text
stringlengths 465
100k
|
|---|
Chinese Police Bust Sex Slave Ring That Preyed on Mentally Ill
Chinese police have reportedly busted two gangs for abducting mentally handicapped women and selling them as sex slaves for as much as 10,000 to 20,000 yuan ($1,634 to $3,268).
Police in Dingyuan county in eastern China's Anhui Province said the two gangs held the women in a local village, where they raped beat them before being selling the victims off to farmers, reports Business Standard.
Like Us on Facebook
Advertisement
Four women were rescued by the police, who arrested seven suspects, including the two of leaders of the gang, identified by only the surnames Kong and Zhang, according to Anhui Business Daily.
The women had been abducted from Nanjing, Chuzhou, Hefei, and Bengbu by gang members and transferred to an agent surnamed Yan, said the police. Yan held the women in a makeshift "cell" with no windows, a narrow door and two palm-sized holes on the walls, reports Anhuinews.com.
Police were led to the gangs by a tip from a woman who told them that she had been kidnapped and taken to Dingyuan, where she was sold to a father and a son. The father and son reportedly confessed to police, who arrested the agent Yan. Upon apprehending Yan, the police found papers in his house that included buyers' numbers, sales contracts and letters of guarantee.
Yan had left a paper trail for the police when he started requiring buyers to sign contracts after several of them returned the women because of their mental disabilities.
This is not the first time women in East China have been kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. According to the police, gangs have abducted no fewer than 10 women from Anhui and nearby Jiangsu province over the past five years.
"Women who appeared in railway stations alone were more likely to be targets," said the police.
Zhang reportedly confessed to the crimes, saying that to better control the abducted women, they would keep at most three women in one room, where "it was impossible to escape."
The victims told police that if they tried to escape, they were beaten savagely. "After I was sold to someone, the buyer also beat up and sexually assaulted me," said one victim.
Advertisement
Advertisement
©2019 Chinatopix All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission |
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) listens as President Trump speaks in a meeting with congressional leaders and administration officials in the White House on Sept. 5. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)
Opinion writer
The Post reports:
Seven in 10 Americans say the nation’s political divisions are at least as big as during the Vietnam War, according to a new poll, which also finds nearly 6 in 10 saying Donald Trump’s presidency is making the U.S. political system more dysfunctional. The Washington Post-University of Maryland poll — conducted nine months into Trump’s tumultuous presidency — reveals a starkly pessimistic view of U.S. politics, widespread distrust of the nation’s political leaders and their ability to compromise, and an erosion of pride in the way democracy works in America.
This is hardly surprising given that voters elected the most divisive modern president, one who delights in stirring prejudice and cultivating resentment, especially among white Americans. Like populists from time immemorial, President Trump got to office claiming the answers were easy and he “alone” could fix our broken politics. In reality, he has no viable solutions and arguably doesn’t seek solutions, just self-enrichment and adulation.
Voters are not unreasonable in perceiving the “swamp” as expanding, not receding. The poll finds that “14 percent of Americans said they view ethics and honesty of politicians as excellent or good, down from 25 percent in 1997 and 39 percent in 1987. And 12 percent say members of Congress base their policies on a set of core values, while 87 percent say they mainly ‘do whatever is need to win reelection.'” A president who refuses to divest his own business, receives foreign emoluments, uses the presidency to call attention to his real-estate properties (and even to charge the Secret Service), hires relatives and will not release his own taxes has set a new low for financial ethics. As for Congress, watching them whine in private and applaud (literally) the president publicly, reverse long-held positions and ignore egregious behavior would make anyone cynical about politicians.
The voters sadly refuse to take responsibility for the results that flow from the politicians they elect:
At least 6 in 10 Democrats, Republicans and independents say “money in politics” deserves a lot of blame, while smaller majorities blame “people with extreme views,” and more than 4 in 10 of each group blame members of Congress. |
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union will delay signing an agreement on closer economic and political ties with Thailand and demands a swift return to democracy following the country’s military coup, according to a draft document seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
Thailand’s army chief, General Prayuth Chan-ocha, seized power in May, vowing to restore order and push through reforms following six months of political turmoil.
“Official visits to and from Thailand have been suspended; the EU and its member states will not sign the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with Thailand, until a democratically elected government is in place,” said the draft, drawn up for adoption by the bloc’s foreign ministers next Monday.
“Other agreements will, as appropriate, be affected. EU member states have already begun to review their military cooperation with Thailand,” said the document, which is still being discussed by EU officials and could change.
The Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, completed last November but yet to be ratified, would boost cooperation in tourism, employment, education, migration, transport and environment as well as allow for a closer political dialogue.
It was unclear whether ongoing negotiations on a bilateral free trade agreement would be affected.
Goods traded between the EU and Thailand totaled around 32 billion euros ($43.3 billion) in 2013, according to EU data.
The draft statement said the EU would keep its relations with the southeast Asian kingdom under review and would consider further possible measures, depending on circumstances.
“Only an early and credible roadmap for a return to constitutional rule and the holding of credible and inclusive elections will allow for the EU’s continued support,” it said.
The EU urged the Thai military “to restore, as a matter of urgency, the legitimate democratic process and the constitution, through credible and inclusive elections”. It also demanded the release of all political detainees and an end to censorship.
Prayuth said on May 30 a process of reconciliation between political factions and reforms would take about a year and a general election would only be held after that.
The EU document said this announcement fell short of a credible roadmap for a return to constitutional rule. |
Bob Condotta, of the Seattle Times, reported last night that Michael Bennett and his agent Doug Hendrickson are meeting with the Seahawks about a possible contract extension. ESPN has already reported the two sides were scheduled to meet, but the “new news” is that it will be about an extension. Condotta goes in the article to describe an extension agreement as contradicting with earlier statements from John Schneider and the team about renegotiating deals with more than one year left on them. That is not quite accurate.
A renegotiation would be about more money without more years
Bennett has been complaining about his deal since last season. Specifically, he feels he has outplayed his contract and is underpaid. He has never, to my knowledge, said he wants to lengthen his deal or avoid free agency. That is because players rarely see free agency as a bad thing. It is their primary leverage in getting more money. Bennett has been trying to create his own leverage through the media.
Schneider has been clear that they do not renegotiate contracts, especially with more than one year remaining. Bennett has two more left on his deal. As far as I know, there has only been one renegotiation that resulted in anything positive for a player since Schneider came to Seattle. That was the conversion of some incentives to guarantees for Marshawn Lynch a few years back. Lynch technically got the same amount of money he was already due, so while it technically correct to call it a renegotiation of the existing contract, it hardly set a precedent players and agents could get excited about.
Renegotiations are far more commonly used to reduce a player’s salary. They happen when a player has underperformed their deal, has little-to-no guaranteed money left owed to them, and the team is threatening to cut the player. The team use their leverage to say, “We are going to give you less money, but it will be more than what you would get on the open market.” This is what Kam Chancellor was worried would happen to him, and why his holdout was as much about guaranteed money as it was about getting more money.
Another situation when renegotiations can happen is when the team needs to create more cap space. They can do that by going to underperforming players and reducing their salary like described above or by going to high performing players and converting salary into a signing bonus. What this does is really defer the cost of the contract over time.
For example, consider the following situation where a player is in the middle of their deal. They have already received their signing bonus money when the deal was first signed. Let’s say the player got a $20M bonus over a five year deal. The way the CBA works means the value of that bonus is prorate across the length of the deal, so $4M per year.
Player X Contract
Current Year: $10M salary + $4M pro-rated bonus on cap = $14M cap number
Next Year: $12M salary + $4M pro-rated bonus on cap = $16M cap number
Following Year: $14M salary + $4M pro-rated bonus on cap = $18M cap number
Player X Renegotiated Contract To Create Cap Space
By removing $15M in salary and converting it to a signing bonus, the team can reduce their cap hit while the player gets more money right away.
Current Year: $5M salary + $5M pro-rated bonus on cap = $10M cap number (Player gets full $15M bonus, so they get $20M in this first year even though the cap only recognizes part of it)
Next Year: $7M salary + $5M pro-rated bonus on cap = $12M cap number
Following Year: $9M salary + $5M pro-rated bonus on cap = $14M cap number
You might wonder why teams don’t do this all the time. It seems like a win-win since the player gets more cash right away and the team clears cap room. This is like all credit situations—it can be powerful tool when properly utilized or devastating to your finances if mismanaged. The Patriots have done this effectively with Tom Brady. The Cowboys have done this horribly with Tony Romo. You are better off paying your debts when they are due in most cases as opposed to kicking the can down the road.
There does not appear to be much of a reason for the Seahawks to clear cap room and create bigger cap headaches later on, so this type of renegotiation seems unlikely with Bennett.
Extensions are about more money for more years
This perhaps belongs in the “duh” section of the blog, but since there continues to be mischaracterizations out there about the difference between an extension and a renegotiation, it felt worth writing. An extension happens when both the player and the team can agree on a player’s value in lieu of pending free agency. These only happen when the player is performing well and both sides want to continue the marriage.
The focus has been on why the Seahawks would not want to renegotiate Bennett with more than a year left on his deal. Most players would rather not sign an extension with more than a year left on their deal. The reason is that the farther away from free agency they are, the less leverage they have. A player doing great things on the field is almost always better off waiting until the team feels the pressure of their impending departure to strike the best deal.
One reason Bennett’s situation might be different is his age. At 30, he knows his ability to command top dollar when the deal ends in two more years will be limited. He very well might be at this peak of negotiating leverage right now. He has little hope of getting a mega-deal like the ones he commonly points to, but there is a chance to get agreement on more money with probably fewer guarantees.
Seattle, and any other club, would feel uneasy about guaranteeing top dollar to a 33-year-old defensive lineman. What they could do is give Bennett a two-year extension with some large dollar figures attached to it but no guarantees beyond his current deal. In essence, it would be a gentlemen’s agreement that if Bennett is still healthy and playing at a high level, the team will pay him what he is due. If his production falls off, the team could cut Bennett or renegotiate.
An agreement like that would give Bennett the recognition and respect he is seeking while also allowing the club to protect themselves from overcommitting to an aging player. The team could also choose to add some additional money in the form of a signing bonus to his existing deal.
Condotta posited in his article that something like that could lead to Richard Sherman or Earl Thomas coming back to the negotiating table early. Highly unlikely. Again, signing an extension early most often benefits the team, not the player. Sherman and Thomas are young enough that it would be foolish for them to avoid the advantages free agency offers them in terms of getting the best deal. If Schneider was renegotiating Bennett’s contract (more money, same years), then you would have the problem Condotta is describing.
No sure thing
Just because the two sides are meeting does not mean anything will happen. Bennett very well could want far more money than the Seahawks are willing to provide. They can try to get creative with incentives based on performance, but there has to be a limit to what the Seahawks are willing to offer someone on the wrong side of 30 years old. |
Aside from meddling in the United States election, there’s another thing the Russian Federation seems to be worrying a lot about these days: cigarette smoking.
Russia’s smoking rates are some of the highest in the world, according to the World Health Organization. Now the Russian government, a big fan of banning things, is going to try and ban citizens born after 2015 from buying cigarettes. This would be one of the world’s strictest smoking bans, and Bhutan was the only other nation I could find that outlawed cigarette sales completely.
Advertisement
The ban proposal obtained by Russian newspaper Izvestia would go into effect in 2033, when the affected Russian citizens (now babies) turn eighteen years old. Russia’s legal smoking age is eighteen, so the law would ensure that those born in 2015 and later could never legally purchase cigarettes. It comes as part of a broader effort to combat smoking from 2017 to 2022 and beyond, according to the Izvestia report. The goal is to lower the country’s smoking rate to 25 percent by 2025, and to drive it down even further later. The proposal also claims that tobacco consumption fell from 39 percent in 2009 to 33 percent in 2016.
Some, like Elena Topoleva-Soldunova of the Russian public chamber, worry that the ban could lead to counterfeit tobacco. Others, like Russian politician Nikolai Gerasimenko, approved of the ban but were unsure how it could possibly be enforced, according to The Times.
In the meantime—before those no longer allowed to smoke come of the age where they definitely can’t legally smoke—the proposal also includes adding laws restricting the locations where people can smoke. Russian cigarette packages now have graphic warning labels, as well. Nevertheless, a 2010 WHO survey found that 12 percent of Russian fifteen year olds smoked daily, and it remains unclear how effective a ban will be so long as cigarettes are still widely accessible to the country’s youth population.
Advertisement
But still, news about Russia that doesn’t involve hacking is always nice.
Russian translations provided by Gizmodo editor Marina Galperina
[Izvestia] |
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday permitted Italian marine Massimilano Latorre to go back home to Italy for his treatment for four months.
The apex court bench headed by Chief Justice RM Lodha said the order would be effective only after the Italian marine has filed an "unequivocal and unambigous undertaking" on his return to India upon the completion of four months.
Latorre has moved the court for permission to go back to his country after he suffered a brain stroke on August 31 and was admitted to the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital. In his plea, Latorre had pleaded the Supreme Court to allow him to return to Italy for two months for his "more rapid and complete recovery".
He has already been exempted by the apex court from appearing before the Chanakyapuri Police Station once a week as a condition of his bail.
Apart from Lattore, Italian marine Salvatore Girone is also accused of killing two Kerala fishermen off Kerala coast on February 15, 2012. |
I’m enjoying the latest Donald Trump outrage, wherein he has attacked a number of famous athletes (such as Stephen Curry of the champion San Francisco Warriors and Colin Kaeperncik, formerly of the San Francisco 49ers) while wrapping himself totally, so to speak, in the American flag. He seems to have succeeded in diverting the attention of the public (“It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman!”) and in driving his implacable enemies, the deepstate media, into a frenzy of impotent rage.
This has taken the wind out of the sails of the Democrats who have been doggedly pursuing allegations of Russian involvement (and maybe even conspiracy with Trump) in the US elections. They, and the media, which really hates Trump, have been hoping against hope to push him into an impeachment, based on the ‘truth by repeated assertion, without proof’ that Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to defeat Hillary Clinton.
It is increasingly evident, even to diehard Hillary fans, especially after the release of her book What Happened, in which she blamed everybody but herself for her failure, that her sense of entitlement was jarring to much of the electorate, and that she defeated herself, even with the highly likely involvement of the deepstate intelligence agencies to interfere on her behalf.
Advertisement
But the media and the left cabal have continued to hound Trump on the Russia story as if their lives depended on it. Trump, on the other hand, has manufactured enough diversionary moves to foil them. The public is losing interest in the ‘Russia accusation’ because they are so many other causes to get indignant over: Trump just keeps manufacturing them, and the public may be overdosing on “outrage!”
I can’t even begin to list all the things that Trump has done that has got the media running off madly in all directions: that list is too long. Suffice to look at a few of the most recent gems. First, the media accused Trump of not caring for hurricane victims or meeting with them or doing anything for them. The outrage metre was going through the roof, but Trump outlasted them on that one.
Then there was the suggestion that his cabinet ministers were misusing public funds for travel. But that came a cropper when it was found that the Education Secretary was indeed using a private jet, but it is her own, and she’s not charging the US government. She is a billionaire: her husband is the heir to the Amway multi-level marketing empire.
Advertisement
Then there have been all these bloodcurdling threats Trump unleashed against Kim Jong-un of North Korea, and the general possibility that there will be a nuclear war, or at the very least an atmospheric hydrogen bomb explosion by North Korea over the Pacific – which by the way would be bad news for any electronic devices in the vicinity as it would create an electromagnetic pulse that would fry them.
Then comes the latest row over the alleged disrespect shown by the athletes – often black – who refused to stand up when the US National Anthem is played. It is a form of protest that goes back a long way: I remember the Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico Olympics by two athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos. They were – and so are the athletes now – protesting against human rights violations, particularly against black Americans.
The flag and the anthem and national pride are highly emotive issues in the US, and despite leftist derision, a large number of people may actually agree with Trump. This puts the media in a dilemma: they cannot indulge their biases openly because it would clash with the prevailing narrative. Trump has pushed them into an uncomfortable place, and kudos to him on the limited point of managing that positioning: rather clever, street-smart marketing tactics.
Advertisement
This is in stark contrast with what is going on in India. The Indian government is getting rattled and railroaded into doing suicidal things. Here too, the leftist media, in cahoots with certain political parties that shall remain unnamed, has invented a whole slew of frivolous memes with the sole intent of obstruction. Again, there are so many, I will only list a few: beef, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s monogrammed suit, deaths in bank queues after demonetisation, the ‘acquittal’ of the killers of Pehlu Khan, Junaid being killed for carrying beef, Kanhaiya, the disappearance of Najeeb, Modi being responsible for the lynching in Dadri, as for the stalking of a woman, and so on ad infinitum.
Some of the most recent I can remember have been (in no particular order):
-Those whom Prime Minister Modi follows on Twitter
-The murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh
-Petrol prices
-GST
-Jobs
-Rahul Gandhi’s pilgrimage to American campuses
-Freedom of speech under attack
-GDP growth slowing
-NDTV’s alleged takeover
-Rohingyas
Advertisement
And I am sure you can remember many more. But the common thread is that they are all nine-days’ wonders. For instance, despite all the initial sound and fury about the murder of Gauri Lankesh, now it’s rather apparent that it wasn’t helping the leftist elements in the media build their narrative . Especially after talks of Naxal involvement in the crime started gathering steam. Tellingly, there were hardly any #Awardwapsi this time around.
Perhaps we’re reaching ‘peak outrage’ and going over the hump into ‘outrage fatigue’. Or you could call it ‘the boy who cried wolf too many times’. When the leftists scream at the top of their lungs 24x7 about the latest atrocity, it does get a little tedious for the rest of us who merely want some peace and quiet.
Unfortunately, the Modi government is not showing the same level of street savvy as Trump is doing. The fact is that, yes, there is a slowdown in the gross domestic product growth rate. Yes, petrol prices have gone up. Yes, there are not so many jobs being created as there should be, despite the high-decibel StartupIndia scheme designed to create entrepreneurs and startup jobs.
Advertisement
But look at the bright side. India is still growing at 5.7 per cent, and luminaries such as the World Bank and Jamie Dimon, boss of JP Morgan Chase are still supporting the India story. 5.7 per cent is a rate that most countries would give their eye and teeth for, given a general slowdown in trade and the possibility of a shooting war between China and the US (Thucydides Trap, anyone?). The visit of Shinzo Abe and the signing of the bullet train agreement and other deals show that India, too, has a friend in the world: Japan. The peaceful pullback by all parties from Doklam shows that India can, and will, stand up to Chinese bullying.
Despite all this, the government is being railroaded into taking drastic steps by playing into the hands of the leftists and abandoning its admirable fiscal rectitude, allowing the deficit to rise, all because it has been stung by the assertion that it is screwing the middle class. It may in fact be, because that is the easiest cohort to squeeze, but it was rather idiotic for a newly-inducted minister to stand up and say baldly, “if you own a car, you can afford to pay Rs 75/litre for petrol”.
I am not sure if this minister realised that in politics, it is not what you do, but it’s what you are perceived to do, that actually matters. Even if it’s true that you’re messing with the middle class, you’re not supposed to admit it in so many words. Marketing, my dear minister. You need to head out to one of the IIMs for a crash course on customer intimacy. You should have put it in terms of global warming, our soaring oil import bill, and reducing dependency on Organisation of Petroluem Exporting Countries (OPEC), as well as the coming era of electric cars. Anything that sounds good and complex and long-term.
Advertisement
And now, in a too-little, too-late attempt to plug the breach, there was talk that the Prime Minister and Finance Minister would announce a multi-billion rupee package that will allegedly fix everything. But that would have meant that the alleged barbs aimed at them by Rahul Gandhi were hitting the mark. Yes, you should not underestimate the enemy, but the likely deepstate managed circus at Princeton, Berkeley, etc. showed that Rahul is still not ready for prime time, and that he’ll cut a sorry figure in 2019.
The real problem that the Prime Minister will face in 2019 is not economic, but cultural and political. As seen in the remarkable fortitude with which people bore with demonetisation, it is clear that they realise the goods and services tax (GST) disruption will also pass. Besides, the Indian public is used to hardship: the Congress has taught us to grin and bear it. They will stand behind Modi in 2019 because they believe in his economic vision.
But where they will question him is in the astonishing fact that none of the major villains who bled the country and looted it are being punished. I define ‘punishment’ as not even jail time, but ‘clawback’. Their ill-gotten wealth has to be clawed back from them with penalties as a deterrent to the next person. Given that demonetisation has been sold to all of us as necessary strong medicine to cleanse the system of corruption, the natural question is, “Why are all these thieves still strutting about?” This the Prime Minister needs to have a cogent answer for.
Advertisement
An even more critical issue is that of the consolidated Hindu vote. The astonishing victory in 2014 was because, for the first time since 1947, Hindus of all stripes could hope for leader who would treat them fairly, and who could recreate the glories of the nation that linger in the collective memory. But serious hard-core Hindus are beginning to lose faith in the Prime Minister because absolutely nothing has been done in any of the core areas: such as the repeal of the terminally flawed RTE, the release of temples from the clutches of rapacious devaswom boards, nor the provision of religion-blind services such as scholarships without special treatment to Muslims and Christians.
It is hope, rather than the famous vikas, that has held a disparate coalition of Hindus together. I see ominous signs of this coalition fraying. They know that India stands at a point of inflexion, when it can either leap up to be one of the G3, three superpowers, or it can fall back into mediocrity. And the national mood is also not one of sacrificing everything on the altar of pure growth. For the first time since 1947, and partly due to social media, Indians are actively seeking to assert themselves as people of gravity, rather than pale imitations of white people.
This cultural renaissance, that which Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda envisioned a century ago, cannot happen if Hindus continue to be an oppressed community, fragmented and powerless. In this festive season, it would be good for the Prime Minister to consider these home truths. We don’t live by economic growth alone, and I don’t think many Indians consider South Korea a role model – they prospered, but they lost their culture and traditions. Japan, which has carefully retained its soul while modernising furiously, is a far better model. In fact, even more than its money, it is Japan’s soul that India needs.
Advertisement
The Prime Minister needs to realise that the leftists, the media, and other friends and fifth columnists of deepstate, China and others, are never going to let up. But he can retaliate against their relentless creation of new memes by springing a few surprises of his own and making their best-laid plans ‘gang aft agley’. Like Trump does, Prime Minister Modi should give them shock treatment.
Why not, for instance, announce that all Hindu temples will henceforth be free to run their own affairs with an elected council of believers (such as in churches and mosques)? #LetMyTemplesGo. That will surely yank the leftists’ chains, and divert them away from their little shenanigans. And after that, a few more surprises up your sleeve? What you need to do is to not just level, but change the playing field. At the moment, you are playing on their field. Force them to play on yours by surprising the wits out of them. Shock and awe is a good tactic. Remember demonetisation? Focused everybody's minds. |
The Financial Times is reporting that Amazon and HTC are teaming up to develop a "range" of smartphones. The timeline is fuzzy at this point, with the report saying that the devices are unlikely to launch this year. Despite one phone supposedly being "at an advanced stage of development," The Financial Times says that Amazon might not release the device at all.
Still, if the report pans out, this will be the second time HTC has helped a company jump into the smartphone market. It previously built the HTC First, the flagship phone for the launch of Facebook Home, an Android home replacement. The smartphone company is surely hoping its fortunes will be better this time, as the "Facebook Phone" was a massive flop, selling only 15,000 units.
But the huge difference between the two initiatives is that the HTC First was an Android device and shipped with the Google Apps. Presumably, the Amazon phone would run a version of the Kindle OS, an Android fork that ships without the Play Store and the rest of Google's apps.
An HTC partnership with Amazon would be extremely surprising. Building a device that runs a fork of Android is something that HTC is expressly forbidden from doing as per its membership in the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), Google's cabal of Android Google app licensees. Members get access to the Play Store, Gmail, Google Maps, and all the other Google apps for Android. OHA members commit to building one Android platform—Google's platform—and not shipping devices that run forks of Android.
We saw Google's response to a situation like this before when Acer tried to ship a device running a non-Google-approved version of Android—Alibaba's Aliyun OS. When Google got wind of it, Acer was told to shut the project down or lose its access to Google Apps. Google even made a whole blog post about the ordeal, saying:
While Android remains free for anyone to use as they would like, only Android compatible devices benefit from the full Android ecosystem. By joining the Open Handset Alliance, each member contributes to and builds one Android platform—not a bunch of incompatible versions.
Historically, it appears that shipping one non-Google device will get you kicked out of the Google ecosystem. So if Amazon's phone makes it to market and doesn't run a Google-approved version of Android, HTC could be banned from future access to Google apps.
Google's grip over the entire smartphone ecosystem is why none of the usual names build Amazon's Kindle Fire line of tablets. OHA members can't ship Android forks, meaning Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE have not built any Amazon devices. This leaves the Kindle Fires in the hands of Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops.
While the plans clearly aren't concrete at this point, HTC and Amazon would need to figure out how to ship these devices without getting HTC expelled from Google's Android ecosystem. Amazon's devices are meant to encourage users to use Amazon's services; it's hard to imagine the company shipping an Android device full of competing services from Google, but that's what HTC's OHA membership requires. We'll be eagerly awaiting Google's response to all this with a bowl of popcorn at the ready.
If Google's level of control over a seemingly open source project is news to you, the rabbit hole goes much deeper. We'll be addressing just how hard life outside of the Google ecosystem is in a feature due out early next week. |
If the New York Jets are in the news, Joe Namath isn't far behind.
This has become the natural order of things. Broadway Joe is clean and sober and living the retired life in Florida. Commenting on the team he led to Super Bowl III glory appears to be his principle job at this point.
When word spread that the Jets had traded for Tim Tebow, it was only a matter of time before the franchise's most famous quarterback chimed in with his take.
"I'm just sorry that I can't agree with this situation," Namath told ESPN Radio New York on Wednesday. "I think it's just a publicity stunt. I can't go with it. I think it's wrong. I don't think they know what they're doing over there."
That last comment is one that could get him in trouble. The Jets have given Namath a lot of rope over the past year or so, but criticism like this likely won't be forgotten.
In other words, if the Jets are on "Hard Knocks" again (inevitable, by the way), don't expect to see Joe Willie and his popped collar paying another visit to camp. |
The world has witnessed an unprecedented day of protests against ACTA. Hundreds of thousands of people have gathered in dozens of cities around the globe to protect what is left of the freedom of expression on the internet.
Protesters from over 200 European cities consolidated their efforts to hold rallies across Europe. The controversial ACTA treaty was signed by the majority of European countries and now there is a battle to dissuade parliaments from ratifying the agreement.
Massive strikes took place in Germany with organizers saying that a total of some 100,000 people have gathered in many cities across the country, including Berlin, Hanover, Hamburg, and Cologne. Just the previous day Germany put on hold its joining the ACTA treaty after its Justice Ministry decided to wait until the issue is discussed in the European parliament.
Demonstrators protest against ACTA on February 11, 2012 in Berlin. (AFP Photo / Soeren Stache Germany Out) Demonstrators protest against ACTA on February 11, 2012 in Berlin. (AFP Photo / Soeren Stache Germany Out)
Demonstrators protest against ACTA in Paris. Demonstrators protest against ACTA in Paris.
In Paris hundreds of masked protesters marched against ACTA, which they say infringes on people’s personal freedoms.
Up to 8,000 people marched in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, carrying signs carrying such slogans as “ACTA la vista, baby!”
In Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, despite the freezing cold, hundreds of protesters rallied in front of the government buildings. Lithuania is one of the EU countries which signed the ACTA agreement, and the protesters are demanding that the government calls off its ratification.
A reasonably large protest was staged in Malta’s capital, Valetta, where more than 500 young people gathered to urge the state’s parliament not to ratify ACTA.
About 1,500 people gathered in the capital of Estonia, Tallinn, while several hundred staged a protest in the university city of Tartu.
The earlier mass discontent over ACTA in the streets and on the Internet has already delivered some tangible results. Some EU countries, including Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Latvia and Germany, have decided to halt their joining processes until the European parliament reaches an agreement on the issue in June.
Last month massive rallies took place in Poland and the Czech Republic, as the countries signed the ACTA agreement. On January 26, the controversial ACTA treaty was signed by the 22 of the 27 European Union member states (excluding Germany, Cyprus, Estonia, the Netherlands and Slovakia), and the EU itself.
So far ACTA has been signed by a total of 31 countries across the globe, but none of the signatories have yet ratified it. To come into force ACTA needs to be ratified by at least six countries.
Insult to democracy |
This month in Germany, a group of far left wing extremist, funded by the Merkel government, decided to make an example of a dentist because this dentist had a public affiliation with the German classical liberal party, the AfD who oppose Merkel's migrant invasion.
Two weeks ago in Germany, a news site did a piece on how this man has been treated, and the total indifference of the police to enforce the law and protect this man's democratic rights.
It has been translated in full here, and an excerpt is below:
They dropped “warnings” into the mailboxes in the neighborhood, which were meant to inform patients that their dentist was a member of the “racist, un-social and hypocritical AfD party”. Then they sent warnings to the other dental practices in the area and asked the “dear praxis teams” not to refer any more patients to Dr. Radtke. In this manner they have tried to ruin the dentist economically since April 13. On their portal, ”antifascist Initiative”, the leftists congratulate themselves about this action, using the motto: “Pulling out Germany’s teeth!” Demonstration in front of dentist praxis Then, on Thursday, May 12, it happened: 60 black-clad people demonstrated in front of the dentist’s practice. The police secured the door behind which Dr. Radtke worked with his dentist’s drill in hand, while they hurled insults at him from the street. The march to the dentist’s office, which used the title “Weissensee ist bunt”, (Weissensee is colorful), was supported by three groups. One of the groups is the “Willkommensnetzwerk Pankow Hilft” (Welcome Network Pankow Helps). This network receives direct financial aid by the federal government, specifically the Ministry for Family. “Pankow Hilft” is the recipient of plenty of praise and favorable mentions in public for their voluntary work with migrants and asylum seekers.
It needs to be understood that this is a message to us all. Anyone who will not go along with the cultural-Marxist program of destroying borders, the rule of law and undermining classical civilization will be punished and the law cannot or will not help you.
In fact, the government itself will pay for your destruction. At least in Germany. How long till the same conditions apply here? |
WASHINGTON -- A key House committee close to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) gutted crucial provisions of a National Security Agency surveillance reform bill on Tuesday. The move dismayed civil liberties advocates, some of whom immediately withdrew their support ahead of a Thursday floor vote.
"The bill has been watered down far, far down even from the compromise that was struck when the bill was voted out of committee," said Patrick Toomey of the American Civil Liberties Union. "While it represents a slight improvement from the status quo, it isn't the reform bill that Americans deserve."
The new version of the NSA bill presents reform advocates with a difficult choice: hold out hope that a companion Senate bill can nudge reform in their direction, or to oppose all efforts at changing the NSA now. In 2015, the provision that underlies the agency's controversial call records program is set to expire, so if no bill is passed before then, the program will end.
One key alteration to be approved Tuesday by the House Rules Committee seems to significantly expand which "selection terms" can be used to compel phone companies to turn records of Americans' calls over to the government. Bulk phone metadata collection was the first program revealed from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and perhaps the most controversial.
The new version of the bill retains some significant reforms to the call records program. The spy agency will still be prohibited from collecting the data in bulk directly, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will still approve requests for phone records data from the telecoms. But the House Rules version of the bill loosens tougher restrictions on the NSA passed two weeks ago by the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, and critics say in particular that the expansion of the call records search terms will seriously undermine those steps forward.
New language in the bill only suggests that the NSA's searches may be limited to terms "such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device." The vagueness of that "such as" language worries advocates.
"Any time they introduce ambiguity, which is what these changes do, that is a very worrying thing for us, because that is what got us here in the first place," said Toomey. "Without there being a more precise definition, it seems like they're opening the door to very bulky collection."
Another change to the NSA reform bill lowers the amount of reporting that telephone and internet companies may provide to the public about government data requests. Advocates had seen those transparency procedures as the canary in the coal mine for government overreaches. In the new version of the bill, the transparency standards mirror those the Justice Department has already agreed to with telecoms.
The new version of the bill is expected to pass out of the House Rules committee Tuesday night.
The ACLU pledged to fight for floor amendments to strengthen the bill's privacy protections. And other groups, including Access and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, withdrew their support for the legislation.
At the same time, the changes introduced by the House Rules Committee do not seem to have deterred some of the staunchest advocates for NSA reform. The new version of the legislation was offered in the Rules Committee by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), as well as Democratic Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) and Bobby Scott (Va.), all of whom supported a stronger version of the reform measure, the USA Freedom Act, that passed the House Judiciary committee.
Some outside Congress suggested that House leadership and President Barack Obama's administration placed significant pressure on legislators to weaken their reforms. Spokespersons for John Boehner and the White House National Security Council did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
"House leaders should have allowed a vote on the compromise version of the USA Freedom Act that was already agreed to, rather than undermining their own members and caving in to the intelligence community's demands," said Kevin Bankston of the New America Foundation, a public policy group, in a statement.
"We're gravely disappointed that rather than respecting the wishes of the unanimous Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the House leadership and the Obama Administration have chosen to disrupt the hard-fought compromise that so many of us were willing to support just two weeks ago."
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that the group Access and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute declared themselves opposed to the new version of the NSA reform bill. In fact, those groups only withdrew their support for the bill. |
“I ain't shaving my beard off. To shave my beard off would be to cut my f*cking nuts off. You know what I mean? Without them, I am no longer… I am now a lie. Why would I do that?”
So said Tom Hardy in a recent interview, when asked if he would remove his face fuzz for a photoshoot. So it’s hardly surprising to see that the actor is hirsute in the second series of BBC crime drama Peaky Blinders. Clearly, even if Hoxton beards weren't popular in post-First World War Birmingham, getting Hardy to shave simply wasn’t an option.
The Dark Knight Rises star has some massive projects next year, including Mad Max and his Kray Twins biopic (in which he plays both Ronnie and Reggie), but before that – as these exclusive shots show – there’s his anticipated stint in Peaky Blinders. |
New aerospace campus at Downsview will see 1,000 students come 2018
Centennial to revamp air force base
By Kristina Kirkaldy
A rendering of Centennial College’s new aerospace campus
The old Downsview air force base is soon to be the home of Centennial College’s new aerospace campus, which will include the historic de Havilland Aircraft company building (built in 1929).
Andrew Petrou, the executive director of Downsview Aerospace Innovation and Research, said the project has been seven years in the making.
“Aerospace has been in the fabric of Canada for years, and the Downsview site is a piece of that fabric.”
Centennial College has been running the aerospace program for over 40 years at the Ashtonbee campus in Scarborough, Petrou said.
The new campus will help to expand the program and strengthen their ties with aircraft manufacturer Bombardier, he said.
“Imagine taking students into Bombardier and saying, ‘Let’s watch how a plane is put together, and how it operates,’ ” said Petrou, “The more hands-on students are, the stronger and sharper they will be at the job.”
Rosanna Laboni, secretary of the Downsview Lands Community Voice Association (DLCVA), said the project is a welcome use of the land because of its history.
“Students will get to learn in the same building World War II airplanes were made,” she said, “I am glad the land is being used for students and training, rather than seeing another retail complex or condominium.”
The new campus will have enough space for 1,000 students.
“This is a significant increase from the number of students we could accept at the old campus. Right now we train around 400 aerospace technicians,” Petrou said.
“We are backlogged in applications,” he said. “It is clear the future of aerospace is bright.”
The new aerospace campus will be located in and around the historic de Havilland building at Downsview Park .
Ward 10 councillor James Pasternak supports the aerospace hub.
“It will help to create more jobs in our community.”
Petrou said the project is estimated to create about 14,000 sustainable high-paying jobs.
The campus will also be used by other universities and colleges, said Petrou.
“We will now have connectivity in this program like you have never seen before,” he said.
The campus is scheduled to open in September 2018 and will be within walking distance of the new Downsview Park subway station. |
Racist Rejection Revives Dark Questions of Electability
Dateline - Lynchburg, Virginia
In a surprising move, which some are calling a deathblow to his candidacy, the Ku Klux Klan today decided to not endorse Senator Barack Obama in his bid for the Presidency of the United States. Seeming to validate Hillary Clinton's assertion that Obama cannot win the all-important poor white racist vote which had became the cornerstone of her support, many are now speculating that rejection by the influential domestic terrorist organization could spell the end for the Illinois Democrat's race for the White House.
At his armed camp outside of Crab Orchard, West Virginia, Imperial Grand Wizard Gomer Bath explained the Klan's decision. "Our secret membership just did not feel that Senator Obama was addressing our core values." he said during press conference to a group of blindfolded reporters. "We examined the platforms of the leading candidates, but for all of us there seemed to be something unsettling about Obama, something lacking in his positions. I don't know about the others," he continued, "but for myself it really came down to health care. As you know, emergency hospital care has always been associated with our Brotherhood, but I feel the Senator has been rather niggardly in explaining the details of his plan. In the end we took a hood count, and voted unanimously against endorsement."
After Obama's abysmal failure to secure the segregationist vote in Pennsylvania, some pundits began to question his ability to reach out to this all-important bigoted base. Subsequent losses in Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and the Sudetenland seemed to confirm Obama electoral weakness with this xenophobic demographic.
"Without Klan support Obama is crippled coming into the Fall election," said Pat Buchanan, MSNBC commentator, and Oberfuerher of his own morning show, "Reich and Shine with Pat. "This proves what I've said all along: hardworking Americans will not vote for anyone with so colored a past." Speaking at a book signing for his bestseller about the campaign, "Is It Getting Dark In Here?" Buchanan noted that Obama had also failed to secure the critical Nazi endorsement, which has played a significant part in American politics for the past eight years. "The election of George Bush proved the importance of both Klan and Nazi swing voters, and it would be a strategic mistake for the Democrats to turn a blind eye when a candidate fails with so badly with these pure-blooded Americans."
From his National Headquarters/Mother's Knitting Room in Kudzu, Alabama, Intergalactic Majestic Dragon, and two-time winner of the "Hit a Black Man with a Stick When He's Not Looking and Run Away" Championship, Chester Podgorney agrees. "Obama's rhetoric and speeches of Hope and Understanding have not won the hearts and minds of my vast Army of Fearless Race Warriors." Podgorney's vast army, Timmy Henderson, quickly agreed. "I want to see more substance behind the words." he said, while simultaneously gaining badly needed hit points for his dwarf, Zolton, in his battle against Podgorney's 12th level Elf Princess. "I also have questions about his foreign policy." he added.
For some exactly how much to not endorse the Obama's candidacy was in doubt until the Senator's comments at a San Francisco fundraiser regarding the "bitterness" in some parts of America came to light.
"That did it for me." said Tucker Jones, lifelong Klan member, outside the unemployment office in Allentown, Pennsylvania. "I mean, sure, I felt a little angry when the factory moved to Uzbekistan. But then the Triple Secret Kleagle explained to me that the off-shoring of American factories was the only reasonable response to the Socialist Zionism Muslim Conspiracy of Osama Bin Goldberg. Boy, I felt like the dumbest guy at that cross burning! But, yeah, I was mad. But I was never bitter! Senator Obama's representation of armed, unemployed fanatically religious small town racists as bitter is exactly the sort of out of touch comment we've come to expect from his kind. Of politician.
With the loss of the Klan endorsement calls for Obama to end his hopeless candidacy have been heard from one end of Fox News Central to the other. However, despite this seemingly fatal blow to his campaign, diehards have noted Obama's apparent strength in states where melanin challenged Americans still make up a majority. But Grand Wizard Bath feels these arguments are baseless.
"Oregon, Wisconsin, Idaho, Nebraska... you have to understand the 28 states Obama's won so far are on the fringe," the robed zealot continued . "They do not represent the true confederacy of values America has tried to spread around the world. And there is also still quite a bit of strong feeling about Senator Clinton."
Noting her strength with the broad swaths of people who have no intention of actually voting for her, Senator Clinton also feels Obama's weakness with people who hate both of them with a passion should give unpledged superdelegates pause.
"I think they should look on Senator Obama's candidacy rather darkly," said the Senator most recently from New York. "The supers should remember that Fall is the important election., and these Klan voters are going to want to to support someone who understands them, someone they feel is one of them. And for some reason that does not seem to be Senator Obama"
Indeed, when questioned many of Clinton's erstwhile supporters said, though her candidacy seems over, they would still prefer to betray her in the General Election than to simply vote against Obama.
"Hillary's campaign is a historic moment in the American story," commented Ethel Jackson Lee Davis of Hole, Kentucky. "Having the chance to vote against the first serious woman presidential candidate was something me and my Cousin/Brother/Husband were very much looking forward to. She had proven time and time again she was willing to delude herself into reaching out to plain folks like us who have no intention of putting a whore like her in the White House, and that meant alot to us. It let us feel part of a movement against real change in America." After pausing to fearfully flinch from a quick movement her husband made as he reached for the Cheese Whiz, she continued. "Years from now, when my Cousin/Sister/Daughter is all grown up, I looked forward to telling her how we helped keep a woman down. But by his winning the Democratic nomination my dream has become just another thing Senator Obama and his people have taken from us."
But Jackson Lee Davis demurred when asked if she was planning to support Sen. McCain this Fall. |
Under the Radar Blog Archives Select Date… January, 2019 December, 2018 November, 2018 October, 2018 September, 2018 August, 2018 July, 2018 June, 2018 May, 2018 April, 2018 March, 2018 February, 2018
A judge ordered that the recount be started Monday at noon. | Getty Dueling court orders issued in Jill Stein Michigan recount
A Michigan court and a federal court of appeals on Tuesday issued dueling orders on Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein's recount push in the state.
The dueling ruling resulted in Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette taking the recount case back to U.S. District Court Judge Mark Goldsmith, who on Monday issued an order that started the recount on that day at noon.
On Tuesday evening the Michigan Court of Appeals directed the state's Board of Canvassers to deny a recount petition by Stein. Meanwhile, in an order issued Tuesday evening, the 6th Circuit panel split, 2-1, along partisan lines in declining to temporarily lift the order that required the recount to begin by noon Monday in order to meet a target next week for states to name Electoral College electors. The Michigan Republican Party and Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette had both asked the appeals court to step in.
"If the recount could not be completed by the federal deadline, the right to a recount provided under Michigan law would have been effectively worthless. Facing the potential that Plaintiffs’ state recount right may have been deprived entirely by the waiting period law, we cannot say that the district court abused its discretion in determining that Plaintiffs would suffer irreparable harm without a TRO," said the court's order, joined by Judges Eric Clay and Bernice Donald.
"This is a severe burden, and requires us to closely scrutinize the justifications put forward for the waiting period. As the district court correctly recognized, the justification put forward by Defendants—that the waiting period allows for judicial review before the state spends resources on a recount—is simply not compelling enough to justify de facto nullifying Plaintiffs’ right to invoke the recount procedures afforded them under Michigan law," the court's majority said.
As a result both Stein's campaign and the Schuette's office released statements hailing one of the rulings.
"Today, Trump and his GOP allies in Michigan tried everything in the book to stop the recount, and they failed. This recount is continuing in spite of their efforts to suppress the vote," Stein lawyer Matthew Brinckerhoff said in a statement. "We applaud this decision by the Sixth Circuit, and look forward to continuing to fight for the rights of Michiganders to ensure their votes are recounted in a timely and thorough manner."
Schuette's statement, meanwhile, praised the Michigan Court of appeals ruling.
"I’m grateful, and I know Michigan taxpayers agree, that the Michigan Court of Appeals has adhered to the rule of law, and clarity in our Michigan statute in agreeing that Jill Stein is not an aggrieved candidate and the recount must stop," Schuette said in his response.
The Michigan GOP has already filed for the case to be taken up by the full 15-judge bench of the 6th Circuit. |
Democrat Jon Ossoff is headed for a runoff in June against a Republican contender after failing Tuesday to score an upset victory Georgia congressional race: Democrat Ossoff, Republican Handel will go to run-off. Despite major outside money, FAKE media support and eleven Republican candidates, BIG "R" win with runoff in Georgia. Glad to be of help! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 19, 2017 Seems like an appropriate song for today! The Devil went down to Georgia – He was looking for a soul to steal – He was in a bind, ’cause he was way behind – He was willing to make a deal – When he came across this young man – Sawing on a fiddle and playing it hot – And the Devil jumped up on a hickory stump and said – “Boy let me tell you what: I guess you didn´t know it, but I’m a fiddle player too,
And if you’d care to take a dare,
I’ll make a bet with you
Now you play a pretty good fiddle,
Boy, but give the Devil his due
I bet a fiddle of gold against your soul
‘Cause I think I’m better than you”
The boy said, “My name’s Johnny and it might be a sin,
But I’ll take your bet, you’re gonna regret,
‘Cause I’m the best there’s ever been”
Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard,
‘Cause hell’s broke loose in Georgia and the Devil deals the cards
And if you win you’ll get this shiny fiddle made of gold,
But if you lose, the Devil gets your soul!
The Devil opened up his case and he said, “I’ll start this show”
And fire blew from his fingertips as he rosined up his bow
And he pulled the bow across the strings and it made an evil hiss
Then a band of demons joined in,
And it sounded something like this
When the Devil finished, Johnny said,
“Well you’re pretty good old son
But sit down in that chair right there
And let me show you how it’s done!”
Fire on the Mountain, run, boys, run
The Devil´s in the house of the rising sun
Chicken in the bread pan a picking out dough,
Granny does your dog bite, “No, child, no”
The Devil bowed his head because he knew that he’d been beat
And he laid that golden fiddle on the ground at Johnny´s feet
Johnny said, “Devil, just come on back
If you ever want to try again,
I done told you once, you son of a bitch,
I’m the best there´s ever been”
He played,
Fire on the Mountain, run, boys, run
The Devil’s in the house of the rising sun
Chicken in the bread pan a picking out dough,
Granny will your dog bite, “No, child, no” Where is Jon Ossoff’s money coming from?
Watch: ActBlue is a cousin of ShareBlue.
Ossoff is a Soros pawn. |
HDST‘s primary goal is to find and characterize dozens of Earth-like exoplanets. A sample of dozens of exoEarths opens up the opportunity to identify truly Earth-like worlds with rocky surfaces and oceans, amidst a complex zoo of other varieties of terrestrial planets. With this large sample, observing telltale signs of life in the planets’ atmospheres becomes possible. If life is rare, HDST will take us from our current complete ignorance of the occurrence rate of inhabited worlds to a first constraint, potentially showing how remarkable our own existence is. If life is common, a large sample of terrestrial worlds with highly unusual atmospheric chemistry will secure our belief that life of some kind exists beyond the Earth, regardless of possible false positives. Whatever the outcome, HDST will change how we see our place in the Universe.
While thousands of exoplanets are already known to exist, none are yet known to be truly Earth-like, even though some have radii similar to Earth’s. Distinguishing habitable worlds like Earth (i.e., those with surface water oceans) from greenhouse planets like Venus, or barren worlds like Mars, requires understanding a planet’s atmosphere. HDST will therefore not just image new worlds, but will also acquire spectra of their atmospheres at visible (and in some cases out to near-infrared) wavelengths to search for signs that indicate a potential planet like our own.
HDST will search for exoEarths around hundreds of stars, but during that quest will revolutionize the study of planetary systems in general. HDST will discover planets of all sizes, and any surrounding debris disks. Such discoveries will not only place detected exoEarths in context within their own planetary systems, but are also interesting in their own right.
While the search for the exoEarths that are waiting to be discovered is compelling, the search is not easy. Not only are these planets intrinsically faint, they also orbit very bright host stars. Viewed from another star, our Earth’s reflected light would be 10 billion times fainter than the Sun itself, with an orbit that separates the Earth from the Sun by a tiny fraction of an arcsecond. These challenges can be overcome if HDST meets three significant goals. First, HDST must have a large primary mirror area both to gather enough photons (exoEarths are as faint as the faintest objects in the Hubble Deep Field) and to cleanly separate the planet and star for hundreds of star systems, many of which are tens of parsecs[2] away. Second, HDST must have exquisite starlight suppression that blocks out the starlight to 1 part in 10 billion for planet-star projected separations of about 35 milliarcseconds (equivalent to the width of a human thumb viewed from a distance of 130 km). Third, HDST must be thermally and dynamically stable for this starlight suppression to perform at the needed level.
Major advances in all areas of astrophysics are possible with HDST. A telescope with HDST’s degree of sensitivity, resolution, and stability will transform current understanding of how galaxies, stars, and planets form and evolve. With its high-definition resolving power, HDST has the amazing ability to take an optical image or spectrum at about 100-parsec spatial resolution or better, for any observable object in the entire Universe, no matter where a galaxy lies within the cosmic horizon. This 100-parsec threshold is the scale of individual star forming regions and dwarf satellites—the constituent building blocks of galaxies. |
Marvel Comics is set to publish two in-continuity comics for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the form of prequel comic books for Black Panther and Avengers: The Infinity War.
This will not be the first time Marvel has published such comics though, as with the current Thor: Ragnarok, they often just adapt previous movies that tie into an upcoming one, such as Captain America: Civil War ahead of Spider-Man Homecoming, and the current adaptation of The Incredible Hulk ahead of Thor: Ragnarok.
However, Ant-Man received original series that expanded the eighties adventures of the original Ant-Man and Wasp – and that’s the treatment Black Panther and Avengers: The Infinity War are getting. First, the Panther, ahead of the movie in February, giving us the movie universe origin of the character for the very first time:
Black Panther Prelude by Will Corona Pilgrim and Annapaiola Martello. Wakanda. The most technologically advanced nation in the world is protected by the mighty BLACK PANTHER! Before the upcoming Black Panther film, learn how T’CHALLA became the legendary hero of Wakanda in this ALL-NEW, NEVER-BEFORE-TOLD tale set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe! See how the mantle was passed to the future king, in a time when Super Heroes were just emerging in the larger world. DATA
AUTHOR: WILL CORONA PILGRIM
ARTIST: ANNAPAOLA MARTELLO
And the Avengers: Infinity War Prelude:
Follow the Avengers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in their adventures leading up to this summer’s blockbuster event, Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War!
In continuity!
About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist.
(Last Updated )
Related Posts
None found |
Once in a great while, the exact $25 million tool you need is laying around, free for the taking. Free, that is, if you can move a delicate, complex piece of scientific equipment halfway across the country without breaking it.
Researchers at Fermilab—a particle physics laboratory outside Chicago—were the recent recipients of this serendipity. A giant doughnut-shaped electromagnet that has been collecting dust for the past 12 years at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York could be the vital centerpiece of an upcoming experiment, one that could help scientists understand data coming out of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. This Saturday, scientists and engineers on both ends are going to move it. But the 50-ft. magnet is so fragile that even the slightest bend–a twist or sag a third of an inch anywhere–could irreparably damage it.
"It's one of a kind," says Chris Polly, the project manager of Muon g-2, the experiment that needs the magnet. He plans for Muon g-2 to be up and running by 2016. But if the magnet breaks, "it would cost a lot more money and cause a pretty hefty delay."
Losing the magnet would be devastating for more than just fiscal reasons. As the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland prepares to bump up the power for its upcoming experiments, Fermilab's new project, Muon g-2, could play a supporting role. "This is a rapid timescale we're talking about," Polly says. "We want to know the physics right now because it's helpful in interpreting data coming from the Large Hadron Collider."
The Big Move
For someone in charge of $25 million worth of absurdly delicate equipment, Del Allspach, the engineer in charge of the move, describes the journey with surprising calm. Because the magnet can't be disassembled without damaging it, Fermilab is going to ship the thing to Illinois on a white-knuckle waterway journey down the Atlantic and up the Mississippi River. The lab has paid for a private barge, a nearly unbendable casing, and a hydraulically leveling trailer designed just for this mission to transport the magnet to and from the water.
On the monthlong boat ride, the magnet will be locked down in its casing, covered from the elements, and decked out with safety-measuring equipment. "We have four accelerometers and one tiltmeter," says Allspach. "We will be watching the readouts of those in real time." If any of his equipment hints that the water is getting too choppy, it'll feed to a satellite modem, and he'll be autodialed day or night. (You can follow the magnet's path on the Muon website.)
On the boat, the magnet will be able to withstand breakers larger than 16 feet. Still, a surprise jolt or an unexpectedly large storm could turn the prize magnet into a 17-ton paperweight. Allspach is assured that with weather forecasting and the protective and monitoring equipment, the magnet—and with it the hopes of starting the Muon g-2 experiment as soon as possible—is in no danger. "We've done calculations," he says, "and we'll have complete control of the barge."
Combing the Vacuum
Muon g-2 will survey the short-lived particles that pop in and out of existence in a vacuum. The experiment relies on one of the strange truths in particle physics: that empty space is anything but empty. Even in a perfect vacuum pairs of particles—a proton and antiproton, for example, or an electron and antielectron—materialize from the void, only to disappear back into oblivion an instant later. "So a vacuum is mainly nothing," says Bill Morse, a particle physicist with the Muon g-2 experiment.
The scientists at Fermilab plan to study these fleeting particles by shooting volleys of muons (the fat, short-lived cousin of the electron) through the giant, empty electromagnet. The electromagnet causes the muons to wobble like toy tops losing their balance. For nearly a century, scientists have been calculating how much the muons are supposed to wobble, but in reality they wobble a tiny bit more than predicted. This is because the muons are pushing past the other particles popping in and out of the vacuum, each of which can steal a little bit of energy. Physicists call this gap between expectation and reality g-2, hence the experiment's name.
This figure, g-2 is more than just an interesting Snapple-cap fact. "It provides the way to see if new theories actually fit our observations," says Glen Marshall, a particle physicist at Canada's national particle physics laboratory, who is not involved in the Muon g-2 experiment. Any theory that seeks to explain the crazy world of subatomic particles must predict the value of g-2. Any theory that can't, or gets the number wrong, is dead in the water.
Fermilab's experiment will be the most accurate g-2 measurement yet, and accuracy is everything. As the measurements of g-2 become more precise, physicists can narrow down what matter does or doesn't exist in the universe. And the last time g-2 was measured, the theory that almost perished was a big one.
The Hint of Something More
The Standard Model of particle physics not only lays out what particles exist and how they interact, but it also explains a huge variety of subatomic phenomenon that other theories can't. Earlier this year, the theory had its biggest open question answered when scientists at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson.
Like all particle physics theories, the Standard Model specifies a precise number for g-2. But the last time g-2 was measured—at Brookhaven in the 1990s using the very same electromagnet Fermilab is moving—scientists discovered that the Standard Model didn't match their findings.
This could have been a major blow to the Standard Model, but there was a slim possibility—just 0.3 percent—that the Brookhaven findings were false and due to chance. And in particle physics, that's too much. For something to be considered a true discovery, the possibility has to be whittled down to (an arbitrary but widely accepted) 0.00006 percent. Brookhaven lacked the power to make a more accurate measurement, and so the electromagnet and the researchers who ran the experiment have been waiting more than a decade to give it another try.
At Fermilab, physicists will get their second chance. Because of advancements made in the past 10 years, and because Fermilab will be recycling parts from the Tevatron (the high energy particle accelerator that was shut down in 2011), researchers will be able to record 20 times more muons than they could at Brookhaven. Because of this the Muon g-2 experiment will be able to put the Standard Model to the test, and perhaps see whether there is something strange left to be discovered. "It could be that there's a new force" or new particles, Morse says. "Another theory is dark light. All of these are possibilities. We don't know."
But Marshall stresses that the Muon g-2 experiment is only one part of a much bigger picture. "You can't find out what's beyond the Standard Model with just g-2," he says. Regardless, whether the Muon g-2 experiment challenges the Standard Model, the measurement will help make sense of any future results coming from other laboratories. "If there is a new particle discovered at CERN," Marshall says, "we'll know something about it right away because of the g-2 experiment." |
The Chinese microblogging site Weibo has a huge following, with around 100 million users posting every day. For those living in China, one of CPJ's 10 most censored countries, the social network offers the chance to discuss and share news that is often blocked in mainstream outlets.
Insight into how Weibo balances the demands of government censorship with the need to attract users has been provided by a former employee, who says he worked in its 150-member censorship department for a couple of years. The employee, who has not been named for security reasons, contacted CPJ via social media at the end of last year.
As well as sharing documents that show daily briefings about topics that are off limits on Weibo and instructions on what method of censorship should be applied to posts, the former employee discussed his views on the evolution of Weibo's censorship.
EDITOR'S NOTE: CPJ is not able to verify the former employee's account. When CPJ contacted Sina's headquarters in Beijing for comment at the end of February, a spokeswoman said the company did not have anyone who could respond to CPJ's questions. This interview has been edited for clarity.
As someone who has used Weibo for several years, I find its censorship appears to be tighter. How do you think Weibo censorship changed during your time there?
I joined the censorship department in early 2011 when Weibo was expanding. The Jasmine Revolution [calls for peaceful pro-democracy protests across China] had just wound down. Not long after, in July, there was a high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou. A massive amount of ordinary users suddenly joined the discussion about this man-made disaster. The social impact Weibo abruptly generated caught the government off guard. It did not anticipate and was not prepared for such nation-wide attention on an issue that could be discussed on a platform where everyone can connect instantly. The sheer volume of content generated by users created enormous pressure on Weibo's censorship team. We didn't know what to do for a moment. The rail crash led to the censorship department accelerating its recruitment and co-operating with the government more closely.
Since 2011, almost all social issues that attracted wide public attention were propelled by Weibo. The Communist Party was terrified by Weibo, staring at it with fear and the determination to tame it.
When I left Sina in 2013 there were crackdowns [by the government] on online rumors and Big Vs [influential microblog commentators] such as the arrest of billionaire Charles Xue, and a ruling was passed allowing users to be charged with defamation if posts containing "false information" are reposted more than 500 times.
The effect was felt immediately. The amount of original posting dropped rapidly. Users not only withdrew from serious commentary, but became reluctant to post about what they heard or saw in their daily lives, because any information not confirmed by government authorities could potentially be deemed as creating or spreading rumors.
Though the Chinese government's control of Weibo never loosened, it no longer focuses that much of its attention on Weibo. Now, it rules Weibo with ease.
The core of Weibo censorship is the lack of clear rules that users can follow. You don't know whether you will be the next target of censorship. Such tactics instill fear in you, then you start to behave yourself. Gradually, it becomes natural not to speak your mind. Over time, you lose the ability to express yourself as a normal person would do in a free society. That is the effect of censorship in the long run.
Do you think Weibo has become better at censoring content?
I think it's probably getting worse. More censorship doesn't necessarily mean better censorship.
During my time at Sina, sensitive words increased from 2,000 to at least over 10,000. Phrases like "McDonald's" and "combo No.3" [code words for organizing protests] became sensitive words during the Jasmine incident, but they didn't get taken off from the "sensitive words list" until the end of 2012, a result of both tardiness and playing it safe. The ever-expanding list of sensitive words greatly increased the workload of the censorship department, which resulted in the lower quality of censorship.
Turnover at the department seemed high. The department had plans to computerize censorship, designing programs to enable computers to complete complex censorship tasks. But the plans didn't pan out, mainly because they were too expensive. The cost of manual labor in comparison was lower. Sina's image recognition technology, to make computers identify the content of pictures, in my opinion was pretty bad, but it was being developed.
What was it like working in Weibo's censorship department?
There were about 10 managerial-level personnel in the headquarters in Beijing and, at its peak in 2012-2013, about 150 rank-and-file employees in Tianjin. The people in Beijing made broad censorship decisions while the Tianjin staff mainly did streamline work: read a post, delete. Read the next one, delete. I've heard from friends who still work there that the number of employees has declined in the past couple of years. The department purposefully only hired men, at least during the period I was there, because the managers thought there were a lot of night shifts and women wouldn't be up to the task.
In Tianjin, there were four censorship teams and one check-up team. The check-up team's job was to censor posts missed by the censorship teams. The four teams alternated shifts. Every four days, each team completed a 10-hour day shift and a 14-hour night shift.
The work environment was stiff and dull. Morale was low. There was never much chatter in the lounge. But there were some employees who seemed to genuinely enjoy the work. They went above and beyond their assigned tasks and diligently looked for "reactionaries"-- [political dissenters]--feeling they were truly contributing to the stability of Chinese society.
What prompted you to quit?
Before joining Sina, I thought there were bad people outside. After I joined, I began to realize how the bad things I know in life, such as censorship, are systematically executed through fine divisions of labor, and how the system encroaches the ethos of a normal society.
When I was at Sina, I helped friends and strangers get back accounts that had been removed and told them how to walk around sensitive words. I also helped big Vs find out which government agencies ordered the removal of their accounts. I later felt doing this was not enough, so I left.
The censorship logs contain phrases such as "send the big form to Beijing" and "the big form sent to the cybersecurity office." What does that mean?
The "big form" is the collection of "harmful information." In other words, censored posts. We submitted the data to the Beijing headquarters. The headquarters would then send it to the Beijing public security bureau, [of which the cybersecurity office is a division]. After the police reviewed it the police might order us to delete additional posts.
Do you know of any instances of users being summoned by police or arrested after you or your then-colleagues reported information about them?
I have not heard of any specific instances internally, but I know that when some mass incidents [protests or unofficial gatherings] happened, or when some political rumor was spread widely, or during the Tiananmen Square anniversaries, police harassed people based on the information we provided. One time, a manager of our department said to us inadvertently--I forget the exact wording--something like "hand in your big form. The police need it to arrest people." I also saw on Weibo some users mentioned this person or that person got arrested for their Weibo postings.
Several times, the censorship logs mentioned fines, such as a March 6, 2013 entry that read, "Statistics reports must be sent to the group, not to a certain individual... [I] have repeatedly said this. Next time if [you] still send statistics reports to individuals, not to the group, fine!!!" Have any of you been fined for not doing a good censorship job?
Not that I know of. The salary was not high to begin with. There is no mechanism to enforce the fine. But we were verbally warned a couple of times that if we did not do a good censorship job, it would cause Weibo to be closed down.
The censorship logs include dozens of tabs for categorizing users--"right-wing speech," "senior VIP," "grassroots celebrities," "New York Times," "two-meetings Weibo group." What do they mean?
The department gave different tabs to different kinds of users, and applied different censorship methods to them. The "two meetings Weibo group" tab was created during the two-meetings, [China's annual legislative sessions] in 2011. Representatives at the meetings, an army of "yes-men" in essence, were to post suggestions for new laws on Weibo--an exercise in creating a façade that the representatives had some say in China's law-making process. We were ordered that any posts by members of this group were not to be censored, even if the posts were flagged for containing sensitive words.
Initially, the New York Times's Chinese-language website had an official Weibo account. I don't quite remember when, but after the newspaper published a story on Communist Party elites the department created a "New York Times" tab, and added the Times' official Weibo account and the accounts of journalists who were affiliated with the newspaper into the group, then treated it as a special sensitive group. I can't recall the exact level of sensitivity it was assigned. Later, the newspaper's official Weibo account was removed permanently.
One of the groups with a high level of sensitivity was tagged "sensitive VIP." This group included verified users who criticized the government a lot, like The International New York Times contributing writer Murong Xuecun who had 4 million followers. All posts of users in this group were manually viewed immediately after being published.
There was also the "sensitive users" tab. These were ordinary users who frequently voiced discontent with the government. All of their posts were manually viewed. The department would use their posts to study methods being used to avoid content being flagged and would use this information to update the sensitive words list.
There are a lot of other groups. Censorship methods that applied to them changed quickly.
What do you think is Weibo's contribution to freedom of information?
Weibo is like a giant fortress. It attracted Chinese-speaking users into the fortress, then managed them through a large team of censors and close co-operation with the government. I wonder if Chinese-speaking users would have been keener to circumvent the Great Firewall and use Twitter if Weibo had not existed. |
With the economy collapsing and the ranks of the unemployed growing, the last thing this country needs is a shortage of cheap entertainment. Perhaps that's why the Senate, unable to agree on plans for another economic stimulus package or a bailout for U.S. automakers, managed to approve a bill that would help consumers keep their televisions on after local stations turn off their analog channels on Feb. 17, 2009.
When those transmissions end, consumers who rely on over-the-air TV and don't have a digital tuner or converter box will be left with nothing but a blank screen. A trial run of the cutoff in Wilmington, N.C., in September went about as well as possible, yet numerous viewers were still caught unprepared. With 10 million or more consumers across the country relying on rabbit ears, chances are that thousands won't be ready for the shift even if the vast majority of Americans know it's coming.
That's why the Senate gave speedy passage to S 3663, by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.). The bill, like a more prescriptive measure awaiting action in the House (HR 7013, by Santa Barbara Democrat Lois Capps), calls for the Federal Communications Commission to let stations temporarily continue broadcasting on their analog channels. The broadcasts would be limited to emergency messages and instructions for how to get help making the switch to digital, including a phone number to call and an URL to visit.
The measure makes sense, but it wouldn't address what's likely to be the biggest problem for the transition to digital. As the Wilmington experience demonstrated, a non-trivial percentage of TV viewers simply can't take all the steps needed to prepare an analog TV for digital broadcasts. (The easiest solution is to hook your TV up to cable or satellite service, but if you don't already have pay TV, that's an expensive way to go.) These folks might be able to buy a converter box, but they need help from family members, friends or volunteers to hook it up, program the remote and scan for digital signals. It's not rocket science, but it's not as easy as plugging a toaster into the wall and turning it on, either. That's why local governments and community groups need to start lining up volunteers now to help the elderly, the disabled and -- yes -- the clueless buy and hook up their digital converter boxes before their free TV gets lost in the digital transition.
Los Angeles Times photo
-- Jon Healey
Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. |
SAN FRANCISCO -- In what might have been the shortest hearing yet during Oracle v. Google, legal teams from both sides met on Monday at the U.S. District Court to clean up unresolved financial issues surrounding the case.
There were three major points that were discussed and finalized during the 25-minute session.
First, Oracle filed a stipulation earlier in the day in which Google has been asked to pay $0 in statutory damages (in reference to the nine lines of code in the rangeCheck method and the test files). Oracle has done this to move proceedings along faster as it works on an appeal. Judge William Alsup asked Oracle's lawyers if there is a catch here. There isn't really except that the damages can be discussed again down the line if Oracle wins an appeal.
Secondly, Google has 14 days to submit application for Oracle to pay legal administrative costs. It's possible that Google could also demand that Oracle pay for legal fees (i.e. billable hours for attorneys) too, but we'll find out in the application.
Finally, while there was no damages phase at all throughout this trial, there were lawyers hired by both sides to determine how much this case was worth overall. Payments for these attorneys hired by Oracle and Google have both been finalized, while the court had another attorney on retainer that analyzed the worth of the case from an objective standpoint for free.
Again, the next item we're waiting for is Google's application for legal cost reimbursement from Oracle.
Judge Alsup acknowledged to the court that he didn't know when he might see everyone involved in this case again. Oracle's lead attorney from Morrison and Foerster, Michael Jacobs, said he hopes after the appeal.
Related: |
Although the Islamic State (ISIS) jihadist group announced that they orchestrated the terror attacks in Brussels last week, Palestinian Authority (PA) Security Forces Spokesman Adnan Al-Damiri has suggested that Israel was in fact behind the attacks.
According to the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), Al-Damiri questioned whether the attacks by ISIS were just "a coincidence" in light of European support for "Palestine" and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
"Question: How come Europe has turned into the scene of terror attacks and murder of innocent civilians after the majority of European parliaments have recognized the State of Palestine, and after the expansion of the European boycott of products made in Israeli settlements? Is it possible that the timing of the targeting (of Europe) by ISIS and its offshoots is innocent and a coincidence? And why specifically Europe now that the European popular and official support for Palestine is growing? Help me understand and answer,” Al-Damiri posted on his Facebook page.
Immediately following the attacks in Brussels, Al-Damiri stated that the US and Europe brought the terror on themselves and that "those who prepare the poison will taste it themselves, and today Europe is having a taste of what it prepared with its own hands."
The PA often libels Israel and the United States as having created ISIS and claim they are the masterminds managing the terror organization and its attacks.
PMW further uncovered similar speculation by an official PA daily that claimed that Israel is the true perpetrator of the terror attacks in Europe. Member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council Muwaffaq Matar speculated why attacks in Paris and Brussels occurred at the same time as Europe's increased support for the Palestinians, indicating that it is logical that Israel was behind the attacks.
"We do not want to throw accusations, but why did the crimes and terrorist massacres of ISIS in France and Brussels coincide with the European Union's first attempt to free itself of the Israeli extortion and of the Jewish persecution in Europe complex, and (coincide with) European members of parliament's support of the Palestinian right (to statehood)?" posted the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida.
Matar specifically mentioned France's leading role in pressuring Israel, and the fact that Brussels and the EU has been heading the boycott and labeling of Israeli products made in settlements. "How can we not allow ourselves to consider this background as the motive of those affected (i.e., Israel) by the new Europe to strike at its heart (i.e., Brussels)," he asked.
Similarly, Fatah accused Israel of being behind the ISIS terror attacks in Paris in November 2015. |
This week a number of stories claiming the Tories had voted that animals are not sentient beings went mega-viral. An article on the Independent website – shared thousands of times on social media – reported “The Tories have rejected all scientists and voted that animals don’t feel pain”. The Evening Standard claimed they “just voted that animals cannot feel pain or emotions”. The Indy, which has truly become one of the most downmarket trash clickbait websites around, even named and shamed the Tory MPs “who voted legislation on animals feeling pain and emotion”. These attacks were tweeted out by celebrities like Ben Fogle and Sue Perkins, politicians including Caroline Lucas and failed LibDem MP Sarah Olney, and petitions were signed by hundreds of thousands of unwitting animal lovers. The stats are huge:
Analysis shows 2 million people have seen articles and tweets about the Tories voting against animal sentience
155,157 signed a Change.org petition repeating the claim
263,476 signed another petition on 38 Degrees
43,081 signed a third petition on ThePetitionSite
Nearly 30,000 have signed smaller petitions (that’s almost 500,000 overall)
Sue Perkins shared it with her 1 million followers
Rachel Riley shared it with her 510,000 followers
Ben Fogle shared it with his 336,000 followers
Caroline Lucas shared it with her 276,000 followers
The RSPCA tweeted it out to their 248,000 followers
Just one problem. It is fake news…
During last Wednesday’s debate, Tory MPs repeatedly explained that the government already recognised animal sentience and that the amendment was flawed. Read it here in Hansard – Tory MP after Tory MP stood up and agreed that animals are sentient. No MPs argued against animal sentience. It is just not true to say, as the Indy did, that “The Tories have rejected all scientists and voted that animals don’t feel pain”. Anyone who has seen the Environment Secretary with his Bichon Frise Snowy, or indeed the hedgehog above, knows these viral articles are fake news. This made up story, circulated by the Tories’ opponents for solely cynical reasons, is cutting through to animal lovers who think they can trust things they believe on the Independent website. This morning Michael Gove categorically committed the government to animal sentience once and for all. He couldn’t be clearer:
“This government will ensure that any necessary changes required to UK law are made in a rigorous and comprehensive way to ensure animal sentience is recognised after we leave the EU.”
Will that go as viral as the fake news BS that hoodwinked thousands in the last week? |
Blog
St. James Court Art Show – October 2015
This October 2nd – 4th, the St. James Court Art Show in Louisville, Kentucky celebrates its 59th year! This juried arts and crafts show boasts 750 artists and more than 30,000 visitors. This is no ordinary show, but don’t take our word for it: Sunshine Artists’ annual survey has voted the St. James Court Art Show the best in the nation six times since 2003.
The Victorian homes of Old Louisville are the perfect backdrop for this great show. Organizers work to make sure there is something for everyone in a wide range of prices. Entrance is free!
The St. James Court Art show even offers a VIP experience. For $99 (purchased by September 11th), you will receive a parking pass for the entire show, VIP tent access (includes lunch), a signed official poster, a one-year subscription to Kentucky Monthly, a patron button with ribbon, and package hold service. Proceeds go to the High School Scholarship Fund.
Hours:
Friday and Saturday: 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Sunday: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Location and Transportation:
The St. James Court Art Show is held in Old Louisville south of Central Park on St. James and Belgravia Courts and adjacent blocks on Magnolia Avenue, Third St., and Fourth St. Many nearby streets will be closed, so you will need to park your vehicle offsite or use the valet service.
More detailed information on this event can be found at http://www.stjamescourtartshow.com.
August 2015
Art Fairs
Art Conventions
Art Galleries |
Toronto hasn't been blessed with the most ideal summer weather, but August is typically the best month of the year to spend in all the pristine lakes around the city, which have had plenty of time to warm up by this stage of the season.
There might not be a more fun way to spend some time out on the water than this new floating water park in Barrie. Located near Centennial Beach, the 13,000 square foot fun pad can accommodate about 100 people at any given time.
A post shared by Barrie Splash ON Water Park (@barriesplashon) on Aug 12, 2017 at 1:53pm PDT
You can use the Splash On Water Park as a giant water-based obstacle course or as a place to chill in the middle the harbour on a scorching hot day, where the relief of the lake is just a few feet away.
There's actually a few of these floating water parks on the west coast run by Okanagan Wibit (who are also behind the Barrie location), but this new addition is the closest attraction of its kind to Toronto.
Splash On Water Park is open daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Pricing packages include evening passes ($15), day passes ($25), and multi-day passes ($75-$99). |
After the rivals see what the court has done, the Republicans and Democrats scurry to make a deal to create or abolish districts so as to protect their favorites and discommode their known enemies, rivals or potential adversaries. Henry J. Stern: Pants Heating Up
Republicans are adamantly opposed to any taxes that discommode the wealthy. Richard (RJ) Eskow: Deficit Hysteria: Washington's War on the Young
He had no great liking for the man, and so had left the Temple until last so as to discommode Augier, but that was scant consolation when he was himself nodding in his carriage. The Mistaken Wife
He, alone, had managed to evade and discommode the heavy-worlders, despite their physical superiority. Cattle Town
The White House would really rather we didn't discommode it, and therefore we don't? Ellis Weiner: Our Mister Brooks II: Reloaded
"I wouldna discommode ye, mistress, " he said, holding himself stiffly. A Breath of Snow and Ashes
Her devilish mood had not passed— she wanted to discommode this polite young fellow in some minor way—perhaps snatch his ridiculous rag of a cap, or even ruffle his hair. The Berrybender Narratives
Then he said, with a clearly modulated and rather mincing articulation: ‘Would it discommode you to contribute elsewhere a coin with a somewhat different superscription?’ The Complete Father Brown
A handful of kinless children would not discommode the Placehold, Whandall thought. The Burning City |
The Portland Timbers on Friday cleared up the intrigue surrounding offseason acquisition Jose Adolfo Valencia.
The Colombian forward will have knee surgery to repair damaged cartilage in his left knee, the team announced Friday.
"The goal is making sure (Valencia) is right," Portland coach John Spencer said.
General manager
said the surgery is scheduled for Monday. Valencia, 20, is expected to miss 6 to 12 months.
A recent MRI showed damaged cartilage in Valencia's knee. The Timbers became concerned about Valencia's knee after noticing it was swollen after a training session Jan. 23, Valencia's first day of training with the Timbers. The Timbers said no one knows exactly when Valencia sustained the injury.
"There was a small issue. Upon further investigation, (we felt) that the small issue could become a big issue," Wilkinson said. "It's better to treat it now. It's better to remove the issue to see if we can get the player to make a full recovery."
The Colombian forward had not trained with the Timbers since Jan. 24. The Timbers, saying they had to work through a variety of issues including negotiating with Valencia's former team, Santa Fe, released few details until Friday.
The new agreement with Santa Fe places Valencia on a one-year loan with a minimum contract for 2012. Valencia will go on the disabled list, but will remain with the Timbers while rehabilitating from the surgery. He will not occupy a spot on the team's roster and will not count as one of the team's international players.
"We're not rushing it," Wilkinson said. "If we did rush it, it would be selfish of us. We're trying to take care of the player. You've got to start to look at what's best for the team."
The Timbers not only had to renegotiate with Santa Fe regarding Valencia's contract, but because of the uniqueness of the injury, also had to determine the best route for treatment.
"We still think this player could be something special," Wilkinson said. "He's only 20. I think with this type of surgery, his age and the health of that particular area of his body looks very good other than this injury."
The surgery will be performed by Timbers director of medicine Dr. Jonathan E. Greenleaf at Sports Medicine Oregon.
Geoffrey C. Arnold: 503-221-8556;
[email protected]
twitter.com/geoffreycarnold
--
; follow him on
. |
The main event scene in Melbourne City Wrestling is in more turmoil than ever before. It all started with Mr Juicy challenging for the number one contendership to the MCW Heavyweight Championship, expecting to cash in his Ballroom Brawl Rumble victory from last years event, twelve months on at this years Ballroom Brawl, which takes place at the Thornbury Theatre on Saturday August 5th. That was until he injured his shoulder at May’s event, ‘Keep It 100.” As we found out last Saturday night at MCW Hostile Takeover, doubt is surrounding whether or not he’ll be able to follow up on that championship opportunity.
The controversy continued in the Hostile Takeover main event on Saturday night, when TK Cooper challenged Dowie James for the MCW Heavyweight Championship that Mr Juicy is the rightful top contender for. The referee for the bout, Edwin Lay, was knocked down during the closing stretch of the bout, and replacement referee AJ Edwards did not notice Dowie James’ foot on the bottom rope when TK Cooper scored the winning pinfall on him, thanks in part to TK’s valet and girlfriend, Dahlia Black, knocking Dowie’s foot off the ropes.
As TK Cooper was awarded the MCW Heavyweight Championship, Edwin Lay would have the decision reversed, having witnessed what went on at ringside during the match ending pinfall, and ordered the bout be restarted. Instead, TK Cooper and Dahlia Black chose to knock out BOTH referees, as well as Dowie James, and left the MCW Arena in a hurry with the championship in their possession. For those playing at home, the match was ruled a no contest.
As a result, we have a champion (Dowie James) who never officially lost the MCW Championship, which is now in the hands of TK Cooper and Dahlia Black. Melbourne City Management met on Sunday to work out what to do in regards to the situation, and with MCW Fight to Survive now looming on Saturday July 15 at the MCW Arena in Essendon, it has been decided that TK Cooper and Dowie James will meet in a rematch for the MCW Heavyweight Championship, in a main event bout where there MUST be a winner.
Prior to the shenanigans that closed out the evening, Dowie James and TK Cooper were engaged in a classic bout for the title, which was one of the best we’ve seen so far in 2017, and there’s no doubt that the same will happen when we see these two collide in a definitive rematch on July 15. But who will walk out the winner, and who will go on to fight for the MCW Heavyweight Championship at Ballroom Brawl?
There are many unanswered questions in this situation, and we hope to have some more clarity as we make our final stop on the road to the Thornbury Theatre on Saturday July 15, as we present ‘MCW Fight to Survive’. Tickets for this event are on sale now, and can be purchased via this link, with front row sold out, and second row now filling up fast. Tickets can also be purchased at the venue door on the night.
MCW Fight to Survive
Saturday 15th July 2017
The MCW Arena – Essendon Ukrainian Hall
11 Russell St (Opposite Essendon Station)
Doors 6:30pm. Show 7:30pm. |
Image caption The black rhino is classified as critically endangered
Three people have been arrested in the US and accused of conspiring to smuggle endangered black rhino horns and carvings from the US into China.
Zhifei Li, 28, smuggled more than 20 raw rhino horns, while Shusen Wei, 44, is charged with trying to bribe a federal law enforcement officer to aid Mr Li, federal prosecutors said.
Qing Wang is accused of sending carved rhino cups to Mr Li in Hong Kong.
US federal law bars trafficking in endangered species.
Mr Li and Mr Wei are Chinese nationals. The investigation was carried out by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
According to prosecutors, Mr Li sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to a co-conspirator in the US to buy rhino horns, which were sent in porcelain vases to another person in Hong Kong, in an effort to evade US authorities.
'Good health'
Mr Li is also accused of trying to buy two rhino horns for $59,000 (£38,000) in a hotel room in Miami in January from an undercover fish and wildlife officer. He also asked the undercover officer to procure more horns and send them to Hong Kong.
Mr Wei, who was sharing a hotel room with Mr Li, later asked an undercover informant to take a fish and wildlife officer out for dinner and offer her money to help Mr Li, prosecutors said.
Meanwhile, prosecutors say Mr Wang bought libation cups carved from rhino horn in the US and sent them to Mr Li in Hong Kong.
Some believe drinking from intricately carved rhino horn cups brings good health, and the cups are highly prized by collectors, US authorities said.
Native to Africa, the black rhinoceros is classified as a critically endangered species, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
But demand for rhino horns and the prices paid for them on the black market have soared in recent years, US prosecutors said. |
The sudden suspension of DisneyLife comes amid a crackdown in China's digital media space.
DisneyLife may be coming to an untimely end in China.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and Walt Disney Co. announced a multi-year licensing agreement to bring the over-the-top (OTT) service to Chinese subscribers in December.
But China's media regulators have already demanded that it be shut down, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Alibaba Group says DisneyLife is "down for an upgrade" and that it has issued refunds to subscribers. But according to the Journal's sources, China's media regulators requested the suspension.
An experiment in cable unbundling, DisneyLife allows users to connect directly to Disney content, including films, cartoon series and games. All the service requires is an internet connection and a special Mickey Mouse-shaped digital device, which Alibaba began selling in China in December for $123 (799 yuan). The service launched in the U.K. around the same time last year.
The first quarter of 2016 has brought a tightening of control to China's digital media sector. In March, Beijing introduced potentially stringent but vaguely worded restrictions on online publishing, particularly by foreign firms.
Last week, regulators required Apple Inc. to shutter the iBooks and iMovies components of the iTunes store in China. Apple says it hopes to get the services reinstated soon.
The sudden closures could be an ominous sign for the technology and entertainment giants, which have both achieved considerably more market access in China than their competitors. Disney is set to unveil its $5.5 billion Shanghai Disney Resort in June, and Apple has reported strong sales for the iPhone in China over the past two years. Both companies have emphasized to shareholders that China is integral to their future growth. |
With Toronto FC looking to strengthen its roster, primarily in central midfield and striker, manager Ryan Nelsen has some tough decisions ahead.
And, while polite and soft-spoken, the former New Zealand international clearly has no problems wielding a scalpel with his lineup.
From squad selection to choosing his starting 11, Nelsen has one guiding force.
"It's what's going to get us the win," he said after practice Tuesday. "This is a professional environment, it's not about massaging egos or anything like that. My door's always open. As I said it's about getting three points and if people are more interested in worrying about their own spot than Toronto getting three points, this is probably not the place to be.
"But no players in this club are like that. They're all really good guys, they're solid professionals, they understand that everybody gets a fair deal and in the end, it's whatever's best for the team."
Canadian midfielder Matt Stinson was waived Tuesday, the victim of a numbers game and an expected influx of new talent.
Nelsen paid tribute to the 21-year-old, who made 25 appearances in two seasons, calling him a "good professional" and a "fantastic servant."
"Unfortunately there just wasn't enough room as we're moving forward," he said.
The MLS club is inching closer to signing an Argentine player, believed to be 22-year-old forward Maximiliano Urruti of Newell's Old Boys.
Nelsen says the deal is 90 to 95 per cent done, with the rocky financial situation of the Argentine club having slowed the transaction.
Several other new signings are expected, meaning more roster decisions.
"Yes and that's great, that's really good," Nelsen said. "Now with a couple of guys coming back from injury, we're looking deeper now and that's been our problem. We haven't had a very deep squad."
Midfielders Luis Silva and Julio Cesar both practised Tuesday but Nelsen cautioned they had plenty to catch up on due to injury layoffs. Only striker Danny Koevermans (knee) practised away from the main squad.
Toronto (1-2-0) has a bye this week before hosting the Los Angeles Galaxy next week. |
WATCH: Noreen Laghari says she was to be used as suicide bomber
RAWALPINDI: Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) on Monday released the confessional video statement of Noreen Laghari, a Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences (LUMHS) student arrested after the April 14 gun battle between security forces and militants.
Noreen confessed that her husband Ali Tariq’s involvement in terrorist activities and revealed that she herself was about to explode herself in an Easter day attack on Christian community in Pakistan.
#LUMHS student #NoreenLaghari says she was about to become a suicide bomber pic.twitter.com/SIZcgMMFNQ — Anees Hanif (@anees_avis) April 17, 2017
“Through this video, I wish to make it clear that I was not kidnapped by anyone but went on Lahore on my own free will. Ali (her husband) was involved in planning of terrorist activities from a long time, his training included carrying out a suicide bombing and kidnapping intelligence officers,” Noreen says in the video.
She added that on April 1, the organisation (Islamic State) provided them with suicide jackets and hand grenades with orders to carry out a suicide bombing in a church on Easter and she was about to be used as a suicide bomber.
Related
LUMHS student disappears, claims reaching ‘land of Khilafat’
Naureen left her Hyderabad home on February 10 and was missing since then but her brother received a message from another girl’s Facebook profile in March that the girl has reached some ‘Land of Khilafah’.
“Brother, I am Noreen, I hope yo all are fine, I am fine and happy too, I have contacted you to inform you that by the grace of God, I have migrated to the land of Khilafah and hope that you all will someday migrate (to this land),” read the message reportedly sent by Naureen.
Noreen was arrested while her husband, Ali Tariq, was killed in the encounter in Lahore’s factory area on April 14. Force said they were planning a terrorist activity on Easter Sunday.
Noreen had married Ali Tariq after joining the militants, forces had found copy of her father’s NIC and her college card from the site of the gun battle.
Intel based op by #PakistanArmy foiled suicide attack on #Easter . #NoreenLeghari was with militant & her cards recovered from site pic.twitter.com/IHxlIulprj — Arshad Sharif (@arsched) April 16, 2017
Related
Copy of Noreen Laghari’s father’s NIC found from Lahore gun battle scene
Comments
comments |
The millionaire activist who admitted smashing up Donald Trump's Hollywood Walk of Fame star called the Republican nominee a 'serial liar and a misogynist' as he explained his actions on Thursday.
James Otis, 52, an heir to the Otis Elevator Company fortune, was arrested on Thursday for taking a sledgehammer and pick-ax to the $30,000 tourist attraction.
He told reporters a short time after he was released from jail on $20,000 bail, that he did it to show support for women who have accused Trump of groping them.
'He's a serial liar and misogynist and that's why we're here: to try to address that and help those women who told Mr. Trump they won't stand for it anymore,' Otis said.
Scroll down for video
James Otis, the man who admits vandalizing Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, speaks to the media about his arrest outside of the LAPD Metropolitan Detention Center
Fixing: By Wednesday afternoon, replacement work on the star was underway. Otis wanted to give auction money to Trump's alleged abuse victims; Trump denies the abuse charges
Otis was arrested for felony vandalism and is due in court on November 18, authorities said.
The charge that could earn him three years in prison and a $10,000 fine if convicted.
Otis, in his news conference, said he is taking responsibility for hacking at Trump's star and he criticized Trump for what he described as dodging his responsibility.
His attack on Wednesday on the star, which Donald Trump received in 2007 for starring in the NBC show 'The Apprentice,' made national headlines.
Otis was captured on video in a hard hat and reflective vest as he hacked at the star before dawn on a sidewalk in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hollywood.
Otis, an heir to the Otis Elevator Company fortune, said he'd taken a sledgehammer to the star because he was furious at allegations that Donald Trump had committed sexual assault
The stunt left Trump's name scratched out of the star, the emblem in the middle dislodged and chips missing.
Leron Gubler, president and chief executive of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which administers the hundreds of star plaques on sidewalks in the Los Angeles neighborhood, has said the star would be covered for days during repairs.
A spokeswoman for Trump did not return emails seeking comment on Thursday.
Trump drew widespread condemnations from voters and a number of Republican elected officials after a 2005 video emerged in which he was heard talking on an open microphone about groping women and trying to seduce a married woman.
Trump has denied the allegations made by several women that he groped them.
On Thursday, Otis said that he has been arrested multiple times over the years for civil disobedience.
He had planned to hold a press conference before turning himself in,TMZ reported, but was pulled in by cops before he had the chance.
He was reportedly co-operative with police as he went in, and had previously spoken about how he 'wasn't afraid' of Donald Trump or being taken to court.
Damaged: The pink terrazzo star had been rendered useless by the attack, and needed to be completely replaced - as did the brass letters and round TV emblem
Smashed: Otis wore a construction outfit while he smashed the star with a pick-ax, taking the name and emblem with the intention of auctioning them off to the highest bidder
Otis was recorded clobbering the star at around 5.45am on Wednesday, early enough that there were no police and just a few bystanders around.
He had intended to take the whole star and auction it, then give the money to the 11 women who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting or harassing them.
However, when he realized the job was too big for his tools, he settled for taking the brass letters spelling Trump's name, and the TV emblem that commemorated his work on 'The Apprentice.'
In a video he recorded for TMZ prior to his arrest, Otis said that members of his family had been victims of sexual assault and that he was outraged by the Trump allegations, which the Republican candidate denies.
Otis said in the video that he has an attorney and that he planned to turn himself in, and that he wants to 'put a spotlight on sexual violence in this country.'
The self-styled 'non-violent activist' also said he had been arrested '24, 25 times' and that it would be an 'honor' to see Trump in court.
Smashing: Otis was able to work unimpeded because he arrived at the spot so early that there weren't many police officers around. He also used plastic barriers to pretend to be a worker
Abuse: Otis said in this video interview that his family members had suffered abuse, and that he was not afraid to go to court for the vandalism
'I'm not frightened of him a bit,' he said. 'He's just a bully... hopefully he will take more concern over the women he's been predatory towards.'
Otis is a direct descendant of Elisha Otis, who invented a safety device to stop elevators if they fall and opened the Otis Elevator Company, which still runs to this day.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he is also the CEO of the Otis Lambert Financial Group LLC, which raises capital for real estate and financial services projects.
Recognition: The star was placed in 2007, in recognition of Trump's work on the TV show 'The Apprentice'. Pictured: The star's unveiling ceremony
An avid peace activist, he hit the headlines in 2009 when he sold a collection of Mahatma Gandhi's possessions - including his glasses - to Kingfisher lager owner and airline magnate Vijay Mallya for $1.8million.
However, he later regretted selling the items, as the Indian businessman had an ongoing dispute with the then-Indian government.
An exclusive video obtained by Deadline Hollywood shows Otis smashing up the star early Wednesday morning, with no police and just a few bystanders watching.
He is surrounded by plastic cones and plastic construction barriers as he slams the tourist attraction repeatedly with his sledgehammer and ax.
'Sorry guys, watch your eyes,' he says, as sparks and chunks of rock fly into the air.
He's then seen rooting around with his fingers to pull up the bronze letters and emblem.
A police cruiser came by the scene near the Dolby Theater at 6.15am, around 30 minutes after Otis began his digging, but by then he had fled.
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which maintains the popular tourist attraction, says it will take several days to repair Trump's star - though work had already begun on Wednesday afternoon.
Filling in: A worker pours the terrazzo into the Walk of Fame star Wednesday. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which maintains the $30,000 stars, says it will take days to fix
Protection: Gregg Donovan, self-styled 'unofficial Hollywood ambassador,' shows his support for Trump's newly restored star. He previously put a Trump sticker on the damaged slab
Shiny bronze letters and a new medal were photographed being inserted back into the newly hollowed-out space by a workman, while crowds looked on.
On Thursday afternoon Gregg Donovan, self-styled 'unofficial Hollywood ambassador,' placed a Trump banner above the newly refurbished star, which had been covered over with a board and surrounded by barriers. |
CORAL SPRINGS, Fla. — The only thing that’s noticeably different is the beard. It’s grown out, more unkempt, perhaps getting a bit grayer with each passing year.
Otherwise, it’s just about impossible to tell right now that Sharks center Joe Thornton is 36 years old and in his 18th season in the NHL.
“I don’t think Joe Thornton is going to have any problem to play, if he wanted to, to my age,” Florida Panthers forward Jaromir Jagr, 44, said Wednesday. “It’s totally up to him.”
Over the last two months, Thornton has at least one point in 24 of his past 26 games, with eight goals and 26 assists. Before Wednesday, he had moved up to 14th in the NHL in scoring with 50 points, three back of teammate Joe Pavelski and one point ahead of Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin.
The average age of the 13 players ahead of him in the scoring race is 26, with most in the prime of their careers. At 31, Pavelski is the only player ahead of Thornton in scoring who is in his thirties.
Most importantly, Thornton’s play and production over the last 10 weeks has helped the Sharks charge back into a playoff position. Going into Thursday’s game against the Atlantic Division-leading Panthers, the Sharks are one point back of second-place Anaheim in the Pacific Division, and seven points ahead of fourth-place Arizona.
“It should,” Sharks coach Pete DeBoer said when asked if Thornton’s play has inspired his teammates. “I mean my God, when this guy shows up to the rink and he’s the most energetic guy in the room and he’s played for 20 years almost, it should inspire you.”
In 2014-15, the season after he was stripped of the Sharks captaincy, Thornton had 65 points in 78 games, a more than respectable sum in today’s NHL with its tight checking and exceptional goaltending. He finished third on the Sharks in scoring, and in a tie for 26th leaguewide.
Still, it wasn’t quite what fans were used to seeing from the future Hockey Hall of Famer.
Barring injury or collapse, Thornton will blow by that total over the last 27 games.
If he reaches 70 points for the 12th time in his career, Thornton, according to quanthockey.com, will be only the 24th time a 36-year-old will have had at least 70 points in a season, with the most recent being Martin St. Louis in 2011-12 (74).
“He’s so consistent and smart. He thinks the game way better and way faster than a lot of guys,” said Panthers defenseman Brian Campbell, who has known Thornton and his family since he was 7. “You look at his whole career, he’s been fairly consistent. I don’t think anybody should be surprised.”
Thornton’s love for the game and his arduous preparation, both in the summer and between games, never went away. Neither did his skating nor his ability to control and protect the puck.
The biggest difference might be the amount of depth the Sharks have up front. Not many teams have been able to match up at even strength against three centers like Thornton, Patrick Marleau and Logan Couture. When Couture was out, missing 23 of the first 26 games, the Sharks offense, including Thornton, struggled.
Of course, having the third-ranked power play in the NHL doesn’t hurt, with Thornton picking up 18 of his points with the man advantage.
Thornton will credit his linemates, as he’s done throughout his career, and as he did Tuesday when he assisted on goals by Pavelski and Melker Karlsson. Since Tomas Hertl joined the Sharks’ top line, Thornton has 21 points in 17 games.
“For a passer, it’s nice the way guys are finishing right now,” Thornton said. “Melky, what a shot he had, and Pavs, what a shot. We’re just working for our chances, and right now, they’re going in the back of the net for us.”
DeBoer and his staff also have made sure to give his veteran players the rest they need between games. Wednesday, for instance, the Sharks stayed off their skates, opting for off-ice workouts instead.
“I just think he’s playing at as high a level as I’ve ever seen him,” DeBoer said. “His work ethic away from the puck, how honest he plays the game, how committed he is, how prepared he is, I can’t imagine many guys out there that are doing that at his age.”
It’s a short list, with Vancouver’s Daniel Sedin, 35, among the NHL’s top 25 in scoring with 46 points this season. Jagr has 40 points.
Jagr, who had 71 points in 2007-08, the season he turned 36, said of Thornton: “He’s so big, he’s got long reach, he’s skating very well, and he’s so strong on the boards. He’s just playing the game like not many guys play.”
For more on the Sharks, see the Working the Corners blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/sharks. Follow Curtis Pashelka on Twitter at twitter.com/CurtisPashelka. |
by Oui Sat Nov 9th, 2013 at 04:24:59 AM EST
For unlimited snooping on Internet communication, the Dutch governement have ordered Israeli systems as reported today. With the intent to start in 2014, this would be illegal today, so lawmakers are urged to make minor changes to the law. An investigative journalist of De Volkskrant joined technical website Tweakers to file this report. I am taking the article at face value.
The project called Argo II is intended to 'process data communication to intelligence' in 2014 in a note written by Interior Minister Plasterk this summer to the House of Parliament . The new equipment will be used by both domestic and military security service AIVD and MIVD. A description of the Department of Defense that Argo II is primarily intended to cover 'the world of the Internet' - where the services can not reach in present day.
The system will probably be built by the Israeli Nice Systems, specializing in surveillance and interception software. This company, which according to U.S. intelligence expert James Bamford has its roots in the Mossad, was one of two companies who enrolled in a public tender. The other candidate, Accenture, has told weekly Vrij Nederland it did not get the contract. The Ministry of Defence does not provide information about the tender.
Automatic alert
The technology website Tweakers describes some systems of Nice Systems, such as Nice Track Mass Detection Center and Nice Track Pattern Analyzer, which is able to intercept data on a national level, monitor, analyze and store it with an automatic alert you for suspicious patterns. |
Source:
DON'T READ FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS!Nebraska is an awesome episode, most likely one of the best, has nothing to do with Nebraska.Hershel goes into town to a bar to drown his sorrows with alcohol, Rick and Glenn go after him.They find him drinking long story short, 2 guys walk in out of nowhere and essentially fake being nice all along wanting to know where they are staying so they can go raid and rape etc. Rick pretty much goes cowboy on em and kills em both. Hershel has a new found admiration for him after this.Anyway after awhile a bunch of people come looking for their friends and finally find out and there is a fire fight between Rick's people and the others, many of them.Almost forgot, "Nebraska" is mentioned in their conversation, they tell Rick that maybe Nebraska is a good place to go and after some verbal sparring Rick essentially tells them to !@#$ OFF to Nebraska.--Shane does not make it through the season, essentially Lori puts into his head that if Rick wasn't around they would still be together. This makes Shane change AGAIN, (he had finally made peace and Lori fucked him up again). Anyway he decides to kill Rick and lures him into the forest chasing after someone you will meet in "Nebraska". Of course Rick isn't stupid he realizes nothing is adding up and tries to give Shane a chance to abandon his plans. Believe it or not Rick loves Shane like a brother, anyway he finally calls Shane on it and Shane basically tells him how Carl and Lori will get over his death. Shane has a gun pointed at Ricks face and seconds away from shooting, when Rick starts to negotiate his way out of it, all along pulling a knife out. Long story short he lunges at Shane and buries the knife in his chest.Even worse HERES A BIG SPOILER.SHANE COME'S BACK TO LIFE AS A ZOMBIE! - Carl shoots him, the whole thing is pretty fucked up.All this causes Rick to slowly change into a Shane if you will, believe me the show is going somewhere so crazy that Shane's death will not even be a burden, he served his purpose by helping Ricks character transform. |
May 9, 2013 5 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
This is the first in a four-part weekly series as I test Google Glass for personal and business uses.
image credit: Taylor Hatmaker
I was one of the lucky individuals who were invited to be among the first 1,000 non-Google employees to pre-order Google Glass -- Google's much-anticipated computerized glasses. They can take pictures and video, give you directions when traveling and even translate foreign languages. With Glass, Google is aiming to disrupt mobile technology and go beyond just smartphones and tablets.
I received my pair of Glass on Friday morning and wore them through Sunday afternoon, taking them off only to sleep. While it's too early to say whether Glass is set for mainstream adoption, here are my early impressions:
Out of the box: Light and easy to start using.
I first saw Google Glass demonstrated at this past summer's Google's I/O conference. This is my first experience handling and wearing the device. The first surprise out of the box was how light Glass is. It weighs about as much as a standard pair of sunglasses.
Putting it on, I didn't have the luxury of a Google Glass guide to sculpt the bendable titanium frame to fit, so it took about 15 minutes of fiddling to have it sit correctly on my face. The Glass display sits above the right eye and can be adjusted via a pivoting arm. It wasn't long before I forgot it was even there.
The experience looking into Google's custom Glass interface is like having a tiny TV overlay above your eye. You can easily make eye contact with others. To check the Glass display, you glance upward.
The screen can be activated via an upward head nod or by tapping the right side of the device. To get around the interface, it's all tapping and swiping with one finger (down, forward, back) on the side surface of Glass. Many actions also incorporate voice controls starting with "OK Glass" to do things like search Google or dictate texts.
Out and about: The social reaction.
I acclimated to Glass within about 20 minutes of having it on, though it took a little longer to get the Android companion app to pair properly to Glass. Once I was connected to my smartphone's mobile network, I headed out into the world. Over the 48 hours, I did everything from grocery shopping to driving my car to a cook-out.
People I encountered were as apprehensive as they were curious. Walking down the street in a busy shopping district, people stopped me to ask if I had that crazy Google product they'd read about and seen on TV. I live in Portland, Ore., which has a thriving tech and startup scene, so most people around me seemed to know exactly what they were but not what to do near them.
Related: From Battery to Camera to Wi-Fi: Tech Specs Released for Google Glass
That said, as much as Glass might be socially disruptive, it's also surprisingly socially unobtrusive. I was skeptical, but after wearing Glass regularly I found myself checking my Nexus 4 smartphone less and less. I could use Glass to receive social media updates and receive emails, so I felt at ease knowing that the information most important to me would appear literally right before my eyes.
image credit: Taylor Hatmaker
Favorite features so far:
Texting. Sending a short, spoken text message is fast, fluid and altogether less cumbersome with Google Glass than a handheld device.
Sending a short, spoken text message is fast, fluid and altogether less cumbersome with Google Glass than a handheld device. Taking photos. Snapping a picture instantly from your eye's perspective makes for unique photographic opportunities. Friends and cats are more candid than ever.
Snapping a picture instantly from your eye's perspective makes for unique photographic opportunities. Friends and cats are more candid than ever. Getting directions. I thought turn-by-turn navigation would be more dangerous with Glass since I'd be driving with something in my field of vision. In practice, I took my eyes off the road much less than if I were using an external GPS or smartphone.
Criticisms and annoyances:
Battery life. I wore down my Glass battery in about three hours of heavy use. While that was an intensive scenario, Glass's stamina leaves something to be desired.
I wore down my Glass battery in about three hours of heavy use. While that was an intensive scenario, Glass's stamina leaves something to be desired. Data. My photos back up to a Google+ private Instant Upload album via bluetooth tethering, not just over Wi-Fi. As a shutterbug, if I can't disable that, it's going to eat up my data plan in less than a week.
My photos back up to a Google+ private Instant Upload album via bluetooth tethering, not just over Wi-Fi. As a shutterbug, if I can't disable that, it's going to eat up my data plan in less than a week. Privacy. A glance at Google's terms of service for Glass brings up thoughts of "Big Brother." Knowing that Google can track my device to prevent me from unloading it on eBay -- for now, Google won't allow early users to share or sell the Glass devices -- creeps me out. Not to mention that recording video and taking photos of people without their consent is amazingly easy.
Initial takeaway: This is the beginning of something cool.
So far, I'm pleasantly surprised. As more developers dream up fun and useful apps, the platform should only improve. Notwithstanding its limitations -- for example, you can't properly browse a webpage yet since most web searches only yield a few lines of text -- the first iteration of Google Glass is refined, if a little socially precocious.
What really matters is what happens as the device is used by more people. Opening the Glass platform to more developers and creative minds should yield innovations well beyond what Glass offers today -- and that's the part I'm looking forward to most.
Related: VC Heavyweights to Fund Tech Startups Creating Google Glass Apps |
Amazon.com is not a real business — at least according to Steve Ballmer.
The former Microsoft CEO shared his thoughts about the Seattle online retail giant on the Charlie Rose Show this week, first noting that “I don’t know what to say about Amazon” before explaining why he’s wary of the company.
“They make no money, Charlie,” Ballmer said. “In my world, you’re not a real business until you make some money. I have a hard time with businesses that don’t make money at some point.”
Ballmer’s comments come as Amazon came up short of analyst expectations and on Thursday posted a $437 million loss for the third quarter, or a loss of 95 cents a share. That followed a net loss of $126 million during the second quarter. Its stock has fallen eight percent today as a result.
Ballmer said it’s OK for a company not to make money for a few years, but he’s perplexed with Amazon, which had yet to post a profit in two decades.
“If you are worth $150 billion, eventually somebody thinks you’re going to make $15 billion pre tax,” Ballmer said. “They make about zero, and there’s a big gap between zero and 15.”
Ballmer admitted that Amazon has “built capability,” and said that he likes the people who work there — “our neighbors,” he called the company. But the Los Angeles Clippers owner really has an issue with the company taking a loss on every earnings report.
“One capability every business is expected to have is the capability to make money,” Ballmer said. “It requires a certain kind of discipline, a certain kind of mindset. … As a businessman, if you ask me what I’m proud of, I’m proud of the fact that I made $250 billion under my watch as CEO.”
Ballmer retired from Microsoft in February after spending 14 years as CEO. The Redmond company on Thursday posted record revenue of $23.2 billion for the September quarter, up 25 percent, with profits of $4.5 billion.
Amazon, meanwhile, has been investing heavily in all aspects of its business in recent years, expanding into areas such as hardware, media, advertising and cloud services. It is also boosting its spending on fulfillment centers, the massive warehouse where the company sorts, packs and distributes products.
Those investments have come with a cost and provoked doubts from some Wall Street naysayers, though the Seattle-based company still commands a whopping stock market valuation of $144 billion.
Watch Ballmer’s interview below: |
On Wednesday, 9 November 2011, CBS Atlanta aired an interview with private investigator T.J. Ward, who used a computer program to analyze recorded statements by Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and Sharon Bialek, who alleges that Cain made a sexual advance on her when she sought his help getting a job. According to Ward’s software, Cain “is being truthful, totally truthful” in denying Bialek’s claim, while Bialek “is fabricating what transpired.”
Ward claimed his software cost $15,000 and has an accuracy rate of 95%. While CBS Atlanta did not disclose the name of this software, a link on Ward’s website indicates that it is Layered Voice Analysis (LVA), a program developed by Amir Liberman’s Nemesysco, Ltd., an Israeli company. This software was completely discredited by Swedish linguists Anders Eriksson and Francisco Lacerda in a 2007 article titled “Charlatanry in Speech Science: A Problem to Be Taken Seriously” (International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, Vol. 14, No. 2). For more on LVA, see “Nemesysco Founder Amir Liberman Is a Charlatan.”
Not that it matters (LVA being pseudoscientific flapdoodle), but it is perhaps worth observing that private investigator T.J. Ward had chosen the setting for analyzing a male voice when conducting his analysis of Sharon Bialek’s remarks:
CBS Atlanta should have done its homework before running with a “news” story based on emperor’s-new-clothes technology. |
A series of leaked emails between key figures in Ukip reveals growing chaos at the heart of the party as it struggles to fill a policy vacuum just days before crucial local elections in which it is expected to make spectacular advances.
In one email, a senior party figure claims that leading the anti-EU party is like "herding cats". Ukip leader Nigel Farage is warned that his party is facing a decade without credible policies, as crippling internal rows rage, and it is suggested that the party should consider buying off-the-shelf strategy from right-leaning thinktanks.
Senior members must "get off their hobby-horses" if the party is to develop policies, Farage is told in the bombshell emails from Stuart Wheeler, the party's treasurer, and Godfrey Bloom, a leading Ukip MEP.
A despairing Bloom, writing last Thursday, warns: "My experience thus far is that as soon as more than two people get in a room progress completely stops. Even where we have experts of our own, they disagree." Bloom suggests the party should now consider buying policy "off the shelf" from thinktanks to lend it some credibility rather than attempting to "reinvent the wheel" by devising party positions on the major issues of the day.
Wheeler, a former Tory donor who gave £5.5m to the Conservatives in 2001 before being expelled for also donating to Ukip, responds: "I could not agree more strongly that some people will have to get off their hobby-horses."
Details of the party's internal crisis are revealed today as Ukip prepares to field an unprecedented 1,217 candidates in Thursday's local elections. The party is unlikely to return large numbers of councillors but Downing Street fears it will deprive the Tories of victory in many seats and be the cause of major trouble for David Cameron's leadership.
Along with its strong anti-European Union message and calls for a hardline on immigration, Ukip is campaigning heavily on issues likely to appeal to wavering Tories, including opposition to green belt development, wind farms and a second high-speed rail line. However, the party's manifesto is vague on details as it attempts to appeal to the broadest audience, including disaffected Labour and Liberal Democrat voters.
The emails leaked to the Observer illustrate how powerless the party is to build a manifesto as it attempts to please its politically divergent support. Bloom says the party's policies are "naturally coming under more scrutiny" as it grows, but warns Farage of the inability of members to agree on policy lines.
Bloom, who also complains that whatever the party says on tax and the economy will "be sneered at or decried", writes: "The charm and frustration of Ukip is we have doctors who fancy themselves as tax experts, painters and decorators who know all about strategic defence issues and … retired dentists who understand the most intricate political solutions for the nation.
"Our website will have no policies at all on there for 10 years if we adopt a neo-Byzantine approach to formulating them. This means some quite senior members are going to have to stable their hobby-horses."
The former financial economist also reveals a split between the old stalwarts of the party, formed in 1993 in response to the Maastricht treaty, and the new members who he fears are introducing "political correctness" among other "main party baggage". Ukip is said to be picking up 1,000 extra members a month, with membership now exceeding 25,500. Bloom writes: "Having worked on the defence paper for over one year it would appear Ukip has more military and naval experts than we have soldiers. Most of them do not agree with each other. It is like herding cats. We are also attracting new members who bring main party 'baggage'. Focus groups, quotas, even political correctness.
"We must be wary of listening to these siren voices. We did not get where we are today by following, but leading."
Bloom claims that he has been in talks with two free-market thinktanks, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Civitas, whose policies he suggests "buying off the shelf where it is close to our own small government, low tax, libertarian position".
The Ukip MEP, who admits in the emails that his party "do not have the resources to write serious papers on major subjects", adds: "If Nigel, or indeed any of the 'frontbench' spokesmen talk of welfare or tax, the endorsement of such institutions is a very strong shield from the sort of dismissive left wing interviewers with whom we usually cross swords.
"Imagine Nigel in a hostile (oh yes it will be) interview with a 'Paxman', being able to say "Yes it will work, our policy has been completely vetted and endorsed by........" fill in the blank, Civitas, IEA, IOD, BMA, RCN etc..."
Wheeler, who reportedly made a £90m fortune in investment banking, writes that he agrees with "a great deal" of Bloom's points, but adds that the party's "policies must be Ukip's policies". He adds: "Obviously we cannot just say, when asked about what our policies are, that we agree with the IEA on X, Y and Z, and agree with Civitas on A, B and C, and some other thinktank on others etc."
A spokesman for the party said: "What you are seeing is discussions about policy development. Mr Bloom would like to get things done rapidly, Mr Wheeler would like to ensure that consensus is reached.
"It merely displays creative tension that in the end will produce a far better policy platform than we might have otherwise without due discussion."
The emails
The email conversation revealed between Godfrey Bloom, the Ukip MEP, and party treasurer Stuart Wheeler:
From: Godfrey Bloom
Sent: 25 April 2013 10:29
To: Stuart Wheeler, Nigel Farage and others
It would appear Ukip has more military and naval experts than we have soldiers. Most of them do not agree with each other. It is like herding cats.
From: Godfrey Bloom
Sent: 25 April 2013 10:29
To: Stuart Wheeler, Nigel Farage and others
We are also attracting new members who bring main party 'baggage'. Focus groups, quotas, even political correctness. We must be wary of listening to these siren voices. We did not get where we are today by following, but leading.
From: Godfrey Bloom
Sent: 25 April 2013 10:29
To: Stuart Wheeler, Nigel Farage and others
We do not have the resources to write serious papers on major subjects, why reinvent the wheel? Why not buy policy 'off the shelf', where it is close to our own small government, low tax, libertarian position.
From: Godfrey Bloom
Sent: 25 April 2013 10:29
To: Stuart Wheeler, Nigel Farage and others
Now here's the rub. My experience thus far is that as soon as more than 2 people get in a room progress completely stops. Even where we have experts of our own they disagree.
From: Godfrey Bloom
Sent: 25 April 2013 10:29
To: Stuart Wheeler, Nigel Farage and others
The charm and frustration of Ukip is we have doctors who fancy themselves as tax experts, painters and decorators who know all about strategic defence issues, and branch chairmen, retired dentists, who understand the most intricate political solutions for the nation.
From: Stuart Wheeler
Sent: 25 April 2013 13:38
To: Godfrey Bloom
Dear Godfrey, I could not agree more that some people will have to get off their hobby-horses. |
, the former nine-term congressman, was convicted Wednesday of
in a verdict that prosecutors said could send the 62-year-old New Orleans Democrat to prison for 20 years. But, in an ironic twist, Jefferson was not convicted of the charge directly related to
that was found wrapped in foil and sandwiched between Boca burgers and Pillsbury pie crust boxes when the FBI raided his Washington, D.C., home four years ago this week.
William Jefferson and his attorney Robert Trout face the media in this video
Government prosecutors have their say in this video
It was that cold cash -- actually marked bills delivered to Jefferson by Lori Mody, a cooperating witness for the FBI -- that captured headlines and made Jefferson, in the words of his defense attorney, a "national joke." But the jury acquitted Jefferson on the charge that he violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, meaning that the government had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jefferson intended to use that money to bribe Atiku Abubakar, then vice president of Nigeria, for his help in expediting a telecommunications deal in his home country. In a post-verdict press conference in front of the Federal District Court, nearly two months after jury selection began, U.S. Attorney Dana Boente, said the money in the freezer remained the most compelling evidence, even if it could not be directly tied to any of the counts on which Jefferson was convicted. Referring to the defense contention that Jefferson had operated in an ethical "gray area," but had not violated the law, Boente declared, "$90,000 in a freezer is not a gray area. It is a violation and today a jury of the congressman's peers held him guilty." "Congressman Jefferson had a contract with the citizens of Louisiana and the citizens of the United States," Boente said. "The citizens were owed honesty and integrity and he used his influence and power to enrich himself and his family." The verdict brings a bitter end to the political career of Jefferson, who rose from hard-scrabble beginnings in Lake Providence to become the first black congressman from Louisiana since Reconstruction and the most important African-American political figure in the state in modern times. Shadowed by his indictment and waiting trail, Jefferson was defeated in December by a political unknown, Republican Anh "Joseph" Cao, in a storm-delayed, very low turnout election. "This is a difficult day for the people of New Orleans and Louisiana, but now we can turn the page on a negative past to focus on a positive future," said Cao after hearing word of the verdict. "My thoughts and prayers go out to Mr. Jefferson and his family during this time." Judge T.S. Ellis III set sentencing for Oct. 30. He agreed to let Jefferson remain free pending sentencing, overruling
that he be remanded to custody immediately because in their view, he represented a significant flight risk. Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Lytle, the lead prosecutor, noted that the potential 20-year prison term for a man of Jefferson's age could amount to a "life sentence," and that Jefferson might flee to an African nation beyond the reach of American rendition. Lytle quoted defense attorney Robert Trout's characterization of Jefferson, in his closing arguments, as a "rock star," in Africa, an enormously popular figure akin to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. But Trout countered, and Ellis agreed, that Jefferson was not a flight risk because of his deep roots and family ties, not the least his five daughters, who, along with his wife, Andrea, figured in the case as both a motive -- some of what the jury found to be his ill-gotten gains were used to pay Harvard tuition -- and as principals in what the government contended were front companies that Jefferson used to receive the bribe money he solicited while concealing his own interest. Jefferson told the judge he had already surrendered his passport. After seven weeks of trial and four-and-a-half days of jury deliberations, the end of the case came suddenly. The jury foreman knocked on the door separating the jury deliberation room from the courtroom about 4:50 p.m. and passed two messages to the court security officer: One announced that the jurors had completed deliberations, the second that a verdict had been reached.
Both prosecutors and the Jefferson defense team were contacted. When Lytle entered the courtroom, he nodded his head "yes" to signal the verdict was at hand. Jefferson arrived a few minutes later with his attorneys, wife and two of their children. Attorney Amy Jackson told him he should sit next to Trout. Trout walked over to shake the hands of all three prosecutors, led by Lytle, and appeared to wish them luck. Ellis summoned the jury into the courtroom, and asked the foreman to hand the verdict notice to the security officer who showed it to the judge. He then asked Jefferson to stand and face the jury, and he did so, with his three attorneys standing at his side.
He stood silently, showing no reaction as the 11 guilty counts and five not guilty counts were read. His wife and daughters -- Jelani, like her father and two of her sisters, a Harvard-educated lawyer, and Nailah, a documentary filmmaker -- sat silently, gloomily looking at times at Jefferson, just a few feet away, and at others times they looked down at the floor. There were no visible tears. Afterward, Ellis called the attorneys together for a brief bench conference, and Jefferson walked over to the front row seats, giving a reassuring glance at his daughters, and whispered a few words to his wife. He then sat silently next to his wife until the brief conference ended and he walked over to the defense table to join his attorneys. Jefferson did not testify in his own defense and his formal defense lasted only about two hours. In his closing argument, which lasted nearly two-and-half hours, Trout presented his client as a man whose dealings had put him in a murky ethical area, but who had not broken the law. Trout's argument was that Jefferson's help on these business deals in Africa were beyond the purview of his "official acts" as a member of Congress, and thus did not violate bribery statutes which prohibit receiving things of value in exchange for official acts. Trout argued that most of the key witnesses -- iGate technology CEO Vernon Jackson and Mody's financial adviser Brett Pfeffer who had pleaded guilty to bribery and are serving prison terms -- and a number of others who testified to avoid prosecution for their own involvement in the various schemes, were telling stories the government wanted to hear to save their own skins. Speaking to reporters in front of the courthouse after the verdict, Trout promised an appeal. "We certainly believe we have very strong legal issues to appeal. We've been fighting these issues since the day of the indictment. We feel very, very strong about them." Trout said he wasn't surprised that the jury rejected the charge related to the money in the freezer -- the alleged violation of the Corrupt Foreign Practices Act. "We're very disappointed that the jury disagreed with us on the counts they found him guilty of." Asked to explain the short two-hour defense, after the government provided more than 40 witnesses and hours of video and audio tapes over more than four weeks, Trout said, "I don't know that it does any good to replay what might have been. I think our judgments were sound." Jefferson referred all questions to Trout. Asked how he was doing, Jefferson said: "I'm holding up." Ellis said the jurors will return to court this morning to decide whether Jefferson should be required to forfeit $477,000 in assets and millions of shares in stock the government says flowed to two Jefferson family companies. The stocks were for a Nigerian telecommunications venture that died when the Jefferson investigation became known in August 2005, and are presumably worthless. Harry Rosenberg, a former U.S. attorney in New Orleans now in private practice, said he believes the split verdict will help prosecutors in the appeal promised by Jefferson's lawyers. "The split verdict helps the government in arguing on appeal that the jury was focused, deliberate and did not accept everything carte blanche," Rosenberg said. He said "If there is any comfort for Jefferson" it is that the bribery statute, which the defense contends was misapplied in this case because the transactions dealt with private business deals, not official duties, providing him "with his best legal argument now that round one is over." Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond prosecutor, said that the prosecution's estimate of a 20-year sentence may be correct because Judge Ellis has a reputation for strict sentencing in public corruption cases. But Stephanos Bibas, a sentencing expert at the University of Pennsylvania said he expects Jefferson will benefit because he has no prior criminal record and the acquittal on five charges. Before the verdict, he predicted a sentence were he to be found guilty on all 16 charges in the neighborhood of eight-to 10 years, less if he were acquitted on some accusations. |
Stephen Farry, a former Employment Minister in Northern Ireland and the deputy leader of the pro-union Alliance Party has warned British leader Theresa May that a united Ireland may be the outcome of a hardline on Brexit.
He warned the province must be treated as a “special case” in the upcoming negotiations with the European Union.
In an interview with the BBC, the legislator for the centrist and cross-community party said, “We do have the option, not one I’d particularly advocate, to rejoin the European Union through a united Ireland at some stage if that’s what the people of Northern Ireland choose.
Read more: A United Ireland now looks certain in the near future
“But we have the Good Friday Agreement and Northern Ireland only works on the basis of sharing and interdependence and Brexit is all about putting up new divisions and new barriers.“So there has to be some sort of special arrangement put in place for Northern Ireland, not least because of the fact that we have a land border with the remainder of the European Union through the Republic of Ireland.”
PM essentially wanting a mandate to wreck UK economy. Determined to hard Brexit whatever deal emerges from negotiations. — Stephen Farry (@StephenFarryMLA) April 18, 2017
He admitted, however, that the Government had a mandate for what the EU’s supporters have dubbed a “hard Brexit” - namely the decision to pull Britain out of the single market and customs union that mandates common standards for goods and trade.
This lead to speculation that such an outcome would lead to a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic—something the European Commission and governments in London, Dublin, and Belfast all hope to avoid.
First, the contentious issue of Britain’s bill must be settled; the EU originally had leaked a figure of $56 billion to pay for the pensions of British staff working for the EU and projects Britain had already signed off on.
.@StephenFarryMLA welcomes EU negotiator comments on a potential special deal for Northern Ireland in #Brexit dealhttps://t.co/EeCc2d1lc7 — Alliance Party (@allianceparty) May 11, 2017
Read more: Huge boost for united Ireland as Europe agrees to admit it to EU immediately
However, after pressure from members states who feared a large gap in the EU’s budget and a decision by Germany not to grant Britain a share of the EU’s assets, the sum has increased to $112 billion—leading to rumors of a British walk out.
Britons will vote on June 8an election May’s Conservative party is expected to win—afterwhich the negotiations will kick off in earnest. Expect sparks to fly.
H/T: Daily Express/CNBC |
Harry Styles has contacted the family of a four-year-old girl with terminal cancer after the heartbreaking photograph of her suffering went viral.
Andy Whelan shared the distressing image of his daughter in pain as she battles the disease that has given her just weeks to live.
The electrician from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, shared the image of Jessica on his Facebook blog Jessica Whelan - A fight against Neuroblastoma, where it's had more than 9,000 reactions.
Scroll down for video
Andy Whelan took this heartbreaking photo of his four-year-old daughter Jessica while she was in immense pain during her cancer treatment. Upon seeing the photo Harry Styles called the family
And now the family has been contacted by the singer Harry Styles who was moved by Jessica's heartbreaking story.
Andy announced that he had been shocked to receive a phone call from the One Direction star on a post on his Facebook page.
He wrote: 'Well that was a surreal telephone call... An unknown number I answered for it to only be HARRY STYLES ringing from USA!!!
'He wants to do a FaceTime or video recording for Jessica! The way she is at the moment I have told him that she would benefit more from a recording which he has said he will do for her and email to us!'
The family were contacted by the One Direction singer who offered to facetime with their daughter but due to her condition agreed to send a recording
Andy said that he found the phone call surreal when he announced the news that the singer (pictured) had called on Facebook
The host of a local radio station in the Wirral, Beverley Macca, had contacts at Harry's management company and arranged for him to phone and Andy is now hoping to arrange a call with the singer.
The phone call comes as the family break their fundraising target of £45,000 on their GoFundMe page.
The page, which was created in order to raise money for Jessica's condition as well as making her life as enjoyable as possible, has now raised in excess of £32,000.
The donations were a response to the candid photograph that Andy shared of his daughter earlier this week.
Posting the photo Andy wrote: 'This is the hardest photograph I have ever made.
Andy shares the details of his daughter's 13-month fight with neuroblastoma on his Facebook blog and her story has captured the attention of Harry Styles
'A few days ago she was given what is most likely a few weeks to live. This was taken at a moment where we as parents could offer no comfort - Jessica pushing us away as she rode out her searing pain in solitude.'
Jessica, who has been fighting stage four neuroblastoma for 13 months, but has now been given just weeks to live after Andy and his partner Nicki Prendergast decided to stop treatment in a bid to allow her to enjoy whatever time she has got left.
'This is the true face of cancer,' says Andy, who documents his daughter's battle on Facebook.
'My baby girls blood vessels protruding from beneath her skin, a solitary tear running down her cheek, her body stiffened and her face contorted in pain.'
'With this photo I don't mean to offend or upset anyone. Perhaps by seeing this photo people will be made aware of the darkness that is childhood cancer, and perhaps the same people will be able to do something in the future so that no child has to suffer this pain, and so that no parent has to bear witness to their own flesh and blood deteriorating daily.'
The youngster was diagnosed in September 2015 and has been through a difficult fight with the disease
Jessica was diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma on 23rd September 2015. Initially, after suffering pains in her arms and shoulders, doctors diagnosed Jessica with a bone infection.
But just as she was about to be discharged, after ten weeks in hospital, doctors decided to examine her one more time.
'Jessica had been crying out in pain during the night,' Andy explains.
'One of the nurses told the doctor so he decided to check her tummy to make sure it was nothing more than constipation.'
It was during the examination that the doctor found a mass in her tummy.
'It was devastating,' Andy explains. 'Jessica was all ready to come home. She was even in her coat. Then we were told she'd need to stay in hospital for more tests.'
An ultrasound showed there was a mass around Jessica's liver, but it was after an MRI the following day that doctors broke the news that Jessica had cancer.
The news felt like my heart was ripped out of my chest while someone sucked the air from my lungs
'I asked the doctor how long she had left, and he said he couldn't give a figure but it was likely to be a couple of years,' explains Andy.
Jessica started chemotherapy and then doctors started her on a clinical drug trial. When her hair started falling out they cut it into a bob, then shaved it all off.
After three months, Jessica went into hospital for tests. But there was bad news.
'The consultant told us the tumour was the same size, they hadn't budged it at all,' says Andy. 'But he said there was another trial we could try, and not to lose hope.'
Jessica spent so much time in hospital, she started making friends with the other children on the ward, and formed strong bonds with the nurses.
By sharing the picture Andy, seen here with Jessica before she was diagnosed, hopes to raise awareness of the pain of childhood cancer. Jessica's parents shaved her head when the chemotherapy caused her to lose her hair, right with her younger brother James
Andy wants to treasure the last few moments of Jessica's life by capturing everything he can with a camera so he can keep memories of her forever
After sharing the heartbreaking photo Andy received thousands of messages of support and love from friends and strangers alike
'On the rare nights she'd spend at home, she'd sometimes cry as she missed the ward,' Andy says.
Months passed and Jessica seemed to improve. Her hair grew back and she had more energy than ever. She spent more time at home as Andy and Nicki were taught to administer Jessica's drugs themselves.
'Every single moment was so precious. I kept my camera around my neck, ready to snap away, capturing every smile, every laugh, every time she cuddled her baby brother James. I didn't want to miss a thing,' says Andy.
'One morning, Jessica was watching TV when a programme about hospitals came on.
'Looking at the patients Jessica turned to us and said, "I don't want to die".
'I knew she didn't understand how poorly she was, but still, it was heartbreaking to hear,' recalls Andy.
During the first stages of her cancer battle Andy and her mother Nicki cut their daughter's hair into a short bob. Then as the chemo continued they opted for a close-cropped do
When the trial came to an end, Andy and Nicki were told that the tumour hadn't shrunk, but it hadn't grown either.
'The consultant told us that there was more treatment they could try, but they were now looking at prolonging Jessica's life - not curing the cancer.'
'It was a shock,' says Andy. 'On the outside Jessica looked so well, it was hard to believe she wasn't getting better.'
The young tot went through a clinical trial went her doctors told her the radiation treatment was no longer working and the cancer had spread all over her body
In August, Jessica underwent MIBG - targeted radiation therapy - in the hope that the family would have another two years with their daughter.
But in October, during an examination Jessica's oncologist found that although her existing tumours didn't seem to have grown, the cancer had progressed to other areas of her body.
'We knew something was wrong straight after his examination as he asked for a nurse to take Jessica away while he spoke to us,' says Andy.
'Despite Jessica appearing to do well after the radiation treatment, her cancer had spread. There were little, or no treatment options left.'
'We asked our oncologist what the likely timeframe we had to work with, and he told us we were looking at months.'
Andy and Nicki chose to end treatments to allow their daughter to enjoy her last few weeks
'There are other clinical trials, but nothing that would make a difference for Jessica,' says Andy. 'So we had to decide whether we wanted to continue treatment, or let her enjoy a 'normal' life in the time she has left.'
'Those studies would be pumping her full of chemicals to keep her alive for our sake, but it's Jessica that matters, not us,' says Andy.
On 12th October Andy and Nicki made the decision to end treatment.
Andy and Nicki have now been told that Jessica may only have weeks to live.
'The news felt like my heart was ripped out of my chest while someone sucked the air from my lungs,' says Andy.
Now, Andy wants to raise awareness of childhood cancer, which is why he's sharing a picture of his daughter during her final weeks.
'I understand this photo is hard to see and even harder to absorb, but this is what cancer does to a child in their final weeks and days. Before her diagnosis I was one of those ignorant to the darkness of childhood cancer. Now I give childhood cancer the respect it deserves, seeing too many children suffering this same fate and seeing families torn apart.
For Andy he hopes that by sharing the photo it will raise awareness and bring the sadness of childhood cancer to the forefront and help fund further research into a cure
'If this photograph makes people think twice about this evil then it's achieved its purpose. Research needs to be done, cures need to be found.
'This, sadly, isn't a sight we see rarely. This is a sight we see every day and night. I could try and use a thousand words to describe what it's like to see our beautiful daughter suffering like this, but these words would fall short of depicting the truth.'
Those who wish to donate to Jessica to help her enjoy her final days as well as give her extra support and care, can donate to her GoFundMe page. |
The Mona Lisa is a well-known image. So well known, in fact, that some people argue that seeing it in person doesn't really add to the experience. For certain car fans, the original Acura NSX is probably just as awe-inspiring as Da Vinci's painting and--thanks to Google Maps--they may have to make a similar judgment about whether it's worth the trouble of seeing one in person.
Google recently added the Lamborghini Museum to street view, allowing users to tour two floors of Italy's best supercars from the comfort of their desks. Now, it's done the same with Honda's museum.
The Honda Collection Hall is located at the Twin Ring Motegi in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. That's a bit of a haul for many people, even though the collection is pretty impressive. Amid the Accord and Civics, you'll find retired race cars, obscure production models like the Beat micro-sports car, and even Honda's Asimo robot.
Google street view covers all three floors of this Honda goodness. It's the perfect way to waste an afternoon on the Internet without feeling like a loser. After all. you're "traveling."
To see the Honda Collection Hall for yourself, click here.
_______________________________________
Follow Motor Authority on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. |
From the shadowy realm of Poland comes Darkwood, an indie survival-horror game that approaches the genre from a slightly different perspective.
Can top-down horror work? I don't know, but with first-person games cluttering up the genre, it's nice to see somebody trying something a little different. And while it might not be "hide in a corner and pray" kind of scary, Darkwood does look like it has some real potential as an atmospheric survival-horror experience.
Darkwood promises "hardcore gameplay" with "no hand-holding, tooltips or linear paths" in a procedurally-generated and deeply twisted world. Characters will improve with perks and abilities and a crafting system will help improve the odds of survival, but if you do happen to die, you're really and truly dead: Permadeath makes reckless behavior a bad idea. And it's not about zombies! While there will be enemies similar to zombies, there are plenty of other dangerous creatures as well, each with their own "characteristic behaviors and goals."
The gameplay trailer doesn't show off anything particularly horrifying but the ambiance looks great, especially for a "pre-alpha," and the promise of a survival-horror RPG/rogue-like crossover set in a well-defined, real-time world is hot stuff indeed. It's being made for Windows, although Linux and Mac versions may be developed as well if the crowdfunding campaign, which isn't yet underway, brings in sufficient funds; the same holds true for co-op multiplayer.
Details about Darkwood can be found at darkwoodgame.com. No release date has been set, but Darkwood is now up for voting on Steam Greenlight and while I would never presume to tell you what to do, you should definitely vote for it. |
Below is the second of two-part series about the Islamic State by Hartmut Krauss, as translated by JLH. Part One is here.
Pure, Unadulterated Islam
On the “Islamic State” — The Basis for its Impetus and Legitimization and for its Anti-Civilization Reign of Terror (Continued)
By Hartmut Krauss
August 29, 2014
Source: Hintergrund-Verlag
II. “Mohammed the Model” and Islamic Imperialistic Conquest as Historical Paragon
The life and works of the Prophet Mohammed as described in traditional tales and biographies are the sacred model for devout Muslims. Whoever doubts, criticizes, questions or actually mocks it is a blasphemer, to be punished with utmost severity.[12]
If we examine Mohammed’s vita more closely, we find a wealth of material for emulation on the violent practice of Islamic orthodoxy. Mohammed functions not only as the proclaimer, but as the enactor of Allah’s absolute laws. Ayatollah Khomeini expressed this clearly and succinctly in his “The Islamic State” (1983, p. 28). “At the time of the most noble Prophet…laws were not just announced and explained. They were carried out. God’s Messenger… carried out the laws. For instance, he carried out the directions of criminal law. He chopped off thieves’ hands, he stoned those convicted under Hadd.[13] The caliph, too has the responsibility of disposing of such matters.” The perpetrators of IS are acting in strict accordance with this principle.
The actions of the Prophet also included contract killing. This was directed at those who — after military confrontations — authored insulting verses about Mohammed’s tribe, the Quraysh. One of these persons was Ka’b b. al-Asraf, a leader of the Jewish Banu n-Nadir. After Mohammed’s death edict had been carried out, “The criminals carried Ka’b’s severed head to Mohammed. As they drew close to his home, they called out, ‘Allahu akbar!’ and the Prophet interrupted his ritual prayer with ‘Allahu akbar!’ ‘Blessed be your countenances!’ He greeted them. ‘And yours, Messenger of Allah!’ they replied, and threw the severed head at his feet. He praised Allah for the death of Ka’b. then he spat into the wound of the [one] murderer who had been injured, and the wound healed. This is what al-Waqidi reports about the ghastly crime.” (Nagel 2008, p. 38)
The IS practice of beheading defenseless male “infidels” as well as raping and enslaving women and girls is also a “Salafist” tradition, as is the early Muslim robbery-and-conquest economy, including the traditional extortion of ransom for captured hostages. The fate of the Jewish tribe, the Qurayzah, may serve as an example. During the “War of the Trench,” they were accused of covertly aiding the hostile besiegers and blockading their own residential quarter for 25 days. After their capitulation, the defeated Qurayzah were prepared, like the other Jewish tribes, to leave the city under the same stipulations. But Mohammed rejected this and made a perfidious arrangement with the arbiter, Sad ibn Moas, “who, he knew full well, did not have a good word to say about the Qurayzah. Sad did not disappoint him. His decision was that all (700, H.K.) men of the Banu Qurayzah should be beheaded, the women and children sold into slavery and their entire property distributed among the Muslims.” (Dashti 1997, p. 163) Rodinson (1975, p. 205) describes the carrying out of the gruesome deed: “The next day, he (Mohammed, H.K.) had great ditches dug in the market of Medina. The Jews were led there, bound and in groups, beheaded one-by-one and thrown in. Some say there were between 600 and 700, others between 800 and 900.”
In retrospect, Mohammed interprets the horrifying occurrence as “God’s judgment”[14] and adds that a Jewish woman was beheaded in contravention of Sad’s judgment, because she had thrown a stone during the blockade of her residential quarter. She had been a friend of his wife Aisha.
Tradition explicitly legitimizes the rape of women in conquered regions: “According to Abu Said — We were on a campaign with God’s Messenger in Mustaliq and took upper-class women from among the Arabs. We had had to practice abstinence for a long time, but we wanted ransom. And we wanted to pleasure ourselves and practice coitus interruptus.
We said: If we wish to do this while we are in company with God’s Messenger, should we not ask him about it.
So we asked him.
He said: You have no obligation not to do it. The creation of a human being, from now until the Day of Resurrection, does not happen, unless God decides it.” (Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, Nasai)[15]
Contrary to the myth of Islamic tolerance — which is just as persistent as it is false — it is legitimate, besides economic extortion and mass slavery, to confirm the following agenda, which serves today’s jihadist as an unadulterated model.
As is known from traditional chronicles, the early Muslim and later conquests were invariably connected with massacres, devastation and extirpation, In the subjection of Syria under the first caliph, Abu Bakr, for instance, 4,000 peasants (Christians, Jews and Samaritans) were murdered. It was the same in the conquest of Mesopotamia from 635 to 642 or the military acquisition of Egypt and Armenia. Sometimes the entire population was slaughtered and in many places women, children and old people were killed. That the expansion of the Islamic culture by the sword was an exception, as claimed by “Islamic leaders” in an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI, does not correspond with the truth. On the contrary, similar atrocities could be recorded in all areas of conquest.[16] On the Arabian peninsula, a policy of religious cleansing was pursued, and Arabia, with the exception of Yemen and Jordan, was made “Jew- and Christian-free” — a procedure that was employed later in Spain by the Almohads and Amoravids after the end of the caliphate in 1031. There were pogroms against Christians in 889 in Elvira and Seville; against Jews in Moroccan Fez in 1033 with over 6,000 dead, in 1066 in Granada with 1,500 families killed[17], in 1135 in Cordova and 1235 in Marrakesh.
“The (anti-Jewish, H.K.) pogroms in Christian-ruled areas,” according to Flaig (2006, p. 37) “are no badge of honor for European culture, but their magnitude was far less than those of the Islamic world. There is a pressing need for a comparative history of religious subjugation.”
The Islamization accomplished as a result of the conquest of numerous tribes also includes an inter-cultural synthesis with, in part, fatal consequences. An example is the combination of Mongolian cultural heritage with the Islamic hegemony culture, as represented by the infamous and blood-thirsty despot, Timur the Lame — also called Tamerlane. He killed thousands of Hindus and erected a triumphal column from their severed heads. He also carried out a systematic annihilation of Christians in Mesopotamia, to which tens of thousands fell victim. His ghastly methods of dominating “represent a historically unprecedented synthesis of Mongolian barbarism and Muslim fanaticism. He symbolizes that particular advanced type of primitive slaughter: Murder committed in service of an abstract ideology, as duty and sacred mission.” (Grousset, quoted in Warraq 2004, p.324)
III. Conclusions
The elemental nexus of the claim to religious superiority, the drive for universal-absolute sovereignty and the jihad principle has two serious consequences:
First, the idealization of violence as well as the normative establishment of murder, theft, enslavement and extortion of tribute as religious duties create an aggressive disposition among the believers socialized under the aegis of orthodox Islam. True, there are, happily, people born into the Islamic milieu but bolstered by their own rational and moral tendency, who free themselves from the dogmatic standards of the religious philosophy forced upon them, and turn to the normative principles of European modernism. (A smart integration strategy would focus this process of resolution, and not broadly encourage or solidify Islamic identity politics.) On the other hand, the persistently peddled myth of the “peace-loving Muslims” must be critically questioned. What this myth overlooks is that the Islamic sovereign culture is a system defined by allotted tasks, in which specific functionaries have the task of introducing swathes of political-philosophical, legal and cultural acceptance and “recognition” into the non-Muslim intake society, while other functionaries elsewhere are simultaneously lopping off heads and massacring infidels. These belong together and no amount of wishful thinking à la Cinderella can bring about two essentially distinctive “Islams.” And it must also be recognized that “peaceful” Muslims can quickly change their attitude when a change in the situation and a concomitant alteration in the balance of power occur. Thus, the Yazidis who fled from ISIS report that, after the jihadists appeared, their Muslim neighbors of many years were not only suddenly aggressive toward them, but were even chiefly responsible for the atrocities committed against them.
“You know, the Yazidis feel so betrayed by the Arab neighbors they had lived among for so many years; they all turned on the Yazidis when ISIS came. Many of the atrocities were carried out not by the militants but by their own neighbors.”[18]
There is absolutely no plausible reason that strictly devout Muslims, confronted with the Islamic terrorism of subjugation and eradication of “infidels” should act differently than the “ordinary Germans” confronting the Nazi terror (cf. Gellately 2002). And lo and behold, current information is that 92% of the population of Saudi Arabia believes that the IS is compatible with Islamic values and Islamic laws.[19]
So it is not really surprising that some time ago, when no one was yet talking about “Google Jihadism” and the PC censorship of thought and investigation still had some holes in it, even among Turkish youth living in Germany, there was recorded a very strong “correlation between an Islamocentric sense of superiority with a largely conservative-traditional point of view and a religiously based tendency to violence.” (Heitmeyer/Müller/Schröder 1997, p. 130) 35.7% of the Turkish youth questioned agreed with the statement “If it serves the Islamic community, I am prepared to use physical violence against infidels.” 24.3% agreed “If it serves the Islamic community, I am prepared to humiliate others.” 28.5% reacted positively to “Violence is justified if it is for establishment of the Islamic faith.” And 23.2% agreed “If someone fights against Islam, he must be killed,” (ibid. p. 129)[20]
Second, the Islamic sense of superiority and the resultant will to dominate require orientation to a kleptocratic-parasitic economy of theft, plunder and extortionate tribute instead of a rationally guided, productive and creative culture of commerce and science. That is, the normative canon of Islam is fixated on an aristocrat-clientele culture of dominance, with its pre-modern, medieval dependency relationships, allotment principles, methods of enrichment, values perceptions and ideas of honor. These are the basic elements of a vicious cycle which is now becoming apparent in the fatal combination of an easily ignited tendency to violence, a pronounced welfare mentality and economic stagnation in the framework of a normatively patriarchal population surplus.[21] IS at present is also following this line: conquest of foreign sovereign territory; grisly killing and enslavement of “infidels”; proclamation of a caliphate; establishment of a reign of terror; possession of oil resources; collection of taxes; ransom demands for freeing of hostages, etc. None of this is new, none of it is surprising or unusual and all of it is within the context of the traditional Islamic matrix
Taken in the aggregate, the Islamic drive for universal domination is a sophisticated strategy capable of taking into account particular power relationships. Its basic maxims are: dedication to the battle when its own strength and the enemy’s weaknesses are clear; avoidance of battle when it is weak and the enemy is strong. When the constellation of powers is such that the forces of the infidels are greater, as for example with Muslim immigrants in a non-Muslim land, the principle of taqiyya is recommended, i.e., permission in unfavorable situations and conditions adverse to action, to conceal one’s own religion and thus the intentions it engenders. Thus, Sharia says:
“If it is possible to achieve a goal by lying and not by telling the truth, then lying is allowed and required, if the goal is obligatory (world conquest is obligatory). But in all these cases, it is religiously more circumspect to use words which give a misleading impression, that is, to say something that is literally true and is therefore not a lie, while the apparent sense of the words deceives the listener. But even if you do not tell the truth and simply lie, this does not violate the law in the given situation.”[22]
In the West, the standard repertoire of this hybrid form of half-truths, lies and deceptions includes the following corresponding claims which are eagerly sucked up and multiplied by the mass media:
1. The Koran and the Hadith are completely, voluntarily interpretable. 2. There is no single Islam, but Islams. 3. It is not the orthodox and radical Muslims who are in the majority, but the “moderates.” 4. Therefore, every form of criticism of Islam must be suppressed, so as not too disturb the illusory achievements of moderate Muslims.
Last but not least, taqiyya appears as a specific type of behavior in the form of a hypocritical accommodation to non-Islamic surroundings, and simultaneously as a concealment of actual intentions. This is especially true of the ambiguous activities of the functionaries of Islamic organizations in Germany who have been specifically trained in this method. What has been said about them over a long period of time is still emphatically true: “To Germans and in German, they emphasize ceaselessly that they honor the constitution and want dialogue. Among Turks and in Turkish, the majority of remarks are inflammatory slogans against German democracy, pluralism and the allegedly ‘morally rotten’ German society.” (Hildegard Becker, cited in Spuler-Stegeman 2002, p.55)
Anyone who wishes — in the face of these facts — to truly free Europe from this reactionary, destructive ballast, must first forge a force that is capable of permanently disassembling this multiple, brachiate, pro-Islamic edifice of lies with its multiple facets of institutional and personal guarantees.
Notes:
12. On Muslim belief in Mohammed, cf. Nagel 2008a. 13. “Hadd” are Islamic punishments intended as deterrents and given for misdeeds against the alleged legal dicta of God. Among them were crimes against property, offenses against Islamic social order and against imposed Islamic customs. 14. In the Koran, Sura 33:25-27, the occurrences are described as follows: “And Allah repelled the infidels in their fury. They gained no advantage. And Allah was enough for the believers in the battle, for Allah is strong and mighty. And he made the People of the Book who had helped them come down from their forts and he cast dismay into their hearts. Some of them you killed and some of them you took captive. And he gave you the inheritance of their land and their dwellings and their property, and a land that you had never entered. And Allah has power over all things.” (Koran 1984, p. 364 f.) 15. The Hadith, Vol. III, p. 37, number 2985. See also Rodinson (1975, p. 190 f.) 16. Cf. the verse in Warraq 2004, pp. 304 ff., Flaig 2006; Singer 1987, pp. 276/77 and 301. 17. “This disaster was just as serious as the one that was to befall the Jews of the Rhineland 30 years later during the First Crusade, but it is not much noted by scholarship,” (Wistrich in Warraq 2004, p.316) 18. www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/world/middleeast/iraq-alissa-j-rubin-a-times-correspondent-recounts-fatal-helicopter-crash-in-kurdistan.html?=3 19. muslimstatistics.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/92-of-saudis-believes-that-isis-conforms-to-the-values-of-islam-and-islamic-law-survey/ 20. Current investigations with subject groups confirm this attitude potential. Cf,, e.g., Krauss 2013 b (Freidenkerln 2/2013); Pew research Center 2013 or the summary in www.gam-online.de/Bilder/Säkulare Lebensordnung-Programm.pdf 21. IS and the other scattered jihadist organizations, with their war and plunder economy, are primary catch-basins for the following groups: 1. Parts of the surplus male population of Islamic lands. This is by far the largest segment, 2. Dis-integrated Islamically socialized immigrants from Western countries who blame their failure to integrate on the non-Muslim host society and have undergone an Islamist/Salafist form of dissent conditioning. 3. A small group of European converts consisting of adolescent misfits, previously associated with left- or right-radical groups, and have now succumbed to the flair of Google Islamism or have been identified by Muslim friendship circles as friendly resources. 22. ncwdi.igc.org/html/shariavfc.html
Sources: |
Introduction
As a major tourist destination, Tampa claims to offer a “unique and exciting experience for everyone.”1 Unfortunately, these unique and exciting experiences include paying unusually high costs for transportation. One major reason Tampa limousines and sedans charge so much more than their neighbors is they have no choice. A “minimum fare rule” created by the Hillsborough County Public Transportation Commission (PTC) makes it illegal for drivers to offer lower prices.
The PTC’s minimum fare requirement has increased over the years, but its current version can be found in Rule 1-20.001(4)(a) of the Rules of the Hillsborough County Public Transportation Commission2. The rule states that limousine drivers must charge a minimum of $50 per hour and that no customer can be charged for less than one hour. In other words, every ride in a limo must cost $50 or more, no matter how short the ride may be. Although drivers are allowed to charge more than the minimum, charging less than the minimum can lead to fines and even the destruction of the driver’s business.
“ The Florida Constitution protects every Floridian’s right to economic liberty—the right to practice one’s chosen occupation free from unreasonable government restriction. ”
The PTC was created by the Florida Legislature, not by Hillsborough County. In 2001, the Florida Legislature gave the PTC the power to set limousine prices throughout the county.3 Not surprisingly, the PTC has abused this power to set minimum fares at the request of “the industry.” Unfortunately for the people of Hillsborough County, the PTC appears to think that “the industry” simply means large taxi and limousine companies.4
Ironically, the PTC was created to “protect the traveling public.”5 Instead it harms consumers by forcing them to pay fares that are well above what many drivers would otherwise charge. These drivers want to offer better deals to their customers, but the PTC will not allow them to do so.
Now, a coalition of customers, a driver and a small limousine business is fighting back. Represented by the Institute for Justice, a national public interest law firm that fights for economic liberty, the coalition is suing the PTC in Florida circuit court to put a stop to the PTC’s minimum fare rule.
The Florida Constitution protects every Floridian’s right to economic liberty—the right to practice one’s chosen occupation free from unreasonable government restriction. The Florida Supreme Court has stated that this includes the right of consumers to “freely bargain” for services.6 This means that the PTC is not only harming customers, entrepreneurs and tourists, but the PTC is also violating the Florida Constitution.
The Plaintiffs
On August 28, 2013, Thomas Halsnik, Black Pearl Limousines, Kenrick Gleckler and Daniel Faubion joined with the Institute for Justice and filed a lawsuit in the Florida Circuit Court for Hillsborough County. For the entrepreneurs—driver Thomas Halsnik and his company Black Pearl Limousines—this lawsuit seeks to vindicate their right to economic liberty. For the customers—Kenrick Gleckler and Daniel Faubion—this lawsuit seeks to vindicate their right to freely bargain for services.
The Defendants
The defendants in this case are the Hillsborough County Public Transportation Commission and its chairman, Victor Crist, in his official capacity. The PTC is responsible for enacting and enforcing the minimum limousine fare rule. The PTC is an “independent special district” created by the Florida Legislature to supposedly protect the transportation customers of Hillsborough County.7
Legal Claims: The Right to Earn an Honest Living and the Right to Freely Bargain for Yourself
The PTC has violated two different sections of the Florida Constitution. These are the Due Process Clause found in Article I, Section 9 of the Florida Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause found in Article I, Section 2 of the Florida Constitution.
Fist, the manner in which the PTC has caused financial harm to the limo driver, small business and customers has violated the due process rights of each plaintiff, including the right of drivers and small business owners to earn an honest living and the right of customers to bargain for lower prices. In order for such harm to be constitutionally permissible, it would need to be reasonably related to a legitimate government purpose. Pure protectionism, however, is not a legitimate government purpose, and the minimum fare rule is not reasonable. Numerous other cities around the country and here in Florida have vibrant transportation industries without imposing any type of similar rule. Consequently, it is clear that the minimum fare rule is totally unnecessary and benefits only politically favored taxi or limousine companies that don’t want to compete with other businesses based on price.
The PTC has also violated the Florida Constitution in a second way. The PTC only enforces the minimum fare rule against limousines, but not against taxis or even luxury taxis, which are similar in many ways to limousines. Therefore, the PTC has violated the Equal Protection Clause found in Article I, Section 2 of the Florida Constitution. In fact, the equal-protection violation illustrates the absence of any legitimate public safety justification for the minimum fare rule. Luxury taxis offer many of the same services as limousines, and if the minimum fare rule had any legitimate public safety justification, then the PTC would want to enforce it against all similar businesses. But it does not. The reason is simple—the minimum fare rule has no purpose other than to protect large taxi and limousine companies from competition by smaller competitors.
Legal Team
The Institute for Justice is the national law firm for liberty. IJ’s legal team in Thomas Halsnik, Black Pearl Limousines LLC, Kenrick Gleckler and Daniel Faubion v. Hillsborough County Public Transportation Commission and Victor Crist is led by IJ-Florida Chapter Executive Director Justin Pearson. Pearson is joined by IJ Attorney Ari Bargil.
The Institute for Justice: A History of Protecting Economic Liberty
The Institute for Justice is a public interest law firm that advocates for a rule of law under which individuals can control their own destinies as free and responsible members of society. Through litigation, communication, outreach and strategic research, IJ secures protections for individual liberty and extends the benefits of freedom to those whose full enjoyment of their rights has been denied by the government.
The Institute for Justice is headquartered in Arlington, Va., and has state chapters in Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, Texas and Washington, as well as the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Law School. The Florida Chapter is located in Miami.
The Institute for Justice has secured numerous victories for economic liberty, including:
• Clayton v. Steinagel—In April 2011, the Institute for Justice filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of an African hairbraider challenging barriers to competition created by Utah’s cosmetology licensing scheme. In August 2012, the U.S. District Court for Utah struck down the barriers to competition as unconstitutional.
• St. Joesph Abbey, et al. v. Castille, et al.—In August 2010, the Institute for Justice teamed up with the monks of the Saint Joseph Abbey to challenge the constitutionality of Louisiana’s requirement that the monks must be licensed as funeral directors in order to sell their handmade wooden caskets. The Institute won at the trial court level and again in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Louisiana recently filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.
• Swedenburg v. Kelly—In May 2005, the Institute for Justice won an important economic liberty case before the U.S. Supreme Court, striking down a protectionist law that granted monopoly power to distribute wine to large, politically connected liquor wholesalers.
• Clutter v. Transportation Services Authority—In 2001, the Institute for Justice defeated Nevada’s Transportation Services Authority and its entrenched limousine cartel that had stifled competition in the Las Vegas limousine market.
• Jones v. Temmer—In 1995, IJ helped three entrepreneurs overcome Colorado’s protectionist taxicab monopoly to open Denver’s first new cab company in nearly 50 years. The IJ victory inspired other municipalities to break open their government-sanctioned taxicab monopolies in Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Minneapolis.
For more information contact:
John E. KramerVice President for CommunicationsInstitute for Justice901 North Glebe Road, Suite 900Arlington, VA 22203-1854Phone: (703) 682-9320 ext. [email protected]
[1] See City of Tampa Official Website: http://www.tampagov.net/information_resources/user_guides/for_visitors.asp.
[2] Available at: http://www.hillsboroughcounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/6827.
[3] See Chapter 2001-299 of the Laws of Florida, available at: http://www.hillsboroughcounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/6215.
[4] PTC representatives have admitted to members of the media that the minimum fare rule was enacted at the request of limousine and taxi companies, see, e.g., Drew Harwell, “Uber Runs into Friction with Local Regulators,” HispanicBusiness.com, August 29, 2012, available at: http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/2012/8/29/uber_runs_into_friction_with_local.htm. PTC representatives have also admitted that the minimum fare required was raised “at the request of the limousine industry.” Elizabeth Flock, “No One Wants to Take Credit for Uber’s $50 Minimum in Tampa,” US News & World Report, August 24, 2012, available at: http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2012/08/24/no-one-wants-to-take-credit-for-bers-50-minimum-in-tampa.
[5] See Report 99-12 of the Florida Legislature Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, available at: http://www.oppaga.state.fl.us/reports/pdf/9912rpt.pdf.
[6] See, e.g., Chicago Title Ins. Co. v. Butler, 770 So. 2d 1210 (Fla. 2000) (striking down anti-rebate statute).
[7] See Hillsborough County Public Transportation Commission website: http://www.hillsboroughcounty.org/index.aspx?NID=2595. See also, Chapter 2001-299 of the Laws of Florida, available at: http://www.hillsboroughcounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/6215. |
Women who kill their newborns usually claim to have been in denial about their pregnancies. Can you carry a child to term without realizing it? And if you do, how responsible are you for your actions?
(Photo: Phil Jones/Shutterstock)
One summer morning in 2006, Jean-Louis Courjault found two dead babies in his freezer. The 40-year-old was trying to find space for some mackerel when he opened a drawer and saw something unusual wrapped in a towel. “I open it,” he later recounted in court. “I see a hand.” In the next drawer there was a second bundle: “I open it and I see that it is also a baby.”
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
Courjault retreated to the living room in shock. He and his family had moved from France to Seoul, the South Korean capital, four years earlier. As an engineer, Courjault was often away for months on business while his wife, Veronique, 38, looked after their two sons and volunteered at a local kindergarten. That summer, Veronique had taken the boys to France, and Jean-Louis was left alone. “I have to call the police but I do not know their number,” he later remembered. “I can barely say my address, I do not know how to say baby, I do not know how to say freezer.” Jean-Louis phoned a Korean colleague who contacted the police.
The case was shocking, but what followed made it a national sensation in France. DNA tests found that the dead infants belonged to the Courjaults. Jean-Louis and Veronique held hands during a press conference and denied all responsibility, but after further tests confirmed the results the couple was arrested, and Veronique confessed. She had concealed both pregnancies from her husband. Each time she had labored alone in a bathroom and then suffocated the child before hiding it in the freezer. A third baby had been born, she added, while the couple was still in France in 1999—Veronique burned the body in the fireplace. The “affaire des bébés congelés,” or “freezer babies affair,” gripped France for months.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
VERONIQUE COURJAULT SEEMED TO fit the image of an ideal mother: a caring Frenchwoman in a stable and affluent marriage with no demanding career to distract from her family. Members of the press were baffled. During the eight days that followed the discovery, Courjault's life was closely scrutinized. What emerged were anecdotes from friends and family about her pleasantness and passivity. “My mother always told me, ‘You give way too much!,’” she said in passing during her trial.
Lindsey Lowe, a 25-year-old children's dental assistant, gave birth to twins in a toilet in her parents' home. Sometime later she emerged from the bathroom with two dead infants. She placed them in a laundry basket in her room, where they remained until her father found one a few days later.
Had Courjault not wanted more children there were options available to her. Abortion is freely available in France during the first trimester. And though it remains officially illegal in South Korea, authorities usually look the other way.
“Regarding abortion, the issue did not really arise,” Courjault explained during her trial, “because in my head, I was not really pregnant.” Courjault claimed that although she had at times been conscious of the fact that she was carrying, she had also experienced a strong feeling of denial. In her words: “There was no rapport between my body and my mind.” She had worn loose clothing to conceal her shape from her husband but was paralyzed from taking any further action. The French psychiatrist, Michel Dubec, described what Courjault did as a “mental abortion.” It might sound “absurd,” Courjault conceded, but “it is the truth.”
THE QUESTION OF GUILT sits at the heart of this story. Is a woman who kills her newborn a cruel Medea, acting out of selfish motives, or does she resemble the other ancient model of neonaticide—the victim of insanity? Euripides' chorus contrasts Medea with Ino, who killed her sons after being “driven to madness by the gods.” This question raises a related concern: Should we punish all perpetrators of neonaticide with the full weight of the law, or treat them for mental illness?
The problem isn't theoretical; Courjault's case is far from unique. Between 2006 and 2013, at least 12 more freezers in France and Germany yielded the bodies of babies. All had been killed by their mothers soon after birth. When confronted, almost all of the mothers claimed to have been gripped by a similar state of pregnancy denial.
And neonaticide is not just a European problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that a baby born in the United States in recent decades was 10 times more likely to be killed during its first day than at any other time of life. And for the first week, a baby's killer is overwhelmingly likely to be its own mother. The vast majority of these women claim to have been in denial about their pregnancies.
THERE ARE STRIKING SIMILARITIES between high-profile cases of neonaticide. In 2011 Lindsey Lowe, a 25-year-old children's dental assistant, gave birth to twins in a toilet in her parents' home. Sometime later she emerged from the bathroom with two dead infants. She placed them in a laundry basket in her room, where they remained until her father found one a few days later. Lowe was promptly arrested. She eventually told police that she had placed her hands over the babies’ mouths in a panic, to stop their cries from being heard by her parents.
She was acquitted, but her enormous guilt over her denial remains. She worries every day that she might be pregnant, and concealing it from herself again.
Like Courjault, Lowe had no criminal history and was known for her willingness to oblige others. Her father described her in court as a “model daughter.” She was engaged to her college sweetheart and had spent the preceding months caring for her mother, who had brain cancer. Like Courjault, Lowe also claimed to have known on some level that she was pregnant—but, in the words of her lawyer, “her mind refused to accept it. She literally, on a day-to-day basis, did not realize she was pregnant.”
Two weeks after Lowe's arrest in 2011, callers to the HLN talk show Dr. Drew on Call argued that she was either “mad” or “bad.” “She had it all planned out and murdered two innocent, helpless baby boys,” said one caller, asking why Lowe hadn't taken advantage of Tennessee's safe haven laws for unwanted babies. Speaking on the show, clinical psychologist Lisa Boesky drew a clear dividing line between complete insanity and absolute culpability, arguing that if there was no evidence of serious mental illness like psychosis, “we need to send a message to the young women out there....”
The trouble is that most women who experience pregnancy denial—including the small fraction who go on to commit neonaticide—are not what you or I might call “insane,” or “mad.” Out of the 32 women charged with neonaticide in Finland between 1980 and 2000, for example, just four suffered from psychosis—and they had pre-existing conditions such as schizophrenia. Some psychotic neonaticide offenders report delusions of being influenced by the devil. By contrast, Lowe, Courjault, and most other neonaticide offenders suffer from no diagnosable long-term mental illness. Both women even said that they had, to an extent, been aware of their pregnancies. This narrative of conscious denial is not uncommon. The amplified version of this, in women who never even become consciously aware of their pregnancy, is often known as unconscious denial. A surprising number of pregnant women—about 1 in 2,500—maintain this until birth. These women often turn up at the hospital with labor pains that they describe as nothing more than excruciating stomach cramps.
But despite their lack of psychosis, neither Lowe's nor Courjault's actions seem entirely sane. Neither a laundry basket nor a freezer are sensible places to dump a body. It might not be a coincidence that both are storage areas—a place to put something away for the time being. In a 2001 study of 16 neonaticide cases, women were found to have engaged in similarly bizarre actions, including “returning to bed with the infant's corpse and keeping it under clothes or in a knapsack.” Dr. Margaret Spinelli, the Columbia professor who led the research, says that “one woman put the corpse in a filing cabinet in a shared office. That's pretty impressive.”
Most recognize that there is a difference between killing your own newborn out of cold, calculated self-interest, and doing the same thing in a fog of delusional psychosis. The grey area between responsibility and absolution stretches just as wide. Lowe and Courjault's stories outline a shared syndrome—but like all mental illness it exists on a spectrum, with absolute “madness” or “badness” applying only to the extreme outliers.
But although many neonaticide offenders tell similar stories, the differences in treatment are enormous. Courjault was sentenced in France to eight years in prison for the murders of three minors. She served just under four years and was released on parole in 2010, while continuing to receive psychiatric treatment. By contrast, Lowe was sentenced to a minimum of 51 years in prison for two counts of first-degree murder, first-degree pre-meditated murder, and aggravated child abuse. She will be 77 before she is eligible for parole.
NO SINGLE TYPE OF woman experiences pregnancy denial or commits neonaticide—but many women are repeat offenders. They come from a range of ethnicities, social backgrounds and ages. Demographically, they reflect the full range of motherhood: around 80 percent have completed their education, more than half are married or living with a close partner, and around halfalready have children.
Our thoughts and feelings can trigger any number of physical responses—from deliberately catching a ball to involuntarily blushing from embarrassment. It shouldn't be surprising that extreme denial can have equally tangible effects on our bodies.
Women with denial often have something to be anxious about: Courjault hinted at her fear that she could not be an adequate mother to more children; Lowe's twins were the product of a brief affair she wanted to keep from her fiancé. But no external reason quite explains the lengths to which women with denial go, or the similarities between their stories. The seed of similarity between these women lies buried in their psychology. Each one has a story that reaches back long before their pregnancy. The rate of infanticide mirrors the rate of adult suicide—not adult homicide. It is associated with self-destructive rather than murderous impulses. A history of abuse plays a part in pregnancy denial for significant numbers of women, but not all. “To understand it, you have to be specific,” says Dr. Jens Wessel, who conducted the first large-scale study of the syndrome. “Why this woman, with this partner, at this time denied this pregnancy.”
COLLEEN BROGAN (NOT HER real name) was 17 when she discovered that she was pregnant. Like Courjault and Lowe she had a reputation—in her own words—for being a “good girl.” "I was very into pleasing," she says of her childhood in Ireland. "Making beautiful cakes, helping my mum with the house—I just loved helping." Colleen was shy: she and her boyfriend had waited two years to have sex. When she missed her period, she told him immediately.
It isn't uncommon for younger women with pregnancy denial to have a “good girl” reputation for being dependable and high achieving. Many also come from families where problems are rarely discussed openly. “It's taken me years to learn that if something isn't dealt with, it doesn't just disappear,” Brogan says. “When my mum was dying of cancer nobody told us. We had a suspicion, but we didn't know.”
Brogan began to struggle with the prospect of telling her parents. “I couldn't bear to see them cry or be upset,” she says. She began to deny her pregnancy to the outside world and then to herself. After a week she told her boyfriend that she wasn't pregnant after all. This began as a tactic to give herself time to figure things out, but “the time kept extending and extending.”
Brogan fell into complete denial. She began to wear loose clothing and spent more time alone. “I thought maybe something might happen that would mean I wouldn't have to deal with it—like I might get attacked and die,” she says. “I used to go out late at night hoping that something would happen.” Over time her denial deepened; she ate little and put on less weight than expected. “I remember lying on my back and touching my belly and thinking: ‘Maybe there isn't anything in there. Maybe it's just my imagination,’” she says.
Despite the changes in her behavior, none of Brogan’s family, friends, or colleagues seemed to pick up anything different. One of the most perplexing elements of pregnancy denial is the way that others seem to participate in it. “Even if they're in bathing suits!” Spinelli exclaims. “People around them don't realize that they're pregnant.” Courjault used to attend yoga classes with her friend Sabine while she was pregnant, and often stripped to her underwear in the locker room. “I never noticed anything,” Sabine later said. “I never imagined that she was pregnant.” Two days before Lowe gave birth she wore a bridesmaid's dress that had been fitted six months earlier. Her sister Lacey testified that Lowe had changed her clothes in front of other women that week without anyone suspecting that she was pregnant. Even sexual partners can remain in the dark: each of the 16 neonaticide offenders in Finland who were in relationships during their denied pregnancy had regularly slept with their partner. Denial can even fool doctors.
Over time her denial deepened; she ate little and put on less weight than expected. "I remember lying on my back and touching my belly and thinking: 'Maybe there isn't anything in there. Maybe it's just my imagination.'"
“I will tell you a very amusing story,” says Dr. Peter Husslein, the head of the obstetrics department at the Medical University of Vienna, when I ask about his first experience with pregnancy denial. “It was my first week in obstetrics. I was called to deal with a woman in deep pain. I felt the abdomen and it was very hard. I recalled from surgical cases that this was often a sign of a rupture of the stomach so I was on the point of sending her for surgical intervention. But then I said to myself, ‘Well, I should examine her vaginally.’” He paused for effect. “I felt the hard head. It was the baby very shortly before delivery. And the woman completely denied, even with those pains—it was a complete shock to her that she was pregnant.”
Our thoughts and feelings can trigger any number of physical responses—from deliberately catching a ball to involuntarily blushing from embarrassment. It shouldn't be surprising that extreme denial can have equally tangible effects on our bodies. In women with pregnancy denial the enlarged stomach is often absent. One theory is that the fetus is positioned vertically within the womb rather than horizontally. More than half of women with denial continue to notice menstruation-like bleeding or spotting. Denial is the mirror image of hysterical pregnancy. Women who are convinced that they are pregnant can develop distended abdomens and unusually high levels of the hormone prolactin, which produces milk from their breasts. In the same way, the body of a woman in denial about her pregnancy often conspires with her unconscious. “Is it just: ‘Oh, I'm going to make-believe that I'm pregnant or not pregnant?’” Spinelli says. “Or is there something genuinely going on between the endocrine system and the central nervous system?”
But denial is hidden by its very nature—by the time it is discovered, any physical evidence has vanished. Skepticism about pregnancy denial prevails among judges and juries. While sentencing Lowe, Judge Dee David Gay stated that her account of denial was “not credible.” The jurors agreed. When a defendant claims to have been in denial, the prosecution looks for evidence that they were aware of the pregnancy. And in cases of conscious denial they often find it. Lowe had used her iPhone to search for information on how to induce labor, and for pornography involving pregnant women. For Gay this, together with her affair, showed that her priorities were ultimately “selfish.”
Like Lowe, Brogan was aware of her pregnancy early on. “It was very odd,” she says, “very childish, very immature, very not dealing with the facts of life.” But she is equally certain that she was not fully in control of her mind. Over time, her denial became more unconscious. Even when the baby grew and began to kick, “there was no conscious thought like: ‘Just don't think about it!’” she says. “I just didn't think about it.” She struggles for a metaphor. “It's like when you watch TV. You're really not thinking, you're just watching. I was totally detached. I was outside myself.”
Cancer patients sometimes display an intermittent awareness of their illness that is similar to Brogan’s approach to her pregnancy. It is known as middle knowledge. Though these patients have been told of their diagnosis they might occasionally deny symptoms—insisting, for example, that a lump is the result of a mild injury that will soon heal. In more extreme cases they refuse to see their doctor or to tell their families, or turn down treatment altogether. Cancer patients and pregnant women with denial are drawing on the same primitive defense mechanisms to cope with a situation that feels threatening. But, like all weapons, denial can backfire.
Even when the baby grew and began to kick, "there was no conscious thought like: 'Just don't think about it!'" she says. "I just didn't think about it." She struggles for a metaphor. "It's like when you watch TV. You're really not thinking, you're just watching. I was totally detached. I was outside myself."
Brogan’s denial paralyzed her. After several months of pregnancy she began to have rushes of high blood pressure. These were early signs that she was at risk of eclampsia—a condition that causes seizures during labor and is fatal without treatment. “I was aware of them because they're massive,” she says, “but my twisted state of mind was—it wouldn't have bothered me if I'd died.” At about 36 weeks, Brogan went into labor alone in her bedroom and began having loud fits and drifting in and out of consciousness. “I remember my mum screaming to my dad: ‘There's a baby, there's a baby!’” she says. Her son had been born, but in the ambulance her heart stopped beating. She was resuscitated and spent several days in a coma.
For most women with denial, feelings of dissociation peak during labor. Women describe “watching” themselves, and often report that the pain was “not bad” or deny having any pain altogether. They make little noise—there are usually other people nearby who never realize what is happening. Many women with denial are unable to think of the baby as an individual. During her trial Courjault said: “It was a part of myself, an extension of myself that I was killing.” Brogan eerily echoes those words: “The baby I was carrying didn't seem like a person—it was a part of me. It wasn't something else, it was me,” she says. “I guess that's what happens when somebody murders somebody. They're not connected to them as a person.”
Brogan is now 46. When she woke from her coma all those years ago, she no longer had any sense of denial. “At that point everything was out,” she says. “The first thing I wanted to do was to see the baby.” Today, her son is 28, and has a child of his own.
It is impossible to say what Brogan might have done had she been conscious. For Husslein of the Medical University of Vienna, neonaticide is sometimes the rational consequence of an irrational situation. “I don't think a mother sits there and says: ‘Well, I have the following options, let's balance things out, I think the best thing to do is to kill the baby.’ She is in shock, she is panicking. The only way to continue on a path of denial is to put the baby away.”
Most neonaticides happen in just this way—by putting the baby to one side rather than taking any direct action to cause death. It is important to distinguish passive neonaticide from active neonaticide. In the late 1980s Dr. Catherine Bonnet interviewed two French women who were in such extreme denial that, she writes, they did not recognize their newborns as babies. One of the babies died from head injuries caused by falling onto the ground during labor, while the other drowned after falling into a toilet. “These women, in fact, did not exercise physical violence on the person of the baby,” Bonnet pointed out, adding that amnesia often followed.
Neglect played a part in another story I encountered. Christine Bernard (not her real name) was 27 and already a mother when she was charged with the murder of her newborn in France. She agreed to speak to me only by email. She told me that she had experienced what is often termed unconscious denial for the full duration of her pregnancy. “I had no symptoms,” she writes. “To give an idea of my ‘form,’ I biked with my son on the luggage rack a few hours before giving birth.”
This narrative of conscious denial is not uncommon. The amplified version of this, in women who never even become consciously aware of their pregnancy, is often known as unconscious denial. A surprising number of pregnant women—about 1 in 2,500—maintain this until birth.
Bernard only became conscious of her pregnancy when she recognized the feeling of the contractions. She rushed to a nearby toilet and gave birth alone in the late afternoon. “The baby died,” she writes. “I was in full physical and mental distress, drained of blood, and I could not call for help and did not want to.” She left the baby in the bathroom, where it was found when help later arrived.
Bernard was arrested and spent a month in a psychiatric hospital before being transferred to prison for six months to await trial. It was only at this point that medical reports suggested that her baby had probably not been healthy enough to live outside the womb without aid. She was acquitted, but her enormous guilt over her denial remains. She worries every day that she might be pregnant, and concealing it from herself again.
WHAT IS THE RIGHT balance of treatment and punishment for women with pregnancy denial? And can anything be done to steer them away from the risk of neonaticide?
Countries such as England, Finland, Turkey, and Colombia use laws to distinguish maternal infanticide from murder. Sweden now asks a panel of doctors to judge such cases; Canadian offenders face a maximum sentence of five years. In America, states such as Kansas have chosen instead to abolish the insanity defense altogether.
“We're very skeptical about things like mental illness,” Spinelli says. “And a lot of that has to do with how the law treats insanity.” States that have kept the insanity defense rely on a legal test from over 150 years ago—the M'Naghten Rule. This rule, strictly imposed, has often favored punishment rather than treatment for delusional psychotics. Andrea Yates, for example, had struggled with psychotic episodes and suicide attempts for years before she drowned her children in 2001. She argued that she had acted to save them from Satan, who had sent her messages via popular movies. Yet the first jury she faced found her guilty, leaving her with a possible death sentence. “For me, when it's so degraded is in the case of women who are really psychotic,” Spinelli says.
Not all psychiatrists agree on how neonaticide offenders with pregnancy denial should be treated. The leading Finnish neonaticide researchers, Dr. Hanna Putkonen and Dr. Ghitta Weizmann-Henelius, argued that harsh punishments were useless: “Treatment is what we suggest.” They have a point: Even with her relatively light denial, Brogan was prepared to die of eclampsia to avoid having to face her pregnancy. The prospect of a harsh prison sentence would probably not have deterred her much.
In a 2001 study of 16 neonaticide cases, women were found to have engaged in similarly bizarre actions, including "returning to bed with the infant's corpse and keeping it under clothes or carrying it around in a knapsack."
But deterrence isn't the only reason for punishment. Spinelli argues that justice requires different mixtures of punishment and treatment for neonaticide offenders with different levels of denial. A woman whose baby dies after a labor that took her completely by surprise should not be held as responsible as a woman whose denial was lighter. But she also argues that even women with lighter forms of denial don't deserve life sentences. “It's actually pretty ludicrous,” she says, adding that probation might be one alternative.
America's second strategy for deterring neonaticide is the provision of anonymous hatches for abandoned babies. These were introduced by the Safe Haven laws that now cover the entire country. It's the same law that Lowe failed to make use of. She isn't alone—just 20 percent of abandoned babies were left in these incubators in the seven years after the law was first introduced in Texas. But in Austria the neonaticide rate more than halved after a different law was introduced to help women before they give birth—by offering anonymous delivery and adoption in hospitals under the country's largely free health care system. “It is the best alternative,” says Dr. Claudia Klier, a forensic psychiatrist who specializes in treating neonaticide offenders. “It avoids the most dangerous situation—when the mother has a secret, unaccompanied delivery.”
The best way to care for babies is to care for mothers—and this particularly goes for those who are at risk of harming their newborns. As we decide how much blame to assign any woman who denied her pregnancy and killed her own child, we must also face the reality of their condition, and the difference that the right measures could have made.
Neonaticide exposes human behavior at its most troubling, but it can also reveal us at our most empathetic. When Courjault was released in 2010 she was reunited with her husband and teenage sons, and welcomed back into the family. Jean-Louis spoke of his sadness about the “wasted lives” of the dead babies he never knew. But he had spent months speaking to other women who had experienced pregnancy denial, and to their partners. “I couldn't not make an effort to understand,” he concluded. “We are guilty of having seen nothing.” |
ON the morning of September 22, 1882, Sydney awoke to a grand and terrible spectacle. Its most flamboyant building, the Garden Palace, was burning to the ground.
The heat was so intense that at 6.05am, windows in Macquarie St cracked and firefighters could do little more than watch the building turn to cinders.
The fire was as magnificent as the palace itself — thunderous crashes, rivers of lead and, when the walls fell away, a terrible vision of flames engulfing a towering bronze statue of Queen Victoria.
By 9am, it was all over and the building that had dominated the city skyline for three years was gone.
media_camera A view of the palace from the Botanic Gardens 1879-1882. Picture: State Library NSW
media_camera A similar view today, where skyscrapers now form the backdrop.
Despite being one of the most captivating buildings Sydney has ever seen, the Garden Palace is largely absent from popular history and most Sydneysiders have never heard of it.
Bigger then the QVB and stretching from the State Library to the Conservatorium of Music in the Botanic Gardens, its towers and 65m-high dome would have dwarfed the buildings around it.
“The size is difficult for most people to conceive and the fact that it was the length of two football fields and in the Botanic Gardens of all places,” said State Library curator Sarah Morley. “A sanctuary within the city of this size was such a luxury.”
Modelled on London’s Crystal Palace, it was purpose-built for the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition and was designed by Colonial Architect James Barnet.
MORE NEWS
ISLAMIC STATE TEEN RECRUIT JAKE BILARDI IN SUICIDE ATTACK
KIERAN FORAN FUMING AFTER LEAK OF $4.7M PARRAMATTA DEAL
KID’S PERFECT LOB STUNS ROGER FEDERER
“It was responsible for bringing the world to Sydney at a time when the colony was prosperous and growing and full of potential. It boosted the economy and encouraged authorities to improve the city’s services and facilities,” Ms Morley said.
“The International Exhibition was ground-breaking in so far as it was the first of its kind to be held in the southern hemisphere.”
media_camera James Barnet designed the building, which was erected at break-neck speed. media_camera Sydney at the time was a sandstone and timber town with few buildings as ornate as the palace.
The Victorian equivalent of a world expo, exhibitions and world fairs were at the height of fashion at the time.
WEB FEATURES
SYDNEY’S SHAMEFUL ASYLUMS: SILENT HOUSES OF PAIN
NOTORIOUS SYDNEY CRIMINALS: THE MAD DENTIST OF WYNARD
MONSTER HUNT: SERIAL KILLERS TARGETED IN COLD CASE REVIEW
“The feel in the city would have been similar to that of the Olympics in 2000. It was a very positive thing for Sydney and NSW, an event to be celebrated. The city would have been buzzing and a hive of activity,” Ms Morley said.
For seven months, more than one million people poured into the sprawling complex to marvel at the colony’s prosperity.
media_camera One of the great attractions of the exhibition was to ascend the north tower in Sydney’s first hydraulic lift to enjoy rare elevated harbour views. Picture: National Library Australia
media_camera A panorama of Sydney, looking over Macquarie St, taken from the palace tower by Charles Bayliss. Picture: National Library of Australia
About 20ha of the botanic gardens became a fairground filled with bandstands, stalls, entertainments, eateries and smaller exhibition buildings.
The Garden Palace was the centrepiece and inside, all manner of inventions, technology, art and ideologies were displayed by local and international exhibitors.
Sydney had pulled out all stops to build the palace and had raced against time to beat Melbourne, which was also staging an exhibition.
Up to 2000 men worked on site night and day, using electric light for the first time, to complete the building in just eight months.
media_camera Under the central dome stood a bronze statue of Queen Victoria. Picture: Courtesy State Library NSW media_camera There were 724 classes of goods and produce on exhibition, from huge pieces of machinery to fine porcelain.
The city was plagued by insecurities in the lead-up to the event, with concerns about whether its public transport, accommodation and water supply would be adequate for all the visitors travelling to the infant city.
It was forced to install a line for a steam tram, a first for Sydney and an unpopular idea at the time after previous tram efforts resulted in the death of prominent musician in 1864.
“A steam-powered tramway was installed to transport exhibition goers around the city. After the exhibition, the tramway network was expanded and by 1905-06 the trams were converted to electric traction,” Ms Morley said.
Despite several accidents, it was a great success and the system expanded rapidly through the city and inner suburbs. It became one of the main attractions of the exhibition
media_camera Powered by steam, the tram built for the exhibition pulled double-decker carriages from Redfern to Hunter St in the CBD. Picture: Courtesy State Library NSW
After the exhibition, the palace continued to play a central role in Sydney’s social life.
Balls, lectures, exhibitions and entertainments were hosted in its auditorium; an art gallery and the first technological museum, the forerunner to the Powerhouse, were established.
Government departments also set up office and important records were stored in the basement, the wisdom of which would later be questioned.
That’s because unlike Barnet’s other sturdy designs such as the GPO, the Colonial Secretary’s Office and the Land’s Department building which still stand today, the palace was primarily made of timber, which ensured its complete destruction when it was engulfed by fire.
media_camera Approximately 20 hectares of the Botanic Gardens were handed over for the exhibition, with 6ha covered in buildings. Picture: Courtesy State Library NSW
While arson was generally suspected, the cause of the fire was never determined and remains a mystery to this day
The blaze, which began before 6am, became almost immediately uncontrollable and thousands lined the streets to witness the calamity.
“Very quiet and orderly were the thousands who looked on,” wrote one reporter in the Evening News. “Many were lamenting and regretting the inevitable destruction of what had given so much pleasure to them, and had carried the name and doings of the people of this country into the Empires and most distant countries.”
media_camera “When the fire was raging in its greatest strength, the sun was seen behind the burning palace through the haze of smoke raising above the horizon its crimson disc. The scene was the most imposing, as it was the most pitiful, ever seen in the colonies.” from a news report on September 23, 1882. Painting of the Garden Palace fire by Gibbs Shallard Company, 1882.
The wind carried ash, cinders and fragments of the building far into the suburbs and a house in Potts Point caught fire.
Almost everything inside went up in flames. The fire destroyed the 1881 census, land occupation records, railway surveys, Aboriginal artefacts, artworks and the foundation collection of the Technological and Mining Museum.
A new map of the colony which took years of work was also lost.
media_camera The destruction was terribly complete. Of the valuable contents of the building, scarcely anything was saved. The building was later razed to the ground. Picture: State Libray NSW
Conspiracy theories from dynamite plots, masked men and trains of gunpowder were bandied about afterwards. Wealthy folk were blamed for trying to restore harbour views, destroy convict ancestry or simply get the gardens back.
Whatever the cause, thousands came to view the ruins and police were on site to keep order.
“To lose such a beautiful building that bought such positivity to the city and one that was so new as well would have been quite shocking,” Ms Morley said.
media_camera Measured against today’s landmarks, the building stretched from the Conservatorium, across the Cahill Expressway and in front of the State Library. Picture: State Library NSW
media_camera An aerial view of the Botanical Gardens today. If the palace continued to stand, it would have added to the cultural precinct.
“Some items and artefacts are irreplaceable, however we do know that in true Australian spirit almost before the the coals had cooled Joseph Maiden, first curator of the (Technological) Museum, set about forming another collection of artefacts by approaching people who had donated items in the original Museum collection.”
Today, all that is left of the palace are the carved sandstone gate posts and wrought iron gates on the Macquarie St entrance to the gardens.
A 1940s-era sunken garden and fountain featuring a statue of Cupid marks the former location of the Palace’s dome. |
Beats by Dre are mega expensive bass boosting earmuffs worn by annoying people on the Tube. Beets… sorry beetroot is an unfairly maligned root vegetable that I hope will make some great wine in a years time. Unlike Beats headphones beetroot is cheap… and plentiful at this time of year with nice wee ones perfect for wine making that will be sweet rather than the woody behemoths later in the season.
Scanning the interwebs there were a number of variations and ideas about beetroot wine. Some said it could be drunk a few months after fermentation and others after a year. The recipes ranged from simple mounds of beetroot to the more spiced mulled style wine with cardamom, cloves or ginger. This is the only wine I have ever seen that can have demerera sugar instead of processed white sugar that all other fruit or vegetable wines use. I imagine this can pair well with the slight malt taste of the beetroot and I may try this another time. There was also down right odd beer-wine hybrid with hops and marjoram that looked intriguing but was ultimately rejected – where the hell can you buy fresh marjoram?
CLICK HERE FOR BEETROOT WINE BEER!
I want a full bodied wine with some vinocity so have 2.2kg of beetroot and 100g of raisins which is more than some recipes, sugar is high in the beet so only 650g of sugar was needed to be added to get it to a Start Gravity of 1.09. The yeast was SN9 to help build body from the vegetable base as well as some tea to pump it up too. With various recipes the acid added ranged from traditional lemon juice or citric acid to less usual ideas. I had a good tip about three oranges and their zest with 12 peppercorns added for a neutral spice and depth of taste (credit to u/mriguy) but this was after I started making it. I chose to use the juice of limes as the acid source as some recipes recommend to compliment the beetroot taste rather than fight it. I might use these ideas in a new parsnip wine recipe next year.
Fermentation is nothing short of violent and quick. The yeast seems very happy to party hard and in only a few days the taste has changed from vegetal to a riper berry like flavour that is rich and full. This will surely further mellow into a surprising, slightly malty wine, probably suited to a little back sweetening just before bottling.
Beetroot has too annoying colour properties as it stains everything blood red like a scene from a Dario Argento film and the wine is photosensitive so ferment and store in the dark so it does not go murky brown.
.
BEETROOT WINE – 4.5 LITRES
2.2kg beetroot
100g raisins
650g sugar to 1.09SG
Juice of 3 limes
Strong mug of tea
4.5l water
SN9 yeast
Yeast nutrient
Pectolaise
BEFORE YOU START COVER EVERYTHING FROM THE BEETROOT JUICE AS IT STAINS EVERYTHING BLOOD RED!
1. Weigh and then wash the beetroot to remove any soil. Remove the woody tops the then chop into small chunks – skin and all and place in the 4.5litres of cold water with the raisins.
2. Bring to the boil in a covered pan and simmer for 45 minutes until the beetroot is soft but not mushy. Leave in the cooling water for 2 hours for flavour to be extracted.
3. Remove the now unneeded beetroot from the water and allow the liquid to cool, add pectolaise and leave for 12 to 24 hours in the covered pan to destroy pectin.
4. Add the sugar, juice of 3 limes and tea and stir in thoroughly then add the yeast and nutrient. Stir in after 15 minutes as it rehydrates.
5. Leave in primary and stir twice a day until fermentation starts to slow.
6. Transfer to an air locked secondary fermentation and rack after 5 weeks and then 10 weeks after that. Keep the wine in the dark as it is photosensitive and will discolour if left in the light.
Bottle and leave to mature for a year. Serve with out telling victims it is made from beetroot!
Advertisements |
By Derrick Broze
On Monday a federal judge challenged the U.S. government to justify the continued imprisonment of an American citizen who has been denied access to a lawyer for over three months.
Washington D.C. – U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has expressed skepticism and frustration over the U.S. government’s arguments for detaining an American citizen for three months. On Monday, at the latest hearing in the case of American Civil Liberties Union v. Mattis, the Justice Department argued that the court had no authority to rule on wartime detentions by U.S. military in an overseas conflict zone. Judge Chutkan seemed to lean in favor of the ACLU’s argument that the man should have access to a lawyer, which he has been denied thus far.
The ACLU is fighting to represent the American who has been accused of fighting alongside the Islamic State in Syria. The U.S military has been detaining the American citizen at a secret prison in Iraq without access to a lawyer or even releasing his name to the public. He has been labeled an “enemy combatant” by the Trump administration despite a lack of evidence to bring charges against the man.
At a November 30 hearing, the government revealed that the man asserted his constitutional rights to a lawyer. Still, the government claims they are not sure he wants to challenge his imprisonment via the courts. The issue to be decided in ACLU v. Mattis is whether or not the U.S. government can hold someone indefinitely without a court review. The U.S. government believes it can hold a suspect for a “reasonable period” before deciding whether or not to charge or release the individual. The government also claims that the ACLU cannot represent the man because they have had no contact with him and he has not made a request.
“He wants counsel, which is an assertion and a request that I don’t think I can ignore,” Judge Chutkan said Monday as reported by the Washington Times. Justice Department attorney Kathryn Wyer told the judge it was a “temporary situation” and the government is “trying to resolve this matter expeditiously.” Wyer also stated that the there was no evidence the suspect wanted representation. However, Judge Chutkan was not supportive of this claim.
“He understands enough to say ‘I want a lawyer, I’m not going to say anything until I get a lawyer, and I’m willing to wait until I get a lawyer,’” she said.
This is not the first time in three months the judge has admonished the government. On November 30 the judge also chastised the government for not being prepared and failing to provide vital information for the case.
“You’re not answering my question, and I’m not trying to be impatient but I’m growing impatient,” Chutkan said at the time. “The court feels the need for that information in order to make an adequate determination in this case. … Frankly, I’m amazed you didn’t come to this hearing with that information.”
According to the Washington Times, an anonymous senior administration official with knowledge of the case said the government is still trying to determine what to do with the man. “We don’t want to release someone who is a terrorist. We don’t want to hold someone who can’t be held,” the official told the Times. “We are trying to see if we have all the evidence collected yet.”
Download Your First Issue Free! Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free?
Download Your Free Copy of Counter Markets
The crux of the case is whether or not the judge will throw out the ACLU’s habeas corpus petition on legal grounds. Habeas corpus is a recourse in law which allows an individual to report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order a determination of whether the detention is lawful. The U.S. Constitution specifically includes the habeas procedure in the Suspension Clause (Clause 2), located in Article One, Section 9. This states that “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”
According to Lawfare blog, the ruling will likely look at the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. In that case, the courts found that at some “reasonable point” a detained American is constitutionally entitled to a habeas corpus petition and access to a neutral tribunal to challenge the legality of their detention. Lawfare writes:
With respect to ACLU v. Mattis, if the court eventually reaches the underlying merits, the government surely will rely on Hamdi and likely also argue that the fact that the the government is detaining the prisoner extraterritorially calls into question the full application of the Constitution to his case.
The court is expected to rule in the coming days on the matter.
As Activist Post previously reported, it is possible that this man is being held under section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual military budget. Many of you may remember that the NDAA 2012 contained the controversial section 1021 and 1022, provisions which allowed indefinite detention of American citizens without a right to trial if they are suspected of terrorism. |
After the success of the Arkade and the Wisdom Tree Collection carts for NES and Sega Genesis, We are back for a new project for you to enjoy!
We have 3 different game carts for you to crowd fund! Each very different from each other, so there is an item for everyone to pick!
Wisdom Tree Game Collection for GBA!
This game was actually made because a Wisdom Tree Fan asked us if we'd ever consider doing a Gameboy collection cart. Doing a GBC collection cart would have been extremely difficult as we do not have the technology to bundle GBC games in one cart. However, after several experiments we realized that we can bundle our game collection in a GBA cart! That is how the Wisdom Tree Games Collection for GBA was born!
We will produce this game in limited quantities, in both Special Numbered Edition and Regular Edition. Limited Edition will only have up to 175 carts made. 25 For Canonized backers, 50 for Early Bird Backers (26-75) and 100 for backers after the Early Bird Rewards have been taken!
The Game titles included for the GBA version are:
-Sunday Funday -Bible Adventures
-Exodus
-Joshua
-Bible Buffet
-Spiritual Warfare
-King of Kings
All physical rewards will be Region Free (Functional in PAL or NTSC consoles) and will come in a cardboard box packaging including a color instruction manual.
Noah's Ark for NES!
Noah's Ark is a NES game Run and Gun game developed by Source and published by Konami in European regions only. The game never saw the light in America or Japan, and let me tell you, this game is GREAT!
Noah has been commanded by God to put two of each animal aboard his ark to save them from the flood. However unhappy people from around the world have captured different animal species, preventing Noah from doing his job. Noah will need to visit these different locations and free the animals from the people holding them captive.
Noah's Ark is a side scrolling action game. The player, as Noah, must choose which level from several world locations to play. Once in a level, Noah can move left right, duck, jump and fire pellets directly in front of him. These pellets can be used to defeat enemy creatures and uncover hidden items. At the end of each level, Noah will encounter a stronger enemy creature who must be defeated. Noah's ultimate goal is to rescue the designated captive animals listed for each level.
We acquired the rights of this game from Source (among other things ;)) and are prepared to publish this game for the regions that did not get to enjoy this game back in the day. Like the GBA collection, we are producing a set of up to 175 Special Numbered Edition version of this game.
All physical rewards will be Region Free (Functional in PAL or NTSC consoles) and will come in a cardboard box packaging including a color instruction manual.
Super 3D Noah's Ark for Sega Genesis
After we came short to the stretch goal of the Arkade Kickstarter Campaign to fund the Port of S3DNA for Genesis; we slowly started working on finishing the proof of concept that we had prepared for the campaign.
Well, that proof of concept is a 95% done Noah's Ark 3D for Sega Genesis! We are just need to polish the game and start a production run!
This game will be also have a Special Numbered Edition made in limited quantities (up to 175).
All physical rewards will be Region Free (Functional in PAL or NTSC consoles) and will come in a plastic box packaging including a color instruction manual.
Stretch Goals!
In addition to Noah's Ark for NES; We acquired Scarabeus, an unreleased Puzzle game for NES. The game ha all 15,000 possible rooms, however Music and color graphics are not implemented. If we reach 37,500 goal, we will finish up the game and offer it at a special price for backers as an add-on reward!
Super 3D Noah's Ark for Dreamcast was another stretch goal from our past Kickstarter that was not reached. Well we will not give up and will offer it this time as well! This game will have to be done from ground up, so if we reach $65,000 in pledges we'll use part of the funds to develop it. Backers will be able to get it at a special price as an add-on reward! |
Donald Trump speaks last night at a rally in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump is doing to the national GOP brand in 2016 what Proposition 187 did to California Republicans in 1994. He continues to inflict lasting, perhaps irreparable, damage to the party’s image among Hispanics. It is not hyperbole to say that Trumpism could relegate the party of Abraham Lincoln to long-term minority status.
Just how anathema is Trump to Latinos? The head of Hispanic media relations for the Republican National Committee, Ruth Guerra, has resigned her post after two years and will take a less prestigious job at a super PAC, which focuses on down-ballot races and thus will not require her to defend him.
Sources said Guerra, who grew up in Texas and is of Mexican descent, grew increasingly exhausted with having to defend The Donald on TV and in public appearances, especially as he continues to attack Hispanics. "I'm so proud of her,” a Hispanic Republican told our Ed O’Keefe last night. "I don't know how she held on for this long."
“It is relatively rare for party staff members to leave the national committee in the midst of a presidential campaign unless they are going to work directly for the nominee,” noted the New York Times, which first reported the story. “Ms. Guerra declined to discuss her feelings about Mr. Trump.”
-- It’s not just Latinos: The RNC’s director of African American outreach and communications director for black media both left the committee in March.
Trump confers with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
-- Notably, the best replacement that Reince Priebus’s leadership team could find for Guerra is someone who has repeatedly trashed the party’s presumptive nominee – which will undercut her effectiveness in the job. Helen Aguirre Ferre, a former Spanish-language conservative radio talk show host whose father-in-law was the first Hispanic mayor of Miami, helped Jeb Bush during the primaries. O’Keefe rounds up some of her anti-Trump comments:
In mid-May, she tweeted out a poll suggesting Miami-area Cuban Americans would leave the GOP if Trump won the nomination. She’s since deleted the post.
On May 8, she appeared on Univision's “Al Punto” with Jorge Ramos and agreed that a segment of the Republican Party will not unite around Trump. She retweeted the show's tweet about her comments -- but recently deleted that too.
She’s also on tape ripping into Trump for his offensive comments about Columba Bush, who was born in Mexico.
"You can have all the Helens you want, but if the candidate continues with his rhetoric and proposals, you're not going to win Latinos," Alfonso Aguilar, a Hispanic conservative activist who knows Guerra and Aguirre Ferre, told O’Keefe last night. "There's a problem in terms of tone and policy. It's going to be tough for Helen -- I don't know how you do it."
-- The legacy of Proposition 187 should haunt Republicans. The demographics of California were already moving against Republicans 22 years ago when Gov. Pete Wilson, in order to get reelected, embraced a ballot proposition that denied public services, including education and health care, to undocumented immigrants. The measure passed overwhelmingly in 1994, and Wilson won his second term, but the next generation of Republicans paid a heavy price. Latinos broke solidly to the Democratic Party, and the state GOP has battled irrelevance ever since.
California tends to be a harbinger of what’s to come for the rest of the country, and that is especially true if national Republican leaders continue to fall in line behind their xenophobic nominee and stay silent about his racially-tinged rhetoric.
The country’s collective complexion becomes a little browner every day. “The Pew Hispanic Center estimates a record 27.3 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in 2016 and would make up about 12% of the electorate, up from 10% in 2012,” the Wall Street Journal notes.
-- Trump, at a rally last night in Sacramento, promised to compete for California in the general election. “Everybody said that for a Republican to run in California is not going to happen. But I'm sort of different," Trump told the crowd, which he claimed numbered 11,000.
He is delusional. A fresh NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows Hillary Clinton beating him there by 24 points, 55 percent to 31 percent, in a head-to-head match-up. His toxicity among Latinos is a major factor.
-- Many Latino Republicans in California get sick to their stomach when they watch Trump speak. The Los Angeles Times collected some brutal quotes from conservative figures in the community for a piece earlier this week. “Trump’s first ad featured footage of immigrants scurrying over a border and ominous music. The imagery and the tone were startlingly similar to an infamous pro-Proposition 187 ad in California that had a tagline, ‘They keep coming,’ that is seared into the memory of many Latinos in the state. Ruben Barrales, a former San Mateo County supervisor and member of George W. Bush’s administration, experienced déjà vu when he saw Trump’s ad. ‘I’m hearing the music and that’s taking me back to 1994,’ he said, adding that the decades-old ad offered a ‘cautionary tale.’”
“The unfortunate part is that right as the specter of Prop. 187 was disappearing in the rear-view mirror, we are now seeing the rise of a new generational problem for the Republican Party,” Mike Madrid, a Republican expert on Latino voting trends, told Seema Mehta.
Watch the notorious commercial:
-- There are ramifications for down-ballot candidates: John McCain suddenly has a very tough race in Arizona because Trump has galvanized Hispanics at the presidential level. Democrats are also targeting several GOP congressman who represent districts with a large but typically dormant Latino electorates, in hopes of a Trump-generated awakening. (Among them: CA-10, CA-21, CA-25, FL-26, NV-4, TX-23.)
-- Trump keeps adding insults to injuries: It has not even been a year since he formally kicked off his candidacy with a promise to build a huge border wall and make Mexico pay for it. In his announcement speech, he said our southern neighbor is sending its rapists and criminals to the United States.
Just last week, he attacked the most prominent Latina in his adopted party, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, during a rally in her home state.
In the days since, he’s been going after U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is handling two class-action lawsuits against Trump University. “He’s a hater,” Trump said at a campaign rally in San Diego, adding that he believed the Indiana-born judge was “Mexican.” Legal experts are alarmed that “the vendetta signals a remarkable disregard for judicial independence,” Jose A. DelReal and Katie Zezima report.
And who could forget the infamous Cinco de Mayo tweet?
-- In the aftermath of 2012, who would have thought the next Republican nominee would get less than Mitt Romney’s 27 percent among Hispanic voters? The post-election autopsy, ordered up by the RNC, called not just for a changed tone but also comprehensive immigration reform. Neither happened.
Florida-based GOP consultant Alex Patton told the Boston Globe that it will be hard for Trump to carry his state. “The entire autopsy on what we’re going to do to reach out to minority and women voters got ‘Trumped,’ ” Patton told Alice Yin. “I hope the GOP can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”
WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
-- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will today roll out a set of new rules designed to rein in payday lenders, taking aim at a profit-making model that involves staggeringly high fees and often leaves serial borrowers with spiraling debt. From Chico Harlan: The proposal marks the first attempt by the federal government to regulate shorter-term loans, which include auto title and installment lending. “At their core, the CFPB’s new rules would put a stop to lengthy, repeated borrowing — what the agency has often called the ‘long-term debt trap’ — by requiring a cooling off period after three consecutive payday loans.” The rules still face months of review, but they could dramatically transform and shrink an industry that preys on the poor.
Enrique Marquez Jr., seen last April, bought the assault rifles used in the San Bernardino rampage. The FBI now says he had ties to a group of jihadists who were arrested in 2012. (Courtesy of KTLA)
-- Federal authorities say they have discovered connections between a friend of the San Bernardino attacker, who has been charged with conspiring to carry out other attacks with him, and a group of men arrested years earlier in California as part of a different plot. "This comes after the FBI had said in the weeks after the Dec. 2 rampage that they found no evidence of any ties between the husband-and-wife attackers and a group of men arrested in 2012 and charged with plotting to travel to Afghanistan to kill American soldiers," Mark Berman and Adam Goldman report.
-- The State Department acknowledged last night that someone in its public affairs bureau made a “deliberate” request that several minutes of tape be cut from the video of a 2013 press briefing in which a reporter asked if the administration had lied about secret talks with Iran. "The embarrassing admission by State Department spokesman John Kirby came three weeks after another spokesperson insisted that a 'glitch' had caused the gap, discovered only last month by the reporter whose questioning had mysteriously disappeared," Carol Morello reports. (And Erik Wemple runs through the administration's evolving answers.)
State claims the technician who was ordered to tamper with the video does not recall who gave the order, and senior officials are in damage control mode:
I had no knowledge of nor would I have approved of any form of editing or cutting my briefing transcript on any subject while @StateDept — Jen Psaki (@Psaki44) June 1, 2016
Republicans are seizing on the government's admission:
The #IranDeal was negotiated, promoted, concealed & EDITED by the Obama Administration to be something that it will never be...Security — Mark Meadows (@RepMarkMeadows) June 2, 2016
-- The former mayor of Anchorage, Dan Sullivan, unexpectedly filed paperwork (just 10 minutes before the deadline) to challenge Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski in this summer’s Republican primary. This will be confusing for voters because the state's junior senator is also named Dan Sullivan. (Alaska Dispatch News)
Rick Snyder (Pete Marovich/Bloomberg)
-- Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) announced he will not endorse Trump. “I’ve stayed out of the whole thing, and I’m going to continue to,” Snyder told The Detroit News Editorial Board. “I’ve got important things I want to work on in Michigan.”
Police swarmed UCLA's campus after the report of an active shooter. (Getty/Robyn Beck)
GET SMART FAST:
A UCLA engineering professor was murdered on campus and his killer committed suicide. (Los Angeles Times) The U.S. economy expanded at a “modest pace” since mid-April, according to the Fed’s latest “beige book,” an economic survey published eight times a year. (Bloomberg) The Pentagon is backing Kurdish forces in an offensive aimed at recapturing an important ISIS stronghold, brushing aside vocal Turkish opposition. (Liz Sly and Karen DeYoung) The family of the 3-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla exhibit said their son is “doing well" and asked the public to donate money to the Cincinnati zoo. (Lindsey Bever and Sarah Larimer) The Justice Department will not charge two Minneapolis police officers who fatally shot 24-year-old Jamar Clark, citing “insufficient evidence." The November incident triggered mass protests in Minnesota. An officer maintains that Clark tried to grab his gun. (Mark Berman) Environmental groups, citing the constitutional right to freely assembly, refused to comply with a sweeping request for information from House Republicans. Science committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) demanded all communications between eight leading environmental groups — along with the attorneys general from about 20 states — related to the effort to force Exxon Mobil to disclose internal documents about climate change. (Steven Mufson) A rise in bisexuality is driving a sharp increase in same-sex experiences in the United States. A big study, conducted nationally since 1972, finds that the percentage of men reporting male sexual partners nearly doubled from 1990 to 2014, and the percentage of women reporting same-sex experiences more than doubled during the same period. ( Rachel Feltman) Former Guantanamo Bay prosecutor Morris Davis settled a seven-year-old free speech case against the Library of Congress, collecting $100,000 after he was fired for writing critical op-eds against Obama’s use of the military commission system. (Lisa Rein) A Queens man spent five months at Rikers Island without knowing his bail was just $2. The 41-year-old Algerian native blamed his previous attorney for failing to inform him. (New York Daily News) The world’s longest and deepest rail tunnel opened in Switzerland, clearing the way for high-speed rail under the Swiss Alps. Seven decades after it was first proposed and 17 years after construction began, the 35-mile route was hailed as a European “milestone." (New York Times) Ken Starr resigned as chancellor of Baylor University. “We need to put this horrible experience behind us,” Bill Clinton's onetime tormentor said on ESPN. “Last week, the university’s Board of Regents fired Baylor’s football coach, Art Briles, and stripped Starr of the title of president in response to a law firm’s investigative report that found the school treated sexual assault accusations against football players with alarming indifference," Nick Anderson reports. A new species of praying mantis was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Cleveland scientists said the justice’s love of the “jabot,” or neck ruffle accessory, resembles the insect’s unique neck plates. (Rachel Feltman) An Alabama teacher was suspended after requiring eighth-grade students to take a math quiz that included questions about “guns, gangs, drugs and ‘ho’s.’” (Emma Brown) A German publisher began selling reprinted versions of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” testing the country’s law against the distribution of Nazi propaganda. (New York Times) A 19-year-old Indianapolis teenager faces multiple counts of murder after carrying out a randomized, four-day shooting spree inspired by “The Purge.” In the 2013 horror film, the U.S. government designates a 12-hour period once a year where all crimes, including rape and murder, are legal. (USA Today) A Colorado surgical technician who was caught switching syringes at a medical center has tested positive for HIV, prompting thousands of patients to get tested for possible exposure to the virus. (USA Today) A North Carolina woman who bought a $30 deep-freezer from her neighbor got more than she bargained for after discovering a corpse inside. The buyer believes the body belongs to her neighbor’s mother, who she has not seen in several months. She speculates that the woman did not report her mom’s death so she could continue to collect her benefit checks. (Yanan Wang)
President Obama speaks yesterday at Concord Community High School in Elkhart, Ind. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
-- President Obama has shifted into campaign mode. In Elkhart, Ind., a city that was saved by bailouts and the stimulus, he launched a full-frontal assault on Trumpism. From Greg Jaffe: “His sleeves rolled up and his voice rising, Obama cast his speech as an ‘intervention’ on behalf of working Americans who were being misled by Republican rhetoric and ideas. ‘Don’t think this agenda is going to help you,’ he said. ‘It is not designed to help you.’ He slammed the Republican message as ‘anti-government, anti-immigrant, anti-trade and, let’s face it, anti-change.’ ‘The primary story that Republicans have been telling about the economy is not supported by the facts, but they say it anyway,’ Obama said." You can totally imagine language in this mold from POTUS during the convention in Philadelphia.
In an interview after ths speech, PBS's Gwen Ifill asked Obama why he carefully avoids saying Trump's name, even as he's clearly attacking him: "He seems to do a good job mentioning his own name," the president replied. "So, I figured I'll let him do his advertising for him."
-- The Speaker will not be rising to Trump's defense:
Paul Ryan to grace the cover of People, but he gave one condition to the interview: No Trump questions, according to People press release — Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 1, 2016
THE DEMOCRATIC DENOUEMENT:
Bernie Sanders speaks at a community center in Palo Alto, California, yesterday. (Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
-- A photo finish in California: Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders by 2 points (49-47) among likely Democratic voters, according to an NBC/WSJ/Marist poll, which is within the survey’s margin of error. Sanders leads among a wider sample of registered Democratic voters (48-47). And Kamala Harris leads in the primary to replace retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer, where the top two candidates advance to the November general election, regardless of party. The state attorney general tops the field, pulling 37 percent among likely primary voters, with Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez at 19 percent and Republican Tom Del Beccaro at 8 percent.
— The Clinton campaign announced that it raised $27 million in May and has $42 million cash on hand. No word yet on Bernie's numbers.
Hillary, with singer-songwriter Jon Bon Jovi, in Newark yesterday. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
— The Narrative: Leading liberals are coalescing behind Clinton to get the nominating contest over with. Elizabeth Warren's staff is now in "regular contact" with Hillary's. From Abby Phillip and Karen Tumulty: Perhaps the biggest sign that an effort is underway to heal party fissures comes from the Massachusetts senator. She still has not endorsed Clinton, but she has stepped up attacks on Trump, and her advisers have begun communicating regularly with the Clinton campaign.
-- Jerry Brown's endorsement is a very important data point in this story line: The California governor competed against Bill Clinton in the 1992 Democratic primary. At one point, Brown called WJC the “prince of sleaze.” In a 1992 debate, Brown questioned Hillary's ethics. He accused the then-Arkansas governor of “funneling money to his wife’s law firm for state business.” Bill replied that Brown was “not worth being on the same platform as my wife.”
Both guys tried to make nice yesterday:
Jerry: “This is no time for Democrats to keep fighting each other. The general election has already begun.”
Bill: "The reports of our long conflict have been greatly exaggerated. We were governors together and we’ve known each other for 40 years."
-- Even with Sanders trapped by both math and the calendar, unification efforts require delicate care. The Vermont senator and his allies are finding ever-more creative ways to justify why he should stay in the race beyond Tuesday's California primary: At a Santa Cruz rally, Sanders warned that the media is expected to declare “the primary process is over” next week. “That is factually incorrect. It’s just not factually correct,” he said, predicting that he would win California and some other states Tuesday and head into the convention with enough momentum to flip the allegiances of superdelegates who have announced support for Clinton. His wife Jane Sanders made a similarly confounding prediction on MSNBC.
The Post's Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, calls out Sanders this morning for continually misleading his supporters: "In complaining about superdelegates, Sanders is trying to have his cake and eat it, too. If not for the 'absurd' superdelegate system, Sanders’s presidential hopes would firmly die on June 7."
-- Sanders attacked Clinton for favoring international fracking as Secretary of State. (David Weigel)
-- Bernie also revealed that the DNC vetoed his nomination of a nurse’s union president to represent him on the platform committee. He said the committee instructed him “not to pick anyone else” from the labor movement. DNC spokeswoman Dana Vickers Shelley confirmed Sanders’ statement, adding that: "Because union leadership was represented on the full platform committee, a decision was made no union leadership would be represented on the platform drafting committee.” (David Weigel)
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro gives a speech about Bernie in Caracas, yesterday. (EPA/Cristian Hernández)
-- Venezuela's embattled president, Nicolas Maduro, announced his support for Sanders and said he would win if the U.S. had "free" elections. From Reuters: “Maduro, a socialist who sees himself as the political heir to his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, has long railed against the United States, blaming it for Venezuela's economic crisis and accusing Washington of attempting to topple him. ‘Bernie Sanders, our revolutionary friend, ought to win in the United States,’ Maduro said during an hours-long televised broadcast. ‘If the elections were free ... Bernie Sanders would be president of the United States,’ he said, criticizing the U.S. Electoral College system as unrepresentative of popular sentiment.”
-- Puerto Rico Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla endorsed Clinton, backing her “experience and knowledge” of the island. The primary there is this Saturday. (Bloomberg)
-- Lawyers for former Clinton IT adviser Bryan Pagliano said he will plead the Fifth during an upcoming deposition and decline to answer questions about the former Secretary of State's use of a private email server. This is the public records lawsuit brought by conservative Judicial Watch regarding the employment arrangement of Huma Abedin. "Pagliano last summer similarly declined to appear before a House panel," Spencer S. Hsu notes.
-- A federal judge ordered the release of another batch of Clinton-related emails. It comes in response to FOIA requests from the RNC, focused on the activities of the Clinton Foundation. (Politico)
THE DAILY DONALD:
Trump addresses supporters at a rally in Sacramento, Calif. (AP/Jae C. Hong)
-- Statistic of the day: USA Today tabulates that Trump and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades, ranging from casino patrons to million-dollar real estate suits to personal defamation lawsuits. A big spread in the print edition calls Trump "The Litigator in Chief.” From Nick Penzenstadler and Susan Page:
“ At times, he and his companies refuse to pay even relatively small bills. In a 2011 deposition tied to a dispute over his deal with Van Heusen menswear, he said he abruptly decided not to sign a check to a firm that helped broker the deal, after 11 consecutive quarterly payments, because ‘I don't feel that these people did very much, if anything, with respect to this deal.’”
In a 2011 deposition tied to a dispute over his deal with Van Heusen menswear, he said he abruptly decided not to sign a check to a firm that helped broker the deal, after 11 consecutive quarterly payments, because ‘I don't feel that these people did very much, if anything, with respect to this deal.’” Trump always distances himself from deals that sour: “In one lawsuit — filed against him by condo owners who wanted their money back for a Fort Lauderdale condo that was never built — he testified in a sworn deposition: ‘Well, the word ‘developing,’ it doesn't mean that we're the developers.’”
“In one lawsuit — filed against him by condo owners who wanted their money back for a Fort Lauderdale condo that was never built — he testified in a sworn deposition: ‘Well, the word ‘developing,’ it doesn't mean that we're the developers.’” “Despite his boasts on the campaign trail that he ‘never’ settles lawsuits, for fear of encouraging more, he and his businesses have settled with plaintiffs in at least 100 cases.”
Trump's lawyers argue that the number and tenor of the suits is pretty standard for the real-estate industry. But USA Today analyzed the legal skirmishes for five top real-estate business executives and found Trump has been involved in more legal skirmishes than all five of the others – combined.
-- Hillary unveiled a new line of attack in New Jersey, seizing on the lawsuits over Trump University to argue that The Donald is attempting to defraud the country. "His own employees testified that Trump U. -- you can't make this up -- that Trump U. was a fraudulent scheme where Donald Trump enriched himself at the expense of hard-working people," Clinton said. "This is just more evidence that Donald Trump himself is a fraud. … He is trying to scam America the way he scammed all those people at Trump U." (Abby Phillip)
Sean Hannity (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
-- Sean Hannity defended Trump’s handling of donations to veterans groups on his TV show. What the Fox News host did not say was that he has had a years-long relationship with one of the groups to which Trump donated $75,000. In a statement, a Fox News spokeswoman said Hannity has not worked with Freedom Alliance in “a number of years, including the current election cycle.” But the president of Freedom Alliance told The Post's Dave Fahrenthold that Hannity still remains “informally connected to the group.” "Sean’s a great friend. He’s done a lot to help us," said Tom Kilgannon. "He continues to talk to people about us, and help us, and send support our way." (Read Dana Milbank's take on "Trump's pattern of stiffing charities.")
-- The PGA Tour yanked its annual golf tournament from Trump’s Doral course in South Florida after five decades, relocating the event to Mexico City. Officials have condemned his criticisms of Mexicans and Muslims. (Miami Herald)
Trump swung back hard last night, sounding an ominous warning about how he would respond to such decisions as president: "Can you believe it?" he said of the PGA move. "Not good.” He continued: "But that's okay. Folks, it's all going to be settled. You vote for Donald Trump as president, if I become your president, this stuff is all going to stop." (Sean Sullivan)
-- Mark Cuban questioned whether Trump is actually a billionaire, saying his FEC filings show he is “horrible” at many aspects of business. He’s good at real estate branding, said the Dallas Mavericks owner, but “whether or not that’s made him a billionaire, I don’t know ... He’s not transparent enough for us to actually know.” (Buzzfeed)
-- Trump will visit Britain on June 24, one day after the national referendum on whether to leave the European Union. From Griff Witte and Karla Adam: “Parliament has debated banning him. The prime minister has called his comments ‘stupid’ and promised that the country would unite against him. But despite the unmitigated hostility toward him in Britain, Trump will visit the country this month in his first trip abroad since becoming the presumptive nominee.” Trump is scheduled to attend the official opening of one of his Scottish golf courses that day.
Fresh evidence that Trump is not ready for primetime:
-- He is also considering a trip to Israel to win over politically-conservative Jews: The potential tour is being organized by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and associates of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. It would likely occur before the convention in July and could be paired with that UK visit. (New York Magazine)
Nancy and David French, with two of their kids, react to Mitt Romney losing on Election Night in 2012. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
-- Bill Kristol’s David French trial balloon continues to deflate. “David French has, charitably, 0.1% name ID. He will have to raise at least $250 million, dedicating almost all of that to ballot access fights and potential legal challenges to extend deadlines under the John Anderson precedent from 1980, which is unlikely. Then he’d have to raise a billion dollars more,” conservative Never Trump activist Erick Erickson writes on The Resurgent. “If David French cannot get ballot access deadlines in Texas and elsewhere reopened and/or extended, he could only appear in a handful of states and his strategy would have to be to keep both Clinton and Trump from 270 electoral college votes, thereby sending the election to the House of Representatives. It is a nearly insurmountable improbability. And still I would vote for David French or even write him in.”
This is what French himself had to say:
All the normal political rules apply. The conventional wisdom has been right. An underdog can't win. Right? — David French (@DavidAFrench) June 1, 2016
And the latest from Kristol:
Here in Israel, reading about possible @DavidAFrench candidacy, thought of Herzl: Im tirtzu, ein zo agada. If you will it, it is no dream. — Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) June 1, 2016
WAPO HIGHLIGHTS:
Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman (Photo by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)
-- Powerful men behaving very badly, cont. --> A top Defense Department official was arrested for repeatedly stealing the license plates of his neighbor's nanny. From John Woodrow Cox: “The mystery that for weeks unnerved this quiet Capitol Hill neighborhood began with a warning placed on a nanny’s windshield. ‘I know you are misusing this visitor pass to park here daily,’ the April 4 note read. ‘If you do not stop I will report it, have your car towed and the resident who provided this to you will have his privileges taken away.’ Baffled, the young couple the nanny worked for sent out a message on the community email group asking for the note’s anonymous author to contact them. No one came forward. Instead, two days later, the nanny’s license plates were stolen from her SUV, according to charging documents. Two days after that, another plate was stolen. Then, in late April, the thief struck once more — but this time the couple caught him on a video camera they had mounted inside their home’s front window.”
The culprit? Bryan Whitman, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. “After handing over the plates to police and being charged with three counts of misdemeanor theft, Whitman, 58, agreed to a deal that would lead to the case’s dismissal if he pays $1,000 in restitution, performs 32 hours of community service, remains out of trouble for the next 10 months, and stays away both from the nanny and the woman for whom she works.”
What makes this story even more bizarre: This guy lives in a rowhouse on First Street SE on Capitol Hill. Parking isn’t actually a significant problem there! Also, most babysitters use the visitor passes, and it’s perfectly legal.
Unanswered questions: “Whitman’s colleagues in the public affairs office declined to say when the department became aware of the charges, if they were investigating his alleged misconduct, whether the case will impact his career or security clearance and how much he gets paid.”
-- It's been 30 years since C-Span cameras have been allowed on the Senate floor. Paul Kane reflects on the milestone: "On Thursday, C-Span II is celebrating its 30th anniversary of gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate floor, something that is taken for granted in today’s culture of 24-hour political news. But back then, allowing TV cameras onto the Senate floor was an encroachment on the august chamber’s tradition. C-Span began airing House floor proceedings in 1979, but the Senate held out. Critics worried, in some cases legitimately, that senators would preach to the cameras and not actually debate, boosting their own image at the expense of legislative give-and-take ... Lawmakers think the benefits of shining sunlight on their proceedings outweigh the negatives." See a highlights reel here.
Rachel Levine, the physician general for the state of Pennsylvania, is transgender. (Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
-- “Meet Rachel Levine, one of the very few transgender public officials in America,” by Katie Zezima: “The staid office where she works as the Keystone State’s top doctor is lined with family photos, including one perched high on a shelf that was taken on a vacation long ago, when her children were young and she was a broad-shouldered man named Richard. Levine is the highest-ranking transgender official in Pennsylvania and one of only a handful serving in elected or appointed offices nationwide. 'It’s really bad. There’s hardly anybody,' said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality … At least one public figure has criticized Levine in the wake of a law passed in North Carolina mandating that people use the public bathroom that corresponds with the gender on their birth certificates. ‘Question: You’re in a public restroom and this person walks in. What do you do?’ former congressman Allen West wrote last month on Twitter, attaching a photo of Levine and link to a blog post on his website about her.”
SOCIAL MEDIA SPEED READ:
— ZIGNAL VISUAL: For all of the trials and tribulations of the Democratic primary, one thing remains constant: Sanders is the darling of social media, while Clinton remains the bigger story on television news. In fact, our analytics partners at Zignal Labs show the different mediums were a perfect mirror in terms of the share of mentions each got last month:
After the UCLA shooting, the NRA tweeted this:
#California Act Now! Anti-Gun Bills being rushed through the Assembly! Make your voice heard here: https://t.co/AHLbQKSkFm #2A — NRA (@NRA) June 1, 2016
California lawmakers reacted to the violence:
I'm heartbroken by news of the shooting at #UCLA. I hope all on campus can find safety. I'll continue to follow as LAPD does their job. — Judy Chu (@RepJudyChu) June 1, 2016
#UCLA students, faculty, and workers-- please stay safe & vigilant. The entire Bruin Community is in my thoughts and prayers. @UCLA — Loretta Sanchez (@LorettaSanchez) June 1, 2016
So 2016 -- Clinton retweeted this anti-Trump message from Mitt Romney:
what a bizarre election this is pic.twitter.com/VjtRCQp0Ve — ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) June 1, 2016
Mixed messages from Team Sanders on Wednesday:
Jane Sanders w/ diff tone on @mitchellreports just now. Says HRC should "pick a progressive" for VP, & they will "respect" superdelegates — Abby D. Phillip (@abbydphillip) June 1, 2016
Sanders campaign mgr Jeff Weaver digs in, tells @jaketapper Dems should wait until the convention to see how super delegates actually vote. — Edward Mejia Davis (@TeddyDavisCNN) June 1, 2016
From the Texas justice on Trump's Supreme Court shortlist:
Liberty is imperiled more "by gradual & silent encroachments ...than by violent & sudden usurpations"
—James Madison pic.twitter.com/HESY4u37BL — Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) June 2, 2016
Airbnb's CEO tweeted this after one of their host's canceled a black woman's room request and sent her racist messages:
The incident in NC was disturbing and unacceptable. Racism and discrimination have no place on Airbnb. We have permanently banned this host. — Brian Chesky (@bchesky) June 1, 2016
GOOD READS FROM ELSEWHERE:
-- New York Times, “Trump’s Secret Weapon: Letters of Love, Flattery and Revenge,’ by Michael Barbaro: “In one letter, Donald J. Trump ranted about the crisis of unsightly hot dog vendors on his beloved Fifth Avenue. ‘Having ketchup and mustard splattered all over the sidewalk,’ he wrote, ‘is disgraceful.’ In a different missive, he offered a rare admission of weakness, declaring, ‘I am nothing more than a frustrated writer of little talent.’” Trump is a master of modern media and self-promotion. But perhaps his most powerful and memorable form of communication is the old-fashioned ritual of a personal letter, signed by hand and sent from the 26th floor of Trump Tower. “Churned out prolifically from a computer-free desk, they are letters of gratitude, hate, flattery and revenge, dispatched to teenage admirers and big-city mayors, professional athletes and magazine editors. The tone can range from florid to juvenile, pleading to poisonous … Tightly clutched and prominently displayed even by those who despise him, the epistles have become keepsakes and mementos for hundreds of people across the country … [offering] a unusual archive of his emotional ups and downs.
-- The Daily Beast, “Trump Taj Mahal Slashed Security, Then the Murders Started,” by Noah Shachtman: “There was only one guard to patrol the Trump Taj Mahal’s 11-story garage when Martin Caballero was forced into the trunk of his own car at gunpoint. Surveillance cameras captured the whole incident, but no one saw the crime as it occurred. The Trump Taj Mahal had pared its security budget further and further back in the years leading up to Martin’s abduction. In 2006 … the casino spent $9,574,419 on security. By 2010—the year Caballero was forced into the trunk of his own car—the budget was $6,646,017. From mid-2008 to mid-2011, there were four murders in incidents arising at the Trump Taj Mahal. It’s a staggering number, considering that Atlantic City during this period averaged 11 murders per year. One in eight slayings in the city were connected to the Taj—in a time when there was not a single homicide at any other area casino … It’s an answer that raises another question: When you give your name to something, how responsible are you for what happens there?”
-- AP, “Emails: Clinton staff reviewed remarks, questions for events,” from Jack Gillum, Chad Day and Stephen Braun: For Clinton, the presidential campaign has been about building an approachable image. She’s often eschewed big arenas in favor of town halls, peppered her ads with personal stories and planned less-scripted gatherings with voters. “But emails obtained by the AP reveal a careful, behind-the-scenes effort to review introductory remarks for college presidents and students presenting the Democratic front-runner as a speaker, as well as suggesting questions that happened to be aligned with her campaign platform … “The newly revealed exchanges … show the workings of a Clinton campaign that touts off-the-cuff moments, like the story of a little girl who asked Clinton: ‘If you’re elected the girl president, will you be paid the same as the boy president?’ That line is a stump speech favorite … While it’s not unusual for campaigns to plan detailed appearances, the exchanges preview the kind of image-control apparatus that could be deployed in a Clinton White House, including attempts to steer conversations with her audiences.”
-- Richard Painter, who served as George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer, flew to Des Moines yesterday to criticize Chuck Grassley for not allowing a confirmation hearing for Merrick Garland. “I’ve been involved with the Republican Party for many years and this is a disaster politically,” said Painter, who is now a professor at the University of Minnesota. From Radio Iowa: “Painter helped Bush get Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito confirmed to the nation’s highest court. … Painter said it was ‘unacceptable’ for [the chairman of the Judiciary Committee] to accuse Roberts ‘of being partisan.’ ‘To me, this is highly-offensive and extremist rhetoric and unworthy of a senator,’ he said. … Beth Levine, a spokesperson for Grassley, called the sponsor of the event a ‘left wing’ group and used the word ‘discredited’ to describe Professor Painter.”
HOT ON THE LEFT: “Judge Strikes Down State’s Restrictions On Access To Life-Saving Drug,” from ThinkProgress: “For the first time, a federal court has struck down a state Medicaid provider’s restrictions on covering hepatitis C medication — restrictions that Congress has referred to as one of the most ‘potent public health issues in the United States.’ On Friday a federal judge ordered Washington state’s Medicaid program to cover hepatitis C treatment coverage for all patients with severe liver disease, not just patients with the most extensive liver damage. The drug rationing system violates federally approved standards of care for Medicaid, the Court found." HOT ON THE RIGHT: “New Study Finds Most Financially Stable States Are Red,” from the Daily Caller: “A study published Wednesday by the Mercatus Center ranked states in order of fiscal responsibility, and the top 10 all had Republican leadership. The study ranked states according to five key fiscal characteristics: cash solvency, budget solvency, long-run solvency, service-level solvency and trust fund solvency. States that only did well in one or two categories but poorly in others were ranked in the middle of the pack, while states that did poorly across the board remained at the bottom of the list. Top dogs include Republican-leaning states Alaska, Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota.”
DAYBOOK:
On the campaign trail: Here's the rundown:
Clinton: San Diego, El Centro, Perris, Calif.
Sanders: Modesto, Chico, Calif.
Trump: San Jose, Calif.
At the White House: President Obama addresses graduates at the United States Air Force Academy commencement ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colo., then returns to Washington, D.C.
On Capitol Hill: The Senate and House are in recess.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I hate to contradict Bon Jovi but, dear God, Hillary Clinton, you give love a good name." -- Cory Booker warming up the crowd for HRC at a New Jersey event that Bon Jovi also spoke at.
NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
-- Another seasonably warm day with some potential thunderstorms on the horizon, according to the Capitol Weather Gang: “Some patches of fog are likely in the early morning thanks to our increased humidity. The sun is strong enough to burn it off quickly and most of us see highs reach the lower 80s with mid-80s in warmer spots if the clouds don’t bubble up too quickly in the afternoon.An isolated thunderstorm can’t be ruled out but would be weak and brief.”
-- The Nationals beat the Phillies 7-2.
-- The Virginia Supreme Court next month will hear a legal challenge to Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s order restoring the voting rights of more than 200,000 felons, agreeing to an accelerated timeline posed by Republican lawmakers in the state. (Jenna Portnoy)
-- The D.C. council advanced a measure to increase the city's minimum wage to $15 an hour, keeping intact the bulk of a plan posed by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser. (Aaron C. Davis)
-- A middle school teaching assistant in Arlington was arrested for allegedly smoking marijuana with a 13-year-old student and proceeding to sell him the drug. (Moriah Balingit)
-- A Springfield man has been charged with murder after repeatedly ramming his Hummer into a Virginia diner last month, killing a pedestrian and subsequently lighting himself on fire. Police say they still do not know what motivated him. (Justin Jouvenal)
-- Lawyers representing a University of Virginia student at the center of a debunked gang-rape allegation have acknowledged in court papers that the student has ties to a fake persona she once named as the ringleader of the alleged attack. "Filed in federal court Tuesday, the papers are part of an ongoing lawsuit a U-Va. associate dean filed against Rolling Stone magazine, arguing that the magazine published a defamatory account of how the Charlottesville school handles sexual assaults. The legal team representing 'Jackie' acknowledged that they had recently accessed a Yahoo e-mail account for 'Haven Monahan,' who the U-Va. student alleged had taken her on a date before leading her into a brutal gang rape in September 2012." (T. Rees Shapiro)
-- Washington Redskins officials said they’re working with the NFL and NFL Players Association to notify thousands of players whose medical records may have been breached after a backpack containing electronic and paper files was stolen from the car of a team athletic trainer in Indianapolis. (Liz Clarke)
-- The Holocaust Museum unveiled an original transcript of Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz,” which Levi wrote shortly after his return from the concentration camp. “Survival” is one of the most revered Holocaust books, along with “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Elie Wiesel’s “Night.” (Michael E. Ruane)
VIDEOS OF THE DAY:
Cecilia Munoz tweeted this celebrity-studded video celebrating Immigrant Heritage Month (click to watch):
As a proud child & wife of immigrants, I celebrate our history every day. #IAmAnImmigrant & so are these celebs! https://t.co/6QkOJdhy6t — Cecilia Muñoz (@Cecilia44) June 1, 2016
Cory Booker posted a video of Hillary dancing:
With Secretary Clinton in Newark. pic.twitter.com/w9Z7Gc482i — Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) June 1, 2016
Team Clinton used the shirtless pranksters from her rally last week in an Instagram video to make the case that she's quick on her feet and knows how to demonstrate leadership. (These guys have heckled candidates across the presidential field.)
Veep's Jonah Ryan is out with a campaign ad:
The American Future Fund debuted these ads featuring victims of Trump University (watch the others here and here):
For those following the Harambe story, here's the audio of the mother's 911 call:
Shaquille O'Neal tried to go undercover as a Lyft driver (spoiler: it didn't fool anyone):
The San Diego Zoo's Tasmanian devil was outfitted with a pacemaker. He has recovered and was released back into his home at the zoo yesterday:
Finally, watch fresh lava flowing out of Hawaii's Kilauea volcano: |
PHOTOS: JARED PERRY | Let me take everyone back for a moment to 1995. August 10, 1995 to be precise.
This was the day my musical taste began to take shape and my life changed forever. That’s far from hyperbole too. On that late summer evening in 1995, I saw my first concert—Weezer at the Nautica Pavilion.
That night, my scrawny little 13-year-old self had his mind fucking blown by live music for the first time. I remember it vividly too. My dad worked security and kept one eye on me and my friend while we parked our asses on the bleachers under strict orders not to move.
The opening jangle of “Surf Wax America” from that night still rings in my head now. My brain swimming with how fucking crowded the show was and everyone was freaking out to the same thing. I remember the giant =w= logo behind the stage and how larger-than-life it made the band seem. Those flashing lights and loud chords sparked a passion to see as many shows as possible through my high school and college years.
It’s crazy how some things stay the same, even as time moves on.
On Sunday night, the Arctic Monkeys came to Cleveland’s Jacobs Pavilion (formerly known as Nautica) and I parked my ass on those very same bleachers, returning to the scene of the crime, now as a 32-year-old man.
Looking out over the crowd, I was struck by just how young the audience was, but then I took a step back and saw myself. How many of these kids were experiencing a show for the first time?
They wouldn’t be disappointed because the guys in the Arctic Monkeys were born to play shows like this.
Let’s just start straight off the top that Alex Turner, the leader, singer, and guitarist is a natural front man. The guy oozes swagger and came on stage in a tailored suit, slicked back hair and with a confidence that drove the girls to shriek. Yeah, did I mention that the young audience was about 70 percent female?
Turner is clearly a heart throb and played up the role by borrowing a few Elvis-like hip shakes and winking at select girls in the front row. This guy has come a long way since his t-shirt days of their first record Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. Now, he is pure sex by way of rock and roll.
Musically, the Arctic Monkeys settled into a mid-tempo groove for most of the set and pretty much rocked everyone’s face off. Bassist Nick O’Malley is their secret weapon for this sound as that bass is cranked way up and gives an impending sense of doom to every song. That edge is clearly indebted to a million classic rock bands that came before them, but it works as basis for their current sound.
To further solidify this connection, during an interlude in “Arabella” they broke into the groove from Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” Sadly, it was over the heads of a majority of the audience. I caught it though, so I tip my cap.
Their sound was just perfectly suited to a bunch of people at an outdoor show—rocking out. The Arctic Monkeys seem clearly destined to rule amphitheaters and arenas for a long time and it’s exciting to know that big giant rock bands aren’t completely dinosaurs.
As the night went on, the big illuminated sign in the shape of the logo on the cover of their latest album, AM, lit up the night, and all I could do is smile. It reminded me of that lit-up Weezer sign and how my senses reached their peak that night in 1995. How it lead me to chase that high for the next (almost) 20 years.
At that moment I realized all is not lost and the kids will be alright. |
[What follows is excerpted from WEB Du Bois’ ‘Marxism and the Negro Problem’, published in The Crisis, 1933, and elucidates Du Bois’ thought regarding the vicious tactics of the aristocracy of labor among the whites, and his rejection of false consciousness as a throwaway excuse for what is actually the interest of the settler working classes, who have become contributors and beneficiaries of imperial capital. As always this piece is provided for the purposes of study and discussion.]
…Revolution seems bound to come.
Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than recent actions in the United States; our re-examination of the whole concept of Property; our banking moratorium; the extraordinary new agriculture bill; the plans to attack unemployment, and similar measures. Labor rather than gambling is the sure foundation of value and whatever we call it — exploitation, theft or business acumen — there is something radically wrong with an industrial system that turns out simultaneously paupers and millionaires and sets a world starving because it has too much food.
What now has all this to do with the Negro problem? First of all, it is manifest that the mass of Negroes in the United States belong distinctly to the working proletariat. Of every thousand working Negroes less than a hundred and fifty belong to any class that could possibly be considered bourgeois. And even this more educated and prosperous class has but small connection with the exploiters of wage and labor. Nevertheless, this black proletariat is not a part of the white proletariat. Black and white work together in many cases, and influence each other’s rates of wages. They have similar complaints against capitalists, save that the grievances of the Negro worker are more fundamental and indefensible, ranging as they do, since the day of Karl Marx, from chattel slavery, to the worst paid, sweated, mobbed and cheated labor in any civilized land.
And while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers. It is white labor that deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies him affiliation with trade unions, expels him from decent houses and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination.
It is no sufficient answer to say that capital encourages this oppression and uses it for its own ends. This may have excused the ignorant and superstitious Russian peasants in the past and some of the poor whites of the South today. But the bulk of American white labor is neither ignorant nor fanatical. It knows exactly what it is doing and it means to do it. William Green and Mathew Woll of the A. F. of L. have no excuse of illiteracy or religion to veil their deliberate intention to keep Negroes and Mexicans and other elements of common labor, in a lower proletariat as sub-servient to their interests as theirs are to the interests of capital.
This large development of a petty bourgeoisie within the American laboring class is a post-Marxian phenomenon and the result of the tremendous and world wide development of capitalism in the 20th Century. The market of capitalistic production has gained an effective world-wide organization. Industrial technique and mass production have brought possibilities in the production of goods and services which out-run even this wide market. A new class of technical engineers and managers has arisen forming a working class aristocracy between the older proletariat and the absentee owners of capital. The real owners of capital are small as well as large investors — workers who have deposits in savings banks and small holdings in stocks and bonds; families buying homes and purchasing commodities on installment; as well as the large and rich investors.
Of course, the individual laborer gets but an infinitesimal part of his income from such investments. On the other hand, such investments, in the aggregate, largely increase available capital for the exploiters, and they give investing laborers the capitalistic ideology. Between workers and owners of capital stand today the bankers and financiers who distribute capital and direct the engineers.
Thus the engineers and the saving better-paid workers, from a new petty bourgeois class, whose interests are bound up with those of the capitalists and antagonistic to those of common labor. On the other hand, common labor in America and white Europe far from being motivated by any vision of revolt against capitalism, has been blinded by the American vision of the possibility of layer after layer of the workers escaping into the wealthy class and becoming managers and employers of labor.
Thus in America we have seen a wild and ruthless scramble of labor groups over each other in order to climb to wealth on the backs of black labor and foreign immigrants. The Irish climbed on the Negroes. The Germans scrambled over the Negroes and emulated the Irish. The Scandinavians fought forward next to the Germans and the Italians and “Bohunks” are crowding up, leaving Negroes still at the bottom chained to helplessness, first by slavery, then by disfranchisement and always by the Color Bar.
The second influence on white labor both in America and Europe has been the fact that the extention of the world market by imperial expanding industry has established a world-wide new proletariat of colored workers, toiling under the worst conditions of 19th century capitalism, herded as slaves and serfs and furnishing by the lowest paid wage in modern history a mass of raw material for industry. With this largess the capitalists have consolidated their economic power, nullified universal suftrage and bribed the white workers by high wages, visions of wealth and the opportunity to drive “niggers.” Soldiers and sailors from the white workers are used to keep “darkies” in their “places” and white foremen and engineers have been established as irresponsible satraps in China and India, Africa and the West Indies, backed by the organized and centralized ownership of machines, raw materials, finished commodities and land monopoly over the whole world.
How now does the philosophy of Karl Marx apply today to colored labor? First of all colored labor has no common ground with white labor. No soviet of technocrats would do more than exploit colored labor in order to raise the status of whites. No revolt of a white proletariat could be started if its object was to make black workers their economic, political and social equals. It is for this reason that American socialism for fifty years has been dumb on the Negro problem, and the communists cannot even get a respectful hearing in America unless they begin by expelling Negroes.
…
In the United States also a petty bourgeoisie is being developed, consisting of clergymen, teachers, farm owners, professional men and retail business men. The position of this class, however, is peculiar: they are not the chief or even large investors in Negro labor and therefore exploit it only here and there; and they bear the brunt of color prejudice because they express in word and work the aspirations of all black folk for emancipation. The revolt of any black proletariat could not, therefore, be logically directed against this class, nor could this class join either white capital, white engineers or white workers to strengthen the color bar.
Under these circumstances, what shall we say of the Marxian philosophy and of its relation to the American Negro? We can only say, as it seems to me, that the Marxian philosophy is a true diagnosis of the situation in Europe in the middle of the 19th Century despite some of its logical difficulties. But it must be modified in the United States of America and especially so far as the Negro group is concerned. The Negro is exploited to a degree that means poverty, crime, delinquency and indigence. And that exploitation comes not from a black capitalistic class but from the white capitalists and equally from the white proletariat. His only defense is such internal organization as will protect him from both parties, and such practical economic insight as will prevent inside the race group any large development of capitalistic exploitation.
Meantime, comes the Great Depression. It levels all in mighty catastrophe. The fantastic industrial structure of America is threatened with ruin. The trade unions of skilled labor are double-tongued and helpless. Unskilled and common white labor is too frightened at Negro competition to attempt united action. It only begs a dole. The reformist program of Socialism meets no response from the white proletariat because it offers no escape to wealth and no effective bar to black labor, and a mud-sill of black labor is essential to white labor’s standard of living. The shrill cry of a few communists is not even listened to, because and solely because it seeks to break down barriers between black and white. There is not at present the slightest indication that a Marxian revolution based on a united class-conscious proletariat is anywhere on the American far horizon. Rather race antagonism and labor group rivalry is still undisturbed by world catastrophe. In the hearts of black laborers alone, therefore, lie those ideals of democracy in politics and industry which may in time make the workers of the world effective dictators of civilization. |
Kyle Abbott was the first man onto the field as Sri Lanka's second innings began. Would it be for the last time?
Speculation over Abbott's future - ESPNcricinfo revealed that Abbott has signed a Kolpak deal with Hampshire and is set to retire from international cricket to honour it - has received far more attention than anything that has happened on the field in the last two days, mostly because it has come as such a surprise.
It's well known that many South African cricketers are disenchanted with their currency and their current situation, and are interested in furthering their careers in the United Kingdom before Brexit stops them. The issue has been explored enough times not to necessitate another voyage of discovery as to their reasons. But Abbott? Right now? Say it ain't so!
But it looks increasingly likely that Abbott's fate may already be sealed. Asked if it will be sad if Abbott goes, Kagiso Rabada today replied:
"Sad, yes. Ever since I came into the team, Kyle has been a great bowler and also a good person. He is just a genuine guy. You can easily get along with him. It will be sad to see him go."
In April 2015, when Abbott was left out of the World Cup semi-final despite being on a hot streak for, shall we say, not-entirely-cricketing reasons, it would have made sense for him to leave. Heck, as recently as two months ago, when he carrying drinks in Perth, it would have made sense. But now, in the wake of Dale Steyn's shoulder injury and his own starring role in Australia, he has an opportunity at a long run in the team. Less than a week ago, Abbott spoke about how much it means to him to see the hard work he has put in over a long period finally paying off and how excited he is for the future of this team. Could it really be a team he is willing to leave behind?
And if it is, imagine having to be part of that team now. The team that discovered Abbott was considering ditching them through a news report because not even their own cricket board knew. The captain, who needs to trust Abbott to play according to the plans they would have made together, didn't know. The person who opens the bowling with him from the other end didn't know, and said as much. "That's a situation between him and Cricket South Africa to sort out. It's for Cricket South Africa to comment on that," Vernon Philander said at the end of the second day, when the news first broke. The person he sits next to in the change-room didn't know.
"Kyle has been a great bowler and also a good person. He is just a genuine guy. You can easily get along with him. It will be sad to see him go." Kagiso Rabada
There must be some sense of surprise, maybe even suspicion, among them. Some may be wondering if they would be tempted to make the same decision themselves. Some may look around and wonder how many others in that dressing room are already in the process of doing the same thing. But somehow none of that spilled onto the field.
As Abbott ambled through his warm-ups and then made his way to the top of his mark, as the field settled into their spots and the Sri Lankan batsmen got ready for another few sessions of survival, it was as though nothing else was happening, except for this match and that moment.
It turned out not to be one for the ages. Coming from around the wicket, Abbott sent his first ball wide and Dimuth Karunaratne didn't have to play. It wasn't the ideal way to begin your last innings as an international.
Abbott adjusted with his very next ball, which nipped back to sneak past the off stump. He was accurate for most of the rest of the innings, as he had been in the first when his eight overs cost nine runs. That is the value Abbott brings to this side, a value they may be enjoying for the last time. Good things may need to come to an end, but so soon?
Abbott might also be wondering that. This is his moment in Test cricket and he may have let it slip by misjudging how important he would become. But South Africa are also to blame for Abbott feeling so isolated that he went in search of something else.
Despite being consistent every time he was called up, he played too infrequently to feel secure. Some of it could not be helped - when Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel are fit, they remain automatic picks and South Africa cannot field an XI with five quicks, but some room should have been made for Abbott along the way. He should have played - perhaps in the Tests against New Zealand in August, perhaps in more ODIs. Perhaps he just needed a few more guarantees. It seems South Africa want to provide them now, even if it may be too late.
CSA met with Abbott's agent on Wednesday. What they discussed will only be revealed at the end of the match but several sources said they believed CSA were trying to come up with an offer that could change Abbott's mind. Whether any changes can actually be implemented is not yet known.
South Africa's selectors are meeting tonight to decide the squad for the third Test and the ODIs, without clarity over Abbott's future. If they know he is going, but only at the end of either the third Test or the home summer, will they still consider him? Or will they see him as taking the place of a player who can be part of longer-term plans? If they had known of Abbott's intention, would have they picked him for the first two Tests at all?
Whatever happens, what is certain is that today was not Abbott's last as an international. With six wickets still to get, there is more to do tomorrow. |
Pin 63 Shares
Recently, Instagram passed twitter to be the #2 social media site. I’ve seen a whole crowd of people on it – with good intentions – trying to evangelize. However, I think most of them succeed much less than they could because they fail to understand the medium enough to transmit a message that is attractive in this medium. Yes, I’m on Instagram; I admit that I’m not perfect in using it to evangelize.
In this blog post I’m using the term “evangelize” more generally than I would otherwise use it: referring to the idea of not just bringing the Gospel to those who don’t have it, but to also support those who fully believe and are walking the Christian life.
I’m going to divide this into three parts: bad ways to evangelize, important principles about Instagram that affect how we can pass on the message there, and examples of people evangelizing on Instagram.
A few fails:
I’ve seen a bunch of accounts which focus on political issues (from either side: I’m an equal opportunity offender) and then occasionally add Bible quotes which seem to support their position. Laypeople should be involved in politics to change her country for good but you have to recognize when your goal is political and not religious.
I’ve seen people who post pictures of religious items, and then post a selfie that indicates a lack of virtue (I’m not going into detail).
Others just post low-quality items. For example they post plain black and white pictures of their Bible all the time (I think this may be a good occasional post but if that’s all you post, your feed gets very boring), or post blurry pictures of religious articles or religious celebrations.
Another fail is someone who posts lots of memes: some of which are positive, and some of which rip others to shreds. Christianity, however, is a positive message so those memes that rip others to shreds detract from the message.
To understand how to evangelize, we need to look at why people go on Instagram. Instagram is not about current events – unlike other social media, you can’t link blog posts or news articles from Instagram. Instagram, at least in general, is not about debating issues such as politics, pro-life, and atheism – in fact it seems set up to be anti-polemical.
I think there are two main reasons people go on Instagram. First, people go on Instagram to see pictures of what their friends are doing. Second, people go on Instagram to look for beauty – this is expressed in many different ways, which is seen from food posts, fashion posts, architecture posts, photography posts, etc. I think each of these ways provides us with an opportunity for evangelizing.
To evangelize friends, all you need to do is be spontaneously positive about the faith. Post a picture of the excellent pizza you had, and then post a group picture of your small group at church that you enjoyed, then your puppy, then a Bible verse, etc. This method should be mainly personal posts and only reposting Bible verse or inspirational stuff that inspired YOU. In this way, Instagram is simply an extension of the friendship evangelizing that Matthew Kelly eloquently proposes in Rediscovering Catholicism. I’ve seen a few great examples of this, but haven’t kept track so I can’t link them here.
To evangelize the beauty, we need to discover that beauty. This type of evangelization takes a particular skill. This skill is picking up beauty that is already there. Two people on Instagram have done this particularly well (and they got #2 and #3 after the Vatican on my list of top 12 Catholic Instagrammers). First, a young lady from Dallas, TX who runs catholic_teen_posts. She grasps what is beautiful in our Catholic faith and is able to put it into meme form. What I find noteworthy is that she constantly shows beauty, not ugliness. This doesn’t mean she never argues, for example a recent post said, “Test your pro-abortion argument by adding ‘therefore, it’s okay to kill children,’ to the end. If you aren’t convinced, don’t waste your time posting it to a pro-life site.” That challenges the other side without belittling them. Second, Father Jason Smith, LC is a priest who is a former Art student and a great photographer. He posts extremely beautiful pictures of his daily life. (Note: my own account copies him more than the young lady.) He captures the physical beauty of a Chapel, or work of mercy, which allows you to see through that physical beauty to the spiritual beauty.
I hope a bunch of you are inspired to evangelize more on Instagram. If you do so, please try to evangelize your friends or evangelize through beauty. |
(CNN) Tests are being carried out on decomposed bodies found aboard so-called "ghost ships" that have entered Japanese waters in the past five weeks.
The key questions facing authorities: Who are they? And where did they come from?
Evidence found on the boats and their grim cargo suggest they came from North Korea. But are they attempted defectors or fishermen who've strayed too far from land?
Here's what we know so far.
The boats
This isn't the first time boats carrying bodies have been found off Japan, but it's the first time they've generated so much interest.
The Japanese Coast Guard says that it's been happening for years, though it only has data for the last five. In 2011, 57 were found. In 2012, it was 47, and in 2013, 80 washed up or were found floating at sea.
In 2014, 65 were found and the count so far this year is 34. That's a total of 283 boats in five years -- however the Coast Guard hasn't disclosed how many bodies were on board.
What's unusual about the current batch of boats is that so many have been found in such a short period of time -- 12 within five weeks.
"We think they possibly met with an accident due to the weather, but we can't confirm as the condition of dead bodies were bad," a Coast Guard spokesman told CNN.
How long had they been at sea?
It's unclear. The bodies found on the second of the most recent boats to arrive appeared to been one to two weeks post-death.
Some of the 10 bodies found on three boats on November 20 could have been there for up to three months, the Coast Guard said.
Where are they from?
Clues on the boats clearly point to North Korea. On one boat, Korean Hangul lettering is said to spell out "Korean People's Army." And tattered scrap of cloth found on one of the boats appears to show the North Korean flag, Japan's biggest broadcaster NHK reported.
"There's no doubt that these boats are North Korean," said John Nilsson-Wright, head of the Asia program at the Chatham House policy institute. Wright pointed to the lettering and the "primitive" nature of the boats.
However, the Japanese Coast Guard told CNN Wednesday that while it was clear the boats came from the Korean Peninsula, it wasn't possible to be more specific.
"We can only say they were possibly from the Korean Peninsula since there were Korean Hangul written on the hulls, but we couldn't identify the nationality of the boats," the spokesman said.
This ship was found in mid-November floating off Noto peninsula off the coast of Ishikawa prefecture.
The flow of currents through the Sea of Japan -- also known as the East Sea -- suggests it's possible for unmanned boats from Korea to be carried close to the Japanese coast.
The Tsushima Current flows past the Korean Peninsula, along the west coast of Japan, leading to the Tsugaru Current, which flows between Japan's north island and Honshu, the main island -- past prefectures where boats have been found.
Who are the dead?
The Japanese Coast Guard said it was not possible to confirm if all the bodies belonged to men, due to the level of decomposition. Autopsies are being carried out to determine their gender and age.
However, many analysts say the victims are likely to be North Korean fishermen. Fishing nets were found aboard some boats.
In recent months the country's leader Kim Jong Un has been pushing his subjects to increase their catch.
An undated image released from North Korea's KCNA news agency on November 23, 2015 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visiting an army Fishery Station.
On November 25, North Korean state media KCNA carried a story about Kim's visit to Fishery Station No.15 under KPA Unit 549.
"It is spectacular to see the pickling tanks and freezing storehouses full of fishes," the report quoted Kim as saying. He "repeatedly" expressed "great pleasure over the fact that the station caught thousands of tons of fishes in a few days."
It added: "He called on the station to set a high goal for remarkably increasing the yearly output of fish in a short span of time on the basis of this year's achievement."
What happens now?
North Korea has yet to comment on the ships, which are being investigated by Japanese police.
As it's not a new phenomenon, it appears likely that more ships will arrive.
October to February is the key fishing season for squid, sandfish and king crab off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula, according to Kim Do-hoon, a professor of fisheries science at Bukyong National University in Busan in South Korea.
"Kim Jong Un has been promoting the fisheries, which could explain why there are more fishing boats going out," he said. "But North Korean boats perform really poorly, with bad engines, risking lives to go far to catch more. Sometimes they drift, and fishermen starve to death," said Kim, according to Reuters. |
Machine Learning: An In-Depth Guide — Unsupervised Learning, Related Fields, and Machine Learning in Practice
Alex Castrounis Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 18, 2016
Articles in This Series
Introduction
Welcome to the fifth and final chapter in a five-part series about machine learning.
In this final chapter, we will revisit unsupervised learning in greater depth, briefly discuss other fields related to machine learning, and finish the series with some examples of real-world machine learning applications.
Unsupervised Learning
Recall that unsupervised learning involves learning from data, but without the goal of prediction. This is because the data is either not given with a target response variable (label), or one chooses not to designate a response. It can also be used as a pre-processing step for supervised learning.
In the unsupervised case, the goal is to discover patterns, deep insights, understand variation, find unknown subgroups (amongst the variables or observations), and so on in the data. Unsupervised learning can be quite subjective compared to supervised learning.
The two most commonly used techniques in unsupervised learning are principal component analysis (PCA) and clustering. PCA is one approach to learning what is called a latent variable model, and is a particular version of a blind signal separation technique. Other notable latent variable modeling approaches include expectation-maximization algorithm (EM) and Method of moments3.
PCA
PCA produces a low-dimensional representation of a dataset by finding a sequence of linear combinations of the variables that have maximal variance, and are mutually uncorrelated. Another way to describe PCA is that it is a transformation of possibly correlated variables into a set of linearly uncorrelated variables known as principal components.
Each of the components are mathematically determined and ordered by the amount of variability or variance that each is able to explain from the data. Given that, the first principal component accounts for the largest amount of variance, the second principal component the next largest, and so on.
Each component is also orthogonal to all others, which is just a fancy way of saying that they’re perpendicular to each other. Think of the X and Y axis’ in a two dimensional plot. Both axis are perpendicular to each other, and are therefore orthogonal. While not easy to visualize, think of having many principal components as being many axis that are perpendicular to each other.
While much of the above description of principal component analysis may be a bit technical sounding, it is actually a relatively simple concept from a high level. Think of having a bunch of data in any amount of dimensions, although you may want to picture two or three dimensions for ease of understanding.
Each principal component can be thought of as an axis of an ellipse that is being built (think cloud) to contain the data (aka fit to the data), like a net catching butterflies. The first few principal components should be able to explain (capture) most of the data, with the addition of more principal components eventually leading to diminishing returns.
One of the tricks of PCA is knowing how many components are needed to summarize the data, which involves estimating when most of the variance is explained by a given number of components. Another consideration is that PCA is sensitive to feature scaling, which was discussed earlier in this series.
PCA is also used for exploratory data analysis and data visualization. Exploratory data analysis involves summarizing a dataset through specific types of analysis, including data visualization, and is often an initial step in analytics that leads to predictive modeling, data mining, and so on.
Further discussion of PCA and similar techniques is out of scope of this series, but the reader is encouraged to refer to external sources for more information.
Clustering
Clustering refers to a set of techniques and algorithms used to find clusters (subgroups) in a dataset, and involves partitioning the data into groups of similar observations. The concept of ‘similar observations’ is a bit relative and subjective, but it essentially means that the data points in a given group are more similar to each other than they are to data points in a different group.
Similarity between observations is a domain specific problem and must be addressed accordingly. A clustering example involving the NFL’s Chicago Bears (go Bears!) was given in chapter 1 of this series.
Clustering is not a technique limited only to machine learning. It is a widely used technique in data mining, statistical analysis, pattern recognition, image analysis, and so on. Given the subjective and unsupervised nature of clustering, often data preprocessing, model/algorithm selection, and model tuning are the best tools to use to achieve the desired results and/or solution to a problem.
There are many types of clustering algorithms and models, which all use their own technique of dividing the data into a certain number of groups of similar data. Due to the significant difference in these approaches, the results can be largely affected, and therefore one must understand these different algorithms to some extent to choose the most applicable approach to use.
K-means and hierarchical clustering are two widely used unsupervised clustering techniques. The difference is that for k-means, a predetermined number of clusters (k) is used to partition the observations, whereas the number of clusters in hierarchical clustering is not known in advance.
Hierarchical clustering helps address the potential disadvantage of having to know or pre-determine k in the case of k-means. There are two primary types of hierarchical clustering, which include bottom-up and agglomerative.
Here is a visualization, courtesy of Wikipedia, of the results of running the k-means clustering algorithm on a set of data with k equal to three. Note the lines, which represent the boundaries between the groups of data.
There are two types of clustering, which define the degree of grouping or containment of data. The first is called hard clustering, where every data point belongs to only one cluster and not the others. Soft clustering, or fuzzy clustering on the other hand refers to the case where a data point belongs to a cluster to a certain degree, or is assigned a likelihood (probability) of belonging to a certain cluster.
Method comparison and general considerations
What is the difference then between PCA and clustering? As mentioned, PCA looks for a low-dimensional representation of the observations that explains a good fraction of the variance, while clustering looks for homogeneous subgroups among the observations.
An interesting point to note is that in the absence of a target response, there is no way to evaluate solution performance or errors as one does in the supervised case. In other words, there is no objective way to determine if you’ve found a solution. This is a significant differentiator between supervised and unsupervised learning methods.
Predictive Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Mining, Oh My!
Machine learning is often interchanged with terms like predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, data mining, and so on. While machine learning is certainly related to these fields, there are some notable differences.
Predictive analytics is a subcategory of a broader field known as analytics in general. Analytics is usually broken into three sub-categories: descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive.
Descriptive analytics involves analytics applied to understanding and describing data. Predictive analytics deals with modeling, and making predictions or assigning classifications from data observations. Prescriptive analytics deals with making data-driven, actionable recommendations or decisions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a super exciting field, and machine learning is essentially a sub-field of AI due to the automated nature of the learning algorithms involved. According to Wikipedia, AI has been defined as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, but also as the study and design of intelligent agents, where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success
Statistical learning is becoming popularized due to Stanford’s related online course and its associated books: An Introduction to Statistical Learning, and The Elements of Statistical Learning.
Machine learning arose as a subfield of artificial intelligence, statistical learning arose as a subfield of statistics. Both fields are very similar, overlap in many ways, and the distinction is becoming less clear over time. They differ in that machine learning has a greater emphasis on prediction accuracy and large scale applications, whereas statistical learning emphasizes models and their related interpretability, precision, and uncertainty.
Lastly, data mining is a field that’s also often confused with machine learning. Data mining leverages machine learning algorithms and techniques, but also spans many other fields such as data science, AI, statistics, and so on.
The overall goal of the data mining process is to extract patterns and knowledge from a data set, and transform it into an understandable structure for further use. Data mining often deals with large amounts of data, or big data.
Machine Learning in Practice
As discussed throughout this series, machine learning can be used to create predictive models, assign classifications, make recommendations, and find patterns and insights in an unlabeled dataset. All of these tasks can be done without requiring explicit programming.
Machine learning has been successfully used in the following non-exhaustive example applications1:
Spam filtering
Optical character recognition (OCR)
Search engines
Computer vision
Recommendation engines, such as those used by Netflix and Amazon
Classifying DNA sequences
Detecting fraud, e.g., credit card and internet
Medical diagnosis
Natural language processing
Speech and handwriting recognition
Economics and finance
Virtually anything else you can think of that involves data
In order to apply machine learning to solve a given problem, the following steps (or a variation) should to be taken, and should use machine learning elements discussed throughout this series.
Define the problem to be solved and the project’s objective. Ask lots of questions along the way! Determine the type of problem and type of solution required. Collect and prepare the data. Create, validate, tune, test, assess, and improve your model and/or solution. This process should be driven by a combination of technical (stats, math, programming), domain, and business expertise. Discover any other insights and patterns as applicable. Deploy your solution for real-world use. Report on and/or present results.
If you encounter a situation where you or your company can benefit from a machine learning-based solution, simply approach it using these steps and see what you come up with. You may very well wind up with a super powerful and scalable solution!
Summary
Congratulations to those that have read all five chapters in full! I would like to thank you very much for spending your precious time joining me on this machine learning adventure.
This series took me a significant amount of time to write, so I hope that this time has been translated into something useful for as many people as possible.
At this point, we have covered virtually all major aspects of the entire machine learning process at a high level, and at times even went a little deeper.
If you were able to understand and retain the content in this series, then you should have absolutely no problem participating in any conversation involving machine learning and its applications. You may even have some very good opinions and suggestions about different applications, methods, and so on.
Despite all of the information covered in this series, and the details that were out of scope, machine learning and its related fields in practice are also somewhat of an art. There are many decisions that need to be made along the way, customized techniques to employ, as well as use creative strategies in order to best solve a given problem.
A high quality practitioner should also have a strong business acumen and expert-level domain knowledge. Problems involving machine learning are just as much about asking questions as they are about finding solutions. If the question is wrong, then the solution will be as well.
Thank you again, and happy learning (with machines)!
About the Author: Alex Castrounis founded InnoArchiTech and is the creator and host of the Pod as a Service podcast.
Originally published at innoarchitech.com here. |
By Express News Service
BENGALURU: A 32-year-old techie committed suicide on Wednesday night as he was depressed over his elder sister’s possible death due to cancer.The deceased is Harsha Shetty, a resident of Vijaynagar and technical leader at the financial services firm Wells Fargo at Kadubisanahalli.
Harsha Shetty
As per police sources, Shetty went to Manipal on Sunday to visit his elder sister Asha Shetty at a private hospital. He was informed that her cancer had reached the last stage, and chances of Asha’s recovery were dim.She had also lost her voice due to the disease.
Shetty returned home on Wednesday morning. He was reportedly depressed over his sister’s condition and spoke to his wife Ramya about it.On Wednesday night, Ramya heard a sound from his room, and found that he had hung himself. She called for the ambulance and he was taken to KC General Hospital, where she was informed that Shetty had passed away.
Police said Shetty’s father had passed away in 2002, and his mother in 2005, after which his sister had been his main support, and hence her condition affected him all the more. In addition, he had lost both his mother and his grandmother to cancer. Shetty has a 2-year-old daughter.A post-mortem was conducted at Victoria Hospital on Thursday and the police have registered a case of unnatural death. |
US tycoon reacts with fury to revelation by news station in his home town that he has not voted in primaries for 21 years
Donald Trump, property tycoon turned reality TV star turned potential presidential candidate, is a busy man. Too busy, it seems, to make it to the polling booth.
Records unearthed by NY1, Trump's hometown news station, show he has not voted in primary elections for 21 years. City election board spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez confirmed NY1's story at the weekend.
The news prompted a furious denial from Trump. "I voted in every general election … You're going to pay a big price because you're wrong ... I have records that I voted and so does the board of elections … I signed in at every election," he told NY1.
Trump has yet to confirm he will run for president but will be hoping for a more committed turnout from his own supporters if he is to move forward with his campaign. In order to secure the nomination he would need to get fellow Republicans to vote for him in a primary election – something that the state election board records appear to show he has failed to do consistently since 1989.
Back in 1989 Trump voted in the primary for mayor when Rudolph Giuliani beat business magnate Ronald Lauder, but according to the documents, Trump failed to show up at the primaries after that for over 20 years.
It wasn't just local elections Trump missed. The tycoon also failed to cast his vote in several presidential primaries, including in 1988 and 1996.
The star of The Apprentice became a Democrat in 2001 but missed the 2001 and 2005 primaries for mayor. In 2002 records show he also appears to have skipped the general election.
In 2008 Trump voiced his support for Barack Obama during the fiercely fought primary with Hillary Clinton. "I think [Obama] has a chance to go down as a great president," Trump told NY1 in 2008. "Now if he's not, if he's not a great president then this country is in trouble." Perhaps it was this ambivalence that led to him missing that vote too.
Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen told Associated Press on Saturday that "for one of the greatest international businessmen who travels all over the country and the world, his voting record is very, very good."
Trump's campaign has been fuelled by his questioning whether Obama was born in the United States, and by his plans to seize the oil of countries including Iraq and Libya. The latest Gallup poll finds Trump tied in first place among Republican voters with Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, on 16%. Mitt Romney is third with 13%, with former Alaska governor Sarah Palin in fourth on 10%. |
Tragedy “resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things,” declared philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in Science and the Modern World (1925). And few things are more tragic in the policy world than the current spectacle of private health insurers destroying their industry, and along with it, hope for a future of dynamic and innovative medical care. In just a few short days, shortsighted actions by the health insurance industry and its lobbyists have resurrected congressional proposals for a government-run health insurance scheme, the so-called public option.
On Saturday, a front page article in the New York Times reported that small businesses are seeing their health insurance premiums go up an average of about 15 percent for the coming year—double the rate of previous year’s increases. Apparently, insurers are trying to revive their stock prices and top up their coffers before health care reform legislation passes later this fall. Opponents of private health insurance quickly seized on these reported price increases. “This underlines the urgent need for health insurance reform, including a public option,” said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Congressional Democrats provided the health insurers with another opportunity for public self-immolation by proposing to repeal the health insurance industry’s antitrust exemption under the McCarran-Ferguson Act. That Act also allows states to regulate the business of insurance without federal government interference. Congress passed the McCarran-Ferguson Act in 1945 in response to a Supreme Court ruling that insurance could be regulated by the federal government as interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
By conferring a regulatory monopoly on each state, the McCarran-Ferguson Act ends up protecting insurance companies from interstate competition—residents may not buy policies from insurers located outside their state. Because health insurers are insulated against out-of-state competition, state insurance commissions and legislatures feel free to impose coverage mandates that significantly drive up policy premiums.
The proliferation of hundreds of state health insurance mandates and regulations also serves as effective barriers to entry for potential competitors. An insurance company trying to enter a new market would have to meet all of a state’s mandates. At the same time, the company would have less negotiating clout with doctors and hospitals, which means it would have to pay providers more for their services. In addition, a new entrant trying to attract policyholders would have to charge lower premiums than the incumbent companies to gain a foothold. So a would-be competitor must pay more to health care providers while earning less from policyholders.
Given these mandated barriers, insurance companies have found that the easiest way to enter to a new state is to buy another company that is already operating in the market. It is this dynamic that is driving the trend toward consolidation in health insurance markets.
The American Medical Association (AMA) sponsored an analysis in 2007 that looked at the concentration of health insurance companies [PDF] in 313 metropolitan areas. To gauge the level of competition among insurers in the health insurance industry in each area, the AMA study used a Justice Department antitrust benchmark, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. A score above 1,000 shows "moderate" concentration. Those scoring above 1,800 yield a "high" concentration, suggesting that there is very little competition in the area. The analysis showed that 96 percent of the 313 HMO/PPO (health maintenance organizations/preferred provider organizations) metropolitan markets studied were above the 1,800 threshold.
The AMA is not exactly a disinterested party when it comes to health insurers, however. The medical credentialing board has a complicated relationship and a long history of conflict with health insurers. But others have found that fewer health insurance competitors in a market mean higher policy prices as well. A 2008 study by Kellogg School of Management professor Leemore Dafny found that local markets with fewer than six insurance carriers charged higher group health premiums. Dafny’s study also found that “markets with 6 or fewer carriers increased dramatically over time, from 7 percent in 1998 to 23 percent in 2005.” She added, “Concentration has only increased since.”
In 38 states, the largest insurance company controlled one-third or more of the market and in 16 states the largest firm controlled more than half the market, according to a 2004 study by University of California-Berkeley health care economist James Robinson. Robinson also noted that during this period of increasing consolidation from 2000 through 2003 saw double digit growth in insurance company premiums, earnings, and equity share prices. Insurance premium prices annually grew 1.5 to 2 percent faster than their costs.
Last week, the House Judiciary Committee voted to narrow the McCarran-Ferguson antitrust exemption. However, many analysts think that action will have, at most, a minor effect on improving competition among insurers. In fact, National Underwriters newsletter reported that the Moody’s rating service does “not believe it would fundamentally change the way health insurers operate or lessen the barriers to entry and change the competitive landscape.”
Changing the competitive landscape, University of Illinois law professor David Hyman argues, requires amending the McCarran-Ferguson Act to allow for jurisdictional competition in health insurance regulation. Insurance companies would pick the state under which they want their policies to be regulated and then would be allowed to sell their policies in all other states. “The goal is to identify the ‘Delaware’ of health insurance regulation,” Hyman says. That is, to allow the market to find the state whose health insurance regulations are the most reasonable balance between protecting the interests of both shareholders and policyholders. This proposal would create a national market in health insurance coverage and help keep premiums low. Neither Congress nor the health insurance lobby favors such proposals.
Which brings us back to the remorseless working of things. If the Democratic proposal to change the McCarran-Ferguson Act is just an empty populist gesture and would not really increase competition among health insurers nor reduce their profits, wouldn’t this be a good time for health insurance lobbyists to maintain decorous silence? That didn’t happen. The chief health insurance lobbying group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, opposes even this half-hearted repeal of the antitrust exemption. By kicking up a fuss, they have handed the Democratic leadership another occasion to demonize hapless health insurers for being anti-competitive and giving proponents of government run health insurance additional rhetorical ammunition for justifying the creation of a public option.
The truth is that companies don’t want competition; they want government guaranteed profits. Mesmerized by the prospect that an individual insurance mandate would provide them with tens of millions of new government-subsidized customers, private health insurers have allowed themselves to be maneuvered into an inexorable process that will lead to their destruction. In 2004, Berkeley economist Robinson warned that double digit growth in premiums and profits was unsustainable. “In the long term, health insurance will be either revitalized by the private sector, through product innovation and competitive entry,” wrote Robinson, “or disciplined by the public sector, through purchasing power and regulatory requirements.”
Five years later, health insurers are about to experience public sector discipline with a vengeance. Make no mistake about it: The government-run public insurance option will eventually out-compete private health insurers by means of the simple expedient of Medicare-style price controls on physicians and hospitals. Under the guise of advocating choice and competition, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats are, in reality, pushing the country inevitably toward a single payer government health insurance scheme. The result will be rationed patient care and drastically slowed medical innovation. Now that’s remorselessly tragic.
Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books. |
The likely departure of their manager, Tim Sherwood, and technical director, Franco Baldini this summer has not prevented Tottenham Hotspur from featuring prominently in today's flurry of transfer speculation. The Sun say the north London club are plotting to bring the midfielder James Milner to White Hart Lane from Manchester City this summer, while the Star say they've lined up the Valencia defender Jérémy Mathieu as a replacement for Jan Vertonghen. The Belgian may move to pastures Nou after being mooted as a potential replacement, along with David Luiz, Daniel Agger and Thomas Vermaelen, for the Barcelona centre-half Carles Puyol.
A native of Luxeuil-les-Bains, in eastern France, where today's Rumours once attended a wedding featuring an unaccompanied choir due to the presence of a family of mice in the church organ, the 30-year-old Mathieu can play in the heart of defence or at left-back and has been scouted on numerous occasions by Spurs already this season. His contract contains a £17m buyout clause, but the Star claims the Spurs chairman Daniel Levy "feels a deal can be done for less than that" even though moneybags Ligue 1 side Monaco are also interested in the French international.
Manchester City are ready to pay handsomely for the signatures of the Everton midfielder Ross Barkley and the Southampton full-back Luke Shaw and will splurge £50m on the pair in order to increase the amount of homegrown talent in their squad. City's neighbours Manchester United are equally interested in signing Shaw and may also attempt to lure his Southampton team-mate Adam Lallana to Old Trafford while they're at it. With Southampton facing a potential exodus of young English talent, their supporters can at least look forward to seeing the Juventus striker Fabio Quagliarella arrive at St Mary's during the summer.
Meanwhile back in north London, Arsenal are preparing to take advantage of Queens Park Rangers' financial woes by signing the French striker Loïc Rémy. Currently on loan at Newcastle, whose owner's apparent lack of ambition will preclude him from signing him on a permanent basis, Rémy has a get-out clause in his contract that allows him to leave Loftus Road in the event of another club offering to buy him for a bargain price £8m.
Should Liverpool finish in the top four this season and secure qualification for the Champions League, Anfield mandarins will reward manager Brendan Rodgers with a transfer kitty of £60m to bolster his squad. The Austrian international centre-half Martin Hinteregger, 21, is unlikely to account for too much of that sum, but that didn't stop Rodgers sending scouts to watch the young defender do a decent job marking Luis Suárez in his country's 1-1 draw against Uruguay last Wednesday. "The imposing Hinteregger caught the eye with his physicality and composure and his style appears to be tailor-made for the Premier League," wrote David Hytner, in yesterday's Observer, adding that: "Hinteregger has also drawn interest from Arsenal."
Sergio Ramos's brother and agent, Rene, has revealed that the Spanish red card magnet turned down a massive offer from an unnamed Premier League club that is almost certainly Manchester City or Chelsea in recent months. "Out of respect to the club I will only say that they are English," he told the Spanish newspaper Marca. "The offers are very, very big in economical terms, but we are at the club we want to be at. The best in the world. So, more than once, I had to say: 'Thanks very much for your interest, but no.' I reiterate, right now, leaving Real Madrid is a non-starter."
In other news from Spain, AS reports that Chelsea's on-loan-at-Atlético Madrid goalkeeper, Thibaut Courtois, has verbally agreed to join Real Madrid when his contract expires in the summer of 2016. And in Germany, Bild claim that both Manchester United and Borussia Dortmund are sniffing around the Cagliari defender Davide Astori, who is available for £9m. |
Chris Nieratko of KingShit magazine recently interviewed Hillary Thompson, the first openly trans skateboarder.
Thompson, 23, explains that “gender isn’t determined only by genitalia. It’s more of a visceral identity thing. Sometimes a person is neurologically wired in a way that their body does not reflect.” She describes her skate crew as having been mostly accepting of her transition, and adds that she hopes to make a difference for younger kids. Thompson is sponsored by Endless Grind, a skate shop in Raleigh that has stood by her throughout her transition. Check out this video interview with Hillary on Queerty.
Thompson, who began taking hormones in 2009, describes her experience as “probably not any harder than anyone else’s life.” She first found out that she could transition at 14 or 15, and told her parents when she was 19. Her parents said they had always known, and they were supportive. A Raleigh, North Carolina native, Thompson has been skateboarding since she was 5 or 6 years old.
Nieratko clearly has a lot to learn about trans folks. He asks invasive questions about Thompson’s genitalia and medical history, and refers to trans identity as “confusing subject matter.” But it’s good to see that the insular and often homophobic skateboarding world is beginning to acknowledge the presence of trans people in their community.
– Revel & Riot Contributor Naomi Moses |
A Torres Strait Islander woman has been elected to Queensland Parliament for the first time, giving Annastacia Palaszczuk one more seat towards the 47 Labor needs to win office in its own right.
Thursday Island-born child protection worker Cynthia Lui won the far north Queensland seat of Cook with 39 per cent of the vote, allowing Labor to reclaim the seat it had held with Billy Gordon last term.
Labor MP for Cook Cynthia Lui, Aunty Rose Elu, Communities Minister (and Ministerial Champion for the Torres Strait) Shannon Fentiman and Aunty Ivy Trevallion during the campaign.
At noon on Tuesday Labor had 44 seats, the LNP had 36 seats, Katter’s Australian Party had two seats, One Nation one seat, while independent and former Noosa councillor Sandy Bolton had won the seat of Noosa.
Nine seats are still so close, including Aspley and Maiwar – the old Indooroopilly seat - they are undecided. |
Please do not share the details of this article openly on social media and spoil Star Wars: The Last Jedi for those that want to remain spoiler free. These are spoilers so let’s respect everyone’s wishes and not spoil those that do not appreciate spoilers like us. Be cool!
Yesterday we discussed a little bit about Canto Bight. A lot of you were quick to immediately point out that the guys we saw on the beach during the filming in Dubrovnik had CBPD on their helmets possibly meaning Canto Bight Police Department. I can confirm that those are in fact Canto Bight police and I have had reason to believe there was a Canto Bight jail set created for Star Wars: The Last Jedi as well. The first time I heard about the guys they were called “Jail House Guards.” I’ve also been told they have goggles that go with their helmets that sort of evoke the Cloud Car Pilot from the old Kenner action figure as well.
This brings me to Benicio Del Toro’s character. He is either named D.J. or it is his code name used by the production. He wears all black. He has a trench coat on with a Han Solo-style belt at his waist to hold his blaster. His hair is short. He also has a strange cap that doesn’t have a bill to it. He looks slimy and dirty but the bill-less cap makes him look sort of like a throwback to a different era. He belongs in the criminal underworld by the looks of him. The man in black-style character we heard about is certainly there but his style evokes a few things in the design. His trench coat reminds me of Anakin’s Revenge of the Sith costume in that its lapels evoke a tabard look and its black leather. All of this makes his ship all the more curious to me.
This is where things get weird. His ship is really fancy. The interior looks like something you would see from Canto Bight. It looks like if someone took the J.J. Abrams Star Trek films and designed the interior of the Falcon for a new Trek film. The cockpit has a very nice singular red seat for him to pilot from. In the back of the ship, it has a communal section like the Falcon where a crew could sit and socialize. But instead of dingy white seats and a chess board it has a very nice bright curved blue booth with a table (no word on a chess board) and it looks more like a nice hotel than something Han Solo would live in. The inside of the ship at Pinewood was a mixture of Amidala’s Nubian ship from The Phantom Menace mixed with the look and feel of the Abram’s Trek and a few hints of the sleek “Apple” design aesthetic we saw revitalize the look of the classic Stormtrooper into the First Order Stormtrooper we have today. If the Falcon is a Winnebago this ship is a luxury yacht made by Bill Gates.
So why does “D.J.” have this fancy ship? Do Finn and Kelly Marie Tran (either named or codenamed “Rose” just like Maz during The Force Awakens production) break him out of jail as part of the casino plot in which they need a hacker played by Justin Theroux? Does “D.J.” dress scummy to trick people into thinking he’s scum but he’s actually an expert gambler? Maybe they just simply steal the ship and that’s how he gets it? Does he look dingy because he’s been in jail on Canto Bight?
Either way, D.J.’s ship design and this character design are at odds. So clearly there’s something going on here. We’re working to confirm the links between D.J., his ship, the jail, the hacker, the casino, and Finn and his friends. The pieces are coming together but we still have a way to go. It is all highly intriguing.
Update:
Max at The Star Wars Post has informed me:
My writer Ben just put up our follow up to your story about Benicio and he found coorborating evidence in a drone pic from last year. Jail cells.
It does look like bars in that old building at the top. Nice work, Ben! Check out their article here. |
Voice over IP (VoIP), a technology for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over the Internet, is at the heart of an unbelievable $2.8 billion patent infringement lawsuit that VoIP-Pal, a Bellevue-based company, filed this morning against the iPhone maker.
“We are confident the current good will on both sides will result in a favorable outcome for all parties involved,” said VoIP-Pal CEO Emil Malak in a prepared statement.
The Cupertino firm’s iMessage and FaceTime services allegedly use VoIP-Pal’s patented technology without authorization. VoIP-Pal has filed similar lawsuits against carriers AT&T and Verizon in Las Vegas court.
VoIP-Pal remains open to an amicable solution
According to court documents, Apple employs VoIP-Pal’s patented technology in FaceTime and iMessage and has “widely distributed infringing products”.
“Instead of pursuing independent product development, Apple employed VoIP-Pal’s innovative caller attribute classification and routing product design, in violation of VoIP-Pal’s valuable intellectual property rights,” as per court papers.
Apple’s messaging system contains a feature that automatically falls back to SMS when iMessage is unavailable. That feature is the subject of VoIP-Pal’s bold patent infringement claim.
Apple directly and indirectly practices certain claims of VoIP-Pal’s ‘815 patent “in order to determine the classification of a user, and, subsequently, how the call should be routed,” according to court documents.
Is VoIP-Pal a patent troll?
VoIP-Pal’s combined patent infringement lawsuits against Apple, AT&T and Verizon are worth an astounding $7 billion. So, how did they come up with the $2.8 billion figure in Apple’s case?
Easy, their lawyers have applied a 1.25 percent royalty rate to Apple’s estimated device profit margins—55 percent for the iPhone, 35 percent for the iPad and ten percent for the Mac—resulting in a massive $2,836,710,031 royalty fee claim.
VoIP-Pal has been in talks with Apple, AT&T and Verizon over solving the dispute and remains open to licensing or selling out its technology to the defendants.
Source: VoIP-Pal |
At a drug-fueled party on Aug. 24, 1965, during a break in the Beatles ' North America tour, John Lennon and George Harrison each took his second LSD trip. Ringo Starr tried the psychedelic drug for the first time, but Paul McCartney , wary of its effects, chose to abstain.
Before the day ended, Harrison would learn more about Indian music. He had started to develop an interest in it during the filming of Help! He would soon incorporate into his music and popularize in the West. Lennon would be inspired to write "She Said She Said," the iconic song from Revolver .
The crush of fans and police around the Beatles’ rented Beverly Hills mansion made it difficult for the band to leave. Instead, celebrities like Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds and actor Peter Fonda came over and spent the day tripping with the three Beatles. (In 1965, LSD was still legal in California.)
Harrison and Starr discussed the band's drug use in The Beatles Anthology . Though they had been smoking marijuana for a year after being introduced to it by Bob Dylan , LSD was unknown to half of them. A few months earlier, Harrison and Lennon had taken their first acid trip at a dinner party thrown by Harrison's dentist, who had slipped it into their drinks. The two were profoundly changed by the experience.
"John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid, because we couldn't relate to them any more," said Harrison. "Not just on the one level — we couldn't relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much. It was such a mammoth experience that it was unexplainable: it was something that had to be experienced , because you could spend the rest of your life trying to explain what it made you feel and think. It was all too important to John and me. So the plan was that when we got to Hollywood, on our day off we were going to get them to take acid. We got some in New York; it was on sugar cubes wrapped in tinfoil and we'd been carrying these around all through the tour until we got to L.A."
"I'd take anything," added Starr. "It was a fabulous day. The night wasn't so great, because it felt like it was never going to wear off. Twelve hours later and it was: 'Give us a break now, Lord.'"
"Paul felt very out of it, because we are all a bit slightly cruel, sort of 'we're taking it, and you're not,' Lennon told Rolling Stone . "But we kept seeing him, you know. We couldn't eat our food, I just couldn't manage it, just picking it up with our hands. There were all these people serving us in the house and we were knocking food on the floor and all of that. It was a long time before Paul took it."
McGuinn told the Daily Telegraph that a conversation he had with Harrison would influence the development of psychedelic rock. "We went in and David, John Lennon, George Harrison and I took LSD to help get to know each other better," he said. "There was a large bathroom in the house and we were all sitting on the edge of a shower passing around a guitar, taking turns to play our favorite songs. John and I agreed 'Be-Bop-A-Lula' was our favorite '50s rock record.
"I showed George Harrison some Ravi Shankar sounds, which I'd heard because we shared the same record company, on the guitar. ... You can hear what I played him from the Byrds' song ' Why .' I had learned to play it on the guitar from listening to records of Ravi Shankar."
Harrison has said, however, that it was Crosby who first mentioned Shankar's music. With the amount of drugs consumed, it's easy to understand the confusion.
Listen to an Early Version of the Beatles' 'She Said She Said'
Though the Kinks and the Yardbirds also experimented with the sitar at the time, the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," which was recorded in October 1965, was the first Western rock song released to feature the sitar.
"I went and bought a sitar from a little shop at the top of Oxford Street called Indiacraft – it stocked little carvings and incense," said Harrison. "It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit. We were at the point where we'd recorded the 'Norwegian Wood' backing track and it needed something. We would usually start looking through the cupboard to see if we could come up with something, a new sound, and I picked the sitar up – it was just lying around. I hadn't really figured out what to do with it. It was quite spontaneous: I found the notes that played the lick."
In 1965, four years before his starring role in the film Easy Rider , Peter Fonda was hardly a household name. It was his friendship with the Byrds that allowed Fonda to attend the party, and he unintentionally influenced a future Beatles song.
"This was the second time they had taken LSD, and George was having a tough time," Fonda tells Empire magazine. "David Crosby comes up to me, and I don’t know why Crosby thought I wasn’t loaded, but he said, 'You have to go down and help George.' Why am I the tour guide? I went down and I said, 'George, don’t worry about it. This is a drug that makes you feel like dying and your brain doesn’t want to do that, so it's trying to stop and that’s the conflict so just let it go and ease out.'
"Then I said, 'I know what it's like to be dead, because a month before I turned 11, I shot myself in the stomach by accident and I died three times on the operating table while my heart stopped, so I'm still here to tell you the story.' I was trying to tell George, 'Don’t worry about it, just let, let the drug take you down the trip.' And John was sitting right there, looking at me as I told George several times, 'It’s okay, George, I know what it’s like to be dead.'
"We didn't want to hear about that!" Lennon told Playboy . "We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and '60s, and this guy — who I really didn't know; he hadn't made Easy Rider or anything — kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, 'I know what it's like to be dead,' and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! And I used it for the song, but I changed it to 'she' instead of 'he'. It was scary. You know, a guy … when you're flying high and [ whispers ] 'I know what it's like to be dead, man.' I remembered the incident. Don't tell me about it! I don't want to know what it's like to be dead!" |
Cuckold
Offline
Activity: 1
Merit: 0
NewbieActivity: 1Merit: 0 "The DAO" and how I got to appreciate its outcome. June 18, 2016, 01:15:04 PM #1
Through time though, I got in terms with the idea that I'm probably going to lose everything; I even got to like it. Fueling a financial revolution ain't easy, just think of how many bitcoiners have lost money to date. We're all just doing our part on bringing society closer to a bank-free future. I have been a fan of Ethereum from a little earlier in this year. I was thoroughly amazed by the smart contract technology and infrastructure for DAOs. I put a significant sum of money I had saved up in ethereum when the price was around 14$/ETH. I watched it go up and down daily but never sold. When "The DAO" came out, at first I was skeptical, but the community's approach changed my mind. Everyone was saying that it was a no-risk investment so I put all my ETH in it and to be honest I still haven't pulled out. After finding out that it was attacked, I didn't know how to act. I saw the DAO/ETH trading price falling well below 1 ETH/100 DAO tokens (which was the price I bought in). I could have sold my tokens in panic in an attempt to minimize losses then but I'd still have lost around 40% of my principal, so I just waited to see if there would be better options. DAO tokens still trade well below their presale price and the notion of a hard fork to fix this keeps seeming more and more distant as per Vitalik Butterin's words Through time though, I got in terms with the idea that I'm probably going to lose everything; I even got to like it. Fueling a financial revolution ain't easy, just think of how many bitcoiners have lost money to date. We're all just doing our part on bringing society closer to a bank-free future. |
PHOENIX (Mar. 2, 2015) – Today, an important Arizona House Committee approved a bill that would create significant roadblocks for implementation of the Affordable Care Act, leaving the federal program without an enforcement mechanism in the state should it pass.
Introduced State Reps. Justin Olson and Rep. Vince Leach, House Bill 2643 (HB2643) would prohibit the state in various ways from “from using any personnel or financial resources to enforce, administer or cooperate with the Affordable Care Act.” The House Rules Committee passed it today by a vote of 5-2 with 2 members absent. The bill is now eligible for debate and vote by the full state House.
Most prominent in this list of prohibitions is a ban on “funding or aiding in the prosecution of any entity for a violation of the act.” This would prevent the Arizona Department of Insurance (DOI) from investigating or enforcing any violations of federally mandated health insurance requirements, something that will prove particularly problematic for the feds.
State insurance commissioners and departments serve as the enforcement arm for insurance regulation in the states. So, when people have issues with their mandated coverage, they will have to call the feds.
“Disputes over these mandates arise under federal, not state law,” said Mike Maharrey of the Tenth Amendment Center. “The federal Department of Health and Human Services cannot commandeer the Arizona Department of Insurance to force them or to investigate alleged violations if this bill passes. And because at present there is no federal health insurance agency and Congress is not likely to create one given the substantial opposition to Obamacare, they’ll just have to figure it out on their own.”
Should the IRS ever gain approval to start using liens to collect failure to pay penalties from people who refuse to sign up, they won’t be able to record them with any level any county clerks or the Secretary of State in Arizona. Without liens, the IRS is already going to have a difficult time collecting, and if they’re permanently blocked from using them in Arizona, that would represent a significant layer of protection for the people there.
HB2643 is a practical implementation of Proposition 122, a voter-approved amendment to the state constitution in 2014 that provides a mechanism for refusing state resources to federal programs.
Beyond the prohibition on the DOI, the bill also expressly prohibits the creation or operation of a health insurance exchange for the ACA. While former Governor Jan Brewer decided that the state wouldn’t create one, Maharrey said leaving such a big decision to the fate of a future Governor is precarious, at best.
“I don’t expect the new Governor to suddenly change course on an exchange, but you never know,” said Maharrey. “Republican Governors around the country have flip-flopped on Medicaid expansion and Common Core, so we can’t really trust them to do the right thing on this either. That’s why an express prohibition on creating an Obamacare exchange in Arizona is an additional protection for the people.”
Shifting the burden for health insurance exchanges to the feds helps overwhelm the implementation of Obamacare. Some analysts suggest that the feds only have the capacity to do so in 30-40 states over the long term, and any more than that will help collapse the system.
Additionally, the HB2643 would prohibit “funding or administering any program or provision of the act…that will result in any of the following:
Reducing the available insurance or provider choices
Increasing burdens on insurance providers or carriers.
Limiting the availability of self-funded health insurance programs
The reinsurance or other products traditionally used with self-funded health insurance programs.
LEGAL BASIS
Both Prop 122 and HB2643 are based on a long standing legal principle known as the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine. Over 170 years of Supreme Court precedent, dating from 1842, have supported the idea that states cannot be required to help the federal government implement or enforce their acts or regulatory programs.
The 1997 case, Printz v. US serves as the cornerstone. In it, Justice Scalia held:
The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.
As noted Georgetown Law Constitutional Scholar Randy Barnett has said, “This line of cases is… considered well settled.”
TAKE ACTION
In Arizona, follow all the steps to support this bill at THIS LINK
All Other states, take action against the ACA in your state at this link.
Michael Boldin [send him email] is the founder of the Tenth Amendment Center. He was raised in Milwaukee, WI, and currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on twitter – @michaelboldin and Facebook. http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com |
Think about the last time you were about to interview for a job, speak in front of an audience, or go on a first date. To quell your nerves, chances are you spent time preparing – reading up on the company, reviewing your slides, practicing your charming patter. People facing situations that induce anxiety typically take comfort in engaging in preparatory activities, inducing a feeling of being back in control and reducing uncertainty.
While a little extra preparation seems perfectly reasonable, people also engage in seemingly less logical behaviors in such situations. Here’s one person’s description from our research:
I pound my feet strongly on the ground several times, I take several deep breaths, and I "shake" my body to remove any negative energies. I do this often before going to work, going into meetings, and at the front door before entering my house after a long day.
While we wonder what this person’s co-workers and neighbors think of their shaky acquaintance, such rituals – the symbolic behaviors we perform before, during, and after meaningful event – are surprisingly ubiquitous, across culture and time. Rituals take an extraordinary array of shapes and forms. At times performed in communal or religious settings, at times performed in solitude; at times involving fixed, repeated sequences of actions, at other times not. People engage in rituals with the intention of achieving a wide set of desired outcomes, from reducing their anxiety to boosting their confidence, alleviating their grief to performing well in a competition – or even making it rain.
Recent research suggests that rituals may be more rational than they appear. Why? Because even simple rituals can be extremely effective. Rituals performed after experiencing losses – from loved ones to lotteries – do alleviate grief, and rituals performed before high-pressure tasks – like singing in public – do in fact reduce anxiety and increase people’s confidence. What’s more, rituals appear to benefit even people who claim not to believe that rituals work. While anthropologists have documented rituals across cultures, this earlier research has been primarily observational. Recently, a series of investigations by psychologists have revealed intriguing new results demonstrating that rituals can have a causal impact on people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Basketball superstar Michael Jordan wore his North Carolina shorts underneath his Chicago Bulls shorts in every game; Curtis Martin of the New York Jets reads Psalm 91 before every game. And Wade Boggs, former third baseman for the Boston Red Sox, woke up at the same time each day, ate chicken before each game, took exactly 117 ground balls in practice, took batting practice at 5:17, and ran sprints at 7:17. (Boggs also wrote the Hebrew word Chai (“living”) in the dirt before each at bat. Boggs was not Jewish.) Do rituals like these actually improve performance? In one recent experiment, people received either a “lucky golf ball” or an ordinary golf ball, and then performed a golf task; in another, people performed a motor dexterity task and were either asked to simply start the game or heard the researcher say “I’ll cross fingers for you” before starting the game. The superstitious rituals enhanced people’s confidence in their abilities, motivated greater effort – and improved subsequent performance. These findings are consistent with research in sport psychology demonstrating the performance benefits of pre-performance routines, from improving attention and execution to increasing emotional stability and confidence.
Humans feel uncertain and anxious in a host of situations beyond laboratory experiments and sports – like charting new terrain. In the late 1940s, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski lived among the inhabitants of islands in the South Pacific Ocean. When residents went fishing in the turbulent, shark-infested waters beyond the coral reef, they performed specific rituals to invoke magical powers for their safety and protection. When they fished in the calm waters of a lagoon, they treated the fishing trip as an ordinary event and did not perform any rituals. Malinowski suggested that people are more likely to turn to rituals when they face situations where the outcome is important and uncertain and beyond their control – as when sharks are present.
Rituals in the face of losses such as the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship (or loss of limb from shark bite) are ubiquitous. There is such a wide variety of known mourning rituals that they can even be contradictory: crying near the dying is viewed as disruptive by Tibetan Buddhists but as a sign of respect by Catholic Latinos; Hindu rituals encourage the removal of hair during mourning, while growing hair (in the form of a beard) is the preferred ritual for Jewish males.
People perform mourning rituals in an effort to alleviate their grief – but do they work? Our research suggests they do. In one of our experiments, we asked people to recall and write about the death of a loved one or the end of a close relationship. Some also wrote about a ritual they performed after experiencing the loss:
I used to play the song by Natalie Cole “I miss you like crazy” and cry every time I heard it and thought of my mom.
I looked for all the pictures we took together during the time we dated. I then destroyed them into small pieces (even the ones Ireally liked!), and then burnt them in the park where we firstkissed.
We found that people who wrote about engaging in a ritual reported feeling less grief than did those who only wrote about the loss.
We next examined the power of rituals in alleviating disappointment in a more mundane context: losing a lottery. We invited people into the laboratory and told them they would be part of a random drawing in which they could win $200 on the spot and leave without completing the study. To make the pain of losing even worse, we even asked them to think and write about all the ways they would use the money. After the random draw, the winner got to leave, and we divided the remaining “losers” into two groups. Some people were asked to engage in the following ritual:
Step 1. Draw how you currently feel on the piece of paper onyour desk for two minutes.
Step 2. Please sprinkle a pinch of salt on the paper with your drawing.
Step 3. Please tear up the piece of paper.
Step 4. Count up to ten in your head five times.
Other people simply engaged in a task (drawing how they felt) for the same amount of time. Finally, everyone answered questions about their level of grief, such as “I can’t help feeling angry and upset about the fact that I did not win the $200.” The results? Those who performed a ritual after losing in the lottery reported feeling less grief. Our results suggest that engaging in rituals mitigates grief caused by both life-changing losses (such as the death of a loved one) and more mundane ones (losing a lottery).
Rituals appear to be effective, but, given the wide variety of rituals documented by social scientists, do we know which types of rituals work best? In a recent study conducted in Brazil, researchers studied people who perform simpatias: formulaic rituals that are used for solving problems such as quitting smoking, curing asthma, and warding off bad luck. People perceive simpatias to be more effective depending on the number of steps involved, the repetition of procedures, and whether the steps are performed at a specified time. While more research is needed, these intriguing results suggest that the specific nature of rituals may be crucial in understanding when they work – and when they do not.
Despite the absence of a direct causal connection between the ritual and the desired outcome, performing rituals with the intention of producing a certain result appears to be sufficient for that result to come true. While some rituals are unlikely to be effective – knocking on wood will not bring rain – many everyday rituals make a lot of sense and are surprisingly effective.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas. |
Cecile Richards is trapped.
The president of Planned Parenthood, responsible for the lion’s share (40 percent) of America’s abortions, has had to personally respond to the undercover video released this week by the pro-life Center for Medical Progress. The video, for those still unknowing, shows Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s Senior Director of Medical Services, discussing donation of “fetal tissue” while out to a gourmet lunch with pro-life activists posing as buyers from a biomedical company.
Nucatola, an abortionist herself, describes how she and her fellow abortion practitioners at Planned Parenthood use what sounds like the legally banned partial-birth abortion procedure to collect and sell the intact body parts of aborted children, including hearts, lungs, liver, and heads.
Miming the opening and closing of forceps, Nucatola explains: “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
The video has prompted at least five states and the Congress to announce investigations into Planned Parenthood’s dealing in organ trafficking. Are their abortionists altering the procedure to yield a better harvest? Are Planned Parenthood affiliates making profits from the “specimens” they collect? Both are illegal under federal law.
Regardless of the outcome of the congressional and state probes, Richards’ terse video response to the scandal is revealing.
SIGN THE PETITION! Congress Must Investigate Planned Parenthood for Selling Aborted Baby Parts
Richards begins her defense with statistics, asserting that Planned Parenthood provides “cancer screenings, birth control, STD testing and treatment, and abortion.” According to their own most recent annual report, from 2013 to 2014, most of these services are in decline. Except, of course, abortion.
Planned Parenthood’s cancer prevention services are down 17 percent over the year, and even contraceptive services – Planned Parenthood’s supposed bread and butter – dropped by 4 percent. Richards completely fails to mention adoption referrals and prenatal care services. This suggests they are prepared, at long last, to end the charade and embrace the fact that abortions make up more than 90 percent of their pregnancy services (94 percent in 2013).
Not that America’s #1 abortion peddler was doing much business in these other areas to begin with: For every adoption referral in 2013, Planned Parenthood performed 174 abortions. In comparing the two most recent annual reports, while abortions rose, adoption referrals dropped 14 percent, and prenatal care services dropped 4 percent.
All facts and statistics aside however, Planned Parenthood still props itself up as a compassionate care provider and friend to women and girls across America. That pressure must be what pushed Richards to go so far as to then state: “In the video, one of our staff members speaks in a way that does not reflect that compassion. This is unacceptable and I personally apologize for the staff member’s tone and statements.”
She apologized. Cecile Richards apologized. She apologized for the tone one of her staff members (the billion-dollar-a-year organization’s chief of medicine) used.
Here’s the remarkable thing. If Planned Parenthood says its actions are perfectly legal, why bother apologizing for tone? Nucatola is only talking about tissue, after all. Products of conception. Clumps of cells.
SIGN THE PETITION! Congress Must De-Fund Planned Parenthood Immediately
Oh wait, those clumps of cells are actually small livers, hearts, kidneys, and brains.
This is the quandary which has led to some of the more interesting moves by abortion apologists in the last few years.
In 2013, Planned Parenthood released its “Not in Her Shoes,” video, as part of a failed campaign to label abortion as a nuanced, “complicated,” “personal choice.” “Don’t let the labels box you in. Have a different conversation. A conversation that doesn’t divide you but is based on mutual respect and empathy,” says the calming narrator. That’s a far cry from Obvious Child, the so-called “abortion-comedy” praised by Planned Parenthood last year. This desire to break down the “stigma” of abortion has driven many of the op-eds, videos, and sympathetic magazine spreads of women who portray their abortion stories as no big deal.
But Richards’ apology signals yet another change in course. She cannot hide behind the tired euphemisms of “choice” any longer and right now she knows it. Not in the face of a viral video featuring her own staff speaking with such brutal, shocking candidness. She is trapped and she knows it. Some truths are just too big to stick behind a pretty phrase. |
Judge Patricia Millett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit led the 6-3 ruling Tuesday that an undocumented teenager has the right to an abortion. (Photo: ap)
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court reversed itself Tuesday and ruled that the Trump administration cannot prevent an undocumented teenage girl from getting an abortion.
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 6-3 that the 17-year-old girl, identified as Jane Doe and represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, does not need to secure a sponsor or leave the country in order to end her pregnancy.
All six judges in the majority were named to the court by Democratic presidents, while those dissenting were Republicans' nominees. Similarly, the three-judge panel that sided with the government last Friday was tilted 2-1 in favor of Republicans.
"Today’s decision rights a grave constitutional wrong by the government," Judge Patricia Millett, who had dissented from Friday's decision, wrote. "Remember, we are talking about a child here. A child who is alone in a foreign land. A child who, after her arrival here in a search for safety and after the government took her into custody, learned that she is pregnant."
The three-judge panel had sought a compromise by giving the Department of Health and Human Services until Oct. 31 to find a sponsor for the girl, who crossed the border into Texas last month and is nearly 16 weeks pregnant. That would facilitate the abortion without involving the government.
Justice Department lawyers had argued in federal district and appeals courts that the girl could return to her home in Central America for an abortion. But the ACLU argued that would deny her the chance to remain in the United States, and that finding a sponsor could take too long.
Millett, one of four judges named to the powerful appeals court by President Barack Obama, based her dissent last week on Supreme Court precedents from 1992 and 2016 that blocked governments from placing an "undue burden" in the way of a chosen abortion.
"The government may not put substantial and unjustified obstacles in the way of a woman’s exercise of her right to an abortion pre-viability," Millett said Tuesday. "The government, however, has identified no constitutiona ally sufficient justification for asserting a veto right over J.D. and Texas law."
Judge Brett Kavanaugh, viewed as near the top of President Trump's short list for the next Supreme Court vacancy, dissented along with two other Republican presidents' nominees. He cited the high court's precedents, under which he said "the government has permissible permissible interests in favoring fetal life, protecting the best interests of a minor, and refraining from facilitating abortion."
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2gGiAQc |
For more than three decades evolutionary psychologists have advanced a simple theory of human sexuality: because men invest less reproductive effort in sperm than women do in eggs, men's and women's brains have been shaped differently by evolution. As a result, men are eager for sex whereas women are relatively choosy. But a steady stream of recent evidence suggests this paradigm could be in need of a makeover.
"The science is now getting to a point where there is good data to question some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology," says social psychologist Wendy Wood of the University of Southern California (U.S.C.).
The eager males–choosy females paradigm doesn't imply that men and women literally make conscious decisions about how much effort they should put into short- and long-term mating relative to their costs of reproduction—minutes versus months. Instead the idea is that during human history, men and women who happened to have the right biochemical makeup to be easy and choosy, respectively, would leave more offspring than their counterparts.
In 1993 psychologists David Buss and David Schmitt, then at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, used that idea to generate a series of predictions about men's and women's sexual behavior. As part of their study, Buss and Schmitt surveyed college students about their desire for short- and long-term mates (that is, one-night stands versus marriage partners), their ideal number of mates, how long they would have to know someone before being willing to have sex, and what standards a one-night stand would have to meet. In all categories the men opted for more sex than the women.
Although the study has been cited some 1,200 times, according to Google Scholar, there were "huge gaps from what I'm used to as a scientist," says Lynn Carol Miller of U.S.C. Miller says that in order to evaluate the relative proportion of mating effort devoted to short- and long-term mating in the two sexes, the proper method is to use a scale such as time or money, which has the same interval between units, not the seven-point rating scale that Buss and Schmitt used.
In a study to be published in the journal Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, Miller and her colleagues carried out their own version of Buss and Schmitt's work, asking how much time and money college students spent in a typical week pursuing short-, intermediate- or long-term relationships. The proportion of mating effort dedicated to short-term mating was the same for men and women. Similarly, both men and women showed an equivalent tendency to lower their standards for sex partners, and men did not report feeling constrained to have far fewer sexual partners than they truly desired.
"I'd certainly accepted the idea that men pursue purely sexual relationships with greater fervor than women do," says Paul Eastwick of the Texas A&M University in College Station. "This is the first time I've seen data that makes me think, 'Hmm, I wonder if that sex difference isn't so robust.'" Miller says the results are to be expected if paternal investment boosted the survival rate of offspring during our species' 200,000-year history. If both sexes invest in their offspring's survival, she says, they should both show similar mating adaptations.
As a corollary to male eagerness for sex, men are also supposed to be bothered more by sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, because men have a vested interest in making sure their offspring are their own and not another man's. Surveys have indeed found that in the U.S. and several other industrialized countries more men than women express greater concern with sexual infidelity than with emotional infidelity (falling in love with someone else). But another recent study suggests jealousy patterns could have something to do with glitches in people's ability to form secure relationships.
Psychologists Kenneth Levy and Kristen Kelly of The Pennsylvania State University surveyed 416 undergraduates to see which type of jealousy bothered them more. They also assessed the students' so-called attachment styles. Previous studies had found that more men than women have what's called a "dismissing avoidant" style in relationships, meaning they tend to deny their emotions and their need for the other person.
When Levy and Kelly broke down their jealousy results by attachment style, they found that men and women who had secure attachment styles were both more likely to view emotional infidelity as more upsetting than a sexual affair. Men with the dismissing style were more bothered by sexual infidelity, but women who manifested this style were also, although the effect was more pronounced in the males.
Levy says attachment styles are largely determined by early experiences with caregivers—usually mom and dad. To explain why more men than women exhibit the dismissive style, he says, "we would have to hypothesize that men are more likely to be raised in such a way that would promote dismissive attachment."
Beyond simply poking holes in the standard evolutionary psychology narrative, researchers have another paradigm ready to put in its place: U.S.C.'s Wood and Alice Eagly of Northwestern University propose that men and women adapt their outlooks to fit their society's division of labor between the sexes, which results from physical differences in size, strength and mobility (during pregnancy).
In a 2009 study Eagly, along with Eastwick and another colleague asked college students of both sexes to imagine themselves as either a future homemaker or provider. Students who imagined being homemakers rated their anticipated spouse's provider qualities as more important than that spouse's homemaker qualities. The finding fits with data indicating that women and men who earn more are more likely to get married, suggesting they make more attractive partners.
"In more equal actual roles, men and women have more similar mate preferences," Eagly says. "In very different marital roles that confine women to a domestic role, men and women choose differently."
The evidence, however, does not move Buss, now at the University of Texas at Austin. He calls Eagly and Wood's theory "bizarre" for positing that "natural selection has shaped sex differences in male and female bodies, but not in male and female brains and the psychological adaptations those brains contain."
In Wood's view the traditional evolutionary psychology paradigm was attractive because it explained the pattern of sex differences people saw around them in a way that made those differences seem natural. It assumed that men and women have always interacted in the way they do now. "We would say that men and women have evolved to act in a lot of different ways," Wood says. "We're the ultimate flexible species." |
Keystone XL Pipeline, Meet Oklahoma Earthquakes
February 15th, 2016 by Tina Casey
How hot is Oklahoma? Another round of three earthquakes struck near the towns of Fairview and Mooreland last week. These registered just under the benchmark of 3.0 magnitude, which is considered to the level at which most people feel them, but that’s just a taste. So far this year alone, more than 90 earthquakes of 3.0 or greater have hit the state.
Keystone XL Rises From The Ashes
To clarify, the overall Keystone project is already partly completed. One leg goes from Canada to Cushing, the TransCanada company’s Keystone Pipeline. A southern leg of Keystone pipeline also recently went into operation. The new leg, Keystone XL, would add a second route from Alberta, through the Bakken fields in the US, and down to a hub in Nebraska.
President Obama formally put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline last fall, declaring that it was not in the national interest. The Obama Administration’s position is that the cross-border project requires federal permit approval under a 1968 executive order. Here’s the explanation from the State Department:
To issue a permit, the Department must find that the border facility would serve the national interest. The Department consults extensively with relevant federal, state, and local agencies, and invites public comment in arriving at this determination.
That was not the end of the story. Last month Keystone XL owner TransCanada took the U.S. government to court, arguing that the President had overstepped his constitutional authority:
This case presents the question whether the Constitution grants the President unilateral power, unsupported by any statute and contrary to the expressed wishes of Congress, to prohibit the further development of the Keystone XL Pipeline on the basis that the pipeline would cross a U.S. border and would, if permitted to proceed, undercut the President’s influence in international climate change negotiations.
Keystone XL And The National Interest
So, there’s still a possibility that the Keystone XL pipeline could be built.
That brings us to the situation in Oklahoma. Aside from being a major oil and gas producer, Oklahoma has also become a hotspot for disposing of the copious amounts of wastewater involved in the drilling method known as fracking, short for hydrofracturing.
As the “hockey puck” graph above illustrates, Oklahoma has become the epicenter of a surge in seismic activity in the US, and evidence is piling up that that the increase is related to fracking waste disposal (and, to a much lesser extent, fracking itself).
Back in 2011 our sister site Planetsave noted that the Keystone route through Oklahoma was compromised by the increased earthquake activity. Fast forward to last spring, and the UK’s Independent raised the alarm specifically over the potential impact of increased activity on the Cushing hub as a whole.
Last fall Bloomberg added fuel to the fire by drawing the national security connection to seismic activity near Cushing. Reporter Matthew Phillips made the point that little has been done to address earthquake hazards in the region, compared to the response after the deadly 9/11 terrorist attacks:
In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, as U.S. security officials assessed the top targets for potential terrorist attacks, the small town of Cushing, Okla., received special attention. Even though it is home to fewer than 10,000 people, Cushing is the largest commercial oil storage hub in North America, second only in size to the U.S. government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
[snip]
The FBI, state and local law enforcement and emergency officials, and the energy companies that own the tanks formed a group called the Safety Alliance of Cushing. Soon, guards took up posts along the perimeter of storage facilities and newly installed cameras kept constant surveillance. References to the giant tanks and pipelines were removed from the Cushing Chamber of Commerce website. In 2004, the Safety Alliance simulated a series of emergencies: an explosion, a fire, a hostage situation.
Interestingly, the Safety Alliance staged a major tornado drill in May 2013, but so far it has been slow to react to the potential for seismic activity to affect storage tanks and pipelines in the area (if you’ve heard otherwise, drop us a note in the comment thread).
Earthquakes And Known Unknowns
There’s a good reason why the reaction to fracking related earthquake hazards has been so slow: very little is known about human-induced seismic activity. The last US Geological Survey report on US seismic hazards was issued in 2014, and in accordance with normal practice it did not include human-caused earthquakes.
USGS has actually been attempting to quantify and analyze induced activity for a number of year, and in April 2015 it issued a preliminary seismic hazard report that underscored the challenges. Here’s a snippet from the abstract for the August 2015 update:
Forecasting the seismic hazard from induced earthquakes is fundamentally different from forecasting the seismic hazard for natural, tectonic earthquakes. This is because the spatio-temporal patterns of induced earthquakes are reliant on economic forces and public policy decisions regarding extraction and injection of fluids. As such, the rates of induced earthquakes are inherently variable and nonstationary…
The full preliminary report incorporates workshop discussions with industry representatives and other stakeholders. It contains this further explication of the knowledge gap (see pages 36 and 38):
It is clear that the established, 6-year update schedule for the NSHM [National Seismic Hazard Model] is not ideal to address induced seismicity. Annual or even more frequent updates of the hazard model and other products could account for rapid changes in induced seismicity…
[snip]
Participants at the workshop requested advice regarding reasonable guidelines for when to shut down and when to restart injection. This is a difficult problem because it is unknown why induced seismicity o ccurs near some fluid injection wells and not at others; in some cases seismicity tracks injection, and in other cases seismicity lags…
The report concludes with this thought (see page 43):
Modeling induced seismicity in probabilistic seismic hazard analysis is very difficult, since we do not understand some of the fundamental differences between natural and induced earthquakes, and because the seismic activity can change based on changes in human activity. P redict ing when and where induced seismicity will occur in the future is challenging…
…In Oklahoma, activity rates have varied exponentially, and earthquakes have migrated several tens of kilometers over a year or two. These changes may be related to oil and gas exploration activity but they also may depend on physical processes, which are poorly understood…
So…stay tuned as the Keystone XL case winds through court. In the meantime, since last summer state authorities in Oklahoma have begun to take preemptive action by placing limits on fracking wastewater disposal, but given the activity this year it could be too little, too late.
Follow me on Twitter and Google+.
Image (screenshot): via USGS. |
Marvel is opening up its massive vault of digital comics for only 99 cents this week to coincide with San Diego Comic-Con. A subscription to Marvel Unlimited — which offers immediate access to over 13,000 comics — normally runs $9.99 per month or $69 if you pay for an entire year up front. But Wired reports that for this week only, paying just under a buck will get you a month's worth of unfettered access to Marvel's universe. There are some limitations; you can store a maximum of 12 comics on a device for reading offline, and there's usually a wait of several months before new issues reach the service. (Marvel isn't trying to put your local comic book shop out of business, after all.)
But there are also perks that come with reading on a screen instead of paper, including original, made-for-digital stories. So if you're headed to experience the Comic-Con madness in San Diego, this could make for a great way to brush up on your superhero expertise — and there's been some huge news lately.
Update July 23rd, 4:40 PM: The article originally stated that Marvel Unlimited is only available inside the US. In fact, it is available internationally. Only the Marvel Unlimited Plus service is limited to the United States. Sorry for any confusion! |
Free Comic Book Day is Coming May 6!
Posted on: May 2, 2017 | Category: News
Would you like a free comic book? Get your favorite at the 16th annual Free Comic Book Day event on Saturday, May 6. Just show your valid Hawaii State Public Library System card at 24 designated libraries statewide and receive a special free comic book, while supplies last.
Choose from titles such as Guardians of the Galaxy #1, DC Super Hero Girls, Doctor Who, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess/Ocarina of Time, TokyoPop Disney Descendants, and more! Comic book selections will vary by library. Don’t have a library card? No worries! You can apply for one at your local library.
“Our public libraries are really excited to be a part of Free Comic Book Day this year,” said State Librarian Stacey Aldrich. “Comic books inspire us with not only amazing characters and stories but art that ignites our imagination.”
See costumed characters from the Pacific Outpost of the 501st Imperial Legion, Rebel Legion Hawaii, and Costumers Guild of Hawaii at selected libraries. Bring your camera for photo ops with your favorite intergalactic heroes and villains. Visit www.librarieshawaii.org or call the hosting libraries for appearance times and more information.
Participating public libraries include: Oahu – Aiea, Aina Haina, Hawaii Kai, Kailua, Kalihi-Palama, Kapolei, Liliha, Manoa, McCully-Moiliili, Mililani, Salt Lake-Moanalua, Waikiki-Kapahulu, Waimanalalo, Waipahu and Wahiawa; Maui – Kahului, Kihei, Lahaina, Makawao; Hawaii Island – Hilo, Kailua-Kona, Thelma Parker; Kauai – Princeville; Lanai – Lanai Library booth at Saturday Market in Dole Park, 8 am – 10 am.
Free Comic Book Day (www.freecomicbookday.com) is celebrated worldwide on the first Saturday in May and participating libraries and comic book shops have given away millions of free comic books over the past 15 years. Mahalo nui loa to the Friends of the Library of Hawaii, Gecko Books & Comics and Collector Maniacs for sponsoring this year’s event. |
Last Fall in 2015, I interviewed with Amazon Web Services for a senior web developer position and was eventually offered a job with one of the AWS teams. Interviewing with a massive tech firm like Amazon was a significantly different experience than with any other company I’ve interviewed with, and I want to talk about how it all went down. How the interviews were structured, what all was discussed, what questions were asked – all the way down to getting flown out to onsite interviews and eventually getting the offer. As I was going through the interview process, I read posts on several forums by people who went through the same thing – and they were helpful, but they never got very deep. Not much of it applied to me, and it would have really helped me to feel more comfortable throughout the process if I could have found a true documented experience by someone who had gone through this before. This is my chance to make that happen for you, the future developer interviewing at a global tech firm. Spoiler alert – I did not accept the position, even after the entire interview process. We’ll get to why I made that decision, but first let’s start from the top.
Interview Structure
You can break my particular interview process up into a few segments – and that’s how I’m going to talk about them:
Phase 1 – Getting Recruited
Phase 2 – First Phone Interview
Phase 3 – Second Phone Interview
Phase 4 – Onsite Interviews in Seattle, WA
Phase 5 – The Offer
As far as my research went, this is more or less the same process that most developers went through who interviewed with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. However, I read a few stories of developers having 3 phone interviews instead of 2, so your mileage may vary. I’ve bored you with enough of this meta-information – let’s get to the meat of the process.
Phase 1 – Getting Recruited
As a developer, I get hit up a lot by tech recruiters either through email or LinkedIn, and honestly I tend to ignore most of them or – if the recruiter sent a half-way decent message – respond politely, declining their request. However, one day in August of 2015, I received a message by a recruiter – but not a normal 3rd-party tech recruiter like I normally see. This was a recruiter working at Amazon Web Services, specifically searching for a Senior Web Developer with one of the AWS teams. From the very beginning, I took it very lightly. I responded saying that working for Amazon would be awesome, but for me and Layla to move up to Seattle would require a 170-200k salary. I assumed this recruiter would take a look at that number, scoff, and politely end our conversation – but she affirmed that they could work with that, and asked if I wanted to set up a phone interview.
I was pretty shocked – but I told her I’d bite. I’ll play along for now. After all, how many times do you get to interview with one of the most influential companies in the world?
Over the next week, I emailed with this recruiter and her hiring manager to complete some basic paperwork and to schedule a date and time for my first phone interview with AWS.
Phase 2 – First Phone Interview
My first phone interview was scheduled at an exact time (2pm) with the manager of the service that I was interviewing for – so basically my intended future boss. I remember I spent the whole day looking up common interview questions for programming, and watching a lengthy video series over data structures so that I knew the time and space complexity differences over iterating between arrays, hashes, binary trees, etc. A few minutes after 2pm on a Friday, I received a call from the manager – we’ll call him Bob (not his real name). All in all, the phone interview lasted about 1 hour and 10 minutes – and it really wasn’t technical at all. No coding, no super-deep programming questions. Initially, the phone call seemed a little bit “bureaucratic” in the sense that I had to verify that I was expecting this call and made sure I had allotted a full hour to speak – but it quickly became very relaxed.
Bob started off with just asking about my general skill-set, and told me a little bit about what the position entailed. After about 20 minutes, we segued into other questions. He asked me if I could explain a single-page app, what MVC was, and he asked me a time when I disagreed with my manager. I hate those types of situational questions – but it wasn’t too bad. We spent about 20 minutes talking about that one question. After that, we just made some small talk about weather, what Bob does, the fact that it was Friday and he was taking it easy, etc. The last 20 minutes were really chill, just 2 people talking. Neither of us were bothered by the fact that the interview had gone about 10 minutes late.
Before we got off the phone, I asked for Bob’s email address (with the intention of sending a thank you email later in the day). I was told that I would hear back within the next week about whether I made it to the next interview. This part was pretty crazy to me, because it wasn’t even a full hour before I heard back from the Amazon hiring manager saying that I had passed the interview and they wanted to schedule another phone interview with someone else to assess my coding abilities. This next interview was scheduled for the following Thursday, this time at 3pm.
Phase 3 – Second Phone Interview
Unlike the first phone interview where I had no idea what it was going to be like, I knew ahead of time that this interview was going to involve me coding for an hour. I was given a link for a service called CollabEdit where I would code inside of a text area and the interviewer – let’s call him Jim – would be able to see in real-time what I was coding.
Jim called promptly at 3pm, and told me a little bit about himself. He was also a manager, but in no way related to Bob or Bob’s team. Jim was someone who I would never work with, and was strictly there to assess my coding skills. He told me he had 4-5 questions for us to get through, but if we only got through a few, then that would be fine. The emphasis was on him assessing me, and not necessarily completing the questions.
For about 45 minutes, I coded with him on the phone. I had a bluetooth headset and mic while I was coding, which I highly recommend anyone else do. I couldn’t have done this with my phone held up to my ear by my shoulder. We spent the entire 45 minutes on one question. Just one. And it was about client-side javascript. The single question was about how would I find all HTML elements on a page by class. Within the first line, I started with a simple jQuery selector – which he said worked. But then he slowly started giving me constraints. How would you do this without jQuery? How would you do this with multiple classes? Can you use a wildcard selector? etc. We spent the whole time on that one question; it was actually pretty fun – we both got really into it. My biggest tip here for anyone in this same position is to talk about what you’re thinking. Jim’s just a man on the phone who can see what I’m coding – but he doesn’t know what’s going on inside my head, so I need to help him with that as much as I can.
Towards the end of the hour, Jim stopped the coding session and asked if I had any questions for him. We then talked for a minute, and he told me something similar to what Bob said – that I would hear back within the next week, but this time, instead of another code interview, the next step would be an onsite interview. He did tell me that he’d had good interviews and bad interviews in the past, and he felt good about this one. This interview was on a Thursday, and I heard back the following Tuesday evening that I had passed onto the next (final) round of interviews.
I was going to Seattle.
Phase 4 – Onsite Interviews in Seattle
I got the email that I had made it to the next stage of interviews, and was asked what dates would be best for me to fly to Seattle for the interviews. This email exchange took place on September 9, and the dates matched up for me to interview in Seattle on October 12. Once the date was set, I was given the information of an Amazon travel agent (run by another company) to call and schedule airline times and whether I was staying 1 or 2 nights. My interview was on a Monday, and I was offered to fly up on Saturday and stay two nights – but I opted to fly up on that Sunday, and then fly right back to OKC directly after my interviews on the Monday. Just a 1 night stay. This is all paid for by Amazon, by the way. I didn’t have to give a credit card number at any point in time.
Once October 11th came, I flew to Seattle and stayed at Hotel Ändra in downtown Seattle. To get around, Amazon told me I could take a cab, Uber, public transportation – anything, and they would reimburse me up to $100/day for food and travel combined. I took the Light Rail directly from the airport to downtown Seattle for $3. Talk about a deal. For dinner, I just got room service. Eating dinner out alone is just … lonely.
My interviews were scheduled to start at 9:45 am on Monday, and were to finish at 2pm. I woke up early, got breakfast by the sea, and explored Pike Place while it was opening up for the day. Definitely a neat experience. From there, I just walked to the interview building.
Amazon encouraged me to dress casually, but I still dressed business-casual (button up, dress pants, no tie). Throughout the day there were 5 back-to-back interviews, each one-on-one. All coding was done on a white board. No electronics involved at all (except for the interviewer taking notes). Here’s the breakdown of my interviews:
Initial interview with a team member I’d be working with. 50% discussion, 50% coding.
2nd interview with a developer on another team. 20% discusion, 80% coding. This coding session involved more “traditional” coding interview questions. The main question was about how to build a circularly linked list, and how would I add a method to delete a node and have the linked list still be circular. I started answering this in C, but after my knowledge failed me, I just moved to ruby, which was significantly easier for me. The interviewer was cool with it, even though he didn’t know ruby.
3rd interview with a developer on another team – strictly to assess my personal skills. These were the “fun” situational questions (mixed in with some personal experience questions). 100% discussion, no coding.
4th interview with Bob – the manager of the team. This was over lunch which he paid for. It was mostly casual talking, but he asked me some technical questions as we were eating.
5th interview with a developer on another team. 20% discussion, 80% coding. This was a very front-end oriented interview. All code involved web development topics, HTML, CSS, and Javascript. One question was how an interaction with a JSON API is different from standard HTML, leading up to how single page apps work – so I basically drew a simple diagram of the request process for a single page app. The main coding question was how would you build a slider (like the ones you see on every page). I stumbled on this at first – as it seemed like a crazy interview question, but I took it one step at a time, i.e. a slider is just a wrapper element with child elements. The CSS should just position them absolutely next to one another. Clicking arrows should just issue JS to shift positions of those divs.
After my final interview, I had just over 2 hours until my plane took off (I wanted to get back home as early as possible). I booked it to the Light Rail station, spent another $3 to get to the airport, hustled through security and made it minutes before my boarding time.
If you go through an interview process like this, here’s a big note: don’t bring checked luggage. You’re staying for a very short time, try to keep everything carry-on. Checked luggage will just be a pain to deal with.
Phase 5 – The Offer
Back in OKC, it was either the next day or the day after that I got a call from Amazon’s HR department. I was told that Bob liked me and they had an offer for me. I won’t get too specific, but it was in the low 6 figures (plus a bonus) – definitely not the 170-200k the initial recruiter told me they could do. Restricted stock units (RSUs) were a part of their overall benefits, and made up about 2k of salary for the first year. They made up a little more after the second year, and would have maximized by year 4. In total, it probably would add up to 40k of stock after 4 years – which isn’t a petty amount. Regardless of salary, I was honestly pretty shocked that I had gotten an offer, and told the HR person that I would get back to them within a week after I discussed this with my family.
This is probably terrible to say, but everything was a game to me up until this point. I never in a million years thought I could get picked up by Amazon – but here it was, the opportunity. We spent that whole weekend deciding what we wanted to do – but in the end, we made the decision not to take the offer.
Relocation cost wasn’t an issue – Amazon pays for all of that, and goes above and beyond to make sure you assimilate to Seattle well. The other benefits that Amazon offered were pretty stellar too, but there were two big reasons holding us back:
Cost of living. Here in OKC, we have super cheap cost of living. In Seattle, we would be paying twice our current house payment for a mid-level downtown one-bedroom apartment, and 2.5 – 3 times our house payment for a two-bedroom. Houses were pretty much out of the question – anything comparable to what we had here that was near downtown Seattle was anywhere from 600k – over 1 million dollars. Sure – the offer I got from Amazon was twice what I made here in OKC at the time, but that was still just too much for us.
Family. This was the big deal. We never really thought about leaving family – until we were forced to. We just couldn’t do it. We have parents, friends, siblings, and nieces all within a few miles that we see just about every week, and we just didn’t want to give that up.
It was difficult, and I did wonder for a few days or so if we had made the right choice – but I’m positive we made the right decision to deny the offer. I explained the whole situation to the HR person I was working with, and he was very kind about it and congratulated me on getting the offer nonetheless. For me, this was truly the opportunity of a lifetime, and I’m so thankful that Amazon was awesome enough to let me have it.
Final Thoughts
I’m sure some of you out there would kill me for not taking the opportunity to work at Amazon – but I promise you, we made the right choice for us. We belong here for now, and going through this process showed me that big time. Plus, with the OKC developer community really growing within the last couple of years, I’m not sure I ever want to leave now. We’re rooted, and I’m happy about that.
Thanks for all of this, Amazon. |
Firefox's broad support for plug-ins and extensions has always been a major feature of the browser, particularly back in the days of IE6. The the browser's enduring popularity has finally caught the eye of malware authors, as a trojan is now targeting Firefox specifically
BitDefender has identified this new bit of holiday cheer as Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.A" (the ChromeInject suffix refers to the Chrome component of Firefox). The trojan installs itself into Firefox's add-on directory, registers itself as Greasemonkey, and begins searching your hard drive for passwords, login details, your World of WarCraft account information, and your library card number.
Please note, this trojan is not actually the Greasemonkey add-on, and only identifies itself as such. Mozilla has confirmed that the official Greasemonkey release contained within Mozilla's own extension repository (and available here) is malware-free. If you're currently using Greasemonkey or are interested in doing so, there's no reason to avoid the legitimate add-on at this time, so long as you download it from Mozilla's page or an equally trusted source.
Once installed, the trojan is capable of identifying over 100 web sites. When an infected user visits a site the trojan recognizes, the parasite comes to life and records the login/password details being transmitted. Presumably it then goes back to sleep, quietly keeping an eye on further system activity.
It's not clear if the trojan is visible as an installed add-on from within the browser, or how it interacts with the real Webmonkey, if that extension is installed. The attack vector is also vague. At the moment, BitDefender believes users are catching the trojan through one of the normal approaches—opening attachments, allowing ActiveX or JavaScript to execute in an unsafe way, or downloading malware-ridden "codecs" in order to catch a sneak preview of 2 Girls 1 Cup 2 Fast 2 Furious. BitDefender has already updated its own AV suite to detect and remove the new trojan; other malware vendors will undoubtedly do the same within the next few days. |
Two players for the LSU Tigers will likely not be seen in purple and gold again after it was reported they are no longer enrolled with the university for the spring semester.
Originally reported by Ross Dellenger at The Advocate, Cornerback Rashard Robinson and Fullback Melvin Jones are no longer members of the Tigers. LSU fans will be the most familiar with Robinson who started 6 games for the Tigers at Cornerback during the 2014 season.
Both players have been struggling academically and their loss can be solely attributed to this fact. Robinson has been in an indefinite suspension since the 10th game for his academic troubles, and Jones did not travel with the team to take part in the Music City Bowl. Head Coach Les Miles listed his status and future as “not certain” on Friday.
Head Coach Les Miles listed Jones’ status and future as “not certain” on Friday.
The 6’3, 177 lb Robinson tallied 16 tackles and 1 pass deflection during the 2014 football season.
Jones, a 6’2 and 258 lb fullback, was handed the ball 4 times for 12 yards while also catching 5 passes for 22 yards and a touchdown.
Robinson saw a total of 8 games and was paired with Tre’Davious White. Many college football analysts saw this duo as one of the best in the nation back in August. Still, all of that potential has been washed away due to problems in the classroom for the talented young defensive back.
“Wouldn’t expect you to see him in the short term,” Miles told reporters, per the Baton Rouge Advocate. “There’s a responsibility he has to this team that has been forgone.” That was the statement Miles made about Robinson back in November. Now, it seems we won’t see him in the long term either.
The Tigers do have players in the waiting who could still potentially provide the long term impact that they hoped Robinson could give. Kevin Toliver II is the number 2 recruit in the nation at the corner spot will be a Tiger and has enrolled early. Xavier Lewis of East St. John is also a player than many expect to join the Tiger team during the summer.
LSU also has some options coming back to the secondary. White will be returning next season as well as Jalen Mills, a senior, who has opted to stay in school instead of entering the NFL draft. While he started the 2014 season at safety he does have the ability to play corner. Several other names will be returning as well.
As for the Tigers losing Jones at fullback, LSU has the top recruit nationally in David Ducre. It is never good to see young athletes struggling academically, but education comes first while these players are still in college.
LSU hasn’t had much of a problem finding and developing quality talent on both sides of the ball as their NFL draft records speak for themselves. We at the Believer wish the best for Robinson and Jones in their future endeavors. |
358 SHARES Share Tweet Share Share Print Send
This list contains titles, links of proof, quotes from the links, and commentary from Reddit
These are just SOME of the thousands of leaks exposing Hillary Clinton’s corruption, and mainly comprise of the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, as well as a few other sources (FBI docs, DNC leaks, etc.)
So much cover-up, media collusion, and pay for play proof was not included, because this list would reach 1,000 if I included them all.
89. Hillary finds out more debate questions https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12427
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/21526#efmAJiAOE
“We have gotten intel that Neil Cavuto plans to ask a veterans question of the GOP candidates tonight. As you can guess, the candidates are very likely to attack the Secretary in their answers. Your press team, therefore, may find it useful to get this to reporters”
“Flagging that Bob B. heard that they could ask about carbon tax and late-term abortion restrictions. Solow and I are pulling debate book materials & running abortion answer by Jen & Rachel ahead of 3pm.” Clinton campaign is getting questions in advance AGAIN for debates. Previously they got a debate question from Donna Brazile. This time it is John Podesta that gets the email from Jon Soltz who somehow learned of a question Cavuto will ask in an upcoming Republican debate. Podesta immediately blasts this out to the whole campaign so they prepare for the fallout. 90. Hillary wants “successful business people” running for office because “they cannot be bought” https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/11011
“You know, I would like to see more successful business people run for office. I really would like to see that because I do think, you know, you don’t have to have $30 billion, but you have a certain level of freedom. And there’s that memorable phrase from a former member of the Senate: ‘You can be maybe rented but never bought.’ And I think it’s important to have people with those experiences.” Admitting Trump can’t be bought. He has proven that over and over again, while Hillary (as discovered in these leaks) is nothing more than a greedy horsefly mindlessly heading towards the money zapper. 91. “We are finishing up the next round of TV scripts” https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/2801 Unclear if it is Hillary who will be scripted or if the MSM will be scripted. I’m thinking both, as has been proven in the leaks above many times. 92. Hillary doesn’t write her own tweets, despite claiming “-H” means she does https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1862
https://twitter.com/hillaryclinton/status/588513047653801984 (the tweet)
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/5479 It took 8 hours for over 10 of Hillary Clinton’s staffers to respond to a single tweet by Marco Rubio, which highlights the campaign’s struggle to cover up Hillary’s lack of accomplishments. The email shows the fake persona.
In the 3rd link, John Podesta receives Hillary’s tweets for approval a few days in advance of the tweets going online. Together with previous leaks, it looks like Hillary doesn’t have much input into any of “her” tweets. They are put together by a group of staffers. 93. On Hillary: “we just keep giving her poll-tested lines that don’t work” https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/10305 Probably because she can’t deliver the lines without sounding completely insincere. 94. Hillary extremely weak on topic of standing up to Wall Street https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/5512
“I believe we started out the campaign about 20 points behind Sanders in Iowa on the question of who would best stand up to Wall Street and that was when we were about 40 points ahead. If you want to make the question of the campaign, who will best stand up to Wall Street, Sanders is the answer and he’ll give you $35 million reasons why.” Not even her own campaign staff believes she is credible on Wall Street. Even though she told Wall St. to cut it out… 95. “Even a clown like Ted Cruz” could beat her https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/2170
“she has huge endemic political weaknesses that she would be wise to rectify…..even a clown like Ted Cruz would be an even money bet to beat and this scares the hell of out me…..” “WHY AM I NOT FIFTY POINTS AHEAD!?????” Side-note, imagine listening to that for 4 years…/shudders. 96. ‘The Huffington Post’ colluding with Hillary https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/5988
“I am committed to make sure she is elected as the next President of United States. I am reaching out to my friends to raise money for her campaign. Please let me know if I can be of any service to you.”
No doubt the entirety of Huffington Post is in it for Hillary when they display their “disclaimer” (“Donald Trump is a racist, sexist, homophobe Hitler” or something along these lines) under every “article.” The author of this email once an “article” on Huffington Post that Trump was “a sorcerer and a wizard”. Yes… Huffington Post published this. That’s why no one takes The Huffington Post seriously, certainly not as a legitimate news source. 97. Clinton campaign memorizing their email cover-up script https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1822
“Feel free to circulate these. We’ve been circulating this on background as an aide, and the additional points below on deep background.” This email shows all the talking points her team needs to learn as they will be questioned on her crimes soon. The notes in here are filled with complete lies however. 98. Heavy press collusion over Cuba and Hillary’s health https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/11277
“The print stories on Cuba will largely be pre-written in the morning based on excerpts that we are providing tonight (Dan has gotten HRC signoff on them already for this purpose). The reporters will do some tiddying up of the stories as the speech is delivered/completed, but they will largely be filed as she goes on.” Blatant. Media. Collusion. 99. Employment rate – They confirm what Trump says https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/11304
“Today in America we have economically disappeared, they don’t score in jobs numbers or jobless claims numbers, they are a lost generation within the larger generation, Obama never talks about them because he wants to claim credit for the economy.” Admitting that the economic numbers they feed the public don’t reflect reality.
Economic opportunity is always the #1 issue; Carville was right about this. Instead of addressing it head on, HRC and team prefer to bury it deeper with tabloid smears. 100. Obama picked people in his administration from the suggestion list of CiTi bank advisor/Wall St shill https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15560
“Barack – Following up on your conversations with John over the weekend, attached are two documents: A list of African American, Latino and Asian American candidates, divided between Cabinet/Deputy and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant Sectetary levels, as well as lists of senior Native Americans, Arab/Muslim Americans and Disabled Americans. We have longer lists, but these are candidates whose names have been recommended by a number of sources for senior level jobs in a potential Administration.” Froman was a Citigroup Managing director until 2009. He’s now championing the TPP as US trade rep.
We look forward to seeing what leaks come out next as we draw closer to election day on November 8th 2016.
SOURCE |
The fundamental goal of typography is to make text easy and enjoyable to read. Typography has its own set of rules and guidelines. From there, we bend the rules to prioritize how to make the text easier to read.
Treating text as an interface is as much about usability as it is enjoyment and ease. It is the writer’s responsibility to make content compelling and interesting and the typography’s responsibility to make the act of reading feel effortless and enjoyable.
Our blog’s interface is text. The goals of that interface are to:
reduce mental effort when reading and deciding what to read.
simplify the information on screen to increase its usability.
re-use patterns to minimize learning.
provide feedback to the user to give them confidence in their actions.
create an enjoyable experience.
In The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst describes typography as a system based on “the structure and scale of the human body,” particularly the eye, hand, forearm, and of course, the mind.
Just as Bringhurst applies the idea of designing with human behavior and physical attributes in mind, we see that practice equally applied in software and hardware design. Typography should take a form that is natural and beneficial for people to interact with.
After making some updates to our blog, it was interesting to see that many of the considerations made in typographic changes are similar to the considerations we make when designing software.
Here’s a screenshot of the updated designs:
The changes we’ve made are centered around one of the jobs-to-be-done by the blog, which is to provide interesting information to the reader. Because of this, one of our goals is to present concise information in a way that allows the reader to make quick and informed assessments of what they’d like to read.
The header elements (our logo and the blog title) have been grouped to stand out from the list of articles. This makes the page easier to scan for content. The title of an article is now emphasized over the date to present the most important information first. This also allows the link to get to the article to be front and center.
To help the reader create accurate groupings of information, we increased the white space around each article listing and added simple borders to enclose the information related to each article. This prevents the information from bleeding together and causing confusion.
To the individual articles, we decreased the line length of the paragraphs and added more distinct styles to the heading tags to emphasize hierarchy.
Using line length as an example, let’s look more closely at the the impact of typography on user experience. Bringhurst advises that:
45 to 75 characters is widely regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size.
In this blog, we are living on the edge at 85 characters per line, but it seems to feel right.
Since English is read from left to right, the eye travels along three pathways:
from the left to the right
down to the next line
left to the beginning of the new line
The goal is to reduce eye strain by keeping the eye from travelling too far to the right to reach the end of the line. This also means the eye does not have far to travel to get back to the beginning of the next line.
In the end, one of the primary intentions of typography is to make the act of reading text comfortable and understandable.
The easier it is for a user to read our text, the more engaged they will be with the content and the more value they will gain from it.
In an evaluation of how people read online Slate found that we are conforming to new reading and comprehension patterns as we are reading more and more on a screen and consuming information in a web format.
Adding a more detailed hierarchy addresses our skimming tendencies. Separating chunks of content with a more emphasized hierarchy of headings and subheadings creates footholds for a reader to grab on to. This also helps to inform navigation through the content and where to focus more attention.
Good typography has the potential to draw people in to the content. By creating an effortless reading environment, we can combat the habit of skimming. In contrast to consuming the content more quickly, we may want the reader to slow down and enable them to fully engage with a piece. Overall, the reader may view fewer pages on a site, but they will spend more time with the content they choose to consume.
The existence of the field of typography is a display of human affection and regard for communication. Beyond getting more visitors on a website, more engagement from users, or more credibility through smart font choices, typography is an expression of how we, as people, value communication and discourse. |
New discipline for TORNADO ROX rosters: Overwatch
We are pleased to announce that we are opening the new TORNADO ROX game roster in the discipline of Overwatch. This team shooter has an incredible popularity all over the world: a few eSports organizations had signed their teams even before the game entered the closed beta stage, and, as the game was released, none but the famous football club Manchester United stated its intention to acquire some Overwatch squad.
For three months since the day when the game was released it got to the top positions in the charts of popularity among the players and even managed to get ahead of League of Legends in PC-bangs of South Korea, where LoL was holding the first place for few years already.
Six players which will now be representing TORNADO ROX was previously playing under the tag of Prets. They drew attention to themselves with their victories on the online tournaments, as they won King of the Watch for 3 times and Lenovo Summer for 2 times. They also made it into top 9-12 of Europe on the European stage to Atlantic Showdown — one of the world's biggest international tournaments.
TORNADO ROX Overwatch roster:
Maxim «Clozz» Khurkunov (captain)
Role: tank
Pavel «BuHorpaduHa» Trifonov
Role: flex (a player which picks hero accordingly the situation: it may be either a second tank, a third DPS, or a third support)
Ilya «Nlaaer» Koppalov
Role: DPS
Andrey «Engh» Sholokhov
Role: DPS
Denis «Tonic» Rulev
Role: support
Stas «Mistakes» Danilov
Role: support
Andrey «Engh» Sholokhov:
«We are very excited to work with TORNADO ROX. Our motivation to practice even harder raised significantly with this move. I hope that we will justify their trust and will show the maximum of our capabilities, achieving the better results.»
Aleksey «KoZRoG» Kunshin, acting eSports director: |
Transit heads are investigating why a routine test drive went sideways this week when a driver lost control of an OC Transpo bus, which ended up flipped in a ditch.
Emergency services responded to the bus crash Monday morning on Russell Road near Ramsayville Road.
Only the driver was on the conventional 40-foot bus, since it was apparently out on a test run during some maintenance. The bus was temporarily in possession of Eastway, a company contracted to do the work.
The bus ended up resting on its right side in the grassy ditch off a soft bend in Russell, just before the stop sign at Ramsayville.
The driver wasn’t hurt.
Troy Charter, Transpo’s director of transit operations, said the department is looking into why the crash happened
What Transpo knows so far is that the bus was out for maintenance and no Transpo staff were involved in the crash.
“Just like our mechanics, when they do repairs on a vehicle they have to take it out on a test drive,” Charter said Wednesday. “We have to investigate what actually happened.”
Transpo hasn’t calculated the cost of any damage, but it will be the contractor’s responsibility to pay for anything that’s broken.
“They’ll have to be on the hook for that themselves,” Charter said.
Charter explained that, although it tries to keep its work in-house, Transpo uses external contractors for some specialized work or maintenance work during peak periods.
The contractor has a maintenance facility not far from where the crash happened.
Eastway should be no stranger to the Transpo fleet. The two organizations did plenty of maintenance-related business in 2016, according to records of Transpo purchase orders.
Fortunately, Eastway specializes in collision repair.
Post media left messages with Eastway on Wednesday to find out what happened on the road that day. No one returned the calls.
[email protected]
twitter.com/JonathanWilling |
We care more about how chickens and cows have been treated than we do about the people who cook and serve our food
Getty Images
Our growing, conscientious food culture has put a priority on eating all things sustainable, local, organic and free-range. Though most foodies would never step foot in a McDonald’s, they would happily eat at a farm-to-table restaurant where food is sourced according to the highest standards.
And yet, here’s the unspoken hypocrisy. We give more thought to how the chickens and cows on our plate have been treated than we do about the people who cook and serve our food. Restaurant workers hold six of the 10 lowest-paying occupations in the U.S., earning less, on average, than farm workers and domestic workers. Just 20% of restaurant jobs pay a living wage, and women, people of color and immigrants are often barred from getting these living-wage positions.
It is “the chasm between American food values and business practices,” writes Saru Jayaraman, founder of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and author of the new book Behind the Kitchen Door.
(MORE: Can We Drink Soda Responsibly?)
The restaurant industry can’t blame the recession: it’s one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy, with annual job-growth rate of 3.4% in 2012, double the growth rate of overall U.S. employment. At the same time, the federal minimum wage for tipped workers has remained at $2.13 an hour for more than 20 years. In 2010, the median wage for restaurant workers was $9.02 an hour, including tips, which amounts to a wage below the federal poverty line for a family of four.
Jayaraman cites examples of rampant exploitation and discrimination. Light-skinned employees are regularly hired and promoted above darker-skinned employees, even when the latter may have more experience and knowledge of the menu and serving customers. Abusive labor practices also prevent restaurant workers from benefits such as sick days, which subsequently poses a serious public-health threat. In 2011, the CDC reported that almost 12% of restaurant workers said that they worked while suffering from flu symptoms, vomiting, or diarrhea on two or more shifts in the last year. Not surprisingly, the CDC also cited restaurants as the third most frequent setting for outbreaks of foodborne illness (after cruise ships and long-term care facilities).
(MORE: What’s Your Wheat Problem?)
Jayaraman puts the onus on the public, the government and the newly formed organization RAISE (Restaurants Advancing Industry Standards in Employment) to raise awareness of these labor issues. “The regular National Restaurant Association represents the voice of big business and not the voice of the employees,” Jayaraman says. “I’ve received hundreds of emails from restaurant owners, Washington lobbyists and people all over the country saying we didn’t know this and we’re outraged.” But in an industry that has become so high-profile, one also wonders why more celebrity chefs aren’t as outspoken about improving these conditions as they are about protecting the nation’s palate. Jayaraman has cited Tom Colicchio, who pays sick days and overtime, encourages promotion and offers English classes to workers, as an exemplary employer for the industry. Colicchio operates 25 restaurants across four states in the Craft and ‘Wichcraft groups and is ultimately responsible for some 400 employees, but that’s only a fraction of the 13 million restaurant workers in the United States.
“I don’t pay my workers a fair rate for press,” Colicchio says. “We treat our staff fairly because it’s the right thing to do.” Perhaps we need a new kind of reality TV cook-off: Top Chef, the Fair Labor Edition.
MORE: Can We Drink Soda Responsibly? |
Samsung may have been forced to recall the Note 7, but that doesn’t mean the company is just going to roll over and let the explosion memes kill it. There are other products coming down the line, like TVs, smartwatches, and the inevitable Galaxy S8. According to a leak over the weekend, there might also be a sweet Chromebook in Samsung’s future.
If the leak, first reported by SamMobile, is true, the Samsung Chromebook Pro would be another in the growing list of Chromebook 2-in-1s with 360-hinges. Where most Chromebooks have garbage displays, the 13-inch Chromebook Pro supposedly sports a 2400 x 1600 resolution touchscreen display. That puts it more in line with quality Chromebooks like Google’s own super-expensive Pixel devices from the past couple of years.
Advertisement
According to the leak, the Samsung Chromebook Pro, would be half-an-inch thick, weigh 2.38 pounds, and comes with a stylus...in case you miss the one you returned with your Note 7.
Processor power rarely matters for Chromebooks, but the Chromebook Pro’s guts are plenty beefy anyways. It supposedly has a six-core Rockchip processor capable of 4K content playback. The leaked specs suggest the device has 4GB of RAM, 32GB of local storage, and, up to 10 hours of battery life.
Advertisement
The Samsung Chromebook Pro hasn’t been officially announced, obviously, but it was briefly listed on Adorama’s website for $500. That’s a little pricey for a Chromebook, but this one looks cool enough that it could be worth it.
We’ve reached out to Samsung for more details and will update if we hear back.
[SamMobile via AndroidPolice] |
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe. Credit: Reuters
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe has called for mandatory drug testing to be introduced into work places across the UK, in an effort to curb demand for illegal substances.
Speaking to the all-party parliamentary group on cannabis and children, he said drug testing and the fear of losing their job would act as a deterrent for many, according to the Daily Mail.
"It seems to me we have got to plant in people’s minds something to affect the demand as well as supply. You can think of many occupations where if you were working with a colleague you would want to be sure in fact that they were drug free.’
Sir Hogan-Howe said "all occupations" should be tested, but stipulated the particular need for teachers, intensive care nurses and transport staff to be drug-free. |
Yankees 2B Robinson Cano will become a free-agent at the end of the season. (Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images) Yankees 2B Robinson Cano will become a free-agent at the end of the season. (Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images)
It looks like the New York Yankees are done giving out 10-year contracts.
Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano reportedly was seeking a 10-year deal worth $300 million when he becomes a free-agent this offseason.
But the Yankees brass said that Cano is still a marquee player but are not prepared to offer Cano a contract that substantial, especially after giving third baseman Alex Rodriguez a 10-year, $275 million deal six years ago.
"I don't feel this organization is ready to do something like that," Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner said on ESPN Radio. "No, I do not."
"We'll see. I know that is a number that is out there now. We'll see if he gets it, how much he wants to be in New York. But, again, I can promise it is going to be a very, very solid offer that we do make because we are going to try. We are going to try the best we can to keep him."
JAFFE: On anniversary of Don Larsen’s perfect game, where does it rank all-time?
The 30-year old Cano hit. 314 with 27 home runs with 107 RBIs this season, and it's clear that the Yankees want to re-sign him.
"I'm optimistic and I know that we are going to make him a very, very good offer," Steinbrenner said. "Is anybody an absolute must-to-sign? No. And that's nothing against Robby. [It's] just not reasonable to assume that about anybody. We are going to do what we can. We've certainly conveyed to Robby we want him back and we want him to be a career Yankee. We'll just have to see what transpires here." |
Share. Where is the Batman? Where is the Batman?
Is history repeating itself? Beware the Batman fans are getting nervous after Cartoon Network made the abrupt decision to pull the animated series from the schedule. Originally, a new episode was slated to air this coming Saturday, but not only is that not occuring, but they aren't airing a repeat of Beware the Batman - instead, two episodes of Teen Titans Go! will air in the DC Nation one-hour programming block. The @NickandMore Twitter account first noted the change.
We checked with Cartoon Network and were told, "Currently, Beware the Batman is no longer on our air. DC Nation will continue on Saturday mornings at 10/9c with new exclusive shorts and a full hour of encore episodes of Teen Titans Go!" For now, no explanation has been given for why Beware has been pulled, though it's likely that the ratings for the show are the cold, hard issue. Beware the Batman is not nearly as successful as Teen Titans Go! and is not performing as strongly as the previous Batman series, Batman: The Brave and the Bold.
Exit Theatre Mode
It was a year ago this month that Cartoon Network abruptly pulled new episodes of Young Justice and Green Lantern: The Animated Series from their schedule. While the shows would eventually air all the completed episodes, that was it for them, with both being cancelled.
So when will Beware the Batman return? The voice of Batman on the series, Anthony Ruivivar, tweeted that the series would return in January, however, that hasn't been confirmed by Cartoon Network as yet.
Beware the Batman has aired 11 of its 26 episode first season order, so there is still plenty more to see. |
Militants from the Islamic State (IS) group carried out a mass killing of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers captured when the extremists overran a military base north of Baghdad in June, a leading international watchdog has said.
The incident at Camp Speicher, an air base that previously served as a US military facility, was one of the worst atrocities perpetrated by IS in its lightning offensive that seized large swaths of northern and western Iraq.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), new evidence indicates IS fighters killed between 560 and 770 men captured at Camp Speicher, near the city of Tikrit – a figure several times higher than what was initially reported.
“These are horrific and massive abuses, atrocities by the Islamic State, and on a scale that clearly rises to the crimes against humanity,” Fred Abrahams, special HRW adviser, told reporters in the northern city of Irbil.
The al Qaida-breakaway claimed in mid-June that it had “executed” about 1,700 soldiers and military personnel from Camp Speicher. The group also posted graphic photos that appeared to show its gunmen massacring scores of Iraqi soldiers after loading the captives onto flatbed trucks and then forcing them to lie face-down in a shallow ditch, their arms tied behind their backs.
The grisly images, meant to sap the morale of Iraqi security forces, and the number of slain troops could not be confirmed at the time. HRW said in late June that analysis of photos and satellite images showed that between 160 and 190 men were killed in at least two locations between June 11 and 14.
After the incident, the soldiers were listed as missing, prompting their families to stage demonstrations in Baghdad in an effort to pressure authorities for word on their sons’ fate.
Yesterday, dozens of angry family members stormed into the parliament in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone after scuffling with security guards, causing commotion and arguing with lawmakers.
They also forced the speaker to call a session today on the missing soldiers.
The HRW statement said the revised figure for the slain soldiers was based on analysis of new satellite imagery, militant videos and a survivor’s account that confirmed the existence of three more “mass execution sites”.
The number of victims may well be even higher as more evidence emerges, the New York-based watchdog said.
“Another piece of this gruesome puzzle has come into place, with many more executions now confirmed,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at HRW. “The barbarity of the Islamic State violates the law and grossly offends the conscience.”
Also today, the UN envoy in Iraq called for a public and independent investigation by Iraqi authorities into the fate of the missing soldiers and the recovery of the remains of those killed.
The investigation is needed “to locate and identify the remains of any who may have been killed, and to undertake all efforts to secure the release of any who may remain in captivity,” Nickolay Mladenov said.
In his weekly address to the nation, outgoing Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki said that a number of “perpetrators” of Camp Speicher atrocities have been arrested or killed and that “security forces were pursuing” others. Mr Maliki did not elaborate.
The onslaught by IS has stunned Iraq’s security forces and the military, which melted away and withdrew as the extremists advanced and captured key cities and towns. The militants also targeted Iraq’s indigenous religious minorities, including Christians and followers of the ancient Yazidi faith, forcing tens of thousands from their homes.
Since then, IS has carved out a self-styled caliphate in the large area straddling the Iraqi-Syrian border that it now controls.
In early August, the US launched airstrikes on the militant group in Iraq, in an effort to help Iraqi forces fight back against the growing militant threat.
Also this week, the United Nations’ top human rights body approved a request by Iraq to open an investigation into suspected crimes committed by the IS group against civilians.
Its aim would be to provide the Human Rights Council with evidence on atrocities committed in Iraq, which could be used as part of any international war crimes prosecution. |
Career Girls Murders Date August 28, 1963 ( ) Location New York City, New York Death(s) Emily Hoffert
Janice Wylie Suspect(s) George Whitmore Jr. Convicted Richard "Ricky" Robles
The "Career Girls Murders" was the name given by the media to the killings of Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie in their apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on August 28, 1963.[1] George Whitmore, Jr., was accused of this and other crimes but later cleared.[2]
The actions of the police department led Whitmore to be improperly accused of this and other crimes, including the murder of Minnie Edmonds and the attempted rape and assault of Elba Borrero. Whitmore was wrongfully incarcerated for 1,216 days — from his arrest on April 24, 1964, until his release on bond on July 13, 1966, and from the revocation of his bond on February 28, 1972 until his exoneration on April 10, 1973.[3] This was after what author T.J. English called, in his book The Savage City, "a numbing cycle of trials, convictions, convictions overturned, retrials, and appeals", Whitmore was cleared of all charges and set free.[citation needed] Whitmore's treatment by the authorities was cited as an example that led the U.S. Supreme Court to issue the guidelines known as the Miranda rights, with the Supreme Court calling Mr. Whitmore's case "the most conspicuous example" of police coercion in the country when it issued its 1966 ruling establishing a set of protections for suspects, including the right to remain silent, in Miranda v. Arizona.[4]
Crimes [ edit ]
On August 28, 1963, Patricia Tolles, 23, who worked at the book division at Time-Life, returned to her apartment on the third floor of 57 East 88th Street. There she found the apartment ransacked and covered in blood. The bodies of her roommates, Newsweek researcher Janice Wylie (aged 21) and schoolteacher Emily Hoffert (aged 23), were in one of the bedrooms. Both had been stabbed over 60 times with knives from their own kitchen and there was evidence that Wylie, who was wearing only a towel, had been sexually assaulted.[5][6][7]
The case was dubbed the "Career Girls Murders" by the media because Wylie, the daughter of an advertising executive and novelist Max Wylie and niece of novelist Philip Wylie,[8] and Hoffert were representative of the thousands of young women who had come from all over America to New York and other larger cities to seek jobs and careers. Others like them now felt unsafe and the police were under pressure to solve the case. Hundreds of detectives were assigned to the investigation and thousands of people were interviewed, but as the weeks went by no arrests were made.[9]
Investigation [ edit ]
Initially, police believed that the victims knew their killer. The level of violence found is usually an indication of a personal relationship with the victim.[5] There were no signs of forced entry and the apartment, which was on the third floor of a nine-story building, was also guarded by a doorman.[6][7] Though the apartment was in disarray, nothing appeared to be stolen so robbery was not believed to be a motive. The victims' hands and feet were bound and then they were tied back-to-back to each other while Wylie was nude and Hoffert was dressed. Two bloody 10- to 12-inch carving knives were found next to the bodies and an additional knife in one of the two bathrooms.[6][7]
Police theorized that the women were attacked and murdered in the bedroom where their bodies were discovered. They did not immediately release information regarding the rape of Wylie. In fact, they told the press that it did not appear that either had been raped, but allowed that an autopsy might reveal otherwise. They did say that the women had been slashed repeatedly in the neck and abdomen.[6][7] The focus on interviewing the people named in Wylie's green address book did not lead to identifying a suspect.[5] A $10,000 reward was established to aid in the apprehension of a culprit.[5]
Janice Wylie's father, Max Wylie, penned a book "Career Girl, Watch Your Step!", a year after the murders, warning career girls of safety and the need to be aware and "feel threatened" as a defence.[10]
Like Max Wylie, everyone initially believed that the attacks were against women who had careers, as both of the victims fit that profile. Women, specifically white women, were left to feel vulnerable despite their desire to gain freedom and independence through their careers.[10]
Many other handbooks, aimed at the safety of single women, were written as an aftermath and issued by local police departments and public safety departments. These handbooks mostly emphasized the importance of prevention of the attacks including having male protection and needing physical security.[10]
Wrong suspect [ edit ]
In April the following year, Elba Borrero identified George Whitmore, Jr., a nineteen-year-old day laborer, as the man who had attempted to rape her a few days prior.[11] Borrero would later acknowledge that Whitmore was the only suspect police had shown her.[5][12]
When Whitmore was arrested, it was found that he was in possession of a photo of a white blonde woman. Brooklyn detectives Joe DiPrima and Edward Bulger jumped to the conclusion that the blonde in the photo was Janice Wylie, although her family denied it.[11] The photo was that of Arlene Franco, a high school classmate of Whitmore, living in New Jersey, who had lost or discarded it in a park, where Whitmore found it and for some reason decided to keep it in his wallet.[3][5] Whitmore immediately became a suspect in Wylie and Hoffert double murder. Detectives DiPrima and Bulger proceeded to question Whitmore about the Wylie-Hoffert murders and after hours of leading questions Whitmore finally confessed.[11]
New York City police announced that Whitmore had confessed to the murders of Wylie and Hoffert, as well as the murder of Minnie Edmonds (an unrelated murder) and the attempted rape of Borrero. The NYPD announced Whitmore had given details of the Wylie-Hoffert killings which only the murderer could have known, but Manhattan prosecutors noticed that every detail in the Whitmore confession was known to the police beforehand.[12] Police stated he had drawn a detailed diagram of the apartment and had in his wallet a photo of Janice Wylie that had been stolen from the flat.[5][13][14]
Whitmore repudiated his confessions, claiming he had been beaten during the interrogations; that counsel had not been present; and that his request for a lie detector test had been denied.[13] Witnesses were located claiming Whitmore had been in Wildwood, New Jersey at the time of the Manhattan murders, watching a live TV broadcast speech of Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington, 159 miles away from the crime scene.[15] Despite Whitmore's discredited confession, New York County District Attorney Frank Hogan did not dismiss the indictment against him.[12]
New leads [ edit ]
On October 9, 1964, Nathan "Jimmy" Delaney (aged 35), a junkie and small-time dealer, was arrested for the murder of a rival drug dealer, Roberto Cruz del Valle. Facing the death penalty, Delaney offered to make a deal: in return for leniency, he would give police the name of the real "career girls" killer, and he claimed it was not Whitmore.
Delaney explained to police that on the day of the killings he had met an old acquaintance, Richard "Ricky" Robles, who had told him that he had committed the murders of Wylie and Hoffert. Robles, a 22-year-old burglar, had a long record of drug use and had been released from prison just two months prior to the murders. To support his habit, Robles needed anywhere from $30 to $50 per day.
Delaney told detectives that Robles had turned up at his apartment on the day of the killings demanding drugs while his hands and clothes were covered in blood. The shaken Robles told Delaney, “I just iced two dames.” His clothes had blood spatters on them; Delaney gave him a shirt and a pair of pants to change into. Delaney said he then went out to buy drugs with money Robles had given him.
Delaney and his wife, Marjorie, were wired with listening devices, which were also installed in their and Robles' apartments. Over time, Robles talked about details of the murders that convinced investigators he was the real killer; he was arrested and charged on January 26, 1965.[13]
Second arrest and conviction [ edit ]
In the autumn of 1965, Robles was tried for the Wylie-Hoffert murders. His attorneys attempted to buoy the credibility of Whitmore's Wylie-Hoffert confession to create a reasonable doubt that their own client had committed the crime. However, prosecutor John F. Keenan replied by summoning Whitmore and the detectives who had arrested him. Robles' attorneys were unable to translate doubts about police interrogation methods to their own client's advantage, despite testimony that Robles had confessed to the Wylie-Hoffert murders while suffering from heroin withdrawal and without his attorney present.[16]
Delaney testified that Robles told him the motive for the murders was because Hoffert told him that she could identify him to police.[17] It was pointed out by Robles' attorney that Delaney was given immunity in exchange for his testimony.[3]
On December 1, 1965, Robles was found guilty of the murders of Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie and sentenced to life in prison. Just months before, the New York Legislature had abolished the death penalty, except in the cases of the killing of police officers, prison guards, and murders committed while escaping jail.[3] He was found guilty, largely on the basis of secretly tape-recorded conversations about the murders. Despite the conviction of Robles, numerous questions regarding the police conduct, in this case, were left unanswered.
"Police detectives, who may have been motivated by their sense of justice, resorted to highly questionable means to extract a confession from a suspect who was too weak to resist. Their colossal blunders in the career girls murder case almost put George Whitmore Jr. on death row for a crime he certainly did not commit. No formal charges were ever brought against Detectives Bulger and DiPrima who consistently denied any wrongdoing in the case. But exactly how Whitmore was able to supply a 61-page confession to a double murder he never committed was never explained."[18]
Robles, who had himself publicly protested his innocence over the original double-murders, did not admit his guilt until a parole board hearing in November 1986. He admitted he had broken into the apartment to obtain money for drugs and had assumed at first it was empty. When Wylie, who had been taking a shower, appeared, he attacked and raped her. Hoffert had turned up shortly afterward and he attacked her as well. Defiantly, she told him that she would remember his face and report him to the police, whereupon he murdered both her and Wylie. The three-member panel rejected granting parole, citing "the nature of the crime". No charges were pressed against the police officers who had obtained Whitmore's "confessions".[18]
Legacy [ edit ]
The case of Whitmore and his treatment by the police was one of many examples used by the US Supreme Court when it issued the guidelines known as the Miranda rights in June 1966 by which, when a defendant is taken into custody and accused of a crime, he must be advised of his constitutional rights.[19] The court acknowledged that coercive interrogations could produce false confessions, and in a footnote stated: [t]he most conspicuous example occurred in New York in 1964 when a Negro of limited intelligence confessed to two brutal murders and a rape which he had not committed.
When this was discovered, the prosecutor[who?] was reported as saying: "Call it what you want — brain-washing, hypnosis, fright. The only thing I don't believe is that Whitmore was beaten."[20]
Janice Wylie's mother and sister, Isobel Wylie and Pamela Wylie Sullivan, respectively, both died within five years of the murders, the former from cancer. Max Wylie committed suicide by gunshot in 1975 in Fredericksburg, Virginia.[citation needed]
Whitmore made a life for himself in Wildwood, New Jersey. He successfully sued for false arrest and was awarded $500,000 from the City of New York. He operated a commercial fishing boat for a time, but he was later disabled in a boating accident. He blew through the award money, was unemployed for long stretches, and suffered from depression and alcoholism. Whitmore never married, and was the father of four daughters and two sons. George Whitmore Jr. died on October 8, 2012, in a nursing home of a heart attack. He was 68 years old.[21]
Richard Robles, known as New York State Inmate #66A0003, has been denied parole multiple times. While in jail, Robles taught fellow prisoners computer skills and also received an associate degree.[22]
In popular culture [ edit ]
The case served as the basis of the 1973 television movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders , which in turn served as a pilot for the crime drama series Kojak . [23]
, which in turn served as a pilot for the crime drama series . A 1973 novel titled The Killings , by Edgar-winning author Clark Howard, also fictionalized the case, changing the setting from NYC to Los Angeles. [ citation needed ]
, by Edgar-winning author Clark Howard, also fictionalized the case, changing the setting from NYC to Los Angeles. In a 2009 episode of Mad Men (season 3, episode 9, "Wee Small Hours"), two characters hear the beginning of a radio broadcast, in which the newscaster reports that the bodies of the victims, Wylie and Hoffert, had been found in their apartment. [24]
(season 3, episode 9, "Wee Small Hours"), two characters hear the beginning of a radio broadcast, in which the newscaster reports that the bodies of the victims, Wylie and Hoffert, had been found in their apartment. The case was revisited in 2013 in Investigation Discovery's series A Crime to Remember (Season 1, Episode 2, "The Career Girl Murders"). [5]
(Season 1, Episode 2, "The Career Girl Murders"). Robert Tanenbaum, prolific author of legal thrillers, and ex trial attorney, former mayor of Beverly Hills wrote novel "Echoes of my Soul" based on his own personal experience employed as a young lawyer in the Homicide Bureau. Mel Glass asked Tanenbaum to write the story of the career girls, and made available trial transcripts and other material to use in the book. The book is available from Amazon.[ citation needed ]
References [ edit ] |
Summary of findings This study is the first, to the knowledge of the authors, to investigate the effects of the neighbourhood food environment on bone mass in children from birth to 6 years of age. Our results showed that greater access to fast-food outlets within residential neighbourhoods was associated with lower BMC adjusted for bone area in infancy and remained robust after adjustment for confounding factors. There were no significant associations between fast-food outlet exposure and bone measures at 4 or 6 years of age. We also found that that greater access to healthy speciality stores within residential neighbourhood, such as greengrocers, farm shops and butchers, was associated with higher BMD at 4 and 6 years of age. Findings for BMC were similar after adjustment for bone area and confounding factors at 4 years, though attenuated after adjustment at 6 years. The direction and effect sizes of these relationships between bone growth measures and count of fast-food outlets and healthy speciality stores were largely consistent between children who had not moved neighbourhood since their mothers completed the initial survey and the total sample. There was little evidence that exposure to supermarkets within a child’s home neighbourhood related to their bone mass or density.
Comparison with previous research Previous research examining the effects of the local food environment on health has largely focused on weight or dietary outcomes. Research in Australia identified no association between fruit and vegetable intake of children and the number of greengrocers within 800 m radius of residential address [28]. Our study showed that a greater count of healthier specialty stores, such as greengrocers, farm shops and butchers, within residential neighbourhood was positively associated with child bone health. The Australian study also showed no relationship between supermarket accessibility in home neighbourhood and fruit and vegetable intake. Similarly, numbers of grocery stores per capita were not associated with changes in weight status of primary school children in the USA [29]. The lack of evidence for an effect of supermarket and grocery store accessibility on weight and dietary outcomes is consistent with the lack of an association between supermarket access and bone outcome measures in our study. The large variety of both healthy fresh produce and unhealthy processed food products on sale in supermarkets suggests that they can be classified as neither healthy nor unhealthy [1]. The healthy and unhealthy effects that supermarkets can have on dietary outcomes were illustrated in previous UK research which measured supermarket density per square kilometre within an 800-m radius of home [30]. The findings of that study showed that greater density of supermarkets was associated with higher vegetable consumption but also higher intakes of sweets, sugary drinks and white bread. More recent research in the UK examined the relationship between weight measures from the English National Child Monitoring Programme in relation to food outlet counts within Middle Super Output Areas (MSOA). MSOAs are similar to but larger than LSOAs and have a population density of approximately 7500 compared to 1500 of LSOAs. Findings showed that greater combined counts of greengrocers, butchers, supermarkets, cafes and restaurants were associated with lower rates of overweight and obesity in children aged 4 to 5 years [5], although this relationship was not significant among children aged 10 to 11 years. Greater exposure to fast-food outlets was, however, associated with increased prevalence of overweight and obesity among the older children, but the opposite relationship was observed for fast-food outlet exposure among the younger children. In the present study, we also found that the relationship between the local food environment and bone density differed across age groups. The strongest relationship between greater fast-food exposure and lower bone density was observed in infancy, whereas relationships between greater exposure to healthy specialty stores and bone density were seen at 4 and 6 years of age. There are a number of ways in which the neighbourhood food environment might influence bone development during childhood. Previous research has demonstrated that the quality of maternal diet during pregnancy is associated with childhood bone development such that children of mothers with better dietary quality have higher bone density at 9 years of age [15]. The findings of the current study suggest that, during the preconceptional period, poorer access to fast-food outlets and greater access to healthy specialty stores related to higher bone density at birth and during childhood. Thus, exposure to a more healthy food environment might optimise childhood bone development through its influence on maternal dietary quality. It is also possible that the local food environment contributes to dietary choices during childhood. A healthy diet during childhood, with adequate protein, calcium, vitamin D, fruits and vegetables, has a positive influence on bone health [13]. Mothers exposed to less healthy food environments might find it difficult to access healthy foods for their children and this in turn could lead to lead to less optimal bone development.
Strengths and limitations A strength of this study was the consideration of both healthy and less healthy types of food outlets, and the finding that these outlets have opposing associations on measures of bone growth. Another strength was the use of DXA which allowed detailed assessment of bone outcome measures. The sensitivity analysis comparing families that had moved home since the initial interview and the total sample demonstrated similar trends between groups. However, the small sample size of the group who had not moved neighbourhood was a drawback that meant that, although many of the effect sizes of these relationships appeared similar, they were not statistically significant. The use of LSOA boundaries as the area measure of residential neighbourhood is a limitation of this study. Administrative boundaries such as LSOAs and census tracts are unlikely to be entirely accurate in representing an individual’s unique spatial experience [31]. Uniform representation of environmental exposures is provided for individuals whether they reside near the centre or the boundary, and natural boundaries such as railway lines in adjacent units are not considered [32]. In addition, this study considered exposure to the neighbourhood food environment but did not have sufficient data to allow consideration of the influence of food outlets to which mothers and children may have been exposed during their daily activities such as when they are en route to school or childcare [33, 34, 35]. These limitations of using LSOA areas may have contributed to the large number of neighbourhoods within our study that had no supermarket, healthy specialty store or fast-food outlet. However, associations between food outlets access and bone health were observed in this study. Further research will use the SWS participant data to examine how food outlet density in buffer zones around school and home are associated with body composition in primary school-aged children. The body composition and food outlet data were collected at different time points, and it is possible that the spread of food outlets may have changed from the time the women and children were surveyed. This is a common consideration in food environment research [36] and was somewhat accounted for by considering the differences in exposure–outcome associations between children who had moved neighbourhood since the initial survey was completed and those who had not. We did not examine change in food environment exposures over time, and there is some evidence to suggest that food outlet locations do change [37].
Public health implications There has been an increased recognition that local authorities can take action to improve food environments and support their communities to make healthier food choices. For example, Public Health England in collaboration with the Local Government Association has released guidance encouraging local authorities to take action where appropriate to limit the number of fast food and takeaway outlets within their boundaries (especially near schools) [38]. Some local authorities have already taken action in this area by introducing planning laws to ban outlets selling hot takeaway food within 400 m of schools as well as putting general restrictions on the clustering of takeaways [39]. With public health responsibilities devolved to local authorities, there is real potential for more local authorities to align public health priorities with other internal sectors such as urban planning. The results of this study provide some evidence to support the introduction of zoning policies to increase the number of healthier speciality retailers within neighbourhoods and to decrease the number of fast-food chains and takeaway outlets. Financial constraints may hinder the introduction of such policies; therefore, further evidence from observational, intervention or natural experiment research could help to support more widespread action by local authorities [40]. |
To subscribe to Capitol Fax, click here. *** UPDATED x1 - ILGOP responds *** CTU may sue to block school funding reform law over tax credits Thursday, Aug 31, 2017 * The Chicago Teachers Union is considering some very risky legal options… If the union successfully challenged the tax credits, the entire school funding measure would be “invalid” under a provision lawmakers inserted into the legislation. That would include the new money authorized for CPS. Previously, an Illinois Appellate Court in 2001 upheld a state income tax credit of up to $500 for parents for paying “qualified educational expenses” that exceed $250 for the education of children in K-12 private schools. The credit was challenged based on the state constitution prohibiting government money for religious purposes, including a ban on spending to “aid” or “to help support or sustain any school” that is “controlled by any church or sectarian denomination.” In its 2001 ruling, the Appellate Court noted that a tax credit “does not constitute public funds” received by the government. Instead, “it merely allows people to keep more of their own money.” So, if the CTU does file a lawsuit and it’s successful (which seems doubtful, but whatever), then the entire evidence based model would be enjoined and $7 billion in state school funding would be halted. Over a $75 million pilot project. *** UPDATE *** ILGOP… “The Chicago Teachers Union has a long history of brinkmanship and intransigence, and their refusal to accept the bipartisan school funding compromise is no different. CTU’s opposition to a five-year, $75 million tax credit scholarship pilot program is not only unreasonable, it puts the education of millions of Illinois schoolchildren at risk. We implore them to try something different for a change - be reasonable and support compromise.” - Illinois Republican Party Spokesman Aaron DeGroot The Chicago Teacher’s Union is threatening legal action over the new evidence-based school funding formula that received bipartisan support just because it contains Illinois’ first-ever school choice pilot program. If successful, their latest temper tantrum would block Illinois schools from receiving over $7 billion dollars in state funding all in the name of brinkmanship and refusal to compromise. Democrat gubernatorial candidates are already jumping on board with Chicago Teachers Union in yet another example of Chicago Democrats kowtowing to CTU regardless of how unreasonable they’re position is. Daniel Biss and Pritzker-running mate Julianna Stratton actually voted against the school funding compromise, opting instead to protect the status quo and their own political interests. J.B. Pritzker himself has said he would’ve voted no, and Chris Kennedy’s campaign has even been fundraising on taking educational opportunities away from underprivileged kids. Once again, the Chicago Teachers Union says jump, and the Democrats ask ‘how high,’ all to the detriment of Illinois schoolchildren. * Related… * Bernard Schoenburg: Sen. Manar pushed school funding changes for years: But Manar had known of the problem for a much longer time. It was when he was in college, in the mid-1990s, he recalls, that he accompanied his mentor, the late state Sen. VINCE DEMUZIO, D-Carlinville, to hear a speech on the need for school funding changes from then-Gov. JIM EDGAR, a Republican. It was in 1997 that the last major revision to school funding in the state was passed, Manar said. - Posted by Rich Miller
46 Comments Sorry, comments for this post are now closed. |
By now most people know the immense value of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for determining an array of diseases or disorders of the body. Yet, for all its power, MRI is only as good as the physician reading the scans, and when used to determine cancer, the physicians are only as good as the chemicals employed to distinguish healthy tissue from cancerous tumors. Now, investigators at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) have developed a new MRI contrasting agent that not only pinpoints breast cancers at early stages but differentiates between aggressive and slow-growing types.
“Doing both will help doctors find the right treatment,” noted senior study investigator Zheng-Rong Lu, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering at CWRU. “There's no such technology available now that we know of.” Findings from the new study were published by Dr. Lu and his colleagues today in Nature Communications in an article entitled “Targeted Gadofullerene for Sensitive Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Risk-Stratification of Breast Cancer.”
The gadolinium-based agent is also more efficient and safer than traditionally used compounds, requiring a gadolinium dose 20 times smaller—which is easily flushed from the body, leaving no accumulation in tissues—the researchers found in tests with mouse models. At the low dosage, the agent lights up cancer biomarkers during scans, overcoming the low sensitivity of MRI's for imaging the markers.
To make the agent, the CWRU team combined commercially available tri-gadolinium nitride metallofullerene (Gd3N@C80), a highly efficient contrast agent, with a peptide-labeled ZD2, which was developed in Dr. Lu's laboratory. “But the key technology for our targeted contrast agent is the peptide attached,” Dr. Lu stated.
“A peptide-targeted tri-gadolinium nitride metallofullerene, ZD2-Gd3N@C80, is synthesised for sensitive molecular magnetic resonance imaging of extradomain-B fibronectin in aggressive tumours,” the authors wrote. “ZD2-Gd3N@C80 has superior r 1 and r 2 relaxivities of 223.8 and 344.7 mM−1 s−1 (1.5 T), respectively. It generates prominent contrast enhancement in aggressive MDA-MB-231 triple negative breast cancer in mice at a low dose (1.7 µmol kg−1, 1 T), but not in oestrogen receptor-positive MCF-7 tumours. Strong tumour contrast enhancement is consistently observed in other triple negative breast cancer models, but not in low-risk slow-growing tumours. The dose of the contrast agent for effective molecular MRI is only slightly lower than that of ZD2-Cy5.5 (0.5 µmol kg−1) in fluorescence imaging.”
The peptide specifically targets the cancer protein extradomain-B fibronectin (EDB-FN). EDB-FN, which is associated with tumor invasion, metastasis, and drug resistance, is highly expressed in the matrix around cancerous cells in many aggressive forms of human cancers. In testing on six mouse models, MRIs detected breast cancers in all cases. But the signal created by the accumulation of contrast molecules on three aggressive triple-negative breast cancers (MDA-MB-231, Hs578T, and BT549) was significantly brighter. Because slow-moving ER-positive breast cancers (MCF-7, ZR-75-1, and T47D) produce less EDB-FN, fewer molecules attached. While detectable, the signal was muted.
“These results demonstrate that high-sensitivity molecular magnetic resonance imaging with ZD2-Gd3N@C80 may provide accurate detection and risk-stratification of high-risk tumours for the precision healthcare of breast cancer,” the authors concluded. Dr. Lu's lab is now investigating ways to reduce the cost of producing the agent to make it more attractive for clinical use. |
Abbott, standing. | Dana Rubinstein After a 'finish line' comment on the Queens stadium, M.L.S. says there's 'a lot left to do'
Major League Soccer wants to build a stadium in Queens, and last week, Don Garber, the league's commissioner, said his team was "at the finish line" in his negotiations with the city.
The stadium, planned to be located in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, has elicited consternation from some community activists, which was exacerbated when Garber's "finish line" were, understandably, read literally by the media.
Story Continued Below
Here's Garber's quote, in full, from the AP:
There's a lot of work that needs to happen to finalize our agreement with New York City over our use of the land and our ability to lease that land to build a stadium. I do believe that we will resolve that shortly. I can't put any timetable on that, but we are at the finish line. Once we are there, we've got to go into a formal approval process that all developers have to go through in New York City. That will take some time. We need to reach an agreement with the city, with the local community and with the state of New York on replacing the land that we will be utilizing for the stadium.
In order for league's stadium plans to materialize, M.L.S. will have to reach an agreement with New York City and New York State regarding, among other things, how it's going to replace the up-to-13 acres of parkland the 25,000-seat stadium would occupy at the site of an old fountain in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
There will also presumably be discussions about stadium financing, parking, tax revenue, and park investment.
According to a recent Crain's article, the league's tentative deal with the city, which Abbott declined to confirm, includes "a 35-year, $1-a-year lease, with no sales taxes on construction materials, no property taxes and no revenue sharing with the city."
At a Monday night community meeting in Queens, Major League Soccer's president, Mark Abbott, sought to emphasize the parts of Garber's quote having to do with the amount of work that remains.
"What I would say is if you looked at the full quote, what commissioner Garber said is that there's a lot of discussions that we continue to have, so and that's the case as I said here today," said Abbott.
"How could you be at the finish line?" a reporter asked.
"Well, I think you have to read the quote," said Abbott. "So the quote says we have a number of other things that we need to do with the community, with the city, and so I think that speaks for itself, that's what he meant."
"What I would say is, we have a lot left to do," Abbott said. |
Many Indian startups have faced this dilemma at some point—stay home or head for the country top-ranked in “ease of doing business.”
Home, for what it’s worth, ranks 134th on that list, put out by the World Bank.
And so, many leave. In 2013:
Mobikon, a cloud-based customer engagement platform for restaurants moved its base to Singapore;
AdNear, a mobile-advertising company set up in Bangalore in 2009 and backed by Sequoia Capital, also moved its headquarters to Singapore;
Venture capital funding among tech firms in the city-state topped $1.7 billion; meanwhile, tech companies in India attracted about $507 million.
How to hang on? Here are a few things the Indian government needs to do to keep entrepreneurial talent:
Support equity investment and help access capital
The social crowdfunding site, Milaap, is headquartered in Singapore, even though all its operations are based in India. Explaining why, founder Sourabh Sharma says, “the fund-raising environment is much more encouraging for startups in Singapore. There is a lot more equity capital available in that country. Also, schemes by the government allow investors to take a lot more risks there.”
Indeed, Singapore offers government schemes to assist early stage startups. Under the National Framework for Innovation and Enterprise, the government could co-invest up to 85% of the capital in select startups being incubated at technology incubators for a value of up to S$500,000 (nearly US$400,000). Technology incubators pitch in the remaining 15%. The incubator can then buy out the stake held by the government after three years.
Another government-operated venture fund invests in startups by matching private investors dollar-for-dollar for up to S$1.5million. So-called angel investors were only recognized by the Securities and Exchange Board of India in its definition of venture capital funds last year. R. Ramaraj of Chennai Angels, also a senior adviser to Sequoia Capital in India, says the country needs to make it easier for startups to get venture debt without collateral from banks. “If an angel or VC has invested in a startup then banks should provide a certain amount of debt without collateral,” he says.
Cut the red tape
Sure, Singapore has fewer government procedures, but it also has less red tape and corruption. While the new Modi government has promised as much, startups are hoping the cleanup comes soon and helps cut down the time it takes to do business, particularly in cases where they have to interact with government agencies. The Indian government also has schemes to support small and medium enterprises, but a lack of information and long drawn-out procedures to qualify pose a challenge.
A little leeway on the duty
Singapore’s tax structure is considerably simpler than India. For its first three years, a startup in Singapore pays no tax on its first S$100,000 (US$80,000) of annual profits and pays only half the tax due on the next S$200,000 (US$160,000) annual profits. Corporate taxes for companies making profits of S$300,000 (US$240,000) and above, the overall tax rate is as low as 17% compared to 30% in India. Ramaraj also points out that Singapore has no capital gains tax making exits simpler for investors. “The government needs to incentivize investing in startups,” says Ramaraj. “There are a number of examples from around the world where tax incentives are given to investors that support young companies.”
Make it easier to actually start
On the ease of starting a business, Singapore ranks third while India ranks 179th. The World Bank report notes that it takes 27 days to start a business in India. In Singapore it takes two and a half days. Registering a business takes less than a day in Singapore. There are 12 procedures that need to be completed before one can start a business in India. In Singapore, there are three.
Make it easier on those who fail
It’s not as much the ease of starting up there as the difficulty in winding up a business in India that tempts Indian entrepreneurs, according to Ramaraj. “Startups in India find it very challenging to wind up a business here in case they fail,” he says. “They get stuck with a lot of processes and find it difficult to move on to the next business.”
Protect intellectual property
India has laws to protect intellectual property. Enforcement is another story. There is a general lack of respect for IP and delays in court proceedings to enforce laws that help IP owners. Enter Singapore—yet again. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2013-2014, Singapore has the best IP protection in Asia and second best in the world. India on the other hand ranks 71st on that list behind countries like Bhutan, China, and Sri Lanka.
Recognize social enterprises
Another advantage of being based in Singapore, Milaap’s Sharma says is a broader definition of business. “The Singapore government identifies social enterprises as a different category of companies. The Indian government identifies not-for-profit enterprises but not social enterprises separately in the Companies Act,” he says.
Indian social enterprises don’t access funds as easily as not-for-profit organizations, particularly in the case of corporate-social-responsibility grants and government grants to not-for-profits. Sharma says: “Many companies give discounted services to organizations that create a social impact, but since social enterprises are categorized together with other for-profit companies they don’t get that advantage, despite making a social impact.” |
Lea Gabrielle (born March 19, 1975) is an American journalist, who served in the United States Navy for twelve years as a combat naval aviator and intelligence officer. As a civilian, she worked as a journalist and correspondent for the Fox News Channel and as a general-assignment reporter for Shepard Smith Reporting. On February 7 2019 it was announced she would head up the U.S. Department of State's Global Engagement Center, tasked with countering propaganda from foreign actors such as Russia, China, North Korea, and ISIS.
Background [ edit ]
While attending Mount Vernon High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, Gabrielle was named a finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.[3][4] She is a 1997 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, earning a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering.[1] Entering the active-duty Navy after graduation, Gabrielle attended the U.S. Navy Flight School at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida from 1998 to 2000,[1] earning her Naval Aviator Wings. She is also qualified with an instrument rating and as a commercial pilot.[1]
She served in the United States Navy for twelve years and was a naval aviator of the single-seat F/A-18 "Hornet," with combat deployment from USS George Washington. Her call sign as a pilot was "Flower".[5] Additional duties were as a landing signal officer (LSO) and as a squadron public affairs officer.[1] She also served as an intelligence operations officer during Operation Enduring Freedom,[6] and while in Afghanistan she was embedded with a Navy SEAL unit conducting intelligence operations.[6] She was also a defense foreign liaison officer.[1]
Journalism career [ edit ]
After leaving the Navy, Gabrielle attended the New York Film Academy in 2009, receiving a digital journalism certificate.[1] She then worked for NBC News (2010-2011) in Washington, D.C.[7] where she shot, wrote, edited, and produced packages for NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, N websites, and web spots. As a digital journalist and editor (Avid), Gabrielle covered stories for the NBC Nightly News web page and nationwide NBC affiliates. She conducted interviews for White House and Political Correspondents and Nightly News (including the President, the first female governor in Afghanistan, and GOP Presidential nominees).[1]
In September 2011, Gabrielle moved to San Diego, California, and became a military reporter for KNSD-TV (NBC 7),[7] using her then-married name Lea Sutton.[8] She joined Fox News Channel in New York City in December 2013.[7]
References [ edit ]
Meet Lea Gabrielle, Fox News Correspondent and Aviation Expert |
From the Kansas City Fed: Tenth District Manufacturing Activity Strengthened Further
The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City released the March Manufacturing Survey today. According to Chad Wilkerson, vice president and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the survey revealed that Tenth District manufacturing activity strengthened further with strong expectations for future activity.
“Our composite index accelerated again, and has only been higher one time in the last 15 years,” said Wilkerson. “The future employment index was the strongest in the 23-year history of the survey."
...
The month-over-month composite index was 20 in March, its highest reading since March 2011, up from 14 in February and 9 in March. The composite index is an average of the production, new orders, employment, supplier delivery time, and raw materials inventory indexes. Activity in both durable and nondurable goods plants increased, particularly for metals, computer, electronic, and aircraft products. Most month-over-month indexes rose further in March. The production and shipments indexes increased considerably, while the new orders and order backlog indexes rose more moderately but remained high. The employment index moderated slightly from 17 to 13, and the new orders for exports index also eased. Both inventory indexes increased for the second straight month.
emphasis added
The Kansas City region was hit hard by the decline in oil prices, but activity is expanding solidly again. The regional Fed surveys released so far suggest another strong reading for the ISM manufacturing index for March. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.