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Early Thursday morning, Jimmy Flores, a father of five young girls, left the family's mobile home in Butte to start training for a new job as a school bus driver.
On the bus, he got an emergency call, said his brother, Armando Astorga. He needed to get home fast. The trailer was on fire.
All five girls were inside. Neighbors frantically tried to help. But the girls' parents and extended family would soon be crushed. The children perished in the blaze that consumed the home, according to Alaska State Troopers. The youngest was 3, the oldest, 12.
Astorga, who lives in Los Angeles, collected bits of the story in phone conversations with his brother, who is shattered by grief and despair and struggling to find a way through.
"It is too much," Astorga said in a phone interview Friday, his own voice cracking. "To bear the loss of a child is enough. To bear the loss of all your children, it's — it's a life-taker."
The trailer home on South Wickham Circle had problems with leaking gas and electricity, his brother told him. Flores reported problems to the landlord and some repairs were made, Astorga said his brother told him.
In the small mobile home park not far off the Old Glenn Highway, Aaron Wytaske and fiancee Whitney Wheeler woke to a neighbor's hysterical screams early Thursday.
Smoke and flames were pouring from the trailer next door — the Flores home.
"The kids are in there! The kids are in there!" yelled another neighbor, who lived on the other side of the Flores place.
It was before 7 a.m. Wytaske shouted for Wheeler to call 911. He said he ran to the burning trailer. Flames were engulfing it. He grabbed a stick and started bashing smoke-filled windows to get the girls out. He couldn't see or hear the girls. He shouted at them to crawl or jump.
But they didn't get out. By 7:15 a.m., the trailer was being consumed.
The state Fire Marshal's Office and Alaska State Troopers are investigating the fire. They haven't yet said how it started. Troopers also haven't publicly identified the girls. Astorga gave the names of his nieces as: Jaelynn Flores, 3, Sofia Flores, 6, Lilyanna Flores, 7, Nevaeh Flores, 8, and Alexis Quackenbush, 12.
A mother collapses
Flores had worked on an oil rig in Alaska but was laid off in the current downturn, Astorga said. He had been in and out of jobs trying to support the family, his brother said. On Thursday he was in training for a new job as a school bus driver for a contractor in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District.
"Everything was looking good. It was finally turning around," Astorga said.
Jen Biddinger, a spokeswoman for First Student Inc., operator of the school bus program in the Mat-Su, confirmed that Flores had just joined its driver training program.
"When he got word (to get home), he was on the bus training with a driver and a group of passenger kids," Astorga said. "He was in the middle of nowhere helping."
The girls' mother, Janelle Quackenbush, had been home with the girls but left for a brief spell, Astorga said. Their grandmother — Quackenbush's mother — had dropped off her car for Quackenbush since Flores had the family car, Astorga said. Quackenbush needed to run her mother home.
Quackenbush, who was working as a hairdresser, woke up the girls to get ready for school. She left the 12-year-old in charge while she dropped off their grandmother. She told the girls she'd be home in five minutes.
Crews from the Butte Fire Department and Palmer Search and Rescue rushed to the trailer.
When the first firefighters arrived, neighbor Wytaske stepped back.
Then Quackenbush pulled up to see her home on fire. She started screaming.
"She collapsed right there," Wytaske said, pointing to a nearby spot on the ground between their trailers. "She knew. She knew it was over."
Everything happened so fast. Thursday was surreal, a blur of grim and awful images. Firefighters prayed in a circle. Relatives and friends came and went, sobbing. Authorities brought the small bodies out of the burned wreckage in special bags.
The conversations have been hard. Astorga said his brother was so distraught it was like he was speaking in tongues. A neighbor saw him at the burned home early Friday morning, sobbing.
At the trailer later on Friday, water dripped from charred interior beams. Few exterior walls remained. A few pink bikes lay on the ground near what had been the front door.
The parents lost their belongings too. Fundraising to help with the funeral and other expenses is underway.
'Little beauties'
The girls often ran around their mobile home park in a pack with a half-dozen other children, Wytaske said, his voice still hoarse from his desperate shouts the day before.
"They all had just little different personalities," he said, tearing up. "They were all just little beauties."
The three middle girls went to Butte Elementary, according to the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District. Alexis, the 12-year-old, attended Palmer Junior Middle School. The youngest went to preschool.
State child welfare officials say there is no specific age at which a child is old enough to care for younger ones. A 12-year-old might well be able to do so, depending on the needs of the younger children and the length of time, said Travis Erickson with the state Office of Children's Services. Neighbors said Alexis was mature for her age.
Another neighbor, Jordan Munroe, sent her 8- and 9-year-old children to school at Butte Elementary on Thursday to keep them occupied and distracted — and to give them access to counselors. Her children played with the girls all the time, including over Labor Day weekend.
Butte Elementary principal Dan Kitchin sent home a letter with information about school support networks and how to talk to children about death.
"As you discuss this sad news with your child, please let them discuss their thoughts and feelings," Kitchin wrote. "They will be comforted by talking calmly and honestly about their classmate or friend who died. There are many things we don't know and it's okay to say so."
The neighbors said that Flores and Quackenbush complained often about various problems at their trailer, including electrical issues and a potential gas leak.
Wheeler, Wytaske and Munroe described similar problems with wiring as well as holes in the floors. The former owner, identified through property and court records as Jackie Hughes, was slow to respond, they said.
A message for Hughes left with his attorney was not returned.
New owner Chris Elder said he took over the mobile home park in August.
Elder's property manager visited tenants on Thursday afternoon and assured them the problems would get fixed, Munroe and Wheeler said.
'There's no going back'
The Flores family landed in Alaska a few years ago because they wanted a safe place to raise their children, Astorga said. They moved from San Bernardino, California, to Sacramento and then went farther north.
"We are a California family. My brother left California because of all the drugs and the crime and everything that was going on here," he said. "He left California to keep his family safe and now they are gone."
Relatives and friends from around the country have been calling, wanting to know what they can do and whether Flores and Quackenbush are OK.
Astorga, who at 36 is the oldest of five siblings, described himself as the person who keeps the family together. Now he is struggling too. He just wanted to hug his own 14-year-old son.
People are afraid to call his brother and don't know what to do.
He tells them: "There's no answer to this problem. There's no going back. You are not going to fix it. You are not going to make it better."
They can only tell Flores they love him and will support him in these darkest times, Astorga said.
Flores is the only one of his extended family in Alaska. Astorga and some others are flying here to do what they can. They want to take the remains of the girls home to California — all five of them.
"You wake up every day for your children," he said. "You make the world a better place for your children to live in. And his children are gone." |
Just a little preview. I decided to try something else artistic in the newest comic and this is what I came up with. This is, of course, the moment that Celestia used the Elements to banish Nightmare Moon.I'm not perfectly happy with this, but it's one of my first real brush painted works. Hopefully I didn't make too many glaring mistakes with angles or anything that will haunt me laterI guess the next comic is... maybe 60%? Well at least I'll have time to finish more stuff before the next season starts anyway.P.S. The moon and sun in their eyes is sort of metaphorical and isn't how their eyes normally would look.Hasbro and Lauren Faust are asweome and own My Little Pony and Celestia. Orbash and Tau Sunflare are mine, but in their style. Thanks to for the tutorial on brush settings. Thanks to NASA for the star-field background behind Orbash. |
Ayn Rand is everywhere and her political opponents are growing nervous.
Rand of course is a champion of individual rights, including property rights, and an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. Walk through any Tea Party gathering and you’ll see signs such as “Who is John Galt?,” “Rand was right” and “Read Atlas Shrugged.” Paul Ryan says of her, accurately in my view, that “Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.”
On this shift in the political landscape, Paul Krugman comments in “A Tale of Two Moralities” that gone are the days when policy disputes were about pragmatic differences in accomplishing the same goal. Today we see a difference in moral principle: one side considers the modern welfare state morally superior to capitalism and the other side considers capitalism morally superior to the welfare state.
What Krugman doesn’t say, however, is that to the extent there actually is a side today that thinks capitalism is morally superior to the welfare state, it’s thanks to "Atlas Shrugged," "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" and Rand’s other works.
But whether Krugman knows this or not, many other people do. What worries advocates of the welfare state is that they have never before faced any moral opposition.
Whatever the rhetoric of Republicans and Democrats in the past, they agreed on the basic goal: more and more government controls are necessary to rein in businessmen, “manage” the economy, and minister to those in need.
No matter which party was in power, therefore, we got things like Sarbanes-Oxley, bailouts of GM and Citibank, a huge prescription drug “benefit” and ObamaCare. Politics was a squabble about the efficacy of any proposed controls, not a dispute about the morality or immorality of imposing controls in the first place. As Krugman observes, in years past everyone “accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state.”
But now its advocates sense that this is no longer true, that some Americans are beginning to question the moral legitimacy of the welfare state. To strangle this questioning in the crib, supporters of government controls are trying to persuade their opponents to abandon Rand.
The current tactic is to tell Tea Partiers and “conservatives” that if you take religion seriously, you can’t be a fan of the atheist Ayn Rand. The American Values Network (AVN) has produced a short video containing snippets of Rand’s rejection of religion, which they hope to e-mail to more than a million people in Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin, asking citizens how they can support both Jesus and Rand.
Leaving aside AVN’s distressing attempt to blur the separation of church and state by basing politics on faith, this much is true. Rand’s moral teachings are fundamentally different from Jesus’teachings.
A rational morality, Rand argued, teaches us the crucial values that make up a successful and happy life. Above all else, it instructs us to uphold reason as an absolute in our lives, as our only source of knowledge and only judge of values, and to achieve self-esteem in our souls. True self-esteem is the knowledge that by your own choices you’ve created a rational mind “competent to think” and a personal character “worthy of happiness.”
In terms of virtues, Rand’s is a moral code that upholds rationality not emotionalism or faith; intellectual independence not authority or obedience; earned pride not humility or the belief in man’s inherent sinfulness.
In Rand’s argument, morality is not about subordination or service to others or to some “higher power”; it is not about self-sacrifice. Hers is a morality that upholds egoism and individualism: it seeks to teach you the difficult task of pursuing the values that achieve your own individual self-interest and happiness.
Only an explicit or implicit individualist and egoist, Rand held, will understand and demand the rights listed in the Declaration of Independence: his inalienable rights to his own life, his own liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness. He will demand his political freedom and reject all government controls designed to restrict his liberty and make him sacrifice for the “public interest.” He will oppose the welfare state.
Given her positive teachings, Rand must reject what is usually taken to be the core of Jesus’ moral teachings, the Sermon on the Mount. But before you dismiss this as unthinkable, ask yourself the following question. Did Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers not reject the Sermon’s advice in creating America?
As I’ve written before: “When the British struck America’s right cheek, did Jefferson in the Declaration tell America to turn to offer them the left? Did Jefferson love his enemy—or did he go to war with him? Did Jefferson, who had a gallery of worthies in his home, portraits of men like Isaac Newton and John Locke, think that the blessed are the poor in spirit—or that the only people worthy of admiration are those who choose to make something of their spirit? Did Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers think that the meek shall inherit the earth—or that, in Locke’s words, the rational and the industrious shall? Did Jefferson give up riches—or did he seek them?”
Today we face similarly stark choices. If we are to reject the welfare state as immoral and thereby restore the American dream of individualism, don’t we need a rational morality that challenges the centuries-old creed of self-sacrifice and instead argues for the individual’s moral right to his own life and happiness?
In other words, don’t we need Ayn Rand?
Onkar Ghate is senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. |
Eight years ago to the day, Jonathan Quick made his NHL debut with the Kings in the club's 8-2 vcitory over the Buffalo Sabres at STAPLES Center.
The Kings, 10-15-2 (22 PTS) coming into the game on December 6, 2007, sat dead-last in the Pacific Division and Western Conference, and 29th out of 30 teams in the NHL.
NHL debuts can’t be easy, and the nerves have to be unbearable, but for Quick that night, the Kings built a 7-0 lead on the Sabres through the midway point of the game with a flurry of goals on Buffalo’s Jocelyn Thibault and Ryan Miller.
Quick, who recorded 15 saves that night, made his biggest one on Derek Roy midway through the first period when the Kings’ lead was just 2-0.
Dustin Brown (2G, 1A) and Anze Kopitar (4A) combined for seven points that game; in fact, they are the only two players on the ice for the Kings that night, beside Quick, who are still with the team.
They were, also, arguably the two most positive things going for the Kings at the time. Brown extended a point-streak to seven games (5G, 6A), Kopitar five games (3G, 6A).
Oh, and someone else wore #73 for the Kings then. Does the name John Zeiler ring a bell?
Prior to the Kings’ 8-2 drubbing of the Sabres that night, Buffalo had outscored the Kings 23-5 in the teams’ previous three meetings.
After Quick got the nod to start, the Kings had accumulated the use of nine different goaltenders over a four-season period, and all five they had used the season before Quick’s debut were no longer with the franchise.
Quick would go on to start one more game during the 2007-’08 season, and appear in another before making 44 appearances the following season. The Kings used a combined seven goaltenders the year Quick made his debut.
Buffalo’s announcers tabbed the Kings’ situation in net as “the big goalie hunt”.
Alas, little did anyone know, that hunt was over. |
Democracy Now did a comprehensive tribute to Yip Harburg several years ago. I've embedded the first part here, the rest are on Youtube.
The Yip Harburg Foundation:
funds projects that (a) work toward world peace, (b) work to end economic and social discrimination and exploitation, racial/ethnic conflicts, and social injustice; (b) provide educational opportunities to low-income and minority students through scholarship organizations; (c) advance and promote new works of American political art, especially efforts involving cultural and societal issues; (d) preserve and enhance the legacy of E.Y. Harburg through new projects or revivals of his standard works in all media.
E. Y. (Yip) Harburg, often known as "Broadway's social conscience," was born on April 8, 1896 of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, raised in poverty on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and later attended City College of New York where he struck up a lifelong friendship with his classmate, Ira Gershwin. Yip was a master lyricist, poet and bookwriter who was dedicated to social justice... From 1951 to 1961 during the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations and the McCarthy hearings Yip was “blacklisted” for his political views from film, television and radio. Broadway, however, remained free from this kind of censorship.
Although never a member of the Communist Party (he was a member of the Socialist Party, and joked that "Yip" referred to the Young People's Socialist League, nicknamed the "Yipsels") he had been involved in radical groups, and he was blacklisted. Harburg was named in a pamphlet "Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television;" his involvement with the Hollywood Democratic Committee, and his refusal to identify reputed communists, led to him being blocked from working in Hollywood films, television, and radio for twelve full years, from 1950 to 1962. "As the writer of the lyric of the song ‘God’s Country,’ I am outraged by the suggestion that somehow I am connected with, believe in, or am sympathetic with Communist or totalitarian philosophy," he wrote to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950. Harburg was unable to travel abroad during this period, as his passport had been revoked. With a score by Sammy Fain and Harburg's lyrics, the musical Flahooley (1951) satirized the witch-hunt's hysterically anti-communist sentiment, but it closed after 40 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway. The New York critics were dismissive of the show, although it had been a success during its earlier pre-Broadway run in Philadelphia.
Yip followed the dream of democratic socialism: He believed that all people should be guaranteed basic human rights, political equality, free education, economic opportunity and free health services. He spent most of his life fighting for these goals; his songs "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" and "Over the Rainbow" express these universal cries for hope in hard times to all peoples. As Broadway's social commentator, and given his ability to "gild the philosophic pill" with witticisms and a lyric style all his own, Yip Harburg is a unique and major lyricist of 20th century American musical theatre. Yip Harburg died on March 5, 1981, at 84 years young.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread? Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Harriet Hyman Alonso enables Harburg to talk about his life and work. He tells of his early childhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, his public school education, how the Great Depression opened the way to writing lyrics, and his work on Broadway and Hollywood, including his blacklisting during the McCarthy era. Finally, but most importantly, Harburg shares his commitment to human rights and the ways it affected his writing and his career path. Includes an appendix with Harburg’s key musicals, songs, and films.
Plunge into this scrupulously documented volume and discover how Harburg, once a poet of light verse, played a major role in the transformation of the Broadway revue into the sophisticated musical of the 1940s and 1950s. With extensive and exclusive interviews and lyrical analysis, the authors capture Harburg's wit, distinctive voice, and creative and collaborative methods. Inquiry into Harburg's Jewish, New York City roots, apprenticeship in his craft, and involvement in the radical politics of the 1930s—he was blacklisted in the 1950s—puts into context the seemingly irreconcilable skepticism and optimism that contoured this lyrical genius's life and work.
Here is a part of their biography More details on his blacklisting According to his biography There are several excellent books about Harburg. I'd suggest Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist: His son, Ernie Harburg wrote, with Harold Meyerson, Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg, Lyricist: I've written about Finian's Rainbow here before , at the time of its first Broadway revival. It is my favorite Broadway musical.
Synopsis:
Having left Ireland, Finian McLonergan and his daughter Sharon arrive in the American state of Missitucky with a magical golden crock which has been stolen from Og, a leprechaun. Finian buries the crock believing that it will grow bigger. Rawkins, a racist senator, is determined to get his hands on the it but is thwarted when he is magically turned black and gets a helping of his own bigotry. After many plot twists all is resolved and love, wealth and happiness descend on Rainbow Valley.
I was born in 1947, the year Finian opened, and friends of my parents were in the show, which made waves then for having a well-integrated cast, and it continued to do so, up into the '60s. This news article touts the first integrated cast in Tampa in 1967. Miles Jefferson, black theater critic and scholar wrote of this in 1947 in The Negro on Broadway, 1946-1947 Phylon Vol. 8, No. 2.
He said:
The real treat of Finian's Rainbow, however, has been left until last. For the first time in this reviewer's memory race intolerance in the Deep South has been subjected to light, but peppery spoofing in a musical show, and this has been accomplished in the best of taste and with great style. Some of the critics accused the show of undue vulgarity in spots and of a tormenting cuteness. Race issues were suspected of having been dragged in by the ears. This spectator cannot agree. Nothing in the show is too coy for comfort and race peculiarities in the South are only exposed to the lightest kind of raillery, quite reticent, in view of their real fantastic nature.
Sharon-
When a rich man doesn't want to work
He's a bon vivant.
Company-
Yes, he's a bon vivant. Sharon-
But when a poor man doesn't want to work,
He's a loafer, he's a lounger
He's a lazy good for nothing Company-
He's a jerk!
Finian had both racial and working class themes.Not very different from the way poor and working class folks are disparaged today—the lazy blahs, po' whites and mexicans.
I've been thinking about Finian's Rainbow a lot recently. Given the uptick in vocal and vitriolic racism from right-wing elected officials and their minions, and the rule of corporate personhood and big money interests of the 1 percent—wouldn't it be nice to find the pot of gold I call reparations, and to have white bigoted senators and congresspeople turned black and/or poor to experience how we have to live our lives under their regime?
Where's a leprechaun when you need one? |
Graphene might be the secret to super-efficient water filters, according to new research published in the journal Nature Communications.
About 1 in 10 people don't have access to clean drinking water, according to Water.org. The World Economic Forum's 2015 risk report found lack of access to clean water is one of the biggest global threats we'll face in the next decade. So creating an efficient, durable water filter is extremely important.
We've known for a while that graphene could be used as a water filter, and a lot of research groups are working on it. The problem lies in the challenges of manufacturing graphene.
Read more: This Unlikely Material Could Be The Super-Thin Condom of the Future
Graphene has some incredible properties: It's a honeycomb-shaped layer of carbon just one atom thick, but it's stronger than steel. Since its discovery, scientists have hailed it as a wonder material with the potential to change entire industries.
Read more: Researchers Have Created a Shapeshifting Material Inspired by Origami
There's a big problem standing in the way, though. A material that thin is really difficult to make, so manufacturing graphene on an industrial scale has proved tricky. Scientists are still struggling to figure out a good way to create a lot of the material in a short amount of time.
This new research may have finally uncovered a good method to manufacture graphene on a large scale.
"We have a form of graphene oxide which we can spread, almost with something like a butter knife," Mainak Majumder, one of the researchers who worked on the paper, told Mashable. "It is not only scalable, but it gives quite a unique [uniform] microstructure that people have never demonstrated before."
Graphene is an ideal material for water filters because it can clean out much smaller particles and last longer than existing filters, according to the researchers.
The filter can clean out everything larger than 1 nanometer (a width 100,000 times smaller than a human hair). And the filter lasts a long time since carbon doesn't easily corrode.
The researchers are already raising money to try and bring their filter design to life. A company called Ionic Industries has already expressed interest in the filter.
h/t Mashable |
Buy Photo Ray Tensing, former University of Cincinnati police officer, walks into the courtroom of Common Pleas Judge Megan Shanahan Wednesday. Tensing is charged in the murder of Sam DuBose during a routine traffic stop on July 19, 2015. (Photo: The Enquirer/ Cara Owsley)Buy Photo
Key developments
A forensic specialist said Tensing was not dragged by Sam DuBose's Honda
Tensing viewed body camera footage before his official statement to police
Tensing said he was "holding on for dear life" at the time he fired the fatal shot
Jurors on Thursday watched Ray Tensing tell investigators in a video that he shot Sam DuBose because he was being “dragged” by DuBose’s car and was “holding on for dear life.”
An expert in video analysis then broke down Tensing’s body camera video for the jury, millisecond by millisecond. Prosecutors said nearly every frame contradicted what Tensing told police.
That breakdown showed Tensing, who at the time was a University of Cincinnati police officer, pull out his gun and aimed it at DuBose’s head when the car wasn't moving. There was no dragging, according to the expert.
"No, he had not been (dragged),” said Grant Fredericks, a forensic video analyst from Spokane, Washington and FBI instructor.
What the jury takes away from this video testimony is crucial to the prosecution's case against Tensing, who is charged with murder and voluntary manslaughter. Prosecutors say Tensing purposely killed DuBose during a July 19, 2015 traffic stop, and that he was never dragged. Tensing says he was dragged, feared for his life and fired the shot because he "was hanging on for dear life."
"I was thinking, 'oh my gosh, I'm getting dragged by this guy's car, I don't want to die today,' " Tensing told investigators.
Fredericks was questioned by both sides for more than an hour and a half. Jurors listened intently, with little expression. Tensing, too, appeared stoic. DuBose's family came away with a definite conclusion.
"You saw what I saw – it was murder," said DaShonda Reid, DuBose's fiancee.
In his testimony, Fredericks said that a split-second before the gunshot – .178 seconds – the car began to move a few feet. Prosecutors say they believe DuBose's foot was moving off the brake pedal. According to Fredericks' analysis, the 1998 Honda Accord accelerated only after the gunshot, when prosecutors believe DuBose's foot hit the accelerator in "postmortem reflex."
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters told reporters Thursday that Fredericks’ analysis “practically contradicts the entire defense.”
“He confirmed what we’ve been saying since opening statements,” Deters said.
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Tensing’s attorney, Stew Mathews, offered his own assessment of Fredericks.
"He's an expert, but his opinion is no better than the 12 on the jury," Mathews said. "One thing that I took away, was that the car was in motion when the shot was fired."
Mathews has said Tensing fired in self-defense. In court Thursday, he questioned Fredericks about whether the car moved at a 45-degree angle. That could support Tensing’s statement to investigators that he thought he’d “get sucked under” the car and run over.
Mathews pointed out that the Accord, which Tensing pulled over after seeing it had a missing front license plate, had to drive away from the curb at an angle. It missed another car parked a few car-lengths in front before striking a guard rail at the end of the street on the opposite side.
Mathews also attacked Fredericks' credibility, pointing out he was paid, although the amount was never revealed and Fredericks said he could only give estimates.
"I guess you're guessing about a lot of stuff," Mathews said.
Testimony in the trial, which is in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court, will resume Friday.
Thursday also featured Tensing's video-recorded interview with Cincinnati police investigators two days after the shooting. Tensing told them he had seen his bodycam video. His police union lawyer showed him the video that same morning.
Sgt. Shannon Heine, one of the officers who interviewed Tensing, explained that the UC police union contract allows them to watch video of an incident before being interviewed. That's different than Cincinnati Police Department's policy, she said.
In the interview, Tensing said his intention was to stop the threat.
"The only shot I could see, that I could take to stop the threat, was a head shot," he said. "I just wanted him to stop the car."
Video from the courtroom
Tap here to watch the video on a mobile device
Video breakdown
Less than three seconds are critical to both sides in the murder case against Ray Tensing. After Tensing tried to open Sam DuBose's car door and DuBose pulled it shut, DuBose restarted the car. Tensing said he reached in "to knock the key out and turn the key off." The numbers below are in seconds before Tensing shot DuBose.
2.266: Tensing's hand moves into the car
2.038: Tensing's hand reaching in front of steering wheel
1.744: Reflection of Tensing's legs on car door, standing away from vehicle
1.581: Car has still not moved
1.255: Tensing's left hand moving toward DuBose's seat belt and chest
1.222: Barrel of Tensing's gun enters view
0.928: Tensing yells "stop"
0.816: Gun coming up, Tensing's left hand at DuBose's chest
0.504: Tensing's left hand in contact with seat belt, DuBose left hand in air, right hand on steering wheel
0.276: Tensing's gun toward DuBose's head; Tensing's left hand grasping seat belt
0.178: Possible slight movement forward by DuBose's car
0.113: DuBose's left hand moving downward and away from the gun
0.015: Forward motion of the car
0.000: Audio indicates the fatal shot is fired
Correction: A previous version of this story referred to the time Sam DuBose's vehicle began moving before the fatal shot that killed him was fired as 0.178 milliseconds. It was 0.178 seconds. The timeline description of video slides has been updated to reflect this change.
Mobile readers tap here to view the transcript of Tensing's statement to police
Tensing statement by Bob Strickley on Scribd
More trial coverage:
• When it's cops testifying against another cop
• `Rebuild' of DuBose memorial Thursday evening
• Conflicting testimony about the shooting's timing
• Visit our trial page for the latest updates
Read or Share this story: http://cin.ci/2fhI6q1 |
In the United States, more people were employed in solar power last year than in generating electricity through coal, gas and oil energy combined. According to a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy, solar power employed 43 percent of the Electric Power Generation sector's workforce in 2016, while fossil fuels combined accounted for just 22 percent. It's a welcome statistic for those seeking to refute Donald Trump's assertion that green energy projects are bad news for the American economy.
Just under 374,000 people were employed in solar energy, according to the report, while coal, gas and oil power generation combined had a workforce of slightly more than 187,000. The boom in the country's solar workforce can be attributed to construction work associated with expanding generation capacity. The gulf in employment is growing with net generation from coal falling 53 percent over the last decade. During the same period, electricity generation from natural gas increased 33 percent while solar expanded 5,000 percent.
Fuel production and electricity generation together directly employed 1.9 million workers last year, according to the report, with 55%, or 1.1 million, working with fossil fuels. The DoE identifies another 2.3 million jobs associated with energy transmission, distribution and storage.
Solar energy added 73,615 new jobs to the U.S. economy over the past year while wind added a further 24,650.
*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista) |
Beef’s environmental impact dwarfs that of other meat including chicken and pork, new research reveals, with one expert saying that eating less red meat would be a better way for people to cut carbon emissions than giving up their cars.
The heavy impact on the environment of meat production was known but the research shows a new scale and scope of damage, particularly for beef. The popular red meat requires 28 times more land to produce than pork or chicken, 11 times more water and results in five times more climate-warming emissions. When compared to staples like potatoes, wheat, and rice, the impact of beef per calorie is even more extreme, requiring 160 times more land and producing 11 times more greenhouse gases.
Agriculture is a significant driver of global warming and causes 15% of all emissions, half of which are from livestock. Furthermore, the huge amounts of grain and water needed to raise cattle is a concern to experts worried about feeding an extra 2 billion people by 2050. But previous calls for people to eat less meat in order to help the environment, or preserve grain stocks, have been highly controversial.
“The big story is just how dramatically impactful beef is compared to all the others,” said Prof Gidon Eshel, at Bard College in New York state and who led the research on beef’s impact. He said cutting subsidies for meat production would be the least controversial way to reduce its consumption.
“I would strongly hope that governments stay out of people’s diet, but at the same time there are many government policies that favour of the current diet in which animals feature too prominently,” he said. “Remove the artificial support given to the livestock industry and rising prices will do the rest. In that way you are having less government intervention in people’s diet and not more.”
Eshel’s team analysed how much land, water and nitrogen fertiliser was needed to raise beef and compared this with poultry, pork, eggs and dairy produce. Beef had a far greater impact than all the others because as ruminants, cattle make far less efficient use of their feed. “Only a minute fraction of the food consumed by cattle goes into the bloodstream, so the bulk of the energy is lost,” said Eshel. Feeding cattle on grain rather than grass exacerbates this inefficiency, although Eshel noted that even grass-fed cattle still have greater environmental footprints than other animal produce. The footprint of lamb, relatively rarely eaten in the US, was not considered in the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Prof Tim Benton, at the University of Leeds, said the new work is based on national US data, rather than farm-level studies, and provides a useful overview. “It captures the big picture,” he said, adding that livestock is the key to the sustainability of global agriculture.
“The biggest intervention people could make towards reducing their carbon footprints would not be to abandon cars, but to eat significantly less red meat,” Benton said. “Another recent study implies the single biggest intervention to free up calories that could be used to feed people would be not to use grains for beef production in the US.” However, he said the subject was always controversial: “This opens a real can of worms.”
Prof Mark Sutton, at the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, said: “Governments should consider these messages carefully if they want to improve overall production efficiency and reduce the environmental impacts. But the message for the consumer is even stronger. Avoiding excessive meat consumption, especially beef, is good for the environment.”
He said: “The US and Europe alike are using so much of their land in highly inefficient livestock farming systems, while so much good quality cropland is being used to grow animal feeds rather than human food.”
Separately, a second study of tens of thousands of British people’s daily eating habits shows that meat lovers’ diets cause double the climate-warming emissions of vegetarian diets.
The study of British people’s diets was conducted by University of Oxford scientists and found that meat-rich diets - defined as more than 100g per day - resulted in 7.2kg of carbon dioxide emissions. In contrast, both vegetarian and fish-eating diets caused about 3.8kg of CO2 per day, while vegan diets produced only 2.9kg. The research analysed the food eaten by 30,000 meat eaters, 16,000 vegetarians, 8,000 fish eaters and 2,000 vegans. |
John Lucy, an Irishman from Cork, enlisted in an Ulster regiment, The Royal Irish Rifles, with his younger brother in January 1912, and after six months at the Depot they joined the 2nd Bn in Dover. Subsequently they moved to Tidworth where the battalion was on 4 August 1914, in 7th Bde 3rd Division; ten days later they were in France. There follow brilliant accounts of Mons, Le Cateau and the retreat to the Marne, the turn of the tide and the Battle of the Aisne where his brother was killed. The battalion was involved in desperate fighting in front of Neuve Chapelle in October 1914, losing 181 killed in four days and virtually ceasing to exist, reduced to two officers and 46 men. Brought up to strength it suffered the same fate at First Ypres. This is a superb book, one of the best written by a ranker , all the better for being one of the very few to describe those early battles of 1914. As a critic wrote in 1938, it is easily the best [war book] written by an Irishman - arguably still true. A great bonus is the description of life in the ranks in that long long ago just before the Great War. |
Twenty-two pounds. Six Inches. $449 retail. The Beatles are releasing their fourteen original studio albums plus rarities into a single massive sixteen LP box set containing a 252 page booklet. Each album will also be sold individually as well. The release(s) have been newly remastered and are available now (“now $349″), for all of you who don’t have copies of the records, possibly purchased from your local used record store.
Rumor has it that this massive sixteen LP and reported 50,000 copy box set has had another, unseen price though too… a delay in the pressing in many other records. Due to the limited and shrinking number of vinyl pressing plants in the US, many other labels have had delayed returns on their own pressings. It’s too early to tell if this will have a serious negative impact on some companies (and record collectors), though the renewed interest in Beatles vinyl could also be good for the already-growing vinyl business as a whole.
Let us know if you’ve had an order delayed “due to Beatles”. |
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Trans model TJ Jans is set to take to the catwalk tonight at Western Canada Fashion Week.
The model, who uses gender-neutral pronouns said they did not think of themselves as a model before being offered the chance to walk in Stanley Carroll’s runwy show.
Jans came out in December 2014 that they would transition, and began taking hormones the following summer.
The new model will be wearing clothes from the menswear collection at the Edmonton design house.
They told the Edmonton Sun: “To be asked to model menswear is a surprising choice; [Carroll[ could face some backlash… Having a female-to-male trans person in his show doing menswear, that’s a possibility. I was surprised that he went there at all.”
The idea actually came from Carroll’ wife Marcie Whitecotton-Carroll, who works with Jans at the University of Alberta.
Jans told the paper that they do not think of themselves as a model.
“This past year is when I came out as trans, so it’s been kind of a crazy journey. I’ve encountered people who are really uncomfortable with that, as well as a lot of people who are awesome.”
“If people choose to express themselves on a gender that’s not what they’re assigned from birth, that’s being trans or gender variant,” Jans says.
“When I say trans, that’s also an umbrella word. But generally, when someone says they’re trans, I think they’re usually moving from one sort of gender presentation to another.”
Jans said they are excited to be able to use the opportunity to give representation to young trans people.
They praised Alberta for moves towards educating and informing young people about trans issues.
Meanwhile in Germany, trans male model Ben Melzer landed the esteemed cover of Men’s Health magazine.
Last year, model Aydian Dowling was the runner up for a competition to win a cover shoot for Men’s Health US – having found a huge amount of public support. |
One diehard Georgia fan is driving from Athens, GA to Pasadena, CA via scooter
The Bulldog nation is traveling to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena in force by plane, car, bus and train to see Georgia play Oklahoma in the College Football Playoff Semifinal.
But only one man is making the journey across the country via motor scooter …
According to his Facebook and Instagram profiles, Clark Hurst, a self-described “scooter adventurist,” started his journey on December 21 at Sanford Stadium.
You may remember Clark Hurst as this man – the “crazy Georgia fan” who called out Spurrier in 2009.
While his exact route is unclear, along the way he has posted videos on his YouTube channel from Columbus, Georgia on December 22, mentions going through Bogalusa, Louisiana on December 24, offered Christmas greetings from the Sam Houston National Forest in Texas on December 25, and talks about fixing a minor fuel leak in Del Rio, Texas on December 27.
Assuming he is avoiding highways, Del Rio is 1,361 miles from Athens according to Google Maps, and it is another 1,388 miles to Pasadena. This puts Hurst about halfway through what will be a total 2,749 mile journey. Google Maps indicates that this would be a 51 hour trip by car, but scooters travel at about half that speed. He has averaged 227 miles per day thus far, but he will need to average 278 miles per day to complete the trip in 11 days to make it to the Rose Bowl by January 1.
Like a true Bulldog fan, and perhaps taking a cue from Coach Kirby Smart, Hurst cites that he is frequenting Waffle House locations to sustain himself along the way.
Beginning of Journey:
Waffle House: |
WASHINGTON—In an effort to shorten the wait time for dialysis patients in need of a donor, the Department of Health and Human Services this week opened a new express transplant list to the public that matches candidates with either a kidney or any other organ at all.
According to sources, the new system allows patients to select from a list of alternative organs, such as a heart, liver, or lung, that they would like to receive should a kidney be unavailable. By no longer restricting kidney patients to one specific donor organ, officials estimate that the average wait for transplant candidates will fall dramatically, from an average of three to five years to less than 24 hours.
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“With over 100,000 people currently unable to find kidney transplants, this expedited list will ensure that each and every one of them receives at least some type of organ in a timely manner,” said HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, adding that in some instances, patients have been ushered into surgery minutes after signing the registration form. “The long wait puts unnecessary stress on those who are already sick, so we hope to alleviate that pressure by quickly locating and implanting whatever we can get our hands on.”
“Getting a kidney is ideal, but a pancreas can be a precious gift, too,” Burwell added.
Whereas more than 4,000 people died annually while waiting for a transplant under the old system, the upgraded list has reportedly eliminated this problem completely, with every patient rapidly receiving a kidney or a more immediately obtainable organ. In addition to major organs, sources said the new protocols allow for kidneys to be replaced with tissue, such as nerve bundles or lumps of cartilage.
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The new list has reportedly drawn praise from patients, who have seen their anxiety vanish virtually overnight at the prospect of their diseased kidneys quickly being exchanged for more accessible body parts.
“I was so sick of leaving my fate up in the air using the old system, never knowing if I’d get the transplant I needed in time,” said 58-year-old diabetic Janet Martin, who selected an intestinal tract, a thymus gland, and 17 other potential backups for the kidney she has been waiting on since 2010. “Now, I know there’s a 100 percent chance I’ll get a new organ, and there’s a 5 percent chance it’ll be the one I really want.”
“That certainty means so much,” Martin added. “I don’t have to lie awake worrying—I’m getting a kidney or something else real soon.”
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But despite the speedy access to transplant organs provided by the new list, critics have alleged that more affluent individuals are offered their preferred kidney alternatives, while less well-off patients are consistently presented with their least desired options.
“If I couldn’t get a kidney, I would have been fine with a gallbladder, a cornea, a spleen—a whole bunch of things,” said Christopher Corvese, 42, who suffers from a genetic condition that produces cysts in kidney tissue. “I bet if I were a millionaire, I’d probably get the heart valve I was really excited about. But, no, I got offered a face transplant, which was way, way at the bottom for me.”
“I’ll take it, of course,” added Corvese. “I mean, it’s better than nothing.” |
RAW: http://ncode.syosetu.com/n0695bs/30/
9: guys sorry, I noticed a mistake in the translation about the monkey monster, its wasn’t moonlight monkey but raging monkey TT_TT
Xant: Good thing I fixed it all already.
Xant: Retconned this chapter due to 9 pointing out it was a 4 person party. Whoops.
Chapter 29 – Crossing the Kizel Canyon! Part 3
“Rick! Rick is…!”
“Rex already ran to the lodging for help! Endure until he returns!”
Its upper body had developed in a strange way, and it’s unbalanced lower body somehow supported it. More than just a big monkey, this thing had an appearance closer to a gorilla.
Its hand was stained with blood from mortally wounding the adventurer Rick who was gasping for air.
The blood on the big gorilla’s hand was spilling onto the ground and making a puddle.
Scowling faces from the adventurers were locked onto the gorilla. They felt powerless in front of this beast, unable to fight back.
The gorilla already had one of the adventurers on the ground, crushing him along with the earth.
【The <Raging Boss> attacked!】
【Era received 193 damage!】
【Era has fallen! HP:0/75】
Haruto, one of the adventurers, lost his will when he saw Era get reduced into lumps of meat.
They had been confident about being able to deal with the canyon’s monsters.
Unfortunately they had run into the floor monster. They should have retreated but they made a grave mistake and challenged it. The result was devastating.
Haruto couldn’t comprehend this massacre.
【The <Raging Boss> used <Voltage Rage>!】
【The <Raging Boss>’ attack power increased!】
The beast became excited by the situation and jumped up and down as if dancing in joy.
It threw the corpse of Rick into the canyon.
There was no need to say who the next target of the ape was.
It struck the ground with its fist, making a small quake and toppling Haruto.
The strike seemed to be a way for the <Raging Boss> to mock and scare Haruto. He could only watch as it jumped and fell towards him.
“I’m sorry you guys…this was my fault…”
“Get away from him!”
He heard a yell from an unknown voice, it seemed to come from above the large monkey.
The <Raging Boss> roared as it fell.
Seigel landed in front of Haruto, and without looking back he got into a stance to face the monster.
(TL: 聞きなれない男の掛け声と共に、空中から自分に向かって落ちてくるはずの大猿が何かに弾かれるように飛んでいった。)
【Seigel attacked the <Raging Boss>! 】
【The <Raging Boss> recieved 377 damage! HP:1566/1943】
“Ah, are you…by chance the Dragon Hunter Seigel?”
“I’ll sign something for you later, right now escape to the lodge.”
Haruto felt that he could rely on Seigel due to his powerful aura and retreated to the lodge.
“Now then, you’ve rampaged long enough. Time to deliver your requiem. Here I come!”
The <Raging Boss> lost its temper at Seigel’s provocation and raised its arm.
“I also don’t want to lose to Ryua.”
Evading the monster’s fist, Seigel plunged into its chest.
“Zero-range <Burst Braver>!”
【Seigel used <Burst Braver>!】
【The <Raging Boss> received 1436 damage! HP:130/1943】
The <Raging Boss> received a direct hit from point blank, collapsing to the ground while raising a loud yell.
Its chest hair had been burnt and as it vanished it revealed burnt bones and innards.
The <Raging Boss> was unable to stand due to pain and without hesitation Seigel impaled its head with his large sword.
Taking one last breath, the <Raging Boss> stopped moving. Its death was quick.
【The <Raging Boss> was defeated! HP:0/1943】
“Now that its dead, I wonder if that guy made it to the lodge? Though I should gather the materials from this guy first since I came all the way out here…”
Seigel skillfully collected the materials from the corpse and casually walked towards the lodging.
///
Both Haruto and Rex were seated in the lobby with dejected expressions.
I really regret hearing about what happened.
We had been submerged in the hot springs, carefree and having fun while others were suffering nearby.
If Seigel hadn’t gone, Haruto would have died.
I don’t want to see anybody else die.
Seeing the scene in front of me was painful.
“It’s my…my fault…because I challenged that monster…”
Haruto was also deeply regretting what had happened. He was grasping his hair with his weary hand, using all of what little strength he had left to hold it.
We could only watch from the side.
“Bloom-san, is there anything we can say to them?”
“Roel-chan, they may look pitiful but they are adventurers. If you mess up judging a situation, even just a little, it could prove fatal and expose your comrades to danger. This world isn’t forgiving.”
He said that in a harsh tone with an unpleasant expression on his face.
“Yosh, I’m back.”
Returning full of energy, Seigel had come back after defeating the floor monster.
I wonder if the luggage he was carrying was the material from it?
“So you made it back safely. I defeated that monster, just so you know.”
“…thank you.”
“That’s that then. What you do from now on is your decision. It may not be my place to say this, but there was probably a reason behind you surviving.”
“Ha? Reason…?”
With a glazed expression he looked at Seigel’s face.
Rex just prostrated on the table without saying anything.
“What if I had died long ago? If that had happened the the great ‘Dragon Hunter’ wouldn’t exist. The life I saved today would have been lost.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“No matter where or when, if someone avoids an unforeseen accident and lives on then things may end up differently. Leaving behind great achievements…’What did I achieve’ is something that only survivors can think about.”
His speech suddenly stopped there and Seigel headed towards the hot spring.
“I may not be able to truly understand things, but live out your life for those that have died. Even I formed a party in the past only to see my comrades die before my eyes. It wasn’t something that only happened once or twice. But I lived on and made this lodging. If I was able to save someone, that is enough reason for me to have survived until now.
As if he was continuing Seigel’s speech, Bloom talked to the two quiet adventurers.
Both of them silently listened, but in the end something had struck a nerve and they started sobbing.
“I-I will…retire as an adventurer…”
You could see the manifestation of Haruto’s decision by his tears of regret.
A comrade dying…it would be really hard for me to bear.
That’s why I will absolutely protect Roel.
I won’t allow a monster to lay even one finger on her from now on.
I don’t want to think of parting.
Seeing the two adventurers in despair and grief is enough to make those words in my mind weigh heavily on my heart.
“Tonight’s dinner will be a <Pecking Bird> hot pot. At a time like this you should warm your body and your mind. I’ve already finished the preparations, so gather up at the dining hall.”
Bloom slowly walked towards the dining hall.
It was almost like the sorrow has taken over my legs, I had to urge them to walk.
/ / /
“That hot pot was delicious! I was able to eat 4 servings…though now I’m totally full.”
“Roel, don’t you think one is normally enough?”
“Bloom may have given a discount for it, but that’s just a way to make you pay extra fees you know?”
“Yeah…I didn’t think about that part.”
The three of us were sitting in our room and chatting, though sometimes we would lay down.
But regardless of how much fun we’re having while talking I can’t get the incident from earlier off my mind.
“Those people…it’s kind of sad. I wonder what they’ll do from now on? If I was in their shoes I wouldn’t be able to bear it…”
“Who knows? But since they’re adventurers wouldn’t they go on adventures? They go hand in hand. Those people should have the resolution to tackle this problem head on. I may sound strict, but you are your own responsibility. Only you can choose your own path.”
“Even if you say that…”
Cynthia was comfortably sprawled out on the bed, you can even see a little bit of her belly.
She wasn’t an adventurer, but to go so far and say that much…
“Sorry, I said too much.”
She might have been able to guess what I was thinking. Cynthia honestly apologized.
She seemed to have changed her posture from facing up. It seems like she’s trying to pretend that verbal slip never happened.
“But, Ryua-chin, you don’t need to worry. That kind of thing happening is too uncommon, we don’t have to worry.”
“Yeah, that’s right!”
Roel, who had dozing off, suddenly got up and entered the conversation.
“You don’t even need my healing powers.”
“That’s not true! The <Fire Rod> is really helpful!”
“Ryua-chin, that didn’t exactly follow up~”
The three of us laughed at the same time.
Roel, whether she’s helpful or not, I just want her beside me.
That’s why I don’t want her to worry about it.
I want to tell her that but I’m afraid she’ll take it the wrong way.
“Now we need to wake up early so we should sleep soon.”
“I’m really looking forward to seeing the Imperial Capital. I’m also curious about the <Avangard Tougi Taikai> that Seigel-san was talking about as well as the festival.”
I hugged a pillow.
I might be able to forget the incident that happened today.
Even if I don’t, I’m sure that the festival will be fun.
“If it’s Ryua-chin you can win it for sure~!…ah, but last time I think it was Tifelia-san who was the champion. If that person is there then I’m not sure…no, for sure you’ll lose.”
“Tifelia? Stronger than me?”
“Avangard’s prided S rank, <Master Knight> Tifelia! All of the S ranks have unique classes, but <Master Knight> is an exclusive class just for her. She only works for the Kingdom, she can’t go to another country. I heard that the cost of her swinging her sword just once is equal to more than the salary of all the Kingdom’s soldiers.”
“S-so there was such an amazing person…”
“I wonder if she’ll appear this time? She doesn’t really show herself in public, the last event was the first time she appeared in it. What a mystery. Maybe there was a reason for her showing up last time? If that’s the case then you can be at ease!”
Cynthia jumped from her bed and moved towards me to strike my back with all her strength.
“I’ll be cheering for you, so good luck!”
For some reason Roel was stirring.
That’s right, in this world there is such a strong person.
<Master Knight> Tifelia…I wonder what kind of person she is?
I don’t know if I can win but I want to at least try fighting her.
Why do I feel so full of energy?
I felt fear in the <Caves of Hell> whenever I fought a formidable opponent.
I’m sure this feeling was mixed in there as well.
Even though I might have died, I wonder why I felt like this back then?
I don’t understand myself sometimes.
Before I had realized it I was the only one awake.
Cynthia had gone back to sleep on her bed in the shape of “大” with her blanket on top of her.
Roel was in a more reserved sleeping position.
I should sleep as well.
I wonder how many more days we’ll need to get through the Canyon?
This lodge was just the halfway point.
Yesterday I wouldn’t have thought I would witness adventurers losing a comrade, but each day brings something different and unknown.
I’ve only been thinking about stuff like that…before I knew it was in a deep sleep.
================================
Monster Book
【<Raging Boss> HP:1943】
It leads the <Raging Monkeys>, the boss of the <Kizel Canyon>.
It crushes the dreams of adventurers with its fist.
As it gets excited its destructive power increases.
You can call it the Untouchable of the <Kizel Canyon>.
Adventurers that encounter it run away at full speed until they’re exhausted.
←Previous Chapter | Next Chapter→
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ATLANTA — Unable to get closure on the party’s stunning losses in November, nearly 20 Democratic interest groups, operatives, and state committees have commissioned their own private 2016 election autopsy reports.
The projects, which aim to diagnose the party’s ills and pave a path forward, are designed in part to fill the void left by Hillary Clinton's campaign, which has yet to offer any formal explanation for its defeat. Instead, leaders of her campaign effort have let the candidate's complaints to donors about Russia and FBI Director Jim Comey's intervention stand alone, leaving a public silence about the details of her defeat that has spawned tangible frustration among party operatives.
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While Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and members of his team have been privately presenting their own findings to Clinton and other influential party figures, the absence of a full, public accounting of the factors and forces underlying her shocking loss has generated a cottage industry of projects dedicated to explaining and understanding how things went so wrong for the party in November.
Some of the investigations would have happened anyway: There are two parallel probes of what happened in the U.S. House alone — one from New Mexico Rep. Ben Ray Luján, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman, and another led by New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney.
By far the largest effort to take stock of the last election cycle is a project that’s unlikely to produce any public-facing set of conclusions. AFL-CIO Political Director Mike Podhorzer in January quietly convened leading political, data, and polling professionals from Clinton’s campaign, outside groups, and progressive organizations for four sessions in Washington where the group shared their own findings.
The Democratic data firm Catalist has also stepped in to provide analyses for a wide range of groups with which it works, pulling together sophisticated, exhaustive looks at turnout and party support based on precinct data, voter files and the group's own models and figures within the states — one presentation describing the situation in a non-battleground state, obtained by POLITICO, stretched to over 50 pages.
“I certainly did mine for the DNC Executive Committee, but hell, every conference call there’s someone with an opinion of what went wrong and why,” said Cornell Belcher, a leading party pollster who presented his initial findings to that group in Denver at the end of last year.
The projects are taking place under the aegis of both national and local-level groups — from super PACs to state parties to organized labor officials — and they often disagree in both their focus and their conclusions.
A number of state parties are conducting deeper-than-usual audits of the election, from the Florida Democratic Party’s analysis of its performance at the state legislative and presidential level to efforts led by party committees in states including Iowa, Minnesota, and Georgia.
The Women’s Voices Women’s Votes Action Fund has analyzed the group’s own November 7-9 polling, exit polls, and its mail-based registration campaign — the largest in the country — to look for response rates in their target demographic groups: unmarried women, millennials, and people of color, explained Page Gardner, president of that group and the Voter Participation Center.
All of it represents tens of millions of dollars worth of investment in research, and hundreds of hours of under-the-radar meetings and panels, according to interviews with a wide range of their drafters and a review of six comprehensive or partial reports obtained by POLITICO.
Spanning from informal pollster presentations to secret hundred-page documents — some of which are finished, and others of which are still being assembled — the constellation of reports is circulating at a time when the Democratic Party nationwide is at one of its lowest depths in a century, and when a persistent chorus of party donors and candidates are demanding answers on the failures of 2016 as they wait for the Democratic National Committee to elect a new chairman.
There is a widespread assumption that the party’s new chairman will also eventually put together a formal party-wide assessment.
The lingering question for party leaders and consultants is how much of the intel and assessment will eventually be made public to ameliorate the fears and concerns of a furious base demanding a clear path forward.
“It’s a good thing for everybody to be involved in rebuilding the Democratic Party, so as many people want to throw their opinions into the mix, eventually the truth will come out of that. My post-mortem is not the complete picture, and I don’t think anyone’s is. The more the merrier, and it’s really important that Democrats look in the mirror and don’t just lean on Russia or fake news,” said veteran party strategist Donnie Fowler, who drafted his own assessment at the request of interim party chairwoman Donna Brazile, referring to two explanations for Clinton’s loss that are frequently proffered by Democrats.
“The donors are really looking of clarity and direction, absolutely,” he said. “But if you want to be Maoist about it, this is a time for a thousand flowers to bloom.”
Crafting an election autopsy before the official party committee builds its own is no easy feat. It’s a politically delicate endeavor in any year, and at the moment operatives still don’t have access to a completely updated voter file with comprehensive nationwide data from 2016. That means that most of the conclusions offered thus far are tentative.
“Most of these analyses are based on exit polls, and the one thing we know about exit polls is that they were wrong,” explained Tom Bonier, CEO of Democratic data firm TargetSmart.
Yet Democrats who are actively engaged in fundraising say the lack of an official party-wide autopsy is a constant topic of conversation for donors considering contributions — especially the big whales who sat on Clinton’s national finance council only to receive a thank you note, but no accounting of the loss from the candidate’s team after November.
Not all of the circulating analyses are meant to be comprehensive. Instead, some are designed to zero in on a demographic or issue most important to the organization in question. But that has led to results that often appear to coexist uncomfortably at a time when party leaders are wrestling with how to fit moderates and increasingly empowered progressives under the same big tent.
When Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver presented his own findings to the Senate Democratic caucus this month, for example, he told senators they need to face up to the reality that more and more primary voters consider themselves liberal, according to a Democrat familiar with the report. The liberal Center for American Progress think tank’s 12-page “The Path Forward” report similarly makes the case that a majority of Americans, including Trump backers, support progressive policies, from safeguarding Social Security and Medicare to combating money in politics.
“America did not sign off on a radical-right agenda with Donald Trump’s election, and progressive leaders should remember that,” reads the report, which was published in December.
But the centrist think tank Third Way’s $20 million “New Blue” initiative is looking at the circumstances under which recently Democratic Rust Belt states voted for Trump -- and one of its initial findings, published Wednesday, was that, “Despite the large change in the demographic composition of the electorate, most voters still do not self-identify as liberals. In fact, liberals remain bronze medalists in the ideological breakdown of the electorate — ever since the question was first asked decades ago."
Other projects have led to disagreements over which slices of the electorate are worth focusing on in particular — an elaboration of the broader fight over whether it makes sense to invest more in winning back working class white men or the young, minority voters of the so-called Obama coalition.
Priorities USA Action, which grew to become the largest Democratic super PAC ever in its support of Clinton last cycle, is using polling and focus groups in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida to study both Obama voters who sat 2016 out and Obama voters who backed Trump. Guy Cecil, the group's chairman, presented some of the findings to the DNC's executive committee on Friday morning. Brazile said she asked Mook to present too, but he was unavailable.
The group’s initial report noted that the party has a clear opportunity to win back the Obama-Trump voters. It’s a popular group to study: more than 200 counties swung from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, and 10 sitting Democratic senators are up for re-election in 2018 in states that Trump won.
In a reflection of the party’s inability to come to a consensus on the causes of Clinton’s defeat, Belcher contends that focusing on such a group is missing the forest for the trees.
“Are there people who voted for Obama and voted for Trump? Yeah, there are some. Are there millions and millions of people who did that? No, it’s fucking absurd,” he said. “It’s not like Trump blew through the Mitt Romney number in any of these states. You know what Trump got in Florida? 49 percent. You know what Romney got in Florida? 49 percent."
The story is different in Ohio, however, where Obama won by three points in 2012 and Trump won by eight in 2016.
There, state party chairman David Pepper is spearheading one of the most comprehensive state-level projects, which includes a series of "kitchen table conversations" beginning last month, wherein party officials listen to groups of 20-30 locals — both Democrats and Republicans — to ensure they aren’t “in a bubble” when it comes to issues that matter to those communities, in Pepper’s words.
Part of a presentation of the “2016 Strategic Ohio Post-Mortem” obtained by POLITICO includes county-level maps comparing Democrats’ disappointing 2016 results to 2012, and charts comparing turnout between the two cycles. It also presents the finding that smaller urban counties saw Democratic performance plummet, while counties that voted for Obama saw a drop-off of roughly 182,000 votes for Clinton in 2016. Among the state’s 50 smallest counties, it also notes, Democrats lost by 20 percent in 2012, and 46 percent in 2016.
“You can’t lose those red counties that badly, you can’t make up that difference. So understanding what happened in those scattered counties is important, because if you don’t do better there, there just aren’t enough Democrats in urban areas to make up for it,” said Pepper.
Treading on more sensitive territory, the presentation also includes a slide titled, “No Persuasion Canvass,” which includes images of three Clinton ads and criticizes the campaign for mandating that organizers not try to persuade voters through conversations — a decision that has been roundly criticized since November.
It’s one of the more explicit critiques of Clinton’s Brooklyn-based operation among the existing autopsies, which tend to shy away from direct criticism but often note the imperative of finding an affirmative message rather than the anti-Trump one pushed by Clinton in the campaign’s closing stretch.
In fact, that’s an argument made in “A Way Forward,” an early January analysis from former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear and party consultant David Eichenbaum.
“The candidate and party with a simple, compelling and consistent economic message that empowers people is the side that usually wins. No matter what polling may say about the efficacy of a positive message at any given time, we need to give voters a reason to be FOR us. A positive vision is not something we can start talking about in the last two weeks of an election, or not at all,” the report concludes.
After all, as Beshear told DNC members at a recent candidate forum in Houston, “The Democratic Party has lost its way. Let’s face it: We’ve been getting our butts kicked in elections. We’ve been losing elections around the country that we should win." |
Need to know about our next Attorney General, Jeff Sessions? Look no further than this set of fun factoids, lovingly curated.
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Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) is President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick for Attorney General, the nation’s top prosecutor. If you don’t follow politics that closely, you might not know much about Sessions beyond his being denied a federal judge’s bench in 1986 when his record in cases surrounding race tripped him up. But we here at the Chute are all about providing vital information to the people but in a fun way.
So here now are five fun facts about Senator Jeff Sessions.
He’s Not a Xenophobe! He just wants to make sure people coming here from other countries go through as many legal hoops and barriers as possible because only people born in another country commit acts of terror.
He’s Not A Homophobe! He just doesn’t think that gay people have a right to marry who they want, or deserve protections against discrimination in the workplace or protections against domestic violence or hate crimes because he doesn’t believe LGBTQ+ people face that kind of thing.
He’s Not In Favor Of A Police State! He just doesn’t think you should criticize police officers ever at all because clearly police officers are incapable of making mistakes, and even if they do it’s so rare it’s really not worth worrying about.
He’s Not Deliriously Out Of Touch About Marijuana He just doesn’t think adults should have the choice to put something in their bodies that has been proven to be no more dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. Because no one ever gets in trouble after drinking too much.
He Doesn’t Have A Racist Bone In His Body He just completely objects to renewing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which promises that the federal government will protect the rights of all Americans — no matter their skin color — to vote because he thinks it’s too hard on states that have shown a clear history of discriminating against non-white voters, and he wants voter ID laws to protect against voter fraud he can’t prove exists. Besides, it’s not like those voter ID laws disenfranchise and unnecessarily impede anyone’s vote, right?
Follow James on Twitter @JamboSchlarmbo.
James' newest satirical compilation is out now and available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and soon at WalMart.com. |
TALLAHASSEE — Senate President Don Gaetz made a public records bill one of his top priorities this session, only to see it stall in the Florida House.
SB 1648, which passed the Senate last month, would make a number of technical fixes to current law to generally improve the public's access to records. But among the bill's chief beneficiaries are attorneys who specialize in public records lawsuits, a select group that includes the Senate president's son — Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fort Walton Beach.
The bill allows lawyers to be paid for time spent negotiating for the legal fees they win. Currently, they are paid only for time spent on the case.
Sen. Gaetz said he didn't talk to his son about the bill. Instead, he says, the inspiration is a 50-year-old Lakeland man named Joel Chandler.
During a Wednesday news conference, Chandler stood alongside representatives from a wide spectrum of groups — the First Amendment Foundation, Integrity Florida, Common Cause and the Tea Party Network — urging the Florida House to pass the bill.
"Open government matters because open government breeds good governance," Chandler said. "It's instructive to note that Don Gaetz, who is arguably one of the more conservative members of the Florida Legislature, has been the chief architect of (the bill) for open government."
Yet Chandler is a curious champion for a bill that promotes open records. Since 2008, he has filed about 200 lawsuits over public records, a frequency that has caused some to question his motives.
"It was always a little baffling to me as to where he was coming from," said former Sen. Paula Dockery, R-Lakeland.
Before 2007, Chandler says he was a salesman of copy machines. He gained widespread attention in 2008 when he requested health insurance information for all Polk County schools employees, and their spouses and children. He expanded it to include Florida's 66 other districts.
The request was so onerous and intrusive that it sparked a law in 2009 that exempted such personal information.
"It was a big nightmare," said Jeff Bergosh, who sits on the Escambia County school board. "It required a lot of data, including the addresses for children. It creeped a lot of people out."
Chandler said he wanted to test which districts complied. He ended up suing 11 districts for the information, which, once he got, he ditched.
"I was accused of selling it," Chandler said in an interview. "I didn't give it to anybody or sell it. Literally, it ended up in a box at the bottom of a closet."
His request came after his brother, David, lost his teacher's certificate. A Dec. 4, 2007, order by the state's Education Practices Commission confirmed findings that David Chandler, while working as a biology teacher at Hillsborough's Leto High School in 2004-05, engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a 15-year-old female student.
Chandler said the request was not a vendetta for his brother's loss of certification.
"I understand how someone would come to that conclusion," Chandler said. "But I don't believe I knew at the time. My contact with David has been very intermittent."
Instead, he says, his crusade started on a whim.
"I know this sounds silly, but I was reading newspapers, where they were sending reporters out to make these requests," Chandler said. "I thought that sounded cool, I'll try that. I knew nothing about my brother."
He said he's gone broke dedicating his life to public records requests. In early April, he and his wife filed for bankruptcy protection.
Chandler now serves as executive director for the Citizens Awareness Foundation, which promotes open records.
He won't reveal his salary or who funds the nonprofit.
"I'm not going to disclose that now," he said. "We're in the process of filing with the IRS. When I'm legally obliged to provide it, I will."
He's flattered by all the attention he's received from SB 1648, which Sen. Gaetz has made a top priority. But he said he didn't add anything to it, including the language on legal fees.
"It was more, 'Here are the proposals we are considering,' " Chandler said. "I don't recall ever making any concrete proposals that weren't already there. I'm surprised anyone cares what I think."
Times researcher Carolyn Edds contributed to this story. Contact Michael Van Sickler at (850) 224-7263 or [email protected] |
Posted on 31 August, 2012
The Great Depression of the 1930’s startled and shook the world. Gone were the illusions of prosperity which had fuelled the previous decade – now, people were unloading their luxury items at a fraction of what they had originally paid for them... all in the name of the next loaf of bread or bowl of soup. As the shock of poverty dulled, and the acceptance of a new reality gradually took effect, normally subdued citizens became solution-generating geniuses... and found ways to survive with unthinkably small amounts of money. Here are a few of these gems of knowledge, which may come in handy in the years to come.
Always Spend Less Than you Can
Your self-esteem need not be reflected by the price tags of the things you buy. By living below your means, it affords you the privilege of saving a “buffer” which can act as an emergency resource. Without this buffer, your life will be tremendously vulnerable to any unforeseen expenses. Layoffs, natural disasters, and rising prices can all place a family in jeopardy very quickly. The trick is to think of this emergency fund as a purchase, and not a savings plan. So what are you buying? Less anxiety on a day-to-day basis, which is a direct benefit that comes from knowing that when and if the next crisis occurs... you won’t be caught completely off-guard.
Purchasing in Bulk
When it comes to shopping in the retail world, here’s how mark-ups work – the smaller the quantity you are buying, the more exorbitant its price will be. Certain items come with a fast-approaching expiry date. Limited by their short shelf life, products such as milk, bread, and eggs make large purchases difficult, especially for a smaller family or an individual. Dry goods, however, aren’t bound by the same conventions – and by purchasing foods like pasta, rice, powered milk, vacuum-sealed coffee, flour, sugar, and canned goods in larger quantities, you can wind up halving or even quartering your grocery bill.
Libraries are Hubs
Already loaded with a wide variety of entertainment and educational media, these bastions of books come complete with comfortable seating, community boards, and a gaggle of knowledgeable individuals who’ve congregated here to use their minds. Think of a library as a resource centre for all of your communities needs – a place to sit amongst your peers, quietly comparing notes and pondering on the problems of today and the solutions of tomorrow. Best of all, this amazing array of resources is available completely free of charge – meaning you can stop by again and again, without ever affecting your budget (unless, of course, you’re nursing some late fees).
Most Consumer Products are Complicated Versions of Very Simple Recipes
The more you make a shift towards independent living, the better off you’ll be. Take advantage of the hidden properties of common household items, and you’ll find that your pantry is a lot more capable that you otherwise may have thought. Baking soda can clean your teeth in a pinch. Vinegar is a great all-natural cleaner. Dried flower leaves, mixed with a sprinkling of perfume, create a wonderful and lingering aroma that surpasses the scent of most air fresheners. Kool Aid creates amazing popsicles. Duct tape can repair just about anything. Windowsills are great places to grow food indoors, year round. Herbs can be obtained for free, simply by politely asking a neighbour if you can have some of their unwanted plants that have gone to seed.
By Josh Byer
Image by cbcs of stock.xchng |
Mutahir Rauf, a Loyola student, was shot and killed during a robbery attempt Friday, Dec. 5. View Full Caption Mutahir Rauf/Facebook
ROGERS PARK — Mutahir Rauf was a muscular Brooklyn transplant who knew street violence well from his time in New York and didn't fear it - but that fearless attitude may have lead to his murder Friday night, friends said.
The 23-year-old pre-med student at Loyola University was fatally shot during a robbery Friday night a few blocks from campus, police said. Thinking a weapon pointed at him was fake, he tried to grab it, Ald. Joe Moore (49th) said. The weapon fired, fatally striking Rauf in the chest.
"I don't think he was ever [robbed], but he had stories of friends. He said in Brooklyn they always used fake guns," Rauf's friend Jay Ramadurai said.
Ramadurai met Rauf last year in the university's weight room, where he spent much of his time. His first impression of Rauf was that he could be a body builder, he said.
A man, 23, was shot and killed during a robbery attempt Friday in the 1200 block of West Albion Avenue. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Benjamin Woodard
"He always had a smile on his face. He's not one of those big meatheads you'd be afraid to approach," Ramadurai said. "He treated his body like a temple. You couldn't shove a fry down that guy's throat."
The two quickly became good friends despite Rauf's shy demeanor. He helped Ramadurai as he struggled with science courses. Soon Rauf became more family than friend, he said.
"He was like another big brother to me. He's always been a supporter of me. It was a lot more than just in the classroom," he said.
"I think there was a cultural connection. I'm Indian and he's Pakistani. We were both focused on our studies," Ramadurai said.
Ramadurai, like other Loyola students didn't pay much attention to the alert the school put out Friday night after the shooting. But he did text Rauf at another friend's urging after she hadn't heard from him.
"I didn't believe [the alert]. You hear about this stuff around here a decent amount of the time. You think 'oh, it's just another one,' then you hear it it's a Loyola student and you get anxious," he said.
He never got a text back. Instead, he awoke to the terrifying news of his friend's death.
"I guess I just froze. I couldn't believe it... someone like him... in those circumstances," Ramadurai said pausing between the phrases.
"He doesn't carry much on him. He even wore tank tops in the cold like this. He lived very simple. No fancy shoes or anything like that," Ramadurai said.
Police said Rauf, of the 1400 block of West Pratt Boulevard, and his brother were walking about 7:50 p.m. in the 1200 block of West Albion Avenue when two others approached, pulled a gun and demanded their belongings.
Then there was a "struggle for the weapon," before Rauf was shot, said Officer Thomas Sweeney, a police spokesman.
No one is in custody.
Police described the suspects as a black man, 18 to 20 years old wearing a black mask and hooded sweatshirt, and a black or Hispanic man, 18 to 20 years old, wearing a black knit cap and a black hooded sweatshirt.
The 23-year-old was shot in the chest and head and was pronounced dead at the scene at 8:08 p.m., authorities said. An autopsy determined Rauf died of a gunshot wound to the chest, the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office said.
Police secured the scene Friday night at the intersection of Albion and Lakewood avenues just west of the "L" tracks, directing passersby to surrounding streets. A body was covered with a white sheet.
A woman named Abby, who declined to give her last name, said she heard what she thought was fireworks or a car backfiring. She was disturbed when she realized it was a shooting, she said.
"My stomach sank. I was kind of speechless. I didn't really know what to think," she said describing seeing the scene in the alley behind her home as police set up, and a distraught man, believed to be Rauf's brother paced back and forth.
The Florida native, who has lived in Rogers Park for about two years, is just trying to put into perspective, she said.
"This isn't new. If anything it just makes me want to have social justice in Chicago. He was a young guy, that's what makes it worse. It was just an armed robbery that could've been anyone in the neighborhood," she said.
Around campus, students said they were being extra cautious after the incident.
"It kind of worries me because I work in the area. And they haven't caught the guy or know his whereabouts," said Molly Ladewig, an 18-year-old freshman at Loyola.
Nick Alamazan, 18, had heard about stalking incidents or robberies in the area but said this was a wake-up call for students.
"This is a whole new level," he said. "I was hoping it wasn't a student so when I got the news it hit home. It's a reminder it can happen to any student. I'm definitely going to be more cautious whenever I go out and I'm not going out late anymore."
Loyola University officials called off a Sunday winter festival set to be held near campus after Rauf's death.
The Polar Palooza went as planned Saturday to "offer the community a gathering spot for solidarity and hope," a university statement said.
On Saturday, the university announced plans to honor Rauf, including a moment of silence at the university’s Lessons and Carols event in Madonna della Strada Chapel, prayers during Sunday's mass and a community-wide prayer service at 3 p.m. Wednesday at the Mundelein Center Auditorium.
"We are shocked and saddened by the tragic and senseless event that took the life of one of our students on Friday evening," Jane Neufeld, Loyola's senior vice president of student development said in a statement. "Our entire community mourns the loss of Mutahir Rauf, a fellow Loyolan, and our thoughts and prayers are with his family during this devastating time. This was a senseless act of violence, and one that has absolutely no place in a civil society.
She said the university's Wellness Center and Campus Ministry staff would be open this weekend, including additional hours on Sunday from 1:30-4 p.m. in room 217 of the Damen Student Center.
Thomas Murray, the university's chief of police, encouraged witnesses to come forward with information about the shooting, according to a notice on the university's website.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here: |
Facebook is to roll out features aimed at helping people who might be suffering mental ill-health.
Nearly 3 million New Zealanders are active on Facebook every month, the social network says, and many of them are sharing details of their personal lives - both the highs and the lows.
Social media often gets a bad rap when it comes to mental health, particularly that of young people.
But the way people use Facebook means it is well placed to help people when they are experiencing a low, said Facebook spokesperson Mia Garlick.
"Sometimes people are going to be using our services when they're not feeling happy and we are trying to make sure we're there for them, and giving them an appropriate experience, to help them."
Photo: Supplied/Facebook
From today, people can alert Facebook to the fact their friend appears to be suffering.
When that person next logs in, they'll be met with a host of tools, which include being able to message a friend, contact a help line, or get other tips and support. The feature has already rolled out in the US, UK and Australia.
Photo: Supplied/Facebook
"The safety and well-being of the people who use our service is tremendously important to us," said Ms Garlick, including on a pragmatic level - if people don't have a good experience, they won't keep using it.
"We're regularly looking for opportunities to really remind people how to stay safe and have a positive experience online. And also taking feedback from different groups in the LGBTIQ community, women's groups, as well as in the Māori community."
Youthline's Briana Hill said allowing people to refer their friends and family was an interesting approach.
"What I'll be interested to see is, does this facilitate people intervening in their loved ones lives - and if not, why not? What is the block stopping people doing that?"
She said if Facebook was where people were "hanging out" it was important people got a positive experience from that, and being about to say "maybe you'd like to talk to someone with some professional expertise" was great.
Ms Hill said research in 2014 found that one in two young people in New Zealand did not think their problems were big enough to ask for help.
"The message we want to give people is 'it doesn't have to be the end of the world. Or to be blunt, the end of your life.'"
Photo: Supplied/Facebook
One feature means that if a person chooses to reach out to a friend, Facebook will suggest a message they can edit and send.
"When people are in a difficult time, we've found that if we just leave a blank text box, they're less likely to complete it, because they're not quite sure how to start the words that they need to use to explain that experience."
So how long will it be before Facebook knows exactly what you're thinking when you're logged in - and how your mental health is?
Photo: Supplied/Facebook
"The challenge with technology is lack of context," Ms Garlick said.
"We can only do so much, as a platform. Other than that, we need experts and people with appropriate insights into what people are going through."
And she's quick to dispel privacy concerns, saying your boss will never see a message or data about your mental health.
"The message gets sent directly to that person, and to nobody else….I would encourage people to think before they share."
A mental health worker said other social media platforms should follow Facebook's lead.
Elliot Taylor, the manager of youth group Zeal's mental health project, said young people used more sites than just Facebook.
"It's great what Facebook is doing, but young people are doing this stuff even more on a platform like Tumblr than on Facebook, so personally I think more needs to be done to spread the net." |
Warrantless Collection Of Cellphone Data By Law Enforcement On The Rise, As Is The Use Of Stingray Tower Spoofers
from the millions-of-'incidental'-records dept
In October 2012, in Colorado, a 10-year-old girl vanished while she walked to school. Volunteers scoured Westminster looking for Jessica Ridgeway.
Local police took a clandestine tack. They got a court order for data about every cellphone that connected to five providers' towers on the girl's route. Later, they asked for 15 more cellphone site data dumps...
The tower dump data helped police choose about 500 people who were asked to submit DNA samples. The broad cell-data sweep and DNA samples didn't solve the crime, though the information aided in the prosecution. A 17-year-old man's mother tipped off the cops, and the man confessed to kidnapping and dismembering the girl, hiding some of her remains in a crawl space in his mother's house. He pleaded guilty and last month was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison.
Local and state police, from Florida to Alaska, are buying Stingrays with federal grants aimed at protecting cities from terror attacks, but using them for far broader police work…
Typically used to hunt a single phone's location, the system intercepts data from all phones within a mile, or farther, depending on terrain and antennas.
Initially developed for military and spy agencies, the Stingrays remain a guarded secret by law enforcement and the manufacturer, Harris Corp. of Melbourne, Fla. The company would not answer questions about the systems, referring reporters to police agencies. Most police aren't talking, either, partly because Harris requires buyers to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
[O]fficials at Indiana’s largest police agency aren’t saying what they do with the technology; they’re mum on whose data they’ve collected so far; and they’re not talking about what steps they take to safeguard the data.
Citing concerns that releasing any information would endanger public safety by hindering the agency’s ability to fight crime and combat terrorism, they won’t even say whether they ask a judge for a search warrant before they turn the equipment on.
As we covered last week, cellphone tower "dumps" are increasingly being used by law enforcement to track criminals. These "dumps" provide LEOs with the information gathered every time someone's cell phone contacts the tower, whether it's to make a call, send a text or email or access the web.This vast amount of data being sought is obtained with a court order, which has a much lower bar than a search warrant, which requires probable cause. The ease in which this data is obtained is one concern. The other concern is that many law enforcement agencies have little to nothing in the way of guidelines for dealing with this collected data -- often allowing it to be stored for years, completely unmiminized. Agencies also are under no obligation to inform citizens that their data has been collected. USA Today has compiled some more information about how these tower dumps are used , as well as on how common they are becoming. As was noted in our original article, requests for these data dumps has jumped over 75% over the last five years (according to Verizon) and more than 1.3 million requests were made in 2011(Verizon and AT&T combined).Here's how one particular case utilized data dumps to search for a suspect.To sum up, tons of data was collected, resulting in a broad sampling of 500 people's DNA, and yet it was an old-fashioned tip that resulted in the arrest and indictment of the suspect. What should be considered a troubling incursion on our civil liberties is viewed by law enforcement as just another tool in the toolset, albeit one that goes long on data and comes up short on results.From this lowered bar (court orders), police use previously obtained cellphone tower dumps as justification for eventower dumps, along with any other information that they can gather without having to obtain a warrant: home addresses, call records, locations and the content of texts. This data is combined with the info gathered by other surveillance technology, including plate readers and traffic cams, to generate very precise recreations of a person's actions and movements -- all without a warrant or any concern for the amount of unrelated data gathered.The intrusion goes even deeper than bulk data dumps, though.Stingray devices give law enforcement agencies roaming cell tower impersonators to grab even more data with, bypassing both search warrants and the wireless providers themselves.Law enforcement agencies don't want to talk about these devices, something the manufacturer has an active hand in.Beyond not wanting to talk about the devices, agencies are also reluctant to discuss what guidelines (if any) they have in place to help safeguard civil liberties. As it stands now, most of these devices are deployed covertly, with citizens having no idea their local law enforcement even possesses this capability.Documents obtained by Indianapolis Star indicate the Indiana state police own a Stingray device valued at nearly $375,000 . Unsurprisingly, the state police have no interest in discussing this purchase.There it is again -- concerns about intrusive technology and untargeted data hauls being waved away by throwing out the word "terrorism" and claiming that revealinginformation would "endanger public safety." It's a cop-out -- one that dodges every potential issue by appealing to fear.The reality is that very few people knowthese are being deployed. The power of the device lends itself to abuse, or at the very least, overuse. As the article points out, police in South Carolina used tower dumps to investigate items being stolen from vehicles and in Miami, the police department deployed a Stingray to spy on protesters at a world trade conference.According to the documents, 25 police departments around the country have contracts with Harris Corp. These devices may be expensive, but utilizing the word "terrorism" when applying for a grant from the DHS generally makes the tech more affordable. These devices also appear to be loaned out freely to other agencies, meaning the actual count of law enforcement agencies with access to this technology is considerably higher than the 25 listed.This unofficial sharing program vastly increases the amount of data gathered -- as well as the potential for the civil liberties violations. While one agency may have guidelines affecting use and destruction of gathered data, the agency borrowing it may have nothing in place at all. And, considering the fact thatagency wants to talk about their usage of Stingrays, it's safe to assume whatever safeguards are in place are lax and full of loopholes.Outdated laws have combined with expansive readings of the Third Party Doctrine to give law enforcement agencies nearly unlimited access to vast amounts of data. The rise of cellphones has been fortuitous for agencies with unquenchable thirsts for data, providing millions of metadata points for millions of users. And, like our intelligence agencies, these law enforcement agencies are operating largely under the cover of "darkness," actively avoiding (or directly thwarting) any attempts at oversight.
Filed Under: abuse, cell tower data, law enforcement, mobile phones, privacy, stingray |
Evangelicals are more skeptical of evolution than of climate change, according to new research from Rice University.
"Examining Links Between Religion, Evolution Views and Climate-Change Skepticism" appeared in a recent edition of the journal Environment and Behavior. The study examines the larger "anti-science" tendency that some see as related to membership in conservative religious groups such as evangelical Protestants.
Using national survey data, Rice sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund examined the link between evolution skepticism and climate-change skepticism while considering religion's association with both. The study included 9,636 people in the general U.S. population, which Ecklund said is up to 40 percent evangelical, dependent on how "evangelical" is defined.
The study was co-authored by Christopher Scheitle at West Virginia University, Jared Peifer at Baruch College and Daniel Bolger at Rice University. Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences at Rice and director of Rice's Religion and Public Life Program.
The research revealed that about 20 percent of the U.S. population is skeptical that climate change is occurring at all or that humans have a role in climate change, and about 45 percent of the U.S. population views natural evolution as probably or definitely false. However, the researchers found that there is a much stronger and clearer association between religion and evolution skepticism than between religion and climate-change skepticism. Almost 70 percent of surveyed respondents identifying as evangelicals said that evolution is probably or definitely false, while only 28 percent of these individuals said that the climate is not changing or that humans have no role in climate change.
"This is different from the popular account that the people who oppose climate-change research and the people who oppose the teaching of evolution are the same and that evangelical Protestantism is clearly linked to both," Ecklund said.
Ecklund and her co-authors hope the research will provide insight into how different science issues may or may not interact with religion and politics and help science policymakers more narrowly channel their efforts to address environmental care and climate change.
###
The evolution portion of the study was funded by the John Templeton Foundation and is available online at Ecklund's website, http://www. elainehowardecklund. com . The survey questions on the environment were funded by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion as well as Rice University's Shell Center for Sustainability.
For more information, contact David Ruth, director of national media relations at Rice, at [email protected] or 713-348-6327.
This news release can be found online at http://news. rice. edu/ .
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews. |
March 27, 2014
James Robertson recounts the history of Kosovo, before and after the breakup of the ex-Yugoslavia, and assesses the accuracy of Russia's comparisons to Crimea.
THE EVENTS in Crimea over the past few weeks, culminating in the territory--a peninsula on the Black Sea off southern Ukraine--being annexed to Russia following a referendum in favor of secession from Ukraine, have provided a platform for some of the most base displays of hypocrisy from all sides.
Barack Obama's criticism of Russian "interference" in Ukraine cannot but seem like empty rhetoric in the wake of far more brutal U.S. "interferences" in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, to name but a few. And upon hearing Secretary of State John Kerry's accusation that Russia was behaving "in a 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext," many of us had to double-check that we weren't watching a piece of satire on The Daily Show.
Meanwhile, Russia's feigned concern for respecting self-determination is undermined by its violent history in Chechnya and its continuous "anti-terror" campaigns designed to weaken other pro-separatist movements in the Caucuses. As for Vladimir Putin, he has few qualifications for assessing the democratic legitimacy of a vote--after his own re-election in 2012 stirred well-founded allegations of widespread voter fraud, Putin used riot police against tens of thousands of protesters.
Russian troops in Crimea
Even the new government in Kiev is playing the game, insisting that Crimea's referendum was a violation of the laws of the Ukrainian constitution. This conveniently forgets that its own assumption of power following ex-President Viktor Yanukovych's downfall was equally illegal, according to the letter of that document.
So there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around. The crisis in Crimea has confirmed the depths of contempt that the current political class has toward ordinary people--in the U.S., in Russia and elsewhere.
HOWEVER, ONE of the talking points shared by both Russian and U.S. leaders in addressing the Crimea referendum to secede from Ukraine was the example of Kosovo, whose unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008 remains a contested issue.
It was Putin who raised the "Kosovo precedent" in a phone call with Obama, as justification for Russia's intervention in Crimea. To Putin's mind, if the U.S. could go to war over Kosovo during the 1999 NATO war in the Balkans, and then support independence from Serbia a decade later, Russia was equally entitled to do the same in Crimea.
The paradox there is that Russia was an ally of Serbia--the main power left as the former Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1990s--and therefore one of the most vocal opponents of Kosovan independence, before, during and after the U.S.-led war.
In response to Putin's sudden conversion to the cause of Kosovo independence, those seeking to defend the legacy of U.S.-led "humanitarian intervention" have attacked the comparison as baseless. For example, Louis Sell, a former U.S. diplomat to Eastern Europe, argued that Putin's analogy "doesn't hold water," ignoring, as it does, the history of persecution of the Albanian majority in Kosovo by the Serbian state.
In Sell's telling, NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and subsequent U.S. support for independence in 2008 was justified on "humanitarian grounds," a basis that is apparently lacking in Crimea.
Both the Russian and U.S. attempts to draw or debunk comparisons between Crimea and Kosovo are aimed at justifying or delegitimizing the Crimea referendum under the framework of international law.
Unsurprisingly, however, no one on either side is actually concerned with allowing international law to dictate their state's foreign policy. International law, especially as it concerns imperialist powers like the U.S. and Russia, is seen as an obstacle to be negotiated, or a credo to be manipulated or evoked retroactively to defend "facts on the ground."
The reality is that law is not so much a framework for the governance of political struggles--it is a condensation of those struggles. International law, in particular, is shaped, reframed and reinterpreted according to the political conflicts and foreign policy necessities of the strongest powers.
If we are to undertake a comparison between Crimea and Kosovo, we need to do so outside of narrow confines of the debate between pro-U.S. and pro-Russia advocates. We need to look at the political differences between these two cases.
The key difference concerning the recent referendum in Crimea and Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008 concerns the roots and scope of the local political struggles that provided the backdrop for the respective imperialist interventions and ultimately for secession.
KOSOVO HAS long been a touchstone for Serbian nationalists because it was the center of a medieval Serbian monarchy and the site of two epic battles in the 14th and 15th centuries. Under the rule of the Turkish Ottoman Empire for the succeeding four centuries, it became home to a Muslim, Albanian-speaking majority.
Kosovo was first incorporated into the modern Serbian state during the Balkan wars of 1912-13. The redivision of the Balkans following the First World War and the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, commonly referred to as "the first Yugoslavia," brought the population of Kosovo under direct rule by Belgrade, the kingdom's capital.
During the interwar period, the state relied heavily on a repressive gendarmerie and military presence to pacify the population of the southern province. In an effort to promote agricultural development, Slavic families from poverty-stricken regions of the kingdom were resettled to Kosovo, and Albanians forcibly removed from their traditional lands.
The discontent bred by such policies toward Kosovo Albanians erupted during the Second World War and led several Albanian brigades to collaborate with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany against both the Serbian nationalist and Yugoslav communist forces.
Following the partisan victory in Yugoslavia, Kosovo once again found itself within Serbian borders. The new regime, headed by Josip Broz Tito, the Stalinist leader who managed to keep Yugoslavia balanced between Russia and the U.S. during the Cold War, moved some way toward protecting the national rights of Albanians. But despite Kosovo's autonomous status granted by Tito, many of the problems of the interwar years continued into the "socialist" period.
Thus, in 1968, huge protests by Kosovo students accused the Yugoslav state of adopting a colonial attitude toward the province and called for greater national rights. The protests were met by a wave of repression, and many of the leaders of the Albanian national movement ended up in prison. But the state nonetheless granted many of the demands for greater local self-determination. Kosovan autonomy was further entrenched under the notoriously complex constitution of 1974, which envisioned greater decentralization for all of the Yugoslav republics, with Tito holding the balance of power in Belgrade.
This devolution of powers came under attack following Tito's death in 1980, with the emergence of Yugoslavia's economic crisis. By the late 1980s, the U.S.-led International Monetary Fund was promoting a program of recentralization to better facilitate the repayment of Yugoslavia's $20 billion debt.
To realize the project of recentralization, international powers turned to the up-and-coming member of the Serbian political establishment, Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic's experience on the board of Beobanka, one of the largest banks in Yugoslavia, put him in close contact with Western economists and schooled him in the neoliberal orthodoxies that by now informed IMF policies.
A combination of foreign support, historical luck and ruthless careerism propelled Milosevic to the heights of political power in Serbia by the late 1980s. With Tito's "communism" discredited economically, Milosevic turned to Serbian nationalism to legitimize his rule.
An important component of this project was his manipulation of the "Kosovo question." Milosevic promised to "right the wrongs" allegedly perpetrated against Serbs in Kosovo. The Serbian nationalist revival successfully rechanneled a rising tide of class struggle and hostility toward the bureaucratic elites.
Milosevic's regime, with its Serbian nationalist agenda, destabilized the delicate balance between the different nationalities in Yugoslavia. Very quickly, the federation started to break apart. In 1991-92, Slovenia, Croatia and finally Bosnia, openly encouraged by Germany and other Western European powers, declared independence.
This led to terrible civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia between local paramilitary groups, newly formed national armies and the Yugoslav National Army, still answerable to the Serb-dominated federal government in Belgrade. Bosnia, in particular, was the site of a horrific three-cornered civil war involving Serbs, Croats and Bosniak Muslims. It wasn't until 1995, with the U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Accords, that the civil war in Bosnia was brought to an end, when Milosevic, under pressure from Washington, compelled Serbian nationalists in Bosnia to back down.
FORCED TO retreat elsewhere, Milosevic became even more determined over Kosovo.
During the 1980s, the Albanian national movement had continued to grow and radicalize. In 1989, amendments to the constitution stripped Kosovo of much of its autonomy, including control of the police and judiciary. In response, Albanian civil society launched a series of protests and boycotted local elections--thousands of workers in the Trepca mining complex began a hunger strike.
Albanians also began to organize parallel state structures, including schools and health clinics that offered services in the Albanian language. This "parallel society" became an important survival mechanism during the 1990s as the situation in Kosovo deteriorated.
Kosovo's first declaration of independence actually took place in July 1990, but it failed to receive any international backing.
As war raged elsewhere in the Balkans, the leadership of the national movement in Kosovo managed to convince the population to remain peaceful. Ibrahim Rugova, the nominal president of the self-declared republic and leader of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), one of the key political organizations in the independence movement, evoked Gandhi and called for nonviolent resistance.
Rugova's strategy for achieving Kosovan statehood was founded on the belief that Western forces would intervene on behalf of the Albanian movement. The Dayton Accords were a watershed moment in the Kosovo conflict--precisely because the West explicitly refused to intercede on Kosovo's behalf, essentially giving Serbia's regime the green light to continue its attacks.
While the Western powers--in particular, Germany and the U.S.--had been enthusiastic about backing the independence of Slovenia, Croatia and, to a lesser degree, Bosnia, with the aim of furthering their own imperialist ambitions in the Balkans, few in the West were keen to see the breakup of Yugoslavia go further than that. After all, centralization had been the priority for the stronger Western powers in the late 1980s--and recognizing the independence of Kosovo might encourage Albanian national movements in Macedonia and Montenegro, leading to wider regional conflicts that might complicate efforts at NATO expansion.
Thus, following Dayton, Rugova and the LDK's strategy of non-confrontation and reliance on the West came under criticism from two key sectors of the Albanian national movement. One section argued that independence could not be achieved without a direct, armed confrontation with Serbian forces. In 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) began a guerrilla war against Serbian police and military, as well as against Albanians believed to have collaborated with the Serbian state.
The other section was a burgeoning student movement. During 1997-98 the Student Union at the University of Prishtine organized a series of protest marches against Serbian rule. Tens of thousands of students and their supporters came out despite the threat of a militarized riot police.
The protests were significant in that they revealed the emergence of an independent student leadership critical of the LDK's strategy of laying low and relying on foreign support. Reportedly during this period, the screensavers on computers in the Student Union's headquarters displayed the following joke: "How do we know that Elvis is dead? Because he joined the LDK."
In response to the UCK's insurgency, the Serbian military escalated its repression, increasingly targeting entire villages. As the civilian death toll rose, young Albanian men looking to fight back joined the UCK. By March 1998, Serbia was in an open state of war with the southern province.
The war produced a refugee crisis--over 800,000 displaced Albanians ended up in camps in nearby Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. These camps, often established in areas with large Albanian minorities--in particular, Tetovo in Macedonia--raised the possibility of the war spilling over into the wider region.
In an effort to contain the conflict, neutralize Milosevic and exploit the situation to expand its authority in the Balkans, the U.S. and NATO carried out air strikes against Serbian targets in the spring of 1999, from March 24 through June 3. The targets included military and civilian structures and claimed the lives of around 500 Serbian civilians. On June 2, Milosevic agreed to a withdrawal of Serbian troops from Kosovo and its occupation by NATO-led peacekeepers.
But for more than a decade before the NATO intervention, Kosovo had been in a state of open social conflict, pitting the repressive Serbian state against an Albanian national movement looking to win autonomy and independence through strikes, mass protests and armed insurgency. Indeed, it was only because of this political conflict that NATO forces were given an opening through which to intervene militarily.
This legacy of protest, rebellion and insurrection is noticeably absent in Crimea. The very first military confrontations date from the end of February, a week after Ukraine's former President Yanukovych fled Kiev--when Crimea's provincial parliament was taken over by armed forces answering to Sergey Aksyonov, who became prime minister.
BUT WHAT was the relationship between the Western imperialist intervention against Serbia and Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence almost a decade later?
The period between the end of the war in June 1999 and the declaration of independence in February 2008 was marked by the tensions of neocolonial rule.
Under the watchful eyes of the UN Mission for Kosovo (UNMIK) and the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR), the two organizations responsible for running the new Western protectorate, Kosovo remained in a political, diplomatic and economic limbo.
Lack of agreement among Western powers over whether to back Kosovo's independence led to various complicated blueprints and years of fruitless negotiations between representatives of the local population, Kosovo's international rulers and the Serbian government, since Kosovo was still formally a part of Serbia. The tendency for Western powers to use Kosovo's status as a bargaining chip with Serbia bred distrust among Albanians who again saw their collective fate being determined by a different foreign power.
The failure of UNMIK to rebuild civilian infrastructure after the war further alienated the population. When I traveled to the country in the winter of 2006, much of the population relied on generators for at least part of the day, owing to electricity shortages. Roads that didn't service Western military or international transportation connections were left in disrepair. The presence of thousands of Western troops had provided the basis for a thriving and illegal sex industry, and the country remained in a state of economic collapse, reliant on Western investment and credit.
Of course, the construction projects that were completed in a timely fashion reveal a great deal about the vision that Western powers had for Kosovo. The most egregious example is the U.S. military base Camp Bondsteel, the largest such base in the Balkans and built within a year following the peace.
That such a project was fast-tracked while ordinary people went without electricity and other basic services shows what UNMIK deemed a priority when it came to "protecting" Kosovo.
Only against the background of the Serbian state terror of the 1990s could such neocolonial policies be tolerated by a population experienced at mobilizing against foreign rule. The widespread local support for what amounted to a Western occupation of Kosovo needs to be understood as a response to the decade of mistreatment at the hands of Serbian bureaucratic and military institutions.
The nationalist movement in Serbia and the Belgrade regime's utter disregard for the national rights of Albanians set the stage for Western imperialism to be welcomed in Kosovo, whatever the imperialist motives of the U.S. and Europe. Serbian chauvinism and Western imperialism buttressed one another, opening the Balkans up to further divisions and undermining the development of a genuine anti-imperialist movement.
HOWEVER, SUPPORT for UN and NATO rule in Kosovo didn't go unchallenged. In 2004, fears and frustration with the failure of UNMIK's rule led to a revival of grassroots independence activism, in the form of the anti-colonial movement Vetëvendosje! (Self-determination!).
Organized by several leaders of the 1990s student movement, Vetëvendosje! became a powerful factor in the political dynamics of Western rule in Kosovo. The movement organized thousands of students and young people into a campaign to pressure UNMIK to end its negotiations with the Serbian state and allow the population in Kosovo to decide its own fate.
Within a few years, the repressive side of UN "protection" was revealed for all to see. In February 2007, tens of thousands of protesters came out to a Vetëvendosje! rally. UN forces reacted violently, firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd and killing two young activists. Afterward, the UN police suspected of the shootings were quietly transferred out of Kosovo, and the leadership of Vetëvendosje! was arrested.
Scenes such as these testified to the growing dissatisfaction with UNMIK rule and revealed the beginning of a political crisis for the protectorate. From below, tens of thousands of Albanians began to exert pressure on their local political elites to withdraw from negotiations with the Serbian state and unilaterally declare independence.
Thus, this political activism became an independent factor in determining Kosovo's political status, offering the population a vehicle to express their demands, outside the priorities of either the Serbian state or the Western occupying powers.
Western governments weren't finished with Kosovo yet, though--they set out to coopt the independence movement. When the Kosovo Assembly, bowing to mass pressure from below, finally proclaimed independence in February 2008, the structures of the new state had been purged of most of their anti-colonial, emancipatory possibilities.
NATO and EU forces were able to remain in the independent Kosovo, and the new territory remained so economically and militarily reliant on its Western backers as to be a safe haven for Western imperialism. Camp Bondsteel remained an important base of operations for U.S. forces in the region.
Writing four years after the declaration of independence, the Prishtina-based Marxist Agon Hamza surveyed the lack of progress:
Four years have passed since the country has declared independence, yet in the Republic of Kosovo, the state of things remains pretty much the same as before February 17, 2008... Kosovo still remains the poorest country in the region. The economy is an object of all sorts of neoliberal experimental interventions. According to the best available figures, the unemployment rate in the country lies between 43-45 percent, while poverty has increased during the last couple of years. Consequently, real political freedom in the country is highly limited. There is but one political paradigm by which the country is ruled: stability. Stability at any cost, that is. As a result of neo-imperial intervention, which materializes itself mainly through EU missions, NATO, the International Civilian Office and, of course, World Bank and IMF offices, as well as with the brutally direct and arrogant intervention at every level by the U.S. embassy, blackmailing reports of the (domestic and foreign) non-governmental organizations, governmental agencies for international development (with who else but USAID as the most influential agency), etc., the space for political intervention has been diminished. The sovereign will of the people is completely marginalized.
THE CONDITIONS under which independence was declared, the reality of EU, UN and NATO military rule, and the use of Kosovo as a stepping-stone in their expansion into Eastern Europe significantly compromised the emancipatory possibilities for the republic. To the extent that the political system in Kosovo rests on the scaffolding of Western military, economic and political institutions, the country's sovereignty and the sovereignty of the entire Balkan region will continue to be undermined.
But just as obviously, it would be mistaken to draw the conclusion that Kosovo's independence was solely a product of Western imperialist intervention.
The process of independence was complex and caused awkward questions for Western and pro-Western states with large ethnic minorities--in this regard, it is revealing that Israel has still refused to recognize Kosovo's independence. While independence served the interests of some Western forces, or at least didn't harm them, another critical factor in this outcome was the two decades of political struggle on the part of Albanian civil society in Kosovo.
There is simply no comparable political struggle in Crimea, where pro-Russian sentiment has been largely passive or, at most, channeled into electoral politics.
It could be argued that NATO and UN intervention were as consequential in securing the possibility of Kosovo's independence as Russia's intervention was in Crimea.
Certainly, Western intervention and the occupation of Kosovo shaped the conditions under which independence was realized and therefore also contributed to the restricted character of that independence, imposing real limitations on Kosovo's sovereignty. But these factors were not the definitive catalysts for the declaration of independence--which is the case with Crimea after Russia's military takeover.
That Russian intervention was the central factor in Crimea doesn't mean we should ignore the other factors at play--not least the nationalist policies of the new government in Kiev after Yanukovych's ouster, which seemed almost deliberately formulated to alienate and provoke the Russian-speaking minority in the south and east of Ukraine and drive them into Putin's arms.
There may even be a significant level of resentment among ethnic Russians in Crimea about the transfer of the territory to Ukraine. Certainly, a large part of the population in Crimea voted willingly for independence from Ukraine and annexation to the Russian Federation.
But the situation remains very different from Kosovo. The referendum on secession was not the direct result of a decades-long struggle for independence. Ultimately, it was a successful attempt to retroactively legitimize Russia's military intervention on the peninsula in response to the political crisis in Kiev. Russian separatist sentiment was mobilized after the fact, for the political convenience of the Russian state.
IT DOESN'T take much examination to uncover the hypocrisy of Putin's lectures about the rights of national minorities in Ukraine given the violence he has unleashed within Russia's imperial periphery. But the double standards and selective concern is obvious even within Crimea itself. The idea of the territory's annexation to Russia is viewed with deepest hostility by other national minorities--most notably, the Crimean Tatars.
It was, after all, the Russian-dominated Soviet state, during the reign of Joseph Stalin, that conducted a policy of ethnic cleansing against the Tatars during the Second World War. Under orders from Moscow, the entire Crimean Tatar population was deported to Central Asia and parts of Russia, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and the traumatic break-up of the national community. It wasn't until 1967 that the Soviet state allowed the Crimean Tatars to return to their homeland, then a part of Soviet Ukraine.
Understandably, therefore, Crimean Tatars were vocal in their opposition to Russia's recent intervention in Crimea--they boycotted the referendum vote on secession.
In response, pro-Russian groups undertook a campaign of intimidation, marking Tatar homes with an ominous "X" in a repeat of the 1944 deportations. Since the vote, hundreds of Tatars have fled to western Ukraine to escape incorporation into Russia.
What awaits Crimean Tatars as "citizens" of the Russian Federation is unknown. On the one hand, the post-USSR Russian state has a very bloody tradition of imposing its will on recalcitrant populations in its periphery--like Chechnya, for example. On the other, clientalist arrangements may be established with local Tatar leaders to buy their loyalty.
Whatever the outcome, though, it's clear that the Russian absorption of Crimea differs significantly from NATO's occupation of Kosovo and the subsequent declaration of independence.
Where Russia retroactively mobilized separatist forces and organized a speedy referendum on independence to legitimize its military intervention, NATO and UN forces were faced with serious political challenges from a national movement in Kosovo with roots and a history of struggle going back decades.
This is not to say that socialists should align ourselves with one imperialist intervention and oppose another; western intervention in Kosovo and Russian intervention in Crimea were guided first and foremost by the strategic goals of rival imperial states. It is our job to unmask the "humanitarian" auspices of imperialism, whether they come from the Russian government or the governments of the United States or European Union.
But understanding the specific political dynamics in these separate cases is central for analyzing the strategies of the respective imperial powers--and for understanding how socialists can at once extend solidarity to struggles for democracy and national liberation, and effectively oppose the politics of imperialism, both at home and abroad. |
Bonus: Walkers Compared to say, the Top 5 on this list, zombies might seem like more of a nuisance now than a threat. Nonetheless, this countdown wouldn’t be complete without the series’ titular monsters.
20. Lizzie The disturbed tween was so enamored of walkers that she murdered kid sis Mika to turn her into one, and was going to off Judith next, had Carol not, um, shown her the flowers.
19. Ron A portrait of adolescent angst, Jessie’s obnoxious older son took aim at Rick but only managed to shoot out Carl’s eye before Michonne finally did him in.
18. Ed About the only good thing we can say about Carol’s scum-of-the-earth, abusive husband is that he was as short-lived as he was short-tempered.
17. Mary Driven mad after baddies laid waste to the sanctuary she’d made of Terminus, Gareth’s Mommie Dearest adopted the coldhearted “You’re the butcher or you’re the cattle” motto that turned many a visitor into an Unhappy Meal.
16. Gabriel It’s a miracle that Father Stokes is now a trusted member of Team Alexandria, considering that, in addition to condemning his former flock to death, he’d once tried to sell out Rick & Co. to Deanna.
15. Pete Even before accidentally killing Reg, Jessie’s husband would have had a spot on this list. Not only was he an abusive drunk, but, as Carl so succinctly explained it to Ron, “Your dad was an a—hole.”
14. Paula The Savior who infamously suggested to Maggie that babies were merely “bite-sized snacks for the dead” was so damn tough, it’s a wonder that a walker managed to sink its teeth into her.
13. Dawn Ruling Grady Memorial with an iron fist, Beth’s amoral killer only got violent on her bad days. “It’s unfortunate for us,” Doc Edwards noted, “that that’s the only kind she has.”
12. Simon Negan’s right-hand man performs his duties with such enthusiasm — glee, even — that he’s almost as off-putting as his merciless boss. Almost.
11. Gregory Sleazy. Cowardly. Treacherous. Yeah, we tried, but we really couldn’t think of a single adjective to describe The Hilltop’s despicable leader that wasn’t a (well-deserved!) diss.
10. Martin Tyreese refused to kill the Termian man-eater even after he implied that Judith would make fine plate of baby back ribs. Not sure we could have shown as much restraint.
9. Nicholas Though this spineless Alexandrian got Noah killed and tried to murder Glenn — and tried hard, we might add — our hero still gave him another chance. Which he squandered on a suicide that again almost got Glenn killed!
8. Shane Even more shocking than the manner in which the dead are transformed into walkers was the way that Rick’s onetime best bud turned into a murderous schemer with a mile-wide dark side. Yikes.
7. Dwight Let’s review: Killed Denise. Shot Daryl. And apparently let his own wife save his skin by “marrying” Negan. Yeah, this shifty Savior is among the lowest of the low.
6. Owen Toward the end of this rabid Wolf’s run, Denise brought out hints of humanity in him. But, between his attacks on Morgan and Alexandria, and his “sorry, not sorry” attitude, it was way too little, way too late to earn our good will.
5. Gareth The sight of the cannibal and his fellow Termians chowing down on Bob’s leg was enough to turn even the most hardcore carnivore into a vegetarian. And the way he taunted his supper? That was enough to make misanthropes of us all.
4. Merle Before his 11th-hour redemption, the Governor’s singlehanded henchman seemed to be every appalling thing that his stouthearted brother Daryl isn’t.
3. Joe So vile was the leader of the Claimers that, before Rick (literally) went for his jugular, his idea of a good time had been raping and murdering pretty much anyone and everyone in sight.
2. The Governor “In this life now, you kill or you die,” Woodbury’s smarmy leader believed, “or you die and you kill.” So he didn’t hesitate to do away with Andrea, Merle, our beloved Hershel and any empathy we might have felt for him. |
Ever since I reviewed the Kawasaki Z1000, I have been intrigued by the naked bike class, and one of the top contenders year after year is the Aprilia Tuono.
So getting my eager little hands on a Tuono Factory after a half-year hiatus from reviewing bikes to tend to family was the perfect way to get back in the saddle. Would the naked Italian compare to the superbikes I’m used to riding? Would I be able to throw it down without worrying about dragging hard parts like the Z1000? Or would it be too much of a compromise from superbike performance to easier riding ergonomics with a detuned superbike motor?
Aprilia offers two versions, the RR and Factory, for the Tuono. The upgraded Factory gets fully adjustable Ohlins suspension, an Ohlins steering damper, racier livery and red wheels instead of black. The RR model is supplied with Sachs suspension and a non-adjustable steering damper. Both bikes get upper level braking systems, APRC electronics and Bosch ABS systems.
Aprilia Tuono Factory. Aprilia photo.
Aprilia supplied me with the Factory edition. The livery is very sharp and alluring. Several non-riders commented on how beautiful “my” bike was and some even correctly guessed it was Italian. What can I say… the Italian style bleeds through.
This Italian bike draws compliments for its style. Photo by Bucky Bautista.
The motor is still the same 65-degree V4 it has been since 2012. Last year, however, displacement was increased to a stout 1,077 cc with an 81 mm bore, up from 78 mm previously. What this means to you is an increase in torque and a broader powerband throughout the low to mid-range. I describe it as having the low-end grunt you would expect from a twin, but with a more linear drive all the way to redline. Not exactly something you feel from the fading top-end power of your typical twin.
I’m a huge fan of how quickly manufacturers have progressed with their electronics. Since traction control and ABS systems became standard on race-ready machines, Aprilia has been ahead of the game. Offering three riding modes with preset electronic levels is a thing of the past. Now, rider adjustability is the name of the game. Changing traction control sensitivity on the fly is simple and intuitive for Tuono riders. Press a “plus” or “minus” button and you’re set. No pulling in the clutch lever for three seconds like with other makes. No decrease in speed while the system waits to see if you mean it. Instant adjustability.
On the other hand, it takes some time to learn how to navigate through modern systems, as I’ve found on the Ducati, BMW, or Yamaha platforms. Aprilia has a simple menu button on the left control that toggles and is depressed to access settings. For the life of me, I just couldn’t get to the option where I was able to adjust the power map. That elusive menu also allows you to recalibrate to different wheel size, which could otherwise cause the electronics (traction control and ABS) to read incorrectly and possibly be hazardous.
The Aprilia Tuono comes with high quality Brembo brakes. Aprilia photo. The braking system is on both models of the Tuono is outfitted entirely by Brembo. I’ve come to desire that initial bite of a Brembo system on performance bikes and these are the bee’s knees. The monoblock radial calipers up front on the Tuono stop you in a hurry! I also like the steel braided lines that come stock on Tuono models. If you’re a performance geek, you know that replacing rubber lines with steel provides better braking.
The Bosch ABS system does an amazing job paired with the RLM (Rear wheel Lift-up Mitigation) system. I actually had a hard time sliding the rear into turns, which I love to do, but that also means more predictable and reliable stability under hard braking.
Testing the Aprilia Tuono on the strip at Irwindale Speedway. It's no drag bike, but it did surprisingly well. Photo by Joshua Jeppesen.
I had the idea of testing the launch control by taking the Tuono to the open "drag night" at Irwindale Speedway. Unfortunately, my test didn't go as planned. The launch control is designed for roadracing starts, when tires are already somewhat up to temperature. If I did a burnout to heat the tire, it would fault the electronics and I couldn't use launch control. So I could only use launch control with a cold tire. Despite that handicap, the Tuono jumped out of the gate well enough that if I'd gone half a second quicker, I'd have needed to get my pro license, under the rules. Not bad for a bike that isn't designed to be a drag racer.
This bike is most at home on a canyon road or a roadrace course. Photo by Cameron Welther.
My hand was a bit forced, due to road closures from the rare Southern California rain storm. I had to conduct my video review on a much tighter and technical road than I wanted. I was on a road I usually ride on my Husky 510SMR supermoto, because of its quicker handling, and I was concerned it was going to be too much for the Tuono. The precise handling, combined with the wider powerband of the V4 motor and the electronics package, proved me wrong within a couple of passes.
The Tuono is a good choice for your favorite curvy road. Photo by Cameron Welther.
Aprilia Tuono Factory. Aprilia photo. The Tuono is essentially the RSV4 with a handlebar instead of clip-ons I have been on several RSV4s and the Tuono Factory felt exactly the same, except with more front end feel thanks to the wider-set grips. The added leverage, compared to the clip-ons, facilitated faster transitions. The Ohlins steering stabilizer and top-notch suspension kept too much rider input in check, making everything smooth as butter.
I am very familiar with some of the challenging sections on this testing ground from riding my tuned 2008 Honda Fireblade. I know exactly where bumps are in turns that I have to pick the bike up to keep from pushing the front from loss of grip. The Tuono Factory is the first bike I have ridden for an extended period of time with upgraded Ohlins suspension. I could literally stay at full lean through the same bumpy turn without the slightest sign of a front-end slide. The upgraded forks soaked it up and kept me planted, railing through the turn, able to hammer on the throttle without hesitation thanks to the traction control set at level four.
The Aprilia Tuono Factory in its natural habitat. Photo by Cameron Welther.
The trick suspension also does a phenomenal job when you’re just commuting on the highway. Splitting lanes in the motorcyclist war zone known as Southern California traffic, I was riding over the continuous line of the lane markers, not even knowing they were there. I once had to get off line and get back on the bumpy reflective mounds to make sure I was actually riding on them. Unexpected holes in the road were also met with unfamiliar smoothness instead of the slight pogoing of my personal bikes. Now I understand why upgrading suspension is the first step for most racers and why it costs so much. You get what you pay for.
The only drawback with the Tuono, like most naked bikes, is the lack of wind protection. I can imagine holding on for dear life and trying to find a bubble behind the nonexistent windscreen on long straights at the track.
The Aprilia Tuono is comfortable and versatile enough to be a good ride for the daily commute, as well as fun and games. Photo by Heather Bonomo.
In the end, the Tuono struck me not as a commuter-friendly upright bike, but more of a superbike-supermoto hybrid on steriods. Turn off all the electronics, if you dare, and you’ll accumulate performance awards from the fuzz faster than Lorenzo changes helmet sponsors in the off season.
I could easily see riders owning the Tuono to fulfill all their needs: commuting, track, twisties and longer journeys. If there is truly such a thing as an all-in-one performance bike, I would go out on a limb and say the Tuono is a top contender. |
Image copyright EPA Image caption A curfew in Indian-administered Kashmir remains in place - along with curbs on mobile internet access and on some cable television services
Several leading newspapers in Indian-administered Kashmir say they have been have been raided by police seeking to end a week of violent protests.
Police seized printing plates and thousands of editions overnight on Friday. Cable television is also reported to have been shut down.
More than 40 people have died in recent clashes in the area.
The crisis was sparked by the killing of a prominent separatist militant, Burhan Wani.
More than 1,500 others have also been injured in fighting between protesters and the security forces.
Image copyright EPA Image caption The crisis was sparked by the killing of a young, well-known pro-separatist militant
Image copyright AFP Image caption The violence is the worst seen in the region for years
A curfew remains in place - along with curbs on mobile and internet access.
"The clamp-down was necessitated as Pakistani channels that are beamed here through cable television network have launched a campaign aimed at fomenting trouble here," an unnamed Jammu and Kashmir government minister told the Reuters news agency.
"Some newspapers were also sensationalising the violence... We will take a decision on [their] restoration after 19 July."
The Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir and the Kashmir Observer, are among the titles who said they were affected.
Abdul Rashid Mukhdoomi, printer and publisher of the Greater Kashmir, said that there were no orders "under which the printing and circulation of our newspapers were stopped". |
Evgeni Nabokov appears ready to finally join the New York Islanders. The goalie told Newsday he will attend the team's training camp in September.
"Yes I do plan on attending," Nabokov said, according the newspaper. "Now I will have full preparation for the season."
The Islanders suspended Nabokov in late January for not reporting to the team after he was claimed off waivers from the Detroit Red Wings.
Nabokov told Newsday he wants to "set the record straight" after failing to report to New York last season.
"A lot of people speculated that I didn't want to go to the organization but that's totally not true," Nabokov told the newspaper.
"What made me make that decision is that I hadn't skated for a month and a half when they claimed me. They were out of the playoffs, but battling to get in and, as a goalie, I know the goalie position is important when fighting for position (in the standings). I didn't feel that I could help them to get to the playoffs. I needed three to four weeks to get ready and the season would've been over."
Nabokov, who played with the San Jose Sharks for parts of 10 seasons, had spent the start of last season with SKA St. Petersburg of the Russian KHL and hadn't yet played for Detroit.
The NHL's collective bargaining agreement states that anyone who plays in a professional league before signing an NHL contract must clear waivers.
Once he signed his one-year deal with the Red Wings, he became available to the Islanders. When Nabokov refused to report to the Islanders, the team suspended him.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. |
The male is often troubled by concerns that his penis is not large enough to satisfy his partner or himself. He is ashamed to have others view his penis, especially in the flaccid state. Such concerns might be unfounded in reality and might be a presentation of social anxiety or some other clinical problem, such as erectile dysfunction. Concern over the size of the penis, when such concern becomes excessive, might present as the ‘small penis syndrome’, an obsessive rumination with compulsive checking rituals, body dysmorphic disorder, or as part of a psychosis. However, it is often a worry that can be described as within the normal experience of many men. Various potential causal factors are considered. A thorough assessment, normalizing the worry and then exploring the treatment options in detail with the man, is essential to allow the matter to be consolidated satisfactorily within the male ego.
Abbreviations SPS small penis syndrome BDD body dysmorphic disorder (dysmorphophobia) ED erectile dysfunction CBT cognitive behavioural therapy SSRI selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
INTRODUCTION The penis, particularly in its erect state, is a symbol of masculinity. In many cultures it has come to symbolise attributes such as ‘largeness, strength, endurance, ability, courage, intelligence, knowledge, dominance over men, possession of women; a symbol of loving and being loved’. A review [1] is recommended which describes Indian Sadhus using weights, Dayak men in Borneo piercing the glans and then inserting items in the resultant holes to stimulate the partner, and the Topinama of Brazil, who encourage poisonous snakes to bite their penis to make it enlarge (for 6 months!). Some of these concepts date back over many thousands of years, and there is evidence that prehistoric cave dwellers attributed the symbolic values of strength and power to penile size, as well as those of virility and fertility, a process also recommended in the Kama Sutra [2]. Given the historical context it is perhaps no surprise that even today many men place great importance on the size of their penis. Hegemonic masculinity is defined by attributes such as physical strength, heterosexuality with authority over women and other men, showing no emotions (such as remorse and uncertainty, which might suggest vulnerability), economic independence, and an ability to demonstrate sexual ‘conquest’. While most men do not embody all of these qualities, society supports hegemonic masculinity within most of its institutions [3]. Given this historical and cultural background, it is perhaps unsurprising that for many men the size of their penis is an important issue. It is perhaps more surprising that when men are concerned about their penile size, this concern relates not only to the erect but also to the flaccid penis. These concerns, when severe, can lead a man to go to extreme lengths to try to change the size of his penis. This review deals with issues surrounding the aetiology, psychology and management of these men, who might be considered to have the ‘small penis syndrome’ (SPS). Classically, the SPS is found in men with a normal‐sized penis but who are anxious about the size of the penis, in contrast to men who have a truly small penis (micropenis). It is perhaps relevant that while men with a larger penis, in length and circumference, have a better body image, genital image and have a feeling of greater sexual competence [4], women do not necessarily believe that a larger penis is ‘better’. For instance, it was shown that 90% of women prefer a wide penis to a long one [5, 6]. The issue of attractiveness to women is complex, but most data suggest that penile size is much lower down the list of priorities for women than such issues as a man’s personality and external grooming.
DEFINITIONS The SPS is defined as an anxiety about the genitals being observed, directly or indirectly (when clothed) because of concern that the flaccid penis length and/or girth is less than the normal for an adult male, despite evidence from a clinical examination to counter this concern. It might be an obsessive rumination, part of a body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), or as part of a psychosis (see below). The degree of emotional distress and behavioural impairment is often much greater than the size and nature of the defect sensed within the self. Often the specific matter of penile size is not an overtly acknowledged issue, and is often situational or context‐driven [7]. As such, the clinician might need to consider this matter as part of the overall assessment of different presenting problems within urology and psychiatry. Dysmorphophobia has been described for more than a century; it is a psychiatric condition, also termed BDD, and is observed as a fixation on an imaginary flaw in the physical appearance. In cases in which a minor defect truly exists, the individual with BDD has an inordinate degree of anguish. People with BDD frequently develop major depressive episodes and are at risk of suicide. They might also show violent behaviour toward their treatment providers that can cause concern to clinical caregivers. In many cases, individuals with BDD have drastic social and occupational dysfunctions that might progress to the point of social isolation. There is embarrassment and fear of being scrutinized or mocked, which often causes these individuals to avoid social situations and intimate relationships. As victims of poor self‐image, these individuals typically do not show sufficient social skills and frequently are single or divorced. People with BDD can believe firmly that a marked change in their perceived body defect is a prerequisite to their happiness and well‐being. As such, it can be a manifestation of abnormal body image. This contrasts with most men, who are likely to be satisfied with their erect (8%) and overall penile size (71%) than with their flaccid size (51%). Further overall satisfaction with the genitals was linked to increased body satisfaction [8].
PREVALENCE Most men rated their penis as average (66%) and only 22% as large and 12% as small, in a large Internet‐based survey of 52 031 heterosexual men and women [9]. Self‐reported penile size was correlated positively with height and negatively with body fat level. About 85% of women were satisfied with their partners’ penile size, although only 55% of men were satisfied, with 45% wanting to be larger (and 0.2% to be smaller). Most women who reported their partners’ penis as small were not satisfied. Men reporting a larger than average penis also rated their appearance most favourably. The authors noted that it might be the reverse; the men’s more general body image influenced their estimates of penis size [8]. Furthermore, self‐esteem might influence their estimate of penile size. These findings are similar to those reported by Lee [10] and Son et al.[11], although both studies had more men reporting small rather than large penises. Finally, the effect of the media might influence men, who give greater emphasis to this trait, that women might want something different from reality, and that women might have a different marketing target to that of men [12].
NORMAL PENILE SIZE Flaccid penile length is just under 4 cm at birth and changes very little until puberty, when there is marked growth. Schonfeld and Beebe [13] noted that the length of the stretched penis approximated the length of the erect penis, while the flaccid circumference was a poor indicator of erect circumference. There is marked variation within individuals, with heat and exercise, as well as anxiety, all contributing to the variation. There have been several reports of measurements of penile size, which are summarized in Table 1[11, 13-22]. These studies measured various aspects of penile size, including flaccid length, stretched length, erect length, flaccid girth and erect girth. The variability of some of the values recorded inevitably reflects the different populations studied and differing techniques of measurement. Stretched penile length in these studies was typically 12–13 cm, with an erect length of 14–16 cm. For girth, there was again remarkable consistency of results, with a mean girth of 9–10 cm for the flaccid penis and 12–13 cm for the erect penis. Table 1. A summary of reports of measurements of penile size Study N Mean or range age, years Population Flaccid* Erect* length stretched length circumference suprapubic fat depth length circumference [ 13 54 20–25 Caucasian – 13.02 8.55 – – – [ 54 2770 20–59 – 9.7 – – – 15.5 – [ 19 156 – Mostly Caucasian – – – – 16 13.5 (base) [ 14 80 54 White 67.5%, Black 20%, Asian 12.5% 8.85 12.5 9.7 (mid shaft) 2.85 12.89 12.3 (mid shaft) [ 20 184 – Heterosexual 60% – – – – 15.71 13.2 (base) [ 16 813 30.8 All homosexual 10.4 – 9.8 (max) – 16.4 12.6 (max) 3417 30.5 All heterosexual 9.8 – 9.4 (max) – 15.6 12.2 (max) [ 15 111 18–19 Potent German men 8.6 – – – 14.48 – 32 40–68 German men with ED 9.22 – – – 14.18 – [ 18 3300 17–19 Italian men 9 12.5 10 (mid shaft) – – – [ 21 200 20–22 Turkish men 6.8 8.98 – – 12.7 – [ 22 104 54 British men – 13 (median) – – – – [ 17 124 59 Before RP 9 13 9.5 (mid shaft) 2.5 – – 63 59 After RP 8 12.5 10 (mid shaft) 2 – – [ 11 123 21.7 Korean men 6.9 9.6 8.5 (mid shaft) 1.1 – – For penile length some general observations are possible. First, the values for penile length show some consistency, with the marked exception of the Korean study [11]. Second, with a value of 9–10 cm, the flaccid length is usually 3–4 cm shorter than the stretched penile length and 5–6 cm shorter than the erect length. Third, as suggested by the work of Schonfeld and Beebe [13], there is a good correlation between stretched penile length and erect length [14]. It is generally accepted that a true micropenis is >2.5 sds below the mean length, and given the values shown in Table 1, it was suggested that any penis with a stretched length of <7 cm is a true micropenis [14]. There are several areas where further work is needed. For instance, except for the Korean study, there is little evidence of racial differences. This runs counter to many widely held suppositions and needs further investigation. For the issue of age (in adult men), while there appeared to be a trend suggesting that men with a greater mean age had smaller penises than those in studies where the mean age was lower, when this question was formally assessed there were no differences [15]. One study compared the values for penile length in homosexual and heterosexual men [16]. That study was based on measurements made by Kinsey some decades earlier, and showed statistically significant differences, with homosexuals having the greater length and girth. The authors suggested that this might reflect greater in utero exposure to androgens, but again it is area that needs further research. Pelvic surgery, in the form of radical prostatectomy, has also been shown to result in penile shortening [17]. The explanation for this might be a direct consequence of the prostatectomy, but an alternative hypothesis is that, with the onset of erectile dysfunction (ED) caused by the prostatectomy, there is a gradual loss of smooth muscle within the penis, with associated fibrosis and shrinking. This further raises the issue of whether men who have severe ED have smaller penises than age‐matched potent men. Again, there are few data on this issue.
AETIOLOGY Early observations The SPS or ‘locker room syndrome’ might have its origin in childhood, when the young boy observes the larger phallus of an elder sibling or a friend, or even of his father. In one study, patients visiting an andrology clinic complaining of a small penis were asked when they believed the problem had started. Of these men, 62.7% said that their concerns started in childhood, when they compared their penis to that of their friends, while 37.3% said that their concerns began during their teenage years, after seeing erotic images [23]. None of these people had a penis of >2.5 sds less than the mean. Often the first penis that a child sees is his father’s, which will inevitably not only be larger, but which will also look relatively larger from a child’s more lowly perspective, especially if the father is seen standing naked after a warm bath or during any state of arousal. When compared to the child’s penis, this observational perspective is compounded by the child looking down at his own penis. This issue of perspective is of course relevant at all ages. Relationships with others Fears and anxieties about penile size might also arise after the breakdown of a relationship, or after derogatory or malicious remarks made by a partner during sexual activities. The receptive partner might report that she or he cannot feel the man ‘inside’ during sexual intercourse. This might lead to poor sexual self‐confidence, with a tendency to feel inadequate in vulnerable public situations, and this in turn might prevent the man from establishing further (or any) intimate relationships. Under these circumstances, the anxiety is primarily related to the erect penis. There is a suggestion that for those men who consider that they have a small penis, there is an insecurity effect [9], although the direction of causality remains unclear. General body image and self‐esteem might influence this further. The denigrating effects of other men might have a strong effect on further concern [24]. Developmental issues There is some evidence that for those men with poorly developed and small testicles, the problem might be accentuated, as there is no upward and forward lift to the penis, and so the genital bulge is minimal. This has a secondary effect of less evidence of a penile form in men wearing tight jeans or swimming attire. Genital confidence can be impaired if there are small testicles, with the perception that the penis is small, when indeed it is normal in size. Occasionally there might be a history of congenital abnormality (e.g. hypospadias). Other impairments of neurological development have been proposed to explain a variation in normal sensation in the genital area, with subsequent ‘misreading’ of any sensations perceived. These include neurological impairment of tactile stimulation and sensation in the perineal area. An alternative theory suggests that there might be dysfunction in one of the ‘association areas’ within the parietal lobe that accumulates a sensory store for ‘perception’. Associated psychological contributions from the effect of cognition and of disgust (possibly via the amygdala) and of the cognition of parts belonging to self (prefrontal cortex) are all possible contributory factors [25], as may that arising from envy. Psychiatric disorder These include obsessive‐compulsive disorder, social phobia, anxiety and depression. BDD is marked by excessive preoccupation with an imaginary or minor defect in a facial feature or localized part of the body. Borderline and narcissism personality types might be over‐represented. Narcissism is a pattern of thinking and behaving in adolescence and adulthood, which involves infatuation and obsession with one’s self to the exclusion of others. Sexual dysfunction This condition is often raised by patients with other clinical conditions, such as ED or ejaculatory dysfunction, and less frequently in conditions such as sexual aversion. Other factors In men who are overweight, there are dual factors of a perspective issue (the penis cannot be seen with the abdominal overhang) and with the presence of a significant suprapubic fat pad causing the penis to be partly buried [18, 26]. Concerns over levels of female sex hormones and industrial pollutants in water have been raised by the media.
ASSESSMENT The clinician must determine whether the main concern relates to flaccid or erect length, and whether girth is a significant concern. The motivation (internal and external) and expectations of the consultation must be understood. A full medical, psychosexual and psychiatric history should be undertaken. Specific themes that must be explored are around concerns about appearance, and body image (and specifically for BDD). General beliefs, values, assumptions and behaviours around genitals and sexuality should be enquired about. How does this affect the man? What is he unable to do in his life that bothers him? Can he use public toilets? Does he socialize in the public house, where beer drinking would necessitate many visits to the toilet? Actual paruresis (an inability to urinate in the presence, real or perceived, of others) might occur for many men (another presentation of social anxiety) and might need specific treatment. Can he go swimming or participate in athletic sports? Does he avoid meeting a potential partner because he is afraid of the consequences of emotional intimacy? Most men will have a normal sex drive but might not have a partner. Has he avoided certain occupations? If the man is in a relationship, try to see the man and partner together, and get the perspective from the partner. Psychological profile scores might be helpful to assess self‐confidence, self‐esteem, quality of life, social anxiety and symptom distress, but should be limited to those clinicians skilled in undertaking and interpreting such inventories. A physical examination should involve an assessment of body habitus, detailed genital examination (immediately after genital exposure, to prevent any changes due to external temperature) with careful exclusion of genuine penile anomalies such as hypospadias, epispadias and Peyronie’s disease. The presence of a significant suprapubic fat pad should be noted. Careful measurements of flaccid length, stretched length and flaccid girth are essential. If the erect size, particularly of girth, is an issue then measurements after intracavernosal alprostadil are also helpful (or ask the patient for a digital image of the erect penis). As endocrine abnormalities can cause true micropenis, a general assessment of the secondary sexual characteristics is valuable.
MANAGEMENT AND TREATMENT OPTIONS Normalize and provide education It is important to avoid dismissing the concerns raised by the man; to do so might further humiliate him and heighten his anxiety and concerns. It is helpful to normalize the situation, as it is a common concern amongst many men, and to give the man some reassurance about the condition and his symptoms. As misinformation or lack of information is often apparent, it is important to educate the patient about the normal variation in penile size and how his penile dimensions relate to the normal range. It is also important to educate the patient about the relative importance placed on the size of the penis by most other men and women, as well as society and the media, and how he might selectively notice certain aspects of external cues around the genitals in general. Mirror work The patient is asked to look at himself undressed in front of a full‐length mirror. By doing so, he will observe the penis in the way that he would see other men. The penis looks longer and larger than when observed from above, looking down while standing upright. This can be done at home when alone, or can be done with a clinician or therapist, with the patient standing behind a curtain partition. This can be very useful for a man who avoids looking at himself naked or has no access to a full‐length mirror at home [27]. Psychological therapies Psychotherapy is important for many men with concerns about having a small penis. Whether the penis is actually small or just perceived to be small, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be useful in building confidence and counteracting negative thoughts. CBT involves exploring the typical thinking patterns experienced by the patient and ascertaining if some of these can be ascribed as automatic, protective but also unhelpful and self‐defeating. Substitution of alternative generated thoughts (alone or with the input of the therapist) and/or changes in ways of responding (behaving) to such thoughts can bring about dramatic changes. Where the penis is on the lower side of normal dimensions, the man can be provided with suggestions on how to cope and accept these facts. CBT is also effective in BDD [28]. Wherever possible, explorative work with a partner should be encouraged. Themes around self‐confidence, self‐esteem, anger, fear of rejection and narcissism might emerge. Therapy in a facilitated group might help men to challenge each other and their stated anxieties more effectively than in individual therapy, although equally there might be ongoing competitiveness to have the ‘smallest penis’ or greatest social impairment. Physical treatments These include use of vacuum devices, penile extenders and traction devices, and penoscrotal and penile rings. Evidence on their efficacy is very limited and it is important that the patient is aware of this. Vacuum devices are ordinarily used as a treatment for ED but can also be used to ‘exercise’ the penis. This can have both a psychological uplifting effect for the patient but evidence suggests that there is minimal physical change. A recent study reported on 37 men with a stretched penis length of <10 cm who used the device for 20 min, three times a week. The mean penile stretched length increased from 7.6 cm to 7.9 cm after 6 months of treatment, although this change was not statistically significant. Interestingly, three men had an increase in their penile length of >1 cm, and nine were satisfied with the treatment [29]. Penile extenders have also been used as a means of stretching the penis, and devices are available for use throughout the day. There are several commercial devices available (including the Jes extender and Andropenis) although there are few data showing efficacy for any of them. A recent study of 31 men, with a mean baseline stretched penile length of 12 cm, showed that with daily use of the Phallosan® extender system for ≥3 h, by 3 months there was a mean stretched length of 13 cm with a further increase to 13.8 cm by 6 months (P < 0.001) [30]. Changes were also seen in penile diameter. There was a good correlation between the duration of use of the device and increase in length, and 80% of patients were happy with the outcome. An older study reported the use of a stretching device (Penistretcher®) in nine men with a baseline stretched length of 12 cm. They reported that after using this device for ≥6 h per day over a 4‐month period, the mean increase in stretched length was 1.8 cm [31]. Both these reports included few men and were only reported as abstracts. There are currently no peer‐reviewed publications related to the use of these devices in men with SPS. Other devices that have been used in this group of patients include ‘Cock rings’ and penoscrotal rings. In one small report, there was a suggestion that they might help to augment penile size and maintain erections in men with anxiety [32]. Medications These might be indicated for use in men with SPS; the main group of drugs used are the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Fluoxetine has been shown to be effective in treating BDDs [28] and is better than placebo in both delusional and non‐delusional patients. Buspirone is an anxiolytic that can be tried in extreme cases of anxiety. Anti‐psychotic medication can be used to treat delusional BDD but there is little evidence of efficacy beyond the treatment of the psychosis per se. A typical course of treatment might be 8 weeks on an SSRI and/or adjunctive treatments such as buspirone or pimozide (a rarely used antipsychotic agent) [33]. Testosterone therapy is only of value in men with micropenis [34] and is not considered further here. Self‐help sources Inevitably, many men, rather than seek formal medical help, prefer to use other sources of information, but might then seek medical advice. The Internet is a rich resource of sources offering to help men ‘increase their manhood’. Inevitably, there are no efficacy data relating to most of these treatments (especially the many pills and lotions available). Common sense advice can be found by some retailers, including ‘bulge underpants’ and swim shorts, body and genital hair trimming or shaving, the use of ‘hot towels and wraps’ and ‘jelqing’. The last is an ancient Arab technique whereby the hand pulls on the penis causing stretching (and effectively self‐focus work encouraging psychological acceptance of the penis, which will change in size and shape during the process) and is recommended on many websites. Some websites advocate that ‘small is beautiful’ and that the smaller penis can be celebrated by both the man and his partner. Surgical treatment This would appear to be an attractive option for many men with SPS, and indeed, for those who research the Internet there is no shortage of sites encouraging such an approach. However, the results of surgery are poorly documented and significant complications can ensue. Accordingly, it is recommended that any surgical procedure should only be used after a careful preoperative assessment, which should include a thorough psychological assessment as outlined above. Furthermore, careful advice on the potential results of surgery and the potential complications that might ensue is essential. Indeed, the 2nd International Consultation on Sexual Dysfunctions concluded that ‘most men will not wish to proceed to surgery when properly informed of the likely outcome and risks of complications’[35]. The ethical issues of offering such surgery to men with a normal sized penis (which is usually the case [36]) are reviewed by Vardi [37], especially as this appears to be increasing in the private sector rather than research or university settings [38]. If, after such an approach, the man wishes to consider surgery, then several surgical options are available. Some surgical approaches will potentially increase the flaccid length of the penis (e.g. division of the suspensory ligament of the penis), while others have been reported to increase both flaccid and erect length. Similarly, some approaches offer an increase in erect girth only, while others offer an increase in both erect and flaccid girth. Either liposuction or suprapubic lipectomy are potentially valuable in men with a significant suprapubic fat pad, thereby making a partly buried penis appear more prominent. Other than bruising, there are few complications with such an approach, and the cosmetic results are reasonable. However, there are few reported results for this approach [39]. Division of the suspensory ligament is the procedure that has been most commonly described for flaccid penile lengthening [39-44]; it allows the corpora cavernosa to be partly separated from the pubis, thereby increasing the apparent flaccid length of the penis. Some form of adjustment of the suprapubic skin is needed (usually a V‐Y advancement flap or a Z‐plasty), and it is sometimes helpful to place a ‘spacer’ between the pubis and the corporal bodies to prevent re‐scarring at the site of the divided suspensory ligament. At best, the proponents of this technique suggest a 2‐cm increase in flaccid length (Table 2) [39, 41-44]. Potential problems include the inevitability that the erect penis will tend to point downwards when the man is upright, rather than standing ‘erect’ and perpendicular to the body. Specific complications include re‐scarring of the infrapubic region, with the consequence that there might be no increase in length and in some cases there might even be penile shortening. A surgical approach to prevent this complication was reported recently [45]. Finally, the advancement skin flaps, when healed, might be unsightly and might result in the disfiguring advancement of suprapubic hairy skin onto the shaft of the penis [14]. It is relevant that in one series, of men with BDD who had this surgery, despite a mean increase in length of 1 cm, only 27% were satisfied and 54% requested further surgery. Table 2. The reported results of penile lengthening procedures Study N, type of patients Technique Follow‐up, years Initial length, cm (range or sd ) Length after surgery, cm (range) Mean gain, cm (range or sd ) Comments [ 43 19, MP + BDD Penile disassembly + cartilage insertion 3.3 (mean) 3.6 (F) (2.6–4.7) 8.3 (E) (6.2–10) 6.6 (F) (5.5–8.2) 11.4 (E) (9–14) – – [ 41 18, MP + BDD DSL 0.75 (≤3) 8.9 (E) 10.5 (E) 1.5–2.5 – [ 42 42, MP + BDD DSL – – – 1.3 (1.2) 35% satisfied [ 42 27, BDD DSL – 11.5 (1.7) 1 (1.1) 27% satisfied [ 39 11, BDD DSL 2 9.12 (7–11.3) 10.75 (9.2–12.9) 1.65 (1–2.3) – [ 44 31, BDD DSL – 8.72 (6.5–10) – 2.42 (1.5–4.8) – [ 43 15, BDD DSL 2.25 – – 3.45 (2.1–4.5) The so‐called ‘Perovic procedure’ involves penile disassembly, with dissection of the glans penis off the corpora cavernosa in continuity with the dorsal neurovascular bundle and the urethra [46]. A piece of costal cartilage is then sutured onto the distal corpora before the glans is replaced over the cartilage. This procedure should result in an increase in both flaccid and erect penile length. It is clearly quite extensive surgery, and runs the risk of glans numbness due to damage to the neurovascular bundle. Short‐term results were reported [46], with increases in length of 2–3 cm for both the flaccid and erect states. However, long‐term results have not been reported, and given what is known about the tendency of devascularized rib cartilage to resorb with time [47], scepticism about the long‐term outcome is inevitable. Several techniques have concentrated on bulking of the subcutaneous fat with fat injections, free dermal fat flaps, or biodegradable materials. There are few reported results of such surgery in peer‐reviewed reports, which is in itself a worry. One recent report of the early results of subcutaneous fat injections was promising, with increases in circumference of 1.4–4 cm reported [44], but studies with a longer term follow‐up suggest disappointing results, with complications including disfigurement, scarring, lumpiness and infection [48, 49]. One recent study reported the use of a biodegradable scaffold seeded with fibroblasts, that was formatted into a tube and wrapped around the degloved penis [43]. Although the authors operated on 204 men a follow‐up was available for 84, with a mean follow‐up of 24 months. The authors reported a mean increase in flaccid girth of 3.15 cm and a mean increase in erect girth of 2.47 cm; 81% of patients judged their satisfaction with the outcome of surgery as either excellent or very good. Recently a technique involving use of a groin fasciocutaneous flap was reported [50]. Another approach to penile girth enhancement was reported by Austoni [41] and involves the use of bilateral longitudinal saphenous vein grafts that are inlaid into the tunica albuginea along the penis. These grafts would be expected to allow expansion on penile erection, thereby increasing erect but not flaccid girth. Austoni reported that there was a minimal change in flaccid diameter, but that the erect diameter increased from 2.85 cm to 4.21 cm (P < 0.01). There is a theoretical risk of ED, as a proportion of men undergoing the ‘Lue’ procedure for Peyronie’s disease develop de novo ED, although this was not reported. As yet there are no long‐term surgical outcomes reported in peer‐reviewed reports. Several techniques to augment the glans penis were reported, including injection with hyaluronic acid gel [51] and placing fasciocutaneous flaps [46]. Robust data on the outcomes of such approaches are at present limited. One final situation where surgery might be helpful is the case of a man with a genuinely small penis and ED, e.g. secondary to Peyronie’s disease, previous failed penile implant surgery, or priapism. A technique was reported whereby there is simultaneous implantation of an inflatable penile implant while the tunica albuginea is inlaid with a series of circumferential saphenous vein grafts [52]. The results in a small series were promising, although verification is needed from other authors, and a longer follow‐up would confirm the place of such operations. The reconstruction of deformities that might arise in men who have had augmentation surgery are reviewed elsewhere [53].
CONCLUSION It is recommended that the initial approach to a man who has SPS is a thorough urological, psychosexual, psychological and psychiatric assessment that might involve more than one clinician. More research is required on the effects of race and age on penile length. Conservative approaches to therapy, based on education and self‐awareness, as well as short‐term structured psychotherapy (CBT) are often successful, and should be the initial interventions in all men. Of the physical treatments available, there is poorly documented evidence to support the use of penile extenders. More information is need on the outcomes with these devices. Similarly, there is emerging evidence about the place of surgery and there are now several reports suggesting that dividing the suspensory ligament can increase flaccid penile length. There are only limited data relating to operations designed to enhance penile circumference. While there are emerging data about the effect of surgical treatment on penile dimensions, there is much less information about the patients’ satisfaction with the outcome of surgery. Such assessments have only been reported occasionally, and in a situation where surgery is used cosmetically to treat a psychological condition, such outcomes are vital to assess the place of such surgery.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST None declared. |
The Washington Redskins' defensive line developed a tight bond during the season, doing many activities together. That bond continues -- and so does the desire to do things as a group, especially when it can help a city.
The Redskins' defensive line donated 3,600 bottles of water to the city of Flint, Michigan, according to a tweet by nose tackle Terrance Knighton.
Dline just ordered 3600 bottles of @FIJIWater to @CCharitiesUSA in Flint, Michigan. Our Prayers are with that city and hope this can help. — Terrance Knighton (@MisterRoast98) January 20, 2016
It's amazing what a simple group chat can do. It is very important that our youth is healthy, because they are the future of this country. — Terrance Knighton (@MisterRoast98) January 20, 2016
He said via text that when he woke up this morning, he texted his fellow linemen about doing something. They were all in, split the bill and it was sent out -- all within an hour.
One of the Redskins' strengths this season was this sort of camaraderie, something the linemen showed time and again -- going to other sporting events together, getting custom-made Washington Nationals jerseys with their nicknames on the back.
A state of emergency has been declared for Flint because of toxic lead contamination in its drinking water. The National Guard was called in to help deliver clean water. Other celebrities have sent help as well, with Cher reportedly sending nearly 200,000 water bottles. |
Thursday morning, bright and early, my husband and I flew to Colorado Springs for the long weekend. Up at 4:20, in the car at 5:20, airport at 5:50 and we were boarding at 6:20. Thank goodness for this vegan sandwich at the food counter right across from the gate. Breakfast mid-flight!
We flew into Denver and rented a car to Colorado Springs.
We drove around some neighborhoods to get a feel for the city and then had lunch at one of the vegan-friendly restaurants on my list.
Adam’s Mountain Cafe is in Manitou Springs, which, turns out, is a super-touristy town. The restaurant is housed in a restored, historic building and is really lovely. It was a sunny day and we opted for outdoor seating (actually, it was our only choice, we arrived at 12:00 and had to wait 30 minutes for a table – the place was hopping!). My husband ordered a salad (the lemon basil vinaigrette was fabulous) and a non-vegan brunch dish. I opted for the soup of the day, which was confirmed to be vegan.
The soup arrived at about the same time as a huge gust of a cold wind burst upon us. That hot bowl of miso hit the spot!
There are many vegan options on the brunch and lunch menu and, after much consideration, I opted for a healthy and hearty tofu and veggie dish.
It was called a Tibetan vegetable dish and it was filled with cauliflower, broccoli, sprouts, cashews and the beautifully sesame-seed crusted tofu. Positively divine.
The next day I started things off right with a gorgeous run along the Pike’s Peak Trail Greenway Trail. It was my first run after battling a nasty head cold all week and, even with the altitude, I felt amazing!
My husband was off doing his triathlon stuff (actually, mountain biking) and we hooked up later for lunch at TAPAteria in Old Colorado City.
The robust tapas menu is half vegetarian and many of the small dishes are vegan or marked as “can be made vegan.”
We were both pretty hungry so we ordered three vegan tapas that we could share and then I ordered a salad (also small) and Dave opted for two non-vegan tapas.
I enjoyed a lovely glass of a 2009 La Cartuja with this fresh, light and filling meal.
While Dave continued his triathlon stuff, I spent some time at the hotel getting work done for a client before taking a little time to explore Colorado Springs. Later that night we were off to TRiNiTY Brewing Company – after doing advance research on vegan-friendly restaurants I was obsessed with their seitan buffalo wings. Sadly, there were no tables and it’s a “seat yourself” joint; we weren’t interested in just hanging out until someone left so we made our way to Plan B, Caspian Cafe, for Mediterranean food.
The restaurant is right off of I-25, next to a typical highway hotel. I wasn’t so sure about the place. But when we walked in and saw the fun decor, filled tables and extremely friendly and efficient staff, we felt like it was probably a good choice.
From the menu:
Welcome to the Mediterranean! The flavors of our menu, presented by our chef, represent cuisine from all around this fantastic region. From Lebanon, Morocco, and Egypt to Greece, Turkey, and Spain. Please view our menus and come in to enjoy the flavors of the world!
We shared a starter.
I loved the presentation because instead of stack of bread the plate was filled with crispy vegetables and a small amount of pita squares.
I then ordered a salad and an appetizer for dinner.
This was a delicious salad! It was huge and I was grateful we opted for a small suite with a refrigerator at the hotel. Leftovers!
These tasty bites hits the spot.
So far so good as far as dining out in Colorado Springs!
***
Are you sick of hearing about this yet? Don’t worry, there are only two more days to vote for my Cinnamon-Ginger Seitan and Veggies in Coconut Gravy recipe
in So Delicious’s awesome contest. I hope you will vote for my recipe today … and tomorrow! |
Destiny 2's trailers have, to date, mainly focused on the sci-fi sequel's shooting, story and characters.
Dab.
That is, until now.
PlayStation Japan has just posted a Destiny 2 trailer which focuses on... dancing. A lot of dancing.
Featuring breakdancing Guardians and its own Destiny-themed pop song, it is the most musical Bungie has got since that whole episode with Paul McCartney.
There are catchy lyrics, too:
We're gonna take back the Light Take on the fight Harness the energy with all your might Shine for humanity and make sure its right Protect community and never lose sight Claim your name and home in history Believe in the ability to achieve victory!
...And so on. Sing along below:
Destiny 2 of course lets you dance as an emote, just as Destiny 1 did. But how about the rest of the game? (Yes, there's more to the came than dancing.) You'll have to wait a while longer yet for our full verdict. |
Hamilton's mayor is still championing all day GO train service in Hamilton and says Metrolinx is not backpedaling on the issue — even though the city is not getting the service the province promised back in 2011.
But opposition politicians say the Liberal promise to the city is proving to have been an empty one, made to help it win an election.
"I would not categorize this as shifting stance," Mayor Bob Bratina, a strong advocate of all-day go service for Hamitlon, told CBC Hamilton. "Metrolinx through the GO management team is dealing with a complex multi-jurisdictional project. The specific outcomes and timelines are difficult to predict as evidenced by the rollout of the Big Move."
In 2011, then-premier Dalton McGuinty promised two-way, all-day GO Train service for Hamilton in time for the 2015 Pan Am games — with Bratina sharing his stage. Bratina has often put all-day GO as the city's top priority in his dealings with the province ahead of LRT, much to the frustration of members of council.
But now, Metrolinx can't say exactly when that service will come to the city. The provincial transit agency is "committed" to bringing all-day GO train service to Hamilton "in the future," says spokesperson Malon Edwards, but he could not be more specific.
Instead of the all-day service that had been promised, Metrolinx is working to bring more "peak period service during the morning an afternoons" to Hamilton by 2015, he says. That means four extra trains daily from the new station planned on James Street North.
"Currently, we are working with CN and the city of Hamilton to develop the infrastructure requirements and staging plan to introduce increased levels of service in Hamilton beyond 2015," Edwards said. "Negotiations are underway with CN to secure access to the rail tracks to finalize the number and timing of trains." CN and GO share the tracks heading to the new station.
Bratina told CBC Hamilton that he would "love to have" all-day GO service even before the 2015 Pan Am games. "We've already seen GO-related development near the new station," he said. "The planned Stoney Creek station would also stimulate growth in that hub, and take cars off the QEW."
Edwards made no mention of a Stoney Creek development for GO's future plans in Hamilton.
Backtracking is 'obvious,' NDP says
Even if the Mayor doesn't think so, provincial NDP leader Adrea Horwath says it's "obvious" that Metrolinx is backtracking on all-day GO in Hamilton.
"The thing that's frustrating is these are the kinds of things that make people cynical about politicians - unfulfilled election campaign promises that don't get followed up on," Horwath told CBC Hamilton.
She also took the government to task for asking people in Hamilton to pay more to fund "The Big Move" while at the same time not providing the service that was promised.
Last month, Metrolinx recommended new fees that will total about $500 per average household to raise the $2-billion needed annually to fund public transit in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
Metrolinx has recommended hiking the HST, raising the gas tax, creating a business parking levy and adding to development cost charges to raise the funds.
"People are being told they have to pay up, and at the same time they're being told that the two-way, all-day service that was promised for Hamilton by GO is not going to happen," Horwath said. "So why would people want to buy in to the government's plan if they're being told that Hamilton is being cut out of the loop on something that was promised years ago?"
Combating gridlock
All-day GO train service should be considered a basic service to communities in the GTHA if we want to do something about gridlock, says PC Transportation and Infrastructure Critic Frank Klees. He says congestion exists because people don't have enough reliable alternatives.
"And one way to give people that reliable alternative is all-day GO train service," he said. "You can't expect people to organize their lives based on two or three trains."
Klees says all-day GO train service was just a promise that was pulled out when it was "politically expedient."
"Then it gets lost in the shuffle," he said.
"I think people are getting tired of this, and at some point, they're going to stop believing these people." |
The way a High school graduate chooses where he will study in Israel after High school, is a very confusing process for a 17 year old. Teenagers at this age are mostly not aware of their spiritual preferences, the characteristics and significant differences between the different Yeshivot and Midrashot, especially when it comes to issues of hashkafa and religious style.
This guide is not perfect and is insensitive to all the existing emphases, especially when in most of the Yeshivot and Midrashot one can find sometimes a mixture of the different aspects, but it still expresses a significant component of the identity of the various yeshivot and midrashot We will be happy to hear any comments and be enlightened and if necessary we will correct and improve.
We are aware that this map is a generalization and does not bring all components into account. Please feel free to provide any feedback so that we can improve this important guide.
White spots = Yeshivot for boys , Black spots=Midrashot for girls
Red flashing rings= Requires a higher level of learning |
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
March 8, 2014, 10:57 PM GMT / Updated March 8, 2014, 11:02 PM GMT
About 750 detainees housed at the Northwest Detention Center in Washington state refused to eat Saturday in an attempt to halt deportations and demand better conditions.
Community to Community Development, an immigrant activist group, helped lead protests outside of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Tacoma where the detainees are being housed. They said the strike began Friday, and that detainees are demanding better food, treatment and pay for work they do at the center.
The activist group plans to protest until Tuesday.
"People showing solidarity right now at Tacoma detention center!" group organizer of Latino Advocacy, Maru Mora, posted Saturday on Facebook.
ICE spokesman Andrew Munoz told NBC News that the agency "fully respects the rights of all people to express their opinion without interference."
"While we continue to work with Congress to enact commonsense immigration reform, ICE remains committed to sensible, effective immigration enforcement that focuses on its priorities," Munoz added.
The Northwest Detention Center houses about 1,300 detainees facing deportation. The detainees on strike are currently under medical observation, Munoz said.
According to ICE detention standards, detainees who refuse to eat for 72 hours are technically considered on a hunger strike.
— Mel Bailey |
Why back us on Kickstarter?
Get it first! - You get your copy of Beast Masters before we sell any via retail or distribute any at conventions.
- You get your copy of Beast Masters before we sell any via retail or distribute any at conventions. A big discount! - Because of it being such a limited print run, you get a HUGE discount on the expected $55 MSRP.
- Because of it being such a limited print run, you get a discount on the expected $55 MSRP. Exclusive Goodies! - These custom dice are a limited printing. Once this run is gone, they are gone :)
- These custom dice are a limited printing. Once this run is gone, they are gone :) Possible Stretch Goals - By backing us here, not only will our print run grow, but so will the content and quality of the game. And who doesn't like that?
By backing at the Trainer Level or higher, you get all of this for just $39 USD + Shipping! (Note: Image to be adjusted with any/all unlocked Stretch Goals)
Here are some details about the Kickstarter Exclusive Dice:
These will be engraved dice in 4 colors, one for each Trainer/Player Color.
Players take on the role of a young beast trainer entering the tournament scene.
Each Trainer has their own Tactics and Trait!
Using their trainer dice, players will train and adventure to compete in the grand seasonal battle royale!
Each beast and tactic offers unique statistics and choices for your trainer.
Each round players also try to fulfill their ambitions, improve their farms and gain valuable accessories for their beasts.
After the game ends, the player with the most Fame wins!
For a more comprehensive look at the game, the rules can be seen below.
And below, we have a revamped How to Play Video,
as well as a 2 Player Play Through below.
Pledging for ANY Pledge Tier will have the Print and Play Files given to them, but we have something for everyone below!
Funding Goal related Stretch Goals will be revealed when we near our funding goal (the red head above is NOT a hint towards one of the goals), but below we will start with Social Stretch Goals we hope you, the community, will engage in!
By engaging, you could be a part of unlocking more Tactics for the game, Solo support, a Rival Deck to make any player count more challenging and Training Cards to spice up the Training Assignment.
Our Facebook Page is HERE
Our BGG Page is HERE |
Paramount Pictures, CBS Studios and producer Alec Peters and his Axanar Productions have settled a lawsuit over Peters’ crowdfunded “Star Trek” fan film “Axanar,” according to a joint statement released Friday by the parties.
As part of the settlement, Peters has agreed to make “substantial changes” to “Axanar” and also affirmed that future “Star Trek” fan films produced by him or his company will follow the “Guidelines for Fan Films” distributed by CBS and Paramount in June 2016.
“Paramount and CBS continue to be big believers in fan fiction and fan creativity,” they said in the statement. “They encourage amateur filmmakers to showcase their passion for ‘Star Trek.’ Paramount and CBS will not object to, or take legal action against, ‘Star Trek’ fan productions that are non-professional, amateur, and otherwise meet the Guidelines, which can be found at http://www.startrek.com/fan -films. Paramount and CBS would like ‘Star Trek’ fans, with their boundless creativity and passion, to ‘Live Long and Prosper.'”
Also Read: 'Star Trek' Fan Film Lawsuit Ordered to Trial
Axanar Productions released a statement of its own, saying the settlement allowed the company to continue to show its “Axanar” prequel, “Prelude to Axanar,” commercial-free on YouTube and that it would be permitted to produce its “Axanar” feature film as two 15-minute segments that could be distributed on YouTube without ads.
“Axanar Productions was created by lifelong Star Trek fans to celebrate their love for Star Trek,” the statement said. “Alec Peters and the Axanar team look forward to continuing to share the Axanar story and are happy to work within the Guidelines for Fan Films for future projects. Throughout this process, we will continue communicating with our fans and backers to ensure they are informed and involved until we reach completion of the production.”
“Axanar” raised $1.13 million in crowdfunding, which made it possibly the biggest fan financed film ever made. CBS publicly said said they never “authorized, sanctioned or licensed this project in any way, and this has been communicated to those involved.”
Also Read: 'Axanar' Producer Responds to 'Star Trek' Fan Film Guidelines: 'Very Disheartening'
However, Peters told TheWrap that he and his team met with CBS prior to production, and the network didn’t offer any specific guidelines concerning what his crew could and could not do, simply that he couldn’t make money off the project.
“CBS has a long history of accepting fan films,” Peters said in August 2015. “I think ‘Axanar’ has become so popular that CBS realizes that we’re just making their brand that much better.”
Later that year, CBS and Paramount filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Peters and Axanar Productions, which was ordered to trial earlier this month — and resolved with Friday’s settlement. |
At the age of 5, when Rimpa Siva told her father Pandit Swapan Siva, a respected tabla player in Kolkata, that she wanted him to teach her, he suggested she try vocal music or the sitar. But she watched him teach others, and imbibed the techniques and rhythms from afar.
“He saw how interested I was and began teaching me (at age 6)," the 24-year-old said in Bengali-accented Hindi on the morning of her concert, which opened the Saz-e-Bahar festival, featuring women instrumentalists, on 10-11 April at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai.
Siva progressed rapidly under her father’s tutelage, debuting at 10. She was hailed as a child prodigy, and in 1998 became the subject of a French film, Rimpa Siva, Princess Of Tabla. Today, she is known for her technical virtuosity and mastery of compositions unique to the Farukhabad lineage, to which her father’s guru, the late Ustad Karamatullah Khan, belonged. While vocal music has gharanas (schools), it would be more accurate to speak of lineages for tabla, according to James Kippen, a Canada-based scholar of Hindustani music and an expert on the history of the tabla. Delhi is the oldest, followed by Lucknow—both originated in the 18th century, soon after the tabla came into being. The other main lineages, all of them dating to the 19th century, are Farukhabad, Ajrara, Banaras, Qasur and Punjab.
In a solo performance at the NCPA festival, Siva demonstrated her virtuosity, playing different pieces in the 16-beat teen taal, including one composed by her father and one by Khan. Ahead of the Mumbai show, Siva had just completed a six-concert tour in Punjab and was headed to Amravati in eastern Maharashtra to conduct a two-day workshop along with her father.
Siva’s accomplishments should not lull us, however, into believing that gender barriers in Indian classical music have tumbled. Gender bias and stereotyping are topics that need much more airing in this field, where only a clutch of women play instruments that are considered to be masculine.
If the number of women percussionists is to increase, more girls need to begin learning, since only a few students will have the ability, tenacity and diligence to make it professionally. Few girls show an inclination for percussion instruments, however, and of those who do, some are discouraged by parents.
For instance, of the 40 students who learn the tabla from Pune-based Savani Talwalkar, only four are girls. Savani, 26, who learnt from her eminent father, Suresh Talwalkar, was his only female student.
This stems at least partly from gender stereotypes suggesting that women are not strong enough to handle percussion instruments or not suited to mastering complex rhythms. “It is still a novelty to see a woman percussionist," says Swaminathan, 24, on email. She learnt from maestro Umayalpuram Sivaraman, has accompanied top musicians, and will begin a PhD in music at the US’ Harvard University this autumn. “This definitely has its roots in what society considers to be feminine and masculine. Musical practice is gendered, even if the music is not."
“About rhythms, we’re dealing with a masculine idea of complexity, i.e. virtuosic, mathematical and difficult to execute," she says. “But musical complexity can also be found in tonal nuances, subtle shifts in feel and intentional silence. These are no less difficult to achieve, but are not marked as masculine. And it probably takes much more strength and stamina to dance than to play the mridangam, and we know that women can do that. But dancing fits into society’s idea of what’s feminine, so no one questions it."
Even after the Brahmanical turn, some women mridangists, such as K.V. Kanakambujam and V.S. Janaki, managed to remain on stage until the 1950s. But this was ironically because of another bias: Brahmin women who were taking to vocal music for the first time could not find men to accompany them. “But once men started playing for women vocalists, opportunities for women percussionists diminished," says Swaminathan.
The first professional woman mridangist who made a name for herself, in the 1980s, was Dandamudi Sumathi Ramamohan Rao, a trailblazer who learnt from her late husband and continues to play.
In Hindustani music, too, paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries showed women playing many instruments, including drums, Kippen says on email. In fact, the earliest image of a tabla player that Kippen has seen is of a woman, from the 1730s. “Tabla was the domain of the Dhadhis, who had access to male performance spaces in the Mughal world; female Dhadhis, also widely known as Domni and later on as Mirasan, played in the private Mughal spaces of the harem and zenana."
At the same time, tabla and sarangi players had a lower status than vocalists because they came from the ranks of rural folk musicians and then became associated with tawaifs—dancer-singers with whom they had family ties, and whom they taught and accompanied. These distinctions persisted even after the modernization of Hindustani music in the 20th century.
“The prejudice (against women playing the tabla) perhaps stems from the lingering stigma associated with tabla’s proximity to the tawaifs," says Kippen. “Attitudes are slow to change. I’d liken this to India’s attitudes towards its great female athletes which, though admiring, is also asking why these young women aren’t taking up more quiescent domestic roles."
In the 20th century, Mumbai-based Parsi musician Aban Mistry, who died three years ago at the age of 72, was likely the first professional woman tabla player—the Hindustani counterpart of Sumathi Ramamohan Rao. But she was largely a soloist—one kind of tabla playing—the others being accompanying instrumentalists and supporting vocalists. All three carry their challenges and prestige, but regular accompaniment provides the most exposure.
Even though Siva has accompanied top artistes—a few years ago, she went on a two-month tour of the US with flautist Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia—she is largely a solo artiste. She is still young and will undoubtedly grow, but the question of whether her path might have been different had she been a man, is worth asking. |
The MEP, who dramatically quit just 18 days into her spell in charge of Ukip last year, admitted "there's been discussions" with the Conservatives about signing up to Theresa May's party. Ms James' tenure was so short she never actually signed official papers to formally take the reins of Ukip in the wake of her leadership election victory last October. She now sits as an independent in the European Parliament having cut her ties with Ukip altogether a matter of weeks after sensationally standing down as the party's leader. But despite the "overtures" from the Tories, Ms James insisted in an interview with Express.co.uk there's "nothing on the table yet" that would see her join another political party.
PA Ex-Ukip leader Diane James revealed she's received 'overtures' from the Tories
Ms James is among a series of high-profile individuals to quit Ukip in the wake of last year's EU referendum result. Her fellow MEP Steven Woolfe now also sits as an independent in the European Parliament, while the party's sole MP Douglas Carswell quit last month. Major donor Arron Banks has also left the party and put in place plans to launch his own political movement. Today, former MP Mark Reckless quit Ukip and will sit with the Conservative Group in the Welsh Assembly. With all of the UK's MEPs due to lose their jobs in 2019 on Britain's exit from the EU, Ms James revealed she is "absolutely focussed" on standing as an MP at the next general election, set for May 2020. Outlining what she believes are her three routes to Westminster, Ms James said: "If I felt that either the Conservative Party, being an independent, or Arron Banks’ new movement would best allow me to realise what I think needs to happen in terms of politics… and reflect on the position that the UK finds itself in post-Brexit, then those three options at the moment all have equal billing." She added: "I’m open to all three options. What I’m not open to is standing for the Communist Party, the far-right, Labour or Liberal Democrats. "Those for me are just completely off the table."
Should I ever need to consider it I know I’ve got somewhere I can push against an open door Diane James
Ms James also ruled out a return to Ukip under current leader Paul Nuttall, who has vowed to take on Labour in its traditional heartlands and hinted at changes to the Ukip brand. She said: "Paul by that stage [2020] will have taken Ukip so far to the Left and he may well have a new version of Ukip. "That’s immediately going to create a distance between me in terms of my views and the way that he’s going to be taking that new party." Mr Woolfe quit Ukip following his infamous 'altercation' with fellow MEP Mike Hookem in the European Parliament amid a dispute over revelations he discussed defecting to the Conservatives.
GETTY Ms James now sits as an independent MEP in the European Parliament
Asked whether she had been tempted to sign up to the Tories since leaving Ukip, Ms James said: "No. I’ll readily admit there’s been discussions and there’s been overtures and I mean, why not? There is nothing on the table yet that would make me want to join another political party." The approaches have come from within the Tory contingent in Brussels and Strasbourg, not from Conservative Party headquarters in London, Ms James revealed. She added: "They nuanced, that would be the nice way of putting it, nuanced that there’s a home here if you would like it. "The response would be very much ‘well, that’s very nice to know, thank you’. "Should I ever need to consider it I know I’ve got somewhere I can push against an open door, shall we say." With the European Parliament due to play a critical role in authorising any Brexit deal between the UK and the remaining 27 member states, Ms James urged all of Britain's MEPs to fight a common cause between them. She said: "I’m a great believer that the UK contingent in Europe, given the result of the referendum, we ought to be pulling together. "There should not be this faction of the Labour Party, as I perceive it, fighting with the EU to keep the UK in. "I’m quite happy to sit and talk to anybody who wants to have a sensible, grown-up discussion."
GETTY Nigel Farage heavily criticised Ms James' decision to quit Ukip
With Brexit due to be completed by the end of March 2019, Ms James suggested "the whole spectrum" of UK politics might be "radically" altered by the 2020 general election. Ms James revealed she is in contact on a "reasonably weekly" basis with Mr Banks and is "following what he's doing" but would "like to see some more detail" of the mutli-millionaire's project, which has been tentatively branded 'The Patriotic Alliance'. She said: "I think his heart’s in the right place. He obviously made a huge contribution to the referendum campaign and he’s keen to see that’s actually delivered. "I can understand why he’s disillusioned with Ukip, he does seem to have fallen out with them in a big, big way over so many different areas now that potentially I think the situation is irretrievable between the two parties. "But he shown clearly that his heart’s in the right place, that his focus is for a very prosperous and successful UK outside the EU. "I think he’s to be applauded on that basis."
GETTY Former Ukip donor Arron Banks has put in place plans to launch his own political movement
Asked whether she had buried the hatchet with her predecessor as leader Nigel Farage, who accused her of "irrational selfishness" when she quit the party in November last year, she said: "I never criticised him and I never will criticise him for the comments he made. I can understand he was very hurt. "I’ve made the point in the past, Ukip - in a metaphorical sense - is his baby. He’s a bit like a parent, he doesn’t want to see any damage to it, he wants to build a wall around it and protect it and he only wants the best for it. "I think with the benefit of hindsight, he now certainly understands a lot more why I made the decision I did because we have been able to have that grown-up discussion. "He’s as frustrated as I am with the blockages, the push back, the constant position of ‘we don’t want to change’." Ms James previously stood for Parliament as Ukip's candidate in the Eastleigh by-election in 2013 - sparked by the resignation of disgraced minister Chris Huhne - where she came second behind the Liberal Democrats.
Nigel Farage in pictures Mon, April 3, 2017 Nigel Farage is a British politician who has been the leader of the UK Independence Party since October 2016. Play slideshow Getty 1 of 48 Nigel Farage in pictures |
tl;dr: 1) Build a great app, 2) Don’t annoy your users, 3) Ask nicely, don’t beg
Since Circa News has been available in the App Store, we’ve done quite well with our app ratings — nearly every major version has ended up with a 5 star average. That’s no accident. Two things have contributed to that: we’ve always focused an incredible amount on a high quality user experience and we’ve also made sure that the right paths to a review from a user who’s had a positive experience exist. In this piece you’ll read about our learnings over the last few years, and how you might apply them in your app.
Why are app ratings even necessary?
App ratings can postively or negatively affect important aspects of how people discover apps.
In the App Store, app ratings are taken into account for search results, and top chart rankings. Apps that have a lot of ratings, and are rated positively are less prone to fluctuate in the app ranking charts and therefore more likely to hold their positions longer. In search results, positive app ratings help an app appear higher in the results. On a more personal note, when I see an app with a 3.5 star rating or below I’m hesitant to even install it, fearing a poor experience. I’d assume I’m not alone there.
Because of the above, asking for ratings became a commonplace. The ratings were simply too critical to app discovery and downloads to leave up to chance. But along the way, “begging” for ratings became despised and started to negatively impact apps.
At Circa we’ve worked hard to ensure that everything we do puts our users’ interests first. Asking for feedback and ratings should especially be a net positive user experience.
No one likes your pop up
Courtesy of Apptentive
The vast majority of the app rating asks that I’ve ever seen look a lot like the image on the left — a pop up that interrupts your experience. Even Circa had employed this method up until our most recent version, to some early success and then later, issues. But while we did have this pop up in place, it wasn’t shown to just everyone who opened the app.
There are three simple rules:
Don’t interrupt someone’s experience. Don’t ask for an app rating after your app has crashed. That’s just stupid. Do delay asking for a rating until there’s a likely moment of constructive feedback (as you’ll read later), or a positive rating.
Apps like HotelTonight ask for a rating after you’ve had a successful experience in booking a room. Someone who’s never completed a room booking is unlikely to give a high rating, so why ask them? But someone who just had a kick-ass experience for a low-cost is going to be stoked to give 5 stars.
With Circa News, since we didn’t have a transactional experience that might result in the previous example, something else was needed. What we decided upon is that we would wait to present the ask until the user has opened the app at least 10 times, over the course of 3 distinct days. This means that we’re self-selecting into a smaller group — sure — but a group that’s more likely to give a positive rating.
While employing the above rules, and still using a pop up, we were able to get incredible ratings. As I mentioned above, every major version of Circa has carried a 5 star average which is extremely rare. But we started noticing something along the way: people were rating us poorly just because we asked for ratings.
Screen grab from AppFigures
Nearly all of the negative app reviews we got were because we asked for a rating.
So here we have a dilemma: we need ratings to help our app discovery, but by simply asking we might get rated poorly. It then dawned on us that it wasn’t the ask that was the problem, it was the method by which it was done.
Integrated rating requests
Integrated rating mid-list
The trouble with the pop up approach is that the app was inevitably interrupting the user’s experience. A method that’s more integral into the experience is the next step — we call this the integrated rating.
For Circa we decided to place an integrated rating in the middle of our list of news stories. That way, someone could scroll right past it without having to interact with it, as opposed to a pop up which requires interaction.
If you have to ask “will this annoy users?” the answer is always yes.
You’ll need to choose a placement that’s appropriate for your app. Perhaps in a shopping app, it would be after someone has successfully placed an order. Or maybe a social app where it’s placed directly within a feed somehow. In any case, the integrated rating should dramatically reduce the annoyance factor, while increasing interaction.
Ask a question. Don’t beg.
In brainstorming our integrated solution we decided to not just ask for the rating straight-up. Instead, we decided to ask a simple question:
Asking for a rating is binary. Users will either rate your app, or they won’t. But the rating itself is not binary — they may still rate your app poorly, such as if they’re annoyed by being asked.
By adding a question into the equation you can actually get valuable feedback from users that aren’t enjoying the app. Tapping “not really” presents our readers with a different question, specifically requesting their feedback. “Yes” will separately lead them to an ask for a rating.
The best part about the above experience is that for those users who are truly not enjoying their experience, they’re giving us their unfiltered feedback. Remember that we still only show this ask after the app has been opened 10 times, over 3 days, and therefore they’re likely to be a somewhat loyal user. If they’re loyal, and not enjoying the app that’s critical to know. The feedback that we’ve received since this has been implemented has been incredible — we’re getting right down to what some folks aren’t enjoying about their time with the app and that feedback will be crucial for any future development.
In Circa News, the feedback itself is collected with a native form that pops up after “Ok, sure” has been pressed. Anything submitted heads directly to our help desk software for processing and response.
While it may be a little less-than-ideal, you could easily replace that native form with popping up an email compose window.
Note: We custom-built everything you’ve read about above. There are a few solutions that deal with components of our methods, but not all. One in particular is Apptentive but at the time of this writing it doesn’t appear that they do anything like our integrated ratings. Perhaps that will change.
Even our readers are noticing! We’ve been seeing a lot of positive tweets about this approach. You read that right — users that are happy to see an ask for ratings. |
Ömer Tunç is a freelance artist and illustrator from Izmir, Turkey, and almost a complete mystery to me. From his Deviant profile, I learned that his favorite movie is The Big Lebowski, that he loves Game of Thrones, and that his favorite book is The Lord of the Rings. Nothing about his art or the projects he’s working on currently.
So, we have only his art and the subjects he paints and that will have to do for purposes of this post. I did discover he won the 2015 GIO Award for Best Illustrator of the Year, for a painting based on The Lord of the Rings.
Ömer is immensely talented. The tone and atmosphere captured in his paintings enthrall you. You have mystery and darkness, and also something else, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Almost like energy teeming below the surface. Or maybe it’s just the composition. Ömer is one of those artists who creates the illusion of intricate detail through his use of texture and composition.
Below is a small collection of his work. Each image links back to the site of origin. Enjoy!
Sometimes you’ll discover an artist whose art really captivates you, so much so, that you find it difficult to compile a selection. This week’s post gave me a bit of a challenge. Most of Ömer’s paintings are superb. However, space and practical considerations meant ignoring a host of them. I am confident I chose the very best, even if they do say art is subjective, but do yourself a favor and go check out his gallery. You won’t regret it.
Hope this week treats you well. If it doesn’t, force it into submission.
Cheers!
Woelf |
Some 83,000 low-income seniors who were denied their guaranteed income supplement (GIS) for up to seven years will not get any interest on the missing retirement money, even though government bureaucrats are responsible for the problem.
The government is sending out at least $245 million worth of GIS cheques by the end of next month, with a few individuals getting between $20,000 and $40,000 in back payments. Some people are owed money retroactive to 2008, with the average repayment about $6,000.
An internal document obtained by CBC News under the Access to Information Act shows the late payments, affecting seniors largely in Ontario and the western provinces, were partly the result of "misunderstandings by officials in various … processing centres."
The guaranteed income supplement payment gaffe, along with another employment insurance problem, were both discovered last year at Employment and Social Development Canada when Conservative minister Pierre Poilievre was in charge. (James West/Canadian Press) But the department says there will be no compensation for failing to deliver years' worth of cheques.
"Interest is not paid on retroactive benefit payments," Julia Sullivan, spokeswoman for Families, Children and Social Development, said in an email.
The legislation that governs GIS payments, known as the Old Age Security (OAS) Act, gives the minister discretion about whether to take "remedial action" to compensate anyone improperly denied benefits because of an "administrative error."
Review process updated
Eligibility for GIS is largely determined automatically through income data supplied by the Canada Revenue Agency, affecting some 1.6 million recipients, but about 100,000 files must be reviewed manually to determine eligibility.
The back payment problem was discovered in late April last year as a new computer system was being installed to end the manual review process. Officials learned that 140,000 people had never been reviewed, some cases dating back to 2008.
The department found that 43,000 of those were in fact not eligible for GIS, but 83,000 had indeed been denied their benefits. Officials are still reviewing the cases of another 12,000 people, which means the $245 million in total backdated benefits is likely to rise.
Reaction by clients has been positive. –Internal memo to clerk of Privy Council
The liability was a late inclusion in the 2014-15 Public Accounts of Canada, though not reported as a separate line item.
The problem was considered serious enough that the clerk of the Privy Council, Canada's top federal public servant, was briefed extensively about the problem during the election campaign last August.
"Phone calls are being made, in addition to letters, for those seniors receiving more than $10,000," a memo to then clerk Janice Charette said. "Reaction by clients has been positive."
Provinces were notified about the problem last August, since receipt of a GIS cheque often triggers other provincially paid benefits, such as prescription drug programs, long-term care eligibility and at least four other types of benefits. In addition, a large cheque suddenly delivered to a low-income senior can put at risk eligibility for some benefits.
"We continue to work in collaboration with [the provinces] to assess and mitigate potential impacts on affected seniors," Sullivan said.
2nd payment gaffe
Mathieu Filion, spokesman for new Liberal minister Jean-Yves Duclos, said the minister has "insisted" that the department complete the review and reimbursement process by the end of March this year.
The payment gaffe is the second by the department in the last year. Officials identified another "system anomaly" last February that had been withholding employment insurance money from about 800 needy families in each year since 2007.
Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, Jean-Yves Duclos, says he is insisting that the guaranteed income supplement payments owed to thousands of seniors be paid back by the end of March. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press) The money was supposed to be paid as a family supplement to top up EI claimants whose household income, including spousal income, was no higher than $25,921.
In the EI case, low-income families were shortchanged about $35 a week, with a total cost to restore the missing money to the affected families at $1.7 million. No interest was paid on those missing amounts either.
The GIS program pays about $10.1 billion each year to low-income retirees, most of whom are women. The non-taxable monthly cheques, paid to those also receiving Old Age Security, are indexed to inflation. The monthly amount can be as high as $773.60, depending on circumstances.
Follow @DeanBeeby on Twitter |
In House Majority Leader's Home District, Many Depend On Health Law He Wants To Scrap
Enlarge this image toggle caption Andrew Harnik/AP Andrew Harnik/AP
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act first and replace it sometime later. That doesn't sit well with Victoria Barton, who lives in McCarthy's rural California district.
"It's like they dangled the carrot and now they're taking it away," said Barton, 38, of Bakersfield, an unpaid photographer and stay-at-home mother of two.
Barton and her husband, a contract computer technician, had been uninsured for most of their adult lives. When Obamacare expanded Medicaid, they were finally able to qualify for the low-income health program. This year, California's version of Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal, paid for surgery to remedy Barton's long-standing carpal tunnel syndrome.
When McCarthy returns later this month to his congressional district, a mostly agricultural region in California's Central Valley including the city of Bakersfield and Edwards Air Force Base, he is likely to face quite a few confused and frustrated constituents.
Two counties represented by the Republican leader are among the most heavily dependent on Medi-Cal in the state. Roughly half of the residents are covered by Medi-Cal, which added about 212,000 enrollees after Obamacare took effect.
Nearly 29,000 residents have purchased health plans through Covered California, the state's insurance exchange, with coverage heavily subsidized by the federal government.
Some of those who favor the law, or rely on it, see a conflict between McCarthy's stated goals as a national leader and the needs of so many of his constituents.
"Those comments he made [about repeal] just demonstrate how disconnected he is from the people he's supposed to be representing," said Edgar Aguilar, program manager for Community Health Initiative of Kern County, an organization that helps enroll residents in Medi-Cal and Covered California in Bakersfield.
McCarthy's staff in Washington, D.C., said there wasn't anyone available to comment.
The complexities of repealing Obamacare are laid bare in the 23rd Congressional District that McCarthy represents, highlighting what other Republican politicians from less affluent areas may face.
On one hand, the district is considered a safe Republican haven. McCarthy easily defeated his Democratic challenger in November, winning about 70 percent of the vote. More than half of voters in Kern and Tulare counties chose President-elect Donald Trump. Some of McCarthy's constituents vocally support his promise to get rid of Obamacare.
On the other hand, constituents like Barton worry about the consequences of repealing the health law without an immediate replacement. They fear losing all or part of their health coverage, or losing jobs in the health care industry.
Unemployment in Kern and Tulare counties runs between 9 percent and nearly 11 percent, twice as high as the state average. About a quarter of residents live in poverty, according to U.S. Census data.
With Obamacare, "we've made this gigantic step ... and then suddenly to just take it away without any rational plan in place seems totally irresponsible," says Bill Phelps, chief of program services at Clinica Sierra Vista, a network of health care clinics serving 200,000 patients. "They're playing chess with the American population."
Since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010, the health care network where Phelps works has hired more than 100 employees and opened at least four new health centers, although some clinics were planned beforehand.
A repeal of the Medi-Cal expansion may require the clinic system to shed some nursing and case management jobs, clinic officials said.
"Health care is such an integral part of the economy," said Phelps, adding that he hopes McCarthy will look into the "details" before scrapping Obamacare. "You just can't turn off the switch."
But McCarthy seems to want a quick repeal. He told reporters that ending the Affordable Care Act is "easier and faster" than passing an alternative policy, which would require more votes.
"I want to make sure it gets done right," he said of replacing Obamacare in an interview with The Washington Post.
Still, some in McCarthy's district will be glad to see Obamacare go, and as soon as possible. "This whole system has been a disaster from Day 1," said Rodger Harmel, an insurance agent in Bakersfield. "Rates have been at an all-time high."
Harmel says most of his Covered California clients earn too much to qualify for the federal subsidies that reduce monthly premiums. He said most are paying more now than they did before the law and didn't need the new rules to be able to buy insurance. "A forced coverage system is not the answer," he said.
But health care advocates in Sacramento have sharply criticized McCarthy's remarks, saying his plan could create "chaos" in California's individual insurance market.
"The elimination of financial help in Covered California — even if delayed — would not just cause people to drop coverage and insurers to leave the market, but would force skyrocketing rates for those left in a smaller and sicker insurance pool," said Anthony Wright of Health Access California, a statewide consumer advocacy coalition.
Meanwhile, Aguilar, the program manager for Community Health Initiative of Kern County, said roughly six people are referred to his organization each month by a local cancer center. They have been diagnosed with cancer or another serious illness but don't have insurance, he said.
For people like this, a full repeal of Obamacare without a replacement would be devastating, Aguilar said.
"It's just horrible thinking about those people who are having the worst experience in their life and now they're not going to have anywhere to turn in order to get the coverage they need to get their medical care," Aguilar said.
"I'm afraid people can lose their lives without the coverage they need," he added.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of the Tate family/KHN Courtesy of the Tate family/KHN
Worry about Obamacare's repeal is not confined to residents who depend on the government for coverage.
Bakersfield resident David Tate, a 34-year-old school nurse, has a son, Lucas, who was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2009, when he was 7 months old. The boy survived after intensive chemotherapy treatments.
Tate, who then had a private market plan to cover Lucas, credited two provisions of the Affordable Care Act for giving his family security and peace of mind after Lucas' initial treatment was over. One was a requirement to cover people with pre-existing conditions. "If the ACA hadn't been there and I needed another private plan, they would have denied him coverage," Tate said.
The second provision prohibited insurance companies from placing lifetime limits on most benefits in most plans.
"Lucas had essentially used his lifetime maximum for treatments in that first year," Tate said. "Could you imagine if Lucas had relapsed? We would have been completely out of benefits. We would have just been hosed."
This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. |
Aston Villa found a novel way to announce the signing of John Terry but clubs have always used the latest communication technology to reveal new players
These are familiar times at Aston Villa. They have, after all, started July by signing on a free transfer a medal-strewn Premier League legend in his late 30s, once considered perhaps the finest player in his position in the land but more recently used to openly pondering the possibility of retirement, and announced the arrival to the world in rather humiliating style.
Transfer window 2017 – every deal in Europe's top five leagues Read more
So far, so 2001. It was 16 years ago next week that John Gregory invited reporters to Villa Park to meet his new goalkeeper, Peter Schmeichel. The Dane, at 37 a year older than John Terry is now, was scheduled to pose for photographers while holding the club’s new goalkeeping shirt in then-traditional style but when it was brought out, bearing his name and the No1, he took one look and turned away.
“I think we’ll have to chat about that,” he told his new manager, choosing instead to brandish the standard outfield kit. “Peter just won’t wear grey,” Gregory later explained. “He’s like a boxer. Everything in his corner has got to be just right.”
The kit manufacturers, Diadora, were bemused. “I am amazed that one guy can dictate to the club what he wears,” said their managing director, Andrew Ronnie. “We worked with David James on the fabric, colour and design and everything was fine. We put a lot of effort into it. David was happy but then he left for West Ham. Peter joined and now we have a problem.”
Aston Villa FC (@AVFCOfficial) 📱✍️ pic.twitter.com/G2DxMQhAv6
Perhaps this was the day that the foundations of the traditional transfer-unveiling ceremony started to crumble. A photo opportunity with the nearest item of club-branded merchandise will no longer do: modern footballers are complex characters with high wages and higher expectations, most of whom would not deign to look at a £9.99 acrylic weave scarf, let alone brandish it with pride for all posterity.
They also bring with them an expanding coterie of agents and advisers. Bryan Robson signed his first contract at Manchester United on the pitch shortly before the start of a match against Wolverhampton Wanderers in October 1981, perched upon a wobbly wooden folding chair with his new manager to his right, the chairman to his left and the club secretary stood behind, helpfully pointing to the bit that needed his signature. It is a scene that viewed today appears as outdated as Robson’s tight perm; any modern restaging would require, at the very least, more chairs, better haircuts, a great deal more paperwork and several bad-tempered arguments about image rights.
Clubs have always used the very latest communication technology to announce new signings, it is just that between the 1890s and the 1990s it changed little, with teams frustratingly restricted to the use of newspapers, photographers and the occasional town crier. Suddenly, however, their horizons have expanded. Villa announced Terry’s arrival by posting on Twitter a conversation on Snapchat, thereby simultaneously ticking two social-media boxes and keeping at arm’s length journalists who might overhear embarrassing conversations about the ugliness of their kit.
Last week Roma unveiled Lorenzo Pellegrini by posting a video of the player using his Roma-kitted virtual self to score a virtual goal on Fifa. Last month Liverpool published a video of a thumb scrolling through a Twitter stream of posts beseeching them to sign Mohamed Salah, which turned out to be Salah’s very own digit. A few days later the world learned that Crystal Palace had finally found a new manager when they posted footage of white smoke emerging, Vatican-style, from the chimney of a local Caribbean takeaway.
The popular reaction has been to mock these clubs for their novelty efforts, but after generations of cut-and-paste shirt-brandishings any innovation is surely to be celebrated, even if we still look forward to someone coming up with a good one. For years it took no thought whatsoever to organise a player unveiling, and now clubs dedicate at least a few minutes’ consideration and a bit of video editing to it, which is a shuffle in the right direction.
The great advance will be to professionalise – and, inevitably, commercialise – the experience, treating sold-out stadiums and audiences of millions via global cinema simulcasts to choreography, showtunes, fireworks both literal and figurative, and inevitable guest appearances from David Guetta. What is for certain is that unlike the monochrome efforts of yesteryear, the unveilings of the future will be anything but grey, which is something Schmeichel, at least, will be grateful for. |
Image caption Concerns grew after two planes had to land without help in Washington because of a sleeping controller
The head of the US air traffic control agency has resigned after a number of incidents where air traffic controllers fell asleep while on duty.
Randy Babbitt, chief of the Federal Aviation Administration, said he had accepted Hank Krakowski's resignation.
On Thursday, Mr Babbitt pledged a "top to bottom review" of the air traffic control system.
In the past month, several planes have landed safely at US airports without controller guidance.
"Over the last few weeks we have seen examples of unprofessional conduct on the part of a few individuals that have rightly caused the travelling public to question our ability to ensure their safety," Mr Babbitt said in a statement.
"This conduct must stop immediately."
Mr Babbitt said David Grizzle, chief counsel of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), would assume Mr Krakowski's duties as acting head of the Air Traffic Organization.
Night shifts
Mr Babbitt announced on Wednesday that the FAA would place an additional air traffic controller on the midnight shift at 27 control towers across the country; previously, they had been staffed with only one controller during that shift.
The issue rose to prominence last month when two jets were forced to land at about midnight at Reagan National Airport, just by Washington DC, without help from the local control tower.
The pilots, who carried 165 people aboard the two planes, were unable to raise the tower controller on the radio, and a subsequent investigation revealed he had inadvertently fallen asleep during the shift.
This week, the FAA revealed that an air traffic controller at a major airport in Seattle had fallen asleep during a morning shift on Monday; the FAA said he had also fallen asleep on two separate occasions during an early evening shift on 6 January.
And a controller in the US state of Nevada was asleep and out of communication for about 16 minutes on Wednesday while a medical plane was landing, federal officials have said.
An air traffic controller in Tennessee was found to have lain down for a nap during an overnight shift in February, the Washington Post reported. |
MUMBAI: Account holders may end up paying the price of additional security at ATMs in the form of fewer free transactions. The Indian Banks Association (IBA) has proposed that the mandatory five free transactions that banks are required to allow in a month include even the ones at the ATMs of an account-holder's bank.The proposal comes in the wake of higher charges that banks foresee as they have been directed to provide guards at every ATM and also have electronic surveillance in the form of CCTVs. The instructions have come from state governments in the wake of a brutal attack at an unguarded ATM kiosk in Bangalore last year.IBA has also supported an increase in charges that banks pay each other when their customers use third-party ATMs from Rs 15 to Rs 18. At present, most banks do not charge account holders if they use the bank's own ATMs. In addition, RBI norms require every bank to allow its customers access to third-party ATMs five times a month without any charge, subject to a maximum withdrawal of Rs 10,000. Some banks provide their customers more than the mandated number of free transactions but this varies from bank to bank.Addressing reporters, IBA chief executive M V Tanksale said that the increase will not affect most account holders since it allows more than one transaction per week. "For balance enquiry, SMS is a much more convenient option," said Tanksale, adding that reducing the number of free transactions would ensure there is no overutilization of the ATM network.According to Tanksale, the ATM network of banks is currently around 1.4 lakh and is expected to increase to around 2 lakh in six months. "The viability of this network depends on the migration of transactions from branches to ATMs," said Tanksale. He added that given the size of the network, any increase in costs would translate into an annual increase in cost of thousands of crores.With ATM networks seeing explosive growth, the RBI has been taking measures to ensure that all constituents are covered. The central bank has said that a percentage of all new installations should be disabled friendly. "IBA has designed a logo to highlight ATMs that are accessible to the visually challenged. This way the public can direct the visually challenged to ATMs that they can use," said Tanksale.The other problem is that with the sudden spike in installations in the last one year, the average transactions has dropped sharply. With the government proposing to transfer subsidies and other benefits directly to individual accounts, banks are expecting a surge in transactions.In the early days of shared payment network, banks charged anywhere between Rs 20 to Rs 60 for use of third-party ATMs. Four years ago, RBI directed banks to waive all charges, but later relented and allowed banks to charge beyond five transactions a month. |
Players are not happy with the latest update to Star Wars Battlefront and they are letting DICE know about it. One sarcastic post on Reddit highlights the issues well, with dry humor and snark, but this is not the only shout-out to DICE that this update blows. Some of the major complaints:
players hate the new map
nerfs and buffs don’t make sense
DICE ignored many player requests/ report bugs
still issues with the music/sound controls
and the list goes on
While it’s common for a new game to have issues and for any game to experience problems after an update, big or small, the real issue the community seems to have with DICE is the lack of communication and the fact that it seems they are not listening to their audience at all. When you ask players to spend such a large amount of money on a game, then have poor communication from a developer level and appear to not listen to suggestions, complaints and bug reports from the players, you’re going to have issues.
There will always be players who gripe and moan. There will always be some who aren’t happy unless they think they’re getting every little thing they want. This is just the nature of the Internet gaming community. However, there are some valid complaints here with DICE/EA. While we’ve been a supporter of Battlefront since the beginning (and continue to be), there are some issues that need to be addressed and the simple truth of it all seems to be that they need better communication with the community. I’ve said before that they need to appoint a community manager or someone who can act as a liaison between the development team and the players. This would ease a lot of tension simply from players feeling like they are more informed about what’s going on and also that their voices are being heard.
What do you think of the most recent update?
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MOSCOW, June 3 (UPI) -- A Russian court has ruled that a teen who is accused of theft can be treated as an adult based on the size of his genitals.
The teen, who claims to be 13, is accused of stealing a cellphone back in March. Tomas, who is from the Ukraine but came to Moscow to live with his aunt, denies taking the phone, the Moskovsky Komsomolets reported Tuesday.
There was apparently some dispute about the boy's age, so a medical examination of Tomas' teeth and genitals was conducted by prison doctors. After the examination, it was concluded that the boy is between 16 and 17 years old and therefore legally viewed as an adult. Based on that decision, the court was able to put Tomas behind bars.
Tomas' Ukrainian documentation reportedly indicates that he was 12 at the time of his arrest and the boy's case will be reviewed by the regional prison service.
The Moscow Times reported that the "age of criminal responsibility in Russia is 16," although it is lowered to 14 for crimes like rape and murder. |
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Islamic State is slaughtering babies with Down’s syndrome in a barbaric echo of the Nazis, according to reports.
The terrorists are claimed to have issued a fatwa – a religious decree – sanctioning the killing of children with Down’s syndrome and other disabilities.
Dozens of babies aged between one week and three months have already been killed by suffocation or lethal injection, according to Iraqi activist group Mosul Eye.
The fatwa was reportedly issued by one of so-called Islamic State’s sharia judges.
A statement from the group said: “Through monitoring and following the death incidents of children with Down's syndrome and congenital deformities, we were able to learn that the Shar'i Board of ISIL issued an 'oral fatwa' to its members authorising them to 'kill newborn babies with Down's syndrome and congenital deformities and disabled children'.
“As if it is not enough for ISIL to kill men, women and the elderly, now they kill children.”
Mosul Eye said more than 38 babies have already been killed in IS strongholds in Syria and northern Iraq.
Most of the children were born to foreign fighters who married Iraqi or Syrian women, it claimed.
The Nazis murdered at least 5,000 disabled children under their eugenics policies. |
About 400 people have died in violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state over the past week, military officials say, almost all of them Muslim insurgents.
A military Facebook page reported the numbers, saying 370 were insurgents, and 29 killed were either police or civilians.
Members of the minority Rohingya Muslim community, however, have reported attacks on their villages that left scores dead and forced thousands to flee.
Human Rights Watch said Saturday that satellite imagery recorded Thursday in the Rohingya Muslim village of Chein Khar Li in Rathedaung township shows the destruction of 700 buildings. The rights group says 99 percent of the village was destroyed and the damage signatures are consistent with fire, including the presence of large burn scars and destroyed tree cover.
“Yet this is only one of 17 sites that we’ve located where burnings have taken place,” said Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy Asia director.
The United Nations says at least 38,000 people have fled from Myanmar into Bangladesh, most of them Rohingya. Community leaders in Bangladesh have told VOA that some Hindus, also a minority in Myanmar, have crossed the border.
Robertson said the U.N.’s Fact Finding Mission should get the “full cooperation” of Myanmar’s government “to fulfill their mandate to assess human rights abuses in Rakhine State and explore ways to end attacks and ensure accountability.”
HRW said Rohingya refugees who have recently fled from Myanmar into Bangladesh told the agency that Myanmar soldiers and police had burned down their homes and carried out armed attacks on villagers. The agency said many of the Rohingya refugees had “recent bullet and shrapnel wounds.”
Sources in Bangladesh have told VOA’s Bangla service that as many as 60,000 have crossed the border in recent days.
Struggling to feed displaced
In addition, thousands of people have fled their villages and sought shelter in temples, schools and mosques in other Rakhine towns.
The deputy chairman of the Emergency Relief Committee, Khin Win, told VOA’s Burmese service by phone that 800 people are sheltering at two Buddhist monasteries in the town of Maungdaw.
“Security in Maungdaw is not even safe and some fled to Min Byar, Sittwe and Yathetaung. No one can guarantee for their safety. People fleeing homes increasing and there are a few left in villages. There is only one police outpost in a village and police do not have capability to protect villagers,” he said.
Volunteers were struggling to find food for the displaced, he said.
“We need drinking water, meat, fish and medicines,” he said. The group has gotten rice and donations from other communities but little from the government.
“Government aid agency provided a few bags of beans and instant noodles. Three boxes of instant noodles for 500 people is not effective. Just a superficial help,” he said.
Hiding in forest
Hla Tun, a Rohingya from the village of Alae-Than-Kyaw, told the Burmese service that Muslims cannot rely on security forces for protection or help.
“Our villages are located near rugged coastal area from south of Maungdaw to Alae-Than-Kyaw village. Almost every village has been burned down and people have nowhere to stay. People are hiding in the forest. In order to avoid authorities they can move only during night time to flee to Bangladesh,” Hla Tun said.
The violence began a week ago, when a group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army launched a series of attacks on police posts in Rakhine, which is home to most of the Rohingya minority group. The police responded with attacks on villages, to hunt down the insurgents.
Myanmar considers the Rohingya to be migrants from Bangladesh, and not one of the country’s many ethnic minority groups. Rohingya are denied citizenship, even if they can show their families have been in the country for generations.
Sectarian violence between Buddhists and Muslims has flared periodically for more than a decade. Until last month’s attacks, the worst violence was last October, when insurgents attacked several police posts, sparking a military crackdown that sent thousands fleeing to Bangladesh.
The Myanmar government has denied allegations of abuse against the Rohingya and has limited access to Rakhine to journalists and other outsiders; but, the country’s ambassador to the United Nations says the government plans to implement the recommendations from a U.N. commission to improve conditions and end the violence.
Amir Khasru in Bangladesh, VOA's Bangla service and VOA's Burmese service contributed to this report. |
A strong plurality of Americans believe that globalization has sidelined them, but has been good for the US economy overall. So, how do they react? They want the government to help them out: massive majorities of Americans believe the government should make college tuition-free and provide healthcare to all people. At the same time they think everyone is whiny: majorities (or strong pluralities) believe that liberals, conservatives, and young people complain too much.
Poll was run by PredictWise with Pollfish on February 27, 2017.
Americans have mixed feelings about globalization; they think it hurts them, but helps the country. "Globalization has sidelined people like me over the last 10 years or so." 48 percent agree and 34 percent disagree; 52 percent of Democrats agree and 46 percent of Republicans agree. "Globalization is good for the US economy overall." 47 percent agree and 35 percent disagree; 58 percent of Democrats agree and 42 percent of Republicans agree.
Americans, worried that globalization is making everyone, but them, rich, thinks the government should make things better for them: free college and healthcare. " Should the government make college tuition-free?" 67 percent agree and 27 percent disagree; 82 percent of Democrats agree and 47 percent of Republicans. " Should the government pursue a universal health care system guaranteeing health care to all people?" 76 percent agree and 19 percent disagree; 90 percent of Democrats agree and 61 percent of Republicans.
Americans think we are nation of complainers; conservative and liberal both complain too much. "Conservatives complain too much." 49 percent agree and 33 percent disagree; 57 percent of Democrats agree and 46 percent of Republicans. "Liberals complain too much." 56 percent agree and 28 percent disagree; 38 percent of Democrats agree and 87 percent of Republicans.
Full Data Here at PredictWise.com.
The PredictWise and Pollfish survey received responses from 1,200 people on Feb. 27 through online and in-app polling methods. We do not report margin of error because we do not believe it can be accurately estimated.
Tobias Konitzer is a PhD candidate in communication at Stanford University. Find him on Twitter @KonitzerTobias.
Sam Corbett-Davies is a PhD candidate at Stanford University in computer science. Find him on Twitter @scorbettdavies.
David Rothschild is an economist at Microsoft Research. Find him on Twitter @DavMicRot. |
Lloyds has agreed to examine all of the transactions it stripped to try to determine where the money was headed. In all, Lloyds hid the source of billions of dollars that passed through the United States, prosecutors said. Lloyds also hid transfers from banks in Sudan, which are also banned from doing business with American institutions.
Half of the $350 million Lloyds has agreed to pay will go to the federal government and the rest to Mr. Morgenthau’s office, which will divide the money between the city and the state.
Mr. Morgenthau said he hoped the money, the largest financial penalty his office has ever collected, would provide a boost to tight city and state budgets.
Although prosecutors did not identify specific individuals at Lloyds responsible for the fraud, Mr. Castleman said, “It was a systemic, wide-ranging scheme." The training manual given to employees of Lloyds even included a section on how to strip transactions, prosecutors said.
Banks in several nations are banned from doing business with American institutions, but the United States is particularly concerned about Iran, which it says finances terrorists and runs an illicit nuclear weapons program. Iran denies those accusations.
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The investigation into Lloyds goes back to 2006. It was conducted jointly by Mr. Morgenthau’s office and the Justice Department, with the assistance of the Treasury and banking regulators.
According to a deferred prosecution agreement, Lloyds handled $300 million of Iranian transfers and $20 million of Sudanese transfers that ended at American banks. Mr. Morgenthau said billions of dollars of transactions went through American banks but ended outside the country.
Several employees in Lloyds’ international payment processing unit in London removed from the bank’s central system orders from certain foreign banks, according to the agreement released Friday by Mr. Morgenthau’s office. Employees struck out identifying information about the originating banks on printed copies of the payment instructions, which someone then re-entered into the payments system. When American banks received the transfers, they seemed to have originated at Lloyds.
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Worried that they might be violating American law, senior officials at Lloyds stopped the stripping operation for Iranian banks in 2004, but transfers from Sudan were stripped as recently as 2007.
Under the agreement between Lloyds and Mr. Morgenthau, no employees, officers or the bank will be charged with a crime unless evidence emerges that the bank or its employees and officers knew that specific transfers were sent to or by terrorist groups or “proliferators of weapons of mass destruction.” The agreement lasts for two years.
In recent years, officials in the Treasury have stepped up a campaign to have foreign banks sever links with Iranian banks, which they accuse of providing support for groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, in addition to financing Iran’s own nuclear ambitions.
In November, the Treasury barred American financial institutions from handling certain money transfers for Iranian interests that had been previously allowed, closing what it described at the time as the “the last general entry point for Iranian banks.” Certain exceptions are still allowed for humanitarian aid and remittances.
In December, federal authorities moved to seize the assets of the Assa Corporation, which the Treasury says is a front for Bank Melli, Iran’s largest bank. Assa owns a stake in a Midtown Manhattan office tower.
Mr. Morgenthau’s office had been investigating ties between the Iranian government and Assa and a related entity, the Alavi Foundation, since 2006. Mr. Morgenthau said evidence unearthed in that investigation led his office to inquire about money transfers made through Lloyds. |
Description
If you have spent time with Metal Gear Solid then you should be very familiar with the concept of this patch. Basically… you sneak around and if someone catches you then this icon appears and you are straight up fucked. They didn’t spell out FUCKED in the game but we read between the lines with Rebound Design Lab and knew what they meant when they typed “Alert.” Also changed was the Kanji, which helps to reiterate how fucked you are as it translates to “you’re fucked” or “you’re screwed.” Each patch comes with the following:
(1) Morale Patch
(1) Sticker
(1) Numbered Card
The Black & Red patches come with a Black & Clear sticker while the Black & Glow in the Dark patches arrive with a White & Clear sticker. These patches are Limited Edition with only 100 of the Black/Red and 100 of the Black/GITD made.
How does this relate to rucking & GORUCK? If you take a breather (or try and cheat the event) and the Cadre catches you then you immediately are in the Alert aka FUCKED zone. Might as well wear the patch because they’ll be going after you! |
Back in the golden days (1994) Blur's Damon Albarn used to bang on about the "Coca-colanisation" of Britain. The steady bleed of American culture into his cuppa tea fantasy of the UK.
It's not an ideology you'd expect to see spun into mainstream comedy in 2013. We have iPads now. We eat from gourmet burger stands. The merger between Brit Corp and the US Inc seems to have gone ahead smoothly. Yet here come Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright with The World's End - a satirical sci-fi comedy that chips away at modern Britain and raises a pint to an old English brand of messy eccentricity.
Gary King (Pegg) is a late 30-something obsessed with a legendary night - 20 years ago - in which he led a gang of mates through the trim streets of Newton Haven to attempt a 12-pint pub crawl. That night whited out before they reached the final boozer. Now Gary's forcing the gang to give "The Golden Mile" another go. This time nothing - not rain, nor fire, nor an invasion of Stepford Wives-style alien replicants - is going to stop Gary reaching the final pub: The World's End.
Reluctantly joining the crawl (and brawl) are Oliver (Martin Freeman), Steven (Paddy Considine), Peter (Eddie Marsan) and Gary's former best friend Andrew (Nick Frost). They're grownups with wives and jobs and grudges against Gary. They're about as ready to down lager as they are to put a bar stool through a marauding alien's head. They'll be doing both before time's called.
With Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz Pegg and Wright made a career out of delaying adolescence, propping pop culture against the door when the real world came knocking. The World's End is their best work since Spaced because - through Gary - they explicitly acknowledge the habit. This new film is full to busting with pop references (Wrestlemania, Batman, LEGO, The Matrix); drunk on a retro soundtrack of Primal Scream, Suede and The Soup Dragons; and as in love with long-term male friendship as anything in their back catalogue, but they offer Gary as a foil. He's both a memorial to his own youth and a clever bit of self-analysis from the film-makers. Namely, that there's a sweetness and sadness to the idea of a man who wears the same outfit and listens to the same music as when he was a teenager - even if those passions have made him rich and famous.
Gary may not have changed in 20 years, but Newton Haven has. There's contemporary art in the town square. The pubs have been franchised, scrubbed into conformity. The people aren't much better. They're glossy-eyed and dull spirited. A result of the alien invasion of course, but perhaps also a comment on our increased tendency for obedience. And the carelessness with which we let our culture slip into uniformity. The scene in Shaun of the Dead in which Pegg's character walked to the shops through a zombie apocalypse without noticing anything amiss made a similar point, but it's intriguing to see Pegg and Wright underpin a whole film with a socio-political statement. It suits them.
Oh, and The World's End is funny of course. Like the idiot bastard son of Morecambe & Wise and HG Wells funny. There are puns and sight gags and juicy dialogue for the ensemble cast (great - particularly Marsan and Considine as the straight guys) to swig at. Wright directs with his usual flair (though perhaps the fast cut/kooky transition thing is a bit tired now), Pegg and Frost still revel in their damaged men-boys working through a broken friendship routine.
The World's End marks the third part of Pegg and Wright's self-described "Cornetto trilogy" (with Shaun and Fuzz). It's an appropriate moniker. With this final film they've slowed down a bit, grown up a lot. And saved the richest bite until last.
• The World's End is released in the UK on 19 July |
Fedora, secure boot, and an insecure future
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The UEFI secure boot mechanism has been the source of a great deal of concern in the free software community, and for good reason: it could easily be a mechanism by which we lose control over our own systems. Recently, Red Hat's Matthew Garrett described how the Fedora distribution planned to handle secure boot in the Fedora 18 release. That posting has inspired a great deal of concern and criticism, though, arguably, about the wrong things.
On a system with secure boot enabled, the hardware will refuse to run any system that has not been signed by a key it recognizes. Secure boot is meant to be a way to thwart boot-time malware by ensuring that only trusted (and unmodified) software gains control of the system. It is not effective as a digital rights management (DRM) mechanism; if you can gain control of the system, it is relatively easy to fool an operating system into thinking that secure boot is in effect when it is not. Providing the degree of control needed for effective DRM requires a trusted platform module (or similar) and associated software.
Secure boot does offer some hope of preventing a system from booting if its bootloader or kernel have been compromised by malware, though, as the "Flame" malware shows, there are limits to how much one can rely on signatures to keep systems secure. Secure boot could also, unfortunately, be effective in preventing booting if the user has tried to install an operating system of his or her choice.
The Windows 8 logo requirements specify that secure boot must be enabled. After some pushback, the requirements have been amended to also say that it should be possible for the owner of a system to disable secure boot or install new keys. It does not say that these actions need to be easy to carry out, though. Given that changing secure boot is a firmware-level operation, users wanting to make changes will be subjecting themselves to the very best sort of user experience that can be created by BIOS developers. It would be entirely unsurprising, for example, if users were forced to hand-enter new keys as long hex strings. For this to be an unpleasant and error-prone process would not be surprising.
Fedora's plan
Developers in the Fedora camp have evidently come to the conclusion that they do not want to force their users to endure such an experience to be able to install Fedora on their systems. So Fedora has chosen to take a different approach. Availing themselves of the Microsoft developer program, they will purchase a Microsoft-signed key for $99, then use that key to sign a minimal bootloader. UEFI-enabled hardware will then consent to boot that bootloader, which will immediately turn around and boot a special version of the GRUB2 bootloader which, in turn, will boot the Fedora kernel. A Fedora system set up in this mode should boot on a system with secure boot enabled with no changes required.
The appeal of this solution is clear: Fedora will "just work" on UEFI systems without forcing (possibly highly non-technical) users to make scary firmware-level changes. But there is a down side as well. The signed bootloader must ensure that it only runs GRUB2 if the GRUB2 binary has been signed by Fedora (using its own key at this point), and GRUB2 will only boot kernels that have been signed by Fedora. GRUB2 will need to be locked down, and the kernel too; the kernel will, for example, only be able to load modules that bear Fedora's signature. Given that, Red Hat's persistent attempts to get signed module enforcement into the kernel despite some interesting resistance make more sense.
Much of the coverage of this plan in the mainstream media bore headlines like "Red Hat to pay Microsoft for the right to run Linux." Such headlines are not strictly true; the payment ($99 total) evidently goes to Verisign, and what is really being paid for is the ability to boot Linux with a minimum of UEFI-caused user inconvenience. The payment for a Microsoft-signed key raises eyebrows, but it is evidently seen as the best response to a bad situation. And perhaps that is just what it is. But it also raises a number of interesting questions.
A good idea?
For example: what guarantees exist that a Microsoft-signed key will continue to be available in the future for a reasonable price? If secure boot takes over, and the only universally-recognized keys are those signed by Microsoft, then Microsoft will have a monopoly on the right to boot an operating system on future hardware. Corporations are, in general, not known for a principled refusal to exploit that kind of position, and this corporation, in particular, is well known indeed for the opposite sort of behavior. One can only assume that the price of such keys would increase in this situation.
Microsoft will also have the right to revoke keys if they can be said to be a threat to the promises given by the secure boot mechanism. That is why Fedora must be careful to limit anything that enables direct access to the hardware; should somebody be able to get such access, the signed Fedora system could be used to attack Windows systems that have secure boot enabled. In theory, all it would take is a kernel security hole to enable this sort of attack; that could then cause the Fedora key to be revoked. A quick check shows about 20 kernel security updates issued by Fedora since the beginning of this year, with multiple vulnerabilities fixed in most. That could lead to a lot of key churn, especially if, as Alan Cox suggests, every kernel hole will require that its certificate be revoked.
Depending on what software is run on a specific system (if it dual-boots Windows and Linux, for example), a revoked key could find itself into the system's "forbidden signatures" database. That would immediately disable the booting of the signed Fedora image, essentially crippling the machine. The amount of joy resulting from such an outcome can be expected to be small.
Some developers have argued that Fedora's plan is a violation of the GNU General Public License, or, at least, of the Fedora project's own guidelines, despite Fedora's efforts to ensure that users retain as much freedom as possible. GPL enforcement actions in this case seem unlikely; there's no shortage of much more severely locked-down Linux systems out there, and they have not been the target of such actions thus far. But there is a definite risk of damage to the Fedora project's image as users discover that they cannot easily install their own kernels, add third-party modules, or run tools like SystemTap.
Finally, there is the risk that Fedora's plan will legitimize the UEFI secure boot mechanism. For now secure boot can be disabled on x86 systems; what if Microsoft, in the future, points to Fedora 18 as an example of how everybody is able to work within the secure boot system and tries to make secure boot mandatory? Thus, some argue, Fedora is giving aid and comfort to those who would most like to take control of our systems away from us.
Why bother?
Given all of this, one might well wonder why Fedora is pursuing this path. Fedora users are not generally known to clamor for locked-down systems that they cannot easily tweak. Without any inside information whatsoever, your editor suggests that there are two entirely plausible reasons for Fedora's attempt to work with secure boot:
The Fedora project, like many free software projects, would like to have a wider base of users. It fears that, in the absence of a "just works" experience on upcoming hardware, it will lose users to other distributions that might be more willing to make that effort. Some of those users may be lost to Linux altogether.
The plan starts with a disclaimer that it is not representative in any way of Red Hat's intentions for its enterprise distribution. But it seems clear that there could be actual customer demand for a version of RHEL that runs in the secure boot environment. If one embraces the sort of restrictions that come with enterprise support, the additional rules imposed by secure boot will have a minimal impact, while the apparent benefits are clear. Fedora's role is, among other things, to test out technologies that might go into RHEL; in this case, Fedora's users get to stumble into the secure boot land mines so RHEL users don't have to.
So Fedora's decision to take this approach is not all that surprising. The project has concluded that it is better to restrict user freedom in certain settings to make their life easier in other ways; as Matthew Garrett put it:
[T]here's no way to rationally say that the loss of freedom in terms of users not being able to produce their own signed bootloader or kernel for free is more or less significant than the benefit of having an operating system that users can install without firmware reconfiguration.
For those who do think that the loss of freedom inherent in the Fedora scheme is unacceptable, the time between the present and when Windows 8 hardware starts shipping would be an ideal opportunity to demonstrate better alternatives. But it's not clear what those would be.
Alternatives?
One could simply ignore secure boot, requiring users to disable it before they can install Linux on their machines. That imposes a potentially scary or difficult task on those users; by the specification, secure boot cannot be disabled by the software directly. There may also be resistance from users who see a switch saying "turn off security" and don't want to flip it. This approach will work fine for hard-core Linux users and developers, but seems certain to lose other kinds of users.
An alternative would be to attempt to gain more control of the situation at the hardware level. An example can be seen in Google, which has made a point of ensuring that unlockable Android handsets exist and are available at a reasonable price. Hardware designed to run ChromeOS also, by design, comes with an easily-toggled physical switch that turns off the boot-time checks for users wanting to install their own software. The level of interest in "jailbreaks" for locked-down handsets shows that a lot of users do see value in having full control over the hardware they own. Open (and "open source") hardware has a following; it may be that the only real way to remain in control is to work to ensure that this kind of hardware continues to exist and has a growing market share. There should be a business opportunity here; projects like the Vivaldi tablet show that some people see that opportunity and are trying to pursue it.
In the absence of open hardware, we will continue to be at the mercy of others whose interests are unlikely to be the same as ours (for just about any value of "ours"). That will leave us in a position where attempts to cope like what we're seeing with Fedora seem like the best options available. That does not seem like the path to freedom; it is not why we have spent decades developing free operating systems. Fedora's secure boot plan may be an effective workaround, but leaves the real bug unfixed. |
We need to ban food speculation and protect the peasant farmers, who produce the bulk of the world's food. We need to halt ''market access'' rules and limit large-scale agribusiness. We need real action to leave fossil fuels in the ground - to stop mining coal, oil and gas. And we need to pay our climate debts to poor countries that are facing climate change now. Utopian? Yes, but necessary now, to overcome the wholesale reversal in development the UN is warning of. Our global financial crisis began in 2008 - the financial crisis in poor countries began in the late 1970s, and hasn't stopped for breath. Billions of dollars each year are still transferred from poor to rich. In 2008, $100 billion was given in overseas aid; in the same year, rich countries pocketed $600 billion in debt repayments.
The debt burden of developing countries became unpayable when the interest on development loans was suddenly hiked in the early 1980s. Just like subprime mortgages in the US, development loans turned into a debtors' prison. After the 2008 financial crisis, rich countries spent more than $20 trillion in bank bailouts and economic stimuli (incredibly, $20 trillion is a fifth of global income). The total debt of all 128 developing countries stands at $3.7 trillion. It can be cancelled if we want it to be. Scandalously, the food crisis in developing countries has passed us by, almost unnoticed. Yet it is the biggest threat to poverty reduction. Farming in many developing countries has been decimated by ''free trade'' rules under the World Trade Organisation. Countries have become dependent on food imports, leaving the poor vulnerable to price hikes. From 2006 to 2008, the global price of food doubled, forcing an additional 180 million people into destitution. Why is food suddenly so expensive? The answer came in 2008, when prices halved with the financial collapse, and then doubled again with the financial recovery.
Speculation on food prices was big business after the US lifted its ban on the practice in 2000. About $13 trillion surged into food commodities from 2006, and then out again in 2008, and then back in again by 2011. That's why we should reverse the WTO's ''market access'' agenda and support peasant agriculture - rather than global agribusiness - and reimpose the ban on food speculation. The third threat to poverty reduction - climate change - is already having a devastating impact on the global poor. Nine of the 10 people displaced by climate change live in developing countries. Poverty is already on the increase due to floods and shortages of fresh water and sea-water inundation related to climate change. The World Bank says $100 billion is needed now, each year, to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change. Obviously, rich countries are most able to stop burning fossil fuels. We are most to blame for the problem and yet still we stall. And aid donors (including Australia) still refuse to accept that climate aid should be in addition to development aid. The debt, food and climate crises are the key drivers of global poverty. Rich countries are responsible for all three crises, and can address them if they have the political will. Why don't they? The Occupy movement told us that governments are captured by the new global rich. In 2012, the World Economic Forum calculated that 1 per cent of the world's population - just 70 million people - own half of the world's wealth. That ''1 per cent'' is the problem. They have no interest in addressing the causes of poverty because they profit from rising food prices, spiralling debt repayments from poor nations and the booming carbon economy. Loading
The WEF - ironically, the forum for the ''1 per cent'' - says this unprecedented scale of global inequality now poses the biggest risk to its interests. It is high time that risk was made real. James Goodman is in the IQ2 debate Foreign Aid is a Waste of Money, Melbourne Town Hall on Wednesday. He is an associate professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. |
This election season there's a billowing cloud of misinformation being sprayed into the American psyche like a burping tail pipe on a primered Vega.
And its smoke is thicker and blacker than ever before thanks to the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision.
Billions have been spent for one purpose and one purpose only: to obscure and distract from the fact that Mitt Romney is backing the identical agenda George W Bush did.
It's really and truly that simple.
Lower taxes for the rich, cutting regulations for Wall Street, hawkish foreign policy with in many cases the same neocon foreign policy advisers W. Bush used make Romney/Ryan "W Bush 2: The Sequel to the Greatest Disaster Movie in Recent U.S. History, Available in Imax."
So please, America, don't fall for this con all over again. Taxes for the rich are at record lows. The uber-wealthy and corps hide profits overseas and work the loopholes to avoid paying what they should. And because of the resulting tax shortfall, deficits soar and education and infrastructure are cut. Why in God's name would anyone in their right mind support cutting taxes for the wealthy more? Especially when it's been proven over and over again to do very little for the economy?
And the idea of cutting regulations for Wall Street after the '08 collapse is as crazy as a guy in a hospital gown by the side of a highway waving Barbie dolls at passing cars. With the derivitives market larger than ever we need way more regulation of Wall Street, not less. And worst of all, Romney's hawkish foreign policy is a beat for beat redux of the Bush doctrine of attack at the slightest hint of threat that led us into the disaster of the Iraq war. Call it "the edgy drifter with a knife" policy.
Voting for Romney after the train wreck of that was the eight years of W. Bush is like losing your pay check playing a rigged game of three-card monte and then playing the same game again a week later cause the cards are a different color.
But Obama is a socialist! He's made things worse! What about the deficit?! Stop your witchy liberal word spells!
These objections to Obama are nonsense and lies at best. They just are. This isn't a "liberal" POV. It's just the truth. Obama does have real failings as a president (illegal drone strikes, a baffling desire to make more trade deals, failure to prosecute past war crimes), but being a socialist big spender is not remotely one of them. The stock market and corporate profits have soared under the Obama administration. And the deficit is 60 percent from tax short falls from the '08 collapse and 20 percent from the Iraq war finally being properly counted. Only $1 trillion of the $5 trillion deficit is from spending that was for the stimulus package that stopped our nation from falling into a depression by any economic metric available. The fact is Obama has spent less than any president in 50 years.
Even Obamacare is a private mandate that will drive billions to the insurance industry, much like the auto insurance mandate. Hardly socialism. In fact, it was a Republican plan to begin with.
But Romney and his billionaire backers have twisted facts and outright lied like we've never seen before. And why? Because if they had to stand on the issues they wouldn't receive a vote. Because Romney and Ryan are exactly on the same page as W. Bush. And that page is stained with champagne and sturgeon eggs.
If Romney wins it will be because voters voted for the lies and the brand ID of the Republican party, not because of facts, context and reality. This is the essence of how a con works. The con man gets the mark to respond emotionally rather than logically. Please, don't fall for it. With climate change becoming the biggest challenge of the next hundred years we can't afford four years more of corruption, misinformation and inaction. We just can't.
We must give up on this blind brand allegiance nonsense -- "the Republican party is for self-reliance and America" -- and start looking at the reality of what they do. They ignored warnings on 9/11, making us far less safe, give billions in subsidies to oil companies, no-bid contracts to the former vice president's company, cut taxes for the rich during a war, stand against equal pay for women, froze the budget to drive our AAA rating down. They are corrupt, for the rich getting richer and for dismantling our government including FEMA, Medicare, and Social Security.
And worst of all, the Republicans do everything they can to make it hard for people to vote. This isn't just creepy and dirty. This is anti-American and an insult to all those that have given their lives for our right to vote.
At a certain point if you're voting for Romney you have to look around the room and see who you're with. W, Bush and Cheney will vote for Romney. Sarah Palin will vote for Romney. Glenn Beck will vote for Romney, as will Rush Limbaugh. Rupert Murdoch, Hannity and Donald Trump are voting for Romney. Have these people been right about anything in the past 20 years? For real. Think about it. |
One percent see it as the top problem today, down from 46% in 2001
PRINCETON, NJ -- Nine years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, 1% of Americans mention terrorism as the most important problem facing the country, down from 46% just after the attacks.
Just before the attacks, in a Gallup poll conducted Sept. 7-10, 2001, less than one-half of 1% of Americans mentioned terrorism as the nation's most important problem. One month later, in October 2001, 46% named terrorism, the highest in Gallup's history.
From that point on, terrorism slowly faded as a response to this question. At the one-year anniversary of the attacks, in September 2002, 19% of Americans mentioned terrorism as the country's top problem, already eclipsed by the economy at the top of the list. By the five-year anniversary of the attacks in September 2006, 11% of Americans mentioned terrorism. Terrorism continued to drop from that point, albeit with an uptick to 8% mentions in January of this year, reflecting the widespread news coverage of the "Christmas Day bomber" who allegedly attempted to detonate explosives on a Northwest Airlines plane headed for Detroit.
As terrorism has faded, other concerns have risen in importance. Over the past nine years, Americans have most commonly mentioned the war in Iraq (from 2003 to early 2008) and the economy or jobs (from 2008 to the present) as the top problem facing the country.
Despite the drop in top-of-mind mentions of terrorism, Americans still say it is an important issue when they are reminded of it. Gallup recently asked Americans to rate the importance of a number of issues to their vote in this year's midterm elections, and 75% rated terrorism as an extremely or very important issue. Still, Americans rated economic issues such as the economy, jobs, and federal spending, as well as corruption in government and healthcare, even higher. They rated terrorism as more important than immigration, Afghanistan, and the environment.
The Sept. 11 attacks took place during the Republican Bush administration, which soon thereafter launched a "war on terrorism." Republicans have consistently been given more credit than Democrats for handling terrorism over the years since; in an August USA Today/Gallup poll, 55% of Americans say the Republicans in Congress are better able to handle the issue of terrorism, while 31% choose the Democrats.
Bottom Line
The low top-of-mind salience of terrorism as the top problem facing the nation no doubt reflects the absence of major terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the nine years since 2001, although there have been occasional news reports of thwarted attacks. It may also reflect the degree to which economic concerns are crowding out most other issues at this point in the nation's history.
The dramatic jump in perceptions of terrorism as the most important problem between September and October 2001, however, serves as a reminder of the potential for terrorism to reclaim its prominence as a concern should there be new terrorist incidents in the future. |
While most of America has been busy digesting a nearly-daily intake of sexual assault allegations, paranoid screeds about a rigged election, and a wildly vituperative back and forth between party elders and their Republican leader, Governor Christie’s political career has been quietly, steadily unraveling.
There are some who will point to the governor’s early and eager embrace of Trump as the beginning of his political demise (others may point to his wife’s obvious disdain for the man for whom her husband was putting his reputation on the line), but the ongoing trial of Christie aides Bridget Kelly and Bill Baroni for their roles in the Bridgegate scandal has revealed a culture of craven and unusually vindictive acts (even for New Jersey pols). The testimonies are devastating to Christie’s political ambitions.
Most damning, two of his top aides* (former Deputy Chief of Staff Kelly and former Port Authority official and one-time Christie henchman, David Wildstein) have now testified under oath that Christie knew of the lane closures—ones that would strand thousands of motorists on the George Washington Bridge—in advance. Prosecutors have maintained that the lanes were closed by Kelly and Baroni as retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, who refused to endorse Christie during the governor’s reelection campaign, and whose residents were most affected by the obscene traffic delays, (the defense teams have maintained their clients’ innocence against nine charges of corruption and fraud).
On Friday, Kelly testified that she reviewed the plan with Christie on August 12, 2013—nearly a month before the lanes were closed for an alleged “traffic study.” This directly contradicts what Christie has maintained all along, most famously in his 108 minute-long press conference on January 9 of 2014, immediately following the Bridgegate allegations—saying he had no knowledge of the lane closures:
“I had no knowledge or involvement in this issue, in its planning or it execution,” said Christie, “and I am stunned by the abject stupidity that was shown here.”
The fact that three of his consiglieres have testified exactly otherwise is very bad for Christie, but it’s perhaps the stuff the governor did afterwards that is unprecedented.
Three days into the traffic mayhem, Kelly says that she and the governor discussed the lane closures at a 9/11 memorial service. By then, Mayor Sokolich was frantically trying to get the lanes reopened, telephoning Christie aide Bill Baroni to communicate his furor. Christie and his team, apparently, found this funny:
“Mr. Wildstein testified that Mr. Baroni delighted in [Mayor Sokolich’s] frustration, so much so that his mocking of Mr. Sokolich’s “it’s maddening” became an inside joke. And Mr. Baroni, he said, bragged to the governor about the scheme at a September 11th memorial service, telling him that there were enormous traffic jams in Fort Lee and that Mr. Sokolich’s calls were not being returned.”
Baroni, by the way, never called Mayor Sokolich back. In his testimony, he couldn’t explain why:
“I have asked myself that question a thousand times,” Mr. Baroni said, sitting on the stand and shaking his head. “I think of it first thing in the morning, the last thing at night.”
There are, ahem, probably a few reasons that the Christie aide did not feel like placating his boss’s chosen adversary. For Baroni, this is certainly abominable behavior, but for the sitting governor of New Jersey to relish in the pain directed at citizens of New Jersey, while attending an event to commemorate the deaths of (among others) citizens of New Jersey on 9/11 is not just illustrative of a robust mean streak: it suggests moral hazard. |
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James Camera is one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, best known for Titanic, and Avatar, two of the world’s top grossing films. He’s also been an evangelist of technological innovation in cinema production. Despite past skepticism, Cameron’s latest thoughts on VR show that he’s coming around to the idea, but still taking a pragmatic look.
Speaking during a recent interview surrounding the upcoming re-release of Terminator 2: Judgement Day 3D, Cameron notes that he’s well beyond the buzz of VR thanks to the virtual camera production techniques he employs.
Look I think… you know VR is kind of a yawn to me because I’ve been… our method of authoring the Avatar films… I work in a VR environment all day every day. When I finished with these interviews, I’m going to go work in VR for the rest of the day. Whether a new artform, a new form of cinema, that’s interactive can be created… I’m waiting for it to manifest.
Cameron clearly appreciates the difference between simple 360 video and more immersive VR video rendered in real-time, and suggests that most people in his circles are conflating the two. Clearly, he’d like to work with the latter.
I will tell you that if I wasn’t making the Avatar [sequels] and that wasn’t taking up so much of my bandwidth, I would be experimenting around with VR. Now what most people are calling VR right now isn’t VR. It’s really omnidirectional camera. And because you don’t really have any spatial control—any spatial movement is baked in—you [only] have the ability to look around in an environment, and that’s not true VR. [In] true VR, you can move around. And you have a lot of control over where you are spatially in the environment.
Though game engines are becoming increasingly capable, rendering a film with the visual complexity of Avatar isn’t possible today in real-time, Cameron notes. When that time comes, he’s ready to jump in.
But to do [real-time interactive VR] to a level of the kind of images we have in Avatar, I think that’s… several generations of technology away. It takes 100 hours of a massive render farm to do a single frame of an Avatar movie. So we’re decades away from being able to render at that level in real-time. Or maybe it’s a decade… whatever. But show me that and then I’ll say, let’s make movies in true VR.
Back in 2015, Cameron had a decidedly more skeptical take on VR tech for films, but it sounds like he’s becoming increasingly convinced at the tech’s potential as a film medium. And it’s true that we can’t render Avatar today in real-time, but between the latest advancements in real-time rendering and new technologies to bring cinema-quality assets to VR, we could hit a level of fidelity acceptable to Cameron sooner than he thinks. |
How bad is the stimulus bill just passed by the Senate? Well, at least as bad as the one passed last week by the House of Representatives, but probably not as bad as the final bill that will land on President Barack Obama's desk, possibly as soon as the end of this week.
Don't take my word for it. In a report to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) laid out in plain English—well, economic language—that the Senate bill would eventually cause not a stimulus but a recession in "the longer run." As CBO's director Douglas W. Elmendorf wrote on February 4:
At your request, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has conducted an analysis of the macroeconomic impact of the Inouye-Baucus amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 1 [the House stimulus bill]. CBO estimates that this Senate legislation would raise output and lower unemployment for several years, with effects broadly similar to those of H.R. 1 as introduced. In the longer run, the legislation would result in a slight decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) compared with CBO’s baseline economic forecast.
On the CBO's The Director’s Blog, Elmendorf explains why the Senate legislation would eventually reduce economic output: “The principal channel for this effect is that the legislation would result in an increase in government debt. To the extent that people hold their wealth in the form of government bonds rather than in a form that can be used to finance private investment, the increased government debt would tend to 'crowd out' private investment—thus reducing the stock of private capital and the long-term potential output of the economy.”
The CBO's latest projection for fiscal year 2009's deficit is that it will reach $1.2 trillion (that’s eleven zeros after the 2) before factoring in any stimulus spending or war spending. That’s 8.3 percent of GDP and far higher than any deficit under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s (when deficits reached 6 percent of GDP). In fact, you have to go back to World War II to find deficits higher than the projections for FY 2009.
Truly massive deficits won't surprise anyone who has looked at the Senate version of the stimulus bill. Much has been made over the "compromises" and negotiations behind the Senate finally arriving at something that garnered enough support for passage. Here are three large categories of expenditures where senators managed to sort out their differences and find a compromise that they can all live with. If only things were so simple for us taxpayers.
1. Billions of dollars in spending exclusively devoted to benefit federal employees.
$5.5 billion for making federal buildings "green" (including $448 million for the Department of Homeland Security's headquarters)
$198 million to design and furnish the DHS headquarters
$200 million for workplace safety in Department of Agriculture facilities
$75 million for the Smithsonian Institution
$300 million more for hybrid and electric cars for federal employees (see below)
$180 million for construction of Bureau of Land Management facilities
$500 million for wildland fire management
$110 million for construction for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
$522 million for construction for the Bureau of Indian Affairs
$412 million for Centers for Disease Control headquarters
$500 million earmark for National Institutes of Health facilities in Bethesda, Maryland
$100 million for constructing U.S. Marshalls office buildings
$300 million for constructing Federal Bureau of Investigation office buildings
$800 million for constructing Federal Prison System buildings and facilities
$307 million for constructing National Institute for Standards and Technology office buildings
$1 billion for administrative costs and construction of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office buildings
That spending was added to an earlier version of the bill, which also benefited federal employees by splurging on things such as the following:
$600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees
$125 million for the Washington, D.C. sewer system
$75 million for salaries of employees at the FBI
$6 billion to turn federal buildings into “green” buildings
$88 million for renovating the headquarters of the Public Health Service
$5.5 million for “energy efficiency initiatives” at the Veterans Administration's “National Cemetery Administration”
$60 million for Arlington National Cemetery
$75 million to construct a new “security training” facility for State Department Security officers when they can be trained at existing facilities of other agencies
$110 million to the Farm Service Agency to upgrade computer systems
$200 million in funding for the lease of alternative energy vehicles for use on military installations
2. Wasteful spending that is not directly targeted at federal employees:
Arguably the best item in the Senate bill is a $1,500 tax credit to anyone that purchases “neighborhood electric vehicles”—also known as golf carts. The total estimated cost of that giveback is $300 million. Purchasers of motorcycles and three-wheelers shouldn't despair, however, as there are benefits available for them, too.
And then there are these:
$2 billion for a FutureGen near-zero emissions powerplant in Mattoon, Illinois
$2 billion for manufacturing advanced batteries for hybrid cars
$650 million for the digital TV (DTV) transition coupon program
$1.2 billion for summer jobs for youth
$200 million for public computer centers at community colleges and libraries
$750 million earmark for the National Computer Center
$10 million to fight Mexican gun-runners
$850 million for Amtrak (on top of its regular subsidy)
$100 million for lead paint hazard reduction
$275 million for flood prevention
$65 million for watershed rehabilitation
$650 million for abandoned mine sites
$1.3 billion for NASA (including $450 million for "science" at NASA)
$100 million to clean up sites used in early U.S. atomic energy program
$10 million for urban canals
$1.5 billion for carbon capture projects under sec. 703 of P.L. 110-140 (though the original section only authorizes $1 billion for five years)
$500 million for state and local fire stations
3. Tax cuts and tax breaks that don't deliver anything close to real reform.
The Senate bill supposedly wooed a few recalcitrant Republicans by trimming spending (see above) and throwing in simple, clear-cut, and effective tax cuts. The tax portions of the Senate stimulus bill do contain approximately 40 separate tax-related provisions aimed at boosting the economy, amounting to an estimated $385.3 billion in cuts and government give-backs.
The Senate might have done something straightforward, like cutting the corporate income tax or cutting the payroll tax that all workers pay. Instead, most of the provisions are tax credits, many of which are refundable. In other words, individuals and businesses need to pay their taxes up front and then will get money back from the government. These sorts of programs, aimed incentivizing investment, are better understood as spending programs disguised as “tax cuts.”
Among the various tax provisions are programs such as the following:
The “Making Work Pay” credit: This would provide a refundable tax credit of $500 to individuals making up to $75,000 and a credit of $1,000 for couples making up to $150,000. It is intended to act as a refund of the Social Security payroll taxes paid by workers, though even those with no tax liability would also qualify to receive a check from the government for the amount of the refundable credit. Additionally, workers receiving this tax credit would receive credit as if they had paid into Social Security and thus accrue benefits toward a retirement pension. The Making Work Pay tax credit is the centerpiece of the Obama “tax cuts."
However, they are akin to welfare checks. Such tax credits are not likely to stimulate the economy because they provide no incentive for individuals to be more productive, but would simply pay them whether or not they were productive. Also, the potential consumption that might result from the tax credits will not have an effect on job creation. Business owners might notice a blip in their sales but they know that it is the result of a one-time tax credit. They won’t build new factories or hire more employees based on a blip. The total cost of this is expected to be $140 billion.
Temporary Increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit or EITC: The EITC is a refundable tax credit available to low-income individuals, which increases with the number of children. Those that earn approximately $13,000 per year receive the maximum benefit (currently $5,028) and those who earn higher incomes receive lesser amounts. The stimulus proposal would increase the tax credit for those with three or more children, raising the total tax credit by about $600. EITC is essentially a welfare program, and while it may help shield its recipients from poverty, it is purely redistributive and will not spur economic growth.
Temporary Increase of Refundable Portion of Child Credit: Individuals with children qualify to receive a refundable tax credit of $1,000 per child until 2010, at which point it returns to $500 per child. If the individual does not owe any taxes, the tax credit is refundable only for those that make more than $12,550, which is intended to assist low-income working parents. The stimulus proposal would lower the amount that parents would have to earn to $6,000. By lowering the amount of income to $6,000, it might decrease the incentive for people to be profitably employed, and therefore would have the opposite of a stimulative effect on the economy.
Waiver of Requirement to Repay First-Time Homebuyer Credit: Current law allows first-time homebuyers to receive an interest-free federal loan of $7,500 (in the form of a refundable tax credit) to purchase a home. The loan has to be repaid over 15 years through an individual's tax returns. The stimulus proposal would waive the repayment requirement, effectively giving all first-time homebuyers a $7,500 credit. This proposal may stimulate the purchase of homes, but do we really need the government to push people toward home purchases? In a time when the housing market is contracting to correct the abuses of the past, it is misguided to assume that additional interventions to spur home purchases will help the economy.
Build America Bonds: The stimulus creates an incentive to invest in municipal bonds that provide financing for public building projects. Like many of the other bonding provisions in the bill, this gives an incentive for private capital to flow toward public investment rather than private. Public investments are only going to promote economic growth if the government decides to use the funds more productively than they would otherwise be used in the private sector. There is no reason to think, however, that the government has suddenly become better at investing people’s money.
There are many more bad policies and spending decisions in the Senate stimulus bill, but even a cursory glance at the parts outlined above give a good sense of the overall legislation—and what is likely to be signed into law by President Obama.
And here is one more thing to consider: There is absolutely no evidence that any stimulus package in the past 80 years has goosed economic activity—not FDR’s during the Great Depression, not Japan’s during the 1990s, and not George W. Bush’s in 2001 and 2008. If anything, the economic evidence suggests that such spending packages actually intensified and prolonged misery.
Instead of rushing through legislation that will likely have no short-term effect on the economy, is guaranteed to have negative long term ones, and that serves the traditional interest groups that politicians are always busy catering to, the Senate should have cut spending like Ireland is now doing and cut marginal tax rates across the board. That would not only have stimulated the economy, it would have been fiscally responsible considering the massive entitlement crisis that is coming our way. But such legislation, alas, will have to wait for another day. Or another crisis.
Veronique de Rugy is a Reason columnist and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. |
I have had the a good fortune of speaking with good number of the leaders in education technology today. Since so many of these players have emerged from academe, the competition between companies is fierce certainly, but there is also a collegial willingness to acknowledge the successes of other companies. In the case of non-profits like edX, CEO Anant Agarawal says, the more companies that enter this space, the merrier. (Stay tuned for my interview with Agarwal on January 20th.) Several of these leaders acknowledge that the most influential person to the MOOC landscape has been Salman Khan. As Agarwal lists the genesis of the MOOCs, he lists Khan and his Khan Academy first among the major players. Sebastian Thrun acknowledged in my interview with him that "I stumbled into this after listening to a gentleman named Sal Khan of Khan Academy. In his speech he noted that he had tens of millions of students in his classes. I was teaching at Stanford at the time and had tens of dozens of students in my classes, and I felt I should try something different and see if we could do what I do and scale it to many people." In fact, in my podcast interview with Thrun, as he listed those who had been most influential to him over the course of his career, he listed Khan on the short list.
With this in mind, I looked forward to meeting this education guru. I met him in his office, and had a chance to see the microphone he uses for the tutorials that he delivers. He was informal, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and the microphone that I used to record our podcast interview was perched on a log that stood in between us. He was affable, bright, and the leadership skills that enabled him to be class president of his senior class at MIT and of his class at Harvard Business School before becoming a serial entrepreneur was quite clear. What followed as a fascinating conversation about the genesis of Khan Academy, his thoughts on the future of education, and his beliefs about the balance between technology enabled learning versus classroom learning.
(To listen to an extended audio interview with Salman Khan, visit this link To read the past interviews in the education technology innovation series, including interviews with Sebastian Thrun, Daphne Koller, and Mike Feerick, please visit this link. To read future interviews in this series, including interviews with Anant Agarwal of edX, and Dean Daniel Huttonlocher of Cornell NYC Tech, please click the "Follow" link above.)
Peter High: Sal, there is the famous story of your cousin, Nadia, who needed some help with her math class in seventh grade as the genesis of the idea that has become Khan Academy. What insights in the early days helped you understand the scale of the need that you hoped to fill?
Salman Khan: I grew up with plenty of smart people. They would beat me at chess, they could solve brain teasers before I could, but then they would struggle in algebra. These were incredibly smart people who simply did not have the foundation in math that I had. I saw the same thing with my cousin, Nadia. She had actually gotten “A”s and “B”s in every math class. Despite that, she had some serious gaps in her knowledge that became more significant as the content became more difficult. This really hit me as a real opportunity.
My background is in software, and I have always had these romantic notions of starting writing software that could help people learn, so I started writing a little tool that would give Nadia and her brothers and the other people I was working with practice problems. I didn’t trust them when they said how long it took them or whatever else. I put a database behind it and that became a useful tutorial tool because I could see where they had gaps, I could intervene appropriately, and I could give them as much practice as they needed.
I realized that I had an issue with scaling this. The software was appropriate for tens of people, but video together with analytics connecting the software to the videos would be necessary to take it to the next level. So I started doing those to complement the software idea, and they took on a life of their own and it reinforced that there was a need that was not being met effectively.
I realized that there are many people who are very good students, but they think of themselves as bad students. At the end of the day what they are really missing is way to understand where their gaps are and a way to address those gaps. The problem is by the time you are in algebra class and if you are a little shaky on decimals, there has not been a good way to address that traditionally. The class is going to move on.
PH: What feedback did you get from students in the early days that helped you determine how to shape the company and its offering?
SK: Some of the strongest testimonials that I got back in the early days were from students who indicated that they thought they were simply bad at a given subject, and they were on the verge of giving up hope when they found our videos. This has been inspiring to me. A member of our team failed calculus three or four times and dropped out of college because of it. Later he embarked on a successful IT career and got to the point where he had to re-learn calculus. He did so using Khan Academy. He joined our team and now is one of our top engineers. He didn’t realize he had all these gaps in his formative mathematics and that was what was keeping him passing calculus. It is not about smart or not-smart, or motivated or demotivated; it is a lot about how strong your foundation is, and how confident you are. One’s perception of themselves has a much bigger role than has been acknowledged to determine who succeeds and who does not.
PH: Do you anticipate a point at which Khan Academy or other comparable companies will change the way in which teaching is done in the classroom?
SK: I don’t think we are a threat or competition to traditional education in any way. This is not Amazon.com versus Barnes & Noble. We don’t believe that you should ever replace physical education. Even in a thousand years, a computer will never be able to do so.
Before the Prussians came up with the current educational model 200 years ago, the only people who got an education were the elite, the nobility and usually only the male nobility. So the Prussian model has served us incredibly well, democratizing education, and allowing us to have it at an industrial scale, so to speak.
As we ask, “What is the ideal experience?” The physical classroom should be changed such that learning is not as passive an experience as it has been traditionally. Students shouldn’t just be listening to a lecture; they should be interacting with peers; they should be working at their own pace; they shouldn’t be isolated from people who are more advanced than they are or people who are less advanced than they are. We ought to use these as opportunities to mentor other people and be mentored by others. This is where Khan Academy comes in. If the computer can give them the right problems at the right time and give the teacher feedback; well, then teachers don’t have to use time for homework review.
PH: In the early days, you performed all lessons. Needless to say, that is not a scalable model. What was the process of expanding beyond you?
SK: In the early days, there was such a direct need for my cousins and then once I started, I realized how much I enjoyed making the videos. I started with algebra and enjoyed that. I then moved on to trigonometry. Next, I did geometry. I eventually got pre-algebra. It kept growing and growing, and it was one of the best intellectual adventures for me. I viewed this as a challenge. I am not a chemist, but I understood chemistry at one point. I delved back into the books I used in school. I moved on to history.
The company is called Khan Academy and I kind of cringe sometimes because it was literally almost a joke. It makes it sound like a major institution, and it is no longer just me, of course. In 2006, the name was kind of a joke, and I did not quit my job until 2009. In 2010, we set up as a not-for-profit. In 2010, we had our first real funding from Gates foundation and Google. We could get office space and hire people. We have more than 40 people now. Three-fourths of them are software engineers.
As you mentioned, I can no longer do everything, even for the things I have done, it is probably not ideal for everyone. We want other voices and other ways of thinking. I have focused on bringing in new people who have a similar enthusiasm and sensibility.
PH: How do you compare Khan Academy to the other prominent MOOCs like edX, Udacity, or Coursera?
SK: We have some comparable content and people from the same universities that they have signed up. We have Stanford Medical School content on Khan Academy for instance. So it isn’t where the content is coming from or who is making it. It is more of how the content is expected to be consumed and what it means to consume it. As other MOOCs move toward accreditation, there may be the perception that it is replacing the physical educational environment. As I mentioned earlier, we explicitly do not intend to do so. With some other courses, there is the perception that “Well, this is the Harvard course.” I think the risk there is that you know the reality-- is it is not the Harvard course.
The other distinction is attempting to virtualize a physical analogue. So there is something called a course today, but it starts on a certain date. It ends on a certain date. There are lectures, and there is homework. Then there is a project. Then there is an exam and everyone kind of moves together. That has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is it does create a cohort like a fact. The disadvantage of kind of going together at the same pace is that it still is the kind of for like were depression model of education, where anytime you are forcing to people together at the same pace, it becomes a filter. It begs the question, “Who can keep up with this pace?”
Khan Academy can help you learn, but we are never going to say that we are somehow a replacement for a physical classroom. So that is why we have invested really heavily in teacher dashboards, teacher diagnostics. Teachers being able to assign exercises, it is coming out soon, so to some degree the teacher could use Khan Academy within their courses. However the teacher decides to do it. It is not a pre-packaged course for them. It could be asynchronous. We could be in the same classroom. You might work on negative exponents. I might work on fractal exponents. That is completely okay. So that is where I would draw some distinctions on how we operate.
We are also differentiated by our mission statement: A free world class education for anyone, anywhere.
PH: You mentioned your use of the dashboards that you are developing for teachers and the diagnostics that you are putting together to help them gauge progress to use an additional aid to determine how the students are doing. What is on your own dashboard to determine whether Khan Academy is making appropriate progress?
SK: In Silicon Valley, growth is number one. You grow at all costs. That is what drives your valuation. We also believe that growth is important, as it means that we are adding value to people. But for us it is really about the average learning per user that we want to maximize and the way we think about that, well first we have to really invest in really strong diagnostic exercises assessments, because if we don’t have those then there is no way of really measuring the impact that the videos or the text might have. So we are doing a very deep course right now and the common core, we are working with a lot of the common core groups you know to make sure that we are really going deep, really doing conceptually that when we are confident that a student is proficient at something We look at how well do we engage the user? How much time they spend? You know we are always running experiments. Five percent of the users see different little tweaks to the system to see if it engages them more. We look at what interventions get them to a proficient state faster.
I also did a very good job of hiring people smarter than myself across the organization. So we have some very, very good people who are thinking very seriously and working with third party researchers at universities and cognitive scientists to understand how we can measure learning and retention.
PH: You mentioned that you mission is to provide free world class education for anyone, anywhere. The key is that the courses are free -- so on flip side of that, what is the revenue model? How do you see yourself continuing to be able to afford this strong talent as you continue to scale the business?
SK: Right now our total budget is about the same budget as a medium size high school, and we are reaching millions of students. I think the social return on investment will continue to be compelling to philanthropists and foundations. As we grow, hopefully less of my time will be spent on fundraising, and more will be spent trying to make the experience on Khan Academy better and deeper. To do so, we are licensing content to some for-profits that are trying to use it in some commercial way. We are open to that as long as our brand is used in the right way. We started to do some brand partnerships; so the most famous one is with Bank of America. If you walk into Bank of America now you will see a little banner where they say, “Better money habits – a partnership with Khan Academy.” They are using our video content on financial literacy and capital markets and accounting, for example. They have developed their own portal. Executives there have told us, “People trust Khan Academy, because you guys have built a brand here, and you are a not-for-profit.” I was really impressed they genuinely are in this to educate their customers. It not just some type of a marketing ploy. These are example of reasons why I feel good that in five or six years, we won’t have to be completely philanthropically supported.
I should mention that one thing that we have ruled out: we won’t charge for learning. We won’t put ads on the site. If we do that, it will mean the electricity is about to go off at our headquarters and we can’t pay our bills.
PH: You have children of your own. How do you plan to use Khan Academy with them?
SK: My son is four. We normally say Khan Academy starts being kind of interesting for a third or fourth grader, but you know I was trying to work with that especially if you have, it is so important to have the human in the room that can get beyond where the technology really fails and we learned how we can fix the technology. I hope that in a couple of years, my son goes to a school where Khan Academy is part of the experience.
I hope that when he is six or seven or eight years old, he gets a chance to be tutored by his peers, to tutor his peers, to do projects with the teacher. I hope that he has time next to the teacher for one-on-one learning even if it is for 15 minutes a week, as opposed to five days per week of sitting in his chair, pretending that he is paying attention looking at the clock to see when class ends. It is just a very unhealthy thing, especially for kids that young, where they want to move, they want to explore. They are naturally curious and it is almost that the traditional Prussian model suppresses that natural curiosity.
PH: You have had a chance to experience the American education system, you’ve been an entrepreneur in this space, and now you are parent to a young child entering it anew, have you thought much about education reform in our country?
SK: I really fundamentally believe that we need to move to a world where it is about competency. What level of competency do you have of algebra? And you know it is not okay to get a C in algebra, but it doesn’t mean that you are a bad person or that you are not hardworking or not capable. It just means that you don’t work on it harder, because no one is benefitting from you getting a C in algebra and then you going and taking algebra 2 or taking pre-calculus after that. It is much better for you to learn algebra at a reasonable level of proficiency. And so I would like to move to a world where you learn, how you see fit, it is personalized
The other reform is we want to see classrooms that are much more human. The people interact with each other. At the conclusion of my education, I should be able to prove to you that I am a critical thinker. I can prove to you that I can write. Here is my portfolio of creative work as evidence of this capability.
Peter High is the President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs, and the moderator of the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. Follow him on Twitter @WorldClassIT. |
WILL Jerusalem’s bustling Old City be turned into a ghost town when Pope Francis comes to the Holy Land on May 25th? That is what worries some of his officials. While the Palestinians are opening up the streets of Bethlehem and providing the pope with an open car when he visits their side of the biblical land, Israel is taking no chances. It is planning a strict permit regime, insisting that the Holy Father travels in an armoured car, with the public kept at arm’s length behind a security cordon. Thousands of police are to be drafted in. “The pope wants to see the people,” protests a papal spokesman. “But Christians won’t be able to see him...Israel is turning the holy sites into a military base.”
Tensions rose in the Old City over Easter, as Israel’s police set quotas for access to Jesus’s burial site, the Holy Sepulchre. They issued wristbands and badges to let Christian groups through the gates of the Old City at allotted times, and set up barriers in the Christian quarter. “Move back,” Commander Golan told pilgrims, as thousands sought to attend the rite of the Holy Fire on Easter Saturday, when believers say fire erupts from Jesus’ tomb, setting thousands of church candles aflame.
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The Israelis say they must be strict because they are responsible for keeping the peace. In 1834 hundreds were killed in a stampede. This year’s Holy Fire flared without injury. But Catholic priests suggest that Israel is using extra security measures to change the Old City’s status, providing for unfettered access to Jews, while limiting the number of Christian worshippers.
Whereas the police held back Christian pilgrims, say the priests, the gates for Jews celebrating Passover, which coincided this year with Easter, were opened wide. Robert Serry, a Dutch diplomat who is the UN’s Middle East envoy, whose way was briefly barred, protested against what he said was Israel’s hindrance of religious freedom. “It is ridiculous that Israel opens Jerusalem for foreign tourists, while millions of Palestinian Christians and Muslims are being banned from entering their occupied capital,” said Nabil Shaath, a confidant of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
Israel has tried to sweeten the papal visit by agreeing to discuss whether Catholics can worship in the room above David’s Tomb on Mount Zion, where in the 13th century Franciscans declared that Jesus had his last supper. The Vatican, for its part, has abandoned its demand for Jerusalem to be a corpus separatum, or international city, in line with a UN resolution passed in 1947, just before Israel’s creation.
The Israelis say that the number of Christians in Israel is growing, whereas in the Palestinian territories (and elsewhere in the Arab world) it is shrinking. In a move heralded by the Israelis as encouraging the integration of Christians in Israel, the army is planning to call up young Christians. It will be voluntary, says an army spokesman, noting the endorsement of a priest in Nazareth, Father Nadav. But most churchmen have condemned the move, saying it will sow sectarian strife between Israel’s 150,000 Arab Christians and its ten-times bigger number of Muslims. Last year, only 40 of some 2,000 Palestinian Christians who reached conscription-age enlisted. |
The war on drugs led to "a 500 percent increase in incarceration in our country, disproportionately affecting poor and disproportionately affecting minorities."
To address racial tensions in the United States, the federal government should invest in law enforcement, said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., on NBC’s Meet the Press July 10. But it has to be the right kind of investment.
"There is a challenge with America where we have invested, unfortunately, in a war on drugs, which has been profoundly painful to our nation, with a 500 percent increase in incarceration in our country, disproportionately affecting poor and disproportionately affecting minorities," Booker said.
President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs in the early 1970s, and about 10 years later President Ronald Reagan strengthened the effort. We decided to look into Booker’s claim that these stricter drug policies led to a 500 percent increase in incarceration.
We found that the number of people incarcerated for drug-related offenses has increased dramatically in the past 40 years, as has the overall incarcerated population. But it’s hard to prove a causal relationship.
Rising incarcerated populations
A spokesman said Booker’s statistic comes from the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform advocacy organization. It says the current incarcerated population is 2.2 million — including federal prisons, state prisons and local jails — which is a 500 percent growth over the past 40 years.
Experts told us that the Sentencing Project’s statistics are credible.
The state and federal prison population grew from 218,466 in 1974 to 1,508,636 in 2014, which is a nearly 600 percent increase. For comparison, the overall United States population has increased just 51 percent since 1974.
The state and federal prison population remained fairly stable through the early 1970s, until the war on drugs began. Since then, it has increased sharply every year, particularly when Reagan expanded the policy effort in the 1980s, until about 2010.
So it seems Booker has his numbers right, but how much of this increase is a direct result of the tougher drug laws? The effort resulted in the Drug Enforcement Administration's establishment, as well as policies such as mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes and new asset forfeiture rules.
It’s hard to say exactly how much of the increase can be attributed to these policies because it’s difficult to isolate the impact to any one cause, experts told us.
That being said, "a lot of people attribute the increase in incarceration to the war on drugs," said Nancy La Vigne, director of the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center. "While it's much more complicated than that, I suppose most would agree that it was the single biggest driver."
In 1980, about 41,000 people were incarcerated for drug crimes, according to the Sentencing Project. In 2014, that number was about 488,400 — a 1,000 percent increase.
More people are admitted to prisons for drug crimes each year than either violent or property crimes, found Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup. So drug prosecution is a big part of the mass incarceration story, he said.
Rothwell told PolitiFact he thinks some of the increase would have happened regardless, but Booker is right to focus on the drug war.
Others see it differently. John F. Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, has argued that the impact of the war on drugs is greatly exaggerated, finding that drug crime only accounts for about 20 percent of prison growth since 1980.
"In reality, a majority of prison growth has come from locking up violent offenders, and a large majority of those admitted to prison never serve time for a drug charge, at least not as their primary charge," he wrote last year.
But violent crime and seemingly unrelated factors that contributed to the rapid increase in prison population growth can actually be connected to the war on drugs, said Steven Duke, a professor at the Yale Law School. For example, if policies cause the cost of drugs to go up, users might be more prone to steal in order to afford drugs. And black markets can lead to more violent crime, like if a drug deal goes sour and results in a murder.
Effect on minorities and poor people
It is a well-established fact that minorities are overrepresented in the prison population. About 58 percent of all sentenced inmates in 2013 were black or hispanic, yet the two groups make up just about 30 percent of the total population.
Research also suggests that when black and white people engage in the same illegal activity and have the same criminal history, black people are more likely to be arrested, more likely to face tougher charges and more likely to receive longer sentences than whites.
In a 2014 article, Rothwell found that the war on drugs has significantly impacted black people. He found that white people are more likely than black people to sell drugs and about as likely to consume them. Even so, black people are 3.6 times more likely than white people to be arrested for selling drugs and 2.5 times more for drug possession.
The question of how poor people are represented in the prison population, particularly among those incarcerated for drug-related offenses, is a little more elusive. The best data about prisoners’ income before their arrest comes from a 2004 government survey.
The Prison Policy Initiative analyzed the survey and "found that incarcerated people had a median annual income of $19,185 prior to incarceration, which is 41 percent less than non-incarcerated people of similar ages."
This would indicate that the incarcerated population is disproportionately poor, but it does not shed light directly on the question of the war on drugs' impact on poorer populations.
Our ruling
Booker said the 40-year war on drugs led to "a 500 percent increase in incarceration in our country, disproportionately affecting poor and disproportionately affecting minorities."
Booker has his numbers right, looking at incarcerated population growth over the past 40 years. It’s hard to conclusively attribute the rapid rise to the war on drugs, but many experts believe that it is a major factor, if not the primary factor.
Minorities are disproportionately represented in the prison population, and some slightly dated research indicates poor people are, as well. Evidence seems to show that black people are more likely to be arrested for drug crime than white people, despite being equally likely to use and less likely to sell drugs.
Even though it’s hard to prove a direct causal effect, the evidence seems to back up Booker’s claim. Because of that additional context, we rate his claim Mostly True. |
Toronto Blue Jays RHP Marco Estrada in the dugout after the seventh inning of a game at Safeco Field last year, is being checked out by opposing scouts. Photo: Ted S. Warren, AP.
By Bob Elliott
Canadian Baseball Network
Tim Conroy scouts for the Kansas City Royals.
He pitched for the Oakland A’s and the St. Louis Cardinals.
Yet, there he was this weekend following around his old team? No, not the Royals, the A’s or the Cardinals.
His old team, the one he followed for the final 40 games of the 2015 season is the Toronto Blue Jays. And Conroy was at Progressive Field in Cleveland to see Marco Estrada work Friday night for the Jays against the Cleveland Indians.
Conroy arrived at the Rogers Centre Aug. 28, 2015, when the Detroit Tigers were in town, saw the Jays final 35 games or the regular season and the five game American League Division Series against the Texas Rangers. So he had a 40-game book on the Jays before Game 1 of the AL Championship Series against his Royals.
When we tweeted the fact Conroy was in on Estrada before Friday’s game Jays fans quickly jumped on it. Sean Lamb asked if he was the one who picked up on David Price’s breathing patterns before certain pitches? and Richard Penn asked if he was the guy who provided the strong overview of Jose Bautista’s throwing tendency?
Included in the book were nuggets on Price, Bautista and others.
The Blue Jays have made it known that lefty starter Francisco Liriano, reliever Joe Smith and Estrada -- all eligible for free agency -- are players that Toronto management is ready to move, according to two scouts from National League clubs.
“All those names you read -- Josh Donaldson, Marcus Stroman, Roberto Osuna -- we’ve been told that those players are not available,” said a National League scout in the know. “The only people they have on the table are those who will be free agents at the end of the year.
There are less than 10 days remaining until the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline.
“We have nine days to go so on one hand it could be early, things may change,” said another NL scout, “Our team has been told that they are only wanting to move free agents.”
* * *
The Royals for one have interest in Estrada and Conroy has a big enough book on the right-hander as he saw his final seven starts in September of 2015: facing the Indians, Baltimore Orioles and the Yankees at the Rogers Centre and at Yankee Stadium, at Atlanta, at Baltimore and Tampa Bay. Five times Estrada worked 6 2/3 innings or more and four times allowed two or fewer runs.
Estrada was 2-0 with a 2.96 ERA, walking 12 and fanning 26 in 45 2/3 innings. He beat the Rangers 5-1 in an elimination Game 3 in Arlington, Tex. allowing one run in 6 1/3 innings, lost Game 1 against the Royals (giving up three runs in 5 1/3) and beating the Royals in Game 5 allowing one run in 7 1/3 innings).
If that, or the 2016 post-season when Estrada dominated the Rangers (one run in 8 1/3) in a Game 1 win, seems like a long time ago it is because it was.
Only Conroy knows how the Estrada of the past, the Estrada of earlier this season when Conroy saw him pitch against the Yankees compares to the Estrada of Friday night. Estrada allowed five runs on six hits and three walks in 4 2/3 innings.
In his nine starts since June 1, Estrada is winless with a 9.52 ERA walking 29 and fanning 40 in 40 2/3 innings.
Estrada, who earns $14.5 Million US this year, was 0-2 in two starts at Kauffman Stadium during the regular season, allowing five earned runs in 13 2/3 innings (3.29) and giving up one home run.
* * *
Liriano, who earns $13.67 Million, starts Monday night for the Jays at the Rogers Centre against the Oakland A’s. Liriano was acquired by the Jays a year ago from the Pittsburgh Pirates at the deadline.
He has made 16 starts and six times, including his last two starts, he has failed to go five innings either due to injury or ineffectiveness. He is 5-5 with a 6.15 ERA walking 40 and striking out 65 in 71 1/3 innings.
Last year the Jays sent Drew Hutchison to the Pirates for catcher Reese McGuire, Harold Ramirez and Liriano. Hutchison is 5-5 with a 3.70 ERA in 19 game -- 17 starts -- at triple-A Indianapolis. McGuire has caught 16 games at double-A New Hampshire batting .216 with two homers, eight RBIs and .694 OPS, while Ramirez is hitting .284 with four homers and 33 RBIs in 84 games for the Fisher Cats with a .660 OPS.
* * *
Smith came off the disabled list on this trip. After pitching in 16 games with the Chicago Cubs last year, Smith was 3-0 with a 3.41 before going down with shoulder inflammation. He had walked eight and struck out 47 in 31 2/3 innings.
He’s available as well.
* * *
The point is if the Jays maintain this stance -- of only moving those about to be free-agents -- fans can only expect a secondary prospect in return from a contender.
The Jays said at the end of last season that their goal was to get younger and more athletic. They then brought in Kendry Morales, Steve Pearce and JP Howell; all 34 years of age.
They brought back Jose Bautista, 36, and brought back Jason Grilli, 40.
* * *
And Conroy and other scouts will be at the Rogers Centre on Monday to see if the Jays alter their stance before the deadline as their chance of making post season dips to 9.7%, according to Fangraphs.com. |
Buried on the second page of a Politico report on the difficulty that Vice President Joe Biden’s handlers are having in managing the loquacious politician is the revelation that, twice during Biden’s fateful visit to Virginia this week, his staff sought to influence his coverage in pool reports.
RELATED: Chris Cillizza Laughs Off Biden’s ‘Chains’ Remark: Joe Just ‘Embracing His Biden-ness’
In Politico‘s story from Thursday, “Mission Impossible: Managing Joe Biden,” reporter Jonathan Martin notes that Biden’s staff sought to influence reporters to include coverage of events that are otherwise unlikely to be covered.
But on two occasions during Biden’s Virginia trip, his staff sought to have certain elements in the reports highlighted while reporters drafted them and discussed the contents with the reporters after the summaries had been sent but before they had before sent to the broader media.
Martin makes it clear that this is not common practice and makes it clear that the Obama campaign knows that Biden’s coverage this week has been an unwelcome distraction.
Staffers spinning reporters to frame events the best they can is, of course, commonplace in politics. But attempting to intervene in the drafting of accounts that reporters share with one another is all but unheard of and reflects the deep concern Biden’s team has about offering any fodder to the opposition.
“Biden officials emphasize how many off-schedule stops he makes on his campaign travels and, noting that that they let reporters hang around his visit to a high school football practice on Monday, point out that they were less restrictive before the “chains” comment,” Martin writes.
Martin also reports that a Biden aide was noticed on Wednesday during a stop at the Virginia Tech campus eavesdropping on a reporter as he interviewed event attendees.
The Politico report shows how much the Obama campaign has increased their efforts to both control the Vice President as well as the coverage of Biden’s campaign stops.
“Yet what the campaign doesn’t seem to realize is that Biden is at his best when he’s not being minded,” writes Martin. He quotes one Democrat close to the campaign who says that Biden is best when he is given enough latitude to be genuine and spontaneous.
Pool reports, gathered by multiple reporting institutions to be distributed to other news organization, are designed to provide coverage of events which are prohibitively difficult for reporters to chronicle in detail due to lack of space or resources. They are often used as background material to inform the broader reporting of events.
h/t Politico
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Have a tip we should know? [email protected] |
THE FUTURE of the Toronto Blue Jays wakes up in a 1978 Volkswagen camper behind the dumpsters at a Wal-Mart and wonders if he has anything to eat. He rummages through a half-empty cooler until he finds a dozen eggs. "I'm not sure about these," he says, removing three from the carton, studying them, smelling them and finally deciding it's safe to eat them. While the eggs cook on a portable stove, he begins the morning ritual of cleaning his van, pulling the contents of his life into the parking lot. Out comes a surfboard. Out comes a subzero sleeping bag. Out comes his only pair of jeans and his handwritten journals. A curious shopper stops to watch. "Hiya," Daniel Norris says, waving as the customer walks away into the store. Norris turns back to his eggs. "I've gotten used to people staring," he says.
This is where Norris has chosen to live while he tries to win a job in the Blue Jays' rotation: in a broken-down van parked under the blue fluorescent lights of a Wal-Mart in the Florida suburbs. There, every morning, is one of baseball's top-ranked prospects, doing pull-ups and resistance exercises on abandoned grocery carts. There he is each evening, making French press coffee and organic stir-fry on his portable stove. There he is at night, wearing a spelunking headlamp to go with his unkempt beard, writing in his "thought journal" or rereading Kerouac.
He has been here at Wal-Mart for long enough that some store employees have given him a nickname -- "Van Man" -- and begun to question where he's from and what he might be doing. A few have felt so bad for him that they've approached the van with prayers and crumpled bills, assuming he must be homeless. They wonder: Is he a runaway teen? A destitute surfer? A new-age wanderer lost on some spiritual quest?
The truth is even stranger: The Van Man has a consistent 92-mile-an-hour fastball, a $2 million signing bonus, a deal with Nike and a growing fan club, yet he has decided the best way to prepare for the grind of a 162-game season is to live here, in the back of a 1978 Westfalia camper he purchased for $10,000. The van is his escape from the pressures of the major leagues, his way of dropping off the grid before a season in which his every movement will be measured, catalogued and analyzed.
If a baseball life requires notoriety, the van offers seclusion.
If pitching demands repetition and exactitude, the van promises freedom.
"It's like a yin-and-yang thing for me," he says. "I'm not going to change who I am just because people think it's weird. The only way I'm going to have a great season is by starting out happy and balanced and continuing to be me. It might be unconventional, but to feel good about life I need to have some adventure."
On this morning, Norris' adventure turns out to be the van itself. He finishes breakfast and turns the key in the ignition, and the engine refuses to start. "Come on, old friend. You can do this," he says, gently patting his hand against the dashboard. He is due at the Blue Jays' spring training facility in an hour for a workout, a massage and a throwing session. He tries the key again, and the engine erupts like a firecracker. Gas leaks onto the parking lot and a cloud of smoke shoots out from the tailpipe, but the VW makes it into gear. "There you go," Norris says, talking again to the van. "Back on the road. Just you and me."
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He bought the van in 2011, a few weeks after signing his first contract out of high school with the Blue Jays, and the VW has been his best friend and his spiritual center ever since. He named it Shaggy after a character in "Scooby Doo." He sings it songs and writes it poems and gives it Valentine's Day cards. He takes it for hiking expeditions in the mountains of Tennessee and surfing trips along the Carolina coast. He drives it each year to spring training in Florida, and this year he stretched that trip out over a few weeks. He drove without a schedule from his home in Tennessee, avoiding the interstate and exploring the dirt roads of Appalachia, sleeping each night in the crawl space behind the driver's seat with his head tucked against the back door. When he finally arrived in Florida, he parked illegally on the beach and camped inside the VW until local police evicted him and offered directions to the 24-hour Wal-Mart, his home ever since.
Now he pulls out of Wal-Mart and drives three miles through Dunedin, squeezing the VW into a parking spot among his teammates' luxury sports cars and tinted SUVs. He sits in the back of the van to heat water for coffee. A few Blue Jays stop by on their way into the facility and watch Norris fiddle with his stove. The pilot light doesn't seem to be working. The water is still cold. "Why don't you just, like, go get something normal to eat," says another young pitcher, Marcus Stroman, reminding Norris that the team provides free coffee inside. "Don't you think this is kind of crazy?"
"Not to me," Norris says. "To me this is the way that makes sense."
HE HAS ALWAYS lived by his own code, no matter what anyone thinks: a three-sport star athlete in high school who spent weekends camping alone; a hippie who has never tried drugs; a major league pitcher whose first corporate relationship was with an environmental organization called 1% for the Planet. He is 21 and says he has never tasted alcohol. He has had one serious relationship, with his high school girlfriend, and it ended in part because he wanted more time to travel by himself. He was baptized in his baseball uniform. His newest surfboard is made from recycled foam. His van is equipped with a solar panel. He reads hardcover books and never a Kindle. He avoids TV and studies photography journals instead.
"Nonconformist," reads one sign posted inside his VW.
But all professional sports value their conformists -- athletes who sacrifice individuality for team, and whose predictable behavior elicits predictable results. Perhaps nowhere is consistency more valued than in baseball, a game whose self-reverence for tradition and purity might be contributing to its fading place as America's pastime. The history of the game is valued above any one major league season; the integrity of a season is valued beyond any one team; the identity of a team is more important than that of its players. Flashiness of any kind is discouraged, and so players such as Yasiel Puig have to defend themselves simply for celebrating a home run. In the game's unwritten code, drawing individual attention is considered unbecoming, if not downright unsportsmanlike.
“Where else can you be as free by yourself in the middle of nowhere. Adventure is freedom.” - Daniel Norris' thought journal
Before the Blue Jays understood his convictions, Norris felt like the team had trouble making sense of his unpredictable life -- coaches, teammates and executives asking him questions that indicated a measure of unease. Why, with seven figures in the bank, did he take an offseason job working 40 hours a week at an outdoor outfitter in his hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee? Would it do permanent damage to his back muscles to spend his first minor league season sharing an apartment with two teammates in Florida and sleeping only in a hammock? Why had he decided to spend his first offseason vacationing not on a Caribbean cruise with teammates or partying in South Beach but instead alone in the hostels of Nicaragua, renting a motorcycle for $2 a day, hiking into the jungle, surfing among the stingrays? And was that really a picture on Twitter of the Blue Jays' best prospect, out again in the woods, shaving his tangled beard with the blade of an ax?
It was all so damn unconventional. And yet for some reason, in Norris' case, it also seemed to be working, so the team's curiosity never rose to the level of complaint. "He takes care of himself as well as anybody we've got," says Tony LaCava, Toronto's assistant general manager. "He's in great shape. He competes on the mound. If that wasn't the case, maybe we'd be more worried about some of the other stuff. But right now, the van and all that is secondary. He has great values, and they're working for him."
Last season, Norris started the year in Class A, led all of the minor leagues in strikeouts per nine innings and climbed steadily into the major leagues, appearing in five games for the Blue Jays in September. Suddenly, Van Man was taking private planes to Boston and New York, striking out David Ortiz, packing his teammates' beer bags for the flight as part of a rookie hazing ritual but still refusing to drink himself. He usually set his alarm early on the road and headed into the city with a camera to explore. "Start behaving like a big leaguer," one player teased him, but what so many teammates didn't seem to understand was that conventionality was the exact thing Norris was hoping to avoid. He was terrified of living by someone else's code.
For almost 80 years, his father and grandfather owned and operated a small bicycle shop in car-dependent Johnson City, and their store was not only a place to sell bikes but a way to spread their family values and popularize a belief system. Play outdoors. Love the earth. Live simply. Use only what you need. Norris spent his childhood outside with his parents and his two older sisters, going for weekend bike rides and hiking trips, playing football, basketball and baseball. In school, he was a varsity star in all three, but it was baseball -- and particularly pitching -- that most aligned with his personality. Being alone on the mound reminded him of being out in the wild, where he was forced to solve his own problems and wrestle with self-doubt. "I was a good pitcher because I was already good at taking care of myself," he says. "I love having teammates behind me, but I'm not going to rely on them. It can get quiet and lonely out there when you're pitching, which drives some people crazy. But that's my favorite part."
By midway through his freshman season in high school, he was one of the best players on varsity, and the stands began to fill with regional scouts. Soon, agents like Scott Boras were coming to see him in his father's bicycle shop. In June 2011, the Blue Jays drafted him in the second round. The team said it wouldn't offer Norris a contract until the end of the summer, so Norris' agent advised him to take a few months off, avoid injury and wait for the money to roll in. "Yeah, that's not going to fit with my style," Norris told him, then ignored the advice and did something virtually unprecedented for a top prospect. He moved to Atlanta to spend the summer playing center field for an amateur team, risking his career with nobody watching in the stands simply because he wanted to be playing baseball outside.
On the morning in 2011 when his $2 million signing bonus finally cleared, Norris was in Florida with the rest of the Blue Jays' new signees. All of their bonuses had been deposited on the same day, and one of the players suggested they drive to a Tampa mall. They shopped for three hours, and by the time the spree finally ended they could barely fit their haul back into the car. Most players had spent $10,000 or more on laptops, jewelry and headphones. Norris returned with only a henley T-shirt from Converse, bought on sale for $14. It's been a fixture of his wardrobe ever since.
It unsettled him in those first months to see so many zeros on his bank account balance -- "Who am I to deserve that?" he wondered. "What have I really done?" -- so he hired financial advisers and asked them to stash the money in conservative investments where Norris wouldn't have to think about it. His advisers deposit $800 a month into his checking account -- or about half as much as he would earn working full time for minimum wage. It's enough to live in a van, but just barely. "I'm actually more comfortable being kind of poor," he says, because not having money maintains his lifestyle and limits the temptation to conform. He never fills Shaggy beyond a quarter tank. He fixes the van's engine with duct tape rather than taking it to a mechanic. Instead of eating out with teammates, he writes each night in a "thought journal" that rests on the dashboard.
"Research the things you love," he wrote one night. "Gain knowledge. It's valuable."
"Be kind. Be courteous. Love others and be happy. It's that simple."
"Where else can you be as free as by yourself in the middle of nowhere, or in the middle of the ocean, or on the peak of a mountain. Adventure is freedom." |
Lisk, the blockchain application platform, has announced the appointment of Joel Fernández as Chief Operating Officer. The announcement was made concurrently with a step up in the search for developers to join the project, with openings for front-end and back-end developers to join the growing team. Lisk also provided recognition and incentives towards the continued efforts being made by Lisk contributors worldwide with a bounty program rewarding LSK.
The Lisk platform allows for the deployment, distribution, and monetization of blockchain applications, each running within their own sidechains. The company completed an Initial Coin Offering in May and attracted approximately14,000 BTC, with a current value of over $8 million USD. The cryptocurrency underpinning the platform, LSK, is worth around $18 million, making it the 16th most valuable digital currency.
READ MORE OF THE ARTICLE AT CHAIN-FINANCE.COM |
Blackburn Rovers wish to announce that manager Owen Coyle has left his role at Ewood Park by mutual agreement.
Assistant manager Sandy Stewart, first team coach John Henry and goalkeeping coach Phil Hughes have also left the club.
The decision has been taken in order to give the club the best possible chance of climbing to a position of safety in the Championship in the remaining 15 games, which starts with the big trip to Burton Albion on Friday night.
The club would like to place on record its thanks to Owen and his staff for all their efforts this season and we wish them well for the future.
The search for a new manager will begin with immediate effect.
No further comments will be made at this stage. |
DeAngelo Williams isn't one for excuses. Yes, he's 33, a geriatric by NFL running back standards, but that didn't keep him from doing his job on Monday night when he steamrolled the Redskins for 143 yards on 26 carries and two touchdowns.
And Williams expects the same quality of service when it comes to his food.
Over the weekend, according to TMZ, a bartender at Ledo Restaurant in College Park, Maryland, took to Facebook to rip Williams for being cheap.
"Just now at work I had DeAngelo Williams come in and I waited on while tending bar," the bartender wrote. "His check was $128.25. He left me $129 with no tip but 75 cents. So there you go [sic] Stealers fans, your running back is cheap as s**t!!! Smh."
Williams caught wind of this and wasted little time defending himself.
You right I tried to leave exact change but couldn't I waited on my food for over 1.5hours got the order wrong then https://t.co/rCqpGGdxmv — DeAngelo Williams (@DeAngeloRB) September 12, 2016 She never asked for refills and took a dish back removed what was on it and left a shrimp tail in my salad https://t.co/rCqpGGdxmv — DeAngelo Williams (@DeAngeloRB) September 12, 2016 Instead of asking for a manager I simply didn't leave a tip for the hardly working server that expected a tip😏 https://t.co/rCqpGGdxmv — DeAngelo Williams (@DeAngeloRB) September 12, 2016 I went over that order 4 times and not only that our food came out with our salads and it wasn't a complex order https://t.co/p7O0EoA8Ql — DeAngelo Williams (@DeAngeloRB) September 12, 2016 So it takes 1.5 hours for u to get me 3 salads and pasta and it's not packed at all and slow by her standards https://t.co/zQL7tQRrIP — DeAngelo Williams (@DeAngeloRB) September 12, 2016
Not surprisingly, this led to many Heated Twitter Discussions, though at least one server came to Williams' defense.
Oh it was awful https://t.co/MUwLNJj3yt — DeAngelo Williams (@DeAngeloRB) September 12, 2016 I use to wait tables and use to be a bag boy so I know what I'm doing here https://t.co/NiuDnC8EGE — DeAngelo Williams (@DeAngeloRB) September 12, 2016
Jimmy Marcos, a co-owner at the restaurant, later told TMZ that the server had been fired because "We were in the wrong" and "the customer is always right." Marcos added: "I want to offer anything I can do. I'll be sure to apologize in person next time he visits and pick up his next meal." |
One warm summer night, I sat with a group of Catholic friends inside a local pub. The low light shone dimly on the wood paneled walls, the air thick with the roar of conversation. “A toast to the kingdom,” one of said as we clinked our frothy pint glasses, filled to the brim with various ales and porters. “And to our Lady,” another added enthusiastically.
For the next several hours, we laughed and argued, discussed and pondered. We talked about our jobs. Our families. Our dreams. And most of all, our faith.
As we left to go our separate ways, we parted as brothers—strengthened, encouraged, and proud to be Catholic.
A Band of Brothers
There are few things as enjoyable or encouraging as this kind of faith-filled camaraderie with other Catholic men. Just being together, arguing about big ideas, smoking and drinking, having a good time—all unified in a common bond of faith.
Brotherhood. We need it. We thrive on it. And truth be told, most of us don’t have it.
I want to change that. Today, I am announcing a new society for men that seeks to provide the community and camaraderie. I’m calling it Fraternitas. I’m launching Fraternitas because now, more than ever, we need to be a unified in faith, a band of brothers marching shoulder to shoulder to the kingdom of heaven.
How it Works
What is Fraternitas you ask? First and foremost, Fraternitas is a place exclusively for men. Here’s how it works:
Book of the Month: Each month you’ll receive a high quality, hand-picked Catholic book from an trusted publisher. These books will be about things like leadership, family, virtue, spiritual growth, prayer, and much more.
Each month you’ll receive a high quality, hand-picked Catholic book from an trusted publisher. These books will be about things like leadership, family, virtue, spiritual growth, prayer, and much more. Discussion Forums: You will get access to exclusive discussion forums where you can meet other Catholic gentlemen from around the world. Think of it as an online pub.
You will get access to exclusive discussion forums where you can meet other Catholic gentlemen from around the world. Think of it as an online pub. Exclusive Webinars: We’ll feature a live webinar each month where you’ll learn new skills and get to interact with Catholic leaders. It’ll be a lot of fun.
We’ll feature a live webinar each month where you’ll learn new skills and get to interact with Catholic leaders. It’ll be a lot of fun. The Gentleman’s List: It’s a monthly newsletter featuring worthy apostolates, finely crafted products, Catholic resources, and more.
It’s a monthly newsletter featuring worthy apostolates, finely crafted products, Catholic resources, and more. Local Chapters: Online communities are great, but there’s nothing like meeting in person. As a member of Fraternitas, you’ll have the opportunity to start a local chapter in your area. You can talk about the book of the month using provided discussion questions, or just have a beer with other Catholic men.
Online communities are great, but there’s nothing like meeting in person. As a member of Fraternitas, you’ll have the opportunity to start a local chapter in your area. You can talk about the book of the month using provided discussion questions, or just have a beer with other Catholic men. Discounts and Early Access: You’ll be the first to know about upcoming Catholic Gentleman products. And you’ll get a special member discount.
You’ll be the first to know about upcoming Catholic Gentleman products. And you’ll get a special member discount. Mass Said for Your Intentions: There’s no prayer more powerful than the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Each month, a priest will say Mass for your intentions.
There’s more, but I’ll be sharing more details as the date approaches.
How You Can Join
I’m launching Fraternitas on June 27, the feast of Our Lady of Perpetual help. At the start, membership will be limited. Readers who are subscribed to my e-mail list will be given the first opportunity to sign up. That’s 2,203 of you.
If you haven’t registered for my e-mail list, sign up using the form below to make sure you’ll be eligible when registration opens.
Stay tuned. I look forward to sharing more about Fraternitas in the days ahead.
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4. UVA School of Law — On A-T-L
ELIE: Bite me. ::lowers collar to half-mast::
LAT: We’re suckers for ATL shout-outs — yes, we plead guilty to vanity — and this whole video is one big ATL shout-out. But it’s also deeply insightful commentary on what it’s like to go to law school in the age of social media. What makes it my personal favorite of all the videos is how darn hilarious it is: I’ve watched it a half-dozen times, and every time it makes me start wheezing from laughter. (Also, props to the UVA kids for having a sense of humor: if you think we treat your law school or law firm unfairly in these pages, spare us the angry emails and make fun of us instead.)
STACI: For the love of God, please pause the video and read the fake ATL posts. This video had all of us laughing our asses off. It took a lot of work to create this audio/visual masterpiece, and I can assure you, the next time we “sh*t on UVA,” it’ll be out of love. Pop your collars with pride, you’ve earned it!
5. Washington University in St. Louis School of Law — This is Law School
ELIE: Considering that the This Is SportsCenter commercials are the greatest on Earth, I was immediately intrigued. I think they got it down pretty good. I wanted more. I think Professor Tamanaha’s next book should be “Stop Ogling My Wife, Start Ogling Your Debt.”
LAT: Amusing vignettes. Hot guys (including an Ashton Kutcher doppelgänger). Excellent professorial appearances. It’s the rare Law Revue video that I actually wish were longer.
STACI: Short, sweet, and very satisfying. And for the record, Professor Tamanaha’s wife is a total fox.
6. West Virginia University College of Law — Law School
ELIE: This is here because the singing is great and the descriptions are good for people who haven’t been to law school. I thought it lacked the “inside baseball” humor of some of the other finalists. If I have to hear Lat wax poetic about this freaking Children of the Corn redhead again, I’m going to lose it.
LAT: Really, really cute (both the video overall and the floppy-haired ginger boy with the awesome voice, Tyler Murray). Sweet, but not annoyingly so. An intriguing combination of melancholy and happiness — a metaphor for law school?
STACI: If you’re thinking about going to law school, you should be forced by admissions officers to listen to this song first. Just think, it’s kind of like a pre-law study aid… Law School in a Nutshell: Drowning in Debt and Dying Inside. Overall, great singing, great rapping, and I was a big fan of the Mordor lyric.
It’s time to vote, everyone. Polls close on WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, at 11:59 PM (Eastern time). Feel free to get out the vote among your friends and family (but please, no bots). Good luck to all the finalists!
Which is the best Law Revue video? West Virginia University College of Law — Law School (32%, 7,409 Votes)
NYU Law School — Last Thursday Night (29%, 6,525 Votes)
UVA School of Law — On A-T-L (22%, 4,918 Votes)
Washington University in St. Louis School of Law — This is Law School (8%, 1,780 Votes)
UCLA School of Law — Don’t Call On Me (5%, 1,125 Votes)
Columbia Law School — That’s Why You’ll Make Law Review (5%, 1,060 Votes) Total Voters: 22,814
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Earlier: Law Revue Video Contest: Dishonorable Mentions
Above the Law’s Fifth Annual Law Revue Video Contest: Everybody’s Got Time For That! |
Starting November 8, fans can watch curling online, anytime, anywhere. The Canadian Curling Association has launched its latest online offering, CurlingTV (www.curlingtv.ca), which will provide fans with the kind of viewing experience they’ve been dreaming of – and asking for!
Want to revisit great moments from the past season? Tune in to CurlingTV.ca to view all games broadcast on TSN during the 2011-2012 Season of Champions events (the Capital One Canada Cup of Curling, the WFG Continental Cup, the M&M Meat Shops Junior Curling Championships final games, the Scotties Tournament of Hearts, the Tim Hortons Brier and the Men’s and Women’s world championships).
Want even more curling? Check out the 1955 Macdonald Brier Final from Regina, Saskatchewan, or interviews with the curlers who competed in 2011-2012 championship events. CurlingTV provides easy access to a wide variety of curling video, including historical Brier footage, instructional videos, media scrums and player interviews.
For fans who aren’t able to catch live television coverage of the upcoming season, CurlingTV will provide full-length TSN broadcasts of games from all the Season of Champions events just 48 hours after each televised draw has been completed.
And to make access even easier, fans can view their video selections through the CurlingTV.ca website or on all mobile devices.
Season of Champions action, player interviews, curling instruction, historical videos – tune into the CCA’s CurlingTV.ca starting November 8 and enjoy curling, anytime, anywhere. |
In a surprisingly close game in the first half, both the San Jose State Spartans and Kansas Jayhawks struggled to knock down shots, before heating up later in the half. The Jayhawks’ physical interior defense proceeded to assert itself, as center Jeff Withey blocked six shots in the first half to protect a 40 – 32 lead into intermission. Travis Releford led KU with 11 first-half points, followed by redshirt freshman sensation Ben McLemore with nine points, including two spectacular alley-oop finishes.
The pesky Spartans kept it close in the first half, led by James Kinney’s 11 points and DJ Brown’s seven points, as each player knocked down a timely 3-point shot. Burly forward Chris Cunningham cleared the glass with eight rebounds, but otherwise suffered through a frustrating first half, making only one of nine shots from the field.
The Spartans got the lead down as close as six points 40 – 34 on Kinney’s two free throws to start the second half, but the Jayhawks poured it on with an 18 – 0 run to open up a 60 – 36 lead. The Spartans’ Kinney started heating up by scoring nine consecutive points, including a 3-point shot and a dunk off a steal. A made 3-pointer by the Spartans’ Christian Garrett, a putback by Mike Van Kirk, and another 3-pointer by Kinney cut the KU lead to 60 – 51. A free throw by Cunningham cut the margin to 60 – 52, before free throws by Kevin Young of KU broke the string of 16 consecutive Spartans points.
Kinney continued his hot shooting, burying jumpers despite many of them being contested. However, Withey’s school-record 12 blocked shots proved too much for the Spartans, the last of which led to a spectacular breakaway windmill dunk by McLemore.
Kinney finished with 30 points, seven rebounds, and five steals. Cunningham grabbed 11 rebounds before fouling out.
Withey ended up with a rare triple double of 16 points, 12 rebounds, and 12 blocked shots. Despite shooting just 4 of 18 behind the 3-point line, the Jayhawks still had a balanced attack of Releford, Johnson, and McLemore scoring 13 points apiece. The final tally was Kansas 70, San Jose State 57, as a feisty Spartan club refused to quit against a dominant performance in the paint by Withey. |
SLRgear Review
May 25, 2016
by Andrew Alexander
Early in 2016, Tamron released a third lens in its lineup of premium SP-series prime lenses - the SP 85mm F/1.8 Di VC USD. It's the first lens in its category of fast-aperture telephoto lens which incorporates image stabilization into its design.
The lens was designed for full-frame cameras in the Nikon, Canon or Sony A-mount, but will also mount on sub-frame (APS-C) cameras from those manufacturers. On such a camera the lens will provide an equivalent field of view of 127mm (Nikon and Sony) or 136mm (Canon).
The lens ships with a round hood, accepts 67mm filters, and originally went on sale with an MSRP of $850.
Sharpness
The Tamron 85mm ƒ/1.8 Di VC USD SP provides excellent results for sharpness, even at its widest aperture setting of ƒ/1.8. On the sub-frame D7100 the lens displays tack-sharp results all the way from ƒ/1.8 through to ƒ/11, where diffraction limiting starts to kick in. On our full-frame D800e, there was just a hair of corner softness at ƒ/1.8 and ƒ/2, but by ƒ/2.8 the lens produced images that were tack-sharp across the frame. Even fully stopped-down at ƒ/16, the lens still provides excellent results for sharpness, impacted only very slightly by diffraction limiting.
Chromatic Aberration
Tamron have done very well for combating chromatic aberration: on either the full- or sub-frame cameras, the impact of chromatic aberration was minor. There is a minor amount of spherical chromatic aberration, which we typically note in lenses with fast apertures.
Shading (''Vignetting'')
When the Tamron 85mm ƒ/1.8 lens is mounted on the sub-frame D7100, we noted corners that were a half-stop darker than the center when the lens was set to ƒ/1.8; at any other aperture, corner shading was negligible.
On the full-frame Nikon D800e, corner shading was a bit more pronounced: at ƒ/1.8, we noted corners that were 3/4 of a stop darker than the center. At ƒ/2.8 this reduces to just over a quarter-stop, and stopping down further reduces it to a negligible level.
Distortion
There is practically no distortion to speak of when taking photographs with the Tamron 85mm ƒ/1.8.
Autofocus Operation
The Tamron 85mm ƒ/1.8 Di VC USD SP uses a ring-type USD (Ultrasonic Silent Drive) that allows the lens to focus very quietly. It's not as quick to focus as other lenses, but we'll attribute that to the wider throw it has to cover; it takes about a second to go through the entire range of focus. There is a slight amount of lens extension as the lens focuses to its closest point, but not so much as to interfere with any attached 67mm filters. Attached filters will not rotate during focusing operations.
Macro
The Tamron 85mm lens wasn't built specifically for macro, producing a magnification of just 0.14x with a minimum close-focusing distance of 80cm (around two and a half feet).
Build Quality and Handling
The Tamron 85mm ƒ/1.8 Di VC USD SP presents a new fit and finish for Tamron SP-series lenses, offering a smooth, satiny finish and weather-sealed construction, including a gasket around the lens mount. The front elements also features a fluorine coating to help shed off water, oil and dirt.
Inside the lens there's an exotic layout of lens elements: 13 elements in 9 groups, including 1 XLD (Extra Low Dispersion) and 1 LD (Low Dispersion) elements. The aperture is made up of 9 curved diaphragm blades, to ensure excellent bokeh. Tamron has provided a windowed distance scale, measured in both metric and imperial, but there is no depth-of-field scale or infrared index.
The external layout of the lens is fairly simple: two switches, one for enabling / disabling autofocus, and one for enabling / disabling the Vibration Control (VC) system. The Sony-mount variant of this lens won't come with VC, because Sony cameras have image stabilization built-in, and the two systems conflict. It's also worth noting that there is a rubber seal at the camera-mount side of the lens.
The manual focusing ring is quite pleasant to use on this lens: it's about an inch wide, with a deep ribbed rubber texture. There are about 90 degrees of focusing throw - great for manual focus - and either end comes to a soft stop to let you know that focusing further won't do anything.
The Vibration Control image stabilization is a definite perk for this lens, as most manufacturers don't include it for a prime lens: however, with digital cameras being used more and more for making movies, having built-in stabilization is very useful indeed. In our testing, the system offers almost three stops of hand-holding improvement: check out our IS Test tab for greater detail.
The lens ships with the HF016 lens hood, which is a round, bayonet-mounted hood. The interior of the hood is ribbed to improve resistance to flare. It's about 2" long, and it will add about 2 1/2 inches to the overall length of the lens when it's mounted. The lens is compatible with Tamron's new TAP-in Console, a USB-based dock accessory that allows for autofocus and mechanical adjustments as well as firmware updates.
Alternatives
Canon EF 85mm ƒ/1.8 USM ~$350
Released in 1992, the Canon comparable lens is getting a bit long in the tooth, and it doesn't provide near the same level of sharpness as the Tamron. In 1992, the idea of providing image stabilization in a standard prime lens would have been unthinkable.
Nikon 85mm ƒ/1.8G AFS ~$480
Nikon updated its G-series prime lenses in the last few years, providing a bit more competition for the Tamron: it's very nearly a match, but the Tamron eeks out a bit more sharpness, especially on the full-frame mount. As well, the Nikon doesn't sport image stabilization.
Sony 85mm ƒ/1.4 Carl Zeiss Planar T* ~$1,700
Sony doesn't offer an ƒ/1.8 lens in the 85mm configuration, but it does offer a very expensive ƒ/1.4 version. Sony offers image stabilization with each camera, so the VC function of the Tamron lens isn't useful here, however, having a ƒ/1.8 option in the 85mm category is.
Sigma 85mm ƒ/1.4 EX DG HSM ~$850
For about the same price, you could get the Sigma 85mm ƒ/1.4, offering a slightly wider maximum aperture, but no image stabilization.
Conclusion
Tamron has done their homework in creating this lens: Sony doesn't offer an 85mm lens in the ƒ/1.8 category, Canon's design is almost 25 years old, and Nikon's, while good, doesn't offer image stabilization: there's something here for everyone, especially coupled with the amazing optical performance. Image sharpness is excellent, practically tack-sharp right from ƒ/1.8, there's no image distortion to speak of, and chromatic aberration is well-controlled.
If there was a downside for the lens, it's perhaps that it's a bit pricier than its Nikon and Canon alternatives, but for the results it turns in, you get what you pay for.
Product Photos
Sample Photos
The VFA target should give you a good idea of sharpness in the center and corners, as well as some idea of the extent of barrel or pincushion distortion and chromatic aberration, while the Still Life subject may help in judging contrast and color. We shoot both images using the default JPEG settings and manual white balance of our test bodies, so the images should be quite consistent from lens to lens.
As appropriate, we shoot these with both full-frame and sub-frame bodies, at a range of focal lengths, and at both maximum aperture and ƒ/8. For the ''VFA'' target (the viewfinder accuracy target from Imaging Resource), we also provide sample crops from the center and upper-left corner of each shot, so you can quickly get a sense of relative sharpness, without having to download and inspect the full-res images. To avoid space limitations with the layout of our review pages, indexes to the test shots launch in separate windows. |
HORROR ON WHEELS BADALS’ FIRMS UNDER SCANNER AFTER THE DEATH OF MOGA GIRL FOLLOWING MOLESTATION ON AN ORBIT BUS
Nikhil Bhardwaj
Tribune News Service
Jalandhar, May 3
Indo-Canadian Transport Company, owned by the Badal family, has been profiting on a route that was shown “non-viable” by the state government a few months after being started five years ago.
The government-owned Punjab Roadways had started the luxury bus service connecting Jalandhar with the Delhi international airport to cater to the NRI-dominated Doaba region. The popularity of the route could well be gauged from the fact that the Indo-Canadian transport plies 13 buses daily on the route during peak season.
While the Punjab Roadways bus was charging a nominal Rs 650, the Indo-Canadian transport jacked up the fare to Rs 1,619 for an ordinary AC bus service and Rs 2,572 for the ‘business class’ ticket, thus ensuring the company earns a huge profit.
The government had started the bus on the demand of the NRIs as it ensured the community a direct service from the airport to their native places.
Punjab Roadways employee union members still insist that the service, scrapped allegedly to extend benefits to the Badals-associated Indo-Canadian transport, must be reintroduced as the NRIs arriving from Gulf nations still preferred economical bus service.
Jagdish Singh Chahal, Punjab Government Transport Workers Union general secretary, said the service was started by the Punjab Transport department in May 2010 to provide “exclusive service to the NRIs, and that too at nominal rates”.
“The fare was Rs 350 when the bus service was started, which was much less than Rs 900 being charged by private players then. The private transporters were also forced to slash their fare to compete with us. The route proved quite profitable for the Roadways as compared to other routes,” he said.
Chahal alleged that the day the Badals took over the Indo-Canadian company, they pressurised the Transport department to shut its service in August 2012.
Amrik Singh Gill, convener, Punjab Roadways Joint Action Committee, alleged the Indo-Canadian transport had been enjoying monopoly over the Jalandhar-Delhi airport route. He said the commuters had no choice but to shell extra money.
Questioned why the bus service was discontinued, Transport Minister Ajit Singh Kohar said, “The commuters started preferring private buses and our service went into losses. So, we had no other option.”
Asked whether the department was planning to resume the service, he said the matter was under consideration and nothing had been finalised yet.
Harkamaljit Singh, an NRI from Tanda who works in Dubai, said they used to pay Rs 650 to reach the Delhi airport, but now they had to shell out a minimum Rs 1,600.
Ranbir Singh, a Jalandhar resident based in Canada, said the Punjab government’s claim of offering low-cost transport to the NRIs visiting Punjab had fallen flat. ”We used to board the Punjab Roadways bus to reach the airport. But now we have no other option but to board the Indo-Canadian service,” he said.
Making mockery of the system
Voices of dissent
"The fare was Rs 350 when the bus service was started, which was much less than Rs 900 being charged by private players then. The private transporters too were forced to slash their fare to compete with us. The route proved quite profitable for the Roadways when compared to other routes."— Jagdish Singh Chahal, gen secy of transport workers’ body
"The Indo-Canadian transport had been enjoying monopoly over the Jalandhar-Delhi airport route. Commuters had no choice, but to shell out extra bucks." —Amrik Singh Gill, convener, punjab roadways joint action committee
"We used to board the Punjab Roadways bus to reach the airport. But now we have no other option, but to board the Indo-Canadian service." —Ranbir Singh, jalandhar resident based in canada
Ministerspeak
"Gradually, the commuters started preferring private buses and our service went into losses. We had no other option (but to discontinue the Jalandhar-Delhi airport Volvo bus service)." — |
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The intersection of hip-hop and basketball has been well-documented. Rappers want to be ballers, ballers want to be rappers, and every MC worth his salt has name-checked the NBA. From the early hip-hop days of Big Bank Hank getting a color TV to watch the Knicks, through Ice Cube's good day when the Lakers beat the (dearly departed) SuperSonics, and on to young global dudes like Joe Budden honoring Drazen Petrovic and Action Bronson repping Arvydas Sabonis, rapping basketball is a time-honored tradition. And yet, for all the rhymes devoted to hoops, one 30-year-old song reigns supreme. (Kick it.) They're playing basssketballlll, we love that bas-ket balllllllll ... (Step up to the mic, John Condon.) Now rapping basketball, No. 1, Kurtis Blow. (Do your thing, Kurt.) Basketball is my favorite sport, I like the way they dribble up and down the court ... This is the story of "Basketball."
THE MAN
In 1984, Kurtis Blow dropped his fifth album "Ego Trip." The Harlem native was already hip-hop royalty as the first rapper signed to a major label, the first to tour the United States and Europe, and the first with a gold record, his 1980 smash "The Breaks." Other hits include his debut record "Christmas Rappin'," the Run-DMC collaboration "8 Million Stories," and "If I Ruled the World," which would be famously sampled by Nas. Blow's had a long career and remains one of the few rap game elite who actually were down from day one. KURTIS BLOW: I've always been a big music lover thanks to my mom, who'd been a great dancer in Harlem at the Renaissance, the Savoy and the Cotton Club. She was popular throughout the neighborhood. I followed in her footsteps. Guys used to come get me for the local dance competitions, I became a B-Boy. I also used to play all the music for the family, spinning James Brown, Motown, the Isley Brothers, Jackie Wilson — all the stuff my mom loved. The first time I ever DJ'ed was in 1972 at my buddy Tony Rome's birthday party. I was 13 and I put together two component sets, my mom's and his mom's, and we had continuous music throughout the party ... WILLIAM "BILLY-BILL" WARING (Lyricist, "Basketball"): Kurtis and I are lifelong friends. We grew up together, maybe 100 yards apart. We started out breakdancing in 1972, house parties and block parties. BLOW: William is three years older than me and he was the only kid my mom would let me hang around with because he was headed to college. He was doing something good with his life, not like a lot of the other thugs and criminals in Harlem. Billy-Bill was the guy who got me into all the parties to breakdance. We learned to appreciate the elements of hip-hop before such a thing existed. WARING: Eventually, we were dancing in the clubs. We learned to appreciate the elements of hip-hop before such a thing existed, but we didn't start writing anything down until the late 1970s. BLOW: I was doing my thing in Harlem and the Bronx, keeping up with what the better known DJs were doing, when I met Kool Herc. This was seven or eight years before the first hip-hop record came out, but I knew that here was something new and fresh. As a DJ, I was already different because I wasn't playing disco. Billy-Bill and I saw ourselves as rebels, that was our ideology for people who came to our more obscure parties, what I called "ghetto discos." MICHAEL OBLOWITZ (video director, "Basketball"): I was part of the No Wave movement, which came out of the downtown arts scene, punk rock and experimental film and the like. Around that time, the first hip-hop shows were taking place in the South Bronx. I‘d become good friends with Charlie Ahearn, who would go on to direct "Wild Style," and we'd cruise up there on the subway to these concerts. It was amazing, an art form that only existed in the Bronx, parts of Brooklyn, and the upper reaches of Manhattan. It was super dangerous, and I was definitely the only white kid from South Africa up there, but I'd never felt anything like it. Television was banned under the apartheid government and I was coming from a place of surfing in the morning and diving for lobsters for lunch. Here we had chain-link fences surrounding these basketball courts, and hundreds of people jammed in there to hear Afrika Bambaataa or Grandmaster Flash. I saw Kurtis Blow rap "The Breaks" up there, it was insane energy. PAUL EDWARDS (author, "How to Rap" and "How to Rap 2"): Kurtis Blow wasn't particularly ground-breaking on a technical level, but that wasn't what he was going for, he was going for hits, sort of like the Will Smith of his day. He was a "party MC" who made dance songs that people could sing along to — and I don't say that disparagingly at all, it's a very important area of hip-hop and he was crucial in making it a viable force in the marketplace and music industry. People like to focus on the more virtuoso lyricists of the time, such as Melle Mel, Grandmaster Caz, and Kool Moe Dee, but the genre needed the balance brought by people like Blow in order to spread it far and wide and get it on the radio. BLOW: I went to City College of New York, where I met Russell Simmons. I majored in Communications and Broadcasting and learned that building up a track record in the boondocks was the path to follow. Every record store had its own chart, its own top 10, which coincidentally, is how I learned to read, by studying the charts. I figured out to compete in the big city with the 40 or 50 other popular DJs, I needed to come in with a couple of No. 1's in a secondary market. So Russell and I opened up a club in Hollis, Queens called Night Fever Disco, where I worked on being a DJ and an MC for about two years. A writer from from "Billboard," Robert Ford, did a story on hip-hop and they listed the best DJs in the city, including a young college kid, Kurtis Blow Walker. It sold like a son of a bitch that summer, everywhere I went "The Breaks" followed me out of those giant boom boxes. J.B. MOORE (producer, "Basketball"): I was in ad sales at "Billboard," but I'm a musician by trade. Robert Ford covered the R&B charts and together, we'd discovered this new thing coming up from the streets, like in the early days of rock ‘n' roll. I believe Robert wrote the first ever article about hip-hop for an aboveground publication. We both knew it was going to be big, we could smell it. We wanted to produce a rap record, talked to Russell, and decided Kurtis was the guy. He was an incredible performer. I'd seen him wake up groggy as hell in the nurses office at Wollman Skating Rink, shake it off, and absolutely kill on stage. I knew it would be easier to sell the label on a perennial, so our first record was "Christmas Rappin.'" We followed that up in the 1980 with "The Breaks." It sold like a son of a bitch that summer, everywhere I went "The Breaks" followed me out of those giant boom boxes kids carried around back then. If PolyGram would have backed it, that song would've gone platinum. BLOW: Having a major label means having major press. PolyGram was flying me all over. I'd get to the office and there would be a full day of press in every city, TV, magazines, newspapers, it was documented all over the world. London, Paris, Belgium ... I'm traveling to places I've only read about and there's paparazzi clicking my picture? It was incredible. MC SERCH (rapper, former member of 3rd Bass, talk show host of "Serch"): In the beginnings of hip-hop, Kurtis Blow was a bigger-than-life character, almost iconic. He wasn't a battle rapper, he was designed to be a party rapper. Kurtis' influence on hip-hop is in his showmanship and the fact that he made songs, he didn't just rap over beats.
THE GAME
Coming of age in New York in the late-60s/early-70s meant rooting for Knicks teams that competed for, and actually won, NBA championships year-in and year-out. Kurtis Blow remains a Knick fan for life, but his deep love for the game was actually inspired by a high-flyer from Long Island who never called Madison Square Garden home. BLOW: I played everything as a kid: baseball, tennis, track, swimming, football, and basketball. I was actually a better football player than basketball, because I'm kind of short, you know? As a spectator, I liked them all, but basketball became my favorite after I met my idol. I loved Walt Frazier, Dick Barnett, Earl Monroe, those Knicks teams of course, but I was a big, big fan of Julius Erving. Dr. J., he was the guy and I hated — hated — that he was in the ABA. Things would have been much better for everybody if Dr. J. was winning those championships rings in the NBA where he belonged. WARING: In 1973, the Rucker Tournament moved from 155th Street to CCNY and Dr. J. was who everybody wanted to see. When Julius would come to Harlem, he'd have people sitting on top of the roofs and in the trees overlooking the courts. People couldn't get seats, but they had to get a glimpse of him. I was totally inspired by Dr. J., he was doing things on the court I'd never seen before. Then Dr. J. said, "I'm glad to meet you little Kurt, you keep up the great work." BLOW: At 14, I was in the CCNY summer youth program, which had all kinds of sports activities. My track coach, Barbara Floyd, had gone to college with Julius Erving at UMass. Coach Floyd knew I was Dr. J's biggest fan. One day, we'd returned to CCNY from a meet where I'd won three big trophies. All the sudden, here comes Dr. J. getting ready to play in the Rucker. He's walking down the block and stops to get a hot dog. I tell Coach Floyd, ‘You know him! Call him over! Call him over!' She said, ‘Julius, come over here and give me a bite of that hot dog!' He took a bite, and handed her the rest. She introduced me, and Dr. J. saw my trophies and said, ‘Man, you had a good day.' I could hardly breath, ‘Iwonthe50yarddash Iwonthe100yarddash Iwonthe4by400relay itwasagreatday.' Then Dr. J. said, ‘I'm glad to meet you little Kurt, you keep up the great work.' From that moment on, basketball and music was it. I grew up without a dad, so I created these fictional "Pops" in my head. James Brown and Dr. J. were two of my Pops.
THE SONG
"Basketball" was the second single off of "Ego Trip." Breaking it down into its components, the song is made up of the concept, the lyrics, the hook/chorus, the sound effects, and the guys-at-the-playground-riffing-about-hoops that closes it out. "You need to make a song about basketball, it's the No. 1 sport for African-Americans and nobody has done it yet." BLOW: The idea came from my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time. She said, "You need to make a song about basketball, it's the No. 1 sport for African-Americans and nobody has done it yet." MOORE: First time Kurtis mentioned it, I knew it was a terrific concept precisely because it hadn't been done. I thought it could have a larger life than some of our other records. We'd been disappointed with the reception to "Party Time," which we thought would be a breakout hit, but I still had confidence in the basketball idea. I was a fan, but Robert Ford knew everything about the sport. One time, he was in Indiana at a VFW or something and he got into a conversation about basketball. He knew more about the Indiana teams than they guys at the bar. Ford knew oceans about hoops, so if he believed the record would be a good thing ... MC SERCH: Kurtis always had that amazing ability to pick regular everyday themes, like Christmas or basketball, and turn something ordinary to extraordinary. Hover to read "Basketball" lyrics Hover to read "Basketball" lyrics BLOW: Billy-Bill and I think a lot alike and we talked basketball all the time, so he knew exactly who to put in the song. He chose the players and included all the greats. We wanted the guys we grew up watching who were all out of the league by the time the song came out, and the best of that time. WARING: The only explicit thing Kurtis told me was Dr. J. had to come first. BLOW: Almost every guy in the song is in the Hall of Fame, except for maybe Darryl Dawkins — but we had to have him, he was the first guy shattering backboards — and Ralph Sampson. But during that time, Sampson was the hottest cat. He was destined for the Hall of Fame, it's hard to believe he didn't make it. He got hurt a lot, and got sidetracked or whatever, so he's forgotten a little bit, but in college, Sampson was the man. End of story. WARING: I wrote the lyrics quick. Sometimes creatively, it just comes to you. Only a few little things got changed. I didn't write the line "Or when Willis Reed stood so tall ..." at first. My original was "When Marv Albert made the call, Yes and It Counts! That's basketball." When I submitted it, I guess they knew the legal ramifications of getting clearances from Marv or whatever, but there's also an old practice where producers put in a line or two to get a songwriting credit. I'm not mad at ‘em. I was cool with the change because it was still about the Knicks. MOORE: We recorded it at the Power Station, which has a 8088 Neve console that allowed us to just kick the shit out of the track. The tremendous equipment and supremely talented engineers allowed us to do some mind-boggling stuff. We wanted "Basketball" to sound a bit removed from what was going on then in hip-hop. It all starts with that catchy vocal hook. Blow was instrumental in introducing choruses to hip-hop, as most of the earlier records were just one long continuous rap with no hook. EDWARDS: Blow was instrumental in introducing choruses to hip-hop, as most of the earlier records were just one long continuous rap with no hook. Kool Moe Dee even calls Kurtis, "The inventor of the rap hook." BLOW: The hook was all mine. That was my thing, hooks were my specialty. I did the hooks on "8 Million Stories," "Fat Boys," "Fat Boys are Back," "If I Ruled the World ..." Simple sing-y melodic hooks stick in your head. MOORE: To our very good fortune, we had Alyson Williams doing the backing vocals. She nailed it. I also had Jimmy Bralower, the drum machinist, make a sample of a basketball being dribbled on the studio floor. We got the best recording of it we could, pre-digital, and sent it off to be burned into a chip. Every drum on the record has a bit of that basketball in it. I don't know if it made any difference, it's hard to tell, but it was a nice piece of ear candy. WARING: I was thrilled when I came into the studio and they had John Condon doing his thing, "Now rapping basketball ..." I don't think he knew what he was getting into, but he was the voice of the Knicks, the guy we saw from the Garden every Sunday, and I knew fans would love it. He died a few years later, so we have history on top of history on that track. MOORE: One underrated or forgotten part of the record is the riffing, the guys just talking hoops. WARING: I wanted to rap on the record, but they didn't let me. I did get on the track though, at the end. That whole section was ad-libbed. I'm the guy who says, "Did you see that kid Michael Jordan?" He was still in college. I'm a prophet, for better or worse. EDWARDS: If you're making a concept track, which this essentially is, then it helps to stay on topic, which "Basketball" does. It includes a surprising amount of detail with its references. It's nothing intricate, but it moves way past the simple "wave your hands in the air" style of most party tracks. MOORE: Everything just came together, that song kicks ass six ways from Thursday. MC SERCH: The main thing that makes "Basketball" so special is that Kurtis was reflecting on what we all dug about the game. He was talking about athletes of the time, running plays, streetball vs. NBA ball, taking the temperature of fans and what they loved about the sport both on-and-off the court.
THE RECEPTION
Kurtis Blow actually had bigger selling records, but "Basketball" took off in ways no previous recording of his ever did. BLOW: "Basketball" got huge radio play. But as a record, it didn't sell like "The Breaks," which as a 12-inch almost went platinum at 940,000 units. "Basketball" was also put out as a single, but only 50,000 records were released. Once those were gone, the record company put out more copies of the album "Ego Trip," which went gold. WARING: Kurtis ended up meeting a lot of NBA stars, they loved it. I didn't travel around with him as much, but I remember the Knicks had a backup forward named Eric Fernsten who got us tickets to a game. That was cool. It was bigger than the NBA though, it became the theme song for teams everywhere. BLOW: I met ‘em all, Ewing, Starks, MJ, Oakley is a good friend of mine, Isiah ... I made a point to reach out to the guys in the league. It was bigger than the NBA though, it became the theme songs for teams everywhere. College, high school, summer youth, elementary school. I heard all the time from professionals and amateurs that "Basketball" was the backdrop for the layup lines. I can absolutely say it's the No. 1 layup line song of all time. WARING: I don't think it's the best song I ever wrote, but it certainly had the most impact. BLOW: When the song was peaking, the NBA started flying me around to do shows. They would send me to a game like the Cleveland Cavaliers vs. the New Jersey Nets, games that weren't even close to being sold out. I would do a live performance right after the game to fill the arena. We sold out the San Antonio Spurs stadium and Goerge Gervin came to the show. The Iceman was the first player mentioned in "Basketball" that I met. That was amazing, but in Philly, Dr. J. came backstage and gave me a huge hug. He thanked me for putting him in the song and he's still a good buddy of mine today.
THE VIDEO
At a time when few black artists, and no rappers, were seen on MTV, a crazy "Basketball" video was shot featuring cheerleaders, martial arts, Adam West-esque Batman graphics, players dunking on short hoops, nunchuks, a blue sky, a lightning bolt jumpsuit, an old-timey photographer, random black-and-white shots of Michael Ray Richardson, Lite Beer from Miller jerseys, a mascot in a chicken costume, the Fat Boys, Whodini, and a man inexplicably eating a giant hot dog slathered in mustard. I knew next to nothing about basketball. I was basically straight off the boat from South Africa, I'd never seen it. OBLOWITZ: I made this experimental avant-garde punk film called "King Blank" that played as a midnight movie double feature with "Eraserhead" at the old Waverly Theatre. Somebody saw it, and off of that, hired me to direct these really slick videos for Carly Simon of all people. I think I may have directed the first videos ever shown on VH1. Anyway, from that, I got hired to do "Basketball," which was ironic because there is a sequence in "King Blank" set to rap music, which I also don't think had been done before. At first I thought I was being hired to do a video for a re-release of "The Breaks," so I was really excited. I even wrote a treatment for it. I so wanted "The Breaks," it would have been a game-changer, a life-changer, and the song talks about universal experiences. I knew next to nothing about basketball. I was basically straight off the boat from South Africa, I'd never seen it. I came from a country where black people were basically enslaved. The main sport the government supported was rugby, a brutal sport of the white ruling class where big drunken burly descendants of Germans and Dutchmen banged their fucking heads into one another like Vikings. And here you have a finesse sport where tall graceful descendants of Nigeria fly around the court. It was so far out of my frame of reference. To me, basketball was the hip iconic image of America. When I got to New York City, streetball was everywhere, it was part of the Bob Dylan line, "Music in the cafes and revolution in the air." It was fucking great. BLOW: The video was shot before the song became a hit, so the NBA didn't want anything to do with it. Our initial idea was to get footage of all the players in the song and we couldn't get clearance for anyone except Michael Ray Richardson. That was the only guy they gave us, so we used his photos. He's not even in the song. Not quite the same as having Dr. J. soaring to the hoop. MOORE: Unfortunately, Kurtis split with Robert and I before the video was made. Had we known what was going to happen I think we would've marched into the studio with a gun to put an end to it. Ford had all these personal connections to the NBA and I think he could have gotten the footage, which would have made for an all-time classic video. OBLOWITZ: It was the first thing I ever made through my own production company and we had a $25,000 budget. My concept was to use those motifs from the Bronx, the chain-link fence, the gang-bangers, the martial arts. I wanted it to be edgy. I wanted to get some of those gnarly dudes from the Bronx involved, recreate what I'd seen, but PolyGram had other ideas. All the cheerleaders in the video are white. Oh, do you know the problems I had with black women around the country? BLOW: I didn't have any understanding of why the director wanted the martial arts and the gangs and stuff. Looking back, it's a little bit cheesy to me, but I was excited to have cameras focused on me, now I'm a super-duper-star. Let's do it. OBLOWITZ: One thing the label demanded was blonde MTV babes. BLOW: All the cheerleaders in the video are white. Oh, do you know the problems I had with black women around the country? All the African-American militants started coming at me, saying I wasn't real and I sold out ... I wasn't thinking about all that, I was just happy we had cheerleaders. I mean, c'mon, they were cute girls. OBLOWITZ: One of the cheerleaders is a light-skinned black girl, but I guess that's a cop-out. I decided to just go with it, to make it a pastiche of all the things I'd seen on TV and at Madison Square Garden. This is what PolyGram wants? Let's have fun with it, let's just make it a blur of colors, cheerleaders, a guy wolfing down a huge hot dog, a guy in a chicken suit, the Fat Boys shuffle, and a fetishization of television itself. It was supposed to be funny, but Kurtis and I had a seriousness of purpose, to get in heavy rotation on MTV. BLOW: It was cool to get my friends in the video, the Fat Boys and Whodini came and did a guest appearance, but some stuff I didn't understand. What was with that guy in the chicken suit? WARING: I wasn't in the video. I'm not disappointed about that. OBLOWITZ: I couldn't believe how much flack we got for the white cheerleaders, for selling out, for not being street enough. I got slammed, but what choice did we have? Without the record label, the "Basketball" video doesn't exist. Besides, we had a hell of a lot of fun making it. I built a court and we had hoops of all different sizes. We had vivid colors and a real Pop Art aesthetic. It was all stylized. I shot from the ground, and used slow motion, and we had trampolines, all to give the appearance of guys flying through the air. And they were real players, semi-pro or something, who showed up with matching jerseys, which I thought was fantastic. Whodini is here? Let's put them in. The Fat Boys? Go for it. One thing I remember from the shoot is how much pizza The Fat Boys ate. Mountains of pizza and piles and piles of cardboard boxes. MOORE: When I first saw it I was pissed off, "What the fuck is this?" It was so stupid, so not Kurtis Blow. I knew it wouldn't do a whole lot of damage because it never played on MTV. When I first saw it I was pissed off, "What the fuck is this?" It was so stupid, so not Kurtis Blow. BLOW: I believe that was the first rap video that got on MTV, but Run-DMC claims it was one of theirs, so I don't know, but there was no rap videos before us, that's for sure. OBLOWITZ: We did what we set out to do, it played on MTV and millions of people got to see Kurtis Blow, this ball of energy who hadn't been exposed to the country. EDWARDS: It's a slick, commercial rap video, before that kind of thing became widely prevalent. Girls, basketball, flashy editing for the time ... it even has a martial arts thing going on in the background at times, nearly 10 years before there was such a thing as a Wu-Tang Clan. MOORE: So this was all PolyGram's doing? My apologies to the director. I take it all back. I've been bad-mouthing the poor guy since 1984. OBLOWITZ: It was sanitized, sure, but I still think the "Basketball" video works as a surreal moment of its time. The HOF International Film Festival in Germany recently did a retrospective of my work, and "Basketball" was one of two videos of mine they selected, the other being "Chill Out" by John Lee Hooker and Santana, and it's not like MTV ever showcased blues legends either. I blew it up to 2K, real cinema HD, and it really popped. The crowd went nuts. The world at-large loves it. I love it. The video was fucking full-on fresh. Even today, it really flows. "Basketball" doesn't have over two million YouTube views by accident.
THE LEGACY
On its 30-year anniversary, "Basketball" is still played wherever people gather to shoot or watch hoops. And while Kurtis Blow hasn't had a hit rap record in years, he's had a long career performing Christian music, leading the Hip Hop Church, a musical youth ministry for any church to teach kids about the gospels, Jesus, and salvation, all with a hip-hop flair. He's even branched out into rock music, collaborating with Bride Dressed in Black on the new release "Hip-Rock." BLOW: A classic song never dies, but "Basketball" did get new life when Michael Jordan put it in NBA 2K12. It's the first thing you hear when you pop in the game. Nothing lasts forever though. Last year, I was at All-Star weekend, I introduced myself to LaMarcus Aldridge, told him I did "Basketball" and that I had him on my fantasy team. He just shook my hand and walked away. Younger kids don't know me, but the OGs do, so it's all worth it. WARING: Kurtis and I have talked about updating it, getting all those guys we missed out on like Barkley, Olajuwon, LeBron, Duncan ... I think we could pull it off. BLOW: I have connections with the Miami Heat and I've thought about a new version and letting guys like LeBron and Wade rap on the record. MOORE: I think a 2013 "Basketball" is a great idea and I'd love to do it. I think the world is ready for a record that's all whacked up like we used to do it, old-school style. MC SERCH: Rap in the 1980s existed in a New York bubble, you didn't think about rhyming for California, Texas or Florida, it was for your city, your borough, your neighborhood, for the dudes on your block. In 3rd Bass, we made a song about streetball, "Soul in the Hole," and other artists have attempted to make songs about the sport, but Kurtis still owns it. The original survives. It's not that the record was that great as it was great back then. I'm always happy to hear it on Backspin in that moment, but I don't want to hear it 60 times a week. It takes me to when I was young, so I don't know if it's a good idea, no matter how talented Kurtis is, to duplicate or remake it. Maybe if he did it with A$AP Rocky or Action Bronson, some of the young guys to get their take on basketball, that would be interesting ... I'm torn to say the least. I think he should leave it alone. Certain things should just live in their own cosmos. His songs stand the test of time. I take a lot of pride in the music we made together. WARING: We were first, we were pioneers in that way. It was a group of talented people doing what they do best. We taught people the history of the game. MOORE: To this day, I regret that I didn't listen to Russell and move Kurtis in a harder-edged direction, which is where rap was going. But his songs stand the test of time, why else would we be talking about "Basketball" 30 years later? I take a lot of pride in the music we made together. OBLOWITZ: I was a draft dodger from South Africa, I skipped out on my country because fighting on behalf of an apartheid government was not something I was ever going to do. But living in downtown New York City back in those days was still living apart from the United States. The country ended at the Verrazano Bridge. We never left. Working with Kurtis Blow was my gateway to America. It opened all kinds of doors for me and got me all kinds of work. After "Basketball," for the first time, I felt like I had a place in America. BLOW: The live performance of "Basketball" is big time. Everyone knows the hook, so when it starts I ask all the ladies to sing along, then I do a thing where I ask the crowd, "What is the name of your favorite team?" And say I'm in L.A., I go through the Knicks, Heat, Bulls, and say the Lakers last. Huge crowd roar. Then I ask their favorite player, "Is it LeBron?" Booooo "Kevin Durant?" Booooo "Kobe Bryant?" Big cheers. Then I end it with, "I know everyone loves Michael Jorrrrrrrrrrrrrdan!" The fans scream, go nuts. "Basketball" is a house rocker. After all these years, people still love it. I thank God for basketball, the song and the sport. Producer: Chris Mottram | Copy Editor: Kevin Fixler |
MUMBAI: When baby Sunita's parents were told that she might need a pacemaker in her heart soon after birth , her Thane-based parents were initially not convinced about the need for the operation so soon."In the two years that Jupiter Hospital's pediatric heart unit has been operational, I have found foetal heart abnormality in 10 cases, but only two parents followed it through. The others just dropped out," paediatric cardiologist Dr Srinivas L said.A permanent pacemaker, weighing 12.8gm, was fitted into her tiny 1.5kg-frame to help her heart beat normally. Sunita was born six weeks prematurely to a Thane couple who were initially not convinced that their child needed an operation right at birth."She is the world's smallest baby to receive a permanent heart pacemaker," said pediatric heart surgeon Dr Asutosh Singh who operated on Sunita (not her real name) at Jupiter Hospital in Thane. He added that this case is possibly the second-fastest instance in the world of a neonate getting a pacemaker. In 2012, a Stanford University's doctors fitted a pacemaker in a 1.58kg baby within 15 minutes of her birth.Sunita's case highlights how better technology and health practices can save lives. Pediatric cardiologist Dr Srinivas L diagnosed the heart anomaly during a fetal scan he performed during her mother's 28th week of pregnancy. "As the heart rate was far below normal, we counselled the parents over the next few months on the possibility that their child would need a pacemaker immediately at birth," he added.The doctors were not too sure the parents would listen. "In the two years that the Jupiter Hospital's pediatric heart unit has been operational, I have found fetal heart abnormality in 10 cases, but only two parents followed it through. The others just dropped out," said Dr Srinivas.In Sunita's case, her mother had an autoimmune disease called Sjogren's Syndrome, a condition in which the body produces antibodies that damage tissues. "During pregnancy, these antibodies cross over to the fetal circulation and damage the unborn child's conduction system, causing the heart to beat slower than normal," said the doctors.At 4.57pm on March 5, Jupiter Hospital's team was in a state of readiness to transport the baby at the slightest hint of distress to the neighbouring operation theatre. "Her heart beat was 55 at birth (against 140-150 which is normal) but within a few minutes it plummeted to 27, indicating that she needed a pacemaker," said Dr Singh.Sunita's father said, "It was a difficult moment for us. She was tinier than usual and doctors wanted to operate on her, but I also realized that she was in danger."Dr Swati Gharekar, pediatric cardiologist with Fortis Hospital in Mulund, said it is great that heart problems are being picked up antenatally. "It shows a great team work," she added. Pediatric cardiac surgeon Dr Suresh Rao said, "Pacemaker operations are now routine even in newborn children. The time that it is fitted—whether in the 20th minute after birth, the next day or in the seventh year of life—is a matter of the medical team's clinical judgement."Dr NO Bansal, who heads the cardiology department of state government-run JJ Hospital in Byculla, said, "This child would have needed a pacemaker some time in life. As it was in distress right at birth, it's good that it got a pacemaker at the right time."As for Sunita, she was discharged on March 20. "She has been gaining weight and doctors are satisfied with her progress," said her father. Her surgeon Dr Singh said unlike other children who undergo two procedures, one to fix a temporary pacemaker and a permanent one 10 days later, Sunita directly got the latter. "This takes away the parental concern of the child undergoing two operations within a span of 10 days," he added. |
Almost a fortnight after Pehlu Khan, the 55-year-old dairy farmer from Nuh in Haryana, was murdered in Alwar, the Rajasthan police say they will not arrest the six named in the FIR before interrogating them to make sure they were involved in the crime.
Alwar superintendent of police Rahul Prakash said they were raiding various places to nab the six people named in Khan’s FIR because they are absconding since April 5 but added that they would only be detained for interrogation.
“We will arrest them only after we are sure that they were involved in the crime,” he told HT.
Earlier, on April 5, Prakash announced a reward of Rs 5,000 each on the six accused for information leading to their arrests.
The FIR in the murderous attack on Khan and four others was registered against six named and 200 unidentified people on the basis of Khan’s statement to police around 11pm on April 1 when the farmer was in the intensive care unit of Kailash Hospital in Behror in Alwar.
In his statement, Khan named Om Yadav (45), Hukum Chand Yadav (44), Sudhir Yadav (45), Jagmal Yadav (73), Naveen Sharma (48) and Rahul Saini (24) for carrying the attack on him and four others with him carrying cattle from a weekly market in Jaipur to their village in Nuh.
On the basis of Khan’s statement, police registered a case against these six and 200 others under sections 147 (rioting), 143 (unlawful assembly), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 341 (wrongful restraint), 308 (culpable homicide), 379 (theft) of the Indian Penal Code. On April 3, section 308 was changed to that of murder (section 302) after Khan died in hospital around 7.30pm.
On April 5, police arrested three people – Vipin Yadav, Ravindra Yadav and Kalu Ram Yadav – on the basis of video footage circulating on social media. Two more people – Dayanand Yadav and Neeraj Yadav – were arrested on April 9.
These five were not named in the FIR.
Saddam Hussain, president of Mewat Yuva Sanghtan, alleged that police were soft on the named accused because of their affiliations with right-wing Hindu organizations. “Either there is pressure from the government to not arrest them or police are not trying hard enough,” he said.
The sangthan took out a silent march in Alwar on April 10 to protest the lynching and demand immediate arrest of the culprits.
According to local sources in Behror, Naveen Sharma is associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Hukum Yadav with Hindu Dharma Jagran and Rahul Saini with the student wing of RSS, the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).
A Behror local said Sudhir Yadav is often in the news for his action against cow smugglers in and around the town. “Jagmal Yadav is patron of the gau shala (cow shelter) where Pehlu Khan’s cattle were taken after they were booked for cow smuggling. Yadav has been involved in the gau shala for about eight years after he retired as a government schoolteacher in Haryana,” the local added.
First Published: Apr 16, 2017 17:21 IST |
Rupert Murdoch has been busy sullying the Wall Street Journal news department's once impeccable reputation for objectivity. Murdoch made his buddy Robert Thomson the new WSJ editor and made Leslie Hinton the publisher who proceeded to "Fox-ify" the Journal as Joe Nocera described it in his blistering OpEd in the New York Times. Nocera describes the changes at the WSJ like this:
Within five months, Murdoch had fired the editor and installed his close friend Robert Thomson, fresh from a stint Fox-ifying The Times of London. The new publisher was Leslie Hinton, former boss of the division that published ’s British newspapers, including The News of the World. (He resigned on Friday.) Soon came the changes, swift and sure: shorter articles, less depth, an increased emphasis on politics and, weirdly, sometimes surprisingly unsophisticated coverage of business.
Along with the transformation of a great paper into a mediocre one came a change that was both more subtle and more insidious. The political articles grew more and more slanted toward the Republican party line. The Journal sometimes took to using the word “Democrat” as an adjective instead of a noun, a usage favored by the right wing. In her book, “War at The Wall Street Journal,” Sarah Ellison recounts how editors inserted the phrase “assault on business” in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama. The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views. That’s half the definition of Fox-ification |
Of course, a petri dish is not a brain, and the petri dish system lacks certain crucial components, like immune system cells, that appear to contribute to the devastation once Alzheimer’s gets started. But it allows researchers to quickly, cheaply and easily test drugs that might stop the process in the first place. The crucial step, of course, will be to see if drugs that work in this system stop Alzheimer’s in patients.
The discovery, said Dr. Sam Gandy of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, is “a real game changer” and “a paradigm shifter.” He added, “I’m really enthusiastic to take a crack at this in my lab.”
Karen Duff, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Columbia University, while praising the work as “a tour de force,” cautioned that once Alzheimer’s starts, tangles can take off on their own and may need to be attacked by drugs that strike them specifically in order to stop devastation in the brain.
Dr. Tanzi is now starting an ambitious project to test 1,200 drugs on the market and 5,000 experimental ones that have finished the first phase of clinical testing — a project that is impossible with mice, for which each drug test takes a year. With their petri dish system, Dr. Tanzi said, “we can test hundreds of thousands of drugs in a matter of months.”
He already has used his system to look at drugs designed to prevent the formation of amyloid, the protein that clumps into plaques. The drugs, he reports, prevented both plaques and tangles in the petri dishes. Some are in clinical trials, and it is not known if they work in people. One was tested in patients and failed because it was too toxic. One hope is to find drugs for other diseases that are known to be safe and work on Alzheimer’s in the petri dish. |
Browse > Home Vatican / Cardinal Kasper Adds Three Sacraments
Cardinal Kasper Adds Three Sacraments
Vatican City––Citing the need for the Church to “update herself with modern times,” Cardinal Walter Kasper declared that the Church has now added three Sacraments to the original seven instituted by Christ. In an interview with America, Kasper explained his decision: “Christ challenged the Pharisees to look deeper than the Mosaic Law, and he challenges us to the same. The original seven sacraments were sufficient for their time, but times have changed, and the Church owes the world a greater number of spiritual life rafts.”
Continuing his interview, Kasper added: “We need a paradigm change and we must – as the good Samaritan did – consider the situation also from the perspective of those who are suffering and asking for help. Christ’s sacraments just aren’t doing the job, and so it is our duty as a Church to reach out in other ways.”
Most of all, His Eminence pushed for the Church to adapt to the Metric system: “The number 7 is a prime number; it can’t be divided by anything. And when you multiply it by anything you always get some weird number like 23 or 49. The Church needs to leave behind the Imperial system of Sacraments and join the rest of Europe in the Metric system.”
Pointing out the complexity of modern life as compared to earlier times in human history, Kasper affirmed that “Life is not just black or white or yellow or green or blue or red or purple; there are, in fact, exactly ten nuances. Not seven.”
Kasper’s new list of Sacraments is as follows:
1. Baptism
2. Confirmation
3. Eucharist
4. Reconciliation
5. Marriage
6. Holy Orders
7. Anointing of the Sick
8. Annulment
9. That YouTube video of that Lifehouse song with that Jesus skit
10. Christmas trees |
A Mission, B.C., man is shaken but has only minor injuries after being knocked to the ground by an aggressive black bear yesterday evening.
Elias Hart says he was walking on the Cedar Valley Connector trail around 8 p.m. PT when the bear popped out about a metre in front of him.
"I turned around to run. He knocked me down, and then lucky there was a fence there so I grabbed onto fence and started yelling at the bear as loud as I could, got up and started waving my hands," Hart said.
"I got up just in time when he swatted at me. He just about got me."
Hart finally managed to scramble over the fence, but the bear followed close behind, scaling the fence as well.
Then just as the bear got on top of the fence and was about to follow Hart over the other side, some cars came by and scared it back into the forest.
"I've never seen bears, not like this before, right up close in my face … I thought I was done," he said.
"It's just craziness. It's just lucky it didn't happen to some woman or some teenager."
Hart walked away with just minor scratches on his leg and a wild story to tell.
"It's right by the road. That's craziness. You don't see that stuff in the city. You hear about a bear attack out in the forest, not the in the city."
Conservation officer Sgt. Steve Jacobi says Hart was very lucky to escape with only minor scrapes, given the bear's very aggressive behaviour.
Officers were in the area Friday morning, trying to track the bear down, and Jacobi said he expects the bear will be destroyed if caught because it was so aggressive. |
Corbyn’s stand-out policy announcement at the Fabian conference this afternoon will be a preposterous ban on businesses distributing dividends unless they agree to act against inequality. The Labour leader will say:
“Another proposal would be to bar or restrict companies from distributing dividends until they pay all their workers the living wage. Only profitable employers will be paying dividends, if they depend on cheap labour for those profits then I think there is a question over whether that is a business model to which we should be turning a blind eye. Too much of the proceeds of growth have accumulated to those at the top.”
Attempting to “bar or restrict companies from distributing dividends” until they do what the state wants is particularly communist even for Jezza. It is also completely impractical. This is what you get when your policy chief is a loony lefty glorified Twitter troll.
Corbyn will also attack the Tories for “balancing the books”, describing attempts to reduce the deficit as a “fake concern”.
“Their concept of fairness is of a very different order to ours. Fairness for only a few is not fairness, but privilege. Hidden among the fake concern for ‘balancing the books’, is the same hoary old Tory ideology – to shrink the state, to shrink fairness.”
Labour could go after Osborne for missing his deficit targets and completely failing to balance the books. Instead, Corbyn tells voters Osborne is balancing the books, and that this is a bad thing. Onwards comrades! |
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Will college football players who skip their bowl games to keep themselves healthy for the NFL risk NFL teams perceiving them as selfish? They might, based on comments from Cardinals coach Bruce Arians.
Arians was asked about the players who have announced that they aren’t playing in their bowls because their focus is now on the draft, and he didn’t sound like a fan of the trend.
“That would concern me,” Arians said. “Depending on what their situation is as a team, because this is a team sport. But you’ve had a couple of guys get injured in the last couple years. Agents have a lot to say about it. Parents have a lot to say about it. But, it would concern me.”
LSU running back Leonard Fournette, Stanford running back Christian McCaffrey and Baylor running back Shock Linwood have all decided not to play in their bowls so they’re healthy for the NFL Combine. Arians said he’d judge such players on a case-by-case basis, but he also said he would love to see them play in their bowls.
“I would love to see that. I would also like them come out of the game healthy,” Arians said.
Interestingly, the Cardinals used their first-round draft pick this year on Robert Nkemdiche, who didn’t play in the Sugar Bowl because Ole Miss suspended him for an incident that saw him get charged with marijuana possession after falling out a hotel window. If missing a bowl game for that reason was OK with the Cardinals, it’s hard to see why they’d have a problem with missing a bowl game to start getting ready for the draft. |
Spring has arrived and we’re taking a look back at the articles we’ve posted since January. Here are a few from the past four months that you might have missed. Hopefully, they’ll provide an informative and entertaining break to your day:
Top Multilingual U.S. Cities
If you haven’t already filled out your 2010 Census form, this article might inspire you to bust out a pen and a stamp. Using data from the previous census, we ranked the United States’ 40 largest cities according to their multilingual characteristics.
Fictional Languages in Film:
The Linguists Behind Na’vi, Sindarin, Klingon and Ulam
Get your geek on! Jennifer discusses the linguists who created a few of the most popular fictional languages in film, and she provides short clips of the languages in use.
10 Confusing English Words and How to Conquer Them
Beyond Words contributor, Maria, looks at five pairs of words that English speakers often muddle up. After reading this, you’ll never “flout” your mastery of English again.
Beyond Words Podcast: Landing in Morocco, An Arabic Lesson
This is the first episode of Beyond Words’ new language podcast. Take a few minutes to learn how to get from an airport to a hotel speaking Modern Standard Arabic, and download the lesson for later playback.
Periodic Table Manners, Wordnik.com, and other Notes on Language from Erin Mckean
Is it possible to not love Erin Mckean? We don’t think so. If you still don’t know who Mckean is, this article serves as a great introduction to the lexicographic work she has been doing for years.
Hegan: The New Male Vegan
The latest neologism of 2010 is hegan. Beyond Words contributor, Jes, analyzes the development of the new word, and offers insights on its cultural sticking power.
10 Foreign Language Covers
Studies show that singing in a foreign language might help learn that language faster. In this article, we compile ten fun English language songs and pair them with their foreign language counterparts. You can listen to both versions of the songs, which should leave you walking like ein Ägypter.
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– photo by mccoryjames |
As an American with a multiethnic lineage, Falcons TE Tony Gonzalez wants to learn Spanish and reconnect with his Latino roots. Jeremy Schaap caught up with Gonzalez to discuss chasing his "lindos suenos"-- beautiful dreams. (13:56)
SAN FRANCISCO -- Tony Gonzalez will have more on his mind than just his final game at Candlestick Park, or all of the family and friends making the trip from Southern California.
One of Tony Gonzalez's fondest memories of Candlestick Park came during a game when he was with the Chiefs and was something that, at the time 13 years ago, was downright terrifying. Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images
On Monday night, the veteran Atlanta Falcons tight end will most certainly remember a chance meeting with a man named Mickey Pfleger.
Among the retiring star's fondest memories of Candlestick Park is something that, at the time 13 years ago, was downright terrifying.
On Nov. 12, 2000, while playing for the Kansas City Chiefs, Gonzalez took a late hit out of bounds and ran into a photographer and knocked him unconscious.
"I remember a play coming toward me rather quickly along the southwest sideline," wrote Pfleger, who died three years ago. "I remember standing up and starting to move backward to get out of the way, like I always do when a play comes toward me. That's the last thing I remember until I came to and realize that I am laying on my back looking at paramedics and doctors."
Gonzalez was concerned but had to keep playing.
"His eyes were in the back of his head," Gonzalez recalled. "He was knocked out, unconscious. I tried to help him up, but people were like, 'Hey, get back in the huddle.'"
Gonzalez later saw the ambulance take the man away for further tests at a local hospital. But it wasn't until three days later that he learned Pfleger's brain scan had revealed a significant tumor that was cancerous. |
THE owner of a popular Southampton bar has confirmed that the business has gone into administration.
The Daily Echo can reveal that Marshals Bar in London Road has been shut down – not even a year after it launched.
As previously reported, the bar had closed for refurbishment last week with no information about when it would be open again and there were rumours that the company was being liquidated after staff received letters saying they had lost their jobs.
Now John Greenwood, who financially backed the company when it launched in October last year, has confirmed that they have been forced to shut down the bar.
John said: “I’m just as disappointed as all our customers that it’s shutting down. It’s mostly upsetting for our lovely staff, it was a great venue with a brilliant atmosphere, good food and drink and a really good team of people working there.”
John said that the refurbishments had been planned to start on Sunday, July 19 which is when they closed the bar for workmen to start moving the front doors and that was supposed to take a few days.
Then on Wednesday, July 22 he found out the company was going into liquidation.
John added: “It just wasn’t a viable business, it wasn’t making enough money and we were struggling to get a good turnover.”
John’s son Max, who is director of Marshals and runs The Rockstone pub, told the Daily Echo last week that he was not aware of the bar going into administration, saying that as the director he would expect to be one of the first to know.
John said he had not yet told his son what was happening because he was waiting for more information and that they were now in the process of finishing the refurbishments so they could sell the lease for the venue.
John added: “We are liable for the fully repairing lease and security of the premises. We are looking to sell on this lease and hence have to complete the works. The staff were informed immediately on Wednesday morning when I heard from the receivers.”
The letter sent to staff said: “I regret to inform you that the company is no longer in a position to make payments to you for services rendered and your contract of employment is terminated with immediate effect.”
The letter also said that the company FA Simms has been instructed to call a meeting of creditors to put the company into liquidation.
John said: “As much as everyone loved it, business is business and I can’t continue funding something that’s not making anything, my bank balance is struggling. But I am deeply saddened by the fact it is closing.”
A statement on Marshals Facebook page added: "It is correct in that the receivers were called in to Marshals, at the beginning of the week commencing 20th July.
"However, the refurbishment and doors being moved were scheduled to start on Sunday 19th and hence the bar was closed on that day. The original time estimate was for a few days.
"We are liable for the fully repairing lease and security of the Marshals premises. As we are looking to sell on this lease we have to complete these works.
"The Marshals staff were informed immediately on Wednesday morning the 22nd when we heard from the Receivers that we were placed into administration.
"I understand the staff's frustration but we had no option to wind up the business as it completely unsustainable." |
Artist's Note: *This is part 2 of a 4 part picture I'm currently working on. This picture is finished, but it's part of a larger piece which is why I've dubbed it a WIP. More to come very soon!*Free of her shackles, Pip comes under attack by a duo of Raiders on the Ponyville bridge. After beating the defenseless Stable pony into the dirt, the Raiders turn their attention on the still bound Monterey Jack, determined make his death as gruesome as possible. Pip quickly realises that there is only one option - she has to fight! Kill or be killed!Arming herself with a sharpened shovel, she rushes to Monterey Jack's rescue, giving the shackled unicorn the chance he needs to strike back, strangling one of the raiders with his chains. Pip faces off against the other Raider, shovel vs sledgehammer. It's do or die... but can she really bring herself to end another pony's life?--------------------------------------------
The unicorn reared up and gave me a kick, her hoof striking hard into my side. Pain exploded and I dropped, gasping. Rearing up again, she brought her full weight down on me. I howled.
Near me, Monterey let out a wet grunt of pain as the earth pony gave him a taste of her sledgehammer. Leaving me in a crying huddle, the unicorn also turned her attention to the still-chained Monterey. In moments it became clear they intended to beat and bludgeon him until he was another lifeless corpse. And probably not stop then.
“Hold his leg out. I’m gonna shoot his hooves off!” The unicorn raider floated the combat shotgun a foot from Monterey’s splayed left hindleg, the only one I had freed from its manacle.
Ignoring the pain, I leapt up, closing the distance and spinning as I gave a fierce back-kick. My hooves connected with the shotgun, sending it flying. It clattered onto the bridge beyond. A moment later, I was levitating the shovel-spear at the two raider ponies who stood facing me with gleeful expressions. Two against one, and both of them were experienced fighters. The one with the sledgehammer stepped closer, as if eager to see if hammer beat knife.
Monterey was on her in an instant, throwing his forelegs over her head, pulling the chain between them across her neck. The sledgehammer fell from her mouth as the raider pony choked.
The unicorn turned, surprised by the sudden change in odds. I could have attacked her then, but threatening a pony is much different than actually attacking one. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to slash at another pony, to draw her blood. To maim, or possibly kill.
The unicorn kicked up the fallen sledgehammer and turned to face me with it, murder in her eyes. And suddenly, I found it easy to thrust the shovel-spear forward. I was no longer struggling with following through on a threat; this was survival. Self-preservation is instinctual; it clears away the moral hesitations. And while I did not have the fighting skills of my opponent, I did have an advantage all my own. S.A.T.S.
Aided by the targeting spell of my PipBuck, I sent the spear slashing across her knees, hobbling her. A second slash, this time across her face, relieved her of her weapon. The third would be a killing blow...
...except I wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet. Instead, I swung the spear around, cracking her across the head with its handle, hard enough to splinter the wood. The unicorn raider fell at my feet, unconscious. |
Although one of the drugs has been taken off the market for further study, researchers said differences in diabetes management and weight loss between the once-weekly drugs were all relatively close. Photo by Anukool Manoton/Shutterstock
LEICESTER, England, Dec. 8 (UPI) -- While there are now several glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1RAs, available for type 2 diabetes patients, little research has been done to compare the efficacy of one against the other.
Researchers at the Leicester Diabetes Center at the University of Leicester compared studies on the five drugs -- dulaglutide, sold as Trulicity, exenatide, sold as Byetta, and albiglutide, sold as Tanzeum, which are on already available, and two that are in development, taspoglutide and semaglutide.
GLP-1RAs, which have have been available since 2010, are once-a-week subcutaneous injections said to have a lower risk of causing hypoglycemia than similar previous medications.
"In clinical studies, these drugs improve glucose control and reduce body weight, without an increased risk for hypoglycemia," researchers said in a press release. "To date, however, no direct comparisons between once-weekly GLP-1RAs are available."
Researchers compared 34 randomized, controlled trials that included 21,126 participants, to find that all five reduced HbA1c and fasting plasma glucose more effectively than placebo treatments. In addition, taspoglutide, exenatide and dulaglutide all were shown to reduce body weight.
The researchers reported little or no difference in the drugs' effects on blood pressure, blood lipid levels, and C-reactive protein levels.
"Compared to other available once-weekly GLP-1RAs, dulaglutide 1.5mg and once weekly exenatide showed a greater reduction of HbA1c and fasting plasma glucose," Dr Francesco Zaccardi, a researcher at the Leicester Diabetes Center, said in a press release. "The risk of hypoglycaemia among once-weekly GLP-1RAs was comparable. Taspoglutide, one of the agents evaluated, has already been withdrawn from the market for high rates of nausea, and this has been confirmed in the meta-analysis".
RELATED Metformin may not help control blood sugar in obese teens with type 1 diabetes
The study is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. |
The special territories of the European Union are 31 territories of EU member states which, for historical, geographical, or political reasons, enjoy special status within or outside the European Union. The special territories divided themselves in two categories: 9 Outermost Regions (OMR) that form part of the European Union, though they benefit from derogations from some EU laws due to their geographical remoteness from mainland Europe; and 22 Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) that do not form part of the European Union, though they cooperate with the EU via the Overseas Countries and Territories Association.
The Outermost Regions were recognised at the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992[1] and confirmed by the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007.[2] The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union states that both primary and secondary European Union law applies automatically to the outermost regions, with possible derogations due to the particularities of these territories. The Overseas Countries and Territories are recognised by the Article 198 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union which allows them to opt into EU provisions on the freedom of movement for workers and freedom of establishment, and invites them to join the Overseas Countries and Territories Association (OCTA) in order to improve cooperation with the European Union.[3]
Collectively, the special territories encompass a population of about 6 million people and a land area of about 2,743,510 square kilometres (1,060,000 sq mi). The vast majority of this land area, 2,166,000 square kilometres (660,000 sq mi), is represented by Greenland, while the largest region by population, the Canary Islands, accounts for more than a third of the total special territories population. Pitcairn Islands, settled by the survivors of the Mutiny on the Bounty, is the smallest settled territory with 50 inhabitants, while the smallest by land area is the island of Saba in the Caribbean (13 km2 or 5 sq mi).
Map [ edit ]
Map of the European Union in the world, with overseas countries and territories (OCT) and outermost regions (OMR)
Outermost regions [ edit ]
The Outermost regions (OMR) are territories forming part of a member state of the European Union but situated a significant distance from mainland Europe. Due to this situation, they have derogation from some EU policies despite being part of the European Union. The nine Outermost regions of the European Union are:
Status [ edit ]
According to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, both primary and secondary European Union law applies automatically to these territories, with possible derogations to take account of their "structural social and economic situation (...) which is compounded by their remoteness, insularity, small size, difficult topography and climate, economic dependence on a few products, the permanence and combination of which severely restrain their development".[4] All form part of the European Union customs area, however some fall outside of the Schengen Area and the European Union Value Added Tax Area.
Seven outermost regions were recognised at the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.[1] The Treaty of Lisbon included two additional territories (Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin) in 2007.[4] Saint Barthélemy changed its status from OMR to OCT with effect from 1 January 2012.[2] Mayotte, which was an OCT that joined the EU as a OMR with effect from 1 January 2014.[5]
Autonomous Regions of Portugal [ edit ]
Azores and Madeira are two groups of Portuguese islands in the Atlantic. Azores and Madeira are integral parts of the Portuguese Republic, but both have the special status as Autonomous Regions, with a degree of self-governance. While derogations from the application of EU law could apply, none do. Their VAT is lower than the rest of Portugal, but they are not outside the EU VAT Area.
Canary Islands [ edit ]
The Canary Islands are a Spanish archipelago off the African coast which form one of the 17 Autonomous Communities of Spain–the country's principal first-level administrative division. They are outside the EU VAT Area.[6] The Canary Islands are the most populous and economically strongest territory of all the outermost regions in the European Union. The outermost regions office for support and information is located in these islands, in the city of Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria.
French overseas departments [ edit ]
French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, and Réunion are five French overseas departments (which are also overseas regions) which under French law are, for the most part, treated as integral parts of the Republic. The euro is legal tender;[7] however, they are outside the Schengen Area and the EU VAT Area.[6]
Mayotte is the newest of the five overseas departments having changed from an overseas collectivity, with OCT status, on 31 March 2011. It became an outermost region and thus part of the EU on 1 January 2014.[8]
Collectivity of Saint Martin [ edit ]
Saint Martin is the only overseas collectivity of France with the status of being an outermost region of the EU.[9] As with the French overseas departments, the euro is legal tender in Saint Martin, and it is outside the Schengen Area and the EU VAT Area.
On 22 February 2007, Saint Martin and Saint Barthélemy were broken away from the French overseas department of Guadeloupe to form new overseas collectivities. As a consequence their EU status was unclear for a time. While a report issued by the French parliament suggested that the islands remained within the EU as outermost regions,[10] European Commission documents listed them as being outside the European Community.[11] The legal status of the islands was clarified on the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty which listed them as an outermost region.[12] However, Saint Barthélemy ceased being an outermost region and left the EU, to become an OCT, on 1 January 2012.
Overseas countries and territories [ edit ]
The overseas countries and territories (OCT) are dependent territories that have a special relationship with one of the member states of the EU. Their status is described in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, and they are not part of the EU or the Single Market. The Overseas Countries and Territories Association was created to improve economic development and cooperation between the OCTs and the EU[13], and includes most OCTs except 3 territories which do not have a permanent local population.
Overseas Countries and Territories Association [ edit ]
The Overseas Countries and Territories Association (OCTA) is an organisation founded on November 17, 2000 and headquartered in Brussels. Its purpose is to improve economic development in overseas countries and territories, as well as cooperation with the European Union. On 25 June 2008, a Cooperation Treaty between the EU and OCTA was signed in Brussels.[14] Current chairmen is the Premier of Turks and Caicos Islands, Sharlene Cartwright Robinson.[15]
22 of the 25 OCTs have joined OCTA as of July 2014, following the adhesion of Bermuda.[16] The three OCTs which are not part of OCTA (British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory and South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands) do not have a permanent population.[17]
Status [ edit ]
The overseas countries and territories (OCT) have been explicitly invited by the EU treaty to join the EU-OCT Association (OCTA).[3] They were listed in the Article 198 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which aside from inviting them to join OCTA, also provided them the opportunity to opt into EU provisions on the freedom of movement for workers[18] and freedom of establishment.[19] Yet, the freedom of establishment is limited by Article 203 TFEU and the respective Council Decision on OCTs. Its Article 51(1)(a) prescribes only that "the Union shall accord to natural and legal persons of the OCTs a treatment no less favourable than the most favourable treatment applicable to like natural and legal persons of any third country with whom the Union concludes or has concluded an economic integration agreement." Again this can be, according to Article 51(2)(b) limited. The obligations provided for in paragraph 1 of this Article shall not apply to treatment granted under measures providing for recognition of qualifications, licences or prudential measures in accordance with Article VII of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) or the GATS Annex on Financial Services.
The OCTs are not subject to the EU's common external customs tariffs[20] but may claim customs on goods imported from the EU on a non-discriminatory basis.[21] They are not part of the EU and the EU acquis does not apply to them, though those joining OCTA are required to respect the detailed rules and procedures outlined by this association agreement (Council Decision 2013/755/EU).[22] OCTA members are entitled to ask for EU financial support.[23]
When the Rome Treaty was signed in March 1957, a total of 15 OCTs existed: French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Comoros Archipelago, French Madagascar, French Somaliland, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, French Southern and Antarctic Lands, French Togoland, French Cameroons, Belgian Congo, Ruanda-Urundi, Trust Territory of Somalia, Netherlands New Guinea. The list was since then revised multiple times, and comprised—as noted by the Lisbon Treaty—25 OCTs in 2007. One of the French territories subsequently switched status from OMR to OCT (Saint Barthélemy), while another French territory switched from OCT to OMR (Mayotte). As of July 2014, there are still 25 OCTs (twelve with the United Kingdom, six with France, six with the Netherlands and one with Denmark)[24] of which 22 have joined OCTA.[16] The three OCTs which are not part of OCTA (British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory and South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands) do not have a permanent population.[17]
French overseas territories [ edit ]
The French Southern and Antarctic Lands (which also include the French Scattered Islands in the Indian Ocean, and the French claim of Adélie Land in Antarctica) is a French Overseas Territory but has no permanent population.[25] It has sui generis status within France.[26]
Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Barthélemy, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna are overseas collectivities (formerly referred to as overseas territories) of France, while New Caledonia is a "sui generis collectivity". Saint Barthélemy[27] and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon use the euro,[28] while New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna use the CFP Franc, a currency which is tied to the euro and guaranteed by France. Natives of the collectivities are European citizens owing to their French citizenship and elections to the European Parliament are held in the collectivities.
On 22 February 2007, Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin were separated from the French overseas department of Guadeloupe to form new overseas collectivities. As a consequence, their EU status was unclear for a time. While a report issued by the French parliament suggested that the islands remained within the EU as outermost regions,[10] European Commission documents listed them as being outside the European Community.[11] The legal status of the islands was clarified on the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty which listed them as outermost regions.[12] However, Saint Barthélemy ceased being an outermost region and left the EU, to become an OCT, on 1 January 2012. The change was made to facilitate trade with countries outside the EU, notably the United States,[29] and was made possible by a provision of the Lisbon Treaty which allows the European Council to change the EU status of a Danish, Dutch, or French territory on the initiative of the member state concerned.[30]
Dutch overseas territories [ edit ]
Six territories of the Netherlands — all of which are Caribbean islands — have OCT status. As such, they benefit from being able to have their own export and import policy to and from the EU, while still having access to receive various EU funds (i.e. from the European Development Fund). The inhabitants of the islands are EU citizens owing to their Dutch citizenship, with the right to vote in elections to the European Parliament.[31] Initially they did not have voting rights for such elections, but the European Court of Justice granted them such rights, when they ruled their exclusion from the franchise was contrary to EU law, as all other Dutch citizens resident outside the EU did have the right to vote.[32] None of the islands use the euro as their currency. The US dollar is used on Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, while Curaçao and Sint Maarten utilize their own shared currency the Antillean guilder, and finally the currency of Aruba is the Aruban florin.[31]
Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten are classified as "countries" under Dutch law and have considerable internal autonomy. In June 2008, the Dutch government published a report on the effect on the islands were they to join the EU as outermost regions.[33][34] It concluded that it would be for the islands themselves to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of becoming part of the EU as outermost regions and that nothing would be done absent the islands specifically requesting it.[35]
Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba (collectively called Caribbean Netherlands) are "special municipalities" of the Netherlands proper. Their current OCT status, and the prospect of advancing their status to become part of the EU as new OMRs (outermost regions), has been scheduled to be reviewed by the Dutch parliament in 2015,[36] as part of the planned review of the Dutch law (WOLBES and FINBES) concerning the quality of their recently implemented new public administration bodies.[37] In October 2015, the review concluded the present legal structures for governance and integration with European Netherlands was not working well within the framework of WolBES, but no recommendations were made in regards of whether a switch from OCT to OMR status would help improve this situation.[38][39][40][41]
The islands inherited their OCT status from the Netherlands Antilles which was dissolved in 2010. The Netherlands Antilles were initially specifically excluded from all association with the EEC by reason of a protocol attached to the Treaty of Rome, allowing the Netherlands to ratify on behalf of the Netherlands in Europe and Netherlands New Guinea only, which it subsequently did.[42] Following the entry into force of the Convention on the association of the Netherlands Antilles with the European Economic Community on 1 October 1964, however, the Netherlands Antilles became OCTs.
Greenland [ edit ]
View of Kangertittivaq in eastern Greenland, one of the largest sund- fjord systems in the world
Greenland joined the then European Community in 1973 as a county along with Denmark, but after gaining autonomy with the introduction of home rule within the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland voted to leave in 1982 and left in 1985, to become an OCT. The main reason for leaving is disagreements about the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) and to regain control of Greenlandic fish resources to subsequently remain outside EU waters. Citizens of Greenland are, nonetheless, EU citizens within the meaning of EU treaties and Danish nationality law.
The EU–Greenland relationship is a comprehensive partnership, which is complementary to the OCT association arrangements under "Council Decision 2013/755/EU"; based specifically on "Council Decision 2014/137 of 14 March 2014" (outlining the relations)[43] and the Fisheries Partnership Agreement of 30 July 2006.[44]
British Overseas Territories [ edit ]
Twelve of the fourteen British Overseas Territories have OCT status namely: Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Antarctic Territory, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Falkland Islands, Montserrat, the Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
The British Antarctic Territory, the British Indian Ocean Territory and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands have no permanent population. Since 2014, they are the only 3 OCTs which are not part of OCTA.
Bermuda originally declined to take advantage of OCT status and did not join the Overseas Countries and Territories Association until 2014,[16] having originally declined to join with the other overseas territories in 2001.[45]
The other two British Overseas Territories: Gibraltar and the British sovereign base areas in Cyprus are dealt with under the Special cases section below.
All citizens of the British overseas territories, except those residing at Britain's sovereign bases in Cyprus (which keep their local citizenships from the two governments in Cyprus, while other civil British residents are not permanent residents), were granted full British citizenship by the British Overseas Territories Act 2002, and are consequently citizens of the European Union.[46]
Special cases in Europe [ edit ]
While the outermost regions and the overseas countries and territories fall into structured categories to which common mechanisms apply, this is not true of all the special territories. Some territories have ad hoc arrangements in their relationship with the EU. Some of these could be called "protocol territories"[citation needed] as their status is governed by protocols attached to their respective countries' accession treaties. The rest owe their status to European Union legislative provisions which exclude the territories from the application of the legislation concerned. Many were opted out from either the VAT area or the customs union or both.[47]
Åland Islands [ edit ]
Åland, a group of islands belonging to Finland, but with partial autonomy, located between Sweden and Finland, with a Swedish-speaking population, joined the EU along with Finland in 1995. The islands had a separate referendum on accession and like the Finnish mainland voted in favour.
EU law, including the fundamental four freedoms, applies to Åland.[48] However, there are some derogations due to the islands' special status. Åland is outside the VAT area[6] and is exempt from common rules in relation to turnover taxes, excise duties and indirect taxation.[49] In addition, to protect the local economy, the treaty of accession allows for a concept of hembygdsrätt/kotiseutuoikeus (regional citizenship). Consequently, there are restrictions on the holding of property and real estate, the right of establishment for business purposes and limitations on who can provide services in Åland, for people not holding this status.[50] The status may be obtained by any Finnish citizen legally resident in Åland for 5 years who can demonstrate an adequate knowledge of the Swedish language.[51]
Büsingen am Hochrhein [ edit ]
The German village of Büsingen am Hochrhein, is an exclave entirely surrounded by Switzerland and as such is, for practical purposes in a customs union with the latter non-EU country.[52] The euro is legal tender, though the Swiss franc is preferred.[53] Büsingen is excluded from the EU customs union and the EU VAT area.[6] Swiss VAT applies.[54] Büsingen was also outside of the Schengen area until Switzerland joined on 12 December 2008.
Campione d'Italia and Livigno [ edit ]
The Italian exclave village of Campione d'Italia is enclaved by Switzerland's Ticino canton as well as Lake Lugano (or Ceresio), and is a comune in the Province of Como, whilst Livigno, a small and remote mountain resort town, is a comune in the Province of Sondrio. Both comuni are part of the Lombardy region. Although part of the EU, they are excluded from the customs union and VAT area, with Livigno's tax status dating back to Napoleonic times.[6] Moreover, the only legal tender in Campione d'Italia is the Swiss franc,[55][56] although in practice shops and restaurants accept payments also in euro - and their bills present dual price display in both Euros and Francs.[57]
Ceuta and Melilla [ edit ]
Ceuta and Melilla are two Spanish cities on the North African coast. They are part of the EU but they are excluded from the common agricultural and fisheries policies.[58] They are also outside the customs union and VAT area,[6] but no customs are levied on goods exported from the Union into either Ceuta and Melilla, and certain goods originating in Ceuta and Melilla are exempt from customs charges.
While nominally part of the Schengen Area (Schengen visas are valid), Spain performs identity checks on all sea and air passengers leaving the enclaves for elsewhere in the Schengen Area.[59]
Channel Islands [ edit ]
The Bailiwick of Jersey and Bailiwick of Guernsey—which form the Channel Islands—are Crown dependencies, under the sovereignty of the British monarch and thus part of the remaining British Empire. The islands take part in the EU freedom of movement of goods but not labour, services or capital. They are outside the VAT area, but inside the customs union.[6]
Channel Islanders are British citizens and hence European citizens.[60] As a result, they can travel freely within the EU, and all European citizens can travel to the islands without restrictions. However, the islands do not participate in the freedom of movement of labour, and as a result their citizens are not entitled to work or reside within the EU unless they are directly connected (through birth, or descent from a parent or grandparent) with the United Kingdom. After five years continuous residence in the United Kingdom, islanders are entitled to participate in the freedom of movement of labour or services throughout the EU.[61]
Isle of Man [ edit ]
The Isle of Man is a Crown dependency, under the sovereignty of the British monarch. The island takes part in the EU freedom of movement of goods but not labour, services or capital. The Isle of Man is inside the VAT area and the customs union.[6]
Manx people are British citizens and hence European citizens.[60] As a result, they can travel freely within the EU, and all European citizens can travel to the Isle of Man without restrictions. However, the island does not participate in the freedom of movement of labour, and as a result its citizens are not entitled to work or reside within the EU unless they are directly connected (through birth, or descent from a parent or grandparent) with the United Kingdom. After five years continuous residence in the United Kingdom, Manx people are entitled to participate in the freedom of movement of labour or services throughout the EU.[61]
Cyprus [ edit ]
When the Republic of Cyprus became part of the European Union on 1 May 2004, the northern third of the island was outside of the effective control of its government due to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, a United Nations buffer zone of varying width separated the two parts, and a further 3% of the island was taken up by UK sovereign bases (under British sovereignty since the Treaty of Establishment in 1960). Two protocols to the Treaty of Accession 2003 – numbers 3 and 10, known as the "Sovereign Base Areas Protocol" and the "Cyprus Protocol" respectively – reflect this complex situation.
EU law only applies fully to the part of the island that is effectively controlled by the government of the Republic of Cyprus. EU law is suspended in the northern third of the island (the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, whose independence is recognised only by Turkey) by article 1(1) of the Cyprus Protocol.[62] If the island is reunified, the Council of the European Union will repeal the suspension by a decision. Four months after such a decision has been adopted, new elections to the European Parliament will be held on the island to elect Cypriot representatives from the whole of the island.[63]
Cypriot nationality law applies to the entire island and is accordingly available to the inhabitants of Northern Cyprus and the British sovereign base areas on the same basis as to those born in the area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus.[64][65] Citizens of the Republic of Cyprus living in Northern Cyprus are EU citizens and are entitled to vote in elections to the European Parliament; however, elections to that Parliament are not organised in Northern Cyprus as it is de facto administered as a transitional state to become either a province or Turkey or a constituent of Republic of Cyprus.[citation needed]
Akrotiri and Dhekelia [ edit ]
The United Kingdom has two sovereign base areas on Cyprus, namely Akrotiri and Dhekelia. Unlike other British overseas territories, they are not listed as Overseas Countries and Territories under the Treaty of Rome and their inhabitants (who are entitled to British Overseas Territories Citizenship) have never been entitled to British citizenship.
Prior to Cypriot accession to the EU in 2004, EU law did not apply to the sovereign base areas.[66] This position was changed by the Cypriot accession treaty and EU law, while still not applying in principle, applies to the extent necessary to implement a protocol attached to that treaty.[67] This protocol applies EU law relating to the Common Agricultural Policy, customs, indirect taxation, social policy and justice and home affairs to the sovereign base areas. The sovereign base areas' authorities have also made provision for the unilateral application of directly applicable EU law.[68] The UK also agreed in the Protocol to keep enough control of the external (i.e. off-island and northern Cyprus) borders of the base areas to ensure that the border between the sovereign base areas and the Republic of Cyprus can remain fully open and will not have to be policed as an external EU border. Consequently, the sovereign base areas will become a de facto part of the Schengen Area if and when Cyprus implements it. The base areas are already de facto members of the eurozone due to their previous use of the Cypriot pound before it was replaced by the euro in 2008.[69]
As pointed out above, inhabitants of the sovereign base areas have never been entitled to British citizenship or to the European Union citizenship that would go with it,[70] however Cypriot nationality law extends to Cypriots in the Sovereign Base Areas, meaning Cypriot residents, as citizens of the Republic of Cyprus, are entitled to EU citizenship. Just under half of the population of the sovereign base areas are Cypriots, the rest are British military personnel, support staff and their dependants.[71] In a declaration attached to the Treaty of Establishment of the Republic of Cyprus of 1960 the British government undertook not to allow new settlement of people in the sovereign base areas other than for temporary purposes.[72]
Since the situation is regulated in an agreement between Cyprus and the EU, and the bases are not part of the EU, it can be assumed that the situation does not change much with Brexit 2019.[73]
United Nations buffer zone [ edit ]
The United Nations buffer zone between north and south Cyprus ranges in width from a few metres in central Nicosia to several kilometres in the countryside. While it is nominally under the sovereignty of the Republic of Cyprus, it is effectively administered by the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP). The population of the zone is 8,686 (as of October 2007), and one of the mandates of UNFICYP is "to encourage the fullest possible resumption of normal civilian activity in the buffer zone".[74] Article 2.1 of the Cyprus Protocol[62] allows the European Council to determine to what extent the provisions of EU law apply in the buffer zone.[75]
Faroe Islands [ edit ]
The Faroe Islands are not part of the EU, and they have not been part of the EU since Denmark joined the community in 1973. Danish citizens residing on the islands are not considered citizens of a member state within the meaning of the treaties or, consequently, citizens of the European Union.[76] However, Faroese people may become EU citizens by changing their residence to the Danish mainland.
The Faroe Islands are not part of the Schengen Area, and Schengen visas are not valid. However, the islands are part of the Nordic Passport Union and the Schengen Agreement provides that travellers passing between the islands and the Schengen Area are not to be treated as passing the external frontier of the Area.[77] This means that there is an identity check at air or boat travel to the islands where Nordic citizens on intra-Nordic travel need no passport, only showing the ticket plus identity card.[78]
Gibraltar [ edit ]
Gibraltar is a British overseas territory located near the southernmost tip of the Iberian Peninsula and overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar, sharing a border with Spain to the north. It is part of the EU, having joined the European Economic Community under the United Kingdom in 1973. Article 355(3) (ex Article 299(4)) applies the treaty to "the European territories for whose external relations a Member State is responsible", a provision which in practice only applies to Gibraltar. Although it is part of the EU, Gibraltar is outside the customs union and VAT area and is exempted from the Common Agricultural Policy; it does not form part of the Schengen Area.[79] As a separate jurisdiction to the UK, Gibraltar's government and parliament are responsible for the transposition of EU law into local law. In 2016 Gibraltar voted "remain" in the UK EU membership referendum; however Gibraltar's membership is not distinct from the UK's and Gibraltar is bound by the overall result of "leave".
Owing to a declaration lodged by the United Kingdom with the EEC in 1982, Gibraltarians were to be counted as British nationals for the purposes of Community law. This was notwithstanding that they were not, at the time, British citizens, but were British Overseas Territories citizens with the right to be registered as British citizens.[80] As such, Gibraltarians have enjoyed European Community treaty rights since UK's accession to the European Community, and subsequently European Union citizenship since the Maastricht Treaty. It was not until 21 May 2002 when Gibraltarians who did not apply for British citizenship were automatically granted British citizenship while still retaining their British Overseas Territories citizenship under the British Overseas Territories Act 2002. Children born in Gibraltar after 21 May 2002 now also have access to British citizenship under the same rules as UK-born children.[70]
Despite their status as EU citizens resident in the EU, elections to the European Parliament were not held in Gibraltar until 2004. The inclusion resulted from the European Court of Human Rights' 1999 ruling in Matthews v. United Kingdom which deemed that Gibraltar's exclusion violated Article 3 of Protocol 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights. In the 2004 European Parliament election the territory was part of the South West England constituency of the United Kingdom. The inclusion was unsuccessfully challenged by Spain before the European Court of Justice.[32]
Like the UK, Gibraltar does not form part of the Schengen Area and, as a result, the border between Spain and Gibraltar is an external Schengen border through which Spain is legally obliged to perform full entrance and exit controls. However Gibraltar does participate in certain police and judicial cooperation aspects of the Schengen acquis in line with the UK's request to participate in the same measures.[81]
With respect to the application of EU law to Gibraltar, the governments of Spain and the United Kingdom made the following Declaration which is appended (as Declaration 55) to the Treaty on European Union: "The Treaties apply to Gibraltar as a European territory for whose external relations a Member State is responsible. This shall not imply changes in the respective positions of the Member States concerned."[82]
Heligoland [ edit ]
Heligoland is an island of Germany situated in the North Sea 70 km (43 mi) off the German north-western coast. It is part of the EU, but is excluded from the customs union and the VAT area.[6]
Mount Athos [ edit ]
Mount Athos is an autonomous monastic region of Greece. Greece's EU accession treaty provides that Mount Athos maintains its centuries-old special legal status,[83] guaranteed by article 105 of the Greek Constitution. It is part of the customs union but outside the VAT area.[6] Notwithstanding that a special permit is required to enter the peninsula and that there is a prohibition on the admittance of women, it is part of the Schengen Area.[84] The monastery has certain rights to house monks from countries outside the EU. A declaration attached to Greece's accession treaty to the Schengen Agreement states that Mount Athos's "special status" should be taken into account in the application of the Schengen rules.[85]
Areas of extraterritoriality [ edit ]
The Saimaa Canal and Värska–Ulitina road are two of several distinct travel arrangements that exist or existed because of changes in borders over the course of the 20th century, where transport routes and installations ended up on the wrong side of the border. Some have become superfluous thanks to the Schengen Agreement.
Saimaa Canal [ edit ]
Finland leases the 19.6 km-long Russian part of the Saimaa Canal from Russia and is granted extraterritoriality rights.[86] The area is not part of the EU, it is a special part of Russia. Under the treaty signed by Finnish and Russian governments, Russian law is in force with a few exceptions concerning maritime rules and the employment of canal staff which fall under Finnish jurisdiction. There are also special rules concerning vessels travelling to Finland via the canal. Russian visas are not required for just passing through the canal, but a passport is needed and it is checked at the border.[86] Euros are accepted for the canal fees. Prior to the 50-year lease renewal coming into effect in February 2012, the Maly Vysotsky Island had also been leased and managed by Finland. Since then it has been fully managed by Russian authorities, and is no longer part of the concession territory.
Värska–Ulitina road [ edit ]
The road from Värska to Ulitina in Estonia, traditionally the only road to the Ulitina area, goes through Russian territory for one kilometre (0.6 mi) of its length, an area called Saatse Boot.[87] This road has no border control, but there is no connection to any other road in Russia. It is not permissible to stop or walk along the road. This area is a part of Russia but is also a de facto part of the Schengen area.
Former special territories [ edit ]
Many currently independent states or parts of such were previously territories of the following EU members since the latter joined the EU or, previously the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC):
Belgium (with multiple territories, from ECSC formation until 1962)
France (with multiple territories, from ECSC formation)
Italy (with Italian Somaliland, from ECSC formation until 1960)
The Netherlands (with multiple territories, from ECSC formation)
Portugal (with multiple territories, from 1986 enlargement until 2002)
United Kingdom (with multiple territories, from 1973 enlargement)
Most of these territories seceded before the implementation of the Maastricht treaty in 1993 and the following years, meaning that cooperation like the EU citizenship, the VAT union or the Eurozone did not exist, so it made less difference to be a special territory then.
These were:
Additionally in Europe there were special territories in the past that had different status than their "mainland", because of various reasons, but now are part of a member state. Some of these territories were as follows:
The Austrian areas of Kleinwalsertal and Jungholz formerly enjoyed a special legal status. The two areas have road access only to Germany, and not directly to other parts of Austria. They were in customs and currency union with Germany and there were no border controls between Kleinwalsertal and Jungholz, respectively, and Germany. When Austria entered the EU (and its customs union) in 1995, the customs union became defunct. The entry into force of the Schengen Agreement for Austria (1997) and the introduction of the euro (2002) caused Kleinwalsertal and Jungholz to lose their remaining legal privileges. It is now legally treated in the same manner as the rest of Austria.
Saar (merged with West Germany on 1 January 1957), was fully part of the Community as French-administered European territory [98]
West Berlin (merged with West Germany on 3 October 1990), was subject to the full application of the treaties [d]
East Germany was until 1972 on paper a part of one Germany and the European Community, since West Germany, the NATO countries and the European Community did not recognize East Germany until 1972. East Germany did not recognize any membership of the EC. The West German government treated trade with East Germany as inter-German trade and not subject to the EC trade tariffs.
The following areas are still special member state territories, but have changed their status. See their entries in the article for details.
European Free Trade Association [ edit ]
Some European countries are strongly connected to the European Union, through the European Economic Area or similar agreements. These countries are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, the member states of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). They are inside the single market (with exceptions) and the Schengen area, but outside the Eurozone, customs territory, and VAT area. Norway and Switzerland have special areas.
Limitations on free movement of workers as a result of indefinite use of safeguard measures in Article 112 of the EEA Agreement.
Outside the Schengen area Outside Norwegian VAT area[100] Outside the Single Market De facto free movement of people as a result of Norwegian citizenship, and allowing EEA/Swiss citizens to reside without restrictions, although special rules on work permits apply[101]
Outside Swiss VAT area[102]
Summary [ edit ]
Summary [ edit ]
This table summarises the various components of EU laws applied in the EU member states and their sovereign territories. Member states that do not have special-status territories are not included (as there the EU law applies fully with the exception of the opt-outs in the European Union and states under a safeguard clause or transitional period). Some territories of EFTA member states also have a special status in regard to EU laws applied as is the case with some European microstates.[109]
Summary for member states that do not have special-status territories, but do not participate in certain EU provisions as they are either not yet eligible or have an opt-out.
A list of the remaining member states which do not have special-status territories, and participate in all EU provisions:
Austria
Belgium
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malta
Slovakia
Slovenia
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ] |
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Is the reliable, respectable news coverage you get from WBHM and NPR worth 30 cents per year?
Before you answer, let’s throw into the deal cultural and entertainment programs, like This American Life, Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! and Mountain Stage.
Wait, there’s more, like the jazz and classical music that WBHM brings you every evening.
Thirty cents. Per citizen. Per year.
That’s how much all of public radio in the United States receives through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Do that math, and in the context of overall federal spending, the amount that goes to public broadcasting is the change beneath the sofa cushion.
But not chump change. The CPB’s annual grants are a small but significant portion of our annual revenue here at WBHM. It’s about 15 percent of our operating budget. Along with the generosity of our individual members, corporate underwriters and philanthropists (about 70 percent of all revenue) and vital support from UAB, that CPB money helps us acquire the programs you hear and, yes, make payroll and pay expenses.
It is a small investment with a big impact.
In his budget recommendations for fiscal year 2018, President Trump is asking Congress to defund the CPB. What’s the cost to taxpayers? The entire CPB budget for public radio and television — $445 million in the current fiscal year — represents 0.01% of federal spending.
Public radio emerged 50 years ago with the mission to enrich American communities with independent journalism and educational programming in large cities and rural places often cut off from sources of news and information.
In Birmingham, it means WBHM brings you NPR’s national and international coverage, and our own local stories on issues relevant to Alabamians.
If our station lost CPB funding I believe we’d see an immediate outpouring of support from the community that would make up the difference. The problem in future years would be sustaining that support. And the larger problem: What would happen to the public broadcasting system? Lots of other stations across the country are more dependent on CPB money and would have to reduce their program purchases from NPR and other content providers, depriving those organizations of revenue that supports their journalism. That would affect the quality and variety of programming available to WBHM listeners.
I know plenty of conservative Republicans who respect the work of public broadcasting and want to find smarter ways of financing it, not toss it out. The hard work for the GOP-controlled Congress will be to reconcile the president’s wishes with the simple fact that eliminating the CPB would have unintended consequences.
What can you do?
At Protect My Public Media you’ll find a petition to Congress where millions of people are rallying to express their support for public radio and TV.
More than 100,000 listeners a week tune into the station, but we have just 5,200 members. Many of you already support WBHM with your contributions, and we need more of you. If you’re not a member, become one.
Then please spread the word to friends, family and co-workers to support your local public radio station at our web site, WBHM.org. And on social media, please use our hashtag: #PledgeWBHM.
It’s your radio station. We just run it. Thank you. |
President Obama delivers remarks at a campaign event at George Mason University in Fairfax, hailing the news that the economy added 114,000 jobs in September and the jobless rate had fallen to 7.8 percent, the lowest since the president took office.
Oct. 5, 2012 President Obama delivers remarks at a campaign event at George Mason University in Fairfax, hailing the news that the economy added 114,000 jobs in September and the jobless rate had fallen to 7.8 percent, the lowest since the president took office. Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post
President Obama kept up his tough critique of rival Mitt Romney during a rally in Northern Virginia on Friday, attacking his rival’s positions on health care and contraception in an appeal to women voters.
Obama used his appearance at George Mason University in Fairfax to hail the news that the economy added 114,000 jobs in September and the jobless rate had fallen to 7.8 percent, the lowest since the president took office. However, he added that more work needs to be done to ensure that unemployed Americans can find work.
As he did Thursday during speeches in Denver and Madison, Wis., Obama went on the offensive in the wake of his sluggish debate performance two days ago. He again mocked Romney’s comment, during their debate Wednesday in Denver, that he would eliminate federal funding to PBS even though he likes Big Bird.
“When he was asked what he’d actually do to cut spending and reduce the deficit, his big example is to go after public television,” Obama said. “So, for all you moms and kids out there, don’t worry — someone is finally getting tough on Big Bird. Rounding him up. Elmo has got to watch out, too. Governor Romney plans to let Wall Street run wild again, but he’s going to bring down the hammer on ‘Sesame Street.’ It makes perfect sense.”
The Romney campaign released a statement from Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R), who said that 23 million Americans remain out of work or stuck in part-time jobs. “President Obama’s policies are not working to deliver the real recovery our country needs,” McDonnell said. “We limp from month to month of sluggish job growth that is barely sufficient to keep up with population growth.”
View Graphic Follow President Obama, Mitt Romney, their running mates and spouses on the campaign trail
In his speech, the president lit into Romney on women’s health issues, an area where the Obama campaign believes it has gained a significant advantage. Polls show the president with a healthy lead among women voters nationally, an edge that has helped boost him to a lead in swing states, including Virginia, where Obama leads Romney by 19 points among women.
Obama warned that Romney’s economic policies would return the country to the past decade under his predecessor, George W. Bush, and that Romney’s health-care policies would return women to the 1950s by limiting their ability to access contraception, get an abortion and purchase insurance that covers breast cancer.
“The decisions that affect a woman’s health are not up to politicians, they’re not up to insurance companies, they’re up to you,” Obama said. “You deserve a president who will fight to keep it that way.”
In Virginia, state GOP lawmakers gained national attention this year after proposing legislation that would have required that most women seeking an abortion undergo a transvaginal ultrasound, a concept lampooned by liberal TV commentators and even “Saturday Night Live.” Amid the uproar, McDonnell had the bill amended to specify a less invasive method, but Democrats have continued to try to capitalize politically on the controversy.
Obama also alluded obliquely to the political fight this year over his health-care reform bill’s requirement that employers provide female employees with coverage that pays for contraception. After leaders of the Catholic Church, along with social conservatives, protested, the administration allowed some exemptions for religious institutions.
“I don’t think your boss should control the care you get. I don’t think insurance companies should control the care you get. I definitely don’t think politicians on Capitol Hill should control the care you get,” the president said. “We’ve seen some of their attitudes. We’ve read about those. I think there’s one person who gets to make decisions about your health care — that’s you.” |
New England Patriots players typically are hesitant to discuss injuries. Defensive end Rob Ninkovich bucked that trend Tuesday.
During an interview with 98.5 The Sports Hub’s “Toucher & Rich,” Ninkovich revealed he has been playing with a blood clot in his leg since late last season.
“I’ve played through a bunch of stuff,” Ninkovich said when asked to name his worst football injury. “But last year versus the Jets, I got hit in the leg, which turned into a blood clot. They thought that I had compartment syndrome, which is when you mess up part of your leg to where it swells up so much that they have to cut you open.
“That wasn’t compartment syndrome, but it just a very big blood clot in my leg, which turned into a hole — a big, cavernous, three-inch hole in my leg. And they had to pack it. Every day, they had to pack it with gauze, and I had to wear this thing over it, and I had to take antibiotics, and I still have a blood clot in my leg right now. So I hope that it doesn’t travel.”
Scary stuff.
Ninkovich said after the hit, which occurred during New England’s Week 16 loss to the New York Jets, his leg swelled to “four times the regular size.”
“You feel it,” he said. “It hurts. It hurt when I was going through it. It hurt when I was trying to play through it. It’s just something you have to deal with. Pain is pain. You’ve just got to try to deal with it as best you can.”
Ninkovich did not miss a game following the injury, playing in the Patriots’ final regular-season game and both of their playoff contests. He suffered a torn triceps during training camp, then sat out the first four games of this season after testing positive for a banned substance.
Since returning in Week 5, Ninkovich has averaged 47 defensive snaps per game.
Thumbnail photo via Mark L. Baer/USA TODAY Sports Images |
Newcastle United target Charlie Austin is yet to make his mind up over where he will be playing next season.
That’s according to friend and former strike partner Billy Paynter, who has been texting the 25-year-old in a bid to find out who the highly sought-after forward will be signing for.
Paynter and Queens Park Rangers’ £15million-rated striker Austin go back a long way, having formed a deadly partnership during a prolific spell at Swindon Town.
And Paynter – who has joined League Two club Hartlepool United – believes his friend was always destined for the top.
Newcastle are keen to sign honeymooning Austin, whose netted 18 goals in the top flight last season, despite seeing his side being relegated, saw him included in Roy Hodgson’s England squad last month.
But with a host of other sides also chasing Austin –including West Ham United – Toon boss Steve McClaren faces stiff competition for the 6ft 2in striker’s services.
Billy Paynter
“I knew back then that Charlie had the potential to play in the Premier League,” revealed Paynter.
“He was a natural finisher. Everything is instinct with him, and if the ball is coming into his feet then he is always looking to get a shot off, which always catches the keeper off guard, and I’m not surprised he has gone on to better things.
“We still keep in touch – we speak every now and again – and I wish him all the best.
“I am texting him to see where he is moving to, or if he is moving, but he isn’t giving anything anyway!
Everything is instinct with him and if the ball is coming into his feet then he is always looking to get a shot off, which always catches the keeper off guard and I’m not surprised he has gone on to better things. Billy Paynter
“There are a few teams that have been sniffing around, and I’m sure QPR will want to try and keep him.
“But he doesn’t know where he is going yet.”
Austin – who turns 26 on Sunday – was a raw 19-year-old playing non-league for Poole when he was unearthed by Geordie talent scout Ken Ryder, who took him to Swindon Town.
It was there that he struck up a goal-den partnership with Paynter.
Austin’s spell at Swindon – were he netted 31 goals in 54 appearances – was the start of a remarkable rise for the forward. A £2million move to Burnley followed, before then-QPR boss Harry Redknapp took him to Loftus Road. Austin helped fire to the Premier League.
Reflecting on their time together at Swindon, 30-year-old Paynter said the pair felt unstoppable.
“Swindon was my most prolific spell in football, and I had a good partnership with Charlie Austin,” added Paynter.
“It was one of those spells where every time I was going out on the pitch I felt like I was going to score.
“I was happy and it was a comfortable environment for me.”
Meanwhile, Newcastle have been warned that Bas Dost won’t leave Bundesliga club Wolfsburg on the cheap.
The 26-year-old striker is one of the club’s top summer targets along with Austin.
But Wolfsburg sporting director Klaus Allofs says the club should use the £29milion fee that Liverpool paid Hoffenheim for Roberto Firmino as a yardstick when he comes to bidding for him.
“I read lump sum payments from 10million Euros (£7.1million) to 12million Euros (£8.5million) for Bas,” said Allofs.
“But then I refer to Firmino’s example, and say they will have to get used to higher amounts if any club really wants to buy Dost.” |
The battle for Aleppo and the hypocrisy of US war propaganda
10 August 2016
This week marks two years since President Barack Obama initiated the latest US war against Iraq and Syria, launched in the name of combating the Islamic State militia. The American president cast the new military intervention as not only a continuation of the “global war on terrorism,” but also a crusade for human rights, invoking the threat to Iraq’s Yazidi population and insisting that he could not “turn a blind eye” when religious minorities were threatened.
The toll of this supposed humanitarian intervention has grown ever bloodier. According to a report released this week by the monitoring group Airwars to mark the anniversary, more than 4,700 civilian non-combatant fatalities have been reported as a result of the “US-led Coalition’s” air strikes (95 percent of which have been carried out by US warplanes). More innocent Iraqi and Syrian men, women and children have been slaughtered by American bombs in the course of two years than the total number of US soldiers who lost their lives during the eight years of the Iraq war launched by President George W. Bush in 2003.
All of Washington’s lies and pretexts about its latest war in the Middle East—as well as the decade-and-a-half of wars waged since 9/11—have been exploded in the course of the past several days as the US government and media celebrated purported victories by “rebel” forces in the battle for control of Aleppo, Syria’s former commercial capital.
That the “rebel” offensive has been organized and led by an organization that for years constituted Al Qaeda’s designated Syrian branch, and the operation was named in honor of a Sunni sectarian extremist who carried out a massacre of captured Syrian Alawite soldiers, gave none of them pause. So much for the hogwash about terrorism and human rights!
The scale of the military gains made by the Al Qaeda-led forces in Aleppo are by no means clear. They have, however, apparently succeeded in placing under siege the western part of the city, which is under the government’s control and where the overwhelming majority of the population lives. The “rebels” have killed and maimed hundreds of people with mortar and artillery rounds.
Washington and its allies, the Western media and the human rights groups that accused the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad of crimes against humanity for bombing the jihadists in eastern Aleppo are now indifferent when these imperialist-backed terrorists are killing civilians in the western part of the city.
Sections of the Western media have gone so far as to celebrate the exploits of “rebel” suicide bombers for providing a strategic “advantage” for the Western-backed militias. Among the most dishonest and duplicitous accounts of the recent fighting are those that have appeared in the pages of the New York Times, whose news coverage and editorial line are carefully tailored to serve the predatory aims of US imperialism.
In a Monday article on Aleppo, the Times wrote that the challenge to government control had been mounted by “rebels and their jihadist allies.” The article continued: “A vital factor in the rebel advance over the weekend was cooperation between mainstream rebel groups, some of which have received covert arms support from the United States, and the jihadist organization formerly known as the Nusra Front, which was affiliated with Al Qaeda.”
The newspaper reports this as casually as if it were publishing a report on the late artist formerly known as Prince. The Nusra Front changed its name to the Fatah al-Sham Front and announced its formal disaffiliation from Al Qaeda—with the latter’s blessing—just one week before it launched the offensive in Aleppo.
There is every reason to believe that this rebranding was carried out in consultation with the CIA in an attempt to politically sanitize direct US support for an offensive led by a group that has long been denounced by Washington as a terrorist organization.
The Times never names any of the “mainstream rebel groups” it says are fighting alongside the Al Qaeda militia, suggesting that they constitute some liberal progressive force. In point of fact, one of these groups recently released a video showing its fighters beheading a wounded 12-year-old child, and virtually all of them share the essential ideological outlook of Al Qaeda.
The Financial Times of London carried one of the frankest reports on the Aleppo “rebel” offensive, noting that it “may have had more foreign help than it appears: activists and rebels say opposition forces were replenished with new weapons, cash and other supplies before and during the fighting.” It cites reports of daily columns of trucks pouring across the Turkish border for weeks with arms and ammunition, including artillery and other heavy weapons.
The newspaper quotes one unnamed Western diplomat who said that US officials backed the Al Qaeda-led offensive “to put some pressure back on Russia and Iran,” which have both provided key military support to the Assad government.
The Financial Times also quotes an unnamed “military analyst” as stating that the character of the fighting indicated the Al Qaeda forces had received not only massive amounts of weapons, but also professional military training.
Significantly, even as the fighting in Aleppo was underway, photographs surfaced of heavily armed British commandos operating long-range patrol vehicles in northern Syria. Similar US units are also on the ground. These are among the most likely suspects in terms of who is training Al Qaeda’s Syrian forces.
They would only be reprising the essential features of the imperialist operation that gave rise to Al Qaeda 30 years ago, when the CIA—working in close alliance with Osama bin Laden—supplied similar support to the mujahedeen fighting to overthrow the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan.
While the blowback from that episode ultimately gave us September 11, the present operation in Syria holds far greater dangers. In what is now openly described by the corporate media as a “proxy war” in which Al Qaeda serves as US imperialism’s ground force, Washington is attempting to overthrow Russia’s key Middle East ally as part of the preparations for a war aimed at dismembering and subjugating Russia itself.
The frontrunner in the US presidential contest, Democrat Hillary Clinton, has repeatedly signaled that she intends to pursue a far more aggressive policy in Syria and against Russia, making neo-McCarthyite charges of Vladimir Putin’s supposed subversion of the US election process a central part of her campaign.
Whether Washington can wait till inauguration day next January to escalate its aggression is far from clear. The “rebel” gains in Aleppo may be quickly reversed and the fighting could end with the US-backed Al Qaeda militias deprived of their last urban stronghold.
US imperialism is not about to accept the re-consolidation of a Syrian government aligned with Moscow. Pressure will inevitably mount for a more direct and more massive US intervention, threatening a direct clash between American and Russian forces.
Fifteen years after launching its “war on terror,” Washington is not only directly allied with the supposed target of that war—Al Qaeda—but is preparing to unleash upon humanity the greatest act of terror imaginable, a third world war.
Bill Van Auken
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Earth science theories
Los Angeles : Two theories by scientists have caught readers’ attention on Wednesday with one claiming that the sea ice off both Antarctica and in the Arctic has shrunk by an area the size of India. While the other one claiming that soon world might expect 25 hours a day.
Talking about the first report, Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado insists that the days are getting really, really long as both poles see record lows.
“There are some really crazy things going on. Temperatures in parts of the Arctic were 20 degrees Celsius above normal some days in November,” he said.
NSIDC data show 2 things:
Ice around Antarctica is retreating with a summer thaw, is the smallest for early December at 11.22 million square kilometers (4.33 million square miles), beating a record from 1982.
Arctic sea ice, expanding in winter, is at a record low of 10.25 million square kilometers (3.96 million square miles), below a 2006 record.
In another concern for scientists, researchers at Durham University and the UK’s Nautical Almanac Office feel that for the past 27 centuries, Earth days have been getting longer by two milliseconds per century – so in 200 million years, the day will be an hour longer.
Study author Leslie Morrison feels, “It’s actually slower than people previously thought – and it’s happening due to Earth’s orbit slowing down. It’s a very slow process. These estimates are approximate, because the geophysical forces operating on the Earth’s rotation will not necessarily be constant over such a long period of time.”
So either ways, it is bad news people- Either your city get submerged under water in coming days or you may have to work for another hour or so in future! |
As I was sitting in the sun-drenched grandstand of Pocono Raceway Sunday, I anticipated the reaction of the fans when Jimmie Johnson was introduced. When his name was finally announced the stands filled the air with boo’s drowning out the few folks who cheered. Jimmie Johnson is fast becoming the driver NASCAR fans love to hate. His crime? He’s too good.
Oh sure there are all sorts of conspiracy theories out there that he and his Crew Chief, Chad Knaus, are overstepping the boundaries of the rules – in other words “cheating”. Let’s take a look at some of the factors at play here.
Is Johnson and his team cheating? After the race on Sunday the Twitter world exploded when word reached the fan base that Johnson’s car was having an issue passing through the post-race inspection. The parking lot was filled with people yelling “Hey! Johnson isn’t passing inspection. They finally caught the son of a (expletive)!” Several minutes passed when word finally came that Johnson’s car eventually passed inspection after a cool down period. NASCAR officials quickly said that it’s standard that cars be allowed to “cool down” in order to meet the height/weight requirements.
All Sprint Cup cars are vigorously tested prior to the race. The race winners along with other cars are impounded and more thoroughly inspected for any violations. Therefore, because Jimmie Johnson wins more often than any other active driver, his car is the most inspected of any. Here are the only issues with Johnson’s car thus far:
February 2012: A C-Post issue discovered with Johnson’s car pre-race
October 2011: Crew Chief Chad Knaus overheard telling Johnson on the radio to intentionally wreck his car in the front if he wins the race.
June 2007: Failed fender inspection pre-race
February: Raised rear window fails post-inspection
March 2005: Johnson’s winning car fails to reach minimum height requirement in post-race inspection.
Folks, there is not much there. Unless NASCAR is involved in a conspiracy that would make OJ Simpson’s jurors blush, there does not appear to be any supporting evidence that Johnson’s team is getting any kind of an unfair advantage mechanically.
Is Jimmie Johnson’s car better? There is no question that the deep pockets of Hendrick Motorsport provide Johnson with the very best of the very best. Hendrick is by far and away the premier team in NASCAR whose stable includes Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kasey Kahne. In a recent interview Earnhardt Jr. said that they have an open-book policy at Hendrick where ALL information is shared between all four car teams. If that’s the case then at least three other drivers have similar cars and setup information.
Most weeks, at least one member of the Hendricks stable seems to run with Johnson. One week it will be Kahne, the next Gordon, and then as in Pocono Sunday, Jr. seems to have a car able to keep up with Johnson. Where Mr.’s Gordon, Earnhardt, and Kahne deviate from Johnson is that Johnson runs up front every week. Week after week Johnson can be found running in front and with the car to beat. If it were not for a restart penalty last week, one in which Johnson still maintains he was set up, Johnson had the Dover field covered as well. Change the track, repave it, change the car, and change the type of tires. It doesn’t seem to matter.
If he’s not cheating and if it’s not just the car, is it the driver? This won’t be popular among the NASCAR faithful but I think we are witnessing the greatest driver in the history of NASCAR. During the peak of Jeff Gordon’s popularity he was vilified and booed soundly at NASCAR tracks. Today, that same reactions now belong to Jimmie Johnson. In a sport where fans have their favorite drivers, if Johnson is not your man, then you owe it to your driver to root against him. “Anybody but Johnson” could be heard through the day Sunday as Johnson led lap after lap after lap. His car looked the same as the others. His car sounded the same as the others. But as usual his car was much faster than the other 43 cars leading 128 of 160 laps.
If we assume that all the Hendrick cars have the same resources available and share all information with each other then why is there such a huge divide between the teammates? Look, future Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon is no slouch and Kahne and Junior are two of the most talented young drivers in the sport today, but they are no match for Johnson who is now the standard bearer which other teams and drivers are measured.
Chad Knaus is a very skilled Crew Chief and Johnson and he have a very good working relationship, probably second to none. Knaus should be given some credit here and I do. That being said, I think if you put Johnson with any other of the Hendrick teams, we’d see similar results with Johnson which we are seeing now.
Folks, there is no use kidding ourselves any longer. Jimmie Johnson is far and away the best driver in NASCAR today and I believe he’s the best of all time. The folks who root for drivers other than Johnson? Sharpen those vocal cords because it looks like you will be booing Jimmie Johnson for a while.
My picks for Michigan:
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jimmie Johnson Greg Biffle
Feel free to give me a follow on Twitter – @JimLaPlante, as well as the site – @LastWordOnSport.
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Photo Credit: flair.wittysparks.com, CC |
Gavin Moorhead from the British Library's conservation team has been busy, and in this guest blog he explains just how.
'At the start of 2017 an item from the Map Collection underwent conservation so that readers could see an iconic piece of London engineering history.
Desseins du Pont Projete sur la Tamise a Londre – or Designs of the Projected Bridge on the River Thames in London (British Library Maps C.49.e.76) is a proposal for the construction of Westminster Bridge (opened 1750).
It consists of 1 drawing on multiple paper panels each measuring 490mm in height but joined together the collective width runs to 14740mm – or almost 15 metres. This ‘single sheet’ has been folded into a ‘concertina’ book block, which is attached to boards bound in tan calf at each end. Written and drawn in ink and watercolour, it is part ‘artists impression’ and part mechanical drawing - which collectively make a fascinating record of plans and construction ideas that the architect, possibly the Swiss engineer Charles Labelye (1705-1781?) had for the bridge and embody the origins of a quintessential London landmark and symbol.
However, 280 years on from its creation, mechanical wear and water damage have acted to severely degrade the leather covers and paper substrate. In this condition, there was no practical method of use. Refurbishment began in January 2017.
Conservation at the British Library is carried out under a code of ethics that includes; making repairs that are reversible; conducting them with minimum intervention; and using only archive quality materials. Added to this is the fact that the British Library is a ‘working’ library so options for repair need to be considered for their suitability, functionality and longevity.
Fig 1: Back board before conservation showing water damage, staining, losses and abrasions.
Any item undergoing conservation has a condition assessment prior to treatment. Images from this documentation record can be seen below. Fig. 1 illustrates the types of damage to the cover boards and book block. The boards have suffered extensive losses, abrasion, warping and staining with the back board in particular showing damage caused by contact with moisture in the dark areas of the leather. The book block has been heavily stained from acid migration from the leather; (Fig. 2), while most of the folded panels were split apart or in the process of splitting from mishandling (Fig. 3).
Fig. 2: Front pastedown and first panel before conservation, showing separation staining from acid migration.
Fig. 3: Separated sheets and dirt deposits before conservation.
The treatment was carried out in two stages - board restoration followed by repair of the book block. The board leather was first consolidated with methylcellulose to enable safer lifting of the outer edges in order to trim back the blackened and brittle water damaged areas. Following this, the edge and corner losses in the boards were re-instated by adding paper pulp mixed with a small amount of wheat starch paste. These were pressed until dry then strengthened with pasted laminates of Japanese tissue paper. Lastly, the new corners were trimmed back to the original shape. The missing areas of leather were replaced with thin strips of calfskin cut to shape and pared down to size. These were inserted and glued underneath the existing leather to form new edges. The speckled marks on the skin were approximated using gouache pigment (Fig.4).
Fig. 4: Front board after conservation.
The book block was first dry cleaned using a smoke sponge eraser then repaired in sections. Extant fragments were located, aligned and reattached using toned Japanese tissue adhered with wheat starch paste. In-fills were made where losses were permanent using western papers, via the same process. Split sections were re-joined with Japanese tissue and paste but the folds were re-enforced with strips of un-dyed natural linen pasted to the verso. The first and last folios were then re-attached to the boards using a pasted linen laminate again to strengthen the joints and facilitate re-folding (Fig. 5).
Fig. 5: Last panel, back pastedown and scale after conservation, showing tissue repairs.
Gavin Moorhead |
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