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The Russian Foreign Ministry shot back at US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her criticism that Russia’s elections were neither free nor fair. But as the US attempts to take the moral high ground, their political games seem as dirty as ever.
In a strongly-worded statement, Moscow expressed its regret that “Washington is sticking to long-outdated stereotypes and continuing to pin labels, without even trying to look into what is actually happening on our electoral field," Interfax reports.
Pointing out that the US electoral system is “far from perfect,” the foreign ministry continued that only the Russian people “can determine the future of our country – regardless of anyone’s partial judgments and politicized recipes."
Clinton, who had previously chastised Russia’s State Duma elections, stepped up the rhetoric while speaking at an Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) ministerial meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania Tuesday.
“When authorities fail to prosecute those who attack people for exercising their rights or exposing abuses, they subvert justice and undermine the people’s confidence in their governments,” she noted.
“As we have seen in many places, and most recently in the Duma elections in Russia, elections that are neither free nor fair have the same effect,” Reuters quoted her as saying.
However, Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar told RT Clinton’s remarks shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
“This is standard procedure for the State Department, interfering in other people’s elections, sometimes directly, like in the Arab Spring; sometimes Indirectly, as is the case of Russia.”
Escobar also believes the US is in no position to criticize Russia’s elections based on its own election irregularities and double standards.
“We had a stolen election in 2000, we had a semi-stolen election in 2004, in Ohio, not in Florida, this is documented, everybody knows this, even in the US, we had Hillary Clinton going recently to Uzbekistan and praising the progress in Uzbekistan, probably she means progress that (Uzbek President Islam) Karimov is not boiling opponents anymore, so it’s an enormous hypocrisy.”
New York-based author and political analyst Eva Golinger believes Clinton’s comments are absolutely politicized. In her view, this is another example of “US intervention in electoral processes around the world, it’s not just Russia.”
“We saw another case about a month ago in Nicaragua, where the reigning government of Daniel Ortega won the election with over 60% of the votes, which were certified by the electoral board, and there were also observers there as well – and the US has not only called into question the electoral process.”
The analyst points out that the US now is not even recognizing the results, but says this is mainly because “they just don’t like Daniel Ortega.”
“So this is evidence of arrogant attitude from the US, where whether or not the process is legitimate – that’s not what they are criticizing: they are criticizing the outcome, because frankly they just don’t like it.”
Brian Becker, a Washington DC political analyst from the ANSWER Coalition, believes that the real intentions of Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration have to be analyzed from the angle of their real ability parse election results: whether they “really want to make a sound judgment, or was it a rush to judgment,” whether it was in fact “the script that choreographed a planned response to whatever happened in Russia – not because of the concern about whether the elections were fair, not because there may have been improprieties, but because the US is involved in an effort to weaken Russia and to delegitimize the Russian government and all things the Russian government supervises, including the electoral process.”
Becker added that Clinton’s reaction is “a flagrant violation of the internal affairs of Russia, and is politically motivated.”
Meanwhile, the EU has also expressed concern over violations noted by OSCE observers at Russia’s parliamentary elections, said Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
She pointed out that she had taken note of the OSCE's report, saying that while the vote was well organized, the reports of not-quite-impartial media; lack of clear division between the ruling party and the state; and obstacles to independent monitoring groups arouse concerns. Ashton went on to say that she hopes Russian authorities will solve the problems pointed out by international and domestic observers in order to make the upcoming presidential elections in spring fair and correctly carried out. | <urn:uuid:b1a52851-995f-4cef-a5e8-b19302464b2b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rt.com/news/us-russia-clinton-election-199/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971826 | 984 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Today we received news from America’s New Economics Institute – a partner of Britain’s nef – about the latest edition of Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World series. Their comment:
Every day, we are presented with a range of “sustainable” products and activities – from “green” cleaning supplies to carbon offsets – but . . . → Read More: Cutting through ‘sustainababble’
In the FT today, James Skinner, chairman emeritus of the New Economics Foundation, asks fundamentally important questions about a stance often adopted by politicians with an interest in supporting multinational business. .
He was prompted to do so by a recent FT editorial “A better plan for London airports”, which cited the . . . → Read More: At a time of ‘austerity’ for so many, are there more beneficial uses for taxpayers’ money than mega airports and HS2?
Gary Greenwood, analyst at Shore Capital comments on the Co-op Group’s food retailing: “It just looks like an organisation that has expanded in the wrong areas . . .“
Food sales were down 0.7% on a like-for-like basis. Overall, the group reported losses before payments to members, the equivalent of pre-tax profit for . . . → Read More: Co-op food retail: an organisation that has expanded in the wrong areas?
David Boyle of the New Economics Foundation writes: “What kind of entrepreneurial activity is most likely to bring local recovery and local resilience?
“The answer is probably not a chain store that competes in every market – the very opposite of an anchor store. It is going to be the revival of a genuinely . . . → Read More: Needed: the revival of a genuinely local entrepreneurial culture | <urn:uuid:bdbc578e-fc34-476c-b4ab-91203405ac82> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://localisewestmidlands.org.uk/category/economy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936967 | 381 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Volunteer to Teach English in Georgia
We are not accepting applications for Georgia at this time.
If you’re looking for a unique ESL adventure abroad, becoming a volunteer English teacher in Georgia is an experience you’ll never forget! A beautiful Eastern European country bordering the Black Sea, Georgia is a country of stunning scenery and windswept mountainous terrain, ancient hillside castles and churches, cobblestone streets, and friendly locals.
Teach and Learn with Georgia (TLG) is a government-sponsored program by the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia. The project’s aim – to improve the quality of education in the country – is a top priority for the Government of Georgia.
By bring fluent English speakers from around the world to the country of Georgia, TLG is working to improve English proficiency and expand Georgia’s global presence. The program also aims to create opportunities for cultural exchange, both within the classroom and within Georgian communities.
As a volunteer English teacher in Georgia, your presence – along with thousands of other teachers from all over the world – will have a profound impact on Georgian youth as well as the entire country.
WHY BECOME A VOLUNTEER ENGLISH TEACHER IN GEORGIA?
Modern city of Tbilisi
The skills you learn as a volunteer teacher in Georgia, whether you’re just out of college, in the middle of your career, or retired, are skills that will help to enhance your marketability with potential employers. You’ll not only gain valuable teaching experience in the classroom, but you’ll also be living in a country the rest of the world knows very little about! The personal and professional rewards that you experience while teaching English in Georgia will last a lifetime!
Volunteering isn’t just about giving back to a community that needs our help in improving the quality of education. The TLG program is about a cross-cultural exchange of ideas, culture, customs, beliefs and values for every side that is involved. You’ll learn about traditional Georgian culture and lifestyle, and as a representative of your country, you’ll also be sharing your own culture and customs with the Georgian students and families that you come in contact with.
IS GEORGIA A SAFE PLACE TO LIVE AS A VOLUNTEER ENGLISH TEACHER?
Absolutely! TLG provides volunteer teachers with the training, information, and support that they need to stay safe and healthy during their time in Georgia. Furthermore, TLG does an excellent job of screening and visiting host families to ensure teachers are being placed in a safe environment.
The crime rate in Georgia is very low. In fact, the crime rate in Georgia is lower than that of the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany and France. View this chart for details: Crime rate statistics.
WHY TEACH IN GEORGIA THROUGH REACH TO TEACH?
As one of the world’s top ESL organizations, Reach To Teach is best known for the quality of care and time that we give to both our teachers and our schools. Our team of ESL experts will be guiding you through every step of your journey from start to finish. In addition to preparing you for your journey, we also offer on-going support throughout the year. Our recruitment staff has been to Georgia. We’ve met with the staff of TLG, we’ve interviewed host families and we’ve visited schools all over Georgia. We are 100% dedicated to making your year in Georgia one of the best years of your life!
WHAT ARE THE REQUIREMENTS FOR TEACHING ENGLISH IN GEORGIA?
Beautiful scenery in Georgia
Teach and Learn in Georgia actively recruits teachers with a variety of experiences and from countries all over the world. To qualify for the program, you must:
- Speak English fluently
- Possess a University Degree, College Diploma, or Associates Degree in any discipline
- Nationalities: American, Australian, British, Canadian, Irish, New Zealand, and South Africa residents are preferred. TLG accepts applicants from all over the world who speak English fluently.
- Complete a medical assessment form that attests to your good health
- Complete a background check
- A teaching certificate or ESL certification is preferred, but not required
- Professionalism, enthusiasm, and a positive attitude!
TEACH ENGLISH IN GEORGIA – TEACHING BENEFITS
Volunteer English teachers receive the following benefits:
- A monthly stipend of 500 Georgian Lari (approximately $300USD)*
- Free round-trip airfare to Georgia and home after your contract
- Living accommodations with a Georgian family
- Medical insurance
- One round-trip ticket for one vacation per year
- A safe living and working environment
- There is no fee to participate in the TLG program
- One week of language and intercultural training classes, educational skills, and cross-cultural understanding provided at the beginning of your contract by TLG.
- A letter of recommendation from TLG, and a certificate of dedication signed by the Minister of Education and Science of Georgia
*Volunteers are expected to contribute 100 GEL per month to their host family, to cover the basic costs of food and utilities.
GET ADVICE FROM OUR ESL EXPERTS
The Reach To Teach staff can you tell what to expect in the classroom. As former ESL teachers, we can advise you on all things ESL-related. Furthermore, we’ll be with you every step of the way, from processing your application to preparing you for your journey, getting you to Georgia, and providing ongoing support and advice throughout your year abroad.
WHERE DO VOLUNTEER TEACHERS GO?
The options for volunteer teaching in Georgia are endless. Every home stay opportunity is completely different. TLG teachers can be found all over Georgia: in the high mountain villages of the Caucasus Mountains, in the beautiful seaside town of Batumi, and the modern capital city of Tbilisi. Your time in Georgia can be tailor-made and the possibilities are endless!
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO VOLUNTEER IN GEORGIA?
Find out what your life will be like volunteering in Georgia from the people who have already lived it: our volunteer teachers. Visit our photo galleries, travel guides and volunteer blogs for more information on the Teach and Learn with Georgia program.
HOW DO I APPLY?
Fill out our application form on our web site. Once we’ve reviewed your application, we’ll be touch with an interview offer!
Come to Georgia, where guests are honored and most welcome! | <urn:uuid:15ccb40e-6967-49c3-a382-9c8220c4a71d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reachtoteachrecruiting.com/teach-english-in-georgia.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934444 | 1,388 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Fri October 5, 2001
Johnston – Johnston High School was evacuated today, after an apparent prank that sent more than 20 students and teachers to the hospital.
Johnston Police arrested a 15 year-old boy, who is a student at the school for the prank. The boy put chlorine tablets in a soda bottle with rubbing alcohol, which released chlorine gas, according to police. He faces a felony charge of placing a bomb in the school.
?He is being charged under Rhode Island general laws for placing a bomb, an incendiary device, in a school building, which is a felony. It carries between a three and 20 year sentence,? said Police Captain David Arusso, ?There was a chemical compound?chlorine tablets, the kind used in swimming pools along with rubbing alcohol. It was placed in a plastic bottle with a cap on it. It caused the bottle to burst.?
Police did not release the suspect?s name. They said he would be held at the State Training School until an arraignment on Tuesday. The boy has no prior criminal record. Police believe he acted alone.
Teachers and students were taken to Rhode Island Hospital with respiratory and eye irritations. All but one teacher was released by mid-afternoon. The teacher was listed in good condition. | <urn:uuid:225a0579-b727-45f5-accb-a84ad99154e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ripr.org/post/school-evacuated | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983438 | 262 | 1.53125 | 2 |
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — Searching for a way out of a crippling financial crisis, officials in Cyprus on Wednesday pursued a new bailout strategy that could include a loan from Russia in exchange for natural gas leases and selling off assets from its most troubled banks.
Cyprus needs to come up with 5.8 billion euros ( $7.5 billion) on its own in order to secure 10 billion euros in rescue loans from international creditors. But the country's first plan to seize up to 10 percent of people's bank accounts failed miserably. Now officials are trying to limit the amount of money they need to take from customer's deposits.
The new "Plan B" could be voted on as early as Thursday, three top government officials said.
The latest move came a day after lawmakers voted overwhelmingly against the earlier plan — a rejection that threw Cyprus' entire bailout into question. That raised the possibility the country's banks could collapse, the government would be unable to pay its bills and Cyprus could be forced out of the euro.
That could roil global financial markets as well as endanger deposits in the country even further.
The new "Plan B" was described by three top government officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the proposal were not being released until party officials had a chance to review them at a meeting Thursday morning.
The package includes a proposal to restructure Cyprus' heavily indebted second-largest lender, Laiki. The idea would be to isolate the bank's bad assets, which would be taken over by the government, from its good assets, which could be sold off to raise money. That strategy could also be applied to the country's biggest lender, Bank of Cyprus.
To avoid bank runs and give officials time to push the package through, the country's banks, which have been shuttered since Saturday, will remain closed for the rest of the week, said the central bank spokeswoman, Aliki Stylianou. Monday is a bank holiday, so banks will not reopen before Tuesday.
Cyprus has turned to long-time ally Russia for help, and Finance Minister Michalis Sarris was in Moscow on Wednesday to discuss a range of aid options and vowed to remain there until he secured a pledge of support. "We will be here until some kind of agreement is reached," Sarris said.
Nearly a third of the total amount of deposits in Cyprus' banks is believed to be held by Russians. The idea that authorities could dip directly into people's bank accounts had outraged Cypriots and Russians alike.
A Cypriot government official said the new proposal still includes some tax on deposits, but at a percentage far lower than those originally proposed. The official said the EU had given Cyprus until Monday to come up with an alternative, so speed was of the essence.
The European Union and Germany in particular, have long argued that they should not have to ask their own taxpayers to contribute to bailing out a country when it was Russian oligarchs who would benefit.
While the economy of Cyprus is tiny — a mere 0.2 percent of the eurozone — its exit from the shared currency could raise speculation that other, larger countries could leave, roiling global financial markets.
Cypriot political leaders held emergency meetings throughout the day Wednesday to try to find an alternative plan and seemed inclined to rely on Russia to help them out.
Russia is a longtime ally and also has skin in the game — Russians own about a third of the 68 billion euros in deposits with Cypriot banks. It was unclear however, how much it would help and the Russians appeared to be balking at pouring any more money into the country.
Russia could extend a 2.5 billion euro loan that it gave Cyprus in 2011 and lower repayment rates. It could also provide a fresh loan, have one of its banks take over one of Cyprus' ailing lenders, or demand an interest in natural gas fields that Cyprus has discovered in the Mediterranean.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev criticized the eurozone and Cypriot officials for their plan to seize deposits, comparing them to Soviet-style autocrats.
"So far, the actions of the European Union, the European Commission and the government of Cyprus have resembled that of an elephant in a china shop," Medvedev said in remarks carried Wednesday by the Interfax news agency.
Scrambling to avert a financial meltdown, Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades held talks Wednesday with European and IMF officials. The eurozone and IMF must sign off on any Plan B the Cypriots come up with if it is to be approved as part of the bailout.
Some sort of deal must be approved within days because Cyprus is running on borrowed time — literally.
The European Central Bank is keeping the Cypriot banks alive by allowing them to draw on emergency support from the local central bank. But the ECB has said it would cut off that aid if there was no bailout deal soon and it became clear the banks had no hope of becoming solvent again.
In Nicosia, residents waited anxiously to see what lay in store for them.
Avetis Bahcecian has been running his Armenian restaurant in Nicosia for years. Now, with the uncertainty swirling around Cyprus, he's worried about his business.
"Whatever they do, they have to do it quickly because this uncertainty is hurting business," the 41-year-old said as he kneaded dough to make lahmacun, a traditional Armenian pizza-style food. "Our business is down by 40 percent in the last couple days."
ATMs have been dispensing cash and debit and credit cards have been working, so Cypriots have not faced any immediate cash shortage for day-to-day living.
Tensions remained high as Cypriots wondered whether the country's final rescue deal would include the hated bank deposit seizures.
Under the initial bailout plan conceived in Brussels last weekend, Cyprus was to have funded its part of the bailout by seizing 6.75 percent of all deposits up to 100,000 euros and 9.9 percent of those above that threshold. That caused outrage, leading the government to propose an amended version that would have spared deposits up to 20,000 euros. That plan was rejected by lawmakers on Tuesday.
As uncertainty grew over the country's future, even the country's influential Orthodox church offered to help.
Its head, Archbishop Chrysostomos II, said the church was willing to mortgage its assets to invest in government bonds. The church has considerable wealth, including property, stakes in a bank and a brewery.
"The wealth of the church is at the disposal of the country," Chrysostomos said.
Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow and David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany, contributed to this report. | <urn:uuid:cb38ee24-6dc5-45c5-bca7-1a22692026d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nwcn.com/news/world/199102921.html?ref=next | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977566 | 1,391 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Editor Nechama Carmel speaks with thirty-seven-year-old Rabbi Itay Meushar from Ma’ale Adumim, Israel who has been leading the Ashkenazic community in Peru for the past three years and is seeking to make a dent in the country’s rampant assimilation problem.
Thirty-seven-year-old Rabbi Itay Meushar leads the Ashkenazic community in Peru. Courtesy of Rabbi Itay Meushar
Jewish Action: How did you come to be the rabbi of the Ashkenazic community in Lima, Peru, the biggest Jewish community in the country?
Rabbi Meushar: While I grew up in Ma’ale Adumim, Israel, I speak Spanish because my family lived in Uruguay for four years when I was a young child. In Israel, I attended Birkat Moshe in Ma’ale Adumim, where I obtained semichah. In 2009, Rabbi Ephraim Zik, who had served as the rabbi in Lima for ten years, called me and told me he was going back to Israel and was looking for someone to take over his position.
I thought to myself: I want to do outreach and bring Jews closer to Judaism. If the Ribbono shel Olam made me a Spanish speaker, it must be for a reason. What could I do with my abilities?
To her credit, my wife agreed to move. She didn’t speak Spanish, but now, baruch Hashem, she gives shiurim in Spanish.
Boys learning in the Bar Mitzvah program run by Rabbi Meushar.
Courtesy of Rabbi Meushar
I am associated with the Religious Zionist Torah MiTzion movement, which actually has a kollel in Lima. (The kollel currently consists of two bachurim. We are looking to recruit more Spanish-speaking avreichim to join us.)
Peru is a major tourist attraction for Israelis—especially for those seeking adventure after serving in the military. Each year, the Chabad house in Cusco, the ancient capital of the Inca Empire, hosts a Pesach Seder for hundreds of Israelis.
Over the last fifteen years, the community has sought out rabbis from Eretz Yisrael—mostly Religious Zionist rabbis because the community in Lima is very Zionistic and believes strongly that the rabbi should serve as a bridge between the galut and Eretz Yisrael.
JA: Can you describe the Jewish community of Peru?
RM: Out of a general population of approximately 27 million people, there are fewer than 3,000 Jews. Most of them are concentrated in the capital city of Lima, a large city located along Peru’s coast. There are two Orthodox communities: the Ashkenazic community and the Sephardic community. (The majority of Jews are not observant, but they are traditional and associate with the Orthodox movement.) Our shul—Union Israelita del Peru—has 600 members. On Friday night, some 150 people show up to services. On Shabbat morning, around seventy people attend.
Rabbi Meushar has been leading the largest Orthodox community in Peru for the past three years. Courtesy of Rabbi Meushar.
Kosher in Peru
With its growing economy and increasing interest in exporting to the US and Europe, Peru is rapidly becoming a new center for OU-certified products.
“We are exploding in Peru and Chile,” says Rabbi Yitzchok Gutterman, OU rabbinic coordinator and regional director, South America. “And we’ve experienced significant growth throughout the entire continent.”
OU Kosher already has a strong presence in South America with hundreds of OU-certified companies in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Columbia. But with Peru’s rich land and natural resources, the country promises to be a leader in raw materials, food coloring, spices, flavorings and general fish and agricultural product exports.
“Currently, quinoa, a highly nutritious grain grown in Peru and other parts of South America, is becoming very popular among health-conscious kosher consumers,” says Rabbi Shoshan Ghoori, OU director of client relations in Latin America.
Rabbi Ghoori, who studied at the Kolel Avreichim de Chile and helped establish NCSY Chile, works closely with Sandro Monteblanco, a Peruvian businessman, to educate Peruvian companies as well as governmental agencies about the enormous benefits of going kosher. Some of the more prominent OU-certified companies in Peru are Alicorp, Peru’s largest processor of edible oils, and Montana, a major player in natural food colorants and flavors.
“Peru understands that kosher certification is critical to compete in today’s international market,” says Rabbi Ghoori.
Although Peru is a predominately Catholic country, there is not a lot of anti-Semitism. For the most part, there is respect for the Jews. Unfortunately, this is why there is a lot of assimilation and very high rates of intermarriage. But slowly the Jewish community is moving toward greater religious observance. We have our own local kosher certification; there is a kosher mini mart, a mikvah and a community school.
I work closely with the OU. [See sidebar.] Kosher meat is available from Israel, and my father, who lives in Israel and is a shochet, travels to Peru every three to four months to shecht animals for the kehillah. I am the local shochet for chickens.
My wife and I play many roles here. She is the “mikvah lady” and gives shiurim for women in the community. I supervise the local kosher certification, organize the daily minyanim, perform levayahs, prepare children for their Bar or Bat Mitzvah and run ongoing classes, shiurim and community events. We are a two-person team.
A Peruvian girl in the village of Coris. Photos: Jack Hazut/www.israelimage.net
JA: What are you doing to instill in young people a strong Jewish identity?
RM: There is a community school with 400 students attended by the Orthodox and Conservative communities (there is no Reform movement in Peru). The school educates about 80 to 90 percent of the Jewish children in the city. I send my own children—I have five (beli ayin hara)—to the community school, but they also get educated at home. I believe that even in cities such as New York, Yiddishkeit is learned in the home. You cannot downplay the significance of the home. Nevertheless, as the children get older, it becomes more difficult to provide them with a quality Jewish education. When my son becomes a bar mitzvah in January, we will send him to live with my parents so he can study in a yeshivah in Israel.
Reaching out to young people is an ongoing challenge. Many young Jews do not stay in Peru. Their parents send them to Israel or to the United States. Younger children in the community participate in our shul’s Bar and Bat Mitzvah program. The program is run like a youth group: we not only teach Torah and how to put on tefillin, we play soccer (a major sport in Peru), paintball and other sports and show the kids how Judaism can be fun. But we know that we need to do more. NCSY in Chile is highly successful; we want to bring it here as well.
JA: What is unique about your community?
RM: There is an unusually warm relationship between the rabbi and the community. I don’t believe you find this in larger Jewish communities. After Shabbat davening, there’s a kiddush with hot kugel and other Shabbat delicacies. Congregants stay to eat and then participate in a shiur where there’s much back-and-forth with lots of questions and answers. The community is very close-knit; we’re like one big family.
JA: Is the community growing stronger religiously?
RM: We realize that change cannot happen from today until tomorrow. Change is a slow, gradual process. But people tell me that compared to ten and twenty years ago, what they are seeing now is amazing.
Baruch Hashem, there are more and more people who want to learn Torah, who want to understand how Torah applies to the modern world. And more and more mitpallelim are coming to shul.
The History of Peru’s Jewish Community
The original Jewish settlers of Peru came from Spain in the sixteenth century to escape the Inquisition. Those who survived are believed to have assimilated and lost all connection to Judaism. The roots of the modern-day Jewish community in Peru date back to the arrival of
Ashkenazi Jews from Western and Central Europe, including England and Germany, in the mid-nineteenth century. Before World War I and in the inter-war periods, many more Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe and Sephardim from the Ottoman Empire came to Peru. In 1970, the Jewish community reached its peak, with a population of nearly 5,200. However, it has slowly declined since then due to political and economic instability in the region.
Today, while the Jewish community in Peru has dwindled significantly, Jews are well represented in Peruvian life. There have even been Jewish prime ministers
There is even a small group of shomer Shabbat Jews. But I believe that every Jew who comes to shul in this kind of environment is a tzaddik. The connection with the shul is very important. For the Jews in Peru, it’s important to feel that they are part of something big; to feel connected to the rest of the Jewish world. It gives us strength.
JA: What is your biggest challenge right now?
RM: To maintain the community’s religious growth and to build upon it. There’s a thirst for learning, a thirst for Jewish knowledge—especially among those who come to shul on a regular basis. We desperately want to make sure there’s continuity among the youth.
JA: Do you have a specific message for the American Orthodox community?
RM: Many people believe that there are no Jews in Peru, that Peru is just Indians who live in the Amazon. I think your readers will be fascinated to discover that there is a small but spiritually growing Jewish community here. We’ve had many religious visitors from Europe and the United States who come to our shul and spend a Shabbat with us. They are genuinely surprised by our warmth and friendliness, and they have a wonderful time. I encourage all of you to come visit; we would love to welcome you. And not only do we have kosher food—we even have kosher take-out!
JA: What do you see as the future of Jewish life in Peru?
RM: Dovid Hamelech says, “Hazorim bedimah, berinah yiktzoru. Those who tearfully sow will reap in glad song.” We are zorim, planting, with a lot of dimah, tears. And we have hope, be’ezrat Hashem, that berinah yiktzoru, we will reap with joy. | <urn:uuid:9c81fd5b-fa86-4b73-95b6-6a55547fa0b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ou.org/jewish_action/08/2012/a-conversation-with-rabbi-itay-meushar-of-peru/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96191 | 2,398 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Blending business and language skills
Catherine Waite ’08 appreciates the flexibility she had in majoring in both business management and Spanish at Santa Clara. She plans to use her management skills and language skills in a career in business.
“Business and Spanish complement each other well. Speaking Spanish has become critical in the United States, especially in California,” she says.
Waite will use her language ability traveling over the next year to Argentina, Costa Rica, and Spain, teaching English and studying Spanish. And she will be studying each country’s business practices while continuing to improve her understanding of a variety of cultures. | <urn:uuid:162fd519-7b41-4203-8656-373a0165c90c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.scu.edu/admission/findmore/regional.cfm?c=61108 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963428 | 131 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Theme: Travel & Transport (2hr lesson)
Topic for Lesson 14: Train
11.30 – 11.40 am Free Play
11.40 – 11.50 am Say Hello
11.50 – 12.00 pm Table Top demo
12.00 – 12.30 pm Table Top Activity: Craft Time
12.30 – 12.45 pm Magic Box, story/sounds/drama Day 2 Bears
12.45 – 1.00 pm Snack (Cheese, Biscuits & Papaya)
1.00 – 1.15 pm Music & Movement
1.15 – 1.30 pm Outdoor Play
We woke up late today. But I manage to cook noodles before we went off for class.
I like the way these children crowd around the desk. They are so tiny.
Yvette was a little bit cranky during the magic box time. She refused to touch the truck when it was passed to her. And she wanted to head toilet when Claire asked her to take up items from the magic box.
Really love the Bear Time and Yvette most of the time, can sit thru. Today the topic they were acting is to teach the child, “No toffee, if not you will have stomach ache and need to take pill” & “Brush teeth twice a day”.
I really admire Claire. She is heavily pregnant now (expecting her first child). At 33 weeks, her tummy is huge. But still, she put in her best effort to teach. She can act so well and making every one of us laughed.
Bear Time teach child a topic thru role acting. Every Bear Time is interesting and always never fails to capture the children attention.
Snack was right after Bear Time. In Claire’s class, she did not emphasis on queuing for food. She allows the child to crowd around the table and get the snacks she prepares.
Music & Movement is only 10 minutes as Snack Time over run. While waiting for the rest to finish their food, they will allow the child to play toys.
Lastly they have water play for outdoor activity. Of course, compare to Evans, this is a small set up. But well the children have fun. Yvette was the first toddler to leave the group. I guess because she plays water every day during bathing time.
She moved herself freely and enjoy every single toy she played.
Home sweet home after class. | <urn:uuid:443c7581-ee52-4ae0-8772-72ab09da45d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sunflower700.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950464 | 510 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Published in Lab Business Week, July 3rd, 2005
According to a study from Nigeria, "We evaluated the pattern of sputum smear positivity and assessed the effects of directly observed treatment short course (DOTS) among tuberculosis (TB) patients at the DOTS clinics in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
"In total, 1391 patients were seen at 6 microscopy and treatment centers across the FCT between January and December 2003. Their sputa were screened microscopically for the presence of acid-fast bacilli (AFB) using the Ziehl-Neelsen staining technique. In total, 296 (21.3%) patients were smear...
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NewsRx also is available at LexisNexis, Gale, ProQuest, Factiva, Dialog, Thomson Reuters, NewsEdge, and Dow Jones. | <urn:uuid:8c7cd3d3-e9d4-4c4e-9cc8-94c979f9d334> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newsrx.com/newsletters/Lab-Business-Week/2005-07-03/062720053331562LB.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945356 | 210 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Without looking, here I go...
1 How many ways are there to make change for a dollar bill? a... ton?
2 T or F – Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated? true
3 What is the only fish that can blink with both eyes? shark... maybe
4 Which hand does most of the typing? left
5 Two-thirds of the world’s eggplant is grown in what US state? ill go with Iowa, as I have no idea
6 All of the clocks in “Pulp Fiction” are stuck on what time? 4:20. Duhh....
7 Almonds are part of what fruit family? there are families WITHIN fruit too? are you sure you didn't screw that question up?
8 What is the only state whose name is just one syllable? Maine
9 Who were Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie named after? The odd couple? maybe? some old show/movie i forgot or haven't seen
10 What are the only four words in the English language to end in “dous”? tremendous, stupendous, horrendous, and... damn
11 On a Canadian two-dollar bill, what country’s flag is flying over the Parliament building? everyone says its America's flag, but they are wrong. i'll provide a link later. but its a varitaion of the canadian royal flag.
12 What animal/creature is known for having the largest eyes in the world? giant squid
13 What occupation was on Al Capone’s business cards? furniture mover
14 T or F After the death of her husband, poet Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) kept his heart wrapped up in silk until she died. Why not? sure, true.
15 The shortest war in history was between Zanzibar and Great Britain in 1896. How long did it last? 3 hours
16 T or F In 1994 Los Angeles police arrested a man for dressing as the Grim Reaper - complete with scythe - and standing outside the windows of old people's homes, staring in. true?
17 How many dimples are on a regulation golf ball?[/quote] 64? who knows
And that's it... I'll edit it to see how i did.
Huh... no answers posted yet. C'mon, pigs... answers...
But here is afore promised link...
(ahem) well, the link doesn't work... but go to http://www.cdnpapermoney.com
, then scroll down to mid page and click on "Pages of Interest, American Flag on $2 Bill?" | <urn:uuid:0e1a2481-597e-4a93-ba2b-df59e2ecade7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fantasyfootballcafe.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=129945&start=20 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956953 | 552 | 1.5 | 2 |
The total number of business failures reached 26,165 in 2009 an increase of 16 per cent compared to the previous year and up by 57 per cent compared to pre–recession levels in 2007. Surprisingly, business failures declined since peaking in the first quarter of 2009 – well before economic output stabilised, according to the latest Industry Watch report.
The rise in insolvencies is certainly considerable and equates to 1 in 74 businesses failing in 2009. However, business failures reached their peak in Q1 2009 and since then we’ve seen a downward trend. Historically business failures are lagging indicators and continue rising well after the economy has turned. So we were surprised to see that business failures rose far less than expectations through this recession and indeed less sharply than during previous recessions.
Usually there is a strong correlation between economic output and business failures but during the 08/09 recession that relationship seems to have been weakened. Surprisingly, businesses have held up better than the economic decline would have suggested.
According to this special edition Industry Watch report a number of factors have worked in tandem to mitigate the worst impact on business during this downturn:
Other factors that have helped businesses weather this downturn have been that Banks have been more flexible when it comes to late payments; we’ve seen more elasticity in the labour market; and, I think on the whole, businesses have learned from the hard lessons of previous downturns.
However, this is not the time to become complacent. With the economic recovery sluggish at the best, and the uncertainty the Election will certainly create, there is the need for continued support in order to avoid a second wave of business failures. A Government of any colour must recognise that enterprise is the UK’s engine room and so any increases in VAT or tax reforms that hinder UK plc’s competitive global standing could seriously upset the apple cart.
To view the full report, please visit www.bdo.co.uk/industrywatch. | <urn:uuid:fb86a3c8-a6ce-4628-bbba-395f7d4aed18> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bdo.uk.com/talk-shop/why-has-number-business-failures-been-less-expected-shay-bannon | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969188 | 402 | 1.578125 | 2 |
There is perhaps no greater web annoyance than a poorly constructed form. Whether they’re clumsy, picky, or just plain confusing, too many forms make submitting data a cumbersome chore. The worst forms transcend mere annoyance and actually drive users crazy (or drive them away alltogether.) The sorry state of web forms need not and should not continue, however, it all begins with knowing why so many are so bad in the first place. Here are 7 form tactics to purge from your website ASAP:
Insisting that passwords have certain characteristics
It’s one thing to require that passwords be more than 3 or 4 characters. It’s even okay to reject obvious passwords like “password.” What’s not okay is forcing annoying requirements on your users, such as making them capitalize the first letter or use at least one number in the password. Even worse is when the form does not state these requirements up-front, allowing the user to set what they believe is a fine password and only telling them after the fact that they need caps or numeric characters. While your goal – keeping your users safe – is noble, going about it in this way serves only to annoy and frustrate them as they try to join your website.
Insisting upon perfect formatting
Ever type your birthdate or credit card number into a form, only to be told that you didn’t use dashes or slashes the way the form wants you to? Weren’t you completely annoyed when you had to go back and fix it before going further? Well, guess what – most of your users feel the same way if your form is doing this or similar things to them. There is simply no excuse for this other than laziness on the part of the website owner. Your users are doing you the favor of trusting you with valuable and sometimes sensitive information. The least you can do is let them give it to you in a way that’s convenient for them.
Vague error messages
Nothing is more frustrating than a form that gives you vague error messages. Just because you were a computer science major doesn’t mean your users are, which means most of them wont have the faintest idea what “could not connect to database” or “fatal submission error” means. Sometimes an error truly is technical and can only be expressed as such. However, when possible, you should make the effort to display errors in ways that are meaningful and intelligable to your audience. Otherwise they might just give up and close the form alltogether.
- Having to re-enter all your data just because you messed one thing up
It’s bad enough to complete an entire form and have to go back because you left something out. (For example, not including a number in your password!) It’s even worse to have to go back and type everything out all over again, just because of the one thing you missed. Not all forms do this, but the fact that some do is another indicator that improvement is needed.
- Poorly coded drop-down menus
Another inexcusable form annoyance is when you click a drop-down menu and it either:
- Doesn’t drop down, or
- Does drop down, but wont let you select any of its choices
This, again, is nothing more than laziness from the programming team or web designer. But it’s far from trivial, for if the user literally cannot select anything from the menu, she is stuck with nowhere to go. Nine times out of ten she will simply close the form and forget about it. Clearly, this is not what you want!
Requiring information that has no business being required
Given the choice, most users wont fill in information they don’t want to give out. Webmasters, in turn, seem to have concluded “well, we’ll just require that information by not letting them submit the form without it!” Unfortunately, this is one instance where the intentions fall far short of the results. People don’t suddenly leap to share information they feel you don’t need just because you put a “Required” asterisk next to the box asking for it. Some will, but most will ditch the form or fill it out with bogus information. Neither does you any good.
- No clear indication that the information was submitted
It’s best to assure users (particularly if your form is long) that the form they just filled out out was successfully submitted. That said, it’s astounding how many forms simply drop users at a blank webpage or some vague message instead. This creates nervousness and panic in the user who is now unsure of whether you received her data. Rather than risking this perception, take the time to type out a small blurb along the lines of “Thank you! Your information has been sent and received. We’ll be in touch shortly!” This leaves no doubt that the time filling out the form was well-spent. | <urn:uuid:7de76d99-d748-41b9-9c6a-395d6ecb4952> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.kissmetrics.com/7-form-tactics-that-drive-users-crazy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948825 | 1,035 | 1.578125 | 2 |
I would like to add something to this convo! I have experimented a lot with getting cakes with level tops by using different brands of cake strips, mainly wilton versus Rose’s method, before I started using Rose’s recipes exclusively. I learned through trial and error, when I use baking strips or silicone strips for level baking, I get an edge that isn’t sealed, slightly crumbly with a weird soft layer that peels off easily. It’s always useable though and looks exactly identical to the edges in all your photos. When I take the strips off, the top is round but the edges are sealed due to the heat searing the crust into a crust! It’s like the difference between a pizza crust made on a wood fired ceramic stove and making the same pizza on an oven rack with an aluminum cookie sheet. Not the same result due to heat concentration/surface.
We see this exact example in Flour Girl’s pumpkin cake, above, where she forgot the strips. This has always meant the difference between sealed sides or soft sides for me. A solution I have employed in the past is taking off the strips very very carefully in the last 15 minutes of baking once the majority of the center has set if I really must have a sealed edge. If I am covering it, I just crumb coat with a thin icing to seal it and carry on. I know you all have done a ton of debating and comparing and experimenting about this phenomenon and it’s occurrence with certain pans. I think your experiments are amazing! I just think this problem is caused by the strips and not the pans so much.
Look at the experiment with the ramekin and the small cake pan. The ramekin didn’t have a cake strip on it, I bet! Also, they get much hotter than an aluminum or metal pan, hence why we cut baking times or temperatures when we use those with cake batter. The cake pan and loaf pan experiment shows the same thing. I bet you didn’t use cake strips on the loaf pan! Once again, I am not trying to burst anyone’s bubble or say your observations aren’t totally awesome (because they are!!) but I have seen this enough times, I can’t help but see this correlation.
What do you think? | <urn:uuid:f7acccaf-8d74-477c-a194-e825b845116f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.realbakingwithrose.com/index_ee.php/forums/viewthread/3826/P30/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946781 | 485 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Sunday Alamba / AP
Onlookers gather at the site of a plane crash Sunday in Lagos, Nigeria,
Updated at 5:19 p.m. ET: Nigerian authorities said Sunday that as many as 153 people were aboard a Dana Airlines passenger jet that crashed into a two-story building in Lagos, the country's largest city. "I don't believe there are any survivors," said Harold Denuren, Nigeria's director of aviation.
Authorities said that in addition to the passengers and crew aboard the plane, an unknown number of people may also have been killed or hurt on the ground. President Goodluck Jonathan canceled all appointments for Monday and declared three days of official mourning for the victims.
The plane was heading from Abuja, the capital, to Lagos when it went down about 3:30 p.m. local time (10:30 a.m. ET), authorities said. It crashed into a building and broke into two before burning up, witnesses said.
Local reports indicated that at least three buildings were severely damaged, one of them a church. Nigerian Eye reported from the scene that bodies could be seen burning on the ground, while pictures on the Internet showed large plumes of smoke across the city.
Police said they had recovered the plane's voice recorder. Al Jazeera reported from Abuja that witnesses said the the plane may have hit a power line in clear and sunny weather.
Razak Fadipe, acting head of the Lagos fire service, told The Daily Times of Nigeria that no one had been rescued alive as of 7:30 p.m. (2:30 p.m. ET) but that people were likely to be trapped in the one of the buildings.
Poor road access and a crowd of hundreds of people were complicating rescue efforts, in some cases blocking fire crews from reaching the scene.
"Our job is crucial to the rescue efforts," Fadipe said. "Without us doing our job, other rescue teams cannot gain access to even rescue any survivors that may be trapped in the building."
The Daily Times quoted a senior official of Dana Airlines, whom it didn't identify, as saying the plane had been undergoing repairs for several weeks.
"The station manager protested its use, but the Indian management insisted it should fly," the official said, according to The Daily Times.
The crash came after 10 other people were killed when a Boeing 727 cargo plane flying from Lagos crashed Saturday in Accra, the capital of Ghana, and hit a bus, the Sunday Tribune of Nigeria reported.
The crew of four survived, authorities said.
A senior military officer told the Sunday Tribune that the bus was severely damaged, while the plane's wings and tail broke off from its body.
More world news from msnbc.com and NBC News:
- Murderer's corpse dragged from car, eaten by bear in Canada
- Queen leads giant Diamond Jubilee flotilla on rainy Thames
- Assad: Syria faces 'real war waged from the outside'
- As United States pulls out, China seeks role in Afghanistan
- U.S. drone strike kills 10 in northwest Pakistan
- Tahrir Square occupied as anger grows over Mubarak verdict
- Mourning the loss of more lives in Syria
Follow us on Twitter: @msnbc_world | <urn:uuid:a96df8ba-a426-447f-86d9-fe70127550b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/03/12034499-153-people-feared-dead-in-nigerian-plane-crash?pc=25&sp=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974554 | 680 | 1.710938 | 2 |
From the Super Mario Wiki
(Redirected from Mecha-Spike Top)
Spike Tops are Buzzy Beetles with shells that are red and have a single spike projecting out of the top (hence the name), making them impossible to be jumped upon, while still being resistant to fire, which makes them one of the most resilient enemies in the Mario series. Their defining trait is the adhesive quality of their feet, which allows them to crawl along vertical and upside-down surfaces. Despite being a shelled enemy, in the platforming games, any effective method of attack will defeat them instantly instead of having them retreat into their shells.
Super Mario series
Super Mario World
Spike Top's debut appearance was in Super Mario World, where they would crawl around walls and ceilings of caves. They could only be destroyed by a Cape Feather, Shell, Starman, or by having Yoshi eat them. If Yoshi jumped on one, it wouldn't do anything to either Yoshi or the Spike Top. They are distinct from Buzzy Beetles in that their eyes are visible and their shells are flatter. Instead of having 4 legs like they do in all of their later appearances, in this game they have 6 legs.
Super Mario Bros. 3: Super Mario Advance 4
Spike Tops appear in the e-Reader levels of Super Mario Bros. 3: Super Mario Advance 4, a Game Boy Advance remake of Super Mario Bros. 3. In the game they attack just like they did in Super Mario World.
New Super Mario Bros.
They return once again in New Super Mario Bros., with the same attack pattern from Super Mario World. A Shell, Starman, or Mega Mushroom could defeat them, as could hitting a block one is on. They only appear in World 5-2, World 6-Tower 2, and World 8-Tower.
New Super Mario Bros. Wii
They also appear in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, mostly in World 2-3. They can be defeated by a Starman, Shell, hitting a block from below with the Spike Top on top of the block, or Ground Pounding the block with the Spike Top on the bottom. Through hacking methods, it is also shown that Yoshi can completely eat Spike Tops, and safely jump on them (not affecting the Spike Top though) as well.
New Super Mario Bros. 2
Spike Tops reappear in New Super Mario Bros. 2, where they act the same as in previous games. They can be defeated with the same methods in the previous games and also by swinging Raccoon Mario's tail near them. They are incorrectly referred to as "Red Spike Buzzy" (their name in the Paper Mario series) in Prima's strategy guide due to their similar appearances.
New Super Mario Bros. U
Nintendo Adventures Books
A swarm of Spike Tops appear to attack Mario and Yoshi in Dinosaur Dilemma of the Nintendo Adventure Books, throwing themselves at the plumber and dinosaur as they are traveling through a desert. Depending on how the reader solves the accompanying puzzle, Yoshi will either eat all the Spike Tops, or one will succeed in knocking Mario out for several hours, allowing Bowser to easily conquer Dinosaur Island.
Paper Mario series
Paper Mario
In Paper Mario, Spike Tops appear as enemies in Mt. Lavalava. They are much more like Buzzy Beeltes in that they can be flipped over, are resistant to fire and explosion attacks, and attack by Shell Tossing.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the Spike Tops have blue shells instead of red and also appear alongside Red Spike Buzzys, a sub-species of Buzzy Beetles that strongly resemble the Spike Tops' original appearance.
Super Paper Mario
Blue-shelled Spike Tops make a reappearance in Super Paper Mario. Due to this game being more of a 2D or 3D side-scrolling adventure and not a turn-based RPG they have the same attack patterns as in the regular installments of the Super Mario series.
Paper Mario Sticker Star
Spike Tops reappear in Paper Mario Sticker Star, this time having a red shell for the first time since the first game. Spike Tops appear in Rustle Burrow and Chomp Ruins. Once again, they cannot be stomped on unless using an Iron Jump sticker. They can retreat in their shells if Mario uses a Iron Jump sticker. Their only method of attack is going into their shell and ramming into Mario.
Super Princess Peach
In Super Princess Peach, it refers to Spike Tops as Mecha-Spike Tops. Despite this name, the Spike Tops of Super Princess Peach look no different than Spike Tops of other games, and therefore do not appear to be mechanical. Super Princess Peach also introduces an angry variety, the Mad Mecha-Spike Top, which can stretch out its spike to attack foes. They could only be defeated by using Rage or Poundbrella.
Official Profiles and Statistics
Names in Other Languages | <urn:uuid:950a3585-065e-4661-b05a-c3de2400c539> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mariowiki.com/Mecha-Spike_Top | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938546 | 1,048 | 1.546875 | 2 |
UN report finds evidence of arbitrary killings in eastern DR Congo, prompts calls for action
|Publisher||UN News Service|
|Publication Date||14 November 2012|
|Cite as||UN News Service, UN report finds evidence of arbitrary killings in eastern DR Congo, prompts calls for action, 14 November 2012, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/50a620b92.html [accessed 18 May 2013]|
|Disclaimer||This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.|
Rebel groups in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) arbitrarily executed at least 264 civilians, including 83 children, over a five-month period this year, according to a report by United Nations human rights investigators, released today.
Many victims were hacked to death with machetes while others were burnt alive in their homes during more than 75 rebel attacks on villages in southern Masisi Territory, located in north-eastern DRC's North Kivu province, the report notes, according to a joint news release from the UN Joint Human Rights Office (UNJHRO).
"Investigators found that the victims were often those least able to flee the attacks, largely children and the elderly," added UNJHRO, which was established in February 2008, and comprises the Human Rights Division of the UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) and the local operation of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The investigators conducted more than 160 interviews with victims and witnesses during six missions – their findings have led to calls for action from the head of MONUSCO and the UN human rights chief.
In the news release, UNJHRO also warned that the actual number of atrocities could be "considerably greater" because security restraints prevented the investigators from being able to confirm "many more" reports of human rights violations.
"The figures noted in the report reflect cases documented in only some parts of Masisi over a relatively limited period of time, and are thus far from presenting a comprehensive overview of the human rights situation throughout eastern DRC," it said in the news release.
Violence has long plagued the area, particularly the provinces of North and South Kivu, where armed groups – some predominantly made up of one or another of the regions' various ethnic groups – have systematically targeted the civilian population, while also combating the DRC army, itself weakened by desertions this year.
"The ethnic dimension of the attacks is of particular concern in eastern DRC where tensions over the past 15 years, while fundamentally rooted in competition over land and natural resources, have resulted in cycles of violence committed along ethnic lines," UNJHRO said.
The investigation additionally confirmed four cases of sexual violence involving the rape of 12 women. Other human rights violations outlined in the report include mass forced displacement and large-scale looting and destruction of private property.
Noting a "significant increase" in human rights violations throughout the Kivus this year, the Secretary-General's Special Representative for DRC and head of MONUSCO, Roger Meece, warned that the security situation could worsen.
"The risk of intensification of this ethnically charged conflict is real, and gives rise to serious concerns for peace and for the security of civilians in the region," he said.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called on the Congolese authorities to take immediate measures to protect civilian populations and to combat what she called "persistent impunity," which she said "only serves to embolden the killers."
"The systematic human rights violations committed by these armed groups, including the slaughter of so many children, are the most serious we have seen in recent times in the DRC," she added.
The human rights chief also said the UN was ready to offer support to DRC's recently launched judicial investigation into the atrocities, noting that these "must lead to the prosecution of those responsible for these acts and ensure justice for the victims."
In DRC, MONUSCO peacekeepers have been supporting DRC army deployments to the affected areas, including during the July-September period. The peacekeeping mission also sent several protection teams to Southern Masisi in order to evaluate the needs of the population and recommend action, which included establishing three temporary military bases and deploying 15 helicopter-supported foot patrols in the most volatile areas.
The UNJHRO investigators found that an armed group known as the Raia Mutomboki was responsible for most of the documented killings, while the opposing Nyatura group carried out others.
The report notes that the Raia Mutomboki was helped by allied community-based Mayi Mayi groups as it targeted mainly ethnic Hutus, a group that has long lived in eastern DRC, but whose numbers increased by the arrival of Rwandan Hutus in 1994 in the wake of power shifts that followed Rwanda's genocide that year.
The report goes on to note that the Nyatura group, sometimes in collaboration with the mainly Hutu group known as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), mainly targeted people of Tembo ethnicity.
Many armed groups, according to the report, have stepped up their activities since the DRC army shifted its focus to pursuing a group of renegade soldiers who, after deserting this year, formed the 23 March Movement (M23) – a group whose own atrocities have been condemned by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and others in the international community.
"Important progress in tracking down the FDLR made early in 2012 by the Congolese army has been reversed since their redeployment to M23-threatened areas," UNJHRO said in the press release.
"Many armed groups," it added, "have taken advantage of the security vacuum left by the redeployment of army units to expand their own areas of influence, often carrying out violent attacks against civilians and exacerbating interethnic tension, already heightened by the M23."
In a statement issued after the report's release, the Secretary-General's Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Zainab Hawa Bangura, condemned, in the strongest possible terms, the "vicious attacks" carried out in Masisi Territory.
"Brutality based on ethnicity only helps to fuel a vicious cycle of attacks and reprisals," she said, while also calling on the DRC Government to urgently take additional measures to restore security and ensure the protection of civilians from such "wanton violence."
"The UN system, and the international community stand ready to help, but it is the primary legal and moral responsibility of the Government to protect its citizens from conflict-related sexual violence and other human rights violations," she added. "The Government must also take immediate measures to investigate reports of sexual assault, identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice to put an end to impunity. | <urn:uuid:3acaaf62-367d-4e9d-897b-1e4c3958c56d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?docid=50a620b92 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960317 | 1,454 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Top photo: "Up 4, 1000 Mesa" by Juan Angel Chavez
Bottom photo: "Vannilla" by Michael Genovese
UTSA hosts 'Sign Language' exhibit through Aug. 25
(July 17, 2008)--The UTSA Downtown Art Gallery and Unit B Gallery will present the exhibit, "Sign Language," featuring new works by Chicago artists Juan Angel Chavez and Michael Genovese. Works will be exhibited at both galleries during Contemporary Art Month at the UTSA Downtown Art Gallery through Aug. 25 and the Unit B Gallery from July 18 to Sept. 5. The exhibits are curated by Kimberly Aubuchon.
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- UTSA alumna Jordan Kaufmann wins $50K for new stent-graft start-up
- UTSA begins new way-finding sign installation this summer at Main Campus
- USA Today: UTSA long jumper Tyler Williamson rescues three-year-old boy
Chavez and Genovese are non-degree holding artists and old friends who started making their art on the streets of Chicago doing "non-permission" collaborative works -- creating a graffiti-like sign language. Forming their ideas from found materials and street vendors, among other sources, the artists generate works as a result of experiencing what is in front of them.
Juan Angel Chavez is a multimedia artist whose work comes from obtaining and reconstructing things he finds. He gathers his art supplies from areas of the city that are deteriorating, finding objects with personality and history that describe our cultural make-up. The works are realized in large-scale sculptures, tableaux, collages, installations and public works that observe the natural and man-made and offer visual commentaries on the past and present.
Chavez was born in La Junta, Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1971 and now lives and works in Chicago. He studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at Bucket Rider Gallery, Chicago; Rhys Gallery, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Mexican Fine Art Center Museum, Chicago; and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. His public commissions can be seen at The Toman Branch Library, Chicago; The Whipple Home in Lake Forest, Ill.; The Chicago Park District and Chicago Transit Authority, among other Chicago-area locations.
Michael Genovese is a sign painter who believes that traditional sign painting is a living language, much like graffiti, and that hand-painted signs are a world apart from the printed signs that so often clutter city streets. As a service, he likes to give back. He paints signs on local street vendors' food carts in exchange for a hot dog or a fruit cup. In his recent works, old-fashioned sign-making traditions come to life in large, hand-painted festive signs and aluminum engravings.
Genovese was born in 1976 in Chicago, where he currently lives and works. His recent solo shows include "Just Cause It's Legal Doesn't Make It Right" at Jack the Pelican, Brooklyn, N.Y.; "We All We Got" at Packer Schopf, Chicago; and "Cabesa de Gato" at Norse Projects, Copenhagen, Denmark. His recent group exhibitions include, "Dark Matter at Co-Prosperity, Version 8" in Chicago; "Fusiform? at Rhys Gallery, Boston; and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" at the Chicago Cultural Center. He recently completed residencies at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Chicago Cultural Center and at Co-Habitat in Monterrey, Mexico. His public collaborations can be seen in Chicago, Milwaukee, Boston and other cities.
UTSA Downtown Art Gallery hours are 8 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Friday, and by appointment, at 501 W. Durango Blvd.Unit B Gallery hours are 1-5 p.m., Saturday, and by appointment. An opening reception, free and open to the public, is 6:30-10 p.m., Friday, July 18 at 500 Stieren St. (at Cedar Street).
For more information, contact Arturo Almeida, UTSA Art Collection curator, at (210) 458-4983. | <urn:uuid:a2441315-eafc-42ed-8474-9c6e8283d751> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://utsa.edu/today/2008/07/signlanguage.cfm?sText=1 | 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 | 0.939536 | 883 | 1.78125 | 2 |
NKU students who wish to pursue careers in dentistry often choose undergraduate majors in the natural sciences and mathematics, but they may meet dental school admission requirements with any degree, provided they fulfill the general course requirements. It's a good idea for students to consult the dental school of their choice for specific entrance requirements.
Students interested in dentistry should work closely with a pre-dentistry advisor who will help ensure they complete the specific requirements for their desired professional program and their undergraduate degree.
At, NKU, both the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Chemistry have faculty who are dedicated pre-dental advisors.
Additional Pre-Professional Programs Offered:
- Pre-Medical or Physician Assistant
- Pre-Physical Therapy
- Pre-Veterinary Medicine
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About Pre-Professional Programs
Pre-professional programs are offered as a service to NKU students who plan to attend a professional program following their work at NKU.
If you are interested in a pre-professional program, or if you don't see your professional area of interest here, please contact an advisor before registering for classes. | <urn:uuid:c74fe45a-ccfb-4d82-af14-f6be2d8a227d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nku.edu/majors/pre-dental.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942449 | 232 | 1.664063 | 2 |
If the ‘aam aadmi’ is paying more for food, one of the reasons is that his income has risen, President Pratibha Patil said in her address to the joint sitting of Parliament on Monday at the start of the Budget session.
The speech listed out the United Progressive Alliance government’s achievements and priorities in the economic and social sphere, besides providing an account of the main foreign policy developments of the past year.
Despite the impact of the global economic slowdown, the President said India has continued to grow “at an impressive rate.” The goal for the next two years was to achieve a 9 per cent growth rate by 2011-12. But she acknowledged weaknesses on the agriculture and food fronts.
Taking note of the “unhappy pressure” on the price of food and food grains, Ms. Patil said higher prices were inevitable given the shortfall in domestic production and high global prices for rice, cereals and edible oils.
“They are also to some extent a reflection of the implementation of our schemes of inclusive growth involving paying higher procurement prices to our farmers and the impact of higher public spending on programmes of rural development, which have successfully raised incomes in rural areas.”
Highlighting the proposed food security legislation, the President said India needed sustained efforts at increasing agricultural productivity combined with a comprehensive reform of the public distribution system and open market intervention.
Detailing the government’s concern for minority rights, Ms. Patil noted that credit flow to the minority communities had risen to Rs. 82,000 crore last year. In addition, recruitment of minorities had gone up, taking their overall representation in Central government jobs from 7 per cent in 2006-07 to 9 per cent in 2008-09. Turning to foreign policy matters, the President reiterated that India “is ready to explore a meaningful relationship with Pakistan if Pakistan seriously addresses the threat of terrorism and takes effective steps to prevent terrorist activities against India.”
The government remains vigilant against all forms of challenges posed by terrorism, she said. “Zero tolerance of terrorist activities is our principled policy.” | <urn:uuid:d383a4c2-c8b3-488f-8e73-716246d6f360> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/centre-admits-unhappy-pressure-on-food-prices/article111168.ece | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958213 | 434 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Who won the Buckhorn challenge?
Who won the Buckhorn challenge? - Related Image.
January 14, 2013
If you're looking for a little shot of summer, this week's creations should take you to that warmer season. Starting today, you've get a look at the entries in the "Images of the Kawarthas” interguild challenge from the Buckhorn Area Quilters' Guild show Quilting at the Lakes.
True to the interguild title, the winners came from four different creative groups. Everyone received the same three fabrics and took the theme in her own direction. The votes came from the people who attended the show, so here is the one they (and possibly you!) chose for first place.
Evelyn Bracegirdle's "Life at the Lake" almost looks like a painting when photographed. Her use of perspective and textures sets a beautiful scene.
A member of the Buckhorn Area Quilters' Guild and its newsletter author, she captured a view she sees from her home.
"Each day as I look out my window, I enjoy the beauty of nature and the ever-changing reflections on the lake," she says. "Using the three challenge fabrics, I have tried to recreate an image to illustrate the beauty of the Kawarthas."
In her commentary, Evelyn adds historical information about how this area was named Ka-wa-tha by Martha Whetung of Curve Lake in 1895, using the Anishanaabe words for "land of reflections." The name was later changed to Kawartha which translated into "bright waters and happy lands."
Congratulations, Evelyn, for such a reminder of how lucky we are to live in such a lovely area.
More to come throughout the week!
This article is for personal use only courtesy of MyKawartha.com - a division of Metroland Media Group Ltd. | <urn:uuid:f3b7efb9-abc0-45b5-8b1b-fc0dfa908210> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mykawartha.com/print/1565112 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958621 | 391 | 1.609375 | 2 |
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Alcohol and Other Drugs
Oregon State University is committed to maintaining an educational environment and workplace free from drugs and alcohol. The university supports programs for the prevention of abuse of alcohol and controlled substances by university students and employees, as well as assistance programs for those with problems related to controlled substance abuse. We strive to educate the campus community about responsible alcohol and other drug use.
OSU and the "3-in-1 Framework"
The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) established a committee to determine the state of prevention for institutions of higher education and submitted a report titled “A Call To Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges.” This report has become the cornerstone by which alcohol abuse prevention programming on college campuses is based. The committee determined that few prevention programs had enough research support to suggest that they would be “proven effective” for college students (NIAAA, 2002). However, this report did outline a framework for developing a comprehensive prevention strategy on U.S college campuses. The “3-in-1 framework,” as it is now known, describes structuring policies, programs, and practices that are focused on three levels of intervention:
- Individual students (and student groups)
- Campus as a whole
- Campus and surrounding community.
OSU has been working toward such a framework, incorporating the following procedures and partnerships:
Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education
OSU ascribes to the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS). CAS is a consortium of 35 professional associations concerned with the development and promulgation of professional standards and guidelines for student learning and personal development support programs and services in institutions of higher learning. The mission of the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education is to promote the improvement of programs and services to enhance the quality of student learning and development. CAS is a consortium of professional associations who work collaboratively to develop and promulgate standards and guidelines and to encourage self-assessment.
OSU supports consistent enforcement of violations of the OSU alcohol and other drug policies and state laws. OSU works closely with the Oregon Liquor Control Commission via a partnership with the Oregon State Police in the enforcement and education regarding such policies and the state laws.
U.S Department of Education Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act (DFSCA) and Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention Regulations
Part 86, the Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention Regulations (Education Department General Administrative Regulations [EDGAR]), requires that, as a condition of receiving funds or any other form of financial assistance under any federal program, an institution of higher education (IHE) must certify that it has adopted and implemented a program to prevent the unlawful possession, use, or distribution of illicit drugs and alcohol by students and employees. If audited, failure to comply with the Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention Regulations may cause an institution to forfeit eligibility for federal funding.
In order to be able to certify its compliance with the regulations, an IHE must adopt and implement a drug prevention program to prevent the unlawful possession, use, or distribution of illicit drugs and alcohol by all students and employees both on school premises and as part of any of its activities. Creating a program that complies with the regulations requires an IHE to do the following:
- Annually notify each employee and student, in writing, of standards of conduct; a description of appropriate sanctions for violation of federal, state, and local law and campus policy; a description of health risks associated with AOD use; and a description of available treatment programs.
- Develop a sound method for distributing annual notification information to every student and staff member each year.
- Prepare a biennial review on the effectiveness of its AOD programs and the consistency of sanction enforcement.
- Maintain its biennial review on file, so that, if requested to do so by the U.S. Department of Education, the campus can submit it.
Oregon Colleges and Community Coalition on Alcohol Conference: OSU has been a participating member of the Coalition and been the host of OCCC Conference for the last eight years. The emphasis of the conference is to reduce underage drinking on college campuses and to reinforce the efficacy of Campus/Community Coalitions.
The Partnership for Reducing Underage Drinking: This community-based coalition involves members of the community surrounding OSU that work together to prevent underage drinking.
Governor’s Taskforce to Reduce Underage Drinking: OSU is a represented as a member of this taskforce. | <urn:uuid:0e774185-979a-4ed5-9fa6-c749f572df9c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://studenthealth.oregonstate.edu/alcohol-and-other-drugs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942095 | 1,093 | 1.734375 | 2 |
The fiscal cliff may seem like a problem for Washington, but experts said lawmakers' failure to make a deal will affect the average person as well.
Spending cuts and tax hikes will take effect Jan. 1, unless President Barack Obama and Congress can come to an agreement.
Richard Rosso with Clarity Financial said he's bracing his clients for the reality that some 30 million Americans may be paying more taxes in 2013.
"Everybody's going to have more of an impact to their paycheck -- more money coming out," said Rosso.
The delay in a decision could also have an impact your tax return. Lawmakers are late in approving tax exemptions that families count on every year. Until they take action, the Internal Revenue Service can't print the tax forms needed to file taxes.
"It could take six to eight weeks for them to get up and running," said Rosso. "Which means you're going to be postponed regarding your filing."
Experts predict most taxpayers may not be able to file their 2012 tax returns until late March.
Rosso said Democrats and Republicans have agreed to raise payroll taxes by 2 percent on Jan.1. That means if you make $50,000 a year, you'll take home about $1,000 less in 2013 than you did in 2012.
Lawmakers have been late in approving these exemptions every year, but officials said they've never been this late.
Senators and Obama cut short their holiday vacations and returned to Washington in hopes of edging closer to a compromise to avoid the fiscal cliff. | <urn:uuid:6496feb9-9ca8-49a1-a99c-07c9aaa4e9ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.click2houston.com/news/Fiscal-cliff-could-lead-to-tax-return-delay/-/1735978/17916918/-/7xgvnmz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977117 | 316 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Friday, October 28, 2011
Why oh Why do we Keep Putting the Clocks Back?
[Last year, about this time, and all the years before that since 2005, I expressed my indignation at the absurd putting back of clocks every year by that precious hour. I have not heard one single person in favour of this measure which continues to shroud in gloom a period of the year which does not need any more more gloom than it already has. So I'm republishing my post of last October and intend to do so until this ridiculous outdated practice is done away with(I know, I know).]
No doubt most people in this country have felt the first chill of autumn as recent unseasonably warm temperatures begin to give way. This reminder that winter is at hand is bad enough but what astonishes me is our government's insistence on putting the clocks back by an hour; this year it's on 29th October.
The case against this joyless annual donning of a temporal hair shirt is as follows:
i) studies show that while there might be more accidents in the mornings these would be more than compensated for by fewer in the evenings; The Guardian some time ago, quoted studies predicting a net saving of 140 lives.
ii) 80 per cent of the population want to keep summer time throughout the year.
iii) Many influential pressure groups favour it, including the CBI, the Police and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.
iv) the experiment of maintaining BST through the winter 1968-71 was, as far as I recall, a substantial success.
v) It would extend the tourist season, the sporting season and..., perhaps most important of all it would make us all feel a damn sight better about the miserable imminence of winter.
The case against reversing the measure is summed up in the two words: Scottish farmers. They would face much darker mornings as the sun would not rise until 10.0am. However, against this it can be adduced:
i) The rate of decline in accidents would actually be greater in Central Scotland(5.5%) than in the south of England(2.5%).
ii)When I used to visit Northern Sweden regularly, farmers up there did not see daylight until much later than 10.0am and accepted it as part of their cost for living in that latitude.
iii) Now Scotland has its own parliament, why doesn't it set its own regional time and do us all a big favour?
iv) is it fair that a nation of 60 million should suffer merely because a few hundred farmers should be able to see their cows more clearly on a winter's morning?
In the war we had a clocks turned forward two hours- Double Summer Time!- why not return to those good old days? Brown might even find his recently flagging popularity recovering immensely if he introduced this simple yet highly popular measure.
Postscript: Well, I was kind of hoping this year the clocks would not go back as articles had appeared in the spring suggesting the Coalition government would change the practice. Well, they haven't but it could just be this is the last year we'll do it. The Policy Studies Institute has produced a report recommending a permanent shift of our clocks forward. Moreover there is now a campaign to achieve this reform and I wish it all good speed. Finally, check out this But the Scots have already said they won't support it which is a good enough reason, maybe, to allow them to drift away into a North Atlantic independence....? See also this broadside against the practice bySimon Jenkins. | <urn:uuid:582f6f36-d8c7-4628-9c2c-e6af2946b668> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://skipper59.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-oh-why-do-we-keep-putting-clocks.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972565 | 733 | 1.59375 | 2 |
16:1 And he said also unto the disciples, There was a certain rich man, who had a steward; and the same was accused unto him that he was wasting his goods.
16:2 And he called him, and said unto him, What is this that I hear of thee? render the account of thy stewardship; for thou canst be no longer steward.
16:3 And the steward said within himself, What shall I do, seeing that my lord taketh away the stewardship from me? I have not strength to dig; to beg I am ashamed.
16:4 I am resolved what to do, that, when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.
16:5 And calling to him each one of his lord's debtors, he said to the first, How much owest thou unto my lord?
16:6 And he said, A hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bond, and sit down quickly and write fifty.
16:7 Then said he to another, And how much owest thou? And he said, A hundred measures of wheat. He saith unto him, Take thy bond, and write fourscore.
16:8 And his lord commended the unrighteous steward because he had done wisely: for the sons of this world are for their own generation wiser than the sons of the light.
16:9 And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when it shall fail, they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles.
16:10 He that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much: and he that is unrighteous in a very little is unrighteous also in much.
16:11 If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true `riches'?
16:12 And if ye have not been faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own?
16:13 No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
16:14 And the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things; and they scoffed at him.
16:15 And he said unto them, Ye are they that justify yourselves in the sight of men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.
16:16 The law and the prophets `were' until John: from that time the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached, and every man entereth violently into it.
16:17 But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one tittle of the law to fall.
16:18 Every one that putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and he that marrieth one that is put away from a husband committeth adultery.
16:19 Now there was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, faring sumptuously every day:
16:20 and a certain beggar named Lazarus was laid at his gate, full of sores,
16:21 and desiring to be fed with the `crumbs' that fell from the rich man's table; yea, even the dogs come and licked his sores.
16:22 And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and that he was carried away by the angels into Abraham's bosom: and the rich man also died, and was buried.
16:23 And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
16:24 And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.
16:25 But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things: but now here he is comforted and thou art in anguish.
16:26 And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that they that would pass from hence to you may not be able, and that none may cross over from thence to us.
16:27 And he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house;
16:28 for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.
16:29 But Abraham saith, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.
16:30 And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one go to them from the dead, they will repent.
16:31 And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, if one rise from the dead.
KESOV.ORG/BIBLE - FREE BIBLE ONLINE - MAJOR TRANSLATIONS
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Courtesy of Kesov Ministry | <urn:uuid:f45d2dd1-d333-41bc-a3ff-098362aa144e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kesov.org/bible/asv1901_bible/42_016.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973869 | 1,192 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Senator Edgardo J. Angara called on the government to strengthen its efforts towards developing renewable energy initiatives during his keynote speech at the German-Philippine Policy Dialogue on Renewable Energy last week.
“After languishing in Congress for 15 years, the Renewable Energy Act was signed in 2008. However, after four years we are still lacking in enforcement and implementation,” said Angara, who authored the law.
SENATOR ANGARA (SEJA): Galing lang ako sa Baler at in-announce ko sa mga kababayan ko sa Baler na hindi na ako magpapatuloy tumkabo sa pagka-gobernador.
I vote “YES” to enacting the RH bill into law. It’s an affirmation of our basic human rights, especially the rights of women, and the right to reproductive health.
At the moment, we have to respond to the challenges that threaten our country:
1,000 women continue to die yearly during pregnancy and childbirth;
about 150,000 children are born from teenage mothers every year;
women who cannot support their children put them into orphanages or labor work;
we have almost 2 million orphans from 0 to 17 years of age, and about 4 million child laborers ages 5 to 17;
Senator Edgardo J. Angara sought to strengthen the country’s capacity to conduct research and development (R&D) in health under the sin tax measure passed by the Senate on Tuesday.
In his amendments, which were accepted by the chamber, Angara urged that the additional revenues be used to fund R&D projects into such key fields as aging, regenerative medicine, and the production of drugs from indigenous sources among others.
Senator Edgardo J. Angara underscored the need to make the sin tax bill equitable by setting aside a credit fund that will benefit affected stakeholders, particularly tobacco farmers.
Angara's proposal to create the credit fund was included in the final measure passed by the Senate on third and final reading on Tuesday.
The veteran lawmaker said the credit fund must be accessible to all eligible farmers from tobacco-growing provinces, and must provide low-cost loans.
During a recent Senate hearing for the 2013 budget of the Commission on Elections (COMELEC), Senator Edgardo J. Angara urged Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. to improve on the dismal 2010 overseas voters turnout.
Angara, Vice-Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, noted that P1.313 billion was spent on overseas voting last 2010, when only 152,323 Filipino overseas voted out of the 589,813 registered, resulting in a scant 26 percent turnout.
During debates on SBN 3312, which seeks to amend the Overseas Absentee Voting Act of 2003 (RA 9189), Senator Edgardo J. Angara emphasized that overseas voters should be able to use postal mail, fax, email and other secure online means in casting their ballots for Philippine elections.
Senator Edgardo J. Angara today stressed that any excise tax resulting from deliberations on the sin tax bill should be equitable and take into consideration the interests of all the affected stakeholders.
On TRO filed by SC
You know the purpose of a TRO is to enable the court to study the merits. Since the law will become effective unless they do that, they have to issue a stop order. I’m not disappointed. I welcome the pause that this TRO creates because it will give time to the SC to study the merits and give also the critics time to reexamine their position because I think that they’re just contemplating on a few provisions of the law that they think are harmful to them. But overall, I think the purpose of the law is given to expand their right to use online communication. And you must read the law, Cybercrime Prevention Act together with the Data Privacy Act because the Data Privacy Act is the one that positively protects the confidentiality and security of one’s personal communication.
What the Cybercrime Prevention Act does is only to regulate socially destructive acts because you cannot enjoy your right fully and confidently if others have an equal right to interfere with your right. That’s the balancing act that you’ve got to do because this is a new frontier. This is an area that is unregulated but if you read both the Data Privacy and the Cybercrime, you will come to the conclusion that, in fact, it expands the right of the user and protects the communication that he or she transmits.
Ang sinasabi ng batas, kung iyan ay libel under the revised penal code, libel din yan dito sa cybercrime. May definition yan under the revised penal code, malinaw ang mga elemento ng libel.
Q: Is the Phil gov't capable of running after these cybercriminals?
SEJA: Maaaring walang enough jails, enough policemen, enough fiscal power, enough judges to prosecute all of these offenders but that is no argument why we should not have a law like this. Kung ganoon ang argument, eh di wag na tayong magkaroon ng criminal laws. | <urn:uuid:c5deec51-e879-4293-bfa6-d136df5787c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.edangara.com/taxonomy/term/11 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945284 | 1,079 | 1.546875 | 2 |
(a) The Legislature finds the following:
(1) Exploration for and development of oil and gas reserves in this state must coexist with the use, agricultural or otherwise, of the surface of certain land and that each constitutes a right equal to the other.
(2) The surface owner of lands on which horizontal wells are drilled shall be compensated for damages to the surface of the land pursuant to the provisions of this article.
(b) The Legislature declares that the public policy of this state shall be that the compensation and damages provided in this article for surface owners may not be diminished by any provision in a deed, lease or other contract of conveyance entered into after December 31, 2011.
(c) It is the purpose of this article to provide Constitutionally permissible protection and compensation to surface owners of lands on which horizontal wells are drilled from the burden resulting from drilling operations commenced after January 1, 2012. This article is to be interpreted in the light of the legislative intent expressed herein. This article shall be interpreted to benefit surface owners, regardless of whether the oil and gas mineral estate was separated from the surface estate and regardless of who executed the document which gave the oil and gas developer the right to conduct drilling operations on the land. Section four of this article shall be interpreted to benefit all persons.
(d) The provisions of this article apply to any natural gas well, other than a coalbed methane well, drilled using a horizontal drilling method, and which disturbs three acres or more of surface, excluding pipelines, gathering lines and roads or uses more than two hundred ten thousand gallons of water in any thirty-day period. Article seven of this chapter does not apply to any damages associated with the drilling of a horizontal well.
In this article:
(1) "Drilling operations" means the actual drilling or redrilling of a horizontal well commenced subsequent to the effective date of this article, and the related preparation of the drilling site and access road, which requires entry, upon the surface estate;
(2) "Horizontal drilling" means a method of drilling a well for the production of natural gas that is intended to maximize the length of wellbore that is exposed to the formation and in which the wellbore is initially vertical but is eventually curved to become horizontal, or nearly horizontal, to parallel a particular geologic formation;
(3) "Horizontal well" means any well site, other than a coalbed methane well, drilled using a horizontal drilling method, and which disturbs three acres or more of surface, excluding pipelines, gathering lines and roads, or uses more than two hundred ten thousand gallons of water in any thirty-day period;
(4) "Oil and gas developer" means the person who secures the drilling permit required by article six-a of this chapter;
(5) "Person" means any natural person, corporation, firm, partnership, partnership association, venture, receiver, trustee, executor, administrator, guardian, fiduciary or other representative of any kind, and includes any government or any political subdivision or agency thereof;
(6) "Surface estate" means an estate in or ownership of the surface of a particular tract of land overlying the oil or gas leasehold being developed; and
(a) The oil and gas developer is obligated to pay the surface owner compensation for:
(1) Lost income or expenses incurred as a result of being unable to dedicate land actually occupied by the driller's operation, or to which access is prevented by the drilling operation, to the uses to which it was dedicated prior to commencement of the activity for which a permit was obtained, measured from the date the operator enters upon the land and commences drilling operations until the date reclamation is completed;
(2) The market value of crops, including timber, destroyed, damaged or prevented from reaching market;
(3) Any damage to a water supply in use prior to the commencement of the permitted activity;
(4) The cost of repair of personal property up to the value of replacement by personal property of like age, wear and quality; and
(5) The diminution in value, if any, of the surface lands and other property after completion of the surface disturbance done pursuant to the activity for which the permit was issued determined according to the market value of the actual use made thereof by the surface owner immediately prior to the commencement of the permitted activity.
The amount of damages may be determined by any formula mutually agreeable between the surface owner and the oil and gas developer.
(b) Any reservation or assignment of the compensation provided in this section apart from the surface estate except to a tenant of the surface estate is prohibited.
(c) In the case of surface lands owned by more than one person as tenants in common, joint tenants or other co-ownership, any claim for compensation under this article shall be for the benefit of all co-owners. The resolution of a claim for compensation provided in this article operates as a bar to the assertion of additional claims under this section arising out of the same drilling operations.
(a) Nothing in section three or elsewhere in this article diminishes in any way the common law remedies, including damages, of a surface owner or any other person against the oil and gas developer for the unreasonable, negligent or otherwise wrongful exercise of the contractual right, whether express or implied, to use the surface of the land for the benefit of the developer's mineral interest.
(b) An oil and gas developer is entitled to offset compensation agreed to be paid or awarded to a surface owner under section three of this article against any damages sought by or awarded to the surface owner through the assertion of common law remedies respecting the surface land actually occupied by the same drilling operation.
(c) An oil and gas developer is entitled to offset damages agreed to be paid or awarded to a surface owner through the assertion of common-law remedies against compensation sought by or awarded to the surface owner under section three of this article respecting the surface land actually occupied by the same drilling operation.
Any surface owner, to receive compensation under section three of this article, shall notify the oil and gas developer of the damages sustained by the person within two years after the date that the oil and gas developer files notice that final reclamation is commencing under section fourteen, article six-a of this chapter. The notice of reclamation shall be given to surface owners by registered or certified mail, return receipt requested, and is complete upon mailing. If more than three tenants in common or other co-owners hold interests in the lands, the oil and gas developer may give the notice to the person described in the records of the sheriff required to be maintained pursuant to section eight, article one, chapter eleven-a of this code or publish in the county in which the well is located or to be located a Class II legal advertisement as described in section two, article three, chapter fifty-nine of this code, containing the notice and information the secretary prescribes by rule.
Unless the parties provide otherwise by written agreement, within sixty days after the oil and gas developer received the notification of claim specified in section five of this article, the oil and gas developer shall either make an offer of settlement to the surface owner seeking compensation, or reject the claim. The surface owner may accept or reject any offer so made: Provided, That the oil and gas developer may make a final offer within seventy-five days after receiving the notification of claim specified in section five of this article.
(a) (1) Unless the oil and gas developer has paid the surface owner a negotiated settlement of compensation within seventy-five days after the date the notification of claim was mailed under section five of this article, the surface owner may, within eighty days after the notification mail date, either (i) Bring an action for compensation in the circuit court of the county in which the well is located; or (ii) elect instead, by written notice delivered by personal service or by certified mail, return receipt requested, to the designated agent named by the oil and gas developer under the provisions of section seven, article six-a of this chapter, to have his, her or its compensation finally determined by binding arbitration pursuant to article ten, chapter fifty-five of this code.
(2) Settlement negotiations, offers and counter-offers between the surface owner and the oil and gas developer are not admissible as evidence in any arbitration or judicial proceeding authorized under this article, or in any proceeding resulting from the assertion of common law remedies.
(b) The compensation to be awarded to the surface owner shall be determined by a panel of three disinterested arbitrators. The first arbitrator shall be chosen by the surface owner in the party's notice of election under this section to the oil and gas developer; the second arbitrator shall be chosen by the oil and gas developer within ten days after receipt of the notice of election; and the third arbitrator shall be chosen jointly by the first two arbitrators within twenty days thereafter. If they are unable to agree upon the third arbitrator within twenty days, then the two arbitrators shall immediately submit the matter to the court under the provisions of section one, article ten, chapter fifty-five of this code, so that, among other things, the third arbitrator can be chosen by the judge of the circuit court of the county in which the surface estate lies.
(c) The following persons are considered interested and may not be appointed as arbitrators: Any person who is personally interested in the land on which horizontal drilling is being performed or has been performed, or in any interest or right therein, or in the compensation and any damages to be awarded therefor, or who is related by blood or marriage to any person having such personal interest, or who stands in the relation of guardian and ward, master and servant, principal and agent, or partner, real estate broker, or surety to any person having such personal interest, or who has enmity against or bias in favor of any person who has such personal interest or who is the owner of, or interested in, the land or the oil and gas development of the land. A person is not considered interested or incompetent to act as arbitrator by reason of being an inhabitant of the county, district or municipal corporation in which the land is located, or holding an interest in any other land therein.
(d) The panel of arbitrators shall hold hearings and take testimony and receive exhibits necessary to determine the amount of compensation to be paid to the surface owner. However, no award of compensation may be made to the surface owner unless the panel of arbitrators has first viewed the surface estate in question. A transcript of the evidence may be made but is not required.
The remedies provided by this article do not preclude any person from seeking other remedies allowed by law. Note: WV Code updated with legislation passed through the 2012 1st Special Session | <urn:uuid:149ce0f4-cd24-4300-b8f5-90e4144c332d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.legis.state.wv.us/WVCODE/ChapterEntire.cfm?chap=22&art=6B | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948517 | 2,219 | 1.835938 | 2 |
MANCHESTER — The Manchester Essex Regional School Committee is considering options on how best to make the district’s schools more secure, and officials are “investigating the concept” of a school resource officer.
Superintendent Pamela Beaudoin said Thursday the talks are merely preliminary, but school officials are looking at ways to improve school security while also making sure practices and policies are up to date.
”The aim is to build a collaborative, proactive approach around safety,” she said.
Although officials are just beginning to look at options and resources, Beaudoin said officials are examining the idea of an academic support officer, not an armed security guard. She added that school officials and police officers have always had open lines of communication and have been meeting regularly to discuss
Additionally, school officials are making sure emergency procedures are up to date and students know what to do, should anything like a school shooting happen.
Beaudoin said another important aspect is cross-training police officers and emergency officials, making sure that Essex police officers and firefighters are familiar with schools in Manchester and vice-versa regarding Essex Elementary.
Manchester’s police Chief Glenn McKiel could not be reached for comment, but the idea is getting support from Essex police.
”My sentiment is there should be some police presence in the schools,” said Essex police Chief Peter Silva.
Silva said this would not mean having an officer frisk everyone that walks into the school, or example, but establishing a police presence whereby officers would regularly interact with students. In that sense, school resource officers could provide a level of safety in schools, while also giving students someone to talk to, he said.
He compared a potential a school resource officer to the national Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program, in which Essex’s Sgt. Paul Francis would educate students about the dangers of drugs and alcohol.
A cut in state funding eliminated the program in Essex, but Silva hopes a resource officer could fill a similar role, adding Francis had great success in building relationships with students.
”They need to trust us, we need to trust them,” he said.
School officials are also discussing on how the position should be funded, if one is created. Silva said he would be in favor of hiring an additional officer in Essex that could work to significantly reduce overtime amounts as well as act a school resource officer. He said that while current overtime amounts are staggering, another officer would save the town money in overtime costs.
Manchester Essex school and law enforcement officials are expected to further discuss school based plans and review facility needs at the next School Committee meeting, set for Feb. 28.
James Niedzinski can be reached at 978-283-7000, x 3455 or at [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:2a1ace05-9a06-438b-8147-a314169094e6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gloucestertimes.com/topstories/x1746089238/ME-school-officials-talk-resource-officer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970495 | 586 | 1.640625 | 2 |
This is a guest post by Kenneth W. Cobleigh, Esq., Managing Director & Counsel at The American Institute of Architects.
When I asked the Entrepreneur Architect tribe who I should contact regarding legal agreements for architects, Ken’s name quickly rose to the top of the list. Ken leads the team developing AIA Contract Documents; the most respected collection of agreements for the construction industry.
There are many options for agreements, but Ken and his team are working hard to keep our firms protected and our projects running smoothly with tools and resources from the AIA. Whether you use AIA Contract Documents or create your own, this post will tell you what you need to know about your Owner-Architect Agreements.
Take a few minutes to look at what’s happening at AIA Contract Documents. You may be surprised by what they offer for the sole proprietor and small architecture firm. – Mark
Every construction project involves risks and rewards for the participants. Optimally, the parties will enter into a written contract that assigns such risks and rewards, as well as the rights and responsibilities of each party, using a fair and balanced approach. This provides a framework for the project to be completed more efficiently and with fewer disputes. However, many construction professionals do not have the expertise or time required to draft their own contracts. Standard form contract documents, such as those published by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), address these issues with widely recognized, tested and accepted language.
Contracts are an integral part of the building design and construction process, and should address all relevant aspects and unique phases of a project. Parties should enter into agreements that are tailored to the specific needs of the project. For small project practitioners, using a document tailored specifically to the requirements of the project is of utmost importance.
A good contract will specify the project requirements, and address the responsibilities and expectations of all parties involved, from owners to sub-contractors. If small firms and sole practitioners fail to utilize properly drafted contracts, the result may be misunderstandings about the responsibilities of each party, with a greater risk of disputes occurring between the parties.
Contract disputes often result when one party has differing expectations about the performance obligations of the other party. Written contracts that describe, at a minimum, the scope of work or services, payment terms and conditions, the project schedule, insurance requirements, terms associated with correction of work, and terms associated with changes in scope of work or services, are critical to ensuring that each party has a clear understanding of its obligations and the other party’s expectations.
Small project practitioners should memorialize such key elements in a written agreement at the outset of a project. Standardized contract documents contain provisions addressing such items, including the owner’s requirements, the architect’s scope of services, compensation, ownership of instruments of service, and termination.
Small project practitioners should carefully think through each of the following questions before proceeding with any project:
- What are the owner’s basic requirements for the project?
- What is the owner’s budget and schedule?
- If these details are clearly understood from the beginning, they provide the framework for project planning and attainment of the owner’s goals.
Scope: design and construction phase obligations
- What is the scope of the architect’s services during the design and construction phases?
- What construction administration services will the architect provide?
- Answering these questions before beginning a project allows you to properly allocate time and resources, and helps avoid potential misunderstandings as the project moves forward.
Compensation: basic and additional
- What is my compensation going to be?
- How am I going to be paid for basic services?
- How am I going to be paid if additional services need to be provided on the project?
- Similar to addressing the scope of work, compensation should be clearly set forth in the contract. Payment disputes can cripple a project.
Ownership of instruments of service
- Who owns the architect’s instruments of service?
- The contract should address ownership and copyrights in the architect’s instruments of service, as well as any rights of the owner to use them after project completion, and how the architect would be compensated and indemnified for such use. Some owners may want to use the design for other projects. Specific contract provisions are required to address the issues associated with such use.
- What happens if a contract is terminated by the architect?
- What happens if a contract is terminated by the owner?
- A good contract should definitively state each party’s right to terminate a contract, as well as the details and process of a termination. This prevents unlawful termination and assures both party’s rights are fairly protected.
When each of these contractual points is memorialized clearly, in plain language, understandable to both parties, the potential for contract disputes is greatly reduced. However, don’t assume that shorter contracts are better contracts. Contract documents should be sufficiently comprehensive and detailed so that important information regarding each party’s obligations and expectations are not written vaguely. Essentially, the contract should be tailored to the size and scope of the project. It is also important that contracts for a project be coordinated. For example, the responsibilities described in the owner-contractor agreement should be coordinated with the construction administration responsibilities in the owner-architect agreement, and both should refer to the same general conditions document.
To address small project needs, the AIA has developed contract documents for use in residential or small commercial projects. Currently, there are two Small Project Family agreements available in paper, software and on AIA Documents-on-Demand. By using coordinated standard form contract documents, parties will develop and share a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities. This shared understanding also helps streamline contract review and negotiations, and ultimately furthers achievement of the project objectives.
Do you use AIA Contract Documents? If not, share what you are doing to protect your firm and keep your projects running smoothly. Please leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts. Speak your mind. | <urn:uuid:c6f73ae4-ff7f-4a58-8259-81aa8b2d5d76> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.entrearchitect.com/2013/03/03/entrepreneur-architect-academy-009-five-provisions-for-your-architectural-services-agreement/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94731 | 1,245 | 1.796875 | 2 |
The Tampa Bay area poses a unique challenge for mass transportation. We'll take a look at the reasons we're behind other metropolitan areas our size and what community leaders are doing to increase our transportation options. You'll also see why having better transportation options makes for a better economy. And we'll hear from one man who has turned his commute to work into a way of life for his whole family. Also: For years, Floridians have heard that the solution to our traffic woes is rail: commuter rail, high-speed rail, light rail. In the Bay area, creation of a regional transit master plan is underway and Tampa's mayor is pushing for light rail in the city. We'll talk to people from Miami and Salt Lake City to find out how they created their rail systems and what they've learned from operating them.
Gabriel and Lesley Tinnaro of St. Petersburg live their lives as most people do. They work for a living while raising a family. They pay bills and go to the store just like everyone else does. Three years ago, though, Gabriel made a change he now says he's really benefitted from - by denying himself the typical convenience most of us take for granted: driving to work. He doesn't focus on what he's missing, though - he's focusing on what he's gained. Producer Larry Elliston brings us Gabriel's journey in this week's feature for Florida Stories. | <urn:uuid:04593d38-e56a-41e0-bb14-dbcf2eb91ece> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wusf.usf.edu/node?page=1365 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98224 | 287 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Portfolio 4 - A Final Look
For those unfamiliar with EL227: This is the fourth and final portfolio I have created for my EL227 Newswriting class at Seton Hill University. Throughout the semester, we explored some basics of journalism as well as had the opportunity to practice writing some of our own articles. The blogging portfolios that we created contain collections of individual blogs on certain topics that our class discussed online prior to attending classes.
It feels like December arrived in a hurry this year. Although I am glad to have the semester end (as most of us are by the time finals week rolls around), I still can't believe how quickly the semester passed. In the amount of time spent in Newswriting, I have gained alot of experience with studying and producing different types of journalism. From TV news to physical newspapers to web pages, our class seemed to have covered a good bit of ground. Before getting into my final relfection of the class, take a look at some of my recent, and final, blog posts for the class.
Here are a few blogs to start out with.
Might Be a Little Too Much - Investigate reporting deals with searching for something someone is trying to hide. I'm trying to do a little bit of this with my Capstone project, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm in over my head with the whole idea.
A Tough Situation - Minority groups in journalism need to be included, both in what is written as well as in the faculty of the newspapers. This topic causes some touchy debates.
These are blogs I managed to get posted on time.
Two Sides- Unidentified sources, how important are they for the readers? Would readers rather receive news later with identified sources or would they rather receive breaking news as quickly as possible even if some of the sources cannot be identified? There are perks and downsides to both.
The Press Should Protect the Kids - When it comes to interviewing, the press should take special care when interviewing minors. What is quoted could affect them for the rest of their lives.
For some topics, I had a longer discussion. Check out what caught my interest and kept me typing.
Daily American vs. Tribune Democrat - Comparing the two papers I receive at home.
Would I Want That to Happen to Me? - Sometimes reporters need to take a step back from their work and consider how they would feel if they were the ones being written about. This self reflection would provide a quick fairness check to their article.
Win-Lose - Freedom of the press: is it being taken advantage of? Where would the line be drawn if it were to become more limited?
This is a blog where I mentioned and linked to a few blogs that belonged to my other classmates.
The Cavalier - A look at a student newspaper. For this particular paper, there were some issues with the way the website was designed.
Here are a couple of comments I left on my classmates' blogs.
Jessie's Blog - Here's a comment I left on her blog on the discussion of the freedom of the press.
Jen's Blog - Another comment I left on a similar discussion topic.
For this portfolio, I had several blogs that had multiple links included (usually I only have a few). Since we were studying some online newspapers during this section, alot of links needed to be used in order to show what I was talking about.
Series - An analysis of a slide show and related articles in the New York Times. The combination of the two allows readers to have options.
Comparing Sites - These are the links I used for some basic research for my Article 4, a practice exercise of investigative reporting. The Santa Monica link will probably be included in my final copy of the article, as an example of a link that would lead readers to more information about the topic covered.
Backup Needed - Our class was supposed to look at a website that provided information mainly through videos. I couldn't get any of the videos to work, causing me to miss out on the information. So, I decided to blog about how a website shouldn't have only one means of providing information, there should be a second option, or a back up plan, in case one method fails.
Addition or Distraction? - This blog takes a look at an article on Wired.com and explores how the several links that are provided in Wired's articles tends to allow the reader to get a little distracted from what they were orignally reading. However, sometimes the distraction can lead to additional information about the topic that can be important for the reader.
Harvard News - A look at a student newspaper. This paper had an organized chaos look that worked well for catching readers' attention to articles as well as providing a lot of information at a glance.
For my wildcard, I chose a few different pieces. The first is my Honors Capstone Proposal, which is kind of the kickoff to online blog journal I have to create for it. The other three pieces are the three portfolios I created earlier in this class.
~ Relfection on Class ~
I felt like we covered alot of different topics in journalism and were able to learn a little bit about each. I also feel as if my writing as overall improved, even when not writng news articles because I have learned how to become more condensed with my writing and not use so many fillers. The in class activities, such as mock press conferences and guest speakers helped me to understand how prepared and quick thinking a journalist has to be. Getting to write different styles of articles for the class also helped me to understand how to write differently depending on the situation and the audience.
I think the only suggestion I have is that there could have been more opportunities for peer reviews as more as more experience with writing some of the articles. However, I think alot of this depends on the time alotted for the class, in this case there was only fifity minutes to work with.
Thanks for checking my portfolio out, feel free to leave comments. Bye! | <urn:uuid:b3409956-50f5-4a2e-aade-b62eb6e94215> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KatieVann/2009/12/two_sides-_unidentified_source.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976067 | 1,244 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Quick Thoughts About Big Data
This is an area where marketers need to get up to speed quickly and stay ahead of the curve. Most consumer marketers have been exposed to pieces of the big data picture, primarily in web analytics, some propensity modeling, maybe some data mining. But now social data is starting to flow into production systems, and if location data becomes accessible, the data flood will become huge.
What to do? Most standard database approaches are not sufficient for big data, given their disk-based I/O limitations. The trend now appear to be in-memory computing, an area my employer happens to be pretty good at. So we’re learning from the huge computing farms of the financial services industry and seeing what the future might look like for consumer marketers.
More to come on the subject, but think of huge chunks of your customer database kept in memory, with business rules, models, and other processes absorbing a constant stream of data and driving continuous real-time responses. | <urn:uuid:6fd588d1-3c98-474e-830f-160a0042992f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.michaelgreenberg.com/2011/11/02/quick-thoughts-about-big-data/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936349 | 200 | 1.75 | 2 |
Day 1: The Islands and Skara Brae
On your first day, take a day trip to the Orkney Islands. Departing from Inverness, the Highlands’ capital, you’ll take a ferry to Orkneys, an archipelago on the north end of Scotland. As you cross the Pentland Firth, keep your eyes peeled for puffins, seals and even whales. Once you have disembarked, your journey really begins. By coach, you’ll visit the capital town of Kirkwall, home to the Viking cathedral of St. Magnus, and continue on to the Orkneys’ famous prehistoric artifacts. As you cross the islands, you’ll be awed by some of the oldest and most-intact Neolithic sites in Europe, in particular, the Stone Age village of Skara Brae. Skara Brae predates Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, and along with Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness, it is a fascinating glimpse into human history and social development. The tour concludes at John O’Groats, the northernmost tip of Scotland. The tour is about 14 hours, so you’ll want to pack refreshments.
Day 2: John O'Groats
If you didn’t get enough wildlife on your trip to the Orkneys, consider a wildlife cruise from John O’Groats. This trip is relatively short; at 90 minutes, it’s a fun and informative jaunt filled with plenty of opportunities to photograph the Highland’s spectacular scenery, as well as its abundant birdlife. Puffins, razorbills and kittiwakes all make their home amid the rugged cliffs, and you can also see Atlantic gray seals, porpoises and the occasional whale. Spend the morning exploring John O’Groats and take this tour in the afternoon; in particular, you’ll want to see the Stacks of Duncansby, three peculiar rock formations jutting out of the sea. These and other amazing, natural architecture are the real reason for visiting John O’Groats, as they are some of the most impressive natural formations in the world.
Day 3: Nessie's Place
You might want to make your last day in the Highlands an options-open sort of affair. For starters, there’s Loch Ness. This 23 mi (37 km) long lake is most famous for 'Nessie,' the mysterious sea creature who may or may not inhabit its chilly waters; boat cruises allow visitors a chance to search for the monster, though your chances of finding it are slim. Urquhart Castle, on the loch’s western shore, is popular with locals and visitors. Other attractions in and around Inverness include Fort George, an 18th century fortress and museum; the Clava Cairns, burial sites that are thousands of years old; and the allegedly haunted Castle Stuart. Inverness is also well-known for a fairly vibrant nightlife; its bars and pubs are popular stops for the best in regional live music.
Excellent tour. Recommended if you stay in Inverness
Fantastic trip. it was the guide that made it she deserves a big bonus.
Reply by Viator, October 2012
Doing what: Orkney Islands Day Trip from John O'Groats
Excellent day out, made extra special by a full day of blue skies and sunshine showing of the Orkney landscape. Everything went to schedule made special with the ferry to start and finish with. On the island a polite and very helpful coach driver giving us a continuous fully informed commentary and just significant time at each venue to appreciate the key items. Highly recommended way of catching the main flavour of the Islands in a day. | <urn:uuid:7d3babd6-2800-4fcf-a6bd-79d219f7aa7f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.viator.com/The-Scottish-Highlands-tourism/3-Days-in-the-Scottish-Highlands-Suggested-Itineraries/d768-t2237 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931546 | 790 | 1.734375 | 2 |
I just found a great deal on a 965EE, which is the very top my mobo (intel D955XBK) can handle. My last chip didn't have an unlocked multiplier, and I am wondering how high I should set it. Most places say it's safe to jump a few notches even with fan cooling. I have a liquid cooling kit for my processor (because of prior overheating problems).
Also, what should I check as I go? I got Speedfan to check CPU temps, and Prime995 to test it.
Well my mobo doesn't support a C2D , so it doesn't do me much good to compare them.
I am running the multiplier at a 16x now based on what I saw from old reviews while doing research last night. Many have stated that going to 16x (=4.267GHz) can be done on a 965 without anything more than stock cooling. That's without changing anything other than the multiplier.
My mobo (d955xbk) gives me the option of bumping the FSB from 1066 to 1333. Should I try it? It seems like a big jump, but some have said that's alright for a dual-core processor. I can also adjust voltages, but haven't needed to do so yet (nor do i have any experience with it).
I was thinking of bringing down the multiplier, then bumping the FSB to 1333 and seeing how it goes with some stress tests. If all is stable, then bringing the multiplier up again. Presumably, the PC will drop out on me at some point, at which time I will bump the CPU voltage a little bit. Does that sound like a good plan to get as much as I can from this rig? [Keep in mind I have a liquid cooler for the CPU]
I know your board doesn't support C2D CPUs, but if you spent a lot of money (and definitely anything higher then $100.) you were better off dumping your current setup and getting a C2D and new board. I've seen used C2D chips for $40, and I'm sure you can find a good S775 board for $60. (reuse your current DDR2 ram.) Such a setup would greatly outperform that old P4, while not costing you much more.
Going from memory 4.2GHz-4.5GHz is the top end of what that chip can do. (not counting high end H2O loops or LN2.) However you get there is up to you and your equipment. If you want to do it with just multiplier bumps or FSB increases it doesn't really matter.
I hear where you're coming from in terms of general advice, but right now I'm sitting in front of a computer with a D955xbk mobo and a 965EE chip. I'm just trying to find out how to make the best of what I've got. Cool?
So it sounds like the chip has more to give, especially since I have water cooler on it. But I've never done any overclocking, so I'm still learning.
Do you think it's safe to bump the FSB from 1066 to 1333 (and drop the multiplier a bit)? My mobo doesn't let me do small increments. Or should I just keep cranking the multiplier until I lose stability?
Every chip is different, you'll have to try both and see. If you have the multiplier adjustment I'd start with that. If it can handle 17 or 18 that's great. Don't be afraid to bump the Vcore up some however as you'll need more juice the faster it gets.
I'm not trying to be a jerk either. I know you are setting in front of the computer you have, but maybe its not the computer you should use. You also said "water cooling kit". Some of those kits aren't any better then good air coolers, so don't be totally shocked if/when you get a heat issue. Not saying it will happen, but unless your "kit" is really a "loop", you might strain it with your high TDP chip.
Like I said, try it both ways and see which gets you farther. And please report back as I'd love to hear how it went. I'm going to guess CPU multiplier will get you farther, but I also bet a small mix of each will be best of all.
I was having no problems at x16, so I went back into bios and tried x17. However, now the computer wont even boot. The video card doesn't even check in, which is usually the first thing I see on the monitor when I turn on the computer.
I guess that means I have to bump the processor voltage a bit to reach x17 and beyond. Now I gotta figure out how to get back into bios to get it working again.
Well that was a real pain the buttocks. The Intel-recommended method for recovery from a bios-setting-induced non-booting state is to manually reset the bios with the .bio file on either a USB stick or a CD. NEITHER of these did anything at all. No matter what I tried with putting the jumper into "reset" mode (as instructed by Intel), nothing ever showed on the screen.
Frustrated, I pulled all harddrives and CD drives from the system, still nothing.
Super-frustrated and about to give up, I put the jumper into the "reset bios passwords" mode... AND IT WORKED! By putting the jumper into this third option, it let me get into the bios where I could change passwords if I wanted, but it also let me reduce the multiplier! Yes!
Rebooted (replaced jumper and reattached windows harddrive) and got into Windows, albeit VERY slowly. I rebooted again, and it started moving a little faster. I shut down, reinstalled all hardware and rebooted twice more. Now it seems to be back to full speed. Success!
Well that's all for now, i'm gonna rest on my laurels and watch some Fringe with a beer. I think I deserved it. The saga will continue tomorrow.
I'm not going to mess with the FSB for now, I've decided. I'm just going to try to work up the multiplier and the CPU voltage. Let's keep it simple, one variable at a time. Once I decide on a max CPU speed, maybe I'll go back and mess with FSB... maybe.
At any rate, I'm back at 16x multiplier, CPU running at 4.267GHz. I want to go further, but I think going to 17x without bumping voltage will just fail to boot like last time. So I think I have to raise the CPU voltage. The default is 1.3250. I've read that max safe is 1.4, but it's best to go up in small increments.
So, first I bumped up the CPU voltage from 1.3250 to 1.3375, but kept the 16x multiplier. When I boot into windows, I see no discernable difference in my reported voltages. While sitting at desktop, Speedfan is reporting anywhere from 1.20-1.24, which is the same range I always see (tested at 14x, 15x, and 16x, all at default 1.3250 bios setting).
Any idea how much I have to bump the bios voltage setting before I can safely jump to 17x? Is there any way to establish better feedback on voltage settings without reaching a point where I have to reset jumpers to recover?
If you don't see your voltages matching, turn off speed step. You can always turn it back on once you get things settled. On a similar note, as long as cooling isn't an issue just set your Vcore at max. Again, you can always turn it back down once you get things settled. (if not max, then whatever max setting you are comfortable with.)
So I would set Vcore to 1.4V, disable speed step, and try for 17x again. If it works then great/try 18x. If it fails then there isn't much you can do. You could set it back to 16x and start upping the FSB to see if you can hit 4.3 or 4.4GHz. Remember then when you start changing the FSB you'll need to worry about your ram settings as well.
I got comfortable with 1.3375 and bumped it again to 1.3500. System booted up just fine, and it was acting normal. Temperatures were a little higher, but still never got over 65.
However, then I turned on Prime95. After less than 10 minutes, I got a BSOD. System reboot, I backed it down to 1.3375. Re-ran Prime95, and got same BSOD. Now I'm back to stock 1.3250, with a 16x multiplier.
At no point in this did I ever see the temperatures break 70. Temps spiked as soon as Prime95 started, but then dropped and stabilized close to 62. Then, several minutes later and seemingly out of nowhere, BSOD. | <urn:uuid:f2cd1217-7943-4627-aaac-8f1fb25a4c3c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/272707-29-high-multiplier-pentium-965ee | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96912 | 1,924 | 1.59375 | 2 |
1 E. 70th St. (Madison-Fifth Aves.) 10021
Description: France has long been fascinated by the Ottoman Empire, and for hundreds of years the taste for turquerie was evident in French fashion, literature, theater and opera, painting, architecture, and interior decoration. Turquerie, a term that came into use in the early nineteenth century, referred to essentially anything produced in the West that evoked or imitated Turkish culture. It was during the late eighteenth century at the court of Marie-Antoinette that the Turkish style reached new heights, inspiring some of the period's most original creations, namely boudoirs or cabinets decorated entirely in the Turkish manner. In 1776 and 1777, several operas and plays with Turkish themes were performed at the French court, increasing the nobility's interest in Turkish style. Soon thereafter, three interiors à la turque were created for the comte d'Artois, Louis XVI's younger brother, and Marie-Antoinette commissioned boudoirs turcs for her apartments at Versailles and Fontainebleau. Since these retreats were intended for private entertaining, interior decorators were allowed more freedom than was permitted for the official, more public apartments at court. The highly theatrical rooms featured furniture and wall panels decorated with turbaned figures, camels, palm trees, and other Turkish motifs, but their form and function remained essentially French. Created for the royal family and wealthy aristocrats, the objects were always of the highest quality, made by the best artists and craftsmen of the day. This summer, The Frick Collection will present a dossier exhibition featuring several pieces made in the Turkish manner for members of the French court, including a pair of console tables acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1914, that illustrate a particularly inventive aspect of French eighteenth-century decorative style. The exhibition is organized by Charlotte Vignon, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts, The Frick Collection.
Venue Description: The Frick Collection is one of New York City's most beloved cultural treasures; with the extraordinary works of Western European art from the Renaissance right up to the end of the 19th century, industrialist Henry Clay Frick charitably bequeathed his collection to the public. The Frick family's former Fifth Avenue mansion and the unique ambience of an art connoisseur's private home has been preserved in the Frick Collection. Remarkable paintings, sculptures, and decorative art objects are presented in public programs, such as free lectures and concerts. The Frick Art Reference Library is esteemed worldwide by scholars and students, and is also open to the public. The Frick Collection?s sixty-seventh concert season presents a number of exciting debuts of European artists. It is also the first time that a concert and preconcert lecture will be offered in conjunction with a special exhibition. The Frick Collection is located at 1 East 70th Street (between Madison and Fifth Avenues) and is open six days a week: Tuesday through Saturday 10am-6pm and Sundays 11am-5pm. The Collection is closed on Mondays and public holidays. The museum is fully accessible to the disabled. Admission into the Frick Collection is $15 for adults; $10 for senior citizens (62 and over); and $5 for students with valid identification. On Sundays, pay what you wish from 11am-1pm. The price of admission includes the ArtPhone audio guide. Lectures are open to the public without charge 30 minutes before the event. Group visits are by appointment only. Lecturing in the galleries is prohibited. Free coat checking is provided in the coat room. Coats (if not worn), packages, umbrellas, and large handbags must be left there. Unfortunately, luggage is not accepted. The Frick Art Reference library is located just around the corner from The Frick Collection at 10 East 71st Street (between Madison and Fifth Avenues) and is open Monday through Friday 10am-5pm, Saturdays 9:30am-1pm, and is closed Sundays, holiday weekends, Saturdays in June and July, and during the month of August. First-time researchers must bring a photo ID and arrive before 3pm on weekdays or 11am on Saturdays. The Library is open to all adult researchers free of charge.
Upcoming Events at Frick Collection: | <urn:uuid:31bc3bc5-a185-4438-bd0a-de79645e4786> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nymetroparents.com/2013neweventinfo.cfm?id=84793 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959877 | 894 | 1.71875 | 2 |
CORPUS CHRISTI — With Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Paul O'Neill has already achieved several notable firsts for a touring musical act.
To O'Neill's knowledge, Trans-Siberian Orchestra is the first rock act to never have an opening act or open a show for any other act. It's the first band to have more than 80 members and the first act to go straight to arenas for its first tour.
He's also set new standards for visual spectacle in a live show, launching more fireworks, fire, lasers and other special effects for each performance than any other rock band in history.
As O'Neill has been fond of saying, a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert is like Pink Floyd on steroids. See that Sunday when the band brings "Beethoven's Last Night" to American Bank Center's Selena Auditorium.
O'Neill has set his sights on live theater, and if his vision for what he calls "rock theater" succeeds, it will be interesting to see how it influences Broadway musicals and other live theater productions are presented.
As he put it, the production values on Broadway have "practically become calcified and Byzantine."
O'Neill's vision for rock theater boils down to a basic concept — to take the spectacular modern visual production of a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert and the fully developed stories that are told in the lyrics of the group's rock opera-styled CDs to the stage and bring theater into the 21st century.
"You know, I worship some of these Broadway shows I've seen over the years, but they could have been produced in the exact same way in 1920," O'Neill said. "It's just the lights, maybe occasionally dry ice, smoke and that's it. I honestly believe if you looked behind the walls of some of these theaters, you'd see electric (systems) installed by Thomas Edison in 1890. And so it (the idea) is to take the cutting edge, always-pushing-the-envelope of the special effects of rock 'n' roll, married to the coherent story telling of Broadway."
Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which features a rock band, full orchestra and an arsenal of singers to go with its spectacular visual production, has been doing annual Christmas tours since 1999.
But TSO was never meant to be strictly a holiday act. And its third CD, which was released in 2000, was "Beethoven's Last Night," which told a fictional story of the last night of the composer's life.
To coincide with this spring's tour, the "Beethoven's Last Night" CD also is being rereleased on March 13 in a new two-disc deluxe edition that includes the narration segments performed by Bryan Hicks that help audiences follow the story line during the live performances.
IF YOU GO
What: Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Beethoven's Last Night"
When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday
Where: American Bank Center Selena Auditorium
Tickets: $41-$61 through the American Bank Center Box Office, all Ticketmaster outlets, online at www.Ticketmaster.com, or charge by phone at 800-745-3000. | <urn:uuid:e1a96395-e32a-4c2f-85db-01222623db5f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.caller.com/news/2012/mar/02/trans-siberian-orchestra-brings-visual-spectacle/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957207 | 668 | 1.695313 | 2 |
When nursing school graduate Elizabeth Mondo found herself saddled with $210,000 worth of student loan debt and jobless in early 2009, she took the only path that made sense — military service.
"I couldn't find a nursing job to save my life, and the economy was so bad," she said. "But I had some girlfriends who were in the army for 10 years and they said I should join. I looked into it and I did."
It was a smart move. After she enlisted, Mondo landed a job at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where she's been contracted to work through 2016.
Like all military servicemembers, Mondo's federal loans were sent into deferment until the end of her service, as offered through the Higher Education Act. Her private loans were a different story.
The U.S. Army agreed to cover $90,000 of Mondo's Sallie Mae loans for three years, and she asked Sallie Mae to put her remaining loan balance — about $120,000 — into deferment until she left active duty. They refused to budge for months, while her loans continued to swell under a 9 percent interest rate.
It wasn't until she posted an online petition seeking action from Sallie Mae that she got the answers she needed. Turns out she was not only eligible for deferment under SCRA, but she qualified for a lowered interest rate as well.
"Nobody ever told me (about this program), so my interest rate for all my loans was accruing at a higher rate," she said.
Luckily, Sallie Mae agreed to honor SCRA, and reimburse Mondo for the interest charges she accrued at the higher rate.
Mondo's story is far from unique. As the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found in a recent study on military student loan debt, servicemembers often rely on lenders for information about loan options –– and they don't always wind up with the full story.
Even if they navigate the maze of options, servicemembers report that they are often met with loan servicer roadblocks. For example, the CFPB has heard from military borrowers, including those in combat zones, who have been denied interest-rate protections because they failed to resubmit unnecessary paperwork. These kinds of servicing obstacles prevent servicemembers from taking advantage of the full range of protections they have earned through their service to this country.
Mondo's ordeal has inspired her to work with Sallie Mae to educate others like her at Walter Reed.
"This has been a huge battle. There are already enough stressors for us. It's just another unnecessary stress of the day."
Here's a comprehensive list of loan repayment options for military servicemembers:
More From Business Insider | <urn:uuid:86f42cc7-0a6e-4a51-a6f5-2a732d17b099> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-wonder-military-servicemembers-easy-212157407.html | 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 | 0.985678 | 581 | 1.632813 | 2 |
WHILE poor little Clotelle was being kicked about by Mrs. Miller, on account of her relationship to her son-in-law, Isabella was passing lonely hours in the county jail, the place to which Jennings had removed her for safe-keeping, after purchasing her from Mrs. Miller. Incarcerated in one of the iron-barred rooms of that dismal place, those dark, glowing eyes, lofty brow, and graceful form wilted down like a plucked rose under a noonday sun, while deep in her heart's ambrosial cells was the most anguishing distress.
Vulgar curiosity is always in search of its victims, and Jennings' boast that he had such a ladylike and beautiful woman in his possession brought numbers to the prison who begged of the jailer the privilege of seeing the slave-trader's prize. Many who saw her were melted to tears at the pitiful sight, and were struck with admiration at her intelligence; and, when she spoke of her child, they must have been convinced that a mother's sorrow can be conceived by none but a mother's heart. The warbling of birds in the green bowers of bliss, which she occasionally heard, brought no tidings of gladness to her. Their joy fell cold upon her heart, and seemed like bitter mockery. They reminded her of her own cottage, where, with her beloved child, she had spent so many happy days.
The speculator had kept close watch over his valuable piece of property, for fear that it might damage itself. This, however, there was no danger of, for Isabella still hoped and believed that Henry would come to her rescue. She could not bring herself to believe that he would allow her to be sent away without at least seeing her, and the trader did all he could to keep this idea alive in her.
While Isabella, with a weary heart, was passing sleepless nights thinking only of her daughter and Henry, the latter was seeking relief in that insidious enemy of the human race, the intoxicating cup. His wife did all in her power to make his life a pleasant and a happy one, for Gertrude was devotedly attached to him; but a weary heart gets no gladness out of sunshine. The secret remorse that rankled in his bosom caused him to see all the world blood-shot. He had not visited his mother-in-law since the evening he had given her liberty to use her own discretion as to how Isabella and her child should be disposed of. He feared even to go near the house, for he did not wish to see his child. Gertrude felt this every time he declined accompanying her to her mother's. Possessed of a tender and confiding heart, entirely unlike her mother, she sympathized deeply with her husband. She well knew that all young men in the South, to a greater or less extent, became enamored of the slave-women, and she fancied that his case was only one of the many, and if he had now forsaken all others for her she did not wish to be punished; but she dared not let her mother know that such were her feelings. Again and again had she noticed the great resemblance between Clotelle and Henry, and she wished the child in better hands than those of her cruel mother.
At last Gertrude determined to mention the matter to her husband. Consequently, the next morning, when they were seated on the back piazza, and the sun was pouring its splendid rays upon everything around, changing the red tints on the lofty hills in the distance into streaks of purest gold, and nature seeming by her smiles to favor the object, she said,--
"What, dear Henry, do you intend to do with Clotelle?" A paleness that overspread his countenance, the tears that trickled down his cheeks, the deep emotion that was visible in his face, and the trembling of his voice, showed at once that she had touched a tender chord. Without a single word, he buried his face in his handkerchief, and burst into tears.
This made Gertrude still more unhappy, for she feared that he had misunderstood her; and she immediately expressed her regret that she had mentioned the subject. Becoming satisfied from this that his wife sympathized with him in his unhappy situation, Henry told her of the agony that filled his soul, and Gertrude agreed to intercede for him with her mother for the removal of the child to a boarding-school in one of the Free States.
In the afternoon, when Henry returned from his office, his wife met him with tearful eyes, and informed him that her mother was filled with rage at the mention of the removal of Clotelle from her premises.
In the mean time, the slave-trader, Jennings, had started for the South with his gang of human cattle, of whom Isabella was one. Most quadroon women who are taken to the South are either sold to gentlemen for their own use or disposed of as house-servants or waiting-maids. Fortunately for Isabella, she was sold for the latter purpose. Jennings found a purchaser for her in the person of Mr. James French.
Mrs. French was a severe mistress. All who lived with her, though well-dressed, were scantily fed and over-worked. Isabella found her new situation far different from her Virginia cottage-life. She had frequently heard Vicksburg spoken of as a cruel place for slaves, and now she was in a position to test the truthfulness of the assertion.
A few weeks after her arrival, Mrs. French began to show to Isabella that she was anything but a pleasant and agreeable mistress. What social virtues are possible in a society of which injustice is a primary characteristic,-- in a society which is divided into two classes, masters and slaves? Every married woman at the South looks upon her husband as unfaithful, and regards every negro woman as a rival.
Isabella had been with her new mistress but a short time when she was ordered to cut off her long and beautiful hair. The negro is naturally fond of dress and outward display. He who has short woolly hair combs and oils it to death; he who has long hair would sooner have his teeth drawn than to part with it. But, however painful it was to Isabella, she was soon seen with her hair cut short, and the sleeves of her dress altered to fit tight to her arms. Even with her hair short and with her ill-looking dress, Isabella was still handsome. Her life had been a secluded one, and though now twenty-eight years of age, her beauty had only assumed a quieter tone. The other servants only laughed at Isabella's misfortune in losing her beautiful hair.
"Miss 'Bell needn't strut so big; she got short nappy har's well's I," said Nell, with a broad grin that showed her teeth.
"She tink she white when she cum here, wid dat long har ob hers," replied Mill.
"Yes," continued Nell, "missus make her take down her wool, so she no put it up to-day."
The fairness of Isabella's complexion was regarded with envy by the servants as well as by the mistress herself. This is one of the hard features of slavery. To-day a woman is mistress of her own cottage; tomorrow she is sold to one who aims to make her life as intolerable as possible. And let it be remembered that the house-servant has the best situation a slave can occupy.
But the degradation and harsh treatment Isabella experienced in her new home was nothing compared to the grief she underwent at being separated from her dear child. Taken from her with scarcely a moment's warning, she knew not what had become of her.
This deep and heartfelt grief of Isabella was soon perceived by her owners, and fearing that her refusal to take proper food would cause her death, they resolved to sell her. Mr. French found no difficulty in securing a purchaser for the quadroon woman, for such are usually the most marketable kind of property. Isabella was sold at private sale to a young man for a housekeeper; but even he had missed his aim.
Mr. Gordon, the new master, was a man of pleasure. He was the owner of a large sugar plantation, which he had left under the charge of an overseer, and was now giving himself up to the pleasures of a city life. At first Mr. Gordon sought to win Isabella's favor by flattery and presents, knowing that whatever he gave her he could take from her again. The poor innocent creature dreaded every moment lest the scene should change. At every interview with Gordon she stoutly maintained that she had left a husband in Virginia, and could never think of taking another. In this she considered that she was truthful, for she had ever regarded Henry as her husband. The gold watch and chain and other glittering presents which Gordon gave to her were all kept unused.
In the same house with Isabella was a man-servant who had from time to time hired himself from his master. His name was William. He could feel for Isabella, for he, like her, had been separated from near and dear relatives, and he often tried to console the poor woman. One day Isabella observed to him that her hair was growing out again.
"Yes," replied William; "you look a good deal like a man with your short hair."
"Oh," rejoined she, "I have often been told that I would make a better looking man than woman, and if I had the money I might avail myself of it to big farewell to this place."
In a moment afterwards, Isabella feared that she had said too much, and laughingly observed, "I am always talking some nonsense; you must not heed me."
William was a tall, full-blooded African, whose countenance beamed with intelligence. Being a mechanic, he had by industry earned more money than he had paid to his owner for his time, and this he had laid aside, with the hope that he might some day get enough to purchase his freedom. He had in his chest about a hundred and fifty dollars. His was a heart that felt for others, and he had again and again wiped the tears from his eyes while listening to Isabella's story.
"If she can get free with a little money, why not give her what I have?" thought he, and then resolved to do it.
An hour after, he entered the quadroon's room, and, laying the money in her lap, said,--
"There, Miss Isabella, you said just now that if you had the means you would leave this place. There is money enough to take you to England, where you will be free. You are much fairer than many of the white women of the South, and can easily pass for a free white woman."
At first Isabella thought it was a plan by which the negro wished to try her fidelity to her owner; but she was soon convinced, by his earnest manner and the deep feeling he manifested, that he was entirely sincere.
"I will take the money," said she, "only on one condition, and that is that I effect your escape, as well as my own."
"How can that be done?" he inquired, eagerly.
"I will assume the disguise of a gentleman, and you that of a servant, and we will thus take passage in a steamer to Cincinnati, and from thence to Canada."
With full confidence in Isabella's judgment, William consented at once to the proposition. The clothes were purchased; everything was arranged, and the next night, while Mr. Gordon was on one of his sprees, Isabella, under the assumed name of Mr. Smith, with William in attendance as a servant, took passage for Cincinnati in the steamer Heroine.
With a pair of green glasses over her eyes, in addition to her other disguise, Isabella made quite a gentlemanly appearance. To avoid conversation, however, she kept closely to her state-room, under the plea of illness.
Meanwhile, William was playing his part well with the servants. He was loudly talking of his master's wealth, and nothing on the boat appeared so good as in his master's fine mansion.
"I don't like dese steamboats, no how," said he; "I hope when massa goes on anoder journey, he take de carriage and de hosses."
After a nine-days' passage, the Heroine landed at Cincinnati, and Mr. Smith and his servant walked on shore.
"William, you are now a free man, and can go on to Canada," said Isabella; "I shall go to Virginia, in search of my daughter."
This sudden announcement fell heavily upon William's ears, and with tears he besought her not to jeopardize her liberty in such a manner; but Isabella had made up her mind to rescue her child if possible.
Taking a boat for Wheeling, Isabella was soon on her way to her native State. Several months had elapsed since she left Richmond, and all her thoughts were centred on the fate of her dear Clotelle. It was with a palpitating heart that this injured woman entered the stage-coach at Wheeling and set out for Richmond. | <urn:uuid:707d4842-8201-4ed4-95de-13d8b9a4baa9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wwbrown/ch14.html | 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 | 0.992091 | 2,784 | 1.664063 | 2 |
“She smiled to herself as she spread the blankets, with the tarpaulin underneath, for a table, having first removed all twigs from the sand.”
“Next, he gathered dry grasses and tiny twigs from the high-water flotsam.”
“But it had been easier to pull the twigs from the brush and drop them directly on the fire.”
“Birch bark stripped into fine strips works well for starting, shave off pieces of flint onto the birch bark shavings, then spark, should light on the first or second try, then add some fine dry dead twigs from a hemlock as tinder.”
“Tue 11/17/09 2: 04 PM her legs look like twigs from a dying tree.”
“Step 1: On the 4th of December, the day of St. Barbara, go and cut some twigs from a fruit tree.”
“They found a few vegetables growing that they had never seen before, and so, collecting twigs from the short, stumpy bushes, they made a fire to cook them.”
“Mundane things fill her with delight: picking up the blackened twigs from the lopped plane trees in the street, and later watching astonished as they burst into bud in a vase; making conversation with a blimpish colonel at a shooting party: "Thank God for colonels, thought Mrs. Miniver; sweet creatures, so easily entertained ... there was nothing in the world so restful as a really good English colonel.”
“The grass had been scattered with twigs from the previous night's gale, and by the next afternoon it was snowing: but while it lasted that day had been part of the authentic currency of spring -- a stray coin tossed down carelessly on account.”
“The fire dwindled, for there was little to burn save the dried twigs from the bushes that lined the stream, nor did Felix dare to leave the horse long enough to gather a fresh supply.”
These user-created lists contain the word ‘twigs’.
Stuff that's crunchy.
The new favourite words of people on Twitter.
A script searches Twitter for "X is my new favorite word" and adds it to this list.
unfathomably, glice, cuh, fab, ciggaty, doll, thuggin, oxymoronic, pineapple, succubutt, griming, cheeky and 2369 more...
Looking for tweets for twigs. | <urn:uuid:9e993794-365c-4017-8a6c-8f9a92aff061> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wordnik.com/words/twigs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94628 | 550 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Writers, take note... or notes. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing, the Guardian asked authors to share their personal rules for writing fiction. A sampling:
* Margaret Atwood: "You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality."
* Roddy Doyle: "Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, e.g. 'horse,' 'ran,' 'said.'"
* Geoff Dyer: "Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire."
* Anne Enright: "The first 12 years are the worst."
* Richard Ford: "Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea."
* Jonathan Franzen: "When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it."
* Neil Gaiman: "Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."
* Jeanette Winterson: "Enjoy this work!"
Enjoy - and keep on writing!
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
I found this fascinating quote today:
Book publishers have lost control over their own industry, not because consumers have won, but because they haven’t — they will be no better off with de facto platform dominance than anyone else except the company that controls that platform.Joseph Esposito under, The Scholarly Kitchen, Feb 2010
You should read the whole article.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
In the words of my grandfather "It is every citizen's patriotic duty to Vote Early and Vote Often!"
Monday, February 15, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
We will be doing additional giveaways this week during our Launch Week Promo so check back for more details!!
Friday, February 12, 2010
It's been a number of years since I was involved in the inauguration of a new imprint, and it is just as intense as I remember. Well, possibly more so, now you have to throw the ebook version into the mix! Everything is coming together and the book launch party is set for tomorrow evening. Right now I'm just trying to remember to breathe!
Catch the excitement! Check out the trailer and read the first chapter of the book - links are here on our blog and on our web site.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Now we've all dug out, the streets are plowed, sidewalks shoveled and all those cooped up puppies have had their walkies. It is time to turn my attention back to the running of this publishing house and the launch of our first book (The Last Track by Sam Hilliard) which is only a few days away.
Time to get back to the mechanics of publicity and marketing. But forgive me while I savor the memory of those quiet moments, inside that snow globe for just a little longer. | <urn:uuid:6c17b364-4cae-4154-a863-b7a3f9251682> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://buddhapussink.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9598 | 673 | 1.625 | 2 |
On October 14th, 1992 the Pittsburgh Pirates and Atlanta Braves were set to play game 7 of the National League Championship Series. The winner went to the World Series, the loser went home.
I was a mere 8 years old, and as much of a Pirates fan as an 8 year old can be. I also had a friend who was a Braves fan, and in the school bus line we argued over who was going to win the entire series. I had yet to hear of statistics or Minitab, so my arguments consisted of little more than “Braves Suck! Pirates are going to win!” For an 8 year old, I think my data analysis was spot on.
The Pirates held a 2-0 lead going into the bottom of the 9th, and I had long since fallen asleep on the couch. The Braves cut the lead to 2-1 and had the bases loaded with 2 outs. Then Francisco Cabrera hit a single to left field, scoring two runs as Barry Bonds just missed throwing out Sid Bream at the plate. Perhaps if he had started taking steroids earlier he would have made the out, sending the Pirates to the World Series. Anyway, the good news was that I slept through the entire disastrous inning. The bad news was that I had to wake up sometime. And when I did wake the next morning, I cried and demanded that I wasn’t going to school. My mom made me go anyway. And the Pirates haven’t had a winning season since.
Fast forward 20 years. We’re more than halfway through the MLB season, and the Pirates are 11 games over 0.500. Earlier in the year, I used a regression analysis in an attempt to predict whether the Pirates would finally finish the season with a winning record. I found that it was just too early in the season to be confident in any such predictions. But now that there have been almost twice as many games played, I’m going to see if I can do better.
For the last 3 years, I took each baseball team's winning percentage on July 20th and their winning percentage at the end of the season. You can get the data here and follow along if you like.
So here is my first question. How often does a team that is above 0.500 on July 20th finish with a losing record? We can use Minitab’s Tally command to find out.
We see that the last 3 years, 51 teams have had a winning percentage over 0.500 on July 20th. The 39 observations with missing values are the teams that were below or equal to 0.500. So of those 51 teams, only 10 were not able to finish the season with a winning record. Of course, the 2011 Pirates were one of those teams. I blame Jerry Meals. But the 2012 Pirates have a winning percentage of 0.560. Have any teams with a winning percentage that high finished below 0.500?
No they haven’t. Of the 10 teams that blew their winning record after July 20th the highest current winning percentage was 0.531. The Pirates are well above that number, so things look good. However, do you know who the team was that went 0.531 until July 20th then went on to have a losing record? Yep, the 2011 Pittsburgh Pirates. Have I mentioned that I blame Jerry Meals? The Pirates went 19-42 after that blown call last year and finished the year with a winning percentage of 0.444. So how much can we really take from a team’s current winning percentage? That is, what is the correlation between a team’s current winning percentage and their final winning percentage? We can use a regression analysis to find out.
The regression analysis tells us that 76.1% of the variation in a team’s final winning percentage can be explained by their winning percentage on July 20th. That’s even more good news for the Pirates because their current winning percentage is pretty high. We can use this model to predict their winning percentage at the end of the season.
The “Fit” value tells us that the model predicts the Pirates to end the season with a winning percentage of 0.549. But remember, our model accounts for only 76.1% of the variation in the final winning percentage. So we have to look at the intervals to determine how confident we can be in that prediction.
But wait; there are two intervals, a confidence interval and a prediction interval. Which one do we use? The 95% confidence interval provides a range of values likely to include the mean response for a given predictor value. That is, if we took multiple teams with a current winning percentage of 0.560, we would expect the average final winning percentage of all the teams to be between 0.540 and 0.558. But we’re not interested in the average final winning percentage of multiple teams. We’re interested in a single observation, the 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates.
For that we have to examine the prediction interval. The prediction interval tells us we can be 95% confident that the 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates will finish the year with a winning percentage between 0.481 and 0.617. Ah, we’re so close to having that entire interval be above 0.500! But we can lower the confidence level until we find an interval that is above 0.500. It turns out that a confidence level of 84% does the trick.
So we can say that we’re 84% confident that the Pirates will finish the season above 0.500. Previously we also saw that 80.4% of teams with a winning record on July 20th end the season with a winning record. I like the Bucco's chances.
So is it a lock that Pittsburgh is going to finish above 0.500? No, it isn’t. Both the 2011 Pirates and the 2011 Boston Red Sox have shown that crazy things can happen late in the season. But those teams are outliers, and we’ve shown the 2012 Pirates definitely had the odds in their favor.
And if things keep up, the topic is going to shift from the Pirates finishing with a winning record to the Pirates making the playoffs. If the season were to end today, Pittsburgh would be in a Wild Card Showdown game against Atlanta. Winner moves on to the Division series, loser goes home. Personally, I say bring on the Braves and let Jerry Meals be the umpire. There are some demons that need exorcised, and this could be the year to get rid of them all! | <urn:uuid:88a466b6-ffa2-4eb8-bd51-75b6750ceddb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.minitab.com/blog/the-statistics-game/the-2012-pittsburgh-pirates-odds-are-the-losing-stops-here | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975644 | 1,358 | 1.5 | 2 |
May 22, 2013
The Withdrawal Follies
Posted on Jul 26, 2007
Think of this as the future in slo-mo—or, as the Wall Street Journal’s Dreazen and Jaffe put it, “a complete withdrawal from Iraq could take as long as two years if conducted in an orderly fashion.” Not only that, but the military—and so the American media—suddenly discovered the vast amount of stuff that had been flown, or convoyed, into Iraq (mostly in better times) and now somehow had to be returned to sender. As TIME’s Duffy put it, included would be “a good portion of the entire U.S. inventory of tanks, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, trucks and humvees…. They are spread across 15 bases, 38 supply depots, 18 fuel-supply centers and 10 ammo dumps,” not to speak of “dining halls, office buildings, vending machines, furniture, mobile latrines, computers, paper clips and acres of living quarters.”
Associated Press reporter Charles Hanley caught the enormity of withdrawal this way: “In addition to 160,000 troops…, the U.S. presence in Iraq has ballooned over four years to include more than 180,000 civilians employed under U.S. government contracts—at least 21,000 Americans, 43,000 other foreigners and 118,000 Iraqis—and has spread to small ‘cities’ on fortified bases across Iraq.” In fact, such lists turn out never to end—as a series of anxious news reports have indicated—right down to the enormous numbers of port-a-potties that must be disposed of. In such accounts of the overwhelming nature of any withdrawal from a country the Bush administration thought it could make its own, cautionary historical examples are cited by the Humvee-load. (After the First Gulf War, withdrawal from Kuwait took a year under the friendliest of conditions; Afghanistan was hell for the Russians; Vietnam, despite the final scramble, took forever and a day to plan and carry out.) And don’t forget about the need to get rid of the “toxic waste” the Americans have accumulated—that alone is now estimated to take 20 months—or, according to reports, the shortage of aircraft for transport, the cratered, bomb-laden roads on which to convoy everything out, and the possibility that our allies, knowing we’re leaving, may turn on us in a Mad-Max-style future Iraq. Finally, don’t forget something that, until just about yesterday, no one outside of a few arcane military types even knew about—the agricultural inspectors who must certify that everything entering the U.S. is free of “microscopic disease.” And so it goes. Withdrawal, it turns out, is forever.
Of course, much of this is undoubtedly foolishness, though with a serious purpose. It’s meant to turn an unpredictable future into what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once termed a “known known” that can be wielded against those who want to change course in the disastrous present. You want withdrawal? You have an ironclad guarantee that, no matter how bad things might be, it will be so much worse.
Withdrawal, in other words, is fear itself. Sanity is a future that’s essentially the same as the present (with somewhat fewer U.S. troops) and, though no one mentions it, a significantly ramped up ability to bring air power to bear. (On this, the AP’s Hanley has just done two superb, if chilling, reports from the field, the only ones of significance on air power in Iraq since the invasion of 2003. He has revealed that the “surge” of U.S. air strength there may prove far more devastating and long-lasting than the one on the ground.)
In the Vietnam years, the ongoing bloodbath of Vietnam was regularly supplanted in the United States by a predicted “bloodbath” the Vietnamese enemy was certain to commit in South Vietnam the moment the United States withdrew (just as a near-genocidal civil war is now meant to supplant the blood-drenched Iraqi present for which we are so responsible). This future bloodbath of the imagination appeared in innumerable official speeches and accounts as an explanation for why the United States could not leave Vietnam, just as the sectarian bloodbath-to-come in Iraq explains why we must not take steps to withdraw our troops (advisors, mercenaries, crony corporations, and port-a-potties) from that country.
In public discourse in the Vietnam era, this not-yet-atrocity sometimes became the only real bloodbath around and an obsessive focus for some of the war’s opponents within mainstream politics. Antiwar activist Todd Gitlin recalled “the contempt with which [activist Tom] Hayden had told me of a meeting he and Staughton Lynd had with Bobby Kennedy, early in 1967. Kennedy, he said then, had been fixated on the dangers of a ‘bloodbath’ in South Vietnam if the Communists succeeded in taking over.”
But it wasn’t only in the mainstream. Antiwar activists, too, often had to grapple with the expected, predicted horror that always threatened to dwarf the present one—the horror for which, it was implied, they would someday be responsible.
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New and Improved Comments | <urn:uuid:c8922eaf-9910-4752-8302-b8a7b61cea37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.truthdig.com/report/page4/20070726_the_withdrawal_follies/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960658 | 1,185 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Does It Still Take A Village?
On Sunday, an emergency summit was convened to talk about possible solutions to youth violence in the community. The summit was spurred by the recent barrage of shootings that took place in Harlem over the Memorial Day weekend where many young people were wounded. Politicians (including Governor Paterson), law enforcement officials, and community representatives all pointed to lax gun laws, lack of youth centers, and a frustratingly high level of unemployment as catalysts that affect the escalation of violence in communities where people are impoverished.
The sudden cluster of events forced the spotlight on our beloved Harlem once again . Only this time the attention was not grabbed by new condos, new anchor retail stores, or even the controversial redevelopment along 125th Street. Rather it was a story that might have fit better on a news article from 1992 when stories of violence in Harlem were commonplace. The thought of 10 people (6 of them teens) being shot along a 20 block stretch of the neighborhood seems a mismatch to the promises of a “new, chic Harlem” that many real estate websites capitalize on these days. Rather, it brings to the forefront one important issue that has been simmering and has finally reached a boiling point. No amount of redevelopment or gentrification (you pick a term) can singularly cure the ails of a historically disadvantaged community. While many community advocates have lambasted developers for taking away from the culture and the “look” of the neighborhood a whole other issue is being ignored. It is the subculture of gang and gun violence that is still very much a part of the new Harlem. This was around before gentrification and is still around now.
While tougher gun laws are crucial to dealing with violence on our streets there are issues that need to be dealt with on a micro level. The fact is that a new Pathmark or Duane Reade may light up the streets better and get the drug dealers off the corner but there are a lot more corners and back streets in Harlem that are left to exploit. Perhaps some people feel that as long as that “hood” element is confined to those streets with public housing and doesn’t spill over to the condos every-thing’s OK. We saw proof that it isn’t OK. In fact the latest shootings spilled over onto 125th Street, Harlem’s main thoroughfare and the future site of the River-to-River project. Among all the new wealth that is being created one has to ask “How come none of these new condo buildings have youth programs or community centers?” They receive financial incentives through tax abatements and rezoning laws but nothing is being injected into the veins of the community except commercialization. All these new buildings have Duane Reade’s, Chase Bank branches, Starbucks, and New York Sports Clubs. Do we really need that many more? None of them have a new P.A.L. facility or other youth sports program. There are no new Scores (except for the one on 125th Street and a Komin center on 8th Avenue). There is no investment in learning centers other than a few scattered programs that many families in Harlem cannot afford. There is nothing that betters the lives of our youth directly.
For years the Salvation Army and other modestly funded school programs have historically carried the burden of positively affecting our youth through summer programs and after school programs. However they have been over burdened, filled to capacity, and in some cases defunded rendering them unable to capture the thousands of youths that are lured into deadly gang alliances. Harlem’s youth violence will not be cured with a new Macy’s or a Chuck E. Cheese. It will take investment into our own community to provide outlets where youths can take refuge.
Secondly, it will involve real, effective meetings and summits that our youths can connect to. I am grateful that these emergency summits and meetings have been called. Their purpose is to show the community that these events are not being ignored. Now these symbolic gestures must be met with action and a call for measurable results. The people we must have present at these meetings are the youths themselves. And they are not going to show up to places where politicians whom they cannot connect with or law enforcement officials are present. Summits must be called by people who were involved in gangs themselves and turned their lives around. These meetings have to be called by people who have been there, done that, and made it out. These are the voices that our youths will listen to.
Finally, this is a call to our parents. There is no denying that there is a strong connection between youth violence and the lack of adult role models in the family. And without falling prey to stereotypes this is still a prevalent condition in Harlem. There are many families where the head male parent is either involved in illegal activities or in jail. And those that are home work long hours and can dedicate little if no time to sitting down with their children. These are real problems. However, there are also families of single mothers (and fathers) who try there best to juggle a job and at the same time stay active in their children’s lives. It is by far no easy task, but it can be done. Parents must reconquer their homes. Even if there were no programs or youth centers they would be the first line of defense. They must fulfill their roles as providers and the most important teachers for their children. They must retake the mantel of order in the household. We cannot let the streets raise our children or they will be killed by the streets. This cannot be a piecemeal effort. The Village of Harlem must take back the reigns of our streets for the sake of our youth. Churches, real-estate developers, politicians, teachers, and all citizens of Harlem old and new need to make a concerted effort to make sure our streets are safe again and remain that way for years to come.
Photo Credit: The New York Times | <urn:uuid:95570103-5973-47e5-a444-56827706e02e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://uptownflavor.com/2008/06/03/does-it-still-takes-a-village/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9758 | 1,220 | 1.625 | 2 |
Transform is pleased to support the upcoming release of new feature documentary 'Cocaine Unwrapped' directed by Rachel Seifert. Below is the film trailer, and a description of the film - followed by details of the upcoming preview screenings in Liverpool (Nov 1st)and London (Nov 10th), and the public premiere on Nov 29th. We have also included a video of a recent episode of Cinepolitics in which Steve Rolles from Transform discusses the film.
Film description from the film makers Dartmouth films;
"This film is the story of cocaine – from production to consumption, as it journeys from the USA to the countries of Latin America. Between scenes we hear from the Western consumers who are unaware of the reality of the trade which their consumption supports. Major Neill Franklin was a police officer for 33 years on the streets of Baltimore. As he drives around the now devastated, boarded up and frequently deserted streets of his community he explains how the decline of industry pushed many heads of households into illegal drug dealing. Incredibly, as he describes how a drugs deal is done on the streets, we see one played out in front of our eyes. Streets where once it was fun to live are not now safe – even in the daytime. Drawing on his experience as a law enforcement officer, Franklin is certain that the USA’s drug policies need to change.
In Columbia 140,000 members of the police are fighting the war on drugs – one of them, Lieutenant Jose Castro takes us on an operation to manually eradicate a coca plantation which, as the country’s vice president explains, is a key part of the war against drugs, which in his country is tied up with paramilitary and criminal gangs. But for Maria, a small farmer in the Tumaco region, the indiscriminate aerial spraying kills not just her coca but her chocolate, banana and yucca plants. As local community leaders explain, the programme causes ill health, economic stagnation and massive displacement of the population. Cesar Gavira, president of Columbia from 1990-94, believes that the social damage caused by the war against
drugs is “terrible….it destroys the lives of people who are not criminals and who are just trying to survive.”
Bolivia is taking a different approach. As president Evo Morales explains, coca leaf in its natural state is not cocaine – it is just a leaf. But for twenty years, until 2005, with the support of the USA the Bolivian government waged a war against coca growers, causing death and destruction. This all changed when Morales was elected president and allowed farmers to grow limited amounts of coca, as we hear from Lucio, a local farmer. At the meeting of the Chapare Coca Growers Union the local co-ordinator Tomas Rejas urges his members to support the government policy of reducing overall production, switching to other crops. And at the Windsor tea factory we see how coca tea is made for the consumer market – but a market which Bolivia cannot exploit because the UN Vienna Convention limits its export. Bolivia not, however, a cocaine free country, as we see when we join the Bolivian anti-drug police as they discover – and destroy – a cocaine factory in the jungle.
As Bolivia abandoned the war against drugs, Mexico stepped it up. We arrive in Cuidad Juarez as the police discover the body of yet another victim of the internecine battle between the drugs gangs. A local journalist, Luis, explains how the level of violence has escalated in recent years, showing the rows of graves already dug to bury the victims. We hear of violence and intimidation from both former gang members and lawyers. As Sanho Tree, of the Institute for Policy Studies explains, the government intervention destabilised the illegal trade, sparking the escalating war in which, as opposition senator Carlos Navarette claims, has led to the corruption of the police and state. Attorney General Medina Mora is convinced that the government is doing the right thing to create peace and security but points out that there would be no problem is there was no demand.
In Ecuador another South American president is taking a different tack than in the past. Rafael Correa, whose father spent three years in an American prison for drugs trafficking, has pardoned and released over 2000 women drugs mules. People like Theresa, who points out that it is not enough just to be let out of prison – there need to projects to help people earn a legal living. Visiting the women in prison we learn how many became mules out of necessity – widowed, with children but without education, this was the only route out of poverty.
Finally we return to the streets of Mexico and Baltimore. In Mexico we see children as young as 10 who have been drawn into a cycle of street living, drug taking and begging. People like Dr Huber Brocca are running a shelter to help get them off drugs but his hope is that the war on drug is replaced by a war on poverty. And in Baltimore we meet prisoner Erik Thompson, a street dealer imprisoned for 25 years – more than some murderers, more than some paedophiles. As Neill Franklin concludes – incarceration is not solving the problem, it is destroying communities. Gil Kerlikowske – President Obama’s drugs “czar” says that in future there will be a more balanced strategy, combining treatment and prevention as well as enforcement. But as the concluding contributions from many of the film’s contributors say: this is a problem of the West – we are the consumers who create the demand."
Cocaine Unwrapped – Preview Screenings
1st November screening at Picturehouse at Fact Liverpool at 6pm.
Tickets available here
10th November screening at Stratford East Picturehouse in London at 8:30pm.
Tickets avaialable here
Cocaine Unwrapped – Public Premiere
29th November screening at Curzon Soho in London (tickets for this not on sale yet)
- Cocaine Unwrapped website
- Facebook page | <urn:uuid:4c5fe787-52eb-47b9-9e72-dc061f7f4be2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-feature-documentary-cocaine.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961129 | 1,237 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Most travelers typically make their way to the major square of a big city when exploring. Here are a few of the world’s most iconic squares.
It is impossible to just walk through Marrakesh’s Djemma el-Fna. You’ll be sidetracked by performers of all sorts, colorful water sellers and at night endless rows of outdoor food stalls.
Museums, government buildings and the entrance to the Forbidden City flank Beijing’s massive Tiananmen Square.
Mexico City’s Zocalo sits on the site of the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, which was conquered by Spain centuries ago. You can still see Aztec dancers and shaman perform their ancient rituals.
St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City is where many come to see the Pope give his blessing and to take in the beauty of the Basilica of the same name.
What iconic squares of the world have you explored or would like to?
Previous Posts in this Series: | <urn:uuid:576d77a3-0d37-4cfa-a2f7-45558aec49c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://escapenewyork.blogspot.com/2009/03/iconic-squares-from-around-world.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931331 | 212 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Focus on facts and avoid the ‘do-something disease’ | Letter to the Editor
January 11, 2013 · 10:57 AM
Any crisis, whether it be an airplane crash from terrorists, automobile accident by a drunk driver or a mass shooting of innocent lives, often causes a public outcry to do something. Unfortunately, government action to do something often results in a loss of freedom to law-abiding citizens and no impact whatsoever on the problem being addressed.
Rahm Emanual, White House Chief of Staff from 2009 to 2010 and now the Mayor of Chicago, said “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
Now the Obama Administration wants to pass stricter gun-control laws on law-abiding citizens that will not affect these types of tragedies. Criminals that want to get a gun will get one regardless of the law.
The Obama Administration tries to pass their agenda based on emotion. Because we are a conscientious, caring society it is very easy for us to just act out of emotion and ignore the facts. In essence, we feel good that we have done something, in spite of the lack of evidence that what we did has any impact. So lets try to remove the emotional part of this issue and concentrate on the facts.
Australia and England have some of the strictest gun-control laws in the world. What they have learned is that law-abiding citizens that gave up their guns have fallen prey to criminals. Criminals know that law-abiding citizens do not have any way to protect themselves. So crime has gone up.
The article titled “The Failure of British Gun Control Law” states: In the period 1981-96, as American crime rates fell, British crime rates rose. Britain now has higher rates of robbery, assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft than the United States. They also state, “Of course, most readers of this column are already aware that gun control largely keeps guns out of the hands of the people that aren’t a problem. What about the people that gun control should disarm? Recent newspaper coverage from Britain suggests that after completely banning semi-automatic rifles and shotguns in the 1980s after the Hungerford Massacre, as well as all handguns after the Dunblane Massacre, they still have a big problem with guns in the wrong hands.
Thomas Sowell wrote an article titled “The Great Gun Control Fallacy.” He writes the following, “The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens; while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.”
Remember that guns do not kill people. People kill people using many tools to accomplish it such as guns, knives, poison, etc. In stead of dealing with the facts, Vice President Joe Biden and Harry Reid, senate majority leader, are right now trying to pass stricter gun laws before the Newtown tragedy wears off. Remember their motto, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” I don’t know what is good about a crisis. I guess they see it as an opportunity to increase the size of government through ineffectual legislation. Too bad they did not move that fast during the fiscal-cliff crisis.
Shari Newton, Redmond | <urn:uuid:a1765c52-8a8c-4eca-a2bf-7b219f4699c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.redmond-reporter.com/opinion/letters/186505641.html | 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 | 0.962746 | 722 | 1.703125 | 2 |
One of the global Occupy movement's longest-running encampments has come to an end in Hong Kong, as bailiffs cleared out anti-capitalist activists and their belongings from a site underneath HSBC's Asian headquarters.
The last of the protesters was removed from the site by late afternoon on Monday. They had spent the day in scuffles with bailiffs, who were carrying out a court order to clear the campsite in a large public passageway in the heart of the city's financial district.
The bailiffs pushed and shoved activists, who had ignored the order requiring them to leave the site by 27 August. Some were carried away forcibly and taken outside a perimeter, where they were released.
As nightfall neared, a handful of demonstrators clung to two sofas, all that was left of a camp that had included a dozen tents, tables, bookcases, gas cookers and lamps. They were surrounded by black-clad bailiffs who dragged them away one by one after earlier cataloguing and packing up their belongings.
Hong Kong's Occupy movement started camping out under the HSBC building on 15 October, when protesters joined others around the world in a day of demonstrations against corporate excess and economic inequality.
The group, which according to media reports numbered more than 100 at its peak but dwindled to less than a dozen, has outlasted other Occupy encampments around the world that have been shut down by authorities in New York, London and Frankfurt.
The land under the HSBC building where the Occupy activists were living is owned by the bank but legally designated a public passageway. A judge ruled that the activists' occupation of the space went beyond its designated use.
The global Occupy movement is generally thought to have begun on 17 September 2011, when tents sprang up at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. | <urn:uuid:0539df3e-f618-4b96-a9b8-43562890be56> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/11/occupy-hong-kong-camp-hsbc?newsfeed=true | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98087 | 370 | 1.71875 | 2 |
View Full Version : To water or not to water...that is my question
03-15-2011, 07:18 PM
OK, I have been on various different cresty sites and some say cresteds won't drink from water dishes because they can't see them so mist and then others say that water dishes are the primary water source and misting is just a back up. I want to know if i should put a water dish in, I currently mist twice a day.
03-15-2011, 07:30 PM
I've watched mine drink from her water dish on more than one occasion. I say do both.
03-15-2011, 07:34 PM
I've never seen mine drink from his, but I've seen evidence of him climbing in it.
I do both- no matter which drinking method (and each gecko may gecko may have different preferences), it offers better humidity level doing both. IMHO, of course.
03-15-2011, 09:33 PM
I've seen both of mine drink from their water dishes, and they seem to like putting their feet in the water. I would say put them in.
03-15-2011, 09:34 PM
All my Cresteds have water dishes and I've watched them drink plenty of times. I also mist them.
03-15-2011, 10:12 PM
I also say do both. They will almost always drink from a misting, and even if they don't drink from a water dish, its never a bad thing to have it in there.... It also depends on the humidity in the room. We used to use misting to keep the humidity up, but not that we keep the entire room humid, we mist much much less and use water dishes as the primary water source.
03-15-2011, 10:17 PM
I do both. I've seen my adults drink out of their dishes often and they don't seem to drink the droplets from mistings a great deal. However, my little babies really seem to like their water as mist. But they also get small dishes of water too. It helps a bit with humidity and gives them another option. I've always been a bit skeptical of that whole "they don't use/need a water dish" line of reasoning. I doubt that it really rains every two or three hours in their native habitat, so I bet they do drink from shallow pools and not just rain and dew.
03-15-2011, 10:39 PM
I now use water dishes as an absolute must, but am also going to get a humidifier set up in the gecko room(s). It really depends on your ambient humidity, dehydration is a killer. :(
03-15-2011, 10:56 PM
I've only had mine for two weeks, but he seems to like having a water dish in there. I haven't seen him drink from it, but i have seen him jump and goof off in it.
So, it certainly can't hurt to put it in there.
03-15-2011, 11:11 PM
Mine wil drink from it ONLY if i replace it late at night, other than that it seems to enjoy bathing in it and pooping in it... as of now though it sleeps on the dish once its dry!
03-15-2011, 11:30 PM
You guys are great, I will put a dish in tonight!
03-22-2011, 08:32 PM
I just caught Zeus drinking water from his dish and made me remember this particular thread so I wanting to post a picture of him in the act.
sorry for the bad picture!
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.0 Copyright © 2013 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:1076f6e0-6ce4-415b-af0a-2bae43c2133f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pangeareptile.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-47570.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972792 | 793 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Following comments from the CCTV lead at the Metropolitan Police Service, the British Security Industry Association has agreed that there is a need for a more cohesive approach in the application of CCTV systems in the UK.
BSIA CCTV Section Chairman, Pauline Norstrom, comments: "CCTV is playing a valuable part in crime prevention and detection in this country. However, there is a need for a more cohesive and holistic approach by CCTV stakeholders to ensure that the benefits of advancing technology are utilised effectively. This is already being undertaken in the form of the National CCTV Strategy, in which the BSIA is already heavily involved. CCTV has evolved over a number of years and in some cases the management of the technology has taken place on an adhoc basis with systems owned by both the public sector and private companies. This evolution has meant that there have been areas of disconnect across government agencies. However, now this issue has been recognised by the authorities and work is being undertaken to ensure that CCTV systems are used - both proactively to deter crime and more effectively to gather vital evidence - in a more structured way."
"Detective Chief Inspector Mike Neville also commented that little thought has gone into how CCTV images will be used in court. The industry has been working to combat this over recent years and a new British Standard BS 8495 which covers the use of digital CCTV images in court has been created to address this issue. Users of CCTV systems should make sure that their systems comply with that standard to ensure that images carry sufficient weight in court."
"CCTV will continue to play an important part in the security and safety of people in the UK. Research has shown that it reduces fear of crime amongst communities and there are many examples of the technology not only preventing crime, but also playing a significant part in the detection of crime. The Jamie Bulger case, the London bombings and the recent Tonbridge convictions are just three high profile examples of where CCTV can make a significant contribution to solving crime. Through the Police, Government, CCTV industry and the users of systems working more closely together, the technology can be used even more effectively." | <urn:uuid:35940a91-c44b-48f9-b137-897c0db85bad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.securityinfowatch.com/press_release/10547148/british-security-industry-cohesive-approach-needed-for-cctv | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967762 | 424 | 1.6875 | 2 |
By Ian Lovett, 8/12/2010
For tourists in Hollywood, in addition to the Walk of Fame, the Hollywood Sign and the Sunset Strip, the list of destinations often includes homes where famous film scenes were shot or where movie stars live. Up and down Hollywood Boulevard, people hand out tour bus brochures, offering tourists a chance to glimpse the homes of Madonna, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
These tour buses have been a Hollywood fixture for years, with the oldest company, Starline Tours, founded in 1935. Many city officials have also highlighted the importance of the tourism industry in the city’s economic recovery. However, the proliferation of tour companies during the last year has led to confrontations on Hollywood Boulevard, and complaints from Hollywood area residents who live near famous homes.
Patty Morrissey, a resident of the area just north of Sunset Boulevard near Orange Drive, said she and 25 neighbors conducted a survey on Friday, July 30, sitting out on the corner from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m., during which time they counted 113 tour buses. She said the buses often illegally block traffic, make too much noise, and sometimes come by after dark when tour-goers can see in the windows of her house.
“The buses have always been a part of living here, and I know this issue is not unique to our neighborhood,” Morrissey said. “But it’s really gotten bad this summer. I understand it’s an important industry for L.A., and we’re not trying to shut the buses down. Nobody is asking for any new laws. We’re simply asking that the buses follow existing state and city codes, which these companies are just flaunting.”
In response to residents’ concerns, Los Angeles City Councilmember Tom LaBonge, 4th District, introduced a motion last week that would ban tour companies from using amplified sound on their buses, instead requiring they provide passengers with headsets. The phase-in of headsets would begin next summer, though tour companies would not have to be in compliance until July, 2015.
The Fourth Council District Office has also been in touch with tour companies about the issue. Starline Tours voluntarily made the switch to headsets on all its buses earlier this year, while several other companies are preparing to follow suit.
Local residents said they were happy to see the city taking up the issue, but hoped officials would focus on the traffic issues as well as the noise.
Cara Rule, the Hollywood United Neighborhood Council representative for Beachwood Canyon, said tour buses often parked illegally at the top of Deronda Drive, where they blocked a fire road into Griffith Park. In response, the local homeowners association has paid around $2,000 to put up signs that will direct buses to places where they can legally park to view the Hollywood Sign and Lake Hollywood. LaBonge is also planning to contact GPS and rental car companies to make sure the navigation systems direct people to the right places.
For the tour companies themselves, however, the new regulations pose additional costs and challenges at a time when the economic downturn and the proliferation of new tour companies has already driven down profit margins.
Jan Sherwood, vice-president of LACity Tours, said her company is in the process of converting their four open-top buses to headsets, which would cost about $2,000 per vehicle. She also worries about the experience that headsets would offer for tour-goers. In addition, the City of Beverly Hills has begun strictly enforcing laws about loading and unloading passengers. Her company has been cited four times in Beverly Hills, each ticket costing more than $200.
“I don’t know what they want from us anymore,” Sherwood said. “We’re supposed to bring these people here so they spend money, but at the same time we have to follow all these new guidelines. A lot of the new companies are operating illegally. We’re obviously going to comply with the new ordinance, but it’s going to be costly, especially with economic cutbacks, and the city not controlling rogue operators taking more and more of our business.”
Kerry Morrison, executive director of the Hollywood Business Improvement District, said the proliferation of tour companies on Hollywood Boulevard has also become an increasing cause for concern.
Next month, a task force that includes representatives from the BID; the office of City Council President Eric Garcetti, 13th District; the Los Angeles Police Department; and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce plan to take up the issue. Earlier this year, the task force orchestrated the removal of masked characters from the boulevard. Morrison said on one busy Saturday, a member of the task force counted 50 different people hawking tours on the boulevard between Vine Street and Orange Drive.
“It’s an unacceptable situation,” Morrison said. “Businesses have started popping up all over, and there doesn’t appear to be any enforcement. It’s led to some territorial turf disputes and even in some cases violent confrontation. Our efforts to get this under control all comes under the overarching objective our board laid out in January to restore civility to the sidewalks of Hollywood. All of these things detract from civil sidewalks. We’re trying to professionalize tourism and the tour business in Hollywood.”
Enforcement, however, remains difficult, in part because so many different city and state agencies have a hand in regulating tour companies, including the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, the California Highway Patrol, the Bureau of Street Services, and the Los Angeles Police Department.
“It’s quite a convoluted process,” said Capt. Beatrice Girmala of the LAPD’s Hollywood Division. “A lot of different regulatory bureaus are responsible for it. I really think we have to take a comprehensive look at things.” | <urn:uuid:b691bedb-53b4-4d54-9040-5815e87cdfde> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://parklabreanewsbeverlypress.com/news/2010/08/tour-buses-rile-neighbors/ | 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 | 0.962395 | 1,215 | 1.695313 | 2 |
NEWTOWN, Conn. -- Grieving parents, families and friends will hold the first funerals today for victims of the school shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead.
The funerals come the day after President Barack Obama met with victim's families and spoke at a prayer vigil.
For people in the community, the terrible reality has set in but the pain has only just begun.
Songs, prayers, and memorials are taking place everywhere across Newtown. A steady line of pilgrims walked the hill toward Sandy Hook Elementary School to remember the 26 students and brave teachers who died there.
Please join us in praying for the families and parents in Connecticut who have lost their children and loved ones. Share your prayers on CBN's on Pray for Newtown, special page.
Christmas trees have been decorated for the victims. A memorial of flowers, teddy bears and candles brings visitors to tears.
People come and go, but the sadness never leaves. Yousef Hattar, from Danbury, Conn., walked the hill with his 6-year-old son.
"We don't know why things happen, but they do happen unfortunately," he said. "There is evil, there's an abundance of evil in this world and we have to confront it."
Some gave thanks that their children survived.
"She heard everything, the shots, the doors slamming and people yelling," one parent said of her young daughter.
"I called my friend and we felt so bad saying this, but we were like, 'Thank God it's not our kids' school."
Another resident also thanked God it wasn't "our kids' school."
Just a week before the shootings, children and their families were here for a happy tradition -- the lighting of the town Christmas tree. People who were here say the air was filled with excitement for the coming celebration of the birth of Christ.
"There's face painting and all the stores are open and there's Christmas music and everybody's running around. And then at six o'clock they light the tree and everybody goes, 'Woooo.' Right there," one grieving parent said. "And now there's two donated trees to mourn the dead people. It's pretty bad."
"It's very difficult for this area," another resident said. "We always say this could never happen to us and it's happening to us."
At a prayer vigil Sunday, President Obama offered comfort by reminding residents the nation grieves with them.
"Let the little children come to me, Jesus said, and do not hinder them for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven," he said. "God has called them all home."
Some churches are keeping their doors open 24-hours for prayer. Saint Rose of Lima Catholic Church was hit especially hard. It will handle eight of the funerals. Some of the children, the shooter's mother, and the shooter all attended the church.
For Sunday mass it was standing room only. People came to the church right after learning the news. They continue to come to reflect and heal.
On Sunday, sermons across the region focused on the tragedy.
Pastor Rocky Veach, minister at Connections Church, is uniquely suited for this moment. More than a decade ago he pastored a church near Columbine High School in Colorado when two teens killed 13 people.
"It's an unfortunate privilege, I guess, I've been through two of these things," he said. "But I think in some ways we're prepared to deal with some of the issues that are going to arise over the next week for us."
Emotions of shock, sorrow, and anger continue.
"For the children, innocent children, this never should have happened. How could this happen? Only God knows," Waterbury, Conn., resident Gia Lawe said.
"God can win with any hand that's dealt and so even when a bad hand is dealt God has a way of turning things," Sam Miller, with Community Church, said.
In many ways this idyllic, New England Community will never be the same. The hurt will linger long after the president, grief counselors, and TV cameras leave.
But there is hope that the pain will open hearts to God's love and peace.
"Man, keep us lifted in prayer because God will give us the answers," Pastor Veach asked. "He'll help us tell people what they need to hear and we don't always know what to say, but we know He does so pray for us." | <urn:uuid:5fa1413c-f824-49cc-96dd-61a8c7f51f37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2012/December/Grieving-Town-Begins-Funerals-for-Sandy-Hook-Victims/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977152 | 930 | 1.625 | 2 |
(1) If the parties have agreed to use a security procedure to detect changes or errors and one party has conformed to the procedure, but the other party has not and the nonconforming party would have detected the change or error had that party also conformed, the conforming party may avoid the effect of the changed
or erroneous electronic record.
(2) In an automated transaction involving an individual, the individual may avoid the effect of an electronic record that resulted from an error made by the individual in dealing with the electronic agent of another person if the electronic agent did not provide an opportunity for the prevention or correction of the error and, at the time the individual learns of the error, the individual:
(A) Promptly notifies the other person of the error and that the individual did not intend to be bound by the electronic record received by the other person;
(B) Takes reasonable steps, including steps that conform to the other person's reasonable instructions, to return to the other person or, if instructed by the other person, to destroy the consideration received, if any, as a result of the erroneous electronic record; and
(C) Has not used or received any benefit or value from the consideration, if any, received from the other person.
(3) If neither subdivision (1) nor subdivision (2) of this section applies, the change or error has the effect provided by other law, including the law of mistake, and the parties' contract, if any.
(4) Subdivisions (2) and (3) of this subsection may not be varied by agreement.
Note: WV Code updated with legislation passed through the 2012 1st Special Session | <urn:uuid:faa54980-91ca-4fa7-9c31-f73004311294> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.legis.state.wv.us/WVCODE/ChapterEntire.cfm?chap=39a&art=1§ion=10 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935215 | 345 | 1.546875 | 2 |
By George Cicotte and William Martin
Employers have less than a year to decide whether they will comply with the employer-mandate provisions of the Affordable Care Act and offer employees affordable employer sponsored health care or pay a penalty. Although the ACA, also known as Obamacare, does not specifically require employers to provide health insurance for employees, the failure to do so may result in an excise tax penalty imposed under the Internal Revenue Code. These provisions go into effect in just under a year, on January 1, 2014.
The play or pay provisions of Obamacare generally provide that an applicable large employer is subject to an assessable payment or excise tax if it (1) fails to offer coverage; or (2) offers inadequate coverage. Only applicable large employers may be liable for an assessable payment. An applicable large employer for a calendar year is an employer who employed an average of at least 50 full-time employees working at least 30 hours per week during the previous calendar year, or a combination of full-time, part-time and seasonal employees that equals at least 50. For example, if an employer had 40 full-time employees working at least 30 or more hours per week, and 20 half-time employees, this would be the equivalent of 50 full-time employees for the purposes of Obamacare.
The penalty for failure to offer health care coverage will apply if a large employer fails to provide full-time employees and dependents the opportunity to enroll in an eligible employer-sponsored health plan.
The separate, “inadequate coverage” tax penalty may be imposed on a large employer that offers full-time employees and dependents the opportunity to enroll in an eligible employer-sponsored plan, if one or more full-time employees is certified to the employer as having received a federal premium tax credit or cost-sharing reduction. Employees who earn up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible to receive a premium credit. For 2013, 400 percent of the federal poverty level is $92,200 for a family of four.
The inadequate coverage penalty will not apply if the employer-sponsored plan provides “adequate” coverage. Coverage is considered adequate when it is affordable (an employee’s required contribution for self-only coverage does not exceed 9.5 percent of the employee’s household income); and provides minimum value (pays at least 60 percent of the cost of covered services).
Under the ACA, the assessable payment for failure to offer coverage is based on all full-time employees of an employer, excluding the first 30. The assessable payment amount is generally $2,000 per full-time employee per year, and it accrues monthly. For example, an employer with 75 full-time employees that fails to offer coverage to its employees would be liable for yearly penalties totaling $90,000 (75 FTE – 30 = 45 FTE, times $2,000 for each FTE = $90,000). The penalty would be payable in monthly installments of $7,500.
The second potential penalty — the one for inadequate coverage — is based on the number of full-time employees who are certified to the employer as having received a premium tax credit or cost-sharing reduction with respect to the employee’s purchase of health insurance for himself or herself on a (soon-to-be established) health care exchange. This penalty amount is generally $3,000 multiplied by the number of full-time employees who receive credits for exchange coverage, and it also accrues monthly. However, if the basic penalty for not providing any coverage would be smaller, then it applies instead.
Notably, employers will not be subject to a penalty as a result of an employee’s receipt of a premium tax credit or cost sharing reduction with respect to coverage for a dependent. Furthermore, employers may not deduct the cost of any assessable payment amount due under the play or pay mandate.
The factors employers must consider when deciding whether to play or pay will vary extensively depending on each employer’s circumstances and line of work. Employers should begin now to evaluate their business goals and implement an appropriate strategy to manage requirements relating to Obamacare. For a fact specific analysis and recommendation relating to the employer mandate or other matters relating to health care reform employers should consult with legal counsel that is familiar with the ACA and related guidance from the applicable governmental agencies.
George F. Cicotte founded the Cicotte Law Firm, LLC in 2002. He has practiced law as an ERISA attorney since 1995, serving clients throughout the U.S. The Firm’s practice involves health and retirement plan design, health reform planning and compliance, labor relations, federal taxation, and advising on a myriad of employment and fiduciary responsibility issues. William L. Martin, III graduated from Gonzaga University School of Law in 2007, then completed a legal masters degree in tax at the University of Washington in 2008. He has practiced with the Cicotte Law Firm since 2009, focusing on ERISA and tax matters. | <urn:uuid:fcaeb921-e04d-443a-ab7b-1ede6ad8bd81> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tricitiesbusinessnews.com/2013/01/affordable-care-act-raises-questions-for-business-owners/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956716 | 1,020 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Howdy, friends: quick post today as I’m up to my commuter horse Revenue’s a$$ in meetings today and the rest of this week. As we shall see, it’s never too soon to start the Great Forgetting! (That is, the tendency of men and women both to choose to ignore, overlook, or hide the importance of women throughout history.) Here goes:
- NPR featured a story last night on two women’s efforts to combat the Great Forgetting of women’s role in the Seattle punk and grunge music scene in the early 1990s. “[Gretta] Harley and [Sarah] Rudinoff also wanted to address the disconnect between the history they had lived and the histories they saw written. In 2011, the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind sparked numerous tributes to the grunge era that didn’t capture the Seattle music community they remembered. ‘We started looking at the books that were written by different authors, and the women were absent, almost completely absent,’ Harley says. ‘And we thought, ‘Wow, this is a story that really hasn’t happened yet.” “ So, after recording more than 30 oral histories of women who were a part of the scene, they wrote a play called “These Streets” in order to document women’s presence in the grunge movement.
- Speaking of oral history: Temple graduate student Dan Royles describes his Kickstarter campaign to raise $6,000 to transcribe the oral histories he has done on AIDS activism in the African American community in the 1980s and 1990s. As of this morning, he’s at $5,374–let’s raise a little coin for him in the next 36 hours, shall we? (If he doesn’t make his goal, he doesn’t earn a dime.) Come on: even if you don’t care much about recent U.S. history, his description of the work he put into developing his Kickstarter campaign is worth at least a double sawbuck, don’t'cha think? I never did anything so worthwhile or noble in graduate school, so as soon as I publish this post, I’m going to give him $75.
- Commenter and fellow blogger quixote writes in an email: “This seems directly relevant to the value — or not — of online learning, although I haven’t seen anyone making the connection: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer causes uproar with telecommuting ban.“ ‘”To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices,” Jackie Reses, Yahoo’s human resources chief, wrote in the memo sent out Friday.” So, sometime showing up for a little face time actually enhances productivity, communication, and yes, learning? “‘The surprising question we get is: ‘How many people telecommute at Google?’ And our answer is: ‘As few as possible,’” Patrick Pichette, Google’s chief financial officer, said recently. ‘There is something magical about spending the time together.’” quixote concludes, “What’s sauce for the goose has to be sauce for the gander.”
Now, get out there and make a little magic, as recommended by our most influential corporate overlords! (Just how many people have Yahoo or Google hired with degrees from Phoenix, Kaplan, or Western Governors “University?” versus Stanford or CalTech? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) | <urn:uuid:4ff63765-8dff-4e6d-8826-29be7e00e584> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.historiann.com/2013/02/27/mid-week-roundup-its-never-to-soon-to-start-the-great-forgetting/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96309 | 790 | 1.507813 | 2 |
KANE COUNTY—The Kane County Health Department is alerting residents that True Taste, LLC of Kenosha, Wis., is recalling vacuum-packaged Hot Smoked Rainbow Trout, Hot Smoked Whitefish, Hot Smoked Herring, Hot Smoked Mackerel, Hot Smoked Salmon Steak, Cold Smoked Mackerel and Cold Smoked Whitefish because they have the potential to be contaminated with clostridium botulinum, a bacterium which can cause life-threatening illness or death. Consumers are warned not to use the product even if it does not look or smell spoiled.
Although no illnesses have been reported to date in connection with this recall, it was distributed in Illinois. The recalled product is vacuum packaged and can be identified with either the True Taste Label or the Lowell Foods Label in Illinois. The recalled product has a white sticker applied to the package with two sets of numbers. The first set of numbers represents the date of processing; the second set of numbers represents the best if used by date. This recall includes all production dates beginning on Jan. 1, 2012, through current.
Botulism, a potentially fatal form of food poisoning, can cause the following symptoms: general weakness, dizziness, double vision and trouble with speaking or swallowing. Difficulty in breathing, weakness of other muscles, abdominal distension and constipation may also be common symptoms. People experiencing these problems should seek immediate medical attention.
The potential for contamination was identified following routine sample collection by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. Consumers that may still have packages of the recalled smoked fish in their homes should not consume the product and are urged to return them to the place of purchase for a full refund.
True Taste LLC has voluntarily halted production and is cooperating fully with the involved regulatory authorities. This recall is being conducted with the knowledge of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
More information is available at www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/default.htm. | <urn:uuid:38d96584-5aeb-47e1-8aa3-2879424899d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://elburnherald.com/27595/2012/12/27/true-taste-llc-recalls-fish-products-due-health-risks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943759 | 408 | 1.617188 | 2 |
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Why young people are flocking to global health and poverty – a series preview
For the past few weeks I’ve been talking to young people, mostly around Seattle, who are involved in global poverty issues. And I’m blown away by the number of initiatives being pursued by people in their 20′s and early 30's.
- A fellow heading to Mongolia to work on microfinance
- A young Bengali couple who have started an organization to fund smaller projects that often get ignored
- A woman who plans to work at the International Criminal Court on women’s issues
Others have noted this before, but my conversations have certainly shown it’s true: There’s something special about this generation, Gen-Y or the Millennials. They are much more internationally aware than many of their older cousins or parents, and they are very socially motivated. Whether it’s starting a business or working through a non-profit, they want to have a social impact.
I’ve written about the networking that’s happening in Seattle, creating more of a shared sense of effort or momentum, through the “Party with a Purpose.” I think the individual stories, of young people who’ve not only gotten involved but are making real progress, are more powerful.
The series begins this week on Humanosphere.org | <urn:uuid:80fcdf11-17df-40c7-92a5-f65b3e2854bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kplu.org/post/why-young-people-are-flocking-global-health-and-poverty-%E2%80%93-series-preview | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959959 | 290 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Twenty years ago, Wendy Kopp started Teach for America in her Princeton dorm room. Today she finds herself and her pet project (now a $200 million enterprise) on the front lines of the battle over how to save America’s failing schools. Do she and her young army have what it takes to win?
It had to take guts. Last August, at the start of a back-to-school season marked by gushing reviews of Davis Guggenheim’s education-reform documentary, Waiting for Superman, Wendy Kopp got up on a Las Vegas stage and ventured the opinion that Superman maybe wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Her position was not necessarily a crowd pleaser. After all, Waiting for Superman, which follows five children and their families as they try to navigate the beleaguered world of public education, makes a passionate case for charter schools. And Kopp was speaking—along with three other leading reformers—at an event convened by the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the well-regarded network of charter schools run by her husband, Richard Barth. Billed as the “godmother” of education reform by the program’s emcee, she was famous—and, in this crowd, revered—for having shaken up the education establishment with Teach for America (TFA), a highly selective program that places recent college graduates in troubled public schools.
Waiting for Superman delivers a controversial message: that bad teaching is to blame for the sorry state of American education. The film casts as the enemies of progress recalcitrant teachers and their unions—the very sort of people who have long disdained Teach for America because it places neophyte instructors in the toughest of schools after just five weeks of training and requires them to make only a two-year commitment to the classroom. Yet Kopp—a shy woman whose body language onstage looked like a plea for invisibility—wasn’t ready to jump on the film’s blame-the-teacher bandwagon. “We are lurching and have for the last 20 years, after that one silver bullet,” she said. In this movie, she continued, her voice steadily gaining confidence, “it’s the unions. You know what? It’s actually not. There are many, many issues in this . . . I don’t think we should blame anyone who’s stuck in this system for the fact that as a country we never decided that we want our education system to be transformational. We need to come together as a system. Let’s come together with a different idea about education.”
She went on to speak bluntly about charter schools, some of which, she said, are led by people who “should very possibly be put in jail”—this in front of an audience full of charter-school professionals. It was classic Kopp. Eschewing ideology, refusing to play to the crowd, and remaining true to her own positive message are what Kopp is best known for. She is successful, those closest to her say, because of her unshakable vision: a focus on what can be done rather than on the obstacles lying in the way. The achievement gap in this country is, Kopp says, “a solvable problem,” and her organization is built on the impressively optimistic idea that “this generation can make a huge difference as teachers in their first years out of college.”
“Wendy is the type of person who becomes obsessed with a thing and will work it until the wheels fall off,” says former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, a heroine of Waiting for Superman and a TFA alumna. “Then she’ll pick it up, rebuild it, refine and improve it over and over and over again until it does what she wants it to do perfectly. Wendy is obsessed with closing the achievement gap and is convinced that TFA is the best way to do that. She has birthed, grown, groomed, rethought, refined, repurposed and expanded the organization to do just that.” | <urn:uuid:b1bd3142-0f26-439f-b457-ab850f04f15a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.more.com/news/womens-issues/class-warfare | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97216 | 868 | 1.835938 | 2 |
That is number whose insurance coverage has been "saved" by the waiver given by the Secretary of HHS.This includes 115,000 from McDonalds and 350,000 from the United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund and according to IBD some 28 other companies or entities.
Quoting from IBD:
"How do you get a waiver from a law, anyway? This law was passed by elected representatives of Congress. How can unelected bureaucrats say some must obey this law but some don't have to?
Well, in lieu of specific guidelines in the law, it is riddled with the phrase "the Secretary shall determine." Which means we serve at the whim of the secretary of health and human services, currently Kathleen Sebelius."Rule of law or rule of whim or of political expediency. This is likely just a sample sample of the many determinations that will be made by the HHS Secretary as ACA unfolds. | <urn:uuid:e1c7d7d1-69f0-44f4-a28c-b90696ea6d0e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mdredux.blogspot.com/2010/10/secretary-hha-shall-determinecan-we-all.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979708 | 186 | 1.742188 | 2 |
The summary judgment in Viacom’s suit against Google is arguably the news of the week. And according to Thomas Sydnor, a Senior Fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation and the director of its Center for the Study of Digital Property, it’s news that negatively affects us all.
While Google’s General Counsel Kent Walker called the judgment “an important victory” which “follows established judicial consensus that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online,” Sydnor took a very different view.
In a press release issued by the aforementioned Progress & Freedom Foundation, Sydnor claims that YouTube used “mass piracy as start-up capital for their product” to “drive law-abiding competitors out of the market.”
Compelling rhetoric, sure, but Sydnor also gets into the legal specifics of why he disagrees with the court’s ruling in favor of Google:
For example, Section 512(c)(A)(ii) denies safe-harbor protections to any hosting-site operator that “is aware of facts and circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent.” But Judge Stanton persuaded himself that a hosting-site operator can actually know that “infringement is ‘ubiquitous’” on its site, yet be wholly unaware of any “facts and circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent.” Appellate courts should find such self-contradiction most unpersuasive.
This case has been so massive, so endless, and so unflattering to both sides that there are many ways you can frame this judgment. But the fact that the judge determined that YouTube is both aware of the “ubiquitous” infringements on its site and somehow exempt from any responsibility for that is bizarre.
We are all about fair use here; we don’t think UMG should have sued Stephanie Lenz. But there are literally hundreds of thousands of videos that ought to be providing income to rights holders, either in the form of royalties or licensing. Google apparently has no interest in helping the rights holders that are central to their success, either by changing their terms of service or by improving their identification software, and for that reason alone, we are inclined to agree with Sydnor in saying that everybody loses. | <urn:uuid:cd60a61c-029b-46cb-ab07-1f0ee396baf2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://weallmakemusic.com/pff-we-all-lose-in-the-aftermath-of-the-viacom-v-google-ruling/ | 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 | 0.950551 | 487 | 1.664063 | 2 |
By what seems only to be coincidence, there has been a bundle of rich, informative writing about the India news media in the last month. It seemed a good idea to collect the links in one place – and they turn out to have a common theme.
Exhibit One is the James Cameron lecture by N. Ram, until recently editor of The Hindu. As befits his biography, Ram writes as a newspaperman but his magisterial survey does not neglect the astonishing growth of 24-hour news television in India. I have already posted about this lecture, so I’ll summarise brutally and say that Ram’s underlying message was: because Indian news media is a “growth story”, don’t assume that everything is fine.
Second item is a piece in the New Yorker (£) by long-time media analyst Ken Auletta on the Jain brothers who run Bennett & Coleman, the owners of the immensely successful Times of India. Auletta isn’t the first person to write about the changes which have occurred at the Times of India but he is the first writer to lay out with such clarity and force the truly revolutionary ideas which have altered the group’s papers.
I do not mean “revolutionary” in any romantic sense. The insight on which the Jain brothers based their changes at the Times of India and the Economic Times was simple but turned the world of those newspapers upside down. The idea is shocking to journalists like me, brought up on the assumption that newspapers have a democratic function beyond their existence as businesses. Not so, thought the Jains: we’re not in journalism, we’re selling advertising. And so the journalism was gradually but firmly subordinated to adjusting the newspapers to be platforms collecting readers whose attention could be sold to advertisers. This has been so successful and influential, that the group’s executive no longer feel and need to fudge or obscure what they have been doing.
Third was a piece by John Lloyd of the Reuters Institute in Oxford, which contrasts the extraordinary growth of magazines and news channels with the lack of depth and bite in the journalism. The Indian economy has boomed, but so has corruption. News outlets proliferate, celebrity interviewers grill politicians but the country’s problems are neglected. Lloyd quotes one of India’s most experienced journalist-publishers, T N Ninan, calling this the Indian media’s “Dickensian” era.
Lastly, a long backgrounder to these pieces focussed on the media. This News Statesman essay by William Dalrymple helps to explain the paradox of how this huge state can both be a rising economic power and dysfunctional at one and the same time. | <urn:uuid:bfb057fb-4896-49fd-8a8b-3e990a090b85> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://georgebrock.net/indian-media-expanding-alright-but-in-the-wrong-directions/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95567 | 564 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Hospital Impact has been ranked one of the top 50 healthcare blogs by Wikio.
Blogs we like:
by Raymond Hino
In the Lewis Carroll book "Alice in Wonderland," there is a marvelous business lesson on planning for success. Remember when Alice meets the Cheshire Cat early in the story?
She says, "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" The cat wisely says, "That depends a good deal on where you want to go?"
Alice didn't care where she was going. So the cat answers, "Then it doesn't matter which way you go."
That leads me to the question that I want to ask you today. Do you know what direction you want your hospital, system or organization to go in the next few years? And, if you do then do you have a plan to get there?
While most of you will answer "yes" we have a plan, my next question is: Are you using your plan to get your organization where you want it to go?
I have found that, perhaps, the most valuable exercise we can take as an organization to move to the "next level," is to not only create an excellent strategic plan but also to use it effectively to achieve our goals. My practice in recent years has been to bring in as many stakeholders as possible into the planning process from the very beginning.
An excellent way to start is with an all-day planning event in which the invitees include hospital board of directors, employees, medical staff, foundation membership, key stakeholders from the community and experts from the field. With as much input as possible, and with expert facilitation, I have used this process to create a strategic plan to guide the hospital's actions in the areas of physical plant improvements, medical staff growth, program development, community development, financial planning and staff development.
Once we created a plan that satisfied everyone and got it down on paper, then the real work started. The real work is implementing the plan!
I subscribe to the theory that a strategic plan is not meant to simply look attractive and validate the fact that we do indeed plan for our future. A strategic plan is a living and breathing tool, much like a computer or a communications system that enables our organizations to achieve our goals and "raise the bar."
I recommend that the board of directors and the community be involved in implementation of the plan, too. This can be accomplished by delegating oversight and accountability for completion of the plan to the board's planning committee. The planning committee should include not only members of the hospital board, medical staff and hospital staff, but also members of the community.
Each month the planning committee receives an update on a specific set of goals in the plan. In my experience, managers and staff who are accountable for their sections of the plan report on new developments since the last report. They also report on resources necessary for completion and percentage of progress towards completion.
Each manager will report four times each year on progress that they have made on their part of the plan. To close the loop, the planning committee reports to the hospital board each month on progress made on the plan.
I cannot stress enough the importance of creating your plan and converting it to action. That way your organization will get to where it needs to go.
As the Cheshire Cat says, "You're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough."
Raymond Hino, MPA, FACHE is vice president of Healthcare Advisory Services, Inc and a board member of the Health Research & Education Trust. Previously, he served as Chief Executive Officer of Mendocino Coast District Hospital in Fort Bragg, California.
Compare Top Solutions in: | <urn:uuid:f48dd303-f582-4916-b17b-13879df9321b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hospitalimpact.org/index.php/2012/12/17/take_your_hospital_from_strategic_planni | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967713 | 759 | 1.578125 | 2 |
But it appeared to break little new ground about the timeline of the Benghazi attack during which Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens, information specialist Sean Smith and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods - who were contractors working for the CIA - were killed. Stevens' slaying was the first of a U.S. ambassador since 1988.
The board determined that there had been no immediate, specific tactical warning of a potential attack on the 11th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. However, the report said there had been several worrisome incidents in the run-up to the attack that should have set off warning bells.
It did confirm, though, that contrary to initial accounts, there was no protest outside the consulate. It said responsibility for the incident rested entirely with the terrorists who attacked the mission.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, administration officials linked the attack to the spreading protests that had begun in Cairo earlier that day over an American-made, anti-Islamic film. Those comments came after evidence already pointed to a distinct militant attack.
United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on numerous TV talk shows the Sunday after the attack and used the administration talking points linking it to the film. An ensuing brouhaha in the heat of the presidential campaign eventually led her to withdraw her name from consideration to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state in President Barack Obama's second term.
Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., emerging from the Senate briefing on the report, kept up the congressional criticism of Rice.
"Now we all know she had knowledge. She knew what the truth was. It was a cover-up," he said.
While criticizing State Department management in Washington along with the local militia force and contract guards that the mission depended on for protection, the report said U.S. personnel on the ground in Benghazi "performed with courage and readiness to risk their lives to protect their colleagues in a near-impossible situation."
It said the response by Diplomatic Security agents on the scene and CIA operatives at a nearby compound that later came under attack itself had been "timely and appropriate" and absolved the military from any blame. "There was simply not enough time for armed U.S. military assets to have made a difference," it said.
The report also discounted speculation that officials in Washington had refused appeals for additional help after the attack had begun.
"The Board found no evidence of any undue delays in decision making or denial of support from Washington or from the military combatant commanders," it said. To the contrary, the report said the evacuation of the dead and wounded 12 hours after the initial attack was due to "exceptional U.S. government coordination and military response" that helped save the lives of two seriously wounded Americans.
Associated Press writer Donna Cassata contributed to this report.
The Associated Press | <urn:uuid:97e866f9-14f1-4afb-999c-6fecf448f31c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/Dec/19/benghazi-review-slams-state-department-on-security/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979231 | 579 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Open Box 2 is a residential project designed and constructed by San Francisco-based design firm, Feldman Architecture. The existing volumetric 1940s stucco house featuring small, dark rooms was transformed into an elegant two story contemporary home. This involved a team that knew how to combine materials, textures and patterns to shape an outstanding modern home. From the architects, “We opened up every aspect of this urban residence to take advantage of its hilltop site and access to the outdoors. Sunlight enhanced the dramatic transformation of this house from an uninspired 2-storey residence into a sophisticated, modern dwelling. With eco-friendly principles guiding the design direction, elements that once appeared dark and unwelcoming were given a glamorous new beginning with the introduction of translucent glass kitchen tiles, white oak plank floors, and fold away ground level doors. A roof that peels away to reveal a lively deck provides the final hinge to a remarkable open box design.’”
Visit the website of Feldman Architecture here. | <urn:uuid:de08d65d-720c-43f4-89fd-fb257381bce3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.onekindesign.com/2012/03/18/modern-hilltop-house-in-san-francisco/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933944 | 203 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Info: Our guest is Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department. She discusses the departmentís growth in the last twenty-three years she has been a police officer. She talks about the homicide rate in the District of Columbia being the lowest number for the past fifty-one years. She describes the reasons for this number, and looks to the future growth of the area as an opportunity to add officers to the force. Lanier recounts stories of growing up in the Washington, DC area and the problems she encountered after dropping out of school at age 15. She was married, had a child, and was divorced. She joined the police force as a single mother with a ninth grade education. She completed her education by obtaining two Masterís degrees and went on to become the youngest Chief in the history of the department. Chief Lanier discusses some of the criticisms of her administration over the years as well as what she considers the qualities needed to be a successful police officer. | <urn:uuid:af289c6a-d16e-467d-bd76-aab2903c5f6b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.q-and-a.org/Program/?ProgramID=1428 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978588 | 199 | 1.609375 | 2 |
After much thinking and discussion, my husband and I decided to enroll our four-year-old daughter, Abi, in the same church-based preschool her older brother and sister attended. Taking this step made me really nervous for a number of reasons. The main one was that Abi had only been home from Ethiopia for seven months. She was still bonding with us and still learning how to live in a family. I was worried that preschool might seem too much like the orphanage where she used to live. A second worry was that the school had never enrolled a blind student before, and really weren’t set up for disabled students. Were we making a huge mistake? What if the teacher was too overwhelmed by Abi’s needs? We considered switching to a special-needs preschool, but we decided to give this school a try first.
I realized early on that I needed to be proactive in making the school year a success. Since my older two kids had the same teacher, I knew her and trusted her. I approached her with the idea of putting Abi in her class, and asked if she would be willing, if she had a lot of support. Rather than demand Abi have her rights, I approached as a friend, willing to do whatever I needed to do to help. She told me initially she was reluctant, as she hadn’t had any training and was worried that she might not be able to make the learning experience meaningful for Abi. Thankfully, she kept an open mind, and together we began brainstorming.
Years ago, I obtained my Braille transcriber’s certificate, so I was able to offer transcription as a resource immediately. I also showed her some of the ways I’ve adapted materials at home, using textured fabric, puffy paint, or bump dots. I explained how adept Abi already is at navigating. She began to get excited that she would be able to teach Abi in a meaningful way. We chatted about Abi’s work on bonding with me as her mother, and she mentioned that rather than interfere with that, she would be able to enhance and support it by teaching her appropriate interaction with a non-parent such as a teacher. The other children who go home each day with their parents would show her examples of other families.
So far, with three weeks of school past us, Abi is doing better than I could have ever hoped. Her teacher constantly finds creative ways to adapt her materials, such as gluing fabric “clothes” on pictures of friends, asking me to Braille extra copies of a book being read, using her intern as an aide to do one-on-one work with Abi, allowing Abi some independent exploration when it’s safe and appropriate, making an audio recording instead of pictures–the list keeps getting longer! I am completely impressed with her enthusiasm and skill in making each activity meaningful for every student in her class. Truly, we have a gem of a teacher.
One thing the teacher mentioned that she’s learned from us is that Abi is just a normal little kid. She’s no longer intimidated by Abi’s blindness, and she now has confidence that she can teach her just as she teaches the other kids. She realized she has already been making adaptations: if a child is extremely shy, she works with that child to feel more secure. If a child struggles with learning letters, that child gets additional help. Teaching Abi requires little more than the right supports, tools, and being willing to think creatively. Blindness ceased being a defining characteristic of Abi’s personality and became merely one of her many attributes.
For her part, Abi loves preschool! She loves making friends with other children her own age. She loves the routine and the challenge of learning. Playing on the playground, walking in line, singing songs and doing crafts all engage her interest. She hasn’t had any attachment confusion and seems to understand that after school each day, she goes home with her family. She’s learning to recognize letters and names in Braille, and learning to navigate around the halls and playground.
For my part, I’m glad I went with my instinct to enroll Abi in preschool there. I’m glad I did not choose a school based only on Abi’s blindness either, and teachers who may have had special education training but lacked in other areas, like enthusiasm, creativity, or individual care. Abi’s teacher has been reading articles on best ways to teach a blind child, but her attitude of wanting Abi to have a meaningful experience goes a lot farther in my opinion than all the training and methodology in the world. | <urn:uuid:2b8fb6ec-5a4c-4cd6-8d88-ec080f0f365c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.matildaziegler.com/2012/10/05/contributor-erin-jepsen-a-great-teacher/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988175 | 975 | 1.71875 | 2 |
by Mike Ratliff
For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. (John 3:34 ESV)
ὃν γὰρ ἀπέστειλεν ὁ Θεὸς, τὰ ῥήματα τοῦ Θεοῦ λαλεῖ· οὐ γὰρ ἐκ μέτρου δίδωσιν ὁ Θεὸς τὸ Πνεῦμα. (John 3:34 GNT)
In John 3:1-21 our Lord spoke the words of God to “ a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.” In this passage our Lord clears the table and tells it like it is. He tells Nicodemus in v3, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Of course, Nicodemus doesn’t “get it at first and asks, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” in v4 and, “How can these things be?” in v9. In between those two perplexed questions, our Lord, the Λόγος or logos or Word, the living Christian proclamation as a whole of the New Testament proclaimed τὰ ῥήματα τοῦ Θεοῦ or “the words of God” to Nicodemus in a way that he had never heard before. He said,”Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” As we read in John 3:34 (above), He spoke or uttered the ῥήματα τοῦ Θεοῦ to this man and all who read John 3. What did he say? Only those born again are part of the Kingdom of God and to be born again is to born of the Spirit. Notice carefully that this rebirth is not something controlled by or contained by or comprehended by people of the flesh. Everyone truly born of the Spirit are so by the work of the Holy Spirit not by the works of men. These are the ῥήματα τοῦ Θεοῦ.
The word ῥήματα is the present tense, indicative mood, active voice, plural of ῥῆμα or rhēma. It usually relates to individual words and utterances. It is John the Baptist speaking in John 3:34 talking about Jesus. Here is the passage in context.
After this Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside, and he remained there with them and was baptizing. John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because water was plentiful there, and people were coming and being baptized (for John had not yet been put in prison). Now a discussion arose between some of John’s disciples and a Jew over purification. And they came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness–look, he is baptizing, and all are going to him.” John answered, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease.” He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way. He who comes from heaven is above all. He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony. Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true. For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. (John 3:22-36 ESV)
John 3:34 is in bold. Think about what this is saying my brethren. John the Baptist was a prophet indeed! Our Lord came and spoke the words of truth from God to Nicodemus and to the multitudes during his ministry yet the number of disciples He had at His crucifixion was very small. On the other hand, they were truly of God. They were truly born of the Spirit and God used them powerfully to also ῥήματα τοῦ Θεοῦ and cause Christianity to grow and spread. God has always worked this way. He takes a few, a remnant, who know Him and and who ῥήματα τοῦ Θεοῦ because that is what they do. God uses them to plant churches and ministries and use people in ways that the world and large flesh driven “ministries” look at and are perplexed because they just cannot understand how God could use “someone like that” to do what they do. There must be some mistake. No, it is not. They are looking at the person when they should be listening to the person ῥήματα τοῦ Θεοῦ.
Those who hear God’s truth being proclaimed and from that they turn in obedience, repentance and belief to the Son have eternal life. On the other hand, those who hear, but reject it because the message is boring or the music isn’t exciting enough or entertaining enough or cool enough, or relevant enough are actually walking dead. They do not obey the Son and so shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on them. Can we make it any clearer?
Soli Deo Gloria! | <urn:uuid:1460192b-6bb2-4220-ab8a-30cd999224d1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mikeratliff.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/speaking-the-word-of-god/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979511 | 1,486 | 1.539063 | 2 |
The ITT List
The Revolution Will Be Published
The 43rd annual Cairo International Book Fair was supposed to take place last January, but there was a revolution instead. So it's back this year, having opened this week for a 15-day run.
How is the post-revolutionary book fair different? Unlike previous years, there is no list of banned books that publishers may not display. Tunisian publishers were named guests of honor, to pay homage to the country that began the wave of revolutions across the Arab World last year, and the fair's opening ceremonies were led by the Egyptian and Tunisian ministers of culture.
There was a brief debate about whether the whole event should be moved to February, to avoid holding it during the anniversary of the revolt that toppled Egypt's dictator Hosni Mubarak a year ago, but in the end the fair went on as planned. One of the largest in the Middle East, it brings together over 700 publishers and nearly 100 secondhand booksellers from 29 countries.
The fair also coincides with the publication of several books about the events of the last year, including Tahrir: The Last 18 Days of Mubarak, by the head of Egypt's state television news, Abdel Latif al-Menawy. The book's positive portrayal of the revolt is a signficant change from al-Menawy's posture while the revolution was unfolding, when his TV news bashed the protesters.
A more credible literary spokesperson for the new Egypt is the novelist Alaa al-Aswany, the author of The Yacoubian Building and Chicago. He recently published a collection of essays on Egyptian politics, "Has the Egyptian Revolution Gone Wrong?" You can read a version of the title essay here. | <urn:uuid:2ba22789-39e6-40d9-ae62-2d102972ee4d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://inthesetimes.com/ittlist/entry/12628/the_revolution_will_be_published/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965784 | 354 | 1.625 | 2 |
A new pilot study by investigators at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) found that breast cancer patients can be treated safely with a “dose-dense” regimen of standard chemotherapy agents and the antibody trastuzumab (Herceptin®), a drug that has previously been shown to cause cardiac toxicity. While previous reports evaluating the cardiac effects of breast cancer treatments including trastuzumab and anthracyclines have shown an acceptable safety margin, the new study demonstrates an even lower risk of cardiac toxicity when standard doses of these drugs are administered more frequently over time — a treatment plan called “dose-dense,” which has previously been shown to be a more effective anti-cancer approach.
The researchers used a dose-dense regimen of doxorubicin (Adriamycin®) and cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan® or Neosar®) followed by paclitaxel (Taxol®) and found that the regimen - when given every two weeks instead of three — pairs safely with trastuzumab, a drug that is used to treat breast cancer in women whose tumors contain the protein receptor called HER2.
According to the findings, only 1.4 percent (one patient) of the 70 early-stage breast cancer patients treated with this regimen experienced congestive heart failure after 28 months of follow-up. This rate of cardiac toxicity is lower than the 4 percent threshold that is generally considered acceptable, and still lower than what was found in larger, previously published trials evaluating conventionally scheduled treatment with the use of trastuzumab.
The study’s authors concluded that this dose-dense regimen combined with trastuzumab is a safe and effective way to treat women with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer in the adjuvant setting and there is no need to forgo the use of this regimen because trastuzumab is also being administered.
Chau Dang, MD, a medical oncologist on the Breast Cancer Medicine Service at MSKCC, led the study, and Clifford Hudis, MD, Chief of the Breast Cancer Medicine Service at MSKCC, is the paper’s senior author.
The study will be published in the March 10, 2008, issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology and was supported by grants from Genentech and Amgen. [PubMed Abstract] | <urn:uuid:7020faba-e7be-4649-a07b-f348b6549ecc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mskcc.org/pressroom/press/cardiac-effects-associated-breast-treatment-appear-lower-dose-dense-delivery-conventional-chemotherapy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934672 | 503 | 1.84375 | 2 |
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Russia denounced a U.N. tribunal Wednesday for undermining international justice by freeing two Croatian generals and Kosovo's ex-prime minister who were accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity against Serbs.
Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told the Security Council that the war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia demonstrated "neither fairness nor effectiveness" in last month's release of generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac, which was quickly followed by the release of ex-Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj and two of his former Kosovo Liberation Army comrades.
As a result, Churkin said, no one has been held accountable for murdering and expelling Serb civilians during a 1995 Croatian military offensive or for murdering and torturing Serbs and their supporters in Kosovo's war for independence.
Gotovina and Markac, the most senior Croatian officers convicted of war crimes during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, were freed by the tribunal's appeals chamber, which overturned their convictions for killing and deporting Serbs in a Croatian military blitz known as Operation Storm that drove thousands of Serbs from their homes and left hundreds dead.
Haradinaj, a former KLA commander, and his comrades were acquitted of crimes against humanity for the second time for allegedly murdering and torturing Serbs and their supporters in Kosovo's fight for independence. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 following a bloody civil war in 1999 that began with a brutal Serb crackdown on separatist Kosovo Albanians.
The court's prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, told the Security Council that serious crimes were documented in both cases and the victims "have the right to justice." He encouraged national authorities in the region "to continue the fight against impunity."
In the case of the Croatian generals, Churkin said Russia was "surprised how blithely, even carelessly, a 3-2 vote quashed the unanimous verdict at trial, one justified by many years of investigation."
He said that in the view of Russia, which has close cultural and religious ties to the Serbs, "justice was not done — as stated by one of the (appeals) judges in dissent." Churkin said a similar assessment is merited in the acquittals in the Haradinaj case where he alleged that "witnesses were subjected to unabashed blackmail and intimidation."
Both verdicts "discredit the idea of international criminal justice," he said. "Faith and the chance of restoring peace through international justice has been substantially undermined." Serbia's First Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic called the two verdicts "grotesque" and told the Security Council that his country's "faith in international justice has suffered a severest possible blow," especially as a result of the "shameful" Gotovina and Markac decision.
He said the tribunal's main goal was to contribute to peace and reconciliation in the Balkans. "In its more than a decade of existence, it has convicted a number of former Serbian political and military leaders for war crimes. At the same time, it has failed to convict a single senior official from Croatia or Bosnia, and it has failed to convict a single senior Kosovo Albanian official for war crimes or crimes against humanity," Vucic said.
"By the recent judgment," he said, "the Serbian nation has therefore been singled out as the sole perpetrator of such acts, and as the sole people responsible for the terrible violence that engulfed the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s."
In response to the tribunal's actions, Vucic told the council that Serbia will continue cooperating with the tribunal but only "on the technical level." Germany's U.N. Ambassador Peter Wittig said he was "alarmed" by Serbia's announcement that it will reduce its cooperation with the tribunal and called on all countries to cooperate with the court "to the fullest extent." He defended the tribunal for its independence and for consistently upholding "high standards of justice ... including the right of appeal."
Churkin vowed to ensure that the tribunal's work is completed as called for by the council by Dec. 31, 2014, expressing dismay that one trial is not scheduled to finish until 2017. | <urn:uuid:5b9a4270-21c0-42e3-84e9-8b2a9abc0e9e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mail.com/in-en/news/world/1746990-russia-denounces-un-tribunal-releases.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97861 | 864 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Asia Can Save World From 'Double Dip': Strategist
Asian economies – including China – have enough firepower to pull the world out of recession if a global double-dip recession occurs, according to Anthony Chan, Asia sovereign strategist at AllianceBernstein.
Chan wrote in a blog post that Asian countries still have room to stimulate their economies should the global economy slump as it did during the 2008 financial crisis.
“On the monetary policy front, we think central banks in the region have room to cut interest rates and stimulate their economies, since real interest rates are high,” said Chan.
“Currently, real rates outside of China stand at around 0.5 percent to 1.2 percent, but we expect disinflationary pressures to continue, which would further increase the policy flexibility of countries across the region,” he said.
According to AllianceBernstein calculations, China’s one-year lending rate stands at 3.16 percent in real terms, with Indonesia’s real rate at 1.25 percent and Malaysia’s at 0.95 percent.
Chan said the region’s countries – in particular, China, Singapore and South Korea – have scope for fiscal as well as monetary stimulus.
“China’s budget deficit was only a modest 1percent of GDPin 2011, which leaves plenty of room to pursue the ‘proactive fiscal policy’ referred to in recent policy statements,” he said.
“Given that China still has a long way to go before reaching a mature stage of economic development, we think there is plenty of room for the government to rev up demand by ‘fast tracking’ new major investment projects if necessary,” he added.
Chan warned however that Asian countries do not have the same amount of fiscal and monetary firepower at their disposal as during the 2008 crisis.
“Most Asian economies are more highly leveraged than they were in 2008, with a significant rise in loan-to-GDP ratios in recent years,” he said. “The fiscal positions of most countries in Asia are much worse than they were just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Hong Kong and Singapore are the only countries in the region expected to enjoy budget surpluses in 2012.”
“I think we could have a global recession either in the fourth quarter or early 2013," Faber told CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report”.
— By CNBC.com's Katy Barnato | <urn:uuid:03a54818-92ed-4d33-9f31-0e5e0669a4bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnbc.com/id/47616204 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960155 | 518 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Wen met Argentine President Cristina Fernandez in Buenos Aires on Monday as part of a South American tour that included visits to Brazil and Uruguay and will end in Chile this week.
In a videoconference with regional leaders, Wen said China should carry out feasibility studies on the possibility of a trade deal.
"We share ample common interests and we have great potential," Wen said next to Fernandez in the videoconference that included Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Uruguayan President Jose Mujica.
China is Mercosur's second-biggest trade partner, and Rousseff said strengthening ties could become a "strategy to keep the crisis contagion from reaching our markets and provoking unwanted consequences in employment and income that would hurt economic growth."
Argentina is a major exporter of soybeans to China, and Fernandez said increasing links between China and Mercosur is "a historic opportunity to add value to our raw materials and create jobs."
The free-trade deal could be discussed during Mercosur's meeting in Mendoza, Argentina this week. Paraguay is also part of the bloc but does not have diplomatic relations with China because it recognizes Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province.
In the first visit of a Chinese premier to Argentina in almost three decades, Wen also signed accords in nuclear energy and for the export of Argentine horses and livestock, as well as fruits, honey, wine and other food products.
Argentina and China had announced in 2010 that Chinese banks would invest $10 billion to restore a massive cargo rail system that once linked Argentina's farming belt. The project, which would help get grains faster and cheaper to port, has been at a stalemate since then. The two leaders said the project is still on track but provided no details.
Most farm products in Argentina are transported by trucks, and farmers have long called for renovation of the dilapidated train system that was once one of the world's best. The deal would be welcomed by Argentina, which is bracing for a nationwide truckers strike Wednesday that could cause food and fuel shortages.
The leaders also signed a separate letter of intent for a loan by the China Development Bank to the Argentine Foreign Investment and Trade Bank. Before the signing of the agreements, Wen visited the Argentine Congress and met with Vice President Amado Boudou and Julian Dominguez, a senator and former agriculture minister. Argentina ships about 80 percent of its soybeans to China, with total trade between the two countries reaching $14.8 billion last year. | <urn:uuid:d839f1c5-c372-448d-9cad-3d07750f0fde> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yorkdispatch.com/nation/ci_20935890/china-interested-free-trade-deal-mercosur | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967865 | 517 | 1.617188 | 2 |
BERLIN (Reuters) - European diplomats discussing the possibility of a separate budget to improve monetary union in the euro zone are considering a sum of around 20 billion euros ($26 billion), according to the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD).
There is still no clear definition of what a single, central budget would entail, but Germany strongly supports the idea as a way of coordinating transfers among member states, and France is also in favor, which in terms of euro zone decision-making means it has substantial momentum.
In the early release of an article to be published on Monday, FTD said the sum under consideration amounted to about 0.2 percent of the common currency bloc's gross domestic product (GDP). It did not cite its sources.
"The budget for the whole European Union currently totals around 130 billion euros a year, which is just over 1 percent of EU economic growth," the paper wrote. "A euro zone budget of around 20 billion euros would mean extra costs of around 0.2 percent of euro zone GDP."
"Germany would be liable for just under 6 billion euros a year," the FTD added.
The single budget proposal was first sketched out by Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, in a paper circulated in September to stimulate debate about how Europe's monetary union should be strengthened.
In the paper, he said a "fully fledged fiscal union" among the 17 countries that share the euro could involve the creation of a single treasury office and "a central budget whose role and functions would need to be defined".
Those suggestions have since been refined into guidelines that will form the basis of discussion among EU leaders at the summit on October 18-19. The idea will also be explored among euro zone finance ministers at a meeting in Luxembourg on Monday.
($1 = 0.7657 euros)
(Reporting By Sarah Marsh; Editing by Will Waterman)
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp | <urn:uuid:ea8cb3e9-2291-44a2-847f-80d522e7e500> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tvtv.com/Euro-zone-mulls-20-billion-euro-separate-budget-pa/7687736?newsId=169947 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951856 | 416 | 1.84375 | 2 |
On passengers' reaction to terror attempt on plane: 'Aggressive intervention has become the new societal norm'
They heard a pop that sounded like fireworks. They saw a glow of flame followed by a rush of smoke. And that was enough for passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to pounce.
From several seats away, Dutch tourist Jasper Schuringa says he jumped to extinguish a fire ignited by a quiet man who just moments before allegedly told passengers his stomach was upset and pulled a blanket over himself. Schuringa said his first thought wasn't to signal a flight attendant or wait for an air marshal to break cover, but rather, "He's trying to blow up the plane."
"I basically reacted directly," Schuringa said Saturday in an interview with CNN. "I didn't think. I just jumped. I just went over there and tried to save the plane."
Aviation safety experts once would have called Schuringa's actions a mistake and cautioned passengers against fighting back during hijackings and other crises in the air. That was before the Sept. 11 attacks and the actions of passengers on United Flight 93, who learned while aloft about the hijacked jets that slammed earlier that day into New York's World Trade Center.
They staged a cabin revolt against the al-Qaida terrorists who had taken control of their flight and died when their plane crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pa. But they succeeded in keeping the jet from destroying another building that day, and their story became legend.
"I don't think people are going to sit back and let somebody kill them in the process of fulfilling their extremist agenda or whatever it happens to be," said Dave Heffernan, who helps oversee self-defense training for commercial flight crews at Valenica Community College in Orlando, Fla. "People have talked about it. They've thought about it. They have a plan of action."
On Saturday, a day after the failed attack on Northwest 253, federal prosecutors charged Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, a native of Nigeria, with trying to destroy the airliner with a device containing a high explosive attached to his body. They alleged that Abdulmutallab set off the device — sparking a fire instead of an explosion — as the flight from Amsterdam descended toward Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
Schuringa, of Amsterdam, told CNN that he didn't think about his own safety when he extinguished the fire with his hands. He and other passengers said that several people on board, including members of the flight crew, then joined him in taking Mutallab to first class to strip off his clothes and search for any more explosives.
"In a matter of minutes everything was settled down. ... The passengers were proactive. We just did it. There was nothing to talk about," said Syed Jafry, 57.
Another passenger, Richelle Keepman, 24, of Oconomowoc, Wis., said passengers were later interviewed by authorities and released from the airport. When Schuringa came through the area, "we were all clapping," she said.
Schuringa joins the passengers on United 93 and others who have leapt into action to defend themselves aloft since 9/11. Just three months after the attacks, Briton Richard Reid was overpowered by passengers and crew members on a flight from Paris to Miami as he tried to ignite plastic explosives hidden in his shoes. A doctor onboard went so far as to inject the restrained Reid with a sedative.
Passengers aren't only responding to obvious acts of terror. In June, two off-duty officers handcuffed a traveler who took off his clothes and kicked and punched a flight attendant on a US Airways flight to Los Angeles from Charlotte, N.C. In April 2008, passengers duct-taped a drunken man to his seat after he attacked a United Airlines flight attendant on a trip to Los Angeles from Hong Kong.
"Aggressive intervention has become the new societal norm," said Bill Voss, an expert at the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va.
The day after the attack, authorities at airports worldwide tightened security, imposing extra searches on the ground and telling passengers flying to the U.S. from overseas they can't get out of their seat during the last hour of their flight. None seemed to mind, and many said they knew the story of United 93 and would respond aggressively if the new security measures failed.
"I know how to tackle," said Stephen Evans, 39, a former rugby player traveling from Chicago to Dulles International Airport near Washington. "Your odds are better to get the guy and risk an explosion on the plane rather than fly into Washington's Monument or what have you."
Jennifer Allen, 41, of Shelby Township, Mich., arrived in Detroit on Saturday from Amsterdam on Saturday's Northwest 253.
"We're not so blase, not so willing to accept that we're safe and we can let someone do our security for us," she said. "We're not going to sit there and wait for somebody else to do it because if you wait, it might be too late."
Corey Williams in Romulus, Mich., Jim Irwin in Detroit and Jessica Gresko in Washington contributed to this report. | <urn:uuid:08691114-0e3c-4612-bb2a-4b9b5caa2cff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/on_passengers_reaction_to_terr.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982745 | 1,065 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Walk #257: Rudram's Gap to Caister-on-Sea
Map of the walk
Maps courtesy of Google Maps. Route for indicative purposes only, and may have been plotted after the walk. Please let me have comments on what you think of this new format. For a detailed table of timings for this walk, please see the table file.
The highlight of the day for me was probably seeing all the seals on the beach near Winterton Ness. There were at least thirty of them, and it was good to see some seals which were obviously so healthy after seeing two dead ones further to the north earlier in the day. Immediately to the south of the seals were a group of walkers with dogs on the loose, so I walked towards them to warn them about the seals and to ask them to put the dogs on their leads. It turns out they knew about the seals as it as they are regularly found there, and we chatted for five minutes and they gave me a donation which was gratefully received.
I meet many people walking along the beach, and many of them have no money on them. Most of them seem genuinely to want to donate something to the charity, so I just ask for best wishes for the journey instead of money. This seems to appeal to people, and after I said that to one lady she dug in her pocket and got some money out!
The coast near Happisburgh (pronounced Hayes-Borough) was very eroded, and the path diverted into a field where the previous well-worn path disappeared into the void off the edge of the cliff. On the southern edge of Happisburgh I reached a stretch of tarmac that went literally over the cliff, with only some portable fencing acting as a barrier to prevent people from walking over the edge. This road originally used to go southeastwards along the coast for a couple of miles as far as Eccles, but the road was long-gone. The sea defences end a few hundreds of yards from the south of the village and restart about a mile to the north, and so the village is currently undefended by any modern sea defences and many houses on top of the cliff are in danger of collapse into the sea. This is now a famous case on the viability of defending the coastline versus the obvious costs of such defences. The situation at Happisburgh is obviously not helped by the cliffs, which are quite high and appear to consist of quite loose sand. Indeed two villages, Shipden and Whimpwell, have totally disappeared into the sea over the years. I last walked along this stretch in early 2001, and even in that short period it was easy to see where a couple of buildings were missing, having been lost to the sea.
About seven miles offshore from Happisburgh are the nine-mile long Happisburgh Sands, which are a major navigational hazard for shipping. Many ships have been lost on these sands, and in 1904 so many wrecks were on the beach that Trinity House had to blow them up to clear them. Wreckage from ships still gets washed up today, and after northeasterly gales villages used to scour the beach for items thrown up by the waves. Many of the people who died in these wrecks are buried at Happisburgh Church, which has a 100-foot high tower. These include 119 men from HMS Invincible, wrecked in 1801, 32 men of HMS Peggy, wrecked in 1770, and 12 men of the Young England, which was wrecked in 1876.
The pretty red-and-white lighthouse standing on the cliffs to the south of the village at Happisburgh had been painted in the television series "Challenge Anneka" many years previously. Apparently despite the fact that they were meant to be doing the painting in two days, they were on site for two weeks that corresponds with other stories that I have heard. It is a very nice lighthouse, looking very symmetrical from a certain angle with the two nice white houses alongside it. It was originally built in 1791 and had a companion low light 400 yards to the north (which was demolished in 1883), and has a range of 17.8 miles and is 94 feet tall.
On the previous trip I bought a history of the Happisburgh and Mundesley lifeboats from the lifeboat station in Happsiburgh. Two things come to mind when I skimmed through this booklet - firstly how much coastal erosion was shown in the maps within the booklet, and the other being the history of the lifeboats. I found it amazing that in the 1860's (when much of the population would never even have seen the sea) the Grocers of England paid for a lifeboat to be stationed at Mundesley, and the Great Eastern Railway Company carried her to Mundelsey from Shadwell in London.
On the prominent red lifeboat station in Caister is a little sign stating 'Caister men never turn back'. This is written for the nine men of he lifeboat who drowned in 1901 when the lifeboat capsized. Only three of the crew survived, and the term has become the motto for the lifeboat station.
I have walked around the coastline of East Anglia much quicker than I did when I walked it before. For instance the section from Hunstanton to Cromer was four walks when I did it in 2001, but on this trip I covered it in two and a quarter. If you take the section between King's Lynn and Cromer, then it is three and a quarter days instead of six. This fact alone shows that I am making good time on this trip. Tomorrow I should be able to get to Lowestoft, and after this I will be on virgin territory once more as I head south along the Suffolk coast.
This walk starts off on the sea wall at Rudram's Gap, which runs beside the B1150 road. Head southeast along the seawall, passing Walcott Gap and heading towards Ostend. When the sea wall ends beside a caravan park you have two choices. If the tide is out then you can choose to walk south eastwards towards Happisburgh - but this should only be attempted if the tide is right out as the cliffs at Happsiburgh go out to sea for a long way. If the tide is high then climb up onto the top of the cliffs beside the caravan park and follow the edge of the cliff past some chalets. When the way ahead is blocked turn right to walk through the are of chalets along a rough track until it ends at a T-junction with a surfaced road. Turn right along this road and follow it as it heads southwards for a short distance, with Walcott Church ahead to the right across some fields. Follow the road as it curves to the left. Just before it turns to the right head left down a track beside some new houses back towards the coast and then turn right to reach a path that parallels the coast. Continue southeastwards for about a mile along this cliff top path, passing a coastguard lookout before reaching a caravan park to the northwest of Happisburgh.
Continue on as the path, which has been severely eroded, continues through the caravan park with the tall tower of the church nearby to the right. At the end of the park join a surfaced road for a few yards before turning left down a track that parallels the coast with some condemned huts stubbornly clinging to the cliff top on the left. This track ends at the sea, so turn right up another track with soon ends at a surfaced road. At this road turn left and follow it past a small hotel until it ends at the sea.
Just before it ends at the sea turn right and follow a path through fields saoutheastwards along the cliff edge. This path approaches Eccles, where I deemed it safe to go down onto the beach for the rest of the day.
Continue along the beach past Eccles on Sea and towards some large stone structures out at sea. These are a new design of sea defences being tested out, and mark the approach to Sea Palling. Continue along the beach past Sea Palling, passing Winterton Ness as the coastline slowly changes from heading southeastwards to a more southerly direction. As the miles get ticked off the beach passes Winterton-on-Sea, Newport and California before eventually reaching the outskirts of Caister-on-Sea. Continue along the beach past Caister until a large red building appears on the right. This building is the Caister lifeboat station, and there is a car park immediately inland from it.
These directions can be used for the tide conditions in which I approached them; a thigh tide that was going out which left me plenty of time to walk along the coast south from Eccles on Sea. If the tide conditions are different for you then you may have to leave the beach and walk inland; there are very discontinuous paths that allow you to do this. Fortunately south of Eccles on Sea the beach is very wide and there are sand dunes to the landward side that should be easy to get over if the tide does trap you.
This makes a total distance of 17.5 miles, with 434 feet of ascent and 436 feet of descent.
We stayed at a site at Highgate Farm, Swim Road, Runham, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk NR29 3EH. They can be contacted at 01493 368133 and are open all year round. This site cost us eight pounds for the night, and is a reasonable low-cost site that is part of a working farm. It was nice to wake up and see grouse running around outside the van, which was parked on a nice level site in a field.
Please note that I take no responsibility for anything that may happen when following these directions. If you intend to follow this route, then please use the relevant maps and check the route out before you go out. As always when walking, use common sense and you should be fine.
If you find any information on any of these routes that is inaccurate, or you wish to add anything, then please email me.
All images on this site are © of the author. Any reproduction, retransmissions, or republication of all or part of any document found on this site is expressly prohibited, unless the author has explicitly granted its prior written consent to so reproduce, retransmit, or republish the material. All other rights reserved.
Although this site includes links providing convenient direct access to other Internet sites, I do not endorse, approve, certify or make warranties or representations as to the accuracy of the information on these sites.
And finally, enjoy your walking!
This walk was mentioned in the following routes: | <urn:uuid:6584bb6b-aade-4d81-ae96-1086bdc9dac2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britishwalks.org/walks/2002/257.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975046 | 2,191 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Choosing The Right Business NameBy: Ramona Creel
Sometimes, new entrepreneurs are in such a rush to get started at their businesses that they jump right into working with customers without giving much thought to their BUSINESS NAME. “I’ll just do business under my own name for a while, until I find something I like.” While it seems easy at the time, you might want to re-think the plan to change business names down the road. You will find that, as your professional recognition and customer base grow, people have started to IDENTIFY you with the name of your company. A name change in mid-stream can be costly and confusing.
First, you will lose ground in the marketing arena -- it takes time and effort to build up BRAND RECOGNITION, and that time is lost when you change names. You may also lose customers to the competition -- what are they to think when they go looking for “Joe’s Mobile Car Wash” in the yellow pages and you’ve changed your name to “Fast and Easy Auto Detailing?” They might think that you’ve gone out of business and it’s time to find someone else to clean their cards. And finally, changing names can cause you increased PAPERWORK and EXPENSE -- changing your bank accounts, credit cards, marketing materials, incorporation documents, DBA registration, etc. So why not get it right the first time? Here are some suggestions for choosing a business name that will serve you well for years to come.
IS IT MEMORABLE?When people hear the name of your company, will they be able to REMEMBER it 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 3 hours, or a week later? When they decide to hunt you up on the web or in the phone book, will they be able to easily recall your business name? It doesn’t matter if you are choosing a fictitious business name or using your own -- the same rules apply. Your name should be UNIQUE enough that it will stick in a potential customer’s mind -- “Smith’s Gym” isn’t going to be nearly as easy to remember as “Work That Body.”
You also want to stay away from names that are likely to be CONFUSED with another company. You may think it’s a cute idea to come up with a name that closely resembles (without exactly copying) another company’s name. But calling your personal coaching company “Joys-R-Us” is confusing, unoriginal, and likely to bring about a lawsuit! And beware of phrases or ACRONYMS that are overused in your profession. You wouldn’t believe how many Professional Organizers use some combination of words that spell out SOS (usually “Someone’s Organizing Solutions”). Your company will stand out more if your name is truly unique.
IS IT EASY TO SPELL?However, the next question is “when they do recall it, is it easy enough to spell that they can immediately find your listing?” You want to stay away from challenging spellings and pronunciations. Calling your restaurant “Phine Phoods” is just asking for trouble -- how is your customer going to know to look under “p” instead of “f” in the phone book? And if your last name is Piccalopoupoulis, you may be better off creating a fictitious business name. A good rule of thumb to follow is to pay attention to what happens when you tell other people your name -- if you are always having to SPELL or PRONOUNCE it slowly, it will be hard for people remember and find later on.
This is particularly important if you are planning to turn your business name into a DOMAIN name. Websites with long or hard-to-spell names get overlooked during standard searches. And try to avoid having to include a hyphen or underscore in your name to make it appropriate for the web. Short, snappy, easy-to-remember names work best in the translation from brick-and-mortar to internet.
DOES IT DESCRIBE YOUR COMPANY?Will customers learn something specific, unique, or descriptive about your business, just from hearing the name? Will they get a feel for WHAT you provide or HOW you provide it? Many individual service providers try to sound like high-end firms by using some derivative of their first and last name for their company identity – “Joanna Carrol and Associates,” or “JC Consulting,” or “Carroll and Company.” But what does that really tell a potential customer about your company? I don’t know if you are an insurance agent or an attorney or a professional organizer. Include something in your name that describes your product or service -- “JC Graphic Design” -- so customers aren’t left WONDERING what type of business you have.
You can also include some information about those special CHARACTERISTICS that make your business DIFFERENT from the competition. Okay -- so you’ve told me that you are a printer. Why should I hire you instead of the printer down the street? You might be faster, cheaper, provide better quality, have more experience, offer a higher-end product, or provide more services than the other guy. If it’s appropriate and pertinent, include one or two of those traits -- “JC Full-Service Graphic Design” -- in your name.
DOES IT LIMIT YOU?If you are joining an industry that allows for “branching out,” be careful about giving your company a name that traps you in a very small service area. For example, a company that starts out putting in tile floors -- but has plans to expand into vinyl, hardwood, and carpeting down the road -- wouldn’t want a name like “TileMasters.” Something more along the lines of “FloorMasters” will give the company the FLEXIBILITY they need to grow and change later on.
And if you have intentions of ever expanding your service area, you need to be careful about a GEOGRAPHICALLY limiting business name. “Hair Over Atlanta” isn’t going to work as well when you open locations in Seattle and Los Angeles and New York. Be sure to check the US Patent And Trademark Office’s online database (http://tess.uspto.gov) to make sure your name is available for national use before you start printing it on your cards.
You also have to stop and think about whether naming your company after yourself -- “Bob’s Bar and Grill” -- will limit you in a different way. If you have ever read “The E-Myth” by Michael Gerber, you know that having customers identify your business as an EXTENSION of you brings about its own special pitfalls. You become indispensable to the company -- people get used to seeing Bob behind the counter every night and that’s what makes it “Bob’s” -- the business can’t run without you. And if you ever decide that you want to take a break, let someone else run the place on your behalf, or sell the company, you will run into a roadblock. Quite often, what seems like a great way to PERSONALIZE your business ends up turning it into a stone around your neck.
This business is your baby, your investment in the future, and you will have it with you (hopefully) for a long time. Don’t short-change your business by skipping out on one of the most important steps you will take during start-up -- selecting just the right name.
Ramona Creel is a Professional Organizer and the founder of OnlineOrganizing.com -- a web-based one-stop shop offering everything that you need to get organized at home or at work. At OnlineOrganizing.com, you may get a referral to an organizer near you, shop for the latest organizing products, get tons of free tips, and even learn how to become a professional organizer or build your existing organizing business. And if you would like to read more articles about organizing your life or building your business, get a free subscription to the "Get Organized" and "Organized For A Living" newsletters. Please visit OnlineOrganizing.com or contact Ramona directly at [email protected] for more information.
Article Source: EzineArticles
- Ease into your First Entrepreneurial Venture
- The Secret To Protecting Your Business Assets
- Waiting to Incorporate: What A Difference A Date Can Make
- Choosing The Right Business Name
- Making Your Business Legal
- Small Business Q & A: Starting Your Business By The Book
- DBA's, Trademarks and dot com's.
- Today's Entrepreneur - First Steps to Starting Your Business
- Legal Considerations for Your Home Freelance Biz
- The Benefits Of Incorporating Your Business
- Using an LLC to Protect Your Wealth
- Protecting Your Business With Non-Disclosure Agreements
- How to Choose the Proper Entity for Your Business
- DBA: What's in the name?
- Limited Liability Companies: Overview
- Important Financial Decisions Before Forming Your Business | <urn:uuid:fed149b4-0290-41bd-82ef-123b2deda317> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dbaform.com/Articles-4.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935542 | 1,975 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Yeah, that is exactly what I meant in my previous post. The acting style seems exaggerated by today's standards.
It's not easy to do, but if you can try to imagine yourself back in the same era, and judge the movie as if you were, it helps.
Also, it can help, as you pointed out, if you are able to look at the movie with a historical eye ("ah, this is how they acted back then," look at the style of dress, look at what they considered "handsome" in a male and "beautiful" in a female, dig the cars, the slang, etc.).
RE: The nudity. Broadway Melody was made "pre-Motion Picture Production Code
(scroll down far enough to click on the photo from "Sign of the Cross"). There were some pretty zesty movies made pre-code.
Turner Classic Movies has two pre-code collections:Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 1Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 2
Vol.2 has a documentary that sounds interesting. "THOU SHALT NOT: SEX, SIN AND CENSORSHIP IN PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD (2008): Over seventy years later, they've lost none of their power to shock, entertain, and titillate. So-called pre-Code movies remain among the most vital films America has ever produced. But why were these films so much more sexually free and socially critical than what came before or after? Who created the Code, and what did it forbid? And why did it finally become a Hollywood commandment? The answer is a fascinating mix of scandal, big business and social history - a unique collision of events that resulted in one of the most dynamic - and delicious - periods in Hollywood history." | <urn:uuid:bb1c74da-6e42-464e-93f8-bb050b011ef7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.axiomaudio.com/boards/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=355293 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964388 | 362 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Bahrain king insists on Iranian role in protest despite commission findings
A special commission investigating Bahrain's March crackdown on Shiite-led protests said on Wednesday that police used "excessive force" and tortured detainees. The findings declared by the head of the Bahrain Independent commission for Inquiry, Cherif Bassiouni, revealed that security forces "used excessive force" while "many detainees were tortured."
Bahrain's leader King Hamad commissioned the report to probe allegations of government misconduct and human rights abuses against protesters and opposition figures. "We will introduce and implement reforms that would please all segments of our society," the monarch said
Earlier, an official spokesman said the government accepts the criticisms."We took the initiative in asking for this thorough and detailed inquiry to seek the truth and we accept it." The statement, cited by AFP, said the government regretted the "mistreatment of detainees, as well as five deaths as a result of torture."
The report acknowledged that the commission did not find proof of an Iran link to the unrest, dispelling widespread allegations that Tehran played a role in instigating the mainly Shiite protests. "Evidence presented to the commission did not prove a clear link between the events in Bahrain and Iran," said Bassiouni.
However, King Hamad, who was present at the panel's announcement of the findings, insisted that Iranian propaganda incited the "sectarian strife" during unrest. "Iran's propaganda fuelled the flames of sectarian strife -- an intolerable interference in our internal affairs from which Bahrain has suffered greatly," he said. | <urn:uuid:bca62485-8765-4f30-944e-08115ad7c379> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.albawaba.com/news/bahrain-king-insists-iranian-role-protest-despite-commission-findings-402379?quicktabs_accordion=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964004 | 311 | 1.640625 | 2 |
About two months ago, I was composing my list of resolutions for the coming year — forty-three of them in all, thanks to the goal-setting-slash-social-networking site 43Things. I tried to think up things I’d been meaning to do but never seemed to get around to, and somewhere in the mid-20s of my list I added the following: compost my garbage.
For those of you who didn’t know already, I live in Manhattan. No yard for a compost bin; no car to tote stuff away to a municipal site. Composting my garbage wasn’t going to be easy — or so I thought.
Did you know: in 2002, 180,000 tons of food went into landfills — in the Portland metro area alone?
Nationwide, 48 million tons of food produced for human consumption is thrown out as waste. To put it into perspective, those 48 million tons we just threw out equals 27% of all the food produced.
Now, granted, a lot of that waste comes from grocery stores and restaurants, but if we’re only looking at what comes from our own fridge, Americans throw away an average of 163 pounds of food per person every year.
Source: USDA, “Estimating and Addressing America’s Food Lossesˮ
A couple years ago, I had read about vermicomposting: indoor composting using a small bin of worms that eat organic waste and turn it into worm “castings” (i.e. worm poop). So, worms — pooping worms — in my house. On purpose. Yeah, that’s not gonna work for me.
So, I needed to look elsewhere if I was going to stick to this resolution. | <urn:uuid:121794f2-59b9-4e84-8587-4c9a8d62596e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://accidentalhedonist.com/well-its-a-dirty-job-but-someones-got-to-do-it/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950154 | 392 | 1.828125 | 2 |
My virology course at Columbia University, Biology W3310, has begun. This course, which I taught for the first time in 2009, is aimed at advanced undergraduates and will be taught at the Morningside Campus of Columbia University.
Columbia University encompasses two principal campuses: the historic, neoclassical campus in the Morningside Heights neighborhood and the modern Medical Center further uptown, in Washington Heights. The two are separated by fifty-two city blocks, a distance of over two miles and 20-30 minutes by subway. My laboratory is at the Medical Center, where I’ve taught a variety of virology courses over the years. However, until last year, a virology course had not been offered at the Morningside Heights campus since the late 1980s. This is a serious omission for a first-class University. Sending graduates into the world without even a fundamental understanding of viruses and viral disease is inexcusable. Remedying this problem is one reason why I developed a new virology course. The other is that I love teaching about viruses.
Biology W3310 will be taught on Mondays and Wednesdays at 4:10 PM. The course rationale and schedule can be found at the course website. The recommended textbook is Principles of Virology, Third Edition, by Flint et al. Students in the course will also read virology blog and listen to the podcast This Week in Virology.
The goal of Biology W3310 is to provide an understanding of how viruses are built, how they replicate and evolve, how they cause disease, and how to prevent infection. After taking the course, some of the students might want to become virologists. The course will also provide the knowledge required to make informed decisions about health issues such as immunization against viral infections.
Thanks to the internet, the information in my virology course is accessible to everyone. | <urn:uuid:557550a8-8cd0-4b8b-b6e0-8bbcfaa5d8b1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.virology.ws/2011/01/24/virology-at-columbia-university/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955333 | 386 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Several Queens Library branches were severely damaged by Sandy, forcing them to close. But most are doing all they can to rally back to full service while continuing to provide important services to the community. NY1's Roger Clark has the story.
The shelves are empty and the laptops are shot at the Queens Library's Arverne Branch.
Four feet of water rushed into the library during Hurricane Sandy destroying much of what was inside.
"We never expected, like everyone else, that amount of water coming in," said Queens Library President Thomas Galante.
Of the five Queens Library Branches in the Rockaways and Broad Channel, four were hit with nearly $7 million in damages, including $2 million in lost books.
The Peninsula Library branch was one of those that suffered massive damage. But the library rallied to be there for the community as it dealt with its own losses.
"Getting the book bus in operation and down to the peninsula on that first Friday, getting the Far Rockaway Library open on Saturday without power, with FEMA handing out food and blankets," Galante said. "So it was an all hands on deck, let's get down there, what can we do to help."
In Arverne, the library set up a temporary branch in a double wide trailer. Shakira Smalls, a jobs and youth counselor for Queens Library, was displaced from her home by the storm and is working to help neighbors in similar situations.
Storm damage at the Arverne library
"The library is not a regular business, it's a community library," Smalls said. "So we are able to give everyone hugs and let them know that we are here for them."
Smalls said her job has expanded as she tries to help residents get back on their feet.
"We are still facilitating our GED programs as well as our computer class, and any sort of job readiness skills, we are here to help them," Smalls said. "We are still running, we are here."
While library officials have said the Broad Channel branch could be reopened as soon as February, it will take months to get things up and running again at the Seaside, Peninsula and Arverne Branches.
But Galante said the Library will remain a presence despite the brick and mortar damage.
"We need to have services here seven days a week to help people retool their lives," Galante said.
Galante said the library has already received some private help to make sure they keep operating in the Rockaways.
If you want to lend a hand, head to queenslibraryfoundation.org. | <urn:uuid:77c62f2d-aa0e-4c86-b389-00bf08351be9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ny1.com/printarticle.aspx?ArID=173408 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982518 | 533 | 1.65625 | 2 |
For Immediate Release, October 15, 2003
Burlington, ON - The Centre for Skills Development & Training (The Centre) is proud to announce the launch of an exciting new career training opportunity for youth: The Enhanced General Carpentry – Skills Link Program.
This new program, which represents the most recent in a series of collaborative partnerships formed by The Centre with both government and industry, will provide 15 young men and women between the ages of 16 and 30 with the opportunity to train for rewarding careers in the construction industry.
With a start date of October 27, 2003, the program features 8 weeks skills enhancement, followed by 10 weeks of “hands-on, on-the-job experience” and 18 weeks paid work placement. The in-class portion of the program will take place at The Centre, while the on-the-job training and work placement portions will be provided through The Centre’s industry partners Monarch Homes, Sundial, Heathwood, Strone and Mattamy Homes. Tuition sponsorship and income support will be provided to qualified candidates by Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC), through a new federal Skills Link program.
“One of the main reasons Canada is facing such a significant shortage of skilled trades workers is that, for decades now, our youth have been taught to see the skilled trades as the career choice of last resort,” says Tom Logan, Manager, Trades and Technology at The Centre. “However, with the aging of our population base and the dwindling supply of skilled trades immigrants to Canada, it would not be unrealistic for a qualified and experienced skilled trades worker to earn a six figure income. This program, like others we offer at The Centre, represents an important first step for youth down that career path.”
For more information about The Enhanced General Carpentry – Skills Link Program, about The Centre or about other Skilled Trades or related programs, please call (905) 333-3499, Ext. 121 or e-mail [email protected].
The Centre for Skills Development & Training is a leading provider of quality career and workforce development programs, products and services specializing in Pre-Apprenticeship Trades and Technology, Career Planning and Development and Language Skills and Academic Upgrading. | <urn:uuid:ad7583b4-c593-4e91-b516-f3fdab12d2dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thecentre.on.ca/new-program-prepares-youth-to-fill-shortage-in-skilled-trades | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935526 | 465 | 1.648438 | 2 |
An Ohio drugmaker began releasing limited supplies of a crucial medication to treat childhood leukemia Thursday, sending hospital pharmacists facing life-threatening shortages scrambling for their share.
Jerrod Milton, chief of pharmacy at Children’s Hospital of Colorado, was among those first in line as Ben Venue Laboratories began accepting new orders for the drug methotrexate, three weeks before the hospital would have run out completely.
“I had a tip that it was going to be available,” he said. “I put my pharmacy team on notice.”
Ben Venue officials said product would be allocated starting now and continuing over the next several weeks to oncology clinics, hospitals and pediatric facilities, easing the shortage crisis. No information was available about which sites would get the scarce drugs first, or in what order.
Milton is awaiting the arrival Friday of what he hopes will be 300 250-milligram vials of the widely-used drug to treat acute lymphoblastic leukemia, known as A.L.L., a blood cancer that mostly affects young children. It's a virulent cancer of the white blood cells that spreads to other parts of the body.
The drug is short-dated, meaning it is set to expire in two weeks, but Milton is requesting it anyway to replenish vital supplies of the medication that makes A.L.L curable in about 90 percent of cases, cancer doctors say. The amount and timing of the drug used varies widely according to age, weight and other patient factors. The Colorado hospital has dozens of patients on the protocol.
“It extends our supply by essentially up to a month,” said Milton, who is also his hospital’s vice president of operations. “But it’s still a very uncomfortable place to be.”
News this week that hospitals across the country were within a couple weeks of running out of the critical drug prompted herculean negotiations involving the federal Food and Drug Administration and the five manufacturers of methotrexate. The story was first reported in the New York Times.
Chuck Eaton, facesofhope.org
Justine Seibel, 13, of Fort Mill, S.C., is among thousands of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or A.L.L., who are treated with the cancer drug methotrexate. Reports of dire shortages worry her mother, Christine Farinick.
It also prompted anxiety and anger for parents like Christine Farinick of Fort Mill, S.C., whose 13-year-old daughter, Justine, was diagnosed with A.L.L. a year ago. She has received dozens of treatments of methotrexate and is scheduled for another session in three weeks -- as long doctors can get it.
“Without it, there’s a high rate of relapse,” said Farinick, who is getting a passport and researching ways to obtain methotrexate from suppliers in Europe and Canada if she can’t obtain it in the U.S. “It is available.”
Bedford Laboratories, which runs Ben Venue, worked with the FDA to arrange allocation of strictly limited supplies of the drug. The product was produced before the troubled firm voluntarily shut down its operations in November because of manufacturing and quality problems identified during FDA inspections.
“We hope this supply will help address near-term patient needs while other companies licensed to manufacture methotrexate increase production,” Ben Venue officials said in a statement.
The four other manufacturers of the drug -- Hospira Inc., Mylan Institutional, Sandoz and APP Pharmaceuticals LLC -- indicated they were trying to increase production or work with the FDA to allow production of the preservative-free version of the drug. Methotrexate without preservative is given intravenously or injected into spinal fluid, where preservatives could cause toxic reactions.
Neither Bedford officials nor the FDA would say how much product is available, or how many hospitals would be served. Hospital buyers say they’re being quizzed about patient need and allowed a two-week supply of the drug, said Erin Fox, manager of the Drug Information Service at the University of Utah, which tracks drug shortages.
The new availability is both a relief and a reminder of the seriousness of drug shortages that now number about 287, the most in U.S. history, cancer experts said.
“Every little bit helps, but it’s so wrong that we have to live like this,” said Dr. Harvey Cohen, a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine and a member of the American Society of Hematology’s government affairs committee. After decades of progress in finding the right drugs to treat -- and cure -- A.L.L., not being able to obtain them is a huge setback, Cohen said.
He was waiting to hear Thursday whether he would get an order of 20 grams of methotrexate to treat a 16-year-old boy with a bone tumor on Friday.
“His tumor responded beautifully to the medicine. We know the medicine works,” Cohen said. “We have the orders in. I signed them myself yesterday. I just don’t know if we will get it.”
Cohen said he and his colleagues essentially have to ration the drug, giving highest doses to children with difficult-to-treat cancer and lower doses to those whose condition is easier to treat.
"Given the shortage, we have to be able to give that to the children who will benefit the most," he said.
Some experts are breathing a brief sigh of relief at the stop-gap supplies of methotrexate. Dr. Michael Link, president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, praised the FDA’s efforts to avert a total shortage.
“The FDA deserves a fair amount of credit for really stepping up to the plate and resolving this for the short term,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that we had to get to a crisis situation.”
Five U.S. senators demanded more information about the problem on Thursday, sending a letter to Ben Venue officials saying patients and providers have been given no timeline for fully resolving the crisis. They asked for more information about the quality problems at Ben Venue that prompted the shutdown, stalling production not only of methotrexate, but other drugs in short supply. The senators asked if reimbursements for the drug, which is a low-profit generic, played a role in the current shortage.
That echoes the concerns of Christine Farinick, who said she believes that low returns are at the root of the problem.
"All the medication shortages are because the drugs are not profitable to make," she said, adding: “I think that’s absolutely disgusting." | <urn:uuid:ae299f65-76f8-4c8f-b319-7b455389e6c1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/02/17/10429352-hospitals-scramble-to-get-scarce-kids-cancer-drug?pc=25&sp=25 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958479 | 1,418 | 1.617188 | 2 |
It's no secret that the Heritage Foundation is conservative, but there's
a significant distinction between advocating an ideology and actively assisting
a candidate for political office. Doing the former is common among tax-exempt
nonprofit groups like Heritage and its liberal counterparts; doing the
latter is illegal.
Heritage's support of Bob Dole's presidential campaign dangles right
on the edge of illegality. In exchange for Dole's signature on a fundraising
letter, Heritage gave the candidate one-time use of its mailing list for
his own fundraising purposes.
In a March 28 editorial, the Wall Street Journal
commented that "'Learning disabled' is one of those ephemeral but handy
categories . . . particularly handy, it turns out, for well-heeled high
schoolers hoping to score well on their college boards." The editorial
referred to reports questioning whether the waiver of time limits on SAT exams
for learning-disabled students was being abused.
Republicans want to make sure voters have a proper
appreciation of their efforts in time for the 1996 elections. Under the budget
plan they approved this past November, tax cuts would apply partially to 1995
and checks for special refunds on 1995 taxes would be mailed out in--guess
On the other hand, the elderly would not see higher Medicare premiums reflected
in their Social Security checks until January 1997.
George Washington famously disdained faction. In his
farewell address, he warned the nation against the "baneful effects of the
spirit of party." This dislike for partisanship may be the only connection
between Washington and his namesake, the magazine George. Editor John F.
Kennedy, Jr. describes George as post-partisan, an effort to engage more people in civic life
by making politics more fun. | <urn:uuid:4c5d35e0-111e-4666-9a11-e45b1eeaa576> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://prospect.org/authors/robyn-gearey | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946252 | 371 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Science research will play a key role in boosting Wits’ world ranking to within the top 100 by its 100th birthday, but some think it will be a difficult goal to achieve.
Wits has dropped by over 100 positions since 2007 to a rank of 399 according to report compiled for Wits by ranking system “QS”. Another ranking system, Times Higher Education, placed Wits between 251 and 275. In ten years, Wits hopes to be placed in the top 100.
“I think it’s quite an ambitious target … it’s obviously possible because UCT’s going up the rankings, but the reality is that we’re going down the rankings,” said David Dickinson, sociology professor and president of Academic Staff Association of Wits University (Asawu).
According to the Wits 2011/12 Facts & Figures booklet, the total staff in the science faculty dropped from 639 in 2007 to 398 in 2011 and academic staff dropped from 192 to 152. Wits human resources confirmed the drop in overall staff headcount but added that the final figures for 2011 were in fact 438.
Dickinson said if Wits wanted to move higher up in the ranking it must publish and teach more, and produce more postgraduates.
Chemistry professor Helder Marques said he was surprised to hear there was a decrease in staff numbers and that it is a cause for concern. He said staff felt extremely pressurised and had to do a lot more teaching. He also said support staff was not as efficient or well-skilled as they could be.
The Facts & Figures booklet shows that research output has decreased slightly over the last few years. The booklet uses “publication units” (a measure related to how much money is received for each publication) and not the actual number of publications.
Marques, however, said that is not a good measure of research output and called the compilers of that data “damn lazy”. His own analysis showed the actual number of publications had been steadily increasing from 348 in 2007 to 511 last year.
He conceded this measure did not address the quality of the published research. He said a new system of performance management would be introduced into the faculty soon that would set targets for academics which will reflect both the number and quality of publications.
Marques also said that eight schools within the faculty rank within the top 1% of the world when it comes to citations, or how often other people reference their articles.
“We’re pretty good [in terms if impact] for a relatively small university.”
Published in Wits Vuvuzela, 18 May 2012 | <urn:uuid:118122e8-cc4b-476a-aaa1-4a2ab28cba41> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://aninaminnaar.wordpress.com/tag/the/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966208 | 554 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Kathryn and Francisco Fernandez are Volunteers in Belmopan, Belize. This photo was taken at in Bermudan Landing at a baboon sanctuary during our first week in country as Trainees. Teaching us to hull rice, among other traditional practices, was our introduction to Creole culture. In order to hull rice the two workers have to get their sticks into a rhythm so that only one stick is in the mataa at a time, but quickly enough that the work gets done. Marriage is challenging enough in the US, but Kathryn and Cisco have truly found their rhythm while serving in Belize. | <urn:uuid:6b09b6dd-3ecb-47ac-90f1-475f2d489f10> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://collection.peacecorps.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/p9009coll11/id/2130/rec/17 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982204 | 123 | 1.710938 | 2 |
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." Matthew 5:6
That word need means many things to many people. I used to think it was a synonym for the word want. And although I still occasionally treat it as such, I now know the difference.
God has used the experience of truly needing food, as opposed to wanting something in my mouth, to teach me about other things throughout the years. This past year He showed me the difference between wanting to write because I felt unfulfilled versus needing to write because I was hungry to serve Him.
Throughout my career as a freelance writer I’ve had the opportunity to write many things. And I’ve become comfortable with several different disciplines, especially in the realm of non-fiction. But this year God’s call involved writing fiction. Something I’ve always dreamed of doing full-time, but have also feared attempting. You see, I have a certain track record with non-fiction, and I know I can succeed there. Now fiction, that’s another thing altogether. Taking that on means stretching, growing, and more importantly relying TOTALLY on God. | <urn:uuid:b90051d8-5961-4a56-be98-60d5a17dfe4f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thewriteconversation.blogspot.com/2013/01/weekend-worshipunfulfilledor-truly.html | 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 | 0.982278 | 248 | 1.515625 | 2 |
On Tuesday, the PHP Group plans to release new versions of PHP in order to address the problems with a previous patch, which was intended to close a security problem. As SecurityWeek reported on Friday, the first patch released by PHP was easily bypassed.
[Update: As expected, the PHP development team released PHP 5.4.3 and PHP 5.3.13. All users are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.3 or PHP 5.3.13.]
Addressing the problems on Sunday, the PHP Group said:
“Another set of releases are planned for Tuesday, May, 8th. These releases will fix the CGI flaw and another CGI-related issue in apache_request_header (5.4 only). We apologize for the inconvenience created with these releases and the (lack of) communication around them.”
The group that discovered the bug was waiting for a patch to be published before they released any information. However, last week details were leaked to Reddit prompting the group (Eindbazen) disclose what they had discovered. The issue was severe enough that CERT issued an advisory.
“When PHP is used in a CGI-based setup (such as Apache's mod_cgid), the php-cgi receives a processed query string parameter as command line arguments which allows command-line switches, such as -s, -d or -c to be passed to the php-cgi binary, which can be exploited to disclose source code and obtain arbitrary code execution,” a CERT advisory on the flaw explains.
In short, the flaw will attackers to issue commands to servers where PHP has been compiled to run under CGI mode. This is often done for security and development reasons. It’s important to note that FastCGI configurations are not impacted by the flaw.
Until Friday morning, sites such as Sony.com and Facebook.com were said to be vulnerable to the flaw. To help webmasters and administrators see the security issue in action, TrustWave’s SpiderLabs blog has a post with detailed instructions for testing PHP installations.
The examples highlight the potential for Reverse Shell attacks, Remote Code Execution, and of course Source Code Disclosure. Anyone interested can head here to view it.
Interested in Secure Development Strategies? Join us for a live Webinar on May 23 at 1:00PM: "The Great Security Divide: How security can work better with development", presented by Coverity Founder and CTO, Andy Chou. You can register free here. | <urn:uuid:a6060d8d-0bc7-4f56-a2d6-1b986cbca7e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.securityweek.com/working-patch-php-security-flaw-be-released-tuesday?quicktabs_1=0 | 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 | 0.950158 | 520 | 1.632813 | 2 |
We’re going to need some new institutions. Between the anarchy and spontaneity of the blogosphere and the rigid, hierarchical structure of the old media, there lies a huge gap. Soon it will be time for some new organizational form to take root in that fertile middle.
Democracy has always been good at making room for organizational creativity. The two-party system in the United States is a good example. The Constitution makes no provision for parties, and the founding fathers didn’t like them much. In his farewell address, George Washington warned against “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” But he was already involved through his support of John Adams, the Federalist Party’s choice for his successor.
Parties are needed to mediate between the complex networks of individual interests and the purposely separated power centers in government. When things go right or wrong, it’s hard to pin the credit or blame on specific officeholders. But if one party or the other is clearly in control of the government, you can hold that party responsible. The decision is reduced to its most basic form. Support goes to the ins or the outs.
It’s going to be the same with media. When big media were natural monopolies, the best of them knew that trust had economic value, both for their communities and their advertisers. Now that media power is becoming radically decentralized through the Internet, we need a new kind of media organization to focus responsibility.
For bloggers and their fans, this idea is counterintuitive. With everyone free to reach everyone else, they argue, a free market will force truth to the top. John Milton made the same observation in 1644 when printing was in its early state: “Whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” But the greater velocity of information today multiplies the opportunities for confusing and misleading the public. Processing is far more important now than it was when information was scarce. It will be necessary to invent a new institution to take the responsibility for evaluating, grading and processing information to make it fair and accurate.
It’s no use asking me what this institution will look like. I don’t know. I just have faith in the ingenuity of free markets to keep finding new things to try until something works. Some kind of order will arise.
Promise Meets Reality
For an example of the existing confusion, consider just one simple moral issue—the ways that bloggers deal with corrections. Back when I was part of the team helping Knight Ridder develop its pre-Internet experiment, Viewtron, it seemed obvious. When we found mistakes, we’d fix them right then. Many were the times as a newspaper reporter when I found an error in my own story and wished that all the papers out on the street could be yanked back into the office and fixed. One of the ways that electronic delivery would add value to information, I fantasized 25 years ago, was that such after-the-fact error fixing could be done.
But it’s not happening. The Internet culture has developed an odd impulse to preserve every error as though it were part of some important historical record. Corrections do show up, but without disturbing the supposedly sacred significance of the original error.
It reminds me of those automobile drivers who, when involved in a fender-bender, insist on preserving the accident scene, right where it happened, regardless of the impediment to traffic. You’ve seen the highway signs: “Fender-bender? Remove vehicle from roadway.” Why is such a sign necessary? What are those drivers thinking? That the wreckage will be a candidate for a national monument? That they want to get it bronzed like baby shoes?
Journalists who make errors in their blogs treat them with the same tender respect. Here’s a personal example: John Robinson, the well-known Greensboro newspaper editor and blogger, mentioned my book, “The Vanishing Newspaper,” in his blog, which was good, but he called me “Dr. Meyer,” which is really bad. In academe there are few greater sins than claiming credentials you don’t have, and anytime somebody calls me “Dr.” I have to go to the trouble of correcting him or her at the peril of passively pretending to have a title I never had. I explained this to Robinson, and here’s what his blog said after the “correction.”
“I haven’t read Dr. Meyer’s book yet—and I emphasize yet—but I’ve been following Porter’s deconstruction closely. Dr. Meyer, a journalism professor at UNC, apparently has done what so many other media watchers haven’t: Substantiated his conclusions with research. (Updated correction: Meyer’s not a Dr.)”
The problem is evident. Now it sounds like I did inflate my academic credentials, and he caught me at it! Why not just remove the offending error?
Blogger Tim Porter, who honored me by serially reviewing each chapter of my book, made an error in his first reference to Hal Jurgensmeyer, creator of the “influence model” on which I based the theory. When I sent Porter a correction, I was terrified that it would end up sounding like I, not Porter, was the one who made the error. So I made a point of assigning blame:
“Good introduction to the concept, Tim. Out of respect for its originator, I’d like to correct your fumble on his name. It’s Hal Jurgensmeyer, not Hans.”
My words were dutifully added to the commentary section way down at the bottom of Porter’s review of chapter one. Six months later, near the top of his review, the influence model was still credited to “Hans” Jurgensmeyer. The correction wasn’t even on the same screen. Only readers who made it all the way through Porter’s piece and continued to the commentary section could learn Jurgensmeyer’s real name. That’s ethical?
Chapel Hill’s Martin Kuhn, in a paper prepared for the August 2005 meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, explained this urge to preserve errors. It represents, he said, a desire for “accountability.” It has become the generally observed rule that “once a blogger makes a post, that post should be treated as if it were carved in stone, and bloggers have a duty never to erase their posts … warts and all.”
Thus is preserved a lot of unnecessary messiness. Why not just fix the damned mistakes and acknowledge them at the end of the document? Robinson would offend no one if he removed the silly reference to me as “Dr.” from his column. He could preserve the history of his mistake, if he insisted, by adding a note at the bottom, e.g. “In an earlier version of this column, I erroneously referred to Professor Meyer as a doctor. He has advised me that he is not any kind of a doctor, and I regret the error.”
That would eliminate a distracting speed bump in the start of his otherwise very readable document. Tim Porter could do the same thing for Hal Jurgensmeyer. Just fix the man’s name! That would leave a clean first reference, and then, in a footnote, he could, if he wished, preserve his precious error by admitting that he got the name wrong on his first attempt.
The Value of Knowledge
Ethical standards develop over time through a natural selection process. Rules that work tend to be kept, while those that cause confusion eventually get dropped or repaired. So it is not surprising that a medium as new as blogging would be in a period of moral confusion.
Nature likes to organize herself into hierarchies of dominance, and blogging will be no exception. A pecking order based on reputation is starting to emerge, and trusted bloggers are slowly rising to the top. We need some mediating agencies, perhaps the rough equivalent of political parties or trade associations, to help that process along.
When it comes to building trust, blogging’s needs are no different from those of the old journalism. It helps if you know what you are talking about. And so one way for a journalist, blogger or mainstream, to earn and keep a reputation is by demonstrating subject-matter competence.
The old journalism has been figuring this out gradually, but it has never been willing to pay reporters enough or to subsidize their training sufficiently to bring standards to where they ought to be. We’re still not very far from the situation described by Nelson Antrim Crawford, who headed my old journalism school before I was born. (It was then the Department of Industrial Journalism at Kansas State Agricultural College.) Here’s what he said in his 1924 volume, “The Ethics of Journalism”:
“Real knowledge of modern economics is less likely to gain promotion for a reporter on the average paper than the ability to write an interesting but largely untruthful story about a street fight over the ownership of a custard pie. The public, the editor says, is more interested in the humor of custard pies than in economics.”
In the past 80 years, that situation has not changed nearly as much as it is about to change in the next 20. In order to stand out in the noisy buzz of the information age, a talent for trivial humor will still be useful. But a reputation for competence and truth-telling will be worth a lot more, and raising the standards of training is the best way to get there.
Thomas Friedman’s advanced degree in Middle Eastern studies isn’t the only reason that his overseas reporting in The New York Times is followed closely. His clear writing and clever reasoning by analogy also help. But his ability to speak with such persuasive authority would be weaker without that training.
Subject-matter competence is still so rare in journalism, mainstream or blogging, that it can be the critical element that gets a voice heard above all the din. Russell Neuman, writing in “The Future of the Mass Audience” in 1991, called this the “upstream strategy.” Profits have been high in the media business because of the bottleneck created by the expensive means of production, i.e. printing presses and TV stations. As these are supplanted by the Internet, the bottleneck is moving upstream, to the creation of content.
The fact that higher quality content is a logical outcome of the new media technologies has been obscured by the reaction of mainstream media to the competitive threat. Instead of making their content better, they have been making it cheaper, a byproduct of their short-term preoccupation with maintaining their historic profitability. That situation will reverse itself after some apocalyptic adjustment.
When it does, the investment in better content is more likely to come from brash new risk-takers, not the careful, conservative old media. And they will need a new institution, perhaps some League of Extraordinary Journalists, to help us identify them and make our personal media choices on the basis of the ethical standards and the competence of their content creators. As individual consumers, we can’t track all the complexities of those variables without help.
The League of Extraordinary Journalists. Doesn’t that name have a nice ring to it? I can hardly wait for it to show up. Keep watching.
Philip Meyer, a 1967 Nieman Fellow, is a Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This article is based on notes prepared for the 2005 meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. | <urn:uuid:aee34469-3cc6-479b-bacc-bdfc8fe35ef2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/100649/Organizing-the-New-News.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963206 | 2,452 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Apple saw its environmental friendliness slip a little over the last year, according to a new study from Greenpeace.
The organization today released the 18th annual "Guide to Greener Electronics." Apple took the sixth spot this time around, with a score of 4.5 out of a possible 10, down from 4.6 (and fourth place) last year. The company was hit hard on Sustainable Operations for "lacking a robust take-back program in India." Worldwide, however, its recycling program is quite good. The biggest issue Greenpeace has with Apple is that lacks "transparency" and … Read more | <urn:uuid:75ac1cc9-c985-4e6e-a14d-208c231caea4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnet.com/8300-5_1-0.html?keyword=greenpeace | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964841 | 123 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Our friend Dan Johnson (photo) wrote this piece following a public forum held in Waukee, Iowa. We asked if we could share his words with you. He said, “Absolutely!”
“Saturday I attended a public forum between candidates State Senate candidates Desmund Adams and Charles Schneider. You might recall this is a special election slated for December 11 due to the untimely death of Senator Pat Ward.
This was standard fare, the better than-expected crowd turned out at the Waukee Library, parking spilled over to a nearby church and the library staff was scrambling for more chairs to accommodate the crowd. Most importantly, this was not a debate, but a public forum where each of the candidates spoke briefly when asked the same questions by a moderator.
Desmund Adams had something of an advantage in terms of nearly 22 months of campaigning versus maybe three weeks for Schneider. He’s had more of an opportunity to articulate his thoughts and form answers to the standard questions. Both candidates provided pretty typical responses right along party lines: no surprises or exceptions I could detect.
Marriage equality or “gay marriage” was one of the more telling issues that seemed to shine a light on a point of significant difference. I’ll paraphrase the question posed to the candidates: "Would you favor an amendment to the Iowa Constitution that would prevent gay marriage?"
Desmund Adams was first to respond. “Equality is equality.” It’s a phrase he echoed a few times, pointing to the fact that Iowa has historically been a progressive state in siding with civil rights reforms, going way back to slavery and long before the Civil War or the Emancipation Proclamation. Adams
pointed out that this is something that won’t go to a public vote since it’s now a judicial issue and the only subsequent step would be a Supreme Court appeal.
Charles Schneider answered the question with more of a troubled look on his face, admitting this is an issue that conflicts him because of several acquaintances or coworkers who are openly gay whom he hopes not to offend. Ultimately he admitted he thinks this is an issue that needs to come to a vote so that Iowa citizens can decide this issue instead of living with the court’s controversial decision. Straight out of the Vander Plaats lectionary.
My choice was already made before I walked into this event, but the answers to this one question showed me how far apart these two are on a significant social issue. A vote for Schneider takes us directly into the past and we’ve got to move beyond the issue of marriage equality.”
Dan Johnson is a native of Cedar Rapids, IA and a Marquette University graduate who lives with his wife and two daughters in West Des Moines.
sign up for membership
Fri, December 7, 2012
by Dan Johnson | <urn:uuid:e3d8389a-5000-40e2-8a9b-e10af8877dd3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://polkcountydemocrats.org/dan-johnson-says-this-is-a-game-changer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969258 | 586 | 1.796875 | 2 |
EASTCHESTER, N.Y. – The Eastchester Police Department 911 dispatcher picks up a call and there’s no answer on the other end. The dispatcher calls the number back to ask if there is an emergency. No one picks up.
What should the police do?
A 911 hang-up may be an emergency or may be a mistake. Either way, Eastchester Police Lt. Robert Jensen said, police have to respond. If there is no response to a call back, officers are sent to the location to ensure everyone’s safety.
“We call back, but if there’s no response on the other end of the line we have to send a police car to the house to investigate,” he said. “We get numerous fake 911 calls from children playing with the phone.”
It would save police resources if people would just admit it if they've made a call in error, Westchester County Police spokesperson Kieran O’Leary said.
“We prefer people to stay on the line if they do dial 911 when they don’t mean to,” O’Leary said. “Because if they freak out or get embarrassed and hang up, we will send police to their door.”
New York State Police Lt. Hector Hernandez said the Hawthorne headquarters receives about 1,200 abandoned calls a month, including misdials, hang-ups and disconnected calls from cell phones. The number is so high because the state police dispatch for all 911 cell phone calls made in Westchester County, and also dispatches for the municipalities of Somers, Cortlandt, North Salem, Lewisboro and Pound Ridge.
In 2009, the Westchester County Police received 92 calls in error, O'Leary said. In 2010, the number jumped to 107. By 2011, the number spiked to 317 when the county began patroling Ossining. Through May of 2012, the department had received 105 calls.
Jensen said that it is important for residents to remember that 911 should only ever be dialed in emergency. The Eastchester Police Department non-emergency line (914-961-3464) should be contacted for general inquiries
“We want people to call if they see an emergency, but people should be selective in calling 911,” he said. “We can’t tie up the lines for reasons other than emergencies or crimes. For basic information, call our regular number.”
While most 911 hang-ups turn out to be benign, O’Leary said it is better to be safe than sorry.
“It comes with the territory. We don’t view it as an inconvenience,” O’Leary said. “It’s our duty to make absolutely sure that the public is safe, so it’s not any sort of burden to us.” | <urn:uuid:151c8510-119e-4b66-88e9-33ce9a739bbb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://eastchester.dailyvoice.com/police-fire/911-hang-ups-are-no-joke-eastchester-police | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931864 | 603 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Radford has a general population of 15,859 and an overall student population of 8,878. Approximately 8,878 of Radford's students are enrolled in schools that offer physics programs.
Of the 1 physics schools in Radford, the largest physics school, by student population, is Radford University. In 2010, Radford University graduated approximately 7 students with credentials in physics.
A total of 7 students graduated with credentials in physics from physics schools in Radford in 2010. If you decide to join their ranks, you can expect to pay an average of $17,874 per year in tuition if you are eligible for instate tuition. Out of state tuition for all Radford physics schools was an average of $27,538 per year in 2009.
In addition to tuition costs, you should plan on spending an average of $1,100 for books and supplies each year, while enrolled in a physics program in Radford. And if you live on campus, you will face an additional expense of $6,970 per year, on average, for room and board at Radford-based physics schools. Students who live at home can cut this cost down to approximately $15,404.
If you decide to work as a physicist in Radford, your job prospects are good. The number of physicists in Radford is expected to increase by 14% by the year 2018. This projected change is the same as the projected nationwide trend for physicists. | <urn:uuid:7758c9df-9be8-450b-a3dc-5360ceb8e623> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hackcollege.com/school-finder/schools/virginia/radford/physics/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969514 | 298 | 1.640625 | 2 |
by Andrea Montgomery
Last month it was declared a World Heritage site by Unesco and last week, for the first time, I decided to take the cable car trip to within 200 metres of the summit.
Thus I duly joined the sweltering ranks of day trippers queuing for tickets and finally (and nervously; vertigo being something of a family trait) boarded the cable car. Less than 10 minutes and 1200 metres later I was walking from the La Rambleta station to the mirador overlooking Pico Viejo, an altitude headache tightening around my temples and La Gomera, Gran Canaria,
It was all very different from the last time I’d found myself at 3,500 metres above sea level on top of the mountain which, to Tenerife’s earliest known settlers, the Guanche, was where the devil lived and where the earth held up the sky…
It was November then, still hot on the beaches at the coast. I’d begun the climb from the bottom of Montaña Blanca at an altitude of 2200 metres at around and had enjoyed the relative solitude and kaleidoscopic panorama as I traversed for over an hour before beginning the ascent to the Refuge.
I’d never walked at altitude before and despite accounts of its effects from a friend who’d climbed Kilimanjaro, I still wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of the debilitation its effects would have on my lungs and muscles. By the time I reached the Refuge 2 hours later, I could barely put one foot in front of the other. As I sat on a bench outside the wooden building and watched the sun going down, the temperature plummeted from 13°C to -1°C in under an hour; I hadn’t been this cold since I left the UK over two years before.
There was little in the way of furnishings in the Refuge and even less in the way of home comforts. But a large open fireplace had held my attention for the past 5 degree drop on the thermometer pinned inside the front door, and as the sun turned the landscape perma-glow orange, I ventured to ask the man in charge what time he intended lighting the fire.
He looked at the thermometer and replied: “It’s not cold enough for a fire tonight.” I laughed, certain that his statement had been intended as a joke. It wasn’t. “We don’t light the fire unless it gets to -7°C “he said. I stared at the thermometer, willing it to drop further, but it faltered at -4°C and stayed there.
In a dormitory shared with 14 strangers, it was ‘lights out’ at and so began one of the longest nights of my life. Despite exhaustion, the altitude and my aching limbs prevented me from even the remotest inclination to sleep and for 6 hours I lay with my eyes wide open in icy silence. Every attempt at shifting into a comfortable position created a cacophony of squeaks and creaks that resounded around the dorm’. For the life of me, I have no idea how many of those people actually managed to sleep that night, but as not a single sound emerged from any one of them, I’m guessing they were all doing the same thing I was…miming death.
At I stepped out of the Refuge to begin the final ascent to the summit and I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; the term ‘pitch black’ had just been re-invented for me. Stumbling around on the loose stones searching for anything that might reasonably pass for a path in the paltry light of a wholly inadequate torch, I finally latched onto a German group who had GPS and seemed to know where they were heading.
My legs were still exhausted from the climb the day before, it was freezing cold, my fingers were numb despite the thermal gloves, my face and ears were stinging and my lungs were snatching at oxygen in the thin air.
Stopping frequently to rest, I gazed open mouthed at the vast expanse of star-saturated sky above us; an African sky; a jewelled, black velvet cloak engulfing the mountain, flashes of light streaking small sections every few minutes as shooting stars fleetingly showed their journey across the black canvas.
The 500 metre ascent took two hours, every step a mental and physical test of stamina. As the peak came within reach in the grey half light of dawn’s beginning, clouds of yellow sulphur rose from fumeroles in the rock’s surface, clogging my mouth and throat. Pushing off a rock to reach the summit, my hand scorched through my glove; I pulled away quickly, suddenly reminded that I was on top of a volcano.
On the summit, I let my rucksack fall to the ground and climbed up onto a boulder; finally I’d made it, I was standing with the Gods where the earth held up the sky.
Cloud floated all around like a halo of foaming sea and the horizon burned pink, then orange as the sun rose. The lower peaks floated in the cloud like a school of hump back whales riding the white surf; beyond the circle of cloud, the lights of the south coast and the neighbouring
I bit into my last piece of chocolate, it nearly broke my teeth it was so hard. When I’d swallowed it I needed a drink but the water in my flask had frozen to ice; I had a six hour, 9 kilometre descent ahead of me, my fingers were numb and my feet and legs were screaming; that’s when I resolved to use the cable car next time I came up here.
If the only reason you're coming to
However, if when your holiday's over, you want to go home with more than just a tan, then let 'Island Drives' show you the real Tenerife and you'll also take back the sounds, sights, tastes and memories of a truly fascinating island.
The refuge offers basic accomodation to those wishing to spend the night on the mountain before climbing to the summit to witness the dawn.
Provided you return from the summit before the first cable car at 9.00 am, you don't need a permit to reach the summit when you stay at the refuge.
Recently re-furbished, the refuge has just re-opened for business. The cost of a night's stay is €20 per person and booking is essential: (0034) 922 010 440.
As the new price to go with the new look has almost doubled, let's hope it's enough to buy some more firewood!
Looking at the night sky in the crater is like gazing upon a sea of sparkling jewels. If you don't fancy doing it the hard way, there's always the option of taking a guided VIP romantic tour.
Not everybody is comfortable driving abroad. If you don't want to miss out on this wonderful landscape, try an organised trip instead. | <urn:uuid:fb3461f1-80b4-4640-afdb-1d4699e7a263> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.realtenerifeislanddrives.com/Mount%20Teide.html | 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 | 0.968804 | 1,479 | 1.664063 | 2 |
The Bricklayers was a pub situated on Reynold Street. It was a very busy pub at one time owing to the fact that it was in a densely populated area and also because it was next door to the Ritz Cinema which has now sadly gone to be replaced by Iceland Frozen Food centre.
It began life as a row of cottages. In 1854 Christopher Fairbrother bought one of the dwellings and in 1857 bought the one next door. He then acquired a beersellers licence. By 1868 he had added a dorma roof which had a quaint stone set into it with the words "Poets Corner" etched into it. It was made as a mirror image but no-one knows why. It also had a small mans face carved into it. It became known as the Bricklayers circa 1917. By 1963 the dorma roof was deemed unsafe and was removed. The stone is said to still be in the possession of Mr James Taylor who was landlord there from 1959-77.
The Bricklayers complete with dorma roof.
When Hyde Market was developed in the late 1960's it lead to various streets in the vicinity being demolished. A lot went through slum clearance too.This took a lot of trade away from the Bricklayers which went into a steady decline throughout the 80's and 90's.
Two photos showing the terrible neglect it suffered before being bought and brought back into use as flats.
The Bricklayers circa 2010. Now a nicely finished off building that has been turned into flats. | <urn:uuid:fc45b6b7-6f54-41c6-8571-74f3b424cb49> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hydonian.blogspot.com/2010/08/bricklayers.html?showComment=1283297771791 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.993813 | 313 | 1.742188 | 2 |
While there are robotically augmented humans, there are hardly any human augmented robots. Since in Nepleslia machines are to work hand in hand with humans should either one wish to remain a factor in an ultra-competitive universe, NAM has created a device that promises to solve many of our society's social ills and improve the harmony of man and machine.
Enter the Savtech - JANE Personal Computer Companion. Its main component is just about the size of a matchbox with only a single outlet to wire it. For it to be truly effective it has to be connected to an input output device, like another more well equipped terminal or preferably an Emrys Industries Emrys Uno Sunglasses. But within this tiny compartment is the magic of this device, a souped up microcomputer connected to actual living neuron cells.
While pure computers simulate personality, JANE has a real personality regulated by its few neuron cells, as it does not require more living matter for other mental functions like calculating and memory storage ( It is the microcomputer's job ). These cells are cloned from actual Nepleslian females ( Which is why it is called JANE ). Its attitude is not entirely based on the person it is cloned from, but rather also the way it is treated by it's user. Much like raising a child.
So with the correct exposure and data the ( Sub-Artificial? ) intelligence of JANE can learn or be trained to assist its user in a multitude of tasks. For example for soldiers it could process various complex battle data and real time reports into simplified narration for a Power Armor pilot so that he can keep his eyes on where it matters ( The crosshairs ), or perform simple human tasks that require a certain bit of heart ( Counseling, Nursing ) or tasks that require some second guessing ( Like identifying ship class by looking a blurry image ). Further down the road include some human to JANE bonding and even kids.
Yep you heard right, Kids. Should the ( Statistically speaking, Male ) user and JANE ( Or what he chooses to name it ) actually have some kind of chemistry and he is prepared, genetic data can be gathered from both parties and a baby be artificially produced, hence solving many of our society's problems namely:
The Savtech-JANE runs on a glucose source the size of a normal pill, nanobots that clean and maintain this device break down this chemical energy into electricity for the microprocessor and pure sugar is fed to the neurons. The lifespan of this device is equal to the lifespan of the neuron cells, although through regular maintenance new stem cells can be injected to replace the dead ones. Battery life lasts two weeks before the pill needs to be replaced, but this can be extended to a month if plugged into an external electric source so that the electronic components need not depend on the pill.
NAM is now working on newer upgrades to keep the microprocessor up to date along with other add-ons, like larger pills, wireless connectablity, and a prototype to allow JANE to attach to an android body. Also not ruling out a SAVTECH - JOHN version. | <urn:uuid:a3fcaf20-0959-497b-a6dc-5b268594baf7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stararmy.com/wiki/doku.php?id=savtech_-_jane | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934969 | 639 | 1.773438 | 2 |
One of the most frequently used reason for removing features from Google's products is that not many people used them. Here's a recent example:
"Google Base has its own search page for users to search across everything that's been uploaded, but it isn't widely used. Instead, people search on Google Product Search for products, or on Google Maps to find houses for rent or sale. Therefore, we're planning to retire Google Base's separate search page in a few weeks."
Google Base search is not the only obscure Google feature. Even though it's difficult to estimate how often each feature is used, it's safe to say that the following features are rarely used:
1. Gmail mute. The option that lets you ignore boring conversations from mailing lists is available in Gmail's standard interface and it has recently been added to Gmail Mobile.
2. Google Reader's auto sorting. "This works by prioritizing subscriptions with fewer items. So, with this setting, your friend's blog with one item a month will not be drowned out by higher volume sites such as the New York Times because we'll raise the blog to the top."
3. Google Chrome's docking positions. "Drag a tab to pre-defined locations, or docking positions, on your computer monitor or browser window to quickly resize your browser window. When the docking icon appears, release the mouse over the icon to have the tab snap in place."
4. GoogleTournament function from Google Spreadsheets. "The GoogleTournament function returns live data for games occurring during the Men's and Women's NCAA Division I Basketball Championship."
5. Google Toolbar's "up" button lets you go up one level in a web site.
6. Google Music Search, used for showing outdated information about music artists.
Can you think of other obscure Google features that are probably used by a small number of people? | <urn:uuid:0df71d1b-816e-4514-aa65-75a2bc09d131> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/10/obscure-google-features.html?showComment=1255252800089 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936208 | 381 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Somewhat later in the day, they went
out for a stroll through the town together.
To Herminia’s great relief, Alan never even noticed
she had been crying. Man-like, he was absorbed
in his own delight. She would have felt herself
a traitor if Alan had discovered it.
“Which way shall we go?”
she asked listlessly, with a glance to right and left,
as they passed beneath the sombre Tuscan gate of their
And Alan answered, smiling, “Why,
what does it matter? Which way you like.
Every way is a picture.”
And so it was, Herminia herself was
fain to admit, in a pure painter’s sense that
didn’t at all attract her. Lines grouped
themselves against the sky in infinite diversity.
Whichever way they turned quaint old walls met their
eyes, and tumble-down churches, and mouldering towers,
and mediaeval palazzi with carved doorways or rich
loggias. But whichever way they turned dusty
roads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of
gloomy suburb, unwholesome airs, sickening sights
and sounds and perfumes. Narrow streets swept,
darkling, under pointed archways, that framed distant
vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the
solid blue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness
of that sapphire firmament repelled Herminia.
They passed beneath the triumphal arch of Augustus
with its Etruscan mason-work, its Roman decorations,
and round the antique walls, aglow with tufted gillyflowers,
to the bare Piazza d’Armi. A cattle fair
was going on there; and Alan pointed with pleasure
to the curious fact that the oxen were all cream-colored, the
famous white steers of Clitumnus. Herminia knew
her Virgil as well as Alan himself, and murmured half
aloud the sonorous hexameter, “Romanos
ad templa deum duxere triumphos.”
But somehow, the knowledge that these were indeed the
milk-white bullocks of Clitumnus failed amid so much
dust to arouse her enthusiasm. She would have
been better pleased just then with a yellow English
They clambered down the terraced ravines
sometimes, a day or two later, to arid banks by a
dry torrent’s bed where Italian primroses really
grew, interspersed with tall grape-hyacinths, and scented
violets, and glossy cleft leaves of winter aconite.
But even the primroses were not the same thing to
Herminia as those she used to gather on the dewy slopes
of the Redlands; they were so dry and dust-grimed,
and the path by the torrent’s side was so distasteful
and unsavory. Bare white boughs of twisted fig-trees
depressed her. Besides, these hills were steep,
and Herminia felt the climbing. Nothing in city
or suburbs attracted her soul. Etruscan Volumnii,
each lolling in white travertine on the sculptured
lid of his own sarcophagus urn, and all duly ranged
in the twilight of their tomb at their spectral banquet,
stirred her heart but feebly. St. Francis, Santa
Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy. But as
for Alan, he revelled all day long in his native element.
He sketched every morning, among the huddled, strangled
lanes; sketched churches and monasteries, and portals
of palazzi; sketched mountains clear-cut in that pellucid
air; till Herminia wondered how he could sit so long
in the broiling sun or keen wind on those bare hillsides,
or on broken brick parapets in those noisome byways.
But your born sketcher is oblivious of all on earth
save his chosen art; and Alan was essentially a painter
in fibre, diverted by pure circumstance into a Chancery
The very pictures in the gallery failed
to interest Herminia, she knew not why. Alan
couldn’t rouse her to enthusiasm over his beloved
Buonfigli. Those naïve flaxen-haired angels,
with sweetly parted lips, and baskets of red roses
in their delicate hands, own sisters though they were
to the girlish Lippis she had so admired at Florence,
moved her heart but faintly. Try as she might
to like them, she responded to nothing Perugian in
At the end of a week or two, however,
Alan began to complain of constant headache.
He was looking very well, but grew uneasy and restless.
Herminia advised him to give up sketching for a while,
those small streets were so close; and he promised
to yield to her wishes in the matter. Yet he
grew worse next day, so that Herminia, much alarmed,
called in an Italian doctor. Perugia boasted
no English one. The Italian felt his pulse, and
listened to his symptoms. “The signore
came here from Florence?” he asked.
“From Florence,” Herminia
assented, with a sudden sinking.
The doctor protruded his lower lip.
“This is typhoid fever,” he said after
a pause. “A very bad type. It has
been assuming such a form this winter at Florence.”
He spoke the plain truth. Twenty-one
days before in his bedroom at the hotel in Florence,
Alan had drunk a single glass of water from the polluted
springs that supply in part the Tuscan metropolis.
For twenty-one days those victorious microbes had brooded
in silence in his poisoned arteries. At the
end of that time, they swarmed and declared themselves.
He was ill with an aggravated form of the most deadly
disease that still stalks unchecked through unsanitated
Herminia’s alarm was painful.
Alan grew rapidly worse. In two days he was
so ill that she thought it her duty to telegraph at
once to Dr. Merrick, in London: “Alan’s
life in danger. Serious attack of Florentine
typhoid. Italian doctor despairs of his life.
May not last till to-morrow. Herminia
Later on in the day came a telegram
in reply; it was addressed to Alan: “Am
on my way out by through train to attend you.
But as a matter of duty, marry the girl at once,
and legitimatize your child while the chance remains
It was kindly meant in its way.
It was a message of love, of forgiveness, of generosity,
such as Herminia would hardly have expected from so
stern a man as Alan had always represented his father
to be to her. But at moments of unexpected danger
angry feelings between father and son are often forgotten,
and blood unexpectedly proves itself thicker than
water. Yet even so Herminia couldn’t bear
to show the telegram to Alan. She feared lest
in this extremity, his mind weakened by disease, he
might wish to take his father’s advice, and
prove untrue to their common principles. In
that case, woman that she was, she hardly knew how
she could resist what might be only too probably his
dying wishes. Still, she nerved herself for this
trial of faith, and went through with it bravely.
Alan, though sinking, was still conscious at moments;
in one such interval, with an effort to be calm, she
showed him his father’s telegram. Tears
rose into his eyes. “I didn’t expect
him to come,” he said. “This is all
very good of him.” Then, after a moment,
he added, “Would you wish me in this extremity,
Hermy, to do as he advises?”
Herminia bent over him with fierce
tears on her eyelids. “O Alan darling,”
she cried, “you mustn’t die! You
mustn’t leave me! What could I do without
you? oh, my darling, my darling! But don’t
think of me now. Don’t think of the dear
baby. I couldn’t bear to disturb you even
by showing you the telegram. For your sake, Alan,
I’ll be calm, I’ll be calm.
But oh, not for worlds, not for worlds, even
so, would I turn my back on the principles we would
both risk our lives for!”
Alan smiled a faint smile. “Hermy,”
he said slowly, “I love you all the more for
it. You’re as brave as a lion. Oh,
how much I have learned from you!”
All that night and next day Herminia
watched by his bedside. Now and again he was
conscious. But for the most part he lay still,
in a comatose condition, with eyes half closed, the
whites showing through the lids, neither moving nor
speaking. All the time he grew worse steadily.
As she sat by his bedside, Herminia began to realize
the utter loneliness of her position. That Alan
might die was the one element in the situation she
had never even dreamt of. No wife could love
her husband with more perfect devotion than Herminia
loved Alan. She hung upon every breath with unspeakable
suspense and unutterable affection. But the Italian
doctor held out little hope of a rally. Herminia
sat there, fixed to the spot, a white marble statue.
Late next evening Dr. Merrick reached
Perugia. He drove straight from the station
to the dingy flat in the morose palazzo. At the
door of his son’s room, Herminia met him, clad
from head to foot in white, as she had sat by the
bedside. Tears blinded her eyes; her face was
wan; her mien terribly haggard.
“And my son?” the Doctor
asked, with a hushed breath of terror.
“He died half an hour ago,”
Herminia gasped out with an effort.
“But he married you before he
died?” the father cried, in a tone of profound
emotion. “He did justice to his child? he
repaired his evil?”
“He did not,” Herminia
answered, in a scarcely audible voice. “He
was stanch to the end to his lifelong principles.”
“Why not?” the father
asked, staggering. “Did he see my telegram?”
“Yes,” Herminia answered,
numb with grief, yet too proud to prevaricate.
“But I advised him to stand firm; and he abode
by my decision.”
The father waved her aside with his
hands imperiously. “Then I have done with
you,” he exclaimed. “I am sorry to
seem harsh to you at such a moment. But it is
your own doing. You leave me no choice.
You have no right any longer in my son’s apartments.” | <urn:uuid:2feacf68-e3a9-40b8-90ee-7984cd9d1d04> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://readcentral.com/chapters/Grant-Allen/The-Woman-Who-Did/012 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958475 | 2,562 | 1.6875 | 2 |
iPhone animation for the less-than-serious.
The ultimate waiting room, classroom, or meeting room application, Kineo lets you create dazzling animations on your iPhone or iPod touch! With just a flick of your finger, a twist of your wrist, and a little help from Kineo, you can let your creativity flow.
Wake up on time -- without setting the time.
Proximity is a location-based alarm that allows you to set where you want to wake up, as opposed to when. Even those of us that don't have a daily commute have experienced issues with public transportation. Whether it's running too early (ha!) or too late, it's never quite on time. Hardly something you can set your watch to, so why set an alarm to it? Proximity lets you set your alarm for your destination, not the time you'll get there, so even if your bus is running a little bit late, you won't miss your stop.
Simply find your stop on the map, drop a pin, and you're on your way! Even if you fall asleep, Proximity will wake you up when you reach your destination.
Your life on the Mac just got a whole lot faster.
Blitz is for people who use software with big needs. When your Mac is clogged with lots of extra processes, the amount of power it can give to any one program is lessened. Running an intensive process like a Photoshop filter or 3D render can be sped up with Blitz. | <urn:uuid:3d81f5b8-6dd5-44f1-98c1-6c79d9b1890c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cocoatype.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940348 | 313 | 1.53125 | 2 |
The essential difference between collaborative lawyers and the traditional adversarial lawyer's conduct of a case on behalf of a client is that the inbuilt focus on obtaining a negotiated settlement is reinforced by the fact that in collaborative law, if settlement cannot be achieved and proceedings are issued, the collaborative lawyer must withdraw from acting.
All matrimonial/children's act lawyers are professionally obliged, whilst pursuing their client's best interests, to act on their behalf in a non contentious manner designed to facilitate negotiation. However, if the negotiations should break down then the traditional solution is the issue of proceedings with the Court so as to obtain the advantages of a Court timetable which will ensure that if settlement is not obtained under the pressure of the proceedings there will be a final resolution by way of final hearing. Whilst very few cases result in a final contested hearing, the fact that proceedings have been issued can often result in long term bitterness between the parties. Especially in those cases where there are children which will require a long term relationship between the parties to continue, this can have grave long term implications for the family.
The "Participation Agreement" lies at the heart of the collaborative law process. This is an Agreement signed by both parties and their respective lawyers. It sets out the intention to negotiate a settlement without the issue of Court proceedings and that all four will work towards arriving at a fair solution with the priority being any children's wellbeing and then that of the parties.
The Agreement sets out that all concerned must negotiate in "good faith", that is, to be truthful, open and honest, giving all information that may be relevant to the discussions, to avoid threats, inflammatory language and accusations, not to criticise the other parent in front of the children or to involve the children in their dispute.
The negotiations are confidential and cannot be disclosed at Court.
Where the negotiations are about money and property each party must make full and proper disclosure as to their means because without agreed figures it is impossible to have constructive negotiations.
As you will see from the above, the lawyers as well as the parties sign the Participation Agreement. Whilst their concern remains only with their client, they also commit to conduct the negotiations in good faith. For this principle of good faith to work, there must be a high degree of trust between the lawyers. This trust is based partly on both being members of the Collaborative Practitioners Group, which means that each lawyer will have attended the relevant training courses and liaised with other practitioners in the specialist practitioners groups.
Where both parties have decided to engage in the Collaborative Law process, there will be preliminary discussions between the respective lawyers and their clients and between the two lawyers to arrive at the arrangements for the first "four way" meeting. The Participation Agreement will be discussed and signed up by all concerned on that first four way meeting. Some interim arrangements may have to be agreed for the children and for maintenance. There will be discussion as to what disclosure of means is required (assuming negotiations are about money/property), how that disclosure will be made and a timetable for its production. The agenda will be set for the second meeting.
There will be further discussions between the lawyers and their clients and between the two lawyers before the second meeting. It may be that some disclosure of means can take place before the meeting and for valuations to take place and/or for figures to be agreed. The second four way meeting will probably be concerned with considering the disclosure process and what further steps may be required to arrive at hard figures. In some cases negotiations may commence on the second meeting.
By the third four way meeting the disclosure process should be complete. Negotiations take place and/or if they commence on the second meeting can progress further. Some cases will settle on this meeting which will subsequently allow for the formal agreement required by the Court to be drafted.
The Participation Agreement sets out that any one of the four participants to the agreement can withdraw or terminate from the process at any time. On the basis that proceedings are then issued, the parties' lawyers can no longer be involved.
Each party is liable to meet their own lawyer's costs unless otherwise agreed.
The Collaborative Law process should not be seen as a "cheaper option". Yes, where agreement is achieved then it is very likely that the parties' costs will be substantially less than under the adversarial process and certainly more quickly than under the traditional route. However, the process can be time intensive for the lawyers and therefore incur considerable costs for each party.
Upon agreement being achieved it is the lawyers' role to formalise the agreement in the legal document to be approved by the Court so that it becomes a Court order and binding on both parties.
The ethos of the process is that of the "good divorce". This articulates that divorce is a modern fact of life. The divorce process is seen as "bad" with tremendous ill feeling and mistrust resulting from the Court process. Whilst nobody would pretend that Collaborative Law will ever be easy, it has a high success rate for those people willing to engage with the principles of good faith and transparency to arrive at settlements not necessarily based on "the most I can achieve" but on "what I will settle for" based on interest rather than on positional bargaining. In the traditional adversarial bargain route both parties will take what may be extreme positions upon which they will negotiate and arrive somewhere between the two opening positions. Collaborative Law aims to avoid this positional "dance" with its financial and emotional cost for the parties.
Achieve the best result for both parties with collaborative law. Call Goodwins Family Law on 020 8423 3525 | <urn:uuid:49a583b6-24a6-40f2-9960-be80d4a31af6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.goodwinsfamilylaw.co.uk/services/collaborative | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970551 | 1,139 | 1.75 | 2 |
Anti-dam activists opposing hydroelectric projects on the Siang River in Arunachal Pradesh decried a public hearing scheduled for next week as a sham, arguing that the state government has deployed three companies of paramilitary troops (or about 360 additional police) to intimidate locals who oppose the proposed 2700 megawatt Lower Siang Hydro Electric Project.
Those of you who are still waiting for my series on the dam crisis in Arunachal Pradesh, this is the latest development. And don't lose hope. We're finishing up the edit of the last article in the series so it should be published soon. The deal is that Arunachal Pradesh--an unspoiled, sparsely populated state in India's northeast--plans more than 150 dams to tap its potential for hydropower. But environmentalists and locals alike say that the state government has overlooked concerns about ecological damage and the threat to the local indigenous tribes in the race to sign lucrative memoranda of understanding with dam builders -- which have already netted them some $300 million.
On Friday, members of various people's organizations, including the Forum for Siang Dialogue (FSD), the Siang Peoples’ Forum (SPF), the Adi Students’ Union (AdiSU), the Lower Siang Dam Affected Land Owners’ Union (LSDALOU), the East Siang District Students’ Union, the Mebo Area Bachao Committee (MABC), and the Mebo Area Downstream Village Welfare Association gathered in Pasighat to oppose next week's public hearing -- which is a mandatory step in seeking environmental clearance.
Everyone present resolved to oppose the proposed public hearings in all the local districts to save the river, the organizations said in a joint press release.
The meeting also questioned the state government's "unnecessary and intimidating act" of requesting the deployment of three additional Paramilitary Companies to the area (which will be 360 police) to ensure that the public hearing can be held despite local attempts to block it.
"Is it going to be a Public Hearing or a Police Parading at the behest of the Jaypee Company and above all to create fear psychosis in the minds of the poor villagers and stage manage the Hearing?" the press release asked.
Speakers also questioned the government's decision to hold the public hearing some 150 kilometers from the villages that will be affected -- Riga, Pangkang, Riew, Sitang, Parong and Raasing villages in East Siang district. Because of the difficulty of traveling during the rainy season, and the ongoing university exams, the activists claimed, the decision will essentially prevent the affected public from attending the public hearing where they're meant to voice their concerns. | <urn:uuid:192e8d1c-dc66-4a0c-92fe-86325ffb8eea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/india/public-hearing-dam-arunachal-siang | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934259 | 554 | 1.570313 | 2 |
This morning I tapped “Baghdad News” into Google and over half of the first 40 results were about bombing and violence. A further 12% of results were political analysis (mostly about bombing and violence). And there was a smattering of more positive news, mostly on Iraqi news channels: three stories on the reinstatement of flights between Baghdad and Kuwait; one story about art; and another about nice pavements. Hardly dynamic, dramatic news and negative news appears to dominate.
In 2012, Pakistan's biggest English language news agency Dawn helped me to conduct a survey, which looked at how people build perceptions of nations. With an academic interest in nation branding, and public diplomacy, I was staggered to see that 83% of respondents drew their perceptions of Iraq from the media. And not surprisingly, these were largely negative.
As the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq draws near, the political pundits swarm and draw their conclusions about Baghdad and Iraq, and Blair and Bush are challenged with the rhetoric of “was it worth it?” Having penned a modest account of “A Better Basra” I too am drawn into the discussion, canvassing my Iraqi friends for their opinion. | <urn:uuid:273b3a07-d172-48c7-8bd8-cd2368786762> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.worldbank.org/category/tags/news-media | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972288 | 245 | 1.585938 | 2 |
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