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Posted By Kartik Mudgal | On 05th, Oct. 2012 Under News | Follow This Author @KartikMdgl
343 Industries has revealed a lot of new information on Halo 4 Flood Mode and have also released a bunch of new screenshots which shows the infected Spartan IVs in action.
Halo 4’s Valhalla Map has been renamed to Ragnarock, and has been remastered as well. It looks gorgeous, don’t believe us? Check out the screenshots here.
“Flood is the spiritual successor to Infection, a fan-favorite game type from Halo 3 and Reach. Our goal was to recreate it and push the mode to be new and different from previous versions,” they wrote on their blog.
“As both War Games and Spartan Ops fit within the fiction of the UNSC Infinity, we wanted to use Halo fiction in this mode too, which led to us to create the Flood form in Multiplayer. Flood-converted humans are much faster and focus on melee attacks, so they were a natural fit for Infection’s successor.”
“Halo 4’s Flood mode is a round-based, ten-player game. It is a true asymmetric experience with the added twist of dynamic teams; this really changes things up as each game is different, especially in the incredibly intense and high-action final seconds.
“At the beginning of each round, two players spawn as Flood forms and eight players spawn as Survivors. Survivors are standard Spartans equipped with shotguns and magnums, while Flood move very quickly and can only use a melee attack.
“When a Survivor gets killed by a Flood, the Survivor will convert and respawn as a Flood. The round ends if a Survivor makes it to 3:00 or if all players are converted to Flood.”
343 has also detailed why the Flood Mode will be unique. You can check out the medal list below.
The Flood Character Model: A unique character model for both first and third-person.
The Claw: A special melee weapon tuned just for the Flood.
Flood Armor Effect: A special effect that trails behind Flood characters.
Flood Screen Effect: A first-person screen effect that shows the haunted view of a Flood.
Dynamic Music: When playing as the Flood or final Survivor, dynamic music plays in the background to intensify the experience.
Flood Gameplay Tuning: Flood move faster, react differently to bullets, and have specially tuned armor abilities, the core of which is an enhanced Flood Thrust Pack.
The Floodsassination: How could we not?!
Medals and Infected Spartan IV screenshots:
Flood Conversion: Convert a Spartan to the Flood
Alpha Conversion: Convert a Spartan to the Flood as an Alpha
Infector: Kill 2 Spartans in a row as a Flood without dying
Carrier: Kill 3 Spartans in a row as a Flood without dying
Juggernaut: Kill 4 Spartans in a row as a Flood without dying
Gravemind: Kill ALL Spartans in a row as a Flood without dying
Flood Kill: Kill a Flood
Flood Kill Assist: Assist killing a Flood
Flood Hunter: Kill 4 Flood in a row as a Spartan without dying
Flood Survivor: Kill 6 Flood in a row as a Spartan without dying
Flood Exterminator: Kill 10 Flood in a row as a Spartan without dying
Last Man Standing: Be the last surviving Spartan
Final Conversion: Kill the last remaining Spartan
Flood Victory: Contribute to the Flood total conversion of all Spartans
Ancient One: Survive the entire round as a Flood and convert at least one Spartan
Clever: Survive the entire round as a Spartan
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IMSA announced Wednesday it has placed Olivier Pla on probation for an on-track incident with Robert Thorne during Friday practice for the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring. He is on probation for the remainder of the 2015 TUDOR United SportsCar Championship season.
Per IMSA, Pla was determined to have violated Rule 48.4 (unjustifiable risk) of the 2015 IMSA Rules. Pla’s No. 57 Krohn Racing Ligier JS P2 Judd contacted Thorne’s No. 45 Flying Lizard Motorsports Audi R8 LMS on the front straight. Thorne posted a video of the incident on Facebook.
Krohn Racing is not currently slated to race any further TUDOR Championship events this year owing to its full season in the European Le Mans Series.
However if they do, the probation would be in effect for Pla upon his return, if he would be in the driver lineup alongside team regulars Tracy Krohn and Nic Jonsson. The trio raced together at both Daytona and Sebring.
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Let’s talk about Russia.
Many people are. But last week’s sturm und drang wasn’t terribly productive. Then came Friday’s revelation that the first charges had been filed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
That cut through the political roar and reminded everyone that the real problem with the 2016 election was the extent to which Russia infiltrated and tried to influence it, and the certainty that country will continue to do so in the future.
Friday’s reveal was more telling than news that a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid the firm that hired the former British intelligence officer who produced the now-infamous dossier about then-candidate Donald Trump’s connections to Russia.
GOP outrage was precious, because where was the anger over the Republican donor who commissioned the report before pulling out when Trump won the party’s nomination? Campaign opposition research is a rough business, as Trump acknowledged when he used the term to describe his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Clinton.
The Mueller news was bigger than the resurfacing of an old controversy centered on Clinton’s role as secretary of state in the sale of a U.S. uranium company that involved Russia and donations to the Clinton Foundation. Check out Politifact’s insightful analysis of this imbroglio. It leaves one thinking that more investigation and reporting might be warranted but that it’s not the scandal described Friday by White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
It even topped news that the Trump campaign’s data analytics company reached out to WikiLeaks seeking access to emails from Clinton’s private server, about the time WikiLeaks released Democratic National Committee emails hacked by Russian operatives.
Yes, I want an answer to whether Trump or his people colluded with Russians. But how about we wait for Mueller to unveil the indictments and finish his investigation before drawing breathless conclusions?
Sign up for The Point Go inside New York politics. By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.
But even Trump-proof, if there is any, might not provide the best spotlight on Russia’s actions in 2016 — a far bigger threat to our democracy than the shenanigans of any particular campaign. A sharper focus hopefully comes Wednesday, when the Senate and House intelligence committees hold hearings on the role played by Facebook, Google and Twitter in facilitating Russia’s influence grab.
A lot is known already about Russia’s campaign. Some of the raw material:
Facebook found 3,000 ads that violated its own policies and were linked to Russian accounts. Twitter acknowledged more than 200 such ads on its site. Google found Russia-linked ads on several platforms, including YouTube and Gmail.
Russian operatives were remarkably adept at using social media to exploit America’s divisions on race, immigration and LGBTQ rights. One Russian campaign pretending to be part of the Black Lives Matter movement used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and Pokemon Go to highlight alleged police brutality and inflame American discord on the topic.
The disinformation campaign included websites, Facebook messages and a fake Twitter account retweeted by, among others, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, actor James Woods, commentator Anne Coulter, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, and presidential son Donald Trump Jr. to their hordes of followers.
Election officials in many states, Democratic and Republican, are working to make voting more secure by next year’s midterms after federal officials notified 21 states that Russians tried to hack their election systems in 2016.
Russia’s intrusion is no hoax. Many questions remain. They won’t all be answered in the hearings, these charges or the political furor to follow. It’s going to be a long haul.
Keep your eye on the ball, the real ball. It’s red, as in Russian.
Michael Dobie is a member of Newsday’s editorial board.
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Computers have always interested me because of their determinism. They would perform perfectly if they were coded and built perfectly; it is the imperfect coding and building of computers that leave them open to attack – and further, why we must take on defensive roles to protect them. I saw information security as a developing field where I could fill a void, become an expert and help shape the industry. It also seemed cool to know how things could be broken and to prevent that from happening. That’s why I decided to study computer science at the National University of Singapore.
Since I was interested in the field, some years ago, I searched for the most valuable information security certification. The Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP®) was the obvious choice. When I searched on the (ISC)² website, I found that I did not yet have the work experience required to become a CISSP, but I could become an Associate of (ISC)². I then picked up a few CISSP books from the library and did lots of practice tests, reviewing the questions after each test until I was consistently scoring above 80 percent. Then I took the test.
From Associate to CISSP
I passed my CISSP exam in 2012 and became an Associate of (ISC)². I got certified as a CISSP in 2015. The Associate of (ISC)² easily opened doors to security-specific jobs and helped me complete the experience requirements. Given the shortage of skilled security professionals, employers will gladly take a chance with someone who has passed the CISSP, even if that person is not yet certified and working towards gaining the experience required to earn the CISSP.
Since I have a four-year bachelor’s degree, it shaved off one year from the five-year experience requirement. My work experience before and after my CISSP exam included security monitoring, operations and some access management and disaster recovery. I also took on risk management tasks when the opportunities presented themselves.
As an Associate of (ISC)², I was invited to an (ISC)² member reception in Singapore. This was where I learned of the nascent (ISC)² Singapore Chapter in 2012 and started volunteering for it. My work with the (ISC)² Singapore Chapter has been good for my career. It has been time-consuming, but very rewarding. It is a satisfying feeling that we are currently conducting events monthly as well as establishing the processes that will enable this chapter to thrive and benefit the members even after the current committee has left the stage.
My involvement with the chapter has given me the opportunity to network with a variety of people from the security field in Singapore and internationally; the knowledge sharing has been quite good. Getting to meet directly with a person who discovered a security vulnerability and its exploit or called off a meeting because his bug-detector went off or social engineered people professionally gives me the confirmation that the threats are real and proximate. Most important of all, I realize it is within our power to fight back.
Advice to any novice security practitioners:
If you are looking for a career in information security, (ISC)²’s Associate Program is a great option. If you are starting out in security but do not yet have the work experience, this will add some weight to your resume. Also, join the local chapters and network with others in the field. The knowledge and contacts that you gain will prove useful and give you added perspective in your role as a security professional. Upgrade yourself. -- Vijay Luiz, Information Security Consultant & Secretary, (ISC)² Singapore Chapter
About the Author
Domicile: Singapore (originally India, but I have been in Singapore for a long time)
(ISC)² certifications held: CISSP
Year of experience in the industry: 5 years
Topic(s) of interest in information security: Simplifying security for the average person. I advocate password management software.
Career Goal: Influence the improvement of information security.
View Vijay's security blog here: www.essaysonsecurity.com
Find Vijay on Twitter: @vijayluiz
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - A trucker accused of using a James Bond-style retractable bumper to evade a $95 toll on the George Washington Bridge has been charged with using burglary tools, police said on Thursday.
Hauling a load of candy across the bridge toward New York City on Wednesday, Pablo Ortega flipped a switch on his dashboard as he approached the toll gates over the Hudson River. That engaged a device that tilted up the truck’s bumper and attached license plate, said Joseph Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police.
“The officer positioned at the toll booth sees the bumper lift to a 90-degree angle. This makes it unreadable to the EZ-Pass reader,” Pentangelo said, referring to the electronic device that collects the toll from vehicles at the bridge entrance at Fort Lee, New Jersey.
The Port Authority, which operates the bridge, charges a $95 toll for an 18-wheeler crossing the Hudson into upper Manhattan.
Authorities also found the rear license plate of the red 1997 Peterbilt tractor-trailer was obscured with grease and unreadable.
Ortega, 45, of the New York borough of Queens is the owner-operator of the big rig. He was charged with tampering with public records and possession of burglary tools. It was not known how many times he had used the device.
“He did volunteer that the kit cost him about $2,500,” said Pentangelo, noting its legal use is to protect bumpers from getting scraped at construction sites and other places with uneven pavement.
The device is the most sophisticated used so far by a toll scofflaw, said Pentangelo, noting others have created homemade devices to lift up the license plate itself or have used tape to obscure the plate.
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Democratic Nominee Hillary Clinton has remained silent after a second night of riots in Charlotte, North Carolina caused major damage in the city.
Protesters angry about the killing of a black man, Keith Lamont Scott, by an African-American police officer terrorized the streets Wednesday night, beating citizens, looting, vandalizing, blocking interstate traffic and setting fires.
But Clinton’s campaign has been silent, as she remains at her home in Chappaqua, New York preparing for her first debate with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Trump was the first candidate to weigh in, voicing his reaction in an interview on Fox and Friends Thursday morning calling for law and order, leadership, and unity.
But Clinton’s campaign appears focused on spreading existing media to the press, with no new statement from the Democratic presidential nominee.
A taped interview of Clinton’s appearance on the comedy web series Between Two Ferns was released on Thursday and the campaign hosted a press conference call with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to question Trump’s ties to Russia.
The campaign also released her weekly podcast, with her daughter Chelsea Clinton as a featured guest. The Democratic nominee didn’t even address the riots on Twitter or social media on Thursday.
Clinton criticized the shooting during a rally on Wednesday, calling it an “unbearable” situation that “needs to become intolerable” but did not mention the rioting.
Earlier in the week, Clinton vowed to Steve Harvey that she would be able to speak “directly to white people” to help stop racial police shootings.
“We’ve got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias,” she said.
Clinton has made her campaign against police shootings and “systemic racism” a focal point in her campaign, particularly in urban communities.
“I’m going to be talking to white people, we’re the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries coming from our African-American fellow citizens,” Clinton told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in July.
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To judge an NFL team’s draft class, wait four years.
So says Bill Polian, a Hall of Famer at judging football talent.
Come January 2020, what grade will the Chargers assign to the eight-man draft class that Polian protégé Tom Telesco and John Spanos assembled last week?
Whatever Chargers bosses conclude, they can’t complain about how the ‘16 draft set up for them.
By “virtue” of their 4-12 season, the Bolts received several goodies that we all know about by now: the third pick overall that was their first top-10 choice since 2004, and five other top-5 picks in other rounds. The eight draft chips led the four-year Telesco Era.
But that wasn’t all.
Once again, Philip Rivers, the gift that keeps on giving, provided extra draft leverage to the guys in the collared shirts.
Telesco, like A.J. Smith before him, was able to skip the quarterback hunt. With Rivers under contract through 2019, the team could invest all of its premium picks in other positions.
Because so many quarterbacks went in the upper rounds this year, the annual Rivers bonus was perhaps greater than ever.
Telesco, without lifting a finger, found players within his reach that otherwise may not have been were quarterbacks less popular. Exhibit A was the No. 3 pick, which, because quarterbacks went first and second, allowed him to draft anyone he wanted. Telesco chose Ohio State end Joey Bosa. He was the team’s top-graded player, the GM said, from September onward.
We’re used to the Chargers not really bothering with quarterbacks since Rivers took over. This trend dates to 2007. Rivers, proving his chops as a first-year starter, had just guided a star-studded team to a 14-2 record.
By now, the trend sports a Weddle-length beard.
For the 10th draft in a row, the Bolts took no quarterback across the top four rounds. Of the other 31 teams, only the Chiefs and the Bears have done the same.
For the eighth time in the 10 years, the Chargers took no quarterback at all.
How popular were QBs last week in Chicago?
Nine went in the top four rounds, the most since 1999.
Seven went in the Top 100, a total last exceeded in 1990.
Goodness gracious, as Rivers might say, even teams that have a franchise quarterback took a quarterback before the fifth round.
The Patriots, in the wake of Tom Brady’s four-game suspension to open the 2016 season, chose a passer out of Philip Rivers U. The cost was a third-round pick (and New England had no first-round pick).
That’s how the Pats roll. Jacoby Brissett of North Carolina State thus joined Kevin O’Connell, Jimmy Garopollo and Ryan Mallett as Patriots-drafted quarterbacks taken in the last 10 years, all of them in a top-four round.
The Raiders, even with Derek Carr entrenched as their quarterback after not missing a start in two years, traded up to the top of the fourth round, where they took Michigan State’s Connor Cook.
So when the Chargers drafted Ohio State linebacker Josh Perry soon after, at 102 overall, he was actually the 95th player as far as they were concerned, because seven passers went before him.
(The Chargers and others can count on the Browns drafting a quarterback in many years. While the choice of USC’s Cody Kessler in the third round was surprising, Cleveland has claimed five quarterbacks before the fifth round in the same 10-draft span that San Diego has taken none there. Behind them, at four, are the Dolphins, Eagles, Jets and Patriots. In three of the last six drafts, the Broncos have spent a top-60 pick on a quarterback. Twice, they also kicked in extra draft capital to trade up.)
Ten quarterbacks had gone by the time Telesco snapped up Akron linebacker Jatavis Brown, a fifth-round selection.
Within minutes, Telesco received several texts from other NFL personnel congratulating him.
Telesco described second-round arrival Hunter Henry as a first-round talent. General managers say those kinds of things, but it made extra sense this time, in light of Hunter being the 32nd non-quarterback taken, at 35 overall.
Four quarterbacks helped get USC center Max Tuerk to the Chargers at 66.
There are various schools of thought about drafting a potential franchise quarterback when you already have one.
Former Raiders and Packers talent man Ron Wolf, a Hall of Fame inductee who served as a Chargers consultant in recent job searches, drafted several quarterbacks during future Hall of Famer Brett Favre’s 16-year tenure with the club. He spun a few off for draft picks. Of course, he hit the jackpot with Aaron Rodgers, who went 24th in 2005, studied under and succeeded Favre, and led Green Bay to a Super Bowl victory.
A young backup quarterback taken after the first round can be cheaper than a veteran backup, liberating dollars for elsewhere. The chance to mold a young quarterback, to integrate him into a system, also appeals to several teams. Rodgers said apprenticing under Favre was invaluable.
While it’s possible the Chargers have missed out on similar dividends, it’s hard to argue with their decisions to sit out the QB market in the last 10 drafts. (They made two late-round selections: of the stunningly inaccurate Jonathan Crompton, by A.J. Smith in 2010; and Brad Sorensen, by Telesco in 2013.)
Rivers has proved nearly indestructible, encouraging the Chargers to push off seeking a replacement.
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Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The brutal killing of Rosa Elvira Cely in 2012 caused shock among Colombians
Lawmakers in Colombia passed a bill on Tuesday imposing tough sentences for hate crimes against women.
The bill was passed with 104 votes in support and three against. It still needs to be signed by the president to become law.
It was named after Rosa Elvira Cely, a woman who was attacked, raped and murdered by a man in a park in the capital, Bogota, in May 2012.
Under the new law, those found guilty could face up to 50 years in jail.
It imposes longer sentences on crimes where women are targeted specifically because of their gender, including psychological, physical and sexual attacks.
'Endemic violence'
Presidential adviser for women's equality Martha Ordonez said that in Colombia a woman was the victim of a violent act on average every 13 minutes, and that every four days one was killed by her partner.
The brutality of the attack on Rosa Elvira Cely brought the issue to the forefront of the national debate in 2012.
Thousands of people marched to demand justice for the 35-year-old, who was found half naked and with signs of torture on her body after being attacked and raped in a Bogota park.
She died of her injuries four days later.
Police arrested a man who was studying at the same night school as Ms Cely. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 48 years in prison.
He was later sentenced to additional years in prison for abusing his underage daughters and raping another woman.
According to a 2013 World Health Organisation report, more than one in three women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual violence.
It said 38% of all women murdered were killed by their partners,
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BBC Iranian affairs analyst Sadeq Saba looks at the key questions in the wake of the country's bitterly contested presidential election result. How did this crisis begin? Authorities have made it hard to organise protests Street protests, which have drawn the largest crowds since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, followed the announcement of the 12 June presidential election result. The result, after a strong turnout and a campaign that seemed to energise many young voters, was expected to be much closer, and the poll was perhaps expected to go to a second round. According to the official result Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received 62.6% of the vote, Mir Hossein Mousavi 33.8%, Mohsen Rezai 1.7% and Mehdi Karroubi 0.9%. Turnout was 85% with just under 40 million Iranians voting. Millions of Iranian simply did not believe the result. The main demand of the protesters has been an annulment of the result and an election re-run. Iran's Spiritual Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has since insisted there was no election fraud and has demanded an end to the protests. What next for the protesters? We are seeing fewer protesters on the streets and the rallies appear to be smaller and more spontaneous. After the recent killings, people are frightened and families are not allowing their young people to attend. Mir Hossein Mousavi, runner-up in the presidential election, and others are saying that people should be allowed to demonstrate peacefully. But there is no clear leadership to the protest now. The authorities have made it very hard to organise protests - they have arrested hundreds of people and restricted their ability to communicate. The authorities appear to be taking tighter and tighter control of the situation. This said, the next key moment or choice for the protesters comes later this week. Ayatollah Montazeri, a widely respected senior cleric who is often a critic of the government, is calling for three days of mourning for those killed in recent protests. The days of mourning are set for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Political protests associated with mourning have a strong tradition for Shia Muslims. If large numbers of people come out on these days, much could change. What is going on behind the scenes? Former President Mohammed Khatami has been unusually outspoken - continuing to question the election result and calling on the authorities to release those arrested recently. On the other side, a powerful conservative, speaker of the parliament Ali Larijani, has made some comments that I see as conciliatory. He said on one of the state channels that the number of people questioning the election result was large. "This group should be respected and one should not mix this big population's account with a small group of rioters," Mr Larijani said. Also, the arrest of members of the family of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - a former president, a powerful opponent of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and key backer of Mr Mousavi's bid for the presidency - was a strong signal that even the most established figures are not invulnerable. What is the evidence that the election was rigged? The way the result was announced was very unusual. It came out in blocks of millions of votes, in percentages, rather than being announced province-by-province as in past elections. And as the blocks of votes came in, the percentages for each candidate changed very, very little. That suggested that Mr Ahmadinejad did equally well in rural and urban areas. Conversely, it suggested that the other three losing candidates did equally badly in their home regions and provinces. This overturns all precedents in Iranian politics and there has been no explanation, despite repeated questions, from the authorities. It is all very suspicious. But it does not necessarily mean there has been widespread electoral fraud. For example, a group of international pollsters did an independent telephone survey three weeks ago which suggested a two-to-one level of popular support for Mr Ahmadinejad over Mr Mousavi, with the other candidates on less than 2% each.
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HARBOR SPRINGS — The Michigan Brewers Guild announced its latest Board of Directors additions, as well as several award recipients, last Wednesday at the Guild’s annual Winter Conference held at Boyne Highlands Resort.
Eric Briggeman of Rochester Mills Production Brewery was elected to his sixth term on the board, and will serve his seventh year as Guild President. Isaac Hartman of New Holland Brewing Company also returns for his fourth term, serving as Co-Chair to the Government Affairs Committee.
Newcomer Garry Boyd of BarFly Ventures was elected to his first term on the board.
Other members include Steve Berthel of New Holland (Secretary and Events/Entertainment Chair), Scott Newman-Bale of Short’s Brewing Company (Treasurer), Brad Stevenson of Founders Brewing Co. (Membership Chair) and Aaron Morse of Dark Horse Brewing (Marketing Chair).
The Guild also presented its annual Tom Burns Award. This year’s recipient — Jon Linardos — released his first beer in 1995 for Motor City Brewing Works. He also was essential in the starting of the Detroit & Mackinac Brewing Company, for which Tom Burns was the founder of.
Rick Lack of RAVE Associates was also presented with the inaugural Michigan Beer Patriot Award.
Formed in 1997, the Guild also announced an increase of 29 brewery members (from 119 to 148) over the course of the last year.
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Last month the Catholic Church voiced strong opposition to a UN Human Rights Council resolution naming the protection of LGBT persons against discrimination and violence an official human right. The reason, according to Vatican representative Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, is that ending discrimination against gays, lesbians, and transgender persons would make those who oppose such human rights the real victims.
During a debate on the resolution (officially called the “Joint Statement on Ending Violence and Related Human Rights Violations Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity”) Tomasi unequivocally stated that the Council, the UN, and other state bodies cannot base law on sexual orientation since “the ordinary meaning of ‘sexual orientation’ refers to feeling and thoughts, not to behavior.”
In clarifying this, he stressed that if sexual orientation were to carry a behavioral component it would be a false premise, because such a definition would be contrary to natural law morality. According to this logic, the recognition of LGBT identity would “undermine his/her ontological dignity”—meaning that since gays, lesbians, and transgender persons are by their nature “intrinsically morally disordered,” claiming sexual orientation identity is, by nature, false.
Tomasi then likened homosexual behavior to pedophilia and incest: “But states can, and must, regulate behaviors, including various sexual behaviors. Throughout the world, there is a consensus between societies that certain kinds of sexual behaviors must be forbidden by law. Pedophilia and incest are two examples.”
To add fuel to the fire, he turned the debate away from violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity to “a disturbing trend in some of these social debates: People are being attacked for taking positions that do not support sexual behavior between people of the same sex… they are stigmatized, and worse—they are vilified, and prosecuted.” He never addressed the reality of actual violence (killings, torture, rape, criminal sanctions, violence, bullying) against gays, lesbians, and transgender persons taking place around the world.
Natural Law vs. Social Justice
Given that Tomasi is the leading spokesperson for the Catholic Church in international bodies, his words take on significant weight regarding the Church’s refusal to accept sexual orientation and gender identity as human rights categories. Since the early 1980s and the ascendency of Cardinal Ratzinger as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the moral theology of the Church has become increasingly locked into a framework of natural law anthropology, which is a logic based on male and female roles as pro-creators in the natural order of a biologistic social order emphasizing the nuclear family as the first cell of society.
This logic also simplistically views a natural order to the human body, meaning that each part of the body has a function that is connected to the whole person and humans cannot change these natural functions—particularly sexual functions. Natural law anthropology does not take into account anomalies in nature that might account for homosexuality and a variety of functional variations that can occur in different humans.
More problematic in Tomasi’s understanding of sexual orientation is the non-recognition of LGBT persons resulting in the Church’s negation of the social, psychological, cultural, and political realities in which they live. The fact is the perpetrators of violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity do recognize this identity and base their anger, rage, hate, and revenge on people’s external identity and not on the “feelings and thoughts” of the victims. For the Vatican to not acknowledge this is a denial of social reality and the behaviors and attitudes reflective of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Prior to Ratzinger’s emphasis on natural law anthropology as foundational to contemporary moral and social issues, the Church’s social justice doctrine might have had tremendous influence in the creation of a positive Catholic LGBT human rights agenda. Such an agenda might emphasize the following dimensions of human life and pertinent social justice doctrine that have been developed since the first social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, of 1891:
• Social-Psychological: Dignity of the human person; Human development of the whole person
• Social Rights: Option for the poor and marginalized in society
• Basic Human Needs: Right to employment, housing, health care
• Cultural: Freedom of participation and association in civil society
• Political: Human rights protections; Right to migrate
• Religious: Religious freedom; Separation of church and state
Because the Vatican denies sexual orientation and gender identity recognition the above tenets of Catholic social justice doctrine cannot be legitimately actualized by priests, religious, lay leaders, teachers, catechists, and others within the Church itself. The natural law arguments of sexual morality and ethics have long been discounted by clergy and laity—especially natural law deductive arguments against birth control, in vitro fertilization, masturbation, male sterilization, stem cell research, same-sex civil marriage and adoption. Yet the longer Catholic tradition of connecting faith with reason and the doctrine of primacy of conscience has empowered many Catholics to look at the social reality of gays, lesbians, and transgender persons and connect the more compassionate aspects of the biblical tradition and Catholic social justice teaching.
Through a more comprehensive inductive logic, Catholics use reason to see and analyze empirical injustice and then apply biblical principles and social justice teaching to the social context of injustice—a bottom-up approach to justice in the world. Not surprisingly, the international scope of the clergy abuse scandal has diminished the teaching authority of the hierarchy on sexuality. Catholics recognize that they do have gay, lesbian, and transgender brothers and sisters in their families, among their friends, in their communities and workplaces. Many recognize their difference and accept it in the same positive way they accept ethnic, gender, cultural, and age difference—as part of one’s external identity that should be respected and accorded full human dignity, even if one doesn’t fully understand the difference in one’s life.
Faith that Does Justice
Social justice-oriented Catholics have been able to utilize the positive aspects of social justice doctrine as a “faith that does justice” in civil society and politics, particularly through organizations like Catholics for Equality, Catholics United, Dignity, and Call to Action—as well as in their local parish and diocesan social justice ministries and in faith-based community organizing. Recent polling by Public Religion Research Institute shows that U.S. Catholics are the most progressive Christian body with 63% supporting civil marriage for same-sex couples and 69% believing that homosexuality is not a moral issue. The Human Rights Council’s recent statement was signed by all of the Catholic countries of Europe and Latin America. Civil marriage for same-sex couples has been ratified in the Catholic countries of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Argentina, and Mexico. Acceptance of LGBT persons is not just an American phenomenon, it’s a broadly international one with a strong Catholic character.
Of course, is precisely these trends that are most disturbing to the Vatican, especially as younger Catholics around the world are even more accepting of homosexuality and the legitimacy of sexual orientation and gender identity than their parents and grandparents. Sadly, in the fight against LGBT rights the Vatican and the US hierarchy is throwing its hat in the ring with some of the most powerful and well-funded voices of religious fundamentalism in the United States, Africa, and Latin America.
There is an easy solution to the hierarchy’s increasing distance from the laity and ordinary clergy: just as the Church finally acknowledged slavery and racial segregation to be wrong and finally recognized full equality for black people, it can acknowledge that homophobia and sexual orientation discrimination and violence are wrong and recognize that sexual orientation and gender identity are social realities in our complex world. Otherwise, the Church lends legitimacy to violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The Church is not the victim.
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Posted on 05/09/2011 by DJ Meph in Dirtbombs, Events, Interviews, Movement (DEMF), Music, Rock
I recently got the opportunity to interview Mick Collins from The Dirtbombs, and we waxed poetic about Movement 2011, Detroit music, records and the flight risk of Detroit musicians. Being new to Detroit’s rock scene, I learned a lot from him, but I think even some of the most die hard Dirtbombs fans will find this interview to be very informative. The Dirtbombs will be performing at Movement 2011, so make sure to come and check them out!
DU: So, you guys are playing at Movement 2011. Is this the first time you’ve played an electronic music festival?
MC: Yes.
DU: What can we expect to see there, will you approach it differently than you would a rock show?
MC: Yeah, for starters they asked us to just play Party Store, but had they not asked for just Party Store, we have a number of songs over the years that are like, super dance songs, really dancy kind of thing that we would have played anyway. So it won’t be a standard Dirtbombs show. We may stretch one or two things out, but it will really just be the album.
DU: So you guys are planning to jam out a little, will you have a lot of electronic instruments on stage?
MC: We kinda can’t help it, because so much of the record you know, there’s a lot of hand claps, a few things off an 808 that we’ll certainly be using. I wont say it’ll be totally electronic, but there will definitely be some things on the record that we don’t normally play live.
DU: What does it mean to you to be a part of the Detroit underground music scene, and how does that work into the experience when you’re performing outside of Detroit and around the world?
MC: Only once or twice has anybody ever really mentioned the fact that being from Detroit means we listen to some techno. We once played a show in Eutrecht, I think, where they had a DJ come in and all he did for the entire hour before we went on stage, he did an entire Detroit techno set. So, we just told him to keep playing. When we walked out on stage, he was still going strong, it was like Death Star or something, X109. It was pretty funny. The audience totally didn’t understand, but they get it now. That was in Eutrecht in the Netherlands, I think, but that was a while ago.
DU: Do you find that Detroit’s underground music culture is celebrated all around the world, wherever you go?
MC: Absolutely. I can’t think of a city that I’ve been to yet, that didn’t acknowledge the contribution of Detroit artists to dance music.
DU: Are you guys all fans of Detroit Techno? Did you grow up listening to it? Did you go Motor, or any parties?
MC: I can’t say it has any influence on The Dirtbombs necessarily, outside of the one record, but I went to shows all the time. I used to go to parties. I used to see Rolondo spin quite a bit actually, and I’ve been to Motor a bunch. I’ve seen almost everybody, I’ve seen them all spin at one point or another over the years. This is in the liners notes of the Party Store remix album, the first record I ever got put on the radio was actually a house record I cut in 1988.
DU: Is that record hard to find?
MC: It never actually came out on vinyl, but if you remember Fast Forward with Alan Oldham on WDET, he played it. It saw air play a year before my first rock record did. Dance music was always something I did. There’s never been any separation between them, music is music for me. In 2008, my first actual dance 12″ came out the same week as the previous Dirtbombs LP. It came out on Mohagani Sound, Moodymann’s label.
DU: Has anyone ever remixed any Dirtbombs songs?
MC: Actually, Moodymann did. He did two songs off the album in 2008, the album was called We Have You Surrounded. He did remixes on two songs, and I did a remix on one, but I couldn’t find a label that was interested in putting it out, because everybody wants to say that The Dirtbombs are the standard sound. Everyone wants to make out like I only make one kind of music, and I don’t.
DU: What other types of music have you experimented with?
MC: I did a jazz soundtrack to a movie, about a decade ago now. I play a little bit of everything.
DU: What movie was that?
MC: It was called The Sore Losers, and I believe it came out around 1999. All the jazz numbers on the soundtrack are me.
DU: Recently, two Detroit area record stores were featured in Rolling Stone’s top 30 record stores in America, People’s Records and Encore Recordings. Did you frequent any of these record stores? Do you have any memories from those two stores? Do you remember any cool, or rare records that you found?
MC: Many, actually. I have been to Encore a bunch, and I used to hang out at People’s daily. I practically worked at People’s. Many, many records, I can’t even put a count on them. The one record that springs to mind right now, for some reason, is a track called Paper Tiger by Sue Thompson…
DU: I know that record, because I have it!
MC: Really?
DU: Yeah, the reason why I have that record is because on the other side of that 7″ is a song with my first name it. Norman… ooooooh
MC: I found that at People’s, just sitting there. I was helping out, cleaning records, and I put it on and everybody thought it was terrible, and they were like “Take that off!” I’m like, “What are you crazy?” So I just bought it. I’m trying to think of something else… A lot of old soul records, I’ve got through People’s. Not a lot of rock, a bunch of classical music.
DU: Esquire recently featured Ben Blackwell in their Last Night in Detroit songwriting contest. Will you guys be performing that?
MC: I haven’t heard it yet actually, but I know it exists. He told me about it. If we rehearse it and it sounds good, it wouldn’t be the first time somebody else’s song made it into a set. A bunch of people think I wrote the song I’m Through With White Girls, which I didn’t write, so we still get requests for it. Even though now everyone knows I didn’t write it, so we don’t play it anymore, but if the song’s good enough I’ll totally play it.
DU: The song is called Bury My Body At Elmwood, and it’s my favorite song on the EP. There’s five songs on the album, one of them is from Brendan Benson and another is from Ben Blackwell, and they both come from the same…
MC: That’s a great title.
DU: …yeah, it is. It’s an awesome song. But they are both coming from the point of view that they both left the Detroit scene for Nashville, and there’s good things and bad things about Detroit that they’ll always love and hate, and Elmwood was really cool because he goes into singing about all the people that were buried there, and how Joe Louis use to run through there, and how it’s the only place in Detroit that preserved the original landscape that was there before the city rose to power. It’s a really powerful song. So, speaking of these two artists, and Jack White. These are guys that left the Detroit scene, and talk about dealing with scumbag club owners, and shady promoters, and fans that always want a handout, and they get jaded. Do you feel the same way? Do you think that the music scene in Detroit will get better with the progress we’ve made so far?
MC: The thing about the music scene is that it’s always been the way it is. You can’t really say that it changes one way or another, because it’s always there. It’s been constant, it’s the same way now as it was before 2001 when everyone started looking. There’s always been a bunch of bands, there’s always been a bunch of places to play, and there’s always been the same folks in every band, it’s always been that way. As far as getting better, I guess there’s some new clubs opening up, so anytime there’s more places to play that’s a good thing. There may be a saturation point in a city that’s as economically hit as Detroit, but really it’s always been good. It’s always been good. I can’t say it’s ever been bad.
DU: So you don’t share the same frustration as Ben Blackwell and Brendan Benson.
MC: No, no no. I wasn’t frustrated about anything at all. I play in a band, and I have a fanbase that’s pretty large. It may not be large in any one place, but when you stack all the cities together, it’s a pretty good fanbase, and I was OK with that. The thing is, there’s no way to make a living at it from just Detroit, you can’t be that parochial about it. You just have to get on the road.
DU: I appreciate your insight, do you have anything else to say about the upcoming performance at DEMF?
MC: I’m looking forward to it. It’s three weeks away, and we haven’t even rehearsed yet. I have a new bass player, so as usual with every Dirtbombs show, we have no idea what’s going to actually happen, when we count off.
DU: That sounds exciting actually. That’s the stuff that good shows are usually made of. I appreciate your time, and look forward to seeing you at DEMF.
MC: Thanks a lot!
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One bit of good news about the two shocking attacks on our nation this week is that they were not the work of organized groups. They appear to have been carried out by individuals – both self-radicalized and deeply troubled – who latched on to a toxic ideology and acted alone.
"Lone wolf" attacks don't kill very many people, but they can be extremely destructive to society if we allow them to be. They can also be very hard to intercept. People who get together to plan organized mayhem (the "Toronto 18," the alleged Via train plotters) are easier to detect and disrupt than people acting on their own.
The two killers were both on the radar screen, and to that extent, the system worked. But setting aside the security issues on Parliament Hill, it isn't clear that either man could have been foiled in advance. Murderous thoughts alone aren't enough to get someone locked up. Endless raving about the criminal Harper government's complicity in imperial wars against the Middle East is perfectly legal. (If it weren't, our jails would be stuffed with activists and university professors.)
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Some people are going to argue that the killers – especially Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the Parliament Hill shooter – were really mental-health threats, rather than terrorism threats, and that by labelling them terrorists we are misdiagnosing the real problem. But no matter how sane they were, both were deadly. Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau didn't put on a kaffiyeh and assume the glorious martyr's pose for nothing. There are reasons why the jihadi cause is such a magnet for the troubled, the lost and the unhinged – what are they?
One reason is that these men are not, in fact, alone. The world is full of Islamic State fanboys, more than we would like to think. They nurture their rage and fantasies on the Internet, and they form a relatively large community of people who think that beheading Westerners is cool. Anyone can become a member. Society's misfits and outsiders can become insiders online. They can even aspire to greatness through martyrdom.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was right when he said these attacks were criminal acts, not religious ones. The trouble is that both the killers and the fanboys believed otherwise.
Jihadi radicalization is here to stay, maintains Peter Neumann, who directs the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation in London. We can't prevent it; we can only do our best to manage it. The most important question is the changing nature of the conflict, not whether we're witnessing a surge of dangerous attacks – we aren't, although it certainly feels that way this week.
The biggest qualitative difference between 9/11 and today, Mr. Neumann says, is the Internet. Another change is the move away from calculated acts of strategic terrorism (Madrid, London) and the rise of large numbers of unorganized jihadi amateurs. The third change is the emergence of aspiring foreign fighters, and their ability to cause disruption here at home. He promises that these challenges will keep us busy for years to come.
Of course, there's another school of thought about root causes, arguing that we've brought this on ourselves. This group, too, is larger than you might think. It includes journalist Glenn Greenwald, who vilified the government's response to Monday's hit-and-run murder of a soldier in an online screed.
"The right-wing Canadian government wasted no time in seizing on the incident to promote its fear-mongering agenda over terrorism," he wrote Tuesday, before the attack on Parliament.
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"… It is always stunning when a country that has brought violence and military force to numerous countries acts shocked and bewildered when someone brings a tiny fraction of that violence back to that country. Regardless of one's views on the justifiability of Canada's lengthy military actions, it's not the slightest bit surprising or difficult to understand why people who identify with those on the other end of Canadian bombs and bullets would decide to attack the military responsible for that violence.
"That's the nature of war. A country doesn't get to run around for years wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others, without the risk of having violence brought back to it."
It's not about "justification," he argued, but "causation."
Mr. Greenwald, who happened to be in Canada this week for several appearances, may have a point – but as international politics expert Dan Drezner points out, it isn't much of one. By this reasoning, half the nations of the world should be awash in terrorism right now. As bellicosity goes, our small and rather unimportant country is way down the list.
But "blowback" is an explanation beloved of many. You could call it an expression of the Fiskian worldview (after journalist Robert Fisk), which blames all our troubles on our wicked meddling in places where we don't belong. "Chickens coming home to roost," tweeted Alex Hundert, the leftist hero of Toronto's G20 protests, after Wednesday's attack. On rabble.ca, frequent essayist Murray Dobbin opined, "We prefer denial and the simplistic – the notion that we can correct 25 years of imperial hubris, ignorance and gross incompetence by Western powers by bombing our own creation." (That was published on Monday.)
You can be for or against our participation in the bombing of the Islamic State. I could argue it either way, myself. But it's ridiculous to argue that chaos in the Middle East (not to mention Afghanistan, Pakistan and large parts of Africa) is all about us. Mainly, it's about a Shia-Sunni conflict that goes back centuries, and a particularly malevolent perversion of Islam.
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I suspect Mr. Greenwald will be sorely disappointed if Canada doesn't devolve into a police state. But for that to happen in a democracy, the people must be very, very frightened. And we're not. We're rattled – but we're fine.
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The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, is current embroiled in four cases involving corruption allegations of one sort or another. The affairs have been dubbed Case 1000 (cigars, champagne); Case 2000 (positive coverage in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper); Case 3000 (purchase of submarines for the Israel Navy from Germany); and Case 4000 (Bezeq and Communications Ministry ties). While the investigations into the cases began as early as about a year ago, there have been quite a few recent developments. Here is an update of where things stand in each one.
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Case 1000
Netanyahu is suspected of accepting gifts from tycoons, mainly Israeli-born film producer Arnon Milchan and Australian businessman James Packer – in the form of cigars, champagne and jewelry – worth an estimated total of hundreds of thousands of shekels. Lately, there have been mounting suspicions that the relationships were mutual: While the premier accepted gifts from Milchan, he allegedly acted on his behalf in the Israeli telecoms sphere. Netanyahu claims he just accepted gifts from a friend, as friends do.
The police say the evidence they have shows that the supply of cigars and champagne was systematic, by means of couriers and code words, and that the gifts were driven by demands by the Netanyahu family. In this case, there may also be a conflict of interest between Netanyahu and his dealings with Milchan.
Case 2000
The police have tapes of Netanyahu negotiating with Yedioth publisher Arnon Mozes, in an apparent effort to skew the daily's coverage in favor of the prime minister. In exchange Netanyahu would supposedly help restore Yedioth’s status to the top of Israel's media industry by spearheading legislation that would hamstring Israel Hayom, the free newspaper owned by American casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson. Or, alternatively, perhaps the premier would convince his friend Adelson to restrict the freebie’s distribution.
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Netanyahu claims he never meant to strike any real deal with Mozes – that he was pulling the wool over the media baron’s eyes. That he was talking nonsense. Accordingly, Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit has set the bar for indictment quite high: He is demanding evidence that Netanyahu took specific action to make the deal with Mozes happen.
Here is where there have been recent developments. Adelson testified last month that Netanyahu asked him about a financial issue that was raised during the negotiations with Mozes – which begs a question: If Netanyahu simply wanted to fool Mozes, why involve the American billionaire at all?
Case 3000
A number of individuals have been arrested in this case; some were released to house arrest. One of them, Miki Ganor, is in negotiations to turn state's evidence, Channel 2 reported Monday. How is Netanyahu involved in this affair – involving the purchase of submarines from a German company? Simple: His confidant, lawyer David Shimron, represented the Germans’ agent in Israel. If Netanyahu knew that Shimron served as counsel for the representative of the Germans, then he may have had a conflict of interest. Netanyahu and Shimron both pressed, in parallel, to cancel the bidding process on the sub deal and to give it to the Germans – a move Israel's Defense Ministry opposed.
Shimron knew that he and Netanyahu were advancing the same agenda. Netanyahu, however, claims not to have known that.
In this case, the prime minister's problem isn’t the evidence, but the way things are beginning to look. Netanyahu’s crony Shimron was under house arrest, but has since been allowed to leave the country for a vacation. Another suspect, Avriel Bar-Yosef, had been Netanyahu's choice for the top spot at the National Security Council but withdrew his candidacy.
Shimron’s law partner Isaac Molho, Netanyahu’s envoy on all sorts of secret diplomatic and other missions, may also be involved in Case 3000. One report says Molho represented the premier in talks with the Germans regarding a sensitive issue that may could have had something to do with the subs. If so, Molho represented the PM while his law partner represented the Germans’ agent. Under these circumstances, it is hard to buy Netanyahu’s claim that he didn’t know of Shimron’s involvement in the deal.
Case 4000
State Comptroller Yosef Shapira says Netanyahu failed to disclose information regarding his personal friendship with Shaul Elovitch, a controlling shareholder of Bezeq, while the premier was dealing with no less than 12 issues connected to that telecoms monopoly. Twice Shapira asked Netanyahu about his ties to figures in the telecoms industry – and yet the prime minister neglected to mention either Elovitch or Milchan. In other words, Netanyahu allegedly made false statements.
Netanyahu is not a suspect in this case, although the attorney general could take action with respect to the apparently false declarations. Netanyahu, for his part, has claimed that he and Elovitch were little more than acquaintances, and thus it was not incumbent upon him to disclose their relations. Yet in an earlier statement in court, he explicitly stated that Elovitch had been his “personal friend for 20 years.”
Not only is Elovitch Netanyahu’s friend: He lavished positive media coverage on the prime minister when he owned the Walla News website. In October 2015, Haaretz reported how the site hid articles and changed headlines on items critical of Netanyahu – apparently based on orders from above. Moreover, while serving also as communications minister at the time, Netanyahu advanced Elovitch’s interests.
After the Haaretz exposé, Netanyahu was prohibited from having anything to do with Elovitch’s business dealings. The handling of him and his companies was left to Communications Ministry director-general Shlomo Filber, another Netanyahu confidant and former head of the Likud Party Central Committee. Filber is now suspected of systematically leaking ministry documents to Bezeq, accepting diktats from the company and even possibly altering the ministry's policies accordingly. State Comptroller Shapira recently wrote that he suspects Filber of having been a “captive regulator” – a sort of Bezeq agent at the ministry.
And if Filber is guilty, what has Netanyahu to do with that? Here is the long answer. Two days after his new cabinet was sworn in, in May 2015, Netanyahu fired the then-director general at the Communications Ministry, Avi Berger, by phone. Berger had been pushing a broadband reform that would have hurt Bezeq. That day pundits wrote that the main beneficiary of the firing was Shaul Elovitch. In any rate, after Berger’s dismissal, Netanyahu named Filber as his successor.
The short answer? Netanyahu is the one who planted the so-called agent.
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SAN FRANCISCO – In a ruling that is causing some parents concern about their children's privacy, a judge has granted a small, parent-run non-profit working for the rights of disabled children the ability to search sensitive information about more than 10 million California students.
In an order earlier this month, Judge Kimberly Mueller said that information including the name, Social Security number, address and mental and physical assessments of every student who attended public school in California since Jan. 1, 2008 must be made available to a court-appointed data analyst so that it can be analyzed on behalf of the Morgan Hill Concerned Parents Association.
The order stems from a now five-year-old legal battle between the Morgan Hill group and the California State Department of Education over whether students with disabilities receive the free and appropriate public education mandated under federal law. The Morgan Hill group was joined in the case by California Concerned Parents Association, which advocates for students with disabilities state-wide.
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"We're not looking for specific student information," said Christine English, vice president of Concerned Parents of California.
Rather, the group wanted access to the state's data so it could see, for example, if African-American students identified as intellectually disabled were disproportionately in special day classes as opposed to mainstreamed into general education classes. Or whether children who were diagnosed with behavioral issues had a behavioral management plan in place, she said.
The department vehemently denies the allegations and is actively defending against the litigation, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said in a letter to local school districts.
"We have fought the disclosure of any kind of student information all along the way and haven't waived in that," said Peter Tira, a spokesperson with the California Department of Education in Sacramento.
According to English, her group came up with multiple scenarios in which the department could have given it percentages and statistics without it ever seeing individual student data. "We even said 'You sit in front of your computer terminal and we'll query you and you give us the results.'"
The department refused.
"Our position has been clear, we are fighting and will continue to protect student privacy rights," Tira said.
Finally Judge Mueller, in the eastern district court of California in Sacramento, ordered that the entire database of student data be made available to a special digital master who would perform the requested analysis, English said.
Although the order was posted online on Feb. 1, information about it only surfaced over the weekend, causing a flurry of concern among parent organizations.
Sherry Skelly Griffith, the executive director of the California state Parents Teacher Association, said her office has been fielding multiple queries from the press and parents.
“It’s just hard to fathom that a judge would allow such an overexposure of children’s information,” she said.
The information will be made available to fewer than ten people who will use it perform a statistical analysis of how California treats disabled students, Concerned Parents of California said in a Facebook posting.
However some parents posting comments on the page expressed anger that the release was to be made at all.
"You have no rights to my child's personal info. I am an advocate and this is still wrong of a certain group of parents to force all parents to now scramble to whether or not they want their own Personal child's personal private give(n) out," wrote another.
Others were more understanding.
Kathy Ramsey, whose children attend schools in San Francisco, said she feels holding the California Department of Education’s feet to the first because it hasn’t supplied services that students are entitled to is “a noble cause, but seems like not a very good solution.”
Specific information about individual students will not be available to the public. Mueller issued a Protective Order which prevents anyone involved in the suit from disclosing confidential data acquired in the course of the lawsuit to anyone aside from the parties involved, their attorneys and consultants and the court.
Once the group had completed its statistical analysis, it is required to "either return or destroy the confidential data at the conclusion of the lawsuit. No student’s identifying records will be disclosed to the public," the parent group said.
60 days to opt out
Still, parents and parent organizations are concerned that parents only have until April 1 to opt out of the data release. An opt-out formhas been made available on the California Department of Education’s website.
The state PTA is scrambling to get the word out to parents.
“We don't think the burden of protecting children’s privacy should now have to fall on parents with a less than 60 day window,” Griffith said.
The State PTA is investigating whether it can ask for an injunction to slow the process, so families have more time to opt out, she said.
California has about 6.2 million students in its public schools. Each year about 500,000 12th graders leave school. If information about all California public school students dating back to Jan. 1, 2008 is released to the group, it should include more than 10 million students.
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EMNLP Recap
The Wit.ai Team Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 22, 2015
The 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing is the high mass for the NLP community. It happened last weekend in Lisbon, Portugal. Here are a few thoughts I’d like to share.
First, NLP is HOT. I could see the Sponsors/Hunters/Gatherers of Talent from many well known Silicon Valley companies… hiding in the dark alleys, waiting for their PhD preys. Hey I had to hide my Facebook badge because I think some researchers thought I was a recruiter and ran away from me!
Application-wise, apart from some people who seem obsessed with “Information Retrieval” (read: automatic surveillance of social media), the old usual suspects: machine translation, summarization, question answering, search, and a bunch of classical academic tasks like parsing, semantic role labelling, etc. Nothing really new.
So what’s new? The deep learning tsunami continues to take over NLP.
I’m proud that I saw the names of my FAIR friends and colleagues Yann LeCun, Ronan Collobert, Antoine Bordes, Jason Weston and many others cited on presentation slides over and over. The insider joke in Lisbon was that the E in EMNLP now stands for Embedding (instead of Empirical) — yes I know, when a full room in a restaurant laughs about something like that, you know you are in a special place. After all, 99% of modern NLP is empirical anyway. The opening keynote was delivered by Yoshua Bengio. Many papers were kind of “the state of the art for X was Y. We replaced the hand-crafted, manually hacked, heavily engineered Z by a RNN. It improved state of the art by 5 points.” The poor guys who presented deep learning-free papers invariably got the question: “did you also try with a [insert deep net technique here]?”
We are now in a new phase where beyond just using deep learning to improve some components (like the acoustic model in speech recognition), researcher start shipping complete end-to-end systems certified 100% deep learning (with 0 added rule based engine!), an approach pioneered by the now classic NLP (almost) from scratch.
I was a bit disappointed that nobody spoke about “grounded NLP”. In fact deep learning brings some much improvement potential, researchers may be tempted to improve existing systems instead of venturing into unchartered territories. I can’t wait to see them try to teach machines the actual, experienced, “felt” meaning of language. I took a Super Bock beer to forget.
Finally, I had interesting conversations about Facebook M, an ambitious project the Wit team is involved with at Facebook, with lots of researchers. We’ll need to improve and expand many aspects of Wit in order to develop M, and I’m glad the community will also benefit from that. That’s the beginning of an interesting journey.
As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.
Keep hacking,
Alex Lebrun & Team Wit
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Helen Spiers has a good story to tell. Particularly this week, as Australia contemplates the woeful Closing the Gap report on Indigenous disadvantage.
The school of which Dr Spiers is principal, Darwin’s Kormilda College, is a low-fee private school run by the Anglican and Uniting churches. In addition to its day students, it educates about 200 boarders drawn from remote Indigenous communities.
They come in year 8, usually with very limited literacy and numeracy. Over the past two years, 49 have graduated.
“They get the Northern Territory certificate of education and they get entrance into university,” says Spiers. “This is a great school. It does a lot of good things.”
Sadly, that is not the story anyone has lately been interested in hearing.
Instead, the focus of parents, the media and electoral authorities has been on another matter entirely: how a respectable school came to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a shadowy associated entity of the Northern Territory’s scandal-plagued and dysfunctional Country Liberal Party government, called Foundation 51.
And the truth is Helen Spiers doesn’t really know the answer. Nor does the school’s board. Those who do know aren’t telling.
Crosby Textor and Foundation 51
This intrigue goes back to August 2012, when Kormilda College determined the need for action to boost flagging enrolments. At that time it took students from years 6 to 12. The college board came to the view that it might help if they set up a feeder primary school. It was decided they should commission some market research and then-principal David Shinkfield was left to organise it.
Eleven months later, in July 2013, the consultancy report duly arrived, recommending the school should go ahead with its planned expansion.
Stamped all over the report was the name of the firm that carried out the work. It was Crosby Textor, probably Australia’s best-known research outfit, by virtue of its long association with conservative political campaigns in Australia, Britain, New Zealand and elsewhere, as well as its work for controversial clients such as tobacco companies.
Spiers says “it was a very comprehensive report”, and the board decided to go ahead with its expansion plan. Most of this work was overseen by Spiers, who became principal after Shinkfield left in March 2013. “We opened the week before last,” she says.
The accomplishment of getting the primary school operational, however, was overshadowed by an unexpected development.
The Australian Electoral Commission released electoral donation returns for the 2013-14 financial year, and among them was a document called an “associated entity disclosure return”, dated October 13 last year and signed by Graeme Lewis as director of Foundation 51.
The AEC defines an associated entity as an organisation that operates wholly or significantly for the benefit of a political party, in this case the CLP.
The disclosure Lewis signed attested that during that year Kormilda College had paid $33,000 to his foundation.
Apart from that, Lewis’s AEC disclosure revealed little. The commission provides those making declarations two choices: they can declare the income as “donation” or “other”. Lewis marked it “other”.
At the school there was initial confusion. As far as the principal and the school board knew, they had never given a cent to Foundation 51.
It didn’t take long for them to work out what had happened. Foundation 51, rather than Crosby Textor, had invoiced the school for the consultancy report.
On Tuesday last week, a day after the calls started, the chair of the college board, Peter Jones, put up a statement on the school’s website. It says, in part: “The payment refers to a consultancy into the establishment of a primary school at Kormilda. The consultancy was undertaken by Crosby Textor, a research, strategies and results company based in Sydney. The board was never aware that Foundation 51 had any involvement in this process.”
The money trail
But that did not resolve the central mystery. Why had one company been paid for what the school understood to be the work of another?
A week later principal Spiers is still none the wiser.
“I have been back into the archives, checked all the emails, board minutes, finance committee minutes, and I can find nothing at all that mentions Foundation 51,” she says. “The only link with Foundation 51 is that invoice.”
When we contacted the foundation’s Graeme Lewis, he was not very enlightening.
He maintains that the former principal, Shinkfield, had come to him via a mutual contact to offer the consultancy. Asked to be more specific about how the arrangement was formalised, he says that “this is a small town”.
Lewis says he subcontracted some of the work to Crosby Textor and that Foundation 51 paid Crosby Textor for its work. How much was paid, he does not recall. Quizzed on what Foundation 51 actually did for the school, other than forward an invoice, Lewis was similarly vague.
“There would have been a report of some sort. I can’t recall. I’m 73 years old and pretty stupid,” he says. “The connotation that it was a political donation is absolute garbage. It was never a political donation. It was a consultancy receipt.”
Foundation 51 has similarly subcontracted other commissions to Crosby Textor, he says. His personal relationship with the firm’s co-founder, Mark Textor, goes back a long way.
“Mark Textor was born in Darwin. I knew him when he was growing up. I knew his father when he was here as a senior policeman. I’ve known Mark for 50 years.”
Their political relationship goes back a long way, too. Lewis has been described as the eminence grise of the territory’s Country Liberal Party. An accountant by profession, he has been its president and its treasurer and worked on many of its campaigns.
Textor likewise is a long-time CLP operative as well as being perhaps Australia’s most cunning political strategist. He is widely credited with bringing to this country various polling techniques pioneered by the Republican Party in the United States, notably the use of focus groups to refine negative messages that might resonate with swing voters.
In the 1994 Territory election campaign, for example, when Textor was a member of the CLP campaign committee, voters were contacted by phone and asked whether they could support a Labor candidate if they knew Labor planned to close the seas to non-Aboriginals and have two laws, one for blacks and one for whites.
This is widely considered to have been the first use by any political party in this country of so-called push-polling, a technique by which damaging, false allegations about an opponent are spread under the guise of seeking to measure public opinion.
Accusations of a 'slush fund'
Over the years, the Northern Territory has been used as a kind of testing ground for various strategies. Which brings us back to Foundation 51.
The company was set up in early 2009 by Lewis and James Lantry, the chief of staff to the then CLP leader Terry Mills. Lewis says its purpose was strictly commercial.
“We did market research for clients, we did a range of consultancy commissions, on social issues, on lots of different issues,” he says.
Brochures distributed when the company was launched provide a somewhat different picture. Foundation 51 offered memberships: at $5500 for a standard membership, or “platinum” membership for $22,000. Members would benefit from access to “commercial research, reports and information gathering … with both economic and taxation advantages”.
The research would be delivered by Mark Textor.
Foundation 51 also offered political access. Guest speakers at events included John Howard, Peter Costello and Joe Hockey, as well as lesser conservative politicians and senior business figures.
For most of its existence, the foundation had largely operated under the radar of electoral regulators, and not made any disclosures. Then it made two, in very short order. The 2013-14 return, as we noted, was signed last October. Total receipts for that year were declared as $101,200.
Six weeks later, another return was belatedly lodged for the previous year, listing total receipts of almost $202,000. Most came from property developers.
Why the sudden rush to lodgement? Lewis says he did it on legal advice, out of “an abundance of caution”.
And no wonder his caution is abundant. The Territory and federal electoral authorities are now investigating the foundation, following the leaking of emails detailing the closeness of the relationship between it and the government, as well as various allegations of impropriety by disaffected former CLP members and a complaint by Territory Labor that it served as a “slush fund” for the CLP.
Space prohibits detailing them all. Suffice to say, as Lewis did when we spoke to him: “The brand of Foundation 51 has now been totally trashed.”
The company has been wound up.
Ongoing investigations
Lewis maintains the foundation was never an associated entity in the strict sense, because money paid into it was not passed on to the CLP.
“The only time that money ever went from Foundation 51 to the CLP was in 2014 when – by the time this had all blown up – I thought, what the hell, and I gave something like $7000 to the CLP.”
But cash is not the only currency in politics. So is information and research.
“My problem was that, as director of Foundation 51, I was coming into information … that then in my spare time I went and helped Terry Mills set up his electoral campaign.
“And then the electoral commissioner said, ‘You must have been helping the CLP – that makes you an associated entity.’ ”
Lewis’s admissions suggest the following picture. Conservative donors pay into Foundation 51. The foundation commissions research. The research, conducted by Liberal Party pollster Crosby Textor, as well as other research companies, then gets passed to the CLP.
As for how Kormilda College and the $33,000 fit into the picture, we can’t be sure. Maybe the electoral commission investigations will find out, but don’t bet on it. The response of the Northern Territory electoral authorities to questions from The Saturday Paper suggests they are not following that money trail. The response from the federal electoral authorities suggests only that the investigation is ongoing.
Crosby Textor did not respond to a request for clarification.
The best we can say is that the school appears to have become collateral damage in the long war between Australia’s conservative parties and funding disclosure laws.
Not that Graeme Lewis cares too much about that. If the school doesn’t know whom it engaged as a consultant, he says, “Well, I’m not responsible for that.”
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Women on Waves (WoW) is a Dutch pro-choice nongovernmental organization (NGO) created in 1999 by Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts, in order to bring reproductive health services, particularly non-surgical abortion services and education, to women in countries with restrictive abortion laws.[1] Other services offered by WoW include contraception, individual reproductive counseling, workshops, and education about unwanted pregnancy.[2] Workshops are conducted for lawyers, doctors, artists, writers,[1] public health care activists, as well as for women and men to learn about contraceptive practices and non-surgical, DIY abortion using RU-486.[3][4] Services are provided on a commissioned ship that contains a specially constructed mobile clinic, the A-Portable. When WoW visits a country, women make appointments, and are taken on board the ship. The ship then sails out approximately 12 miles, to international waters, where Dutch laws are in effect on board ships registered in the Netherlands.[1] Once in international waters, the ship's medical personnel provide a range of reproductive health services that includes medical abortion.[5]
The A-Portable was designed by Dutch artist and sculptor Atelier van Lieshout and functions as both medical clinic and art installation.[1]
Women on Waves volunteers and personnel have been targeted by governmental authorities, religious organizations, and local groups who are opposed to abortion and/or contraception.[1] The NGO is credited for reviving debates about abortion in the countries where Women on Waves visits.[1]
Rebecca Gomperts [ edit ]
Rebecca Gomperts, Lodz, Poland, 2017
Rebecca Gomperts is a physician in general practice, artist and women's rights activist. Born in 1966, Gomperts grew up in the port town of Vlissingen, the Netherlands. She moved to Amsterdam in the 1980s where she studied art and medicine simultaneously.[6] Drawing on her experiences as a resident physician on the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior II, which was captained by Bart J. Terwiel, Gomperts created WoW in order to address the health issues created by illegal abortion. While visiting Latin America on board the Rainbow Warrior II, the organization was inspired by a desire to further facilitate social change and women's health. In some developing countries, as many as 800 illegal, unsafe abortions are performed daily, in contrast to some developed nations, such as the Netherlands, where residents have access to safe, legal, medical abortions and contraception. In collaboration with Atelier van Lieshout, she designed a portable gynaecology unit called "A-portable" that can be installed on chartered ships. The stated goals of the organization are to raise awareness and stimulate discussion about laws regarding abortion which they allege to be restrictive, as well as to provide safe, non-surgical abortions for women who live in countries where abortion is illegal.[7]
The A-Portable [ edit ]
The mobile gynecological clinic was designed and named by Dutch artist and sculptor Atelier van Lieshout. Known as the A-Portable, the clinic is in a retrofitted shipping container. It is painted a light blue color with the Women on Waves logo painted on the sides.[1] To travel, the shipping container is strapped onto ships registered in the Netherlands, and rented by Women on Waves, which is a nongovernmental organization (NGO). Lambert-Beatty describes the logo, which was designed by Kees Ryter in 2001: [the clinic's) "side is emblazoned with a purple spot on which, in turn, floats an orange shape outlined in pink: a squared cross, one quickly realizes, of the kind that symbolizes humanitarian and medical aid."[1] p. 309
The clinic is a fully functional gynecological clinic offering contraceptive counseling, sonograms, and medical and surgery abortions. It is generally staffed with two physicians and a nurse. Trained volunteers also staff the ship to provide education and counseling. The ship's crew is nearly all female.[1] In ports in countries that allow it, the ship's staff provide workshops on legal and medical issues.[1] During visits to countries with restrictive laws, the ship travels into international waters, usually about 12 miles from land, in order to provide services.[1][3]
The A-Portable functions as a medical clinic, but is also considered to be a work of art. The original funds to create the A-Portable were awarded by the Mondriaan Foundation, which is a Dutch "publicly financed fund for visual art and cultural heritage."[8] It appeared in Portugal at the Ute Meta Bauer's Women Building Exhibition; in Amsterdam at the Mediamatic art space;[9] and in Artforum.[1] Lambert-Beatty notes that Claire Bishop, an art historian, critic, and professor of art, interprets the A-Portable as "new political art."[1][10]
Voyages [ edit ]
In 2002, after contentious debate in the Dutch parliament, Holland's Minister of Health, Els Borst, gave permission to medical personnel on board the Women on Waves ship to offer pregnant women RU-486, known colloquially as the abortion pill, on board their boat, Aurora.[2] According to Borst, the decision was in line with the Dutch government's policy on the issue of sexual independence of women. The permission was given on the condition that the abortion pill would only be used to terminate pregnancies of up to nine weeks and would be provided in the presence of a gynaecologist.[11]
Ireland [ edit ]
Women on Waves made its maiden voyage aboard the Aurora to Ireland in 2001. The ship carried two Dutch doctors and one Dutch nurse.[12] The stated purpose of Women on Waves Ireland was to "catalyze" the Irish movement to liberalize Ireland's abortion laws.[13] At the time, Ireland had the most stringent prohibitions against abortion in Europe, with laws forbidding the procedure that dated to 1861.[2] Women on Waves Ireland provided education about abortion and unwanted pregnancy to individuals and to groups in workshops. On that journey, they were not allowed to do surgical or medical abortions, and were limited by Dutch law to provide only information on contraceptives, and not the contraceptives themselves.[2] The ship had been invited by Irish pro-choice organizations which coordinated a publicity campaign in advance of the Aurora's arrival. The ship anchored at Dublin Port, and traveled into international waters to provide educational services as Ireland's law prohibited discussion about abortion and contraceptives. During the ship's visit to Dublin Port, approximately 300 women participated. All of the ship's services were provided for free.[2]
In 2016, Women on Waves collaborated with pro-abortion group to use drones and speed boats to deliver abortion pills to women in Northern Ireland.[14]
Poland [ edit ]
WoW sailed the Langenort to Poland in 2003.[15][1] Women on Waves was charged with violating Poland's laws against abortion by bringing RU-486, also known as the abortion drug, into Poland. Four months afterward, the government of Poland dropped the charges, noting that there was no evidence that Women on Waves had violated Poland's laws.[16] Poland's official polling company, Centrum Badania Opinii Spolecznej, found that prior to WoW's visit, 44% of the population supported the liberalization of abortion laws, and that after the visit, the percentage rose to 56%.[17] In 2015, WoW flew a drone carrying abortion pills from Frankfurt, Germany across the border to Slubice, Poland. German police attempted to prevent the drones from leaving, but were unsuccessful. Polish police confiscated the drones and the personal iPads of the drones' pilots.[18][19]
Portugal [ edit ]
In 2004, the ship Borndiep, carrying the A-Portable, was physically blocked by a naval warship as it attempted to enter Portuguese waters.[20][1] In 2009, the European Court of Human Rights rendered a decision in favor of the plaintiffs in Women on Waves and Others v. Portugal.[21] The court determined that although Portugal had a right to enforce its laws prohibiting abortion, the nation could have enforced the law in less harmful ways, e.g. by sequestering the abortion drugs that were on board the ship.[21]
Spain [ edit ]
In 2008, Women on Waves' ship landed in Valencia, Spain, where it had a mixed reception. Some demonstrators supported the group, others opposed it. According to Catholic News Agency,
"On 18 October a group of 40 feminists gathered to counter the pro-life protests, which brought out four times as many people. They passed out boxes of matches with the picture of a burning church and the caption, 'The only church that brings light is the one that burns. Join us!' On 19 October the feminists met again to distribute matches but decided to disband after they were overwhelmed by the large number of pro-life protesters who gathered at the port where the abortion ship was docked."
As the ship attempted to dock amid both pro-life and pro-choice protesters, harbor patrol agents in a small boat lassoed a rope around the helm of the ship and attempted to pull it away from the dock.[22]
Morocco [ edit ]
On 3 October 2012, the Moroccan health ministry closed the port of Smir to prevent the entry of the Women on Waves ship Langenort.[23] This was the first attempt by Women on Waves to make landfall in a Muslim country. Anti-abortion protesters were present, many carrying signs against abortion. The activist Rebecca Gomperts was at the port to meet the ship, but she was escorted away upon encountering the protesters.[24]
Guatemala [ edit ]
On 22 February 2017, the WoW ship docked in Puerto Quetzal on the Pacific coast for a planned five-day visit. On 23 February, a scheduled press conference was shut down shortly after it started[25] and a blockade was imposed by Army troops, preventing the activists from disembarking and visitors from boarding.[26] Catholic and other religious leaders and politicians spoke vociferously against the ship and its mission: " 'The boat of death has arrived in Guatemala," said lawmaker Raul Romero during a Congress session earlier on Wednesday."[27]
Documentary [ edit ]
In 2014 Vessel, a documentary by Diana Whitten focusing on Women on Waves, premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, United States. It has won numerous awards.[28]
Feminist activism [ edit ]
In an academic article published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Carrie Lambert-Beatty claims that "the vessel [is] one of the most audacious instances of feminist activism in recent memory."[1] p. 309
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
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The Marlins have placed righty David Phelps on the 15-day DL with a left oblique strain, the club announced. Righty Jake Esch is coming up to take a start for Phelps.
The move is retroactive to August 27th, so Phelps can be available to return before mid-September. It’s not yet clear whether the injury will keep him out past that point or not.
Losing Phelps is a major blow to a Miami club that is already showing signs of cracking in the postseason race. He has been remarkably effective all year long, first posting top-quality results over 54 1/3 relief innings and then turning in five excellent starts when a need arose in the rotation.
Regardless of how things turn out over the final month or so of the season, Phelps has turned himself into quite a value for Miami. He will earn a raise on his current $2.5MM salary, but comes with two more seasons of arbitration control.
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“Medical Child Abuse” is the Term Now Used to Legally Seize Children away from Parents
Health Impact News Editor
As people around the country celebrate the homecoming of Justina Pelletier, who was held against her will and the desire of her parents for 16 months over a disagreement on medical treatment, a case in Chicago reminds us that her situation is representative of a larger movement across the country to take children away from parents for the purpose of “medical treatment”.
NBC News in Chicago is reporting that Michelle Rider and her 16-year-old son, Isaiah Rider, traveled from Kansas City to Lurie Children’s Hospital after doctors in her hometown, Texas, and Boston were unable to effectively treat his neurofibromatosis — a painful condition that causes tumors to grow on his nerves. When Isaiah’s pain was reportedly not getting any better at Lurie’s, his mother attempted to have him transferred to another hospital. But doctors at Lurie’s Hospital reported to Cook County Court that Michelle was guilty of “medical child abuse”, as they disagreed with the course of treatment chosen by the mother. As a result, they seized custody of the child and put him into a foster home, allowing the mother to only be able to visit her son twice a week for one-hour supervised visits.
This story has eerie similarities to Justina Pelletier’s story and her parents’ experience with Boston Children’s Hospital. Amid national outcry, even in the mainstream media, the judge over Justina’s case finally released custody back to her parents last week, after a 16-month long ordeal where the parents were charged with “medical child abuse” for wanting to seek different treatment for their daughter.
Lou Pelletier, Justina’s father, has pledged to fight the medical system and the child “protection” services that seized their daughter for 16 months, resulting in her being paralyzed from the waist down. Prior to losing custody, Justina could ice skate and compete in skating events. Lou Pelletier has stated in the press that he believes his daughter was part of a medical experiment, and that they had to gain legal custody to conduct such experiments without the parents’ consent. (Source.)
Health Impact News will continue to cover these stories of medical tyranny and violations of parental rights in choosing their own medical treatments for their children. In these specific cases it is important to note that the parents are not refusing all medical treatment for their children, but simply wanting to pursue other medical treatments from different hospitals and doctors, and getting other opinions to determine the best course of action. But many childrens’ hospitals are now intervening and overriding parents’ decisions and freedom of choice, and there seems to be strong evidence that economic motives for medical research, as well as reimbursement at the state level for foster care placement, has a significant impact on these actions.
See Also:
by Attorney Jonathan Emord Free Shipping Available!
by Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, MD Free Shipping Available!
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PREMIER Annastacia Palaszczuk has revealed Labor stopped taking developer donations on Friday following the CCC recommendation to ban them from local government elections.
PREMIER Annastacia Palaszczuk has revealed Labor stopped taking developer donations on Friday following the CCC recommendation to ban them from local government elections. Chris Ison ROK220917cpremier2
QUEENSLAND Labor has stopped taking donations from property developers since last Friday following release of the Crime and Corruption Commission report into the 2016 local government elections with Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk today endorsing all of its recommendations.
A key reform from the CCC's Belcarra inquiry into elections for the Gold Coast, Logan, Moreton and Ipswich councils was the banning of developer donations for council candidates something Ms Palaszczuk said she would not do without equally applying the ban at the state level.
Sunshine Coast Mayor and Local Government Association of Queensland president Mark Jamieson has criticised the ban claiming it would drive activity underground.
HoweverMs Palaszczuk has made it clear changes have to come telling Parliament today the government intended to address issues of integrity and accountability in local government.
The government has indicated its support in full of 22 of the 31 recommendations and support in principle for nine others.
Of those nine it would consult with the Local Government Association of Queensland in relation to a review of election expenditure caps and amendment of the Local Government Electoral Act to require real-time disclosure of electoral expenditure by candidates, groups of candidates, political parties and associated entities.
Election donation reform was a key element of the engage of letters between Ms Palaszczuk and Nicklin independent Peter Wellington which allowed her to form government.
"Ever since the first bill we introduced to parliament in 2015, my government has consistently demonstrated its commitment to integrity and accountability,” she told Parliament.
"We lowered thresholds for donation disclosure and we have introduced real-time disclosure of donations.
"Last week, the Crime and Corruption Commission delivered its thorough and comprehensive report into corruption risk in local government.
"Commissioner Alan MacSporran QC makes it clear many of these issues are not new - some were addressed by the Criminal Justice Commission 26 years ago.
"But those issues have persisted and the issues remain.
"As Mr MacSporran said, 'I think it's on the nose. And I think this report indicates the public's pretty right. It certainly is at the very least a hotbed of perceived corruption and that occurs when you have a lack of transparency'.
"His report states: 'The recurring nature of these issues, despite increased regulation and oversight of local government, elections and political donations over time, highlights their inherent potential to cause concerns about corruption'.
"He also said: 'The report tabled in Parliament today demonstrates why reform of the local government sector is required. If supported by Parliament, the package of recommendations in my view will result in the most substantial reform of the local government sector in Queensland's history'.”
Ms Palaszczuk told Parliament she had already indicated her support for two of that reports key recommendation being the ban on developer donations, and better mechanisms for addressing conflict of interest concerns in council decisions.
She said her government would endorse all recommendations in the report, supporting some in full and others in principle.
"We will ensure legislative change addressing Belcarra recommendations is properly scrutinised through the committee process,” Ms Palaszczuk said.
"Mr Speaker, most importantly, when it comes to political donations - we will not introduce measures on local government that we do not apply to ourselves.
"Mr Speaker the State Secretary of the Labor Party has advised me that as of last Friday, the party has stopped accepting donations from property developers.
"We will meet with stakeholders through the development of this legislation.”
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REDMOND, Wash., and NEW YORK — Sept. 27, 2016 — Today at Sibos, an annual conference organized by SWIFT for the financial industry, Microsoft Corp. and Bank of America Merrill Lynch announced a collaboration on blockchain technology to fuel transformation of trade finance transacting.
As part of this collaboration, the two companies will build and test technology, create frameworks, and establish best practices for blockchain-powered exchanges between businesses and their customers and banks. Microsoft Treasury experts will serve as advisors and initial test clients, establishing the first Microsoft Azure-powered blockchain transaction between a major corporate treasury and a financial institution.
“By working with Bank of America Merrill Lynch on cloud-based blockchain technology, we aim to increase efficiency and reduce risk in our own treasury operations,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Microsoft. “Businesses across the globe — including Microsoft — are undergoing digital transformation to grow, compete and be more agile, and we see significant potential for blockchain to drive this transformation.”
Currently, underlying trade finance processes are highly manual, time-consuming and costly. With blockchain, processes can be digitized and automated, transaction settlement times shortened, and business logic applied to related data, creating a host of potential benefits for businesses and financial institutions including more predictable working capital, reduced counterparty risk, improved operational efficiency, and enhanced audit transparency, among other benefits.
“The potential benefits of blockchain will help drive meaningful supply-chain efficiencies to the clients of both Microsoft and the bank. This project is another example of our continued commitment to introduce financial innovations for the betterment of global commerce,” said Ather Williams, head of Global Transaction Services at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
“We are excited to be working with Microsoft on this groundbreaking blockchain proof of concept that has the potential to help redefine, digitize and improve how trade finance instruments are executed today,” said Percy Batliwalla, head of Global Trade and Supply Chain Finance at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service was first introduced in November 2015. The global scale, hybrid cloud capabilities, extensive compliance certification portfolio, and enterprise-proven security of Azure provide businesses with confidence and choice, especially in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and government. More than 80 percent of the world’s largest banks are Azure customers. Furthermore, more than 75 percent of the global systemically important financial institutions are using Azure, representing the highest bar for legal, compliance, security and acquisitions teams.
Development and testing of the initial application, built to optimize the standby letter of credit process, is currently in progress. The Microsoft and Bank of America Merrill Lynch teams will demonstrate the technology at Sibos in Geneva, Switzerland. Following the initial development and testing, the teams will work to refine the technology and evaluate applications to include more complex use cases and additional financial instruments.
More information on Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service can be found at www.microsoft.com/blockchain .
About Bank of America
Bank of America is one of the world’s leading financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle-market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk management products and services. The company provides unmatched convenience in the United States, serving approximately 47 million consumer and small business relationships with approximately 4,700 retail financial centers, approximately 16,000 ATMs, and award-winning online banking with approximately 33 million active accounts and more than 20 million mobile active users. Bank of America is a global leader in wealth management, corporate and investment banking and trading across a broad range of asset classes, serving corporations, governments, institutions and individuals around the world. Bank of America offers industry-leading support to approximately 3 million small business owners through a suite of innovative, easy-to-use online products and services. The company serves clients through operations in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and more than 35 countries. Bank of America Corporation stock (NYSE: BAC) is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch is the marketing name for the global banking and global markets businesses of Bank of America Corporation. Lending, derivatives, and other commercial banking activities are performed globally by banking affiliates of Bank of America Corporation, including Bank of America, N.A., Member FDIC. Securities, strategic advisory, and other investment banking activities are performed globally by investment banking affiliates of Bank of America Corporation (“Investment Banking Affiliates”), including, in the United States, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated and Merrill Lynch Professional Clearing Corp., all of which are registered broker-dealers and Members of SIPC, and, in other jurisdictions, by locally registered entities. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated and Merrill Lynch Professional Clearing Corp. are registered as futures commission merchants with the CFTC and are members of the NFA. Investment products offered by Investment Banking Affiliates: Are Not FDIC Insured * May Lose Value * Are Not Bank Guaranteed.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.
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Brian Krebs has been sent heroin and a wreath in an attempt to discredit and intimidate him but sees irresponsible hardware manufacturers as the real threat
Brian Krebs does not use heroin, but sometimes people send it to him anyway. The 43-year-old Alabama native writes Krebs on Security, a one-man operation focused on digital crime. His encyclopedic knowledge of the subject and his network of contacts has made his blog essential reading for anyone interested in cybercrime and a coveted lecturer at some of the biggest companies in the world. It has also made him some dangerous enemies – hence the heroin, meant as a sinister, silencing message.
Looking back on a year in which Russian cyber-spies have been accused of meddling in the US election, Yahoo announced that 1bn email accounts were compromised and hackers used internet-connected devices including baby monitors, webcams and thermostats, to take down some of the world’s biggest websites, what surprises Krebs the most is that people are surprised at all.
The problem is cybercrime is easy, Krebs says. Too many individuals and organizations buy cheap hardware because they can’t imagine the damage millions of slightly-too-stupid routers can do; most owners of the hijacked devices that participated in the attack that took down websites, including Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, CNN and PayPal, as well as the entire country of Liberia earlier this year never knew their property had been used to pull millions of computers offline.
Passwords and hacking: the jargon of hashing, salting and SHA-2 explained Read more
“It’s cheap to make hardware that works,” Krebs says. It’s much more expensive to make sure it works only for you. “There are companies that have zero interest in designing a secure device; they just cobble together software libraries.”
When laypeople write to him, Krebs says, it’s often to beg for help. “People get so frustrated and they’re scared and the clock is ticking and they don’t know what to do,” he says. “They ask where do I go? Who do I turn to?” Soon, he says, something will have to give.
Krebs was writing about a similar bug to the one Yahoo claims compromised 1bn user accounts as far back as 2012; for years he’d warned readers about “botnets” like the one that took down the web across the eastern seaboard in October.
What shocked him, he said, was that people kept using Yahoo, and that the political establishment was “somehow surprised that Russian hackers might want to see if they could impact the direction of our election”. Of course they tried, Krebs says – it’s cheap and you don’t lose much by trying.
Krebs earns a living dragging the perpetrators of obscure and horrifying crimes into the light: before the Washington Post laid him off, his column Security Fix exposed Estonian cybercriminal Vladimir Tšaštšin, whose domain-hosting business turned out to be a berth for child abusers and credit card thieves. Writing on his unshowy blog two years later, Krebs broke news of the notorious Stuxnet worm, a tool of corporate espionage capable of intruding on anyone who used Windows.
Eight things you need to do right now to protect yourself online Read more
His subjects don’t enjoy seeing their crimes written about, and sometimes they want to send him a message. In 2013, that message took the form of a gram of pure heroin taped to the back of a magazine.
That year, Krebs had earned the unwanted attention of a man calling himself The Fly, or Flycracker, later revealed to be a 26-year-old career thief named Sergey Vovnenko. Krebs tracked Vovnenko to a forum where he brokered the sale of credit card information, and found that Vovnenko was holding forth on a plan to damage Krebs’s reputation, maybe even land him in jail.
The plan was to have heroin delivered to Krebs, then to call the police. Krebs called the police first. The heroin came a few days after he gave his statement to law enforcement; he turned it over to the cops, and went to work finding who sent it.
Vovnenko fits a profile Krebs says applies to many in the world of information crime: young, arrogant and frankly sadistic, with a chip on his shoulder. Investigators are prone to boil credit card stealing operations and mass identity thefts to simple greed but often it’s more than that. “These guys have such huge egos,” he said. “What are they after? How much is enough? You make 100 grand a month, is that not enough? Or do you really just enjoy fucking things up and attacking people or having power over people.”
How a Russian cybercriminal tried to frame me with a Bitcoin heroin deal Read more
After Vovnenko failed to frame him, Krebs wrote about the experience in a blogpost, which the Guardian republished. He says he thinks the post embarrassed Vovnenko, who then sent Krebs’s wife a funereal flower arrangement.
“He had it delivered to our house with a note to her, just to her, saying, ‘Dear Jennifer, you married the wrong guy, but we’ll always take care of you. Rest in peace, Brian.’ And at this point I want to know who this fucker is.”
He found out: Vovnenko – just like the people he stole from – shared passwords between the administrator account on his identity theft forum, and the Gmail address he used to do his dirty work. Krebs learned that Vovnenko didn’t trust his fiancee and had her every keystroke logged and secretly sent to the Gmail account; in those messages was every possible personal detail about Vovnenko’s life.
Vovnenko lived in Naples, Italy. He had a son. He married his fiancee. He bought stolen Italian credit card information, printed and embossed credit cards on machines he owned himself, and cashed the cards out through high-end Italian retailers in the fashionable city, Krebs found.
Krebs decided to get in touch with Vovnenko. Running organized crime was one thing; a Ukrainian running an identity theft ring and printing stolen credit cards in the Camorra’s backyard was another. “I just reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, how’s Italy? How’s your son Max?’” Krebs recalls. “And he said ‘Ahahaha, I wait for FBI.’
“I said: ‘It’s not the FBI you have to worry about.’”
Vovnenko fell afoul of Italian authorities and spent “a while” in what he called “Naples’ worst prison” in a letter of apology he wrote to Krebs. Krebs thinks Vovnenko was in a 12-step program; he also told his victim he “forgave” him for posting a picture and Vovnenko’s address on Krebs on Security when Vovnenko was arrested.
Criminal enterprise, especially with an eye to dominating or inflicting humiliation, tends to be the work of young men. Cybercrime is often very humiliating – Krebs recalls the Ashley Madison hack, in which thieves used the data from the cheating spouses website to write extortion letters filled with details culled from social media – another story Krebs first brought to light. “Here’s the number of the last guy who thought I was bluffing,” they said. “Call him and see if he’s happy with how it turned out.”
Like many security researchers, Krebs says the keys to avoiding cybercrime aren’t complicated. Identity theft has largely ceased to be a matter of targeting a specific person; the responsibility for preventing it lies with irresponsible hardware manufacturers who refuse to secure their devices with basic encryption. Hardware companies are struggling to reconcile the higher cost of securing devices with the danger to billions of users that comes with cheaping out on crucial parts. Meanwhile, it’s up to users to keep track of the basics.
Five things you can do to avoid digital criminals
Like most theft, cybercrime tends to follow the path of least resistance. Here are five online hygiene tips anyone can follow, for free, to make life harder for people looking for an easy way to steal your personal or financial information.
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Theresa May refused to say how she would vote if there were a new vote, but other cabinet members have been more forthcoming
Theresa May’s refusal to say whether she would now back leaving the EU in a fresh referendum has left fellow remain-backing members of the cabinet split on how to respond to the same question.
At least two members of May’s pro-EU dominated cabinet, Liz Truss and Jeremy Hunt, have said they would change their vote in favour of Brexit if a referendum were held tomorrow.
Others including the loyal culture secretary, Karen Bradley, have followed the prime minister’s uncertain lead in refusing to give a straight answer. “There isn’t going to be a second Brexit referendum. We are delivering Brexit. I believe in Brexit,” she told ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
But asked whether she would describe herself as remain or leave, Bradley replied: “We are leaving the European Union, I am making sure we leave. I’m part of a government that is leaving, so I guess you would say leave.”
Good Morning Britain (@GMB) This morning the Culture Secretary joined the PM in refusing to say how she would vote in a 2nd EU referendum @piersmorgan @susannareid100 pic.twitter.com/04teby43n8
Remain-backing cabinet members yet to be given the same question will be pondering their answers, as senior divisions continue to be exposed on the type of Brexit deal the government is trying to secure.
Truss said that her expectation of immediate economic damage from a leave vote had turned out to be wrong, and acknowledged that Treasury forecasts of its impact were not accurate.
Why do we expect Theresa May to lie about Brexit? | David Shariatmadari Read more
Speaking to BBC2’s Daily Politics Truss said: “All of us had to make a judgment on what we thought the future would look like. I made a judgment thinking it would be bad for the economy.
“Since we have left, it has been more positive, so the facts have changed and I have changed my mind.”
Daily&SundayPolitics (@daily_politics) "What it means is that the dep't of which you are now number 2, its forecasts were wrong?" @afneil
"Many forecasts were wrong" @trussliz pic.twitter.com/VGP8N0yuGC
Asked whether this meant she now accepted the Treasury’s dire forecasts about leaving the EU were wrong, Truss said: “No forecast is completely accurate. No one has a crystal ball.
“I believed that there would be major economic problems. Those haven’t come to pass and I have also seen the opportunities. The other thing is that there was a big moment on 23 June when British people voted to leave and it was an expression about what kind of country we wanted to be. I think that has changed the debate in this country as well.”
Theresa May refuses to say if she would vote for Brexit in fresh poll Read more
Earlier this month Hunt told LBC’s Iain Dale that the “arrogance of the EU” in response to negotiating offers by the UK had influenced him to change his mind on the issue.
LBC (@LBC) Jeremy Hunt has changed his mind on Brexit, why? "The arrogance of the EU Commission" @IainDale pic.twitter.com/kC7J2MfPCl
On Tuesday May told Dale she did not answer hypothetical questions.
Dale pressed her on the issue, by pointing out that Hunt had given a clear answer to the same question. “If he says he can change his mind, I don’t quite understand why you can’t, seeing as you are prime minister leading us into Brexit.”
Play Video 2:20 Theresa May refuses to say how she would vote in fresh Brexit poll - video
May replied: “What I did last time around was I looked at everything and came to a judgment and I’d do exactly the same this time around. But we’re not having another referendum and that’s absolutely crucial.”
During prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, the SNP’s Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, asked her why she could not give a “straightforward” answer. She said: “There is no second referendum. The people of the United Kingdom voted and we will be leaving the European Union in March 2019.”
At least 20 members of May’s cabinet backed remaining in the EU in the run-up to last year’s referendum.
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An oil and gas platform well in the Gulf of Mexico has lost containment and is leaking natural gas, the Coast Guard said.
Early Tuesday, the Coast Guard and the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement received a report from the owners of the natural gas and crude oil platform that workers had lost control of a well, Coast Guard spokesman Jonathan Lally told NBC News.
“It is actively leaking natural gas,” Lally said, adding that all workers had been safely evacuated and none were injured.
The well, about 74 miles off Port Fourchon, La., is owned by Energy Resources Technology Gulf of Mexico, a subsidiary of Talos Energy.
According to the company's site assessment, “there is a rainbow sheen visible on the surface estimated to be more than four miles wide by three quarters of a mile long.”
Talos Energy President Timothy Duncan issued a statement late Tuesday saying workers were trying to plug and abandon the nonproducing well when “salt water containing a small amount of gas and light condensate began to flow to the surface and around the wellhead.”
He said the platform was evacuated and authorities were notified in “an abundance of caution.”
“We expect that the well will be shut in within the next 24 hours,” he said.
Duncan said that the well is an older one in a field developed in the 1970's, he said, and that the age of the tubing may have contributed to the incident.
“We believe that approximately six barrels of light condensate have been discharged in the last 24 hours, based upon the four mile wide by three quarter mile long sheen as reported by the BSEE and the U.S. Coast Guard.”
A spokesperson for the federal bureau told NBC News that this type of leak was known to happen a few times a year. No oil is being released into the water, according to the spokesperson, saying “the situation is under control.”
Crews from the Coast Guard, the bureau and the company were responding to the incident at Ship Shoal Block 225, Platform B.
According to the Coast Guard, work to temporarily plug Well B2 was under way when workers became aware of the “well control event.” Two other operating wells on Platform B were shut down after the incident.
Coast Guard and the bureau will investigate the cause of the incident, according to a Coast Guard news release.
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement was established in 2011 in the wake of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
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"Healthcare is complicated and you cannot make policy changes at the drop of a hat," Aderholt's statement reads.
Aderholt says it's understandable that BCBS of AL would refuse to continue its existing plans, given the impact of the Affordable Care Act on the cost of insurance.
"The reason that the insurance companies cannot offer the same plans for the same price is that Obamacare changed the cost equation," Aderholt's statement reads. "Despite whatever the President wants to say, the actual numbers don't add up."
BCBS of AL announced on Wednesday afternoon that it would not continue offering existing plans, which are not in compliance with certain components of ACA, for an additional year.
"A one-year continuation of policies that violates the ACA's requirements could create significant legal and financial risks to our policyholders, the state and our company," said Blue Cross spokeswoman Koko Mackin in a statement.
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FRISCO, Texas -- After a 10-day layoff, FC Dallas returns to action for a busy week that sees two home games at FC Dallas Stadium.
First up is a visit from the Portland Timbers on Wednesday night.
FC Dallas has had success over the last couple years against Portland at home, going 2-0-1 with ten goals scored in those three games.
Rookie head coach Caleb Porter’s squad comes into this match with just one loss on the season and one of the league’s better records. Currently the Timbers are 3-1-5 on the season with their last loss coming all the way back on March 9 to the Montreal Impact.
Portland is coming off a 0-0 draw to the New England Revolution last Thursday night.
Injury Watch
Portland has had a couple of players on the injury list for most of the season so far. Both Bright Dike and Brent Richards are out due to ACL surgery. Defender David Horst is also out due to surgery on his tibia.
Last Thursday against the New England Revolution, veteran defender Mikael Silvestre left the game with an ACL tear. He is expected to miss six-to-nine months of action for the Timbers. That may be the biggest loss of all considering how well Silvestre has been for the back line so far this season.
Key Matchup
Darlington Nagbe vs. Jair Benitez – Dealing with speed has been an issue this season for Benitez. The veteran defender will face a tall task on Wednesday night when he goes up against Nagbe. The 22-year-old Timber has two goals and one assist on the season.
Key Player for Portland
Diego Chara – The Colombian Designated Player has really come into his own under Porter’s style of play. Lately, he’s been lined up in the midfield along with Will Johnson and Diego Valeri and that has opened up his ability to win balls in space and open up the attack for the Timbers.
Projected Lineup
Porter lately has been employing a 4-3-3 formation this season though you could argue that at times it resembles more of a 4-2-1-3.
Goalkeeper: Donovan Ricketts; RB: Michael Harrington; CB: Mamadou Danso, Andrew Jean-Baptiste; LB: Jack Jewsbury; RM: Diego Valeri; CM: Diego Chara; LM: Will Johnson; RW: Darlington Nagbe; LW: Rodney Wallace; FW: Ryan Johnson
Keys to three points
Portland got off to a slow start to begin the season, but over the last month, Porter’s team has really taken off with its high-possession and high-attack style of play. The Timbers haven’t lost since Week 2 in MLS, the same week that FC Dallas last suffered a loss.
What Portland does well is apply pressure up front. They have talented players in Valeri, Chara, Nagbe, Ryan Johnson and Will Johnson. Defensively, they have improved a great deal ever since Jack Jewsbury was moved to the back line. Goalkeeper Donovan Ricketts has also stepped up and has recorded three shutouts this season.
The Timbers have been solid in creating counter attack situations this year. FC Dallas will need to control the possession as well to eliminate the amount of chances the Timbers are able to create on goal. Portland has only been shutout once this season, which means they tend to make the most of their chances.
FC Dallas will need to use the width of the field in this match and find ways to make the Timbers chase the game. Fabian Castillo will need to have a big match in place of the suspended Jackson.
While the Timbers have improved this season under Porter, FC Dallas has the rested legs and momentum at home that should be able to carry it to another victory.
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Enlarge By Serkan Senturk, AP Iraqi refugee Suzan and her daughter Aya, seen here on May 8 in Istanbul, Turkey, fled their home in Iraq after Islamic extremists threatened to kill Suzan unless she closed down her hairdressing shop. She paid a smuggler $18,000 to sneak her and her daughter from Turkey to Greece, but they only made it as far as Edirne, near the Greek border, where the smuggler vanished. ISTANBUL, Turkey In the depths of despair, Suzan doused herself and her 14-year-old daughter with gasoline and prepared to set them both on fire. The Iraqi refugee's dream of reaching Europe was dead. Suzan, a hairstylist, had fled her homeland months earlier under threat from Islamic extremists and paid a smuggler $18,000 to sneak her and her daughter Aya from Turkey to Greece. But when they reached Edirne, near the Greek border, the smuggler vanished. Suzan returned to Istanbul, where she feared the only fate for her and Aya was prostitution. "My dream was like a sand castle taken down by a big wave," Suzan said. "I did not want to see the day when me or my daughter are forced to leave the right path." Only Aya's last-minute pleas stopped her from lighting them both ablaze. "Please, mama, I kiss your feet, don't do it," Aya begged. "She was in my arms, soaked with gasoline and shivering from fright ... I was so very desperate, and there was no way out," Suzan recounted, crying at the memory and holding Aya. She spoke to The Associated Press on condition her full name not be used because she fears deportation by Turkish authorities. The desperation of Iraqi refugees appears to be fueling an increase in illegal migration into Europe — and in the activities of smugglers who exploit these refugees. On June 23, the law enforcement agency Europol carried out what it called one of the biggest coordinated sweeps against smuggler networks, arresting 75 people in nine European countries. The sweep was code-named "Operation Baghdad," a nod to the new importance of Iraq as a source of migrants. An unspecified number of both the smugglers and the migrants were Iraqi. While it's hard to gauge the extent of illegal immigration, Europol says asylum applications filed in European countries are an indirect indicator. Such applications increased 10% between mid-2006 and mid-2007. The situation has been exploited by organized crime groups, Europol said in a March report. Up to 2.5 million Iraqis have fled their country over the past five years. Most are in neighboring Syria, Jordan and Turkey, where their status is uncertain, they are barred from working and their money is running out. So many are now trying to get into Europe. A tiny portion of these Iraqi refugees can resettle legally in Europe or the United States. Sweden has given shelter to about 40,000 Iraqis since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq — far more than any other Western country. And after a slow start, U.S. authorities said last month that they had taken in around 5,800 Iraqis so far this fiscal year. But others have little hope. Even those who have gained legal status in Syria, Jordan or Turkey are usually not allowed to work, meaning they must find jobs under the table or live off rapidly dwindling funds brought from Iraq. Some, like Suzan, lose hope in the complicated process of applying for refugee status and resettlement abroad. Suzan's application to the U.N. refugee agency was rejected because Turkey was her second country of arrival. Refugees are supposed to apply for status in the first country they arrive in, under most circumstances. Suzan and Aya now rent a cinderblock apartment with broken windows and cracked walls for $200 a month, and she washes dishes for about $8 a day in Istanbul. Turkey is a frequent launching point for illegal migrants to Europe, due to its borders with Greece, which has a huge coastal area and about 2,000 Aegean islands that allow for easier entry. More than 112,000 migrants were caught sneaking into Greece last year, including 12,945 Iraqis, the second largest group after Albanians. Nearly 2,000 Iraqis were caught by Greek authorities in the first three months of this year. Ahmad Raouf, a 32-year-old Iraqi, is one of those who successfully made it — reaching Sweden in March. Raouf paid a trafficker $16,000 to take him to Stockholm via Turkey and Greece less than two months ago. The smuggler gave him a fake passport, and soon after Raouf arrived in Sweden, he turned himself in, hoping for political asylum. "Not all the smugglers are bad," Raouf said in a telephone interview from Stockholm. "He was very nice to me ... and was with me the whole trip and did not take a penny until I arrived." But for others, the smuggling attempt can lead to disaster. A 35-year-old Iraqi widow, who asked to be identified only by her last name, Abdul-Fattah, said she fled Baghdad with her two children in 2005 after her husband was killed by Shiite militiamen. She applied to the U.N. refugee agency in Syria for resettlement more than a year ago but said she never heard back. So Abdul-Fattah sold all her belongings and borrowed money from friends to pay $15,000 to an Iraqi smuggler who promised to get her and her children to Belgium from Syria. Earlier this year, the smuggler gave her tickets and fake visas to the Central African Republic instead. After landing in the capital Bangui, Abdul-Fattah said she was detained by police and sexually harassed. "I have never been so humiliated or touched that way," Abdul-Fattah sobbed in a telephone interview. She and her children were deported to Libya, then to Damascus. She has considered putting her children up for adoption because she can no longer provide for them. "Vulnerable and devastated are just words. What I feel is far worse," she said. "My husband is gone as well as my home, and now my money." Back in Damascus, with no money and no job, she and her children sleep on the floor in the basement of a friend's building and live off charity from the Iraqi community. "I wasn't stupid when I gave away the money, I was just sinking in a sea of fear and desperation," she said. "He (the smuggler) duped me with his promises of living an easy life in Europe. I wish someone had chopped off my hands before I handed him the money." Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more
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Ireland's hopes of competing in the next World Cup received a lifeline yesterday when the president of the International Cricket Council (ICC) called for a rethink of the format for the 2015 tournament.
Ireland's hopes of competing in the next World Cup received a lifeline yesterday when the president of the International Cricket Council (ICC) called for a rethink of the format for the 2015 tournament.
With one carefully worded news story on the ICC website, the odds of Ireland making the trip to Australia and New Zealand went from non-existent to even money.
The ICC caused an outcry two weeks ago when they announced that only the 10 Test-playing nations would contest the next event, with Ireland -- ranked 10th in the world in one-day cricket -- and the other 94 Associates and Affiliates not even getting a chance to qualify.
After hearing from the Associate nations at the weekend, and receiving a document outlining their case, ICC president Sharad Pawar has asked his executive board to look at its 2015 format again when it meets in June.
"I have given this matter further serious thought and will request the board to consider this topic once more," Pawar said. "I can understand the views of the Associates and Affiliates and the ICC will seek to deal with this issue in the best way possible."
Warren Deutrom, CEO of Cricket Ireland, greeted the news with quiet optimism.
"It is encouraging that the president has reopened this issue but there is still a way to go," he said. "This is a positive step but we're cautious about it because it will be the same 10 people (on the ICC executive board) having the same debate about the same issues."
Irish Independent
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The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran says his country will receive the final batch of a shipment of 149 tons of natural uranium on Tuesday.
“Simultaneously with the execution of the JCPOA and over the last year we have imported around 210 tons of uranium into the country,” the Fars News Agency quoted Ali Akbar Salehi as saying on Sunday.
Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council -- the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China -- plus Germany started implementing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on January 16, 2016.
Salehi noted that the shipment would bring the amount of “yellow cake” imported after the landmark nuclear deal to 359 tons, which increases Iran’s stockpile by 60 percent.
Under the agreement, Iran accepted to put limitations on its program in exchange for the removal of nuclear-related sanctions imposed against Tehran.
In accordance to the JCPOA, Iran can sell its enriched uranium material -- called UF6 -- and buy natural uranium or yellow cake in return.
Iran’s purchasing of natural uranium is monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Read More:
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Welcome to the Wednesday Q&A series, where we focus on one particular topic – today's being the most underappreciated man on the US roster – and ask you to react, share, and discuss in the comments section. However, feel free to ask about anything game-related (MLS, USL, NASL, USMNT, CanMNT, etc.) over the next several hours.
Jermaine Jones and Clint Dempsey got the first two goals goals and most of the glory in the US's 4-0 romp past Costa Rica on Tuesday night. Michael Bradley got some deserved praise for his steady and controlled outing as a No. 6, and wingers Bobby Wood and Gyasi Zardes got mostly a hunk of flack for, um, one or two squandered chances.
In his Facebook Q&A today, Jurgen Klinsmann also spoke highly of the defense, saying that the big thing is that they've now played a few games together, so they've improved and they'll continue to improve. One might see that as reason to ask "Well, if that's your theory why haven't you tried that before in order to build chemistry earlier?", but I'm not here to pound that particular hobby horse today.
I'm here to sing the praises of the forgotten man of this US generation, midfielder Alejandro Bedoya. He doesn't catch the eye with his pace or fancy footwork; he doesn't have a booming shot; and he doesn't habitually slice open the defense with Valderrama-esque through-balls.
What is Bedoya's gift, then? Simple: He is smart. He recognizes things that are happening on the pitch before most players do, and is able to act accordingly while his opponents are taking a half-second to figure things out.
Look at how early he realizes this is a turnover:
Jermain Jones goal for USA vs Costa Rica | 2-0 pic.twitter.com/RtVuC7CyKh — SD Football Videos (@SDFootballVids) June 8, 2016
Before the ball was even lost he was moving into fifth gear, stretching the field and getting into a perfect spot for a lay-off from Clint "Kobe's goin' for 60!" Dempsey.
That lay-off never came, but that's OK. Part of the game is being in the right spot at the right time and forcing your opponent to react to you, and not vice versa. Bedoya does this pretty consistently with his off the ball movement, and for most of last night he had Costa Rica caught in his OODA Loop. He was turning recognition into decisions into action faster than they could keep up, which is why he was so often at the nexus of the best US moments.
One of my favorite Johan Cruyff quotes is this: "When you play a match, it is statistically proven that players actually have the ball 3 minutes on average … So, the most important thing is: what do you do during those 87 minutes when you do not have the ball. That is what determines wether you’re a good player or not."
That play above gives you a taste of what Bedoya does for his 87 minutes without the ball. It may not always be eye-catching, but it shouldn't go unnoticed.
Ok folks, thanks for the abuse!
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Kurdish peshmerga forces sit on top of a tank on the outskirts of Kirkuk April 18, 2015. REUTERS/Ako Rasheed
ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) - Kurdish authorities said their forces, backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, drove Islamic State militants from an 84 square kilometer (32 sq mile) area in northern Iraq over the weekend, widening a buffer around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
The Kurdistan region’s security council said in a statement at least 35 insurgents had been killed by its peshmerga forces in the offensive south of Kirkuk, which began on Saturday on two fronts.
The peshmerga have emerged as a key partner for the United States in its campaign against Islamic State. They have rolled it back in northern Iraq, significantly expanding the formal boundary of their autonomous region in the process.
The Kurds took full control of Kirkuk last summer as Islamic State overran the north of the country, and several divisions of the Iraqi army disintegrated. Kurdish leaders say they will never give up the ethnically mixed city, to which they, as well as Turkmen and Arabs, lay claim.
The U.S.-led coalition said in a statement on Sunday it had provided “reconnaissance (and) advise and assist elements” as well as airstrikes in support of the peshmerga, who had gained “dozens of square miles”.
Islamic State deployed one suicide car bomb, the Kurdish security council said, and teams were now working to clear the area of mines and booby traps — the single highest cause of casualties among the peshmerga.
Last month, the peshmerga pushed the militants out of more than 100 sq km south and west of Kirkuk.
“Peshmerga forces continue to have the initiative - advancing deep into ISIS territory and forcing the group to resort to cowardly acts designed to hurt innocent civilians,” the security council statement said, using another acronym for Islamic State.
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The English dub of One Piece: Heart of Gold might be arriving sooner than we expected.
NBC Dallas-Fort Worth (NBC DFW) recently interviewed some of the FUNimation staff. In the clip that NBC DFW posted on their website, Stephanie Young, the voice actress for Robin, can be seen recording a scene from the recent TV special, One Piece: Heart of Gold. Furthermore, Joel McDonald, who is presumably the ADR director for the special, directs Stephanie’s session.
The date for One Piece: Heart of Gold‘s North American home video release or any further information is yet to be unveiled.
Summary of One Piece: Heart of Gold:
While exploring the New World, Luffy and the Straw Hats meet a mysterious girl named Olga. Her innocent looks hide a twisted, manipulative personality. Both the Marines and a powerful treasure hunter named Mad Treasure are chasing Olga because she is from Alchemi, an island of steel which suddenly disappeared two centuries ago. Rumor has it that a metal created on the island, Pure Gold, is worth a fortune. Some say you could even buy the whole world with it. Olga managed to escape from Alchemi, but both Marine Headquarters and Mad Treasure, who is working for Guild Tesoro (the Straw Hats’ chief nemesis in One Piece Film: Gold), discovered that she survived. Manipulated by the cranky Olga, Luffy decides to hunt for Pure Gold himself. Will the Straw Hats find the legendary treasure? Or will Mad Treasure get there first?
One Piece: Heart of Gold is the movie tie-in TV special to commemorate One Piece Film: Gold‘s release. It premiered on Fuji TV on July 16, a week prior to the movie’s Japanese theatrical release. Tsutomu Kuroiwa, the screenwriter for One Piece Film: Gold, wrote the screenplay for it, and One Piece Film: Z director, Tatsuya Nagamine, directed the special.
Thanks to midod for the news tip.
SOURCE: NBCDFW
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Fine Line Between Assimilation and Integration Lets first define these two concepts, as it appears few truly understand the difference between the two.
Definition of assimilation :
"the state of being assimilated; people of different backgrounds come to see themselves as part of a larger national family."[1]
Definition of integration:"the action of incorporating a racial or religious group into a community."[2] These are two very different concepts that both the Turkish and the German public does not really seem to understand. The Turks in no way should assimilate into the German culture. They should not try to become part of the larger German “national family.” Sevda Yuzbasioglu’s recent article about Kreuzberg-the most Turkish-populated neighborhood of Berlin-serves as a perfect example of how the public lacks an understanding of the key difference between integration and assimilation.[3] She notes that Turks don’t even need to learn German, as the Turkish language and culture is already widespread in Berlin. [3] Yuzbasioglu's article exemplifies how learning the language of the country one resides in is misinterpreted as an act of assimilation, which is indeed, losing one's own culture and background. Instead, integrating is contributing to one's knowledge of the society and culture he lives in. Hence, integration should be examined in a positive light; assimlation shouldn't. The Turks who oppose integrating, echo Yuzbasiolgu's sentiments by saying that their own language is enough for them in their "Little Istanbul" in Berlin.[3] Doing so, they foster a hostile relationship with the Germans who in fact are just as (if not more) to blame. When the Germans blame the Turks for being unable to integrate, they must reason that the process of integration involves the “act of incorporating,” in other words inclusion. Hence, it is more of the German government’s responsibility to convey that sense of welcome and inclusion, which it apparently has failed to do-if the Turks can still easily say that German has indeed become an unnecessary language to learn in a Turkish neighborhood on German soil.
A huge part of the problem is that the Germans are "unwilling to integrate” the Turks into their society. Whether they accept this or not, increased xenophobia exists in Germany. [4] The “racist immigration law,”[4] renewed in 2007, set new standards by which all citizens-required visa for access to Germany-of foreign countries, would have to learn German (even if they are “spouses” of German citizens.)[5] “This is the violation of the family reunion rights, which is present in many international judicial documents including the Charter of Fundamental Rights which Germany insisted should acquire a normative quality.” [5]
The real paradox is that in April of this year the German government placed new restrictions on language learning. [4] Why, if this is a requirement for incoming Turks? Why, if they want the Turks already in Germany to learn German? Aren’t they the ones who want the Turks to integrate?
Apparently NOT!
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Today, we’re kicking off previews of the upcoming Marvel HeroClix Deadpool & X-Force set, releasing in friendly local game stores this March. Introducing the man whose body is made of millions of bees, Swarm!
An evil Scientist and member of the Sinister Syndicate, Swarm is a 120-point piece, with six clicks of life and a range of 5 squares with two targets. Swarm brings one trait, called Only the Queen Matters, which really props up his longevity. The trait states that unless the attack roll is doubles, Swarm takes no more than 1 damage from attacks. He also possesses one special power, which appears on the first three clicks of his attack called Orphan Swarms. This special power states that each time Swarm hits an opposing character, after actions resolve you place a Bee Swarm bystander adjacent to that character unless there already is one. The Bee Swarm bystander token carries the standard powers Poison and Super Senses, as well as a special power that states that the Bee Swarm’s actions do not count against your action total.
As far as standard powers go, Swarm possesses the standard powers Running Shot, Hypersonic Speed, Precision Strike, Super Senses, Shape Change, and Outwit. This allows for Swarm to have a full dial of move and attack, and that great combination of Super Senses and Shape Change.
That’s all for today, HeroClix fans! We hope you’ve enjoyed this look at Swarm, and that you’ll visit us soon for more exciting preview for the upcoming Marvel HeroClix: Deadpool & X-Force set!
Don’t for get to visit the WizKids Info Network to find Marvel HeroClix: Deadpool & X-Force Pre-Release Events near you. Until next time, don’t be afraid to push!
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Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Sep. 5, 2013, 11:57 PM GMT By Marc Lallanilla
In the event of a military strike against Syria, there's a chance that a missile could hit a Miniature Neutron Source Reactor (MNSR) outside the capital city of Damascus, Russia has warned.
"If a warhead, by design or by chance, were to hit the Miniature Neutron Source Reactor near Damascus, the consequences could be catastrophic," according to a statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry, as quoted by Reuters.
The MNSR in Syria is a Chinese-designed nuclear reactor that's modeled on a small Canadian reactor built in the early 1970s. These fission reactors were designed as research tools for neutron activation analysis (which identifies the elemental composition of materials), medical isotope production, neutron radiography (a nuclear imaging technique) and scientific training — they're not powerful enough to provide regional electrical power or other utility needs. [The Top 10 Largest Nuclear Tests]
MNSRs and most other research reactors have a nuclear core consisting of about 2 pounds (900 grams) of highly enriched uranium; generally, the core consists of uranium-235 that's been 90 percent enriched, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The core is cooled in a pool of water and is surrounded by a casing of about 4-inch-thick (10 centimeters) beryllium.
Since the first Chinese MNSR was started up in 1984, the reactor design has proven to be safe, reliable and simple to operate. In addition to two MNSRs in China, the Chinese government has facilitated the sale and construction of five additional MNSRs in Syria, Pakistan, Ghana, Iran and Nigeria.
There have been ongoing concerns, however, about the use of highly enriched uranium-235 in these reactors. Though only a small amount of U235 is needed by MNSRs, at 90 percent enrichment, it's potent enough to be referred to as "weapons-grade" uranium.
Since the 1970s, the United States and other countries have investigated the feasibility of converting research reactors to safer low-enriched uranium. The process of converting these small reactors to low-enriched uranium has been implemented successfully, according to the IAEA website: "It is generally accepted that conversion of the MNSRs (to low-enriched uranium) is feasible and it is likely that China or other fuel fabricators will be able to produce LEU cores for the MNSR reactors in the near future."
But not all research reactors have converted to low-enriched uranium, and the Syrian MNSR still uses highly enriched uranium-235. This has prompted some concern among nuclear experts: There could be "a serious local radiation hazard" if the nuclear material in the reactor were dispersed by a missile strike or some other attack, Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment told Reuters.
Former IAEA chief inspector Olli Heinonen told Reuters that the reactor has far less nuclear material than would be needed to build a nuclear bomb. "Thus, for nuclear explosive purposes, it is of a limited value," he said. Any radioactive contamination, he added, "would be a local problem."
Nonetheless, the Russian Foreign Ministry is urging the IAEA to provide its members with "an analysis of the risks linked to possible American strikes on the MNSR and other facilities in Syria."
Follow Marc Lallanilla on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
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NASA Ready for November Launch of Car-Size Mars Rover
Updated Nov. 19, 2011:
The launch of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory has been delayed one day to allow time for the team to remove and replace a flight termination system battery. The launch is rescheduled for Saturday, Nov. 26 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The one hour and 43 minute launch window opens at 7:02 a.m. PST (10:02 a.m. EST).
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's most advanced mobile robotic laboratory, which will examine one of the most intriguing areas on Mars, is in final preparations for a launch from Florida's Space Coast at 10:25 a.m. EST (7:25 a.m. PST) on Nov. 25.
The Mars Science Laboratory mission will carry Curiosity, a rover with more scientific capability than any ever sent to another planet. The rover is now sitting atop an Atlas V rocket awaiting liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
"Preparations are on track for launching at our first opportunity," said Pete Theisinger, Mars Science Laboratory project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "If weather or other factors prevent launching then, we have more opportunities through Dec. 18."
Scheduled to land on the Red Planet in August 2012, the one-ton rover will examine Gale Crater during a nearly two-year prime mission. Curiosity will land near the base of a layered mountain 3 miles (5 kilometers) high inside the crater. The rover will investigate whether environmental conditions ever have been favorable for development of microbial life and preserved evidence of those conditions.
"Gale gives us a superb opportunity to test multiple potentially habitable environments and the context to understand a very long record of early environmental evolution of the planet," said John Grotzinger, project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "The portion of the crater where Curiosity will land has an alluvial fan likely formed by water-carried sediments. Layers at the base of the mountain contain clays and sulfates, both known to form in water."
Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as earlier Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The rover will carry a set of 10 science instruments weighing 15 times as much as its predecessors' science payloads.
A mast extending to 7 feet (2.1 meters) above ground provides height for cameras and a laser-firing instrument to study targets from a distance. Instruments on a 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) arm will study targets up close. Analytical instruments inside the rover will determine the composition of rock and soil samples acquired with the arm's powdering drill and scoop. Other instruments will characterize the environment, including the weather and natural radiation that will affect future human missions.
"Mars Science Laboratory builds upon the improved understanding about Mars gained from current and recent missions," said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This mission advances technologies and science that will move us toward missions to return samples from, and eventually send humans to, Mars."
The mission is challenging and risky. Because Curiosity is too heavy to use an air-bag cushioned touchdown, the mission will use a new landing method, with a rocket-powered descent stage lowering the rover on a tether like a kind of sky-crane.
The mission will pioneer precision landing methods during the spacecraft's crucial dive through Mars' atmosphere next August to place the rover onto a smaller landing target than any previously for a Mars mission. The target inside Gale Crater is 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) by 15.5 miles (25 kilometers). Rough terrain just outside that area would have disqualified the landing site without the improved precision.
No mission to Mars since the Viking landers in the 1970s has sought a direct answer to the question of whether life has existed on Mars. Curiosity is not designed to answer that question by itself, but its investigations for evidence about prerequisites for life will steer potential future missions toward answers.
The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Curiosity was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. Launch management for the mission is the responsibility of NASA's Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA's Space Network, managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will provide space communications services for the rocket. NASA's international Deep Space Network will provide MSL spacecraft acquisition and communication throughout the mission.
For more information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl . You can also follow the mission on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .
Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
[email protected]
Dwayne C. Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
[email protected]
2011-347
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ST. PETERSBURG, Russia – Werder Bremen are only five games into the new Bundesliga season, and it has been an eye-opening start to the campaign for striker Aron Johannsson, to say the least.
After being expected to miss the season opener recovering from a hip injury that kept him out of action for nearly a year, the USMNT forward passed a fitness test in time to start the first three matches, and he contributed to both of Bremen's goals in that span. But since returning, Johannsson has endured a losing streak to begin the term, a lightning-fast managerial change, and his first red card since he was a 17-year-old pro rookie with Icelandic club Fjolnir Reykjavik back in 2009.
Johannsson was given the boot for referee abuse 10 minutes from the end of Werder Bremen's September 21 away loss to Fabian Johnson's Borussia Monchengladbach. The 25-year-old reacted to what he perceived as a missed handball offense with some salty language, but insists that referee Tobias Stieler mistook his invective aimed at the non-call as a personal attack.
A stunned Johannsson quickly tried to explain the misinterpretation, but the ref turned a deaf ear and showed him the gate.
"There's nothing you can do about it when he writes it in his book," Johannsson told MLSsoccer.com after Bremen's training session on Wednesday. "When he reached for his pocket, I was expecting to see the yellow card."
The sending off came with a ban that has seen him miss the club's last two games. This still remains a source of disbelief, as the American feels he was punished for something he didn't actually say.
"I was very surprised," he stated. "At first, they were going to give me a three-game suspension. I mean, you have guys out there breaking bones with tackles and they get three games."
As the league passed judgment on Johannsson, Werder Bremen were doing the same on manager Viktor Skripnik. The boss was axed after that 'Gladbach match, which only added to the early-season shock treatment.
"I feel kind of sad that it happened, I liked the training staff a lot," said Jóhannsson. "It's not only their fault that we lose, it's also [the players'] fault. But that's football, life goes on."
In this case, it's gone on under caretaker manager Alexander Nouri, who Johannsson is hoping will have his interim tag removed.
"I like his techniques," offered Johannsson. "For me, so far, it's been nothing but positive. Hopefully, we will do well enough that he stays."
After dropping Nouri's first game in charge, Bremen finally broke their duck with a 2-1 defeat of star-studded Wolfsburg this past weekend. To say this cooled tensions around the city would be an understatement.
"It takes a lot of pressure off," Johannsson admitted. "Now, hopefully we can play up to our standards, without panic. We have a very good squad and losing the first four games was unacceptable."
As harrowing as the start to this season has been, though, it sure beats the hell out of Johannsson's 2015-16 campaign. That began well enough, with the forward hitting twice in his first five starts after arriving from AZ Alkmaar during the summer transfer window.
But he went on the shelf with what the club initially thought was an abductor issue that would keep him out a mere matter of weeks. Eventually, doctors realized that Johannsson was suffering from nerve irritation in his right hip and he went under the knife in October.
Johannsson was supposed to return after the winter break, but he still had too much discomfort when brought back to the training pitch in January. This false start repeated a couple more times before Bremen ruled him out for the remainder of the season in March.
He still was unsure how long it would take to get back to action while his USMNT teammates were enjoying a Copa America Centenario adventure in June, and when Bremen began preseason camp in July. All in all, it was a tiresome experience from a mental standpoint.
"For me, that was the most difficult part, not knowing how long it would take," Johannsson said. "If you do your knee, they can say, 'Oh it will be six months,' and everyone knows the exact steps to take in recovery.
"With me, it was difficult to see exactly what the problem was. It would get better, I'd start training and then it would come back again, like three or four times."
Eventually, he had to try a new rehab approach. The Alabama-born, Iceland-raised Johannsson took off for Iceland during the summer, combining rest among family with a physiotherapy visits. The dual-national was thrilled at his other homeland's stirring Euro 2016 run, and by the time that was over, he was ready to return to Bremen.
"Together, with the rest and their treatment, it got better," said Johannsson, almost reliving the relief of that breakthrough.
Now, he must come back from the suspension to regain his Bremen starting place and play his way back into the US national team set-up. Jurgen Klinsmann's strike pool has expanded and improved greatly while Johannsson has been away, but you will not hear him complaining over the heightened level of competition.
"It's definitely a good thing," he said. "We want the best players. When there's more good players for the team, everyone gets better. I want to play with and against the best guys."
Klinsmann has certainly not forgotten Johannsson, who last appeared in red, white and blue a few weeks before injuring his hip.
"I spoke to him throughout the injury, he helped a lot," Johannsson said of Klinsmann. "He sent me to Munich to a clinic for treatment. Now it's just up to me to play good football. If I'm good enough, they will bring me back into the team."
The USMNT is not the only American endeavor on Johannsson's mind. He regularly keeps up with MLS happenings and has publicly stated a desire to play in America while still in his prime.
"They show the [MLS] games on Eurosport, so I'm watching a lot," he said. "I saw the game when Jordan [Morris] scored two against the Galaxy. Especially with teams like Seattle and Portland, it's definitely growing every year. It's nice to see the fans go out to the game and support soccer.
"In coming years, I think it's going to get better and better and bigger and bigger. It's exciting. Like I said, I want to play in MLS, but it has to be right for me and right for MLS. Right now, I'm enjoying my life in Europe and we'll see about the future."
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Hardik Patel-led Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS), a prominent organisation demanding OBC quota for the Patel community, cancelled on Sunday a mass gathering of the community at Kansa in Mehsana district as no one turned up.
Its leaders alleged that the large police deployment at the venue of the event, termed by PAAS as ‘Maha-panchayat’, was the reason, though the police denied it.
“It is a baseless allegation that police prevented anyone from attending the programme....Our deployment was a routine affair. It was not meant to threaten anyone,” said Mehsana district superintendent of police Chaitanya Mandlik.
On Friday, PAAS had announced that the next round of its agitation would start from Kansa, near Visnagar town.
Local PAAS leader Ravi Patel alleged that Gujarat government “put pressure” on the organisers to cancel it.
“Patel leaders from across the Visnangar tehsil were supposed to remain present. However we were forced to cancel the event today, as a large number of police were deployed. It was a pressure tactic by the government,” he said.
Meanwhile, a letter by the jailed quota leader Hardik Patel which was circulated on Sunday said the community should not “bow down” before the BJP. Hardik is in jail in a sedition case.
The letter, addressed to his father Bharatbhai Patel, said the people of Gujarat were “suffering” under the BJP rule which was “worse than the British rule”.
First Published: May 09, 2016 01:09 IST
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While speaking with The Directors Guild of America, David Nutter, the director of the pilots for Arrow, Smallville and the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones, revealed that he would be directing the pilot episode for The CW's Flash pilot. Nutter also talked about his history with comic books."My father died when I was a year-and-a-half old and my mother raised me as a single parent. I lived in West Virginia and the one thing I used to do as a child was buy comic books. I would cut out the characters, and their angles, and how they looked and so forth, and create my own characters for these stories. I’d have Captain America, or Iron Man, or The Flash, or Superman, and I’d create my own stories."So, what are your thoughts about this? Leave your thoughts down below.
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“No cough, no measles” was one of the many mantras and memory aids I learned in medical school. Most were designed to reduce tomes like Gray’s Anatomy and Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine to a few rules. Much of the time, it was easy to miss the point, especially when the subject seemed to be an obscure disease. Ad Policy
Five years into a six-year medical degree at a typical Western university, none of us had ever seen measles. Nor were we bothered. Apart from HIV, microbes like measles seemed prehistoric. Public health was out, plastic surgery was in. Still, I remembered this particular rule, offered by a much-revered professor. But I wondered why he was so focused on a cough instead of “Koplik spots,” the little white dots in the mouth that are specific to measles.
Then I spent ten weeks in a pediatric infectious-disease ward in Cape Town. I thought I would see “African diseases” like hemorrhagic fever and HIV, which I did. But I also saw measles, rubella (German measles), scarlet fever, syphilis, rheumatic fever, typhoid, tuberculosis and many other causes of rash and fever.
Suddenly I could see the point of my professor’s rule. The very first signs of measles are a fever and cough, followed by a runny nose and red eyes. The appearance of a rash three or four days later is usually what prompts parents to bring their child to the emergency room. The problem is that at any given time, half the pre-school children in the ER have a fever, rash or both. The differential diagnosis is hard enough in immunized children, ranging from mild roseola to devastating meningococcal sepsis; the long list includes enterovirus 68, Lyme disease and drug rashes. In an unimmunized child, the ailment might also be rubella—harmless for the child, but catastrophic for unimmunized pregnant patients—or chickenpox.
Or it might be measles, in which case you need to know. Fast. Because measles is the most contagious disease on earth. Among unimmunized people exposed to the measles virus, some 90 percent will contract the disease. Anyone with measles is contagious for several days before the rash even appears; the cough effectively spreads tiny droplets of the virus, which can remain in the air for several hours, long after an infected person has left the room. In an unvaccinated community, each person who gets measles spreads it on average to twelve others. Complications like pneumonia and meningitis can be permanent, deadly, or both, especially for immune-compromised patients such as those with cancer. And in the ER, one of these kids might be in the next bed.
Older Americans remember measles as a common childhood disease that just had to be suffered through, but in fact it is still frequently deadly in low- and middle-income countries. And because the virus weakens the body’s natural immune system, children who survive measles get more infections and have a higher risk of dying from them for several months afterwards.
So a doctor needs to be able to diagnose measles at “hello,” not wait for the results of two blood tests taken two weeks apart to see whether antibodies are rising while the child spreads measles, as happened at Disneyland. I rapidly learned to recognize measles at ten paces, and realized that the idea of using Koplik spots as a diagnostic aid was better suited to passing exams than clinical practice. Toddlers with measles tend to be extremely irritable (another clue) and not madly cooperative about opening their mouths on request for viewing. Nor would you want to get that close, if you’re uncertain whether your parents had you immunized.
So the crucial question becomes: Cough, or no cough? If there’s no cough, it’s not measles. Period. Which is good, as excluding measles early averts both parental and departmental panic. But if an unimmunized child or adult is coughing, take it very seriously. Ensure that the child is kept away from places where he or she could spread the disease to others. Educate parents on how to treat the symptoms. And get the child out of the ER as quickly as possible before he or she infects other patients and staff.
These steps are all the more vital now that measles, long forgotten, is ”back” in the United States and far too few doctors know how to recognize it. And not only is measles proliferating; so are the nasty allegations about the danger of the vaccine by anti-vaxxer ideologues and unscrupulous politicians, even though the vaccine is not only safe, but mass measles vaccination is also the single best public-health intervention we have.
As doctors, there are a few things that we know are fundamental to our well-being. Most of these are public-health measures that enable us to live much longer and better lives, even to grow taller, than 200 years ago. These measures of mass salvation include water purification, toilets and sanitation, garbage collection and disposal, and vaccination to protect children from infectious diseases like smallpox, polio and measles.
Smallpox was a seriously nasty disease, with a fatality rate of 30 percent. For those who survived, the pocks were permanent, and not pretty. Eradication of this vicious virus was the result of achieving global herd immunity, a feat of international cooperation and cost-effective investment in a global good. Herd immunity comes from mass vaccination and eliminates the virus. It protects the entire community—particularly children and adults who can’t safely be immunized and babies who are too young (a child must be 6 to 9 months old before the immune system is sufficiently developed for the vaccine to work). When the global campaign began in 1967, there were 10 to 15 million cases of smallpox each year. Places that had attained herd immunity, such as Europe and North America, had to maintain it to prevent imported cases from India and Africa from triggering an epidemic while rigorous surveillance to diagnose every last case and mass vaccination campaigns around the world created global herd immunity. Ten years later, the virus died out. Smallpox eradication is the public health success story of the twentieth century, and because of it, we are now determined to try to eradicate other infectious diseases, such as polio and measles.
Polio, perhaps the most frightening disease of the twentieth century on account of its invisible spread and devastating effect, crippled tens of thousands of children each year before the discovery of a vaccine sixty years ago. Americans can be rightly proud of the March of Dimes, an enormous effort driven by American mothers, which raised tens of millions of dollars to find a vaccine. The global campaign to eradicate polio required massive international cooperation, overcoming Cold War divisions, to bring the number of global polio cases today down to a few hundred a year—tantalizingly close to eradication.
Measles, like polio and smallpox, is a horrible disease. Second only to smallpox in the total number of deaths it has caused over the past two millennia, it’s still a major killer of children under 5 years of age in the developing world. The development of a vaccine was widely welcomed. It is usually delivered jointly with vaccines for mumps and rubella, known in combination as MMR. One shot provides at least 95 percent protection and offers enduring immunity.
But because of vaccination lapses, measles is now on the rise. There were twenty separate outbreaks in the United States in 2014, involving 644 individual cases—a record number since measles was eliminated from the US in 2000. So far in 2015, there have been 141 cases in seventeen states, 80 percent of which are linked to Disneyland. Blaming it on Mexico and porous borders, as some opportunistic politicians have done, has no basis in reality; there were only two cases in Mexico in January, both imported from the United States. Globally, the number of cases rose from 122,000 in 2012 to 146,000 in 2013, reversing a twelve-year downward trend. In November 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) gave up on meeting its target for measles control.
It gets worse. Measles is so contagious that it is used as the indicator disease to show deficits in immunization coverage of all vaccine-preventable diseases—which means the problem goes well beyond measles. We should hardly be surprised, then, that last year saw WHO announce a Public Health Emergency of International Concern for polio.
Why is this happening?
In Syria, the government’s efforts to withhold routine childhood vaccinations in areas considered politically unsympathetic to the dictatorship was one of the reasons for the popular uprising. Small wonder that polio returned to Syria and that there have been more than 10,000 cases of measles in 2014. Parents are desperate for vaccines, and last year medical workers braved Assad’s barrel bombs to vaccinate 1.4 million unimmunized children in northern Syria for polio, achieving 92 percent coverage, equivalent to the rate in the United States. Similarly in West Africa, people are begging for Ebola vaccines. Yet in the United States the anti-vaccination movement has seen increasing numbers of parents refuse measles and other vaccines “on behalf” of their unprotected children.
That misguided movement began with the unconscionable malpractice of Andrew Wakefield. A doctor who has since lost his license, he and his coauthors of a 1998 article in The Lancet made up a syndrome consisting of diarrhea and developmental disorder (“regressive autism”) that he tried to link to the MMR vaccine for the sole purpose of financial gain. He was not at the time a practicing doctor, and had no expertise with autism, but he manipulated parental fears and an editor’s penchant for controversial papers to secure publication in The Lancet, a respected medical journal. Extraordinarily, despite his financial conflict of interest, despite having fabricated the syndrome and falsified the data to “fit” his criteria, his paper passed peer review.
That paper was then used to support litigation against three companies that produced the MMR vaccine, and to lobby for use of Wakefield’s own measles-only vaccine. Wakefield went on to make more than more $600,000 in the process of the lawsuit alone.
In his 1998 paper, Wakefield alleged that eight children developed autism six days after receiving the MMR vaccine. I remember the paper well, because I was a pediatric fellow in London at the time. I and every other pediatrician were immediately besieged by parents demanding measles-only vaccines. We were staggered by Wakefield’s ridiculously small, uncontrolled and clearly biased study about a syndrome that none of us had heard of, even though the MMR vaccine had been widely used since 1968. But it was also hard to imagine that The Lancet would publish something with such obvious global ramifications unless there was irrefutable scientific evidence uncontaminated by financial interest.
It took six years for The Lancet to admit Wakefield’s financial conflict of interest but it did not retract the paper until 2010. Meanwhile, the rise of measles in the United Kingdom and United States reflects the damage done, and the consequences extend well beyond the West. In Nigeria in 2014, Ebola was successfully stopped and polio seems to have been eliminated, yet this country houses the greatest number of kids not vaccinated for measles after India. Parents keen on protecting their children from polio are known to refuse the measles vaccine, not because of myths about “a Western conspiracy of sterilization” or fears that vaccinators are “spies for the CIA” (after the CIA’s clumsy attempt to use a fake hepatitis B campaign to access Osama Bin Laden’s compound); rather, they are familiar with the anti-vaccine movement incited by Wakefield, asking, “If parents in California aren’t getting their kids vaccinated, why should we?”
Vaccination rates of 94 percent are needed to prevent measles transmission in high-risk areas such as child-care centers and schools. Yet in Orange County and West Hollywood, many schools have documented childhood immunization rates of less than 92 percent, with some schools having rates as low as 38 percent—levels seen in developing countries. The Lancet could help by publishing not just a retraction but also an unequivocal editorial discarding the myth once and for all.
Using vaccination as a political tool is contrary to the public good. Yet some politicians seem unable to assert collective responsibility over individualism: Chris Christie dithers about balancing parental choice and public health, while Rand Paul offers uniformed opinions and contradictory behavior. The White House spokesman said that “people should evaluate this for themselves,” though he urged a bias toward “good science.” Seriously? Should we also start debating the value of safe drinking water and sanitation? Throwing mud means lost ground, which measles relentlessly gains.
In medical school, I couldn’t see myself in a career in public health. (I instead became a critical-care pediatrician.) Public health seemed a “done deal” that everyone could see the value of. I returned to it ten years later, a convert to public and global health. Kids are the most vulnerable, with their poorly developed immune systems. They are also vulnerable to the politicization of the public good, the only ones without a direct say in the debates about their welfare.
And vaccines alone don’t save lives: vaccinations do. There’s little point in having vaccines if parents are allowed to refuse vaccination not only “on behalf” of their own children, but also, effectively, on behalf of other parents’ babies who are too young for vaccination, to say nothing of kids born with immune disorders, for whom the vaccine is ineffective. Parents are understandably confused, but the increasing polarization isn’t helping. Amid the controversy, it’s easy to miss the point: a very serious disease is getting on with its job of invading, infecting and re-colonizing the country, and we are losing control of it. The public good of herd immunity can afford an occasional free-rider, but when large numbers of people place their own ideologies and idiosyncrasies above public health, it’s children who suffer the consequences.
It is particularly because of those children that we need to take infectious disease more seriously. Pandemics didn’t happen until the earth’s population reached a critical mass. We think of rats on ships spreading bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, but it was the far deadlier human-to-human pneumonic version that travelled far and wide. (Both have now reappeared in Madagascar’s prisons.)
Nor it is enough to focus on national health. In an increasingly crowded and connected world, we need to think of public health not simply locally but globally. Air travel now means it is impossible to stop viruses from spreading around the globe. Germs are frequent flyers. Building the homeland walls higher won’t help—the only reliable antidote is building global public health. We have to pay attention to the neglect of infrastructure in West Africa, where Ebola erupted, and the Syrian military’s deliberate destruction of public-health systems in opposition-held areas, where polio emerged. SARS became a global threat when China suppressed word of its emergence. MERS now threatens from the Persian Gulf. All of these diseases can easily spread to the West with profound implications. Just look at the effect of a few cases of Ebola in the United States.
Returning to measles, if the threat of that deadly disease isn’t enough for you to reject anti-vax folklore, here’s a little known fact about the benefit of vaccination. The measles vaccine doesn’t only protect against measles. Because it contains a small amount of a live virus, the immune system must rev up to fight it, which in turn reduces mortality from other infectious disease—including pneumonia, sepsis and others—by 50 percent. This protective effect lasts until a vaccine is administered with a killed rather than a live virus, such as the one for diphtheria and tetanus. So do you want to protect your kids? Give them the measles vaccine.
And all of us should get educated. Education is a social vaccine against sustained ignorance that blocks effective and responsible responses to public-health threats. But education alone is insufficient to overcome self-interest. We all need to act for the public good. Because when public health is at stake, it’s the children who take the fall. Individuals and institutions that are allowed to prioritize personal preference or financial and political gain ahead of children’s health are irresponsible and unethical, and they should not call the shots. In the short term, children’s health and lives are at risk; in the long term, we jeopardize the local and global control of these previously conquered diseases. Prevention is not only better than cure—which isn’t an option for most of these diseases—it’s also more cost-effective. Current and past pandemics reveal that when public health is neglected, history repeats itself in an entirely predictable way.
Our common desire to protect the health and well-being of children was always the best reason to eliminate these diseases, and it remains our best hope of bringing us all back to common ground. Public health is about common sense and common goods. Let’s not allow spin doctors and myths to prevail over our shared aim of protecting the world’s children from the world’s oldest and deadliest diseases.
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The White House released preliminary guidelines for the Mexican border wall promised by President Trump on the campaign trail.
The wall must be 30 feet high while looking imposing from the Mexican side and tasteful from the American side, Pete Hegseth reported.
The Department of Homeland Security began soliciting bids for the wall, adding that they will accept plans for both concrete and non-concrete walls.
Man Sues Bar for Refusing Service Over Trump Hat
WATCH: GOP Rep Booed at Town Hall for Voicing Support for Military
'The Last Time I Saw a 'Fail' That Bad...': Gutfeld Rips Maddow's Trump Tax Reveal
The Washington Times reported that President Trump's budget plan allows for a partition to span as far as 2,000 miles along the border.
Blueprints must prove the bidder's proposed wall would take at least an hour to break through.
The Times also reported that some of the 700 companies registered as possible contractors for the wall could face some backlash in the future.
Cities like Berkeley, Calif. have said they will essentially ignore future bids from companies involved in building Trump's wall.
Tim Allen Calls Out Hollywood Liberals: 'This is Like 30s Germany'
Pirro: The Intolerant Left is 'Changing the Rules' on Law and Ethics
Trump: Obama's Been Nice Personally, But There's 'Animosity' From His People
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DENVER -- Disappointing seasons unearth head-shaking statistics. The Broncos' offense needs a boost. Denver's 56 three-and-out drives a year ago ranked fourth worst. It can be traced to fractures in the passing game. The Broncos completed 65 passes of six yards or less, 31st in the NFL.
The dump off pass. The safety valve. It's about as sexy as Docker's slacks, but it becomes vital in the development of young quarterbacks. When Trevor Siemian and Paxton Lynch look across the line of scrimmage and, in some cases, don't recognize a formation or blitz, they need help. This is where a tight end sitting in the middle of the field or a slot receiver stopping underneath can bail them out.
The Broncos lacked it last year. Denver's tight ends totaled 47 catches, and one touchdown. Virgil Green (60 percent), A.J. Derby (46 percent) and Jeff Heuerman (29 percent) (pictured above) divided the playing time. The Broncos acquired Derby from the Patriots, and see him as a pass-catching threat. Same goes for Heuerman, though he has yet to gain traction because of multiple injuries.
I made the case for taking Stanford's Christian McCaffey 20th overall if he can be used in the slot, at running back and on special teams. Is that a reach? Perhaps. There are tight ends in the first round that could fit. Let's examine some of the choices:
O.J. Howard, Alabama, 6-6, 249 pounds
Howard played his best in the biggest games. He starred in the National Championship in back-to-back seasons, including a 208-yard performance two years ago. The Alabama offense featured plenty of mouths to feed, and Howard suffered. He has the hands and length to be a weapon in an NFL passing game. His blocking requires work, but could be less of an issue in a Mike McCoy offense that incorporated Arkansas rookie Hunter Henry last season. The fact Howard didn't dominant consistently creates some concerns when transitioning to the pros.
David Njoku, Miami, 6-4, 245 pounds
Njoku requires vision. He did not post big numbers at Miami, though he became a reliable scoring threat with eight touchdowns last season. He has eye-opening athleticism, and the type of speed to run seam routes. The Broncos have been searching for this type of player as evidenced by their trades for Vernon Davis and Derby in back-to-back years. Njoku needs polishing on route running, but his potential is enticing. Njoku and Howard rank, by most projections, as the only tight ends worthy of a first-round pick.
Evan Engram, Mississippi, 6-3, 236 pounds
Mississippi recognized Engram as a walking mismatch. The Rebels leaned on him in the passing game. He earned All-American honors, catching 65 passes for 926 yards. While not as big as Howard and Njoku, he's more NFL-ready as a receiver. His speed forces defenses to make difficult choices. Could he be a fit in second round?
Gerald Everett, South Alabama, 6-3, 227 pounds
Because of Antonio Gates, Tony Gonzalez and Julius Thomas, intrigue remains at tight end. Gerald Everett comes out of that mold as a terrific athlete who played only one year of high school football. Everett is built more like a big receiver than a tight end. It gives him advantages in routes, but he needs polishing. As a second-round pick with upside, he makes some sense. But is he worth taking over giving Heuerman one last chance? The Broncos need to answer these type of questions entering the draft. If Denver wants a player with huge upside, Michigan's Jake Butt could be a steal if still available in the third round with a compensatory pick. Butt tore his ACL in the bowl game, so he would likely have to sit out this season.
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Dancers of Project Bandaloop rehearsed on the face of the Old Post Office Pavilion on Pennsylvania Avenue on Wednesday evening. (Published Thursday, May 10, 2012)
A crowd of onlookers had their heads tilted back, watching the dancers of Project Bandaloop rehearse on the face of the Old Post Office Pavilion on Pennsylvania Avenue on Wednesday evening.
The practice run will give spectators a sneak peek at Bound(less), part of the Kennedy Center's Look Both Ways Festival this week. The festival offers performances in unexpected spots around the city.
Founder and Artistic Director Amelia Rudolph is supervising the performance and says the building's facade is a challenge -- so the performance has been adapted for the building.
Project Bandaloop has performed on various towers, skyscrapers, and even bridges, but each building requires a unique approach.
The performance will feature a single dress worn by three women and a tethered group dance. The main (free!) performance is Friday at 9 p.m.
Check Out the Scene: Keep up with what's happening in the D.C. area anytime, anywhere. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Sign up for our e-mail newsletters.
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BRIAN O'Driscoll and Amy Huberman have welcomed a baby boy into their family.
BRIAN O'Driscoll and Amy Huberman have welcomed a baby boy into their family.
BOD II: Brian and Amy have a new baby - Billy O'Driscoll
It is understood that the little boy - named Billy O'Driscoll, adding another BOD to the O’Driscoll family legacy - was born earlier today in Dublin.
Amy Huberman, after it was revealed she is expecting her second child
Billy is now the younger brother to Sadie, the couple’s first child who was born in February 2013.
Bookmakers immediately started offering odds on the baby boy following in the sporting footsteps of his legendary father.
The odds of Billy playing rugby for Ireland are 100- to 1, according to Paddy Power bookmakers.
The bookmakers have put young Mr O'Driscoll at a hefty 500-to-1 to captain the Lions at some stage.
The former rugby star and his actress wife recently celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary together, and had been revamping their Dublin home in preparation for their new arrival.
While in the late stages of pregnancy, Amy described their baby news as perfect timing.
“It's lovely timing with Brian finishing, it's exciting and I'm really excited for Sadie as well," she said.
"She doesn't understand at all though, not a bit. It'll be a new thing for her play for - I'm sure she'll understand by November.
Amy Huberman at the launch of hubby Brian's biography
"Brian is feeling very excited - so it's all change. Two kids, it sounds so responsible," she added.
Brian recently revealed in his autobiography The Test how becoming a father changed his outlook on life.
Brian O Driscoll and Amy Huberman on their wedding day
His own parents, he said, instilled in their children the importance of good manners, something he is anxious to pass on to his one-year-old daughter Sadie.
"Now, as a father myself, I find myself almost wrestling the food back from my little one if I don't hear the magic word," he added.
The former Leinster and Ireland stalwart famously proposed to Amy in 2009 with 'Will You Marry Me' spelled out in flowers across the couple’s garden.
And his romantic actress wife chose the same spot to tell him the news he was to be a father for the first time.
She wrote him a note tucked neatly inside an envelope: "First there were two and then there were three".
"It's a nice moment, a great moment," O’Driscoll recalled in the autobiography.
"It's a few more seconds before I really take it in, but when I do it's the greatest feeling I've ever had, hands down. It supercedes any medal," he added.
The high profile couple managed to keep the news of Amy’s second pregnancy a secret for six months.
The 35-year-old hinted last month that they thought the baby would be born without anyone noticing.
"I managed to keep it under wraps for so long - we thought we'd just get on with it," she laughed.
BOD recently said he knew the Threesome and Clinic actress was “the one” for him after a mere eight weeks of dating.
He famously spotted his future wife when she was a guest on Tubridy Tonight in 2006, and he jokingly thanked Tubridy for the introduction.
He said he fell for the IFTA winner’s girl-next-door charms.
“It’s the old ‘when you know, you know’,” O’Driscoll said on the Late Late Show a few weeks ago.
“I’d never met anyone like her before and I just thought this was the business.”
“This is the full package. She’s gorgeous, she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s driven, she’s independent. She was everything I would have wanted in a wife,” he said.
In order to meet his future wife, O'Driscoll set up a scenario with his friend Joanne Byrne so he could meet the actress at a hotel, with his friends, including Brian's late close friend Barry.
O'Driscoll scheduled to arrive late to make it look like a chance meeting
"The process didn't work out exactly as I had hoped," he admitted.
"The lads came in early and had a few pints. I had to take Barry aside and tell him to stop being the funny guy," he joked.
The high profile couple renovated their €1m Dublin home in order to prepare for their latest arrival.
The couple moved into their four-bedroom home in Goatstown in 2005, and they have already gutted it from top to bottom, built a granny flat and bumped up security to protect their privacy.
An IFTA winner, the Threesome actress has been developing a comedy for an Irish production company, and she handed in her first draft of the script in August.
The couple became the nation’s sweethearts when they married in 2010.
More than 250 guests saw Amy walk down the aisle in her stunning Stephanie Allin gown in Leitrim on July 2, 2010.
Among the guests were rugby stars Shane Horgan, Gordon D'Arcy, Denis Hickey, Luke Fitzgerald, Donncha O'Callaghan, Paul O'Connell Victor Costello, Dennis Hickey and Paddy Wallace.
Online Editors
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October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. It’s too bad that Congress didn’t get the memo — it might have been useful to consider prior to shutting down the government.
Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum and your view on the shutdown, there’s one thing that is not open for debate: Shutting down the federal government makes the U.S. and its critical infrastructure less secure.
One of the biggest security concerns is found in how government agencies are managing and controlling access to privileged accounts. According to research from leading security firms such as Mandiant and CyberSheath, cyber-attackers immediately target privileged and administrative accounts once they breach the perimeter. This is because these accounts provide a gateway to an organization’s most sensitive data.
In the past two years, cyber-attackers have stolen and abused privileged credentials to perpetrate some of the biggest breaches state and Federal government organizations have seen — including the South Carolina Department of Revenue, the NASA Jet Propulsion Library, and the Utah Department of Health, among others.
In addition, abuse of privileged accounts is one of the leading causes for insider breaches. One needs to look no further than the recent revelations around the NSA and how Edward Snowden was able to access, acquire and leak sensitive documents. As a systems administrator, Snowden had access and passwords to privileged accounts that, if abused, can provide almost unfettered access to everything across a targeted system. The results of that unmanaged access are self evident.
These are issues that every single businesses faces — it’s not unique to the government. Privileged accounts exist everywhere. Our own research shows that the number of privileged accounts in any company is typically 3-4x the number of employees. This means that an agency with 1,000 people is likely to have 3000-4000 of these accounts.
Outside attackers and insiders target these accounts because they know they can not achieve their goal of stealing data or causing damage without first stealing the privileged credentials of an authorized user.
So what does this have to do with the federal government shutdown? Understanding these vulnerabilities exist, security organizations such as SANS strongly recommend that every privileged account is isolated, monitored and controlled to immediately identify any misuse. While automation exists, many agencies and businesses still do this through manual processes. In a government agency, it’s traditionally the IT staff that this job falls to. With the government shut down, it’s unknown whether this is still happening. If an outside attacker were to steal the privileged credentials of an authorized user, it could be days before this is realized. Days in which the attacker can steal as much info as possible.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the specter of employees with legitimate privileged access being sent home without pay. It only takes one person to become disgruntled and misuse this access to cause significant damage to any organization. As the Snowden incident demonstrates, the results can be devastating and far reaching.
Regardless of the current debate on Congress, one thing is clear — the government may be shut down, but cyber attackers are still open for business. And business is good. It’s a dereliction in duty to contribute to this.
John Worrall is the Chief Marketing Officer at CyberArk Software.
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Advertisement Man, 18, arrested in fatal shooting of girlfriend's father in Washington Police say Jerald Thompson shot Jerred Price on Addison Street Share Shares Copy Link Copy
What began as a dispute between two teen parents over their baby ended with the baby's grandfather being shot dead in the front yard of their apartment house in Washington County.Police say Jerred Price, 42, was killed by the baby's father shooting from an upstairs window of the home on Addison Street early Friday morning.VIDEO: Watch the report by Bob MayoJerald Thompson, 18, of Washington, Pennsylvania, is charged with shooting Price in the head with his .22-caliber rifle. Police said he fired twice from his second floor apartment window at the victim in the yard below."They were going back and forth, (arguing) from the window and the lawn and that's when shots were fired," Washington city police Lt. Daniel Stanek said. "The shots weren't fired anywhere near the child in that direction or anything. The child was in another room."Thompson is also charged with recklessly endangering the baby's mother and grandmother, who were standing by Price when he was shot in the head. Logan Price, 16, had phoned her parents for help during her domestic dispute."I think it's awful, like, Washington's taken a downturn, like nobody cares about each other's lives anymore. I pray for the family. It's sad that it's they're going through that," neighbor Shayla Chandler said. "I don't know how someone could just shoot somebody like that. It seems that killing someone and taking their lives is just normal to people now.""It kind of gets me on edge because it could happen to anybody," neighbor Jeff Mastic said. "I've been here 15 years and this is the first time in this area that anything like that happened.""(I've) never heard anything from up there. I've never even heard of the police being up there," neighbor Martha Grimm said.Thompson did not resist police taking him into custody. He is being held in the Washington County Correctional Facility without bond. District Attorney Gene Vittone said a preliminary hearing is scheduled for Feb. 18.
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Dear all,As part of our information sharing program we are delighted to share some of the screenshot of the 7 new German tanks destroyers that will be added to our below game in 8.9.Enjoy!
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When someone says multi-core, we unconsciously think SMP. That worked out well for us until recently when ARM announced big.LITTLE. ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture is the first mass produced AMP architecture and as we’ll see next, it raises the bar for how hard multi-core programing is.
A tale of an impossible bug
It all started with a bug report against a phone with such a CPU, the Exynos chipset used on Samsung phones in Europe. Apps created with our software were dying with SIGILL at all completely random places. Nothing could reasonably explain what was happening, and the crash was happening with valid instructions. This immediately made us suspect bad instruction cache flushing.
After reviewing all JIT code around cache flushing we were sure that we were calling __clear_cache properly. That lead us to look around for how other virtual machines or compilers do cache flushing on ARM64, and we found out about some related errata on the Cortex A53. ARM’s description of those issues is both cryptic and vague, but we tried the workaround anyways. No luck there.
Next we went with the other usual suspects. A lying signal handler? Nope. Funky userspace CPU emulation? No. Broken libc implementation? Nice try. Faulty hardware? We reproduced it on multiple devices. Bad luck or karma? Yes!
Some of us could not sleep with such amazing puzzle in front of us and kept staring at memory dumps around failure sites. And there was this funny thing: the fault address was always on the third or fourth line of the memory dumps.
This was our only clue, and there are no coincidences when it comes to this sort of byzantine bug. Our memory dumps were of 16 bytes per line and the SIGILL would always happen to be somewhere between 0x40-0x7f or 0xc0-0xff . We aligned the memory dump to help verify whether the code allocator was doing something funky:
$ grep SIGILL *.log custom_01.log:E/mono (13964): SIGILL at ip=0x0000007f4f15e8d0 custom_02.log:E/mono (13088): SIGILL at ip=0x0000007f8ff76cc0 custom_03.log:E/mono (12824): SIGILL at ip=0x0000007f68e93c70 custom_04.log:E/mono (12876): SIGILL at ip=0x0000007f4b3d55f0 custom_05.log:E/mono (13008): SIGILL at ip=0x0000007f8df1e8d0 custom_06.log:E/mono (14093): SIGILL at ip=0x0000007f6c21edf0 [...]
With that we came to our first good hypothesis: Bad cache flushing was happening only on the upper 64 bytes of every 128-byte block. Those numbers, if you deal with low level programming, immediately remind you of cache line sizes. And that is where it all started to make sense.
Here is a pseudo version of how libgcc does cache flushing on arm64:
void __clear_cache (char *address, size_t size) { static int cache_line_size = 0; if (!cache_line_size) cache_line_size = get_current_cpu_cache_line_size (); for (int i = 0; i < size; i += cache_line_size) flush_cache_line (address + i); }
In the above pseudo-code get_current_cpu_cache_line_size is a CPU instruction that returns the line size of its caches, and flush_cache_line flushes the cache line that contains the supplied address.
At that point we were using our own version of this function, so we instrumented it to print the cache line size as returned by the CPU and, lo and behold, it printed both 128 and 64. We double verified that this was indeed the case. So we went to see that particular CPU manual and it turns out that the big core has a 128 bytes cache line but on the LITTLE core it is only 64 bytes for the instruction cache.
So what was happening is that __clear_cache would be called first on a big core and cache 128 as the instruction cache line size. Later it would be called on one of the LITTLE cores and would skip every other cache line when flushing. It doesn’t get simpler than that. We removed the caching and it all worked.
Summary
Some ARM big.LITTLE CPUs can have cores with different cache line sizes, and pretty much no code out there is ready to deal with it as they assume all cores to be symmetrical.
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THURSDAY, Dec. 27 (HealthDay News) -- The more that people play violent video games, the greater their levels of aggressive behavior, a new study finds.
The study included 70 university students in France who were assigned to play a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 minutes a day over three consecutive days.
Those who played violent games, such as "Call of Duty 4" and "Condemned 2," showed increases in hostile expectations and aggressive behavior each day they played. This did not occur in the people who played nonviolent games such as "Dirt2," according to the study, published online ahead of print in the March 2013 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
The study offers evidence that the negative effects of playing violent video games can accumulate over time and cause people to view the world as a hostile and violent place, said study co-author Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University.
"After playing a violent video game, we found that people expect others to behave aggressively," Bushman said in a university news release. "That expectation may make them more defensive and more likely to respond with aggression themselves, as we saw in this study and in other studies we have conducted."
Because so many young people regularly play video games, it's important to know the long-term effects of violent games, Bushman said.
"Playing video games could be compared to smoking cigarettes," he said. "A single cigarette won't cause lung cancer, but smoking over weeks or months or years greatly increases the risk. In the same way, repeated exposure to violent video games may have a cumulative effect on aggression," he explained.
It's impossible to know exactly how much aggression may increase among people who play violent video games for months or years, Bushman said.
"We would know more if we could test players for longer periods of time, but that isn't practical or ethical," he noted.
"I would expect that the increase in aggression would accumulate for more than three days. It may eventually level off. However, there is no theoretical reason to think that aggression would decrease over time, as long as players are still playing the violent games," Bushman said.
Although the study found an association between violent video games and aggression, it did not establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship.
More information
The American Psychological Association has more about violent video games.
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The other week, feeling sick, I spent a day on my couch with the TV on and was reminded of an odd fact of American life. More than seven months before Election Day, you can watch the 2016 campaign for the presidency at any moment of your choosing, and that’s been true since at least late last year. There is essentially never a time when some network or news channel isn’t reporting on, discussing, debating, analyzing, speculating about, or simply drooling over some aspect of the primary campaign, of Hillary, Bernie, Ted, and above all — a million times above all — The Donald (from the violence at his rallies to the size of his hands). In case you’re young and think this is more or less the American norm, it isn’t. Or wasn’t.
Truly, there is something new under the sun. Of course, in 1994 with OJ Simpson’s white Ford Bronco chase (95 million viewers!), the 24/7 media event arrived full blown in American life and something changed when it came to the way we focused on our world and the media focused on us. But you can be sure of one thing: never in the history of television, or any other form of media, has a single figure garnered the amount of attention — hour after hour, day after day, week after week — as Donald Trump. If he’s the OJ Simpson of twenty-first-century American politics and his run for the presidency is the eternal white Ford Bronco chase of our moment, then we’re in a truly strange world.
Or let me put it another way: this is not an election. I know the word “election” is being used every five seconds and somewhere along the line significant numbers of Americans (particularly, this season, Republicans) continue to enter voting booths or in the case of primary caucuses, school gyms and the like, to choose among various candidates, so it’s all still election-like. But take my word for it as a 71-year-old guy who’s been watching our politics for decades: this is not an election of the kind the textbooks once taught us was so crucial to American democracy. If, however, you’re sitting there waiting for me to tell you what it is, take a breath and don’t be too disappointed. I have no idea, though it’s certainly part bread-and-circuses spectacle, part celebrity obsession, and part media money machine.
Actually, before we go further, let me hedge my bets on the idea that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century OJ Simpson. It’s certainly a reasonable enough comparison, but I’ve begun to wonder about the usefulness of just about any comparison in our present situation. Even the most nightmarish of them — Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, or any past extreme demagogue of your choice — may actually prove to be covert gestures of consolation, reassurance, and comfort. Yes, what’s happening in our world is increasingly extreme and could hardly be weirder, we seem to have the urge to say, but it’s still recognizable. It’s something we’ve encountered before, something we’ve made sense of in the past and, in the process, overcome.
Round Up the Usual Suspects
But what if that’s not true? In some ways, the most frightening, least acceptable thing to say about our American world right now — even if Donald Trump’s overwhelming presence all but begs us to say it — is that we’ve entered uncharted territory and, under the circumstances, comparisons might actually impair our ability to come to grips with our new reality. My own suspicion: Donald Trump is only the most obvious instance of this, the example no one can miss.
In these first years of the twenty-first century, we may be witnessing a new world being born inside the hollowed-out shell of the American system. As yet, though we live with this reality every day, we evidently just can’t bear to recognize it for what it might be. When we survey the landscape, what we tend to focus on is that shell — the usual elections (in somewhat heightened form), the usual governmental bodies (a little tarnished) with the usual governmental powers (a little diminished or redistributed), including the usual checks and balances (a little out of whack), and the same old Constitution (much praised in its absence), and yes, we know that none of this is working particularly well, or sometimes at all, but it still feels comfortable to view what we have as a reduced, shabbier, and more dysfunctional version of the known.
Perhaps, however, it’s increasingly a version of the unknown. We say, for instance, that Congress is “paralyzed,” and that little can be done in a country where politics has become so “polarized,” and we wait for something to shake us loose from that “paralysis,” to return us to a Washington closer to what we remember and recognize. But maybe this is it. Maybe even if the Republicans somehow lost control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, we would still be in a situation something like what we’re now labeling paralysis. Maybe in our new American reality, Congress is actually some kind of glorified, well-lobbied, and well-financed version of a peanut gallery.
Of course, I don’t want to deny that much of what is “new” in our world has a long history. The present yawning inequality gap between the 1% and ordinary Americans first began to widen in the 1970s and — as Thomas Frank explains so brilliantly in his new book, Listen, Liberal — was already a powerful and much-discussed reality in the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton ran for president. Yes, that gap is now more like an abyss and looks ever more permanently embedded in the American system, but it has a genuine history, as for instance do 1% elections and the rise and self-organization of the “billionaire class,” even if no one, until this second, imagined that government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires might devolve into government of the billionaire, by the billionaire, and for the billionaire — that is, just one of them.
Indeed, much of our shape-shifting world can be written about as a set of comparisons and in terms of historical reference points. Inequality has a history. The military-industrial complex and the all-volunteer military, like the warrior corporation, weren’t born yesterday; neither was our state of perpetual war, nor the national security state that now looms over Washington, nor its surveilling urge, the desire to know far too much about the private lives of Americans. (A little bow of remembrance to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is in order here.)
And yet, true as all that may be, Washington increasingly seems like a new land, sporting something like a new system in the midst of our much-described polarized and paralyzed politics. The national security state doesn’t seem faintly paralyzed or polarized to me. Nor does the Pentagon. On certain days when I catch the news, I can’t believe how strange and yet humdrum this uncharted new territory is. Remind me, for instance, where in the Constitution the Founding Fathers wrote about that national security state? And yet there it is in all its glory, all its powers, an ever more independent force in our nation’s capital. In what way, for instance, did those men of the revolutionary era prepare the ground for the Pentagon to loose its spy drones from our distant war zones over the United States? And yet, so it has. And no one even seems disturbed by the development. The news, barely noticed or noted, was instantly absorbed into what’s becoming the new normal.
Graduation Ceremonies in the Imperium
Let me mention here the almost random piece of news that recently made me wonder just what planet I was actually on. And I know you won’t believe it, but it had absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump.
Given the carnage of America’s wars and conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa, which I’ve been following closely these last years, I’m unsure why this particular moment even got to me. Best guess? Maybe that, of all the far-away places — from Afghanistan to Yemen to Libya— in which the US has been fighting recently, Somalia, where this particular little slaughter took place, seems to me like the most distant of all. Yes, I’ve been half-attending to events there from the 1993 Blackhawk Down moment to the disastrous US-backed Ethiopian invasion of 2006 to the hardly less disastrous invasion of that country by Kenyan and other African forces
Recently, US Reaper drones and manned aircraft launched a set of strikes against what the Pentagon claimed was a graduation ceremony for “low-level” foot soldiers in the Somali terror group al-Shabab. It was proudly announced that more than 150 Somalis had died in this attack. In a country where, in recent years, US drones and special ops forces had carried out a modest number of strikes against individual al-Shabab leaders, this might be thought of as a distinct escalation of Washington’s endless low-level conflict there (with a raid involving US special ops forces following soon after).
The other day, when this news came out, I stopped a moment to take it in. If accurate, we killed 150 people and a top leader or two in Somalia. I mean, don’t you find that just a little odd, no matter how horrible the organization they were preparing to fight for?
Remind me: On just what basis was this modest massacre carried out? After all, the US isn’t at war with Somalia or with al-Shabab. Of course, Congress no longer plays any real role in decisions about American war making. It no longer declares war on any group or country we fight. (Paralysis!) War is now purely a matter of executive power or, in reality, the collective power of the national security state and the White House. The essential explanation offered for the Somali strike, for instance, is that the US had a small set of advisers stationed with African Union forces in that country and it was just faintly possible that those guerrilla graduates might soon prepare to attack some of those forces (and hence US military personnel). It seems that if the US puts advisers in place anywhere on the planet — and any day of any year they are now in scores of countries — that’s excuse enough to validate acts of war based on the “imminent” threat of their attack.
Or just think of it this way: a new, informal constitution is being written in these years in Washington. No need for a convention or a new bill of rights. It’s a constitution focused on the use of power, especially military power, and it’s being written in blood.
These days, our government (the unparalyzed one) acts regularly on the basis of that informal constitution-in-the-making, committing Somalia-like acts across significant swathes of the planet. In these years, we’ve been marrying the latest in wonder technology, our Hellfire-missile-armed drones, to executive power and slaughtering people we don’t much like in majority Muslim countries with a certain alacrity. By now, it’s simply accepted that any commander-in-chief is also our assassin-in-chief, and that all of this is part of a wartime-that-isn’t-wartime system, spreading the principle of chaos and dissolution to whole areas of the planet, leaving failed states and terror movements in its wake.
When was it, by the way, that “the people” agreed that the president could appoint himself assassin-in-chief, muster his legal beagles to write new “law” that covered any future acts of his (including the killing of American citizens), and year after year dispatch what essentially is his own private fleet of killer drones to knock off thousands of people across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa? Weirdly enough, after almost 14 years of this sort of behavior, with ample evidence that such strikes don’t suppress the movements Washington loathes (and often only fan the flames of resentment and revenge that help them spread), neither the current president and his top officials, nor any of the candidates for his office have the slightest intention of ever grounding those drones.
And when exactly did the people say that, within the country’s vast standing military, which now garrisons much of the planet, a force of nearly 70,000 Special Operations personnel should be birthed, or that it should conduct covert missions globally, essentially accountable only to the president (if him)? And what I find strangest of all is that few in our world find such developments strange at all.
A Planet in Decline?
In some way, all of this could be said to work. At the very least, it is a functioning new system-in-the-making that we have yet to truly come to grips with, just as we haven’t come to grips with a national security state that surveils the world in a way that even science fiction writers (no less totalitarian rulers) of a previous era could never have imagined, or the strange version of media overkill that we still call an election. All of this is by now both old news and mind-bogglingly new.
Do I understand it? Not for a second.
This is not war as we knew it, nor government as we once understood it, nor are these elections as we once imagined them, nor is this democracy as it used to be conceived of, nor is this journalism of a kind ever taught in a journalism school. This is the definition of uncharted territory. It’s a genuine American terra incognita and yet in some fashion that unknown landscape is already part of our sense of ourselves and our world. In this “election” season, many remain shocked that a leading candidate for the presidency is a demagogue with a visible authoritarian side and what looks like an autocratic bent. All such labels are pinned on Donald Trump, but the new American system that’s been emerging from its chrysalis in these years already has just those tendencies. So don’t blame it all on Donald Trump. He should be far less of a shock to this country than he continues to be. After all, a Trumpian world-in-formation has paved the way for him.
Who knows? Perhaps what we’re watching is the new iteration of a very old story: a twenty-first-century version of an ancient tale of a great imperial power, perhaps the greatest ever — the “lone superpower” — sinking into decline. It’s a tale humanity has experienced often enough in the course of our long history. But lest you think once again that there’s nothing new under the sun, the context for all of this, for everything now happening in our world, is so new as to be quite literally outside of thousands of years of human experience. As the latest heat records indicate, we are, for the first time, on a planet in decline. And if that isn’t uncharted territory, what is?
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A joint federal inquiry into the NBN wants a drastic overhaul of the project, including an independent audit, better information, and a “minimum” of fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) in the rest of the fixed-line footprint.
The year-long inquiry, which is chaired by government MP Sussan Ley, quietly published its 210-page opus in the shadows of the upcoming Labour Day long weekend. (pdf)
The findings of the inquiry paint an incredibly damaging picture of the national broadband network.
However, it was unclear how many - if any - of the 23 detailed recommendations would ever be put into practice.
All five Liberal members of the inquiry - including the chair - issued a dissenting report, defending the government’s rollout strategy and NBN Co’s progress in executing it.
The government members said that any changes would have to be paid for, either by internet users in higher retail prices or by the taxpayer as more funds were sought.
They also said that “on all measures, Bill Morrow and the rest of the executive team at NBN Co have done a phenomenal job in turning the company around”.
The joint NBN committee’s make-up is seven ALP and five Liberal, with one representative each from the National Party, Team Xenophon, Greens, One Nation and one independent.
The Nationals representative Andrew Broad MP did not sign on to the government’s dissenting report.
The committee’s major recommendation that FTTC be set as a minimum standard for the remainder of the fixed line network is ALP policy and likely to reflect their committee membership influence.
While this might be relatively easy to duck, other committee recommendations are likely to reignite fierce debate in the industry and among broadband users.
The second major ask by the committee is for the “Australian Government [to] commission an independent audit and assessment of the long-term assumptions underpinning NBN Co's financial projections and business case as set out in the Corporate Plan 2018-21”.
The network builder’s economics and future financial sustainability have been under increasing pressure over the past year.
NBN Co is increasingly looking at new markets like enterprises to meet 2020 revenue targets that otherwise appear unachievable based on the amount of bandwidth that retail service providers are purchasing, and a stagnant average revenue per [consumer] user.
Another major request is that “clear information” be published “about the maximum attainable Layer 2 speed of NBN infrastructure/services on a per premise basis”.
NBN Co has a database containing this information, which it has been under pressure to reveal in recent months as customers find themselves on connections unable to sustain speeds they thought were achievable.
The committee also wants consumers and RSPs alike to be protected from problems caused by the NBN rollout, particularly missed appointments and blame-shifting between parties over who is responsible for a repair.
“The committee recommends that the regulation of broadband wholesale services be overhauled to establish clear rights and protections for suppliers and end users of NBN broadband services,” it said.
“This framework should include: service connection and fault repair timeframes; minimum network performance and reliability; and compensation arrangements when these standards are not met.
“The committee requests that the Department [of Communications] brief the committee on progress in developing these protections by December 2017.”
The government members fired back, saying they had already embarked on a range of initiatives to fix the problems and that they should be given more time to have an effect, given "most of them being at just the earliest stage of implementation".
Many of the committee’s biggest wants are simply access to more information across all aspects of the rollout.
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The U.S. One Cent coin, or penny, has almost no purchasing power today. The cost of making the pennies (1.66 cents each) is higher than face value, and the melt value of pennies ranges from more than two cents for the pre-1982 copper pennies, to nearly a full cent for the copper plated zinc pennies. However, the penny is a very sentimental coin to most Americans, and many people fear that eliminating the penny would raise prices because things would need to be rounded up to the nearest nickel.
Both sides in the penny debate make some good points, and the solution is far from being an easy decision. This article takes a look at the issues involved in the pro-penny and the anti-penny debate so that you can make up your mind about where you stand on this critical matter.
Background
The United States has eliminated a small denomination coin in the past with relatively little trouble. In 1857, the Mint stopped making the half-cent coin, partly because the cost of making it had exceeded its face value, and somewhat because it was considered to be too small a denomination that it was no longer needed.
Back in 1857, the half-cent had the purchasing power that would translate to well over ten cents today, so in some ways, it was akin to our eliminating the dime. Commerce continued without any major hiccups, even though the one-cent copper coin suddenly shrunk from a hefty, over an inch in diameter piece of copper that weighed almost 11 grams, to a penny that was less than half the weight and 40% smaller.
Other significant changes in U.S. coinage occurred without any catastrophic effects on commerce. In 1965 the U.S. Mint stopped making 90% silver dimes, quarters, and half dollars and changed them over to base metal clad versions. The outer shell was made out of 75% copper and 25% nickel bonded to a core of pure copper. A few people groused about it, but commerce continued unabated.
There have been several other minor changes in the coin metal composition. These composition changes ranged from temporary wartime alterations during World War II, to more permanent switches like using zinc instead of copper for the penny. More recently, the mint changed the cupro-nickel clad dollar coin (the Susan B. Anthony) to the "golden dollar" type used in the Sacagawea and Presidential Dollar types. None of these changes caused any significant problems in commerce.
Many foreign nations have eliminated their most minor denominations with almost no impact on commerce or consumer confidence in the monetary system. New Zealand got rid of its penny and two-penny coins without incident back in 1989, and in 1991 replaced their two lowest paper denominations with coins. In 2006, New Zealand eliminated the nickel, and while they were at it, they significantly shrunk down the rest of the coins. All of this numismatic change took place without any significant problems.
The Canadian government stopped producing pennies in May 2012, and the Royal Canadian Mint ceased the distribution of them as of February 4, 2013. Unlike some other foreign governments, the penny remains legal tender in Canada. However, it is removed from circulation when tendered at a Canadian banking facility.
History has shown us that updating the monetary supply in countries where the currency is very stable has had little if any adverse effect on the economy, or on people's acceptance of the coinage.
Pro-Penny Arguments
Those who think we should keep the U.S. penny cite the following arguments to support their position.
Prices will increase. If the U.S eliminates the penny, merchants will round the price up to the nearest five cents. They will probably round everything up in their favor, costing us more for everything we buy.
If the U.S eliminates the penny, merchants will round the price up to the nearest five cents. They will probably round everything up in their favor, costing us more for everything we buy. The poor pay the most. A corollary to the above argument says that the poor will be affected the most because the poor are most likely to make more frequent, smaller purchases, thus suffering the rounding up more often.
A corollary to the above argument says that the poor will be affected the most because the poor are most likely to make more frequent, smaller purchases, thus suffering the rounding up more often. Charities need pennies. Many small charities depend on penny drives to bring in donations. People think nothing of pouring out their old penny jars to support these drives, but they won't part with nickels so easily.
Many small charities depend on penny drives to bring in donations. People think nothing of pouring out their old penny jars to support these drives, but they won't part with nickels so easily. Nickels cost even more to make. If we eliminate the penny, we will need more nickel coins in circulation. Nickels cost 6.23 cents to make, (1.23 cents over face value, as opposed to 0.66 cents over face value to make a penny,) so making each nickel costs 0.57 cents more than making each penny. Since the penny costs 0.26 more than face value to make, the Mint can make 5 pennies and still lose less money than making one nickel. And, of course, if we eliminate the penny, we'll need a lot more nickels, which will offset the savings of stopping penny manufacture.
Pennies are sentimental. The fact is that Americans love their pennies and hate to change things. We've always had pennies and therefore still should have pennies, according to this thinking. This type of thinking uses the same logic that rejects eliminating the paper dollar in favor of a much more cost-effective coin. Additionally, the same reasoning rejected the adaptation of the metric system in the United States even though virtually the entire rest of the world uses it. Americans are traditionalists, and the Lincoln Cent is the epitome of modern-day circulating coin tradition.
Anti-Penny Arguments
The folks who want to retire the penny also have some compelling arguments, including those below.
Pennies are worthless . They don't buy anything, many people throw them away, and nobody wants to use them, so let's get rid of them. Many stores have "Leave a Penny, Take a Penny" cups next to the cash register for customers who don't want pennies and change.
. They don't buy anything, many people throw them away, and nobody wants to use them, so let's get rid of them. Many stores have "Leave a Penny, Take a Penny" cups next to the cash register for customers who don't want pennies and change. Pennies waste time . The average American wastes 2.4 hours a year handling pennies or waiting for people who handle them. This statistic, which is cited by the folks at RetireThePenny.org, is the result of compiling some penny-handling related events. These events include the ubiquitous 30 second period we sometimes spend waiting for someone who has to dig through their pockets or purse to find that last cent so they can pay for something with exact change. They probably do this, so they don't get stuck with any more pennies.
. The average American wastes 2.4 hours a year handling pennies or waiting for people who handle them. This statistic, which is cited by the folks at RetireThePenny.org, is the result of compiling some penny-handling related events. These events include the ubiquitous 30 second period we sometimes spend waiting for someone who has to dig through their pockets or purse to find that last cent so they can pay for something with exact change. They probably do this, so they don't get stuck with any more pennies. Making pennies wastes taxpayer money. It costs the U.S. Mint 1.66 cents to make each one-cent coins, meaning that taxpayers are losing 0.66 of a cent for each one of the 9.1 billion pennies the Mint produces each year. That is a loss of $60,181,440 to produce pennies in 2016.
Making pennies wastes time . The U.S. Mint makes an average of 21 million pennies per day to produce its nine billion pennies annually. If we get rid of the penny, the U.S. Mint would only have to do half the work. This figure does not include the time, fuel, expense, and hassle of carting all of those pennies around to the banks, merchants, etc. If we stop making pennies in the first place, we save all this associated time and trouble, too.
. The U.S. Mint makes an average of 21 million pennies per day to produce its nine billion pennies annually. If we get rid of the penny, the U.S. Mint would only have to do half the work. This figure does not include the time, fuel, expense, and hassle of carting all of those pennies around to the banks, merchants, etc. If we stop making pennies in the first place, we save all this associated time and trouble, too. Rounding-up prices wouldn't matter . The anti-penny folks rebut the rounding-up argument by pointing out that we wouldn't pay more for each item we buy, only for the total price of what we buy. Even if you shop 2 or 3 times a day, (which most people don't) and even if the rounding goes against you two times out of 3 (which it shouldn't), we're still only talking about a 3 or 4 cents per day at the most! Most people throw more than four pennies into the change-jar or trash each day anyway!
. The anti-penny folks rebut the rounding-up argument by pointing out that we wouldn't pay more for each item we buy, only for the total price of what we buy. Even if you shop 2 or 3 times a day, (which most people don't) and even if the rounding goes against you two times out of 3 (which it shouldn't), we're still only talking about a 3 or 4 cents per day at the most! Most people throw more than four pennies into the change-jar or trash each day anyway! Pennies are less than the minimum wage. A New Yorker article pointed out that pennies are so worthless now that it doesn't even pay the federal minimum wage to stoop to pick one up off the street unless you can do it in 6.15 seconds or less.
Where Do You Stand?
As you can see, both sides have some good points. As the U.S. Mint faces the prospect of having to find more cost-effective compositions from which to make the nation's coinage, the debate about the continued existence of the humble penny is sure to carry on.
Many people thought that 2009, the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln cent, should have been the last year of penny manufacture. But others have a vested interest in keeping the penny alive. For example, the zinc metals lobby, and the Coinstar company (who make those change-counting machines in the grocery store) will both fight hard to keep the penny in production.
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The prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) is a socially monogamous rodent species that forms pair bonds after mating. Recent data have shown that amphetamine (AMPH) is rewarding to prairie voles as it induces conditioned place preferences. Further, repeated treatment with AMPH impairs social bonding in adult prairie voles through a central dopamine (DA)-dependent mechanism. The present study examined the effects of neonatal exposure to AMPH on behavior and central DA activity in adult male prairie voles. Our data show that neonatal exposure to AMPH makes voles less social in an affiliation test during adulthood, but does not affect animals’ locomotor activity and anxiety-like behavior. Neonatal exposure to AMPH also increases the levels of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and DA transporter (DAT) mRNA expression in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in the brain, indicating an increase in central DA activity. As DA has been implicated in AMPH effects on behavioral and cognitive functions, altered DA activity in the vole brain may contribute to the observed changes in social behavior.
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CLOSE Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders warns not to underestimate him in the 2016 Democratic race for the White House. In an AP interview, Sanders, who is formally launching his campaign Tuesday, said he has a strong message that's already resonating. (May 25) AP
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at the launch of his presidential campaign Tuesday in Burlington. (Photo11: ADAM SILVERMAN / FREE PRESS)
BURLINGTON, Vt. — Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., pulled out all the stops Tuesday at his presidential campaign launch in Burlington, as he outlined his role in "a political revolution to transform the country — economically, politically, economically and environmentally."
"Brothers and sisters, now is not the time for thinking small," he told a large crowd at Waterfront Park. "Now is not the time for the same old same old. Now is the time for millions of working families to revitalize American democracy."
With the backdrop of Lake Champlain and its procession of boats large and small, Sanders vowed to steer the the country away from an economy defined increasingly by income inequality.
READ THE SPEECH: Remarks by Sen. Bernie Sanders
Not only is the model "profoundly wrong," he said, "it is immoral, bad economics and unsustainable."
To the nation's billionaires, Sanders added, "You can't have it all."
Sanders is trying to ignite a grassroots fire among left-leaning Democrats wary of front-runner Hillary Clinton — a group that pined for months for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to get in the race. Some still do.
But while Warren remains committed to the Senate, repeatedly saying she won't run for the White House, Sanders is laying out an agenda in step with the party's progressive wing and Warren's platform — reining in Wall Street banks, tackling college debt and creating a government-financed infrastructure jobs program.
Clinton is in a commanding position by any measure, far in front of both Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who is widely expected to get into the race Saturday.
Yet Sanders' supporters in New Hampshire say his local ties and longstanding practice of holding town hall meetings and people-to-people campaigning — a staple in the nation's first primary state — will serve him well.
"Toward the Vermont border it's like a love-fest for Bernie," said Jerry Curran, an Amherst, New Hampshire, Democratic activist who has been involved in the draft Warren effort. "He's not your milquetoast left-winger. He's kind of a badass left-winger."
Sanders, who often votes with the Democrats, has raised more than $4 million since announcing in late April that he would seek the party's nomination. He suggested in the interview that raising $50 million for the primaries was a possibility. "That would be a goal," he said.
Sanders was introduced Tuesday at the waterfront rally by speakers who outlined, in less specific terms, the senator's major premise: that the country's working families need him to advance their cause.
"Bernie knows how to get us there," declared Donna Bailey, executive director of the Addison County Parent/Child Center.
Bill McKibben, a climate activist and author, followed Bailey.
"Yo, Bernie!" McKibben began, and thanked the senator for kicking off the campaign in Vermont.
An unprecedented diversity of voters in the Green Mountain State voted Sanders into office, he continued: "They know that he always means what he says and he always stands for what he believes. What you see is what you get."
Brenda Torpy, CEO of Champlain Housing Trust, credited Sanders with revitalizing Burlington, particularly the creation and preservation of affordable housing.
"He lives and breathes this commitment," Torpy said.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, founders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade ice cream, pitched in.
"It's no accident that corporate profits are through the roof while wages are stagnant," Cohen told the crowd.
Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders' bid for president spell it out Tuesday evening at Burlington's Waterfront Park. (Photo11: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)
Sanders has resisted the influence of large business interests in Washington — "legalized bribery" — Cohen said. "Finally, a candidate worth voting for."
A campaign news release noted that Bailey, Torpy, Cohen and Greenfield represented themselves and not their organizations.
Earlier, in the uncharacteristically steamy afternoon, dozens of supporters lined up for free scoops of Ben & Jerry's ice cream and danced to zydeco music along the sun-washed and flag-draped Waterfront Park.
Sanders, a former Burlington mayor, was joined for the announcement by his wife, Jane O'Meara Sanders.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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A new study shows that colorectal cancer is increasing in young and middle-aged adults. (iStockphoto)
Rates of colon and rectal cancer are rising sharply among young and middle-aged Americans, at the same time that they continue to decline for adults 55 and older, according to a startling new study that is sparking questions about whether screening should start earlier.
The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found that between the mid-1980s and 2013, colon cancer rates increased about 1 to 2 percent per year for people in their 20s and 30s. Rates for middle-aged adults also rose, but at a slower pace.
Rectal cancer rates climbed even faster in recent decades, at about 3 percent per year for people in their 20s and 30s and 2 percent annually for those ages 40 to 54. As a result, three in 10 new cases of rectal cancer now are diagnosed in patients younger than 55 — double the proportion in 1990. By contrast, rectal cancer rates in adults ages 55 and older have dropped for four decades.
American Cancer Society researcher Rebecca Siegel, who led the study, said that earlier work had signaled a growing incidence of colorectal cancer among the groups known as Gen X and millennials. But the magnitude of the increase identified “was just very shocking,” she said.
[Cancer patients, survivors, fear Republican bid to gut the Affordable Care Act]
The study, which included scientists at the NCI, didn't determine the reason for the shift. But Siegel suggested one explanation might be a complex interaction involving the same factors that have contributed to the obesity epidemic — changes in diet, a sedentary lifestyle, excess weight and low fiber consumption. Experts said the cancers are not related to the human papilloma virus. HPV is associated with squamous cell cancers, which are common in HPV-related anal cancer, but not in colorectal cancers.
Colorectal cancer refers to malignancies in the colon or rectum, which are parts of the large intestine. Most cancers there start as polyps, or growths, on an inner wall. Most polyps are benign, but over time some can develop into cancer. The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 95,000 new cases of colon cancer and almost 40,000 new cases of rectal cancer will be diagnosed in 2017. About 50,000 people are expected to die of colorectal cancer in the United States this year.
The latest research involved a retrospective look at more than 490,000 people ages 20 and older who received diagnoses of invasive colorectal cancer between 1974 and 2013, with a specific focus on years of birth and five-year age groups. By comparing different generations at similar ages, it found that people born around 1990 have double the risk of colon cancer and quadruple the risk of rectal cancer of people born around 1950.
Jessica Dilts, 34, of New Hudson, Mich., was a fitness devotee and long-distance runner when she noticed blood in her stool in October 2014. Her gastroenterologist dismissed her symptoms as hemorrhoids or an intestinal disorder; a year later, after her symptoms worsened, she had a colonoscopy and was diagnosed with rectal cancer that already had spread to her lungs and liver.
“I was in shock,” she said. “My whole world changed that day — I could hardly get out of bed.” She began an aggressive chemotherapy regimen and expects to be on maintenance chemotherapy indefinitely. For now, she is doing well. Her lung tumors have disappeared, and those in her liver are shrinking. She's working full time in sales and getting married in June.
[Cancer death rate has declined again, but is higher in men.]
The study confirms what many doctors have been seeing among their younger patients, said Nilofer Azad, an oncologist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, who was not involved in the research. “I have many patients in their 30s and 40s, and some in their 20s,” she said.
Azad stressed that the incidence of colorectal cancer in young people, while on the rise, remains very low. The disease will be diagnosed in just 1 in 100,000 people in their 20s compared with about 50 in 100,000 people in their early 60s, according to data used in the study.
“The vast majority of young people won't get colorectal cancer, and their symptoms are more likely not the disease,” she said. Still, she added, it's critical that young people who have symptoms — which include rectal bleeding or a change in bowel habits — “push their doctors if the problem doesn't resolve.” Young people often are diagnosed at a later stage because, unlike older Americans, they aren't getting screened, and doctors don't necessarily suspect cancer, Azad noted.
Recommendations by the American Cancer Society and other expert groups generally have called for colonoscopies or other tests starting at age 50 for a person with average risk but earlier screening for individuals with a family history of cancer. Some of those recommendations are under review.
“We need to do a new analysis to see if we should start screening earlier, like at 45,” Azad said.
With colorectal cancer rates increasing for people in their early 50s but decreasing for those in their late 50s, the study found a strikingly smaller gap in incidence within just that decade of life. The younger group's rate used to be half that of the older group; it now is just 12 percent lower.
Accountant Dorothy O'Shea of Marlborough, Mass., refused when her primary-care provider urged her to get a colonoscopy at age 50. As a runner and vegetarian, she said she didn't see the need to undergo screening. Then a close friend was diagnosed with colorectal cancer and begged her to get tested. She decided to use the physician-prescribed Cologuard test, which involves sending a stool sample to a lab that looks for abnormal cells.
Two weeks later, her doctor got the results, which indicated there might be a problem. At that point, she readily underwent a colonoscopy and was diagnosed with Stage 1 colon cancer. She has now changed her mind: “I really think that everyone should get screened in their 40s.”
Read more:
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The Obamacare debate: Defining key terms
A boy, a brain tumor and parents who “will do anything”
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The three hot spots in the U.S. with the highest colon cancer death rates
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Report on reducing membership also expected to recommend new appointments on ‘two out, one in’ basis
Peers could be restricted to 15 years in Lords in drive to cut numbers
New peers could be restricted to sitting in the House of Lords for 15 years rather than being given life peerages, and appointed only on a “two out, one in” basis under plans to slash their number in the upper house.
A report by the Lord Speaker’s committee is due to be published this month on reducing membership of the house, which has more than 800 peers who have no official retirement age and can serve until they die. Among its recommendations, the committee is likely to recommend two peers must retire or die in order for another to be appointed.
Andrew Lloyd Webber quits as Conservative peer Read more
The report is not expected to recommend a retirement age, but will rather seek to reduce the number of peers in the Lords by limiting the new appointees and setting term limits, as well as asking parties to find ways to cut their own numbers.
It is also said to avoid recommending major reform to the appointment process by parties and will recommend changes are made without legislation by the House of Commons, which critics said could leave them open to legal challenge.
Some members of the House of Lords have held their seats for more than 60 years, and rules introduced in 2014 that allowed peers to retire and keep their title have prompted only 70 to do so, far fewer than was hoped.
Almost 300 peers have been created since 2010, and seven more in the last couple of weeks, including the former Met police commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe and two new Conservative ministers, the former BBC chair Rona Fairhead and academy funder Theodore Agnew.
The cross-party committee that will recommend the changes, first reported by the Times, is chaired by the cross-bench peer Terence Burns, and has two Labour peers, two Conservatives and one Liberal Democrat.
Attention, fellow Britons - you are paying peers to have lunch | Andrew Adonis Read more
It is understood both Labour and the Lib Dems are willing to back changes in principle that would reduce the size of the House of Lords. Under the committee’s self-imposed rule, the change would require a majority vote from peers to change the so-called standing orders that govern the rules of the upper chamber, but would not need primary legislation.
The Lib Dem peer Paul Tyler, the party’s constitutional affairs spokesman, said the committee was set to “dance around the issue” of the appointment process, which most members of the House of Lords believed was outdated and undemocratic.
“You have a parliamentary house where members are selected or deselected by party whim,” he said. “We wouldn’t tolerate that in any other organisation, it is uniquely and absurdly in the House of Lords.”
Lord Tyler said the committee would face an uphill battle to get its proposals accepted without proper legislation examined by both houses of parliament. “When this comes before the house the question is rightly going to be asked: by what right should we decide our own membership rules without legislation?” he said.
“Those who will find themselves disadvantaged by the proposals will object on that basis and they would have every right to do so. There might even be the potential for legal challenge.”
How the aristocracy preserved their power Read more
Tyler said the “two out, one in” proposal would make only slow progress in reducing the size of the House of Lords, but he did not think a mandatory retirement age was the right answer. “Should Shirley Williams have to retire when Andrew Lloyd Webber remains doing not very much but far younger?” he said.
Most peers believe reform is necessary to ensure there is still public confidence in the upper house. The Electoral Reform Society (ERS) found last month that more than 100 peers had claimed almost £1.3m between them despite not having spoken in the House of Lords for at least nine months.
Peers can claim up to £300 a day for appearing in the chamber, but do not have to speak or vote in order to do so.
Lloyd Webber quit as a Conservative peer on Monday, saying his busy schedule was incompatible with the demands of the Lords.
The committee’s report is understood to be due to be published on 31 October.
Labour and Lib Dem peers have been able to inflict defeat on the government dozens of times over the last parliament, because the Conservatives do not have a majority in the Lords. There are 252 Conservative peers, compared with a combined total of 299 Labour and Lib Dems.
This means the changes could technically win a majority in the upper chamber without government support, though it is unlikely in practice.
Darren Hughes, the chief executive of the ERS, said the time limit alone would not be enough and the process of appointing peers needed greater scrutiny.
“Britain’s bloated second chamber is crying out for change, so these proposals are a start,” he said. “However, these reforms avoid dealing with the real problem in the Lords – a total lack of democracy and transparency in how it is composed.
“These hyper-cautious proposals are sticking plaster politics, and would do nothing to stop prime ministers packing the chamber with party donors and political friends. The light-touch reforms only apply to new peerages, meaning any substantial reduction in size could take decades.”
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The catastrophic global effects of drug prohibition are multiplying at an alarming rate ("Americas signal major rethink as bloody war on drugs falters", In Focus). Without a complete rethink and the adoption of sensible options, we face a certain escalation in violence, disease, mass incarceration and the undermining of democracy. Economists, scientists, doctors, lawyers and an increasing number of politicians have joined those demanding a transparent review of drug legislation.
Expedient politicians continue to exploit public fear by persuading people that the only choice is more of the same failed policies. This has resulted in the tougher approach becoming so entrenched that even to think of other ways seems to go against the grain. Another favoured tactic of those who promote the old failed policies is to say that any other way is tantamount to promoting drug use.
However, there are increasing signs that the public is no longer prepared to accept this propaganda and of a realisation that it is prohibition that is causing most of the damage.
It is going to take tremendously strong political leadership to move from dogma to science in the way we manage drug use. But one thing we know beyond all doubt is when enough people demand change, politicians swiftly get in line.
Sebastian Saville
Executive director, Release
London EC1
I still don't get it. We are told that the war on drugs has been lost. In the UK, those seriously dependent on illegal drugs constitute about 0.3% of the population, which means that 99.7% are not. If this is defeat, then what will victory look like?
Chris Forse
Stratford upon Avon
There is a middle ground between drug prohibition and blanket legalisation. Switzerland's heroin maintenance programme has been shown to reduce disease, death and crime among chronic users. Providing addicts with standardised doses in a clinical setting eliminates the overdose risk associated with illicit heroin use.
The success of the Swiss programme has inspired pilot heroin maintenance projects in Canada, Germany, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands. If expanded, prescription heroin maintenance would deprive organised crime of a core client base. This would render illegal heroin trafficking unprofitable and spare future generations addiction.
Cannabis is demonstrably safer than alcohol and should be taxed and regulated like alcohol, only without the ubiquitous advertising. Separating the hard and soft drug markets is critical. As long as organised crime controls cannabis distribution, consumers will continue to come into contact with sellers of addictive drugs like cocaine. This "gateway" is a direct result of cannabis prohibition.
Robert Sharpe
Policy analyst
Common Sense for Drug Policy
Washington, DC
Congratulations on your editorial on the rethink of our drug policy but your final paragraph is far too weak. It should state that prohibition has totally failed and it is now time to switch to a policy of decriminalisation.
Brian O'Neill
Nottingham
As an occasional user of "soft" drugs in the 1970s, I have some very limited experience of what it's all about, but thankfully I have never been anywhere near the violence and corruption endemic in the supply chain.
Maria Lucia Karam's commentary on drug policy ("This war has failed totally, I've seen the carnage it causes") nearly brought me to tears. Her incisive views should be required reading for all politicians, but more than that, her piece should be the foundation for future global policy.
Neil Shillito
Norwich
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Bioweapons program from 1920s to 1990s
The Soviet Union began a biological weapons program in the 1920s. During World War II, Joseph Stalin was forced to move his biological warfare (BW) operations out of the path of advancing German forces and may have used tularemia against German troops in 1942 near Stalingrad.
By 1960, numerous BW research facilities existed throughout the Soviet Union. Although the USSR also signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Soviets subsequently augmented their biowarfare programs. Over the course of its history, the Soviet program is known to have weaponized and stockpiled the following eleven bio-agents[1] (and to have pursued basic research on many more):
These programs became immense and were conducted at 52 clandestine sites employing over 50,000 people. Annualized production capacity for weaponized smallpox, for example, was 90 to 100 tons. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of these agents were genetically altered to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics. In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin admitted to an offensive bio-weapons program as well as to the true nature of the Sverdlovsk biological weapons accident of 1979, which had resulted in the deaths of at least 64 people. Defecting Soviet bioweaponeers such as Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov confirmed that the program had been massive and still existed. An agreement was signed with the US and UK promising to end bio-weapons programs and convert BW facilities to benevolent purposes, but compliance with the agreement — and the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities — is still mostly undocumented.
History [ edit ]
Pre-World War II [ edit ]
The Soviet BW program began in the 1920s at the Leningrad Military Academy under the control of the state security apparatus, known as the GPU. This occurred despite the fact that the USSR was a signatory to the 1925 Geneva Convention, which banned both chemical and biological weapons.[2]
1928 - Revolutionary Military Council signed a decree about weaponization of typhus. The Leningrad Military academy began cultivating typhus in chicken embryos. Human experimentation occurred with typhus, glanders and melioidosis in the Solovetsky camp.[3] A laboratory on vaccine and serum research was also established near Moscow in 1928, within the Military Chemical Agency. This laboratory was turned into the Red Army's Scientific Research Institute of Microbiology in 1933.[4]
World War II [ edit ]
During World War II, Stalin was forced to move his BW operations out of the path of advancing German forces[5]
1941: Soviet bioweapons facilities are transferred to the city of Kirov.
1942: Alleged use of tularemia against German troops.[3][6]
Tularemia was allegedly used against German troops in 1942 near Stalingrad.[3] Around 10,000 cases of tularemia had been reported in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1943. However, the number of cases jumped to more than 100,000 in the year of the Stalingrad outbreak. German Panzer troops fell ill in such significant numbers during the late summer of 1942 that the German military campaign came to a temporary halt. German soldiers became ill with the rare pulmonary form of tularemia, which may indicate the use of an aerosol biological weapon (the ordinary transmission pathway is through ticks and rodents). According to Kenneth Alibek, the used tularemia weapon had been developed in the Kirov military facility.[3] It was suggested by some, however, that the outbreak might have been of natural origin, since a pulmonary form of tularemia has also been noted in natural outbreaks in Martha's Vineyard in 2000.[6]
In the Soviet Union, the outbreak at Stalingrad was described as a natural outbreak. Crops were left in the field during the German offensive and the rodent population swelled, putting many inhabitants into contact with infected rodents. In some parts of the Stalingrad Oblast, as many as 75% of the inhabitants became infected. It was also noted that before the war, there was a so-called "threshing tularemia", caused by people inhaling infected dusts soiled by rodents while threshing grain.[7]
At the conclusion of the war, Soviet troops invading Manchuria captured many Unit 731 Japanese scientists and learned of their extensive human experimentation through captured documents and prisoner interrogations. Emboldened by these discoveries, Stalin put KGB chief Lavrenty Beria in charge of a new BW program.
The Cold War [ edit ]
1946: A biological weapons facility was established in Sverdlovsk.
The first smallpox weapons factory in the Soviet Union was established in 1947 in the city of Zagorsk, close to Moscow.[3] It was produced by injecting small amounts of the virus into chicken eggs. An especially virulent strain (codenamed India-1967 or India-1) was brought from India in 1967 by a special Soviet medical team that was sent to India to help eradicate the virus. The pathogen was manufactured and stockpiled in large quantities throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
1953: The fifteenth directorate of the Red Army takes responsibility for the program.
By 1960, numerous BW research facilities existed throughout the Soviet Union. Although the USSR also signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Soviets subsequently augmented their biowarfare programs. They doubted the United States’ claimed compliance with the BWC, which further motivated their program.[8] The Soviet BW effort became a huge program, comprising various institutions under different ministries along with commercial facilities and collectively known as Biopreparat after 1973. Biopreparat pursued offensive research, development, and production of biological agents under the guise of legitimate civil biotechnology research. It conducted its clandestine activities at 52 sites and employed over 50,000 people. Annualized production capacity for weaponized smallpox, rabies, and typhus, for example, was 90 to 100 tons.[9]
1973: A "civilian" main directorate Biopreparat was founded. Other organizations involved in the design and production of biological weapons were the Soviet Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Health, USSR Academy of Sciences, and KGB.
A production line to manufacture smallpox on an industrial scale was launched in the Vector Institute in 1990.[3] The development of genetically altered strains of smallpox was presumably conducted in the Institute under the leadership of Dr. Sergei Netyosov in the mid-1990s, according to Kenneth Alibek.[3] (aka Kanatjan Alibekov).
It has been reported that Russia made smallpox available to Iraq in the beginning of the 1990s.[10]
Post-BWC developments [ edit ]
The Soviet Union continued the development and mass production of offensive biological weapons, despite having signed the 1972 BWC. The development and production were conducted by a main directorate ("Biopreparat") along with the Soviet Ministry of Defense, the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture, the Soviet Ministry of Health, the USSR Academy of Sciences, the KGB, and other state organizations.
In the 1980s, the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture successfully developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and psittacosis to kill chicken. These agents were prepared to be sprayed down from tanks attached to airplanes over hundreds of miles. The secret program was code-named "Ecology".[3]
The post-Soviet era [ edit ]
In the 1990s, the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, admitted to an offensive bio-weapons program as well as to the true nature of the Sverdlovsk biological weapons accident of 1979, which had resulted in the deaths of at least 64 people.[11] Soviet defectors, including Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov, the first deputy chief of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992, confirmed that the program had been massive and that it still existed.[12] In September 1992, Russia signed an agreement with the United States and Great Britain promising to end its bio-weapons program and to convert its facilities for benevolent scientific and medical purposes.[13]
Compliance with the agreement, as well as the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities, is still mostly undocumented.[14] Leitenberg and Zilinskas, in The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (2012), state flatly that "In March 1992...Yeltsin acknowledged the existence of an illegal BW program in the former Soviet Union and ordered it to be dissolved. His decree was, however, not obeyed."[15] They conclude that "In hindsight, we know that with the ultimate failure of the... [negotiations] process and the continued Russian refusal to open the... facilities to the present day, neither the Yeltsin or Putin administrations ever carried out 'a visible campaign to dismantle once and for all' the residual elements of the Soviet BW program".[16]
1990-1999: Specimens of deadly bacteria and viruses were stolen from western laboratories and delivered by Aeroflot planes to support the Russian biological weapons program. At least one of the pilots was a Russian Foreign Intelligence Service officer".[17] At least two agents died, presumably from the transported pathogens[17]
2000-2009: The academician, "A.S.", proposed a new biological warfare program, called the "Biological Shield of Russia" to president Vladimir Putin. The program reportedly includes institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences from Pushchino[4]
List of Soviet/Russian BW institutions, programs and projects [ edit ]
Notable bio-agent outbreaks and accidents [ edit ]
Smallpox [ edit ]
An outbreak of weaponized smallpox occurred during testing in 1971. General Prof. Peter Burgasov, former Chief Sanitary Physician of the Soviet Army, and a senior researcher within the program of biological weapons described this incident:
“On Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea, the strongest formulations of smallpox were tested. Suddenly, I was informed that there were mysterious cases of mortalities in Aralsk. A research ship of the Aral fleet had come within 15 km from the island (it was forbidden to come any closer than 40 km). The lab technician of this ship took samples of plankton twice a day from the top deck. The smallpox formulation— 400 gr. of which was exploded on the island—”got her”, and she became infected. After returning home to Aralsk, she infected several people, including children. All of them died. I suspected the reason for this and called the General Chief of Staff at the Ministry of Defense and requested to forbid the Alma-Ata train from stopping in Aralsk. As a result, an epidemic throughout the country was prevented. I called Andropov, who at that time was the Chief of the KGB, and informed him of the unique formulation of smallpox obtained on Vozrozhdeniya Island.”[10][18]
Anthrax [ edit ]
Spores of weaponized anthrax were accidentally released from a military facility near the city of Sverdlovsk in 1979. The death toll was at least 105, but no one knows the exact number, because all hospital records and other evidence were destroyed by the KGB, according to former Biopreparat deputy director Kenneth Alibek.[3]
Marburg virus [ edit ]
The Soviet Union reportedly had a large biological weapons program enhancing the usefulness of the Marburg virus. The development was conducted in Vector Institute under the leadership of Dr. Ustinov who was accidentally killed by the virus. The samples of Marburg taken from Ustinov's organs were more powerful than the original strain. The new strain, called "Variant U", had been successfully weaponized and approved by the Soviet Ministry of Defense in 1990.[3]
List of Soviet/Russian bioweaponeers [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
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Among my emails Wednesday morning, out of the blue, was one from Lance Armstrong.
Riles, I'm sorry.
All I can say for now but also the most heartfelt thing too. Two very important words.
L
And my first thought was ... "Two words? That's it?"
Two words? For 14 years of defending a man? And in the end, being made to look like a chump?
Wrote it, said it, tweeted it: "He's clean." Put it in columns, said it on radio, said it on TV. Staked my reputation on it.
"Never failed a drug test," I'd always point out. "Most tested athlete in the world. Tested maybe 500 times. Never flunked one."
Why? Because Armstrong always told me he was clean.
On the record. Off the record. Every kind of record. In Colorado. In Texas. In France. On team buses. In cars. On cell phones.
I'd sit there with him, in some Tour de France hotel room while he was getting his daily postrace massage. And we'd talk through the hole in the table about how he stared down this guy or that guy, how he'd fooled Jan Ullrich on the torturous Alpe d'Huez into thinking he was gassed and then suddenly sprinted away to win. How he ordered chase packs from the center of the peloton and reeled in all the pretenders.
And then I'd bring up whatever latest charge was levied against him. "There's this former teammate who says he heard you tell doctors you doped." "There's this former assistant back in Austin who says you cheated." "There's this assistant they say they caught disposing of your drug paraphernalia."
And every time -- every single time -- he'd push himself up on his elbows and his face would be red and he'd stare at me like I'd just shot his dog and give me some very well-delivered explanation involving a few dozen F words, a painting of the accuser as a wronged employee seeking revenge, and how lawsuits were forthcoming.
And when my own reporting would produce no proof, I'd be convinced. I'd go out there and continue polishing a legend that turned out to be plated in fool's gold.
Even after he retired, the hits just kept coming. A London Times report. A Daniel Coyne book. A U.S. federal investigation. All liars and thieves, he'd snarl.
I remember one time we talked on the phone for half an hour, all off the record, at his insistence, and I asked him three times, "Just tell me. Straight up. Did you do any of this stuff?"
"No! I didn't do s---!"
And the whole time he was lying. Right in my earpiece. Knowing that I'd hang up and go back out there and spread the fertilizer around some more.
And now, just like that, it's all flipped. Thursday and Friday night we'll see him look right into the face of Oprah Winfrey and tell her just the opposite. He'll tell her, she says, that he doped to win.
Armstrong discusses his cycling career with Oprah Winfrey on Monday January 14, 2013. George Burns/Oprah Winfrey Network/Getty Images
I get it. He's ruined. He's lost every single sponsor. Nearly every close teammate has turned on him. All seven Tour de France titles have been stripped. He could owe millions. He might be in a hot kettle with the feds. Even the future he planned for himself -- triathlons and mountain biking -- have been snatched away. He's banned from those for life.
So I get it. The road to redemption goes through Oprah, where he'll finally say those two very important words, "I'm sorry," and hope the USADA will cut the ban from lifetime to the minimum eight years.
But here's the thing. When he says he's sorry now, how do we know he's not still lying? How do we know it's not just another great performance by the all-time leader in them?
And I guess I should let it go, but I keep thinking how hard he used me. Made me look like a sap. Made me carry his dirty water and I didn't even know it.
Look, I've been fooled before. I believed Mark McGwire was hitting those home runs all on his own natural gifts. I believed Joe Paterno couldn't possibly cover up something so grisly as child molestation. I bought Manti Te'o's girlfriend story. But those people never looked me square in the pupils and spit.
It's partially my fault. I let myself admire him. Let myself admire what he'd done with his life, admire the way he'd not only beaten his own cancer but was trying to help others beat it. When my sister was diagnosed, she read his book and got inspired. And I felt some pride in that. I let it get personal. And now I know he was living a lie and I was helping him live it.
I didn't realize that behind those blues was a bully, a coercer, a man who threatened people who once worked for and with him. The Andreus. Emma O'Reilly. Tyler Hamilton. Armstrong was strong-arming people in the morning, and filing lawsuits and op-ed pieces in the afternoon. We'd talk and his voice would get furious. And I'd believe him.
And all along, the whole time, he was acting, just like he had with Ullrich that day. So now the chase pack has reeled in Lance Armstrong, and he is busted and he's apologizing to those he conned.
I guess I should forgive him. I guess I should give him credit for putting himself through worldwide shame. I guess I should thank him for finally admitting his whole magnificent castle was built on sand and syringes and suckers like me. But I'm not quite ready. Give me 14 years, maybe.
You're sorry, Lance? No, I'm the one who's sorry.
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Care to take a guess at the fastest-growing religious belief in the United States over the past 20 years?
The proliferation of mega-churches might indicate that non-denominational Protestant evangelical Christianity is the answer, but it�s not. In fact, that group is shrinking and now represents fewer than half of Americans for the first time. It�s not Catholicism, or Mormonism, or even Islam either.
It�s None of the Above.
In 1990, about 7 percent of Americans indicated that they had no religious affiliation, according to a study last year by the University of California at Berkeley. By 2013, that figure had risen to about 20 percent.
Just to clarify, that figure doesn�t mean one out of every five people in this country had up and gone atheist. But it does indicate that a whole lot of people have become untethered from mainstream Christianity over the past two decades.
And it�s fast appearing that some of Christianity�s biggest boosters are to blame for its decline.
The alliance between Christianity and conservative politics is now so pervasive that it�s difficult to believe there was a time the two entities weren�t linked.
In fact, the first U.S. president to publicly admit having been a �born-again Christian� was one James Earl Carter, who was, politically speaking, more liberal than the so-called �Kenyan Muslim radical socialist� currently occupying the White House.
But by 1980, U.S. Christian religious leaders had fully thrown in with the Republican political right. And the arrangement has worked out pretty well for both sides ever since. At least until now.
In the past year, a whole host of polls and studies, including a poll of millennials, the hip new term to describe people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, done last month by Pew Research Center, indicates that the culture war � particularly opposition to marriage equality and abortion � is now helping neither Republicans nor Christians.
The math is simple, and dire, for both sides of that now-traditional alliance. Christians who embrace the Republican platform are migrating to the other side of the grass. Replacing them are a wave of millennials who are OK with gay marriage, pro-choice and in favor of marijuana legalization.
Only 10 years ago, President George W. Bush won his re-election campaign largely because his campaign strategists got anti-gay-marriage referenda placed on the ballots in key states, chiefly Ohio, which got Christians out to the polls. They stuck around long enough to vote for the president.
By 2012, President Barack Obama could win re-election in no small part because of his support for marriage equality.
The poll last month clearly indicated a shift that isn�t favorable to Republicans. The American electorate is moving leftward so quickly that, by 2020, all the gerrymandering and voter obstruction in the world won't keep Democrats from taking control of the executive and legislative branches of government.
For Christians, the signs might be even worse. Millennials � at least those who have set foot in churches � have lived their entire lives in a religious climate that links the faith inextricably with social conservatism.
From the perspective of young people, the world itself has conspired to repudiate the principles with which Christianity has identified itself for more than 30 years. And as those 20- and 30-somethings accept equal rights for homosexuals, women, evolution and the reality of climate change, it erodes the credibility of religion.
Christians and Republicans still have one thing in common � the social conservatives, at least in terms of numbers, still control both entities.
The problem facing both entities is that, it�s no longer a long-term business plan likely to yield success for either one.
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In late January, Human Rights Watch released a 196-page report “Capitol Offense: Police Mishandling of Sexual Assault Cases in the District of Columbia,” concluding that in many sexual assault cases, Washington police did not file incident reports, which are required to proceed with an investigation, or misclassified serious sexual assaults as lesser or other crimes. Human Rights Watch also found that the police presented cases to prosecutors for warrants that were so inadequately investigated that prosecutors had little choice but to refuse them and that procedural formalities were used to close cases with only minimal investigation. Below, Eleanor Gourley tells her story.
I always felt that if I was the victim of a crime that the police would be there for me.
The May 2011 night I was assaulted, the police were mostly helpful and kind. One officer came to the hospital with me and stayed by my bed for about an hour, talking to me because I was so nervous and alone. My attacker had stabbed me with a box cutter and told me he would kill me if I did not do as he asked. He took my cell phone, so I couldn’t call anyone. The officer let me use his phone.
I was shaken—not just because I’d been stabbed and was bleeding, but because I had just fought off a rapist. I tried to give him my iPod, I told him I had $40 in cash, I told him we could go to an ATM and I would withdraw money for him.
"Please take my money," I said, already bleeding from the wound on my hand. But he didn’t. He forced me into the alley with the box cutter at my throat. He started to push me against the wall. But when he pulled the weapon away from my throat for a moment, I grabbed his wrist and disarmed him.
One month later, I got the police report from the police station. What the police wrote was very different from what I told them that terrible night. The report made no mention of the fact that I told them the assailant was trying to rape me. Instead, they diminished my experience by classifying my crime as a “robbery with arms,” and not as the attempted sexual assault I know it was.
The police said all he was trying to do was steal from me. That was not, in any way, what I had reported to them. I had tried to give him my money, but he had insisted on dragging me to the alley. To me, it was clear that he wasn’t just trying to take my purse. The attacker ripped my dress. He forced me into an alley and cut me three times. He wouldn’t take my money.
Everything in my body that night told me that I was going to be raped. After I got the box cutter away, I screamed, ‘Rape!’ and a man came running into the alley. I remember when I was being loaded into the ambulance, the police asked him why he came into the alley and he said, ‘I heard a woman screaming “rape.” ’ The first thing I said to my sister was, ‘He was trying to rape me.’ I told the police officers at the scene of the crime that he had been trying to rape me. I told the EMS, nurses, and doctor that it was an attempted rape.
In the immediate aftermath of the assault, I didn’t really feel like a victim. After all, I got the weapon away from him. I saved myself. And then people came and they helped save me.
I only started to feel like a victim because of my interactions with the police in the weeks and months after the assault.
Over time, it became increasingly clear that the police didn’t believe me. The first question the police photographer who met me at the hospital asked was “Why didn’t you just give him your purse?” I was too taken aback to respond but after that first night, whenever I spoke to the police they made me feel ashamed. They again tried to make me question myself and what happened—and they made me feel like I was making something up, when all I was trying to do was tell them what happened so that it could be reported accurately and so that it wouldn’t happen again.
I learned from Human Rights Watch’s report that I am not alone, and that other victims of sexual assault in Washington, D.C. are not always getting the effective response they deserve from our Metropolitan Police Department.
Yet the MPD continues to downplay these concerns, going so far as to mischaracterize the facts of my case. In response to Human Rights Watch’s report, Chief Cathy Lanier told The Washington Post that there was no evidence of sexual assault in my case and that “we have to have the elements of a crime.” Yet attempted sexual assaults rarely have witnesses. If they don’t believe me, bloodied and in a torn dress, with two witnesses who heard me cry rape, whom do they believe?
Why aren’t these cases taken seriously? Maybe it's because until recently the police department gave its officers and detectives no specialized training in sexual assault or in how to interview traumatized victims, according to Human Rights Watch. Maybe it has to do with a departmental culture that downplays sexual assaults—an attitude that seems to start at the top. Whatever the reasons, the report shows that other survivors who tried to report rape felt as I did and do—that police simply did not take them seriously.
The kinds of problems highlighted by Human Rights Watch are not new; they've been exposed before, in a 2008 civil lawsuit against the Metropolitan Police Department. Police Chief Cathy Lanier claims that the issues have "long-since been addressed" through policy reforms, but the Human Rights Watch findings, and my own experience, suggest otherwise. The chief says she has made investigating sexual assault reports a top priority and has asked the Department of Justice to look into police practices. This is a positive step, but an investigation—and there's no guarantee the DOJ will agree to do one—would take at least a year, and the problems identified need to be tackled without delay.
My attacker was never caught. It upsets me to think that he may attack others. When a rape occurred in the same alley eight months later, I worried that it might be the same perpetrator. I wrote to Chief Lanier in 2011 to say it is important that a failed rape be reported accurately so that members of my community know the truth about the crimes committed on their streets and so that police can better protect and serve all citizens. That's why I believe it's so important to bring the MPD under external oversight, to ensure that every single report of sexual assault is documented and thoroughly investigated, and that every victim is treated with respect and compassion.
Now I know many women in the nation’s capital are left feeling confused, disrespected, and even victimized from their interactions with police. We need a criminal justice system that doesn’t diminish crimes, fail to prosecute, and question the credibility of women who ask for help.
Above all, we should support those who have the courage to come forward, and never make survivors of sexual assault feel ashamed when reporting a crime.
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Talk radio host Laura Ingraham took President Barack Obama to task on Fox News’ “The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson” for bringing up the Crusades and the Inquisition during the National Prayer Breakfast, an act she said came out of “malicious ignorance.” (VIDEO: Obama At Prayer Breakfast: ‘People Committed Terrible Deeds In The Name of Christ’)
INGRAHAM: …[W]e can’t be on our high horse, he said, and look at ISIS or what’s happening in the world as if it’s only happening there. And he harkened back, which I thought was pretty interesting, back to the Inquisitions. He went back 500 years to the Inquisition and the Crusades, with some malicious ignorance I think, about what really happened then.
But it goes back to what we talked about before, Gretchen. The president doesn’t seem content to just say, ‘ISIS is evil. We must marshal a coalition that’s meaningful, not just a coalition in name only, but that’s meaningful to stamp it out.’ He won’t say that.
CARLSON: Because he wanted to bring Christianity into the fight.
INGRAHAM: Yeah, it’s ‘the Christians are evil, too!’
…
INGRAHAM: Are the Spanish rulers still burning heretics? Are they still executing them? No. Civilization has advanced. The problem is, in the Inquisition, let’s not forget, that was a defense against what at the time Christendom and Europe thought were the death cult of Islam. That’s why the Crusades actually began; it was a defensive move to protect Europe.
But that being said, we have evolved. And sorry, this Islamic jihadist movement is regressing. So the president can just say that, but instead, he has to lecture us. It’s something in his DNA; he always has to lecture America about our evil past.
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Mar 10, 2013 Long tones
Every brass player has heard of the idea how important long tone practice is, and how the old time players relied it. My question is; what kind of long tones are we talking about? The kind where you take a breath and squeeze out a note to save air for later on? Just playing a long tone doesn't do anything unless it's the right kind. What's the right kind? Think of a large beach ball filled to maximum capacity. If the plug is removed the air escapes in a sudden rush because of the pressure inside and the elasticity of the ball. The ball is made of a material that will easily expand when filled. It is not necessary for the outside of the ball to be contracted by squeezing it. The elasticity and the pressure inside is more than enough to expel the air in a steady, even manner. That's the same idea a brass player needs to produce a long tone. The lungs are filled to capacity, the embouchure seals at the moment of exit, the tongue recedes and the pressure behind the embouchure propels the air forward passed the lips, causing them to vibrate as it passes. No other action is required from the rest of the body. Just as the ball needed no squeeze from the outside to release the air, the embouchure needs no push from the torso to release the air.
The best way to practice long tones, and by best I mean produce the most beautiful sound, is to begin each note with a bell-like start in order to relax as quickly as possible. The bell-like shape of the note will start the air fast enough where no pushing is necessary from the body. The relaxation after the start of the note will allow for maximum resonance. In a sense the torso becomes the concert hall: if the diaphragm muscles are engaged and tight, the concert hall will sound small and dead. If the diaphragm muscles are relaxed the concert hall will sound spacious and reverberant.
Long tones should be practiced at all dynamics, starting with a forte dynamic and always diminuendoing in a long steady manner as the lungs naturally empty without any attempt to push air out. In my experience everyone starts the air in too slow a manner to be able to relax quickly enough to get the best sound. You should feel like you are spitting the air a long distance. Then the only other action required is keeping the embouchure perfectly still by having a perfect seal against the mouthpiece. This way all physical action is accomplished from the chin up, which is the only way to get optimum resonance. Your only responsibility once the air is instantly dispatched is to make sure the air is released in an even manner from the lungs naturally deflating without an ounce of pushing from the body. This will result in a long even diminuendo and the best sound you can produce. When a sustained dynamic is called for this is accomplished by the muscles of the rib cage and not the diaphragm. Long tones should be practiced by the method described above with no sustained dynamic, because the sound will be of superior quality and that is the aim of long tone practice, and not simply to hold notes steady. That quality of sound will hopefully be the model later for all types of note shapes.
Now for the most important thing I can impart to you in this article. Everyone can move air fast when playing the louder dynamics, (although most people even then don't move it fast enough) but as soon as the dynamic is reduced the air will automatically slow down, causing the sound to change, lose focus and projection. The way to think about the sound in the softer dynamics is to imagine a forte dynamic that has been moved a distance away. In other words it is the same sound, same clarity, same intensity and focus, just farther away. The only way to achieve this is to not slow down the air stream when playing soft. Less air will be used at the softer dynamics but it must move at the same speed to get the same sound as in the louder dynamics. This can be done by narrowing the aperture of the embouchure so that the air stream is concentrated into a smaller area causing it to move faster. Think of long tones as ringing a big bell and then a small bell. The small bell never rings slower; in fact it appears to ring quicker, and that's the feeling we need to keep in mind when changing dynamics from loud to soft.
This article has been translated into Polish by Lukasz Michalski.
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Browse > Home Libs & Trads / A Melancholy Pope Michael Still Waiting For Panama Delegates, Welcoming Committee To Pick Him Up From Airport
A Melancholy Pope Michael Still Waiting For Panama Delegates, Welcoming Committee To Pick Him Up From Airport
Pope Michael landed in Panama for the first time on Tuesday, launching a six-day visit that will highlight his love for the Tridentine Mass and his desire to tackle the Church’s most significant political controversies.
In an unprecedented welcome for a Church dignitary, the manager at the airport’s Orange Julius, his wife, and their daughters, along with 17-year-old Sbarro cashier and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, traveled to Gate C-17 from the food court to greet the pontiff.
“I saw that one documentary about him…that was funny, so when I heard he was here, I totally had to come take a selfie with him to post,” Sbarro cashier Timmy Ryland said before telling EOTT that the 65-year-old conclavist kept asking “weird questions” like whether [Ryland] and his girlfriend were Panama dignitaries arriving from the capital to pick him up for “the big event.”
“He kept lifting his hand to my face to kiss his ring and I was like, umm…eww, no,” Rylands on-again, off-again girlfriend Taylor Bellman reported.
On the plane to Panama, Michael held an 80-minute press conference with fellow passengers, all of whom he mistook to be members of the press, telling them that he was happy to make his first Panama, and asked everyone to pray for him, before one passenger reportedly shouted at him to “shut up, already.”
After a brief private meeting with the manager of Orange Julius at Luggage Claim, Pope Michael climbed into a simple black Fiat hatchback with an Uber sticker on the window, much in keeping with his desire to live a humble life as he does in Kansas with his mother and the other handful of people that elected him Pope in 1990.
“Yeah, I called him an Uber,” Orange Julius manager Barry Minkler told EOTT. “I felt bad. The guy’s been sitting here waiting for some sort of dignitary or welcoming committee to come pick him up. So I told Timmy over at SBarro that we should go greet him and send him on his way.”
At press time, the Uber driver who picked up Pope Michael from the airport is asking him to stop getting out of the car at every red light to greet and bless people on the street.
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**Hello, everyone! It's time for every champion to have recalls, and it's time for it to hit PBE!** In case you haven't heard, we're repurposing *existing animations* to give **every champion** in the game a recall! You can read more about it [here](http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/story-art/IngzHFRs-adding-simple-recalls-to-older-champs)! As you may suspect, this change affects a -lot- of different champions, so the testing here will be a bit broad. The bugs on this should be rather limited, probably just a skin missing an animation at worst. Feedback is what is really useful, so here are some questions to think about. * Were you excited to see your champion now has a recall? * Does the recall match your expectation? * Does it meet these rules for the project? >*Ruuuuruuus:* * Only use existing animations. No new animations will be created. * Absolutely no gameplay animations (spells, attacks, anything). * Absolutely no stealing animations from other skins. * Avoid breaking the recall ring (don't have the champion move too far away). * Look for Champion Personality moments (ie. Amumu crying). * The animation does not need to be 8s long (opt to return to Idle1 for shorter animations). * Trend towards Idle variants (they're seen far less in the game, as you're often not standing still). * Trend away from dances - dancing is already something you do for the animation, so we don't want to double up unless it really fits the champion, or there are no other options. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and I hope you have a nice day. :D --- List Format: >[Champ] >[Animation(s) used] >[Skins affected] {{champion:103}} Ahri Idle3 Base, Dynasty, Midnight, Foxfire, Academy {{champion:84}} Akali Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Stinger, Crimson, All-Star, Nurse, Blood Moon, Sashimi {{champion:12}} Alistar Idle4 > Idle1 Base, Black, Golden, Matador, Longhorn, Unchained, Sweeper, Marauder {{champion:32}} Amumu Taunt > Idle1 Base, Pharaoh, Vancouver, Emumu, Prom King, Sad Robot, Little Knight, Regifted {{champion:34}} Anivia Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Team Spirit, Bird of Prey, Noxus Hunter, Hextech, Prehistoric {{champion:22}} Ashe Idle5 > Idle1 Base, Freljord, Sherwood, Woad, Queen, Amethyst, Marauder {{champion:53}} Blitzcrank Dance Base, Rusty, Goalkeeper, Boom Boom, Customs, Definitely Not, iBlitz {{champion:63}} Brand Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Apocalyptic, Vandal, Cryocore {{champion:51}} Caitlyn Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Resistance, Sheriff, Safari, Arctic, Officer {{champion:69}} Cassiopeia Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Desperada, Siren, Mythic {{champion:31}} Cho'Gath Idle2 > Taunt > Idle1 Base, Nightmare, Gentleman, Loch Ness, Jurassic, Prehistoric {{champion:42}} Corki Idle2 Base, UFO, Toboggan, Red Baron, Hot Rod, Urfrider {{champion:36}} Dr. Mundo Dance > Taunt > Idle1 Base, Toxic, Mundoverse, Corporate, Mundo Mundo, Executioner, Rageborn, TPA {{champion:28}} Evelynn Laugh > Taunt > Idle1 Base, Shadow, Masquerade, Tango, Safecracker {{champion:81}} Ezreal Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Nottingham, Striker, Frosted, Explorer, TPA, Debonair, Ace of Spades {{champion:9}} Fiddlesticks Idle3 > Laugh > Idle1 Base, Spectral, Union Jack, Bandito, Pumpkin Head, Fiddle Me, Surprise {{champion:114}} Fiora Taunt > Laugh > Idle1 Base, Royal Guard, Nightraven, Headmistress {{champion:105}} Fizz Idle4 > Idle1 Base, Atlantean, Tundra, Fisherman {{champion:3}} Galio Idle2 Base, Enchanted, Hextech, Commando, Debonair, Gatekeeper {{champion:79}} Gragas Idle2 > Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Scuba, Hillbilly, Santa, Esquire, Vandal, Superfan, Fnatic, Caskbreaker {{champion:104}} Graves Idle2 Base, Hired Gun, Jailbreak, Mafia, Riot, Cutthroat {{champion:120}} Hecarim Taunt > Idle1 Base, Blood Knight, Reaper, Headless, Worldbreaker {{champion:39}} Irelia Dance Base, Nightblade, Aviator, Infiltrator, Frostblade, Lotus {{champion:40}} Janna Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Temptest, Hextech, Frost Queen, Victorious, Fnatic {{champion:59}} Jarvan IV Idle4 Base, Commando, Dragonslayer, Darkforge, Victorious, Warring Kingdoms, Fnatic {{champion:24}} Jax Idle4 > Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Mighty, Vandal, Angler, PAX, Jaximus, Temple, Nemesis, SKT, Warden {{champion:38}} Kassadin Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Festival, Deep One, Pre-Void, Harbinger {{champion:10}} Kayle Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Silver, Viridian, Unmasked, Battleborn, Judgment, Iron Inquisitor {{champion:85}} Kennen Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Deadly, Swap Master, Karate, M.D., Arctic Ops {{champion:96}} Kog'Maw Idle2 > Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Caterpillar, Sonoran, Monarch, Reindeer, Lion Dance, Deep Sea, Jurassic {{champion:7}} Leblanc Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Wicked, Prestigious, Mistletoe {{champion:64}} Lee Sin Taunt > Idle1 Base, Traditional, Acolyte, Dragon Fist, SKT {{champion:89}} Leona Taunt > Idle1 Base, Valkyrie, Defender, Iron Solari, Barbecue {{champion:117}} Lulu Idle4 Base, Bittersweet, Wicked, Dragon Trainer {{champion:99}} Lux Idle4 > Idle1 Base, Sorceress, Spellthief, Commando, Imperial {{champion:54}} Malphite Taunt > Laugh > Idle1 Base, Shamrock, Coral Reef, Marble, Obsidian, Glacial {{champion:90}} Malzahar Idle3 > Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Vizier, Shadow Prince, Djinn, Overlord {{champion:57}} Maokai Idle2 Base, Charred, Totemic, Festive, Haunted, Goalkeeper {{champion:21}} Miss Fortune Idle3 > Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Cowgirl, Waterloo, Secret Agent, Candy Cane, Road Warrior, Mafia {{champion:82}} Mordekaiser Attack3 > Laugh > Idle1 Base, Dragon Knight, Infernal, Pentakill, Lord, King of Clubs {{champion:25}} Morgana Dance Base, Exiled, Sinful, Blade Mistress, Blackthorn {{champion:111}} Nautilus Idle4 Base, Abyssal, Subterranean, Astro, Warden, Worldbreaker {{champion:56}} Nocturne Idle3 > Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Frozen, Void, Ravager, Haunting, Revenant {{champion:20}} Nunu Dance Base, Sasquatch, Workshop, Grungy, Nunu Bot, Demolisher, TPA {{champion:2}} Olaf Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Forsaken, Glacial, Brolaf, Pentakill, Maurader, Butcher {{champion:61}} Orianna Taunt > Idle1 Base, Gothic, Sewn Chaos, Bladecraft, TPA {{champion:80}} Pantheon Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Myrmidon, Ruthless, Perseus, Full Metal, Glaive Warrior {{champion:33}} Rammus Taunt > Idle1 Base, King, Chrome, Molten, Freljord, Ninja, Full Metal {{champion:58}} Renekton Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Galactic, Outback, Bloodfury, Rune Wars, Prehistoric {{champion:92}} Riven Idle2 Base, Redeemed, Crimson Elite, Battle Bunny {{champion:68}} Rumble Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Jungle, Bilgerat {{champion:35}} Shaco Laugh > Idle1 Base, Mad Hatter, Royal, Nutcracko, Workshop, Asylum, Masked, Wild Card {{champion:98}} Shen Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Frozen, Yellow Jacket, Surgeon, Blood Moon, Warlord, TPA {{champion:102}} Shyvana Idle4 > Idle1 Base, Ironscale, Boneclaw, Darkflame {{champion:27}} Singed Dance Base, Riot Squad, Hextech, Surfer, Mad Scientist, Augmented, SSW, Black Scourge {{champion:72}} Skarner Idle4 > Idle1 Base, Sandscourge, Earthrune {{champion:37}} Sona Idle2 Base, Muse, Pentakill, Silent Night, Guqin, Arcade {{champion:50}} Swain Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Northern Front, Bilgewater, Tyrant {{champion:91}} Talon Idle4 > Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Renegade, Crimson Elite, Dragonblade, SSW {{champion:17}} Teemo Laugh Base, Happy Elf, Recon, Badger, Astronaught, Cottontail, Super, Panda {{champion:23}} Tryndamere Idle4 Base, Highland, King, Viking, Demonblade, Sultan {{champion:77}} Udyr Taunt > Idle1 Base, Black Belt, Primal {{champion:6}} Urgot Taunt Base, Crabgot, Butcher, Battlecast {{champion:110}} Varus Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Blight Crystal, Arclight, Swiftbolt {{champion:67}} Vayne Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Vindicator, Aristocrat, Dragonslayer, Heartseeker, SKT {{champion:45}} Veigar Idle2 > Taunt > Idle1 Base, White Mage, Curling, Greybeard, Leprechaun, Baron, Superb Villain {{champion:112}} Viktor Idle2 > Laugh > Idle1 Base, Full Machine, Prototype {{champion:8}} Vladimir Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Count, Marquis, Nosferatu, Vandal, Blood Lord, Academy {{champion:106}} Volibear Idle4 > Idle1 Base, Thunder Lord, Northern Storm, Captain, El Rayo {{champion:62}} Wukong Idle4 > Idle2 > Idle1 Base, Volcanic, General, Jade Dragon {{champion:101}} Xerath Idle4 > Idle1 Base, Runeborn, Battlecast, Scorched Earth {{champion:5}} Xin Zhao Idle3 > Idle1 Base, Commando, Imperial, Viscero, Winged Hussar, Warring Kingdoms {{champion:115}} Ziggs Joke Base, Mad Scientist, Major, Pool Party {{champion:26}} Zilean Idle2 Base, Old Saint, Groovy, Shurima, Time Machine
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Police and school officials are not ready to release any information about the “disturbing incident” involving the junior varsity wrestling team on a Norman North High School bus that was reported earlier in the week.
Advertisement Norman North High School students charged with rape given $5,000 bond Court documents say there were two victims, ages 12 and 16 Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Four Norman North High School students have been charged with rape.Garvin County has charged three of the wrestlers as youth offenders and one as an adult in connection with an investigation following an "extremely disturbing report" on a Norman North High School bus. The bus was returning from a wrestling tournament Jan. 9 in Pauls Valley, according to court documents.All four students were wrestlers.Two victims, 12- and 16-year-old boys, were sexually assaulted while on the bus, the documents say. The 12-year-old victim was assaulted a second time after the bus returned to Norman North High School.Tanner Shane Shipman, 18, has been charged with first-degree rape by instrumentation by force and fear and two counts of first-degree rape by instrumentation of a victim under the age of 14, the documents say. The three charges are felony counts.The three minors have been charged with rape by instrumentation (youthful offender) and two counts of rape by instrumentation of a victim under the age of 14.The four students turned themselves in to jail Tuesday, and were each given a $5,000 bond. They have bonded out of jail.An adjunct coach, who was responsible for supervising students on the bus, was dismissed immediately. A second coach has resigned, according to a school district spokesperson.Norman Public Schools Superintendent Joseph Siano released the following statement:“Student safety is a top priority and we followed procedures we have in place that allow us to effectively investigate and take swift action in these situations. We appreciate the individuals who came forward to provide information, the Norman Police Department’s thorough investigation and the quick action by the District Attorney on this incident. We are well-prepared to handle situations like this and have programs in place to support students who experience trauma. And, while we believe the district’s policies regarding student supervision are strong, we continuously evaluate our procedures to ensure they are followed. As we address the inappropriate behavior displayed by several students, we remain committed to supporting the vast majority of our student athletes, who are quality individuals that demonstrate positive behavior and strong character traits.”
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Go ahead and scratch Phoenix Suns head coach Jeff Hornacek off the list of potential candidates to replace Fred Hoiberg at Iowa State.
According to a close source to the situation, Iowa State recently reached out to Hornacek and offered a meeting with athletics director Jamie Pollard and school president Steven Leath.
Hornacek’s camp declined, according to the source, and has no interest in the job.
This matches up with what a separate source told CycloneFanatic.com last week, that Hornacek is not interested in the college game, specifically when it comes to the recruiting side of the job.
Hornacek, whose jersey is retired at Iowa State, has led the Suns to a combined 87-77 record over the last two seasons. He has one year left on his contract with the Suns and has been rumored to have had interest in the Iowa State job over the last couple of weeks.
UPDATE: 2:16 P.M.
— As you can see below in the comments section of the article, Hornacek’s agent, Steve Kauffman, refuted our report.
"We represent Jeff Hornacek. Rarely do I post but I will simply say this story is inaccurate. Jeff loves his alma mater and the facts are simply wrong here," Kauffman wrote. "School knew they (Iowa State) had to request permission in a certain manner from the Phoenix Suns. I do not wish to allocate the blame
as to the parties at fault here. But it’s a shame."
In two follow up phone calls, the well-placed source stood by our earlier report, that Hornacek declined an interview with Iowa State.
I have attempted to call Mr. Kauffman to get that side of the story and have not yet heard back.
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As far as leaks out of new U.S. President Donald Trump's administration go, the saying "when it rains, it pours," might be appropriate.
Last week alone, potentially embarrassing details concerning telephone calls with the Australian Prime Minister and Mexican President, as well as allegations that Trump's Supreme Court nomination process was being stage managed, saw the cold light of day.
Since the tempestuous U.S. election cycle last year, demand for SecureDrop, one of the primary encryption platforms employed by news outlets to securely facilitate leaks has "absolutely exploded," according to Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation which is behind the tool.
"It's hard to name a news organization that has not gotten in touch with us about installing SecureDrop in the past six weeks," Timm told CNBC via e-mail.
The platform, used by the New York Times and the Washington Post among others, is currently subject of the Guardian's pinned tweet and has been adopted by national broadcasters in Canada and Norway.
SecureDrop's growing popularity is representative of a sea change in the media industry, with leak-based and investigative journalism being foregrounded.
Timm described how "the Trump administration has been leaking at a record pace" and "media organizations are much more willing to actually call lies 'lies.'"
By way of explaining the spike in interest in SecureDrop, Timm outlined his view that there was a "general fear that Trump could turn the U.S.' surveillance on the press," alongside unrest bubbling away within the government itself.
According to Timm, SecureDrop faces little other competition in the U.S. The tool is open source, though he detailed that the Freedom of the Press Foundation did "sign large news organizations who can afford it up to support contracts."
Another encryption platform that has seen its popularity jump is Signal, a messaging app which facilitates communication shielded by end-to-end encryption. BuzzFeed and other media outlets reported in early December that daily downloads of the app had increased 400 percent since the U.S. election.
Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Open Whisper Systems which is behind the platform, told CNBC via e-mail that: "The U.S. surveillance infrastructure expanded greatly under Obama, and there are many people who feel uncomfortable or at risk with Trump inheriting control over the largest, most invasive, least accountable surveillance apparatus in history."
Marlinspike did point out that the Trump transition team also used Signal. Like SecureDrop, the software is open source and Marlinspike hoped that such practice would "ideally … just become the new normal." Google, Facebook and its subsidiary Whatsapp also moved to adopt end-to-end encryption last year.
But for Tom Felle, a lecturer in digital journalism at City University in London, the pick up in encryption software is nothing new, and is instead a "trend that has been building in the last eight to nine years" as journalists need to "protect sources and whistleblowers in the digital era."
Commenting on the rocky relationship between the media and the new Trump administration, Felle did add that there was a "worry in newsrooms as to how to cover fake news." He said that while there were "no grave investigations into Trump as yet," the proliferation of leaks coming out of the new government was "an early example of what will be an interesting four years."
Nonetheless, the media's mass employment of encryption software may well contribute to this.
Timm asserted that, "I don't think it's impossible that a combination of leaks, and whistleblowers and investigative journalism eventually lead to the downfall of Trump."
Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook.
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A story written for a collection of short stories from myself and a few friends, available on Amazon here. This was inspired by various articles on digital philosophy, specifically Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram – and also Arthur Clarke’s ‘The Last Question‘
Easier to read PDF available here
The Celestial Search
When Eli had joined the Celestia program two years ago the prospects of discovery were exciting. They were uncovering the very fundamental laws of the universe – getting closer to refining the unified theory to explain all interactions. They had accomplished their goals more than he thought possible in such a short amount of time. Yet all he could think now was how useless that knowledge was – that it would have been better to be ignorant of the universe’s future and grand design. They had discovered everything they could of their closed box – and now the walls were closing in on them.
“You’ll be working with the greatest minds of our time – working on the most fundamental problems of our universe. Unlimited tools at your disposal for research, with technology beyond anything you have ever seen” Edmund Morris had said, pitching the project to Eli before he had joined. Eli was at first reluctant: it would mean leaving his friends and family for months at a time to stay at the remote laboratory – cut off from the outside world and unable to speak to anyone about the research and technology. But he knew he couldn’t refuse – to him it was the Apollo project of his time – more than a hundred years after the Manhattan project and even more significant. The top scientists and engineers from all over the world were being gathered on this project. The immense budget of the project was paid for by the largest nation-states – yet most of the operations had been kept secret from the public. People had known that an extremely high-energy particle accelerator was being built under miles of the desert land, but he doubted that anyone understood the implications and the use of it. The high-energy particle accelerator was a year away from operations when Eli had joined, when he was first introduced to the quantum loop processor.
The output of any significantly large particle accelerator is in petabytes a second, requiring massive server farms to process all the interactions. But when Eli arrived at the Celestia Laboratory there was just a single machine at it’s center, a single server room with the quantum loop processor. The technology of the processor was completely hidden from the modern world – invented almost a generation ago at the labs of Applied Dynamics and kept in complete secrecy from anyone but the highest levels of the military and world government. The reason for this was the implications of the computing power – it made any encryption breakable with just pure brute force, using quantum computer technology to achieve a speed that previous theorists never imagined possible. Quantum algorithms allowed the machine to work on the calculations completely parallel to one another, harnessing all the distinct possibilities represented in a quantum probability wave so as to do many different calculations simultaneously. While the rest of the world advanced with computing technology – continuing Moore’s law doubling in processing speed every two years – only a small group of researchers were able to use the technology, focusing their efforts on bioinformatics and precise particle physics.
Eli had never imagined the implications of such computing power. He had used supercomputers in his past research as a physics graduate – working on small physical models of fundamental particles, but every case he was always held back by the speed and time required of the intense mathematical calculations. His previous simulations of physical interactions would only contain a few particles at a time, modelling the most basic interactions of electrons and photons, since the total computational power required would grow exponentially with every additional particle. But there were no such limits with this processor – he could quickly program a complete simulation of a star with a total amount of fundamental particles and interactions that was just inconceivable.
The quantum loop processor was able to process massive collections of atoms at the scale of solar systems, reaching levels of mass and complexity enough to simulate black holes of infinite density. The problem then became not one of computation but having the exact correct values. Previously in Eli’s work, at the micro subatomic scale, the results of the test seemed to model the real world – electrons behaved as they had been predicted in the standard model, and all the forces interacting were taken account for. But the errors in the simulations were only truly noticeable once you reached the macroscopic – once atoms formed, then molecules, then you could finally see the resulting errors. All simulations were essentially immediately a failure. Any matter brought together larger than an apple would immediately collapse in on itself – higher level atoms were unable to form, and all simulations became a useless cloud of data with no emergent properties. Thus the need for exact correct values for the fundamental forces at work – something that was only possible by measuring particle interactions at extremely high energy levels. Only at these high energies could you actually detect relativistic effects at the quantum scale, and where researchers were able to get the most correct data to find the true universal constants.
The Celestia laboratory’s purpose was not just to analyze the results of the particle accelerator, as Eli had thought before joining – their goal was to create a perfectly accurate digital simulation of reality: a celestial simulation. The research into the correct values for the fundamental forces and the physical simulation software then became complementary. New observational data from the accelerator could then be tested in the simulation, and as the precision of the fundamental constants increased the simulation became more stable and accurate.
Two years after Eli joined the project they reached a point where everything seemed to suddenly fit, where the simulations simply worked. The jigsaw puzzle was suddenly together, all the pieces meeting the precise requirements to function properly.
With this, they had achieved the grand goal of science, Eli thought. They now had the unified theory of everything – a perfectly accurate way to calculate all possible physical interactions. “What we can create, we can understand” was the mantra. Collisions of galaxies and supermassive structures became trivial for the quantum loop processor to simulate, taking only a few seconds to process the massive amount of interactions and possible outcomes over the span of billions of year of simulated time. With the correct data, any physical phenomenon could be simulated and seen. They were then able to analyze all of the small interactions never previously known – deriving the exact formulas for the thermal radiation of black holes to the properties of dark energy.
The next step then became how to simulate the conditions of the big bang, the beginning of the universe and of time. This would not only be the best test of their formulas and calculations, with the most extreme results possible, but it would also allow them to finally completely understand how their own universe was created. They simply needed to correctly model the first conditions – the inflation seed, the infinitesimally small speck of creation. The initial values such as total mass took refining and testing also, as any deviation meant all matter would either stay in a stable position in the singularity or collapse in an instant. Only once they had the exact correct values did the celestial simulation truly start – the explosion and massive instant growth, thousands of years of atom formation, followed by billions of years of stable expansion.
They knew it would not be the same as their universe, even if the first conditions were exact. Due to the uncertainty of quantum mechanics – the fundamental randomness of elementary particles – they could only test one possible universal outcome. With each fundamental interaction between particles the answer wasn’t definite – the final position of those particles was determined by probability. But what they could do was choose one of the possible outcomes – the most probable position at each step – meaning their simulation was only one in the large space of possible universes.
Eli remembered the enthusiasm of that day throughout the laboratory – they felt as if it was their final step, and that that was a reason to celebrate. They never thought about what they could find and how it would affect them – or what it would mean to truly ‘finish’ science, to completely understand everything – for the game they all loved to be over, the eternal truths they had searched for to be found.
The researchers ran the simulation and in almost an instant it was over. The quantum loop processor had taken 0.025 milliseconds to return the calculation – a noticeable lag in time that had never been seen before. They could watch back, looking just at the interactive graphs of the data at a large scale, how the universe had expanded, how the immense amount of particles had formed together to become atoms and soon stars. Eli read the massive values on the display and pictured the results as if he had seen the star in the sky, focusing on a specific star system. There were planets and maybe even earth-like ones, but there was no effort to analyze and search for any possible life at the time. He watched the star’s birth, the forming of the planets around it, and eventually its death, supernovae to form a new solar system.
13.76 billion years of expansion took place, all to collapse in a few thousand years to reform the singularity as it had started.
The excitement of the scientific accomplishment had clouded many of their visions for the first few moments. Only after looking into what had caused the collapse did Eli notice that this was not just a random outcome of the simulation – that the collapse was a fundamental property of the universe itself. That with each simulation they would run the same results would come – that the universe was destined to collapse within a few thousand years of Eli’s own time.
He kept thinking about a possible error in the simulation, that maybe there was a system error that caused the expansion variables to reverse. But as he analyzed further there was no escaping that it was a requirement – that for expansion to happen as it did the collapse was eventual and definite – another necessary piece of their jigsaw puzzle.
________________
“We have to trust in God’s plan, Eli” Edmund said.
Eli and Edmund waited in the room for the other researchers to come in to discuss the simulation’s results. Eli was surprised that he was asked to come, as he was by far one of the youngest researchers on the project, and had barely known any of the other high level researchers coming. He had constantly debated with Edmund since he had arrived at the lab, arguing over every hypothesis until the results were verified, along with philosophy and essentially every subject that came up. It was because of this he and Edmund had a good rapport, able to discuss complex problems with ease. The main point of conflict had been Edmund’s view of ‘god’ – and of his spirituality and Eli’s apparent complete lack thereof.
Edmund had discussed this with Eli in depth before – “God had always been used to explain the unexplainable. Though we now understand the world and its mysteries, that doesn’t take away the fundamental need – to have that first cause, to explain that there something rather than nothing. You can ask if God created the universe then what created God – but that’s exactly why God is needed, to explain the unexplainable.”
For Edmund, God was a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought, one needed to explain what he felt the physical laws could not – consciousness, life, the first cause. While Eli had respect for this view, he had always believed that Edmund took it to an irrational extent – believing in a ‘designer’ universe created for a purpose. He was curious how Edmund could think that now.
“God’s plan?” Eli responded, shaking his head and smirking at Edmund’s ideas. “How could there be a plan to this? How could there be meaning to creating something and destroying it so quickly? Where’s the rationality or justice – where is the point? The universe was ending without a care – simply cause and effect.”
The other researchers walked in as Edmund ended the conversation with a nod – understanding Eli’s argument.
________________
“Simply because it happened in this test doesn’t mean it will happen again – each simulation is different.”
“With each simulation we will get the same results – the same exact date for the contraction” Eli replied, becoming agitated arguing with the older physicist. “It’s not simply a matter of the test anymore – this total mass,” Eli pointed to a number written on the chalkboard behind him, “when reaching this level of expansion, causes the eventual collapse. It is simply math.”
Ten of the researchers argued over the results, as Edmund lead the discussion. Some had gone towards denial, Eli thought, not believing this result was possible and that surely it must have be an error. Others had still viewed this as just a abstract discovery in the simulation – that this wouldn’t apply to our universe the same way.
“It’s true this is only one outcome” Edmund said calmly. “One in the almost infinite supply of possible outcomes. Almost-infinite. What I propose is that we keep running the simulations – we go through all possibilities, one after the other. We run a large number of cosmic simulations parallel to one another, each going through a massive possible space of simulations. With each quantum possibility the simulation would branch off into another one, so that every possible space could be covered and eventually all data is understood. We would have complete access to the outcomes of all possible universes.”
Eli thought about the space of possible particle positions and configurations, realizing that the number of combinations was higher than a googolplex – a number with ten to the hundredths power of digits. It seemed an absurd idea, and a lost cause to him at this point.
________________
“What exactly are you searching for?” Eli argued, confronting Edmund after the discussion. “Even with the power of the quantum loop processor it could take us decades to compute all of those simulations. Hell, more than decades, thousands of years, possibly even longer – longer than we have, or even this universe has. Are you in denial like the rest of them? Believing this collapse and eventual end is just some anomaly?”
“No Eli, I agree with you. Every universe we calculate will have the same fate, just as our own.”
“Then what? Why keep searching?”
Eli was sure he already knew the answer – that Edmund was just unable to accept the reality they had found, that he needed to continue his search as if there is something still to find.
“Because I believe there is an answer waiting to be known. Our search should be for something more” Edmund said, giving a deliberately vague reply. “I don’t just believe we are just modelling reality with our simulations, Eli – I think our simulations exist in the exact same way. Our simulation is simply just a mathematical model of rules just as our own universe functions – there is no distinction.
“We would no longer be just simulating a single universe – but all existence. It’s long been believed that each time a particle’s wave position collapses, each time a quantum outcome is decided upon, that it creates a new universe with each possible quantum state. The ‘Many Worlds’ theory of quantum mechanics. By setting our simulation to do the same, only then would we truly understand all of existence. We would no longer have a simulation of a single universe, but the entire multiverse.
“And just like the simulations we are creating – I believe the multi-verse was created to search for something. That God created this in order to find something – something emergent out of these base first conditions. The multi-verse could simply be a search function through all possible universes – just as we will do. We will find its purpose.”
Eli tried to understand Edmund’s logic. “What could we exactly find that isn’t just more data? That isn’t something I can go ahead and model digitally right now? Everything we try will have the same result – we know it’s fate – the same timed death once the 13.76 billion year time is hit.”
“We simply know the ingredients Eli, the first conditions. We don’t know the result – we have to find it. We have to discover it – find the reason for the multiverse’ grand design.”
“Grand design…” Eli scoffed. “So you still believe the reason the universe exists is to get to a point – to find something? To put the ingredients together to make this grand plan. Then why can’t it just simply exist that way? Why begin with the big bang and search all possible quantum paths towards something, when it can just start with that?”
“Because maybe the solution is unknown to even itself – it just knows the… answer. Just as we create these simulations find something, this multi-verse we inhabit exists for the same reason. It’s trying to find the solution to something, trying to achieve something.
“It could be life Eli, or something alike to life which we can’t even imagine. Life can’t just be created out of nothing – life must emerge. It can’t simply know what life looks like to create it. It’s impossible to start at the end conditions because the calculation to get to the point must be done. Just like for us to find life in our simulations, we must create it.”
Eli tried to understand what Edmund was getting at, giving him a blank stare forcing him to elaborate.
“What I am trying to say Eli, is maybe the answer is already known but the configuration isn’t.” Edmund looked up and closed his eyes, trying to figure out how to explain his reasoning.
“Let me explain something – the question of P equaling NP. Which is an unsolved problem of computer science. What it asks, in simple terms, is whether the computational power required to check if an answer is right equal to the power needed to find it. Most would say that they are not equal – that just because a problem is easy to check if it is right does not mean it is a easy problem to solve. Checking if an answer is correct, and solving a problem, are two very different things. Deciding on a problem’s correctness could be trivial – yet figuring out that solution could be incredibly hard.”
Edmund continued, connecting what seemed like a tangent of the argument to Eli back to the discussion at hand. “So whatever this multi-verse is searching for, whatever its reason, it might know what the answer looks like, but not the solution itself.
“Suppose you were building two large towers by stacking rocks of various sizes, and you needed to make sure the towers are the exact same mass. Now to check the answer to that is very simple – you just add up the rocks and test if they are equal. But to find the correct configuration isn’t that simple – in fact you may need to go through every single possible configuration in order to find the correct one. With 100 rocks, that’s 2 to the power of 100, meaning the amount of configurations is a number with thirty digits, and with each additional rock that number grows exponentially.
“The multi-verse is doing the same – running through every possible configuration searching for something. We must do the same to find it ourselves – whatever it is. Each fundamental particle is a rock, Eli, and the multi-verse is searching for the perfect configuration – the answer.”
________________
“In the extremely rare circumstances where complex life existed – it seemed to be destroyed in almost an instant. A planet hospitable to life was rare, and an environment where complexity flourished and grew was even rarer. In some entire universal simulations there is simply no life to be found beyond the most basic of lifeforms.”
The researcher Dr. Joseph Shea explained this in a completely rational calm tone, simply analyzing the results he had printed out on the page. Only five researchers were in the room now, including Edmund and Eli – most having left once it was clear the eventual collapse was not an anomaly.
Edmund had started the search a year ago, running through what seemed to be an endless amount of possible configurations with no end in near sight. The outside world continued without knowledge of their initial findings, as they had thought would be best – they were not sure of the possible disruption that their results would have. Eli had stayed after many arguments with Edmund, acting as something of a devil’s advocate to what he began to believe also. But now his resignation seemed near. While Edmund had convinced Eli that finding something was possible initially, and inspired him to continue, as the results came in Eli’s faith in Edmund and his search for answers began to fade.
Nothing unknown or unexpected was found. The most complexity in the simulations that emerged was what they had expected – life. To search for life they had analyzed all the current calculated universal configurations for negative entropy – a property unique to life. But nothing was unpredictable, no unknowns were found. Strange life forms came and went – all eventually destroyed as the universes hit their 13.76 billion year timeline.
“We were able to find life that could be considered advanced. Some these lifeforms had language and tool use – and were able to understand themselves and the world around them. Self-awareness in many species seem to be a byproduct of language and abstraction. Once it was needed for a being to talk to others, it seemed to form the concept of self and be able to understand its own position as a conscious being. In one case a complex non-carbon life form existed that was able to understand how to repair and advance itself, evolving its intelligence rapidly through very few generations. But with the last generation it simply stopped progressing – since it was able to modify its own internal pleasure-based nervous system to it’s needs.”
Eli thought of Dr Shea as a zoologist of of some sort – analyzing these strange beings and measuring their progress and evolution. A recurring pattern Eli had quickly noticed after hearing these reports, was that intelligence was in no way the best path for many species. Brute force and strength would normally win, while too great of intelligence would lead to too much abstraction. Once a species begins to question itself, begins to realize its own subjective experience, then it loses the ability to fight as it had before. If the more advanced life simply died as easily as the rest, Eli thought, then life could not be the answer they were searching for.
“Tools use was prominent in species and much more frequent than complex language. But with this came self destruction and harm. With greater advance of tool use intelligence meant greater conquering of the environment and power in individuals rather than groups – leading to many of the species’ own self destruction, or even destruction of their home planet. With language and abstraction this became even more prevalent. With one species that could be considered close to humans – carbon life form, complex society with empathy, emotion, and art – it too simply destroyed itself and its environment once it reached a significant state of technology.”
The researchers were now able to watch as life flourished in their simulations, only to die off or never reach a state of significant complexity.
Eli could render the earth-like habitable planets on his office’s holographic screen – watching the entire time span of the planet’s life in only a few moments. In every case no matter how unique the species was, the eventual result was the same. Even if the species was in a state of equilibrium in their environment, even if they could last billions and billions of years, the final 13.76 point hit and it would all end. Civilizations would rise and crumble in an instant, as the weather would change, the environment would become hostile, and other species would rise.
“Can you see how wrong we are now, Edmund?” Eli said, interrupting the report. “How could this universe’s purpose be life, when it was so hostile against it? When it was so uncaring and unlikely. Life it seems was just a hiccup, a random fluctuation of still matter so easily fixed and replaced. A by-product that quickly solved itself.”
“Our search isn’t nearly complete, Eli” Shea argued.
“Will it truly ever be ‘complete’? Definitely not in our lifetimes, and very unlikely before the end of it all. What are you expecting to find? What will be your destination?” Eli directed his speech at Edmund. “Even if we find life as advanced as man it will still have the same fate – we will still be just an observer to its eventual death. Self-aware monkeys find self aware pelecypods! How is that a noble goal? What could another being teach us, or help us in any way? Our destiny is known. The Celestia program wasn’t about finding life – it was about finding the universal constants and we have done that. We are simply continuing this search because we all know there is nothing left to find. This program is over – we should now try to go back to the ignorance we had before. What the fuck does it really matter what we find now?” Eli suddenly burst out, adding emotion to what were usually his cold and calculated answers. “It all ends! That’s the result, no matter where we look it’s all going to be the exact same. We can run through an almost infinite number of different simulations all we want, nothing will change that. This program should have never existed, we were never meant to have the knowledge we have now. If our universe has no meaning we should have never found out, we should never had known. Just as if there was no light in the universe it would have been better to not have eyes – to not know it was dark, dark would be without meaning.”
Eli continued as the others stayed silent. “After its glorious few billion years of existence not even a memory will remain of all this. No tears will be shed, no great art painted in its honour – it’ll simply be gone. We’ve been part of the infinitely many iterations of the multi-verse exploding and collapsing in on itself, just as we were one of the trillions of planets in the universe, just as we were one of the trillions to the power of hundreds of possible outcomes. With the illusion of importance and meaning coming from us being lost in it. But both ways we look, from the macro to the micro, we see more how irrelevant we are. Lost in the infinite chaos. This world had started as just a random chaotic creation, and it’ll end just the same.”
“Lost in the infinite chaos, Eli?” Edmund said, speaking for the first time that meeting. “That’s a matter of perspective. When we consider the scale of our universe, something around ten to the power of thirty meters, compared to the size of the smallest distance – Planck’s length – ten to the minus thirty five meters, that doesn’t tell me how we are lost in all this chaos, what it shows me Eli is that we are in the middle of it. Maybe the purpose isn’t just life Eli – maybe it’s simply us. Maybe we need to change our search to find ourselves.”
“And what makes us so different from all other life Edmund? Why are humans so special? The path and patterns will be the same – some will destroy themselves, others will die out, and some might somehow reach a high level of technology without destroying themselves. What are we to gain by finding ourselves in this simulation? Sure we could go through man’s timeline and look at our history – or even look at all the wonderful possible histories we could have had – but we all know how it ends. Do you still hold the belief that man was created in God’s image, Edmund? That maybe this was all created just for man – and these other lifeforms are what, just experimental fuck ups? That the vast majority of the matter in the universe is all here for an almost insignificant amount of life? Why have this giant show for just us – the stage is too big for the drama.”
“We are unique Eli – in all our searching no other species has achieved what we have – no other species has been able to truly understand its place in their universe like us. None could have built the quantum loop processor. Or these simulations.”
“I thought the search was for something we couldn’t understand – to find something in the multi-verse that was beyond our initial conditions and predictions. To find something that could make sense of things. Now your saying this is all here, just so what, we can enjoy it? The universe’s purpose is just to have humans in it – just so we can be another life form that is sprung up and eventually dies? And what makes us special, is our ability to understand the universe? So that’s Gods plan then Edmund, as you see it, that God is so vain as to just create all this so there is someone to view his brilliance.”
“Maybe our purpose is not just to observe the universe, but to truly understand its grand design. What I saying Eli, is maybe the search will end with ourselves – maybe man was the goal of the universe all along” Edmund replied.
“Design? Goal?” Eli shrugged. “There is no design to this – there is no purpose. Just because we are here, does not mean this universe was created for us. Your stubbornness reminds me of the story of a puddle on the ground, Edmund – it wakes up one morning and thinks, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me so well, must have been made to have me in it!’ But then the sun rises in the sky, and as the air heats up and the puddle begins to evaporate, it still hangs on to the notion that everything is going to be alright. Because the world was meant for him! So the moment you disappear might catch you by surprise, might not make sense. But it was simply another cause and effect, Edmund.”
“You don’t believe that, Eli,” Edmund replied. “Otherwise why are you still here?”
________________
“All I ask of you Eli, is you keep searching”.
Edmund had announced his retirement months ago, but only now was Eli realizing that without Edmund he was alone with his thoughts. The other researchers had all been replaced with analysts and engineers, to Eli no one else seemed to have understood the implications of what they had discovered nearly a decade ago.
“Even if we do find humans in these simulations Edmund, where will that lead us?”
“I don’t know, Eli. But I wonder, if we are able to find man, could we find man creating simulations the same as we are doing? Perhaps different tools, different teams, or possibly we could even find ourselves creating simulations – think about where that would lead.”
“To an infinite loop” Eli smirked. “The machine would keep calculating recursively into more simulations, never stopping.”
“So what I am saying Eli, is if there was a machine with infinite computing power, it could regressively create more simulations endlessly. If that is the case, then what makes us think we are on the top, that we are the creators? We could very well be a billion simulations deep into regressive simulations.”
“So this is a simulation then, is that your point?”
“Isn’t it more likely that we are part of a simulation, than not? If an almost infinite amount of simulations exist compared to one true reality? These simulations are closed mathematical realities – if we were in one there is no way for us to possibly know…”
“The quantum loop processor does not have infinite computing power Edmund, no machine does. If the quantum loop processor entered an infinite loop such as you’re suggesting, it would simply never exit. Our processor still requires time to calculate these simulations – if we were to enter an infinite loop our universe would still end eventually, taking the processor with it. As interesting as the idea might seem to you, it leads us nowhere. Even if we did have infinite computing power and were able to start infinitely creating simulations – what exactly would be the point? Why Edmund…. why!? Why would we want to continue this infinite loop, when everything has the exact same fate? How does this explain the first cause Edmund? Why is this loop started, and why should it continue? We would never be closer to explaining why all this exists in the first place.”
“What I am saying Eli is not simply that we are possibly in a simulation – but that is there really a difference? If a simulation exists in the same way as our reality, does it matter? If we can exist in either, both realities are just mathematical constructions. Maybe the transcendent property we are searching for is this Eli – this loop.”
________________
Eli watched in the simulation as a few humans went about their lives – searching for food, caring for their families, fighting for their lives in the hostile environment. This simulation had only produced hunter-gatherers in its existence, yet they seemed to live in complete equilibrium with their environment.
“In all of the current simulations found with species closely matching the DNA of man, the vast majority of them had been the same. Man never reaching a significant level of technology – achieving nothing even close to the technology of the quantum loop processor.”
The young physicists explained the recent findings to Eli, as he watched the simulation displayed in front of him barely listening. Most of the original researchers of the Celestia project had gone years ago. Edmund had left over a year before they had found Earth, leaving Eli as the oldest researcher in the lab.
Eli pressed on the display to slow down one of the simulations being calculated, zooming in on a precise area to watch. He had read graphs and displays about the Earth’s data and progress, but had never taken the time to watch any of the interactions himself.
There didn’t seem to be anything particularly unique to humans – they had the same trends and habits as other lifeforms they had found. They had found lifeforms with what could be called ‘consciousness’ before – awareness of themselves and their environment, but before watching these humans interact with one another Eli had never really realized what that meant. What ‘self awareness’ in these simulations truly would mean – that they had been creating life just as their universe had. That these humans had their own subjective experience – and for the first time Eli could relate and feel empathy for them. As Edmund had said, if the physical matter in these simulations followed the same rules and had the same properties as his universe, does it not exist in the same way? Both were simply mathematical constructions.
With every step forward of the simulation, Eli felt he wasn’t just calculating another abstract model but actually creating something – it was more than just data. Before that moment the experience these humans were having did not exist – Eli was defining it.
“What… are you doing?” The younger researcher asked, as Eli stared at the display, watching the humans interact with one another.
Eli had always thought of these simulations as a predetermined calculation. But if he could stop the simulation, was it determined if it was never actually calculated? Did these lives in the simulations not still have free will the same as Eli, their actions and thoughts not existing until the calculation was done?
________________
After witnessing the lives of the found humans, Eli decided to continue his own. He decided he had spent too much of his time away from society focused on these problems, when he should have been focused on his own life. As the senior researcher Eli made the decision to stop the Celestia program. He left the quantum loop processor intact however, completely self sustained, still running through the calculations and possible configurations with no one left to analyze the results. It had only reached a small amount of the configurations when Eli had left.
Eli had realized there was no need to analyze the simulations – that they would not find what they were searching for – but he felt it was necessary for the simulations to still run. Continuing the calculations, Eli thought, could mean he was creating life beyond the project, defining life and worlds that had previously not existed.
Centuries passed as the simulations were calculated and defined by the quantum loop processor – as humanity continued its existence up until the eventual universal collapse. Only an exact moment before the universal collapse did the processor stop its calculation – hitting its final configuration.
The processor had hit the exact same universal configuration of its own universe. It had defined itself, reaching its purpose.
Every fundamental particle was needed to reach this point, every interaction part of the search. Man was exactly as what was needed to created the quantum loop processor and the Celestia program. With the exact universal constants and properties that were necessary – the necessary conditions needed for itself to have existed.
Reality had defined itself, making A=A. It had been its own first cause – existing for the purpose of creating itself. It had finished its search.
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It's fair to say Game of Thrones has been a big success story, and it's not a surprise - it's very, very good!
One of the stand-out talents on the show has to be Emilia Clarke, who stars as Daenerys, so we grabbed her for a quick chat at the Monte Carlo Television Festival.
Emilia talked about how fans have responded to the books, what it's like speaking Dothraki, why Drogo and Dany are really in love, and what we should expect as the season comes to a close (it sounds a bit ominous!).
Watch Emilia Clarke talking about Game of Thrones below:
Game of Thrones airs on Sundays at 9pm on HBO in the US and on Mondays at 9pm on Sky Atlantic in the UK.
Are you enjoying Game of Thrones? Leave your comments below!
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The Utah Utes and BYU Cougars are bitter college football rivals. They share a state, and they’ve played a lot of nasty, entertaining games since they first met up on the gridiron in 1922. They call the rivalry the Holy War, and it’s a great series.
Utah is entering into a sponsorship with PepsiCo, ditching that company’s own rival, Coca-Cola. But here is the thing: Utah’s color is red, and BYU’s color is royal blue. Pepsi’s base color is also royal blue. So we’re in for a perverse future, one in which Utah’s campus beverage partner is cloaked in the same color as its chief rival.
The plot thickens, though: Pepsi is ditching most of its royal blue coloring for drinks sold on the Utes’ campus in Salt Lake City, KSL reports.
How’s this going to look in practice? It’ll apparently be simple, with Pepsi’s logo remaining unchanged but the blue background on cans and bottles going away.
The school says it didn’t dream this up as some kind of slight at its rival.
“We never asked Pepsi to remove blue from their logo — never a discussion on that. But what we did ask and collaborate with them on is that we develop a concealment that’s conducive to campus, which means a little flexibility from Pepsi and a little flexibility from us,” said Brett Eden, a contract manager for the university’s auxiliary services. “These co-branded machines and the artwork will include a Pepsi logo — their red and blue logo — but the backgrounds will be different.”
Code Red Mountain Dew, another Pepsi soft drink, will be “prominently branded throughout campus.” That’s the most Utes-colored soft drink of all.
Many Utah people do not care about BYU, they might tell you, and there would be no better way to prove how disaffected they are than to strip BYU’s color off their soda cans in a move that’s absolutely not related to BYU.
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Kevin Youkilis played 10 years in the MLB, winning two World Series rings with the Boston Red Sox. He was never the game’s most prolific or feared hitter, but he was someone few pitchers wanted to face because of his patience at the plate.
I mean, he was really patient. In his career, Youkilis faced a 3-0 count 292 times. Not once did he swing, according to Baseball Reference. He kept the bat on his shoulder every single time, drawing 292 walks.
Over the course of his 10-year career, Youkilis walked 539 times. That means more than half (54 percent) of his walks came when he faced a 3-0 count. Even more impressively, Youkilis only swung at the first pitch 10.7 percent of the time — well below the league average of 27.2 percent.
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Needless to say, Youkilis was the epitome of patience at the plate, and it nearly helped him win an MVP when he finished third in 2008 and sixth in 2009.
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A few days ago, members of the Steam community schemed to rig the Steam Summer Adventure competition, a metagame running in parallel with Valve's 12-day Summer Sale. Surprisingly, it wasn't the sort of malicious plan you might expect, but a kind of cease-fire alliance meant to bring equal victory to everyone on Steam. As intended, Team Pink won Sunday. Blue won Monday. Purple will win next, if things go smoothly. On Wednesday, a Red victory is scheduled, then Green.
Is a small collective actually having this big of an influence on a Steam-wide, public competition? Valve has already amended the contest to encourage more competition. I took a look at the evidence and spoke to a few of the people caught up in the dark business of virtual trading card market-manipulation.
How Valve makes money from the metagame
First, a run-down of how the Steam Summer Adventure works if you've been blissfully unaware over the past week, buying and playing discounted PC games rather than being concerned with your gamified game client. Most of Steam's seasonal sales have included a unique trading card set. Craft a full set of these seasonal cards, and you get something like a unique wallpaper or Steam chat emoticon or in-game reward for a few participating games. The 2014 Steam Summer Sale has its own special set of cards you can badge-ify, but with a twist: participating Steam users are randomly assigned to one of five teams during the sale: Red, Pink, Purple, Blue, or Green. Crafting a badge earns points for your team, and 30 members of the winning team get three free Steam games off their wishlists. Oh, and a few extra cards that they can use to keep crafting.
In review: buying games earns virtual cards which can be crafted into virtual badges which increase the rate at which you earn booster packs which contain cards which you can use to upgrade your badges. It's a circular system designed to keep you inside the Steam client, either nickel and diming you to complete your incomplete set of cards or by selling the cards you've been given to encourage you to spend that money on a game.
A competition to see who can craft the most badges, of course, makes money directly for Valve and developers by creating more activity on the Steam Market. Valve takes a 5% cut of all transactions, and the developer of the corresponding game takes 10% (a minimum of $0.01 in both cases).
If I sold one of my Steam Summer Adventure cards for its current value, $0.25, Valve would take three pennies and I'd get $0.22. The Steam Market tells me that 91,650 copies of that card have been sold in the past 24 hours, meaning Valve's profit of a single Summer Adventure card in a single day could be about $2,800. There are 10 of these cards, and another 10 “foil” variants, which run about $2 each.
The community's plan
Bottom line: we celebrate Steam's price cuts, but in the middle of the Summer Sale Valve has integrated a system that stimulates the Steam economy and nets them thousands of dollars a day from virtual, non-existent goods. Many cards and booster packs have risen in price throughout the sale; Dota 2 booster packs, for example, went from trading consistently at about $0.25 for the past month to hovering near $0.40 over the past six days.
The more trading volume and competition, the more the house wins. But a segment of the Steam community is wise to this. They know that a 12-day period when a five-dollar bill can get you our favorite PC game of all time isn't the best time to be engaged in what's essentially a spending war. So to discourage, or at least mitigate, frivolous trading card spending, some Redditors and Steam forum members have organized a coalition to take competition out of the equation. They've called themselves “Team White,” and they've proposed that each Steam team should win twice, on designated days, through June 28.
I spoke to one of the initial organizers behind the plan, Reddit user DayZ_slayer. “It's not really a fun competition when the only real way to win is to spend a lot of cash,” the European 20-year-old told me. “If they did some kind of event that involved playing games it would be a lot more fun to compete, but they didn't, so I figured we all may as well work as a group and give everyone a fair chance at winning some games.”
This seemed to arise naturally, according to DayZ_slayer: many of the teams who had organized individually were planning to compete harder on specific days, he told me, so suggesting that the colored teams take turns simply formalized that process. “I checked the Steam groups/subreddits for the teams and saw which days they were planning on winning, the first five days or so didn't really clash. I made the list showing who should craft on what day and then posted it on all of the team's subreddits under the name Operation EWT. A little later I made the thread on /r/gaming and some other guy posted it to /r/steam.”
I also spoke to Phil Lendon, a 16-year-old living in England who's bought into the concept of Team White. “I first noticed the schedule on Reddit on /r/SteamTeamRed which then spread to /r/Steam and I thought it was a really good idea because here on Team Red we're all about teamwork and communication.” When I asked Lendon how much he's spent toward the contest, he told me that he's “traded hundreds of pounds” to support Red on Wednesday. “Too much that it's unhealthy,” he says.
Valve's response
Up until today, the plan had gone smoothly. Each team won on its designated day. But today the plan is showing signs of falling apart. Valve, apparently unhappy with the lack of competition between teams, changed the contest to award second- and third-place prizes to the runners-up each day. Purple may still come away with first place, but at the outset of today it's already a tight race between the colors. “ The game has changed,” a post on the Purple team subreddit reads. “We need to let purple win but go for second,” a member of team Red comments. "What the heck guys? It's purple's day!" a Pink thread exclaims. Lendon, the Red team member I spoke to, wrote back to me this morning after he noticed Valve's change to the competition. "It's turned into a free-for-all, once I had heard of the news I knew it was going to go to hell. However, I believe, as many other Redditors do too, that the new rules for the competition were to prevent the rigging of the competition, as we saw yesterday when Pink one with over a million points above everyone else, Valve had to take action. However, I personally don't believe the changes to the rules are even worth it, as people's chances are even more reduces to win, as-if it wasn't hard enough already to get a winning three games, it'll be even harder for the 2nd place and 3rd place and not even worth the effort."
It's unclear whether this change will encourage competition enough to disrupt Reddit's plan. On the surface, it seemed wild to me that a small percentage of people could be driving the massive point swings we saw in the initial four days. After all, there's only a few hundred people each in these colored Steam groups, and just 140,000 on the Steam subreddit, most of whom probably aren't aggressively participating.
But the Steam Market tells us that just a small number of tokens that steal 1,000 points from another team—the most valuable item for influencing the Adventure competition—are trading hands. In the past 24 hours, just 88 have been bought off the Steam Market at between $8 and $5 each, and about the same amount of 500-point tokens were sold in that period. Even if a single team were buying those tokens, it isn't that much of a swing relative to the 1.2 million that the Blue team earned yesterday.
More likely, the organized non-competition pact by Reddit and the color-specific Steam communities created single, dominant leader, which not only discouraged the other “big spenders” who are engaged in this competition but probably discouraged some amount of casual crafters from chipping in too.
With the adjustment made by Valve, today will be an interesting test of the internet's ability to dictate the outcome. Purple, who's meant to win today, has a modest lead as I'm publishing this, but we'll have to see if the Steam Trading Card Illuminati's grand plan survives through the week.
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The Oakland Raiders didn't shut down many Denver Broncos plays last night, as their defense allowed Peyton Manning to go for 310 yards on 26-for-36 passing and were otherwise steamrolled by running back Knowshon Moreno, who put up 119 yards.
The Raiders did manage to stop Manning on the play you see here, though—a jailbreak screen to Eric Decker on third down that normally would have picked up the five yards needed to move the chains. Instead the play resulted in a completed pass but net only a single yard—mostly because Raiders defensive backs Phillip Adams, Joselio Hanson, and Mike Mitchell sniffed it out.
You can see the basics of a jailbreak screen here, but a glimpse of the video above will show you exactly how a defense that knows it's coming can shut it down. Mitchell's assignment on the play is a safety blitz, but he holds up as he approaches the line so he can be picked up by the Broncos' right guard. Normally, that guard is attempting to get upfield; after the pass is completed, he'll pick up the defensive back playing man coverage on the outside receiver.
At least, that's the idea. Phillip Adams completely slips Brandon Stokley's attempted block and has Decker in his arms and down nearly as soon as the ball arrives. Pay especially close attention to where Adams breaks: He knows it's a jailbreak screen and that Decker won't be cutting to the sideline.
The Raiders haven't had a huge number of outstanding defensive plays this season, ranking 28th in team defense. How'd they do so well on this play, then? Maybe they were tipped off to the jailbreak screen by Peyton Manning's audible to it of "Prison! Prison!" Manning's one of the savviest QBs at the line in NFL history, so it's kind of amazing such an obvious word would be used. My dad used to call out "Mountain Dew" when he wanted to audible a pop pass, but he was a high school football coach. And sure, maybe it's all coincidence and the jailbreak audible wasn't part of "Prison!" anyway. Either way, the Raiders knew it was coming.
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h/t to Lee who noticed it first
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LIBYA'S revolutionaries posed as star-struck lovers on a dating site to organise their revolt against Muammar Ghadafi.
Former business and opposition leader Omar Shibliy Mahmoudi said he used Muslim dating site Mawada to rally people together while staying out of the gaze of the Libyan secret police, which monitors Twitter and Facebook, ABC News in the US says.
Mahmoudi - leader of the Ekhtalef, or "Difference," movement - acted as if he was looking for a wife under the profile name "Where is Miriam?" and sent coded love letters to spur people to revolution.
Since men cannot talk to other men on the site, revolutionaries posed as women to make contact with Mahmoudi, taking on names such as "Sweet Butterfly," "Opener of the Mountain," "Girl of the Desert" and "Melody of Torture."
Supporters would use phrases such as "May your day be full of Jasmine," referring to the uprisings in the region which have been dubbed the "Jasmine Revolution."
The coded conversations were used to gauge support for the cause and direct people to social networking site Yahoo Messenger for more detailed conversations. The revolutionaries would then use the messaging service and text messages to organise their activities further, avoiding scrutiny from authorities.
Communications would continue through text messages and Yahoo Messenger, to avoid authorities becoming suspicious.
Mahmoudi said he attracted 171,323 "admirers" to a number of profiles on the dating site before Libya's internet crashed on Saturday. He had aimed to attract 50,000 as a sufficient number to take to the streets in protest.
Gaddafi, 68, remains defiant as anti-government forces gain ground and many in the international community seek to bring an end to his regime. He has been accused of ordering the deaths of thousands of protesters and said he would not hesitate to use chemical and biological weapons against opponents.
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- Featured on Fresh Air, Studio 360, Good Morning Amercia, The TODAY Show
- A People Magazine Book of the Week
- L.A. Times Holiday Gift Guide selection
- A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
“This novel is by far [Green’s] most difficult to read. It’s also his most astonishing. . . . So surprising and moving and true that I became completely unstrung. . . . One needn’t be suffering like Aza to identify with it. One need only be human.”—The New York Times
“A tender story about learning to cope when the world feels out of control.” – People
“A powerful tale for teens (and adults) about anxiety, love and friendship.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Turtles delivers a lesson that we so desperately need right now: Yes, it is okay not to be okay…. John Green has crafted a dynamic novel that is deeply honest, sometimes painful, and always thoughtful.” – Mashable
“Green does more than write about; he endeavours to write inside…. No matter where you are on the spiral—and we’re all somewhere—Green’s novel makes the trip, either up or down, a less solitary experience.” – The Globe and Mail
“A thoughtful look at mental illness and a debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder that doesn’t ask but makes you feel the constant struggles of its main character. . . . Turtlesexplores the definition of happy endings, whether love is a tragedy or a failure, and a universal lesson for us all: ‘You work with what you have.’” – USA Today
“Tender, wise, and hopeful.” – The Wall Street Journal
“A new modern classic.” – The Guardian
“Green’s most authentic and most ambitious work to date.” – Bustle
“An existential teenage scream.” – Vox
“Funny, clever, and populated with endearing characters.” – Entertainment Weekly
“An incredibly powerful tale of the pain of mental illness, the pressures of youth, and coming of age when you feel like you’re coming undone.” – Shelf Awareness
★ “A richly rewarding read…the most mature of Green’s work to date and deserving of all the accolades that are sure to come its way.” – Booklist
★ “In an age where troubling events happen almost weekly, this deeply empathetic novel about learning to live with demons and love one’s imperfect self is timely and important.” – Publishers Weekly
★ “A deeply resonant and powerful novel that will inform and enlighten readers even as it breaks their hearts. A must-buy.” – School Library Journal
Praise for John Green
- 50 million books in print worldwide -
#1 New York Times Bestseller
#1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller
#1 USA Today Bestseller
#1 International Bestseller
★ Michael L. Printz Award Winner
★ Michael L. Printz Honor Winner
★ Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
★ TIME 100 Most Influential People
★ Forbes Celebrity 100
★ NPR's 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels
★ TIME Magazine's 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time
Critical acclaim for The Fault in Our Stars:
“Damn near genius . . . The Fault in Our Stars is a love story, one of the most genuine and moving ones in recent American fiction, but it’s also an existential tragedy of tremendous intelligence and courage and sadness.” —Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine
“This is a book that breaks your heart—not by wearing it down, but by making it bigger until it bursts.” —The Atlantic
“Remarkable . . . A pitch-perfect, elegiac comedy.” —USA Today
“[Green’s] voice is so compulsively readable that it defies categorization. You will be thankful for the little infinity you spend inside this book.” —NPR.org
“John Green deftly mixes the profound and the quotidian in this tough, touching valentine to the human spirit.” —The Washington Post
“[Green] shows us true love—two teenagers helping and accepting each other through the most humiliating physical and emotional ordeals—and it is far more romantic than any sunset on the beach.” —New York Times Book Review
From the Publisher
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In the unattainable quest for leftist-deemed inclusivity, a Catholic school in California is purging itself of all remnants of Catholicism, including a statue of baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
On Thursday, Marinij.com reported that San Domenico School in San Anselmo, California, had removed and relocated a number of Catholic statues in order to be more inclusive of other religions, sparking strong reactions from parents of students who attend the allegedly Catholic school.
Thus far, the school has removed and relocated all but 18 of their 180 Catholic icons and statues. The head of the school's board of trustees, Amy Skewes-Cox, claims such removals are “completely in compliance” with school rules, which were approved by the board and the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael last year.
Kim Pipki, whose daughter used to attend San Domenico, recalled the removal of the statue of baby Jesus and Mary as particularly contentious.
“The one main statue that has everyone fired up is the baby Jesus and Mary one,” said Pipki. “It was at the center of the primary school courtyard.”
“It was less about God and more about passing on some traditions,” the mother noted. “People were shocked that the statues were pitched in the basement.”
Shannon Fitzpatrick, whose eight-year-old daughter currently attends Domenico, wrote an email to school officials and the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael expressing her disapproval of the so-called inclusive changes, suggesting their version of "inclusion" apparently means gutting Catholicism from the school altogether.
“Articulating an inclusive foundation appears to mean letting go of San Domenico’s 167-year tradition as a Dominican Catholic school and being both afraid and ashamed to celebrate one’s heritage and beliefs,” wrote Fitzpatrick.
“In our time here, the word ‘Catholic’ has been removed from the mission statement, sacraments were removed from the curriculum, the lower school curriculum was changed to world religions, the logo and colors were changed to be ‘less Catholic,’ and the uniform was changed to be less Catholic," she continued.
The mother said she first became alarmed by the school's changes last year, when San Domenico removed “first reconciliation and first communion from the second-grade curriculum."
In a follow-up email, Fitzpatrick noted that she was not the only parent disturbed by the "inclusive" changes.
“There are other families having the same concerns I do. Many parents feel if the school is heading in a different direction then the San Domenico community should have been notified before the signing of the enrollment for the following year," she wrote.
“I am extremely disappointed in the school and the direction they’ve been going," said Cheryl Newell, a mother of four children who've graduated from San Domenico. "This isn’t a new thing that they’ve been intentionally eroding their Catholic heritage. They’re trying to be something for everyone and they’re making no one happy."
San Domenico is not owned or operated by a specific parish, but, rather, was founded as an independent Catholic school. Head of School Cecily Stock explained that this is precisely why the school has acted to become more inclusive; many know the school is Catholic, she said, but neglect to realize it is also independent.
“San Domenico is both a Catholic school and an independent school,” said Stock, “but what we were finding after doing some research is that in the broader community we are known as being a Catholic school and are not necessarily known as an independent school. We want to make sure that prospective families are aware that we are an independent school.”
“If you walk on the campus and the first thing you confront is three or four statues of St. Dominic or St. Francis, it could be alienating for that other religion, and we didn’t want to further that feeling," she said.
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A lot of different figures have been thrown around to quantify the number of individuals affected by recent network breaches at the Office of Personnel Management.
OPM itself has stuck to its initial 4.2 million estimate, which agency officials offered June 4 when they first announced OPM's records had been pilfered by hackers. But on June 12, when the agency confirmed a separate related breach of security clearance files, officials acknowledged the number of people affected was possibly much higher. Subsequent reports have suggested that the final tally of current and former federal employees, retirees and job applicants whose personal information was compromised could total 14 million, 18 million or even 30 million.
All the speculation could soon come to an end.
“Hopefully we’ll have a number to release next week,” said Samuel Schumach, an OPM spokesman. He added there has been a lot of “conflation” of different numbers floated, and the delay is simply the result of ensuring precision.
“We want to make sure any information we are releasing is as accurate as it can be,” Schumach said.
The spokesman confirmed the tentative timeline it told lawmakers and union groups earlier this week. The announcement will definitively state the number of employees and applicants whose data was exposed during a breach of background check and security clearance data. The original 4.2 million figure dealt only with the initial hack of personnel records for former and current federal employees.
In testimony to Congress last week, OPM Director Katherine Archuleta declined to give an estimate of the number of individuals affected by the security clearance data hack, saying OPM was still calculating the tally.
The confusion over who exactly was affected has caused a backlog for the contractor tasked with providing credit monitoring and customer service to hacked employees. CSID told Government Executive its service centers received “higher than expected” call volumes, as many callers have not been formally notified that their information was compromised -- they simply wanted general information.
Schumach said even once OPM finalizes who exactly was affected by the second data breach, it has not yet determined a timetable for notifying the new round of individuals that their information was compromised.
“At this time we just don’t know about policy on notification,” Schumach said. OPM officials have previously said the agency would send out the notifications “as soon as practicable.”
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By Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins
China’s first aircraft carrier, now referred to as the “Liaoning ” by China’s Ministry of National Defense, has been officially “delivered and commissioned” to China's navy, according official Chinese media. The handover ceremony, with top Chinese leaders presiding, took place on the morning of September 25 at a naval base in Dalian, a port city in northeast China’s Liaoning province.
Just as Liaoning the province was created when existing northeastern provinces and municipalities were merged and integrated into a more powerful whole in 1954-55, so too “Liaoning” the carrier integrates a mix of building blocks into a warship that has the potential to bolster China’s regional influence—and also to force China’s leaders to confront perhaps the most complicated naval diplomacy questions in the PRC’s history.
The Liaoning’s commissioning matters, both symbolically and in terms of China’s naval power and regional influence. The largest ship to be delivered to the Chinese navy to date, the carrier when operational could have a significant influence on regional maritime disputes, in particular China’s smoldering conflicts in the South China Sea.
Names Matter...
Chatter about the commissioning of China’s first carrier began in early September, when photos surfaced online showing the carrier with the hull number “16,” followed by reports in local media that the vessel would be named the Liaoning, after the province that contains Dalian Naval Shipyard, where it has been refitted.
The carrier was built using the hull of an old Ukrainian carrier called the Varyag. Rumors had long circulated among Western analysts that the carrier would eventually be renamed the Shi Lang, after a celebrated Qing dynasty admiral.
In July 1683, Shi Lang used 300 warships and 20,000 troops to defeat the Zheng family, which ruled Taiwan, in a conflict known as the Battle of Penghu. The victory enabled Taiwan’s formal incorporation into the Qing polity, as a prefecture of Fujian Province. This was an historical first: Neither the Ming nor any previous dynasty had ever attempted to incorporate Taiwan directly in to official mainland administration.
Because of Shi’s aggressive efforts to bring Taiwan under mainland administration and his allegedly corrupt and overbearing post-war actions as an official vis-à-vis the island, naming China’s first aircraft carrier after him would send the wrong message for cross-Strait relations, whose stability Beijing seeks to encourage in order to facilitate reunification.
PLA Navy (PLAN) ship naming conventions suggest that ships are typically named after Chinese localities. The rare exceptions in which PLAN ships are named after individuals include training vessels (Deng Shichang and Zheng He) and research ships (Li Siguang ), but not larger combat-operations-focused vessels. Since China’s first aircraft carrier will be its largest and most prominent warship, it would be logical to name it after one of the largest Chinese localities, particularly the one in which it was refitted—hence, “Liaoning.”
But Actions Speak Louder than Words...
Whatever the official nomenclature and symbolism, however, the Liaoning is attracting the world’s attention as a prominent, if modest and incremental in capabilities, indicator of how China will use its growing power. As Major General Qian Lihua declared in November 2008, “The question is not whether you have an aircraft carrier, but what you do with your aircraft carrier.”
Encouragingly, China’s MND lists developing “Far Seas cooperation” and capabilities to address non-traditional security threats as missions for the Liaoning. At the same time, however, it mentions safeguarding national sovereignty as another mission—presumably to address territorial and maritime disputes closer to home.
Despite a statement by Chinese National Defense University Professor and PLA officer Li Daguang that the timing of the Liaoning’s commissioning was designed to demonstrate resolve regarding the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands dispute, for the foreseeable future the vessel cannot pose a direct threat to U.S. or Japanese forces. Yet, even in this modest form, it already worries its smaller South China Sea neighbors. Vietnam, in particular, has reason for concern: It lost skirmishes with Chinese naval forces over disputed islands in 1974 and 1988, even though those forces lacked significant air support. With a vulnerable land border and no U.S. alliance, Hanoi could even conceivably be at risk of suffering defeat in a third clash as it vigorously pursues island and maritime claims vis-à-vis China—this time against a Chinese navy with undeniable airpower from land, and eventually from sea.
China won the Johnson South Reef Skirmish of 14 March 1988, but quickly retreated for fear of Vietnamese air strikes and Soviet retaliation. Rear Admiral Chen Weiwen (PLAN, ret.), commanded the PLAN’s three-frigate force in the conflict with initiative that was temporarily controversial but now widely acclaimed.
In a 2011 interview with Modern Ships, Admiral Chen, who served as a commander in a 1988 conflict with Vietnamese forces in the Spratly Islands, emphasized the difference that an aircraft carrier could make. China had won the battle, but quickly withdrew:
During the Spratly Sea Battle, the thing we feared most was not Vietnam’s surface vessels, but rather their aircraft. At that time, Vietnam had Su-22 fighter aircraft, which had a definite ability to attack ships. The Spratlys are very far from Sanya, and at that time we also lacked airfields in the Paracels. Flying from the nearest airfield, Lingshui [on Hainan Island], our aircraft only had loiter time of 4-5 minutes; in such a short time, they could not solve problems before they had to return, or they would run out of fuel. So we felt deeply that China must have an aircraft carrier: If during the Johnson South Reef Skirmish, we had our own [air] cover from a nearby aircraft carrier, we would simply not have had to fear Vietnam’s air force. Now that the Spratlys have airfields, it is much more convenient. If China’s aircraft carrier enters service relatively soon, and training is well-established, this will solve a major problem. We will seize air superiority; Vietnamese aircraft will not dare to take off.
The idea of using deck aviation to address China’s sovereignty claims is hardly Admiral Chen’s alone. According to "Science of Campaigns," an authoritative volume written by scholars at China’s National Defense University, carriers can play a crucial role by providing air cover beyond the range of land-based air to support long-range amphibious landing operations against small islands: “Combat in the deep-sea island and reef region is relatively more independent, without support from the land-based force and air force. Under this situation, an aircraft carrier is even more important in winning victory in the campaign.” In a recent interview, Sr. Capt. Li Jie, an expert at the PLAN’s strategic think tank, was quoted as stating that “China’s first aircraft carrier...will play an important role in China’s settlement of islands disputes and defense of its maritime rights and interests.”
Looming Large and Making Waves?
So how might Liaoning ultimately influence Chinese naval operations and future naval procurement? The answers to this question will substantially shape other countries’ views concerning the strategic course China takes.
China’s maritime neighbors in Southeast Asia, as well as Japan, India, South Korea, Russia, Australia and the U.S. will pay especially close attention. With Liaoning officially in the fleet, the next questions that China’s military and civilian leaders must grapple with are, first, how to use the ship; second, how many more carriers to build; and third, how to protect it from the increasingly capable anti-ship weapons being acquired by neighbors such as Vietnam, which is due to take delivery of its first Russian Kilo-class diesel attack submarine by the end of 2012. The Liaoning’s existence will likely impel China to develop more advanced surface combatants and anti-submarine forces to protect the symbolically valuable, but operationally vulnerable, asset.
At present, the Liaoning remains first and foremost an emblem of future Chinese sea power. All of its 10 sea trials to date have occurred well within Chinese waters. Chinese naval aircraft have not achieved the basic milestone of landing on its deck with the help of arrestor wires, or “traps,” a process that their American counterparts have been perfecting for decades.
Yet, while the Liaoning’s capabilities will remain modest for the foreseeable future, it will be watched carefully as an important symbol of Beijing’s intentions. As Rear Admiral Yang Yi wrote in a commentary published immediately after the commissioning was made public: “In order to counterbalance the theory that its new aircraft carrier is a threat, China must not only continue to make clear its strategies and policies, it must also take practical actions to convince the world that with the development of China’s military strength, especially the strengthening of its overseas projection capability, it will enhance its role as a defender of regional stability and world peace.”
[CORRECTION: Dalian is a port city located in Liaoning province. An earlier version of this column mistakenly described it as the capital of Liaoning. The capital of Liaoning is Shenyang. Thanks to a reader for pointing out the error.]
Andrew Erickson is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and a research associate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center. Co-founder of China SignPost (洞察中国), he blogs at www.andrewerickson.com.
Gabe Collins is co-founder of China SignPost, founder of ChinaOilTrader.com and is a J.D. candidate at the University of Michigan Law School.
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Twitter paid $10 million back in April for the right to stream 10 of the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games. Now it’s trying to make its money back.
Twitter’s top brass, including CEO Jack Dorsey and COO Adam Bain, is in the south of France this week at the annual Cannes Lions ad festival working to drum up business. On the list of things Twitter is selling: Ad packages linked to its NFL games.
These ads packages — which combine the ad inventory Twitter has around NFL highlights that it also sold last year, plus the NFL game footage it bought this year — are selling between $2 million and $8 million per advertiser, according to a person familiar with the deals. That range depends on the number of ads and whether or not they are shown during a game versus alongside other NFL content (more on that below).
Twitter wants to sell 10 to 15 of these packages, says Matt Derella, who runs North American sales for Twitter and is in charge of selling the NFL packages. Twitter has already sold about 60 percent of this ad inventory, he said. Derella said some marketers who bought ads from Twitter during last year’s NFL season, including Ford, Nestle and Anheuser-Busch, have signed for the games.
Here’s what Twitter is actually selling:
In-game ads: Twitter has a very limited number of commercial spots it can sell during the actual game. The NFL and its existing TV partners, NBC and CBS, will sell all of the game’s national TV segments. That leaves Twitter to sell the local ad spots; the company says it will be able to show different spots to different users based on its targeting data .
Pre-roll ads: Twitter will also sell pre-roll video ads ahead of NFL highlights for all NFL games, not just the Thursday night games, a batch of highlights it sold last year as well. The NFL is giving Twitter 90 highlights per week in 2016, up from 75 in 2015, Derella says. He declined to comment on deal terms for these pre-roll ad packages, but two sources tell Recode that Twitter made about $20 million selling four pre-roll ad packages last year at roughly $5 million a pop.
that Twitter made about $20 million selling four pre-roll ad packages last year at roughly $5 million a pop. Periscope streams: The NFL will use Twitter’s livestreaming Periscope service to broadcast pregame analysis and player footage from the field before each of the 10 Thursday Night games. Twitter will let advertisers pay to sponsor these broadcasts and add branding to the video feed. It will be the first time Twitter has ever monetized an actual Periscope stream.
The $2 million to $8 million pricing range depends on the assortment of options each advertiser chooses. One source told Recode that it’s likely Twitter will bring in, at minimum, $50 million on the entire NFL deal, but possibly more.
What’s unclear is how much of that Twitter will get to keep. The company already paid $10 million just for the broadcast rights, but some of that revenue will need to go back to the NFL. Derella declined to comment on the terms of Twitter’s deal with the NFL. So did an NFL spokesperson.
What’s also unclear is what this whole broadcast will actually look like. Twitter will get the same NBC or CBS game feed that you can watch on TV, but has not unveiled how it will add a social component to the broadcast. Derella hinted that the game feed will be accompanied by a stream of live tweets from fans and/or experts.
Here’s how he described it in an interview.
"We’re going to marry the best of Twitter [with the NFL stream]. So that would be that live experience as it’s happening and that live conversation around Twitter. One flavor would be all the most authoritative analysts and players actually tweeting about the game. So that could be manually or algorithmically curated. Other users might just want the pure roar of the crowd and the unfiltered timeline. We’re going to experiment with what’s best."
Twitter’s challenge, of course, will be convincing users to look at tweets instead of at the game.
Update: We asked our Twitter followers if they'd actually tune in to watch NFL games through Twitter and a pretty sizable portion of you said you would! While certainly not scientific, that's good news for Twitter.
.@Twitter paid millions so it can stream @NFL games online. But will you watch? — Recode (@Recode) June 22, 2016
MLB's President of Media Bob Bowman on streaming live sports
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The city’s only general-interest bookstore will close in January, if the owners can’t find a buyer.
The Ninth Street Book Shop has been a labor of love for two teachers who went downtown to buy furniture one day in 1977 and bought a bookstore instead.
“We just did it on a whim,” Gemma Buckley said. “Our parents thought we were crazy. Within a month, we went from walking into that store to owning it.”
The 1980s were wonder years for Wilmington. As Gemma Buckley put it, “Oh, my God. People would come out in wave from the DuPont Building. The whole city just hummed. You had so much pedestrian traffic.”
They started seeing a big dropoff in 1992. “That’s when DuPont started cutting and relocating,” she said. “Before that, workers felt they could take a whole lunch hour and patronize a local shop. Now they don’t because a lot of them are juggling lots of balls. The mindset is you just stay at your desk. I think they almost make people feel you could be expendable if you aren’t there as much as you should be.”
When The News Journal and Hercules and then DuPont pulled up stakes and left the city, dozens of retail shops got caught in the undertow, but Ninth Street adapted.
“The News Journal was an immediate and significant impact. DuPont really hurt. They took 10,000 people out, and these were better-paying positions,” she said. “They were people who had a different mindset. They appreciated being downtown as a place you could get things done on your lunch hour. After they left, there was less reason to come downtown, so eventually there were fewer services here. It was a chicken-and-egg thing.”
The Buckleys mortgaged their house — again. “It’s pretty much a perpetual thing,” Jack Buckley said.
They did everything to attract the businesspeople who were left — evening hours, joining the art loop, running gift-wrapped books outside to customers who wanted to buy but didn’t want to park.
New office towers brought people but they installed their own restaurants and services so workers never had to go outside. As Jack Buckley put it, “We are an office park. They can park there and they can work there and they can eat there and then they can go home. They don’t have to think about being in the city.”
Now, at least 60 percent of Ninth Street’s clientele is working poor and lower-middle-income readers.
“We have very well-to-do people who come in, and we have homeless people who will come in,” Gemma Buckley said. “Sometimes, the homeless people will be talking to someone on their cell phone and they’ll say, ‘I’ve got to go. I’m at my bookstore.’ My bookstore!! Thank you!”
Some regular customers who are homeless shop for a couple books each month when they get their checks.
“The working poor is more important to us than our business clientele,” Jack Buckley said. “The working poor is the heart of our business.
Ninth Street Book Shop, a name that suited it better before its move to Market Street, has become a downtown institution over 40 years.
When DART wanted to move a favorite bus stop in 2012, the shop became the unofficial headquarters of a bus riders’ movement that gathered more than 2,800 signatures on petitions to stop the move.
When ultra-conservative national talk show host Mike Gallagher wanted a local bookstore to host his Wilmington stop on a cross-country tour, the Buckleys, whose politics lean left, instantly agreed, with one caveat: “We would call up all our outspoken lefty friends and ask them to show up and protest at the store,” Jack Buckley said. “The show was a great success with people of all political stripes attending. Mike pulled up to signs and chants.
He interviewed lots of locals and signed lots of books.”
There have been surprises:
• The day a customer brought an anatomy book up to the sales counter and pointed out that someone had cut all the feet out of the pictures.
• The Saturday the naked toreador showed up on Ninth Street. “This guy’s naked and he takes off his cape, which was just a big old raincoat, and he’s like this with the DART bus,” said Jack Buckley, motioning like a toreador. When a woman took umbrage, Gemma Buckley said, “But could you see that at Christiana Mall??”
While the Buckleys clearly love what they do, the businesses has had its ups and downs. “I need 150 people a day to walk into my store to be successful, and we haven’t been near that number in a long time,” Jack Buckley said.
A quick history:
• Ninth Street Books started out life as the Paperbook Gallery on Orange Street, a long, narrow shop filled with hanging plants leftover from the last owner. “Plants outsold books some months,” Jack Buckley said. “At first, we really couldn’t have made it without the plants.”
• It made several hops around downtown, including a long stop at the now defunct Ninth Street Plaza. There, they experienced four of the five break-ins in store history, all in a row and all by the same perpetrator, who didn’t take anything.
• As Ninth Street traffic slowed to a trickle in 2012, the Buckleys announced they were closing, but loyal readers rallied to keep them. Customers called city officials. Contacts were made. The shop found a smaller home in a Buccini/Pollin building at Eighth and Market. Four hundred customers voted the Ninth Street name should remain, and it did.
Two plate glass windows at the new store offer a fishbowl view of all that’s going on at the corner. It’s not pretty.
Crime in the central business district is low, Jack Buckley said, but what he terms “bad behavior” is a staple there. Salty language. Acting out. The occasional sleeping vagrant. As he put it: “Loud. Offensive. Profane. A lot of that goes on and that’s a big deterrent. Every day we see it. Domestic issues being blasted out right on the mall. The arguments that go on … I saw a man kick in the side of a woman’s car.”
Customers who walk into that often do an about-face, he said: “You see that little look on their face. ‘Oh, oh, this bothers me a little bit.’ And they’re not coming back. Your block has an X on the front of it now.” He thinks a police patrol would turn that around.
When they come to work in the morning, the Buckleys occasionally find a person camped out under their graceful black awning. “You feel bad for them, but, at the same time, maybe other people don’t want to come in here,” Gemma Buckley said. “It’s not that they don’t have a right to be there. From a human rights perspective it’s OK, but, from a business perspective, it’s a problem.”
At 67 and 69, the Buckleys decided this holiday season would be their last. After 40 years of rarely having more than one day off in common, they are hoping someone else will find the prospect of owning a bookshop as joyful as they did.
“We’re getting to the point where they are no guarantees,” Gemma Buckley said. We want some quality time together. We’re not sure how long we’re going to have our health. We have hobbies. We have interests. And, when you’ve got a business six days a week, you can’t take days off together. Our son calls us the Cal Ripken of marriages — all day, every day, never miss a game.”
Gemma Buckley, who knows thousands of customers by name, teared up when she said, “I’m going to miss the people. I’m so grateful to all the people who
have been so loyal.”
“Ninety-nine percent of this whole thing has been positive,’’ Jack Buckley said. “I’d love to pass this on. Leaving the city without a bookstore, I feel bad about that. There’s always been one here for a long, long time. This city deserves one.”
Landlord Rob Buccini said his company was honored to work with the Buckleys, whose presence he said was a major part of the transformation of Market Street. “The goal would be to help them in any way possible to sell their business, as we see the benefit of having the local bookstore on our historic main street, ”Buccini said. “In the unfortunate case that it did not sell, the space would be the only corner retail space we have available in our Market Street and a prime location, and we feel confident it would be filled.”
Doug Hodges, a Random House representative who has Ninth Street on his sales list, said it is one of his favorite bookshops. “The store looks great with good fixtures and great displays. They are up-to-date with systems …” he said. “The best thing has been Jack’s and Gemma’s enthusiasm for books. They communicate that enthusiasm and joy to their customers. I am going to miss seeing them.”
“The city’s in a transitional phase. Just like we took a limited leap of faith, it would take someone else to take a leap of faith,” Gemma Buckley said. “The store has potential. It has a lot going for it. It would take somebody who would definitely have to love what they’re doing because it’s certainly not going to be a big revenue store. You can survive. Thrive? Coming soon, hopefully.”
“The city’s got to bounce back,” her husband said. “You’re not going to turn this town into Pittsburgh overnight. Retail’s going to be the drag. If they get residential, I think it’s possible we can have lots of places to eat lunch and lots of places to drink coffee, but retail’s going to drag. If you go to a mall, it’s all about women’s clothing. When we see people walking into our store with another’s store’s bag, that means they’re shopping. We don’t see that often.”
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Canadian Tire moving Clayton Park store to former Target in Bayers Lake. Canadian Tire also opened their new store in Elmsdale this week.
I’m slow on the draw, this timebut the Burrito Jax in Clayton Park is open, just on the side of Sobeys.
East Coast Lifestyle to open a Halifax storefront, location TBD
The Home Hardware in Enfield is closed after 60 years
In Costco Cafe news Smoked Meat Sandwiches going on Monday. Replacing with Chk Caesar Salad. Will sell meat till stock gone
Urban Outfitters is having their Grand Opening on May 15, paper is off the windows and stocking the shelves is in progress.
Tom’s Havana confirmed that they are indeed moving October 1, but new location not finalized yet. Sleep Country on Spring Garden is moving with BMO to the new building where Winsby’s used to be.
Zions Gate, in Spryfield has open a liquidation centre at the back of South Centre Mall (by Bowlarama)
Ottoman Cafe and Mid Point Coffee on Spring Garden are closing up shop and heading to Toronto.
The Jessy’s Pizza in Kingswood is now open.
The Holiday Inn Express, Kearney Lake is now Chateau Bedford
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Submitted by Koos Jansen via BullionStar.com,
Just after my colleague Ronan Manly wrote a very extensive article on how much gold is left in London (not much), Petropavlovsk Chairman and Co-Founder Peter Hambro discusses gold at Bloomberg Television. He, like Manly, concludes there is very little physical gold left in London. From Mr Hambro:
My baseline is they [the Chinese] have been buying and the Indian have been buying in enormous quantities. It’s virtually impossible to get physical gold in London to ship to those countries. We get permanent requests from Russia, would we please sell our physical gold to India and China. Because there is no physical, only endless promises. And I really worry that the market, that paper market, could be stamped on and people will say “sorry we’ll have a financial close out”, and it’s all over.
Perhaps this quote explains why UK gold export directly to China in June was not a net outflow from the UK – because there is little gold left in London (Manly, Hambro) and thus the UK had to ramp up import from the US in June to send forward to China.
The Financial Times reported on similar gold shortages in London. From the FT (2 September):
The cost of borrowing physical gold in London has risen sharply in recent weeks. That has been driven by dealers needing gold to deliver to refineries in Switzerland before it is melted down and sent to places such as India, according to market participants. “[The rise] does indicate there is physical tightness in the market for gold for immediate delivery,” said Jon Butler, analyst at Mitsubishi.
I’ve also asked BullionStar CEO Torgny Persson in Singapore what he’s currently seeing in the precious metals markets. He replied there are shortages in both the gold and silver market. From Mr Persson:
I just got off the phone with A-Mark which is one of the world’s largest wholesalers. They are reporting that they have no gold and silver at all live available, that they have stopped taking orders for Silver Maples and Silver Philharmonics altogether and that Silver Eagles are available first in the end of November. For Pamp, there is similarly long delivery times for all minted gold bars. We still have most products in stock because we stocked up as massively as we could in the last weeks but for many products, we are unable to replenish as of now when we run out. Big squeeze with shortages starting now both on the wholesale/retail level and at the bulk level… Unless the paper price is reverting up, it may not subside this time around and then the paper fiat mess (including paper prices of gold and silver) is in trouble. If it goes to the point of shortages at the bulk level like 1kg gold bars and 1000 oz silver bars, the emperor will stand without clothes.
To be continued…
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NEW YORK | New York City FC have placed midfielder Matt Dunn and goalkeeper Akira Fitzgerald on waivers, the Club announced today.
Dunn made one appearance for the Club this season, coming on as a first-half substitute and playing 52 minutes in a 1-0 loss at Chicago on April 24. The 21-year-old was selected second overall by New York City FC in the 2014 MLS Dispersal Draft from Chivas USA on Nov. 19, 2014.
Fitzgerald originally joined New York City FC on a free transfer on Dec. 11, 2014. The 27-year-old spent three weeks on loan with the Carolina RailHawks from mid-May until early June.
New York City FC would like to thank Matt and Akira for their time with the Club and wish them both the best in the future.
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Before dawn on July 19, 1845 a fire broke out on the third floor of a whale oil store on New Street (located in lower Manhattan). An influx of early morning business and mild summertime temperatures might have aided in putting a quick stop to the blaze, but a warehouse located just a block away from the oil store was filled with a new shipment of salt peter (which is used in the manufacture of gunpowder). Fire spreading from the oil store extended through the warehouses iron shutters and caused, 'a series of cannon-like bursts of smoke and fire, almost like a volcano, smashing into buildings across the street. It culminated in a terrible final explosion completely engulfing the city block.' The blast was heard as far away as Sandy Hook, NJ.
The fire killed 4 firefighters (volunteers as the FDNY was not a paid department for another 20 years) and 26 citizens. Before the fire was contained and extinguished it destroyed 345 buildings and caused nearly 7 million dollars in damage. With all that devastation, the fire could have been worse. The Last Great Fire of NY was the the third in a series of horrific blazes. The first and second of which occurred in 1776 and 1835. The result of the first two fires was a change in building codes. All new buildings built in New York City had to be made of brick and mortar. This code and the newer stone buildings helped to slow the spread of the blaze and aid in its containment. The other significant aid to extinguishing the blaze was the recent completion of the Croton Resevoir which provided a steady supply of water throughout the conflagration.
Here is an excerpt from a witness account of the blaze.
". . .an immense body of flame... it instantly penetrated at least seven buildings, blew in the fronts of the opposite houses on Broad Street, wrenched shutters and doors from buildings at some distance from the immediate scene of the explosion, propelled bricks and other missiles through the air, threw down many individuals who had gone as far as Beaver Street, spread the fire far and wide, so that the whole neighborhood was at once in a blaze, and most unfortunately covered up the [fire company's] hose.... After this the firemen could with difficulty obtain any control over the conflagration."
Inspiration
When we contacted Ryan Brown from the Pursuit of NY, we gave him very simple instructions. We wanted him to create a design that was historically significant to New York's history. We wanted it to be a fresh, new look for a t-shirt. The rest was up to him. We knew the problem wouldn't be coming up with an idea, more honing in on one great idea. The Last Great Fire tee is the result of all his research. The whale represents the whale oil store that was responsible for the blaze. The whale is also drawn into a rough shape of Manhattan and the blaze escaping from his mouth is roughly where the fire started. Located on the top and bottom of the whale are map icons for the East and North River with an anchor showing north and south and the date of the fire.
The Last Great Fire of New York City encompasses everything we look for when we make a shirt--a design that stands alone on its own merit and becomes more interesting once you learn the story behind the design. Ryan Brown is one of the great talents we've come across since starting H&I and if you're looking for cutting edge designs from one of the hippest indie labels out there, you should check him out at Pursuit of NY.
Historical Novel
While researching The Last Great Fire, I came across a mystery novel that takes place in 1845 New York and includes the The Last Great Fire in the novel. The Gods of Gotham written by Lyndsay Faye was one of Publishers Weeklys top ten Mystery/Thriller novels of the year. Lyndsay spent over a year researching the book before writing it and by all accounts is very historically accurate. Beyond that, I would recommend it as a very easy read.
The Last Great Fire of New York City changed the building codes in New York City and eventually played a part in unifying the fire service into what would become FDNY as we know it today. We're proud to release this shirt and recognize that from the ashes we rise and continue the mission of making the fire service better than it was before we found it.
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As if normal airplane food wasn’t disgusting enough, two nights ago passengers on flight Air China CA1268 to Beijing experienced severe diarrhea and vomiting after eating expired biscuits, Beijing Evening News reports.
One family, surnamed Zhang, had reportedly noticed that the biscuits had been expired for four days and reported them to a crew member, who agreed to replace hers but not to alert the other passengers – because “ladies and gentlemen, the primary function of the cabin crew is to save face at all costs ensuring your safety.” About half an hour later, a bout of diarrhea and vomiting swept through the cabin, affecting at least 30 people, who formed massive queues in front of the lavatories. Hopefully, the turbulence was minimal.
When the plane finally landed at 7pm, the passengers complained to a hotline about the incident, but the info didn’t get relayed until three hours later. The food was allegedly supplied by the (totally appropriately-titled) Fresh Air company.
Maybe it’s time Air China adopted Shanghai’s food poisoning insurance.
Watch this vid of the incident below
[Via Xinapremium]
Follow @ShanghaiistFood
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Titanfall 2 players are still getting regular drops of free content. The game's sixth DLC addition, The War Games, adds a couple of extra maps and drops next week.
War, what is it good for? Games.
PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One players will automatically get the DLC next Tuesday, 27th June.
The Wars Games is headlined by a new map, appropriately-titled... War Games. It's a simulator-set mock-up of high-rise urban buildings and tank garages.
There's also a new Live Fire map, Traffic, a new execution, a third weapon slot for pilots, and more. EA has a blog with more details, although the full patch notes won't arrive until next week.
Titanfall developer Respawn spoke out last year against the Season Pass model, and has instead provided access to a stream of post-launch content for free.
It's an approach which will be adopted again this year by fellow EA-published shooter Star Wars Battlefront 2.
Despite being highly-praised by critics, Titanfall 2 did not match the sales of the series' first installment. Its arrival came sandwiched between genre big boys Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and received nowhere near as much publicity.
"In a banner year for first-person shooters, Respawn delivers what might well be the best," Eurogamer's Titanfall 2 review concluded.
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Just a few short years ago, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina entered the record books by hosting the largest Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix of all time. And on June 12th-14th, thousands of Magic: The Gathering fans will once again descend on the Queen City when StarCityGames.com proudly presents Grand Prix Charlotte! This Modern-format Grand Prix will be held at the Charlotte Convention Center… and it’s going to be huge!
No Grand Prix is complete without artists, and we're excited to have the incredibly talented Clint Cearley, rk post, Mark Poole, Jason A. Engle, Eric Deschamps and Noah Bradley joining us!
But it doesn’t stop there.
StarCityGames.com-run Grand Prix always feature a special Guest of Honor, and Grand Prix Charlotte is no exception. Please join us in welcoming our Grand Prix Charlotte Guest of Honor… all the way from Germany… Volkan Baga!
Normally, this is the part where I’d move on to announcing some of the many other reasons why Grand Prix Charlotte is going to be so big, but I didn’t say it was going to be big; I said it was going to be HUGE! And since this is our second Grand Prix in Charlotte and the event will be celebrating the release of the second Modern Masters set, we thought it’d only be appropriate to commemorate the occasion by inviting a SECOND Guest of Honor!
And we were beyond thrilled when Terese Nielsen accepted our invitation!
Clint Cearley, rk post, Mark Poole, Eric Deschamps, Noah Bradley, Volkan Baga and Terese Nielsen.
Come meet them all… live and in person… at Grand Prix Charlotte June 12-14!
But a Grand Prix is not just about special guests; it’s also about special attractions, and Grand Prix Charlotte definitely has some sweet ones!
Meet and Greet with SCGLive commentators Cedric Phillips and Patrick Sullivan
The return of the massive SCG Prize Wall
A Meet and Greet with “The Dragonmaster” Brian Kibler
The debut of the SCG Infinite Challenge Badge
Almost twenty (!) of the world’s biggest and best Magic: The Gathering vendors
A Next Level Deckbuilding Release Celebration with Patrick Chapin “The Innovator”
A special appearance by cosplayer extraordinaire Christine Sprankle
Live coverage courtesy of Cedric Phillips, Patrick Sullivan and the rest of the SCGLive crew
Of course, a Grand Prix wouldn’t be a Grand Prix without the chance to acquire some sweet swag, and at Grand Prix Charlotte, attendees will have a number of opportunities to get their hands on sleeves, deck boxes, collectible pins, and playmats, all featuring this... lovely... lady...
Noble Hierarch is coming out of retirement to attend the ultimate Magic: The Gathering party at Grand Prix Charlotte, and she expects to see you there as well. :)
Click here to learn more about Grand Prix Charlotte... and preregister today!
Best wishes,
Pete Hoefling
President, StarCityGames.com
Premier Tournament Organizer, Grand Prix Charlotte
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Dave McNeeley, columnist (Photo: Ralph Barrera/Contributed photo)
State leaders are calling for spending $150 million to deal with dysfunctional programs for foster kids, and other problems at Child Protective Services.
This follows the call of new Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Hank Whitman for $142 million to cut workers' caseloads and speed response time.
The emergency money would go to hire 829 employees, including 550 caseworkers and investigators. It would also give $12,000 annual pay raises to existing workers, to cut down on their rapid turnover rate.
State leaders should be applauded for working to solve this problem of previous neglect.
The proposal now must be approved by the Legislative Budget Board, made up of House Speaker Joe Straus and four House members, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the presiding officer of the Texas Senate, and four senators.
Meanwhile, Patrick has spent a good bit of his time pursuing a transgender bathroom bill.
Hold your applause.
It would force public schools to limit transgender students to using the bathroom of the sex designated on their birth certificates, rather than the sex with which they identify.
Back in May, Patrick went to Fort Worth to call for the resignation of Fort Worth Independent School District Superintendent Kent Scribner, for saying the school district would comply with a federal order to allow students to use the bathroom of the sex with which they identify.
Since then, a Texas federal judge in August paused enforcement of the Obama administration's transgender bathroom mandate while the courts around the country wrangle over whether the administration had the power to issue the mandate.
Patrick says he wants to protect females from having males come in the women's bathroom under the guise of identifying as females. He calls his proposal the "Women's Privacy Act."
He designated it among his top legislative priorities, deserving of a low Senate bill number –SB 6 -- high on the list of bill numbers reserved for Patrick's political pets.
Defending what many observers consider a proposed solution for a nonexistent problem, Patrick told the Houston Chroniclein April that the legislation is still necessary.
"Transgender people have been going into the ladies room for a long time, and there hasn't been an issue that I know of," Patrick acknowledged.
"But if laws are passed by cities and counties and school districts to allow men to go into a women's bathroom because of the way they feel, we won't be able be able to stop sexual predators from taking advantage of that law, like sexual predators take advantage of the internet."
Although some observers note that there are already laws that deal with sexual predators, Patrick's concern may prevail in the Senate, where he has several ideological fellow travelers. Tougher sledding is expected in the more mainstream House.
“This isn’t the most urgent concern of mine,” House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, said at a Nov. 29 Texas Tribune pre-session legislative conference.
Straus's coolness toward Patrick's ideological pet is underlined by the Texas Association of Business, the state's chamber of commerce.
In a statement, the TAB estimated Patrick's bathroom ban for transgenders would cost Texas $8.5 billion and 185,000 jobs, from cancellations of events like Austin's South by Southwest festival, NCAA championships, decreased tourism, and groups and businesses boycotting the state.
After North Carolina passed its anti-transgender bathroom bill, the state experienced a significant loss in convention business, tourism, and music shows canceled by performers such as New Jersey rocker Bruce Springsteen.
Several NCAA college basketball championship games were moved, and the National Basketball Association cancelled its All Star Game set for February.
The Atlantic Coast Conference shifted its women's college basketball tournament and college football championship game out of state, plus some other events.
The NCAA basketball Final Four is scheduled in San Antonio in 2018. Straus doesn't want Texas to risk the same fate as North Carolina.
“If it creates a situation like North Carolina went through, my enthusiasm would not be high for that,” Straus said.
"The thought that the NCAA or anyone else would boycott Texas because of this is ridiculous," Patrick insisted to the Houston Chronicle back in April. "It's more than offensive."
Patrick announced back then that he was joining a handful of other states in pushing for the bathroom bill. He said he was willing to risk potential political cost to himself.
“I think the handwriting is on the bathroom wall: Stay out of the ladies’ room if you’re a man,” Patrick said then.
“If it costs me an election, if it costs me a lot of grief, then so be it," he said. "If we can’t fight for something this basic, then we’ve lost our country.”
Guess we'll see.
Contact Dave McNeely at [email protected] or 512-458-2963.
Read or Share this story: http://arnne.ws/2hQ4C9g
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U.S. Pushed Allies on Iraq, Diplomat Writes
UNITED NATIONS — In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war, according to an upcoming book by a top Chilean diplomat. The rough-and-tumble diplomatic strategy has generated lasting “bitterness” and “deep mistrust” in Washington’s relations with allies in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, Heraldo Munoz, Chile’s ambassador to the United Nations, writes in his book “A Solitary War: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons,” set for publication next month. “In the aftermath of the invasion, allies loyal to the United States were rejected, mocked and even punished” for their refusal to back a U.N. resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein’s government, Munoz writes.
The evidence that Bush was lying when he said on 3/08/03, “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq” just keeps piling up. What he was actually doing was preparing for the occupation of Iraq regardless and was all too willing to act like a weasel to get as many nations as possible to surrender their sovereign conscience to the U.S. Obviously a tactic we Americans would resent were the tables turned. As early as 2002 Bush knew that Iraq’s WMD were more myth then reality, Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction
On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again. Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.
That NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) was supposed to according to CIA policy, a non-political document. In fact it did not suggest any political or military actions per se, but because it lacked any input from those that dissent from the views that the Whitehouse wanted to hear it ended up being one of the most politically partisan documents of our time. It wasn’t a national security document as much as justification for shoving a partisan political agenda down America’s throat in the name of boogie man politics. Were there any footnotes in the Iraq NIE?
In one, the State Department’s INR bureau dissented from the intelligence community’s majority view that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, saying there was not enough evidence to reach that conclusion. In particular, it raised doubts about whether a large shipment of aluminum tubes sought by Iraq was intended for centrifuges to enrich nuclear fuel, as asserted by other agencies. In another footnote, the U.S. Air Force’s director for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance questioned whether the unmanned aerial vehicles being developed by Iraq were “probably” intended to deliver biological agents. Instead, he said that would be an unlikely mission for such aircraft. This footnote was left out of the declassified version. [ ]…some Senate Democrats say there was pressure. John D. Rockefeller (W. Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, said July 9 that while policy-makers did not appear to have directly intervened in the NIE writing process, the NIE was assembled in a general “environment of intense pressure” that encouraged caveat-free assertions about Iraq’s WMD. By October 2002, when the NIE was released, “the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions [that Iraq had WMD] publicly,” Rockefeller said. In August 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, said, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
“No doubt”? UNMOVIC and the IAEA – accurately assessed the state of Iraq’s weapons programmes in 2002-2003
IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei told the United Nations in March 2003 that his teams did not find evidence that Iraq had resumed nuclear activity or attempted to import uranium or centrifuge parts, and that in general Iraq’s nuclear infrastructure had deteriorated. Kay’s latest statements confirm the IAEA’s assessment. UN inspections and sanctions, together with US airstrikes, had effectively destroyed most of Iraq’s programmes after 1991. In addition, UN inspectors appear to have provided the bulk of US on-the-ground intelligence prior to 1998.
You still see this in forums across the net, Bush relied on the same intelligence that Bill Clinton did. This claim is always made with out the slightest bit of embarrassment by the commenter. Partly true, Bush issued to the public, in the form of the unclassified summary of the NIE stale leftover intelligence from prior to 1998 to make his case for putting our troops in the line of fire in 2003. So much for Republicans as the Grand Mullahs of National Security. The administration made the claim, successfully linked in the publics mind to this day that Saddam was going to had off nukes or sarin filled missiles to terrorists groups, yet never produced – let me repeat that – never produced any intelligence to back up that egregiously wild claim.
I was a John Edwards supporter, but have since tried to stay out of the fray. There are several posts in which I’ve defended Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama against unfair attacks, but that is not the same as an endorsement. It is disheartening to see some of the back and forth between Clinton and Obama supporters. Especially the crazy declaration that if HC or BO doesn’t win the nomination they’re voting for McCain. Josh Marshall sums things up as regards that attitude very well, Goodbye, Cruel Ballot Box
Clearly though there are some people who really do mean it. A very small fraction I think, but there nonetheless. And there’s really no better example of emotional infantilism that some people bring to the political process . One can see it in a case like 1968 perhaps or other years where real and important differences separated the candidates — or in cases where the differences between the parties on key issues were not so great. But that simply is not the case this year. As much as the two campaign have sought to highlight the differences, the two candidates’ positions on almost every issue is extremely close. And the differences that do exist pale into insignificance when compared to Sen. McCain’s. That’s not to say that these small differences are reasons to choose one of the candidates over the other. But to threaten either to sit the election or vote for McCain or vote for Nader if your candidate doesn’t win the nomination shows as clearly as anything that one’s ego-investment in one’s candidate far outstrips one’s interest in public policy and governance. If this really is one’s position after calm second-thought, I see no other way to describe it.
In my own words, grow the f**k up. Instead of saying that’ll you’ll vote for McCain why not just say screw America, if I don’t get what I want I’m taking my ball and bat and going home. I sympathize up to a point. Ideals are great and each side is damn sure their’s are better, truer and have more nutritional value per serving, but this is the real world of real choices and the always inevitable compromise. Related to the current mini-crisis between candidates, Why am I so afraid that the Democratic Party is shooting itself in the foot?
Modern Baseball wallpaper
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Real Men of Genius is a series of advertisements, primarily 60-second American radio spots, for Bud Light beer. The campaign was originally conceived by copywriter Bob Winter and art director Mark Gross – and co-created with copywriter Bill Cimino – at DDB Chicago.[4]
The campaign began in 1998[3] under the title Real American Heroes with 12 radio spots. Over 200[3] installments have been made. In 2001, the radio version was adapted for television in the UK, advertising Budweiser beer instead of Bud Light (Bud Light is not officially distributed in the UK). The six UK TV spots maintained the same one-minute format and ran for about 18 months.[4] In fall 2003, thirty-second versions of three UK TV spots were edited and seven new ads were produced for US television.[5]
Anheuser-Busch is reported to have spent $38 million per year airing just the radio version.[6]
The singing was done by Dave Bickler, the lead singer of the band Survivor, known for such songs as "Eye of the Tiger" from the 1980s. The humorous, yet seriously spoken, commentary was done by voice actor Peter Stacker. Together, they made an appearance on the television show WGN Morning News and did a Real Men of Genius about the cameraman, which was a parody saying he falls asleep behind the video camera while recording the show.[7]
Sequence [ edit ]
Each sixty-second ad gives mock glorification[8] in the form of a tribute to men in overlooked professions or with humorous or eccentric traits or habits.[5] The language is very observational in style, in part parodying Budweiser's earlier This Bud's for You campaign.[4]
The advertisement is set to 1980s style anthemic music. The announcer (Pete Stacker) reads the mock tribute straight.[4] Humour in part is derived from juxtaposing over-the-top vocals sung by Dave Bickler.[5] Sometimes these vocals are augmented by a female gospel-style chorus.
In addition to providing humor, the music is an effective jingle.[9]
2001/02 redaction and renaming [ edit ]
In mid-2001, Anheuser-Busch ordered another 17 Real American Hero ads be made. These ads were pulled from circulation after the 9/11 attacks as mocking American heroism then seemed questionable.[10] The campaign relaunched in 2002 with the title and lyrics changed from Real American Heroes to Real Men of Genius.
Release and reception [ edit ]
Anheuser-Busch were initially reluctant to air the ads because of their irreverent style. Consumer testing, however, proved them to be very popular.[11]
The ads not only received tremendous consumer response, but also won more than 100 awards, including the prestigious Grand Prix for Radio (twice, in 2005 and 2006) as well as Gold and Bronze Lions at the Cannes International Advertising Festival and, in 2003, a Grand Clio,[12][13] making it the most awarded campaign in history.[14]
The popularity of the series led to many of the commercials being traded on peer-to-peer file sharing networks[15] and bootleg recordings of the ads being sold on eBay.[5]
In 2003, Anheuser-Busch released a collection of 20 ads on CD, titled Bud Light Salutes Real Men of Genius, Vol 1, to be sold in the company's online store. Two additional volumes were released soon after. In 2005, a limited edition compilation combined all prior volumes into one release, Bud Light Salutes Real Men of Genius Volumes 1, 2 and 3. Each volume contained 20 spots[16][17] and have since gone out of print.
In late 2006, Anheuser-Busch sponsored a comedy tour titled "Real Men of Comedy" starring John Heffron, Joe Rogan, and Charlie Murphy. This tour featured the announcer (Stacker) and singer (Bickler) performing several of their famous commercials live at the beginning of the show. Stacker and Bickler performed regional versions of the spots to support Budweiser's comedy tour at radio stations and concert-sponsored venues such as Lollapalooza.[18]
Demise [ edit ]
While never officially canceled, funding for the ads was cut in June 2008.[6] At the time, Anheuser-Busch denied the cost savings were part of a defense against hostile takeover from then-competitor InBev.[6] In July 2008, InBev successfully purchased Anheuser Busch.
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“In this moment, I don’t know who is pursuing whom any more than these fish do.” - Jack Crawford, Hannibal Episode 212, “Tome-Wan”
In Friday’s episode of nbchannibal, Hannibal serves Kholodets, a Ukrainian dish of jellied meat. As Hannibal explains, the outcome of the dish can never be predicted, but we do know that one must use a meat containing cartilage in order to have any chance of success.
Hannibal’s circular Kholodets jelly mold includes fish positioned on opposite ends, thus creating the illusion of the eternal chase. As Hannibal observes, “At a certain point it becomes unclear who is pursuing whom.”
This week we share an image from Finnish photographer tuukkakoski which reminded us of the fish engaged in Hannibal’s eternal chase:
Is the subject of the image the pursuer or the pursued? That all depends on perspective, we guess. In any event, this stunning image comes from Tuukka Koski’s “Eat & Joy Farmers Market” collection. You can see more of the collection here: http://tuukkakoski.com/filter/Food/Eat-Joy-Farmers-Market-2
As always, we appreciate Tuukka’s generosity in allowing us to use his images here.
Spoiler Alert: Hannibal’s response to the question of who is chasing whom? “Whomever is pursuing whom in this very moment, I intend to eat them.” Enjoy “Tome-Wan,” Friday at 10/9c on NBC.
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Motorola has offered an early Christmas present to its US customers by making its new, low-cost Moto G handset available for preorder in time for the holidays.
Up until now, the Moto X's cheaper, younger sibling wasn't expected to reach the US until January. That's still the case if you want to purchase it through a carrier, but Motorola unexpectedly began taking orders for the devices on its own website on Tuesday and says it will begin shipping them in December.
As previously announced, the handsets are selling for $179 for a model with 8GB of onboard storage or $199 for a 16GB model. Neither version has a microSD card for expansion, but both also come bundled with 50GB of free storage on Google Drive for two years.
Only the GSM version of the phone will be available before January. The Moto G is not an LTE handset, and Motorola is not offering a CDMA version for preorder. The handsets are unlocked, however, and they support all of the global GSM bands, so they should work with AT&T, T-Mobile, or any other GSM network.
For either version of the phone, you can also choose between a chipset that's been optimized for US 3G (UMTS/HSPA+) networks or one that works best on global networks when roaming outside the US.
The version of the handset that will arrive in December will ship with Android 4.3 "Jelly Bean," but Motorola has said that it will have an upgrade to Android 4.4 "KitKat" ready by January, and that all Moto G owners are guaranteed to receive it free of charge.
Those who would like to receive the devices by Christmas might be advised to move fast, though. Motorola's website says the phones will start shipping on December 2, but as we go to push the big, red "Publish" button on this story, the ship dates for certain models have already slipped to December 9. ®
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Crazed North Carolina Woman Faces Assortment Of Charges For Road Rage Incident Caught On Tape Share
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A North Carolina driver is facing an assortment of criminal charges after a fellow motorist filmed her in a scary road rage incident.
Kristen Leigh Phillips, 40, is scheduled to be arraigned February 9 on misdemeanor charges stemming from a roadway confrontation last Saturday in Randolph County, where Phillips resides.
According to cops, Phillips recklessly passed another car on a two-lane road, nearly forcing the vehicle off the road. The driver of the second car, Sherri Hastings, dialed 911 to report the incident and began filming the vehicle now in front of her.
As seen in the video--beginning around the 3:00 mark--Phillips abruptly stopped in the road and rushed out of her SUV to confront the 62-year-old Hastings. When she arrived at the driver’s side of the trailing car, Phillips reached into the window and took a swing at Hastings, who quickly began closing the car window.
While the cursing, enraged Phillips pounded the window with her fists, Hastings’s terrified young granddaughter began crying. Before returning to her car, Phillips turned and yelled “Fuck you” as she held up both of her middle fingers.
According to District Court records, Phillips has been charged with assault and battery, communicating threats, and injury to personal property.
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INDIANAPOLIS (Reuters) - Mike Carmichael simply wanted to do something weird when he and his 3-year-old son slapped a coat of blue paint on a baseball in 1977.
The central Indiana resident stuck with painting the ball, which grew large enough to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records in 2004.
At that time, it was 9 feet (2.7 meters) across, and the record was an estimated 18,000 layers of paint. Now Carmichael, 68, figures he is at close to 25,000, although he never set out to break records.
The ball now measures 14 feet after Carmichael, his family, friends and even visitors added more coats of paint over the last several decades. At its last weigh-in two years ago, the sphere of ever-changing colors was about 5,000 pounds (2,268 kg).
“I was always doing something weird, so I wanted something different to do,” said the soft-spoken, self-employed painter. “We had no idea it was going to get this big, this popular or this heavy.”
Carmichael keeps the ball in a custom-built structure on his property in Alexandria, a town of about 5,000 people about 40 miles northeast of Indianapolis.
The roadside spectacle attracts about 1,200 visitors a year. Some just want to gawk, while others, who call ahead and schedule an appointment, grab a paint brush and get to work so they can claim a hand in the ongoing record.
The ball is not a money maker, although Carmichael sells T-shirts and jewelry. Everyone who paints gets a certificate, while every donor receives a paint chip from the project.
The ball, which now looks more like a giant gourd, hangs from the ceiling with heavy chains and an industrial hook. A mirror beneath it ensures the painter does not miss a spot.
A photo hanging in the ball house shows Carmichael’s son, Mike Jr., during the first paint job almost four decades ago. Now 42, he lives nearby and still pitches in with color makeovers.
Carmichael Sr. and others paint every day, although his wife, Glenda, resigned when the ball got larger. “It’s a job now,” she said with a smile.
At one point, Carmichael considered cutting the ball in half to see all the layers of color, but given its size, he dropped that idea.
Red is a popular color with visiting painters, and the job can be done in eight minutes or less, depending on how many participate. Comedian Tom Green and country musicians the Oak Ridge Boys are among the people who have lent a hand.
As for how long Carmichael plans to keep going, he is not sure. The current set-up can hold 11,500 pounds, he said, so he has some time before the ball will drop.
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The Top 25 Under 25 is a collaboration by members of the RawCharge writing staff. Four writers, plus a special guest, ranked players under the age of 25 as of September 1st, 2017 in the Tampa Bay Lightning organization. Each participant used their own metric of current ability and production against future projection to rank each player. Now, we’ll count down each of the 25 players ranked, plus Honorable Mentions.
Feel free to make your own ranking over here!
We’ve almost made it to the end of Raw Charge’s 2017 Top 25 Under 25 countdown. Wooo! It’s been a lot of fun (but a lot of work) to put these profiles together. Our staff looks forward to being able to do this again next year. By doing this ranking year after year, we will be able to see how players grow and how our perceptions of them change.
One of the biggest challenges of doing the ranking is coming up with a metric to evaluate players. We purposely allowed all of our rankers to come up with their own metric. Some valued future potential more, some valued current ability more, and some were some mix of both. An example for the kind of decisions you have to make: take Mathieu Joseph, Dennis Yan, and Boris Katchouk and compare them to Cedric Paquette.
One the one hand, Joseph, Yan, and Katchouk all have good offensive potential, but their projections mostly top out as third liners. Joseph and Yan have a handful of professional games, but otherwise all three have not had an opportunity yet to show what they can do as professionals. While they are full of potential, there’s also the potential for failure for each of them. On the other hand, Paquette is already a solid fourth-liner that plays on the penalty kill and is defensively responsible. How do you compare potential against current ability?
That’s just a few of the questions we all had to ask ourselves as we did our ranking. It’s also why there were some rankings where our staff widely varied, but some where there was consistency. It actually reminded me very much of scouting for the NHL Entry Draft. You’ll have a player with question marks that varies up and down the boards, but another player that’s just solid all the way around and consistently ranked within a few spots.
Raw Charge’s 2017 Top 25 Under 25 Player (Age) Raw Charge Rank Player (Age) Raw Charge Rank ? 1 Andrei Vasilevskiy (Age: 22) 2 Brayden Point (Age: 21) 3 Vladislav Namestnikov (24) 4 Mikhail Sergachev (Age: 19) 5 Slater Koekkoek (Age: 23) 6 Brett Howden (Age: 19) 7 Matthew Peca (Age: 24) 8 Anthony Cirelli (Age: 19) 9 Adam Erne (Age: 22) 10 Mitchell Stephens (Age: 20) 11 Jake Dotchin (Age: 23) 12 Taylor Raddysh (Age: 19) 13 Mathieu Joseph (Age: 20) 14 Dennis Yan (Age: 20) 15 Cedric Paquette (Age: 23) 16 Cal Foote (Age: 18) 17 Boris Katchouk (Age: 19) 18 Dominik Masin (Age: 21) 19 Daniel Walcott (Age: 23) 20 Connor Ingram (Age: 20) 21 Alexey Lipanov (Age: 17) 22 Matt Spencer (Age: 20) 23 Libor Hajek (Age: 19) 24 Erik Cernak (Age: 20) 25
Those Not Receiving Votes
Now on to the rest of the top players under 25. We had seven players that were eligible for the ranking but did not receive any votes.
Brian Hart
Cole Guttman
Johnathan MacLeod
Nick Perbix
Oleg Sosunov
Ryan Zuhlsdorf
Samuel Walker
F Brian Hart
Hart was a second-round pick by the Lightning in the 2012 NHL Entry Draft. Drafted out of high school ranks, Hart went to Harvard for three seasons before turning professional. Hart’s offense didn’t develop as well as his high school production suggested it might. and he only scored a half-point-per-game in the NCAA. He’s spent the past two seasons bouncing between the Syracuse Crunch in the AHL and the Greenville Swamp Rabbits and Kalamazoo Wings in the ECHL.
F Cole Guttman
Another NCAA-bound pick, Guttman was selected in the 2017 NHL Entry Draft in the sixth round. With a lot of potential offensive skill shown in the USHL, he’ll remain in the USHL for one more season and then move into the NCAA hockey ranks with St. Cloud State. He’s a long shot to make the NHL and that’s reflected in his ranking combined with his age.
D Johnathan MacLeod
MacLeod feels a little bit like a forgotten prospect. He was once considered a pretty solid defenseman of the future with a chance to develop into a borderline top four. Selected in the second round of the 2014 NHL Entry Draft, MacLeod has spent the last three seasons with Boston University. He doesn’t have a lot of offense in his game, but he’s solid defensively and is an aggressive hitter. He came along in the second half of his junior year and he’ll need better production in his senior year to earn a professional contract.
D Nick Perbix
Like Guttman, Perbix is an NCAA-bound draft pick from the 2017 NHL Entry Draft, selected in the sixth round. Perbix is a year overage and came out of High School hockey rather than the USHL. Perbix is also bound for St. Cloud State but he’ll head there this year. When you look at Perbix as a defenseman, it’s not hard to see that the Lightning are looking at him as a Coburn type. He has the hockey IQ and defensive awareness to succeed, but he has a lot of holes in his game that he has to shore up to have a chance at making it to the NHL.
D Oleg Sosunov
Sosunov was a bit of a surprise pick in the 6th round of the 2016 NHL Entry Draft. Drafted from Russia, Sosunov measures up at 6’8” and 225 pounds. At the age of 19, he’s already taller and heavier than Andrej Sustr. Sosunov has shown a lack of any offense in his game, putting up only three assists in 46 games at all levels last season. We should get a better look at him this season though as he’s making the move to the WHL’s Moose Jaw Warriors.
D Ryan Zuhlsdorf
Another NCAA player (are we noticing a trend yet?), Zuhlsdorf came to the Lightning in the fifth round of the 2015 NHL Entry Draft. An offensive defenseman, Zuhlsdorf put up impressive offense in the USHL, with 50 points in 102 games over two seasons. He moved to NCAA hockey last season with the University of Minnesota and had five points in 37 games. Playing on a deep blue line on the third pair and no power play time, Zuhlsdorf didn’t have much of an opportunity to shine offensively. I expect that to change this year as the Golden Gophers lost their top-scoring defenseman to the professional ranks.
F Samuel Walker
The Lightning’s final pick of the 2017 NHL Entry Draft, Walker is yet another NCAA bound player (definitely a trend here). Drafted out of high school, Walker is a diminutive center with good hockey IQ and offensive instincts. He scored 46 points in 25 games for Edina High. He had a short audition in the USHL at the end of his season playing four games with the Lincoln Stars. He’ll head back to the USHL with Lincoln this year and look to sharpen his skills before joining Zuhlsdorf at the University of Minnesota in 2018-19.
Conclusions
That’s all of the players that did not receive votes in our Top 25 Under 25. The common theme with all of them is “out of sight, out of mind.” With five of the seven being NCAA or NCAA-bound, they’re just not as visible. The same goes for Sosunov playing in Russian junior hockey. As we go on over the next couple years and we see more of what these players can do, I expect we’ll start to see them rise in the rankings. They may never rank high, but they have the potential to rank in the 20-25 range.
Honorable Mentions
For the Honorable Mentions, players receiving at least one vote, I’ll go through them from the lowest vote total until we get up to the player that ranked 26th on our list of the Top 25 players Under 25 years old in the Tampa Bay Lightning system.
#34 Alexander Volkov
Volkov’s only vote came from Allokago with a 25th place vote. Alex has a little bit of a bias towards the Syracuse Crunch being a long-time Crunch writer and season ticket member. She has high hopes for what Volkov can do this season in the AHL and we’ll all be eagerly watching as the Lightning’s 2017 second-round pick comes over from Russia to do that.
Volkov was a surprise pick this year and very few if any of the scouting services even had him ranked. He couldn’t break into the KHL with SKA St. Petersburg’s very deep roster and he’ll have a chance to contribute in the bottom six this season for the Crunch.
#33 Ryan Lohin
Lohin could have as easily ended unranked with the other NCAA prospects. He received a 24th-place vote from me due to his potential and his solid freshman season, with 29 points in 41 games for UMass-Lowell. A seventh-round pick in 2016, he was an overager after being passed over twice in the draft.
Lohin has good size as a center and it won’t be a surprise to see him step up to a point-per-game pace in his sophomore season. He could end up coming out for the professional ranks before his four years of NCAA eligibility are finished.
#32 Otto Somppi
Somppi received a single 22nd place vote from Achariya. He was a seventh-round pick of the Lightning in the 2016 NHL Entry Draft. He put up 46 points in 59 games with the Halifax Mooseheads of the QMJHL. The Finnish import was unable to improve on his point totals as he only scored 41 points in 60 games this season on a lackluster Halifax team.
Somppi will need to pick up his offense this season as a 19 year old. If he wants to earn an entry level contract, he needs to get up to at least a point-per-game production level. He has grown a bit since being drafted and is now listed at 6’0” and 181 pounds. His game is mostly about offense and if he can show more, he could be a contributor at the AHL level but his NHL ceiling is likely limited.
#31 Cameron Darcy
Darcy is an interesting prospect. An overage pick in the seventh round of the 2014 NHL Entry Draft, the Lightning sent him back to the QMJHL for an overage season instead of signing him to an Entry Level Contract. He had a very slow start when he returned and got traded from the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles to the Sherbrooke Phoenix. With Sherbrooke he seemed to come back to life and put up 20 goals and 45 points in 37 games — after only scoring a single goal, an empty netter, and 14 points in 19 games before the trade.
After Darcy’s overage season, he signed an entry level contract with the Lightning and joined the professional ranks. He stuck with the Syracuse Crunch in a bottom-six role for the 2015-16 season with 12 points in 56 games. Last season he split time between the Crunch and the Kalamazoo Wings in the ECHL. He is one of those minor league tweeners that scores very well in the ECHL, but can’t put it together in the AHL. He’s in the last year of his ELC and will need to show more to earn another contract.
#30 Ross Colton
Colton is another NCAA prospect that got a little bit of love. He received 23rd and 21st place votes. Similar to Lohin, Colton was an overage draft pick but was only passed over in the draft once. A 66-point-in-55-game USHL campaign caught the notice of the Lightning scouting staff and the team picked him up in the fourth round of the 2016 NHL Entry Draft.
Making his debut in NCAA hockey, Colton put up 27 points in 33 games. He’s got a little more of a ceiling than Lohin and has already shown more offense at a younger age. He’ll return to the University of Vermont for his sophomore season. He’s playing well enough that he could come up after this season if he wants to. Steve Yzerman has shown patience with NCAA prospects and has not pressured them to leave school early and to make their own decision about when to turn professional. [Looking at you, here, Predators. - Acha]
#29 Kristian Oldham
With her love of goaltenders, Allokago gave Oldham an 18th-place vote. Oldham was drafted in the sixth round of the 2015 NHL entry Draft. He returned to the USHL for another season where he had a decent .905 save percentage in 31 games. He began his NCAA career as a back-up with the University of Nebraska-Omaha. In limited playing time, he had an .895 save percentage in 10 games.
Unfortunately, he may be stuck behind his teammate Evan Weninger for a while. Weninger is only a year ahead of Oldham. If he doesn’t leave school early, Oldham is going to have to play lights out whenever he gets a chance to unseat Weninger and get more playing time. Goalies desperately need playing time to develop and that’s not great news for Lightning fans.
When Oldham does turn professional, most likely he would serve as a fifth goalie for the organization in the ECHL. That’s assuming he doesn’t unseat Weninger and doesn’t get serious playing time until he’s a senior. He’s still got three years though to develop at the NCAA level.
#28 Jonne Tammela
Tammela received a single 16th-place vote to get him into the honorable mentions. After being drafted in the fourth round of the 2015 NHL Entry Draft, Tammela remained in Finland to play in their top men’s professional league, Liiga. He had 13 points in 37 games which is a solid point total for an 18 year old in that league.
At the end of the 2015-16 season, Tammela signed an entry level contract and played in three games for the Syracuse Crunch. The Peterborough Petes of the OHL drafted him in the CHL Import Draft and the Lightning sent him there. He suffered a knee injury during camp and did not play until mid-season. He played two games with the Petes and re-aggravated the injury and did not return for the rest of the season.
While there is a chance Tammela could play in the AHL this season, if he’s playing professional hockey it’s more likely in the ECHL where he would get substantial ice time to develop his game. The other option is to send him back to the Petes for an overage season in the CHL. That would probably be the best for him after losing a whole year of development time.
#27 Christopher Paquette
The cousin of Tampa Bay Lightning center, and number 16 in our rankings, Cedric Paquette, Christopher Paquette received two 20th place votes. He actually has the same number of points in the rankings as our 26th place finisher, but lost the tiebreaker due to the other player having a higher place vote.
Paquette was drafted in the 5th round of the 2016 NHL Entry Draft. He was a gamble for the Lightning as he had served in a fourth line role for a very deep Niagara IceDogs team in the OHL. He had only managed 14 and 16 points in 54 and 57 games respectively prior to being drafted. With the Lightning scouting staff projecting what they saw into a bigger role, they felt the gamble was worth it.
This season with Niagara Paquette moved up in the lineup and contributed 12 goals and 29 points in 37 games. With Niagara not faring well in the standings, Paquette was traded near the deadline to the Peterborough Petes. With the Petes, he put up 7 goals and 19 points in 29 games. He finished with 0.72 points per game for the season. He’ll need to continue to show more offense in his game this season to make sure he earns a professional contract.
#26 Ben Thomas
Ben Thomas is an interesting prospect. He appears here thanks to a fifteenth-place rank by Allokago. This summer when Steve Yzerman made comments about the Lightning’s defense and their prospects at the position, Thomas’s name came up quite a bit, which was surprising. To me, it’s a signal that the organization is happy with his development and has high hopes for his continued growth.
Thomas was drafted in the fourth round of the 2014 NHL Entry Draft from the Calgary Hitman of the WHL. An offensive defenseman, he hovered around a half point per game through much of his WHL career. He returned to the Hitman after being drafted and put up 31 points in 60 games. The next season, he started off slowly in Calgary with only three points in 14 games.
Thomas was also getting pushed down the depth chart and was traded to the Vancouver Giants. The Giants were pretty bad that season, but Thomas got the opportunity to be a top defenseman there. After the trade, he put up 25 points in 60 games. With the added ice time and responsibility, the Lightning decided to sign him to an entry level contract even when prospect watchers had their doubts about if he would be signed.
He finished the 2015-16 season with the Syracuse Crunch putting up four points in eight games. He was with the Crunch for all of the 2016-17 season and put up three goals and 21 points over 71 games. He came to life though in the playoffs and put up five goals and 13 points in 22 games.
Thomas’ development through his first professional season is very promising. I still view him as being a Mark Barberio/Nikita Nesterov type of 6/7 defenseman. And that’s better than I viewed him even six months ago. At that time, I figured he would be good depth in the AHL providing a little bit of offense from the blue line with a minimal chance he could be an injury fill-in at the NHL level.
With Jamie McBain being the only other experienced right-handed defenseman expected to be on the Syracuse Crunch roster, Thomas will get plenty of opportunity in the top 4 and as a power play quarterback. This will be a prime opportunity for him to shine and show that he has what it takes to make it to the NHL. A 40-50 point performance could force the Lightning to consider a roster spot for him in 2018-19 and beyond.
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Nov 08, 2014 was a huge milestone for LWJGL 3. It was the first time anyone could download a nightly build of the library and start playing with it. A few days later the new site was deployed and suddenly there was so much interest for the project. Not that surprising I guess, LWJGL is used extensively and everyone's been waiting for a better version, but it did come as a shock after two years of silently working towards the next big release. Yes, it's been almost two years, our first LWJGL 3 commit was on Dec 23, 2012!
Initial feedback has been surprisingly positive. Seems everyone's favorite feature is the GLFW bindings and I'd like to take the opportunity to publicly thank Camilla Berglund (aka elmindreda) for the fantastic job she's doing with the project. It's really been wonderful to finally be able to rely on a well-designed and well-implemented windowing system.
The site seems to also have left a positive impression, though it's light on content at the moment. As we get closer to an official release, more information will be added and we hope that we'll also be able to feature the first projects that use LWJGL 3!
The community excitement did also result in a flurry of activity inside the project. Issues had to be fixed, design choices and technical problems explained, new usability features implemented. Change log for the past week or so:
Bug fixes , lots of them! The library was suddenly exposed to a wide variety of hardware and operating systems, so some friction was expected. That's what nightly builds are for. :)
, lots of them! The library was suddenly exposed to a wide variety of hardware and operating systems, so some friction was expected. That's what nightly builds are for. :) The minimum required Java version is now 6 (down from 7). Java 7 was only a minor convenience and was painless to drop. In return, we made deployment of applications that use LWJGL a lot easier for some of our users.
(down from 7). Java 7 was only a minor convenience and was painless to drop. In return, we made deployment of applications that use LWJGL a lot easier for some of our users. Resolved #17, which was affecting a lot of users.
Re-implemented native library loading , so that using LWJGL 3 is as simple as LWJGL 2. Both -Djava.library.path and -Dorg.lwjgl.librarypath are now supported and users do not have to specify a specific OS and architecture anymore.
, so that using LWJGL 3 is as simple as LWJGL 2. Both and are now supported and users do not have to specify a specific OS and architecture anymore. Added new OpenAL extensions and refactored the API to allow for thread-local OpenAL contexts.
and refactored the API to allow for thread-local OpenAL contexts. Made building LWJGL locally less painful. JAVA6_HOME is now optional, added a release Ant target and an override for where the generated files are stored.
The greatest news though was that we already have an offer for a contribution to LWJGL 3, bindings to a new API! Stay tuned!
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Security researchers have found a serious set of security holes in Microsoft’s Outlook.com Android application that allows for user data to be leaked.
Security researchers at Include Security identified the serious flaw in the mobile application back in November 2013 when reverse engineering apps. The application that has tens of millions of downloads was found to store user data on the SD card in plain text, allowing any third party or anyone to have access to the emails.
“In the course of our research we found that the on-device email storage doesn’t really make any effort to ensure confidentiality of messages and attachments within the phone filesystem itself,” Include Security Paolo Soto said in the report. “We’ve found that many messaging applications (stored email or instant message and chat apps) store their messages in a way that makes it easy for rogue apps or third parties with physical access to the mobile device to obtain access to the messages.”
The firm identified various security holes in a number of apps, but narrowed in on Outlook and identified several privacy failures.
Soto said that any third party application installed on the device that has READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission can access the Outlook.com emails, attachments, and other locally cached files. Accessing the Outlook emails did not require the phone to be rooted or further permissions, just that the card itself be unencrypted. While third party applications can easily access the cards directory, an attacker could too gain access via a stolen phone. Simply use an ADB shell and navigate to the sdcard/attachments directory.
Emails inside the application are stored in the app-specific filesystem, and the “pincode” feature inside the Outlook.com application only protects the GUI, it does nothing to secure the messages within the filesystem throughout the device. The pincode feature is not activated by default on the app, but if activated the user is prompted to type a set pincode in every time they try to access, resume, or use the application in anyway. To surprise, this does not offer additional security or pin lock the directory.
If a third party wanted to access the data on the Outlook.com application, they could run a program and extract the database directly from the app. All the emails are stored in plaintext, and HTML meaning anyone could read it.
When researchers at Include Security reported the security leaks, Microsoft responded “…users should not assume data is encrypted by default in any application or operating system unless an explicit promise to that effect has been made.” Microsoft has not and will not appear to implement any form of extra security for the Outlook.com application.
It is highly recommended everyone encrypt their SD card to secure their Outlook.com data, along with other sensitive credentials stored on the SD card.
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