a term originally coined by John Maynard Keynes – is nothing new. Brynjolfsson and McAfee describe how the potential for advances in technology to render human labour obsolete first surfaced during the Industrial Revolution and the advent of the steam engine. Many people then, as now, worried they would lose the race with technology, and unemployment would be widespread. Instead, a plethora of new jobs was created: what differed was the type of skills that were required. Workers were no longer needed for their physical attributes but their mental faculties. The point Brynjolfsson and McAfee make is that we should learn from the past and not attempt to compete against machines, but evolve to work in harmony with them, if we wish to transition into the technological revolution as successfully as we did the industrial one. Harder, better, faster, stronger In the introduction to their book, Brynjolfsson and McAfee explain how “our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organisations are lagging behind. So it’s urgent that we understand these phenomena, discuss their implications and come up with strategies that allow human workers to race with machines instead of racing against them”. In the modern world, that is easier said than done. 2bn The number of jobs expected to disappear by 2030 50% The amount of jobs that are potentially automatable within two decades The technology we are now up against doesn’t simply render our physical attributes useless; computers can outperform us in a wider variety of far more complex tasks. In fact, the only jobs in which we trump machines are those that require social intelligence (e.g. persuasion and negotiation) or creative intelligence (which is simply the ability to imagine new ideas). This means nearly 50 percent of jobs are potentially automatable within a decade or two. But we shouldn’t worry; while automation may eliminate certain jobs, it will also create new ones that require social and creative intelligence. However, this kind of intellect is much harder to acquire. More importantly, there is a natural disparity that is present within nature; such forms of intelligence are very broad and cannot be simply learned. How would you go about teaching such skills in schools? Especially when governments around the world are struggling to adequately educate children with the skills they need in order to compete in the current economy, let alone the ‘creative economies’ of the future. The dystopia has arrived Keynes predicted widespread technological unemployment would occur when our means of economising the use of labour exceeded the pace at which we were able to find new uses for it. Moore’s Law, which describes the exponential growth pattern that is present within modern technology, means what Keynes predicted has now, in the 21st century, become reality. Even if we were able to educate and employ a population of creatively intelligent, highly skilled workers, who were capable of “racing with machines” – as Brynjolfsson and McAfee claim is possible – it might not be enough. As US economist and historian of economic thought Robert Hellbroner said: “[Even if] we can employ most of the population as psychiatrists, artists or whatever… there is still an upper limit on employment due, very simply, to the prospect of a ceiling on the total demand that can be generated for marketable goods and services.”
Security researchers warn that a new attack is capable of infecting Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems with a new variant of the notorious Koobface worm. The attack was spotted on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, the usual hunting grounds of the Koobface gang. It begins with users receiving a messages from their friends, who direct them to an online video. Lures like "Is it you in this video?" have been observed. The included link leads to a fake YouTube page, which displays a video thumbnail. Clicking it launches a Java applet, that users are asked to accept. The applet exploits a remote code execution vulnerability in outdated versions of Java and checks the visitor's operating system. Based on this determination, the appropriate version of the Koobface worm is installed without requiring any interaction from the victim. Koobface is the father of all social networking worms and its authors are constantly coming up with new ideas to avoid detection or to make the threat more resilient. Once installed on a computer, the worm hijacks the social networking accounts of its owner and uses them to propagate. Infected systems join together in a botnet and contact a command and control server, from where they receive instructions. According to Jerome Segura, a security researcher at ParetoLogic, who analyzed the attack, the Linux Koobface version is attached to a Java applet called jnana.tsa. The applet is dropped inside the user's home directory and stops running at computer reboot. This means that on Linux, unlike on Windows, the Koobface infections are temporary. However, Linux computers tend to stay open much longer than Windows ones, which gives attackers enough time to use them for malicious purposes. The attack is further limited by the fact that many consumer-oriented Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, don't come with Java installed by default. Nevertheless, the news might be disappointing to many Linux and Mac OS X users, who seem to believe that malware doesn't work on these operating systems. Researchers have repeatedly advised that as their market share increases, malware authors will begin viewing these platforms as attractive targets. Update October 29: Corrected the first paragraph, which erroneously described the attack as a drive-by download. The attack requires user interaction. Update October 30: Newly discovered information in this case suggests that the Linux infection vector might be a side effect. Read more.
Share. Simple? Sure. Intuitive? No. Our full review. Simple? Sure. Intuitive? No. Our full review. Listen to the latest speech by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and the company's philosophy seeps through: games don't need to be more complicated; game machines don't need to be more complicated. Instead, Nintendo seems to feel that making software simpler and more intuitive is a superior means of attracting players of all ages. Hey -- it worked for Tetris, didn't it? It's likely that the HAL-developed Kirby Air Ride was born of this philosophy. After all, this is a racer that runs on a single button. But somewhere along the way the plan got jumbled up because Air Ride isn't an intuitive racer -- it's a perplexing one. And while mountains of hidden gameplay layers lurk just beyond the blocks in Tetris, the control scheme in Air Ride oppositely works to destroy any depth that might try to coexist with the simple mechanics. The Facts Race as Kirby through a wide variety of colorful environments Simple one-button setup Kirby can boost around corners and absorb the powers of enemies Outrageous track design: loops, corkscrews, twists and turns, and more Features three different game modes Four-player split-screen support Progressive scan support Requires four memory blocks for saves LAN-enabled Gameplay Nintendo has tinkered with a Kirby racer for a long time. Kirby Air Ride was, in fact, originally scheduled to release for N64 several years ago, but was ultimately scrapped. The GameCube version is vastly different from the 64-bit original, but the premise remains for the most part the same: you control the pink, gelatinous mascot as he pilots crazy crafts over unpredictable, colorful 3D courses. This is not an original idea by any stretch of the imagination, but there are some Kirby-styled touches that help separate it from competing software. Air Ride smells of Super Smash Bros. Melee thanks to a sleek, well done interface that looks very reminiscent of the fighter. The GUI is complemented by a crisp, opening FMV with orchestrated music that shows off Kirby in all of his glory. Just as in SSBM, there are all sorts of records and checklists to be pointed to and calculated, all of them linked to accomplishing specific tasks within the game, and these will give some fanatics reason enough to keep playing. Kirby is designed to be as simplistic as possible -- we think so that just about anybody can quickly pick up and play it. (This design choice backfires on more levels than it succeeds, in our opinion, but we'll get to that.) You control Kirby with the analog stick and the A button -- that's it. The stick steers the character left and right (he accelerates perpetually) and the A button when pressed slows him down and when released delivers a temporary speed boost. The idea is to hold the button down around corners, drift them, and then shoot out with a burst of speed. The appealing part about drifting in any racer is that you can round corners without losing speed, but this is disappointingly not the case in Air Ride: you slow down regardless. It's still somewhat satisfying, but not nearly as much as it might have been. Indeed, there are times when you'll want to forego drifting around a corner in order to save time, believe it or not -- a gameplay flaw, as far as we're concerned. Depending on what craft Kirby is piloting (each has unique glide, speed and turn ability) control can feel either very tight or incredibly loose and unresponsive. Some craft, in fact, cannot turn at all unless they are at a dead stop. Try that one on for size. Others soar through the air but perform poorly on the ground. The selection is welcomed, but the system feels unbalanced because fast craft almost always win the races regardless of any lesser attributes they might have. Track design is visually appealing. There are branching paths and multiple levels to explore. There are speed arrows that -- if timed correctly -- can jettison Kirby ahead of an opponent. There is some fun to be had here. But the gameplay choices come back to haunt Nintendo, too. Because Kirby is constantly in motion, you can actually set the controller down and the character will eventually finish the race. He might even place ahead of competitors. Often times, the game drives Kirby anyway: he glides on rails and will simply bounce off walls and continue forward. We understand that Nintendo wanted to keep it simple and that younger players will probably appreciate this, but anybody seeking any depth or real challenge out of Air Ride is in for a gargantuan disappointment. Kirby can suck enemies into his mouth and temporarily absorb their powers as he speeds along the courses. This works in a similar fashion to power-ups in Mario Kart, but HAL's take is sloppier and far more limited. It's fun to gain new abilities as Kirby, but in an effort to keep with the overly simplified control setup full control and command of these powers is completely lost. When Kirby gains Link's sword, he can't fully wield it; he attacks enemies automatically as they near and because we only have one button at our disposal (and it's used for drifting/attacking) there's no way to, say, charge the weapon as Link might to inflict greater damage. Meanwhile, every time you try to attack with the A button you also go into a mini-drift and if you hold it down, you both attack and drift at the same time. It's downright clumsy. Imagine if this same rule applied in Mario Kart -- that every time you tried to slide around a corner you would also use your character's weapon. There's no reason for it, either. There are plenty of other buttons on the GameCube controller that would have prevented this shortcoming, but the developer's mind seems to have been clouded with the idea that Air Ride should only make use of one button. So once more, any sense of depth -- any level of planning or satisfaction that might have gone into an attack -- is decreased significantly, a huge frustration.
Air Jordan 11 “Red” PE for Carmelo Anthony Carmelo Anthony has received a lengthy list of Air Jordan PEs in the past, but his latest may take the cake. Not to be outdone by his son Kiyan’s all-blue Air Jordan 11 that was delivered straight from “Uncle MJ,” Melo has received an exclusive XI of his own in the form of the Air Jordan 11 “Red” PE. This fiery rendition of the iconic Air Jordan 11 places the entire upper in firetruck red, accented by a black inner lining and a white Jumpman logo and tongue strip. Down below, a pure white midsole transitions into an ice blue outsole, which features a black carbon fiber plate and white traction pads. Get a first look via @_PO2345 below, and tell us how this AJ 11 stacks up against other previously seen PEs in the comment section underneath.
While the title/category of this bike seems a bit off, I really don’t know where to put this. Alloy wheels with racing slicks, mono-shock suspension, a massive 1300 high-performance engine and an aggressive stance make this bike more look like a serious track weapon than a classic cafe racer. Last week I’ve published another Yamaha XJR1300 Cafe Racer, which is a completely different bike, based on the same donor. But let’s get over that issue and take a look at this awesome Yamaha XJR1300 built by Eak, owner of the Thai K-Speed. Regular readers may know K-Speed from this radical Suzuki SV650 Scrambler earlier this year. Now Eak took the massive XJR1300 and took it to a fitness training. The bike lost a lot of weight and got nothing but high-end performance parts. Unfortunately just some photo’s, I hope to get some more specs soon. Luckily I was able to get a short video with the sound of this monster.
Probiotic Bacteria Chill Out Anxious Mice Reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers write of reducing anxiety and stress in mice by feeding them a probiotic-laced broth. Study author John Cryan discusses how the gut influences the brain, and whether the same might hold true in humans. IRA FLATOW, host: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. You might have heard probiotic bacteria help keep your gut healthy, but could they be good for your brain, too? A study out this week suggests the answer is yes, at least for mice, because mice on a probiotic diet for a couple of weeks were more relaxed than their counterparts who were not. They showed fewer visible signs of anxiety, lower levels of stress hormones, even chemical changes in the brain. Sounds a little like valium, doesn't it? Other than signals telling you when you're hungry or full, what connection is there between the intestinal tract and the brain? And why would it be there? I know you yogurt lovers out there are probably wondering: Is there any chance this finding might hold true for humans? Well, we'll talk about it. If you'd like to, our number is 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. You can tweet us @scifri, S-C-I-F-R-I, go to our website and talk over there, or you can go to our Facebook page, /scifri. My next guest is an author of that probiotic study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists. John Cryan is a professor at University College Cork in Ireland, and he joins us by phone. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Cryan. JOHN CRYAN: Thank you very much, Ira, it's good to be on. FLATOW: This sounds amazing. You fed the lab animals probiotics, and then why would they have any effect on the brain? CRYAN: Well, I mean, it's been long known that the brain and the gut communicate, as you mentioned, in terms of feelings of hunger, et cetera. And so what's becoming clearer over the last while is that this brain-gut communication or gut-brain, it's a bidirectional communication, but also that the microbials, which is the gut's flora within the gut, can actually also play an important part in regulating this axis. And so we can now describe what we call the microbial gut-brain axis, and this is coming across in a whole variety of studies in whole different ways. What we were interested in was just a test - and we're just starting to see whether - if we fed the animals this lactobacillus, whether there would be any changes in behavior, in stress and then what was driving this in terms of whether it was some of the targets that were known to be implicated in these behaviors. And indeed we found it. So we went after this looking a little bit to see mechanistically how this could happen, which I think is what your question is, and what we found was that one of the major nerves, the cranial nerve, the vagus nerve, which is really very much a relay for monitoring what's going on in all aspects of visceral function to the brain, when this was cut, this nerve, these effects didn't happen. So we know it's happening through a direct mechanism on the vagus nerve, and there is a means for this communication. On the same way, when you're - we've known for a long time that if you're feeling sick, or you've got a bad bacteria, like a food poisoning, the same nerve will signal to the brain to allow you express the sickness behavior. So it's kind of like the good side of what we've already known. FLATOW: I've heard physiologists tell me that there are so many nerves in your guts, it's almost like a mini-brain center down there. CRYAN: And it's often referred to that - as a small brain, and the enteric system is very important for maintaining all aspects of homeostasis. FLATOW: And so people are going to want to say, of course, and I'm sure you've been asked: Should I go out and eat a lot of yogurt with bacteria in it, and will it have the same effect? CRYAN: So what I want to impress on the listeners today from this study is that it's just early days. This is the effects of one specific bacteria, one specific lactobacillus strain. And we're learning a lot about how these bacteria affect health and physiology, but we also know there's lots of difference between the different strains. And so, this one isn't one that is currently commercially available in your supermarket. So it's different, although, you know, it's not unrelated to some of the ones that are there. But it is - we haven't tested this one in any human population yet. So I'd be a bit cautious in over-extrapolating from this to humans as yet. However, what I think the study shows and what I think is really important and why I think it's gaining so much attention is that it gives us the idea that the concept of treating stress-related disorders by modulating gut microflora can happen, and this can happen in a positive way. So it's encouraging is what I would say. FLATOW: You know, we've always heard about food, also, being very quieting to people, you know, when they're upset. I guess it might work through the same mechanism? CRYAN: Well, I mean, definitely the vagus plays a role in satiety signaling and in other aspects. And indeed, we are interested in our lab, here in Cork, we're interested in the interaction between stress and food intake, although it's quite a complex interaction, as well. FLATOW: Why did the bacteria calm the brain down instead of make it more excited? CRYAN: Okay, well, so what it did was it affected - what we looked at was the neurotransmitter GABA, and GABA is the main calming, inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. And what we found was that this bacteria was able to affect the receptors, which are the proteins in the brain that signal the chemicals, so they affected the levels of these receptors. Now, we haven't - there's lots of other receptors and other neurotransmitters, and we haven't looked at this, but we plan to. But it is one of these things that we were quite surprised at, that we were able to get such a pronounced effect, and similar effects as if the animals had been given some pharmaceutical agents that are used to treat anxiety and depression. FLATOW: So you're saying that the effect was so strong that it was like taking a valium. CRYAN: The effects on behavior were very similar to what we would see if we'd given these mice an acute injection of valium, yeah. FLATOW: Wow, that is pretty strong. CRYAN: It really is, and we were really surprised about the robustness. And what was really neat about this, is that we carried out these experiments in two different labs. So, in my lab and my colleagues in Cork, and also that of the Bienenstock and Forsythe labs in McMaster in Canada. So we were able to reproduce it in two different sites, which really give us extra confidence that what we're seeing is real. FLATOW: Do you think that different strains of different bacteria might have different effects? CRYAN: Absolutely, and we know that from studies in immunology and on gut function and other aspects of physiology, that there are different - going to be different responses. Because the key here that we need to really find out is what is it specific about this bacteria that's causing it to activate the vagus. Is it something that it's releasing? Does it need to be alive to do it? You know, there's lot of studies that we need to figure out. You know, is there an additive effect independent of the vagus? There's other things that we need to figure out, but what's important to reinforce is that, you know, if it is a metabolite or something that it is secreting, then that might be specific to that bacteria compared to another bacteria. FLATOW: We have a tweet coming in from Jason(ph) who says: What dosage did you use? I'm sure people want to try this themselves. CRYAN: Oh, well, they won't be able to - I mean, one has to also remember that the - what we give to animals is quite different because of their overall physiological differences. So we use doses - chronic dosing over a number of weeks, and I think it was like 109 colony-forming units of the bacteria, was I think what it was. All the details are - of the specifics are in the paper, but it's consistent with doses that we - what other people have given to laboratory animals, previously. But it's very difficult to - I wouldn't even know how to correlate the doses we would give to animals up to what humans would get. FLATOW: And so where do you go from here? CRYAN: Well, we really want to find out, how this happens. That's really one of the things that we want to know. We want to know if it's, as you asked, is it specific to this bacteria. And, you know, would other bacteria do the same thing? I mean, is it only lactobacillus? And it's probably not. Other good bacteria like bifidobacteria probably also do similar effects. But it's going to vary from strain to strain, and see how it goes. And then finally, of course, we would like to try some type of bacterial intervention and assess, is it a true probiotic in humans? FLATOW: And so you will be doing human testing? CRYAN: Yeah, I mean, our center is Cork is - the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre, it's very translational. So we do everything from molecule all the way up to human interventions. This study here would buoy us very much into attempting to try and do this in humans. And there has been some studies in humans with probiotics, although very limited. There was one out of France in the British Journal of Nutrition a few months ago, which was quite encouraging, which had a mixture of two probiotics, potential probiotics together, which show that they could affect stress, and it could affect mood in a positive sense. FLATOW: Boy, the drug companies don't want to hear this. CRYAN: Drug companies, I don't know. But maybe the food companies do. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) FLATOW: That's right. CRYAN: You know, I mean, it's - what's really neat about this and what's important to reinforce, as well, is that the mechanism that we're showing, in terms of what it's doing to the brain and brain chemistry, is the same as what the pharmaceuticals are doing. So it's not undermining the actual biology theories underlying anxiety or depression in any sense. It's just showing that we can modulate them by maintaining good digestive health. FLATOW: And that's the key, you're saying, good digestive health. CRYAN: Yeah, yeah. FLATOW: And if you do that, the bacteria will take care of themselves? CRYAN: Well, it's hard to know in terms of cause and effect. We do know that, and studies from our own group, have shown that if during - if subjects have early life stress - and also studies from the U.S. have also shown that stress can affect the makeup of your microbiota and gut flora and the composition of it. And we know that perhaps one of the things that they - probiotics are doing in certain situations is kind of working to kind of rebalance any disturbed microbiota composition. However, evidence for that is still not clear, and these studies are ongoing. People are working on trying to basically look for signatures in various patient populations of the gut flora and see how it changes over time and over certain manipulations. FLATOW: Do you expect an influx of money now from the probiotics people to keep...? CRYAN: I don't know. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) CRYAN: I mean, it's hard to know. As you may know, Ireland is in a tough state financially. So getting any type of funding for research is - will be very much welcome. We are very much - we're hoping that this is very much a conceptual change in people's mind with this paper in terms of trying to move the idea that you can, by modulating the gut, we can actually affect behaviors that are previously thought to be largely only to be manipulated by agents that get it across the blood-brain barrier into the brain. So I think it opens up, and there's a lot of work to do, and I'm very excited about it in terms of the potential it might have and especially in terms of the way it might impact patient care down the way because people, some people are more eager to take a food agent than they will be a pharmaceutical. FLATOW: All right, Dr. Cryan, thank you very much, and good luck to you. CRYAN: Thank you very much. FLATOW: John Cryan, professor of anatomy, University of College Cork in Ireland. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. Copyright © 2011 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
To show our appreciation for all members of the campus community, University of Illinois faculty, staff, and students will receive 20% off purchases from Thursday, December 8, through Friday, December 9 at Promenade—the exceptionally eclectic, artfully affordable store. Whether you're looking for elegant jewelry, hilarious cards, fun stocking stuffers, or maybe even a little gift for yourself, Promenade is ready to satisfy your seasonal shopping needs. Just mention this promotion to receive your discount! Shoppers are invited to join Krannert Center in helping children stay warm this winter. Bring new or gently used coats, mittens, gloves, hats, scarves, and ear muffs for this season's clothing drive. All collected items will go to the Champaign Unit 4 School District and Urbana School District 116. Donation boxes will be available in the lobby near Intermezzo cafe.
Hiring Salespeople Over the past 12 years we have been invited into countless President and CEO’s offices to discuss the topic of hiring salespeople. Before the President/CEO opens his/her mouth, we can typically predict what they are going to say. We could hand them over a few comment cards with the following issues and almost guarantee their thoughts will be one or two statements on the card. Comments like: Hiring Salespeople in this organization has been our biggest challenge! We have X number of salespeople but only 20% of them are running on all cylinders – we need better salespeople! We figure over the past year the cost of our bad hires in the sales department has been $X. Many times the figure is in the millions of dollars. Our Sales Managers keep hiring the wrong salespeople on the team. The cost of hiring mistakes in our sales department is causing the whole company to suffer And the list of comments goes on…. Related Article: Risk When Hiring Sales People The reason we continue to hear these “hiring mistake” comments is because we are being brought into the company to assist in hiring the right sales team members through a structured hiring process. What is surprising is to see how little process and logic has been put into existing sales teams hiring processes. Here are a few points that will assist hiring teams in starting to get on solid ground when hiring their next salesperson. Industry knowledge trap – most companies think that when their hiring salespeople they have to come from within their industry. The problem with this thinking is that the same non performing salespeople get “recycled” from company to company. These smooth talking sales candidates go into the interview dropping names and talking the industry jargon and ultimately win the job. Hiring teams need to realize they don’t have to (and maybe should not) hire from within their industry. When hiring salespeople, find someone good and then teach them your business! No structure to the initial interview – Sales managers and other hiring team members need to be provided a set of structured interview questions that “need” to be asked (by the manager) and answered (by the candidate). No exceptions. Do not allow Sales Managers to “wing” the interview. Accountability after the interview – when a sales manager interviews a candidate there must be a follow up or accountability meeting with others within the company on the evaluation of each candidate. Hiring managers are spending valuable company time on each interview so why not take a few extra minutes and review the interview with a fellow manager or associate. Do not allow managers to get away with comments such as “I liked or didn’t like the candidate”. There needs to be concrete reasons why a candidate will be moving forward or be released from the hiring process. Hiring managers should rate or grade each candidate on common attributes discovered in the interview process. This score / grade can be reviewed in the follow up meeting with team members. Bring other forms of assessments into the evaluation process – the interview can’t and should not be relied upon as being the only form of assessing a candidate. Online assessment centres, in-tray exercises and job simulations can bring more structure and rigor to the hiring process. Each element of the hiring process (interview, online assessments and job simulations) should then be graded and provided weights to assist each team member in better understanding the candidate’s ability to execute on the job. Hiring Salespeople should not be difficult or a mystery. Incorporating these four points mentioned in this article will bring more accuracy and profitability to each hire. Test Drive Candidates Let us show you how to see candidates in action before you hire them! Want to know more? Contact Us! Hiring Salespeople – 4 Easy Steps to Increase Your Successful Hires
A few readers asked about the TV series Orphan Black a while back. Now that the show is in its second season (and I finally got around to watching the first one and have caught up with the second one), I thought I’d address the central legal questions raised by the show. Moderate spoilers below if you haven’t seen past the first episode or so, followed by big spoilers if you haven’t seen the season one finale. The first question readers had regards the fundamental premise of the show, so it makes sense to address that one first. The second question is about the twist introduced at the end of the first season. Canonically the show is set in Toronto, but I’m going to answer the first question primarily from a US perspective. The second question regards an area of law I am more familiar with, and I feel reasonably comfortable addressing the Canadian law in that area. I. Is Any of This Legal? And by “this” I mean “human cloning.” The answer depends on why the cloning is being done and where. There are two types of cloning: reproductive cloning (i.e. producing a clone in order to make a whole, mature person) and therapeutic cloning (i.e. producing an embryonic clone for stem cells or matched organs). The former has never (verifiably) been done in humans, whereas the latter has been. At the US federal level there is no comprehensive prohibition on reproductive cloning, despite several attempts at introducing such legislation. Part of the problem has been crafting a bill that would prohibit reproductive cloning without prohibiting or needlessly hampering therapeutic cloning. The states, however, have been more active. As of 2008 at least thirteen states had completely banned reproductive cloning and two had banned the use of public money to fund it. Some of those states also ban therapeutic cloning. Of course, these state bans have limited jurisdiction, and they only affect the act of producing the clone. The clone itself (assuming a viable human results from the procedure) would presumably be treated like any other person…with at least one important complication: who are a clone’s parents? Arguably, existing law does not address the situation very well. For an interesting article on the subject, check out W. Nicholson Price II, Am I My Son? Human Clones and the Modern Family, 11 Colum. Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. 119 (2010). In Canada there is an outright ban on human cloning, part of the 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act. But of course none of these laws were in effect at the time Sarah and the other clones were created in the 1970s 1984 [Note: Thanks to reader ‘pc’ who corrected the clones’ birth year], so in that particular regard the clone creators haven’t (technically) done anything illegal. There is, of course, everything else they did, but never mind that… And now for the big season one twist II. Patent Pending? No, no, no. Wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. The clones cannot be patented. Even if they could be, that does not mean that Dyad owns them or Kira. Oh how wrong this is, let me count the ways. In Canada it’s not possible to patent any higher life forms, not even “simple” animals such as genetically engineered mice (plants are okay, though, for reasons that strike some as unprincipled). Harvard College v. Canada (Commissioner of Patents). It is likely that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would prohibit exerting ownership over a human being via a patent in any case. In the US it’s possible to patent genetically engineered animals, but it is not possible to patent anything that is “directed to or encompasses a human being.” This was a long-standing Patent Office policy and was codified by the 2011 America Invents Act. Furthermore, the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on slavery would almost certainly mean that even if it were possible to obtain a patent on a genetically engineered human being it would be impossible to enforce such a patent. (NB: In the show Rachel says something about a recent Supreme Court decision regarding synthetic DNA, probably a reference to the Association for Molecular Pathology case. It’s a nice reference to current events, but that case has no bearing on patenting genetically engineered humans or on asserting gene patents against individual humans qua humans.) Next up: patents have a limited term, and they must be filed for within a certain time after an invention has been in public use. The law on this varies from country to country and has varied over time as well, but the bottom line is that there is almost no way that Dyad can have a valid patent that covers Sarah and the clones in 2014. Such a patent would either have to have been filed for in the 1970s at most a year after the clones were born (for a US patent), in which case it would be expired now, or it would have to have been filed for more recently, in which case it would be invalid. It’s possible it could have been the result of a so-called submarine patent, but those are difficult to engineer, and in any case I don’t think that was ever really possible outside the United States. Finally: patents are public. The word patent literally means “open.” If Dyad owned patents on a method for producing viable human clones (or on genetically engineered humans, or both) it would be public knowledge and a huge deal. Certainly Cosima would be aware of it. Overall the patent nonsense strains my suspension of disbelief, but I’m okay with it because it’s otherwise a very good show.
The FBI is changing the definition of rape, in part to include men as victims, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told Congress today. Earlier this month the FBI Advisory Policy Board voted to consider changes into definition of rape that is used to track statistics used in the annual FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The current definition of rape under the UCR program defines forcible rape as, "The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will." The definition of sexual assaults has not been updated since the 1920s. The change is expected to reflect a more accurate picture of how many rapes are reported by state and local police agencies to the FBI for the annual crimes statistics. The FBI's current guideline also notes that, "By definition, sexual attacks on males are excluded from the rape category and must be classified as assaults or other sex offenses depending on the nature of the crime and the extent of injury." "That definition was in some ways unworkable, certainly not applicable-fully applicable to the types of crimes that…it should cover," Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee today. The new definition approved by the FBI's policy group will define rape as, "Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim." "I approved a change to that definition, and my expectation is it will go into effect sometime this spring." Mueller told the Judiciary Committee.
Express News Service By CHENNAI:Though the dates are yet to be finalised, India will host the South Asian Games this winter and will include, if all stakeholders sign on the dotted line, 28 disciplines. This was discussed during a meeting in Singapore on Saturday. “We had a fruitful meeting and all the eight South Asian country representatives were very cooperative and agreed upon the disciplines,” Indian Olympic Association secretary general Rajeev Mehta told Express on Monday. The uncertainty over the Games were cleared last month when Sports Minister Sarbananda Sonowal assured the state government that he would give all possible assistance to the state governments of Assam and Meghalaya to host it successfully. “We had a meeting will all stakeholders last week and the Government of India has given approval to the Games,” said Mehta. He also said the two state governments showed keen interest and all stakeholders would work to host the Games without any hitch. A lot of major decisions will be taken during a meeting where representatives from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan and Maldives will meet in Delhi on July 8. “It will be a crucial meeting,” said Mehta. “The Games will be on for around two weeks across two states. We have spoken to other South Asian Federation members and they agreed. Now we have to chalk out a concrete plan. The central government is on board and it will assist the hosts in every way it can. It will help them in upgrading their infrastructure financially.” Mehta also said it was because of this new regime that the Games were revived. “This was supposed to be hosted in 2012 but got postponed because of various reasons. But when we took over, the IOA president and I worked hard it revive and host the Games,” said Mehta. “Some of the member countries were pleased that the Games are being held after a long gap.” The fate of the Games hit a road block this year too. Though the new IOA regime vowed to get it back and running, the hosts – Assam and Meghalaya – suddenly developed cold feet. Assam wanted funds from the Centre to upgrade facilities and said it was not in a position to host it if the Centre did not support them. However, the sports minister during his visit to Assam spoke and convinced the hosts the organise the event and pledged all support.
Wolves were once present in Great Britain. Early writing from Roman and later Saxon chronicles indicate that wolves appear to have been extraordinarily numerous on the island.[1] Unlike other British animals, wolves were unaffected by island dwarfism,[2] with certain skeletal remains indicating that they may have grown as large as Arctic wolves.[3] The species was exterminated from Britain through a combination of deforestation and active hunting through bounty systems. Past presence and extinction [ edit ] England and Wales [ edit ] The British wolf-hunters: A Tale of England in the Olden Time by Thomas Miller. An Anglo Saxon wolf hunt, as illustrated inby Thomas Miller. Humphrey Head , a limestone outcrop which juts into the sea at the entrance to the Kent estuary and is allegedly the place where the last wolf in England was killed in the 14th century. Certain historians write that in 950, King Athelstan imposed an annual tribute of 300 wolf skins on Welsh king Hywel Dda,[4] while William of Malmesbury states that Athelstan requested gold and silver, and that it was his nephew Edgar the Peaceful who gave up that fine and instead demanded a tribute of wolf skins on King Constantine of Wales. Wolves at that time were especially numerous in the districts bordering Wales, which were heavily forested.[5] This imposition was maintained until the Norman conquest of England.[4] At the time, several criminals, rather than being put to death, would be ordered to provide a certain number of wolf tongues annually.[6] The monk Galfrid, whilst writing about the miracles of St. Cuthbert seven centuries earlier, observed that wolves were so numerous in Northumbria, that it was virtually impossible for even the richest flock-masters to protect their sheep, despite employing many men for the job. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that the month of January was known as “Wolf monath”, as this was the first full month of wolf hunting by the nobility. Officially, this hunting season would end on 25 March; thus it encompassed the cubbing season, when wolves were at their most vulnerable, and their fur was of greater quality.[1] The Norman kings (reigning from 1066 to 1154) employed servants as wolf hunters and many held lands granted on condition that they fulfilled this duty. William the Conqueror granted the lordship of Riddesdale in Northumberland to Robert de Umfraville on condition that he defend that land from enemies and wolves.[6] There were no restrictions on or penalties for the hunting of wolves, except in royal game reserves, under the reasoning that the temptation for a commoner to shoot a deer there would be too great.[7] English wolves were more often trapped than hunted. Indeed, the Wolfhunt family, who resided in Peak forest in the 13th century, would march into the forest in March and December, and place pitch in the areas wolves frequented. At that time of year, wolves would have had greater difficulty in smelling the pitch than at others. During the dry summers, they would enter the forest to destroy cubs.[5] Gerald of Wales wrote of how wolves in Holywell ate the corpses resulting from Henry II’s punitive expedition to Wales in 1165.[1] King John gave a premium of 10 shillings for the capture of two wolves.[6] King Edward I, who reigned from 1272 to 1307, ordered the total extermination of all wolves in his kingdom and personally employed one Peter Corbet, with instructions to destroy wolves in the counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire and Staffordshire – areas near to and including some of the Welsh Marches, where wolves were more common than in the southern areas of England.[8] In the forty-third year of Edward III's rule, a Thomas Engaine held lands in Pytchley in the county of Northampton, on the condition that he find special hunting dogs to kill wolves in the counties of Northampton, Rutland, Oxford, Essex and Buckingham. In the eleventh year of Henry VI's reign (1433), a Sir Robert Plumpton held a bovate of land called “Wolf hunt land” in Nottingham, by service of winding a horn and chasing or frightening the wolves in Sherwood Forest. The wolf is generally thought to have become extinct in England during the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509), or at least very rare. By this time, wolves had become limited to the Lancashire forests of Blackburnshire and Bowland, the wilder parts of the Derbyshire Peak District, and the Yorkshire Wolds. Indeed, wolf bounties were still maintained in the East Riding until the early 19th century.[5] Scotland [ edit ] A small sea stack on Handa, where the Scots once buried their dead to prevent their graves from being desecrated by wolves. In Scotland, during the reign of James VI, wolves were considered such a threat to travellers that special houses called spittals were erected on the highways for protection.[9] In Sutherland, wolves dug up graves so frequently that the inhabitants of Eddrachillis resorted to burying their dead on the island of Handa, Scotland.[1] On Ederachillis’ shore The grey wolf lies in wait- Woe to the broken door, Woe to the loosened gate, And the groping wretch whom sleety fogs On the trackless moor belate. The lean and hungry wolf, With his fangs so sharp and white, His starveling body pinched By the frost of a northern night, And his pitiless eyes that scare the dark With their green and threatening light. […] He climeth the guarding dyke, He leapeth the hurdle bars, He steals the sheep from the pen, And the fish from the boat-house spars, And he digs the dead from out of the sod, And gnaws them under the stars. […] Thus every grave we dug The hungry wolf uptore, And every morn the sod Was strewn with bones and gore: Our mother-earth had denied us rest On Ederchaillis’ shore — The Book of Highland Minstrelsy, 1846, pp. 256-258 Island burial was a practice also adopted on Tanera Mòr and on Inishail, while in Atholl, coffins were made wolf-proof by building them out of five flagstones. Wolves likely became extinct in the Scottish Lowlands during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, when immense tracts of forest were cleared.[1] James I passed a law in 1427 requiring three wolf hunts a year between 25 April and 1 August, coinciding with the wolf's cubbing season.[4] Scottish wolf populations reached a peak during the second half of the 16th century. Mary, Queen of Scots is known to have hunted wolves in the forest of Atholl in 1563.[4] The wolves later caused such damage to the cattle herds of Sutherland that in 1577, James VI made it compulsory to hunt wolves three times a year.[1] Stories of the killing of the alleged last wolf of Scotland vary. Official records indicate that the last Scottish wolf was killed by Sir Ewen Cameron in 1680 in Killiecrankie (Perthshire),[1][10] but there are reports that wolves survived in Scotland up until the 18th century,[8] and a tale even exists of one being seen as late as 1888.[11] Folklore and literature [ edit ] In the Welsh tale of Gelert, Llywelyn the Great, Prince of Gwynedd, killed his faithful dog Gelert after finding him covered in blood which he presumed belonged to his baby son. Only later does he discover that his son is still alive, and that the blood belonged to a wolf which Gelert killed in defence of the young prince. In Welsh mythology, both St. Ciwa the "Wolf Girl" and Bairre (an ancestor of Amergin Glúingel) are said to have been suckled by wolves.[12] Scottish folklore tells of how an old man in Morayshire named MacQueen of Findhorn killed the last wolf in 1743.[8] Fossil finds [ edit ] Illustration of the diseased jawbone of a young wolf from Oreston Illustration of a wolf skull excavated from Kents Cavern Wolf remains in the Kirkdale Cave were noted to be scanty when compared with the prominence of cave hyena bones. Cuvier later pointed out that the number of wolf bones in Kirkdale was even lower than originally thought, as a lot of teeth first referred to as belonging to wolves turned out to be those of juvenile hyenas. The few positively identified wolf remains were thought to have been transported to the cave system by hyenas for consumption. William Buckland, in his Reliquiae Diluvianae, wrote that he only found one molar tooth which could be positively identified as being that of a wolf, while other bone fragments were indistinguishable from those of domestic dogs.[3] In the Paviland limestone caves of the Gower Peninsula in south Wales, the jaw, a heel bone and several metatarsals were found of a large canid, though it was impossible to definitively prove that they belonged to a wolf rather than a large dog.[3] In a series of caves discovered in a quarry in Oreston, Plymouth, a Mr. Whidbey found several bones and teeth of a species of canis indistinguishable from modern wolves. Richard Owen examined a jaw bone excavated from Oreston, which he remarked was from a subadult animal with evidence of having been enlarged by exotosis and ulceration, probably due to a fight with another wolf. The other bones showed evidence of having been gnawed by small animals, and many were further damaged by workmen in their efforts to extricate them from the clay. Unlike those of the Kirkdale wolves, the Oreston remains showed no evidence of having been gnawed on by hyenas.[3] An almost entire skull with missing teeth was discovered in Kents Cavern by a Mr. Mac Enery. The skull was exactly equal in size to that of an Arctic wolf, the only notable differences being that the sectorial molar was slightly larger and the lower border of the jaw was more convex. It was positively identified as being that of a wolf by its low and contracted forehead.[3] Proposed reintroduction to Scotland and England [ edit ] In 1999, Dr. Martyn Gorman, senior lecturer in zoology at Aberdeen University and vice chairman of the UK Mammal Society, called for a reintroduction of wolves to the Scottish Highlands and English countryside in order to deal with the then 350,000 red deer damaging young trees in commercial forests. Scottish National Heritage considered re-establishing carefully controlled colonies of wolves, but shelved the idea following an outcry from sheep farmers.[13] In 2002, Paul van Vlissingen, a wealthy landowner at Letterewe, Achnasheen, Ross-shire, in the western Highlands, proposed the reintroduction of both wolves and lynxes to Scotland and England, stating that current deer-culling methods were inadequate, and that wolves would boost the Scottish tourist industry.[14] In 2007, British and Norwegian researchers who included experts from the Imperial College London said that wolf reintroduction into the Scottish Highlands and English countryside would aid in the re-establishment of plants and birds currently hampered by the deer population. Their study also assessed people's attitudes towards the idea of releasing wolves into the wild. While the public were generally positive, people living in rural areas were more sensitive, though they were open to the idea provided they would be reimbursed for livestock losses.[15] Richard Morley, of the Wolves and Humans Foundation (formerly The Wolf Society of Great Britain), forecast in 2007 that public support for wolf reintroduction would grow over the next 15 years, though he criticised previous talks as being too "simple or romantic". He stated that although wolves would be good for tourism, farmers and crofters had serious concerns about the effect wolves could have on their livestock, particularly sheep, that had to be acknowledged.[16] Although the prospect of reintroducing wolves and other large carnivores in the Highlands of Scotland remains highly controversial, there are some who are already making plans for reintroductions. Paul Lister is the laird of Alladale Estate in the Caledonian Forest of North Scotland, and he has plans to reintroduce large carnivores into his wildlife reserve, such as wolves, lynx, and bears[17]. Many of the arguments against this kind of reintroduction are due to the potential impacts these animals could have on farming, but Lister argues that this would not be a problem in Alladale as there is very little farming in the area that could be affected. This type of reintroduction could be beneficial for the economy and ecology of the UK, just as it has in the U.S. In 1995, wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park.[18], which transformed the ecology of the area, allowing forests to regenerate and biodiversity to increase. Wolf related tourism also brings $35.5 million annually to Wyoming.[19]. See also [ edit ]
Former Morgan Stanley CEO and chairman John Mack discussed how millennials in business today differ from past generations. “To have the iPad or the iPhone and to be able to communicate the way they can and get the data and information they have — they’re much more aware,” Mack said. “They’re much more plugged in with each other. There’s just no doubt about that. So from that — that aspect, they’re different.” Scroll to continue with content Ad But for Mack, access to technology isn’t the only difference. “By and large, they’re not as driven as my generation,” he continued. “When I was born, it was World War II. And you came into a world that was rebuilding. It was very different. Thank God, we’ve basically had peace for a number of years, and people can grow and expand what they want to do and go to different places with a sense of safety.” Young adults clearly had a different experience during John Mack’s day. He continued: “And not have to worry about, ‘Am I gonna be pulled into some kinda battle?’ Not have to worry about, ‘Do I have to make money because I’ve got these college loans?’ Today, it’s pretty easy to get a scholarship if you have any aptitude in learning. I guarantee you’ll get a scholarship.” The retired 72-year-old former bank chief now advises some startups led by millennials. Mack was asked for his views on the younger generation by Yahoo Finance’s editor-in-chief Andy Serwer at a speaker series hosted by the New York Asian Cultural Center and PLC Ltd. John Mack According to Mack, the speed that comes with technology can lead to millennials making mistakes. Story continues “I grew up in a business that you cross every T and you dot every I,” Mack said. “Kids today don’t cross Ts and dot Is. They’re so fast like this. They want to get the product or the idea out there. They don’t go back and check, ‘Did I make a mistake or does this open us up to some issue that could hurt them personally or hurt their company?’” He went to use a company led by two “very bright” young men that he advises as an example. “They built a company in the real estate business. And in their company, they take credit card numbers that people can pay some of the real estate calls through credit cards. So I’m talking to them, and I find out they do not have PCI insurance. So PCI insurance basically protects you if someone breaks into your database and takes all this credit card data and accounts. You’re gonna be held liable for it unless you have insurance. So I asked, ‘Why don’t you have PCI insurance?’ ‘It’s too expensive,’ [they said]. I said, ‘Well, do you understand if someone hacks into your system, you’ll be outta business, and you’ll be sued, and you’re gonna be in, you know, tremendous water. You’ve gotta pay for that now.” He added that if you took that same situation and went back 30 to 35 years ago, that would not have happened. “But I think millennials move very quickly. They have a technology that allows them to expand almost exponentially if they want. But they’ve gotta pay attention to details. And that — that’s my big concern with millennials in business.” — Julia La Roche is a finance reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter. Read more:
Ethereum is making its own headlines recently as it’s price went over $440. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency that also performs as a platform for decentralised apps and has often been seen as Bitcoin’s little brother but with a 30% price rise in one week alone it is stepping out of the considerable shadow left by Bitcoin.A few weeks ago one of the most well-known of Ethereum wallets, Parity, froze $150 million of Ether due to a bug, which caused the price to drop suddenly. Normally we see the price rises and falls of Ethereum and Bitcoin mirroring each other to a large extent but post July this year Bitcoins price has left Ethereum behind until recently. Ethereum has now caught up again after these latest rallies.In fact if you look at this year Ethereum has seen more growth than Bitcoin with the price back in January being just $8 for 1 Ether. Bitcoin investor Mike Novogratz thinks there is more growth to come, even this year. He predicts a value of $500 by the end of the year. Ethereum has been rumoured to be getting its own derivatives and with lots of new crowdfunding events coming that are run on the Ethereum platform there could be a lot of mileage left in this Ethereum price hike.
Fantasy epic "The Monkey King" and reality TV adaptation "Dad, Where Are We Going?" both opened huge during the Lunar New Year holiday, while Disney's "Frozen" is expected to make a strong bow Wednesday. Just a few days into the Year of the Horse, the Chinese box office is already galloping full steam ahead. The first day of the Lunar New Year holiday was a record-breaking one, as box-office sales across China totaled $41 million, beating the single-day record of $34 million set last year on Valentine's Day. By Feb. 3, after four days on release, Hong Kong director Poi Soi Cheang's 3D fantasy epic The Monkey King racked up $64.35 million (389.97 million yuan), while Dad, Where Are We Going? took $50.97 million (308.91 million yuan) over the same period. PHOTOS: China Box Office 2013: The Top 10 Movies China is the second-largest global movie market, but it's an absolute world-beater during the Lunar New Year holiday, when millions of Chinese pack the country's new multiplexes to watch the latest cinematic offerings. The box-office bonanza should continue through the holiday, which officially ends on Feb. 14, especially once Disney's Frozen makes its widely anticipated debut on Feb. 5. Box-office data is hard to acquire during the holiday, as most businesses and government offices are closed, but the figures are based on cumulative revenue from Entgroup. Official box-office data for 2013 showed sales of $3.6 billion, with domestic movies taking $2.12 billion of that, a rise of 54.3 percent for homegrown films. PHOTOS: 35 of 2014's Most Anticipated Movies: 'X-Men: Days of Future Past,' 'Mockingjay,' 'Spider-Man 2' There is a seemingly endless appetite for adaptations of Wu Chen-en's classic Journey to the West tales -- Stephen Chow's Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, which also deals with the Monkey King legend, was the most popular film in China in 2013. The latest installment, The Monkey King, grossed a muscular $46 million in its opening weekend, the global leader over the weekend, and continued this strong performance early into the Lunar New Year, which is a horse year according to the Chinese zodiac. Dad, Where Are We Going? opened to $34 million to place number two on the weekend global chart. The movie is based on a reality TV show about the relationships between celebrity fathers and their children, from a Korean format. The show was a huge hit in China last year. According to the People's Daily newspaper, the film broke the record for a single day's earnings for a 2D Chinese-language movie. Wong Jing's The Man From Macau, featuring Hong Kong legend Chow Yun-fat, has taken $15.51 million (94.02 million yuan) so far over the holiday. It debuted to $12.5 million. The movie is the latest installment in the God of Gamblers series, featuring the Hong Kong tough guy actor as the maverick player Ko Chun, with his signature jade pinky ring Huayi Brothers' romantic comedy Ace in the Hole notched up $4.38 million (26.53 million yuan) over the holiday, while the Finnish reindeer movie Niko 2: Lentäjäveljekset had a cume of $1.43 million (8.69 million yuan) over two days.
On a recent mission to Portugal, British champ Jobe Harriss, along with groms Barnaby Cox, Jo Morriss and Max Hudson, decided to put an assortment of foamies to the test in some whomping beachies with hilarious results. Inspired by the antics of JOB and friends, the groms were looking for a specific set of conditions to try the boards out as Barnaby explains: “We found some perfect fun sized but heavy close outs to take them out in and they worked pretty well- they’re so easy to take late take offs on and they make getting smashed more fun”. Like most groms, theses kids weren’t afraid of taking a beating and undoubtedly spent a good while after the session getting sand out of their ears. “On one I slipped off the back of the board” describes Jo of his wipeout at the 1.03 mark “did a rolly polly, surfed on my back for a minute, then went over the falls and hit the sand”. The boards, which are made by three different foamie manufacturer, are a pretty fun addition to any quiver for those less perfect days, and whilst it doesn’t look like the finless in particular is necessarily designed for these conditions, the others looked pretty ideal for practising pulling in, without any of the worries of getting smashed in the head that a normal stick presents.
As streiff laid out this morning, there’s a new narrative going around in liberal (and some non-liberal) circles. That somehow, the loss of life from an ambush in the country of Niger is not just “Benghazi” but “Benghazi on steroids.” The first take was given by none other than Frederica Wilson, who proclaimed such during an interview. That’s since been molded and repeated by numerous Democrats as well as turned into a few different conspiracy theories, the most ludicrous by Rachel Maddow, who claims that Chadian troops pulling out to the far east of the country led influenced the attack. I’ll do a thorough debunking of that later. There’s just one issue with these hot takes. They ignore all the facts to make a political point. Having spent lots of time in Niger, including reaches well outside the capital of Niamey, I want to give my personal experiences, what it looks like on ground, and why the politicization of this issue is short-sighted and shallow. Let’s deal with a few assertions about force strength first. One complaint that’s going around is that there was not sufficient resources in the area to support the soldiers after the ambush took place. That’s true in the abstract. In context, it’s a silly point that ignores the facts on the ground. The country of Niger is not a terrorist hotbed. It’s actually one of the most stable areas in western Africa and Islamic radicalism has basically no foot hold there. This is not Iraq, Libya, or even Nigeria. It’s not even in the same universe. Because of this, American deployments there are not many. Private contractors handle evacuation duties. I’ve actually met the guy once who runs the operation. They have two older Sikorsky helicopters on the east end of the civilian ramp. They looked like variants of the Sikorsky S-61, but I’m not sure of the exact model. I remember them being blue and white and only one looked airworthy. The other was likely being used for parts. Why point this out? It is not a scandal that private contractors are being used. The US military are not omnipresent. They can’t send valuable resources, such as a Blackhawk and the dozens of personnel they need, to one of the least dangerous parts of western Africa to be used a few times a year if they are lucky. It’s much more cost effective and accomplishes the same thing to contract that work out. Another critique I’ve seen is that they were in civilian vehicles, insinuating that they weren’t properly equipped. Anyone who’s operated in an area like this knows that’s normal. You don’t drive around in tanks, announcing who you are, in a country like Niger. Most of the soldiers I saw while there were also in civilian cloths. Again, this is normal and not a scandal. The US’s main presence is on a drone base in Niamey, which is built on the north-western part of the airport. The French have fighters there and they operate routinely in Mali. From what I gathered, our main air assets in the area are drones and there are no combat aircraft available. Advisors are scattered to the east in cities like Maradi and Zinder as well. I believe we’ve pulled out of Diffa because it’s too dangerous (cross border incursions from Nigeria are the issue, not the city itself or it’s people), but I don’t have confirmation on that aside from what people in that city told me earlier this year. To give a better lay of the land, Niamey is the capital and is mostly French speaking as it was a former colony. As you move east, most are Housa and speak that language. To the north, you find smaller people groups, some nomadic (the Fulani for example). North of Niamey, where these soldiers were operating, are the Groumanchema. They speak their own language and are not Islamic but have their own religion. In none of my experiences there did I ever feel threatened or that Islamism was a problem anywhere I went. The Nigerian people seem to be uniquely resistant to violence and Islamic radicalism. That’s to their credit, but it also gives us an idea of whether this was truly a hot zone where the US military would be expected to dedicate large amounts of resources. It simply wasn’t and isn’t. The lack of forces there, QRF, air assets, etc. is not a scandal. It was to be expected given the facts on the ground. Now, let’s deal with the dumbest conspiracy theory emanating from those who want to politicize this. Rachel Maddow shared a convoluted theory (which I guess has started to make the rounds) on her show a few days ago which basically goes like this: Trump put Chad on the travel ban list. Chad pulled their troops out of Diffa. Because Chad no longer had troops in Diffa, this loss of force in the country led to the ambush happening. This is an idiotic theory that show’s Maddow’s lack of knowledge and experience with Niger. Chad had put troops in the city of Diffa, which is on the Chadian border and at risk for Boko Harem activity coming from Northern Nigeria across the border. US Special Forces (again, as far as I was told) pulled out a while ago due to the level of danger and it being so remote. Chad did indeed pull it’s troops out of Diffa, although the plans to do so predated the latest travel ban. But let’s accept the premise. Chad got mad at the travel ban and pulled out. Why does this have absolutely nothing to do with US forces being ambushed north of Niamey? The answer is geographic and mission related. Diffa is 730+ miles from where the ambush took place. To get from Diffa to Niamey is about 24 hours on some of the worst roads you’ll see. There is no reliable road through the desert that cuts the distance off. You must follow the Nigeria border across to Niamey and then go north. From Niamey, where the drone base is and from where the embassy, is about an hour just to get out of the city. Then it’s another several hours north on mostly dirt roads to reach where this ambush took place. I’ve been to the area one time. This also happened immediately after the rainy season, which means many roads would be washed out and impassable. While the rain stops in September, rivers and roads remain affected well into November. All told, it’d of probably taken close to 30 hours for any Chadian forces to reach the ambush area. Furthermore, Chadian forces were not fighting Al Qaeda and ISIS operatives from Mali. They were fighting Boko Harem from Nigeria. While they did indeed leave Diffa, Chad has not stopped fighting Boko Harem nor could any action by them logically influence the outcome of the ambush. These were two different terrorist groups operating on opposite ends of the country. Lastly, I’ve seen the Chadian forces. They are better equipped than the Nigerian forces (and wore pretty cool looking grey camo), but they are still Africans with 60 year old AKs and PKMs with no real technology. Even if the Chadian soldiers were in Niamey, the US forces never would of called on them to respond to this situation. In the end, attempting to link the ambush of US forces north of Niamey to Chadian soldiers leaving Diffa is ludicrous. To then connect that with the travel ban so as to blame Trump is partisan insanity turned up to eleven. So what happened here? US forces were patrolling, most likely to gather intel and maintain relationships with the locals near the Mali border. Cross border attacks at night are a danger in that area. Anytime you leave the confines of a US military installation, there’s risk. Even in a country as quiet as Niger, there’s risk. In this case, due to the low risk level, we did not have a large, layered response presence in the event of an attack. Again, that is not a scandal. It was dictated by the facts on the ground. I’ve seen CNN running with a headline that there was a “massive intelligence failure” (a line given by an anonymous Congressional staffer who couldn’t possibly know the nuances of the situation, but CNN ran with it anyway). That’s sensationalism and misleading. Combat is not a video game and it’s not a movie. Sometimes it’s simply not possible to know the location of the enemy, especially in a situation where you do not expect an attack. Brave men died doing a necessary mission in an area of the world most couldn’t find on the map. They should be lauded but this should not be turned into a political football. This is not Trump’s “Benghazi.” There is no cover up and there were no lies. Libya was a terrorist hell-hole where decisions on the ground were logically wrong and negligent to the highest levels. That is not what happened in Niger. The military’s decisions, at least what we know of them so far, were logical. Even when you do everything right, things can go wrong. The media continue to shame themselves in these situations. Attempting to turn every military death under Trump into a scandal is dishonest and petty. We saw the same thing when there were special forces deaths in Syria earlier in the year. Everyone needs to take a step back here. People like Rep. Wilson and Rachel Maddow, who want to use this for political points, are doing a great disservice to the men and women who risk their lives every single day across the globe. This is not a game where high-minded ivory tower dwellers can have all the answers and they should stop acting like they do.
This is one of the most unfortunate and painful stories that I've come across. Public shaming has a strong presence on social media and it often flies under the guise of being entertaining or humorous. From parents shaming their kids in a comical way, to pet owners snapping photos of their pets next to pet-shaming signs, social media has provided a way for this kind of shaming to not only be accepted, but welcomed. Advertisement However, there is a very fine line between public shaming that is harmless and public shaming that is detrimental, if not, deadly. When you really stop and think about it, parents shaming their kids by posting on social media is not that different from cyberbullying. In the case of 13-year-old Izabel Laxamana, her shaming was followed by a horrific event that is causing parents everywhere to come against public shaming as a form of punishment for kids. Laxamana's story has been picked up by a number of news sites and the discussion it has evoked has been overwhelming. Countless individuals have taken to weighing in on the teen's story, with many expressing anger and shock that parents think it's okay to publicly shame their children. Read the story below and share your thoughts on the matter in the comments. It's not exactly clear why 13-year-old Izabel Laxamana got in trouble with her father, but she did something that, in his eyes, warranted a severe form of punishment. To discourage Laxamana from disobeying him again, her father cut off her long, black hair, recorded a video of it, and then posted it online. In the video, the father can be heard asking Laxamana how many times she was warned beforehand about her actions. She replies, "twice." Her father then goes on to ask her if her behavior was worth it, to which she replies, "no." The footage also shows a pile of black hair lying on the floor and Laxamana standing to the side with her chopped short hair. Shortly following her father's public shaming, Laxamana shocked the entire community of Tacoma, Washington when she jumped off a bridge, falling into a busy interstate after jumping out of the passenger's seat of her grandma's car. Her death was considered a suicide and has shaken all the students at her school, Giaudrone Middle School.
Yoske runs a small and popular hummus place in our town. He’s a Ḥabad ḥasid and keeps a shelf near the door with religious literature for customers to browse in while waiting. A few days ago, I was surprised to come across there, among the tracts of advice and inspirational treatises, a slim paperbound volume identified by its cover as Volume III, No. 1 (1980-81), of the Journal of the American Society for Jewish Music. “Yoske,” I asked, showing it to him, “what is this doing here?” Yoske had no idea. “Someone must have donated it,” he said. “But if you found it, God wanted you to have it, so take it.” His term for God was the traditional ha-kadosh barukh hu, “the Holy One Blessed Be He.” I took the Journal of the American Society for Jewish Music home with my hummus and soon was reading an article on “Seged: A Falasha Pilgrimage Festival.” Its author, Kate Kaufman Shelemay, later published a book titled Music, Ritual, and Falasha History. Yoske would have taken all this as a confirmation of his belief in Providence, because the Seged festival, an annual celebration of Ethiopian Jews—who are rarely called Falashas any longer and are often referred to as Beta Israel—occurs this year on November 11, just in time for today’s language column. These days, Seged is observed almost exclusively in Israel, to which nearly all Ethiopian Jews have immigrated. Back in the early 1980s, however, it was restricted to the highlands of northern Ethiopia. As described by Shelemay: On the 29th day of the eighth month [the Beta Israel lunar calendar begins, as the Jewish year did in antiquity, with the spring month of Nisan], . . . the Falashas come together to ascend a mountain, where they prostrate themselves in prayer. The fast observed by them during the mountaintop ceremony is broken when the community descends to the village below to take part in feasting and secular entertainment. . . . The name seged is derived from a Geez root meaning “to bow” or “to prostrate oneself.” Sign Up For Our E-Mail List Get the latest from Mosaic right in your inbox Daily Weekly Geez or Ge’ez, a south Semitic language no longer spoken, is sacred to both Christian and Jewish Ethiopians. The Torah of the Beta Israel, who had no knowledge of Hebrew, was written in it, and much of their liturgy is recited in it. Its Semitic affiliation can be seen in the word seged itself, a cognate of the Hebrew verb sagad, which, too, means to bow or prostrate oneself. Anyone knowing Hebrew, indeed, can easily pick out many such words in the Ge’ez phrases that Shelemay records in the ceremony attended by her. In her list of the prayers recited on the mountaintop, for instance, there is one that begins ‘esebḥo la’egziabher baḥeywatya, “I will praise God in my life.” “I will praise” in Hebrew is ashabe’aḥ; “in my life” is beḥayay; and Hebrew le-, “to,” is like the la of la’egziabher, the preposition following the Ge’ez verb for “to praise.” Although Hebrew belongs to the northwest Semitic family and is about as far from Ge’ez as two Semitic languages can be, their common roots are apparent. But what Hebrew can be recognized in egziabher, “God”? None at all, which is something to think about. Egziabher is a Ge’ez word with three components: egzi, “Lord”; –a, a possessive postclitic; and beher or bher, “nations”—in short, “Lord of the Nations.” The word is not an immemorially old one. Rather, it was coined during the 4th-century reign of Ezana, Ethiopia’s first Christian monarch, who ruled over and extended the domain of the powerful kingdom of Aksum. Its coiner was probably Ezana’s religious adviser Frumentius, the Syrian-born first bishop of the Ethiopian church. Prior to the arrival of Christianity, the Aksumites had been pagans worshiping different gods and lacking a word in their vocabulary for the single God of monotheism. Egziabher was a neologism invented to fill this gap, and to this day it is the word for God in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia that is descended from Ge’ez and spoken by many Beta Israel. Could this have a bearing on Ethiopian Jewry’s origins? Broadly speaking, there exist two opposing schools of thought regarding those origins. One is that the Beta Israel community in Ethiopia predated Christianity and continued to maintain itself after the latter’s establishment; the other, that it was a Judaizing offshoot of Christian groups that did not crystallize until a thousand years after Ezana. Proponents of the first view have pointed to the existence in Ge’ez of a small number of clearly Hebrew-derived words, such as meṣwat, “alms,” from Hebrew mitzvah, “commandment” or “good deed,” and tabot, “ark,” from Hebrew tevah. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the Ge’ez word for Friday, ‘arb, which can only be explained as deriving from Hebrew erev, “evening,” and specifically, from the expression erev shabbat, “Sabbath eve.” Unless there were already Jews in Ethiopia in pre-Christian times, it is argued, such words could not have entered Ge’ez. Adherents of the second view concede that Jews, settling in Ethiopia from Yemen, Egypt, or elsewhere, could have introduced such words into Ge’ez but contend that the Beta Israel cannot be traced back to them. And this, it may be, is where egziabher comes in. After all, if a pre-Christian Jewish community had survived as the Beta Israel, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that it would have preserved its own Jewish—that is, originally Hebrew—word or words for God, brought by it to Ethiopia before a parallel Ge’ez word existed? If only a single Hebrew word had remained in its vocabulary, wouldn’t this in all likelihood have been that word? Jewish communities speaking the world’s different languages have always, as do English-speaking Jews, used those languages’ words for God, whether these be Yiddish got, Ladino dio, Arabic allah, or others, but they have also always had their own distinctively Hebrew words and names, like Yoske’s ha-kadosh barukh hu. The fact that this is not the case with the Beta Israel suggests that they may never have had any Hebrew epithets for God to begin with, which would strengthen the argument that their origins are relatively late. Although it is, of course, no proof of anything, it does make one wonder.
President Barack Obama hailed Sen. Tim Kaine's optimism. \| AP Photo Obama: Kaine is a 'progressive fighter' Hillary Clinton now has a running mate in Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, and President Barack Obama is on board with the pick. In a Democratic Party fundraising email sent under Obama's name Saturday morning, the president heaps praise on Kaine, who also made Obama's VP shortlist in 2008, picking out moments like the Virginia Tech massacre to show the then-governor's ability to stand up and be a leader. Story Continued Below "Like Hillary, Tim is an optimist. But like Hillary, he is also a progressive fighter," Obama wrote. Clinton announced Kaine as her running mate late Friday. The presumptive Democratic nominee is scheduled to hold campaign rally on Saturday in Florida to formally introduce him to supporters ahead of next week's Democratic convention in Philadelphia. Obama went on to say: "He's the son of a teacher and an iron worker who's always got working families on his mind. He spent nearly two decades and specialized in representing people who had been denied fair access to housing just because of what they looked like, or because they they had a disability. And when a gunman killed 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech, Tim knew he had a responsibility as governor to offer more than thoughts and prayers to the community he mourned with -- and as a gun owner, he stood up to the gun lobby on their behalf." Kaine, Obama concludes, is a "true progressive" who "will make a great vice president," and "you just can't find anyone with a bad thing to say about him." The email was sent by the Hillary Victory Fund, the joint fundraising commitee between Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Former congressman Anthony Weiner, who resigned in disgrace amid a sexting scandal, said Tuesday he would only come out of political retirement to run against Donald Trump Jr. in a race for the mayor of New York City and said he would beat him “like a rented mule.” Trump Jr., the son of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, has been floated as a possible challenger to Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017 since his well-received speech in support of his father at the Republican National Convention last week in Cleveland. Weiner, a Democrat, was attending his party’s national convention in Philadelphia and was asked about the rumored Trump Jr. candidacy. Weiner suggested that he would return from political exile to take on the son of the billionaire real estate mogul. "The only thing that could make me come out of retirement and run for mayor again is if anyone named Trump ran," Weiner told WNYW-TV. "I would come out of retirement just to beat him like a rented mule, and then I'd turn the keys back over to de Blasio." Trump Jr. retorted on Twitter that Weiner, who resigned his congressional seat after admitting he sent sexually explicit messages to women who weren't his wife, should get lost. Too soon Anthony!!! You probably shouldn't be talking about beating anything ever again. Go back to your cave. https://t.co/Mingecu6o9 — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 26, 2016 Trump Jr., an active campaigner who also is helping to run his father's business, has pointedly not ruled out entering politics. But Trump has made clear that Trump Jr. won't be running for mayor next year. "Donald Trump Jr. has no intention of running for mayor of New York, but I was the one who predicted that Anthony Weiner would flame out and not be able to run for mayor," Trump said in a statement. "People were amazed at how insightful I was." Weiner unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2005. He resigned his congressional seat in 2011. He made another bid for mayor in 2013 and was leading several polls until it was revealed he had continued the questionable behavior after his resignation. He now works as a pundit and consultant. Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, is a top adviser to Hillary Clinton, the first woman to win the convention votes needed to claim the presidential nomination of a major U.S. political party. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
TGL has been following the devolution of political discourse into fear-mongering and apparent race-baiting since Van Jones, the former adviser to the Council on Environmental Quality, first got entangled in it. Like many commentators, this blogger has felt that the level of disrespect shown for Obama, and indeed the office of the president, of late was fueled by racism. At least as far as Rush Limbaugh goes, the nagging question has been answered. Limbaugh called for segregation of school buses in response to an incident in which a white boy was beaten up by two black boys. Here’s the chain of events: In one of probably hundreds of school bus incidents that day, a white student was roughed up punched by two black students while onlookers egged them on. Local law enforcement tentatively declared that the incident was racially motivated. The next day, national conservative blog the Drudge Report made the incident its top story. The same day, the AP reported that law enforcement was now saying that race was not a factor in the fight. (The aggressors objected to the boy’s choice of seats.) The next day, Limbaugh discussed the incident, and even after a caller reminded him that the police were reporting that race was not a factor, said: In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on.’ I wonder if Obama’s going to come to come to the defense of the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard. Frankly, it’s hard to make sense of Limbaugh’s rant, but in what appears to be a continued attempt by the right to redefine racism as blacks’ alleged hatred of whites, with what appeared to be sarcasm, Limbaugh made reference to how racism should be socially acceptable because (according to a study cited in Newsweek), it’s inborn like homosexuality. Apparently still using “racism” in this new frankly Orwellian sense, Limbaugh went on to opine that not only was the beating [remember, over the choice of seats] “racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America. Takeaway: Though hardly even coherent, Limbaugh is attempting to tell white people that they should fear this new “racism”; with presidential support, new anti-white Jim Crow laws and beatings could be just around the corner. Danger scale: high. UPDATE: While some bloggers did miss Limbaugh’s sarcasm in this segment, TGL did not. See paragraph 7. Without sarcasm, Limbaugh would have been calling for a return to segregation, which would be racist. With sarcasm, Limbaugh was suggesting that the “racist” president will bring about a new segregation in which whites are the separate-but-(not) equal underdogs. Which is both racist and race-baiting.
(Reuters photo: Jonathan Ernst) He and Kerry worked with Tehran to excuse and ‘exempt’ its flouting of its commitments. Iran “has fully implemented its required commitments.” That was the representation Obama secretary of state John Kerry made to the American people in announcing on January 16 — “Implementation Day” of President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (aka, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) — that international economic sanctions were consequently being lifted against Iran. Advertisement Secretary Kerry added that “Iran has undertaken significant steps that many, and I do mean many, people doubted would ever come to pass.” Still, Kerry promised, the Obama administration would continue watching the mullahs like a hawk, thus “assuring continued full compliance” with the regime’s JCPOA commitments. The same day, President Obama signed an executive order lifting a number of U.S. economic sanctions against Iran. We now know he also set in motion a furtive $400 million cash transfer to the regime as a ransom (which the administration calls “leverage”) for the release of four American hostages — the first installment of a carefully structured $1.7 billion side payment to Iran (ostensibly in settlement of a failed 1970s arms deal), details about which the administration continues to withhold from Congress and the public. All of this was based on this purported “full implementation” of Iran’s “required commitments” under the JCPOA touted by Obama and Kerry. And all of it was a deliberate, audacious, elaborately plotted lie. Advertisement The Institute for Science and International Security (hereafter, the Institute) reported on Thursday that Iran was not in full compliance with its JCPOA commitments on Implementation Day, as was required — we were led to believe — before Iran was to get sanctions relief. What’s more, the Obama administration not only well knew that Iran was not in compliance; it also colluded with Iran, through the secretive JCPOA device known as the “Joint Commission,” in order to exempt Iran’s multiple violations from compliance requirements. Advertisement Got it? As Obama and Kerry were telling you that Iran had “fully implemented its required commitments,” and that the administration would continue working energetically to ensure future continued “full compliance” with those commitments, Obama and Kerry were working with Iran to excuse its flouting of its commitments — and, it turns out, to lay the groundwork for future “exemptions” from compliance. The Institute’s report outlines violations in connection with Iran’s commitment to a cap of 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium (LEU) and with some of the near–20 percent LEU that Iran was allowed to keep, as well as with the heavy-water cap and large “hot cells” that Iran was also permitted to retain. It was known to the administration, in advance of Implementation Day, that these violations meant that Iran’s nuclear stocks and facilities would not be in compliance. But Obama feared calling Iran on its violations. That would have put pressure on him to deny sanctions relief, which would in turn have induced the jihadist regime to pull out of the JCPOA. So, to bury the mockery the mullahs were making of his signature “achievement,” Obama turned to the JCPOA-created farce known as the “Joint Commission,” a body composed of representatives of the deal’s six parties, whose machinations are shrouded in secrecy. There really are no commitments when transgressions are agreed on and forgiven in advance — lest Iran walk away. That’s not an agreement. It’s an extortion racket. With Iran certain to be in violation, the Institute explains, the Joint Commission convened and quietly exempted the regime from its JCPOA commitments. Kerry and Obama then went out and told Americans and the world that Iran had met its commitments. It appears that this was yet another secret side arrangement that Congress has been kept in the dark about. Advertisement The conspiracy to depict a fraudulent “agreement” while ensuring that Iran gets the benefits without performing its obligations has been evident for months. As Fred Fleitz of the Center for Security Policy reported here at National Review back in March, the administration furtively acceded to Iran’s demand that the International Atomic Energy Agency would no longer provide broad reporting on Iran’s nuclear program. The risible explanation? Thanks to the magnificent JCPOA and Iran’s purported compliance with it, exacting IAEA scrutiny was no longer necessary. It would be sufficient, the IAEA claimed, simply to monitor Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA terms. Advertisement If you feel like your intelligence has been insulted, it has: The IAEA knew, when it made this claim, that Iran’s non-compliance with the JCPOA was being “exempted” by the Obama administration. But what we now know goes a long way toward explaining a curious development that Fred highlighted in his March report: the IAEA’s omission of critical data in its JCPOA compliance reports. This rendered it impossible for independent experts to assess whether Iran was truly keeping its commitments and deserving of sanctions relief, as the Obama administration publicly insisted it was. Advertisement The reports were being kept vague because the administration’s representations, to repeat, were audacious lies. Advertisement But that’s not all. As the invaluable analyst Omri Ceren gleans from the Institute’s report, Obama is in discussions with other JCPOA parties to make the exemptions granted to Iran permanent — in other words, to let Iran rewrite the agreement so that its violations are no longer violations but entitlements. Not just that: Obama is also planning yet more exemptions, in anticipation of yet more Iranian violations. All the while, of course, the president and his secretary of state will keep telling us Iran is keeping its commitments. And why shouldn’t they? After all, there really are no commitments when transgressions are agreed on and forgiven in advance — lest Iran walk away. That’s not an agreement. It’s an extortion racket. To summarize, under the JCPOA, Iran gets paid, gets to keep materially supporting terrorism, gets to build its industrial-size nuclear program, gets to develop ballistic missiles in anticipation of loading nuclear payloads, gets to narrow the “breakout” time necessary to convert to weapons-grade the uranium that Obama is helping them enrich, and gets to run roughshod over any terms it finds too inconvenient. What does the United States get? A devious, enemy-empowering, post-American president waving around his legacy “agreement” as the international press swoons, the armed forces of the jihadist regime menace the United States Navy, and the world edges closer to war.
NEW DELHI: The Government values Internet as an innovative medium and wants it to remain plural, inclusive and democratic, Communications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said Tuesday.“We value Internet as a democratic, plural and inclusive platform and it must not be allowed to be abused by a few,” Prasad said, reiterating that Internet is one of the “finest creations” of the human mind.The government has also made it clear that it will stand by Internet as a medium to empower underprivileged and remain open and non discriminatory. “We have always supported Internet’s multi-stake model and value contribution by citizens, private sector players, social groups and academicians,” he said.Prasad also reiterated that the government fully respects the freedom of expression on social media. Working on ambitious programs such as Digital India and Make in India, the communications and IT department is all set to present a report card to the Narendra Modi-led NDA government which is completing a two-year term in office on May 26 this year.During the 20 months in office, the department has put 1 lakh kilometers of optic fibre cable on the ground and 1.30 lakh kilometers of pipe has been deployed, the minister added.The government is also banking on Common Service Centres (CSC) to facilitate connectivity for digital services in rural and remote areas that lack wireless access. Common Service Centres, Prasad said, are important for Digital India as they allow a gamut of services such as healthcare, banking, insurance and other citizen-centric services.“We have created 157,000 service centres in rural regions and aims to add another 1 lakh CSCs in the next one year,” Prasad added. The department is also taking an aggressive approach towards empowering women as village-level entrepreneurs or VLEs to run these common service centers to earn their livelihood."We have come out with a BPO scheme for India’s small towns as the digital profile of the country is limited to urban cities like Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Pune, Bangaluru and Hyderabad among others," Prasad said.The government is initiating a tendering process for 48,000-seat BPO centers in small towns soon for which it has received proposals from 17 companies so far, encompassing 125,000 seats. “We want telecom companies to come forward and pick up districts and we can provide an enabling environment,” he added.Prasad also said that the IT sector is a key driver for the growth of the economy and exhorted that electronics manufacturing must push ahead. India’s IT exports have reached $100 billion.On the other hand, the government has received investment proposals of more than Rs 1.20 lakh crore for electronics manufacturing under the mega Make in India program. The mobile devices production in India has jumped to nearly 11 crore units in 2015-16, Prasad added.
Swiftly expanding trade ties with Cuba, the Obama administration opened the door to easier travel and a wide range of new export opportunities with the communist island starting Friday, punching the biggest hole to date in America's half-century-old embargo. Less than a month after the Cold War foes agreed to end their enmity, the Commerce and Treasury departments unveiled new rules Thursday permitting U.S. citizens to visit Cuba without special permits. Most U.S. travellers still will be required to go on supervised group trips, but now virtually any U.S. company or organization can offer such trips without the paperwork and inspections that discouraged past expansion of travel to Cuba. Some tour operators, already seeing unprecedented interest in legal travel to Cuba, expect some tourists to simply ignore the restrictions. American companies also now will be permitted to export telephones, computers and Internet technology, and to send supplies to private Cuban firms. However, Cuban authorities have said nothing about the restrictions they might impose on U.S. products entering a country that has long frustrated foreign investors with red tape and tapped-out infrastructure. The changes are the latest step in U.S. President Barack Obama's plan to rebuild relations with Cuba after a history marred by suspicion, espionage and conflict. The new regulations come three days after U.S. officials confirmed the release of 53 political prisoners Cuba had promised to free. 'Isolation has not worked' The U.S. is now "one step closer to replacing out-of-date policies," Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said Thursday. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the new rules "immediately enable the American people to provide more resources to empower the Cuban population to become less dependent upon the state-driven economy." They also allow U.S. citizens to start bringing home small amounts of Cuban cigars, long adored by aficionados but banned under U.S. law. The limit is $100 for alcohol and tobacco products and $400 in total goods. U.S. President Obama shakes hands with Cuban President Raul Castro in Soweto, South Africa, for a memorial service for Nelson Mandela. Since then U.S. sanctions have eased dramatically. (Associated Press) Only Congress can fully end the 54-year embargo. Obama announced last month he would soften the restrictions, arguing that "these 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked." The new spirit of cooperation emerged after 18 months of secret talks that culminated in the exchange of imprisoned spies and the release of Alan Gross, a U.S. government contractor who had been imprisoned in Cuba for five years. The few U.S. companies facilitating travel to Cuba say inquiries have exploded since December and American visits are expected to surge this year from about 90,000 annually. "We're hiring more people. We've secured more hotel rooms and assets in Cuba to provide additional travel," said Tom Popper, president of New York-based insightCuba. Commercial flights between the two nations are still some time away. Before airlines offer routine service from one country to another, the two governments must agree on the terms in a treaty. Major airlines look to set up flights Such an agreement did exist between the U.S. and Cuba in the 1950s. However, Thursday afternoon the U.S. Transportation Department posted a notice saying the two nations need to start fresh. The U.S. airlines with 1950s permission to fly to Cuba will not suddenly regain that right and are not favored in the government's new deliberations. "The U.S. government will engage with the government of Cuba to assess our aviation relations and establish a bilateral basis for further expansion of air services," Susan L. Kurland, the department's assistant secretary for aviation and international affairs, wrote in the notice. United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and JetBlue Airways have all expressed an interest in flying to the island nation. Hotels in Havana and elsewhere generally fall short of international standards, and those with better food and service are almost always fully booked during the winter high season. So the tourism surge could be challenging. "American tourists are really demanding," said Maikel Gonzalez, a 34-year-old hotel receptionist in Havana. "How do I explain to one that the taxi didn't come because it doesn't have tires or that there's no water in the rooms?" Cubans also can legally rent out their homes or apartments, which could mean money outside of state control going to private citizens — something U.S. officials say they want. Most of the other possible changes now depend on Cuban President Raul Castro's government. General travel ban still in place Cuba is already awash in American products brought in people's luggage, including iPhones and flat-screen TVs. The main barriers to Internet access are high prices and restrictions imposed by a government desperate for hard currency and worried about allowing citizens unrestricted communications. Cuban officials are keen on greater travel by American tourists and the hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans who currently visit the island each year under a general license. American officials stress that a general travel prohibition for Americans remains in force. Travellers must certify compliance with U.S. laws with airlines in advance, officials say, and investigators can demand to see records and documents up to five years after a trip is made. Infractions can incur penalties. But the 12 categories of people now allowed to visit to Cuba are broad. Months after the musicians Jay-Z and Beyonce went to Havana, a Treasury Department auditor declared their trip legal under rules allowing educational travel. They visited an art school and a local theatre group. And cracking down on violators under the new arrangement may prove difficult. "It's basically unenforceable," said John McAuliff, executive director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, a nongovernmental organization that organizes trips to Cuba.
Takeaway: The fewer new and rich experiences we have, the quicker time passes. The solution is two-fold: make an effort to experience more interesting things, and savor what’s familiar. Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 5s. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed time has started to move more quickly. Of course, the days always tick forward at the same speed—we just relate to them differently over time. I recently indulged a curiosity, and dug a bit into exactly how we perceive time, as well as what we can do to stretch the minutes further. Does time always fly by faster as we get older? What I discovered surprised me. Time does, in fact, pass more quickly as we get older—but we’re also able to reverse that feeling. There’s a curious reason for this timely speed-up. It’s similar to how a return journey feels like it takes half as long as the trip there. Return journeys are familiar, not new and novel. We pay less attention to them, and as a result, process the experience less deeply. The newer and richer your experiences, the slower time passes. You’ve probably experienced this in your own life. When you were a kid, every experience was new and rich—each friend you made, every conversation you had, and each time you got in trouble was a unique and memorable experience. Your teenage years likely brought another onslaught of novel experiences: your first kiss, first drink, or first serious girlfriend or boyfriend. Typically, the older we get, the fewer new and novel experiences we have. Like driving back home after a long road trip, the route is more familiar. We recognize the landmarks and milestones we’ve already passed, and this second experience is less rich and new.1 The amount of dopamine (a pleasure chemical) found in our brain also steadily declines as we get older, starting in our 20s. Research has found that dopamine helps regulate how we perceive time—the more dopamine that is present in our brain, the slower time passes.2 (Conveniently enough, our brain releases dopamine each time we experience something new and rich.) In reflecting on this research, I noticed I spend much of my day immersed in familiar things. I listen to the same podcasts, play my favorite iPad games, and bounce between a few apps, consuming social media updates similar to ones I’ve consumed in the past. These habits are neither new or rich. While many distractions are novel, few are as rich as completely new experiences—talking to a stranger in a cafe, traveling to a place we’ve never been before, or going skydiving for the first time. Distractions make time pass more quickly and lead us to fill the gaps in our day with what’s familiar. Two ways to slow time I discovered the solution to this is two-fold: Seek as many new and novel experiences as possible; Savor what’s already familiar. Seeking new and novel experiences lets us slow time. Instead of going through the motions, we do things we’ve never done before—activities that are rich and release dopamine in our brain. Each new meal, thing we learn, and place we visit is an opportunity to slow time. We step outside of what’s comfortable. Savoring what’s familiar does something similar. Instead of spending our time on autopilot mode, we notice the richness embedded in our familiar routines. Choose something familiar that you experience regularly—drinking your morning coffee, picking up your kids from daycare, or chatting with a coworker—and make a concerted effort to savor, and be grateful for that experience. I personally find meditation, more than almost anything else, helps me savor these small things every day. If you feel like time is passing too quickly, you’re not alone. Seeking new and novel experiences, and savoring the familiar, is the antidote.
Proposal: Safety Through Standard Wallets Alex Amsel Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 19, 2016 The complexity of handling assets safely in Ethereum has been exposed by TheDAO. I’d like to propose a change to Ethereum to increase safety for applications creators and users alike. The same proposal applies to all smart contract platforms and that can include non turing complete ones. The fundamental issue is that Ethereum will protect assets of value yet it’s easy to accidentally or purposely include an exploit. Use of the exploit rewards the attacker, penalises users, and reduces trust in the overall system. Some may disagree but the system is supposed to work for users first and foremost. If it doesn’t, how are we any different from the existing banking system which doesn’t care about the destruction caused by systemic failures, by error or design? I’d like a system which I can trust, yes, but also one which protects me. That’s speaking both as a user and an application developer. I’d like to propose that Ethereum is tooled with standard asset holding and latching contracts (wallets essentially). These contracts would allow: Consensus based halt and emergency recovery. Edit: It’s up to users whether they trust those providing consensus, who may just be the developers, dao like curators, or formal arbitrators. (Note that users are already trusting the contract from the developers wrote and especially early on they can’t be sure of security, regardless of security reviews) Per user security controls, e.g. amount, withdrawal address, time, countersigning, recovery options Per application security controls for application withdrawals, e.g. D(A)O proposals, non solo splits, DO expenditure, royalties, ‘dividend’ payments Future: Arbitration All assets should be held in contracts specifically designed to be highly limited in scope and, ideally, mathematically provable. These contracts should be part of the standard toolkit, not just suggestions. As well as the code, a human language intention of the contract should be expressed in full. Failure of any of these contracts should then be considered as an acceptable hard fork request since these should be considered as integral as the core protocol. These contracts should also include user wallets, and all of them should be natively supported by all wallet software. The reasoning behind this is that the assets are the fundamental value that we care about. Ethereum has provided a wonderful system but it’s clear that it’s incomplete. Standard equivalents to hot and cold wallets, where application creators and users can be in control of their security, is something that decentralised platforms can do superbly well. This significantly reduces the chance of losses from both deliberately designed exploits and bugs, both of which are a deep concern. As a result of the recent failure and should such contracts be viable technically, I firmly believe they should be a core part of Ethereum. However, they will always be optional to use so contract authors who do not want those features can continue to operate as they wish. Think of it as using ethereum at a lower level. Anyone using such contracts then truly understands their risks. Without them, I fear that generic smart contracts simply cannot be trusted. I also fear that we’ll be like Bitcoin where we see thefts galore and can do nothing about it, living in a deeply uncaring world I’m not comfortable with (and most of the world certainly wouldn’t be). By implementing protections within ethereum itself we can show the power of software but retain both a human aspect and empower individuals to choose their own security. Update: From initial conversations it seems like it’s technically feasible for user controlled assets (ether, tokens) and possibly feasible in a sufficiently generalised for DAPPs. The latter may only result in template contracts that need minor amends for DAPP functionality rather than a fundamental contract with adjustable parameters, but that needs further research. It’s also important to understand that the parameters control the risk. Faulty logic and faulty set up can still cause errors but the wallet contract can limit the exposure. It will also be easier to perform security reviews of the use of standard contracts which hold the assets. It may be impossible to predict the logic flaws of surrounding code, but it will be possible to evidence the risk of losses such that a human being can make a decision, including if they trust the arbiters to protect them. The automation of asset transference has to be retained, so it’s about building in safeguards for when pre-agreed safe limits are breached. For example, this could be time based latches for all DAPP expenditure over a certain limit. For user wallets, it’s about supporting notions of multi-signature approval, latches to prevent more than agreed amounts moving per time period, and so on. This means there are also user experience considerations. With standard contracts in place containing a range of features, wallet developers can focus on UI. Finally, developers are constantly told not to roll their own crypto. Managing assets of value on a blockchain should come with similar warnings. You can always do it but you better know what you’re doing. For everyone else, use the template contracts — and even they need handling with care.
SCOPE: Diets rich in cruciferous vegetables are associated with lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which may contribute to potential health-promoting properties of these vegetables. We investigate whether sulforaphane (SF), an isothiocyanate (ITC) obtained from broccoli, could suppress LPS-induced transcription and subsequent pro-inflammatory cytokine secretion at a physiologically relevant concentration using in vitro models of chronic inflammation. METHODS AND RESULTS: We find that exposure of the LPS receptor Toll-like receptor-4 (TLR4) to physiologically appropriate concentrations of SF under non-reducing conditions results in covalent modification of cysteine residues 246 and 609. We further demonstrate that the changes in expression of 1210 genes (p ≤ 0.01) in THP-1 monocytes and the secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines in both human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and THP-1 monocytes induced by LPS exposure can be completely suppressed through exposure with physiologically appropriate concentrations of SF. Finally, we show that in vivo exposure of human PBMCs to ITCs within human circulation reduces secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines following subsequent ex vivo LPS challenge (p < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Covalent modification of TLR4 by ITCs and resultant suppression of LPS-induced cell signalling could lead to reductions in levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines in people with chronic diseases who consume diets rich in cruciferous vegetables. © 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.
With "Hillary flunkies" proclaiming holier-than-thou perspectives on the president, after failing in their efforts to urge Americans not to vote for Trump, some 'so-called' celebrities are choosing not to "obstruct" Congress, but work towards a solution. Have no fear, Lindsay Lohan is here... to solve the Syrian refugee crisis! After visiting Syrian refugee camps with Turkish dictator president Recep Tayyip Erdogan (and a token seven-year-old refugee)... Lindsay Lohan urged during a Facebook Live interview with the Daily Mail, that she wanted a sit-down meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Hollywood celebrities to discuss the Syrian refugee crisis. "I want to try to get the word out to Donald Trump bring him over there, have him see all the positive things they are doing over there and all America can do to help as well." Lohan mentioned Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Rachel McAdams as possible other celebrities she would want involved with the meeting. Why did the world's leaders not think to ask Hollywood before? What fools, the solution was there the whole time... have celebrities adopt immigrants from the seven nations on Trump's list. Brilliant!
In the wake of the MegaUpload shutdown Bloomberg interviewed Yochai Benkler, Prof. of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Benkler criticizes the actions of the Department of Justice, which he characterizes as “aggressive.” “What is a surprise is how aggressive the move is, how much it uses extensions of criminal law enforcement and copyright liability to go after and seize assets and people in anticipation of a full trial,” he says. According to the Prof. the shutdown of MegaUpload is yet another example of the copyright industry hampering technological innovation. “When a new technology comes along […] and destabilizes the way the industries have always made money, the first gut response throughout the 20th century has been; let’s shut down this technology.” As has been demonstrated many times in the past, these lawsuits can kill technologies and companies, the prof adds. “What’s chilling here is that a company can be served with a one-sided indictment that lists a whole set of quasi-legitimate and legitimate technological components that lots of other companies use.” “By the time it will be finished litigating whether that’s enough or not it is dead, because these procedures for forfeiture during the trial will kill the company”
According to a duo of Australian scientists, Aboriginal society has preserved memories of Australia’s coastline dating back to 11,000 – 5,300 BC. Prof. Patrick Nunn of the University of the Sunshine Coast and Dr Nick Reid of the University of New England analyzed Aboriginal stories from 21 places around Australia’s coastline, each describing a time when sea levels were significantly lower than today. “The present sea levels in Australia were reached 7,000 years ago and as such any stories about the coastline stretching much further out to sea had to pre-date that time,” “These stories talk about a time when the sea started to come in and cover the land, and the changes this brought about to the way people lived – the changes in landscape, the ecosystem and the disruption this caused to their society.” “It’s important to note that it’s not just one story that describes this process. There are many stories, all consistent in their narrative, across 21 diverse sites around Australia’s coastline.” Some of the stories are mythologized, some plain narrative. About half came directly from Aboriginal informants, the others relayed through Europeans. “Anything that goes back thousands of years – nearly 13,000 years in some cases – has to be quite exceptional,” Prof. Nunn said. “It’s a remarkable time period when we consider our own memories and what we can remember even with the aid of books and other information.” “I believe these stories endured that long partly due to the harshness of Australia’s natural environment, which meant that each generation had to pass on knowledge to the next in a systematic way to ensure its survival,” he said. The results are reported in a paper published online by the journal Australian Geographer on September 7. _____ Patrick D. Nunn & Nicholas J. Reid. Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7,000 Years Ago. Australian Geographer, published online September 7, 2015; doi: 10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539
Though things could still change over the next five days, the Florida Gators on Monday afternoon released an updated depth chart ahead of Saturday’s game. Florida omitted players that are not participating against the Tennessee Volunteers due to injury or suspension; therefore, the depth chart below is an “active” version rather than a “best-case scenario” version. Three significant changes were made to the depth chart this week, as noted with (»). OFFENSE QB: 6 Jeff Driskel, 3 Tyler Murphy RB: 24 Matt Jones, 33 Mack Brown, 10 Valdez Showers FB: 43 Hunter Joyer, 25 Gideon Ajagbe WR (X): 1 Quinton Dunbar, 11 Demarcus Robinson WR (Z): 83 Solomon Patton, 5 Ahmad Fulwood » 13 Latroy Pittman is suspended for Saturday’s game. F Position: 8 Trey Burton, 30 Mike McNeely » 13 Latroy Pittman is suspended for Saturday’s game. TE: 88 Clay Burton, 87 Tevin Westbrook, 84 Colin Thompson LT: 70 D.J. Humphries, 76 Max Garcia LG: 76 Max Garcia, 63 Trip Thurman C: 72 Jonotthan Harrison, 64 Kyle Koehne RG: 67 Jon Halapio, 64 Kyle Koehne, 77 Ian Silberman » Halapio returns after missing two games with a torn pectoral. RT: 73 Tyler Moore, 74 Trenton Brown DEFENSE DE: 90 Jonathan Bullard, 94 Bryan Cox, Jr. NT: 44 Leon Orr, 4 Damien Jacobs DT: 2 Dominique Easley, 55 Darious Cummings Buck DE: 6 Dante Fowler, Jr., 95 Alex McCalister SLB: 7 Ronald Powell, 13 Daniel McMillian MLB: 3 Antonio Morrison, 51 Michael Taylor » Morrison (suspension) listed as a starter for the first time this season. WLB: 11 Neiron Ball, 49 Darrin Kitchens RCB: 15 Loucheiz Purifoy, 1 Vernon Hargreaves III LCB: 5 Marcus Roberson, 1 Vernon Hargreaves III Nickel CB: 24 Brian Poole, 1 Vernon Hargreaves III » Hargreaves is the back-up at three cornerback positions. Dime CB: 20 Marcus Maye, 31 Cody Riggs S: 14 Jaylen Watkins, 20 Marcus Maye » Watkins replaces Maye as the starter. “You just can’t give up big plays. We can’t afford that to happen. You got to tackle better. Marcus knows that. Jaylen has played well at safety for us. He will still play some corner, but he’s a guy that covers well,” head coach Will Muschamp said Monday. S: 31 Cody Riggs, 21 Jabari Gorman SPECIAL TEAMS K: 16 Austin Hardin, 97 Brad Phillips P: 4 Kyle Christy, 40 Justin Vogel H: 3 Tyler Murphy, 43 Kyle Crofoot LS: 46 Drew Ferris, 43 Kyle Crofoot KR: 83 Solomon Patton, 15 Loucheiz Purifoy » 10 Valdez Showers replaced as the back-up returner. PR: 5 Marcus Roberson, 8 Trey Burton, 24 Brian Poole
Purdue has its first gold medalist of the Rio Olympics and it comes from an unlikely source. Amanda Elmore, a West Lafayette native who rowed for the Purdue club rowing team before graduating and moving on to Michigan, where she also competed, was a member of the U.S. women's 8's coxed rowing team that won gold this morning. The women's team completed the course in 6:01.49 to win its third straight Olympic gold int he event. Great Britain was second at 6:03.98 followed closely by Romania in 6:04.10. This is officially the second medal of these games by Purdue athletes. David Boudia and Steele Johnson already won silver in men's synchronized diving and both should be in the hunt for a medal in the individual competition. Purdue still has Kara Winger and Carmiesha Cox who can medal in track & field as well as Paula Reto in golf. Finally, Aya Traore has been playing basketball for Senegal, but they are out of medal contention.
4 wounded in shooting outside San Leandro nightclub San Francisco police are investigating separate stabbings over the weekend in the Mission District and Chinatown that left two men wounded, including one with life-threatening injuries. San Francisco police are investigating separate stabbings over the weekend in the Mission District and Chinatown that left two men wounded, including one with life-threatening injuries. Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Image, Getty Image Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Image, Getty Image Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close 4 wounded in shooting outside San Leandro nightclub 1 / 1 Back to Gallery Four people were wounded after gunfire erupted outside a nightclub in San Leandro early Monday morning, officials said. Officers responded to reports of the shooting in the parking lot of Club Caliente on the 14500 block of East 14th Street just before 2 a.m., said Lt. Robert McManus, a police spokesman. Four people were injured, all hit by gunfire, McManus said, but none of their injuries was thought to be life-threatening. All were taken to nearby hospitals for treatment, but none of the victims was identified. No arrests were made, and a description of the shooter or shooters was not immediately available. McManus did not say what may have led to the shooting. Kale Williams is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: [email protected] Twitter: @sfkale
Collaborative robots are not safe to use along workers! It sounds odd but we cannot assume that using a collaborative robot alongside workers is entirely safe. There are a lot of things to take in consideration before claiming such things. We recently installed a collaborative robot on our shop floor and we needed to fence it. Read more on our process to implement a safe working environment. Humans > Robots The popular way of thinking is to assume that collaborative robots are safe, which is totally wrong. I’ll give you an example: make your collaborative robot swing a knife close to workers. Is your robot still safe? No, it isn’t. On the same note, if you use a large industrial robot to carry a car but the robot monitors your position and stops when you enter its working radius, you are in presence of a safe collaborative robot. Confused yet? What you need to know is that there’s a misconception of what a collaborative robot is. Most people think a collaborative robot is a gentle robot that will stop when it hits you. In reality, ‘’collaborative robot’’ is a term that regroups all the robots included in the 4 collaboration modes (ISO 10218 & ISO/TS 15066); Safety Monitored Stop, Hand Guiding, Speed & Separation Monitoring, and finally Power and Force limiting. Note that Power and Force Limiting is the collaboration mode that most people recall as being ‘’collaborative’’. With that being said, this safety standard mentions the obligation of doing a risk assessment during your robotic implementation. And this is where it all changed for our particular cell. A robot that handles a knife is a lot more dangerous than a robot that handles a teddy bear at the same speed ISO/TS 15066, I BEG YOUR PARDON? As we were designing our robotic cell, we came across the idea of using a UR10 from Universal Robots. I had worked with a UR previously, so this time would be easy for me. The speed and payload specs were fine for my application, the price was OK and I was able to fit Robotiq products easily on it. It was a no brainer. As I went further into the design phase of our product testing cell, I realized I needed to have extrusions of different lengths to test my product. I needed to lift weights by the tip of these extrusions. At some point I took a step back, looked at the parts that the robot would carry and the speed at which it would operate, and I thought to myself: this is quite dangerous. How to Perform a Risk Assessment for Collaborative Robots eBook At that moment, I went back and re-read the entire ISO/TS 15066 eBook, which treats of collaborative robot safety. I went through all the different force, pressure and energy limitations and realized I needed to 1) do a risk assessment; 2) assist in making the cell safer for the workers. So I analyzed all the potential risks and reduced the ones that seemed most dangerous to me. I went and removed some sharp edges that were unnecessary, tried to see if I could reduce the speed of the robot and went through all the different hypotheses to make my robot as collaborative as possible. It turned out that, by design, my application was not collaborative. The robot was carrying weights and sharp parts rapidly, and I was overshooting the safety recommendations of the ISO standard. It all came down to the conclusion that I needed to fence my robot for the following reasons: Force: We limited the robot safety feature to 150 N, which would result in a safe collaborative cell in most cases. Perhaps we were not sure if that value was exact in a particular orientation. We tested the scenario and we observed that the robot was not reading well the force applied on a specific orientation. We were not ready to live with a robot/worker impact that could be higher than 150 N. Pressure: Some sharp edges were mandatory in the robotic cell (by design). Even with a limited speed, the size of the surface was so small that the pressure (force divided by the area) was so high. We couldn’t think of having an impact at that exact spot. Tip Speed Ratio: The linear speed of the robot was limited to a value that was acceptable for a safe collaboration. But when we considered the angular speed of the tip of the weight, we realised that the energy deployed in the case of an impact with this weight would cause a considerable collision with the worker. Transient Impact VS Quasi-Static Impact: By design, some robot motions were involving a contact between the robot’s moving part and a fixed part of the cell at a considerable speed. That motion would result in a quasi-static impact which is limited to a smaller force/pressure. The robot was overshooting that value. And this is where the hardcore safety geeks would jump in and say: ‘’You could have used a different type of safety sensors and not use fencing to make your robot safer.’’ In fact, I could have designed my cell to make it compliant to Safety Monitoring Stop or Speed and Separation Monitoring, but the fact is that my robotic cell by design needed to be put inside a very limited workspace and that the robot motion would always be stopped and slowed down because of the proximity of the users. Thus, the best way to make my application fast and reliable was to put a physical separation between the worker and the robot. Personally I have used some extrusions and plexiglass to separate the robot from the external world. It was fairly easy to do and can eventually be dismounted and used for further applications. Safety should be your main concern when designing a robotic cell How to estimate a risk? If you are still wondering how I ranked the different risks and how I learned the different potential risks of a robotic cell, you should know that we have built a resource to clarify these notions. First, we have the ISO/TS 15066 Explained eBook that will help you understand what the ISO standard is and what is its aim. We also have a risk assessment template that will help you perform your robot cell risk assessment. and most importantly help you rank the different risks of your robotic cell, and reduce them. Safety should be your main concern when designing a robotic cell. In fact, don’t assume that a robot is collaborative and/or safe before you have analyzed the entire robotic cell. Remember, a robot that handles a knife is a lot more dangerous than a robot that handles a teddy bear at the same speed.
The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday. “If the various estimates we have received… come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish,” Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program’s green economy initiative, told journalists in New York. A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones — ultimately resulting in a thriving industry. The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing ecological destruction around the planet. UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was “drawing down to the very capital” on which it relies. However, “our institutions, our governments are perfectly capable of changing course, as we have seen with the extraordinary uptake of interest. Around, I think it is almost 30 countries now have engaged with us directly, and there are many others revising the policies on the green economy,” he said. Collapse of fish stocks is not only an environmental matter. One billion people, mostly from poorer countries, rely on fish as their main animal protein source, according to the UN. The Green Economy report estimates there are 35 million people fishing around the world on 20 million boats. About 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of people financially linked to 520 million. According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of commercially viable catches by 2050. The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish — with little attempt to allow the fish populations to recover. Fishing fleet capacity is “50 to 60 percent” higher than it should be, Sukhdev said. “What is scarce here is fish,” he said, calling for an increase in the stock of fish, not the stock of fishing capacity.” Creating marine preservation areas to allow female fish to grow to full size, thereby hugely increasing their fertility, is one vital solution, the report says. Another is restructuring the fishing fleets to favor smaller boats that — once fish stocks recover — would be able to land bigger catches. “We believe solutions are on hand, but we believe political will and clear economics are required,” Sukhdev said.
Tony Kanaan prior to the 2013 Indianapolis 500 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (Photo11: Andrew Weber, USA TODAY Sports) INDIANAPOLIS — Tony Kanaan finally broke through to win his first Indianapolis 500, winning under caution. Kanaan, who has become an Indianapolis favorite, ended years of frustration at the "Greatest Spectacle in Racing." Kanaan, who thanked his crew over and over as he crossed the finish line, said before the race, "it was win or else." Two late cautions helped Kanaan achieve victory. Graham Rahal crashed with seven laps remaining in the 97th running of the Indianapolis 500. Rahal, the son of 1986 champion Bobby Rahal was looking for his first Indianapolis 500 win. The Rahals were hoping to join Al Unser and Al Unser Jr. as the only father-son duo to win the "Greatest Spectacle in Racing." Reigning IndyCar champion Ryan-Hunter Reay was leading Tony Kanaan, Carlos Munoz when the caution flag flew. One lap after the green flag flew with four laps remaining, Dario Franchitti hit the wall, bringing another yellow flag. Kanaan grabbed the lead right before the caution flew. Hildebrand crashes early J.R. Hildrebrand is the first driver out of the Indianapolis 500 after a hard wreck on the fourth lap. Hildrebrand spun out between Turns 1 and 2, hitting the wall hard and scraping away most of the left side of his car. MORE: Boston Marathon runners finish race at Indy The northern California native, who walked away from the car under his own power, said he might have been slightly off line. "I got a little loose in the middle of the corner," Hildebrand said to television reporters after being checked and released from the infield care center. "I'm incredibly disappointed. I thought we had a car to run up front." RACING: Kimball cleared to race after illness Hildrebrand, who drives the the No. 4 National Guard car for Panther Racing, started 10th in Sunday's race. He's best known for crashing on the last turn of the last lap in the 2011 race, costing him a shot to win as a rookie. He finished 14th at Indianapolis last year. PHOTOS: 2013 Indianapolis 500 Sato spins, saves car Takuma Sato spun on the exit of Turn 2 on the 57th lap, but recovered without hitting anything and continued on the lead lap. It wasn't the first Indy spin for Sato, who was running among the top 10 a few laps before the spin. Last year, he was challenging Dario Franchitti for the lead when he spun and crashed on the final lap. Franchitti went on to win, while Sato finished 17th. Sunday's spin dropped him to 24th. Carpenter wobbles under caution A misstep under caution nearly caught race leader Ed Carpenter by surprise. Carpenter was swerving back and forth to keep his tires clean and warm when he suddenly dipped onto the infield grass in Turn 3 on the 39th lap. He recovered and retained the lead, telling his crew by radio that he nearly lost control while scrubbing his tires. Shortly before that, a crash cost Sebastian Saavedra. Saavedra crashed in Turn 2 on the 36th lap, blaming Pippa Mann for forcing him too low. He was not injured. Rahal, Jakes fined for pit road infractions IndyCar officials administered financial penalties to Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing teammates Graham Rahal and James Jakes during Sunday's race for improper entry and exit of pit lane. Jakes was later assessed a penalty on Lap 95 for an undisclosed pit safety violation. Each was fined $10,000 for the earlier violations, track officials reported, although the specific nature of those violations was not disclosed. The violations came during pit stops after Sebastian Saavedra crashed on Lap 35. Officials said the drivers violated Rule 7.1.3.2.6, which reads, "The pit lane will start and end at points designated by Officials. The pit entrance and pit lane exit lanes are considered part of the Track. Drivers exiting the pit lane shall rejoin the pack relative to the position they are to the Safety Car and/or Cars on Track as they cross the blend out line. Taking improper position upon leaving the pit lane or failure of a Driver and/or Entrant to follow the direction of Officials may result in a minimum one-lap penalty. The Official's determination of the order is not subject to protest or appeal." It was the fourth $10,000 fine for Rahal Letterman Lanigan in four days. After last week's qualifying sessions, the team was fined $10,000 each for two infractions in attempts to keep cars cool in the pits. The team was assessed $10,000 for Graham Rahal's car and another $10,000 for Michael Jourdain Jr., who failed to qualify for the race. PHOTOS: History of the Indianapolis 500
China is becoming attractive to global talent on an unprecedented level due to the nation’s economic size and vibrancy, according to a report released on Saturday by US business magazine Forbes. The 2018 Global Talent Mobility and Wealth Management report predicts the country will be a major exchange hub for global talent flow by 2022. ADVERTISEMENT “By that time, China will be not only the largest export country of students studying abroad, but also a major destination for global talent to settle down,” said Russell Flannery, Shanghai bureau chief of Forbes China. No country in history has met both criteria, he said, adding that although India used to have the largest number of students overseas, it has not been attractive enough to global talent, such as people from the United States. “China’s role as a hub in global talent mobility will further consolidate and it will help the country to integrate its educational resources globally. Meanwhile, it will provide more competitive job opportunities for overseas talent,” Flannery said. It is the third year in a row the report has been released by Forbes and Wailian Overseas Consulting Group, a Shanghai-based investment and immigration company. Kenneth Jarrett, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, said he has witnessed a growing number of US workers coming to China over the past few years, as well as more Chinese students returning to China to set up their own businesses. To him, this indicates China’s increasing participation in the global economy. The Chinese government has also attached greater importance to global talent, especially since the Organization Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee introduced the Recruitment Program of Global Experts in late 2008. By the end of last year, the country had attracted more than 6,000 high-level overseas workers under the program. At the same time, the return of Chinese talent who studied or worked overseas has been noticeably increasing. Experts in the science and technology sector have made up the majority of returned talent, prompted by the government’s policies and rising domestic companies, according to the Forbes report. ADVERTISEMENT “While other countries are tightening their immigration policies, China should seize the opportunity to come up with more open and friendly talent policies to attract world-class talent, said Wang Huiyao, founder of the think tank Center for China and Globalization. Read Next LATEST STORIES MOST READ
In a fourball match at the 2016 Ryder Cup, 6-foot-5 Thomas Pieters belted a drive 324 yards. His ball was the shortest in the group. Rory McIlroy pounded a 383-yard tee shot on another hole. Drives exceeding 350 yards are seemingly routine for Dustin Johnson. These days in pro golf, power is prevalent. Today’s era benefits from lighter shafts, larger clubheads with springy faces and a solid core multi-layered golf ball. Players are bigger, stronger, more athletic, pay close attention to nutrition and hone their bodies in the gym. Still, the question lingers, how far would golf’s legends hit the ball with today’s equipment? Grainy, black-and-white footage on YouTube, books, magazine articles and anecdotes provide a starting point. First, let’s hear from a six-time major champion who starred in the 1970s. “If we had (the new) golf ball in my day," Lee Trevino told USA Today in 2007, “The best of us would have hit it 300 yards and Jack Nicklaus would have hit it 360.” It’s not a stretch to believe Trevino. Nicklaus cranked a 341-yard blast to win the PGA Championship’s long drive competition in 1963 with the “old ball.” When he was 18 years old, he and Arnold Palmer drove the green on a 330-yard par 4 at Athens (Ohio) CC, a story Nicklaus shared at Palmer’s memorial service. Today, such drives are routine. According to shotlink data, there were 200 measured drives of 375 yards or longer during the 2015-16 PGA Tour season, including eight surpassing the 400-yard barrier. Study the career of Fred Couples to grasp the impact technology has made on driving distance at the game’s highest level. In 1982, Couples was a limberbacked 22-year-old with immense flexibility. He averaged 268.7 yards in driving distance, which was eighth on the PGA Tour. In 2009, Couples was a 49-year-old with a decade-and-a-half battling serious back problems. He averaged 297.5 yards in driving distance, which was 24th on the PGA Tour. His former World Cup partner, Davis Love III, led the PGA Tour in 1986 at age 22, averaging 285 yards per drive. Two decades later, he’d gained 13 yards. This year at age 52, Love was one of the eight golfers who had a 400-plus drive. Technology made gradual progress for more than 60 years, according to Nicklaus. In the last 20 years, it exploded. “Once we got into a wound golf ball and once we got into steel shafts, the game from basically the early 1930s until 1995 changed very little, and all the golf courses that were built needed very little adjustment to be able to handle any kind of a tournament," Nicklaus told USA Today in 2007. Ben Hogan hit his driver 265 yards, according to an article in the June 10, 1949 issue of Time Magazine. Even 15 years later he still hit drives that distance in a Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf match against the equally long-hitting Sam Snead. Considering their length off the tee would’ve put them in the top 10 in 1980, it’s fair to assume they’d rank at least as high today. Snead remained flexible and powerful into his 60s due to a daily yoga routine. With his size, strength and fluid golf swing, he’d challenge J.B. Holmes, who led the PGA Tour in driving distance in 2015-16 (314.5 yards). As Nicklaus states, the ball has played a large role. Driving distances changed little over decades. IBM recorded driving distance data at 11 PGA Tour events in 1968. The top 10 players averaged 270.2 yards, the average was 264.0 yards and Nicklaus led the Tour at 276.0 yards. Adding 35 yards for increased speed, hotter driver and better ball, Nicklaus would've averaged 311.0 last season. When Tour pros put the Titleist Pro VI in play in late 2000, they automatically hit the ball 10-15 yards farther with each iron. A recent study also sheds light on the subject. Chad Campbell averaged 291 yards off the tee in 2009, ranking 70th on the PGA Tour. At the Byron Nelson Classic that year, he hit Titleist Balata 100 balls on the driving range with a persimmon driver supplied by noted golf author Curt Sampson, according to a blog post published at GolfDigest.com. The results were startling. His average drive with the Byron Nelson wooden driver went 247 yards. The ball carried 270 yards off his driver, which measured 45” and 230 off the relic, which measured 43”. He swung the 150-gram steel shaft in the persimmon at 106 miles per hour. He swung the 75-gram graphite shaft in his driver at 113 miles per hour. A driver two inches longer and two ounces lighter enabled Campbell to generate more speed. According to golf club designer Tom Wishon in a post on GolfWRX.com, each mile-per-hour of clubhead speed equals 2.8 yards of carry. He wrote that advancements in golf equipment account for at best, 25 percent of the distance increase. The average clubhead speed increased from 104 mph in 1980 to 113 in 2016. Andrew Loupe led the PGA Tour with 125.5 average clubhead speed. He recorded a top measured speed of 130.9 mph. In all, 14 pros averaged 120 mph or better. Using high-speed film analysis, experts estimate legendary amateur Bobby Jones had a swing speed of 117 miles per hour in the 1930s - using hickory shafts. Only 27 players on the PGA Tour in 2015-16 had a faster average. It’s reasonable to assume Jones, who was one of the longer hitters of the day and the game’s greatest amateur, would have no trouble keeping up if given modern equipment. While the distance a golf ball carries is important, Wishon also makes another key point. Fairways are mown at roughly ½ inch on the PGA Tour now, significantly lower than in the past, although courses benefit from extensive irrigation. Brandt Snedeker, who is slightly shorter than average, played back-to-back rounds on the Sea Island Plantation course for an article that appeared in USA Today. He played one round with his clubs and the next with steel-shafted persimmon woods and irons and a balata ball from the mid-80s. With the driver, he observed a 25-30 yard difference on well-struck shots. The gap stretched to 50-60 yards on mishit shots. Needless to say, Snedeker and his cohorts are glad they don’t have to play for a living with equipment from a previous era. And, the legends from the past would’ve loved to tee up their graphite/titanium beauty and swing away.
Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. APART from being famous and influential, Hu Jintao, David Cameron, Warren Buffett and Dominique Strauss-Kahn do not obviously have a lot in common. So it tells you something about the breadth of global concerns about inequality that China's president, Britain's prime minister, America's second-richest man and the head of the International Monetary Fund have all worried, loudly and publicly, about the dangers of a rising gap between the rich and the rest. Mr Hu puts the reduction of income disparities, particularly between China's urban elites and its rural poor, at the centre of his pledge to create a “harmonious society”. Mr Cameron has said that more unequal societies do worse “according to almost every quality-of-life indicator”. Mr Buffett has become a crusader for a higher inheritance tax, arguing that America risks an entrenched plutocracy without it. And Mr Strauss-Kahn argues for a new global growth model, claiming that gaping income gaps threaten social and economic stability. Many others seem to share their concerns. A new survey by the World Economic Forum, whose annual gathering of bigwigs in Davos begins on January 26th, says its members see widening economic disparities as one of the two main global risks over the next decade (alongside failings in global governance). The debate about inequality is an old one. But in the wake of a financial crisis that is widely blamed on Wall Street fat cats, from which the richest have rebounded fastest, and ahead of public-spending cuts that will hit the poor hardest, its tone has changed. For much of the past two decades the prevailing view among the world's policy elite—call it the Davos consensus—was that inequality itself was less important than ensuring that those at the bottom were becoming better-off. Tony Blair, a Labour predecessor of Mr Cameron's, embodied that attitude. His New Labour party was famously said to be “intensely relaxed” about the millions earned by David Beckham (a footballer) provided that child poverty fell. Now the focus is on inequality itself, and its supposedly pernicious consequences. One strand of argument, epitomised by “The Spirit Level”, a book that caused a stir in Britain, suggests that countries with greater disparities of income fare worse on all manner of social indicators, from higher murder rates to lower life expectancy. A second thread revisits the macroeconomic consequences of income disparities. Several prominent economists now reckon that inequality was a root cause of the financial crisis: politicians tried to counter the growing gap between rich and poor by encouraging poorer folk to take on more credit (see article). A third argument is that inequality perverts politics, with Wall Street's influence in Washington often cited as exhibit A of the unhealthy clout of a plutocratic elite. If these arguments are right, there might be a case for some fairly radical responses, especially a greater focus on redistribution. In fact, much of the recent hand-wringing about widening inequality is based on sloppy thinking. The old Davos consensus of boosting growth and combating poverty is still a better guide to good policy. Rather than a sweeping assault on inequality itself, policymakers would do better to take on the market distortions that often lie behind the most galling income gaps, and which also impede economic growth. Begin with the facts about inequality. Globally, the gap between the rich and the poor has actually been narrowing, as poorer countries are growing faster. Nor is there a monolithic trend within countries (see article). In Latin America, long home to the world's most unequal societies, many countries—including the biggest, Brazil—have become a bit more equal, as governments have boosted the incomes of the poor with fast growth and an overhaul of public spending to improve the social safety-net (but not by raising tax rates for the rich). The gap between rich and poor has risen in other emerging economies (notably China and India) as well as in many rich countries (especially America, but also in places with a reputation for being more egalitarian, such as Germany). But the reasons for this differ. In China inequality has a lot to do with the hukou system of residency permits, which limits internal migration to the towns; by some measures inequality has peaked as rural labour becomes more scarce. In America income inequality began to widen in the 1980s largely because the poor fell behind those in the middle. More recently, the shift has been overwhelmingly due to a rise in the share of income going to the very top—the highest 1% of earners and above—particularly those working in the financial sector. Many Americans are seeing their living standards stagnate, but the gap between most of them has not changed all that much. The links between inequality and the ills attributed to it are often weak. For instance, some of the findings in “The Spirit Level” were distorted by outliers: strip out America's high murder rate (which many would blame on guns, not inequality) or Japan's longevity (diet, not equality), and flatter societies no longer look so much healthier. As for the mooted link to the financial crisis, the timing is dodgy: America's poor fell behind in the 1980s, the credit bubble took off two decades later. These nuances suggest that rather than fretting about inequality itself, policymakers need to differentiate between its causes and focus on ways to increase social mobility. A global market offers far bigger returns to those at the top of their game, be they authors, lawyers or fund managers. Modern technology favours the skilled. These economic changes are themselves often reinforced by social ones: educated men now tend to marry educated women. The result of all this, as our special report this week shows, is the rise of a global elite. At heart, this is a meritocratic process; but not always. Rules and institutions are often rigged in ways that limit competition and favour insiders at the expense both of growth and equality. The rules can be blatantly unfair: witness China's limits to migration, which keep the poor in the countryside. Or they can involve more subtle distortions: look at the way that powerful teachers' unions have stopped poorer Americans getting a good education, or the implicit “too big to fail” system that encouraged bankers to be reckless and left the rest with the tab. These are very different problems, but they all lead to wider inequality, fewer rungs in the ladder and lower growth. Viewed from this perspective, the right way to combat inequality and increase mobility is clear. First, governments need to keep their focus on pushing up the bottom and middle rather than dragging down the top: investing in (and removing barriers to) education, abolishing rules that prevent the able from getting ahead and refocusing government spending on those that need it most. Oddly, the urgency of these kinds of reform is greatest in rich countries, where prospects for the less-skilled are stagnant or falling. Second, governments should get rid of rigged rules and subsidies that favour specific industries or insiders. Forcing banks to hold more capital and pay for their implicit government safety-net is the best way to slim Wall Street's chubbier felines. In the emerging world there should be a far more vigorous assault on monopolies and a renewed commitment to reducing global trade barriers—for nothing boosts competition and loosens social barriers better than freer commerce. Such reforms would not narrow all income disparities: in a freer world skill and intellect would still be rewarded, in some cases magnificently well. But the reforms would strike at the most pernicious, unfair sorts of income disparity and allow more people to move upwards. They would also boost growth and leave the world economy more stable. If the Davos elites are worried about the gap between the rich and the rest, this is the route they should follow.
Verizon is getting rid of contract plans, switching its offerings over to month-to-month plans like AT&T and T-Mobile did before it. Verizon's new plans are all based around shared data buckets — there's no single line or family plan. Instead, subscribers pay for a specific amount of data and then pay a per-device fee to hook it into the plan. Everyone loves per-line access fees! The options include 1GB for $30 per month, 3GB for $45 per month, 6GB for $60 per month, and 12GB for $80 per month. Adding a smartphone to the plan is $20 per month, adding a tablet or hotspot is $10 per month, and adding a smartwatch is $5 per month. Verizon says that larger plans will be available for those who want them; for those who just need a little bit of extra data one month, Recode reports that they'll be stuck paying $15 for an extra gigabyte, though they can always jump up to a new plan the next month. As usual, the pricing is not really friendly or tailored for anyone, but Verizon is under the odd impression that it's easier to understand. The plans go live next Thursday, on August 13th. Current Verizon subscribers will be able to hang onto their existing plans or switch over to the new plans "with some restrictions." Though doing away with contracts is a big shift, it's something we've seen coming. T-Mobile kicked off the trend about two years ago, and AT&T began following it recently by dropping contract offerings from third-party sellers. Alongside the shift away from contracts is the shift away from subsidized phones, meaning that people are going to need to start buying phones at full price or using carriers' payment plans. Verizon has been offering such a plan under the name Edge, though it's now decided to rename it "device payment option," which actually is easier to understand.
Bernie Sanders holds a campaign rally at Eastern Michigan University on Feb. 15, 2016. \| Getty Bernie’s spring break blues When Bernie Sanders will need college students the most, they'll be watching Netflix and partying. Last August, Bernie Sanders packed 12,000 people into a pavilion at the University of Washington, while 3,000 more couldn’t fit and were stuck outside. Later in the fall, he won Western Illinois University’s mock presidential election by a landslide. Last week, his campaign opened a local office just off the Michigan State University campus, calling it a “beacon of hope” for its supporters. But there’s just one problem for the surging senator: When primary or caucus day arrives in each of these college towns, as well as dozens more from Maine to Hawaii, many of the students Sanders hopes will help carry him to the White House won’t be there. They’ll be in Cancún. Or Florida. Or back home. Story Continued Below Call it Bernie’s Spring Break Blues. This year’s spring break schedule clashes directly with a large swath of primaries and caucuses, a conflict that comes at the worst possible time for Sanders, who crushed his rival Hillary Clinton among young and first-time voters in the exit polls in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. The Democratic race is about to enter a four-week stretch where more than half of the party’s delegates will be awarded. But as the voting gets under way, one campus after another is closing down for weeklong breaks. In all, more than half a million college students from 14 states will be on spring break at the same time that the presidential campaign train chugs onto their campuses, according to a Politico analysis of the March 5 to March 26 primary and caucus states. For Sanders to keep his momentum into April, he’s going to need to turn the #FeeltheBern college crowd’s enthusiasm into real live votes. But that’s a lot harder to do when those students have fanned out far away from their classrooms and are binge-watching Netflix on their parents’ couches or partying in New Orleans rather than caucusing in Bangor. “We’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm for his candidacy,” said Mitch Stewart, a veteran field organizer and strategist from Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “This is an instance where enthusiasm alone might not be enough.” The list of spring-break primary clashes is long, covering some of the upcoming battlegrounds’ largest schools, including the Ohio State University, Michigan State and the University of South Florida. It’s also a problem for Sanders in smaller states with large student populations; the University of Maine, the University of Hawaii and Boise State University are all on break when voting rolls around. Sanders’ campaign and its student supporters know about the problem and say they’re trying to work around the scheduling conflict by getting word out about it through Facebook posts, posters in dorm hallways and by promoting alternative options when available, such as absentee balloting and early voting. They expect that the senator’s most enthusiastic backers will stick around school to participate. But that’s easier said than done for many others. “We’re optimistic but realistic,” said Elia Pales, a 19-year-old Michigan State freshman and Sanders organizer bracing for many of East Lansing’s 50,000 students to clear out before the March 8 primaries. There’s not always an easy solution. In Idaho, the March 22 Democratic caucuses coincide with vacations for students at Boise State, Idaho State and the colleges of Idaho, Southern Idaho and Western Idaho. And absentee voting there isn’t even an option. The same goes in Hawaii, where the March 26 Democratic caucuses will come while 18,000-plus undergraduates will be long gone from the University of Hawaii campus at Manoa, as well as at its sister branch in Hilo and at Chaminade University of Honolulu. In Washington state, Sanders supporters are telling college students at the University of Washington, Western Washington University and the Evergreen State College that they actually can participate in the state’s March 26 Democratic caucuses via absentee ballot. It might not be easy: There are new party rules requiring a signature affirming that the voter is missing for a legitimate reason — a short list including religion, military service, work schedule, disability or illness. “We’re going to be pushing that pretty hard,” said Mia Harvey, a junior at Evergreen State College and Sanders backer. (Spring break is not on the list, but they’re hoping students apply anyway.) “It’s on the honor system,” added David Spring, a volunteer Sanders organizer from North Bend, Washington. “There will be no screening of these forms.” Deadlines, no friend of the college crowd, are also quickly approaching in some of the other upcoming states. In Nebraska, Democratic spring breakers from Creighton University, Wayne State College, Nebraska Wesleyan University and Doane College must request absentee ballots by Feb. 24. An online form must be returned by March 2 in Maine if spring-breaking students want to participate in their Democratic caucuses. Among the affected schools: the University of Maine in Orono and Husson University in Bangor. In Michigan, there are some straight-up logistical challenges for absentee voting — an issue for students at Michigan State, Central Michigan University, Western Michigan University, Ferris State University and Olivet College who won’t be in class for the March 8 primary — including a state requirement that first-time voters need to physically go to their city clerk’s office with an ID to request a ballot. “We’re hoping the work we’ve done will help minimize the loss of turnout,” said Pales, the Sanders organizer at Michigan State, who has been pleading with his classmates to make the short walk just off campus to vote by absentee ballot. “But there’s only so much more we can do.” For Ohio State students, the closest early voting center is a 15-minute drive from campus, and a 40-minute one-way ride on the public bus. While it’s open on weekdays during business hours, graduate student and Sanders volunteer Sarah Lukowski noted “that’s when most students have class.” She’s trying to organize car pools and bus rides for Sanders backers on March 5, the lone Saturday when the center is open before her classmates clear out for spring break. “I don’t know how we’re going to get thousands of people out there,” she said. “We’re going to try our best, but it’s a real challenge.” Several other major schools will be dark during a cluster of March 15 primaries: USF in Tampa and the University of West Florida in Pensacola; the four corners of the Illinois state university system: Southern, Northern, Eastern and Western; Washington University in St. Louis and Southeast Missouri State; Duke University and the University of North Carolina. On their Facebook page, the UNC Young Democrats have been spreading the word that “nearly all students will be gone!” during the state primary and are urging students to participate in early voting at a nearby church just off campus on March 5. Sanders is alone in the 2016 field when it comes to pouring so many resources into winning the college vote, though senior campaign adviser Tad Devine downplayed the significance of the spring break absences. “I’m not concerned any more about that than I am about 50 other factors that will influence the outcome of the elections in these other states,” he said. While Devine welcomed college student supporters, he cited the senator’s early-state support among Latinos and lower-income families to note that Sanders is “trying to build a very broad-based coalition. It’s not limited to one set of voters.” The Republican candidates don’t have the same problem; Rand Paul was the only one pushing hard on campus. Now it’s Marco Rubio and Donald Trump vying most for the conservative student vote. The first early test for both will come March 5, when Republicans caucus in Maine and Kentucky, which will be without its students from Western Kentucky University. Vincent Harris, who worked as Paul’s digital director, said if anyone on the Republican side is going to be hurt by the upcoming spring break conflicts, it would likely be Rubio. But he doesn’t see many GOP resources going toward the college crowd overall, so their spring breaks will be a little less risky than Bernie’s. “These are grandmas and grandpas that are voting in Republican primaries,” Harris said. “The last time they were in a fraternity house was during the Nixon administration.”
There was a moment at this week's Democratic convention that seemed to encapsulate the party's stunted vision. It came during the remarks of Maria Ciano, a Colorado woman who presents herself as a former Republican distressed by the modern GOP. "I still believe in small government, but I no longer believe in the Republican Party," she said. "Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want the government to have a say in my family planning. They want employers to decide what kind of birth control coverage I have -- or if I can have it at all." It's an interesting sleight-of-hand that allowed Ciano to get from praising small government to defending a new government mandate in just three sentences. But that's not why I'm quoting her. I'm bringing her up because it's useful to think about why Ciano's employer would have a role in her birth control purchases in the first place. The answer comes in two parts. First, because the law requires a woman to get a prescription before she can buy the pill, and it requires her to get an invasive and frequently unnecessary medical exam before she can acquire that prescription. Eliminate those controls, and insurance coverage would be beside the point; the pill would be cheaply available over the counter. Second, because changes to the tax code in the 1940s and '50s have channeled us into a system where Americans overwhelmingly get their health insurance through their jobs. Eliminate those incentives, and far fewer people would be dependent on their employers for insurance at all, substantially reducing the relevance of the boss's opinions about birth control. It goes without saying that Barack Obama has displayed no interest in rolling back the FDA's birth control rules. Nor has he moved away from the policies that push people into employer-based health coverage, or, more broadly, from a system where so many medical services are purchased via insurance in the first place. Indeed, his signature accomplishment is a law requiring people who don't have health insurance to buy it. If you can't afford to buy it, you may qualify for financial assistance. That's the Democratic Party's promise: We won't end the policies that empower big institutions and raise the cost of living, but when they send you the bill we might help you pay. You saw the same idea at work when various speakers this week invoked student loans: The Democrats will lend you money for college, but they'll do nothing to end the legally enshrined credentialism that makes so many professions off-limits without a degree. And if those subsidies end up inflating the cost of tuition and health care even more...well, then the pols will just call for more subsidies. When Democrats invoked "equality of opportunity" this week, that's what they were talking about: government action to help people run through mazes that the government helped erect. I don't expect the Dems to stop looking for ways to offer assistance, but dammit, it would be nice if some of them would take on the mazes instead of hatching plans that'll make them more complex. Last week the Republicans touted themselves as the party of I-built-that entrepreneurship while presenting corporate welfare queens like Boeing as business heroes. This week the Democrats touted themselves as the party of working Americans while praising policies that shore up the insurance industry and the collegiate sorting machine (and while offering an argument for the auto bailout that amounted to a trickle-down defense of corporate welfare). For the next two months, those parties' standard-bearers will tout this election as a stark choice between deeply different alternatives. Where are those factcheckers when you need them?
January 12, 2015 at 3:58 PM Update: post updated with comments from Sen. Roach and Sen. Chase. OLYMPIA – A leadership squabble put a twist into the opening day of the Legislature Monday, as minority Democrats helped install controversial Republican state Sen. Pam Roach as Senate president pro tempore. In what amounted to a mini coup, Democrats sided with Roach and Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, to install Roach in the leadership post. The move was in part a dig at state Sen. Tim Sheldon, the Potlatch Democrat who has been caucusing with the Republican-dominated Majority Coalition Caucus. Sheldon was president pro tem last year and had been expected to retain the post. Sheldon was taken off guard by the surprise maneuver. “I think there was a little bit of the politics of bitterness shown on the floor,” Sheldon said. He said Democrats wanted to “slap me down” for caucusing with the GOP. “Obviously, Senator Roach and Senator Benton made a deal.” Roach denied that: “there were no deals that were made,” she said, adding that she simply worked to line up the required 25 votes. “I’ve worked very well with Democrats and I think they appreciate that.” Roach said the pro tem job is typically reserved for the senior member of the majority party in the Senate chamber — and she’s the longest serving state senator. Sheldon said he only learned of the effort to depose him shortly before the vote Monday. “It was well-concealed, well-planned and well-executed. That’s the way politics works,” he said. The president pro-tem position is largely ceremonial, but puts Roach in position to preside over the Senate when Democratic Lt. Governor Brad Owen is unavailable. According to Senate rules, the move also stands to make Roach vice-chair of the powerful senate Rules Committee, which decides which legislation comes to the floor for a vote. Monday’s move was all the more interesting given that just a few years ago Roach had been kicked out of the Republican caucus after complaints of hotheaded behavior. Despite all that, Roach was re-elected in November to a seventh term, beating fellow Republican Cathy Dahlquist. Roach’s elevation to a leadership position could be an indirect win for organized labor. Unlike most Republicans, Roach has been supported by state employees unions during her campaigns. Sen. Maralyn Chase, D-Shoreline, who nominated Roach for the pro tem position, denied the move was intended as revenge against Sheldon. “A lot of people might think that’s what it is,” said Chase. “For me, it was about my friend (Roach), who is the senior member of the body.” The early friction in the Capitol is a reminder of how precarious both majorities are in the Legislature — with Republicans enjoying a small majority in the Senate and Democrats a small majority in the House. That leaves plenty of chances for deal-making and power brokering by individual lawmakers. Of course, going against your caucus can have repercussions. Sheldon said the Majority Coalition could decide to yank Roach from the Rules Committee, for example.
Photo LOS ANGELES — After six decades of Nativity scenes in Santa Monica’s Palisades Park in California, there will be no displays of the Madonna and child this year. A federal judge in Los Angeles on Monday denied a request from a nonprofit group to temporarily block Santa Monica’s ban on unattended displays in the park. The City Council passed the measure on the heels of a dispute last winter over atheist displays that outnumbered traditional Christian scenes. “It’s a sad day for freedom of speech and freedom of religion when a very small group of people with an ideological ax to grind succeed in censoring the greatest story ever told,” said Hunter Jameson, the head of the Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee, which brought the lawsuit. “It’s even sadder when a city government like the City Council in Santa Monica goes along with this effort to trample on freedom of expression.” A series of 14 Nativity scenes had been a mainstay in the park since the 1950s. But in recent years, Damon Vix, a local atheist who objected to the religious scenes’ presence on public property, began to erect his own signs in the park with messages like “Religions are all alike — founded upon fables and mythologies,” a quotation from Thomas Jefferson. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Last year, though, Mr. Vix organized a larger protest. He and other atheists applied for dozens of spaces in the park to set up displays. To deal with the increased demand, the city held a lottery; a majority of spots in the park went to the group of atheists, while the churches were left with only a few spaces. Photo The fight briefly placed Santa Monica at the center of a nationwide controversy over religious expression. Many of the atheist displays were vandalized, and in June, the Santa Monica City Council voted unanimously to ban all unattended private displays from city parks.
I’d venture a guess that the average person believes law enforcement has missing persons reports completely under control. Sure occasionally we see those Amber Alerts – and we surely notice those “emergency” beeps on our phone when one is blasted out. But did you know there were over 600,000 missing persons reports filed with law enforcement in the US in 2014 alone?[i] Despite I’m sure their best efforts, law enforcement just cannot have the resources available to dedicate the same amount of effort for all 600,000+. Delays are inevitable, and that’s lost time we don’t have. According to Amy Dobbs, an investigator with the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, “The first 12-24 hours are the most critical in an active missing persons investigation. The longer it takes for a case to be reported and become an active investigation, the less likely a positive outcome will occur.”[ii] For children, the first three hours are especially critical because 76% of abducted children who are killed die within that time frame, according to a 2006 study by the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. After a report is filed, worried parents and concerned loved ones can do little apart from desperate pleas on social media, email blasts, and a whole lot of praying. Krimeshare gives folks the chance to easily, and most importantly, quickly establish a comprehensive case page for their beloved missing individual. This case page can then be effectively disseminated to the community, social media, and outlets that law enforcement just has no presence. It cannot bring comfort to someone experiencing the fear and uncertainty of a missing loved, but it can give finding them a better chance, even just if a small one. Don’t feel like an inadequate Facebook post or posting flyers in your neighborhood are your only options! Just click the button in the top-right to get started! Create professionally-looking, mobile-friendly missing person’s case page – for free, anywhere! Post all the pictures and videos you want* Raise awareness within the community efficiently and effectively. Recruit everyone on the Internet to help find the person. Share on social media to get the word out. Assist the local media and law enforcement in their efforts with a central and consistent platform. *Original submissions are limited to 4 image attachments. Please contact us if you’d like to submit more or would like to upload video! [i] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ncic/ncic-missing-person-and-unidentified-person-statistics-for-2014#two [ii] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/09/23/missing-persons-children-numbers/16110709/ SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/10/most-missing-persons-state_n_6110476.html
Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Yas Marina, 14 November Race: 1210-1515 on BBC One, Red Button, online and Radio 5 live sports extra By David Ornstein Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel produced a stunning qualifying lap to take pole position at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The 23-year-old German is one of four men in contention for the title ahead of Sunday's season-ending race. McLaren's Lewis Hamilton, who still has a slim chance of taking the crown, will start in second and championship leader Fernando Alonso of Ferrari third. Vettel's team-mate Mark Webber, second in the standings, is fifth on the grid, a place behind McLaren's Jenson Button. If the drivers finish the race in the same positions as they start, Alonso will clinch a third Formula 1 world title and his first for Ferrari. JONATHAN LEGARD'S BLOG Hamilton's role could be a significant curve-ball The Spaniard leads the standings on 246 points, eight clear of Webber, 15 ahead of Vettel and 24 in front of Hamilton. There are 25 points for a win, 18 for second, 15 for third, 12 for fourth, 10 for fifth, eight for sixth, six for seventh, four for eighth, two for ninth and one for 10th. "I pushed on the limit and third place is great," stated Alonso, bidding to become the ninth and youngest triple world champion. "It was a good qualifying for us, and we just need one more day in perfection. "We are more or less in the same situation as two days ago, we know there are four contenders. Everything is down to Sunday's race. "Anything can happen, as we saw in the last two races. We need to complete the 55 laps without any problems, it will be a tough and long race for everyone but we are in a very strong position." Since winning the Belgian Grand Prix in August, Hamilton has seen his title challenge fade away but McLaren, aided by a modified rear wing, seem to have found some late-season pace. "I'm very happy, this is the highest I've been for a long time, the car felt great and I got 100% out of the car and more," said the Englishman. "We can both push very hard to get second in the constructors' championship but I am going out to win the race. "The team have done some great things to improve certain parts of the car and it has enabled us to be much more competitive. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain." Alonso arrived at the Yas Marina Circuit in control of his own destiny but the real momentum was with Vettel, who won in Brazil last Sunday and set the fastest time in Saturday's third and final free practice session. Webber also had cause for optimism after he was only a tenth of a second slower than Vettel in FP3, while Hamilton showed that his car was more competitive than in recent races by topping the timesheets in Friday practice. FOUR-WAY TITLE BATTLE EXPLAINED 1 ALONSO 246pts 2 WEBBER 238pts 3 VETTEL 231pts 4 HAMILTON 222pts If Alonso wins or is second, he is champion If Webber wins, he wins the title if Alonso is third or worse If Vettel wins and Alonso is 5th or worse, Vettel wins the title If Hamilton wins, Alonso must fail to score, Webber be 6th or worse and Vettel 3rd or worse for Hamilton to win the title It made for an intriguing backdrop and within minutes of the big four heading out for the first part of qualifying it was clear there was little to chose between them. Vettel and Hamilton looked particularly sharp as they traded fastest laps, with Alonso and Webber snapping at their heels. Alonso managed a lap of 1:40.170 to jump above Vettel (1:40.318) and Hamilton (1:40.335) - and with Webber recording a 1:40.690, the quartet were separated by just five tenths of a second. Times continued to improve at the start of Q2 and 2009 champion Button, whose title defence ended in Brazil, set the quickest lap of the day thus far with a 1:40.156. The Red Bulls of Webber and Vettel were the first of the leading protagonists to switch from the harder prime tyres to the softer option variant and Vettel leaped to the head of the timesheets (1:39.874) on his first flying lap. Their rivals followed suit by opting for a tyre change and all made it through to the top-10 shootout, but no-one could match Vettel for sheer pace. And so to the pulsating pressure cooker of a session that was Q3. Hamilton (1:39.582) and Button (1:39.823) were the first to make a move, with Alonso, his Ferrari team-mate Felipe Massa and Rubens Barrichello of Williams in close proximity. But Vettel soon emerged from the pits of the pits to destroy his rivals, posting a scintillating 1:39.488 on his first flying lap, before going just under a tenth quicker on his second (1:39.394). Hamilton, Alonso, Button and Webber took it in turns to try and usurp the German but to no avail, and the smile that adorned his face on climbing out of the cockpit spoke volumes. "We start from pole, it couldn't be better," said a beaming Vettel after clinching his 10th pole of the season. "It was a tough qualifying session. It was very close with Lewis especially. We are looking forward to tomorrow and seeing what happens. "I saw some statistics the other day about how many poles some drivers had got in a season, guys like Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Michael Michael - they are all up there. "With 10 poles I am not at the top so maybe we could work on that next year. But 10 poles in qualifying in one season is a great effort and shows how good the car is." Meanwhile, Hamilton and Massa will not be punished for an incident which occurred in Q2. Hamilton, on an out lap, cut across Massa, who was on a timed lap, on the approach to Turn Five and had to take evasive action to prevent a collision, cutting across the corner and hitting a bollard which contained a television camera in the process. Both drivers were called to the stewards' room after qualifying and after hearing their explanations, it was decided no action should be taken. Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version
President Barack Obama used communist China, which has very strict gun ownership laws, as an illustration for the benefits of enhanced gun control on a populace. Speaking at the White House on Tuesday, Obama acknowledged, “We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we can try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence.” “Some of you may recall at the same time that Sandy Hook happened, a disturbed person in China took a knife and tried to kill, with a knife a bunch of children in China. But most of them survived because he didn’t have access to a powerful weapon,” Obama claimed. In one knife attack in China in 2012, a 36-year old man stabbed 22 kids and an 85-year old woman. “We maybe can’t save everybody, but we could save some,” Obama said. “Just as we don’t prevent all traffic accidents but we take steps to try to reduce traffic accidents.” Follow Steve on Twitter and Facebook
When Sean Hannity isn’t fanning the flames of a uranium conspiracy, he likes to brag about “Let There Be Light,” a new movie he executive-produced, and in which he makes a sizable cameo. “I’d say 98 percent of people who watch it cry,” he told the Washington Times, as if the film’s mission is to harvest our tears. I tried to offer mine, but it wasn’t easy. Though Hannity’s studio is in New York, and though most of “Let There Be Light” is set here, the city is, to him, a liberal Babylon. Until today, when the film arrived at a single theatre in Flushing, it was nowhere in the five boroughs; New Yorkers who wanted to see the light had to go to New Jersey. I drove there one recent night, sat through the movie’s hundred and one minutes, and returned, dry-eyed, into the darkness. “Let There Be Light” is a “faith-based film,” a euphemism that makes it sound as if the director worked under divine guidance, yelling “action” and “cut” as the spirit moved him. In this case, that director is Kevin Sorbo, of “Hercules” fame, and the film he’s made is a cynical, xenophobic morality tale, as bitter as it is saccharine. Sorbo stars, too, as Sol Harkens, “the world’s most famous atheist,” on his own legendary journey toward Christ. In the mold of Richard Dawkins—but so popular that even his doctor wants a selfie with him—Harkens preaches the gospel of the godless. We meet him before a packed auditorium, his blazer collar popped, inveighing against a meek clergyman and cheering “for sex, drugs, and rock and roll!” His religious credo is “party on”; at the swish launch party for his latest book, “Aborting God,” the specialty cocktail is the Harkens Hedonist. Harkens has a Ph.D. in something or other, but his argument against God is more personal than philosophical: his eight-year-old son, Davey, died of cancer, and Sol can’t see how a benevolent creator would permit such suffering. His grief has made him a sad sack. He double-fists champagne and puns, wincingly, on “killing the pain.” After the party, driving his black Mercedes-Benz with a bottle of liquor in his lap, he receives a call from his agent, Norm—a foppish, bow-tied man who is, it’s made clear, unswervingly heterosexual, even if he loves to call everyone “darling.” Distracted by the call, Harkens’s car promptly collides with a wall. He awakens in a twinkling vortex of wind chimes and soft light, aswirl in memories of Davey. Lo and behold, there the boy is, beatific and blindingly white. “Daddy, let there be light,” he says. Then he says it again. Then he says it a third time, because this is the title of the film. Harkens, it turns out, has been clinically dead for four minutes, a fact that’s somehow leaked to the press by the time he comes to in a hospital bed. Like most people in violent accidents, he’s discharged at once and walks off without so much as a limp, confronting the swarm of reporters who’ve breached hospital security. As seemingly closeted Christians, they’re less concerned with his body than his soul: “Did you see the tunnel of light?” Alone in his apartment with a colorful Andy Warhol–style portrait of himself, Sol guzzles vodka, pops pills, and spends the day—the whole day—hurling paper balls at his trashcan. After a panic attack sends him back to the hospital, he confesses his vision to his ex-wife, Katy, a devout Christian who lives in the suburbs, as the devout must. She prevails on him to see a real professional: her pastor. When we first lay eyes on Pastor Vinny, he’s painting a picket fence—you’ll never guess which color. A formerly “mobbed-up” “street guy,” Vinny approaches the mystery of Christ as a homicide detective might: Where’s the body? “I don’t buy into things too easy,” he tells a careworn Sol. “Jesus gets whacked, right? . . . They stick his body in a tomb, they seal it up tighter than a cement drum. What happens next? Bada-bing! The body disappears.” Harkens, a man of the world, knows a good thing when he sees it, so why putter around? After one talk with Vinny, he’s ready for baptism. Soon enough he’s making amends with Katy—played by Sorbo’s real-life wife, Sam, who wrote the screenplay—and their two sons, played by the couple’s children. Life is all cookies and lemonade—really, they’re both in one scene—until, in a particularly gutless plot twist, Katy collapses in a seizure, causing the film’s third medical emergency. An oncologist, inexplicably portrayed by the country singer Travis Tritt, diagnoses her with stage-four brain cancer, a veritable death sentence. “God’s not going to let this happen again, will He?” one of the couple’s children asks. He will, but before He does, Katy wants to remarry Sol and unveil the Let There Be Light app, which will invite users to shine their flashlights up to Heaven on Christmas Eve, creating “a band of light” like “a selfie for God.” Problem is, no one wants to promote it—Sol is persona non grata among members of the Christian press, who fear that his conversion is a stunt. Well, there is one guy who’s interested. Sol’s publicist receives a call during Sol and Katy’s wedding. “Change of honeymoon plans,” she tells them while they’re still standing at the altar. “You two are doing ‘Sean Hannity’ tomorrow! Fourteen million listeners. Three million viewers! That’s radio and television, baby . . . you can’t buy that kind of publicity.” Except that Hannity just did, for himself. Soon enough, there he is, his American-flag lapel pin firmly in place, sitting in a conference room that touts Fox News’s “Fair and Balanced” motto, even though the network dropped it in June. “You’re literally going to try and convert kids to Christianity,” Hannity tells the Harkenses. “What about diversity? What right do you have to impose your religious values onto somebody else?” “Well, what right does ISIS have to cut people’s heads off?” Harkens retorts. “That’s a powerful point,” Hannity says. It must be noted that “Let There Be Light” is full of such grim non sequiturs. The threat of radical Islam is the dark spectre behind Sorbo’s tale of soppy American evangelicalism, the only global problem of any magnitude in the film’s blinkered perspective. An opening montage lingers on the Twin Towers and the 9/11 memorial. Sol, in high atheist dudgeon, equates the God of Christianity to the God of ISIS, prompting Norm, his agent, to propose making T-shirts that say “ISIS = Church.” Later, Katy dreams of proselytizing life “with as much vigor as ISIS proselytizes death.” Even Pastor Vinny frets that “people are getting whacked like it was the Middle Ages.” In the film’s final minutes, this ambient ISIS anxiety converges with the maudlin conversion storyline in a dénouement of bald Islamophobia. On Christmas Eve, as Katy, at home, is quietly dying in Harkens’s arms, Hannity’s show devotes a three-hour special to the Let There Be Light app, interviewing a young woman who helped develop it. Born in Pakistan, she says she was forced into marriage, beaten by her husband and her father, and threatened with death; Jesus saved her life. As Katy embraces the white light of death, iPhone flashlights ignite the sky, and the children sing “Silent Night.” Roll credits. Hannity has called this a film for the “entire family,” and it’s true that the movie’s concept of good and evil is as narrow as that of a children’s tale. But its studious purity—“You look like heck,” Katy says to Sol at one point—can’t survive its aura of moral panic and fearful prejudice. That Hannity would underwrite a vehicle for the culture wars can hardly come as a surprise—but why this vehicle, and why now? “Let There Be Light” was in post-production by the end of 2016, and I wonder if, when they filmed it, Sorbo anticipated a Hillary Clinton victory. His movie encourages its white evangelical base to substitute piety for politics, as if their prayers will do more to halt ISIS than the government ever could—a point without currency for conservatives at a time when they control all of Washington. In 2017, the film’s veneer of Christian virtue can’t hide its Trumpian appeals to fear and to hate; nor can it disguise the kind of vanity that comes these days from the White House as much as from the multiplex. “People keep asking if I’ll be nominated to the Golden Globes or Academy Awards,” Hannity tweeted this week, adding that he would certainly grace the red carpet. “Their ratings will explode.”
Are you ready to jumpstart your life? Perhaps finding yourself a little fatigued, bloated or grouchy throughout the day. Whether you’re a beginner or a fitness freak, you’ll find some of the most delicious and simple smoothie recipes in this book. With one recipe for each day of the year. You'll find yourself making smoothies on a daily basis. This Book Will Help You: • Get more energy throughout the day • Clear up that mental fog that everyone goes through from having an unhealthy diet • Start a small new habit that will help you trim inches off your waist sustainably In this book you'll learn • Learn how to pick the right ingredient combinations for your smoothies • Teach you how to pick the right blender for your smoothies •Discover how to use your blender to make the perfect smoothies that don’t clump up and leave you in a mess •How to prepare your ingredients My Smoothie Guide Also Addresses Questions Like: • What is the right ratio of ingredients to make tasty smoothies? •What are the correct proportions of ingredients to use for weigh/fat loss? • Is fresh always best for making smoothies? •What are some of the nutritional benefits of the ingredients you put in your smoothie? What Some People Say About Me: “One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from Jen is that smoothie making is as much of an art as it is a science. Smoothie making is about discovering what your preferences are and working on it to make your perfect smoothie.” Eden Hartmann, Executive Pastry Chef “What I love about Jennifer’s classes is her passion for teaching. She has given me a lot of confidence when it comes to making smoothies.” Mellissa Hertz, marathoner "While Jen’s experience and knowledge of making smoothies is what created this book. Her passion for teaching is what makes it a priceless resource for making smoothies." Mary Onozawa, triathlete A Personal Note From the Author Making smoothies has always been one of my biggest passions. I’ve been making smoothies for quite some time now and I realize that it’s the perfect intersection of my passion for fitness and my work as a pastry chef. Smoothies have made a very big impact in life and it has helped me make healthier choices. My goal is to make smoothie making accessible to you by giving you a year’s worth of smoothie recipes. No recipe is set in stone but with this book I’m hoping to guide you with some unique flavor combinations that you might enjoy. Hopefully you can start making smoothies that are perfect for you.
I once went almost five days without sleep in 1996 just to see 1) if I could make a week (I couldn’t), and 2) what the side-effects would be. I was a new neuroscience major at Princeton at the time and hoped to do research with famed serotonin pioneer, Barry Jacobs. Hallucinations cut my sleep deprivation trial short, but I’ve continued to experiment with sleep optimization and variation as a means of improving performance. Here are a few effective techniques and hacks I’ve picked up over the last five years from sources ranging from biochemistry PhDs to biologists at Stanford University… 1. Consume 150-250 calories of low-glycemic index foods in small quantities (low glycemic load) prior to bed. Morning fatigue and headache isn’t just from sleep debt or poor sleep. Low blood sugar following overnight fasting is often a contributing factor. Just prior to bed, have a small snack such as: a few sticks of celery with almond butter, a mandarin orange and 5-8 almonds, or plain low-fat (not fat-free) yoghurt and an apple. Ever wonder how you can sleep 8-10 hours and feel tired? This is part of the explanation. Make a pre-bed snack part of your nutritional program. 1-2 tablespoons of flaxseed oil (120-240 calories) can be used in combination with the above to further increase cell repair during sleep and thus decrease fatigue. It tastes like a mixture of cat urine and asparagus, so I recommend pinching your nose while consuming it — thanks Seth Roberts, PhD. for this tip — or using capsules. 2. Use ice baths to provoke sleep. Japanese have longer lifespans that do most other ethnicities. One theory has been that regular ofuro or hot baths at bedtime increase melatonin release, which extends lifespan. Paradoxically, according to the Stanford professors who taught Bio 50, cold is actually a more effective signaller for sleep onset, but it could have no relation to melatonin production. I decided to test the effect of combining 10-minute ice baths, timed with a countdown kitchen timer, one hour prior to bed (closer to bed and the adrenergic response of noradrenalin, etc. won’t allow you to sleep) with low-dose melatonin (1.5 – 3 mg) on regulating both sleep regularity and speed to sleep. The icebath is simple: 2-3 bags of ice from a convenience store ($3-6 USD) put into a half-full bath until the ice is about 80% melted. Beginners should start with immersing the lower body only and progress to spending the second five minutes with the upper torso submerged (fold your legs Indian-style at the end of the tub if you don’t have room). I’ll talk about the fat-loss and sperm-count benefits of this in future post. The result: it’s like getting hit with an elephant tranquilizer. Don’t expect it to be pleasant at first. 3. Eating your meals at set times can be as important as sleeping on a schedule. People talk a lot about circadian (circa dia = approximately one day) rhythms and establishing a regular sleep schedule, but bedtime timing is just one “zeitgeber” (lit: time giver), or stimulus that synchronizes this biorhythm (like pheromones and menstrual cycle). Eating meals at set times helps regulate melatonin, ghrelin, leptin, and other hormones that affect sleep cycles. Other “zeitgebers” for sleep include melatonin, light, and temperature. Parting suggestion: Get a sleep mask if you have any degree of light in your bedroom. 4. Embrace 20-minute caffeine naps and ultradian multiples. Test “caffeine naps” between 1-3 pm. Down an espresso and set your alarm for no more than 20 minutes, which prevents awakening in the middle of a restorative sleep cycle. Interrupting cycles often leaves you feeling worse than no sleep (though some researchers assert your performance will still improve in comparison with deprivation). For longer naps, test multiples of 90 minutes, which is called an “ultradian” rhythm in some papers, though the proper term should be “infradian” since it’s less than 24 hours. Thomas Edison, despite his vocal disdain for sleep and claim to sleep only four hours per night, is reported to have taken two three-hour naps daily. Don’t forget to factor in your time-to-sleep. It often takes me up to an hour to fall asleep, so I’ll set my alarm for seven hours ((4 x 90 minutes) + 60-minute time-to-sleep). 5. Turn off preoccupation with afternoon closure and present-state training. I have — as do most males in my family — what is called “onset insomnia.” I don’t have trouble staying asleep, but I have a difficult time falling asleep, sometime laying awake in bed for 1-2 hours. There are two approaches that I’ve used with good effect without medications to address this: 1) Determine and set a top priorities to-do list that afternoon for the following day to avoid late-night planning, 2) Do not read non-fiction prior to bed, which encourages projection into the future and preoccupation/planning. Read fiction that engages the imagination and demands present-state attention. Recommendations for compulsive non-fiction readers include Motherless Brooklyn and Stranger in a Strange Land. — From fat-loss (leptin release decreases with sleep debt) to memory consolidation, sleep is the currency of high-performance living. Have you taken time to master it like a skill? Here are a few questions for the researchers among you: -What is the fastest way to pay off sleep debt? -Can you eat more food — or protein specfically — to compensate for sleep deprivation? To what degree? -How do side-effects of ongoing melatonin use compare to drugs like Ambien? -What is the interplay of the hypothalamus and RAS (reticular activating system)? -Does insulin sensitivity change between waking and sleep cycles? How? -Can coffee and its effects on adenosine affect sleep depth or length? Sweet dreams. ### Most Popular and Related Posts: How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks How to Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less (Plus: How to Negotiate Convertibles and Luxury Treehouses) The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen (and Weapons of Mass Distraction) How to Outsource the Inbox and Never Check Email Again How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour Posted on: January 27, 2008. Share this: Facebook Twitter Email Reddit Print Please check out Tribe of Mentors, my newest book, which shares short, tactical life advice from 100+ world-class performers. Many of the world's most famous entrepreneurs, athletes, investors, poker players, and artists are part of the book. The tips and strategies in Tribe of Mentors have already changed my life, and I hope the same for you. Click here for a sample chapter and full details. Roughly 90% of the guests have never appeared on my podcast. Who was interviewed? Here's a very partial list: tech icons (founders of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Pinterest, Spotify, Salesforce, Dropbox, and more), Jimmy Fallon, Arianna Huffington, Brandon Stanton (Humans of New York), Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ben Stiller, Maurice Ashley (first African-American Grandmaster of chess), Brené Brown (researcher and bestselling author), Rick Rubin (legendary music producer), Temple Grandin (animal behavior expert and autism activist), Franklin Leonard (The Black List), Dara Torres (12-time Olympic medalist in swimming), David Lynch (director), Kelly Slater (surfing legend), Bozoma Saint John (Beats/Apple/Uber), Lewis Cantley (famed cancer researcher), Maria Sharapova, Chris Anderson (curator of TED), Terry Crews, Greg Norman (golf icon), Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum), and nearly 100 more. Check it all out by clicking here.
Image copyright Hanson's Auctioneers Image caption The "graphic" images show some of the thousands of soldiers who died in the Second Boer War Dozens of previously-unpublished photographs from the Second Boer War that show battle scenes from the conflict have been found in a house in Derbyshire. The collection of images, along with medals and badges, will go on auction later in July. The find "is like a time capsule that sheds new light on the war", auctioneer Charles Hanson said. The photos were taken by Robert Oliver, who survived the 1899-1902 war. 'Harsh images' He was awarded the Queens Medal for South Africa after fighting in Cape Colony, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in 1901 and 1902. Image copyright Hanson's Auctioneers Image caption The photographs were found in a house in Derbyshire and give a glimpse inside the Second Boer War "The graphic images record the harsh reality, and true horror, of war - something the Victorian press did not portray at the time, as the British Empire was deemed undefeatable," Mr Hanson said. The photos include prints of war dead lying in fields, the funeral of a British serviceman and a Boer War dog. Image copyright Hanson's Auctioneers Image caption The coffin of a British solder is lowered into the ground at a funeral during the war Image copyright Hanson's Auctioneers Image caption The collection includes hats, gloves and medals from the Second Boer War Image copyright Hanson's Auctioneers Image caption Not much is known about the dog pictured in the photograph - shown wearing a cap and smoking a pipe The collection also contains two pairs of original kid gloves, spurs, an ammunition bandolier, caps and hats, an original South African feathered headdress and a cartridge belt. Mr Hanson said: "Robert Oliver was quite a rogue in his youth. At the age of 16, he ran away, ending up on a ship to Canada where he found work as a lumberjack. "He later joined Staffordshire Police and was considered … funny but firm and strict." He also owned and ran the Devonshire Pub in Hartington, Derbyshire. The sale will be held on 25 July.
Some clubs are opposed to having contract discussions once the season starts, but the Rangers are willing to do so. SURPRISE, Ariz. -- The Rangers are not facing a deadline at the end of Spring Training in their contract discussions with pitcher Yu Darvish, as general manager Jon Daniels said that those discussions could carry on into the regular season. SURPRISE, Ariz. -- The Rangers are not facing a deadline at the end of Spring Training in their contract discussions with pitcher Yu Darvish, as general manager Jon Daniels said that those discussions could carry on into the regular season. Some clubs are opposed to having contract discussions once the season starts, but the Rangers are willing to do so. View Full Game Coverage "Where we left [it] is that either side can privately open it or raise it at any point," Daniels told Norm Hitzges on 1310 The Ticket on Monday. "No set deadlines or anything like that. The lines of communication are open, and the relationship is very good. That's a great starting point." • Spring Training: Information \| Tickets \| Schedule \| Gear Darvish can be a free agent after the 2017 season. The Rangers have expressed a willingness to sign him to an extension but have tried to keep their discussions private. "I would leave it at this," Daniels said. "Yu genuinely likes it here. I know every player says, 'I'd love to stay.' He is comfortable here. His family is. I am sure when he was growing up in Japan, he never thought of Texas. I am sure he thinks of the [West Coast when it comes to] the more popular cities for people coming over here. He has had a great experience with the club. They love the city, and he's one of the most talented pitchers in the game. We have interest in him staying here." Darvish is currently in Dallas, where his wife gave birth to a son on Sunday. Darvish is scheduled to throw a bullpen session on Tuesday in Arlington, fly back to Arizona on Wednesday and pitch on Friday, either against the Padres or in a Minor League game. Rangers send nine to Minors: The Rangers sent nine players to the Minor Leagues on Monday, including three with significant Major League service time: pitcher Wesley Wright, third baseman Will Middlebrooks and outfielder Travis Snider. All three do not have out clauses in their contracts, meaning they will likely be with Triple-A Round Rock. The Rangers also re-assigned outfielder Josh Hamilton to Minor League camp, but that was a procedural move. Hamilton is in Houston recovering from surgery on his left knee and has not returned to camp. He will start the season on the Minor League disabled list. Also sent down were catchers Jose Trevino and Patrick Cantwell, first baseman Ronald Guzman, and pitchers Brady Dragmire and Tyler Wagner. Dragmire and Wagner were both waiver claims this offseason and two players the Rangers want to watch closely at Triple-A. Rangers beat • Cole Hamels makes his second Cactus League start on Tuesday against the White Sox in Surprise. Hamels is down for four or five innings and between 60 and 65 pitches. • Allen Webster is expected to start on Wednesday against the Angels in Tempe. A.J. Griffin is supposed to pitch that day but will likely work in a Minor League game. Rotation candidate Dillon Gee is expected to pitch on Thursday against the Dodgers. • Pitcher Andrew Cashner, who has been dealing with pain in his right bicep tendon, is scheduled to pitch in a Minor League game on Wednesday. He will pitch one or two innings, depending on how the first one goes.
The LG V30 (available on all five major US carriers for around $800, as well as unlocked) is the best phone for a big world. It has a wide-angle camera for when you have a large family or too many friends to crowd into a standard photo. And it allows you to go farther afield on T-Mobile than any other phone, thanks to support for the carrier's new Band 71, 600MHz network. The V30 is a big step forward for LG, and comes close to unseating the Samsung Galaxy S8 as our Editors' Choice, but is ultimately held back by a few little things. A Familiar Face Design-wise, the V30 goes for the curved glass that's been so popular on the Galaxy S8. Unlike the LG G6, which has a flat front with a metal frame around it, the glass here protrudes like it does on other phones. The V20's removable back and battery are, alas, gone. Instead, the phone has a shiny, IP68 waterproof metal unibody, with a clear plastic coating over the silver back . It meets the MIL-STD -810G spec for resistance to shock, vibration, extreme temperatures, and a range of other conditions. At 5.96 by 2.96 by 0.29 inches (HWD), the phone is shorter, but a little wider, than the Galaxy S8+ (6.28 by 2.89 by 0.32 inches). Its 6-inch, 2,880-by-1,440, 2:1 screen is comparable with other big phones. Using SQUID, an aspect ratio-neutral measurement of area, the V30 has 14.4 square inches of display, while the iPhone 8 Plus has 12.9, the LG G6 has 13.0, and the Galaxy Note 8 has 15.6. To my eye, Samsung's phones look more striking, in part because of their rounded sides. The V30's metal band makes it look a little more conventional. At 5.57 ounces, though, it's lighter than the S8+ (6.10 ounces) or Note 8 (6.88 ounces). The screen is OLED, with the vibrant colors and perfect blacks that come along with the technology. Brightness is similar to a Galaxy S8 when set side by side, but it falls far short of the blazing Note 8; the difference is especially visible at night. One way the V30 is superior to the Samsungs, though, is in the placement of its fingerprint sensor. In traditional LG fashion, the fingerprint sensor is also the power button, and while it's on the back of the phone, it's far enough down that you don't have to worry about getting fingerprints on the camera the way you do on the S8 and the Note 8. There's a USB-C port on the bottom, a standard headphone jack on the top, and a microSD card slot tucked in with the SIM slot. The phone has wireless charging, and in fact worked with a Samsung wireless charging pad I had on hand. The Best Connection Call quality, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE on the V30 are all excellent. The earpiece gets nice and loud, and the bottom-ported speaker startled me with its clarity. Transmissions when sent from noisy areas successfully blanked out most background noise without making my voice sound robotic. The V30 pulled out slightly better 5GHz Wi-Fi range than the Galaxy Note 8, and Bluetooth 5.0 lets it pair to multiple speakers or sets of headphones at once. Folks in hurricane-prone areas will be happy to see that unlike Apple's iPhones, the V30 has an FM radio as well. This is a gigabit LTE phone on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, joining the S8, Note 8, and Moto Z2 Force. Speeds in a dense urban area were on par with the S8. It's unique on T-Mobile as the first phone to support the carrier's new 600MHz, Band 71 network, which will enhance the carrier's rural coverage as it gets built out over the next few years. While more Band 71 phones will come next year, right now this is the only official option if you want that extended future coverage. LG makes a big deal about its Hi-Fi Quad DAC (digital-to-analog converter), but listening to several tracks on expensive Bowers & Wilkins P7 wired headphones with it turned on and off, I couldn't tell the difference. Part of the issue here is that audio quality through the Snapdragon 835 chipset is pretty good already. Software and Battery The basic specs and performance here are pretty standard for a 2017 flagship phone. The V30 packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of base internal storage (49GB available), and all of the usual bells and whistles. I ran our usual benchmarks, and they were on par with the similarly equipped Essential Phone. The V30 runs Android 7.1.2, not Android 8.0 Oreo, although an Oreo update will come. It's pretty far from stock. LG's default setting eliminates the app drawer for a more Apple-like home-screen-only approach, although you can bring it back. The company's response to Samsung's Edge functionality is the much less compelling "floating bar," a software option that pops out from the side of the screen with app shortcuts, music player controls, or quick contacts. You can turn that off, too, if you want. The V20's "secondary screen" feature, perpetually at the top of the display and not overwriting the content you are looking at, was more useful. The 3,300mAh battery is disappointing. We only got 4 hours, 46 minutes of LTE streaming (full-screen video at maximum brightness) on one battery charge, much shorter than with competing phones. The Galaxy S8, for instance, lasts 5 hours and 45 minutes, and we consider that to be merely average. Most new phones will get you around 7 or 8 hours. Camera LG talks up the V30's dual-camera design in its marketing material, hyping the main f/1.6 wide-angle lens and its f/1.9 ultra-wide rear companion. The front-facing, 5MP selfie camera is also wider than your typical camera phone. Do the rear cameras live up to the hype? Well, yes and no. Let's talk about the dual-camera approach first. LG is an outlier here. Samsung and Apple have dual lenses on the Note 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. There's the standard wide lens, the same type you'll find on just about every smartphone, and a second lens with a narrower angle of view. The second lens nabs shots of more distant subjects, and also works in conjunction with the main imager to blur the background behind subjects. The V30's second lens is wider than wide. Its 120-degree field of view puts it in the same territory as a 14mm lens on a full-frame camera. The extra coverage doesn't come without some trade-offs. First, the wide camera is fixed focus, so it's only good for subjects a few feet or beyond from the phone—we weren't able to run our standard resolution test on the lens because framing our test chart properly put it too close to the lens for it to be in focus. Second, you get some curved barrel distortion, about 3.3 percent. You can see the straight lines of buildings bulging out unnaturally. Since I couldn't generate resolution numbers to compare with other phones, I eyeballed some test images shot with the ultra-wide lens. They definitely don't pick up as much detail as images shot with the main lens (or other phones), but for what it is, it's not bad. Details are fairly strong in the center of the image—I can make out details in the brickwork. But you'll want to keep your subjects mostly in the center of the frame—for one, it minimizes the effects of the distortion. More importantly, details give way to a heavy blur as you move away from the center and toward the edges and corners of the frame. But you probably don't care too much about absolute resolution and corner quality when you need to get that wide, wide image. If you're part of a big crowd at a concert or sporting event you can snap images that put the viewer right there with you, and you can use it to capture wide action scenes that your typical smartphone sweep-to-panorama function just can't get. Sure, there's the modest fish-eye look, but it's the trade-off you make to get the big picture with a device that slides into your pocket. The wide lens sets the V30 apart from the Note 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. Which dual-lens approach is better for you? Get the Note 8 if you photograph concerts or people from a distance, or if you love shooting subjects with a blurred background. The 2x lens (roughly 50mm in full-frame terms) does both. Go with the V30 if crave an ultra-wide field of view, similar to what you get with a GoPro. It's a solid choice for really wide landscapes and photographing groups of people in very tight spaces. See How We Test Phones Now for the main lens, which LG is billing for its low-light capabilities above all. The 4.03mm f/1.6 lens is backed by a 16MP image sensor. LG doesn't list the sensor size in its specifications, but based on EXIF data and the angle of view, it's in the same ballpark as the main image sensor on the iPhone 8 Plus, and covers a similar 28mm angle of view. At low ISO settings the main camera does a fine job resolving detail. It scores 2,356 lines on our standard sharpness test. That's less than the iPhone 8 (2,851 lines) and Note 8 (3,025 lines), but you can't make a direct comparison between the scores because the V30 has a higher-density 16MP sensor, versus the 12MP chips used by the competition. In reality, the V30's extra sensor resolution gives it a slight advantage in resolving tiny details in bright light. But it's not something you're going to notice when viewing images on a screen unless you magnify photos to 100 or 200 percent. In bright light, all of the modern flagship phones we've tested deliver strong results. We've found that scene recognition, exposure, and the other decisions a smartphone camera makes to capture an image are more important than specifications when it comes to more difficult situations. For a phone that's typically dim lighting. LG advertises its f/1.6 lens as being a low-light monster. But let's be real here—f/1.6 is not that much different than the f/1.7 you get on the Note 8 or the f/1.8 you get with an iPhone 8, especially when you consider the extremely small sensor and lens size we're dealing with. Those numbers mean more when talking about full-frame systems with longer lenses. The V30's low-light image quality is frustrating, especially when you compare it with the Note 8, shot side-by-side under the same conditions. Take a look at the crop from a nighttime snapshot to the right. The top image was captured with the V30, the bottom with the Note 8. The V30 didn't record the ISO used in its EXIF data for some reason, but did record that the shutter speed was 1/13-second, but the Note 8 shot was captured at ISO 1000 and 1/10-second shutter speed, so we expect the ISO to be in the same ballpark. Despite our model appearing smaller in the Note 8 crop (an effect of the difference in resolution), you see more detail in her face. Her eyes are visible, her hair color is truer to reality, and there's some color in her cheeks. The V30 is applying some pretty heavy noise reduction here, blurring away all detail, and at the same time applying some garish sharpening that adds weird artifacts, especially visible on our model's nose and eyes. Both cameras have optical image stabilization, which helps to make a shot like this possible in the first place, but it's not a panacea. You'll need your subject to stand still for a stabilized shot. Our studio lab tests confirm that the V30's high ISO image quality is way behind what you get with the Note 8. I shot our standard ISO test scene at each full-stop setting from ISO 50 through ISO 3200. The JPG output is at its best at lower settings, which is to be expected. At ISO 400 we start to see some odd pixelation in the fine details of our test scene. Most cameras would simply blur these, but it looks like the V30 is trying to pull out some detail that just isn't there. It doesn't look good. At ISO 800 the problem is exacerbated. Our test image is a mix of noise, blur, and oddly garbled details. Strangely enough, at ISO 1600 and 3200 we see high ISO results that look more like they should— there's rough grain and lack of detail, sure, but it looks right. Raw results, processed in Adobe Lightroom CC with default develop settings applied appear softer than the V30's JPG output. That's typical for a small-sensor camera, smartphone or not. But they don't show the ugly looking details we get with the ISO 400 and 800 JPG output. So you can skirt some issues by opting for Raw capture. But you need to develop Raw shots to make them useable—not everyone has the skill or desire to shoot Raw format. That also means that there's a chance that LG could update the V30 to better handle JPG output in this ISO range. But the inherent sin here, using a 16MP sensor instead of a 12MP, can't be overcome with a software fix. In the meantime, we continue to recommend the Note 8 for Android fans (and iPhone 8 Plus for Apple devotees) who want the best performance from a smartphone camera in all kinds of light. Despite not having stabilization, the ultra-wide camera is a lot of fun to play with in video mode, because you can swap between the standard and wide-angle lenses on demand: for instance, starting out by looking at an entire playing field in fish-eye, and then going tight on a few players. Video recording is absolutely gorgeous, both in regular and wide-screen modes. Its 120-degree field of view minimizes jitters, and when you switch to the main camera for video you'll enjoy the benefits of optical stabilization. My videos looked smooth with both lenses. The V30 records 4K video at 30 frames per second, with 1080p video going to 60 frames per second. That's similar to the Galaxy Note 8. There are some cool software tricks you can do: "point zoom" causes the camera to slowly zoom in on a specific part of your image, for instance. You do have to make sure to hold the phone the right way, though: there are stereo mics on the top and bottom, and if you cover one with your hand, recordings will be muffled. Conclusions LG's V30 is a phone for a wide, wide world. As the first Band 71 phone, it's the one T-Mobile subscribers who aren't thrilled with their current coverage should grab. As a wide-angle camera phone, it's one that anyone with a big family or a wild group of friends will adore. Gigabit LTE and a faster processor makes the V30 a significantly better pick than the G6, and the wide-angle camera is something you won't find in either Samsung's Galaxy line or Google's Pixel 2. The V30's battery life and LG's aggressive approach to sharpening low-light photos leaves us a little frustrated, though. While the V30 has the specs for terrific camera performance, LG's software leads to low-light photos consistently not coming out quite as clear as photos taken with the Galaxy Note 8 and S8. That leaves the Galaxy S8 as our all-around Editors' Choice, although the V30 is worth strong consideration if the new T-Mobile coverage or wide-angle camera options appeal to you. Jim Fisher contributed to this review
CLOSE Just in time for the holidays, gas prices drop to below $2 a gallon in some parts of the country. Linda So reports. Missouri gas prices are the cheapest in the nation as of Dec. 19, 2014. (Photo11: Valerie Mosley, Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader) SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Just in time for a holiday road trip, gas prices in many places in middle of the country have dipped below $2 a gallon. And here in Missouri, close to the geographic center of the USA, is where drivers can find the cheapest gas as of Friday, according to GasBuddy.com. "As of this morning, there are 24 states with prices under $2 a gallon. But Missouri is lowest," said Patrick DeHaan, GasBuddy's senior petroleum analyst. In Springfield, gas prices at some locations have dipped to $1.96 for a gallon of regular unleaded. They'll continue to drop for a while, DeHaan said. Some surrounding towns like Republic and Nixa typically have even lower prices than Springfield. The last time gas hit $1.99 a gallon in Missouri was June 2009. "It's not guaranteed, of course. But we think they'll drop a little more, 5 to 15 cents a gallon," he said. “My manager came in and changed it. Everyone went crazy.” Jessica Henke, Greenville, Mich. Areas east of Nashville, Tenn., also are reporting prices of less than $2. "The gas at my exit, Stewarts Ferry Road (off Interstate 40), is $1.99," said Doak Turner of Nashville. "Three stations next to each other is great!" American Automobile Association travel analysts estimate that current gas prices, which are at their lowest since 2008, are likely to drop as much as 7 cents by Christmas and possibly 7 more cents by New Year's. Because of higher fuel taxes, some states won't crack the $2 barrier, DeHaan said. Thirteen states, many in the South, have gas taxes of less than 40 cents a gallon, according to the American Petroleum Institute. Seventeen states' gas taxes are more than 50 cents a gallon. Among the states with the highest gas taxes: California at 68.87 cents, New York at 68.65 cents and Hawaii at 66.29 cents. The rock-bottom lowest gas tax? Alaska at 30.8 cents a gallon. The federal portion of that pie is 18.4 cents. Stations in Greenville, Mich., began selling $1.99 gas on Dec. 16, 2014. (Photo11: Tony Love, WZZM-TV, Grand Rapids-Kalamazoo-Battle Creek, Mich.) In Chicago, where DeHaan is based, the price of regular unleaded was $2.74 a gallon. Illinois' gas tax is 57.5 cents a gallon vs. 35.7 cents in Missouri. "I wish, but it's not going to happen," DeHaan said of $2 gas in the Chicago area. "There's no way oil producers would continue producing at 99 cents a gallon. At that price, it's more expensive for them to just pump the oil." But prices below $2 are possible in some high-tax states. Some Citgo stations in Western Michigan, where taxes are 57.43 cents of the per-gallon price, popped below $2 Tuesday. "My manager came in and changed it. Everyone went crazy," said Jessica Henke, a Citgo employee in Greenville, Mich. "I had one lady come in and hand me $10 to fill up her truck. She couldn't believe it." Regular unleaded gas prices peaked this year in late June at about $3.70 a gallon nationwide, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This week the nationwide average is $2.55. The most recent gas-price plunge was triggered in September when Saudi Arabian oil officials voluntarily cut crude oil prices, DeHaan said. The average car has a 12- to 15-gallon tank, so customers are keeping at least $14 to $17 more in their pockets now compared with six months ago. SUV and truck owners, the ones with even bigger tanks, are feeling even richer after a trip to the pump. "It doesn't take me much gas to go back and forth to work," said Kathleen Sagitano, who was filling up on $1.99 gas at Fuel City in Dallas. "But still, if I can fill my tank up just once a week, that's awesome! It's really great. Now I wish I had a four-door truck." That's the double-edged sword for many economists. People feel better off when gas prices are lower because they have more money left at the end of the week, but cheap gas also brings back a longing for bigger, less-efficient vehicles and more travel, which in the long run can hurt the environment. Don't expect these exceptionally low prices to last, DeHaan said. Refineries will begin switching to a more expensive summer blend of gasoline in mid-spring, which they do every year to reduce air pollution, and that higher-priced fuel will work its way to the pumps by June 1. Contributing: Jordan Buie, The Tennessean; Christopher Zoladz, WZZM-TV, Grand Rapids-Kalamazoo-Battle Creek, Mich.; and Carla Wade, WFAA-TV, Dallas-Fort Worth. A couple dozen vehicles line up for $1.99 regular unleaded at a Valero gas station Dec. 15, 2014, in Phoenix. (Photo11: Tom Tingle, The Arizona Republic) Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/16AIxFS
Rosie O’Donnell Details Depression Caused by Presidential Debate Insult in Ivanka Trump Poem On Wednesday, the comedian met Donald Trump’s daughter at an NYC restaurant Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Rosie O’Donnell Details Depression Caused by Presidential Debate Insult in Ivanka Trump Poem 1 / 1 Back to Gallery Rosie O’Donnell wrote a poem about meeting Ivanka Trump in a New York City restaurant this week and revealed that the trip was the first time she had been out of bed since watching Donald Trump insult her during the presidential debate. “I am tired, this is the first time I have been out out of bed really – to be honest, since the debate, I have been sleeping a lot,” O’Donnell wrote in a poem titled “8 Million to One,” posted to her website Thursday. “Depression clings to me — it’s hard to walk, to shower, to try, to care.” During the first debate of the general election, which was watched by 84 million people, Donald brought up the former “View” hosts name while sparring with Hillary Clinton over political attack ads. See Video: Rosie O'Donnell Rips 'Orange Anus' Donald Trump After Another Debate Insult “Hillary is hitting me with tremendous commercials,” Trump said towards the end of the debate last week. “Some of it said in entertainment, some of it said by somebody who’s been very vicious to me, Rosie O’Donnell. I said very tough things to her and I think everybody would agree that she deserves it and nobody feels sorry for her.” He has previously called her “dumb,” “a slob,” “disgusting,” and most recently said she had a “fat, ugly face.” var googletag = googletag \|\| {}; googletag.cmd = googletag.cmd \|\| []; googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.defineOutOfPageSlot('/30981161/TheWrapRemnantOOP', 'div-gpt-ad-1470167200293-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest(); googletag.enableServices(); }); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1470167200293-0'); }); Despite Donald’s insults, O’Donnell described his daughter Ivanka as “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” Although O’Donnell wanted to leave the restaurant, she still introduced herself to Ivanka, writing she “smiled genuinely, her husband was warm and gracious” and noted Ivanka “was absurdly kind” after O’Donnell told her about the “pain and shame” she’s endured. Also Read: Rosie O'Donnell Disappointed at Hillary Clinton for Reading Trump's 'Mean Tweet' About Her She ended the poem with, “I wrote a book once about bashert, the concept of meant to be. It has comforted me on my darkest days, when my inner voices scream ‘you deserved it’ — as her father has, same as my own.” O’Donnell and Donald, both outspoken celebrities, have been embroiled in a war of words for years. In 2006, O’Donnell called Donald a “snake-oil salesman” following his announcement that he would not fire then-Miss USA Tara Conner. The arch enemies got into a Twitter feud in 2011 after Donald tweeted that he felt sorry for her new partner in love. O’Donnell responded, “wow u r an ass.” Also Read: Donald Trump Makes History With Zero Major Newspaper Endorsements Read the entire poem below. i saw 4 cops – security i thought well dressed jovial – handsome – “yo rosie” “wasssup men” my common reply we walk toward one of the quiet booths behind the stairway i am tired this is the first time i have been out out of bed really – to be honest since the debate i have been sleeping a lot depression clings to me it’s hard to walk to shower to try to care i see a couple sitting close together in a small corner booth directly across from me i watch them stunned by her face and his calming charm they were definitely a THEY obvious for all to see oblivious to all seeing them love works like this i thought two so connected alone together in a crowded corner “that is the most beautiful woman i have ever seen” i say aloud to dana she turns to look – turns back at me “that’s ivanka” can’t be i said no it can’t be it is - she reassures me what r the chances i say to myself as dana walked to the hostess station to ask i stared at the young couple as they ate – unaware i was captivated by her beauty it blinded me so i didn’t realize it was even her til dana walked back to the table - nodding slowly yes she said it was dear god i prayed guide me out of here we stood to move to another table but i knew i could not stay my heart i worried would break again it did 4 years ago i won’t survive another one change ur life is the prescription i walked the 5 steps toward her table introduced myself she smiled genuinely her husband was warm and gracious i told her of my children some truths about myself my pain and shame she was absurdly kind “i just wanted u to know” i said in a shaky quiet voice i then made my way down the large wooden stairway into my waiting car the entire encounter start to finish was 4 minutes max i wrote a book once about bashert the concept of meant to be it has comforted me on my darkest days when my inner voices scream u deserved it as her father has same as my own Read original story Rosie O’Donnell Details Depression Caused by Presidential Debate Insult in Ivanka Trump Poem At TheWrap
More than a week after the PRISM story first broke, you might have reached saturation point when it comes to news and discussion about it. That’s understandable, and it seems like some members of the US Senate feel the same way. Still there have been some important developments this weekend, so we thought it was worth highlighting them. A must-read piece by the Associated Press yesterday took a deep-dive into how PRISM fits into the wider context of US online espionage programs. The AP reports that PRISM acts as a kind of refining tool for data that the National Security Agency (NSA) pulls data from the undersea cables that pipe Internet data in and out of the USA: “Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information. “The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president’s daily briefing. Prism makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet’s raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.” The report, considers whether data gleaned from technology companies via PRISM allows the NSA to navigate through the enormous bulk dump of Internet data it collects from the undersea cables. “For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. But if Prism provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government “rewind” its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?” In other words, technology companies may be telling the truth when they say that they only hand over specific user information in response to specific requests, but the NSA doesn’t really need anything more from them anyway, because they already have a ‘raw feed’ of Internet traffic to pull from. Read the AP’s article in full for a fascinating, and perhaps troubling, look at what it seems the NSA is up to. Elsewhere, the Washington Post reports that PRISM works with three other programs run by the NSA; MAINWAY, MARINA and NUCLEON. Together, the programs collect vast swathes of metadata about telephone and Internet communications passing through USA. “When the NSA aims for foreign targets whose communications cross U.S. infrastructure, it expects to sweep in some American content “incidentally” or “inadvertently,” which are terms of art in regulations governing the NSA. Contact chaining, because it extends to the contacts of contacts of targets, inevitably collects even more American data.” Keep up with all our PRISM coverage here. We’re sure there’s still more to come. Image credit: Getty Images Read next: The personal cloud that tomorrow needs
It's been almost a year since US District Judge Otis Wright issued a sanction order repudiating the lawyers behind the "copyright trolling" organization known as Prenda Law. Since then, several other judges have pounded Prenda with expensive sanction orders. Just last week, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and John Steele—the three lawyers commonly linked to Prenda—were found to be in contempt of a devastating sanction order won by AT&T and Comcast. Today, a Minnesota federal judge has issued an order (PDF) going in the opposite direction. US District Judge Joan Ericksen has overturned sanctions that were issued in November by a US Magistrate Judge in her district, Franklin Noel. Like Wright, Noel asked his local US Attorney to take a look into Prenda. He also ordered Prenda to pay back the four defendants who settled cases in his court for amounts ranging from $3,500 to $6,000 in addition to their legal fees. That order was stayed while Ericksen could consider Prenda's objections. Now she has considered their objections and found them convincing. Noel overstepped his bounds as a magistrate judge, Ericksen writes in today's order—something that AF Holdings, a Prenda shell company, repeatedly pointed out. "[T]he Court did not refer the actions to the magistrate judge to determine whether AF Holdings had committed a fraud on the court," wrote Ericksen. "AF Holdings consistently objected to the magistrate judge's authority to determine whether AF Holdings had committed a fraud on the Court. The magistrate judge had no such authority." Ericksen spends a page pointing out that as a federal magistrate, Noel isn't what is called an Article III judge. Despite that, Noel improperly "relied on the inherent power of the Court to determine whether it has been a victim of fraud," and it sounds like Ericksen doesn't approve of how he wielded that power. The order also gives short shrift to long-standing accusations of forgery and identity theft that have been present in the Prenda saga. Recall that the Prenda shell AF Holdings, which sued hundreds of people, involved copyrights to adult movies. The copyright transfers were signed by John Steele's former housekeeper, Alan Cooper; but Cooper later came forward and said his signature was forged. Those allegations have been taken seriously by judges, like Noel and Wright, who talked about Prenda lawyers committing "fraud on the court." But today Ericksen has found that the AF Holdings copyright assignments are valid, even though she notes that Cooper disputes the signatures. The assignor in the copyright transfer for the two movies at issue, Popular Demand and Sexual Obsession, is listed as Raymond Rogers. "That he actually did execute the assignments has not been questioned," notes Ericksen. The issue of Cooper's signature was "immaterial" when Ericksen decided to grant expedited discovery to AF Holdings. The order ends with this sentence, which comes close to suggesting that using a forged document would be fine: "AF Holdings’ submission of the agreements with Cooper’s signatures—legitimate or not, authorized or not—to evince the transfer of the copyrights to AF Holdings did not amount to a fraud on the Court." For the Prenda-linked lawyers, Ericksen's order will surely be seen as vindication in what has been a difficult year. It could be paraphrased as: "Thanks, but you're not a real judge. And the copyright is valid, even if the signature was forged." Listing image by Flickr user: Nathan Meijer
Figure 1. A laboratory prototype of a Limbi robot autonomously builds a modular structure. This process could repeat to build a large truss or spacecraft. As shown here, the modules are small, but a similar approach would work for large modules. Many future space vehicles, planetary bases, and mining operations will be too large and heavy to launch on a single rocket. Instead, component parts would need to be launched on multiple rockets and assembled in space. To enable versatile in-space assembly, a novel class of reconfigurable robots called Limboids has been conceptualized. Limboids are robotic limbs that attach and detach from each other to form a variety of useful configurations. These configurations might be as small as a single limb, which is best for dexterous manipulation of small parts, or as large as necessary for gross manipulation. As a modular system, Limboids could be supplemented with additional tools and limbs. A core concept of Limboids is “modularity at the limb scale.” Each robot, called Limbi, is a self-mobile limb and can function as a standalone robot for single-handed tasks. For example, one Limbi could grab a battery pack from a storage container and insert it into a satellite. Both ends of Limbi are electromechanical docks that can attach to a structure, other robots, or tools like grippers and drills. The base structure powers and controls the robots through these docks, so Limbi can walk end-over-end across the structure without a battery or tether. Researchers recently used a prototype Limbi to demonstrate end-over-end mobility and assembly of a modular structure (Figure 1). Figure 2. Limbi robots can form a wide variety of Limboid configurations, enabling small-scale dexterous manipulation, gross manipulation of large objects, docking with incoming spacecraft, and two-handed manipulation. Because the electromechanical docks provide power to the robots, Limboids could move around and reconfigure themselves without the complexity of power cords. Examples of configurations and use cases for Limboids are shown in Figure 2. These configurations consist of a) Limbi robots working in parallel to perform independent or cooperative work, b) a long arm for grabbing incoming spacecraft, c) a walker-manipulator to carry objects while moving, and d) a torso with multiple arms for manipulating large objects. The use cases include e) three limbs working together to build a chain of parts, and f) a two-armed Limboid holding a large object. In the future, Limboids might help build a large orbiting structure, such as a solar farm or an asteroid-processing facility. They could unpack structural components and climb out along the structure as they build it, using built-in power lines instead of carrying tethers or batteries. Alternatively, they might staff an orbiting spacecraft factory, where they would crawl around on trusses or walk on a floor. There, they would grab incoming shipments, unpack spacecraft components, assemble a solar panel array, and attach tanks, batteries, and instruments to the spacecraft hull. They could be embedded in either of these settings and meet manipulation demands over many years of factory use and multiple spacecraft design cycles.
ABC News' Jovanna Billington reports: Having kids is generally seen as a good thing. Grandparents crave it; parents find it meaningful; our genes' evolutionary mandate requires it. But can there be too much of a good thing? Is eight "enough" - or way more than enough? In 2009, Nadya Suleman gained fame and the moniker, "Octomom," when she had octuplets. She was criticized when it emerged she already had six small children and was an unemployed single mom on public assistance. She denied she was on assistance until April 2012, when she confirmed she received $2,000 a month from the state of California. "How Would You Do It?" contest finalist Trena Shines, from Palo Alto, Calif., submitted a scenario idea based on her experience as the mother of eight. Shines has simply always wanted a big family. Her children, all biological, range in age from 21 months to 21 years. She said people have said rude things to her when she and her big brood have been out together. We took our hidden cameras to Stacks Pancake House, in Paramus, N.J., to film a scenario in which a waitress insults a mother of eight, accusing her of irresponsibly relying on tax dollars. Shines stood behind the scenes. Would anyone stand up to our waitress in defense of the mother? Find out by watching the whole scenario on "What Would You Do?" Friday at 9 p.m. and tell us how you feel by voting below.
On the sixth anniversary of the ruling on Citizens United, Elizabeth Warren spoke to congress to remind them of the egregious error they had made in allowing massive amounts of money to influence politics. “Six years ago today the Supreme Court overturned a century of established law. And, in doing so, unleashed a secret flow of corporate money into our political system. The Supreme Court created a big problem, but that does not mean anyone with any integrity must just roll over and play dead. No, it is time to fight back. This Congress doesn’t lack for workable ideas for how to root out the influence of money in politics, this Congress just lacks a spine to do it!” Warren had some harsh words for the impotent congress, taking them to task for their steadfast refusal to fix the broken political system which allows for massive corporations to play a major part in elections and the implementation of laws. Watch.
Attention! This news was published on the old version of the website. There may be some problems with news display in specific browser versions. War Thunder Competitions - March winners Dear players and Fine Arts experts! A new month has arrived, so it's time to proclaim the winners of our last month's Community competitions! As always, a lot of effort has been put into the content that was created, and the winners will be happy to receive their share of the prize fund totalling more than 25 000 Golden Eagles! Interested in joining any of the competitions below yourself? Then don't waste any time and visit the forums for more information! Straight Screenshot - 1 500 Creator: Thunder421 Artistic Screenshot - 1 500 Creator: olife1 Historical Recreation - 1 500 Creator: Mrdeathman Skin - 2 000 Creator: Headstick Skin - 2 000 Creator: JohnnyAlpha65 Skin - 2 000 Creator: Leviathan_07 First Place - 5 000 Creator: VonRichthofen555 Second Place - 4 000 Creator: WeBe Third Place - 3 000 Creator: Carrera4s Fourth Place - 2 000 Creator: bobeiionut Fifth Place - 1 000 Creator: Thai_Fighter Previous Competitions:
Terentia hairstreak among Apodantia flower buds \| Photo: Aaron Pomerantz / Rainforest Expeditions This story starts as so many stories do: a scientist trudged through a rainforest and stopped to inspect a curious-looking plant. "Huh, that's weird," said Aaron Pomerantz, to no one in particular. The LA-based entomologist took a step closer to inspect the specimen. He found himself looking at hundreds of tiny yellow bulbs protruding out of a tree trunk. At first he thought the bulbs were part of a fungus growing on the planet, or maybe some sort of strange fruit. He didn't think much of it until a closer look revealed caterpillars, happily munching away on the yellow knobs. An even closer look showed that ants accompanied the caterpillars. It's not really that unusual to find caterpillars and ants spending time together in the tropics. The symbiotic relationship between the two even has a name. "Mymecophily" literally means that the caterpillars are "ant loving." Ants really like sugar, and that's something that many tropical plants have evolved to exploit. They offer up small growths called extrafloral nectaries, supplies of nutrients outside of flowers, to the ants. The ants slurp up the sugary nectar and in exchange, they keep parasites and predators at bay. It's a win-win situation. Caterpillar, ant, and flower buds \| Photo: Aaron Pomerantz / Jeff Cremer Caterpillars in the family Lycaenidae have come up with a similar strategy. They evolved something called a dorsal nectary organ. The ants drum on the caterpillars' backs, and the caterpillars release a concoction of sugars and amino acids for the ants to sip. In return, the ants act as caterpillar bodyguards. "While I had little idea at the time what I was looking at, my background in entomology was telling me one thing. This was something cool," Pomerantz says. That's when he noticed something fluttering in the corner of his eye. "I could immediately identify it as a lycaenid and it had a distinct yellow spot on its hind wing that looked remarkably like the yellow bulbs," he wrote in a blog post about the discovery. "Was this the adult of the caterpillars?" What Pomerantz had was the makings of a scientific mystery. What were these strange yellow plants? Were the caterpillars related to the adult butterfly he saw? Did the adult evolve a wing pattern to match the plant? And how do the ants fit in to the puzzle? Thanks to contacts back in the States, Pomerantz learned that the yellow projections were not fruits or fungi. They were instead flower buds of a rare parasitic plant, possibly one called Apodanthes caseariae. The parasite lives inside of the tree, but every year around October its yellow flowers break through the bark and bask in the jungle air where they become food for hungry caterpillars. By January the buds fall off, leaving the tree pockmarked with holes, as if several hundred woodpeckers had found their way to Peru. Pomerantz says that his observations, conducted through his work as a biologist and science communicator for a Peruvian ecotourism company called Rainforest Expeditions, "appear to be the first record of an insect utilizing Apodanthes as a host plant." The butterfly meanwhile turned out to be a critter first described nearly 150 years ago in 1868: a lycaenid called Terenthina terentia, or the Terentia hairstreak. The Amazon rainforest is home to roughly one in every ten species found on our planet, and new ones are being discovered all the time. According to a WWF survey, 441 new species there were described by scientists between 2010 and 2013, including 258 plants, 84 fish, 58 amphibians, 22 reptiles, 18 birds, and one mammal. That's nearly three every week. But describing a species is not the same as really understanding it. Knowing what a particular plant or animal looks like is far different from knowing how it lives its life. The Terentia hairstreak may have been described a century and a half ago, but until now nobody knew much about its life cycle. Where does it lay its eggs? How do the caterpillars survive? How might the butterflies' coloration have evolved? Pomerantz documents the ecological relationship \| Photo: Rainforest Expeditions "By observing its behavior in the wild, we have insight into why the butterfly has this striking yellow wing spot and can start to delve deeper into why it uses this host plant, how it finds it, what purpose the yellow spot serves, and so on," Pomerantz says. "Describing a new species is just the first step. Picking apart its life and behavior is far more interesting." By doing so, Pomerantz has uncovered a mini-ecosystem in the jungle, a complex relationship between two plants and two insects, four species that appear to have evolved alongside each other for a very, very long time. The truth is that anybody can make an exciting discovery like this one if they keep their eyes open. And he should know: unlike many folks making new scientific discoveries, Pomerantz isn't a PhD-wielding doctor. He received his master's degree in entomology and molecular biology in 2014 from the University of Florida. "There are still so many discoveries people can make just by observing organisms in nature, no matter what your educational background or where you are," he says. And as Angelenos know well, you don't have to be in the tropics to do it. After all, a band of citizen scientists in LA helped researchers last year discover more than thirty new species of flies in their very own backyards.
What is Markdown? It’s a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet. Learn Markdown in 60 Seconds Who created Markdown? It was developed in 2004 by John Gruber, who wrote the first markdown-to-html converter in Perl, and it soon became widely used in websites. By 2014 there were dozens of implementations in many languages. Why is CommonMark needed? John Gruber’s canonical description of Markdown’s syntax does not specify the syntax unambiguously. In the absence of a spec, early implementers consulted the original Markdown.pl code to resolve these ambiguities. But Markdown.pl was quite buggy, and gave manifestly bad results in many cases, so it was not a satisfactory replacement for a spec. Markdown.pl was last updated December 17 th , 2004. Because there is no unambiguous spec, implementations have diverged considerably over the last 10 years. As a result, users are often surprised to find that a document that renders one way on one system (say, a GitHub wiki) renders differently on another (say, converting to docbook using Pandoc). To make matters worse, because nothing in Markdown counts as a “syntax error,” the divergence often isn’t discovered right away. There’s no standard test suite for Markdown; MDTest is the closest thing we have. The only way to resolve Markdown ambiguities and inconsistencies is Babelmark, which compares the output of 20+ implementations of Markdown against each other to see if a consensus emerges. We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this specification. We believe this is necessary, even essential, for the future of Markdown. That’s what we call CommonMark. Who are you? We’re a group of Markdown fans who either work at companies with industrial scale deployments of Markdown, have written Markdown parsers, have extensive experience supporting Markdown with end users – or all of the above. John MacFarlane , [email protected] , [email protected] David Greenspan , [email protected] , [email protected] Vicent Marti , [email protected] , [email protected] Neil Williams , [email protected] , [email protected] Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe , [email protected] , [email protected] Jeff Atwood, [email protected] How can I help? Exercise our reference implementations, or find a community implementation in your preferred environment or language. Provide feedback! If a CommonMark implementation does not already exist in your preferred environment or language, try implementing your own CommonMark parser. One of our major goals is to strongly specify Markdown, and to eliminate the many old inconsistencies and ambiguities that made using Markdown so difficult. Did we succeed? Where can I find it? The CommonMark specification. Reference implementation and validation test suite on GitHub. Public discussion area and mailing list via Discourse. Quick reference card and interactive tutorial for learning Markdown. Live testing tool powered by the reference implementation. When is the spec final? The current version of the CommonMark spec is complete, and quite robust after a year of public feedback … but not quite final. With your help, we plan to announce a finalized 1.0 spec and test suite in 2018.
This article from The Wall Street Journal outlines how the NSA is increasingly engaging in domestic surveillance, data collection, and data mining. The result is essentially the same as Total Information Awareness. According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected. [...] Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item -- and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city -- for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans -- the government's spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city. The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit. The information doesn't generally include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone's location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message. Intelligence agencies have used administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI -- which don't need a judge's signature -- to collect and analyze such data, current and former intelligence officials said. If that data provided "reasonable suspicion" that a person, whether foreign or from the U.S., was linked to al Qaeda, intelligence officers could eavesdrop under the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program. [...] The NSA uses its own high-powered version of social-network analysis to search for possible new patterns and links to terrorism. The Pentagon's experimental Total Information Awareness program, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, was an early research effort on the same concept, designed to bring together and analyze as much and as many varied kinds of data as possible. Congress eliminated funding for the program in 2003 before it began operating. But it permitted some of the research to continue and TIA technology to be used for foreign surveillance. Some of it was shifted to the NSA -- which also is funded by the Pentagon -- and put in the so-called black budget, where it would receive less scrutiny and bolster other data-sifting efforts, current and former intelligence officials said. "When it got taken apart, it didn't get thrown away," says a former top government official familiar with the TIA program. Two current officials also said the NSA's current combination of programs now largely mirrors the former TIA project. But the NSA offers less privacy protection. TIA developers researched ways to limit the use of the system for broad searches of individuals' data, such as requiring intelligence officers to get leads from other sources first. The NSA effort lacks those controls, as well as controls that it developed in the 1990s for an earlier data-sweeping attempt.
CEVO Announces ESWC USA Qualifier + MSI x IBUYPOWER Summer CS:GO Series CEVO Announces 2015 ESWC USA Qualifier + MSI x IBUYPOWER Summer CS:GO Series (May 19, 2015) – CEVO, North America’s largest online competitive CS:GO gaming league, and MSI, the largest gaming hardware manufacturer in the world, are pleased to announce the MSI ESWC USA Online Qualifier + the MSI x IBUYPOWER Summer CS:GO Qualifier tournament series. The MSI x IBUYPOWER Summer CS:GO Qualifers are an online tournament series that will consist of three consecutive weekend CS:GO tournaments hosted on CEVO.com and broadcast by CEVO-TV taking place on May 30-31, June 6-7, and June 13-14, 2015 open to North American CS:GO teams of all skill levels. Each weekend tournament will have 25 points up for grabs, and the team that finishes the series with the most points will automatically qualify to compete against the top North American CS:GO Teams in the iBUYPOWER Invitational: Summer 2015 on June 20-21, 2015 also hosted by CEVO. The first event in the series will also serve as the official 2015 ESWC USA CS:GO Qualifier. In addition to the regular tournament prizing, the top USA team from Qualifier #1 will receive complimentary travel + accommodations to the ESWC 2015 CS:GO Tournament in Montreal, Canada on July 9-12, 2015. The 2015 ESWC USA CS:GO Qualifier's will be exclusively broadcast on MLG.tv by CEVO-TV. Registration for Qualifier #1 of the MSI x IBUYPOWER Summer CS:GO Qualifer Series is NOW OPEN and teams can register from now until Friday, May 29th at 11:59 PM ET. Space in this tournament is extremely limited, so don't wait - register your team today! CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE MSI 2015 ESWC USA QUALIFIER #1! Qualifier #1 will begin with a Preliminary Qualifier bracket on Saturday, May 30th (128 team double elimination bracket) from which the top 8 teams will qualify to compete against the 8 invited teams in the Championship Qualifier bracket on Sunday, May 31st (16 team double elimination bracket). Participation in the MSI x IBUYPOWER Summer CS:GO Qualifer Series is completely FREE for CEVO MVP's and $5/player for regular users per qualifier. If you'd like to learn more about the CEVO MVP program, visit http://cevo.com/mvp. $3,000 USD in cash prizes + 15x BenQ XL Series XL2411Z 144 Hz 24-Inch LED Monitors (used @ CEVO s5 LAN) BenQ XL Series XL2411Z 144 Hz 24-Inch LED Monitors (used @ CEVO s5 LAN) Complimentary travel & accommodations to the ESWC 2015 CS:GO Tournament in Montreal, Canada on July 9-12, 2015 (Qualifier #1 Winner) ALL matches played on premium 128-tickrate CEVO gameservers across 15+ locations CEVO's automated match service integration Access to premium tournament features (scrim system, league leaderboards, etc..) ALL matches protected by CEVO's exclusive anti-cheat technology Complete LIVE match statistics for every match Automatic recording and storage of GOTV demos Real-time updated brackets and team rankings Helpful league officials available for LIVE support available throughout the tournament PRIZES Qualifier #1: 1st place - 7 MSI x IBUYPOWER series points + complimentary travel & accommodations to the ESWC CS:GO Tournament in Montreal, Canada on July 9th-12th 2nd place - 5 MSI x IBUYPOWER series points 3rd/4th place - 4 MSI x IBUYPOWER series points 5th-8th place - 2 MSI x IBUYPOWER series points 9th-16th place - 1 MSI x IBUYPOWER series point * The ESWC 2015 invitation will be awarded to the top team from Qualifier #1 that has at least 3 players who are citizens of the USA. MSI x IBUYPOWER Summer CS:GO Qualifier Series: 1st - $1,800.00 + 5x BenQ XL Series XL2411Z 144 Hz 24-Inch LED Monitors + invitation to the iBUYPOWER Invitational: Summer 2015 on June 20-21, 2015 2nd - $750.00 + 5x BenQ XL Series XL2411Z 144 Hz 24-Inch LED Monitors 3rd - $450.00 + 5x BenQ XL Series XL2411Z 144 Hz 24-Inch LED Monitors * These prizes will be awarded to the teams with the most points at the end of the entire MSI x IBUYPOWER Summer CS:GO Qualifier Series. Monitors will only be shipped to players in North America. FORMAT & SCHEDULE QUALIFIER #1 - PRELIMINARY BRACKET: SATURDAY, MAY 30TH: - 128 team double elimination bracket - first come, first serve open registration - best of three maps (bo3) upper bracket and best of one map (bo1) lower bracket - map & side selection (bo3): VETO process (maps 1 & 2) / knife for sides (map 3) - map & side selection (bo1): VETO process + knife for sides - tournament seeds: random - top 8 teams advance to day two Round of 128: 12:00 PM ET Round of 64 / LB Round 1: 2:30 PM ET Round of 32 / LB Round 2: 5:00 PM ET LB Round 3: 6:15 PM ET Round of 16 / LB Round 4: 7:30 PM ET LB Round 5: 8:45 PM ET Round of 8 / LB Round 6: 10:00 PM ET LB Round 7: 11:15 PM ET LB Round 8: 12:30 AM ET QUALIFIER #1 - CHAMPIONSHIP BRACKET: SUNDAY, MAY 31ST: - 16 team single elimination bracket - 8 invited teams (announced soon) + top 8 teams from the preliminary bracket - best of three maps (bo3) - map & side selection: VETO process (maps 1 & 2) / knife for sides (map 3) - championship bracket seeds 1-8 (invited teams): random order - championship bracket seeds 9-16 (qualified via qualifier #1 - preliminary bracket): seeded based on whether they came from the qualifier #1 - preliminary upper or lower bracket, with ties broken randomly. Round of 16: 12:00 PM ET Round of 8: 2:30 PM ET Round of 4: 5:00 PM ET Grand Finals: 7:30 PM ET NOTE: Teams should be aware that the tournament schedule is tentative and teams should be prepared to play matches in a rush style back-to-back format. Reschedules will not be permitted. The complete Qualifier #1 schedule can be found online HERE. The Qualifier #2 (June 6-7) & Qualifier #3 (June 13-14) format and schedule will be released shortly in separate news announcements. MAP POOL de_dust2 de_inferno de_train de_mirage de_cache de_overpass de_cbble ### About Micro-Star International (MSI): As a world leading gaming brand, MSI’s goal is to become the most trusted name in gaming and e-sport. We’ve dedicated countless hours and committed numerous resources to the eSports community to support the world's most aspiring and best gamers and use their knowledge and expertise in our products in return. The insistence on 100% in-house design and manufacturing gives MSI the solid capability to implement innovative ideas and optimized design in our products. For more information visit us.msi.com. About ESWC: The Electronic Sports World Cup is a worldwide competition of video games starting locally with national qualifying to end with a World Final gathering all the cyber athletes and designed as a live show. The ESWC has grown as an independent and innovative project representing gamers and online communities. ESWC federates companies as non-profit organizations all over the world; all convinced that video games champions are genuine athletes precursors of their generation and the new sports of the XXIst century. The ESWC is managed by Oxent SAS, global rights owner since June 2012. About CEVO: CEVO is a global eSports company built around North America’s largest competitive online PC gaming league. Founded in December of 2004 with the intention to transform competitive online gaming into a professional sport, CEVO has been hosting both free and pay-to-play tournaments across a variety of AAA titles for almost 10 years. Through CEVO-TV we are also engaged in online broadcasting and other digital media. Additionally, CEVO offers event management, marketing, development, and design solutions for clients looking to get involved in the business of eSports. For more information visit cevo.com. About Major League Gaming (MLG): MLG is the leader in eSports delivering premium gaming content to viewers through its streaming platform - MLG.tv and promoting eSports globally through premier competition. MLG.tv is one of the fastest growing broadcast networks worldwide reaching 20 million highly-engaged fans each month via web, mobile, connected TVs, gaming consoles and social media. MLG pioneered the eSports industry as the longest-running competitive gaming league in North America and through Gamebattles, the largest cross platform online gaming tournament system with 9 million registered users. For more information: MLG.tv. ### GET SOCIAL with CEVO MLG.tv - Twitter - Facebook - YouTube - STEAM
After two nights of heated arguments, occasionally descending into farce, the Irish parliament voted to permit abortion in limited circumstances, marking a major change in the country's attitude to the morality of reproductive rights. Fittingly for two of the hottest days of the year so far, Ireland's parliament debated what may be the hottest issue in the county's political history since independence. As temperatures reached 80 degrees during the day, the heat went on into the night – in parliament at least – as lawmakers discussed the long-awaited Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill. The bill passed by 127 votes to 31 and will now be sent to Ireland's Senate for further discussion – largely a formality, as the Senate lacks the power to reject the bill. But despite the overwhelming majority, the vote has fractured Irish politics, opening serious divisions inside Ireland's two most significant parties, conservative Fine Gael and centrist Fianna Fáil, and change could be coming to the usually static Irish political landscape. The bill includes provisions for abortion if a woman's life is threatened by pregnancy, including by suicide if a panel of psychiatrists judges the threat to be real. It also prescribes a jail term of 14 years for anyone procuring or performing an abortion obtained under false claims. Campaigners are unimpressed. Anti-abortionists made a failed, last-minute bid to challenge the bill in the courts, while pro-abortion-rights campaigners, while welcoming the law change, say the move is insufficient. "This legislation is not and can not be a viable long term solution to the issue of abortion in Ireland," says Sinéad Ahern of Choice Ireland. Malta is now the sole European Union member state that entirely bans abortion, though Ireland and Poland still have restrictive regimes. Some 166 amendments were discussed and rejected over the course of two nights of heated debate. A final vote was due before Saturday, but in the end occurred just after midnight last night. Deep divisions But the battlefield is strewn with casualties: Irish politics is now in disarray as intra-party divisions have opened across the board. Five government lawmakers defied their party, which demanded unanimous support for the bill, and voted against – in the process losing their membership of the governing Fine Gael parliamentary group. One, junior minister Lucinda Creighton, lost her ministry as a result of voting against the government on an amendment. Ms. Creighton was widely viewed as a rising star and potential first female prime minister of Ireland. A single Fine Gael lawmaker was not present to vote. Two Fine Gael members who had been expected to defy orders in the end voted with the government. One, Michelle Mulherin, made a pointed speech in parliament, saying: "I am now faced with either supporting the Bill or being booted out of the party, my party. And I am not going to allow myself to be booted out so I’m supporting this legislation." The junior government coalition partner, Labour, is unanimously in favor of the change in law, save for one member who accidentally voted against the party whip on an amendment last night amid chaotic scenes. Among opposition parties there is division. Socialist republican party Sinn Féin supports the bill, albeit with one member defecting. Centrist party Fianna Fáil, which headed the last government, is divided on the issue, and did not impose a party line. Ireland's far-left lawmakers, who uniformly support women's right to choose, joined with anti-abortionists in rejecting the bill, doing so on the basis that it doesn't go far enough. Socialist Party leader Joe Higgins described the bill as a "betrayal of women." By their own reckoning, anti-abortion campaigners say there are 100,000 anti-abortion votes up for grabs at the next election. Opinion polls suggest the overwhelming majority of Irish people support the bill, but not abortion-on-demand. Tragic history Tensions have been inflamed by the death of 31-year old Savita Halappanavar, who died in an Irish hospital in October 2012 after a miscarriage. She had requested an abortion, but was refused. An inquest found she died of septic shock. Mr. Higgins's former Socialist colleague and now-independent Clare Daly, a leading abortion-rights campaigner who has submitted two private members' bills on abortion to parliament, says the law makes abortions more difficult to obtain, not less. “In the absence of a referendum to repeal article 40.3.3 of the Constitution – for which we call – we were willing to support legislation in line with the X Case Ruling of 1992. This bill however, will put more obstacles in the way of access to life-saving abortions than are required by the constitution," she said. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy Article 40.3.3 of Ireland's constitution, also known as the eighth amendment, is a rule recognizing: "the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother". It was introduced in 1983 after a bitter referendum campaign, with anti-abortion campaigners supporting and pro-choice campaigners against. The 1992 X Case ruling interpreted the amendment as allowing abortion when a woman's life was threatened by the pregnancy, including by threat of suicide. The judgement came after Ms. X, a 14-year-old girl who became pregnant after being raped, sought permission to travel abroad for an abortion. She was initially sequestered by the state before the judgement came down. Ms. X later miscarried.
Heather Cook, the former Episcopal bishop who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the December 2014 killing of a cyclist in a drunken crash in North Baltimore, is eligible for parole next month. Cook, 60, who has been incarcerated at the Maryland Correctional Institute in Jessup, is scheduled to appear before the Parole Board on May 9, according to a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS). Cook had been sentenced on October 27, 2015, to seven years in prison for the crash, which claimed the life of Thomas Palermo, a married father of two who had been out riding his bike two days after Christmas. Cook pleaded guilt to vehicular manslaughter, leaving the scene of a fatal accident, driving while under the influence and texting while driving. Asked how the state calculated her eligibility for parole, less than two years into her prison term, DPSCS media relations specialist Gerard Shields explained it this way: “She has a seven-year sentence, but because the crime is considered non-violent, she is eligible for parole after serving 25% of it,” Shields said. “It does seem quick,” he agreed. Drunk Driving History The Cook case roiled the church and outraged the city’s bicycling community. The first-ever female bishop for the Maryland diocese, Cook had been selected as a candidate by a search committee whose members had known of Cook’s 2010 drunk driving incident on the Eastern Shore, but failed to share it with others involved in the process of selecting her. In that earlier case, Cook had been found by Caroline County sheriff’s deputies driving on a shredded tire, with marijuana paraphernalia and liquor bottles in the car and vomit on her shirt. On a breathalyzer she’d blown .27, more than three times the legal limit. She received probation before judgment. ___________________________________________ On December 28, 2014, Baltimore Brew broke this story – revealing that the driver who fled after fatally plowing into a 41-year-old Baltimore-area bicyclist was recently consecrated Episcopal Bishop Heather Cook. And we stayed with it through today’s report, breaking the news of Cook’s eligibility for parole. Here is just some of our past coverage. ___________________________________________ In the fatal 2014 drunk-driving crash, Cook’s .22 on a breathalyzer was nearly three times the legal limit. According to prosecutors, she had left her North Baltimore home, drunk and texting, and struck the 41-year-old Palermo as he rode his bike along Roland Avenue in the bike lane. Cook left the crash scene and later passed it as she returned home. Her lawyers said she wanted to drop off her dog before returning to the scene. Arguing for a lesser sentence, Cook’s attorneys had said she suffered from alcoholism and had no help for it. Prosecutors, meanwhile, had pushed for a longer sentence of 10 years followed by probation. Prosecutor Kurt Bjorklund, at sentencing, said Cook’s behavior that day warranted no leniency. “She made sure her dog was okay, but she didn’t care about another human,” he said. Parole Board Procedure Asked whether the May 9 hearing will be open to the public or closed, Shields said that is decided according to the family’s wishes. He said he did not know if the family has expressed a preference. The Brew was unable to reach family members late today for comment. Sheilds said the public may write to the Maryland Parole Commission at 6776 Reisterstown Road, Suite 307, Baltimore, MD 21215 Hunter L. Pruette, the lawyer handling Cook’s appearance before the Parole Board, declined to comment today.
White House officials are exploring ways to pressure Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office \| Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion \| Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.) to return to the controversial issue of ObamaCare repeal when the Senate returns to work in September. President Trump, who has repeatedly criticized McConnell in public, wants to hold the leader’s feet to the fire on the issue, say White House sources. “I have not heard a single voice in the White House say give up on healthcare. Everyone keeps saying 'let’s keep trying and let’s keep pushing,' ” said one White House source. ADVERTISEMENT “We’re definitely not ready to move on and feel members should keep looking for a way to pass the bill. It would be one thing if it had fallen 30 votes short but they were just one vote shy of passing a bill in the Senate,” the source added. One point of leverage the White House may explore is using the looming expiration of reconciliation instructions for fiscal 2017 to argue for one more push. Under the rules, the GOP has until the end of September to pass ObamaCare repeal legislation under the fast-track rules, which prevent a Democratic filibuster. This means the GOP has just one last chance to defund Planned Parenthood or eliminate the most unpopular elements of ObamaCare, such as the mandate on individuals to purchase insurance. McConnell has made it clear he wants to move on to other priorities: raising the debt ceiling, negotiating a spending deal, passing a defense authorization and reforming the tax code. “It’s time to move on,” McConnell declared on the Senate floor after Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.) stunned colleagues by casting the deciding vote against a pared-down ObamaCare repeal bill. McConnell told reporters on Aug. 1 that the Senate will take up tax reform when senators return to Washington after Labor Day. A number of Senate Republicans are also advocating for various ObamaCare repeal bills, though behind the scenes, many are also happy to move on to tax reform ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Another option mentioned by a White House official to press Republicans into action would be to work with the conservative House Freedom Caucus to delay passage of the fiscal 2018 budget, which needs to be passed in order to take up tax-reform legislation, until the Senate takes another shot at ObamaCare. A third option would be to act “administratively” to put pressure on Senate Republicans. For example, administration officials for months have suggested that they could eliminate subsidies that members of Congress and their staff receive through ObamaCare to help them buy health coverage. “People are talking about different things with healthcare. They’re looking at what they can do administratively. There are subsidies for insurance companies, there are also subsidies for members of Congress and their staffs,” said a second White House official. These subsidies serve as employer contributions for lawmakers and staff who were moved from the federal employee healthcare benefits program to the ObamaCare exchanges. A Republican aide acknowledged administration officials had made the suggestion. “It’s a constant threat,” said a senior Senate GOP aide. “I’ve heard this from the Domestic Policy Council and [the Office of Management and Budget].” Administration officials are also looking at stopping the cost-sharing reduction payments designed to shore up insurance companies that lose money by participating in the ObamaCare exchanges. This could put financial pressure on companies to withdraw from individual marketplaces around the country and hasten the unraveling of ObamaCare, which could put pressure on Congress to return to healthcare legislation. That tactic, however, has raised red flags in White House discussions because it may prompt legal challenges. “The talk is, ‘Why don’t we just for now continue the payments, which is a monthly decision, for now so don’t trip any legal wires,' ” said the first White House source. Trump could also put insurance companies under pressure with changes to other payments, which could force action by Congress. White House officials who are looking at ways to undermine ObamaCare are backed up by an array of conservative leaders who on Friday released a memo calling on Trump to take action. “The continuing lack of leadership on repealing ObamaCare makes Presidential action critical and timely. The President has the authority to move the process of repeal forward and show that he aims to keep his word,” members of the Conservative Action Project wrote in the Aug. 11 memo. The signatories included former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.); Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks; former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese III; David Bozell, president of ForAmerica; and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, among others.
A developer planning a mixed-use project in Sugar Land will remove the 900 apartments from its plan after opposition from residents concerned that renters would increase traffic, crowd schools and diminish their suburban lifestyle. The city of Sugar Land announced Wednesday that Newland Communities has decided drop the apartments from its planned project at University and U.S. 59 in the Telfair master-planned community. Newland is the Telfair developer. Mayor James Thompson said in a letter that he met with representatives from the development company to convey community concerns. The residents say apartments and renter culture symbolized a clash with the single-family neighborhoods surrounding the vacant 87-acre tract that has always been designated as a commercial property. The project sparked a grass-roots petition drive to amend the new development code passed by city officials this summer. Ted Nelson, president of the central region for Newland Communities, said in a letter to the city that Telfair will not include the multifamily units in its proposal, now under consideration by city staff, despite the fact that they "believe that multifamily housing is a key element of a mixed-use development and further provides an opportunity for young people and elderly citizens an opportunity to live in Sugar Land." The letter continued, "We have clearly heard the concerns expressed by the citizens of Sugar Land and wish to abide by these concerns." Diana Miller, the Sugar Land resident leading the petition drive targeting the Telfair and similar projects, said she is skeptical the discussion between the city and the developer will guarantee that no apartments are ever built on the property. "A letter is not binding, and it is not unusual for a developer to sell tracts" within a planned development, Miller said. "Another entity could just move forward under the development code," she added. Newland had proposed developing the property, one of the last undeveloped parcels in the city, into a combination of office, retail and hotel pro-jects and apartment buildings. Opponents want their town to remain predominantly single-family homes. Their petition drive specifically targets new rules that establish separate zoning rules for "urban" and "suburban" developments. "Our concern is other potential similar developments coming forward under the new code, not just this one project," Miller said. Miller said her group has collected more than enough signatures to force action.
We are hearing that AOL is planning on laying off hundreds of employees next week. Some of the cuts will undoubtably come from the bloated Patch division, but not all, from what we hear. The conjecture by our source is that AOL may disappoint Wall Street this quarter, and the company wants to have a story around cost cutting already in place. We only have one source on this one, but it's a pretty good one. We've put out many more calls and will update the story when we know more. Leaving AOL has become fashionable of late. In addition to the TechCrunch turmoil, many executives have left in the last few months, including Tim Dierks, Alex Gounares, Tim Castelli, Brad Garlinghouse and Kiersten Hollars . Apparently those departures have not been enough to bring costs into line.
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale Dr. Roy Spencer introduced the updated and much corrected UAH atmospheric temperature data in his blog post Version 6.0 of the UAH Temperature Dataset Released: New LT Trend = +0.11 C/decade. The new temperature anomaly data for the lower troposphere, mid troposphere and lower stratosphere are presently in beta form for comment. That is, they’re not official…yet. I suspect the update will not go over well with the catastrophic-anthropogenic-global-warming crowd. Links to the version 6.0 beta data are at the bottom of Roy’s post, which also contains a detailed discussion of the updates. So if you have questions, please ask them at Roy Spencer’s blog through the above link. This post is a simple data presentation. The version 6.0 beta temperature anomaly data for the lower troposphere used in this post are here. In this post, we’ll take a quick look at the new UAH version 6.0 beta lower troposphere temperature anomaly data, comparing it to: the current UAH version 5.6 data the RSS lower troposphere temperature data. But first… BASED ON LINEAR TRENDS, THE NEW UAH LOWER TROPOSPHERE TEMPERATURE DATA SHOW NO WARMING FOR 18+ YEARS, LIKE RSS For Figure 1, I’ve extended the new UAH version 6.0 beta and the RSS lower troposphere temperature anomaly data as far back in time as they could go while showing no warming based on their linear trends. The new UAH data show no warming for 219 months, and for the RSS data, it’s 220 months. Figure 1 A QUICK OVERVIEW OF LOWER TROPOSPHERE TEMPERATURE DATA The following is a reprint of the initial discussion of lower troposphere temperature data from the monthly updates. The most recent update is here. Special sensors (microwave sounding units) aboard satellites have orbited the Earth since the late 1970s, allowing scientists to calculate the temperatures of the atmosphere at various heights above sea level. The level nearest to the surface of the Earth is the lower troposphere. The lower troposphere temperature data include the altitudes of zero to about 12,500 meters, but are most heavily weighted to the altitudes of less than 3000 meters. See the left-hand cell of the illustration here. The lower troposphere temperature data are calculated from a series of satellites with overlapping operation periods, not from a single satellite. The monthly UAH lower troposphere temperature data is the product of the Earth System Science Center of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). UAH provides the data broken down into numerous subsets. See the webpage here [version 5.6 data]. The UAH lower troposphere temperature data are supported by Christy et al. (2000) MSU Tropospheric Temperatures: Dataset Construction and Radiosonde Comparisons. Additionally, Dr. Roy Spencer of UAH presents at his blog the monthly UAH TLT data updates a few days before the release at the UAH website. Those posts are also cross posted at WattsUpWithThat. UAH uses the base years of 1981-2010 for anomalies. The UAH lower troposphere temperature data are for the latitudes of 85S to 85N, which represent more than 99% of the surface of the globe. UAH VERSION 5.6 VERSUS UAH VERSION 6.0 BETA Figure 2 compares the current version 5.6 UAH lower troposphere temperature anomaly data to the recently released version 6.0 beta. The comparisons start in the Januarys of 1979, 1998 and 2001 and run through March 2015. The first full year of the UAH lower troposphere temperature data is 1979, while 1998 and 2001 are commonly used as start years during discussions of the recent slowdown in global surface and global lower troposphere temperatures. They are the same time periods we present in the monthly surface and lower troposphere temperature anomaly updates. See the most recent update here. Figure 2 Since 1979, the new version (v6.0 beta) of the UAH lower troposphere temperature data show a noticeably lower warming rate than current version 5.6 data. For the periods starting in 1998 and 2001, the new beta version data show cooling of the lower troposphere based on the linear trends, while the current 5.6 version data show warming. RSS VERSUS UAH VERSION 6.0 BETA The warming rate since 1979 for the new UAH data is slightly less than (basically the same as) the lower troposphere temperature anomaly data from RSS. The shorter term cooling rates since 1998 and 2001 are also comparable. See the graphs in Figure 3. Figure 3 CLOSING The RSS lower troposphere temperature data used to be an outlier, showing much lower trends than the surface temperature data and the UAH lower troposphere data. That will no longer be the case with the new UAH version 6.0 data. SOURCES The UAH version 6.0 beta lower troposphere temperature anomaly data are here. The UAH version 5.6 lower troposphere temperature anomaly data are here. The RSS lower troposphere temperature anomaly data are here. Advertisements Share this: Print Email Twitter Facebook Pinterest LinkedIn Reddit
Syria took a break on Tuesday from its gruesome six-year civil war to announce plans to sign the Paris climate agreement, leaving the United States as the only country to reject the emissions-cutting deal. The announcement came at the 23rd Conference of the Parties in Bonn, Germany, the world’s biggest climate conference. The non-binding Paris accord, through which signatories pledge to reduce emissions of planet-warming gases over the coming decades, was brokered in 2015, when the annual conference was held in the French capital. The deal was considered historic because it was the first climate agreement to include the U.S. ― the world’s biggest historic emitter, with by far the largest per-capita carbon footprint ― and China, which currently produces the most carbon pollution on a national level. The U.S. took a lead role in shaping the deal. Only war-torn Syria and Nicaragua, which protested the agreement’s failure to impose strict demands on major polluters, refused to sign. But President Donald Trump, who rejects scientists’ warnings about climate change, announced plans to withdraw from the pact in June, insisting developing nations received more benefits and the U.S. got none. In his announcement ― which, under the terms of the deal, fully can’t go into effect until November 2020 ― Trump seemed to conflate the accord with a trade deal, demonstrating what was widely described as a poor understanding of how the Paris agreement actually works. “Like the playground bully that eventually loses all his friends, Donald Trump has isolated himself on the world stage,” Joe Ware, a spokesman for the charity Christian Aid, said in a statement. “When even Syria, with all its problems, can see the sense of a global climate agreement it really shows how ideologically wedded to climate denialism the US Republican Party has become.”
Saint Mary Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana. DAVE SIZER/FLICKR In a small cabin that serves as the Glacier National Park climate change office, Dan Fagre clicks through photos that clearly show the massive glaciers that give this park its name are in a hasty retreat. “There was a hundred square kilometers of ice in 1850,” Fagre, a United States Geological Survey researcher who has studied the glaciers of Glacier since 1991, explains. “We are down to 14 to 15 square kilometers, so an 85 to 86 percent loss of ice in the park. There’s no doubt they are going to disappear unless some massive cooling happens,” he says, which isn’t likely. The flows of mountain streams and rivers throughout the park will dwindle as their sources melt. And one species that will dearly miss the ice-cold runoff from the glaciers is the meltwater stonefly, an insect that’s only found in a few glacier-fed streams in the park. It will likely disappear when the glaciers vanish, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says. As the United States marks the centennial of the National Park Service, which was officially established 100 years ago this week, the nation’s parks are being widely celebrated for their natural grandeur and vistas, their wildlife, and their abundant recreational opportunities. Far less appreciated though is the critical role that the U.S.’s 59 national parks and hundreds of other park service units play in scientific research, providing unspoiled, protected, and accessible landscapes that host research that can be done few other places. In fact, with a long history of data and field study on everything from wildlife to wildfires, the national parks offer scientists an incredibly rare living outdoor lab. And the high profile of the parks in the American imagination often provides an avenue for conveying that research to the public. Science and scientific education have long been a key part of the National Park Service’s mission. Research in the parks has blossomed to the point where there currently are scientists working in about 289 of the 412 national park units (which include national monuments and historic sites), conducting some 4,000 experiments. Since 2000, there have been 28,000 studies. The work falls into two main categories — research done to aid park management, and more general research on issues that range from climate change to ecological restoration, and even on new products such as medicines or industrial materials, and technologies. “Our lands are the least impacted in U.S.,” says Kirsten Gallo, chief of the park service’s National Inventory and Monitoring Division, the agency that oversees park research. There is a lot of research seeking to understand the “reference” conditions in national parks, she says, which serves as a baseline indicating the original natural variability of ecosystems and providing a guide for ecological restoration elsewhere. The parks are playing a key role in research to determine how climate change will impact protected ecosystems. These days, climate change, which President Obama has called the greatest threat to the nation’s parks, is one of the park service’s most important science missions. The parks currently are playing a key role both in global climate research and in efforts to determine how climate change will impact protected ecosystems — from the glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana, to the giant forests of Sequoia National Park in California, to the East Coast beaches of Assateague Island National Seashore — and in finding possible ways to adapt. Patrick Gonzalez, principal climate change scientist for the National Park Service, says the intact natural landscapes of parks provides climate researchers with a picture of how natural ecosystems, free from most kinds of human influence, are responding to warming. One important study, part of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s research, focuses on biome shifts, which are major vegetation formations that are on the move — north, south, or up slope — to stay within their preferred temperature range. They are key indicators of a warming planet. “Research in Yosemite has documented a shift of sub-alpine forest into sub-alpine meadows,” Gonzalez said. “Research in Alaska has found a northward shift of boreal forest onto tundra. Both have been attributed to human climate change and not other factors because they have happened in national parks that have not been affected by grazing, logging, and other local human disturbances.” A century ago, when the National Park Service was established, University of California at Berkeley biologist Joseph Grinnell advocated study of the parks to better manage them. Without scientific investigation of the animal life in the parks, “no thorough understanding of the conditions of the practical problems they involve is possible,” he and biologist Tracy Storer wrote in the journal Science in 1916. Grinnell and Storer also predicted that development across the country would someday render the parks “the only areas remaining unspoiled for scientific study.” Yellowstone, the country’s first national park, has one of the most robust scientific programs of any national park, largely because of its size, intactness, and unusual natural features. The research mission there is shared by a staff of scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which does much of the research in national parks, and outside researchers from universities and other institutions. Scientists capture moving images of algae living in the thermal waters of Yellowstone National Park in 1923. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Yellowstone was important to researchers even before it was a park. One of the first major scientific expeditions was by USGS geologist Ferdinand Hayden in 1871, a year before Yellowstone National Park was created by President Ulysses S. Grant. A key area of focus for today’s research in Yellowstone is the hunt for the unusual microbial life — microbes called extremophiles — that inhabits the extreme conditions of the hot springs. The major discovery in these steaming waters in the 1960s was a species of bacteria called Thermus aquaticus, or Taq. An enzyme later isolated in Taq revolutionized DNA fingerprinting by allowing inexpensive and rapid amplification of DNA. Yellowstone has about two-thirds of the world’s geothermal features, and few are as pristine as those found in the park. “It’s important that it’s protected because you don’t have people swimming in it — that has value to science,” said Brent Peyton, director of the Thermal Biology Institute at Montana State University. One of the most unique wildlife research projects ever conducted has been the return of wolves to the elk-rich landscape in Yellowstone. Once regarded as a menace, wolves were hunted to extirpation in the Northern Rockies in the mid 20th century, but were reintroduced by federal biologists in 1994. Since then, careful study of the wolf packs (now numbering 12) on Yellowstone’s wild landscape has given researchers a deep look at what happens to an ecosystem when an apex predator returns. It has also provided a rare look at what takes place in packs as they re-establish and evolve on a landscape where human influence, especially hunting, is virtually absent. A hunted wolf, says National Park Service wolf biologist Doug Smith, is a very different animal than a protected Yellowstone wolf. Shooting wolves is “scrambling your omelet constantly,” he said. “By killing wolves you are rearranging packs and their social structure on a routine basis.” That is no small matter. Outside the park, some 90 percent of wolves are shot and trapped. Among the lessons learned on the protected landscape of Yellowstone, is that wolf packs can persist for twenty years or more in the wild, that older males are essential to packs for their wise ways, especially in battles against other packs, and that for some reason, wolves with black coats have a stronger immune system than those with gray coats. Other researchers in Yellowstone have documented the wolf-caused trophic cascade — the major downstream impact of wolves on elk populations and behavior and how that has altered everything from aspen and willow growth to the numbers of beaver. The 1963 Leopold Report found wilderness parks were best managed as a “vignette of primitive America.” Yellowstone has also given us much of the recent science of fire behavior on large wild landscapes. After the historic blazes of 1988 swept through Yellowstone and burned nearly 800,000 acres (more than a third of the park), and the ashes cooled, scientists began to decipher what had occurred. Dozens of experiments were undertaken to study everything from the explosion of biodiversity after a fire to how quickly forests recover. And because this work was done in what is arguably the most iconic of U.S. parks, the results have been thoroughly covered by the media and exposed to a vast audience than usually hears little about fire science. The fundamental wildfire lesson was that, as Yellowstone Superintendent Bob Barbee put it to me at the time, “Nature does not destroy herself.” Fires in fire-dependent western ecosystems are as essential as rain and sun for healthy forests and are how the landscape is renewed. Yellowstone is also where nature broke out of its box. In the early 1960s, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall charged a committee to come up with a plan to better manage the large wild national parks. It resulted in the 1963 Leopold Report — named after Starker Leopold, the biologist son of famed naturalist Aldo — which concluded that the wilderness parks were best managed ecologically as a “vignette of primitive America.” It was the beginning of what is now called “natural regulation.” That means that understanding ecological principles and allowing them to operate should guide the management of parks. After two attacks on campers in Glacier in 1967, for example, both Yellowstone and Glacier ended the feeding of bears in garbage dumps and elsewhere, enabling the animals to become re-acclimated to the wild. Biologists, based on research in those parks, have since established procedures for keeping bears wild and away from people, for the sake of both species. It’s a model that has been adopted all over the world. But the greatest ecological lesson of Yellowstone science is that the park, as big as it is at 2.2 million acres — the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined — is not nearly large enough to sustain many of the species that live there, from elk to grizzly bears to antelope and a wide spectrum of migratory birds. The park itself is just the core of the apple. What’s important, scientists now realize, is not just acres of ground, but natural systems. The wide-ranging grizzlies, for example, need the summer swarms of ladybugs and the fall crop of white bark pine nuts high in the park, as well as the succulents that grow along low-lying rivers well outside the park in the spring. The high profile of parks and the role they play in educating the public about key scientific issues is not to be underestimated, experts say. A volunteer collects wetland plants for study in Rocky Mountain National Park. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE “We’ve had an impact on people’s view of climate change with these photographs of melting glaciers,” the USGS’s Fagre told me. “It really resonates more with people because of the emotional content of Glacier’s name.” Citizen science, the involvement of volunteers in collecting data, is also a growing part of the National Park Service’s efforts. In one nationwide project, hundreds of school kids captured dragonfly larvae in 40 national parks to test them for mercury and see if the levels posed a risk to humans. Because parks are relatively pristine, they provide a strong signal of how much and how far airborne mercury has spread around the country. Much of the park service’s scientific mission is, unfortunately, chronicling the demise of some of the treasures the parks were set aside to protect. That’s particularly true around Yellowstone, where — because of increasing development, visitation, and recreation — the ecosystem continues to be fragmented. And then there are the impacts of climate change. Forests throughout the National Park system are dying, from the whitebark pine of Yellowstone, to the bristlecone pines of Great Basin in Nevada, to the Joshua trees of Joshua Tree in California. Scientists working in parks are conducting “future vulnerability assessments” on how climate-related changes will impact wildlife — from desert bighorns to salamanders — as well as forests, wildfire behavior and other natural phenomena. These assessments are expected to lead to adaptive measures. “We might start irrigating the sequoias,” said Nathan Stephenson, a USGS ecologist at Sequoia National Park who is in charge of charting a future for the massive trees. “Or we might build a giant fuel break around the great sequoias so if a fire came toward the grove we could defend it.” The National Park Service hopes to pioneer these measures, which can then be used elsewhere. The parks are widely seen as among the most important modern-day biological arks in the U.S. — not only for the species that live there, but for species that might someday have no other place to go. American pikas, for example, a relative of the rabbit that lives in boulder fields high in the mountains, are disappearing in some of their lower-elevation redoubts in and out of the parks. Among the possible pika refuges being studied are the higher and colder peaks of mountains in Olympic, Rocky Mountain, and Mount Rainer national parks. Scientists are also looking at how protected migration corridors can be created between parks and other federal land as species move in response to warming. There are no plans, though, to protect the dwindling glaciers of Glacier, by covering them with blankets say, as has been done in Europe. “It’s too expensive,” Fagre says. Instead, he and others he will simply monitor and measure the glaciers as they most certainly vanish over the next few decades. “They are probably already doomed,” he said.
Maintaining your privacy online, like investing in stocks or looking good naked, has become one of those nagging desires that leaves Americans with a surplus of stress and a deficit of facts. So it's no surprise that a cottage industry of privacy marketers now wants to sell them the solution in a $50 piece of hardware promising internet “anonymity” or “invisibility." And as with any panacea in a box, the quicker the fix, the more doubt it deserves. Last week saw the fast forward rise and fall of Anonabox, a tiny $45 router that promised to anonymize all of a user’s traffic by routing it over the anonymity network Tor. That promise of plug-and-play privacy spurred Anonabox to raise $615,000 on the fundraising platform Kickstarter in four days, 82 times its modest $7,500 goal. Then on Thursday, Kickstarter froze those pledges, citing the project’s misleading claims about its hardware sources. Other critics pointed to flaws in Anonabox's software’s security, too. But the Anonabox fiasco hasn’t deterred other projects hoping to sell an anonymity router of their own. In fact, many of them see Anonabox’s 9,000 disappointed backers as proof of the demand for their own privacy-in-a-box product. At least five new or soon-to-launch crowdfunding projects now claim to offer a consumer-focused anonymity router with names like Invizbox, Cloak, TorFi, and PORTAL, each with its own promises—and caveats. Security Claims and Snake Oil Some of those projects are already repeating Anonabox's mistakes, or making significant new ones. A project called TorFi, which offered a version of Tor installed on an off-the-shelf Wi-Fi router, has already had its Kickstarter campaign yanked, seemingly under the same prohibition that killed Anonabox (selling someone else's product). Another router initiative called Project Sierra doesn't use Tor's well-tested anonymity system that routes traffic through three random hops among thousands of computers; Instead, its creator Kerry Cox says it pushes data through VPN servers rented from a Texas hosting company, an option that likely means faster connections but not much real anonymity. Anything you do can be seen by that Texas company or any third party that can get access to its data, including law enforcement. A third option called Wemagin has filled its Kickstarter page with brash claims of a "military grade" USB drive that offers untraceability (without using Tor) and a "private browser...so simple your Grandmother can use it." It doesn't offer details about how any of those features actually work. "I’m surprised these guys aren’t telling you it’ll also help you lose weight and is powered by antioxidants," says Steve Lord, a British penetration tester and one of the critics who poked holes in Anonabox's security claims. A humbler project called Invizbox, which launched last week on Indiegogo, is more straightforward about its protections and imperfections. Invizbox uses the same hardware as Anonabox, and similarly integrates Tor with the open source wireless software OpenWRT. It promises, however, to fix its predecessor's configuration flaws—Anonabox was criticized for shipping with no password protection for its Wi-fi network by default, and hardcoded root and SSH passwords that could let a hacker compromise the device. But Invizbox still uses stock hardware that its creators admit may have vulnerabilities it can't control, and the project has yet to release its software for outside scrutiny. More promising, perhaps, are projects like Cloak and PORTAL. Cloak is a $56, open-source Tor router set to launch with a Kickstarter campaign early next week. Cloak’s creators, a group of developers spread across Britain, Malaysia, and China, are developing their device's hardware from scratch. One member of the team, a founder of the Shenzhen, China-based hardware maker Dragino, is leading the creation of Cloak’s board and injection molded case, which isn’t yet finished. And Cloak's open-source code has already been published for public appraisal. "This is the right attitude," says Lord. "They’re doing it the way that Anonabox should have done it." PORTAL, by contrast, focuses more on software than hardware: The project, whose name is an acronym for "Personal Onion Router To Assure Liberty" uses a "hardened" version of OpenWRT combined with Tor that's designed to be installed on any stock router. Marc Rogers, a security consultant and one of PORTAL's creators, says they've carefully pruned features out of OpenWRT to minimize attack points for any hacker trying to compromise the router. And unlike other projects, he says PORTAL's developers have taken pains to integrate Tor so that it's guaranteed to "fail closed"—Even if the router somehow can't connect to Tor, no data will ever be sent over the unprotected Internet. "If Tor isn’t working, it’s a brick," Rogers says. Big Challenges Ahead But even the most reputable of these Tor router projects like PORTAL and Cloak face serious challenges. Because the official Tor Project doesn't support OpenWRT, they'll be responsible for their own firmware updates. If a vulnerability is found in Tor—not too uncommon an event—it will have to be patched by the Cloak or PORTAL teams themselves, and then users will have to be warned to install the update or be left vulnerable. When the Tor Project was working on creating its own Tor router in 2012, that necessity of separate security updates for OpenWRT was one of the stumbling blocks that kept the router from coming to fruition, says Runa Sandvik, a former Tor developer. "Getting a new version of Tor on OpenWRT out to people was a bit of a process, and not one that the Tor Project itself could easily own and control at that point," she says. "You’d have to take it on yourself to keep it updated to keep your users safe." More fundamentally, routing all the data that goes through your home router over the Tor network may not even be such a smart idea. As soon as a users log into just one of their online accounts over that connection, they've likely identified themselves, and their traffic can be correlated with any other browsing that they had hoped to keep anonymous. To prevent browser fingerprinting techniques like cookies, careful users will still need to use the Tor browser, with its "transparent torification" setting on to avoid routing their traffic through Tor twice and slowing it to a crawl. And even involuntary data leakage like the location data uploaded by desktop searches in Apple's OSX Yosemite could be enough to pierce the veil. Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Tor project, says he's supportive of the idea of building a Tor hardware router, but cautions that simply funneling all your traffic through Tor isn't a simple privacy cure. "We don't do any analysis or cleaning of your data in transit over Tor; nor do we want to do so," Lewman writes. "Plugging in an operating system that wants to share all your data behind a Tor router will just share all of your data over Tor"—including all the data that could accidentally finger you as its source. Better Yet... In many cases, users would be better off segmenting their online activities into sensitive communications that need to be Torified, and the normal non-sensitive browsing that could actually pollute their untraceable traffic. That means carefully plugging into and out of a Tor router depending on the situation; Or privacy activist and developer Micah Lee suggests keeping one computer connected into a Tor router and using that machine only for anonymous activities. "Just using a Tor router won’t necessarily make you anonymous...A lot of what you do on the internet is intrinsically not anonymous." Lee says. "These projects are really good, but you need to be cautious. Don't think you're anonymous when you're not." As with all privacy technology, no single tool provides complete security or anonymity. Instead, fully protecting yourself requires a change in behavior to consider the privacy consequences of every action online—what hackers and spies call "operational security" or "opsec." And that can't be bought in a box. "There’s not much point in having an opsec tool," says PORTAL's Rogers, "if you don’t have an opsec frame of mind."
SHREK THE MUSICAL, based on the Oscar® winning DreamWorks film that started it all, brings the hilarious story of everyone’s favorite ogre to dazzling new life on the stage. In a faraway kingdom turned upside down, things get ugly when an unseemly ogre shows up to rescue a feisty princess. Throw in a donkey who won’t shut up, a bad guy with a SHORT temper, a cookie with an attitude and over a dozen other fairy tale misfits, and you’ve got the kind of mess that calls for a real hero. Luckily, there’s one on hand...and his name is Shrek. A show full of all-new songs, big laughs, and great dancing, SHREK THE MUSICAL is part romance, part twisted fairy tale and all irreverent fun for everyone! RUN TIME: 2 HOURS AND 50 MINUTES (INCLUDING INTERMISSION) Shrek - MICAH HARVEY Fiona - BRITTANY ECKSTROM Donkey - BRANDON TALBERT Farquaad - CRAIG JOSEPH Pinocchio - GREG RININGER Gingy/Sugar Plum Fairy - COURTNEY RININGER Dragon - TAHJA GRIER Young Fiona - BRIANNA SWINFORD Teen Fiona/Blind Mouse - NATALIE WELCH Papa Ogre/Papa Bear - DOUG DOWNIE Mama Ogre/Mama Bear - KORECCA MOORE Little Shrek/Baby Bear/Grumpy - ZACHARY CHARLICK Big Bad Wolf - BRIAN KORNBLUM Ugly Duckling/Blind Mouse - JENNY NELSON Wicked Witch/Queen Lillian - MOLLY WEIDIG Peter Pan/Knight 1 - JIMMY FERKO White Rabbit/Knight 2/Bishop - MATTHEW HEPPE Mad Hatter/Knight 3/Pied Piper - JEREMY WINTER Little Pig 1/Knight 4 - CAMARA RHODES Little Pig 2 - ARIC BIRD Little Pig 3 - SARAH MARIE YOUNG Bo Peep - ADRIANNE KRAUSS Little Red Riding Hood - RACHEL BALKO King Harold/Thelonius - RON VISCOUNTE Tinkerbell - CARLY AMELING Elf/Blue Bird/Blind Mouse - AMANDA MEDLEY Fairy Godmother - CHERYL HENDERSON Humpty Dumpty - SARAH JANE TOY Captain of the Guard - DANIEL CHARLICK
President-Elect Donald Trump complained on Twitter today about a news organization using an unflattering photo of him. Trump tweeted this afternoon about Unprecedented, a new book from CNN chronicling the 2016 election. He says that he hopes the book does well but that CNN “used worst cover photo of me!” @CNN just released a book called "Unprecedented" which explores the 2016 race & victory. Hope it does well but used worst cover photo of me! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2017 This is what the cover of the CNN book looks like: CNN did, however, just put out a special inaugural edition of the book with a different cover, and Trump did not specify which of the two he is talking about. Get the 2017 inaugural edition of CNN's book "Unprecedented" in stores or online https://t.co/mc3RFkFF3O #unprecedented pic.twitter.com/hw3vZ1ge8V — CNN (@CNN) January 2, 2017 Trump has been known to take issue with photos of himself that are used in the media. When the president-elect met with a group of journalists back in November, he reportedly complained to NBC News President Deborah Turness that the network won’t run a nice picture of him, according to Politico. In response to that story from November, and to the tweet this afternoon, those opposed to Trump immediately began to tweet unflattering pictures of the president-elect. Shortly after this tweet about the CNN book, Trump again mocked the media for being wrong about the election. He says in two back-to-back tweets that he always knew he would win the election, even though he specifically said at a rally last month that he expected to lose because of what the polls were showing him. “I went to see my wife. I said, ‘Baby, I tell you what. We’re not going to win tonight,”’ Trump said during a rally in Wisconsin in mid-December, recalling his experience on Election Day. “The polls are coming out…I always used to believe in those things. I don’t believe them anymore.” Also, Trump mentions that he won 306 Electoral College votes when he actually won 304. Various media outlets and pundits say that I thought I was going to lose the election. Wrong, it all came together in the last week and….. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2017
Starting Thursday, 11:07PM local time in Turkey, internet users started reporting that Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter had been blocked. Internet users in Turkey were forced to use a VPN to access their social media accounts. The government has started to tighten access to VPNs as well. Unfortunately, PayPal was denied a financial license renewal by the Turkish government and has withdrawn from Turkey. Bitcoin is now the best way for Turkish netizens to buy goods and services securely. The incident, the second attempt by Turkey to block access to Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter this month, reminds us that Turkey’s handful of Internet service providers (ISPs) work with the government to shut down access to parts of the Internet whenever it is deemed necessary. The ISPs then throttle traffic to and from target websites until they are unusable. Like many other oppressive regimes, the Turkish government has direct control or influence over the actions of the country’s internet service providers and telecommunication companies. Turkey is regressing. For example, In Jammu and Kashmir in India, the internet killswitch is used on more websites than just Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. An internet watchdog group in Turkey, Turkey Blocks, believes that a new law in Turkey is being used which allows the military to bypass the Ministry of Communications to use the country’s Internet killswitch in times of national security emergencies. This internet killswitch is now being used with more frequency and with less provocation. Turkey’s government has not, and likely will not, make any official explanation for the block; the block subsided 7 hours after it started. Twitter users from Turkey use a VPN to bypass internet censorship Yes, both Facebook and Twitter seem to be blocked in Turkey once more. Anyone know why? TT @handekuday: Our generation's gas lamp is VPN. — Ankaralı Jan (@06JAnk) August 25, 2016 Social media websites Twitter, Facebook and Youtube is down in #Turkey. No explanation(s) made on it yet. — Aylina Kılıç (@AylinaKilic) August 25, 2016 Twitter and Facebook are both blocked in Turkey. Always a good sign. — Ali Arikan (@aliarikan) August 25, 2016 This is a clear example of open internet censorship and ignoring its occurrence and reoccurrence allows it to become the new norm. Turkey does this kind of internet censorship all the time. During the July 15 coup, the Turkish government shutdown access to the same three websites. Last week, an explosion in Gaziantep also led to Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter being blocked. Confirmed: Twitter, Facebook & YouTube blocked by throttling in #Turkey at 00:35AM after massive #Gaziantep blast pic.twitter.com/ZLhzcsofpm — Turkey Blocks (@TurkeyBlocks) August 20, 2016 This week’s episode of unwarranted internet censorship likely stems from a suicide bombing in Cizre, Turkey. Eventually, Turkey’s Internet killswitch will be broken An internet killswitch is always a bad idea. Some pundits around the world argue in favor of a government controlled internet killswitch. The world’s governments will always be able to find talking heads that will support their factually wrong view. Just look at the commentary surrounding the “golden key” to breaking strong encryption. Broken has so many meanings. Meshnet technology is key to solving this problem. Imagine a world where the “main net” or “mainnet” has a regularly archived backup that is served by volunteers running nodes on your local meshnet? The future is coming, and there is no room for Internet censorship.
The assault is alleged to have happened during Canada Day fireworks near UBC two years ago. David Alan Lessor is being accused of one count of sexual assault and one count of sexual touching of an eight-year-old girl. At the start of his trial he told the judge he wanted to make a statement about alleged injustices at the lower court level. The judge told him she was there to hear the evidence and that he is innocent until proven guilty, that he had the right to remain silent and that he may make a statement after the Crown’s case goes in. The case goes back to July 1, 2014, when the young girl and her mom, neither of whom can be identified, went to see the Canada Day fireworks. They were at Acadia beach, west of Spanish Banks, when they struck up a conversation with Lessor. The girl, now 10-years-old, testified in B.C. Supreme Court from behind a white screen. Video of her police statement was played in court as Lesser took notes. She told the judge that Lessor lifted her skirt exposing her bathing suit while her mom had gone up to the van. At another point when her mom was away, she said the accused reached between her legs and touched her vaginal area on top of her swimsuit. She said she told her mom he had touched her and that she was uncomfortable. But they stayed on the beach with the accused, and even gave him a ride afterwards. “And the allegation is sexual assault towards a minor, which I’ve pleaded not guilty to because I don’t believe I’m guilty and of these serious allegations,” Lessor told Global News. “And the reason why is because of the state of my mental health and the state that the Family Ministry left me in.” “As my doctor says, I was, I’ve been suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, excessive anxiety.” The mom testified that this is the worst thing a parent could do. She didn’t react to what her daughter said and it took some time before she called 9-1-1. She will be cross examined Thursday.
The electric, push button–operated reclining chair (as opposed to the plain old electric chair) is clearly one of the hallmarks of an advanced civilization. Some models of recliners should probably be sold by prescription only, so soporific can be the effect of yielding one's back and nether region to its welcoming embrace. I have often mused while relaxing in my own recliner that even if sitting be the new smoking—as it has lately been labeled by virtue of the deleterious effects of long-term butt parking—then splay on. So it was in early March that while thusly ensconced I was surprised to come across an article about another kind of lounger, the ubiquitous Adirondack chair. One might expect to find such a piece in, say, Consumer Reports or Smithsonian. But what took me aback while almost lying on my back was that this write-up appeared in the publication JAMA Dermatology. What was it doing there, among the latest reports concerning seborrheic dermatitis, psoriasis and malignant melanoma? Author Megan E. MacGillivray, a student at the Queen's University School of Medicine in Ontario (and surely a future academic department chair), explained that upstate New York Adirondack Mountains region resident Thomas Lee in 1903 “built a pine chair with a long sloping seat and wide armrests.” He intended to make a few for family use, but the design caught on. Meanwhile nearby Saranac Lake had become a haven for tuberculosis patients who benefited from the clean air and sunlight. Ultraviolet light had recently been recognized as a killer of the bacterium that caused TB, which made sunlight effective as a treatment, for at least the cutaneous (and finally we arrive at the dermatology connection) form of the disease. The patients needed to sit in the sun—and the Adirondack chair became the standout choice. This connection between seats and science got me curious enough to check the Scientific American archives for any page space we might have devoted to chairs. Turns out we have not been sitting down on the job. For example, in 1906 we reported on the invention by one George Fentrick of a combination deck chair/life preserver. The chair's back was filled with cork. “The shipwrecked passenger need not worry about the proper adjustment of his life preserver,” we explained, “but may cling to his chair for support,” as he left his fellow swells onboard the cruise liner to confront the freezing swells of the North Atlantic. Based on my latest cruise experience, the proposed chair was a long-term bust, with life preservers and lifeboats still very much in fashion. Deck chair cushions may indeed float today, but the cork onboard cruise liners is under the command of the sommelier. Even further back, in 1897, Scientific American noted the creation of “a rocking chair provided with an air-compressing device adapted to deliver a current of air for cooling the occupant of the chair, for sounding a music box or for any purpose for which compressed air may be applied.” Our article said that the inventor was one Charles Michaelson and not Rube Goldberg, who was only 14 years old at the time and probably still in his early better-mousetrap phase. “Beneath the chair seat are two bellows, having the usual valves, and discharging into a receiver above,” we deadpanned. “As the chair rocks ... the air is forced into the receiver, from which a tube leads into a small compressed air reservoir at the top of the chair back, and in this reservoir is a passageway with reeds and adapted to be used as a music box.” We then added helpfully, “The music box is operated in the usual way.” Like the deck chair/life raft, this device seems to have been consigned to history's furniture junk heap. But bad ideas persist: a quick Google search turns up, available for purchase today, an inflatable rocking chair with a built-in MP3 speaker, thus combining the worst qualities of the unfulfilled dreams of Messrs. Michaelson and Fentrick. Unlike Mr. Lee's Adirondack chair, this seat is not outstanding.
Elouise Bell has died, and I know that she would want people to giggle at some of her humor right now. Signature Books has made her lovely essay collection Only When I Laugh available online. This is a collection I assign to my creative writing students, who are to read an essay a day during the essay unit. Elouise’s essays are pithy and funny, and most of the students can’t stop reading once they’ve started. Elouise was my first creative writing teacher, and was thrilled if premature as she congratulated Bruce and me on our engagement. “May I wish you joy!” she boomed. The problem was, we weren’t engaged yet. Bruce asked what she was wishing him joy for, and she declared that it all appeared obvious. We were GOING to get engaged, right? She was full of humor, bold feminism, strength, courage. Fortunately, she left us with some of her writing. My favorite story of hers for years has been “The Meeting”, which was first anonymously published. What a lovely satire it is! I mentioned it to her once without keeping her authorship quiet and she said, “Shhh! Nobody’s supposed to know that!” So, from Elouise to you. Enjoy. And get the book. FOUR The Meeting by Elouise Bell [p.11]Scene: Inside a large, conventional meeting house. There is the usual pre-meeting hubbub. Women are busily conferring with one another over agenda and announcements; at the door, two women are shaking hands with members of the congregation as they enter, trying diligently to call each entrant by her name. The men are hurriedly urging children into pews, settling quarrels and trying to arrange seating so that the least mayhem will ensue. Some of the men do a better job than others at juggling their paraphernalia: in addition to diaper bags and bottles of apple juice or milk, most have “quiet books,” small toys, and some have rather large and cumbersome Primary materials to hang onto and keep track of. Three or four younger men are radiantly absorbed in small bundles wrapped in fancy crocheted afghans; their fuzzy-headed infants are all dressed in special finery for the occasion, and the seats immediately around them are filled with smiling, wet-eyed grandfathers, uncles, brothers; and over the heads of the crowds, we can see visiting teachers nodding their assurance that they will be ready when the moment presents itself. [p.12]Presently, a confident, comfortable-looking woman in her late forties takes her seat on the stand. She is almost immediately flanked by two others: a slender, dark-suited woman of about thirty who keeps whispering last-minute information to the woman in the center; and a woman of perhaps sixty who appears totally unflappable, as if, having engineered reconstruction after the Flood and supervised logistics during the Exodus, she is scarcely about to be intimidated by anything the present moment might demand of her. Behind them, on the second row, sit four men of varying ages, each in black trousers, white shirt, and black tie. The youngest of the three women, whose name is Abbot, steps to the pulpit. She smiles silently at the buzzing congregation for a few moments, and as the crowd quiets, we hear a tiny voice call out boldly, “That’s MOMMY!” Abbot smiles benignly at the child, while the father, seated in the second pew, blushes, puts a hand gently over the child’s mouth, and shakes his head hopelessly at his neighbor. ABBOT: Sisters and brothers, it’s time to begin. We welcome you all here, members and visitors and friends, and hope your time with us will be pleasant. Now I’m afraid we have a large number of announcements today, but they are all important, so we ask for your attention. To begin with, Brother Hales of the elders group has asked me to tell you that our lovely brethren are collecting empty one quart oil cans, to be used by the group in making special Christmas projects. They are going to construct Christmas tree stands, candle molds and toys from these used oil cans, I’m told. Elder Hales has placed a large carton outside the south entrance and would appreciate it if you’d all deposit your empty oil cans there, and in so doing contribute to this worthwhile project. Next, we want to remind you of the Education Week program early next month. Four of our members will be participating, and I’m sure we’ll all want to attend and take advantage of this special opportunity. Sister Lorraine Larson will be giving a lecture on “Eschatology and Ether in the Perspective of the Book of Revelation.” Sister Ellen Hemming is speaking on “The Gnostic Scrolls and Our Concept of Spirit Translation.” Brother LeRuth Davis will have a workshop titled “Twenty Tips for Keeping a Tidy Garage,” and Brother Terry Joe Jones will repeat last year’s popular series on “Being a More Masculine You.” [p.13]Brother Allen informs me that the quorum is having a special fireside this next Sunday evening with two important guest speakers. Sister Amanda Ridgely Knight will discuss “The Role of Man: Where Does He Fit in the Eternal Plan?” And Sister Alice Young Taylor will lecture on “Three Important Men from Church History.” Next weekend is a big one for the younger teens in our congregation: the Beehive class is going to kayak down the Green River, under the direction of Sister Lynn Harrison. And as I understand it, the deacons will be here at home, helping to fold and stamp the ward newsletter. In the Young Men’s meeting tonight, the boys will have something special to look forward to—a panel of Laurels from the stake will discuss “What We Look for in Boys We Date.” Here’s your big chance boys! Now finally clipped to your programs you see a proposal—and I stress that that is all it is so far—for a method of handling our financial commitments for this next year. This is of vital importance to every member. I stress that. We want every one of you to go home, gather your husbands and children around you, examine this proposal, and decide if you can give us your sustaining vote on it. (At this point, the third woman on the stand, whose name is Chaplin, gets up and whispers briefly to the speaker.) ABBOT: Sister Chaplin reminds me that the basketball team will be practicing this week in preparation for the stake playoffs Saturday. Practice will be every afternoon this week from 4 until 6. Coach Tanner has asked that every player get there right at four, or a little before, if she can. Young women, we want you to know how proud we are of you! In the same vein, the boys’ basketball team has also been doing nicely; if I’m not mistaken, they are leading the region and also have a game sometime this next month. Practice for the boys’ team will be over in the old stake house from 5 to 6:30 a.m. this next week. Any boy having a basketball is asked to bring it, since we’re a little short on equipment for the boys’ team. Well, I think that’s all of the announcements. We will open the meeting by singing on page 102, after which Brother Donny Dee Williams will give the invocation. The chorister steps to his stand and leads the congregation in the following song: [p.14]We are cooking, daily cooking Food that strengthens, food that fills, Casseroles that feed the starving, Wheat from ever-turning mills. Wheat that’s grown and ground and garnished, Wheat that’s fiber-rich and pure, Wheat for woman, to sustain her, As she labors strong and sure. After the prayer, Abbot returns to the pulpit. ABBOT: 1 am happy to report that our numbers are growing: we have had six babies born this last month alone! I’ll just mention each one, and you can congratulate the happy parents after service. Sister Jean Hammond and her husband Dale have a new little girl, to be named Rachel Sariah Hammond. Sister and Brother Ellen Taylor, a girl to be named Ellen Fielding Taylor, Jr. Sister and Brother Margaret Jones, a girl to be named Elizabeth Eleanor Jones. As you know, this baby is Sister and Brother Jones’ sixth, but the very first girl they’ve managed to have, and I just want to share with you what Margaret said this past week. Someone who didn’t know the family asked her how many children she had. “Six,” she said, “and they’re all girls but five!” Now in case you think we’ve forgotten the opposite sex, Sister and Brother Anne Henderson are welcoming a little boy to their home; he’s to be named LeWinky Henderson. Gale and Jimmy Jenson also have a new boy, to be named Tippy Tom Jenson; and Meredith and Billy Joe Gordon have a son whom they have named Fortitude Oak Gordon. Well, our congratulations to all the families and their new members. Right now, it’s time for a special number from our Singing Fathers. They will announce their own selection. (The four men dressed in black trousers come to the front of the stand, cluster together, place their arms on each other’s shoulders, and set themselves for singing. At this point, one man whispers to another, who steps forward.) QUARTET MEMBER: We will sing “O My Mother.” O my Mother, Thou that dwellest in the high and glorious place, [p.15]When shall I regain Thy presence, and again behold Thy face? In Thy holy habitation, did my spirit once reside? In my first primeval childhood, was I nurtured near Thy side? For a wise and glorious purpose Thou has placed me here on Earth, And withheld the recollection of my former friends and birth, Yet ofttimes a secret something whispered, ‘‘You’re a stranger here,” And I felt that I had wandered from a more exalted sphere. I had learned to call Thee Mother, through Thy Spirit from on high, But until the key of knowledge was restored, I knew not why. In the heavens are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare. Truth is reason. Truth eternal tells me I’ve two parents there. When I leave this frail existence, when I lay this mortal by, Mother, Father, may I meet You in Your royal courts on high? Then, at length, when I’ve completed all You sent me forth to do, With Your mutual approbation let me come and dwell with You. After the song, Abbot returns to the pulpit. ABBOT: Thank you very much, brothers, for that special number. Now our speaker today, sisters and brothers, is a returned missionary from our congregation, Sister Eve Wentworth. Sister Wentworth filled a highly successful mission to Japan, was made a district supervisor after she had been out only twelve months, and in due time became Second Counselor to President Marileo Yashimoto of the Nagoya Japan Mission. I happened to meet President and Brother Yashimoto at conference last month, and she told me there wasn’t a missionary in their mission who had been a finer example of dedication and leadership than Sister Wentworth. We’re happy today to hear from Sister Eve F. Wentworth. (In the interests of saving space and avoiding repetition, we here give, instead of Sister Wentworth’s complete speech, a copy of the ward clerk’s notes thereon.) SPEAKER: Sister Eve F. Wentworth, recently returned missionary. Summary of remarks: Missionary work—the central calling of House of Israel. Reason Israel was chosen of God. Greatest thing we can do to bless world in anguish. All worthy women to shoulder this responsibility. Mission also the making of character. Boys must help young women prepare for calling. Must never tempt young women or cause them to fall. Tight pants, dangers of. Bare chests an abomination before Lord. Boys don’t [p.16]understand female nature, how easily ignited. Must set example. Not to be cause for some young woman’s unworthiness to serve mission. Use time when women are on missions to improve selves, prepare for marriage, prepare to be companion to returned missionary, conduit whereby spirits of women are sent to earth. Can be learning skills—gardening, yard work, home repair, etc. Young women to be serious about missions—cosmic in scope. Eternal consequences. Work affects ages yet unborn, fate of nations. Prepare well. Study scriptures in depth; learn languages; social skills. Avoid getting serious abt. boys prior to call. Boys—charming distractions. Then recounted her own experiences from mission—healing sick, rebuking spirits, receiving revelation abt. impending catastrophe, directing district missionaries out of danger. Value of gentlemen missionaries. Did much good, worked right along with sisters. Need more of right kind of brother missionaries in field. Closed with testimony of work. Closing song: “Come All Ye Daughters of God.” Closing prayer: Sister Hannah Ruth Williams More reading like this: Men and Heavy Lifting
A Canadian furniture store owner woke up one morning and smelled the coffee. He realized his company has truck routes that could help recycle wasteful plastic Keurig K-Cups in a way that could provide jobs for people with disabilities. Garnet Wheaton’s trucks making deliveries to his store in Moncton, New Brunswick, usually return to the Halifax, Nova Scotia, warehouse empty. But now, they’re hauling used K-Cups to a recycler. He’s arranged to have the Dartmouth Adult Services Center break open the discarded cups, turn the leftover coffee grounds into compost, and recycle the plastic shells. The center provides jobs for adults with intellectual disabilities and its director says the recycling project helps to improve their people’s work skills. K-Cup single serving plastic pods of coffee have become extremely popular, but they produce a surprising amount of waste. It’s been estimated that if you were to line up all the K-Cups discarded in a single year, they’d circle the earth 10 times. Recycling them is labor intensive, but a perfect job for centers like the one in Dartmouth to undertake. “There is absolutely nothing that isn’t great about this project,” the center’s director, Cathy Deagle-Gammon, told CBC News. Check Out the Surprising Products Being Made From Coffee Grounds Because Wheaton sells K-Cups and coffeemakers inside his Wheaton’s Furniture stores, he wants to recycle as many cups as he can, saying it is the responsible thing to do. To promote the program he is offering a dollar’s worth of coffee products for every 24 K-Cups brought into his Moncton store. If the idea works on this one route, Wheaton wants to expand it to his other stores and maybe one day use it a recycling model for all of Canada. (WATCH the video and READ more at CBC News) — Photo: CBC video Recycle This Story! Share It Below..
Chinese President Xi Jinping said Thursday that his country will "absolutely not permit war or chaos" to break out on the Korean peninsula. Addressing a group of Asian foreign ministers, the comments were made in the context of a wider exploration of China's foreign policy. President Xi also expressed commitment to "comprehensively and fully" implement sanctions targeting North Korea's missile and nuclear programs, as mandated by the United Nations. The remarks come amid a growing wave of activity by North Korea that many regard as provocative. Xi's comment also represents a departure from previous Chinese statements that appeared less bellicose – but observers question whether they really signal a substantial change in policy. "The big question here is: To whom was this directed?" Michael Auslin, an expert on US-Japan relations at the American Enterprise Institute, says in a phone interview with The Christian Science Monitor. There are four likely candidates, as Dr. Auslin sees it: North Korea, South Korea, the United States, and Japan. For South Korea, the message might be not to corner its northern neighbor with excessive pressure or threats. For Japan, it could be more along the lines of a warning to keep away, to let China deal with its precocious ally in Pyongyang as well as other security concerns in the region, particularly in light of Prime Minister Abe's efforts to boost the Japanese military. The most likely intended recipients, however, are North Korea itself and the United States, according to David Firestein, a senior vice president at the EastWest Institute. "China is amplifying a point it's made over the years to North Korea, essentially saying, 'Look, we really don't want to see a conflagration on the Korean Peninsula,'" Dr. Firestein tells the Monitor in a phone interview. But it's also aimed at the US, he says: a reminder that China takes peace in the peninsula "very seriously," and that any US actions that upset the balance, like Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, are also "unwelcome." Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) is a missile defense system that the United States and South Korea have been considering with increasing urgency in the face of North Korea's recent activities, which include a nuclear test and multiple ballistic missile tests this year. But some analysts find that there is more to be gleaned from Xi's statement, even if the fundamental message remains consistent. Some point to the timing, in light of comments made Wednesday by US presidential candidate Donald Trump, who spoke of applying "the leverage on China necessary to rein in North Korea." While China is certainly the country with the most sway over Pyongyang, most analysts agree that it cannot simply dictate decisions to Kim Jong Un and the North Korean leadership; it does not have a "magic key" for opening up North Korea, as Auslin puts it. Speaking to many of the region's top diplomats, Xi may have seen this as an opportunity to give "a show of strength," to talk in starker terms than he usually does, confident that war on the Korean peninsula is still far from imminent. "Historically North Korea's bark has been much worse than its bite," says Firestein. "The likelihood, as they say in China, that he [Xi] would have to 'cash the cheque' is pretty low." Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy But "low" is not equivalent to "non-existent," and using phrases such as "absolutely not permit," as the Chinese president did, leaves some analysts wondering what lengths he would go to in backing up that assertion. "I assume it [Xi's statement] is mainly about not letting North Korea launch an attack," says Dwight Perkins, the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, in an email interview with the Monitor. "But what if the US, South Korea, or Japan decided to launch an attack to destroy the nuclear facilities? The US came close in the 1990s. What does Xi have in mind then?"
Listen to this article: You get one chance to make a fantastic first impression. Just one. WordPress itself isn’t particularly known for its first impressions, and WordPress themes in general are notoriously difficult to get rolling. Sure, it’s easy to install WordPress and upload a theme. But what happens next? Why not make this first impression blow the user away, offering a simple, intuitive, and clever interface to help them get started? Introducing Merlin WP Merlin WP (GitHub) is my stab at addressing the tedious and exhausting WordPress theme setup and onboarding process. It makes installing a new WordPress theme, its recommended WordPress plugins, Customizer settings, widgets, and demo content, an exciting and gratifying user experience. A while back, David Baker created a clever setup wizard class (Github), inspired by the WooCommerce welcome wizard. While it’s a solid move in the right direction, I wanted to build an onboarding wizard that was even more refined. So I did. Here’s a really short demo video I drew up to showcase the Merlin WP experience: And while I originally developed Merlin WP as a side-project to exclusively include in my own theme catalog, I soon pivoted and committed to building the class to be easily deployed within most WordPress themes. How does Merlin WP work? I’m building Merlin WP to be added directly into theme files. Once added, you need to include the class, the merlin-config.php file and then your own demo content files (content, widgets & Customizer data). The configuration file makes it easy to customize any text string throughout Merlin WP, as well as set the class directory and demo content locations. And if you have TGMPA included in your theme, Merlin WP will “just work” with it, pulling the recommended plugins right into the wizard. I’m also working in support for EDD Software Licensing, which I use to power my own WordPress shop, so that users can activate their license key during the onboarding phase. So why did I build Merlin WP? There are a few WordPress plugins currently available, such as One Click Demo Import (OCDI), which import content well, but leave the user experience with quite a bit of room for improvement. Even with an OCDM compatible WordPress theme, the user is required to install OCDI (likely using TGM Plugin Activation), navigate to the OCDI admin page, and then run the importer. But wait, let’s backtrack to TGMPA. Now there’s another process added to the mix. The user needs to perform a plugin install and activation process to get any other recommended WordPress plugins ready to go. Sure, TGMPA makes the process of downloading, installing, and activating plugins simple-ish, but it has a convoluted approach that is not particularly user friendly. And let’s not forget, any custom post type plugins not installed — will not be imported. Love my WordPress theme? I'm using the Tabor WordPress theme. Add your email address below and I'll send you a $10 coupon for the theme. 🎉 Now, if your theme is not compatible with OCDI (or any other importer), then the process is compounded extensively. You’re locating XML files, installing and running the WordPress importer, Customizer Export/Import, and Widget Export/Import plugins, and then setting the home and blog pages. That’s not easy for any user, not just beginners. When will Merlin WP be available? I’m working on the finishing touches, EDD Software Licensing support and a few odds and ends, but I’m shooting for the end of August. I’ll be reaching out about beta testing Merlin WP as well, so if you’re interested click here to subscribe. Edit: The beta is up on GitHub! In Closing Merlin WP is my stab at dramatically improving the WordPress theme onboarding experience. I’m really excited about how easy Merlin WP (GitHub) makes installing and setting up WordPress themes — it’s really “next-level.” Hit me up on Twitter, or email me directly if you have any questions! Also published on Medium.
Laurent Tapie, Managing Director of Groupe Bernard Tapie, Full Tilt’s “White Knight” investor, stated in an interview Friday that – though there is “still a long way to go” before the deal actually closes – they are hopeful the site could re-open as early as January 2012. The statement comes soon after the announcement that Groupe Bernard Tapie had entered into an agreement to buy financially-troubled Full Tilt Poker. The deal would involve repaying all players in full, but is conditional upon several factors including “a favorable resolution with the United States Department of Justice.” “We have shown that we have the funds necessary to repay player debts. We want to find ways where we don’t have to put in all the money and will be talking to the US Department of Justice next week,” said Tapie. He also confirmed that the brand would not change. “[Changing the brand] is not in question. It’s a well-known brand and the technology is widely recognized as being possibly the best in the industry.” However, he states that the management will change. One lingering question mark is a difficulty in Bernard Tapie obtaining a license, due to indiscretions in his past. In 1997, Tapie served six months in prison for fixing a soccer match. He was also convicted of fraud when he lied to authorities about a luxury yacht. Full Tilt’s license was suspended by the Alderney gaming commission yesterday, a move Full Tilt was quick to condemn, saying such a move would make a sale “more difficult.” However, the AGCC said that there remained a possibility to reinstate the license, provided there a change of ownership.
New Evidence Suggests Noah's Sons Rode Flying Dinosaurs CREATION SCIENCE BREAKING NEWS For years, Creation Scientists have disputed how Noah was able to quickly collect millions of indigenous animals from remote, inaccessible regions of the world for a 40-day ride in his ark. New evidence from an archeological find in China supports the long held Christian belief that Noah's sons rode giant flying dinosaurs to transport duck billed platypuses from Australia, and penguins and polar bears from the Antarctic, to name a few. "Those must have been some mighty big flying dinosaurs," says Pastor Deacon Fred. "Imagine the look on Noah's face when his sons flew in for a landing with a pair of Hippos strapped to the back of one of them things! Glory to God!" "The Lord is just amazing," says Creation Scientist, Dr. Jonathan Edwards. "Whenever Atheist scientists make a new find, they think it will hack away at our Christian beliefs. They must get pretty peeved at how sneaky our Lord is, because whenever they unearth something, it only provides more support for the historical accuracy of the Holy Bible And these flying dinosaurs they keep finding are no exception!" Dr. Edwards explains that it would have been impossible for Noah's sons to travel to the four corners of the earth to areas that were previously inaccessible on foot. "Noah and his sons had to collect two of every single creature on the face of the planet," he says. "We're talking about a big haul here. At first we just attributed it to what Creation Scientists call, the Holy Finger Snapping Theory. That's where God snaps his fingers and just makes it so." Edwards points out that Creation Scientists are still unanimous in attributing the fact that Noah was able to load 100 million plus animals onto a 450 foot ark "in the selfsame day" (Genesis 7:13-14) to the Finger Snapping Theory. In the case of how the animals were collected from remote regions of the world in the first place however, recent archeological finds indicate that Noah's sons were able to tame giant flying dinosaurs and in turn, load them up with food supplies and hitch rides for long trips around the world to China, South America, Australia, Greenland, and the North Pole. Creation Scientists estimate that since the Earth is only ten-thousand years old, human beings were living among dinosaurs and had plenty of time to tame them. "I would have loved to have been around to see Cain and Abel rolling around in the grass outside the Garden of Eden playing with the pet raptors their father, Adam, gave them for their birthdays," says Pastor Deacon Fred. "What a glorious time that must have been!" Through tithing donations from Landover Baptist Church members, the Center for Creation Research was able to secure several fossilized remains of flying dinosaurs valued at over $14 million. The remains will be studied exhaustively for evidence of the leather harnessing used to secure Noah's sons for their long transcontinental journeys. Copyright 1998-2007, Americhrist Ltd. All rights reserved. Terms of Service The Landover Baptist website is not intended to be viewed by anyone under 18
"60 Minutes" was trashed all over Twitter on Sunday night for a two-part story on the NSA which critics dubbed obsequious at best. The piece was fronted by reporter John Miller, who had to tell viewers this at the top of the segment: "Full disclosure: I once worked in the office of the director of National Intelligence, where I saw firsthand how secretly the NSA operates." Miller is also likely set to leave CBS soon to work for the NYPD. Miller also said that the NSA agreed to speak to "60 Minutes" because it believes it has "not told its story well." It certainly found a comfortable place to do that on CBS News. The 25-minute segment consisted mostly of NSA officials dismissing concerns that their surveillance has gotten out of hand and showing off their gadgetry to the CBS cameras. There were no anti-NSA advocates or civil libertarians interviewed on-camera for the piece. The last words in the segment came from NSA chief Keith Alexander: "This is precisely the time that we should not step back from the tools that we've given our analysts to detect these types of attacks." Watch the video: In a web-only video, producer Ira Rosen said that the NSA had "allowed" itself to be perceived as a "villain." In his own interview, Miller said the anti-NSA forces have had their chance, and that he wanted to hear what Alexander had to say. "Our job this time was to take the hardest questions we could find and ask them, ‘What’s the answer to it,’ and then spend a couple of minutes listening," he said. The criticism came hard and fast: Wow, the 60 Minutes piece about the NSA was just embarrassing. Kudos to the NSA communications staff. You guys should get a raise. — Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) December 16, 2013 If you thought the Lara Logan debacle was new low for @60Minutes, watch last night's NSA whitewash. Not a single skeptical voice. — TimKarr (@TimKarr) December 16, 2013 That 60 Minutes access-for-uncritical-reverence NSA propaganda piece was a new low for US journalism http://t.co/mEx6jzsxv9 — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 16, 2013 60 Minutes: From terrible journalism to National Security State stenography, in just a few weeks. — emptywheel (@emptywheel) December 15, 2013 CBS both promoted John Miller as "ultimate insider" and asked him http://t.co/slBm9jiyLi if he was worried about being seen as an insider. — Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 16, 2013 Surprised by John Miller's embarassing 60 Minutes NSA puff piece? Don't be. His CIA 'exclusive' basically the same http://t.co/yvsaL1iQiM — Peter Hart (@peterfhart) December 16, 2013 Wonder if NSA will also use 60 Minutes to unveil its "special drone delivery" program. — Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) December 16, 2013 Oy, @60minutes--still waiting for a tough question, follow-up for General Alexander... #NSA — Amy Davidson Sorkin (@tnyCloseRead) December 16, 2013
Forth's Stacks "The" stack and the return stack Standard Forth has two built-in stacks, the data stack, and the return stack. The data stack is so important that it is simply called "the" stack, unless you have to distinguish it from some other stack. I will assume that you are familiar with it, and will not discuss it further. When a word is invoked, the inner interpreter puts the next address on the return stack. When the word is completed the top item on the return stack is popped into a register called ip (instruction pointer), and execution continues from there. Most Forths that run on Intel machines use the BP register for ip. Since the return stack is actually used only on invocation and completion, , it is available as a kind of catch-all in between. One common use for the return stack is to store do ... loop parameters. Anything added to the return stack during the execution of a word must be removed before the word ends, and the same is true for a loop. Words that affect the return stack do ( n1 n2 -- ) Pushes the loop index and loop limit onto the return stack. ?do ( n1 n2 -- ) Similar to do. The difference is seen when n1 equals n2. With do, there will be 64k iterations on a 16-bit machine, whereas with ?do there will be none. The advantage of DO is that it is much speedier on many machines. loop ( -- ) Increments the loop index by 1 and tests against the upper limit. If the loop index is equal to the limit, discard the loop parameters and continue execution immediately following the loop. Otherwise continue execution at the beginning of the loop. +loop ( n -- ) Same, but increments the loop index by n. Exit, as above, if the index has crossed the boundary between the loop limit minus 1 and the loop; otherwise continue. i ( -- n) Returns the current value of the loop index, provided the return stack is "clean," that is, nothing has been added to it by the program. j ( -- n) When do loops are nested, returns the current value of the outer loop index, provided that the return stack is clean. leave ( -- ) Exits from the loop at once, discarding the loop count and loop limit from the return stack. If the return stack is not clean, watch out! If you are lucky, your program will hang up. In early Forths, LEAVE najes the counter equal to the limit, forcing exit the next time LOOP or +LOOP is executed. Forth-83 and ANSI demand immediate exit from the loop. >r ( n --) Store top of parameter stack on return stack. Pronounced "to R." r> ( -- n) Reverse of >R. Pronounced "from R." r@ ( -- n) or r ( -- n) Copy top of return stack onto parameter stack. Prounounced "R fetch." r@ is Forth 83 and ANSI standard. Some older Forths use r. A stack is not an array In some Forths, for example, F83, the data stack and return stacks are located entirely in RAM and can be handled as arrays. In others, this is not so; for instance, many Forths gain speed by keeping the top element of the stack in a register. For this reason, an ANSI standard program cannot make any assumptions about where the stacks are located or how they are implemented. pick ( .... n -- .... x) is available to copy the nth stack item onto the top of the stack. Software Stacks Software stacks are sometimes called "pseudostacks." Actually, they are genuine stacks, and I prefer the term "software stack" or "LIFO", which stands for "last in first out." That name is taken from the language of finance, where it is used to describe a method of accounting for inventory. I have implemented LIFO's as a kind of specialized array with a pointer. Pushing a quantity onto a software stack removes it from the parameter stack, stores it in the array, and bumps the pointer; popping does the reverse. A program can have any number of LIFO's. If only one is needed the code can be simplified. In my implementation, there is protection against underflow but not against overflow. Glossary lifo ( n -- ) ( -- adr) During compilation, create a LIFO (software stack) with n cells. On execution, return the address of the stack. push ( n lifo -- ) Push number onto LIFO. pop ( lifo -- n ) Pop number from LIFO. pclear ( lifo -- ) Clear LIFO. pbounds ( lifo -- addr1 addr2 ) Create parameters for a ?DO loop that will scan every item currently in LIFO. The intended use is: ( lifo ) pbounds ?do -- cell +loop Code meets requrements for an ANS Forth standard program. Home Updated: June 18, 1996 \ Software stacks (see text for documentation) : lifo ( n -- ) ( -- adr) create here cell+ , cells allot does> ; : push ( n lifo -- ) swap over @ ! cell swap +! ; : pop ( lifo -- x ) cell negate over +! dup @ swap over >= abort" [pseudostack underflow] " @ ; : pclear ( lifo -- ) dup cell+ swap ! ; : pbounds ( lifo -- addr1 addr2 ) dup @ swap cell+ ;
Mixes / Mashups TRACKS: Rick Astley - "Never Gonna Give You Up" (Acapella) Nine Inch Nails - "The Hand That Feeds" (Tweaked Instrumental via Garageband) DESCRIPTION: In preparing to see the final live show of the Nine Inch Nails "Lights In The Sky 2008" at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas, I decided to whip up a mix for the road. Little did I know how evil that mix would turn out... As is typical, I usually find out about internet "mashup albums" after they already come out, thereby missing the chance to contribute. Recently, thanks to a leaked acapella, there was an entire mashup album devoted to Mr Astley, called Rickrawked. After checking the album out, then scouring the net, I found the acapella. I was shocked that no one on the album came up with this combination. Then again, mixing Nine Inch Nails with Rick Astley is not something that would come to a normal mind. Oh...did I mention? I made a mashup music video to go along with this mashup! :) And for those of you who have been to my site before, yes I know I already used the NIN instrumental once already. In fact, that mashup (with The Temptations) went through a tweaking, and is now back online!
We're hackers, and we are good-looking. We are the 1%. Bandit The Bandit wargame is aimed at absolute beginners. It will teach the basics needed to be able to play other wargames. If you notice something essential is missing or have ideas for new levels, please let us know! Note for beginners This game, like most other games, is organised in levels. You start at Level 0 and try to “beat” or “finish” it. Finishing a level results in information on how to start the next level. The pages on this website for “Level <X>” contain information on how to start level X from the previous level. E.g. The page for Level 1 has information on how to gain access from Level 0 to Level 1. All levels in this game have a page on this website, and they are all linked to from the sidemenu on the left of this page. You will encounter many situations in which you have no idea what you are supposed to do. Don’t panic! Don’t give up! The purpose of this game is for you to learn the basics. Part of learning the basics, is reading a lot of new information. There are several things you can try when you are unsure how to continue: First, if you know a command, but don’t know how to use it, try the manual (man page) by entering “ man <command> ” (without the quotes). e.g. if you know about the “ls” command, type: man ls. The “man” command also has a manual, try it. Press q to quit the man command. (man page) by entering “ ” (without the quotes). e.g. if you know about the “ls” command, type: man ls. The “man” command also has a manual, try it. Press q to quit the man command. Second, if there is no man page, the command might be a shell built-in . In that case use the “ help <X> ” command. E.g. help cd . In that case use the “ ” command. E.g. help cd Also, your favorite search-engine is your friend. Learn how to use it! I recommend Google. is your friend. Learn how to use it! I recommend Google. Lastly, if you are still stuck, you can join us on IRC You’re ready to start! Begin with Level 0, linked at the left of this page. Good luck!
Benjamin Lewis Salomon (September 1, 1914 – July 7, 1944) was a United States Army dentist during World War II, assigned as a front-line surgeon. When the Japanese started overrunning his hospital, he stood a rear-guard action in which he had no hope of personal survival, allowing the safe evacuation of the wounded, killing as many as 98 enemy troops before being killed himself during the Battle of Saipan. In 2002, Salomon posthumously received the Medal of Honor. He is one of only three dental officers to have received the medal, the others being Alexander Gordon Lyle and Weedon Osborne.[1][2] Biography [ edit ] Salomon was born into a Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 1, 1914. He was an Eagle Scout, one of nine who were awarded the Medal of Honor.[3] He graduated from Shorewood High School and attended Marquette University, before transferring to the University of Southern California, where he completed his undergraduate degree. He graduated from the USC Dental School in 1937 and began a dental practice. In 1940, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and began his military service as an infantry private, qualifying expert in rifle and pistol. In 1942, he was notified that he would become an officer in the Army Dental Corps and was commissioned a first lieutenant. In August 14, 1942, the 102nd Infantry Regt. commanding officer declared him the unit's "best all around soldier". In May 1943, he was serving as the regimental dental officer of the 105th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division. He was promoted to the rank of captain in 1944.[2] In June 1944, Salomon saw his first combat — going ashore on Saipan with the 105th Infantry. With little dental work to do during active combat, Salomon volunteered to replace the 2nd Battalion's surgeon, who had been wounded. As the 2nd Battalion advanced, casualties were high. On July 7, Salomon's aid station was set up only 50 yards behind the forward foxhole line. Fighting was heavy and a major Japanese assault soon overran the perimeter, then the aid station. Salomon was able to kill the enemy that entered the hospital tent and ordered the wounded to be evacuated, while he stayed to cover their withdrawal.[2] When an Army team returned to the site days later, Salomon's body was found slumped over a machine gun, with the bodies of 98 enemy troops piled up in front of his position. His body had 76 bullet wounds and many bayonet wounds, up to 24 of which may have been received while he was still alive.[2][4] Medal of Honor recognition [ edit ] Capt. Edmund G. Love, the 27th Division historian, was a part of the team that found Salomon's body. At the request of Brig. Gen. Ogden J. Ross, the assistant commander of the 27th Division, Love gathered eyewitness accounts and prepared a recommendation for the Medal of Honor for Salomon. The recommendation was returned by Maj. Gen. George W. Griner, the commanding general of the 27th Division. Officially, Griner declined to approve the award because Salomon was “in the medical service and wore a Red Cross brassard upon his arm. Under the rules of the Geneva Convention, to which the United States subscribes, no medical officer can bear arms against the enemy.”[2] However, the guideline for awarding the Medal of Honor to medical non-combatants states that one may not receive the Medal of Honor for actions in an “offensive”. More recent interpretations of the Convention, as well as the US Laws of Land Warfare,[5] allow use of personal weapons (i.e., rifles and pistols) in self-defense or in defense of patients and staff, as long as the medical soldier does not wear the Red Cross. Part of the problem in Salomon's citation was that a machine gun is considered a “crew-served”, not an individual weapon. Prior to Salomon, only two Jewish Americans had been awarded Medals of Honor during World War II, and none for Korea, though some (like Salomon) have been decorated years later, including Pfc. Leonard M. Kravitz (uncle and namesake of the pop star Lenny Kravitz) and Corporal Tibor Rubin, who was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2005.[6] In 1951, Love again resubmitted the recommendation through the Office of the Chief of Military History. The recommendation was returned without action with another pro-forma reason: the time limit for submitting World War II awards had passed. In 1969, another Medal of Honor recommendation was submitted by Lt. Gen. Hal B. Jennings, the Surgeon General of the United States Army. In 1970, Stanley R. Resor, Secretary of the Army, recommended approval and forwarded the recommendation to the Secretary of Defense. The recommendation was returned without action. In 1998, the recommendation was re-submitted by Dr. Robert West (USC Dental School) through Congressman Brad Sherman,[7] with the support of Maj. Gen. Patrick D. Sculley, new chief of the Army Dental Corps.[8] Finally, on May 1, 2002, President George W. Bush presented Salomon's Medal of Honor to Dr. West.[9] West then presented the Medal to Sculley for permanent placement in the Army Medical Department Museum in San Antonio, Texas.[8][2] A replica of Salomon's Medal of Honor is displayed at the USC Dental School.[8][10] The Army Medical Department, at this point, was supportive. Medal of Honor citation [ edit ] CAPTAIN BEN L. SALOMON UNITED STATES ARMY For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty: Captain Ben L. Salomon was serving at Saipan, in the Marianas Islands on July 7, 1944, as the Surgeon for the 2nd Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division. The Regiment’s 1st and 2d Battalions were attacked by an overwhelming force estimated between 3,000 and 5,000 Japanese soldiers. It was one of the largest attacks attempted in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Although both units fought furiously, the enemy soon penetrated the Battalions’ combined perimeter and inflicted overwhelming casualties. In the first minutes of the attack, approximately 30 wounded soldiers walked, crawled, or were carried into Captain Salomon’s aid station, and the small tent soon filled with wounded men. As the perimeter began to be overrun, it became increasingly difficult for Captain Salomon to work on the wounded. He then saw a Japanese soldier bayoneting one of the wounded soldiers lying near the tent. Firing from a squatting position, Captain Salomon quickly killed the enemy soldier. Then, as he turned his attention back to the wounded, two more Japanese soldiers appeared in the front entrance of the tent. As these enemy soldiers were killed, four more crawled under the tent walls. Rushing them, Captain Salomon kicked the knife out of the hand of one, shot another, and bayoneted a third. Captain Salomon butted the fourth enemy soldier in the stomach and a wounded comrade then shot and killed the enemy soldier. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Captain Salomon ordered the wounded to make their way as best they could back to the regimental aid station, while he attempted to hold off the enemy until they were clear. Captain Salomon then grabbed a rifle from one of the wounded and rushed out of the tent. After four men were killed while manning a machine gun, Captain Salomon took control of it. When his body was later found, 98 dead enemy soldiers were piled in front of his position. Captain Salomon’s extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army. Awards [ edit ] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] "Ben L. Salomon, MOH Recipient". Congressional Medal of Honor Society .
While many security experts have been pointing the blame at China for the recent wave of cyberattacks on U.S. companies and newspapers, Bloomberg reports that some of the malware attacks actually may be coming from Eastern Europe. Investigators familiar with the matter told Bloomberg they believe a cybercriminal group based in either Russia or Eastern Europe is carrying out the high-level attacks to steal company secrets, research, and intellectual property, which could then be sold on the black market. Evidence that the attacks may be coming from Eastern Europe is the type of malware being used by the hackers, which is more commonly used by cybercriminals than by government spying. Also, investigators have tracked at least one server being used by the hackers to a Ukrainian hosting company. Roughly 40 companies have been victims of cyberattacks over the past several months. These companies included tech businesses, such as Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, and newspapers, such as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. Apple announced today that hackers targeted computers used by its employees, but that "there was no evidence that any data left Apple." In a statement, the company said it discovered malware that made use of a vulnerability in the Java plug-in, and that it was sourced from a site for software developers. Apple blocked Java from some of its Macs late last month using its XProtect antimalware tool and citing security vulnerabilities. A report by The New York Times yesterday claimed that an "overwhelming percentage" of the cyberattacks on U.S. corporations, government agencies, and organizations came from an office building in Shanghai with ties to the People's Liberation Army. These allegations remain unconfirmed and flatly denied by Chinese authorities. The hack on The New York Times itself was months long and included the theft of corporate passwords of Times employees, as well as spying on personal computers. The attacks on Facebook, Twitter, and Apple were a bit different in that reportedly only a small number of systems were infected and the hackers got in via the Java vulnerability. This isn't the first allegation of cybercriminals operating out of Eastern Europe. Security firm McAfee Labs published a report in December that warned of increasing attacks on U.S. financial institutions from Eastern European hackers. Dubbed Project Blitzkrieg, McAfee said the possible attacks would be done with a highly developed Trojan that could infect victims' computers, plant software, and allow cybercriminals to steal information and money.
Former Cleveland Browns linebacker Karlos Dansby said he came to Cincinnati to win a Super Bowl. (Photo: Ron Schwane, Ron Schwane-USA TODAY Sports) Karlos Dansby could barely get the words out, his brain racing faster than his lips could structure the sentences, a palpable excitement crackling over the phone. “It’s a great opportunity with a great team,” he began. “With a great team, man. Like, you know what I’m saying? Oh, man, this is going to be awesome. I, I, really can’t put it in words, this situation, man. You can’t … you can’t …” You could hear him trying to catch up to his thoughts, having already spent time speaking about defensive coordinator Paul Guenther’s scheme, the defensive line in front of him, the linebackers beside him. “You just can’t draw this up every day, with the talent level we have on this team, man.” At 34 years old, Dansby has started 171 games and played in 180 over 12 seasons. He’s played in a Super Bowl. He scored a game-winning touchdown in a playoff game. He is one interception away from becoming just the fifth player in NFL history to have 40 sacks and 20 interceptions. There are few emotions he hasn’t experienced on the field. The emotion that has escaped him, however, is what comes over a player when he holds the Lombardi Trophy as world champion. It’s why Dansby sought out the Cincinnati Bengals once he released by the Cleveland Browns in mid-March. “I haven’t been around this much talent in a long time,” he said. “You look at the roster man, there’s a lot of talent on this team. There’s a lot of ball players on this team, a lot of guys that have had a lot of success in this game. I just wanted to surround myself with a lot of talent one time to see how it’ll all pan out. I think it’ll pan out great.” Dansby watched other players hold up that trophy right in front of him as a member of the Arizona Cardinals in 2008 when the Pittsburgh Steelers edged his team in Super Bowl XLIII. He also watched the Bengals lose to the Steelers in the first round of the playoffs last year, and he’s well aware of the recent history of the team’s struggles in the postseason. “I feel like I can come in and I can help get us over that hump,” he said. “I want to be a part of something that’s great.” Dansby, who visited the Bengals 2013 before re-signing in Arizona for a season, feels good not only about the talent on the roster, but the coaching staff. He recalled connecting with Guenther, who was then the team’s linebackers coach during his visit, and he played under defensive backs coach Kevin Coyle when Coyle ran the Miami Dolphins defense in 2012. NEWSLETTERS Get the Bengals Beat newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-876-4500. Delivery: Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Bengals Beat Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters Dansby has played every linebacker spot in a 4-3 defense, but in Cincinnati he will play on the strong side when the Bengals linebacker corps is healthy and all together. It will be the first time he’s been on that side since 2007, and admitted the younger players will push him to get better. But he wasn’t about to discount what he can still do. “I think it can be very, very dynamic and it will posse some problems for a lot of teams that wasn’t expecting this kind of move or wasn’t expecting to deal with this kind of talent we have on this defense,” he said. “And the way coach Paul I going to be able to dial certain things up, probably the way he couldn’t do in the past, but now he’ll have some freedom to do that. It’ll just expand the defense, man, and make everybody great.” Despite the fact he’s entering his 13th NFL season, Dansby vividly recalls the sting of not winning the Butkus Award as the nation’s top college linebacker in 2003. The Super Bowl loss has, to this point, permanently bruised his heart. Not winning the Defensive Player of the Year award in 2013, which went to Carolina’s Luke Kuechly, still makes him seethe. “You hear me talking and I get very passionate about it because these things have been eluding me,” he said. Clearly for him, there remains much to prove. Toss in the fact that he did sign for one year, even though he has stated he would like to play another four or five, Dansby feels he’s in lockstep with the rest of his new teammates in having unfinished business to attend to. “The guys being so close last year I know it’s going to push ‘em to another level,” Dansby said. “Back in ’08, when I lost that, when I lost that game in ’08, the Super Bowl, it pushed me to another level. So I know my expectation level here coming is like these guys are going to be ready to go, they’re going to be itching to get back on the field, they’re going to have a certain kind of drive and a certain kind of passion for the game that they didn’t have before because they were so close. They knew they had an opportunity to win that game they lost. So, man, I fit right into that boat, you know? I want to be around guys that have the same kind of mindset.”
Navy SEALs conduct a capabilities exercise at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story on Virginia Beach, Virginia, July 21, 2012. Beginning in mid-January, Navy SEALs will be conducting war games across Washington State’s coastal areas, including through public and private property. (Photo: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class William S. Parker / US Navy) These exclusive Navy documents outline plans for combat training exercises along vast areas of Washington State coastline. Each shows the areas the Navy is prepared to utilize. Beginning in mid-January, Navy SEALs will be practicing unannounced and clandestine combat beach landings across Washington State’s Puget Sound and many other coastal areas of that state. The simulated combat exercises, which will include the use of mini-submarines and other landing craft, will deposit Navy SEALs carrying “simulated weapons” on 68 beach and state park areas in Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Washington’s west coast, unbeknownst to most of the relevant government agencies tasked with overseeing these areas. Internal Navy emails, two slide shows (which can be viewed in full here and here) and other documents obtained exclusively by Truthout reveal the vast extent of the operations. They also reveal the fact that the Navy labeled the relevant files as “For Official Use Only” and emails as “Attorney-Client privilege,” a move that exempts such documents from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Navy has planned exercises that could take place, according to their own maps, along the entirety of Washington State’s coastlines. (Image: Document obtained by Dahr Jamail) Public concern for what is clearly an ongoing domestic military expansionism is growing. In the new scenario, which the military calls “realistic military training,” Navy SEALs carrying “simulated” weapons may also travel across public and private property within city limits, and may swim through public and private marinas occupied by people living on boats. They could conduct war game patrols on roads through residential communities. In addition to tribal, state, federal and county lands, there are many properties on the Navy’s list of training sites marked as private. Naval plans include the use of special reconnaissance teams conducting patrols, which are authorized to go on simulated “direct action” missions. The definition of “direct action” is “short-duration strikes and other small-scale offensive actions conducted as a special operation in hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments and which employ specialized military capabilities to seize, destroy, capture, exploit, recover, or damage designated targets.” Public concern for what is clearly an ongoing domestic military expansionism is growing. Despite some strange conspiracy theories around Operation Jade Helm in 2015, the operation also provoked a very real concern: The spread of the military into residential and public areas. This, coupled with several recently documented instances of abusive, unlawful behavior by Navy SEALs overseas, has many people alarmed by what is to come. War Games in Peace Parks Across Washington, the Navy’s upcoming war game exercises, which are slated to begin January 14, will be carried out across 68 beach areas around the state, many of which lie within the boundaries of state parks. Many of these beaches are popular with the public and contain campgrounds and marinas. According to maps in the two slide shows Truthout obtained, Navy SEAL activities will occur well inland from the beaches. Each site for the exercises will be “utilized” two to eight times per year, and “events” can last between two and 72 hours. Naval maps of the areas where the exercises will occur show large areas where “surveillance and reconnaissance” will occur, along with “direct action” areas and “insertion and extraction” zones. According to the documents, a “safety” buffer of 500 to 1,000 meters will also be maintained by a Navy support team in boats, vehicles and on foot, which will prevent bystanders from entering the areas. “They have exempted themselves from disclosing to the public the full scope and nature of their actions.” This amounts to periodic closings of public land, including state parks and fishing areas, with no public comment periods or government oversight. Given that some of the exercises will entail Navy SEALs swimming through marinas where people live on their boats, along with exercises and patrols through residential neighborhoods and private land, maintaining a “safety” barrier of 500 to 1,000 meters simply does not seem possible. One of many areas slated for direct actions in the Navy’s plans is Fort Worden State Park, on the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula. The Navy has designated a large area atop a hill there – a place that contains popular public trails and picnic areas – for its war exercises. The hilltop location includes a seating area for quiet contemplation, called Memory’s Vault, which is referred to as a “peace park.” The public in the area will likely interpret the Navy’s use of this portion of the park as another of the many gestures of contempt they have seen from the military. According to Karen Sullivan, former assistant regional director at the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Division of External Affairs and a retired endangered species biologist, the Navy’s actions are also illegal. Sullivan has worked in the division for over 15 years, and is an expert in the bureaucratic procedures the Navy is supposed to be following. She is now part of the West Coast Action Alliance, one of two large multistate and international citizen groups that have tasked themselves with watchdogging the Navy, due to what they believe are ongoing violations of the law, blatant acts of disrespect toward human and environmental health, and ongoing bellicose behavior by the military branch. According to Sullivan, the Navy’s actions are a violation of several laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, Administrative Procedures Act, National Historic Preservation Act and possibly others, as well as a violation of the public trust doctrine. “They have exempted themselves from disclosing to the public, and even to state and federal agencies, the full scope and nature of their actions, in order to segment them into smaller pieces that individually may look harmless but cumulatively have big impacts,” Sullivan told Truthout. The Navy’s method essentially ensures that it will get its way. In one example, the Navy, without any consultation with the State of Washington, recently concluded that the war games would have no effect on historic and cultural properties – including those belonging to Indigenous tribes – and therefore there was no need to consult with the State or with tribes on the new sites for 2016. Sullivan expressed deep concerns about the exercises the Navy has planned for Washington coastlines and the communities near them. “Having Navy SEAL kill teams in battle gear conducting war games around private homes and public beaches, parks, campgrounds and marinas is going to have a big effect on the people living and recreating there,” she said. “Besides potentially creating public fear and confusion, the Navy will close off the areas they’re war gaming in. Doesn’t that require a public process?” Connie Gallant is the board president of the Olympic Forest Coalition, a group that promotes the protection, conservation and restoration of natural forest ecosystems and their processes on the Olympic Peninsula. Like Sullivan, she agrees that while the military needs to train, the methods the Navy is employing across Washington are unacceptable. “Navy SEALs must be well-trained for any situation,” she told Truthout. “However, given the fact that there are already many beaches throughout the country where they are currently training, in addition to having a new 60-acre Pacific Ocean complex in San Diego County that adds 1.5 million square feet of coastal development, I question the need to add our pristine beaches to their inventory. Landing on the beaches is only the first step; combat training typically includes the use of ordnance weapons.” Gallant sees the use of Fort Worden State Park in particular as an egregious example of what the Navy’s exercises can do to a once-pristine area. “Because Fort Worden was a military base long ago and is now a historical park, this may give the Navy a good excuse to reclaim it as yet another post/training area – thereby preventing us from enjoying our leisurely walks, exercises, environmental training of marine life, bird watching, photographing, and communing with nature. Paradise ruined,” she said. Truthout has reported extensively on the wide-scale negative impacts the Navy’s war gaming has had, and will have, on wildlife around the region. Nevertheless, the Navy is poised to move forward with its exercises, and according to Sullivan, it is doing so using nefarious, illegal methods. “The Navy will retrofit an environmental assessment [EA] for the places where they’ve already done their war games all around Puget Sound, but eight new sites for 2016 will likely be exempted from the EA via a self-declared ‘categorical exclusion,'” she said. “This is illegal because the new sites are a part of the big picture and cannot legally be separated from them.” Naval documents show specific areas, like this state park area, where beach landings of SEAL teams could take place, including areas where war gaming could take place. (Image: Document obtained by Dahr Jamail) Categorical Exclusion The Navy is using an exemption process called a categorical exclusion (CATEX) as a means of sidestepping federal regulations that could prohibit its use of these areas for exercises. By definition, a categorical exclusion is “a category of actions which do not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the human environment, and, for which, therefore, neither an environmental assessment nor an environmental impact statement is required.” According to an email obtained by Truthout, the Navy intends to issue its own CATEX on some of the SEAL activities as a means to segment and hide the full scope of its actions. Other communications have revealed that the Navy will retrofit an EA for the big action but will continue to CATEX pieces of it to keep it going. The email also said, “… the Navy, without any consultation or concurrence with Washington’s State Historic Preservation Officer [SHPO], has concluded in the CATEX that there is no effect on historic properties and therefore no need to consult with the SHPO.” The Navy’s method essentially ensures that it will get its way, as there is not going to be time for a full and legitimate EA and public process period between now and mid-January (in just a few days), when it begins its exercises for at least the second year in a row. A glance at the Code of Federal Regulation citation for this shows that the Navy’s actions are anything but uncontroversial, or consistent with federal, state or local laws. They certainly do not fall into the categories of public transportation, emergency utility repairs or improvements to existing rest areas and weigh stations, for which categorical exclusions were originally intended. Hence, in the case of these upcoming exercises across Washington State coastlines, the Navy is issuing its own categorical exclusions for a massive amount of covert training in civilian-populated areas. By doing so, it is circumventing state, local and possibly federal governments by concluding “no significant impacts” in its own assessments – and it continues to proceed in secret. “Realistic Military Training” The Navy defines realistic military training (RMT) as training that is “conducted outside of federally owned property.” Hence, according to that definition and according to the US military’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the RMT process is theoretically designed to ensure coordination between US Department of Defense representatives and local and regional officials in the areas where their exercises are to be conducted. Steps like risk assessments, medical plans, surveys of training areas and coordinating their activities with local, state and federal law enforcement officials are supposed to be mandatory. However, in the Navy’s upcoming coastal exercise, not one of the measures listed by SOCOM has been offered to the public or to local or state officials in Washington, and no publicly availabledocumentation exists that such measures have ever been considered. According to SOCOM, the purpose of RMT is “[t]o hone advanced skills, [and] the military and interagency require large areas of undeveloped land with low population densities with access to small towns.” Yet, many of the areas outlined in the Navy’s documents for their upcoming exercises take place in populated areas, on developed land. Well over 100,000 people live on the Olympic Peninsula alone, and Olympic National Park hosts 3 million visitors per year. “The Navy has millions of acres of Defense Department land to train in. Why do they need to invade our neighborhoods, too?” “This is particularly galling with Navy SEALs about to conduct insertions, extractions, launch and recovery, special reconnaissance and other activities with ‘simulated weapons’ in populated areas without the knowledge of the public,” Sullivan said. “Training like that cannot be considered anything but RMT. The fact that the public is completely unaware of it because the Navy has not notified them, despite legal obligations via NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] and policy obligations as described in the SOCOM presentation, is further evidence of its intent to deceive the public and circumvent the law.” There are numerous other RMT-type events that have occurred around the United States in recent years, including “urban” training events in various communities around the country. A December 2015 US Army report titled “Intelligence Support to Urban Operations” addresses challenges facing military action in an urban environment. “With the continuing growth in the world’s urban areas and increasing population concentrations in urban areas, the probability that Army forces will conduct operations in urban environments is ever more likely,” the manual states. Clearly, the Navy’s training in Washington is also focused along these lines as well. “The enemy situation is often extremely fluid – locals friendly to us today may be tomorrow’s belligerents,” the manual continues. “Adversaries seek to blend in with the local population to avoid being captured or killed. Enemy forces who are familiar with the city layout have an inherently superior awareness of the current situation.” Military training for combat in urban environments, like the Navy’s upcoming exercises in Washington, has been ongoing at bases around the country, with the goal of preparing soldiers for close-contact engagements within urban environments. As recently as March 2015 in South Carolina, Operation Vigilant Guard saw large deployments of troops in civilian areas for training. Sullivan sees these actions, and in particular the upcoming naval exercises across Washington State, in an insidious light. “The real story here is the fact that kill teams in training will be conducting covert operations in and around residential communities and on public lands without our knowledge,” she said. Sullivan believes the general public needs to be concerned about the Navy’s actions, along with the ongoing domestic military expansion as a whole, because they both present “an unprecedented and unlawful taking of public and private space for military activity.” She points out that there is no plausible justification for the Navy’s incursion into urban areas. “The Navy has millions of acres of Defense Department land to train in,” Sullivan said. “Now they’re using and closing portions of our national forests. Why do they need to invade our neighborhoods, too?” She also sees another threat from the Navy’s exercises in state parks and private lands: the normalization of military activity “in our lives and in places where it has historically never been.” Like Gallant, Sullivan is not opposed to the military conducting trainings, in itself. She objects to the training happening in places where people live, work and recreate, and without the informed consent of the public. “We object to the shell game that has passed for public process,” Sullivan said. “We object to the Navy’s apparent contempt for the laws of the land, and to the fact that the military is steadily moving off the millions of acres of land the public has given it for training, in order to practice warfare among us, the very citizens it is supposed to protect.”
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has signed an $1 billion agreement with South Korea to build a 300 MWt PWR reactor. The SMART reactor has a design that uses integral steam generators and advanced safety features. The reactor will have a 60 year design life and a three-year refueling cycle It will be used to generate electricity and to power reverse osmosis desalinization plants at coastal sites. The reactor will generate 100 MW of electrical power for these applications. Design characteristics of SMART contributing to the safety enhancement are features such as the integral configuration of the reactor coolant system and improved natural circulation capability. The reactor passed a safety review by the South Korean nuclear regulatory agency in 2012. The agreement is between the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KA-CARE) and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI). It is likely the KSA sought out the South Korean technology due to that country’s success in building four 1400 MW PWRs for the United Arab Emirates. The agreement represents KSA’s first investment in nuclear energy after earlier this year postponing for at least eight years the start of a massive program to build 16 full size reactors at three sites. The initial announcement of that plan set off a feeding frenzy among world reactor vendors only to have their hopes dashed when the KSA energy ministry realized that it didn’t have the workforce, supply chain, or regulatory infrastructure to roll out such a huge program. The ministry said with little explanatory details it was pushing back start of the program by eight years, but these seem to be the most practical reasons for that decision. UAE 4th nuclear reactor pours first concrete The official start of construction of the fourth South Korean supplied 1400 MW PWR type reactor being built for the United Arab Emirates took place at the Barakah site on the Persian gulf coast. The Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC) received a go ahead from the country’s nuclear regulatory agency for units 3 & 4 this time last year. Unit 3 has been under construction since then. Unit 4 is expected to be completed and enter revenue service by 2020. More than 18,000 people are working on all four reactors under construction at the Barakah site. the $20 billion deal, announced in 2009, is managed by the Korea Electric Power Corp. Unit 1 was started in July 2012, Unit 2 in May 2013, and Unit 3 in September 2014. (Table courtesy of World Nuclear Association) According to ENEC when all four units are in operation they will supply about 25% of the nation’s electricity and avoid the emission of 12 million tonnes of greenhouse gases. The plants will also free up oil and especially natural gas supplies for export. Electricity from the reactors will also be used to ramp up a finished goods aluminum industry. Aluminum smelters require significant supplies of reliable electrical power to transform raw bauxite ore into finished aluminum products. According to English language business news media, the UAE has announced plans to build a $3 billion facility for this purpose to begin operations in 2017. State-owned Emirates Global Aluminium plans to spend the money to build the United Arab Emirates’ first alumina refinery in Abu Dhabi, chief executive Abdulla Kalban said. “We are building the refinery to secure our own important materials,” Kalban said, adding that the refinery would produce 2 million tonnnes of alumina annually in an initial phase and an additional 2 million tonnes in a second phase. The first of four nuclear reactors being built in the UAE is expected to come online in mid-2017. Jordan in negotiations with investors for two Rosatom VVERs The government of Jordan is seeking investors for equity shares in the 51% it will need to finance in the two $5 billion apiece Rosatom supplier VVER nuclear reactors to be built in that country. According to the World Nuclear Association, the site for the two new reactors is Qasr-Amra in Al-Azraq province, about 70km south east of Amman. In April 2014 an expert team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) visited the region to evaluate studies on the proposed site, which is some 70 km from the cooling water source at Samra, and well away (100 km) from a fault line. In October 2013 The Jordanian Atomic Energy organization announced that Rosatom will contribute 49.9% of the project’s $10 billion cost, with the state-owned Jordan Nuclear Power Co (JNPC) being responsible for the controlling 50.1%. The plant will be provided on a build-own-operate (BOO) basis. Rosatom will supply all the fuel and take back the used fuel. WNA reports that in September 2014 JAEC signed a project development agreement with Rusatom. The objective is to sign a final construction contract within two years. The Jordanian government has said it does not intend to make a final investment decision until late in 2015 or sometime in 2016. A construction contract is still expected in 2016. Target date for operation of the first unit is 2024. Critics of the plan say that the Jordanian plan is missing the needed investment in the regional power grid to wheel the power to customers. Some have said Jordan would be better off investing in small modular reactors with a power range of 100-300 MW to accommodate the existing power line infrastructure. The Jordanian parliament has raised objections to the plan saying that the government has not been transparent with the legislature in explaining its dealings with the Russian export agencies. # # #
A UCL-led study of 9,050 English people with an average age of 65 found that the people with the greatest wellbeing were 30% less likely to die during the average eight and a half year follow-up period than those with the least wellbeing. The study, published in The Lancet as part of a special series on ageing, was conducted by researchers from UCL, Princeton University and Stony Brook University. It used questionnaire answers to measure a type of wellbeing called 'eudemonic wellbeing', which relates to your sense of control, feeling that what you do is worthwhile, and your sense of purpose in life. People were divided into four categories based on their answers, ranked from highest wellbeing to lowest wellbeing. The results were adjusted for age, sex, socio-economic status, physical health, depression, smoking, physical activity and alcohol intake, to rule out as many factors as possible that could influence both health and wellbeing. For example, terminal illnesses could reduce both wellbeing and life expectancy. Over the next eight and a half years, 9% of people in the highest wellbeing category had died, compared with 29% in the lowest category. Once all the other factors had been taken into account, people with the highest wellbeing were 30% less likely to die over the study period, living on average two years longer than those in the lowest wellbeing group. "We have previously found that happiness is associated with a lower risk of death," says Professor Andrew Steptoe, Director of the UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care, who led the study. "These analyses show that the meaningfulness and sense of purpose that older people have in their lives are also related to survival. We cannot be sure that higher wellbeing necessarily causes lower risk of death, since the relationship may not be causal. But the findings raise the intriguing possibility that increasing wellbeing could help to improve physical health. There are several biological mechanisms that may link wellbeing to improved health, for example through hormonal changes or reduced blood pressure. Further research is now needed to see if such changes might contribute to the links between wellbeing and life expectancy in older people." As part of the Lancet paper, the researchers also examined data on 'evaluative wellbeing', a measure of life satisfaction, and 'hedonic wellbeing', related to feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, stress and pain. International data from the Gallup World Poll confirmed that in high-income English speaking countries, life satisfaction dips around middle age and rises in older age, but the pattern varied across the world. In the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, older residents reported very low rankings of life satisfaction compared with younger residents in those regions. This same pattern is seen in Latin America and Caribbean countries, though life satisfaction does not decrease as sharply as in the Eastern European countries. And in sub-Saharan Africa, life satisfaction is very low at all ages. "Economic theory can predict a dip in wellbeing among the middle age in high-income, English-speaking countries," says co-author Professor Angus Deaton of Princeton University. "This is the period at which wage rates typically peak and is the best time to work and earn the most, even at the expense of present well-being, so as to have increased wealth and well-being later in life. What is interesting is that this pattern is not universal. Other regions, like the former Soviet Union, have been affected by the collapse of communism and other systems. Such events have affected the elderly who have lost a system that, however imperfect, gave meaning to their lives, and, in some cases, their pensions and health care."
A photo of Greg Kleven, dated April 1967, shows him posing in front of a tin-roofed hooch, wearing an undershirt so stained it matches the sand beneath his feet. In his right hand, he is holding an M-16 rifle. His shaved head is cocked to the left and he's sticking out his tongue in a half smile. The 18-year-old enlistee is three months into his tour of Vietnam in a Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance company, a special operations unit similar to the Navy SEALs. He looks brash and ready to take on any Viet Cong who cross his path. "We had all of the difficult missions," Mr. Kleven recalls. "We blew up bridges and parachuted out of planes. Each patrol was like an individual war." As we talk in his apartment overlooking the Nhieu Loc Canal in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, it's hard to find any trace of that brazen marine in Kleven today. Two decades after leaving Vietnam on a stretcher with a bullet wound to his back, Kleven returned to the country for good in 1991, making him, he says, the first American to live in Ho Chi Minh City after the war. Today, Kleven's apartment turns into a classroom several times a week when Vietnamese students come to practice their English. Kleven was a trailblazer in Vietnam for English teaching, a field that did not exist when he first returned to the country as a tourist in the 1980s. He and his brother – an Air Force veteran – became the first foreigners granted a government license to teach in Vietnam. His voice can be heard in classrooms across the country on the government's English-language training tapes. "I wanted to make up for what I had done during the war," Kleven says of his English-teaching career. "I now have a second chance to do things right. I have the chance to be a teacher here instead of a soldier." Kleven is just one of thousands of American veterans who have returned to Vietnam since the end of one of the most divisive conflicts in American history. In the four decades since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, which brought America's direct military involvement in the war to an end, many former soldiers have journeyed there out of curiosity to see a land and people they once fought or to seek closure for a war that continues to weigh on their minds. While no one knows the precise number of returning vets, most experts put the figure in the tens of thousands. Vietnam Battlefield Tours, just one of dozens of groups that organize trips for former soldiers, estimates it has taken more than 1,000 veterans to the country since the group's founding in 2005. The Vietnamese government says that in recent years more than 400,000 Americans – many of them former military – have visited the country annually. A few hundred other former soldiers, like Kleven, have moved to Vietnam permanently. Some of these veterans are working alongside their former enemies to address the legacies of the war. They remove unexploded bombs and land mines from old battlefields that are now rice paddies. They raise money for people who have been diagnosed with disabilities or diseases attributed to exposure to Agent Orange or other herbicides that were sprayed by the United States during the war. And they act as unofficial ambassadors, promoting reconciliation between Americans and Vietnamese as teachers and tour guides. • • • American veterans have a long tradition of making pilgrimages to their old battlefields. The journeys serve to memorialize the war and to honor those that lost their lives in battle. Vietnam veterans return to the Southeast Asian country for these reasons, too, but also because they have a need to make sense of a war that remains controversial. "What makes Vietnam veterans different from World War II veterans who go back is that we lost in Vietnam," says Paulette Curtis, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., who has studied the phenomenon of returning vets. "Veterans that go back to Vietnam are reclaiming their place in history, both in a personal and national sense." While the men who came home from World War II were celebrated as heroes, Vietnam veterans faced an American public that largely did not support the conflict in Southeast Asia. Added to this, American media coverage of Vietnam dropped off almost entirely after the fall of Saigon in 1975, so veterans had a hard time understanding how their role in the war contributed to the country's well-being. Kleven recalls the confusion he felt after coming home from Vietnam in 1967. "I kept asking myself, why did we go? What was behind it? I never knew the history of it. So I was searching for all of those things." The quest for answers drove some veterans to return to Vietnam and connect with the Vietnamese in the 1980s. The trips were difficult in those early years. The US imposed a trade embargo on Vietnam in 1975 and pulled its embassy staff from the country. Before Kleven first returned to Vietnam in 1988 – 15 years after the peace accords – he was warned by the US State Department not to go. Despite these challenges, veterans made up the largest contingent of Americans visiting Vietnam in the 1980s, Ms. Curtis says. From the beginning, veterans who returned played a role in improving ties between the two countries. In the absence of formal diplomatic ties, Hanoi reached out to returning American veterans to discuss outstanding war issues, such as missing soldiers and Vietnamese children fathered by American troops. While the US government discouraged these discussions – and some veterans felt too hardened by the war to have any interest in symbolically shaking hands – well-known veterans such as Bobby Muller, then president of Vietnam Veterans of America, took Hanoi up on the offer. "We see our role as providing a bridge to Vietnam, a conduit to dialogue," Mr. Muller was quoted by The New York Times as saying after a 1984 meeting with Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach. "Our Government will not talk to them. So we do represent the only channel with which to exchange information." When President Clinton announced the normalization of diplomatic relations with Vietnam a decade later, he thanked veterans for supporting reconciliation and moving "beyond the haunting and painful past toward finding common ground for the future." Veterans in Vietnam today are continuing that process and working to address the past on both the grass-roots and diplomatic levels. • • • It's a balmy evening and we're sitting amid the Tiki torches and straw umbrellas of a bar in Da Nang, in central Vietnam. Across the street, ocean waves lap against what US soldiers used to call China Beach. The site was home to a US rest and relaxation center during the war, where soldiers could unwind and play volleyball. Tonight, I can make out the silhouettes of Vietnamese teenagers playing a casual game of soccer under the moonlight. I had planned on meeting only one veteran, but as the night unfolded, more and more joined us. The expatriate community in Da Nang is close, but the group of US veterans living along the beach is tighter still. Bottles of the local Biere Larue are passed around and the men settle in to reminiscing about their first time going back to Vietnam after the war. "I flew into Hanoi and I had the jitters in my stomach," Marine vet Chuck Palazzo recalls. "I had some bizarre thoughts that I'm in this database and they're going to see that I was a marine. And they're going to take me away. Crazy thoughts. But to the contrary, big smile on the guy's face, they stamped my passport. I'm in." The men laugh. Their initial fears of facing their former enemies are still vivid, even after years of having Vietnamese friends and wives. They continue to be astonished by Vietnam's ability to forgive American soldiers for what they did during the war. "For guys that come back today, they're expecting to find sandbags and bunkers, barbed wire and bullets lying around. But rarely do you find that stuff," says Bill Ervin. The Marine vet has been bringing veterans back to Vietnam since the mid-1990s and runs his own travel agency, Bamboo Moon, out of his home near the beach. The veterans in Da Nang speak of meeting former North Vietnamese soldiers on the street who embrace them as brothers. And they recall a trip they took together not long ago during which a poor family invited them in to share a meal of coconut worms. It's clear they feel at home in Vietnam, despite the lingering memories of war. "I tell people that I was born in Vietnam," Suel Jones, the oldest veteran at the table, tells me. "And they say 'what?' Yeah, I was born here in 1968. Because upon my arrival here every breath I've ever had since has been affected by it in some way or another. Everything I've ever done since leaving Vietnam has been affected by my time here." Mr. Jones received two Purple Hearts, first for being shot and later for being wounded by mortar fire in Vietnam, but the mental injury he sustained was far more serious. For 30 years he suffered from what was diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and wandered the US, unable to hold a job or make friends. When he finally settled down it was in a cabin in Alaska 60 miles from the nearest town. In 1995, he traveled to Seattle and underwent a month-long PTSD treatment program at a Veterans Administration hospital. It was during that program he decided to return to Vietnam. "I was a bush marine and we spent all of our time in the DMZ [demilitarized zone]," Jones says. "I never saw a city. I never saw a Vietnamese that I wasn't shooting at or who wasn't shooting at me. And I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about this country. So I thought, it's time to go back and at least see where in the hell I fought and what the hell happened." Jones and Mr. Palazzo now live in Da Nang and help run Veterans for Peace's first overseas chapter. Through the organization, they arrange tours for US veterans who are interested in returning to Vietnam and learning more about the legacies of the war. They also spend time visiting those who were exposed to Agent Orange and raising money for the Da Nang Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (DAVA), which provides assistance to families in central Vietnam. • • • One morning, I drive with Phan Thanh Tien, the vice president of DAVA, to the home of a former Vietnamese soldier whose grandchildren have been affected by dioxin. The house is deep in the countryside in Hoa Vang District, far from the hospitals and markets in downtown Da Nang. We climb a dirt path up a hill to reach the house and pass a cow, munching among the palm trees, that DAVA has given the family. The house is humble – just a few rooms – and like many Vietnamese homes it lacks a front wall, so the breezes flow through the house freely. Chickens and dogs play in the front yard. The patriarch of the family, Le Van Dan, is 68 years old. He was a driver for the South Vietnamese Army during the war, a role he says the military forced him to take on. His wife pours me tea while one of his grandsons examines my notebook and pen. He is 15 years old, but his developmental disabilities make him look much younger. A second grandson lies motionless on a bed in the other room. His legs are skinny and unable to keep him upright. When I speak to him, his eyes move, but he doesn't say a word. They tell me that he can't understand. Mr. Dan remembers seeing the white clouds of herbicide being sprayed by US planes a few miles from his home during the war. He thought it was water at the time. American veteran Palazzo remembers those clouds, too. He served as a reconnaissance specialist not far from Dan's house and was told by his commanding officer that the chemical being sprayed was pesticide. But something about the manure-smelling chemical didn't make sense. "I paid more attention and I realized that this stuff is wilting the leaves, and the trees are just crumbling down," Palazzo recalls. "Mosquito repellent doesn't do this." The US sprayed nearly 20 million gallons of herbicides in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as part of Operation Ranch Hand during the war against North Vietnam. Of these herbicides, Agent Orange is the most deadly. The chemical contains a large amount of dioxin, a toxic compound that takes centuries to break down. Since 1991, the US Department of Veterans Affairs has recognized that exposure to dioxin can cause certain cancers, diseases, and birth defects. American veterans who served in the Vietnam War and have conditions linked to dioxin exposure can receive medical benefits and disability compensation from the US government. But Hanoi has long complained that the 4.8 million Vietnamese that it estimates were exposed to dioxin during the war have not received equivalent benefits from Washington. Moreover, the former US bases where herbicides were once stored, mixed, and loaded into planes have not been properly cleaned. Researchers at the Vietnam Public Health Association estimate that 90 percent of new dioxin poisoning cases occurring today in Vietnam are due to the consumption of food and water contaminated by dioxin that has leaked out of bases abandoned by the US four decades ago. The lack of response by the US government is largely what fueled Palazzo's decision to return to Vietnam and address the outstanding legacies of the war. "I felt a tremendous amount of guilt," Palazzo says. "While I was in Vietnam during the war I had a dream. It stuck in my mind for years that I wanted to come back, and I wanted to do something positive after all of the destruction that we did. So years later, the time was right and I decided to return." Last year, Palazzo visited Dan's family with a group of Americans in Vietnam for the annual Veterans for Peace tour. Dan was moved by the meeting. "It encouraged us and gave us the strength to continue taking care of our grandchildren," he says. "If the US veterans did not come back to Vietnam they would not understand what happened here and wouldn't sympathize with us. It's very, very important for the Vietnamese to see and hear from American veterans." • • • The effects of such sympathy are often most visible at the local level, in the new schools veterans have built and the freight containers full of wheelchairs they have donated to hospitals and orphanages. Yet the work of American veterans in Vietnam can be felt at the diplomatic level as well. After years of campaigning by activist veterans, the US began removing dioxin from the soil of a former US airport in Da Nang in 2012. The project involves digging up contaminated soil and heating it to high temperatures to destroy the toxin. The US Agency for International Development estimates that 73,000 cubic meters of soil will be remediated at the airport, enough to fill 29 Olympic-size swimming pools. "The US would have been much too ready to totally ignore land mines, unexploded ordnance, Agent Orange, and the tragic legacy of the war if we had let them," says Chuck Searcy, a US Army veteran who has lived in Hanoi since relations were normalized in 1995. "But because of the presence here of veterans and our attention to those issues, the US has had to be accountable for those things." Mr. Searcy has seen firsthand the power of veterans to encourage reconciliation through his work on land mines and unexploded ordnance. The US dropped an estimated 7.8 million tons of ammunition on Southeast Asia during the war, more than it used on both Germany and Japan during World War II. Bombs that failed to detonate on impact became de facto land mines. The Vietnamese government estimates that more than 100,000 people have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance since the war ended. Searcy was stationed as an intelligence officer in Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive, North Vietnam's largest assault in the war. He returned to Vietnam in the 1990s to serve as the representative for the Washington, D.C.-based Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and then later helped found Project Renew, a joint Vietnamese-international group that deals with the explosive remnants of war. Searcy says that his status as a veteran has given him access to people in the Vietnamese military and government that other Americans cannot reach. "When I first met with the Ministry of Defense in 1996, they had never had a meeting with an NGO [nongovernmental organization] before, and they did not deal with NGOs period," Searcy recalls. "The only reason they gave me a meeting, they said, was because I was an American veteran. They said, you know what we suffered through because you suffered the same thing. We're brothers." This access proved useful a few years later when Searcy helped resolve a disagreement between Washington and Hanoi over a donation of de-mining equipment. The Vietnamese government was concerned about demands attached to the donation, Searcy says, preventing a deal from moving forward. After speaking with his military contacts in Vietnam and in the US, Searcy was able to help bridge the gulf between the parties and bolster Hanoi's confidence in the gift. A multimillion-dollar donation package was signed soon after. Four decades after the Paris Peace Accords, many of the men who went to Vietnam as teenagers are now in their 60s and 70s. Age is posing new challenges for those living in the Southeast Asian country. Some American veterans in Vietnam are considering moving back to the US, where they can have access to treatment at VA hospitals and have the support of family members. Others are thinking about winding down their humanitarian projects as the work of fundraising becomes too taxing. Yet as veterans in Vietnam contemplate leaving, many veterans in the US who are now retired are considering returning to the country for the first time. "Veterans can afford to go to Vietnam now that their kids are gone and they have more free time on their hands," says Ed Stiteler, president of Vietnam Battlefield Tours and a Vietnam veteran himself. "Most of the people we're dealing with have put a lot of thought into going to Vietnam and are looking for closure and healing." A similar dynamic is also driving many former Vietnamese soldiers back to their own battlefields, increasing the likelihood of chance connections between the former enemies. "Commemorating the war together is one of the most important ways in which veterans are able to work through the past," says Christina Schwenkel, an anthropologist at the University of California, Riverside. "Veterans who meet today in Vietnam are sharing their sorrow and trying to move forward together." Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy Decades after they first went to war in Vietnam, many of them are finally making peace with the past. •Nissa Rhee is writing a book about American veterans who have returned to Vietnam to help overcome the legacies of the war, reconcile the past with the present, and turn enemies into friends.

Subsets and Splits

No saved queries yet

Save your SQL queries to embed, download, and access them later. Queries will appear here once saved.