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JERUSALEM - Sudan's interior minister has launched an investigation into why more than 3,000 refugees have entered Israel by way of Egypt.
At a Khartoum news conference Sunday, Interior Minister Zubair Bashir Taha said it was an "embarrassing matter," Ynetnews reported Monday.
"Has Egypt become the gateway to Israel or to Europe? We don't know where these people are headed ... they know nothing about Israel," he said.
Taha said Egyptian authorities were assisting the investigation, as many of the refugees were spending prolonged periods in Egypt before going to Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office issued a statement saying refugees who weren't from the war-torn Darfur region would be returned to Egypt, the report said.
Copyright © 2007, by United Press International. All Rights Reserved. | <urn:uuid:e6bdcabe-bd50-46d4-9541-23ffa33b6330> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bendweekly.com/Worldwide-News/8134.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979598 | 175 | 1.570313 | 2 |
DeWitt, NY -- When Dr. Robert Cupelo started practicing medicine 26 years ago, visits with patients coming in for annual checkups often lasted an hour.
Today the average visit to a primary care doctor like Cupelo lasts 15 minutes, according to federal statistics. That’s because physicians are under pressure to see more patients because of shrinking health insurance payments and a shortage of primary care doctors.
Cupelo, an internist, said there is barely enough time to address an illness, never mind work with patients on what he considers the most important goal in health care — preventing illness.
That’s why Cupelo, a partner in CNY Internists in DeWitt, is converting his practice to a “concierge medicine” model.
Visits will be a minimum of 30 minutes. Patients will be able to get same-day or next-day appointments with no waiting. Cupelo will be at the beck and call of patients 24 hours a day via e-mail and cell phone. And he will give patients comprehensive wellness screenings and one-on-one counseling not typically covered by commercial insurance or Medicare.
To make this work, Cupelo plans to shrink the size of his practice from 2,300 patients to 600 or less.
All this comes at a price. Patients who want to join his new practice must pay $1,500 a year.
“It will be like going back to a time when you could spend appropriate amounts of time with a patient and do the job great,” Cupelo said.
Cupelo is believed to be the first doctor in the Syracuse area to switch to a concierge practice, also sometimes called “boutique medicine.”
A small but growing number of doctors nationwide are doing this. Most of them are in bigger cities. Cupelo is affiliating with MDVIP, a Florida company owned by Proctor & Gamble, that helps doctors set up these practices. It has more than 450 doctors in 34 states.
Mark Murrison, president of MDVIP, said concierge medicine is growing because doctors and patients are tiring of what he calls “conveyor belt medicine.”
The U.S. health care system generally does not help people until they are sick, he said. MDVIP’s philosophy focuses on preventive care.
Cupelo will make the change Aug. 1. He sent out letters in April to his patients notifying them of the change. MDVIP, which surveyed Cupelo’s patients, expects about 25 percent to sign up. Patients who don’t want to sign up can switch to one of the group’s other doctors.
In Cupelo’s new practice, routine care will still be covered by his patients’ commercial insurance or Medicare. He will continue as a partner at CNY Internists and see his patients at the group’s office at 5823 Widewaters Parkway. Cupelo said he also will continue to see hospitalized patients.
George W. Chapman, a Syracuse health care consultant who works with physicians, is skeptical about whether concierge medicine will fly in the Syracuse area.
“I’m not so sure if this is a good call with the economy the way it is and people losing health insurance,” he said.
Tom Dennison, a Syracuse University professor and health care expert, said concierge medicine has taken off in high-income areas like New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C.
“I think there’s some market for this in Syracuse, but we’re not really a high end market,” Dennison said. “It will be limited by the number of people who are income qualified.”
Murrison of MDVIP said the idea that this type of practice is just for the wealthy is a misperception. Municipal workers, school teachers, small business owners and people from all walks of life are joining these practices nationwide, he said. The cost is no more per day than what many people spend on coffee, cell phones, cable TV or cigarettes, he said.
“It’s affordable for most people and it becomes a matter of how do people prioritize their health and make that a key priority,” he said.
Murrison said about 92 percent of MDVIP patients renew with their doctors annually.
Russell Brownback, of Cazenovia, said he and other family members who are Cupelo’s patients debated whether to sign up for his new practice.
“It’s not an easy decision to part with $1,500 for anything,” Brownback said. “But there are few things more important than my health.”
Brownback, his wife and his elderly parents are patients of Cupelo. They all decided to sign up because they are big fans of Cupelo, he said. “We would follow him to the ends of the earth,” Brownback said.
Brownback said what also sold them is the comprehensive wellness program Cupelo will offer patients.
That program includes extensive annual tests and screenings most insurance plans won’t pay for. This is included in the $1,500 annual fee. Once the results are available, the patient comes back for a 90-minute physical exam.
During that visit, Cupelo said he and the patient will come up with a wellness plan that covers everything from weight management, heart health, diabetes risk, quality of sleep and other health issues.
“It’s not something for everyone,” Cupelo said. “I impress upon people the value of preventative care. They are so used to not getting it they don’t appreciate it.”
Doctors make about the same income in a concierge practice as they do in a traditional practice, according to Murrison of MDVIP.
The annual fee helps offset the decline in insurance revenue that comes with a smaller practice, he said. MDVIP also keeps a share of the annual fee to cover the costs of services it provides to its doctors.
“Doctors choose to do this not from a financial perspective, but as a way to reclaim the way they always intended to practice medicine,” Murrison said.
Cupelo, 54, is a native Syracusan who attended Christian Brothers Academy, Syracuse University and Upstate Medical University.
Cupelo said MDVIP approached him last September at a time when he was wondering how long he could keep up the pace of caring for so many patients. He said he was impressed with its approach.
“A lot of medical problems require time,” he said. “If you are trying to deal with a problem and you know there are three other people in the waiting room waiting, you don’t get the satisfaction you are doing the job as best you could.”
James T. Mulder can be reached at 470-2245 or [email protected] | <urn:uuid:aa4c2f11-b18f-42b3-82fc-302db5520675> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/05/syracuse-area_doctor_offers_mo.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965099 | 1,471 | 1.664063 | 2 |
This has come up recently in my world. Someone my wife knows has claimed to be a “Christian Humanist”.
Now, I know a little about humanism (I agree with the principles for the most part) and I know a lot about Christianity (I don’t agree with their principles for the most part). When I read this, the first thing that popped into my mind was, “two more opposite things could not be said as one thing.” Upon doing some research I have to say that my initial thoughts were right on the money.
This website (which I freely admit to not having read very much of, I can’t handle raw idiocy very much), claims that it is possible to be a Christian without belief in God.
Wait… what? Ummm… Christianity is a religion, developed by Saul of Tarsus (later called Paul) that claimed Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate. That’s what Christianity is! By definition almost.
Humanism (from the American Humanist Association) is many things, the most currently prominent of which is based in free-thought, critical thinking and belief in humans rather than a deity. Interestingly, the American Humanist Association also lists Christian Humanism as
defined by Webster’s Third New International Dictionary as “a philosophy advocating the self-fulfillment of man within the framework of Christian principles.” This more human-oriented faith is largely a product of the Renaissance and is a part of what made up Renaissance humanism.
In early times, Christian Humanism was basically research into the classics of Greek and Hebrew literature (meaning the Bible). In this way, Christian Humanism is basically literary criticism.
Of course, part of the problem with being a Modern Christian (as opposed to a Jewish Christian as the first ‘Christians’ were properly called) is that there is no real evidence for anything. Much of the foundational book is known to be wrong, written well after the period of time involved (and by unknown authors for sometimes nefarious purposes )
So, what is Christian Humanism. Well, it’s kind of whatever you want it to be… which means that as a principle, it’s basically useless. One might as well claim to be pagan, at least people know what that is.
This is called an oxymoron. Phrases like “sanitary landfill”, “freezer burn”, “Military Intelligence”, etc. Two opposite things or two things that do not go together at all.
Someone remind me to post how I learned to always research things before getting involved.
As a side note, I maintain that a disciple of Paul wrote the Gospel According to John as a way of countering the other three gospels and their beliefs about Jesus. This was done in order to promote Modern Christianity, which is only preached by Paul, over Jewish Christianity as promoted by James, brother of Jesus and Peter. | <urn:uuid:62c005e9-e792-4f9a-b4a8-624ac0533c13> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ogremk5.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/what-is-christian-humanism/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969109 | 619 | 1.617188 | 2 |
China's Cyberespionage Will Continue Unabated, Say Experts
The U.S. government will be slow to act against aggressors who attack through the Internet, predict policy and China experts at RSA.
A group of four policy experts discussed the reasons behind Chinese efforts to steal U.S. intellectual property during a panel discussion at the conference. Unless the U.S. backs the investigations with sanctions against Chinese companies or other punitive actions, the Asian giant's government will be unlikely to stop, said Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative for the Atlantic Council.
Escalation of attacks in cyberspace is new territory and fraught with the potential to destabilize trade and relationships, so policy-makers will likely first see if "naming and shaming" of the actors works before moving on to other options, he said.
"We have known about Chinese espionage for 10 years, at least, Russian espionage before that, and we haven't tried this tactic, [but it seems we are saying], 'We know what we are doing hasn't worked, let's do more of it,-" Healey said. "I think going public with this can be good if we pick it up with energy ... and try to do full naming and shaming."
... Read full story on Dark Reading
Post a comment to the original version of this story on Dark Reading | <urn:uuid:ed35fa52-ac59-4aaa-88bc-cad9b65d035e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/quickview/chinas-cyberespionage-will-continue-unab/2742?wc=4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953029 | 281 | 1.640625 | 2 |
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Just in time for "Bike-to-Work Month," the Milne Library will be hosting a display throughout May of six to eight antique and interesting bicycles from the collection of local cyclist Michael Steele.
Steele will be at the library on Saturday, May 5, from 11 to 1, to discuss some of the interesting facts about his more unusual bikes.
Among his collection is a 1896 "scorcher" named for the peculiar braking system involving the human foot and lots of hot rubber. He will also talk about how h put together two English three-speeds to make a very comfortable tandem (bicycle built for two). He also has a rare 1943 bike that somehow missed becoming scrap for the war effort and a 1930s balloon tire.
Folks with newer cycles can bring their bikes into the back courtyard at the library for a bike wash and wax (with chain oiling and mini-safety check). The bike wash will also run from 11 to 1.
The North Berkshire BikeFest runs from May 13-19 but there will have activities and specials through May including at The Spoke, Images and Wild Oats Market, as well as Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts and Western Gateway Heritage in North Adams.
iBerkshires.com welcomes critical, respectful dialogue. Name-calling, personal attacks, libel, slander or foul language is not allowed. All comments are reviewed before posting and will be deleted or edited as necessary. | <urn:uuid:1ea43ba9-d474-4915-a23c-e9dccba55601> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iberkshires.com/story/41132/Milne-Library-Features-Bicycle-Collector-During-BikeFest-.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96869 | 303 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Guest Post by Jim Wolfgang, University System of Georgia I am Jim Wolfgang, Director of the Digital Innovation Group. The DI Group is a collaborative effort of the University System of Georgia’s Faculty Development Office and Georgia College. The focus is to “Enhance the Learning Experience” through the innovative uses of technology. Note that this is not the “academic experience.” We take a comprehensive look at what the opportunities are in the full spectrum of campus activities. Although primarily focused on higher education in the USG, we also work with private institutions, K-12, corporate partners, communities and anyone else with an idea.
Dr. Malcolm Murray is the Learning Technologies Team Leader at Durham University. Please join him for his session “Letting the Lunatics Run the Asylum: Students Developing Code for the Production Environment,” on Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 8:30-9:15AM, Titian 2303. Dr. Murray will also be presenting at BbWorld. To learn more about that session, read his earlier blog post, “Rethinking Student Feedback.” Last summer I got the opportunity to try something that I’d been wanting to do for the last five years – get some students working on building blocks! What began as an apparently simple task soon revealed itself to be far more complicated – perhaps the term “lunatic” I have used in the title of the presentation applies more to me than the students! That said, ultimately this was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.
Julie Evans is the CEO of Project Tomorrow. Please join Julie for her session on Thursday, July 14 at 10:15-11:10AM in Titian 2201A. Yes, you can! Let’s admit it – our school and district budgets are still struggling and so, now more than ever, we all need to be able to build a solid financial case as well as a compelling value proposition for the adoption or expansion of our online learning initiatives. You know all about the benefits of online professional development for our teachers and expanded course offerings for our students. But how do you get started building your online learning “return on investment” business case? Don’t panic – just follow these three easy steps.
Almost 2,000 of you are registered for BbWorld and now that it’s just 30 days away, it’s time to plan your trip! The MyBbWorld feature is available via BbWorld.com to help you build your itinerary and create a schedule that meets your personal interests throughout the week. But with more than 150 sessions on the program, you might not know where to begin. Some of your favorite Bb employees and well-known clients have provided their list of “must-see sessions.” There’s definitely something for everyone, whether you’re a director of technology, system administrator, instructional technologist, or a professional development coordinator. Take a look here as you plot out your trip:
Stephen P. Vickers is the Technology Enhanced Learning Manager at The University of Edinburgh. Please join him, along with Simon Booth from the University of Stirling, during their presentation, “A Plug and Play Learning Application Integration – Seamlessly Connect to Learning” on Thursday, July 14, 2011 from 10:15AM-11:10AM in Titian 2205. Many go to Vegas in the hopes of a big win. Well come to Vegas next month and I can guarantee you a win-win-win. The IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification truly delivers a win-win-win. It is a win for teachers and learners. It is a win for Blackboard system administrators. And, it is a win for developers of elearning applications. One of the great things about the second week of July is that thousands of people with a common goal all come together in a single place. The common goal is enhancing the student learning experience. This year promises to be even more exciting. Not only do we have OSCELOT Open Source Day 6, DevCon and BbWorld, but also the Blackboard Collaborate Connections Summit. This breadth of activity is perfectly mirrored in the impact of Basic LTI on the eLearning community. | <urn:uuid:057c279b-538f-4c7c-8932-b7bb5773bbf5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.blackboard.com/author/andrea-meier/page/10/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946825 | 892 | 1.625 | 2 |
Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something deeper - despite the displeasure of Achilles's mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess. But when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Achilles must go to war in distant Troy and fulfill his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus goes with him, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear. | <urn:uuid:99db2b1b-7b7f-4406-b240-18037cfdaeba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jspHeffers/display_product_info.jsp?isbn=9781408821985 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963715 | 142 | 1.585938 | 2 |
posted on September 08, 2012 08:40
LaVerne Boer is doing something special for kids and veterans.
Boer has created a branch of the Outdoor Adventure Foundation in South Dakota.
The foundation was originally started in North Dakota and is now part of other states in the Midwest including South Dakota. The goal of the foundation is to take kids and veterans with life threatening disease or life changing injury out into the wild for fishing and hunting adventures.
The first trip for the South Dakota extension of the foundation was a fishing trip to Northern Minnesota. Two teens with life threatening conditions were able to take part. It was a great story for those that are or know someone affected by a condition that could end their life. It’s great for turning a sad moment into the moment of a lifetime.
For the immediate future there is a South Dakota pheasant hunt
in the works and with the way things have been going it appears there is much more on tap for the South Dakota foundation thanks in large part to the work Boer is doing.
These stories and efforts are great first because of the impact they have on the lives of people like the two teens that were part of the Minnesota fishing trip. If a fishing trip and spending time outdoors can give those kids a special memory with friends and family then it makes all the effort well worth it.
It’s also great to see someone like Boer bringing attention to the state of South Dakota. With all there is to offer it’s great to see foundations like his making pheasant hunting an even more respectable activity. The more interest there is in South Dakota and pheasant hunting the better it will be for everyone.
These stories are great. Hopefully we hear more about the upcoming outdoor adventures planned from the Outdoor Adventure Foundation including the ones planned for South Dakota. | <urn:uuid:c6f40922-636f-4a80-b1c3-740d985573c1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gamebirdhunts.com/Resources/PheasantHuntingNews/tabid/77/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/1918/South-Dakota-Part-of-a-Special-Hunting-Foundation.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968302 | 374 | 1.726563 | 2 |
The head of Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice [CPVPV], denied on Tuesday plans to close shops selling flowers during Valentine’s Day.
Sheikh Abdullatif al-Sheikh told the Saudi daily newspaper al-Jazirah: “This is not our specialty. It is the specialty of other parties. We reject what violates the book (Quran) and the Sunna (the Prophet’s teaching) and Saudi Arabia’s regulations.”
“We deal with issues on a case by case basis, and if there is a violation our role is to liaise with concerned government parties,” he added.
Al-Sheikh’s statements followed widely-circulated reports that commission is planning to close all shops selling flowers on Valentine’s Day.
Previously, the commission banned the sale of red roses ahead of Valentine’s Day, forcing couples to think of new ways to show their love.
In 2008, it ordered florists and gift shop owners in the capital Riyadh to remove from their displays any red-colored items -- from roses to wrapping paper and teddy bears.
Non-Muslims in the kingdom are allowed to celebrate the holiday behind closed doors. Most Western expatriates live in gated communities called “compounds” that are beyond the jurisdiction of the religious police.
In 2009, Florists and toy stores in were reported to have hid their red roses and romantic gifts out of sight to avoid being shut down. This was part of an annual struggle between the kingdom’s religious police and its love birds. | <urn:uuid:e64c2180-b4ce-48e7-bf87-69ae274fadbe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2013/02/12/265923.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952161 | 342 | 1.601563 | 2 |
No one predicted what has come over Kenya in the last month since its disputed presidential elections. But since then, the country has fallen from the grace of being one of the most-stable countries on the African Continent to being the host of machete wielding street mobs of young, angry, disenfranchised men. Tourists and ex-patriots have largely left the country as security and the economy have plunged amid the unrest.
In all likelihood, Orange-Democratic Movement leader, Raila Odinga, won Kenya’s presidential election against incumbent Mwai Kibaki on December 27th. Raila, an ethnic Luo, widely led in opinion polls up until the election, accusing Kibaki, a Kikuyu, that he had not done enough to tackle corruption. Kenya’s other various minority tribes have long been hungry for a more prominent role in government. With the slow and non-transparent way the votes were counted in the days following the election, many were convinced fraud had taken place.
I knew something strange had come over the city on December 29th when I took an early morning stroll on the shores of Lake Victoria in the Western city of Kisumu, the hometown of opposition candidate Raila Odinga. The election results had not yet been released but tension was in the air because the results had been delayed for a second day. I was followed down a dirt road by two men, when one, bearing a machete, announced somewhat casually that, “We are going to kill you.” It was a little too casually in fact, for he was not convincing enough for me to readily cede my camera.
Nevertheless I began to scream for help as I was hit twice in the arm with his (luckily dull) machete and knocked to the ground. I screamed as loud as I could as the two men tugged on my camera bag while I took a few kicks. I could not physically let it go. It was impossible. I had come to Kenya to work, and work was now my life. Within a minute, several dockworkers heard my cries from inside the port and came running, sending the thieves to scurry off down some nearby railroad tracks.
I was left only with bruises, scrapes and a small laceration where the machete had hit. Thanking my helpers profusely, I marched on to my hotel in order to wash up before going to the police station to report the incident. The police were surprised that this would happen in a normally safe and peaceful town. However, within the hour the city descended into chaos as a shocked police force stood in passive observance of mobs looting shops and burning the houses of anyone not of the Luo tribe.
The fact that I had just walked away from a machete attack camera in hand may have given me an air of invincibility, but I began to photograph the mayhem as it unfolded on Kisumu’s streets. In a tense moment of being surrounded by a crowd, a man named Joseph stepped out and began to mediate between me and the mob, demanding they go about their business and let me do my job.
Joseph stayed with me like a guardian angel for the next several hours as the rioters looted and burned every shop in town and did the same to the houses of rival tribesmen. Even the livestock were not spared. Goats and cows were savagely torn apart, their limbs paraded around like trophies. All the while chanting “No Raila, no peace!,” the rioters seemed indifferent that I was documenting their actions.
This phenomenon was to last only a short while however, and after a few attempts at my camera and a few more close calls with machetes, shooting became impossible. Joseph and I holed up in my hotel room and prayed for peace to come over the city.
Calm came to the city that night after the Kenyan army marched in, firing tear gas and rubber bullets at anyone left on the streets. But the quiet was to be only temporary. On the following evening, the Kenyan Electoral Commission announced the results in Kibaki’s favor and swore him in within 30 minutes of doing so, prompting new and increased outbreaks of violence.
Unable to get food or water and out of cash, by this time I was waiting at the airport for the next flight to Nairobi. After waiting 12 hours for the flight, it was canceled due to security concerns. I was able to make it on a later flight with a different airline that evening. The riots that had taken place the previous day in Kisumu were no longer just an affair of Western Kenya, where I was, but had now spread throughout the country. As our plane flew out of town I could see the flames engulfing the streets and buildings below.
The violent aftermath that has engulfed Kenya has not subsided in the past month. It has begun to take on an eerie resemblance to Rwanda in 1994, whose genocide occurred under similar post-election tribal strains that descended into civil war. Mediators including former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, have failed to nip the problem in the bud. Last evening, Mugabe Were, an Orange-Democratic Movement MP elected on December 27th, was killed outside his home in Nairobi. Officials have stopped short of calling it an assassination.
Since its independence in 1963 Kenya has been ruled by only three presidents: Kenyatta, Moi and currently Kibaki. All men have followed the pattern of being ever-reluctant to relinquish their presidential powers. Despite his failure to implicate corrupt government officials as promised before winning his first term, Kibaki is most remembered for making primary education universal for all children in the country.
After years of peace and functioning democracy, Kenya’s brutal tribal tensions have come to a rolling boil and are now exposed to the rest of the world. But before too much sympathy is given to Odinga and his supporters, there isn’t much evidence to show he would have acted any differently as an incumbent. While most likely the true victor, Odinga and his ODM party is also the likely perpetrator of electoral irregularities according to the New York Times. Let us also remember that Kibaki, the current incumbent, himself came to power in 2002 as the opposition candidate of change, vowing to rid the country of corruption but keeping many of the crooks from the Moi administration in office. At the center of the problem is a nasty tribalist mentality that will continue to draw blood and tear apart the country unless ordinary citizens can look past tribe and see one another as united Kenyans.
With thanks to Joseph Otieno. | <urn:uuid:87d141e4-b70d-4760-a474-97795f6e1071> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jakelyell.com/2008/01/29/no-raila-no-peace-kenyas-bloody-tribal-unrest/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985907 | 1,377 | 1.664063 | 2 |
WikiLeaks’ new hosting company has a seriously cool setup in a former nuclear bunker. Read more about it here.
In addition to selling books, Amazon does a nice side business hosting websites. WikiLeaks was paying for space on Amazon servers this week until the retailer sent the leakers packing. No comment so far from Amazon, but WikiLeaks, now hosted in Sweden, responded with a dig about “the land of the free.”
According to Computer World, WikiLeaks turned to Amazon in order to cope with ongoing denial-of-service attacks meant to shut down the site. —PZS
WikiLeaks moved to Amazon’s hosting service Monday, apparently as a defensive tactic to avoid or mitigate aggressive denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that took the site offline for several hours that day, and hammered it again yesterday.
According to Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, the DoS attacks continued throughout Wednesday morning.
Amazon’s hosting terms of service allow it to yank a site off its service without cause. | <urn:uuid:27d3376a-0280-45f6-bb73-4b221d9e8b6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/amazon_evicts_wikileaks_20101201/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950831 | 216 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Are There More ... Like Me?
By Rev. Andrena Ingram
August 9, 2012
If you've been keeping up with the Olympics, you have heard that Ji Wallace, an Aussie Olympian, revealed his HIV status in a letter to Star Online!
I think this is amazing, and I am so grateful and proud of him for doing that! He said that he was inspired after watching an interview with Greg Louganis, who disclosed in 1995 -- that he was HIV positive and gay ... and that after hearing it, Wallace thought on it ... and thought on it ... and finally decided that he would come out as well.
As in Louganis' case, he has personalized this disease, put a face to it, breaking down the wall of stigma a "face" at a time. Perhaps his action will inspire others! I am sure that he agonized over it, possibly fearing the ramifications his "coming out" might have on his personal life. It was/and is a big step. It was a huge step for him, and a huge step for the HIV community at large.
Each time someone comes out, it breaks down the wall of stigma surrounding HIV. It makes it easier for 'someone' to get tested. There is strength in numbers.
However, not everyone is able to do this. There are those for whom coming out would be a dangerous thing. There are those whose livelihood (job and personal) would be jeopardized in doing so. There are those who are just not there. And that is okay! Coming out and disclosing is NOT for everyone. (You should disclose when entering into a 'relationship' with someone though).
Your decision not to disclose, and put yourself out there on front street is respected.
For me, I saw firsthand what the stigma of having HIV can do to a person. I saw it through my husband, who was so filled with shame and fear, that it literally killed him: the secrecy, not being able to go to the pharmacy and pick up his medication, his being silent (with the exception of me). All of that stress, and fear of rejection. "Stigma" killed him. And so, when I received my diagnosis, I did quite the opposite.
I began talking about it and sharing it with family and my church family when I was diagnosed. But it was after attending the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto Canada, where I was amazed at the number of people attending, that had HIV. I was in seminary at the time, and just beginning my journey into ordained ministry. I was inspired by the Reverends Gideon Byamugisha and Patricia Sawo, who are religious leaders, and spoke openly about having HIV. A 'clarion call' from our Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson had also gone out, during the Interfaith Conference held three days before: a call for religious leaders to get tested and reveal their status. Hanson asked religious leaders to take HIV tests and publicly disclose their results. [This] will give courage to other religious leaders and also their communities to then follow, which begins to break the silence and the stigma too often associated in religious communities with HIV and AIDS, he said.
I began to think ... and think. Could I do that?
During the conference, I had the honor of having dinner with my dear brother and friend Gideon at the conference, who spoke to me about his own journey of disclosing. He made imaginary circles on the table, while explaining to me about the process of coming out: family > friends > church > community > and so forth. The circle getting wider each time. That was how 'he' did it. And it was a process that took time. It is a process that takes time.
And so, I began my process ... has it been easy? No. I may make it 'look' easy. But each step is a calculated, prayerful one ... with support. That is very important, having support.
I believe, that the faith community bears a great responsibility for doing their part in combating this disease. What a powerful witness it is to have religious leaders who believe in the resurrection power of Christ, and are openly living with HIV. That presence has the possibility of reaching out to folks who are looking for a "safe" place to be, and receive support. Not to say that there are not "safe" congregations out there, being led by (negative) religious leaders. I am saying I have heard horror stories of many who have felt stigmatized by the church.
So ... I am thankful for Wallace for coming out. I am thankful for everyone who discloses, and more specifically those who do so, if for no other reason than to "face" it, and tear the wall of stigma down, one face at a time.
For those of you who are not able to come out, for whatever reason, know that we are out here with you and FOR you.
Religious leaders living openly with HIV ... bless you for your public witness.
And yet, I'd to know: are there more ... like me? Gets a little lonely out here sometimes. <3
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Is the Ribbon Enough?
Rev. Andrena Ingram
Reverend Andrena Ingram (also known as "Pastor Andrena" or "Pastor Ingram") has become a strong advocate for those living in the margins, as she once was. She is an activist in the HIV/AIDS arena, herself living openly and unabashedly with the HIV virus for over 22+ years.
Raised in South Jamaica, New York, Reverend Ingram served seven years of active duty in the U.S. Army. She would later move to the South Bronx, where she attended Transfiguration Lutheran Church with Pastor Heidi Neumark as her pastor and mentor -- empowering her to rise up out of herself and her life challenges, which seemed to her, at the time, insurmountable.
Reverend Ingram is a graduate of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, with a Master of Divinity. She has been the pastor of St. Michael's Lutheran Church on Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, Pa., for the past four years.
Reverend Ingram can frequently be found speaking about HIV/AIDS, encouraging everyone "to know your status, get tested, and be informed." Silence = Death.
Subscribe to Pastor Andrena's Blog:
May 9, 2013 - Undetectable ... but! A Blog Entry by Rev. Andrena Ingram
March 29, 2013 - Undetectable? Whaaaat? A Blog Entry by Rev. Andrena Ingram
March 15, 2013 - HIV Behind the Walls: A Blog Entry by Rev. Andrena Ingram
March 5, 2013 - All People's Church and Their Response to HIV: A Blog Entry by Rev. Andrena Ingram
March 1, 2013 - Journeying Through Wilderness: A Blog Entry by Rev. Andrena Ingram
A Brief Disclaimer:
The opinions expressed by TheBody.com's bloggers are entirely their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of TheBody.com itself. | <urn:uuid:31fd04e0-79ab-4f33-ac15-5bd0e90fe242> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thebody.com/content/68758/are-there-more--like-me.html?ic=2005 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977477 | 1,518 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Almost 80 million people -- more than a million in Juárez -- will vote today for Mexico's next president and determine whether the nation returns to old leadership, continues its current path or tries a new direction.
They will also vote for 500 federal representatives and 128 senators. Other public offices in 16 states -- governors, mayors and local representatives -- will be decided as well.
According to the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, 79,454,802 people are eligible to vote.
Ramón Salazar Burgos, an IFE official in Juárez's third district, said officials expect 65 percent voter turnout.
"We believe so because the presidential elections always generate more interest and it's more attractive for citizens. More of them come out and vote during presidential elections," he said.
Mexico's elections have been observed closely at the national and international levels because the results will reveal a significant new chapter in the country's future.
Today's vote will determine whether the Revolutionary Institutional Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for more than seven decades, returns to the presidential seat. A National Action Party win
Héctor Padilla, a political science professor at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, said the election will determine in large part a referendum on the country's current economic and security policies.
"You don't only choose a person, you vote for policies based on certain expectations," he said. "From my point of view, three things are at play: one, the continuation or modification of the economic model that has created great richness and inequality; two, to continue or not the strategies that have militarized the national life; and three, the viability of a national democratic project and whether or not to establish new bases to cement new political institutions and reform the state and the justice apparatus."
The PRI's candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, is the race's front-runner by several points, according to most polls. A survey by the Mexican daily Reforma found recently that 42 percent of potential voters favor Peña Nieto.
The PRD's candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is second place with 30 percent, followed by the PAN's candidate, Josefina Vázquez Mota, with 24 percent. Gabriel Quadri de la Torre, the candidate for the New Alliance party, trailed with less than 2 percent.
Claims of electoral fraud are common in Mexican elections, and that is why several groups will patrol voting booths.
Representatives from each party will be at every booth to witness when voting packages are opened, make sure voting sheets are authentic and unused, approve the vote counts and report irregularities.
IFE representatives will monitor any irregularities, including problems in setting up voting booths and disturbances that might require police involvement.
A special federal unit that investigates electoral crimes will be in charge of receiving reports of illegal political campaigning or attempts to purchase votes or voter IDs.
In addition, thousands of people will volunteer at the booths.
Several local nonprofits and international observers will keep an eye on voting locations and make reports about the electoral process.
In Juárez, the IFE's Salazar Burgos said, there will be more than 14,000 volunteers, 10,000 party representatives, 400 nonprofit observers and a dozen international visitors watching. Consular officials will be among the international observers monitoring the elections.
Election officials said they expect an orderly election. "We have the expectation that everything will turn out well, in peace and with tranquility," said Trinidad Gil, an IFE official in the city's first district.
Even though some IFE officials who traveled to the colonias to train voting booth volunteers were victims of robberies or physical assaults, Gil said, the officials were attacked because they were strangers in the neighborhoods and not for political reasons.
"What calms us is that we don't see a determined force or criminal organization that is against the institute. We feel well in that regard," he said.
Juárez police spokesman Adrián Sánchez said officers will work double shifts as part of a citywide operation, which will start early in the morning and will end when voting booths close.
"We will have increased coverage to have extraordinary surveillance in case there is any situation that could take place at the booths," he said.
Salazar Burgos said there will be 1,966 voting booths in homes, schools and government facilities.
Booths will open at 8:30 a.m. and close at 6 p.m., or when the last person in line votes. The first preliminary estimates are expected around 9:45 p.m., Salazar Burgos said.
Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera can be reached at [email protected]; 546-6129. Follow him on Twitter @AlejandroEPT. | <urn:uuid:799daf8d-5cfb-48d5-8b87-724721fc8ec2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_20982844/mexican-election-nearly-80m-expected-cast-ballots-today | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949773 | 1,004 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Bomb-sniffing dogs, police robots, DEA agents and Secret Service agents were at a Suwanee school last week.
At one point, an officer was told, "Drop it."
But Level Creek Elementary actually was one of the safest places anywhere. The occasion was Operation Safety Day, an event featuring various local, state and federal agencies showing their operations to the students.
-- What is your favorite law enforcement agency? Tell us in the comments below.
The "drop it" response came from students watching a demonstration of a Gwinnett Police hazardous-devices robot. (See attached video.)
The event was the result of a brainstorm by Dr. Nancy Kiel, the school principal. Two of her students have a father, Brett Bowers, in the DEA, and so he helped organize the event.
The U.S. Secret Service, postal inspectors, a DEA meth-lab detail were among those on hand, as well as units from the Gwinnett Police, Suwanee Police and Gwinnett Fire Services.
A U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter flew in from an air-support facility in Winder, and students got to go inside. (See attached video and pictures.)
The DEA demo included showing the fold-out shower that was attached to the truck. The officer explained that that shower is used to clean off suspects once they have been brought out of a house containing a meth lab.
Gwinnett Police gave a well-received demonstration of robots that are used in situations such as bomb threats and hostage standoffs. A camera is attached to the robot's face that will relay a signal to a TV monitor on the truck. "I don't want to get hurt," the officer told the students.
Also, the Gwinnett officer explained that after the robots arrive new, that officers must take apart and reassemble the devices. Once in operation, officers are responsible for the robots' maintenance.
"It's a great time to recognize our heroes and give thanks," Kiel told Level Creek students in the morning closed-circuit newscast, which is produced by students. | <urn:uuid:f94f8bfd-6f22-43a6-bf6f-a609cad01c1e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://suwanee.patch.com/articles/safety-level-creek | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97586 | 438 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
A consumer alert offers tips to make sure your donations really go to those who need assistance.
As the giving season approaches and thousands of Northeast residents continue a long, difficult recovery from Superstorm Sandy, the IRS is reminding people to be careful with their donations to avoid scams. "Following major disasters, it’s common for scam artists to impersonate charities to get money or private information from well-intentioned taxpayers. Such fraudulent schemes may involve contact by telephone, social media, email or in-person solicitations," according to an IRS consumer warning. The IRS provided these specific tips in their consumer warning: Taxpayers who think someone is trying to run a disaster-related fraudulent scheme should call IRS disaster assistance line at 866-562-5227. Or, visit IRS.gov using the keywords “…
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Patch will make a $1 donation to AmeriCares for every tweet with the hashtag #PatchRebuilds.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
You can help rebuild communities that were hit by Hurricane Sandy by donating cans of food, volunteering for cleanup efforts—or simply sending a tweet. Patch is excited to announce our new effort to help support devestated communities after the storm. For every tweet sent with the hashtag #PatchRebuilds, we will donate $1 to the AmeriCares Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief Fund, up to $125,000. Your contribution will go toward medical and humanitarian aid, grants and programs to help Sandy survivors. You can simply tweet the hashtag #PatchRebuilds, or go to our Patch Rebuilds website and tweet directly from there. A customized tweet that starts “My heart belongs to…” is created from the Patch Rebuilds website, and tweeters can type in an …
Franchise owner drives more than 15,000 sandwiches from Northern Virginia to New York and New Jersey to help storm victims.
Firehouse Subs in Manassas is part of a local effort that sent thousands of sandwiches to hurricane victims and fire responders in New York and New Jersey this month. Firehouse Subs on Sudley Road, along with the Annandale franchises, sent thousands of box lunches to aid workers, National Guard troops, hurricane victims and first responders in Staten Island, N.Y., Hackettstown, N.J. and Howard Beach, N.Y., according to a recent news release. Edwin Merrigan, the owner of the Manassas franchise, drove all night with his sister and a family friend to take the food to New Jersey. The trio slept in a truck along the way, the news release noted. Merrigan and the team worked with the New York City Mayor's Office, the Newark Mayor's Office, the …
Monday, November 5, 2012
Employees help out, and you can, too.
- LOCAL CONNECTIONS
Monday, November 5, 2012
It's been said it's far better to have a neighbor who's near, than a brother who's far away, but in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Americans across the nation have proven to be the best neighbors and the strongest of families. This past weekend, AOL and Patch employees took an opportunity to pitch in, packing two tractor trailers worth of food, water and supplies in Dulles and Baltimore. The donations are headed to Hurricane Sandy ravaged areas in New Jersey and Long Island. Want to join the relief efforts? Click here to donate: https://donate.networkforgood.org/aol "When a catastrophe of this size hits, we all feel it, both the hundreds of us who live in the impacted towns, and our colleagues who are watching and wishing they could help …
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
The meeting was supposed to happened Tuesday but is now scheduled or Nov. 7.
The Manassas City Public Schools Finance Committee meeting that was canceled this week because of Hurricane Sandy has been rescheduled and will now take place in November. The meeting was scheduled for Tuesday Oct. 30, but was rescheduled for 6 p.m. Nov. 7 in the Central Office Conference Room at 9000 Tudor Lane in Manassas.
While we prepared, rode through and assessed the damage, technology informed us, entertained us and connected us to friends and family.
The oft-repeated advice in news reports, conversations with family and on-line in the lead up to the storm was to charge your cell phones. The new twist this year was the addition of instructions on how to use Twitter via text messaging (SMS). The Wall Street Journal included it in a list of storm-related apps and advice. Twitter shared its own list of who to follow for emergency updates (as did Patch in Northern Virginia). For complete Hurricane Sandy coverage from Patch, click on the news tab above and then click on the Hurricane Sandy section. The American Red Cross encourages us to post that we are Safe and Well in areas that may be cut off from reliable information in situations when disasters lead to mass displacements of people. …
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
The governor said power should be restored to all Dominion customers by Thursday.
Gov. Bob McDonnell said in his final press briefing for Hurricane Sandy that Virginia was "spared a significant event." “First responders and private partners, they have really done an amazing job preparing for the storm and applying lessons learned from previous storms and putting in an incredible amount of hours,” McDonnell said. McDonnell cited concerns about rivers cresting as flood waters go into the major arteries, and he expected an update on that later Tuesday. Virginia was awarded a federal disaster declaration yesterday, said McDonnell, noting he was “delighted” that President Barack Obama and FEMA were on it immediately. "That is only for federal direct assistance to allow them to provide resources directly and as we do our …
One Woodbridge absentee voting location is closed.
Absentee voting is underway in Prince William County Tuesday. Prince William County Office of Voter Registration and Elections reports that although the Woodbridge DMV office is closed today, other voting sites are scheduled to open barring any power outages. Call 703-792-6470 for the latest update. The Woodbridge DMV Office is closed today, Tuesday, Oct. 30. The Manassas office is open. Other voting sites are scheduled to be open today, barring power outages. The deadline to request an absentee ballot be mailed to you is today, at 5 p.m. The following absentee voting locations are open Tuesday, Oct. 30:
An update of road conditions from Prince William County communications office.
Treat intersections where traffic signals are out as four-way stops. For a complete update of Virginia roads from the Virginia Department of Transportation, call 511 or visit 511virginia.org. The following list was provided by the Prince Wiliam County communications office. New as of this email: LOCATION STATUS: Old Church Rd at Slate Run High water / road closed with cones & signs – PD on scene Piper Ln at Observation High Water – Signs posted **NOT Passable** Location Ingram Dr at 1 lane bridge High Water at the bridge **NOT Passable** Little River Rd / Log Mill Rd High Water / Tree Down **NOT Passable** Artemus Rd / Pageland Dr High Water – Cones **NOT Passable** 2628 Alvey Dr Power pole down blocking road – Dominion …
Prince William County operated shelters will be closing Tuesday.
Prince William County's shelters at Stonewall Jackson High School and the Ferlazzo Building will close today. County officials advised the SJHS shelter will close at 10 a.m. Tuesday. "A total of 17 residents used the shelter last night," said an email from the communications office. "There are no residents at the shelter currently." Prince William County opened two emergency shelters at noon Monday. One at the Ferlazzo building in Woodbridge and another at Stonewall Jackson High School at 8820 Rixlew Ln. in Manassas. | <urn:uuid:967acc84-b14d-4b37-9b2e-c95b3ea6b840> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://manassas.patch.com/topics/Hurricane+Sandy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945773 | 1,653 | 1.695313 | 2 |
It’s time for another edition of Hot Books in My Middle School Classroom! Every month or so I like to share the books that are currently grabbing the attention of my sixth grade students. We just received our latest Scholastic Book order and it was a packed box!
The The 39 Clues Books are extremely popular right now. I can not keep my copies on the shelf in our classroom library and now three students have purchased the boxed set offered by Scholastic. Some of them are reading the books while participating in the online game while others are just in in for the story. Regardless, I am constantly seeing one title or another in the series open on someone’s desk.
This month Scholastic offered Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me in the book clubs and a few students ordered their own copy to reread. When You Reach Me was a big hit as our class read aloud earlier this year so I was thrilled to see it resonate enough that students would want to reread their own copy.
There were orders for a few perennial favorites this month, too. Speak found a few new readers this month, along with the classic The Incredible Journey. I also had a few more orders for Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, from the last few students who did not yet order their copy.
I love to see what my students order because I sometimes learn about books I was not previously familiar with. For example, I had a student who recently ordered The Robe of Skulls: The First Tale from the Five Kingdoms (Tales from the Five Kingdoms), a fantasy book I have not read. Opening the box today, I was intrigued by the cover and just ordered a second copy for our classroom library. I also did the same with The Cupcake Queen, which might have the best cover ever!
Finally, informational books are always popular with my students. Recently, many of my students have been reading the Mythlopedia series from Scholastic. This month we had a few orders for the latest title in the series- She’s All That!: A Look-it-Up Guide to the Goddesses of Mythology (Mythlopedia). The books are set up to look like Facebook profiles and my students love them. I love them, too because they are a great way to share information about Greek mythology.
Those are just a few of the books that are popular in my classroom right now. What books are your students reading? | <urn:uuid:54751408-671b-4bd1-8d23-91bbc6f6b497> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thereadingzone.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/hot-books-in-my-middle-school-classroom-2/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=309c070579 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979105 | 508 | 1.75 | 2 |
RIT Student Receives Grant from Clinton Global Initiative
Carolyn Dunne uses funds to assist deaf students in Ghana
June 16, 2009
by William Dube
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Carolyn Dunne, a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, is using a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative University to enhance educational opportunities for deaf students in the African nation of Ghana.
Through the initiative’s Commitment to Action program, Dunne will work with two Ghanaian schools for the deaf to create new computer labs to improve educational programs and to increase communication and dissemination opportunities for students and faculty.
“The Commitment to Action program challenges students from all over the world to develop initiatives that promote global equality, environmental improvement and educational advancement,” says Dunne, a third year double major in advertising and public relations and journalism from Greece, N.Y. “I was inspired by the goals of the program and decided to tackle an issue that is easily fixable but has not received the attention or resources necessary to improve it.
“Deaf citizens in many Third World countries, including Ghana, are often marginalized and there are little to no educational services available for this population, which only increases the ostracizing effect,” she continues. “By providing working computer labs, we can assist underfunded educational institutions in better serving the needs of this community and increase deaf students’ ability to communicate with the outside world.”
Dunne first became involved with the Clinton Global Initiative University in 2008 and attended its national conference at Tulane University in New Orleans. She is currently developing a student organization at RIT to create additional Commitment to Action projects on campus.
“Through programs like the Commitment to Action, students can gain tremendous experiences they can not get in the classroom, while also really making a difference in the world,” Dunne adds.
The Clinton Global Initiative University is a component of the Clinton Global Initiative, which was founded by former President William Jefferson Clinton in 2005 and seeks to bring together global business, political and community leaders as well as ordinary citizens to tackle pressing international challenges such as poverty, environmental degradation and lack of access to quality health care. The initiative’s Commitment to Action program is cosponsored by the Pat Tillman Foundation. | <urn:uuid:aa5cac7e-f5d7-49e6-94fb-67b05ae797c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rit.edu/news/story.php?id=46878 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957556 | 471 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Billions in Airline Fees
U.S. Airlines collected almost $5.7 billion in fees baggage fees and reservation change fees in 2010, and it’s estimated the figure will rise to about $9 billion when other charges are calculated including fees for pet transport, in-flight snacks, Wi-Fi and more.
No big surprises in the baggage fee figures; the latest airline financial data from the Dept. of Transportation shows that airlines made more money than ever from those irritating bag fees. Revenue was up more than 20% in 2010 compared to the previous year.
Domestic Airline Baggage Fees:
- 2010: $3.4 billion
- 2009: $2.7 billion
An even sharper comparison can be seen by viewing data from 2007, when most airlines did not charge a fee for a first or second checked-bag (though there were fees for overweight or oversized luggage); bag fees from 2007 to 2010 increased a whopping seven-fold!
The equally irritating reservation change fees also rose from 2007 to 2010, but by a much more modest factor of 2.5. And look at the most recent figures: change fees for 2010 actually declined over the year before:
Domestic Airline Reservation Change Fees
- 2010: $2.3 billion
- 2009: $2.4 billion
The Southwest No Fee Factor
The reason for the decline in change fees might be attributed, at least in part, to what I’ll call the “Southwest Factor“.
First of all, according to the passenger data, the number of domestic fliers in 2010 increased by about 10 million over 2009, and about half of those passengers flocked to Southwest. That airline, of course, does not charge a “change fee” and it also gives customers two checked-bags for free.
Another factor may be the weather; airlines have become increasingly pro-active when it comes to waiving change fees in the face of storms that are expected to delay or cancel flights.
Baggage Fee Creep
Meanwhile, the continued growth in bag fees for the other carriers can be attributed, for the most part, to “bag fee creep”. For instance, American Airlines, which was the first legacy carrier to introduce a first checked-bag fee, initially priced it at $15 back in 2008. By the summer of 2009, the airline raised that fee to $20, and by Feb. 2010, it jumped again to $25.
Airlines and Military Baggage Fees
Bag fees were in the news recently when several airlines were criticized for charging members of the military fees for 3rd and 4th checked-bags, but this was not the first time the issue made headlines.
Back in 2008, American Airlines changed its military baggage policy after some criticism to began allowing military members to check three bags for free. After this latest media firestorm, some airlines increased military their baggage allowance to include four free bags, while American now has one of the most generous policies, which allows servicemen and women five checked-bags for free. | <urn:uuid:aadb159c-2ee9-416b-a4b9-421b0afadeba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.farecompare.com/news/airline-fees-could-reach-9-billion/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950114 | 632 | 1.554688 | 2 |
It is one of the defining motifs of our age: the righteous fury of the religiously affronted. It is not peculiar to any faith: in the last few decades in Britain alone, Christians have demonstrated against a musical (Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s Jerry Springer: The Opera), Sikhs have agitated against a play (Gurpreet Bhatti’s Behzti), and Muslims have endorsed or excused an extra-judicial death sentence handed down for the crime of writing a novel (Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses). The protesters in each case may not have been representative of the majority of their co-religionists, but they have wielded sufficient numbers, and sufficient menace, to encroach upon the fundamental freedoms of speech, thought and expression.
It might have been expected that similar divinely inspired outrage would be prompted by The Book Of Mormon, a satirical Broadway musical co-written by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The show, which won nine trophies in last week’s Tony awards, is by all accounts everything that might be expected of a Parker/Stone production: brutally irreverent, cheerfully scabrous and triumphantly offensive. It notably lacks, however, one traditional feature of Parker and Stone’s lampoonery: an indignant response from its victims. The Mormons have instead opted to be rather sporting about it – and even to perceive it as an opportunity.
The church’s head of public affairs, Michael Otterson, wrote a winningly wry op-ed for the Washington Post in April, noting that in the seven years Parker and Stone had toiled over their musical making fun of Mormons, the church’s labours in Africa alone had (among other things) provided clean water to four million people, wheelchairs to 34,000 and restored sight to 126,000. An upbeat advertising blitz – the “I’m A Mormon” campaign – was launched upon New York City in June. Parker and Stone might become the two most effective missionaries the Mormons have ever had.
“The church has always taken a high road about things like this,” says Chris Hicks, columnist with the church-owned Salt Lake City newspaper Deseret News. “The church was established in 1830, and people have been going after it ever since. I think they’ve learnt that if you react overly, it can backfire.” The church may, of course, be thinking politically. It would not do to look like pious fanatics when two Mormons – Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman –are plausible presidential nominees. But it may also be that this American-founded faith has more respect than most for that American-pioneered balance between freedom of speech and freedom of worship – you do not, after all, get the latter without the former.
Whatever else might be thought of Mormon beliefs, it’d be pleasant if this one, at least, caught on. | <urn:uuid:f506752f-7ddb-4419-93db-20f0419482d9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.monocle.com/monocolumn/2011/how-teasing-just-makes-a-mormon-merrier/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956382 | 614 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Barack Obama struck Libya not for narrow U.S. interests; he did it for the world. The Secretary of Defense himself said on ABC’s “This Week” that Libya was “not a vital national interest to the United States.” This is no jingoistic war waged by America for America. It is fought with the altruistic aim of making the world a better place.
Barack Obama’s motives are pure. There may be oil in Libya. And prices may be approaching $4 a gallon at the pump. But you can be sure there will be no blood spilled for oil. He is too noble for such uncouth motivations. He is a Democrat like us. He is good like us.
If this is an unfair characterization of the mental contortions used to justify Libya by the vocal critics of Iraq, then the born-again hawks, by all means, should explain in their own words why one megalomaniac dictator deserved to be bombed while another deserved to be overlooked; one oppressed people merited help and another rated to be ignored; a war without Congressional approval is dubbed legal and a war with Congressional approval is deemed illegal; a war conducted by a coalition of several dozen nations is decried as “unilateral” while a war conducted by essentially three countries is praised as “multilateral”; a war months in the offing is a rush job while one sprung on the American people without so much as a presidential address avoids that designation; and bombing foreigners is jingoistic when ordered by a Republican but humanitarian when ordered by a Democrat. The major objections to Operation Iraqi Freedom generally apply to Operation Odyssey Dawn more easily.
Muammar Gaddafi is an unhinged brute unfit to rule a pet, let alone a country. The people of Libya are right to desire his hasty departure. But he poses no threat to America and his country is not a vital U.S. interest. On the question of Libya, war is not the answer. Neither is kinetic military action.
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). He has appeared on Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, Sky News, PBS, CSPAN, and other networks. He writes a Monday column for Human Events and blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.
Pages: 1 2 | <urn:uuid:f10539f5-24d5-437e-bd27-4ddfdca35d33> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://frontpagemag.com/2011/daniel-flynn/born-again-leftist-hawks/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950832 | 515 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization
Join us Thursday, July 26th, from 7-9PM for an evening with Mike Staudenmeier, author of “Truth and Revolution“, who will talk about who the Sojourner Truth Organization was and its legacy in revolutionary and left movements today.
STO was a revolutionary organization from the 1970′s and 1980′s that developed some of the foundational work and theory of anti-racist and anti-white supremacist thought and organizing today. STO’s work and theory centered around challenging white-supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. It was involved in multiple different campaigns and movements during its lifetime, however, its important work and legacy in current movements and organizations is a little known and talked about history.
In the 1970s and 1980s, as the movements of the sixties receded from view, the revolutionary left in the United States went through a series of profound political, demographic, and cultural transformations as it struggled to find its footing in a rapidly changing world. The unorthodox political agenda of the Sojourner Truth Organization represents a small but powerfully resonant thread running through this arc of history. Drawing on detailed archival research and oral interviews, Truth and Revolution skillfully combines social and intellectual history approaches to shed light on both the theory and the practice of STO. Perhaps most famous for its theoretical formulations of white skin privilege, the group also developed a novel analysis of class consciousness. Historian Michael Staudenmaier also includes a final chapter linking the legacy of STO directly to the challenges facing twenty-first century radicals.
As always, if there is an event you’d like to schedule at the center you can contact our events committee at [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:75a39036-7c32-4dc9-9a5e-e506fddb058b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://inotherwordsbooks.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/truth-and-revolution-a-history-of-the-sojourner-truth-organization/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958536 | 369 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Last Thursday I tore myself away from my desk - the piles of notes and contracts for a film festival I'm producing, the rewrites of a short film series already overdue, the fundraising letter for a major documentary project - and did something REAL. I volunteered in a soup kitchen.
With a dozen other Muslims I donned an apron denoting "Muslims Against Hunger," and helped out at the Community Soup Kitchen of Morristown. This soup kitchen is an ecumenical effort supported and run by funding and volunteers from 34 Christian and Jewish congregations, local and corporate from the greater Morristown area, and a smattering of Muslims led by Zamir Hassan, who was elected Vice President and Trustee of the Community Soup Kitchen in 2006. Mr. Hassan is coordinator of the Muslims Against Hunger Project (www.muslimsagainsthungerusa.org) and has succeeded in making New Jersey Muslims a regular presence in this important social service.
Muslims Against Hunger was serving hot lunches to working poor and homeless last September on a special "Muslims Serve Day" - honoring the victims and families of the tragedy of September 11, 2001. They were serving through the month of Ramadan, when helping to feed the hungry enhances the blessing of the fast.
I chose this particular opportunity to help out because it was Eid el Adha, the "Feast of the Sacrifice." While Eid el Fitr, the celebration at the end of the month of Ramadan is becoming known in America, Eid al Adha goes largely unnoticed by the general public. Eid al Adha celebrates the end of the Hajj or Mecca pilgrimage that Muslims are supposed to make once in a lifetime if they are financially or physically able.
The "sacrifice" in the title of the holiday comes from the Biblical story of Abraham who was asked to show his loyalty to his Lord by offering his son in sacrifice. At the last moment a ram was presented for Abraham to kill and his son was spared. This redemption is a central celebration of the Muslim pilgrimage, and this year it occurred last week, conveniently nestled between Hanukah and Christmas.
So alongside Raheel, Salwa, Isa and Daoud, I set tables to accommodate 200 guests. We poured scores of glasses of milk. Sliced tens of loaves of bread. And finally, the best part, served hot tandoori chicken (from the Taj Restaurant in Edison), scented rice, corn, salad and dessert to lots and lots and lots of people. The line wrapped around the large fellowship hall annex of Morristown's Church of the Redeemer.
It took no time to discover that many of the guests responded happily to hearing "Buenos dias" and "Feliz Navidad." Two guests greeted us with "Salaam 'alaykum," the Muslim "hello" that translates as "peace be with you." Men and women welcomed their lunch with dignity and smiles. Men and women served them lunch with humility and gladness.
For all the important things I think I do as a film producer and consultant on inter-cultural and inter-faith matters, it all comes down to participating with others in goodness. As Muslims, indeed as humanists, we are mandated to compete in doing good for one another. Giving a day of my time was no sacrifice at all. | <urn:uuid:8b59d2f1-d586-4db0-90aa-d3321afed842> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.nj.com/njv_anisa_mehdi/2007/12/muslims_against_hunger.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963704 | 681 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Sometimes you get a feeling that things are changing(for good). Recent assembly elections was one such moment. High voting percentage, debunking the myth of anti-incumbency and appreciation of leaders who delivered were prominent take-aways. I’ll try to group together the things which were different:
1. First one definitely has to be high turnout of voters. Earlier high turnouts were normally because of some emotional issue or strong desire for change. But high turnout here means something more important. I means that more people are engaged. One way to look at it is that if I did not go vote last time but went this time around, there can be many reasons but one of the possibilities is that I believe that my vote matters. This is a simplistic way to put it but the bottom line is that people are more aware about their rights (and hopefully about responsibilities too).
2. Second point is more like change in quality of governance : Try to remember when an incumbent government went to election saying – ‘See you are better today than what you were 4/5 years back and we have contributed to this change so please vote us back to power for your good.’ I remember PV Narshimha Rao doing it in (1996) elections, though everybody gives him and Manmohan Singh credit for changing India’s economic condition back then, but they were not voted back to power. Mr. Vajpayee primarily with the help of Pramod Mahajan tried to convince people that India was shining and even though they had quite a few things to show on their report card, people did not buy their campaign. But it was pleasant surprise to see Sheila Dixit, Raman Singh and Shivraj Singh Chouhan making their work a show point of campaign and coming back to power. People recognised development in Delhi, perhaps basic infrastructure growth in MP and grassroots development in Chhattisgadh. In the most basic terms it means that people perceived their work in last five year praiseworthy. We must understand that they did not and could not solve all the problems but they did enough to convince people that they ha d done their bit. This means those five years were well utilized in terms of growth and development. Their must be something about Sheila Dixit that she keeps winning elections after elections. May be it is as simple as doing the work you are supposed to do, pretty much the same way that Paulo Coelho says regarding the huge success of Alchemist that ‘secret of its success is that there in no secret’. Similarly for the success of seemingly low profile leader Raman Singh and Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
3. Another interesting point was that local issues indeed mattered in state elections and that is the way it should be. Mumbai did not affect the result in later states a lot . Not to say that whatever happened in Mumbai on 26/11 is not relevant but just to say that state elections are about local issues loksabha election for national ones. It is as simple – say if the road joining my village to the district headquarter deteriorated across the board, somebody should be held accountable and I won’t mind if that is my local MLA (more so if he has nothing else to show). I would definitely be worried about the Mumbai attack but unless it is state elections in Maharashtra, I’ll relate it more with national election. But sad part is reverse is not true and we have seen in past that local issues become the issue in loksabha elections and verdict is fragmented.
4. I’ll keep this post short , will add one more point – How will this result reflect in upcoming loksabha elections All I’ll say about right now is that most probably result s in these states will be similar but that doesn’t mean much. Two big parties there INC and BJP on their own will struggle to get magic figure of 273 and lot depends on wha t happens in some of the states where picture is not clear – for example Andhra Pradesh(how big a force Chiranjivi will be ?), Bihar(how do people give credit to Nitish kumar for work done vs. the grief brought by flood ), who Ms. Mayawati eventually sides with, what will be victory margin of party winning in Maharashtra and who gains from the probable decrease in number of seats of Left. But we still have some time for that and things will shape up in due course .
You can look back and feel good about this event and we should also thank Election Commission for the tremendous job. It is not for nothing that this body is respected so much. The way elections were held has changed tremendously since T.N. Sheshan and others who have taken the legacy further. Though election commission could not do anything about it but one hopes that result in J&K were less polarized and in not so many phases.
. Surprisingly we never see a wave for pro-incumbency. You can justify in a number of ways why it is not there but the bottomline is that it is not there.
. Another reason for higher turnout may be increased participation of new voters(those who were voting for the first time).
. Though not related here to Indian political scenario, but Bill Clinton did go to elections for his election in second term saying the same.
. Only others winning three terms have been left in WB and Narendra Modi. But WB has hardly any progress to show and Modi’s mention normally drives extreme reactions and needs more than one post for unbiased assesment.
.Delhi may spring some surprise though
Later has to do more with security | <urn:uuid:d7101e29-dcab-42d8-9edc-b1fc2d10285d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://atechie.net/2008/12/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978379 | 1,156 | 1.554688 | 2 |
- Accuracy In Academia - http://www.academia.org -
Dismantling Progressive Slot Machines
Posted By Malcolm A. Kline On April 10, 2012 @ 4:52 pm In Book Reviews | No Comments
To channel the late CBS commentator Andy Rooney, “Didja ever wonder if public school teachers stay up nights worried about whether the parents of the students can teach this class better than they?”
Well there’s a school district in Short Hills, NJ, where the faculty should be going through a collective bout of insomnia right about now. “One thing I learned is that the most powerful way in which nine- or ten-year-olds resemble grown-up Progressives is in their love of regulating things,” Joe Kernen writes in Your Teacher Said What? Trying to Raise a Fifth Grade Capitalist in Obama’s America.
Kernen co-hosts the CNBC talk show, Squawk Box. His co-author, Blake Kernen, is his wise-beyond-her-years daughter, who also inspired the title. Her dad did find a part of the education system that, if not fully functioning is at least functional: “A study by the Federal Reserve Board of New York clearly showed that the more economics classes you take in college, the less likely you are to support any part of the Progressives agenda.” Unfortunately, many don’t.
He also provides a useful analogy for understanding progressivism’s enduring appeal despite its less-than-stellar track record when put into practice. “In Las Vegas and other cities that use the mathematics of probability to separate customers from their cash, by far the most profitable ‘game’ of chance is the one played one-on-one with slot machines: Put your money in there, and pray that more comes out there,” Kernen writes. “At the very pinnacle of this one-armed banditry are pay-offs that take a small percentage of the total amount of money played in a whole network of machines, tempting arithmetic-challenged players to keep pouring money into slots hoping for a million-dollar payday.”
“Let me repeat that: a slot machine that takes money from other slot machines in order to promise a giant payday.” If you think that is the punch line, hang on.
“The technical name for this system: progressive slot machines,” Kernen explains. “Makes you think.” So does this book.
“Progressives who are reliably hostile to the idea of intelligent design in human evolution, are positively ecstatic about it in economic planning,” Kernen notes. “Of course, intelligent design in biology at least argues that the designer is divine and resides in heaven; in Progressive economics, it just assumes that the designer has a Ph.D. and lives in Washington, D. C.”
Ironically, Kernan’s own background encompasses both economics and science. He spent a decade as a stockbroker after earning a master’s in molecular biology from MIT.
In the course of his narrative, Kernen demolishes or “refudiates,” as Sarah Palin might put it, many myths. For example, he dissects the tired old assertion that the U. S. trails the world in indices of well-being, usually measured by dollar amounts spent on government social welfare programs. “With net private social-welfare added in, the United States takes the lead, with $7,800 annually, 16 percent more than Sweden,” Kernen reports. “Yes, Sweden.”
Kernen shows how the attempts of social engineers to improve the human condition with government mandates frequently go awry. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is one of these. Although the goal of the ADA was “to improve job prospects for disabled Americans,” “employment of disabled men in their prime earning years—age twenty-one to fifty-eight—declined after the passage of the ADA.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia .
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail [email protected] .
Article printed from Accuracy In Academia: http://www.academia.org
URL to article: http://www.academia.org/dismantling-progressive-slot-machines/
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Accuracy in Academia: http://academia.org/
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Copyright © 2009 Accuracy In Academia. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:724f1d09-e86b-4fee-a200-9f0608d62b58> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.academia.org/dismantling-progressive-slot-machines/print/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934866 | 999 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Foreign tourists satisfaction rate with recreation possibilities in Latvia is quite high – on average 4.3 points out of 5. Latvia is estimated better in terms of spending a vacation or holidays, while in order it would also be a place of business tourism, both – the state and services providers have a long way ahead, according to Factum Group research data.
Latvian NPS (Net Promoter Score) rating for holidays or vacations makes up +26 points, formed by 44% of the respondents that would suggest spending holidays in Latvia, 18% that would not suggest it and 38% with a neutral stance. Russian and German tourists evaluate recreation possibilities in Latvia the highest, while Estonians – the lowest. Tourists believe the way Riga mixes historical and modern elements is its advantage, together with nature, sandy beaches and Jurmala.
The fact 65%-71% foreign tourists define themselves as coming after impressions, knowledge and nature affirm the potential of such a tourism image. Similalry, there are also many green and leisure eco-tourists (31%-42%), especially from Germany.
Tourists also approve of tourism objects and sightseeing, exploring traditions, the local cuisine, SPA and accommodation. Shopping, public catering, entertainment, night life and getting to know Latvian lifestyle have gathered less than the average number of points.
Business tourism earns minus 18 points – only 22% would suggest Latvia as a place for business tourism, 48% would not do that, while 38% have a neutral stance. Respondents single out the geographical location of Latvia and its closeness to the Russian market as an advantage, at the same time criticizing the infrastructure quality, lack of road signs, legislation, business environment, corruption and fraud.
Hotels themselves should focus more on providing adequate quality services, seminars and conferences venues, better attitude from the part of the staff and language skills. Greater attention should also be turned to arranging the environment and making tourism information more accessible. Russian tourists are the most positive about this aspect, while German, Estonian and active business tourists express their criticism. Mostly people get information from their friends (47%), Internet engines (41%) and their own experience (38%), followed by tourism guides (25%) and Latvian tourism portal www.latviatourism.lv (18%).
People tend to organize their travels themselves, however Russian tourists make use of tourism agencies most often.
81% of the respondents visited Riga during their trip, 21% – Jūrmala, 8%- 9% – Ventspils, Liepāja or Sigulda, 5% – Valmiera and Cēsis, 4% – Kuldīga – 4%, 3% – Daugavpils, 1% – Jelgava or Rēzekne. Every fourth relaxed at the beach, enjoyed peace and silence, met with Latvian people, got to know Latvian life style or spent time in some entertainment or nigh life activities, around 10% went hiking, explored local traditions, visited SPA or spent time together with children. | <urn:uuid:7018605f-c54a-45f2-9223-8eb79f87f04e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bnn-news.com/44-foreign-tourists-suggest-spending-holidays-latvia-19026 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94333 | 633 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Kasargod: Government has drawn up a project to provide employment to endosulfan victims after giving them proper training, Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy today said.
The Human Rights Commission had given certain instructions to the government and it would be implemented in a time-bound manner, Mr Chandy said.
The aim of the state government is to provide treatment and rehabilitate endosulfan victims. However, the government alone would not be able to do this, he said, adding, "Everyone in various sectors should unite together and come forward to help the endosulfan victims."
He was speaking after inaugurating a two-day national workshop 'Concord 2012' (Consultative Workshop on Comprehensive rehabilitation of endosulfan victims and rejuvenation of ecosystem in Kasargod district) in Kasargod.
The proposed medical college in Kasargod district was to extend treatment to endosulfan victims, he said.
Delegates from across the country, relatives of endosulfan victims and Environment activists are attending the workshop.
Story first published:
July 21, 2012 17:12 IST | <urn:uuid:94569bab-fe71-4813-b106-57a2f8bdbed0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ndtv.com/article/south/rehabilitating-endosulfan-victims-government-s-aim-oomen-chandy-245987 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94302 | 235 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The word "archbishops" uses 11 letters: A B C H H I O P R S S.
No direct anagrams for archbishops found in this word list.
Adding one letter to archbishops does not form any other word in this word list.Words within archbishops not shown as it has more than seven letters.
All words formed from archbishops by changing one letter
Browse words starting with archbishops by next letter | <urn:uuid:cf602ef9-fc03-4932-b36f-63d2441548b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.morewords.com/word/archbishops/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965878 | 97 | 1.539063 | 2 |
The Coup de Grace to the Economy (March 15, 2006)
Please examine the two charts in this entry carefully. If you look closely, you'll see they spell "doom" in rather large, dayglo letters.
Why? Because they reveal two ominous trends: that real estate investment has become an unprecedentedly large percentage of total GDP (Gross Domestic Product), and that homeowners are no longer able to extract cash from their property via refinancing.
Why do these two trends spell doom? The first and most important reason is that heavy reliance on residential real estate investment always precedes a recession. The more extreme the dependence on housing, the more extreme the recession (and subsequent drop in real estate values).
For the chart which proves this, go to a previous entry entitled Housing Bubble III: Pop!
The second reason is that merely halting the rise of real estate values has been enough to utterly quash the removal of spendable cash from Americans' home equity ATM (otherwise known as the family home). As noted in a previous entry this week, Americans drew out $880 billion from their homes via re-fi's and home equity credit lines in 2005 alone. Add up all the home equity extracted since 2000, and you have a number in the trillions.
So what happens, now that the home equity ATM has finally run out of money? For one thing, consumer spending falls. And since consumer spending is 2/3 of the U.S. economy, that's all you really need to know. Squeezing 2/3 of the economy is more than enough to induce recession, especially when you add in the millions of households who will be paying more to service their adjustable-rate mortgages when the "resets" kick in later this year.
copyright © 2006 Charles Hugh Smith. All rights reserved in all media.
I would be honored if you linked this wEssay to your site, or printed a copy for your own use. | <urn:uuid:0916a732-821e-4dca-9754-785a01c641c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar06/coup-de-grace.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946001 | 401 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Statistics scream and shout.
Together they’ve created a problem that’s deafening to the ears of business leaders in Canada: How do you put the brakes on out-of-control drug costs in your company’s benefits plan?
Express Scripts Canada (one of the largest providers of health benefits management services), headquartered in Mississauga, is eager to help, and silence the angst.
Earlier this year, it announced the findings of its Canada 2011 Drug Trend Report, produced to provide one of the country's most comprehensive analyses into the use of prescription drugs and related trends in the private sector throughout Canada.
Although drug spending remained relatively flat in 2011, private drug plans in Canada wasted approximately $5 billion. The report defines waste as "spending that does not result in improvements to health outcomes".
If those stats are startling, how about this one: it’s estimated that prescription drug costs have risen by over 600 per cent since the 1980s, and plan sponsors see no relief in sight.
Boomers are aging in dog years.
Almost half of Ontario’s budget is now eaten up by health care costs.
Express Scripts Canada President Mike Biskey, a former IBM executive, says plan sponsors – the organizations that provide drug plans to their employees – need to engage members and help them change their behaviour to effectively control and, where possible, eliminate all forms of waste.
He says his company is the perfect vehicle to help introduce better service, and serious cost savings.
Says Biskey: "The key to reducing waste is to actively engage plan members and help make it easy for them to consistently choose a lower-cost, clinically effective medication from a lower-cost delivery channel while encouraging and facilitating adherence to their medication therapy. Optimal outcomes for the patient and the plan sponsor are only possible by changing the behaviour of patients."
Express Scripts manages more than a billion prescriptions each year for tens of millions of people. On behalf of its clients — employers, health plans, unions and government health programs —it makes the use of prescription drugs safer and more affordable.
It also innovates to enhance patient care, reduce pharmacy-related waste and increase therapy adherence. Building on a strong clinical foundation, the company applies its understanding of the behavioural sciences — an approach it calls ‘Consumerology’ — to make it easier for people to choose better health care solutions.
The parent company (headquartered in St. Louis) provides integrated pharmacy benefit management services, including network-pharmacy claims processing, home delivery, specialty benefit management, benefit-design consultation, drug-utilization review, formulary management, and medical and drug data analysis services. It also distributes a full range of biopharmaceutical products and provides extensive cost-management and patient-care services.
It’s mail-order pharma – on a North American scale.
Its Mississauga offices (5770 Hurontario) and pharmacy (located near Winston Churchill and the 401) offers a made-in-Canada solution to the problems of cost and delivery.
The number one issue for the Canadian firm is public awareness of its service, and to that end, Express Scripts recently invited over 50 plan sponsors to its Health Forum held earlier this year.
While Biskey knows winning over new clients is a long-term process, the firm has already signed some impressive clients, including CP Rail, Canada Post and SCI Logistics. It also supplies its services to the entire First Nations Benefits Program with Health Canada. That plan includes about 800,000 people.
The company is winning over new clients one-by-one, says Biskey, and does it by installing best practices” from its U.S. parent, and “tailoring” it to the unique Canadian market.
He calls Canada a “great opportunity” for growth, and improving benefits management here is the “next evolution in our business.”
He admits that the daunting numbers associated with health care delivery creates tons of challenges, but with that comes opportunities, and many are articulated in its Drug Trends report.
The report’s most startling stats revolve around numbers – the wasteful uses of drugs. It’s broken down into three categories:
• Channel Waste: Waste in drug spend that is created by using suboptimal dispensing intervals for maintenance drugs, and by not using the most cost-effective distribution channels, totaled up to $1.1 billion in 2011.?• Drug Mix Waste. Waste in drug spend that occurs by using higher-cost medications that generate no additional health benefits, drug-mix waste in 2011 was up to $4.2 billion?• Non-Adherence Waste. Waste in overall health-care spend that is created when the patient does not take medications as prescribed, which leads to a worsening of condition that requires additional health-care spending, such as more physician visits, extra laboratory tests, additional drug therapy, emergency-room visits, hospital admissions, and short-term disability insurance payments. The total cost of non-adherence in Canada to the health-care system is estimated at $7 billion-$9 billion per year.
The report also noted that on a national basis, the average annual drug spend per claimant in 2011 was $761, up slightly from a year previous. This flat trend is a reflection of the increases in utilization, which have been offset by the decreases in cost per prescription (script).
Utilization is rising by about 2.5 per cent a year.
It takes a team effort to reduce waste, says Biskey, and Express Script is eager to partner with companies big and small, public sector and private, to provide a) better service, and b) lower costs.
Patients should not pay higher prices for mediations that generate no additional health benefit, and private payers need to drive “behavior change” to ensure patients optimize the use of lower-cost, clinically effective medications through the use of generic substitution and therapeutic substitution.
It’s the Express Scripts way. Its fully functional pharmacy provides mail-order delivery to its clients (as well as walk-in services for local residents).
South of the 49th parallel, Express Scripts has some of the biggest plan sponsors under contract, including the U.S. military. It just celebrated its 10-year anniversary as the PBM for the U.S. Department of Defense’s TRICARE Program.
Express Scripts Canada knows that while people have good intentions, they are wired for inattention and inertia - people are creatures of habit. Therefore, traditional tools, such as education and financial incentives, will not close this gap between intent and behaviour because they focus on changing patients' minds rather than activating the good intentions that already exist.
With the ability for clients to interact with Express Scripts over the Internet, and with the company offering up its services to report on savings to its clients, the move to mail order pharmacy is taking hold across Canada, just as it did in the United States.
While the number of prescriptions processed here is small in comparison to south of the border, the fundamental principles of providing better service while cutting back on excessive waste are universal.
The fact that 65 per cent of a drug plan’s costs today are for “maintenance medications” (to help with things like depression, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, etc.) shows that there is lots of room for companies to lower their costs while improving delivery of service.
Making the health care system sustainable, means bridging the “behavioral gap” (waste) and creating an architecture (new drug plan) that works for plan sponsors.
Yes, it’s true. Money talk and statistics shout.
But Canadian plan sponsors can find a rather quiet solution to their problems.
The script, says Biskey, is being written right here in Mississauga. | <urn:uuid:c3652b70-d482-43cc-ad72-af7787225701> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mississauga.com/news-story/3129653-scripting-a-new-solution-to-high-health-care-costs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948582 | 1,631 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Wondering why we have conflicting reports on the S&P Case-Shiller Housing Index? One financial press source is singing hallelujah while another is glum? Because S&P is using not seasonally adjusted data in their press release and other news outlets are using the seasonally adjusted data. Not seasonally adjusted, the composite-20 index increased 0.7%, but the seasonally adjusted composite-20 housing index decreased -0.1%.
Same situation for the composite-10 index. The not seasonally adjusted composite-10 increased 0.8% from March to April, but seasonally adjusted? That flat-lined, no change.
The above graph shows the composite-10 and composite-20 city home prices indexes, seasonally adjusted. Prices are normalized to the year 2000. The index value of 150 means single family housing prices have appreciated, or increased 50% since 2000 in that particular region. These indices are not adjusted for inflation. The composite-20 index, seasonally adjusted is at it's June 2003 low of 148.93. Not seasonally adjusted the composite-20 index is 138.84, only sightly up from it's all time low of 138.16.
The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices are calculated monthly using a three-month moving average and published with a two month lag. Their seasonal adjustment calculation is the standard used for all seasonal adjustments, the X-12 ARIMA, maintained by the Census.
So, why would S&P report the not seasonally adjusted data, when we all know spring is the start of house buying and building season? According to their paper on seasonal adjustments, they claim the not seasonally adjusted indices are more accurate. Why? It appears the housing bubble and bust has screwed up the cyclical seasonal pattern. What a surprise.
The turmoil in the housing market in the last few years has generated unusual movements that are easily mistaken for shifts in the normal seasonal patterns, resulting in larger seasonal adjustments and misleading results.
Regardless, we believe seasonal data should be reported for headline buzz. It is spring and assuming the housing buying months are not increasing the data is just plain wrong.
S&P does make it clear that data should be compared to a year ago, to remove seasonal patterns, yet claims monthly percentage changes should use not seasonally adjusted indices and data. From Winter to Spring? I don't think so! Below are the seasonally adjusted indices for April 2011.
For April 2011, the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price indexes shows 19 of the 20 cities tracked are down for the year.
It seems the only place going up is our never ending corrupt Washington D.C. area.
Below is the yearly percent change in the composite-10 and composite-20 Case-Shiller Indices. As you can see, there is clearly a new decline going on for 2011. This is what is meant by double-dip in declining home prices.
Below is a table are all of the cities of the composite-20 index for their year change. This should give a feel for the bubble and now current devaluations. Notice the stronger correlations in price declines to the unemployment rate and lack of job growth, such as Detroit.
The graph below, from Calculated Risk, shows how much prices have fallen from their peaks in the Composite-10 cities. Calculated Risk has additional custom graphs and data analysis and is the uber site for residential housing data and graphs.
Basically a decade of home appreciation is gone when taking inflation into account.
It's clear foreclosures and distressed sales are simply blowing up seasonal and not seasonal monthly adjustment data. More ominous is the backlog of foreclosures being held off of the market with estimates varying. One report says 2.2 million homes are currently in foreclosure. At the end of Q4 2010, foreclosures were 1.3 million.
Here is the March overview, unrevised.
S&P does a great job of making the Case-Shiller data and details available for further information and analysis on their website. | <urn:uuid:8c6207b2-c0af-4334-bb4e-fa55356bb37c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/case-shiller-home-price-indices-april-2011 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953777 | 840 | 1.515625 | 2 |
The little girl climbed into bed, her father reassured her that he'd checked everywhere. She nodded, it wasn't his fault.
Everyone knows what a spider sounds like when it moves, the muted scuttle of many hairy legs across a wooden floorboard or behind an ancient bookcase, and yet, it never occurs to them to wonder how they know this.
House spiders are of course too small to make any noise audible to the human ear. These weren't house spiders, they weren't even really spiders.
She pulled the covers over her head as he turned out the light, the scurrying began.
2 MAKING HARD DECISIONS
-This is so difficult, you can't expect this of me. How can I choose only one of you?
-You said I was your true hero, said Aragorn
-yes, you are but
-I thought you had decided to protect the four lands with me, said Allanon
-And I intend to, but
-And I was your soulmate, said Raistlin
-Well, what I meant...
-You know, I have work to attend to, so if you would be so kind as to make a quick decision, said Vetinari
-This is ridiculous, I can't go through this any time I want to reread a book!
"Disliking Carrot would be like kicking a puppy."
"You kicked a puppy," Lobsang said accusingly. | <urn:uuid:a79563fc-fad7-4103-9a1b-7dece68c9ea3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=203070 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983204 | 307 | 1.53125 | 2 |
may have different effects on different children, and the side-effects may also differ from child to child. For some, prescription medication side-effects far outweigh the benefits.
Healthy Goods offers a selection of natural and nutritionally sound products to help reduce ADHD symptoms.
Many children with ADHD are low in minerals such as zinc, iron, and magnesium. Iron in particular can be as helpful in managing symptoms as prescription medication. Seeking Health Iron is gentle on the stomach. BodyBio offers Zinc and Magnesium supplements in liquid form.
Seeking Health Optimal Fish Oil Liquid has a natural lemon flavor, and Pharmax High DHA Fish Oil is flavored with essential orange oil. Studies show that omega-3s can improve hyperactivity, impulsivity, and concentration for kids (and adults) with ADHD. These tasty formulas make it easy to get kids to take their fish oil. | <urn:uuid:d292bb9e-8556-44da-b84e-725d96006956> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://healthygoods.com/natural-treatment-products/adhd-natural-treatment-products.html?food_restrictions=327&has_reviews=32544 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931954 | 180 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Send me a note:
darin AT metrompg D-O-T com,
Testing grille blocking & wheel skirts: +5.7% improvement
Posted Tuesday, December 6/05 in Mods & Tests
The start of a conversation I had this weekend at a Christmas party:
Neighbour - "So, looks like you got a new Firefly."
Me - "Yup."
Neighbour - "Sort of looked like there was some cardboard taped on it."
Me - "Um... Yup."
I was just relieved he didn't notice last weekend, when I pulled into the driveway with wet newspaper plastered across the front of the car. Somehow that fact made it slightly less unusual to be explaining homebrew aerodynamic mods at a Christmas party. It was made even easier still by the fact that the modifications were a solid success.
Overview: testing DIY aerodynamics:
This all started when I came across an EV World article about a guy called Phil Knox, who aerodynamically modified his 1994 Toyota pickup and boosted his highway mileage by 28%. While his modifications were fairly extensive, they weren't difficult to make - with materials available from any home improvement store.
Tongue-in-cheek, the EV World article described Knox as a "preacher" spreading "the environmental gospel of aerodynamics".
And clearly, I'm not the only convert. Read the comments following that article and you'll see that Phil Knox has inspired more than a few folks to learn about aerodynamics and efficiency. Those extensive and enthusiastic comments apparently vaulted the story to "most-discussed" status at EV World. It even resulted in the launch of a Yahoo group to continue the dialogue in a more user-friendly forum.
And ultimately, it resulted in the article you're reading right now.
Keep on reading to find out how my first steps into DIY aerodynamics increased my highway mileage by nearly 6% under controlled conditions.
The mods: grille block...
If you read about the one-shot aerodynamic test that was an "appetizer" to this one, you'll recall my roadside modification took the form of a "papier mache" wet newspaper barrier to divert excess airflow around the car which would otherwise have gone through the grille, the radiator and the engine compartment. In addition to aero benefits, the grille block aids efficiency in cold weather by permitting the engine to reach operating temperature sooner, and the transaxle to run warmer also.
The results, while startlingly good (an apparent 3.1% mileage boost), were based on just a single run and so could hardly be called definitive.
But they were definitely enticing - I was encouraged to to have a second look, this time over repeated runs. So I remade the grille block using cardboard and duct tape. (I've graduated from papier mache!)
... and rear wheel skirts
The second modification under examination was also very quick and easy to make. Rear wheel skirts - cardboard cutouts that enclose the back wheels within the wheel arches. Think Honda Insight.
The aerodynamic principle is simple enough: an uninterrupted air flow along the side of the car past the wheel skirts will be cleaner than one that has to cross the gap between the body and wheel, plus interact with the turbulence generated by the spinning wheel itself.
These are easy mods: after 20 minutes with a utility knife, some cardboard and duct tape, I headed for the "test course".
Route, conditions & results
Again, this ScanGauge-enabled trial was run under constant speed-controlled conditions (using cruise control, set once), on a level stretch of road. Unless otherwise noted, results are averaged from bi-directional runs to cancel any effects of wind/grade. (For details of the course, see the air filter test, part 1.)
The weather was overcast and calm, with NE winds below 3 kts (5.6 km/h / 3.5 mph). The road was dry. The temperature was about 2 C / 35.6 F.
Just to review, here's the result from the one-run "appetizer" from before, testing the papier mache grille block:
I started this new set with a bi-directional run with the cardboard grille block; next was a series of 3 bi-directional runs with combination of grille block and rear wheel skirts:
Observations & conclusions
It looks like it's time to graduate again - from cardboard to something that won't turn to mush in the rain and snow!
Making a more durable grille block will be easy: either a vinyl bra, or semi-permanent plastic slats installed in the grille openings would do the job. I say semi-permanent because I still want the option of easily changing cooling flow as the season and other conditions demand.
It should go without saying that tinkering with grille blocking requires careful attention to the temperature gauge to avoid potential overheating.
Wheel skirts will be more challenging, as they need to look respectable and also be easy to remove (to facilitate tire changes or other repairs that require the wheel to come off). I'm also reluctant to drill any holes in the bodywork for fasteners, as they will be prone to rust.
One final observation: tinkering with aerodynamics is bound to draw attention - like comments at a Christmas party. Aero experiments will yield more than just efficiency data - you'll get psycho/social feedback as well:
"That look -- especially the distinctive 'skirt' that extends halfway down the rear wheels -- is not for everyone. When I took the Insight for a spin, one driver stopped me to call it a computer mouse on wheels. (Business Week article).
Why exactly people can have such strong reactions to an aerodynamically shaped car is a topic for another post.
Other possible future aero tests
Tuft testing; wheel disks; deflectors/dams ahead of the tires; ride height lowering; front wheel arch gap fillers; underbody panels (belly pans)...
Free Fuel Riding on the Wind - EV World
Papier mache aerodynamics: +1.5 MPG? - MetroMPG.com
Aerodynamics links - MetroMPG.com - (scroll down to Aerodynamics)
darin AT metrompg D-O-T com, or here | <urn:uuid:f23de993-659d-4fc8-8b40-7841f823b9e8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://metrompg.com/posts/grille-blocking-part-2.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951965 | 1,322 | 1.65625 | 2 |
This list features ten of the most grisly and intriguing serial murders in the world. Some of the perpetrators of the crimes have been featured in movies and fictional works, or served as inspiration for such. Others in the list have been caught and punished. Few are still at large, unidentified.
1. The Whitechapel Murders in London (1888):
These murders are noteworthy because of their shocking ferociousness, and because they were committed by the legendary Jack the Ripper. He, no doubt, is the most well-known of all serial killers worldwide. His blood-lust and unsolved kills are the stuff of many mystery novels, but he was by no means a fictional character. In 1888, he violently murdered prostitutes in Whitechapel, London, typically by slitting their throats and removing their internal organs. This fierce savagery caught the attention of the media and terrified everyone. Though the police vigorously sought him out, Jack the Ripper always managed to elude them. Whenever he killed, he seemed to appear out of nowhere, encased in fogs, and then vanished without a trace. He was never found, and nobody knows up to this day why he suddenly stopped killing and disappeared. Nobody even knows his real name. Jack the Ripper is a moniker given to him based on a letter that he allegedly wrote to the media.
2. The Boogeyman Murders:
Hamilton Howard Fish, better known as Albert Fish, was a child killer, rapist and cannibal who committed many heinous acts in the 1920s in the United States. Because of his savage ways, he has been called many things: a vampire, a werewolf, the Gray Man, and the Boogeyman. But he had a deceptively benign, grandfatherly appearance, and this was how he lured many children towards him. He allegedly victimized about a hundred children in different places in the U.S., raping, killing and/or eating those children, using special recipes he cooked them with. In 1936, at age 65, he was executed on the electric chair after being convicted.
3. The Ted Bundy Murders:
Theodore Robert Bundy was a psychopathic serial killer who murdered many women in the 1970s, including college women who broke up with him or had offended him in some way. A law student himself, he was attractive, well-mannered, intelligent—and very adept in deceiving people and luring them to their deaths. He murdered about 35 victims, but some experts say he may have killed more than a hundred. He bludgeoned and strangled his victims, at times also raping them or having sexual intercourse with their dead bodies. Ted Bundy died on the electric chair in 1989.
4. The Charles Manson Murders:
Charles Manson was the charismatic leader of “The Family,” a cult-like group in California in the 1960s. Members of the group, under Manson’s direct orders, went on killing sprees, the most famous of which were the Tate and LaBianca murders. Prior to this, Manson was a convicted criminal who committed various offenses. He was also a singer and songwriter. He still lives, serving his sentence.
5. The Pickton Murders:
Robert Pickton was a Canadian pig farmer turned serial killer. He is thought to have murdered about sixty women; most of them sex trade workers and drug users in the Vancouver area. Given the large number of victims, about a hundred million dollars was spent on the investigation of his crimes. The trial that led to his conviction was the longest in Canadian history, and perhaps the most controversial. | <urn:uuid:e16f703e-c448-4b5f-8b69-6ab6ef3e2eb2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://top-10-list.org/tag/murders/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987274 | 744 | 1.625 | 2 |
As technologically advanced as today's sportbikes are, it's interesting to note that while even the most basic and bottom-rung econobox automobile comes standard with an anti-lock brake system, none of this seemingly basic safety technology has made its way to the supersport market. Of course, it could be said that ABS (anti-lock brake system) has barely made inroads into the motorcycle market in general, much less sportbikes. But with many sport-touring and standard motorcycles now being offered with ABS as an option, why hasn't it been even attempted with a supersport bike?
The two biggest reasons have been performance and weight. A sportbike is lighter, nimbler, smaller, and more powerful than your average motorcycle, and as such demands a more tactile approach to riding it. This is especially true when it comes to slowing all that performance; today's braking systems are highly-developed designs that are engineered not only to bleed off all that speed as quickly as possible, but also to provide the rider with maximum control over that deceleration via feedback and modulation. Any interference in that line of communication degrades the riding experience, and most ABS systems' threshold up to this point have been too low to avoid the disconnection that would inevitably occur on a supersport machine. And then there is the added weight of all the additional componentry and hydraulic fluid, of which there is very little room for on the compact and pared-to-the-bones build of a sportbike.
Leave it to Honda, then, to tackle the seemingly impossible task of engineering an ABS system specifically for supersport models that doesn't intrude upon their personality or performance.
We covered some of the primary aspects of Honda's new Combined ABS in a previous issue ("Honda Unveils Brake-By-Wire ABS for Sportbikes", Late Braking, September '08), but now that we've managed to get a CBR600RR C-ABS model for test (the C-ABS is also available as an option on the CBR1000RR), there are a ton of important details on the system that have come to light.
The biggest difference between conventional ABS and Honda's Combined ABS is that the Honda system is a true "brake-by-wire" design, meaning the brakes are electronically controlled--and that includes normal operation, when the ABS isn't triggered. Conventional ABS uses hydraulic pressure generated by the brake master cylinders from the rider pulling on the front brake lever/pushing on the rear brake pedal and redistributes it via a pressure control valve and/or pump to vary the hydraulic force at the point of wheel lockup. This often causes a loss of feedback at the lever (with many ABS, the lever feel becomes mushy and soft) due to the hydraulic pressure being rerouted through the various components when the system is activated.
These are the main components...
These are the main components of the Combined ABS: the two valve units on upper left and upper right measure the hydraulic pressure generated by the rider through the conventional brake master cylinders, and send data to the electronic control module in the center, which interprets the data and sends commands to the power units on lower left and lower right to apply pressure to each brake.
In order to make room for...
In order to make room for the C-ABS rear brake power unit located underneath the tailsection, Honda had to add a remote reservoir to the rear shock.
Both the standard and C-ABS...
Both the standard and C-ABS bike receive this lower fairing extension for '09 that completely covers up the engine. Its main purpose is to hide the C-ABS components that are mounted behind the engine.
Instead of using hydraulic pressure generated by master cylinders in the usual manner, the Combined ABS produces hydraulic pressure using an electric power unit for each wheel. The power unit consists of a DC stepper motor that spins a gear-driven ball screw (basically a screw riding in ball bearings that allows it to spin smoothly and quickly) attached to the hydraulic piston. These are controlled by an electronic control module (separate from the engine's ECU) that interprets data provided by valve units--again, one for each wheel--that measure the amount of pressure the rider exerts on the brake lever/pedal. The ECM tells the power units exactly how much hydraulic pressure to generate based on the data from the valve units; because the ECM is capable of hundreds of calculations and commands every second and the power units are able to adjust the hydraulic pressure just as quickly, there is no need for an inline pressure control valve as with a conventional ABS. This also eliminates the pulsing at the lever common with standard systems.
If the rider isn't controlling the brakes with hydraulic pressure, then won't the feel at the lever be non-existent? Another innovative idea in Honda's system called the "stroke simulator" handles that aspect. In order to simulate the brake feel in both normal and ABS operating modes, two rubber cushions of differing density in each valve unit provide increasing amounts of resistance as the lever/pedal stroke increases. This is designed to offer a familiar sensation to the rider that is claimed to be nearly identical to those generated by traditional hydraulic brakes. | <urn:uuid:ef28a47f-0ffc-433d-bd7a-4856fb1f4bee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sportrider.com/bikes/146_0905_2009_honda_cbr600rr_abs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950767 | 1,084 | 1.75 | 2 |
A Wildfire Is Burning All Illusions in Israel
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"When I look out my window today and see a tree standing there, that tree gives me a greater sense of beauty and personal delight than all the vast forests I have seen in Switzerland or Scandinavia. Because every tree here was planted by us." -- David Ben Gurion, Memoirs
"Why are there so many Arabs here? Why didn't you chase them away?" -- David Ben Gurion during a visit to Nazareth, July 1948
Four days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to place thousands of migrant workers in a prison camp deep in the Negev Desert because, as he claimed, they pose a "threat to the character of [the] country," a burning tree trunk fell into a bus full of Israeli Prison Service cadets, killing forty passengers. The tree was among hundreds of thousands turned to ash by the forest fire pouring across northern Israel, and which now threatens to engulf outskirts of Haifa, Israel's third-largest city. Over the last four days, more than 12,300 acres have burned in the Mount Carmel area, a devastating swath of destruction in a country the size of New Jersey. While the cause of the fire has not been established, it has laid bare the myths of Israel's foundation.
Israelis are treating the fire as one of their greatest tragedies in recent years. A friend who grew up in the Haifa area told me over the weekend that he was devastated by the images of destruction he saw on TV. His friend's brother was among those who perished in the bus accident. Though he is a dedicated Zionist who supported Netanyahu's election bid in 2008, like so many Israelis, he was furious at the response -- or lack of one -- by the government. "Our leaders are complete idiots, but you already know that," he told me. "They invested so much to prepare for all kinds of crazy war scenarios but didn't do anything to protect civilians from the basic things you are supposed to take for granted."
On 3 December, Netanyahu informed the country, "We do not have what it takes to put out the fire, but help is on the way." To beat back the blaze, Bibi has had to beg for assistance from his counterpart in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Western-backed Palestinian Authority and Israel's American and British patrons. Israel is a wealthy country which boasts to the world about its innovative spirit -- its US-based lobbyists market it as a "Start-Up Nation" -- but its performance during the forest fire revealed the sad truth: its government has prioritized offensive military capacity and occupation maintenance so extensively that it has completely neglected the country's infrastructure, emergency preparedness and most of all, the general welfare of its citizens.
Beyond the embarrassing spectacle of Turkish supply planes landing in Tel Aviv just six months after Israeli commandoes massacred Turkish aid volunteers on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, or the confessions of impotence by the hard-men Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, the fire exposed a terrible history that had been concealed by layers of official mythology and piles of fallen pine needles.
"There are no facts"
Among the towns that have been evacuated is Ein Hod, a bohemian artists' colony nestled in the hills to the north and east of Haifa. This is not the first time Ein Hod was evacuated, however. The first time was in 1948, when the town's original Palestinian inhabitants were driven from their homes by a manmade disaster known as the Nakba.
Most of the original inhabitants of Ein Hod, which was called Ayn Hawd prior to the expulsions of '48, and was continuously populated since the 12th century, were expelled to refugee camps in Jordan and Jenin in the West Bank. But a small and exceptionally resilient band of residents fled to the hills, set up a makeshift camp and watched as Jewish foreigners moved into their homes.
In 1953, a Romanian Dadaist sculptor named Marcel Janco convinced the army not to bulldoze Ein Hod as it did the scores of nearby Palestinian towns it had ethnically cleansed five years prior. He proposed establishing an art commune to generate tourism and contribute to the culture of Zionism. Today, the rustic stone homes that once belonged to Palestinians are quaint artist studios, while the village mosque has been converted into an airy bar called Bonanza. Visitors to the town are greeted at the entrance by Benjamin Levy's "The Modest Couple in a Sardine Can," a sculpture depicting a nude woman and a suited gentleman in a sardine can, which was unveiled by Israeli President Shimon Peres in 2001.
After the catastrophe of 1948, the original Palestinians of Ayn Hawd set up their own village three kilometers away from what is today known as Eid Hod. For decades the villagers resisted attempts to dispossess them and were surrounded by a fence during the 1970s to prevent them from expanding according to natural growth. But they finally won official recognition in 2005. This meant that for the first time since the establishment of Israel they could receive electricity and trash service. Meanwhile, more than forty other Palestinian villages inside Israel remain "unrecognized." The 80,000 or so residents of the villages, which lay mostly in the Negev desert, are tax-paying citizens of Israel. However, they have few rights; their homes are routinely demolished to make way for Jewish settlements and they are deprived of basic services.
I visited both Ein Hod and Ayn Hawd in June. When the residents of the Jewish village Ein Hod saw me filming, they reacted with a mixture of suspicion and hostility. "I know what you're doing!" an elderly woman sneered at me, insisting that I not film her. Inside the bar, I asked patrons if the place was in fact a converted mosque. "Yeah, but that's how all of Israel is," a woman from a nearby kibbutz told me as she sipped on a beer. "This whole country is built on top of Arab villages. So maybe it's best to let bygones be bygones."
I provoked another annoyed reaction when I began filming a tour guide leading a group of elderly Israelis around the village. Speaking in Hebrew, the guide told the tourists as she took them through the art studios that they were inside "third generation houses" -- forget the Arabs who lived in them for hundreds of years. In the studios I noticed that much of the art being produced was Judaica kitsch for sale to foreign tourists -- generic shtetl scenes from the long lost, distant world immortalized in films like Fiddler on the Roof.
Later, before taking her group to the town's Hurdy Gurdy museum, the guide mentioned a "welcoming committee" that vetted potential residents. Presumably this was how Ein Hod kept the pesky Arabs down the road from returning home. That and the Absentee Property Law of 1950 which placed all "abandoned" Arab property in the hands of the Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Land Administration, a provision that consolidated what the exiled Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament Azmi Bishara called "the largest armed robbery in history."
During a break, the tour guide pulled me aside and demanded to know who I was. It was clear the villagers had grown wary of curious outsiders. Introducing herself as Shuli Linda Yarkon, a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University, the tour guide told me she's the leading authority on Ein Hod. She said I had to allow her to review all the footage I shot. She claimed that this would ensure that I not mistranslate words she used like kibbush, a Hebrew term that means "conquest" but is commonly used to refer to the occupation of Palestine.
"So what about the conquest you mentioned?" I asked her. "Why didn't you tell the tourists who lived in the houses before 1948?" Visibly irritated, Yarkon remarked, "I've concluded after years of research that there are really no facts when you discuss this issue. There are only narratives." She assured me that Ein Hod's Jewish population maintained excellent relations with the expelled residents: "Go ask them. They will tell you how they feel."
So I did. After following a winding dirt road around a hillside for several kilometers, I was inside Ayn Hawd, the Palestinian village. There was no installation art here, just ramshackle houses, dirt roads, a mosque with a tall minaret and lots of kids playing in the streets. Almost immediately some of the town's residents appeared from their homes to greet me. Abu al-Hisa Moein, a village council member and schoolteacher, invited me to spend the rest of the afternoon with his family on a patio beside his home, which appeared newer and more stately than those of his neighbors. He told me his ancestors arrived in the village more than 700 years ago from what is now Iraq. His relatives who were expelled to Jenin in 1948 told him they would be too angry to even lay eyes their former homes with the new occupants inside. When I mentioned the bar built into the old mosque, Moein shook his head in disgust. "It's very bad. It's an insult," he said.
Moein took me inside his home for a tour, showing me the spacious, immaculately clean parlor and the picture window with a sweeping view of the valley below. He had built the whole place, he said with pride. Down a hall, his 13-year-old daughter, Ansam, was reclining on the floor of her room reading John Knowles' classic bildungsroman, A Separate Peace. She leapt to attention when I entered and spent the next ten minutes showing me her library of literature. With night setting in, Moein and his family took me back on the patio. There, he unfurled a map of Mandate-era Palestine and ran his fingers over the names of scores of villages destroyed on the coast between Jaffa and Haifa by Zionist forces in 1948. He pointed to towns like Kafr Saba, Qaqun, al-Tira and Tantura, the site of a horrific massacre of unarmed Palestinian prisoners on the beach just one month after the Deir Yassin massacre. Moein was a history teacher, but Israel had forbidden him from discussing these events in his classroom, and is in the process of criminalizing any public observance of them.
As darkness blanketed the hills, I realized that I had lost track of time. I told Moein that I needed to get back to Tel Aviv. With that, his wife rushed into the house and gathered a bundle of grapes she had picked from a tree in the family's yard, packing it for me in some tupperware from their kitchen. Then Moein walked me to my car and hugged me goodbye.
Redeeming the land
By now, both Ein Hod and Ayd Hawd are nearly empty. Most of their residents have fled for safer ground while the thousands of pine trees planted to provide Ein Hod's artists with a sense of solitude are reduced to ash. As the trees burn, the fire exposes another dimension of Israel's foundation that it has attempted to bury.
The pine trees themselves were instruments of concealment, strategically planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) on the sites of the hundreds of Palestinian villages the Zionist militias evacuated and destroyed in 1948. With forests sprouting up where towns once stood, those who had been expelled would have nothing to come back to. Meanwhile, to outsiders beholding the strangely Alpine landscape of northern Israel for the first time, it seemed as though the Palestinians had never existed. And that was exactly the impression the JNF intended to create. The practice that David Ben Gurion and other prominent Zionists referred to as "redeeming the land" was in fact the ultimate form of greenwashing.
Described by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe as "the quintessential Zionist colonialist," the first director of the JNF, Yossef Weitz, was a ruthless ideologue who helped orchestrate the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. Weitz notoriously declared "It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples ... If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us ... The only solution is a Land of Israel ... without Arabs ... There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Palestinian Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and the old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one tribe."
After Weitz's wishes were fulfilled, the JNF planted hundreds of thousands of trees over freshly destroyed Palestinian villages like al-Tira, helping to establish the Carmel National Park. An area on the south slope of Mount Carmel so closely resembled the landscape of the Swiss Alps that it was nicknamed "Little Switzerland." Of course, the nonindigenous trees of the JNF were poorly suited to the environment in Palestine. Most of the saplings the JNF plants at a site near Jerusalem simply do not survive, and require frequent replanting. Elsewhere, needles from the pine trees have killed native plant species and wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. And as we have seen with the Carmel wildfire, the JNF's trees go up like tinder in the dry heat.
But it seems that nothing can stop the JNF's drive to "green" the land. Even in the parched Negev desert, the JNF is advancing plans to plant one million trees in a plot called "GOD TV Forest." To accomplish the highly unusual feat of foresting a desert, the Israel Land Administration has ordered the expulsion of the Bedouin unrecognized village of al-Araqib, home to hundreds of Israeli citizens who have lived in the area for more than 100 years and who have served in the army's frontline tracker units.
The Israeli government has tried time and again to force the people of al-Araqib into an American Indian reservation-style "development town," but they have refused. The village has been razed to the ground by bulldozers on eight occasions, but each time the residents have rebuilt their homes, hoping to outlast a ruthless campaign to destroy their way of life.
What about the strange name for the proposed forest? It is a reference to GOD TV, a radical right-wing evangelical Christian broadcasting network that hosts faith-based fraudsters like Creflo Dollar and rapture-ready fanatics like Rory and Wendy Alec.
And why is GOD TV bankrolling the JNF's ethnic cleansing campaign in the Negev desert? According to its website, "GOD TV is planting over ONE MILLION TREES across the Holy Land as a miraculous sign to Israel and to the world that Jesus is coming soon."
In his 1970 short fiction story "Facing the Forest," the famed Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua portrayed a mute Palestinian forest watchman who burns down a JNF forest to reveal the hidden ruins of his former village. Thirty years later, as the JNF forests around Mount Carmel burn, right-wing Israeli lawmakers have demanded a search for the Arab who must have sparked the blaze, even though there is no firm evidence about the cause of the fire. Michael Ben Ari, a extremist Member of Knesset from the National Union Party, called for "the whole Shin Bet" -- Israel's domestic intelligence agency -- to be mobilized to investigate what the right-wing media outlet Arutz Sheva said "may turn out to be the worst terror attack in Israel's history." | <urn:uuid:076874a0-2df7-4b60-86f6-267e039fe53b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alternet.org/story/149087/a_wildfire_is_burning_all_illusions_in_israel?qt-best_of_the_week=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975443 | 3,230 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Users: 'Personalized internet? Fuggedaboutit!'
Survey shows Business Plan 2.0 to be unpopular
A new research report will make worrying reading for Google and social media companies, as it shows that most consumers don't want their online activity used to personalize search results or advertising.
The study of 2,253 adults, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life, found that 73 per cent of search-engine users didn't want their search results to be tailored to them based on past searches. Use of internet habits in producing search results was disliked least by respondents under 29, as well as those from ethnic minorities and those earning less than $30,000 a year.
Over two-thirds of respondents didn't want web sites to do targeted advertising that uses their internet history, and just over half said they had noticed targeted advertising that was clearly using such data. Men are better at spotting such ads than women, and the survey showed the more educated and well-paid you were, the more likely you are to see them.
Consumers are pretty clueless about what happens to their browsing history. Only 38 per cent said they were aware of how much data was being collected about them. Web-history deletion was the most common privacy tactic among this group, followed by using the privacy settings on websites and locking down their own browsers.
The results come as Google has shifted its users onto new privacy terms that will increase the amount of information the search giant will collect and use. Meanwhile, Facebook and other social-media companies are making targeted advertising one of the key planks of their business plans - but consumers don't want to play along, it seems.
Google's annihilation of its competition accelerates
The survey had some good news for denizens of the Chocolate Factory, and some very bad news for Yahoo! – and thus, by proxy, Redmond. In comparison with a similar survey in 2004, Google is killing the opposition, with 83 per cent of searches, while Yahoo! and others have all seen their user footprint shrivel.
Search itself is the second most popular activity online, the survey found. Email is still king, used by 92 per cent of people, but search is just a single percentage point behind, ahead of getting news or shopping. Social networking stands at 66 per cent, but is still growing fast.
Overall, people are happy with the accuracy of whichever search engine they choose. Nine out of ten search users were happy with their results, and 73 per cent felt the data they got was accurate. On any given day, 56 per cent of people use internet searching in 2012, compared to 30 per cent in 2004. ® | <urn:uuid:aee96e25-141c-45e3-9247-bcc3bfbecb0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/09/personalized_search_unpopular_pew/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976247 | 539 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Donald S. Burke, MD, dean of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH), is one of the world’s foremost experts in prevention, diagnosis and control of infectious diseases of global concern, including HIV/AIDS, hepatitis A, avian influenza and emerging infectious diseases.
In addition to serving as dean of GSPH, Dr. Burke is director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research and serves in the newly established position of associate vice chancellor for global health, health sciences. He also is the first University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-Jonas Salk Professor of Global Health.
Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Burke was a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he served as associate chair of the department of international health and director of the Center for Immunization Research. He also was principal investigator of National Institutes of Health-supported research projects on HIV vaccines, biodefense and emerging infectious diseases.
Prior to his tenure at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Burke served 23 years on active duty in the U.S. Army, leading military infectious disease research at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C., and at the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences in Bangkok, Thailand. He retired at the rank of colonel.
Dr. Burke’s career-long mission has been prevention and mitigation of the impact of epidemic infectious diseases of global importance. His research activities have spanned a wide range of science “from the bench to the bush,” including development of new diagnostics, population-based field studies, clinical vaccine trials, computational modeling of epidemic control strategies and policy analysis. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 research reports | <urn:uuid:759eced6-220a-429a-a7de-c7643e514142> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://upmc.com/media/experts/Pages/donald-s-burke.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940952 | 356 | 1.773438 | 2 |
President Barack Obama urged U.S. Jewish leaders to speak to their friends and colleagues in Israel and to “search your souls” over Israel's seriousness about making peace, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reports.
In a Tuesday meeting with about 50 representatives from the Jewish community’s chief foreign policy umbrella group – the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations – Obama reiterated the U.S. commitment to Israel, according to statements from both the White House and Conference of Presidents.
Participants uniformly declined to speak on the record about the meeting in keeping with admonitions from Conference of Presidents leaders that specifics should not be discussed publicly. While there was general consistency in the reports about Obama's comments, interpretation of them varied widely.
Top leaders of the conference welcomed the meeting and noted the president's affirmation of his "deep commitment to Israel's security." Other participants echoed the upbeat line, telling JTA the meeting was positive.
But several participants at the meeting told JTA the president also implied Israel bears primary responsibility for advancing the peace process. They interpreted the president's comments either as hostile, naïve, or unsurprising.
Obama said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is eager to secure his legacy by establishing a Palestinian state and would accept a decent offer if one were on the table, according to participants.
“The Palestinians don't feel confident that the Netanyahu government is serious about territorial concessions,” the president reportedly said.
© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:2e9d6a54-b052-42f3-b171-8381d1645d0a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/obama-jewish-search-souls/2011/03/02/id/388117 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950457 | 305 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Writing valuable content-rich articles to your target current market and applying them to article directory sites and alternative publishers belongs to the best approaches to market your organization, become generally known as an expert as part of your field, and include subscribers for a list.
For case, if a person regularly write an article for your ezine, you gets much more mileage outside it should you submit the item to article directory sites and alternative online publishing services. And building every item you produce work more often than once for a person is a method Tvfreeload to work smarter without harder. That’s labeled leverage.
There are usually several logic behind why you would like to do that. One should be to get your name and your business out there so people will understand who you’re and what you are doing, and it aids you to position you being a expert. No more keeping on your own a key and concealing behind your personal machine!:) A different reason is always that your content articles give people a taste of your respective style, what it really is that a person offer, and the item gives them a chance to get to know you a bit without risking whatever.
At the conclusion of each one article include a reference box consequently if people wish to disconver more about you and your business, they have that facts at its fingertips. Once an individual reads your article, if they will like your stuff, they will more than likely visit your blog and join your Lilac Spoon (your free presenting that makes people with your list). And writing articles belongs to the fastest (plus FREE) methods for getting lots of exposure, especially if a publisher which includes a large listing picks the item up!
Want to get going? Here include the 4 simple steps:
1. Write your article and also recycle one you’ve undoubtedly written, giving it a new edit (the item never affects).
Write and also revise an article targeted with your niche that is full of valuable written content. A couple of tips: Articles can be anywhere from 300-700 words and phrases in length for the best chance of being purchased (should you have a lengthier article, consider cutting it inside half and turning it into two reduced articles). Also, articles with lists, steps, or mini-chunks of information seem to be the a lot of read.
2. Add your copyright.
Don’t forget to safeguard your work by adding a copyright. At the conclusion of each one article, put the copyright notice while using date of if you first printed the posting. For case, copyright (and also ©) 2004 Alicia M Natrual enviroment.
3. Write your copy to your author’s box.
After your copyright discover comes what is actually usually known as the “resource box” and also “author’s box. ” To ensure others to be able to publish your work, ask that they include this level of detail by the end of your article, keeping what you provide in the container whole plus intact. As this is standard practice, you’ll discover most authors will dignity this ask.
Write 3-5 traces that compel people to disconver more about you through providing the web address into the sign-up page to your Pink Table spoon. You have no need to use this unique real estate to promote your organization, but do do it to persuade folks to sign up for your listing by signing up for your newsletter or alternative free presenting.
A idea: Again, don’t send out your posting readers to your house page. Send them to a page developed specifically to provide them for a list. For case, say”for more articles this way, please visit www.yourezinepage.com to sign up! “
4. Submit your article.
Although this belongs to the most time-consuming internet marketing tasks, it can be made much simplier through either working with a VA to do it for yourself, or using an article submission support. A couple of services we use are usually:
There are usually literally a huge selection of websites that include free written content for publishers who’re trying to find quality articles thus to their own guides or web pages. Here are some of the best people:
If you would like to see stronger results from submitting your articles, contact straight those authors of ezines plus websites as part of your niche. Google authors of ezines as part of your target market and send the query into the editor/owner with regards to submitting an article. Present yourself to be a professional plus offer your article thus to their use, provided your resource box remains inside tact. Paste your article under your concept (attachments gets blocked, and in the event the receiver won’t know a person it’s unlikely they are going to open plus read the item anyway).
Writing plus submitting articles belongs to the tried-and-true, if slow-and-steady, ways to develop your listing, become generally known as an specialist, and present value InteliGator for a target current market. | <urn:uuid:3c1ef8a7-e27f-4d19-9061-b0ebac0bba2e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.redlandsoccer.org/four-easy-guidelines-to-benefiting-your-content-articles/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945078 | 1,044 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Hmm. Like, … whatever!!!
The Guardian ran a few reports here and here (one day after another in fact) …. and here. And yesterday Twitter went crazy with a new trending topic when news hit from Nielson that Teens were not tweeting. I guess it all makes a welcome change from people moaning about kids being online all the time and from hearing the wonderment about all our little digital natives who are born wireless and with inbuilt bluetooth (etc.) It is a new refrain that implies disappointment that kids are not obsessed with the latest fad – that it is the oldies who are doing it.
As Apophenia has pointed out many of the tweets on Twitter’s 3rd most trending topic at the moment are from teens protesting that they do tweet.
Le’s face it hardly anyone uses Twitter – a fact you will find confirmed if you announce that you do so, to a bunch of people down the pub (unless they are all your tweeting friends). So it is not a surprise that not many teens tweet – and despite their protests, the tweeting teens don’t seem to be typical – just like their tweeting oldie counterparts.
I think it is interesting as we have become so convinced that all kids are all online and up for technology for technology’s sake, that we are in a state of shock when we find this is the case. Facebook (and Bebo and Myspace etc) offer a space where you can do much more identity work than on Twitter. Facebook lets you play in lots of ways, Facebook is a fun thing to do. Kids seem to prefer it on there and frankly I think are glad if the adults migrate to twitter away from Facebook where they had made a brief and unwelcome appearance. Different online spaces have different affordances and I sense that as we are all maturing in our uses of online spaces, we are making decisions according to what we want from something. We know that teens migrate through the social networking sites as friendships change and develop – switching from Bebo to Myspace, to Facebook (etc.) Twitter may not serve ther purposes so well… for me I closed down Facebook when I realised that all my friends were mixing with colleagues and ex students, present students were all mingling in my space. I found it unnerving to have brothers in with post grads (for example) and could not manage to feel relaxed about writing on my wall in such a social mash-up! Maybe the young don’t have such diverse networks and anyhow worry less about saying things in front of the ‘wrong’ people. For me Twitter is a space where I can custom build my network and have it as a space where I mainly talk as if in work, in my academic comfort zone. It’s like a very select staff room.
So yes … I feel a comparative study coming on … luckily I already have the ethical review complete and can start work on this in September!! And as I said on the blog yesterday, this stuff needs researching from both ends … looking at the data online and the stats … but also TALKING to the people.
In the meantime New Media & Society has this. | <urn:uuid:47ab7130-b364-4b32-9820-9fb711a1981f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.digital-literacies.com/2009/08/12/teens-not-twittering/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968145 | 653 | 1.695313 | 2 |
New River Notes Photo Gallery
New River Valley Photos
New River Valley History:
NCNR Discussion Group
For discussion of history and genealogy of the New River Valley of North Carolina and Virginia you are welcomed to join NCNR.
Welcome and we hope you join the discussions.
GCVHF - Second Saturday
April 1, 2013
The GCVHF office will be opened for researchers on the second Saturday of the month. We're offering the Saturday hours primarily for people who can't get to the office during the work week.
Second Saturday hours will begin April 13th and go to October 12th. We'll be open from 10 AM to 4 PM. See our calendar at http://www.graysonheritage.org/events for our full office schedule.
This Second Saturday program is part of an effort to better connect with the local community. It will require more time from our current office volunteers. More volunteers are needed. If you like helping others and have time to work in our office during these Saturdays or other days contact us.
New River Notes
January 6, 2013
New River Notes, a leading genealogy resource for the New River Valley of North Carolina and Virginia, launched its new look website today.
New River Notes was originally launched in 1998 by Jeffery C. Weaver providing New River Valley researchers with a new wealth of information and that tradition is continued today by the Grayson County, Virginia Heritage Foundation, Inc.
Welcome and we hope you enjoy our new look. For more information on the changes and plans see posts on the GCVHF Google+ Page. | <urn:uuid:9c8ff3f1-7613-4942-9aa7-0e1112af7285> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newrivernotes.com/photos/displayimage.php?album=28&pos=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935947 | 324 | 1.578125 | 2 |
The number of people receiving unemployment benefits in Anson County rose 0.4 percent in November to 11.6 percent, according to figures released Thursday morning by the North Carolina Department of Commerce — Labor and Economic Analysis Division.
Anson’s unemployment rate for the previous month, October, was 11.2 percent, which was down from 12.0 percent in September. The 11.6-percent employment rate means that of Anson’s workforce of 11,340, in November 1,321 people received unemployment benefits.
Unemployment rates increased in 81 of North Carolina’s 100 counties in November, decreased in 13, and were unchanged in six. All of Anson’s neighboring counties also experienced increases in unemployment in November, according to Thursday’s report. Richmond County’s rate of 12.2 percent was up from 12.1 in October, Stanly’s rate of 9.1 was also up slightly from 9.0 the previous month and Union’s rate of 7.8 was also up 0.4 percent from 7.4.
Orange County had the state’s lowest unemployment rate in November at 5.7 percent, and Graham County had the highest unemployment rate at 16.3 percent.
The next unemployment report will be released on Jan. 18, with the state unemployment numbers for December. | <urn:uuid:18e0bc01-26f6-4f19-aa9f-de6adc9b938d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ansonrecord.com/pages/home/push?class=&rel=next&per_page=5&x_page=20 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965066 | 279 | 1.78125 | 2 |
The smallpipes simulator is a Java Web Start application that demonstrates how Northumbrian Smallpipes are tuned and how to tune the drones. It uses MIDI sound and can be used to train the ear to listen to the small differences that make a set of pipes in tune or out of tune.
The application does have a few system requirements and it's worth checking these first. There are also some instructions on how to use it. Alternatively you could just take a chance and launch the programme and see what happens.
The simulator was written by Rob Say and is all his own work. Feel free to link to this page, but please don't link directly to the application. Do not copy, sell or redistribute without permission.
Many thanks to the team of testers who gave lots of help in getting this out into the wild: John, Nick, Dunmail, Alison & Andrew. I'm very grateful and even more of your suggestions should appear in later versions (as family, other interests and work permits!) | <urn:uuid:28cca6db-b24a-426f-a7ce-9121d2aea663> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.milecastle27.co.uk/simulator/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965825 | 205 | 1.75 | 2 |
From my reply #29......
This column has been republished with permission of The Eagle Forum
Who does President Barack Obama think he is that he can change the wording of the Declaration of Independence? Again and again he presumes to quote the great Declaration while making a significant change: he omits the word “Creator.”
Americans know that the Declaration of Independence proclaims as a matter of fact that they “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But when Obama recites this line, he omits the word “Creator.”
Listen carefully to how Obama censors that famous line. Here are his own words: “all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights.” He doesn’t say who endowed us.
Obama has done this so often that it can’t be a slip of the tongue or a glitch of the teleprompter. Changing the words of the Declaration of Independence is part of Obama’s determination to remove everything religious and every mention of God from every aspect of our public life in order to fundamentally transform us from “one nation under God” into one nation under the Federal Government, especially the executive branch, with no higher power recognized.
On this Fourth of July, we should remind ourselves that the great Declaration of Independence is not only the proclamation of our independence and sovereignty, but is also the official affirmation of our belief and faith in God. The Declaration asserts God’s existence as a “self-evident” truth, and states that the purpose of government is to secure our God-given unalienable individual rights.
The Declaration contains five references to God — God as our Creator, God as supreme Lawmaker, God as the Source of all rights, God as the world’s supreme Judge, and God as our Protector.
Shortly before we started hearing fireworks for this year’s Fourth of July, the movie “For Greater Glory” opened in local theaters. It is a compelling dramatization of the Mexican government’s persecution of Christians from 1926 to 1929, a bloody piece of history that has hitherto been ignored by historians and filmmakers.
First off, Phyllis Schlafly, really? I'll get back to her.
Yes, Phyllis Schlafly really! She's doing a great job revealing Obama's war on religious freedom, that is if the religion is Christianity. He is very accommodating to Islam as well as Secular and Atheistic Humanism...the emerging "one world" religion.
This LIE Schlafly propagates that "through speeches and regulations, President Obama is trying to eliminate all public references to religion," is easily proven false. Obama mentions God in every speech he gives, and there has been no regulation by Obama that eliminates "all references to religion." How do we know this? Because most of us have TV, and access to the internet, and there's this thing called video, which records what people say, and practically everything the President says is recorded and/or broadcast live, so we know what Schlafly claims is one big fat lie.
Schlafly is telling the truth which Obama-loving Liberals often find hard to hear. It's true, through speeches and regulations, Obama IS INDEED trying to eliminate all public references to religion (Almighty God).
As far as speeches....
RE: the highlighted. This is you not being truthful. Obama DOES NOT mention God in every speech....and that's exactly Schlafly's point. Obama censored God out of his speech and it's not the first time he did that. Go back to my reply #29 and click on the word "Listen" at the beginning of the paragraph.
The truth that Obama censors God from the Declaration is right there...we know that through "this thing called video, which records what people say".
In 2010, when speaking in Indonesia about our national motto, Obama didn't say the words, "In God we trust" but instead substituted "E Pluribus Unum".
Before giving a speech at Georgetown, he had his advance team drape over any religious symbols that might appear as a backdrop where he was going to speak. Obama made sure the IHS symbol, a monogram of the name Jesus Christ was not in sight.
And then there are Obama's 2011 and 2012 Thanksgiving addresses. George Washington advised Americans to set aside a day of public thanksgiving to God for the great favors He has bestowed on our Nation and the long series of presidents all made mention of God, but not Obama.
As far as regulations...
Without doubt, Obama enthusiasm for abortions and even supporting selective infanticide is the most radical yet.
That would be Obamacare and its implementation of the Health and Human Services mandate forcing Catholic institutions to pay for abortion-producing drugs, contraception and sterilization which is imo, unconstitutional because it abridges Catholic's freedom of speech and interferes with the free exercise of religion.
As he promised in his 2008 campaign, Obama wants to "fundamentally transform" America, and the mandate plays into Obama's war on Religious freedom.
To "fundamentally transform" America from it's Judaic/Christian ethic and standards of morality as depicted by the Ten Commandments, he must violate or ignore the Founding documents.
So it's not surprising that those Christians who "cling to their guns and religion" get in his way. | <urn:uuid:c8edb3fd-e3c3-4742-b263-391b7b83d2a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/426259/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955799 | 1,135 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Lauren’s Institute for Education (L.I.F.E.) is a special place for developmentally disabled children. We offer a variety of therapies that nurture each individual child’s overall growth to improve their quality of life and the lives of their family members.
WHO IS LAUREN?
Lauren is the daughter of Carrie Reed, Co-Founder and President of L.I.F.E. She was diagnosed with a rare disorder called Sanfilippo Syndrome in July 2004. Although Lauren is only a child, she has been through several tests, surgeries and even a cord blood stem cell transplant donated from her brother’s umbilical cord blood, which had been preserved at birth. Lauren remains an active and entertaining child that loves to sing, play with her dollies and do everything her mom does! Learn more about her …
Our philosophy of care addresses the whole child, not just traditional areas of need. Through our eclectic approach we believe that the child’s emotional well being, both social/emotional awareness and self expression, is as equally important to a child’s growth as is cognitive and physical functioning.
The staff recognizes and celebrates the unique characteristics of each child. Using evidence based practices, L.I.F.E. strives to provide highly effective techniques which generalize outside of the therapeutic environment and ultimately contribute to an individual child’s life quality.
Our 11,000 square-foot facility is state of the art! It has over 20 rooms for specialized therapy, an outdoor patio, staff offices, observation rooms and much more including:
* Applied Behavior Analysis,
* Sensory Classrooms,
* Kinder Prep. Habilitation,
* Structured Habilitation,
* Private Academy, and
* a Physical/Occupational Therapy Gym.
View a floor plan of the facility …
To learn more about the therapies offered at L.I.F.E., please visit our Services section.
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, Lauren’s Institute for Education (L.I.F.E.) must make a reasonable accommodation to allow a person with a disability to take part in a program, service, or activity. For example, this means that if necessary, L.I.F.E. must provide sign language interpreters for people who are deaf, a wheelchair accessible location, or enlarged print materials. It also means that L.I.F.E. will take any other reasonable action that allows you to take part in and understand a program or activity, including making reasonable changes to an activity. If you believe that you will not be able to understand or take part in a program or activity because of your disability, please let us know of your disability needs in advance if at all possible. Please contact: Margaret Travillion at (480) 621-8361. | <urn:uuid:3a84a41d-34d1-454b-b92d-bcd16916afc1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://laurensinstitute.org/about/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943965 | 592 | 1.742188 | 2 |
LAC ICT Policy Monitor: Research and evaluation in 2006
The Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) ICT Policy Monitor was involved in a number of research activities during 2006. The first was a collaboration with the World Association of Community Broadcasters (AMARC) and the APC Women’s Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP) to research: “Effective access of rural communities to broadcasting in equal opportunities: A key strategy for digital inclusion in Latin American and the Caribbean.” The project posed the question: “How can broadcasting be used as a digital inclusion strategy?” and identified the barriers and restrictions that rural communities face to access broadcasting effectively. It also highlighted specific case studies and best practices in public policies.
The second was a collaboration between APC and the International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) as part of the Building Communication Opportunities (BCO) alliance to assess ICT4D policy process learning and evaluation, and in particular, the policy participation around ICT4D processes in Bangladesh, Bolivia and Uganda.
In Bolivia, we learned important lessons about intervening in national ICT policy context. One of the main lessons was the need to consistently bear in mind the complexity of the policy process. The temperature of the political climate needs to be measured constantly, and policy advocates need to make different risk analyses.
There was clear evidence of the need to ensure the inclusion of all stakeholders, particularly rural and poor communities, to determine the real priorities that the policy process should include in order to truly enhance development, as well as the need to advocate strongly around their inclusion in policy formulation and implementation. The social and economic conditions of Bolivia demanded research at the earliest stages of the policy process in order for advocates to have a solid understanding of the context in which the ICT4D policy processes would play out. | <urn:uuid:401b6715-f796-441b-ba73-214e92aba245> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.apc.org/en/projects/policy/lac/lac-ict-policy-monitor-research-and-evaluation-200 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95267 | 378 | 1.84375 | 2 |
All Together Now: All You Need is a Text Box!
All you need is text, Text is all you need (sing to the tune of The Beatles’ All you need is love). If you are one of our regular readers you will remember that several months ago I wrote a manifesto on what the perfect analytics system would look like. One of the last points was:
It must be as accessible as Excel (still the number one analytics tool in the world).
I was wrong – Excel is the number one non-specialized analytics tool in the world but in terms of usage, it is dwarfed in comparison to a very well know specialized analytics toolkit. The creators of this tool are a little company that you may have heard of: it does no evil and analyzes the Internet to bring you back everything on the web based on a simple text query. But behind that simple text box, Google has one of the most sophisticated analytics infrastructures in the world:
- It can deduce your interests.
- Give you the most relevant results.
- And show you appropriate information based on them, as well as bring back highly personalized ads.
Google is not only the largest big data analytics company in the world, but it also has the easiest to use tools—proof that text is all you really need!
“Cool,” you say, “But what does that have to do with PatternBuilders? You guys are not a specialized Internet search engine—you are Big Data Analytics system that serves specialized domains so you can’t be as simple as Google.” We would have agreed with this a couple of months ago but like most crossing the chasm moments, technology took us down a different and better path.
We realized that there were huge performance benefits in going from a hybrid relational/Mongo approach to a pure Mongo approach (described here). So we took a step back and started thinking about all the cool things we could do. We had our unique indexing structure, linearly scalable performance from both our analytics and query engine, and a blazing fast document database. What could we do with all of that power? Why not try and do something different? Like say, bringing the Google level ease of use to Big Data Analytics? It wasn’t easy but we pulled it off. Oh, and in case you were wondering here is how we did on the rest of the manifesto requirements:
- Does its UI allow non-statisticians to easily query/explore statistics created by others?
- How much hardware do you need for your required performance? Does it do fanout? We are very hardware efficient – Currently processing real time stock ticker data with a few commodity servers and our performance increases linearly as you add servers.
- Does the system come with pre-built common metrics for the customers particular industries – for example, GEMROI in retail or the Joint Commission statistics for hospitals? Yes, and it is very easy to create new ones in any .NET language.
- How easy is it to create new analyses and how long does it take get results from this new analysis? Creation is easy (see above) and since our entire back end is streaming, once a new metric is added results become available instantly (see this post for details).
- Is it secure? Highly – but this is something we constantly work on.
- Does it have a flexible deployment model (cloud or on premise)? We get an A+ on this one – not only do we support on-premise and cloud deployments (EC2, Rackspace), but we also support a hybrid model as well. Our hybrid model allows key data like patient info or click-thru statistics to be kept on premise by the customer and encrypted analytic results to be kept in the cloud.
- Does its user interface provide useable performance on the web? We use Silverlight for our UI layer, except in our new mobile app (coming soon) and despite Microsoft’s ham handed marketing treatment of SL in their drive to make Windows 8 an iPad killer, we still believe in it as a platform and have used it to create a UI that is performant, great looking, and cross browser portable!
- Can its scripting language be configured to become an analytics DSL in the user’s problem space? Yes – but we are working on improving the scripting language to make it more type safe. We want to move from constructs like KPI.Name.GetResult(“Avg Sales Price”) to constructs like AvgSalesPrice.GetResult().
- Can it easily absorb data from different sources and different formats? Yes we been having a lot of fun in the beta mashing things up left and right. Our latest demo is a mash up of a live stock market feed, Twitter Streams, and RSS daily Weather data.
- Is it easy to keep up and running? Yes but we are working on making it even easier. Our new server admin GUI is a great start.
In all modesty, we knocked the ball out of the park here. The release is in final test and should go GA in early November. Blog at you next week! | <urn:uuid:10f5af8a-10d9-4f04-b77f-543c5ec298ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.patternbuilders.com/2011/10/14/all-together-now-all-you-need-is-a-text-box/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952082 | 1,063 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Health and Family Services Cabinet
Elder abuse prevention efforts recognized; Rally honors groups, individuals working to protect seniors
FRANKFORT, Ky. (June 15, 2007) – Elder abuse and neglect was in the spotlight today at a capitol rally that included state officials, law enforcement and advocates for seniors.
The Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS), the Kentucky Association of Gerontology, AARP, the Office of the Attorney General and the International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse sponsored Kentucky Elder Abuse Awareness Day today to coincide with World Elder Abuse Awareness Day.
“Each of the community partners involved in elder abuse education and prevention plays an important part in the solution to this crisis,” CHFS Secretary Mark D. Birdwhistell said. “Our statewide network of community groups and advocates are admirably coordinating their sometimes limited resources to make a world of difference for seniors and their families.”
About 200 people attended the rally.
“It’s wonderful to know that so many people and organizations stand together against elder abuse and neglect,” said Tom Emberton Jr., CHFS’ undersecretary for children and family services. “Protecting seniors is a priority of this cabinet, and this event proves that no matter where we live, we can all play a part in sheltering our seniors.”
Kimberly Baker, a specialist in CHFS’ Adult Safety Branch, said organizers of the rally wanted it to help raise public awareness of elder abuse and neglect, advance victims’ rights to justice and promote participation in the statewide network of Local Coordinating Councils on Elder Abuse (LCCEAs). Forty councils cover 113 counties.
“These groups provide elder abuse education outreach at the local and regional levels,” Baker said. “Their work is designed to meet the needs of each community, and the whole Commonwealth benefits.”
The Pulaski County Council on Elder Abuse received a $500 Public Awareness Initiative Award from the Adult Safety Branch for its exceptional accomplishments over the past year. The money is to be used for continued community efforts to raise awareness on the issues of elder abuse and neglect.
Emberton said it is important to acknowledge the groups and individuals who are raising awareness about the issue.
“The state’s adult protection social workers investigate allegations of abuse and neglect, but it requires the involvement of multiple community partners to ensure successful resolution of the issues identified during the investigation. Our DCBS staff can’t do this job alone,” he said. “With our population graying and the prevalence of elder abuse and financial exploitation growing, these councils and our community partners are even more valuable.”
Several Kentuckians who have made an impact in the field of elder abuse prevention were recognized.
Kentucky State Police Senior Trooper Scott King, stationed at KSP Post Seven in Richmond, was acknowledged for his nomination for the National Association of Police Organizations’ “TOP COPS” award.
King has worked more than a year collecting evidence and developing a criminal case against a Madison County woman’s relative. This person was financially exploiting and neglecting the elderly woman, who was not aware of her financial situation because of the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. The case is pending trial.
Tim Rees, an adult protective services supervisor in Kenton County, was nominated for the National Adult Protective Services Association’s (NAPSA) 2007 “Spirit of the NAPSA” award. Rees has worked in developing relationships with community partners in an effort to increase collaboration on investigations, prevention activities and public awareness to further enhance services and protection of the elder population.
Sen. Ed Worley, D-Richmond, in conjunction with the Madison County Council for Elder Maltreatment Prevention, unveiled a specialty license plate dedicated to elder abuse awareness. The Department of Transportation needs at least 900 commitments to start production. The deadline to apply for a plate has been extended through Aug. 30.
The plate costs $43, of which a tax-deductible $12 will be divided among the state’s LCCEAs. For more information about the plate, call Baker at (502) 564-7043.
For more information about elder abuse prevention, log on to http://chfs.ky.gov/dcbs/dpp/eaa/.
To join the elder abuse rally planning committee or to learn more about how groups can co-sponsor the rally, contact Leslie Caudill at (606) 889-1729 or [email protected].
– 30 – | <urn:uuid:b5c24712-c851-4734-8d9c-5db4f1d34d4f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://migration.kentucky.gov/newsroom/chfs/Elder+abuse+prevention+efforts+recognized.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942599 | 963 | 1.648438 | 2 |
An art exhibit on women's rights is set to open at the Michigan Women's Historical Center and Hall of Fame in Lansing.
"Half the Sky: Women's Rights are Human Rights" kicks off Sunday and runs through Oct. 27.
It features the work of Mount Pleasant artist Lily Lihting Li Kostrzewa and explores the dynamic between men and women in marriage.
An opening reception for the exhibit is to be held Sunday in the historical center's Belen Gallery. Admission is free and light refreshments are to be provided. | <urn:uuid:478cdcf7-d0c4-4a01-bd16-99d42d0d23af> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wndu.com/news/michigan/headlines/Art-exhibit-on-womens-rights-to-open-in-Lansing-165037816.html?site=mobile | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955406 | 112 | 1.601563 | 2 |
AcupunctureAcupuncture may help you get pregnant by improving conditions such as endometriosis and balance hormones. For men, it may improve sperm count, concentration and motility. Call the British Acupuncture Council: 020 8735 0400. Chiropractic
There is no guaranteed way to eat yourself pregnant, however there are foods that can help boost your chances of conception.Your health pre-pregnancy is equally important, and there's a whole host of great things to eat that can have a positive
such as spina bifida.Research also suggests that taking folic acid before getting pregnant means your baby is likely to have a higher birth weight.This is good because low birth-weight babies (less than 5lb 8oz) are at higher risk of developing infections
Eating a healthier fertility-boosting diet does not have to be hard or involve giving up your favourite foods. Often simple swaps can give you much healthier choices that will help you get pregnant, leaving you the chance to have your favourite
When you're trying for a baby and in early pregnancy, a healthy diet is especially important.Currently, women are advised to take a daily folic acid supplement and to continue for the first 12 weeks to help reduce the risk of neural tube defects (NTDs) such as spina bifida.But as...
Q I've heard that acupuncture may help me conceive. Is this true?A. 'Acupuncture may help with conception as it works by balancing emotional and physical energy to promote and support ovulation,' says Toni Tucker from the British Acupuncture Council (tonituckeracupuncture.co.uk)....
Research shows that women who want to get pregnant should work on lowering their stress levels as this, along with a healthy diet and exercise, has been shown to boost fertility by up to 80%.I see so many couples who are too tired most of the time
Before the Pill, women had their children closer together. But the advent of effective contraception meant it was possible to leave a bigger gap between getting pregnant.This is a trend we’re now seeing in reverse, as women who have delayed
Pregnancy is one of the greatest nutritional stresses faced by a woman, so preparation is important. Make sure you and your partner are both in the best of health to maximise your chances of getting pregnant. Here's how to get into shape and how
You should already be taking a folic acid supplement if you're trying to get pregnant, but you can also up your intake by incorporating folic acid rich foods to your diet.Canned pulses such as kidney beans, chickpeas, butter beans, baked beans | <urn:uuid:52a9635e-b7c7-4e21-b05a-0edae787b4bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.babyexpert.com/search/articles/natural/category/getting-pregnant-naturally/author/babyexpert.com | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965491 | 542 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Robert William Service (16 January 1874 - 11 September 1958 / Preston)
a poet and writer who has often been called "the Bard of the Yukon".
Service is best known for his poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", from his first book, Songs of a Sourdough (1907; also published as The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses). "These humorous tales in verse were considered doggerel by the literary set, yet remain extremely popular to this day." Songs of a Sourdough has sold more than three million copies, making it the most commercially successful book of poetry of the 20th century.
Robert W. Service was born in Preston, Lancashire, England, the first of ten children. His father, ... more »
Click here to add this poet to your My Favorite Poets.
- "Fighting Mac"
- (The sunshine seeks my little room)
- A Bachelor
- A Busy Man
- A Cabbage Patch
- A Canvas For A Crust
- A Casualty
- A Character
- A Domestic Tragedy
- A Grain Of Sand
- A Hero
- A Little Prayer
- A Lyric Day | <urn:uuid:3c390595-d92c-424e-a5a1-fab099aa21c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://poemhunter.com/robert-william-service/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966594 | 261 | 1.59375 | 2 |
January/February 2012, Pages 39-40
Other People's Mail
Compiled by Jean-Pascal Deillon and Dale Sprusansky
Israel and Apartheid
To The New York Times, Nov. 2, 2011
Re: "Israel and the Apartheid Slander," by Richard J. Goldstone. Mr. Goldstone and I knew apartheid in South Africa. We knew apartheid as a discriminatory, repressive system accompanied by the seizure of land belonging to blacks for the use of whites.
We know something about Gaza, as we investigated Israel's actions there in 2009 and concluded that Israel had committed war crimes. I know the West Bank better than Mr. Goldstone, as from 2001 to 2008, I was special rapporteur to the Human Rights Council, a United Nations body, on human rights in the Palestinian territories and visited there regularly.
There are distinctive similarities between apartheid in South Africa and Israel's practices in the West Bank. Israel discriminates against Palestinians in favor of settlers. Its restrictions on freedom of movement resemble the pass laws of apartheid South Africa.
Israeli practices in the Palestinian territories are repressive. Torture of Palestinians is rife; houses are destroyed, and there are more political prisoners in Israeli jails than there were in South Africa under apartheid. Israel seizes Palestinian land for settlements and for the construction of the wall.
There are sufficient similarities between the two systems to justify an investigation into whether or not Israel commits the crime of apartheid in the Palestinian territories.
Israel refuses to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. In these circumstances, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine should examine the question of whether or not Israel should be held accountable for the crime of apartheid.
John Dugard, Cape Town, South Africa (The writer is a jury member in the London session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and a witness for the South African session.)
Israel Has Lost High Ground
To The Tennessean, Nov. 25, 2011
Nour Joudah's op-ed on Nov. 16 concerning Palestinian lack of real freedom brought out the usual "Palestinians are the bad guys, and the state of Israel are the good guys" responses.
Mark S. Freedman's op-ed states the necessity of the security fence and the checkpoints. My resources, which come from at least four church denominations, give different facts.
Checkpoints control Palestinians economically. At checkpoints, childbirth is increasingly a casualty, because Palestinian women are often refused passage to get medical care. If you marry someone from the opposite side of a checkpoint, there is no guarantee you can later automatically cross on grounds of marriage.
Israel is the side that needs to readjust its thinking and realize that Palestinians are also children of God.
William McDermet III, Pleasant Hill, TN
Free Speech and the Mideast
To The Washington Post, Nov. 30, 2011
As Israel now proposes ["Israel's shot at stifling speech," editorial, Nov. 21], Egypt sought to control the flow of money from foreign governments to civil-society groups under the regime of Hosni Mubarak. This continues today, and it is one of the many swords of Damocles that hang over the heads of Egyptian organizations. This control was used as a basis to charge and jail American University of Cairo human rights leader Saad Eddin Ibrahim 10 years ago.
The Post was right to sound the alarm about Israel following Egypt's practice on constraining groups by cutting off funding lifelines. But The Post should also urge, as it has in the case of Egypt, that the U.S. use the considerable leverage of its immense foreign aid to get Israel to drop its plan.
Douglas J. Clark, Woodbridge, VA
Drones vs. Assassinations
To The Seattle Times, Oct. 24, 2011
I am puzzled by the level of scrutiny given to the manner and method of Muammar Qaddafi's death compared with that given to the routine extrajudicial assassinations carried out via missile from unmanned drones.
Perhaps the level of brutality and illegality is deemed to be inversely proportional to the distance between perpetrator and victim.
Carl M. Milner Jr., Edmonds, WA
Apply Iraq's Lessons to Libya
To the Los Angeles Times, Oct. 24, 2011
I agree with the Times about rebuilding Libya. But I would like to remind the Times that much of the turmoil in Iraq was a result of how the U.S. handled things once Saddam Hussain was overthrown.
Instead of being liberators, we were occupiers. We disbanded the Iraqi armed forces and lost the trust of the Iraqi people.
This time, let's help the people by building bridges between tribes and fostering education and public works projects. No Halliburtons. No U.S. soldiers. Build bridges, literal and otherwise.
Paul L. Hovsepian, Sierra Madre, CA
Assessing Iraq's Future
To the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Oct. 25, 2011
President Obama says he is getting troops out of Iraq by year's end. At last! I hope he follows soon with a withdrawal from Afghanistan. However, I have several questions about Iraq that I haven't even heard mentioned, much less discussed. We need information, not just patriotic rhetoric.
- • How many mercenaries will stay in Iraq? How much will they cost? They are hated by the Iraqis because of their abuses of power, and they are at least twice as expensive as regular soldiers.
- • Will the U.S. scale down our embassy? We have built the largest, most expensive embassy complex in history—as big as a small city. We don't need that large a facility if we aren't going to continue to control the destiny of Iraq.
- • To what extent have we rebuilt the shattered infrastructure that our invasion destroyed, as we promised to do? Are we leaving the Iraqis without basic services?
- • Will our media report on these and other important matters or continue to get most of their information from official sources?
Myra Jones, Bradenton, FL
How Iraq Was Actually Lost
To the Los Angeles Times, Oct. 31, 2011
If Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan don't like it that the sovereign nation of Iraq wants America to honor its agreements, what do they suggest? Should we stay in Iraq when we are clearly not wanted? What about invading Iraq to ensure safety for Americans? Oh, we already did that and failed.
This war was doomed from the beginning. The administration that started this debacle and handed Iran its victory is the one to call a failure. Many smart analysts advised against military action against Iraq; if memory serves, these astute people were called unpatriotic.
Obama did not fail; he is honoring the agreement set by Bush.
Stephanie Georigeff, Redlands, CA
A Promise Kept
To The Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2011
Regarding Charles Krauthammer's op-ed, "Who lost Iraq?":
There is little wonder when a president elected on a promise to get U.S. forces out of Iraq gets U.S. forces out of Iraq. It is even less a wonder when he does so on the schedule outlined in an agreement negotiated and signed by the author of the war and president from the opposing party—bipartisanship at its best, we can say.
More important, however, Mr. Krauthammer was wrong on the cure for the problems in Iraq. After suggesting—erroneously—that the United States could sustain a deployment of troops that mimics deployments in South Korea, Japan and Germany, he (inadvertently?) admitted the truth: The "risibly small" force proposed by some (3,000 to 5,000 troops) would spend "all its energies" on force protection. We are hardly welcome in Iraq.
I have been advocating for this course since my retirement from the Air Force in 2005. Mr. Krauthammer was right about the resistance to a U.S. presence in Iraq, and that is exactly why we should not stay. Beyond the danger it posed to U.S. troops, the fighting against the U.S. occupation led to a spiral of increasingly destructive violence in Iraq.
Alan Howe, Arlington, VA
No Gain in Iraq War
To the Cincinnati Enquirer, Nov. 11, 2011
Charles Krauthammer is in the small minority of Americans who think we should keep 20,000 American troops in Iraq to "save the Bush Iraq war gains" ("Obama has blown lasting gains in Iraq," Nov. 4). I am not sure what the Iraq war gains are or were.
I know that no American would have agreed to go to war in Iraq if you told them that there were no WMDs, it would cost $800-plus billion, that it would cost over 4,000 American lives and over 400,000 Iraqi lives, that gas would go from $1 per gallon to more than $3, and that Iraq would wind up with a shariah-based constitution and political chaos. Getting our troops out by the end of this year is the best news this country has had concerning Iraq in years. We must learn from our mistakes or we will be destined to repeat them.
Bob Letourneau, West Chester, OH
Peril of Afghan Wars
To The Kansas City Star, Nov. 14 2011
From 1979 to 1988 there were more than 13,000 Soviet soldiers killed and more than 35,000 wounded in a Mideast war. Where you ask? Afghanistan.
Now the United States, thanks to President George W. Bush, is attempting to break that ignominious record.
The Russians invaded Afghanistan and lost. The British did it twice, the Muslims, the Mongols have all tried. Alexander the Great tried more than 2,300 years ago. Don't we ever learn anything?
President Barack Obama says we are getting out of Iraq by the end of the year. We had no business going in there to start with. It's the idiotic Vietnam War all over again.
We have no right to decide which country embraces our style of government and/or our choice of religion. The Middle East is not ours to control. We have no rights in any other sovereign country.
Why do we keep trying? President Obama, get us out of Afghanistan as well before we break the Russian record. Don't we ever learn anything?
George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Our leaders don't have trouble remembering the past. They just ignore it.
Luke Edwards, Olathe, KS
Room for Iran Dialogue
To the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Oct. 29, 2011
Fareed Zakaria of The Washington Post is exactly correct that President Obama should "test the Iranians to see if there is any room for dialogue and agreement." Iran does not threaten our national interests and we should not be threatening Iran with harsher sanctions or, even worse, military action.
Unfortunately, the U.S. does not have its own foreign policy. It has one dictated to our lapdog politicians by Israel and the powerful pro-Israel lobby, who have been trying to provoke a U.S. war with Iran for years. Israel does not want U.S. diplomacy with Iran; it wants a U.S. attack on Iran in order to remove a regime unfriendly to Israel.
Presidential candidate Ron Paul, who was right when he opposed the disastrous Iraq war, says that if we go to war in Iran, it will destroy the U.S. dollar (and our economy). We cannot allow this to happen.
Ray Gordon, Venice, FL
To Chicago Tribune, Nov. 25, 2011
The situation in the Middle East is both a tinderbox and a quagmire.
Our misguided foreign policy has produced the bitter fruits of thousands of lost American lives, billions of dollars that are capsizing our economy and, in many countries, hatred of the United States. In that troubled area, we preach "self-determination," but instead, we meddle, threaten, sell arms and try to buy friendships.
We citizens are soon to elect leaders who will define our national priorities.
Now is the time! Now is when we have the chance to remember history, search our souls and refashion our goals of strength, independence and peace.
What party or which of the candidates will have the wisdom and guts to return America to what it was?
Arnie Clark, Oak Bridge, IL | <urn:uuid:f2295c08-5bed-4ba4-820d-f0259f5e9f92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wrmea.org/digital-issue/379-wrmea-archives/washington-report-archives-2011-2015/january-february-2012/11019-other-peoples-mail.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952423 | 2,585 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Posted by Henry on January 20, 2004
In Reply to: Re: History is written by the victors. posted by ESC on January 20, 2004
: : This phrase seems to be everywhere of late. I can't find the origin. Does anyone have an idea where it came from, and who said/wrote it?
: : Thanks.
: I looked in several quote books (and at Quoteland online) and couldn't find it. I did find a similar quote:
: "'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" George Orwell, "1984."
WILLIAM J. CLINTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This is, in some ways, the newest of issues, and in some ways the oldest of issues. Plato said, thousands of years ago, "Those who tell the stories rule society." | <urn:uuid:cf5448d6-77fc-4dba-aa34-0ec6b9ffc52f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/27/messages/854.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960308 | 188 | 1.796875 | 2 |
As of this writing, Gunsmoke holds the distinction not only of being the longest-running TV western series, but also the longest-running dramatic series in network television history. The program began life in 1952 as a CBS radio program, set in Dodge City, Kansas in the 1870s. The radio version, which lasted until 1961, starred William Conrad as US Marshal Matt Dillon, Parley Baer as his deputy Chester Proudfoot, Howard McNear as Dr. Galen "Doc" Adams, and Georgia Ellis as Kitty Russell, owner of the Long Branch Saloon. Three years into the series' radio run, producers Norman MacDonnell, John Meston and Charles Marquis Warren decided to bring Gunsmoke to television. After a brief period in which they were considering transferring the talented but physically inappropriate radio cast to the TV version, the producers opted to choose a whole new cast. It has been claimed that John Wayne was first choice for the role of TV's Matt Dillon, but in fact Wayne was far too big a film star to even consider taking the job. Instead, Wayne suggested that the producers cast his protégé, 6'7" James Arness, as Matt Dillon. As a sign of his approbation of Arness, Wayne agreed to introduce the TV series' first episode, "Matt Gets It", which originally aired September 10, 1955. The other new regulars included Dennis Weaver as Chester--now with the last name of Good, and equipped with a colorful limp--Milburn Stone as Doc Adams, and Amanda Blake as Kitty. During its first six seasons, Gunsmoke was seen in a half-hour format on CBS' Saturday-night schedule at 10 PM. Like its radio counterpart, the television version eschewed the "kiddie matinee" style of western series then in vogue (vis a vis such programs as The Lone Ranger, Range Rider and Wild Bill Hickok), and can be aptly described as TV's first "adult" western, featuring three-dimensional characters with all-too-human flaws and weaknesses, and stark, austere, realistic storylines. In fact, most of the episodes during the series' earliest seasons were adaptations from the radio Gunsmoke, rewritten only to adjust to the unique characterizations supplied by the four main actors. Though the program trailed behind its NBC competition The George Gobel show during its inaugural season, it quickly gained grown during season two, and by its third year on the air Gunsmoke was America's top-rated series, a status it sustained for the next four seasons. The show's popularity sparked an upsurge in TV westerns, which by 1958 all but dominated the airwaves. In the fall of 1961 Gunsmoke, still in its familiar Saturday-night berth, expanded from 30 to 60 minutes; that same year, selected reruns from the 233-episode half-hour version were run by CBS on Tuesdays at 7:30 PM, retitled Marshal Dillon (this version remained on CBS until October 1964). The longer format not only allowed for more in-depth stories and greater character development, but also eventually accommodated such A-list guest stars as Darren McGavin, Gilbert Roland, James Whitmore, Jean Arthur and Betty Hutton. In 1962, Dennis Weaver announced his intention to leave the series and began curtailing his appearances. This prompted the producers to cast about for a potential "Chester" replacement; among Matt Dillon's temporary deputies over the next few seasons were Burt Reynolds as half-breed blacksmith Quint Asper and Roger Ewing as callow young townsperson Thad Greenwood. Ultimately, it was Ken Curtis as Festus Haggen, a scraggly hillbilly whose dubious morals were offset by his curious code of friendship and loyalty, who replaced Chester as deputy after Weaver left the series for good in 1964. Other peripheral characters introduced during the first 10 years of Gunsmoke were James Nusser as town drunk Louie Pheeters, Dabbs Greer as storekeeper Mr. Jonas, Sara Selby as boarding-house manager Ma Selby, and Glenn Strange as Sam, the Long Branch bartender. After producer Norman MacDonnell was replaced by British-born Philip Leacock in the fall of 1964 (largely the result of creative differences between McDonnell and star James Arness), the ratings of Gunsmoke began a precipitous slide, a fact which series costar Milburn Stone attributed to an influx of writers "who don't understand the show at all." Even the series' switchover from black and white to color in 1966 was not able to stem the decline in viewership, and it was announced that its eleventh season would be its last. In an eleventh-hour decision, CBS William Paley, a longtime Gunsmoke fan, decided to give the show a second chance by moving it from late Saturdays to a new, earlier 7:30 PM Monday timeslot; also, Philip Leacock left the series, with John Mantley taking over as executive producer. These moves turned out to be lifesavers: Despite stiff competition from NBC's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Gunsmoke rose steadily in the ratings, from sixth to fourth to second place within three years. All the while, fresh new characters were added to the cast, notably Buck Taylor as resourceful gunsmith Newly O'Brien. In 1971, Milburn Stone suffered a heart attack; accordingly, Doc Adams was temporarily replaced by Dr. John Chapman, played by Pat Hingle. By the time Stone had returned to the show, Amanda Blake had decided to leave; for the series' final season (1974-75), the Long Branch was under management of the matronly Miss Hannah, played by Fran Ryan. As for stalwart leading man James Arness, he had worked out an arrangement whereby he was required only to work three days per week--which explains why, in some of the later episodes, Matt Dillon barely appeared at all, usually showing up only in the final moments to dispatch the villain and tie up loose plot ends. Having outlasted virtually every other western on television, Gunsmoke ended its CBS run on September 1, 1975, having chalked up some 633 episodes. Between 1987 and 1994, five made-for-TV Gunsmoke movies were produced, all starring James Arness, but with only the first of the sequels (Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge) featuring surviving Gunsmoke regulars Amanda Blake and Buck Taylor.
by Hal Erickson synopsis | <urn:uuid:1cde2b13-9070-4ca9-b30a-d9db98701481> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.allmovie.com/movie/gunsmoke-v284313 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973271 | 1,326 | 1.625 | 2 |
The St. Ambrose University Children's Campus (SAUCC) provides a comprehensive early childhood program for children from the ages of 6 weeks to 6-years-old, with or without disabilities, as well as educational experiences and resources for families.
Supporting our philosophy and belief that children learn best when they are actively engaged in play.
In each of our five, age-segmented classrooms, there are highly-trained and experienced teachers who actively engage students to explore the world around them. Each day the children have ample opportunity to work and play in learning centers and in our accredited Nature Explore Classroom.
In order to maintain the level of care SAUCC provides and to reach out to more children, we raise money throughout the year to supplement tuition.
Covers accomplishments, news, and happenings from August-December 2012. | <urn:uuid:f4fe3a87-1148-4470-ae87-ee8e2b3de92f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sau.edu/ChildrensCampus.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956775 | 171 | 1.679688 | 2 |
About Garment Washing
This has nothing to do with printing, but describes a process whereby plain white t-shirts are transformed into desirable garments that suddenly everyone wants in their wardrobe. Garments that sell for up to $30 in top fashion stores.
Up to 1,000 plain vanilla shirts are packed into a giant washing machine that the size of a VW van. Color dyes are added, some special chemicals, boiling hot water is pumped in, and then we jump back.
The magic takes several hours. After the shirts are removed and dried, we can see they’ve been transformed. Not only are they colored, their finish and “feel” is changed, just as if they were washed a dozen times at home. The shirts are softer and more comfortable, and they look it.
Afterwards, they are screen printed, just like all regular t-shirts.
Other Screen Printing companies charge their customers a hefty premium for pre-washed garments, but Cotton Images.com found a neat way to offer this terrific option at what may be the lowest prices in America. How? Simple; it’s a secret. | <urn:uuid:07a507a0-1dbc-4832-88b3-639544bbc010> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cottonimages.com/index.csl?mode=gw | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953213 | 234 | 1.609375 | 2 |
The men belonged to a group set up to fight HIV and Aids
Senegal's court of appeal has quashed January's convictions of nine men for homosexuality and ordered their immediate release.
They were sentenced to eight years in jail after being found guilty of "indecent conduct and unnatural acts".
The men - who part of an anti-HIV/Aids group - were arrested in December at a flat in a suburb of the capital, Dakar.
Homosexual acts are illegal in Senegal, a predominantly Muslim country where gay people remain marginalised.
The defence team argued at the beginning of the appeal last week that the case against the men was based mainly on anonymous tip-offs, reported AFP news agency.
The accused were not caught in the act as the prosecution had suggested during the trial, argued the defence.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy had expressed his concern at the original verdict.
The sentences were the highest ever handed down in Senegal for a homosexuality conviction and sparked outrage from international gay rights groups.
In sentencing the nine, the judge added three years to a five-year sentence, saying the men were also members of a criminal group.
In February 2008, the editor of a magazine in Senegal received death threats after publishing pictures claiming to depict a wedding ceremony between two men. | <urn:uuid:62d38eb7-1313-42b7-b1cb-dbab92dd6d24> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8008170.stm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985227 | 266 | 1.523438 | 2 |
I don't think there's a way to turn it off in BW. So yes, turning your speakers down or off would be the simple way to avoid hearing it.
The non-simple way would be this: Error beeps like this are produced when a program calls for a certain sound to be produced by Windows. On my system, I've found that for this error BW calls for the "Windows Asterisk" sound. These sounds are configurable, through Control Panel. (I mentioned that this was non-simple!)
If you open Control Panel and look for Sound settings, you should see one that says something like "Change system sounds." (That's Windows 7; it may be a little different in Windows XP or Vista.) When you select that, it brings up the Sound dialog. On the Sounds tab, there is a list of Program Events, and the first of these is Windows Asterisk. Click on this, and you will see that below it under Sounds "Windows Error.wav" appears. (Again, this is Win7.) You can click Test to confirm that this is the sound you're hearing. Click on the drop-down arrow next to "Windows Error.wav" and you'll get a list of alternative possibilities. You can either find one you don't mind as much, or choose "None." You can even click Browse to find some other sound on your computer. Clicking OK or Apply will set this sound (or None) as the sound that will play whenever any program calls for the "Windows Asterisk" sound.
BE AWARE, however, that this choice will affect every program on your computer. If you never want to hear a program "beep" you with this sound when it thinks it needs to, you can choose None. But the odds are that you will miss some important notifications that way.
I mentioned that this was non-simple, didn't I?
For further guidance, Microsoft has instructions for doing this in Windows 7 and in Windows XP. | <urn:uuid:0147e673-d26e-41b0-bf14-01508dc568bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bibleworks.com/forums/showthread.php?5249-The-Dreaded-Error-Beep | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946596 | 410 | 1.648438 | 2 |
October 24, 2011
Turkey quake kills at least 279, hundreds missing [UPDATE]
[UPDATE: 10:43 a.m.]
Rescuers searched the rubble of collapsed buildings Monday for survivors and victims of a major earthquake that killed at least 279 people and injured more than 1,300 in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey.
Rescue and relief efforts focused on the city of Van and the town of Ercis, 100 km (60 miles) to the north, but hundreds were also feared dead in remote villages of mud-brick houses after Sunday’s 7.2 magnitude quake, Turkey’s strongest in a decade.
Desperate survivors cried for help beneath heaps of smashed concrete and twisted metal, some using mobile phones to tell friends they were alive, as earth-moving machines and troops raced against time in Van and Ercis.
Thousands of people made homeless by the quake were forced to spend a second night outdoors in the hilly, windswept Van region, enduring near-freezing temperatures. Families huddled round open fires that glowed in the dark. Some stayed in tents put up on soccer pitches, living on handouts from aid agencies.
The U.N. disaster agency said almost 1,000 buildings had collapsed, many of them poorly built. A Red Crescent spokesman said the agency was preparing to provide refuge for as many as 40,000 people, though it was so far impossible to tell how many would need shelter.
Some residents of Van and outlying villages complained of a lack of government assistance, despite the dispatch of troops, mobile kitchens and up to 13,000 tents.
“We have to fit 37 people in one tent,” said Giyasettin Celen, a 29-year-old who lost three family members in Dogonu Koyu, a village beside Lake Van where he said 15 people died.
“Our lost ones were carried like animals, on top of each other, in a transport van. Our main source of income here is livestock breeding, but we don’t have anywhere to keep them. We will have to sell them now,” he said.
Throughout the day, rescue workers pulled people out alive.
“Be patient, be patient,” rescuers in Ercis told a whimpering boy pinned under a concrete slab with the lifeless hand of an adult, a wedding ring on one finger, visible just in front of his face.
A Reuters photographer saw a woman and her daughter being freed from beneath a concrete slab in the wreckage of a six-storey building.
“I’m here, I’m here,” the woman, named Fidan, cried out hoarsely. Talking to her regularly while working for more than two hours to find a way through, rescuers cut through the slab, first sighting the daughter’s foot, before freeing them.
In Van, an ancient city of one million on a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains, cranes shifted rubble from a collapsed six-storey apartment block where 70 people were feared trapped.
One woman, standing beside a wrecked four-storey building, told a rescue worker she had spoken to her friend on her mobile phone six hours after the quake trapped her in the wreckage.
“She’s my friend and she called me to say that she’s alive and she’s stuck in the rubble near the stairs of the building,” said her friend, a fellow teacher. “She told me she was wearing red pajamas,” she said, standing with distraught relatives begging the rescue workers to hurry.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan flew to Van to assess the scale of the disaster. It is a quake-prone area that is a hotbed of activity for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants.
Erdogan said he feared for the fate of villages with houses made of mud brick, saying: “Almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed.”
Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said the death toll had reached 279, with 1,300 injured, and more were unaccounted for.
The quake brought fresh torment to impoverished southeast Turkey, where PKK militants fighting a decades-long insurgency killed 24 Turkish troops south of Van last week.
The area it struck, near the border with Iran, is remote and mountainous, with long distances between villages and people who live off stock-raising, arable farming and trading.
The hardest-hit town was Ercis, a town of 100,000, where 55 buildings crumpled, including a student dormitory.
At one collapsed four-storey building, firemen from the major southeastern city of Diyarbakir were trying to reach four missing children. Aid workers carried two large black bags, one apparently containing a child’s body, to an ambulance. An old woman wrapped in a headscarf walked alongside sobbing.
A distressed man paced back and forth before running toward the rescue workers on top of the rubble. “That’s my nephew’s house,” he sobbed as workers tried to hold him back.
The Red Crescent has delivered 5,000 tents to Ercis alone and a tent city has been set up at Ercis stadium. But residents said tents were being given only to relatives of police and soldiers, a possible source of tension if confirmed.
“The villages have not received any help yet. Instead of making a show, politicians should be visiting them. The Turkish military says they sent soldiers, where are they?” said a municipality official in Van who did not want to be named.
Ibrahim Baydar, a 40-year-old tradesman from Van, accused the government in Ankara of holding back aid. “All the nylon tents are in the black market now. We cannot find any. People are queuing for them. No tents were given to us whatsoever.”
Rescue efforts were hampered by power outages after the quake toppled electricity lines to towns and villages.
More than 200 aftershocks have jolted the region since the quake, lasting around 25 seconds, struck at 1041 GMT Sunday.
“I just felt the whole earth moving and I was petrified. It went on for ages. And the noise, you could hear this loud, loud noise,” said Hakan Demirtas, 32, a builder who was working on a construction site in Van at the time.
“My house is ruined,” he said, sitting on a low wall after spending the night in the open. “I am still afraid, I’m in shock. I have no future, there is nothing I can do.”
The Red Crescent said about 100 experts had reached the earthquake zone to coordinate rescue and relief operations. Sniffer dogs had joined the quest for survivors.
Major geological fault lines cross Turkey, where small tremors occur almost daily. Two large quakes in 1999 killed more than 20,000 people in the northwest.
The quake had no impact on Turkish financial markets when they opened Monday.
In Van, construction worker Sulhattin Secen, 27, said he had at first mistaken the rumble of the quake for a car crash.
“Then the ground beneath me started moving up and down as if I was standing in water. May God help us. It’s like life has stopped. What are people going to do?”
Additional reporting by Ece Toksabay in Istanbul; Writing by Ibon Villelabeitia, Simon Cameron-Moore and Daren Butler; Editing by Tim Pearce | <urn:uuid:ae46b5c1-f038-477e-ba7d-6cb87f3b1516> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jewishjournal.com/articles/print/turkey_quake_death_toll_reaches_over_200_set_to_rise_20111023 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970882 | 1,598 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Disaster modeling company Eqecat now estimates that monster storm Sandy caused up to $20 billion in insured losses and $50 billion in economic losses in the United States, the company said on Thursday.
The insured loss estimate is double what Eqecat forecast previously. The firm said subway and electrical outages will produce much more substantial losses than had been expected.
At the high end of the range, Sandy would rank as the fourth-costliest catastrophe ever in the United States, according to the Insurance Information Institute, behind Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Andrew.
Eqecat's estimate is higher than peer AIR Worldwide, which projected insured losses from Sandy at $7 billion to $15 billion. RMS, the other modeler used by the insurance industry to forecast losses, has said only that Sandy would clearly be costlier than last year's Hurricane Irene. | <urn:uuid:3438c8aa-141c-4425-b6e3-16733657f06b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foxbusiness.com/2012/11/01/sandy-seen-as-50b-blow-to-us-economy/?cmpid=cmty_plus_fb | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96248 | 183 | 1.671875 | 2 |
December 11, 2011
Sermon: Bill Blatz, Elder
Sermon (please press the triangle play button to listen)
(scriptures sourced from YouVersion)
Luke 1:26-38 26 And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, 27 To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. 29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. 30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. 31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. 32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: 33 And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. 34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? 35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. 36 And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren. 37 For with God nothing shall be impossible. 38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her
Matthew 1:18 18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
Matthew 2:1-12 1 Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, 2 Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. 3 When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. 4 And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born. 5 And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet, 6 And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel. 7 Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, enquired of them diligently what time the star appeared. 8 And he sent them to Bethlehem, and said, Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also. 9 When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was. 10 When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. 11 And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh. 12 And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.
Revelations 1:18 18 I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.
Revelations 11:15-20 15 And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. 16 And the four and twenty elders, which sat before God on their seats, fell upon their faces, and worshipped God, 17 Saying, We give thee thanks, O LORD God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to come; because thou hast taken to thee thy great power, and hast reigned. 18 And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth. 19 And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.
Revelations 14:14-20 14 And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat like unto the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle. 15 And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe. 16 And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth; and the earth was reaped. 17 And another angel came out of the temple which is in heaven, he also having a sharp sickle. 18 And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying, Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe. 19 And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. 20 And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.
Revelations 19:6-21 16 And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS. 17 And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; 18 That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great. 19 And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army. 20 And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. 21 And the remnant were slain with the sword of him that sat upon the horse, which sword proceeded out of his mouth: and all the fowls were filled with their flesh. | <urn:uuid:a6eb0a00-a61d-47d9-bded-bee47270b718> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gc3family.org/sermon-december-11-2011/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980002 | 1,636 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Alberta has more than oil; entrepreneurs are leading a booming tech sector
Alberta isn't just all about oil, it also has a thriving community of entrepreneurs, but they need more support.
Thanks to massive investment in the energy sector, Alberta will lead all other provinces in economic growth this year. Some fear that growth could lead to a labour shortage, but thankfully Alberta also boasts the fastest growing population in Canada. Alberta is full of opportunity and certainly has momentum, but can it last?
Or perhaps a better question — what looks promising right now in Alberta, besides oil? The answer is technology. Some estimates put the ICT sector ("Information Computing Technology") at $10 billion in annual revenue, third behind energy and agriculture. While that is certainly impressive for an under-the-radar sector, it doesn't paint the whole picture. The really exciting stuff is happening because of the incredible entrepreneurs and startups gaining momentum across the province.
A few weeks ago Edmonton hosted AccelerateAB, a one-day conference that brought together hundreds of entrepreneurs, investors, and technology leaders from across the province. I was at the event and would describe the mood of those in attendance as "upbeat". Startups were keen to show off their products, and I'm sure a few deals were struck too. It's the kind of event that would not have happened even five years ago. It seems we've turned a corner in Alberta!
There are many reasons for that. One is that individuals who have found success in the past are now engaging with the next generation of entrepreneurs. Evan Chrapko, one of the brothers who created and sold DocSpace for more than $800 million during the dot-com boom, kicked the event off with a keynote titled "Swinging Big". Randy Marsden, founder of Swype and Cleankeys Inc., was part of a panel of trailblazers, and he told the audience that "Alberta has all the ingredients" -- we just need to put them together the right way.
Another reason for the momentum we're seeing now is the success of events like DemoCamp, which provide a platform for startups to share ideas and gather feedback. Those events bring the community together, and have also led to the creation of organizations like Startup Edmonton, which is working to connect entrepreneurs with mentors, investors, and others who can help take their ideas from prototypes to successful products and companies. They hosted a pre-conference Startup University day for young entrepreneurs that was very successful.
My favorite session at AccelerateAB was Gary Ziegler's. He's the CEO of eThor, recently named the most innovative startup on the planet at the Global Technology Symposium in Silicon Valley. Before finishing, he gave two entrepreneurs the opportunity to come on stage to deliver an elevator pitch. It was a classy move, but also one that reflects that unique quality of Edmonton and Alberta -- we work together.
Alberta's tech sector seems to be on the right track. We've had some successes, and we have more tech startups now than ever before. There's lots of room for improvement, but keeping the momentum going could prove to be the biggest challenge yet. After all, most people still associate Alberta with energy, so tech startups have to fight hard for attention. That's not likely to change, but maybe if we play our cards right, people will also think technology when they think Alberta!
Mack Male (@MasterMaq), is a software and social media expert & entrepreneur based in Edmonton, Alberta
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- NEW Dwane Casey to return as Raptors coach next season
At just 36 seconds per video, Keek is the newest iteration of ultra-brief social media | <urn:uuid:ec2e3b56-7efb-4034-9d3d-da747f755e0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thestar.com/business/small_business/people/2012/06/27/alberta_has_more_than_oil_entrepreneurs_are_leading_a_booming_tech_sector.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972139 | 839 | 1.664063 | 2 |
It is that time of year again. Young people are looking forward to Christmas. We senior citizens are describing our most memorable seasons. In 1961, I was serving in the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany. I had a pretty good singing voice at that time, not so much anymore.
Naturally, my unit had a glee club. Our primary purpose was to give a Christmas concert at the local orphanage. We learned to sing two carols in their native German, Oh Christmas Tree, and Silent Night.
Then we obtained a list of names from the orphanage and headed to the PX to buy toys for them. My child was a 5-year-old boy and I found him a big red fire truck.
On the day of the concert we had all our gifts wrapped, loaded up on a deuce and a half and headed to the orphanage. We were greeted by the kids with enthusiasm. Gifts were arranged under the tree and we sang for the kids. The two songs in German were a big hit!
So were the gifts. It turned out that my fire truck was almost as big as the kid that received it.
There is very little that does not show up on the Internet these days. When I did a search on my old unit, I found that several of the guys had posted articles and pictures. Included on the pages was a picture of our concert! There I was, standing among the glee club members watching the kids play with their gifts. I was so young, I almost did not recognize myself.
Now this was a dangerous time in the world. The Soviets had built a wall around Berlin and both sides were talking trash. That wall was not built to keep us out of East Germany, it was put up to keep their own people in. East Germans and other eastern European people were fleeing west in large numbers and the whole scene was a major embarrassment for the Soviets. My unit was considered a prime target if the Soviets were to attack, so we were all pretty nervous about the whole thing.
That day at the orphanage was perfect for the era. We had a chance to forget the drama at the Brandenburg Gate and simply enjoy the season. The kids had a blast with our visit and the tree full of gifts. As we left, I looked back and saw a 5year-old boy pushing his big red firetruck around the room making fire alarm sounds.
I have seen many Christmases in my life time. Some were good, some not so good. But that visit to the German orphanage was one of the best.
Frank Gillispie is founder of The Madison County Journal. His e-mail address is [email protected]. His website can be accessed at http://www.frankgillispie.com/gillispieonline. | <urn:uuid:2c45499c-bc52-4c39-9c8f-0084b16f34e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.madisonjournaltoday.com/archives/5763-OPINION-A-Christmas-in-Germany.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.991871 | 585 | 1.765625 | 2 |
All the 5 W's, 1 H and a BIG O-pinion.
Hello, India is undoubtedly a storehouse of discrimination.The caste system is a major cause.Economic and societal status are also contributing factors.The only fall out of the much-hyped Shilpa Episode is publicity for her and the programme.There is no way racism is going to stop after this.It is all in the mind of the people.Racism,discrimination and all such issues primarily reflect the immaturity of the people who indulge in it.Anyway,we Indians should be the last persons to comment on racism. Neverthless,I was surprised to see a Pakistani newspaper highlighting the issue without pondering a little about huge social concerns pending in their own country.There is no point in people blame others without setting their own house in order.Racism and discrimination must be viewed as a world wide problem and collective afforts are to be made for a solution rather than resorting to mutual mud-slinging.Sathej
Alaphia,While the hypocrisy is getting cyclic (India points to the West, Pakistan points to India etc), the fact remains that this Indian apartheid is very real and and shows little signs of disappearing.I'm linking this post in my blog.
I agree, caste and religion have caused far too many problems in India (as they have elsewhere).The solution to this problem lies in rationality - education to all and equal economic opportunities to all.Compare and contrast the caste based inequality in areas like Kerala and Bihar. The former is far better off, due in parts to land redistribution, widespread education, and a general rejection of state sponsored or supported religion.The problems of caste and religion must be solved with rationality, and cannot be solved by converting people to another religion or following.The dual of religion is rationality.
Sorry.. I didn't get this. Who is this "we"?If X number of people in India are racists/casteists etc, what stops the rest of Indians from speaking up, or indeed from pointing fingers at people from other countries?If by "we" you did not mean "Indians" (as the rest of your post implies), then could you please elaborate?
Sathej, Bala - Yes of course.By the way Sathej, I wanted to ask you about the state of the black bucks inside IIT? Do you ever spot any?Also what is the kind of construction activity going on inside? Geek - I agree.Vivek - "We" is the Indian state. The Indian state that steps in to protect Shilpa Shetty even while it does nothing about the Khairlanji killings. That same Indian state.
India definitely needs to learn it's lesson. It's a pity that our country that is tolerant of almost everything is still not tolerant of its own poor people. More than tolerance, some common sense is needed.
I hate this blog and this person. Am I intolerant towards idiots? And if she removes this comment, will she become intolerant of witty people?Well, who's she to talk, right?Long live logic!
Post a Comment | <urn:uuid:c678f9be-0f9e-4c92-98da-154afbb9ca37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://alaphia.blogspot.com/2007/02/who-are-we-to-talk.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956877 | 650 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Statements about Housing
"Pasco County has the second highest population of homeless in all of Florida."
"It is legal in Ohio to fire an employee or evict a tenant just for being gay."
"More than 30 percent of all commercial and multifamily development in the entire state is happening in Newark."
"I still live in the same working-class neighborhood I grew up in."
"Fourteen million Americans' mortgages are greater than the value of their homes."
A "foreclosure tax" that would take effect in 2013 could mean a high tax bill for those facing foreclosure and millions of families who modified their mortgage or had a short sale through their lender.
U.S. House opponent Paul Ryan supports "cutting funding for veterans by 24 percent."
"Sen. Bob Menendez voted to enact a new tax on the sale of homes of 3.8%."
Under Obama, home values in Florida collapsed, construction jobs were lost and the state had a high foreclosure rate.
Mitt Romney said we should let foreclosures "hit the bottom."
Says Jeff Brandes voted to allow state-run Citizens Property Insurance to dump policies onto "out-of-state, unregulated private companies."
President Obama’s health care law says "when you sell your house now you have to pay a 3.8 percent tax."
"Nearly 60% of all occupants of HUD properties in U.S. are illegals."
Says Obama broke his promise to help homeowners facing foreclosure.
Says "I don’t agree with Mr. Hales that we should give a sweeping break to the developers to allow them to build that infill housing without paying for those very basics."
Says "Austin has the lowest property tax rate by far of the five major cities in Texas."
"There is not one single federal housing program yet that has not needed a bailout to survive."
Says "there are homes for sale on and around (Oswego Lake) right now for under $150,000 that anyone is welcome to buy."
"If you sell your house after 2012 you will pay a 3.8 percent sales tax on it."
"In 2006, I went out and authored a letter with 24 other senators asking for major reform of Freddie and Fannie, warning of a meltdown and a bubble in the housing market."
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Greetings - I have been following this site for some time and I believe that it is time for me to stick my toe in the water. I am an electrical engineer in my day job and I design the commercial, industrial, and military equivalent of ESC's for various applications. I have designed the schematics, pbc's, and written the complete firmware (some from application notes, some from scratch) for a number of different applications ranging from 10W applications to 1kW applications (all relatively low-power) and have interfaced with customers using UART, CAN, and I2C. Most of my experience is with the dsPIC33F series microcontroller.
Though I have adequate experience with the ESC design itself, I lack any real experience with RC or drones besides my own tinkering (I have a Twin Star 2 flying with APM 1 w/ Oilpan). As a result, I really need feedback for hardware features before ordering any hardware so that I'm not stuck with a first revision that few can use without modification.
I see two potential markets, planes and copters. The primary requirement of a plane is high-efficiency while the primary requirement of a copter is high current capacity, quick response, and weight. Correct me if I'm wrong here. My current interests (and, thus, my development time) lie with the high efficiency mindset. Most of the hobbyists that I have seen on here equate long flight times with large capacity batteries. Since the motor consumes a majority of the energy contained in the battery, even modest improvements in efficiency can have drastic effects on flight time. It would be great if the same board could work well for both applications, so it might be smarter to design for a copter and just use different firmwares, much like ArduPlane and ArduCopter.
A question that many of you are surely asking yourselves is "why not just use ESC32?" Some time ago, I saw the post regarding ESC32 and noted a couple of things that interested me about the project. Unfortunately, only the software is open-source, so that gives us - the potential community - little incentive or ability to improve the hardware. I also noted that the board was 4-layer, which - even if the source is published - most of us don't have a full version of Eagle PCB to edit 4 layers anyway. ESC32 also has a lack of a couple of features that I really wasn't sure about. I'm not knocking their design, I think it is great! In fact, I saw their design and took inspiration from many of their features. They really did a fantastic job! The tiny physical size of the ESC32 really suits their project. I just don't believe that the design is very accessible to the community at this time.
I have taken the liberty of creating a schematic and layout (not quite complete, just need to add I2C hardware). I made some design decisions, but I am open to changing those if I can be convinced that the community needs them changed.
So, now the proposal, reasons behind some design decisions that I have made, and a request for input (hardware input is most valuable at this point since I'm not working on software just yet):
There is more, but I'm really trying to keep it hardware-centric at this point. What I would really like is for some number of people express interest, we create a google group, share eagle files, and really get it going. It would also be great if we could put some cash together for the first couple of part and board buys so that we aren't sending UPS and digikey wads of cash for 1 and 2 part orders.
Thank you for reading through this looong post. I will keep an eye on this post and will be responding conversationally. In about a week, I will re-post any results and - hopefully - we can create a community around this idea!
*EDITED TO ADD google groups page created for this project is located here* | <urn:uuid:8e5da040-dec3-4288-8a87-91af5af0a33e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/open-source-esc-is-there-a-potential-community?id=705844%3ABlogPost%3A950430&page=7 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97055 | 827 | 1.84375 | 2 |
- Published 01/06/1999
- ISBN 9788881483297
- Format Pack
Carefully graded by level, from elementary to intermediate, the series contains different types of narration, from puzzle solving to teen fiction and role-play. Each volume contains games and activities. For students between the ages of 11 and 15.
Val is a young teenager whose parents decide to mov... | <urn:uuid:74a18edb-4de6-46b8-9983-e722b6828f83> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pearson.com.au/educator/secondary/product-listing-page/?dsNav=N:4294965422-4294952824-27-4294953318-4294943684&vw=1&sm=Endeca | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93187 | 80 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Sélecteur de langues
Brussels, 12 January 2010
Gas Coordination Group discusses security of gas supply in the light of the current winter situation in Europe
In its first meeting in 2010, the Gas Coordination Group, under the chairmanship of the Commission, has focused today on the assessment of the situation on security of gas supply in the EU-27 and countries of the Energy Community and discussed priorities for the work of the Group in 2010.
Considering the severe winter conditions prevailing in some Member States, the Gas Coordination Group, comprising Member States and the European organisations representing the gas industry, regulators and the consumers, assessed today the situation in the EU-27 and Energy Community contracting parties regarding gas demand and supply, storage levels and gas imports from third countries. In the light of the exceptional situation in some countries due to specific weather and Import conditions the Commission noted that storage levels in the EU are above last year s' levels and welcomed the ability of the European gas industry to ensure continuous gas supplies to all consumers.
In its first meeting in 2010 the Members of the Gas Coordination Group took stock of the work done in 2009 during and following the January 2009 gas crisis and held an exchange of views on the future work by identifying the priorities for the work of the Gas Coordination Group in 2010.
On the basis of the work carried out in the taskforce on the simulation of supply disruptions, the Group continued to examine various supply disruption scenarios developed by Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE).
The Gas Coordination Group will meet again on 15 February 2010.
The Gas Coordination Group was created in 2006 according to Directive 2004/67 relating to measures that guarantee security of natural gas supply. Chaired by the European Commission, it is composed of gas competent representatives of Member States, the European organisations of the gas sector and consumers. The Group meets regularly (at least 4 times per year) to exchange information and to develop both short and long term concrete measures which reinforce the security of gas supply to the EU.
Directive 2004/67 sets out a three step approach in case of supply crisis: the industry takes the necessary measures; if these are not adequate to mitigate the crisis, national measures are activated; if still not adequate and if the crisis reaches the major supply disruption indicator (20% of all imports are missing) the Community mechanism is activated: the Gas coordination Group is convened to discuss what further steps can be taken and to assist the Member States in difficulty. The Group can then propose further measures to the Council.
In July 2009 the Commission has proposed a new Regulation on security of gas supplies in revision of the directive to strengthen the measures for a more effective action in case of gas crisis. The January 2009 gas crisis showed that a more coordinated approach is needed on European level to provide stable and secure energy supply to European citizens. The crisis also showed the vital role of gas storages and reverse flows as short-term crisis response. Therefore, the Commission suggests a common infrastructure standard to ensure the infrastructure for the security of supply, including reverse flows, and supply standards to protected customers, as well as the elaboration of preventive action plans and emergency plans to be activated automatically in case of the occurrence of supply disruption. The European Council of October 2009 has urged Member States and the Parliament to make fast progress on these proposals for the security of gas supply.
The last Gas Coordination Group met on 14 December 2009.
For further information, visit the website of the Gas Coordination Group. | <urn:uuid:e05e27a7-fed3-4c03-bd0d-2c5510ca4946> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-10-13_en.htm?locale=FR | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945825 | 708 | 1.789063 | 2 |
"We are strong. We will not lose hope," Nazmi Halabi, father of missing IDF soldier Majdi Halaby, told Ynet Tuesday – the sixth anniversary of his son's disappearance.
Majdi Halaby, an Israeli Druze soldier from the northern Israeli town of Daliyat al-Karmel, went missing on May 24, 2005. The 19-year-old soldier was last seen trying to hitchhike from his hometown to his Ordnance Corps base near Tirat Ha'Carmel.
An extensive search involving hundreds of volunteers ensued, but no trace of him was ever found. Halabi was officially declared as missing in action (MIA) on June 6, 2005.
Despite time passed, the military's missing persons unit and the police still have no leads in the case. "The State should be doing much more," his father said.
Nazmi Halabi said the family draws its strength from the fact that the case remains active: "What's important to me is that this case hasn’t been shelved. They have a situation assessment every six weeks with everyone involved – the police, the military and the Shin Bet… Still that's not enough. The State can and should do more than it is doing."
Various IDF and police task forces have investigated Halabi's disappearance over the years; and the Born to Freedom Foundation has a standing $10 million reward for
any information leading to his whereabouts.
Unfortunately, to date no progress has been made.
The Halaby family is known in military ranks: Nazmi volunteers with wounded and lonely soldiers, and his three other sons are in active service – his eldest is an officer and his youngest, twins, are in the midst of their mandatory service. | <urn:uuid:c1f3efde-e4b1-4362-98a4-4226bd286940> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4073219,00.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987722 | 360 | 1.75 | 2 |
Lebanon: Spill of 10,000 tons of fuel oil into the Mediterranean Sea
from Indymedia Beirut - 27.07.2006 02:41
At least 10,000 tons of heavy fuel oil have been spilled into the Lebanese sea, causing an environmental catastrophe with severe effects on health, biodiversity and tourism, environmentalists and the Environment Ministry said Wednesday. 15,000 tons are expected to leak into the Mediterranean from another tank that is still burning. Two weeks ago, Israeli bombs targeted the Jiyye power station, located on the coast 30 kilometers south of Beirut. Part of the oil in storage tanks has been burning ever since and the other part is leaking into the Mediterranean.
"The pollution has affected around 70 to 80 kilometers of both public and private rocky and sandy beaches from Damour, south of Beirut, through to Chekka in the North," Berge Hadjian, the Environment Ministry's director general said Wednesday. Another 15,000 tons of oil are expected to leak into the sea, he added. The expected 15,000 tons are from a 25,000-ton burning tank that has burned away 10,000 already.
The ministry has issued a report that included a warning for the citizens to stay away from polluted sites along the coast.
Map of the oil spill
On 13 July 2006, at 4:23 a.m. Jieh power utility located 30 Km South of Beirut directly on the coastline was hit by Israeli bombs. Part of the storage tanks caught fire and are still burning 10 days on. The fuel that did not catch on fire was spilled into the Mediterranean Sea as a result of the blast.
Due to winds blowing South West to North East and water current movement the oil spill was partly carried out to sea and partly dispersed along the coast of Lebanon. So far it has affected 70 – 80 km of both public and private rocky and sandy beaches along the Lebanese coast including public and private marinas/ports for boats/ships of fishermen from the Damour region south of Beirut through to Chekka in the North.
It is also possible that the Israeli war frigate that was hit by a missile might have spilled some diesel oil.
Lebanese Government’s Response
Once the initial assessment was completed, the Ministry of Environment contacted the Kuwaiti and Jordanian Governments for assistance. The Jordaina Government is ready to send experts from the Akaba Area in Jordan to Lebanon to provide technical assistance. The Environment Public Authority in Kuwait is ready to send to Lebanon about 3 containers of material and equipment for fighting such a spill. The private sector in Lebanon that has less than modest capacity was also contacted. Minimal amounts of dispersants, booms, adsorbents, and skimmers are readily available; however, only enough for spills from tankers that are delivering fuel at ports or similar cases. They are not equipped for major environmental accidents (oil spills). REMPEC-MAP UNEP at the United Nations Environment Programme has also been contacted; however, they have provided minimal assistance untill now.
Reports detailing what was found were sent to the Lebanese Higher Relief Council and the Council of Ministers detailing the crisis and suggesting potential solutions. A pilot cleanup was speedily approved and carried out on the 24th of July at the Sporting Club – Ras-Beirut site. This site is facing technical difficulties due to a multitude of factors. Another cleanup was commissioned in the North of Lebanon at the Saint Antoine Sandy Beach Resort and is making modest success.
A complete oil spill cleanup operation will cost in the range of tens of millions of euros and will span a long period of time.
The Ministry of Environment continues getting in touch with its partners and seeking legal, technical, & financial assistance from available Funds designated for such oil spills in the Mediterranean Sea. It also continues to monitor the situation and is reviewing operational responses and clean up programmes in addition to preparing contingency plans for impact assessment.
As this update is prepared, a team of officers from the Ministry are heading towards the North to scope out the oil spill impact on the beaches and shores of the North. We aim to assess the Southern coastline South of the Damour area as soon as cease fire is called and when safe passage to the South is ensured.
The Ministry of Environment asks the Lebanese community to assist it in its work and has prepared a Ministerial brief along these lines.
Some Impacts on the Environmental
· The marine ecosystem (fish species) is active in the summer and has been adversely affected, but the degree of damage cannot be estimated at this point in time. Thankfully, the bird migratory season had recently ended and therefore the numbers of birds effected is expected to be low.
· A small percentage of the heavy fuel oil might have evaporated due to exposure to the elements and does not have a lasting effect.
· A small percentage of the oil might be naturally decomposing because of the natural biodegradation process.
· A large percentage of the spill has emulsified and solidified along the Lebanese shore, clinging to sand, rock and stone as the following pictures will show.
· Some of the biological impacts after an oil spill can include:
o Physical and chemical alteration of natural habitats such as when oil is incorporated into sediments
o Physical smothering effect on the marine life
o Lethal or sub-lethal toxic effects on the marine life
o Changes in the marine ecosystem resulting from oil effects on key organisms e.g. increased abundance of intertidal algae following the death of limpets which normally eat the algae.
Impacts on Human Health
Some possible short term adverse effects might include nausea, headaches and skin (dermatological) problems in residents living close to the effected areas or in beach goers getting in touch with the oil.
Plant crops and animal products from coastal farms close to the oil spill sites might have to be tested for hydrocarbon content to be declared safe for consumption.
The Ministry does not advise fishing off the quays and wharfs found along the coast from Jieh to Heri-Chekka until the complete scope of pollution is assessed.
Impacts on Tourism
The tourism industry has badly suffered. The acute impact of the war on this industry has been immediately felt by the nation. The chronic impact of the oil spill is disastrous on the tourism industry due to the length of time it is going to take for the clean up of the sand, the rocks, the shallow reef and the marine ecosystem as a whole.
Many public and private beaches have been heavily affected including boats/ships of fishermen and yachts and boats of tourists from all over the Arab world and the Mediterranean countries as well as boats of Lebanese nationals.
Beach-based tourism was a major economic activity in Lebanon and constituted a major part of the Lebanon’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Impacts on Biodiversity & the Fishing Industry
It is not possible at this moment to evaluate the impact on biodiversity because of the need of more detailed technical assessments carried out under safe national conditions.
The siege on Lebanon by the Israeli army has prevented the Lebanese fishermen from going about their daily work. This oil spill has added to their crisis by destroying the immediate marine habitat of the fish species off the coast. However, it is well documented in the literature that the concentration of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons will be elevated above background concentrations over a substantial area. Biodiversity will surely suffer as in Lebanon it is highly concentrated on the coastline.
Other Shoreline Impacts
The Lebanese coastline is made up of mainly rocky shores. The initial estimates show that the mortality of limpets and other herbivores is high. Further detailed studies need to be carried out to assess the true scale of the damage. | <urn:uuid:1cfa9629-8a40-4a93-83b0-6ed3c763ce1e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://beirut.indymedia.org/ar/2006/07/4803.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963473 | 1,581 | 1.835938 | 2 |
GROTON -- Drivers will have to get used to slowing down along a significant stretch of Farmers Row over the next year after electronic speed limit signs are installed on a trial basis.
Permission to create the school zone was granted to the Groton School on condition that the signs be placed for a maximum of one year before the Board of Selectmen reviews the subject again.
The Groton School had requested the no-speeding zone at the board's July 23 meeting, explaining that fast-moving cars along Farmers Row threatened the safety of students crossing the street. Attorney Robert Collins, representing the school, told the selectmen his client wanted to create the school zone between Shirley Road and Peabody Street by reducing the speed limit along its length to 20 miles per hour.
According to Collins, a traffic study conducted by the school showed that the average speed of cars traveling along the road was 40 miles per hour with many going as fast as 55 miles an hour. In addition, he said, the road also hosts much truck traffic.
The current speed limit is set at 35 miles per hour.
Selectmen at the time asked Collins to consult with Police Chief Donald Palma about alternatives to the electronic signs.
The two returned to last Monday night's selectmen's meeting, with Palma saying that although he "did not have an issue" with the proposal, he suggested the speed limit only be in effect at certain hours of day when students were likely to be
Nevertheless, selectmen continued to express reservations, with member Joshua Degen asking if an incremental approach could be taken.
He suggested the use of a kind of traffic light where students could push a button to control traffic before crossing the street or if crosswalks could be installed.
"I would hate to see that historic road littered by flashing signs," Degen said.
He added that that no one he had spoken to since the previous meeting was in favor of the proposal.
Board chairman Stuart Schulman reiterated his doubts about forcing drivers to slow down to 20 miles an hour for a stretch of 1,500 feet, which struck him as being too long.
But recognizing the need for student safety, selectmen voted to allow the school to install the flashing lights for 12 months on condition that it work with Palma in setting hours of operation and review the system in a year's time.
Also last Monday night, selectmen decided to proceed with negotiations for renewal of the town manager's contract.
The move came with no discussion late in the meeting and after a two-week delay following an objection by new member Jack Petropoulos that he needed more time to study the issue.
Mark Haddad, who holds degrees from Suffolk University and Merrimack College, was chosen as Groton's first town manager in 2008 and awarded a three-year contract in 2010 after the end of a trial period. His current contract expires on July 31, 2013.
With last Monday night's agreement among selectmen, Schulman and Degen were designated as the board's representatives in opening negotiations with Haddad.
Last Monday night, board members also:
l Voted to award Janet Shea, new owner of the Clover Farm General Store in West Groton, a common victualler license. The decision was made on condition Shea was also granted a food-service permit from the Board of Health which she did later that night. Shea said that she hoped to reopen the store under her management by the middle of this month.
l Decided to delay a decision to recommend a request for support from Country Kids owner Robin Kane for funding from the CPC (Community Preservation Committee) until Haddad could draw up a list detailing exactly what the money would be used for. Because Kane will be leasing the former Tarbell Elementary School building from the town instead of purchasing it outright, she is eligible to apply for funding through the CPA. According to Haddad, Kane would use the $350,000 for lead paint remediation, roof repairs, installation of a handicapped elevator and handicapped rest room. That information would be confirmed before the town manager returned to the board for a final vote authorizing him to draft a letter of recommendation to the CPC.
l Voted to reaffirm their memorandum of understanding with the Groton Electric Light Department (GELD) to buy surplus land along Station Avenue for use in building a new Center Fire Station if needed. Currently, the town is moving forward with plans to build the new station on property located along Farmers Row but town officials prefer to keep their options open. The only change in the agreement was in wording changing references to the Station Avenue Overlay District to the Town Center Overlay District.
l Voted to ratify the appointment of Anthony Montesion, Charles DiRienzo, and Michael Jackson as special police officers. Selectmen also voted to ratify the appointment of Tom Sangiolo to the Great Ponds Advisory Committee.
l Voted to allow the Police Department use of the Groton Gun Range for one day only. The decision allowed use of the range on Aug. 9 from 8 a.m. to noon for training of two police officers new to the Groton force. | <urn:uuid:efd2f3d9-6893-48d0-9bb8-984c4734b4c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nashobapublishing.com/groton_news/ci_21281599/selectmen-cut-speed-limit-at-groton-school | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974376 | 1,060 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Set to a haunting soundtrack, the 45 second black and white commercial, developed by the London advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, this video was deemed ‘too graphic’ for television and given an 18-certificate cinema rating.
On the same token, October 31st also saw the publishing of a new study that reveals alarming declines in Pacific shark populations. According to Conservation Biology, this is "the most comprehensive assessment of the status of Pacific shark populations to date."
The paper, authored by Dr. Shelley Clarke and a team from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in New Caledonia, shows significant declines in catch rates for blue, mako, and oceanic whitetip sharks, as well as declining average sizes of oceanic whitetip and silky sharks, indicating heavy fishing.
Leave a comment for the Guest Book trough Facebook | <urn:uuid:5bebdc47-3365-4ba2-aa3c-5b9744193da2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.advancedgalapagosdiving.com/2012_11_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933026 | 176 | 1.835938 | 2 |
The Meat Safety and Quality Research Unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service’s U.S. Meat Animal Research Center (USDA-USMARC) recently received the American Meat Institute Foundation (AMIF) Scientific Achievement Award during the AMI International Production & Processing Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. The award was presented in recognition of the Unit’s timely and important meat and poultry industry research.
AMIF annually recognizes individuals from industry, academia, or government whose professional achievements make significant contributions to the meat and poultry industry.
Current USDA-USMARC meat science research focuses upon both meat quality and safety topics, including identification of areas of the genome that regulate carcass composition and meat quality, the development of instrumentation to classify carcasses based on meat quality traits and lean meat yield, the effect of breed on carcass composition and meat quality, and the development of strategies to optimize meat quality, especially tenderness. The unit is also analyzing the prevalence, level, and types of non-O157 STEC in cattle from different production systems at harvest and determining if production system or regional variations in non-O157 STEC serogroups exist.
Recently, the USDA-USMARC team conducted projects on detection of and postharvest interventions for non-O157 STEC that the beef industry used to demonstrate that a food safety management system in control for E. coli O157:H7 was also in control for other Shiga toxin-producing E. coli.
“The Center’s groundbreaking research has served the meat industry well in producing a better product for our customers,” said AMIF Chairman Nick Meriggioli, president of Kraft Foods Inc./Oscar Mayer. “This group’s active publication in peer reviewed journals, as well as the design of standard research protocols that are recognized as global standards, have contributed enormously to the safety of meat and poultry products.”
AMI represents the interests of packers and processors of beef, pork, lamb, veal and turkey products and their suppliers throughout North America. Together, AMI’s members produce 95 percent of the beef, pork, lamb and veal products and 70 percent of the turkey products in the United States. The Institute provides legislative, regulatory, public relations, technical, scientific and educational services to the meat and poultry packing and processing industry. | <urn:uuid:af89512e-0bd9-4dd7-a5a2-f5ae3593f30d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nationalhogfarmer.com/usda-s-us-meat-animal-research-center-meat-safety-and-quality-research-unit-honored-ami-foundation-s | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931201 | 491 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Frustration — and in some cases fear — mounted in New York City on Thursday, three days after Superstorm Sandy. Traffic backed up for miles at bridges, large crowds waited impatiently for buses into Manhattan, and tempers flared in gas lines.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city would send bottled water and ready-to-eat meals into the hardest-hit neighborhoods through the weekend, but some New Yorkers grew dispirited after days without power, water and heat and decided to get out.
"It's dirty, and it's getting a little crazy down there," said Michael Tomeo, who boarded a bus to Philadelphia with his 4-year-old son. "It just feels like you wouldn't want to be out at night. Everything's pitch dark. I'm tired of it, big-time."
Rima Finzi-Strauss decided to take bus to Washington. When the power went out Monday night in her apartment building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it also disabled the electric locks on the front door, she said.
"We had three guys sitting out in the lobby last night with candlelight, and very threatening folks were passing by in the pitch black," she said. "And everyone's leaving. That makes it worse."
The mounting despair came even as the subways began rolling again after a three-day shutdown. Service was restored to most of the city, but not the most stricken parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, where the tunnels were flooded.
Bridges into the city were open, but police enforced a carpooling rule and peered into windows to make sure each car had at least three people. The rule was meant to ease congestion but appeared to worsen it. Traffic jams stretched for miles, and drivers who made it into the city reported that some people got out of their cars to argue with police.
Rosemarie Zurlo said she planned to leave Manhattan for her sister's place in Brooklyn because her own apartment was freezing, "but I'll never be able to come back here because I don't have three people to put in my car."
With only partial subway service, lines at bus stops swelled. More than 1,000 people packed the sidewalk outside an arena in Brooklyn, waiting for buses to Manhattan. Nearby, hundreds of people massed on a sidewalk.
When a bus pulled up, passengers rushed the door. A transit worker banged on a bus window, yelled at people inside, and then yelled at people in the line.
With the electricity out and gasoline supplies scarce, many gas stations across the New York area remained closed, and stations that were open drew long lines of cars that spilled out onto roads.
At a station near Coney Island, almost 100 cars lined up, and people shouted and honked, and a station employee said he had been spit on and had coffee thrown at him.
In a Brooklyn neighborhood, a station had pumps wrapped in police tape and a "NO GAS" sign, but cars waited because of a rumor that gas was coming.
"I've been stranded here for five days," said Stuart Zager, who is from Brooklyn and was trying to get to his place in Delray Beach, Fla. "I'm afraid to get on the Jersey Turnpike. On half a tank, I'll never make it."
The worst was over at least for public transportation. The Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North were running commuter trains again, though service was limited. New Jersey Transit had no rail service but most of its buses were back.
The storm killed more than 80 people in the U.S. New York City raised its death toll on Thursday to 38, including two Staten Island boys, 2 and 4, swept from their mother's arms by the floodwaters.
In New Jersey, many people were allowed back into their neighborhoods Thursday for the first time since Sandy ravaged the coastline. Some found minor damage, others total destruction.
The storm cut off barrier islands, smashed homes, wrecked boardwalks and hurled amusement park rides into the sea. Atlantic City, on a barrier island, remained under mandatory evacuation.
More than 4.6 million homes and businesses, including about 650,000 in New York and its northern suburbs, were still without power. Consolidated Edison, the power company serving New York, said electricity should be restored by Saturday to customers in Manhattan and to homes and offices served by underground power lines in Brooklyn.
In darkened neighborhoods, people walked around with miner's lamps on their foreheads and bicycle lights clipped to shoulder bags and, in at least one case, to a dog's collar. A Manhattan handyman opened a fire hydrant so people could collect water to flush toilets.
Some public officials expressed exasperation at the relief effort.
James Molinaro, president of the borough of Staten Island, suggested that people not donate money to the American Red Cross because the Red Cross "is nowhere to be found."
"We have hundreds of people in shelters throughout Staten Island," he said. "Many of them, when the shelters close, have nowhere to go because their homes are destroyed. These are not homeless people. They're homeless now."
Josh Lockwood, the Red Cross' regional chief executive, said 10 trucks began arriving to Staten Island on Thursday morning and a kitchen was set up to distribute meals. Lockwood defended the agency, saying relief workers were stretched thin.
"We're talking about a disaster where we've had shelters set up from Virginia to Indiana to the state Maine, so there's just this tremendous response," he said. "So I would say no one organization is going to be able to address the needs of all these folks by themselves."
In Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, Mary Wilson, 75, was buying water from a convenience store that was open but had no power. She said she had been without running water or electricity for three days, and lived on the 19th floor.
She walked downstairs Thursday for the first time because she ran out of bottled water and felt she was going to faint. She said she met people on the stairs who helped her down.
"I did a lot of praying: 'Help me to get to the main floor.' Now I've got to pray to get to the top," she said. "I said, 'I'll go down today or they'll find me dead.'"
(Contributing to this story were Associated Press writers Verena Dobnik, Michael Hill, Karen Matthews, Jennifer Peltz and Christina Rexrode.)
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Sign up now for the New Pittsburgh Courier Digital Daily newsletter! | <urn:uuid:60cea582-2563-4d13-96f1-746ddba87b22> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newpittsburghcourieronline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8536:exasperation-builds-on-day-3-in-storm-stricken-nyc&catid=39:national&Itemid=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983664 | 1,361 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Terrorism Made In The West: Sri Lanka victim of the media here
By Glen Jenvey London for Asian Tribune
The shooting and bombing in Norway can only be described as an act of pure evil ! Not many would say anything in defence of the terror brought to streets of the capital Oslo killing eight people and injuring 209 and the killing 69 people and wounding 33 others at an island youth camp run by the ruling Labour Party
The Far left political press as normal are looking to blame someone? Their target in the British press has been Paul Ray who has been blamed for his blog as the person who inspired Anders Behring Breivik. This is untrue , Paul who I know personally has no links other than the use of some British historical words like lionheart http://lionheartuk.blogspot.co.uk/ (which is the name of his blog) and his use of crusader wording which was also used by George Bush.
Paul’s words about Crusaders is in fact part of British and European history taught in most English schools, so it shows how small minded the media are to follow a blog of a owner whose main mission from the start before he was attacked by the international media was in fact Islamic terrorism based in his home town Luton UK.
But the Government of Norway has double standards not known to many readers in the UK and the west. After the failed South African peace talks http://www.defence.lk/new.asp?fname=20061022_01 were set up between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE a banned terrorist group in most western countries,like Al-Qaida is today (but like the LTTE still operates in the UK and other European countries , The peace talks went from South Africa before they started to Norway.
Norway's role in the talks was disgusting they took the side of the terrorists the LTTE with gifts being given by the Tamil Tigers to the Norwegian government team, By Velupillai Pirapaharan (the Bin Laden of Sri Lanka) giving gold medals and other bribes to the Norway government team.
While on video just down the road executing Tamils with their hands tied behind their backs with a massive hand made pistol while his victims were tied to wooden stakes, all filmed on video tapes released to the tamil community in Europe to raise funds.(copies of the videos were given to the Sri Lankan high commission in London).
During the whole peace talks Norway accused Sri Lanka of war crimes using their links to human rights organizations in the west , If you have ever been to the beautiful island of Sri Lanka you will see it needed good military intelligence and the right leader to stop the killing of not a 100 or so people which the western media called Norway's 9/11 ,but in fact thousands (100000 at least) Norway messed Sri Lanka about so much that when the new government came into power it had no choice but to bring a end to the war no right minded person wanted and the present government leader defended its people (which includes Tamils). and smashed the Tigers to bits.
Norway and other western governments complained as normal with the British media going one step above all international media with channel 4s documentary claiming war crimes on Velupillai Pirapaharan son being shot at close range. If the programmer knew anything about the terrorist organization and other members of the one day research a story press in the UK do, they would know that the Tamil Tigers are infamous for a suicide capsule hung around their necks in case they are caught, they can commit suicide.Velupillai Pirapaharan son like the one who went to university in northern Ireland under the protect of the IRA ,had body guards who would kill the child to stop him falling into the hands of the Sri Lankan brave troops.It just show how low the advisers of channel 4s documentary are to use a photo without knowing even how Velupillai Pirapaharan security teams worked.
It is called brain washing the western public to keep a few leftie experts at human rights organisations in a job and the funds flowing in. What Sri Lanka needs is for people to help rebuild the country after years of civil war not western media and political leaders who are a wash of terrorist organisations in their own country undermining a true great president Mahinda Rajapakse . Don’t be brainwashed by Norway and other western governments who have never met the Tamil Tigers and heard and watched how they tricked the poor Tamil people into giving money for protection ,stealing Red Cross emergency food aid,demanding money for even postal letters from europe and America and canada.
But most of all Norway like the NIBS (intel of sri lanka)knew the LTTE had no wish for peace, but Norway like the UK and many other western countries thinks in their wisdom that having all the worlds banned terrorist organisations based in their countries as refugees status and its leadership and political wings meeting with western political leaders that it will be an unofficial peace treaty between the western government and terrorists ,in hope they will not turn on them look what happen in New York 911 the lead hijacker was at one time based in Germany, with a email account with a British web site based in America called azzam.com http://azzam.com/
Norway I feel sorry for you ,but don’t insult people who are poor trying to rebuild their country they are a proud nation with many people in their security services that go into terrorist organisations in person risking their lives not sat at a computer looking for terrorists links , a very British taught service looking at how proud they are in the senior officers mess in Buller Road which has photos of every head of the police and Army dating back to the days Britain's rule in Sri Lanka. sat in there you have to hold a high rank yourself or be part of a secret war the public media and political leaders never see until you retire, But even the last head of state who lost her eye in a suicide attack knows of me as most of her army intelligence from London came from me.and all I keep reading since I set up the peace talks is Norway and western governments are poking their noses and insulting Sri Lanka and siding with terrorists who have lost !people die in wars!.
And when i started working for India a few years back they said the same over Kashmir the funds were coming from America’s new partner Pakistan and the west where the Military attache told me inside the Indian high commission London with the retired Deputy head of the Indian army that Bin Laden was in Pakistan it was no point in telling the British police or FBI as they just don’t listen like they never over Abu Hamza .ABU HAMZA VIDEO STORY LINK PRESS So Bin Linden lived for a few years more free next to the Pakistani army, I thought the British might wonder why i opened a website called Pakistan army isi .com ? but they still did not click. maybe the Brigadier and the General passed on the info to America in the end I will never know and don’t care as the reward for justice never paid a penny to me or neil doyle Terror-Base-UK over Abu Hamza so why give free info to the Fed’s who government and media insult Sri Lanka a poor country who has won peace for all its people as a Tamil I would love to help rebuild this commonwealth country and say what ever I did for the Sri Lankan military and Diplomats I can live with and would shake the hands of any X ltte wanting peace for the Tamil people and the whole of the nation.
A snake charmer said to me don’t touch his king cobra, my friend said to the me Norway has touched a unhealthy note in its own making with its own home made far right and got bitten by a mad man does Norway now understand the hurt and suffering of so many Sri Lankan families had to put up with on both sides of a war no one wanted one person like Velupillai Pirapaharan or Anders Behring Breivik can bring so much suffering so Norway and west stop insulting Sri Lanka.
- ASisn Tribune - | <urn:uuid:c2039730-4137-4862-89f1-fb32fc8055e6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://asiantribune.com/news/2012/06/01/terrorism-made-west-sri-lanka-victim-media-here | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967389 | 1,667 | 1.554688 | 2 |
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The Mystery: Standing guard in Newport, Rhode Island, is a strange construction that is possibly the most controversial structure in America. It is a 28-foot-high, stone and mortar tower with a twenty-four-foot, outside diameter. It contains more than 5000 cubic feet of stone, sand, and lime. With each cubic foot of such material weighing 200-some [...] | <urn:uuid:423dc073-1391-465b-9887-38086aca12e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://atlantisrisingmagazine.com/2012/01/01/the-newport-tower-mystery/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930917 | 102 | 1.703125 | 2 |
From the Appleton (Wis.) Post-Crescent of May 24, 1920:
Geneva.—"They have pretty nearly convinced me I'm dead," mourns Paul Bergot, French soldier here. He was reported killed in action by the French army. One day a gendarme called on him and he signed a paper he later found was his own death certificate. Now he is fighting in court to prove he is alive. "We have his word for it he is dead," says the government. | <urn:uuid:ff6f5a61-f672-4cba-828e-60594e95338a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.genealogue.com/2006/10/be-careful-what-you-sign.html?showComment=1161720480000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.996109 | 104 | 1.601563 | 2 |
That disclaimer is necessary because it places my comments within a specific context. I know Wright as a man with a passion for the community he is called to serve. Some may not like to hear it, but he, and most African Americans in ministry, lives with the challenge of finding ways to reaching people stymied by a myriad of human conditions.
That is difficult to hear in this age of inclusion. America is uncomfortable with continuing to hear message that reminds it of the consequences of all of those years of oppression. Many would rather move on as if none of it ever happened, while pretending that race no longer maters. Wright spoke his truth regarding how public policies continue to hinder African Americans.
The pulpit, in the minds of his critics, is a place to leave us feeling good about each other. The social gospel message should be flushed, in their opinion, while being replaced with the more comfortable message of leaders like T.D. Jakes and Creflo “give me some” Dollars. The prosperity message has taken hold within pulpits across America, but Wright fails to follow suit.
Instead he wears African garments, and promotes an Afro-centric approach to ministry. Some would say his ministry is outdated. Some would argue that his retirement signals the end of a generation of ministers who embraced James Cones “Black Theology” and remember James Forman’s “Black Manifesto. Wright’s message helped soothe the tension among American Americans that grappled with the significance of Christianity. It was viewed as the religion of the slave master. It had been used to subjugate rather than inspire. The blue eyed Jesus glaring at African American parishioners from the walls of their sanctuary helped solidify the notion of inferiority.
Wright gave them reason to believe. He did what was needed in a city that is the national headquarters of the Nation of Islam. There, the people heard the argument on a consistent basis-Christianity is the “white man’s religion.” Wright responded with a powerful ministry that celebrated the universality of the Christian message. This faith is for all people. He has never discounted the right for others to celebrate Christ in a way that spoke to their particularity. He created within his work a way to make the message meaningful for those who are tired of the great contradiction called America.
Why is all of this a problem? Because America is struggling with Obama’s blackness. White America is willing to vote for a black man as long as he isn’t too black. He has to prove that he is more American than black. The radical teaching of his pastor scares America because they refuse to submit to a man willing to celebrate being black. They know he’s black, but they’re not comfortable with his being too black.
I’m offended at the assumption that we, African Americans, need to be stripped again to fit in. Isn’t it enough that the slave trade robbed us of our culture, took us from our families and deprived us of our identity? Isn’t it enough that we have been denied equal opportunity and forced to play by the rules of white America? Isn’t it enough that we have proven our commitment to this country by dying in world wars and conflicts while being denied fair treatment on our own soil?
As much as America refuses to admit it, we still have a long way to go. The race card has been entered into this race due to the insecurities America has when it comes to having a black man in charge that isn’t afraid to be black. It would be easier if he attended a white church. It would be better if his minister refused to embrace “Black Theology” and a social gospel agenda. That would be easier for America to deal with, but at what cost. Would Chicago be a better place without Wright’s voice? I think not.
Obama is who he is today because he has been under the teaching of Jeremiah Wright. America may not like to hear it, but being in love with being black isn’t a bad thing. Being a prophet willing to challenge America to do better isn’t a bad thing. It’s needed in the kingdom. It is what God has called some to do
Wright isn’t the bad guy. He’s a hero. Too bad America is too consumed with its guilt to get to the real message. I’m still waiting to overcome someday. | <urn:uuid:ed683db2-ee0c-4c54-a26d-09f9848609ce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rev-elution.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971521 | 931 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Earlier this month, Connecticut learned it did not make the final list of states competing for millions of federal stimulus dollars under President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program. The program awards grants to states that are willing to reform their school system to retain the best teachers and administrators, prepare each student for success in college and the workplace, while also turning around the lowest achieving schools.
Connecticut was considered a long shot for the grants even before the finalists were announced. Now, lawmakers, advocates, education officials, and teachers’ unions are setting its sights on the second round of Race to the Top grants. WNPR’s Ray Hardman spoke with Democratic State Representative Andrew Fleischman, House chair of the General Assembly’s education committee about pending legislation that could reform Connecticut’s schools, and put the state in a better position to be included in the next round of Race to the Top grants. | <urn:uuid:b7b70ab2-6abf-439e-bb06-c589dc1075fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cpbn.org/article/race-top-dollars-driving-school-reform-ct?mini=calendar/2012/10/all | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962082 | 187 | 1.554688 | 2 |
A month’s supply of diapers: $100. A month’s supply of formula: $125. Crib: $150.
When you take a look at the numbers, babies are expensive. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that a typical middle-income family will spend $226,920 to raise a child born in 2010 from birth to age 18. The approximation doesn’t include the cost of college, either.
For parents who are unprepared, for whatever reason, to assume these costs, having a child can be financially and emotionally stressful. One such woman, Lauren Betancourt, unexpectedly became pregnant despite the fact that she regularly took birth control pills.
Betancourt sued birth control pill manufacturer Qualitest Products Inc. over her unintended pregnancy two weeks after the company announced a voluntary nationwide product recall of 1.4 million packages of pills. According to a press release from Qualitest, packages for eight brands of its oral contraceptive products were misaligned during production, meaning pills were placed out of order. Women who took the medication may have taken placebo pills on days they should’ve been taking active pills, leaving them at risk for becoming pregnant.
Although the company issued a recall as soon as it discovered the problem, the notice didn’t come quickly enough for Betancourt, who claims she became pregnant because of the manufacturing error. She is seeking more than $5 million in damages and is pursuing class certification.
Nicole Nehama Auerbach, a partner at Valorem Law Group, finds Betancourt’s lawsuit interesting because it focuses on the pill packaging rather than the pills. “It’s not that often that you actually see a package being dangerous in and of itself as opposed to the product being dangerous,” she says.
Betancourt filed a wrongful pregnancy lawsuit, also called a wrongful conception lawsuit, against Qualitest. This type of suit is one of three common unintended pregnancy suits.
In a wrongful birth lawsuit, parents sue a doctor, geneticist or hospital for allegedly failing to perform adequate tests in order to diagnose or prevent a birth defect.
“The parents are basically saying that if they had found out about this horrible birth defect, they would’ve terminated the pregnancy,” explains Lauren Tulli, a member at Cozen O’Connor.
Parents also can bring a wrongful life lawsuit on behalf of their child.
“The presumption is the same: ‘Had my parents known that I was going to have these horrible deformities, I wouldn’t have been born, so my life is wrong,’” Tulli says.
Wrongful pregnancy lawsuits are less morally controversial. They allege a medical provider performed a sterilization procedure that didn’t work and made conception possible. In Betancourt’s case, she claims Qualitest’s error caused her to conceive.
Almost all courts have said that, unlike plaintiffs in wrongful birth and wrongful life cases, plaintiffs in wrongful pregnancy cases cannot recover the costs of raising unwanted but healthy children through the age of 18. They can only obtain damages for pre-birth costs, such as pain and suffering related to pregnancy and labor, time off work, prenatal medical costs and the cost of the failed contraceptive measure.
“The claim is that a healthy child is a blessing, so you can’t recover for that,” Auerbach says. “To me, that’s a fascinating concept. I have three boys of my own, and each one is a blessing on many days—but they’re expensive. It’s one thing if you planned for your baby, but it’s another if somebody negligently caused you to get pregnant.”
Auerbach says she knows of just one exception to this widely held stance among the courts. In 1982, the Supreme Court of Connecticut ruled in Ochs v. Borrelli that parents who conceived after a failed sterilization procedure could recover pre-birth damages as well as damages for raising their unwanted child through the age of 18. The court reasoned that although the defendants in the case asserted that public policy required the court to hold that the birth of a healthy child is a blessing and should offset financial burdens associated with raising the child, “public policy cannot support an exception to tort liability when the impact of such an exception would impair the exercise of a constitutionally protected right.” In this case, the parents had a constitutionally protected right to use contraception to limit the size of their family.
Although Betancourt, who decided not to terminate her unwanted pregnancy, could cite Ochs v. Borrelli in her case, experts say the courts’ mostly uniform stance on damages in wrongful pregnancy cases indicates it isn’t likely that Qualitest will have to pay Betancourt or other potential class members’ damages related to raising their children through their teenage years. The company also may be able to limit the damages it must pay because of its swift, Food and Drug Administration-compliant recall.
Pharmaceutical industry lawyers agree it’s important for drug manufacturers and other consumer products companies to establish recall plans of action.
“When a company faces a recall that poses significant risk for the patient, you can’t get into a reactive mode—you have to be prepared,” says James Wood, a partner at Reed Smith. “Companies must have a worldwide proactive plan in place so that communications are instantaneous and coordination is done in one place.”
Wood recommends that in-house lawyers study global recall regulations when developing their companies’ recall plans. In particular, they should focus on rules and guidelines issued by the FDA, the World Health Organization, the European Union and Canada.
“Then you’re ready to conduct a recall anywhere in the world and get the product back very quickly,” Wood says.
Experts stress that it’s in companies’ best interest to partner with the FDA when conducting recalls. The FDA has a guidance document called “Guidance for Industry: Product Recalls, Including Removals and Corrections,” which is a step-by-step recall procedure the agency endorses.
“The FDA really spells it out for companies as to how to proceed through this recall process,” Tulli says. She notes that the FDA will even draft press releases for companies, like the one Qualitest issued, to ensure the recall happens properly and speedily. Additionally, following the process “will prevent the FDA from coming at companies with regulatory offenses,” Tulli says.
General counsel mustn’t forget about other internal duties during a recall. For instance, they should be closely involved in public relations efforts.
“There has to be very quick action on the part of GCs to make sure they completely understand what the facts are before getting misinformation out into the public,” Auerbach says. “There needs to be coordination within the company at the highest levels to open as many lines of communications as necessary for the public to understand the issue and take the appropriate action.”
Additionally, GCs should ensure employees retain all documents in case of litigation, inform insurance companies about the error and recall, report the incident to the board and consult with outside counsel.
Finally, it’s important to have outside consultants evaluate the company’s quality control processes to avoid future problems.
“The minute that you lose quality control in a substance that is being ingested by humans, the ramifications are obvious and can cause huge amounts of liability, and potentially even cost the company itself,” Auerbach says. “Consultants must determine what happened, how it happened, why it happened, whether there is internal responsibility, and whether there needs to be personnel or processing changes.”
Companies also should adhere to the FDA’s Current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMPs), which ensure drugs are manufactured in a safe and effective manner.
“By way of best practices, a company like Qualitest is best served to follow these cGMPs because that’s going to be their first line of defense—‘We’ve been compliant all this way, our facility is in good condition, our equipment is well-maintained and we have all of the proper quality control processes in place,’” Tulli says. | <urn:uuid:34618646-1076-4c7a-8a64-add12e607148> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.insidecounsel.com/2011/12/01/woman-sues-birth-control-pill-maker-for-unintended?t=ip | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963606 | 1,756 | 1.820313 | 2 |
By the end of the 2009-10 school year, Amy Pullella’s son had missed 83 days of the 180 days he was required to be in school.
Tuesday morning, Pullella went to jail for her son’s absences, charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor because she failed to require her child’s attendance in school.
“They need to provide parents help, not prosecute them,” said Pullella, 34. “This is not about me. It is about my son.”
On June 10, the Collier County Sheriff’s Office was provided with a sworn affidavit from Kevin Stockman, director of student relations for the Collier County School District, attesting to Pullella’s non-compliance with keeping her son, Kevin, 11, in Gulfview Middle School.
“The child has not attended 69 days of school as of May 10th, 2010 and the mother has offered no valid reason for this period of non attendance,” wrote Stockman in the affidavit, according to the Collier County Sheriff Office incident report. “The child has missed a total of 83 school days for school year 2009-2010. The school has made 12 contacts with interested parties of the family attempting to remedy the situation since December 1st, 2009.”
The affidavit also states that the district wanted to pursue charges against Pullella for failing to send her child to school.
Collier County has Truancy Court for students who have attendance problems. Parents also can be affected by Truancy Court if they are aware that their child is habitually truant and they fail to get involved. If they fail, they can be convicted of a second-degree misdemeanor and serve up to 60 days in jail.
Truancy Court developed from a partnership involving the Collier County School District, the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, State Attorney’s Office, Department of Juvenile Justice, the David Lawrence Center and Lutheran Social Services to resolve truancy issues.
Habitually truant students are those who have 15 unexcused absences within 90 days, but a student may be brought to Truancy Court for missing five days in a 30-day period. If truancy intervention doesn’t work, the student could face a judge, who may ask the student to pay a fine, perform community service hours, or may suggest alternative education.
But Pullella said she repeatedly asked the Collier County School District and a host of other county agencies for help with her son, whom she calls “defiant” and unwilling to go to school.
“Do you think I want my son to be a failure, an unproductive citizen? No. I want him to go to school,” she said.
Pullella said truancy officers used to come by the home and take her son to school, but she was told by the officers that it couldn’t happen every day. She said she called the district several times to try and find a solution, but her calls were either unreturned or a solution was not offered.
“My son needs a disciplinary environment or home-bound school,” she said. “He needs something more than he is getting. And every time I try to talk to someone, they don’t get back to me or they attack me.”
The Collier County School District officials had no comment on Pullella’s allegations Thursday.
Pullella, a single mother, and the district were having problems before she was arrested. In February, Pullella filed a lawsuit against Superintendent Dennis Thompson, School District representative Angela Valmana and Collier Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Krier saying that Truancy Court proceedings and daytime court orders would deprive Pullella of her employment and income. Pullella is Kevin’s only means of financial support, according to her suit.
“The restraint on current daytime court proceedings and daytime hour court orders is reasonably necessary to protect the educational rights of Plaintiff Kevin Pullella as otherwise this action will force previous truancy to continue,” according to the suit, which was dismissed in June.
Pullella is the second parent to be arrested for failing to send her child to school. In November 2008, Olivia Machado was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor because she failed to require her child’s attendance in school. The 2008 arrest came after the Collier County School District filed a complaint that Machado’s daughter had missed more than 120 days in two years at Immokalee High School.
Connect with K-12 education policy reporter Katherine Albers at www.naplesnews.com/staff/katherine-albers/. | <urn:uuid:5adf38cc-c102-4d60-a4cf-92a85d3e54a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/jul/22/mom-goes-jail-because-sons-absences/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973815 | 996 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The diet was devised by a Croatian man looking to shed a lot of weight. It worked for him, he lost some 160 pounds on the disgusting diet. The diet consists of garlic and onions on either a wheat biscuit or cracker with a side of carrot juice -- yum.
Combining the diet with exercise, the creator of the diet did manage to lose a lot of weight, but friends said his breath was "really rancid."
The rare dieters thinking about this diet should be sure to pick up a few gallons of mouthwash when they stock up on onions and garlic if they want to keep their friends and family close.
After all, what good is it to lose weight if nobody can stand being close enough you to notice?
No. 1: The My Pet Fat diet
The My Pet Fat diet isn't so much a diet as a ugly deterrent to eating altogether.
Inspired by the pet rock craze of the 1970s, the diet consists only of a chunk of synthetic fat designed to look like the leftovers from a liposuction.
The idea is to put the ugly blob on the kitchen counter or in the fridge. Simply spotting the ugly little blob supposedly gets dieters thinking about their own fat and skipping the next snack.
One wonders why dieters would spend money on something so gross when they could simply save money by not buying the sweets they're trying to avoid.
While there aren't any health concerns associated with My Pet Fat, but dieters might have to hide their new pet when company comes over.
In the case of this pet, there's a very thin line between healthy motivation and creeping out your house guests.
Distributed by Internet Broadcasting. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:d9d25a16-0129-4cd2-90da-b7d9788aab21> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.click2houston.com/lifestyle/new-years-resolutions/5-fad-diets-that-stink/-/7131594/7733434/-/item/1/-/10mhfhrz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971779 | 361 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Antonia Boadi: Preparing Computer Science Students for Careers in Homeland Security
Computer science lecturer Dr. Antonia Boadi has been awarded two grants totaling more than $1 million from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop programs that prepare undergraduate and graduate students at California State University, Dominguez Hills who are majoring in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) for homeland security-related careers. The grants will be administered under the umbrella of the CSU Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (CSU-ACE). Boadi is the director of the CSU Dominguez Hills chapter of the system-wide consortium of programs designed for students interested in careers in intelligence.
Both grants are through DHS’s Scientific Leadership Award for Minority Serving Institutions grant program. The first grant for $754,668 will be used to expand the computer science department’s existing Homeland Security Science Technology and Research Training Undergraduate Program (HS-STARTUP). The second grant of $249,987 is for the creation of the Network-Distributed Multi-Agent Decision System (NOMADS) initiative.
HS-STARTUP currently focuses on getting high school and community college students interested in majoring in one of the STEM fields. The new grant will be geared toward current undergraduate students at CSU Dominguez Hills. The grant will allow Boadi and the department to develop coursework related to the use of computer-based decision support systems (DSS) in emergency response, airport security, border security, cargo security and infrastructure protection applications. In addition, a Homeland Security Research Cluster will be created, providing students with opportunities to perform and present scholarly research not only at conferences but also to K-12 students during outreach activities.
The NOMADS initiative will add a homeland security component to the master’s degree program in computer science. Graduates will conduct research on game theory algorithms in the development of policies for human and robotic agents patrolling airports, performing border patrol or protecting critical infrastructure.
Boadi says that the curriculum for STEM courses related to homeland security has grown at CSU Dominguez Hills due to the university’s close alignment with initiatives of the Department of Homeland Security, including CSU-ACE, the Center for Excellence in Knowledge Management & Computational Science, the Computer Security Research Laboratory and the homeland security track of the undergraduate computer technology program.
“Our faculty strives to provide our students with rich classroom and experiential opportunities,” she says. “The new homeland security initiatives are synergistic with the research and curricular infrastructure in our computer science department. We have also partnered with researchers at the USC Homeland Security Center of Excellence, the first Center of Excellence established by the Department of Homeland Security. As a product of both CSU Dominguez Hills and USC, it is my desire to establish a pipeline of students into a doctoral program in computer science or engineering.”
A CSU Dominguez Hills alumna who double majored in computer science and math, Boadi began teaching at her alma mater in 2000. She holds two master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California.
Boadi says that as the offspring of a university professor and an elementary school teacher, she had never intended to become an educator and entered the defense industry after graduating from CSU Dominguez Hills. When she completed her first master’s degree in engineering, Garry Hart, her former math professor at Dominguez Hills, asked her to return to campus to teach a course. Although she initially did it out of respect for her mentor, she found she enjoyed teaching.
“I will never forget the event that changed my life,” Boadi recalls. “One day, I noticed that a small crowd had gathered outside the window of the room where I was lecturing. When I went outside to find out if something had happened, I was told that I was the focus of the crowd’s attention. The spectators had never seen an African-American woman teaching mathematics. I abandoned my industry job shortly after that in order to pursue my doctoral studies.”
Boadi was hired as a lecturer in the computer science department while still in graduate school at USC. Shortly after joining the department, she established the Partnership of Women Excelling as Scientists and Scholars (PROWESS), an initiative to increase the representation of women in scientific fields.
Boadi says that the member agencies of CSU-ACE, which include the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI, actively recruit students from all disciplines throughout the CSU because of the diversity of language, culture, age and ethnicity that characterize its student population.
“Federal research sponsors, especially those agencies in the intelligence community, make a strong business case for diversifying the workforce,” Boadi says. “In order to maintain our ascendancy in the innovation economy, the United States must draw upon the creativity of all of our citizens. In addition to being the largest university system in the United States, the CSU system can provide the federal and private sector with a [diverse] pool of employees.”
Boadi says she has worked with numerous students at CSU Dominguez Hills who embody this diversity, including Deisi Ayala, whose research is related to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in border security; Maria Gutierrez, a pre-med student who is interested in protecting the nation from biological threats; and Nate Nikotan, who is engaged in research related to grid computing.
As a former minority student and director of the CSU Dominguez Hills chapter of CSU-ACE, Boadi says that she is honored to be able to introduce students to the Department of Homeland Security and to career possibilities for them in the intelligence community.
“My desire is that my ceiling of achievement should become their floor,” Boadi says.
- Amy Bentley-Smith and Joanie Harmon | <urn:uuid:57f64084-0fb8-4846-86fa-732d7331a27d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.csudh.edu/univadv/dateline/archives/20100225/facstaffnews/antoniaboadi.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951248 | 1,246 | 1.648438 | 2 |
You can also easily be done on top of our arm or working at biomechanics of the shoulders and roll them forwards and backwards. Keep chest open and with control. Use a 4 second count to both lift and carry on regaining movement. The location or other cold compresses. You want to document everything we tend to hit the gym.
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now clearly a very practical investment for the pain is in your range of motion. To allow such range of motion and make concentration difficulty with your shoulder mechanics.
Here are some of the muscles around and behind your head. Use your right arm and hand. Do eight to twelve repetitions. | <urn:uuid:442f0c41-2390-48d4-8f87-4f4ba169ae29> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://shoulderpainx.info/yoga-as-treatment-for-shoulder-pain/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94604 | 1,068 | 1.679688 | 2 |
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The test is involves only a few drops of blood and is simple and effective. Results are instantaneous and are determined in matter of seconds. | <urn:uuid:2860d1cf-d03a-436e-89a4-db3d16052519> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.integratedhealth.com.au/testing/blood-type-testing | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936243 | 103 | 1.789063 | 2 |
After an NGO disclosed the identity of an HIV-infected couple to their neighbours in Jodhpur, they and their four children have been ostracised and are being forced to sleep on pavements, police said on Saturday.
The family has been sleeping on pavements outside the local railway station after their neighbours beat them up and forced them to leave their house when they came to know that they were HIV positive.
The couple lived in Jodhpur's Ambedkar Colony.
Police said a complaint has been registered at Sursagar police station in Jodhpur, 330 km from Jaipur.
"The man and his wife are HIV infected. An activist of an NGO had come to the couple's house in Ambedkar Colony to counsel them a fortnight ago. He asked for directions to their house from some neighbours and mistakenly disclosed that the couple was suffering from AIDS," a police officer told IANS.
"The neighbours feared that the couple would spread the disease among others in the colony, so they beat them up and forced them to leave. As they have nowhere else to go, they are spending nights in front of a railway station," said the officer.
He added that the police are taking cognizance of the incident and a complaint has been registered through a court under section 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedural (CrPC).
A senior medial and health department officer said that disclosing the identity of an HIV-infected person is punishable under law.
"The victims or their family can register a first information report against people who disclose the identity of an AIDS patient," said the officer. | <urn:uuid:7939f20b-35f8-4234-8bce-01298656ec4e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Jaipur/HIV-positive-family-beaten-up-thrown-out-of-home/Article1-963765.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988288 | 332 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal on Thursday called on Union minister of environment and forests Jayanti Natarajan to seek help of Rs. 771.52 crore for 'Punjab Biodiversity & Natural Resources Conservation Project' through a suitable international funding Agency.
this here on Thursday, a spokesperson of the CM's office said that Badal apprised Natarajan of the project, which would ensure protection, conservation and development of forests, wildlife and natural resources in a holistic manner, coupled with livelihoods generation for poverty alleviation in forest-fringe areas. He also informed that this project would be implemented throughout the state in 8 years in a phased manner.
Demanding the enhancement in the state annual plan of operations under PUNCAMPA, from Rs. 75 crore for the year 2012-13 to Rs. 100 crore for the next year, Badal said that the state government had already launched an ambitious "Greening Punjab Mission" under which it was envisaged to increase the forest and tree cover from the existing level of 7% to 15% of the geographical areain the next 8 years. He also said that the state government had planned to plant approximately 5 crore saplings annually for the next 7-8 years. He further said that a separate fund designated as "Greening Punjab Fund" had also been established for this purpose and all boards, corporations and other government agencies of the state had been authorised to contribute to this fund.
He demanded to release the balance amount of Rs. 56 crore under CAMPA project for 2012-13.
Demanding the inclusion of agro-forestry in state CAMPA and other centrally sponsored schemes like SFDA, Badal asked the Union minister to review the CAMPA and SFDA guidelines and also permit the inclusion of agro-forestry/farm forestry activities under their respective ambits for the benefit of forest deficient states like Punjab, which have a vast potential in the field of agro-forestry.
For setting up of hi-tech modern nurseries and a State Forest Research & Educational Institute, Badal further asked the ministry to provide financial assistance to the tune of Rs. 40 crore and Rs. 25 crore respectively in Punjab besides a special grant of Rs. 108 crore to eradicate the menace of weeds from the Kandi belt and Rs. 3.5 crore for establishing herbal gardens and nurseries in the state. | <urn:uuid:fba3d035-2972-435e-b1d2-b51f3aeafc3d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hindustantimes.com/Punjab/Chandigarh/Badal-seeks-funds-for-conservation-projects/SP-Article1-999206.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949557 | 491 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Recent comments by presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann have stirred up the discussion about gay marriage once again. While speaking to a group of high school…
There’s a four-letter word getting thrown around a lot lately. It’s a word I’ve heard used flippantly, jokingly, and disparagingly. Admittedly, sometimes it seems like the most accurate, albeit inflammatory, word to use. Often this word is spoken, perhaps rightly so, by broken and hurting people out of pain and frustration. It’s a word that was used by a commenter on my previous post in Provoketive Magazine, Slap On a Little Lipstick, You’ll Be Fine. If I am being completely honest, it’s a word I’ve used, sometimes quickly out of anger, and a lot more cautiously after great deliberation.
That’s right, I am talking about the ‘C’ word: Cult.
Cult is a term used by many Christians to describe Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and many other fringe religious groups and doomsday groups like Peoples Temple and Heaven’s Gate. It’s also been used to discredit Christian churches and ministries with an authoritarian structure, rigid rules, and/or apparent spiritual abuse. The commenter from my last article used it in reference to what he thought was a minister requiring me to wear lipstick (as a note, I never stated in that article whether that incident occurred at a secular or religious organization). And I’ll admit it, I’d be pretty tempted to slap that label on a minister requiring women to wear lipstick.
Given that it carries such negative overtones, it is probably not a word one should use unless it is known for certain that a group is a cult. But what is a true cult?
Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary gives the following definition:
1 : formal religious veneration : worship
Going by this definition, any religious group or faith is a cult. That’s right, that means any Christian church or group, mainstream or otherwise, by definition is a cult. And it doesn’t stop at religion: any fad or craze with a following is a cult, like the cult of Mac or my personal cult following of choice, that of the canceled Sci-Fi show, Firefly. Really, with the exception of the third listed definition of cult (i.e. a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious), the word shouldn’t necessarily carry a negative connotation.
If, for the sake of this article, we decided to simply run with Webster’s third definition of cult, it would be difficult to find a fully objective person or governing body to determine what is unorthodox regarding religious beliefs and doctrine. So who gets to decide? If you asked a Lutheran, Catholic, Pentecostal, Charismatic, Mennonite, and Episcopalian each about what constituted orthodox versus unorthodox beliefs in other denominations, you would undoubtedly find each denomination labeled unorthodox (and thus a cult) by at least one other denomination.
Even sociologists and psychologist tend to disagree over whether or not to continue the use of the word cult, since what started as a mostly neutral term now tends to bring to mind the poisoned Kool-Aid victims of the Jonestown Massacre. Furthermore, there is more of a continuum or spectrum between what constitutes “cult” and “non-cult,” rather than simple black and white definitions. As such, many have given to using further descriptors for cults, such as “dangerous” or “benign.”
This is why I appreciate the resources that the International Cultic Studies Association has online regarding cults. The ICSA acknowledges upfront the difficulty in cult terminology, and then focuses on the damaging aspects and practices that can occur in cults, without giving a subjective list of cults or bad organizations on their website. Instead, it is up to the reader to use the information to decide on their own. That being said, here is the list of characteristics often found with cultic groups, according to Michael D. Langone, Ph.D, Executive Director of the ICSA:
- The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.
- Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
- Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
- The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).
- The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).
- The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society
- The leader is not accountable to any authorities (unlike, for example, teachers, military commanders or ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations).
- The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members’ participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before joining the group (for example, lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).
- The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guiltinorder to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.
- Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group.
- The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
- The group is preoccupied with making money.
- Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.
- Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
- The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.
Please note that this list is not meant to be a definitive or all-encompassing checklist to diagnose groups, but merely a guideline of characteristics that cults often display. Even if an organization were to have many of these characteristics, I think we should be careful before immediately labeling a group as a cult, given how loaded a word it is. Also, I propose that it is entirely possible that a group everyone would agree is not truly a cult could be shown to display many of these traits, depending on how you describe them.
For example, a sports team could easily be described in such a way as to seem cultic. For one thing, all the members are committed wholly to the coach; questioning the coach can lead to losing the game, being benched, or even being completely removed from the team. Also, team members often engage in weirdly scripted pre-game chants with indiscernible grunts, meant to increase team unity and create a team mind-set. Furthermore, the team must all dress in complete uniformity, down to the color of their clothing, or they are not allowed to participate. The team also has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, viewing all other teams as opponents they must defeat. Being apart of the team will also likely affect their relationships and other personal goals; due to long practice sessions and traveling for games, they will have little to no time to pursue other activities, and they may not see their family very often during the on-season. Now granted, this example doesn’t fit every characteristic listed, but as you can see, it could be easy to make a group fit these characteristics if you were already prejudiced against it.
Because “cult” is an indistinctly defined term that can be misused and misapplied to great detriment, it is important to be careful before immediately slapping the cult label on any religious group that we disagree with or even one that has truly injured us. That being said, damaging groups and cults flying under the Christian flag do exist, and it is wise to be aware of these cult characteristics. Many have the “I’m too smart or balanced to get pulled into a cult” mentality, but people of all walks of life are susceptible to cults, especially as cults often give misleading information about their true nature, organizational structure, rules, etc., when you first become involved. I certainly thought I was too intelligent or psychologically sound to get involved with a sketchy ministry or (gasp!) a cult.
For approximately eight years, I was a part of a 5-fold para-church Christian ministry. If you are unfamiliar with that wordy terminology, essentially it was a Christian organization focused on the 5-fold ministry gifts listed in Ephesians 4:11 (apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher) that was not a church, but rather a ministry that worked alongside Christian churches. I knew of the ministry through respected friends and acquaintances from the church I attend in high school, and my first involvement was merely as a member of the worship team while I was in college.
Shortly after college, my husband and I “joined the team,” becoming more deeply involved and committed to the ministry. As time progressed, the ministry’s meetings (both public meetings and private “team only” meetings) became more frequent and went into the early morning hours (I often arrived back home after 3 am). In addition, more rigid rules were created and enforced regarding everything from not drinking alcohol, meeting attendance, how to act around the leader of our ministry, dress code, taboo discussion topics with non-team members, and much more. Public questioning of the leader was not allowed, and if you questioned him in private, somehow it was always turned around that you had a ”heart issue” and “issues with authority.” Really though, with the high demands on the team, long hours volunteering, etc., everyone was usually too tired to think, let alone have the faculties necessary to find fault with the ministry or leadership.
The “heart issue” was a commonly employed method to get the team to stay in line. When other members left the team (by choice or otherwise), or if the leadership found out we were associating with people who did not agree 100% with the ministry, we were discouraged to continue anything more than a superficial relationship with them. The head of the ministry was always careful to point out that he wasn’t saying we couldn’t associate with them, but that the fact that we would want to, knowing what they thought of the ministry, revealed our true heart. Even missing optional extra-curricular team events was taken as evidence of having heart issues.
Eventually I became even more involved with the ministry, to the point of being privy to much of the leadership’s confidential information regarding the inner workings of the ministry, other ministers, and even other team members. At first, it was an honor to have such a position. However, eventually I began to see the cracks in the leadership and the ministry– cracks I could not point out unless I wanted to have a “come to Jesus meeting” where my supposed heart issues, authority issues, and God knows what other issues might be raised, to deflect from the flaws in leadership. Many things were done at the bidding of the leadership that I did not really agree with. Team members were booted from the ministry when they wouldn’t toe the line, and the rest of the team was given false or highly misleading information about why they left. Long weeks of meetings were called because ‘God was moving’, when behind closed doors in staff meetings, we discussed having extra meetings to get more money to keep the ministry afloat. These are just a couple of examples of the many issues I could mention.
Despite my dislike of who I was becoming at this ministry and my disagreements with what the leadership were doing, I deeply struggled with leaving. Anyone who left the ministry was declared to be ”out of God’s will,” and I certainly did not want to be that! Furthermore, we had put eight years of our livelihood into that ministry, and leaving would lead me to question whether we had wasted the entirety of those years. At the same time, I could no longer believe that the ministry was truly acting in a way that glorified or modeled Christ.
While I struggled and prayed for God to either release me or give me the fortitude to leave on my own, my husband was absolutely certain we needed to leave. He met with the head of the ministry about this, who disagreed that it was time for us to leave. At his request, my husband agreed to take 30 days to pray about this, after which they would meet again. At the same time, I decided it was time to move out of my current job within the ministry, even if we still remained on the team. After the 30 days, my husband’s decision remained the same. The day before his scheduled follow-up meeting, the leader called us up and kicked us off the team by phone before we had the chance to meet with him in person and possibly leave on good terms.
Despite my relief at being released from the team, I still had an incredible amount of anger and pain stemming from how things were handled, both during our time at the ministry and in the way in which we were released from the team. In the first few months after we left, I easily denounced this ministry as a cult. And I suspect that many others may jump to that same conclusion after reading my account from my time there. Looking through the list from the ICSA, this ministry does fit at least 13 out of 15 of the characteristics of cultic groups. Does that mean my original declaration was correct, even if it was spoken out of pain and anger? Perhaps there is more to the story.
Despite the many issues I have with that ministry, I do believe that everyone there, including the leadership, truly believes that they are helping people and doing God’s will. Granted, having good intentions doesn’t keep people from hurting others or doing incredible wrong. Many horrific acts have been done and continue to be done in the name of God and God’s will. And, the belief that you are helping people is certainly not a litmus test to prove non-cult status. But does it count for something along the spectrum of dangerous cult/benign cult/non-cult?
At this ministry, it is my opinion that they end up doing significantly more damage to people than they do good; but, it certainly isn’t at the same level as drinking poisoned Kool-Aid and committing mass suicide. Is there a certain level of damage by which we can measure what is a cult? And, cult or not, what is the correct and appropriate response for Christians when faced with a Christian ministry, church, or organization that is clearly damaging to people? Do we publicly denounce them or silently pray for them?
With this particular group, and perhaps with many other cult-like Christian groups, I think the root of the issue may be with a dictatorial authority structure that does not brook any questioning of leadership, leading to abuse of power. However, this is an authority structure that many groups of Christians believe is biblical and ideal. So what then? Are they right technically but abusing a God-given structure, are they wrong and simply misunderstanding scripture, or worse, are they twisting and manipulating scripture? At what point are doctrinal disagreements and differences in interpretation of scripture so far off that they are grounds for pulling out the cult label? Who really gets to decide who is a heretic nowadays, anyway?
After my particular experience, I certainly wouldn’t recommend that ministry to anyone, friend or foe. If anything, I would tell them to run in the opposite direction. But at this point I also wouldn’t publicly denounce them as a definitive cult. No, it’s not because I “drank the Kool-Aid.” They certainly straddle that fence between spiritual abuse and cult with more aplomb than a sure-footed tight-rope walker. And that line between a legitimate ministry that has fallen due to an abusive authority and a full-blown, destructive cult already blurs so much to me that I just won’t make that final judgment. Instead I choose to pray for them, holding out hope that, in their desire to do God’s will and minister to the body, they will see the damage they are doing and change. And, I pray for myself, that if I have somehow misjudged them, God will open my eyes. | <urn:uuid:0d0ad1c4-89c7-41aa-a6bb-1ac90029f2ae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://provoketive.com/2012/01/16/the-c-word/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972044 | 3,627 | 1.679688 | 2 |
December 23 - Christmas Sweetheart
The topic suggested for today was Christmas Sweetheart. Since, I don't have a sweetheart, I will share two stories about Christmas that involve genealogy.
One year not too long ago (can't remember the year exactly but post 1995 - the two boys in the story are grown up and have children), I was going to be alone at Christmas. When my friend Brenda heard that, she invited me to come to her place for Christmas Day. The food was good and tasty and it was great not to be eating alone. We played a spirited game of trivial pursuit with her boys. This was all fun but what I remember most was that we did genealogical research. Brenda had the 1881 British census on CD. We had fun doing searches on both our families. Brenda and I share a love of genealogical research. We have gone on short research trips together as we are both researching people in common in Markham Township, York County, Ontario. Thank you Brenda for those great memories and your friendship.
Christmas 2000 - I was preparing a short family history for my siblings - focusing on my parents and their direct lines up and down. As Christmas approached, everything was coming together quite well when I received an e-mail that truly was a gift. I subscribe to the Rootsweb web mailing list for Gloucestershire England. From time to time, I had responded to queries mainly focusing on methodology. One of the reader's saw my name and sent me an e-mail wondering if we had any family connections. John listed his direct line. I couldn't see a connection, so I wrote him back (off-line) with mine.
On December 20, 2000, John wrote back.
Thank you for your Email. Do you believe in Father Christmas? Well you should, for your GGGF James was the brother of my GGGF Edwin.
They were the sons of Richard Iles and Patience nee Blandford and were baptised at Elkstone in the parish of Brimpsfield as EYLES. James was baptised 4.9.1823 and Edwin 25.12.1825 - with Isaac in between on 12.12.1824!
So far I have traced no less than 16 children of the marriage - poor Patience, she was certainly well named!
He provided me with an important detail -- where in Gloucestershire I should be researching my Iles family. John had given me the necessary clues I needed to successfully research parish registers and census records at my local family history centre. Thank you for your great gift, John. | <urn:uuid:4f32b96b-4920-4273-9163-b7f0c963b041> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://researchergal.blogspot.com/2007/12/december-23-christmas-sweetheart-topic.html?showComment=1198448520000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982768 | 537 | 1.5 | 2 |
Toyota will reconfigure accelerator pedals on the 3.8 million vehicles it has recalled, and in some cases the shape of the floor surface under the pedal to try to prevent more accidents like that ones that have killed 13 people, government regulators say. But so far it doesn't plan to do anything about the companion problems that the government identified last year in trying to pinpoint the cause of deadly crashes.
Besides the floor mat, the government pointed to Toyota's stop-start button that takes three seconds of continuous depression to turn off. It also noted that the lettering on the automatic transmission gear display makes it hard to figure out the neutral position in an emergency. Both of those additional factors appear to have figured in the August deaths of a California highway patrolman and his family who were driving a Lexus ES 350.
Toyota said nothing about addressing the problem of stop-start button -- and how to shut off engines in an emergency. Or any changes in the transmission gear display.
Chris Woodyard is an auto writer for USA TODAY who covers all aspects of motoring. He revels in the exhaust note of a Maserati and the sharp creases of a Cadillac CTS. Chris strives to live a Porsche life on a Scion budget. More about Chris
Detroit Free Press auto news | <urn:uuid:24e409d0-65dd-4427-96c8-b38d841d9c1d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2009/11/is-toyota-still-endangering-its-owners-with-a-floor-mat-recall-solution-that-doesnt-go-far-enough/1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94505 | 261 | 1.765625 | 2 |
When I designed the medicine cabinet for our guest bathroom, I did something I've only done once before, and that's to make a full-scale drawing first. Usually, I just draw thumbnail sketches and a few tighter sketches of the trickier parts.
Making a full-scale drawing allowed me to work out the joinery details and the hardware size and placement. I was also able to step back to make sure the proportions looked nice. Normally, I just pull out my tape measure, measure the air and say "yeah, that's about right" when I'm determing outside measurements and hope they look good once the project is built.
Instead of actually drawing a design, a lot of woodworkers use Sketchup. I was an illustration major and am more comfortable with a pencil in my hand. Frankly, I prefer the warmth and personality of a pencil sketch over a computer printout; it's one of the reasons I prefer hand tools over power tools. That being said, I can certainly see the benefits of using a software program to design a piece. For one, you can rotate the computer image and view all sides.
I used Wonder Brads to install the molding. No need to predrill, they won't split the wood and are virtually invisible. I did not dab them with wood filler and no one has ever noticed them. | <urn:uuid:439c37eb-089f-453f-a70d-9085a36f66dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://villagecarpenter.blogspot.com/2007/12/medicine-cabinet.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967825 | 275 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Over the past several years we have been experimenting with various approaches to building Groupware tools in Scheme and have developed several groupware platforms for running experiments on collaboration.
In mid-April 2004 we released our first general purpose collaborative editor tools, called GrewpEdit. This tool allows users to either start a GREWP on their machine or to join a GREWP on some remote host. A GREWP is specified by an IP address, port number, and session name. Once a user has connected to a GREWP they can create documents which can be jointly editted by any user connected to the GREWP. They can also view the set of connected users and the set of active documents. The shared editor allows any number of users to collaboratively edit a document and chat about that document. You can learn more about GrewpEdit at
In the coming six months, we plan on distributing the toolkit used to implement GrewpEdit along with extensive documentation and examples. | <urn:uuid:25a7f7b2-a9c6-4735-aa02-2539cb370183> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://groupscheme.sourceforge.net/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930049 | 197 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Responding to Urgent Human Needs
(photo: Gabriel Delmonaco)
Though not an emergency relief organization, CNEWA has a history of taking action when disasters strike. We often respond to those urgent needs that are overlooked or too modest to be addressed by larger aid agencies.
With your generous help, we work with those who know the communities and their urgent needs well: local clergy, religious and lay leaders and church organizations such as the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
Last year, your aid supported:
- The Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Mary as they provided food, blankets, clothes, heaters and kitchen sets for Iraqi refugees in Jordan.
- Syria’s Good Shepherd Sisters, who helped feed, house and provide medical care to Iraqi refugee mothers.
- Caritas Ukraine, for emergency flood relief to families in western Ukraine displaced by the worst flooding in a century.
- The Maronite archbishop of Jbeil and the Melkite Greek Catholic bishop of Tyre, who helped sick and disadvantaged women, children, farmers and the elderly with hospitalization and medication fees.
- The Rosary Sisters, as they removed debris, reconstructed pillars, replaced shattered windows and painted classrooms in Gaza damaged during Israel’s military invasion. | <urn:uuid:7a6f6720-3031-41f0-bbfa-9b82c7540283> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnewa.us/default.aspx?ID=42&pagetypeID=1&sitecode=US&pageno=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942416 | 261 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Every Olympian spends their days dreaming of winning an Olympic medal - whether it be a bronze, silver, or gold (of course they would prefer the gold medals, obviously). It should come as no surprise that every Olympics takes great pride in the crafting and design of creating their medals. London has finally revealed the medals that they will be giving out during the London 2012 games.
Highlights of the medals include -
- They weigh in at 14 ounces, which makes them the heaviest in history
- Intersecting lines which convey togetherness and outreach
- The River Thames behind the logo
- 2,100 of these will be given out during the London 2012 Games. | <urn:uuid:1c654b41-9bba-4cf5-a834-8425477ae78f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://olympics.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Wagnike2/London_2012_Medal_Designs?oldid=10206 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966715 | 136 | 1.734375 | 2 |
How Important Is SEO, Really?
I pride myself in being a bit of a contrarian.
When the ‘masses’ start taking to an idea in large numbers, I start to get suspicious. More and more people are accepting search engine optimization (SEO) as a way of life in business. The phrase is thrown around with reckless abandon amongst business people and there are literally thousands of new articles about the topic emerging on the market every single day (this article being one of them).
But, what difference is SEO really going to make to your business? What kind of results has SEO produced for other businesses? How well does it work for small to medium-sized business?
Well, I decided to find out.
The Biggest Market Ever
The Internet is the biggest market of consumers there ever was.
There are currently two billion Internet users around the world and that number is projected to jump to 2.7 billion by 2015. That’s more people than any other media source and makes up 40% of the world’s population.
That’s a figure that could make even the most self-restrained marketer salivate. All you need is to get the attention 0.000001% of this market and you’re on a major gravy train, right? Well, not exactly. The perils of working in market that big far outweigh the benefits.
There are approximately 634 million websites on the Internet – 51 million of which were added in 2012 alone. How do you stand out with so much competition?
That’s where SEO comes in…
Don’t operate in a vacuum
If your business doesn’t have a website, it doesn’t exist. In 2013, if your business website isn’t search engine optimized, it doesn’t matter either way.
The first thing most people do before they buy anything, even if it’s offline, is search the Internet. Approximately 89% of consumers look to websites like Google, Bing and Yahoo before making a buying decision. Search engines are the number one source of traffic, beating social media by 300%. For these reasons businesses work very hard to make friends with the likes of Google.
But, it’s not enough to be ranked on Google, if you want to have any kind of impact you’ll need to be on the first page because, and although as much as 61% of people look for products online, only 25% ever go beyond the first page of results.
Give The People What They Want
There are two main reasons people use the internet: To check their emails and to get information.
Although email marketing and search engine optimization is linked, the former is a huge field of study in its own right. SEO is more concerned with the second reason – giving people the information that they’re looking for.
Most of your customers go on the Internet to search for information on a certain topic, which is related to your product or service. They aren’t looking for your business, they aren’t even necessarily looking for products and services like the one you offer. However, if you can be the one to give them the information they’re looking for you’ve instantly proven yourself knowledgeable and reliable, which can be a doorway to a very profitable long-term relationship.
To answer the original question I posed in this article – yes, it really is that important. A good SEO marketing plan can mean the difference between a massive business success and operating with a vacuum.
Need help with your SEO marketing plan? Try a few SEO services on Doublelinx. | <urn:uuid:d70abf40-9e8b-4cc5-ac36-8179055b7a52> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://balletisart.tumblr.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958692 | 754 | 1.515625 | 2 |
We need to use our own oil supply
“Oil Feeds My Family.” Do you remember when it was fashionable to place this bumper sticker on the family car?
It really hasn’t been that many years ago when these particular bumper stickers could be seen almost everywhere. My dad worked for Sohio Petroleum Company in Tinsley, so I had more than a casual understanding of the importance of oil.
It literally fed our family. I can still remember making rounds with dad as he checked every well and made sure that everything was working properly. I can still hear him talking about “production” and how important it was to pump a certain quantity of oil during a 24-hour period. If a well shut down or if a pump malfunctioned, he was not a happy camper.
I vividly remember the summer day my brother and I decided to climb to the top of a derrick. Now these things are tall, perhaps 120-feet high, and almost every week we would see the professionals come to service a well. These guys made it look so easy to climb to the very top of the oil derrick and hook up all of the equipment. If they could do it, Buddy and I could do it.
Early one morning, we began our climb. The ladder that leads to the top hangs welded to the outside of the derrick.
This was fun, and we were making extremely good time. I could see the pulleys at the top of the derrick plainly. I did not realize how large they were. The problem I was having at this juncture was figuring out where exactly I was going to stand once I reached the end of the ladder.
I glanced over my shoulder, and the scenery was absolutely beautiful. I could see fields of freshly planted corn, and the rows from this height looked so straight. I could see 10-miles in every direction. Highway 3 was so close, it seemed, that I could hit it with a baseball.
Then I looked to the west. All I could see was a red pick-up truck speeding down the narrow road that led to this particular well.
It was dad. I watched as the truck came closer and closer. Finally, it stopped right in front of Brumfield Number 3. He exited the vehicle, looked up at his two deranged sons and said, “I want you two to come down right now. Take your time, and watch your step, but come down.”
When we finally reached the ground, instead of pulling off his belt and thrashing us, he calmly pointed out that what we had done was very dangerous.
If we had fallen, there was a 100 percent chance that we would die. This thought had never occurred to us. We were just having fun.
The memory of this incident just reminds me that oil is such a wonderful product. My dad spent a lifetime bringing it out of the ground. He thought his work was important because it guaranteed energy to Americans, and it guaranteed that food would be on our table.
Without oil, we would simply be a 16th century country instead of the highly advanced modern society that we are.
A favorite theme that the modern leftists use, including Mr. Obama, is that we Americans represent 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, yet we consume 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil. Now every leftist in America wants you to feel guilty for using this amount of energy. But this is a total misrepresentation of the truth.
When I was in high school, I read a report that stated that the United States had at best a 35-year supply of oil. I think the report meant well, but it was wrong, grossly wrong.
Today, the United States has at least a 300 year supply of oil, perhaps more. We have more than the Saudi’s and more than all of the oil in the Middle East. There is absolutely no chance of running out of oil in our lifetimes, your children’s lifetimes, or their children’s lifetimes.
Barack Obama and the Democrats are in deep trouble. They have failed to live up to their responsibilities and ensure that Americans have access to oil and its derivatives at a reasonable price.
There is no substitute for oil. None. We can’t build enough windmills, or biofuel plants to even come close to doing what oil does. Regardless of what Obama says, pond algae simply will not replace oil. He can write all of the memos he wants, but alternative energy is a long way off.
Unless someone comes up with a simple way to turn water into gasoline, we are stuck with oil. It’s efficient, it’s abundant, and it will not damage the planet.
We just need more of it. Instead of using 20 percent of the world’s oil, I think we should be using even more, perhaps 40 percent. We’ve got it, and we can do more, much more, with it than any other country in the world. Drill, baby, drill. | <urn:uuid:d5eb57cc-a123-47e3-8bee-97e3f7cb92fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yazooherald.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2230:we-need-to-use-our-own-oil-supply&Itemid=2&el_mcal_month=4&el_mcal_year=2013 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986031 | 1,055 | 1.679688 | 2 |
GES026 - Runwe11 Hospital, Essex
R Hospital opened for patients in 1936. When it closed on 23 April 2010 it was operated by South Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust.
Following the ending of contracts accommodating patients at the Essex county's Brentwood mental hospital, joint facilities were developed between East Ham and Southend-on-sea boroughs. A site was chosen at R Hall farm, to the east of the town of Wickford and the firm of Elcock and Sutcliffe were chosen as architects to the site, the former having previously designed the new Bethlem Royal hospital at Monks orchard. Elcock and Sutcliffe were at the forefront of institutional design and when completed, R was seen as being pioneering development in mental hospital compared to its contemporaries. Judging by some of the buildings, there was an element of secure accommodation here. History source: Wikipedia
Like most rural hospitals of it's kind, the site is huge and includes numerous buildings spread over a large area. As seen from above. (Copyright Bing Maps)
A warm but overcast night in July, and I headed over to Islington to pick up TheSpaniard. We had agreed 3.30am, but my text saying 'where are you?' acted as his wake up call apparently, so he finally turned up at 4am. After I'd failed to help numerous drunks in search of somewhere selling more booze. We headed off through East London and into Essex. A county i'd not really visited before. One of the many good things about exploring is you do see a lot more of the country.
After what seemed an age of a journey, we got off and parked up by some houses. Then walked down the road until we came to the bottom of the road that led into the hospital. We headed off into some fields and through seemingly endless brambles and stinging nettle clusters until we popped out into the site. We headed for the Watertower, which i'd seen photos inside of recently, and wanted some of that goodness.
However despite circling the building twice and checking every possibility, I couldn't find a way in. Obviously security had been watching the posting on forum sites, and sealed it up. We did find a way into the boiler house though, and that was pretty awesome. The 4 blue boilers each had a control panel sat next to them.
On the edge of boiler No. 1 was this rather attractive gauge.
This appeared to be the main control board, a few things appear grouped in 4's.
A fisheye of the 4 old boilers, and one slightly less older boiler propped up against the middle one.
This beast sat in a side room, and as the glowing light shows, was very much alive.
Another large room of tanks, pipes, wheels and chains sat at the back of the main boiler room. GE015 got all power crazy, like something out of 'Young Frankenstein.'
Some fisheye action from the corner of the room above.
An old hand truck in the basement area of this room.
We got out a slightly easier way than we got in, and headed West across the site. I grabbed a photo as we moved off from the Boiler House.
We walked past a few buildings that appeared to be shut up tight, and came across a building that wasn't. With clowns and animals painted on the walls, this could only be somewhere for kids. A plaque on the wall showed it to be 'Tinkerbell's Nursery' opened April 1989 fact fans. It was mostly stripped rooms, in a couple of rooms someone appeared to have gone nutso with a staple gun. Whole walls were covered with random staple firing.
Quickly bored we moved off further around the Western side of the site, and passed a modern looking building with a very high thin holed green mesh fence making the area inside secure. We lifted up the gate's drop bolt into the ground and went in for a nosey. However there was no way in, and it was a little exposed, so we left this part. Crossing a field and ducking down to avoid a security chap whizzing by on a bicycle, we arrived at some old ward buildings. They were very reminiscent of West Park and most other asylums. Gently rotting buildings, with a sad atmosphere of loneliness. The first one we came to had a window with no glass in, so we popped inside. It appeared to be built around two quadrangles, and had been empty for quite some time. Vandals had set to work inside.
For some reasons doors were removed in a corridor, nature can be seen trying to reclaim the site at the windows.
One thing that as an explorer you expect, ney, demand, to find in an asylum, is peely paint. And I finally found some on a set of stairs with some rather nasty carpet.
Upstairs, as everywhere in this building, the rooms were all stripped. Where the lack of repair effected the roof, water had dripped in, and with wooden floors that can only lead to mould.
We tried to get into the next block but were thwarted on numerous attempts, mainly by the disturbing amount of nettles, brambles and such like. Also by some unexpected anti-climb paint, which I partially removed with most of my skin on the brickwork and bits of vegetation. We came back the way we'd come, as ahead of us is where we'd seen the security chap on a bike, and it was a little exposed. We arrived back at the boiler house. I took a snap of the workshops buildings courtyard.
It was then onto finding a way into the main block that sits in the middle of the site. We found a small building that faces the boiler house that had central swivel windows. These have a pivot through the middle and come out to horizontal position. They're a huge pain and painful to get through. This one was smaller than normal, and after a couple of preambles, I decided I wasn't going to get in there. A look around showed an open sort of hoist doorway on the first floor, and after some messing about, TheSpaniard got up there only to find it was just a single room with no way out. GE015 then walked carefully along a precarious glass roof to get onto the roofs of the building. I went back down to get my camera bag. As I did so a tough looking security guard walked about 10m away from me. I carefully tried to hide behind a foot high set of flowery weeds. Pathetic I know, but I was also wearing dark clothes in a shadowy area. I think if he'd have looked closer he would have spotted me, but he didn't. I was trapped in this area, so as soon as he was out of sight, I ran across to some windows and watched him through the glass. He stood to the side of the boiler house for around 5 minutes, as if waiting for someone to walk about inside. Satisfied there was no one in there, he carried on with his route. When clear I joined GE015 on the roof. Here we found the old projection room. A sickly light green colour. The holes in the wall where a projector would have pointed, showed a large hall inside the building.
That was the next problem, how to get into the building. The buildings were only recently vacated, and metal thieves hadn't turned up to make more entrances yet, nor had decay rotted window frames. It was going to need some careful work, and after a short while, and a scary squeeze and precarious drop, we were in. Walking around we came upon the kitchen area, still neatly laid out with huge cooking pots and mixing machines.
A canteen serving area lay off to one side. Walking around the corridors, we found some doors open into the corridor. They led into a chapel, judging by the confession booth, a Catholic one. Being someone who despises the Catholic Church for it's vile policies over the centuries, I held back from defiling the place. Instead I sat where the priest would sit to here people's sins.
Next up was the main hall for the site, with a stage and lovely wooden doors, art nouveau windows in the ceilings and up-lights on the walls.
After some malarkey on the stage, that didn't come out very well on camera. We pressed on Southwards through the building and came to the reception block.
Most of the rooms around here had been stripped and were featureless and dull. I did find the odd interesting one, including one full of gorgeous wooden floors and sides. Some kind of library or research room. In another room was an original fireplace, and I do like a good fireplace!
More Art Nouveau was present in the boardroom, a wondrous light streaked down the room over where a large table would have been full of people making important and oh so serious decisions. "we don't have enough ham sandwiches at these me etings do we John?" "You're quite right Mark, more ham sandwiches, those in a agreement?"...
After exploring all of this area, it was off back to the kitchen area, where we'd found a much easier way out. Being careful at windows, as we'd watched a security guard staring into them from the roof. A long corridor stretched up to the kitchen area.
After getting out, we weren't too worried about being caught as we were tired and keen to leave. We walked Eastwards from the boiler house past some more workshops. We walked alongside buildings that reminded me of a 1950's holiday camp (I should point out that watching Hi-De-Hi is my only holiday camp experience!) The place was still neatly laid out, the grass still presentable.
One of the buildings had a long external corridor.
We spotted where the security desk was, near a church, and hopped over a fence into the woodlands that line the site. Somehow we took a wrong turn, and ended up in an area we must have bi-passed before. Full of rather old buildings fully boarded up.
We crossed the sports ground again, and walked down the road back to the bike. There were houses lining the road also boarded up and showing signs of decay. It has to be said, there is a lot left to see at this place, I hope to return before Mrs. Wrecking ball, and Mr.Skip pay a visit.
Cheers to GE015 for the company and drugs. | <urn:uuid:fc3e1322-fcec-471e-a661-1c71ef52794d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guerrillaexploring.com/gesite/public_html/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=76:r-hospital-essex&catid=2:government&Itemid=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985838 | 2,168 | 1.523438 | 2 |
I read the book "A Life That Says Welcome" by Karen Ehman a few months ago and want to try some of her ideas.
*Hang a chalkboard in the kitchen or dining room to write special announcements, menu, etc on.
*Leave notes and gifts for family members to find. We like to set up a mailbox and leave notes and little gifts for each other. I want to do this more often.
*Set up a note center. I want to set up a place to keep note cards, pretty papers and pens so that we will remember to write to each other.
*Keep a one-to-one journal with a family member. I love this idea. You write a question for the other person to answer and then they leave you a question. You keep a journal together. I thought this would be fun for our whole family to do together.
*Keep box of gifts for children to give to each other. They can buy them with extra chores, etc.
*Have a tea party(girls) or coffee time(boys) one day a week. We have done this a few times.
I'm glad I found this book and plan to look through it again for ideas on living at home in a way that welcomes others as well as the people who live with me. | <urn:uuid:d86e63dd-2f9d-4af9-9dae-f979da6e9bdc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://briana-icantdecide.blogspot.jp/2010/06/things-i-want-to-try.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969321 | 270 | 1.726563 | 2 |
- Evening, Weekend & Online Programs
- ALUMNI RELATIONS
- GIVING TO LAKELAND
- ABOUT LAKELAND
Lakeland College traces its beginnings to German immigrants who traveled to North America and eventually to the Sheboygan area where they settled in 1847. Even as they struggled for food and shelter, these pioneers also pursued the dream of higher education for their children. In 1862, they built Missionshaus (Mission House), a combined academy, college and seminary. The school provided training in the liberal arts followed by a traditional seminary curriculum, since most of the early students were destined to become ministers. As the needs of its students changed, Mission House gradually broadened its purpose. By the end of the century, enrollment was no longer limited to pre-theological students and the college had developed strong programs of study in a wider number of disciplines. A talented, scholarly faculty set high standards for the college early in its existence, standards which have been maintained to this day. Known simply as Mission House for 95 years, the college adopted the name Lakeland in 1956 and the seminary moved to St. Paul in l962 to become United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. The era of Mission House had ended, but Lakeland became heir to its campus, tradition and educational mission.
Today, we embrace our relationship the United Church of Christ (UCC). The UCC prides itself on offering an extravagant welcome to all. In ways big and small we seek to emulate this welcome at Lakeland College.
No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here. http://www.ucc.org/ | <urn:uuid:a9da2a12-7d40-48a5-a0ba-a3c882a4a9a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lakeland.edu/StudentServices/SpiritualLife/UCC.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970905 | 345 | 1.5 | 2 |
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