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Greetings, Fast Foodie readers. Welcome back after a bit of a long (and unintentional) hiatus. In the time since my last column, KFC brought back its Nashville Hot Chicken, Taco Bell gave away Doritos Locos Tacos because Francisco Lindor stole a base in the World Series, president-elect Donald Trump tapped the CEO of Hardee's to be Labor Secretary, and an untold number of new menu items and deals were unveiled.
The world of fast food continues to percolate, and it could bring a rare gem to Baltimore in the new year: a Roy Rogers.
You might remember the chain of restaurants named for a movie star cowboy that was a staple in the '70s and '80s. It was a favorite of mine as a kid—so much so that I had a birthday dinner there once. Alas, Roy Rogers faded away in the '90s.
But it's making a comeback thanks to The Plamondon Companies, a business based in Frederick that mostly specializes in hotel management. The company bought the Roy Rogers brand in 2002 and have been steadily growing it ever since, opening five new Roy Rogers in 2016 alone, including one this summer in Pasadena. Maryland has 22 locations in all.
Could Baltimore be next? I called Jim Plamondon, the head of the restaurant division of the business that he and his brother run, to find out.
"The answer is yes, we would like to and we're talking to folks now that are franchise operators that are in Baltimore."
Huzzah!
Unfortunately, nothing is imminent. Plamondon says he's not close to a signed agreement and estimates that it will be six months to a year before a Roys comes closer to the Baltimore area. And let me tell you why it's unfortunate, especially for those readers that don't know it: Roy Rogers is the Swiss Army Knife of fast food chains.
They have what Plamondon refers to as the "holy trio": roast beef, fried chicken, AND burgers.
"And no one, no other competitor, does that," he says. You might be able to find two out of the three at some places, but never all three. And they manage to do all three well.
The real king-maker, though, is the Fixin's Bar, a salad bar of vegetable toppings and sauces that allows diners to dress their order however they like. Anyone who's had a McDonald's burger sloppily slathered with ketchup and mustard knows why this is crucial. Frankly, it's kind of surprising more places haven't adopted it, particularly in the era when Chipotle and the like have made customization king.
Couple the Fixin's Bar with eight different side items in addition to the fast food staple of french fries, and you have an element of choice that most fast food restaurants can't provide.
"We have a lot of repeat customers and a lot of loyal customers who can come in more than one day a week and feel like they're getting a very different experience each one of those days," says Plamondon. As for himself, Plamondon says he eats Roy Rogers six out of seven days in a week. No lie. He and his brothers are hands-on owners, he says, so he stops in to see how things are running.
He also made a point to emphasize the quality of ingredients at Roy Rogers, pegging the restaurant somewhere between your typical fast food chain and fast-casual joints such as Panera and Chipotle. The roast beef, which receives a mid-tier grade of USDA Choice, is just one example.
"That's really a cut above typical beef that you find [at a fast food restaurant]," he says. "It's slow-roasted in the oven and sliced to order."
A little bit more background on Roy Rogers: The restaurant was founded by the Marriott hotel company in the late '60s and eventually grew to more than 600 locations in the U.S., 184 of which, Plamondon says, were in a corridor stretching from Baltimore to Northern Virginia.
In 1991, around the time Trump's man for the Labor Department, Andrew Pudzer (who, by the way, is a total scumbag), was helping Carl Karcher, the founder of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, rebuild his fortune, Roy Rogers was sold by Marriott to Karcher's company. Hardee's flipped some of the locations to their brand before eventually deciding to sell off the assets. Many old Roy Rogers locations became Boston Markets or McDonald's or something else.
But there's still some nostalgia for Roy Rogers, and Plamondon says that's fueling the restaurant's current expansion. Count me among these people: My friends and I used to take road trips to Roys locations in Westminster or Forest Hill (since closed, R.I.P.) for Gold Rush chicken sandwiches (breaded patty, Monterey Jack cheese, bacon, and honey on a bun—seriously, it's legit) and holsters of fries, simply because we loved the place from when we were young.
As people see more Roy Rogers cropping up, they are asking—no, demanding—for one to be put closer to their home.
"I'm not exaggerating when I say not a week goes by—I probably wouldn't be exaggerating if I said not a day goes by—that a customer of ours, either through social media, email to us, or handwritten letters or comment cards that we have on every one of our tables in all of our restaurants says, 'Please open up in my hometown of' fill in the blank," says Plamondon.
Let us hope the ever-persuasive powers of the vox populi soon bring one here to Charm City. |
Four games into pre-season and Fulham have kept the same amount of clean sheets as they did during the entire 2015/2016 season.
Fulham have been incredibly impressive over the pre-season to date, winning all four games scoring 16 goals in the process and are yet to concede in the four games they have played. Interestingly so, Fulham have been scoring freely without their star striker, Ross McCormack who has been absent from the pre-season squads for many different reasons. With Cauley Woodrow, Matt Smith, Floyd Ayite and Sone Aluko racking up the goals and assists, it seems that should Fulham lose their talismanic striker, the club would be in safe hands for the upcoming season.
Last night, Fulham comfortably beat Brighton 3-0 as the game was hosted at Aldershot. An impressive feat, considering that Brighton were a side that narrowly lost out on automatic promotion and beat us 5-0 earlier in the season.
Fulham side V Brighton (19th July 2016 7:45pm):
Bettinelli (Button 46′); Fredericks (Sessegnon 17′), Kalas, Ream (Madl 46′), Odoi (Stearman 72′); Christensen (Tunnicliffe 46′), Parker (Cairney 46′), Edun (Adeniran 61′), Floyd Ayité (de la Torre 61′); Sone Aluko (Humphrys 61′), Woodrow (Matt Smith 46′).
With Denis Odoi entering the side, the Belgian saw his playing time split between both sides of the defence as the game progressed, with Ryan Fredericks picking up an early injury and then young Sessegnon coming on at left-back. Despite the positional switch, the new signing played with his heart on his sleeve, and that desire helped the team press Brighton all over the pitch. This high-tempo approach to the game seems to be the gameplan for Slavisa Jokanovic for the upcoming season, with his transfer dealings focused on an injection of pace.
Once again, Ryan Sessegnon had a massive impact on the game, with the 16 year old finishing a beautiful team move to make it 2-0 just after the break. While Sessegnon is amongst the rising talents of pre-season, fans must keep a lid on their optimism, with the player still only 16 years old, rushing his development into the first-team could halt his future, but should Ryan continue these levels of performances, Jokanovic could call him up to the side for a competitive game sooner rather than later. With Arsenal reportedly interested in a move for the youngster, his emergence around Fulham isn’t going to go unrecognised. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the contracts that can be given to these youngsters at the moment, so remember we can’t sign them up to 5 year deals just yet! But, it is very promising to see the next set of bright talents getting the chance to play and train with the senior side. That experience around the side will only boost their confidence and speed up their learning and understanding of the modern game.
With Fulham linked with a move for Manchester United youngster, James Wilson, competition for the starting striker spot heats up. With Cauley Woodrow and Matt Smith in fine form during pre-season, Wilson wouldn’t be a guaranteed starter should he arrive at Craven Cottage in the next few weeks. The potential positive of James Wilson would be that the loan could lead to a permanent signing the following summer, and with Wilson being versatile enough to play anywhere across a front three – his arrival would provide back-up options should Aluko/Ayite need a rest due the demanding schedules of Championship football.
To conclude, it seems that a deal for Ale Faurlin could be dead in the water with the Argentine not being included in the latest pre-season squad and rumours that he picked up another injury during a recent training session. With the Argentine playmaker struggling to prove his fitness, his agent has reportedly opened talks with other clubs. While, Faurlin would have been an exciting addition – Jokanovic’s high press tactics could prove a tough ask for the injury-prone midfielder, which could force Fulham to spend their resources elsewhere.
And for those who follow Fulham’s youth players a little more than others, former Fulham starlet, Jordan Evans has joined Bristol Rovers on trial following a successful loan spell at Oxford United last season and I hope he secures a long-term deal at the newly promoted side.
Thank you for reading – Please feel free to tweet your thoughts to me @ABronsSmith.
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Share. Towering above the original. Towering above the original.
I like the first Sanctum, but I don't love it. I appreciate its bold mixture of first-person gunplay and tower-defense strategy well enough, but after finishing it I found that I had no desire to rematch its mindless enemies, severely limited maps, and numbing repetition even with friends. I loved the idea, but not the execution. Sanctum 2 is different; this sequel takes all those ideas and runs with them in the right directions, improving in almost every conceivable way upon the original, and I find myself texting friends at ungodly hours to join me to play through a few more rounds.
Exit Theatre Mode
As before, your task is to erect a maze of walls and turrets to keep the enemies from the your power cores for as long as possible, but the most immediately noticeable improvement is that this is a far more beautiful and varied game. Sanctum 2's colorful but sometimes confusing graphic novel-style story panels lead us through a lush, vibrant world spread across 15 maps. Some of these maps do away with the research facilities almost entirely, and the battles unfold before refreshingly natural surroundings or rusty train yards. Each level feels markedly different, both in look and design, and in most cases they don't overstay their welcome.
The waves of alien enemies are tougher, too. The varied cast of creatures come in relatively small numbers to counterbalance their increased hit points, and ever so often are accompanied by hulking bosses that smash through towers as though they were rotting Lincoln Logs. (It’s a pity that they're merely gargantuan versions of the foot soldiers instead of distinct monsters.) Even placed intelligently, the limit of 10 towers usually can’t handle the hordes alone, which keeps the pace fast and desperate.
In a welcome surprise, many of these these enemies will turn and chase you down if you get too close – a needed improvement over their oblivious marches in the first game. I frequently found myself using it to my advantage by luring a tough enemy who'd managed to pass the towers away from the cores.
On our side, there's more personality to be found. Rather than cloning the original's sole ginger heroine, Skye, in co-op, Sanctum 2 also lets you to step into the role of her spunky sister, a robot who could pass for an 23rd-century Apple product, or an easy-going male shotgunner who looks like Adrien Brody's long-lost badass brother. Each comes with some personality in the form of distinct voiced exclamations and their own primary weapon, ranging from Skye’s humble but punch-packing assault rifle to her sister Sweet's massive grenade launcher that sets enemies on fire.
While they tend toward the familiar archetypes like shotguns rather than inventive sci-fi gadgetry, it's all wrapped in a memorable Portal-meets-Mass Effect aesthetic, and each brings helpful strengths to different situations. Playing alone, for instance, I found the robot's sniper rifle too limiting, but in co-op, I think it's safe to say that that rifle's precision and range saved the round on numerous occasions.
Exit Theatre Mode
Regardless of which character I played, I found the gunplay of Sanctum 2 more intense than what I saw back in 2011. Switching out your weapons to let them recharge keeps your damage output pumping when you need it most, although I can't deny that I miss some of those frightful moments when a gigantic bug was nearing the core and I was stuck reloading.
Character development is also boosted by a leveling system that rewards success with excellent perks, and they can be combined in great ways. I matched a perk that damages enemies by jumping on them with one that boosts your speed every time you do damage, allowing me to dart in and out of the fray like a ninja. These perks allow you to adjust your gameplay style to suit a particular map rather than trivializing early ones because you're now too powerful for them.
Between firefights, even the business of building your mazes has been significantly refined. Sanctum 2 lets you incrementally upgrade each tower with small boosts to range and damage with every coin you pump into them instead of lump-sum upgrades. Upgrade tiers still exist, but they're more focused on altering tower behaviors, such as firing speed, rather than firepower. Having the choice between how to upgrade, rather than just whether to upgrade or not, is a massive improvement in between-round resource management.
Indeed, the real fun of Sanctum 2 lies in its cooperative play – or at least when it gets moving. However, the fact that only one (or two, tops) players can build anything during a given build phase, there's a lot of time between rounds spent jumping around listlessly waiting. It's a bummer in random groups – I often thought I had a better or faster strategy in mind but couldn't do anything aside from wait them out... or, in a move that's sure to create intra-team drama, sell a tower they've already built and replace it with my own. I could see this getting nasty on Steam or XBLA fast.
Still, setting a match to the endless survival mode while and fighting back the hordes in a full group presents both a welcome challenge and a handy means of earning XP. For a bonus challenge in the Survival Mode, you and your group can even select up to five feats of strength in the campaign mode for 20-percent increases in XP each, which affect gameplay by limiting respawns or allowing enemies to move faster and heal themselves. With all five triggered, Sanctum 2 becomes a brutal challenge even with a full team and all available perks. In short, Sanctum 2 provides a wealth of tools that let you play this fun, action-packed tower-defense hybrid the way you want to play it. |
Proposed solar plant to store power in shipping container-sized batteries
Updated
Proponents of a $300-million solar battery power plant in outback South Australia believe they have enough backing to turn the plan into a reality.
Key points: Large-scale batteries planned for stable power management
Developers hope to begin construction in 2017
SA has highest electricity prices in the country
The project in Roxby Downs would include about 800,000 solar panels connected to shipping container-sized batteries, which have the ability to manage and store power.
Proposed by the Lyon Group, it is the only South Australian project vying for the next round of funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
Its investors are confident they will be able to get the funds for it to go ahead and said it would be a big step towards creating base load renewable energy.
"The large-scale batteries allow us to manage that power in a more stable manner," Lyon Solar partner David Green said.
"The larger the batteries and the more batteries we include, the closer it comes to base load.
"For governments to achieve their aspirational targets they're establishing for renewable energy, we have to overcome this issue of turning renewable into stable, base load-type power."
He said stage one of the project would create a 20-megawatt power plant, with minimum two megawatt battery storage, but stage two would expand that to 100 megawatts with minimum 20 megawatt batteries.
"That's about the equivalent of 4,000 Telsa home battery storage modules," Mr Green said.
It is hoped the construction will begin early next year, creating about 100 jobs in the building phase then a handful of ongoing positions.
South Australia currently has the highest electricity prices in the country, with prices soaring due to a reliance on interstate power and increased prices set by energy companies.
Over the past six years electricity providers have been criticised for heavy investment in infrastructure upgrades, or so-called "gold plating", which are considered a major factor in driving up average household electricity bills.
The impact of network charges on electricity bills have been investigated in two federal Senate inquiries since 2012, both of which heard allegations that severe regulatory failure had led to massive overspending on electricity infrastructure and costs were being passed down to consumers.
Topics: electricity-energy-and-utilities, welfare, community-and-society, states-and-territories, government-and-politics, roxby-downs-5725, sa
First posted |
Mostly cloudy starting tonight.
Feels Like:
Feels Like: 26˚
Feels Like: 26˚ Low: 28˚ High: 37˚
35˚ Partly Cloudy. Feels Like: 26˚ Low: 28˚ High: 37˚
Mixed precipitation tomorrow through Monday, with high temperatures rising to 47°F on Sunday.
Today
28˚ 37˚
Partly cloudy starting in the afternoon, continuing until evening. 28˚ 5am → 37˚ 3pm 6:35am 5:44pm Snow < 1 in More Details
Wed
24˚ 30˚
Mostly cloudy throughout the day. 24˚ 7am → 30˚ 11pm 6:34am 5:45pm Snow < 1 in More Details
Thu
31˚ 42˚
Mostly cloudy starting in the evening. 31˚ 7am → 42˚ 3pm 6:32am 5:47pm Snow < 1 in More Details
Fri
33˚ 42˚
Snow (< 1 in.) in the morning. 33˚ 7am → 42˚ 4pm 6:31am 5:48pm Snow < 1 in More Details
Sat
37˚ 45˚
Overcast throughout the day. 37˚ 12am → 45˚ 4pm 6:29am 5:49pm Rain 0.25 in More Details
Sun
35˚ 47˚
Snow (< 1 in.) overnight. 35˚ 7am → 47˚ 3pm 6:28am 5:50pm Rain 0.13 in More Details
Mon
28˚ 35˚
Snow (1–2 in.) in the morning. 28˚ 11pm → 35˚ 4pm 6:26am 5:51pm Snow 1 - 3 in More Details
Tue
22˚ 31˚ |
IANS
Andhra Pradesh has become the first state in the country to pilot blockchain technology in two departments and plans to deploy it across the administration, said Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu on 9 October.
Addressing Blockchain Business Conference here, he said the state had also created the largest repository of used cases for global start-ups to test their solutions.
Naidu said since the state was leading in e-governance, it was using blockchain technology to address cyber security issues.
The state launched pilot projects for land records and transport. State Information Technology Minister Nara Lokesh said the technology was required to prevent tampering of land records, which had already been digitised and placed online. Similarly, the technology is used in Transport Department to streamline titles of the vehicles.
Stating that Andhra accounts for 60 percent of Aadhaar-based transactions and extensively uses technology for delivery of services, Lokesh said the state required blockchain to protect the IT assets.
The two-day conference organised by Fintech Valley Vizag is being attended by regional and international experts, startups, corporates, leading FSI executives, regulators, entrepreneurs, policy makers and academics to explore blockchain technologies, its applications and how it will impact the financial services industry.
Naidu said the state was positioning itself to take advantage of the niche technologies to create business and investment opportunities.
The inaugural session saw launch of two accelerators by ICICI and Mahindra Finance in Fintech Valley Vizag, which was established last year. The two companies will bring 30 startup companies each here, mentor and finance them to solve the problems.
The activity covers new technologies like blockchain, big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), cyber security and artificial intelligence.
The state government's Advisor, Information Technology, J. A. Chowdary said that the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Tata Capital, State Bank of India, HDFC, Bajaj Fin Service and others plan to set up accelerators.
Partnering with 40 banks and financial institutions, Fintech Valley has already created biggest repository of used cases. The start-ups will work on problems to come out with solutions and this will become intellectual property of Fintech Valley, he added.
The inaugural session of the conference also saw launch of India Fintech Forum, India Blockchain Forum, Blockchain Report Aby Wipro and Blockchain Hiring Portal.
NASSCOM President R. Chandrasekhar announced that as part of its 10,000 startup programme, it will set up a 70-seat facility in Vizag to help incubate startups, mentorship and provide world class products.
Naidu said nine companies were already set up in Fintech Valley while 16 companies would start their commercial operations soon, exuding confidence that Vizag would become blockchain capital of not just India but of the world.
Naidu said the government encouraged global fintech companies such as BroadRidge Financials, HSBC and Thomson Reuters to setup Fintech academies, announced $1 Million global Fintech Challenge Award.
"We are also in the process of establishing Rs.500 crore Fintech Fund for startup companies operating in the domain and housed at FinTech Valley," he added.
Tech2 is now on WhatsApp. For all the buzz on the latest tech and science, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Tech2.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button. |
JEWEL SAMAD via Getty Images US President Barack Obama comforts Hurricane Sandy survivor in Brigantine, New Jersey, on October 31, 2012.
Former White House photographer Pete Souza, who has taken to trolling President Donald Trump with images of former President Barack Obama’s administration, landed another blow this week.
Following Trump’s Tuesday visit to storm-ravaged Texas, in which the president sought to keep the focus on himself, Souza posted an archival photo of Obama to Instagram, showing the former president comforting a Hurricane Sandy survivor after the devastating 2012 storm.
A post shared by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Aug 30, 2017 at 6:17am PDT
“There are no Democrats or Republicans hurting in Houston; there are just Americans,” Souza wrote in the caption. “At a time like this, it shouldn’t be about selling baseball hats or commenting on crowd size. It’s about helping our fellow human beings.”
Later Wednesday, Souza posted a photo of Obama greeting survivors of a tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, in 2011.
A post shared by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Aug 30, 2017 at 9:32am PDT
Souza quoted remarks Obama made during a memorial service for tornado victims in which he mentioned that some circumstances, like natural disasters, are beyond our control.
“But that does not mean we are powerless in the face of adversity,” Obama said. “How we respond when the storm strikes is up to us. How we live in the aftermath of tragedy and heartache, that’s within our control. And it’s in these moments, through our actions, that we often see the glimpse of what makes life worth living in the first place.”
Other previous presidents, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, also comforted survivors after tragedies.
Win McNamee via Getty Images After Hurricane Katrina, former President George W. Bush hugged a hurricane victim whose home was destroyed in Biloxi, Mississippi.
ROBERT SULLIVAN via Getty Images In 1992, Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida. Here, Bill Clinton, then a Democratic presidential candidate, visited survivors in Florida City, Florida.
Tropical Storm Harvey has wreaked havoc in Texas and Louisiana since Friday, causing catastrophic flooding that has killed dozens of people, caused widespread injuries and damaged property that will take years to rebuild.
Trump repeatedly wore his campaign merchandise to Harvey events. He bragged about the Texas crowds that showed up to see him, marveled at the size of the storm, and praised his administration’s response ― even though the government’s relief effort is just beginning.
HISTORIC rainfall in Houston, and all over Texas. Floods are unprecedented, and more rain coming. Spirit of the people is incredible.Thanks! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2017
Obama, on the other hand, tweeted this about Harvey: |
Saudi state media report that Saudi Arabia has intercepted a ballistic missile fired from Yemen toward the kingdom.
“The missile was heading towards the city of Khamis Mushait and was intercepted and destroyed without any casualties,” the Saudi Press Agency quoted a spokesman for a Saudi-led coalition fighting against Shi’ite Yemeni rebels as saying late on November 30.
The spokesman, Turki al-Maliki, also said that the control of ballistic weapons by Huthi rebels in Yemen represents a threat to regional and international security.
Tensions in the region intensified after a ballistic missile fired from Yemen was intercepted near the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on November 4.
Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman accused Iran of "direct military aggression" by supplying missiles to Huthi rebels.
Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Persian Gulf region have also accused predominantly Shi'ite Iran of fomenting terrorism and conflict in the region.
Tehran denies the accusations.
Based on reporting by SPA |
AKA Devil Shark and Running SharkThere can be little doubt that the Panther Shark is a Lemurian Biomancer Gene-Mage creation. The massive creature is surprisingly fast on both land and sea, and possesses obvious, lethal combat capabilities, from a massive maw filled with shark teeth, to claws and excellent agility. On dry land, Panther Sharks can run at great speed, leap, climb and pounce. The underbelly is lined with blade-like spikes that can fold to retract inside a flap of belly skin or extend to slash opponents as the creature leaps over them or to do additional damage forma pounce or grappling attack.Panther Sharks range in color from light to dark gray with a white underbelly. They are a favorite of Oceanic Guardsmen, Scouts and Serpent Hunters. Unlike some War steeds, Panther sharks are very aggressive and love to be on the prowl, stalking enemies and prey, hunting or fighting.The Panther Shark is capable of running 40 mph (64 km) maximum and can swim through water at a maximum speed of 30 mph (48 km or 26 knots). This speed is doubled along a ley line.Size: 14-18 feet (4.3 to 5.5 m) long from snout to rump, plus another 6-8 feet (1.8 to 2.4 m) of tail, and 5-6 feet (1.5 to 1.8 m) wide at the shoulders, and 7-9 feet (2.1 to 2.7 m) tall at the shoulders (Shark fin adds another 4 feet (1.2 m).Weight: 2-3 tons, females tend to be 25% larger than males.Special features:Can breath air or water indefiniteDepth tolerance of 5 miles (8 km)Nightvision 1,000 feet 305 m)Underwater and surface scent trackingBioregenerationThis illustration appears in the RIFTS: LEMURIA title.Rifts® Lemuria is packed with new magic, weapons, living power armor, monstrous war steeds, weapons, and gear suitable for landlubbers and aquatic adventurers alike.The Lemurians are an amphibious people with floating cities and magic-based technology that allows for land and underwater adventures alike. Discover the secrets and people of this lost and forgotten civilization of magic and wonder. Add amphibious capabilities to your Rifts® campaigns and discover new menaces under the sea. Amphibious in nature, Lemurians wage war against the demonic on dry land and under the waves. Their exotic riding animals, weapons, armor and magic are suitable for use on land and underwater.See following link for purchasing details and inquiries.A Fully Painted version done by can be seen here!!! |
We already know that one of the predictable consequences of having two unpopular major party candidates—Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton—led to poor voter turnout (when presented as a percentage of the voting population).
One of the post-election "Why Clinton lost" narratives was that the campaign didn't have as good a ground game in pivotal states as they needed. Somehow her unpopularity as a candidate didn't properly register with some party insiders and they didn't get out the vote the way they needed to.
Philip Bump over at the Washington Post has another interesting piece of data that could maybe help us understand the consequences of running these two against each other. They tallied together vote totals in 33 states and Washington, D.C., and determined that more than 1.7 million people in those states cast ballots where they did not select any presidential candidate at all. Not only did they ignore Trump and Clinton, they also waved away Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and the Green Party's Jill Stein. This works out to two percent of the total number of votes. More people cast their vote for no president at all than voted for Stein. And given that there's some states left out of the analysis, the real number is actually higher.
Bump also compared these numbers to 2012 and discovered that the percentage of voters who declined to select a candidate for president dramatically increased in many states between the two elections. States like Montana, Arizona, and even Democratic stronghold California saw a significant number of voters decline to vote for president compared to 2012.
Be wary of comparing too closely though and drawing too strong a conclusion. First of all, we're talking about the difference in a re-election in 2012 versus two new candidates in 2016. It is entirely possible that a number of these voters sat out the 2012 race entirely. Flat turnout for the 2012 election was lower than for the 2016 race. Furthermore, in some states, California in particular, voters had many important ballot initiatives to consider. Sometimes there's a good reason for some voters to go to the polls even if they are not impressed or just don't care about the presidential candidate.
But there's still an important lesson for campaign operatives, if they can stop looking for other people (and countries) to blame for Clinton's loss. Bump notes: "In several states, the number of people who didn't vote was near or greater than the eventual margin of victory."
Several of those states were swing states. One of those states was Michigan, where more than 75,000 voters did not cast a choice for president. That would have been more than enough to have handed Clinton the state if only one-seventh of them had cast a ballot for her, Bump notes.
I'm not remotely interested in trying to teach the Democratic establishment how to run better campaigns and win elections. Rather, I'm much more interested in how these numbers represent the disconnection between voters and the people demanding their support.
I previously noted how 1.2 million California voters, given only the choice of two Democrats and nobody else, cast ballots but didn't vote in the race to replace Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate. Those were the early vote returns. I went back and checked out the final numbers and it's even higher: 2.2 million Californians voted for president but not a senator.
It's perhaps worth suggesting that when voters feel disconnected from politicians with self-serving backgrounds like Clinton and a from a system that is deliberately designed to limit choice yet still call it a "popular vote," it helps contribute to the environment for the kind of populist uprisings we've seen with Trump and Bernie Sanders. And the result may be the implementation of some really bad public policies, so it's worth figuring out how counter this trend rather than to blame it on Vladimir Putin.
Check out the Post's chart and info here. |
Hulk Hogan: one sex-tape lawsuit is behind him. (© Danny Moloshok/Reuters)
Hulk Hogan and Bubba the Love Sponge have settled a lawsuit over a tape made of Hogan having sex with the radio personality’s former wife.
The Associated Press reports that the pro wrestler’s civil suit against Bubba the Love Sponge Clem was settled for terms that are not being disclosed. Hogan filed a suit against Clem and his ex-wife, Heather Clem, earlier this month, claiming that the couple recorded him doing the deed without his consent.
To emphasize that everything is now hunky-dory between the two one-time close friends, Bubba the Love Sponge read an apology Monday during his morning show on the Tampa, Fla., station 102.5 The Bone. (Yes, that’s the name of an actual radio station, which surely also broadcasts this fine program.)
“After further investigation, I am now convinced that Hulk Hogan was unaware of the presence of the recording device in my bedroom,” said Bubba the LS (look, I can only type the words Love Sponge so many times in a single post), according to the Tampa Bay Times. “I am convinced he had no knowledge that he was being taped. Additionally, I am certain that he had no role in the release of the video.”
The Tampa Bay Times article states that Hogan is still pursuing legal action against Heather Clem, as well as that $100 million lawsuit against Gawker, which posted the video of an intimate encounter that took place six years ago and that most people could not possibly have wanted to watch.
The Times piece also notes that some believe the two men may have concocted this whole mess as a publicity stunt. In which case: uh, I guess it worked. |
At least ten Turkish troops were killed overnight when Kurdish militants attacked their base near the Syrian and Iraqi borders in southeastern Turkey, a local official said on Monday. Some 20 Kurdish rebels were reportedly killed in the attack.
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AFP - Kurdish rebels armed with machine-guns and rocket launchers attacked a security complex in southeastern Turkey overnight, triggering fierce fighting that left about 30 people dead, local sources said Monday.
Ten soldiers were killed and seven wounded in the attack in the province of Sirnak, the local government said, while other local sources said about 20 members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) were also killed.
Provincial governor Vahdettin Ozkan said the militants had attacked the security complex at Beytussebap late Sunday, killing nine members of the security forces and wounding eight. His office later said that one of those wounded had died.
Police and soldiers returned fire, triggering fierce clashes.
The PKK has stepped up its assaults against Turkish security forces in recent months, with Turkish officials and the local media linking the surge to the conflict raging in neighbouring Syria.
Last month, 10 people were killed in a car bomb attack blamed on the separatist Kurds in the southeastern city of Gaziantep.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had threatened military intervention if the Kurdish rebels set up bases in Syria.
Some government officials believe that Damascus -- once backed by Ankara -- is helping the PKK in retaliation for Turkey's support for rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad.
The PKK, considered a terrorist group by Turkey and much of the international community, took up arms in Kurdish-majority southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed about 45,000 lives. |
Sounds like a good idea — but it isn’t. It’s being used by lawsuit-happy attorneys as an admission that the owner knows they have a dangerous dog.
One of the memes making the rounds on Facebook urges dog owners of shy or skittish dogs to tie a yellow ribbon onto the dog’s leash. The idea is to alert other people that the dog is afraid, so they will give it space. But that isn’t the effect it’s having in many parts of the U.S.
American juries (urged on by plaintiff’s attorneys) are using the yellow ribbon the same way they’ve been using the “Beware of Dog” signs for years: as an admission that the dog owner knows he has a dangerous dog. And your dog could pay with its life if it’s labelled as a “known dangerous dog”. The dog doesn’t even have to bite anyone. In Texas and a number of other states, it’s legal to shoot a dog if someone is “reasonably” afraid of it.
People already use laws like that as an excuse to shoot some breeds on sight — but a police officer in one Texas town shot a Lhasa Apso when serving a warrant for unpaid traffic tickets at a house that had a “Beware of dog” sign on the fence. He heard a dog barking, and simply shot towards the sound of the bark since the owner had labelled their own dog as dangerous by posting the “Beware of dog” sign.
The DogKnobit blog recently carried a post on this subject that perfectly sums up my thoughts. “On one hand, I think we presume too much ‘dog savviness’ on the part of the public. I’ve been a dog fancier for thirty years, but if I’d never seen this poster on Facebook, I wouldn’t have known the significance of a yellow ribbon on a dog leash. Because I am a dog fancier, however, I also know there are better ways to deal with the situations listed on this poster than using a ribbon to ask for ‘space.’
“Responsible dog owners have control over the environment to which their dogs are exposed, as well as the degree of ‘saturation’ in that setting. If a dog has health issues that require minimal contact with other dogs, should the dog even be in such an environment? And is it me, but if a dog doesn’t do well with other dogs, should he even be around them until he’s become trustworthy in a controlled setting? And finally, isn’t it just plain common sense and courtesy to keep one’s dog from getting in another dog’s face?”
I love my dogs, and I love taking them places. Three of my four dogs are friendly, get along well with other dogs, and adore children. The one that doesn’t is the smallest and cutest of the bunch. No one seeing her would assume she could bite. She’s so adorable that children (and adults) feel the need to rush towards her to “cuddle”. A stranger rushing toward her scares her, and she instantly stiffens and begins to growl low in her throat, but that doesn’t deter some of the would-be cuddlers. (Idiots. If a dog growls, back off, no matter how little and cute the dog is.) So, while I adore Suchi, she doesn’t accompany us to public events.
Correction to Yellow Ribbon Meme from Down Under
It seems that the Yellow Ribbon meme being shared on Facebook has lost something in translation as it made its way from Australia (where it originated) to the States. This correction arrived as a comment to my blog post from Pat Robards, of the K9 Events group in Australia, where the yellow ribbon idea originated. It’s too important to leave in the “comments” section, so I have added it (exactly as Pat sent it) to the blog post:
“I don’t think you guys are quite correct about the real facts of the yellow ribbon, it was never meant for the public originally although used by veterinary behaviourists and certain veterinary clinics if the dog has a broken leg ‘please don’t let your dog run up to it and play’.
“The idea was brought back to Australia from the USA originally for our dog for our dog clubs in the year 2000, 14 years ago now. You can read our ABOUT section here http://www.yellowdog-australia.k9events.com/about.html
“This idea was ‘borrowed’ by Sweden then they founded Gulahund June 27th 2012 r e-packaging it for pet dogs . Folk it seems overseas are muzzling dogs putting a yellow ribbon on them and it is such a shame to see something that did no harm I helping dogs cope be given a bad name either by the reporting or those who use it
“We are responsible dog owners like yourself, the yellow ribbon has nothing to do with shelving responsibility, it is asking the idiots out there to control their animals so they cannot get into our dogs face or space. The same goes for people who think it their right to pat any dog they see, why it started in the first place for my shy dog!
“Why did you use this old poster which features a pit-bull, hoping it wasn’t to give your story more reality, if so it lacking empathy towards this breed so I’m not impressed with your article that is not factual. 😦
Cheers Pat Robards Australia http://www.k9events.com/ http://www.yellowdog-australia.k9events.com/”
I’m sorry I misunderstood what I saw on Facebook — but I fear others did, too. I’m very glad my new Australian friend took time to set me straight, and allowed me to reproduce his comment on my blog.
As for pit bulls, my favorite “grand-dog” is a red-nose named Tinkerbell, who lives up to her name. She’s the sweetest, friendliest, most lovable dog ever, because she’s been well-treated and well-trained all her life. The dogs who make headlines belong to bad owners, in my experience, while the great dogs like my friend Melissa’s Tex, or my son’s “Tink”, don’t make the news. I reproduced the Internet meme that was shared on my timeline by several friends without even noticing that the photo was of a pit bull, and meant no disrespect to the breed or responsible pit bull owners.
Be Wary of “Beware of Dog” Signs?
Like the yellow ribbon question, the use of “Beware of Dog” signs can have unintended consequences. Juries have said that they awarded higher damages in cases where owners had “beware of dog signs” — and courts have ruled that the signs aren’t enough to establish that a dog is dangerous. But posting such a sign is more than enough to give a service person, meter reader, or delivery driver the right to refuse to come onto your property.
It’s also enough to give first responders the right to shoot your dog before they enter your property in an emergency. And if your dog does bite someone — including the annoying neighborhood kid who throws things over the fence or pokes his hand through the fence — it could give the kid’s parents more than enough ammunition to have the dog put down even if the dog doesn’t break the skin. (A bruise or red mark may be more than enough.)
There’s a kid in our neighborhood like that. It was enough to get me to replace the 4′ chain-link fence that had been around my back yard since 1959 with an 8′ solid wood privacy fence that encloses three sides of my 3/4 acre lot. (His parents have already sued two people for injuries to their precious little snowflake — an obnoxious kid who knows that mommy and daddy will believe whatever fairytale he spins for them instead of listening to the litany of complaints about his bad behavior. I don’t intend to be their third victim.)
The fact is that laws about dogs vary from city to city and state to state. In most places, just posting a “Beware of Dog” sign or putting a yellow ribbon on a dog’s leash isn’t enough by itself to establish that the owner knew a dog was dangerous. On the other hand, both have been used to justify draconian actions taken against the dog and the dog owner — so why take a chance?
Me, I’m going to keep doing what I think is best as a responsible dog owner. For me that means:
Taking my dogs to obedience school and constantly reinforcing good canine behavior. This means not allowing the dogs to jump on people (even in play), and practicing commands regularly. Not putting my dogs in situations where they will be uncomfortable. I do take some of my dogs for car rides, and to dog-friendly events. But I don’t take all of my dogs — only those who have consistently demonstrated that they are safe around unpredictable humans and noises. Keeping my dogs on a leash except in very controlled circumstances. Only one of my dogs (Jasmine) is allowed off-leash outside our back yard. And she’s allowed off-leash only in our front yard, retrieving balls or playing with an adult. She adores our 12-year-old (he is “her” person), but it isn’t fair to him or to her to make him responsible for her behavior. So if she’s out front with him, so is an adult she knows and trusts (my adult son, adult granddaughter, me, or my husband). Making sure that my dogs always have up-to-date tags, microchips, and current name tags with the correct phone number for me and my vet. Keeping my homeowners insurance current, and complying with all of the laws relating to dog ownership (current vaccinations, leashes the right length, picking up after them when we’re on walks, etc.). The goal is to make sure no one has a reason to question my dog’s identity, or the fact that they are “safe” to be around.
It will never make sense to me that I live in a state where gun ownership is unrestricted, but dog ownership is heavily regulated, or that insurance companies don’t charge a premium to homeowners who have assault weapons — they can’t even ask about guns — but do charge premiums to homeowners with dogs. But the law is the law, even if it is an ass (as Charles Dickens’s character Mr. Bumble said so eloquently). So I comply with it — and vote for those who oppose breed-specific legislation and further erosion of my dog’s right to be safe on my property. |
Chelsea reached the last four of the Premier League Under-21 International Cup on Thursday night as they emerged victorious from another eventful ninety minutes against Tottenham Hotspur at Stevenage’s Lamex Stadium.
A first half performance of the highest quality was capped by three outrageous goals from Reece Mitchell, Kasey Palmer and Ola Aina before the hosts bounced back well later in the game. They were able to reduce arrears first through Anton Walkes and then Will Miller to set up a tense and dramatic ending but Tammy Abraham was on hand to seal a 5-2 win for the boys in Blue with a late brace.
Make sure you check out Dan Davies’ always-excellent match gallery by clicking HERE.
Andy Myers took charge once again in the competition and made five changes from the side that had won 5-4 at the same venue a fortnight earlier. Fikayo Tomori, Jay Dasilva, Charlie Colkett, Mukhtar Ali and Charly Musonda were replaced by Fankaty Dabo, Kevin Wright, Jordan Houghton, Josimar Quintero and Charlie Wakefield – making his full Under-21 debut – in order to spread playing time around as many players as possible.
Tottenham also made five changes and could no longer call upon the experienced Andros Townsend and two-goal forward Shaquille Coulthirst with both players having since secured permanent moves elsewhere, and they were stunned as their visitors roared into a 2-0 lead inside the opening ten minutes.
The first arrived when Christian Maghoma’s under-hit pass out from the back was received equally as sloppily by Anton Walkes, who was duly robbed by the returning Houghton. He handed over to Mitchell, who cut in from the left and thundered an unstoppable strike home via the crossbar from the edge of the box to leave goalkeeper Tom Glover with no chance.
The Australian stopper was equally helpless four minutes later when Palmer added to his seemingly endless highlight reel with another superb solo goal. Collecting possession out on the left, a quick drop of the shoulder saw him away from the first white shirt and quickly beyond a cluster of others into the penalty area, whereupon he opened his body and steered an inch-perfect finish into the far corner.
Lively play on the right by Wakefield allowed Palmer to see up Clarke-Salter for a header straight at Glover as Chelsea continued to exercise near-full control over proceedings, with Tottenham only able to threaten through Emmanuel Sonupe in response. The busy forward had already seen an early shot blocked by Wright but proved a menace on the break throughout the first half and went close to scoring on more than one occasion. His teasing cross from the right required Aina to intervene before it arrived at the feet of Anthony Georgiou before he then worked Brad Collins into a save as well as firing just wide close to half time.
The moment of the half, and indeed the match however, came when Aina made it 3-0 with a most stupendous goal from inside his own half. Striding onto a square ball from Houghton, he looked up and beat Glover from fully fifty yards with a low, flat and true hit that elicited a stunned reaction by those in attendance and, indeed, by Aina himself. It was his second goal of the season; the other coming from less than a yard out away to Norwich back in August.
It had the potential to completely flatten Tottenham’s spirits so close to the break but they began the second half in a far more effervescent fashion and should have been back in the game when Miller got it all wrong when presented with an opening from the edge of the area. Ten minutes after the restart, though, they did get a foothold when Walkes benefitted from a deflection to allow his strike to beat Collins.
Sparked into life by the goal, more Tottenham pressure followed with Kyle Walker-Peters chancing his arm without much luck, whilst Palmer did the same at the other end after receiving a pass from the industrious Quintero in midfield. Chelsea sensed the opportunity to play on the break a little more and were able to utilise Wakefield’s searing pace to set up a chance for a fourth but Glover was this time able to save, with the rebound then eluding the flying Palmer’s head.
Clarke-Salter was perhaps fortunate to only receive a booking for a foul on Walkes as the Spurs goalscorer ran towards goal; Miller saw his free-kick deflected wide and Veljkovic almost turned home from an almighty scramble at a corner soon after. Almost inevitably, the second did arrive for Ugo Ehiogu’s side with a little less than twenty minutes left as Miller connected with a header following a right-wing Sonupe cross and, although Collins got something on it, the spin on the ball took it over the line.
Myers responded by bringing Ruben Sammut and Dion Conroy into the game to shore up a defence that had been under considerable duress and it helped take the sting out of the game at a key point in proceedings. Having twice surrendered leads in the last meeting between the two a fortnight ago, Chelsea weren’t about to let it happen again and with three minutes left Abraham got in on the act for the 20th time this season, applying the simplest of close-range finishes after excellent work on the right by Palmer and then Dabo.
It wasn’t over there though as he continued to display his relentless hunger for goalscoring by grabbing another in stoppage time, jinking past Walker-Peters and Amos before finding the bottom corner. The win sees the Blues become the first confirmed Semi Finalist; they’ll be joined by the winners of the Benfica vs Porto, Sunderland vs PSV and Villarreal vs Athletic Bilbao ties for single-legged clashes in England in February.
Tottenham Hotspur: Glover, Walker-Peters, J.Pritchard (Oduwa 74), Lesniak (Goddard 63), Maghoma, Veljkovic (c), Sonupe, Amos, Miller, Walkes, Georgiou.
Subs not Used: Voss, Paul
Goal: Walkes ’53, Miller ‘71
Booked: Amos
Chelsea: Collins, Dabo (c), Aina, Clarke-Salter, Wright, Houghton (Sammut 74), Wakefield (Conroy 80), Quintero (Scott 69), Abraham, Palmer, Mitchell
Subs not Used: Ugbo, Baxter, J.Dasilva
Goals: Mitchell ‘6, Palmer ’10, Aina ’36, Abraham ’87, ‘90
Booked: Clarke-Salter |
House Speaker Kraig Paulsen doubled down on his insistence that the House will not consider a medical marijuana bill this session after one senator called it a "moral obligation."
Sen. Joe Bolkcom, D-Iowa City, spoke on the Senate floor Monday calling on House Republicans to bring the Senate bill up for a vote.
"This isn't just any issue," Bolkcom said. "It is life and death for many of these patients. If the leadership of the Iowa House wants to deny medicine to Iowans who need it, they should at least have the decency to allow a vote on Senate File 484. In fact, I believe House leaders have a moral obligation to allow a vote on medical cannabis before this session ends."
Senators passed Senate File 484 about two weeks ago on a 26-19 vote.
MORE COVERAGE:
The bill would permit Iowans with health problems such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder and other types of chronic illnesses that cause pain to access medical marijuana. The bill would allow up to four Iowa producers to grow marijuana with state oversight, and it would allow independent dispensaries to sell the drug.
Paulsen, a Republican from Hiawatha, said he doesn't know what Bolkcom means when he calls it a "moral obligation."
Kraig Paulsen (Photo: Special to the Register)
"The way I understand this bill, it's basically couched in medical terms, but it's virtually a recreational use bill," he said. "I don't expect us to be debating that bill this year."
Paulsen said although the bill outlines medical conditions the legislation is intended to address, he doesn't think the language is limited enough to prevent recreational use.
Supporters of the changes say the bill would not create a "slippery slope" toward recreational use, but Paulsen said he remains unconvinced.
He noted that individuals petitioned the Legislature last year to decriminalize cannabis oil, which some say can help treat seizures. Gov. Terry Branstad signed that into law in May 2014.
This year, those same petitioners were back asking for ways to get cannabis oil into the hands of families. Because state laws don't allow the production of the oil, there's no practical way for them to purchase it, they say.
"What I know is this: Last year they came to us and said just do this," Paulsen said. "We did that, and now they're back. So you can decide for yourself on the slippery slope."
With the House choosing not to consider the bill, it is effectively dead for the session which is tentatively scheduled to end May 1.
Read or Share this story: http://dmreg.co/1zkBz5t |
Day 2 of the #liverquiver #BBC14 (Beer Bloggers Conference) started off slowly. I am not a morning person, especially after a day full of drinking with a bunch of new beer geeks bff’s. I managed to roll out of bed, with a mixture of hunger and a timely sense of urgency to get my ass to the first scheduled part of the second day of the conference, which was one of the most exciting ones for the photographer nerd in me, the photography session hosted by Alan Kropf who takes professional pics and gets paid for it. That must be the life, right? So jealous!
I snuck in the back of the photography session only a few minutes late and quickly glanced around to see if there was coffee. Alas, no coffee. Halfway through the session, I regretted not getting a water bottle at the little hotel “store” and gave longing looks at the water cooler across the room that might as well been through the final challenge from Legends of the Hidden Temple. Regardless of my misery, I really enjoyed learning about how a professional photographer works and what the benefits to different equipment can be.
After another session that included videography, we were off to the Yard House for lunch and some drinks. We arrived and was escorted to a private room downstairs that had buffet-style finger food and waitresses sweeping the room with more finger foods. I really was hoping for something more substantial but after a mini hamburger and some chips I started to feel the color come back to my face. We went back upstairs to get some fresh air and socialize until we were required to get back on the bus to head back to the conference.
Upon return, we were treated to a keynote speech from the one and only Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada. He was quite majestic and many of my beer brethren was plucking the stars from their eyes. The room was atwitter…pun intended. Just sitting in a room not interacting and listening to someone talk can be tiring and almost boring, but I wasn’t board by Ken’s speech. He regaled us with stories and the most notable one was the harrowing journey that was the Beer Camp Across America. I just love hearing about people you look up to getting wasted or driving for 14 hours without AC…it makes them so human and relatable.
After one more speech, we participated in live beer blogging which was basically speed dating. We had about 5 minutes with different local breweries and sampled their beer and either tweeted about it or live blogged about it. I opted to tweet about it because I am methodical about what I post on this blog and didn’t want to have a post without good pics or in-depth content. I am so deep, I know.
After the whirlwind speed dating, we had all of 10 minutes to ourselves before being whisked off to Stone Liberty Station for “dinner” and more drinks. I say “dinner” because it was again buffet-style finger food and I again didn’t eat enough. It’s really my fault because I should’ve shoved as much flat bread in my face as possible but noooo…. I went on a tour with my old pal Dr. Bill instead. So, for all of you who haven’t been to Liberty Station yet…it’s crazy beautiful. It’s already won awards for architecture and stuff and it shows. The tour started in the bathroom (of course) and Dr. Bill showed us the open hand-wash station while we took pics and freaked-out the bathroom goers. Sorry citizen, we are bloggers and this shit is too rad to not document. Tooling around the restaurant we saw the back outside patio, the several rooms for food and drinks, the tall ceilings that you could throw a football through, and the tallest tree I have seen since Yosemite. After the tour Dr. Bill dazzled me and my new beer bff’s with pulling some rares from his on-site cellar, Dr. Billy Stylez. Not wanting to leave but wanting to stay with the group, we were herded onto the bus back to the hotel. Oh, and they had replaced our nice and quiet bus with a party-style bus and there was a stripper pole that was well-used on that ride back. Oh the memories.
But wait! It’s not over folks. There was a beer social being held again in the main conference room with more beers, followed by a bottle share with an impossible number of beers to try and taste from some of the most prestigious beers geeks across America. Needless to say, shit got really crazy and luckily I called it a night before I got really sloppy. I was still pretty sloppy, I’m sure.
It’s Sunday morning and I want to die. I decide I can ditch the first part of the conference because I look at my shoes and all I can think was … nope. Not moving around yet. I finally muster the courage to get dressed and suck it up, and visit the hotel store for a diet soda, water, crackers and a protein bar. After plowing through that protein bar and that diet soda, I start to feel normal again and jump into the breakout sessions about bloggers what their experience has been. It was cool to listen to the different backgrounds and experiences some of us have had. The conference ended around noon and I was looking forward to going home to my comfy bed and wonderful husband and cute puppies. I said my goodbyes to my new friends and made the 2 hour trip home. Why does traffic from San Diego to OC on a Sunday suck so hard?
All in all, I really enjoyed my first Beer Bloggers Conference. I think next year I will make a point of it to eat more and bring some more snacking food to tie me over in between meals. I didn’t even drink that much but it was the lack of food and water that really hurt me in the end. I hope to be able to attend the BBC15 in North Carolina for take 2! Hope to see all y’all there! Thanks to all the sponsors and breweries who participated! |
For full respiratory protection in a setting where there are dangerous airborne chemicals or bits to emulate, putting on an ideal face mask and filter device is definitely essential for any kind of employee. Of course there is a setback with wearing a regular face mask for hard common labor, which is that it is really effort having to breathe with an air filter, making job more stressful, and triggering exhaustion to establish in far more swiftly.
By selecting one of the current PAPR masks (Powered Air Purifying Respirators) over traditional versions, there are a lot of outstanding benefits to be had. The first and the majority of quickly apparent among these is that rather of the laborer needing to strive to take a breath via a filter, the electric battery powered air pump connected to the PAPR masks drives air through a thorough filter system, and delivers it directly in to the face mask. The air is amazing in the PAPR mask as a result of the length of the pipe permitting disturbance to clear up away, and relying on the filter made use of in the system nearly all bits can be taken out.
The following significant perk for employees utilizing a PAPR mask when functioning is that since all the hefty elements - the electric motor and filters - are consisted of within a belt installed unit, the mask itself is too much lighter compared to a regular model. This makes it a lot a lot more comfortable to use for long durations of time, as well as lessens the quantity of muscular tissue exhaustion felt by users when they are utilizing the PAPR mask.
There are a selection of different PAPR masks available, and although they all discuss the very same standard attributes of having the cleanser and air pump affixed to the belt and the mask as a separate thing, they can be utilized for different objectives, and customers ought to consider exactly what their specific requirements are just before spending for among these items.
The most significant advantage of a PAPR mask over a hood with an air filter is that it is a wonderful bargain much more versatile for the user, since it is lightweight, and supplies exceptional presence. With a conventional soft hood mask, the peripheral vision of the user is decreased, making them unsuitable to wear within a harmful atmosphere.
To get the maximum gain from putting on a PAPR mask, you need to make certain that it is appropriately suited, working appropriately, and regularly examined and maintained. The air purifying pump should be kept clear of blockages, and the user ought to examine that the mask has a good seal around their face to be sure that none of the gases that they are trying to protect themselves from has the ability to enter through the sides.
The other critical consideration when choosing or establishing a PAPR mask is to guarantee that you have the appropriate type of filters matched. If you are planning to operate in a setting where the main air contaminants that you have to take care of are dirts, you will require a filter system designed to take out dirt and particles from the air stream. If on the various other hand you are preparing to make use of paint spraying equipment, you will certainly require a different kind of respirator package that protects you from the harmful chemicals that are launched when paint.
If a PAPR mask is worn properly, it will certainly supply exceptional degrees of defense from a large array of air-borne contamination and gases. It is necessary to ensure that batteries are well billed and will last throughout of the work that is being done.
By opting for one of the most up-to-date PAPR masks (Powered Air Purifying Respirators) over standard versions, there are a number of outstanding benefits to be had. The first and a lot of immediately noticeable one of these is that rather of the laborer having to work hard to breathe via a filter, the battery powered air pump affixed to the PAPR masks drives air through a detailed filter system, and supplies it directly in to the face mask. The air is awesome in the PAPR mask considering that of the length of the pipe permitting disturbance to settle away, and depending on the filter used in the device practically all particles can be removed.
The biggest advantage of a PAPR mask over a hood with an air filter is that it is a terrific bargain much more versatile for the wearer, because it is light-weight, and provides superb presence. The other vital factor to consider when picking or setting up a PAPR mask is to ensure that you have the best kind of filters suited. |
Tech stocks are on fire, will Apple and Facebook join the party next? 6:56 PM ET Fri, 27 Oct 2017 | 04:44
Big tech is getting bigger.
Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, the world's five most valuable public companies, added $181 billion to their combined market value on Friday.
Investors piled into the group a day after Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon reported better-than-expected earnings.
For the stock market, it was more of the same. Those five companies have gained almost $900 billion in market capitalization over the past year. They've each outperformed the S&P 500 in 2017, and have been the top contributors to the index's 15 percent gain.
Despite potential political and regulatory pressures on Google, Facebook and Amazon and loud voices of concern about the tech giants hurting competition and controlling too much of our data, the stock moves reflect financial performance. And the performance is staggering. |
Welcome to Lost Images of World War II, featuring the photo collection of my grandfather, Staff Sergeant Jerry Pinkowski of the 347th Ordnance Depot Company. These photos serve as a chronicle of his journey across France, Luxembourg and Germany during the war in Europe as his unit chased General Patton's Third Army. After coming home, his pictures of World War II were put away in a dusty hatbox and forgotten for almost 50 years, until they were rediscovered after his death in 1993. With the chance lost of learning of his experiences directly, I set about researching the photos, themselves to unlock their mysteries and retrace his steps across a war-torn continent.
ABOUT THIS COLLECTION
The hundreds of exposures that make up this photo collection were discovered after the death of my grandpa in 1993. Of course, I had known that grandpa was a World War II veteran, but the details of his service were always vague. Like many war veterans Jerry Pinkowski was tight-lipped about his service and it was very difficult to get anything out of him in the way of stories or information. I might have heard him talk about the war on only one or two occassions. I learned more from talking to my Dad over the years. As his son, he was obviously more successful in gleaning information from the old veteran than I was. I found out that Grandpa was not considered fit for service. He was 4-F to hear him tell it! But more likely he was 1-Y, or available for limited service only in war time. He broke his arm as a child and it healed incorrectly, limiting his range of motion in his left arm. Personnel needs being what they were as the country geared up for war, a grateful nation accepted his service and expertise as a trained mechanic. He was also a hobbyist photographer, and this photo collection is the result of him continuing that hobby during his service to his country. He became a soldier but he also became, perhaps unintentionally, a recorder of history. (Read-More) |
Scientists have compiled a 'dentist's handbook' of prehistoric penis worm teeth
Hidden deep in the Canadian Rockies of British Colombia, the Burgess Shale is the cradle of life for almost every animal that has ever existed. At over 500 million years old, it's a fossil field that preserves the tissue remains of some of the first complex organisms that ever inhabited the oceans.
With most of its body concealed, the Ottoia worm would lurk with just its enlarged head sticking out to ensnare passing prey. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Ottoia
Discovered by the palaeontologist Charles Walcott in 1909, the site is a treasure trove of weird and wonderful fossils that continues to surprise modern-day palaeontologists. One of the more common – and certainly one of the weirdest – organisms preserved here was Ottoia, a burrowing predator that belonged to a group of marine worms known as priapulids. Scientists also refer to these animals as penis worms, because, well, it's not hard to see why.
The predatory Ottoia would lurk with most of its body concealed in the seafloor, its enlarged head sticking out just enough to ensnare passing prey. Its mouth could evert (much like a goblin shark's), exposing a throat lined with tooth-like structures called sclerites, like a miniature cheese grater. We know that in modern priapulid worms, these toughened sclerites serve the animals during feeding, sensory activities and movement. They can even help scientists differentiate between different kinds of worms. But as it turns out, with a bit of help from a high-powered microscope, these tiny "teeth" (many of which are just several thousandths of a centimetre across!) can also tell us a lot about prehistoric life.
Thanks to the latest imaging techniques, a team of researchers led by Dr Martin Smith has been able to examine Ottoia "teeth" in unprecedented detail, revealing that these structures had a scaly base and were fringed with tiny prickles and hairs. Their research has resulted in something of a "dentist's handbook" for worm fossil hunters. "Taken together, it will help palaeontologists recognise a range of early teeth," Smith says. The study was published today in the journal Paleontology. "[In the past], these teeth were easily misidentified as algal spores, rather than as parts of animals. Now that we understand the structure of these tiny fossils, we are much better placed to find them."
The new research has revealed the "teeth" of the Ottoia worm in unprecedented detail. Image: Tom Harvey
Based on the features of various Ottoia "teeth", Smith was able to show that predatory worms like this were actually much more common in primeval Cambrian ecosystems than we thought. What's more, the team also confirmed that there was more than one species wriggling about: distinguished by three distinctive peaks on its teeth, a new species, Ottoia tricuspida, has now joined the long-known Ottoia prolifica, which was discovered over a century ago.
"Our new observations emphasize the importance of [studying] sclerites," says Smith, noting that even when the most advanced technology is at your fingertips, the soft bodies of worms are rarely preserved in enough detail to allow experts to distinguish one species from another. Unlike soft tissues that deteriorate quickly, the hard tooth-like sclerites stand up to the test of time, giving scientists information that would otherwise be impossible to deduce.
The new research also highlights how technology can provide insight into the diversity of prehistoric ecosystems – even ones we have studied for years. By applying what they had learned from their Burgess Shale finds to fossils unearthed in other parts of the world, the researchers were able to uncover previously unidentifiable specimens of these “toothed” worms. It turns out that rather than being restricted to ecosystems like the one preserved at Burgess Shale, Ottoia worms were more cosmopolitan, able to live in a range of very different environments, including localities in Australia and China.
"Unrecognized fossil species may well await discovery in [other] existing fossil collections," adds Smith. |
Gov. Rick Scott vetoed a bill late Wednesday that would have ended permanent alimony in Florida.
Scott vetoed the measure (SB 718) just four hours before the midnight deadline to approve or veto it. The bill automatically would have become law if Scott had done nothing by then.
If it had become law, Florida would have become the fifth state to abolish permanent alimony.
In a letter to Senate President Don Gaetz, Scott commended bill sponsors Ritch Workman in the House and Kelli Stargel in the Senate -- both Republicans -- and said there are "several forward looking elements of this bill."
But alimony "represents an important remedy for our judiciary to use in providing support to families as they adjust to changes in life circumstances," Scott wrote. "As a husband, father and grandfather, I understand the vital importance of family."
Scott could not "support this legislation because it applies retroactively and thus tampers with the settled economic expectations of many Floridians who have experienced divorce," he wrote. "The retroactive adjustment of alimony could result in unfair, unanticipated results."
Florida law "already provides for the adjustment of alimony under the proper circumstances," Scott wrote. "The law also ensures that spouses who have sacrificed their careers to raise a family do not suffer financial catastrophe upon divorce, and that the lower-earning spouse and stay-at-home parent will not be financially punished. Floridians have relied on this system post-divorce and planned their lives accordingly."
The proposed law also would have set limits on the amount of alimony and how long one would receive financial support from an ex-spouse.
The bill would have made it harder to get alimony in short-term marriages. And it would have prevented alimony payments from lasting longer than one-half of the length of the marriage.
It also would have required judges to give divorced parents equal custody of their children absent extraordinary circumstances.
"I'm actually surprised," said Jason Marks, a divorce attorney in Miami, about the veto. The bill had passed the House 85-31, with members of both parties crossing over. The Senate approved it 29-11.
"My assumption is, you haven't heard the last of it," Marks said. "Most family law practitioners will agree that uniformity in determination of alimony is a good thing."
The bill said that in a short-term marriage, defined as less than 11 years, the assumption is that alimony would not be awarded. If alimony were granted, it would not be more than 25 percent of the ex-spouse's gross income.
For marriages that last between 11 and 20 years, there's no assumption either way in the bill, but alimony would not have amounted to more than 35 percent of the ex-spouse's gross income.
And in marriages longer than 20 years, there was an assumption in favor of alimony, though not more than 38 percent of an ex-spouse's gross income.
Moreover, the bill did not automatically end alimony when the paying ex-spouse retired, but that person could have asked a judge to reduce the payment or even end it. The judge could have considered age at retirement, ability to pay alimony and the financial situation of the person receiving alimony. |
MEET THE FALMARI
We introduced you to the Falmari, the favourite children of the sea god. They look both human and amphibious and live only on the coast, spending half of their time in the water. Members of this race will often visit Sulan, the sea capital, located in the west of the continent. Read more.
Introducing guild forums!
This week, we also added a long requested feature to the guild module: the guild forums! To help you get started, we have added a guide that not just covers the guild forums, but the complete module! We are looking forward to hearing your feedback in the official Bug Reports & Feedback thread!
FORUM CONTRIBUTORS OF THE MONTH
We are pleased to announce that we have chosen another top 10 players who help contribute to our wonderful community with their posts. We are rewarding them with a key to our first closed beta phase. Keep up the good work!
BLADEMASTER - COMBAT OUTFIT
Our Blademaster costume series concludes with the full combat outfit. What's your favorite Blademaster costume so far?
1 / 1 Front Back Side
CONCEPT ART OF THE WEEK
Our Concept Art of the week shows the not so peaceful side of Nuanor.
FANART OF THE WEEK
Another inspiring week of amazing fanarts!
Our top 3 this week includes Our top 3 this week includes Nyaoneko (EN), Akairo (DE) and Drugsbee (FR).
Congratulations to the winners! Keep an eye on your forum inbox. We'll be sending you a CBT1 key soon! Don't worry if you are not among the top 3. You can still take part in our contest! If you are not an artist, our various contests on Facebook and Twitter @RevOnlineGame have got you covered. So make sure to follow us! |
What a disgrace.
Former Republican President George W. Bush did not vote for Donald Trump.
FOX 5 reported:
George W. Bush and his wife, Laura Bush, did not vote for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump or Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Tuesday.
“They didn’t vote for Hillary; they didn’t vote for Trump,” spokesman Freddy Ford told the Texas Tribune.
The New York Times reported that the two left the presidential vote empty and voted down ballot for other Republicans. Bush and his wife live in Dallas.
George W. Bush’s father, however, was planning to cross the aisle and vote for Clinton.
In September, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend posted a picture of herself with former Republican President George H.W. Bush on Facebook and wrote, “The President told me he’s voting for Hillary!!” Townsend later confirmed the conversation she had while meeting Bush in Maine to Politico. |
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) – The Governor of Kirkuk, the highly contested, multi-ethnic and oil-rich city, expressed his concern on Monday about the instability that might arise from the ethnic imbalance caused by IDPs.
A majority of the displaced people from the city of Tikrit who have been sheltering in Kirkuk Province are not returning home although their city has been cleared from the threat of the Islamic State (IS).
Seventy percent of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Tikrit in Salahadin Province still live in Kirkuk.
Despite the Iraqi government’s announcement that the town has been cleared of mines and explosives planted by IS extremists, the civilians refuse to return.
In his visit to Kirkuk, the Governor of Salahadin stated that the local administration had approved a decision regarding the IDPs to return.
He also mentioned that the families have been given the option to stay in Kirkuk.
On Sunday, members of Salahadin Provincial Council visited Kirkuk to convince the city administration to give the IDPs more time to remain in the province which is protected by Peshmerga forces.
Following a meeting with Kirkuk’s officials, Deputy Governor of Salahadin Ahmed Azawi spoke to reporters about the IDPs’ situation.
“The governor of Kirkuk has promised that the IDPs from Tikrit can safely remain in Kirkuk until their city, and surrounding areas are fully cleared,” he stated.
However, the Governor of Kirkuk Najmaddin Kareem said in a press conference on Sunday that after the liberation of any area from IS and their explosives, IDPs should return home.
“In Kirkuk, we fear that if IDPs remain for a long time, the demography of the city might change,” Kareem explained. “We will not allow this to happen.”
Nearly half-a-million IDPs from central Iraq had fled to Kirkuk since June 2014 when IS insurgents occupied a third of the country.
Editing by Ava Homa and Karzan Sulaivany |
After reading Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah I specifically looked for another novel set during the Siege of Leningrad. I am so glad I did. Although the background is the same the books were very different and illustrated the time and place in very different ways. This book feels starker, quieter while Winter Garden felt bleaker and more crowded. I think the difference may be there due to the masculinity versus femininity. Winter Garden centers on female characters and is written and narrated by a woman, while this one centers on male characters and is written and narrated by a man. I highly recommend both. I read them back-to-back over two long travel days and will likely read more soon. The time and place is fascinating and juxtaposes nicely to the lives most of us live today.
I read some excellent reviews that told you why the book was excellent or detailed why it wasn't a 5 star book but was still highly recommended. I will not try to provide the same detail as those reviews as I never put any spoilers into my reviews and they did such a great job that I do not feel the need to add to them. However, I will say that the starkness of this book, the way it is written in such a matter-of-fact way, appealed to me. It painted a picture in a completely different way than any other historical fiction book I have read, and that style of storytelling made this novel a moving, thought-provoking story of hardship and perseverance. |
Stephen Curry is rocking the ball back and forth on the left wing, staring Oklahoma City's Steven Adams dead in the eyes. It's the third quarter of Game 7 of the Western Conference finals. Curry has just drilled two threes to help erase an eight-point deficit, and now he's sizing up Adams for one more. The Thunder seven-footer already knows he's helpless to what comes next.
For almost anyone else, this type of three-point barrage would be mysticism. For Steph Curry, it's just another Monday.
Two days earlier and 2,500 miles away, the influence of Curry radiates from a fieldhouse in Atlanta. This is where Nike has set up shop for the final stop on its spring Elite Youth Basketball League tour, bringing some of the best high school players in the country together for three days of competition. No one in the gym can shoot like Curry, but that won't stop many of them from trying.
One of those players is Michael Hueitt Jr., a 6'3 guard from Fayetteville, N.C. who is readying for his senior year at High Point Christian Academy. Hueitt may be the best shooter on the EYBL, and on this Saturday afternoon, he's about to prove it. In a game against reigning league champion Georgia Stars, Hueitt pulls up for 14 threes. He makes eight of them.
"You used to hear Kobe all the time," Hueitt told SB Nation. "Now everyone is trying to be like Steph Curry."
Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
The footing of a revolution doesn't truly take hold until change becomes routine. That's what Curry has spent the last few years accomplishing. When he broke Ray Allen's single-season record with 272 three-pointers in 2012-13, no one could have envisioned his current trajectory. He's since broken his own record twice, including a stupefying 402 made threes this year. He's a win away from becoming a two-time champion, already is a two-time MVP and is suddenly the most influential player on the planet.
Not everyone thinks that's a good thing. When the Warriors defeated their past and future NBA finals opponent, the Cleveland Cavaliers, in December, Curry's former coach Mark Jackson posited that the MVP is "hurting the game."
Jackson's comments may have been well-intentioned, and they weren't entirely without merit. But talk to the people in and around high-level youth basketball and something becomes exceedingly clear: The passion and excitement Curry has brought to a new generation of players is a great thing. It also feels like a harbinger of what's to come.
* * *
For as long as it has existed, grassroots basketball has faced an endless string of high-profile criticism. Kobe Bryant blasted "AAU" a year ago for failing to instill the fundamentals of the game as effectively as youth programs in Europe. To its detractors, grassroots basketball is an individual showcase rather than a team game, one that puts an emphasis on playing fast instead of honing skills like footwork, passing, ball handling and, of course, shooting.
It wasn't long ago when a player like Bryant (who perfected the fundamentals himself, mind you) could be held up as an example of why young players "just want to dunk." If Curry really is the most influential player for the next generation, it stands to reason there would be a renewed focus on skills. Curry didn't become the back-to-back MVP by dunking. He did it by mastering everything else. Today's best young players have taken notice.
"He's putting things into my head that I've never never thought of before," said Tremont Waters, a four-star point guard from South Kent, Conn. "Like how to split a double team, taking the the ball behind his back and throwing it to the corner. I do a lot of things that he does now. I just look at his game and I idolize it."
Waters is rapidly becoming one of the best point guard prospects in high school basketball. He's up to No. 31 overall in ESPN's class of 2017 rankings. He received scholarship offers from Duke and Kentucky on the same day this spring. Waters described Curry as an "icon" and "role model" for himself, a player who -- at 5'10, 164 pounds -- isn't beating anyone with his size.
"For kids like me, he gives us confidence," Waters said. "He's motivation if anything."
To Andy Borman, Curry's clout extends far beyond an influx of three-pointers. Borman is the coach of the New York Rens of the EYBL. At 34, he's already a basketball lifer. He was a walk-on on Duke's 2001 national championship team and worked as an assistant at Cal and San Jose State before moving to grassroots ball.
"The thing with Steph is he's an artist," Borman said. "The thing that he's influencing isn't really jump shooting, it's creativity and flair. For these kids, it's not about just making the simple play anymore. It's about making the beautiful play. And that's not a bad thing as long as you can do both.
"I think anyone who inspires positive feelings and a passion for the game is a good role model. That's not destroying the game, that's helping the game."
Still, there are some around youth basketball who think Jackson's comments weren't far off. B.J. Johnson, the assistant director of USA Basketball, worked with Curry when he was a member of the silver medal-winning U19 team in 2007. Johnson said the difference between Curry then and Curry now is night and day, and it's a testament to how hard he's worked. Johnson's believes the real impact of Curry would be felt if kids realized the time he's spent working on his game.
"Even watching this weekend, everyone is trying to hit the three and there are a number of big guys that are pretty good that aren't seeing the ball at all," Johnson said at an EYBL stop in Indianapolis in April. "It's like guards feel like they have to shoot the three to reach their goals, but it comes at the sacrifice of actually playing a team game. There's a lot of guys chucking a lot of bad shots without actually knowing how to get their teammates involved and create for other people.
"[Curry is] walking a line right now where it is a little bit dangerous."
(Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports)
* * *
The EYBL stop in Indianapolis was one of the precious few weekends college coaches are permitted to be in the gym as part of the live evaluation period. It creates a high-pressure atmosphere for both players and coaches, where the former know a strong impression in this setting matters more than anywhere else and the latter are equally aware they can't afford to make a bad assessment. The evolution of the game is at the forefront of everyone's mind.
"Curry has changed the game," said Bob Huggins, head coach at West Virginia. "He's forcing new options and new opportunities. Some of the guys from the old guard who played in the '60s and '70s may not like it, but it's what keeps the game exciting. I see no problem with it."
It should go without saying that not everyone can be Steph Curry. Even beyond his unprecedented numbers are the genetics and wealth that came from having his father play in the NBA for 16 years. Curry is often viewed as an underdog story because he wasn't a prized recruit, but the advantages he had growing up can't be discounted.
Tempting as the thought may be, the NBA likely won't look like an entire army of Curry clones 10 years from now. But with the added emphasis on shooting and spacing sparked in part by the greatness of Curry's Warriors, it isn't far-fetched to believe the volume and efficiency of future shooters could rise to create a new standard. There are already only so many spots for non-shooters on an NBA floor.
"I think any time players are in the gym working on their game, it's good for the game," Oregon head coach Dana Altman told SB Nation. "As a coach, it's your job to make sure it's a good shot. But guys getting in the gym, working on their ball handling, working on their shot, I don't think that can be considered a bad thing for the game."
The fruits of Curry's influence are likely still years away, but it feels safe to say the seeds have been planted. By doing things no one thought were possible, Curry has forced to a new generation to consider what comes next. |
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It’s been quite some time since we’ve seen a great jet-ski game, Nintendo’s Wave Race series being the most notable. However, developer Zordix, known for their iOS title “Aqua Moto Racing”, is looking to fill the gap by bring their latest racing game to the 3DS eShop, Aqua Moto Racing 3D. I caught up with Zordix’s CEO, Matti Larsson, to discuss their upcoming title, the differences on developing for iOS and 3DS, and if there’s any possibility we will see their titles hit the Wii U.
Marcello: First off, thank you for taking the time to provide an interview for the upcoming 3DS eShop title, Aqua Moto Racing 3D. How did this project come about for the 3DS?
Matti: Thank you for both a great site and interest in our new game.
I think this project started the minute we realized that our games, and new games we want to make, are perfectly suited for both the 3DS and the Wii U. When Nintendo opened up the eShop we decided to focus wholeheartedly on the Nintendo platforms. That way we can make even better games, and reach a quality gamer audience.
Marcello: The Aqua Moto Racing series is very well received for the iOS devices. I’ve actually been playing Aqua Moto Racing 2 for my iPhone 4S and have to say I’ve been really enjoying it (and I normally can’t get into iOS games)! What differences will there be for the 3DS installment? Any advantages you were able to harness with the 3DS over the iOS versions?
Matti: There are some really big advantages with the 3DS version like:
1. The analogue control stick that makes all the difference in feeling.
2. A lower screen for a map with race overview.
3. The 3D view is fantastic and I use it myself all the time in a game like this.
4. Making a new version means improvements on all aspects including rider looks and the extreme stunts you can perform and control (again the controls) by using the buttons of a real gaming device.
Marcello: Personally, the game caught my attention immediately upon seeing how it was similar to Wave Race 64. Was that an inspiration for you guys?
Matti: Wave Race has been a huge inspiration and we realized there was a gap to fill in the need for this type of game. I’m not sure it’s fair to compare to an iconic Nintendo TV console launch title with a big budget, but we’re very happy with the result in how fun the game is to play. It should stand its ground well.
A difference worth mentioning is that you get bigger, more varied waves to enjoy in Aqua Moto Racing 3D, which just adds to the fun.
Marcello: Will the game feature local and/or online multiplayer? If so, how many players? Also, will the game utilize the Download Play feature at all?
Matti: It supports up to 6 players, and you can use both the Download Play feature and Street Pass.
Marcello: Now for a non-3DS related question, what do you think of Nintendo’s latest console, Wii U? Would you consider developing any game(s) for it in the near future? If so, any ideas you could share?
Matti: I can’t deny that it would be a dream to realize the Aqua Moto Racing game in a larger format. Possibly with online tournaments, ranking and all that goes with that. Wii U is a natural next step for us and if we decide to do it, I’ll make sure to share some information early on about development.
Marcello: Aqua Moto Racing 3D is out today in Europe. Any ETA for release in North America? Also, what’s the price tag you guys are aiming for?
Matti: A release in North America should be just a month away. We’re looking at a price of around 10 euro in Europe; and we’ll see what that becomes in North America. Not more than 10 USD I think, so a lot cheaper than the boxed games; but with all the fun you might expect.
Marcello: Anything else you’d like to add for our readers?
Matti: We paid attention to all of the important details and it is easy to forget to mention some of them, such as calibration of Sound FX and the original game soundtrack with lots of different songs that give an exciting and varied total experience.
Marcello: Thanks again for your time Matti. I look forward to playing Aqua Moto Racing 3D and other futures titles your studio releases.
Matti: Thank you for the interview. |
George Clooney has published a poem, titled “A Prayer For Our Country.” Two can play at that game, George Clooney.
A PRAYER FOR GEORGE CLOONEY
George Clooney
We can all agree it’s too bad
That your face can’t write the poem
Too bad.
George Clooney
Leave the poem writing to William Carlos Williams
Go get a massage from a monkey. Hire a contortionist for a servant
Do your own nails.
“I pray that we can find more that unites us than divides us”
That’s what you wrote in your poem
George Clooney
Shitty hack line overall.
“I pray for all of our children,” you wrote
Well do you know I pray for?
I pray that I can one day get a refund for my ticket to Money Monster
Starring George Clooney
Advertisement
Sit in a golden bath tub
Serviced by a thousand high priced hookers
Sky dive out of a private plane. Do whatever you want
Besides poems.
“And when I pray, I kneel”
That’s your poem’s last line.
Extremely powerful
Just playing. Sound like a shitty rejected DNC fundraising email
God bless America
You’re a bad poet George Clooney
Leave the writing to ugly people
You were also a corny Batman.
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Amen. |
Dear Backers: Kickstarter projects live and die by the buzz they generate. We need your help to get the word out! If you read this and decide to back us, please use the "Share this project" button above to Share us on Facebook and Tweet about us as well, so we can tell as many people as possible about Phasor! Thank you so much!
Introducing Phasor. This revolutionary development board can connect any project to the Internet, quickly and economically. Phasor has the following hardware features, which we think blow away every comparably priced IoT development solution:
We have also developed stackable add-on shields for Phasor. The shield boards provide Phasor with a ton of cool abilities that other ESP8266 boards just don't offer. And because they are stackable, you don't even need any wires to connect them... just plug them in, one on top of the other. The final version will be keyed, so there's no risk of plugging them in backwards.
Phasor's shield boards provide:
Not all of these shields are going to be available right away... only the OLED shield and relay shield are being offered initially. The other three shields will be offered as stretch goals. Read our section on funding goals to learn more about when the other shields will become available.
Want to see the shields in action? Check out the YouTube video below, which shows the OLED and ADC shields in action. You'll see why Phasor Systems has the best ESP8266 development hardware around.
Phasor's integrated bootloader provides a lot of great features. In addition to dynamically booting user code images, It has an integrated webserver that serves pages off of the flash. The bootloader also serves a configuration page that lets you configure Phasor to join a network, set up an access point, toggle its pins, or flash new firmware.
Phasor's bootloader provides the following features
Embedded web server with integrated flash filesystem
Onboard configuration page for provisioning and controlling pins
Ability to register CGI and REST API callbacks… call any function via HTTP request!
Toggle pins from the configuration page without writing any code
Read filesystems and the contents of flash from the config page
Unexpected reset handling - watchdog timeout reboots into safe mode
Additional software features that are still under construction include:
Drag-and-drop over-the-air firmware upgrade via the onboard configuration webpage
MQTT/NAT traversal system, so you can interact with your board from anywhere in the world!
Our GCC-based toolchain works in Windows and Linux, with Mac support currently under development.
Native build support in the Arduino IDE via a custom core, to make the Phasor Arduino compatible!
Arduino compatible! JTAG debug via Eclipse/GDB/OpenOCD
Decide you don't like our firmware? No problem. Phasor can also run baremetal code, the Espressif firmware, MicroPython or the NodeMCU Lua firmware.
An Awesome Community
The ESP8266 chip has galvanized the hobbyist community like never before. With forums springing up left and right, and multiple firmware cores available for free online, you can bet that the ESP8266 will be one of the most well-supported chips out there for years to come. You can bet that if you have something you want the ESP8266 to do, you can find somebody who has already done it on esp8266.com. And you can bet that if you have a problem, somebody else has had it too, and can talk you through a solution... either on our message board, or somebody else's.
About Our Company
Phasor Systems LLC is a provider of cutting-edge embedded hardware platforms for the Internet of Things (IoT). We build simple, low-cost microcontroller boards that can connect over wifi. We make it easy for our users to build and prototype their projects, and then effortlessly connect them to the internet. Our headquarters is in Annapolis, MD.
The Phasor Systems tagline is "The Internet. In One Square Inch." It's only six simple words, but it sums up our company's mission perfectly. Imagine the limitless, unfettered connectivity of the Internet; the sum total of all human knowledge, available online, just an HTTP request away. Now imagine it condensed down to the size of a couple of postage stamps and placed into every electronic device on the planet. Imagine the power and magic, the light and energy that such a thing could imbue into everyday objects. Imagine the possibilities.
That's what we're about. We want to bring the whole world, and all of its people and devices online. And we've got a team that will make it happen.
Our Team
At Phasor Systems, we have a small but world-class team of engineers. Between the three of us, we have 5 advanced degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and 27 years of industry experience. And we're ready to use that knowledge and expertise to bring Phasor to you.
The Phasor Systems team.
Alex Hoyland, our CEO, is the inventor of Phasor. Alex has a master's degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins. He currently works in the defense industry and has over 11 years of experience in software engineering, board design and project management.
Sam Price, our head of software engineering, works for the space industry and has dual bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He is an expert in programming real-time embedded systems, and has a thorough mastery of web scripting languages.
Adam Kadolph, our head of hardware engineering and manufacturing, has worked in the consumer electronics and medical device industries for several years. He has designed boards for numerous commercial products, and has been on several trips to China to coordinate manufacturing operations there.
Our Funding Goals
Not all of our shield boards will be available from the start of our campaign. We will initially be offering only three: The Phasor, the OLED shield, and the Relay shield. The other three boards will be offered as stretch goals. For each $10,000 we raise beyond our initial goal, we will make one additional shield available.
PRIMARY GOAL: We are trying to raise $50,000 to fund FCC testing and mass-production of the Phasor development board, the OLED shield, and the Relay shield.
STRETCH GOAL #1: If we raise $60,000, we will make the SD shield available on KickStarter. Come back and pledge an additional $20, and we'll send you one, giving your Phasor an SD card slot!
STRETCH GOAL #2: If we raise $70,000, we will make the ADC shield available on KickStarter. Come back and pledge an additional $20, and your Phasor will gain 4 additional ADC channels.
STRETCH GOAL #3: If we raise $80,000, we will make the Adapter shield available on KickStarter. Come back and pledge an additional $20, and you'll be able to plug your Phasor into an Arduino Uno, so you can use it as a WiFi shield.
Production Timeline
At this point, we have already built functional prototypes of Phasor and all of the shields, sourced parts, selected suppliers and assemblers, and contacted FCC testing and certification houses.
On the day we are successfully funded, we will contact our FCC tester and begin the certification process. We have allotted 60 days for FCC testing and certification. Once this process is completed, we will order our parts and have them shipped to our assembler, who has promised us a 30-day turnaround time.
As soon as the boards arrive on our doorstep, we will begin packing and shipping them to you. We expect to complete fulfillment of the boards in August 2015.
Open Hardware, Open Software
At Phasor Systems, we are committed to being meaningfully open source. We have drawn heavily from the work of open source contributors, and are committed to giving back to the community that has helped us along.
As such, we will be open-sourcing all of our hardware and software at the successful conclusion of our KickStarter campaign. Look over our code, make mods, and let us know your opinion. We want you to benefit from our work as much as we have benefited from yours.
Visit us Online
Interested in learning more? Come visit us at www.phasor.io, where you can get updates on our progress, get more information on our products, and sign up for our newsletter. Or you can follow us on Twitter. You can see videos of our projects on YouTube, or check out images of our builds on imgur. And of course you can friend us on Facebook or Google+. |
When the North-East monsoon, Tamil Nadu's main rainy season, set in on October 30, the devastating floods of last year were still fresh in the state's collective memory.
A year after unprecedented rainfall caused a massive deluge in Chennai, Kanchipuram, Tiruvallur, Cuddalore and other parts of the state, killing more than 300 people and causing losses running into several thousand crores, the state is still not rain-ready.
In Chennai, one of the worst-affected areas last year, work on desilting, or cleaning up canals and water bodies and unclogging storm water drains – which should have been completed before the monsoons, has just begun.
To complicate matters, the term of the elected representatives of city’s civic body has ended and local body polls to the Chennai Corporation, scheduled in October, were cancelled by the High Court over alleged irregularities inthe poll process.
Administration of the state has also been hit ever since the hospitalisation of AIADMK head and Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on September 22.
Special officials have now been appointed to the Chennai Corporation to take up flood-prevention measures, but residents, citizen activists and environmentalists have claimed that the last-minute job is shoddy and poorly thought out. Meanwhile, 15 IAS officers appointed as monitoring officers by the government to oversee monsoon preparedness have identified at least 100 major civic issues that could cause flooding this year, according to reports. This includes desilting of canals and rivers, removal of encroachments along waterways and construction of storm water drains in areas that lack an adequate drainage system.
Solution is the problem
A major project that the Chennai Corporation is undertaking is to connect the city's 1,660.31-km long network of storm water drains to several lakes and ponds, so that excess rain water can be emptied into these. Engineers in the Chennai Corporation’s Storm Water Drainage Department who did not wish to be identified confirmed to Scroll.in that 55 water bodies in South Chennai and 95 water bodies in the north would collect outflow from the storm water drain network in the city.
The project, approved in August, is being funded by Germany’s government-owned bank KFW and the Japan International Cooperation Agency. More than Rs 2,000 crores is being pumped into this project.
S Thirunavukkarasu, a retired engineer with the state Public Works Department, said that the plan could, in fact, increase risk of flooding and contaminate the water. “In most residential areas, sewerage lines are connected to these storm water drains,” he said. "So it is not just excess rainwater that will flow into these lakes and ponds but sewage, garbage and muck. The Chennai Corporation is finding a shortcut to the problems that we are going to face when the monsoon comes. We are holding talks with groups which work towards protecting water bodies.”
Environmentalists that Scroll.in spoke to expressed similar concerns.
KA Jayachandran of the South Chennai Lakes Security Group said the chances of flooding in Chennai could increase if the corporation goes through with project. “Already the water bodies have shrunk because of unauthorised construction," he said. "Also, none of these lakes have been desilted in the last 10 years. If the corporation connects the storm water drains to these lakes too, there is a big chance of flooding in residential areas (as the lakes can overflow)".
Environment activist KVRK Thirunaranan argued that the sewage carried by these drains would not just harm humans but also disturb the ecology of the water body. “Many migratory birds visit these water bodies and marshes and this will affect them if the water turns into sewage."
Experts said that the AIADMK government and the AIADMK-led corporation should have learnt from the fate of such projects in the past. In 2001, when the DMK was in power, the government had connected the existing storm water drains to the Cooum and Adyar rivers and the Buckingham Canal, the three main waterways in the city.
"The biggest example is before us – this is what has happened with the Adyar, Cooum rivers and the Buckingham Canal,” said S Janakarajan, water resources expert and professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. "It is only because storm water drains were connected to these waterways that they have turned into sewage ways." A bulk of the city's untreated sewage makes its way into these waters.
In 2011, Central Chennai was selected for a Rs 1,000-crore project, partly funded by the Centre, to connect more storm water drains to rivers.
Work yet to begin
Officials at the Chennai Corporation, however, claimed that there would be no flooding this year as the water bodies are being connected by a network of canals, so if excess water accumulated in one river, it would be carried to another.
“Around 800 areas in Chennai have been identified as places where water logging happens during rains and so in these places this connection of water bodies has already started,” said the engineer with the Chennai Corporation. “But the work will not get finished before the monsoon starts.”
By the state authorities’ own admission too, work at many of these sites is yet to begin.
In a case filed before the National Green Tribunal in Chennai, petitioner Jawahar Shanmugam had asked the court to direct the Public Works Department of Tamil Nadu to unclog the Buckingham Canal, where the accumulation of silt, debris and water hyacinth has been obstructing the flow of water. On October 27, just three days before the North East Monsoon set in, the PWD informed the court that work on the canal had not begun.
The department submitted that Rs 53.15 lakh would be allocated for “various activities in the South Buckingham Canal” and an additional Rs 60 lakhs had been allotted for “specific works” from Kottivakkam bridge to Okkiyam Maduvu, including the construction of a drainage canal. An estimated Rs 638 lakhs has been allocated for desilting of some water bodies and Rs 91 lakhs for “works in Cooum river.”
“Other waterways” in the city would get Rs 150 lakh, the PWD told the tribunal.
The tribunal directed the PWD to finish the work fast and said it would closely monitor the progress. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for December 12. By then, however, the monsoon would be on its way out and the damage, if any, would already have been done. |
I have a PhoneGap app. An HTML5 Canvas game. It appears to use significantly more memory in iOS 8 (including 8.0.2) vs iOS 7.
In addition to using more memory, the JS Garbage Collector does not seem to ever free up the memory it is holding. It is collecting "freed" memory correctly, but never releasing it back for iOS to use.
Here is the memory usage using Instruments Allocations under iOS 7 with an iPhone 5S. As you can see it goes up and down as I load and unload a level. Also the memory usage is very low, at around 23mb, maxing at 41.81mb
Here is the same app running on an iPhone 5S with iOS 8.0.2. As you can see the memory usage never goes down and it uses significantly more memory. In fact the memory usage keeps going up forever as I load and unload the same level. It doesn't go up as high, which makes me think JS is correctly re-using memory from the Garbage Collector, but the GC never seems to free the memory it is holding back to the OS. Also the entire app seems to be using way more memory than before.
The app also runs a lot slower and reached 121mb by the time I stopped it.
I should add that when unloading the level I re-load the page, which curiously does not free up any memory under iOS 8.
Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this problem and what the solution might be? Is this a bug in iOS 8? |
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Roy Hodgson says the coming months will give a clearer indication of whether Ruben Loftus-Cheek’s back problem might be a long-term issue.
The midfielder suffered spasms playing for England against Germany last Friday and has struggled with recurring lower back problems throughout his career. Hodgson admits the 21-year-old’s powerful build may cause problems but, at this stage, the Crystal Palace manager does not think there is any reason for concern.
Loftus-Cheek produced a man-of-the-match display against Germany on his England debut was forced off in the first half against Brazil four days later.
The loan signing from Chelsea is a doubt to face Everton at Selhurst Park on Saturday, but Hodgson said: “I do not see any reason for concern at the moment. Maybe in a month or two if he is not playing the games and you ask me again, maybe I will have to say it is a concern. Time will tell.
“It is something we were aware of, his condition, so it did not come as a massive surprise. He is tall, straight-backed and powerful, so he puts a lot of power through his lower back. It goes for all players of his type: the chances are they are going to have a slight problem.”
Loftus-Cheek was today continuing to be assessed by Palace medical staff but Hodgson added: “I am optimistic and I believe it will not be a problem.” |
Caffe Vero becoming specialty coffee and espresso shop
Over the past few weeks there’s been a few things rattling around about the best place to grab a coffee on Lark, Caffe Vero. They had announced they were closing, but nothing ever closed. All of a sudden there was a sign on the door asking to be forgiven for any missteps during a transition to new management. And they’re still open, every day. A few less things on the walls, few different people behind the bar, but the door’s still open.
The veil has been ripped off and the news has been announced that local coffee enthusiast and all-around solid dude Ron Grieco is now in charge of Vero, which is now officially Stacks Espresso Bar. Ron and his partner Tyler Wrightson now outright own the business and have sweeping changes planned.
One of the biggest things to note is that this will be a multi-roaster cafe. No other spot around is this as roasters will offer incentivized pricing and even loans of coffee gear for exclusivity. This allows all of the coffee in the shop to constantly rotate, not just from roast, blend or region, but roaster as well. In addition to regular drip coffee from the trusty Fetco, there will be a pour-over bar, aptly titled ‘the slow bar’ featuring specific coffees that lend themselves to this style of brewing. There will also be a ton of changes on the inside of the space, which have nothing to do with coffee but everything to do with your ability to sit down and enjoy your drink and snacks.
Stacks Espresso Bar will officially be opened and launched soon, but stop in as there’s a lot changing each day. The best place to grab a cup of coffee on Lark will only get better from here on out. |
Office Space. I had always heard good things about the movie and how it had become a cult classic but for years since it's release in 1999, I slept on it. Boy was I missing out on some hilarity! An outstanding element from this hysterical comedy is it's soundtrack, which uncharacteristic of conventional comedy movies, features an abundance of gangsta rap music. Office Space pulls it off brilliantly. The awesome thing is the use of hardcore rap songs actually enhances the comedy. One notable scene is the main character goofing around the office and doing whatever he dang well pleased to the tune of, A movie that has fast become one of my all-time favorites after the catching it on Netflix isI had always heard good things about the movie and how it had become a cult classic but for years since it's release in 1999, I slept on it. Boy was I missing out on some hilarity! An outstanding element from this hysterical comedy is it's soundtrack, which uncharacteristic of conventional comedy movies, features an abundance of gangsta rap music.pulls it off brilliantly. The awesome thing is the use of hardcore rap songs actually enhances the comedy. One notable scene is the main character goofing around the office and doing whatever he dang well pleased to the tune of, "Damn, it Feels Good To Be A Gangsta."
This song is an old-school hip hop single from 80's hip-hop group, The Geto boys from my hometown of Houston, Texas. Though the song is explicit and promotes the street life, there are some admirable lyrics within the song. So much so that the premise of the song and how it defines what a "Real Gangsta is" and seeing as I had posted my popular blog about the "Traits of a Real Muslim Man" the song inspired me to write a cover song entitled, "Dang, it Feels Good to Be a Muslim". I suggest the best way to read through the lyrics is by playing the instrumental and reading along in that cool non-chalant, laid-back style the original song was performed in. Check it.
Verse 1
Dang it feels good to be a Muslim
A real Muslim-type brotha has his mind right
A real Muslim-type brotha never runs his little mouth
'cause real Muslim-type brothas don't backbite.
And jokers always showin' off in excess
Flashin' his boys all the fresh swag
But real Muslim-type brothas don't flaunt mess
'cause real Muslim-type brothas know to not brag
And everythings cool in the mind of a Muslim
'cause Muslim-type brothas think deep
Up three-sixty-five a year 24/7
'cause real Muslim-type brothas don't sleep (til prayin' fajr)
And all I gotta say to you
Wannabe, gonnabe, horseplayin', dunya(world)-lovin' prankstas
'cause when the clock ticks down what the heck you gonna do?
Dang it feels good to be a Muslim.
Verse 2
Dang it feels good to be a Muslim
Feedin' the poor and keepin' up with charity
Although I was born in jahiliya (ignorance)
The deen of Islam now has brought me clarity.
Dang it feels good to be a Muslim
I mean one that you don't really know
Ridin' around town in a drop-top benz
No Riba(interest) cuz it's been all paid fo'
Now Muslim-type brothas come in all shapes and colors
Some got killed in the past
But this Muslim right here is a smart one
Started living for the Lord and I'll last
Now all I gotta say to you
Wannabe, gonnabe, horseplayin', dunya(world)-lovin' prankstas
When the time comes to go what the heck you gonna do?
Dang it feels good to be a Muslim.
Verse 3
Dang it feels good to be a Muslim
A real Muslim-type brotha knows the play
Real Muslim-type brothas lower their gaze
So when you see sistas, look the other way.
Real Muslim-type brothas don't talk much
All ya hear is the Dhikr on they tongue.
Real Muslim-type brothers seek their Lord's reward
'cause they know Paradise has all the fun.
Now all I gotta say to you
Wannabe, gonnabe, horseplayin', dunya(world)-lovin' prankstas
When your standing before your maker what the heck you gonna do?
Dang it feels good to be a Muslim. |
Celestia: Broken Sky is an upcoming mobile RPG from ZQGame. It takes place in a world that’s been shattered into thousands of pieces after an enormous cataclysm. Broken-up worlds aren’t conducive to peaceful societies that enjoy a good tea party, and sure enough, Celestia’s realms are crawling with monsters, dragons, and other species of bad news.
But that’s all the better for you, because it means there are lots of bad guys to fight – and fight you shall, thanks to Celestia’s deep combat system. You control a party that has command of several skills. Said skills can be charged up to five times, and much of the game’s challenge comes from deciding when to hold your power and when to unleash it on the horde.
Celestia: Broken Sky also features some very pretty-looking graphics for a mobile RPG, with the added bonus of tons of adorable characters to collect. Post-apocalyptic world or not, there is always room for cat-warriors that yowl as they launch attacks.
Celestia: Broken Sky hits Android on April 16. An iOS version will follow sometime thereafter. |
Tribes With Flags
In 1978, Fouad Ajami wrote a seminal article in Foreign Affairs titled "The End of Pan Arabism." Its conceit was that the particular interests and actions of key Arab states had long ago trumped the idealized rhetoric and aspirations of Arab unity.
Forty years on, it may be time to ponder another proposition: In the wake of the Arab Spring, we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of another Arab illusion — the functional and coherent Arab state.
Forget democracies. What’s at stake here is basic coherence and governance.
Three powerful states once competed for power and influence in the Arab world, not to mention America’s attention. Egypt held the key to peace or war with Israel, Iraq determined the power balance in the Gulf, and Syria shaped security and stability in the Levant.
In the wake of the Arab Spring, all three have essentially gone off line, their regional reach much diminished. Egypt, which comes closest to being a coherent polity, is bogged down in interminable political and economic problems; Syria is fighting a bloody civil war; and Iraq is preoccupied with internal security challenges and well on the way to permanent ethnic and sectarian feuding.
As is nature’s way, non-Arab powers have risen to fill this vacuum.
By any standard, Israel, Iran, and Turkey are now the three most consequential powers in the Middle East. To be sure, each faces major constraints in throwing its weight around in the Arab world. But by comparison, they are pretty stable polities with human, technological, and economic resources — not to mention military power — that enable them to project influence outside their borders, in ways the traditional regional powerhouses cannot.
The Arab monarchies, which appear to have overcome the wave of instability that threatened them in 2011 and 2012, are also holding their own. In the lands of the Arab kings, oil revenue, Islam, and royal legitimacy — combined with fear of violence and disorder — have preempted much of the turbulence of the Arab Spring. Though as Jordan and Bahrain can attest, revolt lies under the surface in these places too, and is only kept under control through repression, cooptation and fear of an even worse future.
But what of the other Arabs? In much of the Middle East, the situation looks far worse today than a year ago. The question facing these troubled countries right now is not whether they can become democracies or resolve fundamental identity questions. It is much more basic: Can they produce a minimum of competent governance and order, so that they can begin to deal with the galactic political and economic challenges they face?
It’s tempting to suggest that time will be required to sort all this out. After all, it took a century and a half for the United States — a country that possessed the physical security, natural abundance, and enlightened leaders the Arabs now lack — to deal with the issue of racial equality and minority rights. Indeed, as late as the 1950s, America was still very much a preferential democracy.
I understand all of this. And I understand too that colonial powers, followed by cruel and greedy leaders, prevented participatory government, civic responsibility, and a free press — along with the other elements required for good governance.
But I also understand that however empathetic we may want to be, it shouldn’t willfully blind us to certain realities either. And perhaps one of the most disturbing is the accelerating trend — long present in the Arab world — toward decentralization and weak state control. The political turbulence of the past few years has only deepened this lack of coherence. And it raises serious questions about whether even basic governance is possible.
It has been said about the Arab states that, with the exception of Egypt, the rest are all essentially tribes with flags. One might put it more delicately today, but the idea that sectarian and ethnic identity, rather than national affiliation, is the driving organizing principle in much of Arab politics is an undeniable reality. This is not to suggest that national identity has been absent in Arab lands — the question is whether it will ever come first over these other loyalties.
When these societies undergo stress — particularly in a place like Syria, where Assad is purposefully exploiting sectarian divides — it’s loyalty to the tribe, family, sect, and religious group that provides the primary source of identity and organization. We’ve seen this in Iraq, where Shias displaced Sunnis as the dominant power, and we’re seeing it again in Syria, where Sunnis look to get even with Alawites. Meanwhile, the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq are quite naturally looking to their own interests — not to those of the so-called nation.
And even in ethnically homogenous Egypt, religious identity defines the fault lines of the country’s turbulent political life. President Mohamed Morsy’s first allegiance isn’t to the notion of an inclusive nation, but to the Muslim Brotherhood’s conception of Islamist governance. And let’s be clear, membership in the Brotherhood isn’t like joining a health club: It requires years to gain entry, and it’s a way of life that demands a comprehensive worldview. Like the Eagles’ Hotel California, you can check out but you can never leave.
For the past 40 years, the Arab world’s religious and sectarian tensions were masked by authoritarian leaders — some of whom were hostile to American interests (Saddam Hussein, Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, Muammar al-Qaddafi), and some of whom were U.S. allies (Zinedine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Ali Abdullah Saleh). These autocrats imposed order by repressing their citizens, rewarding privileged elites, and playing on the nationalist pride of their countrymen — even while they bled the country through their own corruption.
The presidents of the Arab world, however, ruled over republics-in-name-only. When their regimes collapsed, so did the pretentions that the state could provide the foundation for better governance.
In certain cases, the process of incoherence and decentralization pre-dated the Arab Spring. Lebanon has been a non-state for years, and will remain that way so long as its many sects — Christians, Sunnis, Druze, and Shia — refuse to enter into a national compact in which they agree to surrender power to the government.
The state of Palestine is split between Hamas and Fatah, creating a kind of Noah’s Ark with two of everything — security services, constitutions, prime ministers, and visions of where and what Palestine is. And Iraq, far from being the coherent whole the Americans dreamed of is a mishmash of Shia authoritarianism, Sunni grievances, and Kurdish autonomy.
In other countries, the arrival of the Arab Spring accelerated the process of decentralization. In Libya, tribal and provincial rivalries are now preventing any meaningful centralized authority. In Yemen, it has probably been tribal coherence, oddly enough, that has provided services and settled disputes, keeping this perpetually failing state from failing altogether. In Syria, decentralization threatens to turn into fragmentation. Whatever emerges at the end of Syria’s current dark tunnel, it’s unlikely to be a strong, unified state.
Let’s be clear about something: The Arab state system isn’t going to completely implode. Since the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, respect for borders in this part of the world has proven pretty resilient. Syria’s intervention in Lebanon, Egypt’s in Yemen, and Saddam’s in Kuwait were exceptions — and all proved temporary.
But just because something calls itself a state doesn’t mean it is. If the locals want to delude themselves, that’s one thing — but we can’t. A state can have a flag, a parliament, and even recognized borders and not have a central government that’s effective and sovereign, let alone possessing the capacity to protect the wellbeing of all of its citizens.
To move beyond the challenges they now face, Arab states need three things they seem unable to produce.
First, they will need leaders willing and able to think and act in truly national terms, transcending their narrow sectarian, corporatist, family, and religious affiliations. Name one leader in any Arab country that fits that description.
Second, Arab states need inclusive and legitimate institutions that aren’t hostage to political intrigue or playthings of the elites that compete for power. Their primary objective should be representing the nation’s citizens — not the perpetuation of their own perquisites and those of the ruling elite.
And third, the Arab world needs a mechanism for negotiating differences and accommodating polarization without it spilling into the streets. As the recent riots in Egypt and the killing of Tunisian opposition leader Chokri Belaid show, the alternative to this is violence and murder.
Forget the "it will take time" argument. It’s right, of course — but it’s also the answer for just about everything in the Middle East these days.
What I don’t see anywhere are the trend lines heading in a positive direction. And forget about the establishment of democracies, or liberal, secular societies. Right now, we’re going back to basics: What the Arab world needs most of all right now are stable polities that can provide basic security and some material improvement in the lives of their people. Oh, and basic security for foreigners who happen to be working or travelling there too. Indeed, the issue isn’t transformation at all, but basic transaction — how to run a railroad.
As for the United States, we’re stuck in the middle of this mess. And we’re not helping much. Our policies on Israel, democratic reform, and counterterrorism are perceived at times as contradictory and hypocritical, and they’re not going to change all that much — guaranteeing that we will remain unpopular with millions of Arab and Muslims.
We can still do business in the Middle East, though, because Arab elites still require things we have. The kings and emirs need our security guarantee against Iran, the Yemenis need our economic aid and counterterrorism assistance, the Egyptians need our military aid and support with the IMF, the Jordanians need our political backing, and the Palestinians still need the hope — however misplaced — that we can deliver a state for them.
America’s room for maneuver in the Middle East is shrinking. The authoritarians have gone — and good riddance. The democrats haven’t yet arrived — and won’t for a good while. And with the end of that old order and the beginning of the new, perhaps we can finally cast off the illusion that the United States can somehow fix all of this. We cannot and will not save the Arabs from us or themselves.
But that’s not new. Here’s what is: As the Arab state grows ever more dysfunctional, it may just be that the Arabs can’t save themselves either, nor transform the world in which they live. |
SAN FRANCISCO — After the deaths of five infants, California health authorities declared an epidemic of whooping cough in the state on Wednesday, urging residents — particularly those of Latino background — to get vaccinated against the disease.
The announcement came after authorities noticed a sharp spike in reports of pertussis, the scientific name for whooping cough, which often is mistaken for a cold or the flu and is highly contagious. All told, 910 cases have been confirmed, with several hundred more under investigation. If the pace keeps up, the outbreak could be the largest in the state in 50 years, the California Department of Public Health reported.
Dr. Gilberto Chavez, the deputy director of the department’s Center for Infectious Disease, said health officials had seen a fourfold increase compared with 2009. And the worst may be to come.
“The peak season starts in the summer,” Dr. Chavez said, noting that July and August usually have the highest number of cases. “And we expect to see a much larger number of cases if we don’t intervene quickly.”
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For five families, however, the state’s warning has come too late. Five children — all Latino and all under the age of 3 months — have died since the beginning of the year, Dr. Chavez said. |
The governing Liberals are trying to hide documents related to the costly cancellation of gas plants in Mississauga and Oakville, the NDP charged Friday.
The New Democrats put in a freedom of information request for documents that made reference to "Project Vapour" — a code name the Liberals used in their correspondence about the gas plants.
But the cabinet office denied the existence of any such records, even though some have already been released, said NDP critic Peter Tabuns.
Emails that were among thousands of documents reluctantly released last month by the Liberals include correspondence between high-ranking officials in the premier's office and cabinet office that directly mention Project Vapour.
If they're denying those documents exist, then there may be others that the Liberals are hiding, Tabuns said.
"This is extraordinary stonewalling on the part of the premier," he said. "If it wasn't so Kafka-esque, it would be completely farcical."
But Tabuns stopped short of calling it a lie, saying he couldn't rule out incompetence or the possibility that someone was given orders on how to respond to the request.
Premier Dalton McGuinty should bring back the legislature as soon as possible so the committee that was looking into the gas plants can resume its work, Tabuns said.
The Liberals' initial reluctance to release documents the committee had requested led to a rare contempt of Parliament motion against Energy Minister Chris Bentley.
Many blame the contempt charge for McGuinty's decision to prorogue the legislature when he announced his resignation last month, which killed the motion and planned committee hearings.
He made the announcement three days after the government released a second batch of about 20,000 documents after the premier and his ministers had insisted all relevant records had already been released.
About 36,000 documents were released on Sept. 24 to comply with a Speaker's order.
Bradley Hammond, a spokesman for the premier, said a "thorough" search was conducted into the NDP's request, but "no responsive records were found."
"It's worth noting that not all records are required to be kept," he said in an email.
"Requestors have a right of appeal — they can go to the Information and Privacy Commissioner if they feel the FOI process was not properly followed."
Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak said he doesn't believe that there are no more documents related to the gas plants.
"I don't believe that they found 20,000 additional documents hidden under a rock somewhere either," he said.
"We had to drag that out of them kicking and screaming. This is more evidence of a government that is engaging in an orchestrated cover-up. They don't want people to know the facts of the issue." |
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identified the first biomarker for major, or clinical, depression. This ‘biological signpost’ could mean boys at greatest risk of depression are treated earlier.
Clinical depression affects one in six people at some point in their lives. Until now, however, doctors have lacked a biomarker for clinical depression, partly because its causes and symptoms are so varied.
According to Professor Ian Goodyer of the University’s Department of Psychiatry who led the study: “Through our research, we now have a very real way of identifying those teenage boys most likely to develop clinical depression. This will help us strategically target preventions and interventions at these individuals and hopefully help reduce their risk of serious episodes of depression and their consequences in adult life.”
The researchers collected spit samples from hundreds of teenagers and measured levels of cortisol in the saliva, as well as self-reported information on symptoms of depression. This they used to divide the teenagers into one of four groups depending on their cortisol levels and symptoms of depression.
After following the group for 12 to 36 months, they were then able to work out which group was most likely to develop clinical depression and other psychiatric disorders.
They found boys with high levels of cortisol and depressive symptoms were 14 times more likely to develop clinical depression than those with neither. In girls, however, this difference was less marked. Girls with high cortisol and depressive symptoms were four times more likely to develop clinical depression than those with neither, suggesting gender differences in how depression develops.
The researchers hope that having an easily measurable biomarker – in this case, raised cortisol plus depressive symptoms – will allow primary care services to identify boys at high risk and consider new public mental health strategies for this part of the population.
“This new biomarker suggests that we may be able to offer a more personalised approach to tackling boys at risk for depression,” said co-author Dr Matthew Owens.
“This could be a much needed way of reducing the number of people suffering from depression, and in particular stemming a risk at a time when there has been an increasing rate of suicide amongst teenage boys and young men.” |
Former All Blacks stars Ali Williams and Dan Carter are teaming up together again, this time at Racing 92.
Dan Carter's French club have hired former All Blacks team-mate Ali Williams as his minder.
The Guardian has reported that Racing 92 have assigned Williams to look after Carter because of the massive off-field interest in their star recruit.
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Williams, who played 77 tests for the All Blacks, retired from playing rugby with Toulon last season.
"Given his experience, his main mission will be to advise and help manage the many demands of Dan Carter, including the media," said Racing on the club's website, with Williams starting work on Saturday.
"Mr Williams will also conduct commercial relations operations for an investment account."
Carter, who retired from international rugby after the Rugby World Cup, is due to make his debut for Racing 92 this weekend in Paris against Northampton in the European Rugby Champions Club.
Racing are fourth in the Top 14 and unbeaten at home this season.
Meanwhile, Leicester announced on Tuesday (NZ time) that Manu Tuilagi, Ben Youngs, Ed Slater and Freddie Burns had all re-signed with the club.
The new deal means Tuilagi is the highest-paid player in English Rugby, earning NZ$980,000 a season over the three-year contract. |
The 19th Saarc Summit scheduled to be held in Islamabad in November has been postponed after Bangladesh and India on Tuesday announced inability to take part in it “in the prevailing circumstances.”
India has already communicated its decision to Nepal, the Saarc chair, The Kathmandu Post reports quoting India’s Ministry of External Affairs as saying.
The summit is automatically postponed or cancelled if one member country skips the event.
Tensions between India and Pakistan are growing after militants suspected to have entered from Pakistan stormed an Indian Army base in Uri on September 18, killing 18 soldiers, according to The Kathmandu Post.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh also announced that it would not attend the Saarc summit citing growing interference in the internal affairs of member states as well as the recent terror attack in India.
However, an official of Saarc wing of the Bangladesh foreign ministry said they have not yet received any formal communication in this regard from Saarc chair.
The summit was slated for November 9-10.
Diplomatic sources said other member states, including Afghanistan and Bhutan, have also conveyed their reservations to Nepal, the Saarc current chair, about attending the summit.
Sri Lanka too has signalled that it would not be participating, the sources added.
Meanwhile, the Pakistan foreign office reacted to the India's decision, calling it “unfortunate”.
As per the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) charter, the summit cannot be held without all the leaders (heads of the state/government) of its member states. |
CLOSE Outgoing Indiana and Kentucky Planned Parenthood's Betty Cockrum talks about the changes she's seen over 15 years and her plans for the future. Kelly Wilkinson/IndyStar
A flier handed out in the Meridian Kessler neighborhood, which included an incorrect address for Planned Parent of Indiana and Kentucky CEO Christie Gillespie and a graphic image of a fetus. Both have been blurred. (Photo: Photo submitted by Regina Eaton)
An anti-abortion group known for displaying graphic images of aborted fetuses passed out fliers Friday with the address of what it said is the home of Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky's CEO.
"Christie Gillespie murders children. Christie Gillespie lives in our neighborhood," said the Operation Save America flier that was handed out in the Meridian-Kessler neighborhood.
As many as 50 protesters with the Texas-based organization passed out leaflets and marched with signs on the sidewalks in front of the house and through the neighborhood.
But Gillespie, who became Planned Parenthood's CEO in July, doesn't live at that address. She sold the house earlier this year to a couple who has three young children.
"I was surprised that a former residence of mine would be targeted," Gillespie said. "I'm not sure what kind of research that led them to believe that it was my house, but I hope they didn't pay for that research."
The current residents, who didn't want to be identified, were upset. .
"They certainly don't want any part of this public mess and don't support these kinds of tactics," said Jon Mayes, a representative of the family. "A number of protesters outside and circulating in the neighborhood asking for people to visit their house. This was very alarming and very unsettling for them and still is giving them great worry and anxiety."
The Operation Save America tactic didn't surprise Gillespie, who said being a target of anti-abortion groups is an expected part of her job.
"It's assumed that all the presidents and CEOS of the (Planned Parenthood) affiliates could be named publicly like that," she said. "You know that when you apply for these kinds of jobs."
About 75 members of Operation Save America have been in Indianapolis since Wednesday, targeting different locations to protest, leaflet, display graphic imagery and hold prayer services, said Ante Pavkovic, one of the group's leaders. They plan to leave Sunday.
Pavkovic, who is from North Carolina, said he didn't know how the organization got the wrong address.
"We're sorry we didn't have the right information," he said. "We don't want to be wrong about things. It’s just an unfortunate mistake."
Regina Eaton was driving her 7-year-old son Fenix to school Friday morning when a woman at a stop sign at 42nd Street and College Avenue stepped up to her car's back window. Eaton thought she was from a nearby church, handing out information. So she rolled down Fenix's window.
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The woman handed the boy one of the fliers.
"Fenix opened it up, and he looked at me," she said. "… All I saw, which is what my son saw, which was a dismembered fetus."
Eaton told the woman she was a supporter of Planned Parenthood. She said the woman called her a sinner and that she'd pray for her. Fenix started asking Eaton questions.
"I just started crying, and I drove away," she said. "He's asking questions like, 'Mom did you do something bad? Are you going to hell?' I didn't even have time to sit him down to explain to him what it meant because he had to go to school."
Eaton said she went out later and screamed at the group of protesters to leave her neighborhood. She posted the account to the neighborhood's Facebook group, which garnered dozens of comments from neighbors expressing concern about the protests.
"They succeeded in their mission today," she said. "They did. They succeeded in getting people like me emotional today."
Pavkovic said parents don't want their children to see the images of bloodied fetuses because "the momentum of the people in our nation is to live in denial."
"The kids are upset because children are honest and they look at the pictures and they go, 'That's a baby. Why would they hurt the baby?'" Pavkovic said. "To be upset with us is an irrational misplaced outrage. We're not the ones hurting the children."
Pavkovic compared the photos they distribute to photos of lynchings that were publicized during the Civil Rights movement.
"Those photos began to change the tide and public sentiment," he said. "They're not pretty pictures to look at today."
The Operation Save America protest is a distraction, Gillespie said, and it's one she plans to ignore.
"Our focus is on providing high-quality reproductive health care to the people who need it," she said. "That's what we focus on. We don't focus on distractions like this."
Call IndyStar reporter Amy Bartner at (317) 444-6752. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/2hCAoc3 |
Review: Vietnam '65 for iPad By Alex Connolly
The Vietnam War is a unique beast. The most unpopular of wars, made immortal through popular culture. Veteran PT readers need no further preamble from this still-FNG to illustrate how Vietnam was as much as a battle of political and ideological PR as it was bush patrols and F-4 sorties against a liquid, unknowable enemy. My digital experience with the theater has been limited to the most facile of shooters, which either made me the perfect or the worst candidate for reviewing Vietnam '65.
The average wargamer will arrive in Vietnam '65 as a veteran of countless WWII sims and possibly the occasional Napoleonic sortie. But across the Ia Drang valley, against the buffer country of the Cambodian border, the player must wage a new kind of war. This is a fascinating tale of Kalashnikov phantoms and the military giant sent to exorcise it from the jungles of Indochina. I would be inclined to call this the new Unity of Command; being a game unafraid to welcome new and seasoned alike, with a distinct core that isn't merely the sum of factory standard parts. Unity of Command was a game that taught imperatives of supply. Vietnam '65 is a lesson in political motivation as a resource, as well as illustrating the confounding operational logistics of the conflict. It's not the deepest game, but I wish more wargames were this bloody daring.
I wasn't sure what to make of Every Single Soldier's creation when I first booted it up. The game felt thin, anaemic. I was wrongfully looking for the tactical flex and unit catalogue of Battle Academy or Panzer Corps. World War II and Vietnam being apples and agent oranges, my mistake was looking to find a stock military hexer, which this game is certainly not. This is not a game that doubles down on the grit and greeble of specific historical encounters. Instead. Vietnam 65 has the player feeling their way along a dynamically generated Ho Chi Minh trail -- a central corridor for Viet-Cong guerrilla activity, invisible to the player on the map. The game creates a new trail every time you play the scenario, and you can only ever deduce its location it's path as you hunt your opponents. Political willpower, wrung from how well the war is being waged, feeds the supply line and helps sustain unit acquisition during the forty-five turn game limit. Patrols, Phantom sorties, FOBs; they're all here, but the H&M mechanic that puts Vietnam '65 in a different light to other wargames.
Along the tough terrain of Ia Drang, ten villages become the operational focus of Vietnam '65. If you win battles near a village, support for you goes up -- but if the Viet Cong is allowed to operate unchecked or (worse) knocks you about in a fight, then the villages' hearts and minds will turn to the enemy. It's a neat reversal of the typical wargame, and one that probably resonates today better than ever: you must control villages that you can't ever conquer, but only hope to influence.
The American arsenal revolves around the iconic Huey helicopter fleets, used to ferry troops and supplies across the rugged terrain. Rather than a certain Wagnerian entrance, these workhorses -- and to an equally important extent, the magnificent Chinook heavy lifter -- flit across the canopies and ridge-lines in a constant utility thrum, keeping patrols supplied and accessing locations far too arduous for a foot-slog. Some might not like the central activity of this game being air traffic control, but managing the whirly-birds is a wonderfully engrossing, ever-changing puzzle. There's as much owed to Transport Tycoon as there is to Panzer General in Vietnam '65.
Keeping the H&M ratio in the black is all well and good, but if the enigmatic VC manage to persuade enough villages during their campaign against the US military, that number will drop below a threshold and the North Vietnamese Army will turn up. Rocking heavier ordnance, nothing dries up political willpower faster than an increase in bodybags being shipped home. This is what makes the VC encounters so fresh; their infuriating ability to tangle, then disappear into the jungles. Tracking them is often fruitless, and you're forced to spread your self uncomfortably thin to counter that elusiveness. Caught in the open, nothing speaks louder than a targeted USMC Phantom bombing run, but if given a tree-line to dash into or a clearing to lace with mines, Charlie does surf. Contacts are recorded on a strategic operational map, which helps track the thicker areas of VC movements and giving the player a good idea of where the next FOP should go.
There's a decent challenge in Vietnam '65. The AI poses wily opposition, bolstered by a muggy fog of war. My first few games were disasters, and I was obviously in need of a few more military advisors. However, once I had a better idea of the ins-and-outs of chopper resupply and projecting a more limber force, the VC began to get smacked back up the track. Drawing them out and engaging them in politically-beneficial locales made me ponder the PR of combat in more than just a clash of proficiency tables. Again, at a mechanical level, there's not much different here to many other wargames. The nuts and bolts are the same. However, it's the wrangling of the outcome, what operations and engagements often mean, that evokes a different ambiance to your usual hex-and-chit affair.
The last time I played something that make me consider the ramifications of my engagement strategies was the wafer-thin but noble RTS Conflict Zone, touting mission difficulty hinging on a player's standing with the media. In Vietnam '65, it examines the temerity of a conventional force fighting against an unconventional foe, and the friction of measuring success therein. Using political resolve as fuel for the fight might merely be a semantic change from spending prowess points, but it's an important distinction. Vietnam '65 is a surprisingly different and refreshing wargame experience that might win hearts and minds outside of Vietnam, too. |
Tax experts say multinationals will be watching to see if Revenue Minister Judith Collins signals anything "unorthodox".
Multinationals such as Google and Apple are about to find out whether they will face tougher tax rules in New Zealand.
Long-awaited measures to clamp down on multinational tax rorts are expected to be unveiled by Revenue Minister Judith Collins on Friday morning.
PwC tax expert Geof Nightingale said big business was waiting to find out whether New Zealand would follow Britain and Australia in implementing a "diverted profit tax" to penalise multinationals caught manipulating the tax system.
SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES Company tax contributes 15 per cent of New Zealand's tax take, but there are concerns multinationals have rorted the system.
United States lobby group Citizens for Tax Justice estimated in October that the top 500 US corporations – including Apple, Nike and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer – had stockpiled US$2.5 trillion of profits in tax havens.
Profit-shifting has prompted G20 nations to back a crackdown by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, called Beps.
READ MORE:
* Victory at hand in multinational tax battle but NZ may not get the spoils
* Inland Revenue legal boss 'not qualified' to make call on trust in tax
Company tax makes up 15 per cent of New Zealand's total tax take of $63 billion, but a Cabinet paper said there were concerns multinationals were not paying their fair share.
Nightingale said a diverted profits tax would be "more politics than policy".
Ministers had indicated the Government was thinking about a diverted profit tax but "probably wouldn't go the whole way", he said.
Instead, the meat of the measures that would be proposed by Collins at a meeting of the International Fiscal Association in Queenstown would likely be technical in nature and would represent New Zealand's attempt to implement Beps, he said.
"I expect they won't be easy to translate into simple soundbites."
An Inland Revenue briefing to Collins released last month confirmed officials were working on proposals to tighten transfer pricing and "permanent establishment" rules and hybrid instruments and on limiting the interest payments that foreign firms could deduct from the profits of their New Zealand subsidiaries.
Nightingale said a key question would be how orthodox those changes would be.
"What will be interesting will be ... how far they have gone towards the OECD recommended position, and whether they are in step with our major investment and trading partners.
"It is appropriate for the Government to focus on this stuff, like governments around the world are, [but] we don't want New Zealand to 'blaze the trail' because we are a small capital-importing country," he said.
Ernst & Young tax partner David Snell said the drivers behind Beps did not apply as strongly in New Zealand as they did elsewhere.
"We don't have a great revenue shortfall, nor do we have in my view strong evidence of corporates having markedly underpaid tax."
Nightingale said multinationals had been impacted by other changes such as the imposition of GST on imported digital services such as Netflix and Spotify and would be watching Collins' announcement closely.
There was a chance political developments such as Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump could delay the wider Beps project, but Nightingale believed the momentum was too strong for it to be derailed.
"Revenue officials are co-operating strongly and I expect that will continue despite the politics.
"But if you put the politics over the top of it, there is going to be a huge ongoing argument between Europe and the US – and there already is – over who gets to tax the revenues of those big European and US multinationals.
"The Trump Administration is going to put America's interests first in a whole range of policy areas, but also in tax," he said.
TAXING JARGON
Transfer pricing refers to the prices multinationals set when they charge their local subsidiaries for centrally-provided services such as accounting and marketing.
Multinationals can divert money to lower-tax jurisdictions by overcharging for such services.
The Government may remove the "burden of proof" on Inland Revenue to show transfer prices are unfair.
Permanent establishment rules determine whether a company has a taxable presence in a country.
Changes may make it harder for foreign firms to claim they don't have a permanent presence in New Zealand if they use intermediaries to enter into contracts here on their behalf.
Hybrid mismatches relate to rorts such as the "double Irish" that involve companies exploiting differences between countries' tax laws – often differences in semantics – to avoid a profit being taxed in either country.
Such "mismatches" can be tackled either through harmonising rules or through general "anti-avoidance" measures.
Interest deductions can be used to channel profits from New Zealand subsidiaries to multinational parents.
Unnecessarily large loans, or loans at artificially high interest rates, can mean cash is unfairly transferred through untaxed interest payments, rather than through dividends on locally-taxed profits.
Already a focus for Inland Revenue, the Government may seek to tighten up practices in this area. |
Baseball fans across the country were saddened at the end of an era on Oct. 3, when Vin Scully, the voice of Dodgers’ baseball for the past 67 seasons, signed off for the last time, calling the San Francisco Giants’ 7-1 victory over Los Angeles in the city by the bay.
But the man known as the voice of baseball is back, this time lending his voice to an audio recording, “The Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” produced by the group Catholic Athletes for Christ in collaboration with Immaculate Heart Radio.
For Catholics who are baseball fans, it’s basically the answer to a prayer.
Scully – whose most famous calls include the Brooklyn Dodgers’ long dreamed of World Series victory over the rival New York Yankees in 1955, Sandy Koufax’s strikeout to complete the lefty’s perfect game in 1965, and Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series game-winning home run when the slugger limped around the bases on two injured legs – turned to a different kind of play-by-play for an unexpected encore.
The Hall of Fame broadcaster and devout Catholic has narrated the Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious and Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary for the recording, which is available on CDs and digital downloads, and people can hear one of the most famous voices of the past century read Gospel passages explaining each of those mysteries and then lead the praying of the rosary.
“We are blessed and honored to have the iconic voice of Vin Scully lead this new recording of the rosary,” said Ray McKenna, the founder and president of Catholic Athletes for Christ, in a statement announcing the recording’s late September release.
“…There is no better storyteller alive today than Vin Scully, and his narration on this recording helps bring alive the stories of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
Kevin O’Malley, the Major League Baseball Ministry Coordinator for Catholic Athletes for Christ who served as an executive producer for the project, told Crux that it will allow both longtime and new fans of Scully to hear the Gospel story “come alive with his voice and incredible talent. It’s the greatest story ever told, by the greatest storyteller.”
And he said the timing could not be more providential.
“Everything happens on God’s time, not our time,” he said, noting the original goal was to have the recording ready for the All Star break in July but it wasn’t ready to go until September, so they announced its release just after Scully’s last home game at Dodgers Stadium.
“In retrospect, the timing (of the recording’s release) was perfect, considering the tremendous outpouring of love to Vin by fans worldwide at the end of the regular season and the start of October, which is the month of the rosary,” O’Malley said.
Scully’s broadcast of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ last home game this season on Sept. 25 had a storybook quality that could have been scripted by Hollywood – or Heaven. Each Dodger who came to bat during the game first took off his batting helmet and held it upward toward the broadcast booth, in tribute to Scully.
With two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the Dodgers’ star rookie shortstop Corey Seager belted a home run to right field to tie the game. Then in the 10th inning, L.A.’s unheralded reserve shortstop Charlie Culberson lofted his first home run of the season to the left field seats to win the game.
Before the Dodgers retreated to the clubhouse to douse one another with champagne, they assembled on the field, and all doffed their caps towards Scully, who offered thanks and farewell to them and the fans.
But accounts of Scully’s final home game broadcast in Los Angeles, and his finale in the booth one week later in San Francisco, also mentioned that the announcer had begun each day by attending Sunday morning Mass in the stadium.
That relates to the rosary recording project, because Catholic Athletes for Christ has been sponsoring Catholic Masses for Major League Baseball since 2006 and now has regularly scheduled Mass at 26 of the 30 stadiums on homestand weekends.
“The Dodgers Mass on Sunday mornings in the press room is very important to many in the Dodgers organization, but especially to Vin,” O’Malley said. “Not only did he attend each and every Mass, he served as our first reading lector.”
Catholic Athletes for Christ – which works to support Catholic professional athletes in deepening and sharing their faith and also has programs for Catholic high school and college athletes – approached Scully with the idea of narrating a rosary recording to raise funds for the group’s outreach.
O’Malley said the broadcaster has been a longtime supporter of CAC and “as always, his immediate response was, ‘Whatever you need.’”
One day in March, Scully arrived at a small recording studio in Los Angeles, and within four hours, he had recorded the narration for all 20 mysteries of the rosary. He was joined by a group of nine responders, who joined him in completing the rosary prayers that he began.
O’Malley said the broadcaster carried it off with his trademark professionalism and required only about two re-takes, and he said Scully expressed several times how honored and humbled he was to help with the project.
Immaculate Heart Radio, which owns and operates more than 30 Catholic radio stations on the West Coast, recorded and engineered the production.
The recording begins with Scully reading excerpts from the 2002 apostolic letter on the rosary written by St. John Paul II, who called it his favorite prayer.
“By its nature the recitation of the rosary calls for a quiet rhythm and a lingering pace, helping the individual to meditate on the mysteries of the Lord’s life as seen through the eyes of her who was closest to the Lord,” Scully said, quoting the papal document.
While some people’s recitation of the rosary can be done in a monotonous or rote way, with Scully, each Hail Mary, Our Father, Glory Be and Apostle’s Creed seems to be heartfelt, as if each prayer mattered, just as each pitch and each at-bat mattered in his baseball broadcasts.
The same is true for Scully’s readings of the Gospel accounts of the Annunciation, and Christ’s Nativity, Last Supper, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension.
In a summer of many accolades, Scully received the Gabriel Personal Achievement Award from the Catholic Academy of Communications Professionals at the Catholic Media Conference in St. Louis in June. The award, named for the angel who announced Mary’s role in bringing Christ to the world, went to the beloved baseball announcer who could not attend because he was broadcasting a Dodgers’ game.
In a recorded message to that group, Scully, with typical humor, asked that a photo be taken of all the priests and nuns in attendance, so he could take it with him on Judgment Day and hold it up and say, “I’m with them.”
In a Sports Illustrated cover story by Tom Verducci, Scully had related how his Catholic faith has carried him through life, from his boyhood attending Mass at the Church of the Incarnation in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, to his Jesuit education at Fordham University in the Bronx, to his present parish, St. Jude the Apostle in Westlake Village, California.
That faith had helped him through the joys of his life, and also the sorrows, which included deaths of family members and broadcast partners.
Tom Hoffarth in an article in the Los Angeles Daily News published on the weekend of Scully’s last broadcast of a Dodgers’ home game noted that the broadcaster said, “I just want to be remembered as a good man, an honest man, and one who lived up to his own beliefs.”
With the rosary recording, people who over the years listened to Scully on their transistor radios and on their radios at home and in the car, and on TV broadcasts, can now pray along with him, on their commute to and from work, or while relaxing or working out at home.
For Catholic sports fans who will never forget Scully’s call of Gibson’s home run – “She is gone!” – the rosary CD offers his narration of three words – “Full of Grace” – that record his sincere prayer to Mary, and are words that many would say sum up the broadcaster’s life and work.
And as the baseball playoffs unfold in October, the month of the rosary, they are happy to hear his voice again.
(The audio recording of “The Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary” narrated by Vin Scully is available for purchase at www.catholicathletesforchrist.org/rosary or can be downloaded from most major digital distribution sites, including Apple iTunes, Amazon Music and Google Play.) |
On the penultimate Saturday before the General Election, the Labour Party made a fairly startling policy announcement that was hardly noticed by the media: “Labour would outlaw Islamophobia”, said Ed Miliband in an interview. At first glance, that doesn’t seem like a scary announcement – I mean, Islamophobia is a bad thing, right?
Unfortunately, it’s much more complex than that.
The proposals are fairly nebulous at this point: Ed says he intends to “make Islamophobia an aggravated crime” and “toughen existing hate crime legislation”. Defenders of freedom of speech should be alarmed at this, because Labour has dangerous previous form in exactly this area: the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006.
What Ed is proposing looks like a return to finish the 2006 act. In 2006 Labour originally tried to criminalise “deliberately insulting” a religion. Those opposed to that law argued that it would become a criminal offence mock a religion, or to say that a religion damages British society, because in doing so they would be accused of “inciting religious hatred” *. There was a huge public out-cry, led by academics, artists, writers and comedians (notably Rowan Atkinson), and in the end the Labour government was defeated by a single vote and the law was watered down. Ed Miliband personally voted for the original wording.
The term “Islamophobia” itself had been so over-used and abused in discourse in recent years that unfortunately it has little real meaning any more, much like the terms “anti-Semitism” and “genocide”, both of which are thrown around all the time in a politicised way. A very large majority of Muslims and a fair number of progressives (including, disappointingly, some in the Lib Dems) considered the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Mohammed to be both abusive and insulting, and indeed Islamophobic – and the un-amended 2006 Bill would have pretty certainly criminalised such images in the UK. Ed Miliband himself attended the “Je Suis Charlie” march in Paris, but now looks like he would want to criminalise the magazine in the UK.
At the Liberal Democrats Conference in Liverpool in 2015, Parliamentary candidate candidate Maajid Nawaz moved a motion in favour of free expression that was passed, and that thankfully puts us in direct opposition to any plans to curb freedom of expression and criticism/insulting of religions. In 2006 five SNP MPs voted with the Lib Dems, but we have no idea what the SNP’s position on this will be if they have 40-50 new MPs; and given their generally illiberal tendencies in other areas we should assume the worst: that they might well support Labour’s plans.
One of the reasons I was so happy to see the back of the previous Labour government was their relentless assault on civil liberties and freedoms.
Ed Miliband had said in the past the he now accepts that this was a mistake, but this announcement indicates that this might not be true at all and that yet again we have things to fear from a Labour or Labour/SNP government. Let us hope, yet again, that there will be enough Liberal Democrats in Parliament to make the difference on legislation like this.
* Please note: Scientology is legally a religion in the UK and would be equally protected as Islam under such laws.
* Dr Mark Wright is a councillor in Bristol and was the 2015 general election Parliamentary candidate for Bristol South. |
Cherokee County’s Major Crimes Unit is investigating an accidental shooting Sunday night that killed an 11-year-old and injured both his parents, Sheriff Jeff Shaver said.
Cherokee County’s Major Crimes Unit is investigating an accidental shooting Sunday night that killed an 11-year-old and injured both his parents, Sheriff Jeff Shaver said.
An emergency call was made about 9:30 p.m. to a residence on County Road 865 in Gaylesville. When deputies and investigators responded, they found the child had been fatally injured. He was pronounced dead at the scene by Cherokee County Coroner Jeremy Deaton.
The child’s father apparently was cleaning the handgun when it discharged. The bullet went through the father’s hand and struck the 11-year-old, who was sitting on the couch, then struck the mother in the elbow, according to a news release from the sheriff’s office.
The man and woman were transported to a hospital for treatment. The case remains under investigation by the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office and the Major Crimes Unit. Officers from DeKalb County and first responders from area fire departments also assisted with the call. |
An oilpatch worker's widely shared social media post accuses Justin Trudeau of ignoring Alberta's economic pain and pleads for help during the economic slump.
Since Lloydminster's Ken Cundliffe posted the letter on Jan. 10, it has been shared thousands of times.
"Since you will not acknowledge what the low oil prices have done to our own people, I will," wrote Cundliffe, an operator with Husky Oil. "It's hard to say in words how scared and desperate people are becoming."
The letter paints a dire picture of layoffs and unemployment insurance running out for many, alongside a jump in theft and suicide rates.
"Alberta has not taken an equalization payment for over 50 years and has done more than its fair share in supporting the East in that time. Now that the Alberta economy is struggling due to low oil prices, why do you refuse to acknowledge the problem?" he wrote, questioning why the Liberal government has given away "BILLIONS of Canadian taxpayer dollars to other countries."
"Please start helping our own people through these tough times," the letter urged.
"You wanted to be the leader of our country. Show some leadership skills and work with the West for once. Please forget about your image on the "World Stage" for a while and focus on your own country. That's all I ask."
Calls for EI changes
While Cundliffe does not offer specific solutions in his letter, he told CBC News in an interview there are several actions the federal government could take.
Among them, he suggested a review of both the equalization payment system and the cap on the length of employment insurance, adding many of these families who paid taxes for decades "have never asked for anything in their lives."
Cundliffe said he wrote the letter because he believes many Canadians are "oblivious" to the increasing hardships people in the West are facing and wanted to dispel myths that those now struggling once held high-paying jobs and "wasted their money."
The feedback has been very positive in Alberta, Saskatchewan and northern B.C., where many are affected, Cundliffe said.
But elsewhere many have shown little sympathy, he said, blaming it on low tax rates and the lack of savings for tough times.
"How many people across the country could be out of work for over a year and still be maintaining?" Cundliffe asked. "So there are a lot that did put away properly to try to get through this, but this is extending into a longer time frame."
The new father said hearing news of other young families struggling with job loss strikes a chord, because his wife is on maternity leave and "it could be us."
Cundliffe is not the first Canadian to send a message to the prime minister on social media, and the outcome leaves him hopeful of hearing from Trudeau.
Shortly after the October election, Trudeau responded to a B.C. mother's public post, which was shared and liked by tens of thousands of people.
"Like we've seen on social media, it's a good way to do it," Cundliffe said. "We've seen him reach out and respond to individuals that have wrote through social media."
[email protected]
@andreahuncar |
Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt and closest dwarf planet to Earth, had been remarkable for its plain surface. New research suggests that most of the material that has struck Ceres in high-speed collisions has stuck — billions of years worth of meteorite material.
A new set of high-velocity impact experiments suggests that the dwarf planet Ceres may be something of a cosmic dartboard: Projectiles that slam into it tend to stick.
The experiments, performed using the Vertical Gun Range at NASA’s Ames Research Center, suggest that when asteroids and other impactors hit Ceres, much of the impact material remains on the surface instead of bouncing off into space. The findings suggest the surface of Ceres could consist largely of a mish-mash of meteoritic material collected over billions of years of bombardment.
The research, by Terik Daly and Peter Schultz of Brown University, is published in Geophysical Research Letters .
Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt and the nearest dwarf planet to Earth. Until the recent arrival of the Dawn spacecraft, all that was known about Ceres came from telescopic observations. The observations showed Ceres to be mysteriously low in density, suggesting it is made either of very porous silicate material, or perhaps contains a large layer of water ice. Observations of its surface were remarkable as well — largely for being unremarkable.
“It’s really bland in the telescopic observations,” said Daly, a Ph.D. student at Brown and the study’s lead author. “It’s like someone took a single color of spray paint and sprayed the whole thing. When we think about what might have caused this homogeneous surface, our thoughts turn to impact processes.”
And to understand impact processes, the researchers turned to NASA’s Vertical Gun Range, a cannon with a 14-foot barrel that can launch projectiles at up to 16,000 miles per hour. For this work, Daly and Schultz wanted to simulate impacts into low-density surfaces that mimic the two broad possibilities for the composition of Ceres’s surface: porous silicate or icy.
“The idea was to look at those two end-member cases, because we really don’t know yet exactly what Ceres is like,” Daly said.
For the porous silicate case, the researchers launched impactors into a powdered pumice. For the icy case, they used two targets: snow, and snow covered by a thin veneer of fluffy silicate material, simulating the possibility the Ceres’s ice sits below a silicate layer. They then blasted these targets with pebble-sized bits of basalt and aluminum, simulating both stony and metallic meteorites.
The study showed that in all cases, large proportions of the impact material remained in and around the impact crater. This was especially true in the icy case, Daly said.
“We show that when you have a vertical impact into snow — an analog for the porous ice we think might be just beneath the surface of Ceres — you can have about 77 percent of the impactor’s mass stay in or near the crater.”
The results were a bit of a surprise, said Schultz, who has studied impact processes for many years as professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown.
“This is really contrary to previous estimates for small bodies,” Schultz said. “The thought was that you’d eject more material that you’d collect, but we show you can really deliver a ton of material.”
The impact speeds used in the experiments were similar to speeds thought to be common in asteroid belt collisions. The findings suggest that a majority of impacts on porous bodies like Ceres cause an accumulation of impact material on the surface.
“People have thought that perhaps if an impact was unusually slow, then you could deliver this much material,” Schultz said. “But what we’re saying is that for a typical, average-speed impact in the asteroid belt, you’re delivering a ton of material.”
Over billions of years of such impacts, Ceres may have accumulated quite a bit of non-native material, Daly and Schultz said, much of it mixing together to create the relatively nondescript surface seen from telescopes. The researchers are hopeful that as the Dawn spacecraft scans the surface at much higher resolution, it might be able to pick out individual patches of this delivered material. That would help confirm the relevance of these experiments to celestial bodies, the researchers say.
The results have implications for missions that aim to return asteroid samples to Earth. Unless the landing sites are carefully chosen, the researchers say, those missions could end up with samples that aren’t representative of the object’s original material. To get that, it might be necessary to find an area where there has been a relatively recent impact.
“You can’t do this like the old claw crane from the arcade,” Schultz said. “You can’t just reach down and grab whatever’s there. You may need to find a fresh impact where perhaps the native stuff has been churned up.” |
CLOSE The ongoing Flint water crisis has taken a toll on residents of this iconic Michigan city, who have been living with lead-tainted tap water for over two years. One Flint resident describes the experience as, “like being in war, but without violence.”
The plan recommended by the mayor and endorsed by county, state and federal leaders still needs a host of approvals.
Flint Mayor Karen Weaver on Tuesday, April 18 endorsed sticking with the Detroit-based water system as Flint water source. Gov. Rick Snyder and Weaver, pictured here, meet with the press after a meeting to discuss the next steps in regards to Flint's water crisis in January 2016. (Photo: DAVE WASINGER, Dave Wasinger/Lansing State Jour) Story Highlights Sticking with Detroit would allow federal dollars to help improve Flint's water distribution system
Residents would also gain access to low-income assistance program to help pay water bills
Detroit-based water system would help Flint pay off its $7M annual debt to another water authority
Proposed water source deal for Flint still needs official city, county, state and federal approvals.
Gov. Rick Snyder praised the city of Flint’s plan to sign a long-term deal with Detroit's water system after the city's departure from it four years ago set in motion one of the nation’s worst drinking water crises.
Snyder told reporters Tuesday that he was pleased to see the tentative agreement reached between city, county, state and federal leaders to provide new financial incentives for Flint to return for the next 30 years to the Detroit system now known as the Great Lakes Water Authority.
“That’s the success we like to see when people work together like that,” Snyder said. “This is a major step forward in terms of providing a better water supply for Flint, for the county and for the Great Lakes Water Authority.”
Flint Mayor Karen Weaver made her recommendation Tuesday, which marked a reversal from the city's original plan to detach from the Detroit-based water system and move to a new regional authority in the hopes of keeping a lid on spiraling costs.
The first-term mayor needed to reevaluate her original decision as a condition of receiving $100 million in federal funding to address the Flint water crisis.
The mayor's endorsement to stay with the Detroit-based Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) received backing of representatives from Genesee County, the competing Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), Snyder's office and federal Environmental Protection Agency. The proposed deal will still need formal approvals from several city, state and federal government bodies, officials said.
"It was important that we took our time to get this right," Weaver told reporters at a news conference at Flint city hall.
Related:
One goal, the mayor said, remained above all else: protecting public health.
The mayor said that city, county, state and federal leaders worked on a possible solution for securing the future water supply by analyzing a dozen options over the last six months.
The decision to remain on Detroit's water system is also the best financial move for the cash-strapped city after a series of missteps, officials said. Flint could have been on the hook for millions of dollars in debt to pay for a new regional water system known as the KWA, even if it left the system. But those financial obligations will be covered by Detroit's regional water system, GLWA, under the proposed deal.
Staying with the GLWA and using the Karegnondi as a backup will cost an estimated $269 million over 20 years. That's compared with options up to $482 million under the most expensive alternative, according to an internal analysis completed for the city.
Still, before the decision is final, the mayor said she wants to hear from residents.
A town hall meeting will be held at 5:30 p.m., Thursday at House of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church in Flint to answer questions from the public about the proposed deal. An MIRS News/Target Insyght poll last year found that more than 36% of Flint residents wanted to stay on Detroit water while 40% said they didn't know enough to say.
Related:
Flint's three-year drinking water crisis erupted when the city under the rule of a state-appointed emergency manager switched from Detroit water to the Flint River in April 2014.
At the time, the state Department of Environmental Quality failed to require the use of corrosion control chemicals -- which the department later acknowledged was a grave mistake -- as part of the treatment process.
The corrosive water caused lead to leach from joint pipes and fixtures, resulting in a spike in toxic lead levels in the blood of Flint children. The city switched its water supply back to Detroit in October 2015, but a risk remains because of damage to the water distribution infrastructure.
Officials also are exploring possible links between the river water and outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease tied to at least 12 deaths. The state attorney general has filed criminal charges against several city and state employees in connection with the water crisis.
Weaver said Tuesday she didn’t want another switch that could stoke fears and anxieties among the city's 100,000 residents over water quality.
Today, state and federal officials say Flint's water meets drinking water standards, but residents are encouraged to use filters because of the lingering threat of spikes in lead levels. More than 800 water service lines have been replaced, but the city expects to examine a total of 18,000 for possible replacement over the next three years.
The plan unveiled Tuesday was also designed to keep a lid on large water rate increases in the future and plow outside funding as well as cost savings into the improvement of Flint's water distribution system. Estimates peg the city's water losses at 35% to 40% of all of the supply brought into the city through leaks and other problems.
Officials at the GLWA said they expect water rate increases to be about 4% a year. The system also plans a reexamination of its rate structure, which could reduce water bills in Flint, officials said.
The GLWA took over operations for the Detroit water system at the beginning of this year. It provides wholesale water and waste water services to 127 municipalities in seven southeast Michigan counties and about 3.9 million customers.
Buy Photo Crews work on finding the water main to replace the lead service line from the main to the valve box with a copper line for two houses on Welch Blvd. in Flint on Monday March 21, 2016 as part of Flint Mayor Karen Weaver's Fast Start program to remove Flint's lead-contaminated lines from 30 Flint homes. (Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press)
Water system officials said they could not guarantee future water rates for Flint residents, who pay some of the highest rates in the country. But they expect those rates to remain stable this year and experience only modest increases during the life of the 30-year contract.
Flint's water woes started in 2010 when the Karegnondi Water Authority incorporated to provide and distribute water from Lake Huron to Flint and other surrounding communities in Genesee County and beyond. The City of Flint signed on to the new system in 2013 and pledged to help cover the construction costs.
The authority began a $270-million project to build new pipelines and pumping stations. Flint intended to buy water from the KWA and treat the water at a city plant.
But in the midst of an acrimonious dispute over water rates, Flint left the old Detroit system early before the KWA was complete. That early exit prompted the city to rely on poorly treated water from the Flint River.
If Flint had tried to pull out of the KWA today without a deal, Genesee County officials have said financial consequences could have been catastrophic for the city. The KWA, which would be stuck with Flint’s share of the debt for the $285-million project, would have been able to seize the city’s water treatment plant and other assets, plus 25% of the city’s constitutional revenue-sharing payments from the state, county officials said.
The new deal offers additional benefits, the mayor said.
“Sticking with GLWA allows us to use federal dollars from the Drinking Water Revolving Fund Program to update the city’s damaged water distribution system, which is aging and deteriorating,” Weaver said Tuesday. “This option would also result in the 72-inch transmission line being returned to the city, and residents would also gain access to a low income assistance program to help pay their water bills."
Flint however remains ultimately responsible for its 28-year, $7-million average annual bond obligation to the Karegnondi Water Authority starting this November.
But the burden of that debt service will be completely offset through credits Flint will receive from GLWA. Those credits will be based upon transfer of the city's raw water rights to GLWA. The Great Lakes Water Authority will also secure a new backup supply for its customers through the KWA, officials said.
"For decades, the utility struggled to find a solution to create affordable redundancies in the system," GLWA Chief Executive Officer Sue McCormick wrote in a letter to her customers Tuesday.
Officials at KWA say they don't expect to take a major financial hit from the loss of one of its biggest expected customers if Flint's proposed move goes through.
"The way this is structured, it doesn't affect KWA," said Jeff Wright, the KWA chief executive and Genesee County drain commissioner.
Initial reaction to the deal appeared positive in Lansing.
Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, R-West Olive, said the number of key leaders signing on to the plan was encouraging.
"I haven’t reviewed it yet," Meekhof said. "I’m hopeful that it’s a good sign that they’ve come to a consensus on a good product to make sure the citizens are served safely.”
Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich, D-Flint, praised the concept of the deal as he awaited details.
"We have a reliable water source, a source we’ve used for 40 years, except for the couple of years that the emergency manager switched us over to Flint River water. It’s reliable. We have a backup source now with KWA," Ananich said. "It seems like this is a move for long term stability."
But if the parties had done this four or five years ago, Ananich said, "all these problems wouldn’t have happened. It’s really frustrating because it shows you the failings of the emergency manager law and the fact that people don’t have a voice."
He added that "there still will be skepticism back home because there have been so many lies told to them. But overall, this is positive for us to have a reliable water source.”
Contact Matthew Dolan: 313-223-4743 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @matthewsdolan.
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Girlfriend, family of man found dead in Westfield mall still in the dark https://t.co/9aajSC40Zn via @jonahowenlamb pic.twitter.com/MzUNEcMxDU — SF Examiner (@sfexaminer) October 7, 2016
Nearly two months after a San Francisco chef was found dead under suspicious circumstances in a downtown shopping center, his passing remains an apparent mystery — much to the dismay of his girlfriend, who suggests that mall management is engaged in a cover-up of his slaying.
You likely recall the situation: On Wednesday, August 10, a male victim of what at the time the San Francisco Police Department termed a homicide was discovered at Union Square-area Westfield Centre at 10:15 that morning.
That deceased male turned out to be 28-year-old San Francisco resident Frank Galicia, a line chef at the Michelin-starred restaurant Sons & Daughters on Nob Hill. Six days later, the SFPD said that Galica's death in a mall stairwell had been reclassified from a homicide to "suspicious," with police spokesperson Officer Giselle Talkoff saying “At the moment, it doesn’t appear to be a homicide, but it doesn’t appear to be a natural death either."
According to Galicia's girlfriend, that "moment" has stretched to today, with police keeping mum on their investigation of her partner's passing.
Speaking with the SF Examiner, Ariel Mittag-Degala says that police "won’t tell me anything" regarding the case.
At a memorial outside the mall that contained a sign reading "Westfield Mall, HIS LIFE or Your Reputation?," Mittag-Degala says that "she believes there is no way her boyfriend was searching for drugs or died by suicide in that stairwell," the Ex reports.
"Instead, Mittag-Degala thinks he was robbed and killed in a dangerous stairwell with little security, a fact she says mall owners would rather keep quiet."
Mittag-Degala, who had been dating Galicia for three weeks when he died, says she was with him the night before his body was discovered. In fact, she didn't learn of his passing until she called police when she didn't hear from him as she expected the next day. After requesting a well-being check, she says police took her to the Hall of Justice for questioning, and only later did she learn that they had found Galicia's remains that morning.
“They were asking me everything that I could give them,” she recalled. “I didn’t realize that morning that they had found the body in the mall.”
When contacted by SFist, a spokesprson for Westfield Center declined to address Mittag-Delaga's allegations, sending us the same statement they sent the Examiner
“The Centre is cooperating fully with the San Francisco Police Department in its investigation and asks anybody with information to contact the SFPD,” the statement reads.
“Since this remains an active investigation, SFPD has requested that any reporter inquiries are directed to the SFPD media relations office.”
A call to SFPD's media relations department was not returned as of publication time.
According to the Examiner, "Galicia’s cause or manner of death has yet to be classified by the Medical Examiner’s Office." But Mittag-Delaga maintains that Galicia "had turned a corner in a major way,” as "he’d met a girl."
“I know he didn’t want to die."
Previously: Body Found At Westfield Centre
Westfield Mall Homicide Victim ID'd As Sons & Daughters Chef
Chef's Body Found In Westfield Mall Reclassified As Suspicious Death, Not Homicide |
In 1997, the video game Frogger was released on multiple platforms for the day for the first time since 1981. While high end graphical versions, at the time at least, were given a lukewarm reception on both the PC and the Sony Playstation, one version of the game was released quietly to little fanfare. Released on October 6th, 1998, this version of Frogger would be the final game released on a now outdated system, the Super Nintendo.
It is strange to think that the final game ever hitting American shores was an updated remake of a game from 1981, but history is sometimes funny like that. With the Super Nintendo, one of the most popular video game consoles of all time, ceasing production earlier that year, it was only a matter of time that the final game released for the system would come to pass. We see that happen constantly; often the final game released for consoles receives recognition for being the last of it’s kind, whether it is Wario’s Woods for the original NES, to Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 for the Playstation 2, the final game released often has a dubious distinction of being the end of a generation for console players.
I doubt, however, anyone would believe that, in 2013, the Super Nintendo would be graced with one more new release, in the hands of a non-licensed Nintendo product. That game is called Nightmare Busters.
Now before we get into Nightmare Busters itself, we first need to address something regarding the classic game market. In the past decade, second-hand gaming has become a whole sub-genre of the gaming industry in and of itself, with the trading and collecting of classic games and consoles being a common practice found in most hardcore collector circles. Many have become savvy to the fluctuating prices of video games and systems, making the hobby of game collecting and restoration expensive, but worthwhile due to the interactivity one has with their product.
So popular is game collecting, we see many YouTube personalities tout their collections online, or produce video series about bargain hunting and game collecting tips. Famous collectors such as Pat the Nes Punk, the GameSack crew, and Game Chasers have not only shared their tips and thoughts with players, but have become major staples of entertainment and advice regarding video game collecting. Through all of this, rare games, imports, and reproduction carts have become big business, and gaming enthusiasts have been paying top dollar for a piece of nostalgia they can call their own.
This also includes the robust homebrew markets out there. Gaming platforms, from the Sega Dreamcast to the Sony PSP, are often notorious for being bastions of homebrewed titles, some often released wide by small-time developers. Redspotgames, a homebrew developer from Germany, is famous for releasing titles on the Sega Dreamcast since 2007, such as Rush Rush Rally and Last Hope. The subculture of homebrewed titles has slowly grown into a niche, independent market for game collectors—one that is often ignored by the AAA gaming public.
This trend is also crossing over into the mainstream. This year, a game titled Sydney Hunter and the Caverns of Death was kickstarted, being touted as an independent NES and SNES game. While we see homebrew titles and classic game hacks floating the internet all the time, Sydney Hunter is among, if not the first, to push for a commercial release. It is possible that the trend of homebrew or independent games may flood the secondary market of retro-styled consoles, which in turn would change game development further, making new Nintendo titles a possibility.
Reproduction cartridges are also rather common now a days, often creating new experiences for the gaming public, from translated Famicon cartridges to non-region locked NES and SNES titles. Beta games have been also recreated, often thrown into cartridges with several other betas that can balloon to prices as high as $150.00 for their creation. Nightmare Busters, however, is a bit different than the average independent reproduction cartridge.
Nightmare Busters, for one, is an actual unreleased game from the SNES days. Often found in emulators across the Internet, this devilishly dark shoot em up was originally developed by a small European studio, Arcade Zone, who had previously worked on the game Legend for the SNES. The title was to be published by the Japanese company Nichibustu, for a 1995 release, but the game was cancelled. The only known evidence of its existence includes a lone screenshot of the game in an issue of Nintendo Power, Vol. 68, as a part of the 1995 preview of upcoming games.
Unlike most abandoned titles, Nightmare Busters was reworked into a game called Flynn’s Adventures, a phone game in 2004 by the company In-Fusio. A review of the game was actually done by Gamespot in 2004, giving it a fairly high grade for a phone game at the time. Then, in 2007, a rom of the SNES title was discovered and subsequently released to the Internet for emulation. The rom was mostly complete, with the game’s levels intact and co-op play possible. For the next few years, two of the original designers of Nightmare Busters, Christope Gayraud and Jean-Christophe Alessandri, have worked with the independent development studio at Super Fighter Team to refine the game even further, finish the title, and subsequently give the game a full release.
Super Fighter Team is well known to many gaming aficionados for the developers behind Beggar Prince, a Sega Genesis RPG released back in 2006. Since then, Super Fighter Team has done several reworks of classic games and released many of them back into the market as full-fledged, non licensed, titles for their respected systems. Nightmare Busters is just the latest of several games now released by Super Fighter Team, and in all likelihood, not the last either.
The history of Nightmare Busters is truthfully one of the most interesting aspects about the game, which in and of itself is a stylish run-and-gun shoot’em up in the vein of Ristar. Controlling the Leprechauns Flynn and Floyd, you basically shoot everything that moves, avoid obstacles, and use your hand-eye coordination to maximum effect. What helps the game stand out is the very “European animation” the graphics have, which were high end, even back in 1994 when the game was first revealed.
It helps that the gameplay is simple and straightforward as well. Most run and gun games have mechanics designed to challenge the player, usually through various enemies weak to certain projectiles, and Nightmare Busters is no exception. Instead of opting for super weapons and homing missiles, you have playing cards and magic at your disposal, which you can cycle through to tackle the game’s many obstacles in your path. You also get a “super charge” attack that makes you invincible from harm for a moment, but limited charges prevent you from spamming the ability.
There really is little else to say about the title other than its presentation is solid, the gameplay addictive, and the challenge fun. If one didn’t know the rather unique history behind Nightmare Busters, it probably would just be seen as one of now two non-licensed Super Nintendo games for the SNES library out in the wild. Thankfully, the care and crafting done by Super Fighter Team have distinguished Nightmare Busters onto a different level; one that is certainly worth a look if you have the money to burn for something unique for your SNES library.
A platforming challenge with solid run and gun gameplay is certainly a hallmark of the era. While many may see the simplicity and the length of Nightmare Busters as a step back from more modern conventions, the game wears its classic roots proudly as a badge of honor. For classic game players, it is definitely worth some space on your shelf, although getting a hold of a copy will be difficult. While Super Fighter Team has printed a second (and likely final) wave of the game, with pre-orders now unavailable, it will still be difficult to get a copy.
Still, Nightmare Busters represents something more in gaming than just a collector’s piece now; it represents how lost titles can be made new again. If Nightmare Busters is any indication, it proves that even with a console being long past its prime, good games can still be published for them years later. The passion and dedication put forth to release, or in some cases re-release, these titles is a part of gaming culture rarely covered, but one that those looking for it never forget.
I hope you enjoyed Games You Never Heard of This Week. We are back on schedule now, so if you have any questions, comments, or requests, please leave them below! You can also shoot me a message on twitter @LinksOcarina. See you next time.
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The sticker seems to have struck a chord with Facebook users. Picture: Traffic and Highway Patrol Command — NSW Police Force Facebook
The sticker seems to have struck a chord with Facebook users. Picture: Traffic and Highway Patrol Command — NSW Police Force Facebook
IF there's one thing people get fired up about, it's people who drive too slow in the right hand lane.
So it's no surprise that when The Traffic and Highway Patrol Command - NSW Police Force Facebook page shared an image of this car's sticker, it struck a chord.
The car was photographed on Friday on The Northern Road, Penrith, NSW.
The post, which they hashtagged "hadenough", has attracted 2.3k likes and over 160 comments - many of the comments passionately echoing the driver's frustration with slow right lane drivers.
But not everyone was a fan of the sticker.
"I'm tipping he'd be one of the muppets who tailgates within 0.5 seconds while drivers ARE actually overtaking, giving them a dose of high beam," wrote one Facebook commenter.
"Don't get me wrong, I'm all for better enforcement of this rule, and I'll keep the hell out of lane 3 on the M4 as much as possible. But, if I'm out there passing a vehicle and I'm pushing a GPS-verified number that's damn close to the limit, just chill till we are both past the slower guy, yeah? I'll move over when we're clear. Then you can get back to your 130km/h."
Some others pointed out that for the sticker to be effective it would actually have to be written in reverse script on the bonnet so slow right lane drivers could see it in their rear vision mirrors.
The Facebook post seems to have reignited the "slow in the right lane" issue that so many people are fired up about.
Lena Kasparian had an uncomfortable chat with Sam Armytage on the Sunrise program following her rant. Source:YouTube
Earlier this month Sydney mum Lena Kasparian was fined $300 by NSW Police on the weekend for driving too slowly in a right-hand overtaking lane.
In NSW on roads of two or more lanes where the speed limit is greater than 80km/h, motorists must not drive in the right-hand lane unless they are overtaking, turning right, avoiding an obstacle, driving in congested traffic or are otherwise instructed by road signs.
After being pulled over by police for the violation, Kasparian recorded herself ranting about the "absolutely disgusting behaviour" of NSW Police and uploaded the video to Facebook.
Her comments drew the ire of countless social media users who blasted her for failing to observe the road rules.
The post went viral and she was subsequently interviewed on Sunrise, where host Sam Armytage could barely hide her disdain for the woman.
Kasparian kicked off the interview by giving a shoutout to the "trolls" who have been bullying her on Facebook.
"Had I known [it was going to go viral] I would have at least dressed up and put some makeup on my face and made sure I looked pretty good," the Sydney mum said.
The interview then suffered a technical difficulty which Armytage took advantage of to throw her first barb at Kasparian.
"Sorry Lena, we've got problems with our satellite link to you," the Sunrise co-host said.
"We might try and go back to you because I want to hear what you've got to say because it is illegal and it's very annoying when people drive slowly in the right-hand lane." |
A two and a half hour roundtable discussion on the state of Vancouver Whitecaps and Canadian Soccer? Yes please! But don’t worry, you don’t have to listen to it all in the one sitting because we’ve split Sunday’s mammoth CiTR radio show into two podcasts.
Your usual AFTN hosts are joined by Jay Duke to chat about all things Whitecaps, Canadian Premier League, and the recent 2026 World Cup bid. The ‘Caps chat is in today’s podcast, and the World Cup and Canadian PL one will be coming on Thursday.
In this first podcast, we look at the current state of the team, what areas need to be strengthened, who should move on, formations, tactics, how the season might play out and much more.
We’re also joined by ‘Caps keeper David Ousted for our new segment of the show – ‘Me, My Shelf, and I’ – as the Dane chats about his favourite books, author, and what he’s currently reading.
Have a listen!
You can download and/or listen to this, and all previous, episodes of the podcast on the following services:
iTunes.
iPhone App
Google Play
Our CiTR Radio Show Page
Podbean.
Stitcher Radio Network.
Or after all that, you could just listen on the player below! |
There are some lessons as a writer that one learns over and over. One that keeps coming around again and again for me is this: What some people love most about a book or story will be the SAME THING that other people hate the most.
I first learned this as an editor. I’ve edited over 100 anthologies of erotic short stories for Circlet Press and many other publishers. In these I was often culling through a slush pile of dozens–sometimes hundreds–of submissions, trying to find stories that were a fit. Every editor looks for stories that are both of publishable quality AND which meet that editor’s particular taste. But there were times when a story would be on the bubble, when for some reason I didn’t outright reject it but didn’t accept it right away either.
These “bubble” stories were often ones where I had doubts, where something made me question either my taste or whether the story was truly a “fit”–and yet I didn’t reject them right away. More often than not I “took a chance” and published the story anyway, despite my reservations. My instincts were trying to tell me something. I would rationalize it as, well, in an anthology with a dozen stories, you want variety, you want a panoply of style and theme… but almost always these “questionable” stories would turn out to be the ones that people loved the most.
Invariably what I found was that if there was a story I was questioning, but my instinct made me pick it anyway, it would be the one story that got singled out for praise by reviewers and literary critics. It would be the one story that got fan mail, the one where customers on Amazon wrote “this story was worth the price of admission.”
Interesting, no?
Same thing in my MFA writing workshops in grad school. The stories or chapters or poems that the class argued the most about–meaning some of the students hated it and some loved it–were often the ones I was sure were actually the best stories. I found myself sometimes taking a fellow student aside and telling them, essentially, don’t let the haters get you down. Sometimes you walk out of a workshop feeling like the life’s been beaten out of you because the reaction was so negative from other students. “Don’t feel bad,” I’d say. “Getting a rise out of them is the proof that you’re actually onto something, you’re writing is actually working. When the story doesn’t work, nobody really cares.” The writers by and large who were able to take that negative feedback as a positive sign were the ones who went on to publish and have careers as pros. The ones who were too discouraged to keep going…didn’t.
As I was saying yesterday when I posted about the starred review in Publishers Weekly my most recent book (TAKING THE LEAD) received, the reviews for my first book from a major publisher, Black Feathers from HarperCollins, were mixed. The reviewer for PW back in the day didn’t like my “sinless creations” and found them only for “people who don’t like sex.” Presumably the stories were simply too consensual for his taste, but that was the very thing that others (and readers) found so fresh and enticing about my work.
Nowadays, the place many writers take their beatings is in public, on Goodreads and on Amazon, where anyone can rate and review a book, even if they didn’t read it. (No really, go look at the huge number of one-star reviews that say things like “I will never read a book by this author because ____________”. Punitive one-star reviews, where reviewers down-vote everything by an author because they don’t like something they said on Twitter, or because they’re down-voting everything with gay characters, or whatever other blanket reason they’re acting out on the Internet, are not the ones to pay heed to, and not the ones I’m taking about here.)
Online reviews on places like Yelp tend to fall into the love it or hate it category. People don’t bother to review a restaurant unless they had a fantastically noteworthy meal or such a horrible one they have to vent. But with books it’s a little different. Amazon nags you to review everything you buy from them, no matter how you felt about it, so that evens things out somewhat. And Goodreads becomes a place where people review everything on their shelf for multiple reasons: they love books, they love to talk about books, they love to network with other people who love books, they want the points or cred they seem to get for having lots and lots of books on their GR shelf, they like the sense of accomplishment of reading lots of books and rating/reviewing on GR gives a concrete way of tracking and sharing that info, etc. etc. Book people have always liked talking about books–that’s part of what makes us book lovers in the first place.
Several high-profile authors took to Twitter recently posting screenshots and quotes from their one-star Amazon reviews, some even making videos of themselves reading them aloud, and the results were predictably hilarious. Check out this compilation below of sf/fantasy authors from Gollancz doing it:
There are of course some one-star reviews that just make you giggle, like one that said the reviewer’s dog had chewed up the book so they DNF’d it (“Did Not Finish”) or where the customer just seems like a total nutjob. Books aren’t the only things getting this treatment, check out this piece in Mother Jones about one-star Yelp reviews for places like The Grand Canyon. One called the desert “too hot,” while another was angry that at Badlands “the mud wasn’t even differently colored layers… It was brown.” (I confess I’ve written TripAdvisor reviews for things like the glaciers we saw in Alaska. “A+++ glacier, very icy. Would visit again.”)
But this interest in one-star reviews got me reading more of them, not the hilarious ones or the punitive ones, but the ones where people really seemed earnestly angry or upset about a book. And not surprisingly, I found the same phenomenon as in my editing work: The five-star reviews, the critics in trade publications, they would praise something about a book that made the book stand out to them…and those exact same elements would be the things called out in the one-star reviews.
I just finished a book I found delightful, Courtney Milan’s The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister Book 1) , with 906 reviews on Amazon (and happens to be FREE to download for Kindle at the moment). It’s historical romance, so it runs in some very very familiar tracks, and yet it felt fresh and new to me in many ways. For example, the wedding night scene I loved so much for being so daringly realistic–leading to a scorchingly believable honeymoon of sex and debauchery–was called out by some Amazon reviewers as “disgusting” and “disappointing.” What!! I couldn’t believe it.
The reviews for The Duchess War are overwhelmingly positive, 82% are 4 or 5 stars, what about the 27 people who wrote the one star reviews? I couldn’t believe people could possibly gripe about this book I found wonderful. But some did. Most of them boiled down to either “this wasn’t what I expected” or “this wasn’t what I wanted.” Those are perfectly legitimate reasons for a buyer to give a one-star review–and those one-star reviews are helpful to other customers who may share the same tastes–in particular on how closely their tastes hew to what has come before. Because ultimately the elements that were picked out for complaint were the same things I loved about the book!
What was wonderful to me about THE DUCHESS WAR was how it broke out of the mold of historical romance while still–for me–fulfilling the feelings I want from a historical. But for some people, stray too far from the mold and it no longer fits what they were looking for. When you go into a pizzeria, maybe you’re delighted to find they’ve got some unique topping (mango! smoked salmon! walnuts!) or maybe your stomach is turned (gross!!) or it might be good but it’s not “pizza” to you, doesn’t satisfy your craving for what you want. As writers we’re being told constantly that we have to do something new, “be creative!” and escape cliche, but the moment you do you risk disappointing readers. Perhaps it’s important to remember two truisms about writing: 1) you can’t please all the people all the time, and 2) the most important reader to please is yourself.
In my own books the majority of my one-star reviews for years and years were a clear indicator I was doing something right. They fell into two categories:
1) There was TOO MUCH SEX in this book
2) This book gave me gay cooties.
A recent one-star review of Slow Surrender gripes: “Hands down the worst book I’ve ever read. Not even 10 pages in and there’s a sexual scene.” One-hundred percent true: if I can’t get my characters into a sexual situation in the first chapter, I don’t consider what I’m writing erotica. (Btw, in the “sexual scene” on page ten our hero never touches the heroine and no one’s clothes come off. In case you were wondering how a book called “Slow Surrender” jibes with the sexual interaction starting right away.) That reviewer was at least factually correct, though. So are the ones like an Audible reviewer who wrote about The Prince’s Boy “>The Prince’s Boy: “Oy every chapter has sex. It was too much.”
Again it comes back to reader expectations and taste. Some people love spicy food, but what’s the right amount of spice for one person is too much for another–and that’s okay. FWIW, I’m pretty sure every “ZOMG TOO MUCH SEX” review I get convinces more people to buy than not-to-buy. For every one of those, there are several of the five-star “ZOMG FINALLY ENOUGH SEX” variety. What one person hates, another will love. (Likewise with the “ZOMG cliffhanger” reviews for Slow Surrender. A majority of the one-star reviews felt –rightly– that they weren’t warned that the book was not a stand-alone and HATED the cliffhanger. I felt that was the publisher’s fault for not marketing the book truthfully, though, and after the initial spate of “I hate cliffhangers” reviews, they died down because people who hate cliffies were then steering clear of the book. So the reviews worked as they should have, as a matchmaking tool. Also I couldn’t help but note that these reviewers felt EXACTLY like the heroine does–jilted, heartbroken, angry, ready to lash out, unprepared for what happened. Hmmmm. I think not only were readers justifiably angry about not being warned, it’s not a coincidence that they felt exactly like Karina. The writing worked.)
As for the accusations about “gay cooties,” I take it as a compliment if my writing was powerful enough that it brought anyone’s latent homosexuality to the fore. In fact, that’s another thing I see where there are positive reviews, too, often of the type: “I thought gay sex would turn me off but this book was so good I found myself appreciating it and curious to read more.”
These days with BDSM still being a growing trend, I get a lot of reviews of the “BDSM was too extreme for me” coupled with the “I thought this BDSM would be too much but I actually liked it.”
So what are the lessons I learned from reading one-star reviews? There are two.
The first is don’t let one-star reviews convince you to conform. The flower that sticks out is the one that gets noticed. The thing that feels like a mistake is going to be the thing that makes a difference. Don’t be afraid to break the mold. Some people will always hate it, but probably far more will love it.
The second is that it’s far more important to write something that moves people than to write something no one cares about. If you write something that people absolutely love there will always be people who hate it, too. The only way to write something that no one hates is either to write something so innocuous it gets no reviews at all, or not to write at all. So, I’ll keep writing books that provoke.
(Don’t forget TAKING THE LEAD, my next rock star BDSM romance, releases on January 26th, meanwhile the Magic University box set is only on sale until February 1st! Oh, and it looks like Hachette just put Slow Surrender on 99 cents sale! Grab it while you can!) |
Pardon is the exemption of a convict from punishment for a criminal conviction. It is normally granted by the grace of the executive of a government. Providing pardon in a criminal offense terminates the criminal liability of the person. All restrictions that result from a criminal conviction will be terminated. However, a pardoned person is not exonerated from the civil liability that a crime may have incurred.
The U.S. constitution provides pardoning power to the President for all federal crimes. The federal constitution does not authorize the President to release a person from the effects of impeachment. The President has the power to grant conditional pardons; to commute sentences; to remit fines and forfeitures; and to grant amnesty by proclamation. This power can be exercised at any time after the offense has been committed, before conviction or afterwards, and even after sentence of imprisonment has been served. The pardons issued by the President cannot be limited or controlled in any way by legislative action[i]. In most of the states, the governor has the same pardoning power regarding state crimes. However, the governor can not grant pardon to persons convicted of treason or criminal contempt of court[ii].
The U.S. constitution limits the pardoning power of the executive. Under the limits of the constitution, the power to pardon extends to every offense committed against the government. However, pardon is not provided to offenses committed against the state. An executive does not have the power to pardon a private wrong. Even if a criminal act is pardoned, the civil liability of the wrongdoer cannot be written off.
In some states, the constitution provides that a pardon can only be provided for criminal offenses. In such states, the governors are not authorized to provide a pardon to a person who is a holder of a license from an administrative cancellation.
Generally, in most of the jurisdictions, statutes limit the power to pardon particular offenses. This is mostly provided in cases such as violent crimes and sex offenses. In some states, “no early release acts” are instituted. Statutes and the state constitution can preclude a pardons board from changing a death sentence or life sentence without parole possibility to any different sentence. No early release act normally applies to aggravated assault offenses. Such acts are strictly construed in the states.
The pardoning power of the executive does not provide relief to defendants from judgments that are rendered in impeachment proceedings. The U.S. constitution and most of the state constitutions exclude granting of pardon for persons convicted in impeachment proceedings.
Governors of the states are not authorized to provide pardon to persons convicted of treason[iii]. But in some jurisdictions, governors can grant reprieves in treason cases until the end of the next legislature. The power of pardoning would be vested in the legislature. When the case is presented, the legislature can pardon, direct execution of the sentence, or grant full reprieve to the treason convict. In circumstances where the legislature fails or refuses to make disposition of such case, the governor can direct enforcement of the sentence at such time and place.
The President of the U.S. has the power to grant pardons in criminal contempt of court cases. The power is provided by the U.S. constitution. If there is a clear expressed authorization of the executive pardon, it can be granted to the offending party if punished[iv].
In some states, courts do not consider criminal contempt an offense for which pardon can be granted by the governor under the constitution[v]. Under some jurisdictions, courts state that pardon should not be granted for civil contempt because civil and criminal contempt are not the same[vi]. In some states, the pardoning power of the executive is upheld because contempt of court is an offense against the state and not an offense against the judge personally. Therefore, in contempt of court cases, the state will be the offended party and the executive can grant pardon to the offender based on its discretion.
[i] Jamison v. Flanner, 116 Kan. 624 (Kan. 1924).
[ii] People ex rel. Robin v. Hayes, 163 A.D. 725 (N.Y. App. Div. 1914).
[iii] Ferguson v. Wilcox, 119 Tex. 280 (Tex. 1930).
[iv] United States v. Grossman, 1 F.2d 941 (D. Ill. 1924).
[v] Parker v. State, 135 Ind. 534 (Ind. 1893).
[vi] In re West Wildwood, 42 N.J. Super. 282 (Ch.Div. 1956). |
Worst-Paying College Degrees of 2012
By Alida Moore, PayScale.com
In these days of rising tuition costs and ballooning student debt, some students choose college majors that will put them on a path to earning a high salary once they graduate. But not every major leads to a big paycheck, and not every student chases monetary rewards.
Based on data in its “2012-13 College Salary Report," online salary database PayScale.com compiled the following list of the worst-paying degrees of 2012. Why would anyone pursue one of these degrees if salaries are notoriously low in these fields? “According to our research, people in these majors typically believe their work makes the world a better place,” says PayScale’s lead analyst Katie Bardaro.
Curious as to which majors fall to the bottom for salary but often pay back in instrinsic rewards? Take a look:
Child and Family Studies
Median Annual Salary: $37,700
Many families are struggling in our current economy. Parents working multiple jobs to stay afloat financially might require assistance to ensure their children get the best opportunities in school. A child and family studies major often works as an advocate for such families, providing parents with the resources they need to help their children succeed.
Find child life specialist jobs.
Social Work
Median Annual Salary: $45,300
Social work is a major for those who care deeply. A career in this field, while not necessarily lucrative, offers a wide variety of workplace choices, including schools, nursing homes, hospitals and government agencies. This major is ideal for those who are champions for social justice.
Find social worker jobs.
Elementary Education
Median Annual Salary: $46,000
Many have called teaching one of the most rewarding professions of all. It’s no secret, however, that teachers do not pull in the highest salaries. However, if you’re considering majoring in elementary education, location matters. “Elementary school teachers can earn more than the national median salary for teachers of $40,600 depending on the state in which they work,” Bardaro says. “Typically, teachers in California, Massachusetts and New York earn median annual salaries of around $65,000.”
Find elementary education jobs.
Human Development
Median Annual Salary: $47,800
Human development majors spend much of their time studying the growth and developmental changes that occur across the human life span. Students who major in this field can go on to careers in counseling, public policy.
Find jobs in human development.
Special Education
Median Annual Salary: $48,900
“It takes a special kind of heart to work in special education,” says Lindsey Childress, guidance counselor at a north Texas middle school. Special ed majors typically work with students who have severe developmental disorders or learning issues, a job that can be both taxing and highly rewarding. According to PayScale’s research, 83 percent of people who major in special ed believe their current work makes the world a better place. Could that reward be priceless?
Find special education jobs.
Culinary Arts
Median Annual Salary: $49,700
The scent of a delicious dinner can bring people together and relax them in a way that few other things can. Those in the culinary arts get the opportunity to create that experience for people again and again. Whether you want to do the cooking yourself or own your own restaurant, majoring in the culinary arts offers you some heart- and belly-warming career options.
Find culinary arts jobs.
Athletic Training
Median Annual Salary: $49,800
Have you ever been to a sporting event where an athlete gets injured and a group of people rush over to help? One of those people is likely to be an athletic trainer, the person who diagnoses, treats and works to prevent athletic injuries. While many athletic trainers work in high schools or colleges, others are employed by professional sports teams, physicians’ practices or the military.
Find athletic trainer jobs.
Source: Salary data provided by online salary database PayScale.com. Salary figures are for bachelor’s degree holders in a given major with at least 10 years of experience. “Job meaning” percentages are for all graduates with a bachelor’s degree in a given major. Salaries include any bonuses, commissions or profit sharing. Education data is from PayScale.com. |
Google is working with local officials in three more cities to plan potential fiber builds. Irvine, California, Louisville, Kentucky, and San Diego, California, are now among the cities that will get Google Fiber if they can set up a feasible plan with Google.
"[W]e’ll work with Irvine, Louisville and San Diego to conduct a detailed study of factors that affect construction, such as local topography, housing density, and the condition of existing infrastructure," Google said in its announcement today. "Meanwhile, cities will complete a checklist of items—such as providing a map of utility lines—that will prepare them for a large-scale fiber build."
There's no guarantee this will result in Google Fiber builds in all three cities, but that's the goal. Google Fiber's gigabit Internet service costs $70 a month, or at least $130 if you also buy TV service. Slow Internet service of just 5Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream is available without monthly service payments, but it requires a $300 construction fee. That can be made as a one-time payment or divided into $25 installments over 12 months.
Google Fiber is available in parts of Kansas City, Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Austin, Texas; and Provo, Utah. Builds are confirmed in Salt Lake City, Utah; San Antonio, Texas; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and Nashville, Tennessee. Several other cities besides the ones just announced today will get Google Fiber if they can meet Google's standards. |
Sunsets are a beautiful sight to witness. As the sun sinks into the horizon, it paints the clouds lovely colours of pink, purple, and gold. Especially in the right place, at the right time, sunsets can take your breath away.
If you’re in Taiwan and you’re looking for a fabulous spot to catch the sunset, these are what 【OWNRIDES suggests】!
Mountains
Mountains are some of the most ideal places to catch the sunset! Being on a higher altitude allows you an unobstructed view of the sunset. Moreover, the mountainsides are free of skyscrapers and other urban infrastructure that can block the view.
1. Alishan 阿里山
Alishan is located in Chiayi County, towards the southern end of Taiwan, between Taichung and Tainan. Alishan is a well-known place to catch the sunrise and sunset – the former being more popular. Still, the sights from this mountain are so stunning, we could not leave it out. Also, if you catching the sunset has the added benefit of not needing to wake up at 3 or 4am!
2. Guanshan 關山
Guanshan is located on the southern tip of Taiwan. We highly recommend for you to take a one day tour of the picturesque Kenting coast, before ending your day with a view of the sunset at Guanshan.
Guanshan rose to international fame when CNN dubbed it one of the “12 Superb Sunset Spots Around The World”. Locals will not hesitate to agree.
Seaside
The seaside is another amazing place to catch the sunset. The gentle ocean breeze and the sounds of crashing waves makes this experience therapeutic and romantic.
3. Baisha Beach 白沙灣海灘
Baisha Beach, also located along the Kenting coastline, looks so picturesque, you’d think it came straight out of a movie. And you’d be right! Baisha Beach was one of the iconic areas where the popular Taiwanese film, Cape No 7, was filmed. The sunset here at Baisha Bay will indeed make you feel like you’re in a movie.
4. Tamsui Fisherman’s Wharf 淡水漁人碼頭
Tamsui Fisherman’s Wharf, unlike Baisha, is not a beach but a port. Nonetheless, it is well-known for the beautiful and romantic sunsets and scenery. The Lovers’ Bridge is especially popular.
Moreover, Tamsui is located a short distance from Taipei, in New Taipei City, which makes this spot more convenient if you’re living in the capital city. Also, near the Wharf, there is the charming Tamsui Old Street, where you can shop and eat after the sunset.
The last – but not least – area on our list is Cingjing Farm.
5. Cingjing Farm 清境農場
Although it is, technically speaking, on a mountainside, Cingjing Farm is a little different. Located in Taichung but far from the city, Cingjing is often a rural getaway for city dwellers. Although if you want to explore Cingjing within a day, it is entirely possible.
What makes the Cingjing sunset so special is the prime location of Cingjing Farm. It is far enough away from the city such that it is not affected by urban light pollution. This provides a more undisturbed view of the sunset. Moreover, after the sun fully sets, you are greeted with thousands upon thousands of twinkling stars, a sight which is equally stunning.
–
That sums up our【OWNRIDES suggests】for the top 5 places to catch the sunset in Taiwan. We hope you found this helpful! If you need help getting around Taiwan, be sure to check out our website to book a private driver!
Bye! |
The NRL has announced that Holden State of Origin III is sold out.
The final tickets for the decider, at Suncorp Stadium on July 12, were sold today.
"This will be arguably the most anticipated Origin clash in the history of the interstate contest, so it will be great to see the house full sign up," NRL CEO Todd Greenberg said.
"We have worked with Suncorp Stadium to maximise capacity. This sort of contest deserves to have as many people watching as possible."
Special extended coverage via host broadcaster Channel Nine will begin at 7pm in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide, and 5.30pm in Perth.
Tom Malone, Nine's Director of Sport, said: "With not even standing room left at Suncorp, the best and only place to watch The Decider will be exclusively live and free on Channel Nine. This is going to be the biggest game of rugby league ever."
Fans attending the game are encouraged to arrive early, avoid the queues at the gates and catch the curtain-raiser games, not to mention the spectacular pre-game entertainment program.
The pre-match entertainment, which includes a lights-out spectacular, a special tribute to Johnathan Thurston and a performance from Bernard Fanning, will commence at 7.30pm.
The national anthem will be sung by Paulini, star of The Bodyguard - The Musical.
To avoid delays, fans are encouraged not to bring a bag unless absolutely necessary and plan to arrive early to assist with the security process.
The free travel offer applies from four hours before the main game kicks off. Special services run regularly to the venue in the two hour period leading up to kick-off.
Fans are also reminded that a new Marketplace for Fans is available for Origin III, giving supporters the chance to buy re-sold tickets at their original price.
The new service is designed for people who legitimately can’t attend the event and want to recoup their ticket costs.
Fans who wish to use the service should visit https://stateoforigin.ticketek.com.au/ |
I wonder why Dong Nguyen might not be enjoying being in the spotlight thanks to his app Flappy Bird.
Strong language ahead.
@dongatory Your game is proper shit — Fludeh (@Fludeh) February 3, 2014
@dongatory HEY FUCK YOU AND YOUR BITCH ASS GAME. I HOPE YOU DROP YOUR PHONE IN THE FUCKING TOILET AFTER YOU TAKE A MASSIVE SHIT. — ☆Bridget☆ (@infinnitycory) February 5, 2014
@dongatory you are a fucking piece of shit for making flappy bird! That games is fucking stupid and pointless. Thanks your fucking faggot! — Kenneth Paul (@KennyBallard91) February 3, 2014
@dongatory you made a fucking horrible game i hope you die of fucking cancer you ugly Vietnamese piece of shit — Persist (@Persistos) February 1, 2014
@dongatory YA FLAPPY CUNT — James Battcock (@JamesBattcock) February 8, 2014
@dongatory thank fuck for that ya piece sookin cunt — Ryan (@davidryanson) February 8, 2014
@dongatory kess emek u and flappy birds im gonna kick u and that flying cunt — Vince Assaf (@vinceassaf) February 3, 2014
@dongatory wanker, shit game & stole ideas off other games #EatShit — Gino (@GinoCara) February 8, 2014
why havent you remove your fucking game you fucking cunt @dongatory — nigel. (@_TorokkumA) February 9, 2014
@dongatory PEOPLE DIE BCUZ OF YOU FUCK U AND UR LIFE — DYLVNJUR (@Dylanjur) February 9, 2014
Or maybe not.
Update: Hey, I wonder how people reacted when it got taken down.
@dongatory ur stupid as fuck you made 50k a day from that game and you just take it down…smh — iNeonFox (@iNeonFox2) February 9, 2014
@dongatory You Are Such An Ass Fuck.. But Thank You For Getting Rid Of A Sad Addiction. — Kasper (@_icexking_) February 9, 2014
@dongatory ok fuck you and fuck your game — Бійдяу Сояё (@Ibrahim9144) February 9, 2014
i hope @dongatory blows his brains out all over the jungle in his ass backwards piece of shit country — welp, (@welpcomma) February 9, 2014
@dongatory BITCH PUT THAT SHIT BACK ON — All Things Britt (@brittmilitia) February 9, 2014
@dongatory I will chop off your dick with your own hand that I will cut off with a chainsaw, then I will above it up your ass. DON'T DO IT. — × i want freedom × (@5foriegnbabes) February 9, 2014
…well. |
Building a Career in Film Editing
Career Advice from a Reddit Editor’s Thread
Inside The Edit goes Outside The Edit
Building a career as an Editor
Learning how to edit is one thing. Learning how to be an editor is another. Learning how to build a career in film editing, one that sees forward momentum and upward mobility is entirely another.
In this post I’ve drawn together some fantastic resources for editors, at all stages of their career, to help us all learn from one another about how to make and seize the opportunities we need.
If you’re after some ‘further reading’ on this topic, then I’d point you to a recent post in which I shared what I keep in my Freelance Editor’s Toolkit.
This includes four essential reads, that I would recommend to anyone working in creative industries, including a book on developing people skills, learning to negotiate and making your ideas happen. Check it out here.
Useful Advice for Anyone Working in the Film Industry
Start at the bottom. Learn protocols. Make connections. Become a PA, then an AE, THEN an editor. Trying to make the leap straight into editing from college won’t work out in most cases. You may have some short term success with smaller projects, but it won’t lead anywhere in the long run.
I was recently checking out the excellent Editors sub on Reddit when I came across this nearly 5000 word thread discussing the most common mistakes that people make when trying to break into working in the film industry, and how to avoid them.
All in all it contains some sage advice for anyone working in the industry, delivered by some professionals with decades of experience. You’d do well to read through the entire thread here.
The premise of the thread is established by CrewCutter15, who shares two common mistakes he sees recent college graduates and younger editors making when they’re trying to get into the business.
These are ‘not starting from the bottom’ and ‘pigeon holing’ themselves into only seeking to work in a specific niche, such as high-end feature films, when there are many other career options available to them.
Although there are always exceptions to any rule, I would agree that there is no shortcut to success. You simply have to do the miles in the chair to gain the experience you need to become a good editor.
I would agree with some other commentators in the thread that if you’re going to invest your time, energy and (a lack of) money in your career in the beginning, climbing the ladder one rung at a time, you at least want to try to pitch it against the wall you want to climb. (To strain an analogy).
By this I mean that if you’re going to start off as a runner in a post house and you plan to stick with that particular shop for some time, then you at least want to be interested in doing what they do. If you want to get into cutting commercials, then run at a commercial’s post house, not a reality TV place.
But at the beginning you often have to take what you can get!
A good editor is like a good barman, a good listener a good communicator and knows when to keep his mouth shut.
The top comment in response to the original post is from Mike3400 who has spent over 22 years working on all kinds of projects from feature films to documentaries to TV commercials and ‘about 1000 games shows’.
Mike shares some useful insights including simple ones like ‘keep your mouth shut’ – if you’ve signed an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) then keep it, to more complex ones like ‘become a people person’.
Mike suggests that you:
[develop] a personality that can take badly handled criticism, a willingness to try things you know won’t work just to share the process of exploring the footage together, a willingness to listen and empathise – far too often I’ve had people crying in my suite as their partner has just left them as a result of their obsession with their film and lack of attention at home. A good editor is like a good barman, a good listener a good communicator and knows when to keep his mouth shut.
One of the most important and complex parts of being an editor, especially on a high-pressure project, is to be able to manage the overlapping and conflicting personalities and preferences from those involved. This is often called ‘managing the room’.
As an editor you first need to be loyal to the director and their creative intent, whilst also adhering to the client/producer/executives requirements. Balancing all of these dynamics can be tricky, but a ‘personable personality’ goes a long way.
Or more simply put ‘don’t have an ego’, as Mellena puts it.
TipsyStatistic also follows up on the importance of this for long term success with this comment:
Having assisted some of the best in the business (features and commercials). The most common trait across all of them is how genuinely nice, chill, personable, and ego-less they are.
A lot of rookie editors will try to argue and get defensive when clients/directors/producers ask for changes. They get attached to a cut feel that their way is the right way. They resist trying something new or different. I think it’s natural, but I’ve spent a lot of time trying to be as nice and collaborative as possible because of the great ones I’ve seen in action.
Advice for Switching Industry Niche
Part of the thread also takes on the challenge of how to progress your career in the direction your really want it to go. What do you do once you’ve managed to build a life as an editor, but you’re not working on the kind of creative projects you’d like to be?
In one example Bored_Boring shares that after 6 years of working in LA they are struggling to create new connections to allow them to make the jump from one industry segment (e.g. reality to scripted) to another.
Former editor and current Show Runner Trinoculusfilms offers some practical wisdom on this topic, which if you read the full thread includes his own journey to making this leap:
Every good job you will ever get will be through knowing someone. You are approaching a difficult step in freelancing, the point where you must turn down work that’s not in the direction you want to go in order to hold out for something that fits in with your long term plan. This will probably make sustaining a high standard of living more difficult, especially as you return to lower-paying gigs and occasional freebies, but you have to know what your goals are, and make definitive steps to reach those goals.
Once you’ve reached the success of being a ‘working editor’ and managing to pay your way, an additional challenge to take on is building your career from that point forward.
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation editor Eddie Hamilton used to edit at the Paramount Comedy Channel 2 days a week so that he could afford to cut his first few features films for free in the rest of the week. Yes, for free!
Getting respectable credits under your belt, whether you were paid for working on them or not, goes a long way to helping you land those preferred projects later on. Eddie shares a ton of other very practical advice on his personal website, here.
On my first ten features there was no budget for an assistant editor. I was my own assistant. Digitizing, synching rushes, logging paperwork, cutting the film, doing playouts, creating EDLs and generally overseeing the entire post on the movie. That is how I learnt my craft. – Eddie Hamilton
Another way to tackle this is to edit short films or smaller ‘freebie’ projects in your own time to build up your reel with examples of the kind of work you want to be known for. This also helps to build connections in the industry, some of whom you’ll hopefully work with again in the future.
Advancing your Editing Career From Corporate Video To Music Videos
There’s a great interview with editor Taylor Tracy on the Frame.io blog, in which she shares plenty of great advice for editors at any stage of their career.
She talks about breaking into the industry, taking risks to advance, moving up the ladder and ultimately making the leap to freelancing.
“When it comes down to it,” she says, “you need to be brave in situations where you may be hesitant or scared. That’s how you move forward.”
It’s a fantastic read, and whatever stage of your career you happen to be in right now, you’ll definitely walk away with some wisdom.
“I’ve worked a lot with freelance editors, colorists and FX people,” she says. “The ones we tend to go back to are the ones who are always responsive, and who want to bring their own spin to the project. Make it a little fingerprint of their own style, but also be very conscious of what the director wants, and being adaptable to any notes that come in.”
Inside the Edit Goes Outside The Edit
Inside the Edit is an insanely detailed course on the craft of film editing, created by award winning British editor Paddy Bird.
I’ve previously reviewed Inside The Edit, in the posts below, and I included it as a core part of my ‘Alternative Film School for Editors‘ – a post in which I built a curriculum and equipment list that could help you kick start a career in film editing for under $10,000.
Learning the Craft of Film Editing | Inside The Edit Review | Alternative Film School for Editors
One of the main (and many) reasons the course is worth the money is that it teaches the WHY of film editing. Teaching you to know why to cut when you cut and how to know if it’s working. Not how to use the trim tool.
Outside The Edit is a whole new course from the team at ITE, in which they discuss ‘professional editing psychology’.
Episode 1 is entitled ‘The Next Level‘ and in it, Paddy tackles the question of “What do I do, once I’ve already achieved some success, to get to the place where I get to do what I really want to do.”
It’s a similar question to the one posed above about changing industry niche.
Paddy’s answer involves a mindset in which you:
Work on your weaknesses. It’s a really interesting point and it’s so often ignored.
Paddy also throws out a warning to us all, as creatives people:
New cognitive studies show that when you learn something, but you stop at a point, but you don’t actually push yourself to get better… over time your abilities can start to fade away.
Outside The Edit is a ‘new content stream’ that is free to all existing subscribers of Inside The Edit.
In each episode, Paddy talks through the essential secondary skills that are needed to build and sustain a successful career in high-end editing. This is not craft, this is professional edit psychology.
Future episodes will cover topics like:
Understanding the balance of power in an edit suite
How to work with difficult directors
How to achieve creative flow inside the cutting room
How to be positive, diplomatic and nurturing with clients
If you think Inside The Edit can help you take your editing career to the next level then save yourself 25% off the price of the course with the promo code: JONNYELWYN
Five Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started
In the introduction to my ebook on How To Be a Freelance Creative, I also share five things I wish I’d known when I started. I thought I’d share them here too, in the hope that you also find them useful.
1. As a freelancer you are an entrepreneur.
As your own boss you shape your own business and make your own success. I used to think though, that as an editor, I was very much at the end of a long chain of events that had to happen before I could get any work; first of all the client had to decide to make a film, then they had to decide to use a producer/director I knew, then that producer/ director had to decide to use me, if I was even available and up to the job.
It was only much later that I discovered how easily I could kick start that chain by pitching to potential clients directly and then either sharing the work with other freelancers or taking on more creative roles for myself.
There is nothing to stop you doing anything.
2. Raise your rates and ask for more money with every new client.
This is one of the simplest ways to increase your income, but for a long time I was nervous to try it.
Also, expect to be asked to offer a better deal, so always ask for more than you’d really be happy with, so you appear to be compromising on the rate. However, at the very start of your freelance career, take whatever you can get just to keep yourself in the game.
3. Sell enthusiastically.
Whenever you sell yourself and your services to your clients, do so with a confident smile. Always be sure to create genuine value for your clients along with a friendly relationship, and they will appreciate what you do for them so much more.
4. The ‘competition’ are your best community.
The more people you know who do exactly what you do the better. You can help them find work and they will help you back. These reciprocal relationships are vital.
5. Being freelance is much more fun than having a ‘real job’, as long as you don’t worry about money.
Getting to a place of not worrying about money definitely takes a few freelance miles to achieve but it is entirely possible. Hopefully some of the practical tips in this book will help you get there too. |
Britain's House of Commons has voted to legalize gay marriage in England and Wales. British MPs approved the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill by 366 votes to 161.
The bill will move onto the House of Lords, where it is expected to face opposition.
Several Tory MPs spoke out against the bill, which has caused tensions within the party. The Labour and Liberal Democrat leaderships backed the bill.
The latest YouGov poll for the Sunday Times found that 54% of Britons support “changing the law to allow same-sex couples to marry,” with over 53,000 civil partnership ceremonies have been carried out since their introduction in December 2005.
Conversely, only 45% of Tory supporters are in favor of changing the law and 48% oppose it, the survey showed.
British Prime Minister David Cameron hopes the bill will soon be enacted into law, with the first marriage ceremonies taking place by next summer.
Cameron is eager to force the bill's passage, in attempts to display his party’s liberal and progressive side, particularly following spending cuts and a lurch to the right on immigration policy, which a number of parties are pursuing following a recent surge in the UK Independence Party's popularity.
Grassroots conservatives have voiced opposition at Cameron and the bill, with conservative co-chairman Lord Feldman reportedly calling activists "mad, swivel-eyed loons."
Britain isn't the only country dealing with tensions surrounding equal rights for homosexuals. Earlier Tuesday, a French writer committed suicide in Notre Dame Cathedral after speaking out against France's recent legalization of gay marriage and adoption. Thousands of protesters took to the streets in the lead-up to the bill's approval.
Just four days ago, Orthodox anti-gay activists in Georgia broke through police cordons to reach gay rights advocates on the International Day Against Homophobia. Twenty-eight people were injured in the clashes.
Last week, Russian authorities turned down requests to hold a gay pride parade on May 25 and a gay rights rally on May 26 in Moscow. |
© The Associated Press Juvenile sex offenders head for a treatment program in California. Some states are beginning to change their laws for registering youthful sex offenders.
This story has been corrected to say that 15 states publish juvenile offenders’ names, addresses and photos on a website.
After years of establishing and strengthening sex offender registries, some states are rethinking policies allowing juveniles to be placed on them.
In states such as Oregon and Delaware, lawmakers have given judges more power to review who goes on the registry. In Pennsylvania, courts have ended lifetime registration for juveniles.
Driving the changes are concerns that putting juveniles’ names and photos on a registry—even one only available to law enforcement, as in some states—stigmatizes them in their schools and neighborhoods and makes them targets of police, sometimes for inappropriate behavior rather than aggressive crimes. Also of concern are laws that add youth sex offenders to adult registries once they turn 18 or 21, even though they were tried as juveniles, not adults.
Human Rights Watch in a 2013 report pointed to the case of a 10-year-old Michigan girl who served time after she and her younger brothers flashed one another in 1991. She was placed on the state’s adult registry when she turned 18. The report also cited a Texas juvenile court that convicted a 10-year-old of indecency with a child for touching a younger cousin—a crime resulting in lifetime registration.
Registries Vary
State laws requiring juveniles to register as sex offenders came into wide practice after Congress passed laws such as the 1996 Megan’s Law and the 2006 Adam Walsh Act, which were named in memory of children murdered by sex offenders. They were designed to better track sex offenders and make information easily accessible to law enforcement and the public. They sought more community notification and greater consistency among state registries.
Thirty-eight states now add juveniles to sex offender registries. The remaining 12 states only add the names of youths convicted in adult courts.
States with juvenile registries vary greatly in what they require. Fifteen states publish juvenile offenders’ names, addresses and photos on a website. In some states, youths may petition to have their name removed from a registry, although it can take more than a decade before they can begin the process. Some states add names to a registry for a set amount of time, while others keep offenders on the list until they die. As their photos are updated through the years, the offenders begin to look less like children and more like pedophiles.
Supporters of juvenile registries say they’re important for public safety, and serve an important purpose for families and victims. Opponents say the penalties are too harsh for children who have been intentionally kept out of adult court.
Nicole Pittman, director of the Center on Youth Registration Reform at Impact Justice, said registries are contrary to the concept of juvenile courts, which are based on the premise that children are more capable of change and should be shielded from the harsher consequences of adult court.
Research shows a child convicted of a sex crime, or an “adjudicated delinquent” in juvenile court, is not likely to commit another sex offense.
Although the recidivism rate for adult offenders is low, generally around 10 percent, youth sex-offender recidivism is usually less than 5 percent, said Elizabeth Letourneau, a professor with Johns Hopkins University and an expert on juvenile sex offenders.
She said registry policies don’t make sense because they’re applied across the board to people who are very unlikely to commit another offense. “A lot of them don’t know what they’re doing is wrong, but they learn that very quickly, though, once they’re going through the legal process,” Letourneau said.
She said the registries can have a scarlet letter effect on children. They tend to be more depressed and anxious than their peers, and have less stability because they are shuffled from school to school and family to family, she said.
Another concern: Even when someone is removed from a registry, the information can remain on nongovernmental sites for years. Even those who aren’t placed on public registries still may have to notify nearby schools or have a postcard sent to addresses within so many miles of their house.
Pittman said people often don’t see why children who aren’t on public websites are affected, but things like mailers are a big deal.
“When you think about a child’s life, that 3-mile radius is their life,” she said, which includes many of their friends, neighbors and classmates.
Pittman said that when people have access to an offender’s address, it is not uncommon for people to vandalize property or otherwise target the house. But because many offenses are carried out within the home, often between siblings or cousins, vigilantes aren’t just terrorizing the offender but often the victim, as well.
Registered children also are more likely to be targeted by police. Letourneau found registered children were more likely to get charged with new nonsexual offenses than juvenile offenders who were not required to register. Even with the increase in arrests, registered children were no more likely to be convicted of these new crimes than their nonregistered counterparts.
Advocates worry that the effects make it harder for children to be rehabilitated, something juvenile prosecutors may be aware of. Letourneau’s review of data from South Carolina found that prosecutors would plead children out on nonsexual charges, say from sexual assault to physical assault, after penalties increased. She said the number of plea deals skyrocketed after two federal laws were passed, one in 1994 that required registering people who commit sex crimes against children and the other in 1996 that required them to be added to a sex offender website.
Although many advocates say states shouldn’t have juvenile registries, they point to Oklahoma as having a better system than most.
Oklahoma’s juvenile registry is accessible only by law enforcement, and children are only considered for registration if a prosecutor determines that they might commit another offense and files an application to have them added to the registry when they are released from custody. Once released from treatment, the juvenile meets with two mental health professionals who report back to the court to help the judge decide whether to add the child to the registry. In the first 10 years of the registry, only 10 juveniles were added to it.
Slow Changes
Changes to the laws have been slow. Oregon this year passed a law giving juvenile judges more discretion over whether youths should be registered. Previously, all children convicted of a felony sex offense were automatically registered for life. Now, once youths complete their sentence, another hearing is set so the judge can review how they did in treatment and weigh their likelihood to reoffend before choosing whether or not they need to be registered.
“Having to register as a sex offender is tough. If you deserve it, I don’t feel sorry for you. But if you’re a juvenile, then you have to spend the rest of your life not being able to coach your children, go to their schools or find a place to live,” said state Rep. Jeff Barker, an Oregon Democrat and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
He said he didn’t think it was fair to make all juveniles register, but he didn’t think there should be no registration either.
Mark McKechnie, director of Youth, Rights & Justice, which pushed for changes to Oregon’s law, said it can be tough to get support for bills that drastically change the system.
“The policy world is slow to react to that because of the nature of the subject. It’s an easy target in elections,” he said.
In Missouri, legislators passed a bill in 2013 that would have given juvenile sex offenders the right to petition to be removed from the state’s lifetime registry. But Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed it, saying there were dangerous people among the 870 that could petition. He said the bill would “undermine public safety and victims' rights.”
The state’s policy came before the state Supreme Court this year when a 14-year-old St. Louis boy convicted of attempted rape in a juvenile court challenged being placed on Missouri’s public adult registry when he turns 21. But the state Supreme Court dismissed the case, saying it was “not ripe for review at this time.”
In Delaware, the state’s public defenders lobbied for five years to loosen restrictions because the state had children as young as 9 years old on their registry. Lisa Minutola, chief of legal services for the state office that oversees public defenders, said that as a result of 2013 legislation, judges now can relieve children under 14 of the requirement to register. That also is an option for children age 14 to 17 who commit less serious crimes.
Ohio was the first state to become substantially compliant with the Adam Walsh Act, which requires more stringent registration practices from states. A number of challenges have chipped away at the state’s registry though, and children no longer are placed on a public website, nor are they subject to automatic lifetime-registration.
In Pennsylvania, the state didn’t try to become compliant with the Adam Walsh Act until 2011, when it faced losing some federal dollars. But the law’s lifetime-registration requirement was overturned by the state’s Supreme Court in 2014. |
I’m not going to mince words here. Relic’s games are a breath of fresh air in the real-time strategy space. They always have been. Their inaugural title, Homeworld, was a breathtaking testament to what strategy games could be, and remains one of the iconic and noteworthy pillars of the real-time strategy space. In terms of both storytelling and creative vision, Homeworld remains virtually unmatched almost a decade after its release.
From Homeworld, Relic went on to make the interesting, but less remembered Impossible Creatures, and then created perhaps the most highly regarded Warhammer video game ever released: Dawn of War. Relic then pioneered (or popularized in the strategy space) a user-friendly expansion model that Blizzard recently aped when they released StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void. This was followed up in 2006 by one of the most widely acclaimed World War 2 RTS, Company of Heroes. Over the years, Relic have had a remarkable track record with creating memorable games and experiences.
Now, I like to pretend that I’m a game designer, but I’m going to try and leave that aside for now. As a player of most of their games, I’d like to talk about what they bring to their games that I appreciate: systems and mechanics (and, where possible, the implications of said systems) that I appreciate and enjoy. I’ll be keeping my references focused mostly on the Dawn of War and Company of Heroes franchises, as I have my experience with these is more recent and exhaustive.
Please note that this does not pretend to be an encyclopedic examination of any of the core systems of Relic’s games, nor a full recounting of their most important systems. These are the systems that I, as a player and ersatz designer, most appreciate (and why). So, as always, please season my rambling to taste.
Unit Types are Experientially Different
In real-time strategy games, there is of course the concept of different types or category of units: infantry, air units, vehicles, et cetera. These different types of unit may interact with the map and other units in different ways: ignore some terrain, be untargetable in certain circumstances, be largely invulnerable to a certain category of weapon, et cetera. Let’s look at how Blizzard’s games have approached these unit categories, and then contrast them with Relic’s approach.
In the Blizzard franchises, the major unit categories tend to be something along the lines of: ground units, structures, air units, and stealth units. Now, of course they have other categorizations like armored, light and mechanical that mostly correspond to the degree of damage units with these descriptors take or deal to units with other descriptors. But, for me, the major noteworthy categories have more do deal with how the units themselves are used and how their threat must be approached.
As a quick for-instance, ground units of various types represent a baseline: some may require specific approaches due to special rules or weapon type, but most other units are at least able to hit them, and they are virtually always the most common type of unit produced. Air units can ignore map terrain and are untargetable by most units, and thus they represent a unique threat profile that requires a dedicated response. Air units are a fundamentally different type of threat, that interacts with the game in fundamentally different ways. They obey different rules to ground units, including the ability to ‘bunch up’ while flying, which is a feature baked into their design at the systems layer.
Stealth units in their turn can be either air or ground units, but stealth itself is a third major threat profile in Blizzard’s games. Dealing with, and using, stealth units require different types of thinking and different types of action and response patterns than ‘regular’ air or ground units. It’s another fundamentally different type of threat. But, uh, enough about StarCraft. Let’s talk about Relic.
(as an aside, Westwood and EA took different unit profiles into account as well: air units have several mechanics that make them operate completely differently from other unit types; infantry can be crushed by vehicles and can access map areas that vehicles cannot; and in later games, vehicles get directional armor and can reverse-move. As a couple of high level examples)
Relic’s games, in the humble opinion of this writer at least, approach these ‘threat profiles’ in a more comprehensive and integral way than most other other real-time strategy studios. So, let’s talk about the unit types, how they’re different, and why that matters.
Infantry
Let’s start with infantry as a baseline. Right out of the gate, infantry in Relic’s Dawn of War and Company of Heroes games feel versatile and capable in ways that, especially at the time of these games’ launch, were uncommon in strategy games. Vaulting over low-lying obstacles, getting bonus or negative armor depending on whether they were standing in a crater (and therefore partially protected by enemy fire by the crater’s lip) or a creek (and therefore less mobile) infantry in Relic’s games have a relationship with the map around them.
This relationship extends, naturally, to the game’s resourcing and victory systems. Infantry, which tend to be among the weakest units in the game, are of course vitally important to capture and contest the various resource and victory points spread across the maps in Dawn of War and Company of Heroes games, where vehicles are unable to do so. This is actually used in balancing vehicles, somewhat, as factions with early game vehicles make a tradeoff. Taking a vehicle early game, a player is banking on being able to push their opponent off of critical map areas and in so doing sacrifices their own ability to capture points on the map. Tradeoffs like these present clear and meaningful choices to players, and allow the player to succeed not just through pure DPS, but through deterrent mechanisms. Relics games provide ample opportunities for players to succeed without devolving into DPS measuring contests, which are really reductive and uninteresting.
Vehicles and monstrous creatures have a completely different relationship with terrain and buildings… but I’ll talk about that momentarily.
In the Company of Heroes games, infantry are even more interesting and dynamic. Since most of Relic’s titles utilize unit level, instead of player-level upgrades and include various bonuses that accrue as they participate in combat, squads of infantry become worse to lose as you pour time and money into them. One thing the Company of Heroes games do is allow some of the funds invested in making units better to be preserved in the game after these units die.
Upgrade weapons like the BAR can be dropped upon a unit’s death, and acquired by any player. This permanence and transferal are very interesting mechanics that can really impact the ebb and flow of a match, are simultaneously more intuitive and less obtrusive than stealing enemy production structures, which is the only comparable mechanic I can think of from other RTS titles. I mean, you see a gun lying on the ground, it’s an instinct to have someone pick it up and use it. This is a lot more obvious -you almost don’t have think think about it, the action just kind of comes naturally- than sending an Engineer to capture a Barracks or a Factory or something.
And, uh, speaking of unit death…
Squads
I’m really drawing things out here, I know. And I apologize. Stick with me, I’m headed towards a point in my own circuitous way. In most of Relic’s titles, individual units or “models” are organized into squads of 1-10 individuals. This has a number of implications. First, it allows entities to occupy the game space in a more permanent way than units in most RTS.
In a game like Age of Empires or Command and Conquer, units are generally pretty ephemeral and disposable. Your spearmen (for example) are brought onto the field, and die by the dozen in pursuit of game objectives. There’s no real reason, beyond pure efficiency, to try to preserve them. And there’s virtually no reason to attempt to preserve any individual spearman for any reason.
Relic flips this on its head: each squad has meaning. Permanence. While individual models might fall,the squad itself is an entity you care about: this is especially true in Dawn of War 2 and Company of Heroes 2 – even the weakest squads retain importance in the later game for bolstering damage, contesting objectives, laying mines, and the like.
Each squad is, for the most part, upgraded on its own, gains experience on its own, and matters as a single object in your game. This is… if not unique, pretty rare in the strategy game space. Battle Realms and War Wind (topics for another day) introduce other personalization mechanics, but Relic (and their later games in particular) are among the only developers that have made me care about each individual entity in a match.
Set-Up Weapons
Set-up weapons share some characteristics with ‘baseline’ infantry, but are less mobile and unable to garrison structures (I believe this holds true across all of Relic’s titles). Their weapons have defined firing arcs, and often require non-trivial times to prepare to attack or to ‘pack up’ their weapon to move. In pretty much all cases in Relic’s games, support weapons themselves are treated as a separate entity within a squad, and can take damage separately. This allows the weapon to become “decrewed” – the crew killed off – and captured by infantry units of another player. Weapons such as these trading hands is a reason to be vigilant and careful with their use, and especially in the Company of Heroes games can be a pretty major point of contention for players. Stealing anti-tank guns or suppression weapons can be a huge boon for a player.
More importantly, this sort of permanence and reuse creates interaction dynamics – and I feel very comfortable saying this – unseen in the majority of other real-time strategy games. Decrewed support weapons, dropped rifles, and of course decrewed tanks all become points of interest on the game map, reusable resources ripe for the picking. Their potential existence also becomes a point of consideration: they make over-extending, losing too many models in a squad, are doubly bad because you could be handing resources (not money, actual physical tools they can use: resources in a literal sense of the word!) which changes the players’ calculus about combat and the risks involved.
Suppression weapons are, perhaps, one of the most important mechanics in Relic’s games. In Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, lethality is (or can be under certain circumstances) a measured thing. Individual units can be killed off of squads, but the squad itself and its items and experience persist until the squad itself dies. Now, this has a crap ton (that’s a technical term) of implications, not limited to:
squad survivability gets another factor beyond HP and armor and unit damage flag.
squads naturally become weaker when units are killed off, limiting their combat effectiveness. This greatly changes how combat functions and must be approached: as squads lose models, the overall lethality of the fight is diminished.
In addition, it really validates options like suppression weapons, which are an alternate method to limiting the effectiveness of some kinds of unit (in this case, infantry) than straight-up killing them.
In Company of Heroes, and to a lesser degree, Dawn of War, the map – and more specifically, traversing it – are highly important. Suppression weapons are a tool for blocking map traversal and limiting the enemy’s use of one or more of their limited resource of infantry squads. They’re a part of an intricate balance of powers (again, especially in the Company of Heroes games) between different categories of unit: effective against infantry though conquerable, vulnerable to indirect fire, somewhat damaging against lighter vehicles but simultaneously vulnerable to them due to decreased mobility respective to regular infantry squads… It’s a beautiful system.
Suppression weapons are a tool that, while able to kill enemy units, is primarily intended for holding them up. Suppression is a state where infantry squads are virtually unable to move, and deal far less damage. Suppression weapons can lock down infantry, forcing them to pull back (wasting the retreating player’s time) and force the enemy to engage on the defending player’s terms. They’re a tool that prioritizes stymying the enemy over destroying them, they synergize well with low-unit count, squad-based unit design, and they have unique relationships with these games’ other unit types. Again, beautiful.
As for why it’s important and interesting that suppression weapons are a largely nonlethal solution… I’ll have to come back around to that momentarily. I’m still talking about the importance of having types of unit that are experientially different from one another.
Vehicles
A couple hundred words, and a point or two I made ago, I alluded to vehicles and the unique roles they play in Relic’s titles. Let’s talk about that now, shall we?
Vehicles are a completely different type of thing than infantry. Even light vehicles take very little damage from small arms fire, and require a separate category of weaponry to scare off or destroy. Vehicles have a completely different relationship with the map, with incoming damage, and their use profiles diverge sharply with those of infantry. Where infantry can often navigate over and around smaller map obstacles, and can often use them to provide a defensive bonus, vehicles tend to destroy them. I mean, their weapons can make short work of map features, but often even just driving over or through them is enough to crush them or at least break bits off. And while infantry can use impact craters to get a defensive bonus, it’s the often devastating weapons that vehicles can carry that can -cause- impact craters in the first place.
Units can Cause Significant Changes on the Map
And that’s a pretty big deal, too. You can probably count on one hand the games where units’ attacks – where units just moving across the map – can impact the ebb and flow of a battlefield. Literally. Tanks or heavy vehicles crush terrain that infantry can use for defense, robbing the enemy (or the player themselves) of good places from which to engage. Likewise, the weapons of some of the heaviest vehicles (or the corpses of destroyed vehicles) can provide additional areas of cover, evolving the way the players approach the map. I mean, this is huge stuff here people. Seriously.
It’s very rare to have the player’s approach to the map change substantially based on player action, and also quite rare to have the map itself change due to player action. Relic have been refining and improving this with each game they’ve made, introducing new intricacies to their interlocking systems, and to the units that interact with or drive those systems. Vaulting over map obstacles is, I believe, a feature of the Company of Heroes titles? I don’t recall units being able to do this in either Dawn of War game.
But do you see how this is working? How the different unit types have a drastically different relationship with the common entities on the map? How infantry provide utility and vehicles provide firepower (or mobility)? How the game keeps evolving: new approaches to holding the map, to controlling the map, to moving around the map open up, and the player’s relationship with the game profoundly changes as they fill in their stable of units with entities of profoundly different types.
Players Are Required Contest the Entire Map from Early Game
In most traditional RTS, players are asked to build one or more bases (or in some cases, can place structures anywhere and can organize defenses for them such as walls and turrets) which house the player’s production structures, economic apparatus, and research or technology options. Often, too, resources are either located naturally near structures, or players are encouraged to build defensive emplacements around or adjacent to harvesting operations to defend them from enemy harassment. The better (in the humble opinion of this writer) RTS tend to separate resourcing operations from base locations, which increases tension and forces the player to defend multiple disparate areas.
Of course, Relic’s games also do this.
Resource Points on the Map (away from Production/Tech)
While many of Relic’s titles feature elements of basebuilding, even their original Dawn of War and Company of Heroes scale it back from the standard (and by ‘standard’ I’m referring to StarCraft, Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, and Total Annihilation, which are 4 of the most played RTS series of all time so I feel the appellation fits). Furthermore, Relic’s titles not only keep resourcing operations away from base building (which C&C, Age of Empires and TA also do) but they allow a greater percentage of a player’s army to participate: instead of miner or builder units, pretty much any infantry squad can capture a resource point. This makes resourcing highly tactical (TA has elements of this too) especially in the Company of Heroes titles, where resource locations actually have real relationships with one another, adding more layers of depth to a system already designed to keep players engaging all over the map from the first minute.
I already mentioned this above, but remember: in Relic’s titles, most units are in a way their own tech structure. Upgrades tend to be applied directly to individual squads instead of at the player/game level (some of their titles have both types of upgrade) making units valuable as stores of tech value as much as of gameplay utility – just another implication of Relic’s squad system. It reminds players that their squads are important and should be used carefully.
In most RTS titles, and by this I truly do mean most, the map starts out with very few points of active interest: your opponents’ base(s). As new structures are added, perhaps new base locations, the number of targets and POIs naturally increases until the entire map is in play. This is a bit reductive (I’d love to write more but I’m already nudging into the realm of 3000 words), but essentially, I think, true. In Relic’s titles (this to include the Homeworld games, which allow the player to move pretty much anywhere in a 3D environment) – the whole map is always in play, right from the get-go. There’s always somewhere else on the map to be, and do. It forces expansive gameplay. It forces action, and consideration of the entire map. It’s all important, and always.
In Relic’s games, the focus tends to narrow over the course of the game, focusing on resource and victory points in high-conflict areas. These high-conflict areas tend to be where multiple map paths come together, and/or the conjunction of several nearby valuable points.
Victory Points and Objective-Based Gameplay
Victory points are another essential piece of Relic’s formula. Their model adds up, over time, to this: success in Relic’s games doesn’t always come down to who has the most firepower in the right place at the right time. This can be an outcome, of course it can. But with tools like suppression weapons, and systems like Victory Points, deterring your enemy can be just as valuable as wiping them out. Relic’s games tend to be full of poke-and-prod scenarios, careful combat engagements, flanking maneuvers and similar to preserve the players’ valuable units. And Victory Points add in a growing urgency as the game goes on. They put a true opportunity cost on running away to heal up and re-engage.
In Conclusion
Relic… now that I’m ending, where do I begin? Their games are full of these interlocking systems, these units that actually feel experientially different to use, games that actually reward smart action and smart thinking and intelligent army composition. Games that have non-trivial choices with interesting and dynamic outcomes. And though I’m well over 3000 words (almost 3200 right here if you’re interested) I’ve left so much out: how the Dawn of War games’ hero units and monstrous creatures impact gameplay and differ from other unit types, how smoke and mines in the Company of Heroes games change the ebb and flow of combat… there’s just so much to uncover as clever and worthy design.
If I were to leave you with a thought, it would be this. Real-time strategy as a genre is largely stagnant. Longtime players know what they love and creators know how to give them that. But Relic’s games, whatever you think of them, are a vision of a different type of RTS. Where units – individual units – matter. Where deterring an enemy from critical territory is as useful and interesting as blowing their armies to bits. Where the whole map is always in play.
Their systems have flaws. All of our games will. That’s not what this article is about. It’s an explanation of what I, personally, think, Relic’s games have brought to the table. I hope you’ve found something worthwhile here, to inspire you as you play or as you create. Thanks for taking the time to read.
See you on the battlefield. |
About
Veteran actor well known for his partnership with director Spike Lee and for appearing in films like The Usual Suspects and King of New York. His performance as drug lord Gus Fring on Breaking Bad earned him the Best Supporting Actor Award from the 2012 Critic's Choice Television Awards, and a 2012 Emmy nomination. He plays Pastor Ramon Cruz in Netflix's The Get Down and Jorge in the Maze Runner films.
Before Fame
He played a slave child when he was eight - it was his fist exposure to the entertainment industry.
Trivia
He was a guest star in the NBC cult sitcom Community as the half-brother of Chevy Chase's character Pierce Hawthorne.
Family Life
He married Joy McManigal in 1995. He has four daughters named Syrlucia, Kale Lyn, Shayne Lyra, and Ruby Esposito.
Associated With
He acted alongside Nicole Kidman in the 2010 film Rabbit Hole. |
Cava Grill Coming to Silver Spring
The popular fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant plans to open on Fenton Street
By Andrew Metcalf
The Cava Mezze Grill location at Westfield Montgomery in Bethesda opened last year Via Cava Mezze Grill website
Cava Grill is bringing its Mediterranean pita wraps and salads to Silver Spring in early 2016.
The new Cava Grill concept will open at 8515 Fenton St. in Silver Spring's downtown, according to a press release. The location will feature an open-kitchen layout and stone-fired ovens. It also will serve seasonal soups, beer and wine.
Cava, which got its start as a full-service restaurant in Rockville, later found regional popularity with its fast-casual Greek concept Cava Grill. The concept is known for its pitas, rice bowls and salads that are served Chipotle-style with a variety of ingredients such as falafel, grilled chicken, lamb meatballs, vegetables and sauces including tzatziki, hummus and spicy harissa.
Cava Grill currently has eight locations, including restaurants on Bethesda Row, in Westfield Montgomery mall and in Gaithersburg's Kentlands neighborhood.
Cava's owners-Ted Xenohristos, Ike Grigoropoulos and Dmitiri Moshovitis-grew up in Montgomery County and came up with the idea for the Cava Rockville restaurant while working at Bethesda restaurants.
In April, the company announced it had raised $16 million in funding and would use the money to finance a West Coast expansion of Cava Grill. |
Country music stars Faith Hill and Tim McGraw have expanded their progressive campaign within the traditionally conservative medium by voicing support for gun control in the newest issue of Billboard Magazine.
The pair, who have been married for two decades and are promoting their first dual album, "The Rest of Our Lives," are forcefully expressing their shared political beliefs in the process.
Speaking to Billboard, McGraw says that while he enjoys hunting, he believes that using "common sense" means supporting gun control.
"Look, I’m a bird hunter -- I love to wing shoot. However, there is some common sense that’s necessary when it comes to gun control," McGraw told the magazine.
He then took aim at gun rights activists. "They want to make it about the Second Amendment every time it’s brought up," McGraw added. "It’s not about the Second Amendment."
Faith Hill quickly joined in and appeared to claim that stricter gun control laws could have prevented the mass shooting in Las Vegas. "In reference to the tragedy in Las Vegas," Hill opined, “we knew a lot of people there. The doctors that saw the wounded, they saw wounds like you’d see in war. That’s not right."
And, of course, as many celebrities are wont to do in the wake of a national tragedy, they spoke out against the National Rifle Association. "Military weapons should not be in the hands of civilians," Hill said. "It’s everyone’s responsibility, including the government and the National Rifle Association, to tell the truth. We all want a safe country."
By now, it's clear that Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock deftly navigated existing weapons restrictions in order to acquire an arsenal of weapons, including military grade guns with "bump stocks" that allowed them to shoot like automatic rifles. In the case of last week's church shooting in Texas, the government — not the NRA — failed to use common sense in enforcing its own laws, and allowed Devin Kelley to purchase guns even though he had been convicted of domestic violence.
But McGraw and Hill have become the progressive conscience of the country music world. They've long since declared their allegiance with the Democratic Party, first supporting President Barack Obama and then 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.They even held a Nashville fundraiser for Clinton, raising thousands for the failed Democrat with a private country music concert. |
Some Republicans will say anything to see the Affordable Care Act fail. The best defense is the truth.
Now I’ve heard everything. Well, probably not, when it comes to myths the GOP invents about Obamacare. But this one’s a doozy.
On the May 29 edition of The Last Word, I saw Tea Party Republicans leading citizens at a town hall meeting to believe that the IRS will get to make decisions about whether or not they receive healthcare coverage or treatment. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist was, “If they don’t like your politics or your religion, they won’t let you get care!”
Here’s the clip:
It’s so preposterous it’s hardly worth mentioning. But the trouble is, there are plenty of people who will believe it. That’s why it’s so important to get the facts out there.
The only involvement the IRS has in Obamacare is enforcing the penalty imposed on people who choose not to buy health insurance, if they can afford it. Oh, and by the way, the maximum penalty is about $800 per year. Right now, I pay $1,200 a month as a self-employed person with type 2 diabetes. So if someone chooses not to buy insurance and pays the penalty instead, they’re getting a deal. Because they still get to go to the emergency room and get care when they absolutely need it. People like me help pay for that.
Getting more people coverage is one of the reasons premiums will go down for countless Americans starting in 2014. We won’t be paying for as many other people’s care. States that accept Medicaid expansion will reduce even more of the burden on people who buy insurance. I’m looking at you, Michigan, among others.
Another myth that’s been spreading like wildfire, thanks in large part to Tea Party Republicans, is that premiums will go up because of Obamacare. That’s simply not the case. I’ve estimated my premiums will drop by nearly 40 percent once I’m no longer penalized for being a woman with type 2 diabetes who is self-employed — all black marks against me under the current system. Premiums are not set by Obamacare or the federal government. Premiums are set by insurance companies. In an open marketplace where insurers must now compete in state or federal healthcare exchanges, they must set market-friendly rates or suffer the consequences. Consumers get to choose the coverage that fits their needs and budget. This article from The New Republic by the always-excellent Jonathan Cohn explains it beautifully.
Look, I get it. Obamacare is a complicated law and there’s a lot to know. But it’s worth learning about — and it’s certainly worth getting the facts out there so the Republicans can’t succeed in what seems to be a plan to sabotage Obamacare through a strategy of misinformation and fear. First, there were death panels and now, the myth that the IRS will be pulling the plug if they don’t like you. I know you’re not that gullible. Let’s make sure everyone else isn’t, either.
There’s more to come. On the one hand, there’s sure to be continued attacks from Obamacare’s opponents. Having lost 37 attempts at repealing the law, they’ll apparently stop at nothing to see the law fail. On the other hand, as Obamacare implementation continues, there’s more and more evidence that it works. We just have to make sure the facts speak louder than the misinformation. Surely a good law that helps millions of Americans can stand up to a pack of lies.
I’ll be writing a lot about Obamacare here in the months to come, sharing new proof of its benefits that are being revealed with increasing frequency as implementation continues. I’ll also be providing facts to disprove any ridiculous lies being spread. So stay tuned and pass on the truth.
Questions are welcome in the comments section if there are topics you’d like to see covered in future posts. In the meantime, this site on health reform from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation is a great resource for independent facts.
[Photo credit: Chris Savage | Eclectablog] |
“With 500+ changes to Google’s search algorithm per year, it can be easy for an SEO marketer to go crazy trying to keep up with all the changes!”
So, in order to prevent a wave of marketers going to the loony bin (although it may be too late for some), I have compiled a guide of the most important SEO factors to keep in mind that if followed, will help reduce the fatigue and stress of those SEO professionals who think they have to know every detail of every algorithm change that has ever happened.
Instead, let’s look at the big picture of how your Search Rankings Are Influenced.
The following statement is the big picture summary:
It’s how you make sure that your content is the best possible content on the Internet for the words that you care about. Source: www.ama.org
When you understand the big picture of SEO, then many of the details become easier and/or unnecessary. Instead of trying to ‘keyword stuff’ the page with the right ‘buyer’ phrases that have been strategically placed to achieve the optimal keyword density, you think more in terms of writing content that will give the searcher exactly what they were looking for in the first place.
Search Engines have evolved and the idea behind intent cannot be ignored. Metrics such as bounce rate, click thru rate, time on site, pages viewed, site authority and latent semantic indexing all play a part in influencing Search Engines to rank a website or not.
In a nutshell, search engines have gotten smarter and they know if your content meets user expectations. Gone are the days of having a crappy ‘keyword stuffed’ webpage that doesn’t provide valuable content rank high in Google.
Search Engine Trends that Can’t Be Ignored
With that in mind, let’s look at some trends that are staring us in the face in 2016.
Social Media Will Continue to Influence Search Results – Social Media is here to stay and the hive mind matters to Google. Whether we like it or not, the content that is being shared throughout Social Media is a key indicator of its importance. According to an article at www.impactbnd.com, 76% of marketers use Social Media to support and boost SEO.
Videos will Become More Prominent in the SERPS – We all know that videos represent some of the most engaging content on the web. From www.quicksprout.com, we learn that videos get 50 times better organic page ranks in Google than pages that have no videos on them. There are many other sources that confirm just how easier it is to rank videos than plain static web pages. In general, videos can create a better experience for the user and create a greater Search Influence.
Mobile Search Influence Continues to Grow – If your website is not Mobile friendly, then there is no use wasting time and money to try to rank higher in the SERPS. Its not going to happen. It is a well known fact that Google has updated their algorithms to give preference to websites that are mobile friendly. The bar has been raised and it is here to stay. Again, this has to do with the user experience. Your audience is no longer using just one device. They are using a combination of devices that include tablets, smartphones, laptops and even watches. In 2015, Google confirmed that over half of all searches are from Mobile Devices. Source: searchengineland.com
Mobile App Optimization Will Pick Up Steam – Does your business have an app? According to Tech Crunch, mobile apps account for 52% of all time spent on online digital media. Since it is obvious that more and more people are using their smart phones for searches, this influence cannot be ignored. Apps take the functionality of a website and offer it to the user in an easier and faster way. More and more businesses will use apps to not only to provide a greater user experience on mobile devices, but also to attract more customers.
Latent Semantic Indexing is a Mega Trend – In the early days of the search engines, keywords were just matched up with pages. This created an easy way to influence search rankings and spam the system without providing quality content. But with Latent Semantic Indexing, the intent behind the query became more understood and the associated web pages were evaluated based on not just a specific keyword phrase, but rather the combined group of associated phrases that would indicate relevance. In other words, if someone searched for ‘cars’, it was also understood that web pages discussing ‘vehicles’ or ‘autos’ would also be seen as relevant. This development actually provides a greater incentive to content creators to provide the best quality content possible without trying to influence the search engines through repetitive text that sounds unnatural.
Local Search Influence Gains Traction – The location of any business is a significant factor in determining the relevancy of search queries. If someone is in Chicago and searching for ‘restaurants’, then no matter how great the content is of other restaurant websites around the country, the ones in the Chicago area will provide more relevance to the search query.
This is a simple example but it highlights the fact that the search engines have evolved to know where you are located and that the search query is a local search query. As a marketer, it is critical to let people know where you are located and what you are offering so your chances of showing up in as many places as possible increases. According to Entrepreneur.com, local SEO is only going to grow stronger.
In summary, each of these 6 trends show one overall large trend: To continue to reward and influence search rankings for websites that have higher quality content that provides the best user experience for a related keyword phrase. Search Engines have finally passed through that awkward phase of puberty and have matured to the point where they can understand what users want and then sift through billions of pages to determine which content is going to best satisfy the user’s curiosity. |
There is nothing wrong with national-level education yardsticks. We’ve had them for decades: the SAT, Advanced Placement tests, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, etc. What is wrong is imposing one standard on everyone, which ignores that all children are unique and no standards-setters omniscient. But that is exactly what Washington is doing with the Common Core.
First, it is necessary to establish that the Core is largely being imposed by the feds. It is not, as Core supporters insist, “state-led” and “voluntary.”
The Core was created by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, but these groups do not represent states. Legislators do, and while people vote for governors, doubtless few, if any, have ever done so based on what they expect a candidate might do in the powerless NGA.
Next, the impetus behind Core adoption in most states was federal action. To compete for a part of the $4.35-billion Race to the Top purse, states de facto had to adopt the Core. Indeed, Race to the Top required state leaders to promise to adopt the Core before the final version had even been published!
Cementing adoption, the Obama administration gave only two options for states to get waivers from the hated, illogical, No Child Left Behind Act: adopt the Core, or have a state university system certify state standards as “college- and career-ready.”
Topping it all off, the U.S. Department of Education selected and funded two consortia to create national tests to go with the Core.
On the too-rare occasion when advocates have acknowledged the federal force behind the Core, they have typically implied that the Obama administration acted against their intent that adoption be purely up to states. But in “Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Get a World-Class Education” - a report published before Barack Obama became president — the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers implored Washington to offer “a range of tiered incentives,” including funding and regulatory relief, to move states onto national standards. The call was eventually reiterated on the Core’s website, then removed.
Despite advocates’ incessant protestations, the facts are clear: Common Core was federally pushed, just as they requested. This top-down imposition is a huge problem for two fundamental reasons.
The first is that all children are unique. They learn different things at different rates, and have myriad talents and goals. Yet Common Core, by its very nature, moves all kids largely in lock-step, processing them like soulless widgets. That’s likely a major reason there is no meaningful empirical evidence that national standards produce better outcomes, and education experts across the spectrum have dismissed the Core.
The second basic problem is that no one is omniscient. As the raging debate over the quality of the Core painfully illustrates, even if there could be a one, best standard for all kids, we don’t know what it is. But with a monopoly, no alternative standards will be able to compete, and better ways of doing things won’t be revealed.
So is the Common Core a bad idea? Absolutely. It is a federally coerced, one-size-fits-all regime that ignores basic, human reality. |
This email has also been verified by Google DKIM 2048-bit RSA key
Fwd: Jeb
From:[email protected] To: [email protected] Date: 2015-04-21 16:05 Subject: Fwd: Jeb
---------- Forwarded message ---------- She's going to stick to notes a little closer this am, still not perfect in her head. Sent from my iPhone On Apr 21, 2015, at 10:12 AM, Joel Benenson <[email protected]> wrote: Stronger than “I am very concerned….” I will leave commenting on campaign tactics to others. What I have made absolutely clear is that corporate money and secret money have no place in our democracy and we should get rid of it once and for all.” * Yes. If she feels need to address Jeb q directly - would suggest the pivot of "I will leave commentating on campaign tactics to others, but I am very concerned about the dark money in politics and have to get rid of it once and for all." Sent from my iPhone On Apr 21, 2015, at 10:03 AM, Margolis, Jim <[email protected]> wrote: Agree with Robby. Do the hit, but don’t go deep into it. One thing that’s interesting… if they do TV through the Super PAC, during the ‘candidate windows’ they won’t get Lowest Unit Rate. In plain english… they will pay a big premium over candidate rates if that’s how they fund a big part of their TV effort (as reported in the article). I wouldn’t share that, but can’t believe they’d outsource here. * I would be reluctant to be vocal on this one way or another since we don't know what will happen on our side. I would have other people push that he's being bought and paid for. Strategically, anyone who saw what happened with ACT in 2004 would think twice about "outsourcing" the ground game or other parts of a campaign, but I don't think we go there w the press. On Apr 21, 2015, at 9:55 AM, Jennifer Palmieri <[email protected]> wrote: So this is a thing...what do people think about Jeb using the super-pac for broader things? Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: * Let us know if you have any thoughts on this arrangement Jeb is setting up, would be interested in your take ... m.apnews.com/ap/db_268798/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=V99KjLZu Download the official Twitter app here <https://twitter.com/download?ref_src=MailTweet-iOS> Sent from my iPhone The information contained in this communication is intended for the use of the designated recipients named above. If the reader of this communication is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this communication in error, and that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify The Associated Press immediately by telephone at +1-212-621-1898 and delete this email. Thank you. [IP_US_DISC] msk dccc60c6d2c3a6438f0cf467d9a4938 This email is intended only for the named addressee. It may contain information that is confidential/private, legally privileged, or copyright-protected, and you should handle it accordingly. If you are not the intended recipient, you do not have legal rights to retain, copy, or distribute this email or its contents, and should promptly delete the email and all electronic copies in your system; do not retain copies in any media. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender promptly. Thank you. -- JP [email protected] For scheduling: [email protected] |
In the Electoral College White Votes Matter More
Lara Merling and Dean Baker
For the second time in the last five elections we are seeing a situation where the candidate who came in second in the popular vote ends up in the White House. This is of course due to the Electoral College.
As just about everyone knows, the Electoral College can lead to this result since it follows a winner take all rule (with the exception of Nebraska and Maine). A candidate gets all the electoral votes of a state whether they win it by one vote or one million. In this election, Secretary Clinton ran up huge majorities in California and New York, but her large margins meant nothing in the Electoral College.
In addition to the problem of this winner take all logic, there is also the issue that people in large states are explicitly underrepresented in the Electoral College. While votes are roughly proportionately distributed, since even the smallest states are guaranteed three votes, the people in these states end up being over-represented in the Electoral College. For example, in Wyoming, there is an electoral vote for every 195,000 residents, in North Dakota there is one for every 252,000, and in Rhode Island one for every 264,000. On the other hand, in California there is an electoral vote for every 711,000 residents, in Florida one for every 699,000, and in Texas one for every 723,000.
The states that are overrepresented in the Electoral College also happen to be less diverse than the country as a whole. Wyoming is 84 percent white, North Dakota is 86 percent white, and Rhode Island is 74 percent white, while in California only 38 percent of the population is white, in Florida 55 percent, and in Texas 43 percent. White people tend to live in states where their vote counts more, and minorities in places where it counts less. This means that the Electoral College not only can produce results that conflict with a majority vote, but it is biased in a way that amplifies the votes of white people and reduces the voice of minorities.
The figure illustrates the gap in Electoral College representation for minority voters. Based on the weight of each vote in each state and given the fact that most minority voters reside in states where each person’s vote counts less in the Electoral College, the result is minority voters are grossly underrepresented. African American votes on average have a weight that is 95 percent as much as white votes, Hispanic votes are on average 91 percent, and Asian American votes, 93 percent as much of a white vote. In the Electoral College, white votes matter more.
Addendum
It is worth noting that there is a fix to this problem which does not require a constitutional amendment or even action by Congress. The organization, National Popular Vote, has been pushing states to pass legislation whereby their electoral votes will go to the winner of the national popular vote. This switch does not happen until states representing a majority of electoral votes have passed the same legislation. At that point, the winner of the popular vote will automatically be the winner of the electoral vote. |
Beyond the sea
In the northern reaches of Newfoundland, near the town of St. Anthony, is the Fox Point Lighthouse. I’ve never been there, but I know it has one of the most impressive ocean views in the world. If you face perpendicular to the right bit of rocky coastline there and gaze straight across the ocean, your mind’s eye peering well beyond the horizon, you can see all the way to Australia.
What’s really across the ocean from you when you look straight out? It’s not always the place you think.
I’m inspired by a map done a couple of years ago by Eric Odenheimer and some follow-ups by Weiyi Cai and Laris Karklis of the Washington Post. Those maps are colorful, handy guides to countries of equivalent latitude across the oceans. It’s easy to forget, for example, that much of Europe is well north of the United States east coast. But they’re not exactly maps of what’s across the ocean from you, at least not directly across from you. To think of east or west as “straight” across is, perhaps, one of those effects of the map projections we see every day.
The latitude maps got me interested in answering the question more strictly: standing on a given point and facing perpendicular to the coast, if you went straight ahead, never turning, where would you end up? There are two reasons why following a line of latitude won’t answer the question.
1. Coastlines are crooked and wacky.
2. The earth is round.
With that in mind, here are some maps showing the points from which you can “see” each of the continents.
Coastline angle
Coastlines face all different directions, bending and turning constantly. The “East coast” isn’t a straight north-south line facing directly east. Just look at the state where I live, which has coastline facing literally all directions.
Taking “across the ocean” to mean directly across, perpendicular to the coast, then what’s across the ocean depends on where you’re standing! To get a rough idea of what direction the world’s coastlines face, I’m calculating the angle between every pair of adjacent coastal vertices in medium scale Natural Earth data, then placing a point in between them and measuring the view from there based on that angle.
The much-maligned Mercator projection comes in handy here. Those angle calculations were made using projected coordinates because the conformal Mercator projection preserves the thing I’m interested in: local angles!
Straight lines on a round object
The second point is trickier to imagine thanks to common rectangular maps and the way latitude itself is defined. If you can detach the concept of “direction” from the concept of east and west, and look at globes and other map projections, it’s easy enough to picture. The shortest, straightest line on a sphere (let’s call the Earth a sphere even though it technically isn’t) is a great circle arc, not something like a line of latitude.
What we often think of as “straight” is a path following a rhumb line, a line of constant bearing. Wikipedia succinctly describes how such a “straight” line actually turns, in contrast to a great circle.
If one were to drive a car along a great circle one would hold the steering wheel fixed, but to follow a rhumb line one would have to turn the wheel, turning it more sharply as the poles are approached.
A typical classroom demonstration of great circles is to pull a piece of string taut on the surface of a globe between two points, and note how the string arcs across lines of latitude, changing its bearing the whole way. Try this specific case to drive home how the spherical “straight” differs from “straight” as we’ve defined compass directions: find a line of longitude on the globe, then a spot along that line somewhere away from the equator. Bring the globe to your eye and place the string perpendicular to the meridian, in between two latitude lines. Line up your view with the string and you can see that even though it starts out going due east or west, as it continues directly ahead the “straight” east/west parallels curve away from it.
So if we want to know what’s truly straight across the ocean from a given coastline point, we need to see what direction the coast faces at that point, then draw a great circle in that direction and see what it runs into.
As for flat maps, certain map projections provide an accurate view of directions. The azimuthal equidistant projection, for example, preserves correct direction (and distance) from the center point of the map. A straight line from the center of the map is a straight line in real life. Here’s the Newfoundland-to-Australia example from earlier:
Such a map, in the end, is how I’m figuring out beach views: center that projection on each point, then draw a straight line in the correct direction until it hits land.
Conclusion
I’m not entirely certain that I have all the math right, but I think it’s at least close. Even we cartographers sometimes have a shaky grasp of map projections and spherical geometry.
But who has time for correct math? I’ve got to start training for the straight-line swim from the number one beach in my life—30th Street in Ocean City, New Jersey—to Brazil. |
Long-term military curfews a human rights violation, says former ECHR judge
Bahadır Özgür - ISTANBUL
Long-term military curfews constitute a violation of the European Convention of Human Rights, former European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) judge Rıza Türmen has told daily Radikal, amid continued curfews in a number of towns in southeastern Turkey.Türmen, who is also currently an İzmir deputy for the main opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP), said long-term curfews constituted a “violation of state responsibility” and the ECHR would likely find Turkey guilty and rule for an interlocutory injunction of curfews.He listed the state’s responsibilities as being to not kill its citizens deliberately, to take necessary precautions when its citizens’ lives are in danger, to conduct efficient investigations when its citizens’ right to life is violated, and to avoid inhumane treatment as principles that have been violated over the past months.“Those people’s right to life is threatened because they cannot leave their houses. They cannot go to hospital, access water, etc.,” Türmen said.“The state fails to cater for these needs, despite its responsibility to do so,” he added, pointing out that unidentified security personnel who commit crimes in the region are not subject to investigations.In response to a question on the legal basis of military curfews, Türmen said declaring martial law or a state of emergency was necessary in order to enforce long-term curfews, but this has not been done in Turkey.Under current circumstances, state-appointed local governors’ mandates are used as the legal basis for curfews in southeastern towns.“Governors have no democratic mandate during mass violations of human rights,” Türmen said, adding that asserting such an authority violated both the ECHR and Turkey’s constitution.Türmen also warned that the European Convention of Human Rights was likely to find Turkey guilty over its current practices in southeastern districts and rule for an interlocutory injunction of curfews, which Turkey would be forced to immediately comply with.“If Turkey decides to disobey an ECHR order, the court would ask the European Commission to apply pressure. This would put Turkey in a difficult situation in the international arena,” he said.The CHP deputy also cautioned against lifting the immunities of Kurdish problem-focused Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chairs Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, arguing that this would further polarize Turkish society and worsen the situation.The Justice Ministry is set to prepare a report for the ECHR on the situation in southeastern towns where clashes between the security forces and outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants continue to rage under military curfews.Diyarbakır Bar Association lawyer Muhammed Neşet Girasun and Batman Bar Association lawyer Erkan Şenses have applied to the ECHR on behalf of Ömer Elçi, resident of the southeastern town of Cizre, to end operations and lift the curfew, which has been in effect since Dec. 14, 2015.Ankara Bar Association lawyer Oya Aydın has also applied to the ECHR on behalf of six people in Cizre and in the Sur district in the center of the southeastern city Diyarbakır.Aydın demanded the lifting of the curfew announced by the Şırnak Governor’s Office on Dec. 14, 2015, and the ECHR demanded a response from Turkey before Jan. 8.The ECHR asked three particular questions to Ankara over the issue: The legal basis for the curfews; whether the needs of locals living in curfew-hit towns are met, including health services; and whether the state can provide a safe exit route to locals if they demand to leave areas under curfew. |
Here's Squad, a standalone commercial game from the makers of Battlefield 2 mod Project Reality. In a stark departure from that project, this game is "an online, team-based military themed first-person-shooter where high levels of teamwork and communication are crucial to success". Wait, did I say 'stark departure'? What I meant was 'basically the same deal, only in Unreal Engine 4'.
In Squad, players will form squads of up to nine people—those squads coming together to form teams of up to 50. As the developers put it, "systems honed over years of experience with the Project Reality series draw the focus away from the lone-wolf player and much more on the cooperation with other members".
As with the Battlefield game, Squad will feature large-scale environments, but with a heavier focus on realistic simulation of things like ballistics and damage. There's also a base-building component that puts a heavier focus on coordinated teamwork and leadership. For more information, head over to Squad's Greenlight page. |
The UK government has once again bared its anti-technology teeth in public, leaning especially heavily on messaging platform WhatsApp for its use of end-to-end encryption security tech, and calling it out for enabling criminals to communicate in secret.
Reuters reported yesterday that UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd had called out end-to-end encryption services “like WhatsApp”, claiming they are being used by paedophiles and other criminals and pressurizing the companies to stop enabling such people from operating outside the law.
“I do not accept it is right that companies should allow them and other criminals to operate beyond the reach of law enforcement. We must require the industry to move faster and more aggressively. They have the resources and there must be greater urgency,” Rudd reportedly added.
Earlier this week she also admitted she doesn’t really understand e2e encryption.
Asked about her understanding of the technology at the Conservative Party conference, Rudd came out with this gem: “I don’t need to understand how encryption works to understand how it’s helping the criminals. I will engage with the security services to find the best way to combat that.”
She also complained about being ridiculed by the tech industry for not understanding the technologies she’s seeking to regulate. Whilst apparently doubling down on the ignorance that has attracted said mockery.
This of course led to more mockery…
Paedophiles are also using roads, planes, supermarkets, pubs, lettuces and Terry's Chocolate Oranges, so we're getting rid of them, too. https://t.co/VncItwvpnb — Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) October 3, 2017
You can see the problem with this strategy. Unless you’re the UK government, evidently.
But what exactly is Rudd trying to get WhatsApp to do? The company has repeatedly pointed out it can’t hand over decrypted message content because e2e crypto means it doesn’t hold the keys to decrypt and access the content.
Which is exactly the point of e2e encryption, and also explains why it’s better for data security.
The Facebook-owned company reportedly rejected a government demand it come up with technical solutions to enable intelligence agencies to access e2e encrypted WhatsApp messages this summer (per a Sky News report).
And an e2e encryption system with a backdoor wouldn’t be an e2e encryption system, as Rudd apparently can’t understand. (She wrote some other confusing words on that topic this summer.)
Meanwhile Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has tried to sell governments on the notion that access to its — doubtless high resolution — metadata should be enough for their counterterrorism/crime-fighting needs.
(Note for Rudd: U.S. intelligence agencies have previously said they kill people based on metadata, so Sandberg probably has a point. But maybe you don’t fully grasp what metadata is either?)
Yesterday Reuters also quoted UK security minister Ben Wallace, whose brief covers counterterrorism and comms data legislation, bashing on services that use e2e encryption for preventing security services from tracking and catching criminals because “we can’t get into these communications”.
Wallace also reportedly had this to say: “There are other ways I can’t talk about which we think they can help us more without necessarily entering into end-to-end encryption. So we think they can do more.”
What “other ways” is the government thinking of? A backdoor into an e2e encrypted messaging platform given any other name would still be, er, a backdoor. Unless you’re just getting your hands on an unlocked device and reading the plain text messages that way. (Which is of course one possible workaround for security services to access e2e encrypted comms.)
We asked WhatsApp (and Facebook) for comment on the government’s latest attacks on its messaging platform. Neither replied.
But when politicians seem intent on ignoring how your technology works while simultaneously asking your technologists to make the tech do what they want (which also happens to be: Destroy the security promise that your service is founded on) you can’t really blame them for not wanting to engage in conversation on this topic.
Security researcher and former Facebook staffer Alec Muffett, who worked on deploying e2e crypto for its ‘Secret Conversations’ feature, did have this to say when we asked for this thoughts: “If the Snowden affair has taught us anything it’s that government will internally redefine any distasteful term such as ‘backdoor’ so that it arguably does not apply to what they wish to achieve. I strongly suspect that state officials themselves do not have technical or specific plans, so much as a set of ‘desired outcomes’ which they will pressure the communications providers to deliver. For the rest of us, any ‘feature’ which breaks the promise that is implicit in the name of ‘end-to-end encryption’ is rightly called a ‘backdoor’ and should be resisted.”
Amen to that.
Meanwhile rumors suggest Rudd is gearing up for a potential leadership fight, if/when current UK PM Theresa May is finally unseated by the Brexit mess she has managed to exacerbate.
So Rudd’s views on e2e crypto — and her apparent willingness to continue to misunderstand how technologies work — should worry us all.
At this week’s party conference she unveiled plans to tighten the law around watching terrorist content online, with proposals to increase the maximum jail term for repeat viewing such content online or via a streaming service to up to 15 years.
So the current political trajectory in the UK is for greater control and regulation of the Internet. At the same time as the government is pushing hard to undermine the security of online data.
Again, that should worry us all — not least because other governments are watching the UK’s example, and some appear to be taking inspiration to make their own moves against encryption.
If Rudd wasn’t enough, another Tory leadership contender in waiting — current foreign secretary Boris Johnson — appears to have an even more butterfingered grasp of digital infrastructure than she does (at least Rudd has taken a lot of meetings with tech firms lately, albeit without necessarily learning a great deal).
Also speaking at the Conservative Party conference this week, Johnson reportedly suggested the UK could diverge from the EU’s data protection standards, post-Brexit — i.e. should he become the next UK PM.
Boris Johnson: Britain "would want to do things differently to
the EU in certain areas, such as data" – UK to diverge from GDPR post Brexit? — Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) October 3, 2017
Where on Earth has Johnson got the idea that the UK would want to do things different in the area of “data”? What can he be thinking to go out on such a strange limb?
His comments come despite the UK’s data protection watchdog sweating hard to inform UK businesses they do indeed need to comply with the incoming GDPR — and will need to continue to comply even after the country leaves the bloc (because, you know, complying with required standards is oil in the engine of trade).
And despite UK digital minister Matt Hancock stating multiple times the government is aiming to essentially mirror EU data protection regulations — precisely to ensure there is no cliff edge as far as data flows are concerned.
If the UK does not meet EU data protection standards once it leaves the bloc, UK businesses and startups will face being instantly cut off from selling into European markets.
The UK will also likely need to negotiate its own data transfer agreement with the US which has its own data agreement with the EU. So could be cut off from the US market too if they can’t get some quick agreement in place (vs mirroring EU DP regs probably making some kind of UK-US Privacy-Shield copy-paste job quicker and easier to pull off.)
Apparently none of the complexities of international data regulation have arrived beneath Johnson’s blonde mop. Expect that grand landing in some very far-flung future.
Instead we find only a vague grasp on “data” — tightly coupled with a telling political stiffness for “doing things differently”.
I don't think he's quite got the hang of international data regulation. Perhaps he could borrow this from Amber once she's done with it? pic.twitter.com/uRCuoy6Ozy — Rupert Goodwins (@rupertg) October 3, 2017
And when button-pushing politicians have such a childish grasp on technology at the same time as powerful technologists are demonstrably failing to factor politics into their platforms we should all be rightly and highly concerned about the resulting societal outcomes. |
A bill that would have resurrected the bail system in Maryland will not get a vote in the House of Delegates, a top aide to House Speaker Michael E. Busch said late Thursday, after Democratic leaders concluded it would not have enough support to pass.
Alexandra Hughes, Busch’s chief of staff, said the speaker made the decision after Democratic members polled their caucus to see how members would vote.
Allowing the bill to die in the House effectively leaves in place a recent Court of Appeals rules change that greatly limits the use of bail and instructs judges to use the “least onerous” conditions when setting bail for a defendant who is not considered a danger or a flight risk.
Busch’s decision was first reported by the Baltimore Sun.
Progressive advocates and lawmakers tried for years to abolish bail for poor defendants, saying it unfairly discriminates against them and can leave defendants who are not flight risks languishing in jail before trial simply because they lack the money to post bond.
Del. Cheryl Glenn chairs a meeting of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland where lawmakers voted to oppose a pro-bail bill. (Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post)
But the Court of Appeals decision was strongly opposed by the bail bond industry, who said it took away judges’ discretion and would mean more criminals on the street and fewer showing up in court for trial.
The industry campaigned against the change on social media and was highly visible in Annapolis during the current legislative session, urging lawmakers to pass a bill sponsored by Sen. Anthony Muse (D-Prince George’s) that would reestablish the option for judges to set bail even for poor defendants.
The bill was approved in the Senate, but it was opposed by the powerful Legislative Black Caucus, one of the largest blocs in the legislature. The Hispanic and Asian caucuses, and the entire Montgomery County delegation, subsequently decided to oppose the bill as well.
“I’m ecstatic,” said Cheryl Glenn, chair of the Maryland Legislative Black Caucus, which voted against the bill. “I was very happy to hear it’s not going to the floor.
“This not only sends a message to the leadership in Maryland but to people across the country about what can be accomplished when African American legislators stand together.” |
Sen. Ray White, R-Bedford, has endorsed U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.
"Unlike the other candidates, Ron Paul has been singing the same tune for years – going back to his first term in Congress," said White, a first-term senator for District 9, which includes Bedford and Merrimack. "He has understood and tried to warn us for decades about the economic crisis we now face, and he is the only candidate who understands the gravity of the situation."
White said strict policies that target the "ballooning budget and fiscal irresponsibility" must be made to correct the course the country is on and if that can be done there might be an opportunity for economic recovery.
"Ron Paul's Plan to Restore America is that opportunity. No one else has put forward a plan to dig this nation out of debt and out of trouble in only three years, and only Ron Paul will do it without ransacking the security of seniors, veterans, and the people who have, unfortunately, come to depend on government programs in these tough times.
"The core of an American recovery must be fiscal responsibility from Day 1 of the new administration. And we can trust Ron Paul to deliver."
White, a Certified Financial Planner and Chartered Financial Consultant, specializes in employee benefits and financial planning. He announced late last month that , citing fairness to his family and business and the time committment required of a senator that keeps him away from those things.
District 9 serves White's hometown of Bedford as well as Merrimack, New Boston, Mont Vernon, Lyndeborough and Greenfield.
Other state lawmakers who have endorsed Paul include state Sen. Andy Sanborn, R-Henniker, and Sen. Jim Forsythe, R-Strafford – Paul's state chairmen. |
Trump Blasts Floundering Democrats Over Fake Russian Story
Key Democratic officials are now warning their base not to expect evidence of Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election.
This comes after months of Democratic leaders and the Fake News media of hyping up the conspiracy that Russia hacked the election.
Today Donald Trump blasted Democrats over the fake Russian story.
The Democrats made up and pushed the Russian story as an excuse for running a terrible campaign. Big advantage in Electoral College & lost! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2017
Sorry Democrats – There is no evidence to support your conspiracies.
James Clapper and others stated that there is no evidence Potus colluded with Russia. This story is FAKE NEWS and everyone knows it! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2017
The real story is the leaking of classified documents.
The real story that Congress, the FBI and all others should be looking into is the leaking of Classified information. Must find leaker now! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2017 |
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Once upon a time, quarterbacks acquired with a high pick in the draft got several years to figure out how to play in the NFL. For most, that included a year or more of learning without playing.
Now, quarterbacks taken at the top of the draft quickly get thrust into the fray. And if they don’t quickly figure out how to play at the NFL level, they’re quickly cast aside.
From a five-year plan to a three-year plan to what may now be a one-year mandate, the reduced cost of young talent under the rookie wage scale has created, in some cities, an up-or-out mentality, regardless of the magnitude of the pick invested in the quarterback.
Last year, some thought Jets G.M. John Idzik wanted Geno Smith, the 39th overall pick in the draft and second quarterback taken, to start from Week One so that the Jets would know what they have in Smith, in the event they land at the top of round one in the 2014 draft.
The possibility of a high second-round pick being on a one-year arrangement seemed bizarre. But it now appears to be a reality.
Mike Vick, at this point in his career, plays the position (if healthy) better than Smith. Smith’s high-road welcome of Vick to New York could be viewed as a concession of that fact.
Actually, Smith’s words read a bit like he’s relieved.
Maybe the Jets are putting a new twist on the modern NFL. Maybe the rookie quarterback can start for a year, be supplanted by a veteran if the rookie doesn’t instantly become a star, and then reclaim the job after the veteran’s one-year contract expires.
Instead of having the rookie take a seat for a year or more, maybe today’s NFL will from time to time entail a rookie who fails the baptism by fire, takes a year to heal his wounds, and then gives it another try.
Either way, it’s a strange new dynamic in the win-now NFL, where teams truly are constructed on a year-to-year basis — and where young players don’t get as much leeway as they used to when trying to figure out how to thrive. |
Brief: Apparently, Open Source alternatives to Microsoft Office is not good enough for Brazil and thus they are reverting to proprietary Microsoft Office and other Microsoft tools.
The latest trend in Europe and developing countries was to ditch proprietary Microsoft Office and adopt an Open Source solution such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice. The move was more concerned with cost saving than for the love of Open Source. Whatever may be the reason, at least several government organizations have started to look beyond Microsoft.
But perhaps the euphoria died for some of them. Brazil that had opted for an open source policy is now reverting to Microsoft in an attempt to “generate cost efficiencies and standardize the IT applications portfolio across departments”, reported ZDNet.
Yes, you read that right. Brazil is opting for Microsoft for ‘cost efficiency’. It’s actually a deal with Microsoft that will allow the Brazilian government to buy Microsoft product licenses as per their requirement in the next 12 months, at a previously negotiated price.
And it’s not just Microsoft Office that they are getting. The deal includes Windows 10 and Windows Server (huh!!).
With this massive deal, Brazil departs from their Open Source policy put in place in the year 2003. The idea behind the open source switch was to reduce licensing costs and allow local IT companies to develop products for the government but apparent ‘lack of skills and interest’ led to the demise of this policy as the government struggled to get quality software.
Not just Brazil
It’s not just Brazil that is going back into the arms of Microsoft. Remember Italian region Emilia-Romagna switching to OpenOffice? Well, they are also going back to Microsoft Office, though, it’s not specified to be Microsoft but a proprietary cloud-based solution.
The open source move was already criticized by some of our readers and I had my suspicion as well. OpenOffice has not been in active development mode for last few years. In fact, OpenOffice has started indicating that it might be discontinued.
LibreOffice would have been the better choice here to replace MS Office. But the governments being the government, opted for the wrong Open Source solution. I do believe that had they opted for LibreOffice, things would have been better, specially considering that LibreOffice has worked a lot on its cloud solution.
These are not good news for us Open Source enthusiasts but I am rooting for the further success of LibreOffice so that it becomes the de facto alternative to MS Office and a ‘better one’ than that. |
iAcquire has recently blogged about their use of heavy use Ubuntu and open source software across the enterprise. Jeff Nappi, Director, Technology athas recently blogged about their use of heavy use Ubuntu and open source software across the enterprise.
iAcquire specializes in digital marketing services and their fulfillment department has 45 happy Ubuntu users.
The single largest department at iAcquire is our fulfillment team and they currently work every day on dual-head Ubuntu 10.04 LTSP diskless workstations. These diskless workstations are what are known as Fat Clients – the entire operating system is loaded via a compressed disk image over our Gigabit LAN, authentication is done via SSH, and home directories are mounted via NFS. All applications are run locally and are very fast – it is nearly unnoticeable that the machine is running entirely over the network. Behind the scenes we have two powerful servers in a hot-standby configuration that serve these diskless clients.
Jeff cites a number of benefits like no virus threats and hardware failures, easy availability of software and no IT support time and cost.
They use popular Linux applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, LibreOffice, Pidgin Instant Messenger and Spotify.
They use popular Linux applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, LibreOffice, Pidgin Instant Messenger and Spotify.
To date we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary costs by choosing Linux and open-source platforms.
They Love Precise Pangolin
Many iAcquire developers are currently using Ubuntu 12.04 on desktops and soon many workstations will be upgraded to Precise.
Several of the iAcquire developers are currently using Ubuntu 12.04 / Precise Pangolin on our desktops – including myself. And we really love it, it’s an extremely good user experience. Unfortunately we’re not yet able to share the awesome experience of Precise with the fulfillment team due to several squirrels (aka bugs) that are preventing us from deploying it. We will be doing more testing over the coming months and plan to share this experience with the rest of the iAcquire team as soon as we can. Thanks to Jeff Nappi
Its a, I will quote some of the parts from the article here. |
A not-so-shocking new study out from Pew Research found that Americans – or, more specifically, Millennials – are big whopping hypocrites when it comes to how much they actually care about the environment.
Pew found that three out of four Americans say they’re concerned about the planet, citing a survey last year that found 74 percent agreed that “the country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment."
On top of that, a majority 55 percent recently told Pew they believe the environment should be one of the top issues addressed by President Trump and Congress.
But it turns out that while paying lip service to Mother Earth while pointing an accusatory finger at the government is a political talking point played on repeat, that concern stops at most people's front doors. Pew notes:
Among U.S. adults, 75% say they are particularly concerned about helping the environment as they go about their daily lives, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey. But only one-in-five Americans say they make an effort to live in ways that help protect the environment “all the time.”
And if that weren’t shocking enough, check out the age demographic Pew found to be the most environmentally friendly…
Those ages 65 and older are three times as likely as those ages 18 to 29 to say they make this effort all the time (36% vs. 12%). Millennials (currently 18 to 36 years old) are also somewhat less likely than older generations to view themselves as environmentalists, with 32% saying this, versus at least four-in-ten among older generations, the Center found in a 2014 survey.
On top of that, Pew noted that older people are actually more likely that Millennials to say they recycle often, and only 32 percent of all Americans say it bothers them when people throw away things that could have been recycled.
Evidence to back up this study isn't hard to find. Take, for example, the so-called "environmental" protesters who set up camp in North Dakota to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. After weeks of ranting against the threat oil pipelines pose to local water sources, the massive hoarde vacated the campground, leaving more than 835 dumpsters worth of trash, abandoned cars, and about a dozen live puppies behind. It took $1.1 million and about a month just to clean up the mess before it could seep into the local river.
Similarly, the Women's March on Washington back in January featured thousands of protesters railing against Trump's "anti-environment" agenda. Their signs, along with their water bottles, and miscellanous debris, ended up scattered all over the streets of D.C.
Looks like when it comes to protecting the environment, more Americans would rather chuck money toward fixing “climate change” and force coal miners into joblessness than actually practice what they preach. |
Already daydreaming about warm, outdoor barbecues and picnics? If so, one thing you’re probably leaving out of your happy vision is the inevitable return of blood-thirsty mosquitoes that crash those otherwise relaxing outdoor events. Luckily, this year, researchers have your back, as Science first reported.
In a high-tech experiment to recreate your bite risks while chilling on your patio, researchers at New Mexico State University tested out 11 common types of mosquito repellent to find the most effective ones. The results: skip the citronella candles and ditch herb-laced bracelets—they didn’t work at keeping away mosquitoes. Instead, stick with DEET-containing products, metofluthrin-blowing clip-on fans, and sprays containing oil of lemon eucalyptus. The results appear in the Journal of Insect Science.
To test out the products, the researchers set up a three-chamber cage of mosquitoes in a wind tunnel, gently blowing at 2 meters/second. Here's how the experiment works: A pack of hungry Ae. aegypti mosquitoes (50 to 125) enters into the middle compartment and can fly to either side—upwind or down. Next, the researchers place some delicious human “bait” one meter upwind of the cage. (The researchers made sure that volunteers didn’t bathe in the 15 hours prior so that the mosquitoes could get a good whiff.) After a little time, the researchers seal off the chambers and tally up how the mosquitoes distribute—toward the bait or not.
In a positive control, 88.8 percent stalked the chamber closest to the bait. In a negative control with no bait, only 17 percent roamed the upwind chamber.
Next, the researchers tried out 11 different types of mosquito repellant on the bait. The products included bracelets, wearable devices, sprays, and citronella candles. The most effective products were, in order of rank:
The OFF! Clip-on, which is a wearable device that spews a fog of metofluthrin insecticide. Only 27 percent of mosquitoes were in the upwind chamber, about a 70 percent reduction in mosquito attraction.
Cutter Lemon Eucalyptus, a spray of oil of lemon eucalyptus. Only 29.6 percent of the mosquitoes were in the upwind chamber.
Ben’s Tick & Insect Repellent, a spray-on containing 98 percent DEET. Only 33.7 percent of mosquitoes were in the upwind chamber, a reduction of around 60 percent.
The personal sonic mosquito repellent, citronella candle, herbal sprays, and bracelets did virtually nothing.
The authors are hopeful that the information can better inform consumers about how to best protect against bites. “At a time where vector-borne diseases like Zika are a real threat, the most egregious danger to the consumer is the false comfort that some repellents give them protection against Ae. aegypti when they actually offer none,” the authors conclude.
Journal of Insect Science , 2017. DOI: 10.1093/jisesa/iew117 (About DOIs). |
Three people were injured when a tractor-trailer rolled over after a collision with a car at the intersection of Route 125 and Route 155 in Epping on Wednesday.
Advertisement 3 injured when tractor-trailer, car collide in Epping Driver of car flown to Boston hospital Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Three people were injured when a tractor-trailer rolled over after a collision with a car at the intersection of Route 125 and Route 155 in Epping on Wednesday.Click to watch News 9's coverage.Police said the tractor-trailer and a car collided about 6:50 a.m. The driver of the car, Elisa Smith, 43, suffered a serious head injury and was flown to a Boston hospital.Smith's 17-year-old daughter was a passenger in the car, and she was taken to Exeter Hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. The driver of the tractor-trailer, Miguel Adames, 54, also had non-life-threatening injuries and was taken to Exeter Hospital.Neighbor Emily Adams has been friends for about five years with the driver and her daughter. Adams said she and her two sons were getting ready for the day when they heard a terrible sound."We just heard a big huge crash and we knew something had happened, and we looked out and we heard the police and the ambulance and saw the lights," she said.State police said it appears that the mother, who was driving, might have misjudged how much space she had."They basically pulled into the path of the tractor-trailer unit that you see here on the roadway traveling northbound," Sgt. Steve Cooper said. "A lot of credit is given to the operator of the tractor-trailer unit, who observed the vehicle in front of and him took evasive action."The tractor-trailer rolled over, spilling part of its load of trash and creating a nightmare for drivers during the morning commute. The position of the truck also created problems for those in charge of cleaning up the mess."Where the tractor is, it's all really soft mud, so we're going to have a hard time with placement of the trucks to get it out," said Donald Gagnon of Rochester Truck.State police said neither driver was impaired, and speed did not appear to be a factor in the crash.Get the WMUR app12967056 |
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says he'll reconsider the ban on beer at sports stadiums ahead of the 2018 World Cup.
Putin was questioned about the ban Thursday when he and FIFA president Sepp Blatter met with fans in St. Petersburg as part of commemorations of the 100th birthday of the Russian soccer federation.
As president, Putin signed a 2005 law banning beer and beer advertisements at sports venues.
He told the fan who asked about lifting the ban that "when the decision was made about stadiums, it came from the best of intentions. OK, we'll return to it again and think about it."
Blatter noted that beer is popular among fans, saying "beer is like a part of life. Can you imagine holding a championship in Germany without beer?"
Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press |
[Note: Social counts reset to zero on this post.]
Several weeks ago I posted a call for stories about children who have been diagnosed with ADHD ( Hyperactivity Disorder) and have been homeschooled, unschooled, or "free schooled." I received 28 such stories and subjected them to a qualitative analysis.
My analysis of these stories suggests that (1) most ADHD-diagnosed kids do fine without drugs if they are not in a conventional school; (2) the ADHD characteristics don't vanish when the kids leave conventional school, but the characteristics are no longer as big a problem as they were before; and (3) ADHD-diagnosed kids seem to do especially well when they are allowed to take charge of their own . In what follows I will elaborate upon and support each of these conclusions primarily with quotations from the stories. But, first, here are some numbers concerning whom the stories were about and who wrote them.
Of the 28 stories:
- 19 were about boys and 9 were about girls.
- 26 were written by a parent of the ADHD-diagnosed child; the other two were written, respectively, by the diagnosed person himself (who is now a 24-year-old man) and by an older sister of the diagnosed person.
- 24 were about children who were diagnosed with ADHD through a formal clinical procedure; the other 4 were about children who were labeled by medical or school officials as "ADHD" but whose , while agreeing that the child showed the full set of ADHD characteristics, chose not to proceed with formal diagnosis.
-21 were about children who started their education in a conventional school (at least through part of kindergarten) and then left conventional schooling; the other 7 were about children who had never attended a conventional school.
-21 described their nonconventional schooling as "homeschooling," 5 described theirs as "unschooling," and 2 described theirs as "alternative schooling" (one was described as a small private school in a home, "similar to homeschooling," and the other as "loosely based on Sudbury Valley").
And now, here are the three conclusions, along with some of the quotations that led to each conclusion.
Conclusion 1: Most children who had been medicated for ADHD while in conventional schooling were taken off of the drugs when removed from conventional schooling, and those who were never in conventional schooling were never medicated.
Research studies have regularly revealed that most children who attend a conventional school and are diagnosed with ADHD take stimulant drugs ( reuptake inhibitors) as treatment.[1] That is not true of this sample of ADHD-labeled children outside of conventional school. Of the 28 children in this sample, 13 were never medicated (these were mostly children who were never in a conventional school or who were removed from conventional school very shortly after the diagnosis), 9 were medicated for at least part of the time that they had been in a conventional school but were removed from after removal from school, and only 6 (21% of the full sample) were being medicated at the time the story was written.
Of the six who were medicated at the time the story was written, one was on Strattera (a non-stimulant norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor), one had just started his first day of homeschooling and was taking Vyvance (a stimulant), and the remaining four were still on stimulants even though they had been homeschooled for a year or more.
Here is a sample of comments made concerning children who had been removed from conventional school and taken off of stimulants. (Each bulleted comment concerns a different child. The numbers in parentheses refer to the story number in my notes):
• (#13): "We decided [when he was in 3rd grade in public school] to switch from Strattera to Adderall. We tried various doses but weren't getting what we needed, so we tried Vyvanse and Concerta at various doses. They just weren't working for him. There seemed to be a short-term improvement, or at least a perceived improvement but it really didn't fix the problem. In all this, his anxiety was paralyzing, so, of course, we ended up on Prozac. ... As parents, it was exactly where we didn't want to be, having a drugged kid just to keep him in school. ... he was being pulled from class daily for being disruptive--making noises, interrupting teachers, asking to leave. He and his special ed. teacher were in constant battle. After a particularly ugly IEP (in January, 2009) we pulled the plug. We finished the year with homeschooling and he made more progress in 3 months than he had made in 3 years of traditional public school. We continued with the meds for another month or so but discontinued them from that point on."
• (#23): "My little brother was put on ADD medication at the age of 7, because he was not able to focus well in school or in his martial arts classes. I saw his immediately dull when they put him on the drugs, but he was much better able to function in organized learning settings. When he was 15, though, he took himself off of the meds, and only then did he realize, and begin to vocalize, that he had been having paranoid delusions for years as a result of the medications. As a 10 year old, he was terrified during every shower b/c he thought terrorists were poisoning the water. My brother wasn't so disruptive on the medications, but he never excelled in school until his last two years of high school, when he attended a private school that was loosely based on Sudbury Valley. Now, he is a fantastic musician, is attending college, and has never had any more problems with delusions or . He hates the drugs he was put on and has a lot of lingering about it to this day."
• (#7) "At age 8 ½ we decided to try Adderall, because he was struggling with and learning... He developed severe at age 10 [while on Adderall]. He was placed on a few more drugs. Each drug seemed to make him better for a few months, and then worse. When a drug caused a side effect, he would be given another one to combat the side effect. ... He developed a B12 deficit because of the Adderall. This gave him obsessive- , and we had to give him B12 injections. ... Then [after altering his and removing toxins from his ] we weaned him off of the Adderall. There was no difference in his focus or activity at that point. He was/is fine. We continue to homeschool him. ... It was just the best thing we could have done for our child. He is now 16 and planning to go to college."
• (#22) "By 4th grade (this time a private school w/ an advanced curriculum) her 7 teachers WANTED her tested. We tried Ritalin for a few months, but it only resulted in a daytime compliant zombie that wanted to work even harder at night to pursue her knowledge. By spring they asked for a conference, refunded our deposit for the coming year .... They agreed she was a classroom mgmt problem, because she could do anything but listen." [The story goes on to describe the success of homeschooling, without drugs, and the fact that she has been accepted to a four-year college.]
• (#1) "And now that we are homeschooling (and he is thriving academically, socially, and behaviorally), medication is no longer a subject of consideration. We are excited about homeschooing--it has changed our lives for the better; we have our son back."
• (#2 concerning a boy who had been on various drugs in 3rd & 4th grades in public school after a previous period of homeschooling without drugs): "We pulled him out of school and went back to homeschooling. I took him off the meds to get a baseline on his behavior Things improved for him so quickly that I never restarted Rx medications."
• (#14) "As a child, around age 5, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I was put on Ritalin and continued on the drug until the age of 11. After coming off the drug my parents noted that I was less angry and generally happier with what was going on around me, as well as less prone to tantrums. At the end of 5th grade my parents made the to homeschool me. I was homeschooled from grades 6 to 10 [without drugs] and during that time I pulled ahead in my math work and got A's on all of my tests. I was able to study how I wanted to, fidget when I wanted to. . .. Then [beginning with grade 11] I was returned to school [for some but not all courses]. ... I was [then] put back on a new form of Ritalin. We tried it for a month, and I went into a severe depression from the effects. After a month I was pulled back off it and that was the end of talks about drugs for the condition. ... I am now 24, married, and expecting a child. I went to college after my senior year ... and joined the Guard. I have noticed in the course of my life that I am calmer for the most part now. I still have urges, ... not what I consider bad urges, but urges to say what is on my mind and to express an opinion whenever I can. ... Overall, I am happy. I my life, my wife and my family."
In contrast to these quotations, those who have kept their child on a stimulant after starting homeschooling report the drug to be very helpful. Here are the three most positive pro-drug comments:
• (#6) "We tried Concerta, but he went crazy. Eventually we tried Strattera (a non-stimulant ADHD medication, a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor) and it helped so much. He now has that second to think about what he's going to do and he makes better choices. No more temper tantrums, throwing things, hitting, or reckless behavior."
• (#10) "Off meds she is inattentive, argumentative, and unpleasant to be with. On meds she is productive, fun, and kind. She does have the side effect of suppression, so we have to get creative to get enough calories into her. That is easily accommodated, though, and we have been happy with her progress both socially and academically in the three years that we have homeschooled."
• (#27) "Once the drug [Focalin XR-a stimulant] kicked in, everything changed. He not only grasped concepts, he remembered them. He flew through three years of math in six months. He will start high school in the fall, with over 20 hours of high school credit, and honors level high school science under his belt [from his homeschooling years]. He is becoming the brilliant kid I only saw in flashes before the drugs."
Conclusion 2: The children's behavior, moods, and learning generally improved when they stopped conventional schooling, not because their ADHD characteristics vanished but because they were now in a situation where they could learn to deal with those characteristics.
Only two or three of the respondents reported that the ADHD-like behavior disappeared when the child was removed from conventional school. The great majority said or implied that such characteristics remained but were no longer such a big problem, primarily because, out of school, the child could be active and self-directed without being disruptive and had opportunities to learn how to cope with his or her personality characteristics. Here are some relevant quotations.
• (#16) "He learns fine as long as he is moving. I have the feeling that in a formal mass education setting, the focus would still be on getting him to sit still. As it is, he would be entering 8th grade in the local school, but he's doing sophomore/junior level work and even has some AP credits. He's teaching himself German and Latin because he wants to. I have no desire to squelch his joy of learning just to get him to sit still! ... He's well adjusted socially and behaves appropriately. However, when he's with other kids with ADHD, we notice they sort of snowball each other's behaviors."
• (#17). "She is a terrific free-range learner. She is sometimes afraid that she is 'behind' and will find websites and books describing what she should know and just devour them. She was reading on an 8th grade level at 3rd grade 3 years ago, so she's reading somewhere on a high school level now. ... Her behavior is normally excellent. Sometimes she has outbursts of exuberance that can be both inconsiderate and difficult to stop, like running through the house shouting late a night."
• (#18). "I think the real advantage of homeschooling has been in the development of my son's social skills. He is a thoroughly nice person, both kind and empathetic. I just don't see how he could have learned to as well at a school where he was being made to feel that he was unacceptable all day."
• (#12, about a boy who at age 5 was diagnosed with ADHD, Dysfunction, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder and who began homeschooling shortly after that): "Today [at nearly age 16] he is an articulate, and confident young man. He takes no medication ... has no odd behaviors ... and impresses every adult he meets. ... His learning style is nothing that could ever be harnessed in the classroom. He almost intuits how to fix everything from cars to air conditioners to ..." (This writer goes on to describe how her son is preparing himself for a through apprenticeships in the trades and at an antique store, in ways that would not have been possible in school.)
• (#13) "His anxiety is gone [since leaving public school and starting homeschooling]. As far as schooling goes, he definitely has a hard time completing his work. He is indeed easily distracted. ... He's still impulsive and demanding but we can handle it much better than the school could and we're all less for it. He takes some classes through local groups and museums and still has a hard time attending to the teachers, but he manages now that it isn't an all-day everyday prospect."
• (#20) "As I mentioned, my son's friendships are always volatile. While he loves being with them, his tendency to 'lose it' or be 'hyper' often gets him into scrapes and he will quite often fall out with them. Being out of school has allowed him to walk away when this happens, to come home, reflect on the situation, talk about it and to not engage in the downward spiral of anger and resentment through being with them all day every day. He is learning about life, about life skills and, most importantly, how to be a happy and fulfilled adult."
• (#24) "... her public schools years of K-3 were mostly disastrous.. . . In response to repeated encouragement by the resource teacher, when she was in third grade we took her to a psychologist and came home with a diagnosis of ADHD and a prescription for Metadate. We tried it for about a week, and the testing results did show a noticeable improvement in areas such as short-term (from 0/10 to 5/10 on one test, for example). Nevertheless, we couldn't bring ourselves to continue the meds: she was awake until very late at night, had a glazed look in her eyes, developed a small rash on her thighs, etc. ... Instead we started her for fourth grade in a small private alternative school for grades K-7/8. It has about 14 or 15 kids and is like a big home-schooled family. ... Getting her out of public school was the best decision we could have made. ... And as for us as parents: before we bailed out for the world of alternative schooling, we felt like we were raising not a child, but rather a set of problems in need of a set of solutions. No more."
• (#28). "We started homeschooling in kindergarten. It was a disaster. Sitting down for 10 minutes a day for a lesson was like pulling teeth. She would weep and cry that she hated school. ‘Do you hate stories?' No. ‘Do you hate games?' No. ‘What do you hate?' Sitting DOWNNNNN! (Wail). I persevered through kindergarten, but with nothing to show for progress after a year of trying. For 1st grade I modified my style a little and let her do things like play Legos, doodle, or ‘sew' while we read. It helped a little. ... By 2nd grade I had given up. ... She was not learning to read. .... Then one day I walked in and she was reading The Chronicles of Narnia. It had just clicked, at around age 8. ... She still misspells atrociously. And her behavior in groups can still be very wild--she is so excitable and dramatic and sometimes scares other children a little. ... As I've gotten to know her better, I find it more and more odd that we label these children the ‘learning disabled.' She does naturally the things other children find so hard--word problems in math, seeing large complex solutions to problems, being a creative problem solver, having a unique perspective on a book she read. The things that are hard to TEACH. And she struggles with the things that are so easily remedied.... calculators and spell-check anyone?"
Conclusion 3: Many of these children seem to have a very high need for self-direction in education, and many "hyper focus" on tasks that interest them.
A staff member who works at one of the Sudbury model schools emailed me this interesting comment about kids who had been diagnosed with ADHD before coming to that school:
"The ADHD label is applied to two very different sorts of kids. One type really has "Attention Surfeit Disorder." Most of these get deeply involved in exactly what they want to do... They do their thing--with other kids when it overlaps with other kids' interests, and without other kids when they are caught up in something that other kids aren't interested in. They get labeled ADD not because they can't attend but because they have no coping mechanisms for enforced boredom..... The other type are simply physically active to the point of being problematic when quiet is called for. These kids may get themselves ejected from JC [Judicial Committee] or the School Meeting when they can't control themselves, and generally have long records for Running and Roughhousing and for Disturbingly Noisy activities. A combination of not calling unduly for quiet (most of these kids can be outside running and roughhousing to their hearts' content most of the time without bugging anyone) and a fair and reasonable JC that helps these kids discern time and place makes this problem less for us and gives the kids a sense of justice and time and place that informs them and lets them develop the ability to shift gears when quiet and serene are called for."
In the sample of stories I received, many of the kids seem to fall clearly into the first category. They seem to be kids who have an even greater need for self-direction in education than do typical kids. (If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know my view that all normal kids learn better in settings where they are in control of their education than in settings where someone else is in control.) In this regard, it is not surprising that the few kids in this sample who were still on ADHD medications during homeschooling seemed to be primarily those whose homeschooling was structured by the parent and modeled after the education one would receive in a conventional school.
A number of the quotations that I have already presented allude to the ADHD-labeled child's need to control his or her own learning. Here are a few more:
• (#3) "She chooses her own subjects and learning material daily. ... She learns much better if she can follow an interest and then hyper focus on it. She may pick something different, and seemingly unrelated, every day, and then tie that randomness into a major project that she will work on for a month."
• (#5) "It seems to be a matter of interest. If he is into something he will be focused and attentive for long stretches, if not he gets antsy. As an example, at our local homeschool conference a robotics club had a booth and had a robot there. My son would have stayed there asking questions about the robot for the rest of the afternoon if I had not moved him along."
• (#19) "We've been unschooling for several years now. He is 11 .... He is energetic and rambunctious at times, but often finds an interest that holds his attention for hours on end. The only time he fits the ADHD diagnosis is when he is bored or uninterested in something. Or he will be particularly rambunctious after sitting for long periods of time (whether he was engaged or bored while sitting still doesn't matter)."
• (#20) "After a while [of parent-directed homeschooling] it became impossible for him to learn. His anxiety increased to a level that we were forced to allow him to take anti-anxiety drugs, which he did for a few months.... I then stumbled on self-directed learning/unschooling and have not looked back! ... It all made perfect sense. My son makes choices about what he wants to learn, he makes his own decisions about when and how he will learn it, he has learnt to define his own boundaries and takes responsibility for his own learning. If he is interested in something, we facilitate and provide resources, links, take him to places that supply the stuff he needs. He has taken a huge interest in music technology. ... He has produced some amazing music, he has found out about a variety of things he is interested in, he has self-defined interests which avoid institutions. . . . He is , and he knows what choices to follow more than we do. Never would I have believed last year, when everything was so bleak and , that a year on, everything would be looking so rosy, and so absolutely fascinating as we follow just what it means to give your child the freedom to be themselves."
• (#22) "Our homeschooling started out with a curriculum program that she hated following. She would just want to read all of the history book . . . The piecemeal, parsing out of knowledge that is "curriculum" always galled her. We started unschooling and everything fell into place. .... The "problem" is that she loves knowledge, wants to go at her own pace (fast), ignoring some subjects while pursuing others, and delving into specialized interests no one else her age has."
• (#21) "We began unschooling about four years ago. ... Today she's 14.5 years old... She is creative, responsible, fun to be around. She has no trouble reading and is skilled at using math in her everyday life. ...She has no signs of the problems the school district saw in her when she was 9 years old. // She was in a large, chaotic class with several children who required one-on-one aids, the district was in the first year of implementing Everyday Math (which I called Everyday Crying) and the books they were giving the children to read, IMO, were boring. Tests made her and she was overloaded sensorily by the noise and smells at the school, especially in the cafeteria. // Since she's been home she's just bloomed. People who know her find it hard to believe that anyone ever questioned her or ability to focus. She's smarter and more responsible than many adults I know."
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Before concluding, I should say that this is obviously just a preliminary study. It is, however, as far as I can tell, the only study that anyone has conducted to date concerning ADHD-diagnosed children's abilities to learn, and to cope without drugs, outside of the conventional school environment. My hope is that this preliminary study will draw the attention of the research community so that more formal, large-scale studies will be conducted. As a culture we are so used to thinking of school as the normative environment for children that we rarely even think about the possibility of children learning and developing well outside of that environment. I am very to those who responded to my call for stories and took the time to write out, so clearly, the experiences of their ADHD-labeled son or daughter.
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Notes
[1] See, for example, Mayes et al (2009), Medicating Children: ADHD and Pediatric Mental (Harvard University Press).
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For more on children's natural ways of learning, see Free to Learn. Also, join me on Facebook and see alternativestoschooling.com. |
For students who graduated in May and June with student loan debt, an important letter is coming soon: the dreaded student loan repayment notice.
For federal student loans, and most private student loans, borrowers have a six month grace period before they have to start making payments. About six weeks before the first payment is due, borrowers will receive a notice from their student loan servicer that highlights the loan balance, repayment plan, repayment amount, and other terms of the loan.
But before you make any choices - some which could seriously harm your financial future - make sure you understand what to do and what your options are.
You Don't Have To Use The Standard Repayment Plan
First, it's important to remember that you don't have to use the standard repayment plan. When you initially get the student loan repayment notice, your lender will default you into the standard plan. This plan is based on equal payments over 10 years. However, this can be challenging for recent college graduates, who may not be making much in their first job.
FinAid.org has a great breakdown of the different repayment plan options for graduates, so make sure you see if a graduate plan or other repayment plan makes more sense for your financial situation.
See If You Qualify For Student Loan Forgiveness
Next , see if you qualify for any type of student loan forgiveness program. Over one-third of student loan borrowers are estimated to qualify for some type of student loan forgiveness, and this can be a great way to lower your student loan burden.
If you do qualify for a program, you need to contact your student loan servicer to see what documents are required to prove eligibility. Many forgiveness options require several years of service after graduation, and your lender will require that you make the minimum payments on your student loan debt while this happens.
Use Backdoor Student Loan Forgiveness Plans
If you don't qualify for regular student loan forgiveness programs, you can see if you qualify for these "secret" student loan forgiveness programs. These aren't true student loan forgiveness programs, but are actually student loan repayment plans that have student loan forgiveness at the end if there is any remaining balance.
If you are struggling to make payments on any of the standard student loan repayment plans, these special plans may work for you. They are typically based on your income (which you have to verify each year to remain eligible), and after a certain period of repayments, you loan balance is forgiven. It's important to note that your repayment plan can last up to 20 years or more, and any balance forgiven is considered taxable income.
What Not To Do
Now that you know your options, here are some important things not to do:
1. Don't go back to school unless you have a really valid reason to do so. Most college graduates shouldn't go straight to graduate school for a variety of reasons - and escaping making student loan payments is one of those reasons.
2. Don't skip making payments because you can't afford it. By not making payments, you will ruin your credit score, which will impact your financial future for years. Having a poor credit score can prevent you from buying a car, buying a house, renting an apartment, even getting a job. With all of the repayment possibilities listed above, simply change your repayment plan to something that works before skipping a payment. |
The White House’s national security adviser resigned Monday night and President Trump tapped retired Lt. Gen. Joseph Keith Kellogg Jr. to serve as acting adviser in his place, in the first major shakeup of the still-young administration.
Michael Flynn, the ousted adviser, admitted that he misled Vice President Mike Pence on the contents of phone calls Mr. Flynn placed to the Russian ambassador, in which they apparently discussed sanctions.
At the time, though he was working for the Trump transition team, Mr. Flynn was a private citizen, and such communications to hash out government policy are illegal.
SEE ALSO: Text of Michael Flynn’s resignation letter from national security advisor post
“Unfortunately, because of the fast pace of events, I inadvertently briefed the vice president-elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian ambassador. I have sincerely apologized to the president and the vice president, and they have accepted my apology,” Mr. Flynn said in a resignation letter released by the White House.
Top officials, apparently relying on Mr. Flynn’s account of the conversation, issued a public denial of reports that he had discussed the sanctions imposed on the Kremlin by the outgoing Obama administration over Moscow’s efforts to influence the U.S. election in Mr. Trump’s favor.
But Mr. Flynn later told White House officials the issue of sanctions may have come up. That revelation left the position of Mr. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, untenable.
SEE ALSO: Trump says the ‘real story’ of Flynn’s downfall is ‘illegal leaks’ out of D.C.
Democrats said Mr. Flynn had to go, but said it doesn’t end the questions swirling around the Trump team over its promises to the regime in Moscow.
“These alleged contacts and any others the Trump campaign may have had with the Kremlin are the subject of the House Intelligence Committee’s ongoing investigation,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on that panel.
“Moreover, the Trump administration has yet to be forthcoming about who was aware of Flynn’s conversations with the ambassador and whether he was acting on the instructions of the President or any other officials, or with their knowledge,” he said.
The Justice Department had warned the White House weeks ago of the conversations and the discrepancy between the public statements and the reality of Mr. Flynn’s behavior, according to the Associated Press.
As the reports piled up, Democrats on Capitol Hill had demanded Mr. Flynn be suspended from his security clearance and fired for his actions.
Mr. Flynn, who was fired from his job as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Obama in 2014, had been a supporter of Mr. Trump’s during the campaign. He even spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer.
After Mr. Trump’s victory in November, Mr. Flynn was one of the first personnel announcements Mr. Trump made, tapping his booster to be national security adviser.
But over the last few days the White House had given conflicting signals about his job. One senior adviser said Monday afternoon that the president maintained “full confidence” in Mr. Flynn, while another said the president was trying to figure out what to do.
Mr. Flynn is the second person on Mr. Trump’s national security team to bow out already.
Last month Monica Crowley, a GOP foreign policy expert who had previously served as online opinion editor for The Washington Times and as commentator for Fox News,announced she would forgo a senior strategist’s position with Mr. Flynn after accusations by CNN and Politico that she plagiarized some of her work.
In his resignation letter Mr. Flynn said he held “numerous” calls with foreign ministers and ambassadors during the transition period after the election but before the inauguration. He said those kinds of communications “are standard practice.”
He also left with a parting thanks to Mr. Trump, saying the president in three weeks “has reoriented American foreign policy in fundamental ways to restore America’s leadership position in the world.”
According to CNN, retired Gen. David Petraeus will be “coming in” Tuesday to discuss the position. Retired Gen. Kellogg also is a candidate for the permanent post, CNN reported. |
Ivory Coast sent hit squads to Ghana to kill followers of former strongman Laurent Gbagbo and paid Liberian mercenaries not to stage cross-border attacks for Gbagbo, a UN report said.
The Ghana government told United Nations sanctions experts they had "foiled" at least two missions this year by Ivory Coast agents to kill or abduct Gbagbo associates, said the report obtained by AFP on Sunday.
"The Ghanaian authorities claimed to have foiled at least two such missions in early 2013," said the report.
At least one former Gbagbo supporter, who had returned to Ivory Coast, "had been abducted and had disappeared," it added.
Payments were made to Liberian mercenaries and Ivory Coast militia commanders in a bid to head off attacks aimed at destabilising President Alassane Ouattara's government.
The report to the Security Council, by experts who monitor UN sanctions against Liberia, cast new light on efforts by Ouattara's government to blunt the threat from Gbagbo, whose refusal to concede defeat in a 2010 presidential election sparked unrest in which thousands died.
Gbagbo is now at the International Criminal Court in The Hague facing charges of crimes against humanity. But several cross-border attacks were staged from Liberia in 2012 and the UN mission in Ivory Coast has said several times that new incidents are possible.
The Ghanaian government told the UN experts in July that its neighbour had been sending Ivorian agents intending to assassinate or kidnap militant pro-Gbagbo refugees.
The experts said they had been unable to "independently verify" the claims.
But they met several former Gbagbo ministers in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, who said they wanted to return "but were afraid that they would be killed if they succeeded."
Gbagbo refused to accept the result of the presidential election in late 2010. At least 3,000 people died in five months of unrest before he was captured in an operation backed by UN and French forces.
Ivory Coast was gripped by civil war for much of the previous two decades. Ouattara has embarked on reconciliation efforts but has been urged to move faster and to clamp down on corruption.
Government payments
The UN experts said they had "gathered substantive information" concerning payments made from May this year by the Ivory Coast government to "key Liberian mercenaries."
Two of the mercenary leaders were identified as Isaac Chegbo, who is also known as "Bob Marley" and Augustine "Bush Dog" Vleyee.
Money was paid for "collecting information from these individuals and discouraging them from conducting cross-border attacks," said the report.
It said the payments were made by the Ivory Coast interior ministry's bureau of operational intelligence.
The mercenaries told the UN sanctions experts they were taken to Abidjan to receive money. One said he was given $8,000 but others said they got as little as $2,000.
"Several of the mercenaries who had received such payments complained that they had been promised substantially more money," the report said.
The mercenaries "alleged that additional financing had been misappropriated by Ivorian officials" and the Liberian intermediary.
The UN report said that while attacks had diminished this year, the payments were not a "sustainable" way of keeping the lid on tensions in the country.
It also said Ivory Coast had failed to tell Liberian counterparts about the payments or other moves to sway Gbabgo followers in Liberia.
An Ivory Coast mission accompanied by a UN official from Abidjan that went to a refugee camp in Liberia in May was briefly detained by Liberian authorities who had not been warned in advance, said the report. |
Arya Stark from Game of Thrones Ygritte from Game of Thrones Margaery Tyrell from Game of Thrones Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones Melisandre from Game of Thrones Jesse and Walter White from Breaking Bad Hector Salamanca and the Cousins from Breaking Bad Skyler White from Breaking Bad Gus Fring from Breaking Bad Tortuga from Breaking Bad Hank Schrader from Breaking Bad Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones The Hound from Game of Thrones Hodor and Bran Stark from Game of Thrones Todd Alquist from Breaking Bad Don Draper from Mad Men Joan from Mad Men Roger Sterling from Mad Men Stringer Bell from The Wire Brother Mouzone from The Wire Omar Little from The Wire Chris Partlow and Snoop from The Wire Clay Morrow from Sons of Anarchy Saul Goodman and Huell from Breaking Bad Jax Teller from Sons of Anarchy Gemma from Sons of Anarchy Cosima Niehaus, Alison Hendrix, Beth Childs, Helena, and Katja Obinger from Orphan Black Trevor, Franklin and Michael from Grand Theft Auto V
It only takes him half an hour.
Each workday Adrien Noterdaem posts another popular character from pop culture – TV shows like Breaking Bad and The Wire, video games like Grand Theft Auto V – rendered in the style of everyone's favorite family from Springfield to his "Draw the Simpsons" Tumblr. It's a feat that’s possible largely because he's learned to turn out the illustrations at such a rapid clip.
"The idea was to do everything quickly, no time to waste," Noterdaem said in an email to WIRED. "It takes me around 30 minutes for one. I try not to spend more time. It's like an exercise, a goal I give to myself."
Noterdaem, who works by day as a creative director for the digital marketing agency Emakina in Brussels, has been a fan of Matt Groening's animated show for nearly 25 years, ever since he watched French-dubbed versions of the show as a kid. He's created around 120 Simpsons-esque images since April, and he recently gained notoriety with his series of Breaking Bad characters around the time of the series finale. "I didn't know at first that this stuff [would] have so much buzz around it," said the artist, who Simpsonized himself before ever taking on a pop culture figure.
Noterdaem, who made several new Simpsonized drawings for WIRED of our favorite female Game of Thrones characters (above) said he doesn't have a particular goal in mind with his character-a-day project, but he will continue to do it "as long as I enjoy it."
"I don't have a hidden agenda," he said. "Maybe I should have one. I don't know. If Matt Groening calls me, I definitely won't think long before taking a plane to L.A."
Images courtesy Adrien Noterdaem |
Like a modern Henri Becquerel, Washington State University doctoral student Marianne Tarun's discovery came quite by accident. Her simple lab error has uncovered a new way to boost electrical conductivity of a crystal by 40,000 percent, simply by exposing it to light.
Tarun had accidentally left a sample of strontium titanate out on a counter before testing the crystal's conductivity and discovering the phenomenon. Her team suspects that photons knock loose electrons which boost the material's conductivity. Her follow up tests confirmed the effect and found that as little as 10 minutes of light exposure could propagate the effect for days on end.
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Known as persistent photoconductivity, it's nowhere near the level of electrical throughput of what super-conducting materials can achieve. However, it does hold a great deal of practical potential. For one, the effect works at room temperature unlike superconductors which only function at a fraction of a degree from absolute zero.
"The discovery of this effect at room temperature opens up new possibilities for practical devices," said Matthew McCluskey, co-author of the paper and chair of WSU's physics department, in a press statement. "In standard computer memory, information is stored on the surface of a computer chip or hard drive. A device using persistent photoconductivity, however, could store information throughout the entire volume of a crystal." This could eventually lead to massive increases in data capacity and, hopefully, a Krypton-style storage medium. [WSU] |
Virtual reality has breathed new life into motion controllers, from the simple (Leap Motion) to the baroque (the omnidirectional treadmill.) 3DRudder, though, is surprisingly practical. It's a round-bottomed board that tracks your feet, translating their motion into gaming controls by mapping four different methods of control onto button presses or joystick swivels. Think of it as a cross between a skateboard and a sewing machine pedal, or a very advanced Wii Balance Board.
We're not sure how much setup goes into the 3DRudder, although supposedly all it needs is a USB port and driver. But at CES Unveiled, we got a taste of how it controls — not with a game, but with a 3D design program. Once you sit down and rest your feet on it, the board calibrates within a few seconds. Sliding it forward and backwards zooms you in and out, turning rotates you horizontally, and twisting your feet — a motion a little bit like pedaling a bicycle — rotates you up and down; though we didn't get to try it, you can also move from side to side, and you can map custom controls onto the axes.
When everything goes right, it's surprisingly intuitive
When everything goes right, the board is remarkably responsive, precise, and intuitive. It feels a bit like driving a car, with fine-grained control over how fast and how far you move. If you've only used it for a few minutes, as we did, it won't all go right, though. I wasn't quite sure how much pressure to put on it, accidentally pushing down too hard to control it well. When I rested, I clearly kept my feet tilted a little too much, because the scene would rotate slightly; I imagine I'd have to either figure out how to tread more lightly or just take my feet off. It's probably theoretically possible to stand on it, but it seems unlikely to work well, not to mention quite uncomfortable.
The 3DRudder controller is midway through an Indiegogo campaign, with a projected shipping date of May. A limited number of early bird specials will get you a board for $110, but the standard price is $130. |
Hundreds of cities around the world now offer bike sharing systems, but if you're with a friend, why use two bikes when one could do the job?
That bike is the Duovelo, a conceptual sort of tandem, electric bicycle. The advantage of a second seat is obvious. It's one vehicle to transport multiple people, and hitching bikes together in a pedal-powered train could be a fun way to take a longer trip with family or friends.
Charles Bombardier About A mechanical engineer and a member of the family whose aerospace and transportation company builds trains, planes, and more, Bombardier's at his best when he ignores pesky things like budgets, timelines, and contemporary physics. Since 2013, he's run a blog cataloging more than 200 concepts, each a fantastic, farfetched new way for people to travel through land, air, water, and space. His ideas are out there, but it's Bombardier's sort of creative thinking that keeps us moving forward.
A cross between a BMX and a fat bike, the Duovelo uses a sliding mechanism to reveal a second seat for a passenger. The extra rider can hold onto a handlebar located between the seats, and rest his feet on lateral foot pegs.
This version of the concept doesn't include extra pedals, but it would be interesting to develop a folding pedaling system for the passenger.
An electric motor would assist the driver during his ride, with a charge indicator (visible even in daylight) on the crankset. You could ditch the e-power for a lighter ride, though it means more work for whoever's doing the pedaling.
The Duovelo itself holds two people (it's right there in the name) but could be connected with another of its kind to seat four, or even more. Imagine going on a bike ride with all your friends at the same time—on the same bike!
This original idea for this concept comes from Jimmy Bilodeau, who submitted it through my Imaginactive website. Adolfo Esquivel, a Montreal-based freelance designer, created the renderings for the Duovelo. |
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump met in the last week in his office at Trump Tower with three Indian business partners who are building a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex south of Mumbai, raising new questions about how he will separate his business dealings from the work of the government once he is in the White House.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump described the meeting as a courtesy call by the three Indian real estate executives, who flew from India to congratulate Mr. Trump on his election victory. In a picture posted on Twitter, all four men are smiling and giving a thumbs-up.
“It was not a formal meeting of any kind,” Breanna Butler, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, said when asked about the meeting on Saturday.
One of the businessmen, Sagar Chordia, posted photographs on Facebook on Wednesday showing that he also met with Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump. Mr. Trump’s children are helping to run his businesses as they play a part in the presidential transition. |
What can we expect from this new series of Red Dwarf?
It’s a throwback, really, to the series that were made in the mid-90s: the four boys on Red Dwarf. It’s character-based comedy, similar to those middle series that were aired on BBC2.
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Why did you go back to a live studio audience – did you feel that the Back to Earth mini-series in 2009 worked less well without the laughter?
The situation with Back to Earth was that we had to play with the hand we were dealt. That isn’t to denigrate Back to Earth, because there were a lot of great things about it. But it wasn’t necessarily what we’d have chosen if we’d been given any choice.
Originally, the idea was that Dave wanted to celebrate Red Dwarf’s 20th anniversary and the actors were going to be in costume introducing some clips. But it evolved, and I don’t think the people who put the budget together realised how expensive it is to start Red Dwarf up from scratch because, of course, we didn’t have any sets at that point at all.
And so, we were forced to go down a particular path, which meant we couldn’t afford the studio audience. In fact, we couldn’t really afford any sets either. In the end, we had two-and-a-half sets. I mean, people look at Back to Earth and think it looks like the most expensive and sumptuous episode ever. It looks like there was a ton of money thrown at it, but that’s just the brilliance of the direction and the visual effects, I’m afraid.
And it’s not necessarily what’s good for the comedy, because the boys hated doing all that green-screen work. So the day after it was broadcast – and, of course, it was very successful – I said that if we were going to do it again, I’d want a proper set and audience back, please.
Plus, I didn’t want to write 23-minute episodes because Red Dwarf episodes are quite complicated – with 23 minutes you end up having to spread the story over several episodes. I don’t think it’s as satisfying as getting a whole story in one episode. Basically, this time around, all the things I wanted we’ve got.
There’s still an appetite for Red Dwarf – didn’t those 2009 episodes get three million viewers?
Yes, and it was repeated over the Easter weekend. If you aggregate all three shows and add the Making Of documentary, the actual figure you end up with is 11 million. It beat BBC2, which is absolutely unheard of for a non-terrestrial channel, which was just amazing.
Also, lots of Red Dwarf fans didn’t know it was on. Even now, a couple of years later, fans say to me: “What? I’ve never heard of it.” So, that’s very bizarre.
Have there been any approaches by the BBC since then to resurrect it?
I think you can probably guess! Of course, BBC2 is where the whole thing started and obviously we want to get the biggest possible audience we can. But no, the BBC hasn’t approached us.
The last one we did with them was series eight, which got eight million and was the most successful series we’ve ever done. And then we wanted to do a film, which took so long not to get anywhere! We were constantly promised that the money was there, or about to be there, and we were sent to places all over the world from Austria to Australia to look at locations.
I think I did 35 rewrites of the script. I was asked to make the movie look more expensive because, at one point, the budget went up to close to £20 million. Then I was asked to rewrite it again to bring it down so it would only cost £8 million. We should have tried to make something for £3 million and it would probably have got made. But that didn’t happen and neither did the movie.
Then we stepped off the TV merry-go-round and once you’re off, it’s hard to get back on. I totally understand the channel controllers who want to encourage the next generation and who say, “We don’t want you old farts back again, although we enjoyed you while you were here. And quite honestly, we don’t know if the people who used to watch your show will still watch.” But I think Back to Earth proved that the Red Dwarf fanbase is still there.
And bizarrely we’ve got a whole new generation because the show’s been repeated on Dave.
Craig Charles told me he gets young people coming up to him and talking about episodes that were made in the late 80s…
Often before they were born! It’s bizarre. I went on holiday with some friends and they had an eight-year-old son. All he did for the entire holiday was watch Red Dwarf on his dad’s iPhone. I’m on holiday, trying to relax and all I can hear is the flipping Red Dwarf theme tune.
In retrospect, do you think the fact that the movie didn’t get made was probably for the best? When you watch the episodes with the studio audience, it’s almost like the cast can time their gags better. Is it a more natural fit on TV?
I think that’s absolutely right. Once we had the budget for the movie, I wanted to do what the Marx Brothers did, which was to take their scripts on the road to test them out with an audience and then film them. So they knew where the laughs were and then they replicated their performance in front of the audience on film. And I thought that was the clever, smart thing to do because there is an extra energy in front of an audience.
No matter what you say to an actor, you can’t make them truly scared in the way that an audience makes them scared. They know that if they don’t perform on the night, the scene won’t ever work. So they all just raise their game in a way that they find much more difficult if they’re in front of green-screen for 12 hours.
Are the cast always willing to jump back on board?
Absolutely, yes. We have such a good time. It is one of the hardest comedies to make though. I mean, poor Robert Llewellyn [Kryten] – if he were to eat while in costume it would completely mess up his lips. So he chooses not to and has these energy shakes, which he drinks through a straw. So he has the mask, which does terrible things to his eyes and skin. And then he’ll go off and have a curry with Craig in the evenings and says that he’s still managed to put on weight by the end of the shoot. It’s so unfair!
So you’ve got the costumes and the miniatures, some green screen and complex stories thrown in. It’s hard, and everyone accepts that it’s hard. But it’s also great fun.
I know the visual effects have become more sophisticated over the years but, for me, the best scenes are always in the bunkroom, where you see the loneliness of the situation these characters face.
We’ve got back to that core with this series. It’d probably be quite a hard sell these days, though, if you went in and pitched a science-fiction comedy. You’re halfway out the door already. People hate that idea.
Plus it’s just four blokes, no women, no aliens or monsters – and a lot of it’s about loneliness and your life slipping by. No one would buy that. But that’s what we’ve got back to: that feeling of trying to make something of your life when there’s not very much there.
There’s a story where Lister has an accidental love triangle with two female dispensing machines. And it’s a situation where you think, “Oh my god, that probably would happen in that environment, where even the dispensing machines are lonely!”
Do you feel that Red Dwarf is strongest when it looks at these little strategies the characters employ to keep themselves sane?
Yes, but occasionally you can have a big plot. You can do a Tikka to Ride, the one in which it turned out that JFK shot himself. And there’s a big one in this series, in show three. Most of the series is set on Red Dwarf, but that has an expansive interior set. So it’ll be interesting to see the reaction to that.
Finally, can you give me three words that you think sum up this series?
I can give you four. Back. To. Its. Best.
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The new series of Red Dwarf begins on Thursday 4 October on Dave |
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We end today’s show with Cody Hall of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. He had two arrest warrants—he had an arrest warrant issued for two misdemeanors of criminal trespass for land defense actions. On Monday, he learned the charges were dropped. I spoke to Cody over the weekend about his arrest.
CODY HALL: In the manner of which I was arrested, was treated like—like I was the Native Osama, with at least 18 state officers that got out of their squad cars when I was arrested on a highway, Highway 1806, going up to Bismarck.
AMY GOODMAN: So, then you were taken to the Morton County jail in Mandan?
CODY HALL: Yeah, yep. Yeah, I was taken there, and I was met with state, you know, police officers dressed in their—you know, in their gear, and then also just really, you know, villainized. You know, just like I said, just—you know, FBI wanted to question me. I invoked my right, you know, silence.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you been targeted since your arrest?
CODY HALL: Yes, yes, I have been targeted. As I look at, you know, side mirrors and rear view mirrors, you know, I have DAPL security in their rented trucks that they drive around with no license plate on them. And so, I like to kind of play a game, and I’ll just drive around a little bit, just to see if that vehicle is tailing me. And sure enough, I get a lot of, you know, vehicles tailing me in the city.
AMY GOODMAN: We also spoke with Cody Hall about his experience inside the Morton County jail, including how he was strip-searched.
CODY HALL: As I exited out of the vehicles and entered Morton County, I came up an elevator, and as the elevator opened up, I was met with state police. And then, you know, of course, Morton County people were there to book people, but—and then, from there, started the process of the booking, and then, again, you know, went into a private room, where they ask you to, you know, get naked. You know, they had my arms. They, you know, kind of like extend your arms out. And you’re fully naked. And they have you, you know, lift up your genitals and bend over, you know, cough. And so, it’s really one of those tactics that they try to break down your mentalness of everyday life, because not every day do you wake up and say, “Hey, I’m going to get, you know, naked and have somebody search me today,” you know? That’s a private—you know, that’s a private feeling for you, when you get naked, so…
AMY GOODMAN: And four days later, when you were finally released—they hadn’t allowed you to go out on bail or bond for those four days—you came before a judge in the orange jumpsuit?
CODY HALL: Yes, yes, I sat in the court office in my orange jumpsuit, locked, you know, still handcuffed, exited out of the courtroom. And as I left the courtroom, there were 20 or so state police all in their bullet-proof vests, everything just looking, you know, like—you know, like they’re going into action of some sort. And then they literally had a line from the courtroom to the door that connects you to the county jail. And my mother walked out with me. And as we got to the door, they were opening the door up. And as I looked behind me, my mother and I, all of the cops then proceeded to kind of swarm.
AMY GOODMAN: That was water protector Cody Hall of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. The charges were dropped against him. Special thanks to Denis Moynihan, Hany Massoud, Laura Gottesdiener and John Hamilton. |
Enlarge Image Tyler Lizenby/CNET
Philips Hue's app-enabled, color-changing light bulbs were among the very first smart-home gadgets to sync with Alexa, Amazon's popular voice-activated, virtual assistant. Pair the two up, and you'll be able to turn lights on and off or dim them up and down using simple voice commands. The only problem? Alexa can't do color changes -- which is, you know, kind of a big part of the whole Philips Hue pitch.
Today, that's changing. Kind of.
As part of a whirlwind day that saw Alexa make her debut in the UK and Germany, along with the arrival of a second-gen Amazon Echo Dot mini-speaker that costs just $50, Amazon also unveiled new Alexa controls that allow her to trigger preset smart home scenes for Alexa-compatible gadgets. And, once again, Philips Hue is one of the first to jump on board.
That means that in addition to turning lights on and off and dimming them up and down, you can now tell Alexa to turn on your Philips Hue lighting scenes, even ones that change the colors of your bulbs. For instance, if you make a "sunrise" scene that turns the bulbs in your bedroom orange and red and sets them to fade up to full brightness over 30 minutes, you could trigger that scene by saying, "Alexa, turn on scene sunrise."
Still, it's odd that you can't tell Alexa to change your Hue lights to specific colors. Color-changes aren't a native skill for the virtual assistant, but the Alexa-compatible Hue competitor Lifx found a way around that shortcoming long ago. The trick? An additional Alexa skill for color changes. Enable it, and you can ask Alexa to "tell Lifx" to change a bulb to a specific color. Philips still offers nothing of the sort for Alexa -- though it does offer voice-activated color changes by way of Alexa's chief frenemy, Siri.
All of that said, Alexa scene controls are a nice step forward for the Alexa/Hue duo and a relatively simple way for users to get their voice control and color-change fixes in one fell swoop. Here's hoping for more as Alexa continues to get smarter and better connected. |
The title is specifically about CloudFront and Laravel, but for the most part, this will apply to most web applications behind a reverse-proxy of some sort, be it a CDN, load balancer, or some other proxy type.
What we'll cover here:
What changes when using a reverse-proxy on your application What your application needs to do to get around these issues How to use the TrustedProxy Laravel package to take care of the details for you in a Laravel Application
Applications behind a proxy
For the launch of https://course.shippingdocker.com, I put CloudFront in front of a Laravel application running inside of a Docker container.
I wanted CloudFront for a few reasons:
Primarily, I wanted to make use of AWS's free, auto-renewed SSL certificate. This frees me from paying for an SSL certificate and/or managing something like LetsEncrypt. Secondly, I was planning on using a t2.nano instance on AWS and wanted to save it some CPU cycles from serving static assets. These instances are tiny, and start eating away at its small number of given CPU credits when it hits just 2% of CPU usage. (Having the site be as speedy as possible for those overseas was also part of this decision).
So, imagine this setup - HTTPS connections are made to course.shippingdocker.com . CloudFront receives this HTTPS request, and then forwards it to my site runnning on an EC2 instance (the "origin server"). The EC2 instance is listening on port 80 for HTTP connections.
Since CloudFront won't forward to an IP address, we need to give it a hostname to use. We can use the EC2 instance's public DNS name - I used http://ec2-34-197-131-119.compute-1.amazonaws.com in the case of my server (try it out, that URL will work).
What your application sees
So, CloudFront is receiving an HTTPS request and decrypting it (terminating the SSL connection). It then sends the decrypted HTTP request to my server (the origin server) using the network address ec2-34-197-131-119.compute-1.amazonaws.com .
Laravel only sees that 2nd request, and thus assumes:
It's receiving requests over http:// instead of https:// , and thus will generate URI's with the the http:// scheme, including form submit URLs and redirect locations The domain name used and thus seen by the application is ec2-34-197-131-119.compute-1.amazonaws.com . Laravel will generate URL's with that domain by default.
Proxy Configuration
Most reverse-proxies (e.g. load balancers, CDNs) will add HTTP headers which can be used by your application to determine the correct information to use.
The important headers are:
Host header - even if the proxy reaches your site by an IP address or hostname such as ec2-34-197-131-119.compute-1.amazonaws.com , they can often still forward/set the original hostname in the Host header. In other words, we can tell CloudFront to forward the Host header, so our server sees domain course.shippingdocker.com instead of ec2-34-197-131-119.compute-1.amazonaws.com . X-Forwarded-For - set to the IP address of the original client (e.g. you, sitting in front of your computer), so the application knows the client's IP address. Otherwise it would only see the IP address of CloudFront. X-Forwarded-Proto - the scheme used by the original client ( https or http ) X-Forwarded-Port - the port used by the client to connect (80, 443 or anything else)
There are more, but those are the important ones.
With that information, we can move onto what we need to adjust to fix the situation.
CloudFront
Within CloudFront, we need to set a few things to get Laravel working properly.
There are two main places to make adjustments:
Cookie Whitelist Header Forwarding
Cookies
CloudFront and other CDNs typically strip out cookies, as cookies effect caching. They're effectively used as part of the cache key. If each persons cookie is unique (it will be!), then everyone effectively gets their own cached copy of what could be just one copy. That sucks, but it's a typical case for applications. CDNs most effectively cache static assets which don't have cookies.
Most cookies are used by Javascript libraries (GA and other marketing libraries) and thus don't need to be sent to your server in order for them to function.
However, Laravel needs at least 2 to function as you'd expect, but ideally 3. We need to set CloudFront to forward the following two:
laravel_session (or whatever you name the sessions, as that's configurable within Laravel) - this is what Laravel needs to identifier a user, even if sessions are stored on-server or in something like Redis XSRF-TOKEN - used to protect against cross site request forgery
This one is more optional but recommended:
remember_* - used for the "remember me" function on login. This is typically remember_web but can be other values. Whitelisting cookie names with a wildcard is supported in CloudFront.
Headers
CloudFront will set the X-Forwarded-For header, but will not forward the Host header nor send along the a X-Forwarded-Proto header (to say if the request is http or https ).
Furthermore, CloudFront, for some reason, won't set a X-Forwarded-Proto header, opting instead to use a custom header CloudFront-Forwarded-Proto .
So, we'll have CloudFront forward those two:
The Application (Laravel)
Finally, we need Laravel to use these headers so it can properly generate correct URI's and send redirect responses to the right place.
First and foremost, the easy part is setting the APP_URL environment variable. Set this to the URI you intend to use in the browser ( https://course.shippingdocker.com in my case).
Secondly, we need to tell Laravel to listen for the headers and adjust the application as needed.
The Symfony classes luckily do this for us by allowing us to set a "Trusted Proxy". If a proxy is trusted, Symfony will check for the X-Forwarded-* (and other) headers and adjust as needed.
To help with that, I created the TrustedProxy package.
There's basically just 3 steps with this package:
In the trustedproxy.php config file, set it to trust all proxies (since we don't know the IP address the CloudFront servers forwarding requests, we need to trust all proxies) Add the HTTP Middleware that the package uses to set the trusted proxy setting. All this does is tell the underlying Symfony HTTP Request object to recognize that a proxy is used Tell the trustedproxy.php config file what headers to expect. We can use the the default ones, except for the proto header, which we know is going to use the CloudFront-Forwarded-Proto header
That config file will look like this:
return [ 'proxies' => '*', # Trust all proxies 'headers' => [ \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_FORWARDED => 'FORWARDED', \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_CLIENT_IP => 'X_FORWARDED_FOR', \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_CLIENT_HOST => 'X_FORWARDED_HOST', # \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_CLIENT_PROTO => 'X_FORWARDED_PROTO', \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_CLIENT_PROTO => 'X_FORWARDED_PORT', # 2. Adjust to CloudFront's header \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_CLIENT_PROTO => 'CLOUDFRONT_FORWARDED_PROTO', ] ];
Note that we have the opportunity to set what $_SERVER['HTTP_*'] variables to use for each header-type. We'll change the PROTO header to expect the CloudFront header.
After all of this, the Laravel and underlying Symfony classes will correctly generate URI's and redirect locations! |
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