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TV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place. The fourth season of Community debuts tonight on NBC at 8 p.m. Eastern. To love a TV show is to know one of two things: Either it will eventually leave you, or you will eventually leave it. There’s no middle ground for the committed. Once you’re in, you’re in, and you’re going to be in until the thing is canceled or until you lose interest because you’ve either figured out all of the show’s tricks or it’s just not the same anymore. That show you loved more than anything? It will eventually feel sort of old and pointless to you after a while, and you’ll have moved on to some new thing that feels fresher but will inevitably disappoint you somewhere down the line. And so it goes. You’ll someday remember that show you loved with such intensity—it will probably be off the air by this point—and you’ll wonder idly why they don’t make ’em like that anymore. The answer is because you’re not who you were anymore, and you can’t fall for a show like that because you’re no longer the same person. Advertisement Which, whatever. Community’s new, and it’s probably not an underestimation to say that this show is that show, the show described above, for a few million people on this planet right now. After a longer than expected hiatus—the last episode of this show aired in May 2012—that came on top of another longer than expected hiatus, after cancellation threats and a shorter order than the previous three seasons, after a summer (and fall… and winter…) filled with an endless string of bad news and uncertainty, there’s been a natural sense of relief sweeping through those several million people, as the première date of February 7 held firm and the show’s return drew closer and closer. And with the way NBC’s spring has plunged directly into the toilet, it seems increasingly likely that this won’t be the end of Community, that there will be the long foretold six seasons and a movie. But should there be? The answer, based on just two episodes of the show’s fourth season, is a deeply qualified “maybe.” Let’s start at the center, with the stuff that matters: This is still an often hilarious, well-acted, well-directed, well-written show with one of the all-time great ensemble casts and background players who can rise to the occasion as needed. It’s a show that can come up with a one-liner that arrives out of nowhere and inspires guffaws—there’s a joke about MS Paint in tonight’s première that’s particularly inspired—and it’s a show that’s capable of ably aping many different styles and genres, with a stable of directors that goes through its paces as well as any directorial team on TV. If you enjoy Donald Glover and Danny Pudi singing, “Troy and Abed something SOMEthing,” well, this is still the only place on TV you’re going to get that particular gag. Advertisement Yet as it begins its fourth season, Community is also a show that’s displaying rampant signs of age. The running jokes that once seemed hilarious now feel beaten into the ground. The laughs are fewer and farther between. The characters, who once had some nuance to them, tread dangerously close to being one-note at times, and the show is more and more reliant on the kinds of hacky sitcom stories that it would have made fun of back in season one, via Abed, a character who makes fun of that kind of thing. Where once the show was a giant pop-culture wood chipper, taking in everything that had ever existed and spitting it out in interesting and new configurations, it’s now a show that essentially does big reference gags, hoping they’ll be funny enough. And that’s okay. A reference gag from time to time isn’t a bad thing, and the fact that NBC is selling the show almost entirely on the back of one tiny joke—in which the Dean announces a Hunger Games knockoff—that doesn’t dominate the episode as much as the advertising has given a somewhat false impression of what the show will be in its fourth year. But that impression is only slightly off. There are things here that suggest a way forward for the show. Abed, the show’s bedrock, is still mostly used well, though he trends a little too much toward being used as an antagonist in both episodes sent out. (NBC, curiously, sent out the season’s third episode, one of Community’s weaker half-hours, along with the première, perhaps because the second episode is set at Halloween, and it didn’t want casual viewers turned off by a bunch of reviews mentioning a holiday that was months ago.) Britta, played by the great Gillian Jacobs, who gets ample opportunity to show off her physical comedy skills, continues to be the show’s weird, skewed heart, a person who cares too much to let go of things she probably should. And though Troy has perhaps been infantilized slightly too much—and this is a trend that stems all the way back to the latter portions of the show’s second season—Donald Glover is still an all-around comedy star who’s going to have a huge career coming out of this show. Joel McHale is also a solid lead for this series, and particularly in the first episode, he’s used very well. The première also comes with intriguing hints of melancholy—always a color the show wears well—about the future of these students and the future of Greendale Community College. Given time, the show could find itself again. Yet even as the show has all of these weapons in its arsenal, it feels increasingly empty. It’s a show that knows what it used to be, a show that’s a bit too obsessed with its own history and repeating it until the repetition grows irritating and finally just exhausting. It’s a show that feels tired of being Community, in some ways, with all that word implies. This is a show that once made fun of sitcoms and chewed them up as so much grist for its mill. Now, it increasingly feels as if it’s just become another one of them. The gags are often just there to kill time—there’s a “Don’t ask” that gets answered with a “Don’t tell” in one of the episodes—and the pop culture stuff often seems to be there because it’s expected that Community would have gags like that. In short, this feels more and more like just another sitcom. A very handsomely produced, excellently acted sitcom, but still. Advertisement And it’s here that we have to get to something I’ve done my best to talk around so far, as I’ve hoped to treat this like just another episode of the show. Dan Harmon, the show’s creator and its chief creative voice for its first three seasons, is no longer with the show. There are shows that can survive the loss of a showrunner—Cougar Town is doing well for itself over on TBS, even though it’s under new leadership—but Community, a series that was driven by the passions and oddities of one man, was a series more like The West Wing or Gilmore Girls, a show that feels a little hollow without the voice that was animating it. For all I know, Harmon was the world’s biggest dick and impossible to work with, and for all I know, he’s the reason the show’s ratings kept trending lower and lower and lower. But he was also the reason Community was Community, and even though everybody involved wants to do their best, wants to preserve the spirit of what he built, it’s a little like a party after the host has gone. There’s fun to be had, and there are good times going on, but the person who was holding everything together just isn’t there anymore, and it increasingly seems like the only reason everyone’s around is because they always have been. New showrunners David Guarascio and Moses Port are talented guys, who created one of my favorite one-season shows ever in Aliens In America, but they and the writing staff mostly try to replicate Dan Harmon’s Community, rather than trying something of their own. As with all attempts to replicate a show so associated with one point-of-view, it doesn’t work nearly as well as it should, though the memory of what was provides a few glimmers of recognition here and there. There’s a popular misconception about Community, both in the media and among some of its fans. The idea goes that the reason the show is popular is because it does wild, crazy, loud things. It makes fun of genres and dissects pop culture as well as any show in television history, and it does so through an endlessly creative lens that finds both the emotional core of said genres and the tropes the show wishes to skewer. Put another way, the première spends a lot of time making fun of a particular television show type tonight, but it does so in a way where the gag basically boils down to, “This exists.” It’s not particularly nuanced, nor does it have anything to say that will challenge the audience. It’s an empty reference, for the sake of doing a genre-bending thing, because that’s what the series is known for. This is only enhanced in a later gag that does the same thing, only to a far greater degree, then in the third episode, which takes a minor joke that took on a life of its own and blows it far, far out of proportion to its humor value. Community only works because it can do the wild, crazy stuff, sure, but also because it can play the more muted notes, can find the character beats and emotional interactions that are true to its vision of a world that can feel harsh and exclusionary but also wants nothing more than to pull everybody into a big hug. That vision of life fit Harmon—who can be best described as a misanthrope who loves the shit out of people—to a T. It doesn’t really fit the new show, which knows how to yell and scream and play like it’s having a good time, but doesn’t yet know how to whisper. There are plots here that want to be emotionally compelling, that want to be about these characters moving toward a better understanding of each other, but they play out under standard sitcom rules and guidelines. (In particular, an Annie plot in the third episode is execrable, and a storyline featuring a prominent guest character is… odd, to say the least.) Advertisement Maybe I’m wrong about all of this. Maybe what has changed isn’t the show, but me. Maybe I’ve reached the point where I’m on the verge of being done with this show. Maybe the love you have for the characters or premise or previous episodes and gags will carry you through these episodes, rough as they are. There are still flickers of the show that you—and I—loved in these two episodes, and there are enough flickers that I’m going to keep having hope for the season going forward. But they’re not enough to fill me with anything but disappointment at what I’ve seen. This is Community, yes, but it’s a version missing the most crucial element to keeping an audience that loves a TV show in love with that TV show: its soul. Stray observations: Welcome to season four of Community! While you were away, we posted over 150,000 comments and came up with a lovely recipe for duck a l’orange. The grade above applies only to the première, which is shaky but is roughly in a class with some of the shakier Harmon episodes. It takes a while, but it rights itself for an ending that more or less makes sense, after getting its, “Yay, Community!” bits out. I’ll try to hop in comments tonight to deal with the episode specifically. Or, if you have questions about it, you can ask Erik Adams and I about them at our Reddit Ask Me Anything tomorrow. I’d provide a link if I had one, but I don’t! Just know that it’s happening at 2 p.m. Eastern time, over at Reddit.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has been pushing for the past few months a narrative holding that the military services have too many flag officers — specifically too many four-star staff billets — and that this reality is both expensive and counterproductive. This makes him the second defense chief to take aim at this particular issue in recent years. Robert S. Gates openly lamented what he saw as a culture of corporate extravagance amongst the services, with too many generals and admirals tended by bloated coteries of executive assistants, chefs, maids, musicians, speechwriters, and groundskeepers, all hauled around the globe aboard a fleet of exorbitantly appointed private jets fueled from a bottomless well of taxpayer largesse. Ultimately, Gates’ best efforts didn’t put much so much as a dent in the problem. In the few years since he championed a policy to reduce flag officer bloat, the overall size of each military service has declined sharply while the number of flag officers has stayed basically the same, resulting in an even more top-heavy ratio of generals-to-troops than before. Nowhere is this top-heaviness more grossly evident than in the Air Force, which is not only smaller than ever before, but has a greater proportion of generals to everyone else than at any point in its 70-year history. To many observers, it’s little shock that this imbalance coincides with the rise of crippling micromanagement, seemingly unbreakable bureaucratic inertia, and policy choices that don’t make any sense to ordinary airmen doing the service’s daily work. In the last three years, the Air Force has slashed 20,000 airmen from the ranks, leaving itself critically understaffed in every career major area. In that same time, it has trimmed just 9 generals. Or to put it differently, for every 2,200 airmen given their walking papers, a solitary general has been gently tucked into a comfortable retirement. If the argument for more generals is that their intellect and experience are important to organizational problem solving, their inability to solve the manning problem despite flashing red warnings of its impending arrival is an indictment of that notion. Here are some interesting numbers that help demonstrate the extreme imbalance between senior leaders and all others in today’s Air Force. In 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the then-youthful Air Force had 320 generals overseeing a service of nearly one million airmen. This was the high-water mark for scope of responsibility, with one general for roughly every 3,000 of the rank and file. Over the course of the following four decades, that ratio would decrease to about one general for every 2,000 airmen … as the service got smaller but inherited more missions, plans, and obligations requiring managerial oversight. Goldwater-Nichols reform, passed in 1986, created a new bundle of joint organizations, growing the senior ranks even as the services got lighter and leaner overall. This drove the ratio of generals to airmen even lower. This seemed to make sense to defense experts at the time, given the increasingly complex and coordination-intensive character of modern warfare. In 1991, as the service masterfully executed the decisive air campaign of the first Gulf War (a campaign notably hatched by a Colonel and his staff rather than a general officer), the Air Force was half the size it had been in 1952, but with the same number of general officers. Span of control had been halved, with one general for every 1,576 airmen. This is worth noting, because it’s the last time anyone can recall the Air Force being in great health as an organization, with a stable value system, appropriately aligned incentives, and a strong focus on core competencies. In the quarter century since, the service has been on a continual trajectory of organizational decline that has accelerated toward collapse in recent years. In that span of time, the Air Force has decreased in size by 200,000 airmen … while reducing by only 25 generals. As a result, there are today only 1,038 airmen for each general officer serving on active duty, according to numbers provided by the Air Force Personnel Center. This is 34% less span of control than during Desert Storm and one-third that enjoyed by senior officers during the Korean War, the service’s first war fought as an independent institution. For today’s Air Force to give generals as much span of control as they were given during the first Gulf War, the service would require an end strength of nearly 470,000 airmen. Alternatively, the service would need to rid itself of 101 general officers. Think about that for a second. We have 101 too many generals. And this is under a relatively charitable analysis that endorses a 1991 “modern warfare” organizational structure rather than a more traditional 1952 model that expected generals to exercise big power broadly and and across a wide expanse. This bloat explains so much. It explains inordinately complicated organizational structures that have multiple chains of command running to and from individual bases, with multiple wing commanders on the same base answering upward to generals operating from different headquarters. This is dumb beyond belief, and it causes myriad issues for airmen trying to get the job done. It explains why bases are constantly playing host an endless string of self-important visitors who consider themselves entitled to tour facilities and operations while being fussed over by honor guards and base leaders. It explains the stubborn persistence of frills like bands, show choirs, demonstration teams, professionally produced ad campaigns, star-studded conferences and symposia, executive officers, aides-de-camp, and huge staffs. It also explains the existence of a fleet of private jets larger than the entire air forces of several developed nations. It explains the politicization and political correctness of the contemporary Air Force, given that generals are political beings, and having an overabundance of them allows each to push politically-driven policies further down the scale than otherwise. But most of all, it explains the organizational dysfunction that grips the Air Force. “Decentralized execution” is a punchline these days, because it’s impossible for lowly senior NCOs and squadron commanders to move an operational inch without constantly reporting their progress and receiving direction from several thousand miles away. Generals are immersed inappropriately in tactical minutiae, which makes sense on some level given that competition for actual strategic-level issues is overcrowded by the presence of too many stars on too many staffs. In default of being able to focus on issues suited to their rank, generals look for ways to exert themselves, and field units pay the price. The generals and senior civilians of the Air Force have built themselves into a situation where they have the capacity to invent more work than can possibly be absorbed by the understaffed and overworked organizations they’re supposedly supporting. Given that most of them have been away from the field for a long time, they also usually lack the perspective to realize the impact of their actions. This is a manufactured organizational disaster for units in the field. This isn’t really about individual indiscipline or ego, although these things can make the problem worse anecdotally. It’s about the reality that how an organization is structured will largely determine how it behaves. Generals are experienced, educated, and accomplished. They are given status, prestige, and latitude to exert themselves to advance the Air Force. They’re not going to sit on their hands and defer that responsibility to others. They’re going to find an outlet for the considerable energy and expertise they bring to their role. In short, they’re going to justify their jobs. This makes it predictable that having too many of them will overload everyone else. How do they do justify their jobs? Well, they get involved in operations or functions well below their level, over-handling things best left in the capable hands of the rank and file. They conduct visits. They hold meetings. They hold teleconferences. They send emails. They invent and attend in-person conferences and workshops. They invent rules and put policies in place. They sign off on rules and policies invented by others. They ask questions, monitor, and verify what’s going on in their organizations. They exercise legal power. They soak in the limelight of a hard-earned place on the senior management team, enjoying the trappings of status that no one has questioned in a long time. In short, they exercise positional authority, and do so maximally rather than modestly. Which is why having too many generals results in a gross imbalance of authority across the structure of the Air Force, with too much of the service’s fate tied to formal edicts from on high and not enough flowing from the exercise of expertise-driven authority in the middle ranks. There’s only so much authority to go around … so much power and decision making that can be absorbed by those doing the actual work. When too much of this power is burglarized by administrators, not enough remains for bona fide supervisors. This is the heart of the USAF’s organizational malady, which persists because of structure more than any other particular reason. It explains why Captains and Lieutenant Colonels are frustrated, why NCOs have forgotten how to lead, and why senior enlisted managers struggle to enforce a panoply of unnecessary and often inexplicably idiotic rules and policies. Things that sounded great in a swivel chair at a staff headquarters but make no sense anywhere in the real world. Now throw in the fact that airmen are more deferential to rank than they should be … and add to that the fact that the service is currently locked into a no-mistake culture that ends careers over style differences … and it’s not difficult to comprehend how the bloat of generals has led to the slow-motion strangulation of morale and productivity among everyone else. Secretary Carter is onto something, but his proposals don’t go nearly far enough. The way we should be looking at this as a military establishment is by asking what we expect of our most senior leaders and working backward from that target to a structure that makes sense. The current structure most decidedly doesn’t. © 2016 Bright Mountain Media, Inc. All rights reserved. The content of this webpage may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written consent of Bright Mountain Media, Inc. which may be contacted at [email protected], ticker BMTM.
We should have seen it coming, this stunning evolution of mobile game graphics. Years of following the industry had taught us that all hardware, no matter how incredible at the time, eventually grew old and gave way to more powerful machines boasting a thrilling display of eye candy, the result of increased polygons, enhanced lighting effects and other assorted bells and whistles. Of course, this was 10 years ago, back when flip phones were all the rage and a black and white version of Snake was the must have killer app. Besides, who in their right mind would choose a cell phone over a Game Boy Advance, and later, the DS and PSP? These were traditional handheld systems, and cell phones, well, they caused cancer, right? Ignorant, sure, but it only goes to show how skeptical we and countless others were about the mobile gaming scene. During those early years (2003-2005, specifically), the games improved, but were limited to simplistic 2D sprites that couldn't compete even with Super Nintendo. There were some bright spots, DOOM RPG being one, Asphalt Urban GT another, but these were minor achievements, at best. Even iPhone gaming seemed bleak, circa 2008. Dizzy Bee was cool, but its graphics were far from revolutionary. Hero of Sparta, Rolando, Snail Mail...remember those? Did you play these games, then toss the DS into the trash? We hope not. Then again, we should have seen it coming, the mobile game revolution. The hardware became sexier (hello, iPad, Android tablets), and with that, the games right alongside it. We're not making strides towards console quality visuals. We're already there. On that note, join us as we look back at the evolution of mobile game graphics. How far we've come, indeed. Snake (mobile phones, 1998) Asphalt Urban GT (mobile phones, 2004) The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey (N-Gage, 2004) DOOM RPG (mobile phones, 2005) Glimmerati (N-Gage, 2005) SOCOM US Navy Seals Mobile Recon (mobile phones, 2005) Lumines Mobile (mobile phones, 2006) God of War Betrayal (mobile phones, 2007) Hero of Sparta (iOS, 2008) Chuck Norris Bring on the Pain (mobile phones, 2008) Yes, this exists! Cro-Mag Rally (iOS, 2008) Dizzy Bee (iOS, 2008) Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid (iOS, 2009) Angry Birds (iOS/Android, 2009) Cut the Rope (iOS/Android, 2010) Rage HD (iOS, 2010) Infinity Blade (iOS, 2010) Contre Jour (iOS, 2011) Galaxy on Fire 2 HD (iOS/Android, 2011) Infinity Blade 2 (iOS, 2011) Real Racing 2 HD (iOS, 2011) Shadowgun (iOS/Android, 2011) Mass Effect Infiltrator (iOS/Android, 2012) N.O.V.A. 3: Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance (iOS/Android, 2012) Asphalt 7: Heat (iOS/Android, 2012) Dead Trigger (iOS/Android, 2012) Tiny Wings HD (iOS, 2012) Image Source Image Source
He’s lucky he wasn’t dealing with Big Tony. In a scene straight out of “The Sopranos,’’ a reputed mobster whose family owns the New Jersey jiggle joint featured in the hit HBO series was beaten and robbed for squealing on fellow wiseguys, court papers allege. Suspected Genovese associate Anthony “Tony Lodi” Cardinalle, 63, was attacked Christmas Eve at his family’s club Satin Dolls, which doubled as TV don Tony Soprano’s Bada Bing hangout, according to Manhattan Federal Court papers. The robbery and beat-down was likely “payback’’ for Cardinalle ratting out his criminal cahorts in a “Sopranos”-style trash-hauling shakedown scheme, his lawyer wrote in the documents. Cardinalle “not only risked injury’’ by singing to the feds “but also was actually beaten and robbed in what was, in all likelihood, revenge or punishment for his cooperation,’’ his lawyer, Alan Silber, said in arguing for leniency for his client in the shakedown case. A thug also came to another of the four New Jersey strip clubs that his family owns and told a dancer “she shouldn’t work there because Mr. Cardinalle was a snitch,” the lawyer said. “It is obvious that the danger — including the possibility of future attacks — is ongoing for one whose cooperation was made public” by the media, Silber added in a Jan. 23 letter to the judge that only surfaced last week. Cardinalle had been “assaulted by two men in a truck’’ after driving to his family’s strip joint — “the one that everybody knows because it was Bada Bing on ‘The Sopranos,’ ” said Silber. The alleged Jersey Mafioso reveled in the notoriety surrounding his club’s fictional counterpart and mob boss Tony Soprano, who used a waste-carting business as a front for his illegal enterprise. Cardinalle decorated Satin Dolls with posters of Tony Soprano actor James Gandolfini and hung a sign outside that said “Thank You Jimmy, Farewell Boss” after the star died in 2013. But reel life turned seriously real when Cardinalle was pinched along with 31 others in January 2013 in connection with a multifamily organized-crime effort to control New York and New Jersey’s waste-hauling industry, authorities have said. Cardinalle could have landed up to 40 years behind bars before copping a plea in December to racketeering and extortion conspiracy charges. He then faced a recommended sentence of 21 to 27 months, but Silber argued for probation in the documents. “The government has acknowledged Cardinalle’s cooperation as ‘noteworthy and significant’” in scoring convictions against at least two members of the mobster’s Lodi, NJ-based crew, he said. Cardinalle ended up getting a slap on the wrist Jan. 29 when he was quietly sentenced behind closed doors to 30 days in jail. He began serving his time Wednesday. Manhattan federal Judge Kevin Castel also ordered him to pay a $10,000 fine and $3,400 in restitution.
The New York Jets do not exactly have a long history of success. You have to go back to Super Bowl III (1969) to find their last championship, and since that point the Jets have made the playoffs only 13 times in 48 seasons -- never more than twice in a row. They haven't been back to the postseason since 2010, a season after which they lost the second of two consecutive AFC title games. Jets fans' despair is often palpable, and now one of their most famous fans put the feeling to writing. George R.R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire book series on which the TV show "Game of Thrones" is based, is a lifelong Jets fan. Here's how he described rooting for the team in a recent blog post: Life for a Jets fan is an unending torment. Last week the refs gave the Pats an win over Gang Green with a bulls—t reversal of a touchdown, one of the worst calls in the history of the NFL. This weeks the Jets did it to themselves, blowing a two-touchdown lead in the fourth quarter to lose to the Fins. Total choke job. Josh McCown finished the choke with a horrible INT with seconds left. He's a decent quarterback, but he's not the answer. He's too old to be the future. He's Fitzmagic the Second. The Jets need to bench him and play Petty and Hack to see if one of those might offer hope. But they won't. They will keep on playing McCown, and win just enough games to make sure they don't get a good QB prospect in the draft, thereby assuring us of another decade of mediocrity. That's the Jet Way. As the author of events like the Red Wedding, the Purple Wedding, the Mountain and the Viper battle, the Battle of Blackwater Bay, Hardhome, and more (look 'em up if you're not a book-reader or show-watcher), Martin surely knows a whole lot about unending torment. And as an experienced Jets fan, he knows all about winning one or two too many games for the team to actually acquire the top pick in the draft. It's a weird form of torment, to be sure, but the Jets are a weird team. Martin's being so disillusioned with the team must have been a recent development, though, because it wasn't all that long ago that he was at Jets camp, smiling next to GM Mike Maccagnan. I'm not a book-reader, but I'll channel some of my friends that are with this next thought: If Martin is so done with the Jets, maybe he could use his free time to finish The Winds of Winter.
0 Petition asks voters to legalize marijuana to benefit local teachers ORLANDO, Fla. - A new petition would ask voters to legalize marijuana in Florida and tax it to benefit teacher salaries. The petition, filed Wednesday by Florida Organization of Reform, is the third petition related to cannabis filed so far this year. This latest measure would allow for marijuana as a dietary supplement and apply up to a 10 percent sales tax, with revenue going towards teacher salaries. "If you don't have an organized movement, if you don't have resources, unfortunately, it will not happen," said attorney Matt Morgan, whose father is chairman of United for Care. United for Care is supporting a completely separate petition that would legalize medicinal marijuana. A similar measure from the group made it on the ballot in 2014 but failed to pass by a few percentage points. In total, three separate petitions have been filed with the Division of Elections. Two of them would permit marijuana sales for recreational use. But all of the proposals face hurdles in making the ballot. While United for Care has raised tens of thousands of dollars in hopes of making the 2016 ballot, online records show the other two petitions haven't raised any money so far. "The money is everything," said Morgan. "Without the money, first all, you can't get the petitions, and if you can't get the petitions, then you have no shot at getting the petition where you need to get it." The state requires ballot measures to pass a judicial review and collect roughly 683,000 signatures. Officially, none of the petitions have submitted any signatures so far. "We get a lot of duplicates, because people don't remember that they signed them so you usually have to go way over the number in order to guarantee that you get to it," said Bill Cowles, Orange County Supervisor of Elections. James Hatcher, of Plant City is with FOR, the group proposing the petition related to teacher salaries. He told Eyewitness News over the phone that he doesn't plan to raise any money and will instead rely on social media and a grassroots campaign. Channel 9 reached out to the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association to get feedback on FOR's petition. The president said it's time for Florida to take the lead in showing they value teachers, whether through tourist tax dollars or other tax dollars. Ultimately, Morgan said getting a measure on the ballot and getting it passed is difficult. "It is incredibly time consuming. It costs a lot of money. It's not something you can do half-hearted," Morgan said.
Geoff Driver retained his Preston North seat and is leader of the Lancashire Conservatives A politician currently on police bail has been confirmed as the new leader of Lancashire County Council. Geoff Driver’s Conservative group swept to power in the May elections and during Thursday’s council meeting he was confirmed as leader. Mr Driver, who represents the Preston North division, is understood to be one of four men arrested on Monday – and released on bail by Lancashire Police – in connection with their long-running One Connect investigation. The Tories voted to back their leader, with all Labour, Lib Dem and other county councillors, voting against the appoint of Mr Driver as leader. Councillor Driver said: “We have one purpose as an organisation and that is to serve the people of Lancashire. “The council clearly faces financial challenges and our first priority is to ensure that we develop a way forward that will enable us to continue to provide the services that our residents need. “That will include looking at where we spend the money that we do have, to ensure that the front-line services valued by our residents are protected. “We are looking forward to rolling up our sleeves and getting to work to deliver on our promises.” Read more: What the local election results mean for Preston Mr Driver inherits a £200million deceit with major savings needed by 2020 – although his party has pledged to immediately reverse the decision made by the Labour administration to close a number of libraries and childrens’ centres in a cost-saving drive. The new cabinet members for the county council have also been confirmed, with a new man in charge of what must be the most high profile position for Prestonians – responsibility for highways and transports. – County Councillor Albert Atkinson, deputy leader (county councillor for Ribble Valley North East) – County Councillor Susie Charles, cabinet member for children, young people and schools (county councillor for Lancaster Rural East) – County Councillor Keith Iddon, cabinet member for highways and transport (county councillor for Chorley Rural West) – County Councillor Michael Green, cabinet member for economic development and planning (county councillor for Moss Side & Farington) – County Councillor Peter Buckley, cabinet member for community and cultural services (county councillor for St Annes North) – County Councillor Viv Taylor, cabinet member for health and wellbeing (county councillor for Wyre Rural Central) – County Councillor Graham Gooch, cabinet member for adult services (county councillor for South Ribble West) Read more: Preston results in the Lancashire County Council elections County councillor Driver is due to take cabinet decisions about resources, which include council functions such as finance, communications, organisational development and HR. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
When Danielle submitted this post, I wanted to talk to her about it first, to address some of her concerns, or to maybe encourage her to look at things another way. But then I thought about it a bit, and I realized she was saying some very valuable things about martial arts training that we all take for granted. Things we should dwell on, and discuss. -David For our most recent class we went on a field-trip that included a gun range. We all took up the offer to fire a few rounds from both a hand gun and a carbine. Of the six of us, only one had ever handled a firearm before. As far as I could tell, everyone else was thoroughly excited the whole time, from the anticipation days earlier to hours after wanting more. Not me. I was a roiling bundle of nerves the whole way through, and even thinking about it now. Before this, the only times in my life that I’ve been anywhere near a firearm have been when I’ve happened to encounter on-duty cops. Even in university when my friends were playing with clear plastic airsoft guns, I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t really want to go in that gun range either. And yet, I did it. I went in, and used 2 different guns. I actually shot pretty well. This did absolutely nothing to make me feel less uncomfortable. Looking at the whole thing from the outside, I see two big questions people could have – why did the whole thing make me so uncomfortable, and why did I do it anyway? The second one is easier to answer, I knew that one going in (or else I wouldn’t have done it). We can’t know for sure what sort of situations we may find ourselves in, and while I desperately hope it never happens, if by some chance I find myself needing to use a gun for self-defense, I don’t want that to be the first time I’ve ever touched one. Not when I’d had this opportunity to try it in a safe, controlled environment with people I trust and who I knew would be supportive of my extreme discomfort. That combined with a general life decision not to refuse to do something that could be useful, beneficial or a good learning experience just because I’m afraid of it. Put the two together, and I knew I’d be firing a gun that night regardless of how uncomfortable it made me. Why it made (makes) me so uncomfortable, even (especially?) in the face of the supposed-to-be-reassuring words of my instructors was more difficult to figure out. The range instructor told us that guns are just a logical progression from the first proto-human throwing a rock, and a bullet is just a rock thrown really hard. David pointed out that the rapiers we use regularly in class are just as much refined killing-machines as any gun. I could tell myself that in the past year I’ve learned a number of ways to maim or potentially kill someone with my bare hands. None of these things made me any less uncomfortable about the idea of guns, or even made me more uncomfortable about our regular class activities. I knew there was something that made firing a gun at a target feel much more dangerous than sparring with a partner in class, whether fencing, boxing or wresting. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Figuring that out took 24 hours of turning the question over and over in my mind, consciously and unconsciously. When the answer came to me lying in bed last night, it was one of those things that seem so obvious that you feel like an idiot for taking so long to figure it out. The clue lay in the instructions we were given before being allowed to touch a gun. Three rules. #1, treat every and any gun like it’s loaded, even if you know for certain that it isn’t. #2, never point a gun at anything you aren’t willing to shoot. #3, be extremely aware of everything behind what you’re aiming at, because there’s no guarantee you’ll hit your target. Compare this to when you’re first handed a rapier: “Here’s your sword, note the blunt on the tip and make sure that it’s not worn through. Never spar without wearing a mask and a gorget.” What it boils down to is this. With unarmed martial arts, most training aims to disable your opponent without killing, and often without seriously injuring them. With the swords we use in training, it would take either a hell of a lot of effort or a series of gear failures and/or serious inattention to actually kill someone. With guns, all it would take is one person’s inattention for a moment. Or a badly timed sneeze. I’m not interested in martial arts for learning ways to kill people, or seriously injure them. I’m interested in the physical challenges and testing they offer and the way they make change my thinking. After starting classes it took quite some time for me to get comfortable with the fact that I was also learning how to hurt people. I came to grips with that by reminding myself that I’d only use those skills in consensual training scenarios or in self defense with the goal of protecting myself while causing as little damage to my attacker as possible. Either way, I’m really not trying to hurt someone. You could even say that I’m trying really hard not to hurt them. In the future I may take part in some sort of airsoft gun training if the opportunity arises, to learn some of the skills and thinking challenges that firearms present. Hopefully, I’ll never touch a real gun again in my life.
Xbox 360 Achievements has the full list of Mass Effect 2 achievements. None are secret achievements, which means you should take the spoiler alert here seriously. Looking through it, I don't see any plot giveaways, although "Cat's in the Cradle" might raise some interesting questions of a character's parentage. Then again, I could be reading too much into that. Here's the full list, 50 in all for the maximum 1,000 gamerscore. The link at the bottom has the achievement icons. Missing in Action (5) Save your crew from an overwhelming attack Very Elusive (10) Return to active duty The Convict (10) Successfully recruit the biotic Convict The Krogan (10) Successfully recruit the krogan The Archangel (10) Successfully recruit Archangel The Professor (10) Successfully recruit the Professor The Quarian (10) Successfully recruit the quarian The Justicar (10) Successfully recruit the Justicar The Assassin (10) Successfully recruit the Assassin Friend or Foe (10) Obtain geth technology Colony Defense (25) Defend a human colony from attack The Prodigal (10) Gain the loyalty of the Cerberus Officer Ghost of the Father (10) Gain the loyalty of the Cerberus Operative Catharsis (10) Gain the loyalty of the biotic Convict Battlemaster (10) Gain the loyalty of the krogan Fade Away (10) Gain the loyalty of Archangel The Cure (10) Gain the loyalty of the Professor Treason (10) Gain the loyalty of the quarian Doppelganger (10) Help the Justicar resolve her mission Cat's in the Cradle (10) Gain the loyalty of the Assassin A House Divided (10) Hack a geth collective Ghost Ship (25) Complete the investigation of a derelict alien vessel Suicide Mission (50) Use the Omega 4 Relay Mission Accomplished (125) Save humanity throughout the galaxy from certain annihilation Against All Odds (15) Survive suicide mission Insanity (75) Complete the game on the "Insanity" difficulty level without changing the setting No One Left Behind (75) Keep your team alive through the suicide mission Long Service Medal (75) Complete Mass Effect 2 twice, or complete it once with a character imported from Mass Effect 1 Paramour (50) Successfully pursue a relationship with a teammate Head Hunter (10) Perform 30 headshot kills with any weapon on humanoid targets Brawler (10) Shoot and kill 20 enemies while they're knocked back by a punch Big Game Hunter (10) Thresher Maw defeated Tactician (10) Hit 20 different targets with multiple biotic powers to combine the effects Master at Arms (15) Kill enemies with 5 different heavy weapons during the game Merciless (10) Make 20 enemies scream as they fall or are set on fire Overload Specialist (15) Disrupt the shields of 25 enemies Warp Specialist (15) Warp the barriers of 25 enemies Incineration Specialist (15) Incinerate the armor of 25 enemies Operative (15) Complete a mission discovered by scanning an unexplored world Agent (50) Complete 5 missions discovered by scanning unexplored worlds Prospector (5) Retrieve mineral resources by scanning and probing a planet in the galaxy map Explorer (10) Visit 100 percent of the planets in an unexplored cluster Power Gamer (10) Reach Level 30 with one character Scholar (15) Unlock 15 new Mass Effect 2 codex entries Technician (15) Obtain (10) technology upgrades Weapon Specialist (15) Fully upgrade a weapon Scientist (10) Complete any research project in the Normandy's laboratory Fashionista (5) Personalize your armor in your quarters on the Normandy Power Full (15) Evolve any power Highly Trained (15) View all advanced combat training videos at Shepard's private terminal. Advertisement Mass Effect 2 Achievement List [Xbox360Achievements.org, thanks Dan B.]
Sen. Ted Cruz's sudden exit from the GOP presidential race Tuesday night in Indiana caught his supporters off guard. Many of them clearly understood that he was putting everything his campaign had left into winning the state. Earlier Tuesday, as voters were going to the polls, his campaign advertised rallies on Wednesday in Nebraska and Washington, two states with upcoming primaries where Cruz was thought to have a chance to win. RELATED: Cruz exits race after Trump's Indiana win What changed was the magnitude of Trump's victory in Indiana, a conservative Midwestern state that was supposed to be "favorable" ground for Cruz, as had been Wisconsin, Cruz's last primary victory. But the bounce from Wisconsin was short-lived, followed by resounding defeats in New York - Trump's home state - and five other northeastern states. Had he chosen to fight on, the delegate count could have given him at least reason for doing so, arguing that Trump, even with his delegate haul from Indiana, still had not clinched the 1,237-delegate majority to lock down the GOP nomination. RELATED: Ted Cruz: 'We are headed to a contested convention' There was, however, more to consider than the delegate tally. Instead of watching the polls narrow after Wisconsin, Cruz was seeing polls widen in Trump's favor across the country, particularly in California, the last and largest delegate bonanza in the GOP race, on June 7. Even at home the news was looking worse for Cruz. Among Texas Republicans, who Cruz won over by a comfortable margin on March 1, a new poll commissioned by the Texas Bipartisan Justice Committee showed Trump leading with 45 percent compared to 40 percent for Cruz. That Trump momentum would have made it increasingly hard for Cruz to enter the national convention short-handed with the hope of turning Trump delegates in his favor - the only strategy he had left since New York, when it became mathematically impossible to reach the magic number of delegates before the convention. RELATED: After N.Y. loss, Cruz officially aims at long slog to contested convention From the beginning, strategists credited Cruz with a shrewd understanding of the 2016 GOP landscape. While party heavyweights like Jeb Bush seemed to corner the insider market, Cruz understood that the party base was looking for an outsider. Cruz would occupy that outside "lane" and force a showdown with an insider establishment candidate like Bush. What he didn't see over his shoulder was Trump coming up behind him, taking over that outsider lane. Cruz tried a brief alliance of convenience, hoping Trump would fade on his own. But eventually he had to engage in the "cage match" with Trump he had hoped to avoid. He lost. RELATED: Ted Cruz: 'We lose our country' if Donald Trump is GOP nominee "Cruz knows that you've got to be able to have money and momentum," said Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based GOP consultant. "He knew it wasn't going to happen. He knew it was going to get worse after tonight." Indiana had widely been described as a "last stand" for the Cruz campaign. A victory there only would have stopped Trump from certain domination. It would not have opened up an easy path to the nomination. Still, Cruz is likely to remain a major conservative player in the GOP, despite his unpopularity in Congress and within the party establishment. He commands an active faithful following, and he's worked intently toward his presidential ambitions for almost 30 years. He'll be back, but not as an outsider. Soon he'll turn to his 2018 Senate campaign, and then 2020 is not far off. RELATED: Cruz laid out presidential plan with striking precision at 17 Cruz kicked off the presidential election last March on a novel platform of challenging his own party's so-called establishment. It seemed like a long shot, but Cruz was ahead of his time, and he brazenly defied media expectations to become the long-standing runner-up in the GOP primary. "He was really well-positioned to be the outsider candidate this cycle, then Trump came in and screwed that up," Mackowiak said. Most experts blame his failure on a very narrow appeal to evangelical Christians and conservative stalwarts. He positioned himself on the extreme right and was detested by many of his Senate colleagues. But Cruz was a brilliant lawyer and assembled an outstanding campaign with high technology and innovative social media tactics. "That's going to be a prototype for students of campaigns to look at for a long time," said Jerry Pollinard, a veteran political scientist at the University of Texas Panamerican. RELATED: Cruz's spending tactics take modern twist The operation caught Trump off guard in Iowa, the nation's first caucus, where Cruz came in first. He'd mobilized an unprecedented grassroots effort there, with dormitories for volunteers from across the country. Observers wondered if Cruz's command of the evangelical vote could carry him through the election. But when a round of typically evangelical Deep South states voted on Super Tuesday and mostly leaned toward Trump, Cruz's grip on that electorate slipped. RELATED: Trump surprises with evangelical endorsement Though Cruz's narrow appeal may have hindered his campaign, he outlasted and outpolled the supposedly broad-based moderate candidates, Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, among them. On Tuesday, Cruz fell to the same force as his rivals before him: Trump. "I think it was hard for any of the candidates to overcome the extraordinary amount of free media that Trump has gotten from the press," said Erick Erickson, a prominent conservative and a leader in the #NeverTrump effort. Cruz described himself as the one true conservative in the race. But in the end he couldn't compete with Trump's popularity with working-class whites, especially men, and his frequent outrageousness.
Pope Francis warns of destruction of Earth's ecosystem in leaked encyclical Read more Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush joined forces with the coal industry and climate deniers in a gathering conservative backlash against the pope, lashing out against a leaked draft of the spiritual leader’s letter on climate change. In his first official day on the presidential campaign trail, Bush, who is Catholic, told a town hall event in New Hampshire that Pope Francis should steer clear of global affairs. The energy industry also turned on the pope, with the lobbyist for one of America’s biggest coalmining companies sending out an email blast on Tuesday, rebuking the church leader for failing to promote fossil fuels as a solution to global poverty. Bush converted to Catholicism when he got married 20 years ago, and regularly cited church teachings when he was Florida governor – even enacting a law to introduce anti-abortion “Choose Life” car license plates. Jeb Bush finally hits campaign trail and casts self as candidate who 'actually did things' Read more But when it comes to climate change, Bush said he would not be guided by the church. “I hope I’m not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinal or my pope,” the former Florida governor said. “I think religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting in the political realm.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeb Bush sceptical of the Pope’s climate change warning – video With those remarks, Bush joined fellow Republicans, the fossil fuel industry, and the climate deniers of the Heartland Institute in trying to discredit the Pope’s much-anticipated message on poverty and climate change – even before its release. At least five of the Republican presidential contenders are Catholic. Two so far – Bush and Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator and devout Catholic – have come out against the pope on climate change. According to the leaked version, the pope will say climate change is real and caused by humans, and that fossil fuels must be phased out of the global economy. He will call on leaders to reach a global deal to fight climate change and make sure to protect the world’s poor as they do so. The Vatican has warned there could be changes ahead of the official release of his encyclical on Thursday – but the response from conservatives has been ferocious. On Tuesday, Tom Altmeyer, a lobbyist for Arch Coal, the second-biggest coalmining company, sent out an email blast of the talking points with the subject line reading: “Unfortunately, the Pope’s Encyclical, to be officiallt released on 6.18. does not apperar to address the tragedy of global energy poverty - see realities below [sic]”. In the email, Altmeyer argued the pope should be promoting fossil fuels if he really cared about social justice. “Industry, policymakers and social leaders – like Pope Francis – must work together to support policies that bring about new advances in fossil energy technologies so we can strike a balance between global economic needs and climate concerns,” the email said. The email was obtained by Greenpeace and made available to the Guardian. Bush earlier this month was the sole Republican presidential candidate invited to speak at a $7,500 golfing and fly fishing retreat hosted by coal companies, including Arch. But Bush’s rejection of the pope’s authority to speak out as a spiritual leader on a global issue such as climate change was in line with comments from other conservatives and fellow Catholics, who claim to followchurch teachings. Angry US Republicans tell Pope Francis to ‘stick with his job and we’ll stick with ours’ Read more Santorum told a Philadelphia radio station earlier this month: “The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality.” Three other Catholic Republican hopefuls: Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio, have yet to speak out on the encyclical. Other Republicans have come forward, however, including the Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, who bluntly told reporters that Francis was out of line – “The pope ought to stay with his job” – at a conference of the climate change-denying Heartland Institute. Most Republicans in Congress deny the existence of manmade climate change and oppose regulations to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Only one of the nearly 20 Republicans running for president acknowledges the danger of climate change: Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, who is considered a long shot. Correction, 17 June 2015: An early version of this story stated that Rick Santorum was the former governor of Pennsylvania. He is in fact a former senator for that state. That has been corrected.
Thus, the objective of this tutorial is to provide hands-on experience on how to perform text classification using conference proceedings dataset. We will learn how to apply various classification algorithms to categorize research papers by conferences along with feature selection and dimensionality reduction methods using a popular scikit-learn library in Python. An interesting application of text classification is to categorize research papers by most suitable conferences. Finding and selecting a suitable academic conference has always been a challenging task especially for young researchers. We can define a 'suitable academic conference' as a conference, which is aligned with the researcher's work and have a good academic ranking. Usually, a researcher has to consult with their supervisors and search extensively to find a suitable conference. Among many conferences, few are considered to be relevant to send a research work. To fulfil editorial and content specific demands of conferences, a researcher needs to go through the previously published proceedings of a certain conference. Based on the previous proceeding of conferences, the research work is sometimes modified to increase the chances of article acceptances and publication. This problem can be solved to some extent using machine learning techniques e.g. classification algorithms like SVM, Naïve Bayes, etc. Text classification (a.k.a. text categorization) is one of the most prominent application of Machine Learning. It is used to automatically assign predefined categories (labels) to free-text documents. The purpose of text classification is to give conceptual organization to a large collection of documents. It has become more relevant with exponential growth of the data, with wide applicability in real world applications e.g. categorization of news stories by topics, products classification into multilevel categories, organization of emails into various groups (such as social, primary and promotions), indexing of patients data in healthcare sector from multiple aspects e.g. disease type, surgical procedure and medication given etc. The dataset consists of 2507 short research paper titles, largely technology related. They have been pre-classified manually into 5 categories (by conferences). Figure 1, summarizes the distribution of research papers by different conferences. The loadData method will be used to read the dataset from a text file and return titles and conference names. Similarly, preProcessing method will take titles as a parameter and will perform text pre-processing steps. By iterating over titles it will convert the text into lowercase and remove the stop words (that are provided in the corpus of NLTK library). You can uncomment one line of code in this method if you wish to remove punctuation and numbers from the titles. Few research paper titles and corresponding conferences are shown in Figure 2. def loadData(filePath="data.txt"): data = pd.read_csv(filePath, header=0, delimiter="\t") return data["Title"],data["Conference"] def preProcessing(titles): num_titles = titles.size clean_titles = [] stops = set(stopwords.words("english")) for i in xrange( 0, num_titles): #letters_only = re.sub("[^a-zA-Z]", " ", titles[i]) words = titles[i].lower().split() words = [w.lower() for w in words if not w in stops] clean_titles.append(" ".join(words)) return clean_titles Machine learning algorithms require numeric feature vectors to learn the underlying representation of the dataset. For this purpose, we need to convert our text into some numeric form. There are a couple of different ways to do this. We will use Term frequency-inverse document frequency or TF-IDF. It is the measure of how important the term is, for a particular document in a corpus. If the term is frequent in the document and appears less frequently in the corpus, then the term is of high importance for the document. It is computed by the product of two terms as follows: the first computes the term frequency (tf), aka. A number of times a word appears in a document, divided by the total number of words in that document; the second term is the inverse document frequency (idf), computed as the logarithm of the number of the documents in the corpus divided by the number of documents where the specific term appears. Hence, terms in the document with a high tf-idf score occur frequently in the document and provide the most information about that specific document. The getDTMByTFIDF method takes two parameters pre-processed title and number of (top) maximum feature that we want to get from the corpus. If None is passed as nfeatures , the method will return all the terms. TfidfVectorizer takes several other parameters to learn more about this consult the documentation. This method also returns the tfIdf_vectorizer object in addition to document term matrix. The vectorizer object can later be used to transform test set (unseen/new) titles during prediction. def getDTMByTFIDF(titles,nfeatures): tfIdf_vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer(max_features=nfeatures) dtm = tfIdf_vectorizer.fit_transform(titles).toarray() return dtm, tfIdf_vectorizer The document term matrix (from Tf-Idf) is usually very high dimensional and sparse. It can create issues for machine learning algorithms during the learning phase. Therefore, it is recommended to reduce the dimensionality of the dataset by either feature selection or dimensionality reduction methods. The former selects important features from the original feature set whereas, later learns new features from the original set in some other dimension. We will apply Chi Square and Information Gain as feature selection methods and Latent Semantic Analysis as dimensionality reduction technique. The χ2 test is used in statistics to test the independence of two events. More precisely in feature selection, it is used to test whether the occurrence of a specific term and the occurrence of a specific class are independent. featuresByChiSq method takes titles and corresponding labels along with a number of top features we want to get based on their importance. Information gain is another technique to determine the relative importance of the term. It measures the number of bits required for category prediction by knowing the presence or the absence of a term in the document. The featuresByInformationGain method uses decision tree and entropy criteria to learn discriminative features. LSA is an unsupervised statistical technique used for extracting and inferring relations of expected contextual usage of words in documents. It utilizes singular value decomposition (SVD) to reduce the high dimensionality of text data. It does so by keeping the first k largest singular values and omitting the rest. featuresByLSA method takes titles and number of components (features) that we want LSA to learn from original features. def featuresByChiSq(features,labels,nFeature=5000): chi2_model = SelectKBest(chi2,k=nFeature) dtm = chi2_model.fit_transform(features,labels) return dtm,chi2_model def featuresByInformationGain(features,labels): treeCL = tree.DecisionTreeClassifier(criterion="entropy") treeCL = treeCL.fit(features,labels) transformed_features = SelectFromModel(treeCL,prefit=True).transform(features) return transformed_features def featuresByLSA(features,ncomponents=100): svd = TruncatedSVD(n_components=ncomponents) normalizer = Normalizer(copy=False) lsa = make_pipeline(svd, normalizer) dtm_lsa = lsa.fit_transform(features) return dtm_lsa We will use three classification algorithms to categorize research papers. 1) Support vector machine with linear kernel 2) Random forest and 3) Multinomial Naïve Bayes. For evaluating/comparing how well the models are performing stratified k-fold cross validation will be used. It seeks to ensure that each fold is a good representative of a whole. Generally, this is used to evaluate the performance of supervised learning algorithms and aims to ensure, each class has (approximately) equal representation across each fold. Weighted average precision, recall and f-score will be calculated that can be used for final model selection. The crossValidate method will perform above-discussed steps of model training and evaluation. It takes document term matrix, class labels, classifier name and number of folds for cross validation and returns averaged precision, recall and f-score.
President Francois Hollande has proposed to ban demonstrations in France, according to his presidential spokesman, who said that at a time when the country is plagued by terrorism, the conditions are not in place to protect “personal or public property." "At a time when France is hosting the Euro 2016 [football tournament], when it is faced with terrorism, demonstrations can no longer be authorized if property, people and public property cannot be safeguarded," Hollande told a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, according to his spokesman Stephane Le Foll, AFP reported. “The conditions under which a manifestation is authorized is a subject of discussion between the organizers and the authorities representing the state,” Le Foll said. "If the conditions are not in place to protect personal or public property, and as things stand now they are not, decisions are currently being made case-by-case not to allow the protests," he added. Read more On Tuesday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Paris, shouting slogans against the new labor law being imposed by the government and carrying placards that read: “For new rights.” Some protestors torched a police car at the Place de la Republique in the heart of Paris. Staff working at the Eiffel Tower announced the closure of the city’s iconic landmark, saying they “would join the protest.” They also warned that sites near it would be unsafe. A group of black-clad demonstrators allegedly vandalized the Necker Children's Hospital, where a three-year-old child, whose mother and father, a policeman, were stabbed to death by an Islamic State militant Monday evening outside their home near Paris, is currently staying. At least 40 people, including 29 officers, were injured as protesters clashed with police in the center of the French capital. Police made at least 58 arrests and deployed tear gas and water cannons against the demonstrators. Health Minister Marisol Touraine called the damage "shameful" and its perpetrators "hooligans." Similar demonstrations were held across the whole of France. Nearly 20,000 gathered in the city of Toulouse, according to the demonstration’s organizers. In Nantes, protesters gathered in the streets, despite a recently-imposed ban on rallies. Despite mass protests, Prime Minister Manuel Valls has vowed to stand firm behind the unpopular labor law. "The government will not change a text which is already the outcome of negotiations with the unions,” Manuel Valls told France Inter radio, adding: “It's a text that is good for employees, for companies that create new rights.” The unpopular law, initiated by Labor Minister Myriam El Khomri, forces employers to pay only 10 percent of an overtime bonus, instead of the current 25 percent. The bill technically maintains the 35-hour working week, but says that in case of “exceptional circumstances,” employees can be asked to work up to 60 hours a week. Anti-labor law protests in France have grown into something more far-reaching and long-lasting, with people saying they are rallying against capitalism, intolerance and French government policies on the whole. The protests’ slogans seem very similar to the Occupy movement, which first started in the US and eventually spread globally.
Foal's head and body are the solid brown of a donkey, while his legs have the characteristic black stripes of a zebra A zoo in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea has welcomed its latest arrival – a zebroid, or zonkey. Named Telegraph by keepers at the Taigan zoo park in southern Crimea, the foal's head and body are the solid brown of a donkey, while his legs have the characteristic black stripes of a zebra. Oleg Zubkov, director of the private zoo near Simferopol, said Telegraph was very popular with visitors. He said Telegraph's mother, a zebra, had not had a mate for a long time and had been lonely and uncomfortable in her enclosure. "So on the advice of a zoologist we moved her in with several other hooved animals and she really liked the donkey. As a result of their affection for one another we've gotten Telegraph." Cross-breeding between zebras and other members of the equine family is not unheard of, although it is rare that the zebra is the mother. The breeding of zonkeys or other hybrids is normally frowned upon by the zoo community. "Such things don't happen in civilised zoos, but can occur at private zoos or on farms," said Anna Kachurovskaya, a spokeswoman for Moscow zoo. "This sort of marketing is not justified or scientific … zoos are for preserving wild species, that is one of their most important goals." Telegraph was named after a local newspaper that recently celebrated its fifth anniversary.
Zara founder Amancio Ortega is now the wealthiest person on the planet, with a $200 million edge over the previous leader Bill Gates. He is worth an estimated $85 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time rankings of the world’s billionaires. Read more The 81-year-old founder of the world’s biggest fashion group Inditex, Ortega has already held the top position three times before but has always conceded the lead within a day. His net worth is up $1.2 billion in the last month. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos held the top spot briefly last month and is now ranked No. 3 with $82 billion. In October 2015 Ortega passed Gates as the richest person in the world for the first time but lost the spot in less than 24 hours. The Spanish billionaire regained the lead in September 2016 but was quickly overtaken by Gates once again. A former store clerk, Ortega founded Inditex with his ex-wife Rosalia Mera in 1975. They grew the business into an international powerhouse with a market capitalization of more than $100 billion. The company's flagship store is Zara, but it also owns the chains Zara Home, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Oysho, Pull and Bear, Stradivarius and Uterque. READ MORE: Jeff Bezos overtakes Bill Gates to become world’s richest person Ortega, who was born in Leon, Spain, never graduated from high school. The magnate holds more than 80 percent of his wealth in Inditex shares and reportedly went 25 years without taking a vacation. Despite stepping down as chairman of the company in 2011, Ortega continues to go to the office every day.
"This isn't the kind of software where we can leave so many unresolved bugs that we need a tracker for them." -- Satoshi Advertised sites are not endorsed by the Bitcoin Forum. They may be unsafe, untrustworthy, or illegal in your jurisdiction. Advertise here. r3wt Offline Activity: 686 Merit: 500 always the student, never the master. Hero MemberActivity: 686Merit: 500always the student, never the master. Re: Where's the new forum Theymos? June 17, 2013, 07:56:18 AM #3 Quote from: Chaang Noi (Goat) ช้างน้อย on June 17, 2013, 07:49:23 AM It would be best to raise enough money to finish the project before starting do you not think? 6000 btc isn't enough? no implied racism, but you could probably pay a group of coders in China or India (where wages are low) to build a forum software for much less than that. But you knew that already GOAT. The ironic thing is, the more i hang around here on bitcointalk the more i realize the hypocrisy of an adminstrative group that scams donators and promises a new forum in return, but just like BFL, its biggest supporter, never delivers. In my opinion this is no more different than a common scammer promising asic shares and never delivering on that promise 6000 btc isn't enough? no implied racism, but you could probably pay a group of coders in China or India (where wages are low) to build a forum software for much less than that. But you knew that already GOAT. The ironic thing is, the more i hang around here on bitcointalk the more i realize the hypocrisy of an adminstrative group that scams donators and promises a new forum in return, but just like BFL, its biggest supporter, never delivers. In my opinion this is no more different than a common scammer promising asic shares and never delivering on that promise My negative trust rating is reflective of a personal vendetta by someone on default trust. greyhawk Offline Activity: 924 Merit: 1000 Hero MemberActivity: 924Merit: 1000 Re: Where's the new forum Theymos? June 17, 2013, 09:13:42 AM #7 Quote from: jimmijames73 on June 17, 2013, 09:04:32 AM Was the new forum supposed to be an improved bitcointalk or a completely separate forum to the current one? Is there an old thread discussing this? There was a sticky once, but it seems to have disappeard. To paraphrase the idea was to bootstrap a new forums software from scratch supporting a plethora of options no other forums software supports as of yet out of the box and getting it right on the first try. "Version 1 is the best version of any software." It was pretty lulzy. EDIT: Found it There was a sticky once, but it seems to have disappeard.To paraphrase the idea was to bootstrap a new forums software from scratch supporting a plethora of options no other forums software supports as of yet out of the box and getting it right on the first try. "Version 1 is the best version of any software."It was pretty lulzy.EDIT: Found it https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50617.0 greyhawk Offline Activity: 924 Merit: 1000 Hero MemberActivity: 924Merit: 1000 Re: Where's the new forum Theymos? June 17, 2013, 09:24:50 AM #8 Quote from: Chaang Noi (Goat) ช้างน้อย on June 17, 2013, 09:16:20 AM I'm pretty sure it was Theymos over reacting to having the forum hacked in 2011. Pretty much this. It was a thought exercise on what would be the absolute perfect forum anyone could wish for. It didn't help that the amount on offer for development at the time was something like 3000 bucks, which is really just "Maybe I'll have a quick look at your specs and tell you what's outright impossible" kind of money. Pretty much this. It was a thought exercise on what would be the absolute perfect forum anyone could wish for. It didn't help that the amount on offer for development at the time was something like 3000 bucks, which is really just "Maybe I'll have a quick look at your specs and tell you what's outright impossible" kind of money. Luckybit Offline Activity: 714 Merit: 500 Hero MemberActivity: 714Merit: 500 Re: Where's the new forum Theymos? June 17, 2013, 09:29:54 AM #9 Quote from: Matthew N. Wright on June 17, 2013, 06:46:36 AM 12 months ago I donated 10 BTC to you to make a new forum. You have since then collected over 6000 BTC and continue to collect on a regular basis, under the guise of "creating a new forum", yet you have yet to create a new forum. Please present a status report of your progress in the past 12 months with creating the forum. Thanks. In my opinion they should plan it out thoroughly and turn this forum into a sustainable business model. They can monetize this forum around micropayments and not have to worry about donations ever again if they take their time. There is no rush either because Bitcoins are only worth $100. My opinion is Bitcointalk should integrate tipping functionality, it should integrate cryptocurrencies into the forum in such a way that clicking certain links initiates a microtransaction or costs a fee. Honestly they will have to take the code base of Bitcointalk and completely integrate cryptocurrencies into it so micropayments, trading, smart contracts and other functionalities can be built into the forum itself. Then all they'll have to do is charge transaction fees, fees for access to certain threads, but also they can have lotteries for posting in certain threads, reward posters who have good karma with bonus coins, etc. So much can be done here that I think they should take their time and work on it a good six months. I think 6000 coins is only 600,000, and in my opinion they should have 2 professional programmers working on it and hoard the rest. They already implemented a web of trust system which I think is cool, it's only a matter of time before micropayments but it cannot happen right now because Bitcoin itself isn't prepared for micropayments with the Max Block Size so it would have to be done where you can use any of the major coins to pay. In my opinion they should plan it out thoroughly and turn this forum into a sustainable business model. They can monetize this forum around micropayments and not have to worry about donations ever again if they take their time. There is no rush either because Bitcoins are only worth $100.My opinion is Bitcointalk should integrate tipping functionality, it should integrate cryptocurrencies into the forum in such a way that clicking certain links initiates a microtransaction or costs a fee. Honestly they will have to take the code base of Bitcointalk and completely integrate cryptocurrencies into it so micropayments, trading, smart contracts and other functionalities can be built into the forum itself.Then all they'll have to do is charge transaction fees, fees for access to certain threads, but also they can have lotteries for posting in certain threads, reward posters who have good karma with bonus coins, etc.So much can be done here that I think they should take their time and work on it a good six months. I think 6000 coins is only 600,000, and in my opinion they should have 2 professional programmers working on it and hoard the rest. They already implemented a web of trust system which I think is cool, it's only a matter of time before micropayments but it cannot happen right now because Bitcoin itself isn't prepared for micropayments with the Max Block Size so it would have to be done where you can use any of the major coins to pay. ShroomsKit Offline Activity: 672 Merit: 500 Hero MemberActivity: 672Merit: 500 Re: Where's the new forum Theymos? June 17, 2013, 09:47:10 AM #13 I understand at least a good bunch of those coins were donated when they were worth less but my guess is people are still donating. I have nothing against the people who run this place. If you want to make sure they can buy a nice car then keep donating. If you're doing it for a forum upgrade then don't send them a Satoshi anymore! They have enough money to run the best forum possible for the next 40 years. Quote from: spooderman on January 03, 2015, 06:43:22 AM Its price is not a very relevant factor in its adoption....
daylighteclipsed Answer: And isn’t it interesting that in both cases Bill was involved, especially after Alex said how much Bill is trying to break Dipper’s spirit? See I’m not convinced Mabel had total control over the place like she thought. After she starts wanting to leave, it takes on a mind of its own and tries to stop her. ‘Her creations’ turn on her and start attacking her and Dipper and co. Mabel loses the ability to manipulate/create more things in ‘her world’, meaning it was never really ‘her world’ to begin with. It’s always been a trap designed by Bill. Bill gave her the illusion of control, but she never actually had any. Mabel herself even says the place gives you what you want before you know you want it. That doesn’t make any sense, unless it’s not really what Mabel wants but it makes her happy enough to believe it’s what she wants. I think Bill took what Mabel wanted and exaggerated her desires. Mabel was hurt by Dipper. She wanted a brother that was supportive and wouldn’t leave her for supernatural mysteries. Bill gave her that, but amplified. He gave Mabel someone Mabel didn’t exactly want, but could have fun and forget about reality with. And someone that would inevitably completely break Dipper’s heart if Dipper so managed to reach Mabel’s bubble. Bill wanted Dippy-Fresh to make Dipper hurt and angry enough to give up on Mabel and storm off, like how Dipper temporarily stormed off in Dreamscapers when he was convinced Stan hated him. I’m like 90% sure Bill had a hand in the memory Dipper stumbled across then too; he wanted Dipper to give up and abandon Stan. But Dipper didn’t. He didn’t give up on Mabel either. In fact, in Mabel’s prison, Dipper didn’t even express any anger toward Mabel about Dippy-Fresh whatsoever. Although I’m absolutely positive it had to feel like a literal knife was being twisted in his heart. Dipper hated Dippy-Fresh and Mabel’s friendship with him. He pretty much wanted to kill the guy. But Dipper was bracing himself for this. He knew before entering the bubble that Mabel was hurt by him, and that it was a prison designed by Bill. He didn’t know exactly what was inside, but he knew it was gonna be rough and it was. Bill tried to break Dipper’s spirit with hurt, anger, guilt, and insecurity (Dipper’s not cool and adored) in the form of Dippy-Fresh. But it didn’t work. And Dipper tells you why: because he knows his sister. He knows she’s scared and that none of this–including Dippy-Fresh–is what she really wants. Dipper forces Mabel to stop lying to herself and living in denial and face reality. He recognizes that he was also lying to himself about wanting to stay in Gravity Falls to be Ford’s apprentice. He doesn’t give that opportunity up for Mabel. He straight up tells her it’s not what he wants. He doesn’t want to be cooped up in a lab with Ford all day. He wants to be with her (and if Ford had paid attention to the kid, he’d know that’s why Dipper was hesitating to take the apprenticeship in the first place). Dipper was making his own choice, free of Mabel and Ford. That becomes certain when Mabel says Dipper can stay with Ford if he wants and, despite Mabel being safe now, Dipper still reinforces it’s not what he wants. Dipper wants to grow up with Mabel. That’s his desire and no one else’s. Dipper has the will of titanium that could withstand Bill’s most diabolical trap, and the strength of that determination is drawn from how much he loves. I’m so incredibly proud of this young sweet boy for being his own person and never giving up.
It’s Golden State then everyone else right now, but after that we have some good teams from the East making noise — Detroit, Atlanta, and, of course, Cleveland. We’re still just a couple weeks into the season so still a lot of volatility in the standings, things likely start to stabilize going forward. 1. Warriors (7-0, last week No. 1). One sign of Golden State’s early dominance: It is beating teams by an average of 19.1 points per 100 possessions, which is 10.3 more than the second place team (Utah). If you’re searching for flaws, they did blow double-digit leads to the Clippers and Kings and had to hang on for wins. But they did. 2. Cavaliers (6-1, LW 4). Slow starts have not kept this team from a six-game winning streak. Kevin Love has flown a little under the radar but is averaging 17 points and 12.6 boards a game, he looks far more comfortable in their offense (at least until Kyrie Irving returns), plus his defense looks improved and more focused. 3. Hawks (7-1, LW 11). They have won seven in a row after their opening night loss, making those of us that predicted a step back look bad. Kent Bazemore has been great, and while this team is not beating the cream of the league so far, it’s beating the teams it needs to beat in the East (Charlotte twice, for example). 4. Pistons (5-1, LW 7). Stan Van Gundy looks smart for his $80 million bet on Reggie Jackson to go next to Andre Drummond right now. When Jackson and Drummond are on the court together the Pistons have an offensive rating of 108 points per 100 possessions, and they are +18.8 points per 100. Drummond is averaging 20-20 through six games, which is ridiculous. 5. Spurs (4-2, LW 5). The Spurs have a top 10 offense and defense (the sign of a true contender), but that offense is living in the midrange and you have to wonder if they can sustain it at this level. It’s fine if it’s LaMarcus Aldridge and Tim Duncan taking those shots, right now Kawhi Leonard is taking a lot of midrange jumpers knocking down 50 percent of them. Can he keep that up? 6. Clippers (4-2, LW 3). Blake Griffin is not getting enough credit for a ridiculously good start to the season. He’s averaging 29.3 points per game with a true shooting percentage of 64.1 percent, he’s grabbing 9.7 boards a game, dishing out 4.2 assists, and has a PER of 32.8. He was amazing in the playoffs last season and has carried that over. 7. Jazz (4-2, LW 13). They have the second best net rating in the league, a sign that this power ranking may have them too low — and that they can sustain the fast early start. Remember that this team picked up Derrick Favors in the Deron Williams trade — Favors has been fantastic for them this season, that move looks brilliant now. 8. Raptors (5-2, LW 6). They picked up a quality win against OKC but have lost two in a row, and that come-from-ahead loss to Miami Sunday showed how much they miss DeMarre Carroll (out with plantar fasciitis, that is going to take a while to get right). Soft schedule this week should help them get back in a groove. 9. Rockets (4-3, LW 19). James Harden is back in his groove — back-to-back 40 point games — and the Rockets have won four in a row. Harden has taken over the offense again, there is less Ty Lawson. We’ll see if there is an effort to balance out the offensive load going forward (they can do it against lesser teams, the Rockets needed these wins and this Harden after the slow start). 10. Heat (4-3, LW 12). This is a deep team getting great production out of their bench, which includes Justise Winslow stepping right in and looking good on defense (teams will regret passing on him in the draft). Miami is in in a seven-game homestand, which Dwyane Wade’s knees appreciates. 11. Thunder (4-3 LW 2). They have a net rating (+7.2 per 100) that suggests OKC will climb these rankings and not have three-game losing streaks often. However, this is still a team with a bottom 10 defense and that is in large part about their bench. It has to improve to challenge the elite of the West. 12. Trail Blazers (4-3, LW 22). It’s not hard to picture how Damian Lilliard and C.J. McCollum could power the Trail Blazers to the league’s fourth best offense because of their ability to shoot the three off the pick-and-roll, but their defense being 11th this young season is why they are above .500 (but will teams keep missing threes against them?). 13. Bulls (4-3, LW 9). Both Derrick Rose and Jimmy Butler said one of the problems in their losses this season (such as the one to Minnesota) is just a lack of consistent effort, especially on defense. This isn’t Thibodeau’s world anymore, guys are going to have to be professional and motivate themselves. They are talking about starting Joakim Noah over Nikola Mitotic, who has struggled the last three games (but I still don’t like the move). 14. Timberwolves (3-2,LW 16). This team could be in the mix for a playoff spot in the West if they keep playing this way. Karl Anthony-Towns is a better defender in the paint as a rookie than expected, Ricky Rubio is underrated at that end, and their starters lock teams down. Good tests this week with the Hawks, Warriors, Pacers, and Grizzlies on the docket. 15. Wizards (3-3, LW 10). Reports are Bradley Beals injury is not serious, which is good as he’s played at a near All-Star level and losing him would be a massive blow. This team drops off badly when John Wall sits, which is an issue. By the way, some guy named Durant comes to town this week. 16. Pacers (3-4, LW 26). Paul George has put up impressive numbers the past three games — when he started at the small forward spot rather than as a power forward. They have won three of four, including over Miami and Detroit. This team could go on a run of wins when you look at the schedule ahead. < 17. Suns (3-3, LW 14). A tough schedule last week (losses to the Clippers, Pistons, and Thunder) showed this team has a pretty good defense but is struggling to find spacing and put points on the board at the other end. The bench has not lived up to expectations and Jeff Hornacek is searching for rotations he likes. 18. Mavericks (3-3, LW 15). Dirk Nowitzki seems to have found the fountain of youth, scoring 17 points a game with a ridiculous 61.7 percent true shooting percentage, plus he’s shooting 50 percent from three. Dwight Powell has been a great find, averaging 11.3 points per game on 50.9 percent shooting off the bench. 19. Bucks (4-3, LW 27). Jabari Parker is back, and while he looks rusty it’s just good to see him back out on the court. Almost as importantly, John Henson is back and that has helped the Bucks’ defense look closer to last year’s levels. 20. Celtics (2-3, LW 20). Isaiah Thomas has looked good as a starter for Marcus Smart, and he showed some chemistry with Jared Sullinger. Their strong defense and good net rating (+3.1, 10th best in the league) suggests this team will climb the ladder (and I have them ranked too low). 21. Magic (3-4, LW 23). Those four losses are by a combined 14 total points, and two games have gone to overtime. Elfrid Payton’s shooting woes are still an issue dragging down the Orlando offense when he plays. 22. Grizzlies (3-4, LW 8). This team’s record is better than they have been playing — Memphis has a bottom 10 offense and defense. The bench units (with Jeff Green at the four) have been unimpressive (to put it kindly). The GM said coach Dave Joerger is not on the hot seat, but if this team keeps falling someone will pay the price. Their schedule the next couple weeks is brutal. 23. Hornets (2-4, LW 25). Quality win over the Bulls and they are the fourth best offense in the NBA at 104.6 points per 100 possessions. They are shooting the ball very well, particularly Kemba Walker, and as a team they are shooting 36.3 percent as three. Impressive, but can they sustain this is the question. 24. Knicks (3-4, LW 17). Kristaps Porzingis has provided more as a rookie than most scouts expected (even Lakers’ coach Byron Scott admitted as much). And Porzingis has mastered the putback dunk. But why is Sasha Vujacic getting so much run? I know Arron Afflalo is still out injured (he could return this week) but has Fisher actually watched Vujacic? Play Langston Galloway instead. 25. Nuggets (2-4, LW 21). They are more fun to watch and more successful going small with Danilo Gallinari at the five and Kenneth Faried at the four, but they miss Wilson Chandler in that lineup. Joffrey Lauvergne has looked good in his limited minutes per night, but they miss Jusuf Nurkic as well up front. 26. Kings (1-6, LW 18). DeMarcus Cousins missing time with injury isn’t the only issue, the Kings’ offense is 5.5 points per 100 possessions better when Rajon Rondo sits (and the defense is 11.9 per 100 better). Rondo isn’t going to lose time to Darren Collison in the short term because Collison is battling a hamstring injury. 27. Lakers (1-5, LW 28). They picked up a win against Brooklyn, Byron Scott has tweaked the rotation to get better defense off the bench (meaning some Metta World Peace, who played okay on D), but the defense is still second worst in the NBA. The Lakers need to focus on player development ahead of wins, which should be obvious but their rotations suggest it’s not the case. They are on the road a lot for the next few weeks. 28. Pelicans (0-6, LW 24). Anthony Davis is certainly playing better, but the injured Pelicans can’t get a win. Their defense is a disaster. The Pelicans will get it together at one point, but the concern remains the same — will it be too early to dig out of the hole and make the playoffs? 29. Nets (0-7, LW 29). Two things are keeping the Nets from falling to last in these rankings: They get Brook Lopez back Wednesday, plus the woeful Sixers. But the Nets have played the softest schedule in the NBA this young season and their offense is just ugly. And dull. 30. 76ers (0-6, LW 30). If you want points, Jahlil Okafor has looked good, scoring 19.7 points per game on 52.7 percent shooting. His jumper is legit, and he can put the ball on the floor. He and Nerlens Noel are showing some real potential this young season.
Report: British Army Sniper's Single Shot Kills 6 Taliban Enlarge this image toggle caption Steve Lewis/Reuters/Landov Steve Lewis/Reuters/Landov A shot fired by a British Army sniper at a suspected Taliban fighter in Afghanistan last December ended up killing not just the man in the marksman's sights but also five other men who were thought to be militant soldiers, The Telegraph reports. News of the unidentified sniper's shot is just being made public this week. Lt. Col. Richard Slack, the marksman's commanding officer, tells the Telegraph that the bullet apparently set off explosives in a vest that the targeted man was wearing. Or, perhaps the man fell on the trigger. "The sniper engaged him and the guy exploded," Slack says in the Telegraph's report. "There was a pause on the radio and the sniper said, 'I think I've just shot a suicide bomber.' The rest of them were killed in the blast." According to Slack, the suspected Taliban fighters were engaged in a firefight with British and Afghan forces when the sniper fired on them from about 930 yards away. The same sniper, Slack says, has also killed a Taliban machine-gunner with a shot fired from 1,465 yards away — only 300 yards short of a mile. Highly skilled snipers in the British, U.S. and other militaries can hit targets from quite far away. Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who became known as the "American Sniper" for his accounts of action in Iraq, once hit an insurgent from about 1.2 miles away. Kyle and a friend died in February 2013 when a former Marine they were trying to counsel allegedly opened fire on them at a gun range.
Markus Winkelhock (born 13 June 1980) is a German professional racing driver, who has taken part in one Formula One Grand Prix, which he briefly led. He is the son of Manfred Winkelhock and nephew of Joachim Winkelhock, both of whom were Formula One drivers in the 1980s.[1] Having switched to sports and touring car racing, he has also won the FIA GT1 World Championship in 2012 with team-mate Marc Basseng. Early career [ edit ] Winkelhock driving in the German F3 series in 2002. Born in Stuttgart, Winkelhock won races in a string of junior formulae including Formula König, German Formula Renault and the Formula Renault Eurocup from 1998–2000.[2] In 2001, Winkelhock joined the German Formula 3 Championship, where he remained until the championship became the F3 Euroseries in 2003. His record was fifth overall in 2001 (three wins), seventh in 2002 (one win) and fourth in 2003 (two wins).[2] He switched to touring car racing in 2004, with a season in the DTM in an AMG-Mercedes CLK. But he failed to score a point all year with the Persson team.[2] Winkelhock switched back to single-seater racing in 2005, joining the World Series by Renault with Draco. He won three times but there were also some less than shining moments – notably when he crashed at Monaco in qualifying and on the first lap of the race.[2] Formula One [ edit ] On 24 January 2006, Marcus Winkelhock was confirmed a test and reserve driver in the Midland F1 team, (formerly Jordan Grand Prix) for the 2006 Formula One season.[3] He participated in Friday test sessions for the team at the Bahrain, Australian, German and Hungarian Grands Prix.[2] He was re-signed for 2007 by the team, which by then had been renamed as Spyker F1.[4] He also made a brief return to the DTM in 2007, starting three races.[2] Following Christijan Albers's departure from Spyker after the 2007 British Grand Prix, Winkelhock was confirmed as his replacement for the European Grand Prix on 18 July.[5] The deal was only for one race with Sakon Yamamoto set to race for Spyker for the rest of the season.[6] 2007 European Grand Prix [ edit ] Due to Christijan Albers's departure from the Spyker F1 Team, Winkelhock was called in for the 10th race of the season, the European Grand Prix. Winkelhock started last on the 22-car grid alongside team mate Adrian Sutil. But on the formation lap with the rest of the field already on dry-weather tyres, the team made a last-second decision to call Winkelhock into the pits to switch to the full wet tyres. When pouring rain forced almost all the others to pit at the end of the first lap, Winkelhock was able to move into the lead, passing some cars as they pitted, and even passing Kimi Räikkönen on the track as the Finn tip-toed around to the pits, eventually building a lead of 19 seconds by the end of the second lap. By lap 4 he had a lead of 33 seconds over Ferrari's Felipe Massa in 2nd place. As the rain got heavier the race stewards first sent out the safety car, and then suspended the race following a series of spin-offs in the first corner behind the safety car. The race restarted after the rain had eased. Winkelhock and his team chose to start on full wet tyres on a drying track in the hope of further showers, as the team expected he would be overtaken by faster cars anyway. The gamble failed and, having restarted the race from pole position, Winkelhock quickly fell down the order. He retired on lap 15 with hydraulic problems that caused a small fire. He had led for a total of six laps.[7] According to Bob Varsha of the Speed Channel commentary team, Winkelhock is the only driver in Formula One history to start last on the grid and lead the race in his first Grand Prix, and due to the red flag and restart, is also the only driver in Formula One history to start both last and first on the grid in the same Grand Prix. Despite leading his debut race, the Spyker team eventually opted against giving Winkelhock a drive for the remainder of the 2007 season for sponsorship reasons, and instead decided to give the drive to former Super Aguri driver Sakon Yamamoto. Post-Formula One career [ edit ] Winkelhock returned to the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters after he lost his Spyker seat, and has remained in the series, driving for Team Rosberg, for 2008 (12th), 2009 (10th) and 2010 (12th). In 2011, he competed in the FIA GT1 World Championship for the All-Inkl.com Münnich Motorsport team alongside team boss Marc Basseng driving a Lamborghini. They won the championship the following year, the team having switched to the Mercedes SLS due to a change in the regulations. Winkelhock was to move with Münnich Motorsport to the World Touring Car Championship for 2013,[8] however he left the team before the start of the season in order to focus on his GT racing commitments, and was replaced by defending champion Robert Huff.[9] Since 2013, he has more or less settled in the Blancpain Endurance Series and also won the 2017 Nurburgring 24 hours sportscar race.[10] Racing record [ edit ] Career summary [ edit ] ‡ As Winkelhock was a guest driver, he was ineligible for points. * Season still in progress. Complete Formula 3 Euro Series results [ edit ] (key) (Races in bold indicate pole position) (Races in italics indicate fastest lap) Complete Formula Renault 3.5 Series results [ edit ] (key) (Races in bold indicate pole position) (Races in italics indicate fastest lap) Complete Formula One results [ edit ] (key) Complete Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters results [ edit ] (key) (Races in bold indicate pole position) (Races in italics indicate fastest lap) 1 – Shanghai was a non-championship round. Complete GT1 World Championship results [ edit ] Complete FIA GT Series results [ edit ] ‡ — Guest driver – Not eligible for points. Complete Blancpain GT Series Sprint Cup results [ edit ] † Winkelhock was ineligible to score points during the Moscow weekend due to Nikolaus Mayr-Melnhof's absence. Complete FIA World Rallycross Championship results [ edit ] Supercar [ edit ] Complete WeatherTech SportsCar Championship results [ edit ] (key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap) † Winkelhock did not complete sufficient laps in order to score full points. * Season still in progress.
OpenYOLO specifies two methods for credential retrieval; one is structurally very similar to hint requests, and another which allows for credential requests to be sent to multiple providers in parallel. The parallel request mechanism is built on top of the "direct request" method, so the direct request method will be specified first. Direct credential retrieve requests on Android are dispatched to the credential provider using an Intent . If a provider supports credential retrieval, it MUST declare this on the manifest entry for its retrieve activity, using the following intent filter: In order to make a credential request, the client creates a credential request message (specified in Section 3.2.1 ) and encodes it to its binary protocol buffer form. An activity Intent is then created to send this to the credential provider. The credential request message MUST be added to the activity Intent using an extra, named "org.openyolo.credential.request". This intent is then dispatched by the client using startActivityForResult . The provider can perform any processing and user interaction required to release a credential. Once complete, the provider creates a retrieve response message (specified in Section 3.2.2 ), and passes this back to the requester via setResult . The intent data returned to the client MUST carry the retrieve result using an extra, named "org.openyolo.credential.retrieve.result". Additionally, the result code contained in that credential result MUST match the result code for the provider activity. Credential retrieve requests can be sent to multiple providers in parallel, using the Background Broadcast Query protocol (see Section 4.6) designed for this purpose. If a provider supports direct credential retrieval, it MUST also support parallel credential retrieval as specified in this section. Parallel credential retrieval is particularly useful where more than one provider is installed and actively used by the user on their device. This often occurs where there is no easy integration for third party password managers into system services, such as mobile browsers, which do not have a plugin mechanism. In this scenario, there can be a disjoint disjoint set of credentials stored in the various providers, so querying them all increases the probability that a usable credential can be found. The query data type used for credential requests is "org.openyolo.credential", with a credential request message (specified in Section 3.2.1) as the query data. Providers respond to the BBQ query with the following protocol buffer response message: message CredentialRetrieveBbqResponse { bytes retrieve_intent = 1; map<string, bytes> additional_props = 2; } This response MAY carry an intent that can be used to retrieve a credential from a provider. Providers do not return an intent if they know that they do not have a credential matching the request. Providers MAY respond with a retrieve intent even if they do not know that they have a credential available: providers which use a master password to encrypt their stores which is not stored to disk may require the user to take an action to unlock the store before an accurate answer can be determined. Where multiple providers respond with an intent, the client SHOULD allow the user to choose which of these providers to proceed with. Once selected, the intent is dispatched to the provider using startActivityForResult. The intent returned via the BBQ response MUST be structurally equivalent to the intents that a client would construct for direct credential retrieval, and the activity it is directed to MUST also follow the same protocol to return results.The provider MAY include additional information in the retrieve intent returned via BBQ, if convenient.
A group of Maryland residents with the support of the National Rifle Association are asking the Supreme Court to reverse a ruling that upheld a Maryland ban on 45 kinds of assault weapons. The NRA said it filed a petition with the high court Friday. It seeks to overturn a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Richmond, Virginia. It found the banned guns aren’t protected by the Second Amendment. The NRA says the ruling is a direct contradiction of the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision called District of Columbia v. Heller, which reaffirmed self-defense rights. But in the February appeals court ruling, Judge Robert King wrote “we have no power to extend Second Amendment protections to weapons of war.” He added that the Heller case explicitly excluded such coverage. Follow @CBSBaltimore on Twitter and like WJZ-TV \| CBS Baltimore on Facebook (© Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
The scope of Hamas's activity in Turkish territory is an open secret. Hamas and Turkish officials claim the nature of that activity is humanitarian. Maybe. But in the real world, kidnapping Israeli teenagers and hitting Israeli cities with rockets might actually be considered a "humanitarian activity" by most Islamists. In 2012, Abdullah Gul, then President of Turkey, when asked by reporters whether Hamas would open an office in Istanbul, said: "Contacts [with Hamas] continue. Time will tell where the dimension of our cooperation will lead us to." Gul is a moderate Islamist compared to his successor as President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Guess what time told. Eight years after the 2006 visit to Turkey of the head of Hamas's political bureau, Khaled Mashaal, the Islamist organization -- deemed a terror group by Egypt, the United States, Australia, Canada, Israel, and Japan -- was coordinating its efforts in the West Bank with logistical support from a command center in Istanbul -- a fact that annoyed even the Palestinian Authority (PA). In 2014, Turkey was also host to Salah al-Arouri, a Hamas commander whom the PA accuses of planning multiple attacks against Israeli targets. The newspaper Israel Hayom calls Arouri "an infamous arch-terrorist believed to be responsible for dozens of attacks against Israelis." According to the Israeli media, the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) has evidence that the deadly attacks against Israelis were planned at the Hamas headquarters in Istanbul. In November, the Shin Bet reported the arrest in the West Bank of members of a cell preparing to attack Israeli targets, who had received military training abroad under the leadership of Hamas in Turkey. Last August, speaking at the World Conference of Islamic Sages in Turkey, Arouri admitted that Hamas was behind the "heroic action carried out by the al-Qassam Brigades, which captured three settlers in Hebron." The three teenage boys were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas operatives, an incident that triggered the spiral of violence that led to the vicious 50-day war in Gaza. In December, Israel's Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon asserted that Hamas operatives in Istanbul were plotting terrorist attacks to be carried out in the West Bank and Gaza. "Hamas," he said, "is trying to build terrorism infrastructure in Judea and Samaria that will carry out attacks in different forms, and we must work aggressively and determinately against this." Ya'alon also claimed, when he met with then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in Washington, that Hamas moved its bureau from Damascus to Istanbul for the first time in late October 2014. His accusations came a month after Israel filed a complaint with NATO for Turkey's role in supporting terrorism by harboring and supporting Hamas officials. The complaint specifically mentioned Arouri, who has lived in Turkey since 2010. Also in December, a Hamas leader, speaking to World Net Daily on condition of anonymity, confirmed that his organization was using NATO member Turkey as a base for logistics, training and planning terrorist attacks. When so much was in the public domain, the U.S. administration shyly felt compelled to act, and appealed to Ankara to prevent Hamas's military activity originating from any base on Turkish soil. After all, Turkey was a NATO ally and most allies viewed Hamas as a terrorist organization. Turkish diplomats and security officials neither deny nor confirm that Hamas has a logistical hub in Turkey. "Call it a bureau or anything else," said one official privately. Another senior official weighed in: "Hamas' activity in Turkey is limited to coordinating humanitarian aid and media work." A recent report in Al-Monitor quoted a Turkish diplomat as saying, "Turkey has a dialogue with Hamas but will absolutely not allow any terror organization to operate on its soil." That line is where verbal "creativity" comes into the picture: "Turkey will not allow any terror organization to operate on its soil." Yes and no. Yes, because Turkey openly declares that it does not view Hamas as a terrorist organization. And no, because Hamas is in fact a terrorist organization. In January, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said: "For us, Hamas is not a terror organization; it has never committed any act of terror." But that was not Ankara's first sleight-of-hand for an entity that vows to kill every last Jew on earth. President Erdogan has repeatedly described Hamas militants as "freedom fighters." In December, Davutoglu hosted Mashaal at a high-profile party congress in Konya, Central Turkey. Taking the stage at the event, Mashaal congratulated the Turkish people "for having Erdogan and Davutoglu." Thundering applause, Palestinian flags waving passionately and thousands of AKP fans shouting, "Down with Israel!" Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal addresses the AKP regional party congress in Konya, Turkey, on December 27, 2014. The scope of Hamas's activity through Turkish territory is an open secret. Hamas and Turkish officials claim the nature of that activity is humanitarian. Maybe. But in the real world, kidnapping Israeli teenagers and hitting Israeli cities with rockets might actually be considered a "humanitarian activity" by most Islamists, whether Palestinian or Turkish. The choice of Istanbul to host the Hamas bureau is not totally irrelevant: Tens of thousands of people in Istanbul take to the streets in the great metropolis every year to commemorate "Jerusalem Day," in which they customarily burn Israeli and American flags and chant, "Down with Israel, down with America!"
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#292e68;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 22px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:28px">Newsletter June#5 2015</span></span></span><br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px"><img align="left" height="110" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/b4c46461-2d37-4304-ad7e-5fec07e22d73.jpg" style="width: 180px;height: 110px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="180">What’s in the New UK Surveillance Bill?</span></span>The government intend wholesale reform but will it perpetuate invasion of privacy or put an end mass surveillance? <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=f73cd2144a&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px"><img align="left" height="100" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/e77fbe41-e4e7-4a62-8a03-32535bcf0f5d.jpg" style="width: 180px;height: 100px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="180">Hackers Invade Hospital Networks</span></span>Hackers penetrate secure hospital networks, collecting valuable information, by targeting medical devices. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=e838255de0&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><img align="left" height="95" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/2ce0592e-f2ca-4a52-946e-19e0bde400c2.jpg" style="width: 180px;height: 95px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="180">Cybersecurity in the Boardroom</span><span style="color:rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:sans-serif,arial,verdana,trebuchet ms; font-size:13px; line-height:20.7999992370605px">Two-thirds of directors are less than confident about their company’s cybersecurity and (surprise) t</span>he biggest risks to security are human errors. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=1a6681c616&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px"><img align="left" height="110" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/0806f99b-b6d9-4366-84e7-a28e796cd6c8.jpg" style="width: 180px;height: 110px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="180">Top 6 Hacking Tools Security Teams Should Know About</span></span>Black Hat or White Hat: Here are the top 6 hacking tools that every security professional ought to know about. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=6b89013402&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px"><img align="left" height="100" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/90b0c4a6-8fa7-4720-bd2c-f6f9351d4333.jpg" style="width: 150px;height: 100px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="150">Got </span><strong style="font-size:20px">Good </strong><span style="font-size:20px">Cyber Insurance Cover? Beware of Holes in Your Policy.</span></span>Just because you have “cyber insurance” doesn't mean your insurer will pay a cyber-related claim. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=179ea378b1&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px"><img align="left" height="110" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/5c450e77-fc73-436d-90c1-7309c95d2054.jpg" style="width: 150px;height: 110px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="150">FBI Unable to Monitor ISIS’s Encrypted Communications</span></span>The FBI has warned US lawmakers there is no way to monitor encrypted online communications. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=95b26304d1&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:19px"><img align="left" height="100" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/b962c7f7-644b-4c9c-88d7-951b4ad92778.jpg" style="width: 150px;height: 100px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="150">A Quick Tour of the Web Black Market</span></span>The most important requirement for both buyers and sellers is the anonymity of transactions using untraceable networks and a virtual currency. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=32003f25cd&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px"><img align="left" height="100" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/1a27d971-5dbb-4f4d-81c1-a24279dc0139.jpg" style="width: 150px;height: 100px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="150">Cyber attack on German Parliament Still Active</span></span>A cyber attack on the Bundestag is still stealing data & could force it to spend millions of euros replacing the entire IT system. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=a19835bccc&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px"><img align="left" height="100" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/d32eea0d-b5bc-4a8e-a6cb-f3f6a1f34dad.jpg" style="width: 150px;height: 100px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="150">The Ever-evolving Cyber Threat to Planes</span></span>Professional hackers claim airline computer systems are riddled with weaknesses that allow a breach via the in-flight entertainment system. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=1ced7eab4e&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px"><img align="left" height="100" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/2af3f036-6d97-4b62-986a-e74ce3fc6ffd.jpg" style="width: 150px;height: 100px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="150">Financial Services Firms Stare into the Abyss as Data Breaches Rocket</span></span>The UK Information Commissioner’s Office reports 791 breaches in this sector between 2012 and 2014, including 585 in 2014 alone. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=0df0ee2213&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px"><img align="left" height="100" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f/images/a912e224-c77a-44ac-afe1-f7b5a76755bb.png" style="width: 150px;height: 100px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;margin-bottom: 10px;" width="150">Cyber Vulnerability Report 2015</span></span>The Insurance industry & their customers need a better understanding of internal security and the different types of insurance available. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=4a7eac83b8&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px">PwC says UK Security Breaches Often Not Reported</span></span>The majority of UK organisations suffering a security or data breach will never report it. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=1a3146e28e&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px">OPM Hack: Paying for Non-Secrets</span></span>Information contained in the hacked OPM files needs to be treated like state secrets: <em>Opinion by Ronald Marks. </em><a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=0503bb98a9&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px">UK MOD to Build Open Source Analytics Platform</span></span>The MOD wants a new open source analytics platform to help understand its data. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=260fd16d6c&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a><br> <br> <span class="h3" style="color: #9090BA;display: block;font-family: Arial;font-size: 18px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;margin-bottom: 10px;text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:20px">Digital Currencies: A Gold Standard for Bitcoin</span></span>Bitcoin-like currencies backed by the yellow metal show promise for crisis-scarred libertarians. <a href="http://cybersecurity-intelligence.us3.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=a7a85ac110ceb74440637343f&id=c82e57ea64&e=f655f647a8" target="_blank" style="color: #9090BA;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">read more</a></div> </td> </tr> </table> <!-- // End Module: Standard Content \\ --> </td> </tr> </table> <!-- // End Template Body \\ --> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center" valign="top"> 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NEW Eugene Burmako I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. Jorge Luis Borges, “Poem of the Gifts” Macro paradise is a plugin for several versions of Scala compilers. It is designed to reliably work with production releases of scalac , making latest macro developments available way before they end up in future versions Scala. Refer to the roadmap for the list of supported features and versions and visit the paradise announcement to learn more about our support guarantees. ~/210x $ scalac -Xplugin:paradise_*.jar -Xshow-phases phase name id description ---------- -- ----------- parser 1 parse source into ASTs, perform simple desugaring macroparadise 2 let our powers combine namer 3 resolve names, attach symbols to trees in paradise packageobjects 4 load package objects in paradise typer 5 the meat and potatoes: type the trees in paradise ... Some features in macro paradise bring a compile-time dependency on the macro paradise plugin, some features do not, however none of those features need macro paradise at runtime. Proceed to the the feature list document for more information. Consult https://github.com/scalamacros/sbt-example-paradise for an end-to-end example, but in a nutshell working with macro paradise is as easy as adding the following two lines to your build (granted you’ve already set up sbt to use macros). resolvers += Resolver.sonatypeRepo("releases") addCompilerPlugin("org.scalamacros" % "paradise" % "2.1.0" cross CrossVersion.full) To use macro paradise in Maven follow the instructions provided at Stack Overflow on the page “Enabling the macro-paradise Scala compiler plugin in Maven projects” (also make sure to add the dependency on the Sonatype snapshots repository and scala-reflect.jar ). <compilerPlugins> <compilerPlugin> <groupId>org.scalamacros</groupId> <artifactId>paradise_<YOUR.SCALA.VERSION></artifactId> <version>2.1.0</version> </compilerPlugin> </compilerPlugins> Sources of macro paradise are available at https://github.com/scalamacros/paradise. There are branches that support the latest 2.10.x release, the latest 2.11.x release, snapshots of 2.10.x, 2.11.x and 2.12.x, as well as Scala virtualized.
Lars von Trier is Writing a Horror Movie Set in Detroit How do you get Lars von Trier to write a horror movie for you? According to Kristian Levring, who will premiere his out of competition title ‘The Salvation’ at the Cannes Film Festival, the secret is to keep talking until von Trier gets sick of hearing about it. “I’ve always thought that Lars would be able to do a fantastic horror movie,’ Levring told Lise Ulrich at Danish magazine Soundvenue. “And I’ve told him so many times throughout the years, and in the end he said: ‘I want you to stop talking about it, so I’ll write it for you instead.'” According to Levring, the film is set in Detroit and has the working title of, well, “Detroit.” However, that title could be a keeper: Said Levring, “It takes place in Detroit, and then there is the wordplay between Detroit and ‘destroyed.'” Levring said that von Trier began writing the film about a month ago. “It’s about a man fighting his inner demons,” he said. “That doesn’t tell that much, but that’s because we haven’t gotten any further so far.” However, he added that “it’s real horror. Of course, there is a psychological aspect, but it’s a real horror movie. That’s what we’re aiming for, at least.” It’s not von Trier’s first entry into the horror genre, with both “Antichrist” and his miniseries “The Kingdom” playing with elements of the genre. However, the Danish Levring cites his fondness for American horror films. “I’m from a generation that grew up with ‘Psycho’ and ’The Exorcist,'” he said. “It’s an extremely visual genre, if you do it properly.” Levring produced “The Salvation” through von Trier’s Zentropa. The film, which stars Mads Mikkelsen, premieres Saturday at midnight. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
In 1861, as debates about evolution were brewing among naturalists, two important skeletons were discovered from the Late Jurassic limestone quarries of Germany. Both would be relevant to ideas about how birds evolved. Although not recognized as such until the late 20th century, Archaeopteryx was the first feathered dinosaur ever discovered and was a confirmation that birds had evolved from reptiles. The other creature, Compsognathus, represented a small, exceptionally bird-like dinosaur, and the anatomist T.H. Huxley took it as a proxy for the kind of animal from which birds originated. "There is no evidence that Compsognathus possessed feathers," Huxley said during his 1877 American lecture tour, "but, if it did, it would be hard indeed to say whether it should be called a reptilian bird or an avian reptile." Now another feathered dinosaur has been discovered from the famous German limestone quarries. Named Juravenator starki in 2006, this dinosaur was a close relative of Compsognathus which lived just a little bit earlier on the same prehistoric archipelago. It is one of the most complete dinosaurs from these limestone deposits. From the tip of the snout to very nearly the end of the tail, the whole skeleton was preserved, but there was something special about this animal that could only be seen in the right light. Earlier this year David Hone and colleagues published a paper showing how examining fossils under ultraviolet light can illuminate soft-tissue structures—like feathers—that would otherwise be hidden. Paleontologists Luis Chiappe and Ursula Göhlich applied the same technique to the Juravenator skeleton, and near the middle of the dinosaur's tail they found an area of preserved soft tissue. The most easily seen parts of the soft tissue were patches of tiny bumps consistent with the skin impressions of other dinosaurs. Yet there were wispy protofeathers, too. Thanks to high-resolution photography, the remains of downy feathers were also detected, and these were similar to the structures that covered the body of a relative of Juravenator from China called Sinosauropteryx. The presence of both scaly skin and filamentous feathers makes Juravenator unique among feathered dinosaurs. This combination has not been seen before, but it is consistent with laboratory models of how feathers evolved from scaly skin. Furthermore, it appears that Juravenator was not wholly covered by a coat of fluffy feathers like baby chicks, perhaps indicating that feathery structures appeared on some parts of the bodies of dinosaurs before others. Frustratingly, the extent of soft-tissue preservation on the first Juravenator specimen is extremely limited, but further discoveries of this animal may help us better understand the origins of feathered dinosaurs. References: Chiappe, L., & Göhlich, U. (2010). Anatomy of Juravenator starki (Theropoda: Coelurosauria) from the Late Jurassic of Germany Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie - Abhandlungen, 258 (3), 257-296 DOI: 10.1127/0077-7749/2010/0125
116, 12, 7. Those three seemingly random numbers have all the meaning in the world to me. During the 2015 NFL season with the Giants, I made 116 total tackles; good enough to tie for 12th in the entire league, in my seventh year playing professional football. Based on all of that, if you had asked me a week ago what I would be doing this weekend, I would have told you to tune in to Sunday Night Football to find me wreaking havoc against the Cowboys. Only, I won’t be suiting up to chase Tony Romo around in the season-opener. Quite the contrary, actually. Now that I find myself out of a job, I will be watching the game on television — just like everybody else. Ultimately, this isn’t a story about numbers. It’s about the reality of today’s NFL, a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world where statistics are not nearly as important as the dollars and cents tied to production and, more importantly, perception. When the phone rang mid-morning on Saturday, I knew immediately. Final cuts were going down, and someone from the Giants’ personnel office wouldn’t be calling me unless the news was bad. Everyone knows how it is from watching Hard Knocks: “We need you to come down to facility with your iPad and playbook. Coach wants to see you right away.” As a professional athlete, you never think you aren’t good enough. You never acknowledge to yourself that there’s even a chance that you won’t be with your teammates when the bell sounds — at least not consciously, anyway. And you certainly don’t expect to be released after you just played the most consistent season of your NFL career. Then again, nothing much shocks me. A team of doctors once told me I would never play football again after I suffered a severe spinal cord injury in 2012. So much for that prediction. So, while no one in the Giants’ organization made me any promises, I wouldn’t have believed them if they had. I don’t take anything for granted. Not with the way I grew up. I’m from North Philadelphia, and my upbringing didn’t start out all that different than those of a lot of black kids from the inner city. My father was out the picture. He was incarcerated over a laundry list of violent crimes, and I never knew the man. That left my mother to take care of my sister, my brothers and me, and though she did the best she could, our family was often one step away from being homeless. It’s probably hard for most people to relate to what we went through, but picture yourself wearing the same pants for three months straight. Imagine yourself as a child — innocent and somewhat naive — not only without a roof over your head, but with no idea where your next meal is coming from, or on what dusty floor you are going to be forced to sleep on at night. When you come from a place like that, you truly have no perspective on how “regular people” live. All you see is your situation, and your friends and their families struggling, too. Oftentimes, it’s a grandparent or an aunt that is filling in for an absent mom and dad. When things finally reached a breaking point for us, just as we had pretty much lost all hope, my family turned to The Salvation Army for shelter. I didn’t really understand what was happening; as far as I knew, everything we were enduring was normal. It simply didn’t occur to me our struggles weren’t typical for other kids and their families. That’s not to say that living in a shelter was comforting — not by a long shot. We had no privacy, and strangers would cycle in and out daily. While I never really feared for my safety, it became clear very early on that what few possessions I did have needed to be kept close if I wanted keep them. Sleeping with one eye open became routine. Literally. All around me, I began to witness firsthand what happens to kids with no guidance, no structure and no opportunity. It started with acting out in school and bullying. It progressed to stealing and vandalism. Eventually, many of my peers turned to drugs and gangs. Of those, more than a few ended up dead. In truth, I was well on my way down that path, too. Luckily for me and my siblings, when I was 14, my aunt and uncle opened up their home to us, and everything finally began to change. No longer having to worry about the things that people take for granted, the newfound security freed me to focus on my education and athletics. I quickly discovered that it was OK to hope for a better future, and if I worked really hard, circumstances that were out of my control would no longer conspire to keep me from achieving my goals. It wasn’t until 2003, though — when I first stepped foot onto the Syracuse University campus as a freshman — that it became clear to me just how different I was, and how impossible the world I came from would seem to those around me. Just seeing the diversity, the maturity, and, honestly, the wealth, it was like I had been dropped into another civilization entirely. Kids had their own cars. They took exotic trips for winter and spring breaks. They walked around without a care in the world or a sense of how lucky they were. I wasn’t the only one whose eyes were wide open. The majority of Division I football players are black, and many of us come from the same types of broken homes and impoverished urban backgrounds. For us, being exposed to “normalcy” was as eye-opening as it was tempting. Lots of guys believed they were ticketed for the NFL or NBA, so for them, school was just a pit stop on the way to the accompanying fame and fortune, a place for them soak up the attention so many of them had not received growing up. I had other ideas. I understood what a precious gift I had been given, and that no matter what doors athletics might open for me, an education was the only guarantee I would have to ensure that I never again would have to rely upon the kindness and charity of others just to survive. Sadly, not all of my teammates and friends felt the same way. For them, particularly when we reached the NFL, the fame and fortune that came along with being a professional football player was the most intoxicating thing they had ever experienced. I wasn’t immune to the pride and privilege that came with being a member of the Ravens, my first team, but given what I had endured as a child, I was not programmed to allow myself to get wrapped up in the spoils. I have always given consideration to life after football, and how to best position myself to support my family over the long haul. It’s why I have been very responsible with my paychecks. It might surprise you, but a lot of athletes actually do pay attention to what’s going with players who are no longer in the league. As former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe points out at The Cauldron today: In October 2012, ESPN Film’s 30 for 30 program ran an episode titled “Broke,” which took an eye-opening look at the many ways professional athletes lose their money. The sheer numbers were shocking to people unfamiliar with what goes on behind the scenes of an athlete’s life: 78 percent of NFL players, broke within just two years of ending their careers. 60 percent of NBA players, broke within five. Even if those figures are only half-true, they are eye-opening and scary. Keep in mind, there was a time when I had to stretch $1.25 to feed myself for an entire day, a challenge even if you are eating off the value menu. Huge houses and fancy cars are nice and all, but I’ll skip the real estate tax and mechanics’ bills to make sure I don’t end up as just another statistic; another sad story of wasted riches and no appreciation for the amazing opportunities I’ve been given. I’ve lived in that other world, the world that no one likes to talk about. And I’m never going back there. So now, as my agent and I consider interest from other NFL teams, I can truly say that I don’t bear any ill will toward the Giants, Mr. John Mara, coach Tom Coughlin or GM Jerry Reece; nor did I toward the Ravens, who released me after the 2013 season, but also gave me my shot in the league. I consider myself fortunate to have played for two of the best, most well-run, and winningest organizations in the NFL, and not only do I have a Super Bowl championship to my name, I can also look at myself in the mirror knowing that I have always given it everything I had, on and off the field. What comes next? Hopefully, another shot to contribute to a team that needs a hard-working linebacker that puts team first. And if that call never comes? Well, that’s the great thing about coming from nothing: Once you’ve lived a life “without,” everything that happens thereafter is a blessing; every day is just another tick in the win column.
Changes to membership If you are visiting this page, you’re probably a cinemagoer here at the National Science and Media Museum. In 2019 we will be making some changes behind the scenes, but don’t worry—it will continue to be business as usual in our three cinemas. If you are a Picturehouse member you will enjoy the full duration of your current membership, and if it expires while the changes are taking place, an interim scheme will be available offering exactly the same attractive package. You can find more information on the Picturehouse website. Our cinemas We are the destination for film in Yorkshire, home to three fantastic cinemas and a world-class sound and vision collection—all in the heart of Bradford, UNESCO City of Film. Indulge in the ultimate immersive cinema experience in our landmark IMAX theatre—the biggest screen in the region. Relax in Pictureville Cinema, which boasts a deeply curved screen and is one of only three public venues in the world that can still show Cinerama. Or enjoy the intimate ambience of the 106-seat Cubby Broccoli Cinema. We play host to the Widescreen Weekend film festival, show the best of independent cinema from around the world, and broadcast extraordinary live performances from some of the world’s best theatres.
The measures by which we judge scientists are always under intense scrutiny. For those who hit the peak of their field, there’s the Nobel Prize. But across all levels of career progression, we publish research papers in journals whose importance or rank can be communicated via a number known as the Journal Impact Factor. The much respected Nobel Prize Twitter site @NobelPrize recently tweeted an impressive video with four Nobel Laureates speaking out against Journal Impact Factors. My view is that the Nobel Laureates are right in theory. But I cannot advise the junior researchers I mentor to ignore Impact Factors. Although imperfect, Impact Factors retain some validity. But more importantly, deep down, I know that as the world of research expands and as people become increasingly specialised, the use of proxy metrics, like Journal Impact Factors and citations, will increase not decrease. Criticism of Journal Impact Factors Nobel Laureates Peter Doherty, Bruce Beutler, Joseph Goldstein and Paul Nurse aren’t alone in their criticism of Journal Impact Factors. The widely supported San Francisco Declaration makes the same point – you can’t judge the quality of research by just looking at the Journal Impact Factor. Australia’s major medical research funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council is also officially opposed to Impact Factors and has essentially outlawed reporting them in grant applications. The Australian Research Council once had a list of A star, A, B and C ratings for journals in its Excellence in Research Australia research assessment exercise but has now abandoned that list and recommends against institutions continuing to use it. In theory all these august bodies are correct. Impact Factors represent the average number of citations for each paper in the journal over a two year period. They are unreliable. They can be gamed in various ways, such as including a lot of reviews in a journal, and they can be heavily influenced by one or two “jackpot” papers. In summary, Journal Impact Factors are a crude short cut to the proper job of estimating quality – they are a type of pre-judgement, a prejudice. Picking a researcher or a grant application on the basis of Impact Factors is like selecting a basketball team on the basis of one single metric – like the height of the players. It’s ridiculous. But hold on – have you ever looked at the heights of players in any professional basketball team? Nearly all the players are giants. Standing tall among giants I would love to take the Laureates’ advice, and read the papers and judge the science on its own merits. But sadly I am only expert in a very small area. I am not capable of critically analysing most of the research I come across. It is not that peer review doesn’t work. It works for publications. I only review papers in the small field where I truly am an expert. But when it comes to grant review or making academic appointments I am often out of my field. So I confess. I do look at Impact Factors. I look at citation metrics. I even count papers. I regret to say that in reviewing perhaps a hundred grants or job applications and trying to find the ten grants to fund or one person to employ, I do not read every paper in the bibliography and assess the research on the basis of my limited understanding. I just don’t have the time or expertise to read and judge all the papers. I pick my basketball team in part based on the player’s height and past match statistics. I want the people I appoint to get grants in the future and I suspect other grant reviewers also look at metrics too, so I can’t ignore them. What is the best advice for young researchers? In their video the Nobel Laureates said that doing sustained, solid, research was the best way to build a reputation. But with grant success rates falling to less than 20%, it is not clear solid research alone will be enough to sustain a lab. So while the advice to downplay Impact Factors is good for established researchers, this is not always feasible for junior researchers. When I was starting out I also lamented the fact that those in authority seemed to want everything – lots of papers, and papers in journals with high Impact Factors, as well as preliminary data prior to the grant even being funded. A wise colleague looked at me with raised eyebrows and said, I thought you were meant to be smart. You’re meant to work it out. You’re meant to balance your research so you deliver some solid work, and some high impact papers, and to manage your resources to produce preliminary data for new applications, while simultaneously delivering on the main research goals of your current grant or start up funding. I think this was good advice. It is up to each of us to optimise our output. Aim as high as you can but don’t be silly and waste your career trying to lodge one paper in Nature at all costs. Those in academic management do not want to make the wrong decisions and only use Impact Factors and other metrics as one indicator and often as a last resort. They, and you, should consider your whole portfolio. Concentrate on these things: Produce a number of first author papers in any Impact Factor journal. New journals such as PLoSONE will publish solid work that isn’t world shattering in its significance. The ability to initiate and wrap up multiple projects is highly valued Establish a focus and academic reputation for being an expert in one area or technique, especially in something that is on the up Collaborate with one or perhaps two leading labs but do not spread yourself too thinly Do aim for high Impact Factor papers but know when to give up – knowing when to give up is actually more important than clinging to your dreams and never saying die (something that is dangerously over-rated in my view!) Most importantly, ask yourself whether you are enjoying it and whether you can handle the hard knocks that research delivers – others can sense this, and tend to support people who have resilience in their DNA. Impact Factors and citations aren’t perfect, but nor are they worthless. Metrics are simply indicators or messengers; in themselves, they are not really the problem. The problem is the rapidly escalating level of competition for grants and jobs. In our world, as it exists, one has to take many measures into account and my expectation is that hard, cold, imperfect numbers will continue to be important in science.
BEIJING: China will exhibit its might to the world during the upcoming military parade, which will display dozens of specialized weapons including seven types of nuclear and conventional missiles on September 3.Troops from at least 10 countries including Russia and South Korea will participate in the parade, which is meant to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Japan's defeat in World War II, the country's armed forces said Friday.The national parade will include 200 aircrafts, about 40 types of weapons numbering 500 pieces of hardware and 12,000 Chinese troops will participate.Though the parade is to demonstrate China's defense capability to Japan, it will be closely watched in New Delhi because it will reveal detains of Chinese weapons system. At least 27 types of sophisticated weapons used on ground, air and sea attacks will be on display.Chinese president Xi Jinping has attached high importance to the preparations for the parade, which is taking place immediately after Japan decided to move towards militarization after spending decades under a pacifist constitution.China will show its capability to carry out "strategic strike" during the parade in Beijing, according to Qu Rui, a general staff headquarters officer. All the weapons are part of "Chinese-made main battle equipment", he. About 84 percent of the weapons will be shown for the first time."They represent the new development, new achievements and new images of the building of Chinese armed forces," he said.The official Xinhua news agency quoted an unnamed source saying, "Our missile weaponry has seen great advances, in terms of firing range, strike methods, accuracy and mobility". Qu said some of the planes on display would be from the "carrier-based aircraft echelon", which means that aircraft attached to China's sole aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, will take part.Japan's retreat from China was prompted by US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . But in China, the government is celebrating the success of what it describes as the "Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War".Earlier, Xi attended a similar parade in Moscow in May commemorating victory over Nazi Germany and President Vladimir Putin is due to return the gesture by travelling to the Beijing event.
Janet Porter (YouTube) The anti-abortion extremist behind Ohio’s “heartbeat bill” was booted from religious radio for promoting “dominion” theology — or the belief that Christians should take over every aspect of society to bring the return of Christ. Janet Porter, the former legislative director for Ohio Right to Life and the founder of the far-right group Faith2Action, has for five years urged Republican lawmakers in her home state to pass the bill outlawing abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, reported Right Wing Watch. That usually happens at about six weeks, which is before many women even realize they’re pregnant. Porter’s bill — which does not include exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s health — was inserted into a child-abuse bill at the last minute and is now awaiting Gov. John Kasich’s signature. She used her “Faith2Action” radio program to promote conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s birth and alleged ties to Russia, and she warned the president planned to round up Christians into internment camps and deny conservatives treatment under the Affordable Care Act. Porter was removed from the conservative VCY America radio network for advocating for Seven Mountains dominionism, an extremist fringe view that right-wing Christians are called by God to impose their rule over government and society to hasten the Second Coming. She later claimed she didn’t even know what dominion theology was until the program was canceled, but admitted she and like-minded religious activists “just want to obey God in every area of influence and use our freedom to spread the Gospel.” Porter, who launched the ill-fated “Reaganbook” conservative social media site, has also released two self-produced films promoting her anti-abortion views. She released the 2015 film “Light Wins,” featuring cameos from anti-abortion lawmakers and activists, that claimed religious freedoms and American children were under attack by LGBT people. Porter stars as herself in a semi-autobiographical romantic comedy, “What’s A Girl To Do?” — featuring Stephen Baldwin, Mike Huckabee and Rep. Steve King (R-IA) — about her efforts to pass a “partial birth” abortion ban. She said she persuaded King at the funeral of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly to introduce a federal version of the heartbeat bill.
Posted 07 November 2014 - 06:01 PM Change Log: 4/20/2018 MadStats menu icon in center to access options and quick links. Creates a Button bar on Weapon stats page to filter by weapon type and clan/is. Creates a Button bar on Mech stats page to filter by weight class, ownership, and clan/is. Adds a sticky table header to maintain readability when scrolling through large tables. Hero mechs renamed for grouping with chassis and preserving sortability; Hero name displayed on hover. Hides mechs that would display as duplicates. Sortable Time columns, hover for original time value display. Single click sorting, descending by default. Automatically updates owned mech list on profile page or mech stats page Table styles using tablesorter's built in theme: Black Ice. At the moment only the Chrome version is available. Utilizes the Tablesorter jQuery plugin. Icons by Sparks Murphey and Tarogato. Thank you! -Updated Data for new mechs. (Through hellfire)An extension that adds features to the mwomercs.com statistics pages. Including: stat column sorting, filtering mechs by ownership, filtering mechs by weight class, filtering both mechs and weapons by Clan/IS, and filtering weapons by type.Beginning with the 5/19/2015 release, the MadStats menu has been moved to it's own icon in the center of the top bar.When enabled, debug mode will enable features hidden from the default view. They are usually only here because there are still bugs to be worked out. This is not a perfect solution, but it allows me to easily control the default experience while still allowing for the functionality to be used and tested. Feedback is greatly appreciated.Due to the instability of the column filters and download button, they currently require a user to enable debug mode.The profile page has some display modifications that removes the scrolling box in favor of all mechs in a grid with transparent background. (Just experiments that could evolve into a custom mech display with potential for stat and smurfy integration later.)Having any problems?Any issues understanding the filters or functionality?Do what thou wilt with the code, but do consider sharing your changes if they might improve the experience for others. There might be other possibilities we can collaborate on, as well. Just let me know.PGI web developers are welcome/invited to invalidate my efforts by adding the feature into the real stats site, I'm willing to help. Edited by MadLibrarian, 20 April 2018 - 07:02 AM.
ES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account A man plunged to his death from a Canary Wharf tower in front of thousands of horrified commuters today. IT executive Gabriel Magee, 39, fell from the top of the 500ft European headquarters of US investment bank J P Morgan just after 8am, at the peak of the financial district’s rush hour. He landed on the roof of a ninth-floor podium of the building at 25 Bank Street, close to Heron Quays DLR station. He was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics and his body was covered with a tarpaulin. Police said the death was not being treated as suspicious. More A JP Morgan spokeswoman said: "“We are deeply saddened to have lost a member of the J.P. Morgan family at 25 Bank Street today. Our thoughts and sympathy are with his family and his friends.” One worker at the bank said: "There’s a lot of upset but no one knows exactly what happened.” London Ambulance Service said: “We were called at 8.04am to reports of a person fallen from a height. We sent one ambulance crew, a duty officer, our hazardous area response team and London Air Ambulance. Sadly, a man in his thirties was pronounced dead at the scene.” Local workers spoke of their shock. Emily Brimson, who works in Bank Street overlooking the scene, said: “The police came and moved the body a little, took measurements etc, but then they all left. Now the body is lying there covered by a sheet. One policeman manning the door.” Another, David, who works on the 29th floor of a law firm opposite the scene and declined to give his surname, said: "It’s upsetting what’s happened but the thought of somebody lying up there for four hours is awful. Tragedy at Canary Wharf 5 show all Tragedy at Canary Wharf 1/5 Canary Wharf tragedy People look out of the window of the J P Morgan building at Canary Wharf after a man fell to his death from the roof LONDON, ENGLAND - JANUARY 28: People look out of the window of the J P Morgan building at Canary Wharf on January 28, 2014 in London, England. Police are investigating after the body of a man was found on the 9th floor of the bank's European headquarter 2/5 Canary Wharf tragedy A police vehicle at the scene in Canary Wharf today 3/5 Canary Wharf tragedy An office worker shields his eyes as he looks out of the window of the JP Morgan building LONDON, ENGLAND - JANUARY 28: A person looks out of the window of the J P Morgan building at Canary Wharf on January 28, 2014 in London, England. Police are investigating after the body of a man was found on the 9th floor of the bank's European headquar 4/5 Canary Wharf tragedy Police said there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the man's death LONDON, ENGLAND - JANUARY 28: A person looks out of the window of the J P Morgan building at Canary Wharf on January 28, 2014 in London, England. Police are investigating after the body of a man was found on the 9th floor of the bank's European headquar 5/5 Canary Wharf tragedy A police car at the JP Morgan building today 1/5 Canary Wharf tragedy People look out of the window of the J P Morgan building at Canary Wharf after a man fell to his death from the roof LONDON, ENGLAND - JANUARY 28: People look out of the window of the J P Morgan building at Canary Wharf on January 28, 2014 in London, England. Police are investigating after the body of a man was found on the 9th floor of the bank's European headquarter 2/5 Canary Wharf tragedy A police vehicle at the scene in Canary Wharf today 3/5 Canary Wharf tragedy An office worker shields his eyes as he looks out of the window of the JP Morgan building LONDON, ENGLAND - JANUARY 28: A person looks out of the window of the J P Morgan building at Canary Wharf on January 28, 2014 in London, England. Police are investigating after the body of a man was found on the 9th floor of the bank's European headquar 4/5 Canary Wharf tragedy Police said there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the man's death LONDON, ENGLAND - JANUARY 28: A person looks out of the window of the J P Morgan building at Canary Wharf on January 28, 2014 in London, England. Police are investigating after the body of a man was found on the 9th floor of the bank's European headquar 5/5 Canary Wharf tragedy A police car at the JP Morgan building today "I got into the office at about 8.10 and the body was on the floor and there were police up there, and they put a white cover on him. “I think he was in a suit. As far as I could see the was dressed appropriately, but there was quite a lot of blood, so me and my colleagues were a bit upset." Andrew Lawrence wrote on Twitter: “Sad scene. Someone jumped/fell at JPMorgan Canary Wharf. A sorry view from my desk. Police everywhere, but nobody approaching the body, odd.” A police spokesman said: “We believe we know the identity of the deceased but we await formal identification.” The 33-storey building has been the headquarters of the bank’s Europe, Middle East and Africa operations since July 2012. It was previously occupied by Lehman Brothers, and seen in photos of bankers clutching boxes of possessions as they left after Lehman collapsed in September 2008, triggering the worldwide financial collapse. The tower was sold to parent company JPMorgan Chase for £495 million in 2010. Originally scheduled to be occupied by energy trading company Enron before its insolvency in 2001, the stainless steel and glass-clad building, was opened in 2004 by Gordon Brown. About 100,000 people work in Canary Wharf. It houses the headquarters of some of the world’s biggest banks, including HSBC, as well as major law firms such as Clifford Chance.
Decriminalising Sex Work vs The Nordic Model Written By Lauren Mulvihill “Beginning on Jan. 1, prostitution by minors will be legal in California. Yes, you read that right. SB 1322 bars law enforcement from arresting sex workers who are under the age of 18 for soliciting or engaging in prostitution, or loitering with the intent to do so. So teenage girls (and boys) in California will soon be free to have sex in exchange for money without fear of arrest or prosecution.” This is according to the Washington Post, and it was a sentiment mirrored by thousands of people in the US. There were clearly some crossed lines. For an adult to have sex with a person below the legal age of consent is considered in all other contexts to be rape, and yet until very recently, this basic tenet of law had been suspended in the State of California if an exchange of money was involved. Children could receive a criminal record as a result of their own exploitation. This is why “prostitution by minors” was not legalised – it was decriminalised. In 2016, Amnesty International released a report wherein they called for the decriminalisation of sex work and the furtherment of human rights protections for sex workers. The report defined ‘sex work’ as a consensual exchange of services between adults, as opposed to non-consensual and otherwise coercive sexual exploitation. Decriminalisation is overwhelmingly the preferred legal model of similar rights-focused groups, including Human Rights Watch, WHO and UNAIDS. Most importantly, decriminalisation is the model favoured by sex workers themselves. Despite these endorsements, there is still significant controversy surrounding the decriminalisation model and a number of alternative approaches have been proposed. As many sex workers have pointed out, these alternatives – though often well-meaning – are rooted in moralistic judgments that focus less on the protection of workers themselves as they do on the political agendas of their proponents. Former sex-worker, activist and comedian Miranda Kane put it well in the subtitle of a recent article: “Amnesty International are right to lobby for the decriminalisation of consensual sex work after undertaking a two-year study where they actually talked to sex workers; and… a bunch of Hollywood A-Listers, who are so desperate to get away from the ‘Actress/whore’ stereotype that they demonise the only way a marginalised section of society can afford to live, all from the safety and comfort of their Beverly Hills mansions, are wrong.” But let’s look at the alternatives. Aside from full criminalisation (where sex work is completely illegal) and legalisation (where sex work is legal, but only in very limited circumstances – this, as I will explain, is the situation as it stands in Ireland), the Nordic Model holds the most sway as a seemingly progressive solution to the dangers faced by sex workers. Put simply, the law – which was first enacted in Sweden in 1999 – criminalises the buyer of sexual services, rather than the provider. The Nordic Model was championed by pressure groups who believed all sex work to be an extension of a patriarchal culture, and fundamentally demeaning to women. Not only does this stance ignore the existence of male and transgender sex workers, it strips rational, consenting adults of autonomy in decision-making. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote in Time Magazine, the ‘sex worker as victim’ narrative has its roots in the Victorian era: nowadays, it’s seen in the common conflation of ‘sex work’ and ‘sex trafficking’ in the media. In practice, the Nordic Model is problematic for a number of reasons. Although its main aim is the protection of sex workers themselves, those in the industry must often compromise their own safety in order to protect the privacy of their clients. Moreover, workers can’t organise or live together for security purposes for fear of being accused of operating a brothel. This serves to make working conditions increasingly dangerous. An interviewee identified as an internet- and street-based escort in Jay Levy’s 2010 study of the effects of the Nordic Model illustrates this: “Twenty seconds, one minute, two minutes, you have to decide if you should go into this person’s car… now I guess if I’m standing there, and the guy, he will be really scared to pick me up, and he will wave with his hand ‘Come here, we can go here round the corner, and make up the arrangement’, and that would be much more dangerous.” Government outreach programmes have been defunded. The criminalisation of clients also has the obvious effect of depriving workers of income. While many have claimed that the number of sex workers operating under the Nordic Model has declined significantly, research in this area focuses overwhelmingly on those operating on the streets, who, according to Sex Workers Alliance Ireland (SWAI), comprise only about 10% of the population. Even this decline may not be representative due to the fact that the laws have pushed the sex industry underground in order to attract clients. Additionally, we should ask ourselves: why, exactly, is it seen as a good thing that consenting adults may have lost their jobs simply because that job involves the provision of sex? In Ireland, ‘prostitution’ is not an offence in and of itself, but many activities associated with it are – public solicitation, for example. According to UglyMugs.ie, in order to operate legally as a sex worker in this country it is necessary to work alone (organising in groups could constitute a brothel, which is illegal). This is a major occupational hazard, as sex workers can and have been the victims of hate crime; UglyMugs, who are the only non-profit in the country working to record human rights abuses against sex workers in both the Republic and the North, received 85 reports in December 2016 alone. The vast majority of these (79) originated south of the border, and of the total recorded, only one crime was reported to police. Websites such as UglyMugs.ie and Saafe.info have been set up in response to help those in the industry share important safety and general information. And while we can’t accurately gauge how many sex workers are currently operating in Ireland for a number of reasons including a reluctance to engage with surveys and varied definitions of what the term can refer to (in cases of phone-sex operation or webcam performance, for example) it can be assumed that most of us will know someone who has engaged in some form of sex work. Decriminalisation is the preferred model of sex workers and human rights organisations because it not only legitimises the work, but it creates a safer environment. This model offers the greatest scope for protecting the human rights of sex workers, which may include increased access to healthcare, ability to report crimes, and ability to organise for safety purposes. Laws that criminalise exploitation, trafficking and violence will not be affected and may even be strengthened. On that note, there is no reliable evidence suggesting that decriminalisation increases rates of human trafficking, which is and should remain an abuse of human rights. In addition to all this, decriminalisation may serve as an important step in reducing the high levels of stigma attached to sex workers. Prejudices against the group are so commonplace as to barely raise an eyebrow, despite their deplorable and dehumanising nature – think of every “dead hooker” joke you’ve heard or read; the countless examples of murder victims identified solely as “a prostitute”; or the incredibly dangerous belief that sex workers cannot be raped. Moreover, if the true aim of those seeking to criminalise sex work is to help those being exploited within the industry – how, exactly, does penalising a victim help them? Margaret Huang of Amnesty International USA acknowledges that decriminalisation is not a “magic bullet” for solving the difficulties faced by sex workers. However, without decriminalisation, they cannot expect the equal treatment under the law needed to improve working and social conditions in a meaningful way. After hundreds, if not thousands, of years of speaking over those engaged in the ‘oldest profession’, of ignoring them, of mythologizing them, of vilifying them – is it not time we started listening to them? Bearing that in mind, I’ll leave you again with the words of Miranda Kane: “I stand in front of you to say look at us. Look at sex workers. We do not deserve the stigma you have attached to us. We are human, we are average, we come in every size, shape, colour imaginable. We are beautiful, we are frumpy, we watch TV in onesies and we have chosen to make a living in a way that doesn’t maim, doesn’t murder, but the stigma we have attached to us is worse than any criminal.” Share this: Facebook Twitter Email Reddit
Author Neil Strauss, formerly known as Style. Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez. Photo by Rickett & Sones. The only edition of Neil Strauss’ The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists available at my local bookstore comes bound in gold-embossed faux leather with gilded page edges and a satiny red ribbon to mark your place. It looks like a combination of Bible and diary, which matches its contents: one part rules to live by, one part gut-spilling. Published in 2005, The Game recounts a two-year period during which Strauss, an entertainment journalist for the New York Times and Rolling Stone, hung out with and absorbed the strategies of the pickup artist, or PUA, subculture, men who have transformed the delicate dance of flirtation into a kind of step-by-step recipe. It culminates with Strauss and a troupe of other full-time seducers moving into “Project Hollywood,” a rented mansion just off the Sunset Strip—the former residence of Dean Martin—where they attract scores of disciples, lead dating workshops, and eventually turn on each other like crabs in a bucket, but not before Courtney Love crashes in a commandeered bedroom for a few months. “She was probably the sanest person in the house,” Strauss writes. “And that was a scary thought.” The Game portrays Strauss as a reformed nebbish. Under the tutelage of a series of pickup gurus—in particular a former stage magician calling himself Mystery—Strauss is reborn as Style. (Dopey monikers are de rigueur in these circles.) As Strauss, he was pale, skinny, balding, and barely capable of uttering a word to an attractive woman; as Style, he is declared the No. 1 PUA of 2003. The techniques by which he attained such heights aren’t detailed in much depth in The Game (for that you need a copy of The Rules of the Game, published four years later), but you get the general idea and a few tips. It was a huge best-seller. Reviews of The Game were haughty and dismissive, pointing out how inane PUAs’ routines are, accusing them of puerility and alienation, and noting, accurately, that these Lotharios seem far more wrapped up in one another and their “community” than they do in the women they pursue. None of this would be news to Strauss, however; the shortcomings of the PUA scene are in fact one of the themes of his book, which opens with Strauss hauling Mystery off to a psych ward before his mood-disordered mentor makes good on threats to kill himself. By the end, Strauss and Mystery have been forced out of Project Hollywood, and Strauss has paired up with a woman, the guitarist for Love’s band. She is impervious to PUA tricks, most notably the “neg”—a backhanded compliment intended to communicate that the player is not intimidated by his target’s beauty. Strauss moves on, abandoning a closet full of paraphernalia used in the Game, because “real life beckoned.” He didn’t make it that time around. As Strauss relates in his new book, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships—also available in a faux leather edition—after he split up with the guitarist, he also blew it with a subsequent girlfriend, Ingrid. He could not rein in his compulsive womanizing, even after finding someone he deeply loved and with whom he wanted to start a family. The breakup precipitates a soul-searching quest, recounted in The Truth, ranging from sex-addiction rehab to experiments in polyamory, swinging, and other nonmonogamous relationships. “This is the story,” he announces in the first chapter, “of discovering that every truth I’ve desperately clung to, fought for, fucked for and even loved for is wrong.” I’m aware that I’m supposed to scorn The Game, but in fact I loved it. As the sentences I’ve quoted thus far indicate, Strauss’ years writing celebrity profiles and co-writing celebrity memoirs (including Jenna Jameson’s best-selling How to Make Love Like a Porn Star) have honed his ability to squeeze the maximum amount of cheesy drama out of every situation. He really knows how to set a scene and sketch a character. The villain of the first bit of The Truth, a puritanical counselor at the rehab center he checks into when Ingrid leaves him, “raises her head like a cobra about to strike” whenever someone in his group therapy session uses the word girl. Strauss is also smart, with a well-developed sense of irony. When a counselor asks his group to calculate how much money they’ve squandered in chasing fleeting sexual encounters over the years, right down to the last condom, he silently totes up the opposite: “My sex addiction pays for my phone, rent, and health insurance. It pays for breakfast, lunch and dinner; for movies, books and the computer I’m writing on; for socks, underwear, and shoes. Fuck, I couldn’t afford to be here getting treatment without it.” Despite the indignation The Game once provoked, taking a moral position on that book hardly seems urgent. It’s set in an alternate, nightclub-rich universe of perpetual recreation. Surgically enhanced women visit it when they want a bit of adventure, and yet, sadly, it is populated by a vast sea of indistinguishably dull, thirsty guys, each equipped with khakis and a cable package stocked with every variant of ESPN. As depicted by Strauss, PUA tactics—from their flamboyant “peacocking” wardrobes to their prefab patter based on questions promised to reveal the respondent’s personality—are meant to make the player stand out in this crowd. Imagine, if you can, a milieu so boring that the approach of a guy wearing a furry top hat and offering to do magic tricks and give Cosmo quizzes would be a welcome relief. The Game was a makeover story: Strauss shaved his head, got a salon tan, and learned to peacock. You can Google up a photo of him wearing a snakeskin-patterned suit the color of milky coffee, towered over by an eyelinered Mystery in platform heels. The Truth is a makeover, too, although less fun, for all the wild sexual shenanigans it recounts. Strauss goes blundering around trying to establish a romantic life that will enable him to “have my cake and eat it too,” employing methods plainly doomed to fail. Having found the demands of living with one woman suffocating, he decides to move in with three, none of whom have even met each other beforehand. This works about as well as you’d expect; hasn’t he seen Big Love? Strauss spends most of his stint in this love nest sleeping on the couch, while his jealous and resentful paramours stew in their rooms. At moments like this, Strauss’ naiveté strains belief—even given humanity’s legendary deficit of common sense in matters of love and sex—and you can scent the unacknowledged imperatives of a book contract. (The guy still needs socks, underwear, and shoes.) The best part of The Game was the hot mess that is the PUA scene, with its highly entertaining intrigues, schisms and feuding gurus. The leaders infuse everything they do with an absurd, camp grandiosity derived from B movies. “You are being led into the inner sanctum of power, my young apprentice,” one pickup guru announces after extracting a promise that Strauss will not impart these lessons to his archrival, “and the price for betrayal is dark beyond measure of your mortal mind.” Then there’s a guy named Steve P. who allegedly teaches Strauss how to guide “any woman, through words and touch, to a powerful orgasm that ‘gushes like Niagara Falls.’ “ Inexplicably, this much-needed savant lives in a “small, squalid apartment” in San Diego. Strauss meets his share of eccentrics and obsessives in The Truth as well, but the stakes are higher. For every nut who insists on providing a play-by-play narration to his wife having sex with Strauss, there’s a therapy session in which the sobbing author confronts the specters of his parents regarding what sounds like a truly damaging childhood. Some people’s lives just seem to be chronically dialed up to 11; when Strauss announces in the book’s preface that as an adolescent he discovered evidence of his father’s secret sexual life, you think it’s going to be homosexuality or crossdressing or maybe S&M, but no: He’s an amputee fetishist. Strauss’ mother quips that, as a 50th-anniversary present, she wants her son to shoot his father. The number these two did on Strauss’ head requires a litany of therapies to correct, each with its own practitioner. Among other things, Strauss punches pillows, writes gratitude diaries, undergoes hypnosis, and learns to “tap on energy meridians” and debug “my operating system.” And yet Strauss still gets to have his cake and eat it, too. By that, I do not mean that he formed a committed relationship that allows him to fool around on the side—or maybe I do, only that relationship is with us, his public. For, while Strauss the memoirist presents himself as a screwed-up guy who has just barely figured out how to patch a decent life together, he also runs a number of side businesses peddling advice and “training” on how to be fabulously successful with women and master other challenges. There’s the Stylelife Academy, where you can take courses on how to “naturally attract women with unstoppable confidence,” using “the most comprehensive, all-encompassing full imersive [sic] seduction program you’ll ever experience.” Or, for $127, you can just buy five CDs that will “upgrade your interactions with women” by making you “the most interesting man in the room.” You’ll find no mention of the Stylelife Academy on Strauss’ main website, although there you can sign up for a bunch of email-harvesting free newsletters or, for a fee, join the Society, a group of “high performing industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and influencers from the technological, entertainment, medical, financial, and self-development worlds” who get one-on-one consultations with Strauss and have recently enjoyed makeovers from “top Hollywood fashion stylists,” a trip to meet the king of Tibet, and invitations to parties at the Playboy Mansion. “I started a protein company with an entrepreneur I met in the group,” goes one testimonial, “and I now perform classical music in major concert halls all over the country.” Forget steeling your courage to approach women: What takes unstoppable confidence is writing a book condemning a previous period of your life as empty and deluded, then selling the keys to such a life to the rubes still scrabbling after it. Strauss has been charging a presumably substantial sum for self-improvement guidance even while writing a book in which he confesses, “I’ve made a mess of everything and may never experience true happiness, love and family.” Sure, another quick Google search suggests that Strauss has worked out some of his problems, but not before a moment of truth on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu where he has to keep ducking off into the bushes to apply Neosporin to a penis rubbed raw by “overuse.” Nevertheless, Strauss has succeeded. An editor friend recently told me that one of his authors, a well-known entrepreneur, is “obsessed” with Strauss and his programs. Not the pickup stuff. “No, no. The rest of it.” I can’t say I’m much impressed by Strauss’ ability to get himself into “swing parties, harems, communes, and moresomes,” but his knack for openly embodying two contradictory cultural narratives at the same time is frankly awe-inspiring. Even your Tim Ferrisses or your Tony Robbinses can’t pull that off; instead, they present themselves as supermen, winners in every contest, capable of feats that seem impossible to the rest of us mortals, from walking on hot coals to getting rich by working only four hours per week. Strauss, by contrast, charms us with confessions of his screwed-up childhood and the many idiotic beliefs and mistakes that have plagued him, then upsells us on the notion that we can be masters of the universe—and he can teach us how. That’s game even smoother than that of the No. 1 PUA of 2003. Color me seduced. — The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships by Neil Strauss. Dey Street Books. See all the pieces in the Slate Book Review. Sign up for the Slate Book Review monthly newsletter.
Offensive: John Ross III, Jr., WR, Washington • Ross accounted for 208 receiving yards and three touchdowns on just six receptions, good for an average of 34.67 yards per catch in Washington's 66-27 win at California. • Ross caught scoring passes of 60, 67 and six yards and increased his season total for receiving touchdowns to 14, second-most in the FBS. • His 208 yards were the fifth-highest, single-game total in UW history while his three TDs were tied for second-most in UW history, one shy of the record of four. Defensive: Sidney Jones IV, Jr., CB, Washington • The junior cornerback led a Husky defense that held California to just 27 points, about 14 shy of its season average. • Jones recorded two interceptions, one of them in the end zone, and also broke up two other passes, while also contributing three tackles. • Washington's defense held Cal to its second-lowest passing yards output of the season (262 yards) as well as the second-fewest TD passes (1), while the Bears' 362 yards of total offense equaled their lowest sum of the year. Special Teams: Isaiah Oliver, PR/DB, Colorado • In Colorado's 20-10 win over UCLA, Oliver returned five punts for 124 yards, including a 68-yard runback for a touchdown that clinched the victory with under six minutes to go (he also had a 42-yard return earlier in the game). • It was CU’s first punt return for a score since Stephane Robinson returned one 81 yards against Kansas on Oct. 22, 2005. • He is the first Buff to have over 100 yards in punt returns in a game since Josh Smith (4-108) against Eastern Washington on Sept. 6, 2008 and it was the most yards since Roman Hollowell had 6-148 against Fresno State on Aug. 26, 2001. • It was the most punt return yards in a game this year by a Pac-12 player and the fourth-most in the NCAA through games of Nov. 4 ALSO NOMINATED: Offensive: Christian McCaffrey, STAN; Ronald Jones II, USC; Luke Falk, WSU Defensive: Chidobe Awuzie, COLO; Rasheem Green, USC; Jayon Brown, UCLA; Nnamdi Oguayo, WSU Special Teams: Conrad Ukropina, STAN 2016 PAC-12 FOOTBALL PLAYERS OF THE WEEK
To paraphrase the Black Belt Bayesian: Behind every exciting, dramatic failure, there is a more important story about a larger and less dramatic failure that made the first failure possible. If every trace of religion was magically eliminated from the world tomorrow, then—however much improved the lives of many people would be—we would not even have come close to solving the larger failures of sanity that made religion possible in the first place. We have good cause to spend some of our efforts on trying to eliminate religion directly, because it is a direct problem. But religion also serves the function of an asphyxiated canary in a coal mine—religion is a sign, a symptom, of larger problems that don't go away just because someone loses their religion. Consider this thought experiment—what could you teach people that is not directly about religion, which is true and useful as a general method of rationality, which would cause them to lose their religions? In fact—imagine that we're going to go and survey all your students five years later, and see how many of them have lost their religions compared to a control group; if you make the slightest move at fighting religion directly, you will invalidate the experiment. You may not make a single mention of religion or any religious belief in your classroom, you may not even hint at it in any obvious way. All your examples must center about real-world cases that have nothing to do with religion. If you can't fight religion directly, what do you teach that raises the general waterline of sanity to the point that religion goes underwater? Here are some such topics I've already covered—not avoiding all mention of religion, but it could be done: But to look at it another way— Suppose we have a scientist who's still religious, either full-blown scriptural-religion, or in the sense of tossing around vague casual endorsements of "spirituality". We now know this person is not applying any technical, explicit understanding of... ...what constitutes evidence and why; ...Occam's Razor; ...how the above two rules derive from the lawful and causal operation of minds as mapping engines, and do not switch off when you talk about tooth fairies; ...how to tell the difference between a real answer and a curiosity-stopper; ...how to rethink matters for themselves instead of just repeating things they heard; ...certain general trends of science over the last three thousand years; ...the difficult arts of actually updating on new evidence and relinquishing old beliefs; ...epistemology 101; ...self-honesty 201; ...etcetera etcetera etcetera and so on. When you consider it—these are all rather basic matters of study, as such things go. A quick introduction to all of them (well, except naturalistic metaethics) would be... a four-credit undergraduate course with no prerequisites? But there are Nobel laureates who haven't taken that course! Richard Smalley if you're looking for a cheap shot, or Robert Aumann if you're looking for a scary shot. And they can't be isolated exceptions. If all of their professional compatriots had taken that course, then Smalley or Aumann would either have been corrected (as their colleagues kindly took them aside and explained the bare fundamentals) or else regarded with too much pity and concern to win a Nobel Prize. Could you—realistically speaking, regardless of fairness—win a Nobel while advocating the existence of Santa Claus? That's what the dead canary, religion, is telling us: that the general sanity waterline is currently really ridiculously low. Even in the highest halls of science. If we throw out that dead and rotting canary, then our mine may stink a bit less, but the sanity waterline may not rise much higher. This is not to criticize the neo-atheist movement. The harm done by religion is clear and present danger, or rather, current and ongoing disaster. Fighting religion's directly harmful effects takes precedence over its use as a canary or experimental indicator. But even if Dawkins, and Dennett, and Harris, and Hitchens should somehow win utterly and absolutely to the last corner of the human sphere, the real work of rationalists will be only just beginning.
Last Thursday, the latest Humble Bundle dropped, and it was unique in many ways . So far, there have been over three million dollars in sales, with half a million people paying what they wanted for six or seven games from a single publisher, THQ. The Bundle is only available through Steam, on Windows. If you haven’t heard of Humble Bundle, Inc., they’re best known for their Humble Indie Bundles. These bundles package together a few games from independent games studios, and gamers can pick them up for any price they felt like paying (between $5 and $9 has been the average, depending on the bundle). The games could be well-known, like World of Goo in the first bundle, or new games looking for exposure. Humble has diversified a bit since their earliest bundles, offering single game “bundles” like the Voxatron Debut, as well as bundles from single developer. They’ve even offered music and eBook bundles. Games are the main attraction, though. Humble has built its sales and consumer goodwill not only through its pay-what-you-want prices, but also because nearly every game sold has Windows, Mac, and Linux compatibility (and sometimes Android), and comes without DRM. Until now. Enter Drama The THQ bundle includes Metro 2033, Red Faction: Armageddon, Company of Heroes (and two expansions), the original Darksiders, and soundtracks for most games. If you beat the average price (currently about $5.60), you’ll also get the absurdly awesome Saints Row: The Third. It’s a fantastic deal for some genuinely good games, but the games are only available for Windows, and only through Steam. We have a lot of Steam fans here on Icrontic, both due to the platform’s occasional wallet-busting sales or from our members’ dedication to Valve’s Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, or Half-Life 3 (trololo) games. Steam works well most of the time, and when it does, it’s easy to forget that Steam is, at its core, a DRM system. When it works, it’s transparent, and doesn’t utilize any especially irksome techniques like SecuROM. When something’s amiss, though, DRM does what it’s best at, and sets legitimate paying customers into a rage. Therefore, I can understand some frustration when Humble, a bastion for DRM-free games like Bastion (Indie Bundle V), suddenly embraces a bundle of games available exclusively on Steam. Ben Kuchera of the Penny Arcade Report considers it a “step backward for bundle model,” and thinks it “gets rid of everything that made people love Humble Bundles, and may be damaging to the brand.” Kyle Orland from Ars Technica wondered why the Humble Bundle was “willing to essentially sell out this core part of its DNA just to get THQ on board?” But haven’t I forgotten something else about Humble? Oh right, the charitable donations. As of a couple weeks ago, Humble Bundle, Inc. had raised over $7.85 million for charity. Penny Arcade-founded charity Child’s Play is a usual beneficiary, and on the THQ bundle, they’re joined by the American Red Cross. Not only do customers pay what they want, they decide who gets the money in what proportion. All of this is possible through the magic of sliders. If anyone doesn’t like the setup, or finds that they like it differently than the other ones, now’s their chance to play with those sliders. If gamers are truly offended in this instance, they can deprive Humble and THQ of their cuts, give 100% of their money directly to charity, and still get a few games to play. There are lots of reasons to discount the criticism of offering mainstream Windows games, and I’m about to get into them. It just seems like if charity is a core part of the Humble brand and that hasn’t been messed with, I should be able to leave it at “think of the children.” What’s in a brand? Critics of the latest bundle derided THQ for trying to make a quick buck, and Humble Bundle for diluting its brand. But what’s in a brand? It’s a “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.” For the sake of discussion, we could consider the main features of the Humble Bundle brand to be: Pay-what-you-want model for video games Cheap way for customers to buy several games at once Easy way for publishers to increase the audience for games Curated, high quality collections Usually independent games Usually DRM-free Usually multiplatform Charitable donations encouraged with every purchase Content that appeals to geeks Simple ordering process (no registration required) Simple order fulfillment/downloads (BitTorrent was added when a survey showed pirates wanted it) None of these are unique to the Humble Bundle, but taken together they are what the Humble brand offers. As such, offering a bundle that is not independent, DRM-free, or multiplatform does dilute their brand somewhat, but to say that it “gets rid of everything that made people love” the bundles is a clear exaggeration. Gamers might feel betrayed by their simpatico distribution company seemingly turning to the dark side, but Humble has no intention of stopping the DRM-free, cross-platform bundles that their customers have grown to love. They do need to do a better job at protecting their reputation in their original domain, however. It wasn’t until critical articles were written about the bundle that Humble Bundle co-founder John Graham told Ars Technica they will “never stop creating Humble Indie Bundles”. Humble should have anticipated and gotten out in front of the criticism by letting their fans know that the indie, cross-platform, DRM-free products they have been accustomed to finding there aren’t going anywhere. When Humble diversified by offering music and eBook bundles, they were met with praise for extending pay-what-you-want to new domains. On their blog, Humble at least acknowledged that these were new kinds of bundles in their announcements. But there was no such acknowledgment in their announcement of the THQ bundle, leaving the clarification for later damage control. The THQ bundle is now being pitched as an experiment into a new domain, and if successful, Humble can generate more consumer goodwill by offering pay-what-you-want for mainstream games. Judging from the success of the music and eBook bundles, Humble has room to grow their brand to new product types, and it makes sense that Humble would try expanding into a category much closer to their original offerings than either books or music. With competition heating up in the independent games space, diversification is probably a good idea, anyway. Incidentally, the eBook bundle included books that were already big sellers, by already acclaimed authors, represented by major publishers. The music bundle also included previous releases from well-known acts OK Go and They Might Be Giants. To me, this means it’s a little inconsistent to characterize the sale of already successful games from mainstream publisher THQ as a money grab when it wasn’t perceived as such for the music and eBook bundles. What are we supposed to think about THQ? The immediate cash flow can’t hurt THQ, but even if they end up taking a few million to the bank, that sort of pales in comparison to $21 million loss last quarter. The real potential in this bundle is increasing the audience for their full-priced sequels: Darksiders 2 (out now), Company of Heroes 2, Metro: Last Light (2013), and Saints Row 4 (2013). I haven’t played any of the THQ bundle’s games before. Until a few days ago, all I knew about Darksiders is that there is a Darksiders 2. All that I knew about Metro 2033 is that it’s frequently used in benchmarks. And all I knew of Saints Row 3 is dildo bat. I’m the target audience, and now I’m probably going to end up buying some of these sequels. Only time will tell if the bundle was a good idea for THQ. It’s early yet, with more than a week remaining for sales, and months before returns are seen on sequels. Investors seem to be pleased, though, as stock prices are up a bit since the bundle began. After the first day of the bundle, they spiked up over 45%, but after some selloffs, shares are down to $1.36 as of this writing, or up 23% from close on 11/28. Internet Groupthink The rhetoric around the bundle and THQ’s prospects has grown toxic, and it risks feeding into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kuchera thinks the bundle could be “a death rattle” for the publisher. Kotaku’s take on the story is just an excuse for their incendiary headline: “THQ Is So Broke, They’ve Made A Humble Bundle”. It’s possible to write a critique of THQ’s business decisions without sensationalism, but we’re not seeing much of that anywhere. It’s as if every writer or Internet troll turns into a shark as soon as he or she smells blood. People seem eager to ridicule THQ, almost wishing for it to fail, so they can say that they called it back when THQ offered that Humble Bundle. If THQ does close, it would be nothing but a loss for all of us in terms of creativity and competition. Is there an Internet groupthink going on? It’s tough to nail down exactly how strong of an effect the dominant narrative has on product performance vs. the actual decisions made by the company. Research has demonstrated that crowds tend to go with the established momentum of opinion regardless of its accuracy, at least initially. If there’s a correction, and we learn to appreciate what we’ve got, I hope it’s while my buddies at THQ still have jobs. Also, CoH2 keys lol 8JX2G-LCFNM-G28KB
Interview: Gov. Scott Walker Talks Faith, Compromise and Helping the Poor Email Print Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, talked about the government shutdown, the future of the Republican Party, helping the poor and his Christian faith, in an interview with The Christian Post. In his new book, Unintimidated: A Governor's Story and a Nation's Challenge, with co-author Marc Thiessen, Walker writes about his battles with public sector unions and the recall effort. Using lessons he learned from those battles, Walker has many word of advice for his Republican Party. "Things may look hopeless in Washington, D.C.," he wrote, "but from where I sit in Wisconsin, the view is decidedly more hopeful and optimistic." The Christian Post spoke with Walker about his book on Tuesday. Here is an edited transcript of that interview: CP: Your new book, Unintimidated, is doing two things, as I see it. It, first, tells the story of your fight with public sector unions, and, second, it talks about lessons the Republican Party can learn from your experience. Did I get that right? Walker: Yep. I think you're exactly right. CP: For this interview, I'm going to focus on the second part. Walker: Sure. CP: You write that, from your standpoint as a conservative Republican, things look grim when you look at Washington, D.C., but outside the beltway, at the state level, Republicans have been winning. I want to push back against that thesis and have you respond. When you look at the groups that Obama did well with – nonwhites and young people, the future for the GOP does not look bright. The elderly will die off and today's young will vote in higher numbers as they reach middle age, and nonwhites will become a greater proportion of the electorate. So, given that, why the optimism? Walker: I think if you look across the board, even with Barack Obama winning reelection last November, at the same time we moved up to 30 states in America, the biggest number we've had in some 12 years, that have Republican governors. And, along with it, there are nearly as many states with Republican legislative majorities. You look at states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada – all of those are traditionally battleground states. All are states carried by Barack Obama. All are states that today have Republican governors. Many, but not all, have not only Republican governors but Republican legislative majorities. To me, there's a real difference there, and the optimism is that, somehow, these leaders in the states are connecting with voters. I have a theory about that, which we talk about extensively in the book. CP: During the government shutdown, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), who was head of the Republican Governor's Association at the time, said Americans should look to Republican governors, not Republicans in Washington. You recently echoed that sentiment, in an interview on Sunday, when you said that the 2016 GOP presidential candidate should be a governor. Why not a congressperson or senator? Isn't three years enough time to recover from the embarrassing government shutdown? Walker: I don't think it's the shutdown. I think there's a difference, there's a reason why Republican governors are winning in states that in the last two elections have been largely carried by Barack Obama. That is, Republican governors are connecting with voters by having an optimistic vision, by laying it out in terms that are relevant to where people are at, and showing the courage to act on it. That's a big difference out there. For instance, in terms of relevance, when I go and talk to voters, constituents, taxpayers in my state, I'm not talking about fiscal cliffs, sequesters and debt ceilings. I'm talking about how to make their kids' schools better, how we're cutting the property taxes for the third year in a row, how their neighbor down at the end of the block has been out of work for six months and helping them find a job, how their grandkids in college are going to be able to stay in state and find a job in the area they actually got a degree in. Those are the things we're talking about and those are the things that are relevant, and I think there's a big difference out there. That's where the contrast is. It's not just the shutdown. When I was asked, not who had to be, but who was my ideal candidate, it's a current or former Republican governor because those are the people getting things done. We're proving, as chief executives, we can get things done even in states, like America, which are pretty evenly split politically. CP: Some conservatives have argued that if you disagreed with the government shutdown strategy to defund "Obamacare," then you're not a true conservative, or you're a cowardly conservative, RINO, etc. That would include people like Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan and you. What's your reaction to that argument? Walker: I think there's some value in terms of the focus on Obamacare. I think we would've got there either way even without a shutdown. I'm glad that it's passed and the focus is on the real problem that I think is universally agreed with amongst Republicans and increasingly by Americans as a whole, and that is Obamacare doesn't work. I said back in August I think the federal government is too big, too expensive, too intrusive in our lives. But, I think, for what is left that is necessary, that we should show it work. My sense as a governor is, and I talk at length in the book about what we did, I'm in no way reluctant to take on a battle. If I was in any way somebody who would back away from a battle I would've done it many times. People reading my book will realize that, all the stories about the protesters and the story about the recall, they're gonna learn there's a whole lot more to it in terms of the political attacks, the personal attacks, the death threats, the impact it had on my family and the families of lawmakers in our state. From my standpoint, I don't think there's any way that people can question our ability to stand up and take a tough stance to fight for the right reasons. We didn't just fight to have a fight. We were willing to make that fight and follow it all the way through because we know, in the end, those reforms would work and the people of our state would see the benefit of that. To me, that's different than just having a fight for the sake of having a fight if you don't have an ultimate end game. That's what I've been trying to encourage folks. We need to have an end game. We should figure out a way to draw attention to the failures of Obamacare. Find a way to work within the current confines to postpone that some way or another, which I think is something most Americans would broadly agree with. And then make a case in 2014, get the Senate back, and then make the case two years later that you could fully replace it with something that's much more market-driven and responsive to the people. CP: Last week the Wisconsin State Assembly passed a bill that would end early voting on the weekends. Is that something you support? Walker: That, and a bunch of other bills they've proposed, I haven't really had a chance to look at. This legislative session my focal points are on two big things. I passed a $100 million property tax cut a couple of weeks ago. That's a big deal for us to get through in a special session. I have a whole series of worker training bills I've honed in and tried to get finished. And I just called a special session to alter the transition we're doing on the Medicaid population because of the absolute meltdown on Obamacare. These others, I'll take a look at it. We'll deal with in the time given to review them, but it's not at the top of our list of priorities. CP: There's a part of the book where you describe some of your own actions as "stupid" and "dumb," and you also advise Republicans to own up to their mistakes. Why is that important? Walker: I think it's important because people need to see us as real people. When people talk about "perfect candidates," there hasn't been a person who could be a perfect candidate for anything for about 2,000 years. The idea that people, particularly in politics, act as though nothing could ever be done wrong, to me, we made some mistakes throughout this process, we owned up to them, talked about what we did, why we did it. In the end, I think people appreciated it. They appreciate the fact that, when you believe in something and you're passionate about it, and you're on the right side of things that you act on that. And if you occasionally have something that's wrong or you find an error, that you own up to that as well. I think that's important. CP: You wrote, "don't compromise your principles, but do be willing to compromise." Why is compromise important in public office? Walker: People go one way or another. Either they think you can't compromise on anything, and so I get some who over read that and think, because they don't want to compromise on their principles they don't want to compromise. The other, there are people who think that compromise means everything, including your principles. My belief is, don't compromise your principles, your core tenants, but the things you do to get there, there should be some flexibility. I think most voters, most Americans, believe that to be reasonable. And I think that's reasonable. I may have a pathway I want to get to and I might find there's another way to get there. A good example in the book, I talked about completely eliminating collective bargaining [for public sector unions], the legislature at the time was a little bit reluctant. They probably didn't want to take it up at all. They pushed back a little bit. I still stayed true to the fact, to get the budget balanced, to do so in a way that was responsive to the needs of, not only the state, but people at the local level, we needed to make that broad change. But we could do a little bit so there was a little bit left on the end, that's probably a better pathway to getting there. That came about with some compromise with the legislature, but we didn't compromise the underlying principle of what we were doing or why we were doing it. CP: You also advise Republicans to "champion the vulnerable." For Democrats, championing the vulnerable usually means spending more on means-tested government programs. I know that's not what you're for. So, what would a Republican platform that champions the vulnerable look like? Walker: I think that's an interesting contrast and it's one, unfortunately, we missed out on this debate as part of the presidential election because the Romney campaign kept the focus largely just on what was wrong with Obama and his team and not on what was offered was better. To me, the right contrast is, the president and his allies have, by and large, measured success in government by how many people are dependent on government, by how many people are dependent on programs like Medicaid and food stamps and unemployment compensation. Those are all things that are heavily driven by more government spending. My belief in measuring success is you measure success by just the opposite, by how many people are no longer dependent on the government. Not because we've pushed them out to the street, but because we understand true freedom or prosperity doesn't come from the mighty hand of the government, it comes from empowering people to control their own lives, their own prosperity through the dignity that comes from work. I think we need to make the case. I'll give you a good example we talk about in the book. One of my entitlement reforms is probably as significant as what I did with collective bargaining, it just didn't have 100,000 protestors. Unlike most states in America, in Wisconsin if you want to get food stamps, if you are an adult without kids who is able bodied, you have to either be employed or in one our employment training programs. We put our money where our mouth is. We put $17 million, I believe it was, to put more employment training programs for about 75,000 people in this category. We do that and the initial reaction on the left was, "the governor hates poor people, he's trying to make it harder for government assistance." I said, "no, I'm not making it harder to get government assistance, I'm making it easier to find a job." To me, that's a very compelling message and we want to go out and tell that. We're about helping people get out of poverty. The mistake made, I talk about this in the book, is that Romney said we don't need to worry about the poor, they have safety-net programs. No, that's exactly the wrong answer. We need to worry about the poor, not because they need more safety-nets, but because we want to empower people living in poverty to get out of it. We should have a message that says, "you want to live the American dream, we want to help you live it. You don't want to be permanently dependent on the American government. We want to transition you from government dependence to true independence." That is not just a conservative or Republican ideal, that's an American ideal and we should be the ones embracing it. CP: What is your religious background? Walker: My father was a Baptist minister. I go to an evangelical, nondenominational church right now called Meadowbrook. CP: When you think about your faith in relation to politics, how does your faith inform your politics, or do you keep those two compartmentalized? Walker: It plays a key role in my life in general, not just in politics. There's not a play card, if you will, that tells me how to vote or how to act on certain issues. So, it's not like issue by issue it drives me. But, the larger context, not only the policy decisions I make, but how I make them, how I interact with people, how I treat people. All of those things are, without a doubt, driven by my faith. Between that and the influence particularly of my parents, it's one of those things that leave me balanced, that lead me to be principled and stick to my guns and do what I thought was right. But, by the same token, make sure that I continue to be decent no matter what the reaction, even in the face of death threats and verbal assaults, targeting political ads and all those sorts of things. We never got to the point where we responded in kind. In fact, a great example of this, I remember two years ago, I was out in front of my home (not the governor's mansion but my real home), I was raking leaves on a Sunday afternoon after church. One of my sons and one of his friends was with us. I hear this honk and a guy drives by, he's got his hand out the window and he's flipping me off. This young man that's with us says, "Mr. Walker, how do you put up with that?" I said, "Well, it's America, people can do and say what they want, but, it's kinda rude. You stay positive and, in the end, good things will happen." I go back to raking the leaves. A couple of minutes go by. I hear a honk again. I'm thinking, "Lord, maybe I should've done this at night." So, I look and now there's not one, but two cars going by. Both of them, the windows are going down, arms are coming out. I say, here it comes again. And both guys stick their hands out and put their thumbs up. This young man says, "Mr. Walker, did you know that was going to happen?" I said, "no." But, it really was a great reminder to me that if you stay positive, just as I told him, good things will eventually happen to you. Maybe not in the way you expect them. It's not a religious-based book, per se, but there are a number of examples I sprinkle throughout the book of moments where, maybe I was under pressure or a little bit down and there would be moments like that, or a guy in a factory would stop and say he and his family are praying for me. One day when I was on the set of a morning TV show in Green Bay, the floor manager leaned down as she put the mic on and said, "Hey, I just want you to know that me and my kids pray for you each night as we go to bed." Things like that, all throughout the times of heightened stress from the protests and the recall that were kinda telling to me and tell a message, not just to those of us in politics, but to life in general, that if you let your faith guide you and you're decent about it, God will continue to send you good messages.
“SNL40” is a lot like a high school reunion. If you went off to become popular and successful, you’re back. But if things got weird after you left, forget it. Hence the glaring omission of Dennis Miller, who was a great “Weekend Update” host but turned conservative mouthpiece in years later. And no Victoria Jackson, who was a chirpy blonde on the show but now fights for the Right. (UPDATE I’m told she was in the audience, but otherwise unseen.) Some others were missing too. Conan O’Brien, who wrote for the show in the late 80s, went to Cuba instead. Cheri Oteri remains a mystery. Julia Sweeney, who was in the audience last winter, didn’t get to trot out It’s Pat! for some reason. Eddie Murphy was a let down after Chris Rock gave him a huge build up. Eddie got a standing ovation, but did nothing. Albert Brooks was very much missing, as was Buck Henry (who at least got a an interstitial photo.) Nevertheless, it was very much a soup to nuts show. Three and a half hours, and Lorne Michaels managed to fit in as much as he could of everything, from Mr. Bill to General Franco, to the Shark at the door. Dan Akyroyd and Laraine Newman re-creating the Bass in the blender was wonderful. Jane Curtin showed her excellent timing with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Norm McDonald, Kevin Nealon, and Tim Meadows were delightful to see again. The music was an issue. While Miley Cyrus did a superlative job on Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” Simon himself settled being there. (He’d flown in from Australia.) Paul McCartney sounded terrible on “Maybe I’m Amazed”– maybe because he was up until late performing last night. Kanye West was dreadful. Simon made for everything by singing “Still Crazy After All These Years” at the show’s end. He’s Lorne’s just about best friend, and has been there literally from day 1. That song was key at the show’s start in 1975. Finally got “Wayne’s World” at 11:12. Three hours, 12 minutes. Worth waiting for if you were still up. The show gets an A. It was sloppy, it was up and down, there were moments of brilliance. It was exactly like any reunion. And ultimately it was very satisfying. And it was nice to see Lorne, Steve Martin and Paul Simon there on the stage at the very end., PS Jon Lovitz was a good sport in the In Memoriam segment, which otherwise was handled tastefully. I live Tweeted most of it. Check it out on Twitter @showbiz411.
Sometimes it can be relaxing to peer into a fish tank and just pass a few minutes in quiet contemplation. Just you and the fish. But if you’re at work, this isn’t really a very practical way of de-stressing. Luckily for you, Mindworks Innovation Lab has created Aquard.io – a virtual aquarium Web app that’s filled with real fish. We’re not entirely convinced this was conceived as a way of reducing stress, rather than an easy way for the creators to feed their fish; either way, visitors to the site can queue up to be the next person to release a feed.At the bottom of the screen, there’s a handy countdown timer showing you when the next portion of food is due. The system was created by connecting an Arduino Uno board to an automatic feeder programmed to rotate and drop food whenever a user interacted via the Web app. As feeding time only comes once every hour or so, the team decided to introduce an air pump into the equation, so that visitors can also create their own bubbles. Some effort has clearly been put in for such a simple task and there are multiple camera angles available and some nice calming music, complete with the option to mute it, which is always appreciated. It might be the most impressive demo of the possbilities of ‘the Internet of Things’, but it’s a nifty solution to the problem of needing to remember to feed your fish, for the creators at least. For you, it’s just an easy way to spend a couple of minutes feeding some fish. ➤ Aquard.io Read next: Designing the details: Why empty states matter
The Los Angeles Lakers have been mentioned numerous times in rumors leading up to the trade deadline on Thursday and one name who has been brought up consistently is Lou Williams. Williams has been one of the team’s best scorers this year and many playoff teams could likely use his skills, but general manager Mitch Kupchak has said he doesn’t think the team will make a trade before the deadline. There is still plenty of time, however, and according to Michael Pina of Bleacher Report, several teams may look to acquire Williams before the deadline is up: Lou Williams is committed to LA, but "several teams" that couldn't pay him last summer may make a run B4 tomorrow's deadline, per a source. — Michael Pina (@MichaelVPina) February 17, 2016 Williams has enjoyed a very solid first season with the Lakers. He is tied for second on the team in scoring at 15.4 points per game and has been excellent at getting to the free throw line, averaging more than six attempts per game. He also has a very attractive contract, being owed only $14 million over the next two seasons. It makes sense that teams would be interested in someone like Williams, but actually coming to terms on a deal is extremely difficult. Moving Williams would clear up time for the young guards, but the team would have to get something valuable in return. The Lakers also don’t want to sacrifice the cap space they have this summer in which they will have room to sign two players to maximum contracts.
Opinion writer The reports of Jeff Sessions’s political death in the Trump administration were greatly exaggerated. The attorney general’s ice-cold announcement that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) “is being rescinded” is the second time Sessions has bent President Trump to his will. And it marked the umpteenth time the greatness of America has been diminished by the “Make America Great Again” crowd. Politico reported last month that the president was “at war with himself over Dreamers.” Even his statement Tuesday was pixilated contradiction. “I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents,” Trump said in a statement. But Sessions’s argument that DACA could not withstand legal challenge from Republican governors vowing to sue the administration if the president didn’t end DACA prevailed. Because, you know, a promise is a promise for the man who campaigned hard against DACA, calling the executive action undertaken by President Barack Obama in 2012 “amnesty.” The estimated 800,000 people who were allowed to work without fear of deportation and could renew their status after two years are now in legal limbo. Relief now lies with Congress, which has six months to come up with a legislative fix. Believe that will happen and you’re also likely to believe the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus are vacation buddies with the Tooth Fairy. [The Arpaio pardon displays Trump’s disdain for the rule of law] Listening to Sessions prattle on about respect for the rule of law after his boss ignored it last month to pardon a racist former sheriff is World Series-level gall. And it fits with the reprehensible zeitgeist that has always enveloped Sessions since before he took the helm of the justice department. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) was as unsparing in her assessment of him as she has been on the president during an interview on my podcast “Cape Up” in May. Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks regarding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program on Sept. 5. (Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images) “I think that Jeff Sessions is very dangerous,” Waters said. “I think he’s a racist, and I think that he absolutely believes that it’s his job to keep minorities in their place.” When I challenged her on her tough language, she doubled down. “I think he’s a racist, I think he’s a throwback, and I don’t mind saying it, any day of the week.” [PODCAST: Maxine Waters: Jeff Sessions believes “it’s his job to keep minorities in their place”] Dreamers aren’t the only ones who felt the lash of Sessions. Transgender students lost out in a fight between the former Alabama senator and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The issue was an Obama-era directive that allowed transgender students to use the bathroom that fit with their gender identity. DeVos resisted Sessions’s efforts. But, as the New York Times reported, resistance was futile, especially when one’s spine is gelatinous. Mr. Sessions, who has opposed expanding gay, lesbian and transgender rights, pushed Ms. DeVos to relent. After getting nowhere, he took his objections to the White House because he could not go forward without her consent. Mr. Trump sided with his attorney general, the Republicans said, and told Ms. DeVos in a meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday that he wanted her to drop her opposition. And Ms. DeVos, faced with the alternative of resigning or defying the president, agreed to go along. Every day, the president and his administration do something that strips the glimmer of hope and opportunity from the United States. In March, a foreign ambassador told me something that has only gained in resonance. “America has lost the one weapon it has, the power to inspire,” the envoy said with a mix of sadness and disbelief. And in the middle of it all is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. Each day that he is in Trump’s orbit and his ear, the promise of America diminishes further. Follow Jonathan on Twitter: @Capehartj Subscribe to Cape Up, Jonathan Capehart’s weekly
Every coin buyer wants to find value. It is human nature to seek the best deal and the question of “what’s it worth?” is a natural, common phrase when collectors gather together. Broadly, there are at least three ways that collectors can take advantage of situations and circumstances to secure good deals. Seller lacks specialized knowledge One way to snag value is to be armed with information. The hobby is too vast for everyone to know everything, so specialization offers opportunities for deal-making in certain circumstances. On a small scale, this happened when I bought a dairy token that was from a town in the next county south of here. The seller, in that same county, had no idea that this “maverick” token was original to his own city, because by their nature, maverick tokens lack identifying details of the place of issue. Though the town was not identified on the token, the token is listed in Ohio Merchant Tokens by Gaylor Lipscomb, where I had recalled reading about it. It was a fortunate stroke of luck, to have read about it, and to have recalled it. That meant my $1 purchase — that I attributed — was worth five to 10 times the purchase price. That is a macro level, but the same principle applies in other areas of the hobby. A Seated Liberty specialist pointed out to me multiple instances where generalist dealers, auction houses and grading services either failed to attribute varieties or attributed them incorrectly, allowing him to purchase them for prices that were discounted over their true value to the specialist. Another Ohio dealer purchased world silver bullion coins from retail customers and then sold them as generic 1-ounce rounds, which carry tighter premium spreads above precious metal value than most bullion coins. In this case, the 2015 silver 1-ounce $5 coins from Tokelau showing the Great White Shark were considered generic, when a major bullion dealer was selling them for $2 each more than generic rounds. When it comes to bullion, with silver treading water at $14 an ounce, that reflects a hefty difference. Liquidity or profit taking issues Some dealers might have issues of liquidity or be undercapitalized, which can lead to the bargain buy for the right customer. A generalist Ohio dealer who buys a lot of silver destined for the melting pot had a cache of world coins, most of which were available at prices based on the “spot” silver price. But in the pile he offered at “melt” were several nice world crown coins that, because of their design, size or mintage, carry medium to strong premiums over the precious metal value. With thousands of dollars tied up in the bin bound for melting, he just wanted to move what he could for his marginal percentage, and have funds with which to make more purchases. In a similar sense, profit taking can lead to bargains. If a dealer bought world coins at silver-based prices when silver was $10 an ounce, and never changed the prices on the holders as the value of the metal moved up, then those coins would each reflect a profit. It’s happened to me on several occasions, even with a generic half-ounce silver piece that sold for half of its true value. By turning over those purchases right away, there was profit to be made. Lack of exposure means bargains Simply put, not every pair of eyes can see every potential transaction. There is no equivalent to the National Security Agency or Santa Claus monitoring every piece at every sales venue. The world is ever smaller than it ever was, thanks to the Internet and auction sites like eBay, which have dramatically altered the antiques and collectibles markets. Used books might be the perfect example — suddenly booksellers across the country could inventory and sell their stock to anyone in the world. True rarity became apparent, suppressing the high prices for items of false rarity. At the same time, there are hundreds of dealers hosting their own auctions, and thousands of daily auctions at sites like eBay. A fool would think they could access all those options and act with timeliness to secure bargains. Sometimes sellers incorrectly identify the item that they have listed in an eBay auction. Coin World reports about new discoveries frequently follow that template, where an item is misattributed, meaning searchers casting a tighter net based on key words might skip over the listing, suppressing bids and ultimately its sale price. A St. Louis anniversary medal described as pewter by a seller on eBay actually was silver, but because of its toning, it sold for a song. A group of five Eisenhower medals, each struck in silver, were purchased at a show for $5 per medal because the dealer thought they were copper-nickel. The Medallic Art Co. name and serial number on the edge, as well as the capsule style, were indicators that the pieces were silver, which was confirmed with additional research away from the show. These are just some of the ways that buyers can obtain value. In the next installment, we’ll explore the other side of the coin, literally, when buying coins or numismatic items turns out to be far too costly.
NOTHING sits still. Even at absolute zero, when the thermal jiggling of matter is frozen, all things must still buzz to the tune of quantum mechanics. Now this subtle jittering has been detected in a small silicon bar, the first solid object ever to reveal its quantum vibrations. This phenomenon, called zero-point fluctuation, is a consequence of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which says that we can never pin down the precise position and motion of any object. So far zero-point energy has only been seen directly in single atoms or small collections of particles. The new experiment uses a silicon bar about 12 micrometres long and less than a micrometre across. Oskar Painter at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues cooled the bar to within half a degree of absolute zero and then used a laser to detect its motion. Some photons from this laser got a shift in energy when they hit the vibrating bar. Ordinary thermal vibrations can either boost or reduce photon energy, but the zero-point quantum vibration is different. Because it is the lowest energy state possible, it can only absorb energy. Painter’s group detected this bias towards lower-energy scattered light, a clear signature of a quantum twang (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.108.033602). “Seeing these effects in large objects can provide us with a way to probe the foundations of quantum mechanics,” says Caltech team member Amir Safavi-Naeini.
The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in Carpenter v. United States. But even before the attorneys and spectators assembled that morning at 1 First Street, it was clear this would be a monumental year for digital privacy rights at the Court. This case will not be decided in a vacuum, and it appears that the justices appreciate both the magnitude of the moment and the complex nature of the problem that they have taken on. To understand the significance of this case, it is helpful to consider the history leading up to Carpenter and the points raised at the Court on Wednesday. ADVERTISEMENT This case has captured the public interest more than most privacy cases at the court, and that is not surprising. The case is about cell phones, location tracking, and the amount of privacy protection that attaches to the digital breadcrumbs that we create every day. Cell phones are no longer seen as a niche gadget or an extravagant convenience. Cell phones, in the words of Justice Sotomayor, are an “appendage.” Indeed, many individuals rely on mobile phones for the majority of their communications, and no longer use traditional landline phones at home. And the Supreme Court is keenly aware of this dynamic. Questions Focused on the Court’s Earlier Cell Phone and Location Tracking Cases In 2013, the Court unanimously held in Riley v. California that officers cannot search an individual’s cell phone without a warrant, even during an arrest. Chief Justice Roberts famously quipped that cell phones are so “pervasive” that “the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” Given the important role that cell phones now play in our daily lives, and the sensitive nature of the data they hold, the Court found a simple answer to the question of what the police must do: “get a warrant.” During the Carpenter argument, Chief Justice Roberts implied that a similarly simple standard could apply to location tracking. When the government’s attorney argued that cell phone records should not be protected because they are “voluntarily” conveyed to third parties, Chief Justice Roberts pushed back firmly: “that sounds inconsistent with our decision in Riley, though, which emphasized that you really don’t have a choice these days if you want to have a cell phone.” The chief justice was not alone in his skepticism of the Government’s position. The views of the justices were previewed in United States v. Jones, a case about whether officers could attach a GPS device to an individual’s car and track their movements over several months without a warrant. The Court unanimously agreed that the Fourth Amendment protects against such searches, but could not agree on what test should apply. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, found that the attachment of the GPS device to the defendant’s car was a “trespass” that triggered the Fourth Amendment. Justice Alito, writing in concurrence, reasoned that tracking the defendant’s movements over an extended period violated a reasonable expectation of privacy. Justice Sotomayor wrote separately, agreeing both with Justice Scalia’s property-based majority and with Justice Alito’s reasonable expectation analysis, and predicted that “it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties.” Justices Considered How A Pro-privacy Decision Would Apply in Future Cases During the Carpenter argument, Justice Alito distanced himself from his conclusion in Jones. He expressed concern over the impact on searches of other types of business records, even though Justice Alito agreed that location tracking “is raising very serious privacy concerns.” In particular, he questioned the ability to distinguish between the sensitivity of location records, telephone call records, and banking records. Justice Kagan, in contrast, was skeptical of the government’s ability to distinguish the location tracking in this case from the GPS tracking that the Court had found unconstitutional in Jones. Justice Breyer also agreed that long-term location tracking was invasive, but questioned how to draw meaningful lines to guide future cases. Given the apparent consensus on the sensitivity of these location records, you might wonder why a decision in this case would represent such a monumental shift for digital privacy rights. The answer lies in the questions posed by Justice Alito and Justice Breyer, and the decisions reached by lower courts across the country. Up until this point, courts have rejected the argument that cell phone location records are protected under the Fourth Amendment. Even after GPS tracking was found unconstitutional in Jones and warrantless cell phone searches rejected in Riley, courts across the nation have dismissed location privacy arguments based on a pair of cases from the 1970s denying protection for banking and telephone call records. Those two cases — Smith v. Maryland and Miller v. United States — have been a roadblock for privacy litigators in cell phone privacy and other digital rights cases. But the justices on Wednesday seemed to acknowledge that is all about to change. Both the Court and Congress Will Play A Role In Defining Future Privacy Protections The justices seem to agree that the Fourth Amendment protects the privacy of location records. The question now is what rule will explain why such records are protected, and what factors should apply in future cases. It is helpful to consider points previously raised by Justice Alito as well as the history and development of modern privacy law. Prior to the Federal Wiretap Act in 1968, the Supreme Court held that the interception of telephone calls violated the Fourth Amendment. The Court first established the broad legal principle, then Congress codified a set of specific and administrable rules to apply that principle. Justice Alito alluded to that same dynamic in his concurring opinions in Jones and Riley, noting that Congress is in a better position to establish specific rules governing these new technologies. My organization, EPIC, made a similar point in the “friend of the court” brief that we filed in support of Carpenter. Congress can provide detailed rules in a privacy law concerning the collection and use of personal data. But in the first instance, the Supreme Court’s role is to set the Fourth Amendment baseline and identify government conduct that crosses the line. As the justices met this week to discuss Carpenter, they likely considered all of these factors as they debated, and tentatively concluded, the outcome in the case. Now we wait to see what happens and how the Court defines the scope of the Fourth Amendment in the digital age. Alan Butler is senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC. EPIC filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of Carpenter.
The Obama administration believes that Iran likely violated a United Nations resolution by test-launching a new long-range surface-to-surface ballistic missile over the weekend. The administration has yet to formally refer the matter to the United Nations, but initial analyses suggest that the Sunday launch likely violated a Security Council resolution seeking to undercut Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile powers, a senior administration official said. “I would put it in the realm of quite likely,” the official said. ADVERTISEMENT However, the launch would not be in violation of the landmark international agreement struck between the U.S., Iran and other world powers to limit Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, officials insisted. That agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), “is about one issue and one issue only: Iran’s nuclear program,” the official added. The ballistic missile launch would be a separate issue that goes beyond the scope of the nuclear pact, they said. On Sunday, Iran announced the launch of its new precision-guided missile, named Emad, which is Farsi for “pillar.” The missile has the range to attack Israel, Iran’s top regional foe and the target of most of its scorn. "The Emad missile is able to strike targets with a high level of precision and completely destroy them,” Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan said in a news conference. “This greatly increases Iran's strategic deterrence capability” Though the Obama administration maintains that the act did not violate the JCPOA, it appears likely to assert that it is a violation of U.N. Security Council 1929, which was passed in 2010 and put limits on Iran’s nuclear powers and ballistic missile activity. A more recent U.N. Security Council resolution signed shortly after the nuclear deal was reached has yet to go into effect. Now, the U.S. will analyze the ballistic missile test and — assuming officials conclude it is indeed a violation — refer it to a special U.N. body for further action. “If the recently reported missile tests by Iran violate any existing U.N. Security Council resolutions, we’ll take appropriate actions at the United Nations,” a second senior administration official said. “We will continue to do this for any and all Iranian violations of UNSCRs [U.N. Security Council resolutions].” The additional analysis won’t be too difficult, the first senior administration official said. “They were not at all secret about it,” the official said. “They’ve given us plenty to work with.”
Rep. John Lewis corrected Rush Limbaugh's misrepresentation of the civil rights movement, responding to Limbaugh's suggestion that Lewis would not "have been beat upside the head" during the march to Selma if he had had a gun. Earlier on Friday, Limbaugh had asked on his radio show, "If a lot of African-Americans back in the '60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma?" He continued, "If John Lewis, who says he was beat upside the head, if John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?" During the 1965 march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery in support of voting rights for African-Americans, state troopers beat the unarmed protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis suffered a concussion. Responding to Limbaugh today, Lewis said in a press release:
Getting a Comic-Con badge is no easy task. HANG ON TO YOUR BADGE! (Yes, we’re shouting at you.) Not only do you need it to get in the door each day at the Convention Center, you also need it to access our events at our satellite areas, at the Hilton Bayfront, the Marriott Marquis, the Manchester Grand Hyatt, and some other offsite areas. Your badge also contains your personal information in the barcode on the front. You will also need your badge if you are eligible to participate in Comic-Con 2014 online preregistration, so keep it AFTER Comic-Con, too! Do NOT give your badge to anyone—friend, family-member, or total stranger—at any time. (PS: Take your badge with you when you go out to eat, too! Area restaurants will be offering special deals for Comic-Con attendees!)
10.Tottenham 3-1 Arsenal (1991) This was the first FA Cup semi-final played between the two sides. Many fans were hoping to see Spurs star Paul Gascoigne continue his brilliant form, following dazzling goals against Oxford, Portsmouth and Notts County in the earlier rounds. Five minutes into the game, Gascoigne scored from a 35 yard free kick that was hit with such power and accuracy that it left Seaman clutching at thin air. Five minutes later Gary Lineker increased Spurs’ lead. Arsenal scored just before half-time through Alan Smith but Lineker scored the third after 78 minutes to take Spurs to the Final. Gazza played for only an hour but left to an ovation – ’Spurs Hero of Wembley’ but everyone played their part in this memorable victory. 9.Tottenham 0-5 Arsenal (1978) The Christmas period of 1978 brought an unexpected gift for Arsenal.It was an unforgettable outcome on an afternoon the Gunners produced arguably their greatest performance during manager Terry Neill’s seven years at the helm. In a team containing Pat Rice, Arsenal tore their north London neighbours – who had just been promoted – apart. Alan Sunderland grabbed a hat-trick, Frank Stapleton also got on the score sheet and Liam Brady’s edge of the area screamer was pure brilliance. Neill’s side went on to finish seventh, four places above Tottenham that season. The result remains Arsenal’s biggest post-war triumph at White Hart Lane.
Last year, Zach Fucale and Philippe Desrosiers were taken within the first 60 picks of the 2013 NHL Entry Draft – something that the QMJHL must have been extremely proud of, given the fact that both goalies were selected out of the same league. Despite the fact that this year’s draft class is seemingly loaded on goalies with immense potential, individuals such as Mason McDonald and Brandon Halverson will look to represent the “Q” at this year’s draft festivities by having their names called by NHL teams selecting at the podium. While Mason McDonald might play a style different from that of Fucale and Desrosiers, it would be hard to ignore the 6’3″ netminder at this year’s draft. Not only does McDonald possess the requisite size to be a highly coveted prospect goalie, he also has great athleticism and reflexes for a netminder of his size – something that not many bigger goalies can lay claim to. McDonald’s quick ascension from Bantam to Midget to Juniors has seen the goalie gain a tremendous amount of experience over the past four hockey seasons, and hockey fans shouldn’t be surprised to see the netminder excelling in his new home with the Charlottetown Islanders. Recently, The Hockey Writers had a chance to sit down and have a conversation with McDonald about his prospects of being drafted, life in the QMJHL, and a variety of other things that make him such an intriguing goaltender going in to the 2014 NHL Entry Draft. The Hockey Writers: Could you describe your experiences progressing from the NSMBHL to the NSMMHL and finally to the QMJHL? Mason McDonald: Well, the Bantam league was the first year that they had that league, and it was a pretty good year as we won provincials and we went on to Atlantics. It was a good season, and then I went to Midget where we had a pretty good regular season and went to the playoffs where we played Dartmouth in the final – we won the series 4-1 over them, wound up going to Atlantics where we lost, but it was still a pretty good season. Transitioning over to the “Q” was definitely a big jump, but I think I adapted to the speed and different shot speeds quickly. THW: Over the last two years you’ve been a member of the Acadie-Bathurst Titan and now the Charlottetown Islanders. Can you describe what it has been like to play for two different organizations in such an offensively charged league? MM: I spent the first year and a half at Bathurst and I enjoyed my time there. I had two good coaches there, unfortunately I was replaced halfway through last year, but it was still a good season. The first half of this season was still pretty good, but it was just time for a change because I wasn’t getting the playing time that I thought I should have gotten. Since I’ve arrived to Charlottetown, I think I’ve really enjoyed it here and enjoyed the playing time as well. THW: What has been your biggest learning curve or learning experience in the QMJHL thus far? MM: I think just playing against some top-level players – some that have gone on to the NHL now and others that will be going there in the future – seeing the skill level that they have and what it will take to get to the next level. THW: What was it like to compete for the Canada Atlantic U17 team? MM: That was a pretty fun experience – we got to go up against the top 16-year olds in the world. We didn’t fare too well – we came in eighth place – but the boys there still battled every game and tried to represent the Atlantic in the best way that we could. THW: More recently, you appeared in the BMO CHL/NHL Top Prospects game where your performance and skills were on display for everyone to see. Can you describe what it was like to compete in such a game and what you took away from it? MM: I won the game, but I didn’t really know what to expect, honestly. I had two good practices leading up to it and the game came around and honestly I was kind of nervous to start the game since it was nationally televised with so many people at the rink. After the first shot, I think I was good, and I was happy with my performance. I took away a great experience from it as it was one of the more fun games I’ve played in my lifetime and it was just a great time overall. THW: You’re a big goalie that covers a lot of the net and you seem to be very poised in net. What would you say is the biggest strength of your game aside from your height and composition? MM: I think the speed going along with my height would be my biggest strength. I think I’m a pretty agile getting from side-to-side and being able to cover the net while going from side-to-side is one of the biggest things. THW: If there was one aspect of your game that you’d like to fine-tune in time for the 2014 NHL Entry Draft, what would it be? MM: I think rebound control – you could always work on that. Just deflecting pucks to the corner, being able to not put pucks back in the slot for players to bang in, and covering the puck in scrambles – that’s something that I’d like to improve upon. THW: What do you think is your biggest asset to NHL teams that are scouting you? MM: I think just competing and showing teams that I want to get to the next level. I want to go out every game and not give up on any plays, and I know that I have to give 100% at all times and be really focused in order to make sure that I’m going all out at all times. THW: Who is your favorite NHL or pro goalie that you like to watch and learn from? MM: Probably Jonathan Quick. He’s not an overly big goalie, but he goes out every game and seems to find the puck no matter where it is. He’s really agile and quick, and he makes these really acrobatic saves that nobody knows how he makes. It’s just amazing how quick he can move and some of the stuff that he does is just awesome. THW: Which NHL goalie do you think you resemble the most in terms of style of play? MM: Oh, that’s a hard one. I think one of the taller guys I guess. I know I’m not as big as him, but Ben Bishop has been solid this year, he’s pretty good laterally, uses his size to his advantage, and he sees the puck well, so I guess I can be compared to him. Although the 2014 NHL Entry Draft might be stocked with goalies that have a tremendous amount of upside, Mason McDonald is doing everything that he can in order to set himself apart from the pack. While McDonald certainly has size playing to his advantage when being scouted, the goalie is a fierce competitor that also has an innate ability to remain very composed in his own crease – something that will undoubtedly help him distinguish himself when the 28th and 29th of June roll around.
Phillips Brooks who died in 1893—and who along with Jesus, Paul, John Stott, Dick Lucas, and other preachers never married—most famously said that preaching is “truth through personality.” This personality factor raises the question of preaching tone. What should a preacher aim at in the tone of his preaching? By “tone” I mean the feel that it has. The spirit it emits. The emotional quality. The affectional tenor. The mood. Personalities Are Like Faces Every personality has a more or less characteristic tone. That is part of what personality is. Some personalities play a small repertoire of emotional instruments, while others play a larger repertoire. Nevertheless, whether a personality plays a two-piece band or a symphony of emotional tones, there is a typical tone. A kind of default tone for each personality. This has a huge effect on peaching. And there is no escaping it. Preachers have personalities, like they have faces. They can smile, and they can frown. But they have one face. It was given to them. The question I have for preachers is: What tone should you aim at in preaching? This is an urgent question because, if you don’t answer it, your listeners will answer it for you. The Tone of the Text Over my 31 years in the pulpit, I have received a fairly steady stream of affirmation and criticism related to the tone of my preaching. The very same sermon can elicit opposite pleas. “More of that, pastor!” “No, we already get too much of that.” This is totally understandable. Listeners have personalities too. Which means they have default tonal desires. They have preferences. They know what makes them feel loved. Or encouraged. Or hopeful. Or challenged. And some people feel challenged by the very tone that makes another feel angered or discouraged. So I ask again: What tone should you aim at in preaching? My answer is: Pursue the tone of the text. But let it be informed, not muted, by the tonal balance of Jesus and the apostles and by the gospel of grace.
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have announced their third LP, the followup to 2011's excellent Belong. They'll release a new album called Days of Abandon on April 22 through Yebo. It was produced by Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine, Sigur Rós, the Kills). The cover art, above, was done by South Korean artist Lee Jinju. There's also a long tour planned in support of the record, with support from Eternal Summers and Fear of Men. Find the dates after the tracklist. Days of Abandon: 01 Art Smock 02 Simple and Sure 03 Kelly 04 Beautiful You 05 Coral and Gold 06 Eurydice 07 Masokissed 08 Until The Sun Explodes 09 Life After Life 10 The Asp at My Chest The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: 03-07 Baltimore, MD - Ottobar * 03-08 Charlottesville, VA - The Southern * 03-09 Carrboro, NC - Cat's Cradle * 03-12-16 Austin, TX - South By Southwest 03-18 St. Louis, MO - Off Broadway * 03-19 Nashville, TN - Exit / In * 03-21 Birmingham, AL - Bottletree * 03-22 New Orleans, LA - The BUKU Music + Art Project 03-23 Atlanta, GA - The Earl * 03-28 Brooklyn, NY - Rough Trade 04-24 Boston, MA - Brighton Music Hall # 04-25 Montreal, Quebec - Le Belmont # 04-26 Toronto, Ontario - Horseshoe Tavern # 04-28 Chicago, IL - Empty Bottle # 04-29 Minneapolis, MN - Triple Rock # 05-02 Vancouver, British Columbia - Fortune Sound Club # 05-03 Seattle, WA - The Vera Project # 05-04 Portland, OR - Holocene # 05-06 San Francisco, CA - The Independent # 05-07 Los Angeles, CA - Troubadour # 05-09 San Diego, CA - The Casbah # 05-10 Phoenix, AZ - The Crescent Ballroom # 05-11 Albuquerque, NM - Sister # 05-13 Denver, CO - Larimer Lounge # 05-15 Kansas CIty, MO - The Record Bar # 05-16 Louisville, KY - Zanzabar # 05-17 Columbus, OH - Rumba Cafe # 05-18 Pittsburgh, PA - Club Cafe # 05-19 Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda's # 05-21 Washington, DC - Rock 'n' Roll Hotel # 05-22 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom # with Eternal Summers with Fear of Men Watch a trailer for the album, directed by Art Boonparn, which features opening track "Art Smock": Watch the Pains of Being Pure at Heart perform "Young Adult Friction" at Pitchfork Music Festival 2012:
Image copyright Press Eye Image caption Ulster and Saracens are set to clash in the Heineken Cup on 5 April A video released by Ulster Rugby featuring Irish international Willie John McBride has received a tongue-in-cheek response from a rival team. On Sunday, Ulster posted a video featuring the former international Willie John and the Ulster Orchestra performing Stand Up For The Ulster Men. Last night however, London club Saracens released the same video altered to Stand Up For The Saracens. The clubs meet in a Heineken Cup quarter-final at Ravenhill on 5 April. Ulster's video, released last Sunday, is part of their #showURsupport social media campaign and has attracted over 16,000 views. Image copyright Ciaran McCauley Image caption Willie John McBride as he appears in Ulster Rugby's showURsupport video It features the Ulster Orchestra performing the song with footage of people from across the nine counties joining in. It also includes Ulster and British & Irish Lions legend McBride, who says: "When you're playing Ulster at Ravenhill, you're not only playing the 15 players on the field - you're playing the whole province of Ulster." On Monday night, Saracens reposted the same video with the song's vocals changed. Mr McBride's line has also been altered to: "You're not playing the whole province, you're only playing 15 players, so you are." The Saracens version currently has just over 2,300 views. The videos are the latest in a social media rivalry between the two clubs. Last year, Ulster campaigned for fans to Make Twickenham Home ahead of last year's Heineken Cup quarter-final against Saracens. Two weeks ago the London club released a video asking supporters to Make Ravenhill Home for the upcoming fixture. However Ulster Rugby said their video, five weeks in the making, was not created in response to Saracens. Neil Brittain, communications manager at Ulster Rugby, said: "Our video is about inspiring and motivating our fans from right across the nine counties of Ulster to get behind the team on 5 April." Mr McBride said: "As far as I'm concerned, none of this video stuff really matters. The answer to it all will be on the field and on the scoreboard." When contacted, Saracens said they had no comment.
The parties running on a joint pro-independence ticket in the Catalan regional election on September 27 are likely to win a narrow majority, thus paving the way for a possible unilateral declaration of independence from Spain. That’s according to the latest poll carried out by Spain’s Center for Sociological Research (CIS), an independent body that reports to the Prime Minister’s Office. The Junts pel Sí (literally, together for yes) coalition and the Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP) parties would take a combined 68 or 69 seats in the regional parliament, according to the poll. The number of seats needed for an absolute majority is 68. Junts pel Sí and CUP would take 68 or 69 seats in the regional parliament. An absolute majority is 68 Catalan regional premier Artur Mas has stated that if pro-independence groups achieve an absolute majority at the upcoming polls, his government will continue with its efforts to achieve independence from Spain for the northeastern region. The CIS survey predicts that Junts pel Sí and CUP would garner 44% of the votes cast. Junts pel Sí is a bloc made up of Mas’s Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (CDC) party, the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and pro-sovereignty civil associations. Together they would win between 60 and 61 seats in the parliament, according to the CIS poll. CUP – a radical left-wing pro-independence party – would garner eight seats and 5.9% of the vote. The rest of the parties that are running would not be able to achieve an absolute majority. The survey also asked respondents what kind of state they would prefer Spain to be. A total of 46.1% answered that they wanted “a state in which autonomous regions are given the possibility of converting into independent states.” The second most popular response – with 27.8% support – was for “a state in which autonomous regions have greater autonomy than they do now.” Catalonia has been ramping up the pressure on the central government to be allowed to decide on its future for months now. An informal referendum on self-rule was held late last year, but ran afoul of Spanish prosecutors, who filed charges against Mas and several aides for organizing it. The center-right Popular Party government, which is headed by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, is fiercely against independence for Catalonia, and recently announced plans to give the Constitutional Court powers to fine or suspend elected officials and civil servants who fail to comply with its rulings. Though applicable to all public administrations, the initiative has been devised to deal with a possible unilateral declaration of independence from Spain in Catalonia. English version by Simon Hunter.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel’s defense minister has accused the United States of projecting weakness internationally and said Israel could not rely on its main ally to take the lead in confronting Iran over its nuclear program. Israel's Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon speaks during a swearing-in ceremony, at the Knesset, Israeli Parliament, in Jerusalem March 18, 2013. REUTERS/Baz Ratner Moshe Yaalon, whose remarks were reported in the Haaretz daily on Tuesday, caused friction with the United States only two months ago when he described Secretary of State John Kerry’s quest for Israeli-Palestinian peace as messianic and obsessive. His latest comments, confirmed by an Israeli official who was present at lecture Yaalon delivered at Tel Aviv University on Monday, displayed deep disappointment with U.S. President Barack Obama’s handling of burning world issues. “We had thought it would be the United States that would lead the campaign against Iran,” said Yaalon, who pointed to the Ukraine crisis as an example of Washington “showing weakness”. It was unclear from Yaalon’s reported remarks where he believed the United States, which on Monday imposed sanctions on two top aides to President Vladimir Putin and nine other people linked to Russia’s Crimean incursion, had gone wrong on Ukraine. Iran and six world powers will try to make headway on the nuclear dispute in talks that started in Vienna on Tuesday, with Western officials hoping the challenge will not be made even more difficult by the Ukraine crisis. Yaalon said that although “people know Iran cheats”, the United States and other nations chose to negotiate with Tehran on restricting activities they fear are aimed at developing atomic arms. “Therefore, on this matter, we have to behave as though we have nobody to look out for us but ourselves,” Yaalon said, echoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s veiled threats of unilateral military action against Iran if diplomacy fails. “Unfortunately, when it comes to negotiating at a Persian bazaar, the Iranians are better,” said Yaalon, a former armed forces chief and a hawkish member of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party. In the Middle East, Yaalon said, he had heard “voices of disappointment” over a lack of U.S. support for Sunni Muslim rebels in the three-year-old conflict in Syria. And on a recent visit in Asia, he added, he found “disappointment about China getting stronger and the U.S. getting weaker”. Netanyahu, whose country is widely believed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed nation, has denounced as a “historic mistake” an interim deal reached with Iran in November on curbing sensitive nuclear activities in return for limited sanctions relief. He has demanded that any final accord dismantle Tehran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges, a position at odds with Obama’s suggestion that Iran, which says its nuclear program is peaceful, could be allowed to enrich on a limited basis for civilian purposes. “Comfortable Westerners prefer to put off confrontation, if possible to next year or the next leadership term. But in the end, it will blow up,” Yaalon said.
“Black Death” by Zora Neale Hurston We Negroes in Eatonville know a number of things that the hustling, bustling white man never dreams of. He is a materialist with little care for overtones. They have only eyes and ears, we see with the skin. For instance, if a white person were halted on the streets of Orlando and told that Old Man Morgan, the excessively black Negro hoodoo man, can kill any person indicated and paid for, without ever leaving his house or even seeing his victim, he’d laugh in your face and walk away, wondering how long the Negro will continue to wallow in ignorance and superstition. But no black person in a radius of twenty miles will smile, not much. They know. His achievements are far too numerous to mention singly. Besides, any of his cures of “conjures” are kept secret. But everybody knows that he put the loveless curse on Bella Lewis. She has been married seven times but none of her husbands have ever remained with her longer than the twenty-eight days that Morgan had prescribed as the limit. Hirma Lester’s left track was brought to him with five dollars and when the new moon came again, Lester was stricken with paralysis while working in his orange grove. There was the bloody-flux that he put on Lucy Potts; he caused Emma Taylor’s teeth to drop out; he put the shed skin of a black snake in Horsos Brown’s shoes and made him as the Wandering Jew; he put a sprig of Lena Merchant’s hair in a bottle, corked it and threw it into a running stream with the neck pointing upstream, and she went crazy; he buried Lillie Wilcox’s finger-nails with lizard’s feet and dried up her blood. All of these things and more can easily be proved by the testimony of the villagers. They ought to know. He lives alone in a two-room hut down by Lake Blue Sink, the bottomless . His eyes are reddish and the large gold hoop ear-rings jangling on either side of his shrunken black face make the children fly in terror whenever they meet him on the street or in the woods where he goes to dig roots for his medicines. But the doctor does not spend his time merely making folks ill. He has sold himself to the devil over the powerful black cat’s bone that alone will float upstream and may do what he wills. Life and death are in his hands — he sometimes kills. He sent Old Lady Crooms to her death in the Lake. She was a rival hoodoo doctor and laid claims to equal power. She came to her death one night. That very morning Morgan had told several that he was tired of her pretenses — he would put an end to it and prove his powers. That very afternoon near sundown, she went down to the lake to bathe, telling her daughter, however, that she did not wish to go, but something seemed to be forcing her. About dusk someone heard her scream and rushed to the lake. She had fallen in the shallow water at the edge. The coroner from Orlando said she met her death by falling into the water during an epileptic fit. But the villagers knew. White people are very stupid about some things. They can think mightily but [illegible in original manuscript]. But the undoing of Beau Diddely is his masterpiece. He had come from up North somewhere. He was a waiter at the Park House over in Maitland where Docia Boger was a chamber-maid. She had a very pretty brown body and face, sang alto in the Methodist choir and played the blues on her guitar. Soon Beau Diddely was with her every moment he could spare from his work. He was stuck on her all right, for a time. They would linger in the shrubbery about Park Lake or go for long walks in the woods on Sunday afternoon to pick violets. They are abundant in the Florida woods in winter. The Park House always closed in April and Beau was planning to go North with the white tourists. It was then Docia’s mother discovered that Beau should have married her daughter weeks before. “Mist’ Diddely,” said Mrs. Boger, “Ah’m a widder ‘omen an’ Doshy’s all Ah got, an’ Ah know youse gointer do what you orter.” She hesitated a moment and studied his face. “‘Thout no trouble. Ah doan wanta make no talk ’round town.” In a split second the vivacious, smiling Beau had vanished. A very hard vitriolic stranger occupied his chair. “Looka heah, Mis’ Boger. I’m a man that’s traveled a lot–been most everywhere. Don’t try to come that stuff over me–what I got to marry Docia for?” “‘Cause–’cause”–the surprise of his answer threw the old woman into a panic. “Youse the cause of her condition, ain’tcher?” Docia, embarrassed, mortified, began to cry. “Oh, I see the little plot now!” He glanced maliciously toward the girl and back again to her mother. “But I’m none of your down–Southcountry–suckers. Go try that on some of these clod-hoppers. Don’t try to lie on me–I got money to fight.” “Beau,’ Docia sobbed, “You ain’t callin’ me a liah, is you?” And in her misery she started toward the man who through four months’ constant association and assurance she had learned to love and trust. “Yes! You’re lying–you sneaking little–oh you’re not even good sawdust! Me marry you! Why I could pick up a better woman out of the gutter than you! I’m a married man anyway, so you might as well forget your little scheme!” Docia fell back stunned. “But, but Beau, you said you wasn’t,” Docia wailed. “Oh,” Beau replied with a gesture of dismissal of the whole affair. “What difference does it make? A man will say anything at times. There are certain kinds of women that men always lie to.” In her mind’s eye Docia saw things for the first time without her tinted glasses and real panic seized her. She fell upon her knees and clasped the nattily clad legs of her seducer. “Oh Beau,” she wept, struggling to hold him, as he, fearing for the creases in his trousers, struggled to free himself–“You said–you–you promise–” “Oh, well, you ought not to have believed me–you ought to have known I didn’t mean it. Anyway I’m not going to marry you, so what’re you going to do? Do whatever you feel big enough to try–my shoulders are broad.” He left the house hating the two women bitterly, as only we hate those we have injured. At the hotel, omitting mention of his shows of affection, his pleas, his solemn promises to Docia, he told the other waiters how that piece of the earth’s refuse had tried to inveigle, to force him into a marriage. He enlarged upon his theme and told them all, in strict confidence, how she had been pursuing him all winter; how she had waited in ambush time and again and dragged him down by the lake and well, he was only human. It couldn’t have happened with the right kind of a girl, and he thought too much of himself to marry any other than the country’s best. The worst sin a woman could commit was to run after a man. So the next day Eatonville knew; and the scourge of tongues was added to Docia’s woes. Mrs. Boger and her daughter kept strictly indoors, suffering, weeping, growing bitter. “Mommer, if he jus’ hadn’t tried to make me out a bad girl, I could look over the rest in time, mommer, but–but he tried to make out–ah–” Docia broke down weeping again. Drip, drip, drip, went her daughter’s tears on the old woman’s heart, each drop calcifying a little the fibers till at the end of four days the petrifying process was complete. Where once had been warm, pulsing flesh was now cold heavy stone that pulled down, pressing out normal life and bowing the head of her. The woman died, and in that heavy cold stone a tiger, a female tiger–was cut by the chisel of shame. She was ready to answer the question Beau had flung so scornfully at her old head: “Well, what are you going to do?” Docia slept, huddled on the bed. A hot salt tear rose to Mrs. Boger’s eyes and rolled heavily down the quivering nose. Must Docia awake always to that awful desolation? Robbed of everything, even faith? She knew then that the world’s greatest crime is not murder–its most terrible punishment is meted to her of too much faith-too great a love. She turned down the light and stepped into the street. It was near midnight and the village slept. But she knew of one house where there would be a light; one pair of eyes still awake. As she approached Blue Sink she all but turned back. It was a dark night but the lake shimmered and glowed like phosphorous near the shore. It seemed that figures moved about on the quiet surface. She remembered that folks said Blue Sink the bottomless was Morgan’s graveyard. All Africa awoke in her blood. A cold prickly feeling stole over her and stood her hair on end. Her feet grew heavy and her tongue dry and stiff. In the swamp at the head of the lake, she saw Jack-O-Lanterns darting here and there and three hundred years of America passed like the mist of morning. Africa reached out its dark hand and claimed its own. Drums, tom,tom,tom,tom,tom,beat in her ears. Strange demons seized her. Witch doctors danced before her, laid hands upon her alternately freezing and burning her flesh. She cried out in formless terror more than once before she found herself within the house of Morgan. She was not permitted to tell her story. She opened her mouth but the old man chewed a camphor leaf or two, spat into a small pail of sand and asked: “How do yuh wanta kill ‘im? By water, by a sharp edge, or a bullet?” The old woman almost fell off of the chair in the amazement that he knew her mind. He merely chuckled a bit and handed her a drinking gourd. “Dip up a teeny bit of water an’ po’ hit on de flo’,–by dat time you’ll know.” She dipped the water out of a wooden pail and poured it upon the rough floor. “Ah wanta shoot him, but how kin ah’ ‘thout . . .?” “Looka heah” Morgan directed and pointed to a huge mirror–scarred–and dusty. He dusted its face carefully. “Look in dis glass ‘shout turnin’ yo’ head an’ when he comes, you shoot tuh kill. Take good aim!” Both faced about and gazed hard into the mirror that reached from floor to ceiling. Morgan turned once to spit into the pail of sand. The mirror grew misty, darker, near the center, then Mrs. Boger saw Beau walk to the center of the mirror and stand looking at her, glaring and sneering. She all but fainted. Morgan thrust the gun into her hand. She saw the expression on Beau Diddely’s face change from scorn to fear and she found it in herself to laugh. “Take good aim,” Morgan cautioned. “Yor cain’t shoot but once.” She leveled the gun at the heart of the apparition in the glass and fired. It collapsed; the mirror grew misty again, then cleared. “You’ll find things alright when you git home,” Morgan said. In horror she flung both money and gun at the old man who seized the money greedily, and she fled into the darkness, dreading nothing, thinking only of putting distance between her and the house of Morgan. The next day Eatonville was treated to another thrill. It seemed that Beau Diddely, the darling of the ladies, was in the hotel yard making love to another chamber-maid. In order that she might fully appreciate what a great victory was hers, he was reciting the Conquest of Docia, how she loved him, pursued him, knelt down and kissed his feet, begging him to marry her,–when suddenly he stood up very straight, clasped his hand over his heart, grew rigid and fell dead. The coroner’s verdict was death from natural causes–heart failure. But they were mystified by what looked like a powder burned directly over the heart. Probably a cigarette burn. But the Negroes knew instantly when they saw that mark, but everyone agreed that he got justice. Mrs. Boger and Docia moved to Jacksonville where she married well. And the white folks never knew and would have laughed had anyone told them. He who sees only with the eyes is very blind.
Up until late last year, the home page of the ICC Language Schools website boasted a group photo of all its teachers and staff emblazoned with the slogan: “Please come and join the ICC family.” In the dead center of this photo, in pride of place in the front row, was teacher Sulejman Brkic. In the picture, Brkic is a fresh-faced young man in his early 30s (he is 44 now), immaculately dressed in a well-pressed suit and tie — a poster boy, almost, for foreign language-school teachers in Japan. But those were happier times. Now the idea of being part of the “ICC family” has taken on a dark, bitter irony for Brkic, whose employment at the company was suddenly terminated after 22 years of service. He says that he now sees that the concept of so-called “family” is really a construct used by employers such as ICC to conceal a darker reality. “The word ‘family’ is often used by employers when speaking of . . . workers in order to hide the fact that they are really wage slaves. If we are a family, then who needs labor rights, right?” he says. “If ICC had been my family, it would have enrolled me in the health-care system in case I got sick and given me paid holidays to rest. Instead of that, my ‘ICC family’ banished me when I complained about it. What kind of family does that?” Brkic has now found himself locked in a legal battle with his former “family” that could set an important precedent for other workers in Japan. At the heart of the case is the issue of what, in legal terms, the nature of his employment status was while he worked for the company. Brkic taught an average of between 25 and 30 hours of French and English lessons per week at the school, for which he was paid only an hourly wage. He was able to take holidays, but these were always unpaid. ICC owner and director Armand Knafo argues that the contract between Brkic and the company was “not a contract of employment” but a “contract of business entrustment,” known in Japanese as a gyōmu itaku contract. In other words, ICC’s case hangs on convincing the court that Brkic worked for the company as a private or independent contractor rather than a regular employee. Brkic, who is Bosnian, was separated from his real family by the bloody Bosnian War. Brkic first came to Japan in 1991, a year before war broke out in his home country, after meeting a Japanese woman in Paris whom he later married. Brkic says the following years were a very stressful time for him, as he was so far from his family. “The feeling that ruled at that time was one of helplessness” in regards to his family in Bosnia, Brkic says — of “not being able to do anything for them from here in Japan.” One of his cousins died in the war and an uncle was imprisoned in a Serb concentration camp. Another family member was wounded and another escaped to Belgium as a refugee. He says he remained in Japan partly because he had nowhere else to go. More than 20 years on, Brkic believes that it was the issues of holiday pay and health insurance that ultimately led to his dismissal. On July 8 last year, he sent a letter to Knafo requesting paid holidays and to be enrolled in the shakai hoken social-insurance program. He asked for a total of 40 days’ paid holiday — 20 days per year for the last two years of his employment — that he believed he was legally entitled to as an employee. Under the Labor Standards Law, paid holidays are calculated according to how many days an employee works per week, not the number of hours worked per day. So, if someone works five days per week, as Brkic did, they are entitled to 10 days’ paid holiday a year after the first six months of work, a number that increases incrementally with each year of employment until it hits the limit of 20 days. The law does not differentiate between full- or part-time employment. Brkic also demanded that he be reimbursed for full transportation costs, especially for trial lessons, as this was work that teachers at the company did for free at the time. Two days later, Brkic received a letter from Knafo — of which The Japan Times has obtained a copy — titled “Last Warning.” To quote: “Dear Mr. Brkic, I consider your yesterday’s behavior towards me, as your employer, as an insult and a gross insubordination which could have resulted in instant dismissal. However, on humanitarian grounds, and considering the difficulties you might encounter in finding another job, after many prior warnings, I am going to give you a last chance to change your behavior and adhere to our school’s rules and guidelines. I tried to explain to you that I had a favorable solution to the transportation fees’ matter, but you refused to listen to me in an insulting manner. I request that you apologize to me in writing and that you promise not to repeat that behavior in the future.” According to Brkic, the “gross insubordination” mentioned in the letter refers to an argument he had with Knafo about his transport fee on the sidewalk near the Machida ICC school. Brkic says he had traveled all the way to the school from his girlfriend’s house in Saitama just to teach a trial lesson in Machida, on the other side of Tokyo, even though he would receive no money for the lesson, and he demanded to be paid the full return train fare. Instead, he was told he would only be paid the cheaper fare from his own home to the school. “I didn’t shout at him. He was talking to me, I interrupted him and told him I couldn’t listen anymore and left,” Brkic says. He also denies he had received any previous written warnings. Five days after that incident, on July 13, Knafo sent an internal email to the administrative staff at the school ordering them to begin reducing Brkic’s teaching hours and start monitoring him closely. To quote from that email, which The Japan Times has seen: “Don’t give new trial lessons to Sulejman Brkic without getting permission from the principal. Also, please report on his behavior, attitude and dress code on a regular basis.” The following day, a letter was sent by Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union, commonly known as Tozen, declaring Brkic’s union membership to the company and backing his request for paid holidays and enrolment in the social insurance program. Brkic continued to work at ICC but he says the atmosphere at the school changed dramatically. “I was, like, ‘Let’s fight this together,’ but all my colleagues, with whom I got on with really well, started to keep their distance. I eventually became a leper,” he says. The union entered into collective bargaining with ICC to try to reach some sort of compromise on the issues surrounding Brkic’s working conditions. But these negotiations fell apart, and on Oct. 19 he received a letter of dismissal from the school and was fired. In a written statement, Knafo explains why Brkic was dismissed: “The main reasons for the termination of the contract are the fact that Mr. Sulejman posted extremely inappropriate comments on the Internet which could cause considerable damage to the school’s reputation and he also ignored our repeated requests to delete said comments and to cease propagating such material. “In addition, his conduct during his lessons was contrary to our policy and we decided that there was no prospect of improving the situation.” The “inappropriate comments” mentioned above most likely refer to a number of postings Brkic made on Facebook, where he criticized ICC and referred to them as a “black company.” He also runs a left-wing political blog called Tokyo Spring and organizes a group that meets monthly under the same name in a Tokyo cafe. Extracts from this blog, his personal Facebook page and his Twitter account were submitted as evidence during the hearing process by ICC. The evidence included a number of postings about black companies in Japan where ICC is named, as well as apparently unrelated political material, such as a photograph Brkic posted on Facebook of Ahn Jung-Geun, the Korean independence fighter who assassinated Japanese Prime Minister Hirobumi Ito in 1909. In its court submission, ICC claims that these political postings hurt their relationship with Japan’s Defense Ministry, one of the school’s customers, although it provides no evidence of how this relationship was adversely affected. Brkic says that despite repeated requests from both sides to take the postings down and the fact it may damage his own case, he will not be silenced. “I am not going to stop. That is how freedom of expression gets damaged — a little here, a little there. Then you end up with a state secrecy law. . . . It is all we have: our voice, our speech.” Brkic’s dismissal is now a matter for the courts, as the union has launched a lawsuit calling for ICC to clarify Brkic’s relationship with the company, a type of suit known as chii kakunin, or “confirmation of position.” The lawsuit, filed at Yokohama District Court on Nov. 29, basically seeks to establish whether Brkic is still employed by the company, but in effect it is an attempt to overturn what the union believes was an unfair dismissal. Brkic and the union are also suing for all the back wages from the time Brkic was unable to work following his dismissal, as well as the legal fees. Contacted for ICC’s response to accusations made by Brkic, Knafo declined to comment beyond a short statement (part of which is quoted above), citing a desire “to avoid damaging Mr. Brkic’s reputation and credibility” and considering that the case is going through the courts. To date, there have been two hearings, the first in January and the second in March, where both sides submitted briefs to the court. There are likely to be around six or seven more hearings before testimony gets underway early next year. Tozen General Secretary Louis Carlet says the union cannot accept the “abusive treatment of a dedicated employee who simply wanted to exercise his rights under the laws of Japan.” For “22 years, ICC treated Sulejman like an employee both in word and action, not a gyōmu itaku contractor. Only after Sulejman joined a union and asked for paid holidays — as is his right — did ICC consult a lawyer and begin to claim Sulejman was a private contractor. Only then did ICC change the language they use and remove the website photo of the ‘ICC family’ with Sulejman in the middle. Sulejman was fired for asking for paid holidays and joining a union, his rights under labor law and the Constitution. That’s why the firing is illegal,” he says. Carlet believes the language ICC used in the “Last Warning” letter is clear evidence that Brkic was not a private contractor. He points to the first sentence in the letter, in which Knafo clearly refers to himself as the “employer.” Calling Brkic “insubordinate” in the letter is also additional proof he had the status of an employee, the union argues. “In the case of a contractor, like gyōmu itaku, you can’t give orders to the person. It is illegal to give orders to a contractor,” he says. The letter’s mention of Brkic’s noncompliance with official ICC “rules and guidelines” — such as by not following the school’s “dress and appearance code” — also suggest that Brkic was an employee, Carlet believes. He adds that Brkic was also being taxed at the rate company employees are normally taxed, not at the lower rate used for private contractors. At the root of the disagreement between Brkic and ICC about the nature of his employment status is the fact that for the whole 22 years he worked at the company, he never had a written, signed contract. Yet, according to Carlet, the absence of a written contract actually points to the fact he was an employee, not a sub-contractor. “Gyōmu-itaku is always with a contract. They are saying he is a contractor without a contract — that is ridiculous.” Despite all the bad blood that now exists between him and ICC management, Brkic says that all he really wants is his old job back. “I loved it. I loved my students. I had great relations with the students, with the staff, with everyone,” he says. “I’d take my old job back in a minute.” Comments and story ideas: [email protected]
Can we expect a good profit by adding this product to our line? Are the costs of developing the product minimal, for example can we use our existing facilities and resources? Does the product complement our existing product line? This is a cross-post from Jeffrey Paul Baumgartner . Jeffrey Baumgartner is the author of The Way of the Innovation Master and Report 103, creator of Jenni innovation process mgmt software, founder of jpb.com & father of two great sons. Follow him on Twitter at @creativeJeffrey . difference between a good idea and a bad idea?you don't know, then read on!in a company proposes a new idea to management, an informal two-step process is often followed—usually unconsciously. The first step is a gut-instinct evaluation. The manager looks at the idea, thinks about it and, if she likes it, instigates the second stage, which is asking the idea proposer to write up a business case of some kind.with this technique is that gut instinct is sometimes wrong, all the more so when considering radical ideas. There is a tendency towards conservatism when considering ideas involving radical change. Moreover, as I have stated before in this newsletter, the best ideas often sound daft at first. When an idea sounds daft, a busy manager is all too likely to reject it out of hand.business case, on the other hand is expensive. It takes valuable staff time from the author, as well as the people who review it. Of course blowing a few thousand dollars on a business case is nothing compared to blowing a few million on a failed idea. Nevertheless, we would certainly like to improve the odds of each business case being convincing, particularly if there is also a larger pool of tested ideas from which to build business cases.means of performing an initial analysis of an idea is a criteria-based evaluation. A criteria-based evaluation is one in which you determine a few basic criteria that are essential for ascertaining whether or not an idea is likely to work. You then determine how well the idea meets each criterion.if you are evaluating an idea for a new product, you would probably want to consider criteria such as:Clearly, you could complete such an initial evaluation of a product idea in just minutes.use a ‘5x5 criteria system’ for evaluating ideas. We determine five criteria and rate the idea against each criteria, on a scale of zero to five. Zero points means the idea does not meet the criteria at all, while five points means the idea completely meets the criteria. Multiply the total number of points the idea receives by four and the result is a score out of 100 possible points, which is easy to analyze.we improve accuracy by allowing some criteria to have higher weightings than others in order to represent their importance. We also allow several people to evaluate an idea, thus providing an even more accurate evaluation.5x5 criteria-based evaluation model has been used on all our creativity products since version one of BrainStormer in 1997. Today, all our web applications use the same core evaluation program which includes a number of features, such as variable weighting adjustment, multiple expert evaluations of an idea (Jenni idea management), comparison evaluation of multiple ideas against a single criteria-set (Sylvia web brainstorming and ideasCampaign), dynamic report generation and more.according to clients, has been lightening fast, yet accurate evaluations of ideas.we have a simple evaluation tool you can play with (free) at http://www.jpb.com/creative/evaluator.php
Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email TENNIS balls that have survived being thrashed around by the world’s best players at this year's Wimbledon Championships are being sent off to help in a very different survival bid. The All England Lawn Tennis Club contacted Surrey Wildlife Trust (SWT) to offer the used balls as an alternative home for the threatened harvest mouse. With numbers thought to be declining in Surrey, and their habitat being reduced, the mice have been put on the Biodiversity Action Plan List for threatened species. A total of 150 balls will recover from being hit by the likes of Andy Murray and East Horsley's own Chris Eaton by housing the mice at sites in Surrey. They include Thundry Meadows near Elstead, Papercourt Marshes near Send, and Brentmoor Heath around West End and Bisley. Traditionally, spherical nests are built by the animals at the top of long dense stalks, such as brambles, in their natural habitat of rough grassland, where they find food such as seeds, berries and insects. As these habitats are now under threat, it is thought the mice could be preserved by providing them with a ready-made home. Dave Williams, mammal project manager at SWT, said: "After modifying the balls to make them a bit more mouse-friendly - that is drilling a front door in each of them and mounting them on stakes - they were soon ready for any homeless harvest mouse to take vacant possession." "The mice nest throughout the summer and will hopefully find the tennis balls an attractive home. We’ll monitor activity and clean out those which have been used and vacated at the end of the season, ready for next year."
Norma McCorvey, better known as Jane Roe from the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, passed away on Feb. 18 after spending decades at the heart of the abortion debate. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) When Flip Benham opened an office of his antiabortion group next door to an abortion clinic that employed Norma McCorvey, the two saw each other through the cliches of their respective ideologies. McCorvey, also known as “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade, saw Benham’s group as “vicious, mean-spirited, fire-breathing, sanctimonious, self-righteous, bigoted hypocrites,” she would later write. Benham, a minister, told the New York Times that he was setting up shop “at the gates of hell.” [Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide, dies at 69] Those “hypocrites” had already driven an abortion doctor out of Dallas and shut down another clinic in the city. And what Benham called the “gates of hell” was the employer of the woman better known by the pseudonym she used in the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal. Almost no one expected McCorvey and Benham to stay neighbors long. Absolutely no one expected that before 1995 was over, they would call each other friends. Nor that their meeting would lead McCorvey to spend the rest of her life — which ended Saturday — as an opponent of the movement she once symbolized. A high school dropout whose Supreme Court victory came too late for her to have the abortion she wanted, McCorvey was working as a marketing director at A Choice for Women in north Dallas that spring. After years of semi-anonymity, she had just released a book called “I Am Roe,” and was somewhat awkwardly assuming the role of a public figure. Like most in Dallas’s antiabortion circles, she knew Benham and his group, Operation Rescue, by infamy. Operation Rescue had protested a nearby clinic every day for six years — until the clinic shut down. The group relocated its headquarters to the suite beside A Choice for Women, in March 1995. “The Lord has given us this place right next door where they’re killing little boys and girls,” Benham told the Dallas Morning News on move-in day. McCorvey phoned police twice before noon. Norma McCorvey in 1983. (Bill Janscha/AP) From Day One, the groups’ shared parking lot became a mob of protesters and reporters. McCorvey and Benham stood in the thick of it, giving competing interviews and sizing each other up. “Are you still killing babies, Miss Norma?” the minister asked her in the parking lot, McCorvey wrote in her second book, “Won By Love.” “Lighten up,” she replied. “What you need is to go to a good Beach Boys concert.” “Miss Norma, I haven’t been to a Beach Boys concert since 1976,” Benham said. Their previous interactions had been few, brief and hostile, McCorvey wrote. Benham had called her a baby killer at her book signing. She once left him drunken taunts on his answering machine. But with that brief conversation — about the Beach Boys, no less — “Flip became more human to me,” she wrote. Accounts of their early friendship diverge somewhat. Benham would later tell Vanity Fair that McCorvey immediately began dropping by his office to “ask us to pray for her.” McCorvey described a more reluctant courtship, but agreed that the minister’s humility disarmed her. [The fascinating life of Norma McCorvey, the ‘Jane Roe’ in Roe v. Wade] She recalled the weekend after Benham moved in. Saturdays were always big protest days, she wrote, and McCorvey was dreading the first one with Operation Rescue next door. As McCorvey stood outside smoking, she wrote, Benham sat down beside her. He apologized for calling her names: “I saw my words drop into your heart, and I know they hurt you deeply.” McCorvey was taken aback. She excused herself, went inside and cried, she wrote. The office block settled into a bizarre pattern: regular police calls and noisy protests in the parking lot, coupled with nascent friendships between employees in opposite offices. “The war in front of our clinic became a war of love and hatred,” McCorvey wrote in her book. About a month after Operation Rescue moved in, county constables raided it. The antiabortion group owed more than $1 million to Planned Parenthood after losing a lawsuit for disrupting clinics in another city. The authorities took everything in lieu of payment. Workers “were forced to stand in the chairless office … and change babies’ diapers on the floor,” the Morning News reported. McCorvey recalled walking next door to find her rivals in “barely contained panic.” “I am so, so sorry,” she said. McCorvey lent her neighbors a fax machine. So it went. In private, after hours, Benham would share Bible passages with McCorvey, she wrote. She, in turn, would explain the complicated mix of religions and mystical philosophies she believed in. [Roe v. Wade may be doomed. Dark days are ahead for reproductive rights.] Her anger at Benham would return whenever she watched him give a bombastic interview. When she first took Benham up on a challenge to go to church, she was put off by a sermon against homosexuals — McCorvey had long identified as a lesbian. Still, she wrote, “I envied them for what they had.” One day, she wrote, after the doctor and other employees had left the clinic, she climbed onto the operation table. A symbol to the abortion movement for 20 years, she had never had the procedure herself. The Supreme Court ruling came too late for her. The two children she bore out of wedlock were given up for adoption. “I put my feet into the stirrups and lay there for some time,” McCorvey wrote in her book. She reflected. On a particularly bad Saturday morning, more than 50 protesters crowded the clinic parking lot. The protests were more than annoyances. It had been just a few months since the last American abortion worker was murdered, and Jane Roe herself was as good a target as any. Norma McCorvey is embraced by the Rev. Robert L. Schenck before she addresses a memorial service at Georgetown University in 1996. (Cameron Craig/AP) “I was terrified,” McCorvey wrote. “And then, almost like an angel, Flip walked out.” With a few quiet words to the protest leader, the minister cleared the entire parking lot. When everyone was gone, he walked over and told her a story. “You know, Miss Norma, I used to be pro-choice,” Benham said, she wrote. “When my wife found out she was pregnant with our twins, I told her to have an abortion.” The confession astounded McCorvey: “If Flip was supposed to be my archenemy, why was he giving me information that could prove damaging to his reputation?” In fact, the minister had told the same story to the Morning News a year earlier, for a profile in the newspaper. But McCorvey wrote that she went home and consulted Tarot cards for the meaning of it all. Before long, she began to imagine infants’ laughter as she worked in the clinic. “Something inside me had changed,” she wrote. In August of 1995, McCorvey was invited to church by an Operation Rescue worker — a woman whose young children she had sometimes watched. She did not know many in the congregation, she wrote, but many seemed to know her before the pastor spoke. [Abortion falls to lowest level since Roe v. Wade] “I can’t really recall much of what he shared,” McCorvey wrote, “but each word began to open the window in my heart just a little farther.” After the service, she accompanied the congregants to a house outside Dallas, to a backyard swimming pool, where she was baptized. The event had been publicized in advance, but still took the country by surprise. “Well, as I understand it, she’s gone through a number of changes in her life and had a serious religious conversion and believes that abortion is wrong now,” President Bill Clinton said the next day. McCorvey and Benham explained the conversion in their own chosen words. “Jesus Christ has reached through the abortion-mill wall and touched the heart of Norma McCorvey,” Benham told the Morning News. “I think I have always been pro-life,” McCorvey told a local radio station. “I just didn’t know it.” In years to come, she would become as much a symbol to the antiabortion movement as she had been to abortion rights supporters. Which is to say, a sometimes awkward one. “Do not vote for Barack Obama,” McCorvey said against a backdrop of images of aborted fetuses, according to Vanity Fair. “He murders babies.” Some were suspicious that her religious conversion was planned for publicity. After she abandoned them, abortion advocates painted McCorvey as an attention-starved figurehead. Even Benham — years later — told Vanity Fair “she just fishes for money.” But on the day after her baptism, with a new religion and a new friend, “Jane Roe” didn’t seem interested in publicity. “There will be no more public appearances from me,” her answering machine said when the Morning News phoned. “I am going to be regular person Norma McCorvey.” More reading: Ohio’s new abortion law is an assault on Roe. Here’s why it won’t work.
A Flight to the Borderlands (c) 1998, 2004, 2009 Paul Gazis Snow on the Mountains at Big Sur Now the story can be told... Like all desperate tales, it began innocently enough. Ed, Don, and I emerged from our tents in the campground at Big Sur, ready for a day of flying. The sight that greeted us was spectacular. A cold front had passed during the night, the sky was clear as crystal, and the tops of the mountains were covered with a fine dusting of snow. It seemed too incredible to be real - the pale blue sky, dark green hills, snow-covered peaks to the east, and shimmering Pacific ocean to the west but there it was, plain before our eyes. It was obvious that the day would be fliable, and might even be good. It was also clear that there was no reason to hurry, so we lingered over breakfast and took our time heading up the hill. We didn't have the slightest inkling how this day would end. By the time we reached launch, conditions had changed. Clouds had formed - indeed, the higher launches were socked in - and the wind had picked up to almost 20 miles per hour. This seemed rather strong for Big Sur, which is usually a sled ride to the beach a long way away, and I felt somewhat intimidated by the glide. But Ed and Don didnt seem worried, and the Plasket launch was still below cloudbase, so we unloaded there and began to set up. Conditions may have been marginal, but they hardly seemed dangerous. The wind might have been strong, but it wasnt so strong that we couldnt penetrate out to the beach. The clouds might have been spreading, but so far they were all safely above and behind the ridge. My chief concern was the launch itself. This would be near my self-imposed limits for wind speed and direction at an unfamiliar site. I elected to go second - the timid pilot's position - so I could watch my Don go first and still get some wire assistance from Ed. I neednt have worried. The launch itself was easy. I held the nose down, balanced the wing, and waited for a cycle. Then I yelled, "Clear!" ran, and was off. If the launch was anticlimactic, the flight was anything but. Quite the contrary it was glorious! My early concern about a brief white-knuckled dash to the beach was entirely unjustified. There was no danger of sinking out. It was easy to stay up! Lift was everywhere! A few small clouds had formed below my altitude in front of the ridge, but they were scattered and easy to avoid. In minutes, I had climbed to 3800' MSL - 600' above launch. I spent the next hour playing around in the air. The mountains, the ocean, and the sky all shone with a beauty that defies any power of description. Some moments are so glorious, so overpowering, so overwhelming, that they seize you by the senses and drag you out of the prison of your skull, straight out into the world. Language is too feeble a tool to describe such an experience. One struggles for words, but the only words that come are, "I saw mountains," "The ocean was dark," or, "The sky was very blue." For that timeless hour, I was not just a man flying a hang glider. I was the glider. I was the mountains. I was the ocean. I was the sky. I remember watching great dark cloud-shadows sweep across the ocean. I remember glimpsing of dark green hills appear and vanish behind brilliant swaths of white. I remember flying along a mere wingspan upwind of a cloud as my shadow, surrounded by a rainbow, hurtled through the mists beside me. I do not remember the slightest hint of danger. The first sign that something might be wrong came when Ed left the ridge, stuffed the bar, and began to fly out towards the beach. I watched him go with some curiosity. He seemed to be heading down to land. Why was he leaving so soon, I wondered? It was still quite early in the day surely we could fly for several more hours. My friend Don seemed to agree with me, for he was headed north along the ridge, looking for more places to play. As I watched, he vanished from sight. After some thought, I decided to follow Ed. Perhaps he knew something I didn't. But I was not in a hurry to follow his route, for Ed had chosen to sacrifice altitude for speed. Given the conditions, this seemed unwise. Sacrifice too much altitude and I might end up below the lift band, down in a valley, trying to penetrate out to the beach in a venturi. This would not be fun, so I chose to fly slower and stay as high as I could while still making progress towards the LZ. By now the clouds were closer together. Cloudbase was well below me, so I had a few tense moments, as I dodged between them. But it wasn't hard to avoid getting whited out, and I wasnt worried, yet. Then, as I watched, a wall of cloud formed between me and the beach. I did not, at first, grasp the implications. Surely that wall of clouds had nothing to do with me! It was more than a mile away! I was still in compliance with the cloud clearance regulations prescribed by the Federal Aviation Regulations Part 103 for flight more than 1500 feet above the terrain: three miles visibility, and either 500 feet below, 1000 feet above, or 2000 feet to the side of the overcast. Surely I could not be in any danger if I was in compliance with the FARs. But the wall of clouds was unbroken. It reached from the treetops, two thousand feet below me, to a point thousands of feet above my head and stretched for miles to either side. It might have been more than a mile away, but it was blowing up the hillside at 20 miles per hour. It would reach me in three minutes. As those three fateful minutes ticked past, I realized that I had precisely two choices. I could roll into a steep bank, dive down, and stick the glider into a tree while I still was able to see, or I could keep flying straight and level, into the wall of clouds, and hope to make it through to the other side. I made the wrong choice. In my defense I must say that the decision to deliberately crash into the trees would have been a difficult one. Even now, knowing what was going to happen, I am not sure I could make it. That is certainly what I should have done. I might have failed in my attempt at a tree landing, I might have been injured, I might even have died, but I would still have been able to exercise some control over my destiny. I would still have been a pilot. But instead, I tried to fly through the clouds. Visibility vanished in a heartbeat. In an instant, the familiar world of colors was gone. The ocean, mountains, coast, and sun were nowhere to be seen. I was alone in a world of pure white. I was not immediately concerned. Surely, I thought, these clouds could not be very thick. In a few seconds I would be able to see the sun. Seconds passed. More seconds passed, with no sign of the sun, I began to feel concerned, but I was able to deny the gravity of my situation. Surely it only seemed that I had been in the cloud for a long time. Surely I would see the sun in a few minutes. Minutes passed. I began to feel the first stirrings of real fear. At last, it became evident that something was terribly wrong. Either the clouds were thicker than I thought, or I had been turned around. I was not going to see the sun in a few minutes. Indeed, if I didnt find a way out of this situation, I might never see the Sun again. I reviewed my options, but these were few: I could keep trying to fly in a straight line, I could try to turn around and fly back the way I had come, or I could throw my parachute. The first option was futile. In the absence of any visual reference to the ground, there was no way I could hope to fly in a straight line. The second option was even more futile if such a thing was possible. As for the third: a parachute seemed like an extremely bad idea. It was a windy day. If I came down under canopy, I would go into the trees at more than 20 miles per hour, This would almost certainly leave me injured and immobilized. In this terrain, in this kind of weather, I might never be found. Unable to move, I would eventually die of exposure. All I could do was keep flying at best glide speed I knew from past experiment that this was the speed at which my glider was most stable keep looking ahead, and hope I spotted the terrain in time to react. This was not much of a hope. Indeed, it was no real hope at all. I had no idea how much altitude Id lost, for I was afraid to look at my altimeter, but I was almost certainly below the level of the surrounding ridges. When I spotted the terrain assuming that I spotted anything at all it would almost certainly be directly in front of me and too close to avoid. More minutes passed. The clouds turned from white to gray. I did not know what this meant, but I was fairly sure that it didnt mean anything good. For several moments, I tried to persuade myself that I was dreaming. It was the only way I could think of to escape the situation. I might seem to be in serious trouble, helpless, and quite likely to die, but if it turned out that I was only dreaming, everything would be OK. If only it would turn out that I was dreaming! But I wasn't dreaming, of course. No matter how much I might wish otherwise, I was really awake. This was really happening. And I really was in serious trouble. Alas. At last, at long last, I resigned myself to death. There was no doubt in my mind that I was going to die. There was no doubt at all. I was no longer a pilot in any meaningful sense of the word. Lacking any sense of attitude or direction, I was just a helpless passenger aboard a glider that was almost certainly headed downwind back towards the ridge. My last sight would be a brief glimpse of a cliff rushing up at 50 miles per hour to kill me At such moments, as one stares into the abyss, one is supposed to have a sudden attack of religion. One is supposed to pray to some god any convenient god that you always did believe in them, you are sorry for all of your sins, and if he, she, they, or it will just get you out of this mess, you will head straight to the nearest church, temple, or neighborhood reading room. Im glad to say that such a thought never crossed my mind. Oh, I did consider it in an abstract sort of way i.e. "How interesting. I'm about to die. I suppose I could pray to Kwannon, Goddess of Mercy, in the hope that she might rescue me, or promise my soul to Odin if he will accept me into Valhalla." But this seemed like a pointless waste of time. If I only had a few minutes left to live, why should I waste them praying to some oppressive myth invented by a bunch of ignorant desert pastoralists? I had better things to do! I was going to savor the few brief moments I had left! I realized two things. The first was that my life until that moment had been miserable. I had spent too many years in a place that I hated, living under horrible conditions, with a companion I was learning to despise. Why had I endured this nonsense when life was so short? It was now precisely too late to change things. Even worse, THERE WAS MONEY LEFT IN MY BANK ACCOUNT THAT I WAS NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO SPEND! OTHER PEOPLE WERE GOING TO GET IT! This sucked. If I got out of this mess, things were going to change! My second realization was that I hadn't told my friends that I loved them. This seemed like a terrible omission. Now I was going to die, and they would never know. If I ever got out of this mess, I was going to call everyone I cared for and let them know how that I cared. The mists below parted for an instant, and I saw trees rushing past less than a hundred feet below. I did not recognize the trees and didnt have the slightest idea where I was. I only knew, as the clouds closed in again, that this was the end. Sometime in the next few seconds, some dark hard thing was going to reach up and claw me out of the sky. Then, suddenly, the clouds were gone! I did not, at first, realize what had happened, so sudden and shocking was the change. One moment I was surrounded by gray, the next I could see again! Unfortunately, things hadnt changed all that much for the better, for I was not in a good place. I had dropped below cloudbase - I distinctly remember a lid of gray above me - but I was also way back in a narrow valley, deep down in some kind of rotor turbulence. I must have flown straight towards a ridge, been picked up by ridge lift, cleared the terrain by less than a hundred feet those must have been the trees I saw and been dropped by sink into the valley on the other side. By reflex I turned to fly down the valley, and edged towards the downwind side to look for lift. I thought I knew my position I would later discover how wrong I was and that if I made it around a bend in front of me, I would be within sight of the landing zone. But it was by no means clear I could make it that far, for I was sinking like a stone, and hadnt had all that much altitude to begin with. Indeed, it was all too likely I would not make it out of the valley at all. At last, too late to do me any real good, I finally had an attack of common sense. "Paul," I thought, "you have made nothing but bad decisions for the last five minutes. It's time to make a good decision. You are going to go down. Why not pick a good place to land and put this glider on the ground while you still have some control over the situation." There weren't any good places to land, not really, but I picked the best place I could, and headed towards what I thought was a flat spot (I was wrong) near what I thought was a settlement (once again, I was quite wrong). It felt strange to be setting up a landing approach for what was obviously not going to be a landing. Pull in, kick out of the harness, hands on the downtubes. Turn base, turn final, keep speed up, watch out for the rotor of the trees, and keep aiming for that spot which is NOT FLAT IT'S NOT A LANDING ZONE IT IS A STEEP SLOPE COVERED WITH TREES THIS IS NOT A LANDING THIS IS GOING TO BE A CRASH! The trees rushed up to meet me. I pushed out to slow down, let go of the control frame, and curled up into a ball. There was a moment of indescribable violence... ...then I found myself hanging in my harness a few feet above the ground. I was alive! The world was a blur, for my glasses had been knocked from my face, I was stunned, Id had the breath knocked out of me, and there was an ominous pain in my side, but I was still alive! I felt compelled to comment on this fact. "I'm ALIVE!" I croaked. "Hunh! Hunh! I'm ALIVE!" "Date: 3-11-90. Site: Big Sur. Glider: Sport 150E Full Race. Launch: 3200 MSL. Wind: WNW 15-25. Type air: cloud suck, clouds. Airtime: 1:20. Flight number: 624 . Max altitude: 3800 MSL. XC miles: 4. Distance from spot: --. Good launch, cloud base dropped, clouds under me. Whited out, trapped in valley in rotor. Crash, almost died. Yow!" This accomplished, I stood up to look around. My glider was tangled in a thicket of young saplings with its nose and right wing low. It looked very strange there, like some alien visitor from another planet, for this was not the sort of place that a glider belonged. A large boulder, the size of a small car, lay just underneath the control bar. There were scrape marks in the moss that covered the boulder, and matching scrape marks on my chest-mount parachute container. This explained the pain in my side. I had bounced off the boulder and cracked some ribs. If I'd been wearing a side-mounted parachute, or had hit a few inches to the right, left, up, or down, I might well have been have been incapacitated or killed. This was most certainly food for thought! Indeed, as I looked around, I realized that I was still in serious trouble. I was lost in the middle of impassible terrain. No one else knew where I was, and they might not, as yet, even know that I was missing. Even if they called for a search, the ceiling was too low to allow a search from the air I knew this from what can only be described as vivid first-hand experience and there was no way they could hope to find me from the ground. I had no food, for Id eaten my emergency supplies several months ago when I was hungry after a long flight, I had nothing to drink, for my plastic water bottle had cracked open on impact, no radio, and I had no way to start a fire. If I was going to be rescued, I would have rescue myself. I also faced a rather gruesome time limit. I had crashed into a thicket of poison oak - the plant is unavoidable in the coast range - to which I am violently allergic. In twelve hours a day at most I could expect to be incapacitated. If I did not get out by then, I might never get out at all. For lack of anything better to do, I broke down my wing. My rational to the extent that I did indeed have a rational was that I didnt want it to mislead potential searchers. I would try to walk out with the glider, abandon it if I couldn't carry it, and then, if I still couldn't make any progress, I would crawl back to where Id left the wing, spread it out so it would be visible from the air, and hope that the weather would clear. My real reason, of course, was that I just couldn't bear to leave the poor thing behind. The brush was so thick that I had to tie it out of the way with my helmet, harness bag, and sail ties, and partially disassemble the glider to break it down. There seemed no meaningful hope that I could actually carry it with me. But I set off, I crawling downhill because the slope was steep, and any other direction seemed out of the question. Also, I recalled a brief glimpse of what I hoped was a settlement in that direction. It was fortunate that I chose to bring the glider with me, for I could never have escaped without it. The brush was impassible on foot. The only way I could move was to use the glider as bridge, pushing it ahead of me, crawling along the bagged-up wing, then rolling off into the brush to repeat the process. At no time during this process did my feet ever touch the ground. At one point I abandoned the glider and tried to continue without it, but this was more like swimming than walking, and it took me five minutes to advance six feet. When I turned around, I found it almost impossible to get back to the wing, even though it was only a few inches away from my outstretched fingers. I wasnt scared, exactly. Instead, my feelings were a strange mixture of anger and frustration. I was in serious trouble, to be sure, but I was also stuck in this damned undergrowth. When was it ever going to end? And where was that clearing I thought Id spotted from the air? After an hour of struggle, during which I covered perhaps two hundred yards, I came upon a glass jug, buried in the undergrowth. I did not find this very reassuring. True, it was a sign of civilization, but its implications were ambiguous. Glass is a durable material, and the design of glass jugs has not changed much over the course of the last century. The jug could plausibly have lain there since the time of William Randolf Hearst. But then, a dozen yards or so farther on, I came upon some beer cans. Better yet, they were ALUMINUM cans. This was more like it! If these cans were made of aluminum, they couldnt be much more than two decades old. Encouraged, I pressed onward, and a short time later, I burst out of the brush onto a jeep trail. For several minutes I lay on the trail, gasping for breath, with my glider half in and half out of the brush. Somehow, this seemed the right thing to do. Then I crawled to my feet and limped down the trail, leaving my gear behind. Once again, I chose to head downhill, for my condition was such that the other direction did not seem like an option. The trail ended in a small clearing. In the middle of the clearing, an ancient picnic table moldering beneath the trees. This, it seemed, was the `settlement' I had seen from the air. No picnickers were in evidence, ancient or otherwise. After pondering this mystery for several minutes, I limped back to my glider and dragged it down to the table. I couldnt carry the wing any farther and this seemed like as good a place as any to leave it while I tried to hike out. I would take my harness with me, since it contained equipment that might be useful, and leave a note with the glider to let any potential rescuers know where to look for me. This note, written on the back of an old bank deposit slip, also sits before me: "It is 1545 Sunday 3-11-90. I crashed about 200 yards uphill from here. I'm OK. I'm leaving the glider here and trying to hike out the jeep trail. Paul Gazis." I still had no idea where I was, but I wasnt entirely without resources. I may not have had a compass, but I had an altimeter, which could be used for navigation. I had a pen and the back of my log book in which to make a map. I had plenty of warm clothes, a toolkit and knife, and my harness and helmet might be good for something. Also, the existence of a jeep trail implied the existence of jeeps. I would hike up the trail and see where it lead. Surely I couldnt be more than an hour or two from civilization. After a stiff climb, I came to a fork in the trail. I marked this on my map along with its altitude, scratched an arrow on the ground, and left a pile of rocks as a marker. Then I turned left because this was downhill and continued through the trees. A short time later, I reached a dead end. Like the clearing with the picnic table, this dead end contained an artifact: a plastic garbage with an old newspaper inside. I was afraid to examine the headline to closely for fear that it might say something like, 'Truman Defeats Dewey!' or, 'Japanese Surprise Attack on Pearl Harbor! War Declared!' but this was still another sign of civilization. I marked the spot on my map, then headed back up the hill to try the other fork. I was sure this would lead somewhere useful. Ho ho. Little did I know. An hour passed, and then another. I found two more forks in the trail, each of which I marked each one on the ground and on my map, along with notes to record the altitude and direction of slope. That meant a total of three forks and five trails in all. But none of these trails lead to an exit. Each and every one of them lead to a dead end. Needless to say, I was mystified. These were most certainly jeep trails, ruts and all, but they didnt seem to go anywhere. In particular, there did not appear to be any way in or out of this place. How did they get the jeeps here? Did they airlift them by helicopter? Did they pack the parts in on foot, assemble the jeeps here for some purpose I could not even begin to imagine, then take them apart and carry the components back out when they were done? None of these explanations seemed plausible. Unfortunately another explanation was all too likely. It was possible that this strange and inexplicable maze had once been part of a larger system of roads that had been destroyed by the passage of time. There might no longer be a way out. If so, I was still in trouble. If I left this maze and pressed straight into the brush, my chances of escape were slim. It must have been around then that I heard the sound of a helicopter. I had no way to signal it, or even to see it, and I was also perplexed. What were they doing aloft in this weather? Were they looking for me? This seemed unlikely, for Id only been missing for two hours; surely this was not long enough for a search to be organized. In this I was correct, for as I found out later, mine had not been the only adventure of the day. Whatever its mission, there was no way the helicopter could help me. I listened to the sound of rotors fading into the distance, then returned my attention to my map. Perhaps it contained a clue. I had explored five dead ends. According to my notes, four of these contained some kind of artifact: a picnic table, a garbage can with a newspaper, an abandoned cooler, and some beer cans. The fifth dead end was empty. Why was it different from the others? It was certainly worth another inspection. I slogged back up the trail to this final cul de sac and examined it closely, to discover that it was not a dead end after all. What I had thought was the end of the trail was actually a large fallen tree. This was a substantial obstacle, but nothing compared with my desperate crawl through the brush. A brief scramble got me over it. On the other side, the trail continued up the hill into the woods. Another quarter hour of marching brought me to a forest service road. When I saw the road, I felt a wave of relief. For the first time since the clouds had engulfed me three hours earlier, I began to believe I would survive. Oh, I still had a choice to make right or left but this road looked well traveled and maintained, so I was sure it would lead somewhere. I turned left, since that was the direction downhill, and continued marching. Now that I knew I would live, my thoughts turned to the possible consequences of my adventure. These were not particularly pleasant to contemplate. Id been forced to abandon my glider, which I doubted I would ever see again. I had what felt like a bruised knee and a cracked rib. Id been forced to crawl through poison oak, roll in it, breath it, and perhaps even swallow it, for more than an hour. Such is the extent of my allergy to this hellish weed that I could look forward to a month of agony, and possibly hospitalization. My adventure was unlikely to help our relationship with the local landowners it might even put some pressure on the site, in which case the pilot community would not be pleased. I had little to look forward too, and I was cold, damp, and miserable as I limped down the hill. Then I had a strange insight. "Paul," I thought, "this is an Adventure! People pay money to read books or watch movies about adventures like these, and here you are having one (almost) for free! You'd bloody well better enjoy it!" I didn't enjoy it, of course, but in some strange way this thought lifted my spirits. It took me at least an hour, perhaps two, to hike down that road. Its length was disturbing. Id come out of the clouds way back in the valley, and there was no way I could ever have made it out to the beach. Indeed, the more I saw of the surroundings the more I realized that I'd set down in the only place from which I could possibly have made it to a trail anywhere else and I'd still be crawling through the brush. Even more disturbing was the fact that none of my surroundings were familiar. This was not the valley I thought it was. I had flown farther in the clouds than I realized. When we reconstructed my flight, weeks later, we determined that I must have been in the clouds for at least five minutes, during which I flew for five miles, crossed three ridges, and lost 1500 feet (!!!) of altitude. When I reached the end of the road, where it met Route 1, I received a further shock. There was no beach here. There was no place to land at all. The valley ended in a sheer cliff that dropped straight to the ocean. Even if I had managed somehow to fly out to the mouth of the valley, I would have flown straight into a box. I turned north I know not why, since I still thought I was north of the LZ and limped down the shoulder of the highway. Then I rounded a corner to receive my final surprise. Far in the distance almost, it seemed, on the very horizon I could see rocks that I recognized as the ones that lay offshore of the campground. They were at least five miles away! I had thought I was flying west in the clouds, but I had actually flown several miles to the south! This was most definitely food for thought. Suppose I had turned a few degrees more, or a few degrees less, as could easily have happened? In the former case I would have emerged miles offshore, gone down in the ocean, and drowned. In the later, I would have crashed downwind into some nameless ridge far back in the coast range and theyd never even have found my body. Neither of these possibilities was particularly comforting, so I turned my attention to the problem of getting back to the campsite. It was too far to walk, so I would have to hitch a ride. Unfortunately, the odds that a bedraggled pilot, his clothes tattered and shredded by a long crawl through the brush, might hitch a ride late in the day on the California coast at the end of a weekend are slim. Twenty-two cars passed without slowing down, and I could imagine the same conversation in each one. "On look, Harold! There's a man by the side of the road waving for help!' "I don't know, Esmerelda! He looks like another one of those hippie drug-addict illegal immigrants with deviant sexual practices that our pastor warned us about! I'll bet he's even a Democrat! We'd better not stop!" "Oh, Harold! I'm glad you are here to protect me!" Eventually I came to a turnoff in which three cars were parked. These offered better scope for requesting assistance since they were stationary, and I might actually hope to engage their occupants in conversation, but I realized that I would have to chose my prospects carefully. The two beautiful women seemed unlikely that sort of thing only works in the movies, in the real world, they would be certain to flee at the approach of an injured stranger. The retired couple were right out i.e. "Harold!" "Quick, Esmerelda! Get the old .45 I used to carry back during the Fillipino Insurrection!" BLAM! Et cetera. That left the two burly fellows in the Mustang convertible with Midwestern license plates. This seemed promising. They would have little reason to fear a lone stranger, and tourists from the Midwest might be less likely to brush me off as a panhandler. Still, I considered my words carefully as I approached them. "Excuse me," I said. "I'm a hang glider Pilot and I Crashed a few miles south of here. Could you possibly give me a ride a few miles north to my camp? It's only a few miles." I was careful to get the words `pilot' and `crash' out as soon as possible, before they had a chance to ignore me. It worked. I could see the thoughts running through their heads: `Tattered clothes... unsteady gait... matted hair... pilot... crash... he's probably a hippie drug-addict illegal immigrant with deviant sexual practices like our pastor warned us... wait a second. Pilot? Crash! Could this guy be telling the truth?' They didnt seem entirely sure they believed me, but my two nameless rescuers were still willing to give me a ride. I never did learn their names, and I doubt they will ever read this tale, but if they ever do, thanks guys! You did a good deed that day! The conversation during the ride back to the campground was somewhat strained. This was understandable, I think, given the circumstances. "So, you, uh, fly hang gliders?" "Uh, yes." "Is it fun?" "Well... uh... usually." Fortunately for my benefactors, the ride was short. We arrived at the Sand Dollar day use area to find an ambulance in the parking lot. "Let me off there," I said. "They're waiting for me." My rescuers obliged with what I suspect was a sigh of relief and sped off, perhaps to return to the Midwest with a tale to tell. Meanwhile, I limped over to the ambulance, which I discovered was not waiting for me after all. It seemed they had come here for Dan, who had been rotored into Sand Dollar LZ, suffered a concussion, and been airlifted to a hospital for observation by the helicopter Id heard several hours before. But they were glad to see me, for theyd known a pilot was still missing. They took my name, gave me the address of the hospital, then spend off into the evening. There's not much more to tell. I collected Dan's gear and the relevant phone numbers. Then, since I had no way to recover my wing, I drove home to make the necessary phone calls and seek medical attention myself. The story was finally over. Still, in a very real sense, the story will never be entirely over. Such stories never are. The gods had picked me up, decided I was too small, and thrown me back into the world. As Earnest K. Gann once wrote, I had peaked behind the veil, seen what some dead men have seen, and returned to tell the story. One cannot help but be changed by such an experience. I felt, and I hope I will always will feel, strangely privileged. Over the next several weeks I moved to a different apartment. I escaped from the clutches of the companion who caused me such sorrow. I even spent some of the money I'd been saving for the future on things that I wanted now - a practice I've tried to continue. I also found it easier to face crises at work and in my life." This isn't a life-or-death situation," I would tell myself. "It isn't even close! I know, because I know what a real life-or-death situation is like!" It's a useful standard of comparison. I even managed to recover my glider. I did, after all, have this great map, complete with a list of the altitudes of every major fork in the trail. But it appears that I dropped my nose cone back at the crash site. It is almost certainly still there, so if anyone needs a spare nose cone for a Sport 150E Full Race, I know where you can find one. Hey, I've even got a map... ...Mountain View, 1998 The new nose cone, one month later
Former Prime Minister's Office legal advisor Ben Perrin may have broken the rules by failing to ensure key emails would be saved from the virtual shredder, a spokesman for the Privy Council Office suggests. The recently revealed policy of automatically deleting the email accounts of departing employees only kicks in after any and all information with "business value" has been archived in the event that it should be required in future, Privy Council Office spokesman Raymond Rivet said. That's an obligation, he added, "made explicit in the departure process and documentation." Once the staffer has officially left the employ of the office — either PCO or PMO, in this case — the department terminates his or her access to the system and deletes the email account, although that information can be recovered from backup for up to 30 days. Not surprisingly, Rivet declined to comment on why Perrin apparently failed to flag those emails for preservation before leaving government. But PMO communications director Jason MacDonald confirmed that the "onus is on staff" to make the call on what records need to be kept. "We expect staff to follow the rules." PM challenged in House The question of just who was in charge of archiving those now hotly pursued emails came up in the House of Commons on Wednesday afternoon. New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair challenged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to reconcile the 'operating protocol' of deleting the email accounts of departing staffers with the requirement to keep all records needed to account for the activities of government. "Why was the law broken?" he challenged Harper. In response, the prime minister assured the House that it is the responsibility of all employees to follow "the applicable rules." Perrin, meanwhile, has yet to respond to queries on why those emails weren't flagged before he returned to his post at the University of British Columbia earlier this year. As for the auto delete policy itself, it doesn't appear to fall afoul of the rules for information management — provided, that is, that all emails that could potentially be disclosed under access rules are preserved before the wipe. If in doubt, 'keep it!' Under the Library and Archives Act, "no government or ministerial record ... shall be disposed of, including by being destroyed, without the written consent of the Librarian and Archivist or of a person to whom the Librarian and Archivist has, in writing, delegated the power to give such consents." That rule. however, only applies to records with "historic or archival value," according to Library and Archives spokesperson Richard Provencher. Departments — including PCO — are free to dispose of records that don't meet those criteria when no longer required. Even federal access to information laws allow for the deletion of transitory records, which are defined as those "required only for a limited time to ensure the completion of a routine action or the preparation of a subsequent record." That does not, however, include records "required by government institutions or Ministers to control, support, or document the delivery of programs, to carry out operations, to make decisions, or to account for activities of government." Judging from the examples provided by the information commissioner's office in its 2010 manual for federal employees — "casual communications," meeting notices, draft documents and photocopies of departmental publications — it seems highly unlikely that any email related to the then-ongoing negotiations with Senator Mike Duffy and his lawyers would even come close to being considered "transitory." "If you are ever in doubt about a record's status," advises the handbook, "keep it!"
In many cases, it’s the characters that make a game memorable. The plot itself doesn’t necessarily have to tell you something unique or life-altering, nor the gameplay be fresh and unique, but if you can relate to the characters, empathise with them, or perhaps just wonder at how unbelievably awesome they are, it can make a game become something truly special. We’ve seen plenty of character driven games this year, and our finalists offered up a mixture of both male and female protagonists and supporting characters from a variety of genres, though the top two spots belonged to strong female characters. Very narrowly beaten into second place was The Witcher 3’s Ciri, with the lethal Lion Cub of Cintra ousting Geralt as the team’s favourite character from CD Projekt RED’s huge RPG. We also saw a number of excellent returning characters in major blockbuster titles. Camilla Luddington’s rendition of Lara Croft returned in Rise of the Tomb Raider, for example, while Kevin Conroy’s Dark Knight capped off an excellent trilogy in Batman: Arkham Knight. At the same time, we had Nathan Fillion injecting a great deal of fun into Destiny: The Taken King as Cayde-6, really helping to make its story engaging and enjoyable. Our winner, however, comes from a game that is wholeheartedly focussed on story, and not on action. Max might have been the leading lady in Life Is Strange, but it was Chloe, portrayed by Ashly Burch, who often stole the show. Where Max is unsure of herself and insecure, Chloe is brash, utterly driven and seemingly fearless, acting as a foil to amplify the characteristics of our sweet and unassuming protagonist. And Chloe is an absolutely integral character to Life Is Strange’s story. It’s really the events within her life – the loss of her father, her rebellious streak and open defiance of her step dad, the disappearance of a close friend – and the traumas that she has faced through these moments which help to drive the story forwards. Not least because you’re constantly having to try and make amends for Max not staying in touch and being there for Chloe during these difficult times. It’s that relationship between Max and Chloe which is the beating heart of Life Is Strange, and that friendship and your emotional investment in both of these characters is what underscores many of the most important moments in the story, right up to its final heartwrenching moments. Runners up in alphabetical order:
Gagnant-gagnant ? Après un combat homérique mené au sabre en plastique et suivi d’une retraite en rase campagne, le premier ministre français Manuel Valls s’est félicité de l’accord trouvé avec les sociétés concessionnaires d’autoroutes (SCA), le 9 avril dernier. Une décision « gagnante-gagnante », selon le ministre de l’économie Emmanuel Macron. Gagnants, les usagers et l’Etat le seraient en apparence. Les tarifs n’augmenteront pas en 2015. Les SCA verseront 500 millions d’euros pour améliorer les infrastructures dans les trois prochaines années et investiront 3,2 milliards d’euros dans le cadre d’un « plan de relance autoroutier », probablement urgent à la veille du sommet mondial de Paris sur le climat… Gagnantes, les sept principales sociétés d’autoroutes le seront assurément. On ne touche pas à l’« équilibre » des contrats. En compensation de leur obole, elles voient leurs concessions prolongées d’au minimum deux ans, reçoivent en cadeau plusieurs tronçons et pourront intégralement répercuter l’augmentation suspendue des tarifs après 2016. Deux chiffres permettent de comprendre ce que les SCA risquaient de perdre. Lorsque, en 2006, M. Dominique de Villepin décida d’achever la privatisation entamée par M. Laurent Fabius en 2002 (1), les grandes entreprises de travaux publics achetèrent les concessions au prix total de 14,8 milliards d’euros (2). Alors que les concessions doivent durer entre vingt-trois et vingt-sept ans, les dividendes versés par les SCA à leurs actionnaires privés en seulement sept ans (2007-2013) ont représenté 14,9 milliards d’euros (3). Mais l’emploi, la dette, l’investissement ? Avec l’accélération de l’automatisation des péages, l’effectif total de l’ensemble des sociétés concessionnaires est passé de 16 709 personnes en 2006 à 13 933 en 2013. Dans le même temps, leur chiffre d’affaires progressait de 26 %, en grande partie grâce à l’augmentation des péages, bien supérieure à l’inflation. Alors que les marges nettes des groupes Vinci et Eiffage végétaient entre 2 et 5 % en 2013, les marges nettes de leurs branches autoroutes étaient comprises entre 20 et 24 %. Contrairement aux engagements pris, l’endettement des sociétés continue à grimper, ce qui s’explique par le versement de dividendes exceptionnels… et la déductibilité fiscale de leurs charges financières. En outre, tout investissement supplémentaire demandé par l’Etat dans le cadre des contrats de plan ouvre droit à des compensations tarifaires. Et l’administration sait ne pas se montrer trop tatillonne : un seul agent — à temps partiel — suit l’ensemble des autoroutes à la direction de la concurrence et de la répression des fraudes (4). Bref, tous les éléments semblaient réunis pour que le gouvernement conteste sérieusement une rente indécente en ces temps de disette budgétaire. Cent cinquante-deux parlementaires réclamaient une résiliation, que l’article 38 des contrats rendait juridiquement possible. Ils ne sont pas les seuls à avoir… perdu.
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Shell Oil Co, the U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, reported flooding Saturday afternoon in the chemical plant of its Deer Park, Texas, refining and petrochemical complex as storms dumped over 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain on the area. A source familiar with operations at the 316,600-barrel-per-day (bpd) joint-venture Deer Park Refinery knew of no problems at the refinery due to the flooding. In a message on a system to inform nearby residents of malfunctions within the complex, Shell said the flooding created “an unauthorized discharge due to an oil-sheen carryover at one of the facility’s stormwater outfalls.” A Shell spokesman did not reply to messages on Saturday asking about the flooding. The message also said Shell was taking steps to mitigate the oil sheen. Exxon Mobil Corp said the nation’s second largest refinery, its 560,000-bpd Baytown, Texas, plant along with the company’s 344,600-bpd Beaumont, Texas, refinery and 502,500-bpd Baton Rouge, Louisiana, refinery were operating normally after a line of thunder storms raked the Gulf Coast on Saturday. Refineries along Houston’s Ship Channel and Texas City, Texas, appeared to be operating normally after storms passed over by mid-afternoon. Ship pilots called a halt to moving vessels along the Houston Ship Channel for 10 hours from early in the morning until the afternoon on Saturday when heavy rains and high winds made navigation of the 53-mile (85-kilometer) waterway unsafe, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. Ships began moving along the Ship Channel shortly after 2 p.m. local time (1900 GMT).
Spread the love Two years after Colorado began its first retail sales of cannabis, towns and cities across the state are enjoying the benefits in a number of ways. With sales this year expected to reach $1 billion, local governments are seeing windfalls of tax revenue, which is funding education, recreation, infrastructure improvements, and even aid to the homeless. The small town of Mountain View may be able to dispel its reputation for collecting revenue through speeding tickets, now that two pot shops reside there. “We have such a small tax base,” said Mayor Jeff Kiddie, who opposed pot stores. “Medical and retail marijuana have definitely helped the town’s bottom line. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t.” Similar stories abound in the 22 counties and 62 cities that allow retail cannabis sales. In Aurora, which has collected millions in sales taxes and fees since October 2014, the City Council keeps the money in a separate fund so it can show the public exactly where cannabis revenue is spent. $1.5 million will be used to address the homeless issue, $2.8 million will go toward a recreation center, and $3.8 million will fund an Interstate 225 crossing. Northglenn uses the money for capital projects and to purchase water rights. Adams County will spend $500,000 on scholarships for low-income students. Filling potholes and fixing roads is a common theme in other towns. “There’s a lot of money left over to address safety issues that come up or really take on projects that these local communities do not necessarily have the funds to deal with,” said Mike Elliott, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group. “For some communities, this tax revenue has made a huge difference.” Denver collected $29 million last year through taxes and licensing fees; the capitol city prefers to spend this revenue on “ramped-up regulation, enforcement, public health and education efforts.” While bureaucrats both honest and crooked are reveling in the flush of cash, more importantly, Colorado citizens are reveling in their newfound freedom. Judging by the immense market impact of retail sales, cannabis is a popular product. Perhaps people are finding it a better and safer alternative than alcohol. There is evidence that people are giving up prescription painkillers in favor of medical cannabis. A fifth major benefit of legal cannabis sales is the dwindling black market. The federal government’s own statistics show that since 2012, when Washington and Colorado voted to legalize cannabis, trafficking offenses have fallen sharply. Violence is less of a concern in cannabis trafficking than the issue of unknown origin and handling. With legalization, consumers know exactly where their product comes from and what is in it, including the THC content. Competition that can operate in the open, instead of having to hide from a senseless drug war, is able to produce the highest quality product using responsible environmental practices. The temptation of tax revenue is certainly one reason why lawmakers in Colorado and other states have endorsed recreational cannabis sales. But taxation should not be the guiding force for legalization. Oregon is proving this point. Authorities in the Beaver State have enacted a 25 percent sales tax on recreational cannabis, which is causing some people to consider going back to the black market. This eagerness to collect as much revenue as possible is a symptom of burgeoning government and threatens to drive people away from the legal market. On the good side, Oregon does not tax medical cannabis at all, perhaps because their medical laws have been in existence since 1998 and sudden taxation would meet with fierce resistance. It is important that other states, as they legalize medical use and sales, follow this example of no taxation. Colorado continues to provide an interesting experiment in the legalization of a plant that has been demonized by government for decades. While taxation of recreational use is allowing cities to provide community benefits, let’s remember that freedom is the number one reason why legalization must happen everywhere.
A few months ago while sitting at a Burger King (yes, I know) I recorded a video on "How to use Windows 8 in 3 minutes" and threw it up on YouTube. It's been viewed nearly a half million times. Eek. It's got poor audio, and it's WAY too fast. I did it on a goof. However, people keep showing it to family and friends. A man emailed me after sending it to his elderly uncle and let's just say that the uncle wasn't impressed with the speed of the video either. It's great for geeks but not for normal people. So tonight I took a few hours and did a new video that I'm VERY happy with and I hope you enjoy it. It's clean, clear, and only 25 minutes long and it explains, I believe, Windows 8 and its changes for anyone with basic Windows experience. I hope you like it and you share it with family and friends. Also check out the related posts at the bottom. The Missing Windows 8 Instructional Video - 25 minutes Related Posts you may enjoy
From Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia. Sherles in Colosseum Chief Sherles (Japanese: ヘッジ署長 Chief Hedge) is the much-overworked police chief of Pyrite Town. Keeping order in such an unruly town would be hard under normal circumstances. The fact that he only has Officer Johnson working under him may mean that the police force in Pyrite Town is even more ineffective than one might initially think. In Pokémon Colosseum, Sherles is first seen sitting in his police office, where he warns Wes and Rui of the uncontrollable lawlessness in Pyrite and asks that they leave town for their safety. He also appears to investigate the windmill after Silva steals one of the generator's gears and comments on Silva's motives for doing so. Finally, Sherles appears to arrest Evice and Nascour at Realgam Tower during the ending. Sherles appears in Pokémon XD, but he plays no significant role aside from being a familiar face. After defeating Snattle, however, he reveals news that Cipher's previous boss, Evice, was only a regional boss, hinting at Greevil's position as Cipher's Grand Master. After defeating Greevil, Sherles can be found outside the Cipher Key Lair, where he is in the act of arresting the remaining Cipher members. His name is probably a derivative of "Sherlock Holmes", the famous fictional detective. In other languages
Kellyanne Conway’s messaging advice needs some work. When presented with the hair-raising evidence that Russian intelligence carried out a successful plan to pick the government of the United States, a principled president-elect would respond with horror and a determination to expose the attack and prevent any recurrence. An unprincipled president-elect would try to make the story disappear by picking away at the evidence around the margins: Russian involvement may be a fact, but while it’s probable that the hacks swung enough votes to decide a very tight race, and it’s extremely likely that Russia specifically hoped to help Trump win, neither of these conclusions can be proven. But the incoming Trump administration is instead going for option No. 3: flat-out lies. Donald Trump insists that if Russia committed the hacks the White House would have said something earlier: If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016 In fact, it did say something before the election. Here is the first sentence of Ellen Nakashima’s October 7 Washington Post report: “The Obama administration on Friday officially accused Russia of attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections, including by hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations.” Trump was even presented with this information onstage at a presidential debate, where he dismissed it. What’s astonishing is that Trump is not only denying the substance of the accusation, he’s denying that the accusation was even made. Let this sink in: The president-elect of the United States is insisting that something that was witnessed on national television by more than 66 million people never happened. Meanwhile, his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, smarmily insists any mention of Russian interference is an attack on the peaceful transfer of power: That is just remarkable. That is breathtaking. I guess he’s auditioning to be a political pundit after his job is over soon. That is incredibly disappointing to hear from the podium of the White House press secretary. Because he basically — he essentially stated that the president-elect had knowledge of this, maybe even fanned the flames. It’s incredibly irresponsible and I wonder if his boss, President Obama, agrees. I think coming from the podium and basically trying to relitigate a political campaign when the president and the president-elect and their senior staff are trying to work together very closely to have a peaceful transition of power in a great democracy with just about a month plus to go, I find it to be very unfortunate. Notice, Conway isn’t directly challenging the truth of the allegation, she’s just calling it “remarkable” and “breathtaking” and “disappointing” and “unfortunate” that people mention it in public. That’s how professional liars in Washington do it.
Stock image Heavy SNOW caused the Montana Department of Transportation to CLOSE 10,947′ Beartooth Pass on US-212 yesterday at 8:10pm. The closure goes from Vista Point on the Montana side to Long Lake on the Wyoming side. Road conditions will be reevaluated this morning around daylight. Pretty awesome that we’re having road closures in Montana in August! US-212 BEARTOOTH PASS IS CLOSED AT VISTA PT ON MT SIDE. ROAD CLOSURE DUE TO SNOW. THE PASS IS CLOSED AT VISTA PT ON MT SIDE AND FROM VISTA PT TO LONG LAKE IT IS COMPLETELY CLOSED ON WY SIDE DUE TO SNOW. TEMPS WILL DROP OVERNIGHT ON TOP TO CREATE VERY ICY CONDITIONS. PASS WILL BE CHECKED AGAIN ON THUR MORN AROUND DAYLIGHT TO WORK ON GETTING PASS BACK OPEN. IF YOU TRAVEL FROM RED LODGE YOU MUST TURN AROUND AT VISTA PT AND RETURN TO RED LODGE. – MTDOT, yesterday US-212 was still closed as of this writing at 9am MST. Colorado, British Columbia, and Alberta all got snow in the past 3 days. There is a summer only ski resort up on Beartooth Pass (Beartooth Basin) that hasn’t been able to get open due to a lack of snow the past 2 summers.
Deportivo La Coruna: Suffered a dramatic fall from grace Deportivo La Coruna have sacked coach Fernando Vazquez only six weeks before the new season starts. Vazquez took charge of the former Primera Division champions towards the end of the 2012-13 season and was unable to save them from relegation, but achieved promotion back to Spain's top flight at the first time of asking. The Galicians finished second, behind Eibar, in the Segunda Division last term, while Cordoba won the play-off final. However, Depor have announced on their official website that president Tino Fernandez has decided to relieve Vazquez of his duties, informing the coach of his fate in a meeting held on Tuesday morning. A statement read: "The Deportivo board has decided to dispense with the services of Fernando Vazquez as first-team coach. "The lack of confidence from the board towards the coach has led to this decision considering that, with pre-season not yet under way, it is still possible to turn this situation around to generate the atmosphere of confidence necessary in the first-team squad, and in order to develop a sporting and business project that allows Deportivo to be a competitive team, on every level, in the Primera Division. "Despite the situation that has arisen in these last few days, Deportivo would like to sincerely thank Fernando Vazquez for his work in these difficult times since he arrived at the club." The statement added that the board had already began the search for Vazquez's successor and hoped to have a new coach in place by the time pre-season starts on July 14. The fact Vazquez's future was uncertain became apparent last weekend after the coach criticised the club's failure to sign the players they wanted. He told local television station TVG: "We can't get our first choice, which could be a great buy, so we end up buying option five, six or seven. We either never get them or we don't try and get them, that's our problem." Vazquez is the second La Liga coach to lose his job in July, with Valencia sacking Juan Antonio Pizzi and replacing him with Nuno Espirito Santo last week. Shortly after being informed of his sacking, Vazquez sought to give his side of the story, insisting he had been let go by the club because his comments had been "misinterpreted". He told reporters: "You can only be betrayed by those who you believe to be your friends, your enemies don't betray you. I got the feeling I was being forced out. "In my mind the arguments put forward do not add up, so I wanted to come out and explain my words. I tried to explain in a colloquial way how transfers work. I wanted to say that we sign the players we can. You will find many coaches making comments similar to that. Only Real Madrid and Barcelona sign the players they want. "I only said that we didn't have any money, I didn't want to cause the club any harm, not at all. I am leaving the club because of some comments I made that were misinterpreted, nothing more than that."
View Caption Hide Caption (CanesInsight.com) The Miami Hurricanes’ new Adidas uniforms are under lock and key at the school, and won’t be seen by the public until next month. But we have a good idea of what they look like. A user on the message board CanesInsight.com posted an image of a placard showing six new uniform designs for the Hurricanes. The image is blurry and of unclear origin, and appears to be taken in the UM equipment room. According to a person who has seen the final version of the uniforms, the designs shown in the image are close to the real thing … but they are not quite the real thing. “[The image is] legit, but it’s an older version,” the source said. There may be minor changes between uniforms seen below and the ones Brad Kaaya and his teammates will wear this fall, but these are pretty close. Here’s what we know about the uniforms so far, according to several well-connected sources: * The new jerseys have a simple, retro feel to them – absent some of the wilder designs Adidas has rolled out for other programs. They are not as retro as the mock-ups Adidas used for promotional materials in February. * There are six uniform combos seen in the photo, but one of them didn’t make the final cut. Several months ago, Adidas and UM decided to ditch the all-green kit (to use soccer parlance) shown in the top left corner of the image. The other five color combos will be used this season. * The Hurricanes’ main sets — versions of which are seen in the lower half of the photo — are white with green numbers and lettering, with orange trim (bottom left); orange with white numbers and lettering, with green trim (bottom center); and green with white numbers and lettering, with orange trim (bottom right). * The all-white and all-black kits on the top row of the photo? Those are specialty uniforms. The white is UM’s “stormtrooper” look, used in road games. The black is for a “blackout” game (and, we believe, will be worn with a black helmet). * It’s unclear how many different helmets UM will wear, but the traditional white with the ‘U’ logo will remain the main helmet. * UM can mix and match its looks, as it has always done: white tops with orange pants, green tops with white pants, etc. and so on. * A retro uniform was originally planned for this year, but was scrapped. * Adidas, which in January signed UM for 12 years and an estimated $90 million, considers the Hurricanes one of its most important partners. As such, the rollout for the new uniforms is not expected to be subtle. Adidas has informed UM it is planning a high-profile event in Miami Beach (is there any other kind?). The party, which is expected to include former Hurricanes players and big-name entertainment, is planned for July 18 at Fontainebleau. UM’s contract with Adidas begins Sept. 1. Contrast the new almost-designs from Adidas with the ones Nike rolled out last year. Which do you like?
It may sound obvious, but the primary role of a data journalist is to analyze data. Whether the analysis is simple or complex, it is our capacity to do this well that makes us valuable in the newsroom. And yet, most of us are still doing it using old-fashioned, error-prone methods. Specifically, we use processes that are: inscrutable (R, numpy); difficult to replicate (Excel, Google Docs, OpenRefine); and wedded to tools that are complex or expensive ( SPSS , SAS , ArcGIS). As journalists, we not only need to solve these problems for practical reporting purposes, but also for philosophical ones. How can we assert that our numbers are correct if we performed a series of manual processes in a spreadsheet exactly once? Do it that way and the only record of how it was done is the one in your head. That’s not good enough. Journalistic integrity requires that we’re able to document and explain our processes. Meet agate For the last year or so, I’ve challenged myself to design a better way of doing routine data analysis. It’s a problem with several parts, and today I’m thrilled to announce that the first and largest piece of the solution has reached version 1.0. It’s called agate, and it’s going to make your process better. I’ve been using agate in production for two months, and I will personally guarantee that it works. In greater depth, agate is a Python data analysis library in the vein of numpy or pandas, but with one crucial difference. Whereas those libraries optimize for the needs of scientists—namely, being incredibly fast when working with vast numerical datasets—agate instead optimizes for the performance of the human who is using it. That means stripping out those technical optimizations and instead focusing on designing code that is easy to learn, readable, and flexible enough to handle any weird data you throw at it. (Love csvkit? agate is all the guts of csvkit, converted to a Python library and amped up a hundred times. Sorry, Ruby programmers—maybe you can steal some of the ideas for your own projects!) Does focusing on human performance mean agate is slow? No: computers are very fast. Except in cases where the amount of data is truly huge (scientific research, financial systems), the optimizations that make these libraries complex, such as writing large parts of them in C, are unnecessary. They also make the libraries less flexible and more difficult to use. agate does away with them to provide a simple, readable, pure-Python solution for the sorts of data analysis journalists (and many others) are doing every day. Running Code You should be skeptical of what I’m saying right now. So I’m going to offer some strong anecdotal evidence, and then you can report it out. Here’s an analysis written with agate: import agate purchases = agate.Table.from_csv('examples/realdata/ks_1033_data.csv') by_county = purchases.group_by('county') totals = by_county.aggregate([ ('county_cost', agate.Sum('total_cost')) ]) totals = totals.order_by('county_cost', reverse=True) totals.limit(10).print_bars('county', 'county_cost', width=80) (Above example updated slightly on 11/5/15 to reflect changes made for agate version 1.1. —ed) This code has no comments and works with a dataset you probably haven’t used before. Yet, I’m almost certain that you can tell exactly what it does. (Here is a version of the same analysis, with explanation, as a Jupyter notebook.) Here is the output you would see in the console if you ran this code: county county_cost SEDGWICK 977,174.45 ▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ COFFEY 691,749.03 ▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ MONTGOMERY 447,581.20 ▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ JOHNSON 420,628.00 ▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ SALINE 245,450.24 ▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ FINNEY 171,862.20 ▓░░░░░░░░░░ BROWN 145,254.96 ▓░░░░░░░░ KIOWA 97,974.00 ▓░░░░░ WILSON 74,747.10 ▓░░░░ FORD 70,780.00 ▓░░░░ +-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+ 0 250,000 500,000 750,000 1,000,000 “Well sure,” I hear you say, “but I already know [SQL\|R\|SASS]. I’ve gotta learn how to do everything all over again!” In designing agate, I’ve been careful to keep its interface as consistent and obvious as possible. Many elements, such as columns and rows, share a base implementation—so once you’ve learned to use one you’ll know how to use all the others. I’ve also borrowed terminology from other common data analysis tools in order to speed your transition. The core table processing functions, for instance, use the names of their SQL analogues— select , where , order_by , etc. Learning to use agate will take effort, but if you’ve done any data analysis before you should find much of it familiar. A clean interface isn’t going to help you very much if you don’t know where to start. That’s why agate also comes with a detailed user tutorial that teaches how to use agate by working through an analysis of a real-world dataset. It assumes you know how to write some Python code, but nothing else. Beyond that introduction, there is also an exhaustive cookbook, which includes dozens of recipes showing you how to perform common tasks (sorting, searching, ranking) and how to convert code from other languages into agate code (SQL, Excel, R). Why Use It? Ultimately, agate is a solution to both practical and philosophical problems. If you take the time to learn it, it will make your data analysis process faster (in human terms), easier to understand, and simpler to replicate. It’ll also mean that when your editor says, “How did you get to this result?” you’ll be able to toss them a Python script that shows exactly how you reached that conclusion. Your editor doesn’t code? Then it’s even more important, because it’ll be future you whose neck is on the line when somebody calls your numbers garbage. You can find more reasons why you should use agate in the “Why agate?” section of the documentation. It’s probably obvious by now that I want you to start using agate. Today. Use it for the reporting project you’ve got on your desk. Build data workflows on top of it. Write extensions that integrate with your data warehouse or add custom features to it. File tickets. Send me pull requests. Just by using it you’ll be helping me to build a tool I truly believe that we all need. (Sold on agate? Then you’re going to love the solution to the second part of the problem. It’s called proof. More on that to come.)
Maskot/Getty Images At the core, most dealers aren’t out to rip you off. But they employ experienced and aggressive salespeople who have a bag of tricks designed to maximize the salesperson’s cut and the dealer’s profit. Here are ploys that some car dealers — even the most scrupulous — may try to run on you when it comes time to buy: 1. The credit cozen: A dealer may say something like, “With your credit score, you won’t qualify for competitive financing rates.” This may be true. However, some dealers will imply your credit is worse than it is so you think you’ll have to pay a higher interest rate. That’s why it’s important to know your credit score before you head to the showroom. 2. The single-transaction strategy: Many people view buying a car as one transaction. It’s not, and dealers know this. It’s really three transactions rolled into one — the new-car price, the trade-in value and the financing. The dealer sees all three as ways to make money. Treat each as a separate transaction, and negotiate each one. If you get a new car for $200 over invoice but receive only $1,000 for a trade-in car that’s worth $2,500, you haven’t done as well as you could. 3. The payment ploy: A dealer might say, “We can get you into this car for only $389 a month.” Probably true, but how? In some cases, the dealer may have factored in a large down payment or stretched the term of the auto loan to 60 or 72 months. Focus on the price of the car rather than the monthly payment. Never answer the question, “How much can you pay each month?” Stick to saying, “I can afford to pay X dollars for the car.” 4. The sticker shenanigan: The vehicle price listed on the window is what’s known as the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, or MSRP. Who cares? You want to know the invoice price — the amount the dealer paid for it. Working from the invoice up is much easier than trying to cut from the MSRP. You should also find out what cars actually are selling for after taking into account any consumer and dealer incentives. Of course, some really hot cars go for sticker price and even above. Be patient and wait: The prices will fall as demand slackens. And three years later, you’ll be selling or trading a car for the same money as the early buyers who may have paid thousands more initially. 5. The holdback hustle: Manufacturers often give cash incentives — sometimes called holdbacks — to their dealers to encourage them to move slow-selling models. This typically isn’t mentioned in advertisements. You’ll want to search for holdbacks or other factory-to-dealer incentives available for the car you’re considering. While it’s not a given that the dealer will apply any of these funds to the car you like, it doesn’t hurt to ask. 6. The financing four-flush: Some dealers have been known to call customers days or even weeks after they signed a purchase agreement to tell them that the financing fell through. It’s a crock. The dealer can know if you qualify for financing almost instantly. The goal of the later call? To sign you up for a loan with a higher interest rate because, according to them, they just found out you didn’t qualify for the lower rate. Never leave the showroom without signed contracts that spell out every detail and with every blank filled in. If you’ve got that, they can’t retreat on the financing. 7. The insurance illusion: Some dealers may try hard to get you to purchase an insurance policy when you’re buying your car. One type, gap insurance, covers the difference between what the car is worth and the amount you still owe on it. Say the car is worth $10,000 but you still owe $12,000. If your car is a total loss, a gap insurance policy will cover that $2,000 difference. But don’t automatically agree to it. Some insurers include the benefits of gap insurance in their regular comprehensive automobile coverage, so check there first. Also, gap insurance is generally quite inexpensive when purchased from your regular car insurance company rather than a dealer. Another favorite, credit life insurance, will pay the balance of your loan if you die before you’ve been able to repay it. These policies may or may not make sense for you, but in most cases you should decline all such offers. If these policies interest you, you’ll want to understand what you’re purchasing and have the opportunity to decline it and shop around for better prices. The mark-up on these policies at the dealership can be enormous, in part because the insurance companies that sell the policies to the dealerships offer them huge incentives — everything from cash to first-class trips — to push the policies. 8. The rate razzle-dazzle: It certainly sounds tempting — zero percent interest to finance a new car. However, this deal may not be the best one for your pocketbook. For starters, most financing incentives are for shorter terms, and you need a stellar credit record. With very short-term loans, such as 24 or 36 months, payments on even a moderately priced car can be sky-high. In addition, you may be better off finding your own financing and then taking the dealer rebate, if one is offered. Say you’re looking at a $20,000 car and will get $4,000 for your trade-in. You can choose between zero percent financing or financing at 3.49 percent with a $2,000 rebate. The term of the loan is 36 months. Over the course of the loan, you’ll come out ahead by more than $1,200 if you take the rebate and the 3.49 percent financing. Use our calculator to compute the actual dollars over the term of the loan to figure out what deal suits you best. 9. The rollover ruse: Often, it’s tempting to trade up to a more expensive car even before you’ve finished paying off the car you’re currently driving. One way that some car buyers do this is by rolling over the remaining payments on their current car into a new car loan or lease. While this isn’t illegal, it is risky. Why? You’ll end up owing more on the second car than it’s worth. In the parlance of the automobile world, you’ll be “upside down” on the vehicle. If it’s totaled in an accident or if you decide down the road to trade it in, you’ll end up writing out a big check to cover the remaining amount of the loan. Rule of thumb: Don’t roll over an old car loan into a new one. 10. The long-term trick: There’s nothing illegal or even deceptive about dealers offering loan periods extending out six or seven years. After all, many cars last longer than they used to, and longer loan terms mean your monthly payments are lower. Still, it’s not optimal. You’re likely to continually owe more on your car than it’s worth because your car is depreciating faster than you’re paying it off. If you’re considering a long loan period, you probably should scale back to a less expensive car better suited to your budget. 11. The balloon bamboozle: Similarly, some dealers will encourage you to purchase a car for unrealistically low monthly payments now but with a much larger balloon payment at the end of the loan period. In a few cases, this can be a legitimate way to finance a car. For instance, you may have just graduated and can realistically assume that your income will rise by the time the balloon payment comes due. But be wary. That big payment could hit you when you’re least able to pay it.
A five-round middleweight clash pitting Mark Munoz against Chris Weidman has been tapped as the main event of UFC on FUEL 4. The summer event is slated for July 11, 2012, though a location and venue have yet to be confirmed. Ariel Helwani broke the news on Tuesday night's episode of UFC Tonight. Munoz (12-2) rides into the bout sporting a four-fight winning streak, including a trio of victories last year over the likes of C.B. Dollaway, Demian Maia and Chris Leben that pushed his name into title contention. Munoz was previously booked to fight Chael Sonnen in a No. 1 contenders bout at UFC on FOX 2, however the 34-year-old abruptly withdrew from the event less than two weeks out due to an influx of bone spurs in his elbow. Munoz's exit paved the way for Weidman (8-0) to enter as a late replacement at UFC on FOX 2, where he ultimately earned the biggest win of his career by out-pointing Maia for a unanimous judges' nod. The former two-time All-American trains under the guidance of former UFC champion Matt Serra and is 4-0 thus far in his brief UFC career, counting dominant victories over Alessio Sakara, Jesse Bongfeldt and Tom Lawlor.
"Central Park Five" redirects here. For the documentary film, see The Central Park Five Central Park jogger case Date April 19, 1989 ( ) Time 9–10 p.m. (EST) Duration 1 hour Location Central Park, New York City Non-fatal injuries Trisha Ellen Meili and others Suspect(s) 11; 6 pled guilty Convicted 1990 Charges Assault robbery riot rape sexual abuse attempted murder Verdict 5–10 to 5–15 years in prison Convictions Five suspects served between 6 and 13 years in prison; four appealed unsuccessfully Litigation Five suspects sued for emotional distress and received $41 million from the city as of 2014 Five convictions were vacated in 2002 and the charges were withdrawn; an alternate perpetrator was identified. The Central Park jogger case was a major news story that involved the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a white female jogger, and attacks on others in Manhattan's Central Park on the night of April 19, 1989. The attack on the jogger left her in a coma for 12 days. Meili was a 28-year-old investment banker at the time. According to The New York Times, the attack was "one of the most widely publicized crimes of the 1980s".[1] On the night of the attack, five juvenile males – four African American and one Hispanic – were apprehended in connection with a number of attacks in Central Park committed by around 30 teenage perpetrators. The defendants were tried variously for assault, robbery, riot, rape, sexual abuse, and attempted murder relating to Meili's and other attacks in the park, based solely on confessions that they said were coerced and false. Before the trial, the FBI tested the DNA of the rape kit and found it did not match to any of the tested suspects. The office of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau presented these findings to the press as "inconclusive".[2] They were convicted in 1990 by juries in two separate trials. Subsequently, known as the Central Park Five, they received sentences ranging from 5 to 15 years. Four of the convictions were appealed and the convictions were affirmed by appellate courts. The defendants spent between 6 and 13 years in prison. In 2002, Matias Reyes, a convicted murderer and serial rapist in prison, confessed to raping the jogger, and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt. He knew facts about the crime that only the offender could have known, and also said he committed the rape alone.[3] At the time of his confession, Reyes was already serving a life sentence. He was not prosecuted for raping Meili, because the statute of limitations had passed by the time he confessed. Morgenthau suggested to the court that the five men's convictions related to the assault and rape of Meili and to attacks on others to which they had confessed be vacated (a legal position in which the parties are treated as though no trial has taken place) and withdrew the charges. Their convictions were vacated in 2002. The five convicted men sued New York City in 2003 for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. The city refused to settle the suits for a decade under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, because the city's lawyers felt they would win. However, after Bill de Blasio became mayor and supported the settlement, the city settled the case for $41 million in 2014. As of December 2014, the five men were pursuing an additional $52 million in damages from New York State in the New York Court of Claims. Attacks [ edit ] At 9 p.m. on the night of April 19, 1989, a group of over 30 teenagers who lived in East Harlem entered Manhattan's Central Park at an entrance in Harlem, near Central Park North.[4] They committed several attacks, assaults, and robberies in the northernmost part of Manhattan's Central Park.[5][6] According to The New York Times, the attacks committed that night were "one of the most widely publicized crimes of the 1980s".[1] According to a police investigation, the main suspects were gangs of teenagers who would assault strangers as part of an activity that became known as "wilding". New York City detectives said the term was used by the suspects themselves to describe their actions to police.[7] This account has been disputed by some journalists, who say that it originated in a police detective's misunderstanding of the suspects' use of the phrase "doing the wild thing", lyrics from rapper Tone Lōc's hit song "Wild Thing".[8][9] The teenagers attacked and beat people as they moved south, on the park's East Drive and the 97th Street Transverse, between 9 pm and 10 pm.[4] Between 102nd and 105th Streets they attacked several bicyclists, hurled rocks at a cab, and attacked a man who was walking, whom they knocked to the ground, assaulted, robbed, and left unconscious.[4][10] A schoolteacher out for a run was severely beaten and kicked between 9:40 and 9:50.[4] Then, at about 10 p.m. at the northwest end of the Central Park Reservoir running track, they attacked another jogger, hitting him in the back of the head with a pipe and stick.[4][11] They pummeled two men into unconsciousness, hitting them with a metal pipe, stones, and punches, and kicking them in the head.[10][12] A police officer testified that one male jogger, who said he had been jumped by four or five youths, was bleeding so badly he "looked like he was dunked in a bucket of blood".[13] Assault on Trisha Meili [ edit ] Trisha Meili was going for a run on her usual path in Central Park shortly before 9 p.m.[6][14][10] While jogging in the park, she was knocked down, dragged or chased nearly 300 feet (91 m), and violently assaulted.[4] She was raped and almost beaten to death.[15] About four hours later at 1:30 a.m., she was found naked, gagged, tied up, and covered in mud and blood. Meili was discovered in a shallow ravine in a wooded area of the park about 300 feet north of the 102nd Street Transverse.[4][15][11][16] The first policeman who saw her said: "She was beaten as badly as anybody I've ever seen beaten. She looked like she was tortured."[17] She was comatose for 12 days.[18] She suffered severe hypothermia, severe brain damage, Class 4 (the most severe) hemorrhagic shock, loss of 75–80 percent of her blood, and internal bleeding.[19][20][16][18][21] Her skull had been fractured so badly that her left eye was dislodged from its socket, which in turn was fractured in 21 places, and she suffered as well from facial fractures.[19][20][12] The initial medical prognosis was that Meili would succumb to her injuries and die.[19] She was given last rites.[20] The police initially listed the attack as a probable homicide.[22] At best, doctors thought that she would remain in a permanent coma due to her injuries. She came out of her coma 12 days after her attack, and spent seven weeks in Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem. When she initially emerged from her coma, she was unable to talk, read, or walk.[20][15] In early June, she was transferred to Gaylord Hospital, a long-term acute care center in Wallingford, Connecticut, where she spent six months in rehabilitation.[19][23][18] She was first able to walk again in mid-July.[24] She returned to work eight months after the attack.[25] Remarkably, she largely recovered, with some lingering disabilities related to balance and loss of vision. As a result of the severe trauma, she had no memory of the attack or of any events up to an hour before the assault, nor of the six weeks following the attack.[24] The crime was unique in the level of public outrage it provoked. New York Governor Mario Cuomo told the New York Post: "This is the ultimate shriek of alarm."[26] Victim [ edit ] Trisha Meili in 2005 Trisha Ellen Meili was born on June 24, 1960, in Paramus, New Jersey, and raised in affluent Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh.[27] She is the daughter and youngest of three children of John Meili, a Westinghouse senior manager, and his wife Jean, a school board member.[28][19][29][30][31] She attended Upper St. Clair High School, graduating in 1978.[19] Meili was a Phi Beta Kappa economics major at Wellesley College, where she received a B.A. in 1982.[28][27] The chairman of Wellesley's economics department said: "She was brilliant, probably one of the top four or five students of the decade."[1] In 1986, she earned an M.A. from Yale and an M.B.A. in finance from the Yale School of Management.[19] She worked from the summer of 1986 until the attack as an associate and then a vice president in the corporate finance department and energy group of Salomon Brothers.[28][19][17][4][32] Meili lived on East 83rd Street between York and East End Avenues on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. At the time of the attack, she was 28 years old and weighed less than 100 pounds (45 kg).[28][19][17][33][4][29] In most media accounts of the incident at that time, Meili was simply referred to as the "Central Park Jogger". However, two local TV stations violated media policy of not publicly identifying the victims of sex crimes and released her name in the days immediately following the attack. Two newspapers aimed at the African-American community—The City Sun and the Amsterdam News—and the black-owned talk radio station WLIB continued to do so as the case progressed.[34][26] The Open Line hosts on WRKS were credited with helping continue to cover the case until the convicted youths were cleared of the crime.[35] In April 2003, Meili confirmed her identity to the media and published a memoir entitled I Am the Central Park Jogger. She then began a career as an inspirational speaker.[36] She also works with victims of sexual assault and brain injury in the Mount Sinai sexual assault and violence intervention program.[23] She continues to manifest some physiological after-effects of the assault, including memory loss.[19][37][38][20] Arrests and investigation [ edit ] Arrest of five youths [ edit ] The police were dispatched at 9:30 p.m. and responded with scooters and unmarked cars. They apprehended Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson along with other teenagers at approximately 10:15 p.m. on Central Park West and 102nd Street.[4][10][11] Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise were brought in for questioning later, after having been identified by other youths as participants in or present at some of the attacks.[10][11] The five juveniles were interviewed for hours. Santana, McCray, and Richardson all made video statements in the presence of their respective parents or guardians.[39] Wise made a number of statements on his own, in accordance with the law.[39] Salaam told the police he was 16 years old and showed them identification to prove it. If a suspect had reached 16 years of age, his parents or guardians no longer had a right to accompany him during police questioning, or to refuse to permit him to answer any questions.[39] After Salaam's mother arrived, the police stopped the questioning, but Salaam's admissions were admitted into testimony.[39] Additionally, before the raped jogger was found, one of the other boys the police had rounded up, sitting in the back of a police car, blurted that he "didn't do the murder" and named Antron McCray as the perpetrator. Kevin Richardson, who was sitting beside him, immediately agreed, saying "Antron did it".[39] Later, after Raymond Santana was interrogated about the rape and while he was being driven to another precinct, he on his own exclaimed: "I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel her tits."[39] Normal police procedure stipulated that the names of criminal suspects under the age of 16 were to be withheld from the media and the public. This policy was ignored when the names of the arrested juveniles were released to the press before any of them had been formally arraigned or indicted, including one 14-year-old who was ultimately not charged.[26] The media's decision to print the names, photos, and addresses of the juvenile suspects while withholding Meili's identity was cited by the editors of the City Sun and the Amsterdam News to explain their own continued use of Meili's name in their coverage of the story.[40] Confessions [ edit ] Four of the five confessed to a number of the attacks committed in the park that night, and implicated one or more of the others.[10][39] None of the five said they themselves actually raped the jogger, but each confessed to being an accomplice to the rape.[10] All five said that they themselves had only helped restrain the jogger, or touched her, while one or more others raped her.[39] Antron McCray said that a "Puerto Rican kid with a hoodie" had been the one who raped the jogger.[10] While he was incarcerated in the Rikers Island jail, Korey Wise told the older sister of a friend of his, according to her testimony, that he had only held the jogger down.[39] Yusef Salaam made verbal admissions, but refused to sign a confession or make one on videotape. However, Salaam was implicated by all of the other four, and convicted at trial. Six others were charged with committing crimes in the park that night as well. They pleaded guilty and received sentences of six months to four and a half years.[10] On appeal, Salaam's supporters and attorneys charged that he had been held by police without access to parents or guardians. The majority appellate court decision noted that Salaam had initially lied to police in claiming to be 16, and he had backed up his claim with a transit pass that indeed (falsely, as it turned out) indicated that he was 16. When Salaam informed police of his true age, police permitted his mother to be present.[41] Analysis indicated that the DNA collected at the crime scene did not match any of the suspects, and that it had come from a single, as yet unknown person.[2] Since no DNA evidence tied the suspects to the crime, the prosecution's case rested almost entirely on the confessions.[26] One of the suspects' supporters, Reverend Calvin O. Butts of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, told The New York Times, "The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that's what happened here."[26] Although the suspects (except Salaam) had confessed on videotape in the presence of a parent or guardian, they retracted their statements within weeks, claiming that they had been intimidated, lied to, and coerced into making false confessions.[2] Salaam confessed to being present only after the detective falsely told him that fingerprints had been found on the victim's clothing.[11] According to Salaam, "I would hear them beating up Korey Wise in the next room", and "they would come and look at me and say: 'You realise you're next.' The fear made me feel really like I was not going to be able to make it out."[42] While the confessions themselves were videotaped, the hours of interrogation that preceded the confessions were not. Trials [ edit ] First trial [ edit ] In a first trial in August 1990, defendants Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, and Raymond Santana were acquitted of attempted murder, but convicted of rape, assault, robbery, and riot in the attacks on the jogger and others in Central Park that night.[10] Salaam and McCray were 15 years old, and Santana 14 years old, at the time of the crime,[9] and they received the maximum sentence allowed for juveniles, 5–10 years in a youth correctional facility.[5][43][44] The jury, consisting of four whites, four blacks, four Hispanics, and an Asian, deliberated for 10 days before rendering its verdict.[45] Second trial [ edit ] The second trial ended in December 1990.[10] Kevin Richardson, 14 years old at the time of the crime, was convicted of attempted murder, rape, assault, and robbery in the attacks on the joggers and others in the park, and sentenced to 5–10 years. Korey Wise, 16 years old at the time of the crime, was acquitted of those charges, but convicted of sexual abuse, assault, and riot in the attack on the jogger and others in the park, and sentenced to 5–15 years.[10] After the verdict, Wise shouted at the prosecutor: "You’re going to pay for this. Jesus is going to get you. You made this up."[46] Meili took the stand during the trial and said afterwards: "I'll tell you what—I didn't feel wonderful about the boys' defense attorneys, especially the one who cross-examined me. He was right in front of my face and, in essence, calling me a slut by asking questions like 'When's the last time you had sex with your boyfriend?'"[24] Wise's lawyer had also asked her whether she had been assaulted by men in her life, suggested that a man she knew may have attacked her, and implied her injuries were not as severe as they had been made out to be.[47] Jurors who were interviewed after the trial said that they were not convinced by the confessions, but were impressed by the physical evidence introduced by the prosecutors: semen, grass, dirt, and two hairs "consistent with" the victim's hair[5]:6 recovered from Richardson's underpants.[48] Four of the convictions were affirmed on appeal, while Santana did not appeal.[5][10] The five defendants spent between six and 13 years in prison.[49] The case attracted nationwide attention and was the subject of many articles and books, both during the trials and after the convictions.[50] Convictions vacated [ edit ] The assailant [ edit ] In 2001, convicted serial rapist and murderer Matias Reyes was already serving a life sentence for other crimes, but he was not at that point a suspect in the Central Park attack on Meili. Reyes met Wise in an upstate New York prison, the Auburn Correctional Facility.[39][51] In 2002, Reyes declared that he was 17 years old on the night of April 19, 1989 when he assaulted and raped the jogger. He said that he had acted alone.[52][53] At the time of the attack, he was working at an East Harlem bodega on Third Avenue and 102nd Street, and living in a van on the street.[53][54] He provided a detailed account of the attack, details of which were corroborated by other evidence.[5] The DNA evidence confirmed his participation in the rape, identifying him as the sole contributor of the semen found in and on the victim "to a factor of one in 6,000,000,000 people".[5] DNA analysis of the strands of hair found in Richardson's underpants established that the hair did not belong to the victim.[55] The victim had been tied up with her T-shirt in a distinctive fashion that Reyes used again on later victims.[5] Reyes was not prosecuted because the statute of limitations had passed, and thus his admissions did not place him at further risk.[39][56] Reyes had been convicted of raping four other women and killing one of them, and a defense psychiatrist in his trial had concluded that Reyes was not capable of telling the truth.[39] Recommendation to vacate charges [ edit ] Yusef Salaam in 2009, seven years after his conviction was vacated Reyes's confession, plus DNA evidence confirming his participation in the rape, led the office of District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau to recommend vacating the convictions of the defendants originally found guilty and sentenced to prison.[5] Supporters of the five defendants again claimed that their confessions had been coerced by police. An examination of the inconsistencies between their confessions led the prosecutor to question the veracity of their confessions. DA Morgenthau's office wrote: A comparison of the statements reveals troubling discrepancies. ... The accounts given by the five defendants differed from one another on the specific details of virtually every major aspect of the crime—who initiated the attack, who knocked the victim down, who undressed her, who struck her, who held her, who raped her, what weapons were used in the course of the assault, and when in the sequence of events the attack took place. ... In many other respects the defendants' statements were not corroborated by, consistent with, or explanatory of objective, independent evidence. And some of what they said was simply contrary to established fact.[5] In light of the "extraordinary circumstances" of the case, DA Morgenthau also recommended that the court also vacate the convictions for the other crimes that night to which the defendants had confessed. His rationale was that the defendants' confessions to the other crimes were made at the same time and in the same statements as those related to the attack on Meili. Had the newly discovered evidence been available at the original trials, it might have made the juries question whether any part of the defendants' confessions were trustworthy.[5] Morgenthau's recommendation to vacate the convictions was strongly opposed by Linda Fairstein, who had overseen the original prosecution but had since left the District Attorney's Office.[2] Despite the analysis conducted by the District Attorney's Office, New York City detectives maintained that the defendants had "most likely" been Reyes' accomplices in the assault and rape of Meili.[57] The two doctors who treated her after she was attacked stated that some of her injuries were not consistent with Reyes' claim that he acted alone.[58][59] (A forensic pathologist at the 1990 trial, and the New York City chief medical examiner in 2002, both concluded that it was impossible to tell from the victim's injuries how many people had participated in the assault.)[60] Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly complained that Morgenthau's staff had denied his detectives access to "important evidence" needed to conduct a thorough investigation.[61] This claim notwithstanding, no indictments, convictions or disciplinary actions were ever taken against District Attorney's office staff members. The five defendants' convictions were vacated by New York Supreme Court Justice Charles J. Tejada on December 19, 2002. As Morgenthau recommended, Tejada's order vacated the convictions for all the crimes of which the defendants had been convicted.[61] All of the defendants had completed their prison sentences at the time of Tejada's order, which only had the effect of clearing their names. One defendant, Santana, remained in jail, convicted of an unrelated later crime. His attorney said that his sentence had been extended in that case because of his conviction in the Meili attack. All five were removed from New York State's sex offender registry.[61][62][63] Aftermath of vacated convictions [ edit ] Armstrong Report [ edit ] In 2002, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly commissioned a panel of three lawyers to review the case.[64] The panel was made up of two prominent lawyers, Michael F. Armstrong, the former chief counsel to the Knapp Commission that had investigated New York City police corruption in the 1970s, and Jules Martin, a New York University Vice President, as well as Stephen Hammerman, deputy police commissioner for legal affairs.[39][64][65][66][67] The panel issued a 43-page report in January 2003.[64] The panel disputed Reyes's claim that he alone had raped the jogger.[39][64][65] It insisted there was "nothing but his uncorroborated word" that he acted alone.[64] Armstrong said the panel believed "the word of a serial rapist killer is not something to be heavily relied upon."[64] The report concluded that the five men whose convictions had been vacated had "most likely" participated in the beating and rape of the jogger and that the "most likely scenario" was that "both the defendants and Reyes assaulted her, perhaps successively."[39][64] The report said Reyes had most likely "either joined in the attack as it was ending or waited until the defendants had moved on to their next victims before descending upon her himself, raping her and inflicting upon her the brutal injuries that almost caused her death."[39][64] As to the five defendants, the report said: We believe the inconsistencies contained in the various statements were not such as to destroy their reliability. On the other hand, there was a general consistency that ran through the defendants' descriptions of the attack on the female jogger: she was knocked down on the road, dragged into the woods, hit and molested by several defendants, sexually abused by some while others held her arms and legs, and left semiconscious in a state of undress.[64][65] "It seems impossible to say that they weren't there at all, because they knew too much," Armstrong said in an interview.[68] Lawsuits by original suspects [ edit ] In 2003, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana Jr., and Antron McCray sued the city for $250 million for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress.[69] The city refused for a decade to settle the suits, saying that "the confessions that withstood intense scrutiny, in full and fair pretrial hearings and at two lengthy public trials" established probable cause.[70] New York City lawyers under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg felt they would win the case.[49] While running for mayor of New York City in 2013, Bill de Blasio pledged to settle the case if he were to win the election.[71] Filmmaker Ken Burns said in a November 2013 interview that Mayor–elect de Blasio had agreed to settle the lawsuit.[72] A settlement in the case for $41 million, supported by Mayor De Blasio, was approved by a federal judge on September 5, 2014.[73] Santana, Salaam, McCray, and Richardson will each receive $7.1 million from the city for their years in prison, while Wise will receive $12.2 million. The city did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement.[74] The settlement averaged roughly $1 million for each year of imprisonment for the men.[75] As of December 2014, the five men were pursuing an additional $52 million in damages from New York State in the New York Court of Claims, before Judge Alan Marin.[49] Speaking of the second suit, against the state, Santana said: "When you have a person who has been exonerated of a crime, the city provides no services to transition him back to society. The only thing left is something like this—so you can receive some type of money so you can survive."[49] Documentary film [ edit ] Ken Burns' daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon premiered The Central Park Five, a documentary film about the case, at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2012.[76][77] It was inspired by Sarah Burns' undergraduate thesis on racism in media coverage of the event.[78] Sarah Burns had worked for a summer as a paralegal in the office of one of the lawyers handling a lawsuit on behalf of those convicted of assaulting and raping the jogger.[76] Ken Burns, who has compared the case to that of the Scottsboro Boys,[79] said he hoped the film would push the city to settle the case against it.[51] On September 12, 2012, attorneys for New York City subpoenaed the production company for access to the original footage in connection with its defense of the federal lawsuit brought by some of the convicted youths against the city.[80] Celeste Koeleveld, the city's executive assistant corporation counsel for public safety, justified the subpoena on the grounds that the film had "crossed the line from journalism to advocacy" for the wrongly convicted men.[80] In February 2013, U.S. Judge Ronald L. Ellis quashed the city's subpoena.[81] Accusations by Donald Trump [ edit ] Daily News. The full-page advertisement taken out by Trump in the May 1, 1989 issue of the On May 1, 1989, real estate magnate Donald Trump called for the return of the death penalty when he took out full-page advertisements in all four of the city's major newspapers. Trump said he wanted the "criminals of every age" who were accused of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park 12 days earlier "to be afraid".[82] The advertisement, which cost an estimated $85,000,[82] said, in part, "Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer ... Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. ... How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!"[83] In a 1989 interview with CNN, Trump said to Larry King: "The problem with our society is the victim has absolutely no rights and the criminal has unbelievable rights" and that "maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done."[84] Lawyers for the five defendants said that Trump's advertisement had inflamed public opinion. After Reyes confessed to the crime and said he acted alone, one of the defendants' lawyers, Michael W. Warren, said, "I think Donald Trump at the very least owes a real apology to this community and to the young men and their families."[82] Protests were held outside Trump Tower in October 2002 with protestors chanting, "Trump is a chump!"[82] Trump was unapologetic at the time, saying, "I don't mind if they picket. I like pickets."[82] After the city announced in June 2014 that they would settle with the defendants for more than $40 million, Trump wrote an opinion article for the New York Daily News. He called the settlement "a disgrace" and said that the group's guilt was still likely: "Settling doesn't mean innocence. ... Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels."[85] According to Yusef Salaam, Trump "was the fire starter", as "common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty." Salaam and his family received death threats after papers ran Trump's full-page ad. Warren argued that Trump's advertisements played a role in securing conviction, saying that "he poisoned the minds of many people who lived in New York City and who, rightfully, had a natural affinity for the victim," and that "notwithstanding the jurors' assertions that they could be fair and impartial, some of them or their families, who naturally have influence, had to be affected by the inflammatory rhetoric in the ads." The Guardian wrote in 2016 that the case and the media attention reflected the racial dynamics at the time; a similar attack took place soon after in Brooklyn on May 2, 1989,[86] involving a black woman who was raped and thrown from the roof of a four-story building, but received little media attention.[42] Her case was brought to Trump's attention. He visited the victim in the hospital and promised to pay her medical expenses.[87][88] It is not known whether Trump actually paid anything.[89] In October 2016, when Trump campaigned to be president, he declared that the Central Park Five were guilty and stated that their convictions should never have been vacated. Trump told CNN: "They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same."[90] Conservative populist commentator Ann Coulter presented an argument describing the actions of the attack, Trump's ad, and the nuances of the case within the prism of DNA knowledge of the 1980s. [91] Trump's statement attracted criticism from the Central Park Five themselves[92] as well as others, including Republican U.S. Senator John McCain, who called Trump's responses "outrageous statements about the innocent men in the Central Park Five case" and cited it as one of many causes prompting him to retract his endorsement of Trump.[93] Salaam said that he had falsely confessed out of coercion, after having been mistreated by police while in custody, deprived of food, drink or sleep for over 24 hours.[94] Acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns called Trump's comments "the height of vulgarity" and racist.[95] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ] News and magazine items: Editorials:
Russian President Vladimir Putin during his annual end-of-year news conference in Moscow on Thursday. REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev Russia's lower house of parliament passed a draft law that would give the banking sector a capital boost of up to 1 trillion rubles ($16.5 billion) on Friday, part of measures to shield banks from Western economic sanctions. Russia's financial sector is reeling from the country's slide toward recession and Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis that have restricted banks' access to international capital markets, driving their funding costs sharply higher. The State Duma said on its website it had passed the bill in all three required readings — speeding up a process that can sometimes see laws languish in parliament for weeks. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told reporters on Friday banks could start receiving the additional capital early next year and that the law would cover all the risks banks faced. The draft law still needs to be passed by the upper house of parliament and then signed into law by President Vladimir Putin. The latest aid package for banks comes after the government provided state support in the form of additional capital to banks including VTB earlier this year. The central bank also eased regulation of the banking sector earlier this week as part of measures to stabilize the ruble, which is down some 45% against the dollar this year. The draft law does not clarify which banks could benefit, but a similar means of supporting banks was a backup option in the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Siluanov said the banks that would benefit would be selected based on the importance of the role they played in lending to the wider economy. Top lender Sberbank would not receive additional capital as part of the measures, according to the head of the State Duma's financial markets committee. Sberbank could however receive additional capital from the central bank if needed. (Reporting by Elena Fabrichnaya and Alexander Winning; Editing by Elizabeth Piper)
LED ZEPPELIN guitarist Jimmy Page says that he "never heard" the SPIRIT song which he has been accused of stealing for his band's iconic track "Stairway To Heaven" until two years ago. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Page gave a declaration in court last week relating to lawsuit brought by the trust of the late SPIRIT guitarist Randy California which argues that the opening notes of "Stairway To Heaven" are too similar to a few notes from a 2-minute, 37-second instrumental titled "Taurus" from SPIRIT's 1968 album. Page stated in the declaration: "Prior to hearing a recording of 'Taurus' in 2014 in connection with this matter, I have never heard 'Taurus' or even heard of it. I am very good at remembering music and am absolutely certain that I never heard 'Taurus' until 2014." The guitarist went on to admit that ZEPPELIN shared the stage several times with SPIRIT. However, in the declaration, Jimmy stressed: "I do not recall ever seeing SPIRIT perform live. Again, though, I am absolutely certain I never heard them, or anyone else, perform 'Taurus'." In his declaration, Page claimed that the beginning of "Stairway To Heaven" "includes a descending chromatic line chord progression and arpeggios, over which played an ascending line. I consider descending chromatic lines and arpeggiated chords basic skills learned by any student of the guitar. Certainly, as a guitarist, I was aware of descending chromatic lines and arpeggios long before 1968." Page went on to say that he composed the music for "Stairway To Heaven" with "the intention to create a long work, with multiple different parts, that would unfold with increasing complexity and speed culminating in a guitar solo that was preceded by a distinct fanfare, followed by the last verse concluding a climax to the song." Page also admitted to discovering a copy of SPIRIT's first album in his record collection but claimed he did "not know how or when it got there," suggesting it "may well have been left by a guest. I doubt it was there for long, since I never noticed it before. But, again, I know I did not hear 'Taurus' until 2014." In 1997, California told Listener magazine that he thought the song "was a ripoff" of his composition. California died later that year. "Stairway To Heaven" is said to be one of the most covered rock songs and its worth is estimated to be more than $560 million. Dr. Charles Fairchild, an American author and senior lecturer in popular music who is part Sydney, Australia's Conservatorium of Music, explained to Fairfax Media that he heard a similarity between "Stairway To Heaven" and "Taurus" in "about 10 seconds" of music. But Fairchild added that he thought the claim was "unlikely to succeed." "The obvious and only similarity between them is the finger-picked guitar passage that starts off the guitar playing in both songs," Fairchild said. "In the [SPIRIT] version, it starts at 0:43 and in LED ZEPPELIN's it starts off the track. It is that easy, slow descending figure that sounds like a few slow steps down to a nice resting point. This constitutes three measures of music in both songs, which in both cases takes up about 10 seconds or so. However, the two songs go off in completely different directions after this." He continued: "It seems to me that anyone claiming to have been the first person to have ever written this passage is making quite an ambitious claim. This passage is little more than a stock standard chord progression whose origins would be very difficult to determine. It also happens to be a very easy and satisfying thing to play on any guitar in standard tuning. There are probably a lot of other versions of it out there that would be equally similar."
Lieutenant-General Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (Russian: Михаи́л Тимофе́евич Кала́шников, IPA: [kɐˈlaʂnʲɪkəf]; 10 November 1919 – 23 December 2013) was a Russian general, inventor, military engineer, writer and small arms designer. He is most famous for developing the AK-47 assault rifle and its improvements, the AKM and AK-74, as well as the PK machine gun and RPK light machine gun.[1] Kalashnikov was, according to himself, a self-taught tinkerer who combined innate mechanical skills with the study of weaponry to design arms that achieved battlefield ubiquity.[4] Even though Kalashnikov felt sorrow at the weapons' uncontrolled distribution, he took pride in his inventions and in their reputation for reliability, emphasizing that his rifle is "a weapon of defense" and "not a weapon for offense".[4] Early life [ edit ] Kalashnikov was born in Kurya, Altai Governorate, Russian SFSR,[1] now Altai Krai, Russia, as the seventeenth child of the 19 children[5] of Aleksandra Frolovna Kalashnikova (née Kaverina) and Timofey Aleksandrovich Kalashnikov, who were peasants.[5] In 1930, his father and most of his family were deprived of property and deported to the village of Nizhnyaya Mokhovaya, Tomsk Oblast.[6][7] In his youth, Mikhail suffered from various illnesses and was on the verge of death at age six.[3] He was attracted to all kinds of machinery,[6] but also wrote poetry, dreaming of becoming a poet.[8] He went on to write six books and continued to write poetry all of his life.[7][9] Kalashnikov's parents were peasants, but, after deportation to Tomsk Oblast, had to combine farming with hunting, and thus Mikhail frequently used his father's rifle in his teens. Kalashnikov continued hunting into his 90s.[3] After completing seventh grade, Mikhail, with his stepfather's permission, left his family and returned to Kurya, hitchhiking for nearly 1,000 km. In Kurya he found a job in mechanics at a tractor station and developed a passion for weaponry. In 1938, he was conscripted into the Red Army. Because of his small size[10] and engineering skills he was assigned as a tank mechanic, and later became a tank commander. While training, he made his first inventions, which concerned not only tanks, but also small weapons, and was personally awarded a wrist watch by Georgy Zhukov.[3] Kalashnikov served on the T-34s of the 24th Tank Regiment, 108th Tank Division[2] stationed in Stryi[3] before the regiment retreated after the Battle of Brody in June 1941. He was wounded in combat in the Battle of Bryansk in October 1941[3] and hospitalised until April 1942.[2] In the last few months of being in hospital, he overheard some fellow soldiers complaining about the Soviet rifles at the time and this is when he came up with the idea of making a new rifle which later became the AK47.[11] Kalashnikov's first submachine gun Seeing the drawbacks of the standard infantry weapons at the time, he decided to construct a new rifle for the Soviet military. During this time Kalashnikov began designing a submachine gun.[12] Although his first submachine gun design was not accepted into service, his talent as a designer was noticed.[3] From 1942 onwards Kalashnikov was assigned to the Central Scientific-developmental Firing Range for Rifle Firearms of the Chief Artillery Directorate of the Red Army.[13] In 1944, he designed a gas-operated carbine for the new 7.62×39mm cartridge. This weapon, influenced by the M1 Garand rifle, lost out to the new Simonov carbine which would be eventually adopted as the SKS; but it became a basis for his entry in an assault rifle competition in 1946.[14] A Type 2 AK-47, the first machined receiver variation His winning entry, the "Mikhtim" (so named by taking the first letters of his name and patronymic, Mikhail Timofeyevich) became the prototype for the development of a family of prototype rifles.[15] The submachine bore an uncanny resemblance to the German WWII-era StG 44 This process culminated in 1947, when he designed the AK-47 (standing for Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947). In 1949, the AK-47 became the standard issue assault rifle of the Soviet Army and went on to become Kalashnikov's most famous invention.[16] While developing his first assault rifles, Kalashnikov competed with two much more experienced weapon designers, Vasily Degtyaryov and Georgy Shpagin, who both accepted the superiority of the AK-47. Kalashnikov named Alexandr Zaitsev and Vladimir Deikin as his major collaborators during those years.[3] Later career [ edit ] From 1949, Mikhail Kalashnikov lived and worked in Izhevsk, Udmurtia. He held a degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences (1971)[1][2] and was a member of 16 academies.[17] Over the course of his career, he evolved the basic design into a weapons family. The AKM (Russian: Автомат Кала́шникова Модернизированный, lit. 'Kalashnikov modernized assault rifle') first appeared in 1963, was lighter and cheaper to manufacture owing to the use of a stamped steel receiver (in place of the AK-47's milled steel receiver), and contained detail improvements such as a re-shaped stock and muzzle compensator. From the AKM he developed a squad automatic weapon variant, known as the RPK (Russian: Ручной пулемет Кала́шникова, lit. 'Kalashnikov light machine gun'). He also developed the general-purpose PK machine gun (Russian: Пулемет Кала́шникова, lit. 'Kalashnikov machine gun'), which used the more powerful 7.62×54R cartridge of the Mosin–Nagant rifle. It is cartridge belt-fed, not magazine-fed, as it is intended to provide heavy sustained fire from a tripod mount, or be used as a light, bipod-mounted weapon. The common characteristics of all these weapons are simple design, ruggedness and ease of maintenance in all operating conditions. Approximately 100 million AK-47 assault rifles had been produced by 2009,[9] and about half of them are counterfeit, manufactured at a rate of about a million per year.[12][18] Izhmash, the official manufacturer of AK-47 in Russia, did not patent the weapon until 1997, and in 2006 accounted for only 10% of the world's production.[8] This arm became famous due to its reliability in the most extreme climatic conditions, functioning perfectly in the desert as in the tundra. It is in official use by the militaries of 55 nations, and has been so influential in military struggle that it has been used on national flags. Prominent examples include the flags of Mozambique and Hezbollah, as well as the East Timorese and Zimbabwean coats of arms. Kalashnikov himself claimed he was always motivated by service to his country rather than money,[7] and made no direct profit from weapon production.[19] He did however own 30% of a German company Marken Marketing International (MMI) run by his grandson Igor.[20] The company revamps trademarks and produces merchandise carrying the Kalashnikov name, such as vodka,[9] umbrellas and knives.[21][22] One of the items is a knife named for the AK-74.[20] During a visit to the United States in the early 2000s, Kalashnikov was invited to tour a Virginia holding site for the forthcoming American Wartime Museum. The former tanker Kalashnikov became visibly moved at the sight of his old tank in action, painted with his name in Cyrillic.[23] Death [ edit ] After a prolonged illness Kalashnikov was hospitalized on 17 November 2013, in an Udmurtian medical facility in Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia and where he lived. He died 23 December 2013, at age 94 from gastric hemorrhage.[24][25][26][27] In January 2014 a letter that Kalashnikov wrote six months before his death to the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, was published by the Russian daily newspaper Izvestia.[28] In the letter he stated that he was suffering "spiritual pain" about whether he was responsible for the deaths caused by the weapons he created.[29] Translated from the published letter he states, "I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I... a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?"[30][28] The patriarch wrote back, thanked Kalashnikov, and said that he "was an example of patriotism and a correct attitude toward the country". Kirill added about the design responsibility for the deaths by the rifle, "the church has a well-defined position when the weapon is defense of the Motherland, the Church supports its creators and the military, which use it."[28] He became one of the first people buried in the Federal Military Memorial Cemetery. Family [ edit ] Kalashnikov's father, Timofey Aleksandrovich Kalashnikov (1883–1930), was a peasant. He completed two grades of parochial school and could read and write. In 1901 he married Aleksandra Frolovna Kaverina (1884–1957), who was illiterate throughout her life. They had 19 children, but only eight survived to adult age; Kalashnikov was born 17th,[16] and was close to death at age six. In 1930, the government labeled Timofey Aleksandrovich a kulak, confiscated his property, and deported him to Siberia, along with most of the family. The eldest three siblings, daughters Agasha (b. 1905) and Anna and son Victor, were already married by 1930, and remained in Kuriya. After her husband's death in 1930, Aleksandra Frolovna married Efrem Kosach, a widower who had three children of his own.[3][6] Mikhail Kalashnikov married twice, the first time to Ekaterina Danilovna Astakhova of Altai Krai. He married the second time to Ekaterina Viktorovna Moiseyeva (1921–1977).[4][31] She was an engineer and did much technical drawing work for her husband. They had four children: daughters Nelli (b. 1942), Elena (b. 1948) and Natalya (1953–1983), and a son Victor (b. 1942).[3][31] Victor also became a prominent small arms designer. The title to the AK-47 trademark belonged to Mikhail Kalashnikov's family until 4 April 2016, when the Kalashnikov Concern won a lawsuit to invalidate the registration of the trademark.[32] Weapon designs [ edit ] During his career, Kalashnikov designed about 150 models of small weapons.[17] The most famous of them are: Awards and tribute [ edit ] Mikhail Kalashnikov on a 2014 stamp of the Russian Post Incorporates information from the corresponding article in the Russian Wikipedia Russian Federation [ edit ] Decorations Awards State Prize of the Russian Federation in the field of design (1997) Award of the President of the Russian Federation in the field of education (2003) All-Russian Literary Prize of Suvorov (2009) Honorary diplomas Diploma of the Government of the Russian Federation (1997, 1999) Medals Jubilee Medal "50 Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" Medal "Symbol of Science" (2007) Gold Medal of Zhukov Medal "For outstanding contribution to the development of the collection business in Russia" Acknowledgements Gratitude of the President of the Russian Federation (1997, 1999, 2002, 2007) Soviet [ edit ] Honours Medals Medal "Hammer and Sickle" (1958,1976) Medal "For Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945" Medal "Twenty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" Medal "In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" Jubilee Medal "Thirty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" Jubilee Medal "Forty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" Medal "For Distinction in Guarding the State Border of the USSR" Medal "Veteran of Labor" on behalf of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Jubilee Medal "30 years of the Soviet Army and Navy" Jubilee Medal "40 years of the Armed Forces of the USSR" Jubilee Medal "50 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR" Jubilee Medal "60 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR" Jubilee Medal "70 years of the Armed Forces of the USSR" Medal "In Commemoration of the 800th anniversary of Moscow" Awards Foreign decorations [ edit ] Order of Honour of Belarus (1999) Order of Friendship, First Class (2003) Other honours [ edit ] the home of Mikhail Kalashnikov in the village he set Courier lifetime bronze bust (1980) the name of the designer named projected prospect in Izhevsk (1994) "Honorary Citizen of the Altai Territory" (1997) Ministry of Economy of Russia award – The sign "of small arms designer Mikhail Kalashnikov" (1997) Union of scientific and engineering organizations and the Government of Udmurtia established an award named after Mikhail Kalashnikov (1999) Diamond company "Alrosa" extracted 29 December 1995 gem diamonds weighing 50.74 carats given the name "designer Mikhail Kalashnikov" (14.5 x 15, 0h15, 5 mm, quality Stones Black) (1999) Mikhail Kalashnikov Cadet School in Votkinsk (2002) Award in his name at the School of Weapon Skills of Izhevsk (2002) Izhevsk State Cultural Institution "Museum of Mikhail Kalashnikov" "Honorary Engineer of Kazakhstan" (Kazakhstan; 2004) Gift from President Hugo Chávez, the highest award of the Republic – a copy of the famous sword of Simon Bolivar, which is a relic of Venezuela and the copy is equal to the highest award of the country (2009) The name of Mikhail Kalashnikov was given to the military department of the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg (2009) Izhevsk State Technical University was awarded the name of Mikhail Kalashnikov (2012) German knife company Boker has dedicated a series to him (2013) The companies that make Kalashnikov rifles, Izhmash and Izhevsk Mechanical Plant were merged and formally renamed Kalashnikov Concern.[40] (2013) Quotes [ edit ] "I was in the hospital, and a soldier in the bed beside me asked: ‘Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men, when the Germans have automatics?’ So I designed one. I was a soldier, and I created a machine gun for a soldier. It was called an Avtomat Kalashnikova, the automatic weapon of Kalashnikov—AK—and it carried the date of its first manufacture, 1947." [41] "Blame the Nazi Germans for making me become a gun designer ... I always wanted to construct agriculture machinery." [12] "When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, 'All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed' ... So this has been my lifetime motto – I have been creating weapons to defend the borders of my fatherland, to be simple and reliable." [18] "I'm proud of my invention, but I'm sad that it is used by terrorists ... I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work — for example a lawn mower." [11] [19] "I created a weapon to defend the borders of my motherland. It's not my fault that it's being used where it shouldn't be. The politicians are more to blame for this." [7] [8] [9] [16] [19] "I sleep well. It's the politicians who are to blame for failing to come to an agreement and resorting to violence."[42] References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ]
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KTHV) -- The sights in any national cemetery always evoke certain emotions; reverence, respect, sorrow, and pride. They should not be a place for shame. But a growing number of men and women are buried there because shame and fear became part of their lives in the military. "He had wounds that weren't visible," said Deborah Johnson, president of the Gold Star Mothers of Arkansas as she visits her son at the Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery in North Little Rock. Sergeant Jeremy Johnson is buried there after taking his own life in March 2010. The 25-year-old was transitioning out after a year-long tour in Kandahar, Afghanistan. While stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia, he killed himself despite being on suicide watch and prescribed medication for depression and anxiety. As a chapter president of an organization made up of mothers whose men and women died while serving in the military, Deborah Johnson knows there are different kinds of sacrifice. She also knows some of the attitudes that exist about the way her son died. "It's a coward's thing to say that you're weak," she said. "Soldiers are supposed to be strong. Big boys don't cry." To fully recognize veterans and the great sacrifice they’ve made also means we must face the dark side of war. The Johnson family is part of a growing crisis in the military, where too many veterans return from war or deal with the battles on the field, by choosing to take their own lives. The reasons are many, and often it’s the end result of how they feel the military treats and deals with their mental health. Johnson appears to have been caught in what old soldiers would call a Catch-22. Modern warriors refer to it as a "Charlie Foxtrot." The phonetic alphabet for the letters "cf," which stands for "cluster f---." "The bottle was found in his room. They were his wife's pain pills," said Johnson’s mother. "I don't think he was taking the medication he had been prescribed. Because he was on a watch, someone would check on him every hour. But that's all they would check." Johnson was taking part in a program for all soldiers returning from a warzone. They go through group therapy sessions, and his superiors recognized he needed something more, based on the prescription he received. But that's where the mental health care ended. He would die in a single room by himself, despite sounding alarms four days earlier when he sent his mother a text saying "this is good-bye." "That Sunday, we had a conversation with his commanding officer," said Deborah. "Basically, he apologized and said that they had failed our son." Johnson's suicide is one of thousands for veterans of America's wars since 2001. The widely cited rate puts it at about 20 vets a day. Most are Vietnam era service members, but the numbers of recent vets is reaching a crisis. The growth comes despite advances in mental health treatment and improved medical care outside the military. And here's where the Charlie Foxtrot becomes apparent. The military can't run if it allows suicidal thoughts in the ranks. Service members are trained to get past that fear despite the horrors of war. So in the military's eyes, the soldier, sailor, airman, or marine who admits fear runs afoul of both codes of conduct and a spirit that keeps fighting units together. And if a person succeeds in taking their own life, the thinking goes, "Well, they took the coward's way out" or "They left behind their brothers." Overcoming that stigma has become the mission for people like Little Rock attorney Chris Attig. He is a retired U.S. Army captain who specializes in veterans' cases and their fights with the Veteran’s Administration. More and more, he is hearing from experts that these mental problems are war injuries and should be treated as such, but the military and the V.A. can't shake institutional norms. "There is the stigma from military service that says we're team oriented, Attig said. "We're mission oriented, and leaving your team is, for one, a crime and then too selfish in a lot of ways." Attig makes his living navigating a bureaucratic maze to help vets get claims and benefits. He said a similar effort will be required to conquer the suicide crisis. "There is a significant problem with how the VA treats mental health," he said. "They throw drugs at it. It takes, on average 26 days to get a veteran in for a comprehensive mental health exam." Those 26 days can be so dangerous for the veteran in crisis. Attig does see signs it can be changed, thanks to veterans groups that know what to look for and want to find the men and women at risk. "I'm in a group called Team Red, White, and Blue," he said. "This is a group of veterans and non-veterans that basically create a connection to a community. They say come into our group. We're going to go outside. We're going to walk together, we're going to run together. We're going to talk. We're going go out and be active together.' It's that connection that shows the best signs of preventing that vet from suicide. If he's connected to something like a church or a social group of some kind." Military brass are listening to family members like Deborah. She often consults with local commanders at places like Little Rock Air Force Base and Camp Robinson. "I'm not smart enough to tell them how to fix it," Johnson said. "But to me the key is to try to find the few soldiers that need more intensive therapy. It's a big problem, and I think they're working on it. It's just so big that it's hard to see any progress.” For more information or more Charlie Foxtrot stories, see our CF section. There you will also find a link petitioning Congress to do more for veterans.
* As of August 2018, all Lunar patches are available, last few Celestial ones available 1. Patch info fav.me/d4s059r -> currently available patchesAll patches come with Velcro backing both hook and loop sides.Feel free to follow me on twitter, where I should be able to post info on any new projects I'll do! -> twitter.com/TensaiOni a) Full colour Lunar patch - the patch is 10 cm (~4") tall in tallest point and 9 cm (~3 1/2") wide in widest place. Comes with Velcro backing.It's a bit larger than your usual patch size, but considering the shape of the patch, only parts of the text "labels" might stick out a bit when placed on an uniform.Available in both "dark" and "light" versions.b) Subdued/camo Lunar patch - the patch is a bit smaller, around 7,5 cm tall (~3"), exactly the size of larger patch's shield without labels.c) Celestial patch - patch is 7,5cm by 7,5cm (~3" by ~3").2. Pricinga) Full colour Lunar patch -> 6 USD (same price for both "dark" and "light" versions) Price includes Velcro backing, both hook and loop sides cut exactly to patch size - makes it perfectly fit for both uniform and non-uniform use! b) Subdued/camo Lunar patch -> 5 USD Price includes Velcro backing, both hook and loop sides cut exactly to patch size - makes it perfectly fit for both uniform and non-uniform use! c) Celestial patch -> 5.50 USD (last few available) Price includes Velcro backing, both hook and loop sides cut exactly to patch size - makes it perfectly fit for both uniform and non-uniform use! To all patches: Optional extra Velcro loop side patch (black, 4" by 4" patch) -> +0.50 USD3. ShipmentOn default I offer to ways of shipment:a) Priority mail -> 2 USDb) Registered Priority mail -> 6 USD As name suggests, registered priority mail is registered, so in case something happens to it, I'll be able to do something about it. Also, in most countries, registered priority mail also needs signature at delivery ** While shipping normal Priority Mail I WON'T be able to do anything if the mail is lost etc., saying that, I had a single case of something missing in hundreds of mail sent to/from US/EU *Shipment costs are the same no matter where you are or what amount of patches you are buying.In theory, it should take up to 3 work days to deliver to EU countries and up to 6 days to deliver to non-EU countries, but you should give it up to 2 weeks to be delivered.If you want to use any different way/option of delivery, please point that out while contacting me.You're also responsible for any customs/duty fees or additional taxes your country will impose on you - though from my experience, there are no additional fees for items of such low value.If you're in European Union, there are no taxes or customs/duty fees.4. PaymentPreferred payment method is PayPal, but if for whatever reason you can't use it feel free to contact me for alternatives.If you'll want to place an order, you'll need to e-mail me at [email protected] or through deviantart's note system the following information:1. Your name and address (including country!)2. How many patches you want to order3. Chosen way of shipmentAfter getting that information from you, I'll be able to process your order and contact you further about payment.And of course, if you have any comments, suggestions or anything, you are free to contact me or leave a comment here!
Advertisement From the Jersey Devil to the Mothman, the US is filled with fictional creatures that have come to life in the nation's imagination. Now one artist has decided to draw these cryptids by hand, revealing the beasts that are feared the most in each state. 'The map is a bit of a declaration of optimism and wonderment as to what might be possible on planet Earth,' artist Mark Adams told Dailymail.com. Scroll down for video The map, created by artist Mark Adams, reveals the imaginary beasts that are feared the most in each state. 'It is a bit of a declaration of optimism and wonderment as to what might be possible on planet Earth,' he told Dailymail.com Big Bird, for instance, has become notorious in Texas where witnesses have reported seeing an ape faced, winged beast with blood-red eyes. Reports of the creature hit their peak in the early months of 1976 after a local radio station offered a reward for the beast's capture. Neighbouring state, Louisiana, is famous for the Honey Island Swap Monster. The creature is 7ft (2 metres) tall, with grey hair, yellow eyes and a foul stench. Native Americans call this creature 'Letiche', and legendary tale suggests the beast came about following a train wreck in the area in the early 20th century. While Bigfoot (left) is more famous in Washington, last year a large footprint unlike one from a human was in the woods in Mississippi. The right image shows the Fouke Monster, which is most feared in Arkansas Louisiana, is famous for the Honey Island Swap Monster (left), while the Jersey Devil (right) is most feared in New Jersey THE LEGEND OF MOTHMAN Mothman is a moth-like creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant area of West Virginia from 15 November 1966 to 15 December 1967. Some ufologists, paranormal authors, and cryptozoologists believe that Mothman was an alien, a supernatural manifestation, or an unknown cryptid. The Native Americans had stories of giant terrible birds called. These thunderbirds could easily swoop down and carry away a man. In their depictions, they look similar to the descriptions of Mothman. On November 12, 1966, five men claimed to see a man-like figure fly low from the trees over their heads while digging in a grave. This is often identified as the first known sighting of what became known as the Mothman. A travelling circus was on the train, and from it a group of chimpanzees escaped and interbred with the local alligator population, according to the tale. 'I personally found myself drawn more to the carnivores and predatory cats, beasts like Shunka Warakin and the Ozark Howler,' said the Philadelphia-based artist. 'Creatures that likely exist in other less-hostile parts of the world, but for some reason are considered to be too far out to survive in North America.' Perhaps the most famous of all the legendary beasts in the US is Bigfoot - a large hairy ape man that is alleged by some to live in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. While Bigfoot is more famous in Washington, last year a large footprint unlike one from a human was in the woods in Mississippi - raising suggestions that the creature it belongs to is Bigfoot. The large print was found by Peyton Lassiter in Vicksburg on August 12 - nine months after another local man, David Childers, saw a large grey figure running through a wooded area nearby. Other monsters in the map include the Mothman in West Virginia, the Jersey devil in New Jersey, the Beast of Busco in Indiana and the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swap in South Carolina. 'I love to think that there could be a cougar roaming the mountains of rural Arkansas, or a dire wolf wreaking havoc on the plains of Montana,' said Mr Adams. 'This world is an incredibly diverse place full of mystery and magic, and I for one like to think opposable thumbs and the ability to 'reason' doesn't immediately entitle us to a sense of certainty that we've got it all figured.' Perhaps the most famous of all the legendary beasts in the US is Bigfoot - a large hairy ape man that is alleged by some to live in the forests of the Pacific Northwest (artist's impression pictured) 'The Legend of the Mothman' statue by Bob Roach graces the streets of Point Pleasant in New Jersey. On November 12, 1966, five men claimed to see a man-like figure fly low from the trees over their heads while digging in a grave. This is often identified as the first known sighting of what became known as the Mothman
Last Christmas morning I sat on the couch in my PJs, sipping hot cocoa from my favorite mug while I watched my husband open his last gift. He looked at the brown box curiously before pulling out 12 small cards with a monthly date night printed on each one. "See?" I exclaimed proudly. "Now you don't have to listen to me whine about date night for a WHOLE YEAR!" (In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have led with that.) You see, 2013 was our first full year as parents. It was the year we slept the least, bickered the most, reanalyzed our roles around the house three dozen times, and changed more than 2,500 diapers (approximately). It was also the year we forgot about date night. Well, I guess we didn't forget per se. It just became easier to stay home and call a carton of ice cream combined with a Breaking Bad marathon "date night" than it was to put on real pants and leave the house looking like two functioning people of society. It was sad, really. We had a laundry list of excuses. We're tired! We hate paying for babysitting! We don't feel like it! This month is too busy! Did we mention that we are tired? I let the blame fall squarely on my husband's shoulders. I wanted to be pursued; I wanted him to give me a reason to dress up. Me, me, me. Poor me. It was easy to grow bitter, to play the victim and complain till I was blue in the face. "You never plan date nights for us anymore!" I whined constantly. (Side note: who wants to date someone who whines all the time?) My princess mentality was getting me nowhere, and finally, one day, it hit me. I'm the planner in the family -- the one who thrives on calendars and to-do lists and planning vacations full years before they actually take place. My husband is much more spontaneous and go-with-the-flow. Quality time is my love language, not his. Why was I stewing in our bedroom, harboring resentment towards him for not planning dates when I was more than capable of planning them myself? So last Christmas, I took matters into my own hands. I planned 12 date nights for us to complete in 2014 -- rain or shine, no excuses. We went to a painting class and learned how to salsa dance and hiked around the river preserve at sunset. We ate corn dogs at the state fair, cheered for our home team at a basketball game, and enjoyed a gourmet picnic dinner at a local farm on a totally average Tuesday night. Last weekend we went to the drive-in and ate Milk Duds and Hot Tamales in the trunk of my car, snuggled up in a makeshift fort under the stars watching Katniss Everdeen on the big screen. None of the dates was extravagant or super expensive, and that was the point. They were simply better than Netflix and ice cream. Because we wore clothes that were not sweatpants and I even wore lip gloss sometimes and for an entire year, once a month, we left the house together, just the two of us. We held hands in the car. We flirted over dinner. We shared candy at the movies. To be perfectly honest, nothing extraordinary happened. We didn't fall in love all over again or run through flowery fields in slow motion while Sam Smith played in the background. That's not what the year of dates was about. The year of dates was simply about taking back date night. It was about setting aside time to focus on each other without a baby in the room. It was about toddler-free conversations, lip gloss and real pants, dinners that didn't involve high chairs or sippy cups. It was about making room to dream together, to laugh together, to tell secrets and hold hands. It was about demonstrating on a regular basis that our marriage is important -- a force to be reckoned with. It was about showing our children that our marriage is a separate entity from them, even though the lines often feel blurry at home. It was about reminding ourselves that as much as we love our children, we loved each other first. Not all of our dates were perfect. One of them ended in a fight. A few of the adventurous dates were modified to accommodate my almost year-long pregnancy. But as we get ready to wrap up the year, I can honestly say: I am proud of us for sticking to it. We went on a date night every single month this year -- a commitment that, at times, truthfully felt like a lot of work. The year of dates was a practice in discipline. That might sound unromantic, but I'm learning that when you have small children constantly vying for your attention, sometimes you have to practice discipline to create the space for romance. Marriage is hard work, and date night is no exception, but if there's one thing I know for certain, it is this: time spent on your marriage is always energy (and money!) well spent. We're already planning another year of dates for next year, only my husband promised to plan half of them this time around. We even have a friendly bet going for who can plan the best date (I'm totally going to win). If you and your spouse have gotten in a rut with Netflix and ice cream, might I suggest you join us? Let's raise our glasses this New Year and toast together to a year of dates -- here's to quality time, to lip gloss and real pants, to a little bit of romance, and maybe even some good ol'-fashioned making out in 2015. This post was originally published on Coffee + Crumbs. Also on HuffPost:
If you like brain teasers, we've got a doozy for you. In this TED-Ed lesson, Alex Gendler walks us through the "prisoner hat riddle," a classic puzzle. In this version, you and nine other humans have been abducted by aliens. The aliens would like to eat you all, but not if you can prove your intelligence. So they propose a test. The aliens line you up, placing you in order of height (tallest in the back, shortest in front), and place black or white hats on each of you. You must face forward, and you mustn't look at your own hat. Starting with the person in the back, each person must say a single word: "black" or "white" to guess the color of the hat on his or her own head, despite not being able to see it. If nine of you get it right, you live. If you don't, you're lunch. The good news? You get to talk it through as a group first. This is a classic puzzler because it requires the group to devise a way to signal hat-color information without directly saying it. I'll admit, I watched the setup, paused the video, and thought about it a bit. I did not solve this riddle. Can you? (The answer is explained after about 90 seconds of setup.) You can read more about this lesson from TED-Ed. If you like this kind of puzzle, you need to check out their Math in Real Life video series.
Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo Barack Obama's job approval rating flattened at an even 47-47 percent in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, his lowest in more than a year, with more than half of Americans disapproving of his handling of the situation with Syria. The public by a 15-point margin is more apt to say Obama's performance on Syria has weakened rather than strengthened U.S. global leadership, and six in 10 continue to oppose the missile strikes he urged. At the same time, the survey finds vast support, 79 percent, for the Russian-backed plan to junk Syria's chemical weapons, even amid skepticism Syria will cooperate. See PDF with full results, charts and tables here. If Syria in fact fails to surrender its chemical weapons, the public divides about evenly on whether Congress should authorize military strikes after all: Forty-four percent say it should, short of a majority but well more than the 30 percent who back missile strikes as things stand now. There are some positive notes for the president. More than half, 54 percent still see him as a strong leader; 52 percent say he's a good commander-in-chief of the military; and more, 60 percent, say he sticks with his principles. On Syria specifically, more accept than reject his argument that the threat of missile strikes helped the situation, albeit by a single-digit margin, 47-40 percent. Similarly, he leads congressional Republicans in trust to handle the confrontation with Syria by 8 percentage points. More Americans in this poll, conducted for ABC by Langer Research Associates, found Obama's address to the nation on Syria last week to be persuasive rather than unpersuasive, by 47-32 percent. However 21 percent have no opinion on the speech, and as often occurs in such cases, some critics may just have tuned him out. VITAL INTEREST? - Most import on Syria is the question of whether or not the situation involves the vital interests of the United States, as Obama has argued. Support for strong action rises in cases when U.S. interests are seen as being at stake; for instance, 67 percent said so about Iraq in 2003, vs. just 23 percent about Somalia in 1993. On Syria, it's a split decision: Forty-five percent of Americans see vital U.S. interests at stake in this situation, while 48 percent do not. Liberals are most likely to see the issue as one of vital concern, with 55 percent saying so; fewer moderates and conservatives agree, 43 and 42 percent, respectively. It matters: People who see vital U.S. interests at stake are 16 points more apt than others to favor missile strikes now (though most still don't) and 23 points more apt to favor having Congress authorize military action if Syria fails to cooperate. Should Syria stall, support for congressional authorization reaches 56 percent among people who think vital U.S. interests are involved, vs. 33 percent among those who think not. SUMMARY NUMBERS - In summary, some of the topline results of this survey, in context, are as follows: At 47-47 percent, Obama's overall job approval rating is its lowest since July 2012. More "strongly" disapprove than strongly approve by 12 points, the largest negative gap in intensity of sentiment about his performance since farther back, January 2012. Americans give Obama a 47-44 percent approval rating for handling international affairs overall, with approval down 7 points from a post-re-election bump. His approval turns negative, 36-53 percent, on Syria specifically, with views on his handling of the situation there more strongly negative than strongly positive by a broad 20 points, 19 vs. 39 percent. Sixty-one percent oppose missile strikes on Syria, vs. 30 percent in support, similar to ABC/Post polls the past two weeks. By contrast, the public supports the Russian plan by 79-16 percent, even though 68 percent lack confidence Syria will cooperate with the collection and destruction of its chemical weapons by international monitors. As noted, substantially more think Obama's handling of the situation with Syria has weakened rather than strengthened U.S. leadership in the world, 32 vs. 17 percent. But a plurality, 46 percent, don't think it's affected perceptions of U.S. leadership either way. Views of Obama as a strong leader, while down by 7 points from early this year, are more positive than negative for the 10 th time in 11 ABC/Post polls to ask this question. His rating as a commander-in-chief is better than his prospective ratings on this question before he took office. While sticking with his principles is a notable strength, he gets an even split on another personal attribute, whether or not he "shares your values." That's been the case steadily since late 2010, with very wide partisan and ideological divisions. GROUPS/OBAMA - Even beyond the customary political gaps, demographic groups divide sharply in their assessments of Obama. His job approval rating is 74 percent among nonwhites vs. 33 percent among whites (with a sizable gap between college-educated vs. non-college whites - 40 percent approval in the former group, 28 percent in the latter). Obama's approval rating reaches 57 percent in urban areas, 55 percent in the Northeast and 55 percent among 18 to 29-year-olds. He holds 54 percent approval in the blue states he won in 2012, vs. 35 percent in the red states. While now usual, the political divisions are huge. Eighty percent of Democrats approve of the president's performance overall; 10 percent of Republicans agree. (It's 42 percent among independents.) Sixty-seven percent of liberals approve vs. 26 percent of conservatives. (It's 52 percent among moderates.) For his worst rating, look to conservative Republicans, a group in which just 6 percent approve of Obama's work in office, while 92 percent disapprove. Eighty-three percent disapprove strongly. Obama loses ground in his own base and in the center alike when it comes to handling the situation with Syria. Sixty percent of Democrats and 55 percent of liberals approve, as do just 32 and 37 percent of independents and moderates - lower in each case than his approval overall in these groups. Independents divide on whom they trust more to handle the situation with Syria, Obama or the Republicans in Congress, 36 to 34 percent; in a notable expression of their political disaffection, 21 percent of independents volunteer that they don't trust either option. Obama and the GOP each win three-quarters of their partisans on this question, with Obama prevailing because self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by 11 points. GROUPS/SYRIA FORCE - Given widespread public expectations that Syria won't in fact cooperate with the Russian plan to neutralize its chemical weapons stockpile, it's instructive to know which groups support or oppose an authorization of force by Congress as a backup plan. Beyond the "vital interests" result, politics and ideology again play a substantial role. Support for authorization of force if Syria doesn't comply reaches majorities among just a few groups in this survey - Democrats (56 percent) and liberals (53 percent), and among two strongly Democratic groups, blacks and nonwhites overall (63 and 58 percent). Even those numbers are comparatively tepid, given that they're core Obama support groups. Were the Russian plan to fail and Obama to return to Congress for authorization, these results suggest he'd face a further difficult battle for public opinion - unless and until the case is made that vital U.S. interests are in fact at stake. METHODOLOGY - This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone Sept. 12-15, 2013, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 1,004 adults, including landline and cell-phone-only respondents. Results have a margin of sampling error of 4 points, including design effect. Partisan divisions are 34-23-34 percent, Democrats-Republicans-independents. The survey was produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates of New York, N.Y., with sampling, data collection and tabulation by Abt-SRBI of New York, N.Y.
College Student Invents Affordable Solar-Powered Fridge January 8th, 2009 by Ariel Schwartz A British college student has invented a new type of solar-powered fridge that can be built entirely from household materials. According to 21 year old Emily Cummins, the fridge works with the help of evaporation. The fridge stays at a comfortable 6° C without using any power, and can keep perishables cool for days. Cummins’ fridge is made up of two cylinders, with one inside the other. The inner cylinder is made of metal, and the water-soaked outer cylinder can be made from wood or plastic. When placed in the sun, the sun heats the outer cylinder and water evaporates off. Heat is removed from the inner cylinder during the evaporation process, keeping the interior of the fridge cool. Emily Cummins isn’t the first person to design a solar fridge, but the cheapness of her design makes it ideal for poor locales. Photo Credit: Flickr user Nictalopen under a CC license
Jeremy Stephens can look directly at his last two losses and he knows exactly where he went wrong both times. It wasn’t a lack of training or conditioning. It wasn’t knowing the correct escape from a submission or failing to stuff a takedown. Stephens lost to both Charles Oliveira and Cub Swanson because his mind wasn’t in the right place and his body reacted. He questioned himself in spots where he shouldn’t have had any doubts and ended up over thinking in a spot where he should have relied on killer instinct. Article continues below ... "The thing that I learned in those fights is just my mindset," Stephens told FOX Sports. "I’m 100-percent confident in my abilities now. In the time of the Charles Oliveira fight, I was in between strength and conditioning coaches. I felt like I could have been better prepared for a situation like that. That problem is fixed. "That was the only thing holding me back in the Cub Swanson fight. I rocked him and normally I would be all over somebody once that happened and that could have been the difference in the fight. I should have went for the finish but I was being conservative because I didn’t want to gas. Off those losses, my confidence has grown. In those things I was fearful, I’m now confident." I’m going to decimate Bermudez. There’s nothing that’s going to stop me. I’m going to go forward and I’m going to do everything in my power to finish this guy — Jeremy Stephens Stephens isn’t afraid to admit his shortcomings in both of those fights, but he’s also smart enough to learn and adapt so it doesn’t happen again. "The last fight, there were a lot of mistakes I made, but I fixed those. I’m good at evolving," Stephens said. "I’m like the Charles Darwin theory, I like to adapt, come back, get better, get stronger and learn from my mistakes. It won’t happen again." For his upcoming fight at UFC 189, Stephens faces Dennis Bermudez on the pay-per-view main card in a bout that could end up stealing the show. The two fighters have combined for 10 post fight bonuses during their respective UFC careers and Stephens believes this will be a crowd pleaser from start to finish. He also knows how fighters approach him once they get a taste of his power inside the Octagon. Stephens has rattled a few jaws in his career including a highlight reel finish over current UFC lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos. Stephens hopes Bermudez is there to put on a show, but he also understand that he turns a lot of fighters into wrestlers the moment they begin to exchange combinations with him. "That’s the way it is. You’re just speaking the truth. I know that. I know from the moment that we come out, if you decide to stand with me, you know as soon as there’s an opportunity I’m going to crack you. If I do, I know within your eyes and your body language you’re going to be looking for a shot," Stephens said. "I’m going to be looking to crush your face the whole time. That’s just what I do. That’s just my style. I know these guys are going to try to wrestle me. That’s the only way they’re going to win." Stephens is well aware that for all the accolades Bermudez has racked up during his career, he still has a wrestling pedigree to fall back on if things go south for him on July 11. Stephens believes he’s ready to counter the takedowns and even if Bermudez gets him on the ground, he then has to keep him there. While he can’t predict a round or a time for the finish, Stephens knows that whether it’s in the opening exchange or just before the final horn sounds — Bermudez is getting his clock cleaned at UFC 189. "He’s a gamer, but I know he’s going to try to put me on my back. Because once he gets hit, it’s over. He could take me down for the whole 14 minutes and 59 seconds, but I guarantee I’m going to land that shot that’s going to change his life," Stephens said. "I’m going to decimate Bermudez. There’s nothing that’s going to stop me. I’m going to go forward and I’m going to do everything in my power to finish this guy."
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- The Tennessee Volunteers (27-26, 7-20 SEC) travel to take on the Georgia Bulldogs (26-27, 10-17 SEC) for the final regular-season series of 2016 conference play from Thursday, May 19 - Saturday, May 21 at Foley Field. Series Info Tennessee vs. Georgia Series Opponent: Georgia Bulldogs (26-27, 10-17 SEC) Georgia Bulldogs (26-27, 10-17 SEC) Date: Thursday, May 19 at 7 p.m. ET Thursday, May 19 at 7 p.m. ET Date: Friday, May 20 at 3 p.m. ET Friday, May 20 at 3 p.m. ET Date: Saturday, May 21 at 12 p.m. ET Saturday, May 21 at 12 p.m. ET Venue: Foley Field (Athens, Ga.) Foley Field (Athens, Ga.) Radio: UTSports.com UTSports.com Broadcast: SEC Network/SEC Network+ Tennessee (27-26, 7-20 SEC) Roster Schedule Stats Georgia (26-27, 10-17 SEC) Roster Schedule Stats The Volunteers enter their last weekend series with a 27-26 overall record, including a 7-20 mark in Southeastern Conference play while the Bulldogs (26-27, 10-17 SEC) look to take their third-straight series win over UT in Athens. In the last matchup between the schools, Georgia completed a three-game sweep over the Vols in Knoxville. Despite the outcome, Tennessee held UGA to just four hits in the Friday series opener, and scored 11 runs over the last two games on Rocky Top. UT's Saturday, May 21 regular season finale will be nationally broadcast, with Dave Neal (PxP) and Nick Belmonte (Analyst) delivering the game action via SEC Network television. The Thursday, May 19 and Friday, May 20 games will also be available for viewing via SEC Network+ online stream. SCHEDULING NOTE: Due to rain in the forecast, Tennessee's Friday matchup vs. Georgia has been moved to 3 p.m. ET on SEC Network+ stream. Weekend Rotation Thursday, May 19 @ 7 p.m. ET: RHP Will Neely (1-2, 3.95 ERA) vs. LHP Bo Tucker (3-4, 3.38 ERA) Friday, May 20 @ 3 p.m. ET: LHP Zach Warren (5-5, 3.89 ERA) vs. RHP Robert Tyler (3-5, 4.15 ERA) Saturday, May 21 @ 12 p.m. ET: LHP Aaron Soto (4-2, 4.19 ERA) vs. LHP Connor Jones (5-6, 4.87 ERA) Tennessee vs. UGA All-Time Overall vs. UGA: UT leads, 118-111 In Athens: UGA leads, 67-49 In Knoxville: UT leads, 66-44 Last Meeting: UGA won, 10-4, in Knoxville (3/22/15) Last 10 Games: UGA leads, 8-2, since 2012 Vols on the Charts Tennessee owns a collective .290 team batting average, the fifth-best mark in the league. Additionally, UT's 81 stolen bases rank second in the SEC, while they lead the conference with 55 double plays turned over 53 games in 2016. Among SEC opponents, the Volunteers also rank second in doubles (101), fifth in hits (521), tied for eighth in total runs scored (325) and seventh in on-base percentage (.375). Tennessee on NCAA charts (as of May 16): Team Double Plays - 55 (T-9th in NCAA) Team Double Plays/Game - 1.04 (13th in NCAA) Team Sacrifice Flies - 29 (T-19th in NCAA) Chris Hall - 16 HBP (T-11st in NCAA) Jordan Rodgers - six sacrifice flies (T-26th in NCAA) Nick Senzel - 21 doubles (T-17th in NCAA), six sacrifice flies (T-26th in NCAA), 23 stolen bases (T-36th in NCAA) Volunteers rank among the SEC's Top 10 in the following categories: Chris Hall - 44 runs scored (T-10th), .445 OBP (10th), 16 HBP (3rd) Brodie Leftridge - four triples (T-7th) Jordan Rodgers - 53 RBI (4th), five triples (T-3rd), six sacrifice flies (T-3rd) Nick Senzel - 53 runs scored (T-3rd), 56 RBI (2nd), 21 doubles (1st), 114 total bases (T-6th), 36 walks (T-3rd), five sac flies (T-7th), 23 stolen bases (T-4th), .446 OBP (9th), .585 SLG (2nd) Vincent Jackson - .344 average (10th), 51 RBI (7th), nine HBP (T-8th) Steven Kane - five runners picked off (T-2nd) Jon Lipinski - 12 games finished (T-9th) In addition to leading the SEC in double plays turned this year as a team, Jordan Rodgers (1st - 48) also ranks first in the SEC for the most double plays fielded. Tracking the Georgia Dawgs Under the direction of third-year head coach Scott Stricklin, Georgia enters the SEC regular-season finale with a 26-27 (10-17 SEC) overall record and looking to punch their ticket to the 2016 SEC Baseball Tournament. The Bulldogs own a .251 team batting average, led by juniors Skyler Weber (.311) and Stephen Wrenn (.286). Freshman catcher Michael Curry (.268) is also making a name for himself, having received National Player of the Week and SEC Freshman of the Week honors following an 8-for-14 (.571), four homer effort last week. On the mound, UGA's 4.55 team ERA ranks 13th in the league, while senior Heath Holder (.162) owns the SEC's lowest opponent's batting average entering their series vs. UT. The Bulldogs' staff has secure wins from eight different pitchers en route to their current 26-27 record, including a team-best five wins from starter Connor Jones (5-6, 4.87 ERA) and Kevin Smith (5-1, 4.01 ERA), who has made seven starts in 10 appearances. Georgia most-recently took a 6-3 loss vs. #22 Georgia Tech in the 14th Annual Spring Baseball Classic at Turner Field. Tech senior Matt Gonzalez hit a two-run homer in the tenth inning to lift his team over UGA before a crowd of 19,286. Midweek Recap In their finale of regular-season play at Lindsey Nelson Stadium, Tennessee gained a quick lead over neighboring ETSU and used a six-run, sixth inning to secure an 11-2 victory over the Buccaneers on Tuesday night. The Volunteers conclude their 2016 home schedule with a 16-13 record over 29 total games on Rocky Top. The Vols' combined for 14 hits during the game, led by Brodie Leftridge (3-for-5, RBI), Chris Hall (3-for-3, RBI) and Derek Lance (3-for-5, RBI). Senior Vincent Jackson has now reached base safely in 18 straight games after going 1-for-4 vs. ETSU, while Nick Senzel recorded his 19th multi-RBI game of the year. For the most up-to-date information on Tennessee baseball, visit UTSports.com/Baseball and follow @Vol_Baseball on Twitter.
The Arizona Democratic Party chair demanded an apology after the state’s GOP party delivered a Wild West-style “Wanted” poster of Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick to her office. The Democrats took the most offense to the bullet holes on the poster, citing the 2011 shooting of former Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson. In a statement, the Democrats called the poster a “disgusting and desperate” attempt to help Sen. John McCain, who is running against Kirkpatrick for a senate seat. “I’m dumbstruck by the inexcusable lack of judgment displayed by the AZGOP,” said Arizona Democratic Party chair Alexis Tameron in the release. State GOP spokesman Matt Specht disputed that the wanted poster depicted bullet holes and said it was just an old-fashioned weathered image from the Old West. AZGOP Delivers “Wanted” Poster to Ann Kirkpatrick https://t.co/enxkrZ7fx5 pic.twitter.com/lXggPoVdcd — AZ Republican Party (@AZGOP) September 1, 2016 The poster reads: “Wanted, absentee Ann Kirkpatrick, last seen: running from constituents who want to hold her accountable.” “Arizonans have witnessed, firsthand, how inciteful rhetoric and imagery can influence acts of aggression and violence towards elected officials,” Tameron continued in her statement. “Today’s political stunt by the Arizona Republican Party illustrates not only a lack of judgment, but a complete disregard of the tragedy that traumatized so many Arizonans on January 8, 2011. AZGOP Chairman Robert Graham and Sen. John McCain should immediately apologize and condemn this display for what it is: a painful and tasteless political act that is unworthy of our politics.” The Republicans released the poster with a press statement on Thursday. “Afraid that Arizonans won’t ‘want’ her in the U.S. Senate if they learn more about her record and positions, Ann Kirkpatrick has been hiding out,” Arizona Republican Party chairman Robert Graham wrote in the statement. “Arizona voters with information on Ann Kirkpatrick’s whereabouts are urged to ask her if Obamacare is still her proudest vote. Please approach with caution, as Kirkpatrick has been known to flee voters when asked tough questions. Kirkpatrick’s known associates include President Obama and Hillary Clinton.” The poster was critical of Kirkpatrick’s support for Obamacare and the “reckless” Iran deal. It also said she was “avoiding voters at all costs.” Follow @KTAR923
Advertisement Herve Cornara was the boss at ATC-colicom in Chassieu - near the scene of yesterday's horrific execution The man who was beheaded by an ISIS fanatic at a factory in France has been named as Herve Cornara. Pictured left, Cornara was the boss at ATC-colicom in Chassieu - near the scene of yesterday's horrific execution. His head was found pinned to the gates at the American-owned Air Products factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier. It was surrounded by two Islamist flags Cornara ran his own business offering a delivery service. Four people were in custody in connection with his beheading, and for setting off the explosion at the Air Products gas factory in south-eastern France. A spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor's office today confirmed that one of the four suspects detained has been released, while the suspected assassin isn't speaking to investigators. Heavily armed police have removed a woman and child from the home of Yassine Salhi - the suspected Islamist accused of carrying out the terror act. He was known to factory personnel because he came in regularly for deliveries, Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said. Police swooped on the apartment building in Saint-Priest, in the suburbs of the city of Lyon, just hours after the 30-year-old delivery driver was arrested on suspicion of writing Arabic slogans on his employer's severed head and hanging it on a fence outside the nearby headquarters of Air Products. Salhi is accused of going on to crash his Ford Fusion delivery van through the factory's gates before ramming it into several large gas cannisters left in the car park - apparently in the hope they would explode and destroy the entire factory complex. The explosions were relatively small, however, leaving just two factory workers with non life-threatening injuries. The murdered man - who French media say owned the delivery company Salhi worked for - is believed to have been killed elsewhere before his corpse was dumped at the Air Products factory site in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier and his head impaled on a fence 30 feet away surrounded by homemade Islamist flags. Speaking before the raid on her home, Salhi's wife described her husband as a 'normal Muslim' who left for work as usual at 7am this morning. 'My heart stopped when I heard he was a suspect....I expected him this afternoon,' the unnamed woman told French radio station Europe 1. Salhi - who is understood to have been known to security services since at least 2006 - reportedly told arresting officers that he is a member of the Islamic State terror group. He is believed not to have a criminal record and an investigation into his 'possible radicalisation' was dropped in 2008. Scroll down for video French President Francois Hollande, speaking in Brussels, said the attack began when a car crashed through the gate of the factory and ploughed into gas canisters, setting off an explosion. 'No doubt about the intention - to cause an explosion,' Mr Hollande said, calling the attack 'of a terrorist nature'. The victims' head was found staked on a gate at the factory's entrance, in what appeared to be an echo of the Islamic State group's practice of beheading prisoners and displaying their heads for all to see. Sickening: The victim's head (which MailOnline has chosen to disguise in this image) was found hanging on a fence near the factory's entrance. Two homemade Islamist flags - one white and one black, both with Arabic inscriptions - were found alongside it Terror raid: French special forces escort an unidentified woman and child as they leave Yassine Salhi's apartment building today Special forces from France's Research and Intervention Brigades leave Yassine Salhi's home with an unidentified woman today A French special forces officer gestures as police escort a woman from a residential building during the raid in Saint-Priest Special forces working for France's Research and Intervention Brigades enter Yassine Salhi's apartment building this afternoon Murder scene: The murdered man's head is understood to have been found 30 feet away from his body, hanging on the factory's fence. The dead man's head was covered in Arabic 'inscriptions' before being placed on the fence, according to local journalists at the scene Under cover: French police cordon off the area where the decapitated body was found at the Air Products headquarters Location: The attack took place in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, close to the city of Lyon in the south east of France An official said two flags - one white and one black, both with Arabic inscriptions - were found nearby. Images from the scene suggest the banners may have been homemade and written using paint. At a press conference this afternoon, Cazeneuve named the arrested man as Yassine Salhi. 'He was investigated in 2006 for radicalisation, but [the probe] was not renewed in 2008. He had no criminal record,' he added. 'This individual has links with the Salafist movement, but had not been identified as having participated in activities of a terrorist nature.' A local newspaper is reporting that the unnamed dead man was Salhi's boss and that their company regularly delivered to Air Products. Before this afternoon's raids at her home, an unnamed woman claiming to be Salhi wife has since spoke to the Europe1 radio station. 'I don't know what happened, he left to go to work as normal,' she said. She said he was a delivery driver who left, as normal at 7am. 'My heart stopped when I heard he was a suspect,' she added. 'He went to work this morning at 7am. He does deliveries. He did not return between noon and two, I expected him this afternoon. 'My sister said turn on the television. She was crying... I know my husband. We have a normal family life. He goes to work, he comes back...We are normal Muslims. We do Ramadan. We have three children and a normal family life.' Anti-terror police subsequently took the woman and her three children out of the apartment block in Saint Priest where she has been living with Salhi for the past six months. AT LEAST 28 TOURISTS DEAD IN TUNISIAN HOTEL ATTACKS AS 'ISIS GUNMEN SHOOT PEOPLE ON SUNBEDS' ALONG BEACH PACKED WITH WESTERNERS Gunmen have killed at least 28 people in an attack on two hotels in the popular holiday destination of Sousse. The attack took place at the Al-Qantawi resort in the city of Sousse, located 140 kilometres south of the capital Tunis on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Militants, feared to be from ISIS, exchanged gunfire with security services on a beach packed with British holidaymakers. Rebecca Miles, a British tourist who was staying at the Royal Kenz hotel with her boyfriend Dean Anderson, 24, having arrived on Monday spoke to MailOnline about what she witnessed. 'We were told to go back to our rooms because there were reports of a bomb,' she said. 'It happened about half an hour ago – I heard a bang and I thought it was thunder but it was a clear sky so it obviously wasn't. 'I heard sirens going off about 20 minutes ago and everyone came running back from the private hotel beach which is about 400 metres from the hotel. Everyone is a bit clueless about what is happening. 'People are anxious because they don't really know what is happening and we are now stuck in our rooms. There have been deaths apparently.' Fellow British tourist Gary Pine told Sky News said: 'We thought fire crackers were going off but you could see quite quickly what was going on. 'There was a mass exodus off the beach. My son was in the sea at the time and myself and my wife were shouting at him to get out and as he ran up he said I've just saw someone get shot.' SUICIDE BOMB RIPS THROUGH KUWAITI MOSQUE AFTER FRIDAY PRAYERS KILLING AT LEAST 13 WORSHIPPERS AS ISIS CLAIMS RESPONSIBILITY At least 13 worshippers have been killed today after an Islamic State suicide bomber struck at a packed Kuwaiti mosque after Friday prayers. Shocking photos show dozens of dead and wounded Muslims who were all observing the holy month of Ramadan in the Al-Imam al-Sadeq Shiite mosque in Kuwait City. Witnesses said worshippers were standing shoulder-to-shoulder in group prayer when the bomb ripped through the building. The ISIS-affiliated group in Saudi Arabia, calling itself Najd Province, said its militant Abu Suleiman al-Muwahhid carried out the suicide bombing. He was seen walking in to the back of the mosque during prayers, before walking among his victims and blowing himself up. The group said the mosque was targeted because they believe it was spreading Shiite teachings among Sunni Muslims. ISIS, a radical Sunni Muslim group, considers Shiites to be heretics. Najd Province claimed similar bombings against Shiite mosques in Saudi Arabia in recent weeks. Last month, the group claimed two deadly bombings against Shiite mosques in Saudi Arabia, both of which took place during the weekly Friday prayers. ISIS has also claimed several such attacks against Shiites in Yemen, the last of which was just a week ago. On June 17, it claimed five simultaneous bombings at Shiite mosques and offices in Sanaa that killed at least 31 people and wounded dozens. But Friday's attack is the first of its kind in oil-rich Kuwait. Press conference: French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve (pictured) named the arrested man as father-of-three Yassine Salhi, who is understood to have been known to security services since at least 2006 The attack was accompanied by several explosions caused by 'gas bombs' being ignited at the site, causing many of the injuries Chaos: The attack took place at the headquarters of Air Products, in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, near Lyon, in the south east of the country. Local media reported that a 30-year-old man 'known to security services' has already been arrested at the scene Lockdown: Local media reported that a 30-year-old man 'known to security services was arrested at the scene. Salhi is understood to have told arresting officers that he is a member of the Islamic State terror group A French Gendarme blocks the access road to the Saint-Quentin-Fallavier industrial area, near Lyon in southern France On alert: Heavily armed police officers were seen guarding the site of this morning's shocking terror attack Investigators: Witnesses said that more than one man was involved in the attack and that the perpetrators were carrying Islamist flags France's prime minister later branded the attack 'Islamist terrorism,' announcing he was cutting short a visit to South America to deal with the crisis. 'Islamist terrorism has hit France again,' Manuel Valls told a press conference in Colombia's capital Bogota, adding that he would take part by telephone in an emergency meeting called by President Francois Hollande, then rush back to France. Within an hour of the attack, French President Francois Hollande was to return home early from an EU summit. Speaking at a press conference in Brussels shortly afterwards, Hollande said a man who launched a 'terrorist' assault on a gas factory Friday has been identified and that there may have been a second attacker. Local media reported that a second terrorist has since been arrested. 'This attack was in a vehicle driven by one person, perhaps accompanied by another,' Hollande added. 'The individual suspected of committing this attack has been arrested and identified.' Local newspaper Dauphine Libere is reporting that a second person has now been arrested, believed to be the man who drove the Ford Fusion 'preview' car around the factory this morning before the attack. Investigators are working to establish the full details of the attack but is widely thought that the explosions were intended to have a far bigger impact than causing several dozen injuries, and may have been intended to blow up the entire Air Products headquarters. Salhi had a 'link' to Salafist movement, Cazeneuve said but was not implicated in any terrorist activities. The Salafi movement is a group within Sunni Islam, which is often associated with literalist approaches to Islam. He said a 'fiche S' was opened on the attacker in 2006 for radicalisation. A 'fiche S' for which the S stands for 'Sûreté d'etat' basically means he had been identified as a possible danger and should be watched. The file was not renewed in 2008, however, meaning authorities no longer considered him a risk. Cazeneuve also said the man named as Yassine Sali had no criminal record. He added that the suspect is believed to be father of three children. He was known for links to extremism but not identified as a high risk who would carry out an attack, says Cazeneuve. ATTACK AT AIR PRODUCTS HEADQUARTERS COMES JUST FIVE MONTHS AFTER CHARLIE HEBDO MASSACRE The attack comes five months after three Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in coordinated terror strikes across Paris. The victims, including journalists and police, were killed in three days of violence, including a mass shooting at the weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, known for its satirical attacks on Islam and other religions. The attackers, two French-born brothers of Algerian origin, singled out the magazine for its publication of cartoons depicting and ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad. The bloodshed ended on January 9 with a hostage-taking at a Jewish supermarket in which four hostages and the gunman were killed. The terror chief behind the murders was killed in a drone attack in Yemen earlier this month. Nasser al-Wuhayshi was once a loyal deputy to Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks on the USA in 2001. Last month, the senior AQAP commander who admitted responsibility for the Hebdo attacks was also blasted to death by a drone. Nasr al-Ansi caused outage in January when he gloated over the murders by France-born Islamists. Two of them – brothers Said and Cherif Koachi – both said they were working for AQAP. The Kouachi brothers and a third terrorist, Amedy Coulibaly, were themselves killed by police following sieges which also saw four Jewish people shot dead in a Kosher supermarket in eastern Paris. Al-Ansi, who was also close to the late terror chief Osama Bin Laden, had called for more attacks in countries including Britain, America and France saying 'lone-wolf' attacks were 'better and more harmful'. Emergency personnel work at the scene of a suspected Islamist attack, outside a factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier in southern France French Prime Minister Manuel Valls ordered heightened security measures Friday at 'sensitive sites' near the gas factory that was attacked in eastern France The president of Air Products - an American owned company that is understood to have recently signed a large contract with Saudi Arabia - is an Iranian Shia Muslim named Seifi Ghasemi (pictured) The president of Air Products - an American owned company that is understood to have recently signed a large contract with Saudi Arabia - is an Iranian Shia Muslim named Seifi Ghasemi. Iran is known to support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria - the sworn enemy of the Islamic State terror group. There remains a great deal of confusion over the exact sequence of events at the factory., which belongs to Air Products - a US chemical company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The company would not confirm whether any employees were injured or killed. 'Our priority at this stage is to take care of our employees, who have been evacuated from the site and all accounted for,' the company said in a statement. 'The site is secure. Our crisis and emergency response teams have been activated and are working closely with all relevant authorities.' The company added that all its employees are accounted for after an attack on a factory in southwestern France. It has not confirmed whether its staff were among the two people reported injured and one dead. It released a statement that all employees have been evacuated from the site, which is secure. It says 'our crisis and emergency response teams have been activated and are working closely with all relevant authorities.' French Prime Minister Manuel Valls ordered heightened security measures Friday at 'sensitive sites' near the gas factory that was attacked in eastern France. Valls, who is on an official trip to South America, asked Cazeneuve to head to Saint-Quentin Fallavier, the site of the attack, the premier's entourage said. Mr Valls said 1,573 French nationals or people resident in France were 'listed as being implicated in terrorist networks.' Of these, 442 were believed to be fighting in Syria, where 97 have died. PROFILE: SEIFI GHASEMI - THE IRAN-BORN PRESIDENT OF AMERICAN-OWNED AIR PRODUCTS Born in Iran in 1944 and a US citizen since 1982, Ghasemi attended the Abadan Institute of Technology where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in General Engineering. He then moved to the United States where he received his Masters degree from Stanford University in California. After conducting research in Fluidics at Stanford, he was employed by the Lear Motor Company before a three year spell as assistant professor at the University in Tehran. In 1974 Ghasemi joined the newly formed National Iranian Steel Industries Company, and three years later became executive director. In 1979, he emigrated to the United States where he joined BOC's Carbon Division. He moved to its US gases business in 1987, becoming its president in 1993. In June of this year, Ghasemi added to this role world-wide responsibility for the Group's Process Plants business. Ghasemi is Vice Chairman of the Compressed Gases Association and on the Board of Directors of the National Petroleum Refiners Association. He has one son, Robert, and lives in Gladstone, N.J., with his wife Ellen. His outside interests include running, skiing and opera. The BOC Group, the parent company of BOC Gases, is a world leader in industrial gases, health care, vacuum technologies and distribution services. The BOC Group operates in more than 60 countries with sales last year of $5.9 billion. Blocked: French police secure the entrance of the Air Products company in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, near Lyon this morning Barrier: A French Gendarme blocks the access road to the Saint-Quentin-Fallavier industrial area following the terror attack Scene: France has been on its highest security alert ever since the Paris attacks and according an internal security services source 'all the signals in recent weeks have been pointing to red for an attack of this nature occurring in the national territory' The murdered man's head is understood to have been found 30 feet away from his body, hanging on a fence The Mayor of Bordeaux, Alain Juppé, took to Twitter to condemn the attacks. 'The terrorist threat is at a maximum', he wrote, adding that France 'must make every effort to protect its citizens'. British Prime Minister David Cameron expressed his sympathies over the incident to French President Francois Hollande. The two leaders spoke in Brussels, where they are attending a European Council summit. A Downing Street spokeswoman said: 'He expressed his sympathies for what looks like an appalling incident. 'Details are still emerging, so we wait to see those. But it clearly looks an extremely concerning situation and our thoughts are with all those affected by it.' The Government's emergency Cobra committee will meet this afternoon following terror attacks in France and Tunisia, David Cameron said as he offered 'our solidarity in fighting this evil of terrorism'.
Feature story - 15 August, 2014 If you are among those who are in doubt about climate impacts and the issue seems too abstract to you , you should see an oil extraction area such as Komi in North Russia. zoom Russia Oil Spill Patrol in Komi Republic © Denis Sinyakov / Greenpeace It is an eye opener for anyone about how dirty the oil industry is capable of operating and at the same time – they are flagrantly covering up what’s happening at the very beginning of the oil production process. I’ve been working together with Greenpeace Russia’s oil spill patrol in Komi, north of the city of Usinsk for the last couple of days. We identify possible oil spills on satellite images and verify the spills on the ground. For each spill, we note down hard facts such as causes, size, dead trees and animals, and failed efforts to recover or recultivate the area. This approach allows us to point out in details which of the existing regulations are being violated - on a big scale. On top of flagging the ongoing violations we have recently published recommendations on how to fill legal loopholes and improve law enforcement. We’ve found an astounding variety of oil spills: corroded and ruptured pipelines, leaking pipeline connections and regulation gear, illegal sludge leftovers and dumping are just some examples. Fresh and shiny fluid deep spills, old and tarnished ones – on grasslands, in forests, swamps and streams. It makes me believe that official statistics mentioning over 10,000 single accidents involving oil pipelines every year in Russia are are very likely to be underestimated. The basin of the Pechora river where we are doing our oil spill monitoring is a natural pastural area which usually gets flooded in spring times when the snow is melting. I can see now what happened here in spring 2013 and is going to be repeated: the natural flooding distributes the toxic crude oil out into the enviroment, on top of the spills which lead directly into streams and rivers. Did you know that crude oil consists of hundreds of substances that include toxic benzene,chromium,mercury, nickel, nitrogen, sulfur, toluene, and xylene? You can feel the toxidity immediately standing close to a fresh spill. But it’s not only the vapor of freshly spilled crude oil you can smell and which makes you feel sick spending some time in the area. I now understand what local people mean when they talk about the impacts of air pollution on their health. The oil industry is still burning up associated polluting gas, which manifests in flames which you can see from great distances while you’re driving along the road. After having seen this onshore disaster on such a big scale it makes it harder than ever to imagine how the oil industry would be able, and willing, to control and invest into safety and precautionary measures in the far more challenging, complicated and risky offshore oil drilling in the Arctic. According to the Russian Minister of Natural Resources, the urgently needed upgrading of the whole interfield oil pipelines system would cost the oil companies 1.3 trillion rubles a year (about EUR 28 billion) and could in return prevent spills of over 30 million barrels of oil every year in Russia. This is equal to approximately six Deepwater Horizon disasters per year. But big companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft prefer to invest epic amounts of money into economical, enviromental and social risky Arctic offshore exploration. In comparison, Rosneft announced they plan to invest 400 billion USD in their Arctic shelf programme in the next 20 years. This is 20 billion USD of financing they need per year. Please help us and tell oil companies to clean up the mess now! by Asti Roesle, Greenpeace Switzerland
When Mayur Kamath, a Vasai-based naturalist, visited an ancient temple in his locality, he saw the 100-year-old pond there had dried up because of the searing heat. The naturalist in him immediately thought of something alraming. The plight of the aquatic life in it was such that several of them were stuck in dried silt or even dying. The pond was home to hundreds of fish. "On speaking to temple authorities, I learnt that this was for the first time that the pond has dried up," he said. Kamath and other animal lovers plunged into rescue mode. On April 6, they launched the first operation and saved 1,000 local fishes. Eighty turtles were also saved. Out of this, 41 were Schedule I species like Indian Flapshell, Brown Roof Turtle, Spotted Indian Turtle and others. There were also exotic turtles like Red-Eared Sliders and others kept as pets. They might have have been dumped in the waterbody by their owners, Kamath said. Some 50 big fishes, including small sharks and others, mostly kept in aquarium, were also netted. "Right from the start, we knew this was going to be a tough work. So we used nets to catch the fish while turtles were caught by hand. Lot of silt had accumulated in the pond over the years and it was drying up due to heat," said Kamath, who is an honorary wildlife warden for Mumbai and state wildlife board member. He was joined by members of his NGO – Wildlife Images and Reflections – local fisherfolks, forest officials and members of Wildlife Conservation And Animal Welfare Association. "During the second operation on Sunday, we rescued 44 more turtles and all the indigenous species have been released into the wilderness. All exotic ones have been kept separately as the law prohibits them from being released. Hence, they will be released in the same waters once the pond gets enough water in the monsoon," said Kamath. Both operations lasted 10 hours each. Thane-based Vaibhav Vedak, a volunteer, said that the whole operation was extremely gruelling and risky. "We were in knee-deep muck with all kinds of trash, including broken bottles, clothes, plastic, nails and most of us got some injuries or the other. We had to pull out these fishes and turtles from the muck. Since we saved so many lives, all efforts were worth it," he said. While the team rescued most of the aquatic life in the waterbody, they are even planning to take up another rescue operation soon. Volunteers are invited. Rescue operation in Vasai Rescue Operation 1-April 6Local fishes- 1,000Big fishes, including those kept in aquariums- 50Indian turtles- 41Exotic turtles- 39Rescue Operation 2 – April 17Indian turtles-32Exotic turtles-12
SAJJAD HUSSAIN via Getty Images A view of the Indian Supreme Court in New Delhi on July 28, 2015. India's Supreme court has referred Yakub Memon's petition against his death sentence for his role in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts to a larger bench after a two judge bench delivered a split verdict. AFP PHOTO / SAJJAD HUSSAIN (Photo credit should read SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty Images) NEW DELHI -- A 14-year-old rape survivor can terminate her pregnancy if it posed a great risk to her life, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday. The Gujarat teenager had been refused permission by two lower courts to go forward with the abortion of her 23-weeks old foetus, even though it would seriously hamper her health if she remained pregnant. Ruling that an abortion was legal if it was necessary to save her life, a Bench led by Chief Justice of India H.L. Dattu on Tuesday overruled the earlier decision by the trial court and Gujarat high court. The class 10 student had been denied permission to abort earlier as it was "too late" under the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971, which said that medical termination should be within 20 weeks of pregnancy. However, the apex court has recommended that instead a panel of four senior gynaecologists should examine the girl on July 30 in Ahmedabad and give their medical opinion in the matter. One of these doctors has already recommended an abortion when she examined the teenager last week. According to a report filed by Dr. Riddhi Shukla on July 25, she said, "When I examined and talked to her, I found her mentally and psychologically devastated and completely broken down. She is also physically and medically too weak to deliver a child. Pregnancy at this age and situation can lead to serious threat to her life." The teenager had been allegedly raped by a doctor who was treating her for typhoid earlier this year. In February, she discovered that she had become pregnant. When her family approached the lower court for permission to terminate the foetus, they were turned down. They filed an appeal in the high court, which was turned down as well. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the matter on an urgent basis today. When the High Court had refused permission for termination of pregnancy on July 24, it had ruled that the baby was innocent and "did not ask to be born". Calling it a "difficult decision", Justice Abhilasha Kumari had said, "Whatever be the circumstances in which the child was conceived, whatever the trauma of the young mother, the fact remains that the child is also not to blame for being conceived."
Vegans, rejoice. A restaurant week just for plant eaters is coming to Baltimore. Baltimore’s Vegan Restaurant Week will be Aug. 18-26, said event coordinator Shannon Light Hadley, and aims to include dozens of Baltimore-area restaurants. Vegan Restaurant Week will not operate like typical restaurant weeks, when patrons shell out hefty sums for a three- or four-course prix-fixe menu. Rather, restaurants are challenged to create an innovative vegan menu item — like Blue Pit BBQ’s pulled jackfruit and slaw sandwich, a vegan alternative to traditional pulled pork or chicken. “The main goal is, on the patron side, to say, ‘Hey, a vegan option doesn’t have to be something that sounds boring,’” Hadley said. The new endeavor was born out of a partnership between Hampden’s Golden West Cafe and Mount Vernon’s The Land of Kush. Golden West Cafe had been hosting its own version of a vegan restaurant week twice a year for the last few years, said Hadley, who is part of the restaurant’s management staff. Land of Kush co-creator Naijha Wright-Brown approached Golden West and proposed a collaborative project. Wright-Brown and Hadley have been “beating the streets,” Hadley said, to drum up interest in their respective neighborhoods. There are 10 restaurants currently involved in the restaurant week, but organizers would like to lock in 40 participating establishments, Hadley said. Visit Baltimore and Yelp are sponsoring the restaurant week and will be promoting the event as it draws closer. The Black Vegetarian Society of Baltimore and the Restaurant Association of Maryland are also sponsors. Hadley said Vegan Restaurant Week aims to be “financially accessible on all levels” — to patrons who might not want to spend lavishly to participate and to restaurants that might be too daunted to create a whole vegan menu. “There’s a lot of evidence that a plant-based diet is healthy for you, healthy for the environment,” Hadley said. ”There’s a large population that [engages in] this mindful eating, so if you’re not supporting them, you’re missing out.” [email protected] twitter.com/dtohl
The refreshed Dacia Sandero range is on sale now. Prices start from £5995, meaning the model retains its title of Britain's most affordable new car. Design That figure buys the regular Sandero model, which sports new headlight clusters with LED daytime running lights, a restyled front bumper and a new, more prominent grille. There are new tail-lights at the back, while different materials and more practical storage areas have been introduced inside. These changes have also been applied to the more rugged Sandero Stepway and the estate-bodied Logan MCV. These models are priced from £8795 and £6995 respectively. Engines and gearboxes A new 74bhp 1.0-litre three-cylinder engine has been added to the range, with Dacia claiming it will be the most fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly engine on offer.
America and its allies have not won the war against Isil , and are not even, at the moment, winning. According to the view of the world taken by President Obama, however, this does not represent failure. The truth is - and this is no cheap smear - Mr Obama does not want to win the war against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - yet. He thinks winning quickly would be pointless and potentially disastrous. In Iraq , his professorial mind sees Isil as being one part of a multilateral equation, involving Iraqis who are Sunni Muslim, like Isil, but also the Kurds, the Shia majority, the Iranians, and the sweep of American involvement since 2003. America supports the Kurds against Isil - but not so far as to encourage them to seek independence. That would involve breaking up Iraq, which America promised not to do after the 2003 invasion - and some American promises have to be kept. Members of the Kurdish Security Forces at a guard post in the al-Ghazl area in Syria (Reuters) America also supports the Shia majority - inside and outside the formal army - who with enough US involvement could defeat Isil. They are already doing so, in some places outside Isil’s heartland Anbar province. However, the Shia’s more significant backers are the Iranians, so a swift result would be to make Iraq’s Sunni population captive to Tehran. More importantly, a combined Shia, American and Iranian victory over Isil would confirm the very narrative of Sunni victimhood that has fueled its rise. Mr Obama believes that this would only be a temporary victory, like his predecessor President George W Bush’s two conquests of Sunnis in Iraq - over Saddam Hussein, and over the subsequent rebellion by the earlier version of Islamic State of Iraq, before the American pull-out. Isil militants fire weapons during a battle against Syrian government forces in Deir el-Zour, Syria (AP) He has instead pinned his hopes on a combination of the mixed-denomination army, the Sunni community and its tribal fighters to put Isil down, without American guns. That clearly isn’t going to happen any time soon. Only a few thousand men have been trained to a standard the US military think is up to the task. They haven’t even tried to retake Ramadi - let alone start a serious reconquest of Isil strongholds like Fallujah and Mosul. So Mr Obama’s policy is to wait - contain Isil if possible, and hope it either burns itself out or that one day, some day, his favoured troops can take it on. In Syria, the calculations are even more difficult but lead to the same result. In Mr Obama’s ideal world, the non-jihadi, anti-Isil rebels would some day acquire the moral and military stature to establish themselves and eventually extend their sway across the country. Bashar al-Assad meeting Faleh al-Fayyad, national security advisor and envoy of the Iraqi Prime Minister (SANA) This will also require time - time in which the Assad regime cannot be allowed to collapse, for fear of further chaos, nor can the Kurds win a separate semi-autonomous state across the north, for fear of offending Turkey, nor can Jabhat al-Nusra, the local al-Qaeda affiliate, be allowed to dominate the rebels. So once again, there is no desire for a quick victory. At some stage, Mr Obama hopes, these non-al-Qaeda rebels will defeat Isil. After that, they will become a force strong enough to compel President Bashar al-Assad to negotiate an exit and a peace deal which can be backed not only by the West, but also by Russia and China, and above all, America’s new semi-partners in international politics, Iran. This is Mr Obama’s world view. In Middle East terms it is one where Sunni and Shia - Saudi Arabian and Iranian - interests are balanced. Globally, it is one in which America is neither a unilateral power - unsustainable, triumphalist, Bush-ist; nor is it just one of several major powers competing on the world stage - that would be an abnegation of America’s evangelical role in promoting the values of freedom and democracy. Rather, he wants America to be primus inter pares, the leader of a freer if not free world which by offering respect to the interests of rivals like Russia and China gets them to join the US in policing rogue nations. If that extraordinarily complex game of chess sounds like fantasy, imagine what it seems like to those caught in the middle. For those being bombed by Assad, Isil offers protection. That remains the view coming out of many Sunnis in Syria. For those who hate America, Isil will remain a rallying point. A Syrian man walks past destroyed buildings in the rebel-held area of Douma, east of Damascus (AFP) For the rebels, it offers no hope of defeating Assad. It is hardly suprising the Americans are graduating so few men from its Turkey-based rebel training programme - 54 so far. It rejects those whose first goal in rebelling against the Assad regime: they have to promise that targeting Isil is their first priority. And then there are those supposed colleagues in the American-led world order, Russia, China and Iran. Since their central ideological raison d’etre to is to oppose both America and the spread of western democracy, assuming ultimate goodwill seems rather optimistic. Waging war has usually, in world history, been a fairly simple affair: use the force necessary to defeat the enemy, as quickly as possible. Mr Obama believes that the world has changed so much that such old-fashioned views no longer apply. Time will determine whether he is correct - but even he knows the time involved will be substantial. By then there will be many more deaths, many more refugees, and many more recruits to Isil’s cause.
Over the past 30 years, the United States has experienced an unprecedented rise in the use of incarceration, with the number of people in prisons and jails increasing from 330,000 in 1972 to more than 2.3 million today. While the United States represents about 5 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. The crime rate over the last decade plunged to levels not seen in generations. Why? And why hasn’t there been a concomitant drop in the incarceration rate? No Connection Between Incarceration and Crime Some experts have postulated that crime has fallen because all the criminals have been locked up. But the data doesn’t support this theory. A number of states with large increases in incarceration over the last 30 years experienced smaller drops in crime than did states that increased their use of imprisonment at a lower rate. For example, Texas, with a 144 percent increase in incarceration, and California, with a 52 percent increase, experienced considerable declines in crime (35 percent and 36 percent respectively), but New York experienced a 43 percent decline in crime despite an increase in incarceration of only 24 percent. An overview of changes in incarceration and crime in all 50 states reveals no consistent relationship between the rate at which incarceration increased and the rate at which crime decreased. In Fact, Some Studies Say More Incarceration, More Crime A recent study that analyzed state prison and crime data revealed that there was no discernible pattern of states with higher rates of increase in incarceration experiencing more significant declines in crime. Between 1991 and 1998, those states that increased incarceration at rates that were less than the national average experienced a larger decline in crime rates than those states that increased incarceration at rates higher than the national average. Since 1998, 12 states experienced stable or declining incarceration rates, yet the 12 percent average decrease in crime rates in these states was the same as in the 38 states in which rates of imprisonment increased. If incarceration was having the impact on crime that proponents suggest, then those states with higher increases in incarceration rates should have experienced more substantial declines in crime rates.
In a since-deleted post, 2 Cheap Cars were offering $10 Pak n' Save vouchers in exhange for five-star reviews Car dealers 2 Cheap Cars is offering $10 Pak n' Save vouchers to customers who leave then a five-star review on Google. "We love good reviews!" the company wrote in a since-deleted Facebook page on Saturday night. The post asked customers to give their local branch a five-star rating, take a screenshot and send it to the company in exchange for a supermarket voucher. The offer was since deleted from the company's Facebook page. Only the first 200 people to do so would receive a voucher, the post said. READ MORE: * 2 Cheap Cars to pay more than $320,000 for employment breaches * Car dealership 2 Cheap Cars calls itself out over use of possible racist term * 2 Cheap Cars announces major stock liquidation Customers haven't taken too kindly to the marketing stunt, with some labelling it as a bribe. JOSEPH JOHNSON/FAIRFAX NZ 2 Cheap Cars has come under fire for its latest marketing stunt. "The fact that you realise that your company getting a good rating is only worth max $10 worth of groceries suggests you already know you don't deserve the reviews you're asking for," one Facebook user wrote. "This is so deceiving and gives a false rating of your company and service," commented another. But some have played along, with many branches having received an influx of five-star Google reviews dated in the past week. Last month the auto dealership was ordered to pay more than $320,000 for employment breaches and short-changing staff on wages. An investigation by the Labour Inspectorate found 2 Cheap Cars owed 12 employees about $20,800. They were taken as a sample of the 83 employed by the business. The company has also faced controversy in the past for its advertising. Earlier this year the company pulled an ad featuring a Japanese car salesman after it received complaints about perpetuating racial stereotypes. The "Ah so" advertisement received 27 complaints, topping the Advertising Standards Authority's most offensive commercials for last year. Another investigation by the Labour Inspectorate found two Hamilton car companies, run by the same person who operates 2 Cheap Cars, failed to pay employees minimum wage and was also in breach of keeping records and employment agreements. They were fined over $65,000 in penalties. 2 Cheaps Cars was unavailable for comment on Sunday afternoon.

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