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Christian Eriksen's last-gasp winners are becoming something of a regular feature in Tottenham games this season - it seems like the gifted Dane is popping up every week to save his often lacklustre side.
It's all becoming somewhat reminiscent of Gareth Bale 's barnstorming, match-saving performances in his last season at White Hart Lane in 2012/13 - particularly given the fact that both players are excellent free kick takers.
Of course, with players like Hugo Lloris, Harry Kane and Nacer Chadli putting in some great performances this season, Spurs are far from the one-man team they were accused of being when they last had Bale in the side. But Eriksen is starting to pull wins out of the bag for Spurs with increasing regularity.
So, is there an argument that Eriksen is more important to Spurs than Bale was in 2012/13?
Eriksen has won more points for his team than any other Premier League player - but team-mate Kane is right behind him.
This obviously suggests Spurs definitely aren't a one-man side - but without their two star forwards they would be a staggering 25 points worse off, leaving them languishing at the bottom of the Premier League.
Take away just Eriksen's points and they would be in 12th position, dropping six league places.
Gareth Bale won Spurs 24 points in his final season at the club. They finished with 72, so without Bale, the Lillywhites would have finished in ninth place with 48 points, dropping four league places.
It is obviously an unfair comparison, given the fact that the season hasn't finished yet, but so far it looks like Eriksen means more to Spurs now than Bale did then.
Late goals
Eriksen also tops the late top flight goals league, alongside Sergio Aguero and Alexis Sanchez, with three scored in the last 10 minutes of play. Bale scored a total of five in 2012/13, but by this stage of the season he had only netted one - against Aston Villa. If Eriksen carries on at his current rate he will pass the flying Welshman with ease.
These statistics clearly do not take into account the quality of team-mates, or the effect two men have on the players around them, but so far it certainly looks like Eriksen means more to Spurs now than Bale did in his final season. |
TOKYO (AFP) - Japan will develop a new land-to-sea missile as part of plans to beef up its defence of remote southern islands, as tensions with China increase over the disputed territory, a report said Sunday (Aug 14).
The two countries are locked in a long-running dispute over the uninhabited islets known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China.
The report comes after repeated protests by Japanese foreign ministry officials over what Tokyo calls "intrusions" by Chinese ships in the territorial and contiguous waters of the rocky islands.
Tokyo plans to deploy the weapon, which reportedly will have a range of 300 kilometres on islands such as Miyako in Okinawa prefecture, the top-selling Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said, without citing sources.
The range will cover the disputed island chain, the Yomiuri said, adding that the deployment is expected by 2023.
Officials at the Defence Ministry could not be reached for comment.
"In light of China's repeated acts of provocation around the Senkaku islands, Japan aims to increase deterrence with improved long-range strike capability," the newspaper stated.
The missile will be developed by Japan and will use solid fuel, the Yomiuri said, referring to the technology that allows for weapon's long-term storage and capacity to be launched at short notice.
Japan also protested in June after it said a Chinese navy frigate sailed close to territorial waters near the islands for the first time.
Tensions over the islands have been a frequent irritant and strained bilateral relations, though tensions had markedly relaxed over the past two years as the countries held talks. |
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that North Carolina illegally packed black voters into two voting districts.
In a 5-3 ruling, the justices affirmed the decision of a lower court. That ruling said North Carolina officials used race as the predominant factor in drawing district lines without a compelling reason when they created two districts — the 1st District and the 12th District — with majority-black voting-age populations.
Both of those districts are represented by Democrats; Rep. G.K. Butterfield George (G.K.) Kenneth ButterfieldDems mock Trump's pitch for Fourth of July celebration Winners and losers in the border security deal Pelosi runs tight ship as more stormy waters await MORE represents the 1st District, while Rep. Alma Adams represents the 12th District.
“Although States enjoy leeway to take race-based actions reasonably judged necessary under a proper interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, that latitude cannot rescue District 1," Justice Elena Kagan said in delivering the opinion of the court.
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“We by no means ‘insist that a state legislature, when redistricting, determine precisely what percent minority population demands.’ But neither will we approve a racial gerrymander whose necessity is supported by no evidence and whose raison d’être is a legal mistake.”As for the 12th District, the court said the evidence offered at trial, including live witness testimony, adequately supports the conclusion that race, not politics, accounted for the district’s reconfiguration.In a rare move, Justice Clarence Thomas, a member of the court's conservative wing, sided with Kagan and the court’s more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.The ruling Monday will not impact North Carolina’s congressional districts as currently drawn. After a federal circuit court overturned the state lines in 2016, the Republican-controlled state legislature redrew the lines of the districts held by Butterfield and Adams, condensing both geographically while preserving the state’s 10 Republicans and three Democrats in its congressional delegation.The new map condenses Butterfield’s district around Durham County and Adams’s district around Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County. Rep. David Price’s (D) district also consolidated around Wake and Durham counties. Much of Adams’s district, which used to snake north from Charlotte into Winston-Salem, is now divided between Reps. George Holding (R), Mark Walker (R) and Patrick McHenry (R).North Carolina was appealing the District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina's decision to side with David Harris, a voter from the state's 1st Congressional District, who brought the case forward with Christine Bowser and Samuel Love, two voters who reside in the state's 2nd Congressional District.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said said the court ignored past precedent in finding that race was the motivating factor in drawing District 12.
In a similar case in 2001 challenging the constitutionality of District 12, the challenger lost because they failed to provide an alternative map that served the legislature’s political objective without producing the same racial effect. Because Harris also failed to produce an alternative map, Alito said he should have lost this case.
“A precedent of this Court should not be treated like a disposable household item—say, a paper plate or napkin— to be used once and then tossed in the trash,” Alito wrote. “But that is what the Court does today in its decision regarding North Carolina’s 12th Congressional District: The Court junks a rule adopted in a prior, remarkably similar challenge to this very same congressional district.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch took no part in considering or deciding the case.
— Updated at 11:16 a.m. Reid Wilson contributed. |
MARLBORO -- The suspicious device that prompted an evacuation of an NJ Transit bus Thursday morning on Route 9 was a small travel clock, police said.
The bus was on its way to Lakewood from Newark when Marlboro police stopped it at around 8:30 a.m. on Route 9 near Robertsville Road, said Jim Smith, a NJ Transit spokesman.
As passengers were exiting the bus at various stops along the route, several people alerted the driver that they noticed a suspicious device on the lap of a man, Marlboro police chief Bruce Hall said.
Hall said the man had just got off a flight from Israel and was heading to see his family in Lakewood, and had a clock on top of his lap that he was using to tell time.
"He had very little rest and he was trying to be on time to visit his family," Hall said, adding that the man was part of the Orthodox Jewish community in Lakewood.
Capt. Fred Reck described the clock in a press release as a "small travel style clock."
Authorities commended the passengers onboard the NJ Transit bus for speaking up.
"High 5 to citizens reporting suspicious activity on bus," the New Jersey State Police tweeted. "No threat, but that's the way it's supposed to work. See something say something."
Hall said, "Unfortunately in these times, people are on edge but it's better to say something."
There were 15 passengers on the bus when it was stopped, and they were transported to another bus, Smith said.
Route 9 was shut down in both directs for a couple hours. Marlboro police led the investigation with the assistance of the State Police bomb unit and NJ Transit officials.
Traffic was reopened at around 10 a.m. after a NJ Transit K-9 dog cleared the bus, Smith said.
Alex Napoliello may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @alexnapoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook. |
Community Rating:
Community Rating: 3.839 / 5 ( 127 votes ) Click here to view ratings and comments. Oracle Printed Card Name: Elbrus, the Binding Blade Mana Cost: Converted Mana Cost: 7
Types: Legendary Artifact — Equipment Card Text: Equipped creature gets +1/+0. When equipped creature deals combat damage to a player, unattach Elbrus, the Binding Blade, then transform it. Equip Flavor Text: Those who grasp its hilt soon hear the demon's call. Expansion: Dark Ascension Rarity: Mythic Rare Other Sets: Card Number: 147a Artist: Eric Deschamps Rulings The “legend rule” checks only for permanents with exactly the same name. Elbrus, the Binding Blade and Withengar Unbound can be on the battlefield at the same time without either going to its owner’s graveyard. Elbrus will transform even if you are unable to unattach it (most likely because the equipped creature died). Withengar’s triggered ability will trigger no matter how a player loses the game: due to a state-based action (as a result of having a life total of 0 or less, trying to draw a card from an empty library, or having ten poison counters), a spell or ability that says that player loses the game, a concession, or a game loss awarded by a judge. In a multiplayer game using the limited range of influence option (such as a Grand Melee game), if a spell or ability says that you win the game, it instead causes all of your opponents within your range of influence to lose the game. This is another way by which Withengar’s ability can trigger. For more information on double-faced cards, see the Shadows over Innistrad mechanics article (http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/shadows-over-innistrad-mechanics).
Community Rating:
Community Rating: 3.869 / 5 ( 134 votes ) Click here to view ratings and comments. Oracle Printed Card Name: Withengar Unbound Converted Mana Cost: 7
Types: Legendary Creature — Demon Card Text: Flying, intimidate, trample (A creature with intimidate can't be blocked except by artifact creatures and/or creatures that share a color with it.) Whenever a player loses the game, put thirteen +1/+1 counters on Withengar Unbound. Flavor Text: There are not enough lives on Innistrad to satisfy his thirst for retribution. Color Indicator: Black P/T: 13 / 13 Expansion: Dark Ascension Rarity: Mythic Rare Other Sets: Card Number: 147b Artist: Eric Deschamps |
This is the sequel of my previous article explaining the implementation details of the signals and slots. In the Part 1, we have seen the general principle and how it works with the old syntax. In this blog post, we will see the implementation details behind the new function pointer based syntax in Qt5.
New Syntax in Qt5
The new syntax looks like this:
QObject::connect(& a , & Counter ::valueChanged, & b , & Counter :: setValue );
Why the new syntax?
I already explained the advantages of the new syntax in a dedicated blog entry. To summarize, the new syntax allows compile-time checking of the signals and slots. It also allows automatic conversion of the arguments if they do not have the same types. As a bonus, it enables the support for lambda expressions.
New overloads
There was only a few changes required to make that possible.
The main idea is to have new overloads to QObject::connect which take the pointers to functions as arguments instead of char*
There are three new static overloads of QObject::connect : (not actual code)
QObject::connect(const QObject * sender , PointerToMemberFunction signal , const QObject * receiver , PointerToMemberFunction slot , Qt::ConnectionType type ) QObject::connect(const QObject * sender , PointerToMemberFunction signal , PointerToFunction method ) QObject::connect(const QObject * sender , PointerToMemberFunction signal , Functor method )
The first one is the one that is much closer to the old syntax: you connect a signal from the sender to a slot in a receiver object. The two other overloads are connecting a signal to a static function or a functor object without a receiver.
They are very similar and we will only analyze the first one in this article.
Pointer to Member Functions
Before continuing my explanation, I would like to open a parenthesis to talk a bit about pointers to member functions.
Here is a simple sample code that declares a pointer to member function and calls it.
void (QPoint::* myFunctionPtr )(int); // Declares myFunctionPtr as a pointer to // a member function returning void and // taking (int) as parameter myFunctionPtr = &QPoint::setX; QPoint p ; QPoint * pp = & p ; ( p .* myFunctionPtr )( 5 ); // calls p.setX(5); ( pp ->* myFunctionPtr )( 5 ); // calls pp->setX(5);
Pointers to member and pointers to member functions are usually part of the subset of C++ that is not much used and thus lesser known.
The good news is that you still do not really need to know much about them to use Qt and its new syntax. All you need to remember is to put the & before the name of the signal in your connect call. But you will not need to cope with the ::* , .* or ->* cryptic operators.
These cryptic operators allow you to declare a pointer to a member or access it. The type of such pointers includes the return type, the class which owns the member, the types of each argument and the const-ness of the function.
You cannot really convert pointer to member functions to anything and in particular not to void* because they have a different sizeof .
If the function varies slightly in signature, you cannot convert from one to the other. For example, even converting from void (MyClass::*)(int) const to void (MyClass::*)(int) is not allowed. (You could do it with reinterpret_cast; but that would be an undefined behaviour if you call them, according to the standard)
Pointer to member functions are not just like normal function pointers. A normal function pointer is just a normal pointer the address where the code of that function lies. But pointer to member function need to store more information: member functions can be virtual and there is also an offset to apply to the hidden this in case of multiple inheritance.
sizeof of a pointer to a member function can even vary depending of the class. This is why we need to take special care when manipulating them.
Type Traits: QtPrivate::FunctionPointer
Let me introduce you to the QtPrivate::FunctionPointer type trait.
A trait is basically a helper class that gives meta data about a given type. Another example of trait in Qt is QTypeInfo.
What we will need to know in order to implement the new syntax is information about a function pointer.
The template<typename T> struct FunctionPointer will give us information about T via its member.
ArgumentCount : An integer representing the number of arguments of the function.
An integer representing the number of arguments of the function. Object : Exists only for pointer to member function. It is a typedef to the class of which the function is a member.
Exists only for pointer to member function. It is a typedef to the class of which the function is a member. Arguments : Represents the list of argument. It is a typedef to a meta-programming list.
Represents the list of argument. It is a typedef to a meta-programming list. call(T &function, QObject *receiver, void **args) : A static function that will call the function, applying the given parameters.
Qt still supports C++98 compiler which means we unfortunately cannot require support for variadic templates. Therefore we had to specialize our trait function for each number of arguments. We have four kinds of specializationd: normal function pointer, pointer to member function, pointer to const member function and functors. For each kind, we need to specialize for each number of arguments. We support up to six arguments. We also made a specialization using variadic template so we support arbitrary number of arguments if the compiler supports variadic templates.
The implementation of FunctionPointer lies in qobjectdefs_impl.h.
QObject::connect
The implementation relies on a lot of template code. I am not going to explain all of it.
Here is the code of the first new overload from qobject.h:
template <typename Func1, typename Func2> static inline QMetaObject::Connection connect ( const typename QtPrivate:: FunctionPointer<Func1>::Object * sender , Func1 signal , const typename QtPrivate:: FunctionPointer<Func2>::Object * receiver , Func2 slot , Qt:: ConnectionType type = Qt:: AutoConnection) { typedef QtPrivate:: FunctionPointer<Func1> SignalType ; typedef QtPrivate:: FunctionPointer<Func2> SlotType ; //compilation error if the arguments does not match. Q_STATIC_ASSERT_X(int( SignalType ::ArgumentCount) >= int( SlotType ::ArgumentCount), "The slot requires more arguments than the signal provides." ); Q_STATIC_ASSERT_X((QtPrivate::CheckCompatibleArguments<typename SignalType ::Arguments, typename SlotType ::Arguments>::value), "Signal and slot arguments are not compatible." ); Q_STATIC_ASSERT_X((QtPrivate::AreArgumentsCompatible<typename SlotType ::ReturnType, typename SignalType ::ReturnType>::value), "Return type of the slot is not compatible with the return type of the signal." ); const int * types ; /* ... Skipped initialization of types, used for QueuedConnection ...*/ QtPrivate:: QSlotObjectBase * slotObj = new QtPrivate:: QSlotObject<Func2, typename QtPrivate:: List_Left<typename SignalType ::Arguments, SlotType ::ArgumentCount>::Value, typename SignalType ::ReturnType>( slot ); return connectImpl( sender , reinterpret_cast<void **>(& signal ), receiver , reinterpret_cast<void **>(& slot ), slotObj , type , types , & SignalType ::Object::staticMetaObject); }
You notice in the function signature that sender and receiver are not just QObject* as the documentation points out. They are pointers to typename FunctionPointer::Object instead. This uses SFINAE to make this overload only enabled for pointers to member functions because the Object only exists in FunctionPointer if the type is a pointer to member function.
We then start with a bunch of Q_STATIC_ASSERT . They should generate sensible compilation error messages when the user made a mistake. If the user did something wrong, it is important that he/she sees an error here and not in the soup of template code in the _impl.h files. We want to hide the underlying implementation from the user who should not need to care about it.
That means that if you ever you see a confusing error in the implementation details, it should be considered as a bug that should be reported.
We then allocate a QSlotObject that is going to be passed to connectImpl() . The QSlotObject is a wrapper around the slot that will help calling it. It also knows the type of the signal arguments so it can do the proper type conversion.
We use List_Left to only pass the same number as argument as the slot, which allows connecting a signal with many arguments to a slot with less arguments.
QObject::connectImpl is the private internal function that will perform the connection. It is similar to the original syntax, the difference is that instead of storing a method index in the QObjectPrivate::Connection structure, we store a pointer to the QSlotObjectBase .
The reason why we pass &slot as a void** is only to be able to compare it if the type is Qt::UniqueConnection .
We also pass the &signal as a void** . It is a pointer to the member function pointer. (Yes, a pointer to the pointer)
Signal Index
We need to make a relationship between the signal pointer and the signal index.
We use MOC for that. Yes, that means this new syntax is still using the MOC and that there are no plans to get rid of it :-).
MOC will generate code in qt_static_metacall that compares the parameter and returns the right index. connectImpl will call the qt_static_metacall function with the pointer to the function pointer.
void Counter :: qt_static_metacall (QObject * _o , QMetaObject::Call _c , int _id , void ** _a ) { if ( _c == QMetaObject::InvokeMetaMethod) { /* .... skipped ....*/ default: ; } } else if ( _c == QMetaObject::IndexOfMethod) { int * result = reinterpret_cast<int *>( _a [ 0 ]); void ** func = reinterpret_cast<void **>( _a [ 1 ]); { typedef void (Counter::* _t )(int ); if (*reinterpret_cast< _t *>( func ) == static_cast< _t >(& Counter :: valueChanged )) { * result = 0 ; } } { typedef QString (Counter::* _t )(const QString & ); if (*reinterpret_cast< _t *>( func ) == static_cast< _t >(& Counter :: someOtherSignal )) { * result = 1 ; } } { typedef void (Counter::* _t )(); if (*reinterpret_cast< _t *>( func ) == static_cast< _t >(& Counter :: anotherSignal )) { * result = 2 ; } }
Once we have the signal index, we can proceed like in the other syntax.
The QSlotObjectBase
QSlotObjectBase is the object passed to connectImpl that represents the slot.
Before showing the real code, this is what QObject::QSlotObjectBase was in Qt5 alpha:
struct QSlotObjectBase { QAtomicInt ref ; QSlotObjectBase () : ref ( 1 ) {} virtual ~QSlotObjectBase (); virtual void call ( QObject * receiver , void ** a ) = 0 ; virtual bool compare (void **) { return false; } };
It is basically an interface that is meant to be re-implemented by template classes implementing the call and comparison of the function pointers.
It is re-implemented by one of the QSlotObject , QStaticSlotObject or QFunctorSlotObject template class.
Fake Virtual Table
The problem with that is that each instantiation of those object would need to create a virtual table which contains not only pointer to virtual functions but also lot of information we do not need such as RTTI. That would result in lot of superfluous data and relocation in the binaries.
In order to avoid that, QSlotObjectBase was changed not to be a C++ polymorphic class. Virtual functions are emulated by hand.
class QSlotObjectBase { QAtomicInt m_ref ; typedef void (* ImplFn )(int which , QSlotObjectBase * this_ , QObject * receiver , void ** args , bool * ret ); const ImplFn m_impl ; protected: enum Operation { Destroy , Call , Compare }; public: explicit QSlotObjectBase ( ImplFn fn ) : m_ref ( 1 ), m_impl ( fn ) {} inline int ref () Q_DECL_NOTHROW { return m_ref .ref(); } inline void destroyIfLastRef () Q_DECL_NOTHROW { if (! m_ref .deref()) m_impl ( Destroy , this, 0 , 0 , 0 ); } inline bool compare (void ** a ) { bool ret ; m_impl ( Compare , this, 0 , a , & ret ); return ret ; } inline void call ( QObject * r , void ** a ) { m_impl ( Call , this, r , a , 0 ); } };
The m_impl is a (normal) function pointer which performs the three operations that were previously virtual functions. The "re-implementations" set it to their own implementation in the constructor.
Please do not go in your code and replace all your virtual functions by such a hack because you read here it was good. This is only done in this case because almost every call to connect would generate a new different type (since the QSlotObject has template parameters wich depend on signature of the signal and the slot).
Protected, Public, or Private Signals.
Signals were protected in Qt4 and before. It was a design choice as signals should be emitted by the object when its change its state. They should not be emitted from outside the object and calling a signal on another object is almost always a bad idea.
However, with the new syntax, you need to be able take the address of the signal from the point you make the connection. The compiler would only let you do that if you have access to that signal. Writing &Counter::valueChanged would generate a compiler error if the signal was not public.
In Qt 5 we had to change signals from protected to public . This is unfortunate since this mean anyone can emit the signals. We found no way around it. We tried a trick with the emit keyword. We tried returning a special value. But nothing worked. I believe that the advantages of the new syntax overcome the problem that signals are now public.
Sometimes it is even desirable to have the signal private. This is the case for example in QAbstractItemModel , where otherwise, developers tend to emit signal from the derived class which is not what the API wants. There used to be a pre-processor trick that made signals private but it broke the new connection syntax.
A new hack has been introduced. QPrivateSignal is a dummy (empty) struct declared private in the Q_OBJECT macro. It can be used as the last parameter of the signal. Because it is private, only the object has the right to construct it for calling the signal. MOC will ignore the QPrivateSignal last argument while generating signature information. See qabstractitemmodel.h for an example.
More Template Code
The rest of the code is in qobjectdefs_impl.h and qobject_impl.h. It is mostly standard dull template code.
I will not go into much more details in this article, but I will just go over few items that are worth mentioning.
Meta-Programming List
As pointed out earlier, FunctionPointer::Arguments is a list of the arguments. The code needs to operate on that list: iterate over each element, take only a part of it or select a given item.
That is why there is QtPrivate::List that can represent a list of types. Some helpers to operate on it are QtPrivate::List_Select and QtPrivate::List_Left , which give the N-th element in the list and a sub-list containing the N first elements.
The implementation of List is different for compilers that support variadic templates and compilers that do not.
With variadic templates, it is a template<typename... T> struct List; . The list of arguments is just encapsulated in the template parameters.
For example: the type of a list containing the arguments (int, QString, QObject*) would simply be:
List<int, QString, QObject *>
Without variadic template, it is a LISP-style list: template<typename Head, typename Tail > struct List; where Tail can be either another List or void for the end of the list.
The same example as before would be:
List<int, List<QString, List<QObject *, void> > >
ApplyReturnValue Trick
In the function FunctionPointer::call , the args[0] is meant to receive the return value of the slot. If the signal returns a value, it is a pointer to an object of the return type of the signal, else, it is 0. If the slot returns a value, we need to copy it in arg[0] . If it returns void , we do nothing.
The problem is that it is not syntaxically correct to use the return value of a function that returns void . Should I have duplicated the already huge amount of code duplication: once for the void return type and the other for the non-void? No, thanks to the comma operator.
In C++ you can do something like that:
functionThatReturnsVoid(), somethingElse();
You could have replaced the comma by a semicolon and everything would have been fine.
Where it becomes interesting is when you call it with something that is not void :
functionThatReturnsInt(), somethingElse();
There, the comma will actually call an operator that you even can overload. It is what we do in qobjectdefs_impl.h
template <typename T> struct ApplyReturnValue { void * data ; ApplyReturnValue (void * data_ ) : data ( data_ ) {} }; template<typename T, typename U> void operator, (const T & value , const ApplyReturnValue <U> & container ) { if ( container .data) *reinterpret_cast<U*>( container .data) = value ; } template<typename T> void operator, (T, const ApplyReturnValue <void> &) {}
ApplyReturnValue is just a wrapper around a void* . Then it can be used in each helper. This is for example the case of a functor without arguments:
static void call (Function & f , void *, void ** arg ) { f (), ApplyReturnValue <SignalReturnType>( arg [ 0 ]); }
This code is inlined, so it will not cost anything at run-time.
Conclusion
This is it for this blog post. There is still a lot to talk about (I have not even mentioned QueuedConnection or thread safety yet), but I hope you found this interresting and that you learned here something that might help you as a programmer.
Update: The part 3 is available. |
TSN's Darren Dreger brings word that the Nashville Predators have reached agreement with forward Nick Spaling on a one-year contract, giving him almost a 50% raise over last season's $1.1 million salary:
Nashville avoids salary arbitration and settles with Nick Spaling on 1-year deal. — Darren Dreger (@DarrenDreger) July 21, 2013
$1.5 mil for Spaling. — Darren Dreger (@DarrenDreger) July 21, 2013
Nick Spaling #13 / Left Wing / Nashville Predators Height: 6-1 Weight: 201 Born: Sep 19, 1988
Spaling faces a challenge in the year ahead for ice time, however, given the signings of Matt Cullen, Matt Hendricks and Eric Nystrom this summer. Where will Spals find his role? The Predators have four veteran centers on the roster, and boast a number of forwards who can kill penalties, too.
As noted in the fancy stats section of our season review, Spaling can do a variety of things for a hockey team, but I'm not sure he does them all that well.
More from On the Forecheck: |
A few days back, Kevin wrote a very helpful explanation of the factors that make health-insurance reform so difficult, and proposed some ways that market forces could be combined with widespread coverage. His ideas are unassailable, as usual, but I do have a couple of tangential comments:
1. One reason that conservative health-care schemes are less popular than we’d like is this: They assume that what Americans want is choices, when in fact what most Americans want is a comfortable default. The same goes for school choice, even in otherwise conservative areas. New York City has a vast number of options for schooling your kids — large, small, public, private, parochial — and I have yet to meet parents who consider it anything but a burden. Customizing health insurance and education options is like customizing Microsoft Word — yes, that little elevated “th” every time you type an ordinal number is annoying, but hardly anyone bothers to fix it. That’s why people say they like their employer-provided health insurance: It’s not because of the benefit structure or the customer service, but because you don’t have to do anything to get it; it’s just there.
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2. I have always thought that the main reason people on the left want “Medicare for all” is not because of the purported (and illusory) cost savings, which have the air of an after-the-fact rationalization. The real reason, I suspect, is that they believe that if rich and poor alike have to use the same system, either (a) the rich will make damn sure that quality and service are improved or (b) if somehow that doesn’t happen, then the rich will suffer along with everyone else. Our experience with highways, airports, the DMV, etc., has shown that (b) is a better bet than (a), which is great for the Left from a schadenfreude perspective but less so from a political one. The trouble with applying option (b) to health insurance is that imposing a single universal system would end up punishing today’s truly privileged elite — government workers. Nowadays government workers have significantly better coverage than those in the private sector — and they often get it from private insurers. So if government employees get stuck with the same crummy insurance as everyone else, it would be a large step backwards for a group that has long been the backbone of the Democratic party. |
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad was seized by Gaddafi forces in the town of Zawiya during the first weeks of the Libyan uprising and held for two weeks. In his first dispatch from post Gaddafi Libya, he describes his return to his former cell and his encounters with his erstwhile jailers
I remembered that Hatem was tall and wore spectacles and had a pudgy, smiling face that didn't seem to fit his profession. But I was not prepared for the warmth he showed. Meeting him again was like encountering an old friend. The questions came tumbling out. "How are you? How did you find me? What happened after you left?"
In the early days of the Libyan revolution, Hatem had been the officer in charge of my custody in during two weeks of solitary confinement inside one of Gaddafi's notorious Tripoli prisons. The last time I saw him we had been separated by an iron door. Only his face and his hands had been visible as he passed food through the tiny hatch.
Outside, the revolution was fermenting in the mountains and the streets of the coastal cities, but inside the prison the officers had been confident. Hatem was angry, frustrated, and sometimes deluded, ranting against the rebels – "the rats", as Gaddafi had dubbed them – the agents of Nato, and the crusaders plotting against his country. He accused journalists of being spies and enemies of Libya.
"What do you want from us?" he would ask every night as he stood outside my cell, drinking coffee. Sometimes, in a sudden burst of generosity, he would pass a small cup through the hatch for me. But he never came inside. "We love Gaddafi. We love him. What's happening is all because of you journalists. It's a plot by Nato and Arab reactionary countries."
Months after I had been released, and after Tripoli had fallen to the rebels, I went to look for Hatem. I wanted to ask him if he believed in what he was telling me or if it was all part of an act. Through him I wanted to tell the story of the security apparatus of the regime in its final days and what's happening to them now.
The mood in Tripoli was jubilant. In Martyrs' Square car horns were honking, children waved flags, women ululated and celebratory bursts of gunfire peppered the sky.
But the signs of the difficult relationship between the old and the new were surfacing. In front of ministries and public buildings there were small demonstrations against old regime officials. In my hotel room I spread my clues out on the bed. I knew what Hatem looked like. I knew he worked in a prison of one of the many security services, but that was it. How do you look for the defeated in the city of victors?
For a city with a single main hospital and one university, Tripoli was well-equipped when it came to prisons. There was the infamous Abu Salim prison, where 1,200 inmates were killed in 1996; the military police prison; the criminal investigation prison. In the last days of the revolution, farms and company offices were converted into prisons and every military or security unit ran its own detention centre.
We drove to the prison of the external security service, where other journalists had been held. The main building was like a dead animal, its spine broken in half by a massive bomb. Around it were manicured lawns and a basketball court and pleasant gardens, smaller white buildings scattered among the shrubs and trees.
With a government guard I went into one of the smaller buildings. Inside, it was efficiently divided into small cells. But they were bigger and lighter than my cell. We walked into another building. During my incarceration I was blindfolded all the time while outside my cell. But I had drawn a map of the place in my mind. I thought I'd recognise it when I saw it. I didn't. Instead, recognition came in flashbacks. I am crouching blindfolded facing a wall, three men in military uniform sifting through our belongings. The room smells of hospital detergent. I can see a man in a surgical mask and rubber gloves. The Brazilian journalist I was captured with [Andrei Netto, who was released a few days later] is led away. A big door slams ...
Now the realisation hits me. I'm in that room again. A few bits of furniture lie overturned on the dark grey, mottled carpet. I can taste the feeling of terror that came over me in this place a few short months ago.
Flashback: three faceless officers interrogating me for hours. "You can tell us what we need to know or we can make you talk."
We walked further, into a long neon-lit corridor, huge black doors lining one side. Behind them lay dark cells with grimy mattresses, filthy, broken toilets. The ghosts of guards and their captives lingered in the air. Here, then. It was here.
I walked into different cells and wondered what had happened to the other inmates: the man who screamed all night, the Egyptian, the Tunisian, the American. "That building was called the Market," a former intelligence officer told me later. "There were food and clothing shops for the members of the service, officers who had to spend weeks without leaving would shop there. Then they converted it into a prison for high-value people, VIPs."
What about torture?, I asked him. "Sometimes they would put the detainees in dog cages, just to scare them. It depended on the officer. Some would go out of their way to harm prisoners."
I was not beaten or tortured but I could hear the sounds of people getting beaten through the walls. The doctor had told me that the foreigners were treated differently. "Where they kept you the treatment was considered luxury compared to the guys who where kept in the back prison or the with the dogs. "The foreigners were not beaten but they beat and tortured the locals. They wouldn't beat the prisoners in front of me, but I did see officers walking with sticks made of palm tree reeds. But even without beating life was horrible, the dark, small dungeons, the fear, the sounds of the dogs. They terrorised the people in these dark cells. You lose your humanity, you lose your respect."
I asked Saleh, a former intelligence officer who spent some time in jail for aiding the rebels in the first days of the uprising, to help me track some of the former officers who worked in the "Market" prison. Two days later we managed to locate one of the guards that I knew. Abdul Razaq was lean and medium height, handsome with grey hair. I remembered him to be always in a good mood but now he looked years older. Dark, sagging rings had formed under his twitching eyes.
We sat outside his house in a small, dusty lane of low, brick houses in Tajoura. The metal shutters of shops were down but neighbours stood outside the high gates of their houses talking. He was scared and anxious. He didn't know why I had come to see him, and he was worried that I might be seeking some form of revenge. His daughters were playing around him like three little kittens. He sent one inside to bring tea. She came back carrying a white plastic tray, that had a silver teapot and three very small cups. He held the teapot high while pouring.
"Look, I am still in charge of feeding you," he said, attempting to break the awkwardness of sharing tea with his prisoner. "When you were there things were good, after you left [mid-March) the prisons started filling. In the small cells we started putting five or six. The big ones held up to 60. The corridors were filled with detainees. It became horrible."
For you or the prisoners?, I asked, half-jokingly. "For us," he said seriously, handing me the small cup. "Imagine the smell, of all those people squeezed together, we went there with masks on.
"When Nato started bombing us, I knew it was over. We can detain people and put them in jail but we can't resist Nato. We all started to defect."
"I couldn't handle the pressure after that," said Razaq. "I asked for a medical leave and I stayed in my house from June.
"I didn't sign up for this, I didn't join the service to be under Nato bombing. Now in the middle of the night I jump. My wife says, what's happening? I say, bombs, bombs. She says, go back to sleep, these are your dreams."
I asked him if he knew the officer I was looking for. He said yes. He asked one of his daughters to bring him his phone and made a call and 10 minutes later the officer came. Tall and striding confidently, it was Hatem.
He was smiling. Abdul Razaq offered him a glass of tea. He drank it and kept asking how I found him.
It was a strange moment. We were meeting like old friends. There was some kind of shared camaraderie between us. Yet can I draw a line between the man and his job? Can you befriend your jailer? He told me about what happened to the jail after I left. He spoke about it fondly, as if it was a place filled with happy memories.
"We knew Nato was going to bomb us, we sent most of the prisoners to another place, a company compound. But we stayed in the headquarters. Most of the nights you can hear the sound of missiles and then you hear the explosion. That night we just heard a huge explosion, the floor underneath my feet went and then there was another explosion, everything was covered with smoke and dust, all the doors burst open from the explosion. The building that was hit was our communication centre. The monitoring equipment was there and we could listen to any phone number we wanted. How do you think we found you?" he smiled.
"We could have [survived] if it was Nato alone, but Libya was infested with spies," Hatem added bitterly. "So many people here defecting in the end – not because they didn't agree or benefit from the regime, but because they knew it was game over."
Burst into the cell
I asked the two officers about another jailer. He was short, stocky and rude and used to burst into the cell in the middle of the night asking random questions. A couple of times he blindfolded me and handcuffed me and marched me around the corridors, just to then bring me back to the cell.
"This guy had a psychological problem," said Hatem. "Sometimes he was nice, and then sometimes something in him clicks and he becomes very aggressive, making life for prisoners hell. In the last days there was paranoia. They were throwing anyone and everyone in prison. The [Gaddafi] militias would grab people in the street, take their money and phones, and hand them to us. We started refusing to receive detainees."
Hatem stood up: "What are you up to now? Let's drive around town."
Tripoli has the most beautiful sunsets in the world. A burning orange disc was sinking slowly into the sea. I watched his face change every time we passed a checkpoint. He would force a meek, uneasy smile, the smile of someone not used to relinquishing power.
People like Hatem are being detained all over Tripoli. They are stopped at checkpoints and pulled out of their cars when they show their ID cards.
"This is a very dangerous time," Hatem said.
"No one has credibility. They call you [the rebels] they say we need to talk to you, you go, and you find yourself detained. The Gaddafi regime used to detain people and no one would know where they are and who detained them. Now it's the same thing."
There comes a point when people know that the days of the regime are over. This point comes at different times to different people. Saleh switched sides in March. Abdul Razaq lost his nerve in June. I asked Hatem, when did he reach that point?
"I never defected. I worked until 20 August (the day rebels entered Tripoli.) Only then I couldn't go to work because of the fighting. But I didn't pick up a gun and fight the rebels. Those are Libyans. I think they are mistaken, but it's not my job to fight in the streets."
The perfect disc was half-submerged now in the water. Families were filling the small playground on the edge of the sea.
A traffic jam built up in front of Martyrs' Square, honking and selling flags.
"The same people who were carrying the green flag in Gaddafi's one million people march are the same people carrying the flag of the revolution," Hatem says.
"Gaddafi didn't import people to cheer for him. They were Libyans. It's fine. People can change their mind." But he adds it is wrong for those same people now to claim they had nothing to do with the regime, and to say that everyone who did should be locked up. Two days later, I met Hatem again. We sat in an old cafe in the centre of old Tripoli, in the courtyard of a beautiful old Italian palazzo.
Men smoked and discussed the politics of post-Gaddafi Libya. Hatem ordered two machyata [machiatos]. I asked Hatem if he or others tortured people in the prison.
"Look, what do you expect from us? We are an intelligence service. We needed to get confessions from people, but it all depends on the officer. Some officers enjoy the pressure on people. Some just do it to get information. Most of the times you don't need to torture people to get information – you just buy it off them."
The more I talked to Hatem, the more resentfully he spoke of the rebel movement.
"Muammar [Gaddafi] is to be blamed for all that happened," he said. "He should have left from the beginning. He was great in his foreign policy. I knew as a Libyan nothing can happen to me overseas because the regime will defend us. But at home, he was a disaster. His sons looted all the foreign investment and they left the country hungry, and when the war happened the poor people became the victims."
In words almost identical to that of Iraqi army officers who found themselves shunned or hunted after the fall of Baghdad, he said: "Five of my friends have been killed in the last month. We were almost 10,000 members of the intelligence service.
"We haven't been paid for two months now. In another month or two, 5,000 will start to rebel against the transitional council if they continue with the assassinations of the former officers. Then we are heading to civil war." |
Contract workers clear the dirt and excess water around water pumps on the Army Corps of Engineers C-44 reservoir site. Image: Zak Bennett/Motherboard
This story is part of OUTER LIMITS, a Motherboard series about people, technology, and going outside. Let us be your guide.
From some vantage points Lake Okeechobee, all 730 square miles of it, looks like an ocean. The third largest natural freshwater lake in the country irrigates farmland and sustains wildlife across six counties in south Florida. People boat and fish, bringing fresh catch home for dinner.
But for the 13,000 residents of Glades County, the lake can loom large and menacing, bursting against aging levees and control gates managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The specter of the 1926 and 1928 hurricanes, both of which burst the dike open and together killed thousands of people, still hangs over communities here. People go about their lives fearing they're one storm away from another devastating breach, as was the case during Hurricane Irma in August.
"The more rainwater that increases in Lake Okeechobee, the more pressure is on the lake, and that pressure can continue to build up and build up and build up and one day the levee can go," said Tammy Jackson-Moore, a Belle Glade resident who co-founded Guardians of the Glades, a nonprofit focused on community advocacy. "And we're talking about wiping out entire communities here."
Florida is defined by its water—the water flowing around it, through it, increasingly over it. But throughout the twentieth century, its major arteries of fresh water, which flowed from the Kissimmee River south of Orlando to Lake Okeechobee and down to the swampy Everglades, were permanently rerouted by the federal government and landowners to stop flooding, and make room for agriculture and housing in the southern part of the state.
Draining the water flow has allowed for bursts of economic growth. Today, Florida's agriculture industry, some of which sits on former swamp land, is worth $104 billion and employs two million people, and a big part of that is the politically influential sugar industry. But tampering with nature has its consequences. The Everglades, the largest swath of subtropical wilderness in the country, is now half of its size circa 1920, and the ecosystem has deteriorated, losing wildlife and native flora. Without a natural place to flow, stagnant water pushes toxic algae blooms into the rivers, and turns pristine ocean into sludgy waste.
Jackson-Moore. Image: Zak Bennett
Now the state is working with the Army Corps of Engineers—the government agency partly responsible for rerouting and draining water to begin with—and the South Florida Water Management District to attempt the largest hydraulic restoration project in the world. And while some say the effort has turned Florida into a battleground, pitting sugar farmers against legislators and environmentalists, others are hoping this will finally right certain man-made wrongs and restore some balance to the state.
If the government is able to fully fund the plan, and should dozens of contractors and state forces successfully carry it out, it could permanently change Florida. And set a precedent for inevitable restoration projects around the world, which are becoming increasingly crucial as climate change manifests in stronger storms and sea level rise.
I followed the historic flow, from Lake Okeechobee down to the Everglades National Park, to find out how these government promises are playing out.
In mid-October, Lake Okeechobee was full because of Hurricane Irma and seasonal rains. Image: Zak Bennett/Motherboard
*
THE PLAN
I'm a few miles east of Lake Okeechobee, stomping through a muddy construction site with a pair of US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) staffers. They're surveying the 3,400 acres that will eventually become the Indian River Lagoon-South reservoir to store and treat water from the nearby St. Lucie Estuary, which is often polluted by agricultural runoff. We find the land soaked by seasonal rains and Irma, which had made landfall a month before, and left behind a wake of flooding and debris. Workers pump water off the property to clear the way for more construction.
The reservoir sits on land that used to be owned by Tropicana, the citrus and juice processing company, and is wedged between roads named after companies like Coca-Cola and Minute Maid, revealing the different stakeholders that have held land across south Florida. Fields of sugarcane, one of Florida's biggest cash crops, line the road to the 741-acre site.
ACE's Kimberly Taplin and Jim Bonnano. Image: Zak Bennett/Motherboard
This project is one of many under the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), the massive, $10.5 billion initiative authorized in 2000 by the federal government, and launched a decade later. This reservoir is one more spot where water can be held and treated, directed to land when necessary, and stored during storm seasons to prevent flooding.
"The goal is, overall, to get the water right," Kimberley Taplin, program manager of USACE's Ecosystem Restoration Branch, tells me. "How do we get it more natural, to the extent we can?"
With 68 components, the plan is multifaceted: slowing down the flow of the Kissimmee River in the north, storing water in reservoirs around the lake, shooting water from the lake toward the east and west, and building bridges to allow the Everglades to flow under them and thrive in the south. It will take more than 35 years to complete.
From the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Program Overview. Image: ACE
CERP has become an accepted, and usually welcome, part of the dialogue around Florida's water issues. But other parts of the legislation are more contentious. The latest debate, for example, has been over a Senate bill dubbed SB 10, a proposal approved by Florida Governor Rick Scott back in May.
This proposed law calls for a new reservoir below Lake Okeechobee, which would be able to contain overflow and store water that would be used for agriculture, to replenish the ecosystem during low tides, and drinking water in aquifers. But SB 10 also has asked for a lot of land. In the original proposal, drafted by Florida Senator Joe Negron, the state was to spend $2.4 billion to buy 60,000 acres of privately held farmland to build the reservoir.
Farmers across the state balked at this idea, particularly those in the sugar industry, one of the more powerful agricultural lobbies in the state. Dozens of companies, like heavyweights Florida Crystals Corporation and US Sugar, wrote letters or protested Negron's bill, citing loss of jobs and land, and hired lobbyists to oppose the deal. The bill was stalled for months.
Some environmentalists, in turn, complained that the sugar industry's political might was getting in the way of a necessary project. "We've been doing this and watching this for years," Kimberly Mitchell, president of the Everglades Trust environmental advocacy group, told the Miami New Times. "Sugar could have pushed the deadline to start back. To give you an idea of how long this had been delayed already, this was the number two priority authorized in the year 2000."
Eventually, Negron was able to push the legislation through by paring the law down in both cost and size—cutting the budget in half, and promising to use already public land being leased to farmers, instead of asking for private land. Now it is awaiting federal approval.
THE LAND
It's easy to delineate the battle for water in south Florida—to look at Big Sugar as the corporate lobbyists fighting environmentalists for every last penny. The sugar industry has, indeed, given millions of dollars to politicians in the state, and was documented as a major source of pollution in the Everglades.
But J.P. Sasser, a former mayor of Pahokee, a 6,000-person city in the Glades, told me everyone, especially environmentalists, are getting it wrong. "They want us to be portrayed as a giant plantation, where sugar is the overseer, and everyone else is just working for them," he said.
J.P. Sasser, former mayor of Pahokee, at his auto shop. Image: Zak Bennett/Motherboard
At Cavinee's Paint & Body Shop, where he works, Sasser held court at his desk in the front office, surrounded by photos and old car paraphernalia. He was fired up about SB 10—just the night before, he had gone to a meeting with USACE officials and grilled them on the timeline for the reservoir project. He doubts that it will be funded by the federal government, or that it will be done on time.
The people of Pahokee, a city built around sugar fields, rice paddies, and mills, have seen plenty of change in the last decades. The government, without warning, Sasser said, shut down a jail in 2011 that employed hundreds of people here. In the past decade, farmers have sold off their land and moved to coastal cities looking for work.
Sasser drove me to one of the sugar mills, this one run by the Sugarcane Growers Cooperative of Florida, an organization of 45 small and medium-sized farms. The mill, which would have been sold off in the original SB 10 plan, smelled both burnt and sweet, and spewing smokestacks where sugarcane is processed. Behind the mill were some new warehouses, where an initiative to turn bagasse, the pulpy sugar refuse left over from sugarcane, into paper is now underway.
"It's not a line etched in stone"
Despite the economic uncertainty here, Pahokee has still managed to grow in many ways, adding chain restaurants and new hospitals and a college in recent years. Agriculture, including sugar, still keeps many of the families here alive—from Sasser's nephew to Tammy Moore-Jackson's husband, everyone knows someone employed by sugar farms or mills, if they themselves aren't.
"Our community has given up more than 100,000 acres of farmland," Moore-Jackson told me. "No one in the Glades was against a southern reservoir. But we were against purchasing additional land."
To lose more land to the government could be something like a death sentence for the Glades too, not just the sugar industry. But to lose this land to either flooding or drought would be equally damaging, potentially catastrophic, for the communities here. A spokesperson for the Sugarcane Growers co-op told me that their main concern was not SB 10, but the high levels of water flowing into Lake Okeechobee.
Meanwhile, as the government attempts to gather more land from farmers for bills like SB 10, housing developments are cropping up alongside the Everglades, threatening the swamp and any space that water has to flow alongside of it.
Most people in south Florida are familiar with what's known as the "urban development boundary," essentially a line that defines how close housing and development can be built to the Everglades and other natural resources. But for years, real estate developers have been testing this boundary.
Back in 1991, an archival news article ponders whether the suburb of Weston, north of Miami, should have been built on drained Everglades land. In 2013, Miami-Dade commissioners moved the line to allow for more warehouses and housing. And as recently as this year, a task force was appointed to consider moving the boundary again.
"It's not a line etched in stone," said Dawn Shirreffs, a senior policy advisor at the Everglades Foundation, a nonprofit environmental group. "Every couple of years we see applications from different interests. But from my understanding, the Miami Dade County Commission has been steady."
THE SWAMP
Then there are the people who have lived among the Everglades before these land grabs began.
I met Randee Solis, a 21-year-old airboat driver, on Miccosukee Reservation land, where he's spent most of his life and summers with his grandfather in the murky swamp waters.
The four reservation areas—about 50 miles south of Lake Okeechobee—are built on and around the Everglades, and the Miccosukee tribe, once part of the Seminole Indians, settled here in the early twentieth century. Now the four reservation areas are home to a cluster of museums and tribal administration offices that uphold tradition and laws.
Randee Solis, who grew up on the reservation, waits to take tourists on an airboat in the Everglades. Image: Zak Bennett/Motherboard
Solis said many of his family members work here, some as airboat operators, to take tourists through the Everglades. He has been doing boat tours since he was nine years old—state laws don't apply on reservations—and knows the ebb and flow and sludge of the waterways.
He also knows when something is off. He said the runoff from agriculture industries, including sugar, has impacted area wildlife. And he's been noticing that the water in the dry season is so low that the boats can't make their way through the swamp.
"You don't see a lot of the bird life, the fish are starting to disappear," Solis said, citing the lower levels of water. "Plant life is another thing. Little by little it's been starting to slowly decrease."
A statue of a man taming an alligator outside the Miccosukee Indian Village. Image: Zak Bennett/Motherboard
The Miccosukee, with a population of about 550, depend on a healthy water flow to sustain their economy—a large part of which is made up of tourist attractions like airboat rides, casinos, and food stalls serving alligator bites. But the tribe's location has made it particularly vulnerable to any changes in water management regulations. In 2003, the tribe teamed up with environmental group Friends of the Everglades to sue the South Florida Water Management District for pumping polluted water into their conservation area.
Then in 2010, the tribe sued USACE over a plan to build a bridge along the Tamiami Trail, a road that cuts through the Everglades in south Florida. This plan, part of the Everglades restoration project, was engineered to allow water and wildlife to flow underneath the road, instead of getting cleaved by the asphalt. But the plan would also inevitably flood and claim some of the reservation land.
The Miccosukee lost this case—the court ruled that the plan didn't violate the Everglades National Park Protection and Expansion Act, which protects the size of the park. During a recent visit, the construction on the Tamiami Trail was underway.
"That's to remove the barriers to flow," said Taplin, the Army Corps program manager, who grew up close to the park. "As you know we starved water to the Everglades National Park, so how much can we restore flowing south?"
Construction on the Tamiami Trail, a major part of the restoration plan. Image: Zak Bennett/Motherboard
THE WATER
Down here in the Glades, the lake can give life or take it away. Nobody can escape some level of understanding of the water and how it's being managed. Everybody has a story about flooding or drought. Everybody knows about some part of the bills and legislation.
Amid a yard of yachts and speedboats, Jim Dragseth sat at a desk, surrounded by photos and maps of the St. Lucie River and its nearby creeks. The president of Whiticar Boat Works, a yacht dealer and repair company that his family started, Dragseth has kept a close watch on the water quality around him in Stuart, Florida. He's someone who keeps the University of Florida Water Report, a comprehensive report of the water conditions that holds an almost Bible-like status in these parts, in his bookshelf.
"I'm not a big fan of the senator's lake plan," he said of Negron's SB 10, though he applauded the effort to use public land. "Personally, I'm disappointed they haven't been able to slow the flow into the lake."
The St. Lucie River, and the nearby estuary, is usually flush with wildlife and biodiversity. In the early twentieth century it was one of the waterways connected to Lake Okeechobee by a man-made canal in an attempt to allow for barges and boats and discharge excess water from the lake when the water levels are too high. That means the lake water that originally flowed south to the Everglades now enters the river.
In more recent years, this system has proven dangerous. In 2013, 2016, and this year, USACE discharged billions of gallons of water from Lake Okeechobee into the rivers to avoid flooding. And with it, freshwater algae and bacteria that started to destroy the ecology of the St. Lucie River and Estuary.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott called a state of emergency last year, blaming the federal government. "If the Obama administration had properly budgeted the necessary funding to maintain the dike to operate at its higher potential capacity of 18 feet, the Corps would not have been required to discharge approximately 30 billion gallons of flood waters," read Scott's executive order.
"We're still getting a ton of outflow out from the lake. It looks like gasoline in water."
Dragseth said inshore boating and fisheries suffered from the increasing lake discharges. And septic tanks and agricultural runoff were polluting the waterways alongside algae and bacteria. But at his business, alongside Willoughby Creek, off the river, he said there's another problem.
"What impacts our business more is water depth," he said, since the creeks are getting shallower. "But it's still pretty, still nice, still warm."
Nearby marinas were reluctant to talk to me about the algae issue, since it had impacted their businesses in the past year—the boating and fishing industries stand to lose significant profit to pollution. And water quality reports from the Florida Oceanographic Society, a nonprofit, showed C, D, and F ratings across the board for the nearby rivers and estuaries.
Following the rivers farther across to the coast, it seems that the diverted waters from Lake Okeechobee only get messier. "We're still getting a ton of outflow out from the lake," said Josh Davis, a lifeguard working on Jupiter Beach on the eastern coast of the state. "It looks like gasoline in water."
Davis. Image: Zak Bennett/Motherboard
Davis, who grew up on West Palm Beach, and who has been a lifeguard for almost a decade, said he now watches the lake water discharges slowly inch across the ocean in front of him, turning blue water into brown sludge. During the week I visited, the combination of lake overflow post-Irma and the King Tides that usually come in the fall meant the beach was down to a thin strip of sand.
Both Davis and Dragseth said the Everglades Restoration Project, with its mandate to restore at least some of the natural water flow, could be beneficial to what they see everyday in their backyards. They're just not sure at what cost, or on what timeline.
As Davis said, "I don't see an end in sight to it."
*
To the untrained eye, Lake Okeechobee seems calm, peaceful on this warm October afternoon. Palm trees arch over the placid face of the lake; birds and fish scuttle on the banks. You wouldn't know that the dike's barriers are too low, that communities have to pump water back into the lake, and that the threat of bacteria and algae live here, under this glassy facade.
If the lake, and south Florida, have been an experiment in man versus nature, then it would seem that both have lost. The water haunts the people who live near it, or downstream. The government is pumping billions of dollars to restore a waterflow it once tried to divert. Meanwhile, the Everglades struggles to rebound from both shallow, dry seasons, and from flooding, depending on the time of year.
Tammy Jackson-Moore, sitting on a dock on top of the lake, spends her days thinking about the Herbert Hoover Dike. She publishes the water levels of the dike on the Guardians of the Glades Facebook page—letting people know when the levels get close to flooding. If the Everglades restoration project manages to undo the past, then there's a chance her community and others like it can continue coexisting with the water in the future. If the government stalls though, the levees are still a storm away from giving away.
"We've had people contact us saying when is the time for us to leave our community, when is that trigger point that we need to be packing up and leaving," she said. "That is an incredible amount of stress."
All GIFs by Lia Kantrowitz. Zak Bennett contributed reporting and logistics. Caroline Haskins contributed research. Editing by Brian Anderson.
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The American IT expert and journalist Jacob Appelbaum testified on Friday in the ongoing hacking trial against Swedish Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and his 21-year-old Danish codefendant
Appelbaum, whose testimony helped clear Warg of hacking charges in Sweden, repeated in the Frederiksberg courtroom that Warg’s computer could have been controlled by others to carry out the hack of IT giant CSC.
Speaking to the press following his court appearance, Appelbaum said Warg’s computer was “clearly a lab computer” designed for multiple users.
Appelbaum said that the prosecution was absolutely clueless when it comes to technology.
“The same facts that were misrepresented in Sweden, I think, are being misrepresented here in Denmark. I don’t think it’s intentional, I just think the prosecutor is ignorant of the topic. He has said that himself and that is an important detail. Everyone has justice in mind, but he clearly does not have technical details in mind,” he said.
“It is pretty obvious he doesn’t understand anything related to technology at all,” Appelbaum added.
The American contended that Warg was a “political prisoner, but because he’s white and this is Scandinavia, people laugh at that”.
He also said it was very problematic that, according to revelations from Politiken, CSC itself has provided all evidence of the alleged hack after neither police nor military defence experts were able to come up with anything on their own.
“The evidence being collected by the victim [CSC, ed] is tainted evidence that doesn’t meet the standard of justice anywhere,” he said.
Despite his views on the prosecution's case, Appelbaum predicted that Warg "would not leave Denmark as a free man".
You can hear Appelbaum's press conference below, courtesy of Radio24syv: |
Everyone hates their Internet service provider. And with good cause: In the age of ubiquitous Internet access, Web service in America is still often frustratingly slow. Tired of being the villain, telecom companies have assigned blame for this problem to a new bad guy. He’s called the “bandwidth hog,” and it’s his fault that streaming video on your computer looks more like a slide show than a movie. The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth—sometimes more during peak hours. While these “power users” are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load.
The ISPs are certainly correct that there’s a problem: The current network in the United States struggles to accommodate everyone, and the barbarians at the gate—voice-over-IP telephony, live video streams, high-def movies—threaten to drown the grid. (This Deloitte report has a good treatment of that eventuality.) It’s less clear that the telecom companies, fixated as they are on the bandwidth hogs, are doing a good job of managing the problem and planning for the future. The ISPs have put forward two big ideas, in recent months, about how to fix our bandwidth crisis. We can arrange these plans into two categories: horrible now and horrible later.
Plan One: Feed the meter. Category: Horrible now. In January, Time Warner announced it was rolling out an experimental plan in Beaumont, Texas, that charged users by the gigabyte. Thirty dollars would get you 5 gigabytes a month, while a $55 plan would get you 40. Each extra gigabyte over the limit costs a buck. In succeeding months, this data-capping idea has caught on. Comcast recently announced that it’s drawing the line at 250 gigabytes per user per month. Once you’ve used that much bandwidth, you can get your account suspended.
A limit of 250 gigs a month is plenty enough for most of us, at least for now. Silicon Alley Insider has a nice rundown of what it would take to hit that limit, to the tune of two HD movies a day and a lot of gaming on the side. But that assumes your connection is speedy enough to stream high-quality video in the first place. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: People use less bandwidth when their connection is crawling from congestion.
A reasonable argument can be made that this is a sound way to clear up congestion. It is rather unfair that people who barely use the Web have to pay the same or similar rates as people who use BitTorrent all day. The “meterists”—and there are a few of them out there—think systems like Time Warner’s are inherently fairer, as they end the practice of forcing light users to subsidize heavy users. The rosiest scenarios even suppose that a pay-as-you-go Internet could give telecoms the financial incentive to expand their networks.
The criticism is easy to condense: No one joyrides in a taxi. A plan like this, as its many opponents have noted, will cramp the freewheeling, inventive nature of the Internet. The Internet owes its success to two pillars of human activity: masturbation and procrastination. (Seriously: We have the porn companies to thank for pioneering all sorts of technologies, from VHS to secure credit-card transactions online.) Is the Internet really the Internet if people don’t use it to waste time?
Widespread deployment of capped or metered plans would also cripple businesses that have invested in high-bandwidth products, like videoconferencing. And if people start pinching bytes, it could also pose problems for security—if you hear the meter ticking, you’ll probably be less eager to install large operating-system updates and new virus-definition files.
Beyond that, capping data transfer is simply a crude way to get people to curb their data appetites. Imposing limits on gigabytes per month is as sensible as replacing speed limits with a total number of miles you can drive in a given day. A more reasonable scenario—though one that’s still decidedly unfun—would be to charge for Internet access as we charge for cell phones, running the meter during peak hours and letting people surf and download for free on nights and weekends, when there’s far less competition for bandwidth.
Plan Two: Blame BitTorrent. Category: Horrible later. In addition to capping data transfer, Comcast is taking a second anti-hog initiative. Rather than charging more, the company plans to slow or cut off peer-to-peer traffic during peak times. Last October, the Associated Press caught Comcast deprioritizing traffic from BitTorrent and other file-sharing protocols. The company received a slap from the FCC for singling out a specific type of traffic, which violates the FCC’s policy statement on network management. Comcast now says it will pursue a more compliant strategy that slows the connections of power users during peak times without singling out specific types of traffic. This tactic is similar to the more general practice of “traffic shaping”: prioritizing data packets for applications like video that shouldn’t lag at the expense of something like e-mail, which can wait in line an extra few seconds without anyone noticing—except that it’s deprioritizing users, not data packets. (People who hate the concept of traffic shaping prefer to call this “throttling” or “choking.”)
This plan is “horrible later” because it fails to account for the natural evolution of the Web toward larger file sizes and higher bandwidth activities. While it isn’t a God-given right to be able to downloaded pirated DVDs all day long, the ISPs should not adopt a long-term strategy that penalizes high-bandwidth activity. As FCC commissioner Robert M. McDowell pointed out in the Washington Post a few weeks ago, this is not the first time we’ve reached a crisis level of congestion. If Time Warner and Comcast had structured their networks around anti-bandwidth-hogging policies, say, 20 years ago, revolutionary services like YouTube and BitTorrent might not even exist.
Now let’s take a step back and sympathize with the ISPs. On the one hand, power users and Web entrepreneurs brand them as anti-innovation for going after bandwidth hogs with regressive tactics. On the other, there are oodles of home users who get infuriated when it takes forever for a page to load in their browser. On top of that, they have to deal with net-neutrality advocates who often seem more interested in policing the ISPs than in proposing ways to fix our bandwidth crunch (though Columbia law professor and Slate contributor Tim Wu runs down some good possible fixes in this New York Times op-ed). So let’s help the ISPs out and look at a few promising technologies that could help us all surf quickly and happily.
The high-fiber diet. If bandwidth demands do continue to scale, we could get to the point where anyone who wants a decent connection to watch a 100-gigabyte holographic movie—or whatever we’re watching five years from now—will have to get a fiber-optic cable directly to their home. Verizon has bet on this solution with its FiOS service. These “fiber to the premises” connections are still very expensive and aren’t yet widely deployed—and the commercials also make you want to retrofit your entire neighborhood with copper, just out of spite—but it looks as if they’re only getting more necessary. (Some researchers believe that the same technology that may someday lead to invisibility cloaks might also be deployed to route fiber-optic signals through today’s existing networks. That effort is fairly nascent.)
Cold, hard cache. Shortly before the start of the 2008 Olympics, some commentators feared the global network wouldn’t be able to handle all the demand for streaming Web video. The fact that the Internet didn’t “melt,” as one ZDNet author feared, set tongues wagging about NBC’s use of third-party “content-delivery networks.” To deliver nonlive content, these companies can store popular content on many different servers around the country—a method of ensuring that data packets don’t have to travel as far to reach their destination. In general, your machine will retrieve information much faster from a “nearby” server on the network than from one across the globe. If a copy of the movie you want is stored by your ISP on a local server, you’ll both get it faster and hold up fewer people in the process. Just as NBC did, companies may need to turn to these content-delivery companies—essentially, large private networks—to help distribute both cached and live content. Still, it feels a little defeatist; taking customers off the public Internet is great for reducing congestion, but the fact that it’s necessary is a problem we need to fix head-on, not work around. |
A WAYWARD pigeon has swapped its usual cree for a Royal Navy frigate after losing its bearings over the North Atlantic.
Paul the pigeon, which is actually a female, was adopted by the crew of HMS Somerset after landing on the vessel last Friday.
The confused bird, which is believed to originate from the Redcar area, has been made to feel right at home as crew fed and watered their latest recruit.
Petty officer Kristen Hughes was the first to spot the exhausted racing pigeon on the deck of the ship.
Since her unexpected arrival, Paul has become a popular feature on deck and she has enjoyed the best hospitality from the ship’s 185 crew members.
The chances of the lost bird winning her race are definitely over after she abandoned the sky for the ocean waves when she was 300 miles out to sea.
Paul picked up her name before she was caught by Leading Seaman William Hughes, an ex-pigeon fancier himself. He quickly discovered that he was in fact a she but the name stuck anyway.
Now the crew are hoping to reunite the lost bird with her owner but how and when is an issue yet to be resolved.
Their feathered friend has a race ring around one leg and an identification ring on the other which reads NEHU NY 2012 1703.
Leading Seaman Hughes said: “It was a stroke of luck that Paul found Somerset. We just hope we can reunite her with her owner.
"She will certainly have a few sea stories to tell her fellow pigeons."
The pigeon continues to build her strength, by eating breakfast cereal and resting in a makeshift coop alongside the Merlin helicopter in the ship's hangar.
The crew, who are involved in a busy training exercise, are receiving regular reports on Paul's progress.
With the ship so far from land this pigeon is enjoying a cruise for the time being and she certainly appears to have settled into life onboard a Royal Navy warship at work.
Lieutenant Mark Gilbert, the ship's flight commander, said: "The Royal Navy is used to saving life at sea and providing assistance to those in need.
"Caring for a lost pigeon seems like a natural extension to our versatile capability."
Do you know who owns Paul the pigeon? Contact the newsdesk on 01325-505054. |
Not since the cold fusion confusion of 1989 has the pop science media industry had a story like the EmDrive. The EmDrive is a propellantless thruster – a device that turns RF energy into force. If it works, it will revolutionize any technology that moves. Unlike rocket motors that use chemicals, cold gas, ions, or plasma, a spacecraft equipped with an EmDrive can cruise around the solar system using only solar panels. If it works, it will violate the known laws of physics.
After being tested in several laboratories around the world, including Eagleworks, NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory, the concept of a device that produces thrust from only electricity is still not disproven, ridiculed, and ignored. For a device that violates the law of conservation of momentum, this is remarkable. Peer review of several experiments are ongoing, but [Paul] has a much more sensational idea: he’s building an EmDrive that will propel a cubesat.
Make no mistake, our current understanding of the universe is completely incompatible with the EmDrive. The idea of an engine that dumps microwave energy into a metal cone and somehow produce thrust is on the fringes of science. No sane academic physicist would pursue this line of research, and the mere supposition that the EmDrive might work is irresponsible. Until further peer-reviewed experiments are published, the EmDrive is the fanciful dream of a madman. That said, if it does work, we get helicarriers. Four EmDrives mounted to a Tesla Roadster would make a hovercar. Your grandchildren would only see Earth’s sun as a tiny speck in the night sky.
This isn’t [Paul]’s first attempt to create a working propellantless thruster. For last year’s Hackaday Prize, [Paul] built a baby EmDrive. Unlike every other EmDrive experiment that used 2.4GHz microwaves, [Paul] designed his engine to operate on 22 to 26 GHz. This means [Paul]’s is significantly smaller and can easily fit into a cubesat. If it works, this cubesat will be able to maintain its orbit indefinitely, fly to the moon and back, or go anywhere in the solar system provided the solar panels get enough light.
While [Paul]’s motivations in creating a citizen science version of the EmDrive are laudable, Hackaday.io’s own baby EmDrive does not display the requisite scientific rigor for a project of this magnitude. Experimental setups are ill-defined, graph axes are unlabeled, and there is not enough information to properly critique [Paul]’s baby EmDrive experiments.
That said, we can’t blame a guy for trying, and the EmDrive is still an active area of research with several papers under peer review. [Paul]’s plan of putting an EmDrive into orbit is putting the cart several miles ahead of the horse, but it is still a very cool project for this year’s Hackaday Prize. |
Mad Men begins its final run of seven episodes on Sunday, April 5, at 10 pm Eastern on AMC. The show will air its series finale on May 17.
The beauty of Mad Men has always been in how it communicates huge emotional turning points via tiny little moments — one line of dialogue, or a physical gesture, or even just a potent image that makes the viewer feel a certain way. It's content to let lots of things stay in the subtext, to allow these swells of emotion to carry the story forward.
TV — even good TV — often over-explains itself, to the point where certain things are hammered into the audience's head. This has never been Mad Men's problem, and it's why the show felt so immediately impressive when it debuted in 2007.
I went to a recent press day for the show in Los Angeles, where I and other journalists got a chance to ask series creator Matt Weiner about some of the techniques he's used to achieve this effect. Here are my thoughts on the show, sprinkled with a few of his. |
Wednesday, April 12 – Tuesday, April 25
[Update] This event starts and ends at midnight PDT.
PDT: Wednesday, April 12, 2017 12:00 AM – Tuesday, April 25, 2017 11:59 PM
EDT: Wednesday, April 12, 2017 3:00 AM – Tuesday, April 25, 2017 2:59 AM
CEST: Wednesday, April 12, 2017 9:00 AM – Wednesday, April 26, 2017 8:59 AM
AEST: Wednesday, April 12, 2017 5:00 PM – Wednesday, April 26, 2017 4:59 PM
Here comes the 12th Anniversary Burning Project, ready to help you level a brand-new character up to Lv. 150!
Create a brand-new character during the event period and select it to have the special “Burning” effect. After they reach Lv. 10, every time that character levels up they will gain an additional two levels! Keep on leveling all the way up to Lv. 150.
This event is open to characters in both Reboot and non-Reboot worlds. Please note that Pink Bean characters cannot participate.
Here’s how it works:
Create a brand-new character during the event period. From the character select screen, choose the new character on your account to have the “Burning” effect.
Only one character on your account can have the “Burning” effect. If you delete the chosen character, you can select another character to have the effect.
Log in with your character and select the quest ‘[12th Anniversary] 1+2 Level Up! Mega Burning Project!’ from the star event notifier on the left side of the screen. You will receive the following special gifts!
Lv . 30 Equipment Box : Untradeable. Can only be opened at Lv. 30. Open to receive a weapon and armor set suitable for your class.
Mysterious Cryptic Chest : Untradeable. 7-day duration. Open to receive:
Snail : 5-hour Duration. Skills: Meso Magnet, Item Pouch. Cannot be moved to Cash Inventory. Cannot be revived with the Water of Life.
Legendary Cryptic Chest : Untradeable. Can only be opened at Lv. 100. Open to receive:
Frozen Weapon Box : Untradeable. 7-day duration. Open to receive:
Frozen Hat : Untradeable. Req. Lv: 100. STR/DEX/INT/LUK +23 MaxHP/MaxMP +270, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT +1, Defense +%d +293. Upgrades available: 10.
Frozen Cape : Untradeable. Req. Lv: 100. STR/DEX/INT/LUK +7, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT +7, Defense: +%d +180, Speed +9, Jump +5. Upgrades available: 7.
Frozen Suit : Untradeable. Req. Lv: 100. STR/DEX/INT/LUK +27, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT +1, Defense: +%d +315. Upgrades available: 10.
Frozen Weapon : Untradeable. Req. Lv: 100. Stats will vary based upon your job.
Frozen Secondary Weapon Box : Untradeable. 7-day duration. Open to receive:
Frozen Secondary Weapon : Untradeable. Req. Lv: 100. Stats will vary based upon your job.
Mastery Book 20 : Untradeable.
Mastery Book 30 : Untradeable.
Keep on Burning Title Coupon : Untradeable. Can only be used at Lv. 130. Use to receive:
Keep on Burning: Title. Untradeable. 14-day duration on stats. Req. Lv: 130. STR/DEX/INT/LUK +10, MaxHP/MaxMP +400, Weapon ATT/Magic ATT +10, Boss Damage +10%, Ignore DEF +10%.
Each time your character levels up, they will receive two additional levels! Work your way up to Lv. 150, so you can wear those sweet equips! |
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Sometimes I think the best argument is raw data. This is one of those times.
In the wake of the horrible school shooting in Connecticut and on the heels of politicians finally being smoked out into the open to talk seriously about sensible gun control policies, it’s important that we understand just how anomalous America is on the issues of guns and violence among developed countries. This table shows how shamefully we measure up against other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Among the O.E.C.D. countries that the World Bank groups as “high income,” America has the highest gun homicide rate, the highest number of guns per capita and the highest rate of deaths due to assault. In fact, America has more homicides by gun than all of the other high-income O.E.C.D. countries combined.
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It’s just shameful. |
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A lesbian asylum seeker, who faced deportation to Uganda, has won the right to remain in the UK.
Campaigners warned that Harriet Nakigudde, 30, risked persecution and imprisonment if returned to Uganda.
The Home Office had attempted to deport Ms Nakigudde, dismissing her testimony and rejecting the fact that she’s gay.
A previous failed attempt to deport the 30-year-old in May resulted in her collapsing whilst boarding a plane.
The stress of her legal fight has taken its toll on Ms Nakigudde. She has lost weight and suffered from ill health, having been detained at the Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre for several months.
On Thursday, the African LGBTI Out and Proud Diamond Group (OPDG) announced that an immigration judge had ruled in Ms Nakigudde’s favour.
“I am so happy, so relieved and over the moon,” Ms Nakigudde told PinkNews.co.uk. “At last I have my freedom and I can live my life.
“I am so happy that the judge believed me because the Home Office representative was trying to make me out as a liar.”
Ms Nakigudde added: “I would like to thank everyone that has supported me. I would like to thank PinkNews, the Out and Proud Diamond Group, and all of the public for helping me.”
In a statement to PinkNews, OPDG Director Edwin Sesange said: “We are grateful that the independent immigration judge has given Harriet fair justice, which was denied before, and has accepted her asylum application in the UK as a lesbian who would face persecution if returned back to Uganda.
“We thank everybody that has given Harriet support, including PinkNews, our legal team and the British public at large.
“And we urge the UK Government to continue offering protection to LGBTI asylum seekers.”
PinkNews understands the Home Office is unlikely to appeal today’s decision.
Uganda is notorious for its widespread homophobic persecution.
A Ugandan law further criminalising same-sex sexual activity, allowing repeat offenders to be sentenced to 14 years in prison, was given presidential approval in February.
Following an appeal, Uganda’s highest court could decide on Friday the legality of the Anti-Homosexuality Act. |
Hungary plans to construct a large border fence to keep migrants from crossing into the country from Serbia.
Ministers have called for plans for a four-meter-high structure to be submitted by next week. The decision follows a large rise in the number of people applying for asylum in Hungary.
So far this year, more than 53,000 people have claimed refuge, up by more than 20 percent in a year and far higher than the 2,000 requests in 2012.
Officials predict the number will reach 130,000 by the end of the year.
Ministers impatient
Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto defended the measures, saying: "This decision does not break any international treaty, other countries have opted for the same solution."
Szijjarto recognized that immigration was a serious problem for all EU countries but that Hungary could not "afford to wait any longer".
Budapest has faced accusations of xenophobia in its response to the refugee crisis.
Many of the migrants are Kosovo Albanians, escaping poverty in their own country and taking advantage of a lifting of travel restrictions last summer.
Able to travel through Serbia on buses, reports say they head straight for a stretch of the 175-kilometer border with Hungary and, once inside the Schengen visa zone, they are free to travel through the rest of Europe.
Listen to audio 01:47 Share Hungary migrants lost in translation Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/1Ffjl Hungary plans posters to deter illegal migrants.
Bound for Germany
Many more migrants end up in Germany. Earlier this year, Berlin sent its own patrols to the Hungary-Serbia border to assist local border staff.
Germany says it rejects more than 99 percent of asylum applications from Kosovans, as candidates must show they would face persecution if they returned to their home country.
Berlin is preparing a law change to make it easier to deport failed asylum seekers from Kosovo by making it a country of safe origin.
mm/rc (dpa, AFP, Reuters) |
This past Friday, Donald Trump abruptly reversed course on birtherism, accepting President Barack Obama’s constitutional legitimacy for the White House after he spent five years questioning it.
But what about Trump’s other conspiracy theories?
After all, birtherism is just one wild idea that Trump has had when it comes to Obama. During a media blitz in 2011 ― when he first began to make his birther claims ― Trump also surmised that the president did not write his own memoir. Instead, he insisted, Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader, penned Dreams from My Father.
“Look,” he told Sean Hannity, “he was born ‘Barry Soetero.’ Somewhere along the line, he changed his name. I heard he had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard. He wrote a book that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but his second book was written by an average person. ... I say Bill Ayers wrote the book.”
Asked why, Trump continued.
“He was best friends with Bill Ayers,” he explained, and Hannity just let him roll on at that point. “Bill Ayers was a super-genius. And a lot of people have said he wrote the book. Well recently, as you know last week, Bill Ayers came out and said he did write the book. Barack Obama wouldn’t be president ― and, you know, I wrote many best-sellers, and also, No. 1 best-sellers, including The Art of the Deal. So I know something about writing. And I want to tell you, the guy that wrote the first book didn’t write the second book.”
This wasn’t some one-off suggestion, either. Trump was adamant that Ayers wrote the book. He made a similar claim on Laura Ingraham’s radio show and raised doubts about the authorship of the memoir during an interview with Fox News in January 2012. He even tweeted about it in 2013.
WH claims it lied about Pres. Obama living with his uncle b/c “wasn’t mentioned in his book.” I guess Bill Ayers never knew about it! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2013
All of this, of course, was rubbish, though Trump was hardly alone in pushing it. Ayers had been an acquaintance of Obama’s in Chicago. The two had met in the spring of 1995, and Ayers had hosted a coffee for the aspiring local politician later that year. Around that time, Dreams was published. But multiple investigations had concluded that the two had a passing relationship and not much more.
Obama, however, was routinely dogged by the Ayers association during the 2008 campaign. As was Ayers, who occasionally tried to deflect the attention through sarcasm. In one instance, he was asked by a conservative blogger if he had been the ghost writer of Obama’s memoir.
“I said…. ‘Yes, I wrote every word of Dreams from my Father. And if you can help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you,’” Ayers recalled in an email to The Huffington Post.
“She was delighted to get the scoop, dutifully blogged it, and the story went viral until Jonah Goldberg, I think, and Bill O’Reilly said I was pulling her leg. Jamie Weinstein, for example, from the Daily Caller, asked me to please tell him the truth about whether I’d written the book, and I responded for the zillionth time, that yes I had, and please split the royalties, and he said several times, ‘No. I know the joke but tell me the truth.’ I repeated the whole thing and he said, ‘I get it, but tell me the truth.’ So there we were: If I said I wrote it, I was mocking the right-wing conspiracy nuts, but if they said I wrote it, that was an example of intrepid investigative reporting. A perfect contradiction.”
This exchange happened in 2009. Trump was continuing to push the conspiracy theory in 2011. His campaign did not return a request for comment on his Ayers theory.
There is a certain irony to Trump accusing Obama of having his memoir ghost-written. In the aforementioned Hannity interview, Trump noted the success of his own book, The Art of the Deal, which is described as part memoir, part business advice. Unlike Dreams, that book was most certainly penned by someone else: a writer named Tony Schwartz, who has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics.
“The only thing Donald Trump knows about writing is that he can’t do it,” Schwartz emailed HuffPost. “That’s why he hires others to write a book. He did not write a single sentence of The Art of the Deal ― not one. He lies about that as he lies about virtually everything.” |
Union County, New Jersey, is home to job seekers hailing from both blue collar and and white collar professions. Now, a new program will offer green job training in two tracks, aimed at helping individuals utilize their existing knowledge in moving into green collar jobs.
The program is being offered by the Union County Board of Chosen Freeholders, and was developed in partnership with Rutgers University, School of Engineering; Union County College’s Industry-Business Institute; and Union County government’s Workforce Investment Board. It will offer nationally-recognized certifications to those enrolled and will begin on April 19.
The residential track, designed to serve displaced construction and/or manufacturing workers, includes courses in residential home energy inspection and solar panel installation. Prior work experience in the construction and/or electrical trades is noted as a plus for individuals interested in making the most of this track.
The commercial track was designed to serve displaced professional workers, such as systems analysts, computer programmers, trainers, project leaders; project managers; marketing and sales workers; accountants, etc. This track will focus on the new “Sustainability Management” career, which encompasses public relations, environmental regulatory compliance, and the ability to identify cost reductions through energy savings, supply chain, and manufacturing waste.
Pre-registration for the program is required. Interested individuals in Union County should contact Elizabeth Paskewich at the Union County Workforce Investment Board, at 908-527-4886 or via e-mail at [email protected].
EarthTechling wants your opinion! Take EarthTechling’s 3-minute reader survey and enter to win a $250 Amazon gift card. The 2011 survey closes on April 15, 2011. |
Ryan Giggs has admitted that he was underprepared for his brief tenure as Manchester United manager, but revealed his excitement at his new role as Louis van Gaal’s assistant.
Giggs, who ended his playing career in May after 963 appearances and 13 Premier League titles with the club, took the reins as caretaker manager for last season’s final four games following David Moyes’s sacking, leading United to two wins, a draw and a defeat.
“When I took the job there were a lot of things that I was quite happy with, but there was the odd thing where I thought: ‘I’m not quite ready for this,’” he told thefa.com.
“Obviously I have gained that experience from Sir Alex [Ferguson] but last year I was still playing so I wasn’t really focused on the coaching and the other side of things.”
Van Gaal, who has won league titles in the Netherlands, Spain and Germany, will join Giggs and the rest of the Manchester United staff in mid-July after completing his spell as manager of Holland, who have provided some of the World Cup’s most thrilling moments. Despite his international commitments, the Dutchman has already completed the first two signings of his reign, with the Spanish midfielder Ander Herrera and England’s 18-year-old left-back Luke Shaw joining the club in the recent days.
Giggs believes that working with Van Gaal will further his own development as a coach. “This year I can put everything into it and learn from someone who has managed at the top in so many other countries,” he said.
“It has been a good thing that I have been with Sir Alex for so long but also I am now getting to see how other people work as well. I got a taste of David Moyes and now Louis van Gaal this year. He is a world-class coach and I know I will learn a lot about coaching from being able to observe and contribute at such close quarters.”
On Thursday, Giggs completed his Uefa pro licence, the highest-level managerial qualification in European football, at St George’s Park, the Football Association’s national base in Burton upon Trent.
“It helped me in gaining confidence in speaking in front of the players and putting on meetings and structuring the week regarding training,” he said. “As a manager you are thinking about things 24/7 and this course definitely helps you get to grips with that.” |
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Built HHKB CF-LX by nathanrosspowell
Built HHKB CF-LX by Hellcatz
Round 2 is here and faster than ever! Like CF-LXXX, this buy will be limited to 10 cases, one per person. These are carbon fiber, skeleton-style cases designed to be lightweight and portable. They are comprised of a carbon fiber plate and backplate, with a frosted clear acrylic midpiece. The case has been designed by foggyflute, who will also be assisting with the manufacturing.This will be utilizing the same design and manufacturer as the first round, so turnaround will be fast. Unfortunately, I am at school until Thanksgiving break, so the cases will be shipped out then. This is a firm date, no sooner no later. Because of my last GB having quite a few extended problems and because I realize that people might be reluctant to hand over money again, pre-payment will be optional. Regardless of your choice, your spot will be reserved. I'll keep a wait list beyond the 10 buyers in case of any non-payers.Anyone who chooses not to prepay will be invoiced when the cases arrive at my house. This should ensure that there is no uncertainty about ability to ship the product in the specified timeframe. Anyone who does not pay within 1 week will have their spot given to the first person on the waitlist.~ $109 plus shipping~ Layouts: Standard 60% or HHKB~ 1.6cm matte carbon fiber~ Frosted white/solid black acrylic midpiece~ Switch-mount PCB~ M3 screws/postsLet me know if I'm missing anything or if there's any other information you'd like to see. |
OKLAHOMA CITY -- Much of the buzz around the Oklahoma City Thunder has been about Kevin Durant's return.
Serge Ibaka's comeback is nearly as important. The three-time member of the All-Defense first team and two-time league blocks leader missed the final month last season while recovering from knee surgery and, without him, Oklahoma City's defense tanked.
In 64 games with Ibaka, the Thunder allowed 99.9 points per game. In 18 games without him, Oklahoma City surrendered 108.3 points. The Thunder went 10-8 during that final stretch and missed the playoffs.
Now the 6-foot-10 power forward whom Durant calls the key to their success has been cleared to play.
"I feel great," Ibaka said at media day on Monday. "I feel great. Can't wait. I'm ready to go."
Editor's Picks Durant on first practice: 'I'm the same player I was' Kevin Durant is back on a basketball court, and the 2014 MVP says he already feels like himself again.
With Ibaka back, it makes everyone's job easier. The improving offensive player averaged 14.3 points and 7.8 rebounds last season.
"It just adds a different dynamic for us," Durant said. "It makes us a little bit more long and athletic. He's one of the best shot-blockers in the league. The most athletic two-way player for his position. Having him on the floor changes a lot for us. We definitely missed him last season, as you've seen, and he's the key to our success."
Ibaka's importance was notable when he was injured before the 2014 Western Conference finals against San Antonio. Ibaka suffered a left calf strain and was thought to be out for the season. He missed the first two games of the series, and San Antonio cruised in both games. A hobbled Ibaka returned, and the Thunder won Games 3 and 4 before dropping the series in six games.
This summer wasn't completely smooth for Ibaka, with the Republic of the Congo native sitting out the NBA Africa game on Aug. 1 for precautionary reasons.
"At different points during the summer, he's had some discomfort," Thunder general manager Sam Presti said. "He saw his surgeon. He's had regular checkups with his surgeon. The surgeon has continued to feel very confident and encourage him to move and play, and he's fully cleared."
Presti said Ibaka might not play every preseason game, but that's normal for the team's top players.
Last season, Ibaka made 77 3-pointers after making just 45 the previous five years. He continued to work on rounding out his game in the offseason.
"I've been working on my game, working on getting better," he said. "I don't want to complicate my game. My main focus is defense, like always. Offensively, I'm trying to do the things I've been doing in terms of getting better and better."
Ibaka's offseason work left an impression on Presti.
"I think Serge may have had the best summer of any of our players, in terms of just improvement in overall game," Presti said. "He's shooting the ball well. His passing has really improved."
Ibaka smiled when asked about Presti's comment.
"It feels great when your GM says something like that about you," he said. "That means you're working hard." |
The U.S. Mid-Atlantic sea-level record
The Albemarle Embayment geological record includes interfluvial, estuarine, intertidal and shallow marine lithofacies arranged in depositional sequences that record repeated sea-level highstands dated primarily by optically stimulated luminescence to MIS 5e, 5c, 5a and 3 (ref. 11) (Fig. 1; Supplementary Table 1; Supplementary Note 1). We adopt the minimum elevation of terrestrial facies and the maximum elevation of marine facies as upper and lower bounds, respectively, of MIS 5a (∼80 ka) and mid-MIS 3 (50–35 ka) sea level. For the MIS 5a data (Fig. 1; Supplementary Table 1), we bound a cluster of sea-level data from 2.5 to 7 m in agreement with previous assessments of sea-level records in the region20. We assume that rare terrestrial markers found at elevations below this range do not represent a constraint on the MIS 5a highstand, but rather a lower sea level reached during late MIS 5a or MIS 4. Furthermore, calculations described below (and detailed in Supplementary Note 3) demonstrate that RSL predictions for MIS 3 are relatively insensitive to the height of sea level during MIS 5a.
For the MIS 3 interval spanning 50–35 ka, three marine indicators constrain RSL to be above −0.9, −3 and −2 m (ref. 11). We thus adopt the elevation of the highest of these marine indicators, −0.9 m, as the lower bound. Regarding the upper bound, three terrestrial indicators, with ages between 50 and 35 ka, show a consistent constraint on the sea-level highstand of 1 m. Two terrestrial indicators dated to earlier in this time window13 are found at lower elevations, however these may represent deposition during a time of rising sea level rather than during the peak sea-level highstand. We adopt the terrestrial indicators at 1 m as the upper bound on sea level, yielding a range of −1 to 1 m. We apply an elevation error of ±3 m that reflects reconstructed paleo-tidal range for the region that may have been up to three times greater than the present amplitude of ∼1 m (ref. 21). The geological sea-level constraints we adopt below (for example, Fig. 2) incorporate these broader uncertainties.
Figure 2: Global mean sea-level curves and relative sea-level prediction. (a) Global mean sea-level curve for Version 1.2 of ICE-5G (dotted black line) and the ICE PC (blue line) ice histories. The GMSL curve for the ICE PC2 history is identical to the curve for ICE PC . (b) Relative sea-level predictions for the reference site in the Albemarle Embayment based on the ICE-5G (dotted black), ICE PC (solid blue) and ICE PC2 (dashed blue; ice-free eastern sector of the Laurentide Ice Sheet from 80 to 44 ka) ice histories. Orange rectangles span the observational constraints on peak MIS 5a and 3 sea level including the ±3 m paleotidal uncertainty (see Fig. 1). For MIS 5a, this range is −0.5 to 10.5 m, and at 44 ka during MIS 3 the range is −4 to 4 m. The grey-shaded region spans the MIS 3 time interval examined within the present analysis. Full size image
Models of glacio-isostatic adjustment
Ice sheet growth and melt produces a complex spatio-temporal pattern of sea-level change22. To predict the present elevation of sea-level markers, we perform calculations based on the sea-level theory and pseudo-spectral algorithm described by Kendall et al.23 with a spherical harmonic truncation at degree and order 256. The calculations include the impact of rotation changes on sea level24, evolving shorelines and the migration of grounded, marine-based ice23,25,26,27. We report RSL predictions at a representative site within the Albemarle Embayment (white star on inset of Fig. 1) for a representative time (44 ka) within the middle of MIS 3 (50–35 ka). This representative site lies within the latitudinal range of the reported geological sea-level markers used to define the bound on local peak MIS 3 sea level (Fig. 1). We have found that RSL highstand predictions for this reference site differ from field locations by less than 0.5 m. We deem simulations acceptable if they satisfy the aforementioned bounds for both MIS 5a and MIS 3 (Fig. 2b, orange rectangles).
Our numerical predictions require models for Earth’s viscoelastic structure and the history of global ice cover. We begin by adopting an Earth model with upper and lower mantle viscosities of 0.5 × 1021 Pa s and 1.5 × 1022 Pa s, respectively; this radial profile is consistent with inferences based on globally distributed ice age data sets28 and geological data along the U.S. mid-Atlantic29,30. Our initial GIA calculation adopts Version 1.2 of the ICE-5G ice history, characterized by a GMSL fall from −87 to −100 m throughout MIS 3 (ref. 8) (Fig. 2a; dotted black line); in this calculation, we make the standard assumption that, for any pre-LGM time step, the geometry of global ice cover was identical to the post-LGM ice distribution with the same GMSL value31. We explore alternatives to the GMSL history, ice geometry and viscosity profile in the discussion below. Using the combination of the ICE-5G model and Earth structure described above, we predict mid-MIS 3 sea level (at 44 ka) at the Albemarle Embayment reference site to be –67 m (Fig. 2b; dotted black line), grossly misfitting (by ∼70 m) the observational constraints (Fig. 1). The misfit is ∼25 m for the MIS 5a record (Fig. 2b). The level of misfit to the MIS 3 record highlights the enigmatic nature of the sea-level record in Fig. 1 and motivates the present study.
Many previous inferences of GMSL during the last glacial phase, particularly MIS 3, reconstruct higher peak sea level (smaller global ice volume) than adopted in the ICE-5G history9,32,33. To proceed in our analysis, we revise the ICE-5G ice history on the basis of results from two recent GIA analyses. First, following the Pico et al.10 analysis of sediment core records from the Bohai Sea, peak GMSL during MIS 3 is placed at −37.5 m at 44 ka. Second, we adopt GMSL values of −15 and −10 m for MIS 5a and 5c, respectively; these values are within bounds (5a: −18 to 0 m, 5c: −20 to 1 m) derived by Creveling et al.30 on the basis of globally distributed sea-level markers from both periods. The GMSL curve for the revised ice model, ICE PC , is shown in Fig. 2a (blue line). The RSL prediction based on this model (Fig. 2b, solid blue) maintains the assumption that the pre-LGM global ice geometry is equivalent to the deglacial phase whenever GMSL values are equal. This prediction is consistent with observational constraints for the MIS 5a highstand, but misfits MIS 3 data. Notably, this Earth–ice model pairing predicts a peak RSL of −12 m at 44 ka, well below the observational bounds of −4 to 4 m.
We performed a suite of simulations to explore the sensitivity of our predictions to the adopted ice history. Specifically, we generated 100 synthetic ice histories in which we varied GMSL randomly across the glacial phase but confined GMSL to −37.5±7 m at 44 ka (ref. 10), and to −15 m and −10 m, for MIS 5a and MIS 5c, respectively (Fig. 3a, blue lines; see Methods for detailed ice history construction). Using these ice histories, we predicted RSL at the reference site within the Albemarle Embayment using the standard treatment for the pre-LGM ice distribution; that is, this distribution matches the post-LGM geometry when the GMSL values are the same (similar to ICE PC ). In this case, the predicted RSL ranges from −26.5 to −7.5 m at 44 ka (blue lines, Fig. 3b), and thus all 100 simulations predict a peak RSL that falls outside the observational constraints.
Figure 3: The effect of varying ice history on relative sea-level prediction. (a) Global mean sea level curves for 100 randomly generated ice histories that pass through −37.5±7 m at 44 ka (blue lines), −15 m at MIS 5a and −10 m at MIS 5c. (b) Relative sea level predictions for the Albemarle Embayment reference site based on the ice histories shown in frame (a). The results of calculations that assume identical pre-LGM and post-LGM ice geometries when global mean sea level values are the same are plotted as blue lines; the calculations that assume an ice-free eastern Laurentide from 80 to 44 ka are shown by black lines. Orange rectangles span the adopted observational constraints on peak MIS 5a and MIS 3 sea level including the ±3 m paleotidal uncertainty. The grey-shaded region spans the MIS 3 time interval examined within the present analysis. Full size image
Revising the geometry of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during MIS 3
We next explored the impact of changing the geometry of the LIS on the local RSL predictions at the Albemarle Embayment. While few field data constrain the evolution of the LIS before the LGM2,4,5, a recent field-based study by Dalton et al.34 suggests that large portions of eastern Laurentia were ice-free during MIS 3 (Fig. 4). This conclusion implies limited or no ice growth from MIS 5a to MIS 3 within large areas of the sector of the LIS closest to the Albemarle Embayment. To investigate the effect of this revised ice geometry on RSL predictions, we constructed an ice model, ICE PC2 , with a GMSL history identical to that shown by the blue line in Fig. 2a, but that was distinguished from the ICE PC history in the following ways: (1) the eastern sector of the LIS is ice-free from 80 to 44 ka, consistent with the conclusions of Dalton et al.34; and (2) the ice removed in this exercise, equivalent to 6.8 m of GMSL, is distributed uniformly over the western sector of the LIS, and the Cordilleran and Fennoscandian Ice Sheets. The latter resulted in an increase in ice thickness of ∼170 m in each region (Fig. 4; See Methods for details on ice model construction). The post-LGM ice geometry remains identical to the ICE-5G and ICE PC models, and thus we no longer assume that global ice geometry prior and subsequent to the LGM were identical whenever the GMSL values match. The simulation, based on this revised ICE PC2 ice model and the viscoelastic Earth model discussed above, predicts a RSL of −3 m at 44 ka, consistent with the sea-level record at the Albemarle Embayment (Fig. 2b). |
MONTREAL — This month, the Gazette reported an announcement by Montreal city councillor Marvin Rotrand that the under-representation of anglophones in the city’s workforce will be addressed by steps such as allowing job applicants to use a dictionary during the written French-language test, and loosening the requirements for French-language proficiency for some jobs.
These steps are positive and welcome, but if they are not part of a carefully planned process — similar to the present employment-equity programs for women, visible minorities and aboriginal people — they could have counterproductive consequences.
The issue is of crucial importance for the long-term vitality of the English-speaking community in all its racial and ethnic diversity. It is also important for the quality of overall city programs and services, and for the integrity of our municipal democracy. It is a widely accepted democratic principle that the legitimacy and effectiveness of a government depends on its ability to reflect and respond to the needs, interests and aspirations of the governed. That ability greatly depends on the representation, participation and input of citizens at all levels of public administration.
Since 2000, under a provincial employment-equity law known as Law 143, all provincial and municipal public organizations overseen by the provincial government — including school boards, universities, municipalities, health institutions and Crown corporations — must adopt measures to eliminate obstacles to equal-employment opportunities for ethnic minorities, visible minorities, women and aboriginal people. The law, however, does not apply to the provincial government’s own civil service — that is, provincial ministries; but it does apply to municipal departments like urban planning, or parks and recreation. The provincial civil service has its own strictly voluntary program for employment equity — and measures apply only to hiring, and not to promotion of employees from within.
Although Law 143 is designed to address discrimination in the employment of members of the designated groups, it does not mention anglophones. Under the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101), the English language was not (and is still not) seen by policy-makers as a factor leading to discrimination in employment in the same way that race, sex or mother tongue other than English or French have historically been perceived and acknowledged.
When Law 143 came into force in 2001, many public organizations were given a transition period by the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission to set in place a structure to implement employment-equity programs. There are specific organizational steps to follow, such as conducting an internal survey of staff composition in all job categories; a review of employment systems, criteria and procedures; the establishment of quantitative objectives to correct under-representation; and the development of redress and support measures to ensure fair representation in all job categories. |
ADELAIDE will have access to its second father-son prospect in as many years, with the son of premiership star Tyson Edwards up for grabs in the 2017 draft pool.
Jackson Edwards impressed in the latter stages of last season and will play for South Australia this year, with the Crows already involved in the Glenelg prospect's development.
The 17-year-old gathered 19 disposals and kicked a goal in the under-17s NAB All Stars clash at Punt Road Oval on Grand Final morning last year, and showed some of his talents playing against the most highly rated draft hopefuls in the country.
The Crows will have first access to the 184cm Edwards, having secured their first father-son selection – Ben Jarman – via last year's NAB AFL Rookie Draft.
Jarman's father, Darren, played alongside Tyson Edwards in the Crows' breakthrough 1997-98 flags. Edwards finished his brilliant career in 2010, having played 321 games for the Crows – the second most of any player at the club.
Edwards looms as one of the most likely father-son prospects this year in what is a smaller field than most seasons.
Richmond has been working closely with Patrick Naish, the son of former Tiger Chris, and he may play for the club's VFL side later in the year.
The Tigers will also have access to Naish's Northern Knights teammate Josh Broderick, whose father Paul played 169 games for the Tigers (as well as 93 for Fitzroy).
At 176cm, Broderick is small but a neat kick and plays as a small defender and midfielder. Naish is a running midfield type with a penetrating kick.
Hawthorn champion Dermott Brereton's son Devlin is draft eligible this season and will be a part of the Sandringham Dragons' under-18 squad. Brereton is a natural smaller forward who, at 180cm and 65kg, is likely to push into the midfield.
Carlton can select Liam Hickmott, the son of former Blue Adrian, while his younger brother Will will be available next year, and Brisbane will have access to Lachie Harris, the youngest son of Fitzroy great Leon Harris.
The speedy Harris has spent time with the Lions over summer, where his father has joined the club in a recruiting position after exiting AFL Victoria last year.
After selecting Callum Brown at last year's draft via the academy/father-son bidding system, Collingwood will also be able to take his younger brother Tyler this season.
The younger son of 1990 premiership player and ex-Magpies skipper Gavin has developed in a different manner to Callum, but spent a week with the Pies in January and can play as a smart half-forward.
The familiar names don't stop there in this year's draft class.
Dandenong Stingrays forward Tom De Konning's dad Terry played 31 games for Footscray and tall Victorian prospect Hayden McLean's dad Paul played for Fitzroy and his uncle and grandfather represented Melbourne.
Charlie Spargo is one of the leading midfielders in the draft, but will be another player to almost qualify as a father-son to North Melbourne. His dad Paul played 81 games for the club before joining Brisbane, meaning Charlie joins Josh Kelly as players the Roos have nearly had in their grasp through the father-son rule in recent years.
Then there are the brothers. Andrew Brayshaw, the younger brother of Melbourne's Angus, will play for the Sandringham Dragons, with older brother Hamish, who skippered the Dragons to their flag last year, likely to return as a 19-year-old after recovering from injury.
Aaron Darling at the Stingrays is the cousin of West Coast forward Jack, while Cassidy Parish is a different player to his older brother, Darcy: he's taller and more of a pure inside midfielder than the dashing young Bomber.
Some clubs will already be looking towards next year's father-son pool, with more names on the radar in 2018.
Mason Fletcher, described as a 'clone' of his father Dustin, will play for the Calder Cannons, as will Rhylee West, who is tied to the Western Bulldogs through his dad Scott.
Ben Silvagni will be able to join brother Jack as a father-son choice at Carlton, Will Kelly (son of Collingwood premiership defender Craig) could also join his brother Jake in the AFL, and Zac Hart, the son of former Crow Ben, is eligible to join Adelaide.
Oscar Brownless is in the Geelong Falcons' program this year after performing well for Vic Country's under-16s side last year, and will have the Cats tracking his progress as he aims to follow father Billy to the club.
The Roos will be eyeing the pool closely next year, with three possible father-sons on the horizon: Joel Crocker (son of Darren), Nick Blakey (son of John) and Bailey Scott (son of Robert).
Blakey and Scott are in the rare position of being eligible to join three different clubs through the father-son and academy rules.
The Brisbane Lions and Kangaroos can select Blakey as a father-son, but he will also qualify as a Sydney Swans academy player given he has lived in the region for more than five years while his father John has been an assistant coach with the Swans.
Robert Scott's career at North Melbourne and Geelong means both clubs will have access to Bailey as a father-son, as will Gold Coast as an academy player from that zone.
Jackson Edwards (left) with father Tyson and brother Luke in 2005. Picture: AFL Photos |
Houston Men’s Basketball poised for major step forward
University of Houston sophomore guard Rob Gray Jr. led the team, and the American Athletic Conference, in scoring this season with 17.4 points per game. University of Houston sophomore guard Rob Gray Jr. led the team, and the American Athletic Conference, in scoring this season with 17.4 points per game. Photo: Tony Gaines Photo: Tony Gaines Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Houston Men’s Basketball poised for major step forward 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
HOUSTON - Sports fans, particularly in an age of burgeoning social media and news immediacy, have a myopic tendency to live in the moment, and the Houston Cougars Men’s Basketball team’s two recent moments, an upset loss against Tulane in the American Athletic Conference Tournament quarterfinals, followed by a first-round NIT loss to Georgia Tech in Atlanta, were not positive.
After finishing out the 11 final regular season games with a 9-2 record, including quality wins against opponents like Cincinnati, Temple and Southern Methodist University, some pundits gave the Cougars a shot to win the AAC Tournament and eke their way into the NCAA Tournament, where - clearly - anything can happen.
But the Cougars finished 0-2 in single-elimination tournament games, leaving a bad taste in some fans’ mouths.
One thing that is easy to lose amidst the hot-takes and 140-character analyses is perspective. Consider the year before last, head coach Kelvin Sampson’s first year at the helm. Houston went 13-19, achieving only a 4-14 record in conference, after the top-rated players on the team, like TaShawn Thomas and Danuel House, fled to programs like Oklahoma or Texas A&M.
This season, Sampson’s first with his own recruits, including budding up-tempo freshman point guard Galen Robinson, Oregon transfer, junior guard Damyean Dotson, and sophomore scoring guard Rob Gray, Jr., the Cougars posted a 22-10 record, 12-6 in AAC play.
Gray, Jr. became the first Cougar to lead the conference in scoring - with 16.3 points per game in the regular season, edging out SMU’s Nic Moore (16.1) - since Aubrey Coleman led Conference USA, and the nation, in 2009-10. Gray, Jr. will return next season.
Dotson was the only player in the AAC to rank in the top-12 in both scoring and rebounding, making a reputation for himself as one of the most efficient two-way players in the conference. Dotson will return next season, with a key role as a senior.
Robinson, Jr. emerged as the starting point guard midway through the season, and ultimately put up triple-digit assists (110), and teammates and coaches report that he is a film-room devotee, a student of the game, and he will be back next season, to key the Cougars’ fast-paced attack.
Houston possessed the best scoring offense in the AAC this season, racking up 77.4 points per game. The 10-game regular season improvement the Cougars managed between last season and this season ranks 10th nationally, a testament to the kind of difference Sampson is capable of making, as he slowly but surely brings in his guys and puts them in positions to succeed.
Sampson suggested that Houston might have been a victim of its own late-season success, heading into the AAC Tournament, suggesting that it can be hard to overcome being hailed as great.
Houston Football head coach Tom Herman is combating the same problem in the offseason, forbidding players to wear Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl gear or in any way continue to revel or relive the major New Year’s Six Bowl victory over Florida State.
The hope and the expectation is that the two late-season failures will leave this team hungry. With no concrete laurels on which to rest, there is no reason this team should not be anxious to get back on the court and erase the memory of two consecutive one-and-done losses in postseason play.
The Cougars also signed an intriguing addition to the roster, 6’11” 250-lb Valentine Sangoyami out of Northern Oklahoma College, a much-needed infusion of size and strength in the post. McNeil High School scoring guard Armoni Brooks, ranked as the No. 11 player in the state of Texas by Rivals, signed with Houston for next season, proving that Cougars can draw top-rated talent from the state, which is imperative.
All indications are that Sampson is preparing to schedule a much tougher preseason for Houston, with the realistic, practical goal being to make the NCAA Tournament this time next year. That is a lofty goal for a program that has had virtually no meaningful, large-scale success since the Phi Slama Jama era, but with Sampson at the helm, and his chosen players beginning to fill the roster, there is reason to think the Cougars will be legitimate players in the postseason next year. |
Friday marks the 36th anniversary of the Seitz decision, a ruling by arbitrator Peter Seitz that stated that any major league player who played one year for a team without a contract became a free agent. The ruling wiped out baseball’s cherished reserve clause, setting the stage for players to earn more money than they ever imagined. From that moment on, one team has been more generous in bestowing those riches than any other: the New York Yankees.
The Yankees are the team that’s synonymous with big spending, so eager to spend big bucks for top talent that they made Catfish Hunter the first big-ticket free agent in baseball history a year before free agency was a thing. They’re the team that has pulled off a big free-agent signing or traded for a big-money player more or less every year, for 36 years in a row.
That New York’s streak might come to an end this year tells us a little about the current crop of free agents, and a lot about how the Yankees do business now.
It’s a shallow group of free agents by historical standards. Only three players will end up with nine-figure contracts, with seven players likely to rake in $50 million or more. The positions those few elite free agents play mostly ran up against the Yankees’ biggest strengths and areas of depth: Mark Teixeira’s got five years left on his $180 million deal and Jesus Montero is poised to become the next star in the Bronx, so there was no room for Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder. Derek Jeter’s nearing the end, but signing Jose Reyes or Jimmy Rollins was still a practical impossibility. A loaded class of closers is irrelevant when you’ve got Mariano Rivera, not to mention nasty setup man David Robertson waiting in the wings.
But the fact that the Yankees were so well covered at these and nearly every other position speaks volumes about the job Brian Cashman has done the past few years. The Yankees have become more adept at recognizing talent, deciding who stays and who goes, and resisting the urge to break the bank or ditch a premium prospect for no good reason than at any other time in years — maybe decades.
From 1982 through 1994, the Yankees missed the playoffs 13 years in a row, the team’s longest stretch of futility since Babe Ruth’s arrival. Each failure made George Steinbrenner progressively angrier, more frustrated, and more eager to do something rash. Though the Yankees signed their share of free agents in those days, Steinbrenner’s signature move was to strip-mine the farm system, ordering good prospects to be traded even when the return wasn’t anything special. Trading Doug Drabek and two other players for an aging Rick Rhoden and two relievers was bad. Shipping Jay Buhner to Seattle for Ken Phelps was, as Frank Costanza would tell you, grounds for prosecution.
Then came the dynasty. The Yankees won four World Series in five years, and looked poised to win a fifth in 2001 until they got Womacked. Losing for years can make a team increasingly antsy to make a big move. But tasting success over and over, then falling just short in heartbreaking fashion, can foster similar levels of angst. The Yankees had brought in plenty of outside help during their four-title run, but acquiring players like Tino Martinez, Paul O’Neill, and Scott Brosius didn’t require massive expenditures of money or talent. After the 2001 loss, Steinbrenner and Cashman started to raise the stakes.
The strategy mostly worked, at first. Homegrown players like Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, and Rivera had grown from up-and-comers to veteran fixtures through the World Series years. But the team’s complementary players started to grow old and increasingly ineffective. Spotting that trend, the Yankees signed Hideki Matsui from Japan, and reaped major benefits. Short-term contracts for still-solid veterans worked out even better than hoped, with Roger Clemens pitching well even as he passed age 40. Less heralded players like Robin Ventura also worked out in pinstripes. The biggest deal of the post-dynasty era also looked like a winner at first. In the first two years of his seven-year, $120 million megacontract, Jason Giambi blasted 82 homers and racked up 12 Wins Above Replacement, giving the Yankees reasonable bang for their copious bucks.
Trouble was, the Yankees weren’t winning; or, at least, they weren’t winning. In 2003, the Yanks notched their sixth straight division title, banked their second straight 100-win season, and made the playoffs for the ninth year in a row. But in the twisted world of Yankeedom, this wasn’t quite enough. Not when one of the greatest moments in franchise history was followed by Josh Beckett serving up a warm plate of STFD. So Cashman started getting even more aggressive.
He traded for Kevin Brown in the 2003-04 offseason, absorbing the $31.5 million Brown was due to make for the next two seasons in the hopes that he had something left at age 39 and 40. Brown wasn’t as bad as his 6.50 ERA in 2005 might suggest, yielding a .385 batting average on balls in play that year that was likely due partly to eroding skills, but also to bad luck. Gary Sheffield got a three-year deal extending into his late 30s; Year 1 was a success, Year 2 a disappointment, Year 3 a gigantic disaster. Expecting too much of old players became a damaging theme for the Yankees. But the team overreached in other ways, too. In the offseason of 2004-05, desperately needing capable starting pitchers to patch the rotation, the Yanks spent a combined $61 million on free agents Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright. Wright was terribly injury-prone; Pavano’s health issues were further in his past, but he brought the added risk of being a finesse pitcher coming off success in pitcher-friendly Miami, now going to the Bronx. The two pitchers teamed up to deliver 3.7 WAR over the seven years of their combined contracts.
Maybe it was the trauma of watching Carl Pavano spend four years doing everything other than actually pitch. But the types of deals Cashman made and the types of players he targeted thereafter were dramatically different from what he’d done before. The biggest change was to avoid paying up for old veterans. Cashman may have been learning along with the rest of baseball that players producing at high levels into their late 30s and early 40s wasn’t sustainable. Maybe he was specifically reacting to his own errors. Either way, he came to realize that having more spending power than everyone else only helps if you devote your resources to signing elite players in or near their prime, not older players or those with mediocre talent.
When the Rangers soured on Alex Rodriguez and his huge contract, the Yankees happily flipped Alfonso Soriano for him and got multiple MVP-caliber years for their trouble. When CC Sabathia hit the open market as one of the top pitchers in baseball with youth and unmatched durability on his side, they (smartly) didn’t blink at his $161 million asking price. When Rivera’s deals kept expiring, the Yankees kept re-signing him, because when Mariano Rivera had to pick out the correct Holy Grail he chose wisely. Like any other GM, Cashman still made mistakes. The same offseason he signed Sabathia, he also gifted $82.5 million to A.J. Burnett, a move that looks awful now. He’s also overpaid several incumbent Yankees to stay in town. In those cases, though, other factions may have intervened: We know that Randy Levine insisted on tossing a few extra million into a Jeter three-year deal that had little to no chance of paying off, and that Cashman wanted nothing to do with the $35 million the Yankees foolishly chucked at Rafael Soriano.
Perhaps the biggest change in Cashman’s approach has been the way he values the team’s own prospects. Three years ago, he dealt Jose Tabata and three other young players to Pittsburgh for Damaso Marte and Xavier Nady. Two years ago, he forgot the cardinal rule: Never trade anything of value to bring Javier Vazquez to New York. But Cashman has grown increasingly stingy in his willingness to give up homegrown potential stars. He held on to Robinson Cano for years amid swirling trade speculation and concerns about his young second baseman’s unrefined approach, and got an MVP candidate for his patience. He’s resisted all overtures for phenom Jesus Montero, preferring to let the 22-year-old slugger swing for the fences in Yankee Stadium next year, not somewhere else. Though they might still get dealt at some point, Cashman’s refusal to sell too quickly on pitching prospects Manny Banuelos and Dellin Betances has resulted in both pitchers maturing into hot commodities with big value to both the Yankees and potential suitors. When the team does decide to part with a top prospect, it can only be if an excellent player offering multiple years of team control is available, the way Curtis Granderson was after the 2009 season.
Hanging on to top prospects doesn’t only allow those players time to ripen and potentially become useful players on the big league club. It can also allow the Yankees to save money at select positions, paying half a million to a rookie where they might’ve once paid $10 million to a 38-year-old. If a thrifty approach seems puzzling given the Yankees’ massive revenue streams, consider the new luxury tax codified in the recently ratified collective bargaining agreement. Cashman has his eye squarely on the $189 million luxury tax threshold to avoid paying big penalties; if Montero’s whacking 30 homers a year in New York and making the league minimum, you’ve solved two potential problems at once.
But here’s the real $189 million question: Are prudence and austerity the right ways to run baseball’s marquee franchise? The Yankees have won just one World Series in the past 11 seasons. In 2010, they had a chance to trade for Cliff Lee, the best pitcher in baseball that year. As with all trade rumors, we can never exactly know what was discussed, and who may have turned down which offer. But the Yankees had Montero and other enticing prospects at their disposal to trade for Lee and Lee instead went to the Rangers, who rode the lefty’s dominant performance in the ALDS and ALCS to the World Series that year, knocking off the Yanks in the process. When Lee spurned New York’s advances that offseason, the Yankees went bottom-fishing instead, taking flyers on Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia. Amazingly, both panned out. Still, there was a sense that last season’s team needed another front-line starter to make a title run. The Yankees never got that arm, watching the trade deadline pass without any major activity, then bowing out of the playoffs for a second straight year.
You can now make it three straight years that the Yankees could really use a strong no. 2 starter to slot in behind Sabathia. But the team’s lowball bid on Yu Darvish and lack of strong interest in C.J. Wilson and Mark Buehrle point to a GM who either didn’t want to spend a ton of money on free-agent pitchers this winter, didn’t like the names that were out there, or both.
Of all the lessons Cashman has learned in the past decade, none resonate more than this: The playoffs can be random, capricious, and cruel. He might still pursue a starting pitcher via trade, sign someone like Hiroki Kuroda as a solid tier-two option, or upgrade the roster in other ways. But if he doesn’t, he can look at a team built with true stars, not retreads, one with rare upside for a Yankees club with Montero poised to improve over a 162-game season. If the Yankees do nothing else this offseason, they’d be a strong bet to get back to the playoffs, where they’d have about as good a chance as anyone of going all the way.
The New York Yankees have become more frugal than they have in years, with enough patience to make them baseball’s most unlikely story of Zen. Wonder what George would say if he could see them now.
Jonah Keri’s new book, The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First, is a national best-seller. Follow him on Twitter at @JonahKeri.
Previously from Jonah Keri:
Will Yu Darvish End The AL East’s Grip On The Wild Card?
Who Do ‘Yu’ Think Your Are?
Who Should Sign Prince Fielder?
What Do We Really Know About Ryan Braun?
To comment on this story through Facebook, click here. |
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The EU spring summit is proceeding today without the British prime minister, Theresa May, who left Brussels in the evening after giving reassurances that both Britain and the European Union were ready to get on with divorce talks.
Still, May but gave little away on when she will trigger the formal Brexit procedure. “Our European partners have made clear to me that they want to get on with negotiations and so do I. It is time to get on with leaving the European Union,” she told a news conference at her last summit before triggering Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty.
She says she will do before the end of the month.
On Thursday, European Parliament president Antonio Tajani said the EU and Britain should first strike a deal on the terms of Brexit and then proceed to discuss future bilateral relations,
Britain has said it would prefer parallel talks on its divorce terms, likely to include a bill to pay and the issue of citizens’ rights, and its future trade and economic relations with the 27 EU countries.
The EU legislature will have to approve any deal with Britain after it quits the EU and will be involved in the Brexit negotiations once London triggers the talks in the coming weeks.
“Before we need to decide the Brexit, and then we will work for a good agreement between us and the UK,” Antonio Tajani, an Italian conservative, told a news conference in Brussels after briefing EU leaders at a summit on the parliament’s views about current issues.
Tajani, a close ally of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, was elected European Parliament president in January for two and a half years with the backing of British Conservative MEPs — a mandate that may help him to play a key role in the two-year Brexit talks.
He said the Parliament wants to be a “protagonist” during the talks and would have officials briefing him from the EU negotiating team led by Frenchman Michel Barnier. |
On Tuesday afternoon, a man crawled out of an apartment window. He stood on the ledge above the Forever 21 store at Powell St. near the cable car turnaround and, eventually, he jumped. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
But this is only part of the story. According to the SF Examiner, a large crowd watched as the man contemplated his demise. Some people tweeted about it. Even more horrifying, others encouraged him to jump, said passerby Terence Prasad, of San Francisco. (**The Chronicle and SFGate elected not to report on the suicide)
Online commenters who say they witnessed the incident paint a similarly disturbing picture. They describe the callous reaction and behavior of bystanders. At the same time, posters expressed with startling honesty the trauma of seeing the suicide while offering an outpouring of empathy, perhaps making up for the sickening lack of humanity yesterday and reminding us there are still many good, decent people out there.
Below are excerpts of posts from the Examiner, Flickr, Yelp and Facebook:
Wilfred Galila (SF Examiner)
I watched this man standing on the ledge a few moments before he jumped. He was thinking and hesistating (sic). I exclaimed that I hope that man is not going to jump and a lady replied that if he really wants to do it, he should already have done it. It is very disturbing then to learn that there were people who did encourage him to jump. Society has become so desensitized and human life reduced to an amusement and a spectacle.
jchuckp (SF Examiner)
… I was so disgusted at the severe lack of respect shown by so many in the crowd. All of the people who were encouraging him to jump…..may your souls burn for all eternity.
Jon Barnhardt (SF Examiner)
The fact that I saw people in the crowd laughing less than 10 seconds after the man’s death may be more disturbing than actually watching him die. May he rest in peace.
Robert Kolbe (SF Examiner)
I walked by just as the police were covering him up. I asked a couple what had happened and the man responded yes — laughingly. I asked him if he thought it was funny. He then gave me a kind of funny look and didn’t say anything. How very sad this man died this way. People, please be nice to each other.
c. (SF Examiner)
i was there and im traumatized. the guys next to me were laughing telling him to jump and videotaping the whole thing. i’m still young and in high school and this is gunna stick with me for the rest of my life. there was a total lack of respect for the poor man and people were laughing when he jumped.
Kittie K. (Yelp)
Fortunately for me, but unfortunately for the victim/his family, tons of people were snapping pics and video and blocked me from seeing it despite being just a few feet from the body as I exited the store.
Mooncricket Films (Flickr):
This person claims to have filmed the incident and wants to use the footage for a larger project on suicide and suicide prevention.
I’m teaming up with @andresra to present this story in an ethical and educational way. Andres and I are researching the incident, from speaking with other witnesses like myself to interviewing the victims neighbors. We’re also requesting an interview with the SF Suicide Prevention Clinic to participate in this journalism project. This is necessary, the statistics are a morbid reality, suicide can be prevented and as a filmmaker I must do my part.
Nick.Fisher (Flickr)
I debated for the rest of the day on whether to post this at all. But I feel that it shouldn’t go unnoticed. It should be reminder to everyone, including myself, that we need to be more considerate and aware of the suffering of our fellow humans. That maybe, if one person had screamed “don’t do it!” this man would be alive right now.
Aaron Anderson (Facebook) posted an aerial shot of the crowd and the building on his Facebook page and included this poignant message:
Dear friends – literally, this just happened outside my office building. Promise me – you will come and have a cup of coffee or gelato with me before you do something this drastic. There’s no need for tragedy in a world filed with grief. We can get you help.
[RELATED LINKS: Facts and warning signs (SF Suicide Prevention) | National Suicide Prevention Lifeline | Suicide Prevention Resource Center] |
We had a bunch of fun taking Little Big Man's favorite song, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, and extending it with a fun fine motor craft! Introducing the Itsy Bitsy Spider Finger Puppet, SURE to get your little one's hands moving! Quick note – affiliate links are used in this post for your convenience.
I discovered an easy shortcut for working with craft foam that is my new favorite trick! You'll see in my photo that I include a plastic lid and sharpie marker in the supplies, but it is not what you think! I actually did not trace anything to make this craft! I used the lid and the cap of the marker to press into the craft foam instead of tracing any shapes! You could do this with any cookie cutter or other shape you have and it will make it MUCH easier to get just the right shape!
The Sharpie marker cap made just about the right size hole for toddler and preschooler fingers. If your kids are older you may want to use something larger.
Itsy Bitsy Spider Finger Puppet Materials
Black Craft Foam
Googly Eyes
2 Black Pipe Cleaners (ours Fuzzy Sticks were provided for free from Craft Project Ideas)
1 Red Pipe Cleaner (Also from Craft Project Ideas)
Scissors
Plastic Lid or Round Cookie Cutter
Sharpie Marker
Itsy Bitsy Spider Finger Puppet Instructions
1. Place the lid rim-down on the craft foam and press down hard all the way around the edge. Use scissors to cut on the resulting circle. Do the same thing with the lid of the Sharpie Marker to mark four small circles for finger holes. Cut them out with scissors or a craft knife.
2. Using the tip of your scissor blade or a pen, carefully poke two holes on both sides of the craft foam for the pipe cleaner legs. Feed the pipe cleaners through from the back. (No need to cut the pipe cleaners, they should be just right if you feed them through from the back!)
3. Stick on the googly eyes.
4. Fold the red pipe cleaner in half. Poke two more small holes in the craft foam, under the eyes for the red pipe cleaner mouth and feed that through too.
That is it! Now you just have to invite your little one to put on the puppet and sing the appropriate song! Get those spider legs wriggling!
RELATED: 40 Nursery Rhyme Activities AND Preschool Fingerplay Favorites
Even More Nursery Rhyme and Book Related Fun
More Itsy Bitsy Spider Fun
For more ideas, or for gifts to go along with the Itsy Bitsy Spider, check out these goodies! Click each link for product details.
Itsy Bitsy Spider Finger Puppet Board Book
Hape Spider Hand Puppet
Itsy Bitsy Spider Game
Itsy Bitsy Spider & Other Nursery Rhymes Book, CD and Plush Set
Fine Motor Friday
Here we are again with a group of fantastic bloggers to bring you a list of activities designed to target Fine Motor Skills in a playful way! Please do visit the other bloggers to see the fun ideas they have come up with this week!
Train-Themed Unwrapping Activity from Craftulate
Fine Motor Play with Marshmallows & Toothpicks from Little Bins for Little Hands
Practicing Fine Motor Skills with Classic Games from Stir the Wonder
Mardi Gras Play Dough from Still Playing School
Post It Notes Sudoku from School Time Snippets
Hedgehog Fine Motor Skills and Counting from Powerful Mothering |
"Hurricane Ben" may have finally blown through the University of California, Berkeley, but the school is bracing for an even more terrifying storm known as "Free Speech Week," and Berkeley's faculty is not happy about it.
As part of its new commitment to embracing all views, the campus is playing host to the four-day long event, sponsored by the Berkeley Patriot, the on-campus conservative student newspaper. From September 24 through the 27, Berkeley students will be treated to speeches from a number of controversial right-leaning speakers, including firebrand Ann Coulter and former White House senior advisor, Steve Bannon.
Each day will feature a different theme: “Feminism Awareness Day” on September 24, “Islamic Peace and Tolerance Day” on September 25, “ZUCK 2020” on September 26, and “Mario Savio is Dead” on September 27 (the late Mario Savio being a pioneer in Berkeley's "free speech movement" in the 1960s, establishing the school as a hotbed of ideas and an incubator for often countercultural thought).
But while the students seem to have begun to thaw in their approach to the conservative speakers they've been conditioned to consider "fascist" and "white supremacist" — after all, Ben Shaprio's speech last night went off so well, By Any Means Necessary protesters were forced to yell at police rather than Republicans for attention — the Berkeley faculty is having a difficult time processing this newfound embrace of intellectual discourse.
They don't believe in free speech for "fascists," by golly, and they're going to resist this onslaught of opposing viewpoints if it costs them their very jobs — and it might. Key members of Berkeley's faculty and administration are protesting Free Speech Week by refusing to work.
According to a letter written by seven faculty members — that reads a bit like a temper tantrum — teachers at Berkeley should take several steps to quash any hint of free speech on campus: cancel classes, refuse to show up for work, close and lock classrooms and study areas, and encourage students to stay at home for their own safety.
“This is a clear threat to public higher education,” one of the professors, African-American Studies Professor Michael Cohen, said. “People are coming to humiliate others and incite violence. … The boycott is a refusal to allow this to happen on our campus.”
The letter goes on for eight pages, but the first page is probably the most instructive. According to the Berkeley faculty, the alt-right is the most pressing threat to civilization today, and have left this fair nation awash in violence.
“We’re not afraid of Milo, Ann (Coulter) or Bannon’s words. We have a deep anxiety over the violence that their followers bring in response,” Cohen said.
Now, there's no discounting that white supremacists are dangerous, but there's no indication any actual white supremacists intend to show up to Berkeley's Free Speech week — and if recent history is any indication, it's Antifa Berkeley has to worry about.
The professors, who likely have nearly a decade of education each, also contend that speech they don't like, which they consider inflammatory and hateful, is not protected by the First Amendment.
And as for their new chancellor's commitment to the very ideals that made Berkeley the cradle of the free speech movement in America, and her promise to expose Berkeley students to all viewpoints, even ones they might think are problematic? Well, that simply will not stand either.
“Chancellor Christ’s idea that we can have these people on campus is a fantasy and a dangerous one," Cohen said.
Free Speech week will go on as planned, say Berkeley conservatives. According to the schedule, only one class — a low level anthropology lecture — appears to have been cancelled as a result of the event. |
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WEBVTT REPORTER: YOU HAVE HOUSE UPGARBAGE AND DEBRIS ALLTHROUGHOUT THE PARKING LOT.IN THE LAST FEW WEEKS, THISBUILDING WAS ATTACKED -- WASTAGGED.THIS BUILDING HAS BECOME A HOMEFOR THE HOMELESS.>> THE OTHER THING IS, ONBUILDINGS LIKE THIS, THEY TURNINTO CRACK HOUSES.IT IS A DANGEROUS PLACE TO BE.JULIANA: THIS IS DANGEROUS, SAFEPLACE IS HOME FOR MANY PEOPLELIVING IN NEW ORLEANS EAST.THE OLD HOLIDAY INN HAS BECOME AHOMELESS HOTEL.PROVIDING SHELTER FOR THOSE INDESPERATE NEED OF HELP.>> EVERYONE IS COMPLAINING ABOUTHOMELESS PEOPLE AND IT IS LIKE,SOME PEOPLE DON'T DESERVE ORCHOOSE TO BE THIS WAY.THEY HAVE NO CHOICE.HEATH: --JULIANA: THOSECOMPLAINTS COMING FROMFRUSTRATED RESIDENTS LIKE DAWNHEBERT.DAWN DRIVES PAST THIS RUNDOWNBUILDING EVERYDAY AND SAYS IT'STIME THE CITY AND THE PROPERTYOWNER, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.>> WE ARE SO CONCERNED WITHIMPROVING THE PERCEPTION OF OURCOMMUNITY, LIKE ANGER PHOEBE --BLIGHT AND GRAFFITI DOES NOTHELP.>> IT IS LIKE A NIGHTMARE.VERY DANGEROUS.YOU DO NOT KNOW WHO IS STAYINGTHERE.JULIANA: THAT BUSINESS OWNERSAID HE WILL BE STAYING BEHINDTHIS GLASS UNTIL THE OLD HOTELIS FIXED UP AND THE SQUATTERSARE OUT.BUT JOHN HOPES THE CITY WON'TFORGET ABOUT THE ONES WHO CALLTHIS PLACE.HOME.>> WORLD, WE GOT TO GET OURACT TOGETHER, IF WE CAN'T TAKECARE OF THE ONES WHO ARE DOWN,WHO IS GOING TO TAKE CARE OF YOUWHEN YOU ARE DOWN.JULIANA: IN THE LAST TWO WEEKS,THERE WAS A NEW PROPERTY OWNERWHO JUST PURCHASED THISBUILDING.THEY WILL BE CLEANING UP ALLTHIS GARBAGE THAT YOU SEE IN THENEXT TWO WEEKS.THEY WILL BE FEELING OFF THEBUILDING THAT PEOPLE CANNOT GETIN OR OUT.WE WILL CONTINUE TO FOLLOW THIS
Advertisement 'Homeless hotel' creates controversy in New Orleans East Share Shares Copy Link Copy
For more than a decade, the old Holiday Inn at 6324 Chef Menteur Highway has been an eyesore for area residents and business owners. Now, it's become a makeshift home for the homeless.The building was severely damaged during Hurricane Katrina, and has been shut down ever since. At least a half-dozen squatters who currently live in the building fear they have nowhere else to turn as renovations get underway."In this economy and in this day in age, you lose jobs all the time. When you lose a job and you can't find one fast enough, you lose your rent, you lose your house. So you got good people out on the streets," said John Cox, a homeless resident traveling through New Orleans East.New Orleans City Councilman James Gray told WDSU someone purchased this property within the past two weeks. Gray said in the two weeks to come, the new owner plans to put a fence around the entire building and seal off the ground floor to keep people from going in or out.The plans have homeless residents worried about what will happen to them."I mean, come on, world. We gotta get our act together," Cox said. "If we can't take care of the ones who are down, who's going to take care of you when you're down?"Residents in the area said it isn't just the homeless living there. It's the garbage and debris scattered around the parking lot and most recently the new graffiti tagged all over the front and back of the building."We are so concerned with improving the perception of our community. This blight and graffiti does not help," New Orleans East resident Dawn Herbert said.Gray would not confirm who purchased the property or for how much.Keep up with local news, weather and current events with the WDSU app here. Sign up for our email newsletters to get breaking news right in your inbox. Click here to sign up! |
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You can't travel around its major cities without seeing the hoarding of a building site.
Now, as hundreds of millions are invested, a Metro is on the way, and a bulk of key developments are due for completion in the next five years, here is what South Wales is shaping up to look like by the early part of the next decade.
Cardiff
One Central Square
Now in the final stages of its development, One Central Square in Cardiff's city centre recently saw law firm Blake Morgan be the first tenant to move in to the 135,000 sq ft office space which forms part of the wider Central Square project.
Home to some amazing views, the strikingly-designed building will soon welcome Julian Hodge Bank and Motonovo Finance as its next big tenants.
What stage is the development at and when will it be complete?
Now that tenants are in the building, there's only some minor superficial work to do. The main work was completed in March.
Related: New pictures show how work is progressing at Cardiff Central Square regeneration scheme
Two Central Square
Work began in August 2015 to demolish the former bus station and start work on a new £150m headquarters for BBC Wales.
What stage is the development at and when will it be complete?
As of May 2016, the site appears to be very active with a lot of ground work being doine. BBC Wales is expected to relocate in 2019.
The Interchange
The Interchange will be a new transport hub and include 200,000 sq ft of office space, a 150 bedroom hotel, retail and food outlets as well as a 300 space car park.
It is expected to be built on the St Mary Street side of Central Station where Marland House and the NCP car park currently are.
What stage is the development at and when will it be complete?
As of May 2016, parts of the area have been boarded with demolition expected to start shortly. Council papers revealed that the new bus station could be open by December 2017, with building work continuing around it.
Related: The next steps for the South Wales Metro from the man who started the project rolling
Cardiff Central Train Station
Network Rail has developed plans that would transform the station, providing new retail space and walkways and allow the station to cope with an expected increase in passenger numbers from 13 million a year to 32 million by 2043.
The redevelopment will also deliver a more modern station that fits in better with the other new developments in Central Square.
What stage is the development at and when will it be complete?
The Government will decide which projects to take forward after Network Rail submits its list in September. If Cardiff Central Station is picked, work will take place between 2019 and 2024.
Callaghan Square
At the heart of the Cardiff Enterprise Zone, the site at the south of Callaghan Square was acquired thee years ago by the Welsh Government and could accommodate up to 50,000 sq ft of new office development.
What stage is the development?
It is understood that commercial property agent Knight Frank will now oversee the sale of the land with formal marketing expected to take place shortly.
Capital Quarter
Split into three main developments, once complete Capital Quarter will house more than 1,025,000sq ft of Grade A offices, residential, student, hotel and retail space and will be Cardiff’s largest redevelopment project.
What stage is the development at and when will it be complete?
Number One Capital Quarter is complete and is now 100% let. A spokesperson for JR Smart confirmed that Number Two Capital Quarter is due for completion in June and is 86% let and development will commence of Number Three Capital Quarter, 75,000 sq ft of Grade A offices, next month.
Related: Opus Energy creating more than 100 jobs at new office in Capital Quarter
Coal Exchange
Cardiff's historic Coal Exchange building could be transformed into a luxury 200-suite hotel.
The Liverpool-based firm behind the project plans to preserve the building's heritage and target South Wales' wedding market.
What stage is the development at and when will it be complete?
MP Stephen Doughty recently called for a halt to the development casting doubt over the developer's credentials. No work has begun, or looks likely to begin soon despite the proposed 2017 completion date.
Newport
Wales International Convention Centre
The joint venture between the Welsh Government and Newport's Celtic Manor to build the 20,000 sq metre facility will comprise a 1,500-seat auditorium, a 4,000 sq metre exhibition hall and 12 meeting rooms.
What stage is the development at and when will it be complete?
Work will begin on the £80m convention centre in the autumn and is expected to be completed by early 2019.
Related: 39 fascinating pictures that show the M4 and Severn Bridge being built
Station Quarter
The mix of high-quality leisure and mixed use destination will be based in the heart of Newport and be anchored by Admiral's new 80,000 sq ft office. It is being marketed towards bars, restaurants and coffee shops.
What stage is the development?
In April 2016, Scarborough Group, the developer, announced it had submitted an application for planning consent of Phase Two of the £30m redevelopment.
Swansea
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City centre development
A £500m transformation of Swansea's city centre will sea an arena, aquarium and new retail and leisure facilities built. The development will stretch between Whitewalls and Oystermouth Road.
St David's arena
Hosting concerts, conferences and ice skating, this 3,500-seat arena will also have an underground car park. Around it will be retail shops, restaurants, a cinema and a public square.
Civic Centre site
A mixture of cafes and restaurants as well as housing, the Civic Centre site will be home to the city's new aquarium and state-of-the-art aquatic science research centre.
Beach promenade
The promenade will be known as the "City Waterfront" and will include more cafes and restaurants and is expected to cost £150m.
What stage is the development at and when will it be complete?
The entire city centre development will begin in 2017 and cost in the region of £500m. Work is expected to be complete by 2021.
Swansea Bay tidal lagoon
The long and ongoing saga that is the Swansea Bay lagoon is supposed to provide enough renewable energy to power 155,000 homes. The overall project will cost around £1bn and is supposed to also include bathing beaches and designated shellfish monitoring points.
As well as the lagoon, an offshore visitor, operations and maintenance centre is planned to be constructed.
What stage is the development at and when will it be complete?
Planning consent was granted in 2015, however the recent announcement of a Government review into tidal lagoons means work may not begin until 2018 now. The entire project is predicted to take around five years to build. |
Murat Sabuncu was detained while authorities searched for executive board chairman Akin Atalay and writer Guray Oz, the official news agency Anadolu said.
The daily said Oz had already been detained.
Police were searching the homes of Atalay and Oz, Anadolu said.
The latest detentions came as authorities pressed a massive crackdown over a failed July bid by a rogue faction of the military to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Tens of thousands of civil servants have since been suspended, fired or detained, with the government pointing the finger of blame for the coup bid at exiled Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen.
The government has also shut more than 100 media outlets and detained dozens of journalists as it presses a purge that has come under fire by Western leaders and human rights organisations.
Sabuncu's arrest also came as the government fought an insurgency from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
The government's operation against the Cumhuriyet daily was launched over its alleged "activities on behalf of" the Gulen movement and the PKK.
The PKK -- proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Ankara, the EU and US -- has waged an insurgency inside Turkey since 1984.
Cumhuriyet's former editor-in-chief is Can Dundar, who was sentenced in May by a Turkish court to five years and 10 months in prison for allegedly revealing state secrets.
Dundar is now believed to be in Germany after he was freed earlier this year pending an appeal.
Turkey sacks 10,000, shuts media
Turkey has dismissed a further 10,000 civil servants and closed 15 more media outlets over suspected links with terrorist organisations and US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, blamed by Ankara for orchestrating a failed coup in July. More than 100,000 people had already been sacked or suspended and 37,000 arrested since the abortive putsch in an unprecedented crackdown President Tayyip Erdogan says is crucial for wiping out the network of Gulen from the state apparatus. Thousands more academics, teachers, health workers, prison guards and forensics experts were among the latest to be removed from their posts through two new executive decrees published on the Official Gazette late on Saturday. |
Very rarely do you have stories about cockroaches spotted in meals that take weeks to settle, the case usually follows the template of 1) find cockroach in food 2) Complain about the cockroach 3) Restaurant apologises profusely for it.
Not this incident though.
The incident
Eugenia Koh was having dinner on Thursday (Jul 14) at Ippudo Ramen with her boyfriend, when she spotted what she thought was a cockroach in her soft shelled fried crab bun.
She understandably freaked out, and her boyfriend for some reason, after hearing her exclamations on the presence of a cockroach, took said cockroach bun and ate it, mentioned that it tasted weird before going on with dinner, and eventually paid $124 for the meal.
Koh, the person who was convinced she had found a cockroach fried into her crab, went along with it.
4 days later
Fast forward 4 days, Koh, while browsing pictures on her phone saw the pictures she had taken on Thursday, she “zoomed into the bun”, and she confirmed her own earlier suspicions.
She hurriedly messaged Ippudo, informing them of the events we covered earlier.
No response
After 6 days without a reply, Koh took to Facebook to pursue the issue, this is her post.
Note to self and others to never ever ever dine at EVER at IPPUDO!!!!!! SUPER UNHYGIENIC RESTAURANT. Got served a fried cockroach in the batter of their soft shell crab bun which you can barely see until you reach home and view and zoom into the picture lol. Super duper gross and I complained to the management on Monday till now 6 days and not a reply. What kind of service is that. Omg
She circled the suspicious parts this time.
Ippudo’s response
Ippudo quickly issued a response on her Facebook page.
Hi Eugenia, we apologize for the experience. We showed the pictures to our chef and kitchen staff and we believe the part where you circled “head” is the eye of the crab. Did you cut open the crab to see what’s inside?
Which wasn’t the response Koh was looking for, and she replied to the comment as such.
If the apology was even sincere, you would have read my msg from fb 6 days back and replied me then instead of now when I just set the matter on my Facebook. And then you guys can double comment on it to make it seem like I’m the one who didn’t check when I already stated everything down. Please at least read before trying to “apologize”
Ippudo responds again
Ippudo put out a statement on the whole incident on their Facebook page as well.
Dear valued customers, It has come to our attention that a food blogger has accused our restaurant of being unhygienic and that she found a little something ‘extra’ in her soft-shell crab. We would like to take this opportunity to say that our kitchen has strict protocols and practices put in place to ensure that food is stored and prepared safely for consumption. Rest assured the picture you see is the eyes and the whiskers of the soft-shell crab. We have proudly served our customers for years and we take pride in what we do, and while we do make mistakes from time to time, we will take a stand when food bloggers try to blackmail us with false accusations.
They then posted a picture of what a soft shell crab looks like before being fried.
With the caption emphasising the fact that ‘the whiskers that may vary in length and size’.
Koh story bro
Koh took offence with the accusation of blackmail, and being a food blogger line. She hit back on her blog:
“I don’t even call myself a food blogger for goodness sake. I pay for most of my meals because I am a consumer who enjoys food just like any other regular customer and diner.”
She also came up with this line:
I didn’t even make much of a commotion by even blogging or slamming shit about (them).
Which isn’t exactly true since she did share a post, to her over 2,000 Facebook friends, that started off with the sentence “Note to self and others to never ever ever dine at EVER at IPPUDO!!!!!!”.
6 exclamation marks.
But we digress.
Moral of the story
Get yourself a man who will eat an alleged cockroach infested fried crab and just shrug it off. Well done William Tan (Boyfriend’s name) you the real MVP.
Top image from Eugenia Koh’s Facebook
If you like what you read, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get the latest updates. |
EXCLUSIVE: Security at the State Department's Benghazi compound was so dire that another contractor was brought in to clean up the mess just two weeks before the 2012 terror attack – and was later pressured to keep quiet by a government bureaucrat under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to two men from the American security company.
Brad Owens and Jerry Torres, of Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions, say they faced pressure to stay silent and get on the same page with the State Department with regard to the security lapses that led to the deaths of four Americans.
They spoke exclusively with Fox News for “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” revealing new information that undermines the State Department's account of the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, where Islamic militants launched a 13-hour assault from Sept. 11-12 that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith and former Navy SEALS Ty Woods and Glenn Doherty.
Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions provides security for U.S. Embassy and consulate personnel around the world in some of the most dangerous locations spanning Africa, the Middle East and South America, according to the firm.
Jerry Torres remains haunted by the fact that specific bureaucrats and policies remain in the State Department after the Benghazi attack despite the change in administrations. "A U.S. ambassador is dead and nobody is held accountable for it. And three guys … all died trying to defend him," said Torres, the company’s CEO and a former Green Beret.
Asked if there was a specific effort by a senior State Department contracting officer to silence them, Torres said, "Absolutely, absolutely."
Owens, a former Army intelligence officer, echoed his colleague, saying those “who made the poor choices that actually, I would say, were more responsible for the Benghazi attacks than anyone else, they're still in the same positions, making security choices for our embassies overseas now."
In 2012, Owens was the American company’s point man in Libya with extensive experience in the region. After the death of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in the fall of 2011, Owens stressed to Fox News it was well-known that Islamic radicals including Al Qaeda-tied militias were pouring into the region and security “had deteriorated considerably.”
Based on documents reviewed by Fox News, Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions bid on the Benghazi compound security contract in the spring of 2012. But the State Department awarded the deal to a U.K.-based operation called The Blue Mountain Group.
Owens, who had personally visited the Benghazi compound to assess security, was shocked. "Blue Mountain U.K. is a teeny, tiny, little security company registered in Wales that had never had a diplomatic security contract, had never done any high threat contracts anywhere else in the world that we've been able to find, much less in high threat areas for the U.S. government. They had a few guys on the ground," he said.
According to Torres, the Blue Mountain Group came in 4 percent lower than their bid – and they challenged the decision, claiming the American company should have been preferred over the foreign one.
Torres said State Department contracting officer Jan Visintainer responded that the State Department had the “latitude to apply” that preference or not.
And there was more: The Blue Mountain Group hired guards through another company who were not armed.
Problems soon arose. One month before the attack -- in August 2012, with The Blue Mountain Group still in charge of compound security -- Ambassador Stevens and his team alerted the State Department via diplomatic cable that radical Islamic groups were everywhere and that the temporary mission compound could not withstand a "coordinated attack." The classified cable was first reported by Fox News.
By Aug. 31, 2012, the situation had deteriorated to the point that Owens and Torres said the State Department asked them to intervene – as Owens put it, an "admission of the mistake of choosing the wrong company."
"They came back to us and said, ‘Can you guys come in and take over security?’ Owens said. “So we were ready.”
But Torres emphasized that time was against them, saying it would have taken two-to-three weeks to get set up.
Twelve days later, the ambassador was killed. Torres learned of the attacks by watching television. He called the circumstances leading up to the tragedy "bad decision-making from top to bottom."
“There was nothing we could've done about it. If we'd had one month warning … who knows what might've happened,” Owens said.
In the chaotic days following that attack, the Obama White House blamed the attacks on an anti-Islam video and demonstration which was not accurate. As a former Green Beret, Torres was stunned: "Coming from a military background, I would expect the administration to tell the truth. So I bought into it for a minute. But I didn't believe it in the back of my mind.” He said they later figured out the video was not the culprit. The attack was a coordinated terrorist assault which included a precision mortar strike on the CIA post in Benghazi.
But as the Obama administration and Clinton’s team struggled to answer questions about the attacks, Visintainer apparently took it one step further -- summoning Jerry Torres from overseas to attend a meeting at her government office in Rosslyn, Va., in early 2013.
Torres took Fox News back to the Virginia office building where he recalled that day's events.
"[Visintainer] said that I and people from Torres should not speak to the media, should not speak to any officials with respect to the Benghazi program,” he said.
Torres said he was afraid for his company – and hasn’t spoken publicly until now.
"We had about 8,000 employees at the time. You know, we just didn't need that level of damage because these guys, their livelihood relies on the company,” he said. “I trust that our U.S. government is going to follow chain of command, follow procedures, follow protocols and do the right thing."
Another part of that conversation stuck out to Torres. He said Visintainer told him “in her opinion, that guards should not be armed at U.S. embassies. She just made that blanket statement. … And she said that they weren't required in Benghazi. So I was kind of confused about that. And she said that she would like my support in saying that if that came up. And I looked at her. I just didn't respond."
The State Department declined Fox News’ request to make Visintainer available for an interview, or have her answer written email questions.
The Blue Mountain Group did not immediately respond to questions from Fox News.
Torres and Owens said repercussions against their company continue to this day – and that of the 20 security force contracts they’ve bid on since that conversation, they’ve lost 18.
Torres and Owens are concerned another attack like the one in Benghazi could happen again because the same State Department employees responsible for the Benghazi contract remain in place and the contracting rules are outdated.
"In 1990, Congress passed a law that required contracts of this nature to go to the lowest bidder that's technically acceptable," Owens explained. "Now, what that has created is a race to the bottom, is what we call it. So basically, every company tries to cut every corner they can for these contracts."
The men say they are hopeful that changes will come with the Trump administration’s promise to "drain the swamp."
"Let's just say there's been a change at management at Department of State," Owens said. "I feel now that, given that the politics has been taken out of the Benghazi situation, now that there's no longer a candidate or anything related to it, a change of administrations, that actually, we have an opportunity here to fix the problems that made it happen."
On the fifth anniversary, Torres said he thinks about the four families who lost a father, a brother or a son in the 2012 attack, and feels sorry "for not bringing this up earlier. For not actually being there, on the ground and taking care of these guys." |
'How Britain's Atlantis' and its tribes were wiped out by a TSUNAMI triggered by a landslide off the coast of Norway 8,200 years ago
Research has modelled in detail a historic and deadly tsunami
The most accurate computer models suggest it devastated landmasses
These include Doggerland, a low-lying area that was home to tribes
The tsunami would have wiped out any people remaining on the island
Dr Jon Hill compares the event to the 2011 Japanese tsunami in scale
Just over 8,000 years ago a huge landslide occurred off the coast of Norway, known as the Storegga Slide.
The event created a catastrophic tsunami, with waves almost half as high as the Statue of Liberty, that battered Britain and other land masses.
And now the most accurate computer model ever made of the tsunami suggests that it wiped out the remaining inhabitants of a set of low-lying landmass known as Doggerland off the coast of the UK.
Scroll down for animation of the tsunami
A new model by researchers at Imperial College London has revealed the devastating effects of a tsunami caused by a landslide off the Norwegian coast over 8,000 years ago. It's believed the event would have devastated an area of low-lying land known as Doggerland that once connected Britain to mainland Europe
The new study from researchers at Imperial College London is being presented at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna this week.
Using advanced computer modelling and paleobathymetry - the study of underwater depths through history - they describe how deadly the tsunami would have been.
And they conclude it would have spelled disaster for the remaining inhabitants of Doggerland.
‘The research we’ve done is using advanced computer modelling to look at the Storegga slide,’ Dr Jon Hill, one of the authors on the study, tells MailOnline.
WHAT IS 'DOGGERLAND'?
Doggerland is a former landmass that once connected Britain to mainland Europe.
It is believed to have disappeared after being flooded by rising sea levels in about 6,500 BC.
It was likely home to Mesolithic tribes (10,000 to 5,000 BC).
Since 1931, a number of discoveries have been made in the North Sea that suggest clues as to what the landmass would have been like.
The remains of mammoths, lions and other animals, in addition to prehistoric tools and weapons, provides evidence for settlement by humans and animals.
‘We’re the first to discover dissymmetry at the time, which no model has done before.
‘So we’re able to quantify what the tsunami looked like at Doggerland – no other study has predicted what the wave would have looked like.’
The huge wave that was created in the Storegga Slide occurred when a large chunk of coastal shelf 180 miles (290 km) long fell into the sea.
The slide was a single event 8,200 years ago, creating a wave that travelled across the Norwegian Sea in a few hours.
Fifteen hours later, the wave would have reached Belgium and Holland.
Dr Hill said it would have been equivalent to the 2011 Japanese tsunami in its scale.
The landmass once connected Britain with Europe, and is believed to have been inhabited by Mesolithic tribes. Artificats recovered from the North Sea provide evidence as to the land's habitation. The tsunami is thought to have wiped out the last people to occupy the area, who were by then restricted to an island
Waves at Doggerland would have been five metres high, as opposed to 10 metres in the Japanese tsunami, as the land was so low-lying just a few metres above sea level.
‘It would have been completely inundated by a 5-metre wave,’ Dr Hill explains.
‘If you put a 5-metre wave towards Doggerland it would have been devastated.’
Archaeological evidence for this area is relatively sparse at the moment.
So far, we are relying mostly on finds made by fisherman.
But the evidence heavily suggests it was inhabited and, according to Dr Vince Gaffney of the
University of Birmingham who authored the book Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland, they would have ‘suffered dramatically.’
‘If we look at what the study tells us they’re talking about waves that are, in Scotland, as much as 40 metres high,’ he says.
‘The inhabitants of any low-lying areas like Doggerland would have suffered dramatically if hit by something of that size.’
Divers from St Andrews University, searching for Doggerland, the underwater country dubbed 'Britain's Atlantis', in 2012. The underwater area is hard to explore as it is a busy sea lane with murky waters
St Andrews University's artists' impression of life in Doggerland. Further research will be need in order to discern just how many people were living on Doggerland, but it's unlikely many or any survived the deadly tsunami caused by the Storegga Slide
Dr Gaffney continues, however, that is hard to know exactly the extent of habitation on Doggerland because it is very inaccessible.
Described as ‘Britain’s Atlantis’ it is now located under busy sea lanes in murky water.
Thus, according to Dr Gaffney, ‘we know little about the people who inhabited these areas.’
Dr Hill says that modelling tsunamis of this type are important for understanding our history.
But they can also provide us with data on what we can expect from similar events in future.
Although he stresses no such event is likely to occur any time soon, the UK is susceptible to such dangers.
‘Part of the research is to find out what would happen as the oceans warm,’ he says.
‘Rising sea levels are an indicator but there’s no correlation between rising sea levels and tsunamis.’
The chances of another event on the scale of the Storegga Slide happening soon is, he says, ‘not likely to happen at all.’
Dr Gaffney adds, though, that these events are known to have occurred throughout history.
‘We sometimes think we’re a safe place to live in the UK,’ he says. |
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A UK estate agent has released a bizarre map which claims to show the only safe places to live if global nuclear war breaks out.
Although Britain is currently out of the range of North Korean missiles, eMoov has revealed the blast radius of a nuclear strike on 20 major British cities in case tensions do escalate.
Skegness, Weymouth and Margate appear to be among the only safe places to buy a property if you fear for the Earth’s impending doom.
EMoov claims a nuclear strike on London will wipe out most of the commuter belt including Surrey and Essex, as well as towns such as Reading and Romford.
The only commutable towns which should be safe from a nuclear attack on London are in the farthest reaches of Kent and Essex.
The average house price in Margate is £216,134, compared to £209,645 in Clacton-on-Sea.
Elsewhere in the country, Carlisle, Lancaster and northern Wales offer good value homes safe from nuclear destruction, according to eMoov.
Founder and CEO of eMoov, Russell Quirk, said: “Luckily, we’re out of range from any North Korean missiles, but if the world was to descend into nuclear madness the fall out would mean house prices would probably become irrelevant.
“That said, with buyer demand already at explosive levels compared to the ground zero stock levels available, a nuclear war could see these more affordable areas grow in value as demand for a house still standing outside of an impact zone increases.” |
Oakland mayor gets up-close look at city’s 'racial disparities’
In her inaugural speech, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf referred to the “morally outrageous racial disparities” in the city’s public schools.
On Friday, she saw some of them.
Schaaf toured three Oakland public schools — including one at the top end of what education has to offer to Oakland children and one at the struggling end.
The tour was part of her honeymoon week in office in which she participated in activities designed to convey her agenda: Crime reduction and educational success represent her highest priorities.
“I wanted my first week to be a demonstration of where my priorities lie,” Schaaf said.
Earlier in the week, she spent 18 hours — until 12:30 a.m. Wednesday — with the men and women of the Oakland Police Department, talking with sworn and civilian staff, spending time with rookie and veteran officers on ride-alongs.
The Friday school tour started with the K-12 Lighthouse Community Charter School, about a mile from the Oakland International Airport with about 750 bright-faced and eager students. Schaaf was instrumental in the efforts to raise funding to build a permanent school more than a decade ago.
Donations and grants
It’s an impressive facility, opened in 2009 with a $15 million donation from Gary Rogers, a philanthropist and the previous owner of Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, and another $7 million from grants and foundations.
Located just off Hegenberger Road, the school is a marvelous modern-day public school experience for students.
“It’s what happens in the building that’s more important,” said the school’s founder, Jenna Stauffer.
The middle and elementary schools are divided by a large multipurpose room, and there is a feeling that the school is a single community with a shared focus.
“Teachers create a connection with students — it just happens,” said Jorge Prieto, an 18-year-old senior. “Teachers care about you and want you to succeed. We are much smaller (of a school), and we are focused on our own community.”
A few miles away, at Life Academy High School, an entire building has been repurposed as a health and science classroom for high school students interested in careers in those fields — and for students seeking an education outside a traditional high school setting.
Schaaf’s entourage encountered a quiet, focused group of students preparing for final exams.
Aspiring to medicine
Some students serve internships at local medical facilities, where they shadow medical professionals to get a feel for the work they are preparing for.
George Reliford, a 16-year-old junior, joined the class after a bike ride from Oakland to Humboldt County led by his teacher, Jessica Oya. He transferred from Oakland High School after his freshman year into Oya’s class.
“The other school was so crowded that teachers didn’t seem to care too much, but Ms. Oya, she cares,” Reliford said.
The final stop of the day was at McClymonds High School in West Oakland, a school that once had nearly 900 students. These days, enrollment is below 300, and it’s one of five Oakland schools targeted by the district for “intense” academic improvement, said Troy Flint, a district spokesman.
The school was immaculate for the visit — the floors gleamed in orange and black school colors — but it lacked the energy and the vast resources available to students at other schools.
Struggling program
The school’s science, technology, engineering and math program lagged behind the work being completed by middle school students at Lighthouse.
Students at McClymonds are just like their counterparts at the others schools. They’re just kids with dreams of doing something bigger, something better, as they mature.
It’s clear that some of Oakland’s unconventional approaches to education work better in some school locations than others. Educators and city officials who want to help the schools must promote and expand successful educational models and re-cast or discard ones that don’t help students make the grade.
Chip Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns run Tuesday and Friday. E-mail [email protected] |
Google has pushed out an update to its search algorithm that is making it even harder for people to discover free movie and music torrents, with sites like Pirate Bay, Isohunt and Torrentz.eu among the worst affected by the rollout.
The rollout comes a month after Robert Thomson the chief executive of News Corp — which owns The Times and New York Post titles — attacked Google, calling it "a platform for piracy," in a letter to the European Commission.
Earlier this month Google published a refresh of its "How Google Fights Piracy" report, detailing its efforts to combat piracy across its platform.
Google's “Pirate” update was first introduced in August 2012. It was designed to prevent sites with copyright infringement complaints, filed via Google’s DMCA system, from ranking highly in Google’s search listings. It acts as a filter, applying a downgrade to sites that have received DMCA complaints.
The latest update to Google’s anti-piracy measure is more far-reaching than before. Some sites have seen up to a 98% markdown in visibility on Google's search listings, according to early analysis by Searchmetrics.
Pirate affects sites the most that carry search keywords such as “download free movies,” “watch [movie name] online free,” online free movies,” “movies download,” “watch [movie name]” and “where can I watch [movie name] online,” Searchmetrics’ founder Marcus Tober details in a blog post.
Some of the worst affected by the downgrade include popular torrent sites such as Kickass.to, Thepiratebay.se, Torrentz.eu and Isohunt.
The charts below show how the SEO visibility for sites include movie4k.to, free-tv-video-online.me and downloads.nl fell off a cliff as soon as the latest update was implemented.
Download.nl
Free-tv-video-online.me
Movie4k.to
And here’s the full “top 30 loser list,” according to Searchmetrics
Get the latest Google stock price here. |
Our aim was to examine the effects of seven high-intensity aerobic interval training (HIIT) sessions over 2 wk on skeletal muscle fuel content, mitochondrial enzyme activities, fatty acid transport proteins, peak O(2) consumption (Vo(2 peak)), and whole body metabolic, hormonal, and cardiovascular responses to exercise. Eight women (22.1 +/- 0.2 yr old, 65.0 +/- 2.2 kg body wt, 2.36 +/- 0.24 l/min Vo(2 peak)) performed a Vo(2 peak) test and a 60-min cycling trial at approximately 60% Vo(2 peak) before and after training. Each session consisted of ten 4-min bouts at approximately 90% Vo(2 peak) with 2 min of rest between intervals. Training increased Vo(2 peak) by 13%. After HIIT, plasma epinephrine and heart rate were lower during the final 30 min of the 60-min cycling trial at approximately 60% pretraining Vo(2 peak). Exercise whole body fat oxidation increased by 36% (from 15.0 +/- 2.4 to 20.4 +/- 2.5 g) after HIIT. Resting muscle glycogen and triacylglycerol contents were unaffected by HIIT, but net glycogen use was reduced during the posttraining 60-min cycling trial. HIIT significantly increased muscle mitochondrial beta-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase (15.44 +/- 1.57 and 20.35 +/- 1.40 mmol.min(-1).kg wet mass(-1) before and after training, respectively) and citrate synthase (24.45 +/- 1.89 and 29.31 +/- 1.64 mmol.min(-1).kg wet mass(-1) before and after training, respectively) maximal activities by 32% and 20%, while cytoplasmic hormone-sensitive lipase protein content was not significantly increased. Total muscle plasma membrane fatty acid-binding protein content increased significantly (25%), whereas fatty acid translocase/CD36 content was unaffected after HIIT. In summary, seven sessions of HIIT over 2 wk induced marked increases in whole body and skeletal muscle capacity for fatty acid oxidation during exercise in moderately active women. |
If you plan on taking college entrance tests in the future you may be subjected to a new "digital DNA" scan, one that researchers say can't be beaten by fraud. (Photo courtesy: Stony Brook University)
— Since the SAT and ACT cheating scandals broke wide open on Long Island, lawmakers have pledged to come up with unique cutting edge ways to combat identity theft.
On Monday, CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan got the exclusive first look at what politicians will see first hand in Albany on Tuesday afternoon, and what could soon be implemented at a high school near you.
Inside the applied DNA sciences lab at Stony Brook University researchers are hard at work inventing and perfecting a system that can prevent cheating on SAT and ACT exams.
“A novel system that’s absolutely unbreakable for securing the identity of a student taking the SAT exam,” said Dr. James Hayward.
The foolproof ID plan and others will be presented to lawmakers, who have pledged to parents, teachers and students that they will work together to protect exam integrity, hold cheaters responsible and fix the fraud, following the shocking scandal that spread from Great Neck North High School to include some 30 test takers and test payers faking their own identities, hoping to buy their into top scores and top schools.
“It’s a great way for people to really be who they are when they take the test, and not try to fake it,” Massapequa High School graduate Jennifer Karp told McLogan.
Karp volunteered her forensic image for a digital DNA. It begins with mandatory pre-registering at a student’s home school with official legal ID documents only.
“All of that is uploaded to an I.T. system of wireless connections called the ‘CLOUD,’” Dr. Hayward said.
The student’s unique digital DNA code is created and assigned to an ID card with covert authentication marks printed onto it. Proctors can verify instantly with a simple UV light and smart phone scan.
“Now you can compare the image on the phone with the image on the ID card, and the image of the student,” Dr. Hayward said.
The technology has been used by the federal government at highly secure sites. Some lawmakers see no reason why a plan like this can’t be implemented and paid for by the Educational Testing Service and College Board.
The mobile DNA security scan would be done as the student enters and again at the conclusion of the test.
Do you think this is a good idea? Please offer your thoughts in the comments section below. … |
With the San Diego Comic-Con just a couple weeks away, we’re likely going to get an onslaught of new information and sneak peeks at whatever Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment have in store for the DC Comics cinematic universe.
The new comic book sandbox won’t kick into full gear until Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice arrives, and then we’ve got a whole slew of DC heroes headed towards the big screen over the next few years. We’ve already got a full slate of films lined up through 2019, but it sounds like some of those plans might be expanding if a new rumor is to be believed.
Reportedly, Warner Bros. has Ben Affleck lined up to direct his own solo Batman movie for release in the fall of 2018. Find out more about Ben Affleck directing Batman after the jump.
Previously we heard a rumor that a solo Batman film was developing at Warner Bros. and the plan was to have it hit theaters in 2019. Now Latino Review (which was also the source of that rumor) is reporting that Affleck will direct himself in the movie, which is still supposedly titled The Batman, to arrive in November 2018. That would put it in direct competition with Marvel’s yet to be revealed Captain Marvel. (Perhaps this is payback for when Marvel set Captain America: Civil War to arrive in the original May release date staked out by Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice?)
The arrival of a new solo Batman movie isn’t out of left field. Back when Warner Bros. announced release plans through 2020 for all of the DC Comics superhero movies, the studio also noted that standalone Batman and Superman movies would arrive sometime before 2020. So it makes sense that a solo Batman film would at least be in development at the studio.
But I will say that releasing it between the two-part Justice League movie seems a little strange. Yes, The Flash and Aquaman are already slated to have their own movies in 2018, but they don’t have quite as high of a profile as a new Batman movie with Ben Affleck. Then again, maybe Warner Bros. is thinking about shifting the dates of Aquaman and The Flash too.
No matter what happens with the release dates, the big news is Affleck potentially directing a Batman movie. It’s not as wild of a concept as you might think, mainly because Affleck already has a good relationship at Warner Bros. thanks to films such as the Best Picture-winning Argo. And it just so happens that the Justice League and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice scripts come from Argo screenwriter Chris Terrio, who is reportedly going to write this Batman movie as well. This would be the first time an actor turned director would direct himself as a superhero.
As of now this is nothing but a rumor, and going along with the recent Green Lantern rumblings out there, it’s clear there’s a lot being talked about with regards to the DC Comic cinematic universe. In fact, it sounds like the previously announced release schedule might also get toyed with since we recently heard from Dwayne Johnson that he expects his Shazam movie to arrive earlier than the projected 2019 release date.
Again, with just two weeks until Comic-Con, I have a feeling that we’ll get a much better idea of what Warner Bros. and DC have in store when they head to Hall H. I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire Justice League cast is brought out for fans, especially since Marvel won’t be there to parade The Avengers around this time. We’ll be in San Diego very soon, so stay tuned for all the latest on the DC Comics cinematic universe.
Do you want Ben Affleck to direct a solo Batman movie? Is there someone else you want behind the camera? |
The Abbott Government has sold this reform as a no-brainer, alleging that the bill merely implements the recommendation of four independent reports commissioned by previous governments to expand the national workers' compensation scheme. This is simply not true. While these reports each advocated greater harmonisation between the state and territory workers' compensation schemes, and the expansion of the national scheme, none of them – other than that of the Productivity Commission – provided unequivocal support for expansion. The Taylor Fry report argued that expansion of the national scheme would lead to a "regulatory vacuum" unless important safeguards were established. The Hawke report recommended the establishment of a "more robust regulatory framework". And the Hanks report identifies a number of positive, concrete recommendations to improve the national scheme. Not one of these perspectives finds a place in the current reform agenda. It is not just misleading, but also blatantly untrue for the Federal Government to represent this bill as merely implementing the recommendations of four reports. The other central plank of the government's message is that the bill is a pro-business piece of reform, cutting costs for multi-state employers who have to comply with different schemes in each of the states and territories.
The vast majority of businesses will actually be worse off, as only multi-state employers can move to the national scheme. This reduces the premium pool of the other schemes, leading to increased premiums for the small and medium sized businesses that remain. This issue of higher premiums is why each of the state and territory governments made submissions to the Senate against the bill. The former Campbell Newman Government estimated that 138,000 Queensland small businesses would be worse off, with many of these unable to absorb premium fluctuations from a premium pool reduced by $250 million. It's also why the Howard Government, in 2004, refrained from touching this reform. The Howard Government knew it would lose its core small business constituency, who would be disadvantaged through higher premiums. Another fundamental problem with the current plan is that the scheme regulator, Comcare, is ill equipped to cope with the national scheme's expansion. The McKell Institute report warns that Comcare could potentially be responsible for 67 times its current workload capacity, despite already conducting far fewer workplace interventions than its state and territory counterparts, and its investigators issuing far fewer improvement and prohibition notices.
Comcare's inspectorate is also poorly structured. The state and territory schemes have greater sophistication and specialised practices around high-risk industries. Moreover, while Comcare's inspectors are organised in the capital cities, with less capacity to monitor geographically disparate areas, state regulators organise inspectors in regional and industry teams. Taking the Beaconsfield mine example, if the current bill had been in operation then, Comcare investigators based in Melbourne could not have reached the mine before the first commercial flight into Hobart, followed by a 40 minute drive to Launceston. This would have been 10 hours after the mine's collapse. State mine inspectors, based in Hobart, were able to reach the mine within four hours. As this example shows, an expansion of Australia's national workers' compensation scheme brings with it many challenges. The fundamental question must be whether a national workers' compensation scheme can operate effectively in Australia. The McKell Institute report, like the four aforementioned reports, agree that a nationally consistent framework for workers' compensation is a desirable policy goal. It's also an objective most stakeholders agree with. But it should not come at the expense of workplace safety or the viability of Australian businesses. While the Parliament should unequivocally reject this bill, the good news is that we don't have to go back to the drawing board. Cumulatively, the Taylor Fry report, the Hanks report and the Hawke report provide a template for how a nationally consistent framework can be achieved. What we need now is a bipartisan approach that draws upon this work to develop a national scheme that produces a system that appropriately compensates injured workers and efficiently manages their return to work.
Dr Joanna Howe is a senior lecturer in Law at the University of Adelaide and author of the McKell Institute report, Unsafe and Unfair: A Critique of the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Legislation Amendment Bill 2014. |
Last night Anderson Cooper, CNN's prettiest anchor, investigated that infamous video of Tom Cruise on Tom Cruise, Scientologist. His correspondent talked to a former member of the church and took us deep into the world of strange symbols and acronyms and claims made by America's favorite tiny grinning superstar actor. Then Cooper replayed a contentious interview with Scientology's head Inquisitor into the crimes of Psychology. Cooper even called the religion a fraud based on pseudo-science (or at least pointed out that that is a "criticism leveled against Scientology"). What's Anderson's beef with LRH?
Rare among modern "legitimate" journalists, especially TV journalists, Cooper has taken on the Church of Scientology before. Cooper's last investigation into the CSI was in 2005, when he introduced viewers to a New Mexico vault marked with "mysterious symbols." According to a former Scientologist interviewed on the show, the vault was covered with symbols viewable best from "the heavens" designed "to show the location of one of the vaults which Scientology has prepared to safeguard the technology of L. Ron Hubbard." Inside the vault, a creepy survivalist compound filled with livestock, food, and the writings of LRH etched into "titanium plates."
Why investigate Scientology's apocalyptic desert bunker? More importantly, why bother debating a lunatic about the merits of psychology? Here's a hint:
Church founder L. Ron Hubbard's son Quentin was gay. Gay and not all that into Scientology. He killed himself in 1976, a victim of his father's tyrannical crusades against homosexuality and mental health. L. Ron Hubbard hated his dead gay son.
Considering what we know of Anderson's biography (short version: gay, forever changed by brother's suicide), it is perhaps understandable that he might not approve of an organization that "cures" homosexuality and refuses to allow its members access to antidepressants, clinical psychology, or even simple talk therapy. |
Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
A municipal chief rabbi is speaking out against one of the time-honored customs of the upcoming Purim holiday.
A key part of the celebrations is mishloach manot, sending friends and relatives food parcels generally containing overwhelmingly sticky and unbearably sweet candies and chocolates which are, for the most part, devoured by sugar- happy children. To the dismay of dentists, however, Rabbi Ephraim Zalmanovitz, municipal chief rabbi of Mazkeret Batya, is recommending that the public refrain from such largesse this year.
Zalmanovitz has called on the residents of his city – and the wider community – to reduce the amount they spend on mishloach manot to the minimum necessary and instead increase the amount of money they give in donations to charitable causes on Purim – a practice known as matanot la’evyonim, literally gifts to the poor.“In our permissive and competitive times, the custom to send fantastic baskets full of candies to as many people as possible has taken hold, particularly amongst those observant of the mitzvot,” said Zalmanovitz. “The person is saying ‘Look how rich I am, giving so generously to others.’ The custom has become an uncontrollable competition and extravagance is celebrated.”He also noted that most of the sweets are not kosher for Passover and are usually thrown away before the holiday, which is celebrated just one month later.Zalmanovitz also took the opportunity to have a swipe at the haredi community’s bete noir Yesh Atid chairman and former finance minister Yair Lapid.“It is especially pertinent to halt this bad custom in current times, in which [former] finance minister Yair Lapid has failed in his attempt to fulfill his promise to improve the income of the middle class, while at the same time succeeding in raising the cost of living, and housing prices continue to rise,” Zalmanovitz observed, despite the fact that state-paid rabbis are forbidden by law from making political speeches or engaging in political activity.The rabbi added that Jewish law requires one to send merely two ready-to-eat items of food to one person to fulfill their obligation in regard to mishloach manot.“It is therefore important to reduce the money spent on mishloach manot to the minimum possible, as the arbiters of Jewish law have ruled, and redirect the money saved to make increased donations to charity, for those who can afford to do so,” he said, noting that the most important aspect of giving on Purim was to those in need.
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US college grads confront the dead end of the profit system
24 April 2012
Amid endless claims of economic recovery by the Obama administration and the media, the conditions facing the working class in the United States continue to deteriorate. This is seen nowhere more clearly than in the fate of young people, who confront a future of unemployment, low-paying jobs and perpetual debt.
The Associated Press reported Sunday that more than half (53.6 percent) of all four-year college graduates under 25 in the US are either unemployed or underemployed—that is, without a job or working at a job that does not require their degree. This is the highest percentage since records began being kept 11 years ago.
Of the 1.5 million people in this category, about half are unemployed and the other half are working for low wages at retail stores, coffee shops, restaurants, etc. The report also noted that only three of the 30 jobs with the largest projected number of openings in the next eight years will require a bachelor's degree or higher.
Overall youth unemployment in the US is over 23 percent, and after three years of official economic “recovery,” the rates of underemployment and unemployment for this group are still rising. The dire employment situation for young people is being used to pit them against older workers. In many cases, companies have laid off workers with decades of experience and replaced them with better-educated workers at half the pay.
The same students who cannot find decent-paying jobs that offer the prospect of economic security and advancement are saddled with huge college debts. The average student debt level topped $25,000 this year and the total amount surpassed $1 trillion.
The conditions facing the younger generation are a barometer of the overall health of a social system. A society that condemns its youth to a standard of living that is worse than their parents is a society that is going backwards. Ritualistic references by politicians to the “American Dream” have no relationship to reality.
The political establishment has nothing to offer the younger generation. President Barack Obama will kick off a three-state tour of college campuses this week, seeking to appeal to young voters with a token demand that Congress lower interest rates on a fraction of student loans. In his appearances at University of North Carolina, the University of Colorado and the University of Iowa, Obama will demagogically call for Congress to keep the rates on subsidized Stafford loans from going up to 6.5 percent on July 1.
The proposal is trivial when compared to the enormous levels of debt born by graduates. It would affect only subsidized government loans—less than one third of all student loans—and would mean only a moderate adjustment in interest rates, with no change in the amount students owe.
All of Obama’s proposals on student loans have been coordinated with and vetted by the banks to make sure they do not impinge on their profits. Meanwhile, Obama has overseen the cutting of federal education spending, supported the mass firing of teachers, and spearheaded the slashing of manufacturing wages. He has made no proposals to seriously address mass unemployment, poverty or home foreclosures.
At the center of the crisis facing young people is not simply the policies of one administration, however, but a social and economic system dedicated to the profit interests of the corporate and financial elite. Both of the official parties, the Democrats and Republicans, represent a ruling class that is seeking to resolve the crisis of capitalism by destroying the living standards of working people.
This is an international phenomenon. The millions of young workers without a future were the major driving force of last year’s upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia and mass protests throughout Europe. In Spain and Greece, mired in depression, youth unemployment approaches 50 percent.
This is only the beginning. Ever more brutal austerity measures are leading to a renewed crisis in Europe. In the United States, the ruling class is preparing to slash domestic social spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product to its lowest level in decades, regardless of who is elected.
The social upheavals of 2011 are only a forerunner of what is to come. But the struggles of young people must be informed by a political and class program. Jerry White and Phyllis Scherrer are running as the Socialist Equality Party’s candidates in the 2012 elections to fight for such a program. They are demanding the abolition of all student debts and a guarantee of free, high-quality education for all. They are further calling for a multi-trillion-dollar public works program to rebuild the social infrastructure, expand cultural opportunities and provide good-paying jobs for all.
To secure these social rights requires a transformation in the organization of society in the US and on a world scale. The banks and major corporations must be nationalized and placed under the democratic control of the working class. A radical redistribution of wealth must be carried out, freeing up the resources needed to guarantee a future for all young people.
There is no way to defend the rights of working people and youth—the right to a job, to an education, to a future without war—within the framework of the two big business parties and the capitalist system they defend. The fight for a future for young people is the fight for socialism.
Andre Damon
Andre Damon |
Verizon Taking Heat For Galaxy S7 Stealth Bloatware One of the criticism's frequently levied at carriers in general and Verizon Wireless in particular is the usage of unwanted bloatware that users don't have full control over. Verizon's taking renewed heat this week for not only the installation of traditional bloatware in the company's versions of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, but the use of a stealth Verizon app installer known as DT Ignite. DT Ignite has been a subject of conversation since at least 2014: given it lets Verizon, T-Mobile and other carriers covertly install bloatware -- and re-install removed bloatware after a reboot.
Verizon's use of DT Ignite on Android devices was apparently only just noticed by Reddit users, resulting in a flood of reports about Verizon's long-standing use of the DT Ignite bloatware -- to install other bloatware. The software operates in the background, letting Verizon deploy customizable additional bloat and advertising wear depending on the users geographic location. Earlier reports have suggested that the application downloaded by the stealthy application does not count against customer usage caps, so that's at least one thing in the platform's favor. DT Ignite will re-install some of a device's bloatware upon reboot or factory reset, and users need to find and disable the app to stop this from happening. Verizon relies on the fact that most consumers will have no idea how to actually do this, and may be too intimidated to even try. But to disable the application, all users need to do is: open settings then go to Applications > Application Manager. Once the list is loaded tap on More > Show system apps. This should create an alphabetic list of applications installed on your phone. Scroll down and select DT Ignite, then tap Disable. Should Verizon ultimately find consumers buying more unlocked or stock Android or other devices, it only needs to look toward its history of bloatware for the reason why. Should Verizon ultimately find consumers buying more unlocked or stock Android or other devices, it only needs to look toward its history of bloatware for the reason why.
News Jump Tuesday Morning Links Monday Morning Links TGI Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links - Valentines Edition Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links ---------------------- this week last week most discussed
Most recommended from 116 comments
buzz_4_20
join:2003-09-20
Biddeford, ME 15 recommendations buzz_4_20 Member This is the number one reason for rooting a phone. That's the first thing I do, root the device so I can uninstall all that UNWANTED CRAP. Chuck_IV
join:2003-11-18
Connecticut 1 edit 15 recommendations Chuck_IV Member This is one of the reasons I... am now on an iPhone. There's no carrier bloatware and you get regular OS updates.
It's not just Verizon. They ALL add their ridiculous bloatware. Not only the carrier but the manufacturer. I previously used a Samsung Note 2 with Sprint and then a Note 4 with Verizon and between Samsung AND Sprint's/Verizon's cr@pware/bloatware, my phone was just a mess at times. I got root with my Note 2 so I was able to clean things up but they never had root when I had my Note 4(I know it just finally got root now but too late).
I never saw myself with an iPhone but got fed up with the direction Samsung was taking and my daughter kept preaching how well the iPhone just "worked".
I have now thanked my daughter a few times for opening my eyes to the iPhone.
**EDIT**
Looks like we have some Apple haters that are voting all mentions of the iPhone down. Try to look beyond your hatred and realize that Apple not allowing Bloatware is a GOOD thing for everybody. ALL manufacturers should require no Bloatware, but unfortunately some manufacturers aren't in the position of being able to dictate to the carriers how to do things.
IowaCowboy
Iowa native
Premium Member
join:2010-10-16
Springfield, MA 10 recommendations IowaCowboy Premium Member Apple won't allow carrier bloatware No carrier bloatware on my phone other than the My Verizon app which I installed myself to manage my Verizon account.
One of the reasons I'm loyal to iPhone. jorcmg
join:2002-10-24
USA 6 recommendations jorcmg Member Welcome to the machine It is all part of loading your phone with crap until it becomes useless. Just so they can keep you on the new phone every 2 years treadmill. Same deal with the non replaceable battery. |
Over the past couple of months, there’s been speculation that Universal’s upcoming Jurassic World could be a reboot of the blockbuster dino-franchise launched by Steven Spielberg back in 1993, but fans can now rest easy with director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) putting an end to the rumours by confirming that the 2015 film will be a sequel to the earlier trilogy. Responding to a question on Twitter, Trevorrow stated that, “Reboot is a strong word. This is a new sci-fi terror adventure set 22 years after the horrific events of Jurassic Park.”
Jurassic World is set for release on June 21st 2015. Ty Simpkins (Iron Man 3) and Nick Robinson (Kings of Summer) are the only cast members confirmed so far, while Bryce Dallas Howard (The Help) is said to be in negotiations and Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy), Jason Schwartzman (Moonrise Kingdom), Irrfan Khan (The Amazing Spider-Man), and Idris Elba (Thor: The Dark World) are said to be on Universal’s shortlist, although Elba has since passed off the talk as little more than speculation. |
When John McCain embarrassed himself last month by declaring that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong,” he quickly claimed that he was talking about his belief in the American worker — and darkly implied that anyone who disagreed was less than patriotic.
For all of that concern, it’s a shame that Mr. McCain hasn’t come up with policies that would actually help workers. Instead, he’s served up the same-old trickle-down theories and a government-is-wrong, markets-are-right fervor that helped create this economic disaster.
Wednesday night’s debate was another chance for Mr. McCain to prove that he is ready to lead this country out of its deep economic crisis. But he had one answer to almost every economic question: cut taxes and government spending. Unfortunately, what Mr. McCain means is to cut taxes for the richest Americans and, inevitably, to reduce the kinds of government services that working Americans need more than ever.
Mr. McCain also stuck to his campaign’s nasty tone. He could not let go of the “Joe the Plumber” parable, saying his opponent’s plan was “to take Joe’s money, give it to Senator Obama and let him spread the wealth around.” Mr. McCain then accused Barack Obama of engaging in the sort of “class warfare” that has, in fact, been a focus of his own campaign.
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Over the last decade, the Giants have been one of the most successful franchises in the game, winning 831 regular season games and, of course, three World Series titles. Along the way, there have been plenty of important weeks, most notably in October, when Madison Bumgarner and friends stepped up and played their best baseball at the most important time of the year. But while the Giants’ recent past has been full of big moments, this week might be the one that determines the Giants future for the next decade.
Obviously, the team’s pursuit of Giancarlo Stanton has dominated news about the team so far this off-season, and Stanton would certainly make the team significantly better. But as Jeff Sullivan noted recently, the Giants aren’t really in a position to just trade for Stanton and think that solves their problems. I’m going to steal a graph from his post, showing the current projected standings in the NL based on the Steamer projections.
The Giants currently project for fewer wins than the Marlins, who are intentionally trying to get worse. They are just a tick ahead of the Phillies and Reds, neither of whom are thinking about taking on $300 million in future contract commitments right now. And while Stanton is a great player, no single player in baseball moves the needle on his own. Here’s Jeff’s second chart, where he assumes the Giants get Stanton.
As he notes, acquiring Stanton would move the team from the 10th-best projected NL team to the 8th-best, which is something, but 8th-best in a league where only five teams make the postseason, and one of them goes home after a single play-in game, isn’t the most enviable spot to be in. The primary point of Jeff’s post is that the Giants can’t just acquire Stanton and call it a day. If they’re going to take most of that contract, they would need to also invest in other upgrades in order to give the team a better chance of getting a return on that significant investment.
The problem is that taking on Stanton’s contract pushes the team well over the CBT threshold, and as a third-time payor, the Giants will pay a 50% tax on every dollar they spent over $197 million. Adding most of Stanton’s deal would put them at around $215 million, so they’d already be pushing up against the first surtax threshold — $20 million more than the CBT threshold — where they’d have to pay an additional 12% on the overage, and put them within striking distance of the second surtax threshold, where another 45% tax would kick in.
So they can’t really just keep spending their way out of their current problems. If they take Stanton’s contract, the rest of their upgrades would likely have to come from low-salary players, which are usually guys you develop internally or trade for. But the Giants’ farm system isn’t very good, so expecting it to produce some cheap big league contributors in 2018 isn’t realistic, and they don’t have the kinds of trade chips that could fetch them a low-cost impact player from another franchise.
And they aren’t really in a position to just wait for some of their low-level guys to make it to the show. While the Giants might not feel old, the reality is that they probably have two more years to try and win before running into a forced rebuild.
Buster Posey is 31, and has logged nearly 7,000 innings behind the plate. He won’t be able to catch forever, and when he has to change positions, he’s going to lose a lot of value. Madison Bumgarner is only 28, but he’s also only under contract for two more years, and he’ll command a huge raise after the 2019 season. And with roughly $100 million in commitments to six players in 2020 — which would be $125 to $130 million for seven guys if they acquire Stanton — there’s a realistic chance that that the team wouldn’t be able to afford Bumgarner, especially if the new salary for high-end players pushes goes over $40 million in next winter’s free agent bonanza.
And the Giants couldn’t really sustain a loss of Bumgarner, because the other guys making money in 2020 are also going to be in their mid-30s, and likely not going to be all that productive. That 2020 cliff looks precipitous, and the Giants essentially have two more years to try and win before they go flying over it.
And thus, one could reasonably argue that they need Shohei Ohtani more than any of the other finalists. Because if they landed both Stanton and Ohtani, all of the sudden they’d be something like an 87-win team, and project as the 4th-best team in the NL heading into the 2017 season. And because of Ohtani’s inability to be financially compensated for his talent, Ohtani would give the Giants a potential impact player without moving the CBT needle at all. All of the sudden, the Giants would be legitimate contenders, and the window could theoretically stay open for an extra year, as Ohtani still won’t be arbitration eligible by 2020.
We don’t know Ohtani’s timeline for choosing a team, but he’s zipping through the in-person meetings right now, and it wouldn’t be entirely shocking if Ohtani’s representatives brought him to the winter meetings for a pomp-and-circumstance press conference next week. And if Stanton was on the fence about joining the Giants because he was unsure of their ability to contend for the duration of his contract, adding Ohtani might just change that calculation.
Or it could go the other way. Perhaps one reason the Giants have tried so hard to acquire Stanton before the Ohtani sweepstakes got underway is that they wanted to have Stanton as part of their pitch, and if they could get him to agree to a trade to San Francisco, perhaps Ohtani would be more interested in going to the bay area. It’s possible that either one of them choosing SF would also make the other one more likely to come too.
Getting both players would dramatically change the Giants’ roster, and probably change their current trajectory, which isn’t great. But if they don’t land Ohtani, one could argue that they’d be better off getting neither, as acquiring Stanton by himself might not get them back to the postseason, but could make the coming collapse even more extreme, especially if Stanton regresses ands up not exercising his opt-out.
Getting both would be great. Getting neither would be okay, as the Giants do have other options to upgrade this winter, and missing out on Stanton might end up leading to a better allocation of resources. The worst outcome might be getting Stanton but losing out on Ohtani, as that may leave the Giants just good enough to hang around the periphery of contention without being quite good enough to overcome any of the three behemoths in the NL.
At the end of this next week, the Giants could be legitimate contenders again. Or they could be spurned by two players they highly covet. Or they could get one and not the other, and the impact on the franchise would be wildly different depending on which of the two it ended up being.
Because Ohtani and Stanton hold all the power, there’s nothing the Giants can do to ensure the outcome they want, but despite that lack of control, this remains a vitally important week for the franchise. The direction of their organization may very well be decided in the next seven days. |
A new Dungeons & Dragons RPG has been announced. That's a turn up for the books, eh?
It's called Sword Coast Legends, and it's being headed up by the director of Dragon Age: Origins. It's a collaboration between the studios N-Space and Digital Extremes that's being made in partnership with Wizards of the Coast. The team also boasts members who have previously worked on Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights—also known as: exactly the sort of people you'd want working on a new D&D game.
As for the game itself, it looks very much in keeping with those old Infinity Engine-era RPGs. It'll feature a full single-player campaign, as well as the option for co-op and the opportunity for an additional player to take the role of Dungeon Master.
Sword Coast Legends is due out later this year. For more details, head on over to its website. |
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Perhaps no single theme animated Donald Trump's run for president as much as "winning." But in reality, success is only an occasional byproduct of President Trump's primary inspiration, which is cruelty.
Trumpism is a zero-sum worldview — someone has to lose for someone else to win — and winning isn't worth the effort unless your opponent isn't merely defeated but also crushed. Trump would not deny this assessment. He was raised by his father to be a "killer" in business and has noted in a number of his books how much satisfaction he derives from doling out punishment, whether it's on his ex-wives, ungrateful beauty pageant contestants, or politicians who refuse to provide his real estate projects with sufficiently generous tax breaks.
On the campaign trail, Trump lamented that America doesn't win anymore and that only a winner like him — so successful in business, in television ratings, in romancing and marrying models, in remaining relevant in popular culture for over three decades — could successfully address the concerns of "real Americans." Whether the problem ailing his base was criminals ravaging their cities, illegal immigrants raping their women and stealing their jobs, or refugees from war-torn countries coming to impose sharia law on the Bible Belt, Trump promised that he alone could fix it, because he is a winner.
On Tuesday, when the Trump administration announced the president's intention to kill DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival), he gave his base a win. But he also brutishly reneged on a promise made by the Obama administration to uniquely vulnerable people — undocumented immigrants who came to this country as children — to trust the government, come out of the shadows, and embrace a path to citizenship. This betrayal is red meat for Trump's nativist base that irrationally considers all immigration to be a threat to both working-class employment and Western civilization.
Yet because of its wanton cruelty, the move has rankled even a number of high-ranking congressional Republicans, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and the pro-Trump immigration hawk Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) — both of whom vigorously opposed President Obama's executive order creating DACA, but both of whom feel it is Congress' place to address the issue through legislation, rather than uprooting the lives of 800,000 young immigrants, many of whom know no other country than America.
The fact that among these 800,000 "DREAMers" (named for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) are valedictorians, military veterans, and doctors makes no difference to Trump or his nationalist allies. Nor does it matter to them that entire families are put at risk for deportation by this action. To hardcore Trumpists, DREAMers are just budding rapists or murderers, and ours is a country of secure borders and the rule of law, so they must all pay.
Winning and cruelty go hand in hand with Trump, and a policy doesn't even have to be successful to be considered a win, it just has to be needlessly vicious. In authorizing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reboot the failed and bipartisanly despised war on drugs, Trump ignores the fact that punitive prohibition has contributed to the bloating of prison populations, ravaged inner cities, and turned local police agencies into militarized occupying armies. To Trump, the only reason armies don't win is because their hands are tied, and Trump supports Sessions' quixotic determination to win the drug war through vigorous enforcement and punishment.
The sudden and shocking moment in January when Trump suspended the U.S. refugee admissions program and halted visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries — including U.S. green card holders and people already on planes — was cruel, impractical, and sowed chaos. Though it interfered with businesses and educational institutions, it was a Trumpist's win, because the president demonstrated to his base that he's the type of guy who will wield the blunt force of presidential power without so much as thinking it through.
When Trump announced his ban on transgender troops in the military, and the removal of the approximately 1,000 already serving, the evangelicals who swallowed their sense of morality and voted for the philandering vulgarian with the penchant for sexual harassment were rewarded with a pointlessly cruel policy that the U.S. military neither asked for nor wanted. But still, winning.
Upon pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio — who abused his state-granted power to violate constitutional rights as a matter of policy — the president praised the disgraced sheriff's toughness. Though Arpaio's sadism included (but was not limited to) placing women and children in chain gangs, feeding detainees barely subsistence-level amounts of food, and housing them outdoors in what he called "concentration camps" under scorching Arizona heat (157 people would die while in custody on Arpaio's watch), Trump admires a man who knows how to punish people. As does Trump's base, and because it so outraged "the media" and "liberals," the presidential pardon of an unrepentant convicted criminal can be sold as more of that promised winning.
The deportation of the DREAMers — should it come to pass — would be a national stain on the honor of the United States for all time. Even Republican congressional leaders who opposed President Obama's creation of DACA recognize that simply repealing it is savagely inhumane, and while they can attempt to distance themselves from Trump's cruelty to their hearts' content, it won't matter to Team #MAGA. The more the president inflicts pain, the more they'll be convinced they are winning. |
The United States announced on Tuesday that an agreement has been reached with Israel on a $38 billion 10-year military aid package for 2019 through 2028.
Senior officials from both sides will sign the agreement on Wednesday in a ceremony in the Treaty Room at the State Department in Washington at 9 P.M. (Israel time).
"This memorandum of understanding constitutes the single largest pledge of bilateral military assistance in U.S. history," said the State Department in its announcement of the agreement. U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice will attend the signing ceremony, but the agreement is expected to be signed by Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Tom Shannon on behalf of the United States.
Jacob Nagel, acting head of Israel's National Security Council, landed in Washington D.C. on Tuesday. He is expected to sign the agreement on the new military aid package with the United States on Israel's behalf. Also attending the signing ceremony will be Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer.
U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House, Washington November 9, 2015. Kevin Lamarque, Reuters
A senior Israeli official said it was likely that Netanyahu and Obama will talk on the phone after the deal is signed on Wednesday. It was still unclear if the two will meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly next week in New York.
The senior official said that despite the criticism of Netanyahu's conduct over the nuclear deal with Iran, the deal has seen an increase of American aid to Israel. According to him, though Israel demanded $4.5 billion annually during the negotiations, it was expected that the sides would compromise on a lower sum. "Against the backdrop of significant cuts in the U.S. budget, we got an increase of defense aid to Israel," the official said. "The credit for closing the deal goes to the prime minister and to the person who ran the negotiations, acting National Security Adviser Jacob Nagel."
The agreement, which the two countries have been negotiating since November 2015, the United States will provide Israel with $38 billion in military aid over 10 years, $5 billion of them to be dedicated to the development of missile defense systems.
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Nagel left Israel for the U.S. Monday night after meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro. The meeting dealt with the final details of the agreement, such as the way the agreement would be announced etc.
The old military aid agreement, which ends at the end of 2018, totaled $30 billion over a decade or an average of $3 billion annually. That being said, the actual military aid the U.S. transferred to Israel was greater due additional aid approved by Congress following requests by Israel. Over the last few years Congress approved an additional $500 million annually to be added to the original base sum, which made the total amount of military aid transferred to Israel annually approximately $3.5 billion.
The new military aid deal is expected to total about $38 billion over a decade, or an average of $3.8 billion per year. This amounts to the largest increase ever in U.S. aid to Israel.
The sum of the new agreement is significantly lower than what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had sought. When negotiations started, Netanyahu asked to increase the aid to $4.5 billion a year, or $45 billion over ten years. Taking into account aid supplements approved in the past by Congress, the new aid agreement effectively increases the annual aid budget by only about $300 million.
Netanyahu gave in to a series of American demands under the new agreement, including a significant limitation on Israel's ability to ask Congress for supplemental aid. One of the annexes to the agreement is an official letter by the Israeli government containing a commitment not to hold any contacts in the coming decade with Congress about any increased aid for development of missile defense systems. The Israeli commitment letter is in addition to another qualifier, which is that Israel may request an aid increase in the event of an emergency such as war.
In addition, Netanyahu has agreed to end an arrangement that permitted Israel to use 26 percent of American aid money to purchase equipment from Israel's military industries within six years of the aid deal going into effect, and to use 13% of American aid money to buy fuel for the IDF. Under the new agreement, Israel will have to spend all its American aid money on purchases from U.S. military industries.
Negotiations for the aid package began in November 2015. President Barack Obama had proposed to Netanyahu to start the talks some six months beforehand, but Netanyahu refused and prevented the start of talks for some months, while he was seeking to thwart a nuclear agreement with Iran. Netanyahu agreed to start talks on the aid package and upgrading the IDF's capabilities only after he failed in his efforts to thwart the deal with Iran. |
The Pro Football Hall of Fame announced the 27 modern era semifinalists for the 2013 induction class late last week. Unlike the balloting for the baseball Hall of Fame, which often generates significant steroid-tinged strum and drang, the Pro Football HoF finalists receive minor fanfare and muted debate. A selection committee of 46 distinguished sportswriters will whittle the list from 25 to 15 to 10, and then to five, and finally vote to determine which of the five can earn the 80% majority vote for enshrinement. In the process, the selection committee will invariably foul up, badly.
I know several members of the committee, and individually they are knowledgeable and passionate about the NFL and its history. As a group, though, the committee acts like Congress, except with no transparency and bigger egos. Veteran observers of the Hall of Fame selection process know that for players who fall below the Joe Montana level of obviousness, enshrinement rests on uneasy truces among Balkanized fiefdoms of experts fiercely loyal to certain regions, eras, or players.
Grudges linger forever, and idiosyncratic table tendencies linger longer. There are "pet project" players who never fall off the ballot. There is lobbying. There are nutty assertions and backwards attitudes. Worst of all, there is a huge backlog of worthy players, and it is only getting larger.
As we sift through the 25 finalists, I will try to touch on two related-but-different issues: whether the player should be inducted in the Hall of Fame, and whether he is likely to be inducted in the Hall of Fame. The former is a complicated issue, since we all have our own Hall of Fame criteria. I try to marry statistical evidence, reputation, and contribution (including playoff and Super Bowl performances), but the marriage is often pretty messy.
As to whether a player is likely to go in, we know that the committee loves Super Bowls, hates statistics with a passion that burns like the core of a dying sun, goes on "runs" of positions or teams, and has an unhealthy obsession with the "signature moment," a single highlight that defines the player, like Lynn Swann's Super Bowl catch or Marcus Allen's change-of-direction Super Bowl run. Character and reputation matter to a degree, and it takes about 15 years of retirement for a player to go from "troublemaker" to "colorful," but a reprobate with a bubbly personality has a better chance of enshrinement than someone who allegedly had a "bad attitude."
Keeping all of these things in mind, let us touch on the semifinalists. We will revisit the finalists when they are announced in January.
Larry Allen, Guard/Tackle, Cowboys: Overwhelmingly qualified. The best guard in the NFL from about 1995 to 2001, and one of the five best for several years after. Allen was a tail-end member of the Cowboy's 1990s dynasty, and he was one of the Clean Boys whose personal life didn't make you feel the need for an antibacterial scrub. Allen was legendary for his weightroom strength: did you know that he could squat six trillion pounds? The weight lifting tales help personify Allen, which counts for a lot when the committee tries to choose among linemen.
Morten Andersen, Kicker, Saints/Falcons: The NFL's all-time scoring leader, and likely to stay there for a while. Andersen is 437 points ahead of Jason Hanson, so Hanson would need to keep having 100 point seasons until age 45 to catch Andersen: possible but not probable. There is no active kicker under 35 within a thousand points of Andersen.
Jan Stenerud is the only modern-era kicking specialist in Canton right now, and Andersen is qualified to join him: the safe perch atop the scoring leaderboard is impressive, he is famous and well regarded, and his overtime field goal to win the 1998 NFC Championship for the Falcons fulfills the silly "signature play" requirement. Andersen's chances are hurt by the huge number of qualified non-specialists likely to line-jump him.
Steve Atwater, Safety; Terrell Davis, Running Back; Karl Mecklenburg, linebacker, Broncos: The Broncos were underrepresented in Canton for years, but now that Shannon Sharpe, Gary Zimmerman, and Floyd Little have been enshrined, there's a risk that overcorrection will set in. Davis has a tremendous peak, but his short career freaks people out. The selectors were lenient about short-career players in the past (Gale Sayers is the obvious example; Dan Hampton and Lee Roy Selmon were only truly great for about four years each), but have recently begun to assume that a Hall of Famer must surround his four signature years with a decade of moderate-quality statistical compilation.
Atwater was a great player from 1990 to 1993 and a reputation guy for years after that; he's a marginal candidate. Mecklenburg, the Snow Goose, is an intriguing player from the lost 1980s Broncos, a team whose storyline has crumpled into "Elway Tries Hard, Loses Super Bowl," with all other details forgotten. The Snow Goose is reasonably qualified, but the fact that there are three Broncos candidates renders the point moot: they will split their delegates.
Jerome Bettis, Running Back, Rams/Steelers: A lovable guy with great raw numbers and a great story: highly qualified and a shoo-in, if not this year then next. All of those 3.8 yard-per-carry seasons at the end of his career might make statisticians blink, but Football Outsiders' metrics are kind to Bettis in those seasons: he was asked to handle a lot of short-yardage work, which lowered his per-carry averages, but he was very good at what he was asked to do. And his great years were truly special.
Tim Brown, Wide Receiver/Kick Returner, Raiders; Andre Reed, Wide Receiver, Bills: If there is one position that causes a collective brain camp among Hall of Fame selectors, it is wide receiver. More counterintuitive, anti-statistical logic is applied to wide receivers than players at any other position. It is a mind-boggling phenomenon that cannot be done justice in a paragraph, but here is the elevator explanation: the selectors are Paul Warfield damaged. Many of them believe that a great receiver must be Warfield-like: catch one 50-yard bomb per game (in slow motion on 35-millimeter film), win Super Bowls, and possess some kind of magical quality. Show the Hall of Fame committee a player who caught 100-passes per year or was part of an offensive sea-change, and they react like you are a used car salesman offering 0% financing: they will automatically assume that the stats are some kind of shell game.
Brown has the chance to end run Canton's wide receiver confusion because he has some Warfield qualities: he was a deep threat, with college superstardom to add to his allure. Reed was the kind of player who makes some selector's hands shake: his numbers were the product of a pass-happy offense that always came up short in the Super Bowl, and he caught too many short passes, which is bad for some reason. Both are solid candidates, and both were better receivers than Michael Irvin, who skated into Canton on the Warfield "less is more, plus rings" path. Neither will make it in this year, which is fine, because the committee must fix its brain sprain about one particular player before it deals with these two:
Cris Carter, Wide Receiver, Eagles/Vikings: Overwhelmingly, painfully, embarrassingly qualified. If Carter is not enshrined this year, it will damage the credibility of the committee.
Don Coryell, Coach, Cardinals/Chargers: Coryell should be relabeled a "contributor." His head coaching record is not close to Hall of Fame worthy, and he never served as an NFL offensive coordinator. Coryell's Hall of Fame candidacy is shrouded in the mists of history: legendary coaching clinics he held at San Diego State in the early 1960s, where Al Davis, John Madden, Sid Gillman, Jerry Garcia, George Lucas, and Ronald Reagan would come to him for advice. (Those last three may be fictitious; the significance of these 1960s jam sessions grows every year). Coryell is the John Adams of the Founding Fathers of modern NFL offense, and while everyone respects Adams, you rarely see his face on money. His credentials are a little smoky and tweedy for me, like giving the Oscar to someone who ran an acting school.
Roger Craig, Running Back, 49ers: Has the 1,000-1,000 rushing-receiving season and the 1980s 49ers luster, but Craig's Hall of Fame candidacy boils down to four outstanding seasons. Craig is no more qualified than Terrell Davis.
Eddie DeBartolo, Jr., Owner; Art Modell, Owner; Paul Tagliabue, Commissioner; George Young, Contributor: Nothing brings on the yawns like a discussion of Hall of Fame executives.
Kevin Greene, Linebacker /defensive end, Steelers/Panthers; Charles Haley, Defensive end/linebacker, Cowboys/49ers, Michael Strahan, Defensive end, Giants: The official Pro Football Hall of Fame website is getting a little cute with the position designations: Greene and Haley are the green-blue and the blue-green of the Crayola box. The Hall may want to consider the blanket term "pass rusher," especially since the committee is lately on a quest to enshrine each and every last one of them.
Many Hall of Fame committee members cramp up if you present them with any argument that sounds even slightly statistical. But now that they have 30 years of accurate sack data to work with, they have gone on a little tear, enshrining Chris Doleman, John Randle, Richard Dent, Rickey Jackson, and Derrick Thomas in recent years to go along with inarguable choices like Bruce Smith, Reggie White, and Lawrence Taylor. It is as if the committee is trying to backfill the all-time sack leader chart; Greene and Strahan can make sure spots one through five are covered, and Leslie O'Neal is the only qualified player in the Top Ten who has not at least been a semifinalist.
All of the recent pass-rushers were fine players, but many carried a "sacks-or-nothing" label during their careers, including Greene. (Dent, Doleman and Thomas earned similar criticism). That charge just doesn't seem to stick anymore, so Greene may make it in, even though Pro Bowl voters ignored many of his 10-12 sack seasons because he was regarded as a one-dimensional player.
Haley played for the two great dynasties of his era, though his five Super Bowl rings may work against him by making him look more like an effect of greatness than a cause. In a world where Doleman and Dent are Hall of Famers, Haley is one, too, but it may not be wise to indulge both the committee's shiny ring obsession and its "we just discovered the sack leader list" phase.
Strahan was known as a more complete player and is now a cuddly television personality; his credentials and his chances are better than the other two. There is no telling if someone in the committee has a bone to pick with the Brett Favre "phantom sack" and is willing to filibuster against Strahan. Oh heck, there almost certainly is.
Joe Jacoby, Tackle, Redskins: Left tackle for the Hogs. Jacoby bubbles up as a semi-finalist every other year or so. If Jacoby had not played for a line with a cute name, he would not be taken seriously as a Hall of Fame candidate. The Hogs were great from 1982 to about 1987, but that does not mean all five belong in Canton. (Russ Grimm, the best of the Hogs, is already in).
Albert Lewis, Cornerback, Chiefs/Raiders; Aeneas Williams, Cornerback, Cardinals/Rams: Regional favorites: cornerbacks with long careers and a handful of standout seasons. Williams is far more qualified than Lewis, who is a truly marginal candidate: more Pro Bowl berths, more interceptions, and a Super Bowl appearance with the Rams. Williams and Deion Sanders were the two best cornerbacks in the NFL in the mid-1990s; I would vote for Williams ahead of Bettis, Andersen, or any of the Broncos, and about 20 times before I voted for Greene.
John Lynch, Safety; Warren Sapp, Defensive Tackle, Buccaneers: The Bucs won a Super Bowl in 2002, and their only serious Hall of Fame candidates from that team are now entering the selection process. Sapp was a dominant defender in the early 2000s but also had a reputation as a nitwit, one which he has failed to refute in his second career as a bankrupt loudmouth and child support conscientious objector. No one will vote him into the Hall of Fame under these circumstances.
Lynch is Steve Atwater, Part Two. Once a safety has two or three outstanding seasons, he's in the Pro Bowl until his legs disintegrate, so it is best to be wary of the "Nine Time Pro Bowler" argument. (His last two appearances were particularly ridiculous.) If the committee wants to enshrine a defensive back from Lynch's era, Aeneas Williams is the best choice, but he is also the least sexy.
Jonathan Ogden, Tackle, Ravens; Will Shields, Guard, Chiefs: Two great linemen from the late 1990s-2000s. Odgen has the better resume: he and Orlando Pace were the two best offensive linemen of their generation, and each has multiple All Pro selections and a Super Bowl ring at the top of his resume. (Pace is two years away from eligibility).
Shields reached the Pro Bowl 12 times, played for Chiefs teams that produced some uncanny offensive statistics, and was one of the few offensive linemen of his era - or any era - with national endorsement deals, which help his "fame" value. Shields' candidacy is beset on all sides: by Larry Allen, who is a better candidate at the same position from the same era; by Ogden, who will split the line vote; by Willie Roaf, Shields' linemate, who was enshrined last year and may have fulfilled some unspoken quota for early 2000's Chiefs; and by the fact that his team had a reputation for going 13-3 and losing in the playoffs, which takes way some benefit of the doubt for many voters.
Bill Parcells, Coach: Overqualified.
Steve Tasker, Special Teamer/Wide Receiver, Bills: A credibility-straining binkie selection by the Bills delegation. Putting Steve Tasker in the football Hall of Fame is like putting Craig Counsel in Cooperstown. Tasker was an exceptional role player, but he was a role player, a backup, whose fame rests on the fact that television announcers can only talk about one special teamer in the NFL per year, and Tasker was in the postseason every year, so he could count on one "what a tough, scrappy, unheralded contributor" rant per week for 20 weeks for about seven peak years.
Tasker was a quality player and seems to be a great guy, but the fact that he is a semifinalist for the sixth time reveals just how flawed the selection system is. Tasker is the pork-barrel tax bill who gets wedged into every piece of legislature. His continued candidacy represents a wish-fulfillment fantasy and the abandonment of common sense by someone who has gotten drunk on toughness-grittiness-swagger juice and won't let a little detail like the fact that Tasker was not a starter keep him from getting a punt gunner into Canton.
While Tasker's ability to force fair catches is debated, teammates Kent Hull, Darryl Talley, and Cornelius Bennett, Pro Bowl starters for those great Bills teams, could not even reach the semifinalist round this year. This is a case of misplaced energy, and of contrarian reasoning gone completely haywire.
Given five players to enshrine this year, I would select Cris Carter, Larry Allen, Aeneas Williams, Jerome Bettis, and Michael Strahan, plus Bill Parcells. |
India is cracking down on online porn.
The country's government has ordered Internet service providers to disable access to 857 pornographic websites in the name of "morality."
A telecommunication department spokesman said the ban has been issued under the country's information technology act, following comments made by India's Supreme Court last month.
"The court said that free and open access to these websites should be controlled," N.N. Kaul told CNNMoney.
The department issued a 17-page document listing websites that it said include content that "violates morality and decency."
Pranesh Prakash from the India-based Center for Internet and Society said the ban is India's largest crackdown on internet content so far.
In July, India's top court examined a petition which claimed online pornography fueled sex crimes. It refused to issue a blanket ban, saying it was not for the court to issue such restrictions.
"It is an issue for the government to deal with," Chief Justice Handyala L. Dattu was quoted by Indian media as saying. "Can we pass an interim order directing blocking of all adult websites?" he asked.
Related: 8 things you won't find in China
Kaul said the restriction is only temporary, until the government finds a more permanent way of dealing with the issue. He said the websites can still be accessed through proxy or private networks.
Indians took to social media to criticize the government for what they say is censorship.
Ram Gopal Varma, Bollywood film director and one of many Indian celebrities to criticize the ban, tweeted: "To ban porn saying it will be seen by who shouldn't see it is like saying to stop traffic because there will be accidents."
Revenge porn victim: My naked photos were everywhere |
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Now this is…CHICKEN TENDER LOVE!!! Click on “Show more” below for this scrumptious Fried CHICKEN TENDER recipe…
CHICKEN TENDER RECIPE
2 lbs. chicken tenders or chicken breast cut into strips
2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon fresh cracked pepper
3 eggs
2-4 cup panko crumbs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
Marinate chicken in buttermilk overnight in refrigerator.
Add flour into shallow dish…set aside.
Beat eggs in a shallow dish with salt and pepper. Set aside.
Add panko crumbs to shallow dish…set aside.
Drain chicken strips from buttermilk. Add chicken strips, one at a time, to flour and coat well. Dip floured chicken strips into egg mixture coating well. Roll floured, egg dipped chicken strips into panko crumbs until well coat.
Add oil to large skillet over medium heat. Fry chicken tenders in heated oil. Fry on each side for 2-3 minutes or until golden brown. Remove cooked chicken tenders and drain on cooling rack.
ENJOY!!!
Video Rating: 4 / 5 |
Best troll ever, seriously. How did you do that...? also, WTB offer 3 chaos EDIT: I checked the HTML for the page and it doesn't look like the OP has done any clever hacking. This actually looks legit...
It contains a fishingrod loot entry with droprate 10. When I first saw this I thought it's to troll people that snoop in the ggpk file. Guess it is not a troll :)
Now as to where you can use it... my guess is act3, see screenshot:
Tell me this does not look like a rhoa? Look at GGG's local game content, you can find the loottable file in there.It contains a fishingrod loot entry with droprate 10. When I first saw this I thought it's to troll people that snoop in the ggpk file. Guess it is not a troll :)Now as to where you can use it... my guess is act3, see screenshot:Tell me this does not look like a rhoa? Last edited by VRShiva on Sep 6, 2013, 5:20:30 PM |
When I first saw the trailer for Disney’s upcoming film, Zootopia, one of the things that struck me first (in addition to the HILARITY of the sloth DMV employee getting a joke) was the fact that, in this movie that seems to be about biases and bigotry, the lead was a female character! It was so clear that gender-related bias was one of the things this film was going to examine and challenge. After all, with Nick the fox saying “You bunnies. Always so emotional,” that had to be on purpose, right? Apparently not.
In a recent interview with io9 the director of Zootopia, Byron Howard, tells the story of how originally, the main character of this film wasn’t supposed to be Judy Hopps, the police officer bunny, but Nick the con artist fox. Back in November 2014, after years of production, the team behind the film realized that the story didn’t make sense with Nick as the lead, even though that was the version of the story that was in the original pitch and the original script. Howard explains:
We’re telling a story about bias, and when you have the Nick character starting the movie, through his eyes the city was already broken. He didn’t like Zootopia. We asked ‘What are we saying with the movie?’ If we’re telling this movie about bias—something that is everywhere and in all of us, whether we want to admit it or not—the character that’s going to help us tell that message is Judy, an innocent, [who comes] from a very supportive environment where she thinks everyone is beautiful, everyone gets along. Then let Nick, this character who knows the truth about the world, bop up against her and they start to educate each other. When we flipped that, it was a major flip, but it worked so much better.
That does, indeed, make a lot of sense. What’s interesting to me, though, is that nowhere in this rationale does it say “In this movie about bias, the character that’s going to help us tell that message is Judy, a female character who constantly faces bias herself.” Gender is mentioned nowhere in this interview. It’s so strange to me that making the female character the lead of a movie about biases wasn’t the original, obvious choice! What’s more, even after giving it thought, it seems like the fact that the character is female wasn’t the obvious thing that made them decide “you know what? She would be a better vehicle through which to tell a bias story.” It’s all about her “innocence” and naivete.
It’s strange to me, because making the bunny character female in the first place feels very much on purpose. All the qualities negatively attributed to bunnies – too small, too weak, too emotional to be in law enforcement – seem like the same characteristics that are often negative stereotypes of women. When I try to think about what the film would be like if the main bunny character were male, I can’t even picture it. Not because males can’t be small, weak, and emotional, obviously, but because I don’t think a Disney movie would frame a male bunny in the same way. First of all, a male bunny would probably be called a Rabbit (the same way that some dolls are called “action figures”), and second, even if the bunny were male, all those characteristics would be seen as a weakness precisely because they’re feminine. So, either way you slice it, Judy Hopps as the lead of this film could be a great way to help kids examine gender bias, as well as all the other race/class biases that will likely be explored in this film.
Even if it was completely unintentional.
(image via Disney)
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Intel's HPC director and evangelist James Reinders is leaving Intel after 27 years - or as he puts it, 10,001 days - accepting the firm's offer of early retirement for long-standing employees.
Reinders describes how he joined Intel in 1989 to work on a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processor called iWarp, designed to be connected into a cluster. It was the early days of a search for higher computing performance via parallelism rather than faster clock rates.
According to Reinders, Intel's work on parallelism eased back when clock rates surged again with the 486 and Pentium processors, but that was only temporary. Reinders became a tireless champion for concurrency as well as for Intel's compilers, libraries and other software development tools.
Not everything went well. Intel's general-purpose GPU and accelerator project, codenamed Larrabee, never came to market. However parts of Larrabee were used in Intel's MIC (Many Integrated Core) concurrent processor, which became Xeon Phi, codenamed Knights Corner, fully released in 2012. China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, the world's fastest according to the Top 500 list, uses Xeon Phi accelerators.
Reinders has written or co-written several books on concurrency and its applications, most recently High Performance Parallelism Pearls Volume 2, where with Jim Jeffers he brings together contributions on topics such as cosmic microwave background analysis, fast matrix computations on heterogenous streams, vectorization optimization, and multi-level parallelism in quantum simulations.
Reinders spoke to the Reg on several occasions, most recently late in 2015 when he talked up Knights Landing, the next generation of the Xeon Phi, Intel's MIC.
Intel's James Reinders
Reinder's departure is a significant loss for Intel, because his ability to articulate the benefits (and pitfalls) of concurrency combined with a deep understanding of both the hardware and the software is exceptional.
The man says he has no immediate plans but it will not be surprising if he continues to be active in the concurrency and HPC community. ® |
Abstract
The ecological impact of invasive tree pests is increasing worldwide. However, invasive tree pests may alsohave significant social costs. We investigated the association between the emerald ash borer (EAB)—aninvasive tree pest first discovered in the US in 2002—and crime in Cincinnati, Ohio. We used a natural experimental approach, and compared crime (in 11 classes) on census block groups infested with EAB with crime on block groups not infested with EAB between 2005 and 2014. We accounted for demographic and biological differences between infested and un-infested block groups using propensity-score weighting. EAB infestation was significantly and positively associated with relative increases in crime in all but four crime categories. Our results suggest that invasive tree pests may be associated with social costsworth considering when managing invasive species. By extension, healthy trees may provide significant social benefits. |
Atheist. Biologist. Writer. Thinker. Richard Dawkins has developed an international reputation of spreading the word that evolution happened and that there is no "intelligent design" or higher being, as you might gather from the title of his book "The God Delusion."
But no matter what you think about his convictions, his ideas have gone viral - including the word "meme."
CNN caught up with Dawkins while he was passing through Atlanta earlier this year. His next U.S. tour is in October.
Here is an edited transcript of part of the conversation. Watch the video above for a more focused look at Dawkins' ideas about evolution vs. intelligent design.
Today, a lot of people think a "meme" is a LOLcat or a photo that's gone viral. How do you feel about that?
In the last chapter of "The Selfish Gene," I coined the word "meme" as a sort of analog of "gene." My purpose of this was to say that although I'd just written a whole book about how the gene is the unit of natural selection, and that evolution is changes in gene frequencies, the Darwinian process is potentially wider than that.
You could go to other planets in the universe and find life, and if you do find life, then it will have evolved by some kind of evolutionary process, probably Darwinian. And therefore there must be something equivalent to a gene, although it may be very, very different from the DNA genes that we know.
I wanted to drive that point home. And rather than speculate about life on other planets, I thought maybe we could look at life on this planet and find an analog of the gene staring us in the face right here. And that was the meme. It's a unit of cultural inheritance, the idea that an idea might propagate itself in a similar way to a gene propagating itself. It might be like catchy tune, or a clothes fashion. A verbal convention, a word that becomes fashionable, like "awesome," which no longer means what it should mean.
That would be an example of something that spread like an epidemic. And the word "basically," which is now used just to mean "uhh." That's another one that's spread throughout the English speaking world.
These are potentially analogous to genes in the sense that they spread and are copied from brain to brain throughout the world, or throughout a particular subset of people. The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be.
My original purpose was to say: It's not necessarily all about genes. But the word has taken off.
There are people who use meme theory as a serious contribution to the theory of human culture and I’m glad to say that the idea of things going viral has also gone viral.
How do you think evolution should be taught to children?
You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution. So I would teach evolution very early in childhood. I don't think it's all that difficult to do. It's a very simple idea. One could do it with the aid of computer games and things like that.
I think it needs serious attention, that children should be taught where they come from, what life is all about, how it started, why it's there, why there's such diversity of it, why it looks designed. These are all things that can easily be explained to a pretty young child. I'd start at the age of about 7 or 8.
There’s only one game in town as far as serious science is concerned. It’s not that there are two different theories. No serious scientist doubts that we are cousins of gorillas, we are cousins of monkeys, we are cousins of snails, we are cousins of earthworms. We have shared ancestors with all animals and all plants. There is no serious scientist who doubts that evolution is a fact.
Why do people cling to these beliefs of creationism and intelligent design?
There are many very educated people who are religious but they’re not creationists. There’s a world of difference between a serious religious person and a creationist, and especially a Young Earth Creationist, who thinks the world is only 10,000 years old.
If we wonder why there are still serious people including some scientists who are religious, that’s a complicated psychological question. They certainly won’t believe that God created all species, or something like that. They might believe there is some sort of intelligent spirit that lies behind the universe as a whole and perhaps designed the laws of physics and everything else took off from there.
But there's a huge difference between believing that and believing that this God created all species. And also, by the way, in believing that Jesus is your lord and savior who died for your sins. That you may believe, but that doesn't follow from the scientific or perhaps pseudoscientific that there's some kind of intelligence that underlies the laws of physics.
What you cannot really logically do is to say, well I believe that there's some kind of intelligence, some kind of divine physicist who designed the laws of physics, therefore Jesus is my lord and savior who died for my sins. That's an impermissible illogicality that unfortunately many people resort to.
Why do you enjoy speaking in the Bible Belt?
I’ve been lots of places, all of which claim to be the buckle of the Bible Belt. They can’t all be, I suppose. I enjoy doing that. I get very big audiences, very enthusiastic audiences. It’s not difficult to see why.
These people are beleaguered, they feel threatened, they feel surrounded by a sort of alien culture of the highly religious, and so when somebody like me comes to town…they turn out in very large numbers, and they give us a very enthusiastic welcome, and they thank us profusely and very movingly for coming and giving them a reason to turn out and see each other.
They stand up together and notice how numerous they actually are. I think it may be a bit of a myth that America is quite such a religious country as it’s portrayed as, and particularly that the Bible Belt isn’t quite so insanely religious as it’s portrayed as.
In situations such as the death of a loved one, people often turn to faith. What do you turn to?
Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it’s a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret. I absolutely don’t ever, under such circumstances, feel tempted to take up religion. Of course not. But I attend memorial services, I’ve organized memorial events or memorial services, I’ve spoken eulogies, I’ve taken a lot of trouble to put together a program of poetry, of music, of eulogies, of memories, to try to celebrate the life of the dead person.
What’s going to happen when you die?
What’s going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to science. I haven’t decided yet.
It just ends?
Of course it just ends. What else could it do? My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot. So no, there’s no question about that.
If there were a God that met you after death, what would you say?
If I met God, in the unlikely event, after I died? The first thing I would say is, well, which one are you? Are you Zeus? Are you Thor? Are you Baal? Are you Mithras? Are you Yahweh? Which God are you, and why did you take such great pains to conceal yourself and to hide away from us?
Where did morality come from? Evolution?
We have very big and complicated brains, and all sorts of things come from those brains, which are loosely and indirectly associated with our biological past. And morality is among them, together with things like philosophy and music and mathematics. Morality, I think, does have roots in our evolutionary past. There are good reasons, Darwinian reasons, why we are good to, altruistic towards, cooperative with, moral in our behavior toward our fellow species members, and indeed toward other species as well, perhaps.
There are evolutionary roots to morality, but they’ve been refined and perfected through thousands of years of human culture. I certainly do not think that we ought to get our morals from religion because if we do that, then we either get them through Scripture – people who think you should get your morals from the Old Testament haven’t read the Old Testament – so we shouldn’t get our morals from there.
Nor should we get our morals from a kind of fear that if we don’t please God he’ll punish us, or a kind of desire to apple polish (to suck up to) a God. There are much more noble reasons for being moral than constantly looking over your shoulder to see whether God approves of what you do.
Where do we get our morals from? We get our morals from a very complicated process of discussion, of law-making, writing, moral philosophy, it’s a complicated cultural process which changes – not just over the centuries, but over the decades. Our moral attitudes today in 2012 are very different form what they would have been 50 or 100 years ago. And even more different from what they would have been 300 years ago or 500 years ago. We don’t believe in slavery now. We treat women as equal to men. All sorts of things have changed in our moral attitudes.
It’s to do with a very complicated more zeitgeist. Steven Pinker’s latest book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” traces this improvement over long centuries of history. He makes an extremely persuasive case for the fact that we are getting more moral, we are getting better as time goes on, and religion perhaps has a part to play in that, but it’s by no means an important part.
I don’t think there’s a simple source of morality to which we turn.
What might come after humans in evolution?
Nobody knows. It’s an unwise, a rash biologist who ever forecasts what’s going to happen next. Most species go extinct. The first question we should ask is: Is there any reason to think we will be exceptional?
I think there is a reason to think we possibly might be exceptional because we do have a uniquely develop technology which might enable us to not go extinct. So if ever there was a species that one might make a tentative forecast that it’s not going to go extinct, it might be ours.
Others have come to the opposite conclusion: That we might drive ourselves extinct by some horrible catastrophe involving human weapons. But assuming that doesn’t happen, maybe we will go for hundreds of thousands, even million years.
Will they evolve? Will they change? In order for that to happen, it’s necessary that a reproductive advantage should apply to certain genetic types rather than other genetic types. If you look back 3 million years, one of the most dramatic changes has been in the increase in brain size. Our probable ancestor 3 million years ago of the genus Australopithecus walked on its hind legs but had a brain about the size of a chimpanzee’s.
Will that trend continue? Only if the bigger brained individuals are the most likely to have children. Is there any tendency if you look around the world today to say that the brainiest individuals are the ones most likely to reproduce? I don’t think so. Is there any reason to think that might happen in the future? Not obviously. You can’t just look back 3 million years and extrapolate into the future. You have to ask the question: What kinds of genetically distinct individuals are most likely to reproduce during the next hundreds of thousands of years? It’s extremely difficult to forecast that.
What are you working on next?
I’m thinking of working on another book and it might be some sort of autobiography, but it’s very much in the planning stage. |
That the UEFI firmware should die in a fire and that its instigators for its adoption should hang their collective heads in shame at the abomination they have created has been confirmed yet again with the news that, on some brands of computers, it can be destroyed with a regular rm -Rf / , bricking the device in the process.
It is high time the Free Software community put all its weight behind open firmwares like Coreboot and Libreboot.
For those of you who don’t know, UEFI widely substituted BIOS on new computers some years ago. The UEFI on your machine is a type of firmware (i.e. software that lives on a chip), a pre-operating system if you will, whose missions include doing some housework, initiating some low level hardware systems, and pulling in a bootloader from the hard disk that will allow the user to load their operating system proper. Harmless enough, right?
Wrong!
In fact UEFI has become the most insidious bane of Free Software operating systems and, what is worse, the most horrid way to abuse users’ rights since… well, since forever. No wonder Apple was so quick to adopt it in big way.
UEFI is a set of “open specifications” that dictates to manufacturers how to implement the firmware in their machines. But don’t let the “open” in the prior sentence confuse you: in no way does that mean the firmware installed on a laptop is open source. Also, that it is widely used, in no way makes it standard. In fact, each vendor can implement it very much as they please, as open source, as closed source, with wildly varied and all equally horribly garish user-interfaces, with malicious software blobs embedded within it… You name it, they’ve done it.
This has led to some egregious abuses and misuses, not least of which is the case mentioned above. If giving a user the power to erase the firmware from within the operating system, doesn’t strike you as shoddy beyond the pale, then you and I have different opinions of what shoddy looks like.
Firmware is meant to by read-only to a very high degree (see the video below on how tricky it is to overwrite a correctly implemented read-only firmware), and is so for a good reason: a writeable firmware opens up a machine to malware at the lowest level. We are talking about trojans and viruses that no antivirus would be able to wipe out. Ever.
So, let me repeat that: allowing the possibility of implementing some parts of UEFI as read/write from software is beyond bonkers.
But it gets worse…
If bricking your laptop and unkillable viruses don’t sound bad enough, how about unremoveable crapware and spyware installed by the manufacturers themselves? Or bloatware that, no matter how many times you purge it, it always comes back, because it’s right there, in the firmware?
And, despite many think this is flogging a dead horse, what else can be said at this stage about Microsoft’s Secure Boot, that gives the shady guys at Redmond the authority to decide what you can or cannot install on your own hardware? The situation with Windows 10 and the renewed hardware certification program, by the way, has made things worse, not better.
HOWTO Install Coreboot
It’s time to move the freedom closer to the hardware and get rid of all those proprietary, insecure and abusive firmwares. That’s what Libreboot and Coreboot are all about. (If you’re wondering why two projects, it wouldn’t be Free Software without at least a couple of competing teams working on the same thing, would it now?).
During FOSDEM 2016, we were able to see how things worked first hand. Vladimir Serbinenko, from the Coreboot project, after informing us that “UEFI is s**t” off camera (no kidding), was kind enough to walk us through a typical Coreboot installation on a Lenovo X220. He also clarified to our clueless reporter what Coreboot actually is and does and how it is very different from your traditional BIOS or UEFI.
Enjoy.
As Vladimir explains, Coreboot has no human-facing interface whatsoever. It goes lower than that. What it does have is a container for a payload, though, and the payload can be anything: BIOS, UEFI, or GRUB — the latter being Vladimir’s choice, because “it bypasses all the old stuff” as he puts it, and loads the Linux kernel directly.
Coreboot and Libreboot, apart from working on older Lenovo/IBM Thinkpads, also work on Chromebooks, and a few more models of laptops.
Cover image: Motherboard by Sergio Stockfleth for Pixabay.com. |
Right now I’m pretty busy with another Exalted 3e assignment, but I haven’t posted anything since Wednesday. So let’s get back to that “Beverages in Creation” thing that I promised a sequel to a while back!
Milk: People have been drinking milk for millennia. Aside from cows, dairy animals include such creatures as sheep, goats, water buffalo, donkeys, horses, camels, yaks, reindeer, and even moose. I assume that, as on Earth, some of Creation’s peoples are lactose-intolerant, but even lactose-intolerant people can more easily digest milk if they regularly eat live yogurt, which definitely exists in the setting. In that vein, fermented milk beverages with little to no alcohol, such as ayran, doogh, kefir, and lassi, have long pedigrees and doubtless exist in Creation, especially in parallel Southern cultures where milk spoils quickly in the heat of the day. Buttermilk and whey, as byproducts of other dairy processes, would also be common wherever butter and cheese are made. And in medieval England, boiled milk was even added to ale or wine to make a curdled drink called a posset. (This would have gone into the “Alcoholic Beverages in Creation” post if I’d thought of it at the time.)
Fruit drinks: I’ve found little information on historical use of fruit juices as a beverage. Grape juice was turned into wine, apple juice into cider, and so forth. The wealthy throughout Creation doubtless have access to luxurious fruit drinks like the classic iced Persian sherbet, but beyond that, crushing fruit to drink unfermented juice would seem to be something of an extravagance, as the juice spoils quickly and extracting it wastes the rest of the fruit. Exceptions include coconut water, which would be consumed seasonally in Western and Southwestern coconut-growing regions, and citrus-based drinks such as lemonade. Beverages made from cooking down fruit, such as blåbärssoppa or hwachae, also seem viable, though my limited research doesn’t indicate whether such beverages have long histories.
Tea: Common in tropical and subtropical regions, an infusion made with the dried leaves of the tea plant has long been drunk as a stimulant in eastern and southern Asia. Various cultivars and styles of tea are likewise common in Creation’s cultures that share the appropriate cultures and climates: the Southwest, the Southeast, and the southern shores of the Blessed Isle. Any number of other herbal teas, from coca leaf to ginseng to rose hip to yerba mate, can also be found throughout Creation.
Coffee: The history of coffee drinking only goes back to the 14th century, but it’s sufficiently iconic for later medieval Islamic societies that we’ll make allowances. It’s doubtless consumed in appropriate locales such as Chiaroscuro or Jiara, and is made by boiling ground coffee beans in water like modern Turkish coffee. An interesting note regarding the origins of coffee cultivation: As with Chinese silkworms, Yemeni coffee beans were originally a carefully guarded resource. Exported beans were heat-sterilized so they couldn’t grow. Eventually a Sufi monk smuggled a handful of fertile beans to India, from whence coffee cultivation spread across the world. Guild merchants may well have a monopoly on coffee production and shipping in Creation—one which an enterprising PC merchant could seek to break.
Cacao: Drinks made from the cacao bean should have appeared in the previous post, as it seems that early Mesoamerican cacao drinks were fermented. Preparations varied—the Mayans served it hot and frothy, mixed with chile peppers and maize flour, while the Aztec elite drank it cold with chile, spices, and honey. Cacao beans, which were prized as currency, traveled long distances through the trade networks of the Americas. The Pueblo peoples, over a thousand miles away, appear to have consumed chocolate as well. In Creation, it’s most likely drunk in far Eastern societies such as Ixcoatli.
Grain water: There’s a long tradition of boiling cereals to produce a drink rather than a solid food. Examples include Korean sikhye and sungnyung (rice), ancient Greek kykeon (barley), Andean chichi morada (maize), etc. Even soy milk, which seems like a modern invention, can be traced back close to two thousand years. Such beverages doubtless exist throughout Creation.
Vinegar drinks: Posca, consumed by the Roman army and the poor, was a mixture of vinegar and water. I’d only expect to see it as a byproduct of the viticulture industry in places that produce so much wine that some of it would regularly go sour; the southern Blessed Isle probably best fits the bill. Persian sekanjabin seems a bit more upscale.
Iced drinks: Ice has been used to cool drinks for millennia. Common folk in the North can store ice through the summer. Elsewhere in Creation, storing snow and ice from the winter or carting it down from mountaintops is a matter for the wealthy and powerful.
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The art therapist concluded that the defendant suffered from a Schizoaffective Disorder at the time of his and presented this in court. Two other expert witnesses contracted by the defense, a psychiatrist and a psychologist, arrived at the same conclusion. This was significant because the conclusion derived from the art-based assessment was developed independently from the other two mental professionals. Ultimately, the defendant received a sentence of 95 years.
This oft-used description of the book Art on Trial (Gussak, 2013) has stimulated intrigue into how art therapy was used for a capital murder defense trial. However, I am certainly not the first art therapist that has served the court system.
Forensic art therapy is “…the combination of art therapy with standard forensic procedure and protocol [which] produces a hybrid that is fundamentally investigative fact-finding, with clinical overtones” (Gussak, 2013, p.12). While art therapy is generally understood as a form of treatment, in this case, art therapy was used for its investigative ability, to assess the art and provide information where words are not available.
In 1990 Safran, Levick, and Levine published the article, “Art therapist as expert witnesses: A judge delivers a precedent-setting decision.” Presenting the case in which an art therapist’s admissibility to provide evidence for an abuse case was brought before a judge, this article demonstrated how the and assessment acumen for art therapists could serve the court.
Marcia Sue Cohen-Liebman, considered the leading forensic art therapist, is responsible for coining the term forensic art therapy and for developing its standard definition. She has been providing her assessment and investigative skills to aide children and victims in abuse cases in the court system for many years. In her work, she realized there were three advantages for using drawings in a forensic context:
As interviewing tools, drawings are used in a supportive capacity in the investigation of legal matters In the capacity of charge enhancement, drawings provide contextual information that can contribute to the determination of charges as well as the identification of additional arenas to investigate Drawings as judiciary aids provide evidentiary material that is admissible in judicial proceedings (Cohen-Liebman, 2003, p.171-italics added)
Most forensic art therapists find themselves providing support for family, custody and child abuse cases. In the case presented in the book, I took a different role—instead of aiding a child victim, I helped the defense attorneys of an adult who murdered a child.
In 2006, I was contacted by a defense attorney and was asked to be a consultant for capital murder case (with the possibility of testifying in court). All I was told was the prosecution was seeking the death penalty and the defense team was considering the presence of a mental illness. Most essential, the defendant had a long history of creating art. Although they had never worked with an art therapist before, the defense attorney believed that they needed someone to determine if the art they collected—over 100 images—revealed a disorder. I was not given any specifics of the case, nor was I told what outcome they were looking for.
I must confess, I was simultaneously excited and cautious that a defense attorney would contact me to provide assessment and testimony. Here was somebody who understood what I already knew—that art therapy was a legitimate and substantive investigative tool in uncovering a long-brewing mental illness, one that had not been diagnosed before. Conversely, I was cautious in that I was not sure how I felt about providing testimony for a murder defendant, especially after I discovered that this person had killed his child. However, I soon came to the realization—and made this clear to the defense team—that I would not testify for or against the defendant but rather I would testify solely on the art. Call this rationalization, call it acrobatic semantics, this mindset allowed me to at night.
I was new to this experience in that had never served as an expert witness in court hearings. I had spent many years working as an art therapist in prisons and juvenile facilities, working with aggressive and violent clients, and had conducted years of research investigating the effectiveness of art therapy in prison. While I had taught assessments for many years in universities, and had to justify my knowledge base, I had never testified in court on a client’s art. I was intrigued, and eventually, I agreed to do so.
Nevertheless, during the 2½ years I worked on the case, the formal elements of each art piece were meticulously assessed and deconstructed. The final analysis demonstrated that the defendant had an undocumented—but dominant -- mental illness. While I spent those years evaluating the art, the defense was hard at work building a defense for their client, including securing my expert witness status. I also met with the defendant on two separate occasions to review his artwork and administer art-based assessments, and I took part in a deposition conducted by the deputy district attorney. These experiences culminated in the hearing before the judge, which included a testimony, cross-examination and redirection that lasted a few hours. Ultimately, what was presented to the court was that the formal elements (as opposed to the symbolic meaning of the imagery) revealed a Schizoaffective Disorder . The psychiatrist and psychologist who testified earlier in the week verified this diagnostic profile. I had not spoken with either mental health professional prior to delivering my testimony.
This experience led to the theory that using art as evidence in a murder trial is beneficial:
Art is a viable assessment tool that can ascertain mental health status at the time of both the crime and trial or hearing
Art can be used as a means to reveal and ascertain the truth of a defendant’s statements and information
The display of art and the demonstration of artistic imagery can humanize a defendant (Gussak, 2013, pp. 176-178).
In future blogs I will explore each of these points. I will examine the assessment approach used for this case, specifically focusing on the formal elements of the images. In one upcoming blog I will detail the ethical, and legal considerations of providing testimony, will compare and contrast other cases in which other art therapists have served murder trials, and how the legal arena reacted to art therapists as expert witnesses. Upcoming blogs will explore the role of art therapy in forensic and correctional settings, including its benefits for these environments, the empirical research that demonstrates its effectiveness in both men and women’s prisons, and case vignettes that illuminate inmate and personal experiences. Finally, I will eventually present and discuss the art of serial killers. Stay tuned.
---------------------------------------------------
Addendum: I had a surprise at the American Art Therapy Association conference in Seattle WA, which I just had to add to this introductory blog. I was asked to lead a Master’s Supervision session on Forensic Art Therapy. I planned on about 20 attendees, a number that was consistent in other years I have led this session. The 20 chairs in the circle quickly filled up, and by the time the session began, there were another 60-75 additional attendees. The attendees’ experiences ranged from involvement with the courts and legal systems to working within various forensic and correctional arenas. Although overwhelming, the discussion was lively and exciting, and it was apparent the attendees were hungry for more information. Many were also surprised to learn that there were many people working in similar settings. I mention this to illustrate the growing field, and the awareness of the value that art, art therapy and art-based assessments can lend to forensics.
Cohen-Liebman, M.S. (2003). Using drawings in forensic investigations of child sexual abuse. In C. Malchiodi’s (Ed.) Handbook of clinical art therapy. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Dissanayake, E. (1988). What is art for? Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
Gussak, (2013). Art on Trial: Art therapy in capital murder cases. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Safran, D.S., Levick, M. F.& Levine, A.J. (1990). Art therapist as expert witnesses: A judge delivers a precedent-setting decision. The Arts in , 17. 49-53.
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Footnotes:
Although this blog precludes my ability to include these drawings, the publishers of the book Art on Trial, Columbia University Press, created a dedicated website on which the images from the book are available for your viewing pleasure—they can be found at www.cup.columbia.edu/static/gussak-art-on-trial-images
Please note that while this blog relies on some common knowledge of art therapy, I won’t be spending a great deal of time providing general information about the field—there are other blogs that do so. This one, however, will explore specific art-based assessment issues, professional considerations in relationship to forensics, and treatment-focused attributes specific to related populations. |
The World Series this year is being fought between two franchises with long and painful histories: The Cleveland Indians have not won a championship since 1948, and the Chicago Cubs go all the way back to 1908 for their last crown.
The latter hasn’t even been in the Fall Classic since 1945.
Young sluggers Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant powered the Cubs to the National League title, while pitchers Corey Kluber and Andrew Miller have been among the stalwarts for the American League champs, aka the Tribe.
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And in the front office, Jews helped assemble both teams: Theo Epstein, the Cubs’ president, and Mike Chernoff, the Indians’ general manager.
With the Series underway — the Indians prevailed easily behind Kluber in Game 1 on Tuesday night, but the Cubs went on to tie the series 1-1 on Wednesday with a sloppy but effective six innings by pitcher Jake Arrieta — we take a closer look at how these two esteemed baseball architects stack up against each other on and off the diamond.
Theo Epstein, 42
Cubs’ president
As president of baseball operations for the Cubs, Epstein is second in command in the team’s front office behind only the team’s owners. He oversees the team’s general manager, Jed Hoyer, also Jewish, and manager, Joe Maddon. Along with Hoyer, he makes the baseball-themed decisions for the organization, from procuring players via trade or free agency to hiring coaches to doling out hefty contracts.
Education: Attended Brookline High School in Brookline, Massachusetts; B.A. from Yale University (American studies); law degree from the University of San Diego.
Family: Grew up in Brookline. His grandfather Philip Epstein, along with his brother, the screenwriter Julius Epstein, wrote the script for the Oscar-winning classic “Casablanca.” Epstein’s father, Leslie, is a novelist who has been the director of Boston University’s creative writing program for over 20 years. Among his several novels is “King of the Jews,” focused on a Jewish character who is made the head of a Judenrat council during World War II.
Mike Chernoff, 35
Indians’ general manager
As general manager, Chernoff is in charge of the Indians’ baseball decisions, albeit in a less senior role than Epstein. (Some have argued that the term “president of baseball operations” is now not much different that general manager.)
Education: Attended the Pingry School in Basking Ridge, New Jersey; B.A. from Princeton University (economics).
Family: Grew up in Livingston, New Jersey. His father, Mark, 64, is the vice president of programming for WFAN, a leading sports radio station in New York.
Professional track records
Epstein: Even at his young age, Epstein already owns a historic resume. In 2002, he was hired by the Boston Red Sox as general manager, at 28 the youngest to hold the post in baseball history. He helped Boston overcome the Curse of the Bambino to win its first World Series in 86 years in 2004; in the A.L. Championship Series, the Sox became the first team in baseball history to overcome a 3-0 series deficit to advance. (Boston won again during his tenure, in 2007). The Cubs hired Epstein as president in 2011.
Chernoff: A promotion to GM after last season was the natural next step in his rise through the Indians’ executive offices. Chernoff has worked for the Tribe since college, when he took an internship during his senior year. He was named assistant general manager in 2010 and had a close relationship with the former club president, Mark Shapiro (also Jewish), who has since left to helm baseball operations for the Toronto Blue Jays.
Signature moves
Epstein: Epstein brought in former Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester as a free agent last year, and the reunion has paid big dividends: The southpaw went 19-5 with a 2.44 earned run average in 2016. This year, Epstein traded for Aroldis Chapman, a closer with a fastball clocked at over 100 miles an hour, to shore up the bullpen. The Cubs also drafted Bryant, last season’s Rookie of the Year and a leading Most Valuable Player candidate in ’16 — during Epstein’s tenure. Bryant has 65 home runs and 201 runs batted in his first two major league seasons.
Chernoff: Perhaps the best decision made by any team this season was Cleveland trading for Miller, a hard-throwing reliever from the New York Yankees. As of Wednesday, the 6-foot-7 lefty has pitched 13 2/3 innings in the playoffs without allowing a run (including in the 6-0 shutout in the Series opener). Chernoff also helped sign free agent first baseman Mike Napoli to a one-year deal before this season, during which he erupted for 34 home runs and 101 RBIs.
Relationship to Judaism
Epstein: Raised in a secular Jewish family in Brookline. He and his wife, Marie Whitney, who is Roman Catholic, are not raising their two sons with any religion.
Chernoff: Had his bar mitzvah at the Reform Temple Emanu-El in Livingston, New Jersey. (The bar mitzvah theme? You guessed it: sports.) Since moving to Cleveland, Chernoff and his family have attended services at the Reform Temple Tifereth-Israel congregation in Beachwood, a Cleveland suburb. |
“We are going to get hammered on defence at the election.” I think I lost track of the number of times people said that before the campaign. But like so many other lazy assumptions destroyed by the past two months, it simply wasn’t true.
Quietly, in fact, the Labour Party has been building credibility on military, security and related matters — just as the Conservatives have seen theirs evaporate, particularly amongst Armed Forces personnel themselves, who are always the hardest to fool.
The challenge now, of course, is to build on that. At the election, the party performed extremely credibly among military areas. Two of the victories that surprised pundits the most — Luke Pollard in Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, Stephen Morgan in Portsmouth South — were in heavily military-focused communities fed up with the effects of cuts and Conservative mismanagement.
Such frustrations may also have helped carry Sandy Martin across the threshold in Ipswich to beat Ben Gummer. With several military units based nearby, Ipswich has a strong veteran tradition and a vocal collection of former military councillors and campaigners.
Even where we did not win in military communities, the Labour Party made dramatic gains. In Aldershot, long considered a Conservative stronghold, the votes of former and current personnel helped former firefighter Gary Puffett to almost double the number of Labour votes. Former military candidates also performed particularly strongly, almost all significantly growing their vote share.
On a purely tactical level, there is much to build on for council elections next year and whenever the next election comes. Labour Friends of the Forces, which relaunched at the beginning of this year and provided support to a number of former military and other candidates during the election, is hoping to dramatically up its game in 2017.
It’s also important, though, to realise that behind all these gains stands some very real substance. Under Nia Griffith as Shadow Defence Secretary, the party has had what one might term a strong and stable policy platform that genuinely makes sense.
Labour has committed to increasing defence spending in real terms to 2 per cent of GDP, ending the messy arithmetic by which the Conservatives massaged the numbers to deceive our allies, if probably not our potential foes.
There’s clearly a lot more heavy policy thinking to be done. In committing to end the public-sector pay freeze, which also affects the armed forces, the Labour manifesto gave real hope to personnel who have all too often felt ignored. There’s much more to be done on a fair deal for families and veterans, ending wastage through contracting out, and building opportunities as well as proper resources for those who do the real work of defending the realm.
The manifesto committed the Labour Party to renewing Trident as the mainstay of Britain’s protection against the latest existential threats, and ensuring the rest of its military was also fit for purpose. The party has also committed to publishing the National Shipbuilding Strategy, which had, bizarrely, gone missing under the Tories.
The aim of a new Labour government will be to make sure military procurement makes sense not just in terms of local jobs, but also in building the lasting industrial base the country needs. Neither will it sacrifice personnel numbers and training budgets to slavish commitment to expensive big-ticket equipment.
The simple truth seems to be that many of the attempts by the Conservatives and right-wing press to label the party — and Jeremy Corbyn in particular — as weak on the topic backfired. Few voters who are also former members of the military, it transpired, like the spectacle of politicians relishing the idea of launching nuclear or conventional strikes.
That was reinforced by the clear lack of content from the Conservatives. Bafflingly, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon — normally a strong performer — decided to dodge the main debates on military and security issues at the Royal United Security Institute to go campaigning in marginal east London constituencies instead.
The result was predictable — a more junior minister who barely knew her brief was trampled over not just by Nia Griffith but also the other parties. What was supposed to be a photo opportunity in Ilford turned into a public relations fiasco — and as we know, strong local candidate Wes Streeting dramatically increased his majority.
It was, I believe, a sign of things to come.
Peter Apps is a Reuters global affairs columnist, an Army reservist and a volunteer co-ordinator at Labour Friends of the Forces.
Come join Labour Friends of the Forces at at Portcullis House at 7pm on Monday 3 July for discussion on the election and its lessons. Sign up details here. |
Scientists in Boston have come up with a twist on an important method for “editing” genomes that could give researchers added control over the DNA of living things and influence a raging patent dispute over the powerful techniques.
Feng Zhang
Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, reported today in the journal Cell that he had developed a replacement for a key component of the genome-engineering system commonly known as CRISPR-Cas9.
The gene-editing technology, which snips DNA at precise locations, has swept through science labs because it provides a versatile, potent way to engineer the DNA of bacteria, plants, and humans. It is allowing scientists to broadly reimagine how they study everything from Alzheimer’s disease to biotech crops.
The work by Zhang’s team, carried out this year, shows that the cutting protein Cas9 can be replaced by a different protein, Cpf1, which he says will also work as a versatile editing tool. In a carefully crafted press release, Broad chief Eric Lander said the system “represents a new generation of genome editing technology” that has “dramatic potential to advance genetic engineering.”
The background for the Broad announcement is a bruising patent fight with the University of California, Berkeley, over who invented the first CRISPR editing tools, in particular Cas9 (see “Who Owns the Biggest Biotech Discovery of the Century?”). The U.S. Patent Office is weighing a decision to intervene in the case (see “CRISPR Patent Fight Now a Winner-Take-All Match”).
The new system, because it has a different cutting protein, could offer a way around the legal quagmire. “The greatest value may be more in terms of the patent landscape than a scientific advancement,” says Dan Voytas, a genome-editing researcher at the University of Minnesota.
The stakes are high as startups race to develop gene editing as a basis for possible medical treatments. Editas Medicine, which is connected with Feng’s lab, raised an additional $120 million in August. Intellia, a competitor connected to the Berkeley team, raised $70 million this month.
CRISPR is based on a natural system some bacteria use to defend against viruses by shredding their invading genes. In the laboratory, it’s been adapted as a tool that consists of two key components: a short stretch of RNA that lines up with a specific gene, and then a cutting protein that moves in to snip the gene open.
Eugene Koonin, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who coauthored the paper in Cell, said the current work began with computer predictions of proteins in bacteria that might serve a similar cutting role as Cas9. “It is indeed a new system that is substantially different than the previously known one,” he says.
Scientists not involved in the work said the new system was likely to fill a limited role in what is a growing toolbox of DNA-editing techniques. George Church, who develops genomics technology at Harvard University, says the system has features that could be useful in cells that don’t divide, including nerves and most other cells in our body, which are typically harder to edit. “There is a niche market for a collection of different proteins so that cuts can be placed anywhere in the genome,” he says.
Broad and Feng have won more than 10 key patents on CRISPR genome editing using Cas9. However, they have been losing the fight to win public credit for the invention, which the news media and prize-giving organizations have instead handed to Jennifer Doudna of Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Germany for work originally published in 2012.
This week, Reuters named Doudna and Charpentier among likely winners of a Nobel Prize in October.
Broad and MIT continue to lobby for a different view of scientific events. This month, Robert Desimone, director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, where Feng holds an appointment, wrote to the Economist correcting that magazine’s account of how CRISPR-Cas9 was invented, saying the Berkeley team had used “no cells, no genomes and no editing.”
The discovery of how to manipulate the CRISPR system is probably only the beginning of a new era of precision genome editing, Feng says, with many new approaches under development. “Nature has had billions of years to create these tools,” he says. “We would like to turn over as many rocks as we can find.”
Patent applications have been filed on the new technology. In its release, the Broad Institute said the new form of CRISPR editing would be available to scientists and widely licensed to companies that sell systems and chemicals for research. The organization was silent on which company might receive rights to use the technology in developing new medical treatments.
Feng said it was “too early to know the specifics” but said rights to the new technology wouldn’t necessarily belong to Editas, the company he cofounded. |
“This is a novelty for me, to be able to fly direct without having to travel to a third country,” said Orestes García Vásquez, 68, who was traveling from Villa Clara to South Florida.
“This allows me to save time and money.”
Cuba and the United States agreed to allow up to 90 daily round-trip flights between the two nations, the Department of Transportation said. Six airlines have been approved for flights to nine Cuban cities other than Havana, but not all of them have announced their schedules.
Mr. Foxx said far more airlines had expressed interest in flying to Havana, the capital, than could be accommodated.
“I haven’t seen anything like it,” he said.
On Wednesday, the Department of Transportation announced that Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Frontier Airlines, JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, Spirit Airlines and United Airlines would operate the coveted Havana flights. The airlines will fly from Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; Fort Lauderdale; Houston; Los Angeles; Miami; Newark; New York; Orlando, Fla.; and Tampa, Fla.
Calling it “good pressure,” Mr. Foxx acknowledged that Cuba would have to improve its airport infrastructure to be able to handle the increased flow of airlines. The country is notorious for poor airport facilities, and passengers often endure hourslong waits because baggage carousels or staircases needed to disembark are tied up.
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez, Cuba’s ambassador to the United States, said the country’s 10 international airports were safe and secure and had fielded nearly 5,000 charter flights from the United States last year. He added that the flight on Wednesday was yet another first for the two countries announced in the past few months.
“We hope that in the near future, all remaining obstacles that limit further exchange between the two countries will be removed,” he said, referring to the American trade embargo, which remains in place. |
President Trump's clampdown on immigrants has already sent staff in top Irish food companies back home to Ireland.
President Trump's clampdown on immigrants has already sent staff in top Irish food companies back home to Ireland.
Speaking at a Brexit conference last Friday, Aaron Forde (pictured), the chairman of Ornua said five Ornua graduates have already been refused visas by the US immigration service.
In addition, two staff that were already stationed in the US were initially refused a renewal of their visas. Both, along with one of the graduates, have since succeeded in securing the required documents.
"It's the first time that we've ever had this problem in nearly 30 years doing business in the US," said Mr Forde.
"It's been very disappointing for us and the first sign of a very different regime."
The visa applications were refused prior to the US president's inauguration, but Mr Forde insisted that the regime had already begun to prepare for President Trump's policy shift on immigrants.
An Ornua spokes- person told the Farming Independent the situation was likely to become more serious as more staff H-1B visas come due for renewal over the coming months.
Over 40 Irish staff are employed by the dairy board, some of whom have been based in the US for more than 20 years. |
YOU find them driving taxis in Buenos Aires, working as waiters in Panama or selling arepas (corn bread) in Madrid. The number of Venezuelans fleeing hunger, repression and crime in their ruptured country grows by the day. For years, Latin American governments kept quiet as first Hugo Chávez and then his successor, Nicolás Maduro, hollowed out Venezuela’s democracy. Now their economic bungling and Mr Maduro’s increasingly harsh rule are causing a humanitarian crisis that the region can no longer ignore. At last, it is not.
Colombia and Brazil bear the brunt of the Venezuelan exodus. By one unofficial estimate, more than 1m Venezuelans now live in Colombia, though many have dual nationality. Colombian mayors have started blaming the migrants for unemployment and crime. Last year more than 7,600 Venezuelans sought care at hospitals in the Brazilian state of Roraima, straining facilities and supplies of medicine, according to Human Rights Watch, a pressure group. This week the mayor of Manaus in the state of Amazonas declared an emergency after hundreds of Venezuelans turned up.
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The flood of refugees is one factor galvanising the region’s governments. The other is Mr Maduro’s descent into dictatorship. This accelerated in March when the puppet supreme court decreed, in effect, the abolition of the opposition-controlled legislature. Although partially reversed, this sparked continuing protests. Mr Maduro announced plans to arm a militia and, this month, to convoke a handpicked assembly to rewrite Chávez’s constitution of 1999. He is using military courts against protesters.
In response, 14 governments, including those of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, have united to demand a timetable for elections, the recognition of the legislature and the freeing of political prisoners. On April 26th, 19 of the 34 members of the Organisation of American States (OAS), a regional body, voted to convene a meeting of foreign ministers to discuss Venezuela. Getting his retaliation in first, Mr Maduro said that Venezuela would leave the OAS.
He retains the support of 25% of the population and of the security forces (some from ideological conviction, others because of perks or corruption). His recent actions suggest that he plans to turn Venezuela into an autarkic dictatorship in the mould of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
That would not be easy. Unlike Cuba, Venezuela is not an impregnable island and it has a democratic culture. Mr Maduro’s actions are opening up fissures in his chavista movement. Three army lieutenants have sought asylum in Colombia. The attorney-general, several retired generals and former ministers criticised the judicial coup against the legislature. “The government is losing control,” Miguel Rodríguez Torres, who was Mr Maduro’s interior minister, told the Wall Street Journal this week. He warned of “anarchy on the streets”.
This opens up scope—and a need—for diplomacy to help broker a return to democracy. But who could lead that effort? “Dialogue” became a dirty word for the opposition after Mr Maduro last year exploited talks organised by the South American Union (Unasur) and the Vatican to gain time.
Behind the scenes, several overlapping initiatives are under way. Argentina has replaced Venezuela in chairing Unasur. The tenure of Ernesto Samper, a chavista sympathiser, as its secretary-general has ended. At a meeting in Quito on May 23rd, Unasur’s foreign ministers may choose as his replacement José Octavio Bordón, a well-connected Argentine diplomat and former politician.
Several presidents are talking about setting up an ad hoc group of countries of the kind that negotiated an end to the Central American civil wars of the 1980s. They would like to get the UN involved, but António Guterres, its new secretary-general, has been cautious. The group might have to include Cuba and the United States, which both have interests in Venezuela. Although Donald Trump’s administration may impose unilateral sanctions on Venezuelan officials (it has already done so against the vice-president, Tareck El Aissami), it would be wiser to join a co-ordinated regional effort.
Any negotiation would have to involve an amnesty. That would be anathema to many in the opposition, who want to see the regime’s leaders on trial for murder and corruption. But the opposition lacks the strength to bring Mr Maduro down. Perhaps the army will do that job, but this is neither certain nor necessarily desirable. Sooner or later, both sides may have to return to the negotiating table—or watch as ever more Venezuelans take the road to exile. |
Gaming peripheral company Mad Catz has debuted its C.T.R.L.i iOS 7 gaming controller at Mobile World Congress 2014, reports Engadget. The offering from Mad Catz brings yet another choice to the iOS gaming controller market that saw the release of the SteelSeries Stratus last month and the Logitech PowerShell and MOGA Ace Power last year.Similar to the Stratus, the C.T.R.L.i can connect to any iOS 7 device through Bluetooth instead of using a Lightning port, and includes a spring-loaded mount that can be used with the iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, and iPhone 5c. The controller itself is based on Mad Catz's popular MLG Pro Circuit Controller for the Xbox 360 , and features console-style controls such as a directional pad, two analog sticks, four face buttons, shoulder bumpers, and left and right triggers. The C.T.R.L.i's Bluetooth capabilities also allows connectivity for up to four controllers.At the current point in time, multiple games offer iOS 7 controller support, including titles like Rayman Fiesta Run Dead Trigger 2 , and Asphalt 8: Airborne . Additional developers have also pledged to build controller support into their apps now that hardware is available to consumers, as more iOS games appear to be receiving updates that enable game controller support.The Mad Catz C.T.R.L.i iOS 7 gaming controller will be available for $80 in April, and will come in colors of black, white, red, blue, and orange. |
In 2017, we decided to try our hand at something new and give our players a chance to experience what it's like to actually sit in the cockpit of a giant robot (the size of a tall building!). We’ve released a short PC VR singleplayer experience under the name War Robots VR: The Skirmish. It's available for free on Steam, and has garnered positive reviews and respect from the community and press.
"This team is already doing a lot of the really hard things about VR development well. Bottom line is the game is already a lot of fun. Now we just need a lot more of it to love for even longer." — VRHEADS
However, unfortunately, it doesn’t support the option to fight other players online. After The Skirmish was released, a lot of players wrote to us asking for a full-blown multiplayer VR action shooter.
"The game’s short teaser looks quite slick, with mechs firing imposing gatling guns at one another as storms roil in the sky above. Gameplay is smooth and responsive, giving the player full control of the battles at hand." — Pocket Gamer
Now, thanks to the participation and positive feedback from this great community, we've decided to go for it! All we need is your support.
Project Description
War Robots VR is a multiplayer, virtual reality action shooter set in the War Robots universe. Team fights, customization, deathmatches and giant robots, each with its own unique strengths and abilities — the game is one of a kind and in a whole league of its own. But that’s not all: we’re also crafting an exclusive gaming experience with a whole new level of immersion.
It's going to be a full-blown, session-based PvP game for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, where players pilot robots and battle against people from all over the world. Our ultimate goal is to help you experience what it feels like to be inside one of man’s most powerful creations, without having to dive too much into the nitty-gritty.
On the one hand, we want to keep things as realistic as possible. There are lots of variables to keep track of if you want to play smart, like your robot’s stats and abilities, safe windows when you can counterattack, landscape advantages/disadvantages and so on. But at the same time, you won’t be too occupied with simulator-y details like heat management. War Robots VR just isn’t about that.
You can try playing The Skirmish (or watch a full walkthrough video instead) to get a better idea how War Robots VR will feel in general, but don’t forget that a full multiplayer game will be balanced differently. For example, unlimited ammo will be the first to go. Reloads and cooldowns are important mechanics in the War Robots universe, and learning to work them to your advantage is what separates great players from just good ones.
In the base game we plan to include 2 game modes, more than 5 maps and nearly a dozen unique robots and weapons, that will combined provide more than 30 playable and balanced setups. That's right, more than 30 differently equipped giant robots with their own advantages to choose from. Wage war your way!
As for the game modes, first of all you can expect deathmatch, a traditional free-for-all mode where everyone fights everyone else. Just imagine all the scrap metal on the battlefield! And secondly, a team battle. Players will be formed into 2 teams and unleashed to wreak havoc upon each other. The number of players in a single battle is something we'll be working out during the internal testing and beta, however we're aiming for something in the range of 3v3 to 6v6, so 6 to12 players total battling in a single match.
We're keeping the praised control scheme of The Skirmish with some robot-specific additions. You'll have a choice of three playing options: keyboard and mouse, a gamepad or motion controllers (that will emulate gamepad). It appears that extended in-house testing allowed us to alleviate some of the most popular issues players have with VR action shooters these days. We haven't received a single report regarding motion sickness or any difficulties with controls.
"It is the mech game you’ve always wanted" — Appspy
The gameplay and graphics will receive a great deal of polish but will remain the same at their base. We did receive some praise here as well, just check out this amazing video for a review by SweViver!
And plus, if for whatever reason you don't have a VR headset, the game will also be compatible without it. Of course, in headset-less mode the game won’t be as immersive, as we strive to optimize everything first and foremost for virtual reality. However, if you don’t want to invest in VR gear, the game will still be playable. |
Original Post
Michelle Kim · Joined Jun 2016 · Points: 0 Jul 14, 2017 · Unknown Hometown encoding='utf-8' ? Hi everyone. I regret to say that I was unfortunately a witness when this completely and utterly tragic accident occurred. My intent with this post is to just be as informative as possible in the hope that this will never happen again. No one should ever have to experience this from any party. We were at the Salt Lake Slips, and I believe the climber was either on Forgotten Ambition (130 feet) or High Fructose Corn Syrup (115 feet). He was top roping. The climber was at the anchors when the belayer went off belay, as he believed that was the cue he had heard from the climber at the top. There must have been a significant miscommunication because the climber leaned back as if he was getting lowered, and then he fell. I know some articles have stated that it was gear failure, but I am not so sure that was the case. I should also note that he was not wearing a helmet. Update: In talking it out with my little sister, we just now realized he was not attached to the rope, so I don't think he was expecting to get lowered, I think he thought he was in the anchors in preparation to rappel when he actually was not. I think this was an error on behalf of the climber. I was just a few routes over (on Entre Nous) and luckily had only reached the first bolt when this happened, where I was then lowered back down to safety. I was with my boyfriend, little sister, and two other friends, and there was another group of three experienced climbers who fortunately were all CPR certified. With the climber was his girlfriend and two other guys (one being the belayer). My boyfriend, friend, and one of the guys from the other group all desperately assisted in trying to resuscitate him, but it was all said and done at the scene. It was a harsh reminder that this sport that brings so many of us life and joy can be so deadly if not conducted properly and to the highest extent of utmost safety. I extend my deepest condolences to his family, friends, and his girlfriend. Much love to them all. Please wear a helmet, please always always always ensure you are hooked in at least a thousand times when at the anchors before proceeding to the next steps, please do extensive research, please over-communicate with your belayer, and please hug and kiss your loved ones a little tighter today.
BrokenChairs ~ · Joined Feb 2015 · Points: 235 Jul 14, 2017 · Sultan, WA encoding='utf-8' ? This is super sad. Michelle thanks for the details I think for me the biggest take away is having a clear plan with your belayer whenever you're going up to clean the anchor; which is something I have really tried to focus on more this season after hearing of the exact same accident that happened last year in Rock Canyon. It's so easy to forget to have this communication before leaving the ground and often time (especially at a crowed crag by a river like The Slips) it's hard to hear and too late once at the top. This type of accident is unfortunately too common and 100% preventable. My heart goes out of his friends/family and to the unfortunate witnesses. Hopefully everyone in the community can learn from this and something positive can come from this horrible accident. I don't even know Matt but for some reason this one hurts; again condolences for any and all involved or affected in anyway by this accident.
wonderwoman · Joined Dec 2006 · Points: 88 Jul 14, 2017 · Unknown Hometown encoding='utf-8' ? Michelle Kim wrote: It was a harsh reminder that this sport that brings so many of us life and joy can be so deadly if not conducted properly and to the highest extent of utmost safety. So true. :( I am so sorry that you had to witness this accident. My condolences to the family / friends of the fallen climber and sending best wishes your way, too.
Jaren Watson · Joined May 2010 · Points: 2,395 Jul 14, 2017 · Idaho encoding='utf-8' ? So very tragic and sad. Positive thoughts and condolences to all involved. Climbers, please, please weight the rope before unclipping your tether. Communication mistakes can and do happen. But this one simple step is so easy to do that it just doesn't make sense not to weight the rope before unclippping. My heart is heavy for everyone hurting over this. Be safe everyone.
Old lady H · Joined Aug 2015 · Points: 873 Jul 14, 2017 · Boise, ID encoding='utf-8' ? Michelle Kim wrote: Hi everyone. I regret to say that I was unfortunately a witness when this completely and utterly tragic accident occurred. My intent with this post is to just be as informative as possible in the hope that this will never happen again. No one should ever have to experience this from any party. We were at the Salt Lake Slips, and I believe the climber was either on Forgotten Ambition (130 feet) or High Fructose Corn Syrup (115 feet). He was top roping. The climber was at the anchors when the belayer went off belay, as he believed that was the cue he had heard from the climber at the top. There must have been a significant miscommunication because the climber leaned back as if he was getting lowered, and then he fell. I know some articles have stated that it was gear failure, but I am not so sure that was the case. I should also note that he was not wearing a helmet. I was just a few routes over (on Entre Nous) and luckily had only reached the first bolt when this happened, where I was then lowered back down to safety. I was with my boyfriend, little sister, and two other friends, and there was another group of three experienced climbers who fortunately were all CPR certified. With the climber was his girlfriend and two other guys (one being the belayer). My boyfriend, friend, and one of the guys from the other group all desperately assisted in trying to resuscitate him, but it was all said and done at the scene. It was a harsh reminder that this sport that brings so many of us life and joy can be so deadly if not conducted properly and to the highest extent of utmost safety. I extend my deepest condolences to his family, friends, and his girlfriend. Much love to them all. Please wear a helmet, please always always always ensure you are hooked in at least a thousand times when at the anchors before proceeding to the next steps, please do extensive research, please over-communicate with your belayer, and please hug and kiss your loved ones a little tighter today. Condolences to all of you. Thanks so much for sharing your story. All I would add is, these things happen blazingly, astoundingly fast, and we are all vulnerable to the simplest of mistakes. My thoughts go out to all of you, but the belayer especially. Best, Helen
Old lady H · Joined Aug 2015 · Points: 873 Jul 14, 2017 · Boise, ID encoding='utf-8' ? Drew Sylvester wrote: My condolences to friends and family. I lost a friend last year to a similar incident. It's easy to get too comfortable and cavalier with safety checks. Most climbing accidents could be avoided if everyone tied knots in the rope ends on rap, weight-tested their setup before coming off the rope/anchor in cleaning scenarios, and clearly communicated their at-anchor plans (lower vs rap) before leaving the ground. Very sad.
I would just add, simply stay on belay, until the rap device is loaded and tested. The belayer can just keep feeding slack as you need it while you get set up. A fall with a few arms of slack on the climbers side is still better than all the way to the deck. Best, OLH
Eric Chabot · Joined Jul 2011 · Points: 45 Jul 14, 2017 · Salt Lake City, UT encoding='utf-8' ? Old lady H wrote: I would just add, simply stay on belay, until the rap device is loaded and tested. The belayer can just keep feeding slack as you need it while you get set up. A fall with a few arms of slack on the climbers side is still better than all the way to the deck. Best, OLH Helen with all due respect what are you talking about? If you are rapping, you need the rope to go all the way to the ground. I don't understand what you are suggesting or how it could possibly help to stay on belay until you are ready to rappel.
All my condolences to the deceased, his family and friends and those who tried to assist him.
Spencer Parkin · Joined Oct 2017 · Points: 0 Jul 14, 2017 · Bountiful encoding='utf-8' ? Eric Chabot wrote: Helen with all due respect what are you talking about? If you are rapping, you need the rope to go all the way to the ground. I don't understand what you are suggesting or how it could possibly help to stay on belay until you are ready to rappel.
All my condolences to the deceased, his family and friends and those who tried to assist him. I'm afraid I have to agree. Climbers need to be able to transition from one source of protection to another. Order of operations and triple checks, and good communication can help prevent bad accidents. And I might add: staying sober too. There was a recent death involving alcohol and rock climbing. My condolences as well. I'm sorry this happened.
Nick Drake · Joined Jan 2015 · Points: 491 Jul 14, 2017 · Newcastle, WA encoding='utf-8' ? Old lady H wrote: I would just add, simply stay on belay, until the rap device is loaded and tested. The belayer can just keep feeding slack as you need it while you get set up. A fall with a few arms of slack on the climbers side is still better than all the way to the deck. Best, OLH Sorry Helen but that just doesn't make sense. If you aren't tie into the rope anymore as you are threading it through the chains having a belay device on one strand isn't doing anything for you. I do FULLY weight my PA after calling for slack before a belayer takes me off. I also fully weight my rappel device before I unclip my PA.
FrankPS · Joined Nov 2009 · Points: 275 Jul 14, 2017 · Atascadero, CA encoding='utf-8' ? Old lady H wrote: I would just add, simply stay on belay, until the rap device is loaded and tested. The belayer can just keep feeding slack as you need it while you get set up. A fall with a few arms of slack on the climbers side is still better than all the way to the deck. Best, OLH Don't profess to be a newer climber in one thread and spew advice in another. It reflects poorly on you. I would recommend you not give climbing advice until you've climbed a few hundred outdoor pitches.
AThomas · Joined Aug 2011 · Points: 25 Jul 14, 2017 · Unknown Hometown encoding='utf-8' ? Yeah, this may be a good time for folks to revisit their systems -- or go out with a qualified guide for a refresher. Condolences to the climber's family and friends. Much love to those who rushed to his aid. H, if a rappel is necessitated, staying on belay, having your partner feed half the rope through their device and then rigging a rappel keeps you hanging on the side of a cliff way longer than necessary. This is why staying on belay, cleaning and then lowering through the fixed gear is advocated so often. But I don't know the local ethics or gear, so maybe a rappel is called for.
blue v · Joined Sep 2006 · Points: 0 Jul 14, 2017 · Unknown Hometown encoding='utf-8' ? Hi , Michelle thanks for your information. Did you or do you know if anyone=(SAR) went back up to the anchors to check the situation up there? |
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In a new ESPN documentary Believeland about the long championship drought experienced by teams from Cleveland, former Browns running back Earnest Byner revisits a play that’s become known as The Fumble.
Byner lost control of the ball on the doorstep of the Broncos end zone late in the 1988 AFC Championship game, Denver recovered and kept the Browns out of the Super Bowl in heartbreaking fashion for the second straight year. In the documentary, Byner gets emotional remembering the play and the reaction it elicited from Browns fans nearly 30 years later.
Bengals running back Jeremy Hill hasn’t had the same kind of distance from his own playoff fumble and it hasn’t taken on the mythic proportions of Byner’s turnover, but he can likely relate to the outsize role that takes hold after a play like that. Hill said his fumble with 90 seconds to go in what turned into a loss to the Steelers is “the elephant in the room any time I walk in somewhere.” He says he’s determined to avoid making that the defining moment of his career.
“I’ve overcome some tough obstacles in my life, and that play, as big as it is, and as big as that moment was for our city and our team, that’s not the hardest thing I’ve had to go through in my life,” Hill said, via ESPN.com. “It’s just adversity in my career, and I can let that play define me, or I can move past it and be the player this organization and this team knows I can be.”
The Steelers’ comeback started with Hill’s fumble, but a pair of personal fouls on the ensuing drive set up the winning field goal so Hill’s experience wasn’t directly analogous to what happened in Byner’s situation. Despite that, Hill probably wouldn’t mind if there were some similarities in the aftermath as Byner went on to win a Super Bowl, be named second-team All-Pro and make a pair of Pro Bowl teams after losing the ball in a fateful fourth quarter. |
Clinton Email Case Gets Nutty: Clinton Offers Faux Support For Faster Release... That She Could Have Done Herself
from the let's-try-this-again dept
As noted above, the Department received the 55,000 pages in paper form. The documents were provided in twelve bankers’ boxes (approximately 24” x 15” x 10 ¼” in size) with labels placed on the outside of the boxes that corresponded approximately to the timeframe of the documents within a given box. The Department initially performed tasks necessary to organize the records. This included foldering, boxing, and creating a box level inventory of the records. In consultation with the National Archives and Records Administration, the Department also conducted a page-by-page review of the documents to identify, designate, mark, and inventory entirely personal correspondence, i.e., those documents that are not federal records, included within the 55,000 pages.
Given the breadth and importance of the many foreign policy issues on which the Secretary of State and the Department work, the review of these materials will likely require consultation with a broad range of subject matter experts within the Department and other agencies, as well as potentially with foreign governments. These records are comprised of communications to or from the former Secretary of State, who was responsible for the overall direction and supervision of the full range of activities of the Department, which operates in approximately 285 locations around the globe. The Department is committed to processing the 55,000 pages as expeditiously as possible, while taking into consideration the Department’s other legal obligations.
The Department has taken multiple steps to facilitate its review of the 55,000 pages. It has developed an approach for addressing the review, upgraded the capabilities of the Department’s processing software, and dedicated staff. Currently, this project is staffed fulltime by a project manager and two case analysts, as well as nine FOIA reviewers who devote the entirety of their time at the State Department to this effort, plus other analysts and information technology specialists who provide collateral assistance to this review in addition to their regular duties. The team managing this project has met daily since early April to implement and oversee this large undertaking.
Each page of the 55,000 must be individually hand-processed in order to ensure that all information is being captured in the scanning process. The scanning process itself involves five steps that are time-consuming and labor-intensive. These are: (1) scanning (inserting barcode separator sheets between each document and its associated attachments and then scanning the documents, which includes converting them for optical character recognition [“OCR”], and then inputting the resulting OCR-ed files into the system in batches based on search segments); (2) scanning quality control (the scanned material is checked to ensure that each document is scanned properly and to flag documents that need to be re-scanned); (3) indexing (indexers review each scanned document to manually input bibliographic coding, such as the “To,” “From,” “CC,” “BCC,” “Date Sent,” and “Subject” fields associated with that document into the system); (4) indexing quality control (a senior indexer reviews the indexed documents to ensure that the bibliographic coding has been properly input into the system); and, (5) duplicate detection resolution (the computer analyzes the indexed documents to identify possible duplicates between the document being ingested and those documents that already exist in the system). Any possible duplicates that cannot be resolved (identified as an exact duplicate, near duplicate, not a duplicate) by automated means are pushed forward for individual review for manual adjudication. This process was made even more complicated by the fact that some, but not all, of the paper records that the Department received were double-sided. It took the Department five weeks to perform the scanning process, which was completed recently in May. There will be further work required to load these into a searchable database, which will be completed by mid-June.
“I have said repeatedly: I want those emails out. Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do,” she told reporters at a campaign stop in Iowa in a rare question-and-answer session. “...[A]nything that [the State Department] might do to expedite that process, I heartily support.”
As stated on the record at today's status conference, Defendant shall file a notice to the Court on or before May 26, 2015, that includes the following: (1) a new production schedule for the Secretary Clinton e-mails that accounts for rolling production and updates from counsel every 60 days, (2) a proposed deadline for production of the Secretary Clinton e-mails relating to Benghazi, and (3) a proposed order that encapsulates the parties' agreement on the narrowing of Plaintiff's request concerning searches for records beyond the Secretary Clinton e-mails. SO ORDERED. Signed by Judge Rudolph Contreras
The whole saga over Hillary Clinton's emails is getting more and more bizarre. Last night, FOIA ninja (it beats the "FOIA terrorist" label some have given him), Jason Leopold revealed that in his FOIA lawsuit over the release of the emails, the State Department was claiming that it would take at least until January of 2016 to release the piles and piles of emails that Clinton gave them... in printed form. (In case you were living under a rock, Clinton used her own personal email server while Secretary of State, and only just recently handed over copies of the emails to the State Department -- after her own staff vetted them -- and then nuked the entire server).The State Department went into great detail [pdf] explaining why it's going to take so damn long. In large part, it's because Clinton handed them all over in printed form, rather than digital form, and the State Department had to staff up just to go through all the emails.When asked about it by reporters this morning, Clinton gave a really ridiculous answer, urging the State Department to speed up the work of releasing the emails, saying that she wanted them released You know what would have expedited the release? First,while you were Secretary of State, so this wouldn't have even been an issue. And, second, when all of this became an issueMeanwhile, the judge in the case, Judge Rudolph Contreras, is not impressed. This morning he issued a minute order telling the State Department that waiting until January of next year was unacceptable, and ordering the State Department to set a renewed schedule with rolling releases every 60 days:In the end, there may turn out to be nothing much of interest in all of those emails (though, of course, the fact that Clinton's own staff went through them and got rid of a bunch first will keep conspiracy theorists in business for ages), but the way that Clinton has handled this whole thing is really ridiculous. Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to print out 55,000 pages of records that were original electronicand make life difficult for those going through it?
Filed Under: clinton email, email, foia, hillary clinton, jason leopold, print outs, state department |
Republicans in Congress have already voted to cut the taxes that pay for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Up to now these tax cuts have been vetoed by President Obama. But with the inauguration of Donald Trump, Republicans in the Senate and House will be free to cut ACA taxes and give hundreds of billions of dollars to the richest Americans.
The ACA taxes include a 3.8% tax on investment income, which mainly goes to the top 1%. Investment income is not taxed to pay for Medicare or Social Security. There is also a 0.9% tax on individuals with very large salaries, which is also not taxed to pay for Social Security. Social Security taxes only tax the first $127,200 in earned income; any income above that or investment income is not taxed.
What this means is that eliminating the taxes for the ACA would provide the top one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) of Americans an average tax cut of almost $200,000 a year, which would be almost 75% of the total dollar tax cut.
These ACA taxes on households raise about $100 billion a year, which along with ACA taxes on health insurance companies, drug and medical equipment manufacturers, and others, pay for ACA. One cost of the ACA are the premium tax credit where the federal government will reimburse low and middle-income households that purchase health insurance through a government exchange for all or part of their health insurance premiums. Another cost is the expansion of Medicaid for low-income Americans.
The elimination of the ACA and the premium tax credits which subsidize the government insurance exchange would cause dramatic losses for about 4% of the population, who would lose insurance subsidies that average almost $5000 each year. While most the poorest 20% of American households, earning less than $25,000 per year, would not see much of a loss in subsidies, they are the ones who are most likely to lose insurance with the elimination of the ACA and its expansion of Medicaid. Eliminating the Medicaid expansion could cause almost 11 million to lose their insurance.
It is no wonder that the wealthiest businesspeople and Wall Street tycoons who are represented by billionaire President-elect Donald Trump are so keen to eliminate the ACA. But their gains would come at the cost of higher health insurance premiums and loss of health insurance for millions of workers and small business owners. |
Image caption It is the first time under the Greek constitution that public sector workers will lose their jobs, with 15,000 redundancies expected by the end of 2014
A week of mass strike action has begun in Greece in protest at large public sector layoffs and forced transfers.
State school teachers walked out on Monday in the first of a planned five-day rolling strike.
Civil servants have called a separate two-day strike on Wednesday, backed by universities, doctors and lawyers.
The job cuts are part of bailout conditions imposed by international creditors, due to meet in Athens to discuss the next loan instalment.
So far Greece has received two aid packages totalling about 240bn euros (£205bn).
It will need around 10bn euros more to cover a funding gap.
Stiff resistance
A number of striking school guards clashed with riot police outside the Ministry for Administrative Reform in Athens on Monday morning.
Security forces fired tear gas to disperse the protesters and three people were taken to hospital with light injuries.
Government officials were due to meet union representatives later on Monday.
Officials from the so-called lending troika - the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund - will convene in Athens this week to decide on the next 1bn-euro instalment.
In exchange for the loans, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has agreed to put 25,000 civil servants on a reduced salary this year before being transferred or dismissed.
It is the first time under the Greek constitution that public sector workers will lose their jobs, with 15,000 redundancies expected by the end of 2014, the BBC'S Mark Lowen, in Athens, reports.
Some 4,500 civil servants - mostly teaching staff - were already redeployed at the end of July.
Greece insists that its notoriously inefficient and bloated public sector needs reform, our correspondent says.
But with unemployment nearing 30%, it is a hard argument to sell to the people, he adds.
The prime minister recently announced that the recession was slowing and Greece would soon wipe out its deficit.
However, public debt remains unsustainably high and the government has faced stiff resistance from those who risk losing their jobs in the coming months.
Greece's economy has shrunk by 23% since 2008. International lenders expect it to diminish by a further 4.2% this year. |
Image copyright Aamer Anwar Image caption Muhammad Asghar, who is from Edinburgh, was arrested in 2010 after writing letters to a number of people claiming to be a prophet
A 70-year-old Scot sentenced to death in Pakistan over blasphemy charges is in hospital after being shot by a prison guard in jail.
Muhammad Asghar, who is from Edinburgh, was arrested in 2010 after writing letters to a number of people claiming to be a prophet.
A court in Rawalpindi convicted him of blasphemy earlier this year.
The attack took place at 08:30 local time inside the Adiala Jail, Rawalpindi, where he was being held.
A Rawalpindi police official told BBC Urdu's Shahzad Malik the gunman who shot the Scot is Mohammad Yousuf, a member of the Elite Force of police commandos.
He said Mr Yousuf walked into Mr Asghar's cell before shooting him.
Prison security, who ran to the scene when they heard the gunshots, were said to have overpowered and disarmed Mr Yousuf.
Mental illness
The extent of Mr Asghar's injuries remain unclear but officials and doctors say he is in a stable condition.
A doctor at the hospital where Mr Asghar was taken told AFP news agency he had "been shot from the back and the bullet has crossed his body affecting his ribs and lungs".
"He is out of danger now," he added.
Another report said at least one bullet had hit Mr Asghar in the arm.
His family and lawyers have said he has a history of mental illness and was sectioned under the mental health act in Edinburgh shortly before travelling to Pakistan.
British politicians and activists have been campaigning for his release, urging the Pakistani government to intervene in his case so he can be treated.
Solicitor Aamer Anwar called on UK Prime Minister David Cameron to ask his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, for Mr Asghar's release.
Mr Anwar, who is acting on behalf of Mr Asghar's family, said: "It is unacceptable that this poor, old, seriously ill man is sat in a prison - presently in a hospital - and is facing death.
"He needs to come home to his family."
Adiala Jail is notorious for being overcrowded with poor conditions.
It is where Mumtaz Qadri, the "celebrated" police guard who killed Punjab Governor Salman Taseer in 2011 is also in custody. Qadri was sentenced to death after confessing to murdering Mr Taseer because he objected to his calls to amend a controversial blasphemy law.
Critics of the law say it can be used to persecute minority faiths and is sometimes exploited for grudges. The assassination divided Pakistan, with many hailing Qadri as a hero.
Image caption The attack took place at 08:30 local time inside the Adiala Jail, Rawalpindi, where Mr Asghar was being held
Mr Asghar was convicted under the blasphemy law in 2010 and filed an appeal in the Lahore High Court in February 2014 against his sentence, but it has yet to be heard. Appeals can take up to five years before they reach the court.
Mr Asghar is now receiving treatment in hospital, but legal charity Reprieve - which is assisting him - remains "deeply concerned" about his security.
Maya Foa, director of the death penalty team at Reprieve said: "This appalling attack shows that the only way to ensure Mr Asghar's safety is to have him returned home to Britain.
"The UK government must redouble its efforts on this front - and as a first step, must urgently ensure that he is moved today to a safe location in Pakistan, until he is well enough to travel.
"Mr Asghar is a vulnerable, 70-year old man suffering from severe mental illness - a fact which has been consistently ignored by the Pakistani courts during his four year ordeal.
"David Cameron said he was 'deeply concerned' about his case earlier this year - but now we must see concrete action to ensure his safety." |
Last Saturday a Porsche 996 GT3 driver killed a Toyota Yaris driver in a high speed accident on the German A95 Autobahn near Munich. Police and eye witness reports suggest the Porsche GT3 was on its way to Munich travelling at very high speeds when the driver lost control over the vehicle at the Starnberg interchange.
For some unknown reason the Porsche spun on the bend through the interchange, slid through the grass onto the connecting onramp of the A952 autobahn in direction Munich. It then collided with a Toyota Yaris driven by a 67-year old woman. The impact with the Toyota was so brutal that it flipped multiple times before coming to a halt on its roof next to the autobahn. The Porsche slid further and came to a rest, also besides the motor way a good 150 meter further.
The woman that drove the Yaris had to be cut out of her vehicle, and although still conscious right after the accident, her condition worsened. She had to be resuscitated at the roadside before being rushed off to a nearby Munich hospital where she died only hours later. The Porsche driver and his co-pilot survived the accident with only light injury. Police reports suggest the Porsche was travelling at between 250 km/h and 300 km/h at the time it lost control. The total accident path was over 600 meters long and the highway was closed off for hours causing long traffic jams.
The stretch of autobahn where the accident happened has no speed limit. However the bend through the interchange and the merging traffic ahead certainly doesn’t allow for these kind of speeds. Sadly its because of incidents like this that more and more parts of the German autobahn network receive a speed restriction! |
Holy shit, guys, it's finally here. The last chapter of Sucker Punch! Got a long author note this time, but I'm putting it here so you can truly just bask in the final chapter and not have me cut in at the end.
So, many people to thank here. First and foremost: all of you. Readers since the beginning, new readers now that it's finished, guests, users, lurkers, everyone. The fact that I knew someone was reading this and enjoying every chapter really gave me the incentive to write, and the fact that none of you begged and pleaded or got on my case when updates took a while means even more. I know I've mentioned before how a bunch of us authors get crap for when we aren't updating constantly, yet now I can proudly say even in my longest story to date, which took nearly two years to complete, I have never one been pestered by these annoying "fans." So, thank you all, for truly understanding the life of a writer and not giving me any grief.
Next, a special thanks to jungie14295 for three pieces of fan art for this story. Sucker Punch marks the first story of mine to have ever received fan art, and the fact that one artist spent enough time to make not one, not two, but three pieces of art for this fic is truly flattering. Seriously, you rock. (And also a big thanks to any and all of you that have made art for this fic. Don't think any of it goes un-appreciated!)
Last, a big thanks and shout out to NicPie and the-effin-mitchell. You guys have been around since the beginning and truly been considered a friend to me on this wild journey. You've let me bounce ideas off you, you've let me gripe about my lack of updates, and you've helped shape this story to what it is today. If I could, I'd hunt you guys down and give you a big ol' hug; so thank you.
Last thing before I release you all to read: many of you have been asking about a possible sequel. Let me just say this: it is not completely outside the realm of possibility. However! It will not come to fruition any time soon. Like I mentioned before, I would like to get this story published as an original work, and that will take time. Also, should it happen, I'd like to see how successful this fic will be before putting more thought into a sequel. I have an idea for one, but I have other fics here I want to work on first.
That being said, this will be my last story in the Frozen fandom for a while. Lately I've been getting into RWBY, and while I've written many oneshots there, I want to try my hand at some multi-chaptered fics. I shall still be reading Frozen fics as I still live and breathe Elsanna, but I will be taking a hiatus myself. So, if you want to stick with me and are a RWBY fan (particularly White Rose), I look forward to seeing you all there!
So, without further ado, please enjoy the final chapter of Sucker Punch! You all are awesome!
Chapter Thirty-Three: And That's The Match
I can't even begin to describe the way Olaf's face lights up when he first sees Elsa's new arm. The fact that he was so enamored with it strictly from only having seen it from a video I had on my phone amuses me to no end, even if I had found myself slightly baffled as well. If this kid doesn't end up doing something with robotics later down the line, I'll know the universe really got off balance somewhere.
"Can I watch it again?!" he asks for literally the seventh time.
Elsa and I just look at each other and giggle before indulging the child and playing it once more, his eyes becoming the size of dinner plates just as they had the last six times. Luckily the rest of the kids were busy entertaining themselves during playtime, and while several others had watched the first airing of "Elsa's New Arm Spectacular," all but Olaf had grown bored halfway through the second playback.
Not that I necessarily can blame them.
Don't get me wrong; I'm probably the second happiest person in the world about the success shown in the video—after all, it's essentially my mom recording Elsa being able to grasp my hand for only the second time before we all dissolve in another fresh wave of tears—but even I'm getting a bit tired.
"That's so cool!" Olaf squeals once more as the video finishes its run-through again. I quickly act to put my phone away before he can make seven times eight. "Why isn't it actually on you though?"
"Well, they wanted to make sure it actually worked before going through all the work to give it to me," Elsa explains. "Next time I go in, I get to finally wear it."
"Can you record that too?!"
Chuckling, I ruffle the kid's hair. "Slow down there, kiddo," I tell him. "You'll still be the first to see the real thing. Until then, let's keep the rest a surprise, okay?"
Olaf nods vigorously, his eyes lighting up again with a different kind of mirth. "I love surprises!" Looking back to Elsa, though, he asks another question: "So will the robot part always be showing? 'Cause I think that's awesome, and I'd show it off all the time!"
"Well, they do have a big glove I can cover it with," Elsa does her best to explain. "They can get one to match my skin color and everything. If you didn't know any better, no one would be able to tell I'm any different than them while wearing it."
"But different is cool!" Olaf exclaims. "My mom always says not to be afraid to be different!"
"Your mom is not wrong, Olaf," Elsa assures him with a smile, "though I've had enough of being different for a while."
Smiling sympathetically, I grab her hand under the table. Glancing to me, her smile warms before she squeezes back.
Damn being around kids so I can't kiss her in this moment.
"Will you come back by and show us it once you get it? Please?"
"Olaf," I admonish gently.
His smile falters as he looks at the table guiltily, but Elsa just leans across the table closer to him.
"Once I get it and assure it's working as it should be, I'll come back," she says.
Had we not already made the kid's year, I'm sure hearing that just did it.
XxXxX
It's nearly another month before the arm is actually ready to be put on Elsa, yet it comes in a flash. Everyone who had played a part in Elsa's trial thus far shows up for the big day, yet it doesn't seem to unnerve Elsa in the slightest; not that it should after that big display weeks ago. Nevertheless, it's still somewhat startling to be reminded how many people were involved in getting Elsa to where she is today. Tarzan and Jane stand by Dr Porter on one end of the computer desk in our usual lab, Dr Callaghan and Tadashi on the other. Hiro stands before Elsa, the final prosthetic held proudly in his grasp, finally ready to meet its other half.
Then, of course, there's me; at Elsa's side as always.
Right where I belong.
"Big moment, huh, Elsa?" Hiro asks, shifting the arm slightly in his grasp.
If Elsa's throat is anywhere near as choked up as mine, it's understandable why her eyes are shimmering and she can only manage a nod in answer. Smile widening, Hiro glances to me.
"Would you like Anna to do the honors?"
My heart rate increases dramatically at the question. Me? Me putting Elsa's arm on for the first time? Me giving her what she's worked and fought so hard for? Me giving her back what she so tragically lost?
Fuck yeah, I'll do it; but not without Elsa's consent.
Looking directly in my eyes, Elsa nods, a smile lighting up her face as a most powerful, "Yes," comes from between parted lips.
A shiver quickly travels down my spine before I focus back on this milestone now being handed to me. The arm is, as explained initially by Hiro and Tadashi, very light because of the materials it's made of. If I had any inclination as to how much a human arm weighed on its own, I'm sure this would come pretty damn close, if not right on the money—that's a pretty gruesome thought, huh? Anyway, the arm itself is black, while the hand and fingers are a shiny silver metal.
"Are you going to actually do the honors, Anna, or you going to just continue to ogle it?" Elsa questions, an amused grin on her face.
Blushing as our spectators all chuckle, I dip my head slightly. "Sorry," I mumble. "It's just… I can't get over the fact that this moment is finally here."
"Well, imagine how I feel," Elsa lightly quips next.
My blush darkens ever so slightly. "R-Right."
The new prosthetic if affixed to Elsa's arm in a similar fashion to her old one, the biggest difference being the new sensors that rest within the small cup her stump slides into. Now, all Elsa has to do is think and behave like she has always had her right arm, and her brain will send signals to the sensors, thus moving the arm. If you ask me, it's all pretty amazing.
"Ready?" I ask, having slid her stump into its spot and waiting to fasten her in.
"More than I've ever been for anything," she replies breathily, her eyes alight as she takes in her right arm in its entirety for the first time in forever.
Beaming, I do the three Velcro straps before carefully letting go and stepping away.
Tears immediately line my eyes as I take in Elsa, truly complete; whole once again.
"You look great, babe," I whisper.
She grins back at me before Hiro steps back forward, Tadashi one step behind.
"Well?" Hiro prompts with a smile of his own. "Give it a whirl!"
Releasing a breath, Elsa nods before looking at her arm. Furrowing her eyebrows slightly, she and the rest of us all train our eyes to her hand, waiting for the first movement. I watch with baited breath as her hand curls back into a fist—the tightest fist yet, I notice with a flip of my stomach—before her right thumb slowly rises up. I can't help the strangled sob that escapes as I soak in the classic thumb's up, both us never believing Elsa would ever be able to do again.
The room breaks into applause then, Tadashi and Hiro hugging each other at their latest success, Doctors Porter and Callaghan exchanging a proud look with each other, and Jane and Tarzan sharing a blissful kiss.
Elsa catches me off guard then as she stands and pulls me forward with her right hand and into a powerful hug. A fit of pleasurable shivers course through my entire being then as I feel her right hand grasp at my shirt, keeping me close.
This is it. This is the end of our beginning.
XxXxX
While Elsa had been able to wear the prosthetic for the first time that day, she isn't able to take it home with her for a few more weeks. The final step in the trial is to perfect her fine motor skills, picking objects up, holding a pencil, typing on a keyboard, and the like. We're back at Mt Sinai the day after for her first session of this new kind of therapy, and I'm truly able to relax knowing we have completed the biggest hurdle when Elsa breezes through all the exercises like a champ. Sure, she has a few missteps here and there—and who wouldn't after not using one of their hands entirely for nearly two years?—but she never lets it get to her.
My heart also cannot keep still when she only continues to write my name over and over during any writing exercise. Sure, the penmanship might match Olaf's, but we don't let it get us down, as Hiro and Tadashi assure us it'll only better itself the more she practices.
Typing on a computer was a bit awkward at first, as her timing had slowed considerably due to her movements being more robotic, but again, it would all become more fluid over time. Still, the Hamada brothers are sure to let Elsa know that she is performing at a level far above average, and after the scare weeks ago at her only registering movement at a two, that comes as a big relief for all of us.
The only thing Elsa has yet to be able to do at all is the most difficult of tasks for new prosthetic users: threading a needle. Of course, neither Elsa nor I are big on sewing, yet I know we can't really be done with this whole trial until she's able to do so. Still, Tadashi and Hiro pass her with flying colors and allow her to take the prosthetic home with her finally, with the assurance that she will come back once a week to perfect her fine motor skills even more. She readily agrees, and we leave Mt Sinai that day with our spirits at their peaks, my left hand held tightly in her right.
Of course, we're stopped by little Reilly before we get too far out the doors, yet it's a pleasant surprise as the young girl is on her feet for the first time in her life.
Elsa instantly pulls away from me and runs up to Reilly and her own physical therapist as they slowly make their way down the hall.
"Look at you!" she exclaims.
"Yeah!" Reilly chirps back. "I just started walking yesterday!"
"That's amazing, Reilly," Elsa affirms, beaming down at her.
"Congrats," I add with my own smile, knowing how close she and Elsa had become throughout this ordeal.
While she may not fully be supporting herself yet, the fact that she's able to walk at all, even with the assistance of crutches, is nothing short of a miracle. Reilly's therapist and I allow the two to brag about their new prosthetics for a bit as Elsa takes over helping Reilly down the hallway. The doctor and I look on at our patients with silent pride the entire time.
When we're on the subway home—that word now meaning whichever of our places we end up at—Elsa turns to me with another huge smile.
"Anna," she starts, "your birthday is coming up, right?"
"Yeah?" I reply, a bit confused at where the question came from. My birthday hadn't been mentioned since my parents had been up, and that was weeks ago.
"Will you let me plan the day? We have to celebrate the birthday of my hero, right?"
My cheeks warm as I glance away. "Elsa… Stop that…" I mumble abashedly.
"But it's true!" she exclaims. "You'll never be able to convince me otherwise."
Sighing dramatically, I lean in to kiss her. "You can plan the day," I tell her. "Just…don't go overboard, okay?" I wink. "You should know by now I'm easy to satisfy."
Seeming pleased with the permission, we share another quick kiss before I can see Elsa go deep in thought with how to celebrate and I can't help but be filled with tickling anxiety.
Four days later, on the first weekend in April, my birthday finally arrives. Elsa wakes me up in the morning with breakfast in bed, and I'm already grinning like an idiot at the plate of pancakes placed before me.
Perfect shaped pancakes; not an Africa-shaped one on the plate.
We spend a prolonged hour in bed that morning, feeding each other and painting the other's face in whipped cream before we finally arise to start the day.
However, before we start any celebrations, Elsa wants to make one detour.
"I know you're not scheduled to work today, but we did promise Olaf we'd show him my arm as soon as I got it, right?" she asks. "I know we're a couple days late, but his joy would make for a good birthday present, don't you think?"
Pecking her on the nose, I smile back. "That would be a great gift indeed."
So, we end up at the library not an hour later, all the kids flocking to me in glee at my surprise visit, Elsa trailing in silently behind me, her hands behind her back.
"Miss Anna!" the kids all cry. "What are you doing here? It's your day off!"
"Isn't it your birthday too?"
"Happy Birthday!"
"Miss Elsa's here too!"
Calming them all slightly, I seek out Olaf in the small crowd and grin.
"Olaf," I ask, "you ready for your surprise, bud?"
Once again, his eyes light up and I'm surprised he doesn't squeal out in glee before pushing aside any and all kids in his way.
"She has it?" he asks. "She finally has it?!"
"See for yourself."
Flourishing to Elsa, she takes center stage, kneeling down before him with a grin before slowly revealing her right arm. Olaf squeaks in glee as the other kids 'ooh' and 'ahh' behind him, moving to get a better look.
"Look!"
"That's awesome!"
"Congrats, Miss Elsa!"
"That's so cool!" Olaf cries. "Can I touch it?"
Elsa chuckles. "I can do you one better, kiddo. How about a high five?"
He nods so enthusiastically he could pass for a bobble-head as he sticks his hand out eagerly. All eyes are trained on Elsa as she brings her right hand forward to touch Olaf's, just enough speed behind it to make that delightful smack.
Needless to say, Elsa has to give everyone a high five then, and we don't get out of there until much later. Still, it was a great sight to see, and truly a great gift.
"So, where are we headed to now?" I ask casually as we stroll down the street hand-in-hand again. I have a feeling we'll be holding hands a lot more excessively here in the near future and my stomach twists pleasantly at the thought.
"Well, you told me to keep it simple, so how about a movie?" she offers. "Then we can go home, get dressed up real nice, and you'll let me treat you to dinner?"
I laugh a bit and roll my eyes, yet truly flattered she's more excited about this day than I am and has put so much thought into it. "You know I'm only turning nineteen, right? Not twenty-one."
"So?" she shrugs with a smile. "My whole world is turning nineteen, and that's something to celebrate."
Nudging her playfully, I mumble, "Stop it you," my blush betraying me.
Of course, we end up not really watching the movie; more like making out in the top row, Elsa not able to keep her hands—gods, I love being able to say that using plurals now—off me as I just laugh and smile so hard my cheeks hurt. Luckily we were in a fairly empty theater.
I'm on cloud nine when we return home, yet I know the night is far from over.
"You gonna tell me where we're going, or is it another surprise?" I ask as I put on the last of my makeup in the bathroom mirror as Elsa changes out in my bedroom.
"A surprise, of course!" I hear her exclaim from the other room. "Seriously, Anna, have you never celebrated your birthday before?"
"Plenty of times, thank you very much," I reply with a grin. "It's just usually the birthday girl gets to choose where to go for dinner."
Elsa comes up behind me and hugs me from behind, nuzzling her face into my neck. My cheeks begin to hurt again from my smile as I take us both in from the mirror.
"Are you seriously complaining?" she mumbles.
"Are you seriously not going to tell me?" I parrot.
"No!" she shouts with a laugh and smack to my shoulder. "Now come on, we have reservations for seven."
When we wind up back outside of BASSO56, I can't contain another grin—who knew it was possible to smile this much in one day?
"Fitting right?" Elsa questions with a sly grin of her own.
Seeing as this is the restaurant we had out first real date in, it honestly couldn't be more fitting.
"You really are something, Elsa."
Kissing my cheek, she whispers, "I try," before taking my hand again as we walk in.
All of this birthday celebration today, I totally forgot to mention Elsa isn't even wearing the sleeve over her arm, letting the robotic limb show with pride. Back when she had first agreed to the trial, the sleeve had been a must as she "refused to walk around looking like the Terminator," if I recall correctly.
We truly have come a long way.
I'm a bit surprised when we aren't led to the same table as before, yet I know I can't hold it against her; she's done so much for me today already, am I really going to mention she didn't go the whole nine yards by reserving the same table? That'd be a pretty ass move on my part.
"I know this day is supposed to be all about me," I bring up after our drinks and appetizer have been ordered, "but I'm so proud of you, Elsa, for coming out in public like this without a second thought."
She cocks her head at me, that adorable confused expression on her face. "What do you mean?"
She doesn't even realize? She really has changed. My stomach clenches.
"You didn't have any qualms about your arm showing," I nod to said appendage. "You've become so carefree about all this. It's amazing."
I finally get a blush out of her today with that as she looks down at her right arm, clenching her hand into a fist before letting it relax.
"You're right," she replies. "I hadn't even thought about it, really."
"Remember when you tried so hard to hide who you were?" I reach for both of her hands from across the table. "Can you believe you've come this far?"
"You're right," she breathes. "It's amazing. But…" she looks to me and smiles. "You've changed too, Anna."
I scoff, yet smile. "Please. How? Going from pushy to extremely pushy?"
She smiles back. "You've grown. And in more ways than just age."
Now it's my turn to look confused.
"When I first met you, you were this wild spitfire. And while you always had the purest intentions at heart, you made them known in a brash way. You wanted to help me, but maybe you hadn't quite absorbed how truly difficult that was for me. Yet, you took a step back, and came back at it with renewed vigor, but you had changed your ways. Perhaps you did so unknowingly, but I was able to pick up on it.
"After our…fight was when I first noticed. You gave me that push still, but you did it with a changed heart. No longer was it so insistent, but rather it was done so with the upmost care. You truly saw things from my perspective, I feel, and you continued to give that push accordingly." Smiling at me briefly once more, she asks, "Be honest with me, when you first moved here, what were your intentions?"
"Well…" I pause to think. "To make a name for myself by boxing and fighting my way to the top."
Her smile flickers wider. "Exactly. You were brawler, and you treated every situation as a fight. Now what are your intentions?"
My heart beats faster as I reply confidently, "To be with you. To be there for you no matter what and for however long."
"And that's the greatest kind of change," she explains. "While boxing's always been in your blood, Anna, it's matured. You came here a brawler, jumping headfirst into everything no matter how rash it made you. Now, you're a fighter. You take time to analyze your situation before you react. While you still don't back down, you do so with heart."
Damn, I think. I never really thought I had been changing alongside Elsa. I had been so focused on her, my evolution kind of just took a backseat, I suppose. Yet, now that I sit here listening to Elsa's words, truly letting all of this sink it, I realize she's right. I was just a kid when I first got to New York. Aside from boxing, I didn't really know who I was. Now, I know I've found who I am, all thanks to being by Elsa's side.
"Wow," I mumble, trying to reorganize my thoughts. "You didn't tell me you had a doctorate in philosophy, Els."
Elsa tries to keep a straight face before she's bursting out in laughter, with me quickly following suit.
Sure, I may have grown, but that doesn't mean my roots don't still reside within me.
XxXxX
Later that night, Elsa and I retire back to her place. After an amazing dinner, we had come back, changed in to comfortable clothes, and curled up on her couch to watch Netflix, a glass of champagne in her hand, and a beer in mine.
"So," Elsa breathes as she plants a trail of kisses down my neck, "you haven't mentioned the fact that I didn't give you anything for your birthday."
I look to her with a raised brow. "Was everything else today not it?"
A shiver runs through me as she licks the shell of my ear. "Maybe. Maybe not."
She tends to my ear and neck some more, leaving me incapable of speech before she speaks again.
"Ask where you present is."
"O-Okay…" I gulp. "W-Where's my present, Elsa?"
Her eyes glimmer in a predatory way as she takes me by the hand. "I'm glad you asked. It's in here."
Pulling me off the couch, she leads me down the hallway and my heart rate picks up drastically with each step that brings us closer to her bedroom. Upon entering, Elsa leaves the room dark, the only lighting being the natural rays of moonlight that filter through her blinds.
Pushing me so I fall gently on her bed, she sensually crawls on top of me.
"This is your present, Anna," she tells me with hooded eyes, lust and love filling her voice
"T-The b-bed?" I try to joke, though my entire body lurches pleasantly as Elsa presses her entire form against mine gently.
She chuckles as she leans down to kiss me, her tongue prodding between my lips momentarily as her right hand trails past my stomach, slipping under the pair of leggings I had changed into.
"No," she whispers huskily, hand now trailing the band of my panties, "me finally being able to love you the right way."
A full body shiver runs back through me then, yet I can't keep the laugh from bubbling out of my throat, nor the classic roll of my eyes.
This girl would never learn. |
There appears to be something wrong with the internal systems over at social management company HootSuite, after it started sending out email reminders to users warning them that their free 60-day HootSuite Pro trial was about to end – but also included the names and email addresses of other people using the service.
Update: Hootsuite has confirmed the issue, and tells TNW that it was caused by the company’s “integration of Seesmic accounts with [its] existing HootSuite user accounts.” The CEO’s response has been included at the bottom of this post, in which he asks recipients to “destroy the messages” and promises a product credit “to make things right.”
Update 2: According to Hootsuite, the incident “occurred to under 4000 emails.”
Scores of HootSuite users have taken to Twitter to voice their displeasure at receiving the flood of emails, with TNW reader Matt Navarra contacting us to share that he has already received more than 485 emails at the time of writing (some have reported more than 1000).
The same user also reports holding a free account, and has not signed up for a free trial of HootSuite Pro.
Given HootSuite’s recent acquisition of Seesmic, we could speculate that the mass of emails could be down to a failed import of user accounts. We have, of course, reached out to HootSuite for comment on what exactly has happened and asked why users are seeing their names and email addresses included in messages sent to other users.
Given that user privacy is at stake here, HootSuite will need to work quickly. We will update the article should we receive a response.
Update: HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes has shared a statement with TNW. See the company’s blog post here.
On Friday November 9th, HootSuite experienced a technical issue related to our integration of Seesmic accounts with our existing HootSuite user accounts. The failing system resulted in email notifications intended for our new Seesmic users being sent out repeatedly and in some cases user email addresses were exposed in the message headers. The issue has since been contained but will likely continue to cause concern over the next few days as people who were away from their computers and email continue to discover the issue. At this time, we are requesting that recipients destroy the messages in order to help us contain the issue. Privacy is a paramount concern for HootSuite and this is in no way a reflection of the respect we have for our users and their privacy. For our customers and people who receive our regular marketing or product notifications, please be assured that your data is safe and is not directly connected to this failed system in any way. The HootSuite team and I, are extremely sorry that this took place and that we were not able to contain the issue sooner. For users who were affected, please stay tuned for a product credit as a further sign of our utmost respect and desire to make things right.
Image Credit: Blue Genie Art/Flickr
Read next: Apple's next chip architecture transition will be inconvenient, but not the end of the world |
Brownsville police are searching for a man who fled the scene after allegedly driving his car into another car, killing two people.
The crash happened around 3 a.m. Saturday on Highway 48 and Price Road.
A black Cadillac Escalade allegedly struck a red Poniac Grand Am from behind.
The impact caused both cars to ram into nearby telephone posts.
The Escalade immediately caught fire, and the fire spread to the Grand Am.
Out of the four passengers in the Poniac, two were able to escape but the other two were trapped.
By the time first responders arrived, a female passenger was already dead.
The other trapped passenger was transported to the hospital where he died hours later.
Brownsville police are still trying to find the driver of the Escalade.
Interim Police Chief Orlando Rodriguez told Action 4 News that they have gotten a lead and believe the suspect is reffered to as Junior.
Anyone with information on the supsect TMs whereabouts can contact Brownsville Crime Stoppers at (956)546-TIPS. |
In Good Neighbors, the Fair Folk have lived in peace with the humans of Still Hollow for centuries. But now, outsiders are coming into Still Hollow in search of gas deep beneath the earth. The Industry does not respect the old ways. Their machines disturb the dwellings of the Fair Folk, and the filth that seeps into the ground around their wells is deadly.
In Good Neighbors, players take on two roles: a human who must deal with the politics of this new industry, and a fairy who feels the full spiritual damage of the Industry. Can your humans enact change to make Still Hollow safe again, or will your fairies need to enact their own justice? Find out in this Fate World of Adventure by Paul Stefko.
Good Neighbors requires Fate Core to play. This 48-page supplement contains:
A streamlined system to allow players to create two characters for use in a single campaign or game session
A profession system with packaged aspects & skills to allow for quick character generation
Rules for fairies and fae magic in Fate using Fate Accelerated approaches
A Reaction Tree system to help GMs easily combine two storylines—in this case, fairy and human—into a single game scenario
Human and fairy sample characters, Industry insiders, and plenty of Still Hollow locations to get you gaming fast
They say good times make good neighbors. These are bad times. |
Say cheese: These strange looking cars have started capturing parts of Switzerland on film (Google)
Fleets of cars fitted with special cameras have begun trawling Swiss cities to collect images for Google's new Street View mapping service.
Street View adds detailed street-level pictures to the search engine's existing Google Maps application, but the new format has raised concerns among some privacy campaigners.
On Thursday Google's odd-looking camera cars, with 360-degree cameras mounted on their roofs, began crawling through urban areas in cantons Geneva, Zurich and Bern to record real street images.
Street View, which was also launched in Britain on Thursday, is already available in the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain and Italy. It is not clear just yet when a Swiss version will be available.
The new service allows users to savour 360-degree views of cities via their computers and mobile phones.
"Since we introduced Street View in the US, Swiss users have been asking about this service. We're thrilled to be able to introduce Street View in Switzerland after it recently appeared for several cities in Spain, Italy and France," Matthias Meyer, spokesman for Google Switzerland, told swissinfo.
But as well as the logistical challenges of taking millions of individual photos of city streets and stitching them together, Street View has also suffered criticism from privacy campaigners since it launched in the US two years ago. They argue that it infringes civil liberties.
The British Daily Mail newspaper has also attacked it as a "burglar's charter", allowing criminals to look for potential victims over the internet.
Respect privacy
Although the images include millions of residential addresses, people and cars, Google insists that they will respect individual privacy and Swiss laws.
"We have checked with Swiss law and it's absolutely allowed to take pictures from public places and streets," said Meyer.
He said the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner had also been consulted over privacy concerns.
Google has also introduced sophisticated technology to automatically blur faces and car number plates to guarantee privacy. And at the bottom of each photograph is a link which people can follow to report a concern to Google.
Those who have been photographed unawares by the car cameras and do not wish to be featured or who want their house or car to be taken off the photo database can register their objections by filling in an online form.
"If it's inappropriate our people will remove the item immediately," said Meyer.
"We are not interested in people walking in the streets. The product is about the city and the goal is to allow people to explore cities all over the world."
Keeping an eye
"We are generally satisfied with Google's answer, but we are keeping a close eye on the implementation of its privacy measures to check whether it works properly and quickly after an alert," Eliane Schmid, spokesperson for the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, told swissinfo.
Since its launch in the US, an American couple tried to sue Google over invasion of privacy but subsequently lost the case. Could that also happen in Switzerland?
"A person could, in theory, take a foreign internet firm like Google to court in Switzerland and a Swiss court could well issue a verdict against the company," said Schmid.
"But how do you enforce that outside Switzerland, for example? That only works if you have international legal cooperation, and as far as the internet is concerned, we're not really there yet."
What's the use?
Street View is creating a big online buzz, but apart from discovering whether we have won a place in online posterity, what will we actually use the service for?
Google says you might use it to view a property to rent or buy, preview your holiday accommodation, show friends abroad where you live, or check out local facilities if you are moving to an area, for example.
Tourist officials have also suggested the application could boost tourism.
Since it was launched software developers have been using its open-source architecture to build various new applications.
In Britain, for example, Google has teamed up with a website which uses Street View to help drinkers find their local pubs.
And in countries where the service has been established for some time, it is gaining cult status with a number of sites springing up dedicated to finding the most weird and wonderful things on Street View, including giant pumpkins, topless women and people drug dealing.
swissinfo, Simon Bradley
Google Google is a US-based internet search engine that generates revenues from advertising. It was co-founded by former Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin and first appeared as a private company in September 1998.
The company listed on the stock exchange in 2004 and was worth $23 billion (SFr26 billion) at the time. In 2007 its market capitalisation value was nearing $200 billion.
It has more than 50 offices in 200 countries and employs almost 20,000 full-time staff.
In 2004 Google launched its own free email service called Gmail and bought up a company that had developed a virtual globe programme, that became Google Earth two years later.
Google launched Street View in the US in May 2007. The French Tour de France cycle race for Street View was the first release of Street View in Europe. Since then the service has also become available for Japan, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, Italy and Britain.
The ultimate declared aim of Google is to provide street views of the whole world.
To use Street View you can either type an address or postcode into Google Maps and find a static photo of it, or you can drag an orange icon, called "Pegman" across the map and drop it wherever you like. The street has to be highlighted blue.
An image of the area will appear on the screen and you can then use arrows to rotate it. end of infobox
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Walt Disney World has evolved significantly over the last four decades. Since the Magic Kingdom made its debut in 1971, the resort has added three additional theme parks, opened three water parks (and closed one of them), built the Downtown Disney entertainment district and grown to host almost 25,000 hotel rooms.
Over a period of more than 40 years, fashions are, of course, going to change. Technology moves on. And so some of the multi-million dollar attractions that Disney has added to its Florida resort have been torn out to be replaced by newer offerings. Or, in some cases, they've simply been abandoned, left in place as a lingering reminder of times gone by.
We can't experience those attractions any more. But they live on in the memories of millions of Walt Disney World visitors. So let's celebrate the lost attractions of Walt Disney World by taking a voyage of nostalgia!
Nostalgia Stop 1: The Magic Kingdom
We'll start over at the Magic Kingdom, with a look at a whole host of rides and shows that are no longer with us. From the Plaza Swan Boats to Mission to Mars, from the Skyway to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Submarine Voyage, enjoy the ride!
Explore 22 lost attractions from Disney's Magic Kingdom!
Nostalgia Stop 2: Epcot
EPCOT Center was the second theme park to open at Walt Disney World, back in 1982. Inevitably, given that the park attempts to offer a vision of the future, many of its attractions went out of date fast. Take a look at these retro-futuristic masterpieces!
Explore 15 lost attractions from Epcot!
Nostalgia Stop 3: Disney's Hollywood Studios
Opened in 1989 to counter rival Universal Studios Florida, Disney-MGM Studios (now known as Disney's Hollywood Studios) was short on attractions. It underwent a rapid period of expansion, with a wide variety of new rides and shows being installed. Given the fast pace that the entertainment industry moves at, inevitably some of these were soon obsolete. Take a look at some of the attractions at the park that have been "cut" over the years.
Explore 14 lost attractions from Disney's Hollywood Studios!
Nostalgia Stop 4: Disney's Animal Kingdom
As the most recent addition to Walt Disney World's theme park line-up, there are fewer "lost" attractions over at Disney's Animal Kingdom. However, the park's roster of rides and shows has changed quite a bit since its debut in 1998. Take a look...
Explore 6 lost attractions from Disney's Animal Kingdom!
Nostalgia Stop 5: The Lost Areas of Walt Disney World
It's not just individual rides and shows that are dumped when Disney sees them as no longer profitable or of value to its guests. Sometimes, whole areas of Walt Disney World are shuttered, abandoned or transformed. Let's take a look at three major areas of the resort that are no longer in use as originally intended.
Explore the 3 lost areas of Walt Disney World!
Share your memories!
We hope you enjoyed this nostalgic trip around Walt Disney World! Why not share your memories of your favorite long-lost attractions at the resort in the comments section below? |
Montgomery County resident Katherine Slover helped rescue passengers and 12 cars from White’s Ferry after it broke from its cables on the Potomac River. (WUSA9)
Montgomery County resident Katherine Slover helped rescue passengers and 12 cars from White’s Ferry after it broke from its cables on the Potomac River. (WUSA9)
Katherine Slover was sitting in her car with her husband at the White’s Ferry landing in Montgomery County on Friday afternoon when she saw something odd. The underwater cable that guides the ferry across the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia had snapped, she said. It “shot up in the air and smacked down on the water, and water shot up in the air. It was beautiful.”
Then the ferry took a right and started heading downstream.
After a brief discussion with her husband about whether this was standard navigation for the ferry, Slover hopped out of the car and began running along the bank while passengers watched and the boat captain yelled frantically for help.
Slover navigated her own perilous route to the river’s edge, and with instruction — and ropes — from the captain tied the boat to several trees before it could float off toward Washington. Twelve cars and about 20 passengers were aboard the ferry, but no one was hurt and the ferry was back in operation later Friday night, said Matt Swensen, general manager of White’s Ferry.
By the time Montgomery County Fire and Rescue boats arrived, the passengers had all reached shore with the help of Slover and others. “We’ve got to get her an application,” fire spokesman Pete Piringer said, “and have her come work for us.”
Katherine Slover helped rescue a ferry that was drifting downstream on the Potomac River. (Courtesy of Katherine Slover)
“It was exciting,” Slover, 49, of Potomac, Md., said Saturday. She had been planning to take the ferry to Leesburg, Va., from Maryland’s Dickerson port. “The current was going quickly and trying to swing the bow around, and I barely got the rope around the tree in time, with my shaking hands.”
White’s Ferry, in operation since 1782, is the last ferry operating on the Potomac and can carry up to 24 cars, its owners say. On Friday, it was making its four-minute journey from Loudoun to Montgomery when the guiding cable snapped about 2:45 p.m., Piringer said.
[White’s Ferry’s swift trips across the Potomac have long history]
Slover estimated that the boat was midway across the river when it took the sudden detour. As she ran along the river, she could hear the captain calling for help. “He was frantic,” Slover said. “People were watching the ferry go downstream. It was unbelievable. I just started chasing it.”
As the captain steered the ferry toward the riverbank, Slover tried to track it along the shore but reached a steep embankment with a creek at the bottom. A few yards inland, “a tree had fallen across the creek” about 10 feet above the water, Slover said, and she “got down on all fours” and crawled across to the other side.
Dusty Slover, Slover’s husband, said that because of the creek, others couldn’t or wouldn’t scramble across the mossy fallen tree to help. “Katherine was the only person between the ferry and disaster and in a position to rescue the ferry, the cars and the passengers from drifting down the Potomac,” he said.
Emerging through the trees, “I could hear the captain,” Katherine Slover said. “He yelled, ‘Is anybody there? Help! I need help!’ ”
The boat was aground, but not solidly. Slover yelled to him, and the captain threw her a rope. “I tied it twice around the tree,” she said. “By the time I did that, the boat had swung around, and we could both hear the tree cracking.”
The captain tossed her a second rope, which Slover said she tied around a larger tree. But she was still afraid that the current would be too powerful, so as they waited for help, the captain tossed a chain from the boat and she wrapped that around a tree, too, her hands now bleeding, her husband said.
Swensen said that White Ferry’s 20-foot aluminum work boat soon arrived to stabilize the boat and help passengers disembark. The boat then pushed the ferry about 500 yards back upstream. It was docked and the cars off-loaded by 3:45 p.m., Piringer said.
Piringer said the ferry’s cable also snapped about five years ago, but no one was injured in that event, either. He said Friday’s passengers climbed off with Christmas shopping in tow, though Slover said some told her that they feared what might have happened had the ferry continued floating downstream.
“She was the savior,” passenger Ted Clarkson of Gaithersburg told the Germantown Pulse. “Once we hit the bank of the river, the pilot was frantically calling for help,” he said.
“We are all lucky that this happened on a pretty day,” Slover said, “because I’ve been on the river when it’s been very windy and choppy. The captain did a great job, but he couldn’t leave the boat and needed a set of hands on land to help secure it. I was just happy to help.” |
Ukraine's volunteer battalion leader, who is now also an MP, said on a Ukrainian television show that the battalions are ready to "intrude" into Russia. He spoke about intended terrorist acts before being cut off by the show's host.
"I will speak on behalf of the volunteer battalions, because I have more information...Today we are ready not just to defend [Ukraine], but to invade the Russian Federation, break into it with reconnaissance detachments and sabotage groups," the leader of the Dnepr-1 (Dnipro-1) battalion Yury Bereza said on Sunday during the 'Shuster Live' TV show.
Bereza spoke about carrying out bombings inside Russia before he was cut off by the show's host, who said the comments made "people nervous."
The Ukrainian military commander of the battalion, sponsored by Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, recently became a lawmaker after being elected to the country's parliament.
Bereza was recently criticized in the media after reports appeared that he ran away from the heavy battle scene near the town of Ilovaysk in eastern Ukraine, leaving his volunteer troops behind. Kiev's fighters were encircled by local self-defense forces in the area, with Ukrainian officials later announcing hundreds of casualties.
READ MORE: Ukraine president blames military failure on deserting commanders
After the Ilovaysk failure, Bereza announced he would "be drinking beer on the ruins of the Moscow Kremlin."
During a meeting with people in a Ukrainian town after the parliamentary elections, Bereza also shared his intentions of becoming the country's new defense minister.
Bereza's volunteer battalion is one of dozens of units formed this year by Maidan activists and ultranationalists of the Right Sector umbrella group in Ukraine. As an irregular force assisting Kiev in its military assault on eastern Ukraine, such groups have been reported to be using fierce tactics.
The recent UN report on the human rights situation in Ukraine covering the period of August 18 to September 16 accused volunteer battalions, such as Dnepr-1, of violating international humanitarian law – "including the principles of military necessity, distinction, proportionality and precaution."
Specific evidence of “beatings, poor nutrition and lack of medical assistance” are also mentioned in the report. The UN expressed special concern over the "enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention and ill-treatment allegedly perpetrated by members of the volunteer battalions," in particular Dnepr-1.
"The government needs to exercise more control over all of its forces, including the volunteer battalions, and to ensure accountability for any violations and crimes committed by their members," the UN report stated. |
Inside James Patterson's Black Lotus Ninja Dojo
James Patterson's Palm Beach home and Black Lotus Ninja Dojo
The only way to deal with the paintings of Thomas Kinkade is to imagine that the buildings are on fire
Every discipline needs an identifiable villain in order to grow and develop in opposition, and James Patterson has been fiction's Hitler ever since Admiral Lafayette Hubbard died. Patterson is a man who works tirelessly to turn the process of writing books into a mechanical act without honor or humanity , into a factory product where he is the ruthless quality-control inspector who rubber stamps his authorized creations, letting the world know that "yes, he has approved these products for sale" and "yes, now you can buy them."Who knows if he even writes anything himself? He will live and die, and the hundreds of non-disclosure agreements he has drafted with his ghostwriters will remain secret until the ghostwriters age and question their lives, and end up saying too much in the dingy back rooms of New York bars.The art world has to deal with Thomas Kinkade single-handedly destroying the spirit of their calling. We have to deal with fucking Patterson. In this fluff piece for the Guardian , we enter Patterson's home in Florida and see the man at work. He is the patron saint of the middle-aged amateur, the kind of wealthy, avuncular person who -- after a successful career in a morally-difficult executive position -- takes their hobby, buys it, and tries to justify their life by claiming it was their real passion all along.Patterson is a one-man vanity press: not only does he buy his own commercials for his own books, he doesn't even write them, and hasn't since 1996. We have to take his word that he wrote his own books before 1996, but isn't it interesting how much he knows about killing people and getting away with it? Is he a thriller writer and a detective fiction genius? Or is he a man who befriends lonely, struggling writers, slits their throats, steals their stories, strikes a line through their name, and replaces it with his own?Are his books clues for us? Is the guilt tearing him apart? Does he want to be caught? Does he want one last chance to explain himself before he is led away in chains to the gas chamber?All we know for certain is that these days he is famous enough to flaunt his "writing process" in our faces.Patterson used to be a head executive at a New York marketing agency before he discovered that he was a genius who didn't even have to write books to make millions as an author. In fact, sometimes he doesn't have to do anything at all.If you have reached this article because you "work for" Patterson and are part of his PR department, if your job is to scan the internet twenty-four hours a day and search for people who are saying bad things about your Master, please, get help, don't let him control your life.Get to a newspaper. It doesn't matter how much money he gave you to shut you up. Tell them where he touched you. Break the cycle of abuse. |
Alabama Shakes Courtesy
Soulful southern rock band Alabama Shakes are coming to the Arkansas Music Pavilion for a show on Friday, Sept. 6.
For those not familiar, the band has experienced one of the fastest rises to rock stardom in recent memory, blowing up seemingly overnight even before the release of their stellar debut full-length album, Boys & Girls.
Since the record came out in April 2012, however, the band has absolutely exploded. Instead of performing for hundreds in the watering holes of hometown Athens, Ala., the band now plays for crowds of thousands at venues like Red Rocks. And instead of delivering mail at the local post office, charismatic singer Brittany Howard is belting out “The Weight” during a Levon Helm tribute at the Grammy’s with the likes Elton John, Mavis Staples and T-Bone Burnett.
Tickets go on sale at 9 a.m. Friday, June 28. Cost is $38.50 in advance or $41.50 the day of the show. To purchase, call 479-443-5600 or visit amptickets.com. Fly Golden Eagle will open the show.
Alabama Shakes – Hold On |
Here is what I cannot say about Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, the JAlba-fronted, Chiklis-obscuring, Evil Space Cloud-lovin’ superhero-film duology, which entered the public consciousness in the summer of 2005 and left forever in the summer of 2007. I cannot say:
— That they are good movies.
— That you should pay any sum of money to watch them again.
— That they represent some kind of missing link in the history of superhero cinema.
You have probably forgotten about these movies. They don’t really have a bad reputation. It’s more like they have no reputation. And accidentally or on purpose, this is part of 20th Century Fox’s plan. This week, the studio releases a new, very different Fantastic Four movie: A Fantastic Four movie that stars a quartet of young, ambitious, “serious” actors, a Fantastic Four movie that features long quiet dialogue scenes where characters speak in hushed tones about the military-industrial complex and the broken promise of the space age and the possibility that humanity itself is a cancer to be wiped from the universe.
Here is what does not happen in the new Fantastic Four movie: A snowboarding montage set to Sum-41.
20th Century Fox does not want you to watch these previous Fantastic Four movies. Not right now, at least. As reported by the Hollywood Reporter earlier this summer, Fox scrubbed FF and FF: RotSS from Amazon and iTunes. They’re not on Netflix Instant. In order to watch the movies this week, I had to go to Vidiots, one of the last rental stores in Los Angeles/the world. (When I brought them up to the guy behind the counter, he asked me: “Why?”) If you don’t do DVDs anymore, and you know how to Google, it is currently easier to watch Roger Corman’s cheapo-cashgrab Fantastic Four film from the ’90s than either of these big-budget blockbuster releases.
Here is what you probably don’t remember: The first Fantastic Four is not terrible. It is occasionally very fun. Fantastic Four hit theaters in late June 2005, a couple weeks after Batman Begins, and so Fantastic Four is maybe the superhero movie that feels nothing at all like Christopher Nolan. Instead, the rip-off touchstone here is Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films. The setting is the same: New York, but a specific retro-Raimi corner of New York populated entirely by genius millionaire industrialists and brash astronauts and tough Bronx bald dudes from the Bronx. The general vibe is the bargain-Raimi. There’s wacky hijinks, there’s wide-eyed, mouth-drop shock every time someone uses their superpowers, there are endless crowds of cheering New Yorkers, and there’s banter that would embarrass Top Gun.
Like, here’s Chiklis-as-Ben Grimm on future teammate Johnny Storm. “That wingnut washed out of NASA for sneaking two Victoria’s Secret wannabes into a flight simulator! They crashed it into a wall! A flight simulator.”
And here’s Johnny Storm, taking a question from the press about Reed Richards and his incredible elongating ability:
REPORTER: “Is it true what they say about him? That he can expand any part of his anatomy?”
JOHNNY: “I’ve always found him to be a little limp.”
And here’s Ben Grimm, talking to eventual bad guy Victor Von Doom about his friendship with Reed Richards.
BEN: “He does the talking. I do the walking.”
VON DOOM: “So take a walk.”
People complain about superhero villains now, but you have to understand: In the original Fantastic Four movie, Doctor Doom is basically Val Kilmer from Top Gun, except with Cara Delevingne’s eyebrows. Julian McMahon doesn’t actually do anything particularly villainous until about 2/3 of the way through the movie. Mostly, he just glowers in the shadows, flashing his Ryan Murphy Brand™ bitchface and trying to draw a wedge between the Fantastic Four using his incredible powers of shameless gossip. He’s the kind of supervillain who mainly seems annoyed that the heroes are getting all the attention: The most poignant moment of Doom’s origin story comes after his IPO fails, when his assistant tells him “Larry King just canceled!” because Larry King would rather talk to the Fantastic Four.
The DVD copy of Fantastic Four that I got from Vidiots had the Extended Edition of the movie. I watched it, hoping for unicorn dreams. There is one reason to watch the Extended Edition, which also happens to be one unqualified great thing about these very-not-great movies.
I’m talking about Chris Evans, doucheboat superhero.
I like Chris Evans as Captain America. But Chris Evans as The Human Torch belongs in a museum. His Johnny Storm is introduced as a washout astronaut. (Those Victoria’s Secret models, remember?) Except, wait, no, he’s actually introduced driving a motorcycle (what a badass!) while making out with a hot girl (what a badass!) except that the hot girl is ALSO driving, a CONVERTIBLE. A high-speed convertible-to-Harley makeout sesh: What a cool guy! So cool, he’s hot! Lest we not understand how cool this Torch is, here are his first lines in the movie, directed at Ben Grimm:
“Digital Camera: $254. Memory stick: $59. The look on your hardass former CO’s face when he finds out he’s your junior officer: Priceless.”
This is, of course, a gag on the catchphrase for the Mastercard commercials. It is impossible to stress how badly that joke has aged, because it was already years out of date when the movie hit theaters. But Evans sells everything. He is The Superhero as Unmitigated Horny Id: He is Downey-as-Tony-Stark, without the redemptive qualities of smartness or Paltrow.
Find me a counterexample, but I think that Evans as the Human Torch is the single randiest superhero in movie history. After his makout sesh with Convertible Girl, after Johnny goes to space and gets zapped by an evil space cloud, after he gets bored of hanging out at the hospital and insists on going snowboarding on a nearby mountain, there is the Nameless Nurse, who agrees immediately to go skiing and even wears helpful girl-coded Bright Pink snow gear:
While they’re totally shredding the slopes, Johnny flames on for the first time, and falls off a cliff, and flames directly into a snowy hillside, creating a hot tub in the middle of the snow. Nameless Nurse skis down to him. Keep in mind: In this world, this is the very first time anyone has ever had a superpower. Johnny Storm has just fallen off a cliff and his entire body has been on fire. (He was also in space yesterday.) He looks confused. Then he looks up at the Nurse. “Care to join me?”
The Extended Edition only has more of this. There is a montage where the Torch rides the elevator in the Baxter Building all day, and incredibly attractive women keep getting in the elevator. He turns on his firepowers. “Is it hot in here?” the attractive women keep saying, as they take off their jacket. (At one point, he appears to make out with two girls at once. ON AN ELEVATOR.)
This is mere prelude for Rise of the Silver Surfer, when Johnny has a full-on semi-romance with an Attractive Soldier Who Actually Has A Name But It Only Gets Mentioned Once…
…but only after we get a brief scene of Johnny with his Nameless Girlfriend Who Is Never Seen Again.
A reporter asks that nameless girlfriend: “What’s does it take to date the Human Torch?”
She responds: “Fireproof lingerie. And a lot of aloe.”
Let me restate that in all-caps, bolded, underlined:
FIREPROOF LINGERIE. AND A LOT OF ALOE.
In order to appreciate these Fantastic Four movies, you have to appreciate how that line is incredibly gross and arguably more emotionally true than anything that has happened in any superhero movie of the decade since. There’s not a lot of sex in superhero movies, unless you count bleak conversations about Black Widow’s uterus. Iron Man 3 boldly hired Rebecca Hall to play a long-ago one-night-stand for Tony Stark. But superhero movies in general are so serious, and so cosmic. Superheroes are either in fairy-tale love, or they’re too workaholic for love: There is no in between. And so there is something fascinating in the Human Torch’s unrepentant horndog attitude. “Come on!” he says early in the movie. “Am I the only one who thinks this is cool?” He’s talking about his superpowers, but he could be talking about the whole idea of superhero movies. (A line the Torch could’ve said, unironically: “Why so serious?”)
I’m not trying to defend any of this, by the way. The enjoyment factor of these two Fantastic Four movies is purely anthropological. They feel like the Roger Moore versions of the Fantastic Four series: Wacky, haphazard, the antithesis of deep. (The Human Torch has a car, and that license plate reads: “TORCH’D.”)
Which means that poor Jessica Alba gets stranded in the Holly Goodhead role. Her Susan Storm gets introduced as an equal to the male characters: “Meet my director of Genetics Research.” All of 23 at the time, Alba immediately gets banished into one character trait that will last her through two movies: Fretting over the fact that Reed doesn’t love her enough. When we first meet the characters, they have actually already dated and broken up: We later learn this was because Reed didn’t want to move in together.
And because the actual superhero battle at the end of the first movie is an afterthought, the main question at the core of Fantastic Four is: Will Reed Richards find it within himself to settle down with a smart, successful woman who loves him completely and looks like Jessica Alba? Muddying the water: Doctor Doom proposes to Susan early in the first movie, when they’re in space — even though, as the movie makes very clear, they have never actually been on a date.
Oh also, this happens:
And then in Rise of the Silver Surfer, this happens:
The films’ beyond-prurient interest in Alba’s body is both unforgivable and another prime artifact of the year 2005. A couple months before Fantastic Four, Alba was the stripper with the heart of gold in Sin City; a couple months after Fantastic Four, Alba was the bikini that occasionally talked in Into the Blue. I’m not even sure we as a culture would allow such an immediate sky-rocket ascendance into Sex Symbol-dom anymore: It’s like the same actress was Demi Moore in Striptease and Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns and Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep. Of course, Fantastic Four is the only movie to give Alba a blonde wig and blue lenses. Alba herself seems, perhaps understandably, to have had an awful time on these movies, which either does or does not explain why she is awful in them. (A happy irony of history: Ten years after she played the bland love interest for two technical supergeniuses, Jessica Alba is a tech-company kamillionaire and nobody has learned how to spell Ioan Gruffudd.)
So maybe what makes these movies interesting is just what a different cultural context they appeared in. Speaking as someone who had a few complaints about Black Widow this year: Anyone who had any complaints about Black Widow should see these movies and thank god Joss Whedon is making these movies now. And there are moments in these two movies that are goofy in a way few blockbusters are goofy now. Throughout Rise of the Silver Surfer, there are loving close-up shots of the Nokia 770 palm tablet, which Mister Fantastic uses for everything: Military alerts, science alarms. You have never seen such craven product placement.
But here’s where I kind of like these movies: They are very aware of the bullshit they are slinging. Earlier in Silver Surfer, the Four are forced to fly coach class on a commercial airline. “What do you guys think about getting an endorsement deal from an airline?” asks the Torch. “I think we have enough endorsement deals,” says the Invisible Woman. Later, the Torch shows off their new uniforms, which he has covered with NASCAR-style advertising. And later, the Torch insists that everyone start calling him “John,” because “Focus-testing found that Johnny skewed a little young.”
The last hour of Rise of the Silver Surfer is just terrible, by the way. There’s Doctor Doom and Galactus and the Silver Surfer. (Weirdly, it’s actually not too different from the last hour of the new Fantastic Four movie: Lots of military guys, lots of corridors, lots of residual Abu Ghraib imagery.)
But let me say this: The first half hour of Rise of the Silver Surfer is one of my favorite sustained sequences of Marvel-dom in the movies. It starts with a planet exploding in some remote solar system, and then we follow a tiny silver surfing comet-thing as it goes to Earth. It passes over Japan and freezes a lake; it passes over the pyramids and freezes the desert; it blacks out Los Angeles.
The media notices, but they don’t pay much attention: Everyone is too excited about the wedding of Sue Storm and Reed Richards, which in the context of the Fourverse is basically the Royal Wedding. (“We’re gonna be auctioning off exclusive wedding photos to the highest bidder!” declares Johnny.) There’s that scene where the FF ride in coach — which gets at the core human banality of Marvel Comics in a way that you don’t really see much outside of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies. The Torch insists on taking Mister Fantastic out for a bachelor party, and he does a weird stretchy-dance, which plays in context like that scene in The 40 Year Old Virgin when Steve Carell smokes weed for the first time. There’s the scene where the Thing lovingly makes out with his girlfriend — KERRY WASHINGTON, PEOPLE! — and the scene with Brian Posehn as the fussy priest at the wedding. And, most importantly of all, there’s the scene after the Torch first meets the Silver Surfer, when the film unveils its one good idea: Every time he touches his fellow teammates, they switch powers.
This is such an awesome and potentially hilarious idea that the movie does nothing with — although it does create a new opportunity for Jessica Alba to lose her clothes. I would love to see Josh Trank, or someone else, take the first half hour of Rise of the Silver Surfer and make that into a full movie: A human comedy about a work-family that is also a real family, complete with the annoying little brother and the gruff uncle and maybe a female character who gets to do more than just pout. Director Tim Story doesn’t bring much to these movies as far as action goes, but there is a lightness of spirit, a sense that none of the mythology really matters. The first film has one of my favorite shots in any superhero movie: The Thing, mournful and alone on a New York night, trapped in his own personal version of Hopper’s Nighthawks.
And there’s the scene where The Thing hangs off the side of a bridge, and talks to a bird. The bird flies away — but only after it leaves a dropping on the Thing’s shoulder. For better or for worse, that will never happen again in a superhero movie. Which doesn’t make these movies good. But it does make them unique. |
Not that this is news to anyone, at all, but Xbox boss Phil Spencer has finally confirmed in an interview that the company’s Xbox Project Scorpio Console will indeed cost more than its recently released Xbox One S console. This should have easily been expected, as the console has been touted as the “most powerful console ever”, complete with 8 CPU cores, 320 GB/s Memory bandwith, 6 Teraflops of power, true 4K gaming, and hi-fidelity VR.
“Scorpio will be a premium console,” Spencer said. “It will cost more than [the Xbox One] S obviously. That’s how we’re building it. We haven’t announced price points for Scorpio yet, but I want to make sure that the investments we’re putting into the product of Scorpio meets the demands of the higher end customer, and that will be a higher price.”
The console is expected to come to market around the holiday time of 2017, but other than the aforementioned specs, not much else is known about the console. Phil Spencer did mention that current Xbox users won’t be left out, making the Xbox Scorpio backwards compatible out of the gate, likely with same Xbox 360 titles that are on the Xbox One Compatibility list.
He also verified that Scorpio won’t be replacing the Xbox One, but rather joining it in a sort of Xbox family. The idea is to provide different consoles at different price points, not unlike the PC market, where consumers can choose the console that best fits their needs.
“There is not one product that our customers come in and buy,” he said. “Some people come in and buy the 500 GB Xbox One S. Many people now are now buying our original Xbox One consoles that are a really good price. There is no one product that you look at and say, ‘This is the product that defines how you are doing in that market.'”
You can watch Phil Spencer speak on Scorpio below. |
People have too many complaints about Facebook's News Feed to count, but they all come back to the same problem: The stream isn't showing people what they want to see. Facebook has attempted to improve this, of course. The "unfollow" toggle allows you to stay friends with someone without seeing their inconsequential updates, and the ability to label connections as Close Friends, Acquaintances, Family, and so on, plays into the News Feed algorithm as well. (Or you could just use those programmed groups as "News Feeds," if you really wanted to.)
None of these iterative tweaks has actually solved the problem. Now Facebook is testing a new potential band-aid, according to a feature spotted by TechCrunch's Josh Constine. "See First" is a button that would sit on user profiles. If you click it, you are essentially starring that person or page. Doing so would supposedly ensure you would never miss their posts, and they would go to the top of your "Top Stories" feed rather than get buried. This is the opposite of the "unfollow" option; with See First, you are saying, "I always want to follow."
TechCrunch
Essentially, what Facebook's doing here is giving users more control over ranking their connections. Being able to assign some sort of value to what users (and official pages) post gives the network insight into what you want to see—which, of course, has plenty of implications for publishers and marketers who are desperate to find out what makes Facebook users tick (or rather, click). But it also means that the News Feed could get a little better: Facebook has said the strength of your connection with a friend plays into its algorithm (do you Like someone's status consistently? Do you linger on their posts for awhile? Comment regularly?), but it stands to reason that you do all these things to the posts that are showing up—if you aren't seeing much of someone's content, then you're not being given the opportunity to interact with it. If you're able to engineer it so that you interact more, then perhaps you can break the News Feed cycle you've been stuck in.
It's worth mentioning that there's no granularity here: If you want to see updates and photos from a friend, but not necessarily every single article they share or the results of every Facebook quiz they take, you're out of luck.
TechCrunch
On the flip side, if your Facebook feed weren't already an echo chamber of people saying the same thing and repeating the same ideas, then you could absolutely try to make it such. There's a danger in securing your online world from new or challenging ideas (or new people!), and such a level of control could allow us to make certain we see nothing except the ideas and friends we're comfortable with. You may have also see a sidebar quiz pop up (which popped up for me this morning), asking you how well you know someone. Whether or not this is related to the development of "See First" remains to be seen, but either way it's clear that Facebook really wants to know how well you know people and likely, how much you want to see information from them.
Screenshot: WIRED
It's really difficult to determine what's right for Facebook's News Feed. The entire network has gotten so big and busy that there simply isn't enough space in the center of your screen to show you everything worth seeing. But hey, if you're of the mind that you know what's best for your feed (a perfectly legitimate mind to be of, for the record), then "See First" will be another weapon in your arsenal. |
Johannes Singhammer complained that too many documents coming from Brussels were not available in German.
“All important documents from Brussels should also be published in German,” he said.
He argued that the EU documents contained laws and regulations affecting Germans, but many could not understand the finer details of them.
"We want to make the EU closer to its citizens," he said. "If we do not create the conditions for this we should not be surprised if we see a low voting turnout at the EU elections."
"German is the most widely spoken mother tongue in the EU," Singhammer added.
He said that many documents were simply not translated, even those affecting Germany.
Singhammer raised the matter after the Upper Bavarian Folk Music Association appealed to him, saying they could not find EU documents on reform of copyright law in German.
SEE ALSO: Ten more untranslatable German words |
Near the end of May, Amazon was awarded a patent that would allow them to accept alternate payment methods for their services.
One of the possible means of payment is Bitcoin, even though Amazon stated in the not so distant past that they don’t really have an interest in this currency. Basically, the patent would allow the user of their services to make payments without necessarily divulging their identity, and without going through the usual steps.
Amazon filed for the patent in March 2012, and has since negated the possibility of incorporating Bitcoin into their business model, so it remains questionable if they only wanted to ensure intellectual property rights, or if they have a plan to actually make use of the crypto currency. There are good arguments in support of either of the theories.
Concerns over Suitability
One of the things that might cause them to be quite hesitant to expand their business model in this way is the fact that Bitcion is not exactly the most reliable currency out there. Apart from the drastic and frequent fluctuations, and the fact that its user base is not exactly large enough to be too appealing to a company with the size and scope of Amazon, there is the issue of the currency’s security, as intrusions and thefts are not exactly a rarity.
Additionally, while they don’t seem to have great plans for expanding it, Amazon does have its currency, Coin, which they are accepting as payment for Kindle Fire app purchases.
On the other hand, the patent does allow for interesting and convenient payment options. Computing resources and services could be purchased with Bitcoin (or one of the other means of digital payment allowed by the patent) without the need to leave too much information, or go through too many steps.
Apart from convenient, instant purchases, that would probably appeal more to individual consumers in urgent need of some of the services that Amazon provides than they would to businesses; this payment model has another interesting aspect. Computing services could be purchased by one party and then resold to end users. The price of the services might be modified by the current demand and other factors, so it wouldn’t be as constant as we are used to, as the services would, in a way, be auctioned off.
Following the Pack
Amazon wouldn’t be the first company to try and offer their users a faster method of paying for their services, and neither would they be the first giant company to align itself Bitcoin. ebay, Paypal and after some back and forth, Apple, all decided to incorporate the currency into their operations, as has the huge satellite company, Dish Network.
Amazon’s patent might only mean that they are sensing a shift in the way that digital purchases seem to be going, and that they want to have their bases covered if the model proves to be successful, but they may have more immediate and formulated plans for the patent.
While the chances of Amazon taking such a huge risk with an unstable currency are not exactly astronomical, it would be interesting to see how they would incorporate Bitcoin into their payment model and how this could prompt other companies to do the same. |
Distributed Browser Expands Test Group, Introduces Developer Tools
In December we announced the release of the alpha version of Project Maelstrom and shared our vision for a distributed web. It’s a vision for the Internet that we’ve long held at BitTorrent; we believe its a necessary innovation to sustain a truly neutral, content-friendly network.
At that time we asked, what if more of the web worked the way that BitTorrent does? Project Maelstrom aims to answer that question with a web browser that powers a new way for web content to be published, accessed and consumed.
Since December, we have learned a lot. We also have established a growing community of testers, developers and publishers. More than 10,000 developers in fact, and an additional 3,500 publishers, looking to share our vision of how the Internet can work. These are technologists, academics and researchers. These are start-ups, agencies, and visionaries. And these are the people who will help us build the next 20 years of the Internet.
Today, Project Maelstrom enters its next phase by expanding our group of testers and by offering a new set of developer tools.
Our test group will be expanded with the introduction of the Project Maelstrom browser beta. This is an open beta for Windows users and by empowering the browser with a distributed protocol we open a better future for publishers, creators, and users. And we do this while offering a more efficient, scalable and cost-effective alternative to HTTP.
The latest release also introduces the first developer tools for Project Maelstrom, empowering publishers and developers to leverage the efficiency of BitTorrent technology in their content and interactive experiences.
Today we’re expanding access to everyone so that tomorrow we will have a sustainable, content-friendly Internet, powered by people. |
For someone with advanced Lou Gehrig’s disease or severe paralysis, a motorized wheelchair can be very hard to use: If you can’t move a joystick with your hand, you have to use a switch embedded in the headset or a “sip-and-puff” device controlled with the breath.
The devices only allow you to control one thing at a time: You can adjust your speed or the direction that your wheelchair is pointing, but not both simultaneously.
[Photo: argallab]
“This basically makes it so the operation of the wheelchair is much more challenging, especially when you’re dealing with tightly constrained spaces,” says Brenna Argall, a professor at Northwestern University who is developing technology for autonomous wheelchairs in her Assistive and Rehabilitation Robotics Laboratory. “What this means, in practice, is that for many people it’s a burden or very fatiguing mentally and physically to operate the wheelchair,” she tells Co.Exist.
And there’s the fact that some people don’t have enough motor control to be prescribed a wheelchair. Children who can’t easily use a wheelchair, similarly, may not be allowed to bring it to school.
Autonomy can change that by outfitting wheelchairs with sensors to avoid obstacles in much the same way a self-driving car does. Several researchers are working on variations of the wheelchair-adapted technology. At Oregon State University, a team is developing a low-cost kit that could be added to existing wheelchairs. At MIT, a team is developing a self-driving wheelchair that could be used in nursing homes or hospitals.
[Photo: C. Jason Brown]
“There is a lot we can borrow from the field of autonomous robots and what mobile robots have been able to do on their own for decades now,” Argall says. |
“Testing solar-electric propulsion and other deep-space technologies, and making lunar scientific investigations”
In a nutshell, this is what ESA’s SMART-1 mission was about. Launched on 27 September 2003, it traveled to the Moon using ion propulsion, carrying a number of miniaturised instruments. Besides testing new technology, SMART-1 did the first comprehensive inventory of key chemical elements in the lunar surface. It also investigated the theory that the Moon was formed following the violent collision of a smaller planet with Earth and looked for water in the form of ice. After SMART-1 concluded lunar orbit science operations, its mission ended by a controlled lunar impact on 3 September 2006.
SMART-1 was the first European spacecraft to travel to and orbit around the Moon, SMART standing for Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology. This was the first time ion propulsion has been used to leave Earth’s orbit.
Today, we are happy to re-release the legacy of more than 100 images of the mission under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO licence, with the kind support of ESA Senior Scientist and former SMART-1 project scientist Bernard Foing, who adds:
“ESA’s SMART-1 small technology mission was an inspiring European journey to the Moon, where we invited many international collaborations. SMART-1 open data and images can now be used further by the world’s scientists explorers, engineers as well as the community of students and citizens to prepare the next steps for the MoonVillage.”
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