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There’s some good news in the battle against bedbugs
Researchers at Stony Brook University have developed what is essentially a man-made spider web that stops bedbugs in their tracks, 1010 WINS reported.
It consists of microfibers 50 times thinner than a human hair which can entangle and trap bedbugs and other insects.
“They can very easily walk along standard fiber materials, like bed sheets, but these nanofibers are smaller than the hooks of their legs,” Prof. Miriam Rafailovich told 1010 WINS. “As soon as they enter a bed of nanofibers they’re stuck, they get entangled, and the more they struggle, the more entangled they get.”
Once the bugs are trapped, they are prevented from feeding and reproducing.
“When they’re trapped, they’re very agitated and they die very quickly, much faster than when they’re in their dormant, non-feeding state,” Rafailovich said.
The fibers are safe for both humans and pets, Rafailovich said. Also, since the trap is chemical-free, the insects can’t develop a resistance to it.
The patent is still pending, but it’s being developed commercially by the private company Fibertrap.
“We are very excited to move this advancement from the lab to the consumer,” said Fibertrap co-founder Kevin McAllister. “Our goal has always been to make a difference for people living in areas where bed bugs are pervasive and difficult to eradicate.”
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Ukraine’s embassy to the EU has detailed Russian military movements in Crimea, saying operations to seize control began one week ago.
The Ukrainian embassy, in a two-page note circulated to EU diplomats on Friday (28 February) - and seen by EUobserver - cited seven “illegal military activities of the Russian Federation in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine.”
Going back to February 21 and 22, it says Russia moved 16 BTR-80 armoured personnel carriers of the 801st Marine Corps brigade from the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea, which it leases from Ukraine, to the Crimean towns of Kaha, Gvardiiske, and Sevastopol.
It notes that on 23 February three BTR-80s moved from the base to the town of Khersones.
On 26 February, 10 armoured vehicles from the 801st brigade moved “into the depth of the Crimean peninsula towards Simferopol.”
On 28 February, 12 Mi-24 Russian attack helicopters flew from Anapa in Russia to the Kacha airfield in Crimea “despite [the fact] clearance was granted only for 3 helos.”
The same day five Il-76 Russian military transport planes landed at Gvardiiske with no clerance at all, while 400 Russian troops from the Ulyanovsk Airborne Brigade moved to Cape Fiolent, near Sevastopol.
The Ukrainian document says that also on Friday: “Belbek airport (Sevastopol) was blocked by an armed unit of the Russian Fleet (soldiers with no marking but not concealing their affiliation). Simferopol airport occupied by more than 100 soldiers with machine guns wearing camouflage, unmarked but not concealing their affiliation to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”
It adds that Captain Oleksandr Tolmachov, a Russian Black Sea Fleet officer, led a group of 30 soldiers who blocked the Sevastopol Marine Security detachment of the State Border Service of Ukraine.
Speaking in Kiev on Friday, Ukraine’s interim president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said: “They are provoking us into an armed conflict. Based on our intelligence, they’re working on scenarios analogous to Abkhazia, in which they provoke conflict, and then they start to annex territory.”
He added: “Ukraine’s military will fulfill its duties, but will not succumb to provocation.”
He also said Russia’s actions violate the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, signed by Russia, the UK, Ukraine, and the US.
Russia in 2008 invaded Georgia saying Georgian forces had fired on its “peacekeeping” troops in Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia. After an eight-day war, Russia retreated from Georgia proper, but entrenched its occupation of South Ossetia and a second breakaway entity, Abkhazia, in what is widely seen as a way of blocking Georgia’s EU and Nato aspirations.
The Budapest document obliges signatories to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.” It also says they “will consult in the event a situation arises which raises a question concerning these commitments.”
There is no shortage of consultations.
The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin on Friday phoned the British and German leaders and EU Council chief Herman Van Rompuy.
Lithuania, which currently holds the UN Security Council (UNSC) presidency, also called a meeting of UNSC ambassadors in New York.
Statements coming from the Budapest signatories echo the terms of the agreement.
A spokesman for British leader David Cameron said he told Putin “that all countries should respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.” US President Barack Obama said on TV “the United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, Sweden, a close US ally, corroborated Ukraine’s accusations. “Obvious that there is Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Likely immediate aim is to set up puppet pro-Russian semi-state in Crimea,” Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt said.
The Polish foreign ministry noted: “Any decisions that will be taken in the coming days, including of military nature, could have irreparable consequences for the international order.”
The UN meeting in New York did little to calm nerves.
Ukraine’s UN ambassador, Yuriy Sergeyev, told press afterward: "We are strong enough to defend ourselves.”
Russia’s UN envoy, Vitaly Churkin, said all Russian military activity in Crimea is “within the framework” of a 1997 Ukraine-Russia treaty governing the use of its Sevastopol base.
Churkin added the EU bears “responsibility” for events because three EU foreign ministers - from France, Germany, and Poland - on 21 February signed a deal between Ukraine’s ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych, and opposition MPs which says he is to stay in power until December.
Yanukovych fled Kiev the next day when Kiev protesters rejected the agreement and threatened to storm his palace.
Churkin accused the EU of fomenting the revolution by criticising Yanukovych for refusing to sign an EU association and free trade treaty and by sending VIPs to Kiev to mingle with demonstrators. “They emphasize sovereignty. But they behave as if Ukraine was a province of the European Union, not even a country, but a province," he said.
Budapest memorandum
For his part, Andrew Wilson, an analyst at the London-based European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, who was in Kiev during the unrest, told EUobserver on Saturday the Budapest accord should not be seen as a Nato-type treaty which obliges signatories to use military force
But he noted that the 1994 memorandum poses Cold War-type questions.
“Are we [the West] going to send a warship through the Bosphorus?” he said, referring to the channel which leads from the Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea and Crimea.
“These kind of questions were asked in the Cold War: Would America be willing to lose Detroit [in a Russian nuclear strike] to save Berlin? Later it was about Vilnius [when Lithuania joined Nato in 2004], now it’s about Simferopol. Budapest is not Article 5. But if we are being logical, it does offer security guarantees and it is still in force,” he added, referring to the Nato treaty’s Article 5 on mutual defence.
Crimea is a majority ethnic Russian region which became part of Ukraine in 1954.
Its local parliament this week elected a new leader, pro-Russian politician Sergiy Aksyonov, who called a referendum on independence on 30 March.
The ethnic Russian population made up 49.6 percent of Crimea in 1939. It currently makes up some 58 percent, after Stalin deported its Armenian, Bulgarian, Jewish, German, Greek, and Tatar minorities during World War II. But Russians are in a minority in nine Crimean districts.
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NEW DELHI: With the illegality of Adarsh Housing Society fully established, auditors are now getting ready to investigate how its promoters cheated the Army of several hundred crores.As the Comptroller and Auditor General of India carries out a nationwide audit of defence land, the scam-tainted Colaba highrise is coming under close scrutiny from its local auditors in Mumbai.Sources said “auditors based in Mumbai are looking at the entire issue” and prima facie a large number of questions are popping up on Adarsh Society, in which several political leaders, military brass and bureaucrats are members. All of them got flats in the society in an expensive part of Mumbai at throwaway prices.While ownership of the land was still with the state, it was in the custody of Army for several years. Army had taken custody of the land ever since it was reclaimed because the state government was to give it to the Army in return for Army’s land in Santa Cruz firing range which was taken over by for expanding the Western Expressway.In the late 1950s, the defence ministry and the State of Bombay had clearly agreed on the modalities of the land exchange. In a letter on December 31, 1958, joint secretary in the MoD, S D Nargolwala wrote to the secretary of the public works department of Bombay, referring to a discussion between the chief minister and defence minister where they agreed on the land swap. “The Government of Bombay should take over the area required from the Santa Cruz Rifle Range and in exchange make available to the Ministry of Defence approximately the same acreage of Bombay Government land from Block VI in Colaba, an area adjacent to the site where Defence installations are already situated.” The letter also said in case the transfer doesn’t take place, the state government will financially compensate the Army.Now, as the auditors go through records, it is clear that the Army neither got the land, nor financial compensation from the state. The financial loss due to this would run into hundreds of crores, at today’s market value, sources pointed out.Besides the financial loss, the CAG would also look at the compromise of security, the misuse of the name of war widows etc. Local auditors are already in touch with the Army’s local authorities, sources said. “We are having regular communications,” a source said.
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Shoot lasers at the moon, solve Earth’s energy crisis. Boom. Done. Next global problem please, we’re on a roll. This is the statement I wish Japan’s Shimizu Corp. had released about their new energy plan, but alas they’ve simply just announced the details of a scheme to harvest solar power from panels on the moon. But, what a plan it is.
Robots will build a belt of solar panels to encircle the moon. The panels will gather up energy from the sun, convert it to electricity and then channel the electricity by cable around to the Earth-facing side of the moon. From there the power will be zapped to large receivers on Earth’s surface using lasers. Why did it take so long for someone to propose this?
The Luna Ring plan, which was introduced in Tokyo, is only the most recent in a long line of envelope pushing, seemingly kooky ideas to come from Shimizu Corp. But, the company seems serious about their plan proposing that the Luna Ring could begin construction by the year 2035.
Judging from the amount of technology needed (a working robot colony on the moon?) and the financial drain attempting such a project would entail, we won’t be holding our breath for this one. Although, because the moon already drives ocean tides the idea of finding even more uses for the moon isn’t completely crazy. Shimizu’s plan might seem like something straight out of a comedy routine, but its not like they’re trying to blow up the moon or anything. Right?
(via CNN Go)
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Golden Victories in War Thunder!
Participate in our latest GE event "Golden Victories!", this Sunday, January the 11th. Win battles in War Thunder and be rewarded with Golden Eagles! Also, fulfil ‘heroic deeds’, by reaching first place in a victorious battle and get even more Golden Eagles!
You can perform the tasks on January 11th
between 02:00 to 04:00 GMT or 17:00 to 19:00 GMT
For US and other American users that is (in Central Standard Time):
January 10th between 20.00 and 22.00 CST or January 11th between 11.00 to 13.00 CST
Complete “Golden Victories!” and receive:
50 Golden Eagles for the second victory.
100 Golden Eagles for the third victory.
150 Golden Eagles for the fifth victory.
Requirements: Win a War Thunder battle, using rank I - V vehicles, 75% activity.
Complete "Heroic Deeds" and receive:
50 Golden Eagles for the first victory with first place in a battle.
100 Golden Eagles for the third victory with first place in a battle.
150 Golden Eagles for fifth win with first place in a battle.
Requirements: Win a War Thunder battle, and achieve first place in the final table of results for combat. Earn in battle not less than 900 points in arcade mode or not less than 600 points in a realistic or simulator battle, using rank II - V vehicles, 75% activity.
You can get gold bonuses for both tasks at the same time! f you do not have time to perform the task in the first phase, you can continue during the second phase. A maximum of 600 Golden Eagles can be earned in total between the two different tasks and tasks are not repeatable.
Become a “Hero of War Thunder” and receive more than 1,000,000 Silver Lions!
Be a winner on the battlefields of War Thunder!
The War Thunder Team
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A former lead police investigator of the arson of Hamilton's Hindu Samaj Temple was involved in a cocaine-fuelled sexual relationship with a crucial informant in the case months before charges were laid in November 2013. Ian Matthews, a beloved cop known to friends as "Blarney," walked into Central police station on Dec. 17, 2013, and killed himself the day after then-chief Glenn De Caire gave his authorization to notify Matthews he was under investigation for his inappropriate — and possibly criminal — relationship with the woman. The relationship between Matthews and the informant, who can only be named as Jane Doe by a court order, is alleged to have also included two incidents of sexual assault. Matthews was also found to have been funnelling confidential information about the arson investigation to the woman even though he was no longer assigned to the case. The woman knew the arson suspects and provided police with vital information about the case. A Spectator investigation two years in the making now raises serious questions about Matthews' misbehaviour, how it was handled by police and whether his misconduct compromised the outcome of the temple arson case. Jane Doe's allegations have been investigated by Hamilton police, Niagara police and the Office of the Independent Police Review Director. The OIPRD has substantiated several of her claims and the Spectator has viewed some of the hundreds of text messages exchanged between Matthews and Jane Doe that also support her claims. Christopher Pollard, Damien Marsh and Scott Ryan all had their arson charges withdrawn in 2014 and accepted deals to plead guilty instead to mischief charges in exchange for no jail time. They each received sentences of three years' probation, 80 hours of community service and to make $10,000 charitable donations for what police described as a "hate crime" that took place just days after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. At the time the men were charged, at least five high-ranking Hamilton police officers — including De Caire, a deputy chief and two superintendents — were aware of the allegations of drug use and an inappropriate sexual relationship between Matthews and the informant.
"This is really explosive and I am shocked," said Panchal, who only learned of the allegations when contacted by the Spectator.
Davin Charney, a Toronto lawyer representing Jane Doe, said he's deeply troubled by the lack of police transparency.
"Why is it left for the victim in all of this to bring to the public's attention this outrageous police misconduct?" Charney asked. "If it wasn't for Jane Doe, no one would even know about this stuff."
Jane Doe has now launched a lawsuit against Hamilton police and De Caire, which is currently sealed from public view.
This is the second case to come to light in the past two months alleging serious misconduct within the Hamilton Police Service. In April, a joint Spectator-Toronto Star investigation revealed shocking allegations of police corruption contained in a lawsuit filed by Hamilton police officer Paul Manning.
Sex, drugs and police misconduct
Questions remain over whether temple arson case was compromised by the behaviour of its former lead investigator
The first true snowfall of the season was coating the city when the news conference began at Hamilton's Hindu Samaj Temple.
It was Nov. 27, 2013 and with both the police chief and mayor in attendance, there was no mistaking the importance of the event.
A dozen years earlier, with the world's nerves badly frayed just four days after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the Hindu temple, reportedly mistaken for a mosque, was destroyed by fire. The arson case had long gone unsolved, to the frustration of police and the temple community.
A 2013 news conference at the Hindu Samaj Temple announcing three arrests had been made in the September 2001 arson at the temple. (L-R) Hamilton Police Chief Glenn DeCaire, Deputy Chiefs Ken Leendertse and Eric Girt, Hamilton Mayor Bob Bratina and Brenda Johnson, Hamilton city councillor for Ward 11 were all in attendance, indicating the significance of the announcement.
Inside the rebuilt temple on that snowy morning, Glenn De Caire, then chief of police, announced three suspects had been charged with arson. A vile case that put Hamilton on the map for the wrong reasons seemed to be finally wrapping up. Then something unexpected happened.
A year later, the three suspects — Christopher Pollard, Damien Marsh and Scott Ryan — all had their arson charges withdrawn. Instead, they accepted deals to plead guilty to mischief charges. All three were handed the same sentences: three years' probation, 80 hours of community service and they were required to make $10,000 charitable donations. The result meant no jail time for the perpetrators of a notorious act described by police as a "hate crime."
The temple community spoke of forgiveness and healing and moving on. And that was that, it seemed.
Behind the scenes, however, two people had been sharing an explosive secret that could have damaged the sensitive arson investigation. One of them was the late Ian Matthews, a former lead police investigator of the temple fire.
Three weeks after the arson charges were laid, Matthews walked into the locker-room at the Central police station in downtown Hamilton, pulled out a gun and killed himself with a shot to the head.
The other person who knew the secret was Jane Doe, as she must be identified by a court order. She knew the arson suspects and she provided vital information that helped police crack the case.
A Spectator investigation two years in the making can now reveal that in the months leading up to the announcement of the arson charges, Matthews had allegedly been having a cocaine-fuelled sexual relationship with Jane Doe, the key informant.
Jane Doe claims she was also sexually assaulted by Matthews on more than one occasion, including one incident that allegedly involved the barrel of Matthews' service pistol.
She alleges Matthews was providing her with confidential information about the arson investigation even though he was no longer assigned to the case at the time.
She alleges Matthews would occasionally give her money and that she was told she would eventually be able to claim a $30,000 reward for her role in the case.
She alleges some of the cocaine they used was stolen by Matthews from confiscated narcotics held at the police station. She alleges she once watched Matthews purchase cocaine from a dealer.
The Spectator's investigation raises troubling questions about Matthews' actions and how they were handled by police. Among them:
1. Why was Matthews still working a case he had been pulled from, and apparently without the knowledge of his supervisors?
2. Did he feed Jane Doe confidential information that could have compromised the arson investigation?
3. Why did it take two months from the time Jane Doe told Hamilton police about Matthews until a decision was made to notify him he was under investigation?
4. Why did an incident heinous enough to be called a "hate crime" result in no jail time for the perpetrators?
5. Was the outcome of the arson investigation influenced by Matthews' misbehaviour?
As De Caire announced the arson charges at the temple, he had already known some of these allegations for more than a month. So did a number of other high-ranking Hamilton officers, including two superintendents and then-deputy chief Eric Girt, who was elevated to chief last month.
They knew about the allegations of drug use and the inappropriate sexual relationship between Matthews and the informant.
They would have realized the police were open to allegations the arson investigation had been compromised by Matthews' misconduct.
The Crown attorney who arranged the plea deals also became aware of some of the allegations relating to Matthews. He would be briefed on them by De Caire and provided with a report prepared by two Niagara police officers brought in to conduct an independent external investigation.
On Dec. 16, 2013, De Caire gave his authorization to formally notify Matthews he was under investigation for a number of possible violations of the Police Services Act.
The next day, Matthews took his life.
Hamilton police Detective Sergeant Ian Matthews was once lead investigator in the temple arson case.
We'll never know Matthews' side of the story or why he was involved with an informant in a case no longer assigned to him. He kept no notes of his contacts with Jane Doe and he died before being formally served notice he was under investigation.
Jane Doe, however, first made serious allegations about Matthews two years ago in several interviews with the Spectator shortly after his death.
She then made the same graphic allegations last year in a lengthy complaint filed with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, a civilian oversight agency that receives, manages and oversees all complaints about police in Ontario.
Her complaint is supported in part by hundreds of text messages exchanged with Matthews, including a number of sex-related messages he sent her. Those text messages have been seen by Hamilton and Niagara police, OIPRD investigators and the Spectator.
The OIPRD has substantiated several of her claims.
Following an investigation of Jane Doe's complaint, the OIPRD determined in February that Matthews was "engaged in an inappropriate relationship" with Jane Doe "that involved sex, drugs and money."
The report also determined Matthews provided Jane Doe with investigative information about the arson case "even though he was no longer the assigned investigator."
The OIPRD determined there was sufficient evidence to find that Matthews engaged in discreditable conduct and breach of confidentiality. Because Matthews was deceased, no further actions were taken.
Davin Charney, a Toronto lawyer representing Jane Doe, said her allegations raise troubling questions about the way the arson case was handled.
"To me it seems astounding and, in fact, shocking that these three individuals would not go to jail for burning down a religious temple, a hate crime," said Charney. "It's really shocking and outrageous."
This is the second major case this year alleging serious misconduct by Hamilton police.
Officer Paul Manning makes a number of shocking allegations of corruption in a $6.75-million suit he's filed against Hamilton police after alleging a botched undercover operation led to an attempt on his life.
Manning also alleges in his lawsuit he was informed by a police-related source that prior to his death, Matthews was under criminal investigation for fraud against Crime Stoppers.
None of Manning's allegations have been proven in court.
Jane Doe has now launched a lawsuit against Hamilton police and De Caire. The lawsuit is currently sealed from public view, and her identity is protected by a court order.
In addition to its report on Matthews' behaviour, the OIPRD issued a report on De Caire's actions.
Jane Doe complained De Caire neglected his duty because he should have notified the province's Special Investigations Unit about Matthews' alleged sexual assault against her. The SIU's mandate requires a notification if a police officer is facing an allegation of sexual assault.
She also complained that De Caire engaged in deceit by misleading the public and members of the Hindu temple community.
In both cases, the OIPRD found her complaints against De Caire were unsubstantiated.
Based on the content and context of the information provided to him, the OIPRD stated, it's not clear De Caire was aware of the sexual assault allegation before Matthews died.
The OIPRD also noted, "De Caire did not attempt to cover up this event or mislead the public, which would have included members of the Hindu temple."
De Caire, now the designate director of security and parking at McMaster University, declined to comment and asked the Spectator to direct its questions to the Hamilton Police Service.
A Hamilton police spokesperson stated the laws governing complaints against officers prevent the service from providing comment in this case.
"The service is in full support of governance, civilian oversight and accountability and takes allegations against its officers seriously," spokesperson Catherine Martin stated.
"We want the community to know that, as a service, we comply with the requirements imposed by the legislation," she added.
Lloyd Ferguson, chair of the Hamilton Police Services Board, said he can't comment because Jane Doe's allegations remain before the court. "I want to stress this case again is allegations only," said Ferguson, councillor for Ancaster.
He said the board received the OIPRD report on De Caire, "which stated the chief's actions were appropriate and there was no wrongdoing on his part," said Ferguson.
What follows is based on two OIPRD investigative reports related to Jane Doe's complaint, interviews with her and others connected to the case including the Crown attorney, text messages between Jane Doe and Matthews and previously published reports about the temple arson.
May 2013 | 'Sex, drugs and money'
Ian Matthews was certainly beloved by many in Hamilton, even those on the wrong side of the law. He's been described as a charming, larger-than-life figure with a gift of the gab.
"Blarney," as he was widely known, grew up in Northern Ireland and started his career walking a beat in Belfast.
He arrived in Canada in 1988, joined Hamilton police and worked his way up the ladder through a number of high-profile units.
He made his mark first as an undercover officer, occasionally being planted in jail cells to try to extract information for a case. Later, he served as an investigator in the homicide unit.
In 2011, Matthews was the lead investigator of the temple arson when there was a break in the decade-old case. Police announced they had DNA profiles from a group of people who had been drinking at the site just before the fire started.
By 2013, though, Matthews was a uniformed staff sergeant at Central station and no longer assigned to the arson case.
For reasons we may never know, he stayed involved in the investigation, which led him to cross paths with Jane Doe.
She knew the suspects in the case and was a valuable source of information about the arson, having first learned about their involvement in the fire back in 2003.
Jane Doe has significant credibility issues.
She was interviewed several times by police and OIPRD investigators over a two-year period and with each interview, her allegations grew more serious and more spectacular.
As an OIPRD report noted, "it cannot be ignored that each time a statement was given, or complaint made, some very significant information was added that had not been disclosed before."
She was suffering from depression during the time she interacted with Matthews and she has bipolar disorder.
Jane Doe has been charged with fraud previously and she told officers investigating her complaint she was a former addict who had been clean for two years before Matthews reintroduced her to cocaine.
In mid-May 2013, Jane Doe called police and asked to speak with Matthews. It's not clear if she found his name from an outdated web page about the arson or if she already knew him from a previous investigation.
After speaking with Matthews, she met him behind the former police station on Upper Wellington Street and provided him with information on the arson. She alleges he told her at some point she could be charged as an accessory if she didn't cooperate.
They began exchanging text messages and one of the earliest ones from Matthews reads, "Working on reward. How much do you need."
On the night of May 17, they met at the Beaver and Bulldog pub on the Mountain. When Jane Doe arrived, Matthews appeared intoxicated and allegedly made sexual advances to her.
They got in Jane Doe's car and drove to a parking lot at the Holy Spirit Sanctuary on Fennell Avenue West.
Matthews began taking her clothes off, ripping her bra in the process. She would later claim he sexually assaulted her that night with the barrel of his service pistol.
They engaged in oral sex then she drove Matthews back to his car.
She would tell investigators she eventually consented to the sex acts because he was in a position of authority and "she didn't know what else to do."
The next day, Matthews sent Jane Doe a number of sex-related text messages and repeatedly tried to convince her to come to his house in Caledonia.
He also texted her he kept a .45-calibre handgun under his pillow. "Don't want an accident …" he texted. She says she took that as a veiled threat.
On May 19, Matthews sent Jane Doe more sex-related texts. That night, Jane Doe drove to Matthews' house.
He tried to have intercourse with her but she dissuaded him by saying she was menstruating. She performed oral sex on him instead. She alleged they consumed cocaine that night.
Two days later, Matthews told Jane Doe by text he would contact Crime Stoppers to help her get some money.
The following day, Matthews texted her that he spoke with Crime Stoppers and that he lied about their connection to help facilitate a reward.
She alleged that Matthews gave her hundreds of dollars during their brief relationship, which appeared to have come from him personally.
In her OIPRD complaint, Jane Doe alleged she was also sexually assaulted at Matthews' house once when he pulled her hair and choked her during sex.
In her interviews with police and the OIPRD, Jane Doe alleged Matthews on more than one occasion drove with her to an ATM, withdrew money and gave it to her to buy cocaine. On another occasion, she claims she watched him buy cocaine from a dealer on Upper Gage Avenue.
She also claims she was at his house once when he brought out a Ziploc bag of cocaine with the word "Evidence" written on it. The bag had allegedly been removed from a police evidence locker.
She told the OIPRD investigators the amount of cocaine in the bag was "way more" than any person would need.
October 2013 | Secrets are revealed
By the fall of 2013, Jane Doe learned the investigation of the temple arson was now being led by Staff Sgt. Matt Kavanagh.
On Oct. 1, she met with Kavanagh at the Central police station. Kavanagh told the OIPRD their conversation was only about the arson investigation and that Jane Doe was afraid of one of the three suspects.
A news conference was held at the Hindu Samaj Temple in November 2013 announcing that police had made three arrests in the Sept. 2001 arson of the temple. Here, Hamilton Police Staff Sergeant Matt Kavanagh announces the three arrests.
Jane Doe, however, alleges she told Kavanagh that day about Matthews' inappropriate behaviour. She claims she used the term "sexual assault" and that she had text messages to support her claims.
On Oct. 13, Jane Doe called Kavanagh's cellphone while he was off duty. This is the date Kavanagh says he learned about the sexual relationship between Matthews and Jane Doe, along with allegations of cocaine use.
He told her to stop and not reveal any more details. She would have to wait until he was on duty because her complaint needed to be investigated formally and it would have to be handled by a different officer.
Two days later, on Oct. 15, Jane Doe was interviewed by Hamilton police detective Catherine Lockley.
Jane Doe reported allegations of sexual encounters with Matthews, drug use, cocaine purchases and the exchange of money from Matthews to her. She also told the detective about the text messages, which were downloaded by police.
Lockley concluded Jane Doe was reporting an inappropriate relationship with Matthews and that she had been pressured into the relationship because he was a police officer. Lockley passed the information to Kavanagh.
That evening, Kavanagh met with Jane Doe and her mother. He claims Jane Doe never told him that day that she had been sexually assaulted, only that she was involved in a sexual relationship with Matthews.
By this point, Jane Doe's allegations of an inappropriate sexual relationship and drug use involving Matthews were quickly making their way up the police hierarchy.
Supt. Dan Kinsella learned of the allegations from Kavanagh the same day.
De Caire, too, was informed of Jane Doe's allegations by Girt.
According to an OIPRD report, "De Caire was informed that a relationship had started between (Jane Doe) and Matthews.
"They would meet up while he was working, meet for drinks at a bar, meet for sex and that games were played where he provided cocaine to her during sex games," the report stated.
"Everything he heard led him to conclude the ongoing sexual relationship was consensual, involved alcohol and possibly drugs," according to the report. "He concluded based on the information known that a Police Act investigation needed to be conducted."
De Caire was provided some of their text messages and the content "confirmed his belief that the relationship was consensual," according to the OIPRD.
De Caire immediately phoned his counterpart at Niagara Regional Police and requested his service conduct an independent investigation into Jane Doe's allegations.
Because he believed the relationship was consensual, De Caire decided there was no need to notify the SIU. The SIU would eventually agree with his decision.
December 2013 | A life ends, a mystery deepens
Insp. CindyWhite, head of the Niagara police Professional Standards Bureau, and her colleague, Det. Sgt. Kim McAllister, conducted the external investigation into Matthews.
On Dec. 6, 2013, they recorded an interview with Jane Doe.
She repeated her earlier allegations and added some important information.
She told the Niagara officers that during her first meeting with Matthews, he told her he had already looked into her background and knew a lot about her and her family, including her past drug use.
Jane Doe told them she twice tried to pull her car over to tell Matthews to get out on the night they ended up in the Holy Spirit Sanctuary parking lot "but she didn't want to make a scene as he was a police officer ... and she had to listen to him," according to an OIPRD report.
She also told them "she felt at times she was sexually assaulted because it was someone in a position of authority who was taking advantage of her and putting her under the use of drugs," an OIPRD report states.
On Dec. 9, White contacted Supt. Debbie Clark, head of the Professional Standards Bureau for Hamilton police, to update her on the interview with Jane Doe.
According to an OIPRD report, White told Clark that Jane Doe believed she was sexually assaulted by Matthews.
But White also told Clark, according to the report, that while White believed there had been repeated sexual encounters between the two, she didn't believe there had been a sexual assault.
White based her opinion on a few factors: the allegation didn't make sense; Jane Doe's recollection was selective, vague and self-serving; and Jane Doe had a poor memory, relying heavily on the text messages.
"She and Supt. Clark shared the opinion that it was not a case of sexual assault," according to an OIPRD report.
Clark, however, maintained the Niagara officer didn't mention to her that Jane Doe "felt she was sexually assaulted by Matthews," according to the report.
On Dec. 16, Clark met with other senior Hamilton officers to determine when to serve Matthews with notice he was under investigation for possible Police Services Act violations.
"She was advised Chief De Caire authorized the notice being given," according to an OIPRD report.
The following day, Matthews killed himself at the Central station. He was 47.
It's not known if Matthews somehow learned informally about the investigation before he died.
February 2014 | An arson becomes mischief
On Feb. 7, 2014, the two Niagara officers met with Hamilton superintendents Clark and Kinsella to brief them on the Matthews investigation and provide them with a copy of their report.
Clark told the OIPRD she didn't read the report but provided it to De Caire that same day.
The Niagara report "did not contain information that concluded a sexual assault had occurred or even referred to an allegation of a sexual assault," according to the OIPRD.
It did, however, contain transcript portions of Jane Doe's interview where she stated "she felt at times she had been sexually assaulted by Matthews because of his position of authority," the OIPRD stated.
"Chief De Caire still did not conclude that a sexual assault had occurred based on the context of her statement, her previous statements and especially the text messages," the OIPRD added.
De Caire immediately met with the Crown attorneys assigned to the arson case, updated them and supplied them with a copy of the Niagara officers' investigative report on Matthews.
Kevin McKenna, Crown attorney for the case, said in an interview he was given the Niagara report but did not disclose it to the defence lawyers. Under the rules of evidence and disclosure, McKenna said, the defence could have made an application to have the report turned over and "they chose not to do so."
Hamilton lawyer Peter Boushy, who represented one of the suspects, declined to speculate on any reasons why the report wasn't turned over.
"It's not really appropriate for me to judge the Crown's actions," Boushy said. "I've had dealings with Kevin for about 15 years and he's an honourable person."
McKenna said the defence lawyers were aware of the allegations relating to Matthews — "they knew about them before I did," he said — and they were discussed during the negotiations between the Crown and the defence.
"As one defence counsel told me, he said 'We've looked at it and decided there is absolutely no point in dancing on Ian Matthews' grave,'" McKenna said. "'There's no point in embarrassing him just for the sake of it.'
"They were fully armed with all this information," McKenna added.
McKenna said the defence lawyers asked for the arson charges to be replaced with mischief charges because it sounded better for their clients.
"From the Crown's perspective, it doesn't make any difference," said McKenna. "They're both equally serious.
"Arson just means you set a fire and cause damage. Mischief means you cause damage by any means.
"If you look at the facts, they caused damage by burning a place down," he said. "From my perspective, if someone wants to call it mischief over $5,000 or arson, it's six of one, half dozen of the other."
On Oct. 28, 2014, Christopher Pollard and Damien Marsh had the arson charges withdrawn against them for the temple fire and they agreed to plead guilty to two mischief charges each.
The Hindu Samaj Temple on Twenty Road was being demolished Sept. 20, 2001, five days after fire tore through the facility early on a Saturday morning.
According to the agreed statement of facts, they started at the Hamilton Mosque, where they were drinking and throwing beer bottles at a window. They then drove to the nearby Hindu temple, drank some more and tossed a Molotov cocktail at the door, starting a blaze that burned for some time.
Scott Ryan, the third man charged, pleaded guilty to the same deal two months later. They were each sentenced to three years' probation, 80 hours of community service and to make $10,000 in charitable donations.
At the time, McKenna said the Hindu community was "extensively" involved in determining the sentences.
There was talk of forgiveness in the temple community's victim impact statement, which was read out in court.
"We stand on the moral ground of reconciliation over retaliation in accordance with the teachings of our religion," read the statement.
But the president of the Hindu Samaj Temple now says his community was never informed of the serious allegations surrounding Matthews by either the Crown or the police.
"This is completely news to me," said Ramesh Panchal, who says he's been a temple board member for four decades. He was the secretary of the temple when the three men were sentenced.
"This is not going to be sitting well with some of the board members or some of the senior members of the temple," he added.
McKenna said he didn't tell the temple community about the allegations against Matthews because they were "totally irrelevant" and "inconsequential to the proceedings."
"That's not something I would have discussed with them," McKenna said.
Panchal said his community was consulted about the sentencing. He's not sure if having the information about Matthews would have had any influence.
He did say, however, there was concern and some division within the temple community when the arson charges were replaced with mischief charges.
"But then we thought it's 12 or 13 years later, at least the police did their job and we were quite happy with the police that they were able to nab the perpetrators," Panchal said.
"We just wanted to close the case."
McKenna, meanwhile, is adamant that Matthews' misconduct with Jane Doe did not compromise the temple arson investigation.
He also said he wasn't concerned the allegations about Matthews could have become public if the arson case had proceeded to a trial.
"I don't want to sound brazen or cavalier but professionally, I couldn't care less," said McKenna. "If it came out, it came out. I had no interest in trying to protect his character or his legacy."
The same goes for Jane Doe, who is now trying to rebuild her life.
"It's created so much turmoil, so much upheaval," she said. "It's ruined my life.
"It's always there," she added. "You can't escape it."
[email protected]
905-526-3226
[email protected]
905-526-3214 | @mollyhayes
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Before I get started, let’s see a few quotes from the Bible on the subject of wisdom:
Fools give vent to their rage, but the wise bring calm in the end. Proverbs 29:11
Mockers resent correction, so they avoid the wise. Proverbs 15:1
To the person who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. Ecclesiastes 2:26
Now, let’s review the wise words of Donald Trump, strewn like seeds on fertile ground, that won him the Republican nomination and the eternal worship of devoted supporters throughout the country:
The list is endless, but I’m not writing a book here.
In contrast, check out the quotes attributed to previous US presidents:
Now, ask yourself: is Donald Trump a man who should be anywhere near the Oval Office?
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Image caption Refugee camps have long been a fixture in north-western Pakistan
Millions of Pakistanis live in a "human rights-free zone" in the country's north-west, Amnesty International says.
Residents of tribal areas face Taliban abuse and get no protection from the government, the rights group alleges.
In a report, it says the Taliban secured their rule by killing elders and torturing teachers and aid workers.
A Pakistani foreign office spokesman rejected Amnesty's findings, saying his government was "fully committed" to improving human rights in tribal areas.
Displaced
"We are not denying that there are problems there," spokesman Abdul Basit told reporters in Islamabad, but he said the government was "sparing no effort" to ensure people's rights were protected.
The 130-page Amnesty report, As if Hell Fell on Me, was based on nearly 300 interviews with residents of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and the surrounding areas.
It says more than a million people have been displaced by fighting between the Pakistani military and the Taliban in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
The report also says available information suggests that at least 1,300 people were killed in the conflict during 2009.
"Nearly four million people are effectively living under the Taliban in north-west Pakistan without rule of law and effectively abandoned by the Pakistani government," said Claudio Cordone, Amnesty's interim secretary general.
The report quotes a teacher, who fled the Swat valley with his family in March 2009, describing how the Taliban operated.
"[The Taliban] took over my school and started to teach children about how to fight in Afghanistan. They kicked out the girls from school, told the men to grow their beards, threatened anybody they didn't like."
The teacher said the government failed to protect them.
"What's the point of having this huge army if it can't even protect us against a group of brutal fanatics?"
Last year the Pakistani army declared the Swat valley to be free of militants after completing an anti-Taliban operation in and around Mingora, the main city in the valley.
Pakistani military spokesman Athar Abbas dismissed the report, describing it as "factually incorrect". He said that tribal elders supported the army's action to bring stability, particularly to the Swat region.
"Local journalists as well as foreign journalists who have been visiting Swat, talking to the people, the elders, the notables, the locals there, they have endorsed the contribution of the military in bringing normalcy and protecting the people," he told the BBC.
Amnesty has documented what many civilians in north-west Pakistan have often been scared to openly say, the BBC's Aleem Maqbool reports from Islamabad.
The report talks of systematic human rights abuses by the Taliban and accuses militants of increasing the likelihood of civilian casualties by dispersing themselves among civilians during clashes with government forces.
But it also accuses the Pakistani army of not doing enough to avoid civilian casualties in its operations against militants, and the government of neglecting the basic needs of the millions of people living in the frontier regions close to Afghanistan.
Deal with that, Amnesty says, and many of the conditions that have led to the considerable unrest in these areas, would be removed.
The group has appealed to both the Taliban and the Pakistani government to end human rights abuses in north-west Pakistan.
It has also called on Islamabad to reform the Pakistani constitution, which excludes the Fata from the legal and parliamentary system of the country.
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The inspector general of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission announced today that the state plans to ban Planned Parenthood from receiving funds from the state’s Medicaid program, according to an official letter obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
The letter states that the termination of Planned Parenthood’s enrollment in the Texas Medicaid program is due to multiple health and legal violations committed by the nation’s largest abortion provider, many of which were brought to light by a series of undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress, or CMP.
The inspector general’s notice to Planned Parenthood states that the organization’s practice of altering the standard of care to procure fetal tissue “violate[s] accepted medical standards, as reflected in federal law” and is therefore a “Medicaid program violation[] that justif[ies] termination.”
The state’s top government health care watchdog also found that Planned Parenthood “failed to prevent conditions that would allow the spread of infectious diseases among employees, as well as patients and the general public.”
Planned Parenthood officials admitted in the undercover videos that they regularly alter the abortion process in order to harvest more valuable organs from the aborted babies. The fifth CMP video showed Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast’s Director of Research, Melissa Farrell, specifically admitting to this while talking about the price of each organ.
The videos also show that the clinics do not take reasonable precautions to prevent infectious diseases from spreading. The letter specifically called out the Gulf Coast clinic for allowing investigators posing as organ buyers to “handle bloody fetal tissue while only wearing gloves.”
The inspector general also cited Planned Parenthood’s history of fraud as a reason for terminating the group’s participation in the state’s Medicaid program. In the past, the abortion provider has over-billed the government for services, including abortions, when it wasn’t allowed to do so. In 2013, the Obama administration’s Department of Justice found that Planned Parenthood significantly over-billed the Texas Medicaid program, and the abortion provider eventually paid $4.3 million in a settlement.
“The State has determined that you [Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast] and your Planned Parenthood affiliates are no longer capable of performing medical services in a professionally competent, safe, legal and ethical manner,” the letter states.
The letter also notes that Texas women will not lose access to health care as a result of Planned Parenthood’s termination, because in 2012 the state stopped funding Planned Parenthood and established the Women’s Health Program, a large network of clinics that distribute contraception and provide other health services to women in need. Since 2012, community health clinics have increased their women’s health care services by an average of 81 percent, a George Washington University study found.
Planned Parenthood has up to 30 calendar days to respond to the notice of termination from the inspector general. You can read the full notice of termination here.
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Yesterday, I suggested the Blue Jays and Cardinals should consider making a swap centered around Josh Donaldson. Unsurprisingly, many of the comments felt the return for a true superstar was less than it should be. Historically, the public expectation of what elite players will return in trade is less than they actually bring back when traded. But beyond just a difference in expected market value for one year of an elite player, I think that the Jays might want to consider that, if things go south this year, they’ll be tasked with trading a third baseman in a buyer’s market.
Let’s start by just looking at the teams that we can reasonably expect to be buyers this summer. There are 10 teams that currently project for 84+ wins in 2018; here are their third base situations.
Astros: Alex Bregman
Indians: Yandy Diaz?
Dodgers: Justin Turner
Nationals: Anthony Rendon
Cubs: Kris Bryant
Red Sox: Rafael Devers
Yankees: Chase Headley/Gleyber Torres
Cardinals: Jedd Gyorko
Diamondbacks: Jake Lamb
Angels: Luis Valbuena
Of those 10, unless there’s a season-ending injury, you can effectively cross off Houston, LA, Washington, Chicago, Boston, and Arizona.
Cleveland could use an upgrade at third base, but isn’t in the habit of paying premium prices for rentals, and Donaldson’s salary might be an obstacle for them. The Yankees could be a buyer, but if Torres returns at 100%, he could easily displace Headley and take the Yankees out of the market for a third baseman. The Cardinals could be the most obvious buyer, but if they don’t get Donaldson this winter, they probably go after some other big slugger, and might not be in the market for Donaldson if they pay a high price for a guy like Giancarlo Stanton. The Angels also could definitely be buyers, but their line-up is very right-handed already, and they might prefer a left-handed slugger instead.
So there are four maybe buyers of third baseman in that mix, but none of them look like perfect fits for a mid-season Donaldson trade for various reasons. And if you go down to the next tier of teams, ones who could be buyers or sellers, the pickings get even slimmer.
The Pirates could use an upgrade on David Freese, but it’s not easy to see them paying a significant price for rent-a-Donaldson in July. The Mets could push Asdrubal Cabrera back to second base or shortstop if their pitching stays healthy and they want to add an impact bat, but they seem like a long-shot to keep up with the Nationals in the NL East, and they probably wouldn’t pay a premium to improve for just a few at-bats in a Wild Card game. The Giants could definitely use a third baseman, but they’re focused on trading for Stanton at the moment, and their farm system isn’t anything to write home about anyway.
The reality is that, outside of the Angels and Giants, there aren’t too many teams that are definitely going to be trying to win in 2018 and have clear needs at third base. And those are two of the worst farm systems in baseball. Oh, and there happen to be two pretty decent free agent third baseman out there in Mike Moustakas and Todd Frazier, both of whom will sign a multi-year deal, likely with one of the aforementioned teams, that will remove them from consideration for a July third base acquisition.
And the buyers market for third baseman is only likely to get worse. Reports suggest that the Rays are going to shop Evan Longoria this winter, putting another above-average third baseman in play for teams looking to upgrade. Given Moustakas and Frazier’s expected contracts, I don’t think the Rays will find a buyer before the season starts, but they’ll probably keep looking to move him in-season if they don’t find a new home for him before Spring Training.
The Orioles unlikely chance to contend will likely crystalize in mid-summer, forcing them to confront the possibility of putting Manny Machado on the market. And if the Rangers fall out of the race again, Adrian Beltre could be made available as a rental.
It’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that all four of these teams could be shopping their third baseman this summer. And having Donaldson, Machado, Beltre, and Longoria on the market at the same time would be a disaster for each of those clubs, especially given how well positioned most contenders are at third base.
Of course, injuries will change things. Someone who isn’t thinking they’ll be looking for a third base upgrade this summer will find themselves in need of an upgrade at the hot corner. The future is unpredictable. But if I was thinking about trading a third baseman at some point in the next 12 months, I’d probably be interested in doing it sooner than later. Once Moustakas and Frazier sign, two potential landing spots will likely be off the board, and there aren’t that many to begin with.
And then potential 3B-sellers might have to race each other to market in order to avoid an oversupply problem. We saw what happened with J.D. Martinez this summer when no one really needed a right-handed corner outfielder. It’s easy to think that there will always be interest in acquiring a great player like Donaldson, and to some extent that is true, but if the Blue Jays are looking for a significant return if they fall out of the race, they might find themselves disappointed on many fronts once August rolls around.
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CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (CLARKSVILLENOW) – The 501st MidSouth Garrison characters from Star Wars will visit Governor’s Square Mall Saturday, June 18 at noon for a meet and greet to benefit Dreams and Wishes of Tennessee.
Take a picture with your favorite characters for a recommended $5 donation.
Dreams & Wishes is a non-profit organization that grants wishes to people between the ages of 5-21 who have relapsed from cancer or have a second life-threatening illness diagnosis.
The 501st MidSouth Garrison is part of the 501st Legion, the world’s definitive Imperial costuming group. Their active members are from Tennessee and Kentucky and are one of the largest of the more than 60 garrisons nationwide in the legion. The group uses their talents, and the force, to support many non-profit groups and organizations with their fundraising efforts.
To learn more about Dreams & Wishes visit www.DreamsandWishesofTN.org or call 615-243-3433.
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Matt Colligan wants the world to know he is not a member of the Ku Klux Klan, nor a neo-Nazi.
The Massachusetts native received national attention last month when he was identified in a viral Daily Progress photograph by Andrew Shurtleff. The haunting image of stern-faced rally-goers carrying tiki torches in Charlottesville became the target of Twitter account "@YesYoureRacist," run by Logan Smith, communication director of left-wing political action organization in North Carolina. Soon after he was identified, internet vigilantes widely shared the phone numbers of Colligan and his family. A family member's address in Southborough was posted online. Death threats were received.
Seeking to put distance between him and the white nationalist rally, and to protect his family from receiving more death threats, Colligan says he has moved more than 6,000 miles away from his home in the Allston/Brighton area.
Behind the torch: former friends identify Massachusetts resident in viral photo taken at white nationalist rally in Charlottesville
Colligan told MassLive he had moved to Japan.
"I decided to distance myself from them, distance myself from everything that's going on right now. And sort of hide out in a place that might not have seen my photo," he said in an interview. "I might stay out here for maybe a year or so."
While he agreed to speak with MassLive on his political views and decision to move, Colligan declined to provide photographic evidence he was living outside the country.
Five days after speaking with MassLive, Colligan claimed on Twitter he was leaving Japan. He now says he's living in Mexico.
Shortly after allegedly landing in Japan, Colligan told MassLive over a series of six private Twitter messages that Japanese residents were "a happy people" and a "homogenous society."
"This is what America needs ... a people who look talk and act similar ... diversity is our weakness," he wrote.
In a later interview, when asked if he believes diversity is bad for society, Colligan replied, "Did I say that?" and then said, "no not necessarily."
He said his original message was "something good to note," and that he believes many of America's issues stem from open borders. He also said he moved to Japan because the country's demographics and culture look different than that of the United States.
Whether in North America or Asia, the man who goes by @Millennial_Matt on Twitter remains active on social media.
In his purview, Colligan is a comedian with an agenda to spotlight the importance of free speech.
To his critics, the 20-something is an attention-seeking, far-right activist who operates under the guise of first amendment heroism.
His YouTube and Twitter accounts showcase perverse humor, mocking transgender people and the Holocaust. In several videos he displays swastikas; in others he says "Hitler did nothing wrong" next to recognizable figures such as actor Shia LeBeouf and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who appear in separate videos to be posing under the pretense that Colligan is a fan taking a selfie.
Colligan initially said his jokes are meant to attract attention, and then added that they are meant to highlight revisionist history.
"A lot of the jokes and comedy that I base around the Holocaust in general and swastikas and things of that sort," Colligan said. "It's sort of one of the edgiest things you could do, right?
"We're living in 2017 where everything's almost been before, and so I found a niche and an opportunity to be able to make fun of some extremely touchy subjects. And reach an audience that way." He added, "I wouldn't be talking to you if I hadn't joked about the Holocaust at some point down the road. It's intended to get some eyes on me so that I, you know, can talk to the world I guess."
His intended purpose of such "jokes," Colligan said, is to spark a dialogue between people across a spectrum of beliefs.
His shot at informative satire is a fairly new undertaking. Not long ago, Colligan was walking around the streets of Boston and Cambridge, canvassing on behalf of women's reproductive rights. He believed in and persuaded others to believe in progressive causes, including helping poorer people gain access to reproductive health care.
"When I started working there I was fairly young. And I didn't really have an understanding of history as I do now. I didn't really look into things for myself," Colligan said.
To those who knew him, Colligan's seemingly 180-degree political flip appears to have occurred over the past two years.
"I don't think he was ever into this stuff before Trump started gaining steam, and it seems to parallel Trump's rise," said Dicky J. Stock, a former friend and neighbor to Colligan when the two lived in Brighton between 2012 and 2014. They lived in adjoining homes, each with about five male roommates.
Stock, 30, now lives in California. He said when the two lived next door in Brighton, Colligan would come over and drink beers on the porch and host punk band shows in his basement.
"Within the past year and year-and-a-half, I started seeing bits and pieces of the white pride stuff," Stock, said over phone. Stock said their last encounter was last February, at the Silhouette Lounge in Brighton on Super Bowl Sunday. He remembers a drunken, friendly dispute over politics that ended in the two acknowledging that "politics is whatever."
Two other sources who wished to remain anonymous also said they knew Colligan when he lived in Boston, and were unaware of what they viewed as his white nationalist tendencies.
"We would talk and share our frustrations about people who would waste their time and energy being anti-choice and homophobic and racist," said one woman who knew Colligan as a canvasser. She also said she noticed a change in his online presence over the past year and a half.
While he is not a unique case - the lives of numerous self-identified internet trolls previously restricted to dark corners of the internet have since cropped up following the rally in Charlottesville - the Massachusetts native is adamant his irreverent personal branding is all in the name of free speech, and calling out those who oppose it.
"If freedom of speech is met with violence, then we have lost ourselves as a country," Colligan said. "I honestly believe, and it's part of what I do, part of the soul of my work and my comedy, my message, you know. It's the meaning I exist. It's the reason we're talking right now. And freedom of speech is the most important right that we have as Americans."
Whether sincere or an attempt to disparage criticism, that American-born passion is driving Colligan's pleas for monetary donations. On a "Patreon" fundraising webpage, he asks for money so he can explore "the Marxist psychosis gripping almost every living being in the United States." Once receiving triple-digit funding each month, donations dropped to under $10 after he received national and local attention in August.
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Except for some really casual games for Linux and the best of paid games for Linux collection, games for Linux and Ubuntu is a category we haven't yet really covered here at all. That is going to change from now on. Here is a quick list of 10 real time strategy(RTS) games for Linux(mostly open-source) in no particular order. Please keep in mind that, I haven't tried them all by myself and many of the games are in the list because of the good reviews they received from users elsewhere. So here they are, read on.
Tribal Trouble is a realtime strategy game designed to be easy to grasp, yet difficult to master. While the game mechanics only take a few minutes to learn, it can still be quite a challenge to beat your opponents: To win, you are going to need some skills in planning strategies and utilizing the varying terrain for successful tactics. is a realtime strategy game designed to be easy to grasp, yet difficult to master. While the game mechanics only take a few minutes to learn, it can still be quite a challenge to beat your opponents: To win, you are going to need some skills in planning strategies and utilizing the varying terrain for successful tactics. Download Tribal Trouble for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
0 A.D. is an open source historical real time strategy game from Wildfire Games. It is comparatively a new comer even though the original project started way back in 2003. The game focuses on the years between 500 BC and 500 AD. The game is still in development though you can install and play the alpha version of the game which itself is pretty good. is an open source historical real time strategy game from Wildfire Games. It is comparatively a new comer even though the original project started way back in 2003. The game focuses on the years between 500 BC and 500 AD. The game is still in development though you can install and play the alpha version of the game which itself is pretty good. Download 0 A.D. for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
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Paul Ryan Must Step Down as Speaker of the House
Guest post by Joe Hoft
Rep. Paul Ryan must step down as Speaker of the House.
America rejected his big government, open borders globalism.
Paul Ryan rejected Trump all year long.
And now the majority are calling on Wisconsin lawmaker to step down.
Americans deserve a Republican Speaker who will support President Trump.
A bridge, not a wall.
Sean Hannity spoke tonight on FOX after Donald Trump won the election for President of the United States. He noted that he spoke with Trump three times throughout the night after he said the following:
And on every objective measure, you know thank God the American people this is about one thing. They see that Washington is broken and by the way Republicans are just as guilty. Paul Ryan is not going to be the Speaker off the House in January. I was going to save that for my program tomorrow. He’s not going to be the Speaker. His state went for Donald Trump tonight. I mean it’s an amazing turn of events because the establishment on both sides Republican and Democrat have lost touch with the real lives of real Americans that are really suffering and Donald Trump has now opened the door and said we’re going to fix it and we’re going to turn that table over and you know what, I wish him all the best cause it’s not going to be easy because it’s all the same people that opposed him in the lead up to tonight are going to be opposing him tomorrow.
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Inc. has agreed to pay $4.5 million to settle allegations it failed to properly pay wages and overtime to thousands of its Oregon employees for seven years.
Up to 20,000 former and current employees of
, ACS Commercial Solutions and Livebridge call centers in Oregon could be eligible for between $50 and $260 from the class-action settlement. Most are now
in the mail of the deal. They have until Sept. 1 to mail or fax their claims or to object to the agreement.
U.S. District Court Magistrate Thomas M. Coffin approved the
last month. The
filed in Portland, alleged ACS failed to pay proper wages and overtime at its Oregon call centers, in violation of state law and the Federal Labor Standards Act.
ACS denied violating any laws, according to the settlement. Company spokesman Kevin Lightfoot declined comment.
ACS employs 2,200 in Oregon at call centers, data center facilities, administrative offices and client sites, Lightfoot said.
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The settlement provides $2.6 million for eligible employees of ACS in Oregon between April 2, 2005 and April 24, 2012. They include phone agents, customer care assistants and and customer care specialists working in ACS retail, travel, insurance, BPS, telecommunications and technology business groups.
The law firm representing the class,
in Vancouver, will get $1.7 million of the settlement. A legal associate at the firm declined comment on Friday.
Employees who brought the lawsuit – Lauri Bell, Mary Henderson, Julia Rosenstein and the heirs of Angela Hayes – share an $85,000 incentive award. All worked at ACS locations in Portland and Gresham.
Claims administrator Kurtzman Carson Consultants gets up to $100,000.
Any money not claimed within 30 days will go back to ACS, according to the settlement. A final settlement hearing is scheduled before Coffin in Portland Oct. 22.
Specifically, the lawsuit alleged call-center employees had to clock in for their shifts on their computer, but often spent time beforehand searching for an available work station or headset or waiting to have their password reset. They should have been paid for those delays, the lawsuit alleged.
It also alleged ACS failed to pay bonuses as promised and failed to properly count bonuses when calculating overtime.
ACS agreed any current employee's claim would not affect their employment at the firm or be disclosed to their direct supervisors.
Call centers in Oregon employed 11,000 workers in March 2012, the latest
. That's up from 9,300 two years earlier.
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It has been a while since I got the time to write one of these articles for Sportscar365, but a lot has changed in the past month with me and Tequila Patrón Extreme Speed Motorsports.
As a team we made a difficult decision to withdraw the No. 1 Honda HPD from the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship and enter into the FIA World Endurance Championship race at Circuit of The Americas.
Texas provided us with an opportunity for us to get our feet wet at an FIA WEC event, in preparation for hopefully going to Le Mans in 2015. It’s something ESM and Tequila Patrón have always wanted to do.
If this were FaceTime you would see a massive smile when I tell you how happy it made me knowing I was getting the opportunity to race in WEC again. I was asked a number of times over the weekend, “Don’t you miss not being the top class?” or “Doesn’t it frustrate you having the P1 cars pass you?”
Are you serious? To me having cars as awesome as the Audis, Porsches and Toyotas flying past me leaves me speechless. I think it’s mega!
Our first practice on Thursday was almost like the first day of school. All we wanted to do was get through the day without being called to the principal’s office. When that first practice was finished and we were P1, we took a deep breath, or maybe a sigh of relief, put our heads back down and focused on the next session.
By qualifying we felt like we had found our stride. We just missed it a little and ended up third. WEC qualifying is very different to TUDOR. Two drivers for each team participate and the average of the best two laps from each driver sets your position.
Race day was great. We had a huge turnout in the grandstands and as an added bonus I had my wife Jessica, my mother-in-law, brother-in-law and his girlfriend all there to cheer me on.
At the race start, I got a good run on the outside into Turn 1 and found myself in second. By mid-stint the Honda was really coming alive on the used Dunlop tires, and with two-thirds of my stint complete, I was leading the class and pulling away after a pretty nice move for the lead, if I do say so myself.
We had a little mishap in the driver change to Scott and came out the pits in third after the first round of pit stops. By the end of his stint it started to rain… and we are talking Scottish rain.
They say everything is bigger in Texas and I would agree on this occasion. We kept Scott in for another stint and pitted him at the perfect time for the Dunlop wets, he was in the lead. As we were in the pits the red flag came out.
The WEC rules state that cars on track have the advantage, so when the race restarted we found ourselves going from the lead, to a lap down and in fourth. Rules are rules, it was just bad luck.
It was unfortunate for us and a number of other cars. That just made us more determined to get back to the front. We’ve already done it twice in the race so far.
Scott had a great start to his stint following the rain, but he was on the full wet tire. Wet tires are designed to race in the wet and not dry, so we were losing valuable lap time and track position.
Since the wet/dry conditions were really tricky and Scott was just about out of fuel, we decided to put me for a double stint. We’d alter the drive order and Ed would finish the race, hopefully in the dry.
We had a problem though, the track was too dry for wet tires, perfect for intermediates and too wet for slicks, but with us out of fuel it was time to gamble, so slicks it was for RazzleDazzle.
I have to admit my first laps out were crazy scary but the team kept encouraging me to keep with it, so I did. And lap after lap it started to come to us. COTA was really dark so it was hard to see the surface of the track and tell the difference between wet, dry and shadows. By about eight laps into the stint everything clicked and I found myself completely in the zone and on a mission to charge to the front.
At one time I was a lap back from the leader. It was hard to really know what was going on because we lost our radio in the rain, but I do remember hearing when they told me I was six seconds a lap faster than the other P2s.
WHAAAAAT!?
By the end of my stint we were in the lead and I handed off to Ed for the final stint. Unfortunately, my last four or five laps we started to encounter an electrical issue. An open cockpit car and rain don’t mix, so we think the rain might have started to affect the electronics. I was having downshift problems.
Ed took over the car in the lead. The electrical issue and downshifting became more difficult. By the last three laps Ed only had third gear, so he soldiered home for a very well-deserved third-place finish and podium in our debut FIA WEC race.
We opted out of Petit Le Mans to focus on the WEC race in China with two cars. China is a big opportunity for ESM and an even bigger market for Tequila Patrón.
We’re looking forward to taking our two-car team to China and really show them what Extreme Speed Motorsports can do.
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By
21st Century Wire says…
Sling shots and stones versus bullets. Knives versus cannons. Israel has a monopoly of force over its indigenous Arab population.
What happened to the Washington’s glorious “peace process”, that diplomatic ritual which premiered all those years ago? Many believed at the time that it was all just political theater. Unfortunately, as we can see today – those skeptics were correct.
While the international media focuses on the “tension” between Israeli paramilitary forces and the Palestinian residents, the Israeli leadership have taken advantage of the crisis in order to militarily encircle the Al Aqsa Mosque, a Muslim holy site, in preparation of enacting its long-term plan of physically isolating and eventually ethnically cleansing the bulk of the remaining Palestinian population out of Jerusalem.
The military operation has been quietly underpinned by an architectural one, a Jonathan Cook revealed this earlier week:
“The big picture is that Israel is weakening the Muslim and Palestinian presence there so that Israeli Jews can believe they are the true owners of the site,” said Yonathan Mizrachi, head of Emek Shaveh, an organisation of Israeli archaeologists opposed to the use of archaeology for political ends.
“Various Israeli archaeological activities, he said, had almost completed Israel’s encirclement of the al-Aqsa compound, isolating it from Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem,” says Cook.
Predictably, the US media has all but refused to cover this part of the story.
Meanwhile, the scale of Israel’s state-sponsored campaign of terror against the native Palestinian population continues unabated…
Palestinian women fight back as IDF brute tries to snatch a young Palestinian girl (Image Source: Counter Current News)
According to a recent report compiled by international aid organization Red Crescent, occupying Israeli military forces has been busy conducting target practice on the Arab population. The numbers from the month of October alone are staggering:
“At least 2,617 Palestinians have been shot and injured by Israeli forces using live and rubber bullets in the month of October, a Red Crescent officials says. On Sunday, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an released a report quoting a Red Crescent spokesperson as saying that at least 760 Palestinians were shot with live rounds across the occupied Palestinian territory, while another 1,857 were hit with rubber-coated steel bullets.
At least 5,645 Palestinians sustained injuries, including burns from tear gas canisters and excessive tear gas inhalation.
At least 72 Palestinians were also killed in Palestinian territories by Israeli soldiers in October.”
By contrast, the number of Israelis killed during this same period is said to total 10 persons, while Israeli officials allege that 130 others have been injured.
How long until the Israeli forces begin driving the unarmed Arab population away at gunpoint?
As bad as that might be, it wouldn’t be the first time Israeli militants have engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide of the native population.
READ MORE ISRAEL NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Israel Files
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If you plan on playing Killer Instinct Season 3 on Windows 10 make sure you start up the Xbox One version first to sync your save file.
Killer Instinct Season 3 released today on Xbox One and Windows 10 with at least one known issue. Unfortunately this issue does not seem to have gotten much press. In a post on one of the leading Killer Instinct fan sites, Daniel Duncan said “I encourage each and every one of you who plans to play both the Xbox One and Windows 10 version of Killer Instinct to read this post very carefully and take note of it! When Season 3 launches tomorrow, you must first sign into the game on your Xbox One console before you sign in to Windows 10. If you do not do this, your data will not carry over to the Windows 10 version and you’ll be starting the game with new save data, meaning all of your hard earned progress will not be available on the Windows 10 version of the game. Yes, you’ll basically be starting from scratch. Now, in the off chance that you no longer have an Xbox One, you can log in to your account on any other Xbox One console for the same results.”
There have been several new additions to Killer Instinct for Season 3. Four new characters have been added for Season 3, including a couple of fan favorites(Kim Wu and Tusk), and a pair of guest appearances(Rash from Battletoads, and the Arbiter from Halo). In addition Season 3 will have three brand new stages, such as the “Arena of Judgment” stage which is based on the Sangheili homeworld from Halo 5: Guardians. On the technical side, KI: Season 3 will introduce cross-play between Windows 10 users and Xbox One users, and feature improved visuals with an all new lighting system and a re-introduced screen space color adjustments. Combined with Season 1 and 2, players will have access to a roster of 26 fighters and 20 stages total. You can check out some of the newest gameplay on PC below.
Three versions of Killer Instinct went on sale today(Taken from the launch article on Xbox Wire):
Killer Instinct: Supreme Edition – ($59.99/£44.99/€59.99 on Xbox One, $49.99/£34.99/€49.99 on Windows 10)
The Supreme Edition includes characters from all 3 seasons (25 total), all retro costumes, all premium accessory sets, the VIP Double XP Booster and 18,000 KI Gold (limited time only). On Xbox One, the Supreme Edition also includes Killer Instinct Classic and Killer Instinct 2 Classic.
Killer Instinct: Season 3: Ultra Edition – ($39.99/£31.99/€39.99 on Xbox One and Windows 10)
The Ultra Edition includes all eight Killer Instinct: Season 3 fighters, starting with the release of Kim Wu, Tusk, Arbiter, and Rash on launch day followed by the remaining Season 3 fighters rolling out on a monthly basis. Additional content in this Edition include a VIP Double XP Booster, 8 retro costumes, accessory sets, bonus retro character colors, and 18,000 KI Gold (limited time only). Even more, owners of the Ultra Edition will get early access to characters and customization items before they’re available to Combo Breaker Pack owners or for individual sale.
Killer Instinct: Season 3: Combo Breaker – ($19.99/£15.99/€19.99 on Xbox One and Windows 10)
Purchase all eight fighters up front at a significant discount over the individual character price. Play as Kim Wu, Tusk, Arbiter, and Rash immediately on launch day, with the remaining Season 3 fighters rolling out on a monthly basis.
Killer Instinct: Season 3 – Characters a-la-carte ($4.99/£3.99/€4.99)
Individual characters from the Season 3 roster will be available for purchase after they have been released for both the Ultra Edition and Combo Breaker Pack. Characters will appear on a regular schedule for you to purchase, starting with Rash on launch day.
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The project was previously set up at Warner Bros. as a feature, but the rights lapsed.
Stephan Zlotescu’s acclaimed short film True Skin is getting another shot at the screen, this time as a television show.
Amazon Studios has optioned the short and is developing it as a one-hour series.
The project was previously set up at Warner Bros. as a feature, but the rights lapsed, with Amazon swooping in.
Zlotescu is on board to direct the adaptation of the short, while Scott Glassgold and his newly minted production company, Ground Control, are attached to produce the series.
A search for writers is underway.
The short is set in the not-too-distant future where everyone is augmenting their bodies. The story’s hero can't afford to augment in the U.S., so he heads to the black market of Bangkok, where he gets hold of a mysterious chip that he discovers is slowly turning him robotic — and is a hot commodity wanted by shadowy forces. Zlotescu directed the short and produced it with his cinematographer, who goes by the name H1.
Zlotescu and his partner, VFX producer Vlad Caprini, are set to provide the visual effects for the adaptation through their VFX company Opticflavor. The firm is a rising entity on the VFX scene and its work has been featured in music videos for such artists as Kanye West and Lady Gaga.
Glassgold’s Ground Control, which has a first-look feature deal at Columbia Pictures, most recently set up the adaptation of Marcus Alqueres’ short film Flying Man at Sony with Chris Collins writing and Alqueres directing.
Zlotescu is repped by CAA, Ground Control and Arnie Lutzker.
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Australia's spy agencies should be forced to disclose any security concerns they would have with a Chinese government-owned firm taking control of electricity assets before NSW voters go to the polls on Saturday, Labor insists.
In a fiery speech in federal Parliament late on Tuesday, Labor Senator Sam Dastyari called on the Abbott government to make public the view of domestic security experts at ASIO on the proposed "poles and wires" privatisation.
His intervention into the state campaign came amid questions over which foreign investors Premier Mike Baird has met with in relation to the sale.
Fairfax Media can reveal Liu Zhenya, the president of the Communist government-owned State Grid Corp of China, expected to be a frontrunner in the power auction, met Mr Baird at a business roundtable function in Beijing in September.
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — California’s Department of Motor Vehicles is expanding office hours as it prepares to issue an expected 1.4 million licenses to people in the country illegally.
The DMV announced Wednesday that it will expand Saturday hours at up to 60 field offices as of Jan. 3 — a day after Assembly Bill 60 takes effect. The extra time is set aside for appointments by people seeking their first California driver’s license.
Those seeking new licenses also will be able to scheduled DMV appointments 90 days in advance — double the current time period.
AB60 — signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year — allows people in the country illegally to obtain driver’s licenses by submitting identification from their home countries. The DMV expects to issue an additional 1.4 million licenses in the first three years of the measure.
(Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
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The National Geographic Channel is working with the guys behind Silicon Valley to make a “docu-comedy” series about world history. John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, who created the HBO tech comedy series and ran Fox’s King Of The Hill for several years, will combine “sketch comedy, animation, puppetry, documentary and archival footage to explore weighty questions such as how the world came about, the evolution of man and the origins of spirituality, money, leisure time, sports, hygiene and entertainment.” Of course, none of that matters as much as the fact that they’re calling it The History Of The World, thus dooming every conversation anyone ever has about it to devolve instantly into a stream of Mel Brooks quotes.
The program, set to debut in the fall, is a rare venture into comedy for Nat Geo, which announced The History Of The World at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour. Nat Geo also announced the return of its long-running Explorer, as well as what it claims to be the world’s first dinosaur autopsy, creatively titled Dinoautopsy. What a show!
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Like many of the three million Filipinos in the United States and millions others scattered around the world, I wake up in the morning wondering what is happening to the Philippines. Since Rodrigo Duterte assumed the presidency three months ago, the nation has gone through so many transmogrifications that the Pearl of the Orient Seas is hardly recognizable.
One reads about a populist strongman who rants and raves, vowing to radically purify a country hopelessly overridden with drugs and criminals. Duterte curses anyone standing in his way – whether Barack Obama, UN’s Ban Ki-moon or the European Union. He flicks a middle finger at the world community, and his 16 million supporters cheer.
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One clicks on another website and learns that 3,000 people suspected of links to the drug menace have been slaughtered by police, vigilantes, or unknown assailants. Human rights groups are horrified. But, many claim they now can wander through the streets of Manila safely. Not bothered by the continuing bloodbath, they sleep peacefully at night.
Duterte severs a 65-year strategic alliance with the United States, ordering Yankees to go home and runs to Beijing, the same bullying country that is poised to take over the West Philippine Sea. Never mind that China is the pipeline of the narcotrade plaguing the country. But people give Duterte a pass because the visionary president is implementing a nationwide 911 hotline, modernizing transportation, subsidizing farmers, increasing the salaries of police and military, etc. The president is a brilliant tactician, they say, as he implements socio-economic programs to alleviate poverty and dismantles decades of entrenched graft and corruption.
The Philippines today looks like the France that Charles Dickens saw when he wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
One goes through social media and wades through much garbage, looking for the gem of truth. But, perhaps that is to be expected. The first casualty of war, after all, is the truth. The words of California Senator Hiram Warren Johnson uttered in 1918 couldn’t be truer today.
Duterte’s unrelenting war on drugs – a program he proudly compared to Hitler’s Holocaust – has killed thousands of Filipinos. It has also killed the truth. A culture of death and a network of deception today enshroud the Philippine landscape.
The Presidents says there are three million drug users. The Dangerous Drugs Board pegs the number closer to 1.7 million. He says these drug users are scumbags and therefore subhuman. They have no human rights. They do not deserve due process.
Duterte’s condescending view of human dignity is far removed from that of St. John Paul II. In Evangelium Vitae (1995), the late Pontiff wrote:
“Man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God. The loftiness of this supernatural vocation reveals the greatness and the inestimable value of human life even in its temporal phase.” The saint wrote further: “In a special way, believers in Christ must defend and promote this right, aware as they are of the wonderful truth recalled by the Second Vatican Council: “By his incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every human being.” This saving event reveals to humanity not only the boundless love of God who “so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16), but also the incomparable value of every human person.”
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Murder, i.e., the extrajudicial killings brought about by Duterte’s drug war, is wrong. As St. John Paul said: “Like the first fratricide, every murder is a violation of the ‘spiritual’ kinship uniting mankind in one great family, in which all share the same fundamental good: equal personal dignity.”
People say that only experts in their fields should criticize the president. That if one is not a geopolitical expert, he or she should not comment on Duterte’s wild international strategies. That unless one is a psychiatrist, he or she should not comment on Duterte’s unstable mental condition. Perhaps, there is some validity to that charge. But setting other issues aside for the sake of achieving clarity, it does not take an academic degree or expertise in ethics or moral theology to recognize right from wrong, justice from injustice, compassion from cruelty. God, in his kindness, has inscribed the natural law in every individual heart and soul. Anyone should be able to recognize that the administration’s strategy of killing of thousands of its citizens is wrong.
To defend the unjustifiable, Duterte has spinned the narrative and blamed the international community for interfering in Philippine affairs. He resorts to nationalistic hot buttons, which many find assuring. Yes, the Filipino needs to keep his head up high. We cannot be the door mat of foreign powers. Who can argue with that?
Patriotism is as delightful as warm puto and hot sikwate in the morning, after all. But whipping nationalistic frenzy in order to cover crimes against humanity is a different animal. It is called smoke-screening, not patriotism.
This national frenzy brings to mind the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The eccentric character did get rid of the rats that had infested the town. But there was a steep price to pay. The town’s 130 children joyfully followed the Pied Piper into a cave never to be seen again.
Filipinos who support Duterte are cheering now that so-called rats are being run out of town. Soon, like the townsfolk of Hamelin in 1284, they will realize the cost of such a campaign – the loss of basic human rights, freedom of speech, habeas corpus, etc.
The question now is this: Are we prepared to face another episode of martial law?
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G20 countries paying $633 billion in subsidies to oil, gas and coal companies: report
Updated
A new report has found that the world's biggest economies are paying $633 billion in production subsidies every year to oil, gas and coal companies.
The report by US environmental think tank, Oil Change International and UK humanitarian think tank, the Overseas Development Institute, found Australia is paying $7 billion on average annually in production subsidies to fossil fuel producers.
The report said the amount spent by G20 governments on fossil fuel subsidies was more than three times the amount spent by the world on subsidies to the renewable energy industry.
"The evidence points to a publicly financed bailout for some of the world's largest, most carbon-intensive and polluting companies," the report said.
Among G20 countries, Russia topped the list with $32 billion in production subsidies every year, the US paid out more than $28 billion annually, the UK paid $12 billion, Brazil's annual subsidies were an average of $7 billion and China gave just over $4.2 billion to oil, gas and coal firms.
Japan had the largest level of public finance for fossil fuel companies with US$26 billion in funding annually.
China was second with $23 billion. Chinese state owned enterprises invested $107 billion a year on average in fossil fuel production.
'Fossil fuel producers paid to undermine climate commitments'
Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, said the payments called into question the commitment of governments to tackle global warming at the United Nation's Climate Change conference in Paris later this month.
"Despite the fact that six years ago G20 nations pledged to end fossil fuel subsidies they are still collectively providing in the G20 more than $US450 billion dollars for fossil fuel production, for the production of coal, oil and gas, each year," Mr Kretzmann said.
The potential fiscal, environmental, and welfare impacts of energy subsidy reform are substantial. IMF report
The report said the $7 billion spent by Australia was mainly on tax breaks for fuel and capital investment costs.
But the Minerals Council of Australia deputy chief executive, John Kunkel, said the fuel tax credit granted to industry was not a subsidy.
"They are probably talking about the fuel tax credit scheme but as the treasury and the productivity commission have said a number of times that is not a subsidy," Mr Kunkel said.
Mr Kretzmann argued that fossil fuel subsidies identified in the report met the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) description of a subsidy.
"It is a subsidy under the WTO definition which is something Australia has signed onto, so we would certainly dispute that characterisation," he said.
The report called on G20 countries to take immediate action to phase out subsidies to fossil fuel producers in order to meet global commitments to combat global warming.
"It is tantamount to G20 governments allowing fossil fuel producers to undermine national climate commitments, while paying them for the privilege," the report said.
Energy subsidies discourage investments in energy efficiency
The authors used publicly available information on subsidies to fossil fuel producers to compile the report.
The report defends fossil fuel production subsidies as national subsidies delivered through direct spending and tax breaks, investments by state owned enterprises, and public finance from majority government owned banks and financial institutions.
A report earlier this year from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said that after-tax energy subsidies were expected to reach $7.4 trillion or 6.5 per cent of global GDP in 2015.
"Post-tax energy subsidies are dramatically higher than previously estimated and are projected to remain high," the IMF working paper said.
"The potential fiscal, environmental, and welfare impacts of energy subsidy reform are substantial."
The authors said energy subsidies damaged the environment, caused more premature deaths from air pollution, worsened traffic congestion and increased greenhouse gases.
"Energy subsidies discourage needed investments in energy efficiency, renewables, and energy infrastructure, and increase the vulnerability of countries to volatile international energy prices," the paper said.
Topics: oil-and-gas, climate-change, coal, united-states, united-kingdom, australia
First posted
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While Bermudians anxiously await the publication of any leaked US diplomatic communiques relating to the Bermuda in the ongoing Wikileaks “Cablegate” document dump, once-top secret communications between the White House and Downing Street almost 40 years ago spelling out the island’s possible role in the event of a global nuclear war are freely available on-line.
Routinely described as “strategically sensitive and classified” in Congressional reports, US Navy activities in Bermuda during the Cold War with the Eastern Bloc were called a “strong thread in NATO’s defense fabric” by the US Department of Defence.
In order to protect the North Atlantic sea routes near Bermuda, the US operated three military bases here until 1995 – the main US Naval Air Station at the East End; the smaller US Naval Annex in Southampton; and the Tudor Hill Laboratory. The Navy used the NAS as a regular deployment airfield for squadrons of nuclear-capable P-3 Orion anti-submarine warfare operations.
NAS was also designated as a deployment base for nuclear depth-bombs in US strategic contingency plans. During peacetime no nuclear weapons were stored in Bermuda — but in “times of advanced readiness’ for anti-submarine warfare operations in the North Atlantic, authorisation had been given for the deployment of 32 nuclear depth bombs here.
By 1995, the range of submarine-launced ballistic missiles (SLBMs) had so increased that Soviet submarines operating in the Atlantic no longer found it necessary to come within range of Bermuda in order to strike American targets and the Bermuda bases were mothballed.
But Bermuda was fully integrated into a global US nuclear infrastructure throughout much of the Cold War — an infrastructure which was ”as deadly as the nuclear arsenal,” according to American military analyst William Arkin, who first revealed the island’s role in US nuclear war strategising in 1985. “They tie (Bermuda) into nuclear plans in such a way it not only becomes a nuclear target, but a nuclear catapult on the front line of the next war.”
The screenshot below is taken from a now declassified ex-’top secret’ communique sent in 1970:
Submarine-launched Soviet ballistic missiles fired from the Bermuda area would have only taken about 16 minutes to reach military and civilian targets along the US East Coast.
Soviet submarines were not withdrawn from the Bermuda “patrol box” until the late 1980s. As late as 1987 the former Soviet Union engaged in a large-scale submarine exercise near Bermuda involving five vessels armed with dozens of strategic missiles — each carrying as many as 10 independently-targetable nuclear warheads.
The Yankee-class submarines, among the quietest in the Soviet fleet, were so difficult to detect that nuclear depth bombs dropped from P-3 Orion patrol aircraft flying out of Bermuda were thought to be the only assured way of destroying them in the event of the Cold War heating up.
“The Anti-Submarine Warfare weapon deployed in Bermuda would have been the B57 [an underwater test detonation is pictured at left] whose explosive yield ranged from five to 20 kilotons,” said Dr. William Burr, senior analyst at the National Security Archive project of Washington’s Georgetown University, who has studied the declassified documents. One kiloton equals the explosive power of 1,000 tons of TNT. It’s estimated the atomic bomb which destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 had a yield of about 15 kt.
Bermuda seems to have been earmarked for the proposed deployment of nuclear depth bombs in the late 1960s. By December, 1970 US President Richard Nixon and UK Prime Minister Edward Heath confirmed a consultation agreement about the use of any nuclear weapons stored here.
Since the beginning of the Cold War, the British sought such commitments from the White House to ensure the United States would not order nuclear strikes from US bases located on British territory without London’s explicit consent. Although background documents remain classified and details on the circumstances of the proposed Bermuda deployment are unavailable, it may have related to US concerns about the expansion of the Soviet submarine fleet in the Atlantic.
Certainly, the deployment was significant enough for then US National Security Advisor and future Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger to have maintained several folders on the “British-US Nuclear Matter (Bermuda Exchange)” in his office files, according to Dr. Burr. This partially edited document on the Bermuda nuclear deployment follows the structure of earlier Anglo-American understandings while this follow-up communique posted below, released in its entirety, serves as a key to the excised portions — mentioning Bermuda specifically.
The full 4-page document is below, click ‘Fullscreen’ for greater clarity:
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Category: All, History, News
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Ever wondered how freelance writers get accepted to write for huge sites – and get paid for it?
On today’s episode my guest is Aja Frost, an English major who does exactly that in her spare time between classes.
Aja began writing for fun shortly after starting her freshman year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She sought out pretty much any site that openly accepted guest contributions, writing on a wide variety of topics and slowly building a portfolio.
Before her freshman year had ended, she was getting offers to write paid articles – and now, she’s paid off all her student loans and created a self-sustaining writing career (all before graduating). Between then and now, Aja has written for TechCrunch, Fast Company, USA Today, Inc., and lots of other sites.
In this episode, we get into the details of how Aja got started, her daily habits, writing routine, and how she gets ideas and does research. We’ll also dig into exactly how she goes about getting her writing on high-profile sites.
Show Notes and Links
Want more cool stuff? You can find all sorts of great tools at my Resources page.
If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes! It’s easy, you’ll get new episodes automatically, and it also helps the show gain exposure 🙂 You can also leave a review!
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Collection opensource
Language English
IN SEVEN OF HIS PRE-WAR BOOKS ARE FOUND MORE THAN EIGHTY
FAMOUS POLITICAL PROPHECIES ACCURATELY PREDICTED.
QUOTATIONS BELOW, CONCERNING GEN. SPIRIDOVICH, EXPRESS THE
ENTHUSIASTIC ENDORSEMENT OF THE MOST PROMINENT
EUROPEAN EDITORS :
"Spiridovich is the Slav Pope - Spiridovich is the Slav Bismarck" - acknowledged
the "Russkoye Slovo," Russia's greatest paper .
"Nothing has happened, nothing was told since 1914, that General Spiridovich
did not foresee, foretell and repeat a hundred times with the fiery, passionate
stubbornnesss, which is the distinguishing quality of the seers and prophets,"
("L'Information," in Paris, on December 27, 1915) .
"So Count Spiridovich prophesied exactly ten years ago. Few prophets have
been more thoroughly justified than he . Today is the tenth anniversary of an
astounding prophecy of his, which appeared on our pages, Dec . 19, 1908,"
(The Editor of the "Daily Graphic" on Dec. 19, 1918) .
"General Cherep-Spiridovich has the credentials as a successful PROPHET"
(the Editor of the "Financial News," on January 24, 1919) .
"The XXth Century Prophet," a "PROPHETIC GENIUS," ("The Christian
Commonwealth" in February, 1919) .
"Count Spiridovich has a more intimate
Identifier TheSecretWorldGovernmentOrHiddenHand Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3514nk10 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ppi 300
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HAVANA, TX - MAY 20: U.S. Border Patrol agents escort a group of undocumented immigrants into custody with helicopter support from the U.S. Office of Air and Marine on May 20, 2013 near the U.S.-Mexico border in Havana, Texas. The Rio Grande Valley area has become the busiest sector for illegal immigration on the whole U.S.-Mexico border with more than a 50 percent increase in the last year. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images) (John Moore/Getty Images)
— Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, warns that the United States will become a third world nation if the federal government does not enforce its immigration laws.
Speaking to “The Sean Hannity Show,” the Republican lawmaker said the country will be destroyed if the U.S. continues to allow thousands of immigrants to cross the border illegally.
“You’ve got to follow the law. You cannot bring hundreds of thousands of people in this country without destroying the country,” Gohmert told Hannity. “Then there’s no place that people can dream about coming.”
Gohmert stated that it’s the government’s job to defend the U.S. “against anybody that would overwhelm the country and bring it down.”
“It’s always been such an irony, though, that people would flee a country that’s got … drug cartels, people that ignore the law, or bribe people to look the other way,” Gohmert said. “So they don’t have jobs there so they come to the United States because we’ve mostly been a nation of laws where the rule of law matters. But then once they are here, they say now we want you to ignore the rule of law, which ironically is like the country they came from.”
Report: Secret Loopholes Allow NSA To Bypass 4th Amendment Protections
Gohmert continued: “Either we’re going to enforce our law and remain strong economically and otherwise, or we ignore the rule of law and go to being a third world nation.”
Gohmert’s comments come as President Barack Obama announced Monday that he will not rely on Congress and take executive actions to fix much of the immigration system as he can on his own.
Even as Obama blamed House Republicans for frustrating him on immigration, Obama asked Congress for more money and additional authority to deal with the unexpected crisis of a surge of unaccompanied Central American youths arriving by the thousands at the Southern border. Obama wants flexibility to speed the youths’ deportations and $2 billion in new money to hire more immigration judges and open more detention facilities, requests that got a cool reception from congressional Republicans and angered advocates.
Obama’s announcement came almost a year to the day after the Senate passed a historic immigration bill that would have spent billions to secure the border and offered a path to citizenship for many of the 11.5 million people now here illegally. Despite the efforts of an extraordinary coalition of businesses, unions, religious leaders, law enforcement officials and others, the GOP-led House never acted.
“Our country and our economy would be stronger today if House Republicans had allowed a simple yes-or-no vote on this bill or, for that matter, any bill,” Obama said in the Rose Garden. “They’d be following the will of the majority of the American people, who support reform. And instead they’ve proven again and again that they’re unwilling to stand up to the tea party in order to do what’s best for the country.”
Obama said that House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, informed him last week that the House would not be taking up immigration legislation this year.
A growing number of advocates and congressional Democrats already have declared immigration dead, the victim, in part, of internal GOP politics, with the most conservative lawmakers resisting the calls of party leaders to back action and revive the GOP’s standing with Latino voters. The Central American migrant surge, along with the surprise defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor at the hands of an upstart candidate from the right who accused him of backing “amnesty,” helped kill whatever chances remain.
Boehner blamed Obama for the outcome.
“I told the president what I have been telling him for months: the American people and their elected officials don’t trust him to enforce the law as written. Until that changes, it is going to be difficult to make progress on this issue,” he said. Boehner called Obama’s plan to go it alone “sad and disappointing.”
Facebook Secretely Involved Thousands of Users In Massive Social Experiment
Obama directed Homeland Security Department Secretary Jeh Johnson and Attorney General Eric Holder to present him by the end of the summer with steps he can take without congressional approval.
The Border Patrol has apprehended more than 52,000 child immigrants traveling on their own since October.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, accused Obama of seeking a “blank check” with no real solutions. “President Obama created this disaster at our Southern border and now he is asking American taxpayers to foot the bill,” said Goodlatte.
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(TM and © Copyright 2014 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2014 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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Some people say crazy things moments before they are executed . Here are some of the most famous and bizarre last words spoken by criminals facing death's door.
Serial killer Theodore Robert Bundy (November 24, 1946–January 24, 1989) killed a confessed 30 women during 1974 through 1979 in Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Florida. His total number of victims is unknown and is estimated to run above 100.
He was speaking to his lawyer Jim Coleman and to Fred Lawrence, a Methodist minister who spent the evening in prayer with Bundy. Both nodded their heads.
Superintendent Tom Barton asked Bundy if he had any last words, to which he replied:
On the night before Ted Bundy was executed, he spent most of his time crying and praying. At 7 a.m. on January 24, 1989, Bundy was strapped into the electric chair at Starke State prison in Florida.
John Wayne Gacy (March 17, 1942–May 10, 1994) was convicted of the rape and murder of 33 men between 1972 and his arrest in 1978. He became known as the "Killer Clown" because of the all the parties he attended where he entertained the children in his clown suit and full-face makeup.
Convicted serial rapist and killer John Wayne Gacy was executed at the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois by lethal injection just after midnight on May 10, 1994. When asked if he had any last words, Gacy snarled:
McVeigh admitted to investigators after his capture that he was angry at the federal government for the way they treated white separatist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 and with David Koresh and the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, in 1993.
Timothy McVeigh is best known as the Oklahoma City bomber and was convicted of setting the bomb which killed 149 adults and 19 children at the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on April 19, 1995.
Convicted terrorist Timothy McVeigh had no final words before being executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001, in Indiana. McVeigh did leave a handwritten statement quoting a poem by British poet William Ernest Henley. The poem ends with the lines:
Gilmore donated his organs and shortly after he was executed, two people received his corneas.
Gilmore was the first person legally executed in the United States since 1967, ending a 10-year lapse in U.S. executions.
Gary Mark Gilmore (December 4, 1940–January 17, 1977) was convicted of killing a motel manager in Provo, Utah. He was also charged with the murder of a gas station employee the day before the motel murder but was never convicted.
Then, after a black hood was placed over his head:
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore's final words before being put to death in Utah on January 17, 1977, by a volunteer firing squad:
John Spenkelink was a drifter convicted of killing a traveling companion which he claimed was done in self-defense. He was also the first man put to be put to death in Florida after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.
Convicted murderer John Spenkelink's final words before being executed in the electric chair in Florida on May 25, 1979, were:
Aileen Wuornos
Chris Livingston / Getty Images
Convicted murderer Aileen Wuornos' final words before being executed by lethal injection in October 2002 in Florida:
"I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the rock, and I'll be back like Independence Day, with Jesus June 6. Like the movie, big mother ship and all, I'll be back."
Aileen Wuornos (February 29, 1956–October 9, 2002) was born in Michigan and abandoned by her parents at a young age. By the time she was in her teens, she was working as a prostitute and robbing people to support herself.
In 1989 and 1990, Wuornos shot, killed, and robbed at least six men. In January of 1991, after her fingerprints were found on evidence located by police, she was arrested and tried and received a total of six death sentences. She earned an inaccurate label by the press of being the first female American serial killer.
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Rage against the caffeine
Eclectablog reader Connie Crew recently sent an email to a variety of media outlets that were running the insultingly deceitful anti-Proposal 2 ad (see my post on that HERE.) She did so using a We Are the People website called Stop the Lies!
She got back an email that about curled her hair.
It started out with Connie’s email to WMKG TV40 out of Muskegon:
I watch your channel in order to receive accurate and credible news and other programming. Countless other viewers across our area rely on your station for the exact same reason. This election season, you play an important role and possess a vital responsibility in informing our views on those issues that matter the most. This responsibility extends to the advertisements your station airs. I am writing to ask you to live up to your important duty by refusing to run the blatantly false ad recently put forth by Citizens Protecting Michigan’s Constitution. This shadowy front-group’s scare tactics are despicable and use Michigan’s children as their pawns to attack Proposal 2, which would protect collective bargaining rights for working families throughout our state. Their claims have already received a “foul” from The Center for Michigan’s independent Truth Squad and been denounced by observers throughout the state. However, the hectic modern lives of many voters mean it’s up to you to stop these fabrications before they gain traction. No matter one’s views on Proposal 2, we can all agree that blatant lies and smears have no place on Michigan’s airwaves. I ask you to live up to your reputation by rejecting the false propaganda of Citizens Protecting Michigan’s Constitution and refusing to run their deceptive advertisement. – Connie Crew
She then got this response. You should know that, not only is the font size accurate, so are all grammatical and spelling errors:
FUCK YOU LIAR
You have never seen our station. We will run what ever we want. If you don’t like it than buy us out. Or other wise stick it up your ass. I am sick of people like you telling me what I can run. Now I will run as many ads for they as possible free. as a public service message. You and the other 500 or more letters we got about this brought it on your self. Bud.
Connie then sent this rather humorous response:
Wow, Bud, decaf dude. It ain’t that big a fucking deal, not worth a heart attack. Sheesh. People sometimes like to know the truth now and then instead of what a bunch of rich white folk want us to believe. Chill.
That prompted this over-the-top response:
THAN YOU START ELLING THE TRUTH…YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN OUR STATION LIAR.
Connie once again responded:
I am a private citizen who requested this email be sent to your station. I am not the organization you seem to have so much animosity toward. YOU don’t know me, you don’t know anything about me. I might be best friends with your boss putz so CHILL dude before you have a heart attack. Pray I don’t file a complaint to the FCC for how you have treated me, a tax paying citizen who might have (past tense) watched your channel every day. Nice customer relations there putz.
Not to be outdone by their previous outrage, yet another freakout response came back:
YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN OUR STATION YOU ARE A LIAR. WE OT OVER 500 COPYS OF THIS LETTER AND NOT ONE SAID PLEASE
Connie poked the hornets’ nest one more time:
You received those 500 letters at the request of 500 INDIVIDUAL CITIZENS you moron! It was an email/online organization that asked us to send them to you if we agreed with them. So, let me type this slowly so you can understand, 500 CITIZENS OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN WANT YOU TO QUIT RUNNING ADS THAT LIE! Understand yet?
That’s when she got this email which cleared things up completely:
Thank you for this information. Please be advised that our E-Mail account has been hacked into and someone has sent out E-Mails that did not come from this office. We are working to take care of this problem. Fenton Kelley WMKG TV
Oops.
Tea partiers: Their own worst enemy since 2008.
UPDATE: I suppose it is possible that this wasn’t a tea partier but, honestly, does anyone really believe that?
[CC image credit: Evil Erin | Flickr]
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Image caption The Duchess of Cornwall came up with the Cook for the Queen competition
The anti-monarchy group Republic is warning schools they may break the law if they take part in a cooking contest to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.
The contest, launched by the Duchess of Cornwall, is for 10 to 15-years-olds.
But Republic says involving children in celebrations of the monarchy without teaching them about republicanism as well is a breach of the Education Act.
The government said the rules were not designed to stop children taking part in national events.
Events to mark the Diamond Jubilee - 60 years of the Queen's reign - will be held on the weekend of 2-5 June.
'Uncritical celebrations'
The Duchess of Cornwall came up with the idea for the Cook for the Queen competition to encourage children to devise a new dish in the vein of coronation chicken.
That recipe - cold chicken with a creamy curry sauce - was invented to mark the Queen's ascent to the throne in 1953.
It is difficult to see how a cooking competition could possibly be construed as inherently partisan or unbalanced Spokesman, Department of Education
The top four entrants will be invited to Buckingham Palace to turn their ideas into canapes with the help of royal chef, Mark Flanagan.
But Republic, which campaigns for the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of a constitutional republic, is unhappy.
Chief executive Graham Smith says schools could breach the law if they hold "uncritical celebrations" of the jubilee without discussing republican views.
He has written to Education Secretary Michael Gove to ask him how he will make sure schools do not breach the rules.
"Through freedom of information research, and from correspondence with concerned parents and teachers, we know that many schools are planning to hold their own jubilee celebrations," the letter says.
"It is quite clear that most of these events and activities will treat the monarchy as self-evidently benign and universally supported, without any indication of the controversy which surrounds it.
"The effect - whether or not it is intended - will be to influence young people to support one contested political viewpoint (monarchism) against another (democratic republicanism). That is exactly what sections 406 and 407 (of the Education Act) were intended to protect children against."
Republic is offering to put parents who want to challenge their children's school in touch with solicitors.
But the Department of Education said: "The law is designed to stop children being indoctrinated by biased and unbalanced political views, not from joining in a national celebration with millions of others.
"Individual schools can choose how to mark the event. It is difficult to see how a cooking competition could possibly be construed as inherently partisan or unbalanced.
"The National Curriculum expressly sets out that classes should teach about all aspects of our political system."
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Notes on police violence
Video shows “firing squad” police killing of Michigan man
By EP Bannon and Tom Hall
31 October 2014
On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a video captured by a police dashboard camera depicting the killing of Milton Hall, a 49-year-old mentally ill homeless man, in July of 2012 by police officers in Saginaw, Michigan. Mark Fancher, a lawyer with the ACLU of Michigan, called Hall’s killing a death by “firing squad.”
The video was released as part of testimony by the ACLU to a hearing of the Organization of American States' (OAS) Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on police violence in America.
The video shows eight police officers surrounding Hall in a suburban parking lot with weapons drawn. One officer continually threatens Hall with a snarling police dog, prompting Hall to produce a small pocketknife to defend himself. Hall assumes a clearly defensive posture and at no point does he approach or come within ten feet of any of the officers.
The video shows police unleashing a hail of gunfire in the style of a firing squad, firing over 45 bullets within the space of several seconds, hitting Hall 14 times, and continuing to fire even after he collapses to the ground. One officer then turns Hall over and handcuffs him, pressing his boot against Hall's back.
Despite the fact that the scene was captured on video and witnessed by several bystanders, no officers have been charged. In January, the Justice Department announced that it would not bring charges against Hall’s killers, declaring that “this tragic event does not present sufficient evidence of willful misconduct to lead to a federal criminal prosecution.”
The release of the video comes only a few weeks after the family of Tony Mitchell, an unarmed man who was killed by police in northern Michigan on July 14, filed a lawsuit in federal court.
Autopsy of Darren Hunt shows police shot him in the back
A state autopsy released Tuesday of a young man shot by police in September while he was wearing a costume sword concluded that most of the gunshot wounds he received were to his back. The autopsy found that Darren Hunt, 22, was shot six times, including four times in the back. This new revelation contradicts claims by police that officers had shot and killed the young man in order to protect themselves.
“I think that means they were pursuing him, he was running away. He was probably scared to death,” said Robert Sykes, an attorney for the Hunt family.
Hunt was shot September 10 as he was walking around a strip mall in Saratoga Springs, Utah, dressed as a Japanese anime character. He had been carrying a sword, a part of his costume, which he had purchased at an Asian gift shop. Police allege that they had responded to a 911 call regarding a “suspicious person” wielding a “samurai-type sword.” Officers claim they fired at Hunt when he brandished his sword and then charged at them while swinging the sword.
The stories of the officers do not match with witnesses to the scene, which claim they saw officers shoot Hunt in the back as he fled. Sykes noted that a picture taken of Hunt by a bystander moments before the killing shows him smiling as he talked to two officers.
Military armored vehicle deployed to Collect Civil Judgment in Small Town
Earlier this month, the Marathon County Sheriff's Department in Wisconsin deployed 24 armed officers and a military armored vehicle to collect a civil judgment from an elderly man. The department used the show of force against 75-year-old Roger Hoeppner, who the town had concluded owed $80,000 in fees over alleged misuse of his property. The dispute arose over the presence of wood pallets and old tractors on Hoeppner's 20-acre plot of land, which the town claimed were not in compliance with zoning standards.
“Rather than provide Mr. Hoeppner or his counsel notice...and attempt to collect without spending thousands of taxpayer dollars on the military-style maneuvers, the town unilaterally decided to enforce its civil judgment" using a show of force, Hoeppner’s attorney, Ryan Lister, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Hoeppner called Lister when he saw the deputies and armored vehicle outside his home. As Lister was on his way to Hoeppner's house, he was stopped by a roadblock that was kept up until after his client was escorted from the premises. Deputies handcuffed Hoeppner and brought him to his bank, where he agreed to pay the civil judgment in their custody.
Marathon County sheriff's officials have refused to apologize for the display of force despite public outcry. Captain Greg Bean, dismissed criticism of his department’s action saying, “People may not always understand why, but an armored vehicle is almost a necessity now.”
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Some people will tell you that in todays modern cynical age of the internet – ‘originality is just plagiarism gone unnoticed’.
One can only presume that member of Wicklow county council and Bray town councillor, Sinn Fein’s, John Brady, was hoping that his brilliance was so original no one would notice. Ireland has a small but highly dedicated community of political anorak and this kind of originality was never going to go unnoticed.
The press release in question is about the upgrade to the N11 motorway, which winds its way through county Wicklow. As is usual when a jobs and public interest story of this size happens in a constituency, you will see a number of press releases from various politicians about said project.
Step forward Andrew Doyle one of three Fine Gael TD’s for Wicklow/East Carlow. Andrew issued this PRESS RELEASE about the motorway upgrade on Tuesday just before lunch time.
Which included…..
Later that night Cllr Brady issued his PRESS RELEASE
Which included….
*AWKWARD*
It didn’t end there though……
From Andrew
From Brady’s press release……
It’s not the plagiarism of a thesis, but if Cllr Brady cannot be trusted to issue a bog standard political press release, what can you trust him with ?
They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery….. It usually is, but in this case it’s certainly not, especially when you can’t even copy and paste properly……
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Tiny Rat Cocktail Parties Shed Light On Why Smokers Drink
Enlarge this image toggle caption iStockphoto.com iStockphoto.com
Scientists have spent the last five years serving up rodent-sized alcoholic drinks to hundreds of little black and white rats, after a nice hit of nicotine.
These miniature cocktail parties have provided a clearer view on why nicotine and alcohol are so often used, and abused, together.
"It's pretty well understood by most people that those who smoke are more likely to drink," John Dani, a professor of neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine, told Shots. "And these people are ten times more likely to abuse alcohol."
Dani's study, recently published in the journal Neuron, sought to find the underlying cause for the cigarette-and-a-drink nexus.
The brain's interaction with drugs is a bit complicated, but Dani's method was simple. He gave rats some nicotine, waited a bit, and then let them drink alcohol.
Dani wanted to know how dopamine, a chemical that helps regulate the reward and pleasure seeking system in the brain, would respond to the one-two punch.
Alcohol consumption increases the amount of dopamine in the brain. Nicotine use does, too. That dopamine release after smoking or drinking encourages people to drink or smoke again.
So Dani expected the rat brains to release a lot of dopamine after consuming both. But the opposite occurred—the rats' dopamine levels after nicotine and alcohol use were really low.
Dani, thinking the results must be a mistake, kept trying to achieve a high dopamine level in his rats, but it never rose. It was as if the rats never got that nice familiar alcohol-induced buzz.
"We did that experiment so many times before we finally went, 'Wow. This is real and now we've got to figure it out.' " Dani says.
The scientists then started measuring how much the rats were drinking, and that's when the pieces fit together. The nicotine-addicted rats ended up knocking back a lot of alcohol, just like humans who smoke.
They found that nicotine use blunts the release of dopamine that normally occurs when alcohol is consumed alone. So smokers may not feel the effects of alcohol as soon or as much as non-smokers, and thus may be prone to drink more.
"It's consistent with what occurs in the brains of risk takers, people who love dangerous, risky activities," Dani said. "Their brains send out a smaller dopamine signal, and so they seek out more and more dangerous activities."
These findings someday may help make treatment for alcohol and nicotine addiction more effective, says Paul Kenny, a professor of neuroscience at the Scripps Research Institute who was not involved in the study.
"There is a tremendous link to biology in this," Kenny told Shots. "Smoking can really influence the neurochemical interactions in the brain."
Dani says his rat cocktail parties are far from over. Next he's looking at whether nicotine makes adolescent rats more likely to drink as adults.
No word yet on whether the rats get teeny tiny hangovers.
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They believe that they know something we, out here at a distance, still haven’t discovered. The Blue Jays like Jeff Mathis, just like Mike Scioscia always liked Jeff Mathis, just like Jeff Mathis’ pitchers have always liked Jeff Mathis. Don’t ignore this. This is data. This, in the absence of any data showing Jeff Mathis’ value, might actually be the most important data point of all. The unicorn might actually be real. - Sam Miller, Aug. 15, 2012
What is your preferred cold remedy? Are you confident it is the best one?
What would it take — on your next pharmacy run — to convince you to pick up an entirely different kind of medicine and go with it? Could price play a role? Sure, but you need results, and are you going to move away from what you’ve always trusted?
Spoiler alert: We’re not talking about cold medicine. Not really. We’re talking about catchers, a very unique aisle of the baseball market where front offices are indeed making this very difficult decision to move away from what they’ve known. We can be pretty sure they aren’t doing so lightly, yet from the results of the offseason thus far, you’d have to assume they know something they didn’t know before.
With new — and newly modernized — front offices taking power in Arizona and Minnesota, we expected teams to be of the same mind, just in different states and circumstances. In most ways, that has been true. But where the Twins made a predictable upgrade by luring Jason Castro, the best framer among starters on the free-agent market, the Dbacks made a move no one really saw coming, a change that had to clear that very high bar for doing an about-face in the pharmacy.
They non-tendered starting catcher Welington Castillo (and his not-unaffordable salary). If they wanted to place an emphasis on defense, then maybe it made sense. Castillo — an above average-offensive player for the position — is not good on defense, and has rated especially poorly at framing.
Still, as my colleague Henry Druschel has pointed out, Major League framing exists within a narrower band than it did even three years ago, the gap between good and bad shrinking in the wake of our wider understanding of the skill and its value. Further, the Dbacks didn’t scope out the market for a new starter that provided more financial flexibility. They had another catcher, a backup, waiting in the wings, ready to ink an admittedly very cheap two-year deal.
They chose an offensively inept part-time player over Castillo. They prioritized it.
The theory here is that the Dbacks (and other clubs) have scaled the mountain of data we are still processing. They have mapped it and they are beginning to understand the territory on a more complex, more granular and more individualized level.
Where we once had a market that balanced offensive and defensive value, then a market that balanced it differently, we now have a market in which clubs are choosing a catcher not based on his value (in the traditional sense), but on how he might inflate the effective return on other, larger investments.
Enter Jeff Mathis, baseball’s patron saint of questioning everything you know, uncommon cure for Zack Greinke’s cold.
There exists, on the Internet, a veritable trove of baseball literature plumbing the depths of Mathis’ career for signs of usefulness. It was written by Sam Miller during his time at Baseball Prospectus, and you should read it. We are not here to retread that path, but instead to advance a theory as to why Mathis was a coveted commodity, to at least one team, in the year of our lord 2016, in our possibly morphing catcher market.
My colleagues at AZ Snake Pit have already explained some of Mathis’ framing appeal, advancing the idea that Mathis may be paired with the Dbacks’ $206.5-million man, Zack Greinke — whose career has already illustrated some of framing’s potential effects.
In early 2015, he said, “I believe that some catchers are better at framing pitches. But I’m not a believer that it’s as valuable as it’s being made out to be. It’s part of a catcher’s skill set. It’s not the most important part.” This opinion may have mellowed, after he went from personal catcher A.J. Ellis (one of the worst framers) to (Yasmani) Grandal, who caught all bar 8 starts in Greinke’s epic campaign that year. There’s certainly a case throwing to Beef may have been part of Zack’s issues here, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Mathis become Greinke’s regular battery mate.
Mathis rated among the top framers on a per-pitch basis last season, according to Baseball Prospectus. He was behind the stellar Grandal, but not by much (in previous seasons, Mathis has been simply above average).
I’m guessing the Dbacks front office has looked at this from another angle, though.
In our exuberance to separate good framers from bad, we haven’t taken as much time to parse the intricacies of the skill, and that extra step may explain the targeting of Mathis, who appears especially comfortable calling for low pitches and turning them into strikes.
Looking to Baseball Savant for ways in which Mathis distinguished himself, this is the most notable: Mathis and Castillo received a greater percentage of pitches in the areas outside the bottom half of the zone than any other catchers (min. 5,000 pitches received). Mathis, notably, received a significantly larger portion of those pitches than the Marlins’ primary catcher, J.T. Realmuto. Those phenomena extend back for several seasons — as Mathis, Francisco Cervelli, former Dbacks catcher Miguel Montero, David Ross and several others continuously paced the league in low pitches received.
A Dbacks catcher tends to appear. And he tends to fall short of Mathis in the called-strike department. In 2016, Mathis converted 16.4 percent of pitches taken in those zones into called strikes, compared to Castillo’s 13.6 percent. If you’re a visual person, their plots of called strikes looked like this.
With those rates, you’d expect Mathis to secure 411 called strikes for every 2,500 pitches taken in those zones while Castillo gets 339 calls.
To pile on, here are the charts of Mathis’ and Castillo’s 2016 performance on pitches taken in the bottom third of the actual strike zone.
I’ll pause to remind you that these numbers don't reflect solely their abilities. Some of those pitches are beyond help, others are relatively easy frame-ups, etc. It’s very difficult to decipher which is which, and best left to the comprehensive work being done at BP and elsewhere. But the difference seems to square with the information available to us: Mathis is a better framer, and perhaps decidedly so on low pitches.
Anyway, this isn’t intended to be the most advanced analysis, but instead a dog-eared data point, a breadcrumb.
That's because if you consult Baseball Savant once more, you’ll find a very big incentive for the Dbacks to pursue a player who excels at converting those specific pitches into strikes. The club threw more pitches in the areas outside the lower part of the zone than any other team in 2016 — possibly an attempt to stem the flood of home runs at Chase Field.
And among players who threw 2,500+ pitches, Greinke threw the third-highest percentage of his pitches in those areas, while Patrick Corbin — a promising pitcher whose rebound from a rocky 2016 could be key to the club’s 2017 prosperity — led all hurlers.
For reference, Greinke threw almost precisely the same number of pitches in those zones as Max Scherzer, a pitcher who overall threw more than 1,000 additional pitches across 70 additional innings.
#Dbacks mgr Torey Lovullo says plan is for Jeff Mathis to catch about 60 games. — Steve Gilbert (@SteveGilbertMLB) December 6, 2016
With those data points and the stated usage goal for Mathis in mind, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that you’ll be seeing him behind the plate as the primary catcher for Greinke and Corbin.
The duo also shared prime real estate in another category: Among pitchers with 120+ IP, Greinke and Corbin were 13th and sixth, respectively, in terms of throwing inside the strike zone the least. These are pitchers who want to live outside the zone. Greinke’s historically good 2015 came along with a career-low 39.9 percent zone rate.
There is likely even deeper reasoning behind the Dbacks’ acquisition of Mathis, but these highlighted facts alone could convince you that the change at catcher might have real, positive implications for Greinke.
And it leads to the questions that may drive future catcher markets: How much of a difference can a catcher make when it comes to a pitcher’s performance? Can that value be accurately attributed to the catcher?
We may witness several high-profile tests of the first question in 2017. Greinke will have the chance to bounce back by emulating 2015’s wildly successful dance around the edges of the plate. And Cubs lefty Jon Lester will face a very different, but no less relevant, challenge in forging on without personal catcher and running-game-suppressor Ross.
The second question is more difficult. It’s not clear that framing, in general, has been properly valued in terms of compensating catchers. We may be learning about the position too quickly, at the moment, for any breakthrough to translate into dollars — every newly discovered talent washed away by another eureka moment as clubs send comparatively expensive catchers packing in favor of other backstops, unknowingly equipped with a skill that makes them a bargain at only $2 million per year.
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On this week’s episode of the Reply All podcast, a story about the Internet encroaching on a world that has managed pretty successfully to block it out — New York’s Ultra Orthodox Jewish community.
New Square, NY, is about 30 miles north of New York city, and it is home to a deeply religious dynasty of orthodox Judaism called Skver. New Square’s founder, Rabbi Yakov Yosef Twersky, wanted it to be a complete oasis from the decadence and temptation of the outside world. And for the most part he was successful. The yarmulkes here were bigger. Men and women walked on different sides of the street. The houses looked like cottages. And everyone was Hasidic.
This was the world in which Shulem Deen lived, with his wife and children. He was an active part of this small, close-knit community. And that is the way it likely would have remained, were it not for a day in 1996 when Shulem bought a tool that opened the floodgates to the world around him. A computer.
Now, the Hasidic community does use technology. They aren’t the Amish. But they won’t use technology that brings in moral influence from the outside world. Radios are banned. TVs are banned. Cars are frowned upon because you could use one to drive somewhere you aren’t supposed to. But appliances — vacuum cleaners, photocopiers, washing machines — all of that is fine.
And when personal computers started making their way to the Hasidic community, they were considered no more influential than a fax machine. When Shulem bought his first computer, he had no notion of the Internet at all. “I was working with children at this school,” he says. “I thought that I would use a computer to create worksheets, particularly to teach children who had difficulty with Talmud study.”
<img src="http://static.digg.com/images/0ca21666215a4dc6bcf8bc3e9ed67026_a1391ad64d0245b7bdea178ddc873e27_1_post.jpeg" alt="" />
But when he started setting up the computer, he was fascinated by it, and wanted to explore it well beyond using it as simply a fancy word processor. “Every single disk that came in that box, I put it in [the computer] to check out what’s in it,” he says. “One of the things that came with the computer was a 3.5 floppy disc. Free AOL trial. So I put in this the floppy disc and it says, y’know ‘Welcome! You’ve got mail!’ and there’s a whole world. There’s news, there are chat rooms.”
When he started setting up the computer, he was fascinated by it, and wanted to explore it well beyond using it as simply a fancy word processor.
Shulem started his explorations as close to home as he could — on an AOL chatroom called The Jewish Community. His early exploration of this chatroom was mostly him chiding other members of the chatroom for being not sufficiently observant of religious law. “I’d just always assumed that if you’re Jewish and you’re not observant it’s probably because you just don’t know. You just need someone to teach you the law and you’ll be on board.” But quickly, Shulem realized that his fellow members of The Jewish Community (the chatroom) weren’t ignorant. They just had a different idea of what it meant to be Jewish.
Suddenly, he found himself voraciously hungry for information from the outside world. And his thirst for knowledge quickly migrated offline, and to the one place he was never supposed to go — the one place that contained all the information the people of New Square were trying to defend against. The public library.
“I just sat there in the children’s section next to a kid, furiously paging through the Berenstein Bears.” From there, he went to the encyclopedia. Realizing it was alphabetic, he looked up Jews. Then Judaism. Then Israel. From there, computers, the Beatles, Bruce Springstein, and countries like Botswana and Brazil. “I wasn’t just acquiring info,” he says. “It was experiencing. Exposure. It was almost like I was traveling.”
“I wasn’t just acquiring info... It was experiencing. Exposure. It was almost like I was traveling.
From there he made his way to Blockbuster Video. He rented Beethoven (you know, the dog movie), and Titanic. And as he was drifting further and further from his religious roots, he was getting more and more reckless. He recalled a time when he was walking down the street and dropped some DVDs he was holding under his arm. He thought for sure he was busted, but he soon realized that they didn’t recognize the Blockbuster Video logo, and so they just kept walking.
While his New Square neighbors may not have known what a Blockbuster was, they were starting to understand what the Internet was. And to the Hasidic community, the Internet was a threat. People put up fliers in New Square, laying out a new rule — no computers. And in Shulem’s community when a rule was passed, it was a big deal.
But the way those rules were actually enforced might surprise you. Enforcement was strict, but also informal. That’s because the people in charge of keeping you in line were usually your neighbors. Which is easy because New Square is very close knit. People actually build houses in each others backyards. If someone found out you had a secret TV, a volunteer organization called the modesty committee might decide to break into your home and confiscate it.
<img src="http://static.digg.com/images/239dc7d9d81d4b45b0443ff76dada998_a1391ad64d0245b7bdea178ddc873e27_1_post.jpeg" alt="" />
And most people welcomed this — after all, the rules were in place to help them hold onto their faith. To keep them safe from the very thing that happened to Shulem. Just six years after he’d first bought the computer, he was still living like a Hassid, dressing like one. But he didn’t feel like one.
“I remember, just one morning, I was getting ready for prayers,” he says. “I was no longer praying at the synagogue, but I was like ‘yeah, I still have to pray,’ because if I didn't pray my wife would get pissed. And so I'm in our dining room trying to just do my prayers and the tefillin straps, put them on really quickly, and—And, as I'm doing this, I'm putting my prayer shawl on, and I had this thought like, ‘I'm not a believer. I'm just not.’”
Shulem felt increasingly isolated in the tiny enclave of New Square, but online, he felt more connected than ever. So he started a blog. At first he called it shulemdean.blogspot.com, but soon, his writing was reaching people outside the Hasidic community. Still hoping to remain anonymous, Shulem renamed his blog “Hasidic Rebel.”
He was still living like a Hassid, dressing like one. But he didn’t feel like one .
Shulem stopped attending synagogue. During prayers he would hang out in an empty classroom where a couple other young hasidic men, also doubters, started to turn up. People in the community were whispering that he was Hasidic Rebel. And then, one Sunday evening in 2005, Shulem was having dinner with his family, when he got a call. Can you come to the village council tonight?
There was a tribunal. Literally a rabbinical court. And Shulem was told he needed to leave. “They actually ordered me out of not just, give up your synagogue membership, but they ordered me to move, sell my house, get out of town. I didn’t see that coming. I don’t know why.”
So Shulem left. He moved with his family to another Hasidic town nearby. But his wife couldn’t get comfortable there. His kids didn’t have any friends. They missed their old home. And his wife, understandably, resented Shulem for all this. For dragging her along on his shameful journey into secularism. So after a few years, Shulem and his wife agreed to a divorce. The kids would visit on weekends. But slowly, one by one, his kids said they didn’t want to visit. So Shulem ended up going to family court to force his ex wife to send them.
“The court ordered them to come,” he says, “and they came and they simply would not engage. They would not look at me. They would not speak to me. They would not eat any of my food. I asked, do you really never want to see me again? Like is that actually what you want? That was my question to them and they said yes. That's what they said.”
Shulem and his kids are now firmly on opposite sides of the chasm.
When I met Shulem last month, it had been seven years since he’s seen his kids. He does still keep tabs on them though. There are a couple guys in New Square that he does favors for. And in return for those favors, those guys secretly photograph his kids when they see them in public. Shulem gets the photos on his phone. Pictures of one son at the grocery store, almost ready for his bar mitzvah. Pictures of his youngest son biking down the street. And of his eldest daughter — the one that sat in his lap while he surfed AOL chat rooms — he watched her getting married.
Shulem spent the evening in front of his computer. He had his spies, two on the girls' side and two on the boys' side, emailing him photos as the wedding was happening.
“I don't know how to describe that feeling of getting those photos of like oh my God, this is actually her like getting married,” Shulem says. “She was a little, sullen angry teenager and now she's a bride. here is my daughter and I saw photos of my other daughters and my sons and they're happy and they're happy even though I'm not there. Like how could she be so happy?”
Shulem and his kids are now firmly on opposite sides of the chasm. They’re both trapped there by the things they now believe. Shulem can’t go back to believing what he used to. So instead, he’s traded one kind of faith for another. He now has to believe that one day, his kids, some of them anyway, will join him on his side.
On next week’s Reply All — we look at the Internet from the perspective of people who are still Hasidic. Subscribe to Reply All on iTunes or with your favorite podcaster, visit our website or just listen on Soundcloud.
You can also subscribe to Reply All's RSS here.
Shulem Deen is the author of ALL WHO GO DO NOT RETURN.
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Announcement
Consumer Beware Policy - Unauthorized DJI® Dealers
To ensure that you only receive the highest quality DJI® Agras MG series products, including MG-1, MG-1S, MG-1S RTK, MG-1S Advanced, MG-1P and MG-1P RTK, DJI is committed to selling its Agras MG series products through a trusted network of carefully selected authorized dealers. DJI strongly advises customers to purchase only from local authorized DJI® dealers and to be aware of the possible risks that may result from purchasing products outside the countries where DJI® Agras MG series product originally sold or through unverified resellers.
There are unauthorized dealers that advertise and sell DJI® Agras MG series products. These products may not be operated. DJI cannot guarantee the quality or effectiveness of such products and as such, they are not covered by DJI’s warranty or return policy. DJI may also restrict the warranty service for DJI® Agras MG series products to the country where DJI or its Authorized Distributors originally sold the device.
Please note that unauthorized sellers may appear on a marketplace site, hosted by companies such as Amazon, EBay and similar marketplaces. When purchasing on these marketplace sites, you should always confirm that the reseller is an authorized DJI® dealer.
It is fully your responsibility as a customer to ensure that the retailer you purchase from is an authorized DJI® dealer. To verify that a dealer is authorized, please contact [email protected] for information.
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Introducing Our First Ever Zero-Emissions Electric Transportation Initiative
Postmates Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 17, 2017
Postmates today announced a partnership with GenZe — a manufacturer of electric scooters and bicycles, to bring zero-emissions transportation solutions to our network of Postmates. Particularly in dense, urban populations like New York City, the ability to get around traffic, park, or get across town efficiently can make the difference in the earnings generated by a Postmate, delivery times for a customer, or the sales rate for a merchant.
That’s why Postmates is introducing a fleet of zero-emissions GenZe e-Scooters, for initial use by our fleet in Manhattan, and a fleet of zero-emission e-Bikes in San Francisco, providing a cost-effective means to enable a faster uptake of orders, paired with more efficient delivery times.
While the initial program is being launched in New York and San Francisco, we actively plan to deploy additional transportation solutions to the fleet across the country in the next twelve months.
The flexibility we’re proud of at Postmates is rooted in the fact that we know our network of hard-working fleet are comprised of students, parents, and teachers who lead busy lives. By simply making a handful of deliveries a week, our Postmates will also be able retain the eco-friendly scooter for unlimited use in their daily lives. With complete insurance and maintenance coverage, and battery packs with long charge times, our fleet will be empowered to travel long distances around their communities.
Over the last seven years, states like New York, Oregon, California — and countless others which Postmates calls home, have made investments in clean energy, and pledges to reduce their carbon footprints. We at Postmates also recognize our responsibility to take steps to safeguard our planet and ease the emission congestion that plagues dense, metropolitan communities.
In addition to the e-Scooters and e-Bikes reducing congestion and noise pollution for the city, they also enable a Postmate to make deliveries faster. That helps generate more earnings and tips for the Postmate, more merchant sales, more small business growth, and more opportunities for the platform to move a higher volume of goods. And since GenZe technologies are assembled in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Postmates is proud that our partnership directly supports jobs in the United States.
The introduction of our robot deliveries, and the introduction of electric scooters & bikes, enables us to usher in 21st century tools to do everything from tackling short-distance & last-mile deliveries, to adding more resources to our fleet to make everyone’s time on the platform worth their while.
By maximizing deliveries, and in turn tips & revenue, for both the company and for individuals on the platform — Postmates recognizes that while our service is always rooted in people, the on-demand economy will be enhanced by next-gen transportation & technological solutions.
For more details about the scooter & bike initiative, please visit https://fleet.postmates.com/ebikes and https://fleet.postmates.com/scooters-initiative.
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Boston’s transit authority, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), have removed “One Word” subway ads, the campaign by NGO Ads Against Apartheid (AAA) highlighting Israel’s crimes against Palestinians that have garnered international attention on social media.
MBTA removed the ads on June 23rd offering no explanation and without even notifying the NGO. After Ads Against Apartheid released this press release yesterday, a contractor who handles advertising for MBTA informed them in writing that all three ads in the Ads Against Apartheid’s One Word series campaign, after running for over three weeks, were ”rejected pursuant to Section (b)(I) Demeaning or disparaging.”
This same transit authority ran Islamophobic anti-Muslim ads by Pam Geller’s group “American Freedom Defense Initiative”. AAA president and co-founder, Chadi Salamoun noted “There is certainly a double standard here. Our ads present facts cited by respectable institutions, the MBTA has allowed anti-Palestinian groups to display opinionated messages that border on hate-speech.”
What’s up with that? Read their full press release:
BOSTON, MA, 10 July 2014 – Boston’s transit authority, the MBTA, has removed advertisements highlighting Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians from Boston’s subway transit system under pressure from pro-Israel groups and in an apparent violation of its own policies. Boston-based non-profit Ads Against Apartheid (AAA), which sponsored the ad campaign, believes the MBTA’s action is a violation of it’s right to freedom of speech. Sarah Wunsch of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLU) said that the organization will support AAA’s efforts to get the advertisements back up. AAA says the MBTA did not notify it that the ads had been removed. The removal took place on Thursday, June 23. As of this writing, the MBTA has not offered an official explanation as to why the contract had been terminated early. An official working closely with the MBTA told AAA by telephone that the ads were likely removed because they were found to be “demeaning to the state of Israel.” Richard Colbath-Hess, Jewish co-founder of Ads Against Apartheid, emphasized that the ads criticize the behavior of the Israeli government, not any national group or individual. “We’ve asked for an official reason why the ads were removed but have yet to be given one,” said AAA president and co-founder, Chadi Salamoun. “It’s been two weeks. You’d think we would have been told two weeks ago. The MBTA had previously approved the advertisements after a lengthy review process, which presented facts – sourced primarily from United Nations reports – challenging the idea that Israel is committed to peace. They were on display for more than half of a month before they were removed without notice. “There is certainly a double standard here. Our ads present facts cited by respectable institutions,” argues Salamoun. “The MBTA has allowed anti-Palestinian groups to display opinionated messages that border on hate-speech,” he said in reference to a pro-Israel ad that the American Freedom Defense Initiative sponsored in early 2014, which sought to draw a contrast between what it called “the civilized man” and “those engaged in savage acts,” clearly implying that Palestinians comprise the latter. “If an ad can be removed for being ‘demeaning’ and ‘subjective,’ then why weren’t these ads removed?” wonders Colbath-Hess. “Aren’t they demeaning to Palestinians? The MBTA can’t use its position to give voice to the Israeli position while silencing ads that highlight human rights abuses that the Israeli government commits daily.” “I’m Jewish,” he continues. “And, I don’t support Israeli apartheid.” “We’re going to continue to publish ads that educate Americans on the impact of Israeli apartheid on Palestinian lives,” says Salamoun. “If the MBTA, a public institution, allows opinionated criticism of Palestinians but disallows factual ads critical of the Israeli government, then we see that as a fairly clear violation of our right to free speech, and we certainly plan to defend our Constitutional rights.”
If you have anything to say to MBTA, your feedback is very important to them.
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Just how powerful will Snapdragon 800 be when it lands in our phones and tablets further down the road? If leaked benchmarks for a Pantech IM-A880X device with Qualcomm's fastest chipset are to be believed, it is faster than even Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa , as found on some Galaxy S4 handsets.
The difference is about 10%, but bear in mind the Pantech gear might be still in an engineering prototype testing phase, hence the benchmarks on AnTuTu, and the final retail version might be squeezing some performance out of the Snapdragon 800.
Sony is another manufacturer rumored to come with a Snapdragon 800-based device by the end of the year, as well as LG , so we can't wait for the cage match when these land. Watch the demo of S800 given us by Qualcomm's team in early spring at MWC.
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Syracuse, N.Y. -- The blue-green algae bloom on Skaneateles Lake contains nearly nine times the amount of toxic chemicals that the state considers to be "high toxins."
The state Department of Environmental Conservation notified public officials today that water samples taken Saturday near the pier and the stairs to the beach contain high levels of a liver toxic produced by the blue-green algae.
The state considers 20 micrograms per liter of the toxin mycrosystin to be "high toxins" level. The sample taken from the beach stairs in Skaneateles Lake had nearly nine times that level -- 171.5 micrograms per liter. The pier reading was 126, more than six times the "high toxins" threshold, the DEC said.
Ingesting large amounts of the microcystins can kill pets and cause liver damage in humans.
The city of Syracuse draws its drinking water from Skaneateles Lake. A city spokesman on Friday said there was no threat to the drinking water "at this time" because the algae blooms were near the shore and the intake pipes are out toward the middle of the lake.
In a statement, Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner said: "At this time, the blue-green algae blooms on Skaneateles Lake pose no threat to city water users."
She added, however, that the city is conducting tests "throughout our system to determine if our supply has been affected."
The DEC said Friday that samples taken earlier in the week tested positive for potentially toxic blue-green algae. Additional samples were taken Saturday at the pier and beach stairs by volunteers from the New York State Federation of Lake Associations, the DEC said.
Onondaga County on Friday issued a blue-green algae advisory for Skaneateles Lake, urging people to "avoid contact with any algae blooms, surface scums, and colored water." The advisory also told people to avoid consuming water "directly from the lake," but did not address the city of Syracuse's drinking water supplies.
Contact Glenn Coin: Email | Twitter | Google + | (315) 470-3251
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Healthy Chocolate “Surprise” Truffles
Say goodbye to Cook for Health September – it’s now October! (Thanks for all your amazing entries , by the way – we’re picking the winners now!) We’re ringing in the start of this new month with a special post and new giveaway to honor Fair Trade Month!
Every now and then, we work with Fair Trade USA by donating a post to spread the word about fair trade. Why? Because we believe in their mission: that fair trade improves lives of workers around the globe, protects the environment, and produces high-quality products. One of their tag lines is “good for people and the planet”. This is basically the reason we started A Couple Cooks (from a food perspective), so we love spreading the word about what they’re doing.
There are a lot of things going on in this post, so here are the main things we want to tell you about:
1. Fair Trade USA! Check out befair.org to learn more. 2. Giveaway: Fair Trade gave us a huge package of goodies to give away to one lucky winner! (See details below.) 3. Recipe: We made these truffles with fair trade ingredients from the goodie package. They were delish. 4. Pinterest Contest: If you’re into things like this, our recipe is entered in a Fair Trade Pinterest competition – vote for us by pinning it from the Fair Trade pinboard > click here! 5. Story: Fair Trade paired us with a farmer to tell her story. Her name is Elvia and she is awesome (see below) .
The Story: A Fair Trade Farmer
Elvia Almachi, 32, from Guaytacama, Ecuador, holds a bundle of recently harvested Fair Trade-certified roses. Elvia has been working at Agrogana for 12 years and is currently a production line field supervisor. She has been part of the Fair Trade committee in the past and has two daughters, aged 9 and 12. Elvia and her husband Luis Alberto Villegas, also an Agrogana employee, are two of only five employees to participate on the weekend adult school program paid by the Fair Trade prize. They are both currently studying an equivalent to high school degrees.
Says Elvia: “Before I worked in a different local flower company and they exploited us. Even while I was pregnant! Once I came here, I could tell the difference was huge. We would like for everyone in Ecuador who works in the flower industry to have the same great benefits we do here. Please continue to believe in us. There are many of us who need to continue improving our quality of life through the Fair Trade prize. It is through these Fair Trade flowers that hundreds of families, like mine, continually improve our lives.”
The Recipe
Our box of Fair Trade goodies included fair trade cocoa powder, chocolate chips, cinnamon, coffee, and chocolate-covered coconut flakes. After a few failed attempts, we had the idea of a healthy truffle (made with dates and nuts like our raw brownies), but stuffed with little morsels like chocolate chips, coffee beans, and hazelnuts. It brings a bit of flair to the everyday healthy truffle to have a surprise filling – and you can stuff it with anything you like! This was Alex’s idea and though I was originally skeptical (not sure how I could be!), it turned out great.
The Giveaway
We have a huge basket of Fair Trade gifts for one lucky winner! Congrats to Molly D. for winning the fair trade giveaway!
The Rules: Up to 3 entries per person (see below), U.S. residents only. Commenting will close on Tuesday, October 7, 2014 at 9:00 pm, EST. One winner will be chosen at random.
Dillanos Coffee Roasters Coffee (@Dillanos)
(@Dillanos) CocoLibre Coconut Water (@CocoLibre)
(@CocoLibre) Guittard Akoma Extra Semisweet Chocolate Chips (@GuittardChoco)
(@GuittardChoco) Lake Champlain Unsweetened Cocoa (@LCChocolates)
(@LCChocolates) barkTHINSTM Snacking Chocolate (@RippleBrands)
(@RippleBrands) Rishi Earl Grey Tea (@RishiTea)
(@RishiTea) Dang Foods Dark Chocolate Covered Coconut (@DangFoods)
(@DangFoods) Honest Tea (@HonestTea)
(@HonestTea) Frontier Natural Products Co-op Cinnamon (@FrontierCoop)
(@FrontierCoop) Eco Lips Colored Lip Balm (@ecolips)
(@ecolips) Alter Eco Deep Dark Sea Salt Organic Chocolate (AlterEcoSF)
(AlterEcoSF) Badger Balm (@BadgerBalmUSA)
(@BadgerBalmUSA) LÄRABAR Bars (@larabar)
(@larabar) Runa Berry Clean Energy Drink (@DrinkRuna)
(@DrinkRuna) SunSpire Coconut Almond Dark Chocolate Bar
Choice Tea Rooibos Chai (@ChoiceOrganicT)
(@ChoiceOrganicT) Nourish Organic Shea Butter (@NourishUSDA)
(@NourishUSDA) Where Am I Eating? Book by Kelsey Timmerman (@KelseyTimmerman)
Healthy Chocolate “Surprise” Truffles (2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 1)
5 from 2 reviews Author: a Couple Cooks
Yield: Yield: 30 truffles Print Recipe Pin Recipe Ingredients 14 medjool dates
½ cup walnuts
½ cup almonds
¼ cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
Fillings: chocolate chips, hazelnuts, and/or coffee beans
Toppings: cocoa powder and coconut Instructions Remove the pits from the dates. Soak the dates in warm water for 5 minutes, then drain and squeeze the remaining water. Pulse 1/2 cup walnuts, 1/2 cup almonds, and 1/4 cup cocoa powder in a food processor until finely ground. Add the dates, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 2 teaspoons cinnamon, and 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt and pulse until a thick, sticky dough ball forms. Remove the dough ball from the food processor. Roll the dough into small balls (about 30). Use the end of a spoon to make a small hole in a truffle, then stuff with the “surprise” filings of your choice: chocolate chips, hazelnuts, or coffee beans, or a combination of each. Then re-roll the truffle into a ball. For the toppings, place some cocoa powder or coconut on a plate and roll each truffle in the filling. Store refrigerated. Notes Inspired by Pinch of Yum
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Buy Photo The Cincinnati Bell Connector passes by Findlay Market. (Photo: The Enquirer/Liz Dufour)Buy Photo
The agency that runs the streetcar is demanding city taxpayers pay an additional $20,000 to run all five streetcars this weekend -- one of the biggest weekends of the year with Oktoberfest Zinzinnati, three baseball games and several races.
The issue has been brewing behind the scenes for weeks, but came to head Monday night when the head of the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority sent a 10 p.m. e-mail to City Manager Harry Black essentially saying it would run just two of the five streetcars.
The city contracts with SORTA to operate the streetcar, which opened to the public Friday.
"Special Events service funding is not included in the budget," SORTA CEO and General Manager Dwight Ferrell wrote. Then he cited the contract, pointing to a section that reads: "At the direction of the City, SORTA will provide supplemental Cincinnati Streetcar service for Special Events or for Charter Operations. This supplemental service will be contingent upon availability of Cincinnati Streetcar vehicles to provide the service and the availability of qualified personnel. The City will pay for the additional costs of such services upon receipt of SORTA's invoice."
Black fired back: "... this is not our understanding of the (agreement.)"
Black then added: "Must say that I am disappointed in the overall lack of leadership on the part of SORTA in the operationalization of the Streetcar in general. Appears as though SORTA is simply lacking in its ability to get this done on multiple fronts."
Also Tuesday it came to light that the passenger-counting sensors on the streetcars did not work properly, resulting in SORTA having to estimate ridership during the first weekend.
On top of that, not all credit card machines at ticket kiosks are functional.
Last week, the night before the opening, SORTA had to pull one car out of service due to a warranty issue. It was back in service within 24 hours after testing.
The 3.6-mile streetcar through Downtown and Over-the-Rhine cost $148 million to build and is projected to cost $4.2 million a year to operate. SORTA estimates 50,000 people rode the streetcar last weekend, its first in operation.
Several council members pointed out increased ticket sales would likely cover the $20,000 cost to run more cars. But nobody knows for sure.
A half million people are expected Downtown this weekend. Oktoberfest runs Friday to Sunday. SORTA's rail director, Paul Grether, told Council's Major Transportation Committee Tuesday SORTA can't afford the cost of increased service. Streetcars, under the contract, are supposed to run every 15 minutes.
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Council members, during their Major Transportation Committee, bristled at SORTA's request.
"I am shocked this is where we end up on Tuesday after service begins," said Vice Mayor David Mann. "This is beyond comprehensible. I guess Shangri-La is over. I don’t think Council can accept that."
Mann said if necessary the city would take the matter to court. SORTA's Ferrell, who signed the letter to the city, could not be reached for comment. SORTA spokeswoman Sallie Hilvers said the issue is contractual.
Councilwoman Amy Murray closed the meeting, summing up the problem: "We agree we need more than two. We have to decide who pays." She added a long-term solution is needed.
"This weekend it is imperative we run more than two cars," Murray said.
Assistant City Manager John Juech said the city will continue to work on the problem.
SORTA Board Chairman Jason Dunn issued a statement Tuesday night pledging the agency "will continue to provide efficient and safe multimodal transit service to the community." He added the board has full confidence in Ferrell’s leadership.
Oktoberfest was moved to Second and Third streets between Walnut and Elm streets this year, after years on Fifth Street. Part of the argument to move the event was so the city wouldn't have to shutter the streetcar and it could be used to get people to the event.
Read or Share this story: http://cin.ci/2clymbO
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Leatherman is known for its namesake multi-tools. But the brand also sells knives, including a so-called ‘naked’ knife that weighs barely more than one ounce.
Small but sturdy, the Leatherman Skeletool knives are everyday-carry models that slip into a pocket with a removable clip. They offer a lockable folding format with a 2.6-inch blade. (The knives come to market this summer.)
A unique look comes from cutouts on the handle and blade. Leatherman notes the minimalist design is a part of the “naked knife” trend. Check out our video below for an overview.
But it’s the same aesthetic seen on the company’s long-popular Skeletool multi-tools. Indeed, hold a Skeletool knife next to its pliers-equipped forebear and you see a sibling; the knife appears stamped out of the multi-tool shell.
Made in Portland, Ore., the lockable knife comes as a straight-blade model (Skeletool KB) or with serration (Skeletool KBx). They will cost $25 when for sale in June.
Tim Leatherman, Mr. Multi-Tool Himself, Gives A Factory Tour Tim Leatherman, the inventor of the multi-tool, gave us a first-hand look at how his products are Made In The USA. Read more…
Review: Leatherman Skeletool Knives
Skeletool knives are about a half-step up from what I would call a keychain blade. The knives are about 3.5 inches closed (or 6 inches when laid flat, blade open) and weigh a scant 1.3 ounces.
In the palm the airy handle is small but just adequate for grip — it fit firmly in my hand. My fingers wrapped around the handle, and with a thumb on top of the blade whittling was easy and precise.
I sharpened a marshmallow stick then trimmed a few errant vines encroaching a wall. The serrated edge sliced through the cord. Out of the box, the blade is usable for any small task.
Knife Blades: Common Steels Explained All the info you need to understand the steel in your knife blade. Read more…
The action end is an industry workhorse, 420 HC stainless. It’s stamped in a swooped drop-point, and the blade is thicker than expected for its length. It’s an inexpensive steel that resists corrosion well and holds an OK edge if well hardened. Time will tell how this one holds up, but for the price, it’s hard to go wrong.
The knife locks open with a tiny click; its liner lock is the same as seen on the company’s multi-tools. It’s strong in the open position, with no lateral movement at the hinge while putting it to work.
Granted, these are hardly survival knives. The Skeletool line is made to replace a pocketknife, not serve as a primary backwoods tool.
That said, for many years while backpacking and on climbing trips, a little knife like this has served me fine. Due to its super-light weight, this will be a great choice for hikers and others who want to carry an ultralight knife for small tasks around camp, but don’t need or want the weight associated with a more formidable blade.
For kindling, gear repairs, and cooking needs, the Leatherman blades will do the trick without weighing you down, hardly more than a single ounce.
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Meddling eurocrats have secured cheaper mobile calls throughout the EU in the latest display of their frightening power.
Every year Britons spend 350 million on roaming charges, which is what it costs to feed and clothe a typical family of Roma gypsies.
But thanks to a plot hatched by Brussels, roaming charges inside the EU will fall by three-quarters, while Brits who want to pay more to use their phone on holiday will face masses of dirty, foreign red tape.
The EU will also make it 66 per cent cheaper to download data while nonchalantly sitting on a deckchair in your sunglasses.
However, the mobile phone free-for-all could leave honest UK citizens vulnerable to dirty talk by foreign perverts from Calais to the Bosphorus.
The Vote Leave campaign says the reduced costs will make it easier for Bulgarian rapists to make peak time calls to your daughter or wife, asking them to ‘do stuff’.
They also claimed that there was a catch, in that when phoning abroad, you’ll probably have to speak either German, French or even fucking Belgian.
Vote Leave spokesman, Simon Williams, said, “This insane new law means a Romanian, a Latvian or a Greek-o can repeatedly snap-chat his genitals to your niece for less than six pence a minute.”
He added, “That might not sound much, but multiply it by the cost of France and Spain combined and you’re looking at a tidal wave of instant messaging.”
“What’s good for Jacques and Pedro is, unfortunately, a nightmare for Nigel and Colin.”
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Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved (Photo: WKRN)
Larry Flowers - MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (WKRN) - There was scary night for tenants of a Murfreesboro apartment complex over the weekend.
According to police, a 20-year old man was attacked and shot at by a suspect who tried to rob him.
A witness told News 2 everyone was alert and on edge after the violent encounter.
"It was a real shocking night," witness Chris Fisher said. "I heard it happening at College Grove before, but never that close. We were on high alert the rest of the night."
But the magnitude of what happened at the College Grove Apartments late Saturday night into Sunday morning has him thinking it could have been worse.
"It was a loud and powerful gun," Fisher said. "[The victim] said it looked like a Smith and Wesson .40 caliber handgun. His brother owns one of those guns, so he could pick it out. It could happen to anyone; that's the one thing I got out of it."
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved College Grove Apartments (Photo: WKRN)
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved College Grove Apartments (Photo: WKRN)
The victim, Dylan Valentine, told police he was walking to his apartment on the second floor of building 500 when he heard footsteps behind him.
He said the suspect grabbed him and placed him in a chokehold, but he tried to fight him off and was able to break free.
"Me and my friends were sitting on the couch enjoying our Saturday night. Basically we felt a gunshot. Heard and felt it; it shook the room," Fisher said.
Authorities say after that shot was fired, the victim continued fighting with the suspect. They ended up rolling down the stairs down to the first floor.
The bullet was found in the wall of the laundry room of the victim's apartment.
"The victim said he's been shot," the witness said. "He sat down and raised up his shirt and there was about a 7-inch graze wound on his right hip."
The suspect ran away, but Fisher remained on his balcony the rest of the night just in case he came back.
"I'm just glad I had a rifle to protect myself up in my apartment. There are doors locked all the time now," Fisher said.
Once police catch up with the suspect, he will be facing aggravated assault, aggravated robbery, and reckless endangerment charges.
Anyone with information is urged to contact Murfreesboro police 615-893-1311.
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A few years back, there was an off-Broadway musical called, “Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson.” It was a flop. But now Broadway is host to the hit musical “Hamilton,” whose creator has lobbied for keeping his lead character on the $10 bill. Now it’s looking like Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will acquiesce, keeping Alexander Hamilton on the 10 and booting Jackson from the 20, instead.
Which proves, I guess, that big decisions about our currency can be determined by Broadway box office receipts. Who knew?
Well, maybe there’s a little more to it than that. Not only has Jackson not fared as well as Hamilton among contemporary historians, but also he really wouldn’t have wanted to be on our funny money central bank notes, anyway. And for good reason.
Contemporary historians have turned against Jackson because he owned slaves and pushed for the removal of Cherokees from the southeastern United States to the Oklahoma Territory in a forced relocation known as the “Trail of Tears.” Fair enough, though there’s a good case to be made that some of the contemporary outrage at Jackson is the usual exercise in easy moral superiority. It’s the comforting smugness of imagining yourself to be brave in 2016 for holding beliefs that were daring in 1832.
The bills in your wallet are called Federal Reserve Notes issued by our central bank, an institution Jackson opposed.
But the issue isn’t whether Jackson is an over- or underrated historical figure. Whether he was, on balance, a good president in the context of his time, does not tell us whether there is any specific reason to keep him on our money. (Whereas with Hamilton, there is no one who belongs there more.) In fact, Jackson wouldn’t have wanted to be on the kind of money we have today. You might notice that the bills you have in your wallet are called Federal Reserve Notes, issued by our central bank, an institution Jackson opposed. You might notice that they also do not say “redeemable in gold,” which Jackson would have regarded as a necessary condition for them to be real money.
When Jackson vetoed the re-authorization of the Bank of the United States in 1836, he did so on the grounds that it would give special favors to the wealthy and connected, to be paid for by everyone else. Old Hickory may have been wrong about other things, but not about this — given that we recently pledged a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to bail out the big banks, and we’re still on the hook should they ever get in trouble again. Jackson explained that the central bank “enjoys an exclusive privilege of banking under the authority of the General Government, a monopoly of its favor and support, and, as a necessary consequence, almost a monopoly of the foreign and domestic exchange. The powers, privileges, and favors bestowed upon it in the original charter, by increasing the value of the stock far above its par value, operated as a gratuity of many millions to the stockholders.” The great innovation of our age is that we extended this privilege — and the “gratuity” paid for by the American people — from the central bank itself to the various private financial institutions regarded as “too big to fail.”
So if Jackson was an enemy of central banks and their privileges, how did he ever get onto Federal Reserve Notes in the first place? Nobody really knows for sure, except that Jackson was still very popular with the general public when the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 and started choosing who went on its bills. (They put him on the $10 bill first and then switched to $20 in 1928.) He was popular because he had a reputation for being the voice of the common man against the elites. A man who rose from modest circumstances on the frontier, rather than from the landed gentry of Virginia, Jackson was the one who took Jefferson’s Republican Party and transformed it into the Democratic Party, giving it a more populist character.
Jackson was popular because he had a reputation for being the voice of the common man against the elites.
While they have recently rejected him, for a very long time, Jackson was an icon of the Democratic Party. The problem is that Democrats wanted to keep Jackson’s populism and his railing against entrenched interests, without paying much attention to how he thought those interests got entrenched. Jackson was not primarily for the people and against the elites on Wall Street. He was for the people and against the elites in Washington, D.C. In his statement explaining his veto of the central bank, Jackson ended by declaring that the “true strength” of the Union “consists in leaving individuals and States as much as possible to themselves.” His supporters agreed. If you went looking for a radical New York City Democrat in 1835, you would have found an advocate of laissez-faire.
If you want to understand the politics of the era, I suggest you read the works of William Leggett, which you may do online. Leggett was an influential newspaper editor and Jackson supporter whose “Democratick editorials” were full of explanations about the “doctrine of equal rights,” which he summed up like this:
Protect their persons and property, and all the rest they can do for themselves. They want no government to regulate their private concerns; to prescribe the course and mete out the profits of their industry. They want no fireside legislators; no executive interference in their workshops and fields; and no judiciary to decide their domestic disputes. They require a general system of laws, which, while it equally restrains them from violating the persons and property of others, leaves their own unimpaired.
Leggett quoted Jackson in repudiating the notion “that because our government has been instituted for the benefit of the people, it must therefore have the power to do whatever may seem to conduce to the public good.” Yet that was precisely the view that would be embraced by a later group of Democrats, the so-called Progressives, who appointed themselves as an elite qualified to decide what conduces to the public good — and who set out to knock down all procedural and constitutional barriers that would prevent them from exercising the power to impose their vision. It was this generation of Democrats who created the central bank that then had the shamelessness to put Jackson on its bills.
And no, in case you wanted to make this argument, their rejection of laissez-faire was not connected to any rejection of Jackson’s racism. For one thing, the most radical laissez-faire Jacksonians, like Leggett, were also abolitionists. Most of them would eventually split off from the Democratic Party and form the new Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln. More important, many of the Democrats of the Progressive era were still dyed-in-the-wool racists. Woodrow Wilson, who had pushed for the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, openly courted the votes of the Ku Klux Klan and introduced racial segregation in federal employment. So their rejection of laissez-faire was not part of some broader program of enlightenment. They did not suddenly discover that blacks and Native Americans had rights. Instead, they were trying to make us forget that anyone had the right to freedom from government control.
Progressives were trying to make us forget that anyone had the right to freedom from government control.
You would think that their choice to continue honoring Jackson was a deliberate mockery of his legacy, except that there is no record that Progressive Democrats allowed themselves to become aware of the irony. They hid the conflict with a giant pretense: that if they railed enough against Wall Street and Big Business, they would still be true heirs of Jackson’s populism, even as they abandoned his doctrines about individual freedom and gave the federal government vast and minute powers to regulate every aspect of our lives — and, of course, to hand out favors to every conceivable variation of special interest.
From this perspective, Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill takes on a more sinister character. It is a reminder of how, in less than 80 years, Democrats went from the party of rugged individualism to the party of big government — from the party that spoke for the little guy against the elites in Washington, D.C., to the party that speaks for the D.C. elites and their desire to order the lives of the little guy for his own protection. And it’s also a reminder of how they tried to cover up that inversion.
We might as well be rid of this little evasion — though it would be nice if we understood what we were getting rid of, rather than doing it as just another knee-jerk concession to politically correct history.
Follow Robert on Twitter.
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A federal appeals court is ordering American Atheists to better explain its claim that the Ground Zero Cross is offensive and violates group members’ constitutional rights. The group is trying to keep the artifact out of the National September 11 Museum.
Read background from FoxNews.com:
The 17-foot-tall, steel beam “cross” was found in the rubble of the World Trade Center twin towers in New York that fell during the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The cross became a sort of shrine or place of comfort for first responders who often prayed there and left messages or flowers. It was moved away from the debris a few weeks later and became a tourist attraction through several years of reconstruction.
American Atheists filed the suit in 2011, which was thrown out last year by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York.
The appeals court ruling Thursday cites an amicus brief filed by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit law firm that specializes in church-state law and protecting the free expression of all religious traditions.
“We’re thrilled that the court picked up on this issue,” said group lawyer Eric Baxter, whose brief argued that American Atheists had no right to bring a lawsuit in the first place. “Courts should not allow people to sue just because they claim to get ‘dyspepsia’ over a historical artifact displayed in a museum.”
The museum officially opened on May 21.
The judge has now given the plaintiffs until July 14 to file supplemental legal briefs before deciding whether the case will proceed. Among the questions that must be answered in the new filings is how the offensiveness of the cross, which the plaintiffs view as a Christian symbol for all 9-11 victims, becomes a “constitutional injury.”
The other question is -- if the plaintiffs indeed feel displaying the cross “marginalizes them as American citizens” -- then how is that a “particular and concrete injury" compared to just “the abstract stigmatization of atheists generally.”
The judge has also asked the plaintiffs to substantiate their claim the museum and Sept. 11 memorial are getting taxpayer dollars.
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Activist Post
Defense lawyers for organizations on the U.S. government’s “terror list” are frustrated fighting the designation, and seizure of assets in many cases, because the government claims it is too tedious to give an explanation of the charges. “It would be extremely burdensome to give a list of charges,” said the government’s attorney, Douglas Letter, the Associated Press reported today:
Attorneys for the U.S. government told a federal appeals court Wednesday that informing each person and organization listed as a global terrorist of the reasons they are so designated would be too much work.
They made the argument in a case involving the government’s seizure of assets belonging to the U.S. chapter of Al Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc., a Saudi Arabia-based charity. The case is being heard by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Al Haramain attorney David Cole said outside court that representatives of Al Haramain were left in the dark after the organization was put on the global terrorist list. They continued to fight the designation without knowing what was driving it.
Cole said he and other attorneys could have provided a much more effective defense for the organization if they knew the reasons for the charges.
Organizations that are arbitrarily placed on the terror list who have their assets frozen are finding the burden of proof to be on them. Yet, they don’t even know what they are supposed to prove given the lack of detailed charges.
In a previous case, U.S. Judge, Gary Karr, ruled that freezing the assets of organizations suspected of terrorist ties has been done without due process by the Treasury Department. However, he also ruled that the “Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control needed only a reasonable belief that the charity was a component of a larger organization that funds terrorism” to take action.
This erosion of due process and reversal of burden of proof, along with Obama’s recent Executive Order to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely, are troubling signs for the “Land of the Free.”
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/9/2012 (2359 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews likely dodged the wrath of taxpayers last week when he cancelled a tender to provide the services of a priest for witches inside Canada's prisons, but you can bet there's more trouble brewing down the road.
Clearly, any decision to deny a Wiccan chaplain for inmates would not survive a court challenge based on Charter rights that guarantee freedom of religion or even expression.
But that eventuality didn't stop Toews, who most likely feared a public paddling when word got out about a plan for the Correctional Service of Canada to pay as much as $50,000 a year for someone to provide about 17 hours of spiritual services a month.
The Canadian Press first reported on the call for tenders, but within hours Toews's office had issued a statement suggesting the plan was off the table pending further review.
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I'm Dezeray Lyn with Tampa Food Not Bombs- On his fb page, bob buckhorn wrote that the city of Tampa was really shining over the week that we had thousands of guests to our community. I’d say that Tampa HAD a chance to shine, but it wasn’t because of the lavish setup in curtix hixon park and not because the TPD were directed to “clean up downtown” by telling the homeless to “disappear” until the events were over.
What would have made Tampa shine would have been people from all over seeing Tampa residents taking care of one another and acting with compassion and kindness.
But instead, the world got the optics of TPD dragging seven people away from a table where they have served food for years, literally hundreds of times. And I was one of them.
While it was upsetting, given the city’s history, it’s not actually surprising.
The city has wasted critically necessary resources bullying allies to the homeless community, even going so far as to dramatically raid and shut down Homeless Helping Homeless Headquarters after they won a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the panhandling ordinance.
In the streets, TPD bully and arrest the homeless (making their chances of finding a job less and less possible) and continually displace them into invisibility.
Last year during two severe storms with flood alerts, while the city had sandbags for residents, they had absolutely no contingency for the homeless enduring the severe conditions and no low intensity shelters set up for them. Tampa Food Not Bombs went out in the early morning hours with hot coffee, ponchos, hot oatmeal and pastries and drove around under bridges and behind buildings finding folks and serving them from our car. And you know what they told us when we found them huddling and fighting to stay dry? They said Tampa resident had already been driving around in their cars throughout the night with hot coffee and sandwiches to make sure that the people in the streets were safe.
That, Bob Buckhorn, is Tampa shining.
This is like the wizard of oz where rather than permits, fees and handcuffs, the city needs a heart, a brain and some courage.
It’s time that the city of Tampa and TPD stop pretending that two small tables in a public park, where our taxes already pay for our usage of the space is what is making this into a problem. The city wanted to hide the issues of hunger and homelessness in our community for a high profile event, that’s how arbitrary the motives are behind all of this hoopla.
The city wants to cherry pick enforcement times of ordinances that by and large don’t apply to us and they ask that we pay for over 100 permits a year to buy some theme park admission ticket to express our humanity and get costly insurance coverage that would divert critically necessary resources away from the community who needs them all just to go to the city who does not.
This is not a business model of the city making life difficult for the suffering and our subsequently feeding them once they are churned out on the other side.
We exist as a challenge to the city.
No one here in our community has ever gotten sick or suffered from a food not bombs share- but thousands ARE suffering and sick from unjust city ordinances, lack of meaningful assistance and resources being diverted away from them as well as an aggressive anti-homeless police force.
If you want to make homelessness disappear, don’t make it a crime to be or to help the homeless. Create housing first initiatives and solve the problem. Thank you.
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Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 and Part 2 are reportedly going to cost $1 billion to produce. It’s also been revealed that Robert Downey Jr. is going to be paid an insane and inordinate amount of money for starring in the films.
Bleeding Cool were the first to report that Marvel Studios plan on spending this astronomical sum on the third and fourth films to bring the superheroes together. The news has started to emerge on the eve of New York Comic Con, which began in the Big Apple on Thursday and will continue until Sunday.
However, while that’s a huge amount of money to spend on a film, it actually makes sense. Let’s not forget that Avengers: Infinity Wars are going to be two movies. Plus, Avengers: Age Of Ultron came to a cost of around $350 million, $60 million of which was refunded in tax incentives. Plus, another $150 million was then spent on both marketing and distribution.
Marvel Studios is still very much in the early stages of planning for Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 and Part 2. In fact, Bleeding Cool also reported that a script for the blockbuster hasn’t even been created yet, and they’re still ironing out the plot. Despite this lack of information, it’s been teased that several Avengers characters are likely to die in the film.
This indicates that the supposed $1 billion budget may ultimately go down, or maybe even up. If the script hasn’t even been written yet, how can the studio know how much scenes will cost?
Plus, they don’t know where filming is going to take place, and it’s likely that countries across the world will be offering all kinds of tax incentives to Marvel to shoot on their locations. Companies will also be looking to pay dozens of millions for corporate sponsorships or product placements being included in the film. That being said, the estimate is still a long way from being confirmed.
Probably the most startling fact to emerge from the alleged budget reveal is just how much one particular actor is going to pocket from starring in the films. It’s been no secret that Robert Downey Jr. has negotiated a pretty sweet deal with Marvel Studios when his original deal with them came to end.
In fact, back in August, Forbes revealed that Robert Downey Jr. was actually paid $80 million last year alone for starring in Avengers: Age Of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War, an amount that’s only going to increase when his royalties from the films come in. This came after he allegedly, via Variety, made $50 million for starring in The Avengers and $75 million from his work on Iron Man 3.
But that’s nothing compared to what he is potentially going to pocket for starring in Avengers: Infinity War Part One and Avengers: Infinity War Part Two.
Bleeding Cool have insisted that Marvel has earmarked $400 million to pay for the films’ screenwriter, director, producers and principal actors. A whopping $200 million of this total will go straight into the pocket of Robert Downey, Jr.
Even by actor standards, that’s an obscene amount of money. In fact, Gwyneth Paltrow, who starred in the Iron Man trilogy opposite Robert Downey Jr., recently told Variety, “Look, nobody is worth the money that Robert Downey Jr. is worth.”
It will be a while before Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 and Part 2 arrive in cinemas. Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have been tasked with writing the blockbuster, while Anthony and Joe Russo will direct. Part 1 will be in cinemas on May 4, 2018, while Part 2 will then follow on May 3, 2019.
[Photos by Marvel Studios; Theo Wargo/NBC; Getty Images for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon; Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney]
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An inmate at Chino State Prison, which houses 5,500 inmates, walks past the double and triple bunk beds in a gymnasium that was modified to house 213 prisoners in Chino, Calif. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
How bad is the suicide crisis in California state prisons? Well, the expert hired by a federal court to help end it is quitting out of frustration, calling any future attempts on his part a “further waste of time and effort.” To be clear: It’s not that he thinks it’s a problem that can’t be solved, just that state prison officials aren’t interested in finding a solution.
Here’s Southern California Public Radio’s report with the details:
[Dr. Raymond] Patterson has analyzed inmate suicides in state prisons for more than a decade and made recommendations every year on how prison officials could reduce the suicide rate. In his report on 2012 suicides, Patterson wrote that his recommendations go “unheeded, year after year,” while suicides “continue unabated.” Patterson concluded that state prison officials just don’t care about the issue, and that making any more recommendations would be “a further waste of time and effort.”
Patterson has been making recommendations to the prison system for 14 years, and filed his latest report with the federal court system on Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Times. That report paints a rather depressing picture of the California prison system: The state has 24 suicides for every 100,000 inmates, a rate that is climbing and already 50 percent above the national average. Inmates in segregation units were 33 times more likely to commit suicide. Of the first 15 suicides of 2012, three were discovered after the onset of rigor mortis, and 13 had indicators of “inadequate assessment, treatment or intervention.”
The state prison system responded with a statement yesterday denying Patterson’s claims that the prison system is turning a blind eye to the problem. “We adamantly reject this monitor’s suggestion that the state is indifferent to the issue of suicide prevention,” the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said. “Far from it. California has one of the most robust prison suicide prevention programs in the nation.”
But the real issue seems to be that prison officials, along with Gov. Jerry Brown, don’t want federal oversight on the issue at all. The statement continues: “CDCR is identifying and implementing improvements on its own. We do not need further intrusive and costly federal court oversight.” In fact, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton is set to rule later this month on the state’s bid to end federal oversight of mental health treatment in the prison system. We’re guessing this latest development won’t exactly be a boon to the state’s case.
For more on the mental health and overcrowding issues plaguing the state system, Southern California Public Radio has a piece with some good context.
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It’s no secret the Philadelphia Eagles need a wide receiver since they released DeSean Jackson.
Florida State’s Kelvin Benjamin, USC’s Marqise Lee and Oregon State’s Brandin Cooks have been mentioned among others when the Eagles pick at No. 22 in the first round of next month’s NFL draft.
But according to NFL Network analyst Mike Mayock, the Eagles should consider moving in a different direction.
“Why is everybody so gung-ho on the Eagles taking a wideout (in the first round)?” Mayock told the Philadelphia Daily News. "From my perspective, they almost have to look at the best-rated defensive player on their board at [No. 22]. I think they [need to take] their highest-rated player between an edge rusher, a corner and a safety. And then, if the entire defensive board is wiped out by the time they're on the clock, then you look at the offensive side.”
Mayock believes the Eagles should target a cornerback with their first-round selection.
“There really are five corners at the top end,” Mayock said. “Everybody has different opinions on who the best ones are. The most talented corners are [Ohio State's Bradley] Roby and [Oklahoma State's Justin] Gilbert. But I don't think they're the best football players. I think [Michigan State's Darqueze] Dennard and [Virginia Tech's Kyle] Fuller are the two best football players. If any of those four are available and the Eagles are on the clock, I think they have to take a hard look at taking one of them right away.”
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Several prominent Illinois politicians have been linked to an illegal African lobbying effort.
The federal investigation has resulted in charges against two Chicago men.
Longtime Chicago Congressman Danny Davis is seeking legal counsel because he was lobbied by one of those charged in Tuesday's federal case.
Davis and Congressman Bobby Rush are among four Illinois politicians wrapped up in an effort to lift U.S. Economic sanctions against the African nation of Zimbabwe.
Longtime Chicago political activist Prince Asiel Ben Israel is charged with accepting nearly $3.5 million from Zimbabwe officials to help dictator Robert Mugabe shake American trade sanctions. Charged with the 72-year-old Ben Israel is C. Gregory Turner, a Chicago business developer who is 71 years old.
According to federal charges, the men arranged trips by U.S. government officials to meet with Mugabe; and that afterward Illinois officials promised to deliver information to then president-elect Barack Obama about lifting the economic sanctions. They lobbied a caucus of state legislators on behalf of Zimbabwean officials and did so having failed to apply for a Treasury Department license to engage in lobbying.
A spokesman for Congressman Danny Davis confirms the was "briefed by Ben Israel, is now seeking legal counsel and expects to meet soon with federal officials."
Authorities haven't named the other Chicago representative who was lobbied but the charges say they sponsored legislation to remove sanctions on Mugabe's regime. Davis and Congressman Bobby Rush were the Illinois congressmen who co-sponsored that bill.
Rush released a statement saying:
"I had been scheduled to travel to Africa as part of an official delegation in 2009. If my itinerary had been shared with anyone connected with Zimbabwe or Zimbabwe officials, I had no knowledge of it. Zimbabwe was not on my itinerary, which included the following countries: Ghana, South Africa, Angola, Liberia, and an overnight stay in Morroco [sic]. Due to sudden illness, I did not travel with the delegation. This is the first I've heard of this. I have not been questioned and I am not a cooperating witness. Also, I have not been notified by the U.S. Department of Justice that I am Representative B in the complaint. I have not retained private counsel and see no need to do so at this time."
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Around this time next year, energy customers in Colorado will be getting some of their electricity from a new type of solar-energy facility: the...
Around this time next year, energy customers in Colorado will be getting some of their electricity from a new type of solar-energy facility: the largest — and first utility-scale — high concentration solar photovoltaic (HCPV) plant in the world.
The Alamosa Solar Generating Project, which will be located near the south-central Colorado town of Alamosa, is expected to generate around 75,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy each year: enough to power more than 6,500 homes. The source of clean energy will also help prevent more than 43,000 tonnes of carbon emissions every year.
The project comes a step closer to reality this week with an offer of a $90.6-million US Department of Energy loan guarantee to the facility’s developer, Cogentrix, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based subsidiary of The Goldman Sachs Group.
HCPV solar power is generated by focusing sunlight from a large area onto a smaller area with a photovoltaic panel on it, rather than just allowing direct sun to fall on a flat-panel solar cell. According to Cogentrix, the multi-junction Amonix solar cells to be used at Alamosa have an energy conversion efficiency of nearly 40 per cent. That’s about twice as much as the typical efficiency for standard flat-panel photovoltaics.
The technology can give solar power a big boost in regions that receive large amounts of direct sunlight. According to Amonix, HCPV also offers a great advantage over power tower or parabolic trough solar technologies, both of which require a significant amount of water for operations — water that is in scarce supply in the sunny American Southwest where Amonix has put its focus. By contrast, the small amount of water required to regularly clean the HCPV panels can easily be trucked in as needed.
In addition to its concentrating optics, the Alamosa plant will feature a dual-axis tracking system that keeps solar cells tilted at an optimal angle toward the sun. All of the electricity generated at the plant, scheduled for completion in the second quarter of 2012, will be sold to Public Service Company of Colorado, an Excel Energy company.
Being built on 225 acres of land at an elevation of 7,500 feet, the Alamosa plant will be 38 time larger than a similar HCPV facility built by the same general contractor — Mortenson Construction — in Aurora, Colarado.
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French government spending on services based on open source software has reached 15% of the public administration IT budget, and continues to grow at 30% per year.
The figures were revealed after an industry trade group, CNLL (Conseil National du Logiciel Libre), approached presidential candidates about their views on open source software and platforms.
According to a blog on the European Commission website, President Nicolas Sarkozy has given tax credits to SMEs that switch to open source software, while François Hollande has pledged to make the use of open source software in education a priority if he’s elected.
The news comes after Iceland announced that it intends to move its entire public service over to open source software and platforms in March, another prominent example of the adoption of open source software and standards by government.
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1st Period
1 - 0 Lightning Bobby Ryan gets his stick hacked out of his hands on the play which is why he was unable to cover Teddy Purcell. It's just been that kinda year for Bobby Ryan.
10:25 - Bobby Ryan is robbed by Ben Bishop whose glove just happened to be positioned in the top corner Ryan was shooting at. It's just been that kinda year for Bobby Ryan.
9:10 - Clarke MacArthur is sprung on a shorthanded breakaway after Kyle Turris forces a neutral zone turnover. MacArthur fires the puck through Ben Bishop's expansive five-hole and ties the game. 1 - 1 Tie Clarke MacArthur was saying a few days ago that the team has to step up, and...hey, wait a second, is Clarke MacArthur leading by example? Somebody get this man a new contract an an 'A'!
7:22 - Teddy Purcell scores on a scramble in front of the Senators net as a Milan Michalek penalty expires. 2 - 1 Lightning
Let's break down the play with the help of Twitter.
Erik Karlsson tries to stave off two guys, Chris Phillips has no man's land locked down. pic.twitter.com/9GDbrrYmSF
— Travis Yost (@TravisHeHateMe) March 21, 2014 Ok, Chris Phillips looks pretty bad here, but he's still got two more years to figure it out.
6:53 - Tampa Bay takes a penalty, and off the faceoff, Spezza wins it to Hoffman, who passes to Karlsson who one-times it past Bishop. 2 - 2 Ottawa This goal leaves Karlsson only one goal back of the Ottawa Senators franchise record of most goals by a defenseman. Steve Duchesne set this record back in 1996-97, but then again, he had a playoff calibre team behind him.
0:26 - Tampa Bay sets up on the powerplay and gets the puck to Steven Stamkos for a one-timer, but Robin Lehner is equal to the task, keeping the score 2-2 after one period. I find it amazing that Steven Stamkos can generate the chances and goals he does. It's not like no one knows that's he's gonna camp out on the left side and set up a one-timer, but he can always pull it off anyway. Glenn Healy probably thinks he's a one trick pony, though. 20:00 - Paul Maclean starts Ottawa's first line of MacArthur-Turris-Ryan instead of his favoured Neil-Smith-Greening line and is punished for his insolence by a Lightning goal 20 seconds into the game.Bobby Ryan gets his stick hacked out of his hands on the play which is why he was unable to cover Teddy Purcell. It's just been that kinda year for Bobby Ryan.10:25 - Bobby Ryan is robbed by Ben Bishop whose glove just happened to be positioned in the top corner Ryan was shooting at. It's just been that kinda year for Bobby Ryan.9:10 - Clarke MacArthur is sprung on a shorthanded breakaway after Kyle Turris forces a neutral zone turnover. MacArthur fires the puck through Ben Bishop's expansive five-hole and ties the game.Clarke MacArthur was saying a few days ago that the team has to step up, and...hey, wait a second, is Clarke MacArthur leading by example? Somebody get this man a new contract an an 'A'!7:22 - Teddy Purcell scores on a scramble in front of the Senators net as a Milan Michalek penalty expires.Let's break down the play with the help of Twitter.Ok, Chris Phillips looks pretty bad here, but he's still got two more years to figure it out.6:53 - Tampa Bay takes a penalty, and off the faceoff, Spezza wins it to Hoffman, who passes to Karlsson who one-times it past Bishop.This goal leaves Karlsson only one goal back of the Ottawa Senators franchise record of most goals by a defenseman. Steve Duchesne set this record back in 1996-97, but then again, he had a playoff calibre team behind him.0:26 - Tampa Bay sets up on the powerplay and gets the puck to Steven Stamkos for a one-timer, but Robin Lehner is equal to the task, keeping the score 2-2 after one period. I find it amazing that Steven Stamkos can generate the chances and goals he does. It's not like no one knows that's he's gonna camp out on the left side and set up a one-timer, but he can always pull it off anyway. Glenn Healy probably thinks he's a one trick pony, though.
2nd Period
17:16 - Robin Lehner breaks up a Tampa Bay semi-breakaway with a well-timed poke check. This competent defensive play leads Paul Maclean to consider pencilling Lehner in for the 3rd defensive pairing.
15:05 - Bobby Ryan takes an interference penalty leading to a Valtteri Filppula powerplay goal. 3 - 2 Lightning It's just been that kind of year for Bobby Ryan.
12:32 - A Mike Hoffman rush leads to a great chance for Cody Ceci who, for some reason, declines to shoot the puck. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, and this one is no exception. They say that when you're playing well, it's like the game is happening in slow motion, but I don't think that mean's you're supposed to actually play the game in slow motion.
5:35 - Ales Hemsky tries to walk around Bishop, but Bishop sticks out his pad and makes the save. "You're going to have to do better than that." says Bishop. "If you say so..." responds Hemsky.
2:28 - Ales Hemsky puts the moves on Radko Gudas like he's me asking a girl to prom. Unlike me, however, he succeeds spectacularly. He also scores on the play, which I guess is another difference between me and Ales Hemsky...You know what, let's just get to the video. 3 - 3 Tie
3rd Period
16:12 - Eric Brewer roofs a high backhand over Lehner's shoulder. 4 - 3 Lightning This was Brewer's first goal of the season, so take it away, Twitter!
Why can't our brewer do that?
— Capital Gains (@Capital_Gains65) March 21, 2014 Nailed it.
11:17 - Steven Stamkos takes advantage of the Phillips-Ceci pairing in order to get a couple of point blank chances, but Lehner keeps the game within one. I assume there was a conversation that went something like this:
Cameron: "Sending out Ceci to defend Stamkos is like sending a boy to do a man's job!"
MacLean: "Right, that's why Phillips is out there."
Cameron: "That might be a bit of an overcorrection..."
8:56 - Zack Smith and Ryan Callahan have a gentleman's disagreement, assuming a slew foot leading to a slash and punch in the face is something that gentlemen do. Smith is assessed a penalty and Callahan scores on the powerplay. Some people would call this karma, and those people would be Tampa Bay fans. 5 - 3 Lightning
2:52 - Erik Karlsson takes a blast from his point which is tipped by Milan Michalek to pull Ottawa within one. Initially it looked like Karlsson had tied Duchesne's record, but Michalek just had to go and pad his stats because he's in a "contract year". Classic selfish play! 5 - 4 Lightning
0:55 - Ottawa pulls the goalie and Erik Karlsson draws a penalty, but fail to score on the 6-on-4.
Ottawa loses 5 - 4. 19:37 - Ottawa starts the 3rd Period on the powerplay, but quickly gives up a shorthanded breakway. Robin Lehner makes the stop. They say your best penalty killer is your goalie, but only in Ottawa is the goalie the best player on the powerplay as well.16:12 - Eric Brewer roofs a high backhand over Lehner's shoulder.This was Brewer's first goal of the season, so take it away, Twitter!Nailed it.11:17 - Steven Stamkos takes advantage of the Phillips-Ceci pairing in order to get a couple of point blank chances, but Lehner keeps the game within one. I assume there was a conversation that went something like this:Cameron: "Sending out Ceci to defend Stamkos is like sending a boy to do a man's job!"MacLean: "Right, that's why Phillips is out there."Cameron: "That might be a bit of an overcorrection..."8:56 - Zack Smith and Ryan Callahan have a gentleman's disagreement, assuming a slew foot leading to a slash and punch in the face is something that gentlemen do. Smith is assessed a penalty and Callahan scores on the powerplay. Some people would call this karma, and those people would be Tampa Bay fans.2:52 - Erik Karlsson takes a blast from his point which is tipped by Milan Michalek to pull Ottawa within one. Initially it looked like Karlsson had tied Duchesne's record, but Michalek just had to go and pad his stats because he's in a "contract year". Classic selfish play!0:55 - Ottawa pulls the goalie and Erik Karlsson draws a penalty, but fail to score on the 6-on-4.
The Wisdom
Guess the Sens marketing department was right all along. Ales Hemsky really is a good reason to go to home games.
Folks, it is the ultimate dream of any NHL player to play for a Stanley Cup, but I'm sure the second best thing in his mind is to play for respect and pride. If you ask me, playing for respect and pride is right up there with playing for the love of the game, which is pretty convenient because that's kinda the point of the season the Ottawa Senators are at right now. Sure, some people may point out that the Senators have not been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, and these people would be technically correct (the best kind of correct). However, when you're talking about a team needing 22 out of 28 possible points to have a 58.5% chance of making the playoffs , you don't exactly need to be Daniel Alfredsson to pithily summarize the chances of there being playoff hockey in Ottawa this spring.Still, the team must soldier on, and we the fans/bloggers must soldier right along with them. What's the worst that could happen? It's not like the Senators' 1st round pick is going to get any worse.Ladies and gentlemen, your 2013-2014 Ottawa Senators: Winning Can't Hurt.Let's have some fun out there!Ales Hemsky is pretty cool.
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My package from "The Internet" arrived on Wednesday chock-full of candy, including the kind of peanut-buttery treats I am now able to eat due to my increased tolerance for peanut butter. Accompanying the candy was a box of Pumpkin Pie Pop Tarts, a food that I haven't eaten in several years, though that changed shortly after opening the package. Finally, for the edible portion of my gift, was Pez, another treat I haven't eaten in several years, and the necessary dispenser.
Though not picture because it was in the dishwasher, my giftee included a Halloween themed glass.
My giftee also sent a book, The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury. Though I know it's a scary story for children, I'm going to wait for a chilly night and read it on my front porch to add some atmosphere to the reading.
Also included, were some were some rub on tattoos that will make me look 10x more badass on Halloween night. I'll probably wear a few of them at work on the nights leading up to Halloween.
Lastly, my "Secret Spook" included a greeting card to which she added her own personal message. She insisted that I use the glass to enjoy my favorite beer and eat some of the candy while watching a scary movie. So, I think I'm going to plan a movie night with my girlfriend and watch our favorite scary movie, eat some of the candy, Pop Tarts, and pez, and share a couple of beers. Then, maybe, if I'm feeling ballsy, I'll scare my girlfriend with the information my "Secret Spook" disclosed.
I managed to eat quite a bit of the candy before I manage to get a picture of the package's contents. So, for the record, there was initially more candy in this box.
My giftee did some good stalking, realized I had a intolerance for peanut butter, which has recently gone away, saw that I occasionally post in /r/beer and /r/books, and that I have a girlfriend, and adjusted her gifts accordingly. Though she didn't include her name or username, I want to thank her. Your gifts were thoughtful and greatly appreciated.
Thank you Secret Spook!
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by Walter W. Murray, reporter
Still stinging from her humiliating November loss, failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is gearing up for a new kind of campaign.
This one isn’t aimed at election… it’s aimed at disruption.
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Clinton has quietly launched a group dedicated almost entirely to undermining the results of the election she lost and funding alt-left “resistance” groups violently opposed to the agenda of President Donald Trump.
And of course, she’s also finding a way to use OTHER people’s money to enrich HER friends!
Little-noticed FEC filings reveal that Clinton recently funneled $800,000 of her leftover campaign cash to a group she’s cooked up with fellow presidential loser Howard Dean called Onward Together.
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Shortly after the payment, her group hired two of her longtime cronies as consultants.
It certainly pays to be in the Clinton inner circle!
Besides paying off her friends, her goal appears to be fomenting “resistance” unrest by giving them cash and other forms of assistance, much as George Soros notoriously does.
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So far, she has vowed to fund at least five left-wing groups behind protests and other forms of agitation: Swing Left, Emerge America, Color of Change, Indivisible and Run for Something.
But where’s the money coming from?
Beyond the donation from her campaign – required by law – we may never know. Like her old pal Soros, she is trying to keep her operations as secret as possible.
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The Daily Caller noted that her group pulled off a little paperwork trick that could help it become a funnel for an unlimited source of the very same “dark money” she railed against on the campaign trail.
Because it’s registered not as a political group but as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” organization, there is absolutely no law or requirement that would force it to disclose where its money is coming from.
Under current law, ALL of her donors could be kept secret!
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That means she could, at least in theory, collect cash from all the shady groups to which she has been repeatedly linked — including brutal foreign dictators — and then use it to pay off “resistance” agitators pushing a leftist political agenda in the United States.
Sounds like a trick right out of the Soros “dark money” playbook.
Who knows… Soros might even be helping to fund Onward Together himself.
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Under the rules, there’s no way to know.
The name of her group, Onward Together, is ironic given that Clinton remains a divisive figure. That’s true not only of the nation as a whole (a recent Bloomberg poll finds she has a 58 percent unfavorable rating), but even — perhaps especially — among Democrats.
Many don’t want her around anymore, and are livid at her insistence on seeking the spotlight.
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“If she is trying to come across as the leader of the angry movement of what happened in 2016, then she’s achieving it,” an unnamed former senior aide to President Barack Obama told The Hill in June. “But part of the problem she had was she didn’t have a vision for the Democratic Party, and she needs to now take a break and let others come to the forefront.”
Clinton, however, has stubbornly refused.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said in May. “I have a big stake in what happens in this country.”
With her book coming out next month — and more violent protests to encourage — she will no doubt become more visible than ever.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a survival expert with decades of experience in prepping and the author of “America’s Final Warning.”
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After months of overtures from President Donald Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Trump administration is trading harsh diplomatic words with Moscow, further dimming the prospects for a strategic alliance between the two countries.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer opened his Monday briefing by reading a statement saying the U.S. “strongly condemns” the detention of hundreds, including leading Putin critic Alexei Navalny, following a weekend crackdown on peaceful anti-corruption protests across Russia.
Story Continued Below
The statement featured the toughest language Trump’s White House has directed at Putin’s government, surprising some Russia hawks unsure whether Trump—who has repeatedly avoided criticizing Putin—would allow the government to rebuke Moscow’s actions. As a candidate, Trump frequently promised to seek friendly relations with Moscow, but that talk has cooled in recent weeks amid intense scrutiny of his campaign’s ties to Russia.
Experts say Putin is highly sensitive to American criticism of his internal political actions, and the Russian leader could react angrily to the condemnation. But it remains unclear whether the statement reflects carefully considered U.S. policy. The top Russia jobs at the State Department and Pentagon remain unfilled. A White House official said the incoming senior national security council director for Russia, Brookings Institution scholar Fiona Hill, has not yet started her job.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin has in recent weeks steadily sharpened its rhetoric about the Trump administration, which has recently taken steps perceived in Moscow as adverse to Russian interests.
On Saturday, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman blasted new Trump administration sanctions against companies doing business with Syria, Iran and North Korea, whose targets included eight Russian companies. In a statement posted on Facebook, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said her government is “bewildered and concerned” by the U.S. move.
Zakharova said the U.S. action “undermines the prospects of setting up comprehensive multilateral cooperation” to jointly fight terrorists. “Washington again does the bidding of those who made a consistent destruction of Russia-US cooperation their main priority,” Zakharova wrote.
And shortly before Spicer spoke on Monday, Moscow’s top diplomat pounced on reports that a March 17 U.S. airstrike killed as many as 200 civilians in the Iraqi city of Mosul.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he was “startle[d]” by the report of the airstrike and said Moscow had requested a special briefing at the United Nations Security Council. Lavrov claimed that "several other tragic incidents in which civilians died have happened since” in the ISIS-controlled Iraqi city since then, according to an official transcript of his remarks posted online by Russia’s foreign ministry.
Lavrov, following a standard Russian playbook of flipping charges back at an accuser, also suggested that the joint U.S. and Iraqi offensive to liberate Mosul from ISIS was more brutal than the recent Russian and Syrian military campaign in Aleppo, Syria. “We have been monitoring the operation to liberate Mosul since its inception, because we remembered how some of our Western colleagues criticized us during the operation in eastern Aleppo,” Lavrov said.
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Lavrov argued that Russia—which was widely condemned for brutal tactics, including airstrikes on hospitals and aid workers—had actually protected civilian lives in Aleppo by opening a “corridor” to allow militants to leave the city, reducing the scale of Russia’s military operation there.
He also urged that a similarly “cautious and responsible approach would be used by the coalition in its further actions in Mosul.” (The U.S. and Iraqi militaries have each launched investigations into the March 17 Mosul strike.)
“I don’t think anyone in the Pentagon will take kindly to being lectured by the Russians about what happened in Mosul,” said Andrew Weiss, a former Bill Clinton White House official handing Russia issues, who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Sadly, this is part of a familiar Russian playbook that has been used time and again by Putin, Lavrov and other senior figures,” Weiss added.
U.S. intelligence officials believe Putin interfered in the 2016 U.S. election in part to exact revenge on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who publicly backed major street protests against Putin in 2011.
Trump administration statements relating to Russia have so far generally tracked those of the Obama administration, which could suggest that U.S. officials are following old guidance as they await fresh policy direction.
More detail could come when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrives in Brussels on Friday for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers at which Russia is certain to be a main topic. Tillerson originally planned to skip the meeting, creating an uproar among NATO allies anxious about Trump’s commitment to European security.
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No plans to cancel Nottinghill Carnival AMID concern over unrest in London, the Metropolitan Police Service (Met/MPS) is moving forward with its plans to cover the Nottinghill Carnival, according to the organising company behind the annual event.
Trinidad and Tobago’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Garvin Nicholas also confirmed there are as yet no plans to cancel the event, which takes place during the August 27 to August 29 UK bank holiday weekend. Nicholas yesterday liaised with organisers of the event London Nottinghill Carnival Limited.
“I spoke with the organisers today. As things stand, I do not think the Carnival will be affected in any way,” he told Newsday.
In a media release issued yesterday, the London Nottinghill Carnival Ltd said the Met had informed it’s moving ahead with its preparations to provide coverage for the event, which normally sees 500,000 congregate on the streets of London. “The MPS have currently made no recommendations to cancel Nottinghill Carnival and we will continue to plan for the event,” the Met said in a statement issued to Nottinghill Carnival. “The MPS continues to work in close liaison with Nottinghill Carnival Ltd and the other partner agencies involved in Nottinghill Carnival. Our plans will be under constant review and this will continue right up to and during the event itself.”
London Nottinghill Carnival Ltd said “the Metropolitan Police Service has not asked us to cancel the event.”
“We will be meeting with the local authorities, carnivalists and the Metropolitan Police Service to assess the severity of the impact the riots may potentially have on Nottinghill Carnival 2011 and to discuss measures that will be put in place to avoid any untoward incidents,” London Nottinghill Carnival Ltd said. In addition to Nottinghill Carnival Limited, the Met has committed to work with Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Brent Councils plus other emergency services.
“Our plans will be under constant review and this will continue right up to and during the event itself,” the Met said on its website.
Specialist policing units such as the Mounted Branch, the Marine Policing Unit, British Transport Police, Status Dogs Unit as well as special constables and volunteer police cadets, will be part of the operation to man the carnival.
The Met plans to continue Operation Razorback, which it has conducted every year since 2001 in the weeks leading up to the Carnival, in an effort to target known troublemakers.
Letters warning people known to cause trouble or who may be planning to break the law are expected to be hand-delivered by officers in the days leading up to the event.
Nicholas yesterday said there were no still no reports of incidents involving Trinidad and Tobago nationals and noted that things have quieted in London.
“The clampdown by the police appears to have worked,” he said.
“The wheels of justice have turned very fast so people who have been involved in this are already facing their sentences so I think that sends a very clear message that this is not a crime that is being committed with impunity,” the UK High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago, David Snell, said yesterday morning on State TV CNMG. “There has also been a lot of members of the general public helping the police, providing photographs and other witness material so it will be possible to track down those who took part in this criminality.”
He said the riots raised the issue of the role of parents. “It requires a wider debate on what is the role of parenting,” he said.
The High Commissioner said not all of the rioters would have been motivated by a desire to protest the police killing of Mark Duggan, a killing which precipitated the riots.
“Clearly a lot of people took advantage of it. I think it would be impossible to say the criminals raiding shops were protesting against this one individual who was shot in a police exercise which is under investigation now,” he said.
As the UK Parliament, recalled from recess, debated the issue, the British Prime Minister announced a series of measures to deal with riots, including a national plan on gangs; the deployment of the army for guard duty; special police powers to remove face masks; and a review of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
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PETALING JAYA: The health ministry will review its safety procedures after a man was caught masquerading as a doctor at a hospital in Kedah for over a year.
The man, who called himself “Dr Ridzuan”, reportedly frequented Sultanah Bahiyah Hospital dressed in a lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck.
The New Straits Times said “Dr Ridzuan” usually stayed in public areas as he did not have access to the wards, adding that he neither treated nor examined patients at the hospital.
Health Minister Dr S Subramaniam was quoted as saying he had been informed by health authorities in Kedah that the man would usually talk to people, pretending to be a doctor, before going home.
“He would come once a week, but he may have some problems, that’s why he is doing it,” he said in the report.
“Dr Ridzuan” was said to have made his rounds until a senior doctor who checked the hospital records realised the deception.
Following this, the hospital lodged a police report and the 22-year-old was arrested.
Subramaniam said the ministry would review the current system and control measures to investigate how the incident could have occurred and prevent it from happening again.
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The first Humble Bundle—the Humble Indie Bundle—was released in 2010, and the growth of the company behind it has been nothing short of remarkable since then, with more bundles (lots of bundles), deals with major publishers, a monthly subscription service, and a full-blown digital storefront. Today it underwent a major change of a somewhat different kind, as it announced that it has been acquired by IGN.
"We chose IGN because they really understand our vision, share our passion for games, and believe in our mission to promote awesome digital content while helping charity," Humble Bundle co-founder Jeffrey Rosen said in the announcement. "I can’t think of a better partner than IGN to help Humble Bundle continue our quest."
Importantly for gamers, Humble will continue to operate pretty much as it always has. "You can expect it to be business as usual, but better. The Humble Bundle our audience knows and love will continue to operate independently from IGN, with our current amazing team," co-founder John Graham said in an email.
"IGN will support Humble Bundle with increased resources, allowing us to bring our community the best gaming bundles, book bundles, and store sales, while nurturing the Humble Monthly and our new publishing initiative, and donate more money to charity, more quickly than ever before."
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," IGN executive vice president Mitch Galbraith told Gamasutra. "The idea is just to feed them with the resources they need to keep doing what they're doing."
That's a good approach to take, and I hope it sticks, although it's not really clear to me what more Humble would need to achieve that goal: Alongside its own remarkable growth over the past seven years, it's also raised more than $100 million for charity—now $106 million, Graham said. "And we plan to donate even more money to charity than ever before now that we’re part of the IGN family."
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On May 24th, a few dozen people gathered in a conference room at the Central Library, a century-old Georgian Revival building in downtown Portland, Oregon, for an event called Radfems Respond. The conference had been convened by a group that wanted to defend two positions that have made radical feminism anathema to much of the left. First, the organizers hoped to refute charges that the desire to ban prostitution implies hostility toward prostitutes. Then they were going to try to explain why, at a time when transgender rights are ascendant, radical feminists insist on regarding transgender women as men, who should not be allowed to use women’s facilities, such as public rest rooms, or to participate in events organized exclusively for women. The dispute began more than forty years ago, at the height of the second-wave feminist movement. In one early skirmish, in 1973, the West Coast Lesbian Conference, in Los Angeles, furiously split over a scheduled performance by the folksinger Beth Elliott, who is what was then called a transsexual. Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker, said: I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister. Such views are shared by few feminists now, but they still have a foothold among some self-described radical feminists, who have found themselves in an acrimonious battle with trans people and their allies. Trans women say that they are women because they feel female—that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.” In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman—and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position—the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement. All this enrages trans women and their allies, who point to the discrimination that trans people endure; although radical feminism is far from achieving all its goals, women have won far more formal equality than trans people have. In most states, it’s legal to fire someone for being transgender, and transgender people can’t serve in the military. A recent survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found overwhelming levels of anti-trans violence and persecution. Forty-one per cent of respondents said that they had attempted suicide. Yet, at the same time, the trans-rights movement is growing in power and cachet: a recent Time cover featuring the actress Laverne Cox was headlined “THE TRANSGENDER TIPPING POINT.” The very word “transgender,” which first came into wide use in the nineteen-nineties, encompasses far more people than the term “transsexual” did. It includes not just the small number of people who seek gender-reassignment surgery—according to frequently cited estimates, about one in thirty thousand men and one in a hundred thousand women—but also those who take hormones, or who simply identify with the opposite gender, or, in some cases, with both or with neither. (According to the National Center survey, most trans women have taken female hormones, but only about a quarter of them have had genital surgery.) The elasticity of the term “transgender” has forced a rethinking of what sex and gender mean; at least in progressive circles, what’s determinative isn’t people’s chromosomes or their genitals or the way that they were brought up but how they see themselves. Having rejected this supposition, radical feminists now find themselves in a position that few would have imagined when the conflict began: shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue. It is, to them, a baffling political inversion.
Radfems Respond was originally to have taken place across town from the library, at a Quaker meeting house, but trans activists had launched a petition on Change.org demanding that the event be cancelled. They said that, in hosting it, the Quakers would alienate trans people and “be complicit in the violence against them.” The Quakers, citing concerns in their community, revoked the agreement. It wasn’t the first time that such an event had lost a scheduled venue. The Radfem 2012 conference was to be held in London, at Conway Hall, which bills itself as “a hub for free speech and independent thought.” But trans activists objected both to Radfem’s women-only policy—which was widely understood to exclude trans women—and to the participation of Sheila Jeffreys, a professor of political science at the University of Melbourne. Jeffreys was scheduled to speak on prostitution, but she is a longtime critic of the transgender movement, and Conway Hall officials decided that they could not allow speakers who “conflict with our ethos, principles, and culture.” Ultimately, the event was held at a still secret location; organizers escorted delegates to it from a nearby meeting place. Radfem 2013 also had to switch locations, as did a gathering in Toronto last year, called Radfems Rise Up. In response, thirty-seven radical feminists, including major figures from the second wave, such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, and Michele Wallace, signed a statement titled “Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of ‘Gender,’ ” which described their “alarm” at “threats and attacks, some of them physical, on individuals and organizations daring to challenge the currently fashionable concept of gender.” With all this in mind, the Radfems Respond organizers had arranged the library space as a backup, but then a post on Portland Indymedia announced: We questioned the library administration about allowing a hate group who promotes discrimination and their response is that they cannot kick them out because of freedom of speech. So we also exercise our right to free speech in public space this Saturday to drive the TERFS and Radfems out of OUR library and OUR Portland! (TERF stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” The term can be useful for making a distinction with radical feminists who do not share the same position, but those at whom it is directed consider it a slur.) Abusive posts proliferated on Twitter and, especially, Tumblr. One read, “/kill/terfs 2K14.” Another suggested, “how about ‘slowly and horrendously murder terfs in saw-like torture machines and contraptions’ 2K14.” A young blogger holding a knife posted a selfie with the caption “Fetch me a terf.” Such threats have become so common that radical-feminist Web sites have taken to cataloguing them. “It’s aggrieved entitlement,” Lierre Keith told me. “They are so angry that we will not see them as women.” Keith is a writer and an activist who runs a small permaculture farm in Northern California. She is forty-nine, with cropped pewter hair and a uniform of black T-shirts and jeans. Three years ago, she co-founded the ecofeminist group Deep Green Resistance, which has some two hundred members and links the oppression of women to the pillaging of the planet. D.G.R. is defiantly militant, refusing to condemn the use of violence in the service of goals it considers just. In radical circles, though, what makes the group truly controversial is its stance on gender. As members see it, a person born with male privilege can no more shed it through surgery than a white person can claim an African-American identity simply by darkening his or her skin. Before D.G.R. held its first conference, in 2011, in Wisconsin, the group informed a person in the process of a male-to-female transition that she couldn’t stay in the women’s quarters. “We said, That’s fine if you want to come, but, no, you’re not going to have access to the women’s sleeping spaces and the women’s bathrooms,” Keith told me. Last February, Keith was to be a keynote speaker at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, but the student government voted to condemn her, and more than a thousand people signed a petition demanding that the address be cancelled. Amid threats of violence, six policemen escorted Keith to the lectern, though, in the end, the protest proved peaceful: some audience members walked out and held a rally, leaving her to speak to a half-empty room.
Keith had an easier time at Radfems Respond, where she spoke on the differences between radicalism and liberalism. Two gender-bending punk kids who looked as if they might be there to protest left during the long opening session, on prostitution. A men’s-rights activist showed up—he later posted mocking clips from a video that he had secretly made—but said nothing during the sessions. Several trans women arrived and sat at the back, but, in fact, they were there to express solidarity, having decided that the attacks on radical feminists were both out of control and misguided. One of them, a thin, forty-year-old blonde from the Bay Area, who blogs under the name Snowflake Especial, noted that all the violence against trans women that she’s aware of was committed by men. “Why aren’t we dealing with them?” she asked. Despite that surprising show of support, most of the speakers felt embattled. Heath Atom Russell gave the closing talk. A stocky woman, with curly turquoise hair and a bluish stubble shadow on her cheeks, she wore a T-shirt that read “I Survived Testosterone Poisoning.” At twenty-five, she is a “detransitioner,” a person who once identified as transgender but no longer does. (Expert estimates of the number of transitioners who abandon their new gender range from fewer than one per cent to as many as five per cent.) Russell, a lesbian who grew up in a conservative Baptist family in Southern California, began transitioning to male as a student at Humboldt State University, and was embraced by gender-rights groups on campus. She started taking hormones and changed her name. Then, in her senior year, she discovered “Unpacking Queer Politics” (2003), by Sheila Jeffreys, which critiques female-to-male transsexualism as capitulation to misogyny. At first, the book infuriated Russell, but she couldn’t let go of the questions that it raised about her own identity. She had been having heart palpitations, which made her uneasy about the hormones she was taking. Nor did she ever fully believe herself to be male. At one point during her transition, she hooked up with a middle-aged trans woman. Russell knew that she was supposed to think of herself as a man with a woman, but, she said, “It didn’t feel right, and I was scared.” Eventually, she proclaimed herself a woman again, and a radical feminist, though it meant being ostracized by many of her friends. She is now engaged to a woman; someone keyed the word “dyke” on her fiancée’s car.
Russell appears in Sheila Jeffreys’s new book, “Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism.” Jeffreys, who is sixty-six, has short silver hair and a weathered face. She has taught at the University of Melbourne for twenty-three years, but she grew up in London, and has been described as the Andrea Dworkin of the U.K. She has written nine previous books, all of which focus on the sexual subjugation of women, whether through rape, incest, pornography, prostitution, or Western beauty norms. Like Dworkin, she is viewed as a heroine by a cadre of like-minded admirers and as a zealot by others. In 2005, in an admiring feature in the Guardian, Julie Bindel wrote, “Jeffreys sees sexuality as the basis of the oppression of women by men, in much the same way as Marx saw capitalism as the scourge of the working class. This unwavering belief has made her many enemies. Postmodern theorist Judith Halberstam once said, ‘If Sheila Jeffreys did not exist, Camille Paglia would have had to invent her.’ ” In eight brisk chapters (half of them written with Jeffreys’s former Ph.D. student Lorene Gottschalk), “Gender Hurts” offers Jeffreys’s first full-length treatment of transgenderism. Ordinarily, Jeffreys told me, she would launch the publication of a new book with an event at the university, but this time campus security warned against it. She has also taken her name off her office door. She gave a talk in London this month, but it was invitation-only. In the book, Jeffreys calls detransitioners like Russell “survivors,” and cites them as evidence that transgenderism isn’t immutable and thus doesn’t warrant radical medical intervention. (She considers gender-reassignment surgery a form of mutilation.) “The phenomenon of regret undermines the idea that there exists a particular kind of person who is genuinely and essentially transgender and can be identified accurately by psychiatrists,” she writes. “It is radically destabilising to the transgender project.” She cites as further evidence the case of Bradley Cooper, who, in 2011, at the age of seventeen, became Britain’s youngest gender-reassignment patient, then publicly regretted his transition the next year and returned to living as a boy. Jeffreys is especially alarmed by doctors in Europe, Australia, and the United States who treat transgender children with puberty-delaying drugs, which prevent them from developing unwanted secondary sex characteristics and can result in sterilization. Throughout the book, Jeffreys insists on using male pronouns to refer to trans women and female ones to refer to trans men. “Use by men of feminine pronouns conceals the masculine privilege bestowed upon them by virtue of having been placed in and brought up in the male sex caste,” she writes. To her critics, the book becomes particularly hateful when she tries to account for the reality of trans people. Explaining female-to-male transition is fairly easy for her (and for other radical feminists): women seek to become men in order to raise their status in a sexist system. Heath Atom Russell, for example, is quoted as attributing her former desire to become a man to the absence of a “proud woman loving culture.” But, if that’s true, why would men demote themselves to womanhood? For reasons of sexual fetishism, Jeffreys says. She substantiates her argument with the highly controversial theories of Ray Blanchard, a retired professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and the related work of J. Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. Contrary to widespread belief, Blanchard says, the majority of trans women in the West start off not as effeminate gay men but as straight or bisexual men, and they are initially motivated by erotic compulsion rather than by any conceived female identity. “The core is, it’s really exciting for guys to imagine themselves with female breasts, or female breasts and a vulva,” he told me. To describe the syndrome, Blanchard coined the term “autogynephilia,” meaning sexual arousal at the thought of oneself as female. Blanchard is far from a radical feminist. He believes that gender-reassignment surgery can relieve psychological suffering; he has even counselled people who undergo it. He also accepts the commonly held view that male brains differ from female brains in ways that affect behavior. Nevertheless, Jeffreys believes that the work of Blanchard and Bailey shows that when trans women ask to be accepted as women they’re seeking to have an erotic fixation indulged.
The last time a feminist of any standing published an attack on transgenderism as caustic as “Gender Hurts” was in 1979, when Janice Raymond produced “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.” Raymond was a lesbian ex-nun who became a doctoral student of the radical-feminist theologian Mary Daly, at Boston College. Inspired by the women’s-health movement, Raymond framed much of “The Transsexual Empire” as a critique of a patriarchal medical and psychiatric establishment. Still, the book was frequently febrile, particularly with regard to lesbian trans women. “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves,” Raymond wrote. “However, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist violates women’s sexuality and spirit.” It’s a measure of how much perceptions have changed in the past thirty-five years that “The Transsexual Empire” received a respectful, even admiring hearing in the mainstream media, unlike “Gender Hurts,” which has been largely ignored there. Reviewing “The Transsexual Empire” in the Times, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz called it “flawless.” Raymond, he wrote, “has rightly seized on transsexualism as an emblem of modern society’s unremitting—though increasingly concealed—antifeminism.” One of the women Raymond wrote about was Sandy Stone, a performance artist and academic who this fall will teach digital arts and new media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. When Raymond’s book was published, Stone was a recording engineer at Olivia Records, a women’s-music collective in Los Angeles. In the late sixties, after graduating from college, and while still living as a man, she had bluffed her way into a job at New York’s famed Record Plant recording studio, where she worked with Jimi Hendrix and the Velvet Underground. (For a time, she slept in the studio basement, on a pile of Hendrix’s capes.) She moved to the West Coast and transitioned in 1974. Olivia approached her soon afterward; experienced female recording engineers were hard to find. Stone became a member of the collective the next year and moved into a communal house that it rented, where she was the only trans woman among a dozen or so other lesbians. According to “The Transsexual Empire,” her presence was a major source of controversy in lesbian-feminist circles, but Stone insists that it was Raymond who created the dissension. “When the book came out, we were deluged with hate mail,” Stone says. “Up to that point, we were pretty much happy campers, making our music and doing our political work.” Stone received death threats, but ultimately it was the threat of a boycott that drove her out of the collective. She eventually earned a doctorate in philosophy at Santa Cruz. In 1987, Stone wrote an essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” which is widely seen as the founding text of transgender studies. It’s still taught around the world; a second French edition is about to be published, and Stone has received a request to allow a Catalan translation. The last time that Janice Raymond wrote on transgender issues was in 1994, for a new introduction to “The Transsexual Empire.” Since then, she has focussed on sex trafficking, and last August a Norwegian government agency invited her to Oslo to speak on a panel about prostitution legislation. When she arrived, however, an official informed her that she had been disinvited; a letter to the editor of a major Norwegian newspaper had accused her of transphobia. Raymond says that similar things have “happened much more frequently within the last couple of years.”
The most dramatic change in the perception of transgenderism can be seen in academia. Particularly at liberal-arts colleges, students are now routinely asked which gender pronoun they would prefer to be addressed by: choices might include “ze,” “ou,” “hir,” “they,” or even “it.” A decade ago, no university offered a student health plan that covered gender-reassignment surgery. Today, dozens do, including Harvard, Brown, Duke, Yale, Stanford, and the schools in the University of California system. There are young transgender-critical radical feminists, like Heath Atom Russell and Rachel Ivey, aged twenty-four, who was one of the organizers of Radfems Respond, but they are the first to admit that they’re a minority. “If I were to say in a typical women’s-studies class today, ‘Female people are oppressed on the basis of reproduction,’ I would get called out,” Ivey says. Other students, she adds, would ask, “What about women who are male?” That might be an exaggeration, but only a slight one. The members of the board of the New York Abortion Access Fund, an all-volunteer group that helps to pay for abortions for those who can’t afford them, are mostly young women; Alison Turkos, the group’s co-chair, is twenty-six. In May, they voted unanimously to stop using the word “women” when talking about people who get pregnant, so as not to exclude trans men. “We recognize that people who identify as men can become pregnant and seek abortions,” the group’s new Statement of Values says. A Change.org petition asks NARAL and Planned Parenthood to adopt similarly gender-inclusive language. It specifically criticizes the hashtag #StandWithTexasWomen, which ricocheted around Twitter during State Senator Wendy Davis’s filibuster against an anti-abortion bill in her state, and the phrase “Trust Women,” which was the slogan of George Tiller, the doctor and abortion provider who was murdered in Wichita in 2009. To some younger activists, it seems obvious that anyone who objects to such changes is simply clinging to the privilege inherent in being cisgender, a word popularized in the nineteen-nineties to mean any person who is not transgender. Alison Turkos has heard complaints that the new language obscures the fact that cisgender women overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the current political attacks on reproductive rights. She replies, “It may not feel comfortable, but it’s important to create a space for more people who are often denied space and visibility.”
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By Taylor Kuykendall
Alex Epstein, founder of think-tank Center for Industrial Progress, told a room full of coal industry professionals Aug. 12 that it is time for the industry to fight back against the portrayal of fossil fuels as an addiction and begin to change its way of thinking about what it does.
"I think it's true that their messaging needs a lot of work, but part of what I tried to explain to the group today is that really fundamentally what's going on, there's a wrong understanding by the public, but even by the industry itself," Epstein said. "The industry doesn't truly understand it's full value and it doesn't understand how to counter many of the arguments that say we are addicted to it and need to get off of it otherwise it's going to cause catastrophic depletion, pollution and climate change."
Epstein is the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, a book scheduled for release in November, which makes the case that from the "big picture" perspective the fossil fuel industry is dramatically improving the planet by making it a safer and richer place. Epstein was the keynote speaker at the American Coal Council's Coal Market Strategies conference in Park City, Utah.
"This addiction idea is totally wrong and it's been totally wrong," Epstein told the audience. "… There's a definite connection between the ability to produce cheap and reliable energy to feed all the machines that make our lives possible and standard of living."
He said the detractors of fossil fuels zoom in on various arguments, often focusing on the negative externalities of coal production and coal burning. What they fail to look at, Epstein argues, is that many metrics of human well-being, from life expectancy to infant mortality, has improved with increased use of fossil fuels.
He said that many environmentalists approach the problem from the perspective of protecting the earth from human development instead of viewing it through a lens of developing the planet in a way that is best for human life. Electricity for heating and air conditioning, he said, are the types of benefits fossil fuels provide in addressing climate issues while also improving quality of life.
"Technology is the solution to the climate problem. The solution to climate problems is not, not using energy," Epstein said. "… Nature does not give us a safe climate that we make dangerous. Nature gives us a dangerous climate that we make safe and that will always be true. We need fossil fuels to make the climate safe."
Epstein said the industry needs to reach out to "champions" for fossil fuels, people who can study the case made in his book and communicate its message. He said people within the industry should be communicating that they are doing something beyond simply taking something out of the ground that is now gone.
"What they didn't see is that thing in the ground was totally useless until your industry found out to make it valuable," Epstein said. "There are all sorts of coal, oil and gas that was totally useless until the industry's ingenuity figured out how to make it useful. … You're not taking a world rich in resources and making it poor. You're taking a world poor in resources and make it rich."
Epstein said with support of the industry, the book, written to "convince a liberal" of its points on fossil fuels could be pushed onto The New York Times bestseller list and begin generating new conversations in only a few months. While there have been similar arguments made regarding fossil fuels as a solution to global energy poverty, Epstein said that alone is not enough. He said that "everything has to fit together" and an argument that centers only on global energy poverty without addressing other core issues about the energy industry may be easily dismissed by detractors.
Environmental organizations have largely shrugged off many of the arguments of fossil fuel's benefits as inappropriately conflating the benefits of electricity and fossil fuels. They often argue that it is possible to replace fossil fuels, especially coal, with other energy sources.
During the conference, Epstein agreed to give a demonstration to one conference attendee on how he seeks to persuade those who oppose fossil fuel use. David Lawson, vice president of coal for Norfolk Southern Corp., went out in Park City with Epstein to witness an encounter.
Lawson said he was able to watch as Epstein talked to a stranger, who quickly raised many of the points Epstein predicted during his presentation.
"While he didn't necessarily convert the guy, he certainly raised the issue and put a whole lot of thought into this individual thinking about the environmental impact," Lawson told SNL Energy. "… I think he has framed a very interesting discussion around that. I think there is some challenge today in the industry where the industry tends to probably more rely on the job creation value and those sorts of things as opposed to taking on those who want more renewables and asking why are they so good for the environment. He does a good job of framing that argument."
The book is available for pre-order through Amazon.
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Organisers of a free speech rally in Boston on Saturday are warning far-Right groups to stay away amid growing fears of a repeat of the violent clashes that led to the death of a protester in Virginia last weekend.
The national director of the Ku Klux Klan has said members are expected to turn out for the event, due to start on Boston common at midday.
And police, already preparing for the presence of thousands of counter-protesters, said they were stepping up their vigilance in the wake of Thursday’s terrorist attack in Barcelona.
The result is a city preparing for the worst.
John Medlar, of Boston Free Speech which is organising the rally, said he was as shocked and horrified as anyone else at the violence in Charlottesville when white supremacist groups protested the removal of Confederate statutes commemorating the Civil War.
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First Time
I have always enjoyed being nude, when I was still young I would sleep nude and wonder around the house when my parents were not home. I find clothes to be very restricting. When I got married the wife and I enjoyed our time together in the nude and when we started a family we raised them in the nudist lifestyle, I didn't know that there was a club close to us until I came across the AANR website and found one in Kansas, we made arrangements to visit the place and that was the best decision we made, we just wish we would have found it earlier, the people are so friendly
-Kevin D
Kansas
First time
I used to think that if someone saw me without my clothes it was one of the worst, most embarrassing things that could happen. I had always been taught that the human body was shameful and dirty but quite honestly, I was nude a lot when my parents would leave the house as I felt so much more comfortable; I slept naked, too, and slept really well. I wanted to try swimming naked and being outside even if others saw me but I didn't want to force it on someone who didn't want to see me and would only want to be around those who didn't mind. That's why going to a nudist resort was something I'd always wanted to do.
I didn't try it until my 30s. I remember the trepidation as I made the call and drove through the front gate. Not seeing a soul, I parked the car and stood there a minute with the car door open and then just like you'd take off a band-aid, I stripped.
Wearing only my sandals and a towel around my neck, I started for the office and passed two clothed couples and began to get nervous. I stepped into the office and a fully-clothed, middle aged woman met me. I started to wish I had not even come but she assured me that she wasn't a nudist but managed the place. She soon made me feel really comfortable because she wasn't shocked or offended then she and showed me around. It just wasn't a big deal.
I sat by the pool and talked with people who spoke like they'd known me for years and I forgot I was naked after about ten minutes. I spent the whole day and evening there. People were so respectful and kind. I didn't feel ashamed of my body and I felt like there were no barriers. Being naked just wasn't a big deal but it so wonderful not having a wet swimsuit on and it was nice to feel the wind and sun on my skin. I went back several times and was welcomed each time.
-TC
Fateful Conversation
I always knew I was a nudist but I didn't have anyone to share it with. Several of my friends knew but none were inclined to participate. Then one day a coworker (my HR manager actually) mentioned that she was collecting money for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
She had a sign that said "Save the Ta-Tas". I knew her pretty well, so I jokingly said "you know, the save the whales campaign shows whales, and Save the Children shows needy children, so maybe you should ..."
To my relief, she laughed and said "yeah, that might bring in more money." We talked a while longer and then I mentioned that it's legal to be topless in our city. She thought, and then said "so I could paint my chest pink and stand on a street corner collecting money for the cause?" I said "yep" as she walked out of the room with a distant look on her face while she pondered her options. (I don't think she ever did that though.)
Two days later, I got up the nerve to ask her if she'd ever consider going to a nudist park. She said she had thought about it, but they were too far away (Europe or the Caribbean). She was shocked when I told her there were two parks within 30 minutes of our office.
She asked if I had ever been, and I told her no because I'm a single male and I don't have a female counterpart to go with. It took her less than a minute to put it all together and she blurted out, "I'm a female counterpart, right? I mean we don't HAVE to be romantically linked to go, do we?" I told her the web sites say pairs can be just friends, and she responded with, "well that's it then. Let's go together. When can we go?"
We went the next weekend on a relatively warm October day. I thought it might be a bit odd to get undressed in front of a friend, but I knew I was comfortable being naked, and it sounded like she was too.
We were met by a nice couple who gave us a quick tour of the park and showed us the indoor pool where we could get undressed. Before I knew it, my friend had pulled her dress over her head and was totally naked. "I figured I'd get into the spirit early and leave the underwear at home" she said with a big grin as I got undressed.
The host couple talked with us for a little while and then left us to a wonderful day of nude recreation and conversation. It was just two friends having a nice day together, but without the social barriers. I learned more about her in that one day than I had in months of prior interactions.
We returned to that park quite a few times over the years and we always have better conversations and more fun together at the park than we ever do when we do similar things in the clothed community.
I'm glad I took the chance to pursue that initial conversation, but I've never found a similar opportunity to startup a conversation like that with any other friend. I'm still looking for opportunities. It would be so much easier if society would allow us to just stand up in a crowd and say "I'm a nudist. Is anyone else interested?"
-B.D.
Washington, District of Columbia
My first time at a nudist resort with reluctant wife.
It was back in the 90's. I had brought up resort nudism with my wife a few times; and she'd said "no" every single time. She just didn't want anyone to see her naked. After doing some homework, I found a resort nearby that allowed first-timers to stay covered. So I made a deal with her: if she'd accompany me to the resort, she would not have to undress; and I would not pressure her to. That convinced her to give it a try.
We drove to WTP on a spring morning. We checked in; I undressed and my wife stayed dressed, quite apprehensive about being around nude people. We did a tour of the grounds; and as it was still early, there weren't many people around. My wife started relaxing and enjoying the natural surroundings. We went for a walk on the trail, had a picnic at lunch, and walked by the clubhouse. The hot tub was inside, and there wasn't anyone else around. I nudged my wife to see if the wanted to get in the hot tub; and being private enough for her, she agreed. We sat and chatted in the hot tub for a while, and just as we started exiting the hot tub; someone walked in! We were both nude, standing outside the hot tub, with our towels out of reach. The individual said a few words, the three of us naked; and my wife unable to hide or cover up. After he left, I was sure at that point that my wife was done and would want to leave. I thought to myself nudism was probably over...
And so my wife got dressed, and we proceeded back to the car. But right as we got to the car, my wife turned to me and said: "Let's not leave yet..." I was surprised. So I asked her what she had in mind. She wanted to go for another walk before leaving. So we went on a stroll, and ended up back at the clubhouse. Once there, my wife just said: "Ok, let's just hang out here a while..." before disrobing! And so we just hung out nude together at the clubhouse for some time. She didn't seem concerned at all about anyone walking in on us again.
Then really came time to leave. Instead of covering up again for the short stroll back to the car, she opted to just throw her towel over her shoulders. Once we got back to the car, she tossed her towel in the trunk, and just as she pulled out her dress, the manager came out of his office to bid us farewell. I thought to myself that one person seeing her nude was one thing, but two would definitely be too much for my wife. But my wife just turned to him, naked, and said a few words back! The manager then invited us to come chat; and before I knew it, my wife proceeded to the office to go have a chat with him. I followed my wife to the office, and found her engaged in a very lively conversation with him, nude and not in the least bit self-conscious about it! We left shortly after, my wife sporting a big grin.
The idea of being seen nude is a big barrier for women when it comes to social nudity. But as my wife found out, in a nudist environment it's not as scary as it seems.
-Anonymous
Thought it Was a Joke
During a time I was experiencing a great deal of stress from my job, an acquaintance suggested that I visit a nudist resort as he said that he had read that being nude could relieve stress. I thought it was a joke. But I was intrigued so I visited a well known nudist resort a moderate distance from the city in which I then lived. When I arrived at the resort, I was quite apprehensive and nervous. But after paying the grounds fee and parking my car, I immediately disrobed and all of the apprehension, nervousness and feelings of stress disappeared. Thereafter, I continued to visit nudist resorts for several years and grew to thoroughly enjoy being nude. I still try to be nude as much as possible and I always find it to be a relaxing and enjoyable experience.
-Ken
Alexandria,
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LUXEMBOURG, June 29 (Reuters) - European Union farm ministers failed to agree on Tuesday to approve six genetically modified (GM) maize varieties for import to the bloc, despite a warning that inaction could lead to a shortage of animal feed.
Following the deadlock, the import applications for use in food and feed can now be approved unilaterally by the bloc’s executive, the European Commission.
In principle that could happen “within a few weeks”, but the Commission has not yet decided whether the approval will be granted before or after the European summer break, a spokesman for the EU executive told Reuters.
Before the vote, EU Health and Consumer Commissioner John Dalli told ministers that authorisations should be approved as a priority to avoid any repeat of last year’s disruption to feed imports.
That was caused by the EU’s zero-tolerance policy on unapproved GM material in imports — shipments of animal feed from the United States were refused entry to the bloc after minute traces of unapproved GM material were discovered in the cargo.
The Commission has said it will propose a small tolerance margin for unapproved GM in imports later this year to resolve the issue, but until then the only solution is for the EU to approve varieties individually for import. [ID:nLDE65922N]
One of the applications was to renew a previous EU approval for the insect-resistant Bt11 maize, developed by Swiss-based biotech company Syngenta SYNN.VX, which expired in 2007.
“A positive endorsement would effectively have signalled to key trading partners that the EU regulatory system for GMOs is functioning properly and would have helped to defuse mounting trade tensions,” said Syngenta spokesman Medard Schoenmaeckers.
“Syngenta is disappointed that once again, member states could not come to a decision.”
The other five covered new approvals for “stacked” maize varieties, developed by combining existing insect- and herbicide-resistant GM maize varieties together using conventional plant breeding techniques.
One was developed by Syngenta, two were developed jointly by subsidiaries of US chemicals companies DuPont DD.N and Dow Chemical DOW.N, and a further two were developed by Monsanto MON.N. (Reporting by Charlie Dunmore, editing by Anthony Barker)
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The team at Tenth Degree has released Isochronic Vol. 3, a 24 track behemoth of a comp, packed full of quality footwork and ghetto-tech influenced heaters. Don’t get it twisted… this is not one of the many compilations where a label throws 40 tunes in hopes that a few are good, in fact almost all these songs are quality. Some of the more notable jams are produced by Albino Gorilla, Nikes, Kid Logic, Neuropunk, Lux Familiar and Profresher. Here’s the condensed review:
Albino Gorrila – Suckas – Strange and mind bending tune based on Public enemy’s Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos. 2 Lightaz
Plastic Pope – Days with You – Traditional footwork jam with an uplifting vibe, snare rolls, choppy samples. 2 Lightaz
Nikes – Look to the Sky – Cyclic haunting vocal and a beat that keeps your head nodding. The rhythm is laced with the toms reminiscent of earlier footwork efforts. 4 Lightaz
SnackmAn x Hoot – Summerbreaks EPIC HORNS – Inventive use of arpeggiation. 4 Lightaz
Dispondant – Bass Odyssey – one of the more clever footwork tunes we’ve ever heard… would love to see some real jukkin to this. 4.5 Lightaz
Attunement – Legend – Very pretty tune with amazing synths, samples and drumwork. 3 Lightaz
Ether Fiend – Hit By Love (VIP) – Footwork / acid house-ish mashup reminiscent of 1992 house music. 3 Lightaz
Profresher – You Promised – Groovy number that reminds the listener how electronic music is only degrees removed from its video game roots. 3 Lightaz
Toro y Moi – Say That (Whitetail Bootleg) Great tune! Driving house organ with sweet, ethereal vocals samples. 3.5 Lightaz
Neuropunk – Bath Salts – Probably my favorite tune on this release. 4.5 Lightaz
In short, this could have been broken up into two different compilations, but hey… the “pay what you want” bandcamp price can’t be beat.
Boom-tip-tip-pap-tip… That’s the beat we get down to.
Cheers – B.G.
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How to Email Your Professor (without being annoying AF)
Laura Portwood-Stacer Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 26, 2016
Every semester, I see the tweets and Facebook posts. My professor friends, they are annoyed. Their students do not know how to write emails, they say. What they really mean is that their students don’t know how to follow the conventions of email etiquette in the academy. I used to be exasperated by student emails too. Until I realized that there was a simple explanation for why they didn’t know how to write them — they’ve never actually been taught how.*
But now, clueless students have no excuse, because they can read this post. Profs, share it with your students. Students, share it with your friends. Or don’t, and be the one person in the class your prof enjoys receiving email from.
10 Elements of an Effective, Non-Annoying Email
Here’s a template you can follow in constructing your email to a professor. Each element is explained further below.
Dear [1] Professor [2] Last-Name [3],
This is a line that recognizes our common humanity [4].
I’m in your Class Name, Section Number that meets on This Day [5]. This is the question I have or the help I need [6]. I’ve looked in the syllabus and at my notes from class and online and I asked someone else from the class [7], and I think This Is The Answer [8], but I’m still not sure. This is the action I would like you to take [9].
Signing off with a Thank You is always a good idea [10],
Favorite Student
Element #1: Salutation
Right off the bat, here’s where you can establish that you view your relationship with your professor as a professional one. Use “Dear,” or if that feels horrifically formal to you, you can use “Hello” or “Hi.” (“Hi” is pushing it. See note about exceptions below.)
Element #2: Honorific
This is where a lot of students unwittingly poke right at their professor’s sensitive ego and sense of justice in the world. You didn’t think this little word was a super big deal, but it actually is to them. An honorific is a title used to communicate respect for a person’s position. Whether or not you, as a student, actually respect your professor’s authority or position, it’s a good idea to act like you do. The simplest way to do this is to address them as “Professor.” If they have a PhD, you can technically call them “Dr.” but you’re safer with “Professor.” Not all instructors have PhDs (and many won’t even have the word professor in their official job title), but if they are teaching a college class they are inhabiting the role of Professor and can be addressed as such. The bonus of “Professor” and “Dr.” is that they don’t require you to know anything about your professor’s gender identity or marital status. If you call your prof “Mrs.” or “Miss,” lord help you.
Element #3: Name
You might be surprised at how frequently students get their professor’s name wrong. This is not difficult information to look up, people. It’s on your syllabus, it’s on the department website, it’s probably Google-able too. Use their last name. Spell out the whole thing. Spell it correctly. If there’s a hyphen in it, use both names and the hyphen (this really falls under spelling out the whole thing and spelling it correctly, but I get it, it’s a special case and it causes a lot of confusion for some reason even though it is 2016).
Exceptions to #1–3 (do not attempt until you have leveled up to pro emailer status)
You may use a less formal salutation, and address your professor by something other than Professor Last-Name in your email, if, and only if, you have received an email from them where they use an informal salutation and sign it with something other than Professor Last-Name. For example, when I was a college professor, I would often sign off on my emails “Prof. P-S” because I knew my last name was long and confusing for people. I then rather liked it when people sent me emails addressed to “Prof. P-S.” But don’t deviate from what they call themselves. NEVER try to use a first name unless you have been given explicit permission to do so. If the prof cryptically signs their emails with only initials, best to stick to Professor Last-Name. Do not under any circumstances begin an email with “Hey” because some people get real huffy about that.
Element #4: Meaningless Nicety
It never hurts to say something like “I hope you’re enjoying the beautiful weather today,” or “I hope you had a relaxing weekend,” to start off. It shows that you see your professor as a person who has some kind of life. Professors like it when you see them as people who have lives outside of their classroom (however remotely this may resemble the truth). It doesn’t really matter what you say here, it’s more the ritual of polite interest that counts. If you can make it come off like you genuinely mean it, bonus points for you.
Element #5: Reminder of how they know you
This one is key, especially if it’s the first time you are contacting your professor. You can’t count on them to remember your name from their rosters or to be able to put your face with your name. If there’s something distinctive about you that would jog their memory and make them look upon you fondly, include that. For instance, “I stayed after class to ask you about the reading that one time,” or “I sit in the front row and have blue hair,” whatever. If you haven’t met them yet, explain your desired relationship to them, such as “I am interested in enrolling in your class next semester.” If you’re fairly certain they will know you by name, you can leave this out. But some profs are very bad at remembering names, so you might as well throw them a bone here. (If you are lucky, those profs will be self-aware and empathetic enough not to make you memorize any names for exams in their classes.)
Element #6: The real reason for your email
This is the whole reason you’re sending the email, so make it good. The important thing here is to get in and get out, while remaining courteous. Concisely state what it is you need from the professor without offering a bunch of excuses or going into excessive detail or sounding like you are making demands. If you can’t explain why you’re emailing in a sentence or two, consider making an appointment to meet with the professor in person, in which case your line here will be “I was hoping we could meet to talk about X. What would be a good time for that?” If they can’t meet and just want to discuss it over email, they’ll let you know.
Elements #7 and 8: This is where you prove you’re a wonderful person
There is a t-shirt for sale on the internet that says, “It’s in the syllabus.” Think for a second about why there is a market for this product. A vast number of emails sent to professors by students are seeking information that has already been communicated by the professor. Before even sending the email, you should actually check the syllabus and your notes (and the class website if there is one) to see if your question has indeed been answered there. It doesn’t hurt to ask someone else from the class too — this is why you should try to get a least one classmate’s phone number or email address during the first week. If you’ve actually done all these things and you still have a question, then your contacting the professor will actually provide helpful information to them that they might not have been clear about something.
If you can try to answer your own question, and you turn out to be right, that saves them a little bit of time in their response. For instance, if you are writing to set up a meeting, you could say, “It says on the syllabus that your office hours are Tuesdays at 3pm. Could I come this Tuesday at 3:15?” This also shows that you thought about the whole thing for more than two seconds before deciding to take up their email-reading time.
Element #9: Super polite restatement of your request
If you’re asking a question you need an answer to, you can say something like “If you could let me know at your earliest convenience, I’d really appreciate it.” If you need them to fill out a form, or contact someone on your behalf, or do something that requires more action than just answering your email, state that very clearly here. This helps them put it on their to-do list and get it done.
Element #10: Sign-off
If you’re not sure how to sign off an email, “Thank you” is nearly always appropriate. You can do “Best,” or “All the best,” or “Sincerely,” or whatever, but some form of thanks here does double duty as both sign-off and expression of gratitude.
The hidden Element #11: The follow-up
If your professor hasn’t responded to your email, and social cues tell you they probably meant to by now, you can send a gentle follow-up. You can format the follow-up using all the elements here, but you can add in “Just following up on my previous email,” right before you get to Element #6. You don’t have to rub it in that they forgot to email you back, they will get the point (and if they genuinely forgot, they might feel bad). If they were not emailing you back on purpose, you probably already annoyed them the first time around, and you might as well be as polite as possible with the follow-up. When is it safe to send a follow-up reminder? You have to gauge this based on how quickly they usually respond to things and how dire your need for a response truly is. If it can wait a week, let it wait a week (or until you see them in person).
Why any of this matters
Learning how to craft professional emails is a skill you can take with you into the so-called real world. A courteous and thoughtfully constructed request is much more likely to receive the kind of response you want. And, let’s face it, professors are humans with feelings who just want to be treated as such.
You might think professors who are annoyed by student emails are over-sensitive and lazy (it’s their job to handle this shit, right?). And you might be right. But consider that while you only have a few professors at any one time, they might have hundreds of students. They are possibly getting the same question from ten different people. They might be an adjunct professor who is actually only paid for the hours they spend in the classroom (and they’re not paid very much for that even). They might have experienced a pattern of receiving less respect from people based on their gender or race. Make your email the one they don’t gripe to their friends about. Now you know how.
*This was corroborated for me when I interviewed a bunch of my former students about how they figured out how to navigate electronic communication in their college careers. The ones who felt confident and effective were ones who’d had a lot of experience interacting electronically with adults outside their family before they ever got to college. We don’t have to go into the sociological dimensions of who’s most likely to have had such opportunities, but you can probably fill in the blanks.
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5 June 2014
TRANSCRIPT OF THE MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS
THE HON. MALCOLM TURNBULL MP
INTERVIEW WITH ALAN JONES
RADIO 2GB
E&OE………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
ALAN JONES:
Let’s see if we can sort all of this out, and Malcolm Turnbull is on the line. Malcolm Turnbull good morning.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Good morning.
ALAN JONES:
Thank you for your time. Can I begin by asking you if you could say after me this? As a senior member of the Abbott Government I want to say here I am totally supportive of the Abbott-Hockey strategy for Budget repair.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Alan I am not going to take dictation from you. I am a Cabinet minister. I support unreservedly and wholeheartedly every element in the Budget. Every single one.
ALAN JONES:
So you’re totally supportive of the Medicare co-payment?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
I support every element, of course, including the Medicare co-payment. Do you want to go through the whole list?
ALAN JONES:
You’re totally supportive of the increase in the fuel excise?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
I support… no, let’s go through it. I support the re-prioritised funding of official development assistance. I support introducing co-payments for general practitioner pathology and diagnostic imaging services in the Medicare Benefits Schedule. I support the reforms to higher education. I support the changes to family payment reform. Do you want me to read through the whole Budget?
ALAN JONES:
You’re sounding very nervous Malcolm. Why are you nervous?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
I’m not nervous.
ALAN JONES:
You’re angry Malcolm.
MALCOLM:
Alan…
ALAN JONES:
We had a yarn last night, Malcolm, I should tell my listeners. And I told Malcolm I’d ask him the first three questions. He is now very well prepared and I am grateful for that preparation. But Malcolm I’ve coached Australia in rugby. If one of my players on the eve of the rugby test was seen socialising, having dinner, privately inviting a member of the All-Blacks on the eve of a major test match the player would be sent home Malcolm.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Well Alan this is not football here. We are not playing football.
ALAN JONES:
Oh, I see. You’re having dinner with Palmer. You’re happy to acknowledge him as a friend. This is the same man who has flaunted his contempt for Abbott, your leader. Accused Abbott of lying – Abbott’s your leader. Has told Abbott to give himself and uppercut – Abbott’s your leader. Called Abbott a lightweight – Abbott’s your leader. Called him WTF, worse than Fraser – Abbott’s your leader. And Senator-elect, Jacqui Lambie has called Abbott psychopathic and Palmer opposes everything controversial in Abbott’s Budget and you invite the bloke to dinner.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Well Alan let me tell you something. We can’t get anything through the Senate after July 1 unless we get Labor and the Greens to vote for it, without the support of Palmer’s group. So all of those things are true that you’ve quoted him as saying. And they’re all bad and I reject all of them. But the fact of the matter is, this business, as John Howard said, is governed by the iron laws of arithmetic. And we need his support, we need to be engaged, you can’t get around that. He will have after July 1 the group of four senators all of whom have been constitutionally elected and all of whom have a vote.
ALAN JONES:
Did Abbott, your leader, indicate in the party room that meetings with Palmer were to be coordinated by Abetz and Pyne? Were Abetz and Pyne aware that you were meeting with Palmer? Was your leader aware that you were meeting with Palmer? Was Hockey aware you were meeting with the head of Treasury?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
The answer Alan to your question is that there is no, as Tony Abbott has made quite clear by the way, there is no restriction or limitation on me or anyone else meeting with cross benchers. The only matter that is to be coordinated is, with Pyne and Abetz, is when we are – and we are obviously not at that stage yet – when we are at a point of negotiating passage of legislation or amendments and you know we don’t want to have the Minister for Health or the Minister for Communications in my case, trying to get the numbers for a bill.
ALAN JONES:
Was the party room told?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
No it wasn’t Alan. It was not.
ALAN JONES:
That Abetz and Pyne were to coordinate meetings with Palmer. Your leader didn’t know you were meeting with Palmer.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Look he didn’t and nor did he need to. And the fact of the matter is, meetings happen here in Canberra.
ALAN TURNBULL:
I spoke to your leader after that and he was very generous about you he said, oh Alan they would have just bumped into one other. You seem to be quite happy to allow it to be interpreted as being bumped in, until Palmer belled the cat and said no Malcolm invited me. Just imagine a senior member of the Government inviting to have dinner with him a bloke who is perhaps the most trenchant critic of that person’s leader. Did you raise all of these issues with Palmer at dinner, did you challenge him about being economically illiterate in terms of the things he was opposing. Did you defend Tony Abbott to Palmer?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
I defend Tony Abbott all the time and all I can say Alan, I’ll just remind you of this. That we are a team, Tony and I are a team. We have a very united team here. And the thing that has distressed me this week is that people, yourself, Andrew Bolt in particular, have set out to suggest that there is dissention in the government that there are challenges to Tony’s leadership.
ALAN JONES:
There is no challenge to his leadership. They are suggesting Malcolm precisely because you have no hope ever of being the leader. You’ve got to get that into your head. No hope ever. But because of that you’re happy to throw a few bombs around that might blow up Abbott a bit. That’s what they’re saying.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Well that’s what you’re saying. And that is what Andrew Bolt is saying. And it is doing the Labor Party’s work. This is the most united, cohesive government we’ve had in this country for a long time and I think it is just very sad that you and Bolt are doing the work of the Labor Party in undermining the Abbott Government.
ALAN JONES:
So we’re the bomb throwers.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
You are Alan. Yes you are.
ALAN JONES:
Bolt says today, Turnbull should run a mile from Palmer. The most dangerous politician in parliament. An erratic populist preaching voodoo economics, blackmailing the Government, vilifying a Liberal staffer and using his status as one of Australia’s richest people to influence others. How could anyone possibly argue with that observation?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Well I’m not going to argue with Andrew Bolt about his criticism of Clive Palmer. I’d simply say to you that we get back to the fundamental question of arithmetic that if we want to get legislation through the Senate – and we do; we’ve been elected to govern, we’ve been elected to legislate – we will need to get the support of Palmer’s group.
ALAN JONES:
So Tony Abbott pulled you in and said, ‘Malcolm go and have a yarn with Palmer’?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Well he did not.
ALAN JONES:
Oh I see.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
I’m not suggesting he did Alan. Why would you put those words into my mouth? You know that’s not true.
ALAN JONES:
Well I would have thought that in such a controversial environment you would discuss this with your leader. He is your leader, you know. That’s the way teams work, Malcolm. You’re not much good at teams. You’re not much good at teams. I mean, in 2009 you were the leader. Godwin Grech told you he had found an email proving the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was corrupt, arranging a loan for a donor mate. Grech had forged the email and later checked himself in for psychiatric care. You’re supposed to be one of these forensic lawyers, evidentiary proof, habeas corpus, must produce the body. Not anymore. No, Malcolm Turnbull’s judgment was, you swallowed it hook, line and sinker. I’m putting it to you that your judgment is just as flawed here in choosing to have dinner with the bloke who is the most trenchant critic of the Government and standing in the way of the kind of budget repair that your Government wants.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Well let’s assume he is standing in the way of our budget repair. Let’s accept that. Do you think the best way to get him out of the way, Alan, is to abuse him in the sort of language that you’re abusing me with?
ALAN JONES:
I’m not abusing you.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Oh really? I don’t think any of your listeners would be under that misapprehension.
ALAN JONES:
I know but you’ve got a few sensitive nerves there, Malcolm.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Alan, the problem with you is you like dishing it out but you don’t like taking it.
ALAN JONES:
I’m willing to take it. Dish it out. Go away, do your best.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
I’m saying to you that you have been promoting the impression that there is disunity in the Government and you have been promoting the impression that I’m after Tony Abbott’s job –
ALAN JONES:
No I’ve told you you’re not after Tony Abbott’s job. You’ve got not a hope in hell of getting Tony Abbott’s job. That’s not my case –
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Alright, that’s Andrew Bolt’s case.
ALAN JONES:
I don’t think it’s Andrew Bolt’s case. I’m simply saying, if you are loyal to your leader and to the Government you will work with that Government to decide on the appropriate strategy of dealing with the crossbenchers. That will be a Government approach. You are seen by people who are loyal to the Liberal Party and loyal to the Government breaking bread with Palmer and they say, ‘oh here’s Malcolm, what is Malcolm up to again?’
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
And Alan, Alan, you are seen by people who are loyal to the Liberal Party as undermining Tony Abbott’s Government at a time when we are trying to sell a very difficult budget because it’s got some tough measures in it. And we need to have those tough measures because we have to fix the financial mess the Labor Party left us. So we are all working very hard to sell that budget and explain it – ‘selling’ the budget is probably not the right term – but explaining why we’ve got to do it. And we’re working very hard to do that. And this sort of stuff that you’re going on about is a distraction. It’s a non-issue. And I just think it’s so sad that someone who’s put in so much effort into supporting Tony Abbott like you would now be undermining his Government. It’s heartbreaking really, to listen to you do it.
ALAN JONES:
Well I don’t want to break your heart Malcolm. I’d be the last person who would want to break your heart.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Oh good, good Alan. I don’t want you to break Tony’s heart either.
ALAN JONES:
No, no. I don’t want to break any hearts here. Now look, coming back to Peta Credlin who worked for you. Here is the same man a couple of days previous you’re hosting for dinner and he’s reached the bottom of the bird cage that Tony Abbott’s pursuing a parental leave scheme because it would help Peta Credlin. You know for a fact that Peta Credlin as a public servant would not benefit from such a scheme because she’s eligible for a generous taxpayer-funded scheme. She’s got it already. And she worked for you. I was waiting – I couldn’t hear any echo from Canberra of Malcolm publicly springing into defence and saying what reprehensible, disgraceful behavior this is. And what an obscenity that this woman who worked for me should be attacked in this way. I was trying to hear the echo from Canberra, Malcolm. I couldn’t hear any reverberation at all.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Well I’ll tell you what I did Alan, because I don’t want to create any more pain for Peta than she has already suffered. What I did was – and I told Peta about this at the time. I wrote to her, and I sent her a note at the time, that very morning. I sent a message to Palmer, telling him he should man-up and apologise. I then rang him and spoke to him and told him in no uncertain terms that he should apologise. And he sent a note which obviously wasn’t an adequate apology. And he’s been rightly condemned for it, as you said earlier. A newspaper asked me if I would write an op-ed writing about Peta Credlin and Clive Palmer and I said to the editor, I’ll ask Peta about that because this is a very sensitive and painful matter and I put it to her and she said, look, I’d rather not. Alan, I don’t want to make political capital out of Peta Credlin’s pain, other people do. I’ve worked with Peta Credlin, she does a very good job for Tony and the nation, she does a tough job. This is really hurtful, personal stuff.
Others can jump up and down, make political capital for and against on this. My only foremost interest has been in ensuring (a) that Palmer apologised and I was unsuccessful in that. And (b) in minimising the pain caused for someone for whom I have considerable respect.
ALAN JONES:
Ok, well I’m not here to mark you out of ten but that is an excellent answer to the question that I raised. What sickens other people though is your argument on January 31 to an ABC program ‘There’s no more passionate defender of the ABC than I’. You told Paul Kelly on March 9 the ABC has a great reputation. On March 19 you addressed the ABC Showcase at Parliament House you said: ‘The ABC my friends, is more important than ever. The ABC’s a very, very special organisation.’ In another way, is this the same ABC that interrupted the Prime Minister of Australia 37 times during that radio interview in Melbourne? Is it the same ABC that’s frightened disabled people into thinking that your Government will kick them off the disability support pension? Is it the same ABC that broadcasts the weekly Question and Answer program that religiously has a panel dominated by left-wingers, and you? Is it the same ABC that took seven months to apologise for broadcasting a doctored image of a journalist, your former chief of staff, Chris Kenny, having sex with a dog? Is it the same ABC that was found to be biased on four occasions when broadcasting stories about asylum seekers receiving burns? Is it the same ABC which failed to feature any stories about the union slush-fund allegations against Bruce Wilson and Julia Gillard when it should have been front page news? Is it the same ABC which broadcast unsubstantiated claims that cholesterol medication could be doing more harm than good, leading doctors to fear their patients would stop taking that medication? Is it the same ABC that caused an international incident when broadcasting Edward Snowden’s allegations that Australia had been spying on Indonesia? Is it the same ABC that runs 5000 stories about the health gap between rich and poor but pays eight of his staff more than $250,000 including the boss, Mark Scott, on almost twice your salary? Is it the same ABC that caused our live cattle industry to be suspended and almost destroyed? Where do you stand on that ABC?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Well Alan, you’ve gone through a long list of failings and mistakes and so forth of the ABC. I can’t remember them all, it’s a very long list. But can I just say this to you? The ABC is a very, very important public institution. It is our national broadcaster. If you live in regional Australia for example, and I know you’re very fond of the bush then the ABC is the single most important source of news. It covers a whole range of issues that struggle to get an airing in the commercial broadcast media nowadays. And the ABC is more important than ever and it has a heavier responsibility to be balanced and accurate than ever because some of the other great foundations of journalism and news, the big metropolitan newspapers in particular, are struggling as their business models have been challenged by the Internet. Having said all of that, look what I’ve done. I am the first Communications Minister for decades, if not ever, who has actually put in a thorough, detailed analysis of the finances of both the ABC and SBS. I got -
ALAN JONES:
Not of what they say, not of what they say. And not of what they do. Even last night, there was supposed to be a settlement. Chris Kenny worked for you.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Hang on. Yes he did and he’s a very good friend of mine. He’s a very good friend of mine.
ALAN JONES:
Have I read anything where you’ve been out there attacking this behaviour of the ABC?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
I was highly critical, I condemned that skit immediately after it was done.
ALAN JONES:
What word would you use to properly describe it? Having sex with a dog?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Well it was crude, tasteless, appalling. I mean pick your epithet.
ALAN JONES:
And there was to be an apology last night and part of the apology was, there was to be no criticism of the ABC by anyone within the ABC for the apology that was delivered and yet statements were made by the same people on the Chaser that they will never apologise to Chris Kenny. Tonight’s on air apology is from the ABC not us. And they’re still working for the ABC today are they?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Well Alan, I don’t know. I don’t know whether they are or not.
ALAN JONES:
Well are you pulling Scott in?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Listen, I had to be very careful once litigation began not to seek to influence the conduct of litigation between the ABC and somebody who is, as you’ve noted, a friend of mine. But this is what I’ve said publicly, and this is what I say privately. I say the same thing. The ABC like any other media organisation, including your own, when it makes a mistake, whether it is a crude attack like that or it just gets the facts wrong, it should as a matter of responsibility and common sense, apologise and correct immediately. Now the stupidity about the Kenny episode is that had Mark Scott picked up the phone to Kenny the next morning and said, ‘look, I’m sorry these guys are idiots, I’ve given them a kick in the bum. We apologise.’ And if they had published an apology that would have been the end of it. All this has done is cause Chris and his beautiful wife Sunita a lot of pain and anguish over this.
ALAN JONES:
And they get away with it.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
And has resulted in the lawyers, all of the costs of which are now paid by the ABC, running up to -
ALAN JONES:
By the taxpayer.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Correct. Running up bills of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
ALAN JONES:
And these people are still in defiance of whatever authority the ABC management has. Why are they still today in the employment of the ABC when they have defied the order and defied the authority of the ABC?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
That is a very good question and it is one that I am sure that Mark Scott will be grappling with today.
ALAN JONES:
If he can’t grapple successfully what will you do?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Alan one of the difficulties, it is a fact of life, I cannot direct the ABC. They have an Act of Parliament and they are independent, they are governed by their board. All I can do is the following -
ALAN JONES:
Change the Act.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
But then of course I would have to talk to Mr Palmer, wouldn’t I? I can’t do that so that probably wouldn’t get through the Senate. The -
ALAN JONES:
Text him, you can just text him.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Yeah, exactly.
ALAN JONES:
That’s what you do.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
I’m glad both of us are getting our sense of humour back on that one. Can I just get back to what I’ve done about the efficiency of the ABC?
ALAN JONES:
I think that’s understood. I’ll just ask you one other question about the ABC because you and I have got to go. If there was a journalist working for the ABC, which there is, wanting to do a story on Mr Di Girolamo, which they are, what would you say if you knew that journalist was ringing another journalist asking that person if he knew where Mr Di Girolamo’s children went to school? Does this mean that we are seeking to involve innocent children in a critical analysis of a parent? And is that acceptable tactics and behavior by the ABC?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Alan I couldn’t, look honestly without knowing the context -
ALAN JONES:
Happy to tell you off the air, happy to tell you off the air.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Children should be kept out of it but look -
ALAN JONES:
Happy to tell you off the air.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
The ABC you have got to remember, I know like any broadcaster they make mistakes and do dumb things from time to time, but they were the ones that exposed Eddie Obeid. They were the ones that first brought the whole Obeid corruption scandal which is a really black stain against the Labor Party in NSW, they brought that to light. So the ABC does practice a lot of very good journalism but I recognise that it’s not always right. My point about them being more important than ever is that because they are there, the public broadcaster with public money, they have a responsibility to be accurate and balanced that is much graver and higher than any commercial media. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t try to be balanced and accurate but the ABC has to be like Caesar’s wife, they have to rise to a standard that is so much higher than the private sector. And that’s a responsibility that I take very seriously in reminding them of that.
ALAN JONES:
Just one final thing because in a very, very balanced and sympathetic interview which we’ve conducted you’re entitled to the final say. I’m sure there is something you want to say before you leave the programme this morning because we will be talking often and again. What finally would you like to say?
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
What I want to say Alan is that the big issue that we’re facing at the moment as Australians is how do we get our public finances back into shape. We recognise, all of us, Tony, Joe, all of us, we recognise that there are measures in the budget that aren’t popular. No one wants to pay more money to go to the doctor, nobody wants to pay more tax, no one wants to pay more at the petrol bowser. But the fundamental fact is this; if we let things go on as they were we would have ended up with deficits forever. We would have ended up with $667 billion of debt within the decade for our, presumably, hoping perhaps, that our grandchildren might be able to pay off. So the real challenge for those who are critics of the budget, and I respect the criticism, people’s criticism, of course I do. But the real challenge is what is your alternative plan? Because unless you have got an alternative plan then what you’re really saying is, ‘don’t worry, keep on spending, keep on borrowing, and we’ll just kick the fiscal can down the road and let the grandkids sort it out’. And that is just not responsible.
ALAN JONES:
Well done, final say.
MALCOLM TURNBULL:
Thank you.
ALAN JONES:
Talk again soon.
[ends]
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President Barack Obama, who campaigned fiercely against Donald Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, has been equally magnanimous, reminding us of the incredible dignity and grace with which he led our country over the past eight years.
I share the sentiments they expressed. We do need to give Trump a chance, for the good of our country. Maybe he will surprise us and build bridges, not walls.
But we can’t suddenly forget or forgive what he said during the campaign.
We can’t forget that Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and killers, or that he said a federal judge can’t decide a lawsuit fairly because he is a “Mexican” (he was born in Indiana).
We can’t forget that his signature campaign promise is to build a wall at the border with Mexico.
We can’t forget that he proposed banning Muslims from entering our country or that he suggested that the “Muslim community” was complicit in the terrorist attack in Orlando.
We can’t forget the despicable way he talks about women or that he bragged about sexually assaulting them.
We can’t forget that he mocked people with disabilities.
We can’t forget that he exploited ugly, racist stereotypes when he described African-American communities as “war zones” and “hell.”
We can’t forget that he failed to immediately disavow the endorsement of David Duke, a neo-Nazi and probably the most well known white supremacist in America.
We can’t forget that he named as his campaign manager a man who runs a website catering to the alt-right, a rebranded white nationalist movement.
We can’t forget that he re-circulated racist and anti-Semitic tweets.
We can’t forget that he went on Alex Jones’ radio show and told the far-right radio host that his “reputation is amazing.” Jones is, in fact, a fabulist, a con artist known for propagating wild conspiracy theories, such as his claim that the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was the work of the government.
The point is, in Trump we suddenly face a president-elect who has been wallowing in the cesspool of hate and extremism.
White supremacists who backed his candidacy are jumping for joy. They think they now have their man in the White House.
Andrew Anglin, proprietor of the Daily Stormer, a truly sickening website popular among neo-Nazis, declared, “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this.”
David Duke was equally exultant, tweeting that “our people played a HUGE role in electing Trump!”
Kevin MacDonald, an outspoken anti-Semite and former professor, wrote, “This is an amazing victory. Fundamentally, it is a victory of White people over the oligarchic, hostile elites.”
We can’t afford to take these statements as the ravings of extremists on the fringes of society. They are now at the gates.
But it’s not just sieg-heiling Nazis and cross-burning Klansmen who should trouble Americans concerned about what a Trump victory portends. It’s also the more polite, suit-wearing extremists who move in mainstream political circles and already have their nose under the Trump tent.
They’re people like Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who birthed the viciously discriminatory, unconstitutional anti-immigrant laws enacted by Arizona, Alabama and other states several years ago; and Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state who is now a senior fellow at the rabidly anti-LGBT Family Research Council. Both are reportedly serving as key members of Trump’s transition team.
As is customary, Trump has pledged to be a president “for all Americans.”
If he truly means it, he must first boot the extremists out of his tent and tell them in no uncertain terms that they will have no voice or place in his administration. If he does that, perhaps he can begin to stanch the bleeding from the wounds he ripped open in our country.
But, given the early signs, we’re not counting on it.
No, we’re going on what Trump has been saying all along. The time is now for progressives everywhere to unite and fight with everything we have.
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Thanks to its prominent position as a combination e-reader and tablet device that has books, full-color magazines and casual games, the Nook Color’s ownership is now almost 75 percent women, according to a Barnes & Noble executive.
While it was known generally that women buy more Nook Colors, we had no idea it was so one-sided. The surprising number came from Claudia Romanini Backus, Barnes & Noble’s director of developer relations, when I spoke with her at CTIA Enterprise 2011 in San Diego. Backus’ job is to work with developers to get more apps into the Nook’s sparse-but-curated 800-count application market, and this statistic is one she frequently cites to app developers she wants to attract.
“We on the app team make it a point to talk about it,” Backus said. “We want developers to realize this is an area they can differentiate and take advantage of.”
Women buy more e-books than men, with recent research by GfK MRI suggesting women are 52 percent more likely than men to own an e-reader. Why the Nook Color is so much more popular women likely comes down to two of its unique features: an extensive array of digital magazines from most major publishers and fun casual games like Angry Birds. It also doesn’t hurt that the device has a 7-inch screen, which makes it better suited for purses than an 10-inch tablet like the iPad.
The $249 Nook Color’s position as one of the cheapest Android tablets around was upended recently by the debut of the $199 Amazon Kindle Fire, which will launch on Nov. 15. Perhaps the tablet’s female fans will be one area the Nook can continue to thrive. That said, I do expect Barnes & Noble to drop its Nook Color price in the near future or release an updated version of the device or both. Or perhaps it could sell this Nook Color for $199 and a new Nook Color 2 for more.
Since the Nook Color’s launch last year, Barnes & Noble hasn’t released official sales numbers for the device, so it’s hard to see just how many women have purchased one. One report in March suggested B&N had shipped more than 3 million Nook Colors and who knows how many the company has sold since then. Even at the low end, as many as 2 million women likely have a Nook Color.
Are you surprised the Nook Color’s female ownership numbers are so high?
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One of five people shot Sunday in a north side bar died overnight.
Sylvia Salazar, 56, who lived in the 4600 block of Kenway Court in Fort Worth, died at 1:57 a.m. in the intensive care unit of John Peter Smith Hospital, according to the Tarrant County medical examiner’s office.
Her sister, Cynthia Villarreal, 55, said Salazar went to the bar with a friend "just to relax. She wanted to go out and have a nice time."
An altercation inside the bar led to the shooting, Fort Worth police spokeswoman Sharron Neal said.
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Salazar “was not involved in the altercation, but was struck by a bullet during this incident,” Neal said.
Four other people, all men, were wounded in the shooting inside the Northside Outlaws Bar, 115 NW 25th St., in the Fort Worth Stockyards, police said early Monday.
The four are in stable to critical condition at area hospitals, Neal said.
Officers first responded at about 8:45 p.m. Sunday to a call reporting a shooting on NW 25th Street. MedStar paramedics took one man in his 20s from the bar’s address to Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth. Salazar was taken to John Peter Smith Hospital where she later died.
A second man in his 20s was found nearby on West Exchange Avenue, a MedStar official said. That victim was also taken to John Peter Smith.
Two other men were transported to area hospitals by private vehicle, said MedStar spokesman Matt Zavadsky.
Early Monday, detectives were still trying to determine whether one of the wounded was the shooter.
Villarreal said Salazar was a good sister, a loving mother and a good grandmother.
"She was raising one grandson, J.R., her oldest son's child," she said.
The bar’s Facebook page sought information today:
“My deepest and most sincere sympathy and condolences to our customers and their families for Sunday’s horrific tragedy.While there are no words or actions to console anyone please know that each and every one of y'all is in our prayers. If anyone has any information please contact the detectives and help us put these cowards away!!!”
In an unrelated shooting, a 20-year-old man was shot about 2:15 a.m. when he answered a knock on the door of his home at Eagle Point Apartments in the 8300 block of Boat Club Road, Officer Neal said.
“The victim stepped outside and was shot by an unknown assailant,” Neal said. “The assailant then fled the scene.”
The victim is in stable condition at an area hospital, she said.
Witnesses that were nearby are being interviewed by detectives, Neal said.
Staff writer Terry Evans contributed to this report.
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There's perhaps no pro sports team in recent memory that spoiled its fans with its success quite like the Detroit Red Wings. The team's fanbase witnessed an organization with an embarrassment of riches make the playoffs for 25 straight seasons — the longest such run in pro sports until it ended in April 2016. During that time the team brought four Stanley Cups home to Detroit, while serving as the National Hockey League's model for how to find and sustain success.
But now, in late 2017 — a few months after Detroit finished last season in the league's bottom five, and following the buzz of the team's new home at Little Caesars Arena — many in the press are using the Wings as an example of what not to do. For those of us fans who are used to decades of positive press, it all feels a little harsh.
As Greg Wyshynski cracked on Yahoo: "The Detroit Red Wings have been mismanaged into oblivion, but you knew that."
The Hockey News feels similar, noting: "Denial is a powerful thing. It kept the Detroit Red Wings in the playoff picture for an astonishing 25 consecutive seasons. Now it threatens to bind their feet in cement for years to come."
Or, as The Score warns: "Look away, Detroit fans. These aren't the Red Wings you grew up on."
"Pain is coming to the Detroit Red Wings," The Athletic forecasts.
Or, as Yahoo's Puck Daddy columnist Ryan Lambert — a guy the fan base generally despises for being one of the first to point out the cracks in the foundation five years ago — put it: "Here's what's so wild about the Detroit Red Wings: Everyone agrees they're bad. Everyone agrees they're rebuilding. Everyone agrees they've got a ton of dead money on the books for years to come; they have the highest payroll in the league right now ... So the idea that they would now be even thinking about jerking around one of the few promising young players they actually have on the NHL roster is a sign of just how poorly run they are."
Oof.
Harsh indeed, but most will agree that such assessments are accurate. Though it's possible that the Wings return to the playoffs this season — especially if Jimmy Howard continues stealing games as he has during the season's outset — the smart money is on another bottom rung finish. And, either way, there's no solid young core around which the team can build.
That's partly a result of the cyclical nature of success in pro sports. A given team wins for a run of years, its stars age, the core breaks up, and the team stinks and sinks to their leagues' depths. Its management then assembles a new generation of stars, mostly through high draft picks. In the NHL, a hard salary cap strengthens and compresses that loop.
What's impressive about Detroit is that it defied the cycle and put together successive generations of superstars over the last two decades. Steve Yzerman, Dominik Hasek, Sergei Fedorov, Brendan Shanahan, and the elite talent of the late '90s and early 2000s passed the baton to guys like Nick Lidstrom, Pavel Datsyuk, Chris Osgood, and Henrik Zetterberg.
But the latter group aged or retired over the last seven years, most of the support players with a real role in the team's last Stanley Cup run in 2008 are gone, and there's no new generation of players in place to make a third push.
So in that way, the dethroning of the Red Wings is not an unusual tale. But there's more.
A growing portion of the fan base feels the Red Wings are indeed "mismanaged into oblivion," and there's no coherent or effective plan going forward. That's leaving some to fear that the organization is entering what could be the opposite of its past success — a protracted run in mediocrity.
The blame for the team's position mostly falls on general manager Ken Holland. Once considered to be the league's best GM, Holland, who took the helm in 1997, is now viewed by some as an obstacle to the franchise's rebuild.
That's the result of a litany of perceived missteps. Fair or not, he receives criticism for the Wings' salary cap management, poor drafting, poor player development, over-reliance on older veterans, overvaluation of its players, and focus on getting bigger while the most successful NHL teams are trending younger and faster.
The worst of the fallout from management's decision to sell off draft picks at the trade deadline to sustain the playoff streak during the last five years is what we see today — a dearth of young talent. And that's frustrating to a fanbase tired of a mediocre hockey team stumbling into the playoffs just to be bounced in the first round. They're ready for a full rebuild.
As "J.J. from Kansas," the editor at the SB Nation blog Winging It in Motown, puts it, "It's death by a thousand papercuts." The sum of these issues is the source of fans' frustration, which can be anecdotally found on any of its fan blogs, or in The Hockey News' "Front Office Confidence" survey, an assessment of the most disgruntled fan bases which found Detroit's to rank third.
"The really passionate fans are worried, upset, frustrated," J.J. tells us. "They're willing to accept the bad; they're just out of patience with mediocre, and that's right where the Wings are."
The ongoing mediocrity is partly a result of fans' and the organization's unrelenting trust in Holland for so many years. But even his most ardent supporters are now forced to accept the situation.
"The amount of things that you had to do wrong for this to happen is pretty high," the Puck Daddy's Lambert says. "You had to overvalue veterans, not draft well, trade away draft picks ... and [management] screwed up on so many fronts that there were no real safety nets. They had so much success for so long that everyone is giving them the benefit of the doubt, which is understandable. But if you looked at a little more closely, this decline is evident to anyone who was paying attention for the last four to five years."
There's some real danger in GMs receiving too much slack in the salary cap-era NHL, as Frank Provenzano — a former NHL executive with the Washington Capitals and Dallas Stars — writes in an article for The Athletic that examines the challenges facing Holland.
"Virtually every team in the NHL thinks they are special in some way, shape, or form (OK, maybe not Winnipeg). This is even more pronounced when you have actually been special. Organizational hubris gets woven into your DNA, and only gets worse when you start filling the front office and coaching ranks with former players from your golden era," Provenzano writes.
"Everyone drinks the Kool-Aid, and there is often no voice in the room to offer a counter-balancing opinion. The real danger here is that you lose perspective of where you actually are in your competitive cycle, and then compound this by making poor free agent and/or contract decisions to reinforce your perception of being a destination franchise."
To understand the whys of all this, it helps to revisit the team's Golden Age.
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Inspired by anomalies that arise in certain mathematical equations, researchers have demonstrated a laser system that paradoxically turns off when more power is added rather than becoming continuously brighter.
The finding by a team of researchers at Vienna Univ. of Technology and Princeton Univ., could lead to new ways to manipulate the interaction of electronics and light, an important tool in modern communications networks and high-speed information processing.
The researchers published their results in Nature Communications.
Their system involves two tiny lasers, each one-tenth of a millimeter in diameter. The two are nearly touching, separated by a distance 50 times smaller than the lasers themselves. One is pumped with electric current until it starts to emit light, as is normal for lasers. Power is then added slowly to the other, but instead of it also turning on and emitting even more light, the whole system shuts off.
"This is not the normal interference that we know," said Hakan Türeci, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton, referring to the common phenomenon of light waves or sound waves from two sources cancelling each other. Instead, he said, the cancellation arises from the careful distribution of energy loss within an overall system that is being amplified.
"Loss is something you normally are trying to avoid," Türeci said. "In this case, we take advantage of it and it gives us a different dimension we can use—a new tool—in controlling optical systems."
The research grows out of Türeci's longstanding work on mathematical models that describe the behavior of lasers. In 2008, he established a mathematical framework for understanding the unique properties and complex interactions that are possible in extremely small lasers—devices with features measured in micrometers or nanometers. Different from conventional desk-top lasers, these devices fit on a computer chip.
That work opened the door to manipulating gain or loss (the amplification or loss of an energy input) within a laser system. In particular, it allowed researchers to judiciously control the spatial distribution of gain and loss within a single system, with one tiny sub-area amplifying light and an immediately adjacent area absorbing the generated light.
Türeci and his collaborators are now using similar ideas to pursue counterintuitive ideas for using distribution of gain and loss to make micro-lasers more efficient.
The researchers' ideas for taking advantage of loss derive from their study of mathematical constructs called "non-Hermitian" matrices in which a normally symmetric table of values becomes asymmetric. Türeci said the work is related to certain ideas of quantum physics in which the fundamental symmetries of time and space in nature can break down even though the equations used to describe the system continue to maintain perfect symmetry.
Over the past several years, Türeci and his collaborators at Vienna worked to show how the mathematical anomalies at the heart of this work, called "exceptional points," could be manifested in an actual system. In 2012, the team published a paper inl Physical Review Letters demonstrating computer simulations of a laser system that shuts off as energy is being added. In the current Nature Communications paper, the researchers created an experimental realization of their theory using a light source known as a quantum cascade laser.
The researchers report in the article that results could be of particular value in creating "lab-on-a-chip" devices—instruments that pack tiny optical devices onto a single computer chip. Understanding how multiple optical devices interact could provide ways to manipulate their performance electronically in previously unforeseen ways. Taking advantage of the way loss and gain are distributed within tightly coupled laser systems could lead to new types of highly accurate sensors, the researchers said.
"Our approach provides a whole new set of levers to create unforeseen and useful behaviors," Türeci said.
Source: Princeton Univ., Engineering School
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While we were all watching The Interview Christmas Eve, the National Security Agency (NSA) released a whole bunch of reports detailing (not that we can read the details with the redactions) all the times it screwed up its surveillance tools and possibly violated somebody’s privacy.
The NSA introduction page says the docs were posted on Tuesday, but David Lerman at Bloomberg News reports they went up Wednesday afternoon. The introduction also declines to mention that the release of the documents is a direct result of a freedom of information lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), making the NSA appear to be more compliant and transparent than it would be otherwise (this has been an ongoing trend with NSA document releases).
Of course, there’s going to be attention on some of the more obvious violations. From Fox News:
The reports show violations including communications from people in the U.S. being “inadvertently targeted or collected” by the agency. Some of the violations resemble the disclosures of NSA programs by Edward Snowden. The report cites incidents of “poorly constructed data queries” that targeted Americans, improper handling of data and information used improperly. Some incidents showed how a U.S. Army sergeant used an NSA system to “target his wife,” which led to a reduction in rank and further punishment.
But while those incidents may be the most disconcerting, actually looking through a report will show dozens upon dozens of less sexy, but nevertheless important bureaucratic and technical issues with the operations of the tools the NSA uses for surveillance. The most recent report (pdf) is for the fourth quarter of 2012. By this time, the NSA has had years to hammer out all sorts of problems with its system. Yet, the quarterly report contains 20 pages of brief descriptions of mistakes. Most are not of sinister intent, like the sergeant who targeted his wife, but many of them are from database queries that have not been properly handled or a due to a failure of oversight over who is supposed to have access to what, where. And several of the entries in just this one report are completely redacted. How much worse do those entries have to be that we’re not allowed to see a single word about what happened?
Should we care about this? Recall the case of Khalid El-Masri, the German-Lebanese man mistakenly arrested and tortured by the CIA in a black site in Afghanistan. This cascade of bureaucratic mistakes doesn’t have to be of ill intent to cause some serious harm to somebody. When the NSA extends its data gathering to people two or three steps away from its target, the next El-Masri could be any of us, entirely because of some analyst’s error.
And, of course, these are only the mistakes or errors the NSA knows about and have reported. They are their own oversight. Every one of these disclosures about their surveillance programs comes with a lengthy explanation about how complex their system of internal oversight is, but it’s still dependent on the NSA being honest and transparent. The fact that the ACLU had to fight the NSA to get just this extremely vague information is a reminder of how little the NSA actually supports transparency.
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The Palace of Justice siege (Toma del Palacio de Justicia in Spanish) was a 1985 attack on the Supreme Court of Colombia, in which members of the M-19 Marxist guerrilla group took over the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, Colombia, and held the Supreme Court hostage, intending to hold a trial against President Belisario Betancur. Hours later, after a military raid, the incident left almost half of the 25 Supreme Court Justices dead.[3][4]
The military's role in the siege has been described as a holocaust and massacre by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.[5]
The siege [ edit ]
Day one: 6 November [ edit ]
On 6 November 1985, at 11:35 a.m., three vehicles holding 35 guerrillas (25 men and 10 women) stormed the Palace of Justice of Colombia, entering through the basement.[6][7][8][9] Meanwhile, another group of guerrillas disguised as civilians took over the first floor and the main entrance.[7] The guerrillas killed security guards Eulogio Blanco and Gerardo Díaz Arbeláez and building manager Jorge Tadeo Mayo Castro.[10]
Jorge Medina - a witness located in the basement at the start of the siege - said that "suddenly, the guerrillas entered the basement in a truck. They opened fire with their machine guns against everyone who was there".[11] The official report judged that the guerrillas planned the takeover operation to be a 'bloody takeover'.[12] According to these official sources[13] the guerrillas "set out to shoot indiscriminately and detonate building-shaking bombs while chanting M19-praising battle cries."
The M-19 lost one guerrilla and a nurse during the initial raid on the building.[14] After the guerrillas had neutralised the security personnel guarding the building, they installed armed posts at strategic places, such as the stairs and the fourth floor.[14] A group of guerrillas led by Commander Luis Otero got to the fourth floor and kidnapped the President of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Alfonso Reyes Echandía.[14]
In the meantime many hostages took refuge in empty offices on the first floor, where they hid until around 2 pm.[12]
The assailants took 300 people hostage, including the 24 justices and 20 other judges. The first hostage the guerrilla group asked for was the Supreme Court Justice and President of the Constitutional Court, then called Sala Constitucional, Manuel Gaona Cruz,[15] who was in charge of delivering the opinion of the court with regard to the constitutionality of the extradition treaty between Colombia and the United States.
About three hours after the initial seizure, army troops rescued about 200 hostages[16] from the lower three floors of the building; the surviving gunmen and remaining hostages occupied the upper two floors.
A recording was delivered to a radio station soon after the seizure, saying that the M-19 group had taken over the building "in the name of peace and social justice".[citation needed] From the Supreme Court, the M-19 members demanded via telephone that President Belisario Betancur come to the Palace of Justice in order to stand trial and negotiate. The president refused and ordered an emergency cabinet session.
Day two: 7 November [ edit ]
The M-19 rebels freed State Councillor Reynaldo Arciniegas at 8:30am, with a message for the government to allow the entry of the Red Cross and initiate dialogue. However, the assault on the Palace of Justice commenced later that morning.[7]
The assault [ edit ]
The operation to retake the building was led by General Jesús Armando Arias Cabrales, commander of the Thirteenth Army Brigade in Bogotá; he appointed Colonel Alfonso Plazas, commander of an armored cavalry battalion, to personally oversee the operation.[citation needed] The retaking of the building began that day and ended on 7 November, when Army troops stormed the Palace of Justice, after having occupied some of the lower floors during the first day of the siege. After surrounding the building with EE-9 Cascavel armored cars and soldiers with automatic weapons, they stormed the building sometime after 2 pm. The EE-9s knocked down the building's massive doorway, and even made some direct hits against the structure's external walls.
The official version of the attack holds that, in an effort to complete one of the two objectives they had assaulted the palace for, the M-19 guerrillas burnt different criminal records containing proof and warrants against many members of the group. It is also believed, but argued whether they also burnt records against Pablo Escobar, one of the nation's biggest drug traffickers at the time.[citation needed] However, "no one knows with absolute certainty what happened. The results of the tests carried out later by ballistics experts and investigators demonstrated the most likely cause to have been the recoil effect of the army's rockets. Tests proved that if fired by a soldier standing within twenty feet of wood-lined walls of the library that housed Colombian legal archives, the intense heat generated by the rocket's rear blast could have ignited the wooden paneling. In any event, in a shelved area stacked high with old papers, files, books, and newspapers, the quantity of explosives used by the military virtually guaranteed a conflagration."[17] In total, over 6000 different documents were burned. The fire lasted about 2 days, even with efforts from firemen to try to smother the flames. An investigated theory to the "disappearance" of the missing entities in the siege is that they were charred in the fire, and were not able to be identified in any way, and without having been found, these entities are regarded as missing in action. This theory is still being studied in the different trials of the case.[18]
More than 100 people died during the final assault on the Palace. Those killed consisted of hostages, soldiers, and guerrillas, including their leader, Andrés Almarales, and four other senior commanders of M-19. After the raid, another Supreme Court justice died in a hospital after suffering a heart attack.
Aftermath [ edit ]
The siege of the Palace of Justice and the subsequent raid was one of the deadliest attacks in Colombia in its war with leftist rebels. The M-19 group was still a potent force after the raid, but was severely hampered by the deaths of five of its leaders. In March 1990, it signed a peace treaty with the government.
After the siege, firemen rushed to the site of the assault and smothered the few flames left in the palace. Other rescue groups assisted with removing debris and rubble left after the siege.
President Betancur went on national TV on the night of the 7th, saying he took full responsibility for the "terrible nightmare"; He offered condolences to the families of those who died—civilians and rebels alike—and said he would continue to look for a peaceful solution with the rebels. Exactly a week later, on 14 November, he would offer condolences for another tragedy: the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, which killed 25,000 people in the Armero tragedy. "We have had one national tragedy after another", he said.
This siege led to the creation of the AFEUR unit within the Colombian Army to manage this kind of situation. Colombia's Armed Forces did not have antiterrorist units specifically trained for urban operations before the siege, and some partially blamed the final outcome on the relative inexperience of the personnel assigned to the task.
Dead magistrates [ edit ]
The twelve magistrates killed were:[19]
Manuel Gaona Cruz Alfonso Reyes Echandía Fabio Calderón Botero Dario Velásquez Gaviria Eduardo Gnecco Correa Carlos Medellín Forero Ricardo Medina Moyano Alfonso Patiño Rosselli Horacio Montoya Gil Pedro Elías Serrano Abadía Fanny González Franco Dante Luis Fiorillo Porras
Shortly after the siege, the U.S. and Colombian Justice Minister Enrique Parejo asserted that drug traffickers financed the operation in order to get rid of various criminal files that were lost during the event, hoping to avoid extradition.[20] The Special Commission of Inquiry, established by the Betancur government after intense public pressure,[21] released a June 1986 report which concluded that this was not the case.[22]
Author Ana Carrigan, who quoted the June 1986 report in her book on the siege and originally dismissed any such links between the M-19 and the drug mafia, told Cromos magazine in late 2005 that she now believes that the mafia may have financially supported the M-19.[23]
Pablo Escobar's son claimed that while his father did not come up with or plan the raid, he did pay M-19 a million dollars because he "believed in the ideals" of M-19 and "looked for ways to preserve and support them".[24]
On the same day of the siege, the Supreme Court's docket apparently called for the beginning of pending deliberations on the constitutionality of the Colombia-United States extradition treaty. The M-19 was publicly opposed to extradition on nationalist grounds. Several of the magistrates had been previously threatened by drug lords in order to prevent any possibility of a positive decision on the treaty. One year after the siege, the treaty was declared unconstitutional.[25][26]
Former Assistant to the Colombian Attorney General, National Deputy Comptroller, author and renowned Professor Jose Mauricio Gaona (son of murdered Supreme Court magistrate Manuel Gaona Cruz [es])[27] along with the former Minister of Justice and Ambassador of Colombia to the United Kingdom, Carlos Medellín Becerra (son of magistrate Carlos Medellín Forero [es]), have consistently pushed for further and broader lines of investigations related not only to the presumed links between the M-19 and the Medellín Cartel drug lords, but also to any other possible links to the investigations performed by the Justices of members of the Armed Forces. Congressman Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla, has denied these accusations and dismissed them as based upon the inconsistent testimonies of drug lords. Petro says that the surviving members of the M-19 do admit to their share of responsibility for the tragic events of the siege, on behalf of the entire organization, but deny any links to the drug trade.[28]
Impunity [ edit ]
Later investigations and commentators have considered both the M-19 and the military as responsible for the deaths of the justices and civilians inside the building. Some have blamed President Belisario Betancur for not taking the necessary actions or for failing to negotiate, and others have commented on the possibility of a sort of de facto "24-hour coup", during which the military was in control of the situation.
According to Ana Carrigan's 1993 book The Palace of Justice: A Colombian Tragedy, Supreme Court Chief Justice Alfonso Reyes was apparently burned alive during the assault, as someone incinerated his body after pouring gasoline over it. The book also asserts that, after the siege was over, some twenty-eight bodies were dumped into a mass grave and apparently soaked with acid, in order to make identification difficult. Carrigan argued that the bodies of the victims of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano eruption, which buried the city of Armero and killed more than 20,000 people, were dumped into the same mass grave, making any further forensic investigations impractical.[29][30]
Despite numerous investigations and lawsuits to date, impunity prevailed for most of the subsequent decades. Ana Carrigan asserted in her 1993 book that "Colombia has moved on... Colombia has forgotten the Palace of Justice siege", in much the same way that, in her opinion, Colombians have also forgotten or adopted a position of denial towards other tragic events, such as the 1928 Santa Marta Massacre. No definite responsibility has been fixed on the government or on the surviving members of the M-19 movement who were pardoned after they demobilized.
Eduardo Umaña, the first attorney representing some of the families of the people killed during the siege, was assassinated in 1998, and several members of those families had to flee to Europe because of death threats against them.[31]
The missing [ edit ]
The eleven missing[32]
Photos of the missing[33] Name Occupation Bernardo Beltrán Fernández Cafeteria waiter[34] Héctor Jaime Beltrán Fuentes Cafeteria waiter[34] Ana Rosa Castilblanco* Assistant chef[35] David Celis Cafeteria Chef[34] Norma Constanza Esguerra Sold homemade
pastries
in cafeteria[35][36] Cristina Guarín Cortés Teller in cafeteria Gloria Stella
Lizarazo Figueroa Cafeteria employee Luz Mary Portela León Cafeteria dishwasher[35] Carlos Augusto Vera Rodríguez Cafeteria manager[34] Gloria Anzola de Lanao Niece of
Aydee Anzola,
state official Irma Franco Pineda Law student,
M-19 member
It is suspected[by whom?] that at least 11 people disappeared during the events of the siege, most of them cafeteria workers, and their fate is unknown. It has been speculated[by whom?] that their remains may be among a number of unidentified and charred bodies, one of which was identified through DNA testing done by the National University of Colombia, leaving the fates of the other 10 still in question. [37]
According to Ana Carrigan, one of the disappeared was a law student and M-19 guerrilla, Irma Franco. Carrigan says Franco was seen by several hostages. She also states that the guerrilla left with several hostages and was never seen again.[38] The Special Commission of Inquiry confirmed Franco's disappearance, and the judges requested that the investigation of her case be thoroughly pursued.[39]
One week after the siege, M-19 released a communique to the press claiming that six leaders, including Franco, and "seven other fighters" had all been "disappeared and murdered" by the army. From the tapes of the military and police inter-communications it is known that army intelligence arrested at least seventeen people in the course of the two-day siege. None of the M-19 leaders, with the exception of Andrés Almarales, were ever identified in the city morgue.[40]
Later developments [ edit ]
Palace of Justice building. The newbuilding.
The events surrounding the Palace of Justice siege received renewed media coverage in Colombia during the 20th anniversary of the tragedy. Among other outlets, the country's main daily El Tiempo, the weekly El Espectador, and the Cromos magazine published several articles, interviews and opinion pieces on the matter, including stories about the survivors, as well as the plight of the victims' relatives and those of the missing. [41][42]
2005–2006 Truth Commission [ edit ]
The Supreme Court created a Truth Commission in order to investigate the siege. The Commission officially began its work on November 3, 2005 and according to one of its members, Judge Jorge Aníbal Gómez.[43]
2006–2007 Judicial processes [ edit ]
On 22 August 2006, Attorney General Mario Iguarán announced that former Colonel Edilberto Sánchez, former B-2 intelligence chief of the Army's Thirteenth Brigade, would be summoned for questioning and investigated for the crimes of kidnapping and forced disappearance. Public prosecutors are to reopen the case after examining video tape recordings and identifying cafeteria manager Carlos Augusto Rodríguez being taken outside of the Palace of Justice alive by a soldier, together with other former M-19 hostages.[44]
Former Col. Sánchez was then detained. In May 2007, former Col. Sánchez has been questioned by prosecutors about his possible role in the disappearance of Irma Franco and at least two cafeteria workers, who would have left the Palace alive. Sánchez rejected the charges and proclaimed his innocence. He accepted that he could have received the order to cover the exit of some hostages from the Palace of Justice.[45]
2008 Virginia Vallejo's testimony [ edit ]
On July 11, 2008, Virginia Vallejo, the television anchorwoman who was romantically involved with Pablo Escobar from 1983 to 1987 and author of "Amando a Pablo, odiando a Escobar" (2007) (Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar),[46] was asked to testify in the reopened case of the siege of the Palace of Justice, in order to confirm events that she had described in her memoir, in the chapter "That Palace in Flames", in pages 230 to 266.[47] In the Colombian Consulate in Miami, under oath, she described the relationship of the drug lord with the Sandinista Government of Nicaragua[48][49] and the M-19; also, a meeting of Escobar with the rebel commander Ivan Marino Ospina, in which she had been present, two weeks before the latter was killed by the Army, on August 28, 1985.[50] In her judicial declaration, Vallejo confirmed how, in mid-1986, Escobar had told her that he had paid one million dollars in cash to the rebels, and another million in arms and explosives to steal his files from the Palace of Justice, before the Supreme Court began studying the extradition of the leading members of the cocaine cartels to the United States.[51] During her testimony, that lasted five hours, the journalist described also photographs of sixteen bodies that she had received anonymously in that year. According to her, Escobar identified the victims as the employees of the cafeteria of the Palace and two rebel women that had been detained by the Army after the siege, and had been tortured and disappeared on orders of colonel Edilberto Sánchez, director of B-2, Military Intelligence.[51] Though her testimony was protected under gag, several excerpts appeared on August 17, 2008 in El Tiempo, the newspaper of the Santos' family, including the vice president Francisco Santos, and defense minister Juan Manuel Santos.[52][53] On radio stations,[54] Vallejo accused the office of the Colombian Attorney General of filtering it to the media and adulterating the contents, to protect the military and the former presidential candidate Alberto Santofimio, Escobar’s political ally.[55][56] On June 3, 2010, Virginia Vallejo was granted political asylum in the United States of America.[57]
Sentence and Absolution of Colonel Plazas Vega [ edit ]
In 2010, retired Colonel Alfonso Plazas Vega was sentenced to 30 years of jail time for his alleged role in forced disappearances after the siege.[58]
The President of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, reacted by declaring that he was "sad and hurt" by the decision. He announced his intention of seeking changes to the way military are judged in Colombia and asked for jail time for those he called the "instigators" of the massacre.[59] Uribe also had a meeting with the military command to find ways to protect them from "judiciary decisions that interfere with their work".[60]
Nevertheless, Colombia's General Attorney has declared that crimes against humanity took place during the siege, which has allowed for the continued processing of another colonel and one general involved in the incident.[31] María Stella Jara, the judge that handed the sentence to Colonel Plazas left the country after receiving multiple death threats to her and her son. She and her family had to live under heavy surveillance for the duration of the trial.[61]
On December 16, 2015 Colonel Plazas Vega was declared innocent in a five to three vote by the Colombian Supreme Court and absolved of his previous 30 year prison sentence. The declaration was influenced by a revisiting of the case in the Supreme Court when the validity of testimonies of 4 witnesses came into question, along with absence of conclusive evidence to prove guilt in the charges brought again Plazas Vega.[62]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
Books [ edit ]
Government/NGO reports [ edit ]
News [ edit ]
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Here's what this man learned from one year on a high-fat / low carb diet
The Effects of a Year in Ketosis by James McCarter from Quantified Self on Vimeo.
At the most recent Quantified Self conference, geneticist Jim McCarter talked about the effects of going on a ketogenic diet for a year.
In this fascinating short talk by geneticist Jim McCarter, we see detailed data about the effects of a ketogenic diet: lower blood pressure, better cholesterol numbers, and vastly improved daily well being. Jim also describes the mid-course adjustments he made to reduce side effects such as including muscle cramps and increased sensitivity to cold. Jim begins: “When I tell my friends I’ve given up sugar and starch and get 80% of my calories from fat, the first question I get is: Why?”
Image: Wikipedia
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Radio host Dana Loesch defended a video ad she fronted on behalf of the National Rifle Association Thursday, saying that liberal critics' reaction to it was "insane."
Loesch told Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight" that the ad, titled "The Violence of Lies" was recorded in April. It features images of violent protests against conservative speakers at the University of California at Berkeley and attacks on supporters of President Trump.
"I’m talking over video clips that show actual leftist violence," Loesch told host Tucker Carlson. "Rioting, property damage, arson, physical assault, and apparently me condemning violence is what’s inciting and dividing America."
The video drew condemnation from several liberal commentators and lawmakers, including Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.
Loesch called Murphy's tweet "incredibly reckless and irresponsible."
"There was nowhere in this video ... where I called for anyone to move toward violence, to silence anyone, or where I called for anyone to even pick up a firearm and enact violence," she said. "We just had a couple weeks ago, due to some of this rhetoric like we see from Sen. Murphy, had a crazy leftist lunatic go out and open fire on a bunch of Republican [congressmen] after he double-checked to make sure they were Republican.
"This has to stop, and I’m not going to stop condemning violence, and it’s a shame that other people on the left, Tucker, won’t do the same."
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User Info: Joe_Cobbs Joe_Cobbs 6 years ago #1
_______________________________________________________________________________
Here's a bit of information:
Destruction is 40% stronger
Illusion is 20% stronger
All essential tags have been removed.
Several new followers and marriage options. All of which are listed in a text file with the download.
Several new items including Sheogorath's Outfit. All of which are listed in a text file with the download.
_______________________________________________________________________________
The file has been scanned with Kapersky Anti-Virus 2011 but feel free to scan it with whatever you have.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Download link:
https://hotfile.com/dl/169606596/c7fe1fd/Modded_Save.rar.html
_______________________________________________________________________________
Please take 5 minutes and read the "Important info" file after downloading it.
I also included the files I used to make this for anyone with a PC who wishes to tweak it themselves without a lot of extra work. This is located in the "Tweaks" folder. If you are only using this for xbox then that folder is useless and can be deleted without any trouble.
_______________________________________________________________________________
If you want to post this anywhere please feel free but I did put a lot of time and energy into this so please don't be that guy. Finally finished. All information about the save comes with the download._______________________________________________________________________________Here's a bit of information:Destruction is 40% strongerIllusion is 20% strongerAll essential tags have been removed.Several new followers and marriage options. All of which are listed in a text file with the download.Several new items including Sheogorath's Outfit. All of which are listed in a text file with the download._______________________________________________________________________________The file has been scanned with Kapersky Anti-Virus 2011 but feel free to scan it with whatever you have._______________________________________________________________________________Download link:_______________________________________________________________________________Please take 5 minutes and read the "Important info" file after downloading it.I also included the files I used to make this for anyone with a PC who wishes to tweak it themselves without a lot of extra work. This is located in the "Tweaks" folder. If you are only using this for xbox then that folder is useless and can be deleted without any trouble._______________________________________________________________________________If you want to post this anywhere please feel free but I did put a lot of time and energy into this so please don't be
User Info: Haduken3 Haduken3 6 years ago #2 "You are a fool, I'm going to crush you and throw you into the wind" -Vegeta i have all this and i dont need an xbox
User Info: ArgentumVir ArgentumVir 6 years ago #3 Haduken3 posted...
i have all this and i dont need an xbox
PC board called. They want you back. They don't care that you're a troll because.. PC MASTAHRACE.
EDIT: Cool work. I won't be using this personally, but many here will love you. Also, I always shoot Joe for his Stealthboy... Just saying. Call me Sterling, or Silva.
Check out my Skyrim RRP http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615804-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/63765062 PC board called. They want you back. They don't care that you're a troll because.. PC MASTAHRACE.EDIT: Cool work. I won't be using this personally, but many here will love you. Also, I always shoot Joe for his Stealthboy... Just saying.
User Info: kybotica kybotica 6 years ago #4 Haduken3 posted...
i have all this and i dont need an xbox
Well aren't you just freaking awesome? Take your inane and obnoxious pc elitism back to the pc boards. Oh, wait, they aren't as busy? Well too bad for you.
Thanks, tc! I'll grab this when I next get the chance to. Looking forward to seeing how a non essential play through will work. What was done with children, out of curiosity? "I mean, if I killed George Bush that wouldn't make portals to Iraq appear in my front yard." -Massany7 on Oblivion Well aren't you just freaking awesome? Take your inane and obnoxious pc elitism back to the pc boards. Oh, wait, they aren't as busy? Well too bad for you.Thanks, tc! I'll grab this when I next get the chance to. Looking forward to seeing how a non essential play through will work. What was done with children, out of curiosity?
User Info: Joe_Cobbs Joe_Cobbs (Topic Creator) 6 years ago #5 I have it on PC too but I'm trying to be nice. So please get the fudge out.
User Info: Joe_Cobbs Joe_Cobbs (Topic Creator) 6 years ago #6 Didn't really get any feedback on removing them so they are all there. I tried adding Babette to the follower list but I'm pretty sure it didn't work.
User Info: kybotica kybotica 6 years ago #7 Joe_Cobbs posted...
Didn't really get any feedback on removing them so they are all there. I tried adding Babette to the follower list but I'm pretty sure it didn't work.
Ah ok. Just wanted to know what to expect before I got into it lol. I presume there wasn't a clear cut way to remove their tag due to their belonging to a "child faction" of some sort? "I mean, if I killed George Bush that wouldn't make portals to Iraq appear in my front yard." -Massany7 on Oblivion Ah ok. Just wanted to know what to expect before I got into it lol. I presume there wasn't a clear cut way to remove their tag due to their belonging to a "child faction" of some sort?
User Info: Joe_Cobbs Joe_Cobbs (Topic Creator) 6 years ago #8 Someone said it was possible but it was tricky. This was a pain in the ass enough. I might attempt it later but I'm done for at least a week.
User Info: LiqiudusSnake LiqiudusSnake 6 years ago #9 You Haven't Seen Anything Yet....
http://soundcloud.com/sunnyterra/audio-recording-on-sunday-72 - Hermiione Thanks, tc!
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Banking giant's shame: HSBC to pay record £1.2bn for helping Mexican drug cartels launder money
The investigation has focused on transfer of billions of dollars on behalf of countries under international sanctions
U.S. Senate committee reported bank transferred $7billion (£4.3billion) in cash from Mexico to U.S in 2007 and 2008
British banking giant HSBC will pay £1.2billion ( $1.9billion) to settle a money-laundering probe by federal and state authorities in the United States, a law enforcement official said on Monday.
The probe of the bank - Europe’s largest by market value - has focused on the transfer of billions of dollars on behalf of nations like Iran and North Korea, which are under international sanctions, and the transfer of money through the U.S. financial system from Mexican drug cartels.
According to the official, HSBC will pay £777million ( $1.25billion) in forfeiture and pay £407million ($655million) in civil penalties.
Scroll down for video
Probe: The HSBC headquarters in London. The bank will pay £1.2billion according to a law enforcement official
The £777million figure is the largest forfeiture ever in a case involving a bank.
Under what is known as a deferred prosecution agreement, the financial institution will be accused of violating the Bank Secrecy Act and the Trading With The Enemy Act.
The London-based bank said it is cooperating with investigations but that those discussions are confidential.
Last month it announced it had set aside £933million ($1.5billion) to cover the costs of any settlement or fines.
The deal could be announced as early as today, the Wall Street Journal reports.
It follows the announcement of a similar but much smaller settlement with UK-based Standard Chartered bank, which will pay £186million ($300million) in fines for violating US sanction rules.
The HSBC settlement had been widely expected following a report by the U.S. Senate, published earlier this year, that was heavily critical of HSBC’s money laundering controls.
In regard to HSBC and Mexico, a U.S. Senate investigative committee reported that in 2007 and 2008 HSBC Mexico sent to the United States about $7 billion (£4.3billion) in cash.
Senator Carl Levin, committee chairman, said HSBC had promised to fix deficiencies but failed to do so
The committee report said that amount of cash indicated illegal drug proceeds.
The deferred prosecution agreement means the bank will not be prosecuted further if it meets certain conditions, such as strengthening its internal controls to prevent money laundering.
The U.S. Justice Department has used such arrangements often in cases involving large corporations, notably in settlements of foreign bribery charges.
Money laundering by banks has become a priority target for U.S. law enforcement.
Since 2009, Credit Suisse, Barclays and Lloyds have all paid settlements related to allegations that they moved money for people or companies on the U.S. sanctions list.
Last summer, the Senate investigation concluded that HSBC's lax controls exposed it to money laundering and terrorist financing.
HSBC bank affiliates also skirted U.S. government bans against financial transactions with Iran and other countries, according to the report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
The report also said HSBC's U.S. division provided money and banking services to some banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh thought to have helped fund al Qaida and other terrorist groups.
The report also blamed U.S. regulators, saying they knew the bank had a poor system to detect problems but failed to take action.
Senator Carl Levin, the committee chairman, cited instances in which HSBC promised to fix deficiencies after being sanctioned by regulators but failed to follow up.
Mr Levin also said the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency - the U.S. agency that oversees the biggest banks - tolerated HSBC's weak controls against money laundering for years and that agency examiners who raised concerns were overruled by their superiors.
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Almost a year ago, we showed you what the Moto X (2nd Gen) with Natural Leather looked like after 3 months of usage. With a new Moto X available, the Moto X Pure Edition, we decided to do the same thing. Again, we went with the Natural Leather option through Moto Maker, as the last device with this option turned out looking fantastic, at least in our opinion.
While the germaphobes among us argued that it was dirty or gross looking, we enjoyed the aged, semi-distressed look that only genuine leather can offer. A leather option on a cellphone, something that is highly used throughout a day, begins to build character after only a few days, showing marks, scratches, and scuffs. It’s very unique, and for anyone who can appreciate that, leather is a great choice on the Moto X Pure Edition.
Take a look at the picture below of the “natural” backed Moto X Pure Edition fresh out of the box. Once you have stared long enough, jump below to see how the phone looks now.
Not too shabby, right? Much like we saw on last year’s Moto X (2nd Gen), the leather is certainly starting to darken, soaking up all of those skin oils and elements from daily usage. At least to me eyes, I don’t exactly care for the texture Motorola decided to add on this year’s leather. If you look close enough to the grooves, it appears as if they are just dirty, not aging like fine leather.
Another observation, while the portion of the backside where my hand rests is becoming flat due to usage, parts of the sides, top, and bottom are not wearing at the same rate. This leaves me with a mix of smooth and textured feels when running my finger along the back. This is not a gripe, but something to note, given the phone’s size. If it was smaller, like last year’s Moto X, then we would probably see a similar rate of wear along the entire backside.
These photos are from only one month’s usage, and I don’t plan on dropping this device anytime too soon, at least until next year’s lineup starts rolling through. This phone just received Marshmallow after all, so I will continue to update you all a few months down the road.
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Another week coming to a close, another week’s worth of Star Wars gaming news to go over.
Video Games
The Bespin DLC is out now for Season Pass holders and there sure are a lot of new things to try out and explore.
Dengar and Lando have landed and EA has put out an article explaining their abilities and what makes them unique.
In addition to the new heroes, there’s also a chunk of new star cards and two new guns that are also explained in an article on EA’s site.
Along with the DLC came a new game update which changed a lot of things, hopefully for the better. A full breakdown of all the updates in the patch can be found on the official forums.
In addition to that, another update will be coming on Monday to fix some unexpected bugs that popped up, such as Dengar being able to one-hit-kill heroes with his hurricane strike.
Also a new event has been announced for The Old Republic: The Dark vs Light Event starts on June 28. Seems like you’re encouraged to start a new character, complete specific challenges, and then reap in the rewards.
Tabletop Games
As we draw closer to the Coruscant Invitational, another tournament is finished and we have a winner. The Yavin Open in Birmingham, UK wrapped up with an Imperial victory. FFG has laid out an article about the winner and his list on their site.
Three new adversary decks are now available for the RPGs. These decks are pretty handy if you’re a GM so check them out!
We’ve also just got a new preview for the Inquisitor Villain Pack for Imperial Assault. This guy looks awesome.
He can cleave on targets that are on opposite sides of him. That’s crazy.
Looks like he also comes with a skirmish attachment that should bring Kayn and Sorin back into the game possibly.
The final round of voting for the ships the competitors must use in the Coruscant Invitational is here.
It’s come down to TIE Punisher vs TIE Defender, HWK vs X-Wing, and Star Viper vs M3A Interceptor.
Which ships do you want to see win?
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The songs are from post-hardcore quintet mewithoutYou ("All Circles") and the midwest emo band Good Luck ("Significant Day") because we need a little more variety in our highlight videos than inane techno music.
The video includes some really good saves, some goals he couldn't do anything on, and some goals he definitely wasn't at his best. Most highlight videos include save after save but you can really tell just how good a goalkeeper is by the type of goals they concede. Not to mention, if you search "Ethan Horvath" on YouTube, the top results are people either talking about Horvath, Horvath getting scored on, or some kid playing piano. So it's intentionally not a highlight video. It's a survey what type of goalkeeper the twenty year old is.
Strengths
Enough can't be said about his technique and mechanics. He clearly has been sculpted as a goalkeeper and the results are someone who can play in Europa League as essentially a young sophomore in college. His stance is typically very even and his jumpset is impeccable. It is because of his sound mechanics that he can overcome his average athleticism to make an extended save. He is set in time with the shot and can move his body in the most optimal way to cover ground. Additionally, he's never trying to force a play. Instead, he is trusts his skills to time the play and react as necessary. So he'll sit back on his line waiting to make a save, like Brad Guzan often does. Even in 1v1 situations, he'll still play very passive. He won't rush out there trying to solve it with brashness. He's calm, playing high percentage areas like a specifically placed wall, instead of a flaming car from 2 Fast 2 Furious.
It should also be noted that he shows the correct mindset and poise to be playing at such a high level, as much as you can tell watching video. He never looks out of depth or beaten; he looks like he really loves the competition and embraces it. There have been a number of young goalkeepers that come up early only to look overwhelmed, especially after giving up a poor goal. Horvath, on the other hand, looks similar whether he made a great save or slipped up on the play. And looking at his path taken to where he is today, it makes sense.
Weaknesses
The biggest weaknesses are clearly his lack of athleticism and reactions. He's not a Bill Hamid or Jon Busch. His top saves will almost all be extension saves. That's not saying he won't have any reaction saves (there's one that opens the video) but it's just not going to happen as often. Similarly, his lateral movement and post-to-post time is relatively slow. I think this has more to do with his body frame and what his focus has been as a goalkeeper up to now. Clearly he has a goalkeeper coach, not a goalkeeper trainer. If he had a trainer, he would be a quicker and stronger athlete but would have spent less time focusing on being a good goalkeeper. I'd still like to see a little more spring in his lead diving foot. Right now, his lead foot is more of a prop to rotate power generated from his back leg as opposed to giving us a nice Oliver Kahn-explosive dive. Several of his dives he doesn't get the elevation or power needed to cover the frame as much as he should.
Outlook
If there was a US goalkeeper I would compare him to it would be Brad Friedel. I know, I know, I don't want to Earl Edwards him - and I'm not - but he has the frame and approach that Friedel had. Both tall and lanky, they loved to let the game come to them and then respond, as if to say "Let's see the best you can do but I'm not worried about it." Friedel was never the most agile of goalkeepers but as someone who was playing in the EPL at 42, he clearly had some thought behind his play. Horvath is in a great position to grow as a goalkeeper. Like I said earlier, he has the mechanics that he can build off of and like David de Gea did, he can up his athleticism still. I'm not penning him down as a definite World Cup starter, but when he's compared to his peers he's noticeably ahead of them.
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Nostalgia. Without a doubt, the game that started it all. Bring back that feeling of risk and reward, death and triumph and always pushing the limits.
Unique. Ultima Online Forever's fundamental concepts and features surpass most of our second and third generation MMO's in a total dynamic way.
Complete. Forever, a server done right. Invest one hour of your time with us, and see how quickly you want to invest more. Built correctly, maintained indefinitely.
Dedication. Unmatched dedication and service. Dedicated professional staff with a mature growing community, UO Forever is an easy place to call home.
Free To Play The entire game can be played without making a purchase. Enjoy the rewarding feeling while you create, build and maintain your character in a world which you will live and exist in. Become a bard, animal tamer, shop owner, craftsman, adventurer, treasure hunter, even a murderer... Read More
Sandbox Style An expansive, immersive sandbox world enjoyed by many players all over every day. It's an innovative and unmatched experience in the realm of MMORPG games. A world in which you can not only fight, craft, create, tame, explore, and triumph...but a world in which you can live... Read More
Total Control The only game in the world where you can do anything, be anything, at any given time. Experience true real-time combat where you decide every move your character makes and where your personal skill really matters. Build your own house, set up a guild, rule the world... Read More
What people are saying about Ultima Online Forever: We were talking on ventrilo last night about how we have not had this much fun in a game in a long time. I attribute almost all of that to both the reliance on other players, and the fact that we have built a community that feels like it is permanent. - KEENANDGRAEV.COM
In Depth Wiki We offer an in depth wikipedia that is constantly being updated by our own players, for our own players.
An All New Adventure! Constantly added to and updated, explore new levels of dungeons Shame, Deceit, Destard and Covetous or try your best character against one of our many new customized Dungeons!
Crafting Benefits Ultima Online Forever offers a unique crafting area located at The Hammer and Anvil Blacksmith shop located North West Britain just south of the Cemetary. This area not only helps crafters but it also brings back that nostalgia from the days when you would go to the blacksmith and have someone repair your gear. Always great to see people helping one another!
Unique Murderer System Ultima Online Forever has possibly one of the most unique, balanced and fun bounty systems that has ever been seen in the game before. When creating this we knew we had to not only have balance, but it had to be done in such a way so that murderers could not use or abuse the system to their personal advantage at all. While murdering people can be a quick way to wealth, bounty hunting and killing murderers can quickly become profitable now too.
Unreal Events! Some that have never been seen or tried before! Here at Ultima Online Forever we offer multiple events which reward platinum, rares, gold and tons of fun/action! From capture the flag events to full town invasions. Mixed in with our powerful "Pseudoseer System" we are able to take full control of the world and even give control to our every-day players ultimately resulting in never seen before events!
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WestJet CEO Gregg Saretsky, frustrated with the new $2-billion terminal at Calgary International Airport, says passengers put off by long walking distances and inconvenient connections may soon avoid travelling through YYC altogether.
In an interview, Saretsky said the airport authority has failed to listen to concerns about the two-million-square-foot terminal, which opened in October to serve people flying to international destinations.
“We’re on record as not having been happy,” he said. “We’ve asked the airport to sit and meet and work with us to solve some of these problems. I think they believe these are all things that will just sort out … Well, it’s open, and it’s still not sorted out.”
The new terminal was designed to ease congestion and clear the path for growth, after passenger volumes nearly doubled over the past two decades. It features a number of new technologies and processes aimed at streamlining connections — including enhanced procedures at customs and pre-board security, as well as a new connections centre which allows many passengers to transit through the airport to other destinations without picking up their bags or having to be re-screened.
But Saretsky said the terminal’s sheer size — the equivalent of 34 football fields — makes it difficult for passengers to get around.
“For WestJet guests arriving domestically and going trans-border or internationally, it’s up to a two-kilometre walk,” he said. “And the baggage systems between the domestic and international terminals don’t connect, and won’t until 2019. So we’ve got a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility that is actually broken in the middle.”
In an email, Calgary Airport Authority spokeswoman Jody Moseley said the design of the new international terminal was endorsed by WestJet prior to the start of construction in 2011, and WestJet was an active participant on the operational planning team. She said WestJet’s input was incorporated into a number of aspects of the terminal’s design, including the WestJet check-in layout as well as the electric-powered passenger shuttle service called YYC Link.
“WestJet is an important partner and as such has been an active participant in our growth and development plans, which are driven by our airline partners’ business strategies,” Moseley said.
Related
But Saretsky said WestJet was concerned from the beginning that the proposed layout would cause problems, and the airport authority failed to fully heed its warnings. He acknowledged the shuttle was in part an effort to address WestJet’s concerns, though he added the shuttle can’t handle large volumes of connecting passengers getting off a 767 jet at once and said the airline would rather have seen the construction of a monorail or terminal link train instead.
“It (the shuttle) is better than nothing, but it’s not world class,” he said.
Saretsky added WestJet has had to build longer connection times into its schedules to allow for walk distances. In Seattle, for example, WestJet builds a 35-minute connection time for passengers into its schedules. In Calgary, Saretsky said the airline now must allow for a 75-minute connection time.
“If some of these issues don’t get addressed, and the connectivity issues don’t get resolved, guests will figure out very quickly that it’s easier to connect in Vancouver or in Seattle than coming through Calgary,” he said. “I think this terminal risks actually forcing traffic to other airports.”
Saretsky added WestJet is waiting for incoming CEO Bob Sartor to take the reins at the airport authority in January, in the hope he will take a fresh look at the airline’s concerns. Sartor, the former head of Big Rock Brewery, is replacing retiring airport authority CEO Garth Atkinson.
“We were urging the airport to build a plan that would better address (our concerns),” Saretsky said. “Now we’ll wait for the new CEO and give him the same list and see if we can make more headway.”
On its Facebook page, the Calgary International Airport has fielded a number of reviews of the new terminal — some positive, some negative. Of the negative reviews, many specifically mention walk distances and difficulties getting around.
But Moseley said the airport authority is “hearing great things” about the connections process, and believes that passengers are moving smoothly through the facility.
“Familiarity with the new systems and processes will take some time, but we are providing information in the terminal, online and through our social media channels to reassure passengers,” Moseley said.
WestJet hired 225 new people to staff the new terminal, adding $15 million in salary costs to the company’s bottom line. Saretsky said the new hires were necessary not because the number of WestJet flights has increased, but because the size and layout of the new facility require staff to be in different physical locations.
[email protected]
Twitter.com/AmandaMsteph
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A lawsuit filed Monday in the D.C. federal district court challenges U.S. foreign aid to Israel. IRmep’s Center for Policy and Law is holding a conference call briefing about the lawsuit August 11 at 10 AM EST (details below). IRmep Press Release:
The U.S. is finalizing a ten-year memorandum of understanding which will reportedly boost aid to $4-5 billion per year. Grant F. Smith, Director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep), in the suit challenges the authority of the president and U.S. federal agencies to deliver such foreign aid to Israel. Such aid violates longstanding bans on aid to non-signatories to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) with nuclear weapons programs. Since the bans went into effect, U.S. foreign aid to Israel is estimated to be $234 billion.
The lawsuit reveals how in the mid-1970s during investigations into the illegal diversion of weapons-grade uranium from U.S. contractor NUMEC to Israel, Senators Stuart Symington and John Glenn amended the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act to ban any aid to clandestine nuclear powers that were not NPT signatories. Symington clarified the legislative intent of the amendments: “…if you wish to take the dangerous and costly steps necessary to achieve a nuclear weapons option, you cannot expect the United States to help underwrite that effort indirectly or directly.”
The Obama administration follows precedents established since the Ford administration by ignoring internal agency and public domain information that should trigger Symington & Glenn cutoffs and waiver provisions governing foreign aid. The administration has gone further in criminalizing the flow of such information from the federal government to the public.
In 2012 the Department of Energy under U.S. State Department authority passed a secret gag law called “Guidance on Release of Information relating to the Potential for an Israeli Nuclear Capability.” The gag law and related measures promote a “nuclear ambiguity” policy toward Israel. The primary purpose of the gag law is to unlawfully subvert Symington & Glenn arms export controls, the suit alleges.
IRmep won unprecedented release of a Pentagon report about Israel’s nuclear weapons program through a 2014 lawsuit. A 2015 IRmep lawsuit dislodged CIA files about the NUMEC diversion.
IRmep’s Center for Policy and Law is holding a conference call briefing about the lawsuit August 11 at 10 AM EST. Register online here to receive the conference call phone number, access code and briefing materials. Registration closes 9 PM on August 10.
IRmep is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit researching U.S. Middle East policy formulation.
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"Taegukgi" and "Taegeukgi" redirect here. For the 2004 South Korean movie, see Taegukgi (film)
Republic of Korea Name Taegukgi / Taegeukgi
(Hangul: 태극기 )
(Hanja: 太極旗 Use National flag and ensign Proportion 2:3 Adopted January 27, 1883 (original version, used by the Joseon dynasty)
June 29, 1942 (Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea)
October 15, 1949 (as the flag of South Korea) [1]
May 30, 2011 (current version) Design A white field with a red and blue taegeuk in the center that is surrounded by four varying groups of short black bars toward each corner Variant flag of Republic of Korea Use Naval jack
The flag of South Korea, also known as the Taegukgi (also spelled as Taegeukgi, literally "supreme ultimate flag"), has three parts: a white rectangular background, a red and blue Taegeuk, symbolizing balance, in its center, and four black trigrams selected from the original eight, one toward each corner.
Symbolism [ edit ]
The flag's background is white, a traditional color in Korean culture. White was common in the daily attire of 19th-century Koreans, and it still appears in contemporary versions of traditional Korean garments, such as the hanbok. The color represents peace and purity.[2]
The circle in the middle is derived from the philosophy of um-yang (yin-yang from China) and represents balance in the universe. The red half represents positive cosmic forces, and the blue half represents the opposing negative cosmic forces.
Together, the trigrams represent movement and harmony as fundamental principles. Each trigram (hangeul: 괘 [gwae]; hanja: 卦) represents one of the four classical elements,[3] as described below:
Trigram Korean name Celestial body Season Cardinal direction Virtue Family Natural element Meaning ☰ geon
( 건 / 乾 heaven
( 천 / 天 spring
( 춘 / 春 east
( 동 / 東 humanity
( 인 / 仁 father
( 부 / 父 heaven
( 천 / 天 justice
( 정의 / 正義 ) ☲ ri
( 리 / 離 sun
( 일 / 日 autumn
( 추 / 秋 south
( 남 / 南 righteousness
( 의 / 義 daughter
( 녀 / 女 fire
( 화 / 火 fruition
( 결실 / 結實 ) ☵ gam
( 감 / 坎 moon
( 월 / 月 winter
( 동 / 冬 north
( 북 / 北 intelligence
( 지 / 智 son
( 자 / 子 water
( 수 / 水 wisdom
( 지혜 / 智慧 ) ☷ gon
( 곤 / 坤 earth
( 지 / 地 summer
( 하 / 夏 west
( 서 / 西 courtesy
( 례 / 禮 mother
( 모 / 母 earth
( 토 / 土 vitality
( 생명력 / 生命力 )
History [ edit ]
The earliest surviving depiction of the flag was printed in a U.S. Navy book Flags of Maritime Nations in July 1882.[4] The earliest surviving depiction of the flag was printed in a U.S. Navy bookin July 1882.
Ceremony inaugurating the South Korean government on August 15, 1948.
The absence of a national flag only became an issue for Korea in 1876, during the reign of the Joseon dynasty. Before 1876, Korea did not assert a need for or the importance of a national flag. The issue arose during the negotiations for the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1876, at which the delegate of the Empire of Japan displayed the Japanese national flag, whereas the Joseon Dynasty had no corresponding national symbol to exhibit. At that time, some proposed to create a national flag, but the Korean government looked upon the matter as unimportant and unnecessary. By 1880, the proliferation of foreign negotiations led to the need for a national flag.[5] The most popular proposal was described in the "Korea Strategy" papers, written by the Chinese delegate Huang Zunxian. It proffered to incorporate the flag of the Qing Dynasty of China into that of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea. In response to the Chinese proposal, the Korean government dispatched delegate Lee Young-Sook to consider the scheme with Chinese statesman and diplomat Li Hongzhang. Li agreed with some elements of Huang's suggestion while accepting that Korea would make some alterations. The Qing government assented to Li's conclusions, but the degree of enthusiasm with which the Joseon government explored this proposal is unknown.[1]
The issue remained unpursued for a period, re-emerging with the negotiation of the United States–Korea Treaty of 1882, also known as the Shufeldt Treaty. The controversy arose after the delegate Lee Eung-Jun presented a flag similar to the flag of Japan to the Chinese official Ma Jianzhong. In response to the discussion, Ma Jianzhong argued against the proposed idea of using the flag of the Qing Dynasty and proposed a flag with a white background, with a half-red and half-black circle in the center, with eight black bars around the flag.[1] On August 22, 1882, Park Yeong-hyo created a scale model of the Taegukgi to the Joseon government. Park Yeong-hyo became the first person to use the Taegukgi in the Empire of Japan in 1882.[6] On January 27, 1883, the Joseon government officially promulgated Taegukgi to be used as the official national flag.[1]
In 1919, a flag similar to the current South Korean flag was used by the provisional Korean government-in-exile based in China.
After the restoration of Korean independence in 1945, the Taegukgi remained in use after the southern portion of Korea became a democratic republic under the influence of the United States but also used by the People's Republic of Korea. At the same time, the flag of the United States was also used by the United States Army Military Government in Korea alongside with the Taegukgi. Following the establishment of the South Korean state in August 1948, the current flag was declared official by the government of South Korea on October 15, 1949,[1] although it had been used as the de facto national flag before then.[7]
In February 1984, the exact dimensional specifications of the flag were codified.[8][9][10][11] In October 1997, the exact colors of the flag were specified via presidential decree.[2][12]
Cultural role in contemporary South Korean society [ edit ]
The name of the South Korean flag is used in the title of a 2004 South Korean film about the Korean War, Tae Guk Gi.
According to scholar Brian Reynolds Myers, the South Korean flag in the context of the country's society is often used as an ethnic flag, representing a grander nationalistic idea of a "Korean race" rather than merely symbolizing the South Korean state itself.[13] He said that: "When the average [South Korean] man sees the [South Korean] flag, he feels fraternity with [ethnic] Koreans around the world."[14] Myers also stated in a 2011 thesis that: "Judging from the yin-yang flag's universal popularity in South Korea, even among those who deny the legitimacy of the Republic of Korea, it evidently evokes the [Korean race] race first and the [South Korean] state second."[15] This was reflected in the original version of the South Korean flag's pledge of allegiance, instituted in 1972 and used until 2007, which stressed allegiance to the "Korean race" rather than the South Korean state.[15]
Myers stated that because of the South Korean flag being considered by a large part of the country's citizens to represent the "Korean race" rather than solely the South Korean state, flag desecration in South Korea by the country's citizens is extremely rare when compared to other countries, where countries' citizens desecrate their own national flags. Thus even some South Korean citizens opposed to the South Korean state or its existence will still treat the South Korean flag with reverence and respect: "There is therefore none of the parodying or deliberate desecration of the state flag that one encounters in the countercultures of other countries."[15]
Specifications [ edit ]
Proper vertical display of flag
Dimensions [ edit ]
Flag construction sheet
The width and height are in the ratio of 3 to 2. There are five sections on the flag, the taegeuk and the four groups of bars. The diameter of the circle is half of the height. The top of the taegeuk should be red and the bottom of the taegeuk should be blue. The groups of bars are put in the four corners of the flag.[16]
Colors [ edit ]
[17] Darker version of the flag using RGB approximations of semi-official Pantone approximations
The colors of the Taegukgi are specified in the "Ordinance Act of the Law concerning the National Flag of the Republic of Korea." (Korean: 대한민국 국기법 시행령)[18] There were no exact specifications regarding the colors until 1997, when the South Korean government decided to provide standard specifications for the flag. In October 1997, a Presidential ordinance on the standard specification of the South Korean flag was promulgated,[19] and that specification was acceded by the National Flag Law in July 2007.
The colors are defined in legislation by the Munsell and CIE color systems:
Gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
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The 15-year-old orphan who touched millions of hearts with his plea for a family inside a Florida church will spend Christmas with potential parents.
Davion Only, who has spent his life in various orphan homes, is spending Christmas with a prospective adoptive family. The couple is reportedly planning to take Only away during the holiday for his first vacation.
In October, the teen made headlines worldwide when he pleaded for a family to adopt inside the St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church in St. Petersburg.
Only, dressed in a dark suit and borrowed tie, told the packed church that he was seeking a family to call his own. His requirements were simple.
"I'll take anyone," he said. "Old or young, dad or mom, black, white, purple. I don't care. And I would be really appreciative. The best I could be."
Only was born while his mother was in jail and has never had a permanent home, according to the Tampa Bay Times, which first reported about the teen's plight.
Last summer, Only tried to find his biological mother, but instead found her obituary, the newspaper reported. She had died a few weeks earlier.
Only also appealed to Florida Gov. Rick Scott in November to speak on behalf of all homeless Florida teenagers seeking a family.
"Even though I'm going through an adoption process right now at the moment, I still hope that other kids in foster care get the benefit that I'm going to have to be adopted and to have somewhere to call home and to have a bed to call theirs," he told the governor and his cabinet, according to the newspaper.
While Only's ordeal has a happy ending, there are 610,042 people who are homeless in the U.S., some 23 percent, or 138,149, are children, according to the government. The states with the highest rates of homeless children are California, Florida and Texas.
FoxNews.com's Edmund DeMarche contributed to this report.
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Look, we know we want the kids to have a growth mindset and to embrace a “ Culture of Error “– in which kids like struggle and challenge and in which getting it wrong is a key tool for getting it right.
We know we want the kids to think, “Oh, good. This is going to be hard!” not “Oh, no. This is going to be hard.” We know it’s great for teachers to say things to the kids like what Bob Zimmerli says in one of the clips in TLaC 2.0, “I’m so glad you made that mistake. It’s going to help me to help you.”
But arguably even more important to a school’s effectiveness is the growth mindset among the adults. Do THEY love struggle. Do THEY embrace error and think it’s safe and beneficial to have their colleagues and school leaders see them struggle?
That’s the key question, and here’s a test I would provide. If you had a teacher (or a coach) teaching something new and difficult for the first time and you asked to drop in, would he or she be more likely to say: “I’ve never taught this before, please don’t come watch me?” or “I’ve never taught this before, please come watch me?”*
* Coda: Just chatted briefly with Larry Ferlazzo about this post and have realized that it could be read as challenging teachers directly to adopt more of a growth mindset. I suppose there’s an element of that for all of us to consider in our lives but my point (and I think Larry’s too) is that this is first and foremost a school culture issue–an important question administrators should ask themselves about their building. We know as teachers that if the kids try to hide their struggles it will be 10x harder to help them grow. My point is that it’s the same for adults. If teachers try to hide the inherent struggle of doing one to the most difficult jobs in our society it will be 10x harder to help them be the best they can be. If we build cultures where our teachers trust that we will support them and make them better when we see them doing the hard parts of the job, then we’ll be on our way.
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by
Review: Lies, Damned Lies, and College Admissions
In the tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, two self-described tailors persuade a vain ruler that they can make him a fabric so light that stupid and incompetent people cannot see it. Then, when the con men create nothing, people still proclaim its beauty for fear that not doing so would be an admission of incompetence.
As the emperor sits in his procession, one lone child cries, “The emperor is naked!” Upon realizing the truth, the chorus of the crowd echoes, “The emperor is naked!” but he continues on as though there were no problem.
Substitute much of higher education in the United States and elsewhere for the invisible fabric, and you have your analogy. The tale’s theme also matches that of my favorite book on the topic, Lies, Damned Lies, and College Admissions: An Inquiry into Education by Arvin Vohra (2012, 200 pages). We met at the 2012 International Students for Liberty Conference, and I was glad to have him on the show soon after. You can hear that interview here—41 minutes.
[audio: http://thestatelessman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/TSM14Mar2012-Part1.mp3|titles=Arvin Vohra on lies about college]
Vohra, an educational entrepreneur and author of The Equation for Excellence, leads into his exposé with the admissions process. He cites the lack of objective and transparent criteria (with racially motivated origins), superficial and irrelevant essay questions—usually not even written by the applicant—and rampant dishonesty.
The admissions process, he says, is “like one of those minor surface flaws that indicates a deeper cultural rot.” As a Brown University graduate and professional tutor for college applications and standardized tests, he observes this rot in a variety of forms.
He believes the cost, for example, is totally out of proportion with the education on offer and the underlying inputs. The waste and inflated prices—usually more than $100 per hour of class time—are hard to deny when one can hire college instructors one-on-one for the same price or less than the college classes.
His point reminds me of when I first came to the United States to attend Boston University. While I was on an athletic scholarship, most students were paying between $35,000 and $40,000 in tuition, and tuition hikes were a frequent topic in the student newspaper, The Daily Free Press. Such articles, however, would always be accompanied by the standard administration refrain that affordability was still their priority.
“We understand that this tuition increase is a burden for many families and we continue to focus on maintaining access to Boston University for students with varying economic means,” says the president. Right, as though the annual $40,000, even with the variety of “financial aid” programs, enables access for those with varying economic means—not to mention the immense costs of textbooks and mandatory on-campus room and board.
Such is the absurdity of college expenses, Vohra believes higher education has become a national religion in the United States—and I can attest to a similar state of affairs in other countries, particularly Canada and New Zealand. Fortunately, Vohra is not alone in making this point, and even The Onion has poked fun at how people cling to the value of their precious degrees, in the face compelling evidence to the contrary.
Man Has Alarming Level of Pride in Institution That Left Him $50,000 In Debt, Inadequately Prepared for Job Market
“The college stamp of approval has almost the same mystical and questionable value that [Catholic] indulgences must have had,” Vohra explains. “Just as the Catholic Church convinced people that they [needed] priests to interpret the Bible, colleges have tricked us into believing we need indifferent professors and inexperienced grad students to accomplish what a library card, an Amazon account, and a few tutors could do better at a tenth of the price.”
Click here for a Stateless Man interview with Duke Cheston of the Pope Center on Higher Education Policy regarding the ten strangest college majors he could find and the viability of international satellite campuses—18 minutes.
[audio: http://thestatelessman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Duke-Cheston.mp3|titles=Duke Cheston: You Majored in What?]
But the trick goes far beyond the stamp of approval. College administrators in the United States manage to get applicants to hand over their bank account and tax return documents before they decide what the final price will be. Vohra describes this as the dream of sleazy, price-manipulating salesmen. That way they can squeeze potential customers for as much as they can possibly pay.
Then college administrators have the gall to presume we should respect them for their practice, as though their financial aid were some kind of charitable act. Such a veneer of altruism also falls flat when Vohra explains how many academic departments deliberately adjust and update textbooks in useless ways. They do so to make students feel obliged to buy new editions, when they would otherwise save handsomely with used copies.
Such tactics have coincided with an explosion of student debt in the United States—by more than 500 percent in the past decade, beyond credit card and automobile obligations. But new students just keep on coming, with a projected record of 21.9 million in American higher education this fall of 2013.
One account Vohra offers for the growing student numbers is the way college administrators have avoided precise performance metrics. Instead they sell an “experience” and “selectivity” (elitism).
This college “experience” marketing ploy is a distraction from the purpose of higher education, where many colleges fail dismally. Further, someone could easily use the money for college to have alternative and superior life-enriching experiences. In four years, for example, one could travel the globe and learn multiple new languages and cultures, all for far less than the cost of college.
Regarding selectivity, Vohra compares college administrators to someone who jumps in front of a parade and claims to be leading it.
“‘Selective’ colleges find students who are going to do well anyway. When they do well, the colleges insist on sharing the credit for successes they had little to do with, and using that association to justify ludicrous fees.”
Elitism and experience, Vohra continues, constitute the “mystical, fuzzy name power that colleges are selling”—complete with clergy-like robes and the magical talisman of graduation. They sell these items because competitors could replicate the course material at a fraction of the price or even for free. The college atmosphere, on the other hand, defies measurement.
Although Vohra gets a little off track at times, venturing into philosophy and theology, there is plenty of valuable material in this book. And despite the inflammatory title, he does not take an all-or-nothing, dismissive approach to higher education. Rather, he acknowledges that it depends greatly on the outcome one is seeking and calls for pragmatism. He even includes an interlude on “How to do Higher Education Without College”—in other words, how to get your qualification with as little wasted time and money as possible.
Many readers will note that there has already been talk of a bubble in higher education and attempts to promote alternatives. However, the chorus of echoes, as occurs in The Emperor’s New Clothes, has yet to arrive. With so many young people giving up their formative years and crippling themselves with student debt, along with wasting taxpayer dollars, I hope people pick up this book and see higher education for what it is and not for what its purveyors claim it to be.
For a broader discussion of higher education, including interviews with James Altucher, Yaël Ossowski, and Shane Hachey, please click here.
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Phobos-Ground probe, which was supposed to have landed on a Martian moon, got stuck in Earth's orbit
A Russian spacecraft bound for Mars but stuck in Earth's orbit will crash next month, the Russian space agency said on Friday.
The $170m (£109m) Phobos-Ground probe was to have landed on the Martian moon Phobos and brought soil samples back to Earth in a 2½-year mission. Roscosmos said the 13.2-tonne craft – including 11 tonnes of highly toxic fuel – would fall back to Earth between 6 and 19 January. But only 20 to 30 fragments weighing a total of up to 200kg (440lb) will survive the fiery plunge and shower the Earth's surface. Where they will land could only be calculated a few days beforehand, Roscosmos said in a statement.
The fuel and radioactive material on board will pose no danger of contamination, the agency said.
Roscosmos lost contact with the probe following its launch on 9 November, but had not admitted the craft was lost until now.
Engineers in Russia and at the European Space Agency have tried to propel it away from Earth's orbit.
Experts had warned that if the fuel froze, some could survive re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and pose a serious threat if it fell over populated areas.
But Roscosmos said it was sure that all fuel would burn on re-entry some 60 miles up. The 10kg of cobalt-57, a radioactive metal in one of the craft's instruments, posed no threat of contamination.
The mission was the latest in a series of recent Russian launch failures that have raised concerns about the condition of the country's space industries.
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Josh Lowensohn
Google has announced an 88 percent price cut for those using Google Maps on high-traffic Web sites and services.
The move, which Google Maps API product manager Thor Mitchell announced yesterday, comes a few days before the developer-oriented Google I/O show and two weeks after Apple ditched Google Maps for the upcoming iOS 6.
Google lets others embed Google Maps on their own sites and services through the Google Maps API, or application programming interface. When Google announced new limits to Google Maps usage last October, Mitchell said at the time, "We need to secure its long-term future by ensuring that even when used by the highest volume for-profit sites, the service remains viable."
But other factors entered into the viability equation. Apple is the highest-profile defection, but there have been others, too, as Web sites dumped Google Maps because of high prices and put their weight behind the OpenStreetMap project instead, Google evidently took note.
"We've been listening carefully to feedback, and today we're happy to announce that we're lowering API usage fees and simplifying limits," Mitchell said. "While the Maps API remains free for the vast majority of sites, some developers were worried about the potential costs. In response, we have lowered the online price from US $4 per 1,000 map loads to 50 cents per 1,000 map loads."
Yes, that's a factor of eight cheaper. Mitchell added:
We're beginning to monitor Maps API usage starting today, and, based on current usage, fees will only apply to the top 0.35 percent of sites regularly exceeding the published limits of 25,000 map loads every day for 90 consecutive days. We aren't automating the application of these limits, so if your site consistently uses more than the free maps allowance we'll contact you to discuss your options. Please rest assured that your map will not stop working due to a sudden surge in popularity.
Mitchell also pointed to another service that may have changed Google's thinking: map-based ads that turn its mapping service into a money maker.
"You can generate revenue from your Maps API application using AdSense for Maps, which enables you to display relevant ads on or alongside your map. As with AdSense's text-based ads, the publisher gets some of the resulting ad revenue -- and Google keeps the rest.
Via Daring Fireball.
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Koralo
Item#: SCP-2641
Object Class: Safe
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-2641 is to be contained in a 15x15mm locked box
Description: SCP-2641 is a 15x15mm 6 sided die carved out of human bones. Carbon dating has show the dice date back to around the 2nd century AD. When the die is intentionally rolled its anomalous effects are triggered. when the die lands on any side other than 1 the die will cause the nearest human being suffer excruciating and constant pain throughout the body despite a lack of physical injuries.
The only way for this pain to end is if the die is rolled again when the previous subject is closest to the die. Upon the second rolling of the die there are two possibilities if the die lands on anything other than a 1 for a second time the subject will suffer total heart failure and die within seconds. If the second roll does result in a 1 however the subjects pain will cease and they will return to their original state with no anomalous properties
if the first roll shows both dice facing up on the side with 1 dot than both of the subjects eyes will become bronze,reflective and grow a vertical pupil similar to the eyes of Vipera aspis .despite the physical change the eyesight of the subject remains unaffected
Discovery: SCP-2641 was discovered by an ammeter archaeologist in 19__ near the village of [REDACTED],Italy. The young man dug up the dice presumably rolled them and is believed to have committed suicide using a large rock. When his body was found the local authorities collected the dice as evidence and were handed to the foundation after the following investigation had failed to find a reasonable cause for his death.
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We asked the members of the Rock and Roll Book Club podcast to recommend some of their favorite reads by, for and about debauched rock 'n' roll musicians. They turned around an eclectic list of 12 books that covers genres from alt-country to hair metal and decades from the '60s to the present. An excellent primer on the memoirs of rock, if you ask us. - Kristen Schmidt
We asked the members of the Rock and Roll Book Club podcast (meet them here) to recommend some of their favorite reads by, for and about debauched rock 'n' roll musicians. They turned around an eclectic list of 12 books that covers genres from alt-country to hair metal and decades from the '60s to the present. An excellent primer on the memoirs of rock, if you ask us. - Kristen Schmidt
"Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove," by Questlove
In this revealing biography, Questlove shows he's not simply The Roots' drummer. With vast musical knowledge and a passion for original ideas, Questlove invites you on his musical journey by giving you a playlist of songs that molded him into the icon he has become. This one is a keeper.
"Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith," by William Todd Schultz
Elliott Smith is an artist you are either hip to or you are not. You might know his song "Miss Misery" or have his entire catalog. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground. "Torment Saint" compels you to turn the page to see where this conflicted songwriter takes you next. Although it's not an uplifting story, it's hard to put down. A must read for fans.
"Girl in a Band: A Memoir," by Kim Gordon
Kim Gordon is better known as the fashionista founding member of Sonic Youth. It would be easy to glance at a band picture and assume she was just window dressing, but this tough as nails artist takes you on a journey full of heartache and overcoming obstacles, digging her heels in and refusing to be what the industry was trying to make her. Creating art. For Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth, that was always the goal, the mission.
"Corn Flakes with John Lennon: And Other Tales from a Rock 'n' Roll Life," by Robert Hilburn
Working for the LA Times when rock was in its formidable years, legendary critic Hilburn met, wrote about, and even advised at times people and artists who would grow to be titans. The Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame practically started with Hilburn liking you. This book was our first podcast and remains the bar. An absolute-read.
"Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota," by Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman is a pop culture aficionado, as he's proven as a columnist for Esquire and writing several novels on the subject. He has a passion for music, especially '80s hair metal. It's easy to see why he became so successful when you read this, his first novel. A memoir from his youth and a tribute the the unabashed LA scene. A must-have in every touring van!
"Drinking with Strangers: Music Lessons from a Teenage Bullet Belt," by Butch Walker
Before he was the indie rock trendsetter, and way before he was a multi-platinum producer and songwriter, Butch Walker was the shredding guitar player for the hottest hair band in small-town Georgia. He and his band rolled the dice and hit the LA strip with a vengeance. They did it right and they made it, or did they? The rollercoaster ride that is Butch Walker's career is a great read.
"Life," by Keith Richards
The first rock 'n' roll bad boy starts the book off with a fantastic story of incredible luck and staying cool under fire. Richards has nerves of steel and has remained unflappable through his entire career. Few can rival the mayhem and wreckage he has survived. (As Feet Banks wrote for Pique, "We need to think about what kind of world we are going to leave for Keith Richards.") At over 500 pages, you would think this book would be over-indulgent, but when you have lived a life like "Keef," it takes some pages to tell it.
"The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band," by Tommy Lee and Vince Neil
If you were ever curious what it would be like to be on top of the world and out of control all at the same time, then this is your book. Mick Mars, Tommy Lee, Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx write down what they can remember about meeting each other. Then they argue about who did what and who got blamed. It's certainly not Shakespeare, but this is a fun read that does not get boring.
"Wilco: Learning How to Die," by Greg Kot
Uncle Tupelo. Son Volt. Wilco. These bands are the headwaters where alternative and country music met. Greg Kot writes this book like he was in the band. He has an understanding of Jeff Tweedy and a great respect for the work and the legacy of Wilco. He handles the evolving cast of the alt-country trailblazers with care and fairness. No one emerges either blamed or completely innocent. You understand where they came from, and you see Tweedy's reluctance to be the hero.
33 1/3 Series
Sometimes it's not the artist you are interested in. Sometimes you just want to read about an album. Where it was recorded and all the little facts and particulars. The 33 1/3 series of books does just that. Pick your favorite iconic album, and there is probably a book about it. They are very well done, inexpensive and a fast read.
"Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction," by Brendan Mullen
The title is apparently not well-liked by a certain social media site, and we received notices that we couldn't do posts with that word. Crazy, right? That said, this story is told in quotes from an incredible cast of characters. It can be argued the Jane's is one of the most influential bands of modern rock. This book goes a long way to backing that up. From Red Hot Chili Peppers to Pearl Jam, Jane's left a lasting mark on music.
"Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life," by Graham Nash
Graham Nash was in the Hollies. An established hit machine. He was already a rock star, and he was miserable. In a decision that shocked and stunned his peers, Graham quit the Hollies and moved to California. He embraced a new life, a new band and helped create a new sound. Graham talks about his interesting life as an artist, entrepreneur, humanitarian and photographer.
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Clinton's realism makes her seem timid. She needs to find some passion.
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton at a Democratic Ddebate in Durham, N.H. on Feb. 4, 2016. (Photo: David Goldman, AP)
Bernie is an impractical dreamer. Hillary has been bought by Wall Street. In a nutshell, that’s what each side says about the other as they campaign in New Hampshire, and those were the arguments they sharpened in their debate ahead of Tuesday’s primary.
The result is a foregone conclusion: Bernie Sanders will clobber Hillary Clinton. He’s had monster leads all week and was up by 31 points Thursday in a CNN/WMUR poll. Much of Sanders’ gargantuan margin comes from under-30 voters, who give him an 8-to-1 advantage in a tracking survey conducted by the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and NBC’s Boston affiliate.
Yep, that big.
A wise political friend once said of a candidate, “He describes like a lion but prescribes like a lamb.” That’s Sanders. He has a great, gutsy critique of America, Wall Street, capitalism, and wealth inequity, but his remedies are missing. It all comes down to an undefined “revolution,” with thousands of people, as he put it Thursday night, standing outside Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s window, demanding change. That’s simply naïve and only a campaign stuffed with idealistic young people would buy such a solution.
Nevertheless, Sanders speaks in simple, declarative sentences that assign blame, demand sweeping change, and pay no regard to practical or political reality. In the MSNBC debate Thursday night in Durham, his answer on a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees was direct: no one who supports the Citizens United campaign finance decision. Clinton’s answer was vague and did her no good. You could almost hear the gears in her head turning as she imagined what might happen to This One or That One whom she might nominate.
The problem for Clinton is that offering only what she thinks can pass an intractable Republican Congress stifles her idealism and makes her seem timid, not moderate. This is how she lost to Barack Obama and why she finds herself trailing another bold idealist named Sanders. Gradualism isn't compelling at time of voter anger and fear. She’s so much better than Sanders on foreign and military policy, she needs to push for at least one more debate just on those topics.
When he wins New Hampshire big, Sanders will surely party like it’s 1999. But he shouldn’t. The state has a relatively paltry 32 Democratic convention delegates. And his momentum will likely come to a screeching halt 11 days later, when 59 delegates are at stake in South Carolina’s Feb. 20 primary. Then come the Feb. 27 Nevada caucuses, with their 43 delegates. Nevada's population is 27.5% Latino; its African-American population 9%. In South Carolina, African-Americans comprise 27.8% of the population and Latinos 5.4%. Both minority groups heavily favor Clinton; it’s one of the few times she benefits from her marriage to Bill.
It’s Super Tuesday on March 1 that will decide this campaign. Fourteen states will vote in what’s been dubbed the SEC Primary, for the many states in it that belong to the Southeastern Conference. The date is in fact dominated by seven southern states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia – with diverse electorates. But also voting that day on the Democratic side are Sanders’ home state of Vermont plus Colorado, Massachusetts and Minnesota – places where he may be able to get traction. On March 1 alone, more than 1,000 Democratic delegates will be at stake.
As the campaign moves to Southern and less liberal states, Sanders may find Clinton emphasizing the costs of his pipe dreams, as she did in the debate. The Wall Street Journal – not exactly the Bible for Democrats – pegged the cost of his programs at $10 trillion over 10 years. It goes for Medicare for all, free government-paid college, and massive infrastructure rebuilding. And his promise to raise taxes “a little” to pay for universal health insurance won’t be greeted warmly in the South and the Rockies, even among Democrats.
But Clinton can't just criticize Sanders. Long before Super Tuesday, she and her advisers need to rethink her pitch. The only time she sounds charged up is when she talks about health care for children, freedom of choice on abortion, civil and LGBT rights, and pay equity for women. More passion and vision would make her more compelling in future debates, in press interviews, and in daily campaigning. Otherwise, regardless of what happens in New Hampshire, the Clinton-Sanders duel will go on and on.
Dan Payne is an analyst for NPR and WBUR radio and president of the Democratic strategy firm Payne & Co. of Boston. His political clients have included John Kerry and Edward Kennedy.
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In a recent article, I suggested that broadband speeds were stagnating in the United States. Comcast, the nation's leading broadband provider, begs to differ. And it has helpfully provided charts to illustrate the point.
The charts show that Comcast's service really has been getting faster. But there's a striking pattern to Comcast's upgrades: while every tier of Comcast service is faster than it was a decade ago, the rate of progress has been dramatically higher for customers who pay the most. Comcast's entry-level "Performance" tier has seen much slower speed increases in recent years than higher tiers.
That seems like a sign of declining competition at the high end of the broadband market. A decade ago, Comcast was competing directly with incumbent phone companies. Their DSL services offered speeds roughly comparable to cable, and they were beginning investments in next-generation fiber infrastructure. That gave cable companies a strong incentive to provide all of their customers with the fastest broadband they could manage.
Today, in contrast, Comcast is the undisputed speed king in many parts of the country. That has freed the cable giant to focus on maximizing its own profits, without worrying very much about improving the experience of the average customer.
A growing gap
In 2003, the typical Comcast broadband customer enjoyed a 3 Mbps broadband connection. That was a 50-fold improvement over the 56 kbps modem connections most customers had been using five years earlier. And it was also the fastest option Comcast offered to residential customers.
Comcast doubled speeds to 6 Mbps in 2005. That same year, Comcast introduced a "Blast" tier. For an extra $10 per month, you could get a blazing-fast 8 Mbps connection. In 2008, the standard package (dubbed "Performance") doubled again to 12 Mbps while the "Blast" tier speed doubled to 16 Mbps:
The last five years have seen an extreme divergence between Comcast's low-end and high-end speeds. Today, Comcast's Performance tier gives you a 20 Mbps connection, only 66 percent higher than the 2008 speed. The Blast tier is 50 Mbps, more than three times the 2008 speed. And Comcast has introduced a new top tier that is 505 Mbps. That's more than 30 times the fastest speed offered to residential customers in 2008.
In other words, Comcast has been rapidly improving its network, but those improvements largely haven't trickled down to the service tier most customers subscribe to.
Comcast says its fastest speed tier, the 505 Mbps one, requires Comcast to install special "commercial grade equipment" at the customer's premises. So it makes sense that the company would charge a premium price—$399 per month—for it.
But Comcast's next-fastest tier, clocking in at 105 Mbps, runs on the same infrastructure as the slower 50 Mbps and 20 Mbps tiers. There's no technical reason Comcast couldn't provide 105 Mbps service to everyone currently subscribing to the cheaper 50 Mbps and 20 Mbps tiers.
Comcast charges $115 per month for 105 Mbps of connectivity. That would have been a good deal five years ago, but it's underwhelming today. For example, Google charges customers of its fiber network in Kansas City $70 for a connection that's almost 10 times as fast. Chattanooga's municipal fiber network doesn't enjoy Google's deep pockets, but it also to offers gigabit connectivity for $70 per month.
Less competition, more discrimination
Comcast is engaging in what economists call price discrimination. Different customers are willing to pay dramatically different amounts for broadband connectivity. So offering different tiers of service, with dramatically different speeds, helps to maximize Comcast's profits.
Comcast knows the majority of its customers are not going to pay much more than $50 per month for broadband service no matter how fast it is. So upgrading its Performance tier wouldn't earn Comcast much more revenue than it's already getting. At the same time, keeping the Performance tier at a pokey 20 Mbps makes Comcast's higher tiers more attractive in comparison.
Comcast says it's simply offering its customers more choices. "We offer a range of different products and speeds to meet very different customer needs," a Comcast spokesman tells me. "We want to give customers many different choices because not all customer are the same."
That's true as far as it goes. But the hallmark of competitive technology markets is that consumers are routinely given more than they think they need. Even entry-level smartphones today are dramatically more powerful than the best cell phones of a few years ago. Competition forces companies like Apple and Samsung to produce the most powerful phones they can build without worrying about whether customers "need" the faster speeds.
In other words, Comcast's strategy only works because Comcast faces limited competition in many markets. If Comcast had more competitors, they would pressure Comcast to cut the price of its highest speed tiers and raise the speed of its cheapest offerings.
We can see a exactly that dynamic playing out in Austin, where AT&T just announced plans to upgrade its network to 300 Mbps in response to Google's own plans for a fiber optic network there. We don't know how much either AT&T or Google will charge for this new, faster service. But if the experience of Kansas City and Chattanooga is any indication, competition should give consumers a lot more bits for the buck than Comcast currently offers to its customers.
Comcast insists that it faces plenty of competition, pointing to satellite services and to recent investments by AT&T and Verizon in their networks. But satellite tops out at 12 Mbps, slower than Comcast's Performance tier. And while AT&T and Verizon have upgraded some neighborhoods to faster fiber-based networks, many others are still stuck with ancient copper lines.
In those neighborhoods, the local cable incumbent is the only firm that can offer speeds higher than about 20 Mbps. As a result, consumers are not getting the fastest speeds technically possible. Instead, the options are designed to maximize the cable company's bottom line. Which leads to most customers getting speeds far behind the state of the art.
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The controversial plan to renovate the glorious Beaux-Arts main branch of the New York Public Library is no longer: The NY Times reports that the library has "abandoned its plan to turn part of its research flagship on 42nd Street into a circulating library and instead will renovate the Mid-Manhattan library on Fifth Avenue, several library trustees said."
Notably, Mayor de Blasio had been against this plan. According to the Times, "Several factors contributed to the library’s decision: a study that showed the cost of renovating the 42d Street building to be more than expected (the project had originally been estimated at about $300 million); a change in city government; and input from the public, several trustees said. (Four lawsuits have been filed against the project.)... The library is still expected to receive the $150 million that had been allotted to the project under the Bloomberg administration, but it will now be used for other purposes, several library trustees said."
Sir Norman Foster was the architect behind the renovation plans; Foster told the Times, "Obviously I respect the decision of the trustees and whoever’s been involved in the decision. If I have any kind of sadness on the thing — besides obviously not having the project going ahead and having spent a huge amount of passion on the project with colleagues — it is that the proposals have never been revealed, and there hasn’t really been a debate by those involved, including those who would have benefitted from an inclusive approach to the library." The Times adds, "Mr. Foster has so far been paid $9 million in private funds for his work on the project."
The Times' architecture critic Michael Kimmelman hated the renovation plans and burned them in this 2013 assessment; some highlights:
This time the bright idea involves demolishing the deteriorating seven floors of the structurally integral book stacks in the vault space under the Rose Main Reading Room at 42nd Street, and in its place installing a brand-new circulating library, designed by Mr. Foster: major transplant surgery, with the great building designed by Carrère and Hastings as guinea pig... The value of an institution isn’t measured in public square feet. But its value can be devalued by bad architecture. And here we get to the schematics Mr. Foster finally unveiled last month. They aren’t worthy of him. After more than four years, this hardly seems the best he can do. The designs have all the elegance and distinction of a suburban mall. I was reminded that Mr. Foster is also responsible for the canopied enclosure of the inner court at the British Museum, a pompous waste of public space that inserts a shopping gallery into the heart of a sublime cultural institution... To make a virtue of [the stacks' windows'] oppressiveness, Mr. Foster has pulled the various floors of the circulating branch back from the wall, creating balconies that officials hail as an architectural boon because visitors will be able to take in the full height of the slot windows. To me, what results is an awkward, cramped, banal pastiche of tiers facing claustrophobia-inducing windows, built around a space-wasting atrium with a curved staircase more suited to a Las Vegas hotel.
Computer programmer Matthew Zadrozny, whose protest against the NYPL's renovation plans gained noticed after Humans of New York featured him , told us, "I applaud the NYPL for courageously stepping in the right direction and look forward to inventing the future of the library with them. This is a good day for New York."
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